Queer Exposures

Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry

Ryan Long

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780822988144
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño's fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño's constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño's texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.

CHAPTER ONE

A Queer Poetics of Intemperie

“Labyrinth” as Darkroom

“Labyrinth” is a short story published in the posthumous collection El secreto del mal (The Secret of Evil) (2007). Its unknown narrator invents a series of interconnected tales about figures in a photograph he describes to the reader in great detail. His ekphrasis, or textual commentary on an image, exhibits a desire for narrative control while acknowledging the limits to that control, thereby setting in motion a productive tension emerging from the interplay of photograph, text, document, and fiction. “Labyrinth” is centrally important to my project because of the way it establishes this tension and interplay, one of whose facets is temporal. Time appears in the story as registered in erotic encounters among different moments, encounters that rely upon and sustain intemperie, a state of radical spatial and temporal exposure.

The story’s narrator proceeds as if he were working in a darkroom. He manipulates a photographic image, itself the abstracted (into black and white) and doubly inverted (into a negative and back to a positive) inscription of a past moment. An explanation of the photograph, a transformed moment, relies upon a return to something other than the photograph, the instant of exposure. In his exposition of a certain photographic exposure, Bolaño’s narrator demonstrates that a return to the past that begins with a photograph necessarily follows spatial and temporal detours: on the one hand relying on that which is not in the photograph in order to explain it, and on the other hand relying on what is in the photograph in order to explain that which is not. In spatial terms, the photograph is defined by the frame, and thus by a tension between what is visible and what is not. In temporal terms, that which appears in the photograph is separated from and delimited by whatever happened before and after the shutter was released. “Labyrinth” navigates three processes of exposure regarding a particular photograph that are also intrinsic to the interpretation of any inscription, visual or otherwise. The first is defined by the moment the photograph was taken, the second by the exposure of the photograph to the narrator’s interpretation of it, and the third by the mutual exposure of past and present inherent to that interpretation.

The multiple temporal and spatial exposures that structure “Labyrinth” reveal another generalizable characteristic of interpretation—namely, the role that power plays. Two specific manifestations of power in “Labyrinth” correspond directly with the spatial and temporal detours the narrator makes around the photograph he reads, detours he develops as plot lines. The first concerns a struggling Central American writer, whom the narrator assigns to a place beyond the photograph’s frame. The second concerns a solitary man who appears in the photograph and whose desire for another man in the photograph organizes the narrator’s speculations about what happens to his characters both inside and outside of the photograph’s frame before and after it was taken. These two characters find themselves on the margins of the profession of writing and publishing, and heteronormativity, respectively.

The narrator calls the gay man J.-J. Goux but leaves the writer unnamed. Goux’s name corresponds to an actual person, just as the photograph in which he appears corresponds to an actual photograph. It portrays eight figures associated with the French magazine Tel Quel at the Fête de l’Humanité in Paris in 1970: Jacques Henric, Jean-Joseph Goux, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Thérèse Réveillé, Pierre Guyotat, Catherine Devade, and Marc Devade.¹ Bolaño’s narrator only lists first initials before complete last names, as if his access were limited to partial information, and he identifies the photograph’s likely date as 1977. He recognizes Henric, Sollers, Kristeva, Guyotat, and Marc Devade, and thus uses their actual first names in the story. He invents first names for Réveillé and Catherine Devade, Marie-Thérèse and Carla, respectively, and leaves Goux’s first name as initials. “Labyrinth” proceeds as if the photograph at its center were a negative, capable of serving as the basis for new, multiple, and altered positive images. These images take the form of stories the narrator invents about the figures in the photograph, which take place over a succession of four nights. On the third and fourth nights, the comparison between the story and a darkroom, reinforced already by the fact that the narrator develops his versions of the photograph when it is dark, becomes even clearer because the photograph experiences physical transformations, which are especially dramatic on the final night, when it appears as if “the viewfinder [photo] had suddenly swung to the right, toward the black hole of chance.”² Gravity’s pull emanates from the Central American writer, whose tale is recounted after the second and before the third night, that is, in the center of the story’s narrative structure, and from Goux, whose actions signal the beginning of the photograph’s gradual destabilization.

To readers familiar with Bolaño’s texts, the Central American writer is immediately recognizable as thematically exemplary, since writing and writers, especially Latin American writers, are principal characters in several of Bolaño’s novels, short stories, and poems. Generally less self-evident, and certainly less covered by critics, is the prominence of queerness. Nevertheless, a closer look, or a different kind of look, reveals that queerness—including homosociality, homosexuality, and queer characters—is an important if not guiding topic in Bolaño’s work. In the case of “Labyrinth,” the thematic importance of writers and queerness that readers may find in Bolaño’s texts is reinforced by remarkable structural significance. The Central American writer literally stands out for two reasons, one having to do with space and the other with time. First, he does not appear in the photograph. Instead, the narrator hypothesizes that he stands beyond the photograph’s border, his presence there the reason for the looks on the faces of Réveillé and Carla Devade. Second, the writer is central to the only episode in Bolaño’s story to occur definitively before the photograph was taken, a centrality reinforced by the fact that the first of the story’s very small number of preterit verbs (scarcely more than ten) is attributed to an action carried out by the writer. Goux’s status as an element within the story’s structure is exceptional for three reasons, which are also related to spatial and temporal positions: he is the first character to “leave” the photograph once the narrator begins inventing stories about those it portrays; he is the only character who leaves behind a blank space, a vacío, in the photograph; and he is the only character who observes the narrator, thereby crossing the border separating the story from its telling, a significant fact in a story preoccupied with gazes and speculations based on observation.

This chapter is divided between an explication of the queer poetics I develop through my reading of Bolaño and a close reading of “Labyrinth.” The explication of queer poetics is developed by considering several separate but related topics: the topic of what I call spatiotemporal capture and queerness’s resistance to it; intemperie as a method of reading that foregrounds spatial and temporal exposure; the interconnections among exposure, storytelling, and close reading; and a definition of literature as a “territory of risk,” which Bolaño formulates in an interview.³ I elaborate on these specific topics in detail in order to conclude more generally that a queer poetics of exposure destabilizes dominant notions of time, space, and narrative. The reading of “Labyrinth” that comprises the second part of the chapter associates this destabilization with topics and formal characteristics central to this story in particular and, in many cases, to Bolaño’s writing in general: the simultaneous assertion and undermining of narrative control; the institution of literature and the space of marginal figures; different forms of doubling, including similes, ghosts, and mirrors; queer espera as an interruption of teleology and totality; and the autobiographical elements of Bolaño’s fiction. This reading of “Labyrinth” aims to present a guide for critically navigating the constellation of Bolaño’s texts.

QUEER POETICS: RESISTANCE TO SPATIOTEMPORAL CAPTURE AND EROTIC ENCOUNTERS OF EXPOSURE

Exposure is encounter. In the case of “Labyrinth,” its public exposure to readers occurred for the first time in Secret, which came out four years after Bolaño’s death. Found on one of Bolaño’s hard drives, its precise date of composition is unclear.⁴ The story’s first appearance in English, in the January 23, 2012, issue of The New Yorker, includes an uncaptioned reproduction of the photograph at the story’s center. Neither the original Spanish nor the English collection includes a copy of the picture. The story stands alone, reading coherently without the photograph. On the other hand, its close reading of the photograph invites its readers to learn about the photograph’s history, to engage in the kind of literary detective work that Bolaño often compels his readers to carry out. The encounter of text and image in the pages of The New Yorker exposes a historical dimension of Bolaño’s story that adds depth to its narrator’s ekphrasis. This depth arises from the fact that the narrator mediates linguistically an image that is itself a mediation of a specific historical instant.

The queer exposures that unsettle the photograph in “Labyrinth” and thus serve as a point of reference for considering photography and sexuality in the texts by Bolaño where these topics are developed function politically in at least two ways. First, they make visible and often critique historical instances of politics. Second, they make possible a critique of a political operation that often structures literary texts—namely, an allegorical facet of social critique that produces the desire for shelter or definition (the latter in both the sense of assigning meaning and of establishing boundaries) in relation to historical experience. Bolaño’s texts oppose exposure to shelter and openness and instability to definition. My emphasis on queer exposure underscores the way in which these oppositions function. Critically, the oppositions to shelter and definition made visible by an emphasis on photography and sexuality are not only spatial; they are also temporal. The detours followed by the narrator of “Labyrinth” are determined by the space of the frame and the moment of the shutter’s release. The queer poetics I develop in relation to representations of queerness and photography in texts by Bolaño are juxtaposed to the desire for control or narrative mastery the narrator of “Labyrinth” often exhibits, a desire for spatiotemporal capture.

My reading of “Labyrinth” is not just about this story, but instead it also aims to expose this story to several of Bolaño’s other texts as a starting point for considering interrelated thematic and formal tendencies that traverse his texts: the combination of fictional and historical referents; depictions of homoeroticism and other instances of queerness; the centrality of different forms of exposure, including photographic, erotic, temporal, and spatial; the desire to contain narratives and their related subjectivities; and a demonstration of the dangers associated with the desire for spatiotemporal capture, such as simplification, reduction, and generalization. An insistence upon teleology and coherence perhaps best characterizes capture in relation to literary representation while also providing a clear analytic counterpoint to exposure. I use the phrase “spatiotemporal capture” because coherence and teleology are, respectively, related to space and time; because “capture” is a verb often used to describe taking a photograph; and because it is a verb that denotes entrapment, paralysis, vulnerability, and potentially fatal exposure to another’s will.

The queer poetics I formulate and practice in relation to Bolaño’s texts reject spatiotemporal capture as a way of reading any text. Examples of such a paradigm might include affirming a text’s allegorical value or situating the text along the timeline of a writer’s progress, a timeline that capture, paradoxically, both relies upon and inaugurates. I emphasize how spatiotemporal capture is often diegetically reinforced within Bolaño’s texts while also functioning in tension with intemperie. I wish to provide an alternative to spatiotemporal capture through the active thinking of intemperie, that is, the thinking about and the thinking from intemperie, figured both as object and method of analysis.⁵ My reading of “Labyrinth” aims to demonstrate a literary critical methodology structured by intemperie, as a central figure to my queer poetics, in order to elucidate connections among Bolaño’s texts while presenting them as forming a shifting assemblage and not a coherently defined system, a system such as that proposed by Andrews’s “genetic reading” of Bolaño’s work.⁶ I oppose openness and exposure to definition and shelter by combining emphases on temporality and queerness. The past returns within Bolaño’s texts disruptively; his own texts return to one another and to readers and critics in equally disruptive terms. Queerness, as thematic and analytic framework, highlights and brings about disruption.

In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam connects queerness and resistant narratives to one another and to notions of queer space and exposure. Photography and exposure play particularly important roles in Halberstam’s discussion of queer spaces, prominent examples of which include the empty swimming pools and lesbian bars featured in a series of images produced by Cabello/Carceller, contemporary queer Spanish collaborative artists. Both the pools and the bars have critical potential. The former “signify the gulf between fantasy and reality.”⁷ The empty pools, as ruins, present possibilities different from those confined within traditional stories of success as material wealth: “When the pool no longer signifies as a marker of wealth and success it becomes available to queer signification as a symbolic site of failure, loss, rupture, disorder, incipient chaos, and the desire animated by these states nonetheless.”⁸ This space is the product of exposure, a conclusion that becomes evident in the following description by Halberstam of one of Cabello/Carceller’s bar photos: “The door is open, it is morning, and the bar stands exposed to the light of day. The light of day [ . . . ] comes in many forms and performs different functions for viewers and for those who dwell within it.”⁹ In contrast to and in inevitable relation with the moment of exposure to daylight (and figured within the moment of exposure that makes the photo possible), the bars’ indoor spaces, writes Halberstam, “offer up a confusing array of surfaces; their planes are not laid one on top of the other but confuse perspectival vantage points and mix up the relation between the foreground and the background, what is emphasized and what is downplayed. [ . . . ] In the multiplicity of planes the viewer understands the vantage point of the lesbian bar as scattered, constellated, and as we wander through we are shocked, suddenly, to have glimpsed the outside, to have crossed a threshold.”¹⁰ That threshold is the light of day visible through the back of the bar, inviting the viewer to escape the confusing space of the bar in lieu of a narrative of futurity, a new morning, while also risking confinement within normative temporality. Staying in the bar offers something different, along the lines of the “remnants of alternative possibilities” that crowd “dominant history.”¹¹ The surfaces Halberstam highlights in the description of the empty bar and the tension between that queer space and the temporality intrinsic to the pools as ruins and the exposure to a new morning are analogous to Bolaño’s constellation of texts.

Instead of a genetic reading of Bolaño, with that term’s emphasis on biology and a seemingly more naturalized form of generation and regeneration, my queer reading of Bolaño aims to resist the systematic totalization that arises from biological and other confining metaphors. In a discussion of the film Robots (2005) and its consideration of genetics within the context of how machines might make a baby, Halberstam writes: “The labor of producing the baby is queer in that it is shared and improvised, of culture rather than nature, an act of construction rather than reproduction.”¹² Halberstam concludes that Robots “imagines embodiment as an assemblage of parts and sees some as optional, some as interchangeable.”¹³ The optionality and interchangeability suggested as part of the definition of “assemblage” by Halberstam is more in line with what Bolaño’s writing exhibits and continues to make possible than a genetically defined system would suggest or desire.

“Labyrinth” serves as an example of how time structures the assemblage of Bolaño’s work because it combines at least two looks back from a future present. These are the narrator’s reflections on the photograph and the look back that the story itself stages, given that it was published posthumously. The story creates a frame within which not only the photograph’s materiality but also the story’s materiality are emphasized. “Labyrinth” presents queerness and intemperie, queer exposures, or the queerness of exposure as elements that structure and delimit this territory while also constantly pointing to and hinting at what may lie beyond its borders. Through an emphasis on temporality and its relations with other of Bolaño’s texts, “Labyrinth” begins to appear as a strange kind of photographic negative. It is strange because it is potentially exposed, paradoxically, in different forms and developed and printed in a seemingly infinite variety. Read as this strange kind of negative, “Labyrinth” casts l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. A Queer Poetics of Intemperie: “Labyrinth” as Darkroom
• Chapter Two. Desiring and Resisting Mastery in Bolaño’s Poetry
• Chapter Three. Reading Queerly: Homoerotic Poetry, Temporality, and Revolution
• Chapter Four. The Detectives of Intemperie
• Chapter Five. Queer Itineraries and Moments of Exposure in The Savage Detectives
• Chapter Six. Queer Exposures and Textual Constellations
• A Conclusion. Certain Stars: Science Fiction and the Emperor of Ice Cream
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index