If Jorge Volpi presented a
novel take on the "Bolaño phenomenon", then Horacio Castellanos Moya wrote something misinformed and misleading about it. The infamous essay was called "
Bolaño Inc." and a translation of it appeared in
Guernica in November 2009.
I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about
Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years,
above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was
already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a
vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the
last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will
only have one more to cure his hangover. The blame for my relapse goes
to my friend Sarah Pollack, who sent me her insightful academic essay on
the construction of the “Bolaño myth” in the United States. Sarah is a
professor at The City University New York and her text “Latin America
Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States” was published in the summer issue of the journal Comparative Literature.
Albert Fianelli, an Italian fellow journalist, parodies a quote often
attributed to Herman Goering and says that every time someone mentions
the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but
neither do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity
that moves on its own according to mysterious laws. The market has its
landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the
landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether
it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.
I say this because the central idea of Pollack’s work is that behind
the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing
operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American
culture and literature that the U.S. cultural establishment is now selling to the public.
I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as
well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the
airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake
of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who
comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García
Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if
he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of
course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel
Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all,
since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help
versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North
Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull
out Bolaño.
The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez,
with its magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the
imagination of the North American reader. But since everything tarnishes
and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually
went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary
groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn’t fit the
enterprise—above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult
to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy
novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño
appeared with his The Savage Detectives
and his visceral realism.
Castellanos Moya's full essay was published
here.
There were several strong reactions to this essay, but I think Garth Risk Hallberg at
The Millions offered
the most cogent refutation of Castellanos Moya's thesis which was inspired by Sarah Pollack's analysis of Latin American literature.
A year after his essay appeared, Castellanos Moya was still patting himself on the back. From his
interview in
Sampsonia Way:
In
“Bolaño Inc,” which appeared in Guernica in 2009, you bemoan
publishers’ marketing of Latin-American literature in the U.S and the
mythologized image they assign to popular writers such as Roberto
Bolaño. Did you see some of the responses you got when that was
published?
Yes. Some people sent me emails. But all the anger
of these people is normal. Bolaño is an idol, so people don’t read him
as a writer. We live in very empty times, so you look for someone to
fill your emptiness, and some people read fiction looking for truth, for
a kind of salvation, which is why a writer like Paulo Coelho is so
popular. And it’s funny, these attacks on that article, most of them
came from Latin American residents in the USA, because those are the
ones who feel much more vulnerable when you attack all this celebrity
crap of American culture that they believe in. [Laughs] When the article
was first published in the daily newspaper La Nación from Buenos Aires,
the reactions were very positive.
Castellanos Moya is a Salvadoran novelist. He is the author of
Senselessness,
Dance With Snakes,
The She-Devil in the Mirror, and
Tyrant Memory. According to Bolaño, who read four of his books, his best novel—"or at least the darkest, a long tirade against El Salvador that caused Castellanos Moya to receive death threats obliging him to go into exile yet again"—was
El asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador ("Nausea: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador"). Bolaño wrote further in
Between Parentheses:
El asco, of course, isn't just a settling of scores or a writer's response to a moral and political situation that he finds profoundly discouraging, it's also a stylistic exercise, a parody of certain works by Bernhard, and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud. Sadly, very few people in El Salvador have read Bernhard, and fewer still have a sense of humor. One's country is no laughing matter. [...] Herein lies one of the book's many virtues: nationalists can't abide it. Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer.
I'm not sold on "Bolaño Inc.", but I'm game with
El asco. Anything that invoked Bernhard, even in a mode of parody, and apparently doing so with skyrocketing humor,
and politically motivated, should have a place in the reading list.
Related links:
"The Peculiar Art of Cultural Formations" by Sarah Pollack (pdf)
"Snatch" (fiction)
Excerpt from the novel Senselessness (1)
Excerpt from the novel Senselessness (2)
"A Dangerous Homage"—appendix to El asco
"Notes/Wanderings"
Interview and excerpts from "Revulsion"
The Nation profile written by Natasha Wimmer
Q&A With Horacio Castellanos Moya
On Heinrich von Kleist
The Poet Versus Lady Macbeth
Read This Next: Tyrant Memory
Snapshot: El Salvador
A Conversation With Horacio Castellanos Moya
