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What We Call the West

The genius of Álvaro Enrigue

The Radical Genius of Álvaro Enrigue

His new novel is as much a work of political philosophy as it is one of fiction.

Unlike political scientists and social critics, who can diagnose the illnesses of a specific body politic without speculating on the best possible form of social organization, political philosophers are in the business of evaluating present society against an ideal conception of justice. The interesting corollary of this banal distinction is that the latter camp of thinkers cannot merely rely on the factual record for these comparisons, for the simple reason that every society that has actually existed has been unjust. As a result, Western political philosophy has been, to a surprising degree, a close relative of genre fiction: Plato’s Republic is secretly a masterclass in sci-fi world-building, Machiavelli’s The Prince is a fantasy role-playing game in which the reader is invited to imagine that they’re the sovereign of an imaginary city-state in Renaissance Italy, and the protagonist of much of Enlightenment political thought is not a nonfictional person but the main character in an elaborate work of historical fiction—the famous and infamous Noble Savage.

But what if a work of fiction attempted to do the work of political philosophy? Instead of ceding the speculative work of political imagination to the theorists, literary writers have often turned the tables and taken up the contentions of philosophers. Even if we exclude the literary productions of thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau on the grounds that Candide and Julie are not so much novels as treatises in disguise, creating a list of serious novels that contain political thought is easy enough. From canonical texts that explore the social nature of the individual by imaging a man in perfect isolation, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to modernist behemoths that meditate on the aesthetic origins of totalitarianism, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, or the more recent middlebrow fables that speculate on future dystopias to warn about present political dangers, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, authors of all stripes have understood that fiction is an excellent tool for inquiring after the nature of justice.

Still, it’s not every day that one comes across a contemporary novel about politics that wrestles with fundamental questions with such argumentative originality and intellectual depth that one walks away from its pages convinced that it ought to be discussed in philosophy journals just as much as in literary reviews. Now I Surrender, the third masterpiece by the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue to be brought into English by the brilliant translator Natasha Wimmer, is unlikely to be received as a major intervention in political theory, but that is precisely what it is. A collage of archival research, field diaries, film criticism, travelogues, nature writing, and narrative history that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, Enrigue’s book accomplishes a nearly impossible feat: It succeeds equally well as a breathtaking historical novel and as a groundbreaking work of political theory that offers the final chapters of the centuries-long war that pitted Mexico and the United States against the Chiricahua Apache as a refutation of both the Hollywood western and the Western nation-state.

Now I Surrender opens with a Mexican white woman running for her life through the inhospitable desert surrounding Janos, a diminutive settlement in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. The year is 1836 and the Mexican-American War is still a decade away, so the theoretical demarcation between the land claimed by the newborn republic of Mexico and the territories where the United States is already fulfilling its manifest destiny to commit genocide lies many hundreds of miles to the north. Still, the scene takes place in a hotly contested borderland: the liminal space where the North American nation-states overlap with the stateless nation of the Apache. The woman—we soon learn that her name is Camila—is fleeing a band of Indigenous warriors on horseback who have just set fire to her family’s ranch in retaliation for the murder of one of their own.

When the Apache inevitably catch her, Camila is so certain that death would be preferable to whatever fate awaits her at their hands that she is dismayed when they refrain from killing her and instead take her captive. But as she adjusts to life among them, she soon realizes that her new existence might be better than her old one. She befriends a young Apache boy who teaches her his language; in return, she teaches him Spanish and gives him the nickname Geronimo, in honor of the patron saint of translators. Neither of them knows it yet, but in a few decades this nickname will no longer call that saint to mind; instead, it will become a shorthand for a philosophy that........

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