One of the most interesting things about Roberto Bolano is that, as one excavates and uncovers his reimagined history of violence in the 20th century, the novels keep being written earlier. That is, the first Bolano novel I read (and posted on) was By Night in Chile which was published in 2000, one of the last works of this novelist who died in 2003. After that I read The Savage Detectives, published in 1998 but translated into English only in 2007. Then I went for the masterpiece 2666, "released" in 2004 and translated into English in 2008. At this point a complete devotee, I then read Nazi Literature in the Americas and was impressed to learn that it was published early, in 1996, although Chris Andrews' English translation appeared in 2008. The reason that this is impressive is that it appears that Bolano had generated his alternative world, not that different from this none, early: he always had a vision of what he wanted to do.
Even so it is fascinating to read Distant Star, published 1996 and translated by Chris Andrews 2004, and exhilarating (I can't think of any other word) to see the scarey, radical coherence of his vision from very early in his novelistic project (Bolano was criticized for straying from the purity of his early obscure-poet vision and for writing popular novels). In Distant Star he fleshes out an idea that is presented in the end of Nazi Literature in the Americas, but the publication dates lead us to think that Bolano saw all of his arch-satirical narrative very early on.
The last Borgian "entry" in Nazi Literature in the Americas is the story of Carlos Ramirez Hoffman, young Pinochet loyalist who stages a party in his apartment where his bedroom is decorated with pictures of his victims; in addition to being a poet he sees himself as an artist of the existential arts of political torture and murder. Central to this is his seduction of the Venegas sisters, scions of a wealthy and liberal family.
Dark Star elaborates the story of this character, here known as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, who changes his name to Carlos Wieder and who stages the party (his victims include the Garmendias sisters, now frankly murdered by Weider). The hapless protagonist of Dark Star is drawn in to a plan to track Weider down and kill him. Killing him is something of an act of exorcism here, but it is unsuccessful: there will be no freedom from the history of violence that is washing over the world.
Weider was a poet who worked in the medium of sky-writing, perfect for the ephemeral, willfully-obscure presentation that Bolano thinks is essential for honest poetry. Weider is a fascist assassin and a poet: tracking down obscure poems and obscure murders are similar obsessions. Most people will just forget both the poems and the killings as they fade into the air.
Showing posts with label Roberto Bolano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roberto Bolano. Show all posts
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Nazi Literature in the Americas
Previous posts on the blog have discussed (in the order that I read them of course) Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile (1998), The Savage Detectives (2000), and 2666 (2000). Knowing those books made for a deeper appreciation of Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). The student of Bolano sees first that he has recurrent themes and interests (poetry and the Nazis being the most prominent if improbable combination). Then it emerges that there are connections among the texts (a young police recruit in 2666, for example, is the bastard son of one of the protagonists of The Savage Detectives). Finally with Nazi Literature in the Americas the scope of Bolano's ambition becomes clear: he has created a parallel world, a fictional history, and interwoven that world with his and ours. The effect is to heighten the power of the fictional world and the ideas that have generated it: as it bleeds over into reality, Bolano's vision seems to establish a greater claim than most fiction does to being an authentic part of reality, an actuality. It is an unsettling effect; there is more moral urgency in Bolano than in almost any other contemporary writer of fiction I can think of.
Ironically the writer than one inevitably thinks of when reading this book is Jorge Luis Borges, that most detached and cerebral constructor of puzzles and games. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a compendium of potted biographies, some only a page or two long, some upwards of twenty pages, of fictional American (North and South) writers and their works. Some are completely obscure (literary obscurity is a strong fetish for Bolano), others are prominent and widely read. Some are poets, some are prose writers, some are genre writers and some are polemicists. The word "Nazi" is construed loosely: there are white supremacists and supporters of military dictatorship but also some whose "Nazism" is little more than conservative Christianity or reactionary nationalism.
Borges delighted in this sort of thing, inventing bibliographies and non-existent essayists and mixing them in with real people and books. Bolano does it throughout his works, The Savage Detectives has pages-long lists of poets and "journals" so obscure that only one mimeographed copy might exist, and 2666 mingles Bolano's invented incidents with the real history of the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. While fictive scholarly apparatus is a "post-modern" trope it actually traces back in Spanish literature to Cervantes, with Don Quixote's displacement into the fantasy world of the picaresque and his glimpse of the printing press setting up the book in which he lives.
The endless appetite for reading, at times almost a mania for literate closure, that is pervasive in Bolano is also portrayed in Borges (for example in "The Library of Babylon" or "Funes the Memorious").
As an estadounidense reader I was impressed by the depth and breadth of Bolano's erudition for USA literature: he obviously loves the genre writing of the tough guy detectives but also the inventiveness of science fiction and he has apparently read everything from Gertrude Stein and Eudora Welty to Wallace Stevens and Wallace Stegner: about what one could reasonably expect of a typical English lit professor at a North American university (who was hip, of course, to poetry and the Beats).
Meanwhile there is The Theory, or at least my theory of The Theory. Bolano, I think, sees World War II and particularly the Nazis as an epochal upwelling of violent evil that then washes across the globe and the decades like a great wave. He seeks to explicate the violent history of Latin America, from the Cold War military governments of the 70s through the Central American political viciousness of the 80s up to the culture of homicide in contemporary Mexico as manifestations, aftershocks or tsunamis, of this great evil. Part of the message of Nazi Literature in the Americas is that this evil energy persists among us, close by and banal, nearer to eruption than we think.
Ironically the writer than one inevitably thinks of when reading this book is Jorge Luis Borges, that most detached and cerebral constructor of puzzles and games. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a compendium of potted biographies, some only a page or two long, some upwards of twenty pages, of fictional American (North and South) writers and their works. Some are completely obscure (literary obscurity is a strong fetish for Bolano), others are prominent and widely read. Some are poets, some are prose writers, some are genre writers and some are polemicists. The word "Nazi" is construed loosely: there are white supremacists and supporters of military dictatorship but also some whose "Nazism" is little more than conservative Christianity or reactionary nationalism.
Borges delighted in this sort of thing, inventing bibliographies and non-existent essayists and mixing them in with real people and books. Bolano does it throughout his works, The Savage Detectives has pages-long lists of poets and "journals" so obscure that only one mimeographed copy might exist, and 2666 mingles Bolano's invented incidents with the real history of the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. While fictive scholarly apparatus is a "post-modern" trope it actually traces back in Spanish literature to Cervantes, with Don Quixote's displacement into the fantasy world of the picaresque and his glimpse of the printing press setting up the book in which he lives.
The endless appetite for reading, at times almost a mania for literate closure, that is pervasive in Bolano is also portrayed in Borges (for example in "The Library of Babylon" or "Funes the Memorious").
As an estadounidense reader I was impressed by the depth and breadth of Bolano's erudition for USA literature: he obviously loves the genre writing of the tough guy detectives but also the inventiveness of science fiction and he has apparently read everything from Gertrude Stein and Eudora Welty to Wallace Stevens and Wallace Stegner: about what one could reasonably expect of a typical English lit professor at a North American university (who was hip, of course, to poetry and the Beats).
Meanwhile there is The Theory, or at least my theory of The Theory. Bolano, I think, sees World War II and particularly the Nazis as an epochal upwelling of violent evil that then washes across the globe and the decades like a great wave. He seeks to explicate the violent history of Latin America, from the Cold War military governments of the 70s through the Central American political viciousness of the 80s up to the culture of homicide in contemporary Mexico as manifestations, aftershocks or tsunamis, of this great evil. Part of the message of Nazi Literature in the Americas is that this evil energy persists among us, close by and banal, nearer to eruption than we think.
Monday, May 31, 2010
2666
When G. bought me Farrar, Straus and Giroux's edition of Natasha Wimmer's 2008 English translation of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, I hesitated to dive into it. Not because I didn't want to read it, but the opposite: it was a book that I wanted to read with care (Bolaño's last work and his self-described magnum opus), and it is gargantuan: this very nice, even loving, edition comes as three volumes in a box, and runs to 893 pages. But G. knew how much I'd loved By Night in Chile (2000) and The Savage Detectives (1998) and asked what was I waiting for? Then I thought that I'd read it one volume at a time, putting the next volume in the Stack as I finished the first one (like I'm doing with Beckett's Trilogy right now). But when I finished the first volume I just kept going, actually I couldn't put it down until I had devoured the whole thing, and I think that that is the right way to read it and probably the way Bolaño would have wanted it to be read. Certainly each section is meant to be appreciated in relation to the others, and above all to the central section about the (actual and ongoing) murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, which Bolaño here calls Santa Teresa.
Saint Theresa of Avila is a 15th century Spanish Catholic mystic who writes about her ecstatic experiences of being penetrated by Jesus's shafts of light. Bolaño gives us the endless litany of murders of women, mostly young (as young as 10 and 12 in fact), mostly workers in the maquiladoras (factories) run by multinationals in and around Ciudad Juarez, located near the US border in the Sonora Desert. They are usually raped. They are very often strangled, and there are patterns of mutilation that suggest a serial killer, but the serial killer or killers is mixed in among a larger group of murderers, including the usual run of homicidally possessive boyfriends, violent gangs of narcotraficantes, etc. The police detectives occasionally pick off the perpetrator without much trouble, at other times they hang murder charges on suspects in order to appear to be making progress (they beat suspects for days during "interrogations"). Even so half or more of the hundreds of murders go unsolved.
Obscene violence of this magnitude must indicate, Bolaño thinks, "the secret of the universe." Perhaps better to say the secret of our moral and spiritual condition. The meaning of our lives, or at least the potential for our lives to have meaning, confronts us in the form of our in-"humanity." Bolaño wants to limn the connection between ordinary citizens and those who actually transgress the farthest boundaries of compassion. The man raping, torturing and murdering a 12-year-old girl (or anyone) approaches the meaning of life at the other extreme, and the victims, like Saint Theresa, can also be seen to be experiencing the extremity of being. The writer too can pursue true being (true meaningfulness) as a writer by going to this place. The only possible absolution can only be real action resulting from recognition of collective guilt.
This gets to Bolaño's obsession with the Nazis and the Holocaust. This preoccupation of his can seem almost quaint 65 years after WWII, in these anti-American days, and I am only speculating about the psychological dynamic Bolaño had with the Nazis. But I think he identified Hitler's National Socialist movement, more than colonialism's feral capitalism, with the right-wing ideology he saw in Latin America: totalizing and yet nihilistic, a vehicle for impunity, something driven more by passion than expediency. Bolaño suggests that the violence in Ciudad Juarez is the identical wave of violence surging through the world as the one that swamped Europe in the 1940s, still sloshing across Mexico now by way of the guerras sucias in Patagonia in the 1970s and the escuadrillas de muerte of Central America in the 1980s.
The devil, for Bolaño, comes from within. He presents a straightforward diagnosis of the Ciudad Juarez murders: endemically corrupt local police and politicians work for money, and the wealthy and the dangerous are protected by an attitude that accepts no responsibility for actually confronting injustice. The situation is to be maintained. In fact, the murdered women are part of the "raw material" of the place: they are used by the maquiladoras and then used by local predators and even the police, lawyers, journalists and others make a living to some degree from their victimization. A homicidal system, in short.
The novel is also Bolaño's ultimate statement about the role of the writer in society, another of his grand obsessions. For one thing, he rejects the ideal of the writer as a kind of little god, setting up a self-contained world with a definite "message," and he challenges the conventional reader who expects this tidily finished product. Maybe, after all, there is no god, and maybe the world doesn't make sense. The most valuable insight of existentialist philosophy (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) is that true morality is only possible against the background of a purely amoral universe, with its profusion of coincidence, absurdity, randomness and, yes, cruelty and heartlessness. Everything in Bolaños's universe ties together, but in the most capricious, absurd, tragic and really funny ways. One of the things I like most about Bolaño is his insistence on showing us the universe as it really is. Bless me if the son of a bitch isn't bringing the Enlightenment to Latin American literature, an achievement that puts him in league with Borges (no one is in league with Cervantes).
Which brings me to the title, 2666. It is a date, a year. A year when things will happen, things as outrageous as what is happening now (there are characters in Bolaño's writings who don't care to stay up drinking all night, who aren't potentially available for sex. It's just that Bolaño has no interest in such people). The mind boggles and can't place a value on this date, 656 years from my writing these words, imagine the world of 1354, some of you can do that better than others: what significance does it have for us? Bolaño is addressing the beat of the butterfly's wings that ultimately causes a universe to disintegrate. Yes, there is causation, yes, there is holism: but the cosmic joke is that it is all well outside of control, and wisdom is the realization that that is a source of humor, and a further level of wisdom is that that does not divest anything of its moral significance. Quite the contrary. When I die and go to the gates of heaven Saint Peter is going to let me in, and you know why? Because I think it's funny! I think that all of that suffering is funny - that is, I can see the humor in it. So God thinks that she might have a beer with me. And that is it. That's the secret of existence.
There is a young detective in 2666, Lalo Cura (la locura: the crazy thing, the craziness, the crazy circumstance). A boy of 19 or 20, chosen by the chief of the bottomlessly corrupt police by virtue of the toughness of his origins, he reads textbooks on police forensics and wants to know what has really happened, unlike most of his colleagues. If you blink you might miss the fact that he is the bastard son of one of the two protagonists of The Savage Detectives (almost certainly Arturo Belano, Belaño's alter ego). The Savage Detectives is to 2666 what V. is to Gravity's Rainbow, an experiment and exploration. The other similarity between the two writers is a paranoia, or a priceless evocation of paranoia, that is supremely provocative by virtue of being burlesque.
The great writer, like the great detective, is the person who can confront the sordid reality of our condition, protected by no god, absent of any justice in the metaphysical sense, and bring the facts back from an impossibly difficult expedition and lay them before us. Thus we are presented with the opportunity for our own redemption.
One last observation: Bolaño achieves his cosmopolitan texture honestly. Mexico, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the US: his evocation of place appears effortless but is the opposite. With just a word or two about a street or a quick meal he somehow summons whole cultures, great depths of variety evoked with tiny details. In The Savage Detectives there was a sense that his persuasive conveying of place was a result of his own vagabondage, and I think that's true; in 2666 we can see that a tremendous amount of research went into the production of the manuscript. This is yet another expression of Bolaño's humility in the face of reality: reality, something a thousand times more bizarre, compelling, obscene and important than anything that anyone could make up. This is the lesson of history.
What a blessing to have this funny earnest writer who gives and gives and gives.
Saint Theresa of Avila is a 15th century Spanish Catholic mystic who writes about her ecstatic experiences of being penetrated by Jesus's shafts of light. Bolaño gives us the endless litany of murders of women, mostly young (as young as 10 and 12 in fact), mostly workers in the maquiladoras (factories) run by multinationals in and around Ciudad Juarez, located near the US border in the Sonora Desert. They are usually raped. They are very often strangled, and there are patterns of mutilation that suggest a serial killer, but the serial killer or killers is mixed in among a larger group of murderers, including the usual run of homicidally possessive boyfriends, violent gangs of narcotraficantes, etc. The police detectives occasionally pick off the perpetrator without much trouble, at other times they hang murder charges on suspects in order to appear to be making progress (they beat suspects for days during "interrogations"). Even so half or more of the hundreds of murders go unsolved.
Obscene violence of this magnitude must indicate, Bolaño thinks, "the secret of the universe." Perhaps better to say the secret of our moral and spiritual condition. The meaning of our lives, or at least the potential for our lives to have meaning, confronts us in the form of our in-"humanity." Bolaño wants to limn the connection between ordinary citizens and those who actually transgress the farthest boundaries of compassion. The man raping, torturing and murdering a 12-year-old girl (or anyone) approaches the meaning of life at the other extreme, and the victims, like Saint Theresa, can also be seen to be experiencing the extremity of being. The writer too can pursue true being (true meaningfulness) as a writer by going to this place. The only possible absolution can only be real action resulting from recognition of collective guilt.
This gets to Bolaño's obsession with the Nazis and the Holocaust. This preoccupation of his can seem almost quaint 65 years after WWII, in these anti-American days, and I am only speculating about the psychological dynamic Bolaño had with the Nazis. But I think he identified Hitler's National Socialist movement, more than colonialism's feral capitalism, with the right-wing ideology he saw in Latin America: totalizing and yet nihilistic, a vehicle for impunity, something driven more by passion than expediency. Bolaño suggests that the violence in Ciudad Juarez is the identical wave of violence surging through the world as the one that swamped Europe in the 1940s, still sloshing across Mexico now by way of the guerras sucias in Patagonia in the 1970s and the escuadrillas de muerte of Central America in the 1980s.
The devil, for Bolaño, comes from within. He presents a straightforward diagnosis of the Ciudad Juarez murders: endemically corrupt local police and politicians work for money, and the wealthy and the dangerous are protected by an attitude that accepts no responsibility for actually confronting injustice. The situation is to be maintained. In fact, the murdered women are part of the "raw material" of the place: they are used by the maquiladoras and then used by local predators and even the police, lawyers, journalists and others make a living to some degree from their victimization. A homicidal system, in short.
The novel is also Bolaño's ultimate statement about the role of the writer in society, another of his grand obsessions. For one thing, he rejects the ideal of the writer as a kind of little god, setting up a self-contained world with a definite "message," and he challenges the conventional reader who expects this tidily finished product. Maybe, after all, there is no god, and maybe the world doesn't make sense. The most valuable insight of existentialist philosophy (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) is that true morality is only possible against the background of a purely amoral universe, with its profusion of coincidence, absurdity, randomness and, yes, cruelty and heartlessness. Everything in Bolaños's universe ties together, but in the most capricious, absurd, tragic and really funny ways. One of the things I like most about Bolaño is his insistence on showing us the universe as it really is. Bless me if the son of a bitch isn't bringing the Enlightenment to Latin American literature, an achievement that puts him in league with Borges (no one is in league with Cervantes).
Which brings me to the title, 2666. It is a date, a year. A year when things will happen, things as outrageous as what is happening now (there are characters in Bolaño's writings who don't care to stay up drinking all night, who aren't potentially available for sex. It's just that Bolaño has no interest in such people). The mind boggles and can't place a value on this date, 656 years from my writing these words, imagine the world of 1354, some of you can do that better than others: what significance does it have for us? Bolaño is addressing the beat of the butterfly's wings that ultimately causes a universe to disintegrate. Yes, there is causation, yes, there is holism: but the cosmic joke is that it is all well outside of control, and wisdom is the realization that that is a source of humor, and a further level of wisdom is that that does not divest anything of its moral significance. Quite the contrary. When I die and go to the gates of heaven Saint Peter is going to let me in, and you know why? Because I think it's funny! I think that all of that suffering is funny - that is, I can see the humor in it. So God thinks that she might have a beer with me. And that is it. That's the secret of existence.
There is a young detective in 2666, Lalo Cura (la locura: the crazy thing, the craziness, the crazy circumstance). A boy of 19 or 20, chosen by the chief of the bottomlessly corrupt police by virtue of the toughness of his origins, he reads textbooks on police forensics and wants to know what has really happened, unlike most of his colleagues. If you blink you might miss the fact that he is the bastard son of one of the two protagonists of The Savage Detectives (almost certainly Arturo Belano, Belaño's alter ego). The Savage Detectives is to 2666 what V. is to Gravity's Rainbow, an experiment and exploration. The other similarity between the two writers is a paranoia, or a priceless evocation of paranoia, that is supremely provocative by virtue of being burlesque.
The great writer, like the great detective, is the person who can confront the sordid reality of our condition, protected by no god, absent of any justice in the metaphysical sense, and bring the facts back from an impossibly difficult expedition and lay them before us. Thus we are presented with the opportunity for our own redemption.
One last observation: Bolaño achieves his cosmopolitan texture honestly. Mexico, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the US: his evocation of place appears effortless but is the opposite. With just a word or two about a street or a quick meal he somehow summons whole cultures, great depths of variety evoked with tiny details. In The Savage Detectives there was a sense that his persuasive conveying of place was a result of his own vagabondage, and I think that's true; in 2666 we can see that a tremendous amount of research went into the production of the manuscript. This is yet another expression of Bolaño's humility in the face of reality: reality, something a thousand times more bizarre, compelling, obscene and important than anything that anyone could make up. This is the lesson of history.
What a blessing to have this funny earnest writer who gives and gives and gives.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
The Savage Detectives and the Untamed Writer
I've just finished reading one of the best novels I've seen this year, easily one of the best five novels out of the past fifty or so that I've read. A few months ago when I read By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano I was enormously impressed by the literacy, the political engagement, the psychological insight and significantly by the attention to the pleasure of the reader. Talented and generous writers are rare. So I Amazoned up a copy of The Savage Detectives, the 648-page novel that established his international reputation virtually overnight when it was published in Spanish in 1998.
I read the 2007 English translation by Natasha Wimmer. I do speak and read Spanish fairly well, but ambitious novels with their slang, wordplay and dense vocabulary - lots of lampposts, boat keels, dustballs, grackles, rolling pins and so forth - are the last frontier for the non-native reader. Having said that, the Wimmer translation is delightful and obviously excellent, a serious literary novel in its own right, funny when it should be, disturbing when it should be.
Like the man says in Baby Snakes, what can I say about this marvelous elixer? Let me start with the heart of the matter: this is a novel about poets and about the practice of poetry. It's not about poetry. There are occasional snippets of poems, cited and invented, but these verses are presented without any pretention that they are necessarily good. Some of the most prominent "poems" are actually punning little line drawings of no great originality. There is much (endless) discussion of whether this or that character is a good or a bad poet, this or that poem a good or a bad poem. There are lists (at one point going on for pages) of poets, mostly actual poets. But it is poets, the practice of poetry and the cultural role of poetry that is the subject.
It is a long love prose poem to Spanish-language poetry, the product of an intense love-hate relationship with poetry and literature. A great joke is that poets are memorialized by having abuse heaped upon them (one minor character has a system by which he divides all Mexican poets into two categories: the "queers" and the "fags"). Poetry for these characters is something for which one gives up one's life, something more important than life itself, and the reader plumbs the text in increasing amazed realization that the author has, must have (Bolano died in 2003 at the age of fifty) thrown himself into this passion to bring this crazy testament back to us.
But that makes it all sound so serious. It's a bawdy picaresque about bohemian students, drifters and drunks, oversexed pot-peddling bums and mentally unstable minor literati at the very margins of the publishing industry, people who live in the bottommost depths of obscurity. They hang around cafes in Mexico City (this is a fantastic novel about Mexico City), wander around Europe working as dishwashers and night watchmen, float around South America, move to California with their mothers. They drink a lot, they smoke a lot, they have lots of sex. Years go by. It's really fun to read about. As I said, this is a remarkably generous writer. He's giving us everything he's got.
It's a novel about the written word, the word is more real than reality. Place names, for example, are handled with a lexicographic meticulousness: obviously the name of a place is one of the most important things about it. Oddly enough this cultish devotion to the Logos, self-consciously echoing Cervantes (or more accurately Don Quixote himself) is tied to the theme of authenticity (the defining obsession of the modern poet). Odd, also brilliant: the fictional Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima as latter-day Quixotes reveal a gnostic, subversive Cervantes, the Quixotic champion of mythic culture vs. modern reality presented as a visionary rather than a fool. Public acknowledgement is corruption, the true artist (and the true philosopher) must defend their obscurity or lose their voice. And modernity, urbanity, secularism are the ultimate enemies of poetry: the heroic poet is Don Quixote, and that's not a windmill at which he is tilting, it's a dragon.
Speaking of bad attitudes, I've thought so far of two people who I feel I need to contact personally. One was Phil Lumsden who went to New College in Sarasota with me in the late 70s. Out of about 300 students we had a pretty good-sized contingent of poets, under the guruship of A. McA. "Mac" Miller, who only brought enough beer for himself to class in his six-pack-sized carrying case (we had to bring our own), an ex-military man with a complicated home life and a taste for Hughesian poetic violence. There were Southern boys who struck manly, racist poses, Bay Area-style hippies whose apartments would be condemned by the health authorities, do-it-yourself punkers who dutifully broke all of their empty beer bottles on the wall, the Russian literature professor was an incomprehensibe fanatic for structuralist theory, one of the English lit professors was on his second student wife and apologized to me for hitting on my girlfriend (he hadn't known she was, he explained to me), the other once had a conversation with me in the dark with his head face-down on his desk (I suspect strong drink), road trips to Tallahassee or Jacksonville to see Kesey, say, or Ferlinghetti (no, Ferlinghetti was a road trip to Buffalo when I was in high school), one night in a bar in Fruitville a drunken man started to recite The Wasteland much to our amazement as we were working through reading the allusions and Pound's editing with Mac - the man said he'd memorized it while he was in the state prison. Later I had to persuade him to get out of the car (of course we had invited him along) when he started to get violent and threaten the girls, I remember seeing him chasing the car in the rearview mirror.
The friendly neighborhood Marxist generally finds the local poets to be dilettantes, decadently apolitical, even frankly antisocial, lost in their cups, penniless moochers. All true. But there is something inevitably subversive about the poetic act, at least there has been since, say, the Industrial Revolution. Bolano recognized that poets in the developed world in the 20th century are crazy, useless, wretched: sacred.
I read the 2007 English translation by Natasha Wimmer. I do speak and read Spanish fairly well, but ambitious novels with their slang, wordplay and dense vocabulary - lots of lampposts, boat keels, dustballs, grackles, rolling pins and so forth - are the last frontier for the non-native reader. Having said that, the Wimmer translation is delightful and obviously excellent, a serious literary novel in its own right, funny when it should be, disturbing when it should be.
Like the man says in Baby Snakes, what can I say about this marvelous elixer? Let me start with the heart of the matter: this is a novel about poets and about the practice of poetry. It's not about poetry. There are occasional snippets of poems, cited and invented, but these verses are presented without any pretention that they are necessarily good. Some of the most prominent "poems" are actually punning little line drawings of no great originality. There is much (endless) discussion of whether this or that character is a good or a bad poet, this or that poem a good or a bad poem. There are lists (at one point going on for pages) of poets, mostly actual poets. But it is poets, the practice of poetry and the cultural role of poetry that is the subject.
It is a long love prose poem to Spanish-language poetry, the product of an intense love-hate relationship with poetry and literature. A great joke is that poets are memorialized by having abuse heaped upon them (one minor character has a system by which he divides all Mexican poets into two categories: the "queers" and the "fags"). Poetry for these characters is something for which one gives up one's life, something more important than life itself, and the reader plumbs the text in increasing amazed realization that the author has, must have (Bolano died in 2003 at the age of fifty) thrown himself into this passion to bring this crazy testament back to us.
But that makes it all sound so serious. It's a bawdy picaresque about bohemian students, drifters and drunks, oversexed pot-peddling bums and mentally unstable minor literati at the very margins of the publishing industry, people who live in the bottommost depths of obscurity. They hang around cafes in Mexico City (this is a fantastic novel about Mexico City), wander around Europe working as dishwashers and night watchmen, float around South America, move to California with their mothers. They drink a lot, they smoke a lot, they have lots of sex. Years go by. It's really fun to read about. As I said, this is a remarkably generous writer. He's giving us everything he's got.
It's a novel about the written word, the word is more real than reality. Place names, for example, are handled with a lexicographic meticulousness: obviously the name of a place is one of the most important things about it. Oddly enough this cultish devotion to the Logos, self-consciously echoing Cervantes (or more accurately Don Quixote himself) is tied to the theme of authenticity (the defining obsession of the modern poet). Odd, also brilliant: the fictional Arturo Bolano and Ulises Lima as latter-day Quixotes reveal a gnostic, subversive Cervantes, the Quixotic champion of mythic culture vs. modern reality presented as a visionary rather than a fool. Public acknowledgement is corruption, the true artist (and the true philosopher) must defend their obscurity or lose their voice. And modernity, urbanity, secularism are the ultimate enemies of poetry: the heroic poet is Don Quixote, and that's not a windmill at which he is tilting, it's a dragon.
Speaking of bad attitudes, I've thought so far of two people who I feel I need to contact personally. One was Phil Lumsden who went to New College in Sarasota with me in the late 70s. Out of about 300 students we had a pretty good-sized contingent of poets, under the guruship of A. McA. "Mac" Miller, who only brought enough beer for himself to class in his six-pack-sized carrying case (we had to bring our own), an ex-military man with a complicated home life and a taste for Hughesian poetic violence. There were Southern boys who struck manly, racist poses, Bay Area-style hippies whose apartments would be condemned by the health authorities, do-it-yourself punkers who dutifully broke all of their empty beer bottles on the wall, the Russian literature professor was an incomprehensibe fanatic for structuralist theory, one of the English lit professors was on his second student wife and apologized to me for hitting on my girlfriend (he hadn't known she was, he explained to me), the other once had a conversation with me in the dark with his head face-down on his desk (I suspect strong drink), road trips to Tallahassee or Jacksonville to see Kesey, say, or Ferlinghetti (no, Ferlinghetti was a road trip to Buffalo when I was in high school), one night in a bar in Fruitville a drunken man started to recite The Wasteland much to our amazement as we were working through reading the allusions and Pound's editing with Mac - the man said he'd memorized it while he was in the state prison. Later I had to persuade him to get out of the car (of course we had invited him along) when he started to get violent and threaten the girls, I remember seeing him chasing the car in the rearview mirror.
The friendly neighborhood Marxist generally finds the local poets to be dilettantes, decadently apolitical, even frankly antisocial, lost in their cups, penniless moochers. All true. But there is something inevitably subversive about the poetic act, at least there has been since, say, the Industrial Revolution. Bolano recognized that poets in the developed world in the 20th century are crazy, useless, wretched: sacred.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Bolaño's Dark Night
By Night in Chile (2000) is one of Roberto Bolaño's last works, but it is the first of his novels to be translated into English (by Chris Andrews in 2003). His novel The Savage Detectives (1998), widely regarded as a masterpiece, has been published in an English translation by Natasha Wimmer in 2007 and I can tell you that it is going into the Stack as soon as Amazon sends me my copy.
When people talk about "Latin American literature" of course the first thing people think of is the "magical realism" of the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Guatemalan Miguel Asturias, etc., but Bolano is closer to the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (Terra Nostra, 1975), a political writer whose canvas is modern intellectual life in the Spanish-speaking world (and a Chilean hybrid of these forms that is worth reading is House of the Spirits (1982) by Allende's niece Isabel Allende). His prose style certainly is exceptional, dreamy and impressionistic but highly literate and allusive, the easy fluency with high culture that the best Spanish artists make to look easy (one thinks of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the paradigm, or the contemporary Spaniard Javier Marias).
It's hard to imagine a more politically engaged novel than By Night in Chile. The protagonist, a dying priest named Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, relates a deathbed confession of horrific tragedy, but a tragedy that unfolds across his adult life, culminating in his complicity with murder and torture under the Pinochet regime. The blandly sinister agents of Opus Dei who suborn him send him off on a junket to Europe, ostensibly to research methods for preserving cathedrals. His findings are a bit more than just allegorical, as the priests there are using falcons to kill off the pigeons who defile the church. At one point a priest's falcon kills the dove who has been symbolically released at the beginning of a charity race. The priests are a bit chagrined in the face of the angry townspeople, but not too much. They apologize and serenely go on their way.
This episode foreshadows Father Urrutia's attending the legendary funeral of Pablo Neruda, just days after the military takeover of Chile following the death of Allende. There are hostile mutterings and even some shouting as Father Urrutia and his companion, a well-known conservative critic, are spotted in the throng, but the two men barely notice that these demonstrations of anger may be directed at them, and proceed along in their self-absorbed way. After all, they were on personal terms with Neruda, who used to spend weekends with them in the country.
Father Urrutia remembers Neruda as part of his literary life, his other acquaintance with greatness being Ernst Junger, famous for his glorification of war and rejection of democracy, although he also famously declined to participate in the Third Reich. Father Urrutia, who sees himself as a conservative, nonetheless has the intellectual gifts to see the corruption of Chilean society (he is recruited to teach a short course in Marxism to the Junta itself, only vaguely sensing that by assigning a Chilean woman's textbook on the subject he is condemning her to death. "Is she good-looking?" one of the officers asks. "Yes."), if only he could tear himself away from his fixation on high literature and see through his own privileged status as a conservative priest.
With this novel Bolano, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, fulfills the highest function of the novelist: no Chilean writer (no writer) who reads this novel will ever be able to look away from the historical crimes of his own time, his own bourgeoisie.
When people talk about "Latin American literature" of course the first thing people think of is the "magical realism" of the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Guatemalan Miguel Asturias, etc., but Bolano is closer to the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969) or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes (Terra Nostra, 1975), a political writer whose canvas is modern intellectual life in the Spanish-speaking world (and a Chilean hybrid of these forms that is worth reading is House of the Spirits (1982) by Allende's niece Isabel Allende). His prose style certainly is exceptional, dreamy and impressionistic but highly literate and allusive, the easy fluency with high culture that the best Spanish artists make to look easy (one thinks of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the paradigm, or the contemporary Spaniard Javier Marias).
It's hard to imagine a more politically engaged novel than By Night in Chile. The protagonist, a dying priest named Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, relates a deathbed confession of horrific tragedy, but a tragedy that unfolds across his adult life, culminating in his complicity with murder and torture under the Pinochet regime. The blandly sinister agents of Opus Dei who suborn him send him off on a junket to Europe, ostensibly to research methods for preserving cathedrals. His findings are a bit more than just allegorical, as the priests there are using falcons to kill off the pigeons who defile the church. At one point a priest's falcon kills the dove who has been symbolically released at the beginning of a charity race. The priests are a bit chagrined in the face of the angry townspeople, but not too much. They apologize and serenely go on their way.
This episode foreshadows Father Urrutia's attending the legendary funeral of Pablo Neruda, just days after the military takeover of Chile following the death of Allende. There are hostile mutterings and even some shouting as Father Urrutia and his companion, a well-known conservative critic, are spotted in the throng, but the two men barely notice that these demonstrations of anger may be directed at them, and proceed along in their self-absorbed way. After all, they were on personal terms with Neruda, who used to spend weekends with them in the country.
Father Urrutia remembers Neruda as part of his literary life, his other acquaintance with greatness being Ernst Junger, famous for his glorification of war and rejection of democracy, although he also famously declined to participate in the Third Reich. Father Urrutia, who sees himself as a conservative, nonetheless has the intellectual gifts to see the corruption of Chilean society (he is recruited to teach a short course in Marxism to the Junta itself, only vaguely sensing that by assigning a Chilean woman's textbook on the subject he is condemning her to death. "Is she good-looking?" one of the officers asks. "Yes."), if only he could tear himself away from his fixation on high literature and see through his own privileged status as a conservative priest.
With this novel Bolano, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, fulfills the highest function of the novelist: no Chilean writer (no writer) who reads this novel will ever be able to look away from the historical crimes of his own time, his own bourgeoisie.
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