Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star

Critical Essays

I. López-Calvo, I. López-Calvo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137492968
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

Roberto Bolaño has attained an almost mythical stature and is often considered the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. The first English-language volume of essays on the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, includes ten critical essays of his oeuvre. With a special emphasis on his masterpieces: 2666, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Distant Star, the essays address topics such as Borges's influence and the role of repetition, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism.

Part I

General Overview

Chapter 1

Writing with the Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility, and Justice in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star

Rory O’Bryen

In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolaño frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of “a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions” (1)¹—Bolaño’s fictional source and alter ego—he promises an expansion of the “grotesque” story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, “rather than mirroring or exploding” former versions, would be “in itself a mirror and an explosion” (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s collaborative “discovery” (also thanks to “a mirror and an encyclopaedia”) of the grotesque universe of “Tlön” (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones 13).² “Tlön” offers a fantastical image of the universe as seen through the normative principles of Enlightenment rationality. It also represents the monstrous distortion of those principles under the conditions of fascism. That Bolaño should evoke Borges in a postdictatorship context signals an effort to develop Borges’s reflections for an understanding of the Chilean present. Bolaño’s claim, immediately after these Borgesian clins d’oeil, that he wrote Distant Star in dialogue with “the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre Menard” (1), makes these aims more explicit, and links this task to a renewal of Menard’s legacy as set out in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”

One commonly held view of Bolaño’s writing is that it offers an inventive reanimation of the aesthetic forms and thematic preoccupations of his Argentine precursor.³ This is partly confirmed by formal similarities between works such as Nazi Literature in the Americas—Bolaño’s pseudoencyclopedic summation of an array of fictional proto-Nazi, Nazi, and neo-Nazi authors writing between 1894 and 2030—and A Universal History of Iniquity (2001), Borges’s satirical retelling of the lives of various deviants, villains, and misfits from the world literary canon. As Celina Manzoni notes in Roberto Bolaño: la escritura como tauromaquia (17–32), both works share a fascination with evil, and with this, an effort to restore such evil to Enlightenment discourses of “Universal History” that construe history, as Hegel does, in terms of the emancipatory, truth-disclosing dialectic of rational consciousness. Bolaño’s political resignification of Borges’s timid exercises de style, one should add, lies in its substitution of the Borgesian appeal to the consequently substituted universals of irrationality and evil with their historical presentation in the particular guise of Nazism. This substitution establishes a dialectical interplay between the peripheral rewriting of (universal) history as a history of iniquity—an instance of Borges’s irreverent “réécriture dans la déviance” (rewriting in deviance [Lafon in Boldy, Companion to Borges 28])—and its universalizing counterpart in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), according to which the dialectic of universal history culminates with its return to myth and barbarism. Nazi Literature of the Americas significantly postpones the dialectical synthesis of these stories to a moment that lurks ominously as a not too distant possibility but one that remains postponed, deferred, yet to come. Additionally, Manzoni’s observation that Nazi Literature is more (Latin) American in its focus than A Universal History (Tauromaquia 24), should prompt us, in our effort to grasp Bolaño’s political motivations for reanimating Menard’s specter, to turn to the immediate context in which he wrote, and particularly to the specifically Chilean context in which literature has become indelibly marked by the horrors of dictatorship and the neoliberal orders that it imposed. Attention to Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” and to its critical reception, as well as bringing the story’s literary aims into focus, will allow us to arrive at a genealogical understanding of Bolaño’s alignment with Menard’s ghost, and with this, more crucially, at an understanding of what is political about his radicalization of the Borgesian story’s deconstruction of authorship in particular.

The principal effect of Borges’s story is a defamiliarization of the activities of reading such that reading is reframed as a kind of writing, and writing as a kind of reading. He achieves this by contrasting the “visible” oeuvre of a minor French symbolist Pierre Menard—one comprising 20 or so publications on topics as varied as Leibnitz, Ramón Llul, Valéry, translation and the Achilles and the Tortoise parable—with its “invisible” counterpart in Menard’s word-for-word “rewriting” of Chapters 9, 38, and 22 of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The latter radically enriches the meaning of the seventeenth-century classic. As the outcome of a reading that leaves no discernible trace on the text, Menard’s work is more “subterranean, [and] interminably heroic” than its “visible” counterpart (Ficciones 51). Borges thus equates the singular act of reading with an animation of the plurality of virtual interpretations lying unactualized within any text and with the power to lay bare the excess of virtual interpretations over the present moment of any concrete enunciation. His qualification that such an “oeuvre” is perhaps “the most significant [work] of our time” (51) also underscores reading’s capacity to put time itself “out of joint”⁴: its power to shed light on the contingency of the present and its radical openness to future reinterpretations. Bolaño’s “Menardian” deconstruction of notions of criminal authorship in Distant Star, as I shall show, points to a similar such contingency in efforts to bring criminals to justice.

Exemplifying the process by which reading opens a text to future resignifications, Borges writes that in Chapter 38 of the Spanish classic, Don Quixote’s discussion of the superiority of arms over letters predictably expresses the view of an author who had once been a soldier. Coming from a contemporary of pacifists such as Bertrand Russell and Julien Benda—whose La Traison des Clers (1927) had denounced intellectual involvement in political and military affairs—Menard’s articulation of the same view has a decidedly anachronistic effect that militates against his stated intellectualism. “Menard,” Borges surmises, had “enriched the slow and rudimentary act of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution” (Ficciones 59). Rather than lament the loss of original meaning generated by such a reading, Borges exhorts us, with characteristic wit, to embrace the differences to which it gives rise: “to read the Odyssey as if it came after the Aeneid, to read Mme Henri Bachelier’s Le jardin du Centaure as though it were written by Mme Henri Bachelier,” even to entertain the possibility that the Imitatio Christi might be the work of Céline or James Joyce (59). To adopt this attitude toward reading is to set in motion a text’s “subterranean” potential, to underscore the contingency of all fixed identities and the semantic inexhaustibility of the present. This emphasis on the inexhaustibility both of individual texts and of the present is key to Bolaño’s appeal to Menard’s ghost, which demands that we approach notions of historical closure with skepticism.

Criticism of stories like “Pierre Menard” long framed Borges as a “universal writer,” particularly after their translation into French by Roger Caillois in the 1950s, their subsequent anthologization in English editions, and their adoption as precursors of poststructuralist trends in literary criticism. In some cases, these readings reify Borges as a poet of “irreality” or inadvertent champion of today’s discourse on the “end of history” (Balderston, Out of Context), disregarding the specific context in which his stories obtain meaning such that they appear “without precedent or provenance” (Boldy, Companion to Borges 3).⁵ In other cases, in ways analogous to Menard’s own anachronistic readings, they underscore the stories’ potential to signify in contexts with which their author could not have been acquainted. Bolaño’s conjuration of Menard’s specter illuminates both the specific Chilean context from which his work emerges and the transformation of that context by global processes. Indeed, Bolaño’s stated dialogue with Menard’s ghost shapes his reflection on a range of issues, including the reconfiguration of the relationship between politics and aesthetics after the Chilean military dictatorship of 1973, the incompletion of the redemocratization process that began in 1990, and the transformation of Chilean life by those neoliberal policies imposed by dictatorship and enshrined by the conspicuously partial transition to democracy.⁶

More recently, criticism has reinforced this political potential in Borges’s oeuvre, illuminating the changing relationship between politics and aesthetics in contexts such as Bolaño’s own. In the light of Borges’s essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (1951), which eschewed the search for “local color” in favor of an irreverent criollo assumption of the right to engage with all Western culture (Borges, Discusión),⁷ Beatriz Sarlo, for example, reads Menard’s construction of meaning in the “frontier space where reading and interpretation confront the text” as a symptom of the conflicted construction of “frontier cultures” such as that of the River-Plate region (Borges: Writer on the Edge 32–33). Alan Pauls’s El factor Borges, in a similar vein, takes Menard’s “parasitical” reading of the Spanish classic as an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari would later call “minor writing” in reference to writing that “deterritorializes” a major work or language by making it foreign to itself.⁸ Tales such as “Pierre Menard” thus reframe “world literature” via a mode of symbolic production that is locally derived, pitting seemingly universal aesthetic and philosophical currents against one another in a manner reminiscent of the duels between gauchos and compadritos in Borges’s early texts. Ricardo Piglia’s observation that Borges strives endlessly to reconcile the conflicting legacies of his split Anglo-Argentine ancestry—his interest in the military battles of the Independence, gleaned from his mother’s family, and his love of English literature and philosophy, the legacy of his father—partly explains Menard’s blurring of the conflict between “arms” and “letters” in Don Quixote (Piglia, “Ideología y ficción en Borges”). What Pauls adds is that the result of this constant labor is a work that turns “literature into a battlefield, books into weapons, and words into blows” (El factor 73). Finally, in a painstaking pursuit of Borges’s historical references that unearths the “political unconscious” that strains to be heard therein,⁹ Daniel Balderston reads “Pierre Menard” as providing one instance of a political conflict that plays out across the entirety of the Argentine’s oeuvre, namely, a conflict between the pacifism of Russell and Benda (voiced in his repudiations of Peronism, fascism, and Communism) and a Sorelian appeal to vi...