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 amount of agency to the author. Although I would not go so far as to claim that an author has full control over his or her work and therefore that artistic works are not, to a degree, autonomous, I do assert that, at least for the sake of these novels, both Bolaño and Ellison have a considerable amount of control over their respective works. Besides, considering that both novels deliberately respond to each author’s unique position as a literary figure and public intellectual, an analysis of either work which does not consider the context out of which it was produced runs the risk of misreading the multiple planes on which the text operates. Such a reading would threaten to pigeonhole the text into an imposed expectation rather than recognize the text for what it is doing. I have deliberately selected for my analyses two novels from entirely different contexts. The first is Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives which was published in 1998 and translated into English in 2007. Hailed as the one of the most important Latin American authors since the so-called Latin American “Boom,” Bolaño and his novel were postulated to an Anglophone readership as Latin America personified. Similarly, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was met with critical acclaim following its publication; it 3 3 won the National Book Award for Fiction shortly after. Although these novels were produced out of different historical, national, cultural, and political contexts, they both respond in their own ways to the same political imperative. Because my study explores a novel written by an African-American writer, it is doubly important to recognize both the political and aesthetic roles literature has served for African-Americans. What we now know as Black literature1 has historically called for the abolition of slavery as an institution in the U.S. and to counter the prevalent racist and stereotypical belief that African Americans were intellectually inferior.2 This body of literature was later expected to protest Jim Crow laws – to challenge the ideology of segregation and white supremacy. While these are important social agendas, it is equally important to recognize how these agendas imposed on the writers of both eras a set of expectations which, as some have argued, stymied interpretations of their artistry. Kenneth Warren speaks to this in his “Does African-American Literature Exist?” by referring to both Ralph Ellison and Edward Blands’ bemoaning the “lack of literary accomplishment among Harlem Renaissance authors in the 1920’s” (2490). Warren notes that “[m]any Harlem Renaissance authors had themselves faulted their predecessors in similar terms” (2491) for limiting the range of topics permitted to African American authors under the mandate to represent black “authenticity.” Again, as important as it is to recognize African-American literature as a political vehicle, it is equally important to not let political protest and literary artistic works written by African-American writers coalesce so that the former becomes codified into a

1 “Black” literature, in its contemporary usage, encompasses all literatures of the African descent diaspora. “African American” (no hyphen) indicates contemporary African descended literature geographically specific to the U.S. “African-American” (with a hyphen) indicates the same racial group but within an earlier time period, through the end of the Jim Crow era. 2 For a few examples of this type of literature, see the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter and Sutton Elbert Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio. 4 4 script that sets the parameters of racial “authenticity” and group belonging. This “moving away” from the identifiable characteristics we have come to expect of a particular category of literature is relevant in a contemporary debate within literary studies and African-American cultural studies. This debate was sparked by Warren in the above- mentioned article in which he contends that “African-American literature” as a term still used in the twenty-first century has become a misnomer. Warren does not postulate that we are living in a post-racial utopia nor that the term “African-American,” as it operates within the political and social realms, has become meaningless; rather, the term, as it relates to a type of literature, no longer accurately describes the political work of the literature. The literature that falls under said category all deal with Jim Crow and its consequences and is therefore, to Warren, a historic period of literature. “Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history” (2489).3 Similar to the debate surrounding the value of the taxonomy of African-American literature, Ralph E. Rodriguez argues in his Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation for a reconceptualization of what should count as Latinx literature. In this important study, Rodriguez claims that the term “Latinx” was useful because it gave cohesion to an entire body of literature “entering” Anglo-American publishing and academic realms, but that the term has since become a restrictive marker. To be clear, Rodriguez does not deny the existence or significance of a Latinx corpus, nor does he reject the efficacy of the label “in social and political arenas,” but he instead argues that this efficacy should not tie all literature produced by Latinx writers to a monolithic model because “[s]hared political and social features do not necessarily mean a shared aesthetic practice or practices” (12).

3 Warren’s assertion has understandably drawn criticism concerning the hard periodization of when racial segregation ended de facto. 5 5

Similarly, I too recognize the important political and social function literature has served for various cultures across time and space. This includes the “overtly political” literature produced by U.S. ethnic minority writers. The people Rodriguez is responding to are those who have come to expect Latinx writers to produce literature on subjects which have come to define Latinx literature as a whole: tales of la familia, el barrio, the struggles of being a “hyphenated” American, etc. The term “Latinx,” as it operates within the literary market, has caused “Agents, editors, and publishers...to expect, even demand, that writing from an author with a Latinx surname deal with ‘recognizable Latinx themes’” (13). These expectations impose upon an artist a prescribed identity, which may not represent their own sense of self-identity, but which they nevertheless are required to conform should they want to be successful in certain literary markets. It is because of these stereotyped expectations of ethnic minority writers that I view with suspicion the lauding of literary texts produced by writers of color by historically white-dominated institutions of power including, but not limited to, U.S. publishers and other “cultural brokers” to use Sarah Pollack’s phrase. As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man both conform to and resist their prescribed identity models. While some of Bolaño’s characters do playfully invoke Latin American stereotypes – peddling drugs and engaging in wild sexual affairs – they also upend these stereotypes as being exemplars of a Latin American identity. Bolaño simultaneously celebrates some of these tropes, but also renders them as being (potentially) absurd. Bolaño was born in Chile, spent a great deal of his life in Mexico City, and ended up living in Spain where he produced most of his published works. This constant movement did not allow Bolaño to ever feel as though he was completely tied to one country, perspective, or way of being. It is this continuous displacement which contributed to Bolaño’s overall view of life and therefore defy, through his work, expectations and definite meanings. 6 6

Similarly, both Ralph Ellison and his title character in Invisible Man are cast in the role of “the American Negro” and, therefore, expected to conform to the preconceived notions (held by both those within and outside the African-American community) of what African-American people and literature should be. He expresses his disillusionment with group identity politics which prioritize racial representation above artistry. Ellison’s novel provides a black ontology too rich and nuanced to be limited by a political lens. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer an approach through which to read The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man. Deleuze and Guattari describe the “rhizome” and “line of flight” as conceptual frameworks that allow a network of interconnections and influences far more complex than that afforded by a linear race or nation-based genealogy. This model allows one to recognize the ways in which both novels resist the category of a defined identity. Both texts to varying degrees circumnavigate the expectations foisted on them in favor of more fluid self-definition. More than an approach to fiction, these two concepts can also be used to approach the ways in which Bolaño and Ellison as writers are compartmentalized into distinct literary categories. These concepts can assist in disrupting the putatively “natural” essences or allegiances readers assign to particular kinds of writers (in this case, an African-American and Latin American writer) which ultimately influences the ways in which one reads and interprets the works produced by those writers. Life, as it is represented in the meandering narratives of both The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man, is something which often resists and exceeds the limits people often try to impose on it. These novels also go against how writing was perceived in each writer’s individual literary milieu. Bolaño and Ellison go against the style of literature and artistry that was considered the norm of the literary establishment. In order to better understand the ways in which one’s engagement with the world is depicted in 7 7 the two novels, this analysis will look to Elizabeth Grosz’s readings of Darwinian biological model of life. In her Time Travels, Grosz posits that life, as it is conceptualized by Darwin “...exceeds itself, its past, its context, in making itself more and other than its history: life is that which registers and harnesses the impact of contingency, converting contingency into history, and history into self-overcoming, supersession, becoming- other” (40). In other words, roles are not predetermined; rather, they are always in progress, unfolding, elaborating on the past, but complete in their present. This analysis argues that both Bolaño’s and Ellison’s novels depict life as such. Both The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man do more than what is normally acknowledged by literary critics: they portray narratives that flow, flirting with a concretized and socially- sanctioned identity and raison d'être, only to then abandon plans on a whim or when circumstances change. Trajectories, no matter how well-constructed, can be deprioritized to reflect life for its reality as a fluid state of continuous becoming. CHAPTER 2: CEASELESS BECOMING IN ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES

Few Latin American authors have had the amount of success in the Anglophone literary world as the writers of the Latin American “Boom” in the 1960’s: Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Fuentes, and, of course, García Márquez come to mind. Although undeniably important, these writers – through their command and reinvention of language – have inadvertently established a literary archetype to which all subsequent Latin American writers are expected to conform – both within their own literary traditions as well as in the English-speaking world. Since the 2007 English translation of his 1998 novel, The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño has been lauded as the single most important writer in decades to have come out of Latin America. At the same time, he has been configured in relation to the cadre of Latin American predecessors with whom the Anglophone world is familiar. Interpretations of Bolaño’s literature from the mainstream U.S. literary realm have been myopic. Exploiting Bolaño’s life, premature death and the mythos surrounding both as selling points to a U.S. readership, the publishers of the English-speaking world have all, consciously or not, packaged The Savage Detectives as a rebellious novel reminiscent of the counterculture in 1960’s America, but with a Latin American aesthetic.4 Moreover, interpretations of The Savage Detectives have collectively tried to reconfigure the text so that it fits into the image of Latin America long held within the U.S. imaginary – a constraining image of sexual indulgence and political unrest, both viewed as engrained elements inherent to societies south of the U.S. border.5 Yet, The

4 Sarah Pollack has noted how the cover design and inner flap of Bolaño’s novel is similar to that of the 2007 “original scroll” edition of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in The United States 357). 5 It is Pollack’s contention that U.S. literary critics and readership have it in their collective imagination that south of the U.S. – Mexico border is an exotic place of wild and sexual escapades. Pollack 9 9

Savage Detectives, a novel about the multifarious adventures of a meandering group of avant-garde poets in Mexico City named the visceral realists, expands in various directions and resists being reduced to having one subject or purpose –a characteristic that still reflects the reality of the “Boom” writers. This chapter will explore the ways in which The Savage Detectives resists the pre- and misconceptions of “Latin Americanness” and the notion of a fixed identity-formation in favor of a more fluid becoming of self. Considering the trajectories of Bolaño’s characters – an eclectic group of people – it is safe to assert that he favors an approach of aimlessness to life – an approach that emphasizes movement as opposed to stagnation and elaboration as opposed to stages of progression or development.6 I will attempt to elucidate how, despite the ways in which Bolaño’s novel has been sold and interpreted by best-intentioned U.S. publishers and literary critics, The Savage Detectives does more than these constraining depictions and interpretations can communicate; it offers us a rich conceptualization of life. The Savage Detectives, by its portrayal of various and multidirectional narratives, manifests the possibilities of what life unfolds in the being of the moment. Moreover, Bolaño’s novel interrogates the putative importance of a concrete identity and life trajectory, conceptualizing life as something of fluidity over fixedness, play over purpose, and becoming over being. In an attempt to provide an alternative ontological framework through which we can better interpret the characters and thus the narratives of Bolaño’s novel, I will refer to Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin’s conception of life which offers a way into this notion of ceaseless becoming, always in progress, never deficient. In this model, life

claims that The Savage Detectives unintentionally perpetuates these stereotypes through the novel’s various “exotic” characters and their sex-driven adventures (Latin America Translated (Again) 360). 6 See Chris Andrews’ Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe, particularly chapter 4: “Aimlessness” wherein Andrews analyzes several of Bolaño’s characters who collectively avoid socially- encouraged trajectories and status-seeking in favor of a perpetual renewal at life. 10 10

“becomes disconnected from a given essence, form, or function” and is instead seen as “a generation of endless variation, endless openness to the accidental, the random, the unexpected” (37-38). Bolaño’s treatment of the characters revels in the potential offered by Darwin’s biological model of life; the hope of what life can be as it unfolds and as it is divorced of a concretized and arbitrarily-assigned purpose or trajectory. While Bolaño experiments with a more open-ended view of life, critics have been slow to recognize his treatment, as his work has been in constant conversation with Latin American predecessors whose works mediates the reception of Bolaño’s own work. The critics’ vision is obscured by their expectations of what the regional aesthetic ought to be. Although it is important to explore the ways in which Bolaño’s text “pushes back” against marketing ploys by U.S. publishers and narrow interpretations by U.S. literary critics, it is equally important to understand that this “pushing back” is not what qualifies Bolaño’s novel as being worthy of serious critical exploration. An interpretation of The Savage Detectives that focuses solely on the ways in which the novel subverts the preconceived notions of Latin Americanness as they are held in the collective U.S. imaginary is problematic for two reasons: 1) it unwittingly reproduces a power dynamic in which the U.S. is afforded the status of the referent while the Latin American text in question is assigned the role of the referenced, and 2) such an interpretation fails to give attention to what Bolaño’s novel does, namely how it negotiates his place in the Latin American literary tradition. My analysis of The Savage Detectives, then, will necessarily explore the ways in which the anglophone has to varying degrees misinterpreted the novel while afterwards discussing at length how Bolaño understood himself in relation to the writers of the Latin American “Boom” – writers who have been propped up in the anglophone imaginary as exemplars of the region and its flair. 11 11

Unlike the writers of the Latin American “Boom,” Bolaño did not view his writing as serving a vanguard or mission of Latin American identity. Instead, Bolaño takes a more playful approach to his literature and life in general because he seems to not take himself, or his writing, seriously. Paradoxically, he recognizes the importance of his Latin American literary predecessors and his relationship to his genealogy, while simultaneously revealing the notion of “Latin Americanness” as an arbitrary signifier that cannot fully encapsulate him or his work. His work depicts a space in which life is portrayed as a constant proliferation of excess, resisting the inclinations to categorize and assign meaning to all of life’s events.

Latin American Fiction, U.S. Literary Market and Readership As alluded to earlier, Bolaño’s posthumous success in the U.S. literary marketplace is a phenomenon with problematic implications. In her essay “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States,” Sarah

Pollack delves into the implications of translating Bolaño’s 1998 novel for the Anglophonic readership of the U.S. – a literary market which has a complex history of publishing Latin American literature. Understanding this history will contextualize the publication of Bolaño’s work, revealing some of the mechanisms and motivations of U.S. literary market at play. Pollack gives an overview of this history, explaining that but a select group of Latin American authors have had significant marketability and success in this country’s literary culture, and, of these writers, most were from the Latin American “Boom” which “emerged” in the 1960’s while the Cuban Revolution was underway. Sylvia Molloy notes how “‘emergent’ literatures…always seem to emerge when the First World discovers a need for new cultural goods” (“Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary” 192), which is to suggest that the concomitance of the two events are not coincidental. Pollack echoes this assertion, noting how U.S. interest in Latin American literature rose 12 12 exponentially in the 1960’s as part of the U.S.’s “Cold War intellectual efforts” in countering the cultural impact of the Cuban Revolution (349). For a relatively small country like Cuba to challenge the political influence and power of the U.S. proved that the U.S. was could be successfully undermined. The North American country felt that this display of subversion would encourage other Latin American countries to follow suit and so, in a concerted effort by both the U.S. government and American organizations, money was pooled to create Latin American literature and cultural studies programs to encourage an ostensible familiarity with the region. Pollack refers to the Center for Inter- American Relations (CIAR) as an organization integral in “programmatically” selecting and translating certain Latin American novels for U.S. publishers (349). Another political instrument used by the U.S. in its cold war efforts to quell potential communist revolution was the now-defunct Spanish-language literary journal, Mundo Nuevo, published in Paris. In his essay, “The Politics of Literary Prestige: Promoting the Latin American “Boom” in the Pages of Mundo Nuevo,” scholar Russell

Cobb explores the ways in which said journal legitimized the movement of the Latin American “Boom” by heavily promoting writers such as Fuentes, García Márquez, Llosa and others who would come to represent the movement as a whole. It is important to consider the amount of influence this journal yielded in fostering the growth of the Latin American “Boom” because by acknowledging the formidable presence of this journal within literary and intellectual Latin American circles, one can better understand why the journal would appear to the U.S. as a potentially-exploitable armature. Although it would be an overstatement to characterize Mundo Nuevo as solely being a propagandic machine for the U.S. ideological cold war efforts, the claim that the magazine was influenced by outside political forces in an attempt to dissuade the Latin American populace from communism is a valid one. As Cobb explains: “Until 1968, the magazine was almost entirely funded by the anti-communist Congress for Cultural 13 13

Freedom, which was, in turn, funded by the CIA” (76-77). The fact that there was a financial connection - albeit an indirect one - between Mundo Nuevo and the CIA indicates the lengths to which the United States went in trying to influence the political climate of the entire Latin American region. U.S. motives should be critically interrogated for such an investment is propelled by ulterior motives. These political tactics should signal the U.S.’s investments in other literary and/or artistic movements, and that these investments exist to deploy this literature as an extension of U.S. national interests. Although U.S. publishers do not allow him space to exist as anything but a “post-Boom” writer, his work exceeds these boundaries. His work resists easy categorization, despite the political machinations that attempt to cohere an image of Latin Americanness for U.S. audiences, and it is within this context that Bolano’s work was initially released. Although this discussion has so far discussed the ways in which the U.S. government worked cunningly to weaponize the Latin American “Boom” for its own political aims, it is also important to consider the ways in which the Latin American “Boom” produced a lasting and often constraining legacy on the literary front. Recognized as a unifying style among the literary works of both the “Boom” and “post- Boom” period is magical realism, a regional genre that blends the fantastic with the mundane. This genre, despite its legitimacy as a distinct literary style, has since been postulated as the monolithic aesthetic practice of all Latin American writers - both old and contemporary. Magic realism is often viewed by the U.S. literary and academic realms as being a recognition of Latin American literary excellence but, as Latin American literary scholars have long noted, there are problematic implications of the genre.7 These scholars have thoroughly critiqued the ways in which the genre has been

7 This means that the pigeon-holing of Latin American literary production on the part of the U.S. has been something slowly recognized by the U.S. while having long been recognized by Latin American 14 14 offered as an archetypal model of Latin American literature and identity to an Anglophone audience and marketplace.8 Indeed, Magical Realism and the Latin

American “Boom” writers who are subsumed under this restrictive marker have created a referent against which the whole literary production of Latin America, at least in the eyes of the U.S. literary and academic spheres, is measured. So strong is the influence of the genre of magical realism, Pollack asserts, that the genre “has been applied retroactively to older works to form an artificial genealogy of Latin American literature culminating in García Márquez” (“Latin America Translated (Again)” 352). Gabriel García Márquez and others from the Latin American “Boom,” have been translated in part because they have what Pascale Casanova terms “literary capital.”9 Pollack elaborates on Casanova’s study and argues there are several concrete aspects which serve as criteria for major U.S. publishers if they are going to expend the energy and money to publish a foreign literary work. That list of criteria is that: it grabs the attention of readers in the north, offers said readers the “illusion” of being familiar with what Latin Americans are like and, finally, serves as a U.S. comparison side by side with Latin America in which the United States defines its own character by negation (“Latin America Translated (Again)” 351-352). Pollack further adds that the translation and publication of Bolaño’s work continues this trend by inaugurating a “New Literary

scholars. This is a similar observation made by Cobb when, in his essay, he explains how even at its inception, the Latin American “Boom” divided people into two main camps: Latin American critics and literati who looked upon the movement as “the first time in history that Latin American prose achieved a truly international audience and expressed an aesthetic vision on par with that of the modernists in Europe and the United States” and critics who “were not against Boom-era fiction per se,” but were rather opposed to what they viewed as a “commercial degradation of Latin American writing” (76, original emphasis). 8 It is important to note that this delineation of “Latin Americanness” is not perpetuated solely by the mainstream publishing apparatuses but also by American academia. Sylvia Molloy argues that however well-intentioned, the American academy has often forwarded a postcolonial model of critique in which Latin America is stripped of its temporal, historical and political specificities and rendered as one large homogenous region whose primary concern is to combat the lingering effects of Spanish colonization (“Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary” 189-191). 9 See Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (1999). 15 15

Paradigm” in the U.S. publishing world to supplant magical realism with a new Latin- flavored fad: Visceral Realism.10 In doing so, Pollack argues, there has been a conscientious effort on the part of publishers and American literary connoisseurs to configure Bolaño into the Latin American “image” held in the U.S. imaginary that reduces the whole of Latin America as one homogeneous region which, in its exotic and magical splendor, serves as a “break from the serious, conventional business of real life in the north” (“Latin America Translated (Again)” 360) (original emphasis). Although The Savage Detectives seems to at times uphold Latin American stereotypes, particularly with its drug-pedaling and sex-indulgent characters, it can be better interpreted that these characters are, more than anything else, demonstrative of a way of existing in the world - a way of being which prioritizes bodily pleasure before anything else. Not all of the 50-character narratives in the novel bear stereotypically Latin American markers, but these characters do not make it on the marketing precis. For every character that conforms to a preconceived notion of what a Latin American person is, there are an ample number of others who do not. Bolaño’s novel portrays a proliferation of life and in doing so, he has produced an “excess” of life which follows no prescribed mode of existence entirely, and certainly not one as prescriptive as that desired by his U.S. readership. Bolaño’s characters collectively roam through life, shifting trajectory from one pipe dream to the next, always expecting to find fulfillment at the end of each journey, yet always finding a space in time that does not fully fulfill. This pursuit is an enactment of “becoming” with no grandiose predetermined end goal, though each pursuit is a specific goal that seems to promise self-realization. As the characters experience life, the thought of an over-arching narrative with the potential of resolving life’s fluidity and

10 Fictionalized version of Infrarealismo - an anti-establishment literary movement founded, in part, by Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago in Mexico City, 1975. 16 16 open-ended nature is a game in a journey. Ultimately, these pursuits never deliver them to the promised land of happiness and content. And so Bolaño’s novel portrays life and the pursuit of literature as equally ambiguous processes that overlap and elude a fixed meaning and/or purpose, yet they exist, in constant movement, and in the fluidity of an ever becoming that never fully defines itself. In order to fully appreciate Roberto Bolaño’s conceptualization of life in The Savage Detectives we must explore the ways in which Bolaño understood himself as a “Latin American” author and how, in an organic ebb and flow movement, he both embraced that identity while at the same time exceeding the parameters of an ethos regarded as arbitrarily assigned by people both within and outside Latin America.

Bolaño’s Literary Tradition and the Rhizome

“We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is

founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes”

(Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)

As it has already been discussed in this chapter, Roberto Bolaño is often marketed in the Anglophone spheres as a “post-Boom” author for no other reason than the fact that he follows the 1960’s “Boom” movement. This unthinking association attempts to render Bolaño’s literature and identity as a writer as being inalienably tied to the “Boom” movement because doing so may conjure up for an anglophone audience justification for the publication of the Latin American text. It is critical to understand that just because no 17 17

Latin American movement has been able to duplicate the success in the U.S. literary market tantamount to that of the “Boom” (a success not rooted entirely out of a simple appreciation for the literature produced out of the “Boom”), it does not mean that there has not been a constant production of literature proliferating south of the border. Anglophone publishers and literary critics are not the only ones uncritically assigning Bolaño a literary genealogy that has at its center/referent the “Boom” writers; this act is also committed by some within Latin America. Nevertheless, Bolaño spoke on several occasions about his personal literary heritage and how that heritage exceeds national, cultural and even linguistic boundaries.11 This section will delve into some of Bolaño’s comments on the matter. I will then invoke Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theoretical concept of the “rhizome” in order to explain why the concept of a literary “genealogy” is restrictive and will instead propose a literary “tradition” for the latter enables Bolaño to provide a distinct – albeit indiscernible – literary lineage. This section will also analyze a scene in the novel wherein Bolaño’s fiction pays homage to an otherwise forgotten lot of literary figures. By providing such a varied list of influences, and by inserting into his fiction an overwhelming amount of allusions to historic literary figures both within and outside the Hispanophone, Bolaño subverts the expectation of him as a Latin American writer to list as his influences the figures most recognized as belonging to a Latin American “literary canon” which often includes the writers of the Latin American “Boom.” In a 2001 interview with Mexican poet Carmen Boullosa, Roberto Bolaño was asked if he belonged to a specific literary lineage: “Where are the roots of your genealogical tree and in which direction do its branches grow?” (61). To this question

11 See Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, specifically “Reading is Always More Important Than Writing” with Carmen Boullosa and “The Last Interview” with Mónica Maristain for discussions with Bolaño about his Latin American Identity, literary heritage and how both of those influence each other. 18 18

Bolaño offers a list of poets and writers from various countries ranging from Nicaragua to the Dominican Republic, Mexico to Spain. Among his influences are Rubén Darío, Pedro

Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, Francisco de Aldana and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to name a few. Bolaño mentions that when formulating his answer to this question, he consciously remained within the “realm of the Spanish language” (Perez 62) and that this list is but a small sample of the eclectic group of literary figures which have influenced his writing. “Of course, I’d love to claim a literary past,” says Bolaño, “a tradition, a very brief one, made up of only two or three writers (and maybe one single book), a dazzling tradition prone to amnesia, but,” adds Bolaño, “…I’ve read too much (and too many books have made me happy) to indulge in such a ridiculous notion” (Perez 62) (my emphasis). Bolaño indeed avoids the “ridiculous notion” of having a clear and discernable literary heritage with a few recognizable names and instead offers a litany of artists while further clarifying that this list is abridged; it operates within specific parameters, namely that these writers wrote in Spanish.

Returning to the question posed by Boullosa to Bolaño, let us consider the constraining language used to frame said question as well as its ontological implications. In asking Bolaño to name the roots of his “genealogical tree,” Boullosa invokes an arboreal metaphor. The implications of the metaphor and the question are that Bolaño’s roots and influences should stem from one common source – one genealogy made up of a few acceptable writers from the Spanish pantheon. Additional limitations are imposed when Boullosa asks Bolaño to describe the single direction in which its branches grow. Trees, when deployed as metaphors, are centered and hierarchical structures that limit and constrict. Here it is helpful to employ Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome which is an alternative and nonhierarchical configuration of knowledge. In dendrology and botany, a rhizome refers to a bunch of threads or roots that proliferate without a controlling center or structure. Deleuze and Guattari use this concept as an analogy for an 19 19

“adventitious” way of thinking – a mode of thinking which stresses the importance of chance or randomness as opposed to the fixedness of design. “The rhizome is an antigenealogy” (A Thousand Plateaus 21), it is nonlinear and often follows no discernable pattern. [U]nlike trees or their roots,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” (A Thousand Plateaus 20). The rhizome is helpful then as a philosophical approach toward understanding the disparate nature of Bolaño’s literary influences. It allows us to appreciate the randomness of those influences instead of looking for a genealogy which would categorize Bolaño along a specific lineage which in turn would establish (or try to establish) a recognizable and marketable identity. It is more suitable to discuss Bolaño’s influences as belonging to a tradition or traditions because that would signify that the writers and poets of said tradition(s) are not necessarily bound by language and/or region but instead cohere according to a theme, aesthetic or, as is the case with the visceral realists, a shared sense of marginality and outsiderness. Pigeonholing Bolaño begins when these parameters or expectations of who he is permitted to be are set. Situating Bolaño solely in relation to the writers of the Latin American “Boom” does not, as it is so often portrayed in the anglophone literary market, laud Bolaño’s writerly merits but instead imposes upon him a monolithic aesthetic and identity of Latin Americanness to which he and The Savage Detectives are to conform. Similar to the instances wherein Bolaño spoke on the varied nature of his literary influences, The Savage Detectives also resists an “amnesic” genealogy that postulates a select few literary figures as the forefathers (I use this word intentionally) and ostensibly forgets the rest. One scene in the novel which illustrates Bolaño’s “pushing against” this limited genealogy occurs during a conversation between the novel’s two main characters, Arturo and Ulises, and an older man named Amadeo whose house the two are visiting. Amadeo rummages through the ephemera of the old visceral realists until he finds a 20 20 broadsheet titled Actual no. 1 that contains a “Directory of the Avant-Garde” published in 1921. Amadeo then reads to Arturo and Ulises an extensive list of real authors, poets, painters and musicians from various countries including but not limited to Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, France, Italy, Germany and Russia. The section ends with Amadeo narrating: And when I had finished reading that long list, the boys kneeled or stood at attention, I swear I can’t remember which and anyway it doesn’t matter, they stood at attention like soldiers or kneeled like true believers, and they drank the last drops of Los Suicidas mezcal in honor of all those strange or familiar names, remembered or forgotten even by their own grandchildren. And I looked at those two boys who just a minute ago had seemed so serious, standing there at attention before me, saluting the flag or their fallen companions, and I too raised my glass and drained it, toasting all our dead. (SD 228)

More than a display of Bolaño’s encyclopedic literary knowledge, this list of avant-garde artists commemorates ghosts of the past who, to varying degrees, resisted “official” recognition or praise and have consequently been largely overlooked or elided completely from literary canons and national memory.12 These are the writers which Bolaño recognized as being within his literary genealogy. It is important to note that Amadeo refers to the directory as having “heroes and errors” (226) because it implies that he does not agree with the inclusion of all the artists mentioned but nevertheless

12 The name first mentioned in the list is that of Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, a Spanish poet and translator whom Borges, in his 1967 Harvard Lecture, expressed perplexity as to why the “dead master” of his had been so forgotten (This Craft of Verse 15). Having produced a corpus of mastery poetry as well as translating Shakespeare and The Arabian Nights (as well as other canonical texts) into Spanish, surely Cansinos-Asséns deserves to be included in anthologies and other aggregates of world literature. This largely forgotten but nevertheless important literary figure sets the tone for what the list does: commemorate forgotten poets. 21 21 recognizes all the listed figures as his comrades. It is then not a matter of taste, but rather of resistance to a standard norm which unites them all – it is an “unofficial” tradition. The earnestness with which the boys express their solidarity is likened a salute of a flag, the ultimate signifier of tradition. The tradition with which the visceral realists identify the most is that of the avant-garde for it is the most expansive tradition; predicated on being unorthodox or experimental, avant-gardism offers in the most general sense a flexibility and movement unable to be claimed by one flag or homestead. Because Bolaño interweaves fictional and semi-autobiographical material in The Savage Detectives, it if fair to assume (as this chapter has so far done) that the novel’s portrayal of nomadic narratives of the visceral realists and their idolatry of obscure literary figures is an extension of Bolaño’s own meditations on life and literature. An aspect of the novel which should be considered then is the visceral realists as a group and the sentiments they collectively hold towards literature and literary artists. The visceral realists are based on the infrarealists, a group of avantgarde poets founded in 1975 by

Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (after whom the novel’s two main characters are modeled). As staunch opposers to the literary and cultural establishment of Mexico City in the 1970’s, the infrarealists would often sabotage public readings of “official” poets. Mario Papasquiaro’s opening lines of his “Infrarealist Manifesto” declares: “‘WHAT DO WE PROPOSE? TO NOT MAKE WRITING A PROFESSION” (qtd. in “Infrarealism” 10). Besides making a profession of writing, what also marked a poet as “official” and consequently a target of the Infrarealists’ heckling, would be if a poet was state-sponsored or “too closely linked with PRI government,” a political institution which ruled Mexican politics for over 70 years (Stramskas 58). Considering how Bolaño, spent much of his youth as a rebellious poète maudit but then later came to be an established writer, it is interesting to see how these two stages are put into conversation in his fiction. Bolaño’s fictional treatment of the 22 22 infrarealists in The Savage Detectives does not soften the general stances the poets had towards the establishment, but it does, on several accounts, imply an appreciation for those literary figures important to Latin America. The resistance of the visceral realists to identify themselves with those of the literary establishment is not to suggest that Bolaño, at the time of writing The Savage Detectives, contested the importance of writers and poets who made up the establishment, but rather that he contested the putative naturalness of the demarcation between “official” and “unofficial” literature. Considering the infrarealists’ stance on the literary establishment, it is interesting to consider how Bolaño would eventually come to view those of the establishment with whom he would later be associated (however exaggeratedly): the “Boom” writers. The international stature and intergenerational influence of the “Boom” was not something which Bolaño opposed. In fact, Bolaño had spoken on several occasions of the importance the “Boom” writers collectively have on not only Latin American literature but on Latin America itself. As for the literature produced out of the Latin American

“Boom,” Bolaño deemed it as being larger than a cathedral: “I do not think time will harm them. The work of Vargas Llosa…is immense. It has thousands of entry points and thousands of exit points. So does the literature of García Márquez. They’re both public figures. They’re not just literary figures…This distorts things a bit, but it shouldn’t make us lose sight of the position they have in the hierarchy…[t]hey are superiors…” (Literature Is Not Made From Words Alone 44). Bolaño postures himself as being indebted to his internationally-acclaimed predecessors.13 What Bolaño seemed to find problematic with the “Boom” are its parameters of which authors were and were not included and the ways in which this literary tradition, especially as it became imbricated with national and cultural identity, concretized as a sort of referent by which later

13 For example, as far as aesthetic style is concerned, critics have noted how the structure of The Savage Detectives stylistically mirrors that of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963). 23 23 generations of Latin American writers are expected to conform. Writers like Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Vargas Llosa became the vanguards of Latin American letters.

What Bolaño’s novel promulgates then, is not a wider, more inclusive list of writers to be included in the Latin American literary canon (though it may be this as well) but rather an understanding that, as with any structure set to contain, there will naturally be those lines which escape or elude from such containment. Bolaño is concerned with those writers which “escape” those categorizations and literary canons. Thus, the infrarealists (and visceral realists) unify under a shared sense of outsiderness and aggressive rebellion. Mandeep Boro echoes this and maintains that the “poetics of infrarealists/visceral realists” is the “rejection of all linked with power or of anything which can be managed, controlled, deployed and maneuvered” (20). This means that the resistance to conform to a fixed identity not performed with the end goal of establishing themselves among the hierarchy but instead with the aim of eradicating the hierarchy altogether. Of course, if pressed hard enough, the logic upon which the avant-garde is based, will undermine itself. It is an axiom to say that no list or canon can ever be fully comprehensive, but it is equally true that tradition or movement based on an oppositional stance of an “official” literature always sustain such contrariness. Indeed, many visceral realists abandon such a position and seek ways in which they can get their poems published and hope that from those publications they may provide sustenance for themselves. Bolaño’s idea of a literary tradition is unorthodox in that it is composed of writers from various nations, time periods and cultures. One could argue that the heterogeneity of Bolaño’s list undermines the premise of a tradition to begin with. It is even more valid, however, to understand that this is only true if one’s idea of tradition is so rigid that it cannot encapsulate writers and artists from outside one’s immediate surroundings or circumstances. Writers who have influenced Bolaño are as random and varied as his own 24 24 life and the books which he has had the opportunity to read and subsequently like. Bolaño recognized the indelible influence of writers like Cervantes and Borges, listing the two as emblematic of the Hispanophone canon. It is not the concept of a literary canon which Bolaño contests but rather the expectation of Latin American writers and, perhaps, of Latin Americans in general to conform to fixed preconceptions of Latin Americanness. The framing of the question of tradition does not allow for multiplicity but instead calls for a more conventional response that invokes Latin American figures with which people from the Anglophone world are “familiar.”

Literary Analysis: Cesárea Tinajero, Life Lines, and Ceaseless Becoming Despite attempts by U.S. publishers and literary critics to contort Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives so that it fulfill U.S. expectations of what a Latin American literary work should be, the novel nevertheless affords us more than those attempts permit. In other words, U.S. publishers and literary critics ironically undersell The Savage

Detectives as a critical work of literature. An alternative reading of the novel will allow readers to recognize Bolaño’s rich conceptualization of life as a constantly-burgeoning force. In an attempt to elucidate where life-as-becoming emerges in The Savage Detectives, this alternative reading will explore three narrative entry points of the novel’s central meditations: 1) a poem by Cesárea Tinajero who is a central character in the novel that embodies the type of nonconforming movement and becoming favored by Bolaño; 2) an interpretation of the lives of a few characters through Gilles Deleuze’s theoretical concept of a line of flight so as to demonstrate how Bolaño again appreciates the movement away from a predetermined life trajectory and/or concrete identity; and 3) a conversation between the novel’s two main characters and an old friend of Tinajero’s through which Bolaño poses the question of whether life and literature are worth it. 25 25 An Ambiguous Journey: Searching for Cesárea Tinajero The novel’s plot is contained within the first and tertiary sections titled “Mexicans

Lost in Mexico” and “The Sonora Desert.” Epistolary in nature, the plot has as its protagonist a 17-year-old Juan García Madero who drops out of school to join the Visceral Realists, an avant-garde group of young poets who meander throughout Mexico City. Written in the form of diary entries, Madero chronicles the literary indulgence and sexual escapades of the visceral realists who steal books they can’t afford, homestead in random and various places, and engage in intense and erudite debates on poetry and literature. Arturo Belano, the thinly-veiled alter ego of Bolaño, and Ulises Lima, modeled after the Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, are the founders of the Visceral Realism movement and serve as the novel’s main characters despite never appearing as narrators themselves. They are, as Juan Madero describes them in one of his diary entries, “like two ghosts” (SD 113), moving in and out of frame and focus, drawing up plans for publishing a magazine that would anthologize the groups’ poetry. The section ends with Arturo and Ulises enacting a plan to escape Mexico City with Madero and Lupe, a prostitute who tries to avoid her violent pimp. The novel’s third and final section resumes where the first section ends. The gang’s escape out of Mexico City turns into a search for a mysterious woman by the name of Cesárea Tinajero, a poet who, in the 1920’s, founded literary collective coincidentally named the visceral realists. They eventually track down the elusive poet. There is a confrontation between Arturo and Ulises, the cop and the pimp, which leads to death of latter two as wells as Tinajero, who sacrifices her life to save Ulises. Bolaño’s fluid conceptualization of life most clearly manifests through Cesárea Tinajero. Recognizing how Cesárea operates as a symbol in the novel, it is important to note how Cesárea offers Arturo, Ulises, and the visceral realists a figure of 26 26 nonconformity and nomadism.14 This is important, as Bolaño understands that literature cannot ever be institutionalized or categorized; language itself is too fluid, and our version of a piece of literature is temporary –it will change with time in meaning and depth of understanding depending on multiple factors. Arturo’s and Ulises’ search for the elusive Cesárea leads them to the home of Amadeo Salvatierra, who warmly welcomes the two to talk and drink mezcal. Amadeo, whose name means lover of god, is an old friend of Cesárea’s and member of the original visceral realists. He shares his fading memories of the poet, who by this time of the narrative, as her name directly alludes, represents the ultimate goal to reach as the pinnacle of understanding and being fully immersed in a poetic way of being that is unrestrained by norms, expectations, societal values, or a material or ego-centered economy. Amadeo reveals that Cesárea was a nonconformist in all areas of life – she was a true poet who inhabits the world of poetry fully. After a falling out with other members of her visceral realists collective, she left the group and went to work for General Diego Carvajal as a stenographer. When Amadeo tells the boys that Cesárea had a boss, he further clarifies: “...boss was just a manner of speaking...you had to have known Cesárea to realize that she could never in her life have a boss or what you might all a steady job” (SD 374) (original emphasis) The prevalent social expectations of a “productive” member of society is to respect authority and “hold down” a job, but this is not Cesárea’s way. These moments of nonconformity are a symbol of her full existence in a reality that is her own’s, as these are not restricted solely to work but also to her personal investments in things that are normally perceived to add meaning to life. Nevertheless, Cesárea was never hesitant to leave it all behind. Amadeo

14 See Mandeep Boro’s “Nomadism and Displacement as Resistance in Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives” for an in-depth analysis on how the characters in The Savage Detectives utilize their shared marginalized status as a way to resist the establishment. 27 27 later shares with Arturo and Ulises his final conversation with Cesárea in which she revealed her plan to leave Mexico City for Sonora. Concerned, Amadeo asked:

What will happen to your magazine...what will happen to visceral realism? She laughed when I asked her that. I remember her laugh, boys, I said, night was falling over Mexico City and Cesárea laughed like a ghost, like the invisible woman she was about to become, a laugh that made my heart shrink, a laugh that made me want to run away from her and at the same time made me understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was no place I could run to. (SD 487) For Amadeo, Cesárea’s flightiness and sense” and this subsequently perplexes him. Cesárea’s laugh instills dread within Amadeo because it appears to mock the “seriousness” of visceral realism - and by extension, the seriousness of poetry and literature. More significantly, Cesárea’s noncommittal and nomadic existence seems to undermine the seriousness of life in general, or at least the seriousness Amadeo ascribes to it. Herein lies the importance of Cesárea as a character: her willingness to turn on a dime, maneuver through life without following a hard-lined trajectory, or to plot a trajectory when it suits her. She is fully aware of the fleeting importance of language, as its nature cannot fully represent, and in this understanding, she is aware that any piece of literature can only exist in the fluidity of future understandings. The institution cannot define language. This willingness to leave everything behind is alluring for Arturo, Ulises, and Amadeo because Cesárea is unrestricted by convention. What does Cesárea know about life which allows her to lead this type of mercurial existence? Cesárea is an ambiguous character whose potential in meaning is constantly on the brink of confirmation and negation. It is the tension that the fluidity of meaning created by Cesárea that draws Amadeo, Arturo, and Ulises towards Cesárea because, at least for the latter two, finding her will reveal whether a more fluid approach to life, and 28 28 indeed the entire movement of the visceral realists, are both a colossal waste of time. It can be interpreted that for Arturo and Ulises, this search for Cesárea is the exact kind of journey that Cesárea would favor; it is a journey which is not aimless for it has the goal of finding Cesárea but is also untied to an ultimate goal of life. In other words, the boys’ shared journeying to find Tinajero is an existence which does not have an ultimate goal in life or the belief that there is a universal architect who dictates meaning and plans for existing. Cesárea’s potential status as the mother of visceral realism renders her as a point of origin for the poets. This narrative of Tinajero-as-Mother retains an appropriately ambiguous meaning then when one considers Cesárea’s name. In his Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel, Héctor Hoyos posits that Cesárea Tinajero’s last name is “arguably a portmanteau” of both “tinaja” and “cenicero.” “A tinaja is an earthenware jar and a cenicero an ashtray” (original emphasis 16), states Hoyos. Based on Hoyos’ claim, we can interpret Cesárea’s last name as symbolizing at the same time both an impenetrable jar with the purpose of preserving and a receptacle for the unwanted excess of a cigarette. Combining the two, one can see how Cesárea is both a person in whom Arturo and Ulises view as preserving the origin of visceral realism and also as an empty signifier, a phantom; someone who, when approached, disintegrates like ash. Cesárea’s first name is no less ambiguous. The English translation of her name means cesarean as in cesarean section which supports the Cesárea Tinajero-as-mother narrative. This narrative retains additional meaning, however, when considering Hoyos’ speculation that being a disciple of Borges who was himself influenced by the Nordic sagas, Bolaño is producing here through the name “Cesárea” a “kenning, or circumlocution, for abortion” (16). Cesárea can be interpreted as the mother who promises an ultimate meaning but then defers that meaning because life is not about one ultimate meaning but rather a multitude of meanings in process. 29 29

Although all three characters are drawn to the mystery of Cesárea, finding Cesárea will potentially answer different albeit related questions for the characters. As implied in the previous paragraph, the question for Arturo and Ulises would be Am I wasting my life? For the old soldier Amadeo, Have I wasted my life? This question sits nestled in Amadeo’s heart and takes an evening of drinking Mezcal to extract. At one point in the evening, Amadeo presents to the boys a copy of Caborca – “the magazine Cesárea had edited with so much secrecy and excitement” and that is essentially “all that’s left of Cesárea Tinajero’s life” (SD 207). The magazine contains Cesárea’s only known poem, “Sión” which appears as follows (Figure 1):

Figure 1. “Sión,” Cesárea’s only known poem.

Amadeo has obsessed over the poem “for more than fifty years, give or take a year or two” (SD 421) but the poem’s meaning has nevertheless eluded him. When the boys? ask Amadeo what the poem means to him, he replies that it doesn’t mean anything to him (421) to which the boys query why then does he consider it a poem to begin with. Amadeo replies because Cesárea told him so and that “If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it...” (SD 30 30

421)15. This dialogue evinces Amadeo’s positioning Cesárea as his model of not only an aesthetic practice but also a model of living life. “Sión” can also be interpreted as

Bolaño’s playful commentary on literature and its precarious position in life. Literature, like life, often oscillates between comedy and tragedy, profundity and meaninglessness. It is this oscillation and deferral of any definitive meaning in literature and life which render both as equally ambiguous journeys. This is indeed Arturo and Ulises’ shared interpretation of the poem as they explain to Amadeo: “it’s a joke, Amadeo, the poem is a joke covering up something more serious” (SD 398)16. The joke of the poem, as the boys explain to a desperate Amadeo, is that there is no mystery to its meaning. In an attempt to help Amadeo understand its meaning, the boys meditate on each of the poem’s “lines.” The boys ask Amadeo what the straight line signifies to him to which he replies, “a horizon and calmness” (SD 422). The second line, a “wavy line,” is suggested by the boys to represent that it could represent a sign of the calmness being disrupted through movement and possibly change (SD 422). Before they discuss the third line, “a jagged line,” one of the boys shares that he would see these lines as a child. When he would see the jagged line, he would “start to feel sick...and lose my sense of things, my sense of stability, and all I wanted was to go back to the straight line”

15 This may also be an allusion to Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s 1961 art titled Merda d’artista, or, Artist’s Shit. This artwork is composed of tin cans in which human feces were dried and packaged (Thompson 45). Manzoni is one figure from a coterie of other artists of the period who collectively moved away from modernism and towards postmodernism. As indicated by his aforementioned Merda d’artista, Manzoni’s artistic pieces were part of “…an effective critique of institutional modernism which was consecrated in an unholy alliance between artistic production and the demands of an increasingly active and dominant art market” (Thompson 39).

16 There is yet another potential interpretation of Cesárea’s poem. As Amadeo articulates, the poem’s title, “Sion,” is a possible reference to “Zion, Mount Zion in Jerusalem” (SD 422) which is the ultimate biblical paradise. This is also a possible homage to one of Chile’s most renowned poems, one penned by Vicente Huidobro: Altazor. The fact that Altazor ends with indecipherable sounds, and the fact that “Sión” is likewise composed of indecipherable symbols, alludes and points to our inability to fully comprehend life as a totality. 31 31

(SD 423). They tell Amadeo to imagine “add a sail to each of the rectangles” (SD 423), producing this (Figure 2):

Figure 1 Arturo and Ulises' shared interpretation of “Sión.”

Comparing the lines to the varying motion of the sea, the boys are essentially giving Amadeo an interpretation that life is a series of these three stages. Sometimes life is calm, sometimes wavering, and sometimes is altogether rugged. Again, Bolaño’s playful view on life and literature emerges. Although Cesárea’s poem is seemingly simple, especially in Arturo and Ulises’ interpretation, we can never definitively say they are correct. Amadeo still seems skeptical as to the poem’s meaning after the boys’ explanation which is indicative of either Amadeo’s proclivity for overcomplicating things and attributing more profundity to something (Cesárea’s life) than is appropriate or it is indicative of his appreciation for the poem’s deep and almost indiscernible meaning. It is indeterminable which is true. Perhaps both are true at the same time. If Arturo and Ulises’ interpretation of Cesárea’s poem is accepted “[a]nd hidden behind the title, Sión, we have the word navigation” (SD 424), then the claim that Amadeo looks to Cesárea’s life for inspiration is validated. Through Amadeo’s nostalgic recollections of Cesárea, the reader will gauge just how much he yearns to discover what 32 32 came of the mysterious founder of visceral realism. The boys also desire to find Cesárea although said desire is not as obvious; consider however, how the two traverse Mexico

City and the Sonora desert to find her. Operating within the boys’ interpretation of Cesárea’s poem, Cesárea is offers through the poem a depiction of life. Sometimes life is calm, and everything is in order, other times, life begins to waver and one’s sense of stability is undermined; other times still life is unstable, threatening to catapult one into a state of chaos. The search and ultimate discovery of Cesárea Tinajero teeters on being meaningful and pointless at the same time and it is the uncertainty of one or the other that is central to Bolaño’s view of life. It is simple and profound at the same time. And that’s the point. Life is full of mystery, but there is no ultimate Mystery, that, when unraveled, provides you the Vision or enlightenment. Instead of allowing this ambiguity to drive one to nihilism or insanity (as it does to several of the visceral realists), Bolaño alternatively embraces the ambiguity of life and playfully portrays it, because these two elements make life interesting and dynamic.

Recognizing the Deleuzian “Lifelines” in The Savage Detectives Having been exposed to the “lines” in Cesárea’s poem, it is important to further explore how the stages those lines represent manifest in the various characters’ lives. In order to do this, I will invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical concept of “lifelines” by which they posit people and the world operate. Approaching The Savage Detectives through this theoretical framework will reveal that, although Bolaño “values an improvising openness over concentrated striving to attain objectives and to ‘make something of one’s life’” (Andrews 95), he depicts with equal attention characters who belong to the latter camp; those who abide by social norms and seek stability in their lives and identities. Of the novel’s three sections, the middle, “The Savage Detectives: (1976- 1996),” is by far the most robust. At 400-some pages in length, this cacophonous section 33 33 contains the narratives of 52 characters and their varying experiences with the group’s leaders, Arturo and Ulises, over the 20-year span between 1976 and 1996. For some of the visceral realists, life’s journey ends in triumph, for others still, tragedy. In “Latin America through the Literary Looking-Glass, and What Bolaño Found There,” Arnoldas Stramskas asserts that The Savage Detectives does not offer literature as a place of refuge – a place in which the line between civilization and barbarity is emboldened but rather the novel offers literature as a place where this line is blurred (59). This analysis will define the three types of lines as Deleuze and Guattari’s theorize them and then trace those three types of lines as they intertwine and run through the lives of the following characters: Barbara Patterson and Joaquín Font. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize that “we are made of lines” (194).17 Ronald Bogue adds that these lines, as Deleuze and Guattari posit them, are “[a]lways in motion, never static, lines ...are ...courses of movement and becoming, some so predictable in their journeys that they may be charted…others as erratic as the line of flight” (Deleuze on Literature 157). The first type of lines are “lines of molar or hard segmentarity” which are ostensibly rigid and maintained by “codes that impose broad social categories, fixed identities and pathways discretely divided into clear segments” (Bogue 159). So clearly marked are these segments and their state of being that the future becomes more determinable and, to a degree, constrained. These lines whereby some live their lives in strict regularity, work to affirm these clearly marked segments that do not “disturb or disperse,” but rather to “ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity” (195). The second type of line is one of “molecular or supple segmentation” which falters from the

17 As Deleuze and Guattari explain in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, these lines are not solely in reference to “lines of writing,” though one can certainly find these lines in literature - in fact, they are often found “between the lines of writing” (194). Instead, these lines are “flesh lines” by which people live their lives (195). 34 34 rigidity of the first mentioned line similar to the way Cesárea’s “wavy line” disrupts the calmness of the “straight line.” Deleuze and Guattari write that if the first line is made of

“questions and answers” and “precisions,” then “the second line is made of silences and allusions, of hasty innuendoes inviting interpretation” (198). Although the line of supple segmentation conveys a sense of minor instability, both of these types of lines compose what Bogue describes as the “routines of daily life…railways of prescribed activities, ruts of habit, coded career paths, programmed highways and byways of socially sanctioned interaction” (Deleuze on Literature 156). One of characters in The Savage Detectives whose life is composed of these lines is Barbara Patterson. Patterson is an Anglo-American who relocates to Mexico in order to do postgraduate study on Juan Rulfo but instead falls in love with Rafael Barrios, an aspiring poet and friend of Arturo and Ulises. The couple join the visceral realists. The group’s allure for Barbara was the fact that they reminded her of the American Beat writers.18 Following her intermittent narrative entries, it is revealed that Barbara and

Rafael end up living in San Diego, California where Barbara finds herself confined to a routine that involves working, cooking and cleaning the house while Rafael watches TV all day, drinks, or plays soccer with the neighborhood Chicanos who affectionately refer to him as “Poet Man” (SD 366). Static and unhappy, one could interpret Barbara’s life as being made up of mostly lines of molar or segmentarity. She hopes that Rafael will resume his writing – will produce something that would catapult him into notoriety among American literary circles or, as Barbara describes it, “the gates of paradise” (343). We are left with the image of a disillusioned Barbara angrily cursing Rafael while making him scrambled eggs. Lines of hard segmentarity move towards a constant albeit

18As Sarah Pollack notes, It is perhaps intentional that Bolaño depicts an American that interprets the visceral realism movement romantically and then, upon discovering that the movement was not as she interpreted it to be, becomes disillusioned with both the visceral realists and her Mexican boyfriend Rafael (“Latin America Translated (Again) 362). 35 35 stagnant identity or existence that operates within the bounds of what is socially encouraged and therefore accepted. Relating back to Cesárea’s poem, these lines of rigid segmentarity are comparable to the poem’s “straight line” which Amadeo and the boys equate to calmness and stability. Rafael has settled for a life of routine and Barbara longs for something different. Turning a critical eye to Bolaño’s treatment of the character Joaquín Font with Deleuze and Guattari’s lines in mind, one will recognize how both the lines of hard segmentarity and supple segmentarity overlapping in his life as well. Font is a middle- aged member of Arturo and Ulises’ visceral realists involved in an extramarital affair with a prostitute named Lupe. Font follows this wavering line of supple segmentarity when he pursues an affair with Lupe. This is not a total break from the first line because he retains his routinized life as husband and father. An affair with Lupe might have revealed itself as a line of flight for Joaquín but it ultimately brought him back to that which was routine and familiar: his house. Lupe escapes with Arturo, Ulises and Madero in Joaquín’s car and leave Joaquín behind. We later find Joaquín in a mental facility. He chased a line, but it took him nowhere; his participation in both the visceral realists and his affair with Lupe resulted in his being back where he began: unhappy and static. The third type of line, the line of flight, which has the most potential because it is the line which detaches from that which is known and familiar. A line of flight is a “‘clean break’” (A Thousand Plateaus 199) from the first two lines. Whereas the first two types of Deleuze and Guattari’s “flesh lines” indicate varying degrees of stability, the line of flight diverges from the trodden pathways of existence and into uncharted territory. Connecting back to the Cesárea’s poem, this is similar to the “jagged line” which, to extend the nautical metaphors, would be like sailing across uncharted seas. Cesárea was fickle and lived her life, accordingly, sometimes embracing routine and living along a line of hard segmentarity (she was a poet and founder of visceral realism) but then 36 36 embraced the wavering line before returning back to the straight line (leaving the visceral realists and working as a stenographer) and then tracing a line of flight out of Mexico

City (leaving everything behind for the desert). Arturo and Ulises follow a similar path as they identify as poets while refusing to settle in one place, trekking throughout the South American, Europe and African continents. The line of flight is the most unstable. Recall how one when describing Cesárea’s poem to Amadeo, one of the boys mentions that the “jagged line” made them want to return to the first line, the stage of calm stability. The line of flight frightens because it is unstable, but it is also exciting because of its potential. Deleuze and Guattari’s lines do not follow a subsequent order. One can embrace the fluidity of life and chase a line of flight but then eventually settle into a more concrete and stable existence. For example, Barbara’s movement out of the U.S. to Mexico City is an instance of Barbara’s following a line of flight. It broke from her routinized existence and, for a while, she avoided an orderly life. Joaquín Similar to the way Chris Andrews claims that Bolaño does not blindly attribute to his aimless characters an “ethical goodness,” I argue that Bolaño’s central characters (Arturo, Ulises and Cesárea) who maneuver through life, following lines of flight, are not any wiser than the others. In fact, as this chapter’s analysis has demonstrated, the journeys of the above-mentioned characters’ is just as ambiguous as anyone else’s life. Bolaño does not romanticize the lives of his nomadic characters but instead offers them to the reader as an alternative way in which life can unfold when divorced from an assigned trajectory.

Life as a Ceaseless Becoming

I know the secret of life isn’t in books. But I also know that it’s good to read, that it can be instructive, or relaxing: we agree about that 37 37

(Roberto Bolaño The Savage Detectives) Life, as it is portrayed in The Savage Detectives, is an ambiguous journey. It is fitting then that the answer to whether it is worth it or not is equally ambiguous. This exact question is posed in the novel during the final episode of the conversation between Arturo, Ulises and Amadeo. Given the heightened importance Bolaño obviously affords this conversation,19 it is crucial to analyze this last section and this question of whether life is worth it posed to us by Bolaño. Thus far we have developed an understanding of Bolaño’s conceptualization of life which is, to say the least, depicted as ambiguous. More than that, however, life is portrayed in The Savage Detectives as constantly bourgeoning, diverging away from categorization and meaning-making. In order to make clear how life is portrayed in The Savage Detectives, we will look to theorist Elizabeth Grosz and her interpretation of Darwin’s biological model of life. In her book, Time Travels, Elizabeth Grosz unpacks the ontological implications of Darwinian Biology which, as she argues, have hitherto been largely unexplored. The

Darwinian biological model, unlike its Newtonian counterpart, allows an open-system of scientific thought which treats life as an always changing thing (40). According to Grosz, Darwin introduces “indeterminacy into a previously determinable universe” (40) which is to say that in his formulation of life as a concept, there is a recognition of the importance of chance, the accidental, randomness, and play (38). Darwin conceptualizes life as a “ceaseless becoming” whereby we are always moving and changing, not necessarily progressing but elaborating because we can – because it is not enough to simply become but we must, in Grosz’s words, “overcome.” Utilizing Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin presents an interpretation of life as something which may appear stagnant but is instead moving, however incrementally, towards becoming something else. To view life

19 Amadeo’s narrative is easily the most invoked in the novel’s dense middle section despite only ever detailing one conversation on a single evening. It also begins and ends the section. 38 38 as such in The Savage Detectives is to recognize Bolaño’s own nuanced understanding of life as constant movement; oscillating at various speeds between being worth it and not.

Mandeep Boro argues that literature and poetry are depicted in The Savage Detectives much like the sexual endeavors of the characters – as “useless” and “wasteful” activities, but, Boro elaborates, this is a celebrated aesthetic of the visceral realism (19). A word that I argue more aptly describes the sexual rendezvouses and artistic produced is not “wastefulness” but excess. The fact that none of the novel’s characters ever present the readers with a poem, despite all being poets, one can also infer that their art (assuming they ever “produce” any) is also excess since those artistic works are not, by the social standards set before them, “official” – that is published or state – sponsored. If we employ Darwin’s conception of life toward literature as well, then we can begin undoing our hardened expectations of what literature, and by extension, life can be. Concluding the middle segment of The Savage Detectives is the final episode of the conversation between Arturo, Ulises and Amadeo. The night has grown late and the room cold as the January air breezes through an open window. Arturo and Ulises sit across from Amadeo on a couch. One of the boys is falling asleep and the other studying Tinajero’s poem, but it is unclear which one is doing what. Amadeo tells the boys that their faces have become pale to which one of the two replies that it is as if the North Pole as fallen on Mexico City. Amadeo asks the boys if they are cold but the question goes unanswered. and I said: boys: is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel. Then I got up (all my bones creaked) and went to the window by the dining room table and opened it, and then I went to what was, strictly speaking, the front room window, and opened it, and then I shuffled over to the switch and turned out the light. (588) (my emphasis) 39 39

Placement of this scene is important. After reading about the lives of various characters which serve as a lengthy interlude between the beginning and ending of the novel’s plot, I argue that this question is posed to the reader. Is it worth it? It is ambiguous as to what “it” is, but it can be inferred that “it” refers to literature and life. As stated previously in this chapter, for Bolaño, there is no distinction between life and literature. Arnoldas Stramskas echoes this assertion in his essay: “Literature does not constitute an inferior realm, secondary, supporting role for life. Life is literature and literature is life” (66). Recalling Amadeo’s question of whether “it” is really worth it, one must consider the answer that Bolaño provides: Simonel. It is a word that Madero references earlier in the novel when he considers its meaning. Simonel is a combination of the words simón and nel which are colloquial Spanish expressions for yes and no, respectively. It is important to consider the etymology of this word because it then becomes clear that only through a portmanteau of informal and unofficial words can the answer be possible. Both simón and nel both share letters in the word simonel and so to remove one word would be to render the other incomplete. More than teenage argot, simonel is a configuration of an ontology that refuses to conform to a dichotomy and instead advocates for a flux and open-ended becoming in which neither answer can ever be adequately sufficient. Stramskas describes literature as the space where the problems and conditions of our times (and of all time) are “approached in ways that are indirect, indefinite and ambiguous” (70). “When we feel that [literature] has failed to provide us with sufficient answers,” states Stramskas, “then that might be the hint that literature has succeeded” (70). The answer Arturo and Ulises give Amadeo is, to use Stramskas’ word, ambiguous. To definitively answer either yes or no would be to overlook the interdependence of the two terms and, by extension, the interplay of the one’s various life experiences. One could strongly argue that within a system the produces an economic product, visceral realism is, by all measures, a failure. As scholars have pointed out, for all of the 40 40 talk of reading literature and poetry, the group fails to produce any themselves. We are never exposed to any of Arturo or Ulises’ writings nor are we exposed to anything of

Tinajero’s besides her childish sketch. Members of the visceral realism also undermine the group’s basic aesthetic of anti-establishment politics. Although predicated on the rejection “official” literature, several visceral realists go on to work for mainstream publishers or for state-regulated institutions such as the university. Seeing as the group did not attain anything begs the question of whether visceral realism has been worth it. The answer to this, and indeed to Amadeo’s question, may tempt one to give primacy to how a story ends in order to render a judgement. In that case, the answer may be no. For some visceral realists, like Andrés Ramírez, fortune comes by chance. As a Chilean stowaway on a cargo ship, Ramírez arrives in Spain where he eventually wins the lottery. The sudden wealth does not make Ramírez happy, however, as he begins to obsess over the “true nature of my luck, of the money that had rained down on me from the sky” (SD 417). Unable to incorporate randomness into his concept of his life’s events,

Ramírez futilely tries to determine how to account for the fortune that befell him and is ultimately left with a sense of malaise. For others still, the journey ends in tragedy: a poet is inadvertently killed in a shootout between police and drug dealers, one is driven mad in his search for ultimate meaning in Pío Baroja’s “The Chasm,” one commits suicide, another dies suddenly in a violent car accident and, of course, Joaquín Font ends up in a psychiatric hospital. I argue that Arturo and Ulises’ answer Simonel is Bolaño’s answer and it is inflected with all of the experiences depicted in the novel’s middle section. The various narratives, rhizomatically shooting in each direction provide us a nuanced understanding of life which, although unsatisfactory, is nevertheless close to reality. There is nothing “wrong” with having a concrete identity or life trajectory nor is there anything “wrong” with attaching a particular aim (political or otherwise) to one’s 41 41 literature. It is when we begin to attribute an essentialism to those identities where tension arises. It is when literature is expected to conform to one purpose or other that people self-impose limits on the possibilities of what literature and life can be. The ways in which Roberto Bolaño and his fiction has been autocratically reconfigured by publishers, critics and scholars to fit into one monolithic identity as a Latin American collectively attempts to place interpretive constraints on said author and his works. This is especially the case with The Savage Detectives. More than a Latin American writer’s nostalgic tale of his youth with a stereotypically Latin American backdrop of political unrest and violence, The Savage Detectives offers readers Bolaño’s complex conceptualization of life and literature as equally ambiguous journeys which are both worth and not worth traversing at the same time. As this chapter has tried to argue, life as it manifests throughout the novel is depicted as something whose purpose is elusive and meaning deferred. At the risk of sounding cliché or axiomatic, it is the journeying which makes life and literature worth it, not the terminus. And that is both profound and absurd at the same time.

CHAPTER 3: ‘DANGER POTENTIAL:’ FLIGHT AND FLEEING IN RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN

The nameless protagonist of ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) on several occasions resists an identity conferred upon him by others. Whether it is the role of an obedient southern negro student, the racial stereotype of the virile and sexual brute, or the sociopolitical leader of the people in Harlem, the invisible man recurrently finds himself in situations wherein people exploit (or try to exploit) his blackness in order to advance their own agenda. “Everybody wanted to use you for some purpose” (288), bemoans the novel’s protagonist. Although Invisible Man has traditionally been read as a tragedy, this chapter will argue that rather than defeat, the nameless protagonist finds himself by the novel’s end as not only running away from something trying to harm him but also towards an open-ended ontology of becoming. Dissatisfied with the identities foisted upon him by both black and white members of society, Ellison’s protagonist enacts agency in fleeing away from those identities which, if embraced, would have insisted on adopting a rigidly policed group allegiance. Instead, the protagonist refuses these trajectories and opts to occupy an open space wherein he may plot his next move. In the same way that his protagonist resists parameters placed on him as a black man, so does Invisible Man as a novel by which Ralph Ellison resisted the social, ethnic and racial expectations placed on him by those both within and outside his cultural community.

The Debate Surrounding Black Art In order to fully understand the significance of Ellison’s narrative and the moments when it resists a fixed identity-formation, it is necessary to understand the context in which Ellison is writing. The conversation surrounding African-American art and the purpose that this type of art should serve can be traced back to the Harlem 43

Renaissance20 of the 1920’s which was the “first concerted African American artistic movement” in the United States (Ford, 234). During this period of unparalleled artistic output from black writers, poets, and musicians, also emerged the debate as to what African-American art should do. Situated on one side of the spectrum were those who believed that African-American art and, by extension literature, must move collectively towards social protest of the living circumstances of black people in the United States which, at the time, was fraught with racial strife. With Jim Crow laws still upholding segregation and the prevalent lynching of African-American by white mobs, there was plenty to protest. In his famous “Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. Du Bois declares: “...all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists” and that “...whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.” People on the other end of the spectrum conceded that social protest was important but that perhaps that protest should be designated to other mediums which did not interfere with art. The rationale behind this latter argument is best summed up by Alain Locke: “There is more strength in a confident camp than in a threatened enemy. The sense of inferiority must be innerly compensated…” (Locke 1). Locke essentially asserts that art should not be solely used as a vehicle for propaganda because doing so will always place the African-American community in the position of the oppressed. Though this debate began in the 1920’s during the Harlem Renaissance, it has been a prevalent topic throughout subsequent decades and up to the present. One of the most prevalent criticism of Ellison was that he, being part of the black literati, was not vocal enough on matters which pertained to the plight of his race. This is a criticism which would follow Ellison from the publication of his Invisible Man in 1952 throughout the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Richard Wright was a major figure of Ellison’s

20 Then referred to as “The New Negro Movement” after Alain Locke’s famous anthology The New Negro (1925). 44 literary influences and predecessors. After Ellison dropped out of Tuskegee University as a music student, he migrated to New York in 1936 where there existed in Harlem a booming literary and artistic scene which Lawrence P. Jackson describes in his “The Birth of the ‘Critic’: The Literary Friendship of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright” as being “pervaded by the socialist zeitgeist” (322). This means that the collective political inclinations were towards the farther left.21 Langston Hughes introduced Ellison to Wright and the two struck up a sincere friendship which afforded the younger Ellison various writing opportunities, mostly for leftist journals.22 Modeling after Wright, Ellison became involved with The Communist Party of the U.S. (CPUSA) in Harlem, even attending some rallies. Attracted by the party’s purported recognition of the oppressive conditions of African-Americans in the U.S. and consequent advocacy of “equal rights and an end to lynching” (Jackson 327), Ellison and Wright maintained a shared political allegiance through the 1930s. The Communist Party would eventually lose the support of the black American community after the Soviet’s signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop

(Non-aggression) Pact in 1939.23 Over time, the relationship between Ellison and his mentor Richard Wright began to sour. Wright, steadfast in his political commitments, held a different relationship to “black folk culture” (Jackson 326) than Ellison who had developed a “decreasing interest in political conflict” (Jackson 345) and therefore decided to pursue literature not so bound to a political function, shaping a work that would not only be a great “African- American” novel but a great “American” novel. Indeed, as Jackson explains, Ellison’s ascendancy as a literary figure after the publication of Invisible Man allowed him to

21 Jackson lists the leftist groups of this era in Harlem as the communists, socialists, Trotskyites and also the “remnants of the African Blood Brotherhood and adhering Garveyites” (“The Birth of the Critic” 322). 22 Ellison would come to downplay his involvement with the radical left in subsequent decades. See Barbara Foley’s “Ralph Ellison as Proletarian Journalist” for an incisive study of an Ellisonian corpus of pre 1946 articles which belie Ellison’s assertion that he was not close to the Communist Party. 23 See Robert Philipson’s “The Sunset Generation.” 45

“embrace fully his America identity” (346) which worked to further wedge Ellison and Wright apart. No longer was Ellison aligning himself with the likes of radical thinkers like Malraux and his mentor Richard Wright but was instead beginning to propose his own personal literary heritage which, much to the chagrin of other black writers, was made up of writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce (Jackson 348).

Literary Analysis: Embracing Invisibility “Visibility is a trap” Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)

Rather than accepting and occupying a fixed and socially-sanctioned identity, our protagonist decides to invoke his already-present invisibility and live hidden in the basement of a building of white tenants in the area surrounding Harlem. Having somehow siphoned electricity from the Monopolated Light & Power company and subsequently covering the entire ceiling of his room with over a thousand “filament type” of light bulbs, the invisible man establishes for himself, to borrow from Ernest Hemingway, “A clean, well-lighted place” to reflect and plan. To claim that the invisible man “invokes” his invisibility is not to ignore the fact that his invisibility is, to a degree, projected upon him by the “dominant” white culture’s collective inability to see him as anything but a means to its own political end. In other words, when referring to the protagonist’s invisibility, this chapter is referring to his invisibility as an individual human being. It may seem paradoxical, but while our protagonist’s human individuality is invisible to both the black and white members of society that surround him, he is at the same time hyper visible to the normative rules of society, due to his inherent blackness. This hypervisibility of the protagonist’s skin comes at the expense of his interior experience for it is the latter with which no one seems particularly concerned. 46

Despite being subjugated under multiple dominant social structures, the novel’s protagonist does retain a sense of control over his invisibility and exerts that control over it when, by the novel’s end, he adopts his invisibility full time. This chapter will argue a similar viewpoint as Shelly Jarenski who recognizes a significant sense of autonomy on the part of the narrator when he ultimately chooses invisibility. In her “Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Jarenski diverges from the prevalent view of scholars and critics that maintain that the novel’s narrator is made invisible not of his accord but rather by the “impositions of a highly racist society” (86) and instead posits that rather than conform to a recognizable and socially-dictated body, the narrator chooses invisibility - he embraces the “abject alternative” (86). Here Jarenski invokes Judith Butler’s reshaping of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject in order to formulate a theoretical framework towards which she may interpret the bodies present in Ellison’s novel. Jarenski argues that the bodies in Invisible Man that are not to be considered “dominant” (i.e. white, straight, male), are instead relegated to the abject realm which is used as an outside “against which dominant bodies...can be defined” (Jarenski 86). If the abject is understood as the collapsing of the “othering” process – self-definition in opposition to another (the subject in relation to the object) – then the narrator embraces an identity within this liminal space outside of those binaries. He becomes invisible when others do not see him as a person but rather see him as a stock character as defined by a cultural binary. In order to regain his sense of individuality, he must remove himself from that binary, thus collapsing the significations on which blackness and whiteness are imbued with meaning. By removing himself from this binary, he embraces abjection by occupying that liminal space. This is especially evident in what is perhaps the most noted and disturbing scene in the novel: The Battle Royal. During this scene, our narrator has been awarded a scholarship to a southern black university. He is brought to a dinner of the town’s 47 venerable where he is to give a conciliatory speech. Before he can give this speech, however, he is be blindfolded with a group of other African-American men and told to fight each other. It is clear that the evening was never about recognizing the narrator’s academic achievement but was rather an opportunity to place black bodies on display for a crowd of gawking white spectators.24 After the evening’s entertainment, the narrator is allowed to deliver his speech. Standing before a smoky room of an indifferent group of white dignitaries, the protagonist tries to assert himself and speak of the need for quality between the black and white races, but the men do not hear this man, they do not see him as a human being but rather as a black body just out of an entertaining physical bout. Echoing Jarenski, I also argue that there exists a presumption on the part of those who equate invisibility with powerlessness which is that being visible is a source of privilege and that if one were to attain visibility, one would also attain empowerment. This is problematic because, as Jarenski further points out, black bodies were quite visible in the time period out of which Invisible Man was published. In fact, black bodies were objects of fascination - they were bodies that were to be ogled after and even imitated.25 Indeed, Jarenski writes that in 1950’s America, black cultural appropriation was alive and well with Elvis Presley being the most obvious example. Blackness was able to be appropriated and marketed to a general audience “precisely because [it] had

24For a related albeit different context, see Itai Vardi’s “Feeding Race: eating contests, the black body, and the social production of group boundaries through amusement in turn of the twentieth century America.” In this article, Vardi explores the ways in which eating contests were historically used by white people as a form of entertainment by which they could collectively gawk at black participants and draw artificial distinctions between eating habits and decorum between the two races. 25 Jarenski notes in “Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison’s Invisible Man” how curious it is for Ellison to reference one form of black appropriation (minstrelsy through Tod Clifton’s Sambo dolls dancing for white spectators) when another, “less overt” form of appropriation was occurring during the time. This second form of appropriation was referred to as “White Negroism” by Norman Mailer which who uses the phrase to describe how white men would imitate blackness, especially white musicians (Jarenski 96). 48 finally been seen by white culture” (Jarenski 97; original emphasis).26 Ellison was aware of the allure black culture and art had for white people. Ellison’s mentor and friend,

Richard Wright, was also aware when he commented on this topic in 1937, criticizing Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920’s for entering white mainstream America “dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior” (“The Role of Negro Writing”). Wright criticized the black writers of the 1920’s because “blacks had no tangible allegiances that could nurture young black talent after the white vogue for the Harlem Renaissance inevitably waned” (Jackson 324). Throughout the novel we find the narrator striving for a visible identity, a social recognition that is produced and therefore recognized by the dominant structures of power. For example, in the novel’s beginning, the unnamed narrator is an exemplary student at a southern black college. The University’s president, a fictionalized Booker T. Washington-esque figure named Dr. Bledsoe, assigns the narrator the task of driving around a visiting trustee, an older white man by the name of Mr. Norton. Things go awry when the narrator, complying with Mr. Norton’s wishes, takes the trustee off the main road to the cottage of the town’s source of shame: Jim Trueblood - the man who fathers a child with his own daughter. Although Mr. Norton treats the narrator relatively well, he still does not see the narrator as a person but rather as a marker of his own success for it is Mr. Norton’s raison d'être to help advance the black race by maintaining the black university. A tremendous pressure is placed on the narrator by Mr. Norton when the latter claims: “‘You are important because if you fail I have failed by one individual, one defective cog; it didn’t matter so much before, but now I’m growing old and it has become very important…’” (Invisible Man 45) (original emphasis). Mr. Norton has

26 See Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Minstrelsy and the American Working Class for an in-depth exploration of the ways in which black culture was historically appropriated by a white audience during the height of minstrelsy popularity and the psychosexual components that entailed. 49 attempts to intertwine his own existence with that of our black protagonist. Upon hearing this, the narrator thinks to himself: “But you don’t even know my name” (45). And this is true; Mr. Norton’s ignorance of the narrator’s name is consequently an ignorance of the narrator’s individuality. The narrator is a token to Mr. Norton – a means through which Mr. Norton can establish himself a lasting legacy. Upon finding out about Mr. Norton’s visit with Trueblood as well as the visit to a lowly bar, Dr. Bledsoe reprimands the narrator and sends him north to New York under the guise of giving the young man an opportunity to work for a while before returning, even providing the protagonist with letters of recommendation for employment. Those letters, however, turn out to communicate to the important men that are to receive them that the narrator was not only expelled from the university, but that he had “gone grievously astray” (187) from the path laid out for him. This condemnation is especially piercing because Dr. Bledsoe is a black man of stature who rose from poverty through the ranks of the University until he attained presidency. He is depicted as the black Horatio

Alger yet, rather than forgiving the narrator for his supposed transgressions, he instead propels him north under the semblance of help when, in reality, the only person the president is helping is himself. Indeed, Dr. Bledsoe sent the narrator away “because his own position of power depends upon the docility and blindness, or covert compliance of the young” (Klotman 281) and, after the narrator’s misstep and subsequent questioning of Dr. Bledsoe’s authority, the narrator deviated from the predetermined path assigned to him as the “docile” negro student. It can be argued, however, that it was the narrator’s abundance of docility which got him into trouble. Seeing the lapses in the logic that holds docility as a pathway towards success in a white dominated society, the narrator becomes disillusioned with both the white and black vanguards of the university and is thus propelled elsewhere for that elusive concrete identity and life trajectory. This is an important sequence in the novel because it 50 alludes to the very real historical context in which this novel was written. There existed during the Jim Crow era a group debate of how best to approach African-American racial uplift: 1) Take a conciliatory position as advocated by Booker T. Washington wherein African-Americans would start from the bottom and attain vocational training in a larger attempt to lift their people up of their own work without upsetting the white racial dominance or 2) promote aggressive assimilation27 which, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, called for radical inclusivity of black people into traditionally white spaces and positions of power including but not restricted to the university. Similarly, the narrator’s involvement in “The Brotherhood” also indicates the former’s desire to be recognized as politically useful in the larger effort of eradicating the exploitative aspects of capitalism in the U.S.28 Modeled after communist collectives, the Brotherhood’s general aim is to strive towards economic equality in Harlem and a “better world for all people” (Ellison 297). An impromptu speech on the part of the narrator from the steps of an old black couple’s residence in Harlem is what makes the narrator visible to Jack, The Brotherhood’s leader. Our narrator gives his speech before a gathering crowd of Harlemites. An old couple is being evicted from their apartment and this draws ire from most in the crowd who collectively lambast the armed marshal ousting the couple. The narrator takes to the steps and addresses the crowd, encouraging the crowd to remain law-abiding while at the same time convincing them to surpass the marshal and enter the apartment so that they may all pray. In delivering this speech, the protagonist uses oration as a declaratory act through which he asserts himself as well as yielding power over the crowd. So influential is his speech that it results in a frenzy with police chasing the narrator as he flees from the scene. He escapes and is later approached by

27 Although the word “assimilation” has acquired a negative connotation in contemporary usage, at the time in which Dubois deployed the term, it was fairly radical. 28 This episode of the novel also portrays, albeit in sardonic fashion, Ellison’s own disillusionment with not only the communist party but with politics in general. 51

Brother Jack who recruits him into The Brotherhood. This is his birth into society, and into the consciousness of language and speech.

This scene finds the narrator at The Brotherhood’s meeting in a rather elegant hotel room, Brother Jack announces to the other members of the organization that the narrator will be undergo training and eventually assigned the role as “chief spokesman of the Harlem District” (350). Brother Jack tells the narrator authoritatively that he (the narrator) will be the next Booker T. Washington. The narrator expresses hesitance to which Brother Jack replies: “‘...it isn’t a matter of whether you wish to be the new Booker T. Washington, my friend. Booker Washington was resurrected today at a certain eviction in Harlem’” (300). Significant is the invocation of Booker T. Washington because Washington is to Brother Jack, and to most whites at the time, the embodiment of non-threatening black intellect, capability, and interracial goodwill. Moreover, Washington is “a black role that has already been officially recognized” (Jarenski 90) by white people and so the narrator is consequently directed to conform this model of blackness placed before him. It is not coincidental that Brother Jack literally assigns the narrator a new name - he and the organization are prescribing the narrator an identity that abides by political group identification. Juxtaposed with what occurred down south, this situation allows for more agency and is therefore more desirable. As the narrator puts it: “At least here was a chance to speak” (301). Another scene in the novel which demonstrates the narrator’s growing dissatisfaction with the politics of The Brotherhood involves Tod Clifton’s death. Once a promising member of the organization, Clifton abandons The Brotherhood and, much to the narrator’s repulsion, makes a living selling Sambo dolls that he makes dance for white spectators. Clifton is a black man peddling black stereotypes to white people and this trafficking in of black stereotypes is the same mechanism that produces the invisibility that the narrator rejects. Following a confrontation with a police officer, 52

Clifton is shot dead in the street. It does not take long before news of the death gets out and inspires anger and protest in the community. There are marches and signs protesting the murder. One sign reads: “Brother Tod Clifton/ Our Hope Shot Down” (439). While the community laments his death as the loss of a young man and symbol of group perpetuity, Tod Clifton was not the beacon of hope the community propped him up to be. In so doing, the community does not recognize Tod Clifton the man but Tod Clifton the symbol. They are engaging in the same “not-seeing” that renders the narrator invisible. The narrator gives a meandering speech at Clifton’s funeral, repeating to the crowd several times Tod Clifton’s name and the basic information about his death, even urging the crowd to go home because his story is already known and that there is nothing else to know. Seeing crowds of people approaching “from all directions,” the narrator questions the motivations for their being there. Was it Because they knew Clifton? Or for the occasion his death gave them to express their protestations, a time and place to come together, to stand

touching and sweating and breathing and looking in a common direction? Was either explanation adequate in itself? Did it signify love or politicized hate? And could politics ever be an expression of love? (441) Despite playing a major role in creating the narrative of Clifton-as-martyr, the narrator has come to question the perpetuation of symbols displacing individuals. It seems that, even in death, a black person’s body is configured to fit into another’s political agenda. This is not to imply that the murder of a black man by a white police officer is not a legitimate social ill plaguing society but that the “narrative-making” which happens after a tragedy like that of Clifton’s death, is something to be at least considered with skepticism because that politicization can erase the individual from the narrative. Brother Jack would later chide the narrator for delivering the speech in impromptu fashion and for referring to the fact that Clifton was a black man murdered at 53 the hands of a white cop. “‘He was shot because he was black and because he resisted. Mainly because he was black,’” states the narrator to which Brother Jack responds disappointedly: “‘You’re riding ‘race’ again…” (458). This exchange makes clear the differences in priorities for Brother Jack and The Brotherhood, and the narrator. The political, social and economic strife facing the African-American community were, in many ways, just opportunities for leftist whites to become better acquainted with a potential source of political mobilization. For the narrator, however, race is his reality and he does not have the luxury of divorcing himself from the “race problem” because his everyday existence is inextricably connected to it. The physical reality of being a black man in America is something which cannot be understood by the “scientific” theories promulgated by The Brotherhood. The narrator’s decision to ...is his way of resisting the commodification or re-appropriation of his body. Recognizing a pattern in how he is viewed by those in the south and in the north, the narrator concludes: “I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used” (497). The narrator’s blackness has been viewed by both blacks and whites as a “resource” which both groups have tried to weaponize to different ends. Neither groups recognize the narrator’s full humanity and it is this lack of recognition on the part of these groups that the narrator lamentably accepts: “I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same - except I now recognized my invisibility” (497). His recognizing his invisibility is the birth of consciousness. The veil has dropped from his eyes, and he now sees the artificial structure of power that has been imposed on him to limit his ability to be. In Derrida’s terms, he has seen the structurality of structure, and has realized that to society, he is invisible as a thinking being; his creative powers are reduced to the color of his skin, and he is negated a space and time that is his own. I am not arguing that Ellison’s Invisible Man is apolitical. In fact, as many scholars have pointed out, the novel is quite political. According to Sterling Lecater 54

Bland Jr. in his “Being Ralph Ellison: Remaking the Black Public Intellectual in the Age of Civil Rights,” despite being viewed at times as “politically distant,” all of Ellison’s work (fiction and nonfiction) melds “into an elaborate mosaic of social criticism that was itself a political act” (57). It is not that Ellison tried to divorce his literature from depicting the plight of African-Americans as some have claimed, but rather that his methods of depicting said plight diverged from other black writers (i.e. Wright). These differences are “in form and style, not commitment” (Bland 56). Considering the logic of these criticisms then, not only should black art be political but must be overtly so in its protests of the systematic oppression of black people. In other words, a literary work by an African-American writer must be recognizable in performing this political act of resistance - this resistance must be visible. Ellison, however, “emphatically resisted any pressure to formulate a response on the basis of ideology” (Bland 57), instead focusing his artistic efforts on aesthetics through which he would then create a narrative which he hoped would convey to white America what one form of black subjectivity could look like in the U.S. at the time. Ellison was not a separatist. He viewed racial segregation as abhorrent. His vision for himself and indeed for his entire race was an identity that was wholly American without effacing their African heritage. Ellison was of the belief, however, that more important than black collectivism was black individuality; the latter stressing the value of the self and the artistic expression of that self, unbounded from any predetermined path or expectation. As Lucas E. Morel notes in his article, “Ralph Ellison’s American Democratic Individualism,” Ellison would often reference Jazz for the “democratic ethos” contained within the genre (60). It is a rich comparison because it illustrates Ellison’s approach to art as an African American writer. A jazz ensemble is on one hand a coherent collective bound together while one the other hand also about “‘...individual assertion within and against the group’” (qtd. in Morel 60). This means not that the 55 movement away from overt protest in Invisible Man is a movement away from his race and the plight of his race but rather a movement towards individualistic expression of that plight and experience. In his essay, “The Charlie Christian Story,” Ellison posits that: Each True jazz moment...springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents...a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazz man must lose his identity even as he finds it… (Shadow and Act 234) It is not that Ellison believed the individual’s plight was more important than that of the group but rather that Ellison did not believe that the plight and narrative of the group should be at the detriment of the individual. Ellison aimed to intertwine or integrate the “Negro American experience” with that of the larger white-dominated American culture so that it produced a symbiosis. From this perspective of Invisible Man as-synthesizing- cultures, we can appreciate Ellison’s novel as a “complex and richly layered historical meditation” on both American history and African-Americans’ “integral role in the shaping of that history” (Banner-Haley 159). Whereas previous African American writers had collectively used their art to prove their humanity, Ellison uses his art to argue for a multiplicity of identity within African-Americanism. Instead of abiding by the strict racial and political expectations of others from both within and outside his own community to produce protest art, Ellison instead creates a narrative that does not get tied down to a projective aim or identity that someone else has projected onto him. The narrator’s namelessness is but one obvious example of a rejection of an identity. Ellison’s novel is not strictly a work of protest, though it does explore some of the racial and or ethnic burdens placed on black people collectively. This is his aesthetic choice. Relatedly, Ellison does not feel the need to describe his literary 56 tradition as one composed solely of black writers. Thus, the resistance to conform to racial expectation occurs on two fronts: 1) In reality with Ellison’s insistence of aesthetics over politics and his insistence of expressing his subjective experience as a black man on his own terms regardless of what contemporary black writers expected of him and 2) in the imaginative realm with his fictional unnamed hero in Invisible Man who ultimately rejects a co-optation of his race, body and talents and chooses to trace a line of flight away from all of the expectations that have been imposed on him from different sides of the color line.

Tracing a Line of Flight in Invisible Man

“To Whom It May Concern...Keep This Nigger-Boy Running”

(Invisible Man) For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a line of flight is that which moves away from a rigid and coherent system of dominance. In the case of the invisible man, there are two distinct systems of dominance that he is fleeing: 1) that of the larger white-dominated U.S. society and 2) that of his own community that polices group belonging. Any system set to constrain or restrict is composed of what Deleuze and Guattari call lines of hard segmentarity which form clear segments. The life made of lines of rigid segmentarity are those which attempt to make the future “calculable and foreseen” (195). Despite being composed of hard lines of segmentarity, however, “there is no social system that does not leak from all directions...even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight” (A Thousand Plateaus 204). The invisible man, then, can be interpreted as operating along these lines by the novel’s end. The narrator broke away from the old routinized lines of action and created his own path; one that is not dictated by the politics of the majority but that does share their concerns. Political organization 57 and social activism intent on the liberation of a people are not in any way “wrong.” Politics can be a powerful vessel through which to enact social change albeit often through masquerading around as if that organization encompass the collective will of one group of people. Ellison did not disagree with political action, despite the criticisms that he was not political enough. It seems that Ellison’s issue with politics was that it too often becomes an “us against them” game and that the process of codifying that “us” rarely allows room for difference from the group. It is a political organization with similar societal concerns as his own which threaten the narrator’s safety at the end of the novel. Just as the debate surrounding identity politics exists today, so did similar questions around the time Ellison was writing Invisible Man. The issues with a race- based politics is its potential to become concretized – rigid – and thereafter held as the identity to which all of those in the group are expected to conform. This script is utilized by people within a particular racial and/or ethnic group to police others - often inflicting social punishment on those to diverge from the model of authenticity they promulgate.

Sticking with this idea of fleeing and flight, I invoke here Phyllis R. Klotman’s “The Running Man as Metaphor in Ellison’s Invisible Man,” wherein she posits that Ellison is one of many American writers who have invoked the motif of the running man in their literature. Many of these writers are those who Ellison claimed as his literary influences: Twain (Huck and Jim to the river), Melville (towards the sea and the elusive white whale), north American slave narratives (running toward the north, to freedom), Emerson (to the woods), Thoreau (to the pond), etc. (Klotman 277).29 It should be stated that the running in the slave narratives are not only a running towards another identity but is also a matter of life and death. It is Klotman’s argument that in no other literary work

29 For a more in-depth study of journey and journeying motifs as they manifest in the literature of the western literary cannon, see Peter Freese’s “The ‘Journey of Life’ in American Fiction.” 58 is the metaphor “central to the meaning and significance” of the writer’s general work nor is there a literary work in which “the ambiguity” of running is “so consistently sustained”

(278). This ambiguity exists because the narrator does not always control the direction of his journey but is instead propelled or oriented toward a direction through deception (Dr. Bledsoe’s lie to send him North), coercion (The Brotherhood’s relocating him to Manhattan), and violence (Ras the Destroyer’s group of black nationalists chasing him underground). I agree with Klotman in her observation that Ellison’s “running man” is an attempt to combine the running of both the white man and black man. By invoking this literary metaphor, Ellison is very consciously invoking a whole literary tradition – a tradition in which he has placed himself with his novel. This tradition is quintessentially American in the sense that it involves an attempt at a new beginning. This is the promise of the frontier: the idea that the past can be left behind. At the same time, however, Klotman points out the important differences between the running that other white

American characters do (Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield) and the running which Ellison’s protagonist does. Ellison’s literature carries within it a heritage of slave narratives wherein running was not an escape from a metaphorical imprisonment but from a literal one (287) where the prospect of death was real. Ellison’s use of the “running man” motif effectively combines the “disparate” histories of white and black folk in America. Just as with “invisibility,” Ellison reimagines the idea of “running” so that the narrator is not only running away from something but also running toward something else. Ellison is essentially co-opting both invisibility and running and making his narrator and himself as a writer an agent of both wherein he asserts himself. 59

The characterization of Invisible Man as a racialized bildungsroman is accurate because, despite Ellison’s own claims,30 the novel functions in part as a loose and stylized documentation of his own meandering life journey while at the same time producing a narrative space wherein, having embraced a more fluid sense of self, the novel’s narrator is afforded possibilities of becoming. This is only possible in isolation, however, because the protagonist cannot ever completely separate himself from the social mechanisms which cause him to flee. In other words, there is no escape from having to escape. It is true that if one were to accept this logic, then the protagonist can never truly be free because what is motivating his fleeing or flight ultimately retains that control over him. To this end, Invisible Man is a tragic story. The argument made in this chapter, however, is that the invisible man did not have to follow a line of flight – a clean break – away from the life-trajectories which were being offered him. He could have just as easily embraced being a political armature for The Brotherhood or for Ras the Exhorter and his group of black nationals. But our protagonist does neither of these things. He occupies several protean shapes but ultimately embraces his invisibility and occupies a space of amorphousness where the he is temporarily free from constraints (temporary because the narrator makes clear his intent to jump back aboveground when he draws up some sort of political plan) placed on him by society. How did the narrator get to this space which allows him to lead a more open-ended existence? Ceaseless movement, both physical and mental. Movement is an important aspect of Invisible Man; the narrator leaves his school in the south, heads north to New York City, is relocated by The Brotherhood to Harlem, temporarily reassigned to lower Manhattan and then, by the novel’s conclusion, the

30 See “An Interview with Ralph Ellison.” When Richard Kostelanetz proposes that one way to misread Invisible Man is to read it as an autobiography, Ellison replies: Yes, that’s true. [Invisible Man] is not autobiographical” (8). 60 narrator takes to the underground in the vicinity of Harlem. It is important to note, however, that not all of this movement has been of the narrator’s own volition. He has, in many ways, been manipulated or forced to flee his circumstances. More than geographical movement, however, consider the ways in which the protagonist move away from preconceived notions of blackness and the already-formulated trajectories assigned him and towards other possibilities of existence. Our protagonist is indeed running away from something but is also running towards something else entirely. There is agency that is enacted in the protagonist’s fleeing. The move underground does not make the narrator a defeatist; he is not squandering away his time with contemplation and inaction – he did enough of that with the Brotherhood and their various schemas - instead, he is hibernating which he describes in his own words as “a covert preparation for a more overt action” (13). The questions as to what form such “overt” actions would take is left open-ended not because of lack of imagination but rather because a plethora of the forms that action could take. The potential is high. As the Invisible man puts it: “My world had become one of infinite possibilities” (563). Ellison’s seminal work is neither an overtly social- protest novel nor is it a “pure” literary work, entirely divorced from politics. Instead, Invisible Man portrays with equal seriousness the oppressive constraints placed on African-Americans in an overtly racist U.S. social system as well as the reality of how one’s fate is well beyond his or her own control and is instead controlled, or at least influenced by, social institutions and structures. The novel portrays a narrative of a black man that does not conform to the pre(mis)conceived notions of authentic blackness insisted upon by either the characters within the novel or the readers and critics ingesting the novel. Both Ralph Ellison and his African-American protagonist resist fixed lines of trajectories towards predestined endpoints and move towards another form of becoming. Becoming considers that which cannot be predetermined or planned. Invisible Man is both political and pure, it both 61 provides a narrative that avoids co-optation (from those within and outside his community) while also advocating for the recognition of black humanity.

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION

This study calls upon others to take into consideration the indeterminable; the excess of literature and life which elude our processes of “meaning-making.” These processes, however well-intentioned and especially as they exist in literature, have a way of producing something that is concretized into a referent – a fixed identity or fixed expectation of certain identities to produce a particular type of literature. This referent often becomes a mediating factor when studying a literary work because it does not allow that work to speak for itself. This is not to say, however, that the terms used to categorize particular kinds of writers cannot be helpful. While these aspects can absolutely contextual a literary work, they are only ever a partial component of the whole. For example, referring to Ralph Ellison as an African-American writer does well to recognize the man’s racial identity and therefore signify to readers what may potentially occupy his artistic endeavors as a writer. This categorizing of Ellison is also problematic, however, because the term “African-American literature,” as it operated within literary circles of the time and as it operates now, invokes an aesthetic expectation. Similarly, Bolaño being marketed in the anglophone publishing world, does well to invoke the “ethnic expectations” already present in the readership. These notions of “Latin Americanness” are both reaffirmed and negated in Bolaño novel. As I have sought to demonstrate in my previous chapters, present in both The Savage Detectives and Invisible Man are narratives of open-ended ontologies. In other words, I believe that both Bolaño and Ellison offer in their respective works alternate ways of viewing human existence. The types of existences portrayed in these novels vary in their openness/fluidity but nevertheless move away from the accepted routes of living and socially-approved (and therefore recognized as legitimate) identities. When I state that both Bolaño and Ellison produced narratives of becoming – narratives which resist 63 63 identities permitted by social codes – I do not mean to imply that the two novels and the narratives contained therein resist fixed identity-formation in the same ways nor am I glossing over the additional layers of significance of one novel’s moving away from a socially-accepted identity over the other. For example, the criticisms launched toward Ralph Ellison and his Invisible Man for not overtly protesting the social constraints placed on the African-American population at the time are indicative of an aforementioned additional layer of meaning in Ellison’s narrative fluidity. Having been written and published during a time of undisguised and violent racial oppression, Ralph Ellison found himself being pigeonholed as an artist by both those within and outside his own race. This racial dynamic and the implications of diverging one’s art away from what others in one’s racial group had before deemed as the role of your collective art is not as prevalent in Bolaño’s case. For Ellison, his work was expected to be an aesthetic arm of a curated representational politics with racial uplift as its objective. I recognize in both these text instances of movement away from a normalized and routine existence – movement away from a fixed identity that is both conferred upon the narrators in the novels as well as the authors. What often happens is that an author will find her or himself within a set of traditions. From literary to nation or race, an author will usually be expected to view their own writing and sense of self in relation to those that precede them. This is not inherently negative, but it can be problematic when an author tries to situate themselves within a wider, more rhizomatic genealogy as opposed to these linear, national or race-based genealogies. Invoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of a line of flight, I explored both novels and found, within their narratives, instances of movement which, not necessarily involving physical movement, entail a shifting or fleeing away from an ostensibly stable existence. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari posit “...we are made of 64 64 lines” – not literary lines but lines of life which are often the subject of literary works (194).

Deleuze and Guattari argue that there are three types of lines. The first line is of molar segmentarity and this line is by which most people live their lives. Lines of these type are rigid and play a part in cementing coherence of an identity; there are clear distinctions between segments. One could interpret the literary taxonomies which relate to my study – African-American literature and Latin American Literature – as operating along these types of lines for they both help in cohering an otherwise disparate group of texts according to a contestable set of criteria. However arbitrary these taxonomies may seem; however, they do allow for a sense of coherence – a marker which allows a wide body of literary production to be recognizable by a wider audience. Thus, this sense of coherence is useful for publishers, readers, and even writers trying to insert themselves into a literary tradition. The important thing is to not begin to view said markers as being indicative of an “essence” or an adequate understanding of the text itself. It is important to recognize that there always exists an excess which no system can completely restrict. That excess is what eludes the world’s collective efforts of categorization and compartmentalization. It is the indeterminable factor. It is useful here to look back to Grosz who posits that Darwinian evolution is “in principle” both unpredictable and historical because “the nature of species in the past prefigures and provides the raw materials for present and future species but in no way contains, limits, or directs them to any particular goal or destination” (Time Travels 38). I model my understanding of the “nature” of cultural influence after Grosz’s elucidation of Darwinian evolution. This means that my view of Bolaño and Ellison’s individual artistic maneuvers in relation to their individual literary predecessors follow the logic of life and evolution that is contained in the above-mentioned quote. Extending the biological view of life to the cultural sphere as it relates to literary traditions and influences is justified 65 65 because, as Grosz explains: “Tied to neither the natural nor the social spheres alone, the concept of life now serves as a bridge, a point of connection and transition between the biological and cultural, the ways in which matter opens itself up to social transformation…” (Time Travels 37) (my emphasis). Certainly, the literature of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez provide for Bolaño, an erudite Latin American reader, the “raw materials” of their works but that is not to say, however, that Bolaño and his work must necessarily be but a consequential extension of these writers’ collective trajectory. It is the same for Ellison: the works of his African-American literary predecessors have absolutely influenced Ellison’s work but that is not to say that the past should dictate Ellison’s own work. His work is an elaboration of what came before, not an extension. As this analysis has argued, to consider an author’s national, ethnic, and racial group identifications is vital in contextualizing that author’s literary work(s) but is just one facet of the interpretative process. A literary work, because it is made of language and life, will always undermine and exceed the taxonomies which have been bestowed upon it; literature is often categorized for coherence but never fully abides by those categories and so, without fail, will continue to move along and expand.

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