Beyond Bolano, Hector Hoyos

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INTRODUCTION Globalization as Form

The world does not quite fit into a book.

As I set out to write this study, I penned down this simple, obvious observation on a piece of scratch paper and kept it on my desk. There, it was a useful reminder when dealing with my objects of study, which are, precisely, literary representations of the world. In particular, I examine a select corpus of post-1989 Latin American novels that offer invaluable insights on globalization. I also show how these novels contribute to the task of thinking through a related phenomenon, the emerging articulation of the study of literature on a world scale. These two lines of inquiry converge because the representations of the world that I will analyze have the peculiarity of resituating themselves within a broader ensemble of potential readers. Per the truism cited above, this process occurs under the sign of negativity: if indeed no single volume can contain all that there is, whenever a given work attempts to represent the world, it is already signaling the impossibility of doing so. However, in the attempt, some works of literature have an effect on how we see the world and on how we conceive of their place within the world. Such narratives, which one could also call Alephs, matter beyond their immediate national contexts.

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I use the term “Aleph” to allude to a key precedent to the emplotment of globalization so prevalent in the contemporary Latin American novel.

It is an important motif in the work of Jorge Luis Borges that I revisit throughout this study for its heuristic value. Nothing offers a more vivid illustration of how aesthetic, historical, and political choices inform a given representation of the world. In more ways than one, the Argentine adds to and illuminates our understanding of the literary representation of a broadening consciousness of the world as a whole—henceforth “globality,” for short.

The Aleph appears in a 1949 eponymous short story published in Buenos Aires, a city now rather well-known around the world but once thought to be on “the edge of the West,” as Beatriz Sarlo might put it.1 A bookish narrator protagonist, in all ways similar to the author, finds in a soon-to-be demolished house on Garay Street “one of the points in space that contain all points,” further described as “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.”2 Andrew Hurley, whose translation I cite, then renders the phrase “nuestro concreto amigo proverbial, el multum in parvo,” an ambiguous designation of the object voiced by the repulsive character of Carlos Argentino Daneri, as “our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh.”3 In the original, the weight of the adjective “concreto” falls on the fact that the rhetorical figure is a friend, a concrete and proverbial friend, or a friend that is a proverb. Be this as it may, the mistranslation is fortunate: the Aleph is an objectification of the idea of much in little, carried to its final logical consequences. Not only is it a world in miniature, but it is also an infinitude of points of view, where recursiveness is unavoidable and where time and space—succession and distance—lose their meaning: The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size.

Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.

I saw the populous sea, saw the dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black

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pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, . . . and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.4 A proverb in the flesh, a proverb rendered concrete—in this powerful description, denotative language becomes music. Words cannot quite designate any particular entity and yet they can suggest an experience that goes beyond the possibilities of both language and cognition. An accomplishment for the Argentine author, it seems, split between his alter ego and his fictional nemesis, Carlos Argentino; a sublation, but not a resolution, of the influential criollismo versus cosmopolitismo debate.5 The preeminence of visual language in the passage should not distract from its experiential core: here Borges grounds the experience of globality. Note that this is not just a smaller version of the world we think we know. It would be one thing to describe a world from one point of view and then imagine its miniature; here there is an infinitude of points of view. This paradoxical transfiguration of parts and whole collapses the logic of synecdoche. It depicts a world rich in possibilities, in the full dimension of its becoming.

There are political implications to this strategy. In one conspicuous parenthetical remark in the story, Borges situates London, that quintessential metropolis, in a corner of the cellar of an innocuous house in Buenos Aires, among spider webs no less. This is an understatement, not a Calibanesque affirmation of the Latin American periphery over the Old World; it is more an act of entitlement than one of subversion. However, the gesture does bring about, quite literally, questions about where the center of the universe lies. Symbolically, Borges is situating himself on par with the great monuments of Western, if not global, culture. He is also reassessing the place of his native country in the world. The deed is done, and Borges, who was terrified of the narrow provincialism that Carlos Argentino represents, has gone down in history as a universal author who is also a porteño. Indeed, it takes literary events on the magnitude of Borges’s writing to exert a lasting transformation of the hegemonic ways

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4 INTRODUCTION

of international cultural prestige. Contemporary authors have replicated this gesturing toward the global, but to date only the Chilean Roberto Bolaño has gained a critical mass of transnational readership. One of the tenets of this study is showing just how Bolaño and several other authors conceive of their own Alephs, which are similarly playful, transformative, and deserving of an analogous stature.

Moreover, this brief discussion of Borges’s Aleph provides a quick illustration of how cultural products may participate in the creation and recreation of narratives of the global. As a cipher of simultaneity and ubiquity, globality is an impossible object made possible within the space of language. Along with several of its cognate concepts, “global” is nothing more and nothing less than a metaphor that operates according to the paradoxical logic of multum in parvo. That we have naturalized the metaphor in common parlance does not mean that the term itself is not metaphorical, just as we do not think of a burning candle when we come across the term “Enlightenment.” Indeed, when we ask what globalization is, we may as well ask how to use a metaphor. It is therefore my contention that literature, particularly closely read Latin American literature, still has much to say about this question. While Brian McHale famously described postmodernism as “not a found object, but a manufactured artifact,” globality is the opposite: a found object we are only beginning to theorize.6 Dwelling for a moment on the comparison of “globalization” and “Enlightenment” is instructive. Would an educated reader not know, or vaguely know, what each of these terms means? We could certainly use them in meaningful sentences even when citing a succinct definition proved difficult. Kant famously “defined” Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” yet this is not really a definition, but rather the performance of Enlightenment itself. Similarly, when we search for the meaning of globalization in culture—and we do this simultaneously, in numerous locales around the world—we bring about globalization. Thus, when Jan Scholte defines globalization as the growth of supraterritorial social spaces, or when John Tomlinson claims that the cultural dimension of globalization affects the world, or even when Gayatri Spivak states

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INTRODUCTION 5

that globalization is only about data, capital, and damage control, they all contribute to the globalization of the discourse on globalization.7 Such a proliferation of voices denotes less the impossibility of defining a term and more the emergence of a distinctive discursive mode of modern times.

Presenting here yet another “What is Globalization?” piece would be unnecessary. The existing bibliography has been constructing, by accumulation if not terminological consensus, a viable field of enquiry. What I advocate for is an understanding of the global from the ground up—that is, from works themselves, through the internal dynamics of actual cultural products. Despite the compelling case for “distant reading” made in a similar context by my colleague Franco Moretti, the Aleph calls attention to the fact that individual literary works have always addressed complexity in a “compressed” form.8 We often say poems, short stories, and novels “create entire worlds” in just a few lines or pages; in doing so, they may elucidate complex ideas, epochs, and many other things, with the aid of ink, paper, and the power of the written word alone. By the same token, an individual work may articulate globality and even preserve, as Borges’s prose does, a necessary tension between the appeal to a vue d ’ensemble and the insurmountable situatedness of the perceiving eye. A method consistent with the Aleph will proceed dialectically. Instead of looking for a priori, fixed definitions of what the world is and organizing bodies of literature around them, this method will engage literature’s potential to reveal and transform such notions. It will also pay attention to how Alephs explore the limits of what literature—and, by extension, literary criticism—can say and convey. This leads to taking positivist agendas of rewriting literary history at a planetary level with a grain of salt, while at the same time allowing a discussion on the dynamic relationship between literature and globalization.

As far as working definitions go, I regard “globalization” as a long process of world integration that has both an economic and a cultural dimension. Although I am sensible to debates on whether it starts with the Industrial Revolution, Columbus’s voyages in 1492, or earlier, what concerns me in this book is its latest stage, which I take as qualitatively different from previous periods and which starts roughly in the early 1990s, when the

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bipolar global order of the Cold War started to dismantle. I understand “world” both as a concrete, geopolitical entity and as any act of literary totalization. The crux of the matter is how these two ideas connect, or fail to do so: worlds depicted, on the one hand, and the actual realm of human activity, on the other. Following current usage, I use “world” and “global” interchangeably unless otherwise specified. Meanwhile, I regard “world literature” as a critical movement that seeks the consolidation of a more or less stable transnational canon. In other words, I consider “world literature” an “ism.” Unlike movements that have been labeled with the suffix, such as poststructuralism or postmodernism, this new trend presents itself as a horizon, when in fact it is a critical current among others.9 This end-of-history matter-of-factness should be questioned elsewhere. I, for one, share the overall thrust of the project, but I take issue with some acritical takes on its articulation. The penchant in this ism is toward considering the world as the organizing principle for literature, when hitherto we have emphasized, for example, individual languages, nations, regions, superstructures, or genealogies.

I understand a “global novel” as a novel that can have a world literary standing. Critics and scholars have a role in maintaining the statuses of texts that already have it, or in promoting the rise of new works. We are a factor amid significant others, which include translation, literary markets, and markets more generally. A pressing question for this book is the status of the global novel in the face of Latin Americanism.10 That other ism, which assumes “Latin America” as a telos and an organizing principle, is in conflict with the denomination because its cultural products, unlike those that originate in individual metropolitan centers, do not enjoy the condition of being always-already global. This has to do with many familiar issues, such as legacies of colonialism, alleged belatedness, less robust literary markets, or lack of institutional clout in universities and elsewhere. In short: geopolitical disadvantage, which will not go away by ignoring it. This disadvantage structures how much prominence the presumed “parts” of world literature have within its “whole.” In the worst-case scenario, we reproduce in literary criticism a global order that is, still, fundamentally uneven.

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The novels studied in this book, which I consider exemplary of what I call the “global Latin American novel,” are works that may contribute to consolidating, simultaneously, both the world and Latin America as their chambers of resonance. It may be tempting to say that Latin America, being a region, should be subsumed under the broader concept. But that would be an oversimplification, dictated by the faulty logic of synecdoche: the all-too frequent act of taking a writer from the semi-periphery for the whole of that locale. I suspect this familiar reading practice has exacerbated and spread after 1989 with the increase in transnational exchange, on the one hand, and as a backlash against the rise of multipolarity that this new global order makes possible, on the other. It is ironic that, after many decades in which the world had two dominant poles (the United States and the Soviet Union), critics seek to reaffirm center vs. periphery dichotomies when multiple, interconnected centers are quickly becoming a reality.

In the twenty-first century, the synecdochal figure has been Roberto Bolaño, who in many circles has come to represent the entirety of contemporary Latin American literature. Recognizing that paradigm, I seek to turn it against itself, instead showing that Bolaño may be a port of entry into a bigger corpus, not something that exhausts it. As we shall see, this corpus also includes works by César Aira, Fernando Vallejo, Diamela Eltit, Mario Bellatin, Chico Buarque, and many others. My sense is that the inscription of contemporary Latin American narratives in global culture should originate in the works themselves and carry across other aspects of literature. This contrasts with the road most taken, which is to decide a priori the categories that define “World Literature,” or simply the literature of the world, for there is room to be skeptical of the reifying effects of capitalization, or of those of agglutination in the Germanic Weltliteratur.11 If we set the rules of the game in advance, what happens with the works that may want to challenge those rules? They are left out of the game, remaining unnoticed, unseen. This is why, within literary works themselves, Alephs assert their conditions of possibility.

Instead of pretending that metropolitan centers will dictate the frame for world literature, I propose that narrative—and the regional dimension

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that renders it meaningful—contribute to that act of framing. It will not only have a say in how it is read within that paradigm, but also in what that paradigm is. Much has been written in recent years about the possibility of world literature, of the methods that should inform such an enterprise, and on the ethical and political ramifications thereof.12 I will not recast these debates here, but instead offer an alternate approach to some of the dominant—and in my view, erroneous—trends that shape our fields today.

My position is that Latin Americanism, which some fear would dissolve and vanish in “World Literaturism,” actually gains from conversing with it. As a whole, Latin America is not particularly exceptionalist or isolationist. Why should its literature be? Despite a disparaging first wave of Latin Americanist responses to the emerging paradigm, World Literaturism is a reality, an influential force in the field of contemporary literary studies—one that, by some accounts, will eventually overtake the entire field of comparative literature. Latin Americanism cannot afford to ignore it.13 Yet some Latin Americanists regard world literature as a ruse of cultural imperialism, as stated in the words of Roberto Fernández Retamar: “European capitalist expansion had established the premises for a world literature, because it had established the premises for the genuine globalization of the world.”14 Skeptical of the possibilities of undoing the allegedly imperialist origins of the world literature, this position abandons the question of literature on a world scale altogether as a problem that does not fall under the purview of Latin Americanism.

For their part, many world literature scholars and non-professional readers lack the signposts and cultural expertise for making sense of Latin American letters on their own terms. Paradoxically, it is those same readers who have turned Bolaño into a global phenomenon. This is all the more reason not to gloss over regional differences. Unlike other studies, I fully engage with the specificity of Latin American cultural production, including its institutional configurations, access to markets, and scholarship. Situating Latin American works within a planetary configuration should not mean shedding away the local critical tradition in which they have been embedded. On the contrary, the present conjuncture affords

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an opportunity to cross-pollinate Latin Americanism and world literature, without forgetting their dissymmetry. Modeling one after the other is not a path I advocate, but rather that of having them bear upon each other, contrapuntally. In that exchange, process matters as much as product. Still, if pressed to give a quick takeaway of this book, I would say the task is not to make Latin American criticism (and that of other regions) fall in step with world literature, but to model world literature after Latin Americanism.

“Latin America” is as utopian a bedrock for literary study as “the world” is. Reading a text qua Latin American or qua of-the-world (for lack of a better term) is a complex decision, a more or less conscious act of framing that may have institutional, ideological, tactical, disciplinary, factual, or simply contingent motivations and biases. But in both cases there is a community the critic seeks to conjure. “Latin America” is an open totality that can inform us about that other, broader, entelechy. It is quite a wonderful construct when one thinks about it, stretching across a vast area, many times the size of Europe, where distinct nation-states are—as the saying goes—“separated by a common language.” This language engulfs both Spanish and Portuguese, for there is increasing intellectual commerce among Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts, as this volume reflects.

Why not just read Peruvians apart from Colombians, as distinct from Chileans and Brazilians? Why not succumb to the geographical evidence that Mexico and Argentina are a hemisphere away? There is something of a leap of faith in reading Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral, or Guimarães Rosa as Latin American, but this leap is one that structures a discipline, a praxis, an ethos.15 It is not unlike trying to understand how works of fiction may belong to a planetary community.

Whereas, given the critical mass and overall influence of U.S. cultural institutions, an American-inflected take on world literature is becoming hegemonic, I propose a Latin American-inflected vision. I do so from a position within U.S. academia, though in close conversation with other locales. Admittedly, this is an unstable site of enunciation, but it is also one I embrace. In fact, Latin Americanism has a relatively long tradition of reflecting on its double or triple positionality, which results from complex

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historical processes (for an earlier generation of scholars, compulsory exile being one reason). Well versed in open, unencompassable totalities, Latin Americanists have been generating discourse about a complex region, rich in particularities, while also accounting for the commonalities. There is much that world literature practitioners could take from that praxis. Of course, someone could say that my Latin Americanist approximation to world literature is partial, but then so are the purportedly ecumenical, disembodied approximations. They are partial by omission, whereas this book assumes its here and now. I do not suggest to cancel out other visions, but to contribute to a larger discussion through position-taking. And so this book is about what contemporary Latin American literature can tell us about ideologies of the global, which in turn underlie any attempt to organize the literature of the world.

This is where another distinctive aspect of Latin Americanism comes into play, namely the vitality of its ideology critique. Critics who travel from the subdisciplines of comparative or world literature to that of Latin American literary studies, or vice versa, often experience something of a culture shock. For Latin Americanists, today’s mainstream comparatism is surprisingly apolitical; for those going in the opposite direction, it is surprisingly engaged. This is a generalization, of course, based on anecdotal evidence, but most readers will recognize this to be the case. In university corridors, one can often hear disparaging remarks that Latin American literary studies is “stuck” in politics, as is no longer the case in those other subdisciplines. (An instance of how belatedness is constructed and imposed.) On the contrary, I believe that Latin Americanism, which has indeed a rich political tradition to draw from, could invigorate world literature debates, especially because it does not sacrifice close reading or attention to the specific forms of works of art in the name of politics. In this way, Latin Americanizing world literature entails both politicizing that paradigm and bringing it closer to texts themselves.

Close-reading may seem counterintuitive when talking about literature and globalization. With so many novels, should we not look for broad patterns rather than examine sentence-level structures? Why follow one particular character around when we can rely on abstractions and types?

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INTRODUCTION 11

Why focus on stories when it is modes of storytelling that will lead us to the most encompassing, reliable judgments? I find there is a bias toward abstraction when we talk about globalization and literature, which is fine for the former and detrimental for the latter. Novels, chapters, and paragraphs are very concrete things. At odds with top-down approximations to the study of literature on a world scale, I build on the insights of narratives themselves, from the bottom-up, as active subjects of theory as opposed to passive objects to theorize upon. As I will show, a renewed attention to the language of fiction allows us to understand how cultural production comes to terms with a changing world.

I should also clarify that the kind of close-reading I have in mind is informed both by rhetorical analysis and by ideology critique, though my affinities lie much closer to Adorno than to I. A. Richards, so to speak.

Globalization is embedded in ideology; no amount of formalistic, sanitized literary study can do away with this. Consequently, I regard the resuscitation of Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur that has taken place over the last two decades more as a symptom of globalization than as a spontaneous critical movement. That we ourselves are subject to globalization is another reason to proceed dialectically—not just projecting totalizing categories over texts, but describing how those texts conceive of totality.

As the latter happens through negativity, it requires contextualization and attentive critical involvement. The global order that a given work of literature depicts is as interesting for analysis as what it obscures from view, but that does not surface without informed, speculative interpretation.

This study makes the case that the insights on the global condition to be found in a corpus of contemporary Latin American novels should lead to their inscription in a transnational literary canon, that is, in “world literature.” At the same time, I show how the object that emerges from this critical operation—a novelistic form that is both global and Latin American, that belongs within a regional and a world paradigm—is a key source for a critique of prevailing ideologies of globalization. My approach recognizes that the struggle of works of art and world consciousness takes place at the level of the form; consequently, I develop a method of close reading that supports and potentiates the meaningful frictions and

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contradictions that constitute the life of the global. This, in a nutshell, is the main argument of this book.

SAVAGES INDEED

Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Los detectives salvajes, 1998; trans., 2007), by now an established point of reference, illustrates the Aleph-like quality of much of contemporary Latin American fiction. The novel has three parts. In the first, we learn about an idiosyncratic group of young poets who call themselves real visceralistas, modeled on the infrarrealistas that Bolaño had joined as a young man in Mexico City, but by and large also reminiscent of Beatniks, unachieved avant-gardists, and gregarious fans of rock music. In naming this fictional collective, Bolaño turned the adjective “visceral” into a noun; the literal translation would be “the real visceralists.” Natasha Wimmer, whose translation I cite, has other concerns in mind when she calls them “visceral realists.”16 They are, really, visceral readers, bovarists in the strict sense. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, the movement’s patriarchs, are latter-day versions of Don Quixote and Sancho that pursue lost causes under the spell not of chivalric novels, but of maudit poetry. Their unquestioned sense of purpose borders on the absurd. They devour literature, yet produce scantily; they demand purity from members, but follow no abiding manifestoes themselves. A parody of a countercultural movement, they go around purchasing books with the profits from marijuana. We are introduced to the group through the journal of an apprentice poet, Juan García Madero, and the first part ends when—as a result of their dealings with the underworld—Belano, Lima, García Madero, and Lupe (a prostitute) flee the city in a white Impala, leaving behind friends and an angry pimp.

The second part is about immanence, about a literary movement becoming the world. A totalizing impulse becomes unbound as the plot races past four-hundred pages, taking the reader across several continents. The urban novel of Mexico City becomes a novella of Tel Aviv, and then a short story set on the outskirts of Vienna. Belano and Lima carry with them lust for life, lust for reading, and lust proper; they wander

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through Catalonia, Managua, Liberia, and Luanda. The Savage Detectives gives credit to Djelal Kadir’s understanding of “world” as a verb, as in “to world”; its characters world as they go.17 A loosely knit web of literary, personal relations emerges in this section, the longest in the book, as we learn of the protagonists’ mysterious wanderings from third-party eyewitness accounts by dozens of more or less fictive characters. These include the late Mexican essayist Carlos Monsiváis, acquaintances from their travels, and minor real visceralistas inspired in actual poets. To some extent these references constitute a roman à clef for literary insiders, but they also suggest a predominant theme of the novel: the porous nature of artistic autonomy, the imbrication of “the world of literature” and “the world at large.”

Something must have been in the air during the 1990s—perhaps the feeling that the world had become “one place” after 1989—because a year after Bolaño’s book was first published, Pascale Casanova published her landmark La république mondiale des lettres (1999; trans. The World Republic of Letters, 2004). In their respective registers, both works present sociologies of literature, attempting to explain— and in the case of Bolaño, to re-enchant—the phenomena that constitute literature on a world scale. Casanova’s argument is well-known: literature is a semiautonomous world unto itself that operates more or less democratically, modeled after a republic; its center, given its critical mass of translations and its protagonism in international cultural brokerage, is Paris. (She notes in passing that Barcelona would occupy a similar position for the Spanish-speaking publishing world.) A dynamic center-periphery model, this literary republic has great descriptive, and also prescriptive, power.

Casanova then sets the groundwork for a “theorization of literary inequality.” The end of that exercise, which I share, would be “the restitution, to the subordinated of the literary world, of the forms, specificities and hardships of their struggles.”18 However, her means, ostensibly sociological, can be at odds with that end, because in some sense it solidifies what it seeks to subvert.

Bolaño and Casanova are both thinkers of immanence. If literature is the world, then critics and writers cannot be “on the outside.” And so description, more or less fictionalized, would already transform the

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ensemble—it would internally affect that world. However, Bolaño’s novel takes exception to some elements of the descriptive turn in literary studies. To put the matter bluntly, if The Savage Detectives were an essay, it would claim that the evolution of literature on a world scale is not something reducible to information. The historicist’s pitfall is reducing all explanations to historical determinism; similarly, pace Bolaño, one could coin the term “sociolicist” to describe Casanova’s project. The fable of real visceralismo reminds us that there is a constitutive excess to literature, a vitality that escapes systemic enquiry. Vis-à-vis Casanova, Bolaño reinstates the gratuity of the creative act at the heart of the world literature debate; favors a rhizomic understanding of literature on a world scale over the center-periphery logic; represents the semi-autonomy of art as the muddled affair it is; and finally re-singularizes literary works before finding their place in the republics (or oligopolies or dictatorships) of world literature.

Two themes carry out these operations, one present in Bolaño’s oeuvre at large and the other exclusive to The Savage Detectives. The former comprises of puzzling forms of fascism, exemplified in the novel in the character of Heimito Künst (here Bolaño drops in an umlaut for good measure), a recovering neo-Nazi poet who meets Lima in the prison at Beersheba, Israel. Never mind that “Heimito” is a comical, Mexicanized diminutive form of Heimlich; the name thinly veils what the character stands for: Heimat Kunsts, the homeland of art.19 Nazism, an ideology of land and origin, serves as the counterpoint to the rootlessness of the many wandering characters in Bolaño’s fiction. The dialectic between these two conflicting impulses gives shape to an artform that, borrowing the art curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s term, one could call “radicant,” namely one that lays roots as it goes.20 The Heimitos in Bolaño’s work mark the ways in which the action of worlding encounters atavistic resistance; they lead to hard questions about autonomy and restitution that more programmatic, institutionally oriented discourses of globalism in literature do not necessarily foreground. In sum, they embody the nightmare of globalism: that at the eleventh hour an authoritarian, heteronomous world of literature—conceived under the sign of fascism, not democracy—prevails. By

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such means, Bolaño’s dystopian sociologies of literature allow one to take a step back from conventional accounts of the politics of literature, a gesture that already factors into a different kind of reparation.

The second theme is the variety of sexual experience, which models the irreducible complexity of literature. In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño pursues the remainder in the description of artistic practices, the hardto-pinpoint libidinal energy of literature that the sociolocist cannot capture. He does so with mordant wit, as when Ernesto San Epifanio, a lesser real visceralista, divides all poetry into the categories of “faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes,” the two major currents being those of faggots and queers. San Epifanio advances his theory by remarking that Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz were queer poets, William Blake and Walt Whitman were faggot poets, Jorge Luis Borges was “a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next,” and Rubén Darío was “el paradigma de las locas,” or—in Wimmer’s rather unfortunate translation—“the prototypical freak.”21 It might be easy to dismiss the passage as a puerile game, and perhaps it is, but what lies behind it is a consistent juxtaposition of the world of literature and human sexuality.

The implications of this idea are worthy of note. One can offer a taxonomy of literary practices modelled after the theory of evolution—as Moretti does in Graphs, Maps, and Trees—but literature is as much reducible to information as desire is.22 The point of human sexuality is not procreation; if literature were like a family tree, it would be one in which promiscuity, not monogamy and wedlock, were the norm. In this light, it becomes apparent that the plotlines of prostitutes and pimps in the first part of The Savage Detectives are not mere picaresque; they set the stage for the rhizomic mapping of the lived experience of literature on a world scale that occupies the second part of the novel. Call it the Kinsey Report of world literature. Alberto, the pimp, stands in for abusive cultural brokerage, while hypersexual Piel Divina (literally, “Divine Skin”) represents restless, aimless reading and writing. These broad, parallel spectra of literary experience and sexuality coincide in Ulises Lima, who is impotent until a French anthropology student named Simone Darrieux gently asks him to spank her while she confesses that she has not read Rigaut, Max

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Jacob, Banville, Baudelaire, Catulle Mendés, or Corbière (although she has, of course, read the Marquis de Sade). The mind reels with the interpretive possibilities of this playing out of “literary inequality.” More generally, it illustrates how in the novel’s sexualized world of literature there is room for gratuitous love and prostitution, power and impotence, perversion and convention, and all kinds of possible combinations and permutations thereof. One is reminded of the argument made by James English in The Economy of Prestige about how literary prizes can at the same time be pure gifts and interested transactions; in The Savage Detectives, there is an economy to the inner workings of the world of literature, but this economy is libidinal in nature.23 The cathectic center of The Savage Detectives, we learn from interviews with Amadeo Salvatierra during the second part of the novel, is Cesárea Tinajero. We go back in narrative time in García Madero’s journal, when the original escapees from Mexico City are cruising the Sonoran Desert in their white Impala, months before Lima and Belano set out to discover the wider world. In a novel that has largely been pure drift, it dawns on the reader that the title of the book has to do with the quest to find Tinajero, allegedly the mother of real visceralismo and in fact the mother of all red herrings. Her name offers a clue about the third part’s puzzling anticlimax: a tinaja is an earthenware jar and a cenicero an ashtray, so her last name arguably is a portmanteau. As for her first name, a Cesarean is of course delivery via surgical incision. I take it that Bolaño—a reader of Borges, who was in turn a reader of Nordic sagas—presents here a kenning, or circumlocution, for abortion. One could not describe the denouement of the novel in better, or more graphic, terms. Given the assimilation of sexuality and literature throughout the novel, what would be a more compelling finale than finding Cesárea “only to bring her death”?24 García Madero describes what finally happens in the last pages of the novel in those very words. Tinajero dies in an unheroic showdown between the poets, the pimp, and an ex-machina corrupt policeman. As we reach page 600 (page 575 in the English translation), the joke is on us.

Tinajero turns out to be an objet petit a: there is no ultimate satisfaction for the unbridled desire that is world literature. In this, too, The Savage

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Detectives is an Aleph, a fleeting glimpse of totality, or if you will, an “inverted Aleph,” for one might be inclined to describe it as parvum in multo, little in much. But what emerges from this long perambulation is an assessment of the precariousness of literature, a timely caveat for a day and age when institutional initiatives to grapple with the totality of literary forms are on everyone’s table. Bolaño summons us to reconnect with the specificity of our so-called object of study, to regard literature both from grounded experience and from under the aspect of eternity. These ideas appear most forcefully in a passage from the second part, worth citing at length, that gains relevance when one considers the book as a whole: Iñaki Echevarne, Bar Giardinetto, Calle Granada del Penedés, Barcelona, July 1994. For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path.

Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.25 How seriously should we take this space opera theory of literature?

Note the tension between the frivolous tone and the grand theme, the contradiction between compressed form and expansive content. If the attribution to an “Iñaki Echavarne” were in fact a nod to Ignacio Echevarría, the influential critic for the literary supplement Babelia and one of the makers of the Bolaño phenomenon, we could speak of metafictional self-awareness.26 This entry, which is something of a riddle, puts

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the ground-level experiences of real visceralistas in perspective, but its meaning is open to interpretation. I take its core message to be that, at the end of the day, the diachronic practice of close reading has the upper hand over critical apparatuses that, by comparison, are always discrete and synchronic. Whether we agree with this prophetic judgment or not, it is certainly one to revisit, for it is not every day that we come across a work of literature that so insistently calls into question some of the most influential critical currents of our time.

As I have already suggested, Bolaño’s Aleph is but one among several considered in this book.27 I find it necessary to go beyond Bolaño, not past him. Taking stock of the Bolaño phenomenon bears fruit at many levels, especially when one does not overestimate it to the point of having the author eclipse his peers or ignore it as mere fad, as if it had not altered the landscape of contemporary literature. Latin American critics have more or less openly denounced the sudden rise of the late Chilean as an imposition from the incommensurately strong forces of the literary market in the First World. Arguably, the recent first wave of “global” readings of Bolaño has been oblivious to its equivalent in a Hispanophone context, which took place some fifteen years ago.28 But the question remains: why is it that as accomplished creators as the Argentine César Aira, the Colombian Fernando Vallejo, and the Mexican-Peruvian Mario Bellatin do not enjoy the massive appeal of their Chilean counterpart?

Sarah Pollack sheds light on this matter, at least so far as the U.S. reader is concerned. She exposes the exploitation of the tragic last years in the author’s life; with the acquiescence of publishers, the English-speaking media turned Bolaño, who died at fifty from liver failure writing on his deathbed, into some kind of Scheherazade on heroin unable to complete the Work. More importantly, Pollack establishes that one of the reasons for the commercial success of The Savage Detectives is that the novel yields itself for a superficial reading that reinforces U.S. stereotypes of Latin America. In her reading, Sarmiento’s dichotomy of civilization vs. barbarism informs the book, and these poles result in a “comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized.”29 However, I think there is also a different set of dichotomies

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that is just as important, anchored in a reductive, pre-1989 view of politics: East vs. West on the international stage, and the radical left vs. militant right both at home and abroad. Bolaño’s writing offers readers everywhere a comfortable choice by being both residual of the Cold War imagination and cognizant of a budding multipolarity. It has enough in common with One Hundred Years of Solitude, a total novel informed by the sixties and dependency theory, to be recognizable as Latin American.

But it also thematizes the intensity of migration and cross-cultural flows that characterizes our present era and challenges the self-evidence of Latin American exceptionalism.

The Savage Detectives is written under the sign of the long year 1989, a period of time that spans more or less from the 1987 reforms in the Soviet Union through the end of the civil war in El Salvador in 1992, and well into the mid-nineties in some places. (Cold War culture did not magically come to a halt, as Berlin Wall fetishism would have us believe, but rather waned away gradually with a few active sites left behind, such as Colombia or Cuba.30) As Jean Franco and Neil Larsen, among others, have shown, a significant portion of twentieth-century Latin American culture revolves around the Cold War and the Monroe Doctrine, its hemispheric precedent.31 Realizing this precedent in its full measure leads to an appreciation of the aesthetic void created by 1989. Long-standing solutions to the problem of how to put into words one’s place in the world simply lose their edge; poets that in their stanzas mirror the conflict between two dominant visions of society—the late Darío, the mature Neruda and Cardenal—speak to a different time. Literary forms need constraint to produce meaning, be they sonnets, free-verse poems, detective novels, or experimental prose; the ideological and aesthetic polarization of society pre-1989 provided a firm ground that no longer exists. The present paradigm of globalization emerges from and supersedes the Cold War, we know as much; making sense of this transition, however, is still a project in the making, both for critics and for writers like Bolaño.

How do you even wrap your mind around “the world” after 1989? The bipolar order of the Cold War offered certainties, schemes, categories, and grids, such as the triage performed by the notions of a First, Second, and

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Third World. Monikers such as “Industrialized North” and “Global South” are substitutes that operate at such a broad scale, and in such a reductive fashion, that it is difficult to have them come to bear at the level of individual works of art or otherwise impinge upon the complex dynamics of the circulation of contemporary literature. The Bolaño phenomenon, beyond the clever “marketing” by publishers and reviewers, owes itself to these uncertainties. A novel like The Savage Detectives provides a literary map to navigate a new consciousness of the world as a whole. Thus, it is not the case that other Latin American authors could just as well fill in the shoes of Bolaño, if they only had a similarly catchy life story or were promoted as favorably. His Aleph prevails to some extent thanks to its didactic qualities, and largely because of its distinctive brand of globalism.

Readers can easily spot adventure episodes within a mise en abyme of the main plot and skip one, or several. Unlike other works that come to terms with a changing world, one can read The Savage Detectives superficially and still get a sense of its vision of globality.

The long year 1989 elicits the search for globality that characterizes contemporary Latin American literature. 1989 is an overdetermined marker that resonates in local and global realms with the force that only pivotal years such as 1945 or 1968 do. Far from Berlin, in my native Colombia, it signals the peak of the war against the drug cartels and the rebirth of civil society: after the murder of two presidential candidates, a group of students initiated a successful campaign for constitutional reform. That same year, Chileans voted Pinochet out of office, and thousands of Chinese students gathered to protest, and ultimately meet their deaths, in Tiananmen Square. I do not mean to suggest that these social movements have any significant connection, only that they add layers of meaning to the date; arguably, but not unproblematically, Beijing and Berlin have more in common. As Internet historians tell us, 1989 was also the year the World Wide Web started its path to being a powerful shaper of globality, often identified with it by metonymy.32 By the mid-nineties it would assume much of its present function as the telegraph of modern times, insofar as it fosters a sense of connectivity.33 The story of globalization is not one of overnight changes or clear-cut stages, but of cumulative, gradual transformation.

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This process intensified as a result of the new world order that began to take shape around that long year, not through a single event but in the confluence of several. I have no investment in rigid periodization and do not seek to claim that a new literary, cultural, or historical epoch began in 1989. The date is an important referent if one is to understand the historical situation of the works at hand; it is a useful marker, not a monument.

Something similar could be said of 2001. Given the geopolitical and U.S. policy changes that followed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Latin America is less aligned with the United States than before.

They are out of sync: the threat of nonstate Islamist armed groups and the War on Terror are dimly felt in the region; moreover, the region has a negligible role to play on the matter. The Drug War rages on, every day more real for Mexicans, Hondurans, and even Paraguayans, while for many Americans it is but an afterthought of the wars waged in the Middle East and Central Asia. In this sense, as Jorge Castañeda puts it, the region became the “Forgotten Continent.” For John Beverley, this diminished strategic interest is a desirable, unanticipated development, since it has facilitated the “Pink Tide” in the region and has given “a new ideological and geopolitical force to the idea of Latin America itself.”34 From a different political persuasion, Castañeda argues more or less openly for the United States to resume its hegemony and do some housekeeping.35 What I take from these debates is an enormous sense of opportunity: at a distance from the Cold War and not entirely subsumed under the logic of the War on Terror, contemporary Latin American writers have an unprecedented chance at imagining the world differently, at modeling an alternate globality.

The question, then, is what kind of criticism may potentiate these processes. Bourriaud has rightly asked for the plastic arts questions that also apply to literature: “Why is it that globalization has so often been discussed from sociological, political, and economic points of view, but almost never from an aesthetic perspective? How does this phenomenon affect the life of form?”36 Artistic form is clearly not a matter of art for art’s sake, but an indispensable aspect to consider if one is to understand how “objects” such as novels can inform globality. As it turns out, we imagine

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the global as we imagine everything else: through metaphor, narrative, image, and related means. Therein lies the renewed interest in the practice of close reading, for when the issue at stake is the utopian, uchronic agenda of activating the “consciousness of the world as a whole,” process matters as much as product.37 It goes without saying that accompanying the experience of individual works of art is time well spent.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

The chapters in this book examine how contemporary Alephs operate.

I primarily consider notable novels by Chileans, Argentines, Colombians, Brazilians, and Mexicans. Although I will also discuss works by other authors, the central figures in this volume are Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, Fernando Vallejo, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, and Mario Bellatin. Their works all stage acts of framing the unframable: they cultivate the tension between the particular and the general, or the local and the global, as their art. In doing so, they attempt, however modestly, to transform the way we understand the world. They constitute a corpus of what I have been referring to as “the global Latin American novel.”

In proposing this term, I am fully aware of its polemical nature. Can something be both global and Latin American? Does Latin Americanness somehow subtract from globalness? Would one be less inclined to raise one’s eyebrows when coming across the terms “global English” or “global American”? In what description would adding a qualifier to “global” lead to redundancy—global modern architecture, perhaps? To conceptualize certain Latin American novels as global seeks to preserve, not resolve, tensions between particularism and generalization, vernacular and widely understood linguistic practices, high-prestige and low-prestige denominations, cultural essentialism and relativism, “parochial” and “world-class” aesthetic values, and locally embedded and abstractly detached art forms.

“Global Latin American” is asymmetric in ways that, say, “global French” is not.38 Particularism, understood as the burden of having to identify the subject matter as other than or opposed to the mainstream, accounts for some of this asymmetry. Cultural phenomena such as Eurocentrism

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loom large as well, as in university curricula where a course on the “Nineteenth-century Novel” can deal exclusively with French texts, while the marker “Latin American” must accompany the study of works by such nineteenth-century authors as Clorinda Matto de Turner and Jorge Isaacs.

The term “global novel” is no less problematic. Should we announce the rise of a global novel for a brave new world? In “The Dull New Global Novel,” Tim Park offers a less rosy picture, warning that a consolidated, global literary marketplace may privilege “flat” works that renounce the use of the vernacular and the inclusion of “culture-specific clutter” so as not to estrange foreign readers. Similarly, Chandrahas Choudhury bemoans the facts that Indian writers who cater for Western, English-speaking readers are “at once too specific—excelling in stating the obvious—and not specific enough.”39 Alas, this remains an open debate. For some, “global” becomes a derogatory term when applied to a novel, the scarlet letter of the cultural mercenary. For others, it signals an aspired condition. And yet both these parties seem to excessively rely on the transparency of the novel as an instrument for cultural translation. As reading Bolaño in Wimmer’s voice suggests, a novel can be both global and opaque. The Mexican slang in The Savage Detectives must be rendered into American slang to carry across as such, while other expressions must remain, italicized, in the Spanish original, so as not to obliterate the source. These conventions reconstruct some degree of spontaneity, allowing English-speaking readers to feel as though they were reading from the original, with just the right amount of mediation. (In fact, the English reader may feel more “at home” with the text than the Spanish reader, who encounters several distinct dialects in the characters’ voices—Mexican, Peruvian, etc.) Flat readings, such as the one exposed by Pollack, can turn a Latin American novel like The Savage Detectives into a “global novel” in the derogative sense: a transient, “global hit.” But the novel’s profound articulation of globality is likely to produce a more enduring effect.

The global Latin American novel seeks not to flatten, but to give an almost tactile quality to the conflicting forces that define worldconsciousness, in the region and elsewhere. It conforms to what Casanova has called a double-positionality in the world republic of letters: “each

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writer is situated once according to the position he or she occupies in a national space, and then once again according to the place that this occupies within the world space.”40 In the case of emerging writers situated in semi-peripheral national spaces, this double-positionality becomes contradiction—or, for lack of a better word, “friction”—as can be seen in the above reading of The Savage Detectives. The same is true for the entire corpus studied in this book, which itself constitutes one among several possible histories of the Latin American novel after 1989. Specifically, these authors have access—however imperfect—to international circuits, write in one of the two major languages in the region (Spanish and Portuguese), concern themselves with the articulation of a global conscience, and can be said to belong to a Latin American cultural realm. This last precision may seem unnecessary, but there are indeed distinctively local artists whose appeal makes sense at a strictly national or even subnational level.

As Jean Franco notes, one of the effects of globalization on literary history is “a questioning of the very term ‘Latin American’ as a selfexplanatory framework.” Accordingly, when Djelal Kadir and Mario Valdés edited Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, a three-volume compilation of articles by prominent scholars in the field, they parted from the premise that “Latin American literary cultures” is a better explanatory frame than “Latin American literature” in light of the heterogeneity of the object of study. More emphatically, Walter Mignolo has proposed a constructivist critique of the concept “Latin America” itself, in order to question the discrepancies between the term, on the one hand, and the territory or cultural entity it alludes to, on the other. To some extent, such discussions are part of an old problematic being played out anew—think of Borges on “Argentine” literature or Arturo Ardao on the idea of Latin America—and that, in its most extreme forms, echoes a philosophical dispute between nominalists and realists.41 Less radical conceptualizations are also reminiscent of past debates, as there have been long-standing tensions about whether even the most established figures of the Latin American tradition should “belong” to individual nations or to broader realms, as homogeneity and heterogeneity in Latin America are, as everywhere else, in constant struggle and flux.

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Although I do not agree with the suspension of the deictic value of the term “Latin American,” I do recognize its limitations: for every writer that may fall squarely within the semantic fields of both the Latin American and the global author, there are several for whom such denominations would be to no avail, and many more for whom the very experience of a national or subnational identity would be at odds with a regional denomination, let alone the global. And yet, if the recent history of Latin American literature is a fragmented, contested terrain, the commonalities to be found in an influential group of post-1989 writers suggest that a common historical narrative, however open-ended, is once again possible.

In this endeavor, I am preceded by several notable studies, such as Francine Masiello’s The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (2001). As her subtitle suggests, Masiello utilizes cultural resistance to neoliberalism as her organizing principle. More recently, Laddaga’s Espectáculos de realidad: Ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas (Spectacles of Reality: Essay on Latin American Narrative from the Last Two Decades, 2007) concentrates on the effects of an expansive media ecology on literary work. Also of note is a recent special issue of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (2012), guest-edited

by Aníbal González, which documents a post-national turn in the literature of the region. While conversing with these and other studies that explicate aspects of an ongoing cultural transformation, the main purpose of Beyond Bolaño is to make sense of the larger whole.42 Novels not only react to conflicting visions of the global, they articulate their own. As my reading of The Savage Detectives illustrates, in order to appreciate such distinctive contributions we must regard a novel as a subject of theory as opposed to an object one theorizes upon, and engage its double dimension as both a self-standing work and as a textual apparatus embedded in more vast cultural formations.

The chapters in this book analyze the strategies, in a broad sense of the word, that allow authors to reflect upon the experience of globalization and to situate themselves beyond the boundaries of national literatures.

As we shall see, such strategies seek to estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across worldwide cultural

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hegemonies. The interest of this study is thus manifold, for while this gesture distinguishes contemporary authors who otherwise do not claim to form a generational “movement” or “aesthetic,” it also shows how literary forms may capture, reproduce, counter, or otherwise affect and be affected by ideologies of the global. Although it is generally accepted that in our contemporary “globalized” world there is a heightened cultural interdependence across borders, such multifocal relations are still predominantly conceived along established axes, with a tendency to privilege cultural flows that emanate from metropolitan centers to the periphery. This book’s chosen corpus often navigates against such currents, invigorating less frequent exchanges or claiming centrality in unexpected ways.

The first chapter focuses on a work that Bolaño dedicated entirely to the trope of Nazism, Nazi Literature in the Americas (La literatura nazi en América, 1996; trans., 2008), which is one among several contemporary works—by Bolaño and by others—that envisions a parallel “Nazi” world. The bestseller In Search of Klingsor (En busca de Klingsor, 1999; trans., 2002) by Jorge Volpi and Shadow Without a Name (Amphitryon, 2000; trans., 2003) by his countryman, Ignacio Padilla, also transform the international, marginal phenomenon of neo-Nazism into a displaced figure of globalization. I show how the counterfactual exercise of imagining such scenarios denaturalizes the global so as to better resituate the Latin American writer within it. By claiming the centrality of Nazism in global imagination, such narratives position Latin American literature within contemporary discussions on the legacy of the Second World War, raising provocative questions about the proprietary relations of local historical memory in globalized times. In analyzing the peculiar construct of contemporary Latin American Nazi literature, I draw from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” particularly from the idea that every document of civilization is simultaneously a document of barbarism, as well as from Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s trial, this being the historical basis for the protagonist in Padilla’s novel. The fact that “Nazi” Latin American novels can exist illustrates the shortcomings of an overly teleological historiography of world literature.

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The second chapter considers a neighboring phenomenon that results from a new, perceived increased proximity among distant cultures throughout the world: plots of impossible escapism. The great Brazilian songwriter-poet Chico Buarque de Hollanda exemplifies this trend in a novel that touches on the Nazism motif but takes it in a different direction.

In Budapest (Budapeste, 2003; trans., 2004), a carioca ghostwriter learns Hungarian and over a span of years develops a career as a well-respected writer in Budapest. He then returns to Rio to discover that the baby son he left behind has become a neo-Nazi youth—and so the radicant dream and the radical nightmare collide. But the novel traces a different arc from that of Bolaño and his cohort, for it shows, by stretching its own pact of verisimilitude to its limits, that in a growingly interconnected world there are no faraway lands. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s reflections on utopianism and ideology, I characterize the obsolescence of escapism in a world dominated by the paradigm of immanence, no more by that of transcendence.

At the same time, that immanent space is weighted toward what could loosely be called a South–South relation, bypassing the presumed EuroAtlantic centers of world history, world literature, and capitalism.

In a similar vein, supermarkets, seen as representation of global capitalism, are the topic of the third chapter. I examine Mano de obra (Labor, 2002) by the Chilean avant-gardist Diamela Eltit; it is an experimental narrative where it is no longer the case that “all the world is a stage,” but rather, the world is now a supermarket. My reading pays special attention to the novel’s allusions to Chilean labor history within the context of international worker solidarity and to its paradoxical documentation of the cultural specificity of a non-place such as a supermarket. Responding to Nelly Richard, I situate this novel both in regard to the experience of neoliberalism in Chile and to the present situation of literary practices within late capitalism. To that end, I compare Eltit’s work to the novel Mala onda (1991) by the aforementioned Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean author who seems to embrace an ideal of global authorship as a function of international celebrity, branding, and trendsetting consumer goods.

From across the Andes, I bring to bear a survey of several texts of César Aira that playfully imagine supermarkets as sites for revolution. A major

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contribution of this chapter for the study of world literature, and for studies on the imprint of globalization on culture, is the identification of fictional supermarkets as sites where one can, so to speak, take the pulse of market-driven transnationalism.

Chapter 4 analyzes a recurrent theme in several Latin American novels from the last two decades: the confluence of the global networks of Christianity and drug trafficking. Each of these strange bedfellows has a worlding effect in its own right, situating practitioners, on the one hand, and consumers and producers, on the other, within larger social structures.

Yet novels like Our Lady of the Assassins (La Virgen de los sicarios, 1994; trans., 2001), by the antioqueño writer Fernando Vallejo, conflate the two.

I describe how Vallejo constructs mid-nineties Medellín as the Rome of the drug trade by exposing the limits of religious and mediatic images as instruments for the mediation between local, national, and global realms.

Drawing from Carl Schmitt, I characterize the novel’s political theology and the ways in which its depiction of global media reveals widespread, undertheorized eschatological beliefs. I complement these findings with a reading of La Santa Muerte (Holy Death, 2004) by the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis. Going against predominant interpretations of narconovelas, which often consider the trade itself as the dominant term of comparison, I show how the absence of a civic-religious constitutive power at a local level plays a key role in their representation of marginality.

Crucially, I make the case that, instead of hastening to adopt the apparent world-literary genre of narconovela, we can use it as a springboard to critique the hegemonic global order that underwrites narcotrafficking.

The fifth and final chapter studies appropriations of the concerns and methods of contemporary art as a strategy for global inscription. I revisit Aira, who in tandem with the Mexican-Peruvian Mario Bellatin refashions the republic of letters by adopting the conventions of a neighboring construction, “the art world.” These authors operate within literary circuits as if they were curators and contemporary plastic artists themselves: Aira assumes the persona of none other than Marcel Duchamp, while Bellatin takes on that of Joseph Beuys. Among other texts, I examine Aira’s “Duchamp en México” (1996) in light of readymades by the artist, as well

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as Bellatin’s aphoristic novel Lecciones para una liebre muerta (Lessons to a Dead Hare, 2005), in that of the quasi-homonymous 1965 performance by Beuys. I also explicate how allusions to landmark works of international contemporary art destabilize the rituals involved in the promotion of literature, calling on their underlying exoticism. In promising new ways, this literary actualization of the international legacy of conceptual and performance art resists the commodification of authorship in the global literary marketplace. The resulting works transcend the limits of the book as an object, and pose some of the most interesting reflections today on the unfolding of creative practices at a world-scale.

My effort to Latin Americanize world literature does not stem from partisanship alone, although I do find it helpful to make explicit the specific emphases that inform any exercise in thinking of literature on a world scale. Let others, from different locales, openly do the same, and we can then have a discussion that is both site-specific and that looks for common ground. I find that the particular traits of contemporary Latin American literature, especially its unique ways of imagining the world, illuminate general reflections about globalization and the novel. Conversely, I think it is time we Latin Americanists regard our corpus, at least part of the time, through the lens of world literature or otherwise reflect on the fact that writers today are increasingly conceiving of their works in the presence of an emerging planetary community.

The implication is also temporal, for this operation seeks to restitute contemporaneity to works that, because of their semi-peripheral provenance, are relegated to an always-already past condition.43 Translation, like interpretation more generally, is always anachronistic. However, in the case of the relationship between Latin America and world literature, there is a particularly erratic form of anachronism that creates notable delays and surprising boomerang effects in the construction of cultural capital.

The gap between the appearance of Borges’s stories in the forties and their international dissemination in the sixties and seventies is a case in point.

Bolaño’s translation regime had a lapse of little over a decade, which is negligible by comparison, and more akin to that of the Boom. The Boom itself was a moment of synchronicity between Latin American and world

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literature, and as such, it became enshrined in the minds of many First World readers as the present of Latin American letters, when this is not the case any more. Meanwhile, the Bolaño phenomenon in translation is about a lone writer, plucked from his context into the realm of literary legend—much like the Boom authors, but with a greater penchant for individuality. There appears to be a virtuous circle, where synchronicity confers canonicity and vice versa. The circle may turn vicious when synchronicity confers canonicity and canonicity, in turn, prescribes a stifling, imposed synchronicity to works that are past their moment of cultural significance. Be this as it may, the works of Bolaño’s contemporaries— as well as other works from Latin America that may also challenge our unexamined present—could easily fade from view in the synecdochal model. Their re-inscription cannot happen without questioning the ways that inscription happens in the first place, a problem I situate, primarily, at the level of reading practices.

This book is an exercise in potentiating, within literary and cultural criticism, the multipolarity promised by the epochal transformations of 1989. That Latin America should effectively become a pole that orients the transnational field, rather than a locale ancillary to the workings of metropolitan centers, is still a work in progress. Some might regard Bolaño as something that, in Spanish, happened years ago, with English and other languages catching up later on. He was, after all, validated by local prestige-building prizes (the Rómulo Gallegos) and editorial houses (Anagrama) before his success in translation. So, in some sense, Bolaño is an instance (which we are bound to have more of as the world becomes more integrated) of metropolitan centers experiencing the kind of belatedness that used to be reserved to, and a hallmark of, the periphery. It would appear that the days of chiefly unidirectional flows of cultural production are coming to an end. However, the cultural economy of the First World is of a different order of magnitude than anything Latin America, and the Latin Americanists in multiple locales, could cobble together. In Spanish, and in Chile in particular, Bolaño became Bolaño only after his international canonization. As this suggests, the transactions among diverse, asymmetrical locales are increasingly complex. Moreover, as my reading

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of The Savage Detectives has put forward, those transactions do not merely frame texts or condition their circulation, but are internal to the tensions and contradictions of literary form.

To recap: if, on the one hand, we regard the return of Weltliteratur as a product of globalization and, on the other, make an appraisal of the transformation in world consciousness from recent years—the intensified interconnection I have called, with moderate investment on the term itself, “globality”—then it follows that the investigation of globality must inform discussions about the configuration of the corpus and institutions of world literature. Fiction can conjure globality, as the Aleph demonstrates.

This occurs in other Latin American works, many of which benefit from a strong tradition of negotiating particularity and universality, specificity and generality, all within complex transactions among national, regional, and global realms. In this way, world literature has much to learn from contemporary Latin American fiction, especially if it wishes to go beyond the limitations of synecdoche. Now, countering the tokenizing effect of transnational canons requires deemphasizing big-picture literary historiography and giving its due to singularities. In other words, going beyond Bolaño entails engaging Aira, Vallejo, Eltit, Buarque, and others. This will likely be an introduction to their works for readers outside of Latin Americanism, and will reframe them for those already within it. But at stake is their world literary standing. This hinges not on genius or on some defense of the inherent value of semi-peripheral or, indeed, of all literature. Their interest lies in their assemblage, because together they present precious literary forms—modern Alephs—that invite us to think, against the grain, about both globalization and literary study on a world scale.

Beyond Bolaño will be of interest for several kinds of readers. One is the scholar of Latin American fiction, whose primary interest is examining with close attention the evolution of literature in this region. Another is the scholar of world literature, who regards novels as part of a broader ensemble, relatively unbound from its provenance yet open to a potentially global community of readers. Then there is the general or “nonprofessional” reader, who does not have a formal training in interpreting a certain tradition and does not make a living out of doing so. One of

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the tenets of this study is to build bridges between these constituencies, recognizing their differences and the tensions that result from their conversation. These may be occasionally overlapping categories, but reading in terms of simply one or the other is not identical. I myself am a trained Latin Americanist who also participates in world literature debates, and I am an enthusiastic nonprofessional reader of authors that, by sheer cultural distance, lie outside of my area of expertise—Murakami and Lu Xun, for instance.

In what follows, I discuss valuable visions of globality from the turn of the twenty-first century. If, as Casanova affirms, writers worldwide acknowledge a certain “Greenwich Meridian” that determines what is held as modern or current, a defining trait of the authors considered here is the attempt to overtake this Meridian precisely by thinking through the global condition. This Borgesian enterprise leads to insightful representations of a complex world in a compressed form—veritable Alephs that transcend the tokenism that Bolaño has been subject to, yet also the orthodoxies of Cold War schemata and Internet reductionism. They reveal, from a Latin Americanist perspective, the true potential of global imagination.