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On Roberto Bolaño Ix Siddhartha Deb LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS About the series This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in litera- ture in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical bound- aries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contemporary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in tra- ditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist approaches. Series Editor Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of US Latin@ Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She has published widely in the areas of folklore, literary studies, women’s studies, and border studies. Her numerous publications include the award-winning novel, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera that chronicles her coming-of-age in Laredo, Texas. The (co)edited volumes: Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, Paths to Discovery: auto- biographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science and Engineering, Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Chicano Tablescapes, and Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams. She is cofounder of CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets and a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop; her poetry has appeared in Vandal, Prairie Schooner, and Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues. Books in the Series: Radical Chicana Poetics Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez Rethinking Chicano/a Literature through Food: Postnational Appetites Edited by Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca Literary and Cultural Relations between Brazil and Mexico: Deep Undercurrents Paulo Moreira Mexican Public Intellectuals Edited by Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature Edited by Brian L. Price, César A. Salgado, and John Pedro Schwartz The UnMaking of Latina/o Citizenship: Culture, Politics, and Aesthetics Edited by Ellie D. Hernández and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson Music and Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature from Our America: Noteworthy Protagonists Marco Katz Montiel New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon Edited by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star Critical Essays Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo ROBERTO BOLAÑO, A LESS DISTANT STAR Copyright © Ignacio López-Calvo, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49517-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-50488-6 ISBN 978-1-137-49296-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137492968 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberto Bolaño, a less distant star : critical essays / edited by Ignacio López-Calvo. pages cm. — (Literatures of the Americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Bolaño, Roberto, 1953–2003—Criticism and interpretation. I. López-Calvo, Ignacio, editor. PQ8098.12.O38Z79 2015 863.64—dc23 2014035190 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my niece and goddaughter, Sara López Gandur This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword: On Roberto Bolaño ix Siddhartha Deb Introduction 1 Ignacio López-Calvo Part I General Overview Chapter 1 Writing with the Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility, and Justice in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star 17 Rory O’Bryen Chapter 2 Roberto Bolaño’s Flower War: Memory, Melancholy, and Pierre Menard 35 Ignacio López-Calvo Part II Two Major Novels Chapter 3 666 Twinned and Told Twice: Roberto Bolaño’s Double Time Frame in 2666 67 Margaret Boe Birns Chapter 4 Ulysses’s Last Voyage: Bolaño and the Allegorical Figuration of Hell 85 raúl rodríguez freire viii CONTENTS Chapter 5 “Con la cabeza en el abismo”: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666, Literary Guerrilla, and the Maquiladora of Death 105 Martín Camps Part III Short Novels and Short Stories Chapter 6 Valjean in the Age of Javert: Roberto Bolaño in the Era of Neoliberalism 131 Nicholas Birns Chapter 7 Literature and Proportion in The Insufferable Gaucho 149 Brett Levinson Part IV Prose Poetry and Poetry in Prose Chapter 8 Performing Disappearance: Heaven and Sky in Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita 171 Luis Bagué Quílez Chapter 9 Roberto Bolaño’s Big Bang: Deciphering the Code of an Aspiring Writer in Antwerp 189 Enrique Salas Durazo Notes on Contributors 211 Index 215 Foreword: On Roberto Bolaño Siddhartha Deb At the age of 20, an aspiring writer goes back to his country to help build socialism, an ideal that comes to a premature end with a right-wing coup. After a brief period of imprisonment, the young man begins a wanderer’s existence, crossing countries and continents, finding fellow exiles scattered in large cities and provincial towns, gathering moments of existential qualm that are transmuted into fic- tion. His stories are full of wine and tobacco smoke, fittingly so for an author often photographed pondering over a cigarette. At 50, as he begins to make a reputation as a writer, he dies in exile, waiting for a liver transplant.1 It sounds, at first, like a thumbnail sketch from some lost age of literature, closer to Parisian exiles and the International Brigades than the world we know, but the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was born a little over half-a-century ago. Considerably younger than the celebrated writers of the Latin American “Boom”—Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar—he died in Barcelona in 2003, so that what initially seems anachronis- tic about his life is nothing other than the disorientation created by literary circumstances unfamiliar to many of us reading and writing from the metropoles in the age of globalization. These seemingly anachronistic circumstances include the idea that writing, and the life within which such writing is shaped, must often function with- out a safety net; that literature must engage with politics even when politics has foreclosed literature; and that a writer will often have to subvert established forms in order to capture the nature of contem- porary reality. These are not new perspectives, but they seem to have been aban- doned in the last 20 years, especially in the West. There, fiction often guides readers along a cultural superstructure that might offer occa- sional glimpses of politics but in general rises far above it, giving them instead an exuberance of style that in turn suggests an exuberance x FOREWORD of lifestyle. Bolaño’s life, by contrast, doesn’t seem to offer a model worth celebrating; after all, this is a writer who was so short of money and hygiene during his wandering years that he had lost most of his teeth by the end of his travels. Still, even Bolaño’s life would not, by itself, be capable of shaking up received ideas of literature and forcing us to reconsider what we have come to accept as the limits of fiction. I came to Bolaño’s work in piecemeal fashion, in translation, and the strange, asynchronous notes I picked up in his biographical details became for me the rever- berations of the sounds I heard in his work and that I found exciting as a writer of fiction for whom politics is a force that shapes the condi- tions that shape our art. What follows, then, is less an introduction to Bolaño’s oeuvre and more a series of thoughts on some of his works. The omissions are considerable—there is no discussion of his poetry, or his essays and lectures, or of much of the fiction, including the massive 2666, which I am still absorbing, uneasily—but I imagine the critical essays in this volume will more than make up for such lapses. And then, of course, there is always the work itself. 1 To begin with, there are the stories. Reading Last Evenings on Earth, a volume of Bolaño’s stories compiled from two separate Spanish- language collections, one might come away with the impression of uniformity. Many of the stories are narrated in the first-person, often by a fictional stand-in of Bolaño’s who goes by the name of Arturo Belano or B. They are largely about literature and the creation of literature, whereas the characters who populate the pages are usually members of a forgotten diaspora of left-wing Latin Americans afloat in their own continent or in Europe. Yet this impression of obviousness, of an author belaboring the point, is an illusion. The range of Bolaño’s stories is remarkably fluid, from 30 pages summing up an entire adult life to pieces that are almost sketches, and where alphabets denote characters and the action is traced out in swift, engulfing sentences (“Two days later I went to his boarding house to look for him and they told me he had gone up north” [73]; “Over dinner with a Chilean couple, B discovers that U has been interned in a psychiatric hospital after having tried to kill his wife” [159–60]).
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