1THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR:ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G. SEBALD, AND NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES

A thesis submitted to the faculty ofSan Francisco State University

In partial fulfillment ofThe requirements for

The degree

Master of Artsin:

Comparative and World Literature

by

Jessie Byron Ferguson

San Francisco, California

August 2007

2Copyright byJessie Byron Ferguson

2007

3CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Archimedean Author by Jessie

Byron Ferguson, and that in my opinion this work meets

the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of

Arts in Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco

State University

___________________________________________Dane JohnsonAssociate Professor of Comparative and WorldLiterature

___________________________________________Volker LangbehnAssociate Professor of German

4THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR:ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G. SEBALD, AND NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES

Jessie Byron FergusonSan Francisco State University

2007

This study examines the representation of reading, writing, criticism and authorship in

three recent novels: La literatura nazi en Amrica [Nazi Literature in the Americas] and

Estrella distante [Distant Star] by Roberto Bolao, and Die Ringe des Saturn [The Rings

of Saturn] by W.G. Sebald. Both authors pay tribute to the work of Jorge Luis Borges in

their fiction, and I argue that Borges short fiction is an important antecedent to the

metafictional, intertextual narrative structure of the three later novels. But those novels

also significantly modify Borges fictional model of the interconnected worlds of people

and texts, partially as a response to the traumatic experiences of historical violence which

play a major role in their work, but also as a deeper critique of the position (and

obligations) of the author in time and space. I argue that these practices are productive

not only as a way of negotiating recent literary and political history, but as possible future

models for writers with similar concerns.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

______________________________________________ _________________Chair, Thesis Committee Date

5PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first debt of gratitude is to my advisors, Volker

Langbehn and Dane Johnson, whose insight and diligence

in reading and criticizing this project have been invaluable.

I would also like to thank Professor Shirin Khanmohamadi,

who gave useful feedback for an early paper on this topic;

the 2005-06 editors of Portals who accepted that paper for

publication; Daniel Medin, for sharing his work on Sebald

(and many other things); and my cohort in general,

particularly Will Arighi, Christy Rodgers, Rachel Gibson

and Olga Zilberbourg, for encouragement and comments. I

have benefited from innumerable conversations about my

work with friends, and from the love and support of my

family, who will all continue to be effusively

acknowledged outside these pages. Finally, Paul Kerschen

gave me inestimable intellectual and moral support during

my degree program; without him this thesis would not have

been possible.

v

6TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Chapter One: Beyond Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Chapter Two: Where Stories Begin and End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Chapter Three: From the Air: Maps and Narrative Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51

Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

vi

1INTRODUCTION

W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and Roberto Bolaos

La literatura nazi en Amrica (Nazi Literature in America) and Estrella distante (Distant

Star) are novels about writers and texts in the former case, mostly English writers and

historical texts; in the latter cases, mostly invented writers and imaginary, belletristic

texts. The first two titles Estrella distante is a slightly different case fall into

different bands of a broad spectrum of encyclopedic writing, and they freely mix

fiction and fact, author and narrator, firsthand consciousness and secondhand

information. They invite the reader to look over the narrators shoulder, as it were, as he

processes an enormous amount of information and ultimately tries to derive meaning

from it. Certain artificial devices common to all three novels, though, hold the same

reader at a distance: most notably, the disjuncture between the author and the first-person

narrator identified with him.

The use of a fictional double for the author in these novels does not, as in some

metafictional writing, have significant implications for the world of the novel itself: that

is, it isnt especially important either to plot or to other characters that one character is

also the author. The doubling affects the relationship with the reader instead. The

authorial narrators play the role of both writer and reader; they are by turns allied with

and opposed to the real reader of the novel. That real reader must therefore attend to

several different levels, and types, of text within the unified whole: those written

originally and explicitly for the external reader (by the author-narrator as writer), and

those recapitulated by the author-narrator (acting as a phantom reader) and taken from

2either real or fictitious outside sources. In this respect, it doesnt matter whether those

sources are real or invented; what matters is that the narrator portrays himself as reading

them.

In the first of this studys three chapters, I suggest that we look at reading,

writing, criticizing, quoting, and similar practices as ways in which people coexist with

texts, and that in the process of coexistence there is more a balance than a hierarchy.

Throughout the three novels, the lives of the majority of characters are interwoven with

texts and experiences with texts; in the case of the narrators, consciously so. The

pressures of this unavoidable coexistence give rise to the formation of ambivalence,

enthusiasms, and nuanced ethical positions. One aim of this study is to trace and describe

that process of formation, particularly in the case of the narrators, and more particularly

regarding the way the narrators relate to their authors and mirror their literary concerns.

As I argue in the same chapter, both Sebald and Bolao were well aware of Jorge

Luis Borges as a forerunner to the sorts of games they play with authorship and

readership. Bolao held the Argentine writer in the highest esteem. In a lengthy and

diverse collection of his writing, Entre parntesis (In Parentheses), Bolao devoted at

least three complete essays (144-45; 174-75; 289-91) and parts of many others to Borges,

calling him probablemente el mayor escritor que haya nacido en Latinoamrica

(probably the greatest writer to have been born in Latin America) (23)1. He obviously

also feels an affinity with Borges writerly persona: the young, flamboyant vanguardist

poet turned contentious bibliophile, combining the best distillations of ancient and

modern aesthetics. Sebald comes from a separate, German-Austrian literary tradition, but

Borges story Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and his Libro de seres imaginarios (Book of

3Imaginary Beings) make several appearances in Die Ringe des Saturn. Borges generally

avoided a direct engagement with his own historical milieu in his fiction, however, while

both Sebald and Bolao take pains to place a history of violence and upheaval near the

centers of their novels. The consequences of this distinction play a large role in my next

two chapters.

In the second chapter I look more closely at a specific practice of reading and

writing literary criticism and at how both Bolao and Sebald incorporate critical

positions and insights into their novels. The critic isnt permitted to invent something out

of nothing like a fiction writer; he or she has other responsibilities, i.e., towards the

demands of history, the obligation of intelligent judgment, and the obligation to put

aesthetic clarity and acumen to proper use. There is a sharp antinomy between criticism

and fiction writing, and although both authors bring the two practices surprisingly close

together, their novels reveal an ambivalence about both kinds of claim to authority.

Despite this ambivalence, both authors offer a positive view of the experience of a shared

community of readers.

In the third chapter, I look at the roles of geography in these novels: questions of

space, nation, and exile, and identification as a member of a geographically-defined

group. Primarily, the narrators who share with their authors the experience of exile

portray their homelands as something troubled, inscrutable, damaged, and abandoned

without the possibility of return. Their exterior positions give them a uniquely

cosmopolitan view of their subject matter, but they retain an anxiety about the past, a

desire to adequately mourn its losses, and above all a sense of inadequacy and

4helplessness to find a position, either individual or collective, that will let this mourning

take place.

This work is therefore neither a study of only metafiction or intertextuality nor a

study of only memory and historical trauma in recent literature. Both aspects are equally

critical to the force and meaning of these three novels, even if the relationship between

them is often vexingly complicated for the scholar; indeed, the fact that these works

strive to negotiate both aspects at once provides particular motivation for a comparative

study. In spite of distinct traditions, styles, and settings, their worlds overlap

geographically, historically and literarily, and I hope to show that they share an

underlying ethical affinity as well.

To my knowledge, the comparison of Bolao and Sebald is limited to a single

reference in a Times Literary Supplement review of Bolaos 2666, written by a translator

then in residence at the University of East Anglia, where Sebald formerly taught

(Gabantxo 34). The serendipity of this connection, which would not be out of place in

either authors work, nor in a Borges story, forms a fitting impetus for this study. Sebald

was born in 1944 in Germany but resided for most of his adult life in England, teaching

German literature and writing, until his death in 2001; nearly all of his creative works

were published during the last decade of his life. Bolao was born in Chile in 1953 but

spent his adolescence in Mexico; after an ill-fated return to Chile a month before the

1973 coup detat, he fled first to Mexico and then to Spain, where he and his family lived

until his death in 2003. Both writers grew up in regions haunted by violence and its

aftermath, and both chose to live as expatriates in their adult years, writing a series of

novels in rapid succession during the relatively peaceful decade of the 1990s.

5The two also occupy an unusual place in their respective (linguistically-unified, if

not national) literary traditions, coming years or even decades after a much-honored,

artistically and economically successful generation of postwar writers in Bolaos

case, primarily the Latin American Boom; in Sebalds, the generation of Gnter Grass,

Heinrich Bll, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Paul Celan, and others.

Neither Bolao nor Sebald belongs to a similar generation, with similar clout; to the

extent that their work is autobiographical, it shows that they respond as writers far more

to predecessors than to peers. I am sure Bolao, a voracious reader with an interest in

German literature, encountered Sebalds work at some point, but I am equally sure that

Sebald had no acquaintance with Bolaos work, which wasnt translated into English (or

any other language Sebald read, to my knowledge) until 2004. Nevertheless, I hope the

dialogue between these works can be a fruitful source for more comparative work on

Sebald, Bolao, and their interlocutors, and on German and Latin American comparative

literature in general.

6CHAPTER ONE: Beyond Borges

It may seem perverse to begin a study with Borges, who so deliberately styled

himself, in his writing, as the heir and curator of literatures past. In what way can the

latest link in a long chain of readers and interpreters be seen as an originator? Borges

himself offers one, somewhat cryptic answer in the essay Kafka y sus precursores

(Kafka and his precursors):

In the critical vocabulary the word precursor is indispensable, but one must try to

purge it of all connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer

creates his precursors. . . . Within this correlation, the identity or multiplicity of

individuals doesnt matter at all.2 (Borges, Otras inquisiciones 109)

In this model, there is a unity in an authors body of work strong enough to be reflected,

backwards and forwards in time, in other writing. The examples of Kafkas precursors in

the essay transcend genre and language: Borges draws the associative line not through

coincidences in plot or harmony of detail but through a shared gnoseological outlook.3

Borges emphasizes the strangeness of the connections: the heterogeneous works I have

enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble one another4

(109). If Kafka, in this Borgesian reading, determines his own precursors, then the set of

stories, utterances, ideas, and tropes we metonymize under Borges name can determine

its own successors. Position in time is immaterial.

But I cannot dispatch the question of Borges inappropriateness as a starting point

so easily. In a study of Borges translation of Thomas Brownes Urn Burial (itself a

highly allusive and intertextual work), Christopher Johnson positions Borges on a line

7running through Browne and Quevedo5 with whom Borges shares an affinity for

quotation, linguistic play, and great conceptual breadth within a single oeuvre and

ultimately extends that line through W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn. Johnson,

referring specifically to the Browne translation, makes the strong claim that it enacts the

seventeenth-century dream of the universal author (175) on Borges behalf, with both

moral and material support from Brown, Quevedo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares:

By making his friend and contemporary Bioy Casares, together with the great

Spanish conceptista poet, Francisco de Quevedo, complicit in his translation of

Brownes magnificent meditation on funerary practices and mortality, Borges

effectively redefines translation as proof of the notion of the universal author. He

confirms, in effect, what Antoine Berman calls ltayage de lacte traductif, that

is: dune manire gnrale, traduire exige des lectures vaste et diversifies.

(174)

For Borges, writing fiction also exige des lectures vaste et diversifies. Johnson

seeks to blur the line between the Urn Burial translation, which Borges actually

performed, and the short story Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which concludes with the

pseudo-Borges narrator translating Urn Burial. In a similar way, I want to show how, in

Borges stories Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, a

variety of activities reading, writing, translating, criticizing all clearly become

infected with the same paradigmatic questions about the status of literature: questions of

how people and books coexist. My inquiry takes the idea of coexistence seriously, even

if it must restrict its answer by considering only a recent segment of the long lines of

author-reader-translator-critics in world history.

8What do I mean by coexistence? The question has several parts: first, the way a

book exists as opposed to the way a person exists; second, how these two sorts of

existence overlap in space and time; third, how they interact and change one another

within that shared region. In the first case, individual books are more durable, portable,

and reproducible than individual people, who have lifespans, periods of development and

degeneration, and unique and irreproducible bodies for Borges this was an enormous

and productive disparity. In the second case, people write books (usually just once, and

sometimes with collaborators); read them (any number of people simultaneously or

sequentially, any number of times depending on the number of copies and readers of

its language); criticize and translate them (less often, but still potentially more than once),

and produce other books or parts of books, which are then read by other people. These

processes, furthermore, can all be described in writing.

The third aspect of coexistence interaction and change is harder to formulate.

The analyses in this study help to document this process in a few selected works by three

writers, which are, if not a statistically significant set of data, still an interesting one,

varied in time, space, language, and culture. For Borges, writing before, during, and after

World War II, a certain aestheticism, and an affirmation of the autonomy of the artist, had

not yet fallen widely out of favor6. As I will show, the example of Tln exhibits a

sustained mental engagement with philosophical questions which come to transform

the world which would seem out of place in the works I discuss by W.G. Sebald and

Roberto Bolao, or indeed in most works of contemporary fiction. It is hard to imagine

Sebald and Bolaos haunted, peripatetic narrators allowing themselves the impassivity

we see in Tlns narrators slow, steadfast work on a translation of Sir Thomas Browne

9in the face of cultural apocalypse; it is easier to imagine them unsettled by a mirror, like

Bioy Casares at the beginning of the tale (Borges, Ficciones, 13-14). Both Bolao and

Sebald attempt to strike a balance between an authoritative narrative voice and a formally

restrained, scholarly or journalistic position, but the balance is uneasy. The weight of the

quoted subject matter exerts an immense pressure, against which the author who has

created the novels himself must employ a variety of stabilizing tactics.

In a brief overview of Borges work, Paul de Man claims: the subject of the

stories is the creation of style itself. . . . His main characters are prototypes for the writer,

and his worlds are prototypes for a highly stylized kind of poetry or fiction (125). The

observation is only half accurate: the analogies of world with book and agent with writer

are ubiquitous in Borges, but he moves from one side of each analogy to the other

without fundamentally privileging either there are plenty of non-prototypical writers,

poems, and works of fiction in his stories. Just as Borges invented worlds can be seen as

prototypes for writing, writing can be seen as a prototype for an uncomfortable sort of

epistemology. De Man claims that each story is built around a central act of infamy

(125); he reads this trope of the villain as an allegory of authorship, the catalyst for

Borges achievement of his writing style:

This style in Borges becomes the ordering but dissolving act that transforms the

unity of experience into the enumeration of its discontinuous parts. Hence his

rejection of style li and his preference for what grammarians call parataxis, the

mere placing of events side by side, without conjunctions; hence also his

10

definition of his own style as baroque, the style that deliberately exhausts (or

tries to exhaust) all its possibilities.7 (128)

This baroque stylistic model exhausting possibilities one by one, considering

and reconsidering is also the critical model par excellence: in its drive for

thoroughness it outstrips even the accomplishments of de Mans essay. Indeed, one

signal feature of Tln and Pierre Menard is the subtle allegiance of the narrator (of

experienced events, rather than books) with a reader and critic, and this allegiance will be

fairly constant through the texts I examine. Borges word exhaust brings to mind the

image of a hunt, which ends only when the quarry is too tired to run and has abandoned

every hiding place and escape route: the elements of life and chance in a story allow the

plot to run its course, while the author systematically bars every exit, working against

development and entropy, until the storys world stands still. In Borges, an ironic gesture

from the narrator cuts off the mirroring and extension of concepts and texts: the classic

example here is the end of Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

In addition to the essay on Kafka, Borges furnishes another odd juxtaposition of

precursors in his essay on Paul Valry, Valry como smbolo [Valry as symbol].

Borges maintains that, as with Walt Whitman, whose mythologized self is not identical

with the biographical author, we can best understand Valry through his alter ego,

Edmond Teste (himself a child of Poes fiction: a derivation of Edgar Allen Poes

Chevalier Dupin8 (Otras inquisiciones 77)). The author and protagonist figure of Valry

that Borges synthesizes has a transcendent power as an ideal himself: a man who, in an

era that adores the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion, always preferred the lucid

pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order9 (78). Teste is not coextensive

11

with Valry, but the two are radically connected. More to the point, this characterization

of Valry invites cathexis and admiration: he symbolizes not an aesthetic ideal but an

ideal of the human mind.

Pierre Menard, eponymous Autor del Quijote, is presented as a friend of Valry

(and not of Edmond Teste). We see the following entry on his curriculum vita, a long list

of heterogeneous, scholarly activities:

p) An invective against Paul Valry in Jacques Rebouls Pages for the

Suppression of Reality. (That invective, it should be noted parenthetically, is the

exact inverse of his true opinion of Valry. The latter understood it as such, and

the old friendship between the two was not endangered.)10 (Borges, Ficciones 51)

The narrator immediately introduces Menard to us as a novelist (47), but there are no

novels in his curriculum vita, indeed no fiction at all. His invisible11 rewriting of Don

Quijote suffices to make him a novelist in the eyes of the narrator, but by trade he seems

to have been a poet and critic. Not just poetry but philosophy, chess, Boolean logic, and

linguistics interest and occupy him: like Teste, he seems drawn to the lucid pleasures of

thought and the secret adventures of order (Borges, Otros Inquisiciones 78).

In the midst of his plans to write the Quijote, we learn that Menard has dismissed

his initial planto take on Cervantes life in 17th century Spain as fcil (easy)

(Borges, Ficciones 53). The narrator interjects: More like impossible! the reader will

say. To be sure, but the enterprise was impossible from the beginning and of all the

impossible ways of completing it, this was the least interesting12 (53). This passage is

broadly comic, and in a way self-reflexive too. Borges writes (so he says) in a kind of

Baroque style meant to exhaust possibilities, but here he shows his diffident French

12

protagonist choosing among impossibilities on the basis of their difficulty. Borges

portrays his own stylistic process through a looking-glass, and the result is absurd.

Why is Menard in fact French? De Man identifies him directly with Valry and

Teste (126); Johnny Payne interprets him as the seeming antithesis of Argentinity and

the Hispanic past (210) and moreover as a man free from filial anxiety towards

Cervantes. Cervantes is, to use Borges term, not an automatic precursor to Menard, who

belongs in a generative line stretching from Poe to Edmond Teste. The narrator,

however, slowly comes to align Cervantes and Menard:

Some nights ago, paging through chapter XXVI [of Don Quijote] which he

never attempted I recognized our friends style and something like his voice in

this exceptional sentence: the nymphs of the rivers, the sorrowful and humid

Echo. That efficacious conjunction of a moral adjective with a physical one

called to mind a verse of Shakespeare, which we had discussed one afternoon:

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .13 (53-54)

It seems Menard has created a precursor for himself in the narrators mind, but he has

done so as a reader and critic, not as a writer. The perceived affinityof word choice

and grammar, not sensibility or philosophy between the phrase of Cervantes and the

discussion of Shakespeare corresponds to Menards visible philological work.

Elsewhere in Menards curriculum vita we find essays on symbolic logic, French

prosody, and poetic language, as well as this entry:

n) An obstinate analysis of the syntactic customs of Toulet (N. R. F., March

1921). Menard I recall declared that praise and censure are sentimental

operations which have nothing to do with criticism.14 (50)

13

His friend the narrator, certainly, will not take this dictum to heart when he praises

Menards unfinished labor at the end of the story. Both friends are locked in a reciprocal

vanity of artistic aims: Menard wants to conjure an almost Platonically pure text devoid

of human contamination; the narrator applauds his work as a great technical advance for

readers, who are now free to imagine other texts in the hands of a diversity of identifiable

writers in different historical periods. Both are utopian fantasies one of transcendental

artistic transparency, the other of artistic meaning determined by place and time and

neither fantasy survives, even in compromised form, among the two writers to whom I

now turn.

Roberto Bolao died, in the summer of 2003, after a short but remarkably prolific

career as a prose writer. Apart from one early novel which he co-wrote with Antoni

Garca Porta in 1984 no fewer than ten of his novels and collections of stories were

published between 1993 and 2004. His last novel, 2666, appeared after his death in 2004,

as did Entre parntesis, a collection of book reviews, periodical writing, and

miscellaneous essays. I note the compression of this publication history only because,

given the many connections (of characters, plots, and locations, to say nothing of ideas

and themes) between his novels, it is quite likely that many were written simultaneously

and thus that separations among them are rather tenuous. In La literatura nazi en America

(Nazi Literature in the Americas), Bolao creates a wide-ranging fictional encyclopedia

of Nazi writers from all over the Americas. The invented writers interact with real

ones (for instance, a fictional Cuban writer challenges Jos Lezama Lima to a series of

duels, although Lezama never shows up); one or two also meet Hitler or serve in the

14

German army. Both La literatura nazi en Amrica and Estrella distante (Distant Star)

were published in 1996; the latter is an expansion of the last chapter of the former.

Bolao explicitly addresses the question of the narrators identity, left somewhat

vague in La literatura nazi en Amrica, in a preface to Estrella distante: he or an

individual who refers to La literatura nazi as mi novela invents a conversation with

my compatriot Arturo B., a veteran of Latin Americas doomed revolutions and a

suicide in Africa15, who told him the story in the final chapter of La literatura nazi and

with whom,

according to the dictates of his dreams and nightmares, we composed the novel

which the reader now has before him. My function was reduced to making

drinks, consulting a few books, and discussing, with him and the ghost, each day

more alive, of Pierre Menard, the validity of many repeated paragraphs.16

(Estrella Distante 11)

How is Estrella distante the product of consultation with the ghost, each day

more alive, of Pierre Menard? Formally, Pierre Menard assembles an intricate model

of the literary work and its historical context. There are four levels of reality, mediated

by quotation17: Cervantes is quoted by Menard, who is quoted by the narratorwho is

quoted (in a slightly different sense) by the author. But the narrator and Menard read

books by other writers outside their acquaintance (like Cervantes), such as Quevedo and

William James and Leibniz; and Menard at least is acquainted with other writers, Valry

and DAnnunzio, as real to him as the narrator is. For the author, Borges, however, every

person in the story is either archival or fictional18; and for the reader (unless he is

Gabriele DAnnunzios son-in-law), the same is true.

15

La literatura nazi shares these four levels of reality with Pierre Menard;

formally, then, what distinguishes the two is the novels final episode. To the active

archival and fictional players in the narrative Bolao adds a third category, the political-

historical, in the form of Salvador Allendes government and the Chilean coup detat.

Many of the fictional writers are contemporaries of Bolao himself (some, in fact, inhabit

the future), but only the incorporation of first-person narrative within the novels final

episode allows the historical force, otherwise only metonymized by the term Nazi, to

be developed fully .

But even within the fictional game its preface sets up, Estrella distante differs

substantially from the antecedent chapter of La literatura nazi; whereas Menard, by

contrast, is the fictional author of a verbatim, if fragmentary, rewriting of Don Quijote.

Belano, like Menard, is a doppelgnger for his author: a writer who tries to demonstrate

the imperviousness of writing to historical circumstance and ends by revealing the

opposite. The parallel is not exact, but it is suggestive. The lesson in Borges story is

one of the indifference of the words on the page to their contextual meaning compared

with lexicon and poetic construction, context and intertextuality do far more work and

exercise an overriding hermeneutic power. The lesson in Estrella distante is slightly

different, given that Bolao is creating an imitation of himself (Belano) who helps a

second, differentiated imitation of himself (the narrator of La literatura nazi) to rewrite a

text initially told by the first imitation to the second. There are doppelgngers and even

Tripelgngers here, but all are attempting to rewrite a real and increasingly remote

history, from which far from being multiplied the voices of writers are

systematically removed. I will return to this point in the next two chapters.

16

Whereas Bolao pays tribute to Borges meditation on authorship, Sebald

incorporates a different parable about textuality into his Ringe des Saturn: namely, Tln,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the story of an imaginary world based roughly on idealistic

philosophy which eventually intrudes into our own world, and whose epistemology

mediated by languagethreatens to wipe out human languages and understanding.

Sebald reproduces portions of the story almost verbatim at the end of the third chapter of

Die Ringe des Saturn:

The world will be Tln. But to me, so the narrator concludes, that matters little, I

am further refining, in the leisurely quiet of my country house, a tentative

translation, after Quevedo, of Urn Burial by Thomas Browne (which I do not

intend to have published).19 (91)

The primary context is Sebalds previous discussion of Sir Thomas Browne, which links

the work of the English polymath with Rembrandts painting of a dissection and localizes

a certain dispassionate fascination with physical destruction. But Sebald introduces the

Borges story rather peculiarly, without reference to the author: Many years later I read,

in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, written in 1940 at Salto Oriental in Argentina, of the

rescue of an entire amphitheatre by a few birds20 (Ringe des Saturn [RS] 87). Although

Sebald dates the text of the story 1940, Salto Oriental, a postscript dated 1947

contradicts the authenticity of the composition date which Sebalds narrator cites as fact.

The line about the birds and the amphiteatre reads merely: At times a few birds, a horse,

have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre21 (Borges 30). There is little how to read of

17

in this terse sentence, and Sebalds focus on this single disjointed line in a story so rich in

information and detail is almost comic. And, soon thereafter:

The memory of the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the aforementioned

Argentine tale, which is primarily concerned with our attempts to invent worlds to

the second or even third degree . . .22 (RS 89)

In Sebalds redaction, the narrator first recounts his dinner with Bioy Casares and their

discussion of an experimental novel, then their subsequent disquieting encounter with a

mirror, and finally their conversation about the mysterious country of Uqbar and sources

for information about itthe world to the second degree, perhaps, to which Sebald

refers. The narrator leaps across the narrative concerning Tln into the postscript thus

reads a postscript from 194723: again, Sebalds narrator takes Borges dates literally to

discuss the penetration of Tln into the world (RS 91). The final sentences of the

redaction are almost direct translations of the end of the story.

El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), the

collection from which Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is taken, was published in 1941, so

the 1947 date for the postscript is fictitious. Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine

writer and friend to Borges. Although they surely dined together and discussed writing

many times, the dinner and discussion in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is fictional.

Sebald himself has always taken pains to stress that his own narrators are fictional,

although they overlap considerably with his own biography and history. (The narrators

are never named, although in several cases they allude to photographs included with the

text24.) For the Sebald-narrator to take at face value the dates given by the Borges-

narrator of Tln and to foreground the experiential elements of the narrative (rather

18

than the speculative discussion of the metaphysics of Tln) until it has become a part of

the world of the Borges-narrator, is to take pains to place the two almost on the same

quasi-fictional, quasi-historical plane to align their positions in the intertextual

hierarchy. As Sebalds narrator concludes his recollections and observations, Borges

narrator abandons his absorption in the nonexistent text about Tln and goes on to discuss

his translation of Thomas Browne, the very author Sebalds narrator has just been reading

and discussing. For a moment, the two narrators are almost precisely superimposed in a

drastically simplified image of a single reader studying a single text. But the consonance

of the image is fleeting, and like Pierre Menards Quijote, it cannot hold its integrity

against the immense perturbation of histories, other readings, and other contexts.

In 1973, the year of the coup in Chile and more than two decades before the

composition of the above novels, the American literary critic Harold Bloom published

The Anxiety of Influence, a study of the development of English poetry.

My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to

wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize;

figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for

nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness,

for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?

(11)

He outlines a six-stage process of negotiating this anxiety that resembles a heroic quest,

culminating in a return of the dead (15). It is hard to imagine a conception of literature

more alien to the aspects I have described of the works above: Blooms conception of a

19

strong poet (and he treats the whole man, including as evidence not just verse but the

poets letters and journal entries [13]) is defined by the imagination: strength and

weakness, wrestling . . . even to the death are wholly psychological processes,

bounded only by metaphoric language. The poet is not solely inferred from his writing:

he is an idealized, heroic figure; his works have mythic resonance.

However, this is not a model any of my three writers consciously, or coherently,

reject. Indeed, I suspect (albeit without proof) that all of them would secretly like to be

such strong poets: their critical work, including Borges essays above and the criticism I

will examine in the next chapter from Sebald and Bolao, evinces a certain amount of

wrestling with precursors. None of them desires the realization that he has failed to

create himself, but they come to that realization anyway. The act of infamy, which,

according to de Man, makes stories possible for Borges, may be related genealogically to

Blooms struggles of anxiety. Fictions, unlike lyric or epic poetry, must mediate directly

between books and people between what is lived but unwritten, and what is written but

unlived and in clearing a space for narrative, they will invariably (and violently) clear

something away. All three writers meet such acts of creation with ambivalence. Borges

was able to generate a series of stories that could thematically embed this anxiety and

turn it to his creative advantage. Neither Bolao nor Sebald write fictions that deal with

the question of authorship as concisely as, say, Pierre Menard, or with the tension

between text and reality as concisely as Tln. Nonetheless, this anxiety permeates their

work, and, as I will show, they ultimately choose different resolutions for it.

20

CHAPTER TWO: Where Stories Begin and End

In Myth and Archive, a study of the Latin American novel, Roberto Gonzlez

Echevarra advances a sweeping thesis on novels as such:

The most persistent characteristic of books that have been called novels in the

modern era is that they always pretend not to be literature. The desire not to be

literary, to break with belles-lettres, is the most tenacious element in the novel.

Don Quijote is supposed to be the translation of a history written in Arabic . . .

Other novels are or pretend to be autobiographies, a series of letters, a manuscript

found in a trunk, and so forth. (Gonzlez Echevarra 7)

If Gonzlez Echevarra is defining the modern era to include everything between Don

Quijote and the work of Alejo Carpentier in the 1950s, then it seems unlikely that novels

really always pretend not to be literature. However, he explains concisely in a preface

that, within the restricted setting of Latin America, novelists do tend to undercut their

own literary authority with claims to analytic, critical rigor: Latin American writers all

too often fashion themselves as critics, and the complicity between literature and

criticism in Latin America is ubiquitous, if rarely admitted (ix). His study goes on to

draw a connection between narrative fiction and legal discourse, and notes the

preoccupation among Latin American writers particularly Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel

Garca Mrquez with the fallacy inherent in the concept of a New World that can lay

down its own laws and generate a stable and lasting social order ex nihilo. New stories

are always pursued by older stories; it falls to them to plead their cases according to

precedent or against it. The simultaneous striving for innovation and its inevitable failure

21

is a mainstay of the novel in Latin America.

Bolaos novels often pretend not to be literature, are concerned with precursors

and with the future of Latin America, and set up a stark opposition between writing and

political power, so they seem to conform quite well to Gonzlez Echevarras description.

In providing a narrative for La literatura nazi en Amrica, his pseudo-encyclopedia,

Bolao clearly fashions himself as a critic as well. But La literatura nazi conforms

almost too well to Gonzlez Echevarras model of archival fiction: it is a kind of hyper-

archive, and its conclusion is one of extreme disintegration. Rather than attempting

innovation and failing nobly, it attempts exhaustion and, in a way, succeeds.

In addition to a series of author profiles (which I will call episodes), La

literatura nazi contains an appendix with a list of names (not all of which are profiled in

the main text, although all are mentioned in one entry or another), a list of publications

culled from the entries, and a list of magazines and publishers. These artifacts are

completely invented; Bolao could have put real authors or real journals on those lists,

too, but he did not. This appendix serves to conclude the book at one level of discourse,

which we can call the encyclopedic. Another, competing level of discourse is prose

fiction, or what Gonzlez Echevarra calls belles-lettres. Within the body of the

narrative, there are no citations, no sources, no list of contributors, no footnotes. La

literatura nazi doesnt take the final step into (false) completeness: it only gestures at

being an encyclopedia.

However, it evinces no anxiety about genre, no clear, sharp points of

ambivalence a quality it shares with Die Ringe des Saturn, which has been assigned to

22

a wide variety of genres25 and given credit for inventing its own. The majority of

Bolao's novels, including these two, constitute an informal roman-fleuve, which is itself

a way of writing life, of keeping the created work open within the realm of the artifact.

The preface to Estrella distante, which I discussed in Chapter One, implies that Arturo

Belano and the author are part of the same fictional universe. Belano, then, if we can

attribute any personhood to him, belongs to the same world as the characters in La

literatura nazi. It is a world, and it is a world full of other writers, just as the world of

Bolao, Sebald, and myself is a world full of other writers with competing claims to the

seat of authorship. This is the entry point for criticism and critical discourse: while

neither writer really puts his critical self into the novels Sebald doesnt mention his

academic career or Bolao his literary essays fiction is the hand that takes away what

the critical hand gives: authority.

But these authors of criticism are still also authors of fiction: two very closely

allied forms of authority, signed by name, scripted by hand. By explicitly giving up

authority in the fiction, the authors can move the focusing eye of the narrative closer to

an Archimedean point beyond the contesting views of other authors. The critical eye

looks down on other writers as well, with a different kind of impersonality: rather than

incorporating the author in the third person, it either avoids person altogether or writes

within a manifestly shared, situated world.

Although Bolao spares few countries26, two sets of Argentines Los

Mendiluce and Los Hermanos Schiaffino neatly form bookends for La literatura

nazi, thereby singling out a nation which shares both an illustrious literary culture and a

23

historically favorable disposition towards the Third Reich. But the narrative ultimately

comes to a close in Chile, Bolaos home country. The narrator (a fictionalized Bolao,

called by name in the final line of the episode) switches discursive modes to give a first-

person account of Carlos Wieder, a.k.a. Ramrez Hoffman, el infame. (Although it is

not made explicit, its reasonable to suppose that the narrator of Ramrez Hoffman is

the same as the narrator of the foregoing encyclopedia.) Wieder is an avant-garde poet

who writes his verses in the sky with a World War II-era German war plane and who

murders women, in particular two young poets whom the narrator knew as a teenager

when they frequented the same salon in southern Chile.

As a shadow history of European influences in Latin American society, and the

debates of the 19th and 20th centuries about national and ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism,

and social legitimacy, Bolaos narrative has an almost inexhaustible supply of historical

models. In a 2005 review of La literatura nazi, Jos Miguel Oviedo noted the Argentine

Leopoldo Lugones and the Mexican Juan Vasconcelos as two significant examples of

influential right-wing Latin American writers; he also mentions Alcides Arguedas (1879-

1946), a supposedly indigenist Bolivian novelist and essayist who cited Mein Kampf as

an authority on race relations in the 1937 prologue to his book Pueblo enfermo (The Sick

People) (Oviedo 69). David Rock, in an essay on the antecedents of nacionalista thought

in Argentina in the early 20th century, notes the influence of French thinkers like Charles

Maurras (17-19) and the prevalence of forms of reactionary Catholicism (20-24) similar

to the strains of ultraconservatism in Portugal and Spain. In some cases, Bolao clearly

draws on these historical antecedents, especially when they are particular to a given

country Juan Mendiluce Thompson could fit easily with Rocks description of the

24

prototypical Argentine nacionalista (Literatura nazi, 24-26) but in others, he shows

how an individuals eccentricity can generate a peculiar, endogenous right-wing

ideology by, for instance, applying Charles Olsons theory of projective vs. non-

projective verse to the Bible, via North American evangelism (Literatura nazi, 139-43).

La literatura nazi doesnt take a uniform tack with its author profiles: some of the

chapters are written in a detached, book-review style (what I have been calling critical

discourse), while others more closely resemble short stories in which the authors literary

output or the contents of it, at least plays an ancillary role. Examples of the first

type include the figures in the section entitled Precursores y antiilustrados (precursors

and notorious figures); examples of the second might include Luz Mendiluce Thompson,

Irma Carrasco, Amado Couto, and, of course, Ramrez Hoffman (Carlos Wieder).

In Estrella distante, Bolao provides much more detail about the formative years

of the poetic culture in Chile which produced the narrator, Carlos Wieder, the murdered

poets, and many others. He devotes several chapters respectively to profiles of a

Russian-Jewish migr saloniste, a gay Chilean poet in exile, and a French translator of

indigenous descent. While La literatura nazi was a book about the Americas, extremely

wide in scope, Estrella distante is less about Chile than about individual Chileans.

Prescinded from the literary-historical pseudocontext of La literatura nazi, the narrative

loses the force of its sharp contrast with the silly, parodic literary works that traffic fairly

benignly in awful ideas, but the human sadness of the original episodes end is deepened

by Bolaos eulogies for a nation in which not only literature but writers themselves were

violated and abused.

25

The Arturo B, or Arturo Belano, who narrates Estrella distante appears as

Bolaos doppelgnger throughout his fiction. The novels Los detectives salvajes and

Amuleto trace his career as a young Chilean poet in Mexico, and he is responsible,

apparently, for relating the story of Estrella distante. Ignacio Echevarra also notes in his

afterword to Bolaos final novel, 2666, that among the notes for the novel one isolated

note reads: The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano27 (Bolao, 2666 1125).) Bolao

effectively splits his authorial persona in two: he narrates the preface to Estrella distante

as his own amanuensis, while Arturo B. is given the authorial role and dictates the form

of the narrative. Why the split persona? Once he gains a separate identity, Belano

(whose first name slyly echoes auteur or artista) also acquires an unfathomable mind:

whatever biographical details he might share with his creator, whatever associations with

Mexico and Chile and Latin American literature, whatever loves and fears and acts of

bravery, his stories are not Bolaos stories, and to seek out a one-to-one correspondence

between his world and the authors is futile. Their relationship is closer to what

Wittgenstein (in a different context), calls family resemblances: a complicated

network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,

sometimes similarities of detail (32e). In other words, the correspondence exists only as

far as any positive connections do; it provides not totality but an insistent suggestion.

Both La literatura nazi and Estrella distante present two kinds of knowledge:

knowledge of a literary tradition, of what can be found in books, and knowledge of a

personal sort, both of which are presented mimetically at a formally fictional level and

which reinforce one another and undermine (through satire and straightforward

denunciation) the historical circumstances which occasioned very similar books and very

26

similar personal experiences. One signal characteristic of La literatura nazi is the

assumption that none of the authors writing is particularly significant or meaningful to

the world at large, including its readers. There are no difficult cases in his book, on the

order of Cline or Heidegger, in which the authors fascist sympathies fail to overshadow

or bury the mainstream value of the work. The Nazi orientation remains marginalized,

just as the political ideology has since the end of World War II; its writers occupy a

shadow world of coteries and infighting and nobly (or ignobly) preposterous artistic

innovations. Bolao has portrayed for us an autonomous artistic world with which

neither men and women of talent nor the literary establishment can be bothered to

interact: it is an allegory of both artistic and political failure.

But this failure, as we see in Estrella distante, has two sides: on the one is the

ephemeral, yet terrifying art of Carlos Wieder, which remains a brief and sinister memory

in the annals of Chilean history; on the other is the unwritten poetry of the two

Garmendia sisters whom Wieder murders, just as the violence of the Pinochet years

swallows up the artistic community in which Belano, or Bolao, took part in his youth.

The painstaking documentation of Nazi literature is a backhanded denunciation of all

writing that colludes with state violence and of the subcultures that sustain it. Only in the

final chapter of La literatura nazi is the shape of this violence discernable: what has been

left implicit is brought to the fore, and mockery gives way to horror.

W.G. Sebald is also preoccupied with the representation of violence in literature,

but he draws out the theme not only in his own fiction but also through his critical

writing. Unlike Bolao (or Borges), Sebald held an academic position throughout his

27

literary career in the 1980s and 1990s, and was known as a scholar of Austrian literature

before he began writing poetry and novels. Although even in the academy his academic

work has never been as influential as his creative work, he has published several volumes

of criticism. Probably his best-known essay, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and

Literature), began as a series of lectures on the suppression of depictions of German

suffering in the Allied fire bombings of World War II. It is not easy reading: he narrates

the destruction of Hamburg in a telegraphic style but spares no hideous detail (stinking,

parasite-ridden corpses fill the streets; zoo animals die), and he goes on to castigate his

contemporaries for their introjection of sentimentality and kitsch in this grisly picture.

A damning essay on the German novelist Alfred Andersch accompanies Luftkrieg und

Literatur in the German edition (called simply Luftkrieg und Literatur). The English

translation of both essays appeared in a volume called On the Natural History of

Destruction with two further essays on Jean Amry and Peter Weiss, two writers who

combine the personal and political in their writings on the Holocaust and their critique of

violence.

Andreas Huyssen compares Luftkrieg und Literatur with Sebalds second novel,

Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), and finds a keen affinity between essay and

creative prose:

I would like to suggest that Sebalds Luftkrieg essay is itself a repetition, a

rewriting of those earlier texts about the experience of strategic bombing . . .

closely related in its deep structure, its conceptual framework, and in its language

(though not in its narrative complexity) to the narrative stance of Die

Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants] itself. (Huyssen 82, my emphasis)

28

He also connects each of the texts examined in Luftkrieg with a particular moment in the

German public debate about World War II and present-day German literature, arguing

that Sebalds own treatment of the issue unwittingly continues the series and belongs to

the post-1989 discourse of the first German generation without direct experience of the

war. Indeed, the most striking difference in narrative stance between the Luftkrieg

essay (and its companion piece, a critical essay on Alfred Andersch) and Sebalds novels

is the harshly judgmental, almost savage tone of his literary criticism, which has no

parallel in his fiction. The pseudoautobiographical narrator is melancholy almost to the

point of caricature, confronted with a world he takes pains to reproduce without often

acknowledging, or recognizing, how he alters it. As a critic, however, Sebald is

unrestrained and prolix in his distasteconcluding a harsh reading of an early novel of

wartime destruction, he writes:

It is not easy to sum up the quantities of lasciviousness and ultra-German racial

kitsch Mendelssohn offers his readers (with, we must assume, the best of

intentions), but in any case his wholesale fictionalization of the theme of the

ruined city . . . plunges headlong into more than two hundred pages of trash. (On

the Natural History of Destruction [NHD] 56-57)28

In the essay on Andersch, whom Sebald finds morally abhorrent and to whom he directs

quite a few ad hominem attacks, he writes of Anderschs wartime journalism that

linguistic corruption and an addiction to empty, spiraling pathos are only the outward

symptoms of a warped state of mind which is also reflected in the content of his pieces29

(NHD 125). But, in Luftkrieg, he makes positive statements as well: commending the

29

virtues of a medical report as against an overwrought, surrealistic passage by Arno

Schmidt, he asserts:

This medical account of the further destruction of a body already mummified by

the firestorm shows a reality of which Schmidts linguistic radicalism knows

nothing. His elaborate style veils over the facts that stare straight at us in the

language of those professionally involved in the horror[.]30 (NHD 60)

Shortly below this, he refers to [t]he informative value of such authentic documents,

before which all fiction pales . . .31 (NHD 60, my emphasis).

Its worth taking a moment to counterpose this discussion ostensibly of

fiction and fact, but really of poetics with the description of Franz Zwickaus

poem Heimat in La literatura nazi.32 The fictional Zwickau is an enfant terrible of

Venezuelan poetry in the 1960s, whose poem utilizes a detached, quasi-medical

discourse:

Heimat (350 lines) describes, in a curious mixture of Spanish and German with

a few isolated expressions in Russian, English, French and Yiddish the intimate

parts of his body with a forensic coldness, while working in the morgue the night

after a multiple homicide.33 (92)

Its hard to imagine the critic Sebald approving of such a poem, if only because it

removes a poetics useful for conveying bare historical facts which must necessarily be

shared by all into a private, inventive realm, in which the objectivity of the forensic

discourse only serves to enhance the realistic quality of a merely grotesque fantasy.

(Even if we assume that this fictional poet wrote his fictional poem about a lived

experience, which doesnt seem to be the case, it is presented as part of an overall

30

aesthetic tendency and a private, eccentric obsession with certain themes.) In Sebalds

judgment of Schmidts linguistic radicalism, fiction pales before a medical report for

reasons Sebald wants to locate in the use of language, but which I think are more

generally situational. If we take this passage to imply a broader range of aesthetic

judgments than the small set focused on writing about the Luftkrieg, we can use the

documentary/aestheticism contrast he sets up as a lens for viewing his fiction. Other

critics have in fact remarked on his inconsistency across genres: Simon Ward, responding

to Huyssens essay, claims that If Huyssen is correct, then Sebalds own works would be

ruled out of court by the standards set in his 1982 essay [on writing and history] (66).

I would propose, for the sake of argument, that one can look at Sebalds narrator

as a character in the tradition of realist fiction. A hundred years ago, Die Ringe des

Saturn might have been published with a frame narrative like the one in The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner, with a wild-eyed Sebald buttonholing the wedding guest and telling

him about the time he tried to take a walk through Suffolk and stared into the heart of an

immense darkness. The frame narrator might offer physical descriptions of this tale-

spinner and of his environs, which the readers could take as relatively reliable. Imposing

such an archaic novelistic framework provides one view of how Die Ringe des Saturn

functions as a novel: the photographs take the place of the frame narrative, providing a

perspective outside the narrators own (even when he seems to have held the camera). I

will continue this line of inquiry in greater depth in the next chapter.

This Sebald-character is a remarkably limited narrative consciousness: his

signature melancholy is ironized by repetition, and the narratives sense of doom is

31

alienating and not always persuasive. It is also alienated itself: the narrators affect is

always recited, never demonstrated, and recited tersely, e.g.:

I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the Mauritshuis . . . I was

so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to harness my thoughts .

. . Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the painting that later it

took me a full hour to recover . . .34 (RS 82-83)

To me, this reticence signals less a kind of objectively overpowering, undefinable malaise

than a restricted vocabulary one restricted either by (lack of) cognizance or by

formality. Between these recitations and one of the first facts we learn that the narrator

was hospitalized exactly a year after he began his wanderings through Suffolk, and

suspects the wanderings somehow contributed to his paralysis we can infer a barely-

expressible traumatic process. But the nonlinearity of the narrative confounds our

attempts to identify with this traumatic response: we are told first the effects

(hospitalization) and then the hypothetical cause (too much reflection on a catastrophic

history). The narrator briefly jumps backwards in time to relate a much earlier sojourn in

Ireland (Ringe 258-76) as well as routinely jumping centuries or millennia backwards

in documentary time and concludes the first-person narrative on a single well-

established date, April 13, 1995. The narrators internal, unshared experience of

melancholy and trauma structures his narrative, rather than being transmitted through it;

it provides melancholy with an anatomy, but not a dynamic, innervated existence.

This is not to propose an absolute separation of author and narrator. Although the

restrained narrative form of the documentary novels serves almost as a negative to the

positive, univocal register of the critic, Sebald the author does not disappear in his novels.

32

He is, as a montage artist, a commanding presence. Superficially, the reproduced objects,

texts, and conversations are allowed an unusual degree of self-explanatory power; it is

when one looks closer that one finds, as with the citation of dates in the quoted Borges

story, small ruptures and inconsistencies in the documentary surface. The voice of

Sebald the critic is also subtly distinct from the voice that narrates his novels, although

the similarities dominate. The form of the critical essay requires him to set up an

argument, but that argument seems often to depend on sensibility or psychology. In the

introduction to his collection of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des

Unglcks (The Description of Misfortune, or alternately of unhappiness), he

dismisses the reduction of Austrian literatures pervasive theme of loss to mere nostalgia

for the Habsburg empire:

The persistence of nature, preserved in life before and after us, is the far more

significant correlative. Melancholy, the contemplation of present unhappiness,

has nothing in common with the death wish. It is a form of resistance. And on

the level of art its function is entirely other than simply relative or reactionary. 35

(Sebald, Beschreibung 12)

Sebald finds another theme in the work he criticizes in this volume: the crucial

category of teaching and learning36 (13), more typical of the Austrian than of the

reichsdeutschen (German national) tradition. This too, it seems, amounts to a form of

resistance, and he includes in this category both written work and lived experiences of

authors both a passage from Kafkas Castle and an episode from Wittgensteins life

(13).37 The hermeneutic distinction between work and life is porous: if you are reading

33

books to learn, you can learn as much from a biography as from a novel. In that case the

two genres do the same work.

Die Ringe des Saturn gives the critic a sensibility of his own. He can juxtapose

melancholy books with other melancholy objects in the world: the horrors of the Belgian

Congo can be narrated beside stories and documents from the life of Joseph Conrad.

Early in the book, before the narrator begins recounting his journey around England (the

novel is subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt, an English pilgrimage), he recalls two

friends who have died since the journeys end, both lecturers in Romance languages, the

one after the other. The first he describes as a model, happy scholar who died suddenly;

the second, who seemed bound to the first in a sort of childhood friendship38 (16), is a

scholar of the 19th-century French novel, with a distinctive approach:

([She had] in the course of her life developed a sort of private understanding of

the 19th-century French novel, free from any intellectual vanity, always

proceeding from obscure detail and never from the obvious.39 (Sebald, Ringe 16)

Sebald goes on to recount several of these details and interpretations in the voice of this

scholar, as he will do with countless other texts, letters, historical documents,

photographs and stories real and invented over the course of the novel but it begins

with this potent image of the literary critic at work. The quiet intensity of her work is

linked through parataxis with her quiet devotion to her friend, whose loss, the narrator

speculates, causes her to collapse in illness. It compounds several images essential to a

model of the author and critic to which, I would argue, both Sebald and Bolao adhere:

the links among writing, reading, and community, the idea of friendships forged through

shared reading and understanding, and the inextricable losses of both ideas and people.

34

This sense of solidarity pushes back against the anxious, self-splintering practice

of the critic, who tries as in the case of Sebalds reviews of Andersch and

Mendelssohn, or perhaps La literatura nazis too schematic version of the Ramrez

Hoffman story to be more ethical than human. But the critical practice is a powerful

force in both novels, and it provides a very particular, elaborate structure through which

fragments of history, and small remnants of human life, can pass on their way to the

readers comprehension and sympathy. The fictionalized narrators, however, in turn

undercut the critical authority of the author by mirroring and displacing him, by showing

inconclusive doubt, worry and confusion: they give the novels structure its own voice

and sense of urgency in speaking, and thus make criticism fallible as well as necessary.

35

CHAPTER THREE: FROM THE AIR: MAPS AND NARRATIVE TERRITORY

So far I have examined two sources of external pressure on the narratives of

Bolao and Sebald: first, the Borgesian model of metafiction and questions of the status

of the author; and second, a critically-oriented, historically motivated practice of ethical

judgment in writing. A third source of pressure derives from geography, broadly

conceived: physical space, nation, political history and its inscription on the physical

world, the itinerancy of individual people, and the experience of exile. Both Bolao and

Sebald lived for many years outside their native countries: Bolao lived primarily in

Spain, Sebald in England (which added a linguistic displacement to the geographical

one). To the extent that autobiography helped to form their novels, this fact of exile (or

expatriation) plays a role in the orientation of the narrative. The narrators of both La

literatura nazi and Die Ringe des Saturn share a sense of displacement, or estrangement,

from a circumscribed American or northern European area. (Estrella distante depends

less on a sense of geography, as most of the narrative takes place within a single country.)

Die Ringe des Saturn is subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt (an English

pilgrimage). However, the narrators description of his physical travels digresses so

seamlessly into secondhand, historical or fictitious accounts of other lands and other

journeys all within a somewhat monotonous narrative voice that the reader finds it

difficult to separate firsthand from secondhand information. The loss of clear boundaries

between a situated, speaking subject and the distinct sources he cites conversations,

literary biographies, diaries, writing by Borges or Browne, etc. leaves the narrator

nearly as detached from present reality as the other, distant voices that he allows to speak

36

within the text: they are closer to him than everyday life in England, his adopted home

to say nothing of the land of his birth, Germany.

La literatura nazi takes an entire hemisphere as its staging ground and uniformly

applies an exogenous political termNazi to the contents of the narrative. As a

unifying concept, Amrica is ultimately more effective than Nazi in giving the disparate

episodes in the book some common ground, and I will argue that within the American

continents, Bolao both identifies his narrator (and thus his viewpoint) with Chile, and

also portrays Chile as a vertiginous, unsteady, and dangerous center of reference, from

which the narrator is fortunate to have escaped.

Each novel sets up an imaginative (if not fully imaginary) geography and marks

its narrators homeland as a negative center of violence and instability. From that center

radiates a concern with literary work, solidarity among writers (and just condemnation of

those who collude with violence), and the historical conditions with which writers of any

sort must reckon.

In an essay on the Chilean avant-garde under Pinochet, Nelly Richard refers

several times briefly to a 1982 installation by Ral Zurita called Sky Writing,40

performed over the sky of New York in a plane. (She doesnt mention what, exactly,

Zurita wrote in the sky.) Zurita, whose other works include a reshaping of the desert only

visible from the air, was part of the Colectivo Accionista de Arte (CADA), which styled

itself as a left-wing vanguard. Richard describes the desert installation as a sort of mirror

image of Sky Writing:

37

In August 1993 the Chilean poet Ral Zurita effected an intervention in the

Northern Chilean desert (fifty-six kilometers inland from Antofagasta) that

consisted of inscribing on its surface a phrase three kilometers long: Ni pena ni

miedo [Neither grief nor fear]. [. . .] He re-cited his own poetry that, since his

1979 collection Purgatorio [Purgatory], had used the trope of the Chilean desert

to configure the evangelizing role of a new writing capable of transcending the

pain of national crucifixion. And he cited by inverting its supports Las

escrituras en el cielo . . . (35)

The interpretation Richard gives of CADAs own goals for its installations carries its own

political ambiguity. In particular, in the passage below, she refers to a stretch of canvas

that virtually blocks the entrance of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (27):

To break with the foreclosure of arts interiority (its inner walls) and accomplish

the avant-garde goal of arts incorporation into lifes exteriority, the divisions that

render art incommunicable the walls of a room (= the confinement of art and

the institution as closure) must be abolished. [. . .] In CADAs pieces, the

books page fades until it finally merges with the Chilean landscape that displaces

and replaces it. The image of the author is deindividuated to the point that it is

lost multiplied into anonymity: Everyone who works, if only mentally, to

expand the spaces in his or her life is an artist.41 (27)

This is probably not Richards own view of CADAs work, I should emphasize: she goes

on to criticize the inherent assumptions of CADAs explicit program and concludes on a

note of ambivalence. The idea that the work is fascist, however, is never even suggested.

Its unlikely that Bolao had no knowledge of these installations while he was writing La

38

literatura nazi: the parallels between Sky Writing and Ramrez Hoffman, or between

the desert intervention and Willy Schrholz, are too exact to be coincidental. The

Willy Schrholz and Ramrez Hoffman episodes of La literatura nazi/Estrella

distante two of the three total episodes set in Chile have their own ambiguities and

complications. I will briefly sketch them here and go on to identify key aspects of their

portrayal of space and place as they are developed elsewhere in these texts.

Willy Schrholz was born and raised in Colonia Renacer (Rebirth Colony,

roughly), a mysterious colony of German immigrants who arrived in Chile after World

War II. The colony is largely closed to the outside world, and there are rumors of sexual

perversions. Readers familiar with current events in Chile will immediately recognize

the infamous Colonia Dignidad in this portrait: founded by an ex-medic in the Nazi army,

Paul Schfer, the colony was established in 1961 and probably used as a torture center by

the Pinochet regime, with which Schfer was on friendly terms42. Although the most dire

revelations were only publicly confirmed in recent years, stories about Colonia Dignidad

had been circulating for decades, and Bolao was surely aware of the basic facts in the

mid-90s. Still, his description of Colonia Renacer ends as a kind of in-joke, or a retreat

from the flirtation with political facts into the safer realm of fictional license:

It was also said that Eichmann, Bormann, and Mengele had secretly been there.

In reality the only war criminal to spend a few years at the Colony . . . was

Walther Rauss, with whom there were later attempts to link certain torture

practices during the first years of the Pinochet regime. The truth is that Rauss

died of a heart attack while watching the televised football game between the two

Germanies during the 1974 World Cup in the Federal Republic.43 (95)

39

In this barely-fictionalized setting, then, we learn that the young Willy Schrholz

didnt master Spanish until the age of 10. Before that he was subjected to an iron

familial discipline, work in the fields, and a few singular teachers who combined equal

parts National Socialist millenarianism and faith in science44 (95), which determined his

character. He is sent to Santiago to study agronomy but immediately becomes an

experimental poet. His poetic work begins as a mixture of disjointed phrases and

topographical diagrams of Colonia Renacer45 (96), not just unintelligible but defiantly

uninterpretable. Critics and vanguardists alike try to find various messages in them, but

even his friends in the avant-garde take some time to recognize his right-wing politics

(that Schrholz holds ideas diametrically opposed to their own46 (96)). This is,

notably, the only explicit reference to Schrholzs politics.

An interested professor of Italian literature is the first to identify the referents in

his next series of poems, which are exhibited at the Facultad de Letras at the Catholic

University of Chile: their verses are written inside enormous ground plans of six well-

known concentration camps. A minor scandal follows, which lends Schrholz the black

aura of a pote maudit which would accompany him for the rest of his days47 (96-97).

Nevertheless, two of the poems are published elsewhere and followed, in 1980, by a

book, Geometra (Geometry) page after page of drawings of empty space surrounded

by barbed-wire fences, with phrases scattered within them: the texts speak murmur

about abstract pain, about the sun, about headache48 (97). Its sequels, Geometra II and

III and so forth, repeat the same pattern: plans of concentration camps superimposed on

plans of Colonia Renacer or of Chilean cities, or simply installed in a bucolic, empty

40

space49 (97). The textual content becomes increasingly dialogic, approaching a

Beckettian, fragmentary drama.

In 1985, however, he gains lasting, trans-American fame for a suspiciously

familiar work of art the sensation of the Chilean cultural season50 (98):

With the help of a set of excavators he carves out, over the desert of Atacama, the

plan for the ideal concentration camp: an imbricated net which, if followed on

foot across the desert, resembles an ominous succession of straight lines and, if

observed from a helicopter or airplane, is transformed into a delicate play of

curved lines. The literary portion remains consigned to the five vowels, dug

violently with hoes by the poet himself and scattered arbitrarily over the crusted

surface of the land.51 (97-98)

Buoyed by this triumph, he makes similar installations in the United States and is offered

a small plane by his promotors, to create a concentration camp in the sky52 (98). But

Schrholz turns them down: he insists that his work has to be seen from above and

generated on the ground. His final artistic triumph is to turn his personal semi-idiocy to

his advantage and write a childrens book in the persona of Kaspar Hauser; his personal

life ends, apparently well, in Africa, where he works as a photographer and German tour

guide. (One imagines him crossing paths with Leni Riefenstahl.)

The episodes in La literatura nazi are quite heterogeneous in tone and content, as

I have noted: some read like book reviews, others like short stories, while others adopt an

essayistic middle discourse. The form of this episode hews closest to the short-story

model: we are given a protagonist, told what forces shape him, and we follow him in a

miniature picaresque through Chilean art and life the rise, the fall, the invariance of

41

character throughout. The two signifiers that anchor the story, however, are Colonia

Renacer and the sensational installation in the desert: that is, Colonia Dignidad and

Ral Zurita; that is, Chile, in a perverse international context. Why international (and

why perverse)? The same two adjectives could be used for the book as a whole. The

Chilean case, however, is particularly emblematic because all three profiles of Chilean

writers involve some form of elusiveness, incomprehensibility, semiliteracy, or other

more grotesque, annihilating aesthetic qualities (Carlos Wieders Nazi airplane, etc.),

which appear only incidentally in the books other episodes. They stand in notable

contrast to the Argentine writers, who are depicted as much better-connected and simply

more literary. Edelmira Mendiluces supposed masterpiece is a meticulous recreation of

Poes room53 a backhanded tribute to Borges and Pierre Menard, particularly given

Poes stature in France and Frances stature in Argentina which is a totalizing

manipulation of space, not unlike the Chilean examples in that respect, but one taken

from an established, domestic, and even quaint paragon of high culture. There is nothing

violent or illiterate in it. With Edelmira Mendiluce and her husband, whose politics

clearly channel Maurras and the nacionalistas, a publishing industry begins: there is no

question in their world of either access to language or power over it.

Not so an earlier Chilean profile, included under the header Los poetas malditos

(the potes maudits). Pedro Gonzlez Carrera, a supposedly brilliant poet with a hard life

(seven kids; primary schoolteacher in rural areas), publishes a scandalous poem in

Santiago in praise of the fascist Italian army, which the narrator uses to mock the

Chileans, accusing them of considering the Italians a race of cowards in part as anti-

Argentine sentiment. His modernist poems, whose images are described in detail, are

42

published in 1947. His poems grow subsequently more terse, more paranoid and full of

images of self-loss in the landscape. He publishes his own book of twelve poems, with a

desolate cover including a swastika and a lost child under the sea, and the cast of

frightening characters now includes Deleuze-like machines. After his death his legacy is

assiduously recovered and praised by a few devotes.

The link between Gonzlez Carreras fear of self-loss/reversion to childhood and

Willy Schrholzs final incarnation as Kaspar Hauser is clear enough, as is the link

(explicitly stated) between Schrholz and Ramrez Hoffman, whose identity is confusing

only to others, not to him. (Bolao devotes several pages in Estrella distante to

analyzing the possible meanings, phonetic associations or cryptograms in his pseudonym,

Carlos Wieder (50-51).) While I dont propose that La literatura nazi seriously be read

as a map of Bolaos own personal geography of the Americas, it is interesting that in

these three Chilean episodes, a totalizing sense of violence and victimization, linked with

Nazism, is experienced subjectively and internally by two of the three writers. In the

case of the third, a first-person narrator appears to experience to react to and process

the violence committed by Ramrez Hoffman, so the experience of individual

victimization remains a leitmotif of Bolaos representation of Chilean literary lives.

The theme of travel in Die Ringe des Saturn has been taken up by several critics,

who arrive at diverse, if not totally divergent, conclusions. John Zilcosky sees a story of

failure to get lost replacing the familiar narrative arc of departure and homecoming (102-

03). John Beck uses the complex patterns of coastlines and ring formation around Saturn

as tropes to illustrate Sebalds labyrinthine, complicated literary world (85-86), while

43

Simon Ward takes ruins as a similarly paradigmatic image (58). Beck particularly

underscores the difficulty and slipperiness of the text (77-78). If these accounts overlap

anywhere, it is in their shared estrangement from, and amazement by, the shattered and

jumbled travelogue Die Ringe des Saturn provides, and their tendency to take some

portion of the book at face value the narrators melancholia, for instance even if it

distorts their sense of the rest of the text into something quite unsettling and peculiar. In

the previous chapter, I suggested that it might be useful to look at Die Ringe des Saturn

as a narrative between quotation marks, with the photographs standing outside the quoted

material like a frame narrative. Another plausible association would be with a genre no

doubt quite familiar to Sebald: the academic lecture, complete with visual aids.

(Luftkrieg and Literatur, whose chapters were first given as individual lectures in Zurich,

has a similar layout and structure.) The material process of assembling the data for the

text is itself narrated: at the beginning of chapter V the narrator tells us that he has been

spending time in archives, reconstructing the contents of a documentary hed slept

through on television; and at various points in the first and last chapters he describes the

process of his research looking for Thomas Brownes skull in the hospital, finding a

documentary on the silk industry from Nazi Germany and reports on the results.

Still, the substance of the narrative belies this formal resemblance. The beginning

and end of the englische Wallfahrt are revealed in the first paragraph: the narrator

began what proved to be at least a nine-day54 walking trip through Suffolk in August

1992, and a year to the day later was hospitalized for paralysis, whereupon he conceived

of turning his notes from the trip into a book. The trip was initially planned with some

care. The narrator had visited a few of his destinations in the past Lowestoft around

44

1977, Southwold on various occasions, Orford in 1972 and may have been revisiting

them for curiositys sake. But he planned visits to Somerleyton Hall, Michael

Hamburgers house in Middleton, the historic home of Edward FitzGerald at Boulge, the

model Temple of Jerusalem at Chestnut Tree Farm, and the dwellings of Charlotte Ives

near Harleston; and may also have intended to walk past the ghost town of Dunwich,

which he relates to a long biographical passage on Swinburne. From an eclectic, and

unreconstructable, assortment of texts, the narrator derived an itinerary for himself,

centered on a particular small region of England. The associations he draws as he walks

through the physical landscapewhich move from Ireland to the Congo to Chinaare

just as far-flung as the connections that built this restricted itinerary. Early on, however,

he begins to suffer from a steady, insistently negative affect, in stark contrast to the

variegated topoi of his thoughts. His melancholy reveals itself in two ways: the recitation

of states of mind (as noted in the previous chapter), and the repetition of certain very

similar sorts of statement about historical atrocities and catastrophes, which culminate in

the final pages on history and mourning. The repetitions add a greater monotony to the

text than even the descriptions of walking (an inherently repetitive act), or the constant,

vertiginous linking of observations to memories to written texts, which flattens the

narratives frame of reference to a single, reproducible state of narratorial consciousness.

In Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald notes that, after he concluded his lectures in

Zurich, many Germans sent him documents to prove that people did write about the war.

But he takes pains to underscore the trite phrases within them, suggesting that their

triteness indicates a process of repression and pain at work (LL 89-90). Its hard to

imagine that the prosaic evidence of me