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1THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR:ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G. SEBALD, AND
NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES
A thesis submitted to the faculty ofSan Francisco State
University
In partial fulfillment ofThe requirements for
The degree
Master of Artsin:
Comparative and World Literature
by
Jessie Byron Ferguson
San Francisco, California
August 2007
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2Copyright byJessie Byron Ferguson
2007
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3CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read The Archimedean Author by Jessie
Byron Ferguson, and that in my opinion this work meets
the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of
Arts in Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco
State University
___________________________________________Dane JohnsonAssociate
Professor of Comparative and WorldLiterature
___________________________________________Volker
LangbehnAssociate Professor of German
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4THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR:ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G. SEBALD, AND
NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES
Jessie Byron FergusonSan Francisco State University
2007
This study examines the representation of reading, writing,
criticism and authorship in
three recent novels: La literatura nazi en Amrica [Nazi
Literature in the Americas] and
Estrella distante [Distant Star] by Roberto Bolao, and Die Ringe
des Saturn [The Rings
of Saturn] by W.G. Sebald. Both authors pay tribute to the work
of Jorge Luis Borges in
their fiction, and I argue that Borges short fiction is an
important antecedent to the
metafictional, intertextual narrative structure of the three
later novels. But those novels
also significantly modify Borges fictional model of the
interconnected worlds of people
and texts, partially as a response to the traumatic experiences
of historical violence which
play a major role in their work, but also as a deeper critique
of the position (and
obligations) of the author in time and space. I argue that these
practices are productive
not only as a way of negotiating recent literary and political
history, but as possible future
models for writers with similar concerns.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the
content of this thesis.
______________________________________________
_________________Chair, Thesis Committee Date
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5PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debt of gratitude is to my advisors, Volker
Langbehn and Dane Johnson, whose insight and diligence
in reading and criticizing this project have been
invaluable.
I would also like to thank Professor Shirin Khanmohamadi,
who gave useful feedback for an early paper on this topic;
the 2005-06 editors of Portals who accepted that paper for
publication; Daniel Medin, for sharing his work on Sebald
(and many other things); and my cohort in general,
particularly Will Arighi, Christy Rodgers, Rachel Gibson
and Olga Zilberbourg, for encouragement and comments. I
have benefited from innumerable conversations about my
work with friends, and from the love and support of my
family, who will all continue to be effusively
acknowledged outside these pages. Finally, Paul Kerschen
gave me inestimable intellectual and moral support during
my degree program; without him this thesis would not have
been possible.
v
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6TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.1
Chapter One: Beyond Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Chapter Two: Where Stories Begin and End . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Chapter Three: From the Air: Maps and Narrative Territory . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.51
Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
54
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. 56
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1INTRODUCTION
W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and
Roberto Bolaos
La literatura nazi en Amrica (Nazi Literature in America) and
Estrella distante (Distant
Star) are novels about writers and texts in the former case,
mostly English writers and
historical texts; in the latter cases, mostly invented writers
and imaginary, belletristic
texts. The first two titles Estrella distante is a slightly
different case fall into
different bands of a broad spectrum of encyclopedic writing, and
they freely mix
fiction and fact, author and narrator, firsthand consciousness
and secondhand
information. They invite the reader to look over the narrators
shoulder, as it were, as he
processes an enormous amount of information and ultimately tries
to derive meaning
from it. Certain artificial devices common to all three novels,
though, hold the same
reader at a distance: most notably, the disjuncture between the
author and the first-person
narrator identified with him.
The use of a fictional double for the author in these novels
does not, as in some
metafictional writing, have significant implications for the
world of the novel itself: that
is, it isnt especially important either to plot or to other
characters that one character is
also the author. The doubling affects the relationship with the
reader instead. The
authorial narrators play the role of both writer and reader;
they are by turns allied with
and opposed to the real reader of the novel. That real reader
must therefore attend to
several different levels, and types, of text within the unified
whole: those written
originally and explicitly for the external reader (by the
author-narrator as writer), and
those recapitulated by the author-narrator (acting as a phantom
reader) and taken from
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2either real or fictitious outside sources. In this respect, it
doesnt matter whether those
sources are real or invented; what matters is that the narrator
portrays himself as reading
them.
In the first of this studys three chapters, I suggest that we
look at reading,
writing, criticizing, quoting, and similar practices as ways in
which people coexist with
texts, and that in the process of coexistence there is more a
balance than a hierarchy.
Throughout the three novels, the lives of the majority of
characters are interwoven with
texts and experiences with texts; in the case of the narrators,
consciously so. The
pressures of this unavoidable coexistence give rise to the
formation of ambivalence,
enthusiasms, and nuanced ethical positions. One aim of this
study is to trace and describe
that process of formation, particularly in the case of the
narrators, and more particularly
regarding the way the narrators relate to their authors and
mirror their literary concerns.
As I argue in the same chapter, both Sebald and Bolao were well
aware of Jorge
Luis Borges as a forerunner to the sorts of games they play with
authorship and
readership. Bolao held the Argentine writer in the highest
esteem. In a lengthy and
diverse collection of his writing, Entre parntesis (In
Parentheses), Bolao devoted at
least three complete essays (144-45; 174-75; 289-91) and parts
of many others to Borges,
calling him probablemente el mayor escritor que haya nacido en
Latinoamrica
(probably the greatest writer to have been born in Latin
America) (23)1. He obviously
also feels an affinity with Borges writerly persona: the young,
flamboyant vanguardist
poet turned contentious bibliophile, combining the best
distillations of ancient and
modern aesthetics. Sebald comes from a separate, German-Austrian
literary tradition, but
Borges story Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and his Libro de seres
imaginarios (Book of
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3Imaginary Beings) make several appearances in Die Ringe des
Saturn. Borges generally
avoided a direct engagement with his own historical milieu in
his fiction, however, while
both Sebald and Bolao take pains to place a history of violence
and upheaval near the
centers of their novels. The consequences of this distinction
play a large role in my next
two chapters.
In the second chapter I look more closely at a specific practice
of reading and
writing literary criticism and at how both Bolao and Sebald
incorporate critical
positions and insights into their novels. The critic isnt
permitted to invent something out
of nothing like a fiction writer; he or she has other
responsibilities, i.e., towards the
demands of history, the obligation of intelligent judgment, and
the obligation to put
aesthetic clarity and acumen to proper use. There is a sharp
antinomy between criticism
and fiction writing, and although both authors bring the two
practices surprisingly close
together, their novels reveal an ambivalence about both kinds of
claim to authority.
Despite this ambivalence, both authors offer a positive view of
the experience of a shared
community of readers.
In the third chapter, I look at the roles of geography in these
novels: questions of
space, nation, and exile, and identification as a member of a
geographically-defined
group. Primarily, the narrators who share with their authors the
experience of exile
portray their homelands as something troubled, inscrutable,
damaged, and abandoned
without the possibility of return. Their exterior positions give
them a uniquely
cosmopolitan view of their subject matter, but they retain an
anxiety about the past, a
desire to adequately mourn its losses, and above all a sense of
inadequacy and
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4helplessness to find a position, either individual or
collective, that will let this mourning
take place.
This work is therefore neither a study of only metafiction or
intertextuality nor a
study of only memory and historical trauma in recent literature.
Both aspects are equally
critical to the force and meaning of these three novels, even if
the relationship between
them is often vexingly complicated for the scholar; indeed, the
fact that these works
strive to negotiate both aspects at once provides particular
motivation for a comparative
study. In spite of distinct traditions, styles, and settings,
their worlds overlap
geographically, historically and literarily, and I hope to show
that they share an
underlying ethical affinity as well.
To my knowledge, the comparison of Bolao and Sebald is limited
to a single
reference in a Times Literary Supplement review of Bolaos 2666,
written by a translator
then in residence at the University of East Anglia, where Sebald
formerly taught
(Gabantxo 34). The serendipity of this connection, which would
not be out of place in
either authors work, nor in a Borges story, forms a fitting
impetus for this study. Sebald
was born in 1944 in Germany but resided for most of his adult
life in England, teaching
German literature and writing, until his death in 2001; nearly
all of his creative works
were published during the last decade of his life. Bolao was
born in Chile in 1953 but
spent his adolescence in Mexico; after an ill-fated return to
Chile a month before the
1973 coup detat, he fled first to Mexico and then to Spain,
where he and his family lived
until his death in 2003. Both writers grew up in regions haunted
by violence and its
aftermath, and both chose to live as expatriates in their adult
years, writing a series of
novels in rapid succession during the relatively peaceful decade
of the 1990s.
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5The two also occupy an unusual place in their respective
(linguistically-unified, if
not national) literary traditions, coming years or even decades
after a much-honored,
artistically and economically successful generation of postwar
writers in Bolaos
case, primarily the Latin American Boom; in Sebalds, the
generation of Gnter Grass,
Heinrich Bll, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Paul
Celan, and others.
Neither Bolao nor Sebald belongs to a similar generation, with
similar clout; to the
extent that their work is autobiographical, it shows that they
respond as writers far more
to predecessors than to peers. I am sure Bolao, a voracious
reader with an interest in
German literature, encountered Sebalds work at some point, but I
am equally sure that
Sebald had no acquaintance with Bolaos work, which wasnt
translated into English (or
any other language Sebald read, to my knowledge) until 2004.
Nevertheless, I hope the
dialogue between these works can be a fruitful source for more
comparative work on
Sebald, Bolao, and their interlocutors, and on German and Latin
American comparative
literature in general.
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6CHAPTER ONE: Beyond Borges
It may seem perverse to begin a study with Borges, who so
deliberately styled
himself, in his writing, as the heir and curator of literatures
past. In what way can the
latest link in a long chain of readers and interpreters be seen
as an originator? Borges
himself offers one, somewhat cryptic answer in the essay Kafka y
sus precursores
(Kafka and his precursors):
In the critical vocabulary the word precursor is indispensable,
but one must try to
purge it of all connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is
that every writer
creates his precursors. . . . Within this correlation, the
identity or multiplicity of
individuals doesnt matter at all.2 (Borges, Otras inquisiciones
109)
In this model, there is a unity in an authors body of work
strong enough to be reflected,
backwards and forwards in time, in other writing. The examples
of Kafkas precursors in
the essay transcend genre and language: Borges draws the
associative line not through
coincidences in plot or harmony of detail but through a shared
gnoseological outlook.3
Borges emphasizes the strangeness of the connections: the
heterogeneous works I have
enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them
resemble one another4
(109). If Kafka, in this Borgesian reading, determines his own
precursors, then the set of
stories, utterances, ideas, and tropes we metonymize under
Borges name can determine
its own successors. Position in time is immaterial.
But I cannot dispatch the question of Borges inappropriateness
as a starting point
so easily. In a study of Borges translation of Thomas Brownes
Urn Burial (itself a
highly allusive and intertextual work), Christopher Johnson
positions Borges on a line
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7running through Browne and Quevedo5 with whom Borges shares an
affinity for
quotation, linguistic play, and great conceptual breadth within
a single oeuvre and
ultimately extends that line through W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des
Saturn. Johnson,
referring specifically to the Browne translation, makes the
strong claim that it enacts the
seventeenth-century dream of the universal author (175) on
Borges behalf, with both
moral and material support from Brown, Quevedo, and Adolfo Bioy
Casares:
By making his friend and contemporary Bioy Casares, together
with the great
Spanish conceptista poet, Francisco de Quevedo, complicit in his
translation of
Brownes magnificent meditation on funerary practices and
mortality, Borges
effectively redefines translation as proof of the notion of the
universal author. He
confirms, in effect, what Antoine Berman calls ltayage de lacte
traductif, that
is: dune manire gnrale, traduire exige des lectures vaste et
diversifies.
(174)
For Borges, writing fiction also exige des lectures vaste et
diversifies. Johnson
seeks to blur the line between the Urn Burial translation, which
Borges actually
performed, and the short story Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which
concludes with the
pseudo-Borges narrator translating Urn Burial. In a similar way,
I want to show how, in
Borges stories Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Pierre Menard,
autor del Quijote, a
variety of activities reading, writing, translating, criticizing
all clearly become
infected with the same paradigmatic questions about the status
of literature: questions of
how people and books coexist. My inquiry takes the idea of
coexistence seriously, even
if it must restrict its answer by considering only a recent
segment of the long lines of
author-reader-translator-critics in world history.
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8What do I mean by coexistence? The question has several parts:
first, the way a
book exists as opposed to the way a person exists; second, how
these two sorts of
existence overlap in space and time; third, how they interact
and change one another
within that shared region. In the first case, individual books
are more durable, portable,
and reproducible than individual people, who have lifespans,
periods of development and
degeneration, and unique and irreproducible bodies for Borges
this was an enormous
and productive disparity. In the second case, people write books
(usually just once, and
sometimes with collaborators); read them (any number of people
simultaneously or
sequentially, any number of times depending on the number of
copies and readers of
its language); criticize and translate them (less often, but
still potentially more than once),
and produce other books or parts of books, which are then read
by other people. These
processes, furthermore, can all be described in writing.
The third aspect of coexistence interaction and change is harder
to formulate.
The analyses in this study help to document this process in a
few selected works by three
writers, which are, if not a statistically significant set of
data, still an interesting one,
varied in time, space, language, and culture. For Borges,
writing before, during, and after
World War II, a certain aestheticism, and an affirmation of the
autonomy of the artist, had
not yet fallen widely out of favor6. As I will show, the example
of Tln exhibits a
sustained mental engagement with philosophical questions which
come to transform
the world which would seem out of place in the works I discuss
by W.G. Sebald and
Roberto Bolao, or indeed in most works of contemporary fiction.
It is hard to imagine
Sebald and Bolaos haunted, peripatetic narrators allowing
themselves the impassivity
we see in Tlns narrators slow, steadfast work on a translation
of Sir Thomas Browne
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9in the face of cultural apocalypse; it is easier to imagine
them unsettled by a mirror, like
Bioy Casares at the beginning of the tale (Borges, Ficciones,
13-14). Both Bolao and
Sebald attempt to strike a balance between an authoritative
narrative voice and a formally
restrained, scholarly or journalistic position, but the balance
is uneasy. The weight of the
quoted subject matter exerts an immense pressure, against which
the author who has
created the novels himself must employ a variety of stabilizing
tactics.
In a brief overview of Borges work, Paul de Man claims: the
subject of the
stories is the creation of style itself. . . . His main
characters are prototypes for the writer,
and his worlds are prototypes for a highly stylized kind of
poetry or fiction (125). The
observation is only half accurate: the analogies of world with
book and agent with writer
are ubiquitous in Borges, but he moves from one side of each
analogy to the other
without fundamentally privileging either there are plenty of
non-prototypical writers,
poems, and works of fiction in his stories. Just as Borges
invented worlds can be seen as
prototypes for writing, writing can be seen as a prototype for
an uncomfortable sort of
epistemology. De Man claims that each story is built around a
central act of infamy
(125); he reads this trope of the villain as an allegory of
authorship, the catalyst for
Borges achievement of his writing style:
This style in Borges becomes the ordering but dissolving act
that transforms the
unity of experience into the enumeration of its discontinuous
parts. Hence his
rejection of style li and his preference for what grammarians
call parataxis, the
mere placing of events side by side, without conjunctions; hence
also his
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10
definition of his own style as baroque, the style that
deliberately exhausts (or
tries to exhaust) all its possibilities.7 (128)
This baroque stylistic model exhausting possibilities one by
one, considering
and reconsidering is also the critical model par excellence: in
its drive for
thoroughness it outstrips even the accomplishments of de Mans
essay. Indeed, one
signal feature of Tln and Pierre Menard is the subtle allegiance
of the narrator (of
experienced events, rather than books) with a reader and critic,
and this allegiance will be
fairly constant through the texts I examine. Borges word exhaust
brings to mind the
image of a hunt, which ends only when the quarry is too tired to
run and has abandoned
every hiding place and escape route: the elements of life and
chance in a story allow the
plot to run its course, while the author systematically bars
every exit, working against
development and entropy, until the storys world stands still. In
Borges, an ironic gesture
from the narrator cuts off the mirroring and extension of
concepts and texts: the classic
example here is the end of Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
In addition to the essay on Kafka, Borges furnishes another odd
juxtaposition of
precursors in his essay on Paul Valry, Valry como smbolo [Valry
as symbol].
Borges maintains that, as with Walt Whitman, whose mythologized
self is not identical
with the biographical author, we can best understand Valry
through his alter ego,
Edmond Teste (himself a child of Poes fiction: a derivation of
Edgar Allen Poes
Chevalier Dupin8 (Otras inquisiciones 77)). The author and
protagonist figure of Valry
that Borges synthesizes has a transcendent power as an ideal
himself: a man who, in an
era that adores the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion,
always preferred the lucid
pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order9 (78).
Teste is not coextensive
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11
with Valry, but the two are radically connected. More to the
point, this characterization
of Valry invites cathexis and admiration: he symbolizes not an
aesthetic ideal but an
ideal of the human mind.
Pierre Menard, eponymous Autor del Quijote, is presented as a
friend of Valry
(and not of Edmond Teste). We see the following entry on his
curriculum vita, a long list
of heterogeneous, scholarly activities:
p) An invective against Paul Valry in Jacques Rebouls Pages for
the
Suppression of Reality. (That invective, it should be noted
parenthetically, is the
exact inverse of his true opinion of Valry. The latter
understood it as such, and
the old friendship between the two was not endangered.)10
(Borges, Ficciones 51)
The narrator immediately introduces Menard to us as a novelist
(47), but there are no
novels in his curriculum vita, indeed no fiction at all. His
invisible11 rewriting of Don
Quijote suffices to make him a novelist in the eyes of the
narrator, but by trade he seems
to have been a poet and critic. Not just poetry but philosophy,
chess, Boolean logic, and
linguistics interest and occupy him: like Teste, he seems drawn
to the lucid pleasures of
thought and the secret adventures of order (Borges, Otros
Inquisiciones 78).
In the midst of his plans to write the Quijote, we learn that
Menard has dismissed
his initial planto take on Cervantes life in 17th century Spain
as fcil (easy)
(Borges, Ficciones 53). The narrator interjects: More like
impossible! the reader will
say. To be sure, but the enterprise was impossible from the
beginning and of all the
impossible ways of completing it, this was the least
interesting12 (53). This passage is
broadly comic, and in a way self-reflexive too. Borges writes
(so he says) in a kind of
Baroque style meant to exhaust possibilities, but here he shows
his diffident French
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12
protagonist choosing among impossibilities on the basis of their
difficulty. Borges
portrays his own stylistic process through a looking-glass, and
the result is absurd.
Why is Menard in fact French? De Man identifies him directly
with Valry and
Teste (126); Johnny Payne interprets him as the seeming
antithesis of Argentinity and
the Hispanic past (210) and moreover as a man free from filial
anxiety towards
Cervantes. Cervantes is, to use Borges term, not an automatic
precursor to Menard, who
belongs in a generative line stretching from Poe to Edmond
Teste. The narrator,
however, slowly comes to align Cervantes and Menard:
Some nights ago, paging through chapter XXVI [of Don Quijote]
which he
never attempted I recognized our friends style and something
like his voice in
this exceptional sentence: the nymphs of the rivers, the
sorrowful and humid
Echo. That efficacious conjunction of a moral adjective with a
physical one
called to mind a verse of Shakespeare, which we had discussed
one afternoon:
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .13 (53-54)
It seems Menard has created a precursor for himself in the
narrators mind, but he has
done so as a reader and critic, not as a writer. The perceived
affinityof word choice
and grammar, not sensibility or philosophy between the phrase of
Cervantes and the
discussion of Shakespeare corresponds to Menards visible
philological work.
Elsewhere in Menards curriculum vita we find essays on symbolic
logic, French
prosody, and poetic language, as well as this entry:
n) An obstinate analysis of the syntactic customs of Toulet (N.
R. F., March
1921). Menard I recall declared that praise and censure are
sentimental
operations which have nothing to do with criticism.14 (50)
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13
His friend the narrator, certainly, will not take this dictum to
heart when he praises
Menards unfinished labor at the end of the story. Both friends
are locked in a reciprocal
vanity of artistic aims: Menard wants to conjure an almost
Platonically pure text devoid
of human contamination; the narrator applauds his work as a
great technical advance for
readers, who are now free to imagine other texts in the hands of
a diversity of identifiable
writers in different historical periods. Both are utopian
fantasies one of transcendental
artistic transparency, the other of artistic meaning determined
by place and time and
neither fantasy survives, even in compromised form, among the
two writers to whom I
now turn.
Roberto Bolao died, in the summer of 2003, after a short but
remarkably prolific
career as a prose writer. Apart from one early novel which he
co-wrote with Antoni
Garca Porta in 1984 no fewer than ten of his novels and
collections of stories were
published between 1993 and 2004. His last novel, 2666, appeared
after his death in 2004,
as did Entre parntesis, a collection of book reviews, periodical
writing, and
miscellaneous essays. I note the compression of this publication
history only because,
given the many connections (of characters, plots, and locations,
to say nothing of ideas
and themes) between his novels, it is quite likely that many
were written simultaneously
and thus that separations among them are rather tenuous. In La
literatura nazi en America
(Nazi Literature in the Americas), Bolao creates a wide-ranging
fictional encyclopedia
of Nazi writers from all over the Americas. The invented writers
interact with real
ones (for instance, a fictional Cuban writer challenges Jos
Lezama Lima to a series of
duels, although Lezama never shows up); one or two also meet
Hitler or serve in the
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14
German army. Both La literatura nazi en Amrica and Estrella
distante (Distant Star)
were published in 1996; the latter is an expansion of the last
chapter of the former.
Bolao explicitly addresses the question of the narrators
identity, left somewhat
vague in La literatura nazi en Amrica, in a preface to Estrella
distante: he or an
individual who refers to La literatura nazi as mi novela invents
a conversation with
my compatriot Arturo B., a veteran of Latin Americas doomed
revolutions and a
suicide in Africa15, who told him the story in the final chapter
of La literatura nazi and
with whom,
according to the dictates of his dreams and nightmares, we
composed the novel
which the reader now has before him. My function was reduced to
making
drinks, consulting a few books, and discussing, with him and the
ghost, each day
more alive, of Pierre Menard, the validity of many repeated
paragraphs.16
(Estrella Distante 11)
How is Estrella distante the product of consultation with the
ghost, each day
more alive, of Pierre Menard? Formally, Pierre Menard assembles
an intricate model
of the literary work and its historical context. There are four
levels of reality, mediated
by quotation17: Cervantes is quoted by Menard, who is quoted by
the narratorwho is
quoted (in a slightly different sense) by the author. But the
narrator and Menard read
books by other writers outside their acquaintance (like
Cervantes), such as Quevedo and
William James and Leibniz; and Menard at least is acquainted
with other writers, Valry
and DAnnunzio, as real to him as the narrator is. For the
author, Borges, however, every
person in the story is either archival or fictional18; and for
the reader (unless he is
Gabriele DAnnunzios son-in-law), the same is true.
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15
La literatura nazi shares these four levels of reality with
Pierre Menard;
formally, then, what distinguishes the two is the novels final
episode. To the active
archival and fictional players in the narrative Bolao adds a
third category, the political-
historical, in the form of Salvador Allendes government and the
Chilean coup detat.
Many of the fictional writers are contemporaries of Bolao
himself (some, in fact, inhabit
the future), but only the incorporation of first-person
narrative within the novels final
episode allows the historical force, otherwise only metonymized
by the term Nazi, to
be developed fully .
But even within the fictional game its preface sets up, Estrella
distante differs
substantially from the antecedent chapter of La literatura nazi;
whereas Menard, by
contrast, is the fictional author of a verbatim, if fragmentary,
rewriting of Don Quijote.
Belano, like Menard, is a doppelgnger for his author: a writer
who tries to demonstrate
the imperviousness of writing to historical circumstance and
ends by revealing the
opposite. The parallel is not exact, but it is suggestive. The
lesson in Borges story is
one of the indifference of the words on the page to their
contextual meaning compared
with lexicon and poetic construction, context and
intertextuality do far more work and
exercise an overriding hermeneutic power. The lesson in Estrella
distante is slightly
different, given that Bolao is creating an imitation of himself
(Belano) who helps a
second, differentiated imitation of himself (the narrator of La
literatura nazi) to rewrite a
text initially told by the first imitation to the second. There
are doppelgngers and even
Tripelgngers here, but all are attempting to rewrite a real and
increasingly remote
history, from which far from being multiplied the voices of
writers are
systematically removed. I will return to this point in the next
two chapters.
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16
Whereas Bolao pays tribute to Borges meditation on authorship,
Sebald
incorporates a different parable about textuality into his Ringe
des Saturn: namely, Tln,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the story of an imaginary world based
roughly on idealistic
philosophy which eventually intrudes into our own world, and
whose epistemology
mediated by languagethreatens to wipe out human languages and
understanding.
Sebald reproduces portions of the story almost verbatim at the
end of the third chapter of
Die Ringe des Saturn:
The world will be Tln. But to me, so the narrator concludes,
that matters little, I
am further refining, in the leisurely quiet of my country house,
a tentative
translation, after Quevedo, of Urn Burial by Thomas Browne
(which I do not
intend to have published).19 (91)
The primary context is Sebalds previous discussion of Sir Thomas
Browne, which links
the work of the English polymath with Rembrandts painting of a
dissection and localizes
a certain dispassionate fascination with physical destruction.
But Sebald introduces the
Borges story rather peculiarly, without reference to the author:
Many years later I read,
in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, written in 1940 at Salto Oriental
in Argentina, of the
rescue of an entire amphitheatre by a few birds20 (Ringe des
Saturn [RS] 87). Although
Sebald dates the text of the story 1940, Salto Oriental, a
postscript dated 1947
contradicts the authenticity of the composition date which
Sebalds narrator cites as fact.
The line about the birds and the amphiteatre reads merely: At
times a few birds, a horse,
have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre21 (Borges 30). There is
little how to read of
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17
in this terse sentence, and Sebalds focus on this single
disjointed line in a story so rich in
information and detail is almost comic. And, soon
thereafter:
The memory of the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the
aforementioned
Argentine tale, which is primarily concerned with our attempts
to invent worlds to
the second or even third degree . . .22 (RS 89)
In Sebalds redaction, the narrator first recounts his dinner
with Bioy Casares and their
discussion of an experimental novel, then their subsequent
disquieting encounter with a
mirror, and finally their conversation about the mysterious
country of Uqbar and sources
for information about itthe world to the second degree, perhaps,
to which Sebald
refers. The narrator leaps across the narrative concerning Tln
into the postscript thus
reads a postscript from 194723: again, Sebalds narrator takes
Borges dates literally to
discuss the penetration of Tln into the world (RS 91). The final
sentences of the
redaction are almost direct translations of the end of the
story.
El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking
Paths), the
collection from which Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is taken, was
published in 1941, so
the 1947 date for the postscript is fictitious. Adolfo Bioy
Casares was an Argentine
writer and friend to Borges. Although they surely dined together
and discussed writing
many times, the dinner and discussion in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius is fictional.
Sebald himself has always taken pains to stress that his own
narrators are fictional,
although they overlap considerably with his own biography and
history. (The narrators
are never named, although in several cases they allude to
photographs included with the
text24.) For the Sebald-narrator to take at face value the dates
given by the Borges-
narrator of Tln and to foreground the experiential elements of
the narrative (rather
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18
than the speculative discussion of the metaphysics of Tln) until
it has become a part of
the world of the Borges-narrator, is to take pains to place the
two almost on the same
quasi-fictional, quasi-historical plane to align their positions
in the intertextual
hierarchy. As Sebalds narrator concludes his recollections and
observations, Borges
narrator abandons his absorption in the nonexistent text about
Tln and goes on to discuss
his translation of Thomas Browne, the very author Sebalds
narrator has just been reading
and discussing. For a moment, the two narrators are almost
precisely superimposed in a
drastically simplified image of a single reader studying a
single text. But the consonance
of the image is fleeting, and like Pierre Menards Quijote, it
cannot hold its integrity
against the immense perturbation of histories, other readings,
and other contexts.
In 1973, the year of the coup in Chile and more than two decades
before the
composition of the above novels, the American literary critic
Harold Bloom published
The Anxiety of Influence, a study of the development of English
poetry.
My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the
persistence to
wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker
talents idealize;
figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But
nothing is got for
nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties
of indebtedness,
for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed
to create himself?
(11)
He outlines a six-stage process of negotiating this anxiety that
resembles a heroic quest,
culminating in a return of the dead (15). It is hard to imagine
a conception of literature
more alien to the aspects I have described of the works above:
Blooms conception of a
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19
strong poet (and he treats the whole man, including as evidence
not just verse but the
poets letters and journal entries [13]) is defined by the
imagination: strength and
weakness, wrestling . . . even to the death are wholly
psychological processes,
bounded only by metaphoric language. The poet is not solely
inferred from his writing:
he is an idealized, heroic figure; his works have mythic
resonance.
However, this is not a model any of my three writers
consciously, or coherently,
reject. Indeed, I suspect (albeit without proof) that all of
them would secretly like to be
such strong poets: their critical work, including Borges essays
above and the criticism I
will examine in the next chapter from Sebald and Bolao, evinces
a certain amount of
wrestling with precursors. None of them desires the realization
that he has failed to
create himself, but they come to that realization anyway. The
act of infamy, which,
according to de Man, makes stories possible for Borges, may be
related genealogically to
Blooms struggles of anxiety. Fictions, unlike lyric or epic
poetry, must mediate directly
between books and people between what is lived but unwritten,
and what is written but
unlived and in clearing a space for narrative, they will
invariably (and violently) clear
something away. All three writers meet such acts of creation
with ambivalence. Borges
was able to generate a series of stories that could thematically
embed this anxiety and
turn it to his creative advantage. Neither Bolao nor Sebald
write fictions that deal with
the question of authorship as concisely as, say, Pierre Menard,
or with the tension
between text and reality as concisely as Tln. Nonetheless, this
anxiety permeates their
work, and, as I will show, they ultimately choose different
resolutions for it.
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20
CHAPTER TWO: Where Stories Begin and End
In Myth and Archive, a study of the Latin American novel,
Roberto Gonzlez
Echevarra advances a sweeping thesis on novels as such:
The most persistent characteristic of books that have been
called novels in the
modern era is that they always pretend not to be literature. The
desire not to be
literary, to break with belles-lettres, is the most tenacious
element in the novel.
Don Quijote is supposed to be the translation of a history
written in Arabic . . .
Other novels are or pretend to be autobiographies, a series of
letters, a manuscript
found in a trunk, and so forth. (Gonzlez Echevarra 7)
If Gonzlez Echevarra is defining the modern era to include
everything between Don
Quijote and the work of Alejo Carpentier in the 1950s, then it
seems unlikely that novels
really always pretend not to be literature. However, he explains
concisely in a preface
that, within the restricted setting of Latin America, novelists
do tend to undercut their
own literary authority with claims to analytic, critical rigor:
Latin American writers all
too often fashion themselves as critics, and the complicity
between literature and
criticism in Latin America is ubiquitous, if rarely admitted
(ix). His study goes on to
draw a connection between narrative fiction and legal discourse,
and notes the
preoccupation among Latin American writers particularly Alejo
Carpentier and Gabriel
Garca Mrquez with the fallacy inherent in the concept of a New
World that can lay
down its own laws and generate a stable and lasting social order
ex nihilo. New stories
are always pursued by older stories; it falls to them to plead
their cases according to
precedent or against it. The simultaneous striving for
innovation and its inevitable failure
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21
is a mainstay of the novel in Latin America.
Bolaos novels often pretend not to be literature, are concerned
with precursors
and with the future of Latin America, and set up a stark
opposition between writing and
political power, so they seem to conform quite well to Gonzlez
Echevarras description.
In providing a narrative for La literatura nazi en Amrica, his
pseudo-encyclopedia,
Bolao clearly fashions himself as a critic as well. But La
literatura nazi conforms
almost too well to Gonzlez Echevarras model of archival fiction:
it is a kind of hyper-
archive, and its conclusion is one of extreme disintegration.
Rather than attempting
innovation and failing nobly, it attempts exhaustion and, in a
way, succeeds.
In addition to a series of author profiles (which I will call
episodes), La
literatura nazi contains an appendix with a list of names (not
all of which are profiled in
the main text, although all are mentioned in one entry or
another), a list of publications
culled from the entries, and a list of magazines and publishers.
These artifacts are
completely invented; Bolao could have put real authors or real
journals on those lists,
too, but he did not. This appendix serves to conclude the book
at one level of discourse,
which we can call the encyclopedic. Another, competing level of
discourse is prose
fiction, or what Gonzlez Echevarra calls belles-lettres. Within
the body of the
narrative, there are no citations, no sources, no list of
contributors, no footnotes. La
literatura nazi doesnt take the final step into (false)
completeness: it only gestures at
being an encyclopedia.
However, it evinces no anxiety about genre, no clear, sharp
points of
ambivalence a quality it shares with Die Ringe des Saturn, which
has been assigned to
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22
a wide variety of genres25 and given credit for inventing its
own. The majority of
Bolao's novels, including these two, constitute an informal
roman-fleuve, which is itself
a way of writing life, of keeping the created work open within
the realm of the artifact.
The preface to Estrella distante, which I discussed in Chapter
One, implies that Arturo
Belano and the author are part of the same fictional universe.
Belano, then, if we can
attribute any personhood to him, belongs to the same world as
the characters in La
literatura nazi. It is a world, and it is a world full of other
writers, just as the world of
Bolao, Sebald, and myself is a world full of other writers with
competing claims to the
seat of authorship. This is the entry point for criticism and
critical discourse: while
neither writer really puts his critical self into the novels
Sebald doesnt mention his
academic career or Bolao his literary essays fiction is the hand
that takes away what
the critical hand gives: authority.
But these authors of criticism are still also authors of
fiction: two very closely
allied forms of authority, signed by name, scripted by hand. By
explicitly giving up
authority in the fiction, the authors can move the focusing eye
of the narrative closer to
an Archimedean point beyond the contesting views of other
authors. The critical eye
looks down on other writers as well, with a different kind of
impersonality: rather than
incorporating the author in the third person, it either avoids
person altogether or writes
within a manifestly shared, situated world.
Although Bolao spares few countries26, two sets of Argentines
Los
Mendiluce and Los Hermanos Schiaffino neatly form bookends for
La literatura
nazi, thereby singling out a nation which shares both an
illustrious literary culture and a
-
23
historically favorable disposition towards the Third Reich. But
the narrative ultimately
comes to a close in Chile, Bolaos home country. The narrator (a
fictionalized Bolao,
called by name in the final line of the episode) switches
discursive modes to give a first-
person account of Carlos Wieder, a.k.a. Ramrez Hoffman, el
infame. (Although it is
not made explicit, its reasonable to suppose that the narrator
of Ramrez Hoffman is
the same as the narrator of the foregoing encyclopedia.) Wieder
is an avant-garde poet
who writes his verses in the sky with a World War II-era German
war plane and who
murders women, in particular two young poets whom the narrator
knew as a teenager
when they frequented the same salon in southern Chile.
As a shadow history of European influences in Latin American
society, and the
debates of the 19th and 20th centuries about national and ethnic
identity, cosmopolitanism,
and social legitimacy, Bolaos narrative has an almost
inexhaustible supply of historical
models. In a 2005 review of La literatura nazi, Jos Miguel
Oviedo noted the Argentine
Leopoldo Lugones and the Mexican Juan Vasconcelos as two
significant examples of
influential right-wing Latin American writers; he also mentions
Alcides Arguedas (1879-
1946), a supposedly indigenist Bolivian novelist and essayist
who cited Mein Kampf as
an authority on race relations in the 1937 prologue to his book
Pueblo enfermo (The Sick
People) (Oviedo 69). David Rock, in an essay on the antecedents
of nacionalista thought
in Argentina in the early 20th century, notes the influence of
French thinkers like Charles
Maurras (17-19) and the prevalence of forms of reactionary
Catholicism (20-24) similar
to the strains of ultraconservatism in Portugal and Spain. In
some cases, Bolao clearly
draws on these historical antecedents, especially when they are
particular to a given
country Juan Mendiluce Thompson could fit easily with Rocks
description of the
-
24
prototypical Argentine nacionalista (Literatura nazi, 24-26) but
in others, he shows
how an individuals eccentricity can generate a peculiar,
endogenous right-wing
ideology by, for instance, applying Charles Olsons theory of
projective vs. non-
projective verse to the Bible, via North American evangelism
(Literatura nazi, 139-43).
La literatura nazi doesnt take a uniform tack with its author
profiles: some of the
chapters are written in a detached, book-review style (what I
have been calling critical
discourse), while others more closely resemble short stories in
which the authors literary
output or the contents of it, at least plays an ancillary role.
Examples of the first
type include the figures in the section entitled Precursores y
antiilustrados (precursors
and notorious figures); examples of the second might include Luz
Mendiluce Thompson,
Irma Carrasco, Amado Couto, and, of course, Ramrez Hoffman
(Carlos Wieder).
In Estrella distante, Bolao provides much more detail about the
formative years
of the poetic culture in Chile which produced the narrator,
Carlos Wieder, the murdered
poets, and many others. He devotes several chapters respectively
to profiles of a
Russian-Jewish migr saloniste, a gay Chilean poet in exile, and
a French translator of
indigenous descent. While La literatura nazi was a book about
the Americas, extremely
wide in scope, Estrella distante is less about Chile than about
individual Chileans.
Prescinded from the literary-historical pseudocontext of La
literatura nazi, the narrative
loses the force of its sharp contrast with the silly, parodic
literary works that traffic fairly
benignly in awful ideas, but the human sadness of the original
episodes end is deepened
by Bolaos eulogies for a nation in which not only literature but
writers themselves were
violated and abused.
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25
The Arturo B, or Arturo Belano, who narrates Estrella distante
appears as
Bolaos doppelgnger throughout his fiction. The novels Los
detectives salvajes and
Amuleto trace his career as a young Chilean poet in Mexico, and
he is responsible,
apparently, for relating the story of Estrella distante. Ignacio
Echevarra also notes in his
afterword to Bolaos final novel, 2666, that among the notes for
the novel one isolated
note reads: The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano27 (Bolao, 2666
1125).) Bolao
effectively splits his authorial persona in two: he narrates the
preface to Estrella distante
as his own amanuensis, while Arturo B. is given the authorial
role and dictates the form
of the narrative. Why the split persona? Once he gains a
separate identity, Belano
(whose first name slyly echoes auteur or artista) also acquires
an unfathomable mind:
whatever biographical details he might share with his creator,
whatever associations with
Mexico and Chile and Latin American literature, whatever loves
and fears and acts of
bravery, his stories are not Bolaos stories, and to seek out a
one-to-one correspondence
between his world and the authors is futile. Their relationship
is closer to what
Wittgenstein (in a different context), calls family
resemblances: a complicated
network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing:
sometimes overall similarities,
sometimes similarities of detail (32e). In other words, the
correspondence exists only as
far as any positive connections do; it provides not totality but
an insistent suggestion.
Both La literatura nazi and Estrella distante present two kinds
of knowledge:
knowledge of a literary tradition, of what can be found in
books, and knowledge of a
personal sort, both of which are presented mimetically at a
formally fictional level and
which reinforce one another and undermine (through satire and
straightforward
denunciation) the historical circumstances which occasioned very
similar books and very
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26
similar personal experiences. One signal characteristic of La
literatura nazi is the
assumption that none of the authors writing is particularly
significant or meaningful to
the world at large, including its readers. There are no
difficult cases in his book, on the
order of Cline or Heidegger, in which the authors fascist
sympathies fail to overshadow
or bury the mainstream value of the work. The Nazi orientation
remains marginalized,
just as the political ideology has since the end of World War
II; its writers occupy a
shadow world of coteries and infighting and nobly (or ignobly)
preposterous artistic
innovations. Bolao has portrayed for us an autonomous artistic
world with which
neither men and women of talent nor the literary establishment
can be bothered to
interact: it is an allegory of both artistic and political
failure.
But this failure, as we see in Estrella distante, has two sides:
on the one is the
ephemeral, yet terrifying art of Carlos Wieder, which remains a
brief and sinister memory
in the annals of Chilean history; on the other is the unwritten
poetry of the two
Garmendia sisters whom Wieder murders, just as the violence of
the Pinochet years
swallows up the artistic community in which Belano, or Bolao,
took part in his youth.
The painstaking documentation of Nazi literature is a backhanded
denunciation of all
writing that colludes with state violence and of the subcultures
that sustain it. Only in the
final chapter of La literatura nazi is the shape of this
violence discernable: what has been
left implicit is brought to the fore, and mockery gives way to
horror.
W.G. Sebald is also preoccupied with the representation of
violence in literature,
but he draws out the theme not only in his own fiction but also
through his critical
writing. Unlike Bolao (or Borges), Sebald held an academic
position throughout his
-
27
literary career in the 1980s and 1990s, and was known as a
scholar of Austrian literature
before he began writing poetry and novels. Although even in the
academy his academic
work has never been as influential as his creative work, he has
published several volumes
of criticism. Probably his best-known essay, Luftkrieg und
Literatur (Air War and
Literature), began as a series of lectures on the suppression of
depictions of German
suffering in the Allied fire bombings of World War II. It is not
easy reading: he narrates
the destruction of Hamburg in a telegraphic style but spares no
hideous detail (stinking,
parasite-ridden corpses fill the streets; zoo animals die), and
he goes on to castigate his
contemporaries for their introjection of sentimentality and
kitsch in this grisly picture.
A damning essay on the German novelist Alfred Andersch
accompanies Luftkrieg und
Literatur in the German edition (called simply Luftkrieg und
Literatur). The English
translation of both essays appeared in a volume called On the
Natural History of
Destruction with two further essays on Jean Amry and Peter
Weiss, two writers who
combine the personal and political in their writings on the
Holocaust and their critique of
violence.
Andreas Huyssen compares Luftkrieg und Literatur with Sebalds
second novel,
Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), and finds a keen affinity
between essay and
creative prose:
I would like to suggest that Sebalds Luftkrieg essay is itself a
repetition, a
rewriting of those earlier texts about the experience of
strategic bombing . . .
closely related in its deep structure, its conceptual framework,
and in its language
(though not in its narrative complexity) to the narrative stance
of Die
Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants] itself. (Huyssen 82, my
emphasis)
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28
He also connects each of the texts examined in Luftkrieg with a
particular moment in the
German public debate about World War II and present-day German
literature, arguing
that Sebalds own treatment of the issue unwittingly continues
the series and belongs to
the post-1989 discourse of the first German generation without
direct experience of the
war. Indeed, the most striking difference in narrative stance
between the Luftkrieg
essay (and its companion piece, a critical essay on Alfred
Andersch) and Sebalds novels
is the harshly judgmental, almost savage tone of his literary
criticism, which has no
parallel in his fiction. The pseudoautobiographical narrator is
melancholy almost to the
point of caricature, confronted with a world he takes pains to
reproduce without often
acknowledging, or recognizing, how he alters it. As a critic,
however, Sebald is
unrestrained and prolix in his distasteconcluding a harsh
reading of an early novel of
wartime destruction, he writes:
It is not easy to sum up the quantities of lasciviousness and
ultra-German racial
kitsch Mendelssohn offers his readers (with, we must assume, the
best of
intentions), but in any case his wholesale fictionalization of
the theme of the
ruined city . . . plunges headlong into more than two hundred
pages of trash. (On
the Natural History of Destruction [NHD] 56-57)28
In the essay on Andersch, whom Sebald finds morally abhorrent
and to whom he directs
quite a few ad hominem attacks, he writes of Anderschs wartime
journalism that
linguistic corruption and an addiction to empty, spiraling
pathos are only the outward
symptoms of a warped state of mind which is also reflected in
the content of his pieces29
(NHD 125). But, in Luftkrieg, he makes positive statements as
well: commending the
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29
virtues of a medical report as against an overwrought,
surrealistic passage by Arno
Schmidt, he asserts:
This medical account of the further destruction of a body
already mummified by
the firestorm shows a reality of which Schmidts linguistic
radicalism knows
nothing. His elaborate style veils over the facts that stare
straight at us in the
language of those professionally involved in the horror[.]30
(NHD 60)
Shortly below this, he refers to [t]he informative value of such
authentic documents,
before which all fiction pales . . .31 (NHD 60, my
emphasis).
Its worth taking a moment to counterpose this discussion
ostensibly of
fiction and fact, but really of poetics with the description of
Franz Zwickaus
poem Heimat in La literatura nazi.32 The fictional Zwickau is an
enfant terrible of
Venezuelan poetry in the 1960s, whose poem utilizes a detached,
quasi-medical
discourse:
Heimat (350 lines) describes, in a curious mixture of Spanish
and German with
a few isolated expressions in Russian, English, French and
Yiddish the intimate
parts of his body with a forensic coldness, while working in the
morgue the night
after a multiple homicide.33 (92)
Its hard to imagine the critic Sebald approving of such a poem,
if only because it
removes a poetics useful for conveying bare historical facts
which must necessarily be
shared by all into a private, inventive realm, in which the
objectivity of the forensic
discourse only serves to enhance the realistic quality of a
merely grotesque fantasy.
(Even if we assume that this fictional poet wrote his fictional
poem about a lived
experience, which doesnt seem to be the case, it is presented as
part of an overall
-
30
aesthetic tendency and a private, eccentric obsession with
certain themes.) In Sebalds
judgment of Schmidts linguistic radicalism, fiction pales before
a medical report for
reasons Sebald wants to locate in the use of language, but which
I think are more
generally situational. If we take this passage to imply a
broader range of aesthetic
judgments than the small set focused on writing about the
Luftkrieg, we can use the
documentary/aestheticism contrast he sets up as a lens for
viewing his fiction. Other
critics have in fact remarked on his inconsistency across
genres: Simon Ward, responding
to Huyssens essay, claims that If Huyssen is correct, then
Sebalds own works would be
ruled out of court by the standards set in his 1982 essay [on
writing and history] (66).
I would propose, for the sake of argument, that one can look at
Sebalds narrator
as a character in the tradition of realist fiction. A hundred
years ago, Die Ringe des
Saturn might have been published with a frame narrative like the
one in The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, with a wild-eyed Sebald buttonholing the
wedding guest and telling
him about the time he tried to take a walk through Suffolk and
stared into the heart of an
immense darkness. The frame narrator might offer physical
descriptions of this tale-
spinner and of his environs, which the readers could take as
relatively reliable. Imposing
such an archaic novelistic framework provides one view of how
Die Ringe des Saturn
functions as a novel: the photographs take the place of the
frame narrative, providing a
perspective outside the narrators own (even when he seems to
have held the camera). I
will continue this line of inquiry in greater depth in the next
chapter.
This Sebald-character is a remarkably limited narrative
consciousness: his
signature melancholy is ironized by repetition, and the
narratives sense of doom is
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31
alienating and not always persuasive. It is also alienated
itself: the narrators affect is
always recited, never demonstrated, and recited tersely,
e.g.:
I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the
Mauritshuis . . . I was
so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to
harness my thoughts .
. . Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the
painting that later it
took me a full hour to recover . . .34 (RS 82-83)
To me, this reticence signals less a kind of objectively
overpowering, undefinable malaise
than a restricted vocabulary one restricted either by (lack of)
cognizance or by
formality. Between these recitations and one of the first facts
we learn that the narrator
was hospitalized exactly a year after he began his wanderings
through Suffolk, and
suspects the wanderings somehow contributed to his paralysis we
can infer a barely-
expressible traumatic process. But the nonlinearity of the
narrative confounds our
attempts to identify with this traumatic response: we are told
first the effects
(hospitalization) and then the hypothetical cause (too much
reflection on a catastrophic
history). The narrator briefly jumps backwards in time to relate
a much earlier sojourn in
Ireland (Ringe 258-76) as well as routinely jumping centuries or
millennia backwards
in documentary time and concludes the first-person narrative on
a single well-
established date, April 13, 1995. The narrators internal,
unshared experience of
melancholy and trauma structures his narrative, rather than
being transmitted through it;
it provides melancholy with an anatomy, but not a dynamic,
innervated existence.
This is not to propose an absolute separation of author and
narrator. Although the
restrained narrative form of the documentary novels serves
almost as a negative to the
positive, univocal register of the critic, Sebald the author
does not disappear in his novels.
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32
He is, as a montage artist, a commanding presence.
Superficially, the reproduced objects,
texts, and conversations are allowed an unusual degree of
self-explanatory power; it is
when one looks closer that one finds, as with the citation of
dates in the quoted Borges
story, small ruptures and inconsistencies in the documentary
surface. The voice of
Sebald the critic is also subtly distinct from the voice that
narrates his novels, although
the similarities dominate. The form of the critical essay
requires him to set up an
argument, but that argument seems often to depend on sensibility
or psychology. In the
introduction to his collection of essays on Austrian literature,
Die Beschreibung des
Unglcks (The Description of Misfortune, or alternately of
unhappiness), he
dismisses the reduction of Austrian literatures pervasive theme
of loss to mere nostalgia
for the Habsburg empire:
The persistence of nature, preserved in life before and after
us, is the far more
significant correlative. Melancholy, the contemplation of
present unhappiness,
has nothing in common with the death wish. It is a form of
resistance. And on
the level of art its function is entirely other than simply
relative or reactionary. 35
(Sebald, Beschreibung 12)
Sebald finds another theme in the work he criticizes in this
volume: the crucial
category of teaching and learning36 (13), more typical of the
Austrian than of the
reichsdeutschen (German national) tradition. This too, it seems,
amounts to a form of
resistance, and he includes in this category both written work
and lived experiences of
authors both a passage from Kafkas Castle and an episode from
Wittgensteins life
(13).37 The hermeneutic distinction between work and life is
porous: if you are reading
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33
books to learn, you can learn as much from a biography as from a
novel. In that case the
two genres do the same work.
Die Ringe des Saturn gives the critic a sensibility of his own.
He can juxtapose
melancholy books with other melancholy objects in the world: the
horrors of the Belgian
Congo can be narrated beside stories and documents from the life
of Joseph Conrad.
Early in the book, before the narrator begins recounting his
journey around England (the
novel is subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt, an English
pilgrimage), he recalls two
friends who have died since the journeys end, both lecturers in
Romance languages, the
one after the other. The first he describes as a model, happy
scholar who died suddenly;
the second, who seemed bound to the first in a sort of childhood
friendship38 (16), is a
scholar of the 19th-century French novel, with a distinctive
approach:
([She had] in the course of her life developed a sort of private
understanding of
the 19th-century French novel, free from any intellectual
vanity, always
proceeding from obscure detail and never from the obvious.39
(Sebald, Ringe 16)
Sebald goes on to recount several of these details and
interpretations in the voice of this
scholar, as he will do with countless other texts, letters,
historical documents,
photographs and stories real and invented over the course of the
novel but it begins
with this potent image of the literary critic at work. The quiet
intensity of her work is
linked through parataxis with her quiet devotion to her friend,
whose loss, the narrator
speculates, causes her to collapse in illness. It compounds
several images essential to a
model of the author and critic to which, I would argue, both
Sebald and Bolao adhere:
the links among writing, reading, and community, the idea of
friendships forged through
shared reading and understanding, and the inextricable losses of
both ideas and people.
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34
This sense of solidarity pushes back against the anxious,
self-splintering practice
of the critic, who tries as in the case of Sebalds reviews of
Andersch and
Mendelssohn, or perhaps La literatura nazis too schematic
version of the Ramrez
Hoffman story to be more ethical than human. But the critical
practice is a powerful
force in both novels, and it provides a very particular,
elaborate structure through which
fragments of history, and small remnants of human life, can pass
on their way to the
readers comprehension and sympathy. The fictionalized narrators,
however, in turn
undercut the critical authority of the author by mirroring and
displacing him, by showing
inconclusive doubt, worry and confusion: they give the novels
structure its own voice
and sense of urgency in speaking, and thus make criticism
fallible as well as necessary.
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35
CHAPTER THREE: FROM THE AIR: MAPS AND NARRATIVE TERRITORY
So far I have examined two sources of external pressure on the
narratives of
Bolao and Sebald: first, the Borgesian model of metafiction and
questions of the status
of the author; and second, a critically-oriented, historically
motivated practice of ethical
judgment in writing. A third source of pressure derives from
geography, broadly
conceived: physical space, nation, political history and its
inscription on the physical
world, the itinerancy of individual people, and the experience
of exile. Both Bolao and
Sebald lived for many years outside their native countries:
Bolao lived primarily in
Spain, Sebald in England (which added a linguistic displacement
to the geographical
one). To the extent that autobiography helped to form their
novels, this fact of exile (or
expatriation) plays a role in the orientation of the narrative.
The narrators of both La
literatura nazi and Die Ringe des Saturn share a sense of
displacement, or estrangement,
from a circumscribed American or northern European area.
(Estrella distante depends
less on a sense of geography, as most of the narrative takes
place within a single country.)
Die Ringe des Saturn is subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt (an
English
pilgrimage). However, the narrators description of his physical
travels digresses so
seamlessly into secondhand, historical or fictitious accounts of
other lands and other
journeys all within a somewhat monotonous narrative voice that
the reader finds it
difficult to separate firsthand from secondhand information. The
loss of clear boundaries
between a situated, speaking subject and the distinct sources he
cites conversations,
literary biographies, diaries, writing by Borges or Browne, etc.
leaves the narrator
nearly as detached from present reality as the other, distant
voices that he allows to speak
-
36
within the text: they are closer to him than everyday life in
England, his adopted home
to say nothing of the land of his birth, Germany.
La literatura nazi takes an entire hemisphere as its staging
ground and uniformly
applies an exogenous political termNazi to the contents of the
narrative. As a
unifying concept, Amrica is ultimately more effective than Nazi
in giving the disparate
episodes in the book some common ground, and I will argue that
within the American
continents, Bolao both identifies his narrator (and thus his
viewpoint) with Chile, and
also portrays Chile as a vertiginous, unsteady, and dangerous
center of reference, from
which the narrator is fortunate to have escaped.
Each novel sets up an imaginative (if not fully imaginary)
geography and marks
its narrators homeland as a negative center of violence and
instability. From that center
radiates a concern with literary work, solidarity among writers
(and just condemnation of
those who collude with violence), and the historical conditions
with which writers of any
sort must reckon.
In an essay on the Chilean avant-garde under Pinochet, Nelly
Richard refers
several times briefly to a 1982 installation by Ral Zurita
called Sky Writing,40
performed over the sky of New York in a plane. (She doesnt
mention what, exactly,
Zurita wrote in the sky.) Zurita, whose other works include a
reshaping of the desert only
visible from the air, was part of the Colectivo Accionista de
Arte (CADA), which styled
itself as a left-wing vanguard. Richard describes the desert
installation as a sort of mirror
image of Sky Writing:
-
37
In August 1993 the Chilean poet Ral Zurita effected an
intervention in the
Northern Chilean desert (fifty-six kilometers inland from
Antofagasta) that
consisted of inscribing on its surface a phrase three kilometers
long: Ni pena ni
miedo [Neither grief nor fear]. [. . .] He re-cited his own
poetry that, since his
1979 collection Purgatorio [Purgatory], had used the trope of
the Chilean desert
to configure the evangelizing role of a new writing capable of
transcending the
pain of national crucifixion. And he cited by inverting its
supports Las
escrituras en el cielo . . . (35)
The interpretation Richard gives of CADAs own goals for its
installations carries its own
political ambiguity. In particular, in the passage below, she
refers to a stretch of canvas
that virtually blocks the entrance of the Museo Nacional de
Bellas Artes (27):
To break with the foreclosure of arts interiority (its inner
walls) and accomplish
the avant-garde goal of arts incorporation into lifes
exteriority, the divisions that
render art incommunicable the walls of a room (= the confinement
of art and
the institution as closure) must be abolished. [. . .] In CADAs
pieces, the
books page fades until it finally merges with the Chilean
landscape that displaces
and replaces it. The image of the author is deindividuated to
the point that it is
lost multiplied into anonymity: Everyone who works, if only
mentally, to
expand the spaces in his or her life is an artist.41 (27)
This is probably not Richards own view of CADAs work, I should
emphasize: she goes
on to criticize the inherent assumptions of CADAs explicit
program and concludes on a
note of ambivalence. The idea that the work is fascist, however,
is never even suggested.
Its unlikely that Bolao had no knowledge of these installations
while he was writing La
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38
literatura nazi: the parallels between Sky Writing and Ramrez
Hoffman, or between
the desert intervention and Willy Schrholz, are too exact to be
coincidental. The
Willy Schrholz and Ramrez Hoffman episodes of La literatura
nazi/Estrella
distante two of the three total episodes set in Chile have their
own ambiguities and
complications. I will briefly sketch them here and go on to
identify key aspects of their
portrayal of space and place as they are developed elsewhere in
these texts.
Willy Schrholz was born and raised in Colonia Renacer (Rebirth
Colony,
roughly), a mysterious colony of German immigrants who arrived
in Chile after World
War II. The colony is largely closed to the outside world, and
there are rumors of sexual
perversions. Readers familiar with current events in Chile will
immediately recognize
the infamous Colonia Dignidad in this portrait: founded by an
ex-medic in the Nazi army,
Paul Schfer, the colony was established in 1961 and probably
used as a torture center by
the Pinochet regime, with which Schfer was on friendly terms42.
Although the most dire
revelations were only publicly confirmed in recent years,
stories about Colonia Dignidad
had been circulating for decades, and Bolao was surely aware of
the basic facts in the
mid-90s. Still, his description of Colonia Renacer ends as a
kind of in-joke, or a retreat
from the flirtation with political facts into the safer realm of
fictional license:
It was also said that Eichmann, Bormann, and Mengele had
secretly been there.
In reality the only war criminal to spend a few years at the
Colony . . . was
Walther Rauss, with whom there were later attempts to link
certain torture
practices during the first years of the Pinochet regime. The
truth is that Rauss
died of a heart attack while watching the televised football
game between the two
Germanies during the 1974 World Cup in the Federal Republic.43
(95)
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39
In this barely-fictionalized setting, then, we learn that the
young Willy Schrholz
didnt master Spanish until the age of 10. Before that he was
subjected to an iron
familial discipline, work in the fields, and a few singular
teachers who combined equal
parts National Socialist millenarianism and faith in science44
(95), which determined his
character. He is sent to Santiago to study agronomy but
immediately becomes an
experimental poet. His poetic work begins as a mixture of
disjointed phrases and
topographical diagrams of Colonia Renacer45 (96), not just
unintelligible but defiantly
uninterpretable. Critics and vanguardists alike try to find
various messages in them, but
even his friends in the avant-garde take some time to recognize
his right-wing politics
(that Schrholz holds ideas diametrically opposed to their own46
(96)). This is,
notably, the only explicit reference to Schrholzs politics.
An interested professor of Italian literature is the first to
identify the referents in
his next series of poems, which are exhibited at the Facultad de
Letras at the Catholic
University of Chile: their verses are written inside enormous
ground plans of six well-
known concentration camps. A minor scandal follows, which lends
Schrholz the black
aura of a pote maudit which would accompany him for the rest of
his days47 (96-97).
Nevertheless, two of the poems are published elsewhere and
followed, in 1980, by a
book, Geometra (Geometry) page after page of drawings of empty
space surrounded
by barbed-wire fences, with phrases scattered within them: the
texts speak murmur
about abstract pain, about the sun, about headache48 (97). Its
sequels, Geometra II and
III and so forth, repeat the same pattern: plans of
concentration camps superimposed on
plans of Colonia Renacer or of Chilean cities, or simply
installed in a bucolic, empty
-
40
space49 (97). The textual content becomes increasingly dialogic,
approaching a
Beckettian, fragmentary drama.
In 1985, however, he gains lasting, trans-American fame for a
suspiciously
familiar work of art the sensation of the Chilean cultural
season50 (98):
With the help of a set of excavators he carves out, over the
desert of Atacama, the
plan for the ideal concentration camp: an imbricated net which,
if followed on
foot across the desert, resembles an ominous succession of
straight lines and, if
observed from a helicopter or airplane, is transformed into a
delicate play of
curved lines. The literary portion remains consigned to the five
vowels, dug
violently with hoes by the poet himself and scattered
arbitrarily over the crusted
surface of the land.51 (97-98)
Buoyed by this triumph, he makes similar installations in the
United States and is offered
a small plane by his promotors, to create a concentration camp
in the sky52 (98). But
Schrholz turns them down: he insists that his work has to be
seen from above and
generated on the ground. His final artistic triumph is to turn
his personal semi-idiocy to
his advantage and write a childrens book in the persona of
Kaspar Hauser; his personal
life ends, apparently well, in Africa, where he works as a
photographer and German tour
guide. (One imagines him crossing paths with Leni
Riefenstahl.)
The episodes in La literatura nazi are quite heterogeneous in
tone and content, as
I have noted: some read like book reviews, others like short
stories, while others adopt an
essayistic middle discourse. The form of this episode hews
closest to the short-story
model: we are given a protagonist, told what forces shape him,
and we follow him in a
miniature picaresque through Chilean art and life the rise, the
fall, the invariance of
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41
character throughout. The two signifiers that anchor the story,
however, are Colonia
Renacer and the sensational installation in the desert: that is,
Colonia Dignidad and
Ral Zurita; that is, Chile, in a perverse international context.
Why international (and
why perverse)? The same two adjectives could be used for the
book as a whole. The
Chilean case, however, is particularly emblematic because all
three profiles of Chilean
writers involve some form of elusiveness, incomprehensibility,
semiliteracy, or other
more grotesque, annihilating aesthetic qualities (Carlos Wieders
Nazi airplane, etc.),
which appear only incidentally in the books other episodes. They
stand in notable
contrast to the Argentine writers, who are depicted as much
better-connected and simply
more literary. Edelmira Mendiluces supposed masterpiece is a
meticulous recreation of
Poes room53 a backhanded tribute to Borges and Pierre Menard,
particularly given
Poes stature in France and Frances stature in Argentina which is
a totalizing
manipulation of space, not unlike the Chilean examples in that
respect, but one taken
from an established, domestic, and even quaint paragon of high
culture. There is nothing
violent or illiterate in it. With Edelmira Mendiluce and her
husband, whose politics
clearly channel Maurras and the nacionalistas, a publishing
industry begins: there is no
question in their world of either access to language or power
over it.
Not so an earlier Chilean profile, included under the header Los
poetas malditos
(the potes maudits). Pedro Gonzlez Carrera, a supposedly
brilliant poet with a hard life
(seven kids; primary schoolteacher in rural areas), publishes a
scandalous poem in
Santiago in praise of the fascist Italian army, which the
narrator uses to mock the
Chileans, accusing them of considering the Italians a race of
cowards in part as anti-
Argentine sentiment. His modernist poems, whose images are
described in detail, are
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42
published in 1947. His poems grow subsequently more terse, more
paranoid and full of
images of self-loss in the landscape. He publishes his own book
of twelve poems, with a
desolate cover including a swastika and a lost child under the
sea, and the cast of
frightening characters now includes Deleuze-like machines. After
his death his legacy is
assiduously recovered and praised by a few devotes.
The link between Gonzlez Carreras fear of self-loss/reversion to
childhood and
Willy Schrholzs final incarnation as Kaspar Hauser is clear
enough, as is the link
(explicitly stated) between Schrholz and Ramrez Hoffman, whose
identity is confusing
only to others, not to him. (Bolao devotes several pages in
Estrella distante to
analyzing the possible meanings, phonetic associations or
cryptograms in his pseudonym,
Carlos Wieder (50-51).) While I dont propose that La literatura
nazi seriously be read
as a map of Bolaos own personal geography of the Americas, it is
interesting that in
these three Chilean episodes, a totalizing sense of violence and
victimization, linked with
Nazism, is experienced subjectively and internally by two of the
three writers. In the
case of the third, a first-person narrator appears to experience
to react to and process
the violence committed by Ramrez Hoffman, so the experience of
individual
victimization remains a leitmotif of Bolaos representation of
Chilean literary lives.
The theme of travel in Die Ringe des Saturn has been taken up by
several critics,
who arrive at diverse, if not totally divergent, conclusions.
John Zilcosky sees a story of
failure to get lost replacing the familiar narrative arc of
departure and homecoming (102-
03). John Beck uses the complex patterns of coastlines and ring
formation around Saturn
as tropes to illustrate Sebalds labyrinthine, complicated
literary world (85-86), while
-
43
Simon Ward takes ruins as a similarly paradigmatic image (58).
Beck particularly
underscores the difficulty and slipperiness of the text (77-78).
If these accounts overlap
anywhere, it is in their shared estrangement from, and amazement
by, the shattered and
jumbled travelogue Die Ringe des Saturn provides, and their
tendency to take some
portion of the book at face value the narrators melancholia, for
instance even if it
distorts their sense of the rest of the text into something
quite unsettling and peculiar. In
the previous chapter, I suggested that it might be useful to
look at Die Ringe des Saturn
as a narrative between quotation marks, with the photographs
standing outside the quoted
material like a frame narrative. Another plausible association
would be with a genre no
doubt quite familiar to Sebald: the academic lecture, complete
with visual aids.
(Luftkrieg and Literatur, whose chapters were first given as
individual lectures in Zurich,
has a similar layout and structure.) The material process of
assembling the data for the
text is itself narrated: at the beginning of chapter V the
narrator tells us that he has been
spending time in archives, reconstructing the contents of a
documentary hed slept
through on television; and at various points in the first and
last chapters he describes the
process of his research looking for Thomas Brownes skull in the
hospital, finding a
documentary on the silk industry from Nazi Germany and reports
on the results.
Still, the substance of the narrative belies this formal
resemblance. The beginning
and end of the englische Wallfahrt are revealed in the first
paragraph: the narrator
began what proved to be at least a nine-day54 walking trip
through Suffolk in August
1992, and a year to the day later was hospitalized for
paralysis, whereupon he conceived
of turning his notes from the trip into a book. The trip was
initially planned with some
care. The narrator had visited a few of his destinations in the
past Lowestoft around
-
44
1977, Southwold on various occasions, Orford in 1972 and may
have been revisiting
them for curiositys sake. But he planned visits to Somerleyton
Hall, Michael
Hamburgers house in Middleton, the historic home of Edward
FitzGerald at Boulge, the
model Temple of Jerusalem at Chestnut Tree Farm, and the
dwellings of Charlotte Ives
near Harleston; and may also have intended to walk past the
ghost town of Dunwich,
which he relates to a long biographical passage on Swinburne.
From an eclectic, and
unreconstructable, assortment of texts, the narrator derived an
itinerary for himself,
centered on a particular small region of England. The
associations he draws as he walks
through the physical landscapewhich move from Ireland to the
Congo to Chinaare
just as far-flung as the connections that built this restricted
itinerary. Early on, however,
he begins to suffer from a steady, insistently negative affect,
in stark contrast to the
variegated topoi of his thoughts. His melancholy reveals itself
in two ways: the recitation
of states of mind (as noted in the previous chapter), and the
repetition of certain very
similar sorts of statement about historical atrocities and
catastrophes, which culminate in
the final pages on history and mourning. The repetitions add a
greater monotony to the
text than even the descriptions of walking (an inherently
repetitive act), or the constant,
vertiginous linking of observations to memories to written
texts, which flattens the
narratives frame of reference to a single, reproducible state of
narratorial consciousness.
In Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald notes that, after he
concluded his lectures in
Zurich, many Germans sent him documents to prove that people did
write about the war.
But he takes pains to underscore the trite phrases within them,
suggesting that their
triteness indicates a process of repression and pain at work (LL
89-90). Its hard to
imagine that the prosaic evidence of me