The descendental work of imagination here is essentially a redemptive possibility, for though JoEl “falls” toward Tláloc, Tláloc is “lift”-ed from the underworld, no longer just a dead myth. Islas transforms him into the desert. As the desert, the rain god becomes a kind of monster, frightening yet beautiful, compelling the Angels to look upon it when they struggle most to live and die with dignity. Islas achieves this realization by compressing language in a way poets are known to do. He does not merely re-create the feelings of his characters but sets them beside or in opposition to moments of intense beauty fused with a mood of death. In doing so, he places the reader at the edge of temporality and transcendence by ignoring that ordinary reality which usually makes us feel less. Islas knows that depicting reality in a work of art depends on possibilities liberated from that reality in order for us to feel more. The Rain God is a story that makes images—images that upset the mortal certainty of the Angel family—out of the vast and murderously beautiful background of the desert. Unquestionably these images call attention to “the centrality of death and solitude” associated with Latin American literature.11 But they also exert a power in their mystery that asks for some spiritual response equal to that power.
When we try to understand why Islas’s images keep calling us back after twenty-two years, why they seem to have a purity of intent despite the fact that The Rain God is a wonderful example of literary mestizaje or mixture, we still focus on the indigenous, the mythic, the poetic—which are all of a piece. The way in which a lyrical quality emerges from the narration and reorients consciousness toward a place and presence that the ancient Mexicans evoked through “flower and song” is unmistakable. Beyond a doubt, Islas does not attempt a one-to-one correspondence between myth and reality; his mind is less scrupulous and more creative, intent on catching what Keats called “a fine isolated verisimilitude” when speaking of that quality of imaginative response he immortalized as Negative Capability, a quality possessed by the best artists. Intent is not canceled by Negative Capability, as Islas’s images show. Rather, selective inclusiveness distinguishes the spiritual and moral response to the world’s conditions in the artist’s attempt to make visible that which is seen with the inner eyes of vision.
While many things converge in The Rain God (autobiography, metafictionality, and queer ethnic sexuality, to name a few), part of Islas’s aim is also to portray a limitless realm of being in the midst of an average, contemporary time. Hence the contrast between our human, disorderly, historical world and the rain god’s static, timeless, hidden world generates great irony and tragedy, and we see this contrast realized most purely in those passages where images of death obscure and swallow whole the thorny human will to survive.
In “Chile,” for example, the death of Tony García gives way to a dramatic scene in which his father, seeing the desert as if for the first time, experiences a moment of intense grief fused with intense beauty:
Ernesto was in the backyard looking at the desert. Seeing it at its most beautiful in the sunset of the holy day, he felt its desolation for the first time in his life. He thought he had always loved it, but now he understood that he had accepted it as a given fact, like breathing. From this day, he could no longer take anything for granted, though his duty as a man was to pretend to do so until the day he died. The vision was overwhelming, and bitterness and despair wrestled with his soul. Both were as dry and timeless as what he was gazing at; only his uncertainty was mortal. (50)
Tony dies on Easter Sunday by drowning, a watery death symbolic of the rain god. Juxtaposed to his submergence is the descent into Ernesto’s soul, which is seen here struggling with the “dry and timeless” realm of the rain god. Ernesto, who has always rejected his wife’s “enthusiasm for the impalpable” (35), her encounters with the spirit world, only truly begins to feel his loss with this descent and struggle, which in turn yields a privileged moment of the transcendent:
After a while, an angel stood beside him. It asked him in a familiar voice why he did not weep. He thought it a strange question from a creature he had been taught had no emotions. He would ask Nina about it; she would be able to explain it to him. He turned to look at the angel. When he took its hand, it vanished and he saw his sister-in-law Juanita.(50)
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