Roberto Bolaño as World Literature

Twelve chapters comprise the anthology, including the exemplary Introduction. It is the best Bolaño critical ensemble since Bolaño Salvaje (2006). It best compares with articles from a published conference, updating issues and inventing others, ahead of the next round on Bolaño it so well inspires. First Part: “Bolaño and World History” delves deep into fascism in fictional and counterfactual terms (Federico Finchelstein); into Nocturno de Chile, extended into Nietzsche and Junger and European aestheticism (Thomas O. Beebee); and also into Amuleto's “ethical turn” and its recasting of Mexico's 1968 students insurgency, less in revolutionary ideological terms, more so through the narration's distanced moral reflections (Juan De Castro). Second Part: “Bolaño's Literary Worlds” offers piercing and documented analyses of regional legacies and their cosmopolite betrayal by theory, counterfeit jargon, arcane correctedness (Will Corral); a subtle Bolaño who in Detectives Salvages experiments in modernist techniques as much as did older writers in the region (Patricia Espinosa); and the Bolaño authorship's passage and absorption into the global publishing system (Enrique Navarro). Third Part: “Bolaño's Global Readers” exudes learning and a tone of fierce irony in accounting for Bolaño's evanescent and often sublime targets of parody, bounced off the problematic challenges posed by Latin America's distinctive and defensive exceptionalism (Benjamin Loy); a witty see-through selfie on how much Chinese Bolaño's Chinese reception turns out to be, as it assimilates his tragic themes through stereotypes of Latin America, at times surpassed (Tweng Wei); Bolaño deftly brought home, momentarily from the basement to the penthouse of American letters, including some inmate cabin-mating with Herman Melville (Nicholas Birns); and, finally, the double-edge publishing negotiations through which Bolaño's resistance against postmodern hegemonies, on shrinking maps, faces absorption by the polymorphous strategies of neoliberalism, as stock is taken of 2666, The Third Reich, and Woes adding up to one huge fiction (Sharae Deckard); who in the collection's final's sentence writes The proleptic trajectory of Bolaño's “total novel,” culminating in Woes' fear of a “vulgar and savage fin de siècle” [...] insinuates that early deathworlds of the twentieth century are likely to reproduced or echoed [sic.] in grotesque new forms in the twenty-first century, so long as both the horrors and the utopian possibilities of past conjunctures have been forgotten and capitalism continues uncontested. (220) The apocalypse in question actually reproduces and echoes the oldest cleavage in the ancient-to-modern culture quarrels about the grounds for authority being stubbornly indebted to religious confessionalism, among ancients, but also among moderns. Such is Carl Schmitt's baseline dictum about political theology's unvanquished claims to sovereignty. Should one write about the Sovereign Republic of Santa Teresa as a citadel adrift and governed by tenebrous Land-and-Sea German legacies? Should such place partially represent the nomadic City in Deckard's total novel by posthumous Bolaño?Bolaño ancient or modern? Writing on this binary in The Battle of the Books, Jonathan Swift sets the cannibal spider against the laborious bee: “The question comes all to this.—Whether is the nobler being of the two, that which, by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, which feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom, produces nothing at last but flybane and cobweb; or that which, by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax” (A Tale of the Tub and Other Works 112). Being a bee that died untimely by spidery habits, Roberto Bolaño is justly served by the articles in this collection, whose previous scant notice I will next supplement in more personal terms.For the vanishing breed of us who came of age as twenty-something academic readers, imprisoned in Cortázar and Vargas Llosa and Donoso and other boomers, and did so justified by the promise of jobs that actually existed, millennial Bolaño resurrected magical yearnings. These illusions came at a moment of increased precarity in the humanities and more so within the subaltern position occupied by literature in nonscientific research. For me, Bolaño rose, heralding darkness, like the Horse entering Troy once the place went missing. Missing perhaps to Juárez, that strange ghost city, adrift, teeming with life, harvested by industrial extraction, cursed by the deletion of women now known as gynocide. The City Awful, so indexed, lies an inch beyond where somewhere might turn into Bucharest (that strange ghost city, adrift, teeming with life, etc.). A topology rises from the page as real as Hell, but menaced by the radical unrealness of today's literariness as the all-too knowing craft of theory-heavy readings.Whenever I confront with decreasing regularity the big hulk of Bolaño work I won't find time to read, I think of rereading Moby-Dick, awed by all that Melville wrote after becoming the great poet who hardly anybody reads as he now stands right next to Whitman and Dickenson. It might be such esoteric epic and ancient-Egyptian Melville that justifies comparison with the consuming and madly readable scripts left in Bolaño's wake, dilated past all measure of secular and civil endurance.Is Bolaño then primitivist scriptural? Has Bolaño, rather, left behind various readerships, whether as bees or spiders, committed to the asylum where inmates inoculate magnifying scripted significance into themselves, seeking immunity against everything that does not germinate out of reading fiction? Is the real Bolaño roommate Thomas De Quincey, not on board Ishmael's Pequot but eating opium at the Italian Opera in London?For companionship with 2006 and its hellish holy places, why not Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876)? the longest poem in American Literature, longer than the Iliad, Aeneid, Paradise Lost, longer even than La Araucana, the epic length achieved by Ercilla, past the point where size matters less and less beyond colonial boredom. As with Melville, the masculinity of treasured or devalued size has haunted my experience of Bolaño; but only as a teacher, in seminars that often led to women readers quitting sickened by what they felt was a path of sadistic pornography.Besides “El gaucho insufrible” (as antidote to gauchesca high-and-low patriotics and a joke on whatever Cultural Studies did to Borges), I have taught Nocturno de Chile, Los Detectives Salvajes, and 2006. My very partial account of this bountiful collection has aimed at regrounding serious readership through the resettlement of journeys past taken to the edge of a page turned digital. If so, Bolaño remains the reader's future in pursuit of the Euro American past. A past that does not want to surrender to sublime aesthetics of German Volk origins. A past not to be hyphened, a time beyond insufferable homely realisms in subterfuge bondage to regional brands of sacralized nationhood. The expatriation of the unhomely Unheimlich won't let go of this American Cain in the wake of his claiming all for himself the murder of Moses the Egyptian

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Latin American Literature Analysis · Latin American Literature Studies · Philosophy