Form and Problem-Solving: On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s “American Abductions”
Mauro Javier Cárdenas | American Abductions | Dalkey Archive Press | May 2024 | 350 Pages
Formally, the first thing you notice about American Abductions are its sentences. They are long, each making up the entirety of a three- to ten-page chapter. There are thirty-seven of these chapters, arranged into six parts, and most of them take their names from a character who has been deported from the United States—or, in the language of the novel, an American abductee—who is defined by their relation to a family member from whom they have been separated: “Roberto’s Father” and “Juliet’s Mother,” for example.
I first read American Abductions in the summer of 2024. Shortly after that, when beginning to take notes for this review, I described its setting in time as “the near future,” and wrote to myself that this would technically make American Abductions speculative fiction (though I cannot write those words without invoking Gerald Murnane’s quip: ‘I would have thought all fiction was speculative’).
Whatever distance might have existed between the political reality of Latin Americans in the United States at the time of the novel’s composition, or the time of its publication, or the time when you or I happened to read it, and the political reality described in the novel is rapidly disappearing. To pinpoint precise details—the kidnapping and forceful deportation of U.S. citizens of Latin American descent, for example, or the deputization of private citizens to carry out those deportations extra-officially—and to say of them “this hasn’t happened yet,” a dubious procedure from the start, is becoming increasingly untenable. It has either happened already, or will happen soon, or is happening now and we just don’t know about it yet. At some point in the recent past, Cárdenas fixed an image in this novel of a destination towards which the United States has been spiraling ever since.
Cherry-picking details of the U.S.’s immigration policies, like who it does or doesn’t decide to deport, or which legal processes or civil rights it decides to override—a favorite practice of mainstream media in the time of the second Trump administration—is also beside the point. It should go without saying that regardless of the contents of a person’s file in one or another state department database, forcibly removing them from their homes and families, detaining them in often life-threatening conditions, and then sending them against their will to another country is horrific and inhumane. Mainstream U.S. media also likes to gloss over the brutal details of these operations using antiseptic, bureaucratic language, including words like “deport” or “repatriate,” and one of American Abductions’ central gestures (in fact, a titular one) is the rejection of this language. Cárdenas calls a spade a spade: the words called for are abduction and kidnapping, and this is the language the novel favors alongside its presentation of the details such bureaucratic flattening seeks to obfuscate.
The details are presented in the form of stories about the abducted, mostly told from the perspectives of the children they were forced to leave behind in the United States. A central thread is that of Antonio José Rodriguez, database analyst and father of two. After he is abducted and sent to Colombia, he begins to interview and tape-record the stories of other abducted Americans. His daughters, Ada and Eva—who he was driving to school when he was abducted—are now adults, and many of the sentence-chapters we read are narrations of them listening to, and reflecting on, these tapes.
Another one of Cárdenas’ operative constraints is to avoid anything maudlin while telling these stories of the survivors of family separation during violent deportation. In an interview, he has mentioned that the impulse to write American Abductions came in part after he watched a new clip in which ICE agents arrest an undocumented father of two while he was driving his teenage daughter to school in Los Angeles. One widely-shared such clip was of the abduction of a man named Rómulo Avelica, and its appearance on US national news in 2017 sparked outrage, leading to several civil rights and immigrant advocacy organizations successfully suing for Avelica’s release. Since then, Avelica has been put on a path to citizenship through a U visa, a special designation for “victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse” at the hands of the police, among other things. His story has been hailed as a victory for immigrants’ civil rights and has been leveraged for political cachet by figures such as Chuck Schumer and the then-Senator Kamala Harris, who held a press conference with Avelica in Washington, D.C.
It is these last machinations—the conversion of such a personal tragedy to the political gain—that Cárdenas’ novel would treat with particular disdain. Throughout interviews, tweets, and direct statements by characters in his novels, Cárdenas has complained about the ease with which conventionally organized narratives package and sell people’s stories, especially traumatic ones. American Abductions opens with Ada thinking back to a time she was asked to turn the story of her father’s horrific abduction and deportation, which occurred in front of her when she was a little girl, into various media productions, and eventually a college admissions essay:
— yes I miss my father — yes I want him back — sob to the nth power is that enough? — the reassuring slogans that were expected of her — we are stronger than the Racist in Chief — I have to be strong for my dad — and so on, as if someone had pressed the deportation button on the American narrative machine and a whole cast of characters had come alive, including Esteban Ramos from Univision, who thought it would be a fantastic idea to replicate on camera our drive to the location where the abductors had captured my father and ask me how does it feel to return to the scene — bad? — yes that’s it! —
Later, a woman recalls watching a video of herself as an infant reunited with her deported mother, in which she ignores her mother completely, failing to produce the happy photoshoot expected of the reunion. Cárdenas’ characters grapple with many emotions towards their abducted parents, including ugly ones like resentment and indifference.
The formal choices of the novel are also part of its resistance strategy. Often, to avoid sentimentality, authors are advised to execute a kind of minimizing function on their prose: to be spare, concise, indirect, and subtle in our presentation of difficult emotions. Cárdenas is in fact quite economical in his deployment of emotion, but instead of calibrating his entire prose style to fit this minimizing function, he folds the carefully arranged pieces of emotional revelation into a breathless maximalism. His prose is constantly shifting from one mode to the next, overflowing with jokes, literary and historical references, snippets of code, general snark and other playful gestures. It’s a kind of minimalism-within-maximalism, wrought through the careful alternation of signals that the reader is encouraged to carefully seek out within the noise—only the noise around any one given signal is not really noise, but the carefully nested and criss-crossing pattern of many other signals pattering over each other at the same time.
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One of the fun things about really long sentences is that they stop performing the unit’s basic function: to contain a discrete thought or event and organize its contents according to the features of a principle voice or perspective. The sentences of American Abductions do technically provide this structure, but only at the highest level of their organization. They are tied to the perspective of a single character who gives the sentence breath, and their thought often does return, after several pages of digression, to its point of origin. But within that character’s voice are many other voices, of other characters. Some are heavily featured throughout the novel, some hardly at all; some are literary figures, authors or philosophers; some are fathers, daughters, sisters, friends, enemies; some are talk-show radio hosts, shrinks, ICE agents; some are algorithms programmed (with mixed success) to generate contextually relevant sentences from the complete works of Leonora Carrington; and all of them are reported to speak within the speech of this outermost level, without quotation marks (those eyesore upside-down commas, as Joyce called them). Their words are appended to dialog tags, separated out by em-dashes (which are sometimes used to replace those missing quotation marks), enclosed in endlessly-expanding nests of parentheses (some of which end with two, sometimes even three closing brackets falling at the same time (like this)); (—by the way, I like semi-colons, but Cárdenas hardly uses them—); but most of the time, they are spooled out with rhythmic pinches by the humble comma, whose heavy application in this text makes the prose generally feel looser after the comparatively taut, sometimes aggressive style of Cárdenas’ first two novels, The Revolutionaries Try Again and Aphasia. The reader not only has to work to construct more-or-less discrete units of voice out of this churn, but they also have to piece together the narrative circumstances of a given chapter-sentence, usually from faint contextual clues (often appended to a dialogue tag: for example, “I am the prodigal son, Eva thinks in the waiting room of the Hospital Luis Vernaza,” though this is one of the more obvious ones).
The cramming of many voices into a single sentence isn’t new to Cárdenas’ writing, nor to the long-sentence camp in general, but the density and diversity of voices-within-voices reaches special heights in American Abductions. Their complexity and indiscernibility hit something of an apotheosis in the chapters titled “Interpretations,” where in the setting of a radio show one Doctor Sueño (Spanish for both ‘dream’ and ‘sleep’) interprets the dreams of a rotating cast. In an early episode, Dr. Sueño tells his interpretees (and the reader) about the provisionality of names: “I won’t be able to remember your names, Doctor Sueño says, so I will assign you names at random you will be Auxilio Lacoutre, you will be Amparo Dávila, you will be Leonora Carrington, can I be Remedios Varo instead, Leonora Carrington says…” What follows is a dizzying reportage and interpretation of various surreal dreams, with a rotating cast of characters shifting names, including surrealist writers and artists and several characters from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (most notably the poets Auxilio Lacouture and Ulises Lima, who are often considered fictionalizations of the real-life poets Alcira Soust Scaffo and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, respectively). In the first of these chapters, we are given the radio show as listened to by Ada as she drives to work in her car, which has a voice-activated, Siri-style personal assistant named Leonora Carrington, and we read Ada listening as a young man in a mental hospital named Roberto (who is not Roberto Bolaño, but who after a while is referred to as Roberto Bolaño) calls in to Doctor Sueño’s show. Roberto suffers a recurring dream set in the prison facility where his father, after resisting attempts to separate him from his son, was beaten to death by prison guards. In the dream, “faceless guards replicate themselves they kick my father until his sprawled body on the floor halts its movements.” The dream is narrated again and again, throughout Roberto’s chapters—the phrase I quoted above occurs six times, not counting variations, and the phrase “faceless guards” many more—and Roberto’s efforts to remember, mourn, and forgive his father are some of the most haunting moments in this novel that, despite its technical bravado, playfulness, and suspicion of pathos in storytelling, produces moments of deeply felt emotion.
This regular interweaving of many voices is a potent gesture towards the multiplicity of our own interiors, the many voices we all bear within our heads. (Everyone in your dreams is you, Doctor Sueño repeatedly reminds us.) It might also be a nod to the book’s composition process. The Revolutionaries Try Again and Aphasia are riddled with more or less direct references to their own composition: Aphasia in particular often uses the dialogue tag “Antonio writes,” suggesting the written quality of much of its own text. (This happens in American Abductions too, but less frequently.) Combined with similarities in form and event, such as the repeated narration of recorded contents through the mechanism of a loved one of the recorded person listening to the recording, it’s hard not to blend the protagonists and narrators of these books all together, and to imagine someone like Antonio alone in a room five mornings a week before going to his job as something like a database analyst at some workplace like Prudential Investments (Antonio’s employer before he is kidnapped) sitting down to record these voices going through his head. This makes American Abductions, at least at the level of form, also a book about writing.
Cárdenas has spoken about his composition process, which brings us to a final constraint that bears on his form: it’s putatively the output of a very specific procedure. According to an interview in Minor Literatures, Cárdenas, over the course of a week or so, works out a long sentence that attempts to “exhaust a human impulse” delimited by a “radius of operations.” He is not allowed to return to the sentence after this initial period, because that would “disturb the progression of the sentence.” How the limits of this radius are determined is never made quite clear, but during this period he seems to piece together the content emerging from chains of association beginning at the initial felt drive. I imagine the “craft” here (to use a word I suspect Cárdenas holds in disdain, alongside other vocabulary of the Pale American Fiction Industrial Complex, which is a phrase I think he would say if he hasn’t already) then becomes about how to use the tools of English syntax and punctuation to arrange the contents of these associations to maximum effect(s)—alternating between play, pain, plot information, misdirection…
This might sound a little mechanical, even algorithmic. “Algorithm” is a recurring word in American Abductions, and it’s one that has been gaining freight steadily in mainstream discourse over the past decade and a half. This began thanks to increasingly desperate sellers of digital ad space, who automated more and more complex processes to identify and target would-be buyers of online merchandise. It took on new significance in the era of curated social media feeds, as kind of dark power that determines not only which advertisements we see—which we say we don’t care about—but which memes, friends, family, and vacation photos we see—which we say we do. And now, it has probably reached its most truly dangerous significance in an era of increasingly automated governance and warfare, giving sophisticated tools to governments for those same functions sellers of ad space love—to identify and target—another political reality whose present is depicted and whose future is forecast in Cárdenas’ books. This very real threat to our civil liberties notwithstanding, the word “algorithm” seems to have risen to its most acute power of emotional and economic kerfuffle in the era of large language models, among other sophisticated generative “AI” systems, whose unprecedented ability to produce reams of bland writing and facts appearing on Wikipedia has elicited extreme reactions from it’ll save the world to it’ll destroy it or at least our humanity, and everything in between.
Unlike these people, Cárdenas both a) isn’t trying to sell you something and b) knows what an algorithm is, which is both simpler and more profound than our manifest image of it. An algorithm is a series of procedural rules for the manipulation of information. This is not necessarily something instantiated in a system of plastic, metal, glass, and silicon (i.e., a modern computer, or the data centers where Cárdenas’ Pale American abductors track their targets). Elements of our genetic expression and physical development are decidedly algorithmic. The sedimentation of river silt and its slow compression into sheets of rock—a favorite example of the Mexican-American theorist Manuel De Landa, whose writing on the subject has heavily informed my own understanding of it—occurs thanks to physically instantiated algorithms based on variable combinations of river flow, size and composition of silt particles, temperature, and other factors. And all linguistic and artistic productions take their form from a set of decision-making constraints, whether conscious or unconscious, internal or external to the producing agent’s supposed unity. It seems like what makes a certain text human is not whether or not algorithms were involved in its production, but rather their complexity, flexibility, and character.
By that account, American Abductions is a deeply human book. Its triumph lies in its rejection of the most banal algorithms of prose composition, to take risks on less proven, more challenging ones. My experience was that Cárdenas’ experimentation has not diminished the novel’s capacity for pathos, but has extended and transformed that power. It demands careful, sometimes exhausting attention to sort its noise into constituent signals, but it rewards it well.
At the end of the novel, Juliet, a woman who was separated and then reunited with her mother as a seventeen-month-old infant, stages a conversation between seven different sub-Juliets, conveniently differentiated by roman numerals (Juliet (i), Juliet (ii), through Juliet (vii), etc.). Together, they arrive at an affirmation of her bond with her mother, despite a life spent struggling with that initial abandonment. Cárdenas would never allow a sentence like the one I just wrote into one of his novels, or at least not unironically, and I had to do a fair amount of sifting through noise to arrive at that signal. But someone had to do it, and after all, isn’t everyone yourself in your dream?