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Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star
Critical Essays
I. LĂłpez-Calvo
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Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star
Critical Essays
I. LĂłpez-Calvo
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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.
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Sujet
LiteraturaSous-sujet
Literatura generalPart I
General Overview
Chapter 1
Writing with the Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility, and Justice in Roberto Bolañoâs Distant Star
Rory OâBryen
In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolaño frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant RamĂrez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of âa fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin Americaâs doomed revolutionsâ (1)1âBolañoâs fictional source and alter egoâhe promises an expansion of the âgrotesqueâ story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, ârather than mirroring or explodingâ former versions, would be âin itself a mirror and an explosionâ (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borgesâs collaborative âdiscoveryâ (also thanks to âa mirror and an encyclopaediaâ) of the grotesque universe of âTlönâ (âTlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertiusâ in Ficciones 13).2 âTlönâ 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 Borgesâs reflections for an understanding of the Chilean present. Bolañoâs claim, immediately after these Borgesian clins dâoeil, that he wrote Distant Star in dialogue with âthe increasingly animated ghost of Pierre Menardâ (1), makes these aims more explicit, and links this task to a renewal of Menardâs legacy as set out in âPierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.â
One commonly held view of Bolañoâs 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 AmericasâBolañoâs pseudoencyclopedic summation of an array of fictional proto-Nazi, Nazi, and neo-Nazi authors writing between 1894 and 2030âand A Universal History of Iniquity (2001), Borgesâs 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 (17â32), both works share a fascination with evil, and with this, an effort to restore such evil to Enlightenment discourses of âUniversal Historyâ that construe history, as Hegel does, in terms of the emancipatory, truth-disclosing dialectic of rational consciousness. Bolañoâs political resignification of Borgesâs 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 iniquityâan instance of Borgesâs irreverent ârĂ©Ă©criture dans la dĂ©vianceâ (rewriting in deviance [Lafon in Boldy, Companion to Borges 28])âand its universalizing counterpart in Adorno and Horkheimerâs 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, Manzoniâs 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 Bolañoâs political motivations for reanimating Menardâs 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 Borgesâs âPierre Menard, Author of Don Quixoteâ and to its critical reception, as well as bringing the storyâs literary aims into focus, will allow us to arrive at a genealogical understanding of Bolañoâs alignment with Menardâs ghost, and with this, more crucially, at an understanding of what is political about his radicalization of the Borgesian storyâs deconstruction of authorship in particular.
The principal effect of Borgesâs 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 âvisibleâ oeuvre of a minor French symbolist Pierre Menardâone comprising 20 or so publications on topics as varied as Leibnitz, RamĂłn Llul, ValĂ©ry, translation and the Achilles and the Tortoise parableâwith its âinvisibleâ counterpart in Menardâs word-for-word ârewritingâ of Chapters 9, 38, and 22 of Cervantesâs 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, Menardâs work is more âsubterranean, [and] interminably heroicâ than its âvisibleâ 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 âoeuvreâ is perhaps âthe most significant [work] of our timeâ (51) also underscores readingâs capacity to put time itself âout of jointâ4: its power to shed light on the contingency of the present and its radical openness to future reinterpretations. Bolañoâs âMenardianâ 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 Quixoteâs 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 Bendaâwhose La Traison des Clers (1927) had denounced intellectual involvement in political and military affairsâMenardâs articulation of the same view has a decidedly anachronistic effect that militates against his stated intellectualism. âMenard,â Borges surmises, had âenriched the slow and rudimentary act of reading by means of a new techniqueâthe technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attributionâ (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: âto read the Odyssey as if it came after the Aeneid, to read Mme Henri Bachelierâs Le jardin du Centaure as though it were written by Mme Henri Bachelier,â even to entertain the possibility that the Imitatio Christi might be the work of CĂ©line or James Joyce (59). To adopt this attitude toward reading is to set in motion a textâs âsubterraneanâ 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 Bolañoâs appeal to Menardâs ghost, which demands that we approach notions of historical closure with skepticism.
Criticism of stories like âPierre Menardâ long framed Borges as a âuniversal writer,â 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 âirrealityâ or inadvertent champion of todayâs discourse on the âend of historyâ (Balderston, Out of Context), disregarding the specific context in which his stories obtain meaning such that they appear âwithout precedent or provenanceâ (Boldy, Companion to Borges 3).5 In other cases, in ways analogous to Menardâs own anachronistic readings, they underscore the storiesâ potential to signify in contexts with which their author could not have been acquainted. Bolañoâs conjuration of Menardâs specter illuminates both the specific Chilean context from which his work emerges and the transformation of that context by global processes. Indeed, Bolañoâs stated dialogue with Menardâs 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 Borgesâs oeuvre, illuminating the changing relationship between politics and aesthetics in contexts such as Bolañoâs own. In the light of Borgesâs essay âThe Argentine Writer and Traditionâ (1951), which eschewed the search for âlocal colorâ in favor of an irreverent criollo assumption of the right to engage with all Western culture (Borges, DiscusiĂłn),7 Beatriz Sarlo, for example, reads Menardâs construction of meaning in the âfrontier space where reading and interpretation confront the textâ as a symptom of the conflicted construction of âfrontier culturesâ such as that of the River-Plate region (Borges: Writer on the Edge 32â33). Alan Paulsâs El factor Borges, in a similar vein, takes Menardâs âparasiticalâ reading of the Spanish classic as an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari would later call âminor writingâ in reference to writing that âdeterritorializesâ a major work or language by making it foreign to itself.8 Tales such as âPierre Menardâ thus reframe âworld literatureâ 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 Borgesâs early texts. Ricardo Pigliaâs observation that Borges strives endlessly to reconcile the conflicting legacies of his split Anglo-Argentine ancestryâhis interest in the military battles of the Independence, gleaned from his motherâs family, and his love of English literature and philosophy, the legacy of his fatherâpartly explains Menardâs blurring of the conflict between âarmsâ and âlettersâ in Don Quixote (Piglia, âIdeologĂa y ficciĂłn en Borgesâ). What Pauls adds is that the result of this constant labor is a work that turns âliterature into a battlefield, books into weapons, and words into blowsâ (El factor 73). Finally, in a painstaking pursuit of Borgesâs historical references that unearths the âpolitical unconsciousâ that strains to be heard therein,9 Daniel Balderston reads âPierre Menardâ as providing one instance of a political conflict that plays out across the entirety of the Argentineâs 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...