The Degradation of Man:
Ridiculousness and the Search for Honor in Flores’ Sex as a Political Condition
by Hollie Dykstra
When I first picked up the book, I was skeptical but curious. With a title like Sex as a Political Condition and a cover depicting a semi-automatic rifle—attached to which is a woman’s erotically extended leg adorned with a bright red stiletto—it’s difficult to avoid being intrigued by Carlos Nicolas Flores’ border novel. So, I opened Sex with the usual voracity with which I approach a new book. I made it through eighty pages before I closed the book, disgusted with the ubiquity of tits and ass and boners. That was three years ago. Two months ago, I finished my new favorite Mexican American novel.
If you didn’t guess, it was the same book. What I later realized was that the abundance of sexual references and the many nicknames the narrator gives to women’s breasts that was so frustrating to me only meant that Flores’ satire was too smart for me. Malynda Nuss of the Texas Observer was another victim of the onslaught of breasty images; she writes sardonically about Flores’ array of vocabulary in her 2015 review of his book:
Breasts proliferate with reckless abandon. They bob and wiggle, they roll and pour, they spread like swirls of chocolate. They are compared to onions, tomatoes, mangoes, calabazas, gourds, scoops of ice cream, ivory pudding, flan, cupcakes, blowfish, boulders, boxing gloves, tulips, smooth mounds of Mexican cheese, B-52 bombers [—my personal favorite, by the way—] twin puppies and vanilla malts topped with pink cherries.
I admit that I empathize with her exasperation because I felt it too sharply on my first round; however, Ms. Nuss never has an epiphany about the sinister but serious and very relevant themes raised in the novel. In fact, she completely fails to understand the absolutely essential use of parody and slapstick, claiming that “Flores can’t bring himself to abandon the silliness” without wondering at the purpose of that “silliness.” Nuss believes that “Flores sometimes impales himself” with his humor. Ironically, one of her criticisms of his humor is actually almost the whole point of the book: she says, “it is difficult to tell whether Honoré is supposed to be heroic or ridiculous. Is he saving the world, or just shepherding a crowd of eccentric egomaniacs?” Nuss fails to realize that these are important questions—questions that are fundamental to the meaning of the novel. I would even go so far as to say that these questions are the whole point.
Let me explain.
Flores’ 2015 novel transports readers to fictional Escandon, located on the U.S.-Mexico border, during 1980s Cold War America. The first chapter introduces us to both Honoré del Castillo, the story’s protagonist, and his attempts to negotiate the concept of manhood in a world prevalent with nihilism, socio-political upheaval, and—what we later discover—mockery. Unfortunately, the novel lacks a prologue or introduction that may provide the historical context for Honoré’s struggle. For younger readers, understanding the pressures of the Cold War and the effects of progressive feminist movements that weigh on Honoré may be difficult. The context that may be missed by a younger audience is that Honoré represents the remnants of man; the decline of the image of man as hero, the slaughter of millions of men in wars, the rise of feminism and attack on patriarchy, and the ever-present threat of impending nuclear attacks in Cold War America leaves men (and women) grasping for meaning and identity. For Honoré, this means answering two questions: 1. Quien es Honoré? and 2. Que significa honoré?
Initially, Honoré seems to think he already knows the answer to the second question: action. He believes his friend Trotsky (a nickname) is honorable because he is a man of action, that is (and this is vital), political action. We encounter this idea early in the novel when Maruca, Honoré’s wife, asks if he is afraid of the dangers of revolutionary, seditionist work, and he replies “My greatest fear is dying in front of the television” (12); he fears being a nobody. This desire to be a man of action, a hero, a political/social being, is simultaneously in conflict with the animal man, or the natural man. We see, although he may not be conscious of it, that he does have two, equally powerful understanding of honorable manhood. On the one hand, we have a man of society, and on the other, a man of family. Flores reveals this conflict when Honoré’s wife demands he cut back the tree whose branches threaten to damage their roof. Honoré thinks “Easy….Any pendejo could cut down a tree. The real challenge was cutting down an entire society rotten to the core. That required real men” (9). But only a moment later, Honoré cautions himself, worrying “who knows what you might cut off? Maybe you could live without a finger or a hand, might even put up with losing an entire arm—but if something else go cut off, you might as well blow your brains out” (9). Honoré quite clearly associates his penis with a meaningful life as a man; however, he doesn’t seem to be aware of how this conflicts with his political notions of heroism. This conflict threads itself through the entire narrative but is left unresolved—a lack that readers feel most frustratingly—at the close of the novel, but Honoré does seem to come to his own conclusion (though not necessarily a resolution), one that I would guess aligns with Flores’ own perspective. But we’ll come back to that.
Readers could be overwhelmed, or even insulted, by the outrageous and brash sexual references that Flores employs. However, in order for Honoré to navigate the world of men and discover the meaning of honor, of being a man of honor, he must confront the animal man, the sexual man, in both himself and others. There is no doubt that sensitive readers will find themselves shocked and offended by the ubiquity with which Flores references tits and ass, penises (or Gila monsters), and, of course, the adored and glorified pussy. But that’s the point: women have a sexual power over men that they cannot avoid—it’s in their faces every day, in advertising, in movies and TV, walking past them everywhere they go—but instead must try to control. Yet, as often as a set of breasts is exposed, so is Honoré’s political half, and in this we see the foundation of the story—sex and politics. A division within men, that represents the ridiculous and impossible-to-navigate dichotomy of real world sexual and political movements.
One realization of this dichotomy that Flores contends with in Sex is the feminist movement, mainly the second and third waves that fought against and sought to eliminate any aspect of perceived patriarchy or its remnants. Though momentous for women’s rights and female identity, the movement deconstructed and devalued the male identity and did nothing to improve the sexual or political relationships between men and women; in fact, as Sex demonstrates, in some ways, those relationships have worsened and become more distorted. To prepare for their revolutionary aid trip to Nicaragua, Honoré attempts to recruit renowned feminist and activist, Dr. Olivia de la O, at a women’s poetry conference in downtown Escandon. What ensues is a slapstick parody depicting the horrors of [traditional] man’s perilous encounter with the world of radical feminism. When one woman asks Honoré what he does and he replies, “I sell kitsch,” another woman accuses him of saying bitch instead. Despite his own protests to the contrary, a shouting match follows with the women accusing him of calling them bitch and witch. The shouting quickly devolves when Honore is challenged if he is “man enough to back up those words” (an unintentionally ironic use of “man enough,” by the way); he refuses to engage physically in attempts to be honorable, like a “respectful…caballero from South Texas,” only to discover that it was a grave mistake. He is labeled a “relic [from] the nineteenth century” and finds himself on the floor, “pummeled” and crushed, face flattened, in the midst of a tussle of epic comedic proportions. Legs are flying, panties are exposed, and the commentary—the commentary is priceless. My particular favorite is when Honoré is confronted with someone’s red panties in his face and fears another “red scare.”
The closer Honoré and Trotsky & co. get to their goal—whether it’s crossing the border, surviving the trek, seeking support, or reaching their destination—the deeper into the ridiculously grotesque Flores delves. Faulkneresque situations of humanity’s sickness, cruelty, and corruption frequent the pages. Flores’ creates more unbelievable and occasionally ridiculous situations here because that is precisely the way—the only way, really—to define or to even begin to grasp the reality of humanity’s darkness; it is difficult to believe. It is ridiculous. It’s insanity. It’s terrifying. But it’s real. And I think, many of us prefer to live ignorant of it, so when forced to confront human cruelty, it seems merely implausible or fanciful, exaggerated. Unconvincing. Malynda Nuss is unconvinced, of course, and criticizes the scatological humor with which Flores portrays one man’s bizarre attempt at self-preservation: “A character farting when confronted with a mixed-race hermaphroditic torturer may be considered a gesture of defiance, but here it comes across as cartoonish, even unrealistic, as if Flores’ revolutionaries are totally incapable of seriousness.” Precisely. Nuss doesn’t give Flores the credit he deserves; she seems to be “totally incapable” of asking why? Why would Flores evoke the impression that he “believes no revolution can ever take place in a world so full of boobies and bodily functions” (Nuss)?. Everywhere these men (and women) turn, their attempts to provide aid are consistently foiled by bureaucracy that only creates waste (wasted time, wasted resources, wasted people), by corrupt cops (like Honore’s fat brother-in-law, a true pig), by violent men thirsty for power who kill and kill, and by la rubia superior, a creature who man is relentlessly trying to resist. Sex and corruption is the world Honore lives in, and in that world—a world too familiar—attempts at being a man of action are desperate. Those attempts appear ridiculous to us, and they feel ridiculous and useless, at least eventually, to them, too.
When confronted with the possibility of his execution, Honore considers what is left for men but to die a wasted death. Nuss accidentally makes the point perfectly; she believes “that a revolution…fought and won by a cast as weird as the one in his book is an indignity too insane to imagine.” Bingo. The heroes are DEAD. Flores shows us that we need them (and want them—as Nuss unwittingly reveals) BACK. What questions are we left with to consider? Honore never finds the honorable manhood he sought. The trip to Nicaragua was a farce of progressivism. Men live meaningless lives. Men die meaningless deaths. So, what? We should be grateful that Faulkner or McCarthy didn’t write this, but that we got Flores’ Mexican humor instead, because we couldn’t handle it.