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ABSTRACT OPEN-ENDED EXISTENCES IN THE NARRATIVES OF ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES AND RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN This thesis engages with Latin American writer Roberto Bolaño and his novel, The Savage Detectives (1998), and African-American writer Ralph Ellison and his novel, Invisible Man (1952). This study will examine the ways in which the narratives contained therein work to avoid hardened life trajectories and a fixed-identity formation in favor of a more fluid becoming of self. Despite the fact that these two novels emerged out of different national, historical, and political contexts, they both respond to similar social and literary mechanisms. These mechanisms come in the form of expectations that are held by not only U.S. book publishers, critics, and literary intelligentsia, but also by the U.S. readership as a whole and these expectations collectively shape the ways in which literary works written by authors who may be read as “other” are interpreted. Thus, this thesis has two aims. First, to explore how the narratives in The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man as well as Bolaño and Ellison as authors resist and exceed these ethnic and national expectations. The second aim, in alignment with the first aim, is to tease out the rich ontological configurations portrayed in both The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man. Both of these novels consciously depict life as a process of “ceaseless becoming” – a process that oscillates between forms and aims. In an attempt to provide a theoretical framework through which one may see life portrayed as such, I will invoke Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts of the “rhizome” and “line of flight” as well as Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin’s conceptualization of life. Angel Garduño May 2019 OPEN-ENDED EXISTENCES IN THE NARRATIVES OF ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES AND RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN by Angel Garduño A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2019 APPROVED For the Department of English: We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree. Angel Garduño Thesis Author Melanie Hernandez (Chair) English Steven Adisasmito-Smith English Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval Dean, College of Arts and Humanities For the University Graduate Committee: Dean, Division of Graduate Studies AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship. X Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me. Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project was made possible, in part, by the sources and materials provided by the Graduate Net Initiative’s Graduate Research Fellowship. I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis committee whose collective energy and feedback have also made this work possible. I want to thank my thesis chair, Dr. Melanie Hernandez, for the consecutive days in which she made time after work to head back to her office and delve into the material with me. She offered me both perspective by which my ideas could acquire complexity and ways in which those ideas could come across more cogently. I want to thank Dr. Steve Adisasmito-Smith for his feedback and encouragement. I remember presenting one of my chapters at a conference on campus and speaking with him afterwards about my paper’s content. Dr. Adisasmito- Smith taught me that yes, even trees can have multiple centers. The world is much more complicated than we often acknowledge. I would also like to express my genuine appreciation and gratitude to Dr. Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval who was there before I even had a thesis topic. He took the time to sit with me and talk literature and theory. Our conversations and his suggested reading materials have proven to be an integral part of who I am not only as a scholar, but as a person. Dr. Jiménez-Sandoval’s mentorship has offered me not only a new view of literature but of life. And for that, I am forever grateful. I want to thank Michaella (Missy) Gonzalez whose influence on me and my work is too wide to fit within these lines. Her ideas and ruminations have colored my writing, her unfailing support, my life. I’ve enjoyed the poetry of it all; our endless conversations, the empty pizza boxes, the late-night typing at corresponding desks. She kept me afloat when it all wanted to unravel. It’s been a beautiful journey. Here’s to us. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: CEASELESS BECOMING IN ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES .......................................................................................... 8 Latin American Fiction, U.S. Literary Market and Readership ................................ 11 Bolaño’s Literary Tradition and the Rhizome .......................................................... 16 Literary Analysis: Cesárea Tinajero, Life Lines, and Ceaseless Becoming ............. 24 An Ambiguous Journey: Searching for Cesárea Tinajero ........................................ 25 Recognizing the Deleuzian “Lifelines” in The Savage Detectives ........................... 32 Life as a Ceaseless Becoming ................................................................................... 36 CHAPTER 3: ‘DANGER POTENTIAL:’ FLIGHT AND FLEEING IN RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN .............................................................................. 42 The Debate Surrounding Black Art .......................................................................... 42 Literary Analysis: Embracing Invisibility................................................................. 45 Tracing a Line of Flight in Invisible Man ................................................................. 56 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 62 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 66 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION My thesis did not emerge from an already-existing piece of writing. I made up my mind early on that whatever the topic of my thesis, it would be something I was genuinely interested in. When I began researching potential topics, I became aware of the constraining ways in which literature written by U.S. ethnic minorities are generally marketed, tokenized and strictly judged according to some arbitrarily established criteria. I realized that this phenomenon occurs with any literary work produced by a writer that can be viewed in the U.S. as a national, cultural, ethnic, or racial other. Although there are definite expectations held within the collective U.S. imaginary as to what African- American literature and Latin American literature should be, these writers often challenge the compartmentalization of their work into constraining categories imposed for marketing or identity politics. My thesis examines Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (2007) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and the narratives contained therein to determine to what degrees those narratives defy a fixed-identity formation and instead establish a more fluid becoming of self. By a fixed identity I mean the identity in which one’s racial, ethnic, cultural and national statuses are enmeshed into politics and are consequently recognized as being “natural.” In order to fully understand the importance of the “fluid” formation of the self in these narratives, we must delve into the different historical and literary contexts out of which each novel emerged. These analyses, then, necessarily develop into an in-depth discussion of the unique literary traditions that precede each of these works and how the respective authors of these works respond to their predecessors’ tradition and influence. Despite my use of the singular nouns of “tradition” and “influence,” I do not consider the literary traditions foregrounding the works of Bolaño or Ellison as being fully representative. Indeed, Bolaño’s literary heritage, as he described it in various 2 2 interviews, is eclectic. One can gauge the breadth of Bolaño’s literary influences by both the interviews in which he spoke on the matter and by reading his fictional works which are littered with allusions to a myriad of literary artists that move beyond his particular time and place. Similarly, Ellison often recognized a variety of writers as his literary influences: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and a plethora of writers that drew the ire from his black artistic contemporaries. It was expected that Ellison, a black American writer, was to wield a political banner and advance a literary genealogy strictly of black forebearers. Instead, Ellison placed his own aesthetics before politics, and his individual identity in relation to but not restricted by his blackness. I am conscious of the fact that, unlike formalist theorists and critics who view a work of art as being completely independent of its creator, I attribute a significant

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