The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón is a chilling, cryptic tale that reads like a parable in its brevity. Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter, the book is unique in its execution and form: Celedón came across an antique stamp collection in Santiago and typeset the stamps by hand to create this narrative. Each page of this book is a single stamp; in a book of about 198 pages, the largest number of words contained within a single page is about 15.
The premise is deceptively simple and defined in the synopsis: in one of the subsidiary offices of an unnamed corporation somewhere in Latin America, the power is suddenly turned off and the workers find themselves trapped. That they’re trapped is not immediately clear to them; the sparse narrative builds up to imbue the on-going situation with increasing menace. The phone lines are cut and the exits are closed off, and they are presumably left without any food or resources.
“I interrupt my daily tasks to make a record,” reads one stamp. The narrative is a chronological record of the days as they proceed, but is otherwise experimental in that it gives no clues about the identity of the narrator or the context of the event and proceeds from page to page — and stamp to stamp — with just a terse documentation of what’s taking place at any one moment.
In this sense, the narrative proceeds like the machinery of corporate bureaucracy. Personal details and individual attributes are ignored; all that is left, like the stamps and dates of memos and documents, are the words of the person who has undertaken to record these dark, taskless days. The first question arises: who is the worker who has undertaken to make this daily record? Secondly, can this person be trusted? In answer to the question “What do you do?” asked by someone identified as “the deaf girl”, the narrator says, “I save people.”
But that’s not enough; the deaf girl asks, “What’s your job?”, and the reply is “I stamp the orders, the instructions, the mandates–”. In a few short pages, the deaf girl, who has read the narrator’s lips despite the darkness, is reduced, as women inevitably are, as a potential vessel for male sexual need. “Want to fuck?” the narrator asks her. Then the narration becomes obscure, over the course of six pages:
“I pull down her skirt.”
“She swallows.”
“She becomes frightened.”
“She hears herself!”
“The deaf girl flees because she doesn’t know how to scream.”
“It will be difficult to find her.”
Immediately, this raises the question of just how much is being “recorded” by the person whose job it is to stamp the orders, the instructions, the mandates. Is the narrator using force? There are no clear answers. There is a mention of dogs. Indeed, the brutality of dogs running through the building is shot through with intimations of brutish sexuality, suggesting potential sexual violence and also the underlying tension of warped or misdirected sexual desire. “The blind girl keeps still while the dogs sniff at her,” reads one stamp, while the next page follows up with “She’s in heat.”
The staff in this office are each identified by a disability: the deaf girl, the blind girl, the mute girl, the lame man, the one-eyed man. The lame man keeps a young boy captive, and this too, takes on the disturbing undertones as questions are raised about why the lame man keeps this boy dependent upon him, and why, as it is revealed later, he has to bathe the boy: “The mute girl showed me how he did it. Expertly, until he grew big.”
There’s an aesthetic break in the middle, where the stamps are displayed in red ink. Here, the narrator reveals a little bit about his past: he used to work in a bank until he claims to have walked out one day. In a stamp visually displayed as a log, he writes: “I visited: 1 circus 1 prison 2 hospital 4 mental facilities.” Then, for the next few pages, he talks about being attended to by “nurses” and the experience of being electrocuted. This subverts his original narrative, and one wonders if the narrator is still in the mental facility, and if this depiction of a subsidiary office during a power failure is not just an analogy for the abuse and torture experienced by the patients in the facility. Of course, this goes against the actual description in the synopsis, but this is the first time I’ve read a book that makes me question the premise in the synopsis. It’s that kind of a book.
Abuse and torture have deep historical origins in Chile. It’s the country described by Milton Friedman as an economic “miracle” for having implemented the neoliberal policies by a group of economists known as the Chicago Boys, who studied under Friedman in Chicago. The combination of torture methods unleashed upon the Chilean citizenry under the CIA-installed military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet in the ’70s and the subsequent forms of agony and hardship endured by the Chilean middle and working class under the neoliberal policies enacted by Friedman’s followers form a potent allegorical mix in The Subsidiary.
The bureaucratic office, the emblem of neoliberal triumph, reveals the violence inherent in capitalist policies that only bring about profits for the owners of the means of production and endless toil and exploitation for workers, while the workers in The Subsidiary endure a literal and metaphorical blackout and are subjected to torture by a well-oiled machinery that delivers attack dogs and layoffs to them with the same chilling indifference. Life under Pinochet, treatment in mental facilities, workers in a modern-day office: the threads are connected. The same logic of violence under a brutal capitalist system works its way through the bodies and psyches of the powerless. (Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine and David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism provide good introductory readings to the Chicago Boys and the ramifications of Pinochet’s rule.)
Celedón’s book is an intriguing work of art, and the imaginative work that went into typesetting the stamps and crafting this story is considerable. The spare narrative is what lends it the aura of a parable or a Lynchian fairytale with its mix of the tedium of corporate bureaucracy and the macabre, grisly reality under the pacifying exterior of well-pressed suits, dull cubicles, and flourescent lights. By saying very little, Celedón allows his reader to fill in the many gaps. It prevents the reader from becoming complacent and refuses them the pleasure of soporific indulgence in a beautifully, comfortably-crafted prose narrative. It also allows him, a Chilean, to draw upon the nation’s bloody history, thanks to US political and economic “interventions”, to craft a work that is defiantly political without being didactic.