Literature

Roberto Bolano’s 2000 speech to a Viennese literary conference on the topic of exile was published recently in The Nation (translation by the great Natasha Wimmer) and I’d recommend that you read it here in its entirety.

About it, I’d like to offer only these most tentative thoughts: Bolaño is one of the world’s more famous contemporary literary exiles. Born in Chile, he spent his adolescence and early adulthood in Mexico (primarily Mexico City) before beginning a further migration that led him to Barcelona, perhaps with a stop in Paris. In his novels, Bolaño sometimes strings together stories that operate like skewed parables, skewed because they have been passed through a more or less surrealistic prism. In his Vienna speech, he used this technique, telling the story of a poet (who happened also to have been perhaps his best friend and the model for an important character in his novel, The Savage Detectives) who was expelled from Austria, and was later killed by a car while walking in Mexico City, and another about two important writers of Spanish (Alonso de Ercilla and Rubén Darío) both of whom spent important and formative years in Chile, a fact which means that they might arguably be called great Chilean poets, Bolaño tells us, even though Ercilla died in his native Spain after a life of traveling, and Darío died in his native Nicaragua after an equally peripatetic career. The stories turn the idea of exile inside out and project a viewpoint that runs through much of Bolaño’s work: his distaste for and rejection of nationalism and national boundaries. He is supposed to have said in his last interview (he died in 2003 from liver disease at the age of 50): “My only country is my two children and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me….”

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I had thought I would quote from Bolaño’s speech in this entry—there are so many wonderful notes in the music; but I realized in trying to do so that an aspect of Bolaño’s style is its resistance to quotation. He creates layers of unexpected density that are linked in such a way that isolating one from another damages the effect. I would therefore suggest reading at the link above. It will be worth your while.

The problem is that realistic fiction always lies in danger of being hijacked by aestheticians of the real, whose purpose is to present a set of aesthetically pleasing coded references to an already perceived world. This is not to criticize such performances. An irresistible force in the world is operating in this direction. Such fiction offers a brand that can be depended upon to deliver a code that is clear, obvious, and refined, and that is based upon a socially normative and easily recognized rule system whose productions, the cryptographs “truth,” “beauty,” and “excellence,” may be disputed only at the margins. These fictions are economically dictated, which is another way of saying they are dictated by the natural world. This is fiction that is finger-smackin’ good. This is fiction that tastes better. Who would deny this?

But what would a recovered contemporary realistic fiction look like? It would have at least the following characteristics: 1) it would not hold as its exclusive duty the remapping of already discovered or perceived worlds; 2) it would on its surface very likely appear to be unrealistic and would be language driven (the irony of these points is their least interesting component); 3) it would react through language to the heat and energy of unmapped sensations and would very likely traverse the obscure borders of such sensations; 4) it would inevitably fail to accomplish 1-3, since these imply impossible preconditions, and because markets, like all organic life, move endlessly toward reproduction and growth.
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Therefore a fifth axiom for a contemporary, and one might even say, replevined, realism would have to include 5) failure, aesthetic disharmony, despoliation, and rupture—which is another way of saying: incoherence—incoherence that can only be made whole (and even register as an aesthetic object) through its concordance with an aesthetically perfected system of coded references to an already existing world.

The following message was posted on the Proust.net message board, 1/23, and I thought I’d share it with you:

Fellow Proustonauts! Hello out there! I finally got started on that translation thing!!! (I know, I know, Lydia Davis, blah, blah—but really! Quick, I’m thinking of a word, what is it? B-O-R-I-N-G? How did you guess?) Anyway, here’s my translation of the first paragraph of In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s magnifico novel. Wish me luck! Here goes! And by the way, thanks Rosetta Stone! Luv, Odette1478

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

For a long time I usually sometimes went to bed at a bonny hour. [Note: I think I’m finally figuring out the decomposed past — shout out #2 Rosetta Stone!]

Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m’endors.»

Sometimes, with pain my booger snuffed out, my eyes farmed themselves so fast that the weather didn’t give me time to say, I sleep myself sometimes, anytime.

Et, une demi-heure après, la pensée qu’il était temps de chercher le sommeil m’éveillait; je voulais poser le volume que je croyais avoir encore dans les mains et souffler ma lumière; …

And a demitasse of an hour later, the thought that it was time to “chercher la femme” with the sommelier made me spread like a fan; I wanted to