Polonio is not alone in the hole: Albino and The Prick are there, and also, like him, come from the most wretched depths of Mexican society. All three are awaiting the arrival of visitors: The Prick’s mother, and the girlfriends of Polonio and Albino — the barely adolescent Meche and la Chata. The three women have to get from the prison entrance to the hole, and, once there, the girls will create a commotion to distract the guards, allowing the old woman to hand over the heroin.
The novel’s plot — unfolding in real time, exactly as long as it takes to read — opens at the precise moment the female visitors enter the prison complex. They have to cross several barriers, submit to extensive searches by the female guards, and then wait with the rest of the visitors to enter the common prisoners wing. The final holding area is a quad, barred on all sides, which will play a vital role in the resolution of the novel. For the three prisoners in the hole — all of them going through withdrawal — the women appear to be moving along their route at the speed of tectonic plates.
José Revueltas’s gaze functioned like a CAT scan — what everyone usually sees is here only outlined: what his writing shows is everything beating within the organism itself. Maybe all literary writing operates the same way — I recount A in order to say B — but Revueltas habitually inverted the realist equation popularized in the novels of the nineteenth century, primarily the French and Russian ones, or those drawn from the Mexican Revolution, which had formed his horizon as a reader. He wrote of what he saw, devoting attention to verisimilitude, but what he cared about was not the perceptible, but what lies behind that. He used conventional narrative strategies, but also a voice that is constantly thinking about what’s being told.
In addition, as a keen and confirmed Marxist — despite his reservations regarding the way that the Communist parties of his time applied the notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — he perceived economic and political forces driving history where the rest of us see individuals in action. For this reason, his writing has an illuminated quality, a biblical flavor, in spite of the fact that he was a raging atheist. His style was always drawn toward the future, toward what would happen once history itself was ending. Revueltas acted and wrote like a prophet — but a prophet from a Political Science department, sporting a beard like Trotsky’s.
At the very middle of the novel, the three female characters finally enter Polonio’s field of vision, shifting the narrative from the hole and the characters’ interior lives to the chaotic world of the prison. Time, moving with grinding slowness up to this point, turns back on itself, transforming into a whirlwind.
In a January 11, 1970, letter to Arthur Miller, Revueltas, a fellow senior member of PEN international, described a terrifying assault in Lecumberri: on New Year’s Eve 1969, the common prisoners broke the police cordon and attacked the wing of activists and students. The assault, so savage and unexpected, was perceived by the political prisoners as a moment of concentrated reality: “Things,” he wrote to Miller, “occurred with precipitate, fantastical, and dreamlike speed.” I cannot find a more concise way to describe the tumult provoked by the women once they reach the hole, things precipitating with brutal speed. What had always been the same is broken and, after that rupture, reality itself undergoes a process of intensification, dropping the astonished characters into a nightmare.
As I write this introduction, I experience a pang of envy when I consider that the English reader is about to encounter, for the first time, the final twenty pages of The Hole, one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century writing composed in Spanish. The symbolic content that Revueltas poured into the first part erupts on all sides. Everything is atrociously real, saturated with meaning, even as the spiraling vortex of images exposes the blinding banality of violence when it becomes an end in itself. The novel does not invite empathy, any more than it allows for pity or even solidarity, since by distancing itself morally from the characters, Revueltas’s criticism turns in on itself: it’s true that both the guards and the prisoners “in the hole” are “homicidal to the roots of their hair,” but it’s the class that owns the means of production — to which the author who is giving testimony belongs — that has alienated them to the point of becoming beasts.
The Hole is the collision of a thriller and a meditation on political philosophy, existing between two opposing linguistic registers — that of the prisoners and that of the narrator — which expose the ruptures in society as a whole. It reads with the high-speed intensity of a crime noveclass="underline" Revueltas, though deeply ideological, understood the limits of Marxism as a creative form of expression. He had such a mocking and black sense of humor that — though it made for political difficulties (surely he set the world record for expulsions from Communist organizations) — his writing remained always free of the servility that destroyed the literary ambitions of two or three generations of radical Latin American novelists.
Maintaining his sense of humor and literary imagination even in the direst circumstances, Revueltas, while still detained in Lecumberri’s wing reserved for murderers — he was only transferred to another wing with the rest of the political prisoners a year later, following a hunger strike — sent a letter on December 7, 1968, to his protégé Martín Dozal, imprisoned with the students. It was to be read aloud to his fellow inmates, announcing that he was soon due to receive a typewriter, something that would facilitate communication with his comrades in the struggle. “From then on,” he noted, mocking the Marxist jargon of the students’ committees, “there will be a marked improvement in my calligraphical superstructure.”
This sense of humor, as corrosive as it was intolerable to the hard-line Communists of his time, brought with it an infinite number of problems — which is probably the reason why, outside Mexico, he still remains mostly unknown: he was simply too much for the loftiest figures of the international left.
When Revueltas published his first novel, Walls of Water, Pablo Neruda denounced it for its pessimism: such existentialist themes were disrespectful of Stalinist orthodoxy. Neruda failed to understand the literary potential of young José Revueltas, who in turn held the Chilean poet — the loftiest of all lofty Communists — in such high esteem that he took Walls of Water off the market. Nevertheless, Neruda was correct in pointing out the link between Revueltas and post-war French literature. His tragic characters belong to the race of Albert Camus’s existential heroes: “indifferent to the future.”
The ending of The Hole, stripped of all theatricality despite being intensely tragic and brutally comic in its existential way, can only be fully understood by recognizing that Polonio’s “Why bother” echoes Meursault’s indifference in the face of his own death at the end of L’Étranger. Those in the hole are visionaries with both feet planted beyond the limits, creatures beside themselves, like Jean Genet’s martyrs of Modernity.
The Hole might be only a well-written prison story were it not for Revueltas’s sophisticated play with the point of view of the narrator, who is never seen but judges the events which are all told in his cynical, intensely literary voice. The panopticon alienates the lower class to the extent of erasing its humanity — in this tale there’s no difference between the prisoners and their guards — but the most abject among these brutalized characters are busy testing the limits: there’s something enterprising and adventurous in their barbarism. On the other hand, the narrator — an outsider to this violence who gives the novel’s testimony thanks to the fact that his social class owns the grammar and the vocabulary, the syntax and the reference book of Western culture — has become even less human than his characters. He merely reports on the horror out of curiosity.