Even apart from this last outburst of drivel - Leopoldo Lugones invents the Argentine Literature of Doom

When I came across Roberto Bolaño calling Argentine literature a “literature of doom,” I took it in part as a joke or as a way to emphasize the place of some specific Argentine writers like the prankster César Aira, at the time almost untranslated but now universally beloved, and the “excruciating” Osvaldo Lamborghini, still untranslated because, I assume, all decent English-language translators refuse to have anything to do with him.

But no, the more I have read in the literature, the more I have seen that Bolaño’s joke was of the “funny because true” variety.  Argentina has the most doom-laden, apocalyptic canon.  Esteban Echeverría’s “The Slaughterhouse” (1838/1871), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), and José Hernández’s The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) all find themselves foundering in doom before they end.  And the tradition continues in Roberto Arlt, J. Rodolfo Wilcock, and Aira.  Much less so in Borges.

Thus the annual Argentinean Literature of Doom hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos, a connoisseur of literary doom.

This year I have finally read Leopoldo Lugones, specifically his Poe-like collection Strange Forces (1906), which I have been meaning to read in its Gilbert Alter-Gilbert translation since coming across, years ago, an enticing post at 50 Watts (and please see this interview with Alter-Gilbert).  Lugones is the key figure in Argentine Doom because he was the first writer to really see it, to pull the texts I mention above together as the central works of Argentine literature.  This was all long before he became a fascist and killed himself over a love affair.

He could see the strain of apocalypse because he shared it.  Strange Forces begins with the destruction of Gomorrah (“The Firestorm”) and ends with a scientist in an insane asylum.  If I am counting right, fully six of the twelve stories are about mad scientists, most of whom destroy themselves in their attempts to convert music into light, like Scriabin, or teach a chimpanzee to talk, or build a disintegration ray.  “What this extraordinary gardener wanted to create was a flower of death” (“Viola Acherontia”).

I guess it is an symptom of Doom – what other literature has such a high proportion of mad scientists?  They feature in Roberto Arlt’s The Seven Madmen (1929), a novel that justifies its title, and Aira’s The Literary Conference (1997), just to pick a single example. J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s The Temple of Iconoclasts (1977) appears to contain an entire catalogue of mad scientists, making the mere six of Lugones look measly.

“I bought the ape at an auction of property from a bankrupt circus” (“Yzur”) – now that is a good first line.  The story cannot quite live up to it; none of Lugones’s scientific romances really do.  “[T]he resolution of any debate which the telling of this story may occasion will not rely, for its sole support, on my proficiency in the scientific arena” (“Psychon”), but in an all too authentically Poe-like gesture they mostly have too much science, too much scientistic gibberish.  “Even apart from this last outburst of drivel, the unbalanced personality of my interlocutor was evident to me…” (“Viola Acherontia”).  Lugones is in on the joke, although Alter-Gilbert argues that there is an esoteric side to the stories that the author meant entirely seriously.  All of that is invisible to me.

And anyways the six stories not about mad scientists are better, and less Poe-derivative, so who cares.  Tomorrow for those.

Recycled Dickens - never perfect, never finished

The commercialized dust heaps of Our Mutual Friend (1865) make the novel a classic of the Literature of Recycling, if there is such a thing.  Dickens was himself a master recycler.  A good part of the fun of reading so much Dickens is watching the author return to characters, images, and problems – problems of how to write fiction, I mean.

See how the grave robber of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the one whose alibi each night is that he is “fishing,” returns in Our Mutual Friend as Jesse Hexam, who fishes corpses out of the Thames.  Both men make their living by recycling the dead, as does Mr. Venus in his bone shop.

A new strain appears in Our Mutual Friend, in the subplot of the dual obsessions of Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone for Lizzie Hexam.  Wrayburn’s nihilism is paralyzing; the unassuming Headstone turns out to be something of a sociopath (“as I was saying – undergoing grinding torments,” from III.10, where one might wonder if both men are maniacs).  This is Dostoevskian Dickens; The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) takes up the theme again and builds the novel around it, reflecting Dickens’s deepening ideas about the nature of evil.  But different shades  of the characters, of Wrayburn at least, had been appearing in Dickens novels for a decade, in the Sydney Carton of Two Cities and Arthur Clennam of Little Dorrit (1857), and now I wonder about Pip, and have something new to look for when I reread Great Expectations (1861).

Dickens was always working on the problems of past novels, and had little interest in perfecting the novel at hand.  One might blame serialization, where the published chapters constrain the unwritten ones – too late to scrap a character or plot and start over – but the issue is one of artistic temperament.  Dickens was a master of serialization because of the way he wrote, not the other way round.  He was an exploratory writer, one who had to write to know what he was going to write, wholly unlike Gustave Flaubert or other conceptual perfectionists.  Flaubert would stop everything else to fix a word in the wrong place; Dickens, recognizing the artistic error, would try to do better next time.

The cleanest example of Dickens recycling is A Christmas Carol (1843), his first Christmas book.  It was written and published in the middle of the ongoing Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44).  Ebenezer Scrooge is a reworking of Jonas Chuzzlewit, one of Martin Chuzzlewit’s villains.  They are similar in appearance, behavior, and attitude, but one is redeemed by the Spirit of Christmas while the other inevitably destroys himself.  I do not know of another example quite like this, where an author retells a story that he is currently publishing.  Today one would have to look at genres where serialization has survived, to television and comic books.

Roberto Bolaño had the Dickens “write first” temperament.  He came close to the Christmas Carol experiment twice.  After Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), Bolaño published Distant Star (1996), a reworking and expansion of the last episode of the earlier book.  The next book after The Savage Detectives (1998) was Amulet (1999), a Savage Detectives episode blown up into its own novel.

I wish I had a conclusion, a grand summing up, although that is not in the Dickensian spirit.  There is no summing up, there is no conclusion, until the inevitable one, death ending the exploration halfway through the new novel which has already suggested the next one that we will never know about.

The long bloody march of the young poets of Mexico

And then Laura asked me, pretending as if she didn’t know, how the young poets of Mexico were faring, whether my daughter had brought me news of their long, bloody march.  And I told her they were fine.  I lied, saying:  they’re fine, almost everyone is publishing…  (II.17)

The speaker is a madman, the context is a dream, but here we have an accurate description of The Savage Detectives.  Roberto Bolaño’s novel is about the vocation of the poet.  Who is a poet, and how can you tell?  To a clear-minded fellow like me, the answer is obvious – a poet writes poetry.   Bolaño is more sympathetic to other ideas, a classic Romantic.  Perhaps poetry is a way of life.  A poet is a person who lives like a poet.

The multiple examples and twenty-year scope of the novel allow Bolaño to see what some of those lives look like.  Publish a single word and vanish, but keep writing.  Writing what, only García Madero knows.  Write feverishly, but publish nothing.  Write as inspiration strikes, publish as opportunity allows.  Work to become a professional writer.  Hustle, or retreat.  Bolaño gives us a little bit of everything.

Much of the argument, the possible arguments, are not about writing but publishing, which is central for the professional writer but more questionable for the vocational writer.  Chapter 23 is composed, mostly, of a series of interviews with professional writers at the 1994 Madrid Book Fair.  Bitterness, envy, crackpot ideas, social striving, greed – what fun a book fair must be.  Spanish writers “act like businessmen or gangsters.”  Writers must “resemble a newspaper columnist,” or a dwarf.  This last writer, at least, is audibly insane.  Another describes his career as a combination of discipline and “charm,” “telling [influential writers] exactly what they want to hear.”  A poet, another crazy one, “smile[s] to keep from howling” and “sing[s] so I won’t pray or curse.”

In summary:  professional writers are twisted madmen.  This chapter was the comic high point of the novel.  Everything that begins as comedy ends as comedy.  Perhaps it is worth noting that in 1994, Roberto Bolaño, his first* novel published the previous year, was one of those professional writers.  Was he also sitting in one of those booths at the Book Expo?  Too bad he was not interviewed.

And I say (or if I’m drunk, I shout): no, I’m not anybody’s mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all. (II.4)

Part of the novel’s story of Arturo Belano parallels the author’s own long, difficult discovery that despite his deep love for conceptual poetry, he was not himself a conceptual poet.  I have no idea what the fictional Belano wrote about, but the real Bolaño slowly shaped himself into a novelist whose subject was poetry.  The Savage Detectives is Bolaño’s ironic and chastening love letter to the young poets.

*  First novel, and book, I think, of his own, fifteen years after all of the infrarealist fun captured in The Savage Detectives.  What do you think goes on in the 1984 Advice of a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic, co-written with A. G. Porta?

My poem is called “Everybody Suffers.” I don’t care if people stare.

I could put together a book by now.  My complete works.  (Dec. 28)

The seventeen year-old Juan García Madero, having only recently entered into the adventurous life of poetry and sex, and on the verge of a more unusual adventure, wrote that.  He has written 55 poems of 2,453 lines.  I do not believe that Roberto Bolaño ever gives us a hint of what any of those lines actually look like, although I am probably wrong about that.  This is an easy book to be wrong about.  See, here’s a hint on November 29:

There’s no free table, I said and went on writing.  My poem is called “Everybody Suffers.”  I don’t care if people stare.

Oh good Lord.  Thank you, Roberto Bolaño, for sparing this reader that poem.  Also see the amusing Nov. 4 entry (“The first [poem] was about the sopes, which smelled of the grave”)

García Madero never publishes his book.  He vanishes.  The big central section of The Savage Detectives that interrupts García Madero’s diary is on one level a compilation of twenty years of the history of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, but it is also the record of the absence of García Madero, who appears only in flickers.  The only explicit mention of his name is a denial of his existence.  I did not notice any of this until I was on the next to last page of the novel.  It is deliberately made hard to see – among the dozens of narrators and other characters, surely García Madero will turn up at some point.

So one strong temptation is to read García Madero back into the middle of the book, to tease out his complete works.  A valuable effort, although I am pretty sure there is no answer.  He is there in various ways, perhaps quite important ways, unless the lesson he learned in the Sonora desert in early 1976 was to escape from this crazy book, or perhaps to imitate Césarea Tinajero, with one improvement: publish nothing.  Publish just one word and they come after you!  By “they” I mean Death and the Eumenides.  Best to engineer your own absence.

Much of Bolaño’s art is the creation of absence, the undermining of meaning.  An analogy is a visual artist’s use of negative space.  Bolaño, too, writes around the void.  This is what I meant when I said yesterday that, while knocking down my fantastical theory about a particular detail of the plot, we found, as is typical with my experience with Bolaño, that even clearly stated points turn out to be deeply flawed as evidence, presented only by one of the novel’s many madmen, for example, or contradicted elsewhere.  Bolaño creates jigsaw puzzles with pieces that do not fit, but different pieces depending on how you start the puzzle.

The Savage Detectives reminds me of no other book so much as Wuthering Heights, another novel of the void, another malformed puzzle that continually strongly suggests solutions to its puzzles but refuses anything resembling proof. Wuthering Heights is, of course, an utter freak among Victorian novels.

The Red and the Black is also kin to The Savage Detectives, and unlike Brontë's novel is mentioned several times by Bolaño.  He wants us to know that García Madero has read it, for example.  Stendhal’s novel is another that seems to retreat from or withhold a clear meaning at key points.  Unfortunately, I am not such a good reader of Stendhal, so I am unsure how to pursue this idea.  Well, no, I know how – read more.  That is always the solution to the mystery, whatever it is, the only tool this Amateur Detective has.

The poem is a joke, they said, it’s easy to see.

he even liked Agatha Christie too, and sometimes we would spend hours talking about one of her novels, going over the puzzles (I have a terrible memory, but his was excellent), reconstructing those impossible murders. (II.7)

We, the gentle detectives, readers of The Savage Detectives, all had good fun on Monday, didn’t we, when in the comments, not even in the main post, I suggested a crackpot solution to one of the minor mysteries of the novel, one that sent everyone off in enjoyable directions.  If nothing else*, wild misreadings force readers to abandon general impressions and reactions and love and antipathy and just look at the dang text.

Assuming the text is text.  The most explicit riddling in The Savage Detectives takes the form of pictures, cryptic little hieroglyphics, some in the form of a children’s game used to kill time while driving, but also in Cesária Tinajero’s only published poem, "Sión":

Image borrowed from Archivo Bolaño (dig their website name).  Readers of the novel know that I am cheating.  This is not Tinajero’s poem, but a later interpretation of the poem.  I am tempted to say that it is not Tinajero’s poem at all.

Do you understand now? They said.  Well, to be honest, I don’t boys, I said.  The poem is a joke, they said, it’s easy to see.  Amadeo, look: add a sail to each of the rectangles like this: (II.18)

and the interpreted poem follows.  So the reader who wants to see the original image needs to imagine – or perhaps print out and then erase – the sails and mast.  Belano and Lima, the young poets turned critics, begin by arguing that the lines represent the sea, calm or agitated – fair enough, a good start – but they cap their interpretation by simply adding the missing pieces to the work. They do the same thing to the title: Sión is short for navigación.  They’re right, this is easy!

I suppose the only difference between what they are doing and what a less physically assertive critic does is that they write their interpretation into the text.  They could have said “imagine that the little boxes have sails.”  What else does a critic do?  We begin with the parts that are there and fill in the parts that are not, in a useful or creative or at least thorough way, so I hope.

The character who reports all of this to us is himself deeply skeptical of the interpretation, and the interpreters themselves remove the sails, invoking Moby-Dick and working through a series of rectangles (“in a universe where rectangles are unthinkable,” ahem, see last page), which they equate with “the desolation of poetry.”  As always in The Savage Detectives, no claim to certainty (“it’s easy to see”) is left standing.

* We did accomplish something else – we demonstrated a fundamental principle of the novel – but I want to save that for another day.

sad policemen beamed in from other worlds

Michel Bulteau, Rue de Téhéran, Paris, January 1978.

Each interview in the big middle of The Savage Detectives begins the same way: speaker, street (or park, airport, etc.), city, month and year.  Michel Bulteau is going to describe a surprise visit from an unknown  Mexican poet, Ulises Lima.  This is in chapter 7, which is all about Lima’s bohemian life in Paris.

Bulteau is a real writer of the French conceptual variety, co-author of Electrical Manifesto with Eyelids of Skirts, lead singer of Mahogany Brain, with which or whom he recorded With (Junk-Saucepan) When (Spoon-Trigger).  Why anyone bothers to write fiction is a puzzle.

So Bulteau said he would meet Lima at the metro station:

It’s only a few minutes from Rue de Téhéran to the Miromesnil metro station, walking fairly quickly, but you have to cross Boulevard Haussmann and then head along Avenue Percier and part of Rue la Boétie, streets that at this time of night are mostly lifeless, as if starting at ten they were bombarded with X-rays, and then –

I’ll just interrupt here to note the presence of a metaphor, a reasonably original one, which are if not rare also not especially thick in The Savage Detectives.  But Bolaño is mimicking casual speech, and often has to pay a price.  He makes up for it a couple of years later in By Night in Chile.  So Bulteau is heading to the metro station – no, hang on –

and then I thought that it might have been better to meet the stranger at the Monceau metro station, so that I would’ve had to walk in the opposite direction, from Rue Téhéran to Rue de Monceau, on to Avenue Ruysdaël and then Avenue Ferdousi, which crosses the Parc de Monceau, because at that time of night it’s full of junkies and dealers and sad policemen beamed in from other worlds, –

I will bet you five dollars and fifty cents that right now, somewhere in the world, some young Bolañist is working on a novel that he thinks will be titled Sad Policemen Beamed in from Other Worlds.  It will be quite difficult to collect on this bet, since the novel will not be published for many years, and will in the end be titled A Second Opportunity on Earth.

from other worlds,  the languid gloom of the park leading up to the Place de la République Dominicaine, an auspicious place for a meeting with the Mexican Death’s-Head.

You have probably already studied the Google map above, which shows the path Bulteau did not take to the metro station where he would not meet Ulises Lima (because he had already told him to go to a different station) but which he describes in such detail that he includes every street on which he would have set foot, no matter for how short a time.  Then he does the same thing in the direction he did take (see left).  Once they meet, the characters wander Paris, each turn onto a new street noted.

Bolaño is here exaggerating an effect that is one of the motifs of the novel, with the names of streets and bars and shops and villages included in obsessive detail by almost all of the dozens of speakers, no matter how different their voices are in other ways.  The kid with the diary gives a tour of Mexico City, not only the streets but the cross streets, which is quite handy when obsessively looking for clues about the novel.  Where is Amadeo Salvatierra’s apartment, or Rebecca Nodier’s bookstore, or the spot where García Madero is so startled by meeting Belano and Lima that he faints?  I gazed upon all of these spots from space, courtesy of Google.  When, in the last couple of pages, the kids are just driving around in Sonora (“February 10 Cucurpe, Tuape, Meresichic, Oopdepe”), their path doesn’t form any sort of pattern, does it?  No, just forget I asked that.

One amusing effect Bolaño gets from this naming neurosis is that it packs more poets and writers into this book about poetry and writing.  Firdawsi appears on Bulteau’s imagined path, the novel’s lone representative of classical Persian verse.  La Boétie was a writer, too, Montaigne’s friend.  Ruysdaël was merely a painter.  Other characters live on or visit streets named after Rubén Dario and Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens and – maybe that’s it.  No, I think there were a lot more.  We are surrounded by literature, at least if we are in France, or Mexico City.

Still, my story won’t be as coherent as I’d like.

Roberto Bolaño has been such a disappointment.  His over-inflated reputation would have been so much fun to puncture.   No, I’m not that kind of writer, but it would have been satisfying to read other people take down that fraud Bolaño and the fools who praise him.

Instead, the balloon seems to have been inflated to the proper poundage.  Oh well.  Maybe the next big hype will be a con job.  Let’s hope.

I liked them.  They reminded me of the beats. (The Savage Detectives, 183)

Did they ever.  If I had picked up The Savage Detectives without knowing anything about it, the first part of the novel, 137 pages of the diary of a seventeen year-old Mexico City neo-beatnik who has just discovered poetry and bohemianism, would have done me in.  Here’s the unimpressive page 90 test:

November 30

Last night something really bad happened.  I was at the Encrucijada Veracruzana, leaning on the bar, switching back and forth between writing poems and writing in my diary (I have no problem going from one format to the other), when Rosario and Brígida started to scream at each other at the back of the bar.  Soon the grisly drunks were taking sides and cheering them on so energetically that I couldn’t concentrate on my writing anymore and decided to slip away.

The voice of that kid is all too plausible.  650 pages of this - forget it!  Details of the Mexican setting aside, and the details do have their interest, I have read this book before; it’s just more of that kind of thing.  I would wonder why everyone was getting so hopped up about it.  Unless I had been lucky enough to flip ahead fifty or a hundred pages.

The idea of not knowing anything about The Savage Detectives before reading it - I just said that as a joke.

I’m not trying to justify myself.  I’m just trying to tell a story.  Maybe I’m also trying to understand its hidden workings, workings I wasn’t as aware of at the time but that weigh on me now.  Still, my story won’t be as coherent as I’d like.  (297)

I knew a lot about this book before I read it.  For example, that once that kid goes on the road with his angel-headed poet pals, on page 139, the one voice becomes many more, dozens more, and the single story shatters.  This is the flashy show-off section of the book, as Bolaño wanders the globe and mimics all sorts of different people, including an impressive variety of madmen, at the same time telling the story of a couple of the Mexican poets, but obliquely, and perhaps also telling yet another story in the negative space of the first one.  I would bet you eleven dollars that at least two of the sections were separately written short stories that were retrofitted into the novel. Bolaño expands one of the best of them into an entire novel.

Then after several hundred pages the party is over, everyone goes home, that proto-poet and his diary return, and I finally discover why Bolaño has made me spend so much time with that kid.  The key sentence, on the next to last page, was “I’ve read Césarea’s notebooks” (646).  I might well have said aloud, “Oh, I get it.”  But I should have gotten it quite a bit earlier.

I could go on and on like this.  It’s the great strength of book blogs, yes, that personal voice, my reaction?  Even though I haven’t said a dang thing.

Richard and Rise organized the shindig and link to even more fragmented voices.

Bolaño, Aira, and the Argentinean Literature of Doom

Roberto Bolaño’s contribution to the Spanish issue of The Hudson Review is flattering.  It’s a post I wrote last year, on the extraordinary riches of Argentine literature.  His essay is maybe just a little different than mine, superior in terms of knowledge, skill, breadth, depth, humor, and every other virtue associated with good writing and good criticism, but is otherwise much like what I wrote.

Post-Borges Argentine literature has become, Bolaño claims, “the literature of doom,” a “literary nightmare, literary suicide, a literary dead end.”  That sounds worse than he means – better literary nightmares than real ones.  Bolaño thinks of Roberto Arlt, for example, as a great writer, but here’s his metaphor for Arlt’s anti-novels:

Seen as a closet or a basement Arlt’s work is fine. Seen as the main room of the house, it’s a macabre joke.  Seen as the kitchen, it promises food poisoning.  Seen as the bathroom, it’ll end up giving us scabies.  Seen as the library, it’s the guarantee of the death of literature.

An aside – I would not want to argue that this is the way all literary criticism has to be written.  No, not all of it.

The strain of doom that has only recently wandered into English is that of the mysterious Osvaldo Lamborghini and his disciple César Aira.  Bolaño describes Lamborghini’s novels as “excruciating,” readable only two or three pages at a time, smelling of “blood, spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts.”  If someone could report back on this, I would appreciate it.

That is not at all how I, or Bolaño, would describe the compulsively readable Surrealist César Aira, author of dozens of little novel-like objects.  Five have appeared in English, with another coming in June.  I am surprised to discover that I have read four of them, all but The Hare.  Tess Lewis, in The Hudson Review, has put together a fine and useful, if perhaps insufficiently skeptical* overview of Aira-in-English.

I have written elsewhere, briefly, about a single amazing scene from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, easily the best Aira novellino I have read (Bolaño prefers the fluid How I Became a Nun), and also the most conventionally novel-like novel, suggesting that I am an aesthetic reactionary.  I read someone – not Tess Lewis – who claimed that Landscape Painter was Aira’s deliberate parody of the well-crafted Modernist novel.  Could be.

The Literary Conference (2006), Englished last year, is about a mad scientist – “the typical Mad Scientist of the comic books” (18) – who plans to conquer the world with an army of clones led by a clone of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.  The mad scientist is the narrator, and author, César Aira.  Of course he is.  Who else would he be?

Aira writes his fiction under a regime of self-imposed daily serialization.  My understanding is that he can polish and refine his day’s writing, but can never revise an earlier day’s work.  He deliberately inserts impossible, unsolvable situations to stymie his future self, who is stuck with whatever nonsense he had previously written.  His novels are one-man exquisite corpses.  A close canonical equivalent I can think of is The Old Curiosity Shop, a brilliant improvisatory flight, which often descends into Dadaist lunacy.  As Aira (“Aira”) thinks, watching one of his old plays at the literary conference:

What was this all about?  I didn’t recognize it, it was too Dadaist.  Nevertheless, I had written it. (55)

Now I see my attraction to Aira.  It is as if he is me, reading one of my old posts at Wuthering Expectations.

Another aside – if someone would hurry up and translate Aira’s only short story, “Cecil Taylor,” that would be great.  Thanks.**

* Aira, like Bolaño, is a straight-faced prankster; their own claims about their biographies and methods should be taken as artistic creations.

** According to Bolaño, one of the five greatest stories he had ever read.  No idea what the other four were.  According to Aira, “No es un cuento” (“It is not a story,” translation by me).  “Cecil Taylor,” accompanied by a perplexing allegorical introduction, can be found in an anthology titled Buenos Aires (1999, ed. Juan Forn).  Someone should translate the whole book.

Roberto Bolaño is a character in a Robert Louis Stevenson story

This isn't much of a poem, but stay with me for a minute, if you don't mind:

Mr. Wiltshire (El señor Wiltshire)

It's all over, says the voice in the dream, and now you're the reflection
of that guy Wiltshire, copra merchant in the South Seas,
the white man who married Uma, had lots of kids,
the one who killed Case and never went back to England,
you're like the cripple turned into a hero by love:
you'll never return to your homeland (but which is your homeland?)
you'll never be a wise man, come on, not even a man
who's reasonably intelligent, but love and your blood
made you take a step, uncertain but necessary, in the middle
of the night, and the love that guided that step is what saves you.

This poem inhabits page 81 of The Romantic Dogs (2008), a Roberto Bolaño poetry selection translated by Chris Knight.  I have the terrible feeling that the poems in the book were chosen because they contained, or might contain, clues to Bolaño's big books.  See, for example, the many the poems employing the word "detective" - "I dreamt of frozen detectives, Latin American detectives," etc.  I was naïvely hoping they would be good poems.  A back cover blurb, written by someone who has apparently read no poetry written after 1950, tells me "His poetic voice is like no other."

Regardless.  Did everybody identify the literary work at the base of this poem?  Would I have been able to identify it, or have the slightest idea what was going on, six weeks ago?  No!  Lines two through five are an accurate if plain summary of "The Beach of Falesá" (1893), my favorite Robert Louis Stevenson story.  Favorite as of six weeks ago, when I read through all of Stevenson's stories.

Is there a single hint in that poem, for the reader who has not read the story, or (I'm thinking ahead), for the reader who has read it, and even wrote a blog post about it, but whose memory is not so good?  I'm imagining that I'd read the poem a year from now, and how agonizing the "this seems so familiar" sense would be.

I have no point here, except that I got a kick out of recognizing the source of this poem, even if it was merely by chance.  I do wonder, though, how many other poems in this little book are built on works that I have never read or never heard of, or if it matters, or why it would.

Robert Bolaño and Edgar Allan Poe discuss interior decorating

The first story or sketch or whatnot in Nazi Literature in the Americas (available here via the Virginia Quarterly Review), describes, in twelve pages, the long life of the Argentinian poet Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce. She publishes poems, marries a rancher, tours Europe, founds a publishing house, becomes a "committed Hitlerite."

Many reviewers have described Bolaño's novel as a menagerie of obscurities and failures, which is not exactly correct. Edelmira, for example, has an "eminent place in the panorama of Argentinean and Hispanic letters." She achieves that status with "her finest work, Poe's Room (1944), which prefigured the nouveau roman and much subsequent avant-garde writing."

Poe's Room contains: a description of a room that Edelmira has had constructed, a "treatise on good taste and interior design," details about the construction of the room and the "search for the furniture, and so on. The room is an exact reproduction of the perfect room described by Edgar Allan Poe is his story or sketch or whatnot "The Philosophy of Furniture" (1840/1845).

In this actual story, available (semi-readably) here,* Poe describes the correct principles of interior decorating, and ends with a long single paragraph, nearly two pages of the six total in the Library of America edition, describing a room, an ideal room, built by a friend. The room is an oblong shape, the colors are gold and crimson, the paintings are large and lie flat against the wall. "Beyond these things, there is no furniture, if we except an Argand lamp, with a plain crimson-tinted ground glass shade, which depends from the lofty vaulted ceiling by a single slender gold chain, and throws a tranquil but magical radiance over all."

That's the last sentence. Really driving it home there, Ed. The Poe story is extremely tedious, although less so than two later pieces ("The Domain of Arnheim", 1847, and "Landor's Cottage", 1849) that do the exact same thing for landscapes. The one touch of weird Poe, just a bit of dreamy surrealism, is the brief mention, buried in the paragraph, that Poe's friend is all the while sleeping on the sofa.

What is Bolaño doing here? This is not a small thing. Bolaño spends four of the twelve pages of the story on this imagined book. More than half of that is directly plagiarized from Poe's story, except that where Poe has a single paragraph, Bolaño makes a list:

"- The frames broad but not deep, and richly carved, without being dulled or filigreed.

- The paintings lying flat on the walls, not hanging off with cords."

Two full pages of just this, straight from Poe, with just minor changes in wording and verb tense (e.g., Poe has "The frames are broad but not deep"). What does this have to do with fascism, or with anything?

Let's see. The point of this piece of conceptual art is that Edelmira actually builds Poe's ideal room; that she brings a fantasy into the real world. Perhaps the analogy is with totalitarian states enacting crackpot ideal rules about art and life.

Or possibly it's the artist - not just Edelmira, but Poe - who is covertly totalitarian. Maybe Poe is serious about his precepts of interior design, or landscaping, that there really is an ideal, he has identified it, and if he had the power that's the way things would be. Bolaño's novel might then be anti-idealistic, the artist presenting the world as it should not be.

This episode gave me one of my hints that Bolaño is going after Modernism. Edelmira reads "The Philosophy of Furniture" and is thrilled: "She felt that she had found a soul mate in Poe: their ideas about decoration coincided." The last clause is a joke; the first is an invocation of a founder of Modernism, Charles Baudelaire, who said the same sort of thing about Poe. If I were a Professional Reader I would find an exact quote of Baudelaire's. I hate to make too much of the absence of a name, but I think this reference is meant to be specific.

As I said, or meant to say, yesterday, I don't understand more than hints of Bolaño's undermining of Modernism, which is itself a Modernist sort of thing to do. Romantic, too, like Baudelaire's attack on Romanticism, hyper-Romantic; not like the Elegiac Poet in that Hugo play, who wants to be a "moderate Romantic."

Glub glub glub. I'm in over my head. I'm sure someone is at this moment writing a conference paper on this exact subject. Good luck with that.

* Please note the hilarious bracketed editorial comment at the bottom: "[It should be noted that Poe, in this article, has adopted an intentionally humorous tone.]" Intentional, you don't say? So noted.

In plagiarizing Senghor his art reached a summit of perfection - Nazi Literature in the America and suspicion about politics in literature

Writing about an explicitly political Victor Hugo story reminded me that I wanted to write a note or two about another novel that is actually about the place of politics in literature, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Cuz people aren't writing enough about him.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a fake biographical encyclopedia, short sketches, mostly just a few pages long, of imaginary North and South American writers, all with some connection to some sort of fascist politics, mostly not related to Nazis. That word in the title is the first of the novel's many obscure jokes.*

The novel is an investigation of, or attack on, the political underpinnings of literary Modernism, or perhaps the reader's assumptions about the politics of Modernism. The imagined writer's area all modernists. One follows the theories of Charles Olson, another writes like Gertrude Stein, yet another is a Beat. Yet they all advocate ideas that range from the crackpot harmless to the murderously dangerous. And most obtain some degree of success and fame as writers. So it's not just the writers who are culpable. There's something about Modernism itself.

A hint lies in the number of poets who are poètes maudits, accursed poets, criminals and madmen, whose works are published in prison newsletters, or only as mimeographs, or as skywriting. Something quite a bit more obvious than a hint is in the entry on "Luiz Fontaine da Souza", Brazil's "leading Catholic philosopher", who begins his career with books titled Refutation of Voltaire, A Refutation of Diderot, and so on: D'Alembert, Montesqieu, Rousseau. This fascist writer's target isn't modernity, but the Enlightenment. And Nazi Literature's target, then, is Romanticism, or at least it's totalitarian tendencies.

Or perhaps the criticism is of aestheticism? What to make of the "John Lee Brook" sketch, which begins "Widely regarded as the best writer of the Aryan Brotherhood, and one of the best Californian poets of the late twentieth century..." Brook is executed, for multiple homicides, after "various appeals, supported by influential members of the Californian literay community."

Or look at the head-spinning chapter "The Many Masks of Max Mirebalais", about a Haitian poet whose art is plagiarism, looting modern French poetry and publishing under a series of Pessoa-like heteronyms. "In plagiarizing Senghor his art reached a summit of perfection: no one realized that the five poems that appeared in the Monitor in the second week of September 1971 signed Max Kasimir were texts that Senghor had published in Hosties noires (Seuil, 1948) and Ethiopiques (Seuil, 1956)."

Much of the interest of this novel comes from following the "author" of the sketches, who, we learn in the last sketch, is named "Roberto Bolaño", as he alternates between something resembling objectivity, revulsion at some (but not all) of the ideas of his subjects, and detailed praise of some (but not all) of their poems and books. The author it turns out, is a pretty strange fellow himself.**

I should perhaps point out here that this is the only Bolaño book I have read, and that I have no idea what the actual author himself thought about any of this. But I can read the book I have in front of me. The novel does not argue that politics do not have a place in literature, or in an author's life. And it is not obvious that Bolaño is advocating a more humanist philosophy, for example, or a return to the Enlightenment, or some other alternative. He's careful to not present an alternative. He creates a void. What should fill it?

If you like this sort of Borgesian literary game you probably will enjoy the novel, and if it's not your sort of thing, you probably won't. But if you were hoping I would say that Bolaño is overhyped, sorry, although I don't blame you. In Nazi Literature, Bolaño is clever and funny, and presents some complicated ideas in an original way. He appears to be the real thing.

Tomorrow, I want to look at a specific episode that will put me safely back in the 19th century.

* There are also plenty of completely transparent jokes: "Schürholz, whose fame had previously been restricted to Chile's literary and artistic circles, vast as they are, was catapulted to the very sumit of notoriety", or, if "vast as they are" is still too obscure, how about "His work, published piecemeal in magazines, consists of more than fifty short stories and a seventy-line poem dedicated to a weasel."

** Or maybe Latin American encyclopedists are just generally, um, different than I expected. Bolaño mentions the actual Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou. When I looked her up I found this on Wikipedia:

"Like most poets, Ibarbourou nursed an intense fear of death. Though it is easy to surmise this from her poetry, she states so explicitly in the first line of 'Carne Inmortal.'"

Like most poets, you say? This could have come straight from Bolaño's novel. Maybe the entire Wiki entry is a Bolaño-esque prank.