Beyond Bolaño

The Global Latin American Novel

Héctor Hoyos

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. Calling attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective, and representation, he also affirms the lead role of Latin American authors in reshaping world literature.

Focusing on post-1989 Latin American novels and their representation of globalization, Hoyos considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world. Challenging the assumption that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, he identifies the rich textual strategies that estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across global cultural hegemonies. Hoyos shines a light on the unique, avant-garde phenomena that animate these works, such as modeling literary circuits after the dynamics of the art world, imagining counterfactual "Nazi" histories, exposing the limits of escapist narratives, and formulating textual forms that resist worldwide literary consumerism. These experiments help reconfigure received ideas about global culture and advance new, creative articulations of world consciousness.

1

NAZI TALES FROM THE AMERICAS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The transnational availability of literary themes related to Nazism is a peculiar sign of cultural globalization. After countless spy novels and war films, it is not difficult for any writer, regardless of nationality, to find enough referents to set an intrigue storyline in the rubble of Berlin circa 1945. Whether it is a love story that takes place across enemy lines with D-Day looming on the horizon or a story of cruelty and resilience en route to a presumed extermination camp, uniforms, vehicles, and villains all come readily to mind. The more conventional these tropes become, the more lackluster and problematic—or worse, unproblematic—the cultural products that feature them may become. Representing or otherwise engaging Nazism in fiction, it seems, can go two ways. It can be a high-risk, high-stakes operation, where writers might fail at producing a work that might meet the difficult task of understanding a troubling past. Or it can be a low-risk, low-stakes operation, where writers have neither anything to lose nor anything to contribute to broader discussions. In this second scenario, Nazism is little more than a prop or background set for storytelling. As practitioners of a world literature where Nazism is, for better and for worse, a recurrent theme, contemporary Latin American authors encounter these preconditions, much like their peers from everywhere else do.

However, they do not all encounter it in quite the same manner. Most Latin Americans who write about Nazism are under less scrutiny and have arguably more creative freedom than, say, many Israelis or Germans. By the same token, their work can easily go unnoticed, or be deemed irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. What can Latin Americans possibly tell us about Nazism in fiction? It is tempting to assume a priori that anything to that effect would be an instance of derivative prose. However, that assumption is hard to reconcile with the fact that every day there are fewer people alive, of any nationality, who have firsthand knowledge of the heyday of Nazism or of the war itself. With the obvious exception of the descendants of victims and perpetrators, readers and writers from different locales around the world are leveled, vis-à-vis historical Nazism, by the pastness of the past and by the widespread proliferation of its memory. Here we enter into difficult terrain. One may suspect there is a hint of U.S.-Eurocentrism in expecting that contemporary Latin American writers are somehow further removed from and have little to say about those horrible events. At the same time, it might be seen as cavalier for them to write about such topics as if, in some sense, they too “owned” them as part of a collective, thirdhand memory.

It is an interesting paradox: the memory of the deadly exploits of Nazism does not have the same weight in different locales, yet cultural products dealing with them appear to be universal. In my mind, this fascinating tension between specificity and generality makes the transnational phenomenon of “literary Nazism” a key site for examining the relationship between globalization and literature, especially from a Latin American perspective, for the region has an interestingly ambiguous role with regard to certain totalizing accounts that involve Nazism. On the one hand, one could see, in the relatively small role of the region in the Second World War, a reason to question the very name of that confrontation. Why call it a “world” war if Latin America was hardly “involved”? On the other hand, Latin America was deeply affected, and provided many essential raw materials, such as rubber, to both the Allies and the Axis. So one can construct an account of the war, and of the rise of transnational fascism, that is inclusive of the region. In both cases, what is at stake is the agency of the region within totalizing world narratives.¹ The crux of the matter is whether Latin America should be at the margins of history, literary or otherwise—an issue that is also germane for globalization debates.

My reflections on Latin American novels with a Nazi subject or element stem from the idea that Nazism, and fascism more broadly, are such limit-cases for comparability that they invite us to think more carefully about comparison itself. Even if one can objectively ascertain that the literary interest in Nazism transcends nationalities and regions, any attempt to examine it on a world scale cannot be reduced to mere genre analysis. Nazism is simply too thorny a subject to ignore its historical significance, which in itself does not play out in the same way or form in every context. In particular, this chapter shows how Latin American stories of Nazism call to question any attempt to construct a purely literary, teleological historiography of world literature. Even if such a project were feasible at the level of themes and narrative, the “themes” of Nazism clearly demand a transnational consideration of “extra-literary” matters, such as political situation and social context. They cannot be scripted in advance in any meaningful approach or technique, for stories of Nazism resonate differently across various times and locales. When confronted with fascism in literature, clinging to the illusion of disengaged, purely descriptive criticism becomes frivolous. As a result of suspending teleological accounts of literary change, the tendency to regard Latin American culture as imitation grows weaker.

I now turn to analyzing why Roberto Bolaño and other Latin American writers invoke “Nazism,” among all possible signifiers to convey authoritarianism or evil, at the turn of the twenty-first century. I also reflect on the gap between such fictional Nazisms and Nazism as a historical phenomenon, as this has important implications for world-scale literary study by challenging center–periphery models. As we shall see, fantastic accounts of Nazism, along with a Borgesian subtext, provide an improbable and thought-provoking way of exposing ideologies of the global, enabling authors to conceive alternative models of globalization and to reposition contemporary Latin American literature within Weltliteratur. This is the very same gesture, described in the introduction, of formulating representations of the world in a compressed form—or Alephs, after Borges. Provocatively, the Alephs considered in this chapter claim the centrality of Nazism in a global collective imaginary. This operation is not an end in itself, but rather a means for reflecting about the place of Latin America in the world and about the meaning of globalization for culture at large.

A BIZARRO WORLD

Predominantly, the Latin American tradition has recurred to Nazism more as an allegory than as a historical referent. In 1949, Borges inaugurated the trend with “Deutsches Requiem,” a short story about the problem of free will set in a war crimes trial. In the 1990s, Nazism returned as the unlikely backdrop for various “retro” detective stories and as an integral part of the reflections carried out in works of fiction such as Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, In Search of Klingsor by Jorge Volpi, and Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla.² The “Nazism” as portrayed in such works is not quite German National Socialism; it is less a political party or ideology than it is a term that, although not completely removed from its historical meaning, often stands for something else. Discerning what this may be requires considering the works in some detail.

Nazi Literature reads as a mock-erudite encyclopedia of imaginary authors, editors, and intellectuals with varied right-wing tendencies. Its cross-referenced entries recount the lives and works of over thirty such characters across several decades, alternating between dramatism and comic relief. The founding figure of the group, socialite writer and arts matron Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, is born in Buenos Aires in 1894 and dies in the same city at the age of ninety-nine after having spent extensive periods of time traveling abroad in Europe, the Aegean Sea, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad, among other far-flung destinations. Similarly wandering lives distinguish most characters of the book, even projecting themselves into the future: the diplomat and land-artist Willy Schürholz is born in Chile in 1956 and dies in Uganda in 2029. Clearly, Bolaño’s ambition is to trace a different constellation than the one he sketched in The Savage Detectives—in this earlier work, he focuses on Heimito’s kin.³ In addition to itinerancy and extremist political views, most characters share a peculiar passion for literature that borders with obsession and, strikingly, rage. Some have a direct involvement in violent acts, such as Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, a military pilot who is also a former torturer for the Pinochet regime and a poet, while most do not go beyond venting bigotry through their poetry. The ensemble defines an ominous world-consciousness, a parallel globalization where diverse forms of fascism take the place that the market economy has had in making our current world, for better or for worse, a more integrated place.

After a few entries, the reader will likely overcome the initial confusion of not knowing for certain whether the book is a work of fiction or a work of reference. But the obvious question that follows is not an easy one to answer: what is the relationship between the entries? This is admittedly an open-ended question, as uncertainty is deeply engrained into this thought-provoking book. A fair amount of free association connects the lives of these “Nazi writers”; however, it is clear that randomness alone cannot sustain the book’s apparatus, nor explain the fact that authors who are not, strictly speaking, Nazis are grouped under that rubric. It would appear then that Nazism is a synecdoche for the broader phenomenon of fascism. More specifically, Bolaño is interested in the underlying traits of various forms of fascism, or what Umberto Eco would call “ur-Fascism.” For Eco, “behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.”⁴ Despite the fact that fascism is “a beehive of contradictions,” Eco notes, there is a family resemblance among the diverse political phenomena that fall under that name, which includes features such as the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, the vindication of action for action’s sake, the fear of difference, and the view of life as permanent warfare, among others.⁵ Eco takes this notion of family resemblance from Wittgenstein, allowing him to describe fascism as a game that can be played in many forms:

abc bcd cde def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.⁶

Bolaño takes to heart the idea that fascism is this kind of a combinatory game and dwells on its permutations. He does so to the point that even family resemblance becomes impossible to detect, leaving it to readers to speculate on the limits of ideological kinship and ur-fascist sensibility. In a notable example, the narrator mentions a series of pictures, one of which features Hitler holding Edelmira’s daughter in his arms, a product of a brief audience that takes place in 1929. As a grown woman, the philo-Nazi daughter will remember with affection this family portrait of sorts, which is all the more disquieting considering that the photo occurs in the context of gift-bearing, as though the baby had been offered to the Führer along with the verses of Martín Fierro that were translated on that occasion. Here Bolaño fabricates a vague family resemblance between Nazism and Argentine nationalist poetry: the picture is as close as any character will actually be to Hitler, despite the umbrella denomination of “Nazi literature.” And yet Nazism seems to spread across locales and epochs, reappearing in different contexts and languages—in a word, globalizing.

In light of this, I would like to propose that the paratactical unfolding of the encyclopedia responds to three key principles. First, there is an overarching narrative: the unfolding of the imaginary cultural formation of Nazi (i.e., ur-fascist) literature. In the classic terms that Raymond Williams used to describe change in culture, this process would have an emergent, a dominant, and a residual moment.⁷ In this case, each stage parallels to distorted, perverse renderings of actual cultural landmarks: the emergent would correspond to late nineteenth-century Argentine criollismo, the dominant to the Chilean neo-avant-garde of the 1970s, and the residual to science fiction novels yet to be written in the United States in the thirties of the twenty-first century. As in Williams, the emergent and the residual can change places, which communicates the sense of danger—the threat of the return of fascism—that determines the plot’s suspense. Secondly, there is the incorporation of numerous references from diverse sources. The cannibalism that Bakhtin attributed to the genre of the novel applies here and then some, as this work not only “devours” several genres, but also different artistic media. There is a veritable mash-up of the motifs in Borges’s metaphysical tales, including the encyclopedia of a parallel world in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) and the teratology in Historia universal de la infamia (1935; trans. A Universal History of Infamy, 1972), among many others.⁸ Additionally, the book evokes performances by Escena de Avanzada, including its theoretical tenets in the work of Walter Benjamin, and draws on comics and other heterodox materials as well. Thirdly, there is a will to challenge the assumed sanctity and autonomy of literary space (the “ivory tower”) through a depiction of Nazism as something that takes hold on the everyday, that stays much too alive, and that lies closer than one may think, if under different garbs.

We also witness the reductio ad absurdum of the roman à clef. Bolaño follows the implications of writing a book that fictionalizes actual people to its ultimate, absurd consequences: even the author and the reader will be alluded to. And so a character named “Bolaño” appears in the last entry, followed by an “Epilogue for Monsters,” where the reader—the monster—can find an annotated bibliography of additional Nazi journals, books, commentary, and writers. Just as absurdly, one character can resemble several actual writers and intellectuals at a time. Consider the case of Thompson de Mendiluce and Max Mirebalais, whose midsection entry deems him “the Caribbean’s bizarre answer to Pessoa” (“el Pessoa bizarro del Caribe”).⁹ Through paronomasia, Thompson de Mendiluce evokes Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson (1786–1868), the renowned hostess of the tertulias (salons) where the Argentine national anthem was sung for the first time; her chapbook “Fervor” alludes to Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) by the young Borges; and her leading role in the fictional journal La Argentina Moderna brings to mind Victoria Ocampo’s involvement in Sur.¹⁰ The Haitian Mirebalais takes after the Portuguese master, although the character resorts both to heteronymy and to plagiarism; he also alludes to the Martinican Aimé Césaire by not giving up on “cierto tipo de negritud”; and, again through paronomasia, as Karim Benmiloud notes, to Rabelais.¹¹

But the adjective “bizarro” is crucial for elucidating this mishmash of epithets and evocations. Indeed, Mariquita was known as “la del destino bizarro.”¹² Although “bizarro” in Spanish means “brave” or “generous”—not “strange” as in the English “bizarre,” or “angry” as in the Italian bizarro—it seems Bolaño used the faux amis as a prompt. In the last line of Edelmira’s biography, he w...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Globalization as Form
• 1. Nazi Tales from the Americas at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
• 2. The Cosmopolitics of South–South Escapism
• 3. All the World’s a Supermarket (and All the Men and Women Merely Shoppers)
• 4. Iconocracy and Political Theology of Narconovelas
• 5. On Duchamp and Beuys as Latin American Writers
• Conclusion: The Promise of Multipolarism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index