Notes on Bolaño’s “Vanguardia
inexistente”
University of Pennsylvania
Que aunque el gusto nunca
más
vuelve a ser el mismo,
en la vida los olvidos
no suelen durar.
Jaime
Gil de Biedma
My first
exposure to Roberto Bolaño’s work was a result of
provoked chance. As I was leaving one of the bookstores that I like to
visit, I
happened to note a pile of big books with an enigmatic title. The
volume in
question was Bolaño’s massive final novel(s), 2666.
Attracted by the repeated numbers of the title, the somber
picture of the cover and Susan Sontag’s words of praise, I decided to
buy
this magnus opus of an unknown
writer. Time was on my side, and twelve hundred pages did not seem
excessive.
On the contrary: at a time when most novels can be bought, consumed and
forgotten in less than an afternoon, the sheer size of the novel
functioned as
an incentive to spend, a welcome invitation to the slow pace of ancient
storytelling. Chance soon led to
intention, as I spent the following weeks searching for and reading
through
Bolaño’s extensive corpus: from his early poetry to his short
stories (Llamadas telefónicas,
El Gaucho insufrible), his
award-winning novel (Los detectives
salvajes) to his minor novellas (Monsieur
Pain, Amuleto, etc).
Less
than five years later, Roberto Bolaño has become THE booming
Latin American writer of the 21st century. Not only has
editorial
Anagrama already published two posthumous works (La
Universidad Desconocida and El
secreto del mal), but the Chilean writer is also the subject of
numerous
conferences and dissertations in progress. To my veiled disappointment,
individual infatuation has turned into collective enthusiasm. The
cynical mind
may attribute this sudden success to Bolaño’s tragic death at
the
age of 50, at the peak of his fame. While this explanation may be a
valid one,
it fails to consider the extent to which Bolaño’s writings have
led to the proliferation of more writing, that is, the extent to which
Bolaño’s corpus has led to the formation of a disparate
readership, a community of anonymous individuals that respond to the
same words
with their own. Whether in specialized academic journals, local and
national
newspapers, blogs or other forms of digital media, Bolaño’s name
is a source of readerly and writerly desire, the Cesárea
Tinajero of
many Arturo Belanos, many Ulises Limas. As such, Bolaño’s work
seems to realize Jean Luc Nancy’s definition of literature in his essay
“La Comparution/The Compearance”:
literature
– precisely that which we generally engage in more or
less since the period of ‘Marx’ – seem[s] devoted to
communicate the common and to offer itself thus as its own space, as
the in and the between of the
common[.]…In this sense (does it have
another?), ‘literature’ offers the in-common (its only reason to
be) as a completely buried memory, a memory also totally, invincibly
present (386).
But what
is that in-common stuff to be found in Bolaño’s
text? What is that shared though forgotten memory that so many readers
recognize in his writing?
The
hypothesis of this essay is that the popular response to
Bolaño’s work results from the author’s stubborn relation to
what is usually called the historical avant-gardes. At a time when the
possibility of utopian or emancipatory narratives is typically seen as
a symptom
of “lumpenismo: enfermedad infantil de intelectual,” if not with
outright suspicion, his writings invite us to question the ideology of
resignation that dominates contemporary thinking (Detectives
181). Unlike any author of his generation, Bolaño
interrogates our accepted readings of the short twentieth century, and
the ways
in which its aesthetic and political legacy may still be lurking on the
horizon. That is, whether the avant-gardes are as “historical” as
we tend to believe. In his short stories, his novels (Estrella
distante, Amuleto,
Los Detectives salvajes or 2666) or
his non-fiction, Bolaño
repeatedly returns to the site of the vanguards, which one of his
characters
describes as a “región imaginaria o real, pero desleída
por
el sol y en un tiempo pasado, olvidado o que al menos aquí, en
París, en la decada de los setenta, ya no tenía la menor
importancia” (Detectives 240).
In the first decade of the 21st century, the importance of
the
avant-gardes is more fragile than ever. Whether in metropolitan Paris
or
“peripheral” Mexico, they are dead and buried, lost in the
“extramuros de la civilización” (Ibid). Like the
many writers that populate Bolaño’s
narratives – from Cesárea Tinajero to Arc(h)imboldi, Pierre
Brune
to Dunozer de Sergonzac, Auxilio Lacouture to Michel Bulteau, actual
founder of
the Manifeste Électrique – one is tempted to believe that the
avant-gardes may never have existed, “como si estuvieran pero no
estuvieran.” (Detectives 329).
Bolaño
is obviously not the only author to address the many
avant-garde movements of the 20th century. A quick search of
the
term “avant-garde” in the MLA bibliography results in 3062 entries,
many of which date from the last few years. And yet, in spite of this
growing
number of writings about the avant-gardes, one can only agree with
Fernando
Rosenberg’s assertion that “for more than twenty years now,
postmodern criticism has issued a death certificate for the idea of
avant-garde, when it didn’t defend it with a gloss of nostalgia” (166).
Like often, quantity is not an indication of vitality, but rather a
deceptive
symptom of the morose tone that characterizes most writings on the
topic.
Reactive nostalgia is however absent from Bolaño’s retrospective
glance at the avant-gardes. Los
Detectives salvajes may be read as a fictional account of Mario
Santiago
and Roberto Bolaño’s actual involvement with infrarrealismo
in the Mexican 70s, but as Rosario Alvarez says in
the novel, and the Chilean author might repeat, “no tengo dinero para
la
nostalgia” (Detectives 420).
Neither does Bolaño’s interest in the vanguards stem from the
denial of historicity, or the necrophiliac tendencies of the archivist.
The
author’s recovery of “poetas perdidos” and “revistas
perdidas” is not about the merely historical and anecdotical, that is,
the methodical recording of forgotten names and the groups they were
part of (Detectives 240). To quote Ulises
Lima’s response to Manuel Maples Arce’s assertion that “el
estridentismo ya es historia y como tal sólo puede interesar a
los
historiadores de la literatura,” “a mí me interesa y no soy
un historiador” (Detectives 176-177).
More precisely, Bolaño’s prose invites us to consider the
present
pastness of the avant-gardes, the potential “pirámides” that
populate “el subsuelo” of the Mexican desert (Detectives
145). If Bolaño rightly affirms that “todo
lo que he escrito es una carta de amor o de despedida a mi propia
generación,” it is equally true that the author’s love story
is still unfinished (Entre
paréntesis 37). Los Detectives
salvajes is not only about the author’s former faith in “un
ideal que hacía más de cincuenta años que estaba
muerto,” or about the failure of the vanguards, but also an intimation
of
what the avant-gardes could (and should) be(come) (Ibid).
An imaginary version of the avant-gardes after their
declared death.
For
instance, in his piece “Conjeturas sobre una frase de
Breton,” the author of 2666
goes back to a buried line from a lost interview of the 70s, in which
“André Breton decía que tal vez había llegado la
hora de que el surrealismo entrara en la clandestinidad. Sólo ahí, creía Breton,
podía subsistir y prepararse para los desafíos futuros” (Entre paréntesis 191). While
this “propuesta, atractiva,
equívoca, nunca volvió a ser formulada,” the author notes
that “siempre me pareció extraño el tupido velo que
cayó sobre esta, llamémosla así, posibilidad
estratégica” (192). This
is not to say that Bolaño actually believes in the reality of
such a
far-fetched possibility. The text does not function as an affirmation,
as much
as a series of questions: “¿Hubo un surrealismo clandestino
operativo en los últimos treinta años del siglo XX? Y si
lo hubo,
¿cómo evolucionó, qué propuestas en materia
plástica, literaria, arquitectónica,
cinematográfica
realizó?” (192) While these interrogations remain in silent
suspension, “en el umbral del misterio,” and it may well be that
“los surrealistas clandestinos jamás hayan existido o sean,
ahora,
sólo una colección no muy numerosa de viejos humoristas,”
the very fact of raising this possibility goes against the consensual
grain of
current criticism and the accepted death of the avant-gardes.
Similarly, a
passage from Amuleto contemplates the
imaginary consequences of an improbable encounter between Ruben
Darío
and Vicente Huidobro: “tras su fructífero encuentro con
Darío, [Huidobro] hubiera sido capaz de fundar una vanguardia
más
vigorosa aún, una vanguardia que ahora llamamos la vanguardia
inexistente” (57-58). Here again, this unlikely scenario remains at the
level of mere conjecture. However, both this absent encounter and the
idea of a
subterranean surrealism force us to reexamine our assessment of what
constitutes an avant-garde, that is, to pluralize our understanding of
it in
order to locate its unrealized potentialities and think though the
current
moment. Part of the reason behind the rejection of the avant-gardes is
indeed
due to the fact that “la fin des avant-gardes n’a pas
modifié l’idée de l’avant-garde” (the end of
the avant-gardes has not modified the idea of the avant-garde)
(Meschonnic 86).
But as Bolaño suggests, if the avant-gardes are not exactly
dead,
neither is their definition or configuration. Delineating the contours
of this
“vanguardia inexistente” will be the topic of this paper.
As Henri
Meschonnic explains in Modernité
Modernité, both the supporters and detractors of the
avant-gardes
ground their respective judgments in a shared universalization of the
term.
Because of their insistence on using avant-garde
in the singular, the multiple and often contradictory meanings covered
by the
military metaphor are typically lost in ahistorical value judgments.
More
importantly, this standardizing gesture “oublie que la
distribution
dans le temps et dans l’espace, et la valeur, du terme avant-garde, est
loin d’être partout la même” (forgets that the spatial
and temporal distribution and value of the term avant-garde is far from
being
the same everywhere) (84). According to this unitary and mythical
discourse,
the idea of the avant-garde is synonymous with Marinetti’s Futurist
movement.
At the level of temporality, this futurist bias means that the
avant-garde
is usually understood as a radical effort to erase the past and the
dusty
weight of tradition. Not only the past, but also the present, hence the
need to
project the future and the production of the new in the shape of
aggressive
manifestos and grand promises. The time of the avant-garde is then
structured
by a linear narrative of progress, and the antiquated opposition
between
“la isla del pasado…donde el peso de lo ilusorio era tal que
la isla se iba hundiendo cada día un poco más en el
río” and “la isla del futuro…cuyos habitantes eran
soñadores y agresivos, tan agresivos…que probablemente
acabarían comiéndose los unos a los otros” (Detectives
367). The ancient is opposed
to the modern, the old to the new.
While
persistent, such a simplistic reading ignores the dialectic
between present and future that structures the temporality of
avant-garde art.
In spite of the avant-gardes’s frenetic production of manifestos, and
the
indefatigable succession of -isms throughout the 20th
century, the
time of the avant-gardes is that of the radical present, the here and
now,
immediately: “un groupe d’avant-garde est ce qui décide un
présent” (an avant-garde group is that which decides a present)
(Badiou 191). Of course, this doctrine of the present and new
beginnings raises
a series of doubts, among which the possibility that the present be
nothing but
a pale replica of the past, that the imagined “commencement” be
only a “recommencement” (192). It is in the context of this anxiety
of repetition that one must read the imperative of manifestos. More
than actual
guidelines for the creation of the new man, or the shape of art to
come, they
function as rhetorical defenses against the fragility of the present,
the
awareness that “le présent est constamment sous la menace du
passé” (the present is under the constant threat of the past)
(189).
In
contrast, the present of Bolaño’s avant-garde is
grounded in the productive use of repetition, and the acknowledgment
that the
past can only be traversed by being repeated: “los actuales real
visceralistas caminaban hacia atrás…[d]e espaldas, mirando un
punto pero alejándonos de él, en línea recta hacia
lo
desconocido” (17). And indeed, in Los
Detectives salvajes, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima’s foundation of realismo visceral in the 70s presents
itself as a repetition (with difference) of the homonymous movement
that was
founded by Cesárea Tinajero in the 1920s. This is not to say
that
Bolaño’s “vanguardia inexistente” denies the
singularity of the present, or the possibility of the new, but rather
that this
actual novelty is charged with the active residues of past generations,
“por el fantasma, mejor dicho, de Cesárea que aún bailaba
en aquellos establecimientos aparentemente moribundos” (297). The novel
is then structured by two contradictory (though inseparable) lines of
flight.
On the one hand, it offers a polyphonic account of realismo
visceral from the 70s to the 90s. On the other, this
movement forward is undercut by the search for Cesárea Tinajero,
which
is also a search for the remains of the past. In one of his diary
entries,
dated January 1st, Juan García Madero describes this
chiasmic
temporality, and the constant overlap between past and present,
yesterday and
today: “hoy me di cuenta que lo que escribí ayer en realidad lo
escribí hoy: todo lo del treintaiuno de diciembre lo
escribí el
uno de enero, es decir hoy, y lo que escribí el treinta de
diciembre lo
escribí el treintaiuno. Lo que
escribo hoy en realidad lo escribo mañana, que para mí
será hoy y ayer, y también de alguna manera
mañana: un
día invisible” (557).
If “hoy”
bears the traces of “ayer,” it is
“también de alguna manera mañana.” And yet, this
future can only be “un día invisible.” In other words, if
the present of Bolaño’s vanguard is traversed by the pull of the
past and the figure of repetition, there is no need to envelop it in
the
fictive future of “manifiestos, proclamas, refundaciones [y] mayor
claridad ideológica” (Detectives
323). The present cannot be reduced to “a proyecto prefijado” but
only regress forward towards “lo desconocido,” because as Luis
Sebastián Rosado explains, “la otredad era dable de ver en
cualquier parte” (228, 278). What matters is not the outcome, but
simply
the act of doing, the gesture, whatever that may be: “todo es empezar,
dice el refrán” (296). In that sense, Bolaño’s
refusal to name the shape of things to come echoes with Breton’s
assertion that “la rébellion porte sa justification en
elle-même” (rebellion itself bears its own justification) (qtd.
in
Badiou 201). The value of the avant-gardes cannot be measured according
to
their supposed failure. On the contrary, the crucial import of the
vanguards
consists in the affirmation of the immediacy of the present and
self-sufficiency of rebellion, regardless of what Badiou calls “la
pragmatique des résultats” (the pragmatic of results), that is,
the language of “lucid” realism: “que es como decir,
muchachos…que veía los esfuerzos y los sueños, todos
confundidos
en un mismo fracaso, y que ese fracaso se llamaba alegría” (Detectives 358).
This
vanguard without promises (and results) brings me to the
sociological definition of the avant-garde. It is well known that
avant-garde
means “group” and organized political intervention. This also
entails the leadership of strong leaders, the most cited of whom is
usually
André Breton and his authoritarian “governing” of the
Surrealist group. In the early pages of Detectives
salvajes, Belano’s attitude seems modeled on the example of the
author of Nadja. We are thus told
that “Belano ha empezado a echar a más poetas del grupo….Belano
se cree Breton (100-101). And yet, this “primera purga en el realismo
visceral” soon proves to be a joke, a comical nod towards the
impossibility
of collapsing the aesthetic and the political – ultimate dream of the
“historical” avant-gardes (97). As
Jacinto Requena explains, “la
mayoría de los expulsados… ni siquiera saben que han sido
expulsados (101). This is not to
say that the “expulsados” were not part of realismo
visceral, but rather that they never wore a membership
card, that their belonging to it was never officialized or written
down. In the
final decades of the 20th century (and the early years of
the 21st),
the alignment of aesthetic avant-gardism with party politics was (is)
nothing
but “un ideal que hacía más de cincuenta años que
estaba muerto” (Entre
paréntesis 37).
In fact,
even at the time when this ideal was still alive, not all of
the –isms that fall under the avant-garde rubric adhered to the
militant
conception of the group that we find in Surrealism or Futurism. For
instance,
an Expressionist text from 1913 openly rejects this received definition
of the
avant-garde: “Wir sind Einzelne, die sich hier in gleichem Strebem
zusammentum,
um doch Einzelne zu bleiben” (We are individuals who assemble in a
common
effort, but in order to remain individuals) (qtd. in Meschonnic 94-95).
In this
passage, individual and community do not function as antithetical, but
rather
as coextensive terms. The preserving of individuality appears as a
necessary
condition for the existence of a viable community, just like the sense
of
community prevents individuality from turning into individualism. In Los Detectives salvajes,
Bolaño’s account of realismo
visceral also oscillates between the longing to be part of a group
and the
awareness of the excess that constitutes the individual. For instance,
even
though the accumulation of recorded voices to be found in the text
revolves
around a same center, a same “punto microscópico” - namely, realismo visceral, the author, date and
location of each source is carefully marked and individualized (106).
More
importantly, the framing narration is offered by Juan García
Madero, an
absent member of the group. As Ernesto García Grajales,
“único estudioso de los real visceralistas que existe en
Mexico,” tells us: “¿Juan García Madero? No,
ése no me suena. Seguro
que nunca perteneció al grupo. Hombre, si lo digo yo que soy la
máxima autoridad en la materia, por algo será….Yo tengo
sus
revistas, sus panfletos, documentos inencontrables hoy por hoy” (551). García Madero was of course part of realismo
visceral, but Grajales’s
ideological and textual conception of what defines an aesthetic group
or
community does not account for the margins that both exceed and
delineate the
page. In that respect, it may also be useful to mention “el primer y
ultimo número de Caborca,”
edited by Cesárea Tinajero, and in which “la mayoría de
los
publicados no son del grupo” (271). If Belano and Lima’s realismo
visceral can and should be read
as a movement or community, it is then a peculiar one, in which
“ocurría algo raro, faltaba algo, la simpatía, la viril
comunión
en unos ideales, la franqueza que preside todo acercamiento entre
poetas latinoamericanos.”
(151).
As
suggested by the lack of virility of realismo visceral,
Bolaño’s critique of avant-garde
groupism relates to the mysoginist subtext that undergirds our received
definitions of aesthetic communities, in which there is no room for
Gertrude
Stein, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Alice B. Toklas, Unica Zurn,
Joyce
Mansour, Marianne Moore and other members of the “Movimiento
Feminista,” which never was a “movement” (Detectives
100). And indeed, it is no
coincidence that the literary luminaries of Bolaño’s poesía
mexicana are all women:
Auxilio Lacouture, María and Angélica Font, Laura
Jauregui,
Cesárea Tinajero and the late Laura Damián.
Bolaño’s
rejection of communal masculinism is further illustrated by Belano and
Lima’s asexual tendencies, Piel Divina’s homosexuality and Ernesto
San Epifanio’s memorable genealogy of “el panorama
poético” :
dentro del inmenso océano de la poesía
distinguía
varias corrientes: maricones, maricas, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones,
mariposas, ninfos y filenos. Las dos corrientes mayores, sin embargo,
eran la
de los maricones y la de los maricas. Walt Whitman, por ejemplo, era un
poeta
maricón. Pablo Neruda, un poeta marica. William Blake era
maricón, sin asomo de duda, y Octavio Paz marica. Borges era
fileno, es
decir de improviso podía ser maricón y de improviso
simplemente
asexual. (83)
Against
the virile community of sympathy and shared ideals,
Bolaño posits the “filena” community of chance encounters
and improvised intimacies. The members of realismo
visceral are not only the signatures of García Grajales’s
“documentos inencontrables,” but also and mainly the migratory
voices that traverse Los Detectives
salvajes, regardless of place, time and occupation: those who read
and
write, but also the “pandilla de analfabetas funcionales” who
accompany them; the teenage prostitute, the neonazi borderline, the
French
sailors, the small-sized bullfighter, the African guerrilla fighters
and many
more (56). In brief, all of those who once spoke the same words, who
once
shared their own disctinctive argot, “que en el fondo era la
única
llave – junto con el dinero – que servía para todo”
(531).
Speaking
of argot, I would now like to locate the reciprocal relation
between community and individual at the level of Bolaño’s
language. More specifically, I am thinking of the author’s distinctive
use of orality. Instead of an actual narrative or linear story, Los Detectives salvajes is structured as
a series of accumulated fragments and scattered entries. While the
first and
third sections of the novel consist of Juan García Madero’s
diary
notes, the middle section can be described as a discordant symphony of
voices
and characters. Among them, we find “Manuel Maples Arce, paseando por
la
Calzada del Cerro, bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico DF, agosto de 1976”;
“Auxilio Lacouture, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico
DF, diciembre de 1976” (she is also the narrator of Bolaño’s
novella Amuleto);
“Joaquín Vázquez Amaral, caminando por el campus de una
Universidad del Medio Oeste norteamericano, febrero de 1977”;
“Daniel Grossman, sentado en un banco de la Alameda, Mexico DF, febrero
de 1993”; “Jacobo Urenda, rue du Cherche Midi, Paris, junio de
1996”. As indicated by the specific date and location of these few
examples, the second section of the novel reads as a series of
transcribed
interviews, or what Reinaldo Laddaga calls Espectáculos
de Realidad. Bolaño’s writing is thus marked by all the
linguistic detours of spoken speech: colloquiallisms, unfinished
sentences,
repeated phrases, amnesic lapses and distorted syntax. In that sense,
Bolaño’s novel can be read as a performance, an effort to
produce
the illusion of live presence. The same could be inferred from the
author’s corpus as a whole, in which the many intertextual nods and
constant rewritings function as emulations of the storytelling
tradition. The
unusual length of Bolaño’s two major novels (Los
Detectives salvajes and 2666)
also points to the needed time of storytelling, the lack of which was
mourned
by Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “The Storyteller.” And yet,
Bolaño’s writing of extensive works and his use of first person
narration cannot be reduced to a longing for presence. In other words,
Bolaño’s “syntaxe oratoire” (oratory syntax) – a
term that, coincidentally, Alain Badiou uses to describe the language
of
avant-garde manifestos – also cancels the claim to presence,
authenticity
or individual autonomy (Le Siècle 196).
In
reference to Lima and Belano’s extraneous syntony, Amadeo
Salvatierra mentions that “tenían las mentes y las lenguas
intercomunicadas. Uno de
ellos podía empezar a hablar y detenerse en mitad de su
parlamento y el
otro podía proseguir con la frase o con la idea como si la
hubiera
iniciado él” (142). While
this unusual phenomenon refers to the two founding figures of realismo visceral, it also applies to
the other characters of the novel, many of whom complete unfinished
sentences
from others, regardless of place or time. Similarly, many voices repeat
the
exact same phrases or fragments, on which they then improvise. A good
example
of this process can be found in chapter 23, in which the various actors
finish
their account with a different riff on the same chord: “todo lo que
empieza como comedia acaba como tragedia,” “todo lo que empieza como
comedia acaba como tragicomedia,” “todo lo que empieza como comedia
acaba como ejercicio criptográfico,” “Todo lo que empieza
como comedia acaba como un responso en el vacío” (484-496). As
much as the respective entries are individualized, the
intercommunication
between voices and systematic use of repetition also contributes to
blur the
source of speech, to dislocate the subject and turn it onto a
de-individualized
machine (a similar procedure can also be found in Amuleto,
where narrator Lacouture loses her teeth and needs to
cover her mouth as she speaks her tale). With its use of what can be
called
“machinic orality,” Bolaño’s work can then be read as
an avant-garde revision of the “historical” avant-garde, and
particularly
surrealism, in which the use of broken syntax, sounds, onomatopeias and
other
textual markers of orality functions as a primitivist return to
origins, the
unconscious, and other signifiers of authenticity. In Los
Detectives salvajes, this backward attitude is made clear by
Manuel Maples Arce’s fear of the depersonalizing effects of the
“magnetófono,” of hearing “su propia voz, los pasos de
uno mismo, los pasos del enemigo” (176). In contrast, García
Madero marvels at the wonders of the “tocadiscos,” in which
“sonaba la voz de Olga Guillot y no la de Billie Holiday,” which
emanated from the same machine on the previous day (38).
While it
may be a coincidence, this brief though crucial reference to
Billie Holiday and jazz may help us clarifying the different points
heretofore
discussed. Similarly to Bolaño’s imaginary avant-garde, jazz
music
stands in a productive relation to the past, one that consists in the
constant
rewriting and signifying of the musical tradition. Here, I am referring
in
particular to the centrality of jazz standards, which, like realismo
visceral, are sites of both the
déjà vu and jamais entendu.
As Julio Córtazar
writes in the opening lines of La vuelta
al día en ochenta mundos, jazz music is “esa
invención
que sigue siendo fiel al tema que combate y transforma e irisa” (7).
Fidel, because artists like Duke Ellington, Lester Young, John Coltrane
or
Albert Ayler have all played the same title, blown the same name;
combatively
inventive, because each of them gave it his own respective coloring,
his own
distinctive sound, regardless of the “cangrejo de lo
auténtico” (7) Of course, the most cited example of this
“palimpsestuous” process is Coltrane’s masterful
interpretation of “My Favourite Things,” in which the saxophonist
both extended and disfigured Gerschwin’s insipid pop tune. The
temporality of a jazz performance is thus a multi-layered one, in which
the
past, present and future coalesce in the intrusion of the now (the
new). This
sonic future is however an unpredictable one, an invitation to the
vagaries of “lo
abierto…esa respiracion de la esponja en la que continuamente entran y
salen peces de recuerdo, alianzas fulminantes de tiempos y estados y
materias
que la seriedad consideraría inconciliables” (7). To the chagrin
of the serious mind, the day after tomorrow cannot be determined or
promised,
but only improvised, whispered in-between the notes. If we now turn to
the idea
of community, jazz improvisation is also analogous to the excessive
dialectic
between individual and group that we find in Bolaño’s
“vanguardia inexistente”. This is particularly true of “free
jazz,” in which the individual heroics of bebop were supplanted by a
return to the collective improvisation of the early days of jazz. Here
again,
the paradigmatic example is probably Coltrane’s “big band thing”
in the seminal album Ascension, where
the two long tracks (40:23 and 38:31) can be described as sonic waves
of
simultaneous solos. The juxtaposed sounds cannot be traced back to
their
originary sources, their individual site of production. Finally, this
musical
detour brings me to the third and last segment of this paper, in which
I will
focus on Bolaño’s relation to the market and the ways in which
it
informs his vision of the literary.
Theodor
Adorno’s rejection of African American music was based on an
acute observation: jazz musicians never defined themselves in
opposition to the
culture industry and the logic of mass consumption. On the contrary,
the
development of jazz and its eventual consecration as a legitimate
artform (i.e.
America’s classical music) was made possible because of
its dissemination through the music industry and the
rapid growth of reproducible technologies in the early decades of the 20th
century. In that sense, the popular (if not populist) thrust of jazz
music
differs from the heroic understanding of art that informed many
avant-garde
groups. In spite of their aesthetic co-optation of advertising
techniques and
the language of the new media, the avant-gardes still adhered to a
romantic
conception of art. They considered the production of the beautiful as
the
highest form of life, and a means of resistance to the homogenizing
forces of
the consumerism. As Perry Anderson writes, “the market as an organizing
principle of culture and society was uniformly detested by every
species of
modernism,” from the avant-garde to its other manifestations (qtd. in
Rosenberg 7). If Fernando Rosenberg is thus right to affirm that “one
of
the main features of the avant-gardes…is the questioning of the place
of
the arts in society,” this questioning was mainly a response to the
decentering effects of commodification, a last attempt to salvage the
imagined
autonomy of the artistic field (166). Bridging the gap between art and
life may
be THE common denominator of the avant-gardes, but this effort was too
often
grounded in a conception of life as pristine purity, imaginary
elsewhere. In
brief, in an artistic conception of life, rather than a lively
conception of
art. Even today, the critical efforts to valorize the avant-garde still
seem to
be “based on a nostalgic quest for the lost place of art as a master
arbiter of cultural value” (Rosenberg 15). Such an idealized,
anti-commercial vision of art (and particularly literature) as space of
transcendence cannot be found in the writings of Roberto Bolaño,
which
relentlessly question the “sacred” status of literature.
If
André Breton and his Surrealist cohort conceived of literature
as the guiding site of the revolution to come, Bolaño’s texts
repeatedly point to the constitutive insufficiency of the literary. For
instance, in Amuleto, Auxilio
Lacouture’s literary “profecías” are preceded by her
affirmation of the “no-poder” of literature, and particularly
poetry (134). Similarly, Los Detectives
salvajes is not exactly about the writings of Belano, Lima and
other
members of realismo visceral, but
rather about their wandering journeys across the globe, from Latin
America to
Africa, Europe to Asia. Cesárea Tinajero, founding member of the
first
wave of the group, also turns out to be a poet without poem, a writer
without
words. Or rather, her only poem consists of three enigmatic lines: “una
línea recta,” “una línea ondulada” and
“una línea quebrada” (399). This does not mean that one
should stop writing or reading, but simply that words should not be
privileged,
that books too are disposable commodities, unexceptional artifacts.
This is
made comically clear by Ulises Lima’s profane relation to his
friends’ libraries. As
the outraged Simone Darrieux remarks: “escribía en los
márgenes de los libros….Y hacía algo todavía
más chocante que escribir en los márgenes. Probablemente
no me lo
crean, pero se duchaba con un libro. Lo juro. Leía en la ducha”
(237). Even more explicitly, Lisandro Mosales once shares his
disenchanted view
of literature, and his impatience with “los literatos”: “la
vida hay que vivirla, en eso consiste todo. Me lo dijo un teporocho que
me
encontré el otro día al salir del bar La Mala Senda. La literatura no vale nada” (301). Examples
of such phrases could be accumulated. However, more than in these
recurrent
outbursts, Bolaño’s awareness of the inescapable immanence of
literature comes forth in his own development as a writer, as well as
the
increasingly transitive nature of his language.
Bolaño
himself liked to repeat it: while he is most famously
known as a fiction writer, he always considered himself a poet. Even
though
most of his poetry was published after his success as a novelist, he
started
his literary career by writing hermetic poetry. These poetic and
experimental
residues of Bolaño’s early days as a writer are still visible in
his novella Amberes (published
in 2002 but written in the
early 80s), a highly fragmentary and modernist book in which the only
sense of
narrative continuity arises from the verbal and occasional thematic
echoes between
the various sections. Amberes can
thus be described as one of these “poemas largos” or
“poemas-novela” that Lima and Belano describe to the editor of La Chispa (151). In contrast, the vast
majority of Bolaño’s short stories and novels are marked by a
shift towards increasing narrativity and traditional storytelling.
Indeed,
towards a new kind of literary “realism.” As previously noted, Los Detectives salvajes is still
structured as a series of fragments, but the fragments are here
carefully dated
and ordered chronologically. In the same vein, the language of
Bolaño’s famous novel is characterized by a level of semiotic
transparency that stands in sharp contrast with the linguistic opacity
of Amberes. Finally, the many references to
be found in the text resist classification in a distinctive literary
genealogy.
Unlike Amberes, and its obvious debt
to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and other luminaries of modernism, the
literary
lineage of Detectives salvajes is a
hybrid one. Not only does it refer back to the formal experimentalism
of the
avant-gardes, but also to popular genres such as detective novels,
crime
stories, science-fiction, dime novels and pornographic fiction. In that
respect, the “profecías” of Amuleto are
particularly revealing: not only do we find the names
of Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Vicente Huidobro, Cesar Pavese or
Nicanor
Parra, but also, and on the same plane, those of Jean-Pierre Duprey,
Gilberte
Dallas, Ilarie Voronca and Alice Sheldon, “[que] firma sus libros con
el
seudónimo de James Tiptree Jr.” (136). It
is at this stage that one can only
repeat, “qué curioso, qué curioso, algunos de los autores
que nombrás no los he leído” (136). And indeed, all of
these improbable names cover the real pages of actual writers. While
Duprey,
Dallas and Voronca were minor members of different avant-garde groups,
Alice
Sheldon was an American science-fiction writer, “most
notable for breaking down the barriers between writing perceived as
inherently
"male" or "female," says Wikipedia. But how to account for
Bolaño’s shift from experimental and poetic avant-gardism to
prosaic and “realist” avant-gardism? How to explain the
juxtaposition of such disparate genres, such disparate names?
A passage from Detectives
salvajes may offer the
beginning of an answer. Talking about the burgeoning of “libros
escritos
para desesperados” - read experimental poetry or poemas-novela such as Amberes, Joaquín Font says:
¡Claro que se los lee! Sobre todo si son
buenos o pasables o un amigo se los ha recomendado. Pero en el fondo lo
¡aburren! En el fondo esa literatura amargada, llena de armas
blancas y
de Mesías ahorcados, no consigue penetrarlo hasta el
corazón como
sí consigue una página serena, una página
meditada, una página
¡técnicamente perfecta!...¡No agotar un
filón! ¡Humildad!
¡Buscar, perderse en tierras desconocidas! ¡Pero con
cordada, con
migas de pan o guijarros blancos! (202).
In other words, at a time in
which the figure of Che Guevara is the promotional icon of countless
commodities, the radical experimentalism of Duprey and Voronca can only
be a
formula for failure and anonymity. This does not mean that one should
not
“buscar” or that the only viable literature will have to follow the
model of Sheldon’s science-fiction novels. It does mean, however, that
formal experimentation needs to be attuned to the logic of mass
consumption. If
literature is one day to exert its “no-poder,” this will only
result from books that are consumed, from words that can move the
largest
possible readership, the most heterogeneous audience. Font’s insistence
on technical skill and the concomitant idea of professionalization also
suggests that literature is only one among many competing cultural
goods, one
more form of entertainment, though an intelligent one: “un ejercicio de
inteligencia, de aventura y de tolerancia. Si la
literatura no es esto más placer, ¿que demonios es?” (Entre paréntesis
105)
In conclusion of this section,
it should be repeated that Bolaño’s critique of the
avant-gardes’s anti-commercial “purity” is not so much a
revision as a revisiting of the vanguards. The Latin-American
avant-gardes of
the 1920s had already “integrated with and accomodated themselves to
the
logic of mass production and consumption” (Rosenberg 5). While
Rosenberg
attributes this unusual “accommodation” to the postcolonial locus
of enunciation of Latin American writers and their acute awareness of
the
“circulation of goods, discourses, and peoples,” the same could be
said of Antonin Artaud or the members of the Collège de
Sociologie, all
renegades of Surrealism. Similarly, though the idea of the avant-gardes
is
usually synonymous with formalism and experimentation, Louis Aragon’s Traité du Style already imagines
the formal future of surrealism as a movement towards realism, though
an updated
version of the 19th century. Here again, Bolaño’s
attempt to imagine the present and future of the avant-garde results
from a
productive return to the past, and a careful re-reading of the many
texts and
authors that were left on the unfinished margins of literary history:
“‘Después de siglos de filosofía, vivimos aún
de las ideas poéticas de los primeros hombres,’ escribió
Breton. Esta frase
no es, como pudiera pensarse, un reproche sino
una constatación en el umbral del misterio” (Entre
paréntesis 193).
After this tentative analysis
of Bolaño’s “vanguardia inexistente,” a legitimate
question comes to mind: Why keep calling it an avant-garde? Why
situating
Bolaño’s work within that specific tradition, if most of his
work
can be read as “una carta de amor o de despedida” to that very
tradition (Entre paréntesis
37)? As logical as these interrogations may sound, the need to voice
them is
precisely the source of the problem, the reason why the avant-gardes
keep being
thought of as relics of the past. Lima and Belano’s decision to name
their “movement” after the one that was founded by Cesárea
Tinajero in the 1920s is not only a gesture of formal or nominal
continuity,
but also an indication of the fact that fidelity to a name is the only
way to
modify the content of that name while keeping its driving force; that
keeping a
sign alive is the only way to overturn it and operate what Breton once
called
“un changement de signe” (a change of sign) (qtd. in Badiou 200).
Giving up the term “avant-garde” would then be more than a mere
terminological disagreement. It would be a call to impotence, an open
letter to
the language of resignation. But as Bolaño once wrote, “la hora
de
sentar cabeza no llegará jamás” (Entre
paréntesis 93).
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Cited
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