Fears and joys of writing in the fiction of Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.

—The poet Amadeo Salvatierra, a character in Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives] (1998)¹

To say that Roberto Bolaño burst like a comet over the skies of Latin America and much of the world during the late 1990s may be trite and, worse, inexact: unlike a comet, Bolaño’s star has not dimmed. Since his premature death from liver disease in 2003, this Chilean-Mexican, pugnacious, and peripatetic writer has become one of Latin America’s most highly-canonized, even legendary authors, joining earlier writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Much of Bolaño’s success can surely be ascribed to his originality—a word that must be used advisedly in our postmodern days in reference to artworks that, instead of absolute breaks with tradition, offer surprising and unexpected recombinations of familiar elements. It was just this originality of a contrarian sort that led Bolaño to write numerous novels and stories prominently featuring poetry and poets, precisely at a time when poetry had lost its predominance in Latin American culture in favor of the novel. In a series of masterly works, Bolaño was able to almost singlehandedly renew poetry’s prestige, in particular that of the highly experimental avant-garde poetry that flourished in Latin America through the first three decades of the twentieth century but had eventually fallen into disfavor. These works include La literatura nazi en América [Nazi Literature in the Americas] (1996), a false biographical dictionary of pro-Nazi poets in both North and South America; Estrella distante [Distant Star] (1996), about a poet who is also a serial killer; The Savage Detectives, about two poets searching for the founder of an obscure Mexican avant-garde movement; Nocturno de Chile [By Night in Chile] (2000), the troubled night thoughts of a Chilean priest, literary critic, and aspiring poet, and the somber, posthumously-published novel, 2666 (2004), focused on the search for an obscure German author by four literary critics in the context of the femicides on the USA-Mexico border.

Bolaño’s achievement is to have written “literature about literature” that nevertheless feels profoundly alive, immediate, and exciting, a literature in which the intimidating and ethically dubious aspects of fiction writing, and of writing as a whole, are given their due, even as the act of storytelling itself is frequently imbued with feelings of energy and exultation. At the risk of falling into the trap of biographical criticism, one might surmise that the almost palpable joyfulness and sense of adventure in many of Bolaño’s fictions were an artistic compensation for his knowledge that he would likely die of an incurable disease in a few years.

It is not essential, however, to invoke Bolaño’s biography to understand how he could be fascinated by both the fearsome and the joyful aspects of writing as a product and as an experience. In this regard, Bolaño was typical of many great authors in a self-reflexive or self-conscious Western tradition of fiction-writing that stretches back to at least Cervantes. As with the Quixote’s author, Bolaño was familiar with and fascinated by writing’s duplicitous aspects, which have been much explored by postmodern writers and critics, from Borges (in his story “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” [“The Garden of Forking Paths”]) to Jacques Derrida (in his essay “The Double Session”²).

In this view, the act of writing produces a “splitting” in consciousness, because the act of writing implies reflection both before the act—as one reflects on what one is going to write—and after the act itself, as one reads what one has written. There is thus an inherent doubleness in writing that shades off into duplicity. This may well be one of the sources of writing’s aura of malevolence, and of the not infrequent association of writing with the abject.

In Latin America after the Conquest, the notion of “civilization” has been persistently linked, as elsewhere around the world, to writing and letters. In spite of this, or perhaps even because of it, writing was from the very beginning regarded in Latin America with a mixture of mistrust and awe. This was also largely due to writing’s oppressive role during the traumatic events of the Conquest, when the predominantly oral indigenous peoples were forced to accept the European invaders’ system of graphic representation.³ At the same time, the Europeans, in a move familiar to colonizers and colonized around the globe, condemned the ideographic or pictographic sign-systems of the Indians as works of the devil, and proceeded to eradicate them through massive book burnings.

Indeed, the Americas experienced the “violence of the letter”⁴ in a drastic and overwhelmingly physical manner. Not only were the sons of the Indian elites forcibly accultured and made to learn Latin, Spanish, and the European alphabet, but they—along with their indigenous brethren and the enslaved Africans who were brought soon afterwards—experienced in their very bodies the intense sort of control made possible only through writing. This writing included the innumerable edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books with which the Europeans attempted to keep their New World subjects, as well as their own people, in line.⁵

In this context in which letters and the law were presumed to be inextricably linked, and in which writing served as a model for the quasi-military ordering of the world, writers in both Spain and its colonies sought to contest or resist the law. These writers frequently took recourse to the magic or demonic tradition of writing, invoking writing’s potential to dissemble, confuse, and undo. A back-and-forth movement often manifested in Latin American writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between a positive view of the written word for public consumption and a negative, fearful one of it in intimate texts. This movement nevertheless gave rise in Latin America to what I would argue as a true ethics of writing, that is, a propensity to ask not only how one could use writing as a critical tool or as an instrument of power, but, more importantly, why one chooses to write in the first place. If writing is not a neutral, almost ethereal, docile, and malleable vehicle, which can be used for either good or evil, but instead is a material entity, heavy and resistant, and “tainted” by its collusion with the state and its attendant violence, as the tradition that fears writing insists, why would any moral person have anything to do with it? The Platonic critique of writing also insisted that writing, as both an entity and as an activity, was devoid of moral principles, or rather, that its guiding principles were anarchy and lawlessness. Whether one sees writing as the instrument of an oppressive, militaristic state, or, as Plato put it, “dumb characters which have not a word to say for themselves and cannot adequately express the truth,”⁶ the question remains: Can writing ever be fully justified?⁷

As I have argued in In Search of the Sacred Book: Religion and the Contemporary Latin American Novel, although Bolaño was frequently compared with the novelists of the Latin American literary Boom, he rejected these authors’ tendency to sacralize the novel in their effort to promote a pan-Latin American cultural and political unity.⁸ Bolaño’s most profound difference with the Boom’s tradition lies not just in his postnational attitude, a view of Latin America devoid of essentialism and skeptical about fixed concepts of national and personal identity, but also in what can be described as his postsecular attitude. The latter leads Bolaño to forego the use of religion as an artifice, as a “partial magic” (to use Borges’s term in “Magias parciales del Quijote” [“Partial Magic in the Quijote”])⁹ or trick to sacralize both the novel and the nation (as the novel’s ultimate subject) and endow them with a transcendent aura, even as his writing searches for some ethical values. His fiction could be regarded as a successful example of narrating without religion at all, if religion is understood as the desire to reach a plenitude of meaning, which is characterized, according to Peter Berger, as the “attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant.”¹⁰ Avoiding the tiresome penchant for blasphemy, for obsessively speaking about religion while trying to go beyond it, of authors such as the Colombian Fernando Vallejo, Bolaño’s narrative questions religion’s importance, seeking to follow non-transcendental coordinates by linking itself to ethics. Bolaño does not aim to assign meaning to the world, but instead to describe how human beings navigate (and sometimes sink) in a world without inherent meaning by forging often highly personal value systems to help them remain stable in their journey through life. As Manav Ratti observes in The Postsecular Imagination, “writers are doing this work of the postsecular. In the very act of their writing, in the very search for affirmative values, they are creatively on the borderlines of received ideas of the secular and the religious.”¹¹ In the sense of the secular as the material (non-transcendental) world, Bolaño’s fear of writing stems in part from material violence, including writing’s connection with Latin America’s history of colonial violence and state control. Yet writing is also for Bolaño a source of joy, a process that allows for a capaciousness and exultation that do not derive strictly from religion, given Bolaño’s skepticism toward religion. Bolaño’s individualistic search for ethics can thus be considered post to the secular, a post constituted by vitality and joy. A framework of postsecularism shows how joy and fear, as literary themes and as emotions, open up important considerations about how the writerly search for ethics and values can be shaped by exultation, capaciousness, and the material world.

Bolaño’s most probing and sustained exploration of fear in general and fear of writing in particular is found in his novel Distant Star. As is known, this novel is a revised and expanded version of the last entry in Nazi Literature in the Americas: “Carlos Ramírez Hoffman (Santiago de Chile, 1950–Lloret del Mar, Spain, 1998).”¹² Focused on the character of Carlos Wieder, a would-be avant-garde poet in Chile during the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship, who is later revealed to be a serial killer, the novel portrays Wieder as a compendium of the negative qualities most often associated with writing since Plato: treachery, deceit, silence, repetitiousness, errancy, deadliness, violence.¹³

Wieder (whose last name means “again” in German) has these traits in abundance, with none of writing’s redeeming virtues as a means of communication. Appropriately, Distant Star’s narrator first encounters Wieder (who called himself then Alberto Ruiz-Tagle) at poetry workshops in the university of Concepción, where, the narrator remembers, “he wasn’t particularly talkative.”¹⁴ Wieder also keeps silent about his family and academic background, claims to be an autodidact (14), but incongruously—in the narrator’s opinion—dresses in clothes that are too fashionable and expensive for an autodidact (14). A friend of the narrator recollects the eerie feeling he experienced when visiting Wieder’s apartment, which “seemed to have been prepared, its contents arranged for the eye of the imminent visitor; it was too empty, and there were spaces from which things had obviously been removed” (17; emphasis original). In terms of his actual writing in the poetry workshops, the narrator observes about Wieder that:

He read his own work with a certain disengagement and distance, and accepted even the harshest comments without protest, as if the poems he had submitted for our criticism were not his own. Bibiano and I were not the only ones to notice this; one night, Diego Soto told him that there was something distant and cold about his writing. (21)

Despite these shortcomings, the narrator recalls that Wieder consistently claimed that he was “going to revolutionize Chilean poetry” (24).

The military coup that brings Pinochet to power coincides with Wieder’s first known crime, the murder of the Garmendia twin sisters (one of whom he had been dating) and their aunt. Not long afterwards, Wieder reappears as an aviator who writes enigmatic poems in the sky with a sky-writing plane: the first of the poems is a quote in Latin from the Book of Genesis followed by the word “Learn” (35–39). The narrator, who witnessed this “first poetic act” by Wieder (34) without knowing who the aviator was, emphasizes in his description the intimidating, near-apocalyptic quality of this writing in the clouds:

Then, preceded by an odd crunching noise, as if someone had stepped on a very large insect or a very small biscuit, the plane reappeared. It was coming in from the sea again. I saw the pointing hands stretch out, the dirty cuffs rise to signal its passage; I heard voices, but perhaps it was only the wind, for in fact at that moment no one dared speak. Norberto squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them very wide. Our father in heaven, he began, forgive us the sins of our brothers and forgive us our own sins. We are only Chileans, Lord, he went on, innocents, innocents. (38–39)

Besides skywriting in smoke and in pen and paper, Wieder writes in another, more deadly medium: dismembered women’s bodies, which he artistically photographs and exhibits one evening in a friend’s Santiago apartment for an audience composed mostly of military men, some of whom recoil in horror at what they see (93–102). Later in the novel, when Wieder has gone into hiding in Europe and is, so to speak, semi-retired from his criminal career, it turns out that he has continued with a less horrific but no less sordid form of body-writing, working as a cameraman for low-budget porn films (132–37). When the narrator helps an avenging Chilean private eye named Romero to find Wieder in the seaside Catalan town of Blanes (Bolaño’s place of residence when he was writing this novel), his close encounter with the poet/serial killer is even more unsettling due to its casual banality. Both are seated at nearby tables in a half-empty bar-restaurant, and, looking at Wieder, the narrator remarks on their resemblance to each other: “He was staring at the sea and smoking and glancing at his book every now and then. Just like me, I realized with a fright, stubbing out my cigarette and trying to merge into the pages of my book” (152). Startled, the narrator sees that in certain ways, in his devotion or even addiction to writing, he has much in common with Wieder’s abject nature.

In Distant Star, Bolaño symbolically embodies the fearful qualities of writing in the character of Wieder. However, in a brief and sarcastic essay he wrote (but never delivered) for a writer’s conference in Seville in 2003, appropriately titled “Sevilla me mata” (“Seville Kills Me”), Bolaño raises the possibility that what Latin American writers fear most is not so much the act of writing itself, but its consequences, or more precisely its potential inconsequence in today’s society:

Where does the new Latin American literature come from? The answer is extremely simple. It comes from fear. It comes from the horrible (and in a certain way, understandable) fear of ending up working in an office or selling cheap trinkets in the Ahumada walkway. It comes from the yearning for respectability, which is just a way to cover up our fear. We may sound, for those who don’t know better, like characters in a movie about the New York mafia, from the way we always talk about “respect.” Frankly, at first sight we look like a pitiful group of thirty-, forty-, and even one or two fiftysomethings who are waiting for Godot, which in this case is a prize, be it the Nobel, the Rulfo, the Cervantes, the Príncipe de Asturias, the Rómulo Gallegos.¹⁵

Certainly Bolaño himself wrote intensely, day and night, during his last decade of life, filling his desk computer’s hard drive with seven books of poetry, fifteen novels, four books of short stories, and one essay collection, some of these published posthumously. As Chris Andrews remarks: “Bolaño began his literary career as a poet and continued to write poetry up until his death, although from 1992 on he devoted most of his energy to novels and stories, hoping to provide for his family, quixotically it must have seemed, at least until the success of The Savage Detectives.”¹⁶ On one occasion, he seems to voice his frustration at having had to write so much prose instead of poetry: “writing in prose is a terrible lapse of taste.”¹⁷ In his 2001 “Self-Portrait,” a brief and ironic autobiographical text, Bolaño expressed what seems to be a heartfelt rejection of writing: “I am much more happy when I’m reading than when I’m writing.”¹⁸

Yet, be it in prose or poetry, Bolaño’s writing consistently conveys an expansive feeling of energy, vitality, and freedom that may easily be equated with a sense of happiness or joy. As the theologian Miroslav Volf has observed: “With its four structural elements (intentional object, perception of the object as good, experience of the object as unowed, and a positive hedonic response), we can define joy as emotional attunement between the self and the world—usually a small portion of it—experienced as blessing.”¹⁹

The joy of writing in Bolaño encompasses in a similarly capacious way the various aspects of joy. And although the term “joy” is rarely referred to overtly in Bolaño’s prose, it is implicit in certain recurring images and themes, as well as in his paradoxical exaltation, in his prose writings, of poetry over prose. In a frequently-cited passage from the ending of his short novel Amuleto [Amulet] (1999), the character of Auxilio Lacouture, a bohemian Uruguayan woman exiled in Mexico who calls herself “the mother of Mexican poetry,”²⁰ recounts an apocalyptic vision in which a large group of young Latin American poets march together singing across a cold, deserted valley:

They walked toward the abyss. I think I knew that from the moment I saw them. Shadow or mass of children, they walked unerringly towards the abyss. (…) And so the ghostly boys crossed the valley and plunged into the abyss. A quick descent. And their ghostly song, or the echo of their ghostly song, which is like the echo of nothingness, kept on marching with the same rhythm, the rhythm of courage and generosity, in my ears. A barely audible song, a song of war and love, because the children were undoubtedly heading towards war but as they did it they assumed the theatrical and sovereign attitudes of love. (…) And although the song I heard spoke of war, of the heroic deeds of a whole generation of sacrificed Latin American young men, I knew that above all it spoke of bravery and mirrors, of desire and pleasure.

And that song is our amulet.²¹

In this passage, reminiscent of Volf’s observation that “joy is best experienced in community,” the “amulet” that is the young poets’ “beautiful song” can be regarded as an audible representation of the poets’ shared joy in artistic creation through language. Volf’s earlier insight that joy is an “emotional attunement between the self and world” sheds light on how a community itself can be constituted by attunement with one another, in the young poets’ case through an exultation based on song.

However, as Chris Andrews lucidly points out: “In Bolaño’s fiction, poetry as product and practice stands for something larger.”²² That “something” is identified by Andrews with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “neotenic openness.”²³Neoteny is a term from the biological sciences, which alludes to the preservation of infantile or juvenile traits in the adult form of an animal. “Neotenic openness,” in Andrews’s formulation, is “a youthful openness preserved beyond the age at which it is typically lost, and therefore a quality that is distinctly manifest only in individuals who are at least relatively old, like Amadeo Salvatierra [in The Savage Detectives] or Benno von Archimboldi at the end of 2666.”²⁴ It is not simply openness to any new experience, but also “being open to an ethical demand, and like detective work it has a contemplative as well as an active aspect. It involves attentiveness, a quality that certain of Bolaño’s characters possess to an extraordinary degree.”²⁵

Predictably, along with this tendency towards “neoteny,” humor and playfulness are also traits present in Bolaño’s writings. In a perceptive article, Benjamin Loy underscores the importance of humor, laughter, and a sense of play in Bolaño’s fiction: “In Bolaño’s works, laughter and tears—which, as expressions of bodily disorder remain to a certain degree impenetrable and opaque—fulfill a dual function: for the characters who experience them, they are instruments in their (bodily) struggle to recover a lost Spielraum [‘freedom to play’]; meanwhile, at an aesthetic level, they become strategies for a ‘humorous’ writing in the broadest sense of the term.”²⁶

Last but not least, at the level of Bolaño’s writing style, the openness that leads to a joy of writing is most clearly manifested by Bolaño’s emphasis on narrative action: narrators in Bolaño insistently describe sequences of acts, with few pauses for reflection and retrospection. From the multiple narrators of The Savage Detectives to the solitary one of By Night in Chile, Bolaño’s narration, although stemming from the past, moves unceasingly forward. His protagonists, who are frequently his narrators, tell little about their origins or do not dwell on them, moved instead by the urge to tell a story whose ending cannot be clearly foreseen and which, moreover, often divides into other stories told by other narrators.

Much has been said about the “fractal structure”²⁷ of Bolaño’s texts, about their tendency to branch out almost indefinitely and of repeating certain patterns on different scales. In Bolaño, fractal structure may be seen as a way of prolonging the act of narration, of bringing “neotenic openness” to an activity that is usually understood as the creation of self-enclosed stories—whether short stories or novels—that are often defined by how and when they end. Bolaño’s “expanding universe” of narratives may thus be considered an act of artistic generosity and optimism. Reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s humorous statement that “the sheer pleasure of storytelling … is perhaps the human state that most resembles levitation,”²⁸ Bolaño turns Borges’s view of writing’s oppressive “infinite regression”²⁹ into an indefinitely expanding and joyful process of poetic creation.

Footnotes