Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry 0826361862, 9780826361868

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Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry

Postmodernism of Resistance in

Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry J. Agustín Pastén B.

University of New Mexico Press

• Albuquerque

© 2020 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8263-6186-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8263-6187-5 (electronic) LCCN: 2020941470 Cover illustration: Bolaño’s Predicament by Sandra Guzmán Maluenda Designed by Felicia Cedillos

Contents

Ackno wledgments   vii A Note on the Text   xi Chapter 1. Introduction and Theoretical Background  1 Chapter 2. An Engaged Postmodern Poet’s Three-pronged Line of Defense  48 Chapter 3. The Detective Genre: A Hero with Multiple Faces  88 Chapter 4. History, Nomadic Gatherings, and Territory in Bolaño’s Short Stories  135 Chapter 5. The Republic of Letters’ Trials and Tribulations  185 Chapter 6. Literature and Disenchantment  241 Chapter 7. 2666 : Historical Hauntings and Capitalism’s Dark Side  273 Conclusion  293 Notes   303 Books by Rober t o Bolaño (1953–2003)   407 Works Cited   409 Index   439

v

Ackno wledgements

Several years ago, in Santiago, Chile, a few hours after Sergio Parra had introduced Luis Cárcamo-Huechante to me, and as he and I were riding the bus to our respective homes, I asked him what writers I should read. Luis suggested two authors and two books: Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes and Lemebel’s De perlas y cicatrices. My first thanks, therefore, goes to him even though some years went by before I read Bolaño’s novel; at the time, my research dealt with the concept of literature in nineteenth century literary magazines published in Chile, not with Latin American narrative. When I finally read Los detectives salvajes, I liked it so much that I decided to change my research focus. At the same time, I began teaching a graduate course on the Latin American novel that included novels by Bolaño. Eventually, the idea came to me to write a book on contemporary Latin American novelists. When I arrived at North Carolina State University from the University of Nebraska, my friend and colleague Greg Dawes, realizing that my project was too ambitious regarding the subject, globalization, but also the number of authors I wanted to include, suggested I just zero in on Bolaño’s work and forget the others. I am forever thankful to him for having insisted on this idea even though I was fearfully aware that it was becoming more and more difficult to publish monographs on single authors and the number of scholarly articles on Bolaño’s novels, especially, continued to grow exponentially. Once I finally began to write the book, Greg reviewed each of the chapters as well as the proposal, offering multiple insightful comments and suggestions; I am most thankful for his generosity and enthusiasm. I would also like to express my appreciation to my friend Jon Thompson, who also reviewed the proposal and helped me out with various crucial matters involving the project. Thanks are due as well to my friend and colleague vii

viii  |  Ackno wledgments Shelley Garrigan, whose perspicacious reading of the proposal definitel improved it. I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, whose careful review of the manuscript and very useful recommendations have made this a more solid study. I am especially thankful to Elise McHugh, my editor at the University of New Mexico Press, who not only supported my book project from day one but also did not throw in the towel when, to my utter shock and disbelief, an unexpected huge obstacle that had nothing to do with literary matters, ended up delaying the publication of the book. At UNM Press, I would also like to thank Denise Edwards, whose careful scrutiny of the whole manuscript has prevented the existence of typographical errors, awkward sentences, and so on; thanks to her impeccable editing, the book reads much better now. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Chilean portrait artist Sandra Guzmán Maluenda and to Patricia Morgado Maúrtua. When asked if she would be willing to make a painting based on the idea I had for the book’s cover, Sandra graciously accepted and began work on it immediately. Patricia, for her part, provided invaluable assistance with the perspective of the map of Latin America as well with color, her expertise; likewise, she is the one who suggested that I have Sandra paint the image I wanted in the first place. I could not be happier with the result and am indeed thankful to both. I am also indebted to Bastián Pastén Delich for dissuading me from having had Bolaño adopt Rodin’s “Le penseur” posture as he contemplates the map of Latin America on the book cover. Thanks, moreover, to Lolita Maúrtua, who always made sure to send me newspaper articles on Bolaño from Chile; and to Emilio Morgado, who threatened not to come back to Raleigh until the manuscript was complete. I am very grateful, of course, to North Carolina State University and to Ruth Gross, the chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. To the University for having provided travel funding that allowed me to present papers on Bolaño at the MLA, LASA, and the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, and research funding to visit Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; and to Ruth Gross for having given me a semester departmental leave that made it possible to concentrate exclusively on the book project. I would also like to express my gratitude to the students who took my

Ackno wledgments   |  ix seminar on Bolaño here at North Carolina State University, especially Samuel Sotillo and Pedro Salas; I have benefited immensely from their intellectual acumen. At the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, when I began my research, Juan Camilo Lorca and Daniel Fuenzalida were extremely generous in providing me with bibliographical material on Bolaño not available in the United States; I am very grateful to them. Finally, I would like to thank both Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos and Chasqui for allowing me to use material originally published in their pages: “De la institucionalización a la disolución de la literatura en Los detectives salvajes, de Roberto Bolaño.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 33, no. 2 (2009): 423–46. “Anatomy of the Detective Genre in Roberto Bolaño’s Poetry.” Chasqui 42, no. 1 (2013): 16–36.

A note on the text

Since all the translations of Bolaño’s poems, stories, novels, and essayistic pieces—as well as those of books and articles on criticism published in Spanish and French—are my own, the page numbers in parentheses are those where a given quotation is located in the Spanish source even though the source’s title appears translated into English in my book. For the sake of convenience, in fact, I avail myself of already-available English titles. The titles of poems appear inside the parenthesis if they are not named in the body of the text. Poems lacking a title are referred to as “Untitled” and their page number in University (Universidad) are placed in parentheses.

xi

Chapter 1

Introduction and Theoretical Background

Introduction When, at the celebration of the twenty-fifth-year anniversary1 of the publication of the groundbreaking Writing Culture at Duke University, anthropologist and cultural critic Orin Starn referred to postmodernism as “that slippery and itself already antique-sounding term”2 as he introduced the book’s editors, James Clifford and George Marcus, I could not help but smile in agreement with his assessment. Immersed as I was at the time in the reading of various theories of the modern, modernism, the postmodern, postmodernism, and postmodernity in order to, in essence, better understand postmodernism, I developed the distinct impression that the so-called postmodernism debate was a thing of the past.3 For some reason, I had either missed it or never quite fully grasped its manifold angles. At the same time, however, I still wanted to answer a question that had been posed both by critics and by some of my graduate students alike: was Roberto Bolaño, the latest Latin American author to reach stardom in the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States—but also in Latin America and Europe—a postmodern writer and, if so, in what sense could his various short stories and novels, above all, be classified as postmodern?4 After all, the disillusionment with politics, the presence of 1

2  |  Chapter 1 characters who move from place to place unable to set roots anywhere, the fragmentary and polyphonic nature of some of his works, the ubiquity of commentaries on literature, and the theme of exile, among other postmodernist attributes, abound in his works. Furthermore, I myself had argued at some point5 that he offered a kind of global narrative aesthetics, while Ignacio Echevarría, one of Bolaño’s best friends and critics, had called him, already in 2002, an “extraterritorial” writer.6 Of course, their family resemblance in the Wittgensteinian sense notwithstanding, I knew global and postmodern were not identical terms.7 What’s more, they had become such empty signifiers with motley fillers, especially global, that it was—and still is—practically impossible to define either concept with any degree of precision. Yet I continued to be convinced that even though Bolaño’s narrative did not quite fit Linda Hutcheon’s (1988) poetics of postmodernism paradigm and his novels had little to do with the narratives projects of, say, a Coover, a Pynchon, or a De Lillo, to mention but a few of the most canonical postmodern writers in the English language, certain elements of postmodernism as well as a patently global disposition did permeate texts such as The Savage Detectives8 and 2666, for example. The issue then became, first of all, to determine whether the supposedly postmodern attributes in the author’s oeuvre manifested themselves foremost at the strictly stylistic, narrative level, or whether, at the philosophical and particularly at the political level, the characters of his narrative works reflected clearly postmodern tendencies; and, second of all, to scrutinize aspects of his fictional world revealing unmistakable global concerns The question as to whether Bolaño’s work is essentially postmodern, however, is further complicated by the fact that, although he was born in Chile and is considered to be a Latin American writer, his narrative production originates in Spain, where he moved from Mexico in 1977. Indeed, he leaves his native land in 1974 and does not go back until 1998. Inevitably, therefore, to be able to answer the question of whether Bolaño is a postmodernist author, as well as to define with a certain degree of precision the nature of the postmodern in his works, it becomes imperative to scrutinize not only the better-known theories concerning postmodernism and postmodernity (Lyotard, Jameson, Harvey, Hutcheon) but also some of the reactions to these theoretical discourses that emerged from Latin America as well as the conceptual differences with competing concepts such as liquid modernity, hyper- or supermodernity, and globalization. Once this has

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  3

been accomplished, I argue, it will become clear that Bolaño is not a postmodernist writer in the sense that, say, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Carmen Boullosa, E. L. Doctorow, or Salman Rushdie are. Surely there is plenty of irony in his narrative works, humorous moments, and some parody; but he is not a playful author and neither does he engage in blatant pastiche gimmicks, as some postmodern writers do. A more appropriate manner to refer to him, consequently, would be an engaged postmodernist. In other words, confronted with the defeat of the Left in Latin America, Bolaño begins a process of mapping the outcome of that defeat. Not surprisingly, therefore, some critics have detected the presence of a certain melancholy in his narrative, not a negative melancholy that immobilizes the subject but rather a so-called melancholia generosa that impels him to push ahead. For this very reason, Bolaño’s narrative must be located within a liminal space that is neither entirely postmodernist in the usual sense nor politically committed in the traditional sense. Put differently, if his fiction and poetry display some of the traits associated with a postmodernist aesthetics, it is not because of modernity’s failure in Latin America but due to the Left’s inability to crystallize its dreams as a result of the Right’s and the military’s crushing of all utopian projects in the continent. Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry examines the key ways in which Roberto Bolaño, an author usually categorized as postmodern, employs in his poetry and narrative fiction a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. This practice, which I call a “postmodernism of resistance,”9 stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolaño’s works as signs of the author’s loss of faith in the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. My study argues, on the contrary, that Bolaño does indeed engage in politics, a politics that is directly related to modernity’s failed implementation in the continent. If, in his collective works, Bolaño repeatedly delves into the themes of political turmoil, exile, literature’s complicity with evil, and Chile’s September 11, 1973, it is because he continues to harbor some hope—even if from a disillusioned and traumatized perspective—in the so-called grand narratives of emancipation. In this study, I contend that in the context of the demise of the grand narratives of emancipation proclaimed so vociferously in Europe and the United States in the early 1980s, Bolaño creates a fictional world comprised of

4  |  Chapter 1 characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat—even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. My study’s major contention is that Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance, which manifests itself most strongly in the importance that he bestows upon history and the past in his oeuvre, has been overlooked in critical assessments of his work thus far. Far removed in outlook from a critic such as Lyotard, closer in spirit to critics such as Habermas, Jameson, and Harvey and, more importantly, Latin American (and Latin Americanist) critiques of postmodernism such as those proposed by Norbert Lechner, Martín Hopenhayn, Neil Larsen, and George Yúdice, Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance rests on the idea that, despite the destruction of the revolutionary dream in Latin America, the ideals of the so-called project of modernity still remain intact and merit critical attention. Carefully examining Bolaño’s poetry, four collections of short stories and most of his novels except for A Little Lumpen Novelita (2002) and the posthumous The Third Reich (2010), The Woes of the True Policeman (2011), The Spirit of Science Fiction: A Novel (2016), and Sepulcros de vaqueros (2017),10 this study is an exploration of the role that the detective genre, autobiography, history, literature, and politics play in the author’s crafting of an aesthetics of resistance that is deeply rooted in the Latin American context. While the presence of multiple geographical locations and universally condemned subjects such as Fascism in his works cause this Chilean-born author to be associated with the World Republic of Letters, I argue that Latin America and Chile in particular remain fundamental catalysts within the apparently globalized nature of his literary project. While the elusive phenomenon of postmodernism and its role in Bolaño’s collective works has been addressed in a limited way, no comprehensive analysis of his particular take on postmodernism has been carried out. In contrast to critical anthologies on Bolaño’s oeuvre in Spanish (Manzoni 2002; Espinosa 2003a; Moreno 2005, 2011; Paz-Soldán and Faverón Patriau 2008; Ríos Baeza 2010; Rodríguez Freire 2012; López Bernasocchi and López de Abiada 2012), French (Benmiloud and Estève 2007; Bel 2007) and English (López-Calvo 2015), as well as in contrast to special editions dedicated to Bolaño’s works in literary journals, such as González Férriz’s 2005 Jornadas homenaje Roberto Bolaño 1953–2003 and various articles in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, the major contribution offered by my study is twofold. First, it analyzes the underlying

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  5

postmodernism of resistance in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry, thus uprooting certain key assumptions that have led to decontextualized interpretations of his works. Second, this book offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes the multiple perspectives on such a complicated author into one text, offering detailed summaries and commentaries of critical arguments made by most of the studies on his collective works published thus far, including some in French. In that sense, it is different in nature from studies that provide an overall introduction to Bolaño’s fictio (Bolognese 2009a; Ríos Baeza 2013; Andrews 2014), or those that focus on specific themes and specific texts (González 2010; Candia 2011; Corral 2011b; Poblete 2010a; Marras 2011; Solotorevesky 2012; Lainck 2014; Saucedo Lastra 2015; Zavala 2015), and even those studies that concentrate on biographical aspects of Bolaño’s life (J. Quezada 2007; Madariaga 2010; Maristain 2012). My study serves as an introduction and, to a certain degree, a reference work on this author’s oeuvre in English that complements the only two other monographs on Bolaño in English, Chris Andrews’s Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe (2014), and the late Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat’s Understanding Roberto Bolaño (2016). This chapter, “Introduction and Theoretical Background,” presents an overview of the book’s content and major arguments as well as an examination of postmodernism’s chief contentions. Offering first a very brief description of liquid modernity, hyper modernity, and globalization in order to better defi e postmodernism, it then discusses the modern/postmodern debate that took place in Europe and the United States and the critical reactions from Latin America so as to clearly frame Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance, defined at the end and analyzed in the ensuing chapters. Probing what is referred to as the northern versus the southern view of postmodernism, this chapter helps explain why even though, formally speaking, certain of Bolaño’s texts display features typically construed as postmodern, he fundamentally aligns himself ideologically with stances critical of postmodernism, depicting fictional worlds not only lacking in the fruits of modernity but also stubbornly returning to events and ideas that keep the memory of political defeat alive. Closer to the southern than the northern stance on postmodernism, however, Bolaño dramatizes defeat in order to overcome the ethos of defeatism in his collective works. By examining closely the poetic output contained in The Unknown University (1993, 2007),11 and focusing particularly on the section “People

6  |  Chapter 1 Walking Away” (or Antwerp 1980, 2002), 12 chapter 2, “An Engaged Postmodern Poet’s Three-pronged Line of Defense,” explores three areas in which Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance manifests itself: the use of the detective genre, self-representation, and the function of the past. A critical analysis of the first demonstrates not only that Bolaño’s treatment of detective fiction has its roots in his poetry but also that, fundamentally, the detective figure is both symbolic and political. This is key to a more thorough understanding of a crucial text such as Detectives and, more important, establishing a direct link in his works between the search and uneven development in Latin America. Similar in nature to the nomadic and homeless characters that populate his fictional works, and usually living marginally on the outskirts of major urban cities, the detective becomes involved in searches in which crimes and crime scenes are nebulous and where the role of the police as guardians of the law is no longer guaranteed. Even at this stage in his poetry, I argue, Bolaño invents a novel detective genre that follows neither the classical mystery story nor the paradigms of the Latin American neopolicíaco genre. Indeed, a close scrutiny of self-representation in Bolaño’s poetry proves that the strong presence of autobiographical elements in several of his novels and short stories introduces attempts to reclaim the subject at a time when it was not popular to do so. Using Lenore Wright’s (2006) three-tiered modes of reflection in the process of self-knowledge (introspection, retrospection, and “alterspection”) to ground the analysis, this study reveals that in the myriad of autobiographical poems in Bolaño’s poetic production there are various degrees of self-narration as well as four subjects that galvanize the poet’s attention: writing, Mexico, his son, and Chile. The role that the past plays in his poems—the third subject covered in this chapter—is crucial to understanding Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance. In his poetry, the lyrical subject’s retrospective gaze focuses mostly on Mexico, not on Chile. The memories of his days in Mexico bring consolation to the self in the present. Moreover, although less prominently than in his fiction, the concurrent topics of carrying out the revolution as well as the subsequent loss of the political project, make their first appearance here Chapter 3, “The Detective Genre: A Hero with Multiple Faces,” analyzes Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Bolaño and Porta, 1984), Monsieur Pain (1999), and The Skating Rink (1993), 13 the least studied novels by Bolaño. Recognizing that the presence of metafictiona

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  7

elements, the mixture between high and low cultural forms, intertextuality, and the very ambiguous nature of its structure qualifies Consejos as a typical postmodern text, this chapter proposes that by representing urban violence as depoliticized and irrational while paradoxically linking the political revolution and literary revolutions, Bolaño and García Porta undermine many of the tenets of postmodernism. Similarly, although the disenchantment with literature and the reasons why it should spawn criminal activity are not explained in the text, this chapter argues that they are related to the scars of exile in the case of Ana and to a rejection of an incipient neoliberal modus operandi in Spain in the case of Ángel. As regards Monsieur, I contend that at the very heart of a text that would appear to adhere faithfully to the classical mystery story model, there are textual elements that subvert it, for instance, the privileging of the irrational over the rational and the unknown over the known. What initially would make one believe that Monsieur is a postmodern novel, nevertheless, is offset not only by Pain, an anti-detective figure par excellence but also by the fictional Vallejo. By using this key figure in Latin American literature Bolaño expresses his wellknown belief in human beings’ unavoidable suffering and, most important, sides with César Vallejo’s indefatigable struggle against Fascism, present in the text in sundry ways. Finally, an analysis of Skating shows that even though the ice rink where the crime is perpetrated becomes a metaphor for the impermanence of the postmodern, it manages to convene not only a small community of outcasts living in an encampment, but also the exculpatory discourse of a Chilean, a Mexican, and a Catalan negating having committed such a crime. In line with Bolaño’s continuous renovation of the detective genre, in fact, this novel is more about the lives of these three than about finding the criminal. Moreover, in a Kafkian vein, there is no investigation in the text, no detective figure, and El Recluta, who confesses voluntarily to the crime, does not know why he committed it. Even though these aspects of the text make of Skating a postmodern novel, Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance is manifested in the marginal lives of his characters as well as in the places they inhabit. By construing the representation of history, community, space, and place as major strategies in Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance, chapter 4, “History, Nomadic Gatherings, and Territory in Bolaño’s Short Stories,” presents an analysis of his four collections of short stories: Llamadas telefónicas (1997), Putas asesinas (2001), 14 El gaucho insufrible (2003),

8  |  Chapter 1 and El secreto del mal (2007). 15 Whether through the memory of dictatorship or the memory of political defeat, history makes its appearance in many short stories. Though never approached directly and most often surging unexpectedly, the characters experience history foremost as trauma. But unlike typical postmodern writers, Bolaño does not ironize, play with, or revise historical events; neither does he experiment with what Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction.” As regards the concept of community, this chapter argues that as much as postmodernism is associated with fragmentation and difference, in his short stories Bolaño manages to create communities not necessarily made up of large groups of individuals. Community, in Bolaño, has more to do with sentiments than with numbers. Resorting to Robert Bellah and colleagues’ concept of “lifestyle enclaves” and “communities of interest” (1985), as well to Michel Maffesoli’s notion of “emotional communities” (1996), I contend that in his short stories Bolaño creates communities rooted not in territory but rather in feelings. Two types of what is called “communities of the heart” stand out: “communities of the sad” or “misplaced ones,” composed of marginal individuals who nonetheless claim no agency, and “literary communities” where what brings individuals together is not always a given aesthetics but rather a certain biography. In the last section of this chapter I offer a cartographical assessment of the spaces and places that the characters of the short stories inhabit. Using Lefebvre’s concept of “physical” or “spatial practice,” this chapter discovers that Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression” (1990) is absent in the stories and that capital is nowhere to be seen. Above all, the stories’ spaces and places speak of modernization’s lack where, paradoxically perhaps, characters are unable to turn place into what Tim Cresswell calls “center[s] of meaning and field[s] of care” (2004, 24). By underscoring this inability here and elsewhere in his works, Bolaño calls attention not only to the fact that postmodernism’s major tenets do not fit in a mostly economically underdeveloped Latin America or a fina cially depressed Spain, but also the fact that marginal characters and marginal spaces testify to modernity’s partial success. The analysis of what I see as a turning point in the evolution of Bolaño’s literary output—a move toward a patently political posture on his part—is carried out in chapter 5, “The Republic of Letters’ Trials and Tribulations,” which examines Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), Distant Star (1996) and By Night in Chile (2000).16 Broadly speaking, these three novels, but

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  9

especially the latter two, represent an effort on Bolaño’s part to warn against the consequences of refusing to deal with history. This chapter argues that while intertextuality, the destabilizing of the concept of literary dictionary, and the use of humorous parody make Nazi a postmodern text, the very treatment of the subject of literature’s collusion with Nazi ideology in the Americas constitutes a palpable act of postmodern resistance. A careful inquiry into this “novel” confirms that Nazi literature has to do with an almost visceral desire to avoid living in the present or accept present circumstances and an equally strong desire to build a type of idealist cocoon where literature exists outside of history. These solipsistic impulses, in turn, give way to two opposing movements in the text, one backward or pre- or antimodern, one forward or utopian but not progressive. Prompted in part by a powerful critique of Chile’s postdictatorship governments, Distant also deals with solipsistic impulses (Wieder’s), but it does so within the framework of yet another version of the detective genre and by incorporating semi-autobiographical elements as well as the concept of literary community. As in his poetry and some of his short stories, the representation of the past plays a paramount role in this novel; so does Wieder’s nationalist discourse. Concerning the former, this chapter demonstrates that Bolaño points to Chile’s lack of modernity in four different ways in Distant: through the representation of money, place, leftist politics, and the 1973 coup and some of its sequels. Regarding the latter, Wieder, an anachronistic figure, seeks the foundation of a new nation but by resorting, paradoxically, to past paradigms (in tandem with Nazi writers from Nazi) while at the same time being the harbinger of a new economic model: neoliberalism. Finally, as regards By Night, Bolaño’s most “Chilean,” most complex, and one of his most studied texts, this chapter contends that it constitutes a type of wake-up call in which its author calls Chile to reflect on its recent past. By Night has an urgency that Distant lacks. The analysis focuses on the tension between the own and the foreign as well as on the representation of literature in the text. In this chapter, I contend that Urrutia Lacroix, the narrator, is a synecdoche for the way in which members of the upper class have historically felt vis-à-vis their own country, that is, torn between a deep sense of patriotism and a profound disdain for its inhabitants, and feeling out of place for the most part. This feeling of estrangement with respect to the nation also affects the literary sphere, which loses in By Night the little innocence that it still preserved in Distant.

10  |  Chapter 1 Chapter 6, “Literature and Disenchantment,” analyzes the process of the literary sphere’s formation in Detectives as well as the concept of history as disaster in Amulet. A sort of compendium of some of the topics found in some of Bolaño’s poetry, novels, and short stories, Detectives contains features that make it no doubt a postmodern text: its fragmentary structure, the multiplicity of narrative voices, and the presence of humor and irony, among others. Nonetheless, chapters such as Auxilio’s account of the Mexican Army’s invasion of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Ulises’s trip to Central America in support of the Nicaraguan Revolution, allusions to Chile’s 1973 military coup, and the way in which the literary institution is represented in the text, constitute clear signs of a refusal to allow history and politics to fall into oblivion. Among these strategies of a postmodernism of resistance in Detectives, this chapter proves that it is the representation of the process of the institutionalization of literature that is paramount to understanding Bolaño’s oeuvre. As paradoxical as it may appear, this is a text about the desacralization of literature. A close scrutiny of the representation of literature in the novel exhibits two coexisting dynamics: one that underscores the essential elements for the existence of the literary institution, such as numerous definitions of literature, the function of criticism and the roles of editors, anthologies, and literary journals; and another that manifests the loss of literature’s symbolic capital, such as the conflicting relationship that is established in Detectives between the visceral realists and Cesárea, literary existence and daily existence, and the “wild duo” (Wood 2007) Arturo-Ulises, and Paz. Chronologically speaking, the story advances from a strong valorization of literature, and especially poetry, to the abandonment of literature and its subsequent capitulation to market forces. With respect to Amulet, I maintain that by centering the narrative voice’s focus upon the Mexican Army’s invasion of the UNAM as well as the massacre of Tlatelolco, and then establishing a link between these two events and what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973, Bolaño conjures up a vision of history as catastrophe that culminates in 2666 . From this perspective, the literal reference to “2666” in the text is not accidental. As much as Amulet may be seen as the elegy for all those idealist young men and women who gave their lives for a sublime cause, it is also a text that, like Detectives, announces the future of Latin America and the future of literature in some way. By focusing on manifold aspects of the text tied unavoidably to the centrifugal force which

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  11

represents Auxilio’s traumatic experience in the bathroom at the UNAM, this chapter further corroborates Bolaño’s patently political, committed stance vis-à-vis the writing enterprise. Rounding out this study on Bolaño, in chapter 7, “2666 : Historical Hauntings and Capitalism’s Dark Side,” I claim that 2666 represents the highest point of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance in the sense that both modernity’s excesses and failures come face to face and thus point to a need for an as yet unarticulated radical change. The whole of Bolaño’s fictional world converges in this mega novel. But what is interesting in terms of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance is that while the settings for his first fictional incursions are located in Europe, and while in Detectives the movement is from Latin America to Europe and finally Africa, in 2666 the converse is true. It is Latin America, and specifically a lost town in northern Mexico, that becomes the centripetal force that sucks into its center everything and everyone in the text. In some measure, Bolaño’s original use of the detective genre reaches its maximum expression here, as the search for the author, the German Archimboldi, is tied directly to the search for the assassins of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa. This chapter maintains that, to a large extent, 2666 represents Bolaño’s utter condemnation of the failure of modernity in Latin America as well as an acid accusation of the pernicious consequences of global capitalism gone awry. Moreover, by treating a historical event such as the rise of Nazism in part 5 and a contemporary event such as the murders of women in part 4, Bolaño confers a universality upon the nature of evil, putting the metropolis and the periphery on equal footing. In essence, this is Bolaño’s most political novel. As much as literature is evoked in this text, especially in “The Part about the Critics” and “The Part about Archimboldi,” it has completely lost its redeeming qualities. As in previous works, moreover, Bolaño continues to turn to history to prevent it from being forgotten, by using a Chilean exile as protagonist and offering an alternative account of Chile’s foundation in “The Part about Amalfitano,” by using an African American journalist interested in the Black Panther movement in “The Part about Fate,” or by portraying the lame excuses of a Nazi war criminal in “The Part about Archimboldi.” In the end, a scrutiny of this mega novel proves that while it contains literary qualities associated with postmodernism, Bolaño is not a postmodern writer pure and simple; on the contrary, he is a committed author who resisted the playful, apolitical nature of postmodernism

12  |  Chapter 1 at every stretch. If this book follows a mostly chronological approach, it is because at the same time that it wishes to assess the purportedly postmodern aspects of the author’s fictio and poetry, it also wants to serve as a kind of overall introduction to his literary worldview in English, complementing, as stated above, Andrew’s (2014) and Gutiérrez-Mouat’s studies (2016).

Liquid modernity , Hyper- or Supermodernity , and Glob aliza tion Before examining some of the major positions on postmodernism and postmodernity, and before pointing to the specific postmodern aspects of Bolaño’s works in the following chapters, a few words concerning liquid modernity, hyper- or supermodernity, and globalization are in order so that the postmodern, itself an often diffuse and nebulous concept, as stated above, might be more clearly defined. Although these concepts are no doubt related to postmodernism in some way, one could argue that only liquid modernity and hyper- or supermodernity bear a direct relationship to it. Very simply put, liquid modernity and hypermodernity are terms that describe the present state affairs at the economic, political, cultural, and social levels in mostly economically advanced societies, whereas globalization alludes to the multiple movements, exchanges, and crossings that take place among countries in general, predominantly in the economic and cultural spheres. The late Zygmunt Bauman’s book Liquid Modernity (2000) consists of an analysis of some of the major features characterizing the present. Unlike critics who call what comes after modernity postmodernity or postmodernism, the Polish sociologist prefers to call it “liquid,” “fluid” (6, 120) and even “light” modernity (116, 119), linking the latter to “the era of instantaneity” (15), “software capitalism” (116), 17 and “the accelerating ‘liquefaction’ of modern life” (170). Bauman’s central argument revolves around Marx and Engels’s famous dictum in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that “all that’s solid melts into air,” a reference to the major consequences of economic and social modernization affecting the most industrially developed nations of Europe in the nineteenth century. He recognizes that, at first sight, it might seem redundant to call modernity liquid or fluid—fo , after all, he asks, “Was not modernity a process of ‘liquefaction’ from the

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  13

start?” (3). He contends that modernity dissolved solids that were disintegrating but only in order to erect new ones.18 It is these solids that are now evaporating, and in particular “the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions” (6). In large measure, Bolaño’s entire oeuvre is a critical reflection of what happened in Latin America when the “individual choices” of people who adhered to the “collective project[s]” of the revolution came to a drastic end in the 1970s. Another central argument in Bauman’s study is the loss of importance of space and the increasing significance of time. While it was size that counted during the modern or “hardware era” (113)—heavy machines, big factory buildings, large crews of workers, and so on—what counts in liquid modernity is the ability to move from one place to another speedily and efficientl .19 Or, as Bauman puts it: “The era of unconditional superiority of sedentarism over nomadism and the domination of the settled over the mobile is on the whole grinding fast to a halt. We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement” (2000, 13). Liquid modernity is the era of “the mobile vulgus” (93), of recycling, of traveling light, of the cellular phone—“invented for the use of the nomad” (128)—of purchasing products knowing that they will not last long. In sum, it is the era of “disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase” (2000, 120) where capital is no longer tied to territor y.20 Hypermodernity bears several of the attributes of liquid modernity and, in fact, it is almost indistinguishable from it. In his introduction to Gilles Lipovetsky’s Hypermodern Times (2005), Sébastien Charles underlines the fluid and flexible nature of “liberal society” (11) today, paying particular attention to how the substitution of ideological discourses for what he calls “the logic of consumption and fashion” (23) has given rise not only to an exacerbated individualism but also to a new conception of the present. This present, however, is not the present of the postmodern, characterized, among other things, by certain hedonism and a lack of concern for the future. In hypermodern times, as Charles puts it, “Narcissus is gnawed by anxiety; fear has imposed itself on his pleasures, and anguish on his liberation” (13). Much of Lipovetsky’s study of hypermodernity centers on this paradox. Even though the author refers to hypermodernity as “the second cycle of modernity” (67), hypermodernity is what comes after postmodernity, whose existence Lipovetsky curiously also acknowledges.21 The difference between what might be construed initially as two similar phenomena,

14  |  Chapter 1 is that the “frivolity,” the “light-hearted,” the “euphoria” and the “carefree . . . attitude” (40) of the postmodern subject is, at the present time, accompanied by stress, anxiety, and, above all, a “rising tide of insecurity” (40). Echoing some of David Harvey’s pronouncements concerning postmodernity (examined in the following section) as well as eerily anticipating the great recession that started in the United States in December 2007, Lipovetsky declares: “We are witnessing a formidable expansion in the size and number of financial and stock-market activities, an acceleration in the speed of economic operations that now function in real time, and a phenomenal explosion in the volume of capital circulating across the planet” (32). Furthermore, just like Bauman and critics of postmodernity in general, the author remarks on the frailty of social bonds typical of hypermodernity, as well as on the replacement of “collective action by private happiness” (37). Lipovetsky provides some nuance, however: Hypermodern culture is characterized by the weakening of the regulative power of collective institutions and the corresponding way in which actors have become more autonomous vis-à-vis group imperatives, whether these come from family, religion, political parties or class cultures. Hence the individual appears more and more opened up and mobile, fluid and socially independent. But his volatility sign fies much more a destabilization of the self than a triumphant affir tion of a subject endowed with self-mastery. (55) Now, if, as suggested earlier, postmodernity appears conceptually intractable, globalization would seem even harder to define. In Theories of Globalization (2013), a recent study that examines assessments of globalization coming from multiple fields 22 Axford Barrie calls globalization “a fiel seemingly without boundaries and promiscuous (2) . . . [which] remains infuriatingly ambiguous and elusive” (2013, 8). Though it is certainly impossible to describe the complexity of globalization in one paragraph, one might arguably say that the concept of globalization encapsulates that of postmodernity and even liquid modernity and hypermodernity. In some sense, it is more neutral than the latter two. And it is, in contradistinction with globality and globalism, a process more than a condition—Barrie even speaks of “alter-globalizations” (2013, 142). In Theories, the critic is careful to point to the similarities as well as the differences between globalization

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  15

studies and other ancillary fields such as international studies, world polity theory, world-systems analysis, world-society theory, and others. The usefulness of Barrie’s book for the purposes of literary criticism is twofold. On the one hand, it extracts from the manifold theories of globalization a corpus of concepts that becomes beneficial whenever calling attention to the “global” aspects of Bolaño’s works. And not only concepts such as territory, border, “space of flows” (86), transnationalization and denationalization, but possibly also glocalization, “grobalization” (51), networks, “chains, flow , liquids and hybrids” (84), and even fluids. (Does his reference to “traveling peoples, tourists and refugees” [181] as “global fluids” [181] not bring to mind some of the characters that fill the pages of Bolaño’s texts, and especially those from Detectives?) On the other hand, Barrie’s Theories of Globalization presents a well-balanced view of the various conceptions of the state held by theories of globalization and scrutinizes the fundamental issue of whether it is still possible to establish a connection between identity formation and national territory. Though the exploration of these two subjects does not constitute the central emphasis of this study on Bolaño, the relationship between the state and national identity is prominent within postmodernism, especially in the Latin American context.23 What comes as no surprise among the theories that Barrie examines is that the state is not as central as it used to be. In fact, it would even seem salutary, from a world polity perspective especially, that this be the case in a globalized world (49). Paraphrasing Saskia Sassen, for instance, Barrie writes, “The modern doctrine of state sovereignty, which was constructed historically through a process of ‘nationalizing territories,’ is being transformed by globalization” (75). 24 Nonetheless, as he reminds us throughout Theories—and even if, as according to some, states are no more than “subaltern actors” (44) in the capitalist-world system—the state is not about to disappear. But let us now turn to the main subject of this chapter: the North’s and South’s views of postmodernism.

Postmodernism and the Nor th’s Attempts t o Underst and its Own Crisis What often tends to be overlooked by critics who enthusiastically refer to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) when referring to postmodernity, postmodernism, or the postmodern, is not only

16  |  Chapter 1 the fact that it constitutes a study of the state of knowledge in the most economically developed countries at the time but that, a few years after its publication, Lyotard admitted to having invented certain accounts and to having alluded to texts he had never read.25 Yet what most stuck in critics’ minds in the end, and what has been associated with postmodernity ever since, is the fact that the so-called grand narratives that had sustained what Habermas (1983) called “the project of modernity,” were now dead, in particular the one that promised to bring an end to economic and social inequality and was espoused so ardently by most young people of Bolaño’s generation in Latin America. Lyotard summarizes the matter thus: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). In the end, these metanarratives constituted the very heart of modernity. But in the appendix that appeared in the English translation (1984), 26 he assured the reader that the postmodern was part and parcel of the modern (79). In other words, just like several other critics, as much as he was conscious of the dark side of modernity, he conceived of the postmodern as a moment of crisis within modernity but not as an entirely new stage in human history. Lyotard was not the first critic to feel ambiguous concerning blind faith in Reason and Progress. As Martín Hopenhayn reminds us (1994, 144–45), the distrust of grand narratives had already started with Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. For some, including Lyotard (38), qualms about progress in the sciences were even present at the very inception of European modernity in the nineteenth century. “Modernity was a mixed blessing. From the earliest social analyses, notes of caution and concern were sounded,” writes David Lyon (1999, 35). Similarly, and as we shall see shortly, the term postmodern had a relatively long history before Lyotard published his study. But, as Perry Anderson notes in his brief history of the origins of postmodernity, “In title and topic, The Postmodern Condition was the first book to treat postmodernity as a general change of human circumstance” (1998, 26). Herein lies its value. Borrowing from one of Habermas’s books’ titles, Legitimation Crisis, it could be argued that Lyotard’s influential study consists of an account of the crisis of legitimacy affecting knowledge and the sciences since the end of the 1950s in what American sociologist Daniel Bell once called post-industrial societies.27 In the end, the question becomes: can legitimacy be found now that metanarratives have lost their value? (Lyotard 1984, xxiv–v). Contra Habermas and “consensus,”28

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  17

Lyotard argues for “the heterogeneity of language games” (xxv). In this context, in fact, scientific knowledge, itself constituted by discourse, is only one more language among several languages competing for hegemony. No doubt aware of Baudrillard’s analysis of consumer society,29 and unaffected by the early warnings of the Frankfurt School concerning the possible negative effects of the so-called culture industry, Lyotard realizes that, in an age in which television in particular and the media in general have an increasing importance in the lives of people, what matters is not so much the veracity of a given language, its truth so to speak, but rather its utility.30 Hence, in the postmodern condition, a “society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich in information and easy to decode” (5). In this new scenario, claims Lyotard, anticipating various future debates on postpolitics and postnationalism—especially in Latin America—entities such as nation-states, political parties, institutions, and historical traditions, among others, cease to be what he calls “poles of attraction” (14). What now counts is not so much finding a new, redeeming narrative for all—since, after all, it is “dissension” and not consensus that need be emphasized (61)—but, instead, local, independent, particular group narratives that create their own temporary truths. In a most celebratory tone, Lyotard concludes on this note: “Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (82). The first to react to some of Lyotard’s ideas contained in The Postmodern Condition was Fredric Jameson, who writes the book’s foreword to the English translation and who publishes that same year (1984) a seminal essay on the subject of postmodernism,31 which, in 1991, under the same title, would become perhaps the most thorough book on postmodernism as a dominant cultural mode of late capitalism. In the aforementioned foreword, however, he anticipates ideas that he will develop more fully in Postmodernism and he reiterates others he had presented in earlier studies. For instance, resorting to a concept he had introduced in The Political Unconscious (1981), he states that it is not that master-narratives have disappeared, as Lyotard claims so gleefully, but that they have gone underground, continuing to have an influence but now at the unconscious level (1984, xii). Similarly, he criticizes Lyotard for not tackling culture (xv– xvi);32 the discussion about the new status of science and technology should have made it possible to postulate the “existence or not of some

18  |  Chapter 1 properly ‘postmodernist’ culture” (xv). Andreas Huyssen, for his part, reduces Lyotard’s study to a repudiation of the Enlightenment project and, consequently, to an attack on Habermas’s major ideas (1986, 240). 33 In The Troubles with Postmodernism (1996), Stefan Morawski accuses Lyotard— but also other “outstanding postmodern philosophers” such as Derrida and Rorty—of being inconsistent (24). And, more recently, Jerry Gill (2010) accuses postmodern thinkers in general, and Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault (1977 ) in particular, of criticizing modernism but without offering any solutions to overcome the impasse. Thus, though Lyotard’s book became a necessary reference point for discussions on postmodernism, it also had many detractors. Indeed, critiques of The Postmodern Condition, as well as critical analyses about postmodernism in general, are plentiful. Some will be discussed below when examining the critical studies of Habermas, Jameson, Harvey, and Hutcheon. Other critiques will be presented in the next section, when looking at views regarding the postmodern and modernity coming from the South as well as from Latin Americanists working in the North. As indicated above, the history surrounding the postmodern precedes the publication of Lyotard’s study. At this juncture, I should clarify that my intent is not to write a book on postmodernism and postmodernity, but rather to address the ways in which certain postmodern features are reflected, or not, in Bolaño’s works. More precisely, it is a literary study that investigates, through close reading mostly, how what I am calling a postmodernism of resistance develops in his novels, short stories, and poetry. Consequently, what follows—a very sketchy prehistory of the postmodern34—is valuable only in so far as it contextualizes the major statements on postmodernism (Lyotard, Jameson, Harvey, Hutcheon) and shows us that what in time became a politically charged debate has its genesis in aesthetics, particularly in a move beyond modernist paradigms in architecture (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and van der Rohe, among others). In a rare display of knowledge by a cultural critic coming from the North, usually unaware of theoretical and cultural discourses produced in the South, Anderson (1998) reminds us that the terms modernismo and postmodernismo first appeared in Spanish and Spanish American literary criticism35 ; in fact, though briefl , he alludes to Federico de Onís, Unamuno, Machado, and Darío (3–4). 36 In the United States, where the postmodern debate eventually started and took off, the term postmodern begins to be

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  19

used gradually by poets such as Charles Olson, literary critics such as Harry Levin,37 Irving Howe,38 and Leslie Fiedler,39 and sociologist C. Wright Mills.40 But it was a review of the poetry of Charles Olson in Boundary 2,41 in fact, that crystallized the moment according to Anderson: “It was this reception that for the first time stabilized the idea of the postmodern as a collective reference” (16). Nevertheless, it was critic Ihab Hassan—a definite reference in almost any study on postmodernism and certainly one of the most cited (e.g., in Harvey 1990, 43; Jameson 1991, 56; Palaversich 2000, 123)—who in Anderson’s judgment is the first to extend the use of the term postmodern into the arts. Though Anderson, like others (Hutcheon 1988, 49; Tompkins 2006, 14), criticizes Hassan for excluding the social in his analyses (19). My own readings of some of Hassan’s texts reveal the following. Although he had broached the subject of postmodernism earlier,42 it was in an essay he included in the second edition of his The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1982) 43 that he provided a more systematic defin tion of it. A thorough analysis of this essay, “Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,”44 is not possible here. However, I deem it to be valuable in understanding postmodernism for the following reasons. Early on, for example, Hassan poses this key question: “Can we really perceive a phenomenon, in Western societies generally and in their literatures particularly, that needs to be distinguished from modernism, needs to be named?” (259). Appearing to stand on the side of those for whom postmodernism reflects a critical moment within modernism,45 he proceeds to respond, somewhat hesitatingly and having Foucault in mind, that “postmodernism may appear as a significant revision, if not an original épistémè, of twentieth-century Western societies” (260). Then, in perhaps a quixotic attempt to encapsulate postmodernism, he offers a disparate list of some fifty names, coming from various disciplines and countries, as representatives of postmodernism: Lyotard, Marcuse, Wolfgang Iser (!), Habermas (!), Ionesco, Borges, Thomas Pynchon, and Cortázar, among others.46 The bulk of Hassan’s piece, however, consists of his reflecting on a series of ten “conceptual problems that both conceal and constitute postmodernism itself” (262–63), leading him, toward the end, to offer a “provisional scheme” (266) made up of two columns—and often referred to by critics of postmodernism—where modernism and postmodernism are placed side by side (267–68). Although an analysis of these “conceptual problems” cannot be carried out here, certain

20  |  Chapter 1 aspects of Hassan’s discussion bear mention in light of the debate on postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s. First of all, Hassan asserts that, like other categorical terms, postmodernism “suffers from a certain semantic instability” (263). Likewise, he thinks that postmodernism is in need of “both historical and theoretical definition” (264). 47 And, most important, he asks, “Is it [postmodernism] only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon, perhaps even a mutation in Western humanism?” (266), foregrounding thus the later distinction between postmodernism—a contemporary artistic tendency—and postmodernity, a cultural phenomenon and, to some, even a particular moment in history.48 Toward the end of the essay, once he has associated modernism in the aforementioned column with, among other traits, “Purpose” (267), “Mastery/Logos,” “Root/Depth,” “Signified,” “Origin/Cause” (268), and postmodernism with “Play” (267), “Exhaustion/Silence,” “Rhizome/Surface,” “Signifier,” “Difference-Difference/Trace” (268), he proceeds to present his own definition of postmodernism. Two tendencies foremost characterize postmodernism in Hassan’s judgment: indeterminacy and immanence (269). To these two tendencies will be added a few years later in 1987 49 what Hassan calls a “paratactic list” of postmodern features that include fragmentation, decanonization, self-less-ness, depth-less-ness, the unpresentable, unrepresentable, irony, hybridization, carnivalization, performance, participation, and constructionism (1987, 168–72). 50 Many of these features, of course—in particular fragmentation, hybridization, and carnivalization—would in time become entrenched in discourses on postmodern culture. But, as stated above, some of the original discussions on the existence of an aesthetics that no longer followed the modernist model were carried out in the field of architecture. Even though Hassan does include in his list of the postmodern two of the key figures in the modern-postmodern debate coming from architecture, Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks (1982, 260), Anderson is correct to point to his scant attention to architecture (1998, 20). It is architecture, according to Anderson, “that fi ally projected the term [postmodernism] into the public domain at large” (20). And it is the American architect Robert Venturi, an acid critic of functionalist architecture (Le Corbusier and van der Rohe) as well as modernist architecture overall, whose Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1977) made one of the strongest pronouncements in favor of leading architecture into an entirely new direction. Put simply, Venturi called for an inclusive, eclectic architecture

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  21

that would not be afraid to borrow artistic forms from earlier historical periods. The fi st to use the term postmodern according to Anderson was Venturi’s student Robert Stern, but it was Jencks who capitalized on it, having published his Language of Post-modern Architecture the same year that Venturi published his impressions on the Las Vegas strip (21). Essentially, for Jencks the postmodern in architecture consists of a style that fuses modern attributes with “historicist syntax,” a fusion of the old and the new, high and low cultural features (22). However, Jencks’s most important gesture, according to Anderson, was “to distinguish, early on, ‘late modern’ from ‘post-modern’ architecture” (23). 51 By the end of the 1980s, and especially after Lyotard published his groundbreaking study in 1979, postmodernism was about to become a hotly debated issue. But before elaborating in some detail on Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991), Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), and Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), a crucial essay by Habermas needs to be analyzed briefl , since he is the one theorist who appears with equal force among critics from the North as well as critics from the South. Anderson (1998) himself, in fact, credits “Modernity–An Incomplete Project” (1983), originally a lecture Habermas gave in Frankfurt in 1980, 52 with having put the postmodern debate on the map (36). The fact that Habermas changed the title to “Modernity versus Postmodernity” when it was published in English in New German Critique in 1981, while remaining identical in content to the lecture, speaks volumes not only about the increasing importance that the modernism-postmodernism debate was having in the cultural sphere in the United States but also about the incontrovertible fact that, whatever the postmodern was, it needed to be evaluated in light of modernity. This is something that would not escape critics of postmodernism in Latin America a few years later, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter. Even though “Modernity–An Incomplete Project” does not broach the subject of postmodernity directly, it is evident when reading this essay that Habermas was very aware that something was happening to modernity’s major tenets. Indeed, he may have been unaware of Lyotard’s study, as Anderson suggests (1998, 37), but he knew there were signs of change in the air. What specifically made Habermas react was a statement written by a German critic for the Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung regarding the firs Architecture Biennial in Venice. The statement read, “Postmodernity

22  |  Chapter 1 definitely presents itself as Antimodernity,” to which Habermas’s replied: “The statement describes an emotional current of our times which has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. It has placed on the agenda theories of post-Enlightenment, postmodernity, even of posthistory” (Habermas 1983, 3). Habermas’s comment encapsulates Hassan’s cerebrations concerning postmodernism and it also advances Jameson’s systematic analy­sis of it later. Nonetheless, what most worries Habermas is not so much the state of modernity, which, as he explains very thoroughly in his essay, has come to be narrowly associated with art, but rather the “project of modernity,” that is, the project born out of the Enlightenment in which, following Max Weber’s ideas, the good relationship between the categories of science (knowledge/truth), morality (justice/normative rightness), and aesthetics (beauty/taste), once separated from religion and metaphysics, would eventually bring social and political liberation to mankind. Responding to the German neoconservatives’ attacks53 against cultural modernity, which they blamed for weakening society’s work ethic without realizing that the economy in particular and capitalism in general were altering the good functioning of the aforementioned three spheres, Habermas asks, “Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?” (1981, 9). Here resides, to a large extent, the very crux of the modern/postmodern debate. Habermas is conscious of modernity’s aporias, and he realizes that “the chances [for the incarnation of the project of modernity] today are not very good” (1981, 13), but he still harbors hope: “The project of modernity has not yet been fulfilled,” he states (11) 54 The value of Habermas’s essay in my view is that, while Hassan had incorporated the concept of the postmodern into the arts, and while Lyotard had examined the philosophical consequences of postmodernity, Habermas was probably the first to attribute the changes in the cultural sphere to changes in capitalism itself. This paramount connection between culture and economics at the heart of the rise of the postmodern condition is the subject of Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991). Before publishing the essay on postmodernism,55 which would become the first chapter of Postmodernism, Jameson had given a talk at the Whitney Museum in 1982 titled “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Published the following year in Hal Foster’s The Anti-­ Aesthetic (1983) under the same title, this is Jameson’s first incursion into postmodernism. Several of the ideas and concepts presented in a more

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  23

thorough fashion in Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism are introduced here: the increasing dilution of the divide between high culture and mass culture, the conceptualization of a new sense of both time and space, notions of “pastiche” and “schizophrenia” as the very trademarks of postmodern culture, among others. In sum, in Jameson’s view the various signs of the postmodern manifested in the paintings of Andy Warhol, the music of Philip Glass, the novels of William Burroughs, the vision of architecture in Learning from Las Vegas, and contemporary theory in general, were nothing more than a reaction against high modernism itself,56 revolutionary in the first half of the twentieth century but now considered “the establishment and the enemy” (1983, 112). He emphasizes that the term postmodernism is what he calls a “periodizing concept” whose value resides in its ability to establish a link between what was happening in the cultural field with what was occurring at the social and economic levels in a society variously called postindustrial, consumer society, the society of the media, or the society of the spectacle. Jameson dates the origin of what he calls “multinational” or “late” capitalism in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the United States and in 1958 in France—with the establishment of the Fifth Republic—and sees the decade of the 1960s as a kind of “key transitional period” in which, at the very moment that this new international economic order is imposed, it begins to face its own internal contradictions (113). Of all the traits associated with postmodernism, two in particular stand out. First of all, what he perceives as “the disappearance of a sense of history” in the social realm and the exultation of life lived in a “perpetual present.” And second, “the transformation of reality into images” (125). He ends his essay by asking whether postmodernism, like modernism before, will in time be equally subversive and oppositional without capitulating to consumer capitalism. In the first two chapters of Postmodernism especially57 Jameson is able to present a more substantive account of postmodern culture in general. He insists, foremost, that postmodernism is not a style that artists can choose at will (1991, 1, 4) but rather “the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism” (45–46). 58 At the same time, although he recognizes that not all cultural production is strictly postmodern, every cultural activity must, of necessity, pass through this “cultural dominant” (6). As a matter of fact, not only is it impossible to escape the postmodern moment, it is also no longer viable to criticize it morally, as the luxury of critical distance has forever disappeared (46, 48). The transformations in the cultural sphere

24  |  Chapter 1 as a direct result of the transformations of the structure of capitalism itself, and their impact upon social life, are several according to Jameson. None is more evident in the new landscape that he draws in Postmodernism, however, than “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superfi iality,” which, for him, arguably constitutes “the supreme formal feature of all . . . postmodernisms” (9). Now, directly related to this “depthlessness,” and partly due to the fragmented nature of the subject in postmodernism—a feature already noted in “Postmodernism” (1983, 114– 15)—is what Jameson calls “the waning of affect in postmodern culture” (1991, 10), that is to say, the idea that the subject is no longer able to express him/herself as he/she had done during modernism and is thus deprived of a personal style (1991, 15–16). 59 For Jameson, it is precisely the diminution of the subject’s importance and the subsequent unavailability of the personal style that irretrievably lead to what he denominates “pastiche” and that he defines as “the imitation of a peculiar or unique idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (1991, 17). Nonetheless, pastiche is not to be equated with parody. Pastiche in fact lacks all the positive qualities that abound in parody: the ability to satirize, the ability to laugh, and the ability to criticize. “Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs” (1991, 17), states Jameson famously. One is led to think that in some way the notion of pastiche is related to another feature of the postmodern, “intertextuality,” which the critic attributes to a “crisis of historicity” (1991, 19, 25). In other words, a fragmented subject can only produce a fragmented culture, aesthetic objects made up of bits and pieces of already existent objects in history, or, even better, Pound’s “make it new” replaced by the practice of new historicism. It is in this new context, finall , a context that Jameson—borrowing from Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1975)—prefers to call multinational as opposed to postindustrial capitalism, where the postmodern subject must learn to live. But to do so, to be able to find one’s way in what he calls “postmodern hyperspace” (44), a space that is overwhelming in every sense, an ability for “cognitive mapping” must first be developed, another important concept in Jameson’s arsenal.60 His most important contribution to the postmodern debate, however—beside the introduction of concepts that will forever be associated with postmodern culture in general (such as cognitive mapping and pastiche)—is that he offers a periodizing concept to approach postmodernism.

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  25

Now, if Jameson focuses primarily on the features of postmodernist culture, David Harvey centers his attention mainly on the causes that led to the advent of this postmodernist culture. He dates the emergence of postmodernism between 1968 and 1972 “out of the chrysalis of the anti-modern movement of the 1960s” (1990, 38). Fully aware of the major arguments concerning postmodernism (Bell, Hassan, Jameson, Habermas, Huyssen), he spends the first third section of his The Condition of Postmodernity on a discussion of modernity and modernism.61 Harvey holds that there is much more continuity than an abrupt change between modernism and postmodernism (116) and, consequently, places a stronger emphasis on the role of modernization in this whole process: Modernism is a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to cond tions of modernity produced by a particular process of modernization. A proper interpretation of the rise of postmodernism, therefore, ought to grapple with the nature of modernization. Only in that way will we be able to judge whether postmodernism is a different reaction to an unchanging modernization process, or whether it reflects or presages a radical shift in the nature of modernization itself, towards, for example, some kind of “postindustrial” or even “postcapitalist” society. (99) Harvey’s emphasis on the role of modernization in the rise of postmodernism is one of the points of his study that separates him from Lyotard, Hassan, Habermas, and, to a lesser extent, Jameson. However, he is very much in agreement with some of the prevalent ideas regarding both modernism and postmodernism. For instance, he recognizes that, just like in postmodernism, in modernism there also were “schizoid moments” (1990, 54). Similarly, he is cognizant of the fact that postmodernism’s insistence on the fragmentary and the ephemeral makes it practically impossible to entertain a political project as much as he values its respect for difference and otherness (116 ) and admits the fundamental role played by deconstruction upon it (49–52). Harvey’s major contention is that the emergence of postmodernist culture is closely related to what he calls the rise of a more “flexible regime of capitalist accumulation” and a “new round of ‘time-space compression’ in the organization of capitalism” (1990, vii). The breakdown of the Bretton

26  |  Chapter 1 Woods agreement62 in 1971, and the adoption of a flexible exchange rate system in 1973, argues Harvey (164–65), accelerated the decline of Fordism and debilitated the Keynesian monetary system. In place since the beginning of the twentieth century, Fordism63 was an economic practice that promoted industrial mass production of standardized, low-cost goods64 through the use of special purpose machinery that depended on unskilled labor whose high wages allowed workers to purchase what they produced. Whereas Keynesianism,65 dominant between the 1930s and the early 1970s—and, one may add, having had a kind of comeback in the 2008 economic crisis (at least in the United States)—assumed that government and the public sector should play a significant role in the economy because, at the macroeconomic level, the private sector does not always get things right. It is the breakup of these two systems66 that, according to Harvey, inaugurates “a period of rapid change, flux and uncertainty” (124). Specificall , he defines “flexible accumulation” as resting on “flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing fi ancial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation” (147). Capitalism, as Harvey so presciently predicts, becomes even more “tightly organized” but “through dispersal” (159), that is, by its stretching its tentacles to multiple geographical locations and eroding nation-states in the process. This new scenario is characterized by deregulation and subcontracting, temporary and self-employment; manifold mergers of all kinds; the increasing importance of information and knowledge as valuable commodities; the increasing autonomy of the banking system; and the advent of ever newer technologies. But what most draws Harvey’s attention is not so much the fact that economic power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands but rather “the explosion in new financial instruments and markets, coupled with the rise of highly sophisticated systems of financial coordination on a global scale” (194), which, we may add, will, in due course, be among the major culprits of the economic meltdown that starts with the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. What happens, in the end, is that the financial system becomes utterly divorced from real production. As stated above, along with the flexible regime of capitalist accumulation starting in the early 1970s, a new compression of both time and space

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  27

within capitalism emerged. Informed by the ideas on time and space of authors such as Blanchot, Lefebvre, de Certau, and Foucault, Harvey concludes that, in order to understand time and space, one has to first understand the “material processes” (1990, 204) that condition them in each instance. He underlines, further, the importance of maps and mapping and establishes a crucial difference between space—nature increasingly controlled by capital through property and exploitation—and place, associated with workers, traditions, and local resistances. The history of capitalism, he contends, “has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life” (240), a process that has broken barriers of all sorts and made the world a smaller place. The reason Harvey talks about a “new round” of time-space compression in the organization of capitalism is because capitalism had already experimented a transformation in its management of time, space, and place in the middle of the nineteenth century, a transformation that not only produced insecurity and made people aware that an event in one part of the world could have repercussions in several other places but one that created a crisis of representation. Most interesting is Harvey’s realization that the manifold reactions to this crisis of representation during modernity—or, as he puts it, “The identity of place was reaffirmed in the midst of the growing abstractions of space” (272)—bear a striking resemblance, in the context of postmodernism, to Stanley Fish’s “interpretive community,” Lyotard’s “local determinisms,” Kenneth Frampton’s “regional resistances,” and Foucault’s “heterotopias.” In other words, responses to modernization during modernity and postmodernity are somewhat similar independently of modernization’s nature at a given time. In the end, what Harvey underscores is the “disorienting and disruptive impact” that an intense phase of time-space compression has had upon “political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life” (284). In sum, with postmodernism there arises a throwaway society in every sense, images become commodities; politics becomes mediatized; unions, once concentrated in the factories of mass production, lose political capital through geographical mobility and decentralization; and money is de-materialized (286, 288, 294, 297). As one can see, then, more so than Habermas and even Jameson, Harvey explains the concrete economic reasons that sustain postmodernism itself. Although early on in this chapter I stated that Hutcheon’s paradigm of postmodernism does not quite correspond to Bolaño’s fictional style, I do

28  |  Chapter 1 deem summarizing the major contentions in her A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) worthwhile for two reasons. First of all, because of all the statements on postmodernism broached in this chapter thus far, hers is the only one that pays closer attention to the poetics of postmodernism; and second, because it is the most canonical.67 Hutcheon does in essence two things in her study. On the one hand, she defines postmodernism and she defends it with vigor. On the other, she conceives of “historiographic metafiction” as the fundamental mode of postmodernism in narrative fiction. Postmodernism’s relation to modernism, she claims, is “typically contradictory . . . It marks neither a simple and radical break from it nor a straightforward continuity with it: it is both and neither” (18). For example, while postmodernist art is essentially self-reflexive and parodic, it does not, as critics such as Jameson (1991), Eagleton (1996), and Huyssen (1986) appear to suggest, deny the past. In effect, postmodernism is neither “ahistorical” nor “dehistorized” (xii) but it does problematize history. What postmodernism challenges foremost, according to Hutcheon, are the central tenets of liberal humanism, tenets such as “autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity, totalization, system, universalization, center, continuity, teleology, closure, hierarchy, homogeneity, uniqueness, origin” (57). Notions dear to modernist aesthetics, such as “originality” and “authenticity,” are equally undermined in postmodernism (11). In the end, the ultimate determining factor is “context.” “Context is all” (54) in postmodernism, argues the critic. Thus postmodernism’s penchant for the paradoxical, the multiple, and, above all, “the provisional” (47). Yet, since Hutcheon stresses the contradictory nature of postmodernism throughout A Poetics, she is fully aware that as much as it puts into question some of the most salient aspects of modernist culture—such as, for example, the autonomy of art—postmodernism also borrows and even capitalizes on such cherished strategies of modernism as, for example, self-reflexive experimentation Though, certainly, not all of postmodernism in literature can be reduced to what Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction,” it is in this literary practice where, in her view, self-reflexivity and parody flourish. From the very beginning of A Poetics (1988), she states that she derives her arguments about historiographic metafiction from arguments concerning postmodernism in architecture, and she mentions the likes of Jencks, Stern, and Moore, among others. She defines historiographic metafiction thus:

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  29

“those well-known and popular novels which are intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (5). In this type of fiction, she continues, not only is narrative perspective,68 but it is also the narrator who tells (as opposed to the one who sees), that are altered both by becoming “multiple and hard to locate” and by, paradoxically, becoming “resolutely provisional and limited” (11). The author spends a good deal of time defending herself against those who take postmodernism to task for either denying historical events or for presenting a distorted version of them. In her defense, Hutcheon contends that postmodernism is “resolutely historical” (4) but that, even as Jameson, a ferocious defender of history, has shown, history is only available to us textually (143). Hence, in historiographic metafiction in particular, “The past as referent is not bracketed or effaced, as Jameson would like to believe: it is incorporated and modified, given new and different life and meaning” (24). What’s more, since, as Hayden White has demonstrated in The Tropics of Discourse and other essays, history is only accessible through texts, one can only conclude that, in the end, there is no essential difference between literature and history as both discourses make use of the past as referent (89). This latter point might be a bit of an exaggeration, certainly. History and literature are not the same, even admitting that the former reaches us textually (and, increasingly, visually). At the same time, saying that “historiographic metafiction” represents the most essential trait of postmodernism in literature might be too narrow because it excludes other forms of postmodern attributes in fiction. Nonetheless, Hutcheon’s efforts to defend the notion of “history” within the context of postmodernism by ascribing to it a less narrow interpretation is a salutary move. Likewise, “historiographic metafiction” might be a good way to look at the historical record not only to question its premises but also to theorize on what the historical record does not say, as long, of course, as we do not forget that it is still a fictitious version of that record Hutcheon’s views regarding postmodernism in general and postmodernist poetics in particular complete the picture of postmodernism that started here with an analysis of Hassan, Lyotard, Habermas, Jameson, and Harvey, but it surely does not exhaust it. Among those who have studied postmodernism but whose ideas have not received ample attention in this chapter are Huyssen (1986 ), 69 Eagleton (1996), 70 and Anderson (1998) 71 —the most important—but also Morawski (1996). 72 A name that

30  |  Chapter 1 comes up with certain frequency in discussions of modernity and postmodernism is that of Marshall Berman73 and, in particular, his classical study on the experience of modernity, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (1982). In 2002, Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli edited Postmodernism: The Key Figures,74 an interesting collection of critical articles on the major figures of postmodernist culture, figures as diverse as John Barth, Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Kuhn, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and others. I do believe, however, that the positions on postmodernism I have covered here represent the most salient ideas on the topic in the United States and Europe. Among these, the one that stands out most, without a doubt, applicable to post-industrial societies but certainly not to Latin America, was the idea that the so-called grand narratives had come to an end. Some saw this simply as a moment of crisis within modernity itself, while for others postmodernism constituted an entirely new phenomenon that had its origins not in culture but in economics. What had happened, according this view, is that capitalism had undergone such a drastic transformation after World War II that it had completely altered every area of life. Yet the question of postmodernism in other parts of the globe, and in particular in Latin America, was generally not addressed in early debates on postmodernism taking place in the United States and Europe. As we shall see next, in Latin America, too, a debate sprung up about modernity and postmodernism.

Some Reactions from the South by La and Latin Americ anists

tin Americ ans

When looking at the literature on postmodernism produced by Latin American and Latin Americanist critics, three things stand out. First, there are no major fi ures attached to theories of postmodernism in the same way we saw in the previous section.75 Second, postmodernism in Latin America is fundamentally a political, not a stylistic or cultural, issue. Predictably, therefore, my study revolves first and foremost around the political aspects of Bolaño’s oeuvre, not around its literary aspects. Third, a good many critics focus their attention on modernity in order to prove that some of the traits of the postmodern were already present in the modern. Modernity, in other words, but particularly modernization, is a central concern when it comes to assessing postmodernism in Latin America. In order to evaluate the multiple reactions to theories of the postmodern emanating

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  31

from the United States and Europe in Latin American and Latin Americanist discourses, I divide this section of the chapter into the following subsections: (1) different views on modernity; (2) assessments that put modernity and postmodernity side by side from a neutral perspective or give more weight to one or the other; and (3) analyses that either praise or condemn the arrival of postmodernism in Latin America. We shall start with analyses of modernity that either criticize the traditional conceptualization of it or claim Latin America’s fundamental role in its construction. The first view is represented by Enrique Dussel (2001) and Raúl Bueno (2002), the second by Aníbal Quijano (1988). Dussel speaks of the existence of two paradigms of modernity, the “Eurocentric” and the “world” paradigm, respectively (93). According to the Eurocentric paradigm, modernity is born in Europe and is then propagated to the rest of the world. According to the world paradigm, however, modernity is not an exclusively European phenomenon but, instead, “the culture of the center of the ‘world-system,’ of the first ‘world-system’” (94), that is to say, of Europe once it discovered, conquered, and colonized what are now called Latin and North America. From this point of view, modernity does not have much to do with the supposedly innate superiority of Europe but rather with its subalternization of newly discovered peoples and the imposition of a capitalist economy in their territory. Once at the periphery of the world system, Europe was now at its center. Dussel further distinguishes two types of modernity, first a “Hispanic, humanist, renaissance modernity” (104), and, second, an “Anglo-Germanic Europe” modernity that is usually taken as the “only modernity” (105). In the end, claims the Argentine philosopher, the debate between those who defend reason and those who defend postmodern culture cannot escape what he calls “the Eurocentric horizon” or, put differently, “The crisis of modernity . . . refers to internal aspects of Europe. The ‘peripheral world’ would appear to be a passive spectator of a thematic that does not touch it, because it is a ‘barbarian,’ a ‘premodern,’ or simply, still in need of being ‘modernized’” (110). 76 Without stating so explicitly, Bueno (2002) would appear to adhere to the world paradigm proposed by Dussel (2001) at the same time that he, like the latter, holds a “Calibanesque”77 as opposed to an “Arielist”78 view of Latin America. In other words, from its very inception, the Latin American continent “entered into the dark side of Modernity” (189), as he contends, because it was not incorporated as a full but rather as a subjugated

32  |  Chapter 1 subject. This explains, partially, the impossibility of Latin America’s ability to perfectly fit Weber’s criteria of modernity—or Habermas’s interpretation of Weber’s ideas about it—and consequently the presence of a “partial Modernity” (190) 79 in the continent. Modernity, therefore, is not what we might call a “blank,” abstract and innocent process by means of which Europe carries its good intentions to the rest of the world in order to save it from itself. On the contrary, “domination” is its “sine qua non prerequisite” (192): “Euro-American modernism would not have become what it is without capitalism, political empires, mercantilism, neo-colonization, transnationals, economic imperialism, and dependency” (192). From this perspective, not only is modernity never a complete process (in Latin America or elsewhere in the so-called Third World) because, we might say, capitalism—modernity’s tool of expansion par excellence—needs to expand constantly, but also because peripheral countries are compelled to develop in tandem with developed countries. In practice, this usually means that developing countries enter the world-system as exporters of one or two products (cotton, tobacco, copper, fruit, or whatever)—thus creating social and economic inequality in the process—and become not only more dependent on the trials and tribulations of the international market but also impaired in the progress of their national economies. Bueno says it best when he talks about the “mimetic modernization of Latin America” (2002, 195), concluding, “Ours is then a submerged Modernity, a kind of deficit sub-Modernity, required by the Center’s ‘conspicuous’ Modernity” (193). In Quijano’s view, what eventually became known as Latin America played a crucial role in the production of modernity at the end of the fi teenth century and continued to have a significant importance throughout most of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries (1988, 17–18). However, when modernity in the continent begins to acquire its own character, Quijano argues, it falls victim to Spain’s retrograde economic policies and later to England’s economic might. While in Europe modernity is both an idea and a reality and is attached to “material social relations” (19), in Latin America it becomes “mere fenced-in, incommunicated, almost incommunicable intelligence” (19), incapable of transforming the material lives of the majority. To prove his argument, Quijano, like Dussel (2001), speaks of the existence of two different rationalities at the very core of the European Enlightenment: on the one hand, a

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  33

rationality that we might call liberating and whose goal was to free humankind from the shackles of tyranny and superstition; on the other, what is traditionally called instrumental reason and is associated with power and, above all, domination. The first was dominant in “Mediterranean Europe,” the second in “Nordic Europe” and especially in “what is now called Britain” (19). Leaving aside for now the veracity of restricting each rationality to a given geographical space, Quijano concludes that it is at this juncture in world history that modernity, as “domination” (19), begins a process of “modernization” which, once the United States enters the scene after the Second World War, turns Latin America into a passive victim and deprives it forever of a rationality linked to liberation. The author puts it this way: “Latin America would experience modernity only under the guise of modernization” (19). 80 Now that we have examined Dussel’s, Bueno’s, and Quijano’s views on modernity, let us turn our attention to criticism that analyzes modernity in Latin America in light of postmodernity, and vice versa. First of all, there are those who take a neutral or objective position, such as Esther Díaz, Eduardo Subirats, Jesús Martín-Barbero, and Juan Enrique Vega. In “¿Qué es la posmodernidad? ” (1988), Díaz offers one of the first critical approaches to the major differences between modernity and postmodernity in Spanish.81 Subirats does something somewhat similar, except that he pays particular attention to the transformations of modern culture. What is most interesting about his take on the issue of modernity is the fact that, just like Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, he locates the crisis of modernity not during the 1950s or 1960s but at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, further stating that “modernity is an integral part of the crisis” (1989, 218). Already at this time, and among philosophers such as Scheler or Cassirer—or even Bergson, Husserl, Dilthey, and Ortega—and sociologists such as Weber or Mannheim, claims the author, there is the perception of the “tragedy of culture” (221) in their writings. From this viewpoint, the so-called crisis of modernity or, rather, the arrival of postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, is no more than an “excessive magnitude” (221) of what was already happening at the very inception of modern culture. In “Modernity and Postmodernity in the Periphery” (2002b), Martín-Barbero asserts that one cannot comprehend the meaning of the crisis of modernity from a Latin American perspective if one does not, on the one hand, stop thinking that

34  |  Chapter 1 Latin America’s modernity is a pale and degraded or deformed version of the “true” (32) modernity, and, on the other, if one persists in opposing “Tradition and Modernity” (33). The problem with these views, he contends further, is that they put one in the predicament of “opting for modernization as a means for a definitive ‘overcoming backwardness’ or pleading for a ‘return to our roots and denouncing Modernity as a simulacrum’” (33). He concludes his article by arguing that, paradoxically, the “postmodern social dislocations” (36) make it possible that modernity be a “collective experience” (36) in Latin America, and that, in that sense, rather than postmodernity substituting modernity, Latin American countries organize their liaison with tradition in a new way. Vega, finall , views the existence of postmodernity as an opportunity to examine once again the modern project, a project that in Latin America “has had a tortuous, atypical and cruel outcome” (1988, 25). Besides theorists of modernity and postmodernity in Latin America who appear not to take a position vis-à-vis either, there are those who recognize the positive qualities of both, and those who criticize the traditional conceptions of modernity. Among the most lucid early articles in Spanish on the subject of postmodernity coming from Latin America is “Un desencanto llamado postmoderno” (1988), 82 by Norbert Lechner. Admitting that his reflections take modernity as a point of reference, as well as recognizing that the debate on postmodernity has long transcended the philosophical, aesthetic, and architectural spheres where it first developed and has now become a “political matter” (129), Lechner poses the following key question: “Has modernity’s transformative impulse been exhausted? ” (129). Indeed, postmodernity is, above all, a kind of disillusionment with modernity. But despite its various contradictions, claims Lechner, the problem is not modernity itself but rather a certain way of construing it. Construing it in such a way, for example, that pluralism and heterogeneity, long feared in Latin America as threats to national unity, may be seen as positive and creative. In the end, it is not Enlightenment reason that is the problem but “equating reason with formal rationality” (133), the latter of which “is guided exclusively by a calculation of means and ends” (133). Furthermore, continues the author, there is a clear and palpable disenchantment with politics in Latin American countries. This disenchantment, however, is not disenchantment with politics itself but rather with a way of doing politics that is unable to produce “a collective identity” (133–34). Similarly,

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  35

postmodernity is not a rejection of modernity tout court but, instead, a rejection of a certain modality of it: “In sum, today’s disenchantment has to do with modernization and, specificall , with a managerial-technocratic way of making politics . . . I insist, it’s a disenchantment with modernization, not with modernity” (134). Latin Americans, concludes Lechner, do wish to be modern, but only as long as modernity and modernization are not confused, and provided that the future is no longer construed as “redemption” (136) and politics becomes just “the art of the possible” (137). Martín Hopenhayn, who has written extensively on Latin America, takes kind of a middle position. He seeks to criticize modernity without abandoning its postulates. Irrespective of postmodernism’s “ideological ambivalence” (1988, 61), 83 the postmodern debate, argues Hopenhayn, constitutes a good opportunity to scrutinize modernity’s unresolved issues. As the article progresses, however, it becomes a criticism of the negative implications of postmodernism. After elaborating on its major attacks against modernity— the idea of progress, the avant-garde as having a direction and a rationality in history, modernization as the true goal of modernity, ideologies of all stripes—and further alluding to the principles to which postmodernism adheres staunchly (diversity, multiplicity of languages, axiological relativism, among others), he focuses on the economic and political consequences of postmodernity for Latin America. For Hopenhayn, postmodernism becomes the ideology of neoliberalism, an economic system that promotes deregulation and privatization as well as the transformation of every area of life into a possible commodity.84 By critiquing politics’ redemptive role he condemns the state, and by critiquing ideology he ends up taking Marxism and socialism to task. Although Hopenhayn’s Ni apocalípticos ni integrados: Aventuras de la modern­idad en América Latina (1994) is too long a study to discuss in detail here, its major thesis is that postmodernity represents the unresolved contradictions of modernity. The author offers an excellent critique of Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne85 as well as analyses of the legitimacy crisis of the “Welfare State” in Latin America86 and the viability of social programs in the midst of the purportedly loss of grand narratives of liberation.87 The problem with Lyotard’s claim that scientific knowledge represents only one more language among several languages competing for hegemony, is that, in the Latin American context, it runs the risk of depriving the continent of needed scientific and technical know-how and

36  |  Chapter 1 “threatens with keeping most of Latin America in an underdeveloped and peripheral position for a long time to come” (104). The exultation of microlanguages and heterogeneity, moreover, could potentially contribute to the further fragmentation, injustices, and exclusion characteristic of what he later calls, appropriately, “societies with a heterogeneous modernization” (243). Above all, Hopenhayn chastises Lyotard’s narrow view of culture, a view that restricts culture to the production of knowledge in highly specialized research centers while completing ignoring the social aspects of it. Somewhat in tandem with Hopenhayn’s rhetorical question in Ni apocalípticos, “What can be more postmodern than Latin American countries?” (1994, 115), Pedro Lange-Churión and Eduardo Mendieta (2001) defend the essentially postmodern nature of Latin America. Much of their analysis, however, revolves around modernity, without which postmodernity, in their opinion, cannot be comprehended. Calling the critical year of 1492 “a condition of possibility of modernity” (17) and aligning themselves with Dussel’s (2001) chief contentions, they seek to dispel both the idea that modernity originates in the center or in the north of Europe and the notion that associates modernization exclusively with secularization (Weber, Simmel). On the one hand, modernity has to do with “the problem of the other” (17) who has been part and parcel of the process from the very beginning; and, on the other, it has to do with capitalism. What Lange-Churión and Mendieta most seek to underscore is that modernity is both a local and a global affair. State the authors, “Modernity is glocal, an epochal configuration in which the local is produced by the global and the global is determined by certain localities” (19). From this point of view, they proceed, “(Post)modernity is mainly the disenchantment of Western society with its own enchantment, its narcissism, its plenopotency” (21). Like Hopenhayn, they point to the negative consequences of the arrival of postmodernity in general, such as “the deindustrialization of capitalism” (25), the enfeeblement of labor, “the virtualization of money” (26), all in the context of a post-Fordism, which, in their judgment, has become global. One of their most productive contentions, in my opinion, is not only that there are different “postmodernities” (26) but also different “modernities” (26). The path toward postmodernity varies from country to country, but the key challenge for Latin America is to find out how it became postmodern, by which specific route 88

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  37

George Yúdice outlines a possible response in “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism” (199 2). If Latin America is postmodern, declares the author, and if, moreover, it is postmodern avant la lettre,89 it is because “the heterogeneous character of [its] social and cultural formations made it possible for discontinuous, alternative, and hybrid forms to emerge that challenged the hegemony of the grand récit of modernity” (1). Heterogeneity in the continent, adds Yúdice, has absolutely nothing to do with a postmodern trick of some kind but all to do with “uneven implementation of modernization” (1–2). The failure of modernization, in fact, is what has historically spawned not just contesting projects in the economic, political, and cultural spheres but also more concrete survival techniques such as, for example, informal economies and other considered “illegal” activities beyond the control of the government. Taking into account the fact that for Yúdice it is the material conditions of a given social formation that ultimately explain what is on the surface a specific cultural phenomenon such as postmodernism, he condemns Hutcheon for deriving a theory of postmodernity based on, among other factors, the formal techniques of concrete literary works (e.g., of Puig or Rushdie). “It is easy enough to identify stylistic markers,” argues Yúdice, “it is more diffi ult to pay close attention to how conjunctural circumstances condition the ways in which those markers are to be interpreted” (7). He rejects Lyotard’s and Jame­ son’s theories of postmodernity for exactly the same reason, stressing that, to theorize postmodernity, one has to look at it as “a series of conditions” (7), each unique both in its specific social formation and in its response to modernization. He concludes his article by stating that, at least in Latin America, it is not a matter of modernity still being an unfinished project but rather “a series of necessarily unfinished projects” (20) 90 Before moving on to assessments of postmodernity in Latin America that welcome it or reject it—the third part of this section—let us briefl look at three views that attempt to balance postmodernity with modernity. The first that ought to be considered is that of María Cristina Reigadas, whose article, “Neomodernidad y posmodernidad: Preguntando desde América Latina” (1988), is similar in scope and depth to that of Díaz’s (1988) except that it takes a much more condescending view of postmodernity. She speaks, for example, of postmodernity’s almost perverse tolerance (120), of its anthropophagous nature,91 of its cultural relativism (121), of its soft and playful character (125), and of its perverse ubiquity

38  |  Chapter 1 (127). Like Hopenhayn and other critics, however, she is aware that modernity also had its dark side and its paradoxes, hence postmodernity would not appear to be something entirely new in this regard. Reigadas states, “What’s at stake are different—and contrasting—interpretations of the tensions and contradictions between the techno-economic order, political democracy, and individual freedom, basic features of modernity” (1988, 123). Postmodernity being “the conscience and thought of the crisis” (125) and rejecting notions such as project, goal, and sense (126) as well as—in the specific case of Latin America—nation-state (134), it unfortunately falls into the trap of assuming “a new modality of universalization” (138–39) since, in its utter rejection of totalizing visions, it ends up erecting negation and fragmentation into absolutes. A second view to examine here is that of Franco Crespi, who goes as far as saying that, in point of fact, what he prefers to call late modernity instead of postmodernity rests mostly on negations (1989, 234), for instance the negation of an ultimate foundation, the negation or disappearance of an “end” (231), and the negation of the subject, all in opposition to the glorious enthronement of reason, truth, and redemption characteristic of modernity. The problem with this stance, however, is that it fails to see “the positive aspects of the search for the absolute” (236) and it even becomes irrational. Regarding the negation of the subject, for instance, Crespi asks, “Who speaks about the end of the subject if not the subject her/himself? ” (235). The way out of the dilemma, he affirms toward the end of his appropriately titled article “Modern­idad: La ética de una edad sin certezas” (1989), is to adopt an ethics that is willing to live with the search for an absolute, knowing fully well that “the limitations of knowledge, the absence of a foundation and an end, and incongruity” (236) constitute “categories inherent in individual and social existence” (236). It would appear as if Crespi wanted to embrace two contradictory tendencies, which takes us to the third definition of modernity and postmodernity examined in this subsection, that of García Canclini and his classic Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1989). For García Canclini, the value of what he calls “postmodernism’s antievolutionist reflection” (23) consists not so much in asking the usual rhetorical question of why worry about theorizing postmodernity in Latin America if we are still only partially modern (20) but, instead, in problematizing the links that modernity established with tradition in order to exclude it or

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  39

overcome it. The core of the issue resides in scrutinizing the connecting sociocultural points between modernity and tradition on the one hand, and—with the assistance of disciplines such as anthropology, communications, the history of art, folklore and literature—the ability to conceive of modernization in Latin America not as an external and overwhelming force but as the manifold ways in which different social groups “take charge of the multitemporal heterogeneity of each nation” on the other (15). 92 In the end, what modernization does is to dispel the notion that so-called high and popular cultures constitute “self-sufficient universes” (18) We should now move to the third category of this section, that is, the one that lays the emphasis on postmodernity in Latin America more specificall . Approaches that recognize its positive or potential aspects will be probed first; those that condemn its possibly nefarious aspects will be considered afterward. The idea is to attempt to provide a panoramic view of postmodernity’s reception in the continent. In his very comprehensive and well-researched 2001 study, “The Challenge of Postmodernity to Latin American Philosophy,” Santiago Castro-Gómez commences by presenting a summary of Latin America’s major critics of postmodernity93 and continues with a confrontation of postmodernism’s principal tenets as regards the continent’s cultural and political realities. Though the article is too long to explore here in detail, it bears alluding to the following points. First of all, postmodernity is an integral part of Western civilization overall, including Latin America (130), and it is also a “‘state of the culture’ with deep roots among us, even though its causes are different from those which produce the same phenomenon in North-Atlantic countries” (137). 94 Though he does not mention him by name, Castro-Gómez rejects Jameson’s central argument that postmodernity is the “ideology of late capitalism” (137) and that it is necessarily in cahoots with neoliberalism. Foremost, postmodernity is not what follows modernity but rather modernity’s reflection of its own aporias (138). To speak of “the end of modernity,” therefore, does not signify, literally, to speak of its death but rather of its ambition for a “unitary ideal” (139). “The end of history,” similarly, means no longer conceiving of history as a moving force advancing forward but, rather, as Foucault theorized, conceiving of it “in terms of discontinuity and particularity” (2001, 141). The value of postmodern criticism in this sense is that, by demonstrating that “human societies do not function according to a sole underlying ‘logic’” (141), it rescues so-called small histories (142) up until

40  |  Chapter 1 now ignored.95 Nonetheless, the author warns certain Latin American intellectuals—for example, Dussel96 (145–46)—not to fall into the opposite trap; that is to say, turning history solely into the history of the poor and the oppressed (142). What makes postmodern thinking valuable for a continent like Latin America is not that it negates the existence of the subject but that it seeks to “decentralize it” by opening “the field to a plurality of subjects that do not demand centrality” (144). Likewise, argues Castro-­ Gómez, the displacement of Enlightenment reason does not entail the negation of reason tout court but the installing of “different types of rationality” (144) or, in agreement with German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, the resorting to a “transversal reason which does not part from unity but rather from plurality and multiperspictivism” (147). 97 If there is one Latin Americanist critic who has advocated the decentralization of the subject—and who has been severely criticized recently for the implications of his posture for literature98 —it is John Beverly. It should not be surprising, therefore, that in his and José Oviedo’s introduction to the excellent collection on postmodernism in Latin America, The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (1995), they admit their “bias in favor of the postmodern turn” (10) while recognizing, at the same time, that “utopian impulses” (9) continue to be present in Latin America despite the feeling of disenchantment brought on by postmodernism. In two previously published articles, included in his Against Literature (1993 ),99 Beverly turns his attention specifically to the relationship between literature and cultural studies and the relation between politics and Latin American postmodernism. Very much in sync with his stand on the inferior position of literature vis-à-vis other nonliterary cultural practices, in the first article he wonders about what would occur, for instance, if instead of enunciation coming from above—as, for example, the lyric voice in Neruda’s “Alturas de Machu Pichu,” intent on becoming the spokesperson for an entire group of people—it acquired a “horizontal” (1993, 18) position that allowed it to “enter into direct relation with forms of political agency of subaltern social groups” (1993, 18). In the second, in reference to Yúdice’s question as to whether it is possible to speak of postmodernity in Latin America,100 he concedes that even though it might not be viable (1993, “The Politics” 106)—alluding to two opposing political views that nonetheless stand together in their condemnation of postmodernism (Nelson Osorio’s and Octavio Paz’s, respectively)—it might equally be erroneous to overlook

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  41

postmodernity’s potential for scrutinizing the increasingly stronger bonds between local and global cultures (1993, 107). In fact, later in the article, he calls on the Left to “aestheticize politics” (1993, 118) and to pay closer attention to the production and consumption of culture, and to redeem the role of postmodernist politics, a politics not “necessarily an ‘antipolitics’ of dispersed single-issue or identity-politics groups” (1993, 120). Among the approaches that view the arrival of postmodernity in Latin America positively, the one by Pedro Lange-Churión is especially interesting. In “Neobaroque: Latin America’s Postmodernity?” (2001), he nuances the typical contention among certain Latin American postmodernist discourses that Latin America has always been postmodern by saying that the crisis of representation at the heart of postmodernity really has its genesis during the baroque and continues in the neobaroque (254). Examining the neobaroque, he claims, will not only cast a light into the present cultural moment but it will also allow for the interrogation of the crisis from the margin, perhaps for the first time in Latin American history (254, 261). Like Castro-Gómez, he rejects Jameson’s argument that postmodernity is no more than the cultural expression of late capitalism, and he defends the “democratizing impetus in the postmodern” (260). Emil Volek, for his part, introduces the expression “second modernization” (2002, xi) to refer to the cultural, economic, and political transformations affecting Latin America since the end of World War II to the present. I fin especially enlightening his subsequent commentary because, while it offers an unbiased judgment of postmodernity, it does not lose sight of postmodernity’s intimate, almost conniving relationship with modernity: “Postmodernity is not primarily something coming after or going against, but rather a historical period characterized by many continuities and discontinuities, and as complex, heterogeneous and contradictory as Modernity was, as was any historical time before and certainly after” (xvi).101 Finally, the works of three authors critical of the postmodern turn in the continent need to be mentioned. The most critical, without a doubt, is Neil Larsen. In his 1995 study on the subject—centered on postmodern philosophy and political theory—he first focuses on postmodernism’s understanding of reason and its view of Marxism, and he then assesses the value of marginality for a postmodernist politics in Latin America. Since, according to Larsen, reason in postmodern philosophy is no longer considered fundamental in the development of human affairs, he calls postmodernism

42  |  Chapter 1 a species of “irrationalism” (112), castigating a philosopher like Lyotard for substituting “paralogy” (112) for more all-encompassing narratives such as Reason and Progress, for example. By rejecting any type of foundationalism, postmodernist theory—capitalism’s greatest ally, the author suggests— really ends up stealthily rejecting the narrative most opposed to its dictates: Marxism. Thus, the critic summarizes later in his article, “I am saying . . . that postmodern philosophy and political theory become objectively, albeit perhaps obliquely, a variation of anticommunism” (118), vehicles for diminishing and even preempting Marxism’s critique of capitalist ideology, that “particular universal” (118). 102 Concerning postmodernity’s marginal and anti-imperialist assertions, he strongly criticizes not only the likes of Jameson—and specifically his controversial essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986)—Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and even Yúdice, but also testimonial literature in general (e.g., Elena Poniatowska) as well as writers such as Eduardo Galeano and Manlio Argueta. Larsen asks, “Does the move to, as it were, found postmodernism’s antifoundationalism in the rebellious consciousness of those marginalized by modernity alter orthodox postmodernism’s reactionary character? I propose that it does not” (125). Another critic of postmodernity, Abelardo Castillo, who extends the reach of postmodern culture even further than Castro-Gómez, attributes its malaise, chiefl , to a failure on modern man and woman’s part “to understand the meaning of the world” (2002, 212). What most troubles him, however, is the recognition that while dreams of a better life continue to abound in Latin America, the very idea of a project becomes weakened in postmodernity. In this context, characterized by a milieu of “non-project” (206) and “non-future” (206), one is inevitably entrapped in an uncaring and indifferent attitude, argues Castillo. In agreement with Larsen, he declares that when North American and European critics talk about the end of utopias and the end of ideologies, what they really mean is the end of “ideologies of emancipation and freedom” (209), such as socialism. In fact, in Nelly Richard’s view, the most serious problem with postmodernism—“a theory of excess and an aesthetics of indifference” (2002, 227) 103 —is that “it violates two basic tenets of solidarity in underdeveloped countries: poverty and social and political commitment, which served as vindicating banners of the Latin American social conscience of the 1960s” (227). Unlike Larsen, however, she recognizes

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  43

postmodernism’s great potential to criticize modernity. Specificall , it provides the tools to scrutinize and interrogate the “heteroclite and mixed” (229) elements at the very heart of modernity at the same time that it turns the center or periphery antagonism “obsolete” (232). As I stated at the beginning of this section, the postmodernism debate in Latin America centered on the political implications of its claims. The key word was modernization, not cultural modernity. Besides, it is not possible at all to speak of a single, unitary modernity in the case of Latin America. For one thing, the continent entered as a subaltern entity vis-à-vis Europe; for another, modernity’s goals there are yet to be fulfilled. Postmodernity, thus, must be understood either as a disenchantment with modernity or as the yet to be resolved contradictions at the very heart of modernity. As we examine Bolaño’s fiction and poetry, we shall discover that what I am calling his postmodernism of resistance has much to do with this disenchantment. Similarly, while he displays disillusionment with traditional politics in his oeuvre, and even though he’s often critical of the Left, a politically engaged stance inspired by leftist principles never quite abandoned him.

Bolaño’s Postmodernism of Resist

ance

The concept of postmodernism of resistance might strike some as contradictory at first sight. Since it doesn’t promote anything, why should postmodernism resist anything? Postmodernism is all-embracing and even democratic in its generosity, resistance, on the contrary, conveys opposition and exclusion. Nevertheless, the fact that modernity has always been an incomplete project in Latin America, and postmodernism, from its conceptual landing on the continent, was mostly circumscribed within the political sphere, allowed Bolaño to maintain a political disposition in his works without succumbing entirely to a postmodern literary aesthetics. The political, in other words, outweighs the postmodern literary attributes present in his works, and it is the author’s political consciousness, marked by the Left’s defeat, and the experience of exile that make his postmodernism of resistance possible. Now, one way to understand the weak aspects of Bolaño’s literary postmodernism (alluded to in passing at the beginning of this chapter)—and before I flesh out the clearly paradoxical notion of postmodernism of

44  |  Chapter 1 resistance—is to offer a succinct account of postmodernist fiction. To do so, I avail myself of a more recent account of it, Bran Nicol’s The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009). Nicol’s definition of postmodern fiction is rather broad: “I would prefer to think of postmodern fiction as a particular ‘aesthetic’—a sensibility, a set of principles, or a value-system which unites specific currents in the writing of the latter half of the twentieth century” (xvi). But like Hutcheon and McHale before him, he points to self-reflexivit , that is, the “acknowledgement of a text’s own status as constructed” (xvi), as the major feature of postmodernist fiction, and to metafiction as its most distinctive formal practice (30–31). Because this paramount feature of literary postmodernism is indeed at the antipodes of Bolaño’s own narrative project—except, perhaps, for his very sui generis use of it in Nazi—a definition of it here becomes necessa y: Metafiction is the main technical devise used in postmodern ficti . . . Metafiction is fiction . . . which is “self-conscious,” that is, aware itself as fiction (as if it has its own consciousness), or “self-reflexiv or “self-referential” fiction, that which reflects on or refers to itself a work of fiction rather than pretending it is offering the reader a insight into the real world. More precisely we might define metafiction as fiction that in some way foregrounds its own status as artifici construct, especially by drawing attention to its form. The effect of metafiction is principally to draw attention to the frames involved i fiction, which are usually concealed by realism. (35 Nicol makes clear from the beginning, however, that it is not that metafiction denies reality, as critics of postmodernism usually maintain, but that postmodern writers display ambivalence toward it (23). At the same time, in contrast to realist texts, in postmodern fiction writing is never referential, and the narrator’s task is not one of simply transcribing a story that is “natural” (24). No story is “natural,” in effect, and fiction is always fictitious, especially postmodern fiction, which continuously reminds the reader of its artificial makeup As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, postmodern fiction is also characterized by fragmentation, the intense use of parody, pastiche, irony, playfulness, humor, intertextuality, the destabilizing of truth, and the mixture of high and low culture, among other characteristics. In Bolaño’s

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  45

oeuvre, however, these postmodern qualities play a rather small role; and both metafiction in general and historiographic metafiction in particular are practically nonexistent. If one ponders the relationship between postmodern fiction and politics and wishes to see where Bolaño stands, it is useful to glance at the following sample list of postmodern writers. In American fiction, for example, novelists whose texts contain strong postmodern features but are not explicitly political are Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, and John Hawkes. In Latin America the picture is much more nuanced, understandably. With Borges, for instance—the postmodern writer avant la lettre— Bolaño shares some of the traits of postmodern fi tion but certainly not the political motivation. The same as with Fuentes, except that Fuentes was political in a different way than Bolaño. As for Puig, the postmodern elements of his novels are clearly stronger than in Bolaño’s narrative but, like the Chilean-born author, he does engage in politics in a novel such as El beso de la mujer araña, for example. In a writer such as Ricardo Piglia there’s arguably a balance between the postmodern and the political, whereas in a novelist such as Diamela Eltit, whose first three novels in particular are heavily influenced by poststructuralism, postmodern attributes (save for playfulness and humor) and political purpose are strong in equal measure. Finally, the Cuban Severo Sarduy and the Mexican Carmen Boullosa practice a postmodern literary aesthetics that, like the American novelists mentioned above, is not explicitly political. What distinguishes Bolaño from these writers, including those whose works express political concerns, is his insistence on depicting the deficie cies of both modernity and modernization, especially in Latin America. When putting his literary project in the context of the northern versus the southern view of postmodernism analyzed in the two previous sections of this chapter, it is clear, for example, that if Bolaño returns again and again to the past it is not, as Jameson puts it, to “bracket” or “efface” it or even modify it but to keep its memory alive. And, despite Martín-Barbero’s (2002a) warning, he could not but continue to regard Latin America’s modernity as pale and deformed (in relationship to the real European-­ American modernity)—in part because he penned practically all of his works in Europe, where he witnessed a different stage of modernity. To the question of Lechner as to whether modernity’s “transformative impulse” had been exhausted on the continent, therefore, Bolaño’s poetry and

46  |  Chapter 1 narrative respond with a resounding no. What’s more, his postmodernism of resistance could be construed as yet another version of Oviedo’s and Beverley’s contention that “utopian impulses” were still present in the continent in the 1990s in spite of the disenchantment with politics precipitated by postmodernism. Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance could be divided into four broad categories: time, genre, geography, and politics. As will become evident in the following chapters, it is, above all, the retrospective look that lives in Bolaño’s literary world. Now, if the past constitutes the backbone of this world, it is because one event in particular—September the 11, 1973— plays a fundamental role in several of the characters’ lives. Paradoxically, however, though this event is chiefly experienced as trauma in the author’s oeuvre, it is also fruitful, as it allows him to bring to the present other historical events long forgotten. Likewise, in some instances the retrospective gaze turns into a healthy strategy to provide solace to a poetic voice who, spatially far away from Latin America and living as an immigrant in a foreign land, is nostalgic for the happy days of his youth. It is precisely this experience of existential and political exile that makes the search, and the detective genre in particular, propitious vehicles with which Bolaño builds much of his literary production. The detective genre, moreover, construed as a very sui generis genre that exceeds the neopolicíaco, has a triple function: structural, symbolic, and literary. The first has to do with the formal aspects of the plot in several of the novels and short stories. The second is related to meaning and interpretation, to the creation of fictional worlds in which life, at least as it concerns Latin America, is a perennial state of dissatisfaction and insufficienc . It is also related to autobiography, to the importance of the first-person narrator inscribing himself into the narratives’ diegeses in order to reclaim the significance of the subject at a time when postmodern culture was depriving it of agency. The third, the literary function of genre, figures in three ways in Bolaño’s oeuvre. In the first case, it doesn’t have much to do with intertextuality per se but rather with a dialogue, through inclusion, with a myriad of authors—most unknown to the common reader—that serves the purpose of rescuing them from anonymity; it is a celebration of the richness of literature at a time when it was beginning to lose its appeal to the increasing omnipresence of the media. In the second case, it deals with the material aspects of literature, its relationship to the market, to editors, to the state. In the third case, finall , the

Introduction and Theoretical Background  |  47

literary function of genre is related not only to the necessary independence of the author vis-à-vis the state apparatus but, in sync with this stance, the enjoining the ethical duty of the literary enterprise. As regards geography, the territory that occupies narrative focalization most is the one that hasn’t been touched by the fruits of modernity. In contradistinction to Harvey’s “flexible regime of capitalist accumulation”— one of the major components of postmodernity in his view—capital is absent from the spaces and places that Bolaño’s characters inhabit. Their sites are the margins, the outskirts, abandoned and barren locales, economically impoverished spaces, even in novels and short stories whose action takes place in major urban centers. What’s most paradoxical about this geography, nevertheless, is that it is here where community, a social formation associated more to modernity than postmodernity, is formed. Finally, the political aspect of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance makes his entire literary project possible. But let it be clear that by political I do not mean committed or revolutionary. The Chilean-born author is only too aware that the Left was defeated in Latin America. At the same time, he had no illusions that a victory of the Left would have meant the solution to all problems in the continent. By political, hence, I mean a disposition, a desire, a strong urge, still from a critical leftist perspective, however, to give voice to relatively recent historical events rapidly falling off people’s minds in Chile and elsewhere. In addition, and most important for this study, it means pointing, wherever possible, to all those aspects that speak to modernity’s Sisyphean efforts in Latin America.

Chapter 2

An Engaged Postmodern Poet’s Three-pronged Line of Defense

As I ad v anced in chapter 1, Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance manifests itself in three ways in his poetry: through the use of the detective genre, self-representation, and the function of the past. But why study the poetry of an author whose meteoric rise to fame is due to his fiction Fundamentally for three reasons. First and foremost, because some of the major themes of his novels and short stories are partially developed in his poems. Second, because, stylistically at least, Bolaño’s poetry is essentially narrative—or not “especially lyrical” (N. Birns 2015, 139) and even “colloquial” (Palma 2010, 92)—which means that many if not all of his poems contain most of the elements of fiction 1 In one of the earliest assessments of Bolaño’s poetry, writer and critic Alejandro Zambra states it as a paradox: “As a poet, Bolaño is a superb storyteller, but there’s absolutely no doubt that, as a storyteller, he’s an excellent poet” (2002, 185). 2 More recently, another critic has asserted that poetry for Bolaño was “the primordial or foundational dream” (García Valdés 2013, 110) and that “Bolaño’s logic is a poetic logic” (113). 3 And, third, because he starts his literary career as a poet and celebrates poetry until the very end of his untimely death in 2003. In “Muse,” a homage and also a petition to poetry and one of Bolaño’s most autobiographical poems, the poetic voice states: 48

An Engaged Postmodern Poet’s Three-pronged Line of Defense

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49

She was more beautiful than the sun . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . And she’s still at my side. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . Muse, protect me, I tell her, . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . Never leave me. (2007, 438) 4 And in Amuleto, as Auxilio Lacouture, the novel’s protagonist, prophesizes the future of certain very well-known authors—James Joyce, César Vallejo, and Maiakovski, among others—she solemnly declares, “Poetry will not disappear” (134). Bolaño published five books of poetry: Reinventar el amor (1976), El último salvaje (1995), Los perros románticos (1995, 2006), Tres (2000), 5 and Fragmentos de la universidad desconocida (1993). He also published Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoiris: 11 poetas latinoamericanos (1979), an anthology that includes some of his own poems.6 Posthumously, in 2007, Anagrama put out University, a book incorporating most of Bolaño’s poetry published during his lifetime and also poems found among his various notebooks and on the hard disk of his computer. This 2007 book also includes the entire set of texts from Antwerp (1980), a hard-toclassify book that the author himself calls his “novel” in the prologue to the 2002 edition (9). 7 Chronologically speaking, Bolaño’s poetic output extends from the late 1970s to the early1990s approximately, which means that he consciously left out the poems he wrote during his very important stay in Mexico (1968–1977) 8; that is, the period of the infrarrealismo movement he contributed to found. In an article on his poetry, Luis Bagué writes, “From then on [i.e., from 1977 on], Bolaño moves along and sees infrarrealismo as a youthful sin from which one doesn’t have to repent but which has nonetheless been buried along with the ideals of a time prone to utopia” (2008, 491). My goal in this chapter is not to provide an in-depth study of Bolaño’s complete poetic production; I only focus on those aspects of his poetry that bear a direct relationship to his fiction and especially those that reflect on his postmodernism of resistance. Since my approach to his works is ultimately thematic, therefore, I shall scrutinize these aspects not so much as they play out in each of the various sections that make up University but rather in terms of how they relate to the overall aesthetic foundation of his

50  |  Chapter 2 literary project as it is construed here. In other words, how certain features that are basic to understanding Bolaño’s novels and short stories begin to be worked out in his poems. The first is the frequent allusion to detectives and policemen in much of his poetry.9 The sui generis way in which Bolaño treats these figures constitutes one of the first instances of a postmodernism of resistance in his works, as we shall see later. Unlike Bagué, however, who centers his attention on the relationship between the author and the poet as detective and whose chief function is to reflect upon literature (2008, 496–97), or Adriana Castillo de Berchenko, who analyses only in passing what she calls the “poet-detective” (2005b, 45) in The Romantic Dogs and Tres, I seek to provide a kind of overall protohistory of the detective genre in Bolaño’s poetic production. It could be argued, in fact—especially if one takes into account narrative texts such as Monsieur (1982–1983; 1992), Skating (1993), Distant (1996), Detectives (1998), and, of course, 2666 (2004)—that the theme of the detective and its ancillary realities, such as a crime (real or not), a search, marginal spaces, and people, among others, constitute a kind of master trope of the author’s total literary production. In effect, Bolaño himself expressed a special predilection for this figure in an interview with Mónica Maristain: “I would have liked to have been a homicide detective much more than a writer. I am absolutely sure of that” (2004b, 343). And in the third section of Tres (“A Stroll through Literature”) not included in University, the poetic voice writes, “I dreamt that I was an old and sick detective who had been looking for lost people for a long time. Sometimes I would look at myself casually in the mirror and would recognize Roberto Bolaño” (86). The second salient attribute of his poetry is its remarkably autobiographical nature.10 This feature represents another instance of a postmodernism of resistance, a way to reclaim the subject—and the author, in particular— at a time when it was fashionable to dismiss its very existence. Although it is certainly true that the character of Arturo Belano (e.g., in Detectives), or, simply, B (in some short stories in Putas), is not Roberto Bolaño, as critics of his works have noted correctly,11 it is evident that Bolaño, as if to challenge both Foucault (1977) and Barthes (1977) in particular and poststructuralism in general, did wish to stake a claim for the presence of the author in his literary enterprise. And, finall , a third feature of the poems from University is their pervasive spirit of nostalgia. Going back to the past, or resorting to the past in the present, constitutes yet another instance of

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a postmodernism of resistance in Bolaño’s works. This nostalgia manifests itself in two ways: first of all, through references to the poet’s past in Mexico: its bars, its parks, poetry readings, friends, and lovers. And, second— and in direct relationship with the overall topic of Bolaño’s engaged postmodernism put forward in this study—through the presence of a sort of elegy concerning the defeat of leftist projects in Latin America. In a recent brief retrospective view of Bolaño’s poetics that, among other things, underlines the centrality of Latin America in his poetry, Patricia H. Espinosa writes: “For Bolaño, Latin America will always be a territory marked by dictatorship, Fascism, naturalized crime, the accumulation of dead bodies, missing persons, violence in every shape and form, fear, and it is precisely in this territory that poets wander even though they are aware that they may fall into the abyss at any moment” (2013, 129).

In Sear ch of the Detective; or the Detective Minus the Crime The traits traditionally associated with the detective genre appear essentially in two different ways in University: spread out in various poems and as a whole in two sets of poems, “Three Texts” (Tres textos) and “People Walking Away” (Gente que se aleja), respectively. In the first instance, rather than gaining knowledge about what could be called the outline of Bolaño’s first incursions into the detective genre, the reader obtains an overall impression of its elements but without connecting them to a full story. In the second instance, on the contrary, no matter how excruciatingly painful it becomes to reach a thorough comprehension of what really occurs owing to the utterly nebulous nature of its structure, there are sufficient elements to constitute a sto y. Yet, as might be expected, neither the classical mystery story à la Agatha Christie nor the Latin American neopolicíaco paradigm—nor nueva novela negra (literally “new black novel”)—is followed faithfully. A product of European modernity, the classical mystery story, as Persephone Braham reminds us, takes place in an “enclosed, rather aristocratic setting” (2004, xii).12 It is within the parameters of what might be construed as a solipsistic space—be it a country house, a private club, or any other enclosed locale— that what Francisco Leal has called the “crime scene” (2010, 336–39) is to be found. The goal of the detective, in fact, is to unveil the mystery in order

52  |  Chapter 2 to “recover a social-legal order” (García-Corales 2010, 308). After all, one of the chief differences between the classical mystery story and either the hard-boiled series—or the so-called noir fiction—of a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler or the neopolicíaco of a Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, is that, in the latter, the detective fights against intrinsically corrupt institutions, such as, for example, the government and the police, while in the former he seeks to disclose the truth precisely in order to preserve the integrity of these institutions. In effect, the North American hard-boiled and the Spanish and Latin American neopolicíaco are born when citizens no longer have faith in society’s institutions. According to William J. Nichols, the hard-boiled is a reaction against a cultural crisis spawned by the failure of modernity in the United States at a time when individuals began to feel despair and alienation (2010, 299– 300). It has its origins in the 1920s during Prohibition, and it seeks to provide an answer to the rise of organized crime and police corruption (Braham 2004, xii).13 Eventually, of course, the crime stories of the hardboiled would find fertile ground in the film noir cinematic productions of the 1940s and 1950s. In Latin America, even though Borges became an ardent defender of the detective genre through his critical studies of Edwardian critic G. K. Chesterton,14 and although he himself composed some detective stories adhering to the English tradition of the mystery genre—“The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Death and the Compass” come to mind—the detective genre in general remained a species of pariah in the Republic of Letters. For one thing, since it was typically associated with popular culture, it was not deemed worthy of critical scrutiny. More important, however, in the context of a literary sphere that had not become institutionalized and for a long time viewed literary productivity as the result of the intimate relationship between the writer and the land,15 there existed an innate mistrust16 regarding the existence of detective fiction by those who paid scant attention to literature in Spanish in either Europe or the United States and from Latin American critics themselves. As José F. Colmeiro contends, Hispanics, it was thought, just were not rational enough (2010, 477); a Sherlock Holmes simply could not arise from a culture that was still neither enlightened nor modern.17 Moreover, how could there be detective stories if there was no native detective genre tradition in the Hispanic world (477)? But the real reason for the lack of detective novels, according

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to Colmeiro, was rather the fact that most Latin American countries did not have strong, democratic states with solid legal apparatuses that could guarantee individual freedom, “the historical and ideological basis of the traditional detective genre” (478). According to the late Mexican journalist and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, arguably the most brilliant writer of urban chronicles in Latin America, the lack of interest in the detective genre was explained by the fact that crime stories simply did not compensate for so many violent historical events in the continent, such as the massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968, for instance, whose perpetrators were never taken to justice (1973, 10). Instead of reading and cultivating detective fiction, Monsiváis appeared to be saying, Latin Americans themselves lived in a perennial crime story. As Jameson showed in his groundbreaking Marxism and Form (1971), historical circumstances ultimately incarnate manifold artistic forms by means of repression, distortion, transformation, and sundry other ways. It stands to reason that at some point in Latin America’s cultural evolution new literary forms would come to provide a kind of outlet for the social, political and economic changes that the continent was undergoing. In the novel, one of the forms that began to gain increasing popularity once the Latin American Boom aesthetics of the 1960s had reached a sort of exhaustion, was the neopolicíaco. Indeed, critics point to 1968, the same year Bolaño and his family moved to Mexico from Chile, as the key year when the detective genre, cultivated until then by following the mystery story model rather faithfully, acquires the very critical role that characterizes it today (Braham 2004, xv). It thus does not surprise Nichols that most authors who practice the neopolicíaco genre today, in Spain, Latin America and Chicano writers in the United States, are, in his words, “sons and daughters of 68” (2010, 302). But as crucial as this year undeniably is in the political, social, and cultural life of the United States, Mexico, and Europe, it only marks the genesis of what was yet to befall many Latin American countries and on which practitioners of the neopolicíaco would begin to focus their attention. I am referring, needless to say, to the emergence in the 1970s of a series of dictatorships on the continent,18 accompanied often by the forceful imposition of economic policies that, on the one hand, debilitated the role of the state and, on the other, turned countries into what Luis Cárcamo-­Huechante has called a “market-nation” in reference to Chile

54  |  Chapter 2 (2003, 99). 19 In very broad terms, this period corresponds, economically, to the gradual liberalization of markets and the growing arrival of transnational capital to Latin American countries; politically, to the increasing loss of faith in ideologies that promised to free humankind from the shackles of poverty and injustice; and, culturally, to the proliferation of communication technologies that would forever change the cultural landscape of the world. It is in this context, whether one calls it globalized or postmodern or both, that the writers of the detective genre begin to polish their critical darts. Braham (2004, x) and Nichols (2010, 302) are indeed correct to claim that the novela negra (noir novel) genre constitutes a new engagé (politically committed) literature in the field of Spanish20 and Latin American letters. Nevertheless, the practitioners’ engagement, though mainly political,21 transcends politics. In what Hubert Pöppel calls the centrifugal and centripetal forces at the heart of what is an essentially mercurial genre (2010, 365–66), new concerns and new voices have come onto the scene. Ana Patricia Rodríguez (2010), for instance, shows how, among Chicano and Latino writers in the United States, the appropriation of the género negro (noir fiction) becomes a vehicle for exploring social and cultural problems as well as issues of identity. Specificall , these authors analyze problems such as poverty, unemployment, racism, and homophobia in their works (425–26). 22 It should come as no surprise, consequently, that one of the most defi ing characteristics of the novela negra or neopolicíaco is its hybridity, a hybridity, let us say, that goes hand in hand with globalization and late capitalism. Colmeiro credits Montalbán with having introduced this attribute into the detective genre: “The original contribution of Vázquez Montalbán’s detective fiction lies in its generic hybridity, a hybridity that includes the political and cultural analysis of the contemporary world, the concern for the imbalance in power relations between the North and the South, bloc politics and new globalizing currents, migratory flows and the narrative imaginary of travel” (2010, 484). Braham, for her part, avers that the neopolicíaco is “in perpetual flux,” adding that it is suffused with “a kind of intertextuality that crosses generic boundaries as well as discursive ones” (2004, xiv, 17). In “Consideraciones en torno a la novela negra,” in dialogue with some works by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek and especially his Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1992), Leal provides some very enlightening thoughts regarding this aspect of the

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novela negra. Above all, he states, this genre is inherently mobile and porous, refusing at all cost to get trapped into the corset of any preestablished form (2010, 325). At the same time, it is a rather paradoxical genre in the sense that it oscillates between an adherence to a certain code and a violation of the code (327). “Novela negra’s lack of definition, as well as its permanent variation, make it ultimately possible that that be the condition of possibility of the genre” (325). This notion of the género negro’s intrinsic formlessness seems a good point to broach the prehistory of the detective genre present in University. I shall first trace this prehistory in isolated poems. I shall then look closely at three poems that treat the subject of the detective more directly. And, finall , I shall analyze the sections “Three Texts” and “People Walking Away.” As was adumbrated at the beginning of this chapter, the manifold allusions to detectives and policemen in these isolated poems, many of which do not even have a title,23 do not constitute full-fledged, well-­ developed stories. What these allusions do provide, nonetheless, is a sort of milieu, a poetic environment paradoxically devoid of poetry—as it is generally the case in all of Bolaño’s poetic output—where a first-perso voice indistinctly assuming the role of nomad, exile, vagabond, or homeless24 talks about either his personal experiences or dreams and sometimes even recounts movies he has seen. In fact, the terms screen and movie, as well as the words dream and nightmare, appear throughout University. Of course, watching movies on television, dreams, and nightmares abound in Bolaño’s entire oeuvre. In almost every case, and especially in “Three Texts” and “People Walking Away,” it is nearly impossible to determine whether the poetic voice’s point of view, predominantly in the first-per on singular, coincides or not with that of the detective. What’s more, it could be argued that in general the detective plays multiple and ambiguous roles in Bolaño’s poetry. Occasionally—for example in “Work” or in “The Taoist Blues of Valle Hebrón Hospital” (2007, 20, 388–89)—this voice would appear to be autobiographical because it reveals information that overlaps with personal information about the author provided either by himself in Entre paréntesis (2004a),25 but especially in Braithwaite’s (2006) Bolaño por sí mismo26 and various newspaper interviews, or else by people who knew him personally and who have written about him, such as novelist Carmen Boullosa27 ; Jorge Herralde in Para Roberto Bolaño (2005); and Jaime Quezada in Bolaño antes de Bolaño (2007).

56  |  Chapter 2 In the two aforementioned poems (2007), for example, one reads “The desperate look of a detective” (20) in the first and, clearly more poignantly in the second, “And we traveled, like Latin American detectives, / the dusty streets of the continent / in search of the assassin” (389). But in other isolated poems are also found “the erratic detectives” (“Untitled” 92), “overwhelmed detective” (“Fragments” 136), and “adolescent detective lost in the streets of Mexico City” (“The Light” 366). At this point in Bolaño’s poetry, two aspects of the detective genre can be observed; on the one hand, the haphazard, informal nature of the detective figure, and on the other hand the connection between the detective’s search and Latin America. Concerning policeman—the other frequent term in his poetry and a figure who at times is synonymous with law and order but other times represents, on the contrary, a menacing and more ambiguous entity in the life of the poetic voice—in one poem he’s placed in a bizarre scenario that includes both victims as well as prostitutes armed with military refuse (“Untitled” 84), while in another the poetic voice dreams with a weekend full of dead policemen (“A Weekend” 126). “To study in police stations,” states oddly the poetic voice in one untitled poem (125), at the same time that, in a different untitled poem, allusion is made to the potential danger of the police force: “At the other end the silhouettes of the policemen have become bigger and are almost over me” (271). So far, two major points could be made regarding the development of the detective genre in Bolaño’s poetry. First of all, “detective” is construed simultaneously symbolically and politically. In other words, there is a search for personal identity but there is an equally forceful search for the “assassin,” that is, for those who, in Mexico (in 1968) and Chile (in 1973), abruptly stopped socialist projects in Latin America. Second, there is an awareness on the part of the poetic voice not only that the police has become a ubiquitous presence, and especially when one is an immigrant in a foreign land, but also that its status as a defender of the law is no longer obvious. My intention here is not to write a typical explication du texte about each of these poems but rather to see how Bolaño begins to delineate what will eventually become a full-blown detective genre with a very personal twist.28 The first thing that stands out is that the detective figure is neither that of a cerebral Sherlock Holmes nor that of a man of action Philip Marlowe (Chandler), Pepe Carvalho (Vázquez Montalbán), or Heredia (Díaz Eterovic). Indeed, what seems unique to Bolaño’s poetics is that, to a great

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extent, this figure represents everyone, author and reader alike, all embarked on a perennially multifaceted search with no end or solution in sight. Accordingly, “detective” has an intrinsically metaphoric connotation in Bolaño’s poetry. Certainly this does not mean that there aren’t real detectives or real crimes in his works, as is evident in Distant and 2666 , to mention only two examples. But the Latin American as well as the young detective in the streets of Mexico City are immersed in an existential as opposed to a real murder investigation. Their existential Angst, nevertheless, has little to do with Sartre’s, Camus’s or, even less, Kierkegaard’s. Neither is it only the result of the disillusionment with what Habermas calls “the project of modernity.” The feelings of solitude and anguish that the characters of these poems experience are produced chiefly by historical circumstances pertaining almost exclusively to Latin America and Spain,29 such as the already mentioned 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco, possibly the 1971 Padilla Affair in Cuba, the 1973 overthrow of socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile and the advent of sundry dictatorships on the continent, the difficult post-Franco period of the late 1970s in Spain, and, last, the lives of immigrants and misfits that many of Bolaño’s characters lead. It is interesting that a careful reading of these poems reveals that if searching has become the new human condition in postmodern times, and the detective its maximum symbol, policing, and the police apparatus in general emerge as the new biopower par excellence. The use of “police system” in “Police” (336) is clearly not accidental. A few verses further, in fact, the poetic voice states, “my body in a system / of police stations and patrol cars” (336). At the biographical level, some of these poems were composed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Bolaño eked out an existence as an immigrant in various European cities and especially in Barcelona; it is around this time, moreover, that Spain begins to receive its first wave of immigrants from Latin America. “Police” appears in the section “My Life in the Tubes of Survival,” the same as the following three poems: “Detectives” (338), “The Lost Detectives” (339), and “The Frozen Detectives” (339 ), the best of Bolaño’s poetry according to Matías Ayala (2008, 97). In “[Author’s Notes, Untitled],” a piece, which along with “Bibliography,” “Brief History of the Book”—written by Carolina López (the author’s wife)—and “Index” was attached to the end of University, Bolaño dates this section in 1992 and adds that poems from 1991 and 1993 were also included (443). This

58  |  Chapter 2 means that although by this time he had already written most of the isolated poems alluded to above, as well as those from “Three Texts” and “People Walking Away,” he was yet to write Detectives and he was in the process of writing Skating. In other words, the detective theme was still very much in Bolaño’s mind but had not yet crystallized in a specific form. It seems reasonable, therefore, that he should dedicate three entire poems to the detective figure. These poems are strategically preceded by a very brief poem lacking a title but that is clearly connected to them. In this three-verses poem, reference is made to the poetic voice having dreamt with “cold” detectives inhabiting what it calls the “great refrigerator” of two major megalopolises: Los Angeles and Mexico City, respectively (337). The image of the “refrigerator” linked to two major megalopolises is strikingly powerful because of its connection to the notion of postmodern urban space as hostile and depersonalized. Unsurprisingly, the expression “lost detectives in the dark city” appears in two of the three poems, “Detectives” (338) and “The Lost Detectives” (339). It is in fact possible that “Detectives,” “The Lost Detectives,” and “The Frozen Detectives” may constitute three versions of the same poem. For example, the second verse of “Detectives” and that of “The Lost Detectives” start the same way: “I heard their screams” (338 and 339). Beyond these and other words that appear in the three poems, such as “blood,” the overall tone of pessimism and despondency that characterize many of Bolaño’s later works is already present here. Readers need to pay particular attention to the detective figure, the crime, and the crime scene. Crime “seems to be the symbol of the twentieth century,” writes Bolaño in “Autobiographies: Amis & Ellroy” (2004a, 206). In “Detectives,” the detective, either in the plural or in the singular, and either “lost” or “absolutely desperate” (338), instead of being the figure who solves the enigma is the lost person who suffers from “nausea.” The main idea of the poem, in fact, is the utter impossibility of the detective’s ability to resolve the crime. Moreover, there is even a certain sense of the absurd regarding the crime, as if the crime lacked a cause and as if all the detective could do was to sit down and smoke a cigarette in a bloody room as he contemplates the clicking of the clock at night. It is interesting that, in this poem, the detective is said to go back to the crime scene, suggesting the possibility that he, like the real criminal, is complicit in the criminal act. In Distant and By Night especially, as we shall see in chapter 5, Bolaño explores the thin line that separates

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good and evil, or rather the potentially destructive side of what is seemingly positive. In the second poem under study, “The Lost Detectives,” the suffering detectives also find themselves “in the dark city” (339) but their role is much more ambiguous. In fact, even though this is not the time to examine the connection between certain poems from University and some of Bolaño’s fictional works, there is an uncanny resemblance between the detective image here and that of Carlos Wieder in Distant. In “The Lost Detectives,” the detective, or rather “detectives” in this case, would seem to make reference to those individuals—usually from the military or illicit intelligence organizations—who infiltrated leftist groups some time prior to the coup d’état in Chile. The poetic voice describes them as being present in his youth and especially in cafes and parks. The last verse of the poem, alluding to a “wound” that a presumed narratee cannot even recall, would appear, if not to dehistoricize the referential allusion to the coup d’état completely, at least to cast it in a more universal light. Nevertheless, if one concurs with the idea propounded earlier that the figure of the detective arguably constitutes the maximum symbol for man in the postmodern world, this poem could be interpreted as the poetic’s voice testimony concerning the loss of idealism and the irrefutability of pain and death. Of the three poems, “The Frozen Detectives” best encapsulates the themes related to the figure of the detective, the crime, and the crime scene discussed thus far. In contradistinction to “Detectives” and especially to “The Lost Detectives,” however, there are no doubts as to the geopolitical space in which the detectives find themselves: Latin America, where the poetic voice dreams with cold Latin American detectives intent on keeping their eyes open (340). As the recurrent references to the idealist youth of Latin America in some of Bolaño’s works (Distant, Detectives, Amulet, and several of the short stories) and interviews show, one wonders, might the poetic voice in this poem be alluding to the disenchantment occasioned by the failure of leftist revolutions to create truly egalitarian societies in the continent? If that were indeed the case, then these detectives would be a clear allusion to those who, like Bolaño himself, and paraphrasing his own words, were born in the 1950s, believed in the revolution and, in the end, became skeptical about the power of politics to transform the world. Nevert­heless, another possibility could be contemplated. If the discussion

60  |  Chapter 2 is circumscribed within the parameters of the ubiquity of violence in the author’s literary world in general, it is feasible, as Chiara Bolognese argues in her book-length study on Bolaño’s oeuvre (2009a, 142), that, far from representing melancholic Latin American youth, the figure of the detective in this poem represents, on the contrary, the one who, in the face of crime and mayhem, remains hypocritically silent. Moreover, unlike the crime referred to in “Detectives”—as in the classical detective genre overall—the crime here is plural, even legion and faceless, metaphorically incarnating the entire history of a people. “I dreamt with horrible crimes,” states the poetic voice, where detectives avoid stepping on “pools of blood” (340). The poem ends on a desperate note almost, but this is not the desperation of Munch’s The Scream, for example; it is a judgement regarding political and economic options that have not worked in Latin America and that leads the engaged postmodernist poetic voice to describe our epoch as one of terror.

The Neopolicía co on a Firmer, yet still Slipper

y, Ground

Thus far, I have focused on some of the attributes of the neopolicíaco present in a few isolated poems from University. Now I turn to two sets of prose poems where these attributes, without becoming fully formed stories, continue to develop and mature. The section “People Walking Away” of University is practically identical to Antwerp30 and is preceded by the section “Three Texts,” both included in the “Second Part” of the text. In what follows, I shall first provide a concise analysis of “Three Texts” and then proceed to examine “People Walking Away,” or Antwerp.31 In “[Author’s Notes, Untitled],” Bolaño states—in my view correctly, as I suggested above—that “Three Texts” constitutes in some sense a kind of prologue to “People Walking Away” (443). Now, in order not to fall into the trap of writing a detailed explication du texte of each of these three prose poems,32 the focus of attention ought to be centered, as it has been done so far, on the detective figure or police, the murder, and the location where the crime takes place. First of all, however, a quick note concerning the nexus between the prologue and its sequel. A close look at these poems reveals without a shadow of a doubt not only that they are related to “People Walking Away” but that they are related to each other. And if this is the case, why didn’t Bolaño include them in Antwerp? One possible

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explanation might be the posthumous nature of University. Who knows, really, where “Three Texts” would have ended up in the text had the author himself edited the final version of his poetic output? Another conceivable answer—in a text that definitely defies Genette’s (1980) concepts of order, duration, and sequence—is that, simply put, Bolaño, at this early stage of his career, was still experimenting with the idea of how to write poetry by means of prose. Be that as it may, many of the principal elements found in “People Walking Away” appear already in “Fat Chance, Pal” (169), 33 “The Inspector” (170–71), and “The Witness” (172–73), the three poems from “Three Texts”: “forest,” “adolescents,” “tennis courts,” “guard,” “scene,” “girl,” “camp site,” “photos,” “policeman,” “Barcelona,” “Castelldefels,” “empty city,” “hallway,” “store,” “bar,” and “man.” Yet the most significan of them all is arguably the most enigmatic figure of “People Walking Away”: “a poor dirty hunchback with a slightly aquatic air” (“Fat Chance, Pal” 169), referred to as “el jorobadito” throughout the text.34 Likewise, as it happens in most of “People Walking Away,” and following Genette’s nomenclature, the narrator of “Three Texts” is an intradiegetic narrator, that is, he is placed inside the plot’s action. In “Fat Chance, Pal”35 and “The Witness,” which have identical beginnings,36 this intradiegetic voice recounts what appears to be two encounters with the jorobadito sometime in the past.37 In “The Inspector,” however, the narrator describes his meeting with an inspector who is asking for the whereabouts of a young woman and who alludes to jorobadito as that “damned son of a bitch” (171). In the first poem of the series, “Fat Chance, Pal,” neither the detective figure nor the crime is named. But what are named are, on the one hand, some features of the detective genre and, on the other, certain components that will play a key role in “People Walking Away,” such as “forest” and “scene,” for example. A group of adolescents is also introduced here who, in “People Walking Away,” will become the victims of a murder. At the same time, the reader learns that apparently both the narrator and the hunchback have been running away, but never know from whom or from what. Most perplexing yet is the narrator’s admission concerning how he met the hunchback: “I’m still unable to explain how I met that character” (169). In a clear allusion to narratees, that is, readers or addressees inside the actions’ plot, the intradiegetic voice states earlier in the poem that it doesn’t know how they met him, that he continues to be a mystery to it.

62  |  Chapter 2 Of the three poems, “The Inspector” is perhaps the most mystifying.38 In part, this is due to a narrative style that combines relatively limpid, objective discourse with a language that is hazier. Making reference to the inspector’s words, for example, the narrator writes: “And the white words came out of the inspector’s mouth like the ribbon of a teleprinter” (170). As mentioned above, this poem—or micro short story, really—deals with the encounter between an unnamed narrator and a police inspector. The latter wishes to know who the young woman is and, more important, “What the fuck does she have to do with all of this?” (170). Information pertaining to the “all of this” is never provided in the text, however, save for the fact that it happened in an “encampment.” But why ask the narrator what his relationship with the young woman is, who the intradiegetic narrator is, and where the narrator and the inspector are? Certain concrete places are cited in the poem, such as a “smoked-filled office,” a “bedroom,” and a “long hall” (170–71). Analogously, it would appear as if the narrating voice described itself as a poet: “Police and poet, in the hour when police stations are empty forever” (170). I say “appear” because another aspect of this bafflin poem is that, given the very ambiguous nature of the narrative discourse, the reader is left with the impression that maybe, after all, one is reading not about what has happened to the narrator but rather what the narrator is watching on a movie screen.39 Were this the case, of course, his function in the poem would be clearly extradiegetic, that is, placed outside the plot’s action. As if to complicate things further, toward the end of the poem yet another possibility emerges, the possibility, characteristic of Bolaño’s fictional work but also existing in the poems of “People Walking Away,” that the intradiegetic narrator is telling his story to himself via the presence of an alter ego, since words stop “between the inspector’s mouth and your own” (171). In sum, nothing in the poem points definitely to the nature of the crime or the identity of the narrator. However, the latter’s function, paradoxically, does become clearer at this stage of the narration. Be he a poet, the young woman’s friend or acquaintance, the hunchback’s former friend whom he now has to hunt, or so on, he has, for all practical purposes, become the detective. Toward the end of the poem, in fact, he’s asked to find out the guilty part . But the injunction to investigate is not carried out in the following poem, “The Witness,” for this third poem of the series is not a continuation of “The Inspector” but rather another version of “Fat Chance, Pal,” or its

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extension and supplement. As in “Fat Chance, Pal,” allusions are made to “forests,” “adolescents,” and “jorobadito”; allusions are also made to “the camp site,” from “The Inspector.” Nevertheless, other terms which appear repeatedly in “People Walking Away” but which are not mentioned in either of the previous two poems, such as “tennis courts,” “bar,” and “store,” also surface here (172–73). As in the case of “Fat Chance, Pal,” no crime is mentioned in “The Witness”; nonetheless tennis courts, and in particular the forest and the camp site, are the potential crime scenes of the section “People Walking Away,” as will be discussed later. Comparing it to “Fat Chance, Pal,” two new factors appear; on the one hand, the idea that the intradiegetic narrator wishes to travel south—“I don’t like Catalans,” he declares (172). On the other hand is the mysterious emergence of a new person in their midst, “a guy crying on the edge” (of the wood) (173). But as in the previous poem, there is a hint here that this “guy” may very well be the narrator himself, as when, alluding to himself earlier, he states, “Sometimes I would cry; I suppose I was reaching the limit” (172) . This possibility is underscored even further at the end of the poem. Fully aware that the jorobadito cannot follow him south, the narrator decides to leave: “I felt the hollow and decided to leave . . . jorobadito just said, ‘fat chance, pal’” (173). But is it he that leaves or is it the “witness?” The last two sentences of the poem are ambiguous: “The man goes away . . . Our only witness doesn’t want witnesses” (173). To summarize what has been stated thus far, then, it is obvious that there is a kind of protohistory of the detective genre in Bolaño’s poetry and that this protohistory evolves gradually though never quite presenting a straight-forward image of either the detective or the crime, as the analysis of “People Walking Away,” or Antwerp, will make especially clear. antwerp ,

or the Impossibility of Meaning

Of all of Bolaño’s works, the collection of poems from Antwerp is, without any doubt, the most challenging and the most inscrutable. Espinosa, one of the first to offer a concise though very apt reading of this text, calls it “Bolaño’s most bizarre and perhaps most complex text, something like a virtuous, drug like metaphysical monstrosity” (2003a, 23). For this reason, I can only venture an interpretation here; and while many answers are possible, none is final. To some extent, Bolaño himself explains the text’s

64  |  Chapter 2 unfathomable nature when he writes in the prologue to Antwerp titled “Total Anarchy: Twenty-Two Years Later”: “I wrote this book for myself, and not even about that am I sure . . . I wrote this book for ghosts, who are the only ones who have time because they are out of time” (9). 40 And in an interview with Álvaro Matus, he refers to Antwerp as “the loose images of a nightmare” even though it is the only book he could reread precisely because of its “radicality” and its “loneliness” (2002b, 75, 77). Serious studies of Antwerp still do not exist, but since coming out in 2002, most reviewers have underlined the text’s utter indefinability in various ways.41 In arguably the most thorough commentary on Antwerp published so far, Argentinian novelist and Bolaño friend Rodrigo Fresán (2003) emphasizes the “cryptographic” quality of the text, reminding the reader that Bolaño himself, in one of his last interviews, made reference to its incoherence. Especially interesting for my own analysis of these poems or fragments, and in a possible allusion to Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity” (2000), Fresán puts Antwerp in the category of “detective fiction as a liquid genre,” where the author is under no obligation to untangle the mystery; enunciating it suffices Before zeroing in on the possibility of locating Antwerp within the parameters of “detective fiction as a liquid genre,” a brief comment on the text’s overall structure is in order. In large measure, understanding certain aspects of the structure of Antwerp assists the reader in establishing a link between it—the structure, that is—and Bolaño’s very peculiar aesthetics of the detective genre. Antwerp is composed of a total of fifty-six 1- or 2-pagelong segments written by a predominantly intradiegetic voice42 that often incorporates the voices of several other characters whose identities are seldom revealed.43 If, as Bolaño says in “Total Anarchy,” the text is a “novel,” it must then be advanced that the diegesis is practically nonexistent or enmeshed in a twilight-zone-like region where reality is either illusive or distorted. In effect, perhaps the most appropriate metaphor to characterize Antwerp would be that of a cubist painting. This does not mean, nevertheless, that there is nothing to cling to in the text; rather, the challenge would seem to reside in knowing how to put the multiple parts of this puzzle together. Some of the components from “Three Texts” also appear here: forest, girl, camp site, policeman, and jorobadito, among others. But as might be expected given the fact that “Three Texts” is the prologue of “People Walking Away” according to the author, new elements come to

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complete the picture: highways, beach, Colan Yar, sergeant, police station, author, Englishman, cadaver, patrol car, and foreigner. And as if these elements were not enough to confound the reader, there are frequent allusions throughout the poems to applauses (186, 232), applauses and laughter (186), he/she applauds (217, 219, 220, and 224), he/she applauded (230), 44 as well as manifold references to screen (179, 194, 205, 206, 208, 213, 215, 218, 219, 227, 240, and 241), movie theater (240, 241), scene (207, 208, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 229, 231, and 241), and camera (207, 220, 223, 238, and 239), which makes it possible that Antwerp is either the narration of a movie or the performance of a play.45 Yet, as bizarre as it may seem, it is also a partially autobiographical text because Roberto Bolaño appears in two poems46 and “Roberto” in one,47 a Borgesian trick to be sure. And, finall , in three of the pieces—­ “The Motorcyclists” (225), “Silent Night” (237; or “You Can’t Go Back” in Antwerp), and “Monty Alexander” (238)—the intradiegetic voice addresses a narratee who may or may not be its own alter ego. But what is the mystery and who is attempting to unravel it besides the reader? Since, as was suggested, Antwerp—arguably more than any other book by Bolaño—presents myriad points of entry to its decipherment, my discussion centers on the crime, the police figure, and the crime scene. As I stated earlier, by no means do I pretend to settle the text’s ultimate meaning; I only wish to elucidate some of its parts. The first specific mention of a crime in Antwerp occurs in “Blue,” where an extradiegetic voice reports the death of six young men in an encampment located in the outskirts of the city. This narrating voice, however, confesses to having read about the crime in a “sensationalist note” and positing even, at the end of the segment, that it may all have been a dream (182). Thirty-five fragments thereafter, in “The Motorcyclists,” there is an allusion to a young man dreaming, among other things, “twenty-year-old criminals” (225) who could possibly be the young men referred to in “Blue.” Then, in “Applause,” an intradiegetic voice talks about young men having died at the beach, whose bodies are riddled with holes but whose identities do not appear to be related to those of the young men from “Blue” (230). These are what could be called the collective murder stories of Antwerp.48 Most references to crimes in the pieces, however, appear to be of an individual nature. Several poems, in fact, refer to various single murders that may or may not involve the same person,49 and one, “An Empty Place near Here” (211), even mentions a

66  |  Chapter 2 rape. In every case, furthermore, a veil of sheer mystery surrounds the crimes, as if recounting them by the intradiegetic voice were only part of a bigger project, a project that also involves, as we shall see shortly, self-­ reflection on writing,50 the precarious conditions of migrants and foreigners,51 and, above all, the thin line that separates the lawful from the unlawful. Precisely because of what could be called the disjointed anatomy of the crimes in Amberes, one last aspect of their essence needs to be mentioned. It often happens that, in reality, no crime takes place. In other words, the crime is either latent, or, as it occurs in much of Bolaño’s later fictional work, it lies just below the surface. A ubiquitous gun serves as a menacing presence in “The Nile” (184), “Perfection” (205), “Footsteps on the Stairs” (206), and “The Gun to His Mouth” (222). In “Never Alone Again,” the narrating voice imagines a young woman tied up in a moving train (229). And, finall , in “The Fullness of the Wind” (178), “The Motorcyclists” (225), “The Dance” (231), and “The Elements” (240), there is reference to a character being persecuted by “Colan Yar”—a police force that appears a total of eight times in the text—who may or may not be the intradiegetic narrator. In “The Fullness of the Wind” and “The Elements,” the issue is posed as a question: “Are you also being pursued by Scotland Yard?” (178, 240). And in “There Are No Rules,” the intradiegetic voice replies, “I am also fleeing from Scotland ard” (232). Like the crime, the police remain a relatively diffuse though omnipresent manifestation in Antwerp. The most conspicuous figure is that of the “policeman,” which is mentioned in several of the fragments. There is also the figure of the “sergeant,” the “lieutenant,” the “Squad,” “police networks,” “Narcotics Brigade,” “Homicide Brigade,” “Counter-terrorism Brigade,” “Colan Yar,” “civil guards,” and “patrol cars.” In fact, and as might be expected, there is almost no piece in the text that does not make some reference to policemen or police force or even detectives.52 But what function do these entities have in the fragments, who are they after, and what is their role vis-à-vis the legal apparatus? In reality, as one traverses the very dislocated diegesis of Antwerp none of these questions finds a definitiv answer. For if in the classical detective novel the cerebral capacity of the detective ultimately disentangles the initially perplexing crime, and if in the neopolicíaco the detective engages in the deciphering of the crimes knowing fully well that his victory will only be partial, in Antwerp, as was suggested above, it is not entirely certain who the crimes’ perpetrators are,

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nor whether the police itself is on the right side of the law, as paradoxical as the latter may sound. What is evident, nonetheless, is that the milieu they inhabit is no longer the city but its outskirts, its margins, that is, the space increasingly inhabited by migrants, refugees, homeless, and vagabonds, as will be shown in the section concerning the crime scene. In “A Monkey,” for instance, a sergeant investigates a murder in a dangerous neighborhood, whereas in “Among the Horses” the intradiegetic voice talks about a writer living on the outskirts of the city who “only writes brief crime stories” (188). In a few of the poems, the police dedicate their efforts to the analy­ sis of pictures that would seemingly show the jorobadito (“Interval of Silence”) or a camp site (“The Sea”)53 but that reveal nothing in the end (“Big Silver Waves”). The most disturbing pieces relating to the police in the text, however, are those having to do with the abuse of power. But like everything else about Antwerp not even this is always unambiguous. What is unequivocal, nevertheless, is that violating the law involves a “young woman,” or a “young unknown woman,” who is present in numerous segments and who might possibly be the “Jewish woman” alluded to in “The Bar,” “Tallers Street,” and “A Hospital.” In particular, the crime here has to do with the violation of a young woman by a policeman initially interested in asking her some questions regarding, ironically, a rape case. In terms of story time—in as much as it is feasible to speak of story time in this text— “The Policeman Walked Away” marks the beginning of the diegesis because it deals with the moment when the policeman approaches the young woman. The rape itself, indubitably one of the crudest pieces of Antwerp, is described in “Occasionally She Shook.”54 Then, as story time and narrative time move almost in parallel, by the time the reader reaches “The Redhead,” the relationship between the young woman and the police appears to have solidified. In other words, they appear to have become a couple, surprisingly, but with the caveat that this fragment is narrated as a dream by an intradiegetic voice that is having nightmares.55 As stated earlier, nothing in this text seems to rest on firm ground. For instance, as regards the subject of the young woman herself, she appears in other poems though not necessarily being raped. Whether this “young woman” is the same as the one raped by the police, nonetheless, is an open question. In “My One True Love,” she is described simply as making love with an unnamed person (195–96). In “A Hospital,” as the intradiegetic narrating voice reminisces about a young woman taking her clothes off, he alludes,

68  |  Chapter 2 in the present of the narration, to a young woman dying in a hospital as a policeman rapidly climbs the stairs. Finally, in “Big Silver Waves,” it is no other than the “foreigner” who, just like the policeman, makes love to a young woman by making her face down. For this reason, it is really not astonishing that, just like the crime and the entity in charge of solving it, the crime scene is also somewhat amorphous and vague. It is true that the crimes alluded to above (in “Blue,” “The Motorcyclists,” and “Applause”) take place in relatively concrete locations such as a camp site or the beach. But as could be expected due to the very nebulous nature of all the fragments of Antwerp, the predominantly intradiegetic narrator never spends a great deal of time detailing the crime scene. Accordingly, and especially if one keeps in mind that, in general, the crimes are either unfocused or latent, it may just be a better idea to speak of space in broad terms, in other words, space construed rhizomatically, space as a transient area where the “jorobadito,” the “English writer,” the “unknown young woman,” the “foreigner,” the “policeman,” and the “tira” (detective), among others, move incessantly and in manifold directions. Regarding this notion of movement in the text, it is worth reminding ourselves here that it is very likely that Antwerp is, in reality, at least two texts taking place simultaneously. On the one hand, the stories are recounted by a primarily intradiegetic narrating voice; on the other hand, the more remote though certainly not improbable possibility that he who narrates recounts from inside whatever is being projected on the ubiquitous screen. That said, one ought not lose sight of the fact that, just like Bolaño supplies a species of x-ray of Mexico City in the first part of Detectives and in Amulet, or a sketch of northern Mexico in the former, in some stories from Putas, and in the second, third, and fourth sections of 2666 , in Antwerp he offers a cognitive mapping of the environs of Barcelona. Without a doubt, the “forest” is the most important and conspicuous site in the text; it is here, after all, that an unnamed man, appearing suddenly and from nowhere, installs a screen and announces, in the presence of the jorobadito, that he is going to project a movie (“The Sheet”), a movie that may just be the text.56 This is the place, moreover, where three other salient, though equally mystifying, locations are situated: the aforementioned camp site,57 the stable,58 and the pool.59 Besides these locales, some very explicit spots are mentioned throughout the text: “Narrow streets inside District V” (“I’m My Own Bewitchment” 181), “abandoned buildings in Barcelona” (“The

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Nile” 184), “the promenade” (“The Instructions” 190, and “Tallers Street” 215), “Castelldefels’s beach” (“The Sea” 204), and “Tallers Street” (“Launch Ramps” 218). Finally, to complete the spatial outline of Antwerp, there are a series of loci which, though very tangible, not only enhance what could be called the new territory of a progressively deterritorialized citizen in postmodern times but also provide a clue regarding Bolaño’s future works: “an abandoned house” (“My One True Love” 195), “an empty street” (“An Extra Silence” 208), “the park” (“The Medic” 213, and “A White Handkerchief” 214), and “dormitory towns, empty avenues” (“The Gun to His Mouth” 222). The most poignant in this regard, however, are not places such as the “police stations” (“There Was Nothing” 187, and “The Instructions” 189) or “police offices” (“Launch Ramps” 218) that appear in a couple of fragments but rather the repeated allusion to “hallways,” replete with people in general and women in particular who, missing their mouths in some cases, are unable to speak and that, needless to say, make one think especially of 2666 ’s fourth section, “The Part about the Crimes”: “I saw a group of people who would open their mouth but could not speak” (“Clear Water along the Way” 227) 60; “She closed her eyes as someone was telling her that she/he had dreamt about a hallway full of women without a mouth” (“The Policeman Walked Away” 192). 61 Metaphorically, is Bolaño here alluding to women’s lack of voice in society in general? It is certainly possible. As the probing of the aforementioned poems demonstrates, there is a patent concern on Bolaño’s part early on in his career to concoct what might be called a detective genre aesthetics. But in the same way that he democratizes literature by incorporating noncanonical authors in his novels and short stories, in his poetry he refuses, consciously or not, to follow the classical mystery novel genre, choosing, instead, not the Latin American or Spanish neopolicíaco model but rather a sui generis paradigm that situates both the detective and the crime in marginal and strange locations where very few things are certain. The same incapacity to unravel the mystery in Monsieur, the analogous inability to ultimately comprehend Cesárea’s poem in Detectives, and the almost impossible task of finding the true murderers of women in 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes,” have their counterparts in the utter nebulousness that surrounds many of the poems and fragments of University and especially of Antwerp. This nebulousness, nevertheless, has more to do with the contents of the poems rather

70  |  Chapter 2 than with the evolution of the detective genre within the poetic output. In fact, there is a clear process of maturation in University that begins with tepid attempts to devise a detective aesthetics in isolated poems and ends with a more thorough though not yet fully-formed policíaco text. A fullfledged detective genre would only emerge once Bolaño began writing fiction and left poet y behind.

The Dynamics of Self-Fashioning in the Poetr or Writing Oneself int o the Poetr y

y;

A second feature of Bolaño’s engaged postmodernism is directly related to what, several years ago and in a different context, Lucille Kerr called the act of “reclaiming the author.”62 In a 2003 interview, when Daniel Swinburn asked Bolaño whether his fiction might not just be a little too autobiographical, he replied: “Excessively [autobiographical]? Not really. In any case, I prefer, say, a literature with some autobiographical traits, which is the literature of the individual, the one that distinguishes one individual from another, to a literature of the we” (2003a, E9). 63 But if Bolaño favors a literature “with some autobiographical traits” and in his fictional works there are plenty of characters who slightly resemble him, it could then be contended safely that he writes himself into the poetry; much of his poetry, in other words, is self-representational. Although University contains too many autobiographical or semi-autobiographical poems to be examined with granular detail here, these could essentially be classified into three different groups: poems and fragments that include some biographical elements, those that are autobiographical, and those that are markedly autobiographical. Now, how does Bolaño write himself into the poetry? Before answering this question, it must be stated unequivocally that even though “there is no intrinsically autobiographical form,” as Elizabeth W. Bruss argues (1976, 10), his poetry, strictly speaking, does not constitute an autobiography. A brief discussion of certain aspects of autobiography, however, might shed some light on the autobiographical self present in so many poems from University. The practice of autobiographical writing, or life writing, has a long history, of course.64 Moreover, it is certainly true, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson observed already in 1996, that “the obsessive desire to create and authenticate individual identity” is very much a “characteristic of our

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times” (6). According to Bruss, furthermore, autobiography is essentially “an act” (19), an act that, just like other illocutionary acts, is closely attached to certain symbolic systems located in certain specific locations (23). Most critics, in fact, underline the importance of location when it comes to self-writing, whether it is the culture at large (Smith and Watson 14), more specific spaces such as a study or a library (Goodfall 2006, 104–5), or even a prison cell (Reichardt 2006). Thus, Janet Varner Gunn’s contention that “the real question of the autobiographical self . . . becomes where do I belong? not, who am I? The question of the self’s identity becomes a question of the self’s location in a world” (1982, 23). But not everyone is in agreement with this position. Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright, for instance, state that, quite often, the autobiographer presents his or her life “as a unity,” as a “single story of a unified, perhaps indivisible protagonist” (2006, 5–6). Lloyd Davis, for his part, while recognizing critics of autobiography who privilege the essence or indivisibility of the autobiographical subject, also points to those who conceive of life writing as being the product of history and culture and who challenge the notion of autonomous selfhood (2006, 22). There are still others who highlight the dialogical nature of self-narration (Smith and Watson 9) or frequent instances of life writing where the focus of attention is a certain audience variously treated by the “I” as “an undifferentiated whole,” as friends, or as enemies (Bruss 1976, 21–22). Finally, J. Lenore Wright (2006) provides yet another view of autobiographical writing that might prove useful to comprehend Bolaño’s autobiographical poems. Wright proposes the existence of two selves: the “Inner self,” which she calls “ontological” (5), “prediscursive” (10), “metaphysical” (27), and “essentialist” (27), and the “Outer self,” which she dubs “rhetorical” (5), “constructivist” (27), a “Heraclitan ego that lingers in a perpetual state of becoming and is always dependent on the shifting contexts, beliefs, and literary aims of a writer for existence” (27). Both “Inner” and “Outer” selves play a role in autobiographical texts in her opinion. Similarly, she speaks of three modes of reflection that facilitate any process of self-­ knowledge: introspection, retrospection, and what she calls “alterspection,” that is, when the writing self, besides looking inward or backward, also looks outward. Wright concludes that “autobiography represents a middle path between fi tion and fact, a path that aptly captures the intersubjective nature of the self, a self that is both ontological and rhetorical, both Inner and Outer” (43). However self-mapping is construed, nevertheless, what is

72  |  Chapter 2 important in self-referential writing is that the subject is both the source as well as the object of communication. One of the questions that one needs to ask oneself, then, is not only whether the self-­scrutinizing that takes place in Bolaño’s University is of a “confessing, complaining, bragging, accusing” or “apologizing” nature (11), or whether what predominates in the poems is “self-explanation” or “self-evaluation” (Mathien 2006, 18), but most important, what is the relationship between the writing self’s introspective, retrospective, and “alterspective” gaze? To answer these questions, I focus only on the most autobiographical poems of University. But as I stated above, these are not the only ones in the collection containing autobiographical information. Whether this information is at times questionable but possible,65 whether it is probable,66 or whether it is highly probable—such as in the case of the poems to be analyzed here67 —the fact is that they all cast a light in a certain way on the life of an author about whom little is known.68 Thematically speaking, the “I” in these very autobiographical texts self-narrates principally on four different topics: writing, Mexico, his son, and Chile. It is precisely through an examination of poems containing these subjects that one is able to gain an insight, to follow Gunn (1982), into what type of “world” the self wishes itself to locate. The physical, historical, and cultural location from where he speaks is probably Barcelona and its surrounding areas and as an immigrant who, without secure employment and often hungry, continues to write as if nothing else mattered. There is no doubt, moreover, that the three modes of reflection mentioned by Lenore—introspection, retrospection, and “alterspection”—are present in several of the poems. Not surprisingly, the subject of writing is the most important of the aforementioned four topics and is present in “Work” (20), “Among the Horses” (188), “Horde” (292), and “Muse” (438–41). In “Work,” by means of self-explanation and self-evaluation, the autobiographical self provides an assessment of his poetry and, alterspectively—to follow Lenore—seeks “credibility” (20) for poems he composed in honor of very specific young women. Presenting himself as a detective who, while broke, drifted around working in the slaughterhouses of the old and new continent, the writing of poetry, “an illusory labyrinth,” is conceived of as a frenetic activity that is nonetheless incapable of redeeming humankind. Even so, it is presented as the sole activity able to save the autobiographical self from oblivion, and poetry as his only advocate for the future.

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The most fervent praise of poetry is “Muse,” a paean to the genre, surely. Composed of twenty quatrains, formally speaking it is probably the most lyrical poem of University. Although retrospection is not the predominant mode of reflection here, the few allusions to the past are important in light of the author’s biography, as when the autobiographical self, directly addressing poetry, remembers seeing her (poetry) among political prisoners in hospitals (439). Or when he, identifying himself by name, makes specifi mention of places in Mexico City, such as parks and libraries, where he and his friends used to hang out and either bought or stole books (440). The autobiographical self represents poetry as an accompanying, protective fi ure that first made its appearance when he was sixteen years old: “guardian angel” (438), “queen of dreams” (439), he calls her. But if “Muse” constitutes a celebration of poetry, it is also a call, a petition, a request that poetry never leave the autobiographical self or his son: “Never separate from me / Look after me / and my son Lautaro” (438). As noted at the beginning of this chapter, in spite of the fact that at some point in his literary career Bolaño comes to the conclusion that, in reality, he simply could not make a living by writing poetry, spiritually he never detached himself from poetry, specifically claiming that he always followed in her footsteps (440) “Among the Horses,” from “People Walking Away,” constitutes yet another version of the topic of writing in the context of self-mapping. Unlike “Work” and “Muse,” this segment utilizes an intradiegetic voice that tells the story of a writer whose biography is uncannily similar to that of the author. Indeed, “Among the Horses,” more than an autobiographical piece, is a sort of fictional biography of Roberto Bolaño that centers on a very unique moment in his life. Thus, one cannot speak of introspection, retrospection, or alterspection here. The writer is said to live on the outskirts of the city and to work in a stable. A simple man, all he wants is a place to sleep and free time to read. At some point, states the narrating voice, he meets a young woman and falls in love. At this moment a few practical problems arise: finding a place for two people, procuring the money to pay for it, finding a stable job, getting a visa, obtaining social security. The first and most pressing obstacle that this immigrant who writes encounters, however, is the lack of funds to pay a visit to his loved one, who now lives in a different city. But he is lucky enough, declares the intradiegetic narrator, to have a friend who gives him the chance to write articles for a certain magazine. Nevertheless he is unable to write, falling

74  |  Chapter 2 instead into a state of utter stagnation: “He spends his afternoons . . . trying to write, but he can’t. Nothing comes out, as it is commonly said” (188). It is feasible that “Among the Horses” refers to a moment in Bolaño’s life when he had just arrived in Spain as an “economic immigrant”69 and was leading a precarious existence. Most important, nonetheless, this poem seems to be a testimony concerning the autobiographical self’s inability, or unwillingness, to practice a kind of writing just to make a living. Unlike those authors in Latin America who, toward the end of the nineteenth century, at the very genesis of the process of the institutionalization of literature and the autonomy of the writer, had to become journalists precisely in order to write, Martí is certainly the most emblematic, or those for whom journalism became the stepping stone to writing novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez comes to mind, Bolaño opted for jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with writing. It comes as no surprise, consequently, that in “Horde,” the last poem dealing with the subject of writing, the autobiographical self should direct his critical darts against writers, and especially poets—such as Neruda and Paz, for example—who, while dwelling in “the Great Building of Power” (292), attained economic security at the expense of artistic freedom. Leaving aside the fairness of this judgment, this is of course a theme that runs through much of Bolaño’s oeuvre.70 The self-portrait of the I as a victim could simply be construed as a strategy to find a place in the litera y field. A poem that very clearly exemplifies the dialogical nature of self-narration (Smith and Watson 1996), the autobiographical self in “Horde” talks about a dream in which “poets from Spain and Latin America, the most infamous / Of literature, . . . rats from the bottom of my dream,” come to him, essentially, to destroy him. Addressing the I, they tell him not only that they will obliterate him, they will also erase his writings, writings that they themselves have plagiarized. Following Bruss (1976), the self constructs an audience of enemies here. These enemies, furthermore—or, rather, competitors in the jungle of literature—also include those who, in large measure, play a key role in the literary institution, such as cultural attachés, people working in publishing houses, and poets who have sold their soul to the devil in order to survive. The words in “Horde” are doubtless very harsh, but they do represent an early fictional example not only of the author’s attitude toward many writers and poets, particularly, but also of his supposedly innately confrontational personality.

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Mexico, the second theme concerning the autobiographical self’s writing himself into the poetry, appears in the following five poems: “Untitled” (122), “Lisa” (350), “Untitled” (351, a sequel), “Roberto Bolaño’s Devotion” (397), and “A Happy Ending” (437). In contradistinction to the poems discussed above, both the tone and the gaze are different here. Although the subject of nostalgia will be treated later in this chapter, there is no denying that what stands out in these five texts is the retrospective look. And, predictably, it is a predominantly happy look into the past. The first untitled poem (122), whose narrative time is probably marked by instability, hunger, cold, and all the trappings of an immigrant existence, transports the autobiographical self to joyous experiences in Mexico City in the past when he and his friends—“Mario,”71 “Mara,” and “Bruno”72 — would return home after having spent the whole night together. The autobiographical self expresses his gratitude to the city and the bus drivers who gave him, the “foreigner” (122), rides home when he did not have money to pay the bus fare. In the following two poems—“Lisa” and an untitled poem where a Lisa is mentioned—the autobiographical self broaches the subject of love, a subject that plays an even greater role in the section “Prose from Autumn in Gerona” of University and that is always present in Bolaño’s works in various ways.73 In contrast to the narrating voice of “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” a text which, structurally speaking, is very similar to “People Walking Away” in the sense that there are allusions to an “author,” a “character,” a “screen,” and an “unknown [woman],” among other elements,74 the autobiographical self in “Lisa” does not recount a love relationship happening in the present but rather one that took place in Mexico a long time ago and still haunts him. Characteristic of an array of characters in Bolaño’s novels and short stories, the autobiographical self remembers a time when, from a telephone booth while in Mexico, he called Lisa, the greatest love of his life, only to find out that she had made love with someone else. “The two worst hours of my life” (350), the poetic voice states. In what could be interpreted as Lisa’s continuation, her presence is even more tangible in the untitled poem, as memories of Lisa emerge abruptly (351). A patent difference is established here between a miserable present and a blissful past. Identifying himself with Mexico by transforming both his abode and himself into Mexico, the narrating voice, alluded to as “Roberto Bolaño,” clamors for his “one true love” as he’s about to become forty years old.

76  |  Chapter 2 In the third poem dealing with Mexico specifically in the context of life writing, “Roberto Bolaño’s Devotion,” there seemingly would be no attempt on the part of the author to establish a distance between the narrating voice and himself. Contrary to what the title might imply, however, the narrative focus here is what Genette calls “nonfocalized” (1980, 189), in other words, a traditional omniscient narration where the “he” of the poem—Roberto Bolaño—is, so to speak, not the subject but rather the object of the narrating. In the poem, the poetic voice refers to a specific year (1992) when this “he” was alone and very sick, feeling that he didn’t have much more time to live (397). Clearly, this is a “subsequent” narrating instance in Genette’s terms (217), that is, a past-tense narrative centered, first in 1992 and then, twice removed from the narrative present, in an even more remote past in Mexico. From a spatial instance that remains undetermined in the poem but that, as in other poems and segments of University, feasibly might be Barcelona and its outskirts, the fictive autobiographical self proceeds to allude to Mexico and its friends as a true panacea in the life of a sick and lonely “Roberto Bolaño” no longer there. As Lisa and Mario Santiago come to his mind, Mexico is alluded to as “that magical country” that brought “good” and “worthy” things into Roberto Bolaño’s life. But besides Lisa, his true love, and Mario Santiago, his best friend, it is Mexico City itself, with its streets, its inhabitants, and its neighborhoods, that come to alleviate his pain. Underscoring that he was “sick and alone,” the I of the poem recalls how Roberto Bolaño would gather forces by thinking about the city, its nights, its music, and specific neighborhoods such as Guerrero. In “A Happy Ending,” the last of four poems involving Mexico and autobiography, the autobiographical self, principally via retrospection but also via the use of a kind of historical present, focuses on home, not on his friends and the city. The poem is divided into two parts, one written in prose and another written in verse. In both parts the center of attention is the self’s daily existence at his parents’ house on the one hand, and the self’s contemplation of the neighborhood from the window on the other. Also a subsequent narrating instance, the autobiographical self reminisces nostalgically about a time long gone when he lived with his parents and, curiously in light of the role that television plays in most of Bolaño’s novels and short stories, without television’s ubiquitous presence (437). The last line of this fragment in prose, in fact, reiterates, “And without the buzzing

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of the television!” The recurrence in Bolaño’s fiction of lonely characters who live precariously and whose contact with the world is often filtere through television programs opens the possibility for the creation of meta­ narratives—a fixture of his narrative style, certainly—while conveying at the same time the idea that now, in an increasingly postmodern globalized society, reality can only be accessed virtually, that is, through simulacra. In the past, in Mexico, at his parents’ home, television was not necessary and the autobiographical self could dedicate his time to the activities he enjoyed most, such as translating French poets, for example. In the presumably lonely present of the narrating instance Mexico and family are joined together and provide comfort or a happy ending to the self. Bolaño’s son, the third theme linked to autobiography, is portrayed in three different poems: “Four Poems for Lautaro Bolaño” (432–33), “Two Poems for Lautaro Bolaño” (434–35), and “Portrait in May, 1994” (436). In the first one, the autobiographical self speaks directly to Lautaro Bolaño, the author’s son name in real life as well as the poem’s narratee. Through an obviously alterspective look that also seeks to establish a dialogue with a child too young to understand, the self refers to four different moments in his son’s life. Although most of the poem is written in the present, the first section, “Lautaro, our familiarity,”75 adheres to what Genette (1980) calls a prior narrating instance in the sense that what is narrated has a predictive connotation: “The day will arrive when we will not / do many things together as we now do / hugging each other as we sleep” (432). Now, despite the fact that the focalization of the autographical self zeroes in on various instances of his son’s daily existence—when he has nightmares, when he emulates his father, and when he most resembles his grandfather—there are verses where the self alludes to his own present situation. The self speaks, for example, about returning to “the crime scene,” baffled to still be alive The following poem, “Two Poems for Lautaro Bolaño,” constitutes both an injunction and an encomium. In the first section, “Read the Old Poets,” the autobiographical self exhorts his son to read poets from the past: “Read the old poets, my son / and you will not regret it” (434). As can be seen in several texts by Bolaño, poets—“nomads” who “live . . . / in Dreams”—are described as heroic creatures who, even when aware of imminent defeat, continue to fight until the end. While in this first section the self addresses his son, in the second, “Library,” he addresses his books. Alluding to the

78  |  Chapter 2 many books he has bought but probably will never read, he implores them to protect his son and to resist the rain and scorching heat (434–35). Of the three autobiographical poems that revolve around the self’s son, “Portrait in May, 1994” is perhaps the most complex. Although the poem is born out of a joyous occasion—his son’s birthday—the autobiographical self describes a place devoid of poetry: “this coast abandoned by the Muse” (436). Why has the Muse abandoned the place where he and his son live? And what does Muse represent here? If in autobiography in general the distance between the author and the narrating instance is closest, as it is indeed the case in the autobiographical poems under study here, then it is likely that this statement is prompted by the defeat of the political project once cherished by the self, especially as allusion is made to all that was not fulfilled. At the same time that the self represents himself as fragmentary and adrift, he regrets not having been able to build a strong and stable world. It is interesting, moreover, that the autobiographical self uses the first-person plural, as if he were the spokesperson for all those whose political and cultural projects did not materialize. In one of the few instances in Bolaño’s works in which a direct verdict on the revolution is made, calling it, in fact, a “meadow / of red flags,” the poetic voice admits that it was crushed by reality because it was founded, like the clouds in Baudelaire’s famous poem, on air. The poem, nevertheless, ends on a positive note, as the self envisions his son or, rather, his son’s self-portraits, surrounded by the same light that illuminated his own steps and those of his father. Chile, the last major theme concerning life writing in University, is treated in “Roberto Bolaño’s Return”—divided in three sections (398–99)—“Self-Portrait” (430), and “Self-Portrait” (431). 76 Leaving aside for now the issue of whether Bolaño was or was not a Chilean writer77 — when Nazi and Distant came out in 1996 some questioned his “Chileanness,” in fact—these poems lack the feeling of jubilant nostalgia that characterize several of the poems about Mexico. In “Self-Portrait” (430), for instance, the autobiographical self starts the poem saying that he was born in Chile in 1953, only to add, “The friends painted by Posadas came later / as well as the most transparent region,” a clear allusion to José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), Mexico’s famous cartoonist and satirist; Carlos Fuentes’s Where the Air Is Clear; and possibly Gerardo Murillo (1875–1964), alias Dr. Atl, who appears in various Bolaño works.78 In

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contrast to this “Self-Portrait,” where the retrospective self presents Chile almost as a mere accident in his journey, in his second “Self-Portrait” he delves into his childhood there, mentioning some of his friends, the town where he lived, and the 1962 World Cup, held in Chile. As in “Portrait in May, 1994,” however, in this poem—where the autobiographical self not only narrates retrospectively but also projects the present into the past— the world surrounding the I also crumbles: “So, without realizing it, / we began to lose everything” (431). In a 2003 interview in the Chilean paper La tercera, Bolaño stated that, if given the chance to be born again, he would be a pimp in a brothel.79 “Roberto Bolaño’s Return,” the last poem concerning Chile, constitutes a tribute to prostitutes and one of the few instances in Bolaño’s writings where the term homeland is used. Referring to his return to Chile, the self states: “I returned pale like the moon / and without too much enthusiasm / to the brothels of my homeland / and prostitutes smiled at me” (398). 80 One last poem regarding the I’s inscription into poetry—a poem that does not specifically revolve around the themes of writing, Mexico, his son, or Chile—needs to be analyzed here. Titled “The Years,” this autobiographical piece constitutes a sort of summation of the process of self-­ mapping, a true self-portrait in the sense that neither “Self-Portrait” examined above is. Curiously, nevertheless, the autobiographical self presents himself not as a subject but as an object. In the course of the poem, the fictive Roberto Bolaño—though not mentioned by name—is presented as “a Latin American poet” (401) and not just as a poet; in fact, this is the only verse that appears three times in “The Years.” But not surprisingly given Bolaño’s perennial search for a poetics and also his having left Latin America for good, he is presented as a Latin American poet far away from Latin American poets. At the same time that he is presented as a poet, he is also portrayed as a reader of certain poets: Rimbaud, Oquendo de Amat, Cardenal, Parra, and Lihn. Parra and Lihn were the author’s favorite poets, of course, as several of his essays and interviews attest. 81 Another aspect of Bolaño’s biography fi tively constructed in this poem has to do with his trips throughout Latin America and Europe and his ideals and disappointments: “A vagabond / A wrinkled passport . . . a dream // sunken in the slime of its own nightmare” (401). Of special interest in the context of Bolaño’s relationship to Latin America is a verse where the narrating voice shows the fictive, racially mixed Roberto Bolaño

80  |  Chapter 2 increasingly removed from the continent. This does not mean, nonetheless, that the place where the poet now lives, Europe, has become his home: he feels “a foreigner in Europe” (402), despite the fact that the real Bolaño felt immensely comfortable in Spain. “The Years” ends on a very optimistic note as the poet continues to cling to a wonderful and eternal ideal regardless of his trials and tribulations. As these autobiographical poems demonstrate, therefore, there is a clear effort on Bolaño’s part to write himself into the poetry. But the degree of the presence of the fictive self varies. In the most intensely autobiographical poems, likewise, though the gaze of the autobiographical self alternates between retrospection, introspection, and alterspection, a retrospective posture is perhaps the most common, especially in the poems concerning Mexico and Chile. In those poems dealing with writing and his son—the two other predominant themes within the autobiographical output—the self expresses himself through a mixture of alterspection and introspection. As regards writing, the self extolls the virtues of poetry at the same time that he chastises certain poets. And as regards his son he asks poetry to protect him while also asking his son to read poetry.

The Ever -Present Past Besides the themes of the detective and autobiography, the subject of nostalgia and even melancholy constitute a strong presence in the poems of University. This is partially manifest, as was discussed above, in connection with the autobiographical self’s retrospective thoughts concerning Mexico. But Mexico’s presence in the poems transcends the topic of autobiography and becomes a most important reference point through which the poet is able to deal with the present. In effect, in this third and last theme of this second chapter of my study—the theme of nostalgia—Mexico plays a pivotal role. The other subtheme, the loss of the political project, is less predominant though no less significant Judging by the abundance of allusions to Mexico in Bolaño’s poetry, and the relatively few references to Chile, one could argue that Mexico was the author’s adopted homeland. This despite the fact that Bolaño himself claimed to feel Latin American, above all, and regardless of the fact that, as stated already, he felt immensely comfortable in Spain. The question

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that needs to be posed, then, is, what aspects of Mexico stand out in the poems, or, what relationship does the poet establish with Mexico? To accomplish this, I shall center my attention on “Untitled” (321), “Atole” (364–65), “The Light” (366), and “Prickly Pear” (367). 82 As was discussed in the preceding section, Mexico emerges as a beam of light in the life of the narrating self, bringing friends, old loves, and places that come to provide comfort and solace to a precarious narrating instance in the present. What a more appropriate way to express this sentiment than to call “A Happy Ending” a poem that combines memories of Mexico and home? It is not surprising, thus, that this same spirit of gratitude appears in almost all of these poems. In “Untitled” (321), two parallel situations stand out. On the one hand, there is the presence of an anguished poetic voice that seeks to avoid, at all cost, sinking into a deeper state of desperation by falling asleep. On the other hand, the cataloging of a series of actions that the poetic voice entreats himself to carry out in order to remain awake takes place. It is in this context, precisely, that Mexico comes to the poet’s rescue: “Remember happy images, / Mexico City’s chromes, steel poets at the Café La Habana.”83 As is well known, Mexico in general and Mexico City in particular played a crucial role in the personal, social, and cultural formation of Roberto Bolaño. It is not surprising, consequently, that in this clearly autobiographical poem the poet should resort to his Mexican past in order to alleviate his uncertain present. Allusion is made in this untitled poem to young men strolling certain neighborhoods and eating certain foods. The second poem under scrutiny, “Atole,” also focuses its attention on Mexico’s past. But this time the poetic voice, through a dream or a hallucination, imagines a more specific aspect of this past: his best friend in real life, Mario Santiago, and “Orlando Guillén,” both of whom he calls “Mexico’s lost poets” (364). Similarly, the poetic voice uses a plural narratee—“My friends”—at the same time that he proceeds to re-create a certain kind of ambience, such as typical Mexican music. The poem ends with the poetic voice locating Mario Santiago and Orlando Guillén in a place that truly belongs to them: “The Mexico of solitudes and memories / of the nightly metro and Chinese cafes” (365), where atole (a popular hot beverage) welcomes them at dawn. The theme of nostalgia within the context of memories of Mexico in University continues in “The Light.” As in the previous poem, Mario

82  |  Chapter 2 Santiago also appears here. At the same time, there is an allusion to “el Dr. Atl,” who is not only mentioned in “Atole” but, as stated above, figures in several of Bolaño’s works. The poem begins with a reference to a time of the day—“dawns” (366)—which , along with another time of the day—“sunsets”—surfaces frequently in Bolaño’s novels and short stories. Similarly to “Untitled” (122), analyzed previously, the poetic voice goes on to reminisce the times when, after a long night, he and his friends would board the bus and travel in circles in the “suburbs of the dark city.” This time, however, the goal was to escape from the morning light, which the poetic voice compares to a knife hovering over the sacrificial altars of Mexico City. In the last poem dealing with Mexico, “Prickly Pear,” the poetic voice compares himself to a prickly pear. What is most interesting about this poem is not only the object chosen for the comparison, that is, a prickly pear, arguably one of Mexico’s most distinctive symbols, but how, by identifying himself with it and by the plant’s ubiquitousness in the Mexican territory, the poetic voice reaches a kind of fusion with it and hence with Mexico despite Mexico’s menacing storms. In the poem, he describes himself as an “adolescent” (367) who’s “alone” and, as he stands with “outstretched arms,” embraces “Mexico’s interminable horizon.” When Bolaño first attracted the attention of the critical establishment, and especially in the United States, one of the most quoted aspects of his biography—initially found especially in usually superficial Internet pieces written in English and based, for the most part, on Detectives or on personal interviews—was the one that had to do with his having returned to Chile from Mexico in 1973 to “make Revolution.” “I went back to Chile to make Revolution when I was twenty,” he states in “Exiles” (2004a, 52). 84 It is whatever happens after this experience in Chile, of course, that will greatly shape his entire oeuvre. Distant, Amulet, “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” in Putas, and, to some extent, By Night provide an excellent account of what comes after the revolution has been defeated. However, the feelings of disillusionment and disenchantment, which in Bolaño crystallize into nostalgia, not nihilism, are already evident in some of the poems of University. In the poems where the expression “to make Revolution” appears,85 or just the word revolution,86 the political urgency that the term conveys is missing, presenting instead a poetic voice that speaks from a very personal perspective and for whom the transformation of society seems like a very distant reality. In poems such as “The Last Love Song of Pedro J. Lastarria, Alias

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‘El Chorito’” (368–70), “The Romantic Dogs” (372), and “The Donkey” (383–85), it is not exactly the revolution that stands out but rather a strong feeling of loss regarding the past, confirming in some way the “penchant for sacrifice” that Cristián Gómez (2010, 77) detects in Bolaño s poetry. Calling himself a “South American in a land of Goths” (Spaniards) (368), the poetic voice compares his present situation to happier times in the past in “The Last Love Song of Pedro J. Lastarria.” Possibly an autobiographical poem, it is interesting that he should refer in negative terms to the place from where he speaks: “a land more hostile / than hospitable” (368). 87 The poetic voice then proceeds to present a kind of summary of his life: “My life was a succession / of lost opportunities.” The pain of the present can only be palliated by memories of the past. As he’s sick in the hospital, he cannot but think of the good things that happened to him in earlier times. Then, as in a succession, the poem mixes the poetic voice’s personal past as well as the past of those who, like him, lost their youth, and the palpable sorrow that he feels in the present. He reminisces childhood trips, parents, and grandparents but also the positive aspects of “my lost youth,” something that is beyond the comprehension of those who surround him (368–69). What is interesting, nonetheless, is that there is no defeatism here. In other words, the failure of the revolutionary project does not lead to nihilism but evokes rather a recognition of the bravery of the past: “The memory of failure / having become the memory / of bravery” (369). It is to some extent the extolling of this courage that characterizes “The Romantic Dogs,” the second poem dealing with the loss of the political project in the context of nostalgia. The time of the poem coincides exactly with the military coup in Chile in 1973: “I had lost a country / but I had gained a dream” (372), states the poetic voice. Due to the very autobiographical nature of “The Romantic Dogs,” these words are indeed paradoxical. To what dream does the poetic voice refer? Is it that the loss of the collective project spawns the freedom of the individual, that is, the relinquishing of the political for the sake of the subjective? It would appear to be so even though in the rest of the poem dream remains an ambiguous term. For instance, later on the poetic voice refers to his “dream” both as an “eternalized statue” as well as a “nightmare.” It is this nightmare, in fact, that addresses the poetic voice by asking it to forget painful memories from the past. To which the poetic voice replies in an

84  |  Chapter 2 almost defiant fashion that, back then, in the past, it would have been criminal to grow up, but now, in the present, it’s there to stay with the “romantic dogs.” These verses clearly underscore the idea that, while the shock of defeat was indeed unbearable, the poetic voice continues to be strong and resist. Apropos of defeat, in his interview with Donoso, Bolaño declared: “I am one of those who believes that human beings are a priori condemned to defeat, to defeat without appeal, but that one has to come out swinging and fight, and fight, moreover, in the best way possible, cleanly and facing ahead, without asking for mercy (because they will have none on you anyway), and attempt to fall like a brave man, and that that is our victory” (2003b, E3). This fight is in large measure what Bolaño will do through his novels and short stories. Of the three poems concerning the mourning for what did not materialize, “The Donkey” is perhaps the most telling. What makes this poem unique is the fact that it sets the feeling of loss in the context of Mexico, not only confirming the significance of his stay there between 1968 and 1977 but also suggesting that, in the end, the author suffered from a sort of double exile. Not surprisingly, the poem begins with an allusion to Mario Santiago: “Sometimes I dream about Mario Santiago / coming to get me in his black motorcycle” (383). The presence of the adverb of time “sometimes” underscores, of course, the recurrence of the experience, the permanent feeling of nostalgia in the present for a past that will not return. What comes afterward in this long poem constitutes one of the first instances in which northern Mexico, arguably the most impor­ tant geopolitical space in Bolaño’s oeuvre—as is evident in the third section of Detectives, “Gómez Palacio,” and especially “The Part about the Crimes” in 2666 —is mentioned. It is hard not to think here of the hurried journey to the north that Arturo, Ulises, García Madero, and Lupe take at the end of the first part of Detectives, as, leaving Mexico City behind, Mario Santiago and the poetic voice head north toward Texas on the latter’s motorcycle (383). 88 But if in Detectives the goal is to fin Cesárea Tinajero, in this poem these travelers go “pursuing an unnamable / nondescript dream, the dream of our youth, / that is, the bravest of all / our dreams” (383). But again, what is this dream? Is the poetic voice suggesting that the political involvement of the members of his generation prevented them from having other, more personal dreams? It is certainly likely, as it is also likely in “The Romantic Dogs.” In the

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following verses, furthermore, the poetic voice proposes not only that it is just them who are truly qualified to witness the defeat but also that their poetry originates from, and in, defeat. In other words, in contradistinction to Adorno’s famous statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,89 and presumably responding to Hölderlin’s question in “Bread and Wine” (“What use are poets in times of need?”), the idea here is that, on the contrary, poetry assumes the task of chronicling the horror. In the poem, in fact, it is figuratively amid sandstorms and other calamities that poetry reaches its full potential (383–84). The desert, the crime scene in 2666 , thus becomes a metaphor not only for emancipatory politics incarnated in Chile in 1970–1973, but also in Mexico in 1968, Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979. All these represent “the dream of our youth,” which was ultimately beaten back. It is no accident, consequently, that in the verses that follow the poetic voice, surprisingly using a religious language almost directly taken from the New Testament and reminiscent of some of Parra’s poems written during the dictatorship, should seek to establish a communion with, as well as to become a spokesperson for those who died or disappeared and who “are no longer here” (384). In large measure, this metaphoric journey to the north becomes a sort of homage to those who “are no longer here,” a homage to their ideals, their persistence and, above all, their bravery, despite the “unnamable and useless” nature of the dream, a dream whose “ultimate meaning” the poetic voice confesses to not being able to comprehend even though he calls it “a happy farewell song.” This last verse, of course, makes one think of the scene in Amulet, situated almost at the end of the diegesis, when Auxilio Lacouture sees the youth of America falling into an abyss. But considering that the poems collected in The Romantic Dogs, including “The Donkey,” were composed during the 1980s and early 1990s, 90 plus the fact that Francis Fukuyama’s original essay, “The End of History?” (1989),91 quickly reached widespread notoriety—especially once his The End of History and the Last Man came out in1992—it is more likely that the poetic voice is alluding rather to the end of the utopian dreams of the Left in the face of the so-called triumph of capitalism. It is not a relinquishing of the dream or a welcoming of what was yet to come but rather a celebration of the courage of those who gave their lives for the betterment of Latin America, as suggested above. As the poem comes to an end, four ideas stand out: (1) the recalcitrance of the past, the idealist past as

86  |  Chapter 2 the thorn in the flesh of the poetic voice; (2) the likely possibility that “donkey” and “motorcycle” serve as metaphors for the wishes and desires of those to whom the poetic voice pays homage; (3) the equally likely possibility that the poetic voice is too far or no longer able to partake of the dream; and (4) that as long as one hangs out with donkeys and poets, there is still hope. Toward the end of “The Donkey,” in fact, the phrases “our hope / and our bravery” (385) complete the poetic voice’s metaphoric journey. Samuel Sotillo is correct92 —in contrast to Gareth Williams (2009) 93 — to ascribe a “melancholia generosa” to Bolaño’s works in general. In other words, melancholy is understood not as depression or despondency—or, as Freud would have it, not as the inability to overcome mourning—but rather as a positive state of expectancy for creative energy. As seen in this section, many of the poems from University reveal a deep interest in the past on the part of a poetic voice speaking from an uncertain present. Nevertheless, the feeling of nostalgia that permeates these poems does not translate into either nihilism or resignation. Mexico, for example, where much of the retrospective gaze focuses, becomes synonymous with happy moments in the past. It is also the place of poetry and friendship. Political disillusionment, for its part, does not transform itself into defeatism but rather a celebration of those who fought the good fight, a celebration of their valor and their unfathomable heroism. It stands to reason, if Bolaño enters the literary field first through the genre of poetry, and especially a markedly prosaic poetry, that several of the topics found in his narrative fiction are already present in his poems. At this early stage, what I have called his postmodernism of resistance manifests itself in three ways: through a sui generis treatment of the detective genre that is very much in its embryonic state, by an almost-­ rabid desire to inscribe the self in the poems and through the retrospective tone that characterizes much of his poetic production. Concerning the first, it is relatively clear that both detective and search have a metaphoric connotation that is linked to human existence but also to very specific events often tied directly to Latin American history. As regards the second, even though the subject of poetry constitutes the principal concern of the poetic voice, the themes of Mexico, the poet’s son, and Chile also occupy his attention. With respect to the third, the feeling of

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loss that overwhelms the poetic I in the present, a loss that has to do with the defeat of the political Left in Latin America, is partially palliated by his memories of Mexico during his youth there. In the three novels to be analyzed in the next chapter—Consejos, Monsieur, and Skating—Bolaño continues to employ a sui generis detective genre through which a postmodernism of resistance manifests itself.

Chapter 3

The Detective Genre A Hero with Multiple Faces

Per h a ps bec a u s e w h a t Peter Brooks calls “the narrative impulse” (2005, 201) was stronger than the lyrical impetus in Bolaño at the beginning of the 1980s, or, as suggested in the previous chapter, because Bolaño wisely realized that, unfortunately, poetry did not fare as well as fiction in the market, or, simply, because he concluded that he was not a good poet,1 he turned to the writing of novels and short stories. Let us remember, as stated earlier, that, though belatedly, he calls Antwerp a “novel,” after all, and that much of his poetry contains elements from narrative, a blurring of genre distinctions attributed equally to modernism and postmodernism certainly. The transition from poetry to fiction appears thus logical and natural. In the span of time from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, Bolaño wrote three novels: Consejos (1984) 2—in collaboration with Catalan writer and friend Antoni García Porta—Monsieur (1999b),3 and Skating (1993). In regards to Consejos, despite García Porta’s introductory essay to the 2008 edition seeking to clarify who wrote what and when, all that seems clear is that he provided the initial text and Bolaño improved it and completed it.4 The three novels received an award in Spain before reaching a wider reading audience later.5 Of the three themes analyzed in his poetry in the previous chapter, it is the theme of the detective that stands out in these early novels, even if the detective figure continues to be hard to identify. It is true 88

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that one of the protagonists of Consejos is Chilean, that Remo Morán, also a Chilean and one of the three narrating instances from Skating—as well as one of two protagonists of The Spirit of Science Fiction: A Novel (2016)—thinks about his youthful days in Mexico, and that César Vallejo, in a bizarre way, to say the least, plays a central role in Monsieur. However, nostalgia does not figure prominently in these early narrative texts as it does in Bolaño’s poetry and nor does autobiography. In fact, the character Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s so called alter ego, appears for the first time in Distant. The questions that need to be answered as attention is focused on Consejos, Monsieur, and Skating, then, are: what does Bolaño do with the detective genre here? What shape does the neopolicíaco, a Protean genre, as we saw earlier, take in these texts? And how do these novels reflect the author’s engaged postmodernism? In order to provide a response to these questions, I shall examine each of the novels, starting with some critical background and proceeding with the analysis per se. 6

conseJos de un discÍpulo de morrison a un FanÁtico de Joyce :

The Case of a Post-neopolicía

co Text Av ant la Lettre

Naturally, since Consejos was written in collaboration with someone else, it does not have the same status as, say, Detectives. Indeed, even Bolaño’s most recent posthumous novel, Sepulcros de vaqueros, could be said to stand on firmer ground as a text contributing to a more thorough understanding of his total narrative production. Why study Consejos then? Well, because of the obvious but no less important fact that he is one of the authors and also, according to García Porta, the text’s final editor. Of the three novels to be examined in this chapter, Consejos is arguably the most postmodern regarding both narrative technique and political stance. Furthermore, besides its metafictional ambiguities and its seemingly casual treatment of politics, there is also the matter of the mixture of high and low cultural forms. Equally significant is the fact that, from the standpoint of Bolaño’s early dabbling in the detective genre as seen in his poetry in general and Antwerp in particular, this is the first text to indulge in the detective genre without making concessions to poetry. Among the pieces of advice Bolaño gives García Porta concerning the novel they are writing together, in fact, one reads: “To definitively write it in the detective fiction tradition . . . modestly and in novela negra fashion, to do with Joyce—or with J. J.’s

90  |  Chapter 3 Ulysses—what the latter did with Homer and The Odyssey” (Bolaño and Porta 1984, 10). At the same time, the fact that he practices, at least theoretically, a kind of intertextuality by holding up Joyce’s Ulysses as the protagonist’s model for his own text within the text, makes Consejos clearly an experimental work. It is arguably Bolaño’s first novel. But, understandably perhaps, of all his works this is the one that has received the least amount of critical attention. In her study on Bolaño, for example, Bolognese states that she does not analyze Consejos—and neither Monsieur nor A Little Lumpen Novelita for that matter7 —not because it was written with someone else but because it does not belong to what she calls “the Bolaño territory” (2009a, 61). 8 The critical assessment about Consejos thus far is basically circumscribed to two overall reviews of the text—one by Alexis Candia (2006) and another by Álvaro Matus (2006)—and an article by Patricia Poblete (2011). Candia underlines, above all, the tense relationship between Consejos and the policíaco genre in general, claiming that even though it borrows from the policíaca novel the mixture of violence and eroticism typical of the hard-boiled, it does not present a critique of criminality or a desire to find the truth and restore order. For, after all, boredom and disenchantment move the two young protagonists (257). Matus, correctly, establishes a connection between Consejos and the road movie genre as regards structure, but most of his review is no more than a summary of García Porta’s introductory essay “La escritura a cuatro manos.” Poblete, who sees Consejos as “transit or hinge between the Mexican period and his later narrative works” (2011, 89) and examines the elements of both in the text, argues that this is Bolaño’s first attempt to position himself in the litera y field (96) Consejos is divided into twenty-four chapters9 plus an appendix.10 Ángel Ros, a “dramatized narrator” in Wayne Booth’s terms,11 or an “autodiegetic” narrator in Gérard Genette’s,12 recounts how he and Ana, a young Chilean woman exiled in Spain,13 engaged in a series of criminal acts in Barcelona that ultimately led to Ana’s death and to his own escape to Paris, where he is possibly composing the text. At the level of the fabula (or sequence of events), however, there is yet another story, or a metanarrative, if you will: constant allusions to, as well as bits and pieces of, a novel Ángel is writing about a character named Dedalus who is a devotee of James Joyce and whose actions closely resemble those of his creator (i.e., Ángel). 14 A couple of times in the diegesis, in fact, both in a letter to his mother (86) and a postcard he writes to her but ends up throwing into the Seine (152),

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he signs “Dédalus.”15 His mother faults him, moreover, for being unable to distinguish himself from the character of his novel (85). One might hence be tempted to conclude that what the reader is reading is the novel Ángel is writing, and that “Manuscript Found in a Bullet: Ángel Ros’s Diary,” the appendix (159–70), constitutes the main story, especially in light of the last chapter, significantly titled “À suivre”16 and ending in “I then erased everything” (157). However, as ambiguous as this text at times is concerning the separation between Ángel’s world and the metafictitious world of his novel—Cant de Dèdalus anunciant fi—there are two instances in the diegesis that would appear to remove the ambiguity and where, very clearly, Ángel refers to Dèdalus as the hero of the work he is writing.17 Nevertheless, this is complicated because he also states in the appendix that he wishes to write both a novel about a bank thief who’s an expert on Joyce and an erotic novel, hastening to add, “I must win an award!” (161). Leaving aside for now the image of the writer-award chaser evoked in the last sentence and masterfully represented in Bolaño’s autobiographical short story “Sensini” (from Llamadas, 1997), this quote conveys the idea that, in the final analysis, Consejos is made up of two diegeses plus the one of the appendix. But what to make, for example, of the subsequent lines?: “I will never write Cant de Dédalus18 anunciant fi” (163). What text has the reader been reading then? Consejos starts in medias res: “The fucking bitch was driving at full speed. We had been very lucky and there was no need to be going so fast” (19). Following Meir Sternberg’s (1978) notion of “expositional modes,” it could be argued that certain elements of the exposition are even found in the novel’s appendix: “I met Ana a week ago” (159), reads a sentence in the first paragraph of the appendix although Ana dies in chapter XX of the main diegesis. Most interesting not only from the perspective of the subject of literature and writing prevalent in the novel but also in terms of the ambiguous nature of the dramatized narrator, is the fact that he makes reference to having consulted a couple of translations of Ulysses (159) and to being in disagreement with Anthony Burgess’s critique of the unity in Ulysses (166). All of which leads one to ask: since they are both in Paris, who narrates in the appendix, Ángel or Dedalus? What contributes to the ambiguity, of course, is the fact that the appendix contains information related to the main diegesis as well as information clearly referring to events after chapter XXIV, indeed as if the appendix had been cut off

92  |  Chapter 3 from the major story. As can be seen, therefore, Consejos is a novel composed essentially of two parts, one presented as a narrative and another presented as a diary but containing elements of that narrative. The firs section, furthermore, incorporates into the narrative discourse letters that Ángel sends to his mother, excerpts from Ulysses inserted into these letters (84–85), and, toward the end, letters from Ángel to Ana’ s mother as well as a postcard to her.19 But arguably the most interesting part of the firs section in light of its connection to the appendix is chapter XII, “Cant de Dèdalus anunciant fi,” the novel the appendix’s narrator states he will not write and divided into “Synopsis,” “Readings,” “Notes,” and “Some Elements for a Critique of Joyce.” The structure of Consejos is somewhat complex. Its complexity, nonetheless, does not resemble the narrative complexity of, say, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House or other Boom novels such as, for example, José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night. One could claim that Bolaño and García Porta, at the same time that they wish to design a text that does not emulate the narrative aesthetics of the Boom, cannot help but fall under its spell. After all, not only had scarcely a decade gone by between the end of the Boom and the time when they were writing Consejos but the major Boom writers were still actively writing at the time.20 The anxiety of the Boom’s influence does not overcome them completely, however. The narrative structure of Consejos is somewhat similar to texts such as Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) or even Vargas Llosa’s Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1978), novels with a certain degree of narrative complexity that are also able to include a great deal of popular culture. The fact that Bolaño’s and García Porta’s novel could be construed as two texts in one makes it possible not only that the discourse on the novel in general and the discourse on literature in particular play an important role in the diegesis, but also that the criminal acts committed by Ana and Ángel, “the pair of murderers” (Candia 2011b, 28), may be mitigated. The self-consciousness present in Consejos—or should I say the meta-self-consciousness? —makes it both a modernist as well as a postmodernist text. Nonetheless, the manner in which violence is represented and the authors’ treatment of the neopoliciaco genre make Consejos a clearly postmodern novel, as we shall see. Now, how does the policíaco genre play out in Consejos and what are the attributes of Bolaño’s engaged postmodernism here? In order to provide an answer to these questions, I center my attention on the following aspects

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of the novel: (1) the nature of the crime and the crime scene; (2) the relationship between literature and crime and; (3) the subjects of violence, exile, immigrants, and politics. As might be expected, Bolaño offers a version of the detective genre that is faithful neither to the classical mystery story nor to the hard-boiled detective model nor even to the neopoliciaco. There is absolutely no mystery to be resolved nor are there specific corrupt institutions against which a specific individual struggles. Indeed, there is not even a detective in this novel.21 Bolaño’s is a sui generis genre that closely resembles what Glen Close has recently called “post-neopoliciaco” (2008, 52) and has little to do with the resolution of the enigma or the condemnation of the institution and much to do with the “reimagining of urban violence as depoliticized, intimately subjectivized, and decisively removed from reductive schemes of moral containment” (Close 2008, 52). In the post-neopoliciaco, moreover, the story is narrated by the criminal subjects themselves, as happens in Consejos. Regarding the third point, I claim that literature in the text is the result of a disillusion with the political. And, with respect to the fourth point, I contend that, through Ana, a Chilean who carries a picture of Violeta Parra in her purse, and Ángel, a frustrated writer, a kind of an amorphous postpolitics is proposed. Above all, this novel by Bolaño and García Porta is about the criminal meanderings of two urban dwellers who engage in a succession of criminal actions almost as an attempt to stave off boredom and who are ultimately unable to find a space in a society in transition Owing partially to the feeling of ennui that affects Ana and Ángel, as well as a sort of disillusionment with their present circumstances, violence in the text appears gratuitous. But not in the same way that, for instance, the extremely violent acts committed against women in part four of 2666 may initially appear gratuitous. Somewhat similarly to Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, there is a playful violence in Consejos that at first sight seems more literary than real, as if the two criminals were consciously playing the protagonists of a modern film noir only to parody it. Not surprisingly, in his very brief allusion to the novel, José Promis writes, “The reality of fictio and the fiction of reality constitute mirrorlike discourses. The story is a parody of itself” (2003, 57). At times, the allusion to popular culture in the diegesis goes even beyond the literary and includes the visual. In chapter XI, for example, Ángel states, “We were arriving when I remembered Belmondo in A bout de souffle and I began to imitate him as I drove” (72). What

94  |  Chapter 3 is relevant about this comparison is that in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960 film, the protagonist, just like Ángel in Consejos, becomes involved in crime, except that he chooses Humphrey Bogart as his model. Although certainly not as prominent as Jim Morrison in the story, the reference to this new wave French film underlines the increasing importance of popular culture in the development of the novel,22 but be that as it may, real crimes are committed in the novel. What is interesting, however, is that the most serious are committed by Ana, not by Ángel. A signature of Bolaño’s overall oeuvre, of course, is the presence of very strong and independent women23 —María, Xóchitl, Lupe and Cesárea from Detectives, Auxilio from Amulet, the unnamed female narrating voice from “Murdering Whores,” and Liz Norton from the first part of 2666 immediately come to mind. Ángel recognizes, as a matter of fact, not only that he cannot fend for himself (120) but also that he has never had the will to get to the bottom of things (127). 24 It is Ana who proposes to him to perpetrate the first crime, the murder of an old woman for whom she works (21). The crimes themselves could be divided into two different categories: those committed by either Ana or Ángel, and those committed by others and that will be analyzed later.25 Among those in the first category, there are the already-mentioned killing of an old woman (21, 27–28), the assault of the office where Ángel used to work (32–36), the burglary of a house whose owner happens to be one of Ángel’s former bosses (54–67), the hijacking of a car (106–7) and the subsequent robbery of a pharmacy by Ángel (122–23), a bank robbery carried out by Ana and someone else (118), and, finall , the holdup of a business by both (135–44). As one might expect, money is the principal motivation for the crime each time. However, what most stands out in these criminal acts, and especially in those committed by Ana, is their utter violence. In the end, Ángel is no more than an accomplice, almost a bystander who is there to carry out Ana’s orders. Ana’s brutality could be attributed to her being drugged whenever she and Ángel commit a crime. Nonetheless, it has to do foremost with a deep resentment, a palpable anger, a feeling of alienation on Ana’s part in a society not yet used to immigrants where her only defense is, indeed, the gun that she uses against the people in the crime scenes. In other words, what seems to motivate her, more than anything else, is revenge. In effect, in none of the crimes in which she is involved is it necessary to kill the victims. She kills the old woman, for instance, because, in

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her view, she was “stinking,” “annoying,” and “very old” (27). In the office where Ángel used to work, she kills three of his former colleagues callously (33–34). In the house of his former boss, she first forces him to make love to his Philippian maid and then kills them both in cold blood. And, in their last robbery together, Ana assassinates one of the executives, saying, “I’m going to kill you . . . you disgust me, [you] typical male chauvinist, spoiled brat” (140). Evidently, crime here has nothing to do with the resolution of the enigma or the condemnation of a specific institution and much to do with personal anger, with a kind of irrationality that affects the protagonists. In Ana’s case, and assuming that she is an exile from a country under dictatorship, it is the result of the scars left both by political struggle and possible torture as well as of her not being fully accepted in the new country. In Ángel’s case crime is the outcome not only of ennui but of unemployment and a lack of hope for the future. As stated above, there is an interesting nexus between literature and crime in Consejos. First, there is the matter of creating a character (Dedalus) in the metanarrative that is Cant de Dèdalus anunciant fi who, though he is an expert in Joyce’s work, engages in robbery. Second, there is a metaphoric connection between making political revolution and carrying out a revolutionary, avant-garde literary transformation. Ángel not only wishes the novel he is writing were revolutionary, he also chooses as his model a writer (Joyce) who completely transformed the modern novel. At some point in the diegesis, when Ana tells Ángel that she is not planning to make a revolution, he replies, “It’s foreigners that prepare revolutions: Alain Robbe-Grillet” (130), a reference to a writer who also practiced a type of revolutionary narrative aesthetics. And, third, there is the subject of disenchantment with literature caused by Ángel’s and his friends’ inability to replicate the literary tertulias (gatherings) and soireés that engaged writers such as Joyce, Pound, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and others in 1920s Paris. Once this idealist literary community fails to materialize, as well as once Ángel abandons his novel, he and Ana begin to commit crimes. What is not left clear in the text, however, is why literature’s loss of cultural prestige or cultural crisis should provoke criminal behavior. Did literature ever have this power? One wonders. Although the idea itself seems strange, one could speculate that, as stated above, there are some very real social and economic reasons that lead both Ana and Ángel to commit criminal acts. Feeling marginalized, lacking secure employment, and lacking family

96  |  Chapter 3 support prompt them to carry these out. But this in itself does not explain why the loss of literature’s symbolic capital makes the protagonists of Consejos carry out such horrible deeds. Curiously enough the reason might very well be found in literature itself. It could be argued, for example, that if Ángel chooses Joyce, an avant-gardist author, and if he alludes in the text to other avant-gardist authors, he is carrying out an avant-gardist act of his own by putting into practice the aesthetics of the neopoliciaco. From this point of view, the killing and robbery that occur in the novel are no more than literary acts, even if they are real, although whether they are real or not is ultimately not clear given the ambiguous nature of the story. Now, precisely because of the strong connection between literature and crime in Consejos, two ideas seem to run in a parallel fashion throughout the novel. On the one hand, the notion that the literary impetus on the dramatized narrator’s part, or, conversely, his inability to crystallize this impetus in a concrete text, is what ultimately leads Ana and him to a life of crime. On the other, the idea that it is crime that spawns fiction, as when, for example, the narrator admits that there came a time when the protagonist of his novel, Dédalus, gradually became a “copy” of Ana (22). Like Ana and Ángel, in fact, Dédalus also engaged in the robbery of banks, and like Ángel’s, his literary career had not turned out as he originally planned (30). Let us not forget that, structurally speaking, Consejos contains two diegeses. The close link between literature and crime is patently clear in Consejos in chapter V, “Hello You All, I’m back, I’m Ángel Ros,” and chapter IX, “A Meeting with Catalan Poetry.” In the fi st instance, before shooting Ángel’s former boss in the head, Ana hangs on the wall a poem that she had written especially for the occasion (36). In the second instance, it so happens that the woman of the house Ángel and Ana are robbing is not only a “philologist” (60) but also a writer. In terms of narrative action, as Ana forces the woman’s husband to make love with the maid in one room, the dramatized narrator converses about writing and literature with her in another. Montserrat, the woman, informs Ángel that she has published six books of poetry. Surprised that one of her poems is called “Reading of Sylvia Plath,” he asks her if she knows her works, to which she replies that she has indeed read Plath’s entire oeuvre (61). Now, what do these two facts mean in the context of literature and crime? Neither of them plays a significant role in the development of the story. In both cases, in effect—a literary gesture in the first instance and an intertextual

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reference in the second—they seem to be there only to satisfy the whims of a narrator bent on being a writer but also bent on playing the role of a writer and insistent on leading a literary, neopoliciaco life. For, how credible can these actions truly be? When Ana leaves a poem in the middle of the crime scene, does she do so to prove that literature, and especially poetry, still holds symbolic capital? And when Ángel holds a conversation about literature with a victim who happens to know Plath’s poetry, are the authors, in an oblique fashion, trying to establish a connection with Ana’s suicidal disposition in the diegesis? It is indeed likely, though, in the end, these two events may have more to do with a desire to desacralize literature, to confer upon it a new, more pedestrian, more ordinary status. Probably due to the fine line that separates the story of Ana and Ángel from that of Dédalus, quite often the discourse on the literary would appear to take over the criminal event. In fact, as if to justify his life of crime, or because he was not a true criminal in the first place, the dramatized narrator does not tire of saying that he wanted to be a writer. Of course he is writing via analepsis (Genette 1980), that is, retrospectively, which means that there is a tangible chasm, if we consider Mieke Bal’s concept of focalization,26 between the “character focalizer” who lived and observed the events in the fabula and he who narrates in the time of the narrating and who is no longer the same person because of the experiences he has undergone. Notwithstanding this distance, however, writing and literature continue to play a role both in the recounting of the story as well as in the structure of the text. “I must warn you, since it will be a constant feature in this story, that there was a time when I wanted to be a writer” (20). This desire is expressed a few times in the diegesis (40, 160). The dramatized narrator even states that he already has partially written novels as well as soon-to-be published books of poetry (21). Moreover, in as much as in the appendix he declares that he will never fi ish Cant de Dèdalus anunciant fi, in the course of the fabula the writing process of this text is ubiquitous (20, 22, 30, 40, 76–81, 94–96, 117, 121), with him claiming toward the end of the novel to be “oblivious to everything that did not belong to Dédalus and his world” (124). Finally, in what could be interpreted as a somewhat antediluvian attitude on Ángel’s part, he fantasizes that in Spain, in the future, “[Ana] . . . would work legally, I would devote myself to writing” (68), and in Paris “[Ana] . . . would study French and would clean houses . . ., and I would write, non-stop!” (75).

98  |  Chapter 3 Another aspect of the omnipresence of literature in Consejos beyond that of the connection between it and crime and the wish to become a writer is the discourse on literature itself. This subject, of course, is a fixture of Bolaño’s entire oeuvre. It is interesting, even taking into account that Consejos was not written by the author alone, that the theme of literature should figure so prominently this early in his career. In chapter VIII, the dramatized narrator broaches, parenthetically—as if it were Dédalus and not him narrating—the issue of the status of literature, affirming that there was a time when he was convinced that “literature would draw people, like rock music” (49). This, clearly, reveals an avant-garde posture that precedes the disenchantment with literature that comes afterward in the diegesis. Without it being necessarily a postmodernist text that constantly reflects on itself, however, there is at its center an awareness that literature does in reality affect life. Later in the fabula, in effect, the same indeterminate narrating voice—Ángel-Dédalus—deduces that if he engaged in a life of crime it is because literature itself, whose purpose is to make life “clear, legible, stable” (51), has lost its form. Although this insecurity regarding literature is not entirely explained in the novel, as stated above, it does possibly point to the transformation that it was experimenting at the level of form and content as a consequence of the gradual inclusion of popular culture. It is thus predictable when in chapter IX, revealing his own insecurity concerning the merits of the literary enterprise, Ángel asks Montserrat whether she truly has faith in the writing of poetry (61). More telling even, in “Cant de Dèdalus anunciant fi,” the chapter that constitutes the outline of Ángel’s novel, one reads in the section “Some Elements for a Critique of Joyce”: “Accuracy in literature . . . No differentiation between literature and reality. To turn into myths what’s vulgar and everyday” (81). The belief as to whether art in general and literature in particular are able to transform life can of course be found among the Romantics and the practitioners of the various avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century as well as in Distant, Amulet, and Detectives, where young poets yearn to live artistically, as if indeed there were no difference between art and life. The discourse on literature in Consejos has one final feature, a feature that will become one of Bolaño’s most characteristic traits and that, in some sense, reaches its apex in Nazi: the ubiquitous presence of the names of fictitious and real writers from multiple literatures whose role in the fabula is not always clear. Though this aspect of Bolaño’s works has been

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partially studied by some critics,27 it has not yet been examined in Consejos. Of course, the first reference to literature is found in the title; hence a brief discussion on the possible meaning of it is in order at this time. As stated earlier, the title for the novel was suggested by the poem “Advice from a Disciple of Marx to a Heidegger Fanatic,” written by Bolaño’s best friend, the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, who dedicates the poem to Bolaño and someone else.28 In the appendix’s diegesis, in fact, the dramatized narrator meets Santiago and even reads his poem (160). But except for what could be considered an overall criticism of models in Santiago’s text, there is no apparent thematic relationship between it and the content of Consejos.29 The question that needs to be posed, therefore, is: what is in the end the advice that Morrison’s disciple gives Joyce’s aficionado, or, put differently, what sort of relationship is established in the diegesis between the two? What is obvious upon a reading of the novel is that the dramatized narrator on the first diegetic level, Ángel, is Morrison’s disciple, and Dédalus, the dramatized narrator on the second level and who barely surfaces in the metanarrative that is Ángel’s text, is Joyce’s devotee. Apart from this feature of the novel, however, there is no manifest connection between Ángel and Dédalus. In my judgment, consequently, the key to understanding the text’s title lies in the word advice. A careful reading of the novel reveals that advice, instead of being construed literally as “advice,” should be interpreted as an imaginary dialogue, mental communication, or even obsession. From this perspective, Consejos would be the imaginary dialogue that Ángel sustains with the hero of his novel, Dédalus, a dialogue that terminates when he decides not to write his novel. Indeed, it is no accident that the authors should have chosen the first lines of Jim Morrison’s song “The End” as the novel’s epigraph. In some measure, Consejos has to do with the end of literature and with the end of paradigms and models and possibly with the advent of music as the new literature of the times. In the course of the fabula, Ángel, a former musician himself, is obsessed with Morrison and listens to his songs whenever he can (72, 132); he buys cassettes of the Doors (115) and even dreams of the famous scene in Miami in 1969 when Jim Morrison reportedly took his penis out and displayed it in front of the public: “He’s going to fuck the microphone!, he thought” (116). At the same time, he admits that, just like him, Dédalus “comes to literature via music and protest movements originated in the United States by singers and poets” (78). In the end, nonetheless, Ángel comes to the realization

100   |  Chapter 3 that “I should have never loved a statue, a myth” (116), that is, neither Morrison nor Joyce. In the last chapter of the main text, once in Paris, he symbolically throws away the roses that he was planning to put on Morrison’s tombstone (157). Now, Dédalus’s presence in the text as well as the specific section of Joyce’s Ulysses—recited by Ángel and Ana “at the height of everyday life” (83)—are only two of several allusions to writers and texts in Consejos.30 Naturally, these allusions have partially to do with the fact that, as is the case in so many of Bolaño’s texts, the protagonist himself is a writer. But they also have to do with the fact that, aware that the theme he wishes to explore in his own novel is already a common staple of “Spanish fiction (40), Ángel turns to a different, more modern (or, rather, modernist), and less politically charged paradigm, Joyce’s Ulysses. He discovers at the end of the fabula, nevertheless, that even this paradigm, the paradigm of the modern novel, does not suffice. Perhaps this is the reason why most of the writers referred to in Consejos are those, just like him, who felt like orphans in the Republic of Letters and fiercely challenged the status quo of their respective societies. Accordingly it is not an accident that Montserrat is an avid reader of Silvia Plath’s poetry, or that Ángel identifies with Sophie Podolski and Tristán Cabral (89), poets of the same ilk as Plath. Specificall speaking, the writers alluded to in the novel proceed from the Francophone and mostly Anglo-Saxon and particularly North American literary traditions: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (50), Virginia Woolf (62), Ezra Pound (74), Boris Vian, J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut (85), Henry Miller (95–96 ), Alain Robbe-Grillet (130), Daniel Biga, Joyce Carol Oates (155–56), Djuna Barnes (157), Ford Madox Ford (162), Georges Perec (163), Sartre (167), and Baudelaire (167). The saliency of the literary theme in the novel, as well as the fusion between this theme and the post-neopolicíaco elements of the diegesis, which run parallel, converge at the end of the appendix when the narrating voice, in a sign of relief, utters the following after realizing that the police has not entered the bookstore where he is reading in order to arrest him: “As I write this I’m still shaking” (170). The last aspect of Consejos that needs to be analyzed, as it will play a crucial role in Bolaño’s later works, is the representation of violence, exile, immigrants, and politics. These themes are not as pervasive as the two analyzed thus far, but they do merit some analysis. As I stated earlier in this chapter, the violent acts carried out by Ana and Ángel are not the only ones

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mentioned in the novel. Indeed, one gets the impression that violence is rampant in Consejos. Unlike the violence perpetrated by Ana and Ángel, however, the violence committed by others does not belong, strictly speaking, to the text’s diegesis. It is really Ángel himself, who at times feels like a “harsh detective” (127), especially when he is looking for Ana, who reports on violence as he watches it being reported on television, becoming a sort of nondramatized narrator in Booth’s term: “It seemed as if the city had submerged itself in a gangster film . . . the reign of terror had returned . . . to destabilize democracy” (73–74). Later on in the novel the dramatized narrator alludes to “the wave of summer violence in Barcelona” (131). What is significant in these quotes from the text, and especially in the first instance, is the increasing importance that television in particular and the media in general begin to play. Similarly, what makes Ana and Ángel most anxious regarding their situation is their fear that they might be mistaken for those who assaulted the “Hispano Americano” bank, referred to several times in the text (19, 21, 37, 48, 53) and contributing in part to create the post-neopolicíaco milieu that characterizes the novel. This is reinforced, similarly, by the fact that, a few times in the fabula (22, 30, 80), the dramatized narrator says that he wants Dédalus to be a bank robber. It is equally reinforced by the presence of “civil guards and policemen” (24) in the streets and by the fact that, throughout the text, they feel that the police is following them closely (32). Finally, in chapter VI, “The Boy from Sant Boi,” Ana and Ángel talk about a bank holdup carried out by two young women who may have burned a child—it is not clear in the narration—after stealing his bicycle in order to escape. In my view, one of the interesting things about this in Consejos is the fact that Ana, the other protagonist of the text—whom Patricia Novillo-­ Corvalán calls “femme fatale” and “merciless siren” (2013, 348)— is “South American.” We shall ultimately never know whose idea it was to make Ana, a criminal, a South American, whether García Porta, a Spaniard who may have held negative stereotypes about South Americans in general just like most of his compatriots,31 or Bolaño, who may have thought that the only way to survive as an immigrant in Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s was by resorting to illegal activities now and again. Assuming that it was Bolaño who decided that Ana come from Latin America, and especially that she be from Chile, this would be the first time in Bolaño’s work that the subject of exile, and specifically its traumatic effects,32 plays such a

102   |  Chapter 3 preponderant role. But assuming that it was García Porta who made Ana a South American, it is then not surprising that the derogative term sudaca—a term used by Spaniards to allude to Latin Americans living in Spain—is employed several times in the diegesis. As the reader listens to the dramatized narrator voice one cannot help but imagine the presence of two worlds, his, that is, the Spanish world, and the world of Ana and other South American characters mentioned in passing in the text. Now, since, as noted, it cannot be ascertained in the final analysis whether it was García Porta’s or Bolaño’s decision to make Ana a South American, it is better that attention be turned immediately to the issue of immigrants and politics in Consejos. At no point in the narrative does the dramatized narrator indicate that Ana is Chilean. The reason that one deduces that she is probably from Chile is that, upon inspection of Ana’s purse, Ángel finds a picture of Violeta Parra (29), the artistic symbol— along, perhaps, with Victor Jara and Pablo Neruda—of the Chilean cultural Left and a kind of amulet for all those who had to leave Chile in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet came forcibly to power.33 Curiously, he also finds a picture of Ángel Pavlovsky (to this picture I shall return later), an actor and theater director of Argentinean origin living in Barcelona. The other factor that contributes to the strong possibility that Ana may indeed be from Chile is the fact that, at least in the initial chapters, there are constant references to the precariousness of her mother’s situation in Barcelona due to her immigration status.34 In a telephone conversation, for example, she tells Ana that the police want to expel her from Spain “for not having her papers in order” (49), and that she has ten days to leave the country (88). Ana’s situation is no better, of course. In the appendix, the dramatized narrator writes that Ana has been fired from her job (165). It is, in reality, after this fact that she begins to work, illegally (70), for the elderly woman whom she would assassinate later. In general—and not surprisingly given this particular time in Spain’s history as well as Bolaño’s partial composition of the text—South Americans are portrayed as individuals living on the margins of society and doing whatever is needed to make ends meet. The dramatized narrator affirm that the media did not know whether to call Ana a “punk . . . drug addict or typical South American” (32). He also wonders whether his hero, Dédalus, would go to bed with a “South American whore” (41). Throughout the text Ángel establishes a clear distance between him and Ana even though

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he also feels strongly attached to her. He underscores that Ana’s friends were “South American or crazy Spaniards” (69), and he imagines her “listening to los sudacas” (70). The dramatized narrator is convinced, further, that it was thanks to Ana’s contact with other South Americans in the city that she was able to obtain arms and drugs (74–75). On two occasions, finall , he uses the word sudaca to make a negative comment: paradoxically when he visits his only South American friend apart from Ana—“The damned sudaca laughed” (111)—and in allusion to Borelli, a friend of Ana’s to whom he pays a visit: “But I knew he was sudaca and a fag and that was already something” (123). Notwithstanding what would certainly be construed as politically incorrect language today, there are some veiled though real allusions to politics in Consejos, the last aspect of the novel to be broached in this section of the chapter. On the one hand, politics has to do with the subject of exile; but on the other, it has to do with a firm refusal to embrace the dictates of a type of society that was beginning to take shape in Spain at the time of the story. The fact that Ana carries a picture of Violeta Parra in her purse reveals much about her political affiliation certainly. But there are other instances in the text that link her to the political Left. For example, the dramatized narrator makes reference to Ana’s former boyfriend being a member of a leftist party who did not wish to go into exile (69). He also declares that “for Ana, the subject of the U.S. was taboo” (93). At some point in the fabula, furthermore, the dramatized narrator himself spends the whole day watching “Latin American militant cinema” (124). There is, nevertheless, another side to the political, a side that hints at a possibly new conception of politics as a consequence of the disaster of dictatorship in Ana’s case and the inability to adjust to the new cultural conditions in Ángel’s. To a great degree, this is at the heart of Bolaño’s oeuvre. Let us remember that Ana carries in her purse a picture of Ángel Pavlovsky as well as a picture of Violeta Parra. Metaphorically, this means that, as a result of the traumatic experience of the defeat of the Left’s project in Chile, Ana is still in mourning; nonetheless, she’s seemingly ready to embrace a new type of politics, or to leave politics behind altogether. She even tells Ángel, “I’m not interested in revolutions or political matters” (131). In this context, it is noteworthy that she has chosen the image of a musical icon rather than, say, the image of Allende or El Che. Pavlovsky’s picture underscores even further Ana’s new posture. However, an even

104   |  Chapter 3 more telling instance of this new political status, its ultimate negative outcome notwithstanding, is when Ana, upon entering the building she is going to rob, declares, “This is the revolution” (140), a clear rhetorical response to Ángel’s earlier comment that, in his view, she wanted to “make Revolution” (130). Now, if Ana’s disenchantment is directly related to her past political experience, it is also related to her present circumstances. At the time of the story, neither she nor Ángel is employed. Ángel is able to continue to work on his novel precisely because he has lost the job he had. What is more, “everybody is unemployed” (160), says Ana in the appendix. Yet, if it is true that unemployment is widespread in the Barcelona of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it is equally true, as stated above, that there is a fir reluctance on Ana and Ángel’s part to willingly accept the new economic modus operandi. In fact, at some point Ángel harshly criticizes the future that awaits the youth, specifically the idea of building a country that, if at all, only offers a rather modest pension for a job that seems more and more impossible to obtain in the present (31). The previous quote clearly reflects the thinking of many of Bolaño’s characters and possibly even of Bolaño himself. In fact, it is a Weltanschauung that is partially present in some of his poems and somewhat in Antwerp. In contrast to the latter in particular, and to the poems contained in University in general, however, Consejos—arguably Bolaño’s first novel— develops foremost the theme of the detective but in a post-neopoliciaco mode avant la lettre. This is important for two reasons. First because it shows the increasing relevance of an urban violence that was no longer directly tied to politics in Spain and Latin America; or, put differently, politics’ loss of symbolic capital. Second, because it anticipates in some way the slew of crime fiction that would eventually emerge in Latin America.35 The appropriation of a subgenre typically associated with popular culture rather than with canonical or high-brow fiction represents a clear postmodern move on García Porta and Bolaño’s part, no doubt. As regards structure, even though the fabula in Consejos does not present the same narrative difficulties that Antwerp does, there are certain aspects of the text’s structure that are not completely clear, such as, for example, the amount of diegeses, the ambiguous nature of the dramatized narrator, and the role of the appendix. To a great extent, of course, this has to do with the fact that Consejos is a double text, so to speak, the one the reader

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is reading and the one the narrating voice is writing. As suggested above, this ambiguity may also reveal the tremendous weight that the Boom aesthetics still exerted upon the novel’s authors. Although this novel was written with someone else, this is one of the first instances in which the subject of literature plays such a crucial role in Bolaño’s works. On the one hand, there is the matter of the close relationship between literature and crime; on the other, there are the issues of the contemporary status of literature as well as the allusion to numerous writers in the diegesis. One of the major contributions of Consejos for an understanding of Bolaño’s early works, nevertheless, is that it establishes a close relationship between violence and politics. If Ana’s criminal acts seem gratuitous, it is because, as an exile, she is still suffering from the effects of dictatorship and needs to take revenge in some way. As an unemployed sudaca in Spain in the company of an unemployed Spaniard who does not tire of pointing out that she is from South America, Ana does not harbor much hope for the future. At the same time, she is not afflicted by melancholy and may even visualize a new politics. But in the end neither she nor Ángel is embraced by the system; neither wishes to accept the system the way it is. Bolaño’s predilection for the marginal is also explored in the first novel written entirely by him, Monsieur, except that the marginal figure in the text, a Vallejo who might possibly be César Vallejo—a not so marginal poet in Latin America but an unknown poet in Europe—is strangely absent from it. monsieur pain :

A Multif aceted Enigma

In “Bolaño, epidemia,” one of the first articles to deal with what has been called “the Bolaño phenomenon,”36 Mexican writer Jorge Volpi refers to “the insufferable Monsieur Pain” and situates it, along with Putas and Gaucho, among the “frankly bad books” (2008, 201) that Bolaño wrote. Independently of whether this statement is true or not, how uncanny it is that the author of En busca de Klingsor and El insomnio de Bolívar should use the adjective “insufferable” to refer particularly to this novel. For, after all, the main plot revolves around the suffering of a dying man, a fictitious César Vallejo, and—as Fernando Iwasaki has noted—by the time Bolaño decided to publish a novel that he had originally written in the early 1980s, he already knew that he was dying, further hypothesizing that if in 1981 the author identified with Pierre Pain, he now in 1999 identified with Vallejo

106   |  Chapter 3 (2008, 119, 121). The validity of Iwasaki’s hypothesis notwithstanding— how does one probe it?—the fact is that Monsieur is the first novel that Bolaño wrote entirely by himself. At the same time, one could argue that of all the novels that put into practice the detective genre model, this is the one that comes closest to the traditional mystery novel paradigm. We shall see, also, that the nebulousness that permeates Monsieur is closer to Antwerp than it is to Consejos. If one compares Consejos with Monsieur in terms of critical reception, the latter has not elicited a significantly bigger quantity of critical essays as one would have expected. It is as if—to date—all critical attention were being gobbled up by 2666 . As it is the case with Consejos, critical assertions regarding Monsieur are found in a few isolated commentaries and two or three more substantial articles. It is worth repeating here that the novel reached a wider audience when it was republished by Anagrama in 1999—the same year Bolaño obtained the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize—and that its original title was The Elephant Path37 when it was first published by the Municipality of Toledo in 1994. 38 In general, it was well received. In one of the first reviews of Monsieur, Javier Aspurúa (2000) claims that even though there is a certain rigidity in the text that does not allow it to flow easily, it is already possible to detect Bolaño’s own voice and narrative security (9). In contrast with Aspurúa’s judgment, Espinosa contends that, in fact, there is in Monsieur “no signs of a novice [writer]” (2000, 8), underlying, correctly, that this early novel displays key features of Bolaño’s narrative, such as “a multiplicity of discursive levels, perspectives and interweaves” (8). For this critic Monsieur is “almost” a detective novel, arguing that, in reality, it combines the detective genre with “a Gothicism à la Faulkner” (8).39 Of the critical assertions on Monsieur published so far, three stand out, two of which appeared in that other seminal study on Bolaño’s work, Territorios en fuga (2003a), edited by Espinosa. In the shorter of the two, though he does not mention the classical The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, Darío Oses focuses on the trials and tribulations of the hero40 and protagonist of the novel, Pierre Pain, asserting that the text “has the mythical structure of the hero’s journey” (2003, 250). Referring to Pain as “a defeated man” (249)—a description that could very well be applied to several of Bolaño’s characters41 —he speaks of his painful, tiring, and useless pilgrimage (250). Correctly, Oses declares that most of the myths associated with Paris, such as the city of light, sensuality, and bohemian life, are

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completely destroyed in Monsieur. In the larger of the two articles, Magda Sepúlveda contends that Bolaño delegitimizes the traditional detective genre in Monsieur by destabilizing the discourse of modernity on which it was based. According to her, since nothing can be explained clearly in the novel as the characters in the text seem to be moved by forces beyond their control, chance and crime are inevitably linked, invalidating consequently the task of the detective, who is unable to resolve a case that has neither guilty parties nor motivations, key features of the detective novel (2003, 106). Ultimately, in her view, Bolaño challenges “truth as a discourse that makes sense of the world” (109). In the fabula, because some of the information is received through dreams, and given Pain’s hallucinations precluding him from ordering reality logically, it is impossible for him and the reader to follow the traces that will allow them to unravel the mystery (109– 10). In the end, the critic shows, in this novel Bolaño proposes a new type of truth, truth as faith and belief rather than as objective, verifiable knowledge (111). No wonder, then, that at the end of her article Sepúlveda writes as a kind of summation of the novel, “Postmodern reflection in a controversy against modern literature” (115). 42 Finally, in the third critical assessment of Monsieur, Sergio R. Franco (2014) argues that this novel represents a critique of instrumental reason and, consequently, an utter repudiation of science and technology from essentially two fronts: mesmerism and poetry, incarnated in Pain and Vallejo, respectively. Following Todorov, he detects in the text features of “the traditional detective fiction genre, novela negra, and the metaphysical detective story” (474) but claiming, also, that Monsieur “is an enigmatic novel rather than a novel about an enigma” (475). Before proceeding to my own discussion of the novel, I would like to briefly allude to what Sepúlveda has to say about César Vallejo. For the Chilean critic, Vallejo functions as a metaphor for poetry. In her judgment, Pain’s search is the search for poetry in the final analysis. From this perspective, Vallejo’s incurable hiccups are related to the inability of language to express itself43 ; the two Spaniards in the diegesis, respectively, represent, metonymically, the Spanish language as a “jail” (2003, 108). She writes: “Because the novel treats language as the goal of the police inquiry, it transcends the typical objects of the detective search, i.e., a stolen good or a kidnapped person. What’s looked for here is poetry, that is, an unattainable object” (108).

108   |  Chapter 3 Earlier in this chapter I said that Vallejo’s appearance in Monsieur was bizarre. In some sense, he plays a crucial role in the text’s diegesis, yet he is an absent character. If, as Sepúlveda avers, Pain is a mere spectator in the novel (2003, 113), then Vallejo is not even that. Cesárea Tinajero, an equally absent presence in first part of Detectives, at least begins to have some life in Amadeo Salvatierra’s account in the second part of the novel and finally materializes in the third. I agree with Sepúlveda, however, that Vallejo is a metaphor for poetry, precisely by virtue of his elusiveness. Nonetheless, I think there is another possibility for his inclusion in Monsieur, one that was suggested to me by my reading of Promis’s 2003 article on Bolaño’s poetics and that will allow me to develop of my own thesis later. Essentially, Promis argues that if Vallejo must die, it is not solely because of his revolutionary ideology or his membership in the Communist Party but, more important, because his poetry is even more revolutionary than the former two (61). Thus, I do not think that Bolaño chose Vallejo accidentally, and he did not choose him just because he was a poet. He chose the Peruvian poet because, more so than Neruda or Guillén, say, and of course more so than Borges and Huidobro—or any other poet in the Spanish language, for that matter—Vallejo’s poetry incarnates the absolute inevitability of human suffering. “There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know!” reads the canonical verse from “The Black Heralds” (Vallejo 2015, 16). Or, from “I am going to speak of hope”: “I do not suffer this pain as César Vallejo. I do not ache now as an artist, as a man or even as a simple living being. I do not suffer this pain as a Catholic, as a Mohammedan or as an atheist. Today I simply suffer. // I ache now without any explanation. My pain is so deep, that it never had a cause nor does it lack a cause now. // Today I simply suffer” (Vallejo 2015, 318). 44 Of course, I am not suggesting that suffering—or evil—in Bolaño’s oeuvre is not rooted in very specifi political circumstances; Distant, Amulet, and By Night demonstrate this point incontrovertibly. However, there is in his narrative an element of Vallejo’s more existential and even unfathomable conception of suffering that is equally pervasive and that transcends the merely political. “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” for example, is able to escape political violence only to fin physical violence linked to culture later. How to explain, moreover, the senseless violence inflicted upon hundreds of fictional women in 2666 ? Some very concrete reasons have been adduced regarding the deaths of the nonfictional women of Ciudad Juárez, as we shall see in chapter 7, but

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an element of irrationality having to do with a species of rottenness of human nature still remains. That it be César Vallejo whom Pain needs to cure, in sum, has to do with Bolaño’s concern, this early in his career, to develop a poetics of pain. My own analysis of Monsieur attempts to answer the two following questions: (1) In what sense does the novel depart from the mystery novel paradigm while still adhering to its aesthetics, or, put differently, where does his postmodernism of resistance reside in a seemingly modern text? (2) What are the possible reasons that led Bolaño to choose Vallejo as the major figure the story revolves around? Before analyzing each of these points, however, a very brief summary of the novel’s plot as well as a few words about its structure are in order. Structurally less complex than Consejos though immensely more mysterious, in Monsieur an autodiegetic narrator, Pierre Pain, a doctor who practices mesmerism (a kind of hypnotism), recounts in a subsequent narrating mode how he has been approached by a friend, Madame Reynaud, who asks him to save the life of a friend’s husband, someone by the name of Vallejo, who is dying from uncontrollable hiccups in a clinic for reasons completely unknown to the doctors looking after him. Almost at the same time that Pain receives Madame Reynaud’s urgent request, two nameless Spaniards come to see him to ask him expressly to forget about Vallejo and to leave him alone, but without offering any reasons as to why. In the end, as much as Pain tries to assist Vallejo, he learns, toward the final part of the fabula, that he has already died. This is the major diegesis, and it is divided neither into named nor numbered chapters.45 The following and much shorter section, “Epilogue for Voices: The Elephant Track,” which serves as a sort of appendix of the text, contains nine separate subsections, each headed by the name, as well as by the date of birth and date of death, of the main characters. What is especially interesting about “Epilogue for Voices,” beyond its resemblance to Nazi in terms of structure and the possible implications for an understanding of the novel, is the fact that the subsections are not narrated in the same way. In fact, one finds four different narrative modalities here. Four subsections—including that of Pierre Pain, the last of the nine—appear within quotation marks and are narrated by a dramatized narrator. Two subsections combine paragraphs within quotation marks with paragraphs without quotation marks, which means that there are two different narrative voices, one at the intradiegetic and another at the extradiegetic levels. Two other

110   |  Chapter 3 subsections are narrated by a nondramatized narrator extradiegetically. And, finall , one subsection, that of Jules Sautreau, comes from another text: “From his daughter Lola’s notebook” (159). The first question that comes to mind, of course, is, who are the dramatized narrators in the other six sections? Though referring to different characters, is the dramatized narrator the same in each case? Where is the narrator located? The story time in the main diegesis of Monsieur is April 1938, but what is the “discourse-time”46 or time of the narration? Furthermore, and as perplexing as it will be in the second part of Detectives, whom is the dramatized narrator addressing? In other words, who is or are the narratees in these interview-like texts? 47 In these nine minibiographies of the novel’s main characters, finall , the information that is offered postdates 1938, meaning that it is virtually impossible for the reader to reconstruct the story that takes place in the main diegesis by the reading of this “Epilogue for Voices.” No wonder, then, that most critics have called Monsieur a mystery novel. Now, in most mystery novels a crime has been committed, and in most mystery novels a detective, or a detective-type figure, is called upon to investigate and solve the crime. What most characterizes the mystery story—in contradistinction, say, to its pure hard-boiled detective version—is not the action but the enigma, an enigma that can only be unraveled by a combination of logic, observation, deduction, and inference. Is Monsieur, therefore, a mystery novel? Pain is clearly not a detective and neither does he see himself as one: “What are you? A detective? //—Gosh no . . . [responds Pain] Do I look like one?” (66). Likewise, no crime has been committed. In the end, thus, the mystery revolves around two fundamental questions: why is Vallejo dying, and, why has Pain been asked not to save him? Monsieur departs from the typical mystery novel model in essentially four ways. As just stated, it departs from its prototype in the sense that there is really no crime to solve and, consequently, no criminal to be found. What is novel in this regard is the fact that the mystery resides in the prevention of a possible crime but without knowing for sure who the potential criminals and what their motives are. The enigma in Bolaño’s text is also unique because there are almost no traces, information, or knowledge that may cast a light on its unraveling; in other words, Vallejo’s condition plays a kind of centrifugal function: instead of calling for its enlightenment, it summons its own covering. Moreover, in contrast to most mystery novels, where the mystery constitutes the very heart around which the characters,

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including the detective, revolve, in Monsieur the mystery is—so to speak— multiplied, not only thanks to Pain’s dreams and other unexplained events in the fabula but also because of a parallel story, that of Terzeff, that remains equally unresolved. Finally, and most important, Bolaño’s text departs from the traditional mystery novel because Pain, the detective (supposedly), lacks all the necessary attributes to unveil the enigma: collectedness, reasoning, logic. Afflicted by dreams, hallucinations, and feelings of insecurity and possible paranoia, he is a kind of antidetective, or a “baroque detective” (S. Franco 2014, 476). From this perspective, therefore, Monsieur is a postmodern text, one that privileges the irrational over the rational, the unknown over the known, the unpredictable over the predictable. One could even hypothesize that, by making Pain a practitioner of mesmerism, Bolaño consciously created an antidetective figure, just like Arturo and Ulises in Detectives or just like the critics in “The Part about the Critics” of 2666 . As always in Bolaño, the search is much more significant than the find, even if unsuccessful In what follows, and before examining why Bolaño chose Vallejo as the protagonist of the novel, I would like to analyze the latter two aspects just mentioned, namely, the matter of the multiplication of the mystery and the figure of Pain as antidetective. As stated previously, the most enigmatic elements of the text—the two-pronged mystery around which all other mysteries revolve—have to do with the inability to know why Vallejo is dying and why there are those who do not wish to see him recover. “He’s dying [and] no one knows from what” (17), Madame Reynaud tells Pain at the beginning of the diegesis. Dr. Lemière reiterates this later in a conversation with Vallejo’s wife, Georgette (32). 48 Bafflingl , for their part, the two enigmatic Spaniards ask the dramatized narrator not to help Vallejo “for the common good” (42). I shall return to this quote but, for the moment, I should like to affirm that if, in most mystery novels, there is a gradual movement from ignorance to knowledge even when often times obstacles to fin the truth do present themselves, in Monsieur such movement does not exist. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case; the more Pain persists in his efforts, the more elusive the truth becomes. It is as if the whole novel constituted a calculated attempt to debunk reason and truth. Hence, it is really not surprising that the text is plagued with signs that are mysteries unto themselves but yet connected to Vallejo’s perplexing condition. These signs, in turn, contribute to create the atmosphere of fear and impending

112   |  Chapter 3 disaster that characterizes the novel. For example, if not the Spaniards, themselves mystifying figures, who are the two men dressed in black staring at Pain and Madame Reynaud at the restaurant (20, 25)? Why does Pain, called upon by Madame Reynaud precisely because of his mesmerist abilities, venture the possibility that, ultimately, there are certain aspects of mesmerism that he does not accept (23)? Why does Madame Vallejo fear Dr. Lejard, her husband’s main doctor (30)? Why have Vallejo’s urine samples disappeared without a trace (30)? How, even before being approached by Madame Reynaud, do the Spaniards learn that Pain was going to be asked to save Vallejo (41, 46–47)? Who, or rather what, is the eerie presence with hiccups that pursues Pain inside an abandoned warehouse where he decides to spend the night at some point in the diegesis (100–104)? And, finall , what is the trembling “body without arms” (144–45) that appears in front of Pain as he is desperately trying to escape from the desolate clinic where Vallejo is dying? None of this is clarified in the course of the novel. But perhaps equally or more bewildering than these mysterious signs, is the story of Terzeff. Not strictly speaking a metadiegetic narrative in Genette’s (1980) sense—since Paul Rivette and Aloysius Pleumeur-Bodou do play a role in the fabula—Terzeff’s story, just like Vallejo’s condition, is surrounded by mystery. The function of this parallel story, linked to the main diegesis by Rivette, is to distract Pain’s attention from Vallejo to some extent. But the two stories are connected in some way. Six months earlier, Rivette, Pain’s former teacher, had recommended him to Madame Reynaud in order to save her husband’s life (21). Then, the same day Pain calls Rivette to inform him that he has accepted a bribe from the Spaniards, the latter tells him that, in fact, he had been thinking about him (Pain) and Pleumeur-Bodou (46), proceeding to ask him if he remembered Terzeff, a scientist, as well as classmate of both Pain and Pleumeur-Bodou, who had attempted to refute Madame Curie and had committed suicide in 1925 (47). Now, even though this is not stricto sensu a metadiegetic narrative, as just stated, it does seem to fulfill the “explanatory function” that Genette attributes to some stories at the metadiegetic level (232). As a matter of fact, it is at the precise moment when Pain simply cannot comprehend why someone would go as far as to bribe him so that he would not see Vallejo that, right before asking him about Terzeff, Rivette affirms, “There are always explanations, Pierre, and when there aren’t any it is because there

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cannot be any” (47). This line reads almost like a response to the very enigma that is Monsieur, the latter part especially. At this point in the fabula no more information is provided regarding Terzeff. In fact, very briefl , attention is focused on Pleumeur-Bodou (50), who later in the narration, just like Rivette at the beginning of it, will become the bridge that will connect the first narrative to Terzeff’s story. However, Terzeff, Rivette, and Pleumeur-Bodou do appear again in the fabula the same night Pain talks to Rivette, in a series of dreams and nightmares that, stylistically speaking, constitute extremely complex metadiegetic texts (51–57), where, among other things, the dramatized narrator is twice warned, either by someone in the dream or by his own internal voice, “Be careful with the South American” (55, 56), that is, with Vallejo. As the diegesis advances, and as Pain becomes more and more desperate and confused, both because he was prevented from seeing Vallejo (91) and because Madame Reynaud leaves the city without informing him (108–9), he cuts off his friendship with Rivette, telling him, “I believe Vallejo is going to be killed . . . Don’t ask me how I know that . . . There’s no valid explanation” (110), continuing “We are all implicated in this hell” (111). Chance, as well as the impossibility of finding logical explanations for everything, is at the heart of Monsieur, as attested by Rivette’s comment earlier and Pain’s words here. It is thus not surprising that just a few hours after having spoken with Rivette, the dramatized narrator recognizes one of the Spaniards and follows him to a movie theater where (just by chance?), Actualidad, a movie documentary where Terzeff appears, is being shown.49 (This entire episode, composed mostly of the dramatized narrator’s careful description of the movie he is seeing, is one of the longest of the text [112–31].) 50 The biggest surprise, however, is that the Spaniard sits next to Pleumeur-Bodou (122–23), who had come to Paris from Spain with the express purpose of seeing the film (130). But the film will not cast a light into Vallejo’s situation. What Actualidad and Pleumeur-Bodou’s own comments about it will do, nevertheless, is to complete, or, rather, offer a different version of what Rivette had told the dramatized narrator about Terzeff earlier. Structurally speaking, what is happening on the screen becomes a truly metadiegetic narrative of sorts, or, in reality, a double metadiegetic narrative, if you will, given that Actualidad is made up of a movie and a documentary: “In reality, Pain, it’s two different movies” (126), Pleumeur-Bodou tells him. At the same time, this part of the fabula, that is, the

114   |  Chapter 3 movie theater scene, is comprised of multiple discourses: Pain’s rather meticulous description of the movie on the screen (121), Pain’s description of what is happening inside the movie theater (127–28), the dialogue between Pleumeur-Bodou and the Spaniard (123), the dialogue between Pain and Pleumeur-Bodou (125), Pleumeur-Bodou’s explanations of what is going on in the film (129), the direct discourse of the actors on the screen (122), and, of course, Pain’s own dramatized narration (128). One may wonder whether at this point in the narration the dramatized narrator has completely forgotten about Vallejos’s critical situation, as engrossed as he is in his description of Actualidad and his conversation with Pleumeur-Bodou. On the contrary, he asks Pleumeur-Bodou about Terzeff, and he also wants to know if he knows why the Spaniard, José María, begged him, and even paid him, not to save Vallejo’s life. “Frankly, Pierre, I have no idea” (132), Pleumeur-Bodou replies. What is more, in words clearly supporting Sepúlveda’s contention that the modern discourse that sustains the traditional detective genre is absent from Monsieur, and that, consequently, there is an inevitable connection between crime and chance, Pleumeur-Bodou provides not only a possible explanation for the mystery that surrounds the text but also a likely explanation for Bolaño’s view concerning the very nature of evil. He reminds Pain about Bergson’s contention that, ultimately, chance is involved in much of the crime that’s committed (133). In Detectives, in a section dealing with the subject of crime and evil, Abel Romero—probably the same Abel Romero who appears in Distant and who probably kills Carlos Wieder at the end of novel—tells Belano something along the same lines: that the gist of the matter resides in knowing whether evil or crime is the product of chance or of specific causes, and that the only way to fight against it is combating its causes; if evil or crime is the result of chance, however, there’s no hope for humanity (397). At this point in the diegesis, nevertheless, and notwithstanding Pleumeur-­Bodou’s discourse on chance, one still wonders, what is the relationship between Terzeff’s story and Pain’s mission to save Vallejo’s life? Actualidad, as I said, does not offer a key to understand Pain’s situation. In fact, it is almost a distraction from it. Moreover, the Terzeff’s sections in the film are nebulous and not very long, and Pleumeur-Bodou confesses that even though he has seen it many times, he does not completely comprehend it (138). A possible answer to the puzzle, rather, might be found in the story about Terzeff that Pleumeur-Bodou proceeds to tell Pain after

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they leave the movie theater. Before examining his account, however, it is worth mentioning here that, throughout the novel, there are various allusions to the unavoidable antagonism between science and faith, or science and mesmerism, or even spiritualism. The most telling example of this antagonism is when, aware that his presence at the clinic is unwelcome by Vallejo’s doctors, Pain himself admits, “Doctor and quack are incompatible” (36). Earlier, Dr. Lejard had called him a charlatan (31). Nonetheless, the dramatized narrator is convinced that he can cure Vallejo (65). 51 One could argue that a likely possibility for Terzeff’s story is not so much to enlighten Vallejo’s situation but rather Pain’s; in other words, Terzeff’s predicament is as a mirror image, though not a copy, of the dramatized narrator’s own predicament. Pleumeur-Bodou’s account of Terzeff—a brilliant young scientist who was also an enthusiast of mesmerism—begins by denying that the latter had refuted Madame Curie. Instead, what interested Terzeff was Monsieur Curie, especially his project on “psychic forces as manifested in trances” (136). However, this project falls into oblivion when Monsieur Curie is run over by a truck, prompting his collaborator, D’Arsonval, to disappear without a trace. According to Pleumeur-Bodou’s account, Terzeff, after carefully looking into the matter, comes to the conclusion that Monsieur Curie was assassinated, but he never tells him why: “If I told you, he said one night, you would think I’ve gone mad” (137). Pleumeur-Bodou, however, reaches his own conclusion, stating that Monsieur Curie’s death fulfilled “a ritual function” (137) and Terzeff must have discovered “something terrible” that eventually led him to his demise (137). Unlike Terzeff, Pain does not commit suicide. Unlike Terzeff, he does not discover “something terrible.” But like Terzeff he is pulled into a situation that he can neither fathom nor control. Similarly, neither of the mysteries is ultimately unveiled. Indeed, the question that Pleumeur-­ Bodou’s words seem to prompt, is, metaphorically speaking, what “ritual function” does Vallejo’s death fulfill in the text in particular and in Bolaño’s worldview in general? I shall venture an answer to this question in the last section of my analy­ sis of the novel, when I discuss why Bolaño may have chosen Vallejo as a major character. For now, let me turn to the matter of what makes Pain an antidetective figure. A good point of entry to broach this aspect of the text resides in the question that a taxi driver asks the dramatized narrator at some point in the fabula: “Are you pursuing someone, or is someone

116   |  Chapter 3 pursuing you?” (67). True, Pain wants to cure Vallejo, but he is prevented from doing so before he even starts, so in this sense this two-pronged question must be answered in the affirmative. Though he admits that he is not a detective, he knows there is a mysterious situation that he needs to clarify. However, Vallejo’s condition does not qualify as a crime, as has been said. Consequently, to understand why Pain constitutes an antidetective figure, attention ought to be focused on what impedes him from carrying out his task, which is almost the same as focusing on the forces that persecute him. (In broad terms, of course, it could be argued that any mystery, be it a crime or not, always haunts or persecutes the detective in some sense.) From the very beginning of the diegesis, as Rosso (2002a) correctly observes in relationship to the dramatized narrator’s overall performance throughout the text, one has the sense that Pain is a psychologically unstable individual who will probably be overwhelmed by circumstances in the end. As he is reflecting on Madame Reynaud’s request, for example, he questions his own mental state and he feels that something is not right, admitting to the presence of a certain danger (23). Now, where is the source of this “danger” to which he alludes? Is it in the rarified atmosphere that surrounds him or in his own state of mind? It is located in both, really. As stated earlier, in contrast to the classical mystery story, in Monsieur one must speak of mysteries rather than mystery. From this perspective, Pain is as inscrutable as Vallejo. Furthermore, the narration itself oscillates between events that point to potential threats beyond the dramatized narrator’s control, and events that would seem to have their origin inside the dramatized narrator himself, never completely making clear where. In his first attempt to see Vallejo, Pain feels terrified, both because of the alarming faces of the doctors as well as the frighteningly ominous atmosphere of the clinic (32, 34). If the dramatized narrator feels the need to call Rivette later on (twice) it is precisely because he has completely lost control of the situation: “I don’t know what to do,” he tells him, “I’m losing it . . . I’m losing touch with reality” (109). Similarly, in his dream—or rather nightmare about Rivette, Pleumeur-Bodou, and Terzeff—he feels that he is in hell and asks himself whether he was looking for Vallejo or someone else (52), replicating, linguistically, what could be called, for lack of a more appropriate expression, the aesthetics of Trilce (or cubist aesthetics): “I thought that my ear was my eye” (53). In the final analysis, what immobilizes the narrator, above all, is fear, a fear that he cannot explain but from

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which he cannot seem to escape (77). Unlike the classical detective figure from either the mystery story or its hard-boiled version who confronts the world face-to-face, Pain conceives the world as a menacing place where, paradoxically, there are no dangers (99). The impending threat as well as fear materialize later in the diegesis in the invisible though almost palpable presence that follows Pain inside an abandoned warehouse (100). Hearing its “hiccup” (104), Pain asks, “Vallejo?” To conclude with my analysis, I now proceed to offer some tentative hypotheses as to why Bolaño may have chosen a fictive César Vallejo to inhabit the world of this novel. But before that a few words are in order regarding the relationship between Vallejo, the character of Monsieur, and César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet who died in Paris in 1938, just like Georgette’s husband in the text. According to Andrea Valenzuela (2008, 116) and Sergio Franco (2014, 472–73), a great deal of information found in Georgette de Vallejo’s memoirs makes its way into Bolaño’s text. Bolaño himself states in the “Preliminary Note” of the novel that almost everything he fictionalizes in Monsieur occurred in real life, such as Vallejo’s hiccup, Curie’s death, and even Pain himself, among other facts (12). 52 Stephen Hart’s 2007 study corroborates some of this information. He writes, for instance, that on March 24, 1938, Vallejo was transferred to a clinic in Villa Arago—Arago is the name of the clinic in the novel—and that the doctors who saw him, including a Dr. Lemière, were unable to determine what made him ill (14). 53 It may accordingly be concluded that the Vallejo of Monsieur is the fictional version of the real César Vallejo (2015), the author of The Black Heralds, Trilce, and Poemas humanos, among other texts. “Monsieur Vallejo is Peruvian, had I already told you?” (38), Madame Reynaud tells Pain. As I argue above, if Bolaño chose to center his novel around Vallejo’s dying condition, it is because César Vallejo, the poet, more than any other Latin American artist, epitomizes the true nature of pain and suffering, or possibly because Bolaño identifies with Vallejo’s aesthetics and life. Yet in neither the fictional nor the real Vallejo can the causal or casual nature of crime be ultimately distinguished.54 Which does not mean, needless to say, that Vallejo is not political—texts such as España, aparta de mí este cáliz and Poemas humanos clearly prove the contrary—or that Bolaño is apolitical, as it was initially thought. The major difference between them is that Vallejo wrote at a historical moment in Latin America and Spain when it was still

118   |  Chapter 3 possible to believe that fighting against injustice made sense, whereas Bolaño writes as a disenchanted man aware that, in fact, the system, or evil forces, almost always wins. Consequently, and as it will be shown shortly, if Bolaño fictionalizes Vallejo it is because the latter was one of the most vociferous defenders of the Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and thus one of Spanish fascism’s worst enemies.55 Authoritarianism in general and fascism in particular play of course a preponderant role in Bolaño’s entire literary production, starting with Nazi and Distant and continuing with Amulet and By Night. In Monsieur Bolaño presents the two sides of César Vallejo: what could be called the existential side on the one hand, represented in poems such as “The Black Heralds” and “I Am Going to Speak of Hope,” for example, and the engagé side on the other, represented in the poem “Masses.” Let me start with the existential side. This side has to do with Vallejo’s condition itself as well as with the description of spaces mirroring that condition and the overall feeling of claustrophobia and solitude the text exudes. As affirmed earlier, the biggest of all mysteries is why a seemingly healthy Vallejo is dying: “All his organs are new! I don’t see what could be wrong with this man” (32), says Doctor Lemière. What ultimately kills him is a series of uncontrollable hiccups that, according to Sepúlveda, represent language’s impossibility to express itself. Now, might these uncontrollable hiccups, as well as Vallejo’s general condition, also epitomize rather the utterly irrational and finally arbitrary nature of suffering? In the end, does suffering exist independent of a person’s will? The following quotation from the text points in that direction: “Vallejo’s hiccup . . . seemed to be in control of total autonomy, oblivious to my patient’s body, as if the latter didn’t suffer from hiccup but rather as if it suffered from him” (63), declares Pain. At the same time, and dovetailing with Vallejo’s Christian weltanschauung as well as with the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936– 1939), there is the idea in the text that the fictional Vallejo is a species of Christ figure who must, of necessity, pay with his life. In this regard, his death fulfills a ritual function: “I thought: there’s an innocent man involved. I thought: the South American will pay [the price] for all” (128). 56 Indeed, earlier in the fabula the dramatized narrator declares in no uncertain terms that he conceives of mesmerism not as science but rather as humanism (87), another notion at the center of Vallejo’s poetry. As regards spatial conditions that provoke a state of claustrophobia and

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solitude, the most important, of course, is the clinic, described in the text as “of a metallic shade,” “Non-natural” (29), full of shadows (35) and never-­ending halls (49, 142–43), which make one think not only of the strange hallways of Antwerp but also announce other sites of pain in Bolaño’s work, such as Wieder’s apartment in Concepción and the apartment in Santiago where he exhibits the pictures of the women he has killed, or the basement of María Canales’s house where her husband carried out torture sessions in By Night. Tellingly, what most surprises Pain when visiting the clinic for the first time is its utter solitude (28). Solitude, a predominant theme in Vallejo’s poetry, permeates the entire novel. Madame Grenelle complains about how very lonely she feels (79). Similarly, the dramatized narrator speaks of “the loneliness of the night” (35), adding, “The street was empty, as if people had decided to remain closed in their homes.”57 This feeling of claustrophobia, of imprisonment, of enclosure that the fictional Vallejo probably feels inside the clinic because he is unable to move—a feeling the real Vallejo probably felt when he was imprisoned in Trujillo for a crime he did not commit—has its counterpart especially in two instances in the narration: when, during his dream about Terzeff, Pain finds himself “inside a cloaca” (55), and when, inside the warehouse, he decides to spend the night inside a bathtub that resembles a coffin (103). Oses is correct to observe that the entire city would appear to suffer from a feeling of impending tragedy (2003, 253–54). Indeed, at some point Pain alludes to the impending “threats” surrounding the city of Paris (61); at another he remarks on its “sinister” (106) sky . To finish my analysis of the novel, I now move from the existential to the engagé side of César Vallejo’s poetry played out in the text. In some way, this part of my analysis will provide an answer concerning the oppressively overwhelming feeling of solitude that affects both the novel’s characters and space. As might be expected, Vallejo’s political commitment in the text is essentially reflected through criticism against fascism. The novel’s historical context, of course, is the Spanish Civil War. In his first call to Rivette, in fact, the latter informs Pain that Pleumeur-Bodou is working for the Franco forces in Spain (50), information Pain is able to verify later in the fabula when Pleumeur-Bodou himself tells him that he’s an intelligence office whose knowledge of mesmerism is put into practice in the interrogation of political prisoners (139). There is another quasi-metadiegetic account, nevertheless, which, though partially oblique, perhaps, casts a light not only on

120   |  Chapter 3 what is going on in Spain at the time but also on what will befall Europe a few years thereafter. I refer to the episode when Pain enters a café and talks to two “blond young men” (69) whose hobby it is to make fish tanks. What is most unusual about this “fish tank” (70)—which the dramatized narrator calls “marine cemeteries” (75) later on in the fabula—is that inside it contains “trains and airplanes . . . that simulated catastrophes” (70). But that is not all. As Pain gets closer to the fish tank, he notices along a black train— imported from Germany by the two brothers—“black dots”: “they were cut off heads or figures buried up to their neck. A trail of cadavers” (71). This is of course a metaphor for something else, and it is also a prophecy. The “fish tank” is a microcosm of what is about to happen in Europe, that is, the arrival of the Second World War. The black train and the cadavers along it could be said to represent the thousands of Jews transported to death camps. The “young blond men” are the Nazis. As a matter of fact, the unnamed intradiegetic narrator of the section dealing with them in the “Epilogue for Voices” describes them as being extremely dangerous (157). Finally, there are two other episodes in the diegesis that offer criticisms not only against fascism but against war. In the first one, the criticism is launched in two ways: by means of a metadiegetic account and through a direct conversation, respectively. Upon entering Café Raoul, Pain reads a newspaper describing in granular detail the air bombardments and the thousands of dead in the war in Spain. The connection with Vallejo’s own criticism against fascism and war becomes more apparent, however, when, in response to the comments of a habitué of the café, Pain calls war’s landscapes (82) Dantesque and miserable. Then, in the same conversation, another character remarks that even though he does not know a great deal about Nazism, Germany represents a danger for France and France must confront it (83). Thereafter, when this same character says that it is ultimately the poor who fight in wars, the dramatized narrator, by means of a reminiscence that takes him back to when he himself fought in the Great War, concedes that he didn’t remember seeing dead officers on the frontline and that it was a troop made up peasants, workers, and petit bourgeois, who had to endure bombs, gases, and sickness (84). In the second and final instance regarding the criticism against fascism, Pain mingles with a group of students discussing the Spanish Civil War and tells one of them that fascism must be stopped (141). When the Spaniards ask Pain to leave Vallejo alone “for the common good,” therefore, what is probably meant is

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that a new society is on the brink of being established in Germany and Spain, a society diametrically opposed to the values and mores of the Spanish Republic Vallejo symbolizes.58 As shown here, Monsieur does not adhere to the traditional mystery paradigm even though it is undoubtedly one of Bolaño’s most enigmatic works. From this perspective, it is arguably even more postmodern than Consejos. For one thing, there is the matter of the multiplication of the mystery and the complexity of the text’s structure (although, granted, not the same complexity found in certain modernist texts). For another, there is the issue of the novel’s appendix and the indeterminacy of the multiple dramatized narrators. At the same time, other inexplicable aspects of the fabula, such as why Pain is prevented from assisting Vallejo, or what the purpose of Terzeff’s metadiegetic story is and how it is connected to the dramatized narrator’s situation, contribute to the widespread feeling of confusion inherent in the novel. Given these aspects, plus a myriad of very obscure signs that plague the text, there is a movement from bits and pieces of information to almost complete ignorance. In essence, the text’s diegesis—or diegeses, rather—would appear to oscillate between these inscrutable events and what goes on, furiously almost, inside Pain’s head, plus his dreams, his nightmares, and his anxiety. In the final analysis, this novel by Bolaño escapes the traditional mystery model because there is neither a crime nor a criminal. Moreover, its protagonist and major dramatized narrator, Pain, represents the very opposite of the calculating and cerebral figure typically associated with the genre. In the end, it would appear as if the most evanescent character in the text, Vallejo, were at the same time, and as paradoxical as it may seem, the most concrete, for it is precisely his condition that makes it possible that there be a text in the first place. Vallejo functions as a metaphor, as a fulcrum that contains Bolaño’s nascent ideas concerning the world. On the one hand, there is the notion that there are specifi historical events that bring about the destruction of human life—such as fascism or dictatorship, for example—and that they need to be confronted face-to-face. On the other, there is the idea that evil and crime cannot always be explained or, more terribly, that they are part and parcel of human nature. Thus the urgency of being able to decipher whether the crime is casual or causal is paramount. As an analysis of Skating will show, sometimes, even if the criminal admits his responsibility in a given crime, he does not know the reasons that led him to commit it.

122   |  Chapter 3 the skating rink :

The Detective Genre with Neither a Detective Nor an Investiga tion of the Crime

In Spanish, a pista de hielo is a skating rink, a place to glide on ice and to amuse oneself. But literally, pista de hielo can be read as a “trace of ice,” or as a trace that, at some point, due precisely to the very ephemeral nature of ice as sign and trace (Pino 2006, 124), could potentially dissolve and disappear. Critic Myrna Solotorevsky (2010) is correct when she claims that the pista of the title already leads the reader to the detective genre. In Skating, quite ingeniously, Bolaño turns this site, an impermanent site par excellence, into the crime scene. From this standpoint, might there be a close relationship between the impermanence of the crime scene here and Bergson’s “criminal chance” alluded to above by Pleumeur-Bodou, or between it and Romero’s contention in Detectives that, sometimes, crimes are accidental? Possibly, especially if one takes into account that if in Bolaño there are concrete reasons and causes that explain certain criminal acts, there are other criminal acts that lack apparent explanations. Eventually, then, the question that would need to be answered is whether in Skating crime is causal or casual, and what the consequences of either response might be. In Consejos crime is incontrovertibly causal. In Monsieur it is both causal and casual, even if no crime is ultimately committed. Except for Aspurúa (1998, 40), for whom what stands out in the text above all is the marginal quality of the characters,59 most critics (Pino 2006, 118; Rosso 2002a; Gras 2005, 55; Fishbach 2007; Clemens and Sepúlveda 2009; and Baker 2012, 28) agree that Skating is essentially a detective novel.60 In an interview with Loreto Novoa in 1998, Bolaño himself describes the novel as “a thriller, a detective novel with three voices. I would not risk any other definition” (1998, 28). At this writing, four critics have provided more than a superficial overview of Skating: Mirian Pino (2006), Érich Fishbach (2007), and Clemens and Sepúlveda (2009). The first, just like Juan Andrés Piña in his own review of the novel (1998b, 2), maintains that Skating contains, in embryonic form, many of the narrative elements that will appear in later novels by Bolaño (Pino 2006, 118). Echoing much of the criticism on the author published thus far, she makes the point that, in effect, certain ingredients of the policíaco novel permeate “the totality of Bolaño’s fiction” (118). Moreover, she

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calls the Chilean Remo Morán, one of the three narrating instances in the text, Bolaño’s alter ego (120). From this perspective, and assuming she is correct, Morán would be a kind of proto Arturo Belano. Pino’s major contention is that, in Skating, the author does not reject the traditional detective novel but instead plays with it by emptying it and hence offering a new version of it (126). She concludes in her essay, “I argue that Skating is an answer to everything ‘post,’ the neo-avantgarde of the neo-avantgarde, since it is possible to read Benvingut as the welcome to a new way of creating novela negra, one that abandons the rigid dichotomies between the concepts of good and evil, innocent and guilty, the modern and the postmodern” (127). Whether Skating constitutes “a new way of creating novela negra,” we shall see later. For now, let us see what Fishfach (2007 ) and Clemens and Sepúlveda (2009) have to say about it. Fishfach, while admitting that the text has “a framework that owes much to the detective novel” (164), also recognizes, appropriately, that “everything here moves Skating away from the generic model” (172) in the sense that none of the three narrating voices makes an attempt to comprehend the crime or even look for the criminal (171). Similarly, he underlines the fact that Skating does not present three different versions of the same crime but, rather, three different stories (170). For their part, in their discussion of the text in Tinta de sangre (257–65), Clemens and Sepúlveda (2009) focus their attention on the melancholic nature of the characters’ personalities, both as a result of first having been the victims of dictatorship and then the victims of democratic governments that, adhering faithfully to neoliberal policies that reduced the power of the state to its bare minimum, abandoned its citizens to fend for themselves. Alluding to these characters—characters who resemble very closely those from Antwerp as well as the majority of Bolaño’s marginal flâneurs, it must be noted—the critics write, “We can say that this generation presents itself as the ‘refuse’ of the new commodified polis; they are the dead subjects who walk among tourists performing precarious and unstable jobs” (258). And, later, “For a few characters the trauma is personal and for others political, but all of them remain in a state of melancholia that deprives them of a normal life and civic praxis” (262), concluding, “The survival of characters in postdictatorships is, symbolically, the ice rink built in a ruined palace, that is, a space that keeps them frozen; it is constructed on the ruin of a generation” (265).

124   |  Chapter 3 Needless to say, each of these critical statements contributes to a decipherment of a text that is, by its very nature, fragmentary and polyphonic, just like the second part of Detectives though not exactly. Pino (2006), Fishfach (2007), and Clemens and Sepúlveda (2009) are correct to circumscribe Skating within the detective novel genre. But Aspurúa (1998) and Matus (n.d.) are also right to claim that the psychological portrayal of the characters plays an important role in the text. Bolaño’s own description of the novel—“a thriller, a detective novel with three voices”—is an appropriate definition of the novel. The main question that needs to be posed, therefore, is: what makes Skating a novel? Also, following Pino’s thesis as well as this study’s question, in what sense does this text approximate or distance itself from the traditional detective genre? Similarly, what is the nature of the crime here, causal or casual? As we shall see, this question will lead us to a brief analysis of Skating’s characters and the issue of Bolaño’s engaged postmodernism. And, finall , what are the autobiographical features of Skating? Structurally speaking, Skating does not offer any of the challenges that Antwerp, Consejos, and Monsieur present. It is a much simpler text. In essence, it is a novel in which three characters or narrating instances—the Chilean Remo Morán, the Mexican Gaspar Heredia, and the Catalan Enric Rosquelles—recount, retrospectively, not so much the circumstances that led to the crime but rather their own personal circumstances before the crime takes place. Composed of forty-eight chapters headed by the names of the narrating instances, they each provide a specific piece of the puzzle, contributing in the end not to present different versions of the crime—as, for example, the classical movie by Akira Kurosawa Rashomon (1950)—but rather to fill in the elliptical vacuums of what might be called the principal diegesis of the text. Lacking, in fact, an undramatized narrator at the extradiegetic level who could theoretically confer a relatively stable presentation of the events of the fabula, Skating’s mock or fictitiou reader—to follow Walker Gibson’s (1996) terminology—is ultimately Cortázar’s lector-cómplice, that is, a reader who, in this particular case, must decide who of the three narrators is telling the truth. Now, if, as Catherine Burgass contends in “A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot” (2005) and Hutcheon (1988) pounds into our heads in her own study, postmodern narratives in general call for very active readers, Bolaño’s text, just like Detectives, addresses also a narratee, that is, a specific reader within the

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diegesis. But this narratee, or these narratees rather, is not as elusive and amorphous as that of Detectives. In the latter novel, narratees travel through time and space. In Skating they appear to be fixed; and if they are fixed is because they are listening, possibly as policemen, interviewers in a television show, or, simply, as friends and even family members in the case Rosquelles, to what might be classified as the confessions or witness accounts of Morán, Heredia, and Rosquelles after the crime has been committed. Morán: “The purpose of this story is to try to persuade you of the opposite” (10); Heredia: “I should make clear that I did not ask for the job” (11); Rosquelles: “I felt trapped, like anyone of you” (143). A discussion of the crime is certainly a useful point of departure to answer the first two questions formulated above, that is, whether Skating is a policíaca novel, as Bolaño and others claim, or whether it departs from the traditional detective genre model and to what extent. Two elements concerning the crime stand out in the text. First of all, the fact that, though early on in the diegesis a murder (10) is mentioned, it is not until almost the end of it that the victim’s identity is revealed (146). Second, in reality, the enigma of the crime is never resolved; instead, it is confessed to by the criminal himself. In other words, throughout most of the fabula, that is, throughout the time of the narrating, the victim is alive discursively but already dead physically. Skating is accordingly not a detective novel in the traditional sense because there is not even an investigation of the crime. In effect, upon his confession of it to Morán, Recluta, the criminal, complains, “I’ve waited all that’s humanly possible for [some type of] enlightenment to reach the police, but in this country no one wants to work, boss” (195). Now, by implication, if there is no search for the criminal, there is also no detective figure, either in its classical or its neopolicíaco guise, as much as at some point in the fabula Heredia looks for Caridad, becoming thus a temporary detective, and even if Morán states, “I think I would have loved to be a detective. I am observant and have deductive ability, besides being a fan of detective fiction. If this were useful for something . . . In reality, it is useless” (118). Regarding the crime scene, it is true, as Erin Smith maintains, that, besides enclosed locales (Braham 2004), crimes also take place in small communities and small towns where people know each other (2006, 138),61 as it is the case in Skating, for instance. But what is interesting beyond the ephemeral nature of the ice rink, or the ruinous state of the palace where it was built, is the fact that, in the joining of these two sites,

126   |  Chapter 3 Bolaño has, consciously or not, offered a kind of metaphor for a postmodern society where life is real only as spectacle and where reality has been supplanted by virtual reality. One cannot help but think here of Marx’s memorable words regarding modernity—“all that’s solid melts into air”— and Marshall Bergman’s very lucid account of this process in his book by the same title. Surely, modernity is not postmodernity, but how uncanny that in the ice rink both a process of construction, fame, simulacra, power, and a process of destruction, loss of fame, reality, and poverty, be conjoined. Nuria, for whom Rosquelles builds the ice rink using public funds, wants to be a star above all; but it is the ice rink that ultimately brings her down. In an interesting note, moreover, the writing of Skating in the early 1990s coincides with the advent of reality television. In the end, it could be said that if Benvingut (“welcome” in Catalan)—a palace constructed by an “Indiano”62 who made his fortune in Latin America and later became Z’s chief (41) according to Rosquelles—could be interpreted to mean welcome to a new type of detective genre (Pino). It could be interpreted also as welcome to a brave new world, a world where, more terrifyingly maybe that in the nineteenth century, all that was solid—the state, politics, jobs, community—did indeed appear to begin to melt into air. But going back to the crime, what are the causes that led its perpetrator to commit it? As evinced earlier, the presence of the crime is almost an excuse so that Morán, Heredia, and Rosquelles might be able to relate a segment of their lives. Nonetheless, without the murder of Carmen, a homeless artist, there would be no text. In fact, throughout Skating the ubiquitous presence of narratees suggests that the three narrating instances are immersed in an attempt—desperate in Rosquelles’ case—to exculpate themselves, or at least to explain the circumstances that preceded the crime. Morán’s intention, it would appear, is to state that Heredia, a friend whom he met in Mexico in his youth and works in his encampment in Z during the time of the story, could really not commit the crime: “From Bucareli street, in Mexico City, to the murder!, you are probably thinking . . . The purpose of this story is to try to persuade you of the opposite” (10). But to persuade the narratees and reader of what, that Heredia could not have possibly committed the crime or that he was indeed capable of committing it? Morán’s words are not unambiguous, to say the least. Rosquelles, for his part, is sure of his innocence: “Everyone will agree that the least possible individual to become involved in a murder is me” (13). Heredia

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does not allude to the crime until the time he finds the body of Carmen lying on the ice rink (151), but he is concerned about his legal status in Spain: “I thought about my papers—about my lack of papers—and about what I could tell the police” (63). In the end, only two people see Carmen’s corpse before the arrival of the police (if one takes Rosquelles’ words at faith value, of course): Morán and Heredia, the latter having discovered it before the former. Now, assuming that Recluta’s confession is true—though the possibility does exist that he may be protecting Caridad by imputing himself the murder—what is his motive for killing Carmen? When prompted by Morán, he tells him that he doesn’t know why he killed her, that maybe he’s sick but doesn’t know from what (195), adding later on in the same segment, “I snatched the knife with which the poor thing was planning on defending herself (from me? No!), and at that instant I became an animal” (196). As can be gleaned from this information, therefore, the crime in Skating seems to be both causal and casual. It is casual because the criminal himself ignores the reasons that led him to perpetrate it. And it is causal not only because he apparently wanted to defend Caridad from Carmen but also because he could never quite fully accept the fact that the latter, with whom he maintained a romantic relationship of sorts, wished to preserve her independence at any cost. In a statement reminiscent of Bolaño’s tremendous admiration for the spirit of tolerance that, according to him, characterized Barcelona in particular and Catalan culture in general,63 Morán writes, “Carmen used to say that her independence was the most precious thing in the world and that Recluta needed to learn tolerance from Catalans” (105). At this point in my analysis, a few comments regarding the characters and their narration is in order, for, after all, this is a text where the crime plays a smaller role than the narratives of those who may have been involved in its execution. I am not interested in whether these characters are round or flat per E. M. Forster,64 or whether they are “rendered” or “embodied,” in William H. Gass’s sense (2005, 118). Instead, my attention focuses briefly on the subject of narrative focalization in the case of the three narrative voices, and, more extensively, on how Morán, Heredia, and Rosquelles—but also Carmen, Recluta, Caridad, and Nuria, among other minor characters—represent, more patently perhaps than the characters of Antwerp or Consejos, the characters that will appear in most of Bolaño’s later works. Now, why should the issue of focalization be important in the

128   |  Chapter 3 case of Morán, Heredia, and Rosquelles? Simply because, as adumbrated above, they each contribute to filling in the gap in the other two accounts. From the point of view of narratology, what is most interesting not only about Skating but especially about the second section of Detectives (in several instances), is the fact that those who tell are also those who see. It is worth remembering here that Genette, in his Narrative Discourse (1980), corrects previous notions of narrative point of view by postulating the essential distinction between the one who sees, the focalizer, from the one who tells, the narrator, while Bal, in her Narratology (1985), polishes Genette’s ideas by, among other things, establishing a clear distinction between the subject and the object of focalization and designating an autonomous position to the focalizer. Though my intention here is not to enter into the nitty-gritty of Bal’s arguments in regard to focalization, I do deem useful to consign how Bal defines focalization and how she differentiates internal from external focalization. Focalization, for Bal, consists of “the relations between the elements presented and the vision through which they are presented” (1985, 116), or, put differently, “the relationship between the ‘vision,’ the agent that sees, and that which is seen” (118). The difference between internal and external focalization is that, in the former, a character takes part in the diegesis as an actor, while in the latter the person who focalizes is an anonymous agent located outside of it (119). This is of course reminiscent of Booth’s (1961) concepts of “undramatized” versus “dramatized” narrators and Genette’s extradiegetic versus intradiegetic levels of narration. The questions that immediately come to mind, then, are: how do Morán, Heredia, and Rosquelles focalize, internally or externally, and where is their narration situated? They narrate at the intradiegetic level and theirs is a predominantly internal focalization. And while at the time of the narrating they are no longer active actors in the fabula, they played such a key role in it that they now feel the need to explain what went on before. As the focalizers and narrators they are, each of them zeroes in on a particular part of the puzzle that is Skating. Morán, for example, focuses his attention foremost on Heredia, Nuria, Lola, and Recluta. Heredia focalizes on the encampment and those who live and work there, especially Caridad and Carmen but also Carajillo and Recluta; he is, moreover, the only one who knows, along with Carmen and Caridad, that Nuria and Rosquelles secretly spend time on the ice rink inside the palace Benvingut. Rosquelles,

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indubitably the most self-centered of the three narrators, concentrates on his fears and worries, his relationship with Nuria, Morán, and, to a lesser degree, his relationship with Pilar and Lola as well as his encounter with Carmen. Everything known about the events and characters of Skating is internally focalized by these three dramatized narrators, each of whom offers his own version of the fabula. In some sense, this is a text with a tripartite diegesis where each narrator presents information that the other does not. For instance, though Heredia does speak briefly about himself, it is really Morán who describes him in some detail. Through Morán’s account one also sees an aspect of Nuria’s personality that Rosquelles either refuses or simply fails to see. It is significant that Morán discovers Carmen’s dead body on the ice rink and, although he and Heredia do not have a good relationship during the story time despite their friendship in Mexico in their youth, he hides the incriminating evidence that could have cast suspicions upon him and Caridad. Morán, final y, is the only one to whom Recluta confessed that he killed Carmen. Heredia, for his part, just like Morán, initially zeroes in on his past in Mexico and then proceeds to explain how he came to work in Morán’s encampment in Z. Of the three narrating instances of Skating, he is the one who presents the most thorough x-ray of the encampment and its inhabitants. As stated above, most of his attention centers on Carmen and Caridad, in particular the latter, who throughout his account remains an utter mystery. It puzzles him, for instance, that Caridad should carry a knife with her at all times. In fact, it is Heredia who first finds Caridad and her bloody knife next to Carmen’s dead body on the ice rink. Moreover, it is he who focalizes on the oftentense relationship between Carmen and Recluta and it is through him that the reader learns of Carmen’s past encounter with Rosquelles and her strong dislike of him. Finally, as a secret witness to the conversations between Nuria and Rosquelles at the ice rink, he offers yet another view of these two important characters. Accused of Carmen’s murder, Rosquelles’ discourse is the most defensive of the three dramatized narrators. Above all, he wants to make clear that even though he used public money to construct the ice rink, he is not an assassin: “I swear to God I didn’t kill her” (166). Much closer to the autobiographical I of Rousseau’s Les confessions than to the fictional first person of Ibacache’s By Night, Rosquelles reveals a significantly greater amount of information about himself than either Morán or Heredia. He insists, for instance, that he is intelligent, extremely

130   |  Chapter 3 efficient, and a great believer in hard work and progress. He also describes himself as being short and fat. In the end, he admits that what ultimately contributed to his downfall was his love for Nuria, for whom he built the ice rink so that she might be able to continue to dance after she lost her scholarship. Of the three dramatized narrators, Rosquelles, a socialist, is the only one who offers an inside-look into the politics of local governments. However, one of the most salient aspects of his narration is his racism and, especially, his xenophobia, which Morán experienced firsthand in his three contacts with him.65 “I don’t like blacks. Less still if they are Muslim” (96), states Rosquelles. It particularly bothers him that Morán employs other foreigners in his business, alluding to them as “scruffy and wounded . . . , resentful, maladjusted . . . , sick beings” (96). Now, is this not—Rosquelles’ racism and xenophobia notwithstanding—a rather accurate description of the characters that will populate Bolaño’s later narrative works? It certainly is. In effect, Rosquelles’ words could even be applied to the characters from Antwerp as well as to Ana and Ángel from Consejos. In my view, nonetheless, this description, from which wounded and maladjusted clearly constitute the more appropriate terms, does not exclusively relate to expatriates and exiles, it refers also to a kind of global condition having to do directly with immigration, unemployment, and, generally, a precarious economic situation characteristic of late capitalism. Instability, in other words, was quickly becoming the new and seemingly permanent modus vivendi for the young and the uneducated especially. Many of Bolaño’s characters find themselves in this position. In these uncertain circumstances, the “camp site,” alluded to in several of his short stories and novels, becomes the metaphor par excellence of the new home, the new movable terroir, so to speak, where communities and relationships are formed only to be dissolved: “To live in the camp site, Caridad used to say, was like being on vacation” (174). And, as if to further underscore their instability, Heredia adds that he and Caridad used to call the tent where they slept in the encampment “our home” (174). Except for those who work inside and for the system—such as Rosquelles, Pilar and, to some extent Lola, who in reality serves as a link between the system and the margins, and Nuria, who is only too happy to benefit from it— most other characters from Skating are immigrants or homeless people whose existences are ever unpredictable and shaky. True, Morán constitutes an exception in this regard for, while he is an immigrant, he has a

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comfortable economic situation66 ; nonetheless he is constantly harassed by the local authorities precisely because he is a foreigner and hires other foreigners. Heredia, whose life closely resembles that of the author in his first years in Spain, lives in permanent fear that the police will find out that he is living in Spain illegally: “My legal situation in Spain, . . . was, . . . desperate: I don’t have a residence permit, I don’t have a work permit, I live in a kind of indefinite purgatory” (11–12). “Indefinite purgatory,” what an apt metaphor to describe not only his own situation but also that of the Peruvian man, the Senegalese woman, and the “three old Spaniards whom no one wanted anywhere” (36) who also live in the encampment! Then there is Carmen, an old homeless opera singer who earns a precarious living by singing in the streets, or Recluta, a vagabond who spends his time hanging out with her. The most inscrutable of characters in the text, however, the most existentially “foreign,” is Caridad, a Spaniard: “Caridad, I thought, was foreign to God, to the police, to herself, but not to me” (198). That she is Spanish, of course, underlines the fact that at least part of the orphan-like nature of these characters transcends the merely economical and may have to do with a desire to simply live freely and unattached to material possessions, as it is clearly the case with Carmen, Auxilio in Amulet, and Lola in “The Part about Amalfitano in 2666 , to mention but a few examples. Finally, to conclude with my analysis of Skating, I turn to the matter of autobiography in the text. This is the first of Bolaño’s narrative works to present a character—or rather two, as we shall see shortly—whose biography resembles that of Bolaño’s own. But Pino is only partially right when she claims that Morán is Bolaño’s alter ego (2006, 120). In this novel at least, the author’s fictive self is shared by two characters: Morán and also Heredia. Indeed, the fact that they first met in Mexico City and later ran into each other in Spain is not accidental. Now, going back to the discussion concerning the strong presence of the autobiographical “I” in Bolaño’s poetry in chapter 1 of this study, one can easily see that such a presence does not play out in the same way in Skating. Though one could easily agree that the location from which the dramatized narrators of Skating write is the same as that of the “I” of the poems, and especially that of Antwerp— that is, Spain and, specificall , Cataluña—it is neither the same time nor is there a desire to inscribe the self in the same way. Wright’s (2006) distinction between the Inner Self and the Outer Self becomes thus a moot point

132   |  Chapter 3 here and elsewhere in Bolaño’s narrative works—for instance those in which Arturo Belano or B appear.67 Fundamentally, as much as Morán and Heredia may share certain biographical traits with Roberto Bolaño the author, they are ultimately fictitious characters. Nevertheless, in what sense can it be said that they incarnate him? Morán is from Chile but met Heredia during his adolescence in Mexico. Like the latter, he is a poet, but for some unexplained reason, because of something that happened in Mexico and that remains a mystery in the text, the subject of poetry is carefully avoided. Morán is, however, desirous to know whether Heredia continues to write poetry. Like it was seen in the section on autobiography in the previous chapter, Mexico here also occupies a central position. But what is interesting in Skating is that the information that is provided by both, though small, coincides not only with the biographical information about Bolaño provided by the writer himself, as well as those who knew him in Mexico, such as novelists Carmen Boullosa and Juan Villoro, for example, but also with fictional information from Detectives and Amulet. Morán, for instance, alludes to Bucareli Street, Café La Habana, and Colonia Guerrero. But he also makes reference to hanging out with his friends the “steel poets” (34) 68 in Mexico City and to missing his youth there (115–16), or his having seen a dead body in Chile in 1973 while he was in jail (117), but saying at the same time that he would never return to Chile (189). This retrospective gaze is accompanied by information related to the autobiographical self in Spain, such as his having held several jobs when he first arrived there, his having sold jewelry (31), and his awareness that South Americans are somewhat distrusted in Spain (46). Heredia’s narrative discourse completes the autobiographical aspects of the text not only by describing the camp site—a place where Bolaño worked several times and knew very well—but also by expressing nostalgia for Mexico and feeling, once, “enveloped in a certain unmistakably Mexican energy” (60). Their speaking about their days in Mexico, in fact, is the only thing that brings Morán and Heredia a bit closer (164–65). A comparison between Skating and Bolaño’s previous narrative works demonstrates that he continues to be fascinated with the detective genre. But it also demonstrates that he is intent on subverting the model each time. Indeed, Skating is a detective novel, but there is neither a detective nor a criminal investigation in the text. Similarly, unlike most mystery or policíaco novels, here not only is the victim’s identity revealed toward the

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end of the fabula but it is the criminal himself who confesses to the crime without being asked to. One of the most surprising aspects of the crime is the fact that Recluta, the assassin, does not really know why he killed Carmen, which confers a casual attribute to his action. At the same time, however, the fact that he may have killed her because he hated her independence bestows a causal characteristic upon it. Another feature of Skating contributing to its uniqueness is the fact that, ultimately, it is a text that has much more to do with the biographies of the three dramatized narrators rather than with their efforts to clarify the crime. In what might be construed as a tripartite diegesis, and by means of internal focalization but at the extradiegetic level, Morán, Heredia, and Rosquelles focus on distinct characters and spaces. Their account of the circumstances that led to the crime is therefore partial and unstable, to say the least. Also unstable are the lives of many characters in the novel, characters who lack a fixed income and whose legal status in Spain is uncertain. This almost inveterate instability, of which the ice rink constitutes its tangible metaphor to a certain degree, may have less to do with past political circumstances and more to do with a nascent economic situation that excluded not only immigrants but also those in Spain who refused to abide by the system, such as Caridad and Recluta. Finally, in terms of autobiography, what is interesting in Skating, beyond the fact that Morán may arguably represent the first appearance of the author’s alter ego, is the fact that there is no patent interest in inscribing the self here in the same way as in some poems of University. In fact, Bolaño’s fictive persona in the text is divided equally between Morán and Heredia, the latter making reference to the author’s biography in Spain and the former alluding to Bolaño’s stay in Mexico. What unites the three novels examined in this chapter, nevertheless, is the topic of the detective genre, a genre that does not follow the traditional paradigm and that evolves differently in each of the texts. Because of the narrative technique that is employed as well as the mixture of high and low cultures in its content, Consejos is arguably more postmodern than Monsieur and Skating. What is interesting about this novel is that Bolaño and García Porta practice a kind of post- policíaco genre avant la lettre that brings to the fore both the representation of urban violence and politics’ loss of symbolic capital. Also interesting despite the intricacy of the text’s structure and the ambiguous nature of the narrative voice is the relationship that is established not only between literature and crime this early in

134   |  Chapter 3 Bolaño’s career but also between violence and politics, a politics directly related to economic conditions affecting particularly immigrants and the marginalized in Spain. Like Consejos, Monsieur does not adhere to the classical detective genre either, but it is paradoxically even more enigmatic than a typical mystery novel. On the one hand, there is neither a crime nor a criminal in the diegesis. On the other, Pain, its protagonist, is the very opposite of the calculating and cerebral figure of the detective. Nonetheless, what is most significant in the context of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance examined in this study is that Vallejo, a poet who incarnates the historical and the existential equally forcefully, functions as a metaphor both for the crucial role that certain historical events play upon human affairs—and specifically fascism in the text—and the inscrutability of evil and crime. The inability to explain the causes of crime is especially evident in Skating, a text that, like the previous two novels, also defies the traditional detective genre model. Not only does the criminal himself admit that he has committed the crime, there is also neither a detective nor a criminal investigation in the diegesis. And like in Consejos, the characters’ social instability has much to do with a nascent economic situation that has a direct impact upon their lives. As we shall see in the following chapter, the detective genre does not play a large role in Bolaño’s collection of short stories. Nevertheless, his postmodernism of resistance continues to manifest itself both in the influence that a specific historical event has upon the characters as well as the manner in which the author strives to portray individuals bent on finding meaningful locations

Chapter 4

History, Nomadic Gatherings, and Territory in Bolaño’s Short Stories

It w ould be certainly tempting to conclude that the diverse nature of Bolaño’s short stories makes it impossible that they be approached with only one theme in mind, and especially when that theme, the grand narrative of postmodernism, hails difference and fragmentation. Similarly, not only do some of the subthemes explored in the previous chapters, such as the detective genre, Mexico, and autobiography, continue to be present but the title of his posthumous collection of short stories—Secreto (2007), taken from an unfinished story by the same name1—clearly resonates with one of the most widely studied aspects of Bolaño’s works thus far, evil2 and horror. At the same time, this title, El secreto del mal (The Secret of Evil), symbolically (though retrospectively) delineates a thematic trajectory that starts in Nazi and Distant—and not in Consejos, as Candia contends (2011, 32)—develops partially in Amulet, continues in By Night and reaches its full force in 2666 . This latter point, of course, has much to do with Bolaño’s well-known practice of working on several literary projects at the same time and with his intention to create what Dunia Gras has called “the total work” (2005). 3 It is interesting, furthermore, that Bolaño should locate the settings of his early fiction in Spain4 (except for Monsieur) and that he should conclude his narrative journey—The Third Reich, The Woes of the True Policeman, The Spirit of Science Fiction, Sepulcros de vaqueros, and whichever text 135

136   |  Chapter 4 comes out in the future notwithstanding—with an almost visceral return to Latin America (e.g., in Gaucho and 2666 5). He could have done it the other way around, but he did not, proving that no matter how distant he was in terms of space and time from Latin America, Latin America’s presence endured. What’s more, even though most of Bolaño’s short stories6 take place in Latin America (mostly in Mexico) and Spain,7 a historically specific event connected to Latin America becomes crucial even in stories located in Spain8 and elsewhere.9 Does this mean that the “post-nationalist” and “wordly” (Villalobos-Ruminott 2009, 194) character of his narrative disappears? Certainly not. But instead of focusing exclusively on the deterritorialized aspects of some of his works (e.g., Detectives and 2666 ), a more appropriate strategy might be to conceive of his narrative production overall as a wholeheartedly dialectical enterprise. Yes, Belano ends up in Liberia in Detectives, but his existential journey commences in Chile and continues in Mexico prior to his arrival in Europe. And in 2666 Europe converges in northern Mexico. In order to ascertain how this dialectics plays out, we may wish to explore, for example, whether the so-called narratives of emancipation have any place at all in Bolaño’s short stories, or whether, from the standpoint of a postmodern aesthetics of resistance, other, less grandiose accounts of liberation are proposed. In conjunction with this, it would also be interesting to investigate whether Bolaño’s narrative vision emphasizes difference or totality, and whether a sense of community is at all present even in the seemingly decentered worlds he creates in his stories. At the same time, attention needs to be paid to any sign of disenchantment with modernization as well as to the spaces and places that the characters of his works inhabit. Similarly, an examination of Bolaño’s short narrative must, of necessity, scrutinize the role that history plays in the construction of the fabula, especially in light of works where it is paramount, such as Distant and By Night. Although not systematically, these concerns are present in one way or another throughout the analysis of Llamadas, Putas, Gaucho, and Secreto. Research on Bolaño’s works thus far has focused mostly on his novels Distant, Detectives, Amulet, By Night, and 2666 , not on his short stories.10 However, some critical assessments of specific short stories, or specific collections of short stories, did appear in the first critical anthologies dedicated to his literary output11 and have recently appeared in new critical

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anthologies12 as well as in academic journals13 and books not dealing with his works directly.14 Similarly, and as might be expected, several, relatively small reviews were published in Chilean newspapers when the collections first appeared.15 In the existing critical corpus, some stories have received a great deal of attention—“The Insufferable Gaucho” especially, but also “Sensini”—while others have received less, for example, “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” “Murdering Whores,” “Last Evenings on Earth,” “Vagabond in France and Belgium,” and “Dance Card,” and yet others have been virtually ignored (“A Literary Adventure,”16 “Buba,” and “Police Rat,”17 to mention but a few). Understandably, when it comes to assessing the critical corpus of a given body of work, there is a clear distinction between general judgments of a text and more thorough, academically rigorous approximations. Before turning to my own analysis of Llamadas, Putas, Gaucho, and Secreto, therefore, I would first like to offer a very concise description of what in my view represent the most comprehensive analyses of some of the single stories published thus far, and then briefly allude to more general, yet critically pertinent assessments of some of the collections as a whole. Needless to say, critical assertions of Bolaño’s short stories are also found in studies not directly related to them.18 As stated above, of all of Bolaño’s short stories, “The Insufferable Gaucho” is the one that has attracted the greatest amount of critical attention. And no wonder, since, in writing this story, Bolaño was not only honoring Borges—the best Latin American writer in his view19 —but he was also, like the inorganic literary critic that he was, offering his own take on one of Borges’s favorite literary subjects: the gaucho. In her study of “Gaucho,” Juana Martínez analyzes what she regards as Bolaño’s own reaction concerning what Bioy Casares called “a process of agauchamiento”20 (2006, 233) taking place in the Argentina of the 1930s and which, in turn, had manifestations not only in Borges’s “The South” but also in the gauchesca (gaucho literature) texts of Ascasubi, Fidel López, and Estanislao del Campo earlier. Unlike these writers, who created literary gauchos because gauchos no longer existed in real life, Bolaño creates a fictitious gaucho because real-life Argentina’s dire economic crisis (1999–2002) becomes too hard to bear.21 Somewhat similarly to Martínez, Federico Pous (2008), besides analyzing the role of irony in “Gaucho,”22 also examines the subject of gauchesca literature, but he does so from the perspective of memory. In a process he calls a “literary inversion,” Pereda, the story’s protagonist,

138   |  Chapter 4 reinserts literature in the heart of a gaucho society that has little to do with fictitious gauchos. A lawyer-become-twenty-first-century-gaucho, he hosts friends from Buenos Aires in his home in the countryside as if they were instances of his literary memory. For his part, Luis Alejandro Nitrihual Valdebenito (2007) offers a more traditional comparison between Bolaño’s “Gaucho” and Borges’s “The South.” The Peruvian Gustavo Faverón Patriau (2008) presents what might be called an archeology of the story. The value of this article is that it goes beyond the familiar comparisons with “The South,” bringing to light hypotexts—or texts on which Bolaño’s story is based—not manifestly evident in “Gaucho” but written by writers Bolaño respected.23 He calls “Gaucho,” in fact, “a critical pastiche of all of them” (373), adding that Bolaño’s text “is mainly made up of literature . . . events . . . are meticulously intertextual and metaliterary” (401). Very much in line with my central argument, Julio Figueroa contends that Bolaño provides a new vision of the subject in “Gaucho.” This subject, located beyond both the defeat of the Revolution and Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–1983) but still victim of neoliberal practices, seeks an internal exile in the “pampa” due precisely to the state’s inability to improve the protagonist’s lot. The search for a new subjectivity which Figueroa calls “post-state” and “post-­ national” (2008, 156, 153), while redefining the concept of exile as “a sheer penchant for marginality” (152), frees the subject to construct a new type of nation where even if he is “less of a citizen,” he is “more political” (160). Ramiro Oviedo, who seems to conceive of the text as the testimony of a dying man—Bolaño himself, whom he calls “an essentially stateless and marginal writer” (2011, 323) 24 —examines the manifold stages of “the journey of agony” (320) that traverses Pereda and has much to do with Bolaño’s own poetics. In his analysis, the allusions to literature in general and to Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra in particular serve as a kind of “consolation of philosophy”25 for a dying man who, at least in this text and according to this interpretation, calls on literature to save the nation from the political.26 As noted, the other story by Bolaño that has elicited critical attention is “Sensini.” But in contrast with “Gaucho” fewer academic studies have been written about it even though it was published earlier. That said, it is indeed interesting not only that the first article on a single story was dedicated to “Sensini” but that, in the critical collection where it appeared, Territorios en fuga (2003), it comes right after Espinosa’s excellent introductory essay. In

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the article, critic Guillermo García-Corales argues that “Sensini” represents a type of “microcosm” (2003, 36) of Bolaño’s entire literary project. Cognizant of Argentinean writer Antonio Di Benedetto as a model for Sensini (37)—but possibly also literary figures such as Haroldo Conti and Rodolfo Walsh (38–39)—and of Chilean literary critic Rodrigo Cánova’s notion of orphanhood27 to define the then new Chilean narrative (39), GarcíaCorales establishes the patent connections in Bolaño’s narrative among politics, literature, and disenchantment. In the second study dedicated to “Sensini” to date, Diana Hernández (2010) explores Genette’s concepts of intertext and paratext present in the story, calling Bolaño a “a good postmodern writer” (166) who, in his allusions to Cortázar, Bioy, Sábato, and Mujica Lainez, is able to create “a narrative referential illusion” (167) by mixing fiction with reality. In terms of the biographical background for “Sensini,” she states that, after multiple searches and discussions by the author’s friends and editors, it has been determined that Bolaño met Di Benedetto at a literary competition where he, Bolaño, submitted a story titled “El contorno del ojo” (171). “Joanna Silvestri”28 (from Llamadas), “The Eye” (from Putas), “Whores” (from Putas), “Card” (from Putas), and “Labyrinth” (from Secreto) have also been the subject of single studies. In regard to “Joanna,” for example, Rosso examines the role this short story plays in the context of what he calls “the Wieder saga” (2002b, 58). Is it possible to narrate once one has seen the abyss? That is the question that this and other stories of the same ilk pose, according to Rosso. Concerning “The Eye,” Alvarado and Romero (2010) argue that exile is at the very heart of this story. In their judgment, Bolaño not only seizes “the ‘muffled voice’ of exiles” (161) but also shows that, ultimately, more than a physical displacement, exile is a moral and subjective experience (158). In “La princesa cyborg,” María Torres (2010) analyzes “Whores,” indubitably one of Bolaño’s most compelling stories. By conceiving of the female narrating voice as a cyborg, that is to say, as a “duality between organism and machine” (150), Torres is able to postulate the idea that the text contains a kind of feminism—or, rather, “multiple feminisms” (144)—that allows the narrating cyborg to completely transform the traditional myth of the prince and the princess. Paradoxically, contends the author, the cyborg makes herself into a liberated woman, although, as a prostitute, she is subjugated (150). In her study on Neruda’s role as a public figure María Luisa Fischer dedicates a section to Bolaño’s

140   |  Chapter 4 “Card,” calling it, quite appropriately in my judgment, not only “a reckoning with Neruda” (2008b, 1) 29 but also “a reckoning with his own generation” (7). Bolaño’s ultimate goal is to reject the religious attributes bestowed upon a figure whose image “one would have to revere” (7) and to whom, even so many years after his death, “it would be necessary to pay tribute” (7). The last single study dedicated to a short story by Bolaño to date is Fernando Moreno’s “Los laberintos narrativos de Roberto Bolaño” (2011), an analysis of “Labyrinth.” The reason the author alludes to Bolaño’s “narrative labyrinths” is because he maintains that the story’s narrator—described both as “voyeur” (334) and “clairvoyant” (335)—having started with an objective description of the photo he is looking at, proceeds with a subjective discourse that allows him to invent, suggest, and even present literary possibilities.30 Asserting that this particular story proposes “a labyrinthine space” (338), he concludes by affirming not only that “Labyrinth” constitutes “a paradigmatic text of Bolaño’s short story writing” (341) but that his “solidifying of a writing of the labyrinth” (341) makes him, more or less, one of the most prominent innovators of the short-story genre. To complete this succinct overview of critical assessments on Bolaño’s short stories, I turn to studies that present a broad evaluation of Llamadas and Putas.31 I follow a chronological order. It should not surprise us that some of these studies—for example, the four published in Manzoni’s 2002 seminal critical collection32 —are so compact; after all, her goal was to introduce Bolaño to the public by providing a general view of his work. As time has elapsed, however, more comprehensive critical assessments of the stories have become available. The first critical analysis in Manzoni’s collection is that of Juan Masoliver. One of Masoliver’s most apt insights is on Bolaño’s ability to create a literary space in which the normal and abnormal live side by side (2002c, 51), certainly a characteristic of the author’s overall oeuvre.33 Ignacio Echevarría, who provides the second assessment, underscores the phantomlike quality of all the characters of Llamadas, including Sensini, whom he calls “twice a ghost. Or thrice” (2002c, 54). Along the same lines, but opting for the phrase “a journey of sadness” to characterize the meanderings of the characters, he presents, in the third comprehensive appraisal of the stories, a description of Putas that several later critics of Bolaño’s work will echo. Echevarría writes, “In Bolaño’s work we can see . . . the castaway of a continent in which exile constitutes the

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epic figure of desolation and vastness” (2002a, 193). At the same time, he views the stories from Putas—but also those from Detectives—as playing a fundamental role in what he calls, agreeing with Gras’s, Antoine Ventura’s, and Ríos’s assessments, Bolaño’s “project of a totalizing novel” (193–94). The fourth critical evaluation of the stories in Manzoni’s study, that of Mihály Dés in relationship to Putas, also emphasizes the somber milieu of the stories in the text, resorting to expressions that, in time, will be taken up by Bolaño’s critics also, such as “a melancholic disappointment with a taste of defeat” (2002c, 197–98) or, in reference to “Gómez Palacio,” “Last,” and “Days of 1978,” 34 “autobiographically inspired stories overwhelmed by solitude and rootlessness” (198). 35 The first among subsequent and more exhaustive approaches to Bolaño’s books of short stories as a whole is Stéphanie Decante’s article, “Llamadas telefónicas: Claves para una escritura paratópica,” included in Moreno’s first critical anthology devoted to Bolaño’s work.36 Two ideas stand out in this article. First of all, the idea that the prominence of phone conversations—especially in stories such as “Llamadas telefónicas”37 and “Adventure”—allows for the presence of orality and a triviality whose tension with the strictly literary is the result of the search for a poetics. And, second, that the emphasis on writing in stories such as “Sensini,” “Enrique Martín,” and “Henri Simon Leprince”38 provides “a poetics of the entredeux, of the paratopia” (129), that is, a poetics where the narrator not only establishes a relationship with marginalized writers but the writers themselves, “pariahs of the canon and the hierarchy of the literary field” (130), maintain a kind of dialogue with more canonical literary figures. Decante Araya summarizes the dynamics of writing in these stories as “a very elusive writing” (2005, 134) that proposes “a worldview as an indecipherable text” (134). In his analysis of “Last”—referred to as a “chronicle of a disaster foretold” (37)—“Dentist,” and “Cell Mates,”39 Chris Andrews (2005)— who has translated several of Bolaño’s texts into English—proves that in the course of the diegesis there is a visible story that is steadily overtaken by another, more enigmatic one. The advent of this new story (or stories) in the middle of the narration, however, does not necessarily illuminate the mystery. Figueroa focuses his attention on the concept of exile, understood foremost as “a post-catastrophic experience” (2006, 89), 40 present in all the short stories in Llamadas and affecting both the characters and the narrators.41 The critic notes, “Every attempt to build identity in the stories from

142   |  Chapter 4 Llamadas . . . remains incomplete, and it rather aims to represent alienation, dispersion, the ‘not being anywhere’ of the I, of the subject” (93). María Eugenia Kokaly Tapia gathers the stories from Llamadas, Putas, and Gaucho under the rubric “a poetics of the periphery” (2008, 387) where the characters seek to willfully escape the center. For Ríos (2009a) what most characterizes Llamadas is the desacralization of literature that permeates the stories, where elements from science fiction or the erotic novel are no longer ancillary to the main story but rather central to it.42 The last two exhaustive approaches to Bolaño’s short stories published thus far—both dedicated to Putas—are by Raphäel Estève and Cristián Montes Capó. Estève, who, by the way, asserts that “in our opinion, a poetics of exile . . . characterizes Murdering Whores” (2011, 224), focuses on the presence of urban spaces within urban spaces, or what he refers to—following Foucault but also Deleuze—as “places-other” or “the resistant site of the urban space” (237). In the case of “The Eye,” for example, it is the brothel, and in the case of “Whores,” it is the stadium where Max is dancing, which he calls “symbolic heart of the urban space” (225). The second offers one of the most thorough and enlightening analyses of Putas yet. Availing himself of certain ideas of Benjamin, Adorno, and Agamben, Montes (2011) examines what he calls the problem of the “crisis of experience” (307) mainly in “The Eye,” “Last,” “Vagabond,” and “Dentist,” but also in “Whores” and “The Return.”43 This crisis of experience, according to the critic, is characterized by the following symptoms: the inability to coherently communicate a personal event (308), “a kind of muteness” (308) as well as the emergence of “a space of silence” (308) in the stories, the deterritorialization and the characters’ inability to establish social connections (309), “the annihilation of collective dreams” (310) as well as “the lack of certainties” (310); and, linguistically, “the crisis of the ability to narrate” (313) and “the imprecision of the speech act” (313) . Toward the end of his study, he concludes: “Bolaño’s writing shows how the decentering of the subject is linked to the crisis of experience and the impossibility of articulating life’s experience in a unifying story. What remains from the writing is the configuration of a split off subject who reveals, in turn, the limits of language” (316). 44 In many ways, this lived crisis to which Montes alludes has much to do with the postmodern condition as a whole. But so do some of the other topics discussed by critics, especially memory and exile, intertextuality, and

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the inclusion of nonliterary genres. These issues, of course, are also present in Bolaño’s novels and relate generally to the dynamics of postmodernism in literature. My own analysis will no doubt cross paths with them. However, my major focus is on how certain signs of resistance to what are intolerable situations lie at the very heart of the stories. This does not make Bolaño’s aesthetics modernist, certainly; neither does it make him a politically conservative writer. Yet, if we had to provide an answer to the first question posed above, that is, whether narratives of emancipation play a role in his short stories, we would have to say yes, they do, but neither in the Enlightenment nor in the modernist sense. Bolaño is a son of 1968 and 1973 and has no illusions regarding the redemption of human beings via the political. From this perspective, critics are justified in referring to his overall poetics variously as a poetics of defeat, disenchantment, pain, sadness, among others. I argue, nonetheless, that it is precisely out of the ashes of defeat, trauma, and disillusionment that Bolaño creates a narrative of emancipation (call it a postmodern narrative of emancipation if you will)45 that celebrates certain aspects customarily associated with postmodernism but without succumbing to either its lightness or playfulness. Concerning the subject of community, for example, one might contend that Bolaño erects a community of those who do not belong to a community: subjects living on the margins, exiles, poets, the unemployed, nomads, the psychologically unfit, and so on. But what distinguishes these characters from the so-called subaltern subject is that they do not seek agency; none of them claims one, and none of them wishes to change the world or their circumstances. This does not mean, however, that Bolaño favors difference and condemns totality (one of the other questions posed earlier). But it is a totality made up of differences, paradoxically. Regarding disenchantment with modernization and the spaces and places that the subject in the stories inhabits, one might say that the first is not tackled directly, while the second could arguably be tied to the first. In other words, although the issue of modernization may not be patently clear in the stories, modernization’s lacks are, thus the emphasis on spaces and places outside the center, such as the outskirts of the city, rundown neighborhoods within the urban space, abandoned buildings, towns located far away from the capital, among other locations. Finally, regarding the role of history (the last point alluded to above), it must be said that it plays a crucial role in several of the stories (and really in Bolaño’s oeuvre overall). Nonetheless, he does not conceive

144   |  Chapter 4 of history as triumphant or messianic like the modernists, but rather as trauma, history as the thorn in the flesh of the present, history as the cross that one must bear in order to continue to live. In what follows, I offer an analysis of the presence of history in Llamadas, Putas, Gaucho, and Secreto. Then, I scrutinize the types of community that some of the stories present. And finall , I center my attention on the places and spaces that the characters inhabit.

The Stubbornness of Chile’s September 11, 1973 In Bolaño’s short stories, history is rarely treated directly. At times, it weighs heavily on the characters’ present circumstances, other times it surges unexpectedly in their midst, and yet other times it is simply mentioned in passing. Furthermore, there is no intention on the narrative voice’s part to question a given historical event or to provide a different version of it through irony or parody; Bolaño does not delve into historiographical metafi tion, as indicated earlier. The ubiquitous historical episodes par excellence in his narrative are dictatorship and, directly related to it, the defeat of the Left in Latin America, although, occasionally, he also explores more contemporary historical situations (e.g., in the unfinished “The Troublemaker,” from Secreto). No other story illustrates so well how an event from the past exerts such an influence in the present—with the exception of “The Eye,” perhaps—than “Sensini,” the first one in Llamadas. Although it deals with an Argentine exile living in Spain, “Sensini” constitutes a microcosm of both the historical and political conditions of several countries in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their consequences. In the same way that the use of Vallejo in Monsieur or the allusion to Violeta Parra in Consejos is not accidental, neither is the use of proper names here. Videla (15), thus, stands for Jorge Rafael Videla, dictator of Argentina between 1976 and 1981, and Rodolfo Walsh and Haroldo Conti (15) stand for Argentine writers Rodolfo Walsh (1927–1977) and Haroldo Conti (1925–1976), respectively, both “murdered by the dictatorship” (15). The three, however, stand for dictators and disappeared artists throughout the continent. While the narrator narrates analeptically, the time of the diegesis extends foremost from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, when democracy returns to Argentina. Already in the first letter he sends to Sensini, the narrator tells him about “the Chilean and

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Argentinean political situation” (16) and he makes reference to the entrenched nature of the dictatorship in each country. Even though much of the text revolves around the issue of literature and publishing, his attention zeroes in on Sensini’s personal life, on his precarious existence as an exile in Madrid, and, above all, on his indefatigable search for his son, who had disappeared without a trace. The book’s epigraph by Chekhov, “Who better than you is able to understand my terror?,” finds a direct parallel in the text when the narrator imagines Sensini’s sister Miranda searching for his brother’s eyes in a poem he had written: “in search of Gregorio Samsa’s eyes which shone at the back of a corridor in darkness where the lumps of Latin American terror moved imperceptibly” (22). This “Latin American terror,” in turn, materializes when, finall , Sensini is informed that his son’s body has been found in a “clandestine cemetery . . . [in] a mass grave containing more than fifty cadavers of young people” (24), even if later in the diegesis the certainty of this discovery is put into question.46 What is important from the perspective of Bolaño’s use of history here is that events from the past, especially traumatic events, continue to haunt its victims in the present. When, toward the end of the story, Miranda pays a visit to the narrator, she confesses to him that her father “never recovered from Gregorio’s death” (26). The overwhelming feeling of melancholia that deeply afflicts Sensini is also experienced by Mauricio Silva, alias “The Eye,” but differently. Narrated by a homodiegetic narrator who, as it happens in several of Bolaño’s stories, uncannily resembles the author,47 “The Eye” tells the story of The Eye, a Chilean exile who lived in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Milan, and India. In a way, this story is made up of two stories: the one told by the narrator, and the (metanarrative) one told to the narrator by The Eye. As in “Sensini,” the narrator narrates retrospectively, and the temporal interval that separates the moment of the narrating from the moment of the story is quite long; significantl , “The Eye” also is the first short story in the collection (Putas). To a great extent, the first lines of the text could be read as Bolaño’s acerbic dictum with respect to the historical and political evolution of the Latin American continent. Declaring that The Eye did his best to avoid violence, he states, “But from violence, from true violence, it’s impossible to escape, at least those of us who were about twenty when Salvador Allende died” (11), an idea reiterated later (22) but with regards to a different type of violence. If in “Sensini” history is lived as trauma, the trauma of dictatorship here is

146   |  Chapter 4 compounded by the discrimination against The Eye for his purportedly homosexual orientation. The narrator criticizes The Eye’s leftist friends who “at least from the waist down [thought] in exactly the same way as people from the right who at the time lorded it over Chile” (12). In this first section of the story, the narrator becomes a sort of historian who also evaluates what happened after Allende’s overthrow, focusing specifi ally on Chilean exiles living in Mexico. As if to contest the veracity of what truly occurred in Chile during the 1973 coup d’état,48 he disclaims vainglorious statements from the Left as well as self-righteous statements from the Right by declaring that, in fact, resistance to the military was “more ghostly than real” (11), confirming not only what has been said by the participants themselves in documentaries such as Patricio Guzmán’s brilliant “La batalla de Chile” but also in well-documented histories of Chile.49 Oftentimes it is not easy to pinpoint Bolaño’s political position; however, criticism of certain segments of the Left from a left-wing point of view is evident in his works, as can be seen in the following quote: “I remember that we ended up ranting and raving about the Chilean left and that, at some point, I toasted to the wandering Chilean fighter , a large fraction of the wandering Latin American fighter , an entelechy made up of orphans who, as its name shows, wandered through the wide world offering their services to the highest bidder, who was always . . . the worst” (13–14). 50 The core of “The Eye,” nevertheless, lies really in the story within the story, and it has to do with “something terrible” (16), which The Eye shares for the first time with the narrator. In essence, he tells him about his oneand-a-half year stay in India, where he had been assigned to take pictures of a red light district for a French magazine reporting on prostitution and where he learns of a religious ceremony that involved the castration of a child in order that a god might inhabit his body. Once the child is incarnated by the god, The Eye continues, a celebration ensues and the child’s family, which is very poor, receives gifts; but after the festivities finish and the child is returned home, his family rejects him and he is forced to live in a brothel. The real moment of truth for The Eye comes when he rescues two children who are about to be castrated, escaping with them to another city and, eventually, becoming, in his own words, their “mother” (22). In the end, nonetheless, the two children die and he is utterly brokenhearted. At first sight, this story might be construed as a petite histoire (a short story centered on anecdotes and details) in which Bolaño seeks to give voice to

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a small group of children victims of antediluvian practices. But, in fact, the focus of “The Eye” is the protagonist’s suffering and his inability to stop violence. Following Freud’s 1915 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” we might argue that, while Sensini lived in a state of melancholia and was thus unable to heal psychologically, The Eye can begin his process of mourning only after he has shared his Indian account with the narrator. The implications of this story for an understanding of Bolaño’s poetics, however, are much broader. By tying the history of political violence (dictatorship) with the history of personal (gender violence) and social-religious violence, the Chilean-born author in some way universalizes violence just like he universalizes evil. But the point of departure, as always throughout his narrative, is Latin America and, specificall , what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973. The story ends with an inconsolable The Eye unable to stop crying about the death of his “children,” a death, needless to say, that is also the death of the socialist dream in Latin America and of all the young men and women who sacrifice their lives for it: “That night, . . . unable to stop crying for his dead children, . . . for his lost youth, for all the young people who were no longer young and for the young people who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and for those who were afraid to fight for Salvador Allende, he called his French friend” (25). One of these young people, named “U,” makes his appearance in “Days,” another short story from Putas. In large measure, this text belongs to the same group as “The Eye” and “Sensini,” but here the consequences of the traumatic event from the past reach their maximum force since, at the end of the fabula, U commits suicide. The predominantly heterodiegetic narrator51 focuses on the obsession that B, a Chilean exile living in Barcelona to whom the idea of ever returning to Chile seems awful (67) and who also resembles the author,52 has for U, another Chilean exile. B’s obsession is not gratuitous. In some sense, U is there to remind him of his own existential journey, of his own recent history. The more B tries to forget U, the less he is able to, “as if [U] were there to tell him something, something that’s important” (68). Much of the narration revolves around U, in fact, a “dead man walking” in every sense. He is a deeply wounded young man, a metaphor for the scars that a terrible event from the past can leave on a person’s psyche. In a sense, “Days” is Bolaño’s attempt to show that there is nothing heroic in the life of an exile.53 Ideologically, for instance, U is now a confused individual, since “he mixes up Marx with

148   |  Chapter 4 Feuerbach, Che with Franz Fanon, Rodó with Mariátegui [¡!], Mariátegui with Gramsci” (65). U’s visit to the concert of a “Chilean folk group” (66) whose members’ physical appearance—“guys with long hair and beard” (66)—is identical to his according to the narrator, symbolizes his utter inability to leave the past behind.54 Furthermore, besides having spent time in a psychiatric hospital and having attempted to murder his wife, the narrator imagines U, very much like the figure in Munch’s The Scream, running “through a vaguely Chilean, vaguely Latin American street, howling or uttering screams” (67). 55 As stated above, Bolaño is often critical of the political Left but from the left. Although this critical attitude is manifest to some extent already in some of his poetry as well as in some of his early narrative works, it is somewhat more pronounced in “Days.” If in “The Eye” the criticism is against Chilean exiles living in Mexico, here it is against those living in Barcelona. More pointedly, as he focalizes through B, who realizes that U belonged to a leftist party in Chile,56 the narrator informs the reader that B no longer sympathizes with U’s political party (66). And, in words that reflect what might be called Bolaño’s criticism of the Left from a left-wing perspective, he adds regarding B: “Reality, once again, has shown him that demagogy, dogmatism and ignorance are not the patrimony of any specific group” (66) By no means do I wish to give the impression that Bolaño’s criticism of the Left signifies his embracing of a more conservative ideology, or that, retrospectively, he blamed the Left in Chile for the arrival of the military.57 In fact, nowhere does he criticize the Allende government. Besides, he had already published Distant by the time his first two collections of short stories came out. In “Detectives” (from Llamadas), Bolaño’s most linguistically Chilean text,58 the past surges unexpectedly even though it cannot be said that history as trauma is completely absent from the diegesis. Two things stand out in this text. First of all, there is its autobiographical nature. In a story that is essentially a dialogue between two detectives, one of them suddenly recalls an Arturo Belano (125) who had moved to Mexico when he was fifteen and had gone back to Chile when he was twenty (124), having become a “political prisoner” (124) when they find him in jail, and who, surprisingly (and just like in real life), had been their classmate in a high school in the city of Los Angeles (125). What we have here besides the fact that Bolaño’s notion of time consists in “exerting violence upon the ‘civil time’ of clocks and calendars,” according to Ríos Baeza (2010,

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220), is not only another piece of the author’s biographical puzzle but also a kind of confirmation that what happened to the fictitious Arturo Belano also happened, or may have happened,59 to Bolaño. Of all the texts where Belano is either a character60 or a character who also recounts a story,61 and excluding those where B is a character62 as well as other autobiographical pieces,63 this is the only one that describes in some detail the traumatic event that comes back again and again in Bolaño’s narrative. Second, “Detectives” is a very critical assessment not only of Chile but also of what occurred in Chile in 1973. In point of fact, what triggers the dialogue between the detectives is an article claiming that while Americans like fir arms, Chileans, who are silent by nature, prefer “bladed weapons” (114). Not only is Chile a country of cowards64 where there aren’t “tough dudes” (117) with the exception of Belano—who “hobnobbed with the toughest” (125)—but, according to one of the detectives, Chile is a “country of cowards and murderers” (122). As much as there is a recognition on the part of one of the detectives that “the true tough guys of the homeland” (121) were assassinated during the dictatorship and others were simply “disappeared” (121), or that women were raped (123), and terrible interrogations (124) took place, a certain melancholic feeling prevails in their discourse. With regards to 1973, for example, one of the detectives states, “There is little to explain, but there is much to cry about,” (121), adding that the dead erupt into his dreams and declaring later, “at times I am under the impression that I am not going to be able to wake up, that I’ve already blown it forever” (121). The two aspects that characterize “Detectives” also distinguish “Card,” except that in the latter—its hard-to-classify nature notwithstanding (short story? autobiography? literary criticism? )—a fictitious Roberto Bolaño presents his own biography. Rojo refers to “Card” as Bolaño’s “draft for the memoirs that he never wrote” (2004, 202). But this text is also a reckoning with Neruda, as Dés (2002c) and Fisher (2008b) have argued, as well as palpable proof that it is certainly not easy for a writer to establish a literary genealogy, as Manzoni has contended. Indeed, “Card,” though seemingly simple, is too rich a text to be reduced to one or two interpretations. From the standpoint of Bolaño’s postmodernism, and specifically from his treatment of history, we could say that “Card” fulfills two missions: on the one hand, to reiterate the existence of the subject as an essentially historical entity linked to very specific circumstances;65 on the other, to connect the

150   |  Chapter 4 history of a particular country (Chile) to that of a continent (Latin America). Written at a time when Bolaño already knew that he was suffering from a terminal illness,66 this exceedingly autobiographical text might also be conceived as an effort to set the record straight. For instance, in reference to the time when he was arrested in 1973 (and assuming, of course, that he did travel to Chile that year), he is very clear: “I was not tortured, as I feared” (212). 67 But in prison he did hear the screams of those being tortured. Against those who, later on, have questioned Bolaño’s return to Chile in 1973, he writes, “In 1973 I went back to Chile in a long journey by land and sea” (210), 68 adding, “I wanted to participate in the construction of socialism” (211), a key piece of biographical information repeated both by some of his literary creations as well as by critics. Even though, unlike “Sensini,” “The Eye” and “Days” history here is not construed as trauma, some of the narration centers its attention on what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973, and on the consequences this event had in Latin America in general and its youth in particular. Echoing to some degree what the narrator of “The Eye” affirms regarding this fateful day in Chilean history, the narrator of “Card” describes Chile’s September 11th as being, “besides a bloody spectacle [also] a humorous spectacle” (211), stating not only that he forgot his password (211) that day but that he was in charge of defending an empty street in the company of fifteen-yea -olds as well as retired and unemployed comrades. As the biographical account progresses, nonetheless, it becomes more serious and more reflective. To the rhetorical question that the narrator himself posits, “Were Chileans of my generation brave?,” he replies, “Yes, they were” (212). He then proceeds to make mention of various female members of the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) 69 who had rats introduced into their vaginas70 as they were being tortured and who eventually died of “sadness”71 while in exile in Mexico. Toward the end of “Card,” what had been an autobiographical account that revolves around Neruda and poetry turns into a critical repudiation of recent Latin American history. Bolaño’s seemingly post-political position is also present here, however. For in the same way that the narrator condemns the fracturing of the Left by making reference to three Argentine brothers who died “attempting to make revolution in different countries in Latin America” (214) and who ended up betraying each other, he laments the fate of those who died in the struggle: “The children of Walt Whitman, José Martí, Violeta Parra; flayed, forgotten, in

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mass graves, at the bottom of the sea, . . . I think about poets who died in the torture rack, . . . about those who believed in the Latin American Paradise and died in the Latin American Hell. I think about those deeds that might allow the Left to come out of the hole of shame and ineffectiveness” (215). But, as stated earlier, the point of departure for criticism is always what happened in Chile, no matter how seemingly negligible a role this may play in the story’s diegesis. In “Snow” (from Llamadas), for instance, which, like “The Eye,” basically consists of a story told to the narrator, most of the action occurs in the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless Rogelio Estrada, the Chilean narrator at the metanarrative level—who comes from a proletarian family “with class-consciousness” (85)—is the son of one of the most prominent members of Chile’s Communist Party who had “a high position in Allende’s government” (85). As in other stories, there is an ironic and at times even humorous treatment of the Left in “Snow,” but of people on the Left and leftist institutions, not of leftist ideology or leftist ideals. Alluding to the days he and his family had to spend in the Soviet Embassy after the coup, for instance, Rogelio says, “Horrible . . . those people spent all day singing the International or the No pasarán. Anyway, a deplorable environment, like in a party of canutos” (86). 72 Later on, in reference to his father’s work in Moscow, he adds, “My father lived in a Moscow of papers and memoranda, the Moscow of bureaucrats, with orders, countermands, . . . internal quarrels, internal hatreds, an ideal Moscow” (88). The last two stories where Chilean history makes its appearance are “Last” and “Buba,” even though it plays a prominent role in neither one. What is important in terms of the subject under study in “Last,” however, are the autobiographical elements that are alluded to. I am referring, besides clear parallels between B’s biography and Bolaño’s biography,73 to the historical and political events that are emphasized by the heterodiegetic narrator regarding B, the protagonist. Upon arrival in Acapulco a year earlier, for example, B “knew that . . . in some way, he was saved. This happened in 1974” (54). When he tells his father about his trip to Chile, he summarizes it thus: “the Latin American flower wars. They almost killed me, he said” (59). Later in the story, when B’s father loses his wallet and he and his son jump into the water to fetch it, the narrator makes a clearly political comment connecting their situation to that of young leftist revolutionaries whose bodies were thrown from airplanes into the ocean by the military: “For sharks, . . . hell

152   |  Chapter 4 is the sea’s surface. For B (for most twenty-two-year-old young people), hell is sometimes the bottom of the sea” (55). In “Buba,” a story told retrospectively by a homodiegetic narrator from Chile to a nameless narratee, history and politics come together in a mystifying dream about the first statue of Che Guevara in Latin America outside Cuba and located in the narrator’s childhood neighborhood of “La Cisterna.” Narratologically speaking, and frequently with regards to dreams in Bolaño’s works, there would appear to be no clear connection between the metadiegetic narrative of the dream and the first narrative into which it is inserted. Nevertheless, the fact that in the dream, in the precise space that had been occupied by the statue of Che—a statue that “soldiers . . . blew up for good” before multiple “attacks” (151)—the narrator finds Buba, confirms, if not an illustrative function for the metanarrative, at least a thematic one. Buba’s substitution of Che, the number one symbol of the revolutionary Left in the 1960s, might mean the end of armed struggle as a means to achieve social equality. It is not accidental, in fact, that later on in the diegesis the narrator, a soccer player, states that he played for “Colo-Colo” before going into retirement, adding, ironically, “but no longer as an extreme left-winger, the life of an extreme left-winger is short” (169 ).74 But Buba’s replacement of Che might also signify the end of politics and the arrival of mass culture—soccer in this case—as the new religion. To conclude with this section on the treatment of history in Bolaño’s short stories, I now turn to the analysis of brief allusions to Latin America in “Prefiguration of Lalo Cura”75 (Putas), “Dentist” (Putas), and “Labyrinth.” This surely does not exhaust the author’s references to historical events; in effect, references to more current historical circumstances can be found in stories such as “Meeting with Enrique Lihn,”76 “Gaucho,”77 “The Troublemaker,”78 and “The Colonel’s Son” (Secreto),79 as well as in texts that, though of an essayistic nature, have been incorporated in some of his short-story collections, such as “The Myths of Cthulhu” (Gaucho),80 “Scholars of Sodom” (Secreto),81 and “Sevilla Kills me.”82 Nonetheless, as stated above, as much as Chile’s history represents the fulcrum of some of his narrative works, it almost always extends outside to Latin America in general. In “Prefiguration,” Lalo Cura,83 a homodiegetic narrator who narrates retrospectively and who addresses an unnamed narratee (105), recounts the story of “Productora Cinematográfica Olimpo,” a small fil studio specializing in the production of pornographic films in Colombia.

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What most stands out in this story is the depiction of Latin America as an almost premodern continent84 that Europe continues to exploit and where even the highest of aspirations end in naught. Speaking of his father, who was a priest and who may well be a reference to one of the most famous precursors of liberation theology in Latin America, the Colombian Camilo Torres, the narrator says: “My father disappeared in the Gospel. Latin America called him and he continued to slip away in the words of sacrifice until he vanished” (97). The core of “Prefiguration,” nevertheless, has to do with pornographic films, with Bittrich, a German film producer and occasional actor, and with Pajarito, a porn actor who, for some unexplained reason, is rejected by some (the police and the army) and liked by others (the women with whom he has sex). At first sight, the description of Pajarito by the narrator might give one the impression that he is a metaphor for Latin America’s lack of modernity. However, what Bolaño seems to be showing is not only that Latin America continues to serve as the entertainment industry for Europe but that even Europe, in the person of Bittrich and the twisted and perverse movies he makes, also harbors a premodern side. No doubt Benjamin’s idea that “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1968, 256) is present here in some way. Hence it is not an accident that, toward the end of the fabula, the narrator makes a statement that connects “Prefiguration” to 2666 at the same time that he reveals much about Bolaño’s worldview: “Now there’s no time to get bored, happiness disappeared somewhere on earth and only amazement is left. A constant amazement, made up of cadavers and ordinary people such as Pajarito” (112). Another story that explores the premodern geography of Latin America, and specifically that of Mexico, is “Dentist,” which will be analyzed more fully in the section on space and place later in this chapter. It suffices to note here, however, that, aside from the not so veiled clin d’oeil to Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude,85 there are two references that speak to Bolaño’s political stance. On the one hand, there is the recognition that time for big changes has passed. As the homodiegetic narrator provides a small summary of his life and that of his friend the dentist, he explains how “both of us try not to pay attention to the slow collapse of our lives, the slow collapse of aesthetics, of ethics, of Mexico, and our failed dreams” (187). 86 But on the other, the fact that his friend, in his spare time, works as a dentist for a medical cooperative that assists the poor and where “caring dentistry

154   |  Chapter 4 students, most of them from the Left” (176), also work. As regards “Labyrinth”—an extremely interesting story from the standpoint of Bolaño’s relationship to literature that, even if it resembles “Photos” closely, is a much more complex text structurally speaking—I find it significant that, in the very midst of a story containing multiple metanarratives, and all of them dealing with French authors, one of them should introduce a Central American writer. This writer stands at the opposite pole of the Guatemalan painter in Reyes’s metanarrative in By Night because, instead of showing the disaster he has seen, like the painter, he has the potential to produce it: “a potentially dangerous fellow” (79), says the heterodiegetic narrator of him. At the same time, in this Central American writer Bolaño has perhaps wanted to epitomize the nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American artist in general, enamored of French culture but unknown by it. From the point of view of the author’s continuous relationship to Latin America, and especially if one thinks of 2666, what is thought-provoking is that although certain signs of pain and horror are related to some of the French writers mentioned in the story, most of them have to do with the Central American writer.87 J. J. Goux, for example, dreams of a photo where a voice warns him about “the presence of the devil” (75). Julia Kristeva shows pain (88) in her face as she sleeps, while, inexplicably, blood comes out of Philippe Sollers’ index finge , and “the possibility of feeling fear draws nearer” (88) for Jacques Henric. In none of these cases is the information provided very extensive. The metanarrative on the Central American writer, nevertheless, is quite long (seven pages). Not only is he represented as sycophantic and obsequious, he is also depicted as resentful and dangerous. A “Pol Pot” who could “become an assassin without any problem whatsoever” (85) once he returns to Central America, states the narrator. As he leaves the offices of Tel Quel and comes across the (fictitious) writer Marie Thérese Réveillé, the latter “perceives a look of ferocity in his yes . . . and . . . discovers, behind the comfortable front of resentment, an unbearable well of horror and fear” (82). As we can see, even in a story like “Labyrinth,” where the diegesis does not revolve around history, history still erupts as an unexpected presence; and Bolaño once again manages to build a bridge between Europe and Latin America. The concern with history, which is neither parodic nor playful, has its genesis in the overthrow of Allende’s government on September 11, 1973, and is almost never expressed directly. Instead, the Left’s

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defeat and the dictatorship that followed act either as traumatic events that overwhelm the lives of characters in the present or emerge in the least expected moments of the diegesis. In what follows, I provide a mapping of the types of community that Bolaño constructs in his stories.

A Profile of Unassembled Communities The building of community, of course, seems antithetical to postmodernity, as I suggested earlier, so in what sense can it be reasoned that Bolaño crafts certain kinds of communities in his novels and short stories? As expected, these are not communities necessarily tied to fixed geographical locations; nor are they virtual communities or networks. They are, rather, communities of the heart, if you will, and they do not of necessity entail the presence of groups of people. In fact, they are usually formed by no more than two or three individuals. It is by giving life to their interaction that a community is created. From this perspective, more than represent a given community, Bolaño creates one made up of individuals not belonging to a traditional community. In some sense, needless to say, I construe the term community metaphorically here. Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) speak of “lifestyle enclaves” and “communities of interest,” and Michel Maffesoli (1996) has developed the notion of “emotional communities” where what brings individuals together are not obligations and responsibilities but rather feelings and emotions. This is the territory that most of Bolaño’s characters occupy. More specificall , I see basically two dynamics being played out in his short stories surrounding the issue of community. On the one hand, by the mere fact of portraying characters, most if not all marginalized from the mainstream, the Chilean-born author seeks to create a species of community of the sad ones, or a community of the misplaced ones, in the same way that, throughout most of his oeuvre, he also pursues, by simply mentioning their names at times, a community of minor or forgotten authors. On the other hand, Bolaño pursues the creation of a community based on literary tastes and preferences but also personal likes and dislikes. At times these two dynamics coexist, as we shall see. In what follows, I focus on stories dealing with subjects involved in very strange relationships and who seem lost and despondent; I then analyze texts that depict individuals living at the margins of society. And, finall , I concentrate on stories that have literature at its core.

156   |  Chapter 4 Three stories stand out foremost in the first category, and they are all from Llamadas: “Calls,” “Mates” and “Clara.” A cursory reading of these stories might lead one to conclude that they are about failure and defeat in the sense that they dramatize precarious relationships, making them thus incontrovertible products of a postmodern rather than a modernist moment. However, while this is true to a great extent, it is also evident that there is a certain desire on both the author’s and the narrator’s parts to resist this state of affairs. In “Mates” and “Clara,” for example, a homodiegetic narrator recounts personal stories that took place in the past, reconstituting via analepsis love relationships with Sofía and Clara, respectively. It is interesting that, while delving into the past, a past that in these two texts can stretch all the way to the present of the narration, the narrators should zoom in on such hopeless characters. Does this mean that, in the presumably unstable present circumstances of the narrator, the past, no matter how disturbed, how strange, confers a kind of solidity, a kind of refuge? Certainly. But there is also the matter of establishing a communion with the past in order to perhaps illuminate the present of the narrating voice, at least as far as “Calls” is concerned. At the same time, is not Bolaño, here as elsewhere in his works, propounding, or at least reflecting on, a species of ars amatoria for times when, irrespective of its myriad of shortcomings, love would appear to be the last bastion of stability? Possibly.88 Though it is ultimately not clear in “Calls” whether X’s assassin is B, her boyfriend, what is clear is that B seeks to resuscitate a very old love relationship with X in order to palliate his current unfortunate state of mind.89 The problem, however, is that, not only does the relationship become “problematic and intense” (63) but, also, X appears to be in a more deplorable emotional state than B, displaying typical signs of depression: “each day X borders on suicide, . . . she often cries” (63). As it happened the first time, X terminates her relationship with B. But B continues to call her in a seemingly vain effort to resume the relationship. Intent on seeking what Octavio Paz has called “an aristocracy of the heart”90 with X, B persists in his efforts. The harder he tries, nevertheless, the more elusive she becomes: “X’s attitude becomes colder every day, as if, with each call, B were distancing himself in time” (64). Apart from the fact that B lives in Barcelona and must travel a long distance by train to visit X, not much information is given about either of them, save that she has a brother. In the end, they are both depicted almost as phantom-like characters; there is no mention, for

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example, of what each does to make a living or about their social relationships. The major focus of “Calls” is B’s attempt to communicate with X and ultimately failing to do so. In some sense, it could be argued that B and X belong neither to modernity nor to postmodernity, indeed as if they carried out an existence outside of history. But this, needless to say, is impossible, so perhaps a better hypothesis might be that, on the contrary, as Spain began to leave behind Franco’s long dictatorship, certain segments of the Spanish population were not appropriately integrated into history and had no choice but to look for solace within smaller communities, even if that meant going back to the past and finding one single individual The title “Cell Mates” appropriately conveys this idea. As in “Calls,” in this story a certain type of community is established between the narrator and Sofía. However, even though there are certain similarities between Sofía and X, there are also some differences. Sofía appears to suffer from schizophrenia and psychological trauma, not from depression. She speaks, for instance, of monsters, conspiracies, and assassins (144). A significan common denominator between the dramatized narrator and Sofía, nonetheless, is what happened to each in the past, specifically in November 1973: “In November 1973, while I was in Chile, [Sofía] was imprisoned in Aragón” (137). Like other texts by Bolaño, therefore, “Mates” is also very autobiographical: “At times I would imagine Sofía in jail, in Zaragoza, in November 1973, and I would imagine myself, in custody during a few but decisive days in the Southern Hemisphere, around the same time” (142). What is the significance of this coincidence? The fact that here community is established through the sharing of a past historical event that, in large measure, still marks the lives of both the narrator and Sofía in the present. Among other things, this story speaks of what occurs after political defeat, creating, on the one hand, a community of the defeated and, on the other, depicting the heavy psychological toll caused by oppression. Sofía’s favorite author is David Cooper, who, in Argentina, administered “hallucinogens” (140) to “leftist militants . . . People who would get sick because they knew they could die at any moment” (140). At the same time, not only does she eventually marry someone who had also been imprisoned in 1973 (138) but also falls in love with a member of the Communist Party at some point (140). 91 Most of the narration revolves around Sofía’s état d’esprit (state of mind), presenting a character on the brink of going crazy, frequently sick, as elusive as X, and, toward the end of the diegesis, “thinner than ever”

158   |  Chapter 4 (146), with “a gloomy or reflective or sick face” (147). It is interesting— and surprising, really—that the story concludes with the narrator and Sofía going out to have pizza, leaving open the possibility that she had killed her boyfriend and that she kept his body inside the locked room that the narrator saw. The last story in this category centers on Clara, a woman from southern Spain with whom the homodiegetic narrator had a relationship in the distant past. While it is interesting that, frequently, the women with whom the protagonists of Bolaño’s works have romantic liaisons come from southern Spain92 —a fact that probably has to do with the traditional movement of immigrants from Andalucía to northern Spain, particularly Barcelona, in search of jobs—it is even more telling that, in some way, narrators recount their past love relationships as both compensation for lack of community in the present as well as catharsis. In the case of “Clara,” the retrospective of her life that is provided is also in some sense a reflection of the narrator’s own life. The latter, in fact, appears stuck, unable to move away from Clara, as if the communion he establishes with her by recounting her life justified his own existence. Paradoxically, nonetheless, there appears to be a clear disconnect between Clara’s own nomadism, her own restlessness and inability to be happy and satisfied 93 and the narrator’s insistence on clinging to the fleeting stability they once shared: “On one occasion I became nostalgic and tried to recall past days, but Clara would then cover herself with an ice shield and it wouldn’t be long before I would abandon my nostalgia” (157). Furthermore, although the narrator does not judge Clara’s decisions, some of his statements reflect a kind of disenchantment with what often awaited Spain’s youth in the 1970s and 1980s, a vision similar to the narrator in Consejos. Specifically in connection with Clara’s academic pursuits, for example, he states acidly, “All those one-year careers and a diploma and promises of work to which desperate young people rush head or ass long” (151). To a large extent, the protagonists of “Calls,” “Mates,” and “Clara” could all be said to be “desperate young people” in search of community. Now, if Bolaño thematizes community by fictionalizing dysfunctional relationships, he also creates community by simply representing the lives of individuals whose behavior does not easily conform to society’s expectations. In this second category dealing with community, the following stories stand out: “Joanna” and “Anne Moore’s Life” 94 from Llamadas; “Whores,”

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“Prefiguration,” and “Return” from Putas; and “Jim” and “Gaucho” from Gaucho. When I say that the characters in these stories do not follow society’s dictates, I mean that they engage in activities condemned by many (“Joanna,” “Prefiguration,” and “Return”) or, tired of their circumstances, they simply leave everything behind (“Gaucho” and “Jim”). In other instances, nonconformity and marginality have to do with an existential stance rather than with an economic situation (“Life”). But whatever the characters’ motivations might be, Bolaño creates a sort of community by the mere fact of representing them and conferring upon them a kind of respectability. Take, for example, “Joanna” and “Prefiguration.” Both stories deal with pornography. In the first, Joanna Silvestri, an actress in pornographic film who appears for the first time in the eighth chapter of Distant95 in connection with the search for Carlos Wieder, reminisces about a trip she took to Los Angeles in 1990. Although this Joanna and the one from Distant are essentially the same character and speak from the same location (a clinic in Nîmes)—“Here I am, Joanna Silvestri, 37 years old, porno actress, prostrated . . . listening to the stories of a Chilean detective” (159)—in “Joanna” the focus is not Wieder (or R. P. English, Wieder’s alias in both texts) but the porn industry in general and Jack Holmes, one of the industry’s most accomplished stars, in particular. Not only does the subject of community in this story play a role because it portrays a slice of life of a retired porn star who narrates retrospectively about the good old times; community is also emphasized by the narrator through the partial depiction of the daily lives of porn actors and actresses, directors, the shooting of scenes, and, especially, her reencounter with Jack. The heart of the story, as a matter of fact, lies there, in the communion Joanna establishes with him during those few days in 1990 several years after they last saw each other. No longer his old self, possibly afflicted with AIDS and living in a dilapidated house, the only thing that, according to the narrator, has not changed, is what she calls Jack’s “great drilling machine” (167) in reference to his penis96 ; except that he is no longer interested in sex: “According to him, he was now dry after so many movies” (167). Ironic or not, here—as well as in his entire oeuvre it has to be said—Bolaño confers a kind of primacy to sex. Sex for him is indeed redemption (Ríos 2013, 137). 97 If in other, more “respectable” activities success is measured in terms of money and degrees, in the pornographic world success is measured in terms of sexual

160   |  Chapter 4 prowess. Three different instances confirm this in the story’s diegesis. When Jack shows up unexpectedly as Joanna is shooting a sex scene, she states that a “luminous silence” (169) was created on the set and that Jack’s presence there “seemed to sanctify our film and our work and our lives” (171). Then, when Jack and Joanna attend a party, “everybody knew Jack or wanted to know him and got close to him” (171). And, finally and most important, Joanna confesses to feeling happiest in Jack’s company. “I knew that that was true” (169), she states, claiming to have reached “a form of solidifi ation” (172) when she said goodbye to him. In “Joanna” Bolaño manages to do two things: to represent a rarely represented community and, within that community, to depict a relationship not based on sex but on a form of love and understanding. The respectability alluded to earlier appears to be absent in “Prefigur tion”; a sense of community, however, is not. But, once again, this is a community of those who do not belong to a community stricto sensu. And who are they? The narrator puts it somewhat crudely: “Young mestizos, blacks, whites, American Indian, children of Latin America whose only wealth was a pair of balls and a penis cracked by the elements”98 (106–7). Earlier, it was suggested that one might easily conclude that Pajarito is a metaphor for Latin America’s lack of modernity; it could also be postulated that the story itself is an allegory for the continent in general. Often Bolaño does not display a very positive view of Latin America,99 as much as, paraphrasing Maristain’s assessment of Volpi’s words, “He truly considered himself a Latin American” (2012, 238). At the beginning of “Prefiguration, for example, there is a statement that pretty much condenses his Weltanschauung overall but which has especial resonance vis-à-vis the continent: “That is what it boils down to. To come closer or to move away from hell” (97). If this is the state of affairs the narrator describes, where is the way out one wonders? Fraught with ambiguities, characterized by a language that always means more than what it says, later in the fabula one gets the impression that danger is always around the corner in the continent: “The misery of life in Latin America. Like a tiny bird in front of a serpent” (100). Then, the narrator makes a few interesting statements as he summarizes various pornographic films made by the German director. In reference to one of them, he declares, “There’s the solitude to which I was alluding” (107), proceeding to wonder what it was that Bittrich was trying to do: “To justify amnesia, our amnesia? . . . To simply show us an uncircumcised penis

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dripping in the vastness of the continent? A feeling of useless grandeur by beautiful young people without scruples destined for sacrifice: to disappear in the vastness of chaos? Who knows?” (107). Multiple ideas are encapsulated in this quote. Most important, of course, the idea that the young sacrificed their lives for their ideals (an idea best represented in the last section of Amulet), but also the idea that the forgetting of the past constitutes the very nature of the present in Latin America. “Vastness of the continent” and “to disappear in the vastness of chaos” make one think of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring his Son,” a monstrous continent that condemns its inhabitants to a permanent state of defeat and destitution. In this regard, “house of solitude” (98) or “house of crime” (98, 112), the place where Bittrich made his porno movies, would be no more than a microcosm for a community involved in its own self-destruction. A version of community connected to the two categories examined thus far is exemplified by two short stories from Putas, “Return” and “Whores.” Concerning the first, what most stands out is not the fact that France’s most famous fashion designer enjoys having sex with the bodies of dead men but rather the reason that leads him to do so and the relationship he starts with the homodiegetic narrator. The narrator, who has just died and speaks from the afterlife,100 does not condemn Villeneuve, the fashion designer, when the latter proceeds to violate his cadaver. In fact, once in his presence he realizes that Villeneuve is, contrary to what might be expected given his reputation, “very shy” (136) and afflicted by a “deep-rooted solitude” (144) and a “chronic insecurity” (144). He aptly compares Villeneuve’s look to that of an “unprotected boy” (137) who, even when he violates his body, he does so tenderly, apologizing afterward: “Villeneuve hugged me, caressed me, kissed me chastely on the lips” (139). At the end of the diegesis, the narrator decides to stay with Villeneuve, alleviating thus the latter’s stark solitude. The ultimate point of this story is to show that community does not necessarily have to be comprised of more than two individuals, and that the desire for company and understanding is often stronger than social and political ideas. This desire for company and the narrator’s “deep-rooted solitude” (120) are especially present in “Whores,” except that no happy ending is to be found here. The meeting between the homodiegetic narrating voice, a young woman living on the outskirts of the city who describes herself as “young and useless” (114), and Max, a young man who displays neo-Nazi sympathies clearly,101 ends badly for the latter.

162   |  Chapter 4 No doubt, “Whores” could be read as a feminist text in some way. It is she, the narrator, after all, “an impatient princess” (114), who brings him, a “deaf prince” (125), back to her “castle” (127). But if death awaits Max it is in large measure because he neither understands nor values women.102 If she seeks Max, it is because of her pain (125), and if women in general, the narrating voice indicates, seek prince charming, it is due to their despondency. “Women,” she tells Max, “are murderous whores, . . . monkeys shivering with cold who contemplate the horizon from a sick tree, they are princesses who look for you in the dark, crying, inquiring the words they could never say. In misunderstanding we live and plan our lifecycles” (122–23). No feminist manifesto here, certainly. At the same time, as in the rest of the stories examined thus far, no economic or political reasons for the characters’ malaise are presented. One is all too conscious, nonetheless, that, at least in the case of Max and his friends, their Fascist inclinations are very much tied to issues of economic marginality and lack of opportunities, aggravated by the arrival of immigrants from Eastern Europe, northern Africa, and South America to Spain and other European countries in the 1990s. Up until now, attention has been focused on stories that have some type of relationship at its core; in other words, community construed as “emotional community.” Before turning to the subject of “literary community,” the last category of community in this chapter, let us broach stories whose characters do not seem to fit in or have opted to either leave mainstream associations or start new ones. “Life” is a good example of the first, while “Gaucho” and “Jim” are good examples of the second. In “Life,” a story with certain autobiographical overtones,103 a homodiegetic narrator recounts the nomadic life of Anne Moore. Even though, from an economic standpoint, Anne is not a marginal individual—her trips are plentiful (Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, Spain, Africa) and money is clearly not an issue—she is without question one of the best examples of what might be called an aesthetics of movement in Bolaño’s narrative. The characters, in other words, are involved in a perennial search for an existential territory, be it literary, political, or whatever. She, like the postmodern individual par excellence according to Jameson, truly lives in a kind of perpetual present. What most characterizes Anne’s existence is her permanent dissatisfaction, her omnipresent ennui, her inability to put down roots.104 Of her, in fact, one could say what Rimbaud’s sister Isabelle said in an 1892 letter

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regarding her recently diseased brother Arthur: Anne suffers, just like the poet, from “a passion for walking” (Rimbaud 1972, 736). Furthermore, similar to some of the characters examined earlier—Clara, for example— Anne has psychological issues105 and also becomes psychically sick. However, more than disenchanted, she appears restless and lacking a clear sense of direction; in this regard, Anne is clearly a postmodern character. The small communities she does build in the course of her life are evanescent, temporal, ephemeral, and comprised of several isolated individuals, but they are still communities, just like in the case of the characters examined above. In some cases, nevertheless, leaving one’s own community appears as the only way out in Bolaño’s short stories. In “Jim,” the character on whom the homodiegetic narrator focuses his attention—a North American, just like Anne—is a former marine who fought in Vietnam and, like so many foreign writers before him (Malcolm Lowry and André Breton come immediately to mind) is fascinated by the country to the south, Mexico. What distinguishes Jim most is his sadness. In fact, the story starts thus: “Many years ago I had a friend called Jim and since then I have not seen again a sadder North American. I have seen many desperate ones. Sad, like Jim, none” (Gaucho 11). The questions to be posed, of course, are: what has brought this former marine, who is also a poet, to Mexico City? Is it the need to abandon a modern country and the desire to participate in a different, less formal sort of society? Is it the wish to, as he himself claims, search for “the extraordinary” (11)? Is it the craving for a warmer, more humane community? Is the south, simply, the north’s other, necessary side? Each of these questions can be answered positively. In the story, Jim’s attention is totally focused on a fire eater in the street, and he cannot move away from him, it is as if he were waiting for a sign. “Mexico’s spell had trapped him and he was now looking straight at the faces of his ghosts” (13), states the narrator. Although, at the end of the fabula, the latter takes Jim away from the scene at the precise moment when the fire eater was going to throw fire at him, one could probably argue that, in the fleeting, spellbound encounter between the two, a sort of communion is temporarily established, even if this communion conceals another, potentially dangerous reality. The ultimate idea, indeed, is that in Bolaño’s narrative violence can never be escaped. Does not Pereda, in “Gaucho,” escape a kind of state violence and seek refuge in the pampa, as Figueroa has suggested? Yes. The

164   |  Chapter 4 reader is informed, as a matter of fact, not only that Pereda avoided becoming involved in politics (15) but that, whenever politics came up, his body “tightened as if he were being administered an electric shock” (19). The major difference among Anne, Jim, and Pereda, however, is that he leaves the city (Buenos Aires) not to roam indefinitely but to join, paradoxically, a new, older community, a gaucho community. One could in effect argue that Pereda exchanges postmodernity for premodernity, or neoliberalism for an economy based on the palpable exchange of goods where all that is solid—not the least of which are the rabbits that had substituted the horses and cows of old—will not melt into air. At the end of the fabula it is thus not surprising that, confronted with the dilemma of returning to the pampa or staying in Buenos Aires, he chooses the former, where a new type of community can still be built. The last section dealing with the subject of community in this chapter concerns stories that revolve around literary matters: “Sensini,” “Henri,” “Enrique,” and “Adventure,” from Llamadas, and “Gómez,” “Vagabond,” and “Photos” from Putas. Although the “literary” in Bolaño could be said to be a hero with a thousand faces amenable to multiple critical approaches—as has been suggested more recently by Alberto del Pozo Martínez’s 2014 study—here I wish to explore the ways in which literature and literary activity serve the purpose of configuring a type of community. In each of these stories, a rapprochement motivated by a predilection or fascination with a certain writer or group of writers takes place. Contrary to what one might think in the case of an author utterly imbued with the literary field in general, it is not always a specific kind of literature that brings writers together, their particular literary aesthetics, say, but rather their biographies and even their personalities. Though this might not be the case of Henri Simon Leprince or Enrique, whom Decante Araya calls “ghost-like writers” (2005, 126), it is partly the case of Sensini, another “ghost-like writer” according to Decante, as well as Henri Lefebvre from “Vagabond” and to some extent A from “Adventure.” In “Sensini,” even though the first contact between Sensini and the narrator occurs in the literary terrain—the latter had already read a novel written by the former and had a clear idea of where to place him in relation to novelists such as Cortázar, Bioy, and Sábato, among others (14)—it is really not Sensini’s literary aesthetics that brings them together as much as the narrator confesses to prefer him to Rodolfo Walsh and Haroldo Conti

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(15), and as much as he is all too happy to be included in a book that also includes a story by Sensini (14). Neither is it “the world of literature” (19), which Sensini deems “terrible” and “ridiculous” (19). 106 What does bring these two “scalpers” (28) together is Sensini’s “economic contingencies” (23) and the narrator’s need to make a living. A communion between the two, sustained solely through letter writing, becomes progressively stronger as they each tell the other where to send their stories and what the best strategies to win literary prizes are. Even when the narrator stops sending stories to literary contests, their friendship continues to deepen, sharing personal information about each other’s lives and each inviting the other to visit his city. Although they never actually meet, a kind of community that has its genesis in a literary endeavor is created. Something similar occurs in “Vagabond,” except that in this story, B, the protagonist (who resembles Bolaño greatly107 ), does not have a personal relationship with the author with whom he seeks to commune, Henri Lefebvre108 —who appears in Skating for the first time (178). Indeed, Lefebvre has been long dead at the time the story takes place. And, what’s more, connecting the theme of community with the previous topic discussed in this chapter (history), the extradiegetic narrator observes that he died in 1973, “That is: he died the year the Chilean military carried out a coup d’état” (84). So what is the importance that these two subjects be connected and how is a literary community established here? What prompts B to search for Lefebvre is that, of all the writers that appear in a magazine he is reading (Luna Park), including Sophie Podolski, he is the only one whom B does not know. Bolaño, thus, seeks communion with minor or unknown authors not only to rescue them from oblivion109 but also to imagine a kind of literary coterie with them by writing about them. “Vagabond,” as a matter of fact, has much to do both with B’s search for and obsession with Lefebvre, about whom he reads incessantly when he is in Paris, and with a slew of seemingly innocuous references to facts that take him back to his Chilean experience in some way: his going to bed with the daughter of a Chilean exile, his finding a history of the 1973 coup as well as a book on the Mapuches in her apartment (85–89), and his insinuating that he was in Chile in 1973 (93). 110 From the point of view of Bolaño’s literary poetics, however, what is important beyond the incessant meanderings of this postmodern flanêur is his concern, his preoccupation, and his desire to establish some type of link with Lefebvre and the historical coordinates of the Popular Unity

166   |  Chapter 4 government’s project of creating democratic socialism. When, at the end of the fabula, M, the daughter of the Chilean exile, asks him why he worries so much about Lefebvre, he replies, simply, “Because no one else does . . . And because he was a good man” (96). 111 “Adventure” is a story where the concept of community is sandwiched, so to speak, between the strictly literary and the biographical, unlike the other stories included in this section. The point of departure is certainly literary, but it becomes personal from the very beginning. Although we cannot explore thoroughly here the richness of this story in terms of the light that it shines upon an understanding of Bolaño’s concept of literature and especially the literary institution, it suffices to state the following: The theme of community that is broached in this extradiegetic narration also has its genesis in an obsession (like in “Vagabond”), but B—the major focalized character whose biographical resemblance with Bolaño is less prominent than in “Vagabond”112 —does know the author who obsesses him, A. In fact, it is A’s public persona, manifested not only in his writings but also in the media, that motivates B to write a text where he satirizes him. What B most dislikes about A, declares the narrator, is that A “pontificates about everything that exists, human or divine, with academic tediousness, with the mood of someone who has used literature to reach a social position, a respectability” (52). This, in turn, is directly related to the major differences between the two. Even though both come from “families of the petite bourgeoisie or a more or less well-off proletariat” (52), and although “both are leftist” (52), A is famous, rich, and well known—“the greatest ambitions (and in that order) to which a man of letters can aspire” (52)— and B is not. Community, in “Adventure,” is thus created by opposition and even by duality. Indeed, A does not realize that B is making fun of him (A) in the book that he is writing and that he, A, is reviewing, and he praises it highly. Furthermore, he begins to write positive reviews of all of B’s books with the same tenacity that B continues to read everything A publishes. Apart from the fact that, in Bolaño, literature is often a pugilistic affair— later in the diegesis, in fact, at a party, B fears that A “must be armed” (58) 113 —and leaving aside the issue of the double in Bolaño’s aesthetic (Stein and Soto in Distant, among several other instances), what is interesting in this story is that the less known writer becomes better known thanks to the famous author whom he dislikes and yet appears to envy. Consequently, is “Adventure” a story about the envious writer? Is it one about the

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complicity between writer and critic? Is it about the process of reading in general and accidentally fi ding the mock reader in Gibson’s (1996) sense or the implied reader in Booth’s (1961)? The text dramatizes all these issues, surely. But what stands out most from the perspective of community, and what is most ironic, is the fact that, while it is true that A’s favorable reviews constitute a kind of reward for B’s “so many years of work and anonymity” (57), it is also true, as B postulates, that A wishes to “to stick to his work like a limpet” (56), which means not only that the well-placed writer also needs the lesser known one but that he might be the only one who understands his literary message. Indeed, at the end of the fabula, when B finally meets A, the latter asks him, “Finally, . . . how are you?” (62), as if he had been waiting for him for a long time. In the next stories to be analyzed—“Henri” and “Enrique,” respectively—the literary weighs more heavily than the biographical but the latter still plays a role. In the first, for example, it is really never clear why Leprince is not liked. Is it because of the quality of his writings—writings about which the reader is given no information whatsoever—or is it because of his personality? “There’s something . . . in [your] face, in the way [you] speak, in [your] look, which brings about the rejection of most people” (35), he is bluntly told by a young novelist toward the end of the fabula.114 Of the three writers Decante Araya calls pariahs, Sensini, Enrique, and Leprince (130), Leprince is indubitably the one who best incarnates her classification. “His presence provokes an untranslatable, an unclassifiable rejection” (33), states the extradiegetic narrator, describing him in such a way that one is often tempted to see Wieder in Leprince.115 In the context of the story, Leprince does not really exist as a writer, meaning that his writings are unknown to established writers.116 It is only when the Second World War explodes and he is put in the predicament of having to work either for the Resistance or collaborate with writers who support the Vichy Regime that he becomes relatively visible. Indeed, he turns down an offer by the collaborationists and seeks community with the Resistance in order to enter their circle—that is the impression one gets, anyway—helping a poet and an essayist escape Nazi persecution.117 No doubt, there appears to be a not-so-veiled condemnation here of writers who, lacking creative ability, use other means to become known. But despite certain superficial parallels between Sensini and Leprince (and Bolaño)—the publishing of poems and stories in lesser magazines, for example—what stands out most

168   |  Chapter 4 in Leprince’s case is the bad quality of his literature: “Of course, [Leprince] is a failed writer, that is, he survives in the rotten Paris press and publishes poems (that bad poets consider bad and good poets do not even read) and short stories in magazines from the provinces . . . His manuscripts are always rejected (30) . . . Allusions to his person are scarce, allusions to his work nonexistent” (33). Here too one might ask, is this repulsion due to the nature of his aesthetics? After all, the narrator tells us that Leprince reads Stendhal and even Daudet’s father but condemns the surrealists (30). Toward the end of the diegesis, a necessary community between good and bad writers is finally proposed: “In his heart, Leprince has finally accepted his condition of bad writer, but he has also understood and accepted that good writers need bad writers even if only as readers or squires” (35). 118 In “Enrique,” the literary has definitely much more saliency than the biographical. A homodiegetic narration related through an analepsis by no other than Arturo Belano and, consequently, peppered with autobiographical information,119 this story has to do, on the one hand, with a theory of poetry, and on the other, with a certain aspect of the literary institution. In fact, the two are closely related. Now, what sorts of communities are confi ured here? First of all, the community of poets, a community which, predictably in Bolaño, is associated both with youth and, above all, with suffering and endurance: “A poet can endure anything” (37), states Belano.120 Even though the question of who gets included in an anthology and who does not is present in the text—Belano’s poems, for example, are not incorporated into Enrique’s anthology because another Chilean told him that “two Chileans were too many Chileans” (38)—the core of “Enrique” resides in Enrique’s desperate search for the narrator’s blessing of his poetics. Belano, however, does not like his poetry: “His poetry in Spanish was willful and affected and often clumsy, devoid of any hint of originality” (37). He criticizes Enrique’s poetry—though he is careful not to sound critical—for resembling too closely the poetry of Miguel Hernández, León Felipe, Blas de Otero, and Gabriel Celaya (51), poets associated with a kind of engagé aesthetics, adding that he, by contrast, still reads the poems of Sanguinetti121 and Frank O’Hara. Typically in Bolaño, the narrating voices of his texts do not go into detail regarding authors and works, no matter how recondite.122 He simply assumes the reader’s knowledge concerning these authors and works, or he prompts reading them. This is,

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in some sense, another way to establish community. Ultimately, the conclusion that one can derive from Enrique’s suicide at the end of the story is that he kills himself because he is unable to overcome his own poetics and, consequently, unable to enter the community of poets. To conclude with this section on the connection between literature and community, I now turn to a very brief analysis of “Gómez” and “Photos.” In “Gómez,” a partially autobiographical text,123 a dramatized or homodiegetic narrator recounts, retrospectively, a trip to “Gómez Palacio,” a “lost town in northern Mexico” (27), in order to see if he would be interested in directing “a literature workshop” (27) there organized by “Bellas Artes” (27). The link between the literary and community in this rather bizarre story is twofold. First, there is the matter of the literary as the product of government sponsorship. Although literary workshops have probably always been a private affair in Latin America, one must not forget that there was a time, especially in the nineteenth century but also (though differently) during the governments of Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and the first period of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua—to mention but the most emblematic examples—when literature served a specific function: to build the nation and to construct citizenship (or socialism in the latter cases). This is partially the case of “Gómez” although nothing is said concerning what is read and what is written in this “workshop.” Second, there is poetry itself, which establishes (or attempts to establish) community between two or three individuals dedicated to its practice: the narrator, the ex-centric school principal,124 and a young student who declares, “I started writing because poetry makes me freer, teacher, and I will never abandon it” (31). 125 A true poetic community is especially palpable in “Photos,” the possible continuation of Detectives126 and Belano’s partial literary biography.127 The entire narration revolves around Arturo Belano as he contemplates, reflects, and ruminates on the photos of French and Francophone poets from La poésie contemporaine de langue francaise depuis 1945 , a poetry anthology edited by Serge Brindeau in 1973. Essentially, “Photos” consists of two stories: one in which the protagonist, at the same time that he is looking at the pictures of poets, makes up stories of their lives,128 and second, one that shows him lost in the middle of the desert somewhere in Liberia as a flock of vultures gets ready to attack him (no doubt, this scenario makes one think of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal and especially the poem “Une charogne”). The concept of community is presented here

170   |  Chapter 4 variously as anxiety of influence, homage to French poetry, discourse on poetry, and history of poetry. The only thing that ultimately accompanies Belano in the desert in what are probably his last days is a community of poets, starting in Mexico, “when he was a writing machine” (200), and ending in Liberia, “with the book of French language poets under his arm, grateful, and his thought goes faster than his steps through the jungle and desert . . . , as when he was an adolescent in Mexico” (205). Seemingly, the confection of communities appears antithetical to postmodernity; in Bolaño’s case, nevertheless, this literary effort constitutes a clear act of resistance. Unlike in modernity, communities in these stories are not tied to terroir. They are tied, rather, to emotions and to feelings. Likewise, they are made up of individuals. What unites these individuals is the fact either that they feel misplaced in their surroundings or share a love for literature that oftentimes reveals more about their personal character than about the quality of their literary productions. In what follows, I conclude this chapter by elaborating on the spaces and places these communities occupy.

On Spaces and Pla ces A reasonable port of entry for an understanding of the geography that the characters in Bolaño’s short stories traverse might be to approach the issue along the lines of the distinction that is usually made both in philosophy and urban studies and, more recently, in what is called humanistic geography, between space and place. I cannot embark on a thorough analysis of this distinction here because the subject is indeed complex and would certainly require much more space (no pun intended). Nonetheless, a few notes on the subject are in order. In his Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), Harvey puts the matter thus: “Place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct” (261). Already in 1973, in his Social Justice and the City, Harvey had underlined the necessity of reflecting on the nature of space in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of what was occurring in the city under capitalism. More recently, in an essay titled “Space as a Key Word” in his Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006), he develops the concept of space even further, establishing three different spatial categories: absolute, relative, and relational. “Absolute space,” according to Harvey, is “fix d” (121); it is the space of “Newton and

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Descartes and it is usually represented as a pre-existing and immoveable grid amenable to standardized measurement and open to calculation . . . Socially this is the space of private property and other bounded territorial designations” (121). “Relative space,” on the contrary, belongs to the world of “non-Euclidean geometries” (122) and has to do with “multiplicity of locations” (122) as well as with who is doing the observing. “Relational space,” finall , “holds there is no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them” (123). Similarly, it is not possible to disassociate space from time and, consequently, the focus ought to be “on the relationality of space-time rather than of space in isolation” (123). In the end, basically repeating what he had already stated in Social Justice and the City (1973, 13), Harvey concludes after aligning his own concepts with those of Henri Lefebvre’s (133) and Marx’s (141–42) toward the final part of his essay, “No priority can be accorded to any one spatio-temporal frame. The three spatio-temporal frames [i.e., the absolute, relative, and relational] must be kept in dialectical tension with each other in exactly the same way that use value, exchange value and value dialectically intertwine with the Marxian theory” (142). As the reader might remember from this study’s introductory chapter, the advent of a flexible regime of capitalist accumulation in the early 1970s had brought about a new round of “time-space compression” in the organization of capitalism, according to Harvey. Clearly for this British geographer, capital is innately mobile while place is inherently fixed. This view has been strongly criticized by another theoretician of space, Doreen Massey, who in her essay “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place”129 claims that Harvey’s conception of place as being immutable disregards people’s essential mobile experiences in the world. Places are not static, claims Massey, they are processes: “What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations” (Cresswell 2004, 69). Women and blacks, for example, experience space differently than white men (64). She is quite correct, furthermore, to question Harvey’s idea that “timespace compression” is—or was especially at the beginning of the 1970s—a universal phenomenon (65–66). Broadly speaking, the major difference between space and place is that the former is much more abstract than the latter and lacks any sense of identity. Tim Cresswell defines place, simply, as “a meaningful location”

172   |  Chapter 4 (2004, 7), 130 while Edward Relph describes space as being “amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and ana­ lysed” (1976, 8). One of the most thorough investigations on the nature of space is the one carried out by French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991). Even though his now classical La Production de l’espace (1974) 131 is too intricate a study to offer a fair analysis of it here, the following should provide a fairly straightforward picture. Like Harvey (and Jameson), Lefebvre emphasizes the fundamental importance that capital’s hegemony has upon space. In contradistinction to Harvey’s notion of place being fixed, however, Lefebvre conceives of space as a construction, asking himself, “Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no” (133). He then goes on to speak about the “active” role of space “in the existing mode of production” (133) and proceeds to focus on what he calls different fields: the physical, the mental and the social (133). 132 What this means is that, in order to comprehend the dynamics of space, and particularly in order to have a better grasp of what Benjamin Fraser calls the “shifting multivalent urban fabric” (2011, 122), attention needs be paid to the natural, epistemological, and symbolic processes that are involved in the production of space. Ultimately, the French philosopher seeks to construct what he calls “a spatial code” (135) since “It seems to be well established that physical space has no ‘reality’ without the energy that is deployed within it” (134). In the societal production of space, Lefebvre sees thus the dialectical interaction of the following triad: “spatial practice” (or le perçu), “representations of space” (or le conçu), and “representational spaces” (or le vécu). Very simply, spatial practice has to do with the practices of everyday life or, as Lefebvre puts it, a type of practice that “embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation” (139). “Representations of space” constitute what might be called the cognitive aspects of space, and it is the terrain of urban planners, social engineers, signs, and codes, among others. “Representational spaces,” fi ally, belong to the symbolic world, space, as Lefebvre contends, “as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’ but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated . . .

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space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (141). 133 In what follows, in the manner of a cartographical assessment, I analyze the spaces and places that are described in Bolaño’s short stories, concentrating particularly on the physical or spatial practice aspect of Lefebvre’s paradigm. As I examine some of his stories, I attempt to answer these questions: On what types of geographies do narrative focalizations zero in on, urban, rural, or outside the city perimeter? Where do the inhabitants of Bolaño’s short fiction reside? Do they experience time-space compression as a consequence of a flexible regime of capitalist accumulation? What kinds of social relations do they build? Do they transform the spaces they inhabit into “center[s] of meaning and field[s] of care” (Cresswell 2004, 24)? My analysis follows more or less the order in which Bolaño’s short stories were published. “Sensini” constitutes a good starting point for our discussion of spaceplace in Bolaño’s short stories because the locales described in this story resemble very closely a large swath of the territory that the characters of these small narratives inhabit. Right off, a reading of these stories shows that these characters do not experience what Jameson calls “postmodern hyperspace,” that is, a space that does not allow the individual “to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (1991, 44). Spatially speaking, one could argue that most spaces described in Bolaño’s short stories belong either to an evolving modernity or, in some cases, even to a species of premodernity. Due in large part to this spatial circumstance, it stands to reason that they should not experience time-space compression as a result of the accumulation of capital. Capital, in fact, is, for the most part, absent from the fictional world of Bolaño’s stories. Take, for example, Sensini, who lives in a small apartment in a “drab neighborhood of Madrid” (21) and hardly makes a living. If this constitutes Sensini’s spatial practice in Lefebvre’s terms, his representational spaces are two-pronged: the city of Buenos Aires where he still harbors hope of finding his missing son, and the countryside where most of his short stories are located. In some sense, Sensini does not truly experience the environment that surrounds him, since, mentally at least, he is not completely there. As for the narrator, he shares with Sensini the same sense of precariousness because he lives in a “house in ruins” (13) on the outskirts of Girona; but unlike the

174   |  Chapter 4 Argentinian writer—and similarly to many characters in Bolaño’s works— he dwells in a kind of movable space given the fact that he holds several different jobs (he sells crafts, works in a camp site, in a hotel, etc.). Because the subjects of literature, writers, presses, poetry workshops, and literary activity in general are so prominent in Bolaño’s oeuvre, the existence of a literary sphere or space should not be surprising. This space, of course, is multifarious and perhaps unnecessary to diagram in full here. One aspect that does stand out, however, is the contrast that is usually established between the center and the periphery (or the big city and small towns). In “Sensini” (as in Bolaño’s early literary career), “the province” represents the space that saves the writer—who sends his manuscripts from the city—from starvation.134 In “Henri,” on the contrary, the province appears as a devalued place. Leprince, “a failed writer,” publishes his poems “in magazines from the provinces” (30). Another related spatial aspect that stands out has to do strictly with what might be called the qualitative attributes of the places where literary manuscripts are published, a surprising commentary if one takes into account Bolaño’s defense of less-known writers. Besides publishing his poems in “magazines from the provinces,” he also “survives in the rotten Paris press” (30), as stated earlier. The writers who reject him do so because they perceive that Leprince has for too long been “in the purgatory of poor or rotten publications and know that neither person nor animal escapes from there, or that only those who are strong and brilliant and great do so” (33). (Is Bolaño praising himself here by indirectly identifying himself with the latter group of writers?) Although the representational spaces of literature are also manifest in “Enrique” and “Adventure,” the physical places mentioned in these texts are even more salient, in particular the city of Barcelona as well as bars, both of which figure prominently in Bolaño’s entire literary production. Like the narrator of “Sensini,” the narrator of “Enrique” also lives “on the outskirts of a town of Girona” (43). Except for a few trips to Barcelona where he and his friends meet, at “the bars of the old town” (39), for example, he stays put for the most part. It is Enrique, by contrast, who experiences space more fully, moving from place to place within the city, “He now lived in the attic of the Gracia neighborhood” (41), and even traveling to Madrid. In terms of the construction of space, while it is true that homes, and especially bars, represent a primordial terrain for the social relationships that are established between writers, one must not forget that each of

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them brings to these spaces his or her own representational or symbolic space, the Extremaduran mental geography in the case of Enrique and the more modern, more cosmopolitan mental space of the narrator. Another representational space that is alluded to in “Enrique” and that is relevant owing to the autobiographical nature of this story is Mexico City. The narrator makes reference to receiving letters from his sister “from a Mexico City he was no longer able to recognize” (43). As regards “Adventure,” the title already conveys a sense of movement, a movement tied to literature without question. As in the previous two stories but even more strongly, this short narrative’s territory is representational space. Clearly, however, representational space and spatial practice here have a more interesting connection than in “Sensini” and “Enrique.” Or, to put it another way, representational space spawns spatial practice. The relationship that is established between A and B originates in a strictly symbolic literary cosmos. But as the relationship deepens, it prompts spatial practice especially on the part of B, who is impelled to travel to Madrid to meet A. Thus, their “adventure” starts metaphorically but becomes physical. B’s increasing obsession with A, for example, produces in him a restlessness that makes him move from place to place almost directionless: “At the beginning he walks aimlessly through deserted streets” (55). Although various physical locales are mentioned in the story—a hotel, museums, a bar, and bookstores—the narrator’s focalization privileges open spaces. Indeed, it is here that most of Bolaño’s characters’ subjectivities are formed. In “Adventure,” for instance, Madrid is described as “a neglected, even dirty city” (60) with a park “full of beggars and junkies” (62). An extremely important part of this open space is of course the telephone booth, where Bolaño’s characters spend a significant amount of time. Arguably, and paradoxically given its transient and ephemeral nature, it could be said that, to some extent, in Bolaño’s short narrative the telephone booth constitutes the sole “place,” the only meaningful location in Cresswell’s (2004) sense. While most of the characters in Bolaño’s stories lead fundamentally very nomadic, very erratic, and unstable existences, the small, private space of the telephone booth, located in the public space of the street, often appears as the only “center of care,” the site where, even fleetingl , space is turned into place. The title of the collection, Phone Calls, is thus not accidental. In the remaining stories from Llamadas, the representational space of

176   |  Chapter 4 literature is practically nonexistent. In general, the narration focuses on the character’s spatial practice. Surely, much of what transpires in “Mates,” for example, has to do with what occurs in Sofía’s and the narrator’s mental space. But what stands out most are their actions and the spaces they inhabit. Typical of some of Bolaño’s characters, at some point in their relationship, Sofía and the narrator take a trip to Portugal and also hitchhike through several Spanish cities. At the same time, Sofía moves from house to house and so does the narrator, whose electricity is cut off because he cannot pay the electrical bill. In large measure, Sofía’s mental state coincides with the places she occupies: “a building that was falling apart (142) . . . it was appalling, dirtiness leaked through the walls” (145). In “The Grub,” although the story takes places in Mexico City and places familiar to Bolaño readers such as “la Alameda” and “Librería de Cristal” are mentioned (71), it is Grub’s metanarrative that holds interest as regards space and place. In what he shares with Arturo Belano, Grub presents a kind of spatial cartography of northern Mexico (78–79), alluding to Santa Teresa and the city of Villaviciosa, “rather poor, with few means of subsistence, not a single industry” (77). Northern Mexico in general plays a crucial role in Bolaño’s work (in Detectives and 2666 especially), of course; it is simultaneously spatial practice and representational space in Lefebvre’s terms. It is all the more interesting, therefore, that Belano should indicate that Grub “pinned his security in Villaviciosa’s survival in its [own] antiquity . . . [and] also . . . in the precariousness that surrounded it and consumed it” (78), and that, later on in the diegesis, Grub should say that Villaviciosa was full of “assassins and security guards” (81). Bolaño’s northern Mexico, but specifically Santa Teresa, is Juan Carlos Onetti’s Santa María or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Finally, in “Joanna,” one could reason that Jack has turned a marginal, degraded space—“he lived . . . in a bungalow that was falling to pieces because it was old and neglected” (164)—into a “center of meaning,” whereas in “William Burns,” the house that Burns shares with the two women is reminiscent not only of Wieder’s apartment in Concepción (in Distant) and María Canales’s basement (in By Night) but also of Sofía’s closed room (in “Mates”) as well as Bittrich’s “house of crime” (in “Prefiguration”). When he bumps into a strange room at the very moment Bedloe is attempting to enter the house, Burns states, “And at that instant I knew, with a certainty similar to terror, that it was destiny (or misfortune, which is the same) that had driven me there” (110–11).

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For the most part, spaces and places in the stories from Putas do not differ greatly from those found in Llamadas; that is, except for perhaps a couple of cases, they are peripheral and marginal in every sense. Take, for example, the narrating protagonist of “Whores.” Surely, in terms of representational space, hers is the space of fantasy, the fantasy of being the princess who seduces the prince into coming into her castle, as she puts it (127); similarly, it is the representational space tied to television and what it shows. However, she describes herself as “a fucking whore from the . . . outskirts of the city and of time” (124). This is, after all, the spatial practice that in some way conditions or gives birth to her representational space. Social exclusion, in other words, is what ultimately makes her take revenge on Max. She does not realize that even though he appears to exist in the glaring world of the media, he is a pariah of the system just like her. The spatial practice of “Prefiguration” is also located at the margins of the city: “Bittrich had a house on the outskirts, . . . The house of solitude which later became the house of crime, in an isolated area” (98). What distinguishes this story from “Whores,” however, is not only that no representational space is clearly manifest here but also that the marginality of spatial practice is replicated or multiplied in the several pornographic fi ms that Bittrich produces. With respect to one of these films, Barquero, the narrating voice affirms, “Because of the ruins one might believe that it’s about life in Latin America after the Third World War. Girls traverse landfills and deserted roads” (104). While in “Whores” the narrating protagonist probably lives on the outskirts of Barcelona and Bittrich’s house is located on the outskirts of Medellín, three stories from Putas are situated in Mexico. As regards spatial practice, “Gómez” partially resembles the metanarrative contained in “The Grub,” that is, narrative action takes place in northern Mexico. But even though the narrating voice calls Gómez Palacio “a city with a horrible name” (27), there is a parallel location in this story that is missing from “The Grub.” In other words, attached to the real places that are described, there are other more symbolic, more imaginative locales that are equally important. When the narrator arrives in “Gómez,” the school’s principal puts him up in a “motel on the outskirts, an awful motel in the middle of a highway that led nowhere” (28). Moreover, he refers to “Gómez” as a “lost town in northern Mexico” (27). Nevertheless, there is also the representational space of the poetry workshop. There is, similarly, the representational space

178   |  Chapter 4 of the radio, where the principal’s friend sings sad songs.135 And, last, there is the desert, which even though it is located in northern Mexico, is really not the desert of 2666 . On the contrary, the desert and its surroundings here become meaningful locations for the school’s principal: “A green light that seemed to breathe, for a split second, alive and reflective in the middle of the desert, . . . it appeared as dream or a miracle, which are, in the end, the same thing” (35). Northern Mexico is absent from the next two stories located in Mexico to be analyzed here, “Last” and “Dentist,” respectively. Concerning representational space in the first, there is no doubt that the Chilean experience exerts an infl ence on the spatial practice of father and son in Mexico. There is no doubt, furthermore, that the son’s reading of a collection of French surrealist writers somewhat marks his concrete spatial practice in Acapulco. Nevertheless, what is truly interesting from my point of view, and especially taking into consideration Bolaño’s penchant for the margins, is not the fact that father and son leave the center—Mexico City—and head to the margin; as a coveted tourist destination, especially in the twentieth century, Acapulco did not really constitute a “marginal” place, to say the least. What is indeed interesting is the fact that father and son—in large measure prompted by the father’s former life as a boxer—end up in a barbrothel that “lacks windows” (58) located on the outskirts of the city. In an ending that brings to mind the ending to Borges’s “The South,” the reader is not sure whether father and son will be able to leave the bar. However, the final days of Gui Rosey, one of the writers from the book of French surrealist writers the narrator is reading, suggest a possible outcome: “B thinks about Gui Rosey, who vanishes from the planet without a trace, docile as a lamb as the Nazi hymns ascend to the blood-colored sky, and he sees himself as Gui Rosey, a Gui Rosey buried in an Acapulco wasteland, disappeared forever” (63). The nature of the narrator’s experience when reading José’s story in “Dentist” is similar, but significantly more intense, to B’s reading surrealist writers in “Last.” Literature and art—in the narrator’s friend relationship with Cavernas and his paintings—are clearly representational spaces here; so is the narrator’s strange experience in the seemingly empty building he visits. There is, nonetheless, more attention given to spatial practice in “Dentist” than in “Last.” If one construes this spatial practice in terms of movement, one notices a trajectory that goes from Mexico City to Irapuato

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in Central Mexico, and, once in Irapuato, from the center to the margin136 ; it is clearly in this latter place that most of the focus of interest lies. Like so many places in Bolaño’s narrative, the geography that most stands out in “Dentist” is the geography strewn with poverty and abandonment. There is an almost conscious decision on the author’s part to depict either premodern locales or sites that have never been reached by modernity. Given the concept of multiple modernities or uneven modernity, this should not be surprising, of course. In the story’s fabula, the narrator and his friend start their nocturnal roaming in “city bars, actually upper-middleclass bars” and move to “the suburbs of Irapuato” (176). From here, however, they venture even further, reaching a landscape that resembles very closely that of 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes.” From a purely hermeneutical perspective, what is most provocative is that it is here, in this “unreal landscape, . . . made up of rickety trees, undergrowth, . . . a hybrid between the landfill and the typically Mexican bucolic image” (183), inside “two miserable shacks” (192) , that the epiphany of literature (or the power of literature, if you will) manifests itself. A complete x-ray of José’s neighborhood on the outskirts of Irapuato is presented: “a huge vacant lot, an unpaved street . . .” (182), “abandoned industrial factories or warehouses, vestiges of an already forgotten past in which an attempt was made to industrialize the city. There was no street lightning” (192). Although I have asserted that Bolaño’s fiction tends to situate its action in marginal locales, I do not mean to convey the idea that they all display the same physical traits or that there is a fixed pattern in the relationship between the characters’ spatial practice and their representational spaces. In the last group of stories from Putas to be examined here, one will notice that there is not much of a symmetry regarding space and place. In “Return,” for instance, though a discotheque, a street, and a morgue are alluded to, it is really in a house in “one of Paris’s most exclusive neighborhoods” (141) that the narrative action takes place. What a chasm, moreover, between Villeneuve’s and the narrator’s representational spaces. In “Photos,” spatial practice changes completely. And, besides, this story shares with stories such as “Sensini” and “Enrique” the symbolic terrain of literature. Somewhat similarly to “Labyrinth” and less so than, say, “Last,” the literary universe that crystallizes in the images that Belano is contemplating conditions in some way his present spatial practice in Africa. In “Photos,” however, the narrator’s location is not Monrovia, Liberia’s

180   |  Chapter 4 capital, but rather “that small village forsaken by humans and God’s hand” (197), “this fucking hamlet” (203) 137 which, not surprisingly at all, makes a tired and wilted Belano think of Mexico, “when I was an adolescent” (205). “Meeting,” a bizarre autobiographical text, either poses the question regarding spatial practice and representational space or dissolves the difference between the two. It starts thus: In 1999, after returning from Venezuela,138 I dreamt that I was taken to the house where Enrique Lihn was living, in a country that might well be Chile and in a city that might well be Santiago, if we take into account that Chile and Santiago once resembled hell and that resemblance, in a substratum of the real city and the imaginary city, will remain forever. (217) There is no doubt that the fateful experience of 1973 as well as the representational space of literature are very much present here. In the course of the narrative, in fact, the symbolic space of literature, and particularly Chilean poetry, reaches a certain prominence. But is it this space that conditions the physical space described, or is it the other way around? It would appear, from what follows, that the political debacle of 1973, plus the narrator’s literary experience of Chilean literature—marked in real life by Bolaño’s two visits to Chile—are the elements that ultimately influence spatial practice in this case. The narrating voice, for instance, refers to “the remaining filth of Santiago” (219); and in allusion to a group of poets from the 1970s, including himself—“Bertoni, Maquieira, Gonzalo Muñoz, Martínez, Rodrigo Lira and I” (219)—he states, “Kitties from a lost province” (219), mixing thus representational space with spatial practice. “The Eye” and “Vagabond” provide yet another piece of the spatial puzzle. In both stories incessant movement characterizes the lives of the protagonists. But if The Eye’s spatial practice is heavily influenced by the historical and political experiences that he had in the past in Chile, it is literature, in B’s case, that plays a crucial role. At the same time, the spatial practice of each is quite different. The Eye moved from the periphery to the center and then back to periphery again, from Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Milan, Berlin, to India, whereas B’s movements remain in the center (Perpignan, Paris, and Brussels) though they originate in the periphery of Chile, Mexico City, and Barcelona (assuming, of course, that

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the time of the story precedes Spain’s entry into the European Union). What is important from Bolaño’s aesthetic standpoint, nonetheless, is the fact that in “The Eye” and “Vagabond” focalization zeroes in on places and spaces far away from the center. Although these are The Eye’s spatial practices, the places mentioned in the story become his fundamental places even if temporarily and reluctantly and only as long as he is able to extricate the children from them; now, these places never become his “field of care” in Cresswell’s (2004) sense. Like he does in other stories, Bolaño presents a true picture of misery: “demolished gardens, . . . truly poor areas . . . prostitution scene (17),” “narrow and putrid streets” (18), “Once the festival is over the boy is returned to his home, or to the foul hellhole where he lives” (19). Though B’s territory does not have anything to do with The Eye’s Indian geography, he privileges the outskirts, not the center. In Brussels, for example, he stays at a hotel next to “a wasteland where grass grows next to garbage. In front [of it] there is a row of houses that seem to have been bombed” (85–86). Later on in the fabula, before he heads to search for Lefebvre’s house, he walks to a “neighborhood where people of color abound” (90). As pertains to Gaucho, two stories deserve brief attention as regards the subjects of space and place: “Gaucho” and “Jim.” Except for an allusion to Mexico City, where the story takes place, there is not a great deal that can be said about “Jim.” However, what must be noted is not only that it is “the begging children of Mexico” (11) who approach Jim to ask him about the nature of poetry but also that he is a former marine who fought in Vietnam and is married to a Chicana. The spatial practice of each is strongly infl enced by their respective representational spaces. From where else does the sadness that overwhelms Jim, according to the narrator, derive except his war experience? And what explains the Chicana’s suffering (12) and anger (12) if not her being a marginalized citizen? In “Gaucho,” as expected, space and place are significantly more complicated issues. On the surface, two spaces stand out, one urban (Buenos Aires) and the other rural (the pampa). In addition, in terms of representational space, the historical and political tension between the two represents almost a fixture of Argentine thought, the well-known topic of “civilization and barbarism.” Inside the fictional world of the story Bolaño alters representational space by offering a degraded image of Buenos Aires—“Buenos Aires is sinking” (19)—and a more positive image of the pampa but without elevating it to

182   |  Chapter 4 the mythical. In this context, in fact, another representational space enters the scene, that of Borges’s “The South,” where the countryside is presented as containing the very essence of Argentina. In “Gaucho,” though the pampa is said to be “direct, manly, without subterfuge” (23), as in Borges’s story, Pereda’s house is “almost in ruins” (25) and, instead of cows and horses, rabbits populate the countryside. Pereda asks, “What true gaucho would think about making a living by hunting rabbits?” (33). Concerning spatial practice, in the story’s diegesis the capital starts to degenerate139 while the pampa, thanks to Pereda’s efforts, begins to prosper. Finally, let us quickly examine three stories from Secreto: “The Colonel’s Son,” “Scholars of Sodom,” and “The Death of Ulises.” Although in “The Colonel’s Son” the narrator declares concerning a movie he has seen on television, “It was my biography or my autobiography or a summary of my days on the fucking planet Earth” (31), its content does not really reveal any autobiographical information. This story from Secreto consists, in essence, of the recounting of a movie that the narrator decides to call The Colonel’s Son and that he classifies under the category of a zombie movie.140 As regards the spatial practice that Bolaño privileges in his short stories, “The Colonel’s Son” corresponds to places and spaces seen elsewhere in his narrative. Although the action takes places in an unnamed city in the United States, the narrator focuses on the most abandoned, most desolate parts of that city: “The city streets . . . show a devastating aspect. The locations were probably situated in the outskirts of any North American city, abandoned, semi-ruined neighborhoods” (34). In “Scholars of Sodom,” a mixture between short story and autobiography (and essay even), the narrator imagines writing a short story about Trinidadian-British writer V. S. Naipaul’s visit to Buenos Aires where the latter, in his own chronicle about the visit within the story, in some way anticipates “the worsening of the confrontation between the right and left wing of Peronism, the coup d’état, the dirty war, the massacres” (52). Stricto sensu, one can argue here that representational space—the author’s—creates the spatial practice in the text. In other words, had Bolaño not experienced firsthand Chile’s 1973 military coup, he might have not had Naipaul picture Buenos Aires as he does here: “In my story, simply, Naipaul traveled through the streets of Buenos Aires and, in some way, sensed the hell that hovered over the city . . . But he also perceived, or his antennas perceived, hell’s static in the wandering nights of Buenos Aires” (52).

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While, according to the narrator, Naipaul’s dreams about Buenos Aires in the story within the story became nightmares (53), in “The Death of Ulises,” the last story to be examined, spatial practice and representational space become practically indistinguishable. A text that, like “Photos,” could arguably have become a component of the second part of Detectives, it condenses practically all the spaces and places that both Belano and Bolaño inhabited in Mexico. In that sense, though it is a heterodiegetic narration strictly speaking, it certainly has biographical elements.141 Essentially, “The Death of Ulises” tells the visit of Belano, a famous writer who left Mexico some twenty years ago and has been invited to participate in the Guadalajara book fair but decides, instead, to pay a visit to his friend Ulises Lima in Mexico City. This is the visit, of course, that the Chilean-born author never paid. Spatial practice centers principally on the capital, where Belano asks a taxi driver to take him to Lima’s last known location. Two places stand out even if not much is said about them, “the Lindavista suburb”142 or “the Guadalupe-Tepeyac suburb” (163) where, we are told, Belano (and Bolaño) lived, and “bars and bedrooms” frequented by Lima. In large measure, this story is a tribute to Mario Santiago, Bolaño’s best friend in Mexico and “[the] greatest Mexican poet” (169). 143 An examination of Bolaño’s short stories demonstrates that he is and he is not a postmodernist writer. Put differently, the Chilean-born author could be said to have a conflictive or ambivalent relationship with postmodernism. None of the stories analyzed in this chapter, for example, constitutes strictly speaking a narrative of emancipation. And yet in almost all of them there is something that prevents circumstances from remaining the way they are. Hence, though a seemingly apolitical posture is displayed throughout his short narrative, there is at the same time a kind of resistance that seeks to clarify, rectify, and remember. As seen in the section on history, for instance, both what happened in Chile on the eleventh of September 1973, and the eventual defeat of the Latin American Left have a fundamental impact upon the daily lives of several of the characters. But it is precisely history experienced mainly as trauma that in some cases prompts the necessity of community, even if these are presented as dispersed communities for the most part, as we saw in the second section of this chapter. In essence, in these short narratives Bolaño creates communities of the heart or emotional communities (communities of survivors?) made up of individuals who carry on dysfunctional relationships or simply

184   |  Chapter 4 do not fit in the mainstream or opt out of it. Likewise, he imagines manifold literary liaisons that are not always based on literary tastes and dislikes tout court but rather on writers’ biographical idiosyncrasies. Finally, in terms of space and place, this author privileges marginal locations even if these sites are frequently located within the city itself; in most, if not all, of the stories analyzed here, moreover, space is not transformed in place as a meaningful location.

Chapter 5

The Republic of Letters’ Trials and Tribulations

The concept of a postmodernism of resistance that characterizes Bolaño’s oeuvre gains special momentum with the publication of three texts, two published in 199 6 within months of each other, Nazi and Distant, and one, By Night, published in 2000. Though this might give the impression that both Detectives (1998) and Amulet (1999), especially the former, represent a kind of hiatus from the political—even if these narrative pieces do contain political moments—one must keep in mind that the author was engaged in the writing of 2666 , where his postmodernism of resistance is most evident and has global consequences, the last years of his life,1 as Jorge Herralde, his former editor in Anagrama, states in Para Roberto Bolaño (2005, 13) and as Bolaño clarified publicly (e.g., in Braithwaite 2006, 113– 14). What does this mean? It means that the engagé side of the author’s literary output never quite abandons him, no matter what formal techniques he may employ, and no matter how ironic, how satirical, and how seemingly apolitical the contents of some of his texts might appear. This implies, similarly, that the concept of evil in Bolaño’s oeuvre, which has been such an enticing subject of study for most of his critics, has its roots in very concrete historical events and in overall material circumstances2 even if at times one gets the impression that, as was suggested in chapter 3, evil appears as more casual and, hence, more unfathomable than causal. 185

186   |  Chapter 5 Let us reiterate, finall , some of the elements of a postmodernism of resistance present in the texts examined thus far in this study: the rescuing of the past3 as well as strong autobiographical components and the connection between the detective figure and Latin America in his poetry; the link between violence and politics in Consejos; the appropriation of César Vallejo’s persona to scrutinize and problematize the intractably ambiguous nature of evil in Monsieur; the ubiquitous presence of Chile’s September 11 as well as the construction of multifarious communities of the heart made up of marginal characters in the short stories; and, finall , the privileging of geographically borderline sites inside the urban center where, most often, these characters are not able to turn space into place as meaningful location. Even though an author’s intention can never be known, one can surely speculate. What may have led Bolaño to launch such caustic attacks against certain sectors of the Chilean political establishment as well as some segments of Chilean society first in Distant and then in By Night is mainly the fact that Chileans, in general, assisted in grand measure by the new governments of the never-ending Transición4 (Patricio Aylwin 1990–1994, and Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle 1994–2000), did not wish to deal with their most recent past. 5 Conscious that Pinochet was still the commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, tired of politics even if there had not been legal political activities in Chile in the last seventeen years (from 1973 to 1990), in the 1990s (and even later), most Chileans avoided confronting their own recent past. In the literary sphere, moreover, though what came to be known as the “new Chilean narrative” included several authors beside Alberto Fuguet6—and some who did delve into the past such as, for example, Gonzalo Contreras in La ciudad anterior—it was Fuguet and especially his Bad Vibes (1991), a novel that both celebrates and welcomes Chile’s rapid process of globalization while undermining both politics and history, that became best known. In light of this, should one be surprised that a writer who conceived of literature as an instrument to explore the darkest of subjects and who liked controversy may have wished to raise some consciousness? Bolaño’s physical and mental distance from Chile allowed him to be as critical as possible without suffering the consequences. Distant and By Night, and to a lesser extent Nazi, anticipate studies on historical memory that will become abundant later in Chile and Argentina. In what follows I analyze the presence of a postmodernism of

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resistance in Nazi, Distant, and By Night; this postmodernism of resistance consists of recognizing the often unstable status of literature and the nebulous nature of the narrating subject while at the same time focusing on very specific historical-ideological subjects nazi literature in the americas :

On Fascist Oscilla tions

Nazi Literature in the Americas: a curious title, no doubt, that immediately captures the reader’s attention. What kind of text is this? A history of literature, a dictionary of writers with Nazi ideology, a novel that, in the words of Wilfrido H. Corral, “will continue to be the standard with which the rest of his works will be measured, even those published before The Savage Detectives” (2011a, 384), a foundational text in Bolaño’s overall poetics (Sueldo 2008, 155)? The book’s title immediately reveals three aspects of Bolaño’s narrative: his partial interest in metafiction 7 or literary fiction, if you will; his exploration of the subject of fascism; and the author’s concern with the American continent, including the United States in this case. Nazi is made up of fourteen sections with each one containing—with the exceptions of “Epilogue for Monsters,” “The Thousand Faces of Max Mirebalais,” and “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman”8—the entries of between two and four writers, with a total of thirty entries in all. Since its publication in 1996, the definitions to refer to it have been more than abundant: an “inventory . . . of more or less extravant writers” (Echevarría 2002b, 37); “a school manual for Fascist apprentices” (Tarifeño 2002 , 121–22); a “novel disguised as a dictionary of authors” (Jennerjahn 2002, 69); “a hagiography of delirious villains, a bestiary” (Bisama 2003, 83); a “dictionary” (J. Oviedo 2005) 9; “a polybiographical novel of American naziphile writers” (F. Rodríguez 2007, 20); a “pseudo-encyclopedic novel”10 as well as a “fake anthology” and a “comic eulogy” (Williams 2009, 130) 11 ; “a literary text written in the style of literary dictionaries” (Schmukler 2010, 407) 12 ; “a collection of stories” (Corral 2011b, 118); “a compilation of chronicles or brief apocryphal monographs . . . [of] the strange and touching Nazi family” (Benmiloud 2006b, 119, 121) 13 ; and, most recently, “a biographical survey of imaginary writers who flirted with or espoused far-right ideologies” (Andrews 2014, 13); among other definitions 14 The plethora of names to describe Nazi only underscores the difficulty in defining the type of work it is. In some sense, it is all of these and none of these. There is consensus among critics,

188   |  Chapter 5 nevertheless, that the author was inspired especially by Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy15 but also Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires (1896). 16 As happens with earlier texts by Bolaño analyzed in this study, the critical corpus on Nazi is not plentiful despite being his first work to reach a certain degree of notoriety.17 Moreover, though one might get the impression that the very strangeness of this text precludes attempts at analyzing it beyond those that seek to describe aspects of its structure, some interesting critical assertions have nevertheless been made. In one of the earliest critical assessments of the text, Gonzalo Aguilar analyzes how Bolaño posits the existence of a parallel literature in Nazi, a kind of shadowy literature that exists as “a weak and sinister double of literature in America (and, by extension, of its culture)” (2002, 149). This is no doubt an enlightening comment especially understanding the role that literature and the literary institution at large play in Bolaño’s oeuvre. Another early assessment of the text by Rosso points to the existence of a network of writers in the text that is nonetheless never mentioned by name (2002a, 138). 18 Not surprisingly, of the earliest analytical pieces on Nazi, one of the most thorough, is Manzoni’s. For the Argentinian critic this text by Bolaño constitutes an attempt to prevent history from falling into oblivion (2002, 18) but also a reminder to the readers that the irrational, violent, intolerant, and nationalist fanaticism could possibly repeat themselves (21). Nazi represents, similarly, a questioning of both the notion of character and biography as well as of writing, according to Manzoni (2002, 21–22). Likewise, Ina Jennerjahn’s 2002 article on Nazi is arguably one of the most cited in critical studies on Bolaño’s narrative, especially those dedicated to Distant.19 Jennerjahn centers her attention on “Ramírez,” establishing a comparison between this section of the text and the previous, especially as it pertains to the change in narrative voice and focusing, in the latter part of her study, on the connection between Hoffman’s poetics acts and Raúl Zurita’s poems written in the air as well as CADA’s and the Escena de Avanzada’s (Advanced Scene) artistic performances at the end of the 1970s and beginnings of the 1980s in Chile—a subject that has received much interest in critical approaches to Distant, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter. More recent critical approaches have explored other aspects of the text. In his doctoral dissertation, for example, Franklin Rodríguez argues that Nazi constitutes “the foundation of Bolaño’s project” (2007, 10) 20 ; I concur with this idea in the sense that Nazi contains themes and traits of both

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previous and future books by Bolaño. In her review of the English translation of the book, Stacey D’erasmo rescues Bolaño’s tremendous faith in literature’s capacity “to affect history,” concluding with the following question and answer: “Is Nazi poetry an oxymoron? Not a bit of it, posits Bolaño. On the contrary, it’s all too possible” (2008). This is of course at the heart of Nazi (and Distant, I hasten to add). What’s more, almost as a response to Adorno’s famous dictum, Bolaño wishes to demonstrate that, all too often, art and literature go hand in hand with practices such as those carried out by Nazism. In the ever-increasing critical bibliography on Bolaño’s oeuvre, fiv recent studies on Nazi stand out above all; I refer to three here. Ignacio Rodríguez de Arce examines the ways in which Bolaño utilizes what he calls “a caricature-like imitatio” and “parodying reading” in Nazi, indicating that the author’s greatest achievement is to have composed his text “in the style of old manuals and dictionaries of literary writers” (2009, 24). Now, if Rodríguez de Arce centers much of his attention on “caricature-like imitatio” or “satirical pastiche” (25) it is because he notices an incongruity in Nazi between its structure, that is, the fact that it is supposed to be a dictionary of authors, and the content of the biographies; this incongruity, in turn, produces “a patently comic effect” (25). The critic observes, nevertheless, that while the authorial intention consists of imitating certain texts, it also seeks to transform them in a playful fashion (26). 21 In the end, Rodríguez de Arce claims, Nazi elicits two types of reading, one that is accessible to most readers, those who read the text as a “satirical pastiche,” and one that is not, which is those who perform a “parodyingly metacritical reading” (27). His analysis of Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce’s Poe’s Room is especially illuminating. The second article on Nazi could be called “anatomy of a failure” (Bolaño’s, according to the critic). In it, Gareth Williams (2009), basing his argument mostly on Carl Schmitt’s theory of politics, examines Bolaño’s concept of the political especially as it applies to Nazi and Distant. For Schmitt, asserts Williams, the political is founded on “the friend/enemy divide” (125), in other words, politics consists of recognizing one’s enemy. By reducing the political to the recognition of an enemy, however, an enemy that in the text appears as a “monstrous brother or evil Siamese twin” (129), Nazi falls into a “melancholic paralysis” (129). This paralysis, in turn, is enhanced by the fact that, though a sort of Nazi aesthetics is

190   |  Chapter 5 promised in the text (compounded by a series of proper names, birthplaces, etc.), it is never actually delivered. Or, as Williams states regarding this “philological enterprise called La literatura Nazi en América” (132): “The novel recuperates a profoundly mediocre, forgotten, ignored and, of course, nonexistent literary corpus. As such, Nazi literature remains at all times beyond any real measure, for it exists as an impendency or imminence in the novel that is never actually produced” (130). 22 In the third article, Enrique Schmukler does two things. First, he analyzes the process by which what he calls “the ‘narrator-biographer’” (2010, 415) writes a parody of both the figure of the author and the biographical genre. Like Rodríguez de Arce, he finds an essential “contradiction between form and content” (408) 23 in Nazi since the authors are located “in an offset context, alien to literature and a likely poetic culture” (408) that not only transforms them but also deforms them and degrades them. In the end, claims Schmukler, what Bolaño calls into question in the text are the mechanisms by which a given author enters the literary system. Second, the critic compares Nazi with Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy and Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires, concluding that there are three elements that distinguish Bolaño’s text from the latter two: in Nazi all entries are fi tional; the infamous is basically reduced to Nazi ideology; and “irony constitutes the critical dimension of Bolaño’s oeuvre with respect to the literary field” (416) 24 In some way, Nazi is the text by Bolaño that best characterizes the notion of a postmodernism of resistance that this study examines. On the one hand, it is an essentially postmodern text in the sense that it dialogues with and seeks to provide a different version of previous texts (fundamentally, those of Schwob, Reyes, and Borges). It also reformulates, destabilizing playfully, the concept of the literary dictionary. The issue of genre, in other words, is central to its significance 25 Moreover, although Nazi is definitely not a novel, the narrator-literary critic, or the narrator-book reviewer, rather, does practice, as was seen above, a kind of parody or pastiche using a metacritical discourse that approaches a postmodern literary aesthetics. On the other hand, though, one must not forget that the focus of the narrating voice’s seemingly objective posture centers on characters who displayed both in their lives as well as in their literature a fascination with Nazi ideology. Specificall , Bolaño’s genius resides here, in having explored Nazi ideology within the parameters of the literary enterprise; but equally

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important in the overall context of his oeuvre is the fact that he does so concerning literature in the Americas. Despite those who either downplay the political in Bolaño’s oeuvre tout court, such as Wilfrido Corral in his 2011 Bolaño traducido (197– 99), 26 or those who, like Gareth Williams (2009), view it as failure in Nazi and Distant, the fact remains that there is an undeniable committed side to his poetics. Not, certainly, the same commitment that one observes in texts such as Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Birds Without a Nest, César Vallejo’s Tungsten, or Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, to mention but three canonical examples from Latin American literature, but a commitment, nonetheless. If not, I insist, why broach such a politically controversial theme as Nazi ideology? Bolaño, an extremely well-informed individual, was well aware that certain sectors of the political establishment in Europe were turning dangerously to the extreme right (e.g., think of Jörg Heider in the 1990s in Austria) and that this often meant an unfounded fear of the other, especially the immigrant, as can be found in Detectives, where members of a neo-Nazi group try killing Ulises Lima while in Vienna (308–14). When in his “Discurso de Caracas” he associates quality writing with “to know how to put one’s head in the dark” (Paz-Soldán and Faverón Patriau 2008, 39), therefore, or with “to be aware that literature is basically a dangerous job” (39), he was in essence bestowing a political function upon literature that went beyond writing well or not writing well. For Bolaño literature has to transcend itself and thus reveal political realities that are meant to bring the reader discomfort. In what follows I examine some of the basic attributes of Nazi ideology as embodied in the authors as well as the literary texts to which the narrator-literary critic refers in Nazi. But I specifically center my attention upon those traits that cast a light on Bolaño’s engagé postmodern standpoint. I argue, fundamentally, that Nazi literature as presented in Bolaño’s text has to do, on the one hand, with an almost visceral desire to avoid living in the present or accept present circumstances and, on the other, an equally strong desire to build a type of idealist cocoon where literature exists almost outside of history. There is at the heart of this very strange literature a simultaneously premodern as well as a postmodern (construed as a reaction against the modern) impulse that is frequently characterized by an exultation of the countryside and a rejection of the city. Let us start with how some of the characters from Nazi relate to the

192   |  Chapter 5 present. Traditionally, postmodernism is associated with a celebration of the present. Jameson even speaks of a “perpetual present” at the very heart of postmodern culture, as we saw in chapter 1. What is most interesting about a text that is palpably postmodern in terms of structure, nevertheless, is that it is populated with authors who are rabidly antimodern and loathe the times in which they live. Paradoxically, this inability to embrace the present, or the ability to experience their present circumstances enclosed in a solipsistic capsule that keeps history and politics at bay, often gives way to two distinct movements, one backward (or anti- or premodern) and one forward (or modernist). The first has to do with a desire to go back to the past, the second with a fervent desire to create a kind of Shangri-­­La but, paradoxically, in the future. It is not an accident, in fact, that words such as bucolic and ideal should appear frequently throughout Nazi. The idea, in the end, is to build a physical as well as a mental sanctuary where Nazi literature rejoices in its own cacophony. In the very midst of Argentina’s military dictatorship, for example, Luz Mendiluce Thompson, author of the poem “I Was Happy with Hitler” who makes fun of homosexuals and Communists alike, asks Claudia, with whom she has fallen in love after a failed marriage, “What about poetry?” (33). This is not a clin d’oeil to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s famous Rima— although romantic aesthetics do figure partially in the text27 —but proof rather of Mendiluce’s utter blindness regarding the country’s difficul political circumstances; months later, in fact, Claudia, a Trotskyist sympathizer, is assassinated by the military. The Colombian Ignacio Zubieta, who joins Franco’s forces in Spain and becomes a close friend of Dionisio Ridruejo—a poet known in real life for his politically conservative views— does not say a single word in his letters concerning Spain’s Civil War or “the cataclysm that seems to be hovering over Europe” (39). It is as if he were not a participant in one of Europe’s most important historical events in the twentieth century, as if the present did not affect him, as if history has passed him by. Another character, a Brazilian this time, Amado Couto, recalls Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix (from By Night) when the latter, in the midst of an agitated social and political climate in Chile during the early 1970s, indulges in the reading of Greek philosophy. The darker side of the intellectual in Bolaño’s oeuvre, which María José Bruña Bragado explores so well in her 2012 article, becomes patently clear when, after having become a member of death squads, Couto “kept on thinking about

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literature” (115). What’s more, as people continue to be tortured and to disappear, the Brazilian writer continues to be obsessed with real writer Rubem Fonseca in a similar fashion to B’s being obsessed with A in “Adventure.” As can be seen in these three cases, the present does not have an impact upon the lives of these individuals. Or, put differently, the pursuit of literature has blinded them to their surrounding circumstances. This species of idealism in extremis often takes the writers of Nazi in two opposite directions, as stated above. But in either case, whether looking into the past or into the future, one is ultimately propelled to construct a room of one’s own, so to speak. Let us first scrutinize the movements with a backward bent. In “Silvio Salvático,”28 an entry that establishes a possible link between Nazi literature and Argentinean nineteenth-century political thought, the narrator, in a comical and satirical tone, refers to an Argentinean writer who, among other atavistic wishes, wanted “the reinstatement of the Inquisition” (51). This farcical and preposterous desire would be no more than the product of a quixotic mind were it not for the fact that Salvático also seeks the extermination of the Indians, the immigration of northern Europeans to “progressively lighten the national epidermis” (51), and the curtailing of Jews’ rights. The narrative voice establishes thus not only a kind of chronology of Nazi ideology but arguably also creates its precursor. In effect, by connecting Nazi literature to Sarmiento’s racist political ideology, and by linking it further to a primitive institution such as the Inquisition, Bolaño is universalizing the existence of evil. Some of the first steps in the construction of what Chris Andrews calls “anatomy of evil” (2014, xvi) take place in Nazi, after all. In the case of Peruvian poet Andrés Cepeda Cepeda, this becomes especially pronounced and even more irrational if one considers that Peru did not receive immigrants from northern Europe. The narrator-literary critic tells us that, in his poems, Cepeda calls for a “return to an iron age that he locates at approximately Pizarro’s time” (73). The oscillation between the past and the future that prevents these characters from living a full life in the present becomes particularly evident when we learn that the Peruvian poet also calls for the birth of a “blond child in the ruins of a sepulchral Lima” (73). What is ironic about this, as Ríos reminds us regarding Nazi in general, is that “we are talking about ‘mixed people’ who defend the principle of ‘racial purity’” (2013, 46). The whitening of one’s skin, a common practice in colonial Latin America (and presently in Asia and Africa), is synonymous

194   |  Chapter 5 with yet another way of refusing to deal with one’s present circumstances. This refusal to accept the present becomes especially evident in the case of Mexican writer Irma Carrasco, who writes a novel that clearly anticipates the scenario of 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes.”29 She not only calls for Mexico’s return to 1899 in one of her works and to Spain’s sixteenth century in another (83), but also, in an interview, she admits that the “the theocratic” system is the sole political system in which she has faith “although generalissimo Franco wasn’t doing things badly either” (82). 30 The return to the past in Nazi, which symbolizes also a manifestly antimodern and Fascist posture, has another facet, one that has to do with what Bourdieu calls the positioning of authors in the literary field vis-à-vis the tradition that precedes them. Normally, authors seek to distinguish themselves from the tradition both by breaking with it and by not accepting current literary norms. In Bolaño’s text the contrary occurs: while some of the writers here condemn certain “modern” authors, it is only to revert to a traditional literary aesthetics. Ignacio Zubieta, for instance, imitates Góngora in his first book of poems (37), whereas Juan Mendiluce Thompson accuses Cortázar, one of Bolaño’s favorite authors, of being “unreal and bloody” (25). He also chastises the French modern novel for lacking in spirituality and failing to understand human suffering (25). The Cuban Ernesto Pérez Masón, for his part, disliked Lezama Lima (57), an author whose novel Paradiso, for example, though not mentioned in Nazi, no doubt resembles the French Nouveau Roman in the sense that it is not lisible (readable) in Barthes’ terms. The Chilean Pedro González Carrera, finall , is unaware of the symbolists, the surrealists, and the modernists (67) and “imitates Campoamor, Espronceda, Spanish romantics” (65). In Nazi Bolaño thus offers a kind of antiliterature, or a literature without a future. If his is a “narrative on the margin” that is “essentially anti-canonical,” as Ríos contends correctly in his most recent study on Bolaño (2013, 28), it cannot be argued, consequently, that Nazi literature is canonical. It is not. In point of fact, as numerous as the texts written by some of these “artists of evil” (Gamboa 2008, 211 ) might be, they are rarely read: “The truth is that no one reads him” (69), “His literary work is practically unknown” (86), “The book of poems . . . was ignored if not perversely hidden by the critics” (92), “The readers’ response was nonexistent” (129), “He published a book of poetry that nobody read” (140). Moreover, Nazi literature is, pure and simple, bad literature: “A damned, terrifying, badly

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written book” (91), states the commonly subjective narrator regarding writer Franz Zwickau. Now that we have seen how some writers take refuge in the past in order to avoid the present, let us see how others look to the future for salvation from the present. Not surprisingly, in a literature that could very well be characterized as disorderly, irrational, chaotic, and contradictory, dystopian impulses can often be found in the same texts and writers who extoll the past. Andrés Cepeda Cepeda, for example, who dreams of a return to the sixteenth century, has high hopes for the continent’s future. In a text whose discourse arguably brings to mind Martí’s “Nuestra América” or Rodó’s Ariel but written by an author whom critics classify as an “antediluvian Nazi, mad, . . . minion of the cloacas [sewers]” (72), among other descriptions, the narrator-literary critic states that Cepeda presents “a new framework of American perception, where will and dream . . . would fuse together . . . in an American awakening” (71). 31 Whereas, Irma Carrasco, who also wishes to go back to the sixteenth century, envisions in one of her texts “a new Mexican dawn which she indistinctly calls resurrection, awakening, dreaming” (77). 32 What stands out in both of these texts is the ultimate desire to confect an ou-topos—literally, in Greek, a “no place” (and certainly not in Augé’s sense)—that exists only as a figment of the writer’s imagination. In all instances where the future—a sort of an antimodern modernity in this case?—is called upon to save the writer from the present, Bolaño is of course condemning not only the avant-garde’s (or rear-garde’s?) overzealous hubris concerning the power of literature (and art in general) to transform the world, but every attempt to bestow salvific attributes upon the literary enterprise in general. The idea that Nazi literature as represented in Nazi gazes either at the past or the future, and consequently lives in an uncomfortable present, appears in the Colombian Jesús Fernández-Gómez’s entry. A member of the Falange who thinks that Hitler is the most appropriate leader for Europe but who nonetheless does not speak a great deal about politics, according to the narrator (43–44), writes a 3,000-verses book of poems called Cosmogony of the New Order (42). Of the two parallel stories contained therein, perhaps the more interesting is the one concerning an “American student” who must prove his bravery by killing someone but who fails to do so when confronted by a “cascade of mirrors that blind him forever” (42– 43). That this takes place in a dream is noteworthy. The narrator wants to

196   |  Chapter 5 underscore the total disconnect between Fernández-Gómez’s imagination and reality despite the fact that the Colombian writer was actively involved in the Spanish Civil War. The Argentine Mateo Aguirre Bengoechea who, like Silvio Salvático and Ernesto Pérez Masón, belongs to the group of “precursors and anti-enlightened,” “augurs a brilliant period for humanity, the triumphal entrance into a new Golden age” (50). The fact that he is included among writers who refute the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, and Sartre, and even those of Hegel, Marx, and Feurbach (53) is, needless to say, not an anodyne point. Does this constitute a movement backward or forward? one is prompted to ask. How is it possible that a “new Golden age”— for where is the old one located?—be situated in a territory that dispenses with the Enlightenment unless, of course, this new golden age existed already in the past? The narrator here is not only emphasizing the utter irrational idealism of Nazi literature but also its inveterate antimodern stance, even if it sometimes looks forward, such as in Bengoechea’s case. The construction of utopian sites located outside of history is especially patent when it comes to the Central American writer Gustavo Borda. His entry is placed in the section “Vision, Science Fiction,”33 underlining thus both his utopian disposition and his disenchantment with the present in some sense; moreover, Borda—a mestizo, one assumes—has a fixation with everything Germanic. While in his diaries he blames Jews for all the evils of the world, we are told, in his novels “all his characters are blond and blueeyed” (109). Luche’s (2011) concept of chimerism in Nazi alluded to in an earlier note34 fits perfectly here. What can be more chimeric than wanting to be white, and hopefully blonde (!), when one is not? It really would not be surprising if in this story Bolaño were criticizing those in Latin America in general and Chile in particular who still lament the presence of ethnic groups in the continent, blaming them often for maintaining Latin America in a perennial premodern state.35 The wish for racial purity tied to an avoidance of the present is not, however, the purview of this Central American writer alone. The two poets included in the section “North American Poets” manifest similar desires. The first, Jim O’Bannon, who, the narrator tells us, initially adheres to a “beatnik aesthetics” (135) and dedicates poems to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Gary Synder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti only to break with them later on, talks about a “national renaissance” (137) in one of his poems. This so-called national renaissance does not include Jews or homosexuals, of course (138). The

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second, Rory Long, an indefatigable writer who practices all genres but without rhyme or reason and who hates the 1970s because they are full of “sad hippies and . . . sad whores” (141), believed fervently in the need for an “American resurrection” (141). This is certainly not the world envisioned by the likes of Walt Whitman or Mark Twain but of Ezra Pound. At the end of the entry, as a matter of fact, purity (143) is sarcastically postulated as the secret to long life. Everything that has been said so far regarding the ideological platform of these “pure Mestizos” (92)—the pursuit of racial and philosophical purity and the longing for a return to the past as well as the confection of a brilliant future in an effort to evade the present—culminates, hermeneutically speaking, in a kind of Dystopia that becomes a dead end ultimately. As we begin to put the finishing touches on this section of the chapter, it behooves us to briefly recall our discussion on the distinction between space and place in the previous chapter. For these are the questions that need to be answered here: do these “delirious villains,” or “infamous rulers,” as Ríos calls them (2009b), 36 inhabit a place or a space, and do these places and spaces have possibilities? One might remember that, for Harvey, both “absolute space” and “place” are innately static, especially the former, which he conceives of as bounded territory. Massey, meanwhile, rejects Harvey’s conception of place, arguing that, on the contrary, place is full of movement and social energy and holds much potential. Broadly speaking, space is more abstract than place. Finally, Cresswell (2004) construes place as “meaningful location,” whereas, for Lefebvre, space is essentially constructed and thus marked by spatial practice. The simple answer is that Nazi’s geography is an abstract territory where its inhabitants have no opportunity for growth. They occupy, following Harvey, an “absolute space” where “place” can really never become “meaningful location” in Cresswell’s terms. At the lexical level, the presence of terms such as ideal, bucolic, estate, brotherhood, to name a few, reveals a state of permanent mental imprisonment on the part of Nazi writers. Often, this manifests itself through the Spanish Golden Age’s well-known motif of “contempt of court and praise of village,” even if sometimes certain contradictions do stand out. The story of Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, the first one in the collection, illustrates this point well. On the one hand, in her book Argentinean Hours, she calls for a “return to the origins: working in the country” (15)—an idea that goes along with her giving Hitler a copy

198   |  Chapter 5 of Martín Fierro (16) and her founding the journal Criolla Letters (21)—; on the other hand, however, back in Argentina from Germany, she wishes to build schools in the Argentinean territory “where civilization has not yet arrived” (16). 37 Which prompts one to ask: does Edelmira want Argentina to be modern, or does she wish it to remain unchanged? The central part of the story concerning the issue of space and place comes when she reads Poe’s essay on interior decorating “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840). What makes this crucial is not that she is then prompted to build a room following Poe’s instructions exactly, or that, shortly thereafter, she starts writing “Poe’s Room,” or even that, somewhat à la Pierre Menard, the “room” represents not only a detailed description of the reproduction of Poe’s room (20) but also a description of its furniture and its paintings, and so on. What does make this crucial is that, at the end of her life, Edelmira retreats to “the Blue farm, shut away in Poe’s room where she used to . . . dream about the past” (23). Is this a clin d’oeil to modernism’s canonical founding text (as well as an indirect criticism of its aesthetics, especially if one thinks of Darío’s “El velo de la reina Mab” and similar texts)? It possibly is. What is indisputable is that in the spatial cocoon that is Nazi literature, which can be managed, measured, controlled, and so on precisely because it is conceived of in absolute terms, there is no transformation, no advancement, no redemption. The only image that comes to mind when thinking of Edelmira’s situation and that of writers of the same ilk in Nazi is that of the inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno, in whichever circle they may find themselves Among Nazi writers who share Edelmira’s predilection for enclosed places, either in their own lives or symbolically, is the above mentioned Bengoechea, who at the end of his life prophesized a “new Golden age” and spent most of his life living on a “country estate.” The link between physical location and mental space is clear here. What Bolaño seems to be saying is that a protected, almost cloistered existence can only spawn reverie and delusion. In another case, a German poet born and raised in Caracas, Franz Zwickau, author of symbolically fraught texts such as Concentration Camp, Heimat, and The War Criminal’s Son (92), and who attacks what we might call “rational” authors such as Montaigne and Pascal while reciting Goethe, participates actively in an “Aryan Naturalist Commune” (92) and writes poems, in German!, “of a rather bucolic atmosphere” (93). At first sight, this could be construed as a sarcastically acerbic criticism of

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romantic aesthetics. But what is different between Zwickau and the founders of German romanticism—the Schlegel brothers, Herder, Heine, among others—is that the exotic, the strange, and the other are sought after and cherished in the latter (orientalist attitudes aside) and condemned in the former. In one of his poems, in point of fact, he speaks of “the will for purity” (91). Like Edelmira, Zwickau has no contact with his surrounding reality; for why else would a Venezuelan-born writer of German ancestry want to live in an Aryan Commune and compose poems in German while living in Venezuela? Ultimately, what Zwickau and others like him do is what Borda, the Guatemalan writer, was compelled to do, specifically because of the maltreatment he claims to have been a victim of his entire life, which is the reason for the prevalence of the Germanic component of his works. To be able to continue to live and to write, Borda claims he felt compelled to take refuge in an “ideal space” (110).38 In reality, all writers in Nazi seem to inhabit this “ideal space” in one way or another. J. M. S. Hill, for example, included, like Borda, in the section “Vision, Science Fiction,” describes “a southern philosopher whose pipe dream was to create an Ideal Republic in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle” (101) in his first novel. Symbolically speaking, there is indeed no difference between this “absolute space,” the “Ideal Republic,” and “estate” or even “brotherhood,” for they all expel, or distort, the present. They are all havens from the maelstrom of history; they are all, in the fina account, claustrophobic sites devoid of social practice. In some cases, the unremitting desire to build this solipsistic sanctorum gives way to an embrace of the countryside and a rejection of the metropolis, as suggested above. Such is the case, for example, of the Argentinian Argentino Schiaffino, who, if he ends one of his stories with a bucolic scene “under the absolutely free heavens of the homeland” (165), 39 he also writes a poem in which he reminisces “the idyllic visions of recovered childhood” (169). 40 Once again, the movement is nostalgically backward and away from the present. The countryside in Nazi, nevertheless, is not, automatically, synonymous with the province or small towns in terms of space. Generally in Bolaño’s fiction, the province is associated with ignorance and lack of tolerance, as stated in the previous chapter. Cepeda Cepeda’s conservatism, for example, is attributed to his having received a provincial education (72), while, in large measure, we are led to believe that González Carrrera’s Fascist sympathies are connected to the fact that “he always lived in small towns” (69).

200   |  Chapter 5 The story that brings all these elements neatly together in Nazi, “Willy Schürholz,” and in some sense lays the groundwork for “Ramírez”—­ hypotext which in turn bridges Nazi with Distant and will be examined more closely in the next section of this chapter—is that of the Chilean Willy Schürholz, one of the two “Germans at the end of the world” (89). This occurs in two ways: first, due to the very peculiar place where the narrator states that Schürholz was born, in “Colonia Renacer” (94); second, Schürholz’s Faustian impetus. Anyone relatively familiar with Chilean history will immediately know that Colonia Renacer likely alludes to Colonia Dignidad (now Villa Baviera), the commune-like entity founded by the World War II German medic Paul Schäfer at the beginning of the 1960s in southern Chile. For the purposes of our discussion here, two points need to be made. First, during the time that Schäfer was at the helm of Colonia Dignidad (1961–1997), the German immigrants as well as the poor Chilean families living inside had absolutely no contact with the external world. Second, it is now incontrovertible that during Pinochet’s dictatorship various political prisoners were tortured and murdered inside its premises.41 In the story, the word renacer (literally, to be born again)42 implies the idea that, in large measure, in real-life Schäfer wanted to reproduce Germany on Chilean soil, as, historically, other Germans may have been tempted to do in Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay43 ; it also shows Nazi literature’s innately utopian and solipsistic disposition. The narrator affirms that Colonia Renacer has “an autarchic economic system that allows it to live with its back to what Chileans, perhaps with an excess of optimism, call ‘Chilean reality’ or ‘plain reality’” (94). A character like Schürholz could only emerge from a system with these characteristics, we are led to believe. The Faustian impetus to which I alluded above has mainly to do with Schürholz poetic activities. Like Ramírez Hoffman, he is an “experimental poet” (96), except that, unlike Ramírez Hoffman (or really Carlos Wieder in Distant), he does not write poems in the air. Similarly, though he is Ramírez Hoffman’s disciple according to some—or his “complementary figure” (Jennerjahn 2002, 74)—he lacks the latter’s “excess” and his art “is systematic, monothematic, concrete” (97). Specificall , Schürholz’s poems consist of plans and the titles of his books poems are called Geometry. But what ultimately puts Schürholz in the company of Nazi writers examined in this section is not just that his poetry consists of concentration camp plans, as despicable as this might be, but also the very idea of constructing an

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“absolute space” devoid of meaning. In the city of Valparaíso, for instance, he locates his concentration camps in “a bucolic and empty space” (97); and in the Atacama Desert he designs “the plan for the ideal concentration camp” (98). 44 If Schürholz’s entry encapsulates the major ideas discussed in this section, it also, proleptically, announces “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman,” which in turn explodes in Distant, as we shall in the next section. Here, in Nazi, an almost unclassifiable text that adheres to postmodernism formally but whose content reveals a clear engagé side, Nazi literature displays two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, its practitioners seek to avoid living in the present at any cost and they are blind to the historical circumstances that surround them. On the other, they turn their eyes to the past, paradoxically, to confect a utopia that will protect them from that present. As we shall see next, the feelings of utopia and grandeur also characterize Bolaño’s most famous Fascist, Carlos Wieder. distant star :

The Persistence of the Past and the Building of a New Na tion

In the same way that Amulet has its first life in Detectives, and, similarly, A Little Lumpen Novelita emerges from “Muscles” in Secreto, and 2666’s “The Part about Amalfitano” rises partially from the ashes of The Woes of the True Policeman—a process tied to what Carmen de Mora calls Bolaño’s predilection for “autophagy” (2011, 183) and Jorge Dávila Vázquez “the Balzacian process of reusing characters and circumstances” (2007, 146) 45 —Distant (1996), published just a few months after Nazi, emerges from the cocoon of Nazi’s last story, “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman.” Distant is, in Genette’s (1980) terms, the hypertext of “Ramírez” (with “Ramírez” being Distant’s hypotext, as already stated). Manzoni refers to what happens here as “a vampirizing of one’s own writing” (2002, 39). 46 Indeed, except for the change of names, plus the fact that Distant is much longer than “Ramírez,” both texts are practically identical (as in the case of Amulet and Auxilio Lacouture’s account in Detectives). Now, as stated above, it would appear that Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance reaches its full force here. Unquestionably, by delving into the past the Chilean author rewrites history and prevents painful events from falling into oblivion (Ramírez Álvarez 2008, 49). 47 Since the novel casts a light in the present onto an event that took place in the past, its title, Distant Star, does have an allegorical

202   |  Chapter 5 connotation (Fischer 2008a, 159). At the same time, since it was published when Pinochet was still the chief of the armed forces and the governments of either Patricio Aylwin or Eduardo Frei Ruíz Tagle had not dared change the constitution or the neoliberal policies imposed forcibly during the dictatorship,48 Distant could be looked at as an effort to renew “Latin American political identity in a time of transition to an uncertain future” (Cacheiro 2010, 132). To a large extent, when Carlos Vargas Salgado declares that Bolaño’s novel constitutes, basically, “an examination, a persecution of Wieder” (2011) one would have to add that it is also an examination of the governments of the Transición in Chile. Although criticism on Distant has been varied, and even though critical studies of the novel have often touched upon several subjects at once, certain themes have stood out more than others. One of the most important has to do with Bolaño’s recasting of the avant-garde aesthetics in general49 and CADA and the escena de avanzada in particular.50 In this context, various critics have centered their attention on the possible connection between Wieder’s poetic performances and Zurita’s sky poems.51 Others have looked, more specificall , at the violent aspects of the avant-garde and what Juliet Lynd calls “Wieder’s public happenings” (2011, 171). 52 The first public happening, where this “glacial dandy” (Cohen 2002, 33) uses verses from the Bible to write a poem over the city of Concepción, has been examined amply.53 So have Wieder’s photo exhibition in the city of Santiago54 as well as the reasons for why he was subsequently discharged from the army.55 A topic that has also elicited much critical attention has been the innately conjectural nature of the narrative discourse, marked, throughout the text, by the presence of an “elusive narrative voice” (Simunovic 2006, 10). 56 Another focus of attention has been the presence of the double in Distant, both in terms of the doppelgänger57 but also as regards the fine line that separates those who are guilty from those who are not.58 Within the parameters of the double, two subjects have been explored: on the hand, the role that the chapters on Stein and Soto (and Petra) play in the novel’s diegesis59 ; and, on the other, the way in which an initial crime detective story that eventually becomes a literary detective story reflects a political standpoint that condemns the Right but also the Left.60 The relationship between Distant’s prologue and Nazi’s “Ramírez” has of course also been analyzed.61 Finally, two other aspects that critics have tackled have been the matter of whether, at the end of the novel, justice has or has not

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been served in Wieder’s case,62 or whether an ambiguous and dubious ethics prevails,63 and the possible implications of Romero’s future economic plans for the overall political intent of the text.64 In my judgment, of the already extensive bibliography published on Distant, nine studies stand out.65 As a kind of preamble to my own critique of the text I shall refer very briefly to five of them: those of Piérola (2007), Vargas Salgado (2011), Lynd (2011), Mandolessi (2011), and Di Stefano (2013). Borrowing from Hutcheon’s idea of the predominance of self-­ reflexivity in postmodern art, and rejecting Jameson’s (or Harvey’s) circumscription of postmodernism to the development of capitalism and capitalist accumulation at a specific point in time, José de Piérola describes Distant as a reflexive historical novel (244) whose main goal consists not so much in questioning the various possible versions of history or even “the truth of History” (245), but rather historiography in general, conceived in terms of what materials and what methods are employed to (re)construct history (245–46). Now, if the novel’s narrative discourse, which is full of conjectures, hesitations, and trepidations, invites the reader to reflect on the aesthetics of the text, its content invites her to think of its ethics. Similarly, contends Piérola, Distant calls on the reader to think of the past and of the memories of that past (249). In the end, Bolaño’s text questions the validity of the archive as a final arbiter of the historical truth (250) and, perhaps most important, makes one reflect on the very “statute of the historical novel” (251). Carlos Vargas Salgado’s 2011 article on Distant overlaps with my own ideas on two fronts: the novel use of the detective genre in Bolaño’s text—Vargas Salgado calls it “the Latin American policiaco”— and the engagé side of his oeuvre. Regarding the latter, he writes, “There is in all of them [Bolaño’s works] a keen, destabilizing question regarding the social function of writing, and its relation to historical events.” As regards the former, it allows Bolaño to present the issue of the violation of human rights and abuse of power through the use of a type of writing that exceeds the predominantly literary to enter the patently political. Consequently, “the story’s policiaco program meets in an ingenious manner with the ideological[program].” Juliet Lynd’s 2011 study contains multiple insightful comments on the text. Its most original contribution, however, is that she approaches Distant from the point of view of performance theory, focusing not only on what Fischer calls Wieder’s “macabre happening[s]” (2008a, 151) but also on other performance-like aspects of the text

204   |  Chapter 5 such as, for example, the stories of Stein, Soto, and Petra. To be able to comprehend the true political import of Bolaño’s novel, she claims, it becomes necessary to go beyond an understanding of the text from the standpoint of either “the tropes of mourning” (170) or “the politics of postmodernism” (170). She stresses, particularly, Distant’s oral aspects— she refers, for example, to “the tensions between orality and writing” (181)—and the idea that its performative quality tests the reader’s agency at every stretch (171, 177). At the same time, she emphasizes throughout that, even if there are ideological reasons behind Wieder’s actions, it is his disrespect for difference, especially his misogynistic proclivities,66 that are ultimately brought to the fore in the text’s diegesis. Lynd’s analysis also underscores Bolaño’s harsh criticism of the governments of the transición present in Distant. Mandolessi’s 2011 article explores the concept of abjection and the abject in Bolaño’s text by using Julia Kristeva’s definition of these two terms as expressed in her Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Like Vargas Salgado, Mandolessi also expresses an idea that runs through my own study on Bolaño’s oeuvre, except that she frames it in the context of abjection. Regarding the political ambiguity she perceives in Distant, she states, “This ambiguity ought not be read as ideological ambiguity; this ambiguity is inherent in the way in which Bolaño tackles the political: i.e., by focusing on abjection” (65). Although my own argument is that this “ideological ambiguity” tends to lean more toward the engagé side of the political spectrum, I do agree with Mandolessi that the abject plays a fundamental role in Distant. She identifie various instances in the text where the abject makes its appearance: for example, Wieder’s undefinable and elusive identity (70), the pictures of dismembered women’s bodies and the reactions they provoke (74, 77), the presence of substances that produce disgust and that are usually associated with abjection (e.g., Norberto’s saliva and Tatiana’s vomit), among others. Mandolessi concludes: “The political value of Bolaño’s fiction resides, precisely, in the abject instances that it represents: instances of the crisis of signification . . . If Bolaño’s fiction appears as ideologically ambiguous, this is due to the fact that abjection . . . does not have an intrinsically political meaning” (77–78). In the fifth and final study on Distant to be considered here, Eugenio Di Stefano (2013) emphasizes the political even more, but he does it in a way

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that might give initially the opposite impression. This critic’s major contention, in fact, is that, contrary to postmodernism’s erasure of the line that separates art from non-art (or art from life), and against the “antiliterary or extraliterary” (465) efforts of either testimonio literature (as Beverley argues) and the escena de avanzada (as argued by Richard 2002), Distant claims, above all, the autonomy of the aesthetic object and the need for interpretation. For, after all, he maintains, Romero is able to find Wieder thanks to the narrator, who is a poet; it is only once the latter has detected the aesthetic object—traceable to Wieder, who is also a poet—that this “esthete of horror” (Echevarría 2002b, 38) or “Sade-like hero”67 (Ménard 2003, 400) can be finally reached. In other words, the search for the poem not as evidence but as an aesthetic object is crucial to this detective story that is Distant. Now, if Bolaño’s text constitutes a rejection of the critique of aesthetic autonomy, it also constitutes a rejection of those who, like Beverley and Richard, for example, see the value of literature not in what a text might mean but rather in how it might make the reader feel. A substantial part of Di Stefano’s study, as a matter of fact, is a critique of those who have started to promote affect theory as possible critique, from the Left, of capitalism and neoliberalism. The conclusion of this very illuminating article is worth quoting because it brings together various points discussed by the author: My point has not been that Bolaño’s novel does, in fact, produce some sort of prescriptive utopian vision for the Left, much less that there is a form (aesthetic or otherwise) that can catapult the reader toward utopia. Nor is the point that the assertion on form is inherently a leftist project. The idea is not that insisting on aesthetic autonomy will produce economic equality. Rather, the idea is that the assertion of aesthetic form in Distant is also an indictment against the fantasy that affect is a critique of capitalism. The novel thus reminds us that the question of the aesthetic today is essential, not simply because it is a motor of dominant ideologies, but also and more importantly, because it provides a space where dominant forms of thought can be contested. In sum, what Bolaño’s novel asks its readers to consider is precisely whether the Left’s commitment to affect and affective politics serves not to produce a more just world, but rather to endorse contemporary neoliberal politics today. (479)

206   |  Chapter 5 The idea that the aesthetic has the power to transform society—one of the avant-garde’s major articles of faith—has of course always been utopian and some might even say cultural politics. To expect, similarly, that either testimonial texts or politico-artistic performances may affect the reader-­ viewer in such a way as to prompt her to eliminate political abuse and eventually bring about more equitable social and economic conditions seems equally quixotic. To accomplish this it just might be more profitable to read Thomas Piketty’s already classic Le capital au XXIe siècle (2013), and particularly chapters 14, “Repenser l’impôt progressif,” and 15, “Un impôt mondial sur le capital,” and then choose politicians who would be willing to implement his economic proposal. Or even to participate in mass demonstrations against oppressive governments and strike against abusive employers, among many other practical measures. Yes, Di Stefano (2013) is correct to call attention to the importance of the aesthetic in Distant; but he is equally right to reject affective politics as a viable weapon to combat neoliberalism. As I elaborate my own thesis concerning Bolaño’s novel, I cannot help but think of Lynd’s statement, “The politics and ideological position of Bolaño with regard to history and memory—in this novel and throughout his work—are still contested” (2011, 171), or of Raúl Rodríguez Freire’s contention that “Bolaño’s entire oeuvre constitutes a literature of memory” (2012, 22). And yet, as I have been arguing throughout my study, while Bolaño may not be vociferous in his unconditional support of the Left—indeed, at times one even gets the impression that he is plainly apolitical—he does lean in the direction of a progressive politics traditionally associated with the Left, especially in Distant, By Night, and even Amulet. Put differently, if, in terms of narrative form he at times resorts to a typically postmodernist structure— for example, in Antwerp, Detectives, and even in 2666— regarding content there seems to always be a preoccupation, a concern, an engagement with the circumstances that is patently political. Now, which of the traits of a postmodernism of resistance examined in Bolaño’s previous works are present in Distant? There is, as in Consejos, Monsieur, and Skating, the use of the detective genre. There is, also, as Piérola correctly maintains, not only a critical reflection on the past but one that zeroes in on a specific, very critical event of Chile’s recent history. Even if, at the end of Distant’s diegesis, the “Take care, Bolaño” (199) from Nazi becomes “Take care, my friend” (157),68 the autobiographical component is undeniable.69 Close defines

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the text’s narrator, in fact, as “an exiled Chilean writer closely identified with the author” (2014, 600). The idea “to make Revolution” present in Bolaño’s poetic production turns into a depiction of the disastrous outcome of that revolutionary project. The resistance to an incipient capitalist Spanish society at the end of Consejos as well as the use of the name of Vallejo in Monsieur are replicated in Distant by a criticism of the new Chile emerging from dictatorship and the condemnation of dictatorship’s brutal repression. Finally, as in the case of Bolaño’s short stories (published, granted, after Distant), both the presence of literary communities—in the guise of the narrator and Bibiano’s literary workshops or Jules Defoe’s “barbarian writing”—and Latin America play a significant role in the story. In what follows, I focus on two aspects of Distant: (1) the crucial role the past plays in the story (of these two aspects to be examined here this is no doubt the most important in the context of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance and thus the one that merits most attention); and (2) Wieder’s nationalist discourse. In the first I see an effort on Bolaño’s part to recall an event that, at the time of the writing of his novel, is being mostly ignored both by the political establishment and by Chileans in general. The second represents the ideological stance that, intent on turning Chile into a modern nation, destroys the ideals of groups that also sought to modernize Chile but by entirely different means. As we saw in our analysis of Nazi, delving into the past for certain Nazi authors is a way to avoid facing the present, but in Distant it is precisely the author’s present that elicits reflection on the past. It is very likely that, in light of most Chileans’ refusal to confront their recent dictatorial past at the beginning of the 1990s, plus the tepid governmental condemnation of human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship and the publication in Chile of novels that sought to entertain rather than to enlighten,70 Bolaño was prompted to turn his attention to Latin America in general and his country of birth in particular. He was well aware of what was happening in Latin America, as his friends can attest. Besides, the geographical distance from the continent certainly provided him with a better vantage point. Let us remember that the actions of his first novels (except for Monsieur) take place in Spain. But let us not forget that a nostalgic élan does permeate much of his poetry and that a picture of Violeta Parra appears in Consejos and Morán, from Skating, is Chilean. That he should thus fictio alize Allende’s overthrow—an event that was deeply felt by the Left around

208   |  Chapter 5 the world at the time—and the defeat of the revolutionary dream is really not surprising. Moreover, even though, theoretically, he could have chosen to enlarge a different story from Nazi, he chose “Ramírez.” In other words, Bolaño goes back to Chile, his country of origin—to which he returns in By Night with force—in the same way that he goes back to Mexico in Detectives later. Now, what aspects, moments, places, and experiences does Bolaño wish to re-create in Distant? The historical referent of the story coincides both with Pinochet’s coup d’état and the narrator’s (and Wieder’s) stay in Chile in the first half of 1970s. Culturally and economically, of course, this is a very different Chile from the one in the 1990s. It is also true that the narrator’s account is essentially analeptic and that he provides various clues throughout the narration regarding the passing of time. But the major focus—the events that catapult what ensues in the diegesis—lies in the 1970s in a country that is still economically underdeveloped. When Bolaño is working on his text in the mid-1990s, Chile—and Latin America in general—is beginning to live a post-political, a post-ideological moment marked by a disenchantment with politics (Lechner, Hopenhayn) and a kind of willful amnesia; almost everything in the characters’ daily existence, nevertheless, is political, including literature. In Distant, and especially in the first chapters, the author resists the postmodern by depicting a society that is only partially modern. In representing 1970s Chile, four aspects of the story are worth examining regarding Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance: (1) the issue of money; (2) the matter of place; (3) the representation of leftist politics; and (4) the re-creation of the 1973 coup and some of its sequels. Even though the subject of money is not central to Distant, it does serve the purpose of showing Chile’s transformation from an incipient developing nation to a progressively neoliberal one as the time of the story advances. Chronologically speaking, the first corresponds to the early 1970s and the second to the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship and, especially, the period of the postdictatorship. At the beginning of the diegesis, in order to establish a clear difference between him and the other members of the poetry workshop and Ruiz-Tagle, the newcomer, the autodiegetic narrator makes reference to the way the latter dresses. What most surprises him is Ruiz-Tagle’s claim that he was self-taught. Being self-taught and wearing the clothes that he wears appears contradictory, in his judgment, as, at

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that time in Chile, “autodidacts were poor” (14). The unsurprising assumption, of course, is that the other members of the workshop dressed more humbly and did not have the means to purchase as many clothes as Ruiz-Tagle, who changed attire constantly and who even had blue-jeans (14), which in Chile in the early 1970s, constituted a clear sign of distinction71 as well as a sign of rebellion. Whereas, before the arrival of consumer culture, people from low- and middle-class sectors had few clothes (particularly the young) and women often knitted their own sweaters and frequently made their own clothes, Ruiz-Tagle “always wore expensive, designer clothes” (14). 72 In a country where one was judged by the clothes one wore, to wear designer clothes—usually associated with European and especially North American (United States) brands such as Lee and Levi in the case of blue jeans—meant belonging to an economically affluent group even if it also meant displaying a culturally rebellious disposition. The idea that there is a gulf between the members of the poetry workshop and Ruiz-Tagle is further reinforced by the fact that either the latter’s father or grandfather73 was the owner of a country estate (14), just like Farewell in By Night. In other words, Ruiz-Tagle came from the upper rural class, a historically very powerful class in Chile associated with ideologically very conservative political views. The difference between the two is further strengthened by the places where they lived. Like most Chilean students during the 1970s (and even today, though less so), the members of the workshop either lived with their parents or in “poor student pensions” (16). Ruiz-Tagle, by contrast, lived alone and in a rather spacious apartment. Besides, affirms the narrator, he and his friends were almost always broke whereas Ruiz-Tagle never lacked money (16). The subject of money continues to play a role as the story progresses. In fact, once Bibiano realizes that Carlos Wieder, the poet-pilot who had been writing poems in the air, is none other than Ruiz-Tagle, he is appalled by the last name he chose for himself (55), that is, he chose a last name that in Chile has a certain prestige (55). Critics have seen the use of this prestigious last name as a condemnation of the governments of the transition on Bolaño’s part and a possible allusion to Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle.74 Bibiano’s allusion to Wieder’s appropriation of this last name, however, speaks not only to the association of the name Ruiz-Tagle with social, symbolic, and real capital in Chile but also to the crucial importance that last names as social markers, in general, have traditionally had in Chilean society. Now,

210   |  Chapter 5 whichever definition of the name Wieder one might choose from the list of possibilities that Bibiano entertains (50–51), Wieder’s ancestry is undeniably related to German immigration to southern Chile, and German immigration often meant the expelling of indigenous populations (Mapuches) from their land. In Ruiz-Tagle’s and Wieder’s names, consequently, is encapsulated Chile’s history of colonization and oppression. It is thus not surprising that when later on the dramatized narrator focalizes on Amalia Maluenda, the Garmendia sisters’ maid who testifies against Wieder, he has her establishing a mental connection between Wieder’s crime and the multiple crimes and injustices perpetrated by the Chilean state in the course of Chile’s history, “a history of terror” (119). Money acquires special significance in Wieder’s performances. The fact that businessmen (41) attend some of his early aerial shows and that “several private companies” (53) finance his trip to the South Pole speak to the increasing collusion between the military regime and business interests in Chile, a collusion that in real life has as one of its signal moments the visit of Chicago economist and neoliberalism’s guru Milton Friedman in 1975. 75 The ultimate triumph of neoliberalism in Chile as well as the concomitant pervasiveness of the idea of economic success as almost the sole raison d’être for Chilean society become evident in Distant not only because the person who hires Romero to capture Wieder “has become rich in recent years” (145)—“it seems that in Chile lots of people are becoming rich” (145), ironizes Romero—but particularly because Romero, whose “major professional satisfaction” (124) had been to receive a “medal of bravery” (124) from Allende’s own hands, wants to capture Wieder for the money. Indeed, when the narrator suggests he not kill Wieder because it could ruin them both, he replies, “It’s not going to ruin me, . . . on the contrary, it’s going to capitalize me” (155). These words hint at the possibility that it behooved certain members of the Chilean bourgeoisie to get rid of Chile’s Fascist past.76 With respect to place, the second point of discussion surrounding Bolaño’s reflection on the past, something needs to be said, first of all, about the city of Concepción and specifically the Universidad de Concepción, where both Stein’s and Soto’s poetry workshops convene. Lynd is correct when she points to the symbolic link between the name of the city and the start of a new era in Chile (2011, 173). 77 What has not been contemplated, nevertheless, is the possible connection between the Universidad de

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Concepción in the text and certain major events taking place there in the 1960s, both literary and political. In 1960, Gonzalo Rojas, a young Chilean poet and a professor of Spanish at the Universidad de Concepción—who, in 1958, had organized a meeting of Chilean writers in the city of Concepción (and Chillán)—put together the university, the Primer Encuentro de Escritores Americanos, attended by writers such as Ernesto Sábato, Allen Ginsberg, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Nicanor Parra, and others.78 Then, in 1962, Rojas’s university hosted the Congreso de Intelectuales de la Universidad de Concepción, attended not only by major Latin American writers79 but also by philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, physicists, and Nobel Prize winners coming from around the world. In the history of Latin American letters this is arguably the most important event of its kind. Even though my intention here is not to provide a detailed account of what transpired in each of these encounters, it suffices to say the following in order to better understand their possible connection to Distant: The 1960 writers conference centered on the subject of Latin American identity, especially on the validity of the social function of literature, whereas the 1962 conference focused more on the social than the literary. It stressed issues such as what being a writer in Latin America meant, what role the continent played in the world, and, more important, the need for Latin American authors, who knew the literatures of Europe, the United States, and those of their own countries very well, to better familiarize themselves with the writings of other Latin American writers from the continent. Germán Alburquerque states about this conference: “We can say that it inaugurates the Latin American writers’ network” (2000, 344). Perhaps one of its most significant aspects is the authors’ almost unanimous support for the Cuban Revolution. Politically, the other decisive event associated with the Universidad de Concepción is that several founders of the MIR, who had belonged to a movement called Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario in the early 1960s in Concepción, became student leaders at this university, including the well-known Miguel Enríquez who, like other members of the MIR, would later be assassinated by the military. Though, surely, Bolaño does not re-create in Distant the writers’ conferences or the students’ political activities that took place at the Universidad de Concepción in the 1960s, in Stein’s and Soto’s poetry workshops and the young poets’ political discourse he does seek to reconstruct an important moment in Chilean history.

212   |  Chapter 5 Part of this reconstruction effort involves the re-creation of a certain setting, a certain physical ambience that, in the mind of a narrative voice narrating in the early 1990s, belongs to an older, less economically developed Chile. As in Bolaño’s short stories, the predominant focus here lies on a spatial geography associated with an incipient modernity or even a premodernity. This geography, in turn, corresponds almost perfectly with both the writers’ conference desire to bestow upon literature a social responsibility and with the young poets’ revolutionary wish to transform the world mentioned above. In other words, though not in a cause-effect relationship, they are each spurred on by certain economic circumstances that the narrator deems necessary to evoke in the text. In the story about Lorenzo, a boy who loses his arms in an accident, the narrator underlines that, besides having grown up during Pinochet’s regime and being a homosexual, he was poor, something that led him to become an artist even though being an artist, poor, handicapped, and homosexual constituted a true challenge in the Third World (81) especially. In a scene reminiscent of B’s and his father’s plunging into the sea in “Last” and Reiter’s several submersions into the Baltic in 2666 , the narrator refers to many things that cross Lorenzo’s mind as he attempts to commit suicide by jumping into the sea. Among these, the one that seems to stand out most is the memory of how difficult life was in Chile’s poor neighborhoods (82). The allusion to this premodern cartography is further emphasized in the context of Wie­ der’s aerial performances in the city of Santiago when mention is made of an expression that has long disappeared from the political vocabulary in Chile: “two huge shanty towns” (89) over which he flies. A few lines earlier, the narrator provides a description of the outskirts of the city that brings to mind certain scenes from Guzmán’s documentary La batalla de Chile that vividly describe urban conditions in many large cities in Chile in the 1970s, such as, “abandoned factories” (89), “poor houses, waste ground” (125), all masterfully summarized in the phrase “a scenery of crime in the Third World” (125). It is interesting that this economically pauperized scenario stands in dark contrast to the location where Wieder carries out his ultimate artistic performance (a photo exhibition of hundreds of mutilated women’s bodies): an apartment in Providencia, one of Santiago’s most affluent neighborhoods at the time. This means that as much as Wieder’s actions inaugurate a new era in Chilean life, they also symbolize a regression to a time when those who organized the coup and the civilians who

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supported it ruled, that is, to a time before the short-lived Allende government. Regarding the third component of the past—the manner in which leftist ideals are portrayed in Distant—no quote encapsulates the narrator’s (and young Bolaño’s) political stand better than the following: “We would talk a lot: but not only about poetry, also about politics, trips, . . . revolution and armed struggle; the armed struggle that was going to bring us a new life and a new age but which, for most of us, it was like a dream or, more appropriately, like the key that would open the door of dreams, the only ones for which it was worth living” (13). The narrator is of course referring to his days at the Universidad de Concepción, and the “revolution and armed struggle” to which he alludes belongs especially to a 1960s and 1970s Latin America. In order to establish a clear difference between him and the other members of the poetry workshop and Ruiz-Tagle, the narrator makes a rather strange distinction. He states that he and his friends spoke in a “Marxist-Mandrakista jargon” (16), 80 whereas Ruiz-Tagle “spoke Spanish. That Spanish of certain places in Chile” (16), associating thus Ruiz-Tagle’s speech not only with the same colonial power that subdued Mapuche culture in southern Chile81 but also with landowners, such as Ruiz-Tagle’s grandfather, who fought Frei’s and Allende’s agrarian reform ferociously. The difference with Ruiz-Tagle becomes even more palpable when the narrator refers to his friends’ political affiliation and his own. In words that offer a kind of summary of the Left during 1960s Chile, the spectrum of this political affiliation goes from, say, “the MIR” to “the Catholic Left,” among other leftist youth movements (16). Bibiano, for example, finds out many years later that their friend Patricia Méndez, who disappeared after the coup, had been a member of a literary workshop organized by “the Communist Youths” (42). Finally, as if to complete the picture of the Left in Chile in this period, the narrator informs the reader that la Gorda Posadas wished to become “a kind of Marta Harnecker of literary criticism” (21). The allusion to Harnecker here is certainly not gratuitous. A former student of Althusser, this Chilean sociologist published in 1969 a book that would eventually become one of them most popular books on Marxist theory in Latin America: Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico.82 As we can see, there is no doubt whatsoever that the poetry workshops in the text constitute a kind of metaphor for the political alliance that was the Popular Unity government.

214   |  Chapter 5 Since Bolaño’s recourse to the description of leftist politics in Chile in the 1960s and 1970s represents another facet of his postmodernism of resistance in Distant, it is not surprising that the narrator should extend this description to the rest of Latin America. He does so, in fact, by providing an account of what happened to both Stein and Soto after the coup. As critics have argued, the story of these two poets—recounted in chapters 4 and 5 of the text, respectively—constitutes a kind of interruption of the diegesis and, I would add, resembles what Rick Altman (2008) calls, borrowing from Jakobson and Genette, “‘hyperbolic’ modulation,”83 in the sense that the narrator ceases, if only momentarily, focusing on Wieder, the object of his ultimate concern (as theologian Paul Tillich would put it). Of the two accounts, Stein’s is the more pertinent in the context of the Left’s presence in 1970s Latin America. What’s more, there is almost a direct link between the “revolution and armed struggle” mentioned above and Stein’s actions in Central America.84 Anyone vaguely familiar with the political scene in this region of the world during this time will immediately recognize the referents employed by the narrator: “Nicaragua,” “Sandinista Front” (66), “Ernesto Cardenal” (68), “El Salvador” and the “FMLN” (69). Although Stein’s revolutionary actions are put into question by the narrator later on in the story, the very allusion to these transcendental moments in the political life of Latin America underscores the resisting nature of Bolaño’s postmodernist stance. That said, nonetheless, the author’s criticism of the Left from the Left pointed to in chapter 4 makes its first appearance here and has two faces. The first is a soft criticism while the second is a caustic one. The first dresses itself in the form of a melancholic feeling that extolls the idealistic efforts of those who gave their lives for the revolutionary cause. Specificall , the narrator places Stein in the company of those in Latin America who, again and again, everywhere in the continent, attempted by all means possible to alter reality for the better only to witness failure (66). The second criticism dresses itself in the form of a criticism tout court that seeks to offer a more nuanced account of leftist politics in Latin America. The narrator informs the reader that Bibiano calls a certain Argentinian poet who had excluded the poetry of Parra and Lihn in a poetry recital a “typical arriviste from the Left” (68), adding, ironically, “He would have been better off . . . on the Right” (68). This would imply two contradictory things: that the Argentinian poet’s leftist stand is lukewarm and, also, that too dogmatic a commitment blinds one to

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good poetry, or to poetry that cannot be pinned down politically that easily. The narrator, similarly, cannot understand why anyone would want to assassinate Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton.85 In his mind, it makes absolutely no sense that Stein, a “Bolshevik Jew” (69), could ever associate himself with those who murdered Dalton because it was good for the revolution. Once again, the narrator appears to be chastising a dogmatism that, this time, even leads to crime. The last feature regarding Bolaño’s treatment of the past in Distant has to do with the re-creation of the 1973 coup d’état and some of its sequels. Indeed, this is the event without which the novel would not exist. The author’s account follows very faithfully what happens in Chile between the arrival of the military junta and the first years of the post-dictatorship period. But, of course, Distant is not, stricto sensu, a historical novel, so the information that is provided by the narrator is not rich in details; besides, his focus of attention is Ruiz-Tagle’s (or Wieder’s) whereabouts, not contemporary Chilean history. To indicate what happened on September 11, 1973, for example, the narrator alludes to the coup and its aftermath in a single phrase (26). The rest of the information, never presented in a playful fashion or ironically, is a familiar story (at least to Chilean readers)—let us remember, moreover, that the narrator is recounting retrospectively and consequently has an awareness of the events that he probably lacked as these events were taking place. He recalls thinking, for instance, about who had gone to jail, who went into hiding, and who was being looked for (27). He appears to condemn, similarly, not only the belief held by the dictatorship that those who were members of leftist political groups, “the so-called ‘extremists’” (27), were dangerous but also the idea that their friends were equally dangerous. The connection in the text between these so-called extremists and “the Department of Sociology” (27) allows the reader to recall that, during the real coup, careers in such subjects as literature, philosophy, political science, anthropology, and others were also considered a threat to the regime. The narrator’s most poignant feelings about the situation are expressed thus: “I knew at that moment that everything I believed in was sinking forever and that many people, among them more than one friend, were being tortured” (27). Among the coup’s sequels the actions of Wieder play a fundamental role, of course. He stands in the text for all those who violated human rights during Pinochet’s regime. Leaving aside for now his aerial performances

216   |  Chapter 5 (which, really, belong more to the fictional than to the historical realm), the way in which the narrator imagines how Wieder carried out the murder of the Garmendia sisters’ aunt—the beginning of a process that Ainhoa Vásquez calls “the murder of women ritual” (2010,301)—is indeed reminiscent of the hundreds of disappearances of political opponents by members of secret military organizations such as the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) and, later, the Central Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), that took place especially during the first years of the dictatorships (though neither of these organizations is mentioned by name in Distant). The DINA was a secret police agency created in 1974 whose goal was the extermination of key sectors of the Left. Though prior to the coup, each branch of the armed forces had its own specialized intelligence department, the need arose to centralize as well as to reduce the brutality of the military repression that took place the first months after Allende’s overthrow. The DINA’s basic modus operandi was, first, the torture of political prisoners detained in multiple secret locations, and then, the disappearance of their bodies. Its agents wore civilian clothing and drove in unmarked cars. It was central to the consolidation of Pinochet’s power. In 1977 it was replaced by the CNI, an institution that resembled it but was also very different from it.86 In the text, it is noteworthy that Wieder is accused of having belonged to an “independent operative group” (116) 87 in charge of the assassination of students in Concepción and Santiago. As a corollary to Wieder’s murderous deeds, the narrator refers, in passing, to two entities: the church (42, 112) and a truth commission (116, 119). In Chilean history, the first probably alludes to Comité Pro Paz, a human rights organization created jointly by various Christian denominations and the Chilean Jewish community immediately after the coup in order to protect those who were being persecuted by the military.88 The second is likely an allusion to the Rettig Report, a commission created by President Patricio Aylwin in 1991 whose goal was to investigate the innumerable violations of human rights committed under Pinochet’s regime. Besides these historical referents, Bolaño also inscribes in Distant other key elements of the post-coup period in Chile, for instance, concentration camps for political prisoners (the Peña Center in the text); political prisoners from the city of Lota (38), a mining town with a long tradition of labor unrest and the site that inspired the naturalist short stories of Baldomero Lillo; students expelled from the university because of their leftist

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leanings (47); the closing down of libraries and poetry workshops (52); the life of Chilean exiles (75); the idea, hammered throughout the seventeen years of military rule, that there was an internal war in Chile (118), among other elements. Now that the reconstruction of the past in Distant has been scrutinized, let us briefly turn our attention to Wieder’s nationalist, right-wing discourse. By nationalist discourse I basically mean Wieder’s desire to rebuild a nation that he sees as having been contaminated by elements external to its presumed essence. In this regard, he belongs in the same category of those writers from Nazi who avoid living in the present by taking refuge in the past. From this point of view, it is really not surprising that he should resort to verses from Genesis for his fir t “artistic” performance. Yet, it is certainly a paradoxical gesture, for he uses a very traditional, a very conservative text to announce a new beginning. The paradox is further stressed by the fact that he reenacts an action—the flying of a plane, and specificall a German plane used in the Second World War at that—that may have had a foundational character during the historical avant-garde but surely not in the 1970s. Consequently, Wieder, as well as the military regime he represents, are anachronistic figures, to say the least. But be that as it may, comprehending the meaning of his message is easy. The newly instituted regime brings a new order (Mandolessi 2011, 74) upon an erroneously conceived empty space. Wieder’s fallacy, of course, is to present the old order as a tabula rasa devoid of history. If, as Nietzsche warns in “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” historical knowledge can sometimes be an obstacle rather than an asset in furthering society’s well-being, Wieder’s fault is to dispense with history altogether. The most mystifying part of his aerial poem, however, is the last word: “LEARN” (39). Who are the narratees of his command? Chileans in general. But what does he want them to learn? Béatrice Ménard sees Wieder’s admonition as an injunction to learn a lesson by force (2003, 405). However, the problem with Wieder’s admonition is that it lacks content. Apart from signaling the arrival of a new modus operandi characterized by violence, no other attribute for the new nation is provided once this first performance concludes. In this sense, the two instances in which he draws the Chilean flag in the sky (41, 43), as well when he refers to the “Chilean Rebirth” (43) in a later performance, constitute symbolically charged motifs lacking in substance. And yet, throughout Distant, even if a concrete nationalist agenda is not

218   |  Chapter 5 fleshed out, it can certainly be deduced. Although I do not subscribe to Schmitt’s notion that the political consists of recognizing one’s enemies, there is clearly in this “Nietzschean superman” (Simunovic 2006, 15) an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, that is, to divide those who should belong to the “Chilean Rebirth” from those who should not. Similarly and indeed inextricably tied to this imperious desire, there is the search for a pure, primal state where the new nation might be built. Above all, nevertheless, it is Wieder’s own fictional nation. When, in reference to his flight to the Antarctic, the narrator states that Wieder opted for flying alone (55), he is expressing much more than the fact that he flew alone. He is describing an attitude, a posture, a comportment that is exclusive and, foremost, exclusionary. As indicated earlier, the association of Wie­ der’s peculiar Spanish with the colonial power and the propertied class already sets him apart from his fellow poets, according to the narrator. However, the separation is not just economic, it is first and foremost ideological. Early on in Distant, at the Garmendia sisters’ house, when everyone knows him by the name of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, the narrator has him thinking ironically, and ominously, a “civil poetry” (31), a rumination that both hints at what is to come and draws a clear line between the civilian and (in this case) the military. Alluding to his poems written in the sky later in the diegesis, those who admired him say: “They were the poems of a new iron age for the Chilean race” (53). The use of “Chilean race” here is certainly not unintentional.89 In some measure, it is directly related to Wieder’s fervent desire to provide a new foundation for the nation. What better location to do so—at least metaphorically—than on a clean slate? This is where his aerial performance in the Antarctica gains full meaning.90 He writes, “THE ANTARCTIC IS CHILE” (55). And earlier, in an interview right after his performance, he talks about silence, saying, among other things, “Silence is like leprosy, . . . silence is like communism, silence is like a white screen that has to be fille . . . If you are pure, nothing can ever happen to you” (54–55). In their study of Distant, Alma Corona and Alma de Saavedra refer to Wieder’s “neo-baroque existence and his ambiguous conduct” (2010, 284) and to the text’s use of “the literary grotesque” (284–85). Though neither of these concepts is defined clearly by the authors,91 they are indeed useful to think about Wieder’s actions. For instance, what does this “aviator-poet” (Bruña 2012, 46) who is also an “executioner-poet” (Ramírez 2008, 41) mean

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when he avers that Chile is the Antarctic? Does he mean that it is a propitious territory to edify a new polity? Or does he mean, taking into account that silence pervades the Antarctic, and that he equates silence with leprosy and communism, that Chile is a territory that has been contaminated? At best, it is ambiguous, at worst, ungraspable. Not surprisingly, Ménard characterizes Wieder as “an ambivalent figure” (200 3, 400) and Gamboa as unknowable (2008, 213). He is probably both. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Wieder, as solitary a figure as he may appear to the narrative voice that evokes him, persists in his attempt to bring a new age to Chile. In a later aerial exhibition, in fact, he writes a series of verses starting with the anaphoric phrase “Death is.” From a political perspective two verses are particularly significant: “Death is Chile”92 and “Death is responsibility” (89). The first is written as Wieder’s plane flies over shantytowns, signaling, symbolically, the death of the old nation and the advent of neoliberalism; the second as his plane flies over the presidential palace, La Moneda, indicating not only the inauguration of a new regime but faulting the old one (Allende’s) for its own collapse. What is most ironic, however, is that Wieder persists in his nationalist efforts even after he has disappeared from the limelight. By then, of course, with much irony and plenty of humor, the narrator offers information about Wieder that drastically mitigates his idealistic yearnings to create a new Chilean race. Wieder, who has become involved in the creation of wargames—a subject at the heart of Bolaño’s posthumous The Third Reich—creates a game based on the War of the Pacifi (1879– 188 3), a war that pitted Chile first against Bolivia and then against Bolivia and Peru. Historically a source of immense pride for Chileans—since Chile defeated both neighboring nations—as well as the origin, in conjunction with the defeat of the Spaniards by the Araucanians, of the myth of Chilean bravery, the narrator not only debunks certain historical facts considered true but also makes fun of key historical figures. For instance, of the possible three readings of this wargame, one of them ironically questions the “real”93 significance of various aspects of facts and names that are a fixture of Chilean history, such as “Huáscar,”94 “Grau,” “la Esmeralda,”95 and, of course, “Prat” (109). Another reading posits the resemblance between Prat, the hero par excellence in Chilean history, and certain representations of Jesus. And, finall , a third reading that focuses on the invading Chilean army as well as on the crazy possibility that Chile’s

220   |  Chapter 5 “Race” (109) may have its origin in Peru’s capital (109). 96 This last sentence not only deflates Wieder’s grandiose ideas concerning the existence of a Chilean race by locating its genesis in a foreign nation, it also underlines the bellicose origin of the new nation he represents. In the end, Wieder suffers from the same malady that affects the characters from Nazi: an inability to live in the present that leads him to want to build a country that does not exist in real life. Now, if Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance manifests itself somewhat more strongly in Distant than in Nazi, it is because in the former he dramatizes the most important event in Chile’s recent history, not in order to ironize it or to play with it but to remind the governments of the transition that not enough was being done to deal with the tragic consequences of that event. The criticism against the Left, however, is still launched from the Left. And, like in previous works analyzed in this study, the use of his sui generis detective genre, the reclaiming of the subject via certain autobiographical textual features, the dramatization of the negative outcome of the revolutionary project as well as the condemnation of neoliberalism, all contribute to carry out the attack. In By Night, as we shall see next, Bolaño continues to resist the amnesia of his compatriots. by night in chile :

A Call t o Self-Reflection

By Night is without a doubt the most “Chilean” of Bolaño’s narrative works. In some way it is also the most realistic, keeping in mind, as Gastón Molina’s 2012 insightful analysis of the novel reminds us, that what is important is not so much to verify whether a given fictional name or fact has a correspondence in real life97 but rather how one construes the relationship between the literary and the referential. At the same time, one must not forget, as some critics have observed, that both the author’s first trip to Chile in 1998 as well as Pedro Lemebel’s urban chronicle “Las orquídeas negras de Mariana Callejas,” from De perlas y cicatrices (1998), may have inspired Bolaño to write By Night,98 as may have, similarly, Pinochet’s arrest in London that same year.99 Like Distant, it is a first-person narration, but unlike Distant he who narrates does so from within the machinery of power and not necessarily with the intention of telling the truth, as much as he wishes to convince us otherwise. Structurally speaking, it is a relatively simple text comprised of a single paragraph of some 140 pages plus another

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paragraph of just one sentence. Yet, along with Antwerp, By Night is arguably one Bolaño’s most complex texts. Not surprisingly, most critics consider it a codified novel.100 Some have compared the unrelenting narrative voice to a rant (Andrews 2006, 135).101 Others have called the protagonist’s suffocating homodiegetic discourse fluctuating (Moreno 2005, 209), digressive (Oliver 2006, 145), narcissistic (Zapata 2007, 139), chaotic (Espinosa 2006, 43), disrupted (Lopez 2007, 53), erratic (Esquerro 2006, 71), elusive (Domínguez 2012, 78), and concealing (Amaro 2010, 154). No matter how one defines this discourse, however, the permanent state of undecidability that characterizes what most critics have called the delirious rumbling of the protagonist prompts the unavoidable questions of what By Night is and what it is that the protagonist does. Most have referred to it as a self-examination, variously qualifying what Rodríguez calls, very aptly, “an oscillating consciousness at work” (2009, 20), thus, self-examination (Estève 2006, 103), stream of consciousness (Castillo de Berchenko 2006, 33; López-Vicuña 2009a, 208), the exercise of an “amnesiac memory” that suffers from a “guilty conscience” (Decante Araya 2007a, 15), the workings of a “dark conscience” (Espinosa 2002, 130; 2003a, 28),102 a conscience involved in an internal war with itself (Coddou 2001, 60), the tormented conscience of an accomplice (Fandiño 2010, 404) and “the uneasy conscience of an ultra-right-winger” (Draper 2012a, 127 ). Some have described the novel as a simple monologue (Cuadros 2006, 87) while others have nuanced their assertions by calling it interior monologue (García-Romeu 2007, 71, Nordenflycht 2011, 208) or a combination of interior monologue and dramatic monologue (Andrews 2006, 136). Manzoni (2006, 52) and Moreno (2005, 203) have called it a fictional autobiography. By Night has also been defined, finall , as a mémoire and “pseudo-confession” (Dove 201 2, 36), “a tortured effort at confessional expurgation” (O’Bryen 2011, 474), a “senile litany of auto-justific tion” (Roger 2007, 89), and as “the reminiscence of an existence” (P. Catalán 2006, 124). The novel’s narrator is Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix but he also goes by the nom de plume of H. Ibacache. He is a priest as well as a literary critic and a poet. He is also a member of the Opus Dei. He is Chilean. Though the text does not indicate specifically from where he begins his story, the narrator begins his account by telling the reader that, despite the fact that he is dying, he still has many things to say. Most of all, he wants to defend

222   |  Chapter 5 himself against the charges that a so-called aged young man who appears intermittently throughout the diegesis launches against him. As he attempts to justify his past actions by selectively choosing certain key episodes in Chilean history, his narration expands from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1990s. He is not an entirely new character, as a “Nicasio Ibacache,” one of Chile’s most reputable literary critics, just like him, extolls the poetry of Wieder in Distant. There is general agreement that Urrutia Lacroix stands for José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, alias Ignacio Valente, a Catholic priest and literary critic who published literary reviews in El Mercurio, Chile’s most conservative paper, since 1966, and has exerted a significant influence on the count y’s Republic of Letters.103 Of the three texts examined in this chapter, there is no doubt that By Night is the one that has received the most critical attention.104 As in the case of Distant, even though the critical corpus has been diverse, a few aspects of the text have elicited more scrutiny than others. Some of the most significant, already alluded to above, are the matter of the protagonist’s discourse and the nature of his narrative performance. Others, in order of importance, include the following: Given the extremely intimate connection between literature and politics in Bolaño’s overall narrative production and especially in By Night, it should not be surprising that much has been said about the representation of literature,105 the canon,106 the writer’s107 and the critic’s108 responsibility in the context of María Canales109 and Urrutia Lacroix’s visits to her house,110 but specifically as regards Canales’s dictum, repeated by Urrutia Lacroix later, “This is how literature is made in Chile” (By Night 147). 111 The metanarrative of the Chilean writer Salvador Reyes and the German writer Ernest Jünger while in occupied Paris has also received critical attention112 ; so have the Guatemalan painter they visit113 as well as his painting of Mexico City (43). 114 As one might expect, critics have examined not only the meaning of the novel’s title115 but also the epigraph that precedes the diegesis116 and By Night’s last, mystifying sentence (150). 117 Since Urrutia Lacroix’s “culpable stream” (Briceño and Hoyos 2010, 608) or “confessional series” (Domínguez 2012, 77) is, as stated earlier, directed at an omnipresent though speechless narratee that goes by the name of “aged young man,” multiple different descriptions about who or what this ubiquitous presence might be have been proposed,118 some even establishing a kind of parallel between the aged young man and the author. 119 Another equally

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mystifying presence throughout the text, in the form of a question that contains the name of an Italian troubadour this time—“Sordello, What Sordello?”—has also piqued the interest of critics.120 Finally, Urrutia Lacroix’s trip to Europe121 as well as his teaching of Marxism to Pinochet and three other members of the military junta122 have also been discussed amply. In such a symbolically fraught text such as By Night, critics have also alluded, though less frequently, to the role that Farewell plays in Urrutia Lacroix’s life123 and to Là-bas, Farewell’s country house.124 In this context, some have commented on Neruda’s significance in the text125 ; others have referred to Urrutia Lacroix’s encounter with peasants, women, and children, a subject I develop in my own analysis later. It is not a surprise, moreover, given its close connection to the role of the artist’s relationship to the political establishment, that another metanarrative in By Night, that of the shoemaker and Heldenberg, should have been broached by scholars,126 or that certain salient formal characteristics of the texts have been noted.127 Last, more than a few critics have evaluated the theme of melancholia in the novel,128 as well as the function of Odeim and Oido,129 Urrutia Lacroix’s quasi fixation with his robe,130 and, directly related to what Scott Esposito calls the priest’s “schizoid personality” (2012, 96), the issue of the double,131 also present in Distant, as seen above. Of the ten most insightful studies on By Night as of this writing,132 I would like to allude, very briefl , to two that relate in some way to my own analysis of the text, that of Rory O’Bryen (2011) and Susana Draper (2012a). The first, which also considers Amulet, centers on memory, melancholia, and political transition. O’Bryen’s major argument—situated almost at the antipodes of Avelar’s central thesis in his The Untimely Present—is that By Night simultaneously constitutes a true document of memory that attempts to narrativize the memories concerning the defeat of the political Left in the 1970s and presents a concept of melancholia that confers hope both upon politics and literature. Rather than signaling defeat, in other words, for this critic, melancholia is synonymous with resistance, both political and literary.133 Draper, whose overall study conceives of post-dictatorial Latin America as an open prison, focuses on the house in By Night, paying particular attention to Là-Bas and María Canales’s house, and analyzing the ways in which the idea of home is disturbed almost at every stretch by the uncanny. From her perspective, the text becomes an

224   |  Chapter 5 attack on Bolaño’s part directed against both the Right and the Left in a country that has not dealt appropriately with its past, a kind of J’accuse . . .! if you will. “A central activity of By Night, as a novel,” writes Draper, “is making the obvious and the clichéd visible, but in such a way as to make it less obvious and to show how the military gaze is still dominating post-dictatorial Chile (as Bolaño remarked)” (2012a, 149). Since my central argument in this book is that Bolaño practices a postmodernism of resistance, I could not agree more with O’Bryen’s (2011) major contention that melancholia provides a kind of political impulse in By Night. Concerning literature, I think it may also contain salvific qualities in the text, as he claims, yet I see it as standing on less solid ground in Bolaño’s oeuvre overall, as we shall ascertain especially in Detectives in the following chapter. Draper’s attention to By Night’s spatial configurations is indeed interesting not only because it makes us think of other spatial dynamics in Chilean narrative where space is a marker of social and national tensions—for example, in the generally claustrophobic spaces of Donoso’s and Eltit’s novels134 —but especially because she partially focuses (though without stating the matter in exactly these terms) on the localglobal or own-foreign relationship at the heart of the text and illustrated more broadly in the urban chronicles of Lemebel and the novels of Fuguet.135 What is interesting, in my view, is that at a time when globalization begins to alter more and more the social and cultural landscape of Chile, when it becomes increasingly clear that neoliberalism’s basic modus operandi will continue to go unchallenged—no matter what political party is in power—Bolaño writes a novel as if to remind his amnesiac compatriots that there are still issues to be resolved. Sure the novel is “a poetics of evil” (Bisama 2003, 88) or “the absolute construction of the world evil” (González 2010, 45). And sure it is “a tapestry in which the history of present-­day Chile can be deciphered and analyzed” (Dove 2009, 145) or “a work about the invisible ties that bind literature to power” (Castillo de Berchenko 2006, 31) and even “a demonstration of the exploration of the tensions between aesthetics and ethics that Bolaño carries out” (Briceño and Hoyos 2010, 607). But, above all, By Night is a wake-up call in which, metaphorically, a narrator, the author himself, addresses a narratee, Chile, and asks it to reflect on its recent past. In this regard, it has a sense of urgency that both Nazi and Distant lack. Put in the context of the postmodern-modern debate, and especially as

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it applies to Latin America, one could argue that By Night reflects either the aporias of an incipient modernity or the perennial strife between the own and the foreign. Politically, this is manifested in the text by the elimination of one form of government and the forceful imposition of another. Literarily, it is expressed in a conception of literature that adheres to an l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) philosophy and refuses to engage with the social and the political. In terms of form, the only two postmodern literary elements to note are a certain degree of intertextuality and the essentially fragmentary nature of the narrative discourse. The self-reflexivity that characterizes Urrutia Lacroix’s words, however, does not make By Night essentially postmodern for this self-reflexivity, this “narrative stammer” (Esquerro 2006, 72), rather, is more a symptom of his own troubled conscience than a reflection on the text as text. Concerning content, this novel represents a departure from the detective genre of previous texts. Likewise, the autobiographical is absent here (unless we concur with critics who dubiously identify the aged young man with Bolaño). Nevertheless, two ways in which Bolaño does show his postmodernism of resistance are his almost ferocious return to the past—more potently so than in Distant—and, in conjunction with it, his reevaluation of history not in order to parody it but to bring attention to it. Somewhat in line with Draper’s (2012a) own analysis, in what follows I explore the tensions between the local and the foreign in the text, as well as the function of literature. It is precisely in these two inextricably tied aspects that Bolaño’s engaged postmodernism of resistance manifests itself best. If By Night and Distant have been called Bolaño’s Chilean novels and have often been studied together (López Vicuña 2009a), it is for a reason. What connects them is not only Chile but the presence of two diametrically opposed Weltanschauung at the very heart of Chilean society. Wieder’s nationalism goes hand in hand with Urrutia Lacroix’s teaching Marxism to members of the junta, and the young poets from Distant are in some way the pigeons from By Night. But while in the former literature still preserves a degree of innocence, in the latter it is lost forever. A good way to start the analysis is to examine Urrutia Lacroix’s vision of Chile and Chileans.136 In Bolaño’s poetry, as we saw in chapter 2, Chile figures prominently. But here, in By Night, Chile does not have to do with the nostalgic feelings of the autobiographical self. It has to do, rather, with the dramatized narrator’s contradictory disposition toward his country and compatriots. On the one hand, the “delirious I” (Oliver 2006, 147) firmly

226   |  Chapter 5 states not only that he’s Chilean (12) but also that he loves his country (96); similarly, he readily accepts the appellation of “shinning Chilean” (122) that people utilize to refer to him when he passes by in the streets. On the other, however, he often expresses negative feelings toward his compatriots and their customs. One might be tempted to conclude that this is due to his being immensely proud, like so many Chileans in real life, of his double ancestry (Basque and French in his particular case), to the fact that, to put it bluntly, no indigenous blood runs through his veins. Nonetheless, although the issue of an oscillating identity is at play here in some way, it goes beyond that. Urrutia Lacroix is much more than what Martí calls “exotic Creoles” in reference to leaders intent on molding their societies on foreign models in nineteenth-century Latin America. His condescending attitude is related foremost to a feeling of superiority that is tied directly to his social and cultural capital. As we shall see in what follows, throughout By Night there is an almost permanent chasm that separates the protagonist from the nation; Chile and Chileans seem to always be at a distance from the narrative voice. One of the ways of inscribing the nation in the text is by referring to the country’s food. Part of the “exquisite . . . meal” (25) that is served in Urrutia Lacroix’s first visit to Là-bas, for example, consists of a “Chilean style salad” (25). 137 Later, at a restaurant, Farewell gets ready to gobble down another dish that he deems typically Chilean (51). The scene that most powerfully links food to country, however, is when Reyes invites Jünger to “drink tea, a Chilean tea” (39). 138 What stands out here is not so much the nature of this afternoon meal (similar to the English afternoon tea or the French goûter) but what Urrutia Lacroix reports Reyes having thought upon extending his invitation. Above all, the latter hoped that Jünger wouldn’t reach the conclusion that Chileans were a primitive people, that is, that they still wore feathers (39). “To wear feathers” is, of course, synonymous with belonging to an indigenous culture, to being premodern, to not being European or, ultimately, to not being “civilized.” The practice of drinking tea in the text, therefore, even though probably a custom learned from European immigrants who moved to Chile, is proudly presented as putatively Chilean. Another way of inscribing the nation is by referring to Chileans themselves, albeit it is here where the priest’s identity as Chilean shows its first fissures. In regard to the Guatemalan painter, for instance, he informs the reader that Reyes’s immediate reaction, “as a good Chilean”

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(42), was to offer him a meal. A true Chilean, hence, is hospitable by nature. He also describes a Chilean cultural attaché in Europe as “a nice guy, very Chilean” (94). Nonetheless, in the same sentence, he adds, but “not very educated” (94). Clearly, Urrutia Lacroix’s discourse on Chile and Chileans is ambivalent. When he mentions the literary soirées that took place in María Canales’s house for the first time, he reiterates this latter point, describing Chile as an isolated country where, even though people are nice, most of them “know nothing” (126). Most of the priest’s comments, however, marked by the distancing effect that produces the word Chileans, are negative. He refers to them as being gossipy (103), he states that one of their most outstanding personality traits is to avoid standing out or being embarrassed (129), and he makes reference to their being intellectually deficient (78). And, finall , Farewell, who displays a similar view regarding Chile and who affirms that “all Chileans are sodomite” (66), states in a moment of despair that Chileans are the first to disappear after the collapse (67). While it is certainly true that whatever is said in By Night is the result of what Decante Araya calls “a failing and guilty memory” (2007a, 16), it is no less true that throughout the text Urrutia Lacroix feels out of place, even when he identifies himself as Chilean The presence of what might be called the “uncanny” or “unheimlich” manifests itself especially in Urrutia Lacroix’s first visit to Là-bas, when he undergoes his literary baptism in Chile’s Republic of Letters. Dino Plaza speaks of an overall “feeling of not belonging” (2006, 93) that invades the young priest from the moment he arrives. Although this feeling of not belonging is palpable in Farewell’s house, it is particularly evident when he runs into a group of men, women, and children in Là-Bas’s surrounding area, encounters that Caroline Lepage describes as “fleeting as traumatic” (2007, 78) as well as nightmarish (79). It is here, when Urrutia Lacroix accidentally discovers this other Chile, the Chile whose labor power makes it possible for country estates like Là-Bas to function, that he feels most detached, most foreign. “Away from his environment,” states José García Romeu, “Urrutia . . . is no longer in his homeland” (2007, 72). Nevertheless, as we saw earlier, the priest confesses to feeling a true love for Chile. The term homeland, in turn, appears eight times in the text.139 Which leads us to ask ourselves, what is Urrutia Lacroix’s homeland, and how much does he really love it, as he assures us? To answer these questions, let us examine his encounters with the peasants and children. As we shall see,

228   |  Chapter 5 what is at stake in these encounters with the subaltern is not just his national but also his religious identity. The first instance of what Draper calls “irreducibility and incommensurability” (2012a, 135) in reference to the young priest’s encounter with the peasants really takes place at the very moment of his arrival to Querquén, when he chastises the man, a peasant, assigned to transport him to Farewell’s estate, for not pronouncing his name correctly (18). Language as marker of social class will appear again later in the diegesis.140 Sometime after greeting Farewell and a poet with whom he was talking, Urrutia Lacroix ventures beyond the house’s garden, into an open field he describes as wild (20). By doing this, he enters, symbolically, into a different historical time and, of necessity, into a different culture. Without a doubt, these scenes outside the limiting confines of Farewell’s house proper provide a relatively faithful representation of life in the countryside in the 1950s (Berchenko 2011, 12) and how economically under­ developed it was (Mora 2011, 192). Similarly, as Gabriel Salazar has shown in his excellent Labradores, peones y proletarios (1989), the process of what he calls la descampesinización (rural peasants moving to the city) of the countryside took place essentially between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Chile was still predominantly rural in the decade of the fifties. The priest’s first encounter with the subaltern subject occurs when he enters into a cabin without asking for permission. With Farewell’s library in mind, Lopez refers to this space as “inverted double of the hunting lodge” (2007, 59). What is revealing about this episode apart from Urrutia Lacroix’s reaction to one of the women kissing his hand, is the way those inside the cabin—two women and three of Farewell’s peons (20)—respond to his arrival: obsequiously happy. This has to do, partially, with a genuine reaction on the part of those who welcome strangers. But in a semi-feudal-like context and particularly in Chile, it may more likely have to do, as Salazar also shows in the aforementioned study, with the great influence that, historically, rural Catholic priests had upon a generally uneducated populace, which they often exploited economically by charging high prices for religious ceremonies and receiving food items in exchange for religious pardons, among other nefarious practices. Urrutia Lacroix claims to have felt disgust (20) when one of the women mentioned above kissed his hand.

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The young priest’s reaction is revelatory not only of his utter contempt for the other but also of his lack of knowledge of her living conditions. While his fear is produced by his ignorance, his feeling of revulsion proceeds from deeming himself superior. He, who ultimately exalts the ideal over the real, does not want to be contaminated by matter. Yet, when moments later he is informed that there is a sick or dead child (which, he is not sure), he resorts to the real, suggesting to the peasants that they call a doctor and implying that there is nothing he could do (21). Two things are worth noticing about this episode. First of all, there is the linguistic misunderstanding; he claims not to have comprehended what he was told (21). Second, there is the issue of responsibility. One will remember that, at the beginning of the fabula, as he begins his “speech of ‘discredit’” (Catalán 2006, 129), he asserts, “One has a moral obligation to be responsible for one’s acts and also for one’s words and even for one’s silences” (11). In his role as priest, nonetheless, Urrutia Lacroix shirks his responsibility and even rationalizes his actions. Admitting his inability to help the sick or dead child, not only does he exhort the peasants to call a doctor, he also asks them to pray, suggesting that he had other more pressing things that required his attention and that, as long as the child was baptized, everything was fine (21) 141 As shocking as this scene may appear, however, it is not the instance that most radically reflects the narrative voice’s feeling of complete foreignness relative to his surroundings. This instance occurs the following day and somewhat in crescendo as Urrutia Lacroix, again, takes a stroll away from Farewell’s house. He first spots a couple of peasants and presents a seemingly neutral description of nature that nonetheless also includes “orchards that appeared forsaken” (29). At almost precisely this point, the local, represented by two naked children playing, and the foreign, incarnated by the priest, come face to face. Instead of pondering the innocence of childhood, having momentarily forgotten, it would appear, that, in his Christian faith at least, it is necessary to become like children to enter the kingdom of God (as Jesus exhorts his disciples to do), the priest zeroes in on the ugliness of the experience, paying particular attention to the liquid that comes out of the child’s nose (29). Then, embodying almost perfectly Kristeva’s notion of the abject, he proceeds to say how nauseated and sick he felt (29). Soon after that, as he continues to stroll, he notices the “dirty sticks” (29) of a chicken coop, as if, in reality, they could be any different.

230   |  Chapter 5 What most surprises him, nevertheless, is the presence of an araucaria (29) next to a stable, wondering what such a “majestic and beautiful” tree could be doing there. As Molina suggests, nature’s grandiosity prevents him from comprehending the human experience (2012, 179). Or, put differently, the priest’s book culture blinds him to real culture. We shall see later that, in large measure, this attitude is intimately related to Urrutia Lacroix’s conception of literature and the literary in general. The apex of the priest’s “instance of dislocation” (Draper 2012a, 135) occurs when, imagining a child wearing “a worn-out sweater” (30) and smelling “a scent of a cheap soap” (30), he spots two women and three men sitting in a semicircle and covering their faces. The impact of the vision is such that, once again, he is overcome with a feeling that resembles the abject. He is so affected mentally and physically, in fact, that he almost falls to the ground, contrasting the experience of the vision of the men and women with the peace of mind that he had just felt as he contemplated nature (30–31). Although Urrutia Lacroix does not explain why he feels this way, it is clear in the text that his reaction is related to the physical appearance of the men and women. In By Night, this is the moment that marks the widest gap between the foreign and the local, the modern and the premodern, the city and the country. In a rush to return to Farewell’s house—since, after all, his having traveled there had to do with literature and not with religion (31)—he is not interested in offering the religious service that he suspects the men and women may want. Instead, his “amnesiac memory” only remembers the physical aspects that intense labor leaves on women’s faces (31) and, above all, the men’s and women’s ugliness (33) and the incoherence of their language: “everybody was ugly” (33), recalls Lacroix. This is certainly not the image of the noble savage depicted by Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is more the image of Caliban, and not so much the Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest but the one in Fernández Retamar’s Calibán, that is, the image of the colonized, exploited subject who works outside and with his hands. Espinosa is correct to note that Urrutia Lacroix’s contemptuous attitude toward the men and women here completely overturns literary criollismo’s exaltation of the peasant as the very epitome of the own, the local (the Chilean, in this case), thus rejecting social realism’s view of the poor as a symbol of capitalist exploitation predominant in the 1940s (2006, 44). There is no doubt, moreover, that the Golden Age topic of “contempt

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of court and praise of village” is also overturned here (Mora 2011, 192). What is most relevant in the context of the postmodern-modern debate, nevertheless, is that the “extraterritoriality” of the peasants appears not to be specific to late capitalism but rather “co-originary with the affirmation of national belonging, and as a corollary of what might be termed the intranational status of the subaltern” (Dove 2009, 149). 142 Throughout the text there are other instances, here and there, in which the distinction foreign and local manifests itself. At times, it has to do with certain terms employed by the priest; other times it has to do with his movements in the city. In the first case, it is a clear reflection of class and distinction; in the second it is that plus the sign of the spatial transformation of Santiago’s urban space. At Farewell’s house, for instance, poetry, a genre usually associated with high culture, stands in contrast to tango, regarded as popular and eventually mass culture. During the after-dinner conversation and after having listened to Neruda’s poems recited by the bard himself, Urrutia Lacroix is disturbed by tango songs that describe “unspeakable stories” (25) coming from a gramophone. To employ the title of Alberto Flores Galindo’s book,143 these “unspeakable stories” emanate from the “submerged [or real] city” and, in the 1950s, more specificall , from the world of the uneducated, the urban workers inhabiting the margins of the fast-­ growing Latin American cities, not from Ángel Rama’s “Lettered City” (1984) to which the priest belongs and clings. Later on in the diegesis, he employs the term roteque twice, first in reference to a restaurant in downtown Santiago where he and Farewell eat (51) and later, at Neruda’s funeral, to describe people condemning the coup (100). In Chilean parlance, roteque is related to roto, and like it, it is mostly used by the middle and upper classes to refer to individuals whose mores and manners do not correspond to theirs and who are, generally, economically disadvantaged. In the case of a restaurant described with this word (51) that, not surprisingly, is located downtown, it essentially means a restaurant attended by the low-middle class. If “unspeakable” and “roteque” are employed by Urrutia Lacroix to characterize certain cultural expressions, locales, and individuals, it is not surprising that, later on in the story, he calls María Canales’s Mapuche maid a “horrible housemaid” (134). It is all part of the same Weltanschauung that looks at the national with a foreign eye and begins to inhabit an increasingly segregated Chile. In the end, Urrutia Lacroix’s racist and condescending comportment turns him into an antihero with whom the reader cannot identify.

232   |  Chapter 5 One of the many virtues of By Night is that, in Urrutia Lacroix’s promenades in the city, it offers a small picture of the changing urban cartography of Chile’s capital in the second half of the twentieth century especially. If one looks at the historical development of the city of Santiago,144 one is able to understand the transformation it has undergone since the decade of the 1950s , when the young priest enters seminary, and the decades of the 1990s, when he pays his last visit to María Canales’s house. Simply put, from its genesis to the present Santiago evolves into essentially two spaces. Traditionally, Santiago has been divided into two distinct sectors: el barrio alto, an area located closer to the Andes Mountains and populated by the upper-class and the affluent, and de Plaza Italia para abajo, a zone westward of the historic center where the poor and the middle class live. Historically, well-to-do families have moved away from the center toward the mountains . . . In recent years, though the traditional barrio alto continues to exist, there have arisen extremely expensive developments even closer to the mountains (“La Dehesa,” for example). (Pastén B. 2005) Urrutia Lacroix moves about in different parts of the city, tracing his steps from an older, more “Chilean” cartography, if you will, to an increasingly newer, more globalized terrain (particularly after the coup). In one of his fir t allusions to space, he describes what is located “de Plaza Italia para abajo” (from Plaza Italia down) referring specifically to going back and forth between his place of work, presumably at the Universidad Católica, and various fields and shantytowns around Santiago (73). It is here where he claims to have been robbed by two criminals (73). When he tells them that he does not have money, they violently reply with patently Chilean insults (73). Although this language is not the same as the one used by the country peasants in Là-Bas many years earlier, it proceeds from the same social class. In all likelihood, these “criminals” are former peasants (or miners) who emigrated from the countryside to the capital and did not find employment. The use of criminals, and later thieves (73), is very much in tandem with the use of roteque; it is a way to socially distinguish himself from those who have neither economic nor social capital. After being robbed, in fact, he decides to change his daily route so he could be safer. He mentions Las Condes (73, 114), for example, a traditionally opulent

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district where (paradoxically) he will later teach Marxism to members of the junta, but also Providencia (73), an equally prosperous district, as well as el Parque Forestal (73), a section of the city that, though close to downtown, has historically harbored economically prosperous families. In the text, these stand in stark contrast to historic downtown and certain streets and locales. He refers to a restaurant located on Bandera street (75) where he and Odeim eat as no longer having the luster it once had (75). Nevertheless, he reserves his harshest description for el Haití (76), a historically very popular coffeehouse145 situated in the very heart of downtown Santiago that he describes as “a foul place.” María Canales’s house, one will remember, is located near the mountains, far away from the subaltern segments of the city. As adumbrated above, Urrutia Lacroix’s sense of superiority vis-à-vis traditionally conceived “national” elements goes hand in hand with a certain conception of literature that sees the literary as having its own life, independent of reality; literature is one thing, reality another. His aesthetic stance, thus, is yet another sign of social distinction that separates him from common folks. In By Night, in what would appear to be a call for an engagé literature in Sartre’s sense, Bolaño questions this position. While politically, literature is unable to change the world, for Bolaño it does have a moral responsibility of sorts. The paratextual “Take off the wig” of the epigraph points in that direction. Casting Urrutia Lacroix as an antihero clearly helps Bolaño distance himself from his protagonist’s aesthetic stance and, hence, allows him to carry out a critique of it. Let us examine instances in the text where literature is presented as a cocoon or refuge from the travails of history and moments when this function is put into question. As we saw earlier, Là-Bas contains two spaces, one for literature (inside) and one for labor (outside). Symbolically speaking, Farewell’s house is the ivory tower where the writer takes refuge.146 Farewell is a landowner who adheres to an art pour l’art conception of the literary and the guardian and protector of the canon. Nonetheless, in this seemingly impervious space where the aesthetic rules, reality also makes its appearance. On the one hand, the name itself, Là-Bas, is intimately connected to literature. The priest is completed overwhelmed by the myriads of books in Farewell’s library (19, 22). Neruda and Farewell remember a verse from one of Góngora’s poems (25) and later recite poems by Darío (28). 147 On the other hand, Farewell’s voice is compared to a “bird of prey” (14) and the living room of his house

234   |  Chapter 5 resembles a “library” but also a “shooting lodge” (19). Clearly, the relationship between literature and death, which will become even more evident in the episode of Reyes’s and Jünger’s visit to the Guatemalan painter’s apartment and, above all, in that of the writers’ visits to María Canales’s house of detention, is established here. In fact, Farewell, main symbol of the literary as pure and disinterested, is also compared to “Baccus . . . , or some mad Spanish conquistador” (19). Paradoxically, though predictably, the disillusionment with literature that permeates Detectives—as we shall discuss in the next chapter—is present in the persona of Farewell himself. If he is Urrutia Lacroix’s “putative father,” as critics have argued, it is also he who alerts him, throughout the text, of the possible perils of the literary enterprise. While telling the young priest early on in the diegesis that Chile is a country of barbarians (14) where reading is undervalued—revealing thus his ignorance concerning the practical factors surrounding the cost of books and potential readers’ access to them—he also informs him that the literary journey is difficult (14). Then, when his power in Chile’s Republic of Letters has subsided significantly and he has been essentially displaced by the priest, Farewell asks the latter, “what are books for, they are just shadows” (64), adding categorically, “there is no consolation in books” (65). Farewell’s despondent feelings here regarding literature might be construed as the realization not only that literature is not immune from history’s maelstrom and consequently does not always offer solace but, most important, that both literature and the writer have, as stated earlier, a kind of moral responsibility vis-à-vis the circumstances that surround them. From this perspective, it should not surprise us that, in Là-Bas, it is Farewell, not Neruda, who brings up Sordello’s story, as paradoxical as this may at first appear. He is really not Urrutia Lacroix’s possible double, as some have claimed (Benmiloud 2006a, 154). Indirectly, Sordello’s story, which will haunt the priest throughout the text, is a warning, a kind of supraconscience—like the aged young man—that reminds the priest to assume his religious and ethical responsibility whenever his attachment to literature prevents him from doing so. Reyes’s metanarrative also serves this purpose. At the same time, it is yet another proof that in Bolaño’s view literature does not necessarily make people better persons. In the novel, Urrutia Lacroix is in fact unable to make a connection between what transpires in Reyes’s story with what

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occurs later in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Put simply, in Reyes’s account literature does not rise to the occasion. When he begins telling his story, Reyes calls Jünger “one of the purest men” he had ever met in Europe (37). But he does not say in what sense Jünger was pure. Is it because, as a Nazi officer of the Wehrmacht, Jünger adhered to an ideology of racial purity? Is Reyes alluding to his character as a person, or is Jünger’s presumed purity related to his conception of art? In the context of my overall argument here, Reyes and Jünger, “institutionalized writers” or “writers-­ officials,” stand for literature; the Guatemalan painter and the occupation of Paris by the Nazis stand for reality. The two meet in the painter’s apartment but do not mingle. One of the most mystifying aspects of this story, no doubt, even taking into account that he suffers from “melancholy” or “black bile” (41), is the painter’s refusal to accept the food that Reyes brings to him from time to time. Equally perplexing is his “fixed contemplation of Paris” (45), which prevents him from paying attention to what happens around him. However, what most shocks us is Reyes’s and Jünger’s indifference regarding his situation. Although Reyes does seem genuinely concerned about the painter’s physical condition—“rickety” (42) stands out among several adjectives used to describe it—he is upset when he discovers that the latter has not read the novel that he loaned him and thus stops visiting him for a while. Similarly, at no point in Urrutia Lacroix’s reported speech is there a questioning on Reyes’s part about what may have been happening outside the window of the painter’s apartment. What’s more, not only does he use the expression “to waste his time” (43) with respect to the painter’s staring out the window but also, when he himself is impelled to look at what the latter was looking, he closes his eyes immediately. While, as Benmiloud claims in one study (2006a), the topic of deafness plays a crucial role in By Night, so does the subject of blindness. The Guatemalan’s painting, for example, seems almost out of place, both in the context of the Second World War and the context of a text regarding Chilean history. Moreover, even though its Mexican theme takes us back to Bolaño’s poetry, Detectives, and Amulet, and forward to 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes,”148 neither Reyes nor Jünger link the painting’s content to the war crimes taking place outside the painter’s window even if the former does notice the presence of “blurred skeletons” (44) in it. Instead, as the painter’s gaze continues to be fixed on Paris, still refusing to eat, Reyes and Jünger begin to eat and drink while discussing art (painting)

236   |  Chapter 5 and other academic subjects, resuming this activity later, at Reyes’ house, drinking even better drinks and comfortably discussing literature, as if nothing happened (49). There is specifically one moment in the text’s diegesis that somewhat sets the stage for the final scene at María Canales’s house and also confirms, despite the intermittent eruptions of both the aged young man and Sordello, but especially Reyes’s story, that the priest had not learned his lesson. I am alluding, of course, to the episode when, interspersed with a series of very significant political events during Allende’s government, Urrutia Lacroix begins to read Greek authors almost frantically. His use of reading as a form of escape, however, starts somewhat earlier; first, on his way to Europe, when, perhaps inadvertently, he reads José Asunción Silva’s classic modernist poem “Nocturno” (83). He claims to recite it out loud as homage to Colombian literature on the ship taking him to Europe without realizing that, in large measure, Silva’s poem is not only a reflection of his own state of mind but, most important, an announcement of a history that will forever perturb his notion of the literary.149 Then, on the same trip, and informing us that in Colón, Panama, a group of “whippersnappers” (82) had attempted to rob him, he reminisces about the ship’s reading room, a reading room that, spatially and semantically, might be said to correspond to Farewell’s house and the club (13) to which he belonged. There he spent many hours “immersed in the reading of the Greek and Latin classics and Chilean contemporaries” (83). Between these two instances and the arrival of Allende’s government, Urrutia Lacroix receives yet another warning regarding his religious comportment, this time from another priest, Father Antonio, who suggests to him that the method employed by the church to prevent its buildings from being damaged by pigeons’ excrement might not be the most appropriate (90). Nevertheless, he does not heed Father Antonio’s words, as his dream about him later pointing to the “Judas tree” (135–38) with the clear intention of accusing him of betrayal—and, by extension, accusing also those in Chile who failed to speak up during the dictatorship—demonstrates. As readers can glean from Urrutia Lacroix’s own comments about the Allende years, his “sin of omission” is to have buried himself in literature and philosophy while history passed him by. Recalling what happened in Chile from the beginning of the Popular Unity government to the arrival of the dictatorship, he makes reference not only to very specific events such as the

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process of the nationalization of the copper industry or even the agrarian reform, but also to very recognizable names. The information he provides in the text corresponds very closely to events that did take place in Chile during or right before Allende’s government. The army general to whom he refers, for example, is René Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army at the time of the 1970 presidential election who died in a botched kidnapping attempt and whose major goal was to prevent Allende from coming to power. The “colonel . . . who attempted a coup d’état” alludes to Roberto Souper who, on June 29, 1973, attempted a military coup; this episode is called “el Tanquetazo” or “Tancazo.” The cameraman was the Argentinian cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen. Allende’s aide-decamp was Arturo Araya Peeters, who was assassinated by right-wing individuals intent on destabilizing Allende’s government (96–99). As is evident, during this three-year period the priest has no participation whatsoever in the history of his country. Instead of having joined other members of the Catholic Church working in so-called grassroots Christian communities organized by priests and layman alike adhering to Liberation Theology precepts—like so many priests did in real life during Allende’s government and before—he plunges into the reading of Greek philosophers. Lepage’s characterization of Urrutia Lacroix’s as “a species of larva incapable of movement” (2007, 77) acquires its full sense here. Not only does he prac tice a type of reading that belongs to the past and is far removed from the contemporary scene, he is also a bystander who experiences peace when this messy but hopefully auspicious contemporary scene comes to a violent end. “What peace!” (99), states Lacroix as he seems to welcome the military coup. The insurmountable gap between literature and reality reaches its apex in the events that take place in María Canales’s house. Urrutia Lacroix’s account of this episode, nevertheless, is not exempt from some ambiguity. In short, the priest describes the literary tertulias in Canales’s house by stating that the house also served as a detention center for political prisoners. To be able to better understand this part of the priest’s retrospective account, one has to divide the analysis into two parts: what Urrutia Lacroix himself states, and what he reports Canales herself to have said. Let us first focus on certain instances in the text that seem to indicate that, indeed, the narrator-protagonist, suspecting that something is definitely wrong, condemns the situation. For example, he appears to be disturbed and troubled

238   |  Chapter 5 when he intuits that Canales’s oldest son knows something is not right and swears he will never again return (134). Nonetheless, he does return, and after having paid a visit to Farewell, he asks, “Where’s literature? . . . Is the aged young man right?” (135). The first question, in particular, gives the impression that Urrutia Lacroix is questioning the usefulness of literature in the face of pain or that he is calling on literature to take action; but it is ultimately not clear. Then, almost immediately after the Judas tree recollection disturbs his peace once again, he tells Canales that what is impor­ tant is not literature but life (138). What does this mean? Does he really believe that life is more important than literature? As I have been arguing throughout, literature and reality are presented as two distinct entities in By Night. Therefore, the priest’s comment may have more to do with his belief that Canales’s literary ability is defi ient—she is writing a novel when Urrutia Lacroix talks to her here—than with the fact that he truly believes in life’s superiority over literature; let us not forget, by the way, that he is an unreliable narrator in Booth’s (1961) sense. At the same time, by saying that life is more important than literature he persists in separating the latter from reality. Finally, one last moment that contributes to the ambiguity of Urrutia Lacroix’s “exculpatory logic” (Domínguez 2012, 86) occurs in his last visit to Canales’s house, many years later, when Chile has already started its post-dictatorial period. After informing him that what she tells journalists wanting to know who attended the literary soirées in her house as well as what happened in the basement is that she is indeed interested in literature, not in politics, the priest reacts, “Forgive her [Lord], . . . forgive her” (145). This clearly gives the impression that Urrutia Lacroix repudiates Canales’s action. But it is only an impression, since the reader is well aware by now of the priest’s questionable past. Nonetheless, there are other instances in Bolaño’s novel, both involving the priest and Canales, when he not only continues to defend the privileged status of literature but also exculpates it from its inaction, a stance that Bolaño the author would surely repudiate. When, for instance, a friend of Urrutia Lacroix who attended the literary get-togethers tells him that another participant had seen a man in the basement with clear signs of having been tortured, he says, “His conscience tormented him. Go in peace, I told him” (139). There is no attempt whatsoever on his part to at least elicit some type of critical reflection from his friend. This is especially curious because, as the years go by and other people emerge who tell the

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same story, Urrutia Lacroix hones the idea that no one saw or heard anything at Canales’s house, as if he were indeed chastising those who, having seen the man tied to the metallic bed, chose to remain silent. Yet, he clears his conscience by saying that he didn’t see anything. And if he didn’t see anything, or if he knew about what was happening in Canales’s house basement only much later, why bother, he asks (142). This last rhetorical question, of course, reveals the priest’s true character. It shows that, contrary to what he states at the beginning of the diegesis regarding the need to be responsible, he has been irresponsible in his role as a man of the cloth. The moment that most clearly shows literature’s utter incapacity to really confront reality face to face comes toward the end of the story, specifically in the dialogue between Urrutia Lacroix and Canales, who becomes a kind of involuntary spokesperson for all the writers and artists who attended the literary soirées at her house. Perhaps in order to confirm what Canales herself will say, the priest first makes an allusion to her husband being implied in the killings of political opponents in Washington, Buenos Aires, and Europe150 —crimes that did take place in real life and for which Mariana Callejas’s husband was condemned—trenchantly adding that she was not unaware of her husband’s actions but that, since “she wanted to be a writer” (141), this excuses her in some way. The whole force of Urrutia Lacroix’s words resides precisely in “but she wanted to be a writer.” Let us also remember that Canales refuses to discuss politics because she wants to talk about literature. Similarly, when the priest tells her that she is still young and can start anew, Canales replies, “And what about my literary career?” (145). Her last words to Urrutia Lacroix, “This is how literature is made in Chile” (147), to which he adds also in other Latin American and European countries, seal the matter once and for all, closing forever the possibility that literature may have an ethical function vis-à-vis reality. And what is interesting, finall , is that not even writers traditionally associated with the political Left—represented in By Night by “the feminist novelist” (131; Eltit?, an unlikely possibility) whose texts were bad copies of novels written in France in the 1950s (132) and “a theorist from the avant-garde scene” (140; from CADA?)—escape from this acerbic judgment. Earlier in the text, when rumors of his having given classes on Marxism to the members of the junta began to spread, the priest comes to the realization that it really does not matter who governs in Chile, whether the Left, the Right, or the military, since they belong to the “same family” (121) and will,

240   |  Chapter 5 sooner or later, reach the highest political office. Using a key concept in mathematics, he concludes, “The order of the factors does not alter the product!” (121). This is perhaps Bolaño’s greatest contribution, to have shown that ultimately no ideology is immune from the possibility of evil. Let us remember, as we read these last words, that it is Urrutia Lacroix, not Bolaño, who is speaking here. Besides, it is the discourse of an unreliable narrator. And yet, the author’s criticism of the Left from the Left resonates somewhat with the priest’s utter skepticism regarding politics. That said, however, in By Night, like previously in Distant, the representation of a specific event in the past such as the military coup in Chile in 1973 constitutes a clear sign of resistance. In both texts, similarly, the function of literature is seriously called into question, especially in By Night. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, Bolaño’s dismantling of the aura of literature begins to take shape already in Detectives.

Chapter 6

Literature and Disenchantment

the saVage detectiVes :

Litera ture’s Ambiguous St atus

As is well known, Detectives (1998) is the novel that puts Bolaño firmly on the Spanish-speaking literary map, having obtained the Premio Herralde de novela in 1998 and the Rómulo Gallegos1 the following year, the two most prestigious awards in the narrative genre in Spanish (especially the latter). Probably the author’s most popular text, it is also the one that has been the greatest contribution to not only the creation of what has been called the “Bolaño phenomenon” in the English-speaking world2 — particularly in the United States—but also to a new, though still reductive image of Latin America, as Sarah Pollack (2009) has so eloquently demonstrated.3 In an original fashion, the presence of the detective genre that begins to take shape in Bolaño’s poetry and crystallizes timidly in Consejos and more fully in Monsieur, Skating, and especially Distant, culminates in Detectives. This novel, in fact, is a kind of box that contains many of the stylistic and thematic elements present in Bolaño’s previous works. The autobiographical component, for example, that we saw in his poetry as well as in certain short stories from Llamadas (“Sensini,” “Enrique,” “The Grub”) has its counterpart, in terms of a first person who narrates, in the first and third sections of Detectives, even though the homodiegetic narrator 241

242   |  Chapter 6 who narrates in these stories, Belano, becomes one of the protagonists in the novel (as in the short story “Detectives”). Likewise, the nomadic and marginalized nature of characters such as “The Neochileans” (University), Jorobadito (Antwerp), Caridad, Carmen, Recluta (Skating), or Anne Moore (Llamadas) reach epic proportions here. Aesthetically and politically, the margin becomes the center in Detectives. What we called “communities of the heart” in chapter 4 is also present in this novel, except that its members congregate almost exclusively around the subject of literature, as in Distant. As we shall see later, literature, included already in Bolaño’s poetry, in Consejos, Monsieur, in some stories from Llamadas, and especially in Nazi and Distant, is without a doubt the text’s most important theme. What does distinguish Detectives from previous texts, nevertheless, is the place where the action takes place: Mexico, or, rather, Mexico City and northern Mexico, although anyone who has read the novel knows, of course, that this is not entirely true, since those who speak in the second section of the novel, significantly titled “The Savage Detectives (1976– 1996),” do so from as diverse places as the Midwest, Barcelona, Paris, London, Tel-Aviv, and Madrid, among others. The central story that gives birth to the multiple stories that follow originates in Mexico City, and most of the characters in the novel are Mexican and speak from Mexico. It is not surprising, therefore, that some have called Detectives Bolaño’s Mexican novel in the same way that Distant and By Night have been referred to as his Chilean novels. Alberto Julián Pérez states the issue literally: “Bolaño has written a truly authentic ‘Mexican’ novel” (2010, 307), whereas Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas expresses the matter more colorfully: “one of the best contemporary Mexican novels written by a Chilean who lives in Catalonia” (2002a, 69). 4 Emilcen Rivero refers to Bolaño as “the greatest chronicler of Mexico in the seventies” (2001, 82). Because one of the aims of this study is to serve as an introduction to Bolaño’s oeuvre, a basic description of the text is in order so as to better comprehend what I see as the major postmodern feature of Detectives.5 Detectives has three parts: “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975),” “The Savage Detectives (1976–1996),” and “The Deserts of Sonora (1976).” The firs and third are narrated by Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old law student who wants to be a poet; the second and longest of the three is “narrated” by multiple “narrators.” I put these words in quotations because, stricto sensu, they do not narrate but rather testify in front of a sometimes

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singular, sometimes plural unnamed narratee, whereas García Madero’s accounts clearly consist of a diary. The text has two story times: in the first and third sections, time extends from November 2, 1975, to February 15, 1976, in the second from January 1976, to December 1996. It essentially also has two diegeses, one being more straightforward and less diffuse than the other. In the diegesis from parts 1 and 3, García Madero is invited to join a group of poets called the visceral realists, founded by Arturo Belano, a Chilean, and Ulises Lima, a Mexican. Belano and Lima are engaged in the search for Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of the first visceral realist movement, in 1920s Mexico; in the third part of the novel, Belano, Lima, García Madero, and Lupe—a young prostitute fl eing from her pimp— leave Mexico City for northern Mexico to protect Lupe but, principally, to find Cesárea. This is Detectives’ first diegesis. The second diegesis is more complex, as just stated. But it is also more problematic narratively and, arguably, even nonexistent. In broad terms, one could say that the text’s second diegesis consists of a series of testimonies regarding Belano and Lima provided by people who knew them. This is complicated, however, by the fact that the information that is given about them during a span of twenty years is fragmentary at best and certain witnesses, specifically those speaking from the book fair in Madrid,6 have never even met them, but also by the fact that, often, some testimonial accounts contain metanarratives of their own having their own diegeses. One of Detectives’ most original aspects is the way in which it is structured, that is, the fact that the action at the end of part 1 is left hanging only to resume in part 3, with part 2 serving as a kind of bridge that advances in time. Another aspect is not only its polyphonic nature but also the lack of a well-defined protagonist. Who is/are the protagonist/s of Detectives, after all? Since it came out in 1998, critics have wrestled with this and a multitude of other aspects of the text. As I have done in the previous chapters, in what follows I provide a sketch of some of the major points upon which critics have commented, from those pertaining to structural and thematic aspects of the text, to those dealing with more specific aspects, such as the meaning of certain chapters as well as the significance of the three sets of drawings contained therein. Predictably, many have attempted to offer an overall definition of what Echevarría initially called “a hefty volume of more than six hundred pages” (2002d, 71) and I would call Bolaño’s novel about the desacralization of literature.7 Some have called Detectives a Bildungsroman8;

244   |  Chapter 6 others have called it an anti-Bildungsroman.9 Given Bolaño’s own predilection for Julio Cortázar, and especially taking into account the novel’s structure, several critics have linked Detectives to Hopscotch.10 Like the latter, Bolaño’s novel also has three parts, as stated above, but critical comments on the second part have been more abundant than those on the first and third.11 Regarding part 2, moreover, its most perplexing feature, without a doubt, is the unknown identity of the narratee or interviewer, except for Belano, who is the only narratee mentioned by name (in the Chilean Andrés Ramírez’s account).12 This is all the more puzzling because this interviewer is presented sometimes in the singular, and sometimes in the plural.13 The novel’s epigraph, “Do you want Mexico’s salvation? Do you want Christ to be our king? / No,” from Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano, announces in some way the story’s diegesis and has elicited critical comments.14 Understandably, especially in light of the text’s title but also in the context of Bolaño’s practice of the neopolicíaco genre, several critics have commented on the characteristics of the detective genre present in Detectives15 as well as on the identity of the text’s protagonists.16 Among the themes that have been explored by critics, it is not surprising that the journey17 and the search18 stand out most; after all, each acquires a symbolic connotation that transcends its literal meaning in the text’s diegesis. Attention has been focused specifically on the trip to northern Mexico19 but also on Cesárea’s identity20 and the significance of her death at the end of part 3.21 In the context of the theme of the journey some have sought to establish a connection between Detectives and Homer’s Odyssey22 and Joyce’s Ulysses,23 while others have explored the connection between Belano’s and Rimbaud’s journeys.24 The nomadic and marginalized nature of some of the novel’s characters alluded to above has also been analyzed,25 with some critics focusing specifically on the link life-literature the visceral realists defend.26 Along these lines, understandably, some scholars have looked at the way in which this avant-garde movement from the 1970s attempts in some sense to re-create a Mexican historical avant-garde movement, Estridentismo,27 recognizing that, at best, its aesthetic posture is nebulous28 and, at worst, nonexistent. What visceral realism is ultimately is a question that hovers over the entire text.29 Another topic that has been commented upon and I elaborate in depth later in my own analysis of the novel, is the function that literature and the literary play in the text. Finally, among other aspects of Detectives the following have merited critical

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assessments: the notion of defeat and the loss of faith in the idea of revolution30 ; the connection between Detectives and 2666 31 , and, related to this, the meaning of the desert32 ; and the role that characters such as García Madero and María play in the text’s diegesis.33 Among chapters or incidents within chapters from the novel’s second part, critical declarations have centered especially upon the one where Amadeo Salvatierra, a former visceral realist, provides Arturo and Ulises with information about Estridentismo, visceral realism from the 1920s and, most important, a copy of Caborca, an avant-garde magazine founded by Cesárea and containing “Sión,” her only poem.34 Others have zeroed in on the possible signification of Belano’s challenging literary critic Iñaki Echevarne35 to a duel,36 a duel recounted by three different witnesses invited to the event.37 A few critics have analyzed chapter 23, which appears to have no relation whatsoever with the tenuous diegesis of the text’s second part and where various writers, paradoxically, speaking from the Madrid Book Fair, give their opinions on literature, poetry, and writing.38 Some critics have commented on the possible implications of the story about two writers standing on opposite sides of the political spectrum about whom Belano tells Felipe Müller before boarding a plane for Africa.39 Finally, chapter 24, where Ulises meets Octavio Paz, the visceral realists’ arch-enemy and a ubiquitous presence throughout Detectives, has also received some attention.40 In terms of the text’s visual images, Cesáreas’s poem41 and the windows and accompanying questions at the end of part 3 42 have received more attention than the drawings of Mexicans and accompanying questions,43 also included in novel’s third part. The postmodern traits that have been attributed to Detectives have been mentioned in passing, but they have not been elaborated fully. For example, the fragmentary nature of the text (Jofré 2003, 234), the dissolution of the subject (Flores 2002, 93), the skepticism about form (Saucedo, 2008, 802), the novel’s penchant for the “collage pop” (Martín-Estudillo and Bagué 2008, 469), the rejection of ideology and the persistent use of irony, parody, and humor (Fell 2007, 36), and, needless to say, the multiplicity of narrating voices. These and other characteristics, surely, put Bolaño’s work firmly in the category of literary postmodernism. Nevertheless, no matter how evident they might be, there are episodes in the text that bring the political to the fore and demonstrate the clear presence of a postmodernism of resistance. One of the most significant, in my view, is

246   |  Chapter 6 young Arturo’s experience in Chile in 1973. As we saw in chapters 4 and 5, this event marks the point of departure of Bolaño’s oeuvre in some way. In Detectives, having seen the revolutionary dream crushed by the military makes Arturo a different person: “And when Arturo returned,” states Auxilio, “he was already someone else” (195). This does not mean, however, that his desire to “make the revolution” (167, 195) comes to an end. It just means that, from then on, resistance takes a different form, now being carried out through literature and culture. When, years later, Xóchitl recriminates Jacinto Requena, another visceral realist, for not being true to his Marxist ideology, he replies that if he had to “make the revolution” (344) again, he would do so “with proverbs and boleros” (344). Political contestation, in other words, has been substituted by a no less revolutionary contestation, one that, initially, fights on two fronts: against “country poetry,” and against “Paz.” Another memorable instance of a postmodernism of resistance in Detectives is of course Auxilio’s story about the army’s invasion of the UNAM,44 which we shall examine in detail when we analyze Amulet. Ulises’s trip to Nicaragua, even if it constitutes a mockery of left-leaning writers’ support for the revolution there (1979–1990), also resuscitates the political at an increasingly post-political time in Latin America (1998), as do, to some extent, Arturo’ s final days in Africa Nonetheless, it is in the representation of the process of the institutionalization of literature that the author’s postmodernism of resistance manifests itself most vividly in Detectives. Critics have called attention to the role that literature in general plays in Bolaño’s works, but no one has examined in detail how the portrayal of the literary institution functions in this novel. Early on, for example, Carrión recognized the metafictional nature of the author’s literary production (2008, 362) and Manzoni analyzed the ways in which Bolaño’s literature reconfigures the canon, reclaiming authors now forgotten on the one hand, and incorporating new writers on the other (2008). More recently, del Pozo, complementing Manzoni in some way, offers a thorough account of what he calls the “literary dominant” (201) in Bolaño’s oeuvre, presenting a kind of cartography of all the possible manifestations of the literary in his novels and short stories, including the criticism around them. More specifically regarding Detectives, for some it constitutes a thorough assessment of Latin American literature in the last century (Pinto 2002a, 76), or “a deep reflection on the why of literature” (A. Pérez 2010, 305), whereas for others Bolaño’s novel represents an

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expansion of the canon (Burgos 2011, 323). According to Florence Olivier, Detectives is a paean whose objective is to bestow honor on those who live by and for literature (2007, 184). At the center of Bolaño’s text, argues Sandra Garabano, “lies the search for the redefinition of the literary experience and the place the writer occupies in society but also the suspicion that literature has lost its authority and the archive has lost its prestige” (2008), adding that the return to the avant-garde in the novel does not guarantee the intellectual’s aura in the present of the narration; on the contrary, he has been substituted by a bunch of literary vagabonds. I agree with Garabano (2008)—and Emilio Sauri (2010, 416, 421– 22)—that literature appears debilitated in Detectives. Nevertheless, unlike them, I focus my attention on what I conceive as a two-pronged dynamics at the very center of the text and that has no doubt been influenced by Bolaño’s very strong views vis-à-vis the literary institution. Furthermore, though Carrión (2008) was correct to have pointed to the metafictional nature of his works, in Detectives’ case in particular the metafictional ought to be construed not as a reflection on language but, chiefl , as a discourse on the literary institution. Two processes take place, paradoxically, inside Bolaño’s novel. The first underscores certain elements that are crucial to the institutionalization of the literary sphere: the definition of literature, the function of literary criticism, and the role of editors, anthologies, and journals. The second brings to prominence a contrasting dynamics that reveals a certain loss of literature’s symbolic capital: for example, that of Cesárea-visceral realists, life-literature, Arturo-Ulises, and Paz. In the end, the text’s narrative discourse oscillates between a strong valuation of the literary and, in parallel, a species of devaluation of literature; or, from the standpoint of the sociology of literature more specificall , between the process of the institutionalization of literature and the concomitant dismantling of the literary institution. To institutionalize, of course, means to institute, to construct, to lay the groundwork for a given institution. It is a process that is directly related to the division of labor as well as to modernity and is extremely complex.45 It is a process, moreover, that is closely connected to the building of the nation, especially in the case of Latin America. In order to fully comprehend the evolution of the institutionalization of a given literature, Barthes reminds us, instead of looking for the text’s intrinsic meaning one has to “amputate literature from the individual” (1977, 162). For his part, Peter Hohendhal, in his already classic study

248   |  Chapter 6 on the development of the writer’s autonomy in Germany, argues that one must focus one’s attention not on the work’s internal functioning but rather on that of the institution. How does one approach a textual object, then, from a sociological perspective? Symbolically, no doubt, but conscious, as stated earlier, of the metafi tion, or “meta-reflective interrogation” (Labbé 2003, 94) and even certain autobiographical aspects that characterize Detectives.46 My central argument is that, paradoxically, a text that, for lack of a better word, we might call metafictional—like almost all of Bolaño’s works but especially Detectives—that is, a text where certain elements characteristic of the literary sphere play a fundamental role, contains narrative elements that in some way devalue, question, or just reposition the literary within the cultural field; elements, in sum, that dismantle literature. Certain readers might ask: how is it possible for literature to appear devalued in Detectives when García Madero, besides reading and writing poems whenever he can, frequently entire days (17), also robs books with a certain degree of frequency? Arturo and Ulises, besides robbing books and reading tirelessly—Ulises reads poetry even when showering!—are involved in a desperate search for the founder of visceral realism. There are repeated allusions in the novel, moreover, to critics, writers, poetry workshops, and literary magazines. In what sense, then, does the literary enterprise lose significance in the text? In order to answer these questions, I shall first focus my attention upon certain dimensions of the text that are essential to the formation of the literary institution; and I will then underscore those that, in my view, contribute to a weakening of the aura that has traditionally surrounded literature. Let us start with the factors that, of necessity, must be taken into account when evaluating the process of what in Spanish is referred to as the autono­ mización of the literary field: the function assigned to literature by institutions and cultural agents, the symbolic production that such institutions and agents leave outside the circuito letrado (intellectual sphere), the relationship that is established between those who write and the state apparatus, the reading public, the role played by literary journals and newspapers, the literary genres that are privileged, the work of the publishing industry and the literary market, the function played by literary critics in the Republic of Letters, among others. Now, since not all of these elements are present in Detectives, and given the fact that, to some extent, the process of the

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institutionalization of literature is always incomplete, the first part of my analysis of the novel focuses on the following points: (1) the meaning of literature in the text; (2) the function of criticism; and (3) the role that editors, anthologies, and literary magazines play in the novel. Regarding the first point, there is indeed no systematic or coherent theory of literature in Detectives. This is due, in part, to the novel’s polyphonic nature as well as to the fact that it is circumscribed within the parameters of the search. To define literature would in some sense be a contradiction in terms in a text that not only downplays the literary enterprise but certainties in general. Thus the various statements concerning literature found in the novel could easily be framed both in terms of Auxilio’s “because I wrote, I resisted” (198), and in terms of Don Crispín’s “The problem with literature, as with life . . . is that, in the end, one always ends up becoming a son of a bitch” (113). In the first case, Auxilio is alluding to her having hidden in a bathroom when the Mexican army invaded the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968. Politically and culturally this is doubtless a crucial year and the 1960s, in general, harbor much hope for Latin America; literature and politics enjoy a great deal of symbolic capital in this period. By 1975, however, when Don Crispín utters the aforementioned words, the arrival of military governments throughout the continent accelerates the devaluation of the political. From a different standpoint, likewise, the function of literature in the text oscillates between an Arturo who “seemed to think in terms of literature all the time” (225), 47 and an Arturo who, at the end of the diegesis, having already abandoned literature, departs for Africa and, in the middle of the Liberian civil war, wanders “in the bushes” (548). 48 It is precisely between these two poles, the positive and negative one, so to speak, that one must examine the literary in the novel. The oscillation that one perceives in Detectives between the fostering and parodying of the literary activity can be ultimately explained in two ways. On the one hand, the text would seem to indicate that literary passion coincides especially with the first years of a writer’s life; as time elapses, literature loses some of its initial appeal. On the other hand, it is unquestionable that in this novel Bolaño sought to map the change that literature undergoes when it no longer has a clear and precise function, that is, when it ceases to relate and to build the nation and when it no longer consoles the individual. It is precisely this loss of utility, as well as the refusal to accept

250   |  Chapter 6 this new situation, that leads literary activity in the text to be both praised and perceived with irony. In large measure, literature in Detectives equals poetry. As is well known, before the emergence and subsequent popularization of the novel, poetry had played a cardinal role in what used to be called the belles lettres. As the writer reaches a degree of autonomy in Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century (Ramos 1989), and once poetry loses some symbolic capital as it now has to compete with the increasing popularity of prose— especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century—poetry is compelled to go on the defensive for it is unable to penetrate the literary market with the same ease as narrative. From this standpoint it makes much sense that the young visceral realists might want to redeem the poetic genre in some way. Theirs is an absolutely romantic gesture in sync with their chronological age as much as with a historic moment in which poetry, as stated above, no longer has a specific usefulness. It is hence not surprising that the name of Octavio Paz—though also that of Sor Juana—be one of the most repeated throughout the text. Nevertheless, it is not a matter of overcoming him or taking away his authority. The Mexican Nobel winner is presented as already devalued in Detectives; now it is just a matter of silencing him and removing him from the cultural scene. That is why the visceral realists attempt to kidnap him (171, 507). As Rojo suggests (2003, 67–68, 72), the search for Cesárea by the four “savage detectives” represents an effort to find a sort of third poetic way, an effort that, let us add, is circumscribed within that tradición de la ruptura (a tradition against itself) that Paz himself defended so many times, especially in his Los hijos del limo (15–39). The young visceral realists do not identify themselves with Paz, Neruda (3), Parra (166), or the “country poets” (352). What’s more, when referring to Arturo and Ulises later, Piel Divina, one of the characters who knew them well, asserts that, in the end, politically, literarily, and socially the two friends did not belong to any group whatsoever (352). Therefore, when Macarena Areco (2005) includes Detectives in a group of relatively recent Spanish and Spanish American novels under the category of hybrid novel, one would have to add that such hybridity also has to do with a refusal to side ideologically or literarily with any given position. This inability, this not wanting to defend this or that aesthetic stance, is due to the imprecision (Flores 2002) and ambiguity (Labbé 2003) that characterize this novel. On the other hand, however, there is a strong desire on the part

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of the young visceral realists “to change Mexican poetry” (30), “to create a movement at the Latin American level” (36), and even to evaluate “the health of the new Latin American poetry” (150). Of course, at this point in the diegesis the young poets—if we follow Harold Bloom’s categories— probably find themselves in the second stage and hence continue to cling not only to literature but, more important, to the idea that literature has a patria (homeland), so to speak, be it at the national level, Mexican poetry, or at the continental level, Latin American poetry. This concern for the subject of literature, nonetheless, fades gradually after Cesárea’s death and once Arturo and Ulises leave for Europe. Visceral realism’s active period, consequently, belongs to the search for a poetic identity, to the construction of a certain Republic of Letters; from then on, even though literature does not vanish entirely, it does become a markedly solitary enterprise that has to take into account market conditions willingly or not. Semantically, Detectives’ literary activity is characterized by that “gang of functional illiterates” (56) that Arturo’s and Ulises’s visceral realists friends were, according to María, or those “drug dealers” (328) that Arturo and Ulises were in Alfonso Pérez Camarga’s view, as well as by those eight jaded writers who, at the Madrid Book Fair—in chapter 23 of the novel—reflect on poetry, literature, and literary success. In other words, from a romantic vantage point of view of literature, that is, literature construed as passion and way of life, to literature understood as profession or to the complete professionalization of literary activity. Another attribute related to the notion of literature contained in Bolaño’s novel is the one that, by means of personal testimony, essay, or catalog, defines it in manifold ways, classifies authors, and assesses books, but without the reader being able to deduce clearly which of these defin tions, classifications, or literary judgments is ultimately privileged. From this standpoint, although it is true, as Trellez affirms, that Detectives requires especially active readers, these “bloodhound[s]” (2005a, 149) very rarely catch their prey. While at the insane asylum, Quim, María’s father, offers a kind of catalog of various types of literature. He speaks, for example, of a literature for when one is bored and he says that it abounds (201). This suggests, on the one hand, that most available literature is of little value— thus implicitly assuming the existence of a certain classic literature—and, on the other, that literature is not an activity on which to spend one’s free time but rather one to which one must consecrate all of one’s time, as

252   |  Chapter 6 Bolaño himself did. He goes on to say that “the best literature” is for when one is “calmed.” In regard to this, one could infer that, according to the author, there exists a certain dispute, a contradiction even, between the literary activity, which demands complete time and dedication, and the literary market, which demands sales and profits. The part of Quim’s catalog that stands out most, however, is the one that states that Arturo and Ulises were wrong to have practiced a literature “for when you are desperate” (201). What does Quim mean? Even though on the following page he elaborates on this idea, he does not really explain it clearly. But what is clear is that he recommends the need to overcome the “desperate” stage of literature, be it as a reader or as a writer, in order to reach a certain degree of maturity that could only be called literary. Ernesto San Epifanio, another member of visceral realism, offers a definition of literature that is more novel even. In his view, there are basically three types of literature: heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. In terms of genre, the novel is generally heterosexual while poetry is “absolutely homosexual” (83). According to this interpretation, the novel is arguably a democratic genre that includes everything, whereas poetry is less apt to incorporate variegated discourses. In fact, in poetry San Epifanio distinguishes manifold poetic currents, all of them having to do with sexual orientation where there is a strong predominance of “fags” (Walt Whitman) and “sissies” (Neruda). According to Perla Avilés, one of Arturo’s friends, poets were just “hermaphrodites” (166). Evidently, these are not conventional definitions of literature. To these definitions we may add others. Rafael Barrios—another member of visceral realism—for example, offers a disparately strange list of different types of writing that the visceral realists began practicing once Arturo and Ulises departed for Europe, including “automatic writing” (214) and “bloodthirsty poetry,” among several very peculiar kinds of poetic writing. Amadeo Salvatierra, finall , shows Arturo and Ulises a list of the “Directorio de Vanguardia” that appeared in the 1920s avant-garde journal Actual n.1,49 which included names of painters, musicians, sculptors, and writers of all possible stripes, from the very wellknown to the practically unknown. With respect to the concept of literature, consequently, it is basically circumscribed to poetry and it appears as diffused in the text. As stated earlier, however, Arturo, like Bolaño himself, eventually abandons poetry to dedicate himself to the novel, a genre that he forsakes eventually. This might mean not only that Detectives proposes,

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paradoxically perhaps, a literature capable of incorporating all sorts of discourses, a kind of textual democratization of literary activity, but also the end of literature as such, that is, literature as a cultural product among many that must compete in the market with multiple other cultural products. Criticism, the second topic of my analysis and, indubitably, one of the most significant aspects of the process of the institutionalization of literature, represents in some measure the cornerstone of the novel. If we leave aside for now other important themes in the text—such as, for instance, the search or the journey—what do most of the characters in Detectives, and especially the visceral realists, do most of the time if not judge, evaluate, comment, and read the works of canonical as well as marginal authors? If, etymologically speaking, the word criticism signifies assessment, one could then argue that this novel in particular becomes a critical evaluation that Bolaño carries out of all the previous literary traditions, the avant-garde (Paz) as well as the engagé literary traditions (country poetry), creating thus a new literary paradigm, a paradigm that one might call postmodern, postliterary, disenchanted, de-territorialized, or even globalized but also still political in some way. In the author’s oeuvre, in fact, Detectives gives birth to what we may call the global novel, a type of novel that blossoms fully in 2666 . We are far away from Sommers’s foundational novels; far away, also, from the so-called novelas de la tierra (regionalist novels) and even from Boom novels such as Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz or Vargas Llosa’s The Green House, whose main purpose still was to offer a kind of national narrative. In Detectives, Anderson’s “imagined community” gives way to a type of “world community” where neither borders nor nationalist symbols exist. In their journeys through Europe, Israel, Central America, and Africa, Arturo and Ulises, migrants more than citizens, move from place to place without a fixed goal. The text, therefore, posits the possibility of a geographically and literarily open literature, and criticizes, though indirectly, what for lack of a better word we might call the “natural” locality of literature. This global nature of Bolaño’s novel, nevertheless, transcends the goings and comings of characters in the text; invariably, the global also has to do with the perennial transcendence of all the novelistic models that may emerge in the future. For that reason, ultimately, literature in Detectives is no more than the criticism of literature. And criticism involves editors, anthologies, and magazines, capital agents in the construction of the canon.

254   |  Chapter 6 Significantl , there are two episodes in the novel that strategically frame the function of criticism to some extent: the get-togethers at Julio César Álamo’s poetry workshops about which García Madero writes on the second day of his diary (November 3, 1975)—where he meets Arturo and Ulises—and the duel with critic Iñaki Echavarne. The first could be interpreted as a denouncing of literary workshops in general on Bolaño’s part; the second as a parody not only of the idea of duels, but also of the excessive seriousness with which writers take the literary judgments of critics. It would appear as if the author were saying that literature is an absolutely personal affair and no one learns to write in workshops. It is better to learn on one’s own, in meetings with friends, in informal chats on authors and books in different bars in the city (Mexico City in this case), in bookstores, walking on the streets, and even in María’s house, where life and literature mix constantly. As the writer gradually enters the literary market, however, and, like Arturo, starts a family, displaying a defiant attitude toward critics becomes less viable. After several sessions at Álamo’s poetry workshop, the incipient visceral realists end up challenging him and mocking the “dear teacher” (14). 50 Years later, having already become a novelist, Arturo confesses to his friend Guillem Piña that he will receive “a bad review” (473). Indeed, Arturo assumes that he will receive a bad review, but there is nothing in the text to confirm as much. It is precisely the fear that he may be taken to task adversely that leads him to challenge critic Echevarne. Although, in the end, the duel is essentially a joke, Arturo abandons literature afterward and leaves for Africa. It is not surprising, nevertheless, that before the duel he had already abandoned poetry to devote his efforts to writing novels; the change of genre implies the acceptance that, as editor Lisandro Morales asserts, “There’s too much poetry and poetry doesn’t sell” (206). It is ironic, though, that journalism, which was the entr y door, the point of departure in the evolution of the writer’s autonomy in Latin America (Rama, Ramos, Aníbal González), in Detectives becomes the vehicle that will allow the freelancer Arturo Belano to renounce literature forever. As stated earlier, the process of the institutionalization of literature is always incomplete. Why is it significant then that Arturo becomes a journalist at the end of the novel? It means, in purely practical terms, that he can make a living doing so. But, beyond that, the journalistic activity affords him the chance to witness history personally. It would appear that Bolaño is suggesting that the writer never reaches, or should never reach, full

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autonomy vis-à-vis real life. In order to be able to write, in other words, the reading of books has to be complemented with experiences. What is interesting, though, is that Arturo leaves for Africa. Why Africa? Because, as critics have suggested, Belano follows metaphorically in Rimbaud’s footsteps. Moreover, Bolaño seems to suggest that this continent is the last possible stronghold for life experience and, furthermore, that it is the only place left in need of representation, at least for the Western writer today and certainly from an entirely different perspective than, say, that of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, for example. Let us go back to the function that editors, anthologies, and magazines have in Detectives. As expected regarding the process of the institutionalization of the literary sphere, in the elaboration of a canon it becomes paramount to include certain authors and to exclude others. Although later in the diegesis it is clear that it is just a joke (112)—like much of what occurs in the novel—51 the visceral realists are truly concerned by the purge of the movement that Arturo and Ulises undertake in the first part of the novel (100–101). “Cut heads. Reduce the small circle until it becomes a microscopic dot” (106), advises Quim with respect to the purge. As Pablo del Valle later declares when alluding to the poets’ honor, “The world of literature is a jungle” (490). In this jungle, in this perennial being inside, being outside of the circle, editors obviously play a fundamental role; it is mostly them who ultimately decide what gets published and what does not. The function of the editor is specifically illustrated by two episodes in the novel: in that of the aforementioned Lisandro Morales (205–10) and in that of the lawyer and poet wannabe Xosé Lendoiro (427–48). The close relationship that is established between literature and the market, a relationship that becomes especially strong in 1990s Latin America (Alatriste 1999)— when Bolaño writes Detectives, in fact—is particularly evident in the firs episode for, it would appear, Xosé Lendoiro is a patron of the arts immune to the laws of the market. In contrast to Morales, Lendoiro only publishes poetry. Morales, on the contrary, is conscious that publishing poetry is much less profitable than publishing novels. Thus his reluctance to publish an anthology of poetry that his friend Vargas Pardo brings to him; for Morales, publishing poetry is nothing but “supreme stupidity” (206). And even though he had published a poetry magazine before, he had done it on the condition that its sales could help his publishing business

256   |  Chapter 6 economically; profits and not quality was its “major objective” (205). The Lendoiro episode is more complex than that of Morales and would no doubt require a more thorough analysis than the one I can carry out here. It suffices to note the highly parodic nature of this episode.52 Paradoxically, as well as ironically, this nostalgically retrospective metanarrative-within-an interview ends up becoming a severe criticism of the lawyer-poet-editor Xosé Lendoiro. The constant references to the fact that the best writers from Barcelona published in his poetry journal (434), or that the best known poets from other parts of Spain and also Latin America wanted to publish there (435), and, finall , the fact that the reputation of the journal increased with each passing day (438), stands in stark contrast to Lendoiro’s belated realization—belated to him, not to Arturo—that, in his own words, “I was a terrible poet” (444). It is thus not surprising that when he finally invites Arturo to write a review for his reputedly prestigious magazine, the former wants to know, first of all, how much money he will get paid; it does not interest him at all who publishes in Lendoiro’s journal. At this stage of the diegesis, the idealist phase of the literary activity having been overcome, literature has become a vehicle for making a living. Anthologies and magazines, needless to say, have been crucial to the development of the literary institution, as stated earlier. Paz’s 1966 collection Poesía en movimiento53 and, more recently, Alberto Fuguet’s and Sergio Gómez’s McOndo (1996), 54 are good examples of the former. With regards to literary magazines—which, with the advent of the Internet will probably never again have the same degree of importance—one thinks of Sur, Marcha, Casa de las Américas, and Vuelta55 in the Latin American context, to mention but a few of the most significant ones. Now, even though literary magazines in Detectives are not of the same ilk as these, the visceral realists do want to carve out a space for themselves in the literary sphere. There is a rumor, for example, that Arturo and Ulises are putting together an anthology of young Mexican poets,56 a rumor that causes poet-apprentice García Madero to harbor some hope that a few of his poems might just be included in it (115). On a different occasion, however, where the idea is precisely to exclude the members of visceral realism from an anthology, Piel Divina, a visceral realist himself, is grateful not to be included (279). To appear in a given anthology, therefore, marks a path, so to speak, and it either opens or closes doors. In the context of the novel, and especially in the 1970s, anthologies and magazines constitute stepping stones that in

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some measure lead, or can lead—depending on critics and the market—to the eventual publication of a book; and from that first book to the possible publication of more books, until the author becomes or does not become well-known. Marco Antonio Palacios, one of the characters who attends the Madrid Book Fair, offers a picture of what the necessary guidelines for achieving success in the literary market are. Among those who participate in this process are not only critics and editors but also bookstores and booksellers, equal key actors in the institutionalization of literature. In his diary, in fact, García Madero goes so far as to establish some type of almost necessary relationship between booksellers and Mexican writers, both of which constitute a mafia (103) in his view. He also complains that visceral realists have to fend for themselves because they receive absolutely no help from the cultural establishment (113). As stated above, in the literary hierarchy, and specifically as pertains to poetry and the short story, to publish in magazines marks a first step, an initial incursion into the literary scene. Although several magazines are mentioned in Detectives, four stand out: Caborca, the magazine of “the northern visceral realists” (551), “Visceral Realism’s official organ, one might say” (270); Lee Harvey Oswald, a magazine published by Ulises with Quim’s financial assistance; Quim’s own curious magazine, which he claims to be preparing so that “those kids” may become aware “what the avant-garde is all about” (80); and, finall , Lendoiro’s aforementioned magazine. Generally speaking, these four magazines could be divided into two groups: the financially-strapped (Caborca and Lee Harvey Oswald) and the affluent (Quim’s and Lendoiro’s). The fact that only one issue of Caborca comes out testifies to the difficulty of publishing. Moreover, it is said that in order to finance the publication of Lee Harvey Oswald and other visceral realist magazines, Arturo and Ulises have to sell drugs. In contrast, Quim and Lendoiro—an architect and a lawyer, respectively—use their own funds. Regardless of this economic aspect, nonetheless, it is indeed interesting, in light of Rojo’s early article (2003) on the novel, that the contemporary visceral realists should use the name Lee Harvey Oswald for their magazine. The Chilean critic argues that the death of the precursor (68), Cesárea, is the necessary step to start developing a personal literary style.57 By using the name of a famous assassin for their magazine, Arturo and Ulises wish to underscore both the typically avant-garde character of the whole visceral realist enterprise and the death of a myth; in other words, to underline the removal of one model and the

258   |  Chapter 6 creation of another. With respect to Caborca, whose title might also have a curious connection,58 it is a kind of imitation or travesty of so many literary journals that emerged in Mexico during the avant-garde period. After all, it is the magazine of a literary movement that breaks with Estridentismo, Mexico’s avant-garde movement par excellence. On the other hand, perhaps the most notable difference between Quim’s magazine project and Lendoiro’s may reside in the fact that the latter, by only accepting “the best writers from Barcelona,” leaves new poetic voices out, whereas the former’s sole goal consists precisely of being open and experimental. But be that as it may, Detectives displays a clear awareness of the material aspect of the literary field that takes the form of allusions to literature, criticism, editors, anthologies, and literary magazines. Perhaps for this reason Bolaño saw the need to provide a sort of different cartography of the literary, the literary seen from a different angle, the literary seen from the perspective of the underdogs, so to speak. This alternate cartography of the literary at the heart of the text, as we shall see next, can be traced taking into account the following textual components: (1) Cesárea-visceral realism; (2) life-literature; (3) Arturo-Ulises; and (4) Paz. When analyzing these elements as well as those analyzed before, one must not forget that Detectives’ entire narrative discourse is located in a type of neutral or imprecise space, as Flores (2002) has shown, a narrative discourse which García Madero defines quite appropriately when he states that visceral realism is somehow both “a joke” and “something completely serious” (17). Here lies, roughly, the meaning of the text and Bolaño’s broad stance regarding literature. Metaphorically, and following Pablo Catalán’s ideas (2003), literature is probably situated in a species of no place, in a space that solidifies itself only to disappea . Let us start with Cesárea. Why choose her as the principal goal of the search? In their long interview with Amadeo Salvatierra, Arturo and Ulises tell him that they are working on the estridentist poets and that, even though they have repeatedly run into the name of Cesárea in their readings, they have yet to read one of her poems, thus their interest in her. As stated earlier, according to Rojo, Cesárea represents the literary paradigm that must be overcome. Nevertheless, in another study by Bloom that Rojo does not incorporate in his analysis, The Anxiety of Influen e, a relatively similar thesis to that presented by him in an A Map of Misreading is proposed: the thesis that the poet, to be able to find her own way, has to first

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break with the poetic tradition that precedes her. The question that arises, thus, is not only how might it be possible for the avant-garde—already outdated in the 1970s when the “new” visceral realism emerges—to constitute a relevant literary tradition, but how might it be possible that Cesárea, a practically unknown figure, stands as the most important model to follow or surmount? Inevitably, this leads us to reflect on visceral realism itself. What to make of a group of poets calling themselves a “gang” (17)? How to derive a poetics from such a group if their poems are conspicuous by their absence? What is visceral realism, ultimately? Laura Jáuregui, who says that visceral realism originates spontaneously while she is in a romantic relationship with Arturo, defines it mockingly as “a love letter” (149) and diminishes its importance. Is visceral realism a metaphor for the truly revolutionary, antiestablishment position to which literature must always adhere, a kind of parallel literary activity that sits at the margins of institutionalized literature? The fact that Cesárea never became a member of estridentismo makes one think so,59 as well the fact that the visceral realists in the present of the narration do not identify themselves with any poetic movement. On the other hand, why create so many expectations in the reader if, in the end, only one poem by Cesárea is offered, a confounding poem-drawing-riddle hard to figure out? What’s more, the alleged “mother” (461) of visceral realism, who meets an absurd death, to say the least, is portrayed as the very antithesis of poetry. “She looked like a rock or an elephant” (602), states García Madero in the novel’s third part. By this time, let us recall, she had already relinquished literature a long time ago. The idea of abandoning literary activity, or mixing life and literature, is effectively present throughout Detectives and affects characters such as Cesárea, Xóchtitl, Pablo del Valle, and Arturo, among others. Salvatierra is utterly surprised when Cesárea informs him not only that she’s moving to Sonora but that she will look for a job and a place to live there (461). Like Arturo, she abandons poetry, but instead of devoting her efforts to writing novels, she begins to write what could be called notes or observations in notebooks that she never publishes. Xóchtitl, another visceral realist, is able to combine her editorial and writing activity with her job at a supermarket and bringing up her son. What is the meaning of so many characters in the text forsaking literature? It is as if Bolaño were saying that everyday life is one thing and literature another. “Life is to be lived, that’s all, . . . Literature

260   |  Chapter 6 is worthless” (301), states editor Leandro Morales. On the other hand, Felipe Müller, one of Arturo’s best friends, is left with no choice but to write him a letter broaching practical matters that had nothing to do with literature (221) in order to make him reflect on his mother’s deplorable conditions in Barcelona. Whereas María Teresa Solsona, a friend of Arturo also, declares, “I know that life’s secret is not to be found in books” (519). But the story that develops most thoroughly the idea that the writer cannot escape everyday existence because, otherwise, it will haunt him constantly, is Pablo del Valle’s, who speaks at the Madrid Book Fair. While reading and writing frantically, in informal conversations on literary matters with his friends and in book presentations, Del Valle cannot stop hearing “the noise of my wife’s flat-heel shoes” (488), a government employee who must work every day no matter what. Years later, even, already separated from her, he still hears her “footsteps”: “The noise of my wife’s flat-heel shoes resonates inside my head” (489). To renounce literature, consequently, or to be able to combine both literary and practical activities, appears as something inevitable and even necessary in the text. It is not a matter of Bolaño promoting the death of literature; and neither is he pointing to the loss of literature’s symbolic capital in the same manner that critics have done in the last few years.60 The fact that some characters in Detectives abandon literature either partially or entirely is directly related not only to the fact that they can barely live from their literary endeavors but also to the fact that perhaps solely in as far as the writer engages actively in real life—like Arturo in Africa—is it feasible to revitalize and give sense to literature. In Detectives, of course, Arturo and Ulises, this “wild duo” (Wood 2007), these beings “blurred in their absence,” these “antiheros” (Flores 2002) who flee and search at the same time, these “fleeing detectives who themselves are trace and sign at the same time” (Vargas Vergara 2005), are the characters that best incarnate the possibility, or rather the need and ineluctability, of fusing life and literature. As argued earlier, however, one of the most curious aspects of the text is that the reader does not have access to what they write.61 “The characters write or plan on writing—only poetry— speak about what others write. But we do not know their poems” (2003, 3), writes Chilean critic Camilo Marks. It is paradoxical, furthermore, in such a prolific author as Bolaño, that the idea that reading is more pleasurable than writing should be so abundant in his oeuvre. References to the value of reading are plentiful in 2666 , for example.62 Nazi, in turn, could also be

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conceived as a celebration of the marvelously playful potential of reading. In Detectives, immediately after affirming that life’s secret does not reside in books, María Teresa Solsona adds, “But I also know that it’s good to read . . . it’s instructive or a consolation” (519). 63 Gradually, nonetheless, as time passes, certain disenchantment with the literary sets in. This does not mean that, suddenly, Arturo and Ulises stop reading and writing, but it does mean that daily existence takes a heavy toll on their lives. In this sense, the journey to Europe marks a breaking point that originates at the end of the third part of the novel, after Cesárea’s death and the subsequent escape of the four young visceral realists. From that moment on, the collective adventure of their small community becomes individual adventures. Arturo and Felipe Müller abandon the group for good because they were trying “to survive” (244). Ulises also disappears temporarily from the literary scene. He, “the father of visceral realism” (334), emulating almost perfectly the trips de rigueur to France that, historically, Latin American artists took during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, heads first to Paris and lives there like Vallejo, that is, poorly and miserably. Then, after heading to southern France to meet with Arturo for the last time, he leaves for Israel in search of Claudia, the woman he loves. There he meets Heimito, a kind of postmodern Zarathustra in whose company he becomes violent. After spending time with Heimito in Vienna and returning alone afterward to France, Ulises goes back to Mexico. He is invited then to Nicaragua by the members of the country poetry group in order to support the revolution (331), but he does not take part in any of the activities that had been organized and disappears for two years. Although he eventually returns to Mexico, no one knows anything about him but there is plenty of speculation (457). Arturo ends up disappearing in Liberia, as already stated, initially “to get himself killed” (529) though later “he no longer wanted to die” (530). Like his pal Ulises, he travels to Paris but ends up staying in Barcelona. Unlike Ulises, he writes constantly, he works, he falls in love, and he even has a son. Maybe because Arturo is Bolaño’s alter ego, the voices in the second part of the novel offer more complete information regarding his deteriorating situation. Besides his poor health, he is the only “real” interlocutor in this part, as already stated: “My life was destined for failure, Belano,” (383), tells him Andrés Ramírez, another Chilean. As we saw earlier, we ultimately do not know what happens to Arturo after joining the Spanish photographer in Liberia.64

262   |  Chapter 6 What is incontrovertible, however, is that before Arturo leaves literature for journalism, when he is still a visceral realist, Paz was the group’s “great enemy” (14), as García Madero puts it in his diary. But the fact that Paz may appear undervalued in Detectives, or that his poetics should be critiqued throughout, does not imply, as stated above, that the visceral realists ally themselves with “country poetry,” or with Cuban critic and writer Fernández Retamar, who is presented, simply, as “the son of Habana” (323) in the second part’s thirteenth section. Moreover, I do not concur with Trellez when he claims that Ulises’s encounter with Paz reveals “a conciliatory attitude on the author’s part” (2005a, 147). Yes, it is true that Paz recognizes Cesárea’s name and shakes Ulises’s hand. In general terms, nonetheless, the point in the text is to ridicule him. All the negative references to Paz throughout Detectives culminate precisely in this thirteenth section, in the words of Clara Cabeza, Paz’s secretary. From the standpoint of the dismantling of literature, this episode is crucial. And it is crucial not just because of the meeting of two different poetic traditions but because, to discredit Paz, ultimately, means repositioning literature’s role and proposing a new literary vision. Specificall , Clara disarms Paz’s entire poetics, starting, as could not be otherwise, with the concept of “otherness, something about which I have thought a great deal,” she says, “and that I have not been able to find out what it is” (503). Ironically and mockingly, throughout this section Clara describes Paz’s daily routine in detail, from the letters he received and how he classified them, to the daily activities in which he was involved. Perhaps the section that most adequately illustrates not just the coup de grâce to the poetic tradition that Paz represents but also to the idea that literature, and specifically poetry, does not always provide comfort, is the one where she tells her interviewer that, whenever she feels stressed, she doesn’t read poetry—least of all that of “Pellicer” or “Gorostiza”—but watches silly television programs (508). There is indeed a certain parallel between the pronouncements on literature by Quim, a fool, and Clara Cabeza, a secretary. Both deflate the value historically assigned to literary activity. But what is interesting about Clara Cabeza—a character whose name, of course, is not gratuitous65 —a character not engaged in literature, is that she seems to have rather lucid insights, if not concerning a specific type of literature, then concerning literature’s current state in general. From this perspective, her saying that television is the only medium that calms

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her down is very much in tandem with Bolaño’s own ideas. This implies, partially, the triumph of popular culture over literature. As we can see, even though the discourse on literature is one of the most salient subjects in Detectives, there are a number of aspects in the text that minimize literature’s significance. What stands out in Bolaño in contrast to authors who also treat the topic of literature, or authors whose works is patently intertextual, is that he specifi ally underscores factors that are intimately related to the process of the institutionalization of literature. It is precisely within these factors’ dynamics where the continuous oscillation between the valuing and devaluing of the literary can best be noted. Needless to say, though, Bolaño cannot be said to be a realist writer, or even less a committed writer in the classical sense of the term. But what is undeniable is that, by calling attention to marginal aspects of the text at the very heart of the text—critics and criticism, editors, literary magazines, and so on—he makes us aware, from a sociological standpoint, of the material elements of the literary activity. His reflection on the basic components of the literary sphere coincides with a historical moment in Latin American cultural life in which the relationship between literature and the market started to solidify. It also coincides with the consolidation of both the entertainment industry and mass media in general in Latin America. It is indeed interesting, moreover, that even though Detectives does not posit the death of literature, it does suggest the end of the figure of the traditional intellectual in the continent. In the novel, Octavio Paz, the colossus of Latin America’s Republic of Letters at the moment, the great defender of literature for literature’s sake, loses his hegemony for good. In Detectives, Bolaño seems to propose that, now that the intellectuals’ judgments no longer have the weight they once had in Latin American cultural and political life, at a post-political and post-literary moment, literature is finally free. Everything can be included in it: goodbye to the idea that canonical texts are the only valuable texts. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that literature has lost some of its symbolic capital, and it now has to compete with film, the Internet, streamline television, among other visual media. amulet :

Memory’s Contuma cy

In this wonderful little novel, Bolaño puts into practice the same process of “vampirizing of one’s own writing” that Manzoni noted in relationship

264   |  Chapter 6 to Distant in the previous chapter. Specificall , Amulet, the author’s favorite novel,66 is the expanded version of the fourth chapter of Detectives’ second part. The surrealist and dreamlike quality of the text’s atmosphere might give the impression that history and politics play a small role in the diegesis; so might the presence of the protagonist’s elusive voice that, ubiquitously, seems to travel backward and forward in time while recounting her story retrospectively. Nevertheless, the historical and political animus that propels much of Bolaño’s narrative is at the heart of this novel. What’s more, the very significant year 1968 in Western culture constitutes the centripetal force in which all that is told converges. This means that despite the seemingly postmodern attributes of the text, the author insists on practicing a postmodernism of resistance by building fictional worlds around very concrete historical realities, including Chile’s September the 11, 1973, as much as he had done in Distant and would do in By Night the following year. So far, the relatively small critical corpus devoted to Amulet has alluded to the following aspects of the text. Some have commented, not surprisingly, on the connection between Amulet and Detectives67 as well as on the figure of Auxilio.68 Others have analyzed the text’s title69 and the genre to which it might belong.70 The novel’s narrative discourse71 as well as the metanarratives within the diegesis—those of Arturo Belano, Elena, Lilian Serpas, Remedios Varo, and Erígone—has also received critical attention.72 Given the tremendous importance that Auxilio’s stay in the bathroom has for the narration’s development, more than one critic has commented upon it.73 Likewise, in direct relationship to this, critics have alluded to representations of memory and the past in the novel74 as well as to the significance of 1968 75 (and 1973) and the subject of time.76 In the end, because Amulet seeks to give witness to a crucial historical event in Latin American history, the topic of the function of testimony in the text,77 the representation of politics,78 and the final scene portraying the sacrifice of the youth in the continent have also been scrutinized.79 In some measure, my own analysis combines these last three aspects; for testimony, the political repercussions of the army’s invasion of the UNAM (as well as the massacre of Tlatelolco) and the youth’s sacrificial ethics all support the contrarian nature of Bolaño’s postmodernism. I find it interesting, moreover, especially in light of the sui generis quality of the author’s detective genre analyzed in chapter 2, that Auxilio should call the account

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she is getting ready to share with her narratees80 a “detective story, a story . . . of terror . . . the story of an atrocious crime” (11). And I find it interesting not only because this “detective story” originates in Detectives—even if there is no search whatsoever in Amulet—but because, metaphorically at least, the “atrocious crime” stands for the massacre at Tlatelolco and conceivably also for the crimes committed against women in 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes.” In some sense, then, Bolaño’s text announces 2666 even though it deals with a past event. Furthermore, let us not forget that, when writing Amulet, he had already started to think of writing 2666; an indicator of this is that the number 2666 is mentioned in the text.81 What I am ultimately arguing is that Bolaño’s narrative work provides a kind of archeology of the recent political and social life in Latin America, if you will, and that Amulet represents one more piece of the puzzle, a piece that will be completed with the publication of 2666 . Put differently, the Chilean-born author holds a skeptical view of the continent and does not have much hope for its future except in his writing. Like critic Andreea Marinescu (2013), however, I see Amulet’s testimonial and political potential as ultimately positive, and therefore I do not agree with Sánchez Fernández (2012) (or Paula Aguilar 2010) that the presence of humor and ideological ambiguity in the text diminishes its political intention. In what follows, I analyze (1) the meaning of Auxilio’s stay in the bathroom; (2) the connection between Mexico 1968 and Chile 1973; and (3) Auxilio’s references to Latin America and terror. Whether one conceives of Auxilio’s stay in the bathroom as an “aleph” (Dés 2002a, 172–73), a “traumatic chronotrope” (Long 2010, 130), a “traumatic ordeal” (O’Byren 2011, 474), or whatever name one wishes to give to this interminable moment in time, it is resistance, above all, that defines the experience. Throughout this study I have been claiming that it is the left-leaning political nature of Bolaño’s texts that shape his postmodernism. In Amulet resisting means, mainly, not forgetting, and specificall not forgetting key events that, from the point of view of both the textual author and the narrative voice, mark much of the history of Latin America. In the end, the year 1968, whose significance in the text will be analyzed in more detail later, stands, symbolically and chronologically, for every event in which the efforts to create a more socially and economically just society have been crushed by those in power. If the essence of trauma consists of reliving an awful event again and again, then bringing up the

266   |  Chapter 6 narrative time in the present again and again, and moreover connecting it to another similar historical event (Chile’s 1973 coup), becomes a liberating instance in which the act of remembering constitutes the best line of defense against oblivion. From this angle, rather than a prison (Long 2010, 136), Auxilio’s bathroom is a fortress, a place in which she keeps historical memory alive. In the course of her testimony, she refers to it variously as “lookout from 1968,” “watchtower,” “metro car that bleeds,” “time machine,” (52), “my abolished cavern” (59), calling the toilet stall where she is sitting as she reads Pedro Garfias s poems the “cubicle that I never had . . . trench . . . my epiphany of Mexico” (145). From the standpoint of resistance, as traumatic as Auxilio’s inability to leave the university may have been, none of these metaphors carries with it an inherently negative connotation. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning, in light of Marinescu’s feminist approach to the novel, that she who testifies to “the birth of History” (128) is a woman and she does so from a marginal location, a toilet (28, 145), the least poetic, the least heroic, the least noble of places. 82 And yet, as seen in this study, the margin is the site of enunciation par excellence of Bolaño characters, so perhaps it should not surprise us that the author locates Auxilio in the bathroom’s toilet. What should surprise us in light of our conclusions regarding the role of literature in Detectives— although not in the context of the prominence that literature and the discourse on literature overall reach in his oeuvre—is the fact that literature, and particularly poetry, acquires such a significant value precisely as force of resistance. “I thought: because I wrote, I resisted” (147), states Auxilio. Nevertheless, it is reading, really, that occupies most of her attention as she sits on the toilet. Apart from the fact that, as seen in Detectives and elsewhere in Bolaño’s works, reading is paradoxically more important than writing, it is noteworthy that Auxilio is reading the poetry of a little-known poet who is at the same time an exile in Mexico. By choosing a foreign nomadic woman who engages in the reading of a noncanonical figure in such an antipoetic place (in Parra’s sense), Bolaño is proposing an alternative view of history that calls into question the official account of what happened at the UNAM in 1968 and also bringing the event back to memory thirty years thereafter. Now, what does Auxilio see and what does her testimonial account emphasize? What stands out foremost in her recollection is the Mexican army’s very violent entry into the university campus (35). Although the rather graphic description of the Mexican army’s

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invasion of the UNAM stands in contrast to the nebulousness that characterizes much of the narration, it is the event without which no account would be possible. It is Amulet’s kernel; everything revolves around it. Three things stand out in the depiction of the event that Auxilio experiences incessantly throughout the novel. First, there is both the matter of the state’s violent intervention in an ostensibly protected location, and the use of the terms violate and autonomy which appear five other times in the text,83 conveying such an action. Second, there is the allusion to the massacre of Tlatelolco that, even though more alive in the Mexican imaginary and certainly more costly as regards loss of human life, plays a less prominent role in the text despite Auxilio’s strong injunction never to forget it. And third, there is the matter of her resistance both as a poet and as a Latin American. As in his previous works, Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance manifests itself through the historical and the political here. In my judgment, the fact that Amulet may have more fictional than documentary traits (Sánchez Fernández 2012)—it is a novel, after all—does not take away from its testimonial quality.84 In fact, I see a close relation between Amulet’s testimonial quality and the connection between the events of Mexico 1968 and those in 1973 Chile, the second point of my discussion. Spatially speaking, while the “women’s bathroom” is the most signific nt site in the text, the year 1968, and the month of September, in particular, is the most important in terms of time. “I was living locked up in the Department’s bathroom, I was living embedded in the month of September of the year 1968” (43), Auxilio tells her amiguitos (dear little friends). Although hers is a predominantly subsequent narration in Genette’s (1980) sense of the term, Auxilio utilizes this key year to configure her entire narrative world. Everything she says, every world she re-creates, every person she recalls has its genesis in 1968, to which she returns repeatedly in the narration. By calling the women’s bathroom a “time machine” and a “metro car that bleeds” and specifically referring to the toilet where she sits as a “trench,” she symbolically merges the violence she witnesses when the army invades the university with the resistant attitude she adopts. In this context of incessant resistance in which the dramatized narrator simply refuses to forget, the year 1973 slips through almost inadvertently. As we saw in previous chapters, this is a meaningful year in Bolaño’s work, and here in Amulet it makes its appearance in connection with Auxilio’s friendship with Arturo Belano. Belano’s presence in

268   |  Chapter 6 the text is, of course, explained by the fact that Amulet, ultimately, has its origin in Detectives, where he is one of the main characters. It is also due to the crucial role that autobiography as one of the features of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance has in his works overall.85 But the fact that Amulet is rather a short text confers even greater importance on Auxilio’s allusion to Belano. By focusing on the biographical information regarding Belano’s trip to Chile in 1973 to “make the revolution” (63), a close link between what happened in Mexico in 1968 and what happened in Chile in 1973 is established. Auxilio even states, “And in that September of 1973 emerged the dream of September of 1968, and surely that meant something, these things don’t happen by chance” (67). This is, no doubt, a key passage in the text that can be read in two ways. First, the idea that what occurred in Chile in 1973 is a repeat of what occurred in Mexico in 1968; second, and more pessimistically, that political and social dreams are bound to be defeated, especially if they are implemented too forcefully. Despite this disillusioned view, nevertheless, Auxilio goes on to state that, in the same way that she resisted the army’s invasion of the UNAM, she also resisted the coup in Chile by joining those who protested against it: “and we all moved forward together as we chanted the people united will never be defeated” (68). 86 Auxilio comes out a stronger individual after her experience at the UNAM, and so does Belano after his Chilean journey. Predictably, therefore, Ernesto San Epifanio asks Belano to defend him from “the King of the male prostitutes” (75), convinced that, after having experienced firsthand the atrocities of the dictatorship in Chile, nothing else could scare him (75). In other words, both of these experiences, that is, Belano having witnessed the military coup in Chile in 1973 and Auxilio’s testimony of the Mexican army’s invasion of the UNAM in 1968, reinforce the patently political nature of Bolaño’s postmodernism and give us a certain idea of what he thinks of the Latin American continent. In chapter 2, I examined the close relationship between the detective figure and Latin America in his poetry. In chapter 4 we saw how, even in short stories that take place predominantly in Spain, the Latin American presence emerges in one way or another and how a narrative oeuvre whose setting is located initially in Spain (Consejos) ends up converging with Latin America (2666 ). This concern for Latin America is also present in Amulet. Most references to the Latin American continent, not surprisingly, are tied directly to the multiple young poets with whom Auxilio hangs out;

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and, invariably, most if not all have negative connotations. In every case, the possibly ironic, funny, or even loftily humorous tone of the dramatized narrator’s voice stands in direct contrast to the very serious nature of the statement made. In allusion to the young poets to whom she was a mother, for example, Auxilio affirms, “Everyone was growing up in the Mexican open air, in the Latin American open air, which is the biggest open air because it is the most divided and the most desperate” (42–43). As stated in chapter 4, in the majority of cases where the term open air appears in Bolaño’s oeuvre, it connotes sadness and desolation, and it is certainly no different here. Unlike a typical postmodern narrator who would wish to question and play with history, Auxilio’s words reflect a clear knowledge of the uncertainties and difficulties that await the continent’s youth. Further on in the narration, in the context of her friend’s Elena short-lived relationship with Paolo and their discussion on love, she refers to Latin America as “this continent that so unfortunately Spaniards found, that so unfortunately those absent-minded Asians populated” (51). This is not a postcolonial statement on the dramatized narrator’s part but rather another way to show the precariousness of the Latin American continent. In fact, when discussing later on in the diegesis a story that she heard José Emilio Pacheco tell about how Latin American poetry would have looked like had Darío and Huidobro met (56–59), Auxilio refers to “a different health, not doomed to die down prematurely like so many things in Latin America” (58). Clearly, hope for the future of the continent, a continent that she calls absurd (63) later on, is lacking here. But perhaps Auxilio’s harshest statement concerning Latin America is the one that is elicited by her vision of an unpopulated valley that, though she is unable to describe, prompts her to state, “Perhaps this solitary valley is the figuration of the valley of death, because death is Latin America’s walking stick, and Latin America cannot walk without its walking stick” (67–68). Although 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes” is not all of 2666 , Santa Teresa, the city where the deaths of women occur, is the site where the other four parts of the text converge, thus making these words from Amulet especially significant if one argues, as I am doing here, that Bolaño holds a skeptical view of the continent. Yet the five statements concerning Latin America included here manifest not an apolitical, ahistorical, and playful postmodern disposition but rather a committed attitude that is almost politically modern in its intent. As noted above, Auxilio’s existence in the text is inseparable from the

270   |  Chapter 6 young people with whom she spends her time; moreover, there appears to be a connection between Latin America’s youth and expressions related to terror, particularly if one keeps in mind Amulet’s final scene. In the diegesis, words such as “youth,” “young poets,” “young poet,” or “poets” abound. No other work written by Bolaño—except, perhaps, for Detectives—exemplifie so well the following words read by him upon receiving the Rómulo Gallegos literary prize for narrative in 1999: To a great extent, everything I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation, to those of us who were born in the fifties and chose, at some point, to join the revolution—in this case it would be more correct to say militancy—and who gave the little we had, as much as we had—which was our youth—for a cause we deemed the most generous in the world and that in some way it was, but that in reality it was not. (Manzoni 2002, 212) Taken as whole, and despite the fact that, at some point, Auxilio refers to them as “young boozers” (59), the young people in the novel stand for the young people of Bolaño’s generation. The narrative voice, however, would seem to distinguish two moments in their evolution. The first is a hopeful, optimistic, joyful moment in which the nomadic Auxilio accompanies the young everywhere, reads their poems, listens to their problems, drinks with them plentifully in various Mexico City bars, attends poetry festivals, and so on. Textually, this first phase occupies most of the text. Toward the end of the novel, nevertheless, after a strange visit to painter Carlos Coffeen Serpas’s home, which prompts her to stop going out with her young friends and makes her fall asleep everywhere she goes, there unexpectedly appears a voice that asks Auxilio, “Have you found out where the youth of our continent ended up?” (133). This marks the second moment of the young people’s evolution in the novel. Unlike the fi st moment, this second moment is characterized by uncertainty and abandonment. Naturally, it is semantically connected to Amulet’s final scene; but it is also associated, in my view, with certain words linked to terror in the text, words that point, metaphorically, not only to the army’s invasion of the UNAM as well as to the massacre of Tlatelolco but also to the future of the young people of Latin America. It all starts, as stated above, with the fact that Auxilio promises to recount “a story . . . of terror

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. . . the story of an atrocious crime.” Then, as she proceeds to tells us about her experience working at the house of exiled poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfias, she makes reference to a certain vase that consumes her attention. Along with her encounters with Carlos Coffeen Serpas and Catalan painter Remedios Varo, this is perhaps one of the most mystifying moments in Amulet. Although the meaning of this vase is not clear in the text, its connection with terror is incontrovertible. She calls it, in fact, “object of my terror” (17) and “that mouth of hell” (16), concluding, “if not hell, there are nightmares there, everything people have lost is there, everything that causes pain and is better to forget” (17). But, of course, Auxilio cannot forget, for all she has, she says, are her “memory” and her “memories” (43). Another mystifying reference in the text, one that foreshadows 2666 in some way, is the comparison the dramatized narrator makes between Guerrero Street and “a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery” (76). Might this be a veiled allusion to Santa Teresa in 2666? Possibly, but like so many other aspects of this deliciously strange novel, no further clarification is provided. In my own view, while the mention of “terror,” “atrocious crime,” “vase,” and “hell” contributes to the creation of an apocalyptic climate that eventually leads to the dramatized narrator’s vision of the “multitude of young people” (151) heading into “the abyss” (152), the allusion to a forgotten cemetery from 2666 complements this apocalyptic scenario. However, whether one agrees or not with Franklin Rodríguez’s assertion that the young people are symbolically heading to their deaths in Tlatelolco (2007, 168), like O’Byren (2011) and especially Marinescu (2013), I see this final scene as fraught with political possibilities despite its seemingly negative outcome. In this regard, one should remember that, in the final analysis, although “the most beautiful children of Latin America” (153) fall into an abyss, they do so as they are singing. Marinescu is correct to suggest that in Amulet Bolaño provides an understanding of the political that repudiates violence as a means to bring about social change (143–44), and O’Byren is right to underscore Auxilio’s celebration of the young people’s ideals and desires (478–79). Nevertheless, as political as this text may be, it leaves the reader with a conundrum when the dramatized narrator affirms, concerning the “sacrificed Latin American youth” (154): “I knew . . . that, even though they walked together, they did not make up what’s commonly called a mass: their destinies were not interwoven in a common idea. Only their generosity and bravery united

272   |  Chapter 6 them” (152). What type of politics is the implicit author advocating? Is it possible to be political without being part of a collective? Draper is correct to state that this is certainly not a “homogenous militant subject”—“they did not make up what’s commonly called a mass”—but what unites them besides “their generosity and bravery” (2012b, 74)? The text does not tell us. But the fact that it does not tells us does not mean that Amulet is any less political. As I have argued, the historical and the political are at the heart of Bolaño’s novel. By literarily resurrecting an event that had such an impact in contemporary Mexican history but without playfully questioning it or reconstructing it, Bolaño bestows upon literature a certain political power—however tenuous and often ambivalent even—that it had begun to lose with the advent of postmodernism. No matter how one construes testimonio, the dramatized narrator’s intention to give witness to the army’s invasion of the UNAM in 1968 is incontrovertible. As stated above, it is the event that makes the novel. At the same time, it is the event, along with the military coup in Chile in 1973, that serves as a metaphor for a vision of Latin American history as disastrous, particularly its future. In this regard, Amulet prefigures 2666 to a certain extent, and not only because the year 2666 appears in the text but because there is a parallel between what happens to Auxilio’s young friends and what occurs to the women in 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes.

Chapter 7

2666 Historical Hauntings and Capitalism’s Dark Side

Until not long ago, there wasn’t a consensus among Bolaño enthusiasts as to whether Detectives was a better text than 2666 , or vice versa. But presently the number of critical studies dedicated to the latter far surpasses those dedicated to the former.1 Perhaps this is due to the fact that 2666 ’s implications for literature and politics are much greater in scope. Still, the comparison between the two is really not fair. Detectives is one novel that contains several metanarratives, whereas 2666 is five interconnected novels where, while also containing stories within stories and as much as there is an infernal “physical center”‘ (Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 186) or “black hole” (Marras 2011, 159) in which all the major plots converge, each part can stand on its own. Understandably, this novel of 1,125 pages has been called a “vast narrative fresco,” a “book of books” (Elmore 2008, 259), and a “fictitious mammoth” (Marks 2004). It is also Bolaño’s “literary testament” (Poblete 2010a, 10; Gras 2012, 108) in the sense that it is the last work he conceived for publication before dying in 2003. To do justice to it here is of course not possible—Patricia Poblete’s and Arndt Lainck’s (2014) books, for example, focus on only one theme.2 As regards the topics analyzed in this study in the previous chapters, we could say that 2666 looks more to the present and future than to the past, the past being evoked in the fifth part partially to establish a link with what is happening 273

274   |  Chapter 7 in the fourth in the present and hence universalizing the subject of evil. Even though in the text’s “Note to the First Edition” Echevarría tells us that he found a note by Bolaño indicating that Arturo Belano is the novel’s narrator (2004, 1,125), and Arturo García-Ramos recognizes that at times a subtle subjectivity does emerge in the narration (2008, 119), the autobiographical presence is practically nonexistent; in fact, for most critics 2666 ’s narrator is omniscient (Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 199; Logie 2014, 615; Ercolino 2014, 100). Daniella Blejer refers to the narrating instance as a “narrator-archivist” (2013, 273), while Manuel Pérez suggests that each part has its own distinct narrating voice (2010, 358). 3 With respect to the detective figure, it continues to play a crucial role in 2666 . But, as occurs in previous texts by Bolaño, his search is ultimately futile; the critics fail to find Archimboldi in the first part and no one is able to identify the women’s assassins in the fourth. Except for the fact that Amalfitano is Chilean and a landfill where the bodies of several women are found is called El Chile, the author’s concern with Chile’s September 11 and its consequences practically disappears in 2666 . What does not disappear, of course, is Bolaño’s portrayal of violence and the political, now in a global context.4 Finally, except maybe for the four critics in the novel’s part 1, the building of “communities of the heart” that we saw in some of the short stories and Distant does not take place in 2666 . Before analyzing the presence of a postmodernism of resistance in this text, let me first mention the major points to which critics have alluded. Not surprisingly, several have reflected on the possible meaning of the novel’s very enigmatic title5 and the text’s epigraph6—taken from Baudelaire’s “Le voyage”—as well as on the text’s structure.7 Others have attempted to define the nature of the text as a whole.8 Likewise, the question as to whether 2666 fits or does not fit the detective genre has been discussed.9 For most critics this is essentially a global novel10 although its local, nationalist, or continental implications have also been recognized.11 Among the multiple episodes and aspects that the critical corpus has commented upon are: (1) the beating of the Pakistani taxi driver (2666 101–3, 109–10) 12 and painter Edwin Johns’ severing of his right hand to turn it into a work of art (“The Part about the Critics”)13 ; (2) Amalfitano s hanging of Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geométrico on a clothesline (in “The Part about Amalfitano” 239–46) 14 ; (3) the very mystifying sentence, “No one pays attention to these murders, but the world’s secret is hidden in them”

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(“The Part about Fate” 439) 15 ; and (4) Zeller-Sammer’s story (“The Part about Archimboldi” 934–60). 16 As to the themes that have been analyzed, evil, of course, stands out, with “The Part about the Crimes” often being the major focus of attention in this regard.17 Another theme that has received critical scrutiny, intimately related to the former and centered upon the same section, is violence.18 The roles of capitalism and neoliberalism have also been examined.19 Likewise, and certainly not surprising, critics have referred to aspects of Bolaño’s novel that bear directly upon literature: literature’s power to combat violence and evil, for example20 ; similarly, the way in which time21 and dreams22 function in 2666 as well as the meaning of the desert.23 Scholars have also alluded to the manner in which the unreal or spectral is treated in the text.24 What’s unfortunate, but predictable, is that most critical studies have zeroed in on “The Part about the Crimes.”25 And this is understandable and inevitable to some extent, but it is also limiting. As Sol Peláez argues, the text cannot be reduced to this part (2014, 45). And 2666 is much more than this section, as cardinal as this section is. Still, except for “The Part about Fate,”26 in each of the novel’s four remaining parts there are areas on which critics have concentrated most. In “The Part about the Critics,” for example, the focus has been on what the four literary critics represent.27 In “The Part about Amalfitano” reflection has centered on the reasons why a Chilean exile who also is a philosophy professor decides to leave Spain to settle in a northern Mexican town.28 Predictably, numerous aspects of “The Part about the Crimes” have piqued the critics’ interest. With regard to Santa Teresa, for instance—which, according to most critics, stands for Ciudad Juárez29 —some have referred to the possible connotations of the name30 and others have looked into the economic and social conditions of the city.31 Moreover, since what inspired Bolaño to write this section is the late Mexican journalist and writer Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto (2002), 32 a few critics have scrutinized the differences and similarities between the two texts33 as well as the role the fourth section plays in the novel.34 Likewise, critical comments on this part’s narrative voice—admittedly the most disconcerting of the five—have been plentiful.35 Some scholars have commented on the representation of women36 and, most important, on why they are killed.37 In this context, Haas,38 in addition to the link between the murder of women and

276   |  Chapter 7 unbridled capitalism at the border, has been noted.39 In “The Part about Archimboldi,” finall , critics have mostly examined Archimboldi’s name change and its significance for the rest of the novel 40 In some sense, my own discussion intersects with some of these key aspects of 2666 ’s critical corpus. However, my major goal is to explore signs of a postmodernism of resistance in the text while also focusing on certain sections that have not received adequate attention thus far. I examine these signs within the framework of topics that have been broached in previous chapters, such as Latin America, space and place, politics and the Left, and, tied to the latter two but not yet probed in this study, fleeting references to feminist practices. I then analyze two episodes: Amalfitano s recollection of Kilapán’s book O’Higgins Is Araucanian (1978) and Fate’s interviews of both Barry Seaman and Antonio Jones. While structurally speaking 2666 can certainly be construed as a postmodern text in the sense that it is not just polyphonic but has an open ending and is made up of five parts, each of which is freestanding to some extent, it likewise reveals clear symptoms of the postmodernism of resistance as it has been defined in this study. Postmodernity and postmodernism as conceptualized by the North and examined in the introductory chapter are nowhere to be seen in Bolaño’s last novel. There are, naturally, several instances of irony and humor even in the most terrible diegetic situations, but what could be further from pastiche, self-reflectivit , and especially the disillusionment with grand narratives and the disenchantment with politics than the brutally objective depiction of the bodies of hundreds of women whose stories are based on the lives of real women? Indubitably, especially considering the prominence of “The Part about the Crimes,” 2666 is Bolaño’s most patently political and engaged novel. By focusing his attention on the lives of mostly young women from other Mexican states who flock in hordes to work under very diffi ult conditions in maquiladoras located in the border town of Santa Teresa, Bolaño manages to criticize the failure of modernity in Latin America as well as to warn against the very negative effects of globalization and particularly global capitalism. At the same time, and notwithstanding the various differences between the two, it would appear that by including Sammer’s account, he is putting the victims of the Shoah and the murdered women of Santa Teresa on an equal footing. The scale and the methods may be different, but the result is the same. As seen in the previous chapters, Latin America figures prominently in

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Bolaño’s oeuvre, particularly in his poetry, certain short stories, Distant, Detectives, and Amulet. Influenced first by political disillusionment and then by disappointment concerning the continent’s social and economic development in the 1980s and 1990s, these texts reveal an overall negative view of Latin America. This view does not change in 2666 , if anything it is amplified, especially if one considers that “The Part about the Crimes” constitutes the text’s very center. Upon reading this part in particular and commentaries on Latin America in the aforementioned texts in general, one gets the impression that, according to the author, there is no solution to the continent’s multiple problems. Even though specific references to Latin America do not abound in 2666 , there are some. In “The Part about Amalfitano,” for example, in a dream, the rather strange message of the voice of a French woman who interprets initially her own words as “broken history” or “dismantled and assembled history” (264), becomes, after other possible interpretations are alluded to, the story of a continent marked by the incessant conflicts between the haves and the have nots propelled by a ubiquitous pain (264). A predominant leitmotif in Bolaño’s narrative as indicated in chapter 4, the word pain appears several times in the text.41 But beyond the existential connotation that it often has, here it is attached directly to the social history of Latin America. One gets the impression, in fact, that the continent’s historical evolution is marked by a Sisyphean effort, a “dismantled and assembled history” that fails to bring the fruit of modernity to all. The concepts of multiple modernities or even incomplete modernity so often applied to Latin America fit almost perfectly in this worldview. Allusion to the haves and have nots, furthermore, reveals that the issue of inequality for which Amalfitano (who has the dream) and the many exiles that populate Bolaño’s works fought so courageously remains unresolved in the present of the narration, in the same way that “hopeless metamorphoses” (264) demonstrate that, no matter what happens, no viable future for the continent is at hand.42 Early in my study, I argue that, to some extent, Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance originates in what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973, an event that emerges frequently in his works. Mainly the catastrophic political consequences for leftist projects that this event portends, but also the author’s conflictive relation with the Chilean intellectual establishment at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the new millennium, explain both his gloomy Weltanschauung vis-à-vis Latin America’s future and his

278   |  Chapter 7 use of “El Chile” to refer to “Santa Teresa’s biggest clandestine garbage dump” (752) in text’s fourth part.43 Of all the places where female corpses are found, this is the one that is most often mentioned by name.44 The significance of this gigantic dump—beyond the fact that several of the murdered women are dumped here—is that the most thorough descriptions of El Chile in the text (466, 752 –53) provide another angle to the discussions of Farred (2010), Deckard (2012), and McCann (2010a) regarding the role of transnational capitalism in 2666 . In some sense, El Chile constitutes a metaphor for Latin America’s failed modernity and also an illustration of extractive capitalism’s nefarious effects in the era of globalization. Personified as a monster that will eventually swallow its surroundings, it is inhabited by people who have absolutely nothing. “To remove the clothes from a cadaver of El Chile,” states the narrator, “is like skinning him” (467). But if one group of people ekes out an existence in this terrible dump, another, comprised of “the trucks from the maquiladoras” (752) as well as garbage trucks both from the private and public sectors, disposes of their excess. While this is Bolaño’s predominant view with respect to Latin America in the context of modernity, it is also a warning of sorts concerning globalization’s most deleterious outcomes. To conclude about Latin America in 2666, I wish to briefl discuss a dialogue that Amalfitano has with Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton for it bears directly on the author’s very negative opinion regarding the relationship between the writer and intellectual45 —and especially Latin American poets, “those poor, rickety and pompous phenomena” (908)—and the state, a topic that comes up again and again in Bolaño’s oeuvre. As we saw in our discussion of Detectives, a strong awareness of the extra literary aspects of the literary institution characterizes the text’s manifold narrative discourses. In the dialogue in question, it all starts when Amalfitano advises the three critics not to lend much credence to Almendro’s information concerning Achimboldi’s whereabouts since, just like a typical Mexican intellectual, he’s basically interested in survival, to which Espinoza replies that, in reality, no Latin American intellectual is exempt from this (160). After responding to the Spanish critic that there are some intellectuals on the continent “who are more interested in writing” (160), he offers an assessment of the relationship between the Mexican intellectual in particular, and the Latin American intellectual in general, and the state. Although this assessment is clear at the beginning yet acquires allegorical

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connotations that make it rather abstruse as it progresses, and even though, once he’s done, Amalfitano asserts, “Actually I’ve been just talking nonsense” (164), some conclusions can be reached. Predictably, Amalfitano, who might indeed be construed as another alter ego of the author (Levinson 2009, 182; Blejer 2013, 279), defends the intellectual’s independence. Bolaño himself was relentless on this point. The problem, however, is that Amalfitano compares the Mexican (Latin American) intellectual, who in his judgment generally works for the state, with intellectuals in Europe, who work for independent media and are immune from corruption (161). The assumption, of course, is not only that the state corrupts the intellectual but that, like the chained dwellers of Plato’s allegory of the cave—a mine in Amalfitano s account and, interestingly, with its dwellers standing outside, not inside, of it—each is unable to interpret reality adequately. Aside from the fact that this is a faulty generalization about the relationship between the state and the writer in Latin America, plus the fact that Amalfitano s point is that the critics will ultimately fail to find Archimboldi, his assessment is really symptomatic of the search for a poetics broadly speaking, a poetics in which the writer-intellectual, by being independent from the state, is better positioned to give free rein to his creative capabilities. What Amalfitano does not seem to realize, nevertheless, is that given the continent’s unequal economic development, some writers, and artists overall, often have no choice but to receive state assistance in order to survive. As regards the issue of space and place, this chapter’s second section, there is no doubt that, just like in the short stories, in 2666 it is a propitious subject for an examination of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance. The multiple settings described in this text do not differ greatly from those depicted in some of the stories. In other words, focus continues to reside in the margins and characters are once again unable to turn their surroundings into “meaningful locations” for the most part. I say for the most part because the opposite occurs in the account that Norton tells Morini about painter Edwin Johns (75–77), who not only goes to live and thrive in a neighborhood that’s falling apart but, in large measure due to the overwhelming success of one of his paintings, contributes to its eventual gentrification. In most of 2666 , however, what stands out is a geography of misery and poverty whose center is located in Santa Teresa and its environs. It is here that modernity’s failure and globalization’s dark side meet in Bolaño’s works. At the same time, in contrast to the characters’ movements

280   |  Chapter 7 in the short stories, there is no existential nomadism here; migrants come to Santa Teresa to work, not to resolve spiritual issues. An examination of the city’s landscape reveals essentially two sides, neither of which constitutes a “field of care” in Cresswell’s sense: on the one hand, there is the site of maquiladoras and industrial parks where capital is generated; on the other, impoverished settlements exist whose dwellers eke out an existence. The first is made up of foreign companies, while the second is mostly comprised of migrants coming from other parts of Mexico. Moreover, both migrants and maquiladoras workers are predominantly female. What stands out in 2666, as suggested above, is that the state of flux that characterizes the movements of the characters in the short stories—for example in “Vagabond” or “Life”—is nonexistent. In fact, there is no movement in the text or, put differently, the migrants’ movements end either in their deaths or inside the confinement of the maquiladora. Likewise, in the same way that the narrator provides almost no information regarding what goes on inside the space of the maquiladora, he offers no details concerning what led to the victims’ murders. Attention is focused solely on their bruised bodies, which become fixed spaces of sorts Now, with respect to the physical locus that, so to speak, contains these bodies, certain terms prevail in the most descriptive sections46 : poor, vacant lots, indigents, garbage dump, unpaved streets, shacks, and huts, among others. Rebeca, for instance, who lives in a poor neighborhood, tells Espinoza that the houses nearby were located on empty ground and had been built by their owners (198); there is an allusion, similarly, to the presence of strong-smelling chemicals in the air. In the text, unpaved streets abound and so does the lack of electric lighting (347). Only one of the maquiladoras provides food for its workers while the rest have to eat anywhere they can (449). Kessler, the private detective who comes from the United States to investigate the crimes, insists on being taken to “the slums” (736). “The Obelisk,” or “The Place to Die,” one of Santa Teresa’s several settlements, is referred to as “one of the most miserable among the miserable ones” (628). Indubitably, this geography brings to mind Lima’s pueblos jóvenes (shantytowns), Brazil’s favelas (shantytowns), and Buenos Aires’s villas miseria (slums). But the difference between these cities’ slums and Santa Teresa and its settlements is that even though both spaces evince an utter failure of urban planning and the complete absence of the state, the latter, given its border location as well as its transnational capitalism, metaphorically

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announces the likely dangers of globalization, especially for developing nations, while the former reveals the unsuccessful process of modernization in Latin America. The intensity with which this cartography is employed, as well as the fictionalization of the murder of women and the Holocaust, make 2666 Bolaño’s most strongly political novel, as stated above. But, as we shall see in this chapter’s third section, there are other moments of political resistance in the text. Even though these do not revolve around a single theme and are ironic at times and seemingly innocuous even, they do nonetheless provide certain markers of political commitment. One of them, for instance, is a reference to women having lost their jobs because they wanted to organize unions in the maquiladora where they worked (516, 721); another concerns a woman who claims to have been fired because she was simply demanding her rights (721–22). Although the narrator does not offer further details, what this information reveals is the increasing loss of workers’ rights in the era of globalization, especially workers employed by multinational corporations located in sovereign states who, in reality, often have no rights whatsoever. Another political moment, this time in the context of a snuff movie having been filmed in Argentina, is comprised of allusions to socialist and Peronist revolutions in 1972 (676), agrarian reform and the future of Latin America (678), and a film producer’s participation in deaths squads (681). Mention of these events is important not only because it presents the historical and political background of Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s when the aforementioned movie was being made but also because it ties two key concerns in Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance: faith in the revolution and political disenchantment. It also connects the production of snuff movies to the assassination of women in Santa Teresa. After all, the Argentinian journalist who establishes a connection between the porn industry in general and snuff movies in particular visits Santa Teresa and writes an article about the murders of women. Then, in passing, references both to the revolution and the Left are made: in the first case, a veiled allusion to Lima’s and Belano’s belief in a new revolution (697), as well as to Ansky’s belief in it (888); in the second case, Deputy Azucena Esquivel’s criticism of young Mexicans who want to “make the revolution” (749) and her own former militancy in what she calls “the useless Left” (754). Some skepticism about the Left while still maintaining a left-leaning

282   |  Chapter 7 politics is a trait that is present pretty much throughout Bolaño’s oeuvre, as I’ve been contending in this study. One curious episode in this regard is Amalfitano s dream of Boris Yeltsin, whom the narrator calls “the last communist philosopher of the twentieth century” (290). Since “The Part about Amalfitano” ends with this episode, it would be easy to conclude that this dream represents an acceptance on Amalfitano s part that communism, or leftist politics in general, has been a mirage, a joke, an illusion, especially considering that, in the dream, Yeltsin is not only drunk47 but ends up falling either inside a crater or a latrine (291). Besides, to refer to the fictiona Yeltsin as “the last communist philosopher of the twentieth century” strikes one as funny and somewhat astonishing. Yet it also implies that communism is not dead, that other communist philosophers will come in future years (an implicit call for a “new” New Left?). What’s really interesting about this episode is what Yeltsin tells Amalfitano before disappearing. But to be able to understand the full force of his words, one has to put them in the context of the text’s previous episode, as Lainck does (2014, 96–97). In the dream, Yeltsin tells the philosophy professor that “life is supply and demand, or demand and supply, everything is restricted to that” (291), an affirmatio that could well be interpreted as a firm defense of the free market and likely corresponds with the sentiments of the real Boris Yeltsin as, almost overnight, Russia went from being a welfare state to being a neoliberal state in the 1990s. Nevertheless, right after his declaration, Yeltsin adds, “but one cannot live like that” (291), concluding, “This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and also sex and Dionysian mist and play” (291). In the previous episode, with words that clearly complement what Bolaño himself asserted so convincingly when receiving the Rómulo Gallegos Prize regarding what true literature is (290), Amalfi ano expresses sadness at the fact that, presently, even the most avid and enlightened readers prefer “minor to greater works” (289). 48 The obvious idea, of course, is that the market does not suffice, but also that certain works of literature are more important than others. As much as Bolaño often displays an ambivalent relationship vis-à-vis the value of literature, as we saw in the previous chapter, he clearly adheres to a type of poetics. At the same time, by juxtaposing these last two episodes, he is saying that politics without art does not suffice either. In other words, though it may not appear to be so, Bolaño does have a literary canon. Similarly, he does defend a certain independence for literature vis-à-vis the political.

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The last aspect on politics I’d like to examine before moving on to flee ing references to feminist practices in 2666 is the inclusion, in “The Part about Fate,” of The Slave Trade, a book offered to Fate by Antonio Jones, a member of the Communist Party. “It will be very useful to you” (331), Jones tells him. Two sections of the Spanish translation of English historian Hugh Thomas’s book The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440– 1870 (1999) are reproduced in the text. What’s compelling about the first is that it inserts the comments of an English preacher saying that the most humane and moral Africans he had met were the ones who had had the least contact with Europeans (334); the second zeroes in on economic aspects of the slave trade (340). Since Fate chooses these two sections at random partially because he’s dealing with his mother’s recent death, one is inevitably prompted to ask the reasons for the book’s inclusion here as well as the justification of its use for a man who, twice, states that he writes about the political and social issues that affect the African American community. Understandably, Fate does not really need to be made aware of the history of the slave trade. By including Thomas’s book in 2666 , therefore, Bolaño seeks to place at the same level of injustice the suffering undergone by blacks, Jews, and women. If Fate decides to write about the murders of women in Santa Teresa instead of a boxing match, it is precisely because, as an African American, he knows exploitation and victimization. Without a doubt, by writing 2666 Bolaño wanted to call attention to the plight of women being murdered in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s, just like González Rodríguez was doing. Blejer’s argument that this novel constitutes a kind of homage to them is thus correct (2013, 263). But this homage, as the reader knows, is not based on the exaltation of the subject, her values, or the virtue of her actions. Likewise, the merit of this novel, and especially “The Part about the Crimes,” does not reside in giving voice to the voiceless as one usually understands this expression. This is not a testimonial novel, in fact. The female subaltern subject does not speak, either. In some measure, in the text’s fourth part Bolaño does for the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez what documentary filmmaker Alain Resnais did for mass-murdered Jews in Nuit et Brouillard (1956). That which speaks, in both instances, is the body in pain, as Elaine Scarry might put it, and, above all, the lethal violence exerted upon it. From this perspective, one could even assert that the very objective, detached, forensic descriptions of the dead women’s bodies in the novel, plus sections where women are clearly

284   |  Chapter 7 denigrated—for instance the one on misogynistic jokes about women in general (689–92)—deflate the potentially feminist impetus of the text. And this is true to some extent. However, if one takes into account the fact that when the novel was being written the issue of the murder of hundreds of mostly young women was an urgent problem that received little attention in Mexico, as well as the fact that most of these women were employed by multinational corporations, then 2666 ’s importance with respect to feminism becomes more tenable. Furthermore, since the women in the novel’s fourth part cannot speak because they are dead, others do on their behalf. In fact, to find what we might call a feminist posture stricto sensu in 2666 attention needs to be focused on the sparse references to women protests in the text. The first is found in “The Part about Amalfitano.” As he’s walking by the town square, Amalfitano notices two signs in the middle of a women’s protest, one that reads “No to impunity” and another that reads “Enough of corruption” (272). Curiously, in “The Part about Fate,” Guadalupe Rocal, a journalist and avowed feminist, confesses to Fate that “It’s difficult being feminist in Mexico” (378), especially if one comes from the middle class; involvement in feminist causes, she adds, requires economic capital. However, whenever allusions to demonstrations by women are made in the text, there is really no way to know from which sectors of Mexican society they come. What is mentioned in the first allusion to such demonstrations, probably in an effort to provide a chronology of a movement whose voices, in real life, received scant attention from the media, is the fact that it was the first one (568). At this point, clearly, even when the 34th victim is found, interest in the murders remains a local matter. As time elapses and the number of dead women increases, it continues to be a local matter, but knowledge of the murders becomes more widespread thanks in large part to Florita Almada, a seer who claims to literally see the crimes (575) and who appears on a television program in the company of the aforementioned women’s group in order to call attention to the murders (631). Subsequently, the women activists go on to speak of impunity, police apathy, corruption, and the unceasing number of women being killed in Santa Teresa since 1993 (631–32). Later, two days before the body of the 104th victim is found, the same women’s group organizes a demonstration in Santa Teresa to protest against the femicides—or “femi-genocides” (Segato 2016, 157) rather— being committed in the city, this time joined by some nongovernmental as

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well as student organizations (758). Although, as stated earlier, allusions to these protests are almost incidental in the context of the large number of murders being committed against women, they nonetheless constitute the sole source of criticism, the only act of resistance amid an utterly horrific situation that, as Florita Almada declares, no one wants to see (574). As regards Amalfitano s sudden reminiscence of Lonko Kilapán’s book O’Higgins Is Araucanian: 17 Proofs, Taken from the Secret History of Araucanía (276), it would be easy to attribute it to his seemingly unstable state of mind, or to the fact that, two nights before, a voice that challenges some of his beliefs and warns him about the assassination of women in Santa Teresa appears to him out of nowhere (258–59, 266–69). But given that as he’s thinking about Kilapán’s book he is also contemplating Dieste’s Testamento geométrico (285)—and given the fact that Kilapán’s book is a real book that was published in Chile in 1978 49 —its insertion in the novel is not as bizarre as it may initially seem. In a strange way, to be sure, the presence of Dieste’s book confers a degree of stability and gives some meaning to Amalfitano s life. At the same time, if we agree that Amalfitano is Bolaño’s alter ego, it makes perfect sense that a book that deals with both Chile’s history and Chilean identity should appear in this section of the text. The book’s incorporation has to be put in the context of the author’s conflictive relationship with Chile the last years of his life especially. By appropriating Kilapán’s very unusual biography of Chile’s founding father, Bolaño offers two critiques: first a critique of Chile’s problematic identity, that is, the fact that while Chileans in general feel immensely proud of their European heritage and show disdain for local indigenous culture and its people, they nonetheless have traditionally traced their supposed bravery as a people to their Araucanian past; and second a critique of Chile’s past and more recent political scene. As one examines these two critiques, one has to pay attention to two aspects of Kilapán’s book: on the one hand, the information that is included in the text itself, and, on the other, Amalfitano s own reactions to this information. Let us turn to the first critique Via Amalfitano s focus Bolaño reproduces the following from Kilapán’s 1978 sixty-one page book. We are told, for example, that Kilapán studies race and is in charge of both an organization that deals with ethnic matters in Chile and another that is responsible for Araucanian language (276). We are also told that he is the author of two other monographs on the Araucanians. Moreover, in the prologue to Kilapán’s text, written by a

286   |  Chapter 7 “Chief from Puerto Saavedra” (277), we are informed that, among those who fought for Chile’s independence, only O’Higgins’s relationship to the Araucanians can be proved without a shadow of a doubt. In fact, the first proof that is adduced to confirm this relationship is that O’Higgins “was born in the Araucanian state” (278) 50 and, most interesting in Amalfitano s judgment, “is the son of an Araucanian woman” (282). Much of what’s inserted in 2666 from Kilapán’s text, however, has to do with the Araucanians’ telecommunication systems and, as outlandish as it may sound, their Greek origins. This last contention particularly, supported by Kilapán’s two aforementioned monographs plus one that Bolaño does not include in the novel, El origen griego de los araucanos (1978, 61; The Greek Origin of the Araucanian), is what may have prompted the author to fictionalize O’Higgins Is Araucanian; similarly, it is what allows him to assess Chilean identity through Amalfitano, as we shall see next At first sight, one could easily conclude that Amalfitano is defending the significance of Araucanian culture regarding the founding of Chile. Some of his comments vis-à-vis Kilapán’s very peculiar biography, nevertheless, cast doubts on this possibility. As he remembers cracking up when he first read the book, he illustrates Chile’s ambivalent identity by remarking that while some historians expressed pity for O’Higgins because he was illegitimate, others showed complacency (1978, 277). That O’Higgins’s father (Ambrosio) was Irish was doubtless “a good joke” (277), he muses, at the same time that, in a clin d’oeil to the multiple violations of women taking place in Santa Teresa, he considers the traditional kidnapping of a future wife in Araucanian culture—reported in Kilapán’s text—as a euphemism for the rape of O’Higgins’s mother by his father; “a macabre practical joke that just referred to an abuse,” muses Amalfitano Of course, one of oddest aspects of Kilapán’s book that comes to his mind is the relationship that the author establishes between the Araucanians and the Greeks. It is said, for instance, that the Chilean state “was like the Greek State” (1978, 278), that there existed a close relationship between the Araucanian language and “Homer’s language” (284), that, according to the renown homme de lettres Juan Ignacio Molina, there couldn’t be any doubt whatsoever regarding the kinship between Greeks and Araucanians (279) and, most appallingly from the perspective of the reader, that the first Araucanian immigrants who settled in northern India—“where they were called Aryans” (283)—traveled to “Germania”

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(283), southern Greece, and Chile. Lainck is correct to claim that what saddens Amalfitano is Latin America’s inability to conceive of itself outside European values (2014, 94). But in the specific context of Bolaño’s take on Chilean identity, from which I am approaching Amalfitano’s reminiscence of Kilapán’s book, this has to do also with Chile’s incapacity to deal with its own past. If neither nonindigenous Chileans nor indigenous people—who, in Kilapán’s text at least, trace their origins not to Europe but rather to the genesis of European civilization—are able to accept themselves as they are, then there is a problem, a problem at the root of which lies one’s obsession with origins, a sentiment which, in turn, is spawned by the country’s insularity. It’s not an accident that, in Kilapán’s text, Chile is referred to as “a remote island in the sea” (279). 51 The second critique that Bolaño launches through Amalfitano s brooding on Kilapán’s biography of O’Higgins affords him the possibility—as previously in Distant and By Night—of recalling Chile’s recent military past and democratic present. It all begins when, toward the end of his rumination, he ponders the likelihood that, in actual fact, Kilapán may very well not be O’Higgins’s author, that its author could be someone working for an intelligence organization (286), or indeed a general putting on airs of intellectual, something that was not that unusual in Chile, a country where soldiers behave like writers and writers behave like soldiers. He realizes, moreover, that the book came out during the dictatorship under what must have been very inauspicious circumstances (285). As so often occurs in Bolaño’s work, the author’s alter ego manages to throw a quick jab at political figures by resorting to literature. He posits the possibility, for example, that Kilapán “could be Pinochet’s nom de plume” (286), and he alludes to “the bad reputation that Chile enjoyed abroad” (287) during his regime. He also entertains the idea that, in reality, Kilapán’s biography could have been written by Aylwin, Lagos, Frei, or even someone from the extreme right, concluding that his style was so diverse that it reflected the whole spectrum of political ideas, from neoliberals to those who had belonged to the MIR (287). He even makes reference to “socialist politicians praising the military dictatorship’s economic policies” (287). Even though these cerebrations are maintained in the context of Kilapán’s text, they do reveal a total disenchantment with the political on the author’s part, at least with the politics of traditional political parties. It’s likely that this disenchantment, especially the dissatisfaction with the Left that these words manifest,

288   |  Chapter 7 was produced by the Chilean political experience of the 1990s. But what’s important to keep in mind is that, throughout his career, his hope in the Left never vanished completely. To conclude with this chapter, I now turn my attention to two metanarratives that confirm that in Bolaño’s oeuvre the political and the historical represent the basic elements of his postmodernism of resistance. The first deals with Barry Seaman, one of the founders of the Black Panthers,52 the second with Antonio Jones, the last member of the Communist Party in the United States. Both are interviews, as stated earlier, but the first takes place in the present and is from the point of view of the narrator and Fate, while the second is a dream that transpires as a television program in Fate’s hotel room is giving a report about the murders of women in Santa Teresa. That Bolaño should choose to fictionalize the Black Panthers makes sense not only because Fate is an African American journalist interested in “political topics that affect the Afro American community” (394) but also because an implicit parallel is established between their struggle and that of young revolutionaries in Latin America. The words that Seaman utilizes to refer to the demise of the movement, in fact, reflect in part those often used in Bolaño’s own works to allude to the end of revolutionary dream: “the smoldering remains of a nightmare which we had entered when we were adolescents and from which we were now coming out as adults” (318). Foremost, Seaman’s episode constitutes an homage to the Black Panther Party and, to a lesser extent, a remembrance of the Asian and, above all, African decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s at a time (in the 1990s) when, amid the euphoria of the triumph of capitalism and the purported end of history, they had fallen off the radar. Specificall , it centers on a five-point speech that Seaman delivers in a church in Detroit. In the same way that Bobby Seale did during his active years in the Black Panthers and after, he travels around the country giving lectures, the purpose of which is to educate the African American population politically. In the text, even though Fate is criticized and mocked for working for a journal with such an anachronistic name, Black Dawn, the narrator sets the stage for Seaman’s presentation by focusing first on Seaman’s run-down neighborhood and a mural displaying workers in various “stages in the chain of production” (307), and then a song being sung by the church’s choir that makes reference to Moses and the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt (313). A connection seems to be established between, on the one

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hand, a city (Detroit) representing the end of modernity or the end of capitalism’s age of manufacture, and, on the other, the history of people— African Americans—that for the most part continue to be economically and socially oppressed. As Seaman presents each of the five topics of his speech—danger, money, food, stars, and utility—he provides advice to his audience at the same time that he recalls his days in the Black Panther Party. What surprises him most upon having been released from prison is that the Panthers had fallen into oblivion and that some even considered them terrorists. He realizes, however, that if there were more African Americans occupying important positions in society, it was in part due to their efforts (315, 318). Furthermore, he feels proud to have traveled to Algeria and China (314) and to have met Chinese leader Lin Piao,53 expressing in no uncertain terms that if “Kissinger and Nixon” (319) were successful in resuming relationships with China in the early 1970s, it was thanks to them. Then, as if to combat the negative reputation the Black Panthers have even among those who barely know them, he recollects their origins. Faithful to the historical record, the fictional Black Panthers in the text come on the scene to solve practical problems in the African American community, Seaman tells his audience. Specificall , they become traffic wardens, but not in order to issue tickets for parking violations; rather, to prevent speeding cars from running over children because town hall had refused to install traffic lights (322). When analyzing the subjects of money and utility, Seaman offers two pieces of advice to his audience. In reference to what he calls “economic relativism” (316) and conceding, at the end of this section, that “money will always be a pending problem” (317), he exhorts poor blacks to invest their money wisely by helping their neighbors, sending their children to university, helping those rotting in jail, and starting small businesses whose profits might go back to the community. Then, in what is probably Bolaño’s most passionate defense of the virtues of reading in his works, he urges his listeners to read books, but especially those written by male and female black authors. “When one reads,” he tells them, “one never wastes time” (325). Finally, Antonio Jones, purportedly the last member of the Communist Party in the United States, gives Fate a book (The Slave Trade) that in some sense complements and explains the history of the African American people that Seaman and the Panthers partially represent. But why juxtapose

290   |  Chapter 7 these two accounts in the novel? Is there a relationship between the two? If the story of Seaman could be read as an apology for and, chiefl , a call to political commitment, it would indeed be tempting to read Jones’s as Bolaño’s recognition of the Left’s and Communism’s ultimately failure. When asked by Fate what he thought about Stalin and Lenin, for instance, he replies that they were both sons of bitches (329–30). Nevertheless, when asked about his opinion regarding Marx, Jones responds, “He was a great guy” (330), implying that the problem is not with the Marxist ideology but rather with the people who have implemented its principles. Moreover, no matter how crazy Fate’s colleagues at Black Dawn may think Jones is, certain aspects of his story clearly underscore Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance as is being defined in this study. Jones’s nickname in his Brooklyn neighborhood, for example, is “Scottsboro Boy,” a reference to the now almost forgotten Scottsboro Boys Trial that took place in 1931 in Alabama, in which nine very young blacks were unjustly accused of assault and rape by an all-white jury and almost sentenced to death. We are told that the reason he was called thus is because Jones never stopped talking about this trial, implicitly suggesting the need to keep its memory alive. As in the case of Seaman’s story, the narrator also places Jones in an extremely poverty-stricken area of the city; and as in the case of Seaman’s account, allusion is made to an image—specifically a photo in Jones’s apartment— that extols “a maintenance worker from the municipality of Brooklyn” (329). Then, as if to complete the picture of this “last communist,” in Fate’s dream of the interview Jones is claimed to have stated that the only fault he found with Marx was his irritability, but that this irritability had to do with the state of poverty in which Marx lived. As I finish this section on Jones, two things are worth noting in the context of Bolaño’s postmodernism construed primarily as a postmodernism of resistance. Unexpectedly, Jones begins to sing the first line of a slightly modified “The International,” the most famous song of the Workers’ Movement: “Arise poor of the world, arise slaves without bread” (330). Then, when Fate asks Jones why he continued to support the communist cell, he replies, “Because someone has to maintain the cell in an operational state” (331). Similar to this strangely heroic resistance, the author’s own spirit of resistance is present until the very end of his life. Even though certain specific episodes of the text and part 4, principally, as well as subjects such as evil and neoliberalism, have so far received the bulk of the critical

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attention, Bolaño’s last and most stubbornly political novel continues to explore topics that originally emerge in his poetry and evolve in the rest of his narrative. Latin America, for example, still epitomizes modernity’s failure but here it also serves the purpose of warning against the harmful impact of unregulated globalization. As in the case of so many of the author’s other texts, characters are simply unable to turn the marginal spaces they inhabit into sites of “meaningful location.” Moreover, even though most women cannot speak for themselves, some do come to their own defense by protesting in the streets. The author’s furiously political impulse, nevertheless, does not end there. It also manifests itself, once again—and as it does in nearly most of his oeuvre—by criticizing Chile, both certain painful episodes of its history and also its political present; or by introducing new subjects, such as the history of blacks in the United States, that in one way or another bring the novel’s five parts togethe .

Conclusion

In his review of Pankaj Mishra’s recently published Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Carlos Lozada (2017) writes: “There is nothing worse than partial modernity. And all modernity, it turns out, is partial.” Even though Mishra’s book does not directly address Latin America, Lozada’s statement goes to the heart of the present study. The reader will remember that what prompted this writer to analyze the fiction and poetry of Roberto Bolaño was the question of whether he was or was not a postmodern author. At the time, two issues permeated the critical discourse on Bolaño’s oeuvre: referring to Bolaño as a postmodern writer but without explaining too well in what sense his fiction was postmodern, and Bolaño’s appropriation, especially at the height of what’s been called the “Bolaño Phenomenon,” by the US academy. As, eventually, Bolaño’s works (and particularly 2666 ) entered the inner sanctum of the World Republic of Letters and 2666 began to attract (and continues to attract) the attention of critics worldwide (the so-called Bolaño effect), certain elements pertaining specifically to Chilean–Latin American history as well as the presence of clear signs of a “partial modernity” in his novels and short stories, fell off the radar. As a result, earlier works by Bolaño, including his poetry, suffered the same fate. The goal of this study became thus two-pronged. First and foremost, to provide, through a close examination of his narrative production and poetic 293

294   |  Conclusion output, an answer regarding Bolaño’s postmodernism. And, second, to offer, in detailed footnotes mostly, summaries, comments, and analyses of most critical studies on Bolaño’s oeuvre published thus far—a “thus far” that, at some point, became simply impossible to respect due to the plethora of the scholarly material that, to this day, continues to come out nonstop—including those in French, in order to understand what aspects of his fiction and poet y had elicited the greatest critical interest. Now, since, as I stated in the introduction, the “postmodern” has become quite an elusive creature that is often conflated with “globalized” and a long time has elapsed since the modern-postmodern debate was fresh in everyone’s mind, I have deemed it necessary to present an overview of postmodernism’s major contentions as well as a concise history of its evolution. In order to put Bolaño’s postmodernism in perspective, in the introductory chapter I separated this section in two: the European-American version of postmodernism, and the reactions to it coming from Latin America and Latin Americanists. Although, as I have shown, while it is true that some texts by Bolaño do display features associated with postmodernism—such as irony, humor, and a certain degree of fragmentation, for example—Bolaño’s literature does not delve into self-reflexivit , pastiche (with perhaps the exception of Nazi), or even a significant amount of intertextuality, as much as the subject of literature plays such a central role in his works. Similarly, in contrast to Lyotard’s famous dictum that “the grand narratives of modernity” had come to an end, including Marxism—the emancipation narrative that had been so dear to the young people of Bolaño’s generation—Bolaño, out of the ashes of the defeat of the Left in Latin America, creates a literary oeuvre that reacts against this defeat. It has been my argument, in fact, that his is a postmodernism of resistance that has much more to do with politics, history, the past, and modernity’s shortcomings, than with play, parody, self-reflexivit , and “historiographic metafiction. I have argued that, in his poetic output, Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance manifests itself through the confection of a sui generis detective genre that while it conceives of the detective figure symbolically and politically, it ties this figure to the recent history of Latin America specifically this explains in part the pervasive feelings of nostalgia that inhere in the poems as well as the lyrical I’s memories of Mexico and the traumatic experience of dictatorship in Chile. As I have demonstrated in my analysis,

Conclusion   |  295 moreover, the fact that this lyrical I often inscribes himself in the poetry as “Roberto Bolaño,” “Roberto,” or, à la Pessoa, via several different nameless heteronyms, constitutes yet another sign of a postmodernism of resistance in a discernible attempt to rescue the figure of the author from poststructuralism’s “death of the author.” As the autobiographical element practically disappears in Bolaño’s first three novels, the detective milieu does not; in fact, it continues to evolve at the same time that, paradoxically, both the detective figure and the crime remain enigmatic and even nonexistent. I have shown that in Consejos, Bolaño’s “first” novel and arguably the most postmodern stylistically speaking, a post-neopoliciaco genre is put in place so as to link the rise of urban violence to the disillusionment with politics and the rejection of an incipient neoliberal modus operandi. In Monsieur, a narrative text that comes closest to the mystery novel but whose dramatized narrator is furthest away from having the necessary capabilities to solve a crime that does not exist, Bolaño’s incipient postmodernism of resistance chooses to fictionalize an author—César Vallejo—whose work contains two major themes running through his own oeuvre: the inscrutability of pain and the historically conditioned causes of evil. In some sense foreshadowing the mystery that surrounds the deaths of women in 2666 —the self-confessed perpetrator of the crime doesn’t know why he committed it—Skating is a text where the exculpatory narration of the three dramatized narrators becomes significantly more important than resolving the crime. And the skating rink but especially the camp site become the first manifestations of the types of marginalized communities that will become a staple of Bolaño’s narrative and whose origin goes back to Antwerp. As regards the short stories, what stands out most from the standpoint of community and its relation to postmodernism—antithetical to collective projects—is that Bolaño turns the concept on its head. Indeed, I have argued that his postmodernism of resistance leads him to the creation of communities based neither on numbers nor on ideas but on sentiments: emotionally dysfunctional communities or communities of the heart that seek no agency. I have also demonstrated that, as occurs in his poetic production, in Bolaño’s short stories history plays a fundamental role, in particular what happened in Chile on September the 11, 1973. Arguably, the author’s oeuvre would not exist without this crucial event in contemporary Chilean history. Even though history is not treated directly in the short

296   |  Conclusion narrative, it always emerges as trauma in the lives of the characters, a living presence that cannot be escaped. Additionally, in contrast to “historiographical metafiction”—and this is paramount to understand Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance—history here is not parodied, played with, or questioned. In Llamadas, Putas, Gaucho, and Secreto, furthermore, characters are unable to turn spaces and places into centers of care or meaningful location; similarly, the dramatized narrator’s gaze focuses mostly on premodern sites where capital is lacking. As I held in chapter 5, no texts incarnate more convincingly Bolaño’s patently political stance toward history than Nazi, Distant, and By Night, particularly the latter two; it is here, comparably, that the writer’s status vis-à-vis the literary enterprise becomes a major subject of concern. These are the texts that, from the viewpoint of the author’s postmodernism of resistance, lead straight to 2666 . As I showed in my critique of Nazi, as much as it may display stylistic features associated with postmodernism, it is really the link between Nazi ideology and literature, broached partially in Monsieur, that is pivotal in the evolution of Bolaño’s thought. Nazi literature, characterized as essentially antithetical to the present, propels its authors in two opposite directions: toward the past to create a utopian world that will protect them from existing circumstances, and toward the future where, paradoxically, Nazi writers seek to build a utopia founded on past paradigms. In Distant, a text that provides yet another iteration of the detective genre in Bolaño’s oeuvre, Chile’s recent past plays a key role. It is indeed the country’s utter refusal to deal with this past that prompts the author to launch his critique. Above all, this novel constitutes a condemnation from the Left of the governments of the “transición.” Bolaño depicts a society that, while still premodern in many respects, advances, stubbornly and uncritically, toward the imposition of a neoliberal modus operandi intent on forgetting its dictatorial past. In this process, Wieder, a close relative of the Nazi writers from Nazi, plays, of course, a central role. He wants to rebuild the nation by eliminating what he deems its foreign elements and by returning it to its presumably pure essence. Urrutia Lacroix displays a similar attitude in By Night, but in his case it is not only communist ideology that distances him from the nation but also its people, the poor and the uneducated in particular. By Night, then, becomes a call to Chile to wake up from its amnesia and to reflect on its recent history, as well as a severe denunciation of literature for neglecting its ethical function.

Conclusion   |  297 In the gradual dismantling or, rather, desacralizing of literature that such an intensely literary author as Bolaño carried out throughout his career, Detectives takes center stage. Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance here expresses itself through an examination of literature not so much as a series of texts that comprise a given canon but rather literature as an institution: its editors, its literary journals, its diverse conceptualizations of the literary, poetry workshops, among others. In the partial overview of the process of the institutionalization of literature that Detectives presents, at its very core, there are two movements, two impulses, two opposing sets of literary ingredients regarding literature and literary activity: a strong valuation of literature, authors, texts, and reading, and the seemingly inevitable loss of literature’s symbolic capital. Now, in the hypertext that is Amulet, where resistance and remembering go hand in hand, literature appears to recover the redeeming qualities it had lost, especially in Distant (and will lose again in By Night). Postmodernism construed as an essentially political phenomenon in Latin America reaches its full force in this novel by Bolaño. By fictionalizing the Mexican army’s invasion of the UNAM in 1968 and establishing a direct link with Belano’s experience of the coup in Chile in 1973 through Auxilio’s memories, the author offers a rather negative view of the continent’s recent past and casts a shadow over its future. In some sense, the dramatized narrator’s reference to her account as a “detective story, a story . . . of terror . . . the story of an atrocious crime” (11) summarizes Bolaño’s literary production at the same time that it announces 2666 . What distinguishes this last novel is its apocalyptic nature. Santa Teresa is the scene of the crime where hundreds of women are killed, and it is also an omnivorous centripetal force that pulls the text’s characters to its center as well as the dystopia that awaits humanity in a world where anarcho-­capitalism reigns supreme. From the standpoint of a postmodernism of resistance, 2666 is Bolaño’s most palpably politically engagé text. By censuring the pernicious effects of globalization, the author is in some way criticizing the failures of modernity in Latin America. As in previous texts, narrative focalization continues to reside either on sites where modernization is yet to arrive or on neighborhoods that have fallen victims to the state’s abandonment. Bolaño’s political resistance is expressed in his judgment against fascism in “The Part about Archimboldi,” and in his calling attention to the plight of women in “The Part

298   |  Conclusion about the Crimes.” But it is also expressed in more subtle, less attention-­ grabbing ways and frequently through the use of metanarratives. In “The Part about the Crimes,” for example, the women groups’ protests against the government’s inability to solve the crimes represent a small yet symbolic act of resistance even though, clearly, the use of such a clinical representation of their deaths does not qualify this section of the text as a feminist manifesto. In the inclusion of Kilapán’s book in “The Part about Amalfitano”—compounded by the fact that the name El Chile refers to the landfill where some of the bodies of women are found—Bolaño returns to the subject of his country’s conflictive identity and refusal to deal with its past. In Barry Seaman’s story—an homage to one of the founders of the Black Panther Party—the author establishes a parallel between the struggle for liberation in Latin America and the struggle for freedom for African Americans in the United States. He also resuscitates, in passing, the Asian and, above all, African decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s as discourses on the end of history and the triumph of capitalism raged on in the 1990s. In this context, the story of Antonio Jones, purportedly the last communist in the United States, and his offering of The Slave Trade to Fate, point not to the end of the Left but rather to the necessity of perennial resistance from the Left. Perhaps because his father was a trucker who was also an amateur boxer, Bolaño conceived of life as a state of permanent struggle, a pugilistic affair where ideas and convictions had to be defended to the death in the boxing ring that is existence. He had some very strong opinions. With the same passion with which he praised Jorge Luis Borges, Nicanor Parra, Julio Cortázar, and Enrique Lihn, for example, he condemned Isabel Allende and Diamela Eltit (as well as Augusto Pinochet but also Hugo Chávez). What most fascinated those who knew him personally, however, is that oftentimes he would take a position and defend it vigorously one minute, only to defend the opposite position the next. When Mónica Maristain asked him, “Why are you so contrarian?” he famously replied, “I’m never contrarian” (Bolaño, 2004a, 332). This simultaneously categorical and equivocal attitude is at the heart of Bolaño’s oeuvre and explains in part the unique nature of the postmodern attributes of his fiction and poetry. During his youth in Mexico, when he was a member of the infrarrealist poetic movement, he identified with Trotskyism; but then, in 1973, he left for Chile to support Allende’s democratic road to socialism. In an

Conclusion   |  299 interview, he claimed that his only homeland was literature and his children, yet he published some forceful political novels. The political and the literary, these are the territories of Bolaño’s work. Bolaño’s greatest contribution to literature in general and to Latin American literature in particular is to have bestowed an ethical function upon the literary enterprise. If, during the nineteenth century, literature’s goal was to afford civic and moral values to the citizens of the new nations of Latin America and to inscribe the autochthonous during the firs decades of the twentieth, both the advent of repressive dictatorships and the consolidation of neoliberalism called for a new role for literature. Bolaño, however, just like Octavio Paz before him, believed that literature owed allegiance to itself first of all. In the famous 1969 debate between Cortázar and Óscar Collazos concerning whether the writer should or should not engage politically, Bolaño would no doubt have sided with the former rather the latter. He would have agreed with the Argentinian writer that, in order to be revolutionary, it does not suffice that a novel have a political content, it is also imperative that it be revolutionary in form and structure. He would have likewise concurred with Cortázar—and with Mario Vargas Llosa, who joined the debate a year later—that history and politics, as significant as they are, are not the only realities with which the writer should engage; the psychological, the unconscious, and the oneiric are equally real. Collazos, writing in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, when it was believed that intellectuals had to contribute to the revolutionary cause, launched his critical darts against Boom novels that he deemed too complex, accusing their authors (e.g., Carlos Fuentes) of emulating narrative techniques that were not appropriate to represent the reality of Latin America. Bolaño’s merit resides precisely in his having integrated the political in his works but without sacrificing the literary; in fact, oftentimes the literary appears to overwhelm the political. Looked at chronologically, it would appear as if the ethical function he assigns to literature evolved over time. Although moments of resistance are evident in the poetry and early novels, there is a tangible chasm between these texts and 2666 , for instance. Indeed, the move toward a more committed position starts with the publication of Nazi and Distant. As I suggested, this has to do with Bolaño’s perception that Chile was refusing to deal with its recent past. It may also have to do, nevertheless, with his reaction against what came to be known as “the new Chilean narrative,”

300   |  Conclusion comprised of a rather heterogeneous group of fiction writers whose texts he may not have even known. Did Bolaño read Fuguet’s Bad Vibes (1991), for instance, or Gonzalo Contreras’s La ciudad anterior (1991) and even Marcela Serrano’s Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (1991)? Most times, his critical pronouncements about certain Chilean authors are scathing but without much substance. What is it specifically about Eltit, for example— whose work has been critical of both the dictatorship and postdictatorship governments—that he does not like? In his essay “The Corridor with Apparent No Way Out,” for example, he refers to her fiction as “the damnedest writing of current Chilean literature” (2004a, 75), but he doesn’t elaborate. Is this a positive or a negative comment? Moreover, why dismiss so nonchalantly the novels of Hernán Rivera Letelier and embrace so wholeheartedly the urban chronicles of Pedro Lemebel? Bolaño was trying to make space for himself in Chile’s Republic of Letters, without a doubt, but this does not fully explain his harsh assertions. One of Bolaño’s accomplishments, however, consists in having incorporated into his works two major aspects of what would become, in time, the central elements of the process of globalization: the ever-increasing movements of people and the often damaging consequences of transnational capitalism for developing countries with weak governments and weak institutions. While I realize that this applies especially to Detectives and 2666, what is important to understand in the context of Bolaño’s postmodernism of resistance is that, ultimately, what is put into question in his works is modernity itself. In other words, among the different postures vis-à-vis postmodernism coming from Latin America presented in this study’s introduction, he belongs to those for whom modernity continues to be an incomplete project. From this perspective, Bolaño’s oeuvre could be interpreted as a direct response to the triumphant celebration of globalization proposed first in Bad Vibes (1991) and later in the preface of McOndo (1996). How could Latin America be global, he appears to suggest, if it is still not modern? One also needs to remember that not all the characters that move from place to place in his novels and short stories do so for existential reasons; many do so for political reasons, as exiles, while several others do so on economic grounds. Another of Bolaño’s feats is to have bestowed new value upon literature at a time when literature was beginning to have to compete with other media. Romantically and anachronistically, he returns the aura to literature

Conclusion   |  301 and demands an ethics from it. Bolaño lived for and by literature while recognizing, paradoxically, what might be called literature’s useful uselessness. One of his greatest contributions in this regard is to have expanded the literary canon like no other author before him. With respect to the large number of known and especially minor writers that populate his fi tion the difference with authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, and Ernesto Sábato, to mention but a few well-known Latin American novelists, is truly striking. Of course, he is writing at a different historical moment and the comparison may be unfair. All the same, the presence of so many authors in his novels, coming from so many literary traditions and nationalities, has certainly enriched literature. Bolaño’s literary output constitutes a species of ecumenical calling in which the reader is invited to read the works of other writers in order to expand her literary and intellectual horizons. It is not an accident, in fact, that the Chilean-born author exhorted the advantages of reading with such energy. As far as his having included such a diverse group of poets and fiction writers in his narrative production, one could argue that Bolaño is ultimately proposing a new definition of the canon, one where it is not the critic or the literary institution but rather the reader that sets the standards. The profusion of critical studies on Bolaño’s work might lead one to the conclusion that a sort of exhaustion has been reached. Some have even recommended a salutary letup, in fact. Nevertheless, a close inspection of a critical corpus that continues to grow relentlessly reveals that there are still areas worth exploring. A fruitful area of inquiry, for example, would be to determine whether behind Bolaño’s effort to incorporate the names of multiple authors in his works there lies the proposition of a particular poetics, or whether their incorporation in the story contributes little or nothing to the diegesis. Though this has been done partially as pertains to Latin American authors, a study that takes into account all of the poets, fiction writers, and intellectuals in his works has not. In similar fashion, a concordance that included the names of all of these figures would be tremendously useful to Bolaño readers, even in the age of Internet. Some obvious possibilities for future research reside also in exploring the relationship between Bolaño’s last four posthumous novels and texts such as Detectives and 2666 , and especially between The Woes of the True Policeman and 2666 , and The Spirit of Science Fiction and Detectives. Likewise, and as I have noted in this study, more serious and comprehensive analyses of

302   |  Conclusion Bolaño’s poetry, early novels, and short stories need to be carried out. Future studies might also elaborate on the extent to which the author’s statements in his interviews and essays cast a light on his creative work. Finally, more needs to be known about Bolaño’s biography. While Maristain’s (2012) and Saucedo’s studies, as well as Ricardo House’s documentaries, have illuminated the biography of an author about whom, until recently, little was known, certain information would be useful to understand specific aspects of his oeuvre. In relationship to Bolaño’s last two visits to Chile, for example, it would be helpful to find out what exactly happened between him and certain members of Chile’s literary circles, who unfortunately have not wanted to say much. Correspondingly, and since the author spent most of his productive life in Spain, future studies might wish to scrutinize the influence that Spanish history and politics may have had upon his early novels, as well as the presence of Spanish poetry in his own poetic output. Similarly, it would be useful to have access to Bolaño’s letters (and even e-mails). Throughout the years, Bolaño wrote letters to his friends Antoni García Porta, Bruno Montané, and others; but these letters remain unpublished. What would of course be of great utility is to have access to all the notebooks containing poems, stories, unfinished novels, and so on that Bolaño organized so carefully during his lifetime and that were partially displayed in Barcelona in 2013 at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea. As more posthumous novels are announced, however, this may not be possible for a long, long time.

Notes

Chapter 1















1. September 30–October 1, 2011. 2. In a recently published study on postmodern fiction, Nicol refers to pos modernism as a “notoriously slippery and indefinable term” (2009, 1). Eagleton, for his part, refers to it as “such a bizarrely heterogeneous entity” (1996, 21). And Lipovetsky recognizes the “ambiguous, clumsy, not to say loose” (2005, 30) nature of the expression postmodern. 3. In fact, two sessions at the MLA in Seattle in 2012 pointed in that direc tion (“The Novel after Postmodernism” and “Refashioning the Poetics of ‘Post’; or, How to Imagine beyond Postmodernism”). 4. For Crusat, for example, there is no doubt whatsoever that Bolaño’s oeuvre is postmodern (2009, 88). 5. In “Ni del lado de allá ni del lado de acá: Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolaño,” a paper I presented in Genoa in 2006 at Congreso Internacional del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. 6. At a symposium on Bolaño’s work organized by the Instituto Catalán de Cooperación Iberoamericana in November 2002. Echevarría’ s inaugural lecture at the symposium can be found both in his Desvíos (2007a) and in Paz-Soldán’ s and Faverón Patriau’s Bolaño salvaje (2008, 431–45). 7. Although in his Globalización cultural y posmodernidad (1998), for example, the Chilean sociologist José Joaquín Brunner does attempt to establish the links between the two. 8. Los detectives salvajes in Spanish. Detectives from here on. 9. I borrow this concept from Neruda critic Hernán Loyola (1999), who uses it to explain why, in his later poetry (1958–1967), despite the fact that the utopian impulses that had characterized Neruda’s poetic oeuvre were no longer present, the Chilean bard, paradoxically, became even more political. 10. Granted, 2666 was also published posthumously and it was even not entirely finished by 2003, but unlike the latter four novels, Bolaño had edited most of it by the time he died. For some background information on this matter, see 2666 ’s appendix (Echevarría 2004, 1121–125). 11. La universidad desconocida in Spanish. University from here on. University is an anthology containing most of the poems Bolaño wrote in his lifetime and that

303

304   |  Notes t o pages 6–15

















appeared, earlier, in Reinventar el amor (1976), Fragmentos de la universidad desconocida (1993), El último salvaje (1995), Los perros románticos 2000), and Tres (2000). 12. “Gente que se aleja” and Amberes in Spanish. 13. Monsieur Pain and La pista de hielo in Spanish. Consejos, Monsieur and Skating from now on. Since, as of this writing, Consejos has not been translated into English, I retain the Spanish title. 14. The stories contained in these two collections appeared, in English, in Last Evenings on Earth (2006) and The Return (2010), respectively, but each includes stories from the two collections in Spanish. Since I provide my own translations of Bolaño’s texts, I refer to them as Llamadas and Putas. 15. The Insufferable Gaucho (2010) and The Secret of Evil (2012) in English. Gaucho and Secreto from here on. 16. La literatura nazi en América, Estrella distante, and Nocturno de Chile in Spanish. Nazi, Distant, and By Night from now on. 17. A term he borrows from Nigel Thrift’s article “The Rise of Soft Capitalism,” Cultural Values (April 1997): 39–40. 18. He puts it thus: “Modern times found the pre-modern solids in a fairly advanced state of disintegration; and one of the most powerful motives behind the urge to melt them was to wish to discover or invent solids of—for a change— lasting solidity; to replace the inherited set of deficient and defective solids with another set, which was much improved and preferably perfect, and for that reason no longer alterable” (3). 19. “Bulkiness and size are turning from assets into liabilities,” writes Bauman (2000, 121), adding, “Giant industrial plants and corpulent bodies have had their day: once they bore witness to their owners’ power and might; now they presage defeat in the next round of acceleration and so signal impotence” (128). 20. Presciently, and echoing some of Harvey’s own pronouncements regarding postmodernity, the author declares, “The disembodied labour of the software era no longer ties down capital: it allows capital to be exterritorial, volatile and fickle. Disembodiment of labour augurs weightlessness of capital” (121) 21. In point of fact, Lipovetsky argues that we are currently witnessing the “consummation” (2005, 31) of modernity , adding, “We had a limited modernity: now is the time of consummate modernity” (32). 22. Among the various theories of globalization discussed in the book are those of Saskia Sassen, Anthony Giddens, Leslie Sklair, Michael Hard and Antoni Negri, Immanuel Wallerstein, George Ritzer, Ulrich Beck, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, John Tomlinson, Tony Hopkins, Nancy Fraser, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, and Joseph Stiglitz. 23. Understandably, postmodernist philosophy’s claim of the death of the autonomous subject—in conjunction with the process of decolonization starting in the 1950s as well as the increasing importance of mass culture and technol ogy in the 1950s and 1960s—brings to the fore, on the one hand, the birth of identities up until then dormant or non-existent, and on the other, the question of identity itself as a valuable category. Indeed, for Reigadas the crisis of identity constitutes the most crucial attribute of postmodern culture (1988, 135). In

Notes t o page 15   |  305 general, discussions on identity and postmodernism have fallen into two camps: those who look askance at identity, and those who hold a more nuanced view of it vis-à-vis Latin America. Brunner, for instance, thinks that one cannot talk about the existence of a Latin American identity. While it may be true that one can speak of “personal identity” (2002a, 107), one cannot talk about group identities such as states, nations, classes, and so on. “In spite of this,” he writes, “we persist in speaking of something that we call national identity or even Latin American regional identity” (107). Horacio Machín echoes Brunner’s argument by saying, “In Latin America it has been difficult to think difference and identity without falling back on the enigmas of nationalism and essentialism” (2002, 262). Mario Roberto Morales goes even further. In an analysis of autochthonous cultures in Latin America in the context of globalization, he declares that it is no longer just a matter of seeing the ethnic or popular subject in opposition to the white subject, but that because both are immersed in transnational patterns of consumption, it simply becomes impossible to speak of a “single identity” (137), be it “indigenous, Indian or Maya, or ladino” (2002, 137). He concludes, correctly , “It is time, then, to begin accepting the fact that there are no pure identities, only negotiable ones (live or extinct)” (152). For his part, Fernando Aínsa, in his article “The Challenges of Postmodernity and Globalization: Multiple or Fragmented Identities” (2002), echoing the voices of those who in the 1990s talked about identity no longer being tied to physical space, alludes to the existence of a “new cartography” (62), making the further incontrovertible point that, in postmodern times, identity is no longer necessarily attached to specific texts or “immovable rituals and symbols fixed once and for all” (60). Thus the increasing presence, in his opinion, of “figu es of exodus and exile” (64, italics in the original), as well as the recognition that contemporary identity “is divided (and in some cases torn) into multiple loyalties” (69). The Chilean sociologist and cultural historian Jorge Larraín, who has written extensively on identity—his Identidad chilena (2001) is especially enlightening—and modernity in Latin America, for example, his Modernidad, razón e identidad en América Latina (1996), basically contends that postmodernism tends to exaggerate terms such as fragmentation, contingency, division, difference, and discontinuity, among others. The problem with this position, he argues, is that postmodernism ends up contradicting itself regarding identity: on the one hand, it elevates the other and confers agency upon it; following Spivak, yes, the other can speak. But on the other hand, it relishes the death of the subject and the loss of personal identity. Larraín does not think, as postmodernist discourse claims so vociferously, that “the subject has become totally fragmented” (2002, 96) or that one can change one’ s identity “as one changes one’s clothes” (97). He faults postmodernism, in fact, for establishing too big a gap between the subject and the other. And at the end of his article he warns, “Ultimately, to accept the Postmodernist premises in relation to identity is to accept the final loss of the subject as a conscious agent of construction and change, . . . to accept the inability of the subject to change circumstances and to propose an alternative rational future. It is the end of all genuine political practice of transformation” (102).

306   |  Notes t o pages 15–18











24. He also writes further, “Under globalization, almost every feature of sovereign power . . . is subject to international and global constraints” (147). 25. He states in an interview, “I made up stories, I referred to a quantity of books I’d never read, apparently it impressed people, it’s all a bit of parody . . . It’s [La condition postmoderne] simply the worst of my books, they’re almost all bad, but that one’s the worst” (in Anderson 1998, 26, footnote). 26. “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” This essay had originally been written in French—“Réponse à la question: qu’est-ce que le postmo­ derne?” in Critique, no. 419 (April 1982)—and was translated by Régis Durand in order to be included in Innovation/Renovation, edited by Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan (1983). 27. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Bell is better known, however, for his controversial The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. 28. “The principle of consensus as a criterion of validation seems to be inadequate” (Lyotard 1984, 60). 29. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970). 30. “The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the state, or institutions of higher education is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What use is it?’” (Lyotard 1984, 51). 31. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” 32. Anderson also makes the important point that, in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard fails to allude to the possible implications of postmodernity for aesthetics and politics (1998, 30). 33. To have a clearer idea regarding the theoretical differences between Lyotard and Habermas, read Jay’s 1984 essay. Also consult certain sections of Hassan’s article “Making Sense: The Trials of Postmodern Discourse” (1987, 191–213) and the fifth section of his essay “Prospects in Retrospect” (1987 214–34). 34. Needless to say, the literature on the postmodern, postmodernity, and postmodernism is immense. When the so-called postmodern debate was in full swing in the 1980s and 1990s, and before the term postmodern was somewhat overshadowed by the now seemingly overused term global, critics in almost every field felt the need to give an account of how the “postmodern turn” (Hassan; Best and Kellner 1997) was having an impact upon their disciplines. To simplify matters, therefore, in order to elaborate this sketchy prehistory of the postmodern, I draw much of the information from Anderson’s excellent The Origins (1998). Nevertheless, there are other studies on the subject that have been indeed very useful; for example, Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic (1983). Of special interest in Foster’s collection are the essays by Habermas, “Modernity–an Incomplete Project” (3–15), and Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1983, 111–34; originally a talk at the Whitney Museum in 1982); but also those by Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication (126–34),” and Kenneth Framp ton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (16–30). Also interesting are Huyssen’ s After the Great Divide (1986)—a kind of defense of postmodernism—and Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), a fascinatingly brilliant critique of postmodernism, in particular

Notes t o pages 18–19   |  307











the fifth chapter (“Fallacies”), where the autho , through careful analysis of how postmodernism construes concepts such as “identity,” “value,” and the “subject,” among others, comes to the conclusion that, politically, it cannot bring ultimate emancipation. 35. Clearly, however, Anderson does not seem to realize that the term posmo­ dernismo in Spanish had nothing to do with postmodernism in English but that instead it alluded to a type of poetic production in Spanish America that constituted a reaction to modernismo, also a term that did not exactly match the English modernism. Hassan, who in his The Dismemberment of Orpheus, also refers to de Onís’s use of the term posmodernismo in his Antología de la poesía española e hispanoamericana (1934), appears to fall into the same trap though he does at least state that, by “posmodernismo,” Onís meant “a minor reaction to modernism already latent within it” (261). But which modernism does he mean, the modernism of the European avant-garde, that of a Joyce, a Woolf, or an Eliot, or the modernismo of a Darío or a Martí? Throughout his Los hijos del limo, Paz cautions critics not to confuse these terms, and especially not to confuse posmodernismo and postmodernism, in English. 36. Interestingly, Habermas alludes to Octavio Paz’s Los hijos in his discussion on modernity (1983, 6; 1981, 9–10). I insist, however , that references to intellectuals from Latin America, Africa, or Asia are rare among Europeans and North Americans from the United States. 37. “What Was Modernism?” Massachusetts Review 1, no. 4 (August 1960), reprinted in Refractions (1966, 271–95). 38. “Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction,” Partisan Review 26, no. 3 (Summer 1959), reprinted in his Decline of the New (1970, 190–207). 39. “The New Mutants,” Partisan Review 32, no. 4 (Fall 1965), reprinted in his Collected Essays, vol. 2 (1971, 379–400). 40. The first chapter of Anderson s study, “Prodromes” (3–14), offers a good account of how the term postmodern began to be used in literary and cultural contexts. 41. This journal played a crucial role in the dissemination of postmodernism in the literary field. In spring 1976 (March 25–27), it sponsored A Symposium in Postmodern Literary Theory at SUNY, Binghamton University. Some of the papers presented at the Symposium were published in the 1977 winter issue. In the introduction to this issue, the editors state: “The purpose of this gathering was to provide a forum for a variety of ‘new’ approaches—paracritical, Marxist, deconstructive, structuralist, phenomenological, hermeneutic, existential psychoanalytic, etc.—to the crucial literary questions which . . . have been made explicit by the breakdown, during the last decade, of the New Criticism as a viable instrument of literary interpretation and criticism” (319). Interesting from the perspective of our discussion of postmodernism is their description of the (then) present moment as one of a “centerless universe” inhabited by the “postmodern man” (Symposium 1977, 320). 42. See “Culture, Indeterminacy, and Immanence: Margins of the (Postmodern) Age,” Humanities Society 1, no. 1 (Winter 1978), reprinted in The Right

308   |  Notes t o pages 19–24

















Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), chapter 3. 43. The first edition of this book was published in 1971 44. Hassan includes a revised version of this essay, titled “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” in The Postmodern (1987, 84–96). 45. The following two statements in the essay point in that direction: “I do not mean to take my stand with the postmoderns against the (ancient) moderns” (262). And, “Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or Chinese Wall” (264). 46. Some of these names—such as Lyotard, Pynchon, Deleuze, and Baudrillard—are definitely associated with postmodernism. But what about Julia Kristeva, Barthes, Harold Pinter, Robbe-Grillet, and García Márquez, among others? (260). 47. Italics in the original. 48. In “Postmodernity and Hermeneutics” (1977), Richard E. Palmer offers a lucid account of the differences between postmodernism and postmodernity. 49. But this time in the context of “pluralism, which . . . has become the irritable condition of postmodern discourse” (Hassan 1987, 167). 50. Specifically in the essay “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” (167–87) 51. Jencks’s most recent contributions to postmodernism are Critical Modernism: Where is Post-Modernism Going? (2007) and The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (2011). 52. Habermas gave this lecture on the occasion of his having been awarded the Theodor W. Adorno prize by the city of Frankfurt. The following year, on March 5, 1981, he delivered the same lecture at the New Y ork Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In winter 1981 it appeared for the first time in English but with a different name, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” in New German Critique, and it was then reproduced with the original title in Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic (1983). A Spanish translation of Habermas’ s essay can be found in Casullo, El debate. 53. Although he does make reference to American neoconservative Daniel Bell, whom he calls “the most brilliant of the American neoconservatives” (“Modernity–An” 6). 54. Right before, Habermas asserts, “I think that instead of giving up modernity and its object as a lost cause, we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant programs which have tried to negate modernity” (1981, 12). 55. In New Left Review (1984). 56. Abstract expressionism, Stravinsky, Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Proust, the International Style in architecture, and philosophy. 57. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1–54) and “Theories of the Post modern” (54–66), respectively. 58. In the second chapter of Postmodernism, Jameson speaks of postmodernism as “a general modification of culture itself with the social restructuring of late capitalism as a system” (1991, 62). 59. In due time, but especially in chapter 2, we shall have the occasion to

Notes t o pages 24–29   |  309













explore whether the manifold autobiographical elements in Bolaño’s work in some way represent a reaction to the dilution of the subject in postmodern times. 60. For now I only mention this important concept in Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism. Once the analyses of Bolaño’s works begin, we shall have the chance to see if the characters in his novels and short stories undergo the experience of feeling lost and disoriented in their comings and goings and whether Jameson’s notion of “hyperspace” coincides with the multiple, varied places they move about. It must be said, here, however, that Jameson introduces the idea of “postmodern hyperspace” not only in the context of the cozy relationship between architecture and multinational capitalism that begins to take place in the 1970s—and which, as Patricia Morgado and others have shown, will eventu ally give birth to what’s called “star-architecture” (Frank Gehry, among others)— but, specificall , in the context of the architecture of Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves, and Frank Gehry (1991, 5, 38–44). 61. He carries this out primarily in chapter 2 of his study, “Modernity and Modernism.” 62. Essentially, the Bretton Woods Agreement, developed in 1944 by the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was an agreement that, for the first time in histo y, created an institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that would govern monetary policy among nations. The ultimate goal was the stabilization of the world’s monetary system by pegging world currencies to the value of gold. In time, of course, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, for example, in conjunction with the governments of wealthy nations, have become instruments to turn less developed nations into what Piketty has recently referred to as “un champ d’expérimentation, sans véritablement chercher à tirer parti des enseignements de leur propre expérience historique” (a field of exper mentation, but without really attempting to benefit from the lessons of their own historical experience [translation mine]) (2013, 790). 63. Gramsci is the first to employ the term Fordism, using it in his essay “Americanism and Fordism” from his Prison Notebooks. Harvey (1990) offers a good over view of it in chapter 8 of The Condition of Postmodernity. 64. Such as, for example, the Ford Model T. 65. Keynesianism derives from the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who first presented his ideas regarding the role of government in economic policy in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). 66. Harvey (1990) explains this breakup in chapter 9 of The Condition of Postmodernity, “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation.” 67. But it is certainly not the only one. Although I have not consulted them, two other studies along the lines of Hutcheon’s 1988 study bear mentioning, Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Patricia W augh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984), both of whose ideas are worked out in Hutcheon’s own arguments. 68. And, we may add, point of view or focalization, either in its external or internal variety, if we follow Mieke Bal’s conceptualization.

310   |  Notes t o page 29



69. Even though Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986) is too rich to give it a fair assessment here, the following ideas from it bear mentioning. Without being uncritical, he offers a mostly celebratory view of postmodernism, or, at least, a realistic one, one that recognizes the affirmative as well as the negative aspects of it. He states, “What will no longer do is either to eulogize or to ridicule postmodernism en bloc. The postmodern must be salvaged from its champions and from its detractors” (182). Like many critics of postmodernism, he argues that there cannot be a radical break between the modern and the postmodern; it would be senseless to think so (208). He puts the matter this way: “My main point about contemporary postmodernism is that it operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art, in which the second terms are no longer automatically privileged over the first” (216–17). From this point of vie , he continues, postmodernism does not represent “just another crisis within the perpetual cycle of boom and bust . . . which has characterized the trajectory of modernist culture . . . [but] rather . . . a new type of crisis of that modernist culture itself” (217). At the same time, though postmodernism constitutes a “new paradigm” (x) that mixes elements from modernism, the avant-garde, and mass culture, it lacks the “radical vision of social and political transformation that had been so essential to the historical avant-garde” (169) despite its loud protests against the culture and the politics of the 1950s. Somewhat similarly to Hassan, Huyssen distinguishes the postmod ernism from the 1960s from that of the 1970s and early 1980s (1986, 188–89). If, during the 1960s, postmodernism may have had some of the “shock value” (170) that had characterized the historical avant-garde, as time has elapsed it has gradually lost its critical edge and has become more and more affirmative and complicit culturally and politically. Although Huyssen finds Habermas s call for the completion of modernity very problematic (174–75), he agrees with him that, ultimately, postmodernism has more to do with politics and culture than with style (206). Toward the end of his brilliant study the author concludes that if postmodernism is to have any chance at all, it must, of necessity, become what he calls a “postmodernism of resistance, including resistance to that easy postmodernism of the ‘anything goes’ variety. Resistance will always have to be specific and contingent upon the cultural field within which it operates. It canno be defined simply in terms of negativity or non-identity à la Adorno, nor will the litanies of a totalizing, collective project suffice” (220–21) 70. The title of Eagleton’s 1996 study on postmodernism pretty much tells the whole story, but it does so—as one might expect from such an accomplished and brilliant critic—in an ironically intelligent fashion. He starts his analysis by establishing a crucial difference between postmodernism and postmodernity, adding that, as plural and diverse as postmodernist theory may present itself, it still adheres to “rigid binary oppositions” (25–26). In this situation, terms such as difference and plurality appear as indisputably positive, whereas notions such as unity, identity, and universality are presented as innately negative. Eagleton chastises postmodernism for opposing History, with a capital letter, while at the same time giving too much importance to “history” (1996, 32). The problem, though,

Notes t o pages 29–30   |  311







is that “in overhistoricizing, postmodernism also underhistoricizes, flattening out the variety and complexity of history in flagrant violation of its own pluralistic tenets” (49). Furthermore, regarding postmodernism’s flat-out rejection of the so-called grand narratives, Eagleton argues that not all grand narratives are progressive (1996, 55), which might explain his argument that postmodernism might just rise from, “among other sources . . . the impossibilities of modernity, from its implosion or ironic self-scuppering” (63). In tandem with other critics of postmodernism, he thinks that postulating the death of the subject means giving up on the search for justice (90). Finally, postmodernism may be politically “oppositional,” but it is “economically complicit” (132). 71. Anderson’s 1998 study is a kind of overall summary of postmodernism, but it is certainly not an uncritical assessment of its major figures. In his evalu tion of Hassan’s ideas, for example, he points to Hassan’s oversight concerning the social impact of postmodernism (19). He also notes that, curiously, of all the grand narratives that he claimed were dead, “classical socialism” stood out (31). Moreover, even though he criticizes Jameson for not realizing that capitalist modernization was not a reality in much of the so-called Third World (120), he praises him for having developed a cultural logic of capitalism (72). Along the same lines, he reminds the reader that, contrary to what Harvey may believe, the regime of flexible accumulation that he diagnoses was not unive sally dominant (79). 72. Like Anderson’s The Origins, Morawski’s The Troubles with Postmodernism (1996) is fundamentally a critique of postmodernism. In chapter 1 he offers a very sound, synthetic critique of it. Above all, he stresses postmodernism’s rejection of all emancipatory and utopian aspirations, claiming that it focuses primarily on artificial realit . Furthermore, he accuses postmodernism of being conformist in relationship to modernism, whose intent it was to ameliorate the social fabric. Reflecting a clear preference for modernism, he states, “Modernism fed on the Utopia of making culture authentic. It valued nature so highly that it either colonized it pitilessly or sought to transform it into an Arcadian asylum. Postmodernism obliterates the demarcation lines between the authentic and non-authentic, the natural and the artificial; it pulls cultural values down from their pedestal and simply declares nature null and void” (19). 73. Berman’s name usually comes up when the issue of the validity of modernism in the midst of the postmodern is broached. In one article, for example, his description of modernity bears a striking resemblance to postmodernity, stating that in the former, life is essentially contradictory (1989, 71). He calls postmod ern those who during the 1960s held an affirmative view of modernism (84). In another article he claims that modernism is alive and kicking and he blames those who, like Anderson, center their attention on major historical events and big ideas but neglect what’s going on in the streets. His message to intellectuals from the Left such as Anderson is categorical: “The Reading of Capital will be useless to us unless we also know the word on the street” (Berman 1989, 130). Earlier, in “Modernity and Revolution” (1984), a sort of critical response to Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air, Anderson had criticized Berman’s

312   |  Notes t o pages 30–33















understanding of time as continuous and moving forward and his view of modernism as uniform and spread equally across Europe. In fact, claims Anderson, there were parts of Europe that were not affected by modernism. It baffles the critic that Berman should take so many examples of the highest achievements of modernism from the Third Word, and particularly from Latin America, concluding, “The Third World furnishes no fountain of eternal youth to modernism” (109). 74. In the introduction to their study, they offer an interesting conclusion about postmodernity: “Postmodernity, then, can be said to stand for the acceptance of difference and the celebration of heterogeneity within an overwhelmingly capitalist framework” (xiv), adding that it is characterized “by both an aggressive, entrepreneurial capitalism and an intense and prolonged wave of self-examination taking different but related forms” (xv). 75. Although, surely, some names are more recurrent than others in the scholarship dedicated to the subject of postmodernism in Latin American: for example, Ernesto García Canclini, José Joaquín Brunner, Martín Hopenhayn, Jesús Martín-Barbero, Nelly Richard, George Yúdice, and John Beverly, among others. 76. Viano, after providing an etymological study of the terms modern and modernity and explaining how, in time, there emerges the idea of “modernity as rationalization” (1989, 189), settles the matter by saying that, to speak of the end of modernity, is simply silly. 77. In reference to Caliban, a character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who is associated with primitive instincts and brute force and who becomes a servant of Prospero, another character in the play. 78. Ariel is also a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but he represents the spirit, the noble, the good, and he becomes Prospero’s closest friend after the latter sets him free from Sycorax, a witch who happens to also be Caliban’s mother. My use of both “Arielist” and “Calibanesque” is of course mediated by my readings of José Enrique Rodó’s classic Ariel (1900) and the contemporary response to it by Roberto Fernández Retamar, Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América (1971). 79. Bueno concludes, “In short, the Weberian version of Modernity barely reaches certain but not all Latin American regions. And the parts it does reach, are affected (or benefited, depending on the beholder) only partially and asy metrically” (2002, 192). 80. Quijano’s (1988), Dussel’ s (2001), and Bueno’ s (2002) views on Latin America and modernity are not the only ones available, of course. Fernando Calderón Gutiérrez, for example, aware that certain metanarratives in the continent—such as “developmentalism, dependence, . . . revolution, etc.”—“were fatally wounded” (1988, 12), reminds the reader not only that modernity in Latin America was partial and exclusionary even though it was a global Western phenomenon, but (citing an article by Alain Touraine) that it is paramount to distinguish modernity from modernization. Brunner, one of the most prolific writers on both modernity and postmodernity in Latin America, argues that the so-called crisis of modernity that affects Europe should not concern the

Notes t o pages 33–36   |  313









American continent because in Latin America modernity was not “linked to the principles of the European Enlightenment, . . . and never did it act as a unified spiritual or social experience” (1988, 98). He speaks, in fact, of the presence of an “untruthful modernity” (98) characterized by heterogeneity, difference, and variety. More recently, Brunner has claimed that a true “modern cultural confi uration” (2002b, 19) begins to take shape in Latin America during the 1960s, when the usual modes of production, transmission, and reception of culture start to be transformed (19). In both articles, he underscores the idea that one cannot talk about postmodernism in Latin America in the same way that European and North American discourses do (1988, 98; 2002b, 28). Rubert de V entos (1989), another well-known critic of modernity, asserts that, since even in Plato’s time the harmonious link among the scientific, moral, artistic, and political spheres begins to be destabilized, it becomes all the more urgent to comprehend modernity differently, taking into account its essentially diversified nature and never attempting to reconcile its parts. Finally, Enrique Marí thinks that nowhere in the world has the so-called project of modernity been more than a dream than in Latin America (1988, 12), while the Colombian Martín-Barbero (2002a) calls for an understanding of Latin American modernity that divorces it from a European conception of it. Correctly, like Brunner, Néstor García Canclini (1989), and Renato Ortiz, Martín-Barbero further contends that Latin American modernity has less to do with the Enlightenment and high culture aesthetics than with mass education and the expansion of the culture industries. Ironically, he refers to Latin American modernity as “postmodern in its own way” (2002a, 44). 81. Although she does not focus on Latin America, the value of her article resides in having made available to the Spanish-speaking public the main lines of argument surrounding the modern-postmodern debate in Europe and the United States, starting with a solid scrutiny of the evolution of the term modern (18–20) and continuing with how the postmodern has affected the sciences, architecture, the arts, and politics (21–43). 82. An updated version of this article was published in English in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (147–64), edited by John Beverly , José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna. In my own analysis of it, however, I use the original version in Spanish. 83. Part of this article will eventually become a section of his best-known study, Ni apocalípticos ni integrados (1994). 84. Not surprisingly, one of Hopenhayn’s attacks is Hernando de Soto’s classic El otro sendero: La revolución informal (Bogotá: Editorial Oveja Negra, 1987), a book that praises the wonderful possibilities of the market to prevent poverty (and terrorism in Peru!) and that became required reading in several MBA programs in the United States once it was translated into English in 1989. 85. In “La condición postmoderna entre la ruptura y la continuidad” (94– 128). 86. In “Crisis de legitimidad en el Estado Planificador” (180–212) 87. “¿Es pensable lo social sin metarrelatos?” (213–39). 88. Put differently, “What is clear is the imperative need to understand the

314   |  Notes t o pages 37–42















specificity of the Latin American confrontation with the obsolescence of certain ideals and utopias of modernity, and the way this recognition has been registered in Latin America” (Lange-Churión and Mendieta 2001, 27). 89. Reigadas, whose take on postmodernity we shall examine later, poses this possibility as a question from quite a different viewpoint: “Might we not then be postmodern avant la lettre because we experienced before, and intensely, the humiliation of domination as well as the condition of residual and weak subjects, objects of a hegemonic, absolute and powerful subject?” (1988, 138). 90. “Modernity has by no means run its course,” writes Barry Smart in his Postmodernity (1993). 91. “A swirling mass that devours everything,” she states (121). 92. Italics in the original. 93. On pages 125–29. Among those he alludes to are Gabriel V argas Lozano, from Mexico; Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Franz Hinkelammert, and Pablo Guadarrama, from Cuba; and Arturo Andrés Roig, from Argentina. 94. Italics in the original. 95. Castro-Gómez declares: “It is time for us to realize that the Latin American societies are not a homogeneous fabric of events that can be observed from a single point of view, but rather a collage of multiple, irreducible histories that reflect each other” (2001, 142–43) 96. Castro-Gómez does recognize, however, that Dussel precedes philosophers such as Foucault, Vattimo, and Derrida in establishing a link between the omnipresent, all powerful Cartesian subject of the Enlightenment and colonialism (2001, 145). 97. Italics in the original. 98. In “The Politics of Contemporary Latin Americanism” (13–32), the sec ond chapter of Maarten Van Delden’s most recent book (2009, coauthored with Ivon Grenier). In this chapter written by Van Delden, the critic severely criticizes Beverly—as well as Walter Mignolo and Alberto Moreiras—for, in essence, conceiving of literature “as an instrument with which to advance political projects” (32). He specifically accuses Beverly of valorizing politics too much. In Mignolo s case, he condemns what in his view is a very simplistic way of understanding modernity as “coloniality” (24). And, finall , he censure’s Moreiras not only for his simplistic conception of global capitalism but also for his belief that the role of criticism is to fight against it (26–27) 99. “‘By Lacan’: From Literature to Cultural Studies” (1–22) and “The Politics of Latin American Postmodernism” (103–23), respectively . 100. Which he poses and answers in “¿Puede hablarse de postmodernidad en Latino América?” (1989). 101. Maldonado (1989) expresses a similar sentiment but by contrasting “postindustrialismo” (262) with the modern and modernism, calling the latter two ambiguous categories. 102. Italics in the original. 103. Italics in the original.

Notes t o pages 48–50   |  315

Chapter 2













1. In an interview by Pedro Donoso, Bolaño states that poetry and prose are first cousins and that they get along well (2003b, E2). Bruno Montané, one of Bolaño’s best friends from his days in Mexico, argues not only that Bolaño was always reading poetry and narrative simultaneously but that, in the end, he made no difference between the two genres, concluding, “unquestionably, in a symbiotic relationship, his poems live side by side and complement his narrative works” (2005, 102). 2. The ubiquitous presence of poetry in Bolaño’s prose, and especially of Chilean poets such as Nicanor Parra, Enrique Lihn, and Jorge Teillier, is examined by Usandizaga (2005). The much less scrutinized but nonetheless paramount subject of the poetic nature of the author’s prose is analyzed by critic and writer Sierra Golden. Making use of Paz’s El arco y la lira as well as texts that specifically stud prose poems—such as Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California and Without Rhyme or Reason: Gaspard de la Nuit and the Dialectic of the Prose Poem—she concludes that Antwerp is nothing but “prose poetry” (2011, 13). 3. Italics in the original. 4. Since all the translations of Bolaño’s poems, stories, novels, and essayistic pieces—as well as those of books and articles on criticism published in Spanish and French—are my own, the numbers in parentheses are those where a given quotation is located in the Spanish source even though the source’s title appears translated into English in my book. For the the sake of convenience, in fact, I avail myself of already-available English titles. The titles of poems appear inside the parenthesis if they are not named in the body of the text. Poems lacking a title are referred to as “Untitled” and their page number in University (Universidad) are placed in parentheses. 5. The Romantic Dogs (2008) and Tres (2011) in English. 6. Poems of his and other members of the infrarrealista movement that he helped found also appeared in magazines of short duration, such as Pájaro de calor (1976), Correspondencia infrarrealista (1977), Rimbaud vuelve a casa (1977), Regreso a la Antártida (1983), and Berthe Trépart (Gerona 1983). Similarly, poems by Bolaño can be found in the anthology Entre la lluvia y el arcoiris (Antología de jóvenes poetas chilenos) (1983), edited by Soledad Bianchi; Literatura chilena: Creación y crítica XXX (1984); Litoral (1999), in the section “Chile. Poesía con temporánea”; and in the literary journal Ventanal: Creación y crítica (1987), in the section “Muestra de poesía chilena actual.” 7. The prologue’s title in English is, “Total anarchy: twenty two years there­ after” (Antwerp 9–11). I am aware, of course, that Bolaño writes this retrospectively and that when he first wrote the fragments that make up Antwerp he probably did not conceive of these “loose pages” (Antwerp 9) as a narrative text tout court. 8. For a detailed account of Bolaño’s stay in Mexico, see Bolognese’s article, “Roberto Bolaño y sus comienzos literarios” (2009b), and especially Madariaga Caro’s (2010) and Saucedo Lastra’ s study (2015). 9. Promis is one of the first critics to point to the practice of the novela negr genre in Bolaño’s narrative production (2003, 61–63).

316   |  Notes t o pages 50–53

















10. Even though he warns against what he calls “the literature of the I” in his essay “Vagaries of the Literature of Doom” (Paréntesis 2004a , 28, and Secreto 2007a, 98), and he asserts, “I have always found autobiographies abhorrent” in his “Autobiographies: Amis & Ellroy” (Paréntesis 205). 11. Judging Bolaño’s complete literary output as a “total work,” for example, critic Dunia Gras calls Arturo Belano, who appears for the first time in Distant and later in Detectives and “Photos” (from Putas), and B, who appears in “Last Evenings on Earth,” “Days of 1978,” and “Vagabond in France and Belgium” (all from Putas), “intended or alleged autobiographical masks [that] play with the reader in order to induce him into improper, though no less legitimate spurious identifications” (2005, 68) 12. For a basic typology of the panoply of possibilities of the mystery genre, consult Hoppenstand’s study (1987, 24). For a full account of it, see the work of Caillois (1982). 13. Hammett publishes his first hard-boile story in the magazine Black Mask in 1922. But then, soon thereafter, other writers become practitioners of what Nichols denominates “a noir poetics” (2010, 299): the already mentioned Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and David Goodis, among others. 14. In Spanish, whenever critics refer to the detective genre in general, the terms novela policial and novela policiaca are employed indistinguishably. To allude to the hard-boiled or noir novel, novela negra is used. Braham (2004) examines Borges’s reading of Chesterton in the second chapter of her study, “Origins and Ideologies of the Neopoliciaco,” and specifically in the section, “G. K. Chesterton, Precursor of the Latin American Detective Novel” (6–17). 15. Here, of course, I am thinking of the so-called telluric or regionalistas or mundonovistas novels of the 1920s and 1930s in Latin America, such as La vorágine (1924), Don Segundo Sombra (1926), and Doña Bárbara (1929), among many others. 16. A mistrust that somewhat continues to exist today even though the detective genre in general, in literature and especially in film, is certainly one of the mos popular of cultural forms. Braham talks about the “permanent stigma” that afflict Hispanic detective fiction (2004, 4). Mempo Giardinelli, who has written one o the most lucid accounts of the novela negra—El género negro: Ensayo sobre la novela policial, published for the first time in 1984 and revised in 1996—says it best in recent interview by Nichols: “Still today, many people are unable to explain the fascination that this literature exerts upon millions of folks. However, despite this massive acceptance, this literature is still considered ‘minor’” (2010, 501). 17. It is interesting, in light of this, to consider the relationship that Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus establishes between the rise of the mystery story and modernity. In the mystery story, he contends, a process of enlightenment—the French word éclaircissement would be more appropriate in my view—becomes the very allegory of modernity. “More specificall , ‘one enlightenment (as a concrete process)’ that reconfirms the Enlightenment (as a historical achievement)’” (in Pöppel 2010, 364). 18. When Nichols asks Giardinelli about the reasons for the proliferation of

Notes t o pages 54–55   |  317















the género negro in Latin America, he replies: “The proliferation of the detective genre goes hand in hand with the process of dictatorships and infantile anticommunism that the United States caused in Latin America . . . Clearly, this occurred from the seventies on. Until then, the detective genre in Latin America was very naive, limiting itself, in the European tradition, to the hunting of the criminal. In this case, in other words, it is also the process of crisis that developed the género negro” (2010, 500). 19. In Tramas del Mercado (2007), Cárcamo-Huechante provides an excellent critical analysis of how the rhetoric of the free market became a hegemonic cultural discourse both in the context of the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) but also during the so-called transición, a transition that could arguably be said to have come to an end with the arrival of Sebastián Piñera’s first term in office in 201 20. According to Colmeiro, in Spain it is Vázquez Montalbán, “Hispanic Literature’s precursor in the novela negra genre” (2010, 478), who provides this new political and critical orientation for the genre, becoming a model, moreover, for neopoliciaco writers in Latin America. 21. The fiction of Chilean writer Ramón Díaz Eterovic represents a prima y example of this tendency. Two are the overarching concerns in the more than twenty novels he has published so far: the unveiling of crimes committed in Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship, and the uncovering of economic and political corruption during the so-called transition to democracy. 22. The link between Chicano and Latino writers who write novela negra, and who are either gay or create a gay figure for the detective, is explored by Daniel Pérez (2010). 23. It must be said, in effect, that many of the poems included in University do not have a title. 24. The figure who most resembles the meanderings of this characte , more so than Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) or its copy-cat contemporary Latin American version, Matías Vicuña, from Alberto Fuguet’s Mala onda (1991), is Adam Apollo, the blasé, solipsistic protagonist of J. M. G. Le Clézio’s first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (1963). In both instances, coinci dentally, the action—if one can speak of “action” in relationship to the isolated poems by Bolaño under scrutiny—takes place along the Mediterranean coast, the French Riviera in the case of Le Clézio’s novel, and Barcelona and other coastal towns in the case of Bolaño’s poems. 25. Between Parentheses (2011) in English, Paréntesis from now on. A kind of “fragmented ‘autobiography,’” as it is said in the (English) back cover of this book, Paréntesis is a collection of essays, articles, and speeches written by Bolaño between 1998 and 2003. For a review of its English translation, see Garner (2011). 26. This book contains selected interviews of Bolaño originally published in mostly Chilean and Spanish but also Argentinean and Venezuelan newspapers. 27. See Boullosa’s “Bolaño in Mexico,” a 2007 review of the English transla tion of Detectives, and her “A Garden of Monsters,” a 2008 review of Nazi’s translation into English. For a very concise account of Bolaño’s life, consult Bolognese’s study (2009a, 21–25).

318   |  Notes t o pages 56–61















28. Critic Horacio Simunovic writes regarding this aspect of Bolaño’s work: “His persistence in incorporating structural elements of detective fiction makes him a heretical and critical writer of detective fiction, more concerned with cr ating an aesthetic performance for the elements that the tradition conceives as typical of the genre than reiterating stereotypical formulas” (2006, 21). 29. This is a point that has unfortunately escaped many critics of Bolaño in the United States and especially those who, intent on wishing to canonize him as the new García Márquez of Latin American literature, have, for the most part, overlooked the fact that he consolidated himself as an author in Latin America after the publication of Detectives in 1998 and not, as a happy-go-lucky hippie in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, during the 1960s and 1970s. For an excellent critique of this wishful thinking position, as well as a lucid analysis of how and what literature from Latin America reaches the North American market and how the cultural establishment in the United States reconfigures the image of Latin America, see Pollack s article (2009). W riter Castellanos Moya (2009) provides an interesting reaction to Pollack’ s article. 30. A detailed comparison of the two shows indeed very few changes. Most of these have to do with punctuation and the change of a word here and a word there. For instance, the poem “The Instructions” reads “I didn’t have much to cover” in University (189, my italics) and “I didn’t have much to travel” in Antwerp (34, my italics). Similarly, the titles of the poems in both books are identical except for three poems. “She Had Red Hair” (Antwerp 38–39) is called “The Policeman Walked Away” in University (192–93), “Y ou Can’t Go Back” (Antwerp 109) is called “Silent Night” in University (237), and “Working-Class Neighborhoods” (Antwerp 113) is called “Empty Cars” ( University 239). When looking at the two sets of poems side by side one gets the impression that those from Antwerp are more polished than those appearing in “People Walking Away,” which would make sense, of course, since Bolaño published Antwerp in 2002, when he was still alive. 31. Throughout my analysis, I shall refer to “People Walking Away” and Antwerp interchangeably, especially when a critical overview of it is provided, above all because all criticism of this text thus far has centered on Antwerp and not on this particular section of University, that is, “People Walking Away.” 32. Since, strictly speaking, these are texts that do not follow the typical conventions of poetry, throughout this study terms such as fragments, pieces, and segments are also utilized. 33. Since the narratee whom the poetic voice addresses in this poem is male, I have opted for “Pal” instead of “Hon,” as it appears in Laura Healy’s translation (The Unknown University 291). Perhaps “Fat Chance, Man” could also be used. 34. Whenever allusion to the hunchback in the diminutive is made, I leave it untranslated. The use of this name might be a possible homage to Argentinian writer Roberto Arlt, one of Bolaño’s favorite authors and the author of a story collection called El jorobadito (1933), in fact. 35. In “[Author’s Note, Untitled],” Bolaño clarifies this phrase, saying: Nel, majo wishes to be the meeting point of two visions, the Mexican and the Spanish.

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Nel, in Mexican slang, means ‘no.’ Nel, ‘majo’: No, pal: No, poet” (443). This curious expression also appears as a one-line poem, without a title, in the section “Prose from Autumn in Gerona”: “The old man called ‘Nel, majo’” (280). It is also Gaspar Heredia’s “favorite phrase” in Skating, according to Remo Morán (85). 36. “I told him we could stay there” (169 and 172, respectively). 37. Curiously, in the fragment “The Gun to His Mouth” of “People Walking Away,” the intradiegetic voice poses it as a question: “Did I see the jorobadito for the first time in Mexico City?” (222) 38. This term, as well as, for instance, puzzling, cryptic, inscrutable, and mysterious, apply to pretty much most poems of “People Walking Away.” 39. The response the narrator gives the inspector concerning the fate of the young woman is interesting in this regard because he claims that even though he saw her at a movie theater there aren’t any clues that might lead them to her (170). 40. In the same prologue, he goes on to add that when he wrote the book— “loose pages” for a long time (9)—he lived “outdoor and without a resident permit” and still read more poetry than prose (9–10). 41. Remarking on its very experimental makeup and the dissolution of a story line, Álvaro Bisama calls Antwerp “a video clip from hell” (2002, 13). M. A. Or hofer (2010), while recognizing the text’s difficult , views it as “a quite fascinating document of the author as a young artist.” As if confirming what Bolaño himself ha told Pedro Donoso in an 2003 inter view, that is, that at the time he wrote Antwerp he simply did not perceive a formal distance between poetry and prose (E2), Marta Figlerowicz (2010) detects “two formal impulses” at the heart of the text: on the one hand, “the epic narrative,” and on the other, “the modernist lyric.” To David Miklos (2003) Antwerp is simultaneously a kind of pornographic thriller and an exercise in stream of consciousness where both lucidity and obscurity take turns. Mauricio Montiel Figueiras (2003) calls the text, simply and appropriately in my judgment, “a literary laboratory.” More recently, in a study that follows Bolaño’s journey from Antwerp to 2666 , Sergio Marras calls the former Bolaño’s “initiatory magma” (2011, 32), asserting, in terms that in my opinion are too broad, that it is in this text that certain common places in the author’s narrative—such as the frequent allusion to films, Mexico City s Bucareli Street, and the city in general (32–39)—have their origin. Finally, Olvido García Valdés calls this text “a book of visions that, in reality, are sonorous, chromatic, verbal” (2013, 114). 42. Only eight of the fifty-six fragments are narrated by an extradiegetic voice: “Blue,” “There Was Nothing,” “The Sheet,” “Interval of Silence,” “Synopsis: The Wind,” “27 Years Old,” “Yellow,” and “Working-Class Neighborhoods.” 43. All the lines from the segment “An Empty Place Near Here” (211), for example, are written within quotation marks. 44. One of the fifty-six segments, in fact, is called “Applause” (230) 45. “The elements” begins thus: “Movie theater among the pine trees of * de Mar camp site, the spectators look at the screen and, with their hands, they frighten away mosquitoes” (240). 46. In “I’m My Own Bewitchment,” the penultimate sentence reads, “My

320   |  Notes t o pages 65–66









name is Roberto Bolaño” (181). In “Romance Novel,” a poetic voice asks an unidentified third person whether a “Roberto Bolaño” had helped “jorobadito” because, years earlier, he had been with a Mexican woman and “jorobadito” was also Mexican (201). 47. In the poem “There Are No Rules,” one reads, “Every writing at the limit of its tension conceals a white mask. That’s all. The rest: poor little Roberto writing at a stop on the road” (232). 48. In the fragment “Cleaning Utensils,” the allusion to “dead thieves” (185) might be related to the dead young men of either “Blue” or “The Motorcyclists,” however. 49. In “I’m My Own Bewitchment,” for example, the intradiegetic voice confesses to having been a gang member and having killed an Arab (181). In “A Monkey,” there is a description of a dead body’s clothes and how death occurred (186). “An Empty Place Near Here” mentions a “cadaver” (211), whereas “The Medic” alludes both to a “fallen bulge” and a “cadaver” (213). Finally, in the segment “A White Handkerchief,” the intradiegetic voice refers, nonchalantly and as if in passing, to “a dead bloke”: “I walk in the park, it’s fall, there seems to be a dead bloke on the grass” (214). 50. As a matter of fact, the subject of writing plays a relatively important role in Antwerp. If one takes into account the various ramifications of this aspect of the text, one could easily classify them into three different categories: (1) the presence of the author; (2) the discourse on writing and writers; and (3) the allusion to the “English writer.” As was mentioned earlier, in several poems there is a direct allusion to “author” (in “The Bar,” “They Talk but Their Words Don’t Register,” “Perfection,” “An Extra Silence,” “Three Years,” “The Gun to His Mouth,” “Clear Water Along the Way,” and “Applause”). This “author,” needless to say, is not Roberto Bolaño even though, as it was noted above, his name does appear in three of the segments and the resemblance between some of the poems and certain aspects of the biographical data is remarkable. (For an examination of the patently autobiographical nature of much of Bolaño’s narrative, consult the recent article by Bagué 2010). At times, the “author” figures in the text as a type of alter ego of the narrating voice, as stated above (“The Bar” and “They Talk but Their Words Don’t Register”); other times he’s said to be writing (“Perfection”). In “An Extra Silence” the “author” is just one more of the characters in the fragment, whereas in “Three Years,” he emits a direct assessment on writing. Regarding the discourse on writing and writers, the second category pertaining to the theme of writing in Antwerp, the predominantly intradiegetic voice approaches it in manifold ways. For example, and certainly not surprising even at this early stage of Bolaño’s literary career, there are a few allusions to “poet” and “poetry” in the text. Sophie Podolski, a young Belgian poet dear to Bolaño who is mentioned three times in Detectives (29–30, 84) and is already alluded to in Consejos (89), and who’s mentioned even in The Woes of the True Policeman (22) and in his essay “Writers Lost in the Distance” (Paréntesis 182), appears in “The Fullness of the Wind” and “The Nile.” What’s interesting about this fragment is that it is one of the first instances in which Bolaño broaches the topic of

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the not-always-easy relationship between an author and the literary institution: “All that literary shit has gradually been left behind. Poetry magazines, limited editions” (“The Nile” 184). Though he’s clearly referring to Podolski, who had recently committed suicide, one cannot but think of Bolaño’s own attacks against the crassest aspects of the literary world disseminated in his short stories, novels, and interviews. In “Summer,” a segment with distinct autobiographical overtones, a distressed “foreigner” is said to be unable to “write epic poetry” (235). Then, in both “A Monkey” and “Nagas” the intradiegetic voice expresses not only his inability to think coherently but his powerlessness to write (186, 241). The most unequivocal judgment on writing, nevertheless, is found in the last segment, “Postscript,” where the intradiegetic narrator forcefully declares that, of all that he has lost, the only thing he wishes to recover is “the daily availability of my writing” (242). Finally, the figure of the “English write ,” the third category concerning writing in Antwerp, is arguably one of the most puzzling along with the figure of the “jorobadito.” In effect, although he appears, or is alluded to, in several pieces—“Synopsis: The Wind,” “Perfection,” “Yellow,” “The Medic,” and “Tallers Street”—perhaps his most decisive appearance is in the one called “The Sheet” (194). In the context of the text’s entire dynamic, and specifically in consideration of the fact that, in the end, Antwerp is nothing but an exercise in representation or even representation of a representation, “The Sheet” could possibly be conceived of as the heart of the text, as the centrifugal point from where meaning emerges. Like in “Synopsis: The Wind” and “The Medic,” here the “English writer,” or “the Englishman,” shares the same space with “el jorobadito”: the ubiquitous “forest” of most fragments. Unexpectedly, “a man”— similarly to “the man” of Borges’s “The Circular Ruins”—appears out of nowhere and attaches a sheet to two pine trees, saying to “el jorobadito”: “I am going to show a movie” (194). This “movie,” of course, might ver y well be what the reader sees while reading Antwerp, as it was proposed earlier. 51. The topic of migrants and individuals who live outside the system is, of course, one of the signatures of Bolaño’s entire oeuvre. In the poems of Antwerp, this topic is presented always in the same way, that is, migrancy as an uncertain, hazardous, and unsafe state: lacking legal papers in “Among the Horses” (188), unemployment in “The Instructions” (189), being hunted by the police, literally, in “The Bar” (191), and being asked for one’s papers by the police in “The Policeman Walked Away” (192–93) or “She Had Red Hair” (in Antwerp). In this context, the presence of the “South American” in some of the pieces is particularly telling. Indeed, for Fresán (2003) Antwerp is a text that shows Latin America as a highly contagious virus. The unnamed “South American” appears in two segments, “Synopsis: The Wind” and “An Extra Silence,” respectively; there is likewise a brief allusion to “a way of speaking South American” (177) in reference to the intradiegetic narrator in “Façade.” Just like the man dying at a Paris hospital in Monsieur, the South American’s identity remains extremely mysterious. In the first segment, fraught with all the elements pertaining to the detective genre in general and Antwerp in particular—jorobadito, forest, police networks, English writer—the South American is said to be agonizing in a Barcelona hospital on

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the one hand, and traveling on the other (202). A longer and more elaborate segment, “An Extra Silence,” would appear to be a continuation of “Synopsis: The Wind,” in the sense that the figures of the jorobadito and the policeman play a role in the diegesis but, foremost, because it provides an answer concerning the South American’s fate: “In off, a voice says that the South American didn’t die . . . The South American walks along an empty street. He has recognized the author . . . ‘The South American opened the door’” (208). Now, if the figures of the English write , the jorobadito, and the South American remain a complete mystery throughout the text, the character of the foreigner stands as one of the most impenetrable. He is mentioned in six of the pieces: “Big Silver Waves,” “Never Alone Again,” “Summer,” “You Can’t Go Back,” “Monty Alexander,” and “Postscript.” While in “Big Silver Waves” he is presented as the former resident of a camp site who used to take pictures that are now, at the time of the narrating, in the hands of the police, in “Never Alone Again” and “Monty Alexander” he’s barely alluded to. The most dramatic condition of the immigrant living in a foreign land, nevertheless, is illustrated in “Summer,” a fragment with obvious autobiographical overtones: “I wish she knew the foreigner ‘is having a hard time,’ . . . ‘without great possibilities for anything’” (235). This precarious condition is emphasized further in “Silent Night” or “You Can’t Go Back,” where “foreigners without papers” are put in the same company as “policemen and thieves” (237). 52. The detective figure, howeve , is the least prominent. It only appears in the segments “Synopsis: The Wind” (202) and “The Redhead” (216–17) and, instead of the generic detective, its Chilean equivalent tira is employed. 53. An unnamed man is said to be photographing a dead body in the short fragment “An Empty Place Near Here” (211). Might this man be the jorobadito? Furthermore, is the camera in the hands of the police in “Big Silver Waves” (223–24) his camera? 54. Unlike Healy, I translate this title as “Occasionally She Shook” instead of “Occasionally It Shook” (The Unknown University 367) because the allusion is clearly to a female character. 55. It is likely that this fragment constitutes a kind of embryo for the short story “Murdering Whores” from Putas, in the sense that, just as in the case of the story’s protagonist, the redhead also rides a motorcycle: “The redhead [woman] moves away as she drags her motorcycle through a tree-lined avenue” (“The Redhead” 217). 56. The poem “My Poetry” might be construed as a kind of compendium of several of the elements of Antwerp and a couple of elements from Detectives: the two of three lines comprising Cesárea’s poem. Allusion is made to the writing of poetry in 1980, the juxtaposition of two movies and two movie theaters, the jorobadito, a policeman, and a small ship (27). 57. In “Blue,” “Reasonable People vs. Unreasonable People,” “The Instructions,” “Synopsis: The Wind,” “The Sea,” “Perfection,” “Yellow,” “Big Silver Waves,” “The Motorcyclists,” “There Are no Rules,” “La Pava Roadside Bar of Castelldefels,” and “The Elements.”

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58. In “Reasonable People vs. Unreasonable People,” “Among the Horses,” “The Policeman Walked Away,” and “Synopsis: The Wind.” 59. In “The Fullness of the Wind,” “Perfection,” “The Gun to His Mouth,” “Like a Waltz,” “Never Alone Again,” and “Monty Alexander.” 60. In “Occasionally She Shook,” it says: “I dreamt about a hallway full of people without a mouth, he said, and the old man answered: don’t be afraid” (209), and in “A Hospital,” one reads: “Someone applauds. The hallway is full of people who open their mouth without making any sound” (219). In the fragment “Like a Waltz,” it is stated: “I dream about faces that open their mouth and cannot speak” (228). Finally, in “Applause,” it is no other than the author who is unable to hear: “The mouth opened itself but the author was not able to hear anything” (230). 61. “Among the Horses” commences thus: “I dreamt about a woman without mouth, says the fellow on the bed” (188). 62. In her Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (1992). 63. Bolaño’s reply continues thus (E9): “[The literature] that appropriates your I and your history with impunity and tends to merge with the masses, which is unanimity’s pasture, the place where all faces become confused. I write from my own experience, my personal experience, say, as well as my bookish and cultural experience, which, over time, have become one and the same. But I also write from what used to be called the collective experience, which is, contrary to what some theoreticians used to think, something quite ungraspable. Let us say, to simplify matters, that it can be the fantastic side of the individual experience, its theological aspect. Under this perspective, Tolstoy is autobiographical, and I follow Tolstoy, of course.” 64. As might be expected, critics of autobiography point to St. Augustine’s Confessions as the first autobiographical text in the histo y of Western writing. For Peter Goodfall, for example, an analysis of the relationship of writing and reading to self-representation must, of necessity, start with St. Augustine’s Confessions (2006, 105). Then, from St. Augustine, most critics move on to examine Des cartes’s Discourse on Method, Rousseau’s Confessions, John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita, and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, although some also include Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography. But except for those who specialize in Latin American literature, no critic of autobiography makes the slightest mention of texts in Spanish that fall clearly within the parameters of life writing, such as, for example, The Conquest of New Spain—the first autobiography in the so-called New orld—by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, or even of The Devastation of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas; Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America; and—the issue of the quasi-fictional nature of the narrative and the problem of the double authorship notwithstanding—Alonso Carrió de la Vandera’s hybrid text, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. Not to mention, finall , testimonial texts such as Biography of a Runaway Slave, by Miguel Barnet, Let me Speak!, by Domitila Barrios de Chungara; Here’s to You, Jesusa!, by Elena Poniatowska; and, certainly the most controversial, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, by Rigoberta Menchú, even taking into account that it was precisely the very nature

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of the self-portrait of the “I” in this latter text that prompted the debates and critiques surrounding testimonial discourse in the US academy in the 1980s and 1990s in the first place 65. In these sorts of poems, their contents point in the direction of fragmentary biographical information. The following are found in University: “A Sonnet” (36), “Untitled” (69), “Untitled” (75), “Untitled” (94), “Iron T able” (97), “The Window” (98), “Two Poems for Sara” (107), “Saint Roberto of Troy” (113), “The Sirens” (105), “The Bend” (141), “Untitled” (the last verse of this poem con tains the first of three references to the collection s title, that is, “the unknown university” [142]; the other two appear on pages 163 and 287, respectively), “Perfection” (205), “The Bum” (226), “Like a W altz” (228), “There Are No Rules” (232), “La Pava Roadside Bar of Castelldefels” (233), “Untitled” (263), “Untitled” (269), “Untitled” (273), “Untitled” (284), “Untitled” (328), “The Worm” (360–63), “The Last Love Song of Pedro J. Lastarria, Alias ‘El Chorito’” (368–70), and “Palingenesis” (395). 66. Since it is really a matter of the degree of biographical information that these poems contain, it could be said that these poems are more autobiographical than the previous set of poems. Still, they need to be separated into two different groups depending on the degree of probability of the biographical information. In other words, even though the degree of the information is probable, as stated above, in some it is more probable than in others. Among those where the biographical information is less probable, one finds “Untitled” (19), “Fuc ing Whistler” (28), “Untitled” (34), “Untitled” (35), “For Efraín Huerta” (37), “Solitude” (66–67), “Angels” (76), “Untitled” (77), “Streets of Barcelona” (78), “Untitled” (85), “Money” (129), “Untitled” (131), “Untitled” (158), “Untitled” (162), “Untitled” (163), “Façade” (177), “I’m My Own Bewitchment” (181), “The Nile” (184), “Cleaning Utensils” (185), “Romance Novel” (201), “T allers Street” (215), “Untitled” (267), “Untitled” (271), “Untitled” (275), “Untitled” (321), “Untitled” (322), “The Sunset” (345), “Self-Portrait at T wenty Years” (346), “Untitled” (352), “Atole” (364–65), “The Light” (366), “The Romantic Dogs” (372), “The Donkey” (383–85), “I Saw My Father Again” (386–87), and “Self-Portrait” (431). Among those poems where the biographical information is more probable, one finds: “Untitled” (147), “27 ears Old” (207), “Summer” (235), and “The Taoist Blues of Valle Hebrón Hospital” (388–89). 67. “Work” (20), “Untitled” (122), “For Antoni García Porta” (149), “Among the Horses” (188), “Horde” (292), “Lisa” and “Untitled” (350 and 351, respectively), “Roberto Bolaño’s Devotion” (397), “Roberto Bolaño’s Return” (398–99), “The Y ears” (401–2), “Self-Portrait” (430), “Self-Portrait”(431), “Four Poems for Lautaro Bolaño” (432–33), “Two Poems for Lautaro Bolaño” (434–35), “Portrait in May , 1994” (436), “A Happy Ending” (437), and “Muse” (438–41). 68. Besides the biographical information about Bolaño provided by Madariaga, Saucedo (Mexico), and Bolognese (2009a), the documentaries “Roberto Bolaño: El último maldito” as well as “Roberto Bolaño: La batalla futura,” also offer information on the author’s life, particularly the latter.

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69. In “Roberto Bolaño: El último maldito,” Bolaño’s wife, Carolina López, says that the author went to Spain from Mexico as an “economic immigrant” in order to take care of his sick mother. 70. See, for example, his essays “Puigdevall the Strange” and “An Attempt at an Exhaustive Catalog of Patrons” (Paréntesis 152 and 194–95, respectively). 71. A very likely allusion to Bolaño’s best friend and the man who serves as the inspiration for the character Ulises Lima in Detectives, the Mexican poet Mario Santiago. There are numerous allusions to Mario Santiago in University: “A Sonnet” (36), “Mario Santiago” (133), “A Fly inside a Fly , a Thought inside a Thought and Mario Santiago inside Mario Santiago” (134), “The Worm” (360–63), “Atole” (364–65), “The Light” (366), “The Donkey” (383–85), and “Roberto Bolaño’s Devotion” (397). 72. The reference is probably to the Chilean Bruno Montané, with whom the author found the infrarrealista poetry movement in Mexico in the 1970s. 73. “Prose from Autumn in Girona” would appear later in Tres, constituting the first of three sections, followed by “The Neochileans” and “A Stroll through Literature,” the second and third sections, respectively. In his study, Blume (2003) centers his attention on “Prose from Autumn,” while in “ Tres de Roberto Bolaño” Espinosa (2003a) analyzes the three sections of Tres. 74. As regards the autobiographical aspect of “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” it is interesting to note that while the narrating voice of the thirty-five segments of this section—all without a title—is, ultimately, an intradiegetic voice with its own alter ego, this is a clear effort on the part of the author to inscribe himself into the poetry. Above all, he underscores his very precarious existence in Spain. In one untitled poem, for instance, the self alludes to his being in his twenties, having run out of money, and having had his visa renewed but not “authorized to work in Spain” (263). In another untitled poem, referring specif ically to October 1981, the poetic voice mentions a Chilean by the name of R. B. who’s allowed to remain in Spain for another three months but also “without working” (269). In a third untitled poem, the poetic voice makes reference to his Mexican passport being valid until 1982 and his having been given permission to stay in Spain but, like in the two previous poems, “without the right to work” (275). Finally, in a final untitled poem the poetic voice admits to feeling “empt , without feeling like writing” (284) at the same time that he recognizes that “I had no chance of getting another [job].” 75. The four subsections of this poem are written in italics. 76. Unlike Mexico, Chile does not figure prominently in Bolaño s poetry. In the poem “Patricia Pons,” for example, the poetic voice states that all he remembers from Chile was “a twelve-year-old girl” (83). In “La Chelita,” the poet remembers a Chilean exile in Europe whom he calls “almost a shadow of Chile in Europe” in reference to her precarious situation (118). And then, in the long poem “The Neochileans” (409–23), the poet talks about a trip that he and his friends took first to Peru and then to the rest of Latin America probably in the early 1970s. 77. One of the first critics to openly discuss Bolaño s “Chileanness” was

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Camilo Marks in his 2003 article “Roberto Bolaño, el esplendor narrativo finise ular.” Although he claims that Bolaño is by far the best writer in the Spanish language in recent decades, he correctly recognizes, “Categorically, Roberto Bolaño is not, in essence, a Chilean writer. He doesn’t belong to Chilean literature and it is impossible to associate him with Chile’s narrative tradition” (126), conclud ing, “we shall define Roberto Bolaño, for the time being, as a fiction writer bor in Chile who writes in Spanish” (127). Marks repeats the same idea in a more recent study (2010,199–200). Iván Quezada, for his part, in “La caída de Chile” (2003), would appear to be saying—and I say “appear” because his article is confusing—that, regardless of the fact that Bolaño’s characters travel the world, and in spite of the fact that some of them are exiles, Bolaño is a Chilean almost despite himself: “It’s the fate of a divided writing. After all, the adagio is perhaps true, and a Chilean is always a Chilean” (146). Finally, in his analysis of Distant, Dávila Vázquez states: “In his works [Bolaño’s] one is able to perceive, constantly, a dramatic feeling of the loss of something that, diffusely, we could call homeland, even if we run into his ironic perspective about it” (2007, 145). For a more thorough analysis of the representation of Chile and “lo chileno” in Bolaño’s works, see especially Moreno’s “Roberto Bolaño: Chile” (2007b). 78. “Dr. Atl” was a Mexican painter and writer, who specialized in landscapes and the painting of volcanoes. He’s mentioned twice in Detectives (197, 210), and he’s alluded to three times in Amulet (87, 137, 145). 79. “If I were to be born again I would be a pimp in a brothel, but in a peaceful brothel in the forest. Urban [brothels] are not as pleasing to me” (Bolaño 2003c, 36). 80. More than likely, this return to the homeland is metaphoric, unless, of course, it alludes to Bolaño’s first return to Chile from Mexico in 1973. When, in the third section of the poem, the autobiographical self says that he returned being more at peace with himself, and rather sick, skinny, and broke (399), he’s probably not referring to the Bolaño who, in approximately 1992, finds out that he suffers from liver disease. 81. In “An Afternoon with Huidobro and Parra,” for example, he refers to Parra as “the best poet alive in Spanish” (Paréntesis 69). And in “A Few Words for Enrique Lihn” he calls Lihn “the best poet of his generation” (Paréntesis 201). 82. Of course, these are not the only poems in University where Mexico, whether its people or its places, plays a role. Also interesting are “For Efraín Huerta” (37), “Mexican Manifesto” (295–306)—a short stor y more than a poem—“Untitled” (322), “The Worm” (360–63) and “Homage to T in Tan” (382). 83. “Steel poets” also appears in the first lines of Skating (9). 84. Of Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s so-called alter ego, it is said in fact in Detectives that he returns to Chile in 1973 to “make Revolution” (167, 195). The same is said of Arturo Belano in Amulet (63). Similarly, there is an entire episode in Detectives dealing with the support of Latin American writers on behalf of the Sandinistas during the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 (331–41), even if it is really a tongue-in-cheek account. In the second part of Detectives, moreover, Felipe Müller, Arturo’s cousin, recounts the story of two writers, a Peruvian and

Notes t o pages 82–88   |  327









a Cuban, respectively, who believed in the revolution (496–500). There is also an allusion to the validity of making or not making the revolution (344) as well as plenty of allusions to the Russian Revolution (84), the Cuban Revolution (85, 151, 323), the Cultural Revolution (498–99), and, of course, the Mexican Revo lution (38, 193, 217, 461). 85. In “Untitled” (39) and “Untitled” (159), respectively . 86. “Fritz Leiber Rereads Some of His Stories” (61). 87. Paradoxically, Bolaño felt comfortable in Spain, as stated above. So, what to make of a verse that speaks in rather bleak terms of his place of residence later in the poem (370)? Assuming that the distance between the poetic voice and the author is almost nonexistent, what Genette, following German critics, calls “‘auctorial’ discourse”—“the presence of the author (actual or fictive) and the sovereig authority of that presence in his work” (1980, 258–59)—one would then have to conclude that the experience recounted in the poem is directly related to Bolaño’s extremely precarious existence as an immigrant in Spain in the late 1970s. In University itself there is a poem where, patently by means of an “‘auctorial’ discourse,” he thanks his friend García Porta for having given him food, medicine, and a sleuth of other things during this time: “Your gifts have moved me” (2007, 149). 88. Conceivably, Bolaño may have been thinking about the classic 1969 movie Easy Rider when writing this poem. In the movie, two counterculture bikers make a journey from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of the soul of America. What is more, in Detectives, Arturo and Ulises are in effect compared to these two bikers (321). But as my former student Pedro Salas intelligently obser ved, Arturo and Ulises identify not with the character played by Peter Fonda in the movie but rather with the one played by Dennis Hopper, that is, with the more marginal of the two. 89. In his 1951 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society.” 90. The first edition of The Romantic Dogs was published in 1995 after Bolaño won a poetry contest in San Sebastián. It is interesting, I believe, that in this first edition “The Donkey” is the first poem of the collection. Neither the 200 (Lumen) nor the 2006 edition of the book (Acantilado) place this significant poem in this position. 91. Published in the summer issue of The National Interest. 92. In his thesis for an MA in Spanish. 93. In his 2009 article, Williams bases his analysis on Nazi and Distant, respectively.

Chapter 3

1. An assessment that Palma contests (2010, 90). 2. The title for this novel was suggested by a poem by his friend Mario Santiago called, “Consejos de un discípulo de Marx a un fanático de Heidegger” (Advice from a Disciple of Marx to a Heidegger Fanatic). Both Santiago and this poem are mentioned in an appendix of the novel titled, “Manuscrito encontrado en una bala: diario de Ángel Ros” (Manuscript Found in a Bullet: Ángel Ros’s Diary) (160).

328   |  Notes t o pages 88–90













3. In a few interviews, Bolaño said that he wrote this novel between 1981 and 1983. 4. This essay, titled “La escritura a cuatro manos” (2008), is so far the only document that casts a light on the writing process of Consejos. According to García Porta, the difficulty in reconstructing this process resides in the fact that, besides having a terrible memory, Bolaño himself, whenever he was asked about who wrote what, would offer a different answer each time (7). He remembers, similarly, that Bolaño wrote the following somewhere: “It’s a novel that I wrote together with Toni García Porta. He wrote a draft and I finished it. e had a lot of fun writing it, especially I” (9). García Porta claims to be have written a first version of the novel in 1979 (9) and to have received a letter from Bolaño in 1981 suggesting a series of changes regarding the novel’ s characters (10). The reexamination of various letters he received from Bolaño leads him to conclude that “Bolaño . . . put together the final draft” (10) and proceeded to look for publishers (11). The only light that Bolaño casts on Consejos is in his short essay “A. G. Porta” in Paréntesis (2004a, 125–26), in which he explains that García Porta had read everything Joyce had ever written. 5. Consejos wins the Premio Ámbito Literario de Narrativa in 1984 and is pub lished by Anthropos. Monsieur, whose original title was The Elephant Path, received the Premio de novela corta Félix Urabayen, bestowed by the municipality of the city of Toledo in 1992. Skating won the Premio de novela Alcalá de Henares in 1993. 6. Advice from a Disciple of Morrison to a Joyce Fanatic. 7. Even though she does allude, in passing, in the subsection “Siluetas en la intemperie” of her study, to the abundance of phantasmagorical characters in Monsieur as one of the most salient aspects of the novel (181). 8. Franken Clemens and Magda Sepúlveda (2009), for their part, do exam ine Monsieur and Skating in their study on the policíaca novel in Chile, but not Consejos. In “Una lectura conjectural: Roberto Bolaño y el relato policial” (2002a), included in the first critical anthology dedicated entirely to Bolaño s works, Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia (2002), edited by Argentinean critic Celina Manzoni, Ezequiel de Rosso does not mention Consejos though he does allude to Monsieur, Skating, Distant, Nazi, and Detectives. 9. Each of the chapters has a roman numeral and is followed by a title that is thematically related to what happens in it. For example, “II. Turistas veloces” (II. Speedy Tourists). 10. 159–70. 11. Put simply, a “dramatized narrator” is one who participates in the action, versus an “undramatized narrator,” who does not (151–54). 12. In his chapter on narrative voice of his Narrative Discourse. 13. Although it is not explicitly stated that she’s from Chile, she carries a picture of Violeta Parra in her purse (29) and her former boyfriend was a member of a leftist party who did not want to go into exile (69). 14. The novel’s name is Cant de Dèdalus anunciant fi, a clear allusion to Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego and the protagonist of his somewhat

Notes t o pages 91–99   |  329











autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as an impor­ tant character in Ulysses. In Consejos, the dramatized narrator repeatedly states that he, just like the hero of his novel, Dèdalus, had wanted to be a writer (20, 40, 78). Similarly, certain events that take place in Ángel’s life also take place in Dèdalus’s (41, 78). Moreover, both Ángel and Dèdalus—and Bolaño!—suffer from appendicitis (77). Finally, in the same way that Dèdalus is impelled to engage into a life of crime as a result of his disillusionment with literature (30), so is Ángel (51). 15. And in a letter to Ana’s mother he tells her that he now has another name (151). 16. In French, this expression means “to be continued.” 17. On pages 40 and 121, respectively . The information from page 121, it must be noted, comes not from the fabula per se but rather from one of the letters Ángel writes to his mother. 18. Throughout the novel, the e of Dédalus appears equally accented and unaccented. 19. “XXII. Borradores de una carta inconclusa” (XXII. Drafts from an Unfi ished Letter) (148–51) and “XXIII. Una postal” (XXIII. A Postcard) (152), respectively. 20. Though Cortázar dies in 1984. 21. Even if in chapter XVIII, “Con Borelli” (With Borelli), Ángel does temporarily become one as he is looking for Ana (127). 22. Later in the fabula Ángel suggests to Ana to tell her mother that they were like “Bonnie and Clyde, a happy couple” (87). The allusion here might very well point to the real criminals from the early 1930s or to the characters in the 1967 film version of their lives 23. I thus disagree with Patricia Poblete when she states that the woman in Bolaño’s work “is always a combative, slippery and even disastrous being” (2010a, 79). I do agree with her, however, when she writes that Bolaño’s women are also “somewhat ethereal, always incomprehensible and always fascinating” (80). For a cursory view of the various roles women in Bolaño’s novels and short stories play, see pages 76–85 of her study. 24. And later on in the fabula, when Ana and Ángel rob the house of one of Ángel’s former bosses, it is he and not his wife who breaks down in tears (56). 25. A crime is also mentioned, nevertheless, at the metanarrative level in the novel Ángel is writing, in the section “Notas” (80). 26. I am thinking of the subsection on “Focalization” in chapter 7 of her study (100–14). 27. See the articles by Manzoni (2008), Valdebenito (2007), Garabano (2008), and my own (which I develop in chapter 6 of this study). Manzoni pres ents Bolaño’s indissolubly creative and critical enterprise as that of a good Samaritan who was bent on, on the one hand, dusting off the works of canonical writers who are seldom read and, on the other, rescuing literary figures that never made it into the canon in the first place. In the end, it was a matter of confecting a new literary-imagined community based on the reconfiguration of an old and

330   |  Notes t o pages 99–102











stodgy literary tradition. Valdebenito explores not only the apparent connections between Borges’s classic “The South” and Bolaño’s “The Insufferable Gaucho” but also the points at which both texts diverge from each other. Finally, there are two articles that deal with the topic of literature in Detectives. Puzzled by the fact that Bolaño chooses Mexico City as the epicenter of his literary project at a time when Mexican novelists such as Jorge Volpi, for example, intentionally locate their narrative plots in European contexts, Garabano (2008), picking up on Roberto González Echevarría’s (1990) concept of the novel of the Latin Amer ican archive, conceives of Detectives as a kind of resurrection of the Latin American archive in the sense that, fundamentally, the novel wrestles with the issue of how to do literature in Latin America. Paradoxically, however, if on the one hand Bolaño looks with a certain degree of nostalgia at a group of writers who sought to fuse art and life, on the other hand he mocks them because, deep inside, he’s aware that neither the writer nor literature holds the same symbolic capital they once did. Still, conscious of this dilemma, contends Garabano, Bolaño picks up the pieces and devises a new literary archive. 28. The dedication reads thus: “A Roberto Bolaño & Kyra Galván / camaradas & poetas” (To Roberto Bolaño & Kyra Galván / comrades & poets) (Bolaño, 1979, 157). 29. There are in Santiago’s poem—originally published in Muchachos (157– 67), the poetry collection edited by Roberto Bolaño—certain verses censorious of the system in general: “it’s a pity . . . / that Russia is so fiercely antitroskyite” (159); for a while, let us remember, Bolaño was a sympathizer of Trotsky’s ideas; “he who dreams about revolutions that remain / for too long in the Caribbean / he who would want to gouge out the heroes’ eyes / from posters / in order to reveal the emptiness of the farce” (159–60); or, “those who suffer from perennial amnesia and suck their finger from happiness / because the Earthly Paradise is here and not in Miami / those who swear this to be free territory, independent island / that it may not degenerate into junk, ruin, supermarket” (162). 30. The dramatized narrator also states that Ana liked reading what he wrote (22). 31. Although let us remember that, as stated in the previous chapter, García Porta was extremely generous with Bolaño when the latter led a rather precarious existence in Barcelona soon after his arrival at the end of the 1970s. In fact, Bolaño writes a poem expressing his immense gratitude to him (“For Antoni García Porta,” 2007, 149), and he reiterates Porta’ s generosity in “A. G. Porta” (2004a, 125). 32. Tangible in stories such as “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” and “Days of 1978” (from Putas) in particular but present in many other narrative pieces as well. I am thankful to Pedro Salas for this valuable insight. Raphaël Estève, for his part, calls U, from “Days of 1978,” “the most prominent individual among the Chilean exiles in the collection” (2011, 238). 33. There is also a reference to Violeta Parra in Distant (30), when, in his imagining what may have happened the night Wieder killed the Garmendia sisters’ aunt, the narrator has the aunt tell Wieder that she attended Parra’s

Notes t o pages 102–108   |  331















well-known get-togethers in her tent in the La Reina neighborhood of Santiago in the 1960s. The allusion to Parra in Distant is one more component of the leftist milieu during the Allende government that the narrator seeks to re-create. 34. Although another sign that Ana may indeed come from Chile is when, imagining the possible participants in her funeral, she asks herself, “cultural [or] military attachés?” (147), a clear allusion to a countr y under dictatorship. 35. The multiple novels by the Chilean Ramón Díaz Eterovic as well as the narconovelas of the Mexican Élmer Mendoza come immediately to mind. 36. See Pollack’s article (2009) and, especially, Corral’s Bolaño traducido (2011b). See, also, Epler’ s (2013) brief article in Archivo Bolaño, both in Spanish (119–24) and English (167–69). 37. In the original novel, The Elephant Path—which was first published in 198 according to Sergio R. Franco (2014, 485)—was the name of the text’ s appendix. 38. In a 1999 inter view with Carolina Andonie Dracos, however, Bolaño states that the novel was published in 1992 and that he wrote it in 1982 and 1983 (16). 39. Along the same lines, Mihály Dés affirms that Monsieur fulfills all the requirements of the mystery novel (2002b, 169). He asserts, similarly , that despite the novel’s relative simplicity with respect to the books that made Bolaño famous, it is their precursor (170). He is right, furthermore, to see the last sec tion of the novel, “Epilogue for Voices: The Elephant Track,” as a kind of an announcement, in terms of narrative structure, of both Nazi and Detectives (170), a point of view shared by Dunia Gras in her own study of Bolaño’s work (2005, 57). Like Aspurúa (2000), Rodrigo Pinto notes in the author’ s novel “still a rigid tone . . . in the development of the story” (2002b, 167–68) while recognizing that Monsieur “shows a Bolaño who’s already a master of his narrative talent” (167). Rosso, for his part, maintains that the reader feels as confused and lost as the protagonist while reading the text (2002a, 137). It is thus not surprising that critic Roberto Brodsky refers to Monsieur as “that hermetic novel” in his own analysis of the author’s oeuvre (2005a, 22). 40. For critic Fernando Pérez-Villalón, on the contrary, Pain “never quite reaches the status of a narrative hero, to the very end of the story he maintains his anodyne, somber, mediocre disposition.” 41. Indeed, one could probably talk of Bolaño’s work as a poetics of defeat that nonetheless does not succumb to nihilism. 42. Some of these critical views are included also in Clemens and Sepúlveda’s Tinta de sangre (2009, 46, 253–56). 43. In fact, Joaquín Manzi refers to Vallejo’s hiccups as “paradoxical and haunting” (2005, 79) and Sergio Franco as “an ominous partial object, an organ without a body” (2014, 487). 44. It is worth mentioning here that, in that very strange text that is the third section of Tres, “A Stroll through Literature”—a literary autobiography similar to “Dance Card” (from Putas)—one reads in the twenty-seventh segment: “I dreamt that I was fifteen and that, indeed, I was leaving the Southern Hemisphere. As I put the only book I had (Trilce, from Vallejo) in my backpack, it [Trilce] was

332   |  Notes t o pages 109–117













burning. It was seven o’clock in the afternoon and I threw my burned backpack through the window” (90). 45. For a more thorough summary of the text, see Sánchez (2008). 46. See Seymour Chatman (1980, 118). 47. For instance, in the subsection about Aloysius Pleumeur-Bodou, Pain’s former classmate and nemesis of sorts, the narratee replies that Pleumeur-Bodou never got married (164); in the subsection about Guillaume Terzeff, another of Pain’s classmates, he states that he was the first to inform the police (166); and in the subsection about Pain, the narratee wonders how Pain began to work there (168). 48. He’s baffled, in fact, by what might be afflicting allejo. See also page 59, where the same idea is expressed in a dialogue between the dramatized narrator and Madame Reynaud. 49. When Pain sits next to Pleumeur-Bodou in the movie theater, the latter explains to him how the documentary where Terzeff appears, filmed in 1923, is superimposed upon the movie on the screen, filmed in 1934 (124) 50. Manzi (2005, 78) construes Actualidad as a kind of “an advance of the historical plot” in which Pain himself would eventually become involved. For how Bolaño employs techniques coming directly from the film genre in this section of the novel, see Hernández Rodríguez’s 2011 study (71–72). 51. Madame Reynaud is completely convinced that he can do so (18). 52. Georgette de Vallejo presents this information in two books whose main purpose appears to be to rectify or, rather, to demythologize what according to her is erroneous knowledge regarding certain aspects of Vallejo’s life. Though the Spanish poet and essayist Juan Larrea is her bête noire, she launches her critical darts against other critics who, in her view, have simply not understood her husband appropriately. However, what is most interesting about these books in the context of Bolaño’s novel is the information Georgette de Vallejo provides concerning the last days of her husband’s life at the Arago clinic. Clearly, the second book, Vallejo: Allá ellos, allá ellos, allá ellos! (1978), is to some extent a fuller version of her first book dedicated to the subject, Apuntes biográ­ ficos sob e Poemas en prosa y Poemas humanos (1968), and thus more time is spent discussing Vallejo’s illness and ensuing death (116–41; 11–12 in Apuntes biográfico ). A careful reading of Georgette de Vallejo’s account confirms wha Bolaño says, that is, that much of what he writes about Vallejo’s situation in Monsieur is true. To mention but one example from Vallejo: allá ellos, “A friend of mine who has just become a widow after having been married for 24 years tells me about a Pierre Pain. He practices acupuncture and in some exceptional cases he uses his gift to magnetize . . . His lungs were burned when he was 21 in the Great War of 1914–1918 . . . After hesitating for a long time, too long!, I make a decision and call her.” In the novel, of course, it is Madame Reynaud who calls the fictitious Pain 53. Georgette de Vallejo herself corroborates as much, both in Apuntes (1968, 46) and Vallejo (1978), where she writes, “On Thursday, April 7, they called the renown Lemiére, who stated: ‘all the organs are new’ [in bold in the text],

Notes t o pages 117–132   |  333



















adding as if talking to himself, ‘let’s hope we’ll find one in poor condition! . . . I see this man is dying . . . but I do not know from what’” (118). 54. With the exception, perhaps, of a novel like El Tungsteno or a story like the posthumous “Paco Yunque,” where it is easy to understand that injustice has a definite causal foundation 55. In her own very personal assessment of her husband’s life, Georgette de Vallejo maintains that, once the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Vallejo again adopts a “dynamism of an unconditional Marxist militant,” which he seems to have put aside while in France (1968, 11). Moreover, he collaborates in the Comités de Defensa de la República (Committees for the Defense of the Republic) and begins to teach Marxism to the workers, alerting that the fascist forces that were attacking Spain constituted an international menace that went beyond Franco (12). 56. Italics in the original. 57. At some point in the narration, the dramatized narrator refers to “the anguish” (76) that emanates from the costumes of a group of people with whom he runs into the streets and who are clearly celebrating. 58. Candia downplays the engagé aspect of Vallejo’s presence in the text, arguing that the reasons behind the desire to let him die have more to do with preventing him from imposing the “rupturing and avant-garde” (2011b, 89) traits of his poetics than with his sympathies for the Left. 59. In his own review of the novel, Matus refers to Bolaño’s portrayal of the characters thus: “The magic of this brief novel resides precisely in the balance with which Bolaño describes psychologically each of the protagonists.” 60. And one even estimates that it transcends the traditional detective novel (Rojas Gómez 1999, B17). 61. A good example would be Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, even though the two criminals do not belong to the community. 62. One of the meanings of this term refers to a foreigner, and mostly a Spaniard, who made his fortune during colonial times in what’s now called Latin America. 63. See, for example, his essays “Sara and Steva” (Paréntesis 2004a, 143) and “Town Crier of Blanes” (Paréntesis 2004a, 232). 64. Aspects of the Novel (1927). 65. Referring to Rosquelles’ unexpected visits to his bar in order to make sure he was not violating the law, Morán describes him as a very unsavory character whose animosity toward South Americans in particular was very evident indeed (47). 66. There is certainly a clear parallel between Morán and the also Chilean character from the second part of Detectives (383–96), Andrés Ramírez. The difference between the two, of course, is that while the latter made his money through luck—by winning the lottery—the former made it through work. 67. Distant, “Enrique Martín,” “Phone Calls,” “The Grub,” “Detectives” (from Llamadas), Detectives, Amulet, “Last Evenings on Earth,” “Days of 1978,” “Vagabond in France and Belgium,” “Photos” (from Putas). In “The Infamous Ramírez

334   |  Notes t o pages 132–136



Hoffman,” from Nazi, “Bolaño” appears as narrator (199). “Dance Card” and “Meeting with Enrique Lihn,” from Putas, are probably the most autobiographical of Bolaño’s narrative texts. 68. As we saw in chapter 2, this expression first appears in one of Bolaño s untitled poems (University 321).

Chapter 4









1. Included in Secreto (23–26). Ironically, though not surprisingly, the so-called secret of evil is not revealed in the course of the diegesis. What’s more, in allusion to the story he’s about to recount, the undramatized narrative voice states, “It’s an unfinished sto y, because this type of story doesn’t have an end” (23). Those who know Bolaño’s works, of course, are aware that several of his stories lack a clear end. From this perspective, Echevarría’s notion of “poetics of inconclusiveness” (2007b, 9) to refer to Bolaño’ s narrative is quite appropriate. 2. Most recently, Lainck’s 2014 study on 2666 . Daniuska González (2010) analyses what she calls “absolute evil” and “radical evil” in several of Bolaño’s works. For the concept of “co-belonging” between literature and horror in Bolaño’s fiction, see Villalobos-Ruminott s 2009 article. 3. Ventura and Ríos (2010) explore this aspect of Bolaño’ s narrative but from a quite a different perspective. 4. In Antwerp, Consejos, and Skating. 5. 2666 in the sense that Santa Teresa, and the crimes committed against women therein, is what ultimately ties up the five parts of the novel. It is interes ing that El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (known as “El Inca”), who, unlike Bolaño, never went back to his native country and whose identity perennially oscillated between that of a Spanish subject and an Indian one, also turned to what we might call a “national” issue toward the end of his life (even though nationalism had, of course, not been born yet in Latin America). While in Spain, El Inca first translates León Hebreo s Dialoghi d’amore, he then writes an account of Hernando de Soto’s expedition to the state of Florida (La Florida del Inca), and, finall , he writes a history of the Inca Empire (Comentarios reales) as well as a history of the conquest of Peru (Historia General del Perú, the second part of Comentarios reales and named thus by an editor). 6. In Llamadas (1997), Putas (2001), Gaucho (2003), and Secreto (2007a). 7. With the clear exception of “Henri Simon Leprince” (Llamadas), “Vaga­ bond in France and Belgium” (Putas), “The Secret of Evil,” “Labyrinth,” and “The Tour” (Secreto). And with the less clear exceptions of “Snow,” “Another Russian Tale,” “William Burns,” “Joanna Silvestri,” “Anne Moore’s Life” (Llamadas), “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva,” “Photos” (Putas), “Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey” (Gaucho), and “The Days of Chaos” (Secreto). 8. For example, in “Sensini” (Llamadas) and “Days of 1978” ( Putas). 9. “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” (Putas). 10. Bolaño en sus cuentos (Paula Aguilar and Teresa Basile 2015) was published after I had concluded this chapter and I unfortunately did not have the time to read it.

Notes t o pages 136–137   |  335









11. Those by Masoliver (2002c), Echevarría (2002c, 2002a,), Dés (2002c), and Rosso (2002b) in Manzoni’ s Roberto Bolaño (2002); and the one by García Corales in Espinosa’s Territorios en fuga (2003a). 12. Those by Andrews and Decante Araya in Moreno’s Roberto Bolaño: Una lite­ r­atura infinit (2005); the one by Faverón Patriau (2008); critical assessments by Ríos in his 2010 study Roberto Bolaño: Ruptura y violencia (“Los ‘lados B’ de B” and “Arturo,” both of which also treat other texts besides Bolaño’s short stories); Torres Ponce (2010); Alvarado and Romero (2010); and Hernández Juárez in Ríos’ s Roberto Bolaño: Ruptura y violencia (2010); those by Montes, Ramiro Oviedo, and Moreno in Moreno’s Roberto Bolaño: La experiencia del abismo (2011); and, most recently, the one by Levinson in López-Calvo’s Roberto Bolaño (2015). 13. Those by Figueroa (2006 and 2008), Pous (2008), Rojo (mostly on “Dance Card” in his 2004 study on the relationship between Bolaño and Chile), and Valdebenito (2007). 14. Critical assessments by Juana Martínez (2006), Fischer (2008b, specifically in connection to Bolaño’s “Dance Card”), Ríos (2009a), and Estève (2011). 15. On Llamadas, for example, those by Marks (1998), Piña (1998a), and Promis (1998); on Putas, the not very favorable review by Marks (2002), and the one by Álvaro Bisama (2001); on Gaucho, those by Edwards Renard (2003) and Zambra (2003); and, finall , on Secreto, those by R. C. and A.,G.,B. (2006), and Soto (2007). 16. “Gaucho,” “The Eye,” “Whores,” “Last,” “Vagabond,” “Card,” and “Adventure” from here on. 17. Although Levinson provides an interesting analysis of this short story from Secreto (2015, 163–66). 18. Early on, Espinosa took note of “the figure of the decadent individual, in general linked to literature” (2002, 127) present in Llamadas and argued that it represented the typical Bolaño character. Ventura (2007), for his part, offers interesting insights on several of the short stories. For example, even though he points to the concepts of fragmentation and the fragmentary as of capital importance in Bolaño’s oeuvre, he claims that this dynamic does not exactly apply to the stories; on the contrary, here “it’s a matter of giving shape to fragments, to textual unities initially isolated” (195). He underlines, furthermore, the “fast-paced movement toward nothingness” (201) that characterizes Bolaño’s narrative in general and especially Llamadas, for example, in “Adventure” but also Putas, particularly in “Last.” In her 2008 study on the concept of literature and the canon in Bolaño, Manzoni plays particular attention to “Dance” among the short stories, but commenting also on “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (from Putas) and “The Myths of Chtulhu” (from Gaucho). She calls “Dance” “a kind of homage to ‘Surrealism First Manifesto’” (2008, 346–47), by Breton, where Bolaño, at the same time that he expresses a certain kind of aesthetics, also demonstrates the difficult task of finding a trustworthy liter y genealogy. In his own study, the Chilean Leonidas Morales—arguing, rightfully, that “crying is the most recurrent gesture in Bolaño’s works” (2008, 14)—analyzes Detectives, 2666 , and Putas. What stands out foremost in “Whores” and “Photos,” in his

336   |  Notes t o pages 137–139











view, is “the present as lacking a utopian impulse, the present as absence” (71). However, it is in “The Eye,” marked by a “crying of an interminable mourning” (76), that most thoroughly incarnates the feeling of mourning and melancholia so patent in Bolaño’s fiction. Finall , if in his “Prólogo” to his critical anthology on Bolaño’s works, Ríos declares that in Bolaño “the canon itself . . . will be forced” by the deconstruction of “the canon’s frontiers” (17), in his own study included in the collection he tells us how this occurs. In search of “a specific ‘literary space’” (2010, 109), argues the critic (following Blanchot’ s notion of literary space), Bolaño manifests his anticanonical posture by resorting both to science fiction and pornography not as themes but as an aesthetics (111, 122). As expected, Ríos concentrates his analysis on “Enrique Martín” and “Joanna Silvestri.” He also makes reference to the stories in the last study to be mentioned here (“Arturo”), a study dedicated to the concept of time in Bolaño that centers on tracing the steps of Arturo Belano in several texts. Although he examines canonical Bolaño stories such as “The Grub,” “Last,” “Photos,” and “Vagabond,” especially, he also studies less known texts, such as “The Old Man of the Mountain” and “Death of Ulises,” both from Secreto. 19. “Borges is or should be the center of our canon,” states Bolaño in his lecture “Sevilla Kills Me” (2007a, 176). And in his talk on Argentinean literature “Vagaries of the Literature of Doom,” he calls him “probably the major writer to have been born in Latin America” (2004a, 23; 2007a, 92). Borges is also Pereda’s favorite author in “Gaucho” and “The one you would want to have as a literature professor forever” in Woes of the True Policeman (132, italics in the original). 20. In other words, the process of how one becomes a gaucho. 21. Writes Martínez, “In sum, the story presents two worlds that move in opposite directions and in parallel but without any possibility of coming face to face. On the one hand there is the ‘agauchamiento’ process of the judge, and, on the other, the process of ‘desgauchamiento’ that the gauchos experience. Pereda resembles a literary gaucho more and more, whereas the pampa scenery that surrounds him loses its literary aspects, it disassociates itself from the literary, topical image, in order to integrate itself in a real and troubled world” (2006, 240). 22. A theme that, incidentally, has been amply studied in Andrea Valenzuela’s excellent 2008 PhD dissertation in relationship to his entire oeuvre. 23. Writers and texts such as the following: those by Borges himself (“El evangelio según Marcos”), Santiago Dabove (“Ser polvo”), Antonio Di Bene­ detto (“Caballo en el salitral,” “Aballay,” and “Conejo”), Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (“Los conejos”), Cortázar (“Carta a una señorita en París”), and Rodrigo Fresán (“Padres de la patria”). 24. Mihály Dés also calls him “stateless” (2002c, 197). 25. I refer, of course, to Boethius’s text Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524). 26. Finally, in the most recent assessment of the story, Brett Levinson puts the emphasis on the sense of strangeness that Pereda feels vis-à-vis the gauchos being at odds with their own world, and how he, a city dweller, attempts to become a gaucho in order to restore a sense of balance (2015, 161–63). 27. In Cánovas’ Novela chilena (1997).

Notes t o pages 139–145   |  337













28. “Joanna” from now on. 29. Dés also calls “Card” “the author’s reckoning with Pablo Neruda” (2002c, 198), but he adds “apparently” (198), adding that this stor y is a “vitally peculiar intellectual autobiography” (198). 30. Moreno states, “More than a certificate of reality and veracit , photography appears as a framework of hints, indications; it’s a source of suppositions, origin of suspicions: the observer—the narrator, the reader—is driven to the investigation and the search” (2011, 339). In this regard, it must be said that the narrator in “Photos” (from Putas), who’s looking at the pictures of multiple poets, is much more limited. 31. At this writing, comprehensive academic analyses of either Gaucho or Secreto are not yet available. 32. Surprisingly, neither Llamadas nor Putas is the object of critical attention in Espinosa’s Territorios en fuga (2003a). 33. In this context, Patricia Poblete refers to “the logic of the hidden that governs Bolaño’s poetics” (2010a, 122). 34. “Gómez” and “Days” from here on. 35. Even though Dés makes reference to the abundance of what he calls letraheridos—something like, “wounded by literature”—in Bolaños’s overall oeuvre, he states something that in my judgment is completely correct irrespective of certain of Bolaño’s comments suggesting the contrary: “Bolaño is arguably the last writer to believe that literature is the most important thing in the world” (2002c, 198). 36. Roberto Bolaño: Una literatura infinita (2005). 37. “Calls” from here on. 38. “Enrique” and “Henri” from now on. 39. “Mates” from now on. 40. Italics in the original. 41. For him, the narrator of “Sensini,” who suffers from what he calls a “precarious sociability” (2006, 97), is the most emblematic of this condition. 42. “Desacralization sparkles as an essential pillar of his poetics” (91), states the author. And further on, he adds, “The stories from Llamadas are splashed with references to ‘B movies’” (97). He refers especially to “The Grub,” “Enrique,” “Anne Moore’s Life,” and “Joanna.” 43. “Return” from here on. 44. I am quoting from Montes’s article in Moreno’s study Roberto Bolaño: la experiencia (2011), but it can also be found in Ette and Nitschacks’ s critical anthology (2010, 137–46). 45. As paradoxical as this may sound. 46. “As regards Gregorio, no news was conclusive” (27). To date, of course, in Argentina and Chile many of those who lost loved ones during the respective military regimes continue to look for them. 47. Autobiographical features in “The Eye” are the narrator’s stay in Mexico, his allusion to his mother and sister living in Mexico City (11), his leaving for Europe and becoming a relatively well-known writer, among others.

338   |  Notes t o pages 146–149



















48. Bolaño provides a critical account of what happened the day of the coup in his essay “A Modest Proposal” (2004a, 82–85). 49. For example, in Collier and Sater’s 2004 A History of Chile, 1808–2002 , chapter 13, subsection “Consolidation of the Pinochet Regime” (359–64); and in Loveman’s 2001 Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism, chapter 10. 50. Italics in the original. 51. I say predominantly because even though the narration is carried out by an undramatized narrator, at some point, early in the story, one reads, “I am not saying this, B is thinking this” (65). 52. It is said in the story, for example, that he has just arrived in Barcelona from Mexico (65) and that he led a precarious existence there. The year 1978 from the title, of course, is not accidental. 53. I am referring here to those in Chile who still think that those who had to leave the country for political reasons in 1973 had a great time in the countries that received them. 54. Unsurprisingly, U’s goal on his trip to Paris prior to his suicide was to pay a visit to “an old comrade from the party” (78). 55. When the narrator learns of U’s suicide attempt, what first comes to his mind is U’s face when he met him at a party, a face that was “trapped between fear and rancor” (73). 56. The MIR (67), Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, a leftist party founded in Chile in 1965. 57. A view held by many in Chile, and especially by those who saw Pinochet’s military intervention as the only way to bring some order to an already chaotic situation. 58. Though Bolaño’s use of words and expressions from Chile, Mexico, and Spain in his narrative are well known—and initially criticized by some for lack of stylistic harmony—in this short story there is a conscious intention to inscribe “Chileanness” by means of language. The fact that “Detectives” is basically a dialogue, of course, contributes to creating a very Chilean setting. Among some of the words and expressions employed are “huevón,” “huevee” (114), “llamái” (116), “colisa,” “gallo” (118), “Ahí me pillaste chanchito” (119), “tira reculiado” (127), among others. 59. Now, the certainty of whether Bolaño witnessed the first months of Pin chet’s dictatorship personally has been put into question by some of his friends. See Rohter (2009). 60. Distant (though here Belano is not strictly speaking a character of the fabula), Detectives, Amulet, “Photos,” “The Old Man of the Mountain,” “Death of Ulises,” and “The Days of Chaos.” 61. “Enrique” and “The Grub.” 62. For example, “Adventure” and “Vagabond,” among others. 63. “Sensini,” “Mates,” “Last,” and so on. “Card” is in a category of its own, as we shall see in the next paragraph. 64. When one of the detectives tells the other that there aren’t any brave men left in Chile, the other replies, using a play on words with the expression andarse

Notes t o pages 149–152   |  339













por las ramas (beating around the bush): “I am Chilean to the core and don’t beat around the bush” (123). To which the former responds, ironically, “There you’re wrong: we are all Chilean to the core and no one gets off the bush. A thicket that terrifies” (123) 65. As stated earlier, Bolaño contests both Barthes’ (1977) and Foucault’ s (1977) concept of the author, insisting on its strong presence in works of literature. 66. Bolaño learned that he was suffering from a pancreatic disease in 1992. 67. Kind of a preemptive response to mostly North American readers who have wanted to see in Bolaño a type of Jack Kerouac of Latin America, with perhaps a dose of Che Guevara, and who believe, in order to confirm their large than-life image of Bolaño, that he was tortured by the military in 1973. 68. In the television program Off the Record, in 1998, Bolaño tells Fernando Villagrán the same thing. 69. See note 56. 70. In “A Modest Proposal,” though he admits that the Left in Chile did commit mistakes, unlike the political Right it did not insert rats into women’s vaginas (2004a, 84). In “Words from Outer Space,” a piece on the clandestine recording of the preparation of the coup by members of the future military junta, he alludes again to a twenty-two-year-old young woman, a member of the MIR, having had rats inserted in her vagina (2004a, 80). 71. Sadness and pain constitute two of the most predominant leitmotifs in Bolaño’s narrative. The story’s narrator asks, “Is it possible to die of sadness? Yes, it is possible” (213). Among the myriads of allusions to pain, see “Gómez” (30) and “Photos” (199). 72. Canuto in Chile is a somewhat derogative term that refers to Protestants in general and to evangelicals in particular. 73. For instance, the fact that B and his father arrived in Mexico City from Chile in 1968; that they are from the south (B’ s father buys him a horse in “Chiloé” [43]); that, like Bolaño’s father, B’s father is a boxer; and, finall , that, though B has not yet been to Europe, like the real Bolaño at the time, he “has traveled around all of Latin America” (44). 74. A possible allusion to groups such as MIR? 75. “Prefiguration” from now on 76. “Meeting” from here on. In this story, an autobiographical text—the narrating voice identifies himself as “Roberto Bolaño” three times in the course of the fabula (220, 222, and 224)—which has elements of the short stor y and literary criticism, an intradiegetic narrator recounts a dream with Chilean poet Enrique Lihn. Although most of the text revolves around Chilean poetry, the narrator emits two statements critical of contemporary Chilean history. On the one hand, he recalls how, years ago, “Chile and Santiago . . . resembled hell” (Putas 217), a resemblance, he adds, that will always remain. On the other, he chastises, as is usual in Bolaño, not only writers who have a cozy relationship with the state in order to receive scholarships and other benefits to advance their careers, but also “the new government of the center left” (220) that marginalizes

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young poets (Bolaño probably writes “Meeting” before Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s president between 2000 and 2006, implemented a cultural politics that fortified cultural production in general, including poetry). 77. In this story, which is no doubt a very critical assessment of contemporary Latin American history, a heterodiegetic narrator depicts in relatively vivid terms the economic catastrophe that took place in Argentina in 2001 (“Buenos Aires is sinking” [19], “the Argentinean economy fell into the abyss” [20], “ever ything was in the bank freeze, in other words, everything was lost” [21], “Buenos Aires was a land of thieves and buddies, a place similar to hell” [34], etc.). Figueroa (2008) is completely correct to speak of a post-state and post-national subjectivity in “Gaucho.” The disillusion with politics is a direct result of the failure of the neoliberal state. “Gaucho,” clearly, is another example of the post-political posture in Bolaño’s works that I have been sketching in this study. 78. A short story that ends abruptly and was written months before Bolaño’s death, “The Troublemaker” revolves around a Catalan who enjoys art and the sciences and who protests against the Iraq war. As in so much of his narrative, the narrator does not neglect to mention characters living at the margin of society, such as “workers,” “Maghrebi, black or South American immigrants” (174). 79. In this story, an intradiegetic narrator becomes a heterodiegetic narrator as he recounts a movie he has seen on television and that he chooses to call The Colonel’s Son: “It was my biography or my autobiography or a summary of my days on the fucking planet Earth” (31). Unlike other texts mentioned in this study, this story does not abound in autobiographical data. Nevertheless, what is interesting from what might be called Bolaño’s political outlook is the establishing of a comparison between what occurs in the movie and revolution, a key word in his vocabulary. What’s more, when the narrator states about the film he s about to recount, “Every photograph still breathed out and exhaled an air of revolution, let us say an air in which one could intuit the revolution, not the entire revolution, if you know what I mean, but instead a rather minuscule, microscopic piece of the revolution” (32), one cannot help but think that, who knows, perhaps Bolaño had not given up the possibility of revolution, after all. Later in the metanarrative, in fact, among the books that an African American who saves the two young protagonists has collected from the gutter where he lives, there are “books that speak about the revolution” (41). This is not the revolution of Arturo Belano from Detectives or even of Bolaño, of course. Besides, the movie being recounted is about zombies invading a North American city, not about politics (was Bolaño inspired by The Night of the Living Dead or Return of the Living III?). However, the appearance of a group of Mexicans in the film s diegesis who eventually become zombies in some measure connects The Colonel’s Son especially to 2666 , where, in “The Part about the Crimes,” Mexicans arguably do self-destroy. There is one sentence in particular that brings 2666 to mind: “The other three Mexicans, in the meantime, watch the vomit as if the secret of the universe were hidden in it” (36). 80. Although “The Myths of Cthulhu” could be described as Bolaño’s partial effort to construct a poetics (like “Vagaries of the Literature of Doom” and, to

Notes t o page 152   |  341





some extent, “Sevilla Kills me”)—in the sense that he not only condemns writers who seek “social respectability” (172) above all else, but also those whose novels are easily understood by everyone, for example, Pérez-Reverte (159), Vargas-Llosa (171), Isabel Allende (170–71), Rivera Letelier (173), and so on— it likewise serves the purpose of using the assessment of the contemporary Latin American novel to criticize certain aspects of Latin American history. A text that is a combination of literary criticism, manifesto, and essay, and whose tone is satiric and ironical throughout, “The Myths of Cthulhu” includes two statements that reflect, on the one hand, Bolaño s continuous preoccupation with Latin America despite his long absence from the continent; and on the other, his post-political or politically independent disposition. The first one reads, “Latin America was Europe’s asylum as the United States was its factory. The factory is now in the hands of foremen and fugitive madmen are its workforce. The asylum has been burning in its own oil, in its own grease, for more than sixty years” (168). The second one, though less poetic, no less trenchant, reads: “May God bless Fidel Castro’s concentration camps for homosexuals and Argentina’s twenty thousand disappeared ones and Videla’s perplexed mug and Perón’s old man macho smile that is cast on the sky and Río de Janeiro’s murderers of children and the Spanish that Hugo Chávez uses, which smells like shit and is shit and I have created” (173). For an interesting analysis of “The Myths of Cthulhu,” see Olivier (2007, 180–82). 81. “Scholars of Sodom,” which was Bolaño’s original title for Putas and does appear to be incomplete, as Echevarría indicates in “Nota preliminar” (2007b, 10), is a mixture between autobiography and short story in which a uniquely heterodiegetic narrator recounts writing a story about Trinidadian-British writer V. S. Naipaul’s visit to Buenos Aires and the latter’s account of it (“In his text or perhaps in my story” [55], states the narrator in the diegesis). It would seem that, as much as Bolaño respected several Argentine writers highly, he was still critical of certain aspects of recent Argentine history and of the image that Argentines have of themselves, especially if we take into consideration the last sentence of this incomplete text: “But, for better or worse, Argentina is what it is and comes from where it comes, which is, know it!, from everywhere except Paris” (57). The principal connection with Bolaño’s concern for history, however, is found in the metanarrative that the narrator says Naipaul would probably write and has to do with Peronism’s internal problems, “the coup d’état, the dirty war, the massacres” (52). The link between horror and politics or, simply, the horror brought about by military dictatorships throughout Latin America and that plays such a significant role in Bolaño’s overall oeuvre, is also found in the following lines: “Maybe Naipaul finishes his chronicle before the coup d’état, he probably published the text before the number of the disappeared was known, before the magnitude of evil was confirmed. In my sto y, Naipaul simply traveled through the streets of Buenos Aires and, in some way, sensed the hell that hovered over the city” (52). 82. This text, which, according to the essayistic I should really be called “Where Latin American Literature Comes from” (“Sevilla” 175), could be interpreted as a close relative of both “The Myths of Cthulhu” and “Scholars of

342   |  Notes t o pages 152–159















Sodom” because it broaches the subject of the present state of Latin American literature (the novel, in particular) and it seeks to answer the question about the social and economic background of those who engage in literary pursuits today. However, as if he could not help it, he makes two quick allusions to Latin America in the middle of his talk. He calls it a “labyrinth, or, more than a labyrinth, . . . atrocious Latin American crossword puzzle” (176). Similarly, and symptomatic of his inability to leave the history of Latin America behind, he talks of the dark future that awaits young Latin American writers: “That future is as gray as Castro’s dictatorship, as Stroessner’s dictatorship, as Pinochet’s dictatorship, as innumerable corrupt governments that have come along, one after the other, in our land” (177). On “Sevilla Kills me,” see Olivier (2007 182–83). 83. A character with this name, though with a different profession, appears again in 2666 , in “The Part about the Crimes.” 84. The narrator speaks of “the vastness and devastation of this continent” (107). 85. The text is peppered with allusions to Mexico and “Mexicanness.” In one of the dialogues between the intradiegetic narrator and his friend the dentist, one reads: “Do you know when we are truly alone? In the crowd, I said, thinking that I would just go with the flo , but no, it was not in the crowd, I should have imagined as much, but rather after death, the only Mexican solitude, the only solitude of Irapuato” (186). 86. In “Enrique,” Arturo Belano, the narrator, states something similar: “We were beginning to leave youth behind, to accept the end of our dreams” (44). 87. The connection between Central America, specifically Guatemala, and horror is elaborated very briefly in an incomplete short sto y called “The Room Next Door” (Secreto), a partially autobiographic text where one individual tells a friend that he has just assassinated his wife. 88. Regarding this point, Candia maintains that in Bolaño’s works, love and sex are inextricable, and that, while it is possible to find love with sex, the opp site is not true (2011b, 166, 171–72). 89. B’s état d’esprit becomes evident in two metanarratives, in two dreams. In the first, a snowman—literally “snow monkey” (64)—walks in the desert and heads directly “toward disaster” (64); in the second, it is B himself who finds himself lost in the desert (66). 90. In La llama doble (35). 91. One must not get the impression, however, that certain nostalgia for the Left is present in the text. In fact, the narrator refers to becoming involved in repeated “useless controversies” (138) with a Communist who lived in the house. 92. But the cities are seldom mentioned by name. Here, for example, the narrator refers to Clara’s city as “that unknown city” (149) and states later that she went to work in “another Andalusian city” (154). 93. The narrator refers to Clara as “a desperate woman” (151) who used to dream of rats and suffered from depression and mysterious diseases. 94. “Life” from here forward. 95. On pages 134–37.

Notes t o pages 159–162   |  343









96. Five other instances of penis size come to mind in Bolaño’s work. One appears in the section “Epilogue for Monsters” of Nazi under the name of actor Dan Carmine, who is not included in the body of the text but who might serve as inspiration for the character of Jack. The section reads: “Porn film acto , extremely gifted, his penis measured 28 centimeters” (204). Another appears in the section of writer Jesús Fernández-Gómez from Nazi who, the narrator states, feels proud of “the length of his virile member” (43). A more veiled allusion to penis size can be found in the farce that Argentino Schiaffino, from Nazi, writes (161). In Detectives Lupe’s pimp spends a significant amount of time measu ing his large penis with a knife. And in 2666 , in “The Part about Archimboldi” (1,018), what distinguishes Entrescu is the gigantic size of his penis. The first reference to the length of his penis, however, appears in the section “Epilogue for Monsters” of Nazi (205). See, also, The Woes of the True Policeman (131). 97. In his own study on Bolaño (2011), Candia speaks of “the erotics of trans gression” as a way to combat evil. 98. The word elements appears repeatedly in Bolaño’s work. It most often connotes desolation and solitude (e.g., in Amulet, 1999a, 42–43), but it also means freedom, especially the writer’s freedom to create and work without the assistance of the state apparatus. The connection between elements and literature is also established in “On Literature, the National Literature Prize, and the Rare Consolations of the Writing Life” (2004a, 104) and in “Puigdevall, the Strange” (2004a, 152). In “Out in the Cold” (2004a, 86–87), Bolaño analyzes the so called new narrative and the status of poetry in Chile. He titles another essay “Chilean Poetry Under Inclement Skies” (2004a, 88–89). 99. In his essay “The Lost,” for example, he calls Latin America “what most resembles Kafka’s penal colony” (2004a, 96). 100. The story is inspired by the movie Ghost (1990). 101. The narrator states, “You begin to sing your songs, some of you raise your arm and greet Roman-style” (115). And later in the text specifically regarding Max, “You don’t like disorder, you don’t like blacks, you don’t like fags” (120), “You leave behind your raised hand . . . your warlike hymns that evoke purity and the future” (127). 102. For Max, claims the narrating voice, she is no more than “the special trophy after a collective magic night” (123). She blames him, in fact, for not listening to what women have to say: “Always listen carefully, Max, to the words that women say while they are being fucked . . . if they speak, even if it’s only a murmur, listen to their words and think about them, think about their meaning, think about what they say and what they don’t say, try to understand what they actually mean” (122). 103. The narrator indicates that, in her trip to Mexico, Anne stayed “more or less in the same area where I used to live” (185). He even states, in reference to her, “her adventures resembled mine a great deal . . . we had traveled through the same map, the same flower wars” (199). From this possible autobiographical connection, it is no accident that the narrator should see Anne for the first time in the town of Girona (198), where Bolaño also lived for a while.

344   |  Notes t o pages 162–167

















104. Her love for Tony, her husband, comes to a sudden end (191), she refuses to have a child with Bill (194–95), saying she is still too young, and, in between, she becomes involved in multiple relationships and takes multiple trips. 105. She has strange dreams (186) and “she liked talking about her fears, the explosion she foresaw crouched behind any regular day” (186–87). 106. What’s more, when the narrator asks Sensini whether his daughter would study literature at the university, he replies, categorically, “Oh my god, no way!” (21). 107. These autobiographical elements, needless to say, should not surprise us by now. In the story, it is mentioned that B travels from Barcelona to Perpignan (81), lived in Mexico (82), and also in the Southern Hemisphere (83), smokes like a chimney (94), among others. 108. It might be tempting to think that this Henri Lefebvre is the same as the author of the famous La production de l’espace and countless other works. However, in “Vagabond” Lefebvre is not French but Belgian. That said, this story also has a lot to do with movement around the city and between cities. 109. Madariaga writes: “Already in 1976 Bolaño enjoyed bringing to light moth-eaten poets lying in bookshelves” (2010, 103). 110. Without going into too much detail, some of these “seemingly innocuous references” are rather interesting because, as so often happens in Bolaño, they are surrounded in mystery. What does it mean, for instance, that the narrator states that B, upon noticing these texts, experiences a kind of shuddering that makes him think that something is not right (88–89), or that M walking naked in the living room, plus the presence of these texts from her “disappeared father” (89) seem to him “a sign . . . A terrible sign” (89)? Nothing terrible occurs in the story. Nonetheless, the allusions to these historical events do seem to be connected to other works by Bolaño. The presence of a history of the Chilean coup and a book on the Mapuches bring to mind the killing of the Mapuche woman by Wieder in Distant. And the connection between a naked woman and a disappeared father makes one think not only about 2666 ’s “The Part about the Crimes” but also about the end of the political traditionally conceived as a possibility. 111. “To be good,” or “to be a good person,” is a recurrent motif in Bolaño’s narrative aesthetics, and it is almost always attached to writers and literature, which should surprise us if one keeps in mind his generally negative view of the literary institution and especially of writers who capitalize on their contacts with government functionaries. 112. Really, the only statement that might partially reflect on Bolaño s own narrative aesthetics is the following: “[B] thinks about his own work, marked by satire and rage, and he compares it unfavorably with the work of A” (62). 113. It is never clear in the text if it is A, however. The best example of literature as a pugilist encounter is, of course, the duel between Arturo and Echavarne in Detectives. 114. Earlier in the diegesis, through external focalization, the narrative voice states regarding Leprince: “He suddenly understands that his territory (his homeland) . . . is that of the resentful, of low-class writers” (31).

Notes t o pages 167–169   |  345











115. Although, initially at least, Wieder appears to elicit the opposite reaction, especially among the Garmendia sisters. 116. “So phantasmal are his work and his public stature” (34), states the text. There is also an allusion to Leprince’s marginality (35) and fragility (36). 117. Arguably, this is a veiled reference to Benjamin’s crossing the Franco-­ Spanish border in 1940 before committing suicide. 118. Frequently, in his fiction as well as in his essayistic works, Bolaño examines the subject of good versus bad writers and major (or canonical) literature versus minor literature. Partially in relation to this, although unable to offer an explanation, I deem very prescient, in light of 2666 , that the young novelist advises Leprince to “disappear, to be a secret writer” (35). Is not Archimboldi “a secret writer” also? What the young novelist suggests to Leprince is, obliquely, what the old woman asks Hans Reiter in “La parte de Archimboldi” to do, that is, to change his name (973). 119. Belano was born in 1953 (37) and lives on the outskirts of Girona (43), has a sister who sends him letters from Mexico City (43), and keeps in touch with “South American poets lost in South America” (44). 120. This idea of the poet almost as a superhero who can pretty much endure any type of hardship is everywhere present in Bolaño’s oeuvre. 121. Though this name appears with two ts in the text, the allusion is probably to Italian poet and writer Edoardo Sanguineti (1930–2010). 122. If the author or work alluded to is well known, this does not present a problem for a relatively well-read reader. However, this is not always the case. In fact, already forgotten and unknown writers abound in Detectives as well as 2666 and other works. 123. For example, the homodiegetic narrator, a poet, says he is twenty-three years old and will not stay in Mexico much longer (27) (Bolaño leaves Mexico when he is twenty-three, in 1977). He also states that, as he talked to the school principal, he could not stop smoking. The most autobiographical section, however, is when he describes himself, a description that coincides closely with several pictures of Bolaño’s days in Mexico: “When I think about him, . . . I still have long hair, I’m skinny, I’m wearing a denim jacket and very large, disgusting glasses” (33). 124. Before leaving Gómez Palacio, the school principal tells the narrator: “I know you’ll be able to forgive my excesses, . . . after all, we are both readers of poetry” (36). But the latter adds, curiously: “I was grateful for the fact that she didn’t say that the two of us were poets” (36). Whatever the case may be, in that desert—a desert that though it recalls the desert of “The Grub,” Detectives, and 2666 , has nothing to do with it (and much less with the latter text)—a species of poetic community has been given life. 125. There is a parallel, no doubt, between this student and the adolescent who writes short stories in “Dentist.” They both write from the periphery. By including these characters in his works, Bolaño is extending the literary field, unde lining perhaps the idea that literature transcends both the big city and canonical figures

346   |  Notes t o pages 169–179











126. And not only because Belano finds himself in Liberia—where the Belano of Detectives ends up disappearing in “the bushes” (548) according to Jacobo Urenda’s account (Detectives 526–49)—but also due to several allusions to his days in Mexico and to the presence of “an Uruguayan” (Auxilio Lacouture?) who, ruminates Belano, took with her, “ in ’73 or ’74, . . . a book about Arab or Maghrebi poets . . . everywhere in Mexico” (202). 127. In the sense of what he has read, his views on poets and poetry, and so forth; in other words, all the information that’s missing from Detectives. In his feverish ruminations in the desert Belano is careful to indicate which poets he has read and which he has not: “Gérald Neveu (whom he has read) . . . or JeanPhilippe Salabreul (whom he has read)” (198), among others. 128. The creative exercise here, however, is markedly different than in “Labyrinth,” the latter being a more complex piece, as I suggested earlier. Moreover, there is also the fact that in “Labyrinth” a narrative is constructed while in “Photos” much of the information about the poets proceeds directly from the book itself. But be that as it may, it is interesting that in the two texts where French literature is confronted face to face in Bolaño’s oeuvre, it is done so through images, not only underscoring the traditional strong presence of French letters in the Latin American Republic of Letters but also providing, symbolically, a kind of response, as well as a homage, to that influence. “For poets, especially French ones, Arturo Belan thinks, lost in Africa, as he leafs through a kind of photo album where poetry in the French language commemorates itself, motherfuckers, he thinks” (197). Incidentally, another description of the faces of poets that appears in photos is the one carried out by Amalfitano in The Woes of the True Policeman. In this case, the narrative voice describes the faces and looks at the “barbarian writers” that appear on the cover of Revista Literaria y Comercial (108–9). 129. My references to Massey’s essay come from Tim Cresswell’s 2004 Place, where it is partially reproduced. Originally, her essay appeared in the collection Mapping the Futures (1993), alongside Har vey’s essay, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity” (originally a lecture delivered at the Tate Gallery in 1990). 130. Adds Cresswell, “When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way) it becomes a place” (2004, 10). 131. English translation 1991. 132. Italics in the original. 133. Italics in the original. 134. Sensini’s negative view of those who read the manuscripts notwithstanding. 135. One of her songs, for example, “Spoke about a lost town in northern Mexico where everyone was happy except her” (32). 136. “And we left the bar . . . and we disappeared in the streets that marked the boundaries of Irapuato” (192); “If earlier we had hobnobbed with professionals, civil servants and merchants, we were now surrounded by workers, the unemployed, beggars” (176–77).

Notes t o pages 180–187   |  347





137. Italics in the original. 138. Bolaño the author had gone to Venezuela to receive the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for narrative for his novel Detectives. 139. “The city was full of beggars and decent people who organized soup kitchens in the neighborhoods in order to put something in their stomachs” (34). 140. Hernández Rodríguez refers to this story as a “tale-movie” (2011, 55). 141. “[Belano] has come to Mexico as a guest to a conference of Hispanic American writers . . . His books are read (though not much) in Spain and Latin America and all of them have been translated into several languages” (164); “Belano . . . continues to watch television as he smokes one cigarette after the other” (166); “Our Arturo Belano, dear readers, is already forty-six-years-old and is suffering, as you all know or should know, from liver disease, from pancreatic disease and even from the colon, but he still knows how to box” (167). 142. “Colonia Lindavista” is also the title of one of the unfinished stories from Secreto. Not surprisingly, it is a very autobiographical text: “When we arrived in Mexico, in 1968, . . . I spent some years in Blanes” (15); “My parents . . . were Chilean ” (18). The heterodiegetic narrator alludes to his beginning to write with a certain assiduity (19) around the time of the story and he also mentions his parents and his sister (20). 143. Though the reference here is to Ulises Lima, not to the person who inspired the character from Detectives.

Chapter 5









1. According to a friend, in his last visits to Barcelona from Blanes, Bolaño would say that he was writing a novel that “was growing in his hands without measure,” but that he would only tell his closest friends what it was about (Alatriste 2006, 107). 2. Although I agree with Corral’s 2011 contention in his Bolaño traducido that an author’s work is ultimately the product of his own imagination, I disagree with him when he declares that Bolaño’s oeuvre “is rarely guided by external conflicts” (47). As I’ve been contending throughout this stud , certain historical events do weigh heavily in the fictitious situations he creates 3. I am not in complete agreement with Madariaga when she claims that nostalgia is absent from Bolaño’s literary output. 4. Presumably, the period of the transition in Chile continues with the government of Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) and ends with the government of Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010). 5. Concerning Distant, both Lynd (2011, 170, 175–77) and Chaar (2011, 657–58) concur with this assessment. 6. For instance Carlos Franz and Ana María del Río, among others. Marks refers to “New Chilean Narrative” as “a useful publishing maneuver to bolster writers who emerged at the beginning of the 90s, coinciding with the start of the democratic transition” (2010, 183). 7. Chris Andrews prefers the term metarepresentation to refer to this aspect of Bolaño’s work. See his Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction (2014).

348   |  Notes t o pages 187–188















8. “Ramírez” from here on. 9. In an article that examines the ambiguous role of the figure of the inte lectual in Bolaño’s Nazi, Distant, and By Night, Bruña Bragado refers to Nazi as a “dictionary or manual of naziphile writers” (2012, 408) and also as an “anthol ogy” (408). 10. Cacheiro calls it “a fictional encyclopedia of writers with fascistic tende cies throughout the Americas” (2010, 131) as well as a “parodical anthology” (131). 11. If Jennerjahn, Franklin Rodríguez, and Williams call Nazi a novel, in his 1996 review of the book the Chilean critic Camilo Marks is categorical in saying that Bolaño’s text is definitely not a novel (1996, 3). Simunovic, for his part, calls it a “pseudo-documentary novel” (2006, 17). 12. Italics in the original. 13. In her own study of what she calls “barbarian writing,” González refers to Nazi as “a fictional regist y of subjects under the shadow of failure and evil” (2010, 142). 14. For instance, “a sort of manual” (Gandolfo 2002, 115), a “dictionar y, repertoire or catalogue of writers” (Gras 2005, 59), a fictitious dictiona y (Rodríguez de Arce 2009, 23), a “dictionar y of writers” (Luche 2011, 681), “a critical cadastre” (Ríos 2013, 36). 15. See, for example, Jennerjahn’s 2002 article (69–70). 16. For an incisive comparison between Nazi and Borges’s and Schwob’s texts, see Schmukler (2010). Crusat, for whom this “imaginar y cartography of Nazi writers” (2009, 103) is not a novel (102), compares in some detail Bolaño’ s Nazi and Schwob’s Vies. In his review of Nazi, José Miguel Oviedo situates Bolaño’s text in the company of other texts along the lines of A Universal History of Infamy, such as Borges’s own El libro de los seres imaginarios (1957; originally under the title of Manual de zoología fantástica) as well as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). Gras, for her part, mentions Alfonso Reyes’ s Retratos reales e imaginarios (1920) as well as the Argentinian-born author Rodolfo Wilcock’s The Temple of Iconoclasts (1981, posthumously) as possible sources of inspiration for Nazi (2005, 60). In his essay “Wilcox,” Bolaño situates The Temple of Iconoclasts among “literature’s masterpieces” (2004a, 151). Schwob is also mentioned in Woes of the True Policeman (45, 61). 17. Nazi was originally published by Seix Barral. In the section “Vida editorial de Roberto Bolaño” of his 2005 book (31–47), Herralde states that though Bolaño’s text received good reviews in some Spanish papers, it really did not sell well at all (35). 18. Specificall , Rosso refers to the existence of a “hidden order” (2002a, 138). 19. What is interesting about this early study is that none of the critics who use it to analyze Distant seems to be aware that, in reality, Jennerjahn’s object of study is Nazi’s “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman,” not Distant. This might be explained, though not justified, by the initial paucity of critical articles on Nazi but, particularly, by the almost identical nature of “Ramírez” and Distant.

Notes t o pages 188–189   |  349





20. What Rodríguez means is that Nazi in particular but also Distant contain certain narrative and thematic characteristics that, in one way or another, will be present in later works by Bolaño. While I agree in principle that this is true, I would simply add that some of the traits that he mentions are also present in earlier works, such as Antwerp in particular but also in Monsieur and a few poems. These are “the four major aspects of Bolaño’s narrative” to which Rodríguez refers: “(1) a fragmentary quality that is a major characteristic of his poetics as it affects ethical, political and aesthetical readings and compositions of his novels; (2) a preoccupation with ‘the uncanny’; (3) the problem of the abject, abjection and; (4) the role of writing or art in translating experience” (10–11). 21. Literally, de Arce states: “with an intention that seems to lean more toward the ludic than toward the satirical” (27). 22. Williams adds later on, “The novel is nothing more than the inscription of its own unproductive cataloguing system (2009, 130) . . . the suspension of its own project” (131). 23. Italics in the original. 24. In the fourth recent critical study on Nazi, Karim Benmiloud examines the very hybrid nature of what he calls Bolaño’s “novel of novels” (2006b, 126), a “polyphonic and deeply hybrid text” (120), he states. Even though a reading of this article might convey the idea that it is no more than a description of its content, in reality Benmiloud provides a thorough cartography of the multifarious discourses and genres contained therein: science fiction (122), the pastoral (124), romantic love (124), film (125), journalism (125), and sports (125). Sure Nazi is a “dictionary of authors” (119) or “rather a literature manual” (120), concedes the critic, but it is also a “binnacle of trips and readings” (121), a “compendium of obituaries” (121), a “portrait galler y” (121), “a true editorial catalogue” (121), among other things. Although I do not entirely agree with him when he declares that it is in this text that Bolaño posits for the first time “the fundamental issue of the articulations between Poetics and Ethics” (128)—the relationship between poetics and ethics is also present to some extent in Consejos and Monsieur—I do find the following statement most interesting because of how ironic it is: “One of the revelations of this apocryphal volume is that Nazi literature is not pure; on the contrary, it is mixed, hybrid, and impure. In it, purity alternates with triviality, what’s bucolic with what’s perverted, and what’s ethereal with what’s eschatological” (124; italics in the original). Finally, in the fifth article, Laura Luche explores the reasons for why Bolaño chose members of an avant-garde from the Right to represent the avant-garde from the Left in particular and the avant-garde movement in general. She focuses specifically on the notion of “chimerism” (2011, 683; italics in the original) and responsibility . The former has to do with the Latin American avant-garde’s literary, political, and social quixotic enterprises that have no connection with reality; the latter with its responsibility in some very tragic events in the history of the continent, such as the massacre of Tlatelolco and the coup in Chile in 1973. In Luche’ s judgment, Nazi “ends up . . . becoming a type of ‘museum of useless efforts,’ as the title of a short story by Cristina Peri Rossi goes” (2011, 684). Broadly speaking, continues

350   |  Notes t o pages 190–194







the critic, due to the failure of the Nazi writers in the text, who write books that no one reads, Bolaño launches a criticism against Latin American intellectuals who, historically, have often borrowed foreign ideas without understanding the reality of their own countries. In a book among whose major traits is “its comical character” (684–85), even the narrator indulges in a fruitless effort to provide a rigorous biography of writers who are utterly irrelevant. Ultimately, argues the critic, Bolaño—who reveals himself as the narrator in the last biography of the text (“Ramírez”)—is poking fun at himself by offering a picture of a movement to which he also belonged in the 1970s in Mexico (“Infrarrealismo”). What Luche means is that the “chimerism” of the authors included in Nazi as well as their complete faith in literature even in the face of defeat also characterized the infrarrealistas, an idea that is of course true but with a catch, as we shall see in the chapter on Detectives. 25. It is interesting in this regard that when Corral (2011b) attempts to under stand the reasons as to why Carmen Boullosa’s prediction that Nazi’s English version would be prolifically reviewed had not yet been fulfilled at the time of hi own study on Bolaño’s reception in the United States and England, one of the possible explanations he adduces is the fact that the text belongs to “no genre” (246). 26. “People always want to politicize Bolaño’s metaphors,” states Corral (2011b, 299) later on. 27. And even in Bolaño’s entire literary production, according to Poblete (2010a, 76–86). 28. The irony of the name should not go unnoticed here: “Silvio,” related to Latin “silva”: wood or forest; and “Salvático,” related to Late Latin “salvare”: to save or to rescue. In other words, a kind of Rousseaunian scenario but with an anti-Rousseaunian platform; not a movement from culture to idyllic nature but rather a movement to a primitivism of the worst kind. 29. Regarding this scenario, the narrator states, “It represents Mexico’s future geography, barren, desolate, the perfect scenario for new crimes” (82). From the point of view of Andrews’s four processes of narrative technique in Bolaño’s oeuvre, “expansion, circulating characters, metarepresentation, and overinterpretation” (2014, xii), and especially from the first and the second, it makes perfect sense that this be so. In fact, it is in here, in Nazi, for example, that General Entrescu, from 2666 , appears for the first time (79, 86, 205); also Ernest Jünger (92, 142, 212), who appears in Distant and By Night. The character of Daniela de Montecristo appears in the posthumous Secreto, but her biography there is different than the one in Nazi. Then, the novel Guerreros del Sur, written by Zah Zodenstern, from Nazi, resembles very closely the short story from Secreto “The Colonel’s Son.” The writer Gustavo Borda could very well be construed as another version of the Central American writer from “Labyrinth.” Andrews’s concept of expansion reaches its full meaning, of course, in Nazi’s “Ramírez,” which, in reality, at least in terms of the text’s diegesis, has its origin in “Willy Schürholz, Colonia Renacer,” also from Nazi. For how this story “explodes” in Distant, see pages of 34–41 of Andrews’ 2014 study .

Notes t o pages 194–200   |  351











30. Italics in the original. 31. Italics in the original. 32. Italics in the original. 33. Ríos explores the role of science fiction in Bolaño s oeuvre in his Roberto (123–36). 34. See note 24. 35. This is especially true in Chile, a country with a small though historically important population of German ancestry where being white and having a foreign name (hopefully European) is a sign of distinction that opens many doors. Calling someone “indio” in Chile has traditionally been one of the worst insults that can be proffered. The historical mistreatment of indigenous populations in the country, and especially Mapuches, does not only have to do with the taking of their land by both private individuals and the state; it also has to do with an effort to, paradoxically, preserve whiteness of skin in a mostly mestizo population. Most Chileans’ strong rejection of Haitians presently has its roots here. 36. In his article, Ríos borrows the term from Foucault and centers his analysis on Nazi, Distant, and By Night. The section on Nazi also analyzes the concept of the grotesque as it applies to Silvio Salvático, Amado Couto, and the Schiaffino brothers. 37. Nonetheless, isn’t this, after all, what Sarmiento does after coming back from his stay in the United States, or what other members of the ciudad letrada in general do in the nineteenth century after having studied and lived in Europe? 38. Italics in the original. 39. The narrator makes a similar claim regarding Schiaffino s brother Italo. He states that one of his books of poetry establishes a relationship with “the virginal spaces of the homeland” (157). 40. The Chilean Willy Schürholz, the narrator-literary critic informs us, also idealizes childhood in the short stories he writes for children (98), no matter how disturbed such childhood may have been. 41. Having been accused of sexual abuse in Germany, Schäfer decided to migrate to Chile and buy some land in a very isolated region in the southern part of the country. Although, in principle at least, Colonia Dignidad was a religious institution, it also served the material needs of its dwellers. Initially, Schäfer invited members of his religious community in Germany to join him in Chile. Gradually, however, poor Chileans living in the vicinity were also invited to join. Colonia Dignidad had its own hospital and its own school and everything that was consumed was produced by the people living there. The idea was for Colonia Dignidad to be completely self-sufficient, a kind of replica of Germany in Chilean territory. Similarly to leaders like “Jim” Jones of the infamous 1978 Jonestown Massacre or, more recently, David Koresh of the 1993 W aco Siege, Schäfer expected complete allegiance from the commune’s members. But unlike the latter two, he did not allow couples to have children; men and women could not live together, sleeping in separate quarters. The few children who were born inside its premises were taken from their parents at birth. A climate of fear prevailed inside and surveillance was constant. For an excellent recent summary of

352   |  Notes t o pages 200–202













Colonia Dignidad, see Falconer’s 2008 article. Also consult Basso Prieto’ s 2002 study. 42. In Distant, the narrator, Arturo Belano, tells us that, in one of his aerial poetic exhibitions in Santiago, Wieder writes about the “Chilean Rebirth” (43). 43. An extreme position in this regard, needless to say, is Nietzsche’s sister and her husband in Paraguay at the end of the nineteenth century. 44. This might be a veiled allusion to a concentration camp for political prisoners built by the Pinochet regime in the Atacama Desert in 1973, called Campo de prisioneros Chacabuco. In the wonderfully shot documentary Nostalgia de la luz (2010), Chilean film director Patricio Guzmán inte views a resident of the camp who provides vivid details of life inside the camp for those who lived there between 1973 and 1975. 45. Valerie Miles, who has had privileged access to what Bolaño wrote between the late 1970s and the time of his death in 2003, states the following regarding the author’s notes and documents: “These are the stories and pieces and novels that evolved into sections of other stories and then novels, while sections of novels were fragmented into other novels with new names or slightly altered names but in a new relationship with other texts. Bolaño didn’t leave things behind, but threw them back into the stew, this evolving project of a multidimensional universe turning like a grand kaleidoscope of symbols and metaphors and themes and meanings with secret passageways, wormholes back and forth in time and place, occult intentions and shadowed suggestions, placed and replaced in different orders or alongside different texts” (2013, 139). In a recent retro spective of his friendship with Bolaño during his first years in Spain, his friend A. G. Porta refers to him as “a man who had the seal of the literary agitator programmed into his DNA, who was caught up with lots of projects which I see, as I said before, as little boxes, sometimes communicating and sometimes separate” (Centro de Cultura 2013, “RB” 148). Finally , novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, who met Bolaño in 1996 and with whom he developed a solid friendship, states with regard to this process of autophagy to which Mora refers, “With Bolaño it was always thus. From one book emerged another and everything was somehow connected . . . his work always advanced through this unfolding of one novel into another” (2013, 157). 46. In her own study, Poblete refers to this narrative strategy on Bolaño’s part as “the telling again” (2010a, 107) and, following Manzoni, as “the vampirizing of one’s own texts” (107). 47. For López Alfonso Distant is a historical novel in the classical sense of the term, that is, as it was conceived by Walter Scott and as it was described by Luckács (2011, 679). 48. For a very recent description of the major characteristics of neoliberalism in general, see Solimano’s Economic Elites (2014). For the negative consequences that neoliberal policies applied forcibly in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship still have upon Chilean society, consult his Chile and the Neoliberal Trap (2012). 49. See López Alfonso’s “La vanguardia, mundos desorbitados y Estrella distante” (2011), an offshoot of his earlier excellent study on the double in Distant;

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Rodríguez’s “Unsettledness and Doublings in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante” (2010); Fandiño’ s “Alegorías” (2007) replicated and expanded in her “El poeta-investigador” (2010); and L ynd (2011). For López Alfonso, one of the most important aspects of the text is how it reflects on the totalitarian potential of the avant-garde (2011, 677). From this perspective, it makes per fect sense that Rodríguez (212), Fandiño (2007, 101; 2010, 401), and L ynd (2011, 174) should all make reference to Filippo Marinetti, the founder of futurism, in their analyses. For, after all, if in his futurist manifesto (1909) Marinetti exalts speed, the new, and the powerful (and, consequently, the train, the car, and the airplane), he also glorifies wa , the destruction of libraries and museums, and, last but certainly not least if we think about Wieder’s murder of women in Distant, contempt for women. 50. Even though she writes on “Ramírez” (as stated earlier), Jennerjahn is the first to put the artistic pe formances in Bolaño’s text in the context of CADA and the escena de avanzada (2002, 75–77). For Williams, these artistic per formances clearly represent a response (2009, 133) to C ADA but especially to Zurita’s poetry. Also see Fandiño (2007, 101); Rodríguez (2010, 212); Mandolessi (2011, 73), who draws her information on C ADA both from Jennerjahn and Donoso’s articles; and Lynd (2011, 177–79). 51. Some basically recognize the connection (Manzi 2004, 134; Gamboa 2008, 223) while others attempt to explain the connection. For Jennerjahn, the parallel with Marinetti is that both Zurita and Ramírez (or Wieder) seek a kind of messianic superstardom (2002, 80). For Solotorevsky (2007, 362), Cacheiro (2010, 136), and Chaar (2011, 654–55), Wieder’ s aerial performances are a clear parody of Zurita’s fifteen verses from his poem “La vida nueva” written over the sky of New York in 1982. Both Donoso (2008, 5) and L ynd (2011, 178), for their part, underline not only the utter contrast between the artistic actions of each but, above all, the fact that if Wieder seeks to impose a message of death, patriotism, and authority, Zurita seeks to give voice to the politically voiceless and to those marginalized by gender or ethnicity. Fischer recognizes the difficulty in apprehending the meaning of Zurita’s gesture in Wieder’s hands (2008a, 153). In her own study on Distant, Mandolessi (2011, 73–75) centers her attention not so much on the relationship between Wieder’s and Zurita’s sky poetry but between Wieder’s artistic performances and the escena de avanzada’s in general. For Pino (2011, 90), in turn, Wieder’ s sky poems constitute an homage not only to Zurita but also to pilot-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Huidobro, and Mexican Manuel Maples Arce. In Levinson’s view, the allusion to Zurita does not constitute a criticism of his aerial experiments but rather a questioning of “whether literature is still conceivable” (2015, 152). Finally , Bolognese, who published the first monograph on Bolaño, analyzes the relationship between Wieder and Zurita in “Roberto Bolaño y Raúl Zurita” (2010), part of which is later reproduced in a shorter article that explores the difference between what she calls “ghost-like writer and ghost writer” in Bolaño’s novels and where she locates Wieder in the middle of the two categories (2011, 671). According to her , through Wieder’s aerial performances Bolaño both parodies and praises Zurita (2010, 262). She

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underscores the “poet-prophet” (263) attitude that characterizes both Wieder and Zurita and points to other significant differences between the two. But what’s most interesting about Bolognese’s study is the fact that she includes an interview with Zurita himself. The interview revolves around Zurita’s most recent book of poems, Cuadernos de guerra (2009), where the author has Bolaño him self, appearing sick and emaciated in the text, writing poems in the air (265). It’s indeed interesting that Zurita claims that for Wieder to have written all that he wrote in the air, he would have needed many airplanes being used at the same time (270). However, more interesting even, especially given the fact that the Chilean poet did not have a chance to confront Bolaño personally while he was still alive, is the comparison that Zurita establishes between the members of CADA and the infrarrealistas: “Bolaño’s friends were young men making mischief, small tricks in Mexico City. We [the members of CADA] had to very quickly learn to live under Pinochet’s tyranny, we didn’t have time for that innocent pastime of inventing a new marginality ad hoc for ourselves, we were not infrarrealists. Personally, I would have been happy to change Bolaño’s worst job in those years for the best job I had during that time. I stole books from bookstores not to read them but to sell them so I could eat” (271). 52. Gamboa, for example, declares that Wieder’s artistic performances are the product of an almost literal interpretation of some of the most nihilistic aspects of the avant-garde, where acts of torture and murders were often part and parcel of an artistic ideology that saw no problem in the breaking of the barriers that separated art from life (2008, 218). Donoso, for her part, fol lowing Nelly Richard in her La insubordinación de los signos, argues that both a destructive and a deconstructive avant-garde are at play in Distant, the first ha ing to do with the coup d’état and incarnated in Wieder’s actions, the second with CADA-type actions and also incarnated in him (3). Donoso states, “In the description of Wieder’s poetic actions, Bolaño is questioning the avant-garde nature of the military coup, and he’s denouncing the aestheticization of politics as well as the death that it caused” (2008, 4). Burgos, who starts his article alluding to the reference in “The Eye” to the effect that those who were born in the 1950s cannot escape from violence—an idea that is repeated in other Bolaño texts—speaks of a “foundational violence” (a notion he borrows from Benjamin) in all the Chilean-born author’s works (2009, 123). Specifically i the case of Wieder’s character, which is essentially “authoritarian and violent” (131), he links it directly to the avant-garde manifesto: “The avant-garde mani festo . . . is the radical and violent text par excellence. That’s why it’s interesting to remember Breton’s phrase: ‘the surrealist act par excellence is going out into the streets and fire on the crowd’” (131) 53. It is not surprising, given the fact that Wieder utilizes verses from the book of Genesis to write his first poem in the ai , that most critics should speak of a foundational act. By construing his performance as a revolutionary poetic act, and thus establishing a relationship between poetry and “a divine foundational action through the recovery of a biblical text that opposes darkness to light” (Fandiño 2007, 101), Wieder presents himself as a supreme being or ,

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even better, a “poet-demiurge” (Fandiño 2007, 101). See, also, Fandiño’ s “El poeta-­investigador” (2010, 400). For Williams, in Wieder’ s first poem there is the transcription in the sky of “the mystical foundation of military sovereign command” (2009, 136). Critic Béatrice Ménard calls this first poem in general but the one-word verse “APRENDAN” in particular a “commandment that imposes the celestial message as the first lesson of a forced reeducation whose objective is to deprive the defeated of their own expression in order to appropriate their consciences” (2003, 405). What stands out most, according to Donoso, is that just like what occurs in the book of Genesis, in Wieder’s first poem, poet y must also “emerge from out of nowhere” (2008, 4). For Mandolessi, the reason that Wieder is, paradoxically, obsessively attracted both by the repugnant and the pure is because, ultimately, he searches for the “foundation of a new order” (2011, 74). It is the wanting to impose a new order , in fact, that according to Lynd makes this poetic performance in the sky that uses a language, Latin, synonymous with authority so very powerful (2011, 174). Finally , both Pino (2011, 89) and Di Stefano (2013, 471) underscore the shocking or affective quality that Wieder’s first poem has on its audience in the Peña concentration camp 54. According to Jennerjahn, in the photo exhibition Ramírez Hoffman (or Wieder) does essentially two things. On the one hand, by showing pictures of women whom he has murdered, he violates the vow of secrecy that a politics of disappearance entails; on the other, he completely distorts the artistic performances of the Chilean neo-avant-garde (CADA and the escena de avanzada, respectively) whose goal was precisely to protest against such disappearances (2002, 81). Ménard, for her part, alludes to the “process of reification” (2003, 402) that undergo the victims in Wieder’s hands, as their bodies appear as dismembered mannequins in the pictures. From this perspective, two critics, Manzi (2004, 136; 2005, 74) and, more recently , Close (2014, 603), have linked Wieder’s photos of dismembered women to the dolls of surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer. Manzi (2005, 75), moreover , recalls the interest on the part of the post-avant-garde at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s for the fragmented doll and the mistreated female body, while Close connects Distant’s photo exhibition to contemporary art’s fascination with the abject as well as detective fiction s “history of sensational exploitation of eroticized images of murdered female bodies” (606). In Fandiño’s judgment, the photos, “in their capacity as allegories of horror, serve the purpose of softening memory in the sense that they cause to multiply memories of horror” (2007, 93); they repre sent, in sum, “the climax, . . . the explosion of ‘the horrific’” (Fandiño 2010, 401). Donoso sees the photo exhibition as an action that completes Wieder’s aerial poetry (2008, 5). Franklin Rodríguez calls the pictures of dead women’ s bodies “photographic fragments of a historical calamity” (2010, 213) through which Bolaño pays homage to the real victims of state power. What’s interesting for Mandolessi (2011, 76–77) is that while Wieder wishes his photos to be viewed as aesthetic objects—he arranges them as if they were in an art gallery—it is their very materiality that cannot impede the viewer from relating them to the real bodies of murdered women. Vargas Salgado concurs with this assessment when

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he writes: “What I wish to underscore is that the horror effect occurs when the attendees perceive the photos as real, as possible, because their own knowledge of the disappearances allows it” (2011). Di Stefano, finall , stresses the importance for Wieder that his photos be perceived as objects of art (2013, 472). 55. Since Wieder is principally an abject individual according to Mandolessi, the military regime is simply unable to put up with an action that exceeds the limits (2011, 72), even though she recognizes that the reasons for the confronta tion between him and the military remain ultimately unknown in the text (77). For Lynd, Wieder’s faux pas is to have made public something that should have stayed secret (2011, 176). In Close’ s judgment, what provokes Wieder’s expulsion from the military is not the murder of leftist students and poets but having invited his colleagues and other spectators to the photo exhibition (2014, 600). 56. Ménard says it best: “Distant’s narrator . . . interrogates the past by attempting to interpret the signs that might have revealed Wieder. But the verbs of supposition and the adverbs of hypothesis overwhelm the discourse, expressing the trials and errors of a conscience in search of a truth that hides itself” (2003, 407). She continues, “The narrator is only able to assert his lack of certainty, to proclaim the impossibility of any objectivity” (408). For Simunovic, “the ‘vague ness’ of the information that the narrator offers” (2006, 15) is ultimately an aesthetic choice that wants to emulate the same imprecise nature of the information that we, the readers, receive concerning the events that Distant recounts. In her own critical review of Distant, Solotorevsky emphasizes the “conjectural discourse” (356) that abounds in the text. Piérola, for his part, construes this “con jectural discourse” as being part and parcel of a novel that is essentially reflexive and whose goal consists, partially, of reconstructing the past (2007, 247, 249). For Ramírez Álvarez, the narrator is only too aware that his account constitutes only one of many possible accounts of the past (2008, 41); Bolaño’ s text, consequently, “is assembled through suspicions” (42). According to Fischer, Wieder’s entire biography represents a conjecture (2008a, 149). Burgos puts the matter in the context of the subject of the search so prevalent in Bolaño’s narrative, saying, “Bolaño exploits the ‘conjecture’ to which the figure of the disappeared one invites [e.g., Tinajero and Archimboldi]. The disappeared, any disappeared, is always the engine of conjectures” (2009, 140). Not surprisingly , therefore, with respect to how the Garmendia sisters and their aunt may have been assassinated by Wieder, conjecture “becomes the privileged medium to try to remember” (Fandiño 2010, 397). For Rodríguez, who calls Distant “an extended self-critical journey” (2010, 205), self-criticism plays a fundamental role, both in terms of how the information is presented and, most important, in terms of the narrator’s own ambivalent judgment regarding Wieder’s actions. In two articles on Distant—in which a section of the former has been reproduced in the latter—Pino makes reference to the “conjectural semiosis” (2011, 87; 2012, 184–85) that the narrator of the text uses to rewrite history. López Alfonso opts to describe the novel’s predominantly conjectural nature in Bakhtinian terms: “In some sense, Distant is a dialogical novel because it appeals neither to the truth nor to the authority of the narrator but rather to voices and discourses that compete with

Notes t o page 202   |  357







each other” (2011, 678). Finally , for Lynd, what ultimately destabilizes both narrative discourse and the history it depicts is “the insistent self-referentiality of the narrator” (2011, 180). 57. Underscoring the necessity of biographical elements in the novela negra written after dictatorship in order to show the various faces of history, Pino states regarding Bolaño: “Here we have a person who continuously avoids sameness in order to incarnate others” (2012, 186). For his part, Simunovic, at the end of his article, alludes to the presence of doubles as one of the most predominant Borgesian leitmotifs in the author’s fiction (2006, 23). More specificall as pertains to Distant, Fischer refers to “the structure of deformed doubles on which the novel is based” (2008a, 158). For Manzoni, the series of “doublings” (2002, 40) that take place in Bolaño’ s text—for example, that of Bibiano, who in her opinion is another double of the narrator (40)—has its origins in the very preface, which in itself is the “duplication” or “burst” (40) of Nazi’s “Ramírez.” Like Manzoni, and also Rodríguez (2010, 206), López Alfonso calls Bibiano the narrator’s “alter ego” (2006–2007, 43) and, in the sense that the narrator and Romero contribute to Wieder’s death, they are both the latter’s double (50). In Mora’s judgment (185), because Wieder and Stein lead a double existence, Stein is the former’s double. Not every critic, however, adheres to the importance of the double in Bolaño’s novel. Ménard, for instance, underlines Wieder’s state of “constant representation” (2003, 406), while Mandolessi puts emphasis on his inveterately slippery and elusive personality (2011, 70). Then, Rodríguez, who builds his entire study of the text on what he calls the novel’s “extended process of self-criticism via doublings” (205), also recognizes Wieder being in a “constant displacement throughout Distant” (210). 58. In the context of what transpires at the end of the novel’s diegesis, Manzi (2004, 139) asserts that the fine line that separates victim from executioner is very thin indeed, and that it all depends on the historical and personal circumstances of each. What’s paradoxical, for Gamboa—for whom the relationship between Wieder and the narrator is the most important in the text (2008, 216)—is that the two characters who appear to be at the antipodes of each other (Wieder and the narrator) become closer and closer as the story develops (216, 221–22). Bruña Bragado contends the same in her own article on Distant (2012, 45). Chaar (2011) and V argas Salgado (2011) are even more emphatic in this regard. The first states that “the politico-ideological difference that the ide tity of each represents is deleted horrifically . . . based on a shared complicity” (657). The second claims: “In a way, the author proposes a seminal, deep identity between the good and the bad poet, between the assassin and the righteous man.” Also see López Alfonso (2011, 678). 59. For Rodríguez, the chapters on Stein and Soto are constitutive of the dynamics of “doubles and contraries” (2010, 211) characteristic of Bolaño’ s novel. The value of the inclusion of these two chapters is that, while “inessential for the tracking of Wieder” (Lynd 2011, 182), they are “fundamental to the novel’s presentation of differing forms of struggles for justice” (182), including, of course, justice for homosexuals. In this regard, the account of Lorenza-Petra

358   |  Notes t o pages 202–203







is paramount (Lynd 181; Chaar 2011, 662). In Cacheiro’ s view, the inclusion of chapters 4 and 5 of Distant serve the purpose of putting into question the issue of the subject as well as underscoring “the role of fantasy as a structural component” (2010, 138). López Alfonso refers to a kind of secret union among Stein, Soto, and Wieder (2006–2007, 46). Finally , for Chaar (660), the stories of Stein, Soto, and Petra represent a ray of hope and the promise, in the context of a capitalism that seems undeterred, of a new ethics and a new politics. 60. According to Bolognese (2010, 263), for example, though ironically and critically, Bolaño appears to approximate the art emerging from the Right to that emerging from the Left by having Wieder carry out artistic actions similar to those of Zurita. Rodríguez concurs with Bolognese (2010, 212), asserting later in the context of the novel’s last chapter: “A subject/narrator of leftist inclinations identifies himself with the other (Wieder) so that he becomes uncertain as to which his self is. The insistence in Distant on the tension between division and unity . . . asserts a unity that threatens the existing cultural ideologies by suggesting that self and other (good and evil . . .) are constructed from the same material” (216). In López Alfonso’s estimation, it is the dynamics of the double that makes it possible to “suspect in oneself the destructive potentialities apparent in the other” (2006–2007, 48). See, also, López Alfonso’ s “La vanguardia” (2011, 676) and Luche’s “La imagen de las vanguardias” (2011, 686) and “Apocalipsis y literatura” (2013, 485). 61. Echevarría is one of the first to describe the link between “Ramírez” and Distant, calling the process “literary fractality” (2002b, 38), that is, “a narrative sequence whose profile and whose sense itself were configured identically wit independence of their extension being reduced or increased” (38). Manzoni, referring to this process as “the vampirizing of one’s own texts,” as stated above, also calls Distant a palimpsest where a transformation of the original text occurs (2002, 39). Consult, also, Solotorevsky’ s “Estrella distante” (2007, 354–55, 360– 61) and Ramírez (2008, 42). 62. Indeed, the contention that Distant’s ending is “open and indefinite” (Simunovic 2006, 21) but also “suggested” (Solotorevsky 2007, 358) has much to do with Wieder’s fate. Concerning the issue of justice, some critics are categorical. Ménard, for example, puts it this way: “Wieder’s death is neither redemptive nor restorative. It doesn’t solve anything and it doesn’t offer any answers” (2003, 410). L ynd goes even further, calling the final chapter of the text “intensely unsettling” (2011, 185). What most disturbs her is the narrator’ s acceptance of a kind of common humanity with Wieder (177, 186), who is “humanized” (185) by him. She calls this “deeply unsatisfying” (177) because it “leaves the reader with the unsettling sensation that in these historical circumstances, only private, secret, vigilante revenge—rather than public justice—is possible” (177). Along the same lines, see Williams (2009, 138) and V argas Salgado (2011). Agreeing with Ménard and Lynd that there is no human justice at the end of the novel, Manzi affirms that there is, at least, a type of poetic justice (2004, 137). In co trast, Ramírez states the matter thus: “Although it functions as metaphor, Distant affords justice—or vengeance—to those who suffered dictatorship closely” (49).

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For Rodríguez, since vengeance as a system is not an option, the narrator ends up turning to Romero, who becomes “the only means of justice” (2010, 216). 63. Cohen detects what he calls a “Chandler-like, perhaps Auster-like skepticism” (2002, 35) at the end of the text, whereas Manzi refers to “the ethical ambivalence typical of the notion of subject which emerges after the Holocaust” (2005, 77). 64. For Chaar (2011, 657), Romero’ s future plans of becoming an entrepreneur in the funeral industry marks the moment of the emergence of neoliberalism in the novel, a moment that is made evident by Wieder’s first name, Ruíz-Tagle, the same last name of Chile’s second president during which time neoliberal policies became even more entrenched. This is not just a criticism of the governments of the transition, in Chaar’s view; it is also an admission that the trauma of the dictatorship and that of the improvement of neoliberalism during the transition are not that dissimilar (657–58). For V argas Salgado (2011), the fact that Romero is hired by someone who has become rich in Chile’s transition period is of capital importance. See, also, Cacheiro (2010, 140). 65. They are, in chronological order, those of López Alfonso (2006–2007), Piérola (2007), Gamboa (2008), López-Vicuña (2009), Mandolessi (2011), Lynd (2011), Vargas Salgado (2011), Chaar (2011), and Di Stefano (2013). 66. She alludes to the “gendered nature of Wieder’s crimes” (184). 67. Caroline Page prefers to call him “sadistique executioner” (“Littérature,” 2007, 69). 68. The informal Spanish imperative is used in the first case and the formal in the second. 69. Lynd (2011) recognizes this biographical element and thinks that the change of name is a way to prevent readers of Distant from establishing too facile a link between the protagonist and the author, adding that the narrator’s lack of a clear identity confers a kind of universality to his experience of exile (180). 70. I refer, for the most part, to the novels by Fuguet and Marcela Serrano, among others. 71. Lee and Levi jeans were the most prestigious brands and were almost inaccessible to most lower- and middle-class families in Chile. 72. For an enlightening examination of the role that clothes in general and items such as television sets, refrigerators, radios, and others played in Chilean society both before Pinochet’s arrival to power and after, see chapter 2 of Heidi Tinsman’s 2014 study. 73. There is no certainty regarding this piece of information in the text. 74. For an interesting analysis of the implications of the use of this last name in the novel, see N. Birns (2015, 140–41). 75. Regarding Friedman’s recipe of shock treatment for the Chilean economy and its tremendous impact especially upon the poor and middle class, consult chapters 2 and 3 of Cárcamo-Huechante’s Tramas (2007). 76. I owe this very pertinent comment to my friend and colleage Greg Dawes. 77. In Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), Diamela Eltit also utilizes the city of Concepción, but literally not symbolically, as father and daughter conceive a child without realizing their true blood relationship.

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78. I take the information regarding literary conferences at the Universidad de Concepción from Alburquerque’s very useful 2000 study. 79. Among the best known are Alejo Carpentier, Mariano Picón Salas, José María Arguedas, Augusto Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, and Mario Benedetti. 80. This neologism—“mandrakista”—is probably a combination of “mandrágora,” the name of a plant, which was adopted by a surrealist group in Chile founded in the late thirties called "La Mandragora," and "trotskista." 81. This connection becomes even more apparent when Amalia Maluenda states later on in the story that, on the night the Garmendia sisters’ aunt was assassinated by Wieder, she heard “a music of Spaniards” (120). When Soto insults the three neo-Nazis before being killed, it is interesting that he insults them in Spanish, “The adverse Spanish of southern Chile” (80). 82. In By Night (108–9, 111–12), in his classes on Mar xism, Urrutia Lacroix discusses this book with the members of the military junta extensively. 83. See, in particular, pages 23–24 and 323–24 of his study . 84. Though, by stating that, according to some accounts, Stein and five former members of the MIR had been fighting in Angola against South African forces (66)—a conflict which, mutatis mutandi, was the counterpart in Africa of what was happening in Central America at the time—Bolaño seeks to provide an even stronger picture of the globalized nature of the “revolution and armed struggle” in the decade of the 1970s. 85. In Detectives, among the many books that García Madero says he has stolen, one is by Roque Dalton (103). 86. For an excellent analysis of the secret operations of the DINA, the CNI, and repression in general during Pinochet’s dictatorship, consult Policzer’s 2009 analysis. 87. Italics in the original. 88. Due to pressure by Pinochet’s regime, this committee was eventually dissolved in 1975 and was substituted by Vicaría de la Solidaridad (1976–1992), a similar organization created by Pope Paul VI. 89. And, in fact, it might be a clin d’oeil to Chilean Nicolás Palacios’s famous (or infamous) 1904 book Raza chilena: Libro escrito por un chileno y para los chilenos. 90. Of course, this might be a not-so-veiled allusion to an event that took place in 1992. That year, the Chilean government, to show that the Pinochet dictatorship was over and, especially, to prove to the rest of the world that it was a modern country, not only transported an iceberg from Antarctica for display in the World Expo in Seville but, unlike the other Latin American countries at the World Expo, it had its own separate stand. 91. In effect, their study is no more than a recapitulation of certain sections of Bolaño’s book and lacks a thesis. 92. All these verses appear in italics in the text. 93. Italics in the original. 94. The boarding of the Peruvian ship Huáscar carried out by (Arturo) Prat from the Chilean ship La Esmeralda, and dying as a result, has historically been

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regarded as the most heroic moment in Chilean history. A close second would be Caupolicán’s impalment in Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem La Araucana. 95. Italics in the original. 96. Bolaño elaborates this idea further in Amalfitano s recollection of Kilapán’s book in 2666 . 97. Which, in Molina’s judgment, would be a clear disadvantage especially to the reader not familiar with Chilean history (2012, 171). 98. Decante Araya (2011, 223–24) situates the origins of the novel in two chronicles written by Bolaño after his trip to Chile in 1998, “Fragments of a Return to the Native Land” and “The Corridor with No Apparent Way Out,” both of which were later included in Bolaño’s Paréntesis(2004a, 59–70, 71–78, respectively). Castillo de Berchenko (2007, 14) alludes to the significance of Bolaño’s first trip to Chile in the crafting of By Night. So does Draper, who writes, “It seems that the multiple functions and temporalities of the place Bolaño first visited (literary soirées, museums, restaurant, vineyard) played a key role when he was crafting By Night” (2012a, 126). Regarding Bolaño’s inclusion of some of the information from Lemebel’s chronicle in “The Corridor with No Apparent Way Out,” see Moreno (2007, 47–48) and F . Rodríguez (2009, 18–19). 99. See Decante Araya (2007b, 119–20). 100. Lopez, for example, states, “The text is thus followed by an at times very complex system of codification, a meta-litera y play underpinned by a convolution of hyper and hypo textual references” (2007, 67). Consult, also, Berchenko (2011, 11), Castillo de Berchenko (2006, 34; 2007, 14), and López-Vicuña (2009a, 208). For their part, Molina asserts that By Night is “like a roman a clef” (2012, 170) while González Echevarría, by contrast, declares that Bolaño’ s text “is not a roman a clef” (2010, 126). 101. In his analysis of the novel, Andrews (2006) refers specifically to the North American fiction writer Philip Lopate (135) 102. Although Espinosa’s articles cited here are very similar, the value of “Estudio preliminar” (2003a) is that it offers, for the first time in Chile, an overall critical evaluation of Bolaño’s works. She alludes specifically to By Night on pages 28–30. 103. Some simply recognize the fact (Moreno 2005, 206 and Castillo de Ber­chenko 2007, 27–28) while others underscore certain aspects of Ibáñez Langlois’s career that figure prominently in Bolaño s fictional construction of both Nicasio and H. Ibacache. Pérez Villalón (2007), for example, states that Ibáñez Langlois taught Marxism to the members of the junta, while Dove (2009, 153; 2012, 45) suggests that the junta’ s invitation to Ibáñez Langlois to teach them certain principles of Marxism may be due to his publication, in 1973, of El marxismo: Visión crítica. Briceño and Hoyos also mention this book by Ibáñez Langlois (2010, 604). Cuadros, for his part, refers to his publication, in 1964, of an essay titled “El marxismo como teoría y como práctica,” adding not only that his literary weight during Pinochet’s dictatorship was unrivaled but also that he has never denied or admitted attending the literary soirées at Mariana Callejas’s house in the 1970s (2006, 85). Berchenko asserts that “during the

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military regime [Ibáñez Langlois] practiced, hegemonically, what was called ‘critical dictatorship’ in chronicles published in Revista de Libros on Sundays” (2011, 16), and that many considered him “the only critic” (16); he adds, further, that Ibáñez Langlois was the first Chilean priest to become a member of the Opus Dei (17). Both Manzoni (2006, 52) and Moreno (2007, 52) refer to Ibáñez Langlois’s Veinticinco años de crítica (1992) as the fictional Las lecturas de mis lecturas, the book by Nicasio Ibacache in Distant. Manzoni goes on to say that Ibáñez Langlois criticized both structuralism and poststructuralism harshly. In her study, she offers a quote from Ibáñez Langlois’s Veinticinco años regarding what led him to become a literary critic that casts a strong light on H. Ibacache’s own thinking: “eagerness to purify the literary environment and to denounce certain impostures that threaten to impose their authority on public opinion” (52). F. Rodríguez (2009, 23) alludes to Ibáñez Langlois’ s 1986 trip to Europe to become a member of a committee—along with former pope Joseph Ratzinger and others—dedicated to protecting the church against the doctrines of Liberation Theology. In one of her studies, Espinosa presents an excellent retrospective look at the close connection between the Catholic Church and the task of literary criticism in Chile, where the former was traditionally construed as a kind of Panopticon or police (2006, 43), starting with Pedro Nolasco Cruz and continuing with Emilio Vaisse (alias Omer Emeth) all the way to Hernán Díaz Arrieta and Ibáñez Langlois. Finally, and to be fair, Pablo Catalán (2006) reminds us that there are aspects of H. Ibacache that do not correspond to Ibáñez Langlois. The latter, for example, was not a close friend of Díaz Arrieta (Farewell in the text), and, moreover, he even criticized some of Díaz Arrieta’s literary opinions. In the end, states Catalán, Urrutia Lacroix incarnates many literary critics, not just Ibáñez Langlois (125–26). 104. Thus far, for example, besides 2666 , By Night is the only book by Bolaño that has been studied under a single theme. La memoria de la dictadura (2006), edited by Chilean Fernando Moreno, dedicates seventeen critical articles to By Night. Les astres noirs de Roberto Bolaño (2007), edited by Benmiloud and Estève, includes seven, and Écritures des dictatures: Écriture de la mémoire (2007), edited by Vásquez, Mächler, and Mamani, also includes seven. 105. One critic, for example, states that By Night poses the question not only of the function of literature in today’s world but also its value (Domínguez 2012, 90). To another, the writers’ attendance at Canales’s house prompts the question of the very nature of literature, its location (Plaza 2006, 100). Several critics have pointed to what Amaro (2010, 155) calls Urrutia Lacroix’ s “non-ideological, escapist vision of literature” (Cuadros 2006, 88; Decante 2007b, 125; Bisama and Bisama 2006, 27; Espinosa 2006, 46). The loss of literature’ s symbolic capital, its aura—a subject I analyze in the next chapter—has also been mentioned (Rincón 2002, 21; López-Vicuña, 2009, 213). Manzoni, for her part, alludes to the crisis that the literary institution undergoes in the novel (2002, 40). Some scholars have made reference to the intimate relationship between literature and power in By Night (González 2010, 75); specificall , Gómez-Vidal talks about “the complex and ambiguous links” (2007, 44) between the two. Others have

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pointed to the complicit relationship between literature and evil present in By Night (González Echevarría 2010, 126). In one of two studies, Castillo de Ber chenko remarks two dynamics in the text: on the one hand, the critical analysis of the literary tradition, on the other, the aesthetic reflection on the work of art (2006, 35). O’Br yen underlines Bolaño’s “‘untimely’ attachment to literature as an instrument of political critique” (2011, 475). In her chapter on the novel, Draper disputes Villalobos’s contention that Bolaño’s works reveal the exhaustion of literature (2012a, 144–45). Finally , in both of Dove’s practically identical articles—the English version having been published first—the author wonders whether, by juxtaposing a critique of the literary institution and at the same time using a “well-worn cliché” (2009, 150–51)—in reference to the tortured man in the basement in Canales’s house—Bolaño might not just be contradicting himself. In the end, Dove states, “Literature cannot keep itself pure and free of the problem of signification” (2009, 150–51; 2012, 44–45) 106. In Bisama’s (2003, 93) and Manzoni’ s views (2006, 49), By Night constitutes, in large measure, a reflection on the litera y tradition and the canon. From this perspective, Urrutia Lacroix, as reader, is, foremost, a canon maker (Vargas Vergara 2005, 60). In their comparative analysis of Javier Cerca’s Soldados de Salamina and By Night, Briceño and Hoyos contend that both texts reflect on the consequences of incorporating in the national canon authors who identified themselves with controversial political positions (2010, 601–2). They also add later on that the value of Bolaño’s inclusion of characters who are writers in his fiction is to remove literature from the ivo y tower and “its merely spectator-like position of historical events” (604) in which it often has found itself. To Decante, the canonization process that Urrutia Lacroix carries out in By Night is no more than an empty gesture, as “authors and works are led astray in the novel, deprived of their political sense, robbed of their relation to issues of the present, reduced to a string of clichés” (2007b, 123–24). 107. It certainly makes sense, given Urrutia Lacroix’s dual role as writer and critic, that scholars should tackle the topic of writing and criticism or, specifically, the writer and the critic. For Decante, the inclusion of authors in By Night brings to the fore the issue of the writer’s ethics as well as that of “the separation between art and life, between poiesis and praxis” (2007a, 20; 2007b, 125). Huneeus, availing himself of some of Bourdieu’s concepts, explores the manner in which Urrutia Lacroix enters the cultural field, eventually becoming the critic ­ aristocrat par excellence to whom all other writers must submit (2007, 85–87). 108. According to most scholars, both the critic and literary criticism in general are represented as devalued in By Night. A labor that is initially conceived of as a “civilizing mission” (Plaza 2006, 95) by Urrutia Lacroix culminates in the recognition of “the vanity of the critical enterprise” (Roger 2007, 89). The novel becomes the theater of the various stages of the “crisis of criticism” as well as the ultimate “‘misplacing’ and dislocation of the critical subject” (Nordenflycht 2011, 210). In By Night, hence, the literary critic is presented as an essentially degraded individual (Gerendas 2002, 8). In Franklin Rodríguez’ s judgment, instead of the critic being “the traditional decipherer of truth or

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autobiographical detective” (2009, 7), in Bolaño’ s novel the critic becomes a “puzzle creator” (8), an “enhancer of undecidability and disseminator of false clues” (8) whose task is “to erase the marks and the traces” (7) that might lead to unraveling the secret. Now, some have seen Urrutia Lacroix as critic differently. Espinosa, for example, indicates that the priest assigns two functions to literary criticism: (1) as a strategic activity that might enhance his own poetry; and (2) as a kind of civic enterprise that contributes to society’s well-being (2006, 45). Manzi, finall , asserts that the latter function serves the purpose of “curing his secret and intimately shameful writing practice” (2007, 106). 109. As stated earlier, the character of María Canales is modeled on Mariana Callejas, a writer who, in the 1970s, during the harshest period of the dictator ship, held literary tertulias in her house while working for the DINA (1974– 1978). She was married to North American Michael Townley, both a CIA and DINA agent responsible for the murders of opponents of the military regime (e.g., Orlando Letelier and General Carlos Prats). Callejas and Townley’s house also served as a detention center for the torture of political prisoners (Carmelo Soria, a Spanish diplomat working for Allende’s government, for instance, is said to have been tortured there before being killed). Some of this information is provided by Callejas herself in her autobiographical account Siembra vientos: Memorias (1995). For Castillo de Berchenko, the fictional Canales, whom she calls “a deformed monster, born out of a decaying literature” (2006, 31), is used by Bolaño to reveal some of the prejudices against women writers in Chile who avail themselves of their youth and good looks in order to be recognized as creators (35). Similarly, for Berchenko, in contrast to Farewell, Canales is a faithful representative of the right-wing social climber (2007, 32). It is not a surprise, therefore, that three critics should underline not only the fact that Canales never repents but that, even after the dictatorship is over, she still insists on keeping politics and aesthetics apart (Moreno 2007a, 51; Briceño and Hoyos 2010, 609). Moulian refers to this as “a new proof of the moral futility of writing” (2001, 2). 110. The visits to Canales’s house by Urrutia Lacroix and other writers have of course elicited a great deal of critical assertions. In real life, and as Lemebel suggests in his own chronicle (1998, 14–16), those who attended Callejas’ s house denied it categorically. The point of the story, in Dove’s view, is that, through “the motif of complicity” (2009, 150), it illustrates the way in which society , represented by the writers who visited Canales’s house, may have seen torture but chose not to see it; this is independent of the fact of whether, in reality, they were or were not aware that torture sessions were being conducted in the basement (2009, 150; 2012, 44). Rodríguez, who establishes an interesting contrast between Lemebel’s bravery in denouncing what took place in Callejas’s house (in “Las orquídeas”) and Socialist politician José Arrate’s all too comfortable position in the Concertación government (to which Bolaño refers in “The Corridor with No Apparent Way Out”), argues that the house’s ultimate destruction after the dictatorship is directly related to what he calls—following Moulian in Chile actual—“the rapid transition or the blanqueo . . . or . . . transaction” (2009, 18). Decante Araya refers to Canales’s house (as well as to Farewell’s) as “places of

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removal, cut off from the daily political reality” (2007a, 20). Canales’ s house has also been conceived of as “the mise en abyme of Chile under dictatorship” (GómezVidal 2007, 45), the site where language hides reality and where literature is at the service of dictatorship. In Draper’s analysis (2012a), Canales’ s house, which is essentially figured as a detention center and thus a place of horro , Bolaño has successfully portrayed “the normalization of the practice of secrecy” (149) both during and after the dictatorship (148–49). Finally , Fandiño, who, like Draper, uses theories of space to analyze Canales’s house, writes, “María Canales’s house . . . sets up once again the duplicity between what is manifest and what hides itself through the vertical ordering up/down, in which the top and visible part links the semantic chain salon-party-silence-oblivion, whereas the bottom part articulates the following notions: basement-torture-failure to report-memory” (2010, 411). For information regarding what really transpired in Mariana Callejas’s house as well as which writers attended the literary workshops there, see Peñas’s article and his interview of Callejas. In the 2010 inter view, Callejas mentions the names of three young writers who attended her house in Lo Curro: Carlos Franz, Gonzalo Contreras, and Carlos Uturra. But she assures Peña that none of the guests knew that the house was also a detention center for political prisoners. 111. From here on, all textual references from the novel are indicated with the page number in parenthesis. “This is how literature is made in Chile”—with which Bolaño ends his chronicle—is no doubt at the heart of By Night. Decante Araya calls it “nuclear syntagma” (2011, 224) while for Castillo de Berchenko, who dedicates an entire article to it, it is the text’s raison d’être in the sense that it dramatizes the problematic relation that exists between art and the role the artist plays in the socio-cultural sphere (2006, 31). López-Vicuña calls it “enig matic,” affirming that if it might be looked at as mere self-justification on Urruti Lacroix’s part, it can also be construed as a “cry of impotence in the face of literature’s inability to change, justify or redeem the catastrophe that is contemporary history” (2009a, 212). One critic views the words “This is how literature is made in Chile” as indicative of the condemnation of the separation between aesthetics and ethics that it implies (Rodríguez 2009, 19). Another states that it reveals a complete lack of concern for the suffering of others for fear of losing one’s own privileges (Andrews 2006, 141). In Draper’ s view, this key sentence by Canales constitutes an effort to naturalize, neutralize, or anesthetize that which might otherwise “arouse an uncanny feeling” (2012a, 144). Finally , for Briceño and Hoyos there is a certain ambiguity in the “así” of the sentence that is not resolved in the end (2010, 610). 112. The conversation between Reyes and Jünger—which is not included either in Reyes’s Recuerdos de París (Moulian 2001, 2) or in Jünger’ s diaries (Manzi, 2005, 79)—illustrates the problematic relationship between art and Nazism (Berchenko 2007, 39). In this metanarrative, in fact, though Urrutia Lacroix is able to acknowledge the ethical problems that it raises, he is unable to connect it to his own situation (Rodríguez 2009, 9). Gerendas calls Reyes and Jünger “insti tutionalized writers” (2002, 8), while Zapata refers to them as “true ‘ogres’ of culture” (2007, 139). These two “writers-officials,” as Huneeus calls them (2007,

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87), have each been evaluated differently. Rodríguez refers to Jünger as “the aristocrat writer par excellence” (2009, 9). So does López-Vicuña, who notes his heroic qualities, adding that Jünger, even though he was an essentially conservative writer, assisted leftist artists, including Picasso, during the Vichy regime in Paris (2009a, 209–10). In Lopez’ s judgment, if Jünger—Urrutia Lacroix’s “object of fascination” (2006, 79) in whom he projects himself—is unable to see the political repression that castigates Paris, so is the priest incapable of recognizing the social and political problems that burden Chile (78–79). Gómez-Vidal sees the inclusion of Jünger—whom she calls “this warrior/poet, this war hero and great writer” (2007, 59)—in the novel as a condemnation of his Nazi sympa thies. Estève, whose article centers partially on the representation of Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (1941) in By Night, provides some interesting information on the German author. He says, for instance, that in his Journaux de guerre Jünger admits having read “L’Équipage de la Nuit, by Salvador Reyes, Chile’s consul” (620) (2007, 142). Calling the fictional Jünger the pe fect antithesis of the Guatemalan painter (145), he sees in the real Jünger of Journaux de guerre “a man from the art world” (145) who knows how to subordinate “to beauty and to art all the vicissitudes of these troubling times” (146). As regards Reyes, in Nordenflycht s view he plays the role of a spectator who awaits being illuminated by Jünger (2011, 214). Benmiloud, for his part, chastises the Chilean author for his utter indifference when confronted with the Guatemalan painter’s Angst; instead of having shown solidarity with a Latin American like him, he feels hurt that the latter hasn’t read the novel he loaned him (2007, 115–16). 113. The Guatemalan painter, in whom one critic has seen a partial transfi uration of Guatemalan painter Carlos Mérida (Manzi 2005, 80), incarnates for most critics the concept of melancholia: “It is he who, clearly, concentrates all of the symptoms of the morbus melancholicus,” states Decante Araya (2007a 22). For one critic, the painter’s melancholia is a reflection of Bolaño s own melancholic posture as manifested in the text (Mora 2011, 193). T o another, who argues that Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” permeates much of the novel, the painter’s melancholia constitutes a superior type of melancholia that Reyes and Jünger both pity but also admire (Zapata 2007, 138). In her own study on Bolaño, González claims that the Guatemalan painter “constructs melancholia” but also “existential emptiness and pain” (2010, 133). Others have empha sized attributes of the Guatemalan painter that go beyond his melancholia. For Benmiloud, for example, the painter prefigures the tortured man in Canales s basement and is also an allegory for what he calls Nazi death (2007, 115, 119). Domínguez, who refers to him as “a ghost of himself” (2012, 79), argues that the painter, in his lucidity, provokes the envy of his visitors (79). For both Rodríguez (2009, 10) and Molina (2012, 186) he’ s a species of supra conscience that reminds Urrutia Lacroix of his own ethical shortfalls. In García Romeu’s view, what most stands out in the painter’s contemplation of the city of Paris is his impotence (2007, 74). Finally , if Gerendas underscores his greatness in defeat (2002, 8), Estève repudiates his resentment, making him a squarely anti-Nietzs chean figure (2006, 105)

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114. In her three studies dedicated to By Night, Decante Araya underlines the fragmentary nature of the painting, adding that the latter shares several thematic traits with the text. Her major contention, however, is that the Guatemalan painter’s oeuvre becomes the site from where a poetics of resistance that spawns a reflection between art and memo y emerges (2007a, 24–28; 2011, 229). She calls the painting “a poetic model for a mise en abyme in the novel” (2007b, 132). In Mora’s view—for whom this is a surrealist painting—“The painting’s spatiality, attached to its content, becomes a metaphor for By Night’s own spatiality” (193). For Benmiloud, for whom the painting is directly linked to the novel’s title, there is no doubt that the painting is a symbolic representation of the Nazi concentration camps’ victims (2007, 116–17). See, also, Rincón (2002, 34–35). 115. Of all the titles of Bolaño’s texts, for one critic this is the most complex given the multiple significations of the term nocturno (Esquerro 2006, 69). For most, needless to say, the connection to a musical composition marked by somber and melancholic tones is undeniable (Domínguez 2012, 76; Decante 2011, 223; Rodríguez 2009, 8). Decante writes, in fact, “The title of the novel itself appears to inscribe it under the sign of melancholia” (2007a, 13). The novel’ s title has also been connected to Chile’s so-called cultural blackout (Decante 2011, 223; Berchenko 2011, 11). Moreno, for his part, while asserting that the text’s title is both multifarious and specific (2006, 160), astutely makes the point that the calm and tranquility that nocturno announces is patently contradicted by Urrutia Lacroix’s extremely tormented discourse (2005, 202–3). In Adolfo and Álvaro Bisama’s view, Bolaño both parodies and problematizes the term nocturno (2006, 23). The paratext that is the novel’ s title designates the time of the enunciation, that is, nighttime, claims Roger (2007, 89), and, at the same time, it is a reference to Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (90). “From the title of the novel,” writes Benmiloud, “the reader knows that he’s entering the world of the night . . . a dark world, darkened . . . with shadows” (2007, 109), whereas González Echevarría states, “From the title itself, By Night announces a profound, meticulous and sustained reflection on the homeland, on the nation” (2010, 121). For more information regarding the novel’s title, see Plaza (2006, 91–92). 116. The text’s epigraph, “Take off the wig,” is taken from G. K. Chesterton’s short story “The Purple Wig.” In it, an impostor who uses a wig to pass himself off as a duke is prompted to take it off. Once he does, however, it is revealed not only that he is not a duke but that, ultimately, he has nothing to hide, that he’s just like all other men. For Dove, who expands his discussion on the implications of this epigraph in the Spanish translation of his original article (2012, 37–38), the quote from Chesterton’ s short story offers the “interpretive key for reading the novel” (2009, 146). Most critics argue that what the epigraph announces is the exposing or unmasking of the protagonist (Decante 2011, 227; Moreno 2006, 160). For Adolfo and Álvaro Bisama the epigraph has to do with “the progressive uncovering of truth that is carried out in the priest’s interior monologue, free from any cosmetic and disguise” (2006, 24). Nevertheless, as Benmiloud reminds us, what the reader eventually finds out is that, in realit , the wig or mask conceals “the hidden, monstrous Ear which has heard the crime

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. . . the screams of the victims murdered inside María Canales’s cave” (2007, 128). In Manzi’s judgment, Urrutia Lacroix tries various wigs throughout the story, until, finall , “there is neither word nor wig that is worth it” (2006, 112). López-Vicuña, finall , interprets the epigraph thus: “This quotation invites the reader to question all of the literature’s pretensions of nobility, impartiality, and superiority, recognizing that in all literature there is also hypocrisy, bad faith, and betrayal” (2009b, 163). 117. Some have understood this last sentence as a kind of return of that which was repressed or not articulated throughout the diegesis (Decante 2011, 223; O’Bryen 2011, 484). Others have made the connection between it and Jünger’ s memoir of his experiences on the Western Front during the First World War, Storm of Steel (Rodríguez 2009, 21; Gómez-Vidal 2007, 59). Catalán, like Briceño and Hoyos (2010), offers two possibilities. Elaborating on the meaning of this last sentence in some detail, he argues that while he who enunciates the novel’s last words might be Urrutia Lacroix, it makes much more sense that it be the aged young man (2006, 127–28). For Briceño and Hoyos these words either allude to the priest’s condemned soul or indicate a new beginning of the story (608). In Dove’s view, the novel’s last words “have [sic] the paradoxical effect of displacing the idea of salvation to which [By Night] aims from its inception” (2012, 40). Moreno construes this sentence both as a sign of closure and open ing, explaining that it is really not possible to know whether this narrating voice is the same as that in the rest of By Night (2006, 160). One critic suggests that the text’s last sentence reveals the realization on the priest’s part that everything he has done has been useless (Plaza 2006, 101). Another sees a direct relationship between the “shit” of the sentence and the doves’ excrement that contaminate the churches in Europe (González Echevarría 2010, 122). In his study on the expression “Sordello, What Sordello?,” Benmiloud tells us that a very famous poem by Sordello ends in “storm” (2006a, 155). See, finall , Estève (2007, 150). 118. Not surprisingly, many critics have referred to the aged young man, simply, as Urrutia Lacroix’s conscience or superego (Dove 2009, 147, 2012, 39; Rodríguez 2009, 6, 19; Masoliver 2002b, 190; González Echevarría 2010, 118). Others refine this assessment by calling it the priest s guilty conscience (Espinosa 2003a, 29; Benmiloud 2006a, 154, 2007, 111); “real voice of the protagonist’ s and narrator’s guilty conscience,” writes Decante (2007a, 17–18). The aged young man has also been construed as Urrutia Lacroix’s double (Gómez-Vidal 2007, 61; García-Romeu 2007, 72; Esquerro, 2007, 39) or alter ego (Domínguez 2012, 83; Decante 2011, 227; Masoliver 2002b, 190). Moreno calls him “terrible double” (2005, 208) and Esquerro labels him “diabolical double” (2006, 70). Draper writes, “The ambiguous specter that haunts his consciousness throughout the novel stands both as a double of the young priest . . . and as the specter of a leftist militant, who reappears at the end of the novel as a corpse” (2012a, 129). The German term doppelgänger has also been employed (Briceño and Hoyos 2010, 616; Nordenflycht 2011, 212). He has been likened to a phantom-like figure (Nordenflycht 2011, 212; Esquerro, 2007, 39) that may ve y well represent a detenido-desaparecido (a victim of illegal abduction and forced disappearance by

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military dictatorships) who comes back again and again (Manzi 2006, 115; 2007, 104–5). The same goes for Rodríguez, who calls the aged young man “the trace and record of all the victims” (2009, 20). For O’Br yen, like Auxilio and Sordello, it is he who “thwart[s] all forgetting” (2011, 484). Similarly , Fandiño (2010, 405) and Esposito (2012, 103) conceive of him as he who appeals to the priest’ s moral responsibility. Several critics have underscored the aged young man’s function as producer of Urrutia Lacroix’s discourse. In her studies dedicated to By Night, for example, Decante, referring to him as either a “disruptive force” (2007b, 124) or “competitor” (2011, 227), argues that it is he who makes Urru tia Lacroix speak by provoking in him an unbearable crisis (2007a, 18; 2007b, 124; 2011, 226–27); without him, in other words, there would be no novel. Pablo Catalán goes as far as to call him “the source of discourse, the producer of the subject of enunciation and the cartography of the statement” (2006, 125), and calling the priest’s narration the hypertext of the aged young man’s hypotext (125, 129). Along the same lines, Moreno refers to him as a “true trigger of the tumultuous memory” (2005, 208) as well as “a motor of the stor y” (2006, 161). Esquerro states he is the “trigger of the confessional discourse” (2007, 38), and “the great disturber who prevents the moribund from enjoying silent peace” (2006, 70). In the aged young man Castillo de Berchenko sees a figure that proposes a different kind of memory, that of the exile who has come back, “a stalking presence-absence that insults and determines the auto-justification of the priest, critic, and poet” (2006, 35). T wo critics have simply made allusion to the aged young man’s formal role in the text, one calling him an “internal narratee” (Domínguez 2012, 77) and the other Urrutia Lacroix’ s “interlocutor” (Cuadros 2006, 90). Finally , there are critics who diverge from the most accepted assessments regarding him. Plaza, for instance, thinks that, at least from Urrutia Lacroix’s standpoint, he represents another critic who has come to undermine the values that have justified his existence (2006, 100). o Molina, he is essentially an undefined figure whose major characteristic is that he doe not respond (2012, 176). In his book-length study , Candia refers to him as a “mental projection that brings to mind Carl Jung’s figure of the shado , the one that represents the dark side of human beings’ personality” (2011b, 71). 119. Some identify the aged young man as Bolaño tout court (Catalán 2006, 129; Masoliver 2002b, 190; Manzi 2006, 115). Others, focusing on information that somewhat coincides with Bolaño’s biography—for example, the fact that he was also born in the early 1950s—conclude that the aged young man approximates or could be the author (Amaro 2010, 154; Nordenflycht 2011, 212; Moreno 2005, 208; Lopez 2006, 83; López-Vicuña 2009b, 163). Castillo de Ber chenko states: “His itinerary reminds us of Bolaño. Is he Bolaño? Is he Bolaño’s double? Is he Urrutia’s conscience? Is he Urrutia himself?” (2006, 35). Domín guez, finall , calls him an “awkward” literary projection of Bolaño (2012, 83). 120. This question is posed by Farewell as he’s talking about Italian poets and at the precise moment when he puts his hands around Urrutia Lacroix’s waist (26). A thirteenth-century troubadour, Sordello was one of Italy’s most famous poets, included in Dante’s Purgatory and known above all for his bravery. It is to

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this latter quality, in fact, plus the love for his country, that most critics make reference as they contrast Sordello’s behavior to that of Urrutia Lacroix’s (Domínguez 2012, 82; Decante 2007a, 17; G. Aguilar 2002, 150). Decante calls the Italian troubadour an “incarnation of the civil poet” (2007b, 124) and Andrews, as he exalts his personal ethics, asserts that he’s the very antithesis of By Night’s protagonist (2006, 139); so does Gómez-Vidal, who adds that, in contradistinc tion to the priest, in Sordello words and acts are one and the same (2007, 45). In Lopez’s view, besides the fact that for Bolaño Sordello incarnates the model of the ideal literary figure in general and the poet in particula , he’s used in the text to “enrich and to broaden the referential space of his narration” (2007, 65). Benmiloud, for his part, in one of his studies, establishes a close parallel between the refrain and what he calls Urrutia Lacroix’s “deafness” (2007, 128), that is, his inability to listen. In another, devoted entirely to “Sordello, What Sordello?”—to which he refers as “a short, nagging and obsessive refrain” (2006a, 149)—he argues that the refrain originates in a misunderstanding (149), and not only in the sense that neither the young priest nor Neruda knows who Sordello is but also because, etimologically speaking, there’s a link between it, that is, the failure to understand, and “deafness.” At the same time, proceeds Benmiloud, the leitmotif is related to Urrutia Lacroix’s guilt (151) as well as his identity (153), an identity that stands at the antipodes of that of the troubadour: “While Sordello sang and shouted against the powerful, he, the narrator, shouts, but plagued with terror . . . and amidst general indifference” (157). Molina, finall , emphasizes the formal aspects of this leitmotif, claiming that it functions as a kind of signifier that becomes a fetish (2012, 184–85) 121. The stated purpose of the protagonist’s trip is to write a report on the preservation of churches there (80). Nevertheless, as it becomes evident in the diegesis, his journey is fundamentally symbolic. For some critics, the method employed in Europe to prevent pigeons from damaging churches, that is, by having falcons kill them, pure and simple, reflects the existence of an internal war going on inside the church in the 1960s—in Chile in particular and in Latin America in general—between a progressive wing represented by Liberation Theology and a conservative wing that loathed Communism and was dead set against land reform (Berchenko 2011, 12–13; Moreno 2006, 168; Manzi 2006, 117). Of course, the symbolically charged figures of the falcons and the pigeons have led others to see their confrontation as a foreboding of the attack against members of the Left opposed to Pinochet’s dictatorship (Manzi 2006, 118; Huneeus 2007, 92). In this context, the falcons either represent the militar y or the DINA (Andrews 2006, 138), or they constitute a prophecy of the dictatorial regime to come, the pigeons symbolizing the victims (Fandiño 2010, 407–9). Draper goes as far as to claim that, in his trip to Europe, the priest becomes a “national security agent” (2012a, 136), while Moreno relates it to the infamous Operación Cóndor in which the military regimes of southern cone countries sought to eliminate political opponents (2006, 168–69). In Berchenko’ s view, Urrutia Lacroix’s European journey brings about his political awareness (2007, 35). One critic calls this journey “a sort of bloody baptism” (Lopez 2006, 80)

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that awakes in him “his own predispositions of nocturnal predator” (80). Regarding the falcons themselves, some have made a connection between their savagely speedy flights and Italian futurism (Domínguez 2012, 85). Others, specificall concerning their names, see them as a satire of nationalism, in the sense that each of their names is related to a national trait (González Echevarría 2010, 122). Finally, Estève, in one study that examines the concept of technique in By Night by using Heidegger’s concept of technique, asserts that the falcons, “these predatory birds” (2007, 150), are “a metaphor of technology” (150) and, of necessity, a prefiguration of the airplanes that bombarded La Moneda. In another study, claiming that the priest’s European journey represents a symbolic change and pointing to Father Antonio’s strong spiritual power, he states that the latter is “the strict religious correlate of the Guatemalan painter in his mortified der liction” (2006, 108). 122. The discussion of this part of the story has chiefly centered on two points: the figure of Pinochet and the fate of criticism. For Burgos, Bolaño s brilliance resides in portraying Pinochet not as a superman or grand dictator but rather as a simple, ordinary man (2009, 131–32). Now , though the fictional dictator—like Jünger before him—represents the writer who has reached power, his power is diminished by the mediocre quality of his writings; by focusing on Pinochet as a writer, in other words, “Bolaño shatters the figure of the writer” (Gerendas 2002, 9). In the end, like Hitler, Pinochet is a frustrated artist, and politics is the sphere where aesthetic failure is resolved (Bisama and Bisama 2006, 30). The fictional dictator in By Night underlines “the symbolic degradation of writing” (Moulian 2001, 2), proving, most important, that “writing doesn’ t make anyone a better person” (Moulian 2). Besides the fact that Urrutia Lacroix’s lessons on Marxism revisit the topic of the soldier-writer, or intelligentsia-dictatorship in this case (Berchenko 2007, 40), and dramatizes “the connivance between militar y power and the power of the critic” (Espinosa 2006, 46), Pinochet’ s presence also signals the priest’s failure as literary critic since he’s unable to rebuff the dictator’s opinion regarding Lafourcade’s Palomita blanca (Plaza 2006, 99). Criticism ceases being an “evaluating discourse” and a “liberating praxis” (Nordenflycht 2011, 216) and becomes just another instrument of politics. If, as Rodríguez contends regarding this episode, Urrutia Lacroix’s lessons constitute a distraction whose useful aspect is to force him to take stock of his values and his actions (2009, 12), Bolaño’ s warning not to allow oneself to be seduced by the powerful (Andrews 2006, 138) is completely disregarded by the priest (Estève 2006, 109). 123. Most critics have referred to Farewell as Urrutia Lacroix’s “putative father” (Lopez 2007, 55, 2006, 79), second or substitute father (Dove 2012, 39, 47), “adoptive father” (Esposito 2012, 102), “literar y father and predecessor” (Rodríguez 2009, 6), father, simply (Esquerro 2006, 72), and “father and guru of his writing life” (Draper 2012a, 132). As regards Farewell’ s cardinal role in Chile’s Republic of Letters, he’s been called “a barely disguised version of Alone” (Bisama and Bisama 2006, 25) as well as a “cultural authority” (Dove 2009, 152) who is culturally superior both to Neruda and the priest (Andrews 2006, 140). Along these lines, Espinosa goes as far as to call Farewell a “literary dictator”

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(2006, 41) and Huneeus a “countr y estate’s boss of the cultural field” (2007, 86). It is he who constructs the literary canon (Briceño and Hoyos 2010, 602). If Urrutia Lacroix represents bourgeois values, he, Farewell, represents aristocratic ones (Nordenflycht 2011, 210). These values and this way of conceiving culture, nonetheless, are disappearing (Berchenko 2007, 31–32). But this “Virgilian” (González Echevarría 2010, 127) or “Dionysian” figure (Estève 2006, 106) remains “stuck in the past” (Zapata 2007, 140) unperturbed. 124. Là-Bas is the name of an 1891 novel by French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans whose major theme is Satanism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, some critics have construed Farewell’s Là-Bas as an infernal location (Lopez 2007, 57; Rodríguez 2009, 19). For one critic, Là-Bas is a representation of Chile’s countryside prior to Frei’s, Allende’s, and the military regime’s land reforms (Berchenko 2011, 12). It has also been seen as the site of literature and art (Decante 2007a, 20; 2007b, 130) and even as a kind of re-creation of the well-known pastoral locus amoenus (Briceño and Hoyos 2010, 609). Mabel V argas defines Là-Ba metaphorically thus: “Port where the battleships of literature run aground and . . . place where [Urrutia Lacroix] will have to mold his knowledge” (2005, 59). Now , if one keeps in mind that Farewell’s abode is the terrain where literary and artistic matters are discussed among friends, plus the fact that the Colombian José Asunción Silva’s famous poem is mentioned in the text (82), a possible connection between Silva’s own modernist novel De sobremesa and Là-Bas might be established. For a more complete analysis of the connection between By Night and Huysmans’s Là-Bas, see Mora (2011, 191–92). 125. Though Rojo alludes to “Bolaño’s anti-Neruda disposition in By Night” (2004, 206), it is worth noting that Neruda is mentioned several times in Detectives (30, 83, 146–66, 332, and 394) and, as we saw in chapter 4, Bolaño carries out a reckoning with the Chilean poet in “Card.” He’s alluded to three times in By Night: at the beginning, in Farewell’s house, and toward the end of the diegesis, both when he receives the Nobel and when he dies. With respect to the powerful aura that surrounds him when the young priest visits Là-Bas, one critic refers to him as “demiurge of the Chilean world of letters” (Lopez 2006, 78). Decante, in her analysis of Neruda’s poem in the text, argues that what we have here is a parody of his poetics (2007b, 126–27). For Briceño and Hoyos, from the perspective of Farewell and Urrutia Lacroix, Neruda “incarnates the contradiction between Chile’s literary history and its history in a broader sense; as a socialist, he should be on the fringes of Chile’s political history, but as a writer of great recognition he needs to be at the center of its literary history” (2010, 608). Finally, for Berchenko, the allusion to Neruda’s death and his funeral ceremony being guarded by the authorities symbolizes the arrival of the country’s blackout and the end of the old Chile (2007, 35). 126. The story of what happens during the war in this site is told to Urrutia Lacroix by Farewell (51). For Plaza, it encapsulates several issues treated in the text (2006, 96). T wo critics see it as an allegory. For Nordenflycht, it s an allegory of the critic who’s obsessed with building a type of definitive canon (2011, 215). González Echevarría sees this stor y as an allegory of a writing whose faith

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and dedication to the fatherland approaches fascism, or even a reflection of Pinochet’s dictatorship; however, he admits that he ultimately doesn’t really understand what function it has in diegesis and how it is connected to the rest of the text (2010, 125). Three other critics stress the stor y’s exemplary quality. Briceño and Hoyos, for example, call it a parable about the deceiving nature of the heroic and the monumental (2010, 617), whereas for Gerendas it illustrates the risks and dangers that being seduced by power entail (2002, 9). In fact, the shoemaker’s ultimate failure announces Urrutia Lacroix’s own subsequent debacle (Roger 2007, 89). Understandably , one critic sees this story as an illustration of a cultural system that depends on patronage for its survival (Huneeus 2007, 88); for another it exemplifies—along with the sto y of Jünger and Reyes—the ethical textual instances in which intellectuals are confronted with power (Manzoni 2006, 53). Domínguez refers to it as “the essence of the artistic text as monument” (2012, 79), and Gómez-Vidal asserts that it becomes “a buffoonish fairy tale” (2007, 60). Finally , in the arrival of the Russians at Heldenberg, where they find the shoemaker s body, Benmiloud sees the arrival of the Russians at Auschwitz-Birkenau (2007, 120–21). 127. Among these formal characteristics, the use of the ellipsis has been noted, both at the level of content (Domínguez 2012, 78) and discourse (Decante, 2007a, 15). The testimonial nature of the narrative discourse has also been noted (Decante 2011, 226; Oliver 2006, 145–46). As regards By Night’s structure, it’s been called “suffocating” (Berchenko 2011, 11) and “reflective” (Andrews 2006, 137). T o describe Urrutia Lacroix’s ever oscillating discourse, which jumps from one event to another, one critic has spoken of “an intertwining process of focalization” (Espinosa 2002, 130). Finally , in one study, Moreno makes reference to what he calls “metaphorical discourse,” meaning that Bolaño borrows from a previous text (e.g., the figure of Ibacache) and rewrites it, inserting it in a new context in which it expands and transforms itself (2007a, 43). In another , he describes other formal traits: for instance, the use of “repetition, juxtaposition, simplification, amplification, and deviation at the level of language” (2006 163). One of the most enlightening articles on Urrutia Lacroix’s discourse, if not the most enlightening, is Enrique Luengo’s “Nocturno de Chile de Roberto Bolaño. Anatomía de una confesión imposible” (2017). 128. The subject of melancholia in By Night is no doubt one of the most broadly studied. So far, six studies have been dedicated to it: Plaza 2006; Ben miloud 2007, the best of the six; Decante 2007a and 2011; Zapata 2007; and O’Bryen 2011. In one of her two articles, Decante, arguing that oftentimes in the text melancholia is used playfully and parodically, characterizes the priest as an essentially melancholic being (2007a, 13); in the other , she contends that melancholia is related directly to mourning and memory but also to a critical review of the canon during the transition (2011, 221). Other critics also underscore the innately melancholic attributes of Urrutia Lacroix’s personality. Estève, for example, states that melancholia affects him diachronically (2006, 104). Plaza claims that there is no better way to describe the priest than as a melancholic individual, but that, in the end, it is precisely this melancholia that erodes all of

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his certainties (92, 94). For her part, Zapata, who calls Urrutia Lacroix a “melan cholic cannibal” (2007, 143), construes melancholia in By Night fundamentally as pathology (136). To Benmiloud, melancholia constitutes “the symptom of the Fault (2007, 128) . . . the psychic manifestation of this mourning of the dictatorship itself that the personage is never quite able to carry out” (130–31). In their analyses, more than one critic has established a connection between the priest’s posture as he narrates—that is, leaning on his elbow—and Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving “Melencolia I” (Benmiloud 2007, 111; Roger 2007, 87); a connection with Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy has been established also (Mora 2011, 189; Benmiloud 2007, 113). Finally , in contrast to most critics who see melancholia in the text as a debilitating force, O’Bryen sees it as a source of contesting energy both politically and in terms of empowering the literary institution (2011, 475). 129. Written backwards, the names of these two characters become “miedo” (fear) and “odio” (hate), respectively. It is really not surprising, then, that they have been referred to as “messengers of horror” (González 2010, 136), “sinister double” (Manzoni 2006, 53), and “diabolical characters” (García-Romeu 2007, 77). Almost every critic sees Odeim and Oido as CIA agents who instigated the coup d’état in Chile during Allende’s government (Berchenko 2007, 34; 2011, 19; Manzi 2006, 117; Rodríguez 2009, 12). For Estève—although he doesn’ t express it in exactly these terms—these two characters represent the arrival of neoliberalism (2007, 156). Benmiloud, one of whose articles is dedicated entirely to Odeim and Oido, sees them, simply, as projections of the narrator himself, of Urrutia Lacroix’s own fear and hate (2007, 133). But he also sees them as the narrator’s doubles (2010, 231), as the typical henchmen used by dictatorial regimes (233), calling them “two hitmen” (234) or “acolytes” (237) who not only could be conceived of as agents of the CIA and the DINA but who “incarnate this absolute Evil that Roberto Bolaño represents and stages obsessively in all of his narrative works” (238). 130. Urrutia Lacroix’s cassock indeed becomes a kind of motif in the diegesis. For instance, he regrets not having taken it off prior to dinner at Farewell’s house (21); in this respect, Manzoni notes a correspondence between his pedestrian doubts regarding what to wear and his much more serious moral ambivalence about how to act (2006, 50). Later , in the city of Burgos, as he frees the symbolically named falcon Rodrigo to go after the pigeons, he compares his robe to a “flag” that s “full of fury” (91). Calling it “well where Chile’s sins sank and never again came out” (74), however, is certainly the strongest appellation. Specifically in regard to the priest s visit to Burgos, Domínguez argues that, metaphorically through his robe, Urrutia Lacroix becomes a kind of accomplice of Rodrigo’s lethal attacks (2012, 81). The cassock, in this sense, which encap sulates night and darkness, reveals the priest’s true personality, “letting show his demonic and monstrous dimension” (Lopez 2007, 66). For Zapata, Urrutia Lacroix’s cassock confers upon him the image of a “bird of prey” (2007, 141) that defends the interests of the upper class and the dictatorship. Estève, finall , referring to his robe as “an attribute of high metonymic density in the novel”

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(2006, 108), argues that, among other things, it helps the priest to hide and dis simulate. 131. In large measure, of course, duality, as Benmiloud reminds us (2006a, 154), is at the heart of By Night. Decante speaks of a “splitting of the narrative instance” (2011, 226) and Moreno of “a double, discursive and referential entity,” a discourse that “plays permanently with duality” (2006, 159, 160). In the end, naturally, this duality has to do essentially with the narrator. One critic refers to Urrutia Lacroix’s “fundamental duplicity” (Esquerro 2007, 115). This duplicity or duality is due, to a great extent, to the omnipresent figure of the aged young man (Decante 2011, 226), who might be construed as the priest’ s double (Benmiloud 2007, 111). Castillo de Berchenko speaks of “the splittings of the narrator” (2007, 13), but she notes that he never combines his activity as a poet with his role as critic (20–21). Besides the aged young man, other Urru tia Lacroix doubles have been mentioned. Benmiloud, for example, who shows how “doubles are multiplied ad infinitum” in the text and “end up pullulating” (2010, 230), refers to Odeim and Oido as “a doubled projection of the I/(AND/ OR) of the narrator” (242). He also alludes to Farewell, the poet in his house, and Sebastián—María Canales’s son—as possible doubles of the priest (2006a, 154). Rodríguez states that Reyes and Jünger are both Urrutia Lacroix’s double (2009, 10) and María Canales is his “feminine double” (18). See, also, Esquerro (2007, 35–36). 132. Moreno (2006), Lopez (2007), Estève (2007), Benmiloud (2007), Decante (2007b), Rodríguez (2009), Dove (2009), O’Br yen (2011), Domínguez (2012), and Draper (2012a). 133. The notion of melancholia as resistance in light of trauma and disaster— in contradistinction to Freud’s view of it in “Mourning and Melancholia”—has been defended recently by Jean Franco in her Cruel Modernity (2013). 134. I am thinking, particularly, of Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of the Night and Eltit’s The Fourth World, Custody of the Eyes, Jamás el fuego nunca, and Fuerzas especiales, among others. Luis Orrego Luco’s Casa grande (1908) and Carlos Cerda’ s Una casa vacía (1996) also come to mind. 135. For an analysis of how the own-foreign works in Lemebel’s chronicles and Fuguet’s novels, see Pastén B (2005). 136. “In Roberto Bolaño’s work Chile plays a fundamental role,” writes Moreno (2007, 107). 137. A salad that’s made up of tomatoes and onions. 138. The Chilean expression “tomar once,” which is the one that Lacroix utilizes, refers to a light meal that’s eaten between four and six in the afternoon and that corresponds to the afternoon tea that’s served in Britain. 139. On pages 23 (twice), 24, 65, 69, 94, and 96 (twice). 140. When, for instance, Urrutia Lacroix makes fun of a woman peasant for using a country expression (33). 141. As Lopez states regarding Urrutia Lacroix: “His role as a man of the Church is limited to the strict minimum that his robe may require, in other words, that of verifying that the dead child was baptized and blessing the ‘shed.’

376   |  Notes t o pages 231–241







The act of benediction leads to a mechanical gesture and is not accompanied by any religious fervor” (2007, 61). 142. Draper writes about this encounter: “This becomes an instance of irreducibility and incommensurability but also of coimplication since the estate (the Chilean economy) could not subsist without that un-Chilean fragment of Chile” (2012a, 135), that is, the peasants. 143. La ciudad sumergida, aristocracia y plebe en Lima, 1760–1830 . 144. I quote, in extenso, from my own article: “From the beginning of Chile’s history, it [Santiago] quickly became the center of political and economic hegemony even if much of the wealth was not created within its borders. Between the fin de siècl and the first decades of the 20th Centu y, well-to-do families settled in the historic center of the city, where they built beautiful mansions which closely resembled those of France and England. It is in this area where some of Chile’s first department stores as well as political and cultural institutions were built . . . For the poor, circumstances were quite different . . . they were forced to live confined in shantytowns located at the edge of the historic center without potable water and electricity. In this context, [sic] is not surprising that some writers protested against the palpable chasm between rich and poor not only in Santiago but in the country at large. Nicolás Palacios (1858–1927), for example, denounced fiercely the fact that, when it came to economic investments and internal colonizations, the government favored foreigners instead of Chileans from middle and poor class sectors . . . In time, the ‘Gran Santiago’ would emerge and the affluent would begin to leave the historic center toward the mountains, giving birth to neighborhoods such as El Golf, Las Condes, and Vitacura, among others” (2005). 145. “Popular” in terms of attendance, not in the sense that even the poor could attend. 146. Literally, the priest compares it to an estuary (22) where both good and not so good writers can feel safe. 147. In this context, they probably recite poems from either Azul or Prosas profanas, not from Cantos de vida y esperanza. 148. When asked what inspired him to paint the painting, the Guatemalan replies that he was moved, for lack of a better word, by a “Mexican feeling” (47). 149. For the significance of Silva s poem in By Night, see Gómez-Vidal (2007, 46), Briceño and Hoyos (2010, 607), and Bisama and Bisma (2006, 23). 150. See notes 109 and 110.

Chapter 6



1. The first Chilean to do so 2. Even though when Detectives had come out in an English translation in 2007, By Night, Distant, and Amulet already had appeared in English. Likewise, several stories from Llamadas and Putas had also been translated and included in the collection Last Evenings on Earth. 3. Pollack’s (2009) primar y interest resides in examining the process through which Latin American literature has been translated in the United

Notes t o pages 242–243   |  377





States. Once this is done, she proceeds to analyze Detectives’ reception in the US market, concluding that, in the same way that García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) helped create an extremely reductive view of Latin American literature in the United States—circumscribing it exclusively to magic realism and exoticism and ultimately disregarding other, more realistic narrative expressions—Detectives has contributed to creating yet another distorted and equally reductive view of contemporary Latin American literature in the United States. Bolaño’s novel, she claims, “foments a (pre) conception of alterity that satisfies the fantasies and collective imagination of U.S. cultural consumers” (347). It is interesting, she remarks, not only that just 3 percent of books pub lished in the US market yearly are translations (355) but that even the works of contemporary Latin American authors who have nothing to do with magic realism (or Crack and McOndo)—Daniel Sada, Sergio Pitol, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Alan Pauls, among others—“have been largely ignored” (353). Which prompts us to ask: what was it about Detectives in particular and Bolaño more broadly that was so attractive to critics and readers alike in the United States? After numerous praiseworthy comments on the novel by well-known critics in important publications across the country, argues Pollack, the way Detectives was packaged and sold also played a significant role in its canonization (357). For example, instead of having used a picture of Bolaño on the book’s cover where he appears as an adult, a picture of him in his twenties with long hair was used. Similarly, proceeds Pollack, certain episodes of his biography that went hand in hand with this picture were emphasized: “his decision to drop out of school and become a poet; his land odyssey from Mexico to Chile, where he was detained, arrested, and released from jail; the formation in Mexico . . . of the ‘infrarrealist poetry movement’. . . ; Bolaño’s itinerant existence in Europe; his odd jobs, . . . drug habits and dental problems; his uncompromising commitment to the poetry of living and the living of poetry” (357–58). In the end, Pollack states, “Thanks to Bolaño, U.S. readers can vicariously relive the best of the seventies, fascinated with the notion of a Latin America still latent with such possibilities” (361). At the same time, and politically more crucial in my view, Detectives “plays on a series of opposing characteristics that the United States has historically employed in defining itself vis-à-vis its neighbors to the south: hardworking vs. lazy, mature vs. adolescent, responsible vs. reckless, upstanding vs. delinquent. In a nutshell, Sarmiento’s dichotomy, as old as Latin America itself: civilization vs. barbarism. Regarded from this standpoint, The Savage Detectives is a comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized” (362). 4. See, also, Masoliver’s “Las palabras traicionadas” (2002b, 310), which is a reprint of his “Espectros.” Derbyshire (2009, 167) and Echevarría (2002d, 71) also refer to Detectives as Bolaño’s Mexican novel. 5. Bolaño’s novel, of course, is much more than what I include in this very brief description. 6. In chapter 23 of the second part. 7. It should not be surprising that most critics have defined Detectives from

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the perspective of the predominance of the literary in the text. “It’s a profound reflection on the why of literature” (2010, 305), writes Alberto Julián Pérez. For Garabano, who sees the text as a new version of the novel of the archive first proposed by González Echevarría in his Myth and Archive (1990), Detectives poses the fundamental question of how to do literature (2008). The novel “is above all a novel about literature” (459), Martín-Estudillo and Bagué state in their 2008 article. Along similar lines, many have seen Detectives as a kind of “portrait of the artist” (Del Pozo 2014, 202) or “portrait of the artist as a young man” (Campos 2011, 142; Camps 2015, 109); writer Alan Pauls goes as far as to call it “a Great Introduction to Artistic Life” (2008, 329). Candia argues that Bolaño’s novel represents the search for poetry, a search that ends in failure (2011a, 173), whereas for Carrión, Detectives, at the same time that it is an encyclopedia of literature it is also a parody of the avant-garde (2008, 362). Focusing much of his attention on Cesárea’s poem “Sión,” Sauri conceives of the text as the proposal of a theory of poetic form in which the subject (or reader) is in the same level of importance as both the nature of the poem and what it means (2010, 411). Critics who have not explained Detectives as essentially a novel about literature have defined it from the standpoint of the intrinsic nature of the text, or from the position of its characters, or even from the political consequences of the story. Regarding the first, Novillo-Co valán calls the novel radical (2013, 357) in the sense that it is experimental. Klengel refers to Detectives, very appropriately, in my view, as “a literary hopscotch” (2008, 325). For Oyarce Orrego, Bolaño’ s text constitutes the “nucleus of his narrative proposal” (2012, 19). With respect to the second, for some critics (Kaegi and Terráneo 2011, 130) the novel becomes a sort of glo rification of the margin, whereas for another critic (Quintero 2010, 57) Detectives rescues poets who have not made it into histories of literature. Concerning the third, Fell, besides determining that this novel by Bolaño is a foundational novel (2007, 34–35), asserts that it is also “the disenchanted epic of some [members] of the Latin American intelligentsia who experienced the military dictatorships of the seventies and the economic catastrophes that have hit the subcontinent” (31), adding that the text also problematizes the literary in its relation to ideology (31). A Spanish translation of this excellent article can be found in Moreno’s Roberto Bolaño: La Experiencia (2006, 153–65). Olivier calls Detectives a “kind of elegiac chronicle as well as manifesto a posteriori” (2009, 313). Finally , other, more vague critical assertions relative to the novel have been offered. Domínguez Michael calls it “a youth novel” (2011, 50–51), Vila-Matas “an intelligent allegory of human destiny” (2002, 100), and Jofré, vaguely though correctly , “a testimony that others give about someone” (2003, 239). 8. Hostettler-Sarmiento calls the text Bildungsroman (2012, 132) whereas Camps nuances by calling it “a Joycean buildungsroman [sic]” (2015, 110); “bil dungsroman . . . a travel novel” (46), says Domínguez (2011, 46). For their part, Hartwig refers to Detectives as a “bildungsroman that doesn’t close” (2007, 68) and Novillo-Corvalán as “a Bildungsroman of sorts” (2013, 357). 9. Both Villoro (2002, 77) and Kottow (2004, 130) call Bolaño’ s novel an “anti-initiation novel.”

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10. In one of the earliest academic articles on Detectives (2005)—reprinted subsequently in Moreno’s Roberto Bolaño: Una literatura Infinit (2005)—Trellez makes reference to the specific aspects from Cortázar s text that Bolaño elaborates in his novel, paying particular attention to those related to the detective genre and the role of the active reader presented in chapter 79 of Hopscotch (2005a, 150). For Fell, who borrows some of his own ideas from T rellez’s article, “The allegory of the search as initiatory approach no doubt reinforces the proximity between Hopscotch and The Savage Detectives” (2007, 35). In Sauri’ s judgment, the connection with Cortázar’s Hopscotch resides in the function of “reader-accomplice” (2010, 413) that Belano and Lima acquire as they attempt to decipher Cesárea’s poem. See, also, Rodrigo Pinto (2002a, 76), Vila-Matas (2002, 103), and Alberto Pérez (2010, 295). 11. Early on, the Chilean novelist Roberto Brodsky referred to Detectives’ first and third parts as “García Madero’s initiatory diary” (2002, 86). Cobas Carral and Garibotto (2008) also call these parts a diar y, but it’s a diary that forces the reader to become a detective who must discover the aesthetic identity of a group, the visceral realists, whose members exist only in García Madero’s and others’ discourses (168). Camps, for his part, establishes a connection between the text’s first section and the “novela de la onda” (2015, 107), since in both “the use of colloquial language and its recounting of a young writer’s bohemian lifestyle in the ‘concrete jungle’ of Mexico City” (107) play a big role. As regards the second part of a text that, according to one critic, “is laid out as a ‘sandwich’” (Moraga 2008), there is no doubt that it is the most interesting of the three. Alberto Pérez calls it “the most experimental and original” (2010, 297). Most of the critical statements regarding this part revolve around its form. In another early study of the text, Kottow remarks, “The novel develops as a kaleidoscope in ‘The Savage Detectives’ (1976–1996)” (2004, 133). Several critics underline, of course, its testimonial nature. Hartwig refers to the characters here as witnesses (2007, 56). Masoliver argues that “the reconstruction is made through the contrasting testimony of a motley gallery of witnesses” (2002a, 67). López Bernasocchi and López de Abiada speak of a “series of fragmentary and partial testimonies” (2012, 232). Kunz, whose insightful article centers on what he calls “the pre tended orality” in the text, alludes to “the pseudo-oral fragments of the central section” (2012, 160) that are “small, dramatic, polyphonic, but not univocal monologues” (160). Other aspects of Detectives’ second part have also been mentioned. Hartwig, who analyzes this part 2 thoroughly, compares it to a documentary (56). She underscores, especially, the second part’s incomplete nature. Its orality, for example, contributes to some of the accounts remaining unfinished (56); similarly, often times the reader must wait for a long time before knowing about whom any given witness is talking (56). At the same time, there is really no hierarchy regarding the witnesses’ credibility (57). In Derbyshire’s view, it is Cesárea’s death, understandably, that spawns the second part of the novel (2009, 168). For Martín-Estudillo and Bagué (2008), who examine Detectives in the context of what they call “hybrid literature,” the multiple voices of this section bear witness to the “generational failure that the novel articulates” (458). Del

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Pozo, finall , sees the text’s second part, among other things, as “a study of the evolution of literature from the avant-garde to the commodification of art today” (2014, 206). 12. On pages 383, 385, 394, 395, and 396. I differ from Burgos’ s otherwise well-written and well-argued study when he states that Belano is “the interlocutor of many of the voices that circulate throughout the novel’s second part” (2011, 310); or with Baker, who posits that he might be “the implied interviewer” (2012, 31) of this part. One could think of the narratee as an “invisible inter viewer,” as does Kottow (2004, 133). However , this does not take into account that, often times, the interviewer or narratee is plural; or that Auxilio refers to it as amiguitos (199, dear little friends), which indicates a degree of familiarity with those conducting the interviews. It is likely, of course, that those carrying out the interviews, at times working individually, at times possibly working in pairs or collectively, be policemen or detectives trying to resolve the deaths of Cesárea, Alberto, and Alberto’s friend. Cuadros suggests that the interviewer could very well be a journalist or detective obsessed with Arturo and Ulises (2005, 159). What’s irrefutable is that the identity of the narratee continues to be a mystery. Moreover, the narratee or interviewer does not necessarily have to be the same person who gathers the accounts of all the interviewees. From this perspective, Labbé, who, like Trellez and Kottow, writes one of the first academic articles on Detectives, is correct to point to the existence of a “narrator comparable to an editor or an archivist” (2003, 95). 13. There are very few instances of a singular narratee. Laura Jáuregui (168), Lisandro Morales (209), and Amadeo Salvatierra (271) refer specifically to a singular formal you (“usted”). Bárbara Patterson also mentions a singular narratee (“you already know” 179), and so does Ernesto García Grajales (“sir, I’ll tell you” 550), who’s writing a book on the visceral realists. Most references to a narratee are plural, however, and most employ the second-person plural pronoun “ustedes”: Luis Sebastián Rosado (154), Rafael Barrios (321), José “Zopilote” Colina (325), Xosé Lendorio (448). Auxilio uses “ustedes” (194) but also “ami guitos” (199). Sometimes the identity of the inter viewer or narratee is expressed through a verb or indirect object pronoun: “pardon the expression” (Joaquín Font 202), “all of us here” (Jacobo Urenda 545), “What do you think?” (Clara Cabeza 504). 14. In Gras and Meyer-Krentler’s judgment, there is a direct connection between Lowry’s novel and Detectives in the sense that, like the British consul in Under the Volcano, the characters in Bolaño’s text also feel lost and are looking for something (2010, 32). Along these lines, Candia argues that the “abandoned by god” world (2011a, 168) that is present in the diegesis is already announced in the epigraph, adding pointedly that Detectives “is the story of a wandering, not a pilgrimage” (169). For Derbyshire, the question in the epigraph sets the interrogative tone that characterizes the entire novel (2009, 167). Novillo-Cor valán, more ambitiously, points to the “larger historical and allegorical significance” (2013, 365) of the “No” from the text’ s epigraph, adding that the question therein takes the reader to certain historical moments in Latin America—the

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Mexican Revolution as well as manifold “socialist utopia[s]” (365)—whose ulti mate failure the poets from the novel inherit. 15. In the introduction to a recent study on detective fiction that includes a chapter on Detectives, Baker asks regarding the ubiquity of the genre, “Why this form, why this persistence, why this moment?” (2012, xi). He then contends that while certain features of the detective genre can be found in pretty much all of Bolaño’s works—as I myself have been claiming throughout—it is in Detectives, “a genre-defying work” (2012, 28), that these features reach a kind of philosophical apex, as the novel “involves epistemological questions of how one knows anything” (28). For Chilean Mabel Vargas, who carries out a thorough analysis of the aspects that distinguish Detectives from the classic detective novel, Bolaño not only transcends but also destroys the detective genre in the text. For Kottow, the connection with what she calls “the detective novel genre” (2004, 135) resides in the fact that Belano and Lima search for Cesárea, the characters in the second part focus on them, and the reader, like a detective, tries putting all the textual pieces together. In Trellez’s judgment, what makes Bolaño stand out among those who practice the detective genre is that he invites the reader, through a play of references that combine reality and fiction, to find the answers. Th reader, he states, “becomes the bloodhound that, little by little, completes the puzzle and, through its reading, creates the significant labyrinth of the novel” (2005b, 149). What Bolaño does in Detectives, according to Hartwig, is to play with the various elements of the detective genre; however, what’s important is not resolving the mystery but knowing the detective’s identity and what the object of the search is (2007, 68). Most puzzling is not only the fact that Cesárea’ s name practically disappears from the section “The Savage Detectives (1976–1996)” but that, despite its title, this is the section furthest removed from the detective genre (61). Kaegi and Terráneo underline the multifarious aspects of the figure of the detective in the novel; the combination, for example, of the illegal and the criminal, or the poets and the interviewees, and the reader, all of whom are involved in some type of search (2011, 132). The disappearance of García Madero at the end of part 3, in turn, transforms the detective into an enigma (139). For Quintero, what’s most original in Detectives is that the detectives—García Madero, Belano, and Lima in his opinion—because they are poets, ultimately, must relinquish reason (a fundamental requisite in solving the mystery) and adhere rather to a romantic poetics that privileges chance, dreams, and the unconscious (2010, 42–43). Quintero writes further, “The search, carried out by two subjects who don’t believe in the power of reason as a privileged tool to understand reality, questions the outcome of the search itself” (44). In López Bernasocchi and López de Abiada’s view, finall , only in the first and third parts of the novel is the detective genre developed (2012, 178); while, for Navarrete (2004), though Detectives does contain elements of “the crime novel,” it does not adhere to its precepts faithfully. 16. In reality, the question of who are the real protagonists of Detectives has not been answered appropriately; most critics have focused, instead, on the identities of Belano and Lima who, for all practical purposes, could very well be considered

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the text’s most salient characters. It is true that they are mostly absent characters, but it is also true that most of the interviewees in the part 2 focus on them. In the first version of her article on Detectives, Flores argues correctly, “actually, there are no protagonists” (2002, 93). In contrast, Villoro, exaggerating somewhat in my opinion, calls Ulises Lima “the absolute protagonist of the story” (2002, 78). As just stated, the focus has been on what Belano and Lima represent. For Cobas and Garibotto, the latter is the true poet, whereas the former is the brave man marked by his revolutionary experience in Chile (2008, 176). In Hostet tler’s view Ulises incarnates the vagabond as well as the “true poet” (2012, 144). Kaegi and Terráneo call Arturo and Ulises “vagabond par excellence, wandering beings” (2011, 136). “They are the absent ones par excellence who, from their absence, articulate, precarioulsy, the totality of the body of the story,” says Kottow (2004, 134). For Olivier , it is not really possible to obtain a clear idea of who Arturo and Ulises are since, in the end, the discourse about them is “oblique, fragmentary and multiple” (2009, 321). Some critics refer to them as antiheros (López Bernasocchi and López de Abiada 2012, 234–35; Novillo-Cor valán 2013, 358) and even hold a negative view about them, calling them “infantile and fragile” (López Bernasocchi and López de Abiada 234–35). For Saucedo, finall , Belano and Lima are a “literary manifestation of Bolaño’s program and narrative ideal as well as a [literary manifestation] of the fictional biography of Bolaño himself” (2008, 800). 17. From the most concise to the most elaborate statements, critics agree that the journey in Detectives is marked by a symbolically downward movement. One critic sees it as a trajectory that starts in idealism and ends in emptiness and nothingness (Saucedo 2008, 796). Another , focusing specifically on the time tha elapses in García Madero’s diary between December 31, 1975, and Januar y 1, 1976, qualifies it as a journey through time that culminates in chaos (Ríos 2012 66–67). For Garabano, the journey in Detectives has ceased being liberating, as it was in modernity (2008). According to Nicholson, who views the incessant move ments of the visceral realists in general as a critique of both the illustration and modernity, Arturo’s and Ulises’s journey constitutes “an attempt to go beyond modern hegemony and epistemology in order to find a space of exteriority tha exploits the shortcomings of Modernity itself” (2008, 97). It is also “the most rad ical deconstruction . . . of Ithaca’s love . . . [and] the account of the exhaustion of a political affiliation that tied land and destin , homeland and life, until death” (2012, 136), writes Rodríguez Freire in the first version of his article on Detectives (an English version of it can be found in López-Calvo’s 2015 Roberto, 85–103). Not surprisingly, especially if one thinks about the text’s third part, Bolaño’s novel has also been compared to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in particular and to the road-movie film subgenre in general. Critics recognize, howeve , an essential difference between the two. While the characters from Kerouac’s book are full of optimism and seek intense experiences, those from Detectives have already lost their illusions; in some way, through ironic statements in the text, Bolaño parodies On the Road (Gras and Meyer-Krentler 2010, 73–75). Martín-Estudillo and Bagué refer to Detectives’ “The Deserts of Sonora (1976)” as “the disenchanted

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road movie” (2008, 459). In Hostettler’ s view, for most characters in the novel the journey doesn’t take them to a promised land, a home, or a homeland (145). Kaegi and Terráneo look at the various meanings of what they call the “search-journey” (2011, 134) of part 3: for example, the road-movies tradition as well as adventure novels (134). It’s a journey, ultimately, that is circular and thus “an infinite journe , a journey that lacks both an end and a return” (139), as suggested in the final part of the text. Finall , more broadly, Pablo Catalán (2003) examines the processes of territorialization and deterritorialization in the text, focusing specifically on ho , in their various vital movements, Arturo and Ulises simultaneously appropriate and abandon spatial locations that are diverse. Arturo’s life, writes Catalán, “is a constant becoming of ruptures of the chains that bind him, of deterritorialization and territorialization of territories marked by their rhythm, their environment, their distance marks” (99). 18. What is it that the characters from Detectives search? Arturo and Ulises are looking for Cesárea, of course, and the characters from part 2 are looking for them in some way. Yet, as Camps has written recently, the quest itself is more important than finding either Cesárea or Archimboldi (in 2666 ) (2015, 105). In Olivier’s judgment, it’s a “poetic search of the avant-garde” that becomes “a poetics of the novel as play and agony” (2009, 322). Others, less optimistically , refer to the search in Detectives as a “search en abyme” (Labbé 2003, 95) given the text’ s ambiguous discourse and fragmentary structure. For Rojo, in Detectives Bolaño is poking fun not only at the search motif but also at art’s and modern literature’s most sacred rituals (2003, 71). See, also, Pinto (2002a, 75–76). 19. Bolognese calls this trip from Mexico City to northern Mexico in search of Cesárea a “Faustian journey” (2008, 470). For Cobas and Garibotto (2008) it’s more than just a journey to find the founder of visceral realism; it s also a journey in time as well as the confirmation that, just like it happened to Cesárea in the 1920s, Arturo’ s, Ulises’s, García Madero’s, and Lupe’s efforts to re-create the modernizing project of the avant-garde is destined to fail (171). Nicholson construes the journey as a kind of religious pilgrimage in which the “foundational mythical figure” (2008, 95) that is Cesárea sacrifices her life. Likewise for Rojo the voyage represents a return to the mother (2003, 69), except that the four visceral realists don’t travel north in order to receive a message from Cesárea that they would then learn and spread; they go there, rather, to get rid of her and thus liberate themselves from a certain experience of modernity that she represents (74). Some critics have made reference to poems by Bolaño that closely resemble the journey to the north, such as “The Donkey,” from The Romantic Dogs (Kaegi and Terráneo 2011, 130), or “The Neochileans,” from Tres (Campos, 2011, 138; Gras and Meyer -Krentler 2010, 63). Among scholars who have offered more specific comments regarding the journey to the north, the tendency has been to link it either to the road-movie tradition (Olivier, 2009, 313)—as we saw above in relationship to the meaning of the journey in gen eral—or to evaluate its literary significance. Alberto Pérez refers to Detectives’ part 3 as “a novel of the ‘road”‘ (2010, 303). For Baker , the intersection between the “literary detective story” and the “Mexican gangster movie” develops gradually

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from the very beginning of the journey (2012, 37). Kaegi and T erráneo, whose study focuses specifically on the traits of the road-movi film genre in the text, argue that the road movie begins the moment the four travelers get in Quim’s Impala at the end of Detectives’ first part (127). Literarily speaking, the journey north embodies a questioning regarding the cognitive sense that literature and reading have acquired since romanticism (Labbé 2003, 94). For Garabano, it’ s a journey that attempts to restore the aura of literature (2008). Finally, Candia, following Rojo’s analysis closely, conceives of it as “a journey in search of a specific poetic knowledge” (2011a, 176). 20. Some critics have seen Cesárea as the model for the mother. For Quintero, for instance, she’s first a poetic and then a protective mother (2010, 59) Others, however, don’t conceive of Cesárea as mother. Rodríguez Freire sees her, rather, as a seer (2015, 97) or oracle (2012, 159). Olivier speaks of her as “this hyperbolic figure of the avant-garde (316) . . . this supreme model of th extreme and never marginal avant-garde” (2009, 318). In Cobas’ s and Garibotto’s judgment, Cesárea epitomizes the failure of the avant-garde’s modernizing project in the 1920s (2008, 167, 172). She represents “a poetic tradition,” according to Derbyshire (2009, 168). Finally , though I concur with Hostettler when she declares that Cesárea’s death liberates the visceral realists from the past, I can’t agree with her when she adds that she represents all revolutions alluded to in the novel: the Mexican and the Cuban revolutions as well as the student movements from 1968 (131). 21. Of all those who have opined critically with respect to the meaning of Cesárea’s death, Rojo presents the quaintest description: “parody of a third or fourth class crime story, or of a Mexican film from the forties” (2003, 71). The consensus regarding this no doubt absurd event is that it marks a significant moment in the story’s diegesis. It marks, of course, the genesis of the end of the second visceral realism movement (Cobas & Garibotto 2008, 172), “the metaphorical demise of the Visceral Realists” (Novillo-Corvalán 2013, 359) and, ultimately, “the oblivion of visceral realism” (Martín-Estudillo and Bagué 2008, 460). If the existence of the visceral realists depended on their finding a model, her death makes it impossible (Kottow 2004, 137). “After T inajero’s death,” writes Derbyshire, “all that is left is prose—and even this is inadequate” (2009, 174). Arturo, let us not forget, leaves poetr y for prose later in his life and then the novel for journalistic essays. In Rodríguez Freire’s view, Cesárea sacrifices her life so as to give life to Lima in order that he may become a witness to her poetic truth (2012, 161). From this perspective, one critic construes Cesárea’ s death as a type of exorcism that started originally as homage (Medina 2009, 551). Baker , finall , wonders if it is even feasible to assign fault in Cesárea’s death case (2012, 40). 22. Both Flores (2002, 93) and Kaegi and T erráneo (2011, 137) see in Ulises from Detectives a kind of degraded Ulysses from Homer’s text. Hostettler-Sarmiento, stretching the matter somewhat, speaks of the presence of a “multiplied Ulises” (2012, 127) in the text, so that characters such as Edith Oster and Joaquín Font, for example, also incarnate the myth of Ulysses.

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Rodríguez Freire, whose article revolves in large part around the connection between Detectives and Homer’s Odyssey, states, more ambitiously, that Bolaño’s novel “is the last Homeric rewriting that we have, at least in Spanish” (2012, 136), adding later that it incarnates “the exhaustion of the Odessan circle, a circle which has crossed the representation of western reality from Homer on” (153). It would be impossible to fully comprehend Bolaño’s text, argues Rodríguez Freire, if one doesn’t read it as a rewriting of the Odyssey and canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno (2012 157; 2015, 96), texts from where he claims that Bolaño gets the models for the various characters of Detectives (2012, 149). He continues, “Bolaño’s Ulises is Dantesque, but he travels in order to deconstruct Homer’s Ulysses” (157). 23. Novillo-Corvalán, whose insightful 2013 study centers on Bolaño’ s and Borges’s relationship to Joyce as well the latter’s impact upon Detectives and 2666 , among other things, talks about Bolaño’s “accretive method of composition” (341–42), a method he adopts as a direct consequence of Joyce’ s influence. She calls Detectives and 2666 , in fact, “protracted late-twentieth—and twenty-first ce tury Latin American analogues of Ulysses” (342). Detectives, she maintains further, “adheres to a peculiar Latin American tradition of disintegrating traditional or linear models of reading. Indeed, Bolaño’s debt to Joyce, via Cortázar’s Hopscotch, is manifested in the complex fictional structure of Detectives” (357). Other “Joy cean devices” utilized by Bolaño in the novel are a penchant for “literary taxonomies” and “encyclopedic projects” (359). 24. Correctly, Baker speaks of Rimbaud as “one of Bolaño’s constant touchstones” (32) and “a template for the character of Arturo Belano” (2012, 34). For Cuadros, he’s a ubiquitous presence in the text (2005, 162). In Derbyshire’ s view, Belano’s trajectory is almost identical to that of Rimbaud, calling Belano’s actions in the novel a “parodic biography” (2009, 170). It is interesting that Kaegi and Terráneo argue that, besides reenacting the myth of the poet whose traces get lost in a strange geography, Belano’s activities in Africa and particularly in Liberia at the “end” of the diegesis reenact a motif tied to the literary enterprise: that of the committed writer, even if from an ironic perspective (2011, 137). Medina also underlines this idea (2009, 549). For Quintero, Rimbaud’ s significance in Bolaño s work in general and Detectives in particular resides in the value that is attached once again to the poet as seer (2010, 45, 47–48). 25. Fittingly, Alberto Pérez refers to the characters in Detectives as “diaspóricos” (diaspora-propelled beings) (2010, 305). Fell, whose article expands on the notion of ceaseless and directionless movement in the novel, attributes to them a “drive for wandering” (2007, 28), specifically calling Arturo and Ulises “eternal migrants” (29) as well as “hobos” (30). Broadly speaking, according to Fell this vital nomadism that propels the characters in Detectives must be construed as “an act of resistance, [as an act] of dissidence regarding established powers, literature, ‘official’ histo y, and hegemonic culture, as well as an act of adherence to anomie” (2011, 154). For Nicholson, the characters’ perpetual motion prevents them from being “codified,” terrified as they are of “the violence of offici knowledge” (2008, 96). Medina, who contends that exile represents the gist of

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Bolaño’s writing, states that the portraits presented in the text “are not portraits of exiled artists but rather portraits of the artist as exile . . . exile is life itself, a vital attitude” (2009, 547), an apt description of the concept of nomadism in Detectives. In Bolognese’s view, the characters’ vagrancy is not over even when the journey is over (2008, 473). Finally , in Rial’s judgment, each and every place in the novel represents a sort of challenge to “roots and stability” (2011, 150). 26. The connection between life-literature in Bolaño’s oeuvre was noted early on in the critical corpus (Brodsky 2005b, 142). More specificall , in the context of Detectives, Cobas and Garibotto declare that the visceral realists are more interested in action than in words, and that ethics and aesthetics become one and the same in the text (2008, 169). For Cuadros, the novel’ s major question is the relation that exists between poetry and individual existence (2005, 161). More assertively, Labbé thinks that, on the contrary, Detectives shows the fundamental difference between life and literature, and that it’s better not to confuse the two (2003, 92). 27. As a matter of fact, Martín-Estudillo and Bagué state that the infrarrealista movement in Mexico—on which visceral realism is based—“functioned as a sort of Dada in a Mexican manner” (2008, 461). “Their scandalous public per formances,” adds Novillo Corvalán, “deliberately adhered to an inherently vanguard style which both emulated and parodied the spirit of the European avant-garde” (347). These critics are referring, of course, to their iconoclastic gestures, typical also of the visceral realists. Concerning the latter—which “lay claim to a kinship of sorts between themselves and the vanguardistas of the past” (Sauri 2010, 416)—for both Olivier (2009, 314) and Campos (2011, 136) these gestures constitute both a repetition and a reenactment, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the surrealist artist in particular and the avant-garde artist in general. In some way, suggests Garabano, Detectives interrogates the fate of those vanguard artists who attempted to unite art and life (2008). Burgos, for his part, states that what most attracts visceral realists to the avant-garde—much more so even than their iconoclastic attitude vis-à-vis classical art—is “the group and communal dimension which sought to break, relativize or mock the invariable criteria of the literary institution” (2011, 321). Four critics, finall , make specific reference to estride tismo and its representation in the novel. Domínguez, for example, reminds us not only its short duration—a year and a half—but also the fact that it comes to an end at the precise moment when General Adalberto Tejeda (Diego Carvajal in the text) asks estridentista artists to work for him (2011, 47). For Cobas and Garibotto, the presence of this general represents the intersection between the literary avant-garde and politics (2008, 165). Certain features of estridentista texts, according to Klengel—features such as descriptions of urban space, modern techniques, transportation systems, and so forth—establish a kind of “genealogical line” (2008, 328) with the representation of the city in Detectives. 28. In Maples Arce’s poetry, for example, some elements of futurism are perceptible. 29. Most critics agree on this point: no one knows who the visceral realists are, and, most important, what they stand for aesthetically. Pauls expresses it best:

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“A book that’s swelled with, filled with, teeming with poets and there is no Work. There is no work” (2008, 327, italics in the original). It surprises Burgos, in fact, that there are fewer works (2011, 313) than accounts concerning the evolution of the movement. “The poets in the novel are poetically silent,” states Derbyshire (2009, 168). Not knowing what Arturo’ s and Ulises’s poems say, as well as a lack of “Visceral Realism’s aesthetic program” (95), are some of the lacunae that Labbé (2003) detects in the novel. Even most visceral realists themselves remain ignorant about what their movement is (Sauri 2010, 414). Throughout the text, argue Cobas and Garibotto, there is a want of information regarding visceral realism’s poetic attributes (2008, 165). At the same time, these critics ask, “What’s the difference between Visceral Realism and its estridentista counterpart?” (165); in the end, visceral realism seems no more than “the literar y dream of a gang of Latin American poets ‘lost in Mexico’” (177). In contrast to Stephen (from Ulysses) and Oliveira (from Hopscotch), claims Novillo-Corvalán, the visceral realists are “bereft of a meaningful founding figure and mythological centre” (2013, 359). In his analysis, Campos obser ves the fact that the visceral realists were not interested in poetry itself, poetry as writing—what he calls “testimony-­ object” (2011, 138)—to be stored in a librar y as evidence, but that they did endure it as “an incurable decease” (318). Baker recognizes that readers of Detectives “are never really clued in to what exactly ‘visceral realism’ is” (2012, 29–30), but he also recognizes that “it is never so much a question of what visceral realism is (knowledge as content) as it is the various activities (forms of life, or lebensformen) of its practitioners” (30). Ultimately, what does define its members is “what they are opposed to” (32). Kottow is among those who see something positive in the visceral realists’ lack of a clear aesthetic program: “The difficulty of clearly defining and limiting [visceral realismo] is the key to understanding its essence and becomes the central motif of the novel as a whole” (2004, 129). In other words, she seems to suggest that there would be no novel if visceral realism were more clearly defined. Nicholson goes even furthe , bestowing a certain degree of authority on the movement. Its members, he argues, “do a good job of highlighting the fractures in the colonial matrix of power while avoiding the violence of reductionism (92) . . . One trait that unites all of the Visceral Realists and something that its founding members never abandon is the constant critique and disillusion with epistemic structuring. Through their constant challenge of knowledge, they seek out new demigods, challenge State knowledge and iconic literary figures, manipulate the market, and more importantly never pause long enough for any of their actions or ideologies to become ossified and categorized” (2008, 93). Hartwig, finall , recognizes the nebulous nature of visceral realism (2007, 59–60) while underlining its representative character as an avant-garde movement (58). 30. As Cobas and Garibotto remind us in the context of Amadeo Salvatierra and the estrindentistas, literature and revolution were part and parcel of the same project in the 1920s (2008, 164). By the time the visceral realists emerge, of course, the notion that literature could bring political liberation begins to disintegrate. Arturo’s and Ulises’s return to Mexico City from the Sonora Desert,

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in fact, evince the acceleration of this process in the novel (173–74). Cobas and Garibotto state, “The failure of the modernizing project of the avant-gardes of the twenties is repeated in the frustration of the cultural and political project for Latin America in the seventies. The relationship between poetry and revolution also marks the passage from the seventies to the nineties. If in the seventies the promise of the Latin American revolution is part of the climate of ideas in which visceral realism emerges, Lima’s experience in Nicaragua and Belano’s refle tions before his departure for Africa show, unequivocally, the dramatic shipwreck of the revolutionary dream . . . After failure, dissolution is the only possible way out for these Mexicans forever lost in Mexico, for these South Americans invariably lost in Europe” (178–79). 31. Camps conceives of Detectives as “the blueprint” (2015, 106) of both Bolaño’s literary world in general and 2666 in particular, especially in terms of the thematic and technical similarities between the two texts. For Cobas and Garibotto (2008) the resemblance between Detectives and 2666 can be located especially in the third part of Detectives, particularly in the Sonora Desert and the diverse frontier towns that populate Bolaño’s posthumous text. “A fragmentary and incomplete work” (2012, 157), states Rodríguez Freire, “full of voices that coincide and contradict each other, The Savage Detectives also announces the disastrous future that is fulfilled in 2666 ” (157). 32. Cobas and Garibotto refer to this very prominent space in Bolaño’s work overall as “a space that demonstrates the failure of the modernizing project. The desert, as the opposite of progress, hosts the debris of modernity” (2008, 188). For Kaegi and Terráneo, it’s an untamed, impenetrable, and empty location (2011, 136). At the same time, it’ s the territory that harbors everything that has been expelled by the institution and the market. Everything that, in their opinion, has not been accepted by the center—lost poets, lost magazines, unknown literary works—has some hope of life here (138). The critics conclude: “The lost northern towns, places of forgetfulness and debris, reveal the true side of Latin America, they partially become its history, showing pre-capitalist scenarios which have not been able to integrate themselves into multinational, global capitalism. Nevertheless, Bolaño eludes the stereotypical representations that the desert has adopted in most Latin American narrative” (146). For Olivier, finall , the desert plays a mythical role and becomes a metaphor of “terra incognita” (2009, 315). And, like Kaegi and Terráneo, she also sees the desert as the place where a new type of poetry can emerge (315). 33. Understandably given the fact that he’s the narrator in part 1 of the novel, García Madero has received more critical attention than María. In his role as narrator, argues Rojo, García Madero represents a displacement as well as a double of both Belano and Lima (2003, 69). Baker calls him an “ephebe” or “idiot questioner” in Wallace Steven’s sense (2012, 29), claiming that even if he is too indolent to be an investigator or detective, he still wishes to know. López Barnasocchi and López de Abiada call him “a true antihero—who still has childlike features—who allows himself to be run over by events in which he becomes involved unwillingly and who is unable to make sense of them” (210). Olivier

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refers to García Madero as a “Rimbaud’s new avatar” (2009, 315), an appellation with which I do not agree. García Madero has none of the security and strength that Rimbaud displayed in his life (both in France and Africa), poetry, and letters to his family and business associates. María, for her part, has been called “visceral realism’s nymph” (Candia 2013, 47). 34. Indubitably, this is the most significant chapter of “The Savage Detective (1976–1996).” It starts and ends the novel’ s second part. It’s the only one in which time does not advance chronologically and the chapter that appears most times in the part 2 (thirteen times, to be exact). As has been suggested, Detectives could have functioned perfectly, structurally, if it had contained only parts 1 and 3; had this been the case, the Salvatierra section would have been located, diegetically, in the middle section and García Madero would have been its narrator. But had this been the case, Bolaño’s text would have been a much more traditional book and it certainly would not have the importance that it has today in the history of Latin American narrative. One could argue, in fact, that if part 3 gives origin to part 2, the Salvatierra entries give birth to the entire novel. In other words, the novel would not exist without them. Thus, when Rojo calls the Salvatierra sections the text’s “Bridge” (2003, 70) and Cuadros refers to them as the novel’s “main beam” (2005, 161), they are so in more ways than one. As Cobas and Garibotto state, “The Amadeo fragments . . . traverse the novel’s second part by structurally and thematically joining García Madero’s diary with the testimonial section” (2008, 164). For Olivier , these fragments constitute an homage to bad and forgotten poets as well as to all those who have given their life for art (2009, 319). For his part, Ríos, whose article revolves around the concept “space-time” in the text and who avails himself of Heidegger’s and Stephen Hawkins’s ideas, declares regarding the Salvatierra section: “It’s the only space-time that repeats itself, the only possible constant that allows the book to continue to be suspended as a ‘series of events’ without being absorbed by a dark hole” (2012, 74). 35. This name, of course, was inspired by Spanish literary critic Ignacio Echevarría, a friend of Bolaño. Echevarría, however, has said that he had not yet met Bolaño when Detectives came out (Carrión 2008, 368). 36. The reason for why Arturo challenges Iñaki Echavarne to a duel—that is, because he was afraid that the well-known critic would write a negative review of his last novel—seems indeed absurd, and the duel itself seems comical and even cartoonish. For both Cobas and Garibotto (2008, 182) and Nicholson (2008, 96), what are at stake in the duel are the writer’s honor and the defense of literature when confronted with the claws of the market. Or, as Olivier puts it, “What’s at stake in this parable is the recognition of the value of literature, which is worth a duel between the author of a work and its critic, both involved in combat, gauging their weapons, not only in order to defend their own honor but also that of their common object” (2007, 184). See, also, Candia (2011, 167). 37. Susana Puig, Guillem Piña, and Jaume Planells. 38. Cobas and Garibotto examine this section of the novel in light of the connection between literature and the market (2008, 179–82), a subject that I

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shall touch upon later in my own discussion regarding the process of institutionalization of literature in the novel. Olivier spends a great deal of time analyzing the phrase “the honor of poets,” stating that this phrase is a direct translation of a sentence—L’honneur des poètes—that was the title of a clandestine 1943 poetr y magazine that appeared in France while under German occupation (2007, 173–75). For Fell, the writers of the Madrid Book Fair in this section “offer a spectrum of individualized reactions, all of them revealing a very disillusioned perception of the profession” (2007, 33), that is, the literar y profession. 39. One implication, for instance, is that since revolutionary programs always become institutionalized in the end, poetry has two options: either “become hegemonic upon linking itself with those state programs, or be stigmatized as dissident by those same programs” (Cobas and Garibotto 2008, 186). Upon reading this story there is no doubt that the Cuban writer refers to novelist Rei­ naldo Arenas. Regarding the Peruvian writer, Trellez suggests that it might allude to Peruvian poet Enrique Verástegui (2005b, 156). 40. Trellez sees this encounter between the last visceral realist poet, Ulises Lima, and Octavio Paz, the foremost cultural figure in Mexico in the twent eth century (along with Carlos Fuentes, perhaps), as a conciliatory attitude on Bolaño’s part (152). Not surprisingly, for Quintero it’s evidence of two different conceptions of the poetic phenomenon (2010, 61). The encounter between Paz and Ulises, according to Candia, symbolizes visceral realism’s defeat, as Ulises recognizes Paz’s importance as well as the emptiness of the idealism of his youth (2011a, 173). Bolognese suggests that, maybe, the author “is implicitly referring to the subject of the renouncement of the word and indescribability which Paz suggested” (2011, 667). 41. Cesárea’s poem “Sión” has a first life, so to speak, in Antwerp—in the poem “The Sea” (53)—and in three poems from University, each offering it’s unique version, “My Poetry” (27), “When I Was a Boy” (203), and “The Sea” (204). Sauri provides the most thorough analysis of Cesárea’s poem. In their dialogue with Amadeo regarding the possible meaning of the poem, claims Sauri, Arturo and Ulises wish to prove that “Sión” “has a meaning irrespective of its status as a poem” (2010, 409). In the end, the meaning of the poem resides in the subject who interprets it, not in the poem itself. But even more important in Sauri’s judgment is that by adding certain lines to Cesárea’s poem the distinction between “seeing and reading—as well as between lines and words” (2010, 409)— disappears. Cobas and Garibotto call the poem “a visual exercise of interpretation” (2008, 166). For Saucedo, “Sión” constitutes a game that seeks to intensify both image and word. At the same time, it is a reflection of all that the visceral realists go through in their manifold meanderings, “the visual personification, the plastic and symbolic prefiguration of the histo y that the protagonists have lived and will live: from paradise to collapse” (2009). Cesárea’ s poem ought to be understood in the context of Wittgenstein’s concept of “private language,” argues Baker (2012, 35), an attempt on Bolaño’ s part to make the reader aware of “the limits of interpretation” (36). Along these lines, Quintero thinks that, in “Sión,” Bolaño presents a deconstructed object that makes interpretation nearly

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impossible, as if the intent were to return poetry to its mythical foundation (2010, 60). Cesárea’ s poem is not a joke, claims Derbyshire, but rather a way to convey the mistrustfulness of language in its attempts to signify meaning, a move to “literal imagism” (2009, 171) on Cesárea’ s part. “Sión,” argues Olivier, “is like a game or a riddle” (2009, 319) and it is just another variant of earlier drawings by the author, when he was not yet engaged in the writing of novels (320). For Oyarce, finall , Cesárea’s poem “functions as a central enigma” (2012, 26) and reflects the author s own literary evolution (21), this latter point being somewhat unclear in her article. 42. This section, in fact, can be approached from the perspective of those who’ve zeroed in on the windows themselves and those who have focused their attention on the question “What’s behind the window?” at the end of part 3 of the text. Labbé is the first critic to have commented on this visual image. In ge eral, he conceives of the images in Detectives as a sort of distraction in the diegesis (2003, 97). Concerning specifically the breaking lines in the last windo , he sees it as a graphic representation of the literary meaning of the novel, a meaning that has to do with the undermining of the literary activity itself as well as with literature’s incapacity to represent “a certain phenomenon” (92). Klengel compares the window to a fata morgana (2008, 329), asking whether it might not just be a film screen that disappears into obscurity once the movie is ove . Olivier, for her part, writes, “Logically, it has to do with imagining the invisible from the visible, with building an image-sense from the suggestive traits” (2009, 321). For Saucedo, the windows are pictures and the accompanying questions their respective title. At the same time, he thinks that they are poems from Cesárea’s complete works (2009). In Sauri’ s (2010) view, the windows are riddles that pose the question of perspective. From the subject’s position, each window represents a specific aesthetic. If the first window has to do with realism and the secon with modernism, the third “signals the ‘end of literature’ and the exhaustion of modernism itself” (430). Also, see Hartwig (2007, 65). Concerning the question that precedes each of the images of the windows, the answers have been diverse. Behind the windows, states Brodsky, there’s a journey that leads nowhere (2002, 89). For Ricardo Martínez, what’s behind the window is a type of future poetry whose meaning must be deconstructed by the reader (2003, 200). The question “What’s behind the window?” write Cobas and Garibotto, “synthesizes . . . the keys of its reading” (that of the text, that is) (2008, 163), adding later , “behind the window is found the history of the failure of visceral realism. Placed at the end of the novel . . . the question also emphasizes Cesárea’s death and, by doing so, it closes the project of the seventies” (187). In Garabano’s judgment, the question does not suggest the end of modernism, as Sauri thinks; modernism continues to be present, but now made up of fragments upon which a new literary genealogy, a new archive, is formed (2008). Finally, “emptiness, nothingness” (2009), is what is behind the window according to Saucedo. 43. García Madero calls these drawings “enigmas I was taught in school a very long time ago” (573); he includes fourteen of them (574–77). Camps suggests that these drawings might be indebted to Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy

392   |  Notes t o pages 246–254







(1759) in the sense that, just like in Stern’ s text, in Detectives literary solemnity is mocked (2015, 110). For Labbé, they constitute a distraction from the stor yline (2003, 97). In Saucedo’ s view, these enigmas function as a foreboding of what happens at the end of part 3 of the text, that is, Cesárea’s death (2009). Belano’ s answer with respect to the last drawing, let us remember, is directly related to a wake (577). See, also, Oyarce (2012, 23–24). 44. The Mexican army occupied the UNAM from September 18 to September 30, 1968. 45. The process of the institutionalization of literature has been thoroughly studied by Hohendhal, Jusdanis (1991), and González Stephan (1987). The analyses of Ramos (1989), Rama (1984), and Gonzalo Catalán (1985) are also very useful. For a more recent critical approach that pays particular attention to the relation that’s established between certain “star writers” and the global literary market in general, see the first two chapters of Brouillette s 2007 excellent study, “The Industry of Postcoloniality” and “Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace,” respectively. James English’s 2005 book would also be very useful to examine the current state of affairs in Latin America in which an increasingly reduced number of transnational publishing houses control both the production and distribution of books. 46. In his review of the English translation of Bolaño’s novel, Wood called it “craftily autobiographical” (2007). 47. Italics in the original. 48. Arturo’s disappearance makes us think of The Vortex’s Arturo Cova’s and his friends’ disappearance in the Colombian jungle, about whom the consul writes in a cablegram: “The jungle devoured them!” (385). It might be argued that both characters flee the civilized world, one from a modernity that advances speedily toward the peripheral urban center, Cova, and the other, Arturo, who escapes from a dehumanized and postmodern European continent. The difference between the two, nevertheless, is that Arturo strays into the jungle to accompany a photographer friend who decides to die because he has lost his son, whereas Cova’s disappearance is utterly mysterious. 49. Actual No. 1 was Estridentismo’s manifesto. 50. Those who had the chance to meet Bolaño and the group of poets for which the real visceral realistas stand in the text—the infrarrelistas—say that they caused panic in Mexican literary circles in the 1970s. W riter Juan Villoro, who was a friend of Bolaño, stated in an article that he wrote on the occasion of poet Mario Santiago’s death: “Along with Héctor Apolinar, Roberto Bolaño and other iconoclasts, [Mario Santiago] founded the visceral realist avant-garde. Inspired by the Beat Generation, surrealism, patafísica and, above all, by rebellious Latin American poetics such as nadaísmo and the group ‘Techo de la Ballena,’ the infrarrealistas stormed the readings and cocktails of our very serene republic of letters, broke tall glasses, became engaged in boxing happenings and ran the risk of losing their prestige in an environment where the writer, and above all the poet, must behave like an encyclopedic gentleman” (in Trellez 2005a, 146). In her review of the English translation of Detectives, Mexican novelist Carmen

Notes t o pages 255–260   |  393













Boullosa, who also knew Bolaño, offers a fascinating portrayal of literary life in Mexico in the 1970s, specifically in regard to the rivalries between those who identified themselves with poet Efraín Huerta and those who identified with Paz or, as she puts it, “It was the street-smart types versus the aesthetes” (2007, 26). 51. Cesárea’s poem, for example, is said to be a joke (400), and the duel between Belano and Echavarne is referred to as a nonsense (469). 52. The Lendoiro character could be an allusion to Carlos Barral, with the difference, of course, that Barral was key in the promotion of the novelists of the Boom, and in the 1960s, whereas Lendoiro supports poetr y and much later. 53. With the collaboration of Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. 54. In contrast to most literary anthologies, it is well known by now that McOndo, and particularly its prologue, caused quite a stir when it came out. Critics pointed to the creation of a new myth about Latin America. The Latin American continent that was portrayed, especially in the prologue, was no longer a premodern, rural, and exotic Latin America, condemned vehemently by Fuguet and Gómez, but rather a globalized and postmodern one where there were no social or economic differences. One of the best critiques of the editors’ statement is that of Palaversich (2000). 55. Both Casa de las Américas and Vuelta are mentioned in the novel, the latter implicitly on page 206 and the former on pages 323–24. 56. The anthology that, in effect, Arturo takes to Morales so that he may publish it prior to his trip to Europe. 57. Let us not forget, however, that Cesárea’s death is entirely accidental. The purpose of the investigation (32) or inquiry (587) that the detectives Arturo and Ulises carry out is certainly not to kill the founder of visceral realism. 58. “Caborca” brings to mind the name of Jack Kavorkian, the so-called doctor of death, accused of having helped more than one hundred US terminally ill patients to die in the 1990s. In Detectives “Caborca” is also the name of a small town north of Hermosillo (566) as well as the name that’s engraved in Cesárea’s knife (596). 59. Salvatierra, however, minimizes the difference between these two groups. In a dialogue with Cesárea, he tells her that the goal of both was essentially to reach “fucking modernity” (460). 60. For Avelar, the genesis of what’s called “the loss of the auratic quality of the literary” (1999, 29) coincides with the Boom, that is, when, according to him, literature finally becomes independent from other spheres of knowledge. In Masiello’s view, the loss of literature’s symbolic capital is due to the increasing predominance of audiovisual culture (2001, 1–18). For his part, Y údice speaks of the worldwide “crisis of the book” (2001, 651), whereas Kozak Rovero, making reference to “the crisis of the paradigm of the literary in the twenty-first centu y” (2001, 688), asks herself, “Where’ s literature heading?” in the partial title of her essay. Finally, Castro-Klarén, who argues that literature has lost the privileged status that it once had and constitutes now just one more field among others, concludes that, at present, literature represents an archive that can potentially

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contain any text, without one being better than another, without keeping inside, as in the past, any “treasure of the nation” (2002, 264). For more information on literature’s loss of symbolic capital, consult Olalquiaga’s 2001 study. 61. There are only two allusions to their texts in the novel, a poem by Ulises that García Madero hears in Álamo’s poetry workshop (16) and another by him that Norman Bolzman had heard in Israel (286); in neither case does the reader have access to the content of Ulises’s poems. For his part, Arturo introduces himself as writer (144) while, according to Quim, Ulises couldn’t stop writing (181). 62. And I am not just referring to “The Part about the Critics” or “The Part about Amalfitano,” the first and second of the novel, respective , but to specific allusions to reading. Once Anski stops being a soldier, for example, he starts reading like a mad man; Reiter does the same once freed from the prisoner camp. Reading is always presented as a consolation, as a respite from literature (986). 63. Let us not forget that Auxilio spends a significant amount of time reading poetry in the bathroom while the university is being invaded by the army; she calls it a vice (192), in fact. 64. Unless we were to view Bolaño’s “Photos” as a possible continuation of the novel. 65. Literally, “Clear Head.” 66. In Soto and Bravo’s interview with the author, Bolaño states that Amulet is his favorite (1999d, 92), and in Rodríguez Villouta’ s interview he says that it is his best (2000a, 58). 67. For Dés, the almost identical nature of the two texts does not imply that they have the same form, function, strategy, or focus (2002a, 171). Manzoni puts it this way: “In a movement that takes part of what might be called autophagy, the new text sacks the preceding one, shreds it and, in the same act, reconstructs it” (2002, 176). For Gras, understandably , Amulet becomes a much richer text than its first version in Detectives (2005, 63). 68. Long’s 2010 study of Amulet expands upon the biographical information that served as the basis for the construction of the character of Auxilio and that was initially provided by Manzoni (2002, 175). He states that Bolaño bases his character on Uruguayan poet and educator Alcira Soust, who arrived in Mexico in 1952 and who was, in fact, trapped inside the Philosophy and Literature Department’s bathroom at the UNAM in 1968. According to Long, Soust met Bolaño in 1970 and saw him for the last time in 1976 (129). Castillo de Berchenko calls Auxilio the memory and conscience of her time (2005a, 170); so does Gigena (2003, 26). In Draper’ s view, Auxilio presents herself as a sister or mother who, in contraposition to the male political establishment bent on remembering a catastrophic past, seeks rather to reconstruct “that which couldn’t be” (2012b, 62). Along similar lines, Marinescu conceives of Auxilio as a kind of savior who, because she was able to witness the defeat of the leftist revolutionary project, is now able to put the pieces of the “lettered city” together and thus imagines new political and cultural possibilities for the continent (2013, 136). More somberly, Lepage underscores her “role of victim, of sacrificial lamb”

Notes t o page 264   |  395







(2007, 70), while Medina sees Auxilio as “one of those fetishes of exile” con gealed in time who, like many exiles in Bolaño’s works, is unable to move forward (2009, 550). Amaro calls her , simply, a flâneur (2010, 152). For Daniuska González, Auxilio symbolizes, above all, the emptiness of Mexican poetry as well as the sterility of literature (2010, 149). Gutiérrez-Mouat, finall , calls Auxilio “a reincarnation of la Maga” (2014, 43). 69. Unsurprisingly, Manzoni was the first to defin Amulet: she called it “a migratory text” in her 2003 study (33). The year before, Dés classified it as baroque and risky (2002a, 173). Rodríguez saw Amulet as a kind of “prelude to 2666 ’s meditations on State violence, horror, Mexico, genocide, transnational ethics” (142) in his 2007 doctoral dissertation. He also saw it as a revisiting of the topics of reading and writing as they relate to violent acts and testimony (144). In her own 2008 dissertation, V alenzuela refers to Bolaño’s text as “the brief ‘Mexican’ total novel” (2008, 115). It is interesting that Bagué argues that Amulet could be read as Detectives’ prologue in the same way that “Photos” could be read as its epilogue (2010, 845). For Paula Aguilar , more recently, the novel’s title constitutes a reflection of Auxilio s own discourse, a discourse that, like an amulet, protects against the repetitions of history but also revises and criticizes the revolutionary Left (2010, 160). O’Br yen calls the novel By Night’s “sister-text” (2011, 482). See, also, Sánchez Fernández (2012, 141). 70. The text itself, of course, provides a sort of definition of what it is when the narrative voice tells the reader at the beginning of the diegesis, “This is going to be a horror story” (11). As Castillo de Berchenko notes, these initial words and those that follow immediately after “underscore a matter of genres” (2005a, 165), both literar y but also sexual because, after all, it is a woman who narrates. She goes on to call Amulet “a detective novel, a story of noir fiction sui generis” that ends up being a “funeral song, a painful and sore requiem about lost illusions and faded and sacrificed utopias” (172). Amaro calls the text “this anom lous policiaco” (2010, 150). 71. Indubitably, the text’s narrative discourse is one of its most attractive features. Somewhat similar in nature to Urrutia Lacroix’s discourse, Bolaño himself refers to it as “a kind of delirious discourse” (2000a, 58). Early on, Manzoni com pared its repetitive and obsessive nature to a “psychotic discourse” (2002, 177; 2003, 34). Gigena, who picks up and expands upon this idea, alludes to Auxilio’ s “obsessive voice” (2003, 17), a voice that is borderline between craziness and sanity (18), or between craziness and poetry (21), “an I who does not . . . stop saying to herself” (19). Dés refers to Auxilio’s voice as “broken and ironic” (2002a, 172–73). Castillo de Berchenko underlines, correctly , the “touching affectivity” (2005a, 169) that emanates from the text, underscoring the ubiquity and omnipotence of the narrative voice’s enunciation (168). Amaro, for her part, noting the pseudo testimonial and untrustworthy nature of Auxilio’s discourse (2010, 150), clarifies that “hers is the delirium of the oracle, of the seer” (150). More recently, Paula Aguilar has argued that, paradoxically, while one of the predominant traits of Bolaño’s fiction consists of the destabilizing of the real in a strongly referential discourse, in Amulet the possibilities of the real are expanded

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(2010, 161, 163). In his review of the text included in a study of several Chil ean writers as well as in Moreno’s Roberto Bolaño: La experiencia del abismo (2011, 197–206), Concha underscores the multiplicity of “disjunctive conjunctions” (2011, 351) in the text but without drawing a conclusion. Draper refers to how Auxilio’s “interior monologue” is characterized by a focus that is “oblique and dissymmetric” and that it can only come from a “foreign awareness” (2012b, 61, 62, and 71). Sánchez Fernández, who denies the testimonial character of Auxil io’s discourse, writes, “Discourse presents itself as capable of producing another version of itself, as capable of being interpreted; in sum: as unstable and, thus, hardly acceptable as testimony” (2012, 139) . . . “The memorial-like capacity of [Auxilio’s] discourse weakens, producing a mystifying creation instead of a true memory” (140). Marinescu, by contrast, reminds us that Auxilio does not claim to be objective (2013, 141). 72. For Manzoni, these metarratives constitute one more element in the series of expansions (2002, 182) present in Amulet, expansions implemented by means of amplification and repetitions. Regarding the stories of Arturo Belano and Lilian Serpas, for example, Castillo de Berchenko states that they constitute “authentic axes of signification that fuse and successfully integrate with the major plot” (2005a 168). O’Br yen, who works with Freud’s concept of melancholia, maintains that Auxilio’s integration of the metanarratives has much to do with a “melancholic identification” (2011, 477) whereby she incorporates what is lost. For an understanding of Erígone’s story in the text as well as the role of Greek literature in Bolaño’s works, consult Blanck’s 2009 study. 73. For Gigena, Auxilio’s stay in the bathroom represents a kind of freezing of time where both the past and the future come to a halt (2003, 22–23) and “everything happens interminably” (24–25). In Dés’ s view, this interminable time constitutes a kind of “aleph” (2002a, 172–73) that allows Auxilio to reinterpret past and future. Long calls Auxilio’s “bathroom prison” (2010, 136) a “traumatic chronotope” (130), whereas O’Br yen refers to it as a “traumatic ordeal” (2011, 474) that never ends. Sánchez Fernández interestingly asserts that Auxilio’s bathroom experience has the same symbolic and totemic relevance that the pyramid has for Paz (2012, 139). 74. The reconstruction of a certain past, of course, is at the very center of Bolaño’s novel. Early on, Tarifeño noted that, along with Detectives, Amulet constitutes a kind of overturning of official historiography in which “an alternative model of memory” (2002, 122) is proposed. Gigena, however , thinks that “memory as restoration of the past” (2003, 26) remains neutralized in the text precisely because the limits among past, present, and future are never stable, making Auxilio inhabit a sort of eternal memory that repeats itself (27). Castillo de Berchenko, for her part, contends that, on the contrary, her paramount task consists of remembering what happened in order to protect the young and especially young poets (2005a, 172). If Urrutia Lacroix is unable to remem ber the past, maintains Paula Aguilar, her most dreadful feeling is to forget it (2010, 158); what’ s more, owing more to psychoanalysis than to historiography, she is intent on problematizing it and comprehending it instead of simply just

Notes t o page 264   |  397







constructing it (159). In Long’s critical perspective, Auxilio’s traumatic experience allows her to have a more enlightened understanding of the past (2010, 136–37). In her own analysis of the text, Draper goes even further, asserting that there is a potential in Auxilio’s memory in the sense that she has the ability to imagine a past that never occurred but wishes that it had occurred (2012b, 56). O’Byren states something similar: “In this refusal to remake selfhood by ironing out the contortions of memory into a coherent linear narrative, the text aligns the scrambled grammar of melancholy with a resistance to time and a preservation of past dreams for the sake of the future” (2011, 479). 75. The year 1968 is the “place that contains ever ything” (2002, 182), wrote Manzoni in her seminal critical study on Amulet. Concha calls 1968—and 1973— the “chronological peak of the same destructive barbarity” (2011, 348). V ery insightfully, Draper states regarding this key year, “I find that in this text there s a kind of idea in which Bolaño urges us to think about how ‘68’ repeats itself as ‘gesture’ and how one inherits the promise of a ‘68’ that wasn’t, that couldn’t be or that could have been but that, nevertheless, emerges as question—a sort of web that takes ’68 beyond its temporality and links it to a bigger history made up of events and exclusions” (2012b, 55, italics in the original). 76. The entire novel, according to Gigena, is built on what she calls a “temporal figuration” (2003, 21); in the text, time does not pass, it dwells in the fictional world in “an instant that therefore doesn’t develop, paradoxically, because it occupies everything” (22). Time, in fact, becomes one of Amulet’s themes (22). For Long, the presence of what he calls “unsettled time” (2010, 131)—a time that by not following a strict chronology rejects teleology and progress (130)— facilitates “a critique of the archive as cultural institution” (131). In Draper’s view, the “temporal confusion” (57) or “confusion of times” (63) in the text opens the possibility of rethinking the political (2012b, 58, 63). O’Byren, finall , alluding to “this kaleidoscoping of temporal planes” (2011, 477), maintains that the lack of a linear chronology makes it possible that memory serves “as a means to (healthy) forgetting” (475). 77. “Its testimonial function is undeniable,” writes Concha (2011, 350), while Paula Aguilar contends that the presence of visceral realism in the text undermines this function (2010, 166). The two most thorough analyses about the role of testimonio in Amulet are those by Sánchez Fernández (2012) and Marinescu (2013), especially the latter. Sánchez Fernández maintains that, in contrast to writers such as Poniatowska or Monsiváis, for example, Bolaño’s novel lacks a documentary or testimonial intention: “Bolaño’s intention is not documental and, in some sense, he problematizes the documental functionality of discourse itself” (134). Moreover, the fictional account of Auxilio s stay in the bathroom, its humorous and absurd nature, makes it not only ambiguous ideologically but foremost devoid of the “pact of credibility and representativity” (138) necessar y for any true testimony. For Marinescu, who disputes Aguilar’s belief that Amulet does not have a testimonial value, the text’s testimonial import resides in the fact that it investigates the reasons for why the ideals of the 1960s failed at the same time that it provides an understanding of political struggle that moves away from

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a sacrificial ethics (2013, 140). Here lies her key argument: “In Amulet bearing witness means bearing witness to this failure to think otherwise about what it means to be courageous, about how to be politically engaged yet depart from a model that glorifies violence and puts action before thought. Bolaño, through the voice of Auxilio, calls attention to the madness of martyr-like practice, which reproduces violence and ends in failure” (144). 78. Although I agree with O’Byren that in Amulet Bolaño maintains “a political will” (2011, 479)—a political will that, as my study shows, is ver y much what gives the resistant character to his postmodernism—I do not concur with him that in his previous works (specifically in Nazi, Distant, and Detectives) “he seemed to have declared” this political will “dead and defunct” (479). For Draper, the value of Amulet consists in giving new possibilities to the political. She states, “Bolaño seems to be aiming at the need to think about other types of political figurabilidad capable of differing from left and right narratives, victims of historicism and what he calls the invisible and introjected gaze of the jailers” (2012b, 61). In tandem with my own ideas regarding Bolaño’ s political penchant throughout his entire body of work, Sánchez Fernández says that even though his novels and short stories are heavily influenced by the conceptua fragmentation of poststructuralist discourse, “it cannot be said that he pretends not to know the meaning of ‘struggle’ and the importance of what happened to the students of ’68” (2012, 140). 79. This scene is no doubt one of the most striking in the novel. Early on, Gigena saw it as an image of catastrophe which is prefigured in Auxilio s encounter with Remedios Varo (2003, 28). Castillo de Berchenko saw it, appropriately , as an “allegory of political, social and human transcendence” (2005a, 172). More literally, perhaps, Rodríguez thinks that when Auxilio talks about the young falling into the abyss, in reality she is, proleptically, referring to their “marching towards their death in Tlatelolco” (2007, 168). In “Questions for Bolaño,” Jean Franco calls this moment “one of the most haunting and the most telling” (2009, 209) in Bolaño’s fiction, adding, somewhat flippantly later on, “a romantic idea of chivalry seems to be at work here, or perhaps a hippy sensibility that accepts the law of chance as the only law” (210). Draper, who sees a connection between this final scene and the first testimonial account of Poniatowsk s La noche de Tlatelolco (2012b, 69), underlines the diversity of the group of young people who march undeterred to their deaths; this group, in her judgment, cannot be reduced to a “militant, homogenous, ideal, stigmatized subject” (74). More in line with my own reading of this final scene, O’B yen construes it as a politically hopeful moment. He states, “In these lines the confusion of past, present and future entailed by Auxilio’s melancholia no longer constitutes passive endurance of trauma and psychic breakdown. Instead it forms the basis of an active political stance: not just a refusal to forget those crushed under Tlatelolco’s rubble and frozen out of history, but also a resilient fidelity to their dreams and desires, a commitment to sing to their tune indefinitely” (2011, 478–79, italics in the original). For Marinescu, finall , the value of this final scene consists of testing what she calls “the logic of sacrificial ethics” (2013, 142). In the end, suggests the critic,

Notes t o pages 265–274   |  399







the text shows that although a whole generation of young men and women may have been prompted to “make the revolution” out of love and a sense of justice, violence is not worth it because violent acts only beget more violence (143–44). Also, see Long (2010, 143). 80. “Amiguitos” (55, 61, 78, 80, 110, 115, 123). 81. Specificall , Auxilio compares Guerrero Street to a forgotten cemetery in the year 2666 (76). 82. One wonders whether Bolaño might have been inspired by Jorge Semprun’s L’écriture ou la vie (1994) in his choosing the toilet as a place of resistance. In this autobiography concerning not so much life in the concentration camp (Buchenwald) but rather life after liberation, Semprun describes the prisoners’ bathroom as an almost magical site where true communion and resistance took place. 83. On pages 28, 33, 79, 97, and 148. 84. When discussing how to best tell what happened to them in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Semprun tells his friends that, without a dosage of fiction, the truth of the experience cannot be conveyed. In French, he calls this “le mentir wrai de la littérature” [the true lying of literature] in L’écriture ou la vie (1994, 239). “T o become true, that is, believable, reality is often in need of invention,” he writes later in the same book (336–37). 85. As examined above all in chapters 2 and 4 of this study. 86. Italics in the original.

Chapter 7







1. Among the best studies at this writing are those of Donoso (2008), Blejer (2013), Burgos (2013), Manuel Pérez (2010), W alker (2010), Herlinghaus (2011), Deckard (2012), López-Vicuña (“Desdoblamientos”), Olivier (2011), Lainck (2014), Logie (2014), Gray (2014), and M. Birns (2015). 2. The apocalyptic and evil, respectively. Since my own study on Bolaño was already in press, I was not able to consult Pedro Salas’s just released book, 2666 : En búsqueda de la totalidad perdida (Raleigh, NC: Editorial A contracorriente, 2018). 3. Also see Salas-Durazo 2012, 121, note 15. 4. Martínez de Mingo calls 2666 a “cosmopolitan novel” (2012, 294) and Ercolino puts it in the category of “supranational” (2014, xii) or “stateless narra tive” (84). 5. Thinking especially about the allusion to the number 2666 in Amulet (77), for some the novel’s title is either an announcement of the murders of women in the part 4 (Walker 2010, 104) or the final demise of modernity s utopian dreams and capitalism’s ultimate triumph (Deckard 2012, 367). Others, taking into con sideration the number of the beast, 666, in Revelation 13, underscore its apocalyptic connotations (Poblete 2010a, 26–27; López Badano 2010, 370; M. Birns 2015, 67–68), going as far as saying that Santa T eresa’s violence is the violence that awaits Latin America as a whole (Muniz 2010, 38). See, also, Rodríguez de Arce (2006, 203), Nitschack (2008, 533), Levinson (2009, 187), and Stegmayer (2012, 119).

400   |  Notes t o pages 274–275

















6. According to Correa and Buendía (2009, 276–79), as well as Novillo- ­ Corbalán (2013, 365), Bolaño’ s appropriation of Baudelaire’s verse is a way to warn not against modernity, as did the French poet, but against globalization and capitalism gone awry. Walker elaborates on the semantic implications of Bolaño’s translation of the verse (2010, 102–4). 7. Most critics point to the fragment as 2666 ’s major structural feature (Burgos 2013, 468; Deckard 2012, 369; Ercolino 2014, 50; Fourez 2007, 189) but some prefer to speak of “the accretion of disparate tales” (Levinson 2009, 177) and even cuts (Muniz 2010, 47). Consult, also, Omlor (2014, 666) and Lainck (2014, 28, 187–88). 8. It should come as no surprise that for many critics 2666 is a novel about evil (Galdo 2005, 24; Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 183; Muniz 2010, 44, 49; Olivier 2011, 243). For others it is about violence, either as a consequence of globaliza tion gone awry (McCann 2010a, 136) or as the inability of morally alert criticism to write about violence (Peláez 2014, 30, 33, 44). For Blejer 2666 is a special honor to the memory of murdered women (2013, 263) while for Deckard it is a reinvigoration of realism’s potential in the age of millennial capitalism (2012, 353). See, also, Solotorevsky (2006, 129), Dove (2014, 158), Logie (2014, 611, 613), and Lainck (2014, 16). 9. According to most critics, 2666 does not follow the traditional detective genre paradigm (Willem 2013, 80, note; Deckard 2012, 364; Logie 2014, 623; Lainck 2014, 15, 30, 127; Sepúlveda 2011, 233–34; M. Birns 2015, 73) even though some still recognize a few of its attributes—or those of the neopolitical (Blejer 2013, 256)—in the text (Vial 2005, 119; Burgos 2013, 472; Olivier 2011, 243; Herlinghaus 2011, 117). Camps calls it “a ‘criminal novel,’ because [in the part 4] the police never appear to be doing their job, thus inaugurating a macabre new genre” (2015, 117). 10. Deckard calls 2666 a “world-system novel” (2012, 369) and Herlinghaus argues that it is a text “about a planetary state of affairs” (2011, 106). Also see McCann (2010b). 11. For Gray, for example, it is indigenism and not multinationalism that is at the heart of the novel, especially if one focuses on the text’s fourth part (2014, 167). 12. Critics coincide in pointing to the almost orgasmic feeling that Espinoza and Pelletier experience either as intoxication (Herlinghaus 2011, 114–16) or abjection (Huneeus 2011, 255–58) but where, clearly , the line between civilization and barbarism becomes fuzzy at best (López-Vicuña 2012, 104). 13. Levinson (2009, 184), M. Birns (2015, 78), and Logie (2014, 626). 14. Andrei Vasilenko puts it in the context of the apocalyptic images that populate the text (2009, 23). Also see Levinson (2009, 183–84) and Logie (2014, 616). 15. Dove (2014), whose whole study of 2666 revolves around this sentence, establishes a connection between the murders of women and neoliberalism and the loss of state’s sovereignty. For his part, Lainck writes: “The secret, the incomprehensible enigma of 2666 , resides in the fact that it is itself a well-known

Notes t o page 275   |  401













secret. The secret of evil is its very unnoticed obviousness” (2014, 126). Consult, also, Farred (2010, 705) and especially Zavala (2015, 145–208). 16. Willem provides the most thorough critical assessment of Sammer’s story (2013, 82–88). For her , as well as most critics, what’s interesting about it is not just the connection that Bolaño establishes between genocide and feminicidio but also the fact that the genocide is recounted not by the victim but by the assassin, an assassin who resembles Adolf Eichman in the bureaucratic way that he justifies the murder of the Greek Jews and whose murder by Reiter is crucial to the latter becoming a writer (Burgos 2009, 133; V asilenko 2009, 25–26; M. Birns 2015, 71; Donoso 2009, 136–38; López-Vicuña 2012, 110, 112; Lainck 2014, 190–91, 214–15). 17. For Rodríguez de Arce, evil is the central motif of 2666 (2006, 180). For Donoso, Bolaño’s originality resides in the fact that, formally, he utilizes, especially in the part 4, narrative methods that emulate evil practices characteristic of the twentieth century, such as repetition (2009, 132). For his part, Huneeus, resorting to Hannah Arendt’s most famous phrase, speaks of “the banality of evil” (2011, 261, italics in the original). Lainck, who carries out a thorough analysis of the concept of evil, conceives of it not as an inexplicable mysterious force that attacks Mexican society but rather as that which reveals society’s malfunction and, foremost, as a lack of empathy (2014, 21, 59, 239). 18. Peláez’s 2014 article on the subject is the most thorough; her major con tention is that violence in 2666 appears as deterritorialized and pervasive, including major violent actions but also minor ones. Along the same line, McCann refers to its “amorphous sense” in Santa Teresa (2010a 138). For their part, Huneeus (2011, 263, 265) and Nitschack (2008, 538) underscore the inherently masculine nature of violence in the text. Lainck (2014, 147), who, like McCann (2010b), establishes a connection between sexual violence and the excesses of capitalism, argues that the rampant violence in Santa Teresa still lacks “the automatized rationality of the crematories” (146). For other comments on the subject, see Donoso (2009, 126, 128, 132, 134), Herlinghaus (2011, 106), and López-Vicuña (2012, 103, 109). 19. Particularly by Farred (2010) and Deckard (2012). 20. Even in the most gruesome descriptions of dead women, argues Willem, Bolaño manages to insert the poetic (2013, 80). Deckard refers to “the lyrical bursts of the irreal that punctuate the otherwise flat affect” (2012, 367). For other ways in which literature operates in the novel, see McCann (2010b) and Omlor (2014, 664). Concerning the functions of reading and the reader , consult Elmore (2008, 289), Peláez (2014, 34), and Lainck (2014, 37, 76, 105). 21. Ríos—whose entire 2014 article, “Archimboldi,” is consecrated to the function of time—and Levinson (2009, 190) maintain that time in 2666 appears as a force that, by altering chronology, leads to disruption and chaos. 22. Most critical comments revolve around the four critics’ dreams in the novel’s first part. In this context, they se ve to reveal the violence that takes place in Santa Teresa (Blejer 2013, 257; Olivier 2011, 247–48) as well as “the sites of cri sis in the ‘disorderly’ globalized world” (Herlinghaus 2011, 113); likewise, they

402   |  Notes t o page 275















are the only vehicles through which the critics establish a contact with Archimboldi’s literature (Lainck 2014, 60). More generally throughout the text, dreams embody the apocalyptic as a permanent threat (Logie 2014, 614) or they have a visionary function (Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 202). 23. This essential location in Bolaño’s oeuvre has been construed in 2666 as symbolic of an existential taedium vitae (Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 178, 188), as the barren space that awaits the continent’s future (Poblete 2010a, 43), and as the most propitious site for the emergence of evil (López Badano 2010, 370). 24. Some locate it in language itself (Deckard 2012, 355) while others, partic ularly in relationship to the novel’s fourth section, see it as either a phantom-like presence at the heart of a “dislocated, denationalized experience of global capitalism” (McCann 2010b) or as dead women’ s “spectral traces claiming for justice” (Peláez 2014, 32). In Rodríguez S.’ s 2014 analysis the presence of movies and photography in 2666 provide sets of images that, paradoxically, hide reality. 25. For example, those of Barberán (2010), Donoso (2008), Peláez (2014), and Walker (2010). 26. The only study to focus most of its attention on this section is that of Rodríguez S. (2014) 27. Most scholars have commented either on the critics’ lack of understanding and commitment (Deckard 2012, 359; Herlinghaus 2011, 107–8; Muniz 2010, 41) or their empty and failed existence (Huneeus 2011, 253; M. Pérez 2010, 344). For Logie they symbolize a parody of European culture (2014, 616), whereas in Vasilenko’s view in this section of the text Bolaño is satirizing the “emergence of academic industries” (2009, 23). For Rodríguez de Arce, finall , the four critics constitute “a metropolitan version” of Detectives (2006, 203). 28. According to most, these reasons are inseparable from Amalfitano s previous political activities. From this perspective, he incarnates the disenchanted Latin American intellectual (Blejer 2013, 258; Logie 2014, 620; Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 192; Piña 2005, 124) and has even been referred to as Bolaño’ s alter ego (Levinson 2009, 182; Blejer 279). Others have seen him as a seer (Herling haus 2011, 112) or as “the only clair voyant” (Omlor 2014, 667) able to discern what hides below the surface. 29. Marks (2004), Paz-Soldán (2006, 112), Ruisánchez (2010, 395), and Donoso (2009, 132), among several others. For Cánovas, nevertheless, Santa Teresa approximates Onetti’s mythical Santa María (2009, 247). 30. Even though the religious connotations of the name have been recognized (Fourez 2007, 188), for the majority of critics the city connotes a sort of hell on earth (Poblete 2010a, 41–42; Garcés 2004; Rodríguez de Arce 2006, 186). In this context, it’s been called “the city of death” (Barberán 2010, 55), Latin America’s final city and a type of cemete y of the continent (Rivera de la Cuadra 2008, 179), and “a cr ystal ball of the horror to come” (Camps 2015, 117). Not surprisingly, it’s also been tied to modernity’s failure (Lainck 2014, 114–15) as well as to globalization’ s pernicious effects on women (Farred 2010, 704). 31. Bolaño himself defined Ciudad Juárez as “our curse and our mirror”

Notes t o page 275   |  403











(2004a, 339). The following authors provide ver y useful information about the city and also its representation in the novel: Burgos (2013), Barberán (2010), McCann (2010b), Dove (2014), and Peláez (2014). The consensus, of course, is that what the Financial Times called “The City of the Future”‘ in 2008 (in M. Birns 2015, 72), the “capital of the twenty-first centu y” (McCann 2010a, 136), and, more pessimistically, “a site of necropolitical violence” where women become disposable bodies (McCann 2010b), constitutes the ver y epitome of an economically deregulated space where the state has lost all control and where multinationals reign supreme. Another critic, more optimistically, argues that, while there’s plenty of drug violence in Ciudad Juárez, there’s also economic opportunity (Reeds 2011, 145–46). 32. In fact, Bolaño writes a review of it and alludes to his friendship with González Rodríguez (2004a, 214–16). 33. Gras’s (2012) and Balmaceda’ s (2010) studies are the most thorough. The latter calls Huesos en el desierto “the documental reverse of the novel” (336). Consult also Rodríguez de Arce (2006, 184, 200); W alker (2010, 100); and Gray (2014, 173). 34. According to most critics, this part is the point where all the other parts of the novel converge (Garcés 2004; Logie 2014, 617; Lainck 2014, 129). Bal maceda (2010, 341) and Olivier (2011, 244) define it as a lamentation over all the dead women. Rodríguez S., who examines the function of both film and photography in the text, contends that “The Part about the Crimes” “can be seen . . . as a film about murders; a thriller about a possible serial killer who changes his body and multiplies himself” (2014, 15–16). In Rodríguez de Arce’ s view, it is “an amplificatio ” (2006, 195, italics in the original) of one of the most prevalent nightmares in Bolaño’s oeuvre: the death and disappearance of young Latin Americans of his own generation. 35. Walker (2010) provides the most complete account. Generally, and not surprisingly, the terms forensic and medical are the most common to allude to this part’s narrative voice (Rodríguez de Arce, 2006,198; V asilenko 2009, 24; Donoso 2009, 135; Balmaceda 2010, 332; T ornero 2013, 27; Logie 2014, 617; Peláez 2014, 38). Some critics emphasize the neutral tone of the narrative voice (Walker 2010, 101; Logie 2014, 623) as well as its affectless nature (M. Birns 2015, 73; Gray 2014, 167). Understandably , they also compare part 4’s narrative style to both the police report (Stegmayer 2012, 120; Willem 2013, 80; Close 2014, 599) and journalistic discourse (M. Pérez 2010, 360; T ornero 2013, 35). Furthermore, two critics underscore the importance of iteration in the description of the dead women (Willem 2013, 80; Peláez 2014, 38, 42). Deck ard, finall , states that “the narration is hyperrealist, an empiricist stenography drained of emotion” (2012, 364). 36. For Huneeus, women in this section epitomize the “oasis of horror” to which the novel’s epigraph alludes (2011, 260), whereas for Burgos they can be seen, sexually, as just another consumer product (2013, 470). 37. To almost every critic of Bolaño’s text this constitutes the apex of inscrutability (Nitschack 2008, 539; Donoso 2009, 139; Barberán 2010, 57; Deckard

404   |  Notes t o pages 275–282











2012, 364; Stegmayer 2012, 126; Dove 2014, 156). In his long study Lainck speaks of “epistemological skepticism” (2014, 145) regarding 2666 in general but the part 4 in particular. Farred puts it best, however, when he writes that the question as to why women are killed “remains the unaskable question . . . that question that is beyond—or, worse, without possible—redress” (2010, 699). Y et, some probable answers have been proposed. For Margaret Birns, for example, the crimes are the result of deep prejudice and a social order affected adversely by neoliberalism (2015, 74). In V asilenko’s view, women are killed because they represent the weakest group in the era of globalization (2009, 25). According to Gray, finall , “killings are the blood sport of the idle rich . . . Or . . . symptoms of patriarchal backlash against working women” (2014, 170). 38. In relationship to the murders, Haas is nothing but a scapegoat according to critics (Huneeus 2011, 264; Gras 2012, 112; Poblete 2010b, 423; Lainck 2014, 155). 39. Deckard (2012, 365), M. Birns (2015, 73, 76), and Dove (2014, 142, 149). 40. Archimboldi is no doubt 2666 ’s mysterious figure par excellence. His ori inal name is Hans Reiter, the name of a German doctor who in real life was a war criminal (Nitschack 2008, 542; López-Vicuña 2012, 110). He decides to change his name after the war so that the new authorities would not trace Sammer’s death to him. In honor of Anky’s favorite painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo—who, incidentally, is also mentioned in Cortázar’s Hopscotch (in section 60)—he begins to call himself Benno von Archimboldi. Critics have variously referred to Archimboldi as a “reconstructed Nazi” (Farred 2010, 691), a kind of German Salinger (Logie 2014, 627), a black hole (Ríos 2014, 124), and an uprooted heroic artist (McCann 2010a, 138), who, in his moral ambiguity , resembles Ernest Jünger (Lainck 2014, 229). In Muniz’ s judgment, the name change enables an allegorical reading of the novel (2010, 45). López Badano states the matter thus: “With this choice of pseudonym, the multinovel operates a reading instruction about the hidden figures of the sto y, a story that presents itself as an amorphous construction that can be read as much as in its parts as in its totality” (2010, 375). 41. On pages 541 (“Man is born into pain”), 639 (“Ever y life, . . . no matter how happy, always ends up in pain and suffering”), 702 (“If pain didn’t exist, . . . But there it was, to fuck it all up”), 1,075 (“All eloquence was the eloquence of pain”). 42. This point is emphasized in “The Part about the Crimes” where, as four women are waiting to hear about the disappearance of the daughters of one of them, “they experienced what it felt like being in Purgatory, a long, defenseless wait, a wait whose spine was neglect, something very Latin American” (759–60, my italics). 43. Given this conflictive relation it makes more sense that Chile alludes to the author’s birthplace than to “chili,” a hot pepper. 44. On pages 466, 506, 752, and 759. 45. Amalfitano employs these two terms indistinctl . 46. On pages 170–72, 449, 628, and 736–37 especially . 47. In real life Yeltsin was known as “the happy drunkard.”

Notes t o pages 282–289   |  405







48. If in their work on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari construe “minor literature” as a kind of writing that emerges within the major language but almost in opposition to it, in Bolaño it has mostly to do with literary quality. 49. By Editorial Universitaria. Essentially, Kilapán’s 1978 ver y short book (61 pages)—whose several sections are reproduced exactly in 2666— is no more than an exaltation of Bernardo O’Higgins’ (the Chilean George Washington) Araucanian ancestry, without which, argues Kilapán, O’Higgins wouldn’t have been able to obtain Chile’s independence. 50. Italics in the original. 51. In his essay “Words from Outer Space,” Bolaño refers to Chile as “the infantile island called Chile” (2004a, 80). 52. Bolaño, of course, takes the name from Robert George “Bobby” Seale, who, along with activist Huey P. Newton, founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. 53. Biao in real life.

Books by Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003)

Monsieur Pain (1981, 1999); Monsieur Pain (2010) Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984) (cowritten with A. G. PortaBuchenbald); no English translation) La pista de hielo (1993); The Skating Rink (2009) La universidad desconocida (1993, 2007); The Unknown University (2013) Los perros románticos (1995, 2000); The Romantic Dogs:1980–1998 (2008) Literatura Nazi en América (1996); Nazi Literature in the Americas (2008) Estrella distante (1996); Distant Star (2004) Llamadas telefónicas (1997); Last Evenings on Earth (2006) (includes short stories from Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas) Los detectives salvajes (1998); The Savage Detectives (2007) Amuleto (1999); Amulet (2006) Nocturno de Chile (2000); By Night in Chile (2003) Tres (2000); Tres (2011) Putas asesinas (2001); The Return (2010) (includes short stories from Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas) Amberes (2002); Antwerp (2010) Una novelita lumpen (2002); A Little Lumpen Novelita (2014) El gaucho insufrible (2003); The Insufferable Gaucho (2010) 2666 (2004); 2666 (2008) Entre paréntesis (2004); Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003 (2011) El secreto del mal (2007); The Secret of Evil (2012) El tercer Reich (2010); The Third Reich (2011) Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011); Woes of the True Policeman (2012) El espíritu de la ciencia ficción (2016); The Spirit of Science Fiction (2019) Sepulcros de vaqueros (2017) (no English translation)

407

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Index

abject, the, 204, 229–30 À bout de souffl (film), 9 absolute space, 170–71, 197, 199 Adorno, Theodor, 16, 33, 85, 142, 189, 308n52, 310n69 “Adventure” (Bolaño), 141, 164, 166; space-place in, 174–75 aesthetics: of cubism, 116–17; of Latin American Boom, 92; of postmodernism and postmodernity, 44 affect theory, 205–6 African Americans, 288–89 After the Great Divide (Huyssen), 306n34, 310n69 Against Literature (Beverly), 40 Agamben, Giorgio, 142 Age of Anger (Mishra), 293 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 188 Aguilar, Paula, 395n69 Allende, Isabel, 298, 341n80 Allende, Salvador, 145–48, 169, 236, 374n129; overthrow of, 57, 154–55, 207–8, 237 All that Is Solid Melts into Air (Berman), 30 alter-globalization, 14–15 Althusser, Louis, 213 Altman, Rick, 214 “Alturas de Machu Pichu” (Neruda), 40 Amberes (Bolaño), 66 “Among the Horses” (Bolaño), 67, 72–74 Amulet (Bolaño), 49, 68, 82, 85, 94,

98, 118, 246; critical assessment of, 264–65, 395n69; Detectives related to, 201; as detective stor y, 265; histor y in, 10; Latin America in, 268–69; Long on, 394n68; Manzoni on, 263–64, 395n69, 396n72, 397n75; memory in, 223, 263–72, 396n74; metanarratives in, 396n72; narrative discourse in, 10, 395n71; the past in, 396n74; the political in, 108, 185, 271–72, 398n78; testimonial quality of, 267–68, 397n77, 398n79; time in, 397n76 Anderson, Perry, 16, 21, 29, 306n32, 306n34, 311n72; on Jameson, 311n71; on postmodernism, 307n35, 311n71 Andrews, Chris, 12, 141, 347n7 “Anne Moore’s Life” (Bolaño), 159, 162–63, 280 Anti-Aesthetic, The (Foster), 22–23, 306n34 antidetective figure, 111; in Monsieur, 115–16 anti-modernism, 25 anti-Semitism, 196, 401n16 Antwerp (Bolaño), 49, 60, 63–70, 88, 89, 104, 128, 206, 318n30; crime scenes in, 68–69; critical assessments of, 319n41, 320n50; imager y in, 64–65; Latin America in, 321n51; marginal communities in, 295; migrants in, 321n51; police in, 66–67; writing in, 320n50

439

440   |  index Anxiety of Influence, Th (Bloom), 258 Apolinar, Héctor, 392n50 Apologia Pro Vita (Newman), 323n64 “Applause” (Bolaño), 65, 68, 319n44, 323n60 Araucanians, 219, 285–87 Araya Peeters, Arturo, 237 architecture, 18, 20–21, 28, 309n60 Areco, Macarena, 250 Arendt, Hannah, 401n17 Argentina, 137–38; democracy in, 144–45; dictatorship in, 192–93; the Left in, 150–51 Argueta, Manlio, 42 Ariel (Rodó), 195, 312n78 Arlt, Roberto, 318n34 Arrate, José, 364n110 art: life transformed by, 98; in postmodernism, 28 Aspurúa, Javier, 106, 122, 124, 331n39 “Atole” (Bolaño), 81 Augustine (Saint), 323n64 authoritarianism, 118. See also fascism “Autobiographies” (Bolaño), 58 autobiography, 46, 241–42, 268; Bolaño on, 70, 295; in “Card,” 149–50; in “Detectives,” 148–49; in “The Eye,” 337n47; in “Meeting with Enrique Lihn,” 180; in poetr y, 70–80, 324n66; in “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” 325n64; in Skating, 131–34 Autobiography (Cellini), 323n64 autonomy, 267; of literature, 254–55 autophagy, 201, 352n45, 394n67 Ayala, Matías, 57 Aylwin, Patricio, 186, 202, 216 Bachelet, Michelle, 347n4 Bad Vibes (Fuguet), 186, 300 Bagué Quílez, Luis, 379n11, 386n27, 395n69 Baker, Peter, 381n15, 384n19, 385n24, 387n29, 388n33, 390n41 Bal, Mieke, 309n68; on focalization, 97, 128

“Bar, The” (Bolaño), 67, 320n50, 321n51 Barcelona, 68–69, 72, 76, 90, 101, 102, 104, 127, 147, 148, 156, 158, 174, 177, 180, 242, 256, 258, 260, 261, 321no51, 330n31, 338n52, 344n107, 347n1 Barnes, Djuna, 100 Barnet, Miguel, 323n64 Barral, Carlos, 393n52 Barrie, Axford, on globalization, 14–15 Barth, John, 30, 45 Barthelme, Donald, 45 Barthes, Roland, 50, 247–48 Là-Bas (Huysmans), 372n124 “batalla de Chile, La” (Guzmán), 146, 212 Baudelaire, Charles, 100, 169, 274, 308n46, 400n6 Baudrillard, J., 17, 306n34, 308n46 Bauman, Zygmunt, 12–13, 304n19 Beat Generation, 318n29 Bell, Daniel, 16, 306n27 Bellah, Robert, 8, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 142, 153, 345n117 Benmiloud, Karim, 235, 349n24, 367n116, 368n117, 370n120, 375n131 Berman, Marshall, 30, 126; on modernism, 311n73 Bertens, Hans, 30 Beverly, John, 40, 46, 314n98 Biga, Daniel, 100 “Big Silver Waves” (Bolaño), 67–68, 322n51, 322n53 Birds Without a Nest (Turner), 191 Bisama, Adolfo, 367n116 Bisama, Álvaro, 319n41, 363n106, 367n116 “Black Heralds, The” (Vallejo, C.), 118 Black Mask (magazine), 316n13 Black Panthers, 11, 288–89, 405n52 Blejer, Daniella, 274, 283, 399n1, 400n8 Bloom, Harold, 251, 258

index   |  441 “Blue” (Bolaño), 65, 68, 319n42, 320n48 Bolaño, Roberto: autobiography used by, 70, 295; Borges influencing, 137–38; in Chile, 82, 361n98; contrarianism of, 298–99; critical studies on, 82, 301; on defeat, 84; on exile, 101–2; fame of, 241; on globalization, 300–301; influence of, 293–94, 299; in infrarrealistas, 392n50; Joyce as influence of, 385n23; literature in works of, 246; melancholia generosa of, 86; metafiction in work of, 45, 247–48; in Mexico City, 81; modernity critiqued by, 45–46; on poetr y, 48–49, 55, 70, 79, 315n1; on the political, 8–9, 45–47, 108, 296–97; political consciousness of, 43–44; postmodernism of resistance of, 45–46; prose of, 315n1, 315n2; in Spain, 327n87; as stor yteller, 48; translations of, 315n4; women characters of, 68, 94 Bolaño antes de Bolaño (Quezada, J.), 55–56 Bolaño Phenomenon, 105, 241, 293 Bolaño por sí mismo (Braithwaite), 55 Bolognese, Chiara, 60, 90, 315n8, 353n51, 358n60, 383n19 Boom. See Latin American Boom Booth, Wayne, 90, 101, 167; on narrators, 128 Borges, Jorge Luis, 178, 182, 188, 298, 316n14, 330n27; on detective genre, 52; influence of, 137–38; political motivation of, 45 Boullosa, Carmen, 3, 45, 55, 350n25, 392n50 Bourdieu, Pierre, 194, 363n107 Braham, Persephone, 51–54, 316n14, 316n16 “Bread and Wine” (Hölderlin), 85 Breton, André, 163 Bretton Woods, 25–26, 309n62

Briceño, Ximena, 363n106, 368n117, 372n125 “Brief Story of Postmodern Plot, A” (Burgass), 124 Brindeau, Serge, 169 Brodsky, Roberto, 331n39, 379n11 Brooks, Peter, 88 Bruña Bragado, María José, 192–93, 357n58 Brunner, José Joaquín, 312n80 Bruss, Elizabeth W., 70, 71, 74 “Buba” (Bolaño), 137, 151, 152 Bueno, Raúl, 312n79, 312n80; on modernity, 31–32 Buenos Aires, 181–82 Burgass, Catherine, 124–25 Burgess, Anthony, 91–92 Burgos Jara, Carlos, 247, 354n52, 356n56, 371n122, 380n12, 386n27 Burton, Robert, 373n128 busca de Klingsor, En (Volpi), 105 By Night (Bolaño), 58–59, 108, 118, 119, 154, 176; Castillo de Berchenko on, 361n98, 363n105, 365n111; Chile in, 9, 220–40; critical attention to, 222; Decante Araya on, 367n114, 375n131; duality in, 375n131; the foreign and local in, 225, 229–31; history in, 186; inspiration for, 220; literature in, 225, 233–35, 237–39, 362n105, 363n108; Manzoni on, 221; melancholia in, 373n128; memory in, 223–24; Mexico in, 235–36; modernity in, 225; narrator of, 221–22; postmodernism of resistance in, 225; revolution in, 82; space-place in, 223–24; the uncanny in, 227–28 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 323n64 Cacheiro, Adolfo, 202, 348n10, 353n51, 358n59 Cain, James M., 316n13 Calderón Gutiérrez, Fernando, 312n80 Calibán (Retamar), 230, 312n78

442   |  index Callejas, Mariana, 364n109 “Calls” (Bolaño), 156–57 Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction, The (Nicol), 44 Campbell, Joseph, 106 Campo, Estanislao del, 137 Camps, Martín, 378n8, 379n11, 383n18, 388n31, 391n43, 400n9 camp site, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 130, 174, 295, 319n45, 322n51 Camus, Albert, 57 Candia, Alexis, 90, 92, 135, 333n58, 342n88, 343n97, 369n118, 378n7, 380n14, 384n19, 390n40 canon, 141, 222, 233, 246, 255, 282, 297, 301, 345n118 Cánova, Rodrigo, 139 Canto general (Neruda), 191 canuto, 151, 339n72 capital au XXIe siècle, Le (Piketty), 206 capitalism, 205; accumulation under, 25–27; Har vey on organization of, 26–27, 203; late, 23, 308n58, 311n71; in Latin America, 275–77; postmodernism and organization of, 25–27, 39, 41–42, 203, 308n58; time-space compression in, 171; 2666 and critiques of, 276–78 Capó, Cristián Montes, 142, 337n44 Capote, Truman, 333n61 Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Vargas Llosa), 92 Cárcamo-Huechante, Luis, 53–54, 317n19 “Card” (Bolaño), 139–40, 337n29, 338n63; autobiography in, 149–50 Carrión, Jordi, 246, 247 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 230, 323n64 Castillo, Abelardo, on postmodernism, 42–43 Castillo de Berchenko, Adriana, 50, 224, 364n109, 369n119, 375n131, 394n68, 395n70, 395n71; on By Night, 361n98, 363n105, 365n111 Castro, Fidel, 169, 341n80

Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 314n96; on postmodernism, 39–40 Castro-Klarén, 393n60 Catalán, Pablo, 258, 362n103, 369n118, 383n17 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 317n24 Catholic Church, 228, 237, 362n103 Celaya, Gabriel, 168 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 255 Cellini, Benvenuto, 323n64 “Cell Mates” (Bolaño), 141, 156, 176; narrator in, 157–58 Central Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), 216 Cerca, Javier, 363n106 Chaar Pérez, Kahlil, 347n5, 353n51, 357n58, 358n59, 359n64 Chandler, Raymond, 52, 56, 316n13 Charles, Sébastien, 13 “charogne, Une” (Baudelaire), 169 Chávez, Hugo, 298 Chekhov, Anton, 145 Chesterton, G. K., 52, 316n14, 367n116 Chile, 2, 3, 79, 85–87, 102, 132, 147–48, 168; Bolaño in, 82, 361n98; in By Night, 9, 220–40; colonization of, 210; criticisms of, 149; cultural blackout of, 367n115; dictatorship in, 9, 317n19; in Distant, 8–9, 186, 207–8, 211–12, 216–17; exiles from, 165–66; founding of, 285–86; free market r hetoric in, 317n19; human rights in, 215–16; indigenous population of, 351n35; the Left in, 147–48, 150, 154–55, 213, 214; literature in, 326n77; national identity of, 226–27, 285–87, 338n64; nationalism and, 217–19; neoliberalism in, 208–10, 219, 352n48; political establishment in, 186, 239–40; religion in, 228–29, 237; rural areas of, 209, 228–29; September 11, 1973, 83, 144–55,

index   |  443 183, 186, 215, 264, 267–68, 277–78, 295–97, 349n24; social class in, 209, 228–29, 351n35; socialism in, 150; Transición in, 186; urban spaces of, 231–32 chimerism, 196, 349n24 ciudad anterior, La (Contreras), 186, 300 Ciudad Juárez, 108, 275, 283, 402n31 “Clara” (Bolaño), 156, 158 Clemens, Franken, 122–24, 328n8 Clifford, James, 1 Close, Glen, 93 CNI. See Central Nacional de Inteligencia Cobas Carral, Andrea, 382n16, 389n34, 389n36, 389n38, 390nn41– 42; on Detectives, 379n11, 383n19, 384n20, 386n26, 387nn29–32 Collazos, Óscar, 299 Colmeiro, José F., 52, 54, 317n20 “Colonel’s Son, The” (Bolaño), 152, 340n79, 350n29; space-place in, 182 colonialism: in Chile, 210; decolonization movement, 288–89; modernity as, 314n98 Columbus, Christopher, 230 Comité Pro Paz, 216 communism, 108, 151, 157, 282, 283, 288, 370n121; in 2666 , 289–91 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx & Engels), 12 community, 47, 183–84; in Detectives, 253; emotional, 162; exile and, 143; of the heart, 156–58, 242; literary, 164–70; poetic, 169; in postmodernism, 155, 170, 295–96; in postmodernism of resistance, 295–96; in Putas, 161–62, 164; thematization of, 158–59; unassembled, 155–70 conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico, Los (Harnecker), 213 Concha, Jaime, 396n71, 397n75, 397n77

Condition of Postmodernity, The (Harvey), 25 confessions, Les (Rousseau), 129–30, 323n64 Conrad, Joseph, 255 Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Bolaño & García Porta), 6–7, 128, 135, 158, 186, 206, 295; crime in, 94–95; as double text, 104–5; exile in, 101–2; expositional modes in, 91–92; literature in, 95–99; narrator in, 90–91, 98; as neopolicíaco, 89–105; postmodernism of, 133–34; self-consciousness in, 92; structural complexity of, 92–93; title of, 99–100; violence in, 100–101; women in, 101–2; writing process of, 328n4 “Consideraciones en torno a la novela negra” (Leal), 54–55 context, 28 Conti, Haroldo, 139, 144, 164–65 contrarianism, 298 Contreras, Gonzalo, 186, 300 Cooper, David, 157 Coover, Robert, 2, 45 Corona, Alma, 218–19 Corral, Wilfrido H., 187, 191, 331n36, 347n2, 350n25 Corso, Gregory, 196 Cortázar, Julio, 244, 298, 299, 379n10 Couto, Amado, 192 Crespi, Franco, 38 Cresswell, Tim, 8, 171–72, 197, 280, 346n129 crime, 114; in Consejos, 94–95; in Distant, 57–59; literature and, 95–96; in monsieur, 121–22; in Skating, 122, 125–27; social class and, 232–33; against women in 2666 , 68–69, 93, 108, 275, 278, 280–81, 283–84, 295, 334n5, 403n37 crime scene, 51–52; in Antwerp, 68–69; as political metaphor, 85; in 2666 , 57, 85 crisis of experience, 142

444   |  index Cuba, 85 Cuban Revolution, 211, 299, 327n84 cubism, aesthetics of, 116–17 Culturas híbridas (Canclini), 38 cyborg, as narrator, 139 “Dance, The” (Bolaño), 66 “Dance Card” (Bolaño), 137, 331n44, 334n67 Darío, Rubén, 18–19, 198, 233, 269 Dávila Vázquez, Jorge, 201, 326n77 Davis, Lloyd, 71 “Days of 1978” (Bolaño), 141, 316n11, 330n32; exiles in, 147–48 “Death and the Compass” (Borges), 52 Death of Artemio Cruz, The (Fuentes), 253 “Death of Ulises, The” (Bolaño), 183 Decante Araya, Stéphanie, 141, 164, 167, 227, 361n98, 366n113, 367n115, 373n128; on By Night, 367n114, 375n131 Deckard, Sharae, 278, 399n1, 399n5, 400nn7–10, 401n19, 402n24, 402n27, 403n35 decolonization movement, 288–89, 304n23 deconstruction, 25 Deleuze, Gilles, 142, 405n48 Del Pozo Martínez, Alberto, 164, 246, 378n7 democracy, in Argentina, 144–45 “Dentist” (Bolaño), 141, 152–54, 345n125; space-place in, 178–79 De perlas y cicatrices (Lemebel), 220 D’erasmo, Stacey, 189 Derbyshire, Philip, 377n4, 379n11, 380n14, 384nn20–21, 385n24, 387n29, 391n41 Derrida, Jacques, 18 Dés, Mihály, 141, 331n39, 337n35, 394n67, 395n71 Descartes, René, 171, 323n64 “desencanto llamado postmoderno, Un” (Lechner), 34

detective genre, 6, 46, 51–60, 86–87; Amulet as, 265; antidetective figure, 111, 115–16; Borges on, 52; Detectives as, 111, 381n15; Distant as, 206–7, 296; hard-boiled, 52, 316n14; in Latin America, 52–53, 316n18; Monsieur as, 114; postmodernism of resistance in, 294–95; Skating as, 125–26, 132–33; Spanish names for, 316n14; stigma afflicting, 316n16; symbolic construction in, 56; unconventional approaches to, 133–34. See also neopolicíaco genre “Detectives” (Bolaño) (poem), 59–60 “Detectives” (Bolaño) (story): autobiography in, 148–49 Díaz, Esther, 33, 37 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 323n64 Díaz Eterovic, Ramón, 56, 317n21, 331n35 Di Benedetto, Antonio, 139 dictatorship, 236–37; in Brazil, 192–93; in Chile, 9, 317n19; of Pinochet, 186, 200, 202, 212, 215–16, 235, 370n121, 371n122 dictatorships, 53–54, 147; trauma of, 144–45 Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), 216 Dirty War, 138, 182 “Discurso de Caracas” (Bolaño), 191 disembodied labor, 304n20 Dismemberment of Orpheus, The (Hassan), 19, 307m35 Distant Star (Bolaño), 50, 89, 114, 118, 135, 159, 176, 348n19; as allegor y, 201–2; Chile in, 8–9, 186, 207–8, 211–12, 216–17; crime in, 57–59; criticism on, 202–4; as detective novel, 206–7, 296; the double in, 202–3; ending of, 358n62; histor y in, 186; the Left in, 213; literature in, 98, 240, 297; Mandolessi on, 353n51; Manzoni on, 201; money in, 207–9; the past in, 201–20; the

index   |  445 political in, 82, 204; postmodernism of resistance in, 208, 214, 220 Di Stefano, Eugenio, 203–6, 355n53, 356n54 Doctorow, E. L., 3 domination, modernity as, 32–33 “Donkey, The” (Bolaño), 83–85 Donoso, José, 92, 224, 301 Donoso, Pedro, 84, 315n1, 319n41 Donoso Macaya, Ángeles, 17, 51, 353n50, 353n51, 354n52, 355n54, 399n1, 401n16, 402n25 Don Segundo Sombra (Güiraldes), 138, 316n15 Doors, the, 99 doublings, 202, 357n57 Dove, Patrick, 363n105, 368n117 Draper, Susana, 221, 224, 231, 361n103, 363n105, 364n110, 367n116, 368n117 dreams, 116–17, 152 Dussel, Enrique, 36, 40, 312n80; on modernity, 31 Eagleton, Terry, 28, 29; on postmodernism, 310n70 Easy Rider (film), 327n8 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 323n64 Echevarría, Ignacio, 2, 140–41, 243– 44, 358n61 “Elements, The” (Bolaño), 66, 319n45 Eltit, Diamela, 45, 224, 239, 298, 300, 359n77 emancipatory politics, 85, 294 “Empty Place near Here, An” (Bolaño), 65–66, 319n43, 320n49, 322n53 “End of History?, The” (Fukuyama), 85 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), 85 engaged postmodernism, 3, 92–93 Engels, Friedrich, 12 enigma, 110–11 Enlightenment, 18, 22, 32–33, 34, 196, 313n80 “Enrique Martín” (Bolaño), 141, 164,

168–69, 336n18; space-place in, 174–75 Enríquez, Miguel, 211 Entre paréntesis (Bolaño), 55 “Epilogue for Monsters” (Bolaño), 187 España, aparta de mí este cáliz (Vallejo, C.), 117–18 Espinosa, Patricia H., 51, 63, 106, 138– 39, 230, 335n18, 361n102, 371n123 Estève, Raphäel, 142, 330n32, 366n112, 371n121, 373n128, 374n129 Estridentismo, 244–45, 258, 386n27 ethics, literature and, 299–300 Eurocentric paradigm, 31–32, 43 Europe: modernity in, 31–33; right wing movements in, 191 evil, 108, 114, 135, 185–86, 334n1; immunity from, 239–40; 2666 and theme of, 401n17, 402n23 exile: Bolaño on, 101–2; Chilean, 165– 66; community and, 143; in Consejos, 101–2; Figueroa on, 138, 141 exiles, in “Days of 1978,” 147–48 “Exiles” (Bolaño), 82 expositional modes, in Consejos, 91–92 external focalization, 128 “Extra Silence, An” (Bolaño), 69, 320n50, 321–22n51 “Eye, The” (Bolaño), 108, 139, 142, 144, 151; autobiographical features in, 337n47; narrator in, 145–47; space-place in, 180–81 Farred, Grant, 278, 401n15 fascism, 4, 7, 118, 187–201, 297–98 “Fat Chance, Pal” (Bolaño), 61–63 Faulkner, William, 176 Felipe, León, 168, 271 feminism, 139, 266; in “Murdering Whores,” 161–62; in 2666 , 284 femme fatale, 101 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 100, 196, 211 Fiedler, Leslie, 19 Figlerowicz, Marta, 319n41

446   |  index Figueiras, Mauricio Montiel, 319n41 Figueroa, Julio, on exile, 138, 141, 335n13, 340n77 film noi , 52 financial crisis of 2008, 2 Fischer, María Luisa, 139–40, 202–4, 335n14, 353n51, 356n56, 357n57 Fish, Stanley, 27 Fishbach, Érich, 122–23 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 95 fleurs du mal, Le (Baudelaire), 169 Flores, María Antonieta, 245, 250, 258, 260, 382n16, 384n22 Flores Galindo, Alberto, 231 focalization, 77, 181; Bal on, 97, 128; external, 128; geography and, 173; internal, 128; in Skating, 127–28 Fonda, Peter, 327n88 Fonseca, Rubem, 193 “Footsteps on the Stairs” (Bolaño), 66 Ford, Ford Madox, 100 Fordism, 26, 36, 309n63 Forster, E. M., 127–28 Foster, Hal, 22–23, 306n34, 308n52 Foucault, M., 18, 19, 27, 39, 50, 142, 339n65 “Four Poems for Lautaro Bolaño” (Bolaño), 77 Fragmentos de la universidad desconocida (Bolaño), 49 “Fragments” (Bolaño), 56 Frampton, Kenneth, 27, 306n34 Franco, Jean, 375n133, 398n79 Franco, Sergio R., 107, 111, 117, 331n37, 331n43 Frankfurt School, 17 Fraser, Benjamin, 172 free market, 282, 317n19 Fresán, Rodrigo, 64, 312n51, 336n23 Freud, Sigmund, 86, 147, 366n113 Friedman, Milton, 210, 304n22, 359n75 friend/enemy divide, 189–90 “Frozen Detectives, The” (Bolaño), 57–60 Fuentes, Carlos, 3, 30, 45, 78, 253, 299

Fuguet, Alberto, 186, 224, 256, 300, 317n24, 359n70, 375n135, 393n54 Fukuyama, Francis, 85 futurism, 353n49, 371n121, 386n28 Galeano, Eduardo, 42 Gamboa, Jeremías, 354n52 Garabano, Sandra, 247, 329–30n27, 378n7, 382n17, 384n19, 386n27, 391n42 García Canclini, Néstor, 313n81; on postmodernism, 38–39 García-Corales, Guillermo, 52, 139, 335n11 García Márquez, Gabriel, 74, 301, 308n46, 318n29, 377n3 García Valdés, Olvido, 319n41 “Garden of the Forking Paths, The” (Borges), 52 Garibotto, Verónica, 382n16, 389n34, 389n36, 389n38, 390n41nn–42; on Detectives, 379n11, 383n19, 384n20, 386n26, 387nn29–32 Gass, William H., 45, 127 gaucho insufrible, El (Bolaño), 7–8, 105, 136–37, 144, 159, 296 Genette, Gérard, 90, 112, 128, 139, 214, 267, 327n87; on narrative, 76 geography, 47, 170–71; focalization and, 173 Giardinelli, Mempo, 316n16 Gibson, Walker, 124, 167 Gigena, María Martha, 394n68, 395n71, 396nn73–74, 397n76, 398n79 Gill, Jerry, 18 Ginsberg, Allen, 196, 211 globalization, 2, 5, 276; alter globalization, 14–15; Barrie on, 14–15; as danger, 278–81, 291; defining, 14–15; postmodernity and, 14; theories of, 304n22 global novel, 253 glocal, 36 Godard, Jean-Luc, 94

index   |  447 Golden, Sierra, 315n2 Gómez, Cristián, 83 Gómez, Sergio, 256, 393n54 “Gómez Palacio” (Bolaño), 84, 141, 164, 169, 177–78, 339n71 González, Daniuska, 224, 334n2, 348n13, 362n105, 366n113, 374n29, 395n68 González Echevarría, Roberto, 330n27, 361n99, 367n115, 368nn117–18, 372n126 González Férriz, Ramón, 4–5 González Rodríguez, Sergio, 275 Goodfall, Peter, 323n64 Goodis, David, 316n13 Goux, J. J., 154 Goya, Francisco, 161 Gramsci, Antonio, 148, 309n63 Gras, Dunia, 135, 141, 273, 316n11, 331n39, 348n14, 348n16, 380n14, 394n67, 403n33 Green House, The (Vargas Llosa), 92, 253 Guatemala, 162, 342n87 Guattari, Felix, 405n48 Guevara, Che, 152, 339n67 Guillén, Orlando, 81, 108 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 138 Gunn, Janet Varner, 71, 72 “Gun to His Mouth, The” (Bolaño), 66, 69, 319n37, 320n50, 323n59 Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo, 12, 395n68 Guzmán, Patricio, 146, 212, 352n44 Habermas, J., 4, 16, 18, 25, 27, 306n34, 308n52, 310n69; on modernity, 16, 21–22, 32, 57; on postmodernity, 21–22 Hammett, Dashiell, 52, 316n13 “Happy Ending, A” (Bolaño), 75–77, 81, 324n67 Harnecker, Marta, 213 Hart, Stephen, 117 Hartwig, Susanne, 378n8, 378n29, 379n11, 381n15, 391n42 Harvey, David, 4, 8, 14, 47; on

capitalism’s organization, 26–27, 203; on postmodernism, 25, 27, 203, 304n20; on space-place, 170–71, 198 Hassan, Ihab, 25, 307n35, 310n69; on postmodernism, 19–20 Hawkes, John, 45 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 255 Hemingway, Ernest, 95 Henric, Jacques, 154 Henrichsen, Leonardo, 237 “Henri Simon Leprince” (Bolaño), 141, 164, 167–68, 174, 344n114, 345n116, 345n118 Hernández, Diana, 139 Hernández, Miguel, 168 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell), 106 Herralde, Jorge, 55, 185, 348n17 historiographic metafiction, 8, 44–45, 294; Hutcheon on, 28–29 history, 295–96; in Amulet, 10; in By Night, 186; as catastrophe, 10; in Distant, 186; in “Labyrinth,” 154–55; as text, 29; as trauma, 8, 144–46, 149–50; in 2666 , 10, 273–91 Hohendhal, Peter, 247–48, 392n45 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 85 homeland, 223–24, 227–28; of literature, 251; as metaphor, 326n80 Homer, 90, 244, 286, 384n22 Hopenhayn, Martín, 16, 313n84; Lyotard critiqued by, 35–36; modernity critiqued by, 35; on postmodernism, 35–36 Hopper, Dennis, 327n88 “Horde” (Bolaño), 72, 74, 324n67 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 33 “Hospital, A” (Bolaño), 67–68, 323n60 Hostettler-Sarmiento, Milene, 378n8, 382n16, 383n17, 384n20, 384n22 House, Ricardo, 302 Howe, Irving, 19 Hoyos, Héctor, 222, 224, 361n103, 363n106, 365n111, 368n117, 372nn123–25

448   |  index Huesos en el desierto (González Rodríguez), 275, 403n33 human rights, 215–16 Hutcheon, Linda, 2, 27, 44, 124–25, 203, 309n67; on historiographic metafiction, 28–29; on postmodernism, 28–29 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 372n124 Huyssen, Andreas, 18, 28–29, 306n34, 310n69 hybrid novel, 250–51 hyper modernity, 5, 12–15 Hypermodern Times (Lipovetsky), 13 hyperspace, postmodern, 24, 173, 309n60 Ibáñez Langlois, José Miguel, 222, 361n103 Identidad chilena (Larraín), 305n23 identity, postmodernity and, 304n23 ideology: end of, 42; Nazi, 190–91 Illusions of Postmodernism, The (Eagleton), 306n34 IMF. See International Monetary Fund “I’m My Own Bewitchment” (Bolaño), 68, 319n46, 320n49, 324n66 inequality, 16, 32, 277 “Infamous Ramírez Hoffman, The” (Bolaño), 187, 201, 202, 333n67, 348n19, 358n61 infrarrealistas, 350n24, 354n51, 386n27, 392n50 insomnio de Bolívar, En (Volpi), 105 “Inspector, The” (Bolaño), 61–63 institutionalization of literature, 247– 49, 253–55, 257, 297 “Instructions, The” (Bolaño), 69, 318n30, 321n51, 322n57 “Insufferable Gaucho, The” (Bolaño), 137, 152, 159, 162–64, 336n19, 340n77; space-place in, 181–82; subject in, 138 intellectuals, in Latin America, 278–79, 402n28 internal focalization, 128

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 309n62 intertextuality, 7, 9, 24, 44, 46, 90, 142, 225 “Interval of Silence” (Bolaño), 67, 319n42 Irapuato, 178–79 Iwasaki, Fernando, 105–6 Jameson, Frederic, 4, 37, 42, 53, 172, 192, 306n34; Anderson on, 311n71; on postmodernism, 17–18, 22–24, 203, 308n58, 309n60; on spaceplace, 173 Jara, Víctor, 102 Jencks, Charles, 20, 21, 28 Jennerjahn, Ina, 187, 188, 200, 348n11, 348n15, 348n19, 353n51, 353nn50–51, 355n54 “Jim” (Bolaño), 159, 162, 181 “Joanna Silvestri” (Bolaño), 139, 159–60 Jornadas homenaje Roberto Bolaño 1953– 2003 (Férriz), 4–5 journalism, 254–55 Journey to the End of Night (Céline), 255 Joyce, James, 49, 89–90, 92, 95, 100, 244, 328n14; influence of, 385n2 Jung, Carl, 369n118 Jünger, Ernest, 222, 226, 234–35, 365n112, 366n113 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Harvey), 170 Kaegi, Pablo, 381n15, 382n16, 383n17, 384n19, 384n22, 385n24, 388n32 Kafka, Franz, 7, 343n99, 405n48 Kerouac, Jack, 196, 318n29, 339n67, 382n17 Kerr, Lucille, 70 Keynes, John Maynard, 309n65 Keynesianism, 26, 309n65 Kill Bill (film), 9 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig), 92

index   |  449 Klengel, Susanne, 378n7, 386n27, 391n42 Kottow, Andrea, 378n9, 379n11, 380n12, 381n15, 382n16, 384n21, 387n29 Kozak Rovero, Gisela, 393n60 Kristeva, Julia, 154, 204, 229 Kuhn, Thomas, 30 Kurosawa, Akira, 124 Labbé J., Carlos, 248, 250, 380n12, 383n18, 384n19, 386n26, 387n29, 391n42, 391n43 Labradores, peones y proletarios (Salazar), 228 “Labyrinth” (Bolaño), 139, 140, 152, 179, 346n128; histor y as presence in, 154 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 153 Lagos, Ricardo, 340n76, 347n4 Lainck, Arndt, 273, 282, 287, 334n2, 399n1, 400nn7–9, 400nn15–16, 401n16–20, 402n22, 402n30, 403n34, 404n40, 404nn37–38 Lange-Churión, Pedro, 36; on postmodernism, 41 language, 402n24; social class and, 228–29, 232–33 Language of Post-modern Architecture (Jencks), 21 Larraín, Jorge, 305n23 Larsen, Neil, on postmodernism, 41–42 “Last” (Bolaño), 141, 142, 151, 212; space-place in, 178 “Last Evenings on Earth” (Bolaño), 137 “Last Love Song of Pedro J. Lastarria, Alias ‘El Chorito,’ The” (Bolaño), 82–83 late capitalism, 17, 23, 39, 41, 54, 130, 231, 308n58 Late Capitalism (Mandel), 24 Latin America, 2, 136; in Amulet, 268– 69; capitalism in, 276–77; detective genre in, 52–53, 316n18; identity in, 305n23; intellectuals in, 278–79,

402n28; Leftists in, 3, 47, 183; literature of, 53, 211, 239–40, 246– 47, 263, 279; market liberalization in, 54; modernity in, 31–32, 43, 45, 160, 277–78, 290–91, 312n80; modernization in, 30–31, 43, 280– 81; poetry of, 269; political evolution of, 145–46, 388n30; postmodernism in, 30–43, 294, 300; racism in, 193–94; revolution in, 214; in 2666 , 135–36, 153–54, 276–79; youth of, 59–60 Latin American Boom, 53, 105, 253, 299; narrative aesthetics of, 92 “Launch Ramps” (Bolaño), 69 Leal, Francisco, 51, 54–55 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi), 20–21 Lechner, Norbert, 4, 45; on postmodernism, 34–35 Le Clézio, J. M. G., 317n24 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 27, 171, 197; on space-place, 172, 173 Left, the: in Argentina, 150–51; in Chile, 147–48, 150, 154–55, 213, 214; criticism of, 148–50, 205, 206, 214, 281–82; in Distant, 213; failure of, 51, 85, 154–55; in Latin America, 3, 47, 183 Lemebel, Pedro, 220, 224, 300, 361n98, 362n103, 364n110 Lenin, Vladimir, 290 Lepage, Caroline, 227, 237, 394n68 Levin, Harry, 19 Levinson, Brett, 279, 335n17, 336n26, 353n51, 399n5, 400n7, 400nn13– 14, 401n21, 402n28 Liberation Theology, 153, 237, 370n121 Liberia, 136, 169, 170, 179, 261, 346n126, 385n24 “Light, The” (Bolaño), 56, 81, 324n66, 325n71 Lihn, Enrique, 79, 180, 214, 298, 315n2, 326n81, 339n76

450   |  index Lillo, Baldomero, 217 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 13–14; on modernity, 304n21 liquid modernity, 2, 5, 14–15, 64; defining, 12–1 “Lisa” (Bolaño), 75–76, 324n67 “Literary Adventure, A” (Bolaño), 137, 141, 164, 166; space-place in, 174–75 literary magazines, 248–49, 256, 258, 263 literature: abandonment of, 259–60, 262; anthologies, 247, 256; autonomy of, 254–55; in By Night, 225, 233–35, 237–39, 362n105, 363n108; canon of, reconfigured, 246, 329n27 335n18; in Chile, 326n77; in Consejos, 95–99; crime and, 95–96; criticism of, 253–54; in Detectives, 10, 234, 246–49, 252–53, 263, 266, 377n7; in Distant, 98, 240, 297; ethical functions of, 299–300; homeland of, 251; institutionalization of, 247–49, 253– 55, 257, 263, 297; of Latin America, 53, 211, 239–40, 246–47, 263, 279; life contrasted with, 259–60; the market and, 253, 255–56; murder as literary act, 94–96; new paradigms of, 253, 258; as poetr y, 250; the political and role, 299; on postmodernism and postmodernity, 306n34, 307n41; postmodernism of resistance and, 296; revolution and, 299; role of, in works of Bolaño, 246; sexuality of, 252; symbolic capital of, 96–97, 247, 249, 260, 297, 362n105, 393n60; utility of, 249–50 Little Lumpen Novelita, A (Bolaño), 4, 90, 201 Llamadas telefónicas (Bolaño), 7–8, 91, 136–37, 144, 159, 164, 175–76, 241–42, 296, 335n18; critical assessments of, 140–41 “Llamadas telefónicas” (Bolaño), 156–57

loneliness, 64, 77, 119 Long, Ryan, 394n68, 397n76 Looking Awry (Žižek), 54 López, Fidel, 137 Lopez, Pierre, 221, 228, 361n100, 366n112, 369n119, 370nn120–21, 371n123, 372nn124–25, 374n130, 375n132, 375n141 López Alfonso, Francisco José, 352n47, 352n49, 353n49, 356n56, 357n57, 358nn59–60 359n65 López Bernasocchi, Augusta, 379n11, 381n15, 382n16 López de Abiada, José Manuel, 379n11, 381n15, 382n16 Lorenza-Petra, 357n59 “Lost Detectives, The” (Bolaño), 57–59 Lowry, Malcolm, 163, 244, 380n14 Loyola, Hernán, 303n9 Lozada, Carlos, 293 Luche, Laura, 196, 348n14, 349n24, 350n24, 358n60 Lynd, Juliet, 202–4, 206, 210, 347n5, 353nn49–51, 355n53, 356n55, 357n56, 357n59, 358n59, 358n62, 359n65, 359n69 Lyotard, Jean-François, 2, 4, 37, 294, 306n25, 306n32; Hopenhayn critiqued by, 35–36; on postmodernism, 15–18, 21–23, 25, 27 Machín, Horacio, 305n23 Madrid, 145, 173, 174, 175, 242 Madrid Book Fair, 243, 245, 251, 257, 260, 390n38 Maffesoli, Michel, 8, 155 magazines, literary, 248–49, 256, 258, 263 magic realism, 377n3 Maiakovski, Vladimir, 49 Mala onda (Fuguet), 317n24 Mandel, Ernest, 24 Mandolessi, Silvana, 203, 204, 217, 359n65; on Distant, 353nn50–51, 355nn53–54, 356n55, 357n57

index   |  451 Manzi, Joaquín, 332n50, 355n54, 357n58, 358n62, 359n63, 365n108, 368n116 Manzoni, Cecilia, 149, 362n103, 362n105, 363n106, 374n130, 394n67, 395n71; on Amulet, 263–64, 395n69, 396n72, 397n75; on By Night, 221; on Detectives, 246; on Distant, 201; on doublings, 357n57; on literary canon, 246, 329n27, 335n18; on Nazi, 188; on short stories, 140–41 Map of Misreading, A (Bloom), 258–59 Mapuches, 165, 210, 344n110, 351n35 Marcus, George, 1 margin, the, 47, 67, 105, 130–31, 177, 179, 266 Marinescu, Andreea, 265, 266, 271, 394n68, 396n71, 397n77, 398n79 Marinetti, Filippo, 353n49, 353n51 Maristain, Mónica, 50, 298, 302 market liberalization, in Latin America, 54 Marras, Sergio, 273, 319n41 Martí, José, 74, 150, 195, 226, 307n35 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 74, 313n80; on modernity and crisis, 33–34 Martín-Estudillo, Luis, 245, 378n7, 379n11, 382n17, 384n21, 386n27 Martínez, Juana, 137, 335n14, 336n21 Martínez, Ricardo, 391n42 Marx, Karl, 12, 99, 147, 171, 196, 290; on modernity, 126 Marxism, 213, 223, 233, 239–40, 290, 294; postmodernism rejecting, 41–42 Marxism and Form (Jameson), 53 Masiello, Francine, 393n60 Masoliver Ródenas, Juan Antonio, 140, 242, 335n11, 379n11 Massey, Doreen, 346n129; on spaceplace, 171, 197 “Mates” (Bolaño), 156–57, 176 Mathien, Thomas, 71 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 191

Matus, Álvaro, 64, 90, 124, 333n59 “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva” (Bolaño), 108, 137, 139, 142, 144, 151; autobiographical features in, 337n47; narrator in, 145–47; spaceplace in, 180–81 McCann, Andrew, 278, 400n8, 401n18, 401n20, 402n24, 403n31 McCoy, Horace, 316n13 McHale, Brian, 44 McOndo (Fuguet & Gómez, S.), 256, 300, 393n54 “Medic, The” (Bolaño), 69, 320n49, 321n5 “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (Bolaño), 152, 335n18; autobiography in, 180, 334n67 melancholia, 3, 80, 396n72; of Bolaño, 86; in By Night, 373n128 memory, 142–43; in Amulet, 223, 263– 72, 396n74; in By Night, 223–24 Ménard, Béatrice, 205, 217–19, 355n53, 355n54, 356n56, 357n57, 358n62 Menchú, Rigoberta, 323n64 Mendieta, Eduardo, 36, 313n88 Mérida, Carlos, 366n113 mesmerism, 107, 109, 111, 112, 115, 118, 119–20 metadiegetic narrative, 112, 152, 350n29; in Monsieur, 113–14, 119–21 metafiction: of Bolaño, 45, 247; defining, 44; in Detectives, 247–48; historiographic, 28–29, 44–45 metarepresentation, 347n7, 350n29 Mexico, 2, 86, 153–54, 163, 178, 180, 342n85; in By Night, 235–36; as homeland, 80–81; 1968 in, 57, 85, 249, 264–65, 267; northern, 84, 176, 178; Tlatelolco massacre, 53, 57, 267, 270–71, 349n24; in 2666 , 68, 178 Mexico City, 175–76, 178–79, 222; Bolaño in, 81; in Detectives, 242

452   |  index Meyer-Krentler, Leonie, 380n14, 382n17, 383n19 Mignolo, Walter, 314n98 migrants: in Antwerp, 321n51; fear of, 191 Miklos, David, 319n41 Miles, Valerie, 352n45 Miller, Henry, 100 Mills, C. Wright, 19 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 30 Mishra, Pankaj, 293 Modernidad, razón e identidad en América Latina (Larraín), 305n23 modernism and modernity, 1; Berman on, 311n73; Bolaño critiquing, 45–46; Bueno on, 31–32; in By Night, 225; colonialism and, 314n98; crisis of, 33–34; defining, 307n35; as domination, 32–33; Dussel on, 31; in Europe, 31–33; Habermas on, 16, 21–22, 32, 57; Hopenhayn critiquing, 35; in Latin America, 31–32, 43, 45, 160, 277–78, 290–91, 312n80; Lipovetsky on, 304n21; liquid, 5, 12–15, 64; Martín-Barbero on crisis of, 33–34; Mar x on, 126; Morawski on, 311n72; myster y story and, 316n17; postmodernism contrasted with, 19–23, 28, 34, 39, 126, 231, 294, 310n69; Quijano on, 32–33 modernismo, 18–19 “Modernity” (Habermas), 21 “Modernity and Postmodernity in the Periphery” (Martín-Barbero), 33–34 modernization, 25, 43, 143–44; in Latin America, 30–31, 280–81 Molina, Gastón, 220, 230, 361n97, 361n99, 366n113, 369n118, 370n120 “Monkey, A” (Bolaño), 67, 320nn49–50 Monsieur Pain (Bolaño), 6–7, 50, 69, 89, 105–22, 186; antidetective figure in, 115–16; crime in, 121–22; critical reception of, 106, 331n39; detective

genre and, 114; metadiegetic narrative in, 113–14, 119–21; as mystery novel, 110–11, 121–22, 331n39 Monsiváis, Carlos, 53, 397n77 Montané, Bruno, 302, 315n1 Montes Capó, Cristián, 142–43 “Monty Alexander” (Bolaño), 65, 322n51, 323n59 Mora, Carmen de, 201, 228, 230, 352n45, 357n57, 366n113, 367n114, 372n124 Morales, Leonidas, 335n18 Morawski, Stefan, 18, 29; on modernism, 311n72; on postmodernism, 311n72 Moreiras, Alberto, 314n98 Moreno, Fernando, 140, 141, 326n77, 337n30, 362n104, 367n115, 368nn117–18, 369n118, 370n121, 373n127, 375n131, 379n10, 396n71 Morgado, Patricia, 309n60 Morrison, Jim, 94, 99 Moscow, 151 “Motorcyclists, The” (Bolaño), 65, 66, 68, 320n48, 322n57 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 147, 366n113, 375n133 Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoiris (Bolaño), 49, 330n29 murder, as literary act, 94–96 “Murdering Whores” (Bolaño), 94, 137, 139, 142, 159, 322n55; feminism in, 161–62; narrator in, 177; space-place in, 177 Murillo, Gerardo, 78 “Muse” (Bolaño), 72–73, 324n67 “My One True Love” (Bolaño), 67, 69 mystery genre, 51–52; modernity and, 316n17; Monsieur as, 110–11, 121– 22, 331n39 “Myths of Cthulhu, The” (Bolaño), 152, 340n80, 341n80, 341n82 Naipaul, V. S., 182–83, 341n81

index   |  453 Narrative Discourse (Genette), 128 narratives: of Amulet, 10, 395n71; dialectics of, 136; of emancipation, 136, 143; Genette on, 76; impulse, 88–89; Latin American Boom aesthetics of, 92; metadiegetic, 112– 14, 119–21, 152; nonfocalized, 76; postmodernism and, 44, 124–25 Narratology (Bal), 128 narrators and narration: Booth on, 128; of By Night, 221–22; in “Cell Mates,” 157–58; in Consejos, 90–91, 98; cyborg as, 139; in Detectives, 125, 380n13; dramatized, 128; in “The Eye,” 145–47; indeterminacy of, 121; in “Murdering Whores,” 177–78; in “The Return,” 161; in “Sensini,” 144–46; in Skating, 124–25, 127–28, 133; in 2666 , 212, 274, 403n35; undramatized, 128; as voyeur, 140 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 246, 249, 266, 268–69, 271–72, 297 nationalism, 217–19 Natoli, Joseph, 30 Navarrete González, Carolina Andrea, 381n15 Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño), 8–9, 78, 109, 118, 135, 187–201, 217, 296; critical works on, 189–90; entries in, 192–99; geography of, 197–98; Manzoni on, 188; as pastiche, 189; poetr y in, 200; Rodríguez de Arce on, 189 Nazis, 8–9, 11, 120 neoliberalism, 39, 123, 164, 400n15; in Chile, 208–10, 219, 352n48; failure of, 340n777; postmodernism as ideology of, 35 “Neomodernidad y posmodernidad” (Reigadas), 37–38 neopolicíaco genre, 6, 46, 51, 52, 53, 60–63; Consejos as, 89–105; hybridity of, 54; post-neopolicíaco, 93, 100– 101, 104, 295

Neruda, Pablo, 40, 102, 108, 149, 191, 223, 231, 233, 250, 252, 360, 370n120, 372n125; criticism of, 74; as public figure, 139–40; utopianism of, 303n9 Newman, John Henry, 323n64 New Testament, 85 Newton, Huey P., 405n52 Ni apocalípticos ni integrados (Hopenhayn), 35–36 Nicaragua, 85, 214, 246, 261, 326n84 Nichols, William J., 52–54, 316n13, 316n16, 316n18 Nicholson, Brantley, 385n25 Nicol, Bran, 44; on postmodernism and postmodernity, 303n2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217, 323n64 “Nile, The” (Bolaño), 66, 320nn50–51, 324n66 noble savage, 230 noche de Tlatelolco, La (Poniatowska), 398n79 “Nocturno” (Silva), 236, 372n124 nonfocalized narrative, 76 Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (Serrano), 300 nostalgia, 76–77, 83–84; in University, 80–82 novela negra, 51, 123, 316n14, 316n16; formlessness of, 55; hybridity of, 54 Novillo-Corvalán, Patricia, 101, 378nn7–8, 380n14, 385n23, 386n27, 387n29 Novoa, Loreto, 122 “Nuestra América” (Martí), 195 Nuit et Brouillard (film), 28 Oates, Joyce Carol, 100 O’Bryen, Rory, 221, 223–24, 271, 363n105, 395n69, 396n72, 397n76, 398n79 Obscene Bird of Night, The (Donoso, J.), 92, 375n134 “Occasionally She Shook” (Bolaño), 67, 322n54

454   |  index Odyssey, The (Homer), 90, 244, 385n22 O’Hara, Frank, 168 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 276, 285–87, 405n49 Olivier, Florence, 247, 341n80, 378n7, 382n16, 383n18, 384n20, 388nn32– 33, 389n34, 389n39 Olson, Charles, 19 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 176 On the Road (Kerouac), 382n17 open air (intemperie), 269 Oquendo de Amat, Carlos, 79 Origins, The (Anderson), 306n34 Ortega, Daniel, 169 Oses, Darío, 106, 119 Osorio, Nelson, 40 Otero, Blas de, 168 otro sendero, El (de Soto), 313n84 Oviedo, José, 40, 46 Oviedo, Ramiro, 138, 335n12 Padilla Affair, 57 Palacios, Nicolás, 360n89, 376n144 Para Roberto Bolaño (Herralde), 55, 185 parody, 3, 9, 24, 28, 44, 93, 144, 190, 245, 254, 294, 352n125, 353n51, 378n7, 384n21 Parra, Nicanor, 79, 85, 211, 214, 250, 298, 315n2, 326n81 Parra, Violeta, 93, 102–3, 144, 150, 207, 328n13, 330n33 past, the: in Amulet, 396n74; in Distant Star, 201–20; in University, 80–87 pastiche, 3, 23, 24, 44, 138, 190, 276, 294; Nazi as, 189 “Patricia Pons” (Bolaño), 325n76 Paz, Octavio, 10, 40, 153, 156, 247, 253, 256, 258, 262, 263, 299, 307n35, 315n2, 390n40, 393n50; criticism of, 74, 245–46, 250 Peláez, Sol, 275, 400n8, 401n18, 401n20, 402n24, 403n31, 403n35 penises, 343n96 “People Walking Away” (Bolaño),

51, 55, 60–62, 64, 73, 75, 318n30, 319n38 Perec, Georges, 100 Pérez, Alberto Julián, 242, 378n7, 379nn10–11, 385n25 Pérez, Manuel, 274, 399n1, 402n27, 403n35 “Perfection” (Bolaño), 66, 320n50, 324n65 Peronist revolution, 281 perros románticos, Los (Bolaño), 49 Peru, 193, 219–20, 313n84, 325n76, 334n5 “Photos” (Bolaño), 154, 164, 169–70, 179, 333n67, 334n7, 337n30, 346n128, 361n11, 394n64 Piao, Lin, 289 Piérola, José de, 203, 206, 356n56, 359n65 Piglia, Ricardo, 45 Piketty, Thomas, 206, 309n62 Piña, Juan Andrés, 122, 335n15, 402n28 Pino, Mirian, 122–24, 126, 131, 353n51, 355n53, 356n56, 357n57 Pinochet, Augusto, 223, 298, 338n57, 352n44, 360n88, 361n103; arrest of, 220; coup of, 102, 208; dictatorship of, 186, 200, 202, 212, 215–16, 235, 370n121, 371n122; human rights violations under, 215–16 Pinto, Rodrigo, 246, 331n39, 379n10, 383n18 place. See space-place Plath, Sylvia, 96–97, 100 Plato, 279, 313n80 Plaza, Dino, 227, 362n105, 363n108, 367n115, 368n117, 369n118, 372n126, 373n128 plurality, 34, 40, 310n70 Poblete, Patricia, 90, 273, 329n23, 337n33, 350n27, 352n46, 399n5, 402n23, 402n30 Podolski, Sophie, 100, 165, 320nn50–51 Poemas humanos (Vallejo, C.), 117–18, 332n52

index   |  455 Poesía en movimiento (Paz), 256 poésie contemporaine de langue francaise depuis 1945, La (Brindeau), 169 Poe’s Room (Mendiluce), 189, 198 Poetics of Postmodernism, A (Hutcheon), 27–28 poetry, 132; autobiography in, 70–80, 324n66; of Bolaño, 48–49, 55, 70, 79, 315n1; community and, 169; of Latin America, 269; literature as, 250; in Nazi, 200; postmodernism of resistance in, 49–50, 86–87; religious language in, 85; self-fashioning in, 70–80; sexuality and, 252; of V allejo, C., 117–18 police, 6, 50, 52, 56; in Antwerp, 66–68 “Police” (Bolaño), 57 “Policeman Walked Away, The” (Bolaño), 67, 69, 318n30, 321n51 “Police Rat” (Bolaño), 137 political, the, 30, 43, 47, 103, 191; in Amulet, 108, 185, 271–72, 398n78; Bolaño on, 8–9, 45–47, 108, 296–97; in Distant, 82, 204; literature and, 299; redemption via, 143; Schmitt on, 189–90; subjectivity and, 83; in 2666 , 245, 276–78, 281–83, 297–98, 402n28; violence and, 271 Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 17 Pollack, Sarah, 241, 318n29, 331n36, 376n3 Poniatowska, Elena, 42, 323n64, 397n77, 398n79 Pöppel, Hubert, 54 Popular Unity government, 213, 236–37 pornography, 152–53, 159–61, 336n18 Porta, Antoni García, 6–7, 88–105, 302, 328n4, 330n31, 352n45 “Portrait in May, 1994” (Bolaño), 77–79, 324n67 Posada, José Guadalupe, 78 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 15–18, 35 Postmodernism (Bertens & Natoli), 30

Postmodernism (Jameson), 21–23 “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (Jameson), 22–23 postmodernism and postmodernity, 17–18, 21–23; aesthetics of, 44; ambivalence towards, 183; Anderson on, 307n35, 311n71; art and, 28; Bolaño and, 1–3; Canclini on, 38–39; capitalism related to, 25–27, 39, 41–42, 203, 308n58; Castillo on, 42–43; Castro-Gómez on, 39–40; community in, 155, 170, 295–96; of Consejos, 133–34; contradictor y nature of, 28; crisis of identity and, 304n23; critiques of, 310n69, 311n72; cultural dominance of, 23–24; defining, 2, 5, 12–14, 294 303n2, 312n74; of Detectives, 206, 245–46; disenchantment in, 34–35; Eagleton on, 310n70; engaged, 3, 92–93; fiction of, 43–46; globalizatio and, 14; Habermas on, 21–22; Har vey on, 25, 27, 203, 304n20; Hassan on, 19–20; Hopenhayn on, 35–36; Hutcheon on, 28–29; hyperspace of, 173, 309n60; as irrationalism, 41–42; Jameson on, 17–18, 21–25, 27–29, 40–41, 203, 308n58, 309n60; Lange-Churión on, 41; Larsen on, 41–42; in Latin America, 30–43, 294, 300; Lechner on, 34–35; literature on, 306n34, 307n41; L yotard on, 15–16, 18, 21–23, 25, 27; Mar xism rejected by, 41–42; modernism contrasted with, 19–23, 28, 34, 39, 126, 231, 294, 310n69; Morawski on, 311n72; narrative and, 44, 124–25; negative consequences of, 35–36; neoliberalism and, 35; Nicol on, 303n2; origins of, 16–19; postmodern turn, 306n34; self-reflexivity in, 203 Yúdice on, 36–37 Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, The (Beverly & Oviedo, J.), 40 postmodernismo, 18–19

456   |  index postmodernism of resistance, 3–4, 43–47; in By Night, 225; community in, 295–96; defining, 294, 310n69; in detective genre, 294–95; in Distant, 208, 214, 220; elements of, 186; literature and, 296; Nazi and, 190–91; in poetr y, 49–50, 86–87; political aspect of, 45–47; September 11, 1973 and origin of, 277–78; in 2666 , 11, 185, 275–76 poststructuralism, 45, 50–51, 295, 362n103 Pound, Ezra, 95, 100 Pous, Federico, 137–38 Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Kristeva), 204 “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place” (Massey), 171 “Prefiguration of Lalo Cura” (Bolaño), 152–53, 159, 160, 176, 177 Premio Herralde de novela, 241 “Prickly Pear” (Bolaño), 81–82 “princesa cyborg, La” (Torres), 139 Proces-Verbal, Le (Le Clézio), 317n24 Promis, José, 93, 108, 315n9, 335n15 “Prose from Autumn in Gerona” (Bolaño), 75, 319n35, 325n73; autobiographical aspects of, 325n74 Puig, Manuel, 3, 37, 45, 92 Putas asesinas (Bolaño), 7–8, 68, 105, 136–37, 147, 159, 296, 322n55; community in stories of, 161–62, 164; critical assessments of, 140–44 Pynchon, Thomas, 19, 45 Quezada, Iván, 326n77 Quezada, Jaime, 55–56 Quijano, Aníbal, 31, 312n80; on modernity, 32–33 Quintero, Julio, 378n7, 381n15, 384n20, 385n24, 390n40, 390n41 racism, 54, 130, 191, 231; in Latin America, 193–94 Rama, Ángel, 231 Ramírez, Andrés, 244

Rashomon (film), 12 Raza chilena (Palacios), 360n89 reading, 260–61, 301, 394n62 reality television, 126 “Red Head, The” (Bolaño), 67, 322n52, 322n55 Reigadas, María Cristina, 37–38, 304n23, 314n89 Reinventar el amor (Bolaño), 49, 304n11 religion, 402n30; in Chile, 228–29, 237; poetr y utilizing language of, 85 Relph, Edward, 172 Resnais, Alain, 283 Retamar, Fernández, 230, 262, 312n78 Rettig Report, 216 “Return, The” (Bolaño), 142, 159, 179; narrator in, 161 revolution, 82–83, 95; in By Night, 82; Cuban Revolution, 211, 327n84, 384n20; in Latin America, 214; literature and, 299; Peronist, 281 Reyes, Salvador, 222, 226–27, 234–36, 348n16, 365n112, 366n113 Richard, Nelly, 42, 205, 354n52 Rimbaud, Arthur, 79, 244, 255, 367n115, 385n24 Ríos Baeza, Felipe A., 141–42, 148, 193, 194, 197, 336n18, 389n34, 401n21 Rivera Letelier, Hernán, 300, 341n80 Rivero, Emilcen, 242 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 95, 100 Roberto Bolaño (Moreno), 379n10, 396n71 “Roberto Bolaño’s Devotion” (Bolaño), 75–76 “Roberto Bolaño’s Return” (Bolaño), 78–79, 324n67 Rodó, José Enrique, 148, 195, 312n78 Rodrigo Lira, 180 Rodríguez, Ana Patricia, 54 Rodríguez, Franklin, 188–89, 221, 271, 349n20, 355n54, 357n59, 363n108, 395n69 Rodríguez de Arce, Ignacio, 189, 190, 273–74, 348n14, 401n17

index   |  457 Rodríguez Freire, Raúl, 206, 382n17, 384nn20–22, 388n31 Rojas, Gonzalo, 211 Rojo, Grínor, 149, 250, 258, 335n13, 372n125, 383n18, 383n19, 384n21 Romantic Dogs, The (Bolaño), 50, 85, 327n90, 383n19 “Romantic Dogs, The” (Bolaño), 83– 84, 324n66 Romantics, the, 98 Rómulo Gallegos, 106, 241, 270, 282, 347n138 Rorty, Richard, 18 Ros, Ángel, 90 Rossi, Cristina Peri, 349n24 Rosso, Ezequiel de, 116, 122, 139, 188, 328n8, 331n39, 348n18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129–30, 230, 323n64 Rushdie, Salman, 3, 37 Saavedra, Alma de, 218–19 Sábato, Ernesto, 139, 164, 211, 301 Said, Edward, 42 Salazar, Gabriel, 228 Salazar Bondy, Sebastián, 211 Salinger, J. D., 100, 317n24, 404n40 Sánchez Fernández, Juan Antonio, 265, 267, 395n69, 396n71, 396n73, 397n77, 398n78 Sandinistas, 214, 326n84 Sanguinetti, Edoardo, 168, 345n121 Santa Teresa, 176 Santiago (city), 231–32, 376n144 Santiago, Mario, 76, 81, 84, 99, 183, 325n71, 327n2, 392n50 Sarduy, Severo, 45 Sartre, Jean Paul, 57, 100, 196, 233 Sassen, Saskia, 15 “Saturn Devouring his Son” (Goya), 161 Saucedo Lastra, Fernando, 245, 302, 315n8, 382nn16–17, 390n41, 391n42, 391n43 Sauri, Emilio, 247, 378n7, 379n10, 386n27, 390n41, 391n42

Savage Detectives, The (Bolaño), 2, 6, 50, 69, 82, 98, 122, 136, 169, 185, 191, 301–2, 326n84; Amulet related to, 201; characters of, 385n26; Cobas Carral on, 379n11, 383n19, 384n20, 386n26, 387nn29–32; community in, 253; critical assessments of, 243–45, 379n11; as detective novel, 111, 381n15; fame established by publication of, 241; Garibotto on, 379n11, 383n19, 384n20, 386n26, 387nn29–32; as hybrid novel, 250– 51; literature in, 10, 234, 246–49, 252–53, 263, 266, 377n7; Manzoni on, 246; metafiction in, 247; Mexico City in, 242; narrates in, 380n13; postmodern traits of, 206, 245–46; protagonists of, 381n16; structure of, 242–43, 389n34; 2666 compared with, 245, 273–74 Schmitt, Carl, 218; on the political, 189 Schmukler, Enrique, 187, 190, 348n16 Schneider, René, 237 “Scholars of Sodom” (Bolaño), 152, 182–83, 341n81, 341n82 Schulz-Buschhaus, Ulrich, 316n17 Schwob, Marcel, 188, 190, 348n16 “Sea, The” (Bolaño), 67, 69, 390n41 Seale, Bobby, 288, 405n52 secreto del mal, El (Bolaño), 7–8, 135, 144, 182–83, 296 self, the: as fragmentary, 78; inner, 132; outer, 132; self-consciousness, 92; self-fashioning in poetry, 70–80; selfknowledge, 6; self-mapping, 71–72, 73; as victim, 74; J. L. W right on, 71–72 “Self-Portrait” (Bolaño), 78, 79, 324nn66–67 self-reflexivit , 28, 44, 225, 276, 294; in postmodernism, 203 “Sensini” (Bolaño), 91, 137, 140, 141, 147, 164–65; critical studies on, 138–39; narrator in, 144–46; spaceplace in, 173–74

458   |  index September 11, 1973, Chile, 3, 10, 83, 144–55, 150, 154, 183, 186, 215, 274, 295–97, 349n24; fictional world built around, 264; 1968 linked to, 267–68; as postmodernism of resistance origin, 277–78 Sepulcros de vaqueros (Bolaño), 4, 89, 135–36 Sepúlveda, Magda, 107–8, 114, 118, 122–24, 359n70 Serrano, Marcela, 300, 359n70 “Sevilla Kills Me” (Bolaño), 152, 341n80, 342n82 sex, 159–61, 282, 342n88 sexuality: of literature, 252; poetr y and, 252 Shakespeare, William, 230, 312n77, 312n78 short stories, 135; critical assessments of, 136–41; Manzoni on, 140–41 “Silent Night” (Bolaño), 65, 318n30, 322n51 Silva, José Asunción, 236, 372n124 Simunovic, Horacio, 202, 218, 318n28, 348n11, 356n56, 357n57 Skating Rink, The (Bolaño), 6–7, 50, 88– 89, 122–34, 165, 295; autobiography in, 131–34; crime in, 122, 125–27; as detective novel, 125–26, 132–33; focalization in, 127–28; narrators in, 124–25, 127–28, 133; structure of, 124–25; voices in, 124 skin whitening, 193–94 Smith, Erin, 125–26 Smith, Sidonie, 70–71 “Snow” (Bolaño), 151, 334n7 Snyder, Gary, 196 social class: in Chile, 209, 228–29, 351n35; crime and, 232–33; language and, 228–29, 232–33 socialism, 42, 311n71; in Chile, 150; critique of, 35 Social Justice and the City (Harvey), 170–71 Soldados de Salamina (Cerca), 363n106

Solimano, Andrés, 352n48 solitude, 57, 118–19, 160–61, 342n85, 343n98 Sollers, Philippe, 154 Solotorevsky, Myrna, 122, 353n51, 356n56, 358n61, 400n8 Sor Juana, 250 Sotillo, Samuel, 86 Soto, Hernando de, 313n84 Souper, Roberto, 237 Soust, Alcira, 394n68 “South, The” (Borges), 137–38, 178, 330n27 space, 170–84 space-place: absolute, 170–71, 197, 199; in “Adventure,” 174–75; in By Night, 223–24; in “The Colonel’ s Son,” 182; defining, 197; in “Dentist,” 178; in “Enrique,” 174–75; in “The Eye,” 180–81; in “Gaucho,” 181–82; Har vey on, 170–71, 198; Jameson on, 173; in “Last,” 178; Lefebvre on, 172, 173; Massey on, 171, 197; in “Murdering Whores,” 177; relative, 171; in “Sensini,” 173– 74; in 2666 , 279–80; in “V agabond,” 180–81 Spaces of Global Capitalism (Harvey), 170–71 Spain, 2, 7, 8, 32, 57, 74, 80, 88, 90, 135; Bolaño in, 327n87 Spanish Civil War, 118–20, 196, 333n55 Spanish Republic, 118, 121 spatial practice, 8, 172 Spirit of Science Fiction, The (Bolaño), 4, 89, 135, 301 Spivak, Gayatri, 42 Stalin, Joseph, 290 Starn, Orin, 1 Stein, Gertrude, 95 Stern, Laurence, 391n43 Stern, Robert, 21, 28 Sternberg, Meir, 91 Steven, Wallace, 388n33

index   |  459 subaltern, 15, 31, 40, 43, 143, 228, 231 Subirats, Eduardo, 33 sudaca, 102, 103 supermodernity, 12–15 Swinburn, Daniel, 70 Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II, 52 “Tallers Street” (Bolaño), 67, 69 “Taoist Blues of Valle Hebrón Hospital, The” (Bolaño), 55, 324n66 Tapia, María Eugenia Kokaly, 142 Tarantino, Quentin, 93 Teillier, Jorge, 315n2 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 230, 312nn77–78 Terráneo, Melina, 381n15, 382n16, 383n17, 384n19, 384n22, 385n24, 388n32 Territorios en fuga (Espinosa), 106, 138–39 Theories of Globalization (Barrie), 14–15 “There Are No Rules” (Bolaño), 66, 320n47, 322n57, 324n65 Third Reich, The (Bolaño), 4, 135 “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (Jameson), 42 “Thousand Faces of Max Mirebalais, The” (Bolaño), 187 “Three Texts” (Bolaño), 51, 55, 58, 60–61, 64 time: in Amulet, 397n76; in 2666 , 401n21 time-space compression, 8, 25–27, 171, 173 Tinta de sangre (Clemens & Sepúlveda), 123, 331n42 Tlatelolco massacre, 10, 53, 57, 264– 65, 267, 270–71, 349n24 Tolstoy, Leo, 322n63 Torres Ponce, María, 139, 335n12 “Total Anarchy” (Bolaño), 64, 315n7 Touraine, Alain, 312n80 trabajadores de la muerte, Los (Eltit), 359n77

Tramas del Mercado (CárcamoHuechante), 317n19 Transición, 186, 202, 204, 296, 317n19 Trellez Paz, Diego, 251, 262, 379n10, 380n12, 381n15, 390nn39–40, 392n50 Tres (Bolaño), 49–50, 331n44 Tristram Shandy (Stern, L.), 391n43 Tropics of Discourse, The (White), 29 Trotskyism, 298 “Troublemaker, The” (Bolaño), 144, 152, 340n78 Troubles with Postmodernism, The (Morawski), 18, 311n72 Tungsten (Vallejo), 191 2666 (Bolaño), 2, 50, 111, 131, 194, 206, 260–61; African Americans in, 288–89; capitalism critiqued in, 276–78; communism in, 289–91; crimes against women in, 68–69, 93, 108, 275, 278, 280–81, 283–84, 295, 334n5, 403n37; crime scene in, 57, 85; critical assessment of, 106, 274–76, 400n8, 401n22; Detectives compared with, 245, 273–74; evil as theme of, 401n17, 402n23; feminism in, 284; histor y in, 10, 273–91; Latin America in, 135–36, 153–54, 276–79; Mexico portrayed in, 68, 178; narrator in, 212, 274, 403n35; the political in, 245, 276–78, 281–83, 297–98, 402n28; postmodernism of resistance in, 11, 185, 275–76; publication of, 303n10; space-place in, 279–80; time in, 401n21; violence in, 108, 401n18 “Two Poems for Lautaro Bolaño” (Bolaño), 77, 324n67 último salvaje, El (Bolaño), 49, 304n11 Ulysses (Joyce), 90–92, 100, 329n14 UNAM. See National Autonomous University of Mexico uncanny, the, 227–28 Under the Volcano (Lowry), 244, 380n14

460   |  index unemployment, 54, 95, 104, 130, 321n51 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, 309n62 Universal History of Infamy, A (Borges), 188, 190, 348n16 universidad desconocida, La (Bolaño), 5–6, 49, 55, 60, 69–73, 78, 318n30; nostalgia as theme of, 80–82 “Untitled” (Bolaño), 56, 75, 81, 82, 315n4, 324nn65–66, 325n74 Usandizaga, Helena, 315n2 utopianism, 42, 46, 196; of Neruda, 303n9 “Vagabond” (Bolaño), 142, 164, 166, 280, 344n108; space-place in, 180–81 “Vagabond in France and Belgium” (Bolaño), 137, 142, 164, 316n11, 333n67, 334n7 Valdebenito, Luis Alejandro Nitrihual, 138, 329n27, 335n13 Valenzuela, Andrea, 117, 336n22, 395n69 Vallejo, César, 7, 49, 89, 105, 107, 108, 109, 191; poetr y of, 117–18 Vallejo, Georgette de, 111, 117, 332n52, 332n53, 333n55 Van Delden, Maarten, 314n98 Vandera, Alonso Carrió de la, 323n64 Vargas, Mabel, 372n124, 381n15 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 92, 253, 299, 341n80 Vargas Salgado, Carlos, 202, 203, 355–56n54, 357n58, 358n62, 359nn64–65 Vásquez, Ainhoa, 216 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 52, 54, 56, 317n20 Vega, Juan Enrique, 33, 34 Ventura, Antoine, 141, 334n3, 335n18 Venturi, Robert, 20–21, 309n60 Vian, Boris, 100 Viano, Carlos, 312n76

victimhood, 74 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 144, 341n80 Vies imaginaires (Schwob), 188, 190 Vila-Matas, Enrique, 352n45, 378n7, 378n9 Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio, 136, 334n2, 363n105 Villoro, Juan, 132, 382n16, 392n50 violation, 267 violence: in Consejos, 100–101; escape from, 163–64; murder as literar y act, 94–96; political, 108–9, 147; the political and, 271; in 2666 , 108, 401n18; universalization of, 147 virtual reality, 126 Volpi, Jorge, 105, 160, 330n27 Vonnegut, Kurt, 100 “voyage, Le” (Baudelaire), 274 Walker, Carlos, 403n35 Walsh, Rodolfo, 139, 144, 164–65 Watson, Julia, 70–71 Weber, Max, 22, 32 “Weekend, A” (Bolaño), 56 Welsch, Wolfgang, 40 Weltanschaung, 104 Where the Air Is Clear (Fuentes), 78 White, Hayden, 29 “White Handkerchief, A” (Bolaño), 69, 320n49 Whitman, Walt, 150, 197, 252 Willem, Bieke, 401n16 Williams, Gareth, 86, 187, 189–90, 191, 327n93, 348n11, 349n22, 353n50, 355n53, 358n62 “Witness, The” (Bolaño), 61–63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 390n41 Woes of the True Policeman, The (Bolaño), 4, 135, 201, 301–2, 320n50, 336n19, 343n96, 346n128 women: Bolaño depicting, 68, 94; in Consejos, 101; 2666 and crimes against, 68–69, 93, 108, 275, 278, 280–81, 283–84, 295, 334n5, 403n37

index   |  461 Woolf, Virginia, 100 “Work” (Bolaño), 55, 72, 73, 324n67 world-systems, 15, 31, 32, 400n10 World War II, 30, 33, 41, 120, 167, 200, 217, 235 Wright, D. G., 71 Wright, J. L., 6; on the self, 71–72, 132 xenophobia, 130 “Years, The” (Bolaño), 79–80, 324n67

Yeltsin, Boris, 282 “You Can’t Go Back” (Bolaño), 65, 318n30 Yúdice, George, 40, 42, 393n60; on postmodernism and postmodernity, 35–37 Zambra, Alejandro, 48 Žižek, Slavoj, 54 Zurita, Raúl, 188, 202, 353nn50–51, 358n60