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
53, at the peak of his fame. While this explanation may be a valid one,
it also 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. Whether 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” (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” (240). 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 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, as Bolaño
writes, “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 through 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’idee 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’etre partout la même”
(“forgets that
the spacio-temporal distribution and value of term avant-garde is far
from homogeneous”) (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’ 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, manifestos 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 hacía atrás…de 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 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 from 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” (228) but only
regress forward towards “lo desconocido,” because as Luis Sebastián
Rosado explains, la otredad era dable de ver en
cualquier parte” (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 carries 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 pragmatics 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 Detective 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” (97) 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
associated with the avant-gardes 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 thus 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” (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 communión 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” (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’ “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 unica 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: colloquiallism,
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 déja vu and jamais entendu. As Julio
Cortazar 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, beyond 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
consideraria 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 of 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 his
seminal album Ascension, where the two long tracks
(40:23 and 38:31) alternate between simultaneous solos and sonic waves
in which the source of the myriad sounds cannot be traced back to their
originary sources. 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.
In spite
of Theodor Adorno’s obvious ignorance of African American music, his
rejection of jazz stems from 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
though 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
salvages 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, ¿qué
In conclusion
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, many of whom were
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” (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).
Works Cited
---.
Entre Paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y
discursos (1998-2003).
---. Los Detectives
Salvajes.
Meschonnic, Henri. Modernité
Modernité. 1988.
Nancy
Rosenberg, Fernando J. The
Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in