Then it turned out I'm not macho after all and I started to cry like a faggot. I also wet my pants. I squealed horribly as if I was a Liberian Pygmy hippopotamus who wanted the people listening to want to be dead so they didn't have to hear me. I wanted them to put eight bullets in my prostate to make me into a corpse. And I wanted the whole world to be extinct. Franklin Gomez came over to give me a hug but Winston Lopez shouted at him to leave me alone.
The narrative is arranged around this crisis, which is both absurd and tragic. And yet, it feels wrong. A 10 year old would not narrate this (who is he talking to, an analyst, a cop?) and so we infer that his words are supplied by another, some ventriloquist who is speaking like a 10 year old might if he were capable of narration.
Children tend not to narrate. They have access to clouds of affects which precipitate only in certain circumstances, and then incoherently as under a parent’s questioning about some traumatic incident at school which the child’s account only further obscures. The child is surrounded by a mess of feelings to which words randomly attach.
In general, the child narrator is an authorial means for revealing some object by obscuring it. Or to put it another way: the reader perceives the ‘elephant in the corner’ as the one thing left a room after all the adult knowledge has been sucked out of it. The child protagonist is a literary means for showing what is really in the scene through the mechanism of his ignorance.
Is that okay? I am seriously wondering whether that is okay. Because really, the child protagonist is not really a child, it is the manifested intent of the author playing cute, sucking the knowledge out of himself but sketching it back in for ironic effect. If the child narrator does not conform to how a child is then how is to show what is really there?
Isn't the child protagonist a false formulation of the holy fool, the melancholy clown? But how can you explain such a figure in a narrative, how does he relate to the father character? The answer is probably that that is the point of the fool, he cannot be explained instrumentally. He is excess baggage, a Claudius figure, carried on in the definite narrative flows of the gang’s leaders; the fool is one who speaks as a dependent of the whims of powerful others.
It would have been preferable if Down the rabbit hole's protagonist were a fool, preferable because more true to what Villalobos is attempting. If Tochtli had been some infantilised (male) (and cute) adult dependent, we would have got closer to the terrifyingly arbitrary rationale behind gang culture’s sentimental attachments: he may be a faggot but he is our faggot.
