Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel 9780231538664

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Globalization as Form
1. Nazi Tales from the Americas at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
2. The Cosmopolitics of South-South Escapism
3. All the World’s a Supermarket (and All the Men and Women Merely Shoppers)
4. Iconocracy and Political Theology of Narconovelas
5. On Duchamp and Beuys as Latin American Writers
Conclusion: The Promise of Multipolarism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Beyond Bolaño

Literature Now

LITERATURE NOW Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Beyond Bolaño THE GLOBAL L ATIN AMERICAN NOVEL

Héctor Hoyos

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoyos Ayala, Héctor, author. Beyond Bolano : the global Latin American novel / Hector Hoyos. pages cm. — (Literature now) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-16842-7 (cloth : acid-free paper) — isbn 978-0-231-53866-4 (e-book) 1. Latin American fiction—History and criticism. 2. Globalization in literature. I. Title. PQ7082.N7H69 2015 863.009'98—dc23 2014014338

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover art by Federico Uribe, Side Effects. Courtesy of the artist and Arte al Limite, Chile Cover design by Andrew Brozyna References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Globalization as Form 1 1. Nazi Tales from the Americas at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century 33 2. The Cosmopolitics of South–South Escapism 65 3. All the World’s a Supermarket (and All the Men and Women Merely Shoppers) 96 4. Iconocracy and Political Theology of Narconovelas 126 5. On Duchamp and Beuys as Latin American Writers 157 Conclusion: The Promise of Multipolarism 189 Notes

223

Bibliography 255 Index

273

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While the ideas and mistakes of this volume are my own, many people contributed to its writing. I have had the fortune of belonging to several interlocking, closely-knit intellectual communities across several locales, in a manner befitting the subject matter of the book. For their comments and insights, I am indebted to Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Debra Castillo, Djelal Kadir, and Aníbal González. At different moments and in different ways, generous interlocutors have included David Foster, Rebecca Walkowitz, Chris Hill, David Kurnick, Jorge Volpi, Natalia Brizuela, Mabel Moraña, Theo D’Haen, Alberto Moreiras, César Aira, Carlos Rincón, Román de la Campa, Pheng Cheah, Mariano Siskind, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Luz Horne, and Juan Manuel Espinosa. Special thanks go to the Stanford students from my graduate and undergraduate seminars on Aira, the theory of the novel after 1989, and contemporary Latin American literature in translation. The same goes for everyone, from the Bay Area and elsewhere, involved in my research group, Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture (2009–2012). I would also like to recognize the input of my fellow researchers and mentors at the Stanford Humanities Center, where a one-year fellowship allowed me to launch a different project and revise this one. I am also grateful to the following institutions: Cornell University, where my ideas first took

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shape; the Universidad de los Andes, where various continuing collaborations contribute to the big picture of this book; and, more recently, the Institute for World Literature at Harvard, where I shared my views with sympathetic scholars from various subdisciplines. Attendants and co-panelists provided invaluable feedback at several venues. I presented the arguments of this book by kind invitation of Gustavo Guerrero at École Normale Supérieure in Paris; of Adela Pineda at Boston University; of Horacio Legrás at the University of California at Irvine; of Alex Woloch and Nancy Ruttenburg at the Center for the Study of the Novel; of Estelle Tarica at the University of California at Berkeley; of Fredrick Aldama at Ohio State University; of Ángela Robledo at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá; of Matías Ayala at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago; of Valeria de los Ríos and Andrea Jeftanovic at Universidad de Santiago de Chile; and of Ramón Saldívar and Robert Dale Parker at the MLA. I am grateful for the support of past and present department chairs and program directors at Stanford: Joan Ramon Resina, Roland Greene, Gabriella Safran, Jorge Ruffinelli, Rodolfo Dirzo, Orren Robinson, Paula Moya, Lanier Anderson, Josh Landy, Russell Berman, and Dan Edelstein. As I worked on the manuscript, I could count on the collegiality and interest of my colleagues Sepp Gumbrecht, Robert Harrison, Marisa Galvez, Laura Wittman, Nariman Skakov, Marília Librandi Rocha, Vincent Barletta, Lisa Surwillo, Michael Predmore, Adrian Daub, Amir Eshel, David Palumbo-Liu, Franco Moretti, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, José David Saldívar, Márton Dornbach, Harris Feinsod, Adam Morris, Gavin Jones, Mark McGurl, Sianne Ngai, Clair Jarvis, Vaughn Rasberry, and José Luis Villacañas. This book, and its author, benefitted from the friendly support of Alejandro Guarín, Elisabeth Norcliffe, Leonard Schmieding, Katja Zelljadt, Subhasree Chakravarty, Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Naseem Alizadeh, Augustin Le, Saikat Majumdar, Charles Kronengold, Carol Vernallis, Daphna Davidson, and Jesse Rodin. I also cannot discount the encouragement of June Erlick, in Boston and Bucaramanga.

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I owe a special recognition to the artists, photographers, gallerists, writers, and institutions that allowed me to include images of their work in this volume, as well as to the facilitators that helped me establish contact with some of them. The former include Federico Uribe, Raúl Zurita, Matthew Shugart, Companhia das Letras, Ana María López Sotomayor, Edilberto Aldán, Javier Cruz (Semana), Sandra Gamarra (LiMAC), Mario Bellatin, and Doris Salcedo. The latter include Ricardo Silva Romero, Felipe Arturo, Iván Jaksić, Rafael Salguedo, and Mario Fonseca. Indeed, illustration captions have their own story to tell, configuring not only a subtext, but also a thread of gratitude. No one knows this better than Caroline Egan and Robert Casas, who went above and beyond in providing practical assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. Ángela Becerra also contributed to that endeavor. Philip Leventhal and Kathryn Jorge at Columbia University Press have been a pleasure to work with. Friends and family have always been close, offering an impetus and purpose that should not go unacknowledged. My most significant interlocutor, on the book and otherwise, has been Ximena Briceño. I dedicate this book to her, with love.

Beyond Bolaño

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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INTRODUCTION

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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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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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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INTRODUCTION

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.

INTRODUCTION

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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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INTRODUCTION

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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INTRODUCTION

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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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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INTRODUCTION

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

14

INTRODUCTION

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

INTRODUCTION

15

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

16

INTRODUCTION

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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INTRODUCTION

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

INTRODUCTION

19

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

20

INTRODUCTION

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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21

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

22

INTRODUCTION

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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23

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

24

INTRODUCTION

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.

INTRODUCTION

25

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

26

INTRODUCTION

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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INTRODUCTION

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.

1 NAZI TALES FROM THE AMERICAS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The transnational availability of literary themes related to Nazism is a peculiar sign of cultural globalization. After countless spy novels and war films, it is not difficult for any writer, regardless of nationality, to find enough referents to set an intrigue storyline in the rubble of Berlin circa 1945. Whether it is a love story that takes place across enemy lines with D-Day looming on the horizon or a story of cruelty and resilience en route to a presumed extermination camp, uniforms, vehicles, and villains all come readily to mind. The more conventional these tropes become, the more lackluster and problematic—or worse, unproblematic—the cultural products that feature them may become. Representing or otherwise engaging Nazism in fiction, it seems, can go two ways. It can be a high-risk, high-stakes operation, where writers might fail at producing a work that might meet the difficult task of understanding a troubling past. Or it can be a low-risk, low-stakes operation, where writers have neither anything to lose nor anything to contribute to broader discussions. In this second scenario, Nazism is little more than a prop or background set for storytelling. As practitioners of a world literature where Nazism is, for better and for worse, a recurrent theme, contemporary Latin

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American authors encounter these preconditions, much like their peers from everywhere else do. However, they do not all encounter it in quite the same manner. Most Latin Americans who write about Nazism are under less scrutiny and have arguably more creative freedom than, say, many Israelis or Germans. By the same token, their work can easily go unnoticed, or be deemed irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. What can Latin Americans possibly tell us about Nazism in fiction? It is tempting to assume a priori that anything to that effect would be an instance of derivative prose. However, that assumption is hard to reconcile with the fact that every day there are fewer people alive, of any nationality, who have firsthand knowledge of the heyday of Nazism or of the war itself. With the obvious exception of the descendants of victims and perpetrators, readers and writers from different locales around the world are leveled, vis-à-vis historical Nazism, by the pastness of the past and by the widespread proliferation of its memory. Here we enter into difficult terrain. One may suspect there is a hint of U.S.-Eurocentrism in expecting that contemporary Latin American writers are somehow further removed from and have little to say about those horrible events. At the same time, it might be seen as cavalier for them to write about such topics as if, in some sense, they too “owned” them as part of a collective, thirdhand memory. It is an interesting paradox: the memory of the deadly exploits of Nazism does not have the same weight in different locales, yet cultural products dealing with them appear to be universal. In my mind, this fascinating tension between specificity and generality makes the transnational phenomenon of “literary Nazism” a key site for examining the relationship between globalization and literature, especially from a Latin American perspective, for the region has an interestingly ambiguous role with regard to certain totalizing accounts that involve Nazism. On the one hand, one could see, in the relatively small role of the region in the Second World War, a reason to question the very name of that confrontation. Why call it a “world” war if Latin America was hardly “involved”? On the other hand, Latin America was deeply affected, and provided many essential raw materials, such as rubber, to both the Allies and the Axis. So

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one can construct an account of the war, and of the rise of transnational fascism, that is inclusive of the region. In both cases, what is at stake is the agency of the region within totalizing world narratives.1 The crux of the matter is whether Latin America should be at the margins of history, literary or otherwise—an issue that is also germane for globalization debates. My reflections on Latin American novels with a Nazi subject or element stem from the idea that Nazism, and fascism more broadly, are such limit-cases for comparability that they invite us to think more carefully about comparison itself. Even if one can objectively ascertain that the literary interest in Nazism transcends nationalities and regions, any attempt to examine it on a world scale cannot be reduced to mere genre analysis. Nazism is simply too thorny a subject to ignore its historical significance, which in itself does not play out in the same way or form in every context. In particular, this chapter shows how Latin American stories of Nazism call to question any attempt to construct a purely literary, teleological historiography of world literature. Even if such a project were feasible at the level of themes and narrative, the “themes” of Nazism clearly demand a transnational consideration of “extra-literary” matters, such as political situation and social context. They cannot be scripted in advance in any meaningful approach or technique, for stories of Nazism resonate differently across various times and locales. When confronted with fascism in literature, clinging to the illusion of disengaged, purely descriptive criticism becomes frivolous. As a result of suspending teleological accounts of literary change, the tendency to regard Latin American culture as imitation grows weaker. I now turn to analyzing why Roberto Bolaño and other Latin American writers invoke “Nazism,” among all possible signifiers to convey authoritarianism or evil, at the turn of the twenty-first century. I also reflect on the gap between such fictional Nazisms and Nazism as a historical phenomenon, as this has important implications for world-scale literary study by challenging center–periphery models. As we shall see, fantastic accounts of Nazism, along with a Borgesian subtext, provide an improbable and thought-provoking way of exposing ideologies of the global, enabling authors to conceive alternative models of globalization and to reposition contemporary Latin American literature within Weltliteratur.

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This is the very same gesture, described in the introduction, of formulating representations of the world in a compressed form—or Alephs, after Borges. Provocatively, the Alephs considered in this chapter claim the centrality of Nazism in a global collective imaginary. This operation is not an end in itself, but rather a means for reflecting about the place of Latin America in the world and about the meaning of globalization for culture at large. A BIZARRO WORLD

Predominantly, the Latin American tradition has recurred to Nazism more as an allegory than as a historical referent. In 1949, Borges inaugurated the trend with “Deutsches Requiem,” a short story about the problem of free will set in a war crimes trial. In the 1990s, Nazism returned as the unlikely backdrop for various “retro” detective stories and as an integral part of the reflections carried out in works of fiction such as Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, In Search of Klingsor by Jorge Volpi, and Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla.2 The “Nazism” as portrayed in such works is not quite German National Socialism; it is less a political party or ideology than it is a term that, although not completely removed from its historical meaning, often stands for something else. Discerning what this may be requires considering the works in some detail. Nazi Literature reads as a mock-erudite encyclopedia of imaginary authors, editors, and intellectuals with varied right-wing tendencies. Its cross-referenced entries recount the lives and works of over thirty such characters across several decades, alternating between dramatism and comic relief. The founding figure of the group, socialite writer and arts matron Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, is born in Buenos Aires in 1894 and dies in the same city at the age of ninety-nine after having spent extensive periods of time traveling abroad in Europe, the Aegean Sea, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad, among other far-flung destinations. Similarly wandering lives distinguish most characters of the book, even projecting themselves into the future: the diplomat and land-artist

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Willy Schürholz is born in Chile in 1956 and dies in Uganda in 2029. Clearly, Bolaño’s ambition is to trace a different constellation than the one he sketched in The Savage Detectives—in this earlier work, he focuses on Heimito’s kin.3 In addition to itinerancy and extremist political views, most characters share a peculiar passion for literature that borders with obsession and, strikingly, rage. Some have a direct involvement in violent acts, such as Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, a military pilot who is also a former torturer for the Pinochet regime and a poet, while most do not go beyond venting bigotry through their poetry. The ensemble defines an ominous world-consciousness, a parallel globalization where diverse forms of fascism take the place that the market economy has had in making our current world, for better or for worse, a more integrated place. After a few entries, the reader will likely overcome the initial confusion of not knowing for certain whether the book is a work of fiction or a work of reference. But the obvious question that follows is not an easy one to answer: what is the relationship between the entries? This is admittedly an open-ended question, as uncertainty is deeply engrained into this thought-provoking book. A fair amount of free association connects the lives of these “Nazi writers”; however, it is clear that randomness alone cannot sustain the book’s apparatus, nor explain the fact that authors who are not, strictly speaking, Nazis are grouped under that rubric. It would appear then that Nazism is a synecdoche for the broader phenomenon of fascism. More specifically, Bolaño is interested in the underlying traits of various forms of fascism, or what Umberto Eco would call “ur-Fascism.” For Eco, “behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.”4 Despite the fact that fascism is “a beehive of contradictions,” Eco notes, there is a family resemblance among the diverse political phenomena that fall under that name, which includes features such as the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, the vindication of action for action’s sake, the fear of difference, and the view of life as permanent warfare, among others.5 Eco takes this notion of family resemblance from Wittgenstein, allowing him to describe fascism as a game that can be played in many forms:

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abc bcd cde def Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.6 Bolaño takes to heart the idea that fascism is this kind of a combinatory game and dwells on its permutations. He does so to the point that even family resemblance becomes impossible to detect, leaving it to readers to speculate on the limits of ideological kinship and ur-fascist sensibility. In a notable example, the narrator mentions a series of pictures, one of which features Hitler holding Edelmira’s daughter in his arms, a product of a brief audience that takes place in 1929. As a grown woman, the philoNazi daughter will remember with affection this family portrait of sorts, which is all the more disquieting considering that the photo occurs in the context of gift-bearing, as though the baby had been offered to the Führer along with the verses of Martín Fierro that were translated on that occasion. Here Bolaño fabricates a vague family resemblance between Nazism and Argentine nationalist poetry: the picture is as close as any character will actually be to Hitler, despite the umbrella denomination of “Nazi literature.” And yet Nazism seems to spread across locales and epochs, reappearing in different contexts and languages—in a word, globalizing. In light of this, I would like to propose that the paratactical unfolding of the encyclopedia responds to three key principles. First, there is an overarching narrative: the unfolding of the imaginary cultural formation of Nazi (i.e., ur-fascist) literature. In the classic terms that Raymond Williams used to describe change in culture, this process would have an emergent, a dominant, and a residual moment.7 In this case, each stage

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parallels to distorted, perverse renderings of actual cultural landmarks: the emergent would correspond to late nineteenth-century Argentine criollismo, the dominant to the Chilean neo-avant-garde of the 1970s, and the residual to science fiction novels yet to be written in the United States in the thirties of the twenty-first century. As in Williams, the emergent and the residual can change places, which communicates the sense of danger—the threat of the return of fascism—that determines the plot’s suspense. Secondly, there is the incorporation of numerous references from diverse sources. The cannibalism that Bakhtin attributed to the genre of the novel applies here and then some, as this work not only “devours” several genres, but also different artistic media. There is a veritable mash-up of the motifs in Borges’s metaphysical tales, including the encyclopedia of a parallel world in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) and the teratology in Historia universal de la infamia (1935; trans. A Universal History of Infamy, 1972), among many others.8 Additionally, the book evokes performances by Escena de Avanzada, including its theoretical tenets in the work of Walter Benjamin, and draws on comics and other heterodox materials as well. Thirdly, there is a will to challenge the assumed sanctity and autonomy of literary space (the “ivory tower”) through a depiction of Nazism as something that takes hold on the everyday, that stays much too alive, and that lies closer than one may think, if under different garbs. We also witness the reductio ad absurdum of the roman à clef. Bolaño follows the implications of writing a book that fictionalizes actual people to its ultimate, absurd consequences: even the author and the reader will be alluded to. And so a character named “Bolaño” appears in the last entry, followed by an “Epilogue for Monsters,” where the reader—the monster—can find an annotated bibliography of additional Nazi journals, books, commentary, and writers. Just as absurdly, one character can resemble several actual writers and intellectuals at a time. Consider the case of Thompson de Mendiluce and Max Mirebalais, whose midsection entry deems him “the Caribbean’s bizarre answer to Pessoa” (“el Pessoa bizarro del Caribe”).9 Through paronomasia, Thompson de Mendiluce evokes Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson (1786–1868), the renowned hostess of the tertulias (salons) where the Argentine national anthem was

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sung for the first time; her chapbook “Fervor” alludes to Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) by the young Borges; and her leading role in the fictional journal La Argentina Moderna brings to mind Victoria Ocampo’s involvement in Sur.10 The Haitian Mirebalais takes after the Portuguese master, although the character resorts both to heteronymy and to plagiarism; he also alludes to the Martinican Aimé Césaire by not giving up on “cierto tipo de negritud”; and, again through paronomasia, as Karim Benmiloud notes, to Rabelais.11 But the adjective “bizarro” is crucial for elucidating this mishmash of epithets and evocations. Indeed, Mariquita was known as “la del destino bizarro.”12 Although “bizarro” in Spanish means “brave” or “generous”—not “strange” as in the English “bizarre,” or “angry” as in the Italian bizarro—it seems Bolaño used the faux amis as a prompt. In the last line of Edelmira’s biography, he writes, “mantuvo la lucidez (‘la rabia’, decía ella) hasta el final.”13 Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, Cleveland teenagers of European-Jewish émigré families, had done something similar in Superman with their character Bizarro. In its early days, the comic strip often responded to Nazism and to its austere visual economy with colorful artworks where the Man of Steel, an idealized representation of U.S. values and agro-industrial power, vanquished the German enemy and, incidentally, its visual representation of heroism. A comic book cover from the early forties features the hero bending the cannon of a tank emblazoned with a swastika insignia; another cover shows him ready to fight an enemy paratrooper who is about to land (figure 1.1). After the war was over, different antagonists needed to appear in the series. Since there is no better challenger to the hero’s unparalleled prowess than himself, along came Bizarro—who, puzzlingly, is in everything identical to Superman and means well, but does evil. Superman eventually solves the puzzle and figures out that Bizarro thinks “in reverse,” so although the latter wants to help Earth, he could eventually destroy it (figure 1.2). It is not difficult to see how this storyline represents ideological difference and the inversion of values. Bolaño’s characters, too, “think in reverse.” Examples include international volunteers who travel to Europe to join the cause of fascism—a “bizarro” combination of the International Brigades that fought on the

Figure 1.1 Superman against the Nazis. Action Comics (December 1941), no. 43. tm and © DC Comics. Used with permission.

Figure 1.2 Superman against his bizarro self. Superman (May 1964), no. 169. © DC Comics. Used with permission.

tm

and

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Republican side of the Spanish Civil War and of the Blue Division of Spanish Falangists who fought for the Third Reich—or an imaginary, openly homophobic “Beat” poet who opposes the vindication of sexual freedom that characterized actual Beatniks. Several of these thought-provoking games suggest alternative constellations in literary historiography and call attention to overlooked aspects within specific cultural formations. In this vein, Mirebalais and Thompson de Mendiluce remind readers that criollismo and Négritude were, in a strict sense, “racist.” While ethnicity is always hybrid, both movements identified themselves with an essentialized mixture. Fittingly, Sartre described Négritude as “racisme antiraciste.”14 Within their historical contexts, these movements counteracted stronger forces: criollismo served the young Latin American nations in the cause of achieving cultural independence from Spain, while Négritude proposed an alternative to white European cultural dominance. Bolaño insinuates this “tactical” racism is a lesser evil not entirely unrelated to fascism, suspending historical specificity for the sake of provocation. His aim is to dust off the bookshelves, so to speak: to portray literary movements as spaces of confrontation, not as stale historical referents. Unlike Siegel and Schuster, Bolaño offers no clear-cut distinction between heroes and foes, nor does he provide a compass to navigate the differences between good and evil. The encyclopedia prefers irresolvable tensions over Manichean oppositions. Distorted mirror images of authors and movements can be singular and static, but also multiple and dynamic, as in the “cascade of mirrors” in the entry for “Cosmogonía del Nuevo Orden” by Jesús Fernández-Gómez, a Colombian volunteer in the Nazi army: A poem of epic aspirations, it tells two stories, constantly juxtaposing them and jumping from one to the other: the story of a Germanic warrior who must slay a dragon, and the story of a South American student who must prove his worth in a hostile milieu. One night the Germanic warrior dreams that he has killed the dragon and that henceforth, in the kingdom it had long tyrannized, a new order shall prevail. The South American student dreams that

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he must kill someone, and in his dream obeys the order, obtains a gun, and enters the victim’s bedroom, in which he finds only “a cascade of mirrors, which blind him forever.” The Germanic warrior, reassured by his dream, goes unsuspectingly to the battle in which he is to die. The South American student will spend the rest of his life wandering, blind, though the streets of a cold city, paradoxically comforted by the splendor that caused his blindness.15 Nazi Literature in the Americas resembles that cascade of mirrors. Its readers, presumably, are not the perpetrators, but neither do they leave the pages unscathed as beautiful souls. The fatal attraction and ultimate misencounter between the pen and the sword reveal the precariousness of literary autonomy, a recurrent theme in Bolaño’s oeuvre. Elliptically, the passage also alludes to Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins,” for the two characters seem to have the same dream. With a peculiar use of Chinese boxes—in an entry about a poem about a dream—Bolaño renders canon formation as a secularized epic immersed in historical contradiction. The proximity between war and literature urges readers to recognize their place within the heteronomy of literature, to admit their share of responsibility—or rather, like the comforting blindness of the student, acknowledge their share of irresponsibility. The work’s final goal is to restore historicity to literary history, and to do so in a global context. In this regard, Bolaño agrees with an oftenquoted passage by Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”16 (It bears noting that Benjamin wrote these lines under the duress of Nazi persecution, a few days before committing suicide.) The encyclopedia foregrounds the difficulty of differentiating civilization from barbarism— the norm from the exception—when one lives within a certain historical horizon. It exposes junctures that one may take as given, as necessary victories of civilization over barbarism, and not as the sites of political and aesthetic dispute they truly are. Benjamin believed that part of the duty of the critical historian was to put in relation to each other moments in the past that hold the promise of emancipation, such as the Parisian

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revolts of 1830 and 1848, along with the Commune of 1871. While such a constellation counteracts a positivist and linear view of history, Bolaño proposes a constellar model of literary historiography and a view of history that, far from being positivist, is skeptical in regard to the emancipatory possibilities of literature. When left to its own means, literature can serve any political purpose, a position epitomized in a grouping of “insurgent Nazi writers” awaiting some sort of negative emancipation. The unstated claim in Nazi Literature is that there is a specter haunting literature, and that, parodying the opening line of the Communist Manifesto, it is the specter of fascism. Another distant but meaningful bizarro antecedent of the curatorial principles of Bolaño’s collection is the infamous exhibition of “Entartete Kunst,” or degenerate art, which took place in Munich in 1937. It gathered the key artists of European modernism—including Chagall, Kandinsky, Dix, Grosz, and Ernst—in a single hall of shame. The organizer’s intention was to “clear the public’s palate” to make way for the heroic, sanitized, edifying, and grand Nazi art.17 Similar propagandistic maneuvers applied to music (figure 1.3). But what constitutes an exhibition of the degenerate, the works themselves or the way they are presented? In a naturalized Nazi horizon, this might pass for a chicken-and-egg question, whereas from a non-Nazi “perspective” it is obvious that if anything must be called “degenerate,” it would be the rationale for the collection. As it turns out, Bolaño imagines a space in between these mutually exclusive positions; he suspends what we now know about the telos of the exhibition, seizing instead its moment of uncertainty. The appreciation of Nazi art poses the disquieting possibility of understanding barbarism on its own terms. To Adorno’s question on whether it is possible to write poetry after Auschwitz, Bolaño’s characters respond, provocatively, that poetry begins with the extermination camps. However, these characters are not counterarguments to the idea, often attributed to Adorno, that poetry—and by extension, art—is no longer possible.18 Rather, Bolaño carries out a narrativized continuation, in a different key, of Frankfurt School dialectics of culture and barbarism—call it the dialectics of global culture and the residues of fascism.

Figure 1.3 Advertisement for the Degenerate Music exhibition, Düsseldorf (1938). Courtesy of akg-images.

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The freak show of “Nazi” authors inscribes these residues into literary history. Alberto Moreiras observes that the force of reactionary thought lies in its holding onto the residual while denying its residual condition; he also advises against ignoring the residual altogether, for “we cannot get rid of reactionary reason without risking a complete loss of historicity.”19 Bolaño seems to take heed of this warning, and the encyclopedia’s imaginative counterfactual scenarios summon reactionary ideals to bear upon the present. This constitutes the necessary counterpoint for there to be historicity in a given temporal horizon; let us remember that the nineties, following the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization as we know it, often fancied itself as ahistorical or posthistorical.20 It may be difficult to distinguish the emergent from the residual in discrete national contexts, but it is all the more so in a global context determined by transnational cultural undercurrents. Nazi Literature in the Americas finds critical potential in this uncertainty and in the odd resonances it generates. It is a book capable of insinuating Nazism as a function of Sarmiento’s dichotomy of civilización y barbarie, or of revising criollismo after fascism; in short, of renegotiating literary history on a world scale as our notions of time, space, and cultural belonging find themselves in flux.21 These operations come into their own in the partial assimilation of early twentieth-century, postwar, and post-dictatorship art forms. In this regard, it is illustrative to contrast the entries on Schürholz and Ramírez Hoffman, as well as the places they occupy within the ensemble. Whereas, in the first chapters of the book, several members of the Mendiluce family have met Hitler himself, after Schürholz we find characters such as Rory Long, a Christian preacher whose sole involvement with Nazism is the penning of a humoristic poem in which Leni Riefenstahl and Ernst Jünger make love as they both approach one hundred years of age, an event laconically described as “un entrechocar de huesos y de tejidos muertos.”22 Schürholz marks a historical and narrative turning point located roughly halfway along a gradual decline of personal involvement with Nazism that comes to completion in Ramírez Hoffman, whose only connections to Nazism belong in the book’s compendium. Then there is a madman, “el loco Norberto,” who sees his military aircraft in the distant skies and swears

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it is a Messerschmitt from the Luftwaffe.23 This pilot, known by the epithet of “the Infamous,” occupies the place of honor in a book where, as so seen often in Borges, honor and infamy change places: all roads lead to this final entry, the very “heart of darkness,” an envoy and an envoi of sorts. Indeed, much of the book’s suspense depends on the insinuated interaction of Schürholz and Ramírez Hoffman. The former, who idolizes death but has not physically hurt anyone, sets the stage for the latter, a serial killer and artist of death. The encyclopedia presents Schürholz’s derivative, later work before introducing the master, making readers wonder what kind of perverse greatness lies in Ramírez Hoffman’s oeuvre such that he might succeed where Schürholz fails. In passing, it should be noted that the pilotpoet is also the theme of the author’s next published novel, which narrows its focus to Chile: Distant Star (Estrella distante, 1996; trans., 2004). The protagonist of that work is named Carlos Wieder—among other things, wieder means “again” in German—while the title alludes to the country’s flag. There, too, the residual and the dominant can change places.24 As it happens, these pilot-poets and land-artist-poets converge in that they allude, perversely and anachronistically, to different stages in the career of Raúl Zurita. In 1993, with assistance from the Chilean Ministry of Public Works, the poet bulldozed a three-kilometer wide verse onto the Atacama Desert: “Ni pena ni miedo” (“Neither shame nor fear”) (figure 1.4). In 1982, while Chile was still under dictatorship, he had the poem “The New Life” written across the sky over New York City (figure 1.5). Literally claiming new spaces for poetry, these actions took place in the spirit of the art collective Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), which the poet cofounded along with sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit, and visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo. Their performances were acts of political resistance. Bolaño inverts their declared sign, politically speaking: his characters perform authoritarianism. Schürholz carves vowels with a mattock in the Atacama Desert over an enormous diagram of “the ideal concentration camp.”25 Ramírez Hoffman hosts a two-part soirée: first, he scribbles eerie, immense verses in the sky with his airplane, such as “La muerte es amistad / La muerte es Chile / La muerte es responsabilidad / La muerte es amor,” while Zurita’s aerial verses read:

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Figure 1.4 Raúl Zurita, Ni pena ni miedo (1993). Photograph by Ana María López Sotomayor. Courtesy of the poet.

Figure 1.5 Raúl Zurita writing his poem “New Life” in the skies over New York, 1982. Photograph by Ana María López Sotomayor. Courtesy of the poet.

“MI DIOS ES DESENGAÑO / MI DIOS ES CARROÑA / MI DIOS ES PARAÍSO / MI DIOS ES PAMPA.”26 Then, as the reader learns indirectly from the reactions of those who attended the party, Hoffman offers a semi-private exhibition of explicit pictures of his tortured victims. These irreverent bizarro doubles have a paradoxical effect: they expose the

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reactionary forces that CADA stood up against and they bitingly call into question the group’s specific practices. As Inna Jennerjahn has shown, Bolaño “intertwines two opposite discourses, that of the fascist avant-garde with the anti-establishment discourse of the Chilean neo-avant-garde.”27 It is as if the author were calling attention to an unintended echo of Marinetti’s futurism, particularly of the artista aviatore and its glorification of death, in Zurita’s post-coup poetry. In this sense, Bolaño anticipates the criticisms to the Escena de Avanzada that Willy Thayer formulated in his landmark article “El golpe como consumación de la vanguardia” (“The coup as the consummation of the avant-garde,” 2004); briefly stated, the movement’s use of artistic shock reproduced the historical shock of the coup itself.28 While Thayer reaches this conclusion by analyzing the artists’ methods in relation to national events, Bolaño hints in that direction by recontextualizing national concerns within the broader history of the tense relation of fascism and the arts throughout the long twentieth century. Bolaño’s caricature of artistic production in Chile under dictatorship may be unfair, but it is not reductionist. Truly, the power of provocation in the fable of Ramírez Hoffman lies in its multiple registers. The reader may be unfamiliar with some or many of the numerous and heterogeneous historical and literary allusions that make this critical operation possible, but their residual presence constitutes the foundations of the encyclopedia’s bizarro world. For example, a reader may not know that Schürholz’s birthplace, “Colonia Renacer,” a rural settlement in the south of Chile founded by exiled Germans, is modeled on the real-life “Colonia Dignidad,” a hamlet close to Parral founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, a former Luftwaffe paramedic.29 Or consider Ramírez Hoffman’s allusions to Nazi war criminals in South America. In the only entry told in the first person, a Chilean writer exiled in Catalonia (“Bolaño”) tells us how Abel Romero, a sixty-some-year-old man who was once a distinguished policeman (read “detective”) under Allende’s government, entrusts him with a mission: to help him identify Ramírez Hoffman, who is living incognito in Europe, by recognizing his contributions in an array of literary magazines and ultimately by seeing him up close and confirming that he has the right man. The writer

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delivers and the policeman presumably kills the pilot-poet. As Latin American bounty hunters roam the world to hunt down their own in the Old Continent, Ramírez’s extraterritorial execution is a bizarro inversion of the pursuit of Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi in charge of the trains that carried millions to the extermination camps, who was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina in 1960 and later convicted and hanged in Israel. It is reasonable to see in this story Bolaño’s own demands for justice: at the time of publication, Pinochet had not yet been arrested in London. One could hastily assume that Bolaño is likening Nazism to Pinochetism or assimilating state crime under Latin American dictatorships to the Holocaust. Whereas the book does not foreclose such historically flattening readings, Nazi Literature presents a thorough exploration of transhistorical resonances in their complexity, including their insurmountable dissonance. Given the author’s situation, so often thematized in his writings, as a Chilean exile in Europe, when Bolaño looks back in time he finds it unavoidable (albeit problematic) to view Nazism through the prism of Pinochetism and vice versa. Thus, his encyclopedia can be seen as an attempt to answer the question of what the artist could and should do when events of local and of global import are linked in the imagination. In the book, Nazism and Pinochetism, among various other phenomena, regard each other in a relationship best described as “perverse gravitation.” In a metaphor, the black sun that holds the system together is Evil, an abstract, vague, and questionably ahistorical concept to which all entries in one way or the other orient themselves. That Evil and genocides-of-all-times coincide acritically in occupying this absent center of infamy would be the least compelling aspect of Bolaño’s literary project. Regardless, the truly powerful features of Nazi Literature are the way in which it brings about a dynamic image of a totality in constant transformation and its enquiry on the role of art in regard to such ungraspable totality. Interdependency among different cultural sites and temporal collapse characterize this globalized space: what happens in the Caribbean matters in Europe, the 1909 manifesto of futurism illuminates CADA’s actions and vice versa. The book intensifies the transnational cultural flows that

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characterize our times, exacerbating them to the point of becoming “a cascade of mirrors.” Bolaño imagines a world literary culture refounded on the premise of simultaneity. Viewing a hypothetical global culture from a radically integrated world, madman Norberto would not be the only one seeing mirages of Messerschmitts, nor would Bolaño be the only one rethinking the German postwar period from the vantage point of Chilean postdictatorship or criollismo from that of Aryanism. The affinities, as well as the dissonances that result from such operations, are the daily life of globality. At this point, I am reminded of the poem that Carlos Argentino was using the Aleph to write: “La Tierra,” the Earth. The criollista poet, who antagonizes Borges’s narrator-avatar in the short story, does not want his house demolished for fear of losing the prodigious object that gives him inspiration. Short-sighted despite his discovery of the all-scopic Aleph, Argentino sets out to write a hyperbolically long poem, filled with overwrought images, that sets itself to the task of describing the entire planet: “tratábase de una descripción del planeta, en la que no faltaban, por cierto, la pintoresca digresión y el gallardo apóstrofe.”30 With Bolaño, one could say that Argentino is a bizarro Borges, and “La Tierra” a bizarro Aleph. Yet Argentino fails to appreciate how the Aleph offers not only infinitude, but also an infinitude of infinites. His perspective does not seem to change, while Borges the character sees every object from infinite perspectives. When the house is finally demolished, Argentino publishes a work entitled “Argentine Pieces”; once broken down, his limited vision is nothing but stylized local color. In presence of the world, suggests Borges, criollismo is the one to crumble. While Argentino has a utilitarian relationship with the Aleph, Borges experiences—again, that adjective—“infinite veneration, infinite pity.”31 This ethical reaction to totality underwrites Nazi Literature in the Americas and several other of Bolaño’s writings. The combinatory exercise of fantastic fascism communicates, in a grotesque key, the richness of the world—its irreducibility to all but failed literary attempts to describe it. Bolaño unwrites himself as much as Borges does. In the latter’s case, this happens in the surprising “postscript” section of the short

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story, where the protagonist speculates that the Aleph in the house on Garay Street was “false.” In the former, it occurs in the long epilogue of an imaginary Nazi bibliography, the form of which mocks the book’s very own conceits. In the end, the genealogy of Nazi literature proves to be an impossible task, or one that does not get to the heart of the matter. Why should other genealogical, teleological descriptions of literature on a world scale be any different? Bolaño’s failed encyclopedia reveals little about the underlying rage that “Nazi” literature is built upon. The most exhaustive account of “world” literature, sociological or otherwise, would say just as little about the stakes of literature. One may try to impose a successive, hierarchical model on the transnational unfolding of literary forms. But awe, in its strict etymological sense of reverential fear, seems the more adequate ethical reaction to the wonder of their simultaneity. THE EXTENDED FAMILY OF THE MENDILUCE

In Search of Klingsor and Shadow Without a Name take many of their cues from Nazi Literature in the Americas, but they diverge significantly from it. The difference that most immediately comes to mind is their more insistent depiction of all things Nazi: regalia, military ranks, places, and proper names. Both novels follow the conventions of Hollywood’s imagery of Nazism, a debt Ignacio Padilla acknowledges in Shadow Without a Name by naming one of his characters “Bogart,” presumably after the actor’s famous role in Casablanca (1942). In an inversion reminiscent of Bolaño, Shadow Without a Name’s Bogart, unlike his cinematic homonym, turns out to be a Nazi. Cinema itself changes sides in Jorge Volpi’s novel, which opens with a disquieting description of a wolfish Hitler sitting in a private cinema in his bunker as bombs fall on Berlin, relishing in the gory images of the executions of those who had plotted against his life the year before: “—¡Bravo!—he howls again, as if a camera were to immortalize his gums and the cavities in his teeth.”32 Such evocations and diversions of the cinematic medium indicate self-awareness about the novels’ place within a thirdhand rendering of Nazism mediated by pop culture.

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Like the last entry of Nazi Literature and its denouement in Distant Star, both novels are quests to hunt down a criminal. Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor recounts the efforts of Francis Bacon, a young scientist enlisted in the U.S. army, as he travels through Germany after the Second World War to find the mastermind behind Hitler’s atomic bomb program. Bacon comes across the code-name “Klingsor” as a loose thread in the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials and carries out extensive interviews with important scientists of the stature of Einstein or Bohr in order to make sense of the name. The interviews are occasion for the author to deploy thinly veiled essayistic prose pondering the nature of evil and the possible relations between everyday life and scientific theories such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Along four hundred pages of thoroughly researched historical speculations, moral disquisitions, and scientific divulgations, the thriller surprises the reader with a series of plot twists in which Klingsor appears not as a man but as an entity—or, as it turns out, the fantasy of a mad man in a mental asylum.33 A reader of Borges will recognize the roles of the characters in “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” fulfilled in this case by scientists. Much of the critical discussion surrounding the novel has focused on interpreting the fact that, while the author is Mexican, the subject matter of his work is not. Two dominant positions arise from this discussion, one that criticizes Volpi for allegedly turning his back on his lived reality and tradition, and another that, on the contrary, celebrates his cosmopolitan thrust to unlink literary works from their place of origin.34 A radical version of the second position sees in Volpi an affirmation of the periphery over the center. Thus, after documenting how the initial reception of the novel in the German-speaking world was predominantly celebratory—with the notable exception of Georg Pichler, who laments Volpi’s “indifference vis-à-vis the victims of the Nazi State”—López de Abiada and Leuenberg suggest that the novel is politically engaged in a struggle against Eurocentrism.35 However, there does not appear to be anything particularly anti-Eurocentric in mastering a realist semblance of life in postwar Germany from the distant shores of contemporary Latin America. On the other hand,

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neither does the book’s fascination for those times and that place suggest a backdoor return to Eurocentrism. The very debate is ill-founded: the subject matter of the work is Mexican insofar as the legacies of the Second World War are part of an increasingly global cultural heritage, especially through the mediation of Hollywood films. If a German novelist of Volpi’s generation were to write about the Third Reich’s scientists, he or she would resort to the same secondary sources mentioned in the “Nota final”—which does not amount to saying that the author’s nationality is negligible, as legacies weigh unevenly. Nationality matters for many reasons, not the least of which is that the better chances at canonization for Klingsor lie first in being a Mexican novel dealing with such a topic and second in being a Latin American novel doing so, and only then in the insights it offers on the topic itself. Like Nazi Literature, Klingsor contributes less to an understanding of the Second World War, with the obvious exception of the role of scientists therein, than to the inscription of Latin American literature in the global. The debates surrounding Klingsor illustrate many of the tensions that arise when Latin American authors seek to position themselves beyond the realm of the national or the regional. The views of Volpi as Caliban and as an apátrida both hold grains of truth, if not in the terms they are most commonly framed. First, Volpi is not usurping the language of the master but showing that the language is not, and has not been for a long time, the master’s: the (cinematic) conventions of spy narratives set during the Third Reich or during its aftermath are up for grabs. Secondly, Klingsor is not leaving a Mexican horizon by leaping onto a world stage, although, by assuming the convention all but too wholeheartedly, it fails to do justice to the tensions between the local and the global Bolaño tackles. In other words, while Nazi Literature as a narrative invites the reader to reflect about the effects of art and historical discourse across borders, Klingsor does so primordially through the debates it has generated. In this sense, Padilla’s Shadow Without a Name has more in common with Volpi than with Bolaño. The novel is rich in historical detail, but historical dispute itself is reduced to a racy chess match between worthy opponents. The narrator follows a mysterious character whose stunning

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personal transformations constitute the novel’s dominant theme and the main device for the plot’s intrigue. The first of several identity swaps occurs when Austro-Hungarian private Thadeus Dreyer, who is travelling on a train to the front during the First World War, bets his destiny over a chessboard against Victor Kretzschmar, who is on his way to a safe post as a switchman. If Volpi uses a layman’s understanding of Gödel’s theorem— the idea that something, in this case Klingsor’s existence, is undecidable, that is, both true and impossible to prove—as the underlying principle for his plot, Padilla uses the job of a switchman and the game of chess as his. Here Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) becomes a garden of forking railroads. The lives of Padilla’s characters are such that one can fill in “the tracks” of another—in other words, assume his destiny. Along the way they remain under the threat of being fatally “derailed” by an invisible agent that alternatively hints at fate, a divine force, or the author. In terms of the comparison with chess, all characters are but pawns in a match that ultimately includes the author and the reader, an image that ciphers the book’s vocation: to be an intelligent and entertaining game. As amenable storytelling and intrigue for intrigue’s sake occupy a more central role in Volpi and Padilla than in Bolaño, so do moral readings of history. Evil is not an absent center as in Nazi Literature, but a ruling force that makes itself be felt throughout. The very name “Dreyer” denotes a certain evil that is passed on, like a torch, among different individuals who at different points bear the name. Thus, the would-be switchman loses the initial match, becomes Dreyer, and ultimately dies by his own hand to comply with the terms of a bet against a young seminarian, who sought to expose his opponent’s false identity and who, burdened by guilt upon the other’s death, decides to assume that very same identity. The new Dreyer rises through military ranks and becomes an important general in Hitler’s army. Other twists unfold, loosely inspired by actual cases of double espionage and assumed names, until the growing puzzle involves the identity of none other than the “master switchman”: Adolf Eichmann, who in reality happened to be a chess player. Dreyer’s heirs, entrusted with a chess manual in Polish containing a code that explains a secret plan to replace key figures in the Nazi regime with doubles, suspect that the Eichmann who

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is being judged in Jerusalem is not the real Eichmann: “quizá aún estemos a tiempo para salvar de la horca a un hombre inocente.”36 This is the point where the novel becomes both more problematic as a representation of Nazism and more interesting as a token of the place of contemporary Latin American literature within the global. Padilla’s Eichmann is no less a caricature of a historical figure than the ones Bolaño so frequently uses; the difference is that Padilla’s recourse to lighthearted detective fiction and his characterization of Eichmann are both unironical. Given the novel’s narrative economy, the man who personally oversaw the extermination of millions of people could be just any other person under the insidious influence of the name “Dreyer,” or in other words, possessed by wickedness. Despite the complex storyline, the course of history itself is reduced to a battle of good versus evil, an idea reinforced by the mythic overtones of the title.37 Padilla, who mentions Hannah Arendt’s “now legendary” Eichmann in Jerusalem in the novel’s coda, seems to proceed from a reading of Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” that renders “banality” in a literal yet mystified sense.38 Arendt clarifies such concept in the postscript to her well-known report and philosophical study of Eichmann’s trial: When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain”. . . . He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. . . . And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.39 Indeed, Shadow Without a Name gives “demonic profundity” to Eichmann and posits his deeds, if not as commonplace, as the result of an inscrutable fate or the random sum of discrete actions—two sides of a coin—that could turn any honorable chess player into an armchair

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murderer. However, Padilla offers an interesting reflection about the force of the name “Eichmann” upon the present, where it is less of a proper name than a site recognized worldwide for infamy: “el nombre de Adolf Eichmann ha comenzado a invocarse en todas partes con rencor y desprecio.”40 Aside from exploring the limits of personal identity and individual responsibility, the novel taps into the interpelative power of names and images that circulate globally and incorporates them into its narrative. Though it is problematic that it should situate itself at an all but equal distance from Bogart as from Eichmann, the novel is noteworthy not only as an example of Latin American literature’s drive to reach beyond the national, but also in its participation in the transmission and transformation of global cultural referents. Despite their differences, reading Nazi Literature in the Americas alongside the novels by Volpi and Padilla allows us to refine our understanding of the invocation of a cinematographically and otherwise pop-culture mediated “Nazism” in contemporary Latin American literature. Such a gesture speaks to, borrowing Andreas Huyssen’s words, the “effects of the Nazi image-world upon the present,” which arguably include attractionrepulsion, taboo, and awe.41 Taken as a whole, “Nazi literature” from Latin America takes advantage of such effects to imagine a different present, challenging dominant narratives of globalization and their assumptions about centrality, periphery, and the directionality of cultural exchange.42 Volpi and Padilla reclaim the surface of Nazism, so to speak—hence the emphasis on names and mainstream visual cues. Bolaño examines the roots of fascism as a global phenomenon; at the same time, he confronts narratives of globalization with disquieting evocations of fascism. GLOBAL FASCISM

In the works considered in this chapter, we see another instance of contemporary Latin American literature trying to capture globalization at the level of form. The impulse to inventory that is so evident in Borges’s Aleph is present here in Bolaño’s long list of characters and in the tally of their imaginary works, as well as in the many lives of Padilla’s protagonist and

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in Volpi’s extensive “who is who” of modern physics. These are no ordinary catalogues. It would be one thing for narrators to situate themselves outside of what is being described, as stable, external subjects that face the object of their description. But like Borges, Bolaño and his contemporaries implicate their narrators, and to some extent their writerly personas, in their inventories. Worlding is a recurring, self-referential operation, which transforms the subject and its situation as it proceeds. Meanwhile, works of fiction that deal with events of world-historical significance do so from distinct vantage points, and have varying social functions depending on their circulation and readership. By creating a gap between their Nazisms and the historical phenomenon, the Global Latin American novel destabilizes the assumed role of the region in the memory of the Second World War and elevates regional phenomena to worldhistorical significance. Put differently, the counterfactual exercise of Latin American “Nazism” seeks to affect the circulation of Latin American literature within world literature. These works point outside of fiction, to an emerging planetary-collective memory, because historical consciousness is one of the arenas where the struggle for literary relevance is fought. The kaleidoscopic quality of these novels gives form to their renegotiation of literary and cultural value. For that reason, they are best approached as processes, not as products. The Aleph is an impossible object, always in flux. In Bolaño, readers gradually become aware of a world of Nazi literature, but they cannot apprehend it all at once, as Borges imagines his protagonist does in the short story. This may be a permutation of the Argentine’s short form when transposed onto a longer genre. (It is little wonder that Nazi Literature in the Americas combines attributes from a short story collection and from a novel.) As in other works by Bolaño, multum in parvo becomes its opposite—a partial vindication of Carlos Argentino. Once the reader apprehends the underlying logic of the encyclopedia, all that is left is to succumb to the pleasures of little in much, to dwell in iteration. Still, there is a repositioning in the world taking place as the stories, or entries, rage on. Similarly, if arguably less successfully, Volpi and Padilla construe themselves as the privileged witnesses of

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the Second World War and its aftermath that the vast majority of Latin Americans were not historically situated to be. Since Latin America was one of the few regions on the planet to be spared from major combat during the Second World War, it is not surprising that it should lay claim to a relatively short tradition of literary representations of Nazism. However, thanks to Hollywood and other global media, today the region stands on equal footing alongside others regarding the vicarious memory of the war. Or does it? As previously noted, the First and Second World Wars are called “world” wars despite Latin America’s scarce involvement. (Though not by everyone; the Soviets knew the latter as “the Great Patriotic War.”) The point is not to object to the name of conflicts with global implications, but to situate them within a trajectory of grand historical récits that marginalize Latin America. Some, informed by a perverse form of Eurocentrism, posit Nazism as the most perfect—read “evil”—form of fascism the world has ever seen, and describe its configurations and echoes elsewhere as deviations from that golden standard. This is a mere displacement, with inverted values, of widespread ideas about any number of intellectual and political developments, including liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism. Several Latin American republics, informed by liberalism and nationalism, coalesced before their European counterparts, but are still measured against them. Likewise, while the ideas of the French Revolution greatly influenced the independence struggles of the Spanish territories in the Americas, there is a tendency to overstate their importance, as if local thinkers and political figures had not been indispensable agents. Mutatis mutandis: one wishes Latin American (and Iberian) fascisms were merely copying Hitler, but they were largely homegrown ideologies. In finding their place within the global rise of fascism, historiographers can figuratively relegate them to a corner of the cellar, or find in each of them, remembering Borges’s short story, the entire universe. This recognizes the paradoxical, shifting relationships between local and global realms. On the other hand, straightforwardly totalizing accounts of totalitarianism risk reproducing, at an epistemological level, the primacy of origin and land that informs the ideology itself. Better then to see the whole in the

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part and to proceed dialectically, rather than imposing an a priori, idealized form of what fascism, literary or not, “should be.” In a different metaphor: as much as one might want to find the seed of fascism to root it out once and for all, the different soils where it acclimates are just as important—or there may not be an original strain to begin with. The question is less “why couple the globalization plot and the Nazi conspiracy storyline?” and more “why carry this coupling to its ultimate consequences as a thought-experiment?” The answer is manifold. One aspect has to do with a reaction against conventionalisms, for there are unwritten rules for invoking Nazism in fiction. Bestsellers and B-side novels may revisit Nazism with little restriction, provided they maintain a certain lightheartedness. Commenting on the 2002 movie The Sum of All Fears, based on a best-selling book by Tom Clancy, the late Roger Ebert found that “the use of the neo-Nazis is politically correct: best to invent villains who won’t offend any audiences.”43 Indeed, the victims of the Nazis are all but gone, as are the card-carrying members of the party; neoNazi sympathizers are always “neo,” never operating on the same level as the originals. At the opposite end of the spectrum of cultural production, one may find works that deal with Nazism in an informed, critical fashion, often binding it to the Holocaust it brought about. Of course, lightheartedness does not belong there. And in come Latin American writers to unsettle categories in this province of the literary imagination, and by doing so, to renegotiate historical significance in the wake of a global era. Manuel Castells famously claimed we inhabit a virtually worldwide “flow society” determined by global networks that carry information.44 Flows of fantastic Nazism illustrate how flows at large are asymmetric expressions of power relationships that can escape the logic of their controllers. However, they also forewarn against the tendency to narrowly conceive of the “power of flows” only within the realm of information. The path to a global historical consciousness may pass through images of Bogart and Rains walking into the fog, but it does not stay there. The creative tension between historical referents, pop-culture images, and local concerns demands going beyond the reductionist thinking about globalization as interconnectedness. Connections are as much about form as

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they are about content: globalization involves actual people with historical baggage who filter the experiences from other coordinates of the world through the ones they are most directly involved in. Despite the obvious asymmetry, the critical discourse generated around Chilean art under Pinochet’s dictatorship could, to some extent, bear upon contemporary discussions about art after Nazism. Moretti and Casanova would foreclose this possibility, because they map Castellian dynamics onto a Wallersteinian center-periphery model: flows go from the metropolis to the margins. After Bolaño’s exploration of the reactionary, one may appreciate how the very notion of “flow” has its limits, as it does not seem to account for the many “frictions” of the present. This thought experiment on Nazi literature suggests that a given flow can occur, in terms of that metaphor, in a “viscous medium”—flows meet resistance, “counterflows,” and so forth. Conceptual aides such as a “World Republic of Letters” or the graphs, maps, and trees of Moretti’s eponymous study join these ad-hoc notions in being attempts at describing cultural phenomena on a world scale. In sociology, literary or otherwise, the lack of standard terminology is symptomatic, because we do not quite yet know how to achieve this task, or agree that we should in the first place. I, for one, use sound metaphors, such as resonance and dissonance, for their descriptive value. I also use them because listening implies attentiveness for singularity and context, the “resounding chambers” in which literary works, which in my view are closer to music than to information, take place. Vis-à-vis the work in progress of writing literary history on a planetary scale, the texts considered in this chapter suggest that some answers lie in narratives themselves. In fact, Bolaño and his cohort anticipate the route taken in alternative theorizations of transnationalism in literary studies. In a 2011 article, Christopher Hill calls for a renewed critical vocabulary to account for non-teleological trajectories of cultural exchange, much in the same way that Latin American authors from the 1990s wondered and debated how to capture the gist of our increasingly global times. But unlike Moretti and Casanova, Hill is more comfortable with offering a “messy” account of how literature travels and comes to something closer to the haphazard

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trajectories of Nazism in Bolaño than to the strictures of Moretti’s graphs. Drawing on his earlier work on the routes taken by naturalism, Hill puts forward “contagion,” “performance,” and “mobility” as viable categories to think of the many avatars of Nana, the character, in world literature.45 One of the advantages of this model is that it undermines our fetish with originality, manifest in the idea that Zola’s original is by default better than all the rest or in the assumption that Latin American or East Asian naturalisms are mere derivations of the European real thing. Another promising feature is its ability to take social function, not just genre evolution, into consideration. Fantastic Nazism brings all of these points home. The original was never better than the copy: to use a Borgesian term, they are both “abominable.” But an actual genre of Nazi literature would put the detached, cool gaze of the distant reader to the test. The critic would be compelled to engage these texts and refute them, and not just report their position within a larger history of world literature. For if those Nazi undercurrents were credible and judged to be so, the very possibility of art, let alone the practice of literary criticism, would be at stake. This is an extreme, life-or-death reminder of the importance of historical conditions in literary transmission; less eccentric matters may be less pressing, but they are not devoid of historicity. The project of telling literary history on a planetary scale cannot escape discussions of aesthetic value and historical consequence. One can speculate that the decision to filter the experiences of a post1989 world through those of a pre-1945 world is informed by numerous factors. Apart from the continued cultural relevance of de-politicized Nazi imagery, the suspension of the Cold War allows writers to see past it to the years before the Yalta Conference. The enduring significance of fascism-associated aesthetic movements like futurism is also a factor, as is the disquieting persistence of fascist sympathies among the extreme right. Beyond these factors, there is a historical phenomenon that contemporary Latin American writers are immersed in, for better and for worse: neoliberalism. It would be an overstatement to say that their portrayals of Nazism amount to a critique of the authoritarian, top-down imposition

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of that economic model in most of the region, particularly in the nineties. Yet one cannot help but wonder if the general tenor of neoliberalism, which transforms historical events into theme-park attractions, informs the weaker moments of Shadow Without a Name and In Search of Klingsor, or whether Bolaño’s gradual unfolding of historical forces is a way of resisting this, precisely. Be this as it may, they are all attempts to imagine different world orders using the materials handed down to them by global culture, in a more or less explicit conversation with their local history. Clearly, the thought-experiment of global fascism is not only about literature. Apart from occupying a peculiar place in a long trajectory of representations of Nazism, these narratives short-circuit the tendency to think of globalization as a post-historical phenomenon. “Global fascism” may appear as a contradiction in terms, to the extent that fascism places great emphasis on idealized locales, but terms such as Heimat, Fatherland, and patria translate all too easily into one another. Despite of and beneath the parody and the humor, the works considered here serve as reminders that reactionary ideals can travel just as far and deeply as capital and information, and are known to do so, too; at times they choose literature as their medium. Steeped in history, literature can be, as Bolaño would put it, “an ugly affair.”

2 THE COSMOPOLITICS OF SOUTH–SOUTH ESCAPISM

Telling stories of globe-trotting Latin Americans and their (mis)adventures is a trend in the work of Roberto Bolaño and his contemporaries. This certainly reflects a surge in international travel that is due to many factors. In comparison to previous decades, air transportation is less expensive, broadening the base of travelers; as democratic rule becomes the norm and military dictatorship the exception, political persecution becomes a less pressing reason to venture overseas; mass migration, fueled by economic inequality, continues to grow. As Zygmunt Bauman adroitly puts it, the Janus-face of globalization features a wandering tourist on one side and an illegal immigrant on the other— the winner and loser of transnational capitalism.1 Indeed, freedom of movement across borders and travel restrictions coexist, but not always shown as such in singular works of literature. Some capture the rosier side, others the grimmer. But the underlying dialectic between these two poles is always there, as the consideration of a broad corpus of post1989 novels would demonstrate. In this chapter, I provide a model for that study by focusing on Chico Buarque’s Budapest (Budapeste, 2003; trans., 2004).

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My goal is to explicate the cosmopolitics of what I call “novels of South– South escapism,” works that present fantasies of evasion through leisurely travel to destinations other than the more usual (for Latin American travelers) Western Europe and the United States. I derive the notion of the cosmopolitical from Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, for whom the term denotes “the global force field of the political,” broadening the scope of cosmopolitanism, or world citizenship, often construed in narrowly ethical terms. I also take my cues from Ernst Bloch’s writings, particularly his methodological call for appraising both the utopian and the ideological elements in cultural products and everyday life.2 Novels of South–South escapism formulate a utopian vision of globality characterized by grassroots transnationalism and solidarity, while simultaneously suppressing the less appealing aspects of traveling-while-Latin American: the longer immigration and customs lines, the suspicious looks and baggage searches, the precious stamps and visas, and the needling knowledge that many of your countrymen (especially so-called “illegals”) have it worse than most intellectuals do. In their pages, the concrete anxiety of losing in the “game” of globalization meets the lofty disorientation of the déraciné. Alephs are exacerbations of this tension. Before the irruption onto the world stage of the one on Garay Street, Borges’s character, Carlos Argentino, muses on modern man. He pictures him with all the trappings of technology (“telephones, telegraphs, phonographs . . . ”), subverting “the fable of Muhammad and the mountain—mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad.”3 One realizes later in the story that Argentino’s reverie foretells the prodigious appearance of the Aleph. Beyond the use of a phrase or dicho, which befits the character’s folksy criollo manners, the cultural referent is not accidental: Muhammad, a prophet of a faraway land, who lived in a long bygone era.4 We will travel without leaving the room; the world, in its irreducible plurality, will be right there. At the same time, the thrust of this image will carry on beyond the text itself, catapulting Jorge Luis Borges to worldwide acclaim. His anxiety of locality, and the language he deploys to expose its burning contradictions, brings about the sublation. Mountain and Muhammad, Argentino and Borges, near and far—these all change places in the written kaleidoscope that makes the story so memorable.

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Novels of South–South escapism share this kaleidoscopic quality, and often deploy unexpected cultural referents. Their intent is ultimately the same: that of disrupting the familiar circuits of transnational cultural exchange. There is an intervention-like quality to the way these novels are written, especially in how they tap into the stereotypes and clichés of locales and turn them on their heads. My own intervention here is to reveal the potential of this gesture to leap off the pages and attract a transnational readership. By accompanying the critical operations at work in the novels, I also seek to solidify their contributions to our understanding of a globalized present and of its cognate phenomenon, Weltliteratur. These are, after all, narratives that could adequately be described as “world literary,” as part of their aesthetic program is to bind cultural sites that were hitherto not strongly connected in the imagination, such as Rio de Janeiro and Budapest. Borges’s Aleph was indeed a reflection on modernity, and hence the allusion to “modern man.” The Alephs considered in this chapter reflect on an intensified form of exchange, in a time when the simultaneity, hyperlocality, and multiperspectivism of the historical Aleph has become the norm. My reading underscores the political element that Borges—or the similarly cautious proponents of world literature—do not always make explicit. WORLDLY MEN AND LOCAL WOMEN

One passage in Buarque’s Budapest seems particularly poised to move its Brazilian readership: the tale of a break-up during Réveillon, the onenight New Year’s Eve carnival celebration. The protagonist, ghostwriter José Costa, discovers that the man he wrote a successful “autobiographical” novel for is having an affair with his wife Vanda. Dramatically, as he winds through the crowd, he glimpses the seemingly enamored couple at a distance, a sight that will ultimately prompt him to leave his native Rio for the remote city that gives the book its title. Not coincidentally, in a clever game of mixed referents, the multitude dances to the deafening music of “Alá-lá-ô,” arguably the most upbeat of marchinhas, a song that any Brazilian would recognize. It tells the story of a people that, while crossing

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the Sahara Desert, pray to Allah for water—not to Yahweh, despite the allusion to the Jews, in the interest of rhyme and indistinct exoticism.5 The thirsty revelers sing with joy as the protagonist begins his exile to a faraway city in a faraway land, Budapest. Perhaps due to the author’s own cult status as a musician, readers may listen to the lyrics anew, noticing the pain amid the party, the tragicomic foreignness of a well-known tune. Duped on a congested Copacabana beach, the protagonist’s last name, Costa, which translates both as “coast” and as “back,” resonates differently: he is now the lost coast, the broken back. In the most Brazilian of rituals, there is something that is irremediably other. The force of this dramatic vignette stems from familiarity with a culturally specific referent that, paradoxically, builds on a lack of cultural specificity. Similar tensions abound in a book by a quintessentially Brazilian author who, for the most part, caters to a generic, global sensibility. It matters that Costa is caught between those two distant locales, but arguably other settings could take their place. As if having a third-party reader in mind, one who is neither Brazilian nor Hungarian, the sites in each city are the most obvious choices, the top five places to visit in any tourist guide: the beaches in Leblon and Ipanema, the medieval castle atop a hill in Buda, Margaret (Margit) Island, and so forth. These are enough for readers to fill in the blanks, for as Rita Olivieri-Godet rightly notes, the true focus of Costa’s travels is an internal, subjective voyage.6 Two main storylines, the pursuit of fame and the seduction of a woman, intertwine, leading to multiple plot twists. José Costa undergoes a journey from hometown obscurity to fame abroad as Hungarian-language author Zsosé Kósta—a transliteration of his birth name. The pact of verisimilitude in the book consists in having us believe that one lifespan, the difficulties of apprenticeship and reputation building notwithstanding, is enough for such a radical and unlikely transformation. Along the way, the protagonist abandons Vanda and their child for Kriska, a single mother, and her child. I see in this quest for fortune and love an under-acknowledged, negative take on certain aspects of the chivalric ideal, carried out on a global scale. In the medieval tradition, knights are openly violent and manly; they conduct their pursuits under public scrutiny and have little in the way

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of interiority or psychological development. Costa, on the other hand, is squeamish and secretive. For the most part, he is consumed by inner turmoil, and rarely engages in, or even realizes the existence of, violent acts. As a ghostwriter, he is decidedly unheroic, cultivating anonymity while secretly desiring public recognition. His globetrotting adventures do not prove his worthiness, only his selfish character. After abandoning Kriska and Pisti for the first time, he goes back to Vanda and Joaquinzinho, abandons them in turn, and then flies once again to Budapest to plead room and board from a resentful Kriska. Meaningfully, the chapter where the reluctant reconciliation takes place opens with the line “grande senhor comedor de merda,” which Alison Entrekin translates, minus the ironic lord title, as “you big shit eater.”7 As honor and humiliation trade places, Costa both puts himself in positions of weakness and womanizes the international “ladies” of his saga. It may appear that chivalry has little to say about modern-day Brazil, or about the relationship of that country with the world at large. But Buarque is self-consciously playing with his own standing as something of a gentleman-ambassador of Brazilian culture. Indeed, the author and songwriter is a real-life hero who has more than proven his worth away from home, and in so doing, has transformed the place of Brazilian culture within world consciousness. As several of the articles compiled in Charles Perrone and Chris Dunn’s Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (2001) demonstrate, from the 1960s onwards various strands of folk music have shaped Brazilian identity and its recognition abroad. MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), the genre championed by Buarque, and the earlier bossa nova, have transformed Brazilian society from the inside out, giving prominence to popular musical forms hitherto neglected, but also from the outside, giving them an international stamp of approval. The volume Chico Buarque do Brasil (2004) serves as an indicator of the author’s role as a powerful cultural broker who mediates between his country and the world. Starting with the title itself, that collection of testimonies and scholarly contributions, edited by the National Library of Brazil, is all about conferring symbolic knighthood to Buarque, signaling his role as a national treasure and a personified ideal of nobility.8

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This explains the poignancy of reading a book written by a national hero about an ignoble character who renounces his own nationality. Buarque has achieved a kind of synthesis as a musician, and to a lesser extent as a writer, that few Latin American artists have attained: he is relevant in Latin America and in the world at large. While Costa must choose between fame and Brazil, Buarque has both. The character’s plight is thus a displacement of the author’s own trajectory, a fantasy of failure in an otherwise successful career. Buarque engages in an interesting inversion: based on biographical evidence, it is clear that he knows Brazil in depth and Hungary only superficially. But here fiction goes in the opposite direction, rendering Brazil as a simulacrum and transforming Hungary into an embodied experience. In this sense, Budapest plays out an essential trait of the Global Latin American novel, namely, the tension between local and supranational realms. But how does it represent the place of Brazil in the world? Previous critical readings tend to leave this question aside and focus on the protagonist and his intimacy, as though travel and acculturation were mere catalysts for the transformations in his soul. However, a different picture starts to emerge when one reads this remarkably malecentered and purportedly apolitical novel against the grain. My sense is that Buarque circumscribes geopolitics to the bedroom. The novel transfigures the power struggles that constitute the daily life of globalization into the conflicted ascendancy of a cosmopolitan male subject over his localized female partners. Budapest trades a well-known series of dichotomies—First versus Third World, barbarism versus civilization, and so forth—for the conventional, properly chivalric opposition of the masculine versus the feminine, with an emphasis: the woman is at home while the man is out in the world. This is not the first time Buarque has explored this theme. In his close reading of the 1976 song Buarque co-wrote with Augusto Boal, “Mulheres de Atenas,” Rinaldo de Fernandes notes that women belong to the domestic realm while men roam about.9 Buarque and Boal call on modern women to measure themselves against (“mirem-se no exemplo”) ancient Greek women, who raised the warriors’ children and did not protest when their husbands went out chasing and fighting for Helens. One possible interpretation of Budapest, extrapolating

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Fernandes’s argument about the song, is that the author is exploring the construction of a global masculinity and, through irony, calling attention to the ongoing subordination of women.10 However, this does not seem to be the case. After all, the book devotes beautiful, lyric passages to women, but also renders them along fixed gender roles. Critics have overlooked this misogynistic element, which is a powerful subtext in Buarque’s novel. Writing about its multiple mirror games and mimetic structures, Sônia Ramalho de Farias underlines how “The Gynographer,” the autobiography that Costa ghostwrites in Brazil for the German adventurer Kaspar Krabbe, is a specular image of the poems that Kósta pens in Budapest, and also of Budapest as a whole.11 She goes on to show how Buarque explores the dilemmas of personal identity, an operation that rightfully reminds her of Borges’s famous prose poem “Borges and I.” Likewise, she notes how the novel, more or less explicitly, revisits the tenets of Roland Barthes’s argument on the death of the author, and furthermore thematizes the “controversial topic of literary mimesis and the representation of the subject in contemporary fiction.”12 As pertinent as those more speculative points are, they pay insufficient attention to the very concrete, sensual, in-the-flesh operation that lies at the center of “The Gynographer” and by extension, borrowing Ramalho’s terminology, in its associated fantasmatic texts. Krabbe’s apocryphal memoir, as the etymology of its title suggests, tells the story of a man who writes fiction on the bodies of women. The muses all participate in the experiment of their own accord: first Teresa, the Brazilian beauty who will break the German’s heart; a flurry of prostitutes and ticklish schoolgirls; and then lastly a redeeming love who erases by night what Krabbe has written during the day. For all their complicity in this erotic, literary adventure, the novel never considers the possibility that women could in turn write on men’s bodies. This understated masculinist fantasy plays a fundamental role in the book’s imaginary: the man contemplates his work on the feminine body, adds to its “perfection,” and takes possession through the act of writing. Costa is in awe of the whiteness of Kriska’s skin—”eu nunca tinha visto corpo tão branco em minha vida”—not only, as implied, because

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Magyars are “whiter” than the Brazilian women the protagonist frequents, but because it is the whiteness of an empty page.13 Hence the syntactical symmetry found later on, when Costa is confronted with the Hungarianlanguage memoir published under his name: “eu ñao tinha escrito aquele livro.”14 One could say that Kósta writes on Costa’s back, as per the surname’s meaning. However, they both inscribe their words on women, the mute Scheherazades whose bodies tell the tale. While José/Zsosé is both a subject and an object for writing—an author and someone else’s character as well—feminine characters are consistently objectified. In fact, episodes of domestic violence punctuate the stages in the plot. Costa forcefully drags Vanda away from the New Year’s Eve party. In an empty room, he holds her still and grabs her by the hair. In his inner monologue, he imagines that she is afraid that he might rape her— arguably the roundabout way through which his own impulses surface to his consciousness. Short of battering her, he reveals the hurtful truth: he is the author of “The Gynographer,” the book he thinks made her fall for Krabbe.15 This brings the plot’s “introduction” to its completion, in the sense that, by then, all its elements have been laid out. Later on, a threatening Costa smashes against a wall the plate of spaghetti that Kriska had served him. He is enraged because she detects something that sounds oddly foreign in the grammatically correct Hungarian poems he has ghostwritten for the preeminent Magyar poet Kocsis Ferenc.16 One may rightly consider this second episode the point of no return, when the protagonist loses his mind. (A possible interpretation of the novel’s ending is that Kósta’s Brazilian past is pure delusion.) From thereon, he challenges a Magyar ghostwriter to a reading-cum-duel, and prevails, only to be denounced by that writer and deported to Brazil. His adversary turns out to be Kriska’s well-connected ex-husband. Some months later, that same writer has Kósta repatriated back to Hungary and publishes on his behalf “Budapest,” a best-selling memoir. The climax of the novel is a repeat of the initial episode with Vanda: And one night, in bed, I jumped on Kriska, threw the book [“Budapest”] across the room, held her by her hair [segurei-a pelos cabelos],

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and remained like that, panting. I am not the author of my book, I wanted to tell her, but my voice wouldn’t come out of my mouth, and when it did, it was to say: You are all I have. And Kriska whispered: Not today; the boy was sleeping there in the cot next to the bed, because he had to be breast-fed every half-hour.17 In this highly charged passage, imminent violence dilutes into tender rough play. The choice of domesticity over savagery finally relieves the mounting tension, leading to the novel’s denouement. Again, woman is home, the port of arrival in this journey. Moreover, she is sanity. The alluded-to child appears abruptly, as Joaquinzinho did many pages earlier, catching the father—and the reader—by surprise. This binds together fatherly and creative anxieties, as if conceding authorship and acknowledging paternity were the same thing. Readers will recall that, during his deportation to Brazil, Costa runs into Joaquinzinho, by then a tattooed skinhead who, not recognizing his father, raises a threatening fist against him. Contrastingly, Hungary welcomes him with fame, realization, and a baby who might not turn out as thuggish as his son with Vanda. As even his stepson Pisti rejoices, the storyline of paternal/authorial maladjustment comes to its completion. Ambiguously, this ending seems both to counteract and to ratify male ascendancy. The protagonist must give in and relinquish his symbolic power to Kriska’s ex-husband, the master Hungarian ghostwriter, to defeat the parvenu. This adversary is so powerful as to afford this altruistic action, which he carries out, it seems, to teach Costa a lesson, as well as out of pity toward the mother of his child. Costa resigns himself to being a beta male in a contest with understated sexual connotations. It all brings to mind Marilyn Frye’s now-classic The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), where she establishes a link between misogyny and certain forms of male gay eroticism.18 The combination informs the relationships between ghostwriters and “proper” writers in Buarque’s novel, as well as the depiction of Greek life in his earlier song written with Boal: in both cases it is about men who are attracted to each other, more or less intellectually, in a way that relegates women to a second tier.

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Consequently, when Costa and Vanda attend Kocsis Ferenc’s reading at the Hungarian consulate in Rio, the poet stares into Vanda’s captive eyes and recites, from the “Secret Tercets”: “egyetlen, érintetlen, lefordíthatatlan!”19 A simple dictionary search would reveal that the foreign words, so aptly and even musically woven into the Portuguese text, are feminine adjectives: “unique, untouched, untranslatable.” Vanda is a muse—poetry itself. Costa sulks after the reading, yet claims he is not jealous, he says, because Vanda was the only one not to notice that the poet was gay. The last line of the novel, an envoi of sorts, signals absolution and plenitude, Vanda and Joaquinzinho long-since forgotten. It is a phrase that resonates long after one has closed the book: “E a mulher amada, de quem eu já sorvera o leite, me deu de beber a água com que havia lavado sua blusa.” Entrekin renders this as “And my beloved, of whose milk I had partaken, made me drink from the water in which she had washed her blouse.”20 The primary meaning of “sorver,” particularly when coupled with the noun “milk,” is “to drink.” However, the verb also translates as “to destroy,” which is probably why Entrekin chooses the fittingly ominous “partake” despite of its rather equivocal Christian overtones. Be this as it may, communion, replenishment, fulfillment, and redemption are all part of the novel’s resolution. In terms of the bodily fluids that identify different moments of the story, Costa goes from eating shit—“o grande senhor comedor de merda”—to drinking milk, every drop of it, even its traces on the blouse. Nourished, infant-like, he is finally home: his long march through the desert is over.21 FOR LOVE OF STR ANGENESS

A sobering thought experiment: in real life, a Brazilian who found himself—or herself, more likely—in Budapest, with no legal status, visa, linguistic skills, or money, might become entangled in the webs of prostitution rather than being celebrated on the avant-garde poetry scene. In that flipside of Buarque’s story, infamy takes the place of fame, dishonor that of honor, disempowerment that of recognition. The sordid underworld of sexual slavery and human trafficking is not far, I think, from the materials

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the author works with to create his fable of globalization. Krabbe turns to prostitutes when he hits bottom, while Kósta, symbolically speaking, risks becoming the prostitute of his poet-rivals. For one, Marx saw prostitution as a stand-in for capitalism. As he famously observed in the Manuscripts of 1844, “prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer.”22 The promise of a “socialist sexuality,” one based on equality and mutual recognition, is the utopian element in Costa’s heavily ideological worldview. The suppressed element is the provenance of the traveler from what was until very recently, and still is in some circles, known as the Third World. Socialism is the elephant in the room. Costa is blinded (along with us, the readers, who see through his eyes) to the one thing that would have struck a Brazilian traveler the most, particularly if he or she lived under the kind of right-wing dictatorship Buarque himself fled from in the late sixties. While following Costa from an anachronistically media-savvy Rio to a parochial Budapest, we have the feeling of traveling to the past, from an era of cosmopolitanism to an older one of nationalism. What we fail to see is the contrasting political and economic systems, or the overall social dynamics. Costa’s integration in Magyar society happens only at the level of his incipient family with Kriska and at that of his career as a Hungarian writer. Work and family, the privileged spheres of daily life in capitalism, occupy the entirety of narrative space. Upon meeting him, a bold Kriska throws away the book “Hungarian in 100 Lessons” before he could purchase it, as if telling him that “one does not learn the Magyar language from books”—the implication being that she will teach him, if he is lucky, through love.23 Indeed, intimacy and literature are the only sources of Costa’s Hungarian. Given the very few Hungarian speakers he interacts with, it is surprising that he learned to speak the language at all.24 Budapest engages in a kind of reverie that actively suppresses collectivity. Costa flees Copacabana in inner turmoil, annoyed with the paparazzi and angry at his cheating wife, but he takes for granted the televised, scripted character of an occasion that was once was a popular festivity.25 He lacks any sense of social responsibility, from the rudiments of parenting to feeling empathy for the orphans Vanda reports about. Obsessed

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with his own personal future, he turns his back on history, writ large. But it must surely take willpower to stay so self-absorbed in a changing world! Yet Budapest ignores any emancipatory potential in state socialism, particularly the Hungarian variant of the period, which was exceptionally liberal by Eastern Bloc standards. More significantly, it also eludes representing the popular in two locales and turns its back on every form of community except for the estranged association of ghostwriters, itself a shadowy global organization that cannot coalesce. Throughout the novel, the nostalgic mood serves an individualist agenda. Borrowing Bloch’s terms, this constitutes the ideological foreground of the novel. However, all great works of arts “have implicitly a utopian background,” says Bloch, who carries on to affirm that “from the standpoint of the philosophical concept of utopia, these works of art are not ideological jokes of a higher form but the attempted path and content of known hope. It is only in this way that utopia fetches what belongs to it from the ideologies and explains what is historically progressive and continuously having an effect within the great works of ideology itself.”26 Extending this argument, I see Budapest as an ideological work of art rich in utopianism. More specifically, it deploys the “utopian function,” defined for present purposes as the anticipation of a progressive society, in this case one of global solidarity. Bloch explores, in more detail than is fitting to cite here, the results of the encounter of the utopian function with various archetypes, including Romeo and Juliet as the archetypes of young love.27 The archetype in Buarque’s imagination would be an amalgam of the knight and Don Juan, and the encounter with the utopian function leads to the hyperlocalization of female subjects. The male gaze seeks to organize the world and assert its privilege therein, as well as, evoking Bauman, the ascendancy of the tourist over the refugee. “Being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation,” claims Bauman, who goes on to note that “the tourists travel because they want to; the vagabonds because they have no other bearable choice. . . . Vagabonds are travellers refused the right to turn into tourists.”28 The verisimilitude of Budapest hinges on the possibility of conflating the categories of the vagabond and the tourist

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within the space of fiction. Buarque tests this premise to its limits, until the plotline works against it. That’s when the utopian background, so to speak, comes forward: at the closing, an immigrant Kósta weakens the rigid individualism of the novel by becoming an unlikely family man living off the kindness of others—a hint that perhaps there is more to the world than the mere sum of discrete, free-roaming individuals. The tension between utopia and ideology informs the author’s notion of globality and determines the novel’s multiple contradictions. In the terms of Alfred Sauvy’s influential coinage, he goes from the Third World to the Second World, that is, from the nonaligned to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.29 Yet he also travels from a privileged, internationalized upper-middle class to a monolingual, geographically fixed lowermiddle class. Costa escapes from a realm of images to one of words, but it is not one in his mother tongue—linguistically, too, he finds a new “mother.” He leaves a global language, spoken by hundreds of millions of people on three continents, for an endemic language with relatively few speakers residing predominantly in a delimited geographic area. Additionally, the novel reflects present conditions where, to put the matter bluntly, an affluent Brazilian tourist can comfortably travel through Western Europe’s poor cousins. Because the book is weary of the dominance of visual media, epitomized in the paparazzi that harass Vanda, it fantasizes about a pre-television, not to mention pre-digital, past—and, through its Magyar mirror-image, of a parochial Brazil. Besides a disavowed fantasy of socialism, there is also one of the possibility of transcendence and foreignness, precisely at a time when immanence and familiarity become more prevalent. Just as Costa feels attraction-repulsion toward fame, the novel does, too, toward globalization. Hence the ambiguous fascination and repugnance with media other than the printed word, as they facilitate the rapid exchange of images “in real time.” In a notable, recurrent passage, Kriska mocks Costa’s rudimentary Hungarian. Instead of telling her over the (landline) phone something along the lines of “I am almost there,” he says that he will be arriving one body part at a time.30 She makes him repeat this comic slip and cracks up into laughter, revealing herself as a

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sadistic disciplinarian of a teacher—one who, as we later find out, is more powerful than Vanda because she is master of the language of Costa’s new literary aspirations. Aside from character development, in this seemingly innocuous joke lies a commentary about the role of media in generating a sense of ubiquity, coevalness, and presence. The passage also defines the book’s aesthetic option of countering these elements. It prefers opaqueness over transparency of communication, deferral over immediacy, and words over images. It seeks to replace the superficiality of media glitz with the deep experience of literacy, but ultimately trades the surface of television screens for that of human skin. The personal revolution comes back in full circle. Kriska serves him spaghetti that he smashes against the wall; Vanda served him soup that he lets go cold. It cannot be a coincidence that the protagonist of Silvano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan (1985) is named Eduardo da Costa e Silva, a last name that literally means “of coast and jungle,” but may also suggest, by phonetic association, a “whistling backside.”31 That Costa was a young gay man fleeing homophobic Brazil and attaining sexual freedom in the United States—a story of transcending the national. Our Costa is a macho man both here and there, and he ultimately reconfigures his traditionalist heterosexual family structure in his new locale. The sublation consists in that he is less of an alpha male and in that images and words—or be it literature and video—finally make a truce. In the individualist imaginary of the novel, this translates into the synthesis of adultery, a great theme of the bourgeois novel since Flaubert, and domesticity. The final reconciliation of words and images, intimacy and exposure, and authorship and anonymity comes with Kriska, who starts making home videos while pregnant with Costa’s son. She carelessly alternates between moving pictures, reading her man’s (apocryphal) work, and childrearing: “And when she wasn’t watching a video or nursing the boy, Kriska read the book.”32 By this point, it dawns on the reader that “the rage of Achilles” in the plot—that is, its unity of action—is the love of strangeness, including the maladjustment between the world as experienced on and off a screen. When the protagonist returns to audiovisual familiarity, the story is complete.

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Before that resolution, however, the consumption of images is almost always an alienating experience. While presenting the news, Vanda’s halfsmile is “appropriately equidistant” from two stories, one about women’s soccer and another about orphans with gouged-out eyes;33 later on, her baby falls asleep while she bids the viewers goodbye on the television screen.34 These moments work on many levels. They comment on the condition of being orphaned or homeless, which affects parents and children alike until the very end of the novel. They also present moving pictures as something that trivializes and distorts; suggest the protagonist’s chauvinist apprehension toward his wife’s successful career (do women playing soccer or having professions somehow lead to orphaned children?); and exemplify his anxiety with exhibition and public life as a whole. At one point, Costa claims that literature is the only art that does not need to “exhibit itself ” (não precisa se exibir), but later he humiliates a rival ghostwriter precisely by “showing off ” (era para o Sr . . . que eu me exibia).35 It seems that, for Costa, looking is just too sensuous an activity to circumscribe to the screen; a voyeur, he experiences attraction-repulsion for the limelight. In one of several iterated passages, he stares at Vanda, who is enjoying a book she does not know he has written, and compares the situation to watching her undress without her realizing it.36 Such private acts of observation contrast with the public exposure he both rejects and craves: the cameras that follow Vanda during Réveillon and the interviews he gives on Hungarian television much later, when fame stamps his cultural belonging and assimilation into Magyar society. For Buarque, global exchange is decidedly something other than a scrolling marquee of indexes at the bottom of a television screen. His protagonist embraces literature and personal interaction as the ideal media for cultural immersion, while considering streams of images as mere simulacra. Kriska befits his search for the root of all things Hungarian; as a purist, she shuns the use of foreign terms and spends afternoons listening to old Hungarian songs. This as opposed to, one may hypothesize, watching cable programs. It is interesting to note the media that do not appear in this early twenty-first-century novel, including, most prominently, the Internet. Truly, there are several moments in the plot that

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would become rather unrealistic with its presence. During his first long stay in Budapest, Costa fails to reach his wife over the phone in London. Even with the excuse of different time zones, the lack of communication that facilitates his extramarital relationship would be easily remedied by Voice-over-Internet applications such as Skype or even simple e-mail. In a sense, Costa can double his romantic life because, without the Internet, the world remains a vast place. Buarque engages in this nostalgic exercise as if, in order to make oneself understood in a foreign land, Global English is of little use and as if physical distance proves an insurmountable obstacle. Cut from his own land and people, Costa’s only option is to become Hungarian. The plot itself is undated, although one may assume, since Joaquinzinho and Pisti grow into young adults over the course of the narrative, that it spans some eighteen years. If it ends shortly before the time of publication (2003), those would be the years of the intensification of global cultural exchange I associate with 1989. The novel is remarkably apolitical, despite the fact that, in the vague past Costa would have lived through, historical events of great importance were taking place. To give but one example, East Germans risked their lives fleeing into Hungary, not knowing the Berlin Wall was about to fall. Although Buarque is not being anachronistic through and through—electronic communication, cable television, and the Americanization of Central Europe are recent phenomena—his novel is the bookend to a bygone era of relative cultural isolation. Some more or less subtle hints at anachronism do appear, perhaps unwittingly: when Costa first comes to Budapest, he passes by a Kodak, a Benetton, and a C&A store. While Kodak was once a staple of analog photography around the world, brand-name clothing stores would have been a less likely find in the Hungary of the early eighties. Of course, it matters less whether the novel is factually accurate or not—after all, Kósta’s hallucinated story could be as apocryphal as the one he writes for Krabbe—than to appreciate the erasure of the social that allows for this individualist nostalgia. The one social bond that is taken for granted is cross-cultural love. The emplotment of the love of strangeness prevails over that of the strangeness of love. Past infatuation, what do a middle-aged, well-to-do Brazilian writer

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and a Hungarian single mother of modest means have in common? The novel must assume their enduring love as a given, eluding psychological depth and the more meaningful sociocultural shocks that would occur over the course of such a long relationship. Love must be the magic force that bridges all gaps. Buarque succeeds in making this verisimilar through stylistics, narrative symmetry, and masterful command of suspense. The work effectively lures the reader into its fetishization of foreignness, which comes down to the letter level, as exemplified in the emphatic use of the letter K, a rarity in Romance languages. Budapest transforms the leap of faith of falling in love into that of instant acculturation. From a jetsetter, Costa turns into a refugee; all it takes is for someone back home to cancel his credit cards. To Buarque’s own credit, readers do not ask why this novel is not written in Hungarian. We are gently persuaded into a Hungarian dream, and upon waking up, the volume in our hands is there to prove that we were far away. The narrative device brings to mind a passage Borges quotes from Coleridge: “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay!—and what then?”37 What then, indeed? For a moment it seems that Rio is hell, complete with women playing soccer and orphans with gouged-out eyes, while Budapest is the paradise where Beatrice awaits. But, as we know, oblique nostalgia for Brazil is a key element of the plot, and, as Costa states playfully early on, the Magyar language is the only language on Earth the Devil respects.38 In other words, this experience of travel is not entirely one of transcending to a different realm, or of breaching from vigil into dream. The materiality of the book object, its Coleridge’s flower-like quality, is about giving concreteness to the virtual. The novel’s Budapest must be tactile, unlike the streams of images from distant locales we see on cable television. Readers are encouraged to believe they hold in their hands the very “Budapest” that catapulted Kósta to fame in Hungary. The volume itself is the color of mustard (paprika would be too obvious), as is the imaginary book and the city itself in Costa’s early recollections when he first flies back to Rio (figure 2.1). The back cover is an inverted mirrorimage of the cover, except “Zsozé Kósta” occupies the place of the author’s

Figure 2.1 Chico Buarque, Budapeste (front cover). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003.

Figure 2.2 Chico Buarque, Budapeste (back cover, designed as a mirror-image of the front cover, with the protagonist’s assumed name in place of the author’s). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003.

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name and the title drops the Portuguese “-e” ending in favor of the Magyar spelling of the city’s name (figure 2.2). Buarque is too famous for anyone to assume that Kósta were his actual secret identity, but the book’s genius lies exactly there: it enables the author to escape, or to reinvent, his own fame, while affording the cosmopolitan reader a new form of escapism. The author does not waver between ghostwriting biographies in Portuguese and composing poems in Hungarian, but he does go back and forth between the two “languages” of music and prose. Similarly, very few readers find themselves caught between Hungary and Brazil—unlike, say, between Mexico and the United States—but they can still picture new lives in a faraway land.39 Allusions to “the other side” abound: the mirroring back cover, the backs of women who serve as Krabbe’s canvases, the protagonist’s last name. These forgotten halves are residues of Cold War dichotomies. They participate in the comforting fantasy, prevalent until 1989, that the world is essentially split into a single “us” versus “them.” There is no frontier, wall, or border between Hungary and Brazil, but the novel cannot entirely imagine the world without such scaffoldings. There is no other side to break into, which is the reason why the protagonist’s split love and personality compensate for the lack of resistance and opposition in this utopia of a world without significant travel restrictions. Dialectically, within that utopianism there is also delusion, particularly in the belated appearance of visa troubles. The delusion here consists not in that they occur, but in that they do not occur, as they often do in real life, early on. Douglas Kellner notes that, for Bloch, ideology and utopia are not just opposites, “because utopian elements appear in ideology and utopias are often permeated with ideological content and mystification.”40 This is certainly the case in Budapest, a work that wants to change the world, paradoxically, one escapist fantasy at a time. No other passage encapsulates this dynamic better than the momentary return of Costa to Rio de Janeiro. The protagonist trades his Hungarian dream for a Brazilian nightmare, as his philoxenia and fatherly love clash against Joaquinzinho’s apparent xenophobia and parricidal tendencies. Let’s recall the scene: before recognizing the young skinhead as his

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son, he sees the menacing tattoos on his bare, muscular chest, and for a moment thinks he can decipher them.41 This is an inversion of the earlier, erotic inscription of Krabbe’s tale on the bodies of subdued women. What makes the tattoos so disturbing to Costa, and so jarring to readers, is their straining of the novel’s conventions. The protagonist calls the tattoos “hieroglyphs” because the characters are so strikingly illegible to him, despite his mastery of a very foreign language and the previous legibility of prose on skin. In addition to generational struggle, the passage revisits the homoeroticism-misogyny pair. Costa thinks that the skinheads think that he is gay: “talvez pensassem que eu fosse veado.”42 On the verge of panic, he speculates that those skinheads must be the kind who like to beat “fags” (“bichas”) and describes their motorcycle pursuit as running “com a moto na minha cola.”43 Emasculated, he does not find cigarettes in his pocket when the young thug, brandishing a cigarette in his lips, asks him for a light. Entrekin gives us the ensuing confrontation as follows: He was one hand taller than me. . . . My eyes met his eyes staring at me, and they were feminine eyes, very black; I knew those eyes, Joaquim. Yes, it was my son, and I barely managed to stop myself from uttering his name; if I smiled at him and held out my arms, if I gave him a paternal hug, perhaps he would not understand. Or perhaps he had known from the start that I was his father, and that was why he was looking at me like that, why he had me trapped against the wall. He made a fist, drew back his arm, and I think he was going to get me in the liver, when I heard voices beside me.44 Here Costa finds himself on the receiving end of imminent violence, in a scene that conjures fantasies of parricide, male rape, and xenophobia. After this traumatic experience, he quits on his fellow Brazilians, starting with his biological son, and channels any sense of solidarity and affiliation toward his fellow Magyars. The recomposed, transnational family of Kósta, Kriska, and Pisti is all that is left of the promise of a world bound by a deep sense of care. But what would it mean for Joaquim (no diminutive here) to avenge the violence inflicted upon his mother? In my reading,

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that hypothetical denouement would be the rough landing, which never takes place, to the novel’s escapism. Buarque repurposes escapism, which predominantly occurs along North–South or West–East axes, for what I have called a “South–South” axis—a journey from one semi-peripheral nation to another. Yet, at the same time, Budapest exhausts the possibilities of its form. If we read against the grain its eleventh-hour vindication of the escapist plot, we appreciate the shortcomings of a categorical diversion from social reality in a world increasingly bound by images and stories. THE VANISHING ORIENT

Although it may appear that the theme of Buarque’s novel is unusual, there is in fact a surge in Latin American novels, both Brazilian and Spanish American, set in atypical locales. Elsewhere, I have argued that the relatively numerous recent novels from the region that take place in Chinesespeaking settings result from the increased world-awareness that comes with economic globalization.45 In a volume devoted to Latin American orientalisms, my contribution considers the Colombian Santiago Gamboa’s Los impostores (2002) as well as novels by two Argentines, César Aira’s Una novela china (1987) and Ariel Magnus’s Un chino en bicicleta (2007). The first is a lighthearted noir set in Beijing, featuring a Peruvian of Asian descent as a comic antihero; the second an idiosyncratic riff on the life of the Chinese poet Lu Xun (1881–1936); and the third a comedy of errors set in Buenos Aires’s Chinatown. My chapter concludes that “south–south orientalism engages imperialist fantasy without reproducing its ideology of cultural superiority.”46 In his introduction, Ignacio López-Calvo, the volume’s editor, concurs, as do several other contributors. Latin American orientalism would have the mirroring effect that all orientalisms have—they reveal things about the source but hardly anything about the fantasized locale—without the legitimizing effect that such effacement had in the case of, say, the British Empire. Some of these findings bear upon Budapest. Although examining the relationship between orientalism and escapism would require a separate study, one could tentatively claim that all orientalism is escapist, while

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not all escapism is orientalist. “In all of his novels,” states Said, “Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy.”47 Costa’s trip could have taken place just the same in Beijing, or anywhere fit for a love triangle. This is consistent with the history of orientalism; Asia, Central Europe, and the Middle East have all been equated in Western literature as faraway lands. What is interesting about this new instantiation is that Latin America, for centuries an orientalized locale (hence the name “West Indies”) now finds itself as the subject of orientalist discourse, not as its object. It is not anymore the destination to escape to, but to escape from—and not, at least in the imagination, in precarious exile, but in unhurried tourism. South–South escapism and its accompanying orientalism serve as the testing ground for different ways of being in the world as a Latin American. For once, readers from the First World assume the role of spectators, while the actors are from elsewhere. Their reversed situation is similar to that of Latin Americans in regard to the spy novels and early James Bond films of the Cold War: it always seems history happens to someone else. South–South imagination tries to fixate an elusive object, given the shifting post-1989 geopolitical order. Consequently, China may appear in fiction as a backwards land or as an emerging power. In Buarque’s novel, Budapest is construed as an uncorrupted, isolated locale, while Rio gains the prominence of a world capital. These shifting modes of representation lead me to revise my earlier thoughts, and to suggest that we not overlook the aspirations to hegemony that are codified in the South–South plot. Even if, at a utopian level, novels like Buarque’s speak to the impossibility of escapism and the end of faraway lands, at the ideological level they may serve a variety of purposes. For instance, they may emphasize otherness in a time of sameness, celebrating the homogenizing effects of a common world market. Or their nostalgia for isolation could constitute a reaction against interdependency and deep cultural exchange. Given that a false terrorist alert leads Costa’s rerouted plane to land in Budapest for the first time, the ensuing plot could be equally seen as a rejection of the centrality of counterterrorism in the international agenda or as a dismissal of real obstacles to utopian cosmopolitanism.

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Brazil has its own share of recent narratives that take place in underexplored places. Olivieri-Godet hypothesizes they inaugurate a “poetics of alterity,” and identifies traits such as the use of an oneiric atmosphere as a way of representing otherness, the presence of terms or phrases in a foreign language to suggest the opacity of cultural encounter, the valorization of exoticism, and the incorporation of the Freudian notion of the uncanny. The Réveillon scene in Budapest would corroborate this last point, offering readers what could be described as an unheimlich take on carnival. Similarly, the critic analyzes other novels that depict alien elements in what feels most like home, particularly Bernardo Carvalho’s Mongólia (2003) and Alberto Mussa’s O enigma de Qaf (2004). The first, a fictionalized travel diary in the nation that gives the book its title, features two Brazilian diplomats searching for a missing photographer (note the affinity with Bolaño). In a similar quest, the second features a contemporary Brazilian poet of Lebanese descent traveling to the Middle East to discover the origins of a sacred poem, alongside stories set there in ancient times. But it seems to me that Olivieri-Godet’s category of “otherness” is too broad a category to bind these novels. Perhaps Mussa’s work, situated in the pre-Islamic Middle East, should be read as a historical novel or as a novel with a historical setting. A case in point would be the Colombian Enrique Serrano’s Tamerlán (2003), a fictional take on the famous Central Asian conqueror. Then again, there could be a double movement toward both alterity and history. In a different way, this surge calls into question Olivieri-Godet’s organizing principle that otherness abounds in Brazilian literature that does not transcend the nation-state. After all, the famous line of Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) is “Tupi or not Tupi,” alluding both to Shakespeare and to the one of the peoples indigenous to the Amazon rainforest. Even if we accept the disparate nature of the corpus, Olivieri-Godet makes the troubling assumption that these novels “go beyond a socio-historical dimension . . . to open themselves to an existential and metaphysical questioning.”48 While the second part is true, philosophical ruminations on identity alone cannot account for the kind of sensibility these books are catering to. In Buarque, the possibility of losing carnival

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forever, of leaving Brazil behind never to turn back, is rooted in the experience of modern expatriates. A similar argument could be made about the other contemporary Spanish American and Brazilian novels I have alluded to. It does not take much to see the more collective, historically configured aspects of globalization behind these fictions of individual transformation and loss of self. The organizing principle is South–South escapism, a notion that elucidates the historical content of these works. The gender dynamics of Kósta’s recomposed family—the grounded women and roaming men—reflect this, and inform the novel’s take on globality. While chivalric romances, in the analogy used above, reflect on medieval experiences such as the crusades or peregrination, Budapest reflects on the experience of jet travel, real-time media, and the promise of ubiquity. Call it a family romance of the global era: the quest is partly about fame, but the grail is cross-cultural competence and a sense of belonging. In its particular variant of amorous escapism, women are the substratum that allows a male-centered plot to translate shifting geopolitics into identity crisis. It makes sense that Vanda is an anchorwoman and Kriska a strict Hungarian-language teacher, for the two serve as “anchors” to the man’s drift, albeit in different ways. (He learns his first words in Hungarian from a hotel television; he forgets them when he returns to Brazil, but they come back to him in foretelling dreams.) José Costa’s split love is a contest of surface versus depth, of televised tidbits of love versus amorous surrender, martial overtones intended. Note how the protagonist’s wandering between Vanda and Kriska implies an elaborate opposition of images and words; what is at stake in this maladjustment is the very possibility of representing globalization. Returning to Borges for a point of comparison, one could say that Buarque is not as interested in the Aleph itself—the epiphanic realization of a complex whole—but in the gradual, partial acts of revelation that lead to it. Literary form is a crucial aspect, as in the Argentine’s short story. More than oneiric language, what we find is the voice of incantation, rich in visual and musical elements. Images and sounds give the imagined Budapest a certain palpable quality, engaging all the senses. In Borges, the hyperaesthetic experience of the Aleph leads to a crisis; in Buarque, the

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gradual unfolding of these elements accompanies the slow movement of acculturation. Whenever Costa is on the brink of crisis, it is in the form of sexual violence. As it happens, some of this libidinal energy is also present in Borges the character. After all, his visits to the house on Garay Street originate in the death of Beatriz Viterbo, his lost unrequited love (which gained a namesake in a major publisher in Argentina). One of the sights in the Aleph that make him “tremble” is certain letters, whose handwriting he recognizes: “obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino.”49 Argentino is Beatriz’s first cousin—in Spanish, her “primo hermano.” Evidently, latent incest punctuates the story. This leads to Borges the character’s revenge: the patronizing dismissal of the miracle, when he does not confess to have seen the Aleph but instead recommends Argentino “to take advantage of the demolition of his house to remove himself from the pernicious influences of the metropolis.”50 Bluntly put: a pissing contest over the love of a dead woman. Kriska is not dead—she just has a subordinate role within the narrative—but the poets Kósta and her unnamed ex-husband cross swords in a similar way. Ditto for Costa and Krabbe over Vanda. It is plain to see how Kriska, Vanda, and Beatriz are grounded women— the latter being literally and permanently below ground. Regardless of how much of an influence Borges may have had on Buarque, I would like to emphasize how gender politics informs narrative worlding. The same is true of politics tout court, as Argentino represents criollismo and Costa/Kósta’s adversaries represent a variety of evils, from consumerism (Álvaro, his business partner) to xenophobia (several characters). Examining the form of the Global Latin American novel is not merely about ahistorical storytelling or metaphor, for texts weave their historical situation into their very fabric. This approximation is not unlike what Adorno called Wahrheitsgehalt, or truth-content. For the philosopher, socioeconomic antagonisms “crop up in art because artistic labor is social labor and because an artistic product is a social product.” Moreover, “society’s discontinuities, its untruths and ideologies, emerge in the work as structural discontinuities, as deficiencies.”51 The rich deficiencies of escapism in Budapest illustrate this, for they emerge from contradictions both internal

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to Brazilian society and to the incorporation of the country within a planetary ensemble. In this way, revealing the truths about globality embedded in literary form requires a labor of negativity, the task of bringing to bear what the text does not say to what it does say, thus elucidating its historicity. A narrow view of interpretation might find it excessive to postulate transnational sexual slavery as the dialectical opposite of Budapest’s globalist lyricism. But if we pay attention to what world literature is telling us, we will be able to establish such connections and, moreover, trace their effects on our reading practices and ways of thinking. Given its topic, Budapest is a text that one can unequivocally read as world literature. Yet also, given Buarque’s standing and the book’s reception, it is clearly a Brazilian work, and therefore Latin American literature. Like Buarque’s ubiquitous music, it is poised to remediate the relationship between local and global realms, and between national, regional, and potentially world readerships. The book inscribes this problematic in its story, language, and motifs. As the introduction has shown, so does Borges’s Aleph; and as chapter 1 has shown, so do Bolaño and his fellow “Nazi” authors. This is the gesture, by now familiar, of capturing globalization as form while subverting its unspoken rules. What is new about Buarque’s particular topsy-turvy world is how much it can serve as a model for world literature at large. If we are to concede that the study of different traditions can somehow become integrated into a new whole, or in other words, if the paradigm of world literature is to have any critical currency beyond the valuable, but insufficient, task of reminding critics that they are in a vast and present world, then we must also grasp how individual works of world literature are themselves documents of confrontation, literary spaces where cultural prestige and positionality are in dispute. There is another option, which is to read a work like Budapest without reflecting on what being in the world as Brazilian or as Magyar entails. If one does not think critically about the world the novel comes to imagine, or about the “extra-literary” stakes of its sophisticated narrative, then it is easy to dismiss it—or praise it, according to one’s tastes—as international airport fiction. Buarque’s novel is a remarkable page-turner, which hides its constitutive antagonisms behind a veil of legibility. Similarly,

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the promise of a world literature might suggest that the age of ideology critique is over—at least, until the ideologemes of the global come back to haunt us. Adorno and other Frankfurt School thinkers understood that social contradictions give shape to works of literature, whether they explicitly thematized them or not. Why should this not be the case for works that seek to conjure a global readership? Brazilian society’s tensions are reproduced within the work’s labor, if for no other reason, because the newly (relatively) affluent country is both a source and a destination for a specific kind migration: one driven by a desire for social mobility. Geopolitical tensions are there, too, as Costa’s itinerary shows. To recapitulate: I have made the case to read Budapest as a prime example of South–South escapism. In terms of corpus, this might direct the attention of comparatists to works by Gamboa, Mussa, Carvalho, Aira, Magnus, and others that configure a unique world literature phenomenon. It is one that deserves to be studied both within Latin Americanism and as part of broader manifestations. The corpus could be even more ambitious: what about novels written elsewhere, with Hungarian characters wandering through Brazil or Lebanese travelers reconnecting with their diasporic families in Latin America? Clearly, the rudiments of a collaborative critical enterprise are to be found here, including one that elicits partnerships among Southern academics, or at least renegotiates Northern brokerage. There is a caveat, however. There may be positive, descriptive knowledge to construct about these transnational works of fiction, but establishing the crisscrosses and literary borrowings can lead to a peculiar form of archive fever that suspends politics, or that limits its role to the reshaping of the archive. From there on, it is a short step to business as usual, just with a richer corpus. In other words, there may be an ideological moment in the utopian impulse of reconfiguring literary exchange worldwide. The cosmopolitical approach to world literature I envisage, which informs the present volume, engages the negativity of literary works. We must not forget how individual works read us—how they assume our sense of belonging in the world and may ultimately transform it. They also occur within certain institutional configurations, whose rules they

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may likewise call to question. Novels set in China, Hungary, Central Asia, or the Middle East in some sense alter how we see the Latin American literary corpus, internally or externally—that is, within the subdiscipline or not. In order to appreciate the worlding and institutional implications of these works, it is best to interrogate their form, instead of taking it as a given. That there are Latin American novels set in unusual locales is interesting by itself; how, why, and to what effect this is so are even more interesting questions, and call for a dialectical method like the one I have used here. The crux of the matter is to understand how complex, transnational forms of power give shape and purpose to literary form, while the opposite—more modestly given the role of literature today—is also the case. Namely, that literature affects how we think about power in a globalized era. The world as imagined by Latin American novels of South–South escapism is eminently Latin American; there is a regional specificity to their take on the whole. Budapest stands at a turning point where Brazil might break away from the rest of Latin America, to broker with the world as a nation-state and not as part of a larger region. In “America’s backyard,” a province has emerged as a viable interlocutor. Buarque still writes from the edge of the West, like Spanish American authors, but he is already signaling something else. Budapest is an affirmation of the Brazilian Dream. Recall how one of the protagonist’s mirages is Krabbe, a repulsive character that evokes the European colonizer (“entering Guanabara bay,” he iterates) and the contemporary sexual tourist. Budapest responds to a zeitgeist of changing geopolitics, but particularly to an emerging Brazilian middle class who might in some sense feel closer to the well-off German immigrant than to the country’s poorer populace. In light of this, let us revisit the question: what is the historical content of these works? I would point toward BRIC. In 2001, Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs analyst, coined the acronym as a grouping of countries he deemed had great potential for economic growth and, concomitantly, global ascendance: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.52 Today, the catchy denomination has permeated the public domain. Taxi drivers in Rio bring it up in informal conversations, regarding its promise of affluence, along with the

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designation of Brazil as the venue for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, as unequivocal signs of the country’s stepping onto the world stage. (As this book went into production, the debacle of World Cup logistics and related protests raised serious doubts.) In 2010, Jorge Lanata, a well-respected journalist and founder of Buenos Aires’s left-of-center newspaper Página 12, hosted the documentary miniseries BRIC for the cable television channel Infinito. While traveling through these countries, Lanata muses about what the year 2050 will be like, the date by which BRIC countries will have emerged, allegedly, as superpowers. (More or less explicitly, he also bemoans the fact that his native Argentina is left out of this projected world order.) Bearing witness to Goldman Sachs’s influence, BRIC governments have held economic summits; further reifying the denomination, there is now a “Dow Jones BRIC 50” index.53 Imagine a cultural counterpart to BRIC. In a not so distant future, more Russian, Mandarin, and Hindi is spoken in São Paulo than, say, Spanish or English. It makes less and less sense to speak about a Latin American culture that bridges the gap between Spanish and Portuguese, and even less so of a culture of the Americas, shared by the entire hemisphere. Could this happen? For now, BRIC belongs to the realms of statistics and speculation, funneling the attention of investors and generating a thin sense of cultural belonging only as a by-product. Moreover, even suspending the import of shared history, it seems unlikely, despite rapid progress in communications, that geographical proximity will become negligible. But BRIC mythology reveals the extent to which novels of South–South escapism occur within contested visions of globality. Their utopian side shows more or less common people who immerse themselves into a different culture, and in so doing, transform their lives and societies; their ideological side, again in Bloch’s terms, cultivates the superficial sense of connectedness, of coexistence without exchange, that any cable television subscriber gets from zapping through many foreign-language channels and ultimately settling on the usual ones in his native language. The formidable contradictions in the novel exemplify many of the converging strands that define the Global Latin American novel and, more

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broadly, the problem of representing the world as a whole after 1989. Real-time media and ease of communication bring superficial awareness, while the waning of conventional representations of otherness poses new narrative and critical challenges. Budapest follows BRIC mythology in thinking of globality as the integration of the middle classes of the world, while the less privileged remain so because of their locality. After a work of fiction of this nature, one can imagine solidarity as a horizontal, supranational affair, while vertical, national integration becomes impossible— hence the orphans. However, as this chapter has shown, the promise of supranational, vertical solidarity is still present in its pages. Does it even matter that Costa is Brazilian? Disavowing the popular comes at a loss of specificity. If Budapest were a song, one might expect the faint tune of a Magyar violin over MPB elevator music.

3 ALL THE WORLD’S A SUPERMARKET (And All the Men and Women Merely Shoppers)

If there is any historically configured space that presents globalization as a lived experience, it is the supermarket. Historicizing its very quotidianness affords us a rare opportunity of regarding capitalism as an ideology rather than a natural state of affairs. Indeed, supermarkets have some of the qualities that arcades had for Benjamin in that, shown under a certain light, they may reveal the affective life of capitalism and its hold on our imagination. The predominant form of globality today—our understanding of the world as a whole—is shaped by the recent consolidation of a world market, most noticeably after the collapse of numerous non-market oriented economies in 1989 and the years that followed. Supermarkets are close to markets, but not only by name and by common history; they are also bound together in the imagination. The daily life of peoples who lived in formerly communist countries is marked by the transition of getting their groceries from stateowned shops to private stores, from few product options to multiple brands and varieties of food. At ground level, ordinary men and women experience epochal change, as it turns out, at the supermarket. Excepting those living in socialist Cuba or going through hyperinflation, most Latin Americans, living in a continent that has urbanized

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itself exponentially since the 1950s, have done their grocery shopping at a combination of supermarkets and small shops. However, as a more complex global capitalist model gains momentum, transnational supermarket franchises become the privileged brokers of the food supply. Similar transformations happened earlier in northern countries, informing works from Allen Ginsberg’s famous 1955 prose poem “A Supermarket in California” to Don DeLillo’s 1985 White Noise.1 The present chapter analyzes novels that respond to market reform and increased consumerism in Latin America from the nineties onward. North and south, contemporary supermarkets offer a wealth of products originating from multiple locales; they provide immersive environments that, after Borges, one could regard as capitalist Alephs. But, as we shall see, while in the public sphere greater “consumption power” assumes the role of surrogate world consciousness, the work of writers such as Diamela Eltit, Alberto Fuguet, and César Aira invites us to estrange and historicize the supermarket, and in so doing, to imagine the global differently. This chapter combines several of the strands of my argument presented up to this point. If the world of South–South escapism is best characterized as an immanent, self-contained space, the supermarkets depicted here exacerbate this to the point of claustrophobia. In some quarters of thought, the word “globalization” lends an aura of legitimacy and inevitability to harsh economic policies such as “outsourcing” and other forms of transnational exploitation—read “increased productivity.” I insinuated in the first chapter that the presence of fascism in contemporary Latin American literature corresponds to the rise of neoliberalism. I will now introduce narratives that invest the supermarket with an almost prescient quality, for they allow us to see with unclouded eyes the economic forces that shape our globalized reality. In this sense, they are works of world literature, for similar phenomena have been occurring almost everywhere. They also respond to very specific, national concerns and, in their iterations in different locales throughout South America, contribute to a wider regional picture. While the geometric arrangement of standardized supermarket aisles is all about displaying products and not the international labor relations that put them there, the forms of these narratives adopt the

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physical space of the supermarket as a potentially transformative site for world consciousness. They are, in short, radical Alephs. A SHORT HISTORY OF INVISIBLE L ABOR

The supermarket has not one, but several origins. Its most prominent predecessor is the market, a concrete gathering place where products are bought, traded, and sold. “The market,” the abstract sum of economic activity, is a much later concept. As Georg Schwedt notes, there is the Persian “bazaar” and the Arabic “souk”; in the West, historical markets were also places for the exercise of citizenship and debate, as in the Greek agora or the Roman forum.2 Open-air markets were superseded by roofed, not-yet-private spaces, such as Les Halles Centrales, which inspired Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873). Over time, the pressures of efficiency, hygiene, and urban planning made these structures unviable in most modern cities. Aside from the market, supermarkets branched out of private businesses, including neighborhood shops (which still exist) and general stores where metropolitan citizens could purchase exotic products brought from the periphery and the colonies, namely rice, coffee, and tea. Fittingly, in German the latter are called Kolonialwarenladen. Supermarkets as such originate in the United States in the twentieth century, and their proliferation around the world bears witness to the success of the American Way. During routine visits, the supermarket does not reveal its history, and neither does it advertise the social relations that make it possible. Nearly everything about the supermarket happens “behind the scenes,” where shoppers rarely go, if at all. There are fundamental asymmetries to the supermarket: between what you see and what you do not, between the experience of workers and that of customers, between the naturalness of the shopping experience and the artificiality of the light-controlled, purposefully scented spaces where it takes place. The supermarket can be seen as a local or a global phenomenon, as a historically determined set of practices or as an apolitical commercial space. Similarly, the roles of shoppers, owners, and workers waver between reification and contingency. All of

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these issues play out in narrative form, as the problem of perspective readily suggests: deciding who gets to tell the story of a supermarket is in itself a political decision. Fictional representations of this ubiquitous form of retail space must confront its underlying contradictions, including that of exhibiting products while keeping production and producers out of sight. Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra (Labor, 2002)3 is one book that distinctly inscribes the supermarket in history, writ large. It is composed of a series of unnumbered vignettes, twenty-seven in total, divided into two major parts. Each vignette features daily life stories from a supermarket known only as “el súper,” told from the point of view of one of the workers. Although there is no clearly discernible main plot, there are more or less subtle overarching storylines that unfold across several vignettes. The first part carries out an ethnographic study of sorts, while the second essentially tells the story of a failed attempt at the consolidation of a union or some other form of worker governance. The first part is entitled “EL DESPERTAR DE LOS TRABAJADORES (Iquique, 1911)” and the second “PURO CHILE (Santiago, 1970),” both in all-caps for typographical emphasis. The vignettes in the first part present themselves under headings that, along with those of the two main sections, are inspired by the names of worker-based periodicals and the places where they circulated: “Luz y Vida (Antofagasta, 1909),” “Nueva Era (Valparaíso, 1925),” and so forth. The first edition of the book does not provide a table of contents or make an explicit connection with such publications, but later editions do.4 Mano de obra carries out two main operations: denaturalizing the shopping experience and inviting its readers to situate the modern supermarket within the annals of Chilean labor—itself a notable chapter in the history of international labor relations. Summary fails to capture the complete gist of Eltit’s insistently openended storytelling, but contrasting the sections of the book provides useful points of reference. In the first part, the supermarket chiefly appears to be an indissoluble social order. Employees worry about the possible termination of their contracts and lament their poor working conditions, but the underlying values that determine those conditions remain strongly in place. In a not entirely appropriate comparison, workers are afraid of

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losing the game, but do not quite question its rules. Contrastingly, in the second part there are hints that the order may soon give way. It is not entirely clear whether there is one or more first-person narrators in the first part, as all its characters go unnamed. However, distinguishable multiple narrators and proper names do appear in the second part, though minus psychological development: Enrique, Gabriel, Sonia, Gloria, and so forth. Along with limited individuation and a stronger sense of communal bounds, there comes a greater measure of agency and some degree of challenge to the social order of the supermarket. There are numerous episodes that leave strong impressions on the reader and invite theoretical considerations. An anonymous worker stacks apples and muses on putrefaction; come Christmas time, another worker—the same, perhaps—plays a part in a nativity scene while discreetly getting drunk; a third recounts an excruciating 24-hour work shift during New Year’s Eve, a vignette that brings the first part to its completion. Multiple temporalities converge: the steady progression of organic decay, cyclical Christian time-keeping, the circadian rhythms of the sleepless staff, the disjointed historical time of periodical headings, the internal time of the récit, and what Benjamin would call the “homogeneous, empty time” of alienated labor. This superposition constitutes a field of questioning; it opens up multiple interpretive possibilities. Indeed, Mano de obra poses more problems than it offers solutions, and it does so precisely by turning the supermarket into a laboratory for cultural critique. In this vein, complex power dynamics occupy the later portion of the book, playing out along lines of ethnicity and gender roles. Attractive, lighter-skinned women like Isabel promote products; when Sonia ages, she is demoted from being a cashier to quartering chickens behind the scenes (where she chops her finger off ). These hierarchies spill over into private life because the workers share an abode, acting in some ways like a family and in others like a pack. At home, Gloria assumes an ambiguous role as mother and prostitute: “when they get on top of me I think about the meal I will prepare tomorrow.”5 At work, she denounces a worker named Alberto who challenges Enrique, the alpha-male leader, and seeks

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to form a union. But Gloria, seemingly the bedrock of this social order, has a soft spot for Gabriel, a packer and an underdog who ultimately usurps Enrique’s position. Again, the burden is on the reader to fill in the blanks in a narrative that juxtaposes the public and the private realms, begging the question of whether, in our consumption-driven present, there is no outside to the supermarket. Beyond the stories themselves, the book’s language is also an object of theoretical interest. Ana del Sarto, in her Sospecha y goce: Una genealogía de la crítica cultural en Chile (2010),6 reminds us that for Eltit and her cohort among the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) and the Escena de Avanzada—practitioners of an avant-garde inspired, interdisciplinary form of cultural critique—language is an instrument, an object of study, and a field for political confrontation. Both during the dictatorship and in its aftermath, these Chilean intellectuals sought to produce works of art that were themselves acts of resistance. Mano de obra is no exception. In a seminal article, Patrick Dove shows how the novel explores “the double role of language—as that which secures the sovereign order, and as causing it to tremble.”7 With its dry lyricism, the book conveys something of the oppressive environment of the supermarket and the cyclical time of alienated labor, just as it insinuates ways of overcoming these conditions. A typical stream of consciousness combines factual statements with intellectual reflection: I become alienated. Disoriented, I try to find North, any miserable reference point among this crowd that tyrannizes me and pushes me around with their carts. And as if I were a captured warrior, they jostle me to the center of the arena. To fight (you understand, I guess, what I am talking about, you comprehend that I am referring to my work post).8 Phrases such as “the daily grind” or “the daily struggle” assuage the less pleasant aspects of these so-called “dead end jobs,” an idiom that befits this character’s disorientation, the difficulty of finding a way out. Eltit evokes similar expressions, in Spanish, that likewise serve the purpose

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of making monotony more bearable. But here the daily struggle suggests proper combat, which proves that the same language we use to naturalize the social order can also work against it. An uncharitable reading might claim that Eltit ventriloquizes actual subjects: the intellectual speaks for and through unskilled workers. Moreover, most readers are presumably not supermarket employees themselves. Eltit assumes these contradictions; in fact, she makes it a point to document the gap between intellectual discourse and the labor force. Hence the hyperbolic use of coarse, popular language in the second part, rich in chilenismos: “Curado culiado concha de tu madre, por lo menos limpia la cagada que dejaste huevón” (approximately, “You drunken fuck, you motherfucking cunt, at least clean the shit-mess you left behind, asshole”).9 This is the counterpart to the parodic, hyper-intellectualized moments of philosophical reflection in the first part, which hints at archaisms: “No me considero especialmente proclive a pensar en cuestiones abstractas que no conducen a un resultado mensurable” (“I do not consider myself particularly disposed to thinking about abstract matters that do not yield a mensurable result”).10 The book’s title suggests that writing is manual labor, too, just as reading is a form of work, but these allusions are both about the necessity of solidarity and about the difficulty of articulating it in the present. Mano de obra is not about whether the subaltern can speak, to echo the well-known terms of Spivak’s debate, but about the resounding chambers where that voice can be heard. The supermarket could be just that kind of space.11 It is a site where different social classes meet, literally; a regulated space where the pressures of the global economic system meet the realities of local labor; a staple of normalcy. The ethnographic exercise that constitutes the first part of the novel makes these elements visible by attributing ethnographic authority to the worker.12 A distraught, maladjusted employee examines the conduct of the clients, declaring himself a connoisseur (“catador”) when it comes to shoppers.13 We learn about the ways that adult clients treat their young and their old. Children are set loose as soon as they enter the supermarket; they pounce on toys with something akin to hunger, suffering “enormous sorrow and pain.”14 Older people stand in the way

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of younger adults, who try to reach for products and become annoyed by their elders’ dilly-dallying. They ask impertinent questions about the quality of produce, one supposes, because they recall and want to recapture the more personal interaction of open-air markets and small shops.15 The narrator records these observations with a mixture of restraint, selfpity, and scientific scrutiny. Jacques Rancière’s thought sheds light on the scope and method of this denaturalization of the supermarket. In the philosopher’s terms, I think Eltit seeks to intervene in her readership’s “distribution of the sensible,” defined for present purposes as a subconscious set of practices, indeed basic ways of sensing, that are ideologically conditioned.16 As it happens, the supermarket is an ideal illustration of Rancière’s theory: it politically defines whether we have eyes for products only, or whether we are able to take in the people who work there. (One may assume that Eltit’s readers are more likely to identify themselves with customers rather than with service workers.) Rancière, as Wittgenstein before him, knows that seeing is already “seeing as.” In the moment of perception, we can see a supermarket’s shelving as a mere passageway or as a prop for consumption; we can also ignore it altogether and focus only on the goods it displays. Eltit’s narrators urge us to see the supermarket under a new light and, furthermore, to inhabit it differently. The novel puts readers in the shoes of the toiling worker, with the caveat that this is not a task that straightforward narrative empathy can carry out alone. There is some recourse to pathetic appeal, as when readers, upon turning the pages of the book, learn that manipulating paper notes all day, day after day, dries the skin on cashiers’ hands. But reading about supervisors who watch employees on a closedcamera circuit is about acknowledging one’s place within the visual scaffoldings of capitalism.17 Consequently, the choice of privileging a worker’s perspective (in the strict sense of “point of view”) gains significance when we compare it to the birds-eye view of capital. One example of the latter would be a diagram for the “Allocation of Selling Space in the ‘Ideal’ Supermarket” in a study in marketing by Robert Chisholm. This illustration speaks volumes when considered against the backdrop of Eltit’s narrative elab-

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orations on visuality. It offers a snapshot of the managerial perspective, where workers need not be mentioned, and everything within their dayto-day field of vision is commoditized (as “selling space”), quantified (the original specifies a quota for each section), and optimized. They themselves are, too, but this requires no illustration, as the ordering of space takes care of that already. In the “ideal” supermarket, labor relations are a given. This abstraction is a denaturalization of the supermarket that veers in the opposite direction to Mano de obra, toward the invisibilization of labor. Presumably, to the executive class for whom the diagram is intended, even the slightest possibility of appreciating shopkeeping as a craft, as indeed it was considered for centuries, is anathema. In this context, metaphoric expressions like “top-down” and “bottom-up” serve as literal descriptions of the antagonistic roles of a supervisor—literally an “overseer”—and the so-called “floor worker.” The expropriated labor of farmers and factory workers, the invisible force behind the “grocery and other” and the “non-food” sections in the diagram, dictate spatial form; in turn, that form reinforces that expropriation. Eltit wants to interrupt that circular logic through a visual reconfiguration of this seemingly familiar space. She wants readers to feel differently about the supermarket, to apprehend it and conceptualize it in a radically other way. The book makes labor visible, and Chilean labor in particular, at the same time that it explores the role of aesthesis—predominantly visual practices—within power structures. Microscopy and distant vision collapse in Borges’s Aleph, as they do for Eltit’s workers: “underneath the polluting surface of plastic wrap, food products surrender to an unleashed bacterial process. (Dairy is damaged at a speed that I would have never imagined, if I had not seen it happening with my own eyes.).”18 Including this impossible microbial snapshot, the proliferation of points of view seeks to capture the supermarket as a world unto itself. The focus is not on the space of the supermarket or on workers per se, but on an amorphous collective body that coalesces around the historical construct of the supermarket. Characters are functional elements of a broader, non-mimetic project; hence no employee is also a shopper at a supermarket, as would be the case in real life. The real protagonists

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are relations and forces of production over time, seen from the vantage point of the present. To this end, Mano de obra invokes three historical moments and purposefully omits at least two others. As suggested above, the periodical headings in the first part allude to a highpoint in worker organization during the early twentieth century, and the general title of the second part comes from the flagship publication of Unidad Popular, Salvador Allende’s political party.19 Contrastingly, the individual titles of the vignettes in the second part are a hodgepodge of anodyne labels (“El momento comercial de las papayas en conserva”),20 brutal assertions (“Sonia se cortó el dedo índice”),21 and accounts of daily hardship in the style of newspaper headlines (“Se levantó a las cinco de la mañana”),22 among others. This textual apparatus constellates the tens and twenties, the early seventies, and the mid-nineties to early naughts, or, in other words: the foundations of unionism, the promise of democratically elected socialism, and the center-leftist coalition government of Concertación. The omissions could not go unnoticed: the 1907 massacre of Santa María de Iquique, where thousands of saltpeter miners died, and the 1973 coup against Allende, followed by the Pinochet years, which ended in 1989. What role does the supermarket itself play in this assemblage? It provides a site for intervention via a redistribution of the sensible. An estranged, historicized supermarket produces a purloined-letter effect: we realize that ideology has always been there, before us, in the practices that give shape to this naturalized form of retail. Additionally, underestimating the role of the supermarket in Eltit downplays the specificity of the narrative medium at hand. Put bluntly, if Eltit wanted to write an essay on neoliberalism, she would have done so. Similarly, she could have written a more conventional story, one with a discernible beginning, climax, and end. One of the challenges with theory-driven fiction, particularly the kind one may aptly describe as experimental, is to avoid the pitfall of holding it to the conventions of more established forms. It might be more fitting, in the spirit of combining media that characterizes CADA, to compare Mano de obra to a contemporary art diptych: on one panel, named after the early twentieth-century Iquique publication, there are images

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and stories of alienation from individuals employed at a supermarket; on the second panel, named after the Unidad Popular publication, are groupings of workers with the corresponding legends or labels. This conceptual exercise relieves interpretation from the demands of verisimilitude and narrowness of meaning to which the novel has been subjected. The most salient fact about the assemblage is the anachronism between legends and vignettes, which is comparable to featuring full-color, digital pictures dated in an impossibly earlier time. Likewise, it is hard to miss the contrast between vibrant past worker movements and the stagnant modern supermarket. The omissions are just as noteworthy: why does a historical account of Chilean labor not mention the infamous events of 1907 and 1973? Taken together, anachronism, contrast, and omission prompt numerous readings. Broadly speaking, it is clear that Eltit is criticizing an economic structure. But how to advance this intuition? For one, Cynthia Tompkins has made a cogent argument about the effects of neoliberalism on the bodies of workers, who must adjust to new rigors in the name of increased productivity. Similarly, Niebylski, Barrientos, and Vidal have underlined Eltit’s rejection of the policies adopted by Augusto Pinochet and its enduring consequences on post-dictatorship Chile.23 While such readings agree on the fundamental traits of Eltit’s political program, they disagree on its specifics, such as whether the emphasis is on resistance, denunciation, or hope. Mano de obra infuses the unauratic space of the supermarket with the spirit of public debate that characterized open-air markets. It unearths the agora underneath the shelving. Symptomatically, this lack of critical consensus occurs during a government that favors an ideology of consensus, as was the case with Concertación. Taking after Nelly Richard, one may see in the reactionary character of Gloria (“Glory”) a critique against the tactical, excessive adoption of motherhood and family values as instruments for national reconciliation.24 Along such lines, Eltit’s political balancing act would consist in advocating for the radicalization of Concertación, while being cognizant of its many achievements. Mano de obra suggests the need to open the political system beyond the dyadic scheme of having one coalition party versus the right wing. After all, although

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Pinochet laid the groundwork for the current economic model, powerful supermarkets thrived under the successive Concertación governments of Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994), Eduardo Frei (1994–2000), and Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006), the president at the time of the novel’s publication. Supermarkets do not only represent an economic model; they articulate society and shape urban spaces in its image. The character of Enrique alludes to what has bitingly been called “machismo leninismo,” the unfortunate association of stereotypical manliness and radical politics in Latin America. In Chile, the tides would turn with the election of Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010), the first woman to serve in that high office. However, at the time of writing Eltit is struggling with the gender politics that have de facto permeated progressive movements. Raquel Olea has rightly noted that Mano de obra thematizes the difficulties of constituting a collective subject, an undertaking that Rancière would describe as the realignment of aesthetic practices.25 But what if Eltit were more interested in disaggregating than in constituting, in dispersion over concentration? In this regard, the author’s emplotment of theory assembles diverse materials, combining a feminist outlook with the post-Althusserianism to be found in Rancière, who she does not mention, to the rhizomatic thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose notion of the “nomadic war machine” she does briefly mention. A reader versed in A Thousand Plateaus will readily identify the worker collective with that notion. For the French thinkers, it signals a way of doing politics outside of the state—polymorphous interventions that resemble nomadic raids against the Great Wall of China, itself guarded by the army, a statecontrolled war machine.26 It is not difficult to appreciate the poignancy of this figure when deployed in the context of post-dictatorship Chile, where Concertación presidents struggled to assert themselves at the top of the chain of command of Pinochet’s former war machine. Elucidating this Deleuzian reference does not simplify matters, but adds to the impression that Eltit’s supermarket seeks to establish a space for dissent. Certainly, at a given moment the worker collective holds emancipatory promise. In the first part, where alienation is mostly unchallenged, the regular army makes its presence felt: “fully armed guards seize

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the considerable bounty and move towards the armored truck, carrying out a beautifully coordinated military operation.”27 In the second part, the collective gains momentum. But when Enrique gets promoted, he “changes sides” by becoming a supervisor. As the book’s most eminent narrative arc comes to a close, the narrator bemoans the loss of the collective’s leader: “the same Enrique we loved so dearly, in whom we entrusted our fates. Enrique, our miserly godfather [padrino cacho], our servant, our war machine.”28 One could read into this passage that Enrique takes the war machine along with him—the moment when all hope is lost. Or one could assume that losing its head is a good thing for a nomadic, rhizomic structure, particularly when that head becomes caught up in patriarchy and even perhaps in the compulsive repetition of dictatorship. Or the colloquial turn “cacho” could indicate that the godfather status of Enrique is itself a dilemma (“un cacho”). The book, more akin to a contemporary art piece than to a parable, keeps silent on such matters. Yet no other operation stimulates the imagination and multiplies interpretative possibilities as the omissions, that of the massacre at Iquique and of the coup. The worker publications alluded to in the first part were all published and circulated after the massacre; they correspond to worker movements thriving despite persecution and hardship. Eltit may be signaling that it is time for a worker movement to flourish again in Chile, now that roughly the same temporal distance separates us from the coup and that the years of Concertación governments serve as a buffer from the totalitarian tendencies still at large in contemporary Chilean society. The sharp contrast between the unenlightened worker collective and the Unidad Popular magazine could also point in this direction. However, these associations are just as inconclusive as the denouement of Enrique’s nomadic war machine. Referring to the headings of worker publications, Dove observes that “if these proper names can still be said to signify anything, it would be an absent absence: these calcified signifiers call attention to the silent withdrawal of any possibility of a labour movement—and thus the non-existence of a working class as such—in present-day Chile.”29 To the contrary, I believe these proper names signify plenty if we see Mano de obra as a starting point and not as a final destination, as a major

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work in progress that finds the rudiments of a political platform amid the rubble of earlier models of social articulation. This path seems more consonant with the view of labor in the book. To be sure, a working class does exist in Chile, but it is transnational in nature. This was already the case in the early twentieth century. Therefore, in order to fully appreciate the relevance of the supermarket as a trope for globalization, we must veer from the dominant mode of reading Eltit as an autonomous whole and put her work into conversation with other authors and material sources, Chilean and otherwise. Eltit is certainly not pointing to the void when it comes to worker periodicals. At the National Library in Santiago, one may consult microfilms of several publications the book alludes to. The section titles could be read as merely the names of periodicals, but it is more productive to see them also as allusions to the physical, stillexisting banners of those periodicals. They are not all easy to find, nor are they readily available for scholarly consultation. This is precisely the point: when Eltit names them, she is inviting a deeper, historical approximation to the supermarket. The names are material traces in a text that is closer to an art installation than to, say, a nineteenth-century French novel. Against the more conventional hermeneutic impulse to regard said titles as an explanation or an illustration of the “contents” of their respective “chapters,” it is more fitting to see them as relics that interrupt the flow of words. They have a deictic function, which transcends the text itself and invites us to follow through with the tasks of denaturalizing supermarkets and resituating them in history. After reading Eltit, it is striking to see the effective concurrence of speculative thought and worker struggle that one can find in these periodicals. There, language fits reality like a glove. The anticlerical rants in the anarchist Verba roja (figure 3.1) denounce an actual mechanism of social control that played an important role in the region—the Church. This is decades before Althusser coined the term “ideological state apparatus.” The cultivation of worker literacy and international political awareness come across as unequivocal forms of empowerment, as seen in the denunciations of imperialism in Puro Chile, the magazine of Unidad Popular. By directing our attention to these publications, the book momentarily

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suspends the blinding relevance of the coup and of dictatorship, which are longstanding concerns of Eltit’s literary creation. If we accept the invitation to go from the immediacy of the local supermarket to the longue durée of international labor history, we find ourselves in the presence not of hollow names or tombstones in a cemetery of discontinued publications, but in that of the meaning-making communities that breathed life into those banners and that, in different forms, remain alive today. If there is any possible takeaway in a text as opaque as Mano de obra, it would be that, despite internal contradictions, gender imbalances, and multiple other shortcomings, the intelligentsia can participate in an alternative model of bottom-up, historically and theoretically informed social articulation. Omitting the coup and the massacre at Iquique amounts to taking a step back to wonder about their place within broader narratives of social transformation that culminate in the global supermarket. Our assessment of the present will change if we regard those events indifferently, or if we see them as milestones, painful setbacks, tragedies, or admonitions. Surely, it is not coincidental that the book’s epigraph is Sandra Cornejo’s dictum: “Sometimes, for an instant, history should feel compassion and alert us.”30 The names of worker periodicals, and the actual holdings that remain of those publications, belong to the historical residues and resources one can mobilize against consensus, in Chile as elsewhere.31 This operation can take place very straightforwardly: the early twentiethcentury struggle to attain an 8-hour workday and Sunday rest vividly resonates today, when the acceptance of “flexibilization of labor” policies have regrettably made these rights, once more, into luxuries. THE FALL OF AN IMPORT-EXPORT AGENT

Recent consumption patterns inform Alberto Fuguet’s aesthetic choices. He is known for coining catchy denominations, evocative of brand names, catchphrases, and political buzzwords. In that vein, he coedited, with Sergio Gómez, the influential short story compilation McOndo (1996)32 and wrote the essay “Magical Neoliberalism” (2001).33 In the latter, he claims to be representative of a generation of writers and artists whose tastes, affinities,

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Figure 3.1 Front page of the anarchist worker periodical, Verba roja. Valparaíso, Chile, November 1918. Sección Periódicos de la Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

and worldview has been shaped by free trade: “in this new FTAA era, borders will be even less explicit and influences will become so global that a new type of artist will evolve who will not be the nowhere man but, on the contrary, the here-and-now man. . . . This new artistic sensibility-to-be is less about nationality and more about empathy.”34 Both his introduction to the book and his solo piece build on a series of oppositions that are characteristic to the author, such as urban versus rural, pop culture versus folklore, the individual self versus the masses, new versus old, etc. Under the moniker of “magical neoliberalism,” Fuguet conjures an aesthetic project that condemns the alleged parochialism of magical realism and purportedly achieves two conflicting goals: opening itself to the world and representing the inner life of the individual. While earlier figures wrote about the gap between rich and poor countries, Fuguet implies the existence of a global middle class. For the “magical neoliberal,” the world is but a collection of individuals.

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Although in other texts Fuguet is less unambiguously enthusiastic about the market as the space for the realization of possibilities, his use of language and political views are clearly at odds with those of Eltit, who was born in 1949. In comparison, where she is opaque and critical, he is transparent and indifferent. A younger writer, Fuguet was born in 1964 and spent a significant part of his childhood in California; he then returned to his native Chile, where he came of age under the dictatorship. His opera prima, Mala onda (1991; trans. Bad Vibes, 1997)35 is a bildungsroman set against the backdrop of the 1980 plebiscite, which reformed the Chilean constitution and legally ratified Pinochet’s presidency. As Stéphanie Decante Araya has documented, the novel was met with a lukewarm reception from the Chilean literary establishment, which labeled it as “commercial literature” or “culture light.”36 But as she points out, Fuguet is self-aware of—and encourages!—the tension between commerce and literature in his work; after Bourdieu, one could approach his provocateur stance as a way of putting into question the rules of the literary field. It appears, then, that Fuguet is less of a reactionary writer than his critics claim him to be. That said, little in his work indicates any dissatisfaction with the less savory effects of “free trade” in society. Contrary to expectations, there is significant overlap between the supermarkets in Eltit and in Fuguet. If Mano de obra recounts the story of a failed revolution in one such location, Mala onda tells that of a failed rebellion. Throughout its pages, Matías Vicuña, an adolescent from Santiago’s wealthy upper class, totters between apathy, compliance, and disobedience. True to form, he experiments with drugs and sex, questions the ways of his parents and social milieu, and halfheartedly carries out a threat to abandon his home—only to take refuge at a downtown hotel and ultimately reconcile with his kin. The drama unfolds during the heated last days before the election; the results have yet to be announced when the protagonist makes amends with his father, reveling alongside him at an upscale brothel. Clearly, the novel allegorizes that historical conjuncture by focusing on an individual’s plight. Call it a parallel, “internal plebiscite”: in the end, the status quo is shaken but

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ratified, and the conflictive elements in the adolescent’s personality find their place. However, before that resolution there is a pivotal supermarket scene where Matías confronts some of the ugly truths that underlie his life of privilege. The stage is a Jumbo, a local hypermarket. Matías likens it to a storehouse; the precise term he uses is “galpón,” a word that originally referred to slave quarters.37 There, vegetables “shine as if they were made of plastic,”38 and customers are stocking up in fear of a potential shortage of supplies that the elections, or their result, could bring about. While it is not made explicit, this panic evokes the response of the middle classes to the scarcity on the shelves of supermarkets and grocery stores during the later portion of Allende’s government. (The collapse of the food supply in major cities, the result of inflation and embargo, played a decisive role in the public’s willingness to write a blank check to the military junta.) Matías’s father, Esteban, has his own reasons to be wary, as his political and social standing depends on the victory of the YES-vote. Influential family members and military officers will attend a dinner party at their house that evening—“gente relacionada con el dinero”39—and father and son are in charge of purchasing the bottles of alcohol for the gathering. In this charged environment, they first run into Eynard Enger, a recently broke import-exporter Esteban used to admire “with a zeal that was almost ideological,”40 and then Pochi, the sister of Esteban’s former lover. This is the point in the book where Fuguet’s cuadro de costumbres of Pinochetism comes closest to social criticism. Matías realizes that the vaunted family values are just a front: Esteban’s affair is reprehensible because his lover, Hilda Escudero—note the last name, “Squire”—is not a member of the underclass (“no es una cualquiera”), and such scandals are bad for business.41 As these truths come to the surface, an upset Esteban takes refuge in consumption. Walking down the aisles, Matías comes across promoters whose false smiles he compares to that of his dad when he first met Enger. At the moment when the charade is about to be revealed, the promoters help Matías stay in character. Kristina Cordero translates the scene in this way:

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“Would you like some?” asks a heavily tanned model [bronceada por la nieve]. “Sure, only a little, though. I’m not crazy about martinis.” “But this is Italian. The real thing.” “Fine. I’ll take two bottles.” The girl [la mina] seems overjoyed. Like they say, it doesn’t cost anything to be nice. I push the cart toward the rest of the liquor. There are two more girls standing there, one promoting Pisco Capel and one offering a selection of Mitjans liqueurs. I look at the labels: almost all imports. I pull bottles off the shelves at random [a destajo]: Johnnie Walker Black Label, Stolichnaya, three Tanquerays, a Napoléon Cointreau, Bacardi, four six-packs of Heineken, two tequilas with worms at the bottom.42 What for Matías is just flirting, for the promoters is work. Mano de obra would have readers realize that the interaction with attractive promoters is part of what the supermarket profits from. By contrast, Mala onda, which is always narrated from the point of view of the shopper, insinuates that consumerist escapism is of a piece with the moral turpitude in a decadent Chilean aristocracy. Eltit speaks about politics where Fuguet appears to be more invested in ethics, but the supermarket is still the space where, in a metaphor, the bubble may burst. In a different metaphor, the supermarket is a theater that shows its props, that allows us to question the part we have been assigned to play. Pochi drives the moment to its crisis by testing the limits of what is acceptable at a supermarket—and metonymically, in society at large. Inexplicably, she gets drunk on the free samples of liquor, hops onto a stage, and asks the supermarket’s mascot to dance with her. The mascot is a man in an elephant costume, a figure that brings to mind the inebriated worker clad in biblical robes at the manger of Eltit’s súper.43 Shoppers are at first taken aback but then cheer, and for a moment it appears as though a popular fest might prevail over preelectoral uneasiness. The band plays festive music instead of martial tunes, under a banner that reads “Happy national holidays [fiestas patrias] from Jumbo Hypermarket.”44 But Pochi’s dance moves are too racy; she wraps

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the elephant trunk around her neck and starts to lift her skirt. Appalled, Matías and his father flee the scene. In this carnivalized venting of repressed social unrest, the fallen import-export agent symbolizes the so-called “Chilean economic miracle” turned sour and the unseemly Pochi is the incarnation of the fear of losing face in an oligarchic system where connections and wealth go hand in hand. There is a thought-provoking confluence of the disgraceful consumption of imports, a bankrupt exporter, and objectified women. The emphasis is on transaction: between the adolescent and his environment, between Chile and the world—Matías navigates these oppositions and negotiates his identity. Throughout the novel, he has identified all things Chilean as backward, and has pandered in American pop music, Brazilian maconha, and imported clothing. Similarly, he fluctuates between megalomania and self-hatred. The supermarket scene serves as a catalyst for the novel’s denouement, because Jumbo is an exteriorization of Matías’s emotions, yet also serves as a liminal space where Chile goes abroad. Indeed, the entire novel is about the things the conceited adolescent takes in and consumes, and about the little he gives back. Frequent rants about the insularity of Chile are accompanied with a lack of clarity as to the terms in which Chile is to become internally constituted or integrated into a broader community. During Matías’s senior trip to Rio, he gets “good vibes” from carioca youths who compare their own military regime to his, and does not quite know what to make of that. Enger was once the hero in a narrative that explains Chile’s place in the world as a purveyor of agricultural goods and a consumer of luxury products. The workers at the supermarket may appear relegated, but those in the fields are completely left out of the picture. There is an echo of the supermarket scene later that evening. Matías’s uncle, a diplomat (another mediator between Chile and the world), chuckles at the sight of the lavish meal in front of him. He observes, with dark humor, “And then people say that in Chile there is nothing to eat.”45 A tipsy, defiant Matías steps out of character and challenges him, in so many words, to go take a walk in the shantytowns and stop saying bullshit. He is bluffing, of course, as he has not been there himself. Neither is he

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suddenly struck by political awareness or by nationalism. Earlier, after all, he prank called and threatened the mother of one of his friends, who personifies the inelegance he identifies with Chileanness. Later, he will wind up in a poor neighborhood and beg a taxi driver to take him to a more reassuring place. But in that bold moment at the dinner party, the adolescent tests his limits. The public embarrassment that ensues mirrors Pochi’s inappropriate dance. Matías’s parents ask him to apologize and behave; he refuses and takes off, but the doubts raised at the supermarket finally manifest within the household. The social structures and hierarchies challenged at the supermarket, and in various moments throughout the plot, stand strong at the end. The climactic scene where Matías and Esteban pay for sex contrasts with a passage from the midsection of the novel where Matías and a friend his age, in a not particularly probable bucolic scene of sexual initiation, befriend and make love to two freethinking young maids who later vanish from their lives.46 One can readily appreciate the contrast between that earlier consensual, horizontal relationship and the hierarchical, abusive transaction at the end. Matías’s sexuality models a way to relate to paternal authority and to the lower classes.47 He consumes women just as he consumes everything else. Presumably, the brothel is a safe haven for libertinage, whereas decorum continues to rule over the household and even the supermarket. Matías’s family does not survive the scandals intact, but the pecking order, ultimately presided by Pinochet, has not changed: his mother leaves with Uncle Sandro, a prosperous entrepreneur succeeding where Enger failed, and who happens to own the BMW Esteban has coveted all along. By association, the mother of the protagonist becomes, or has always been, a “trophy wife.” Everyone has a price, and Jumbo subsumes the entire society. VIOLENCE

In 1966, sharp increases in the cost of food were met with a major supermarket boycott across the United States. Protesters picketed outside their local stores. The leaders were, as a consumer historian puts it,

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“women . . .young, well-educated, middle-class homemakers.”48 This sight was not uncommon. Throughout the seventies there were meat, sugar, and milk boycotts, one of the latter beginning, symbolically, on Mother’s Day.49 Such demonstrations reveal a discontent toward the distinctly gendered space of the supermarket, which is, as Tracy Deutsch puts it, “identified with women’s domesticity.”50 The supermarket encourages its predominantly female customers to feel empowered through consumption, even though grocery shopping is actually a household chore.51 Not surprisingly, outbursts against supermarkets are a worldwide phenomenon. Beyond consumer activism, different incidents, including civil insurrections, punctuate its smooth surface of contentment. Looting can be a symptom for a variety of issues, from the grief after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which led to a Chicago grocery store being burned to the ground, to the anti-systemic protests that took place in Argentina in 2001 after the economic collapse, which led to similar occurrences. The supermarket stands at the crossroads of consumerism, gender politics, and politics tout court. In La prueba (The Proof, 1992),52 César Aira addresses the multifaceted cultural significance of the supermarket and exposes the violence that underlies it. A much-discussed short novel, this emblematic work is representative of the best of the author’s writing. (It was adapted to film twice by Diego Lerman as the short La prueba in 1999 and as the major motion picture Tan de repente in 2002.) Aira is known for rekindling the spirit of historical avant-gardes through the use of interruption and conceptual play, traits I will examine in more detail in chapter 5.53 For the present argument, however, I will focus on his representation of the supermarket as a space of pure potentiality, a stage for gratuitous acts that destabilize gender roles and question the social pact. La prueba shares several elements with Eltit and Fuguet’s novels, but arguably takes them to their final consequences. These include a critique of the invisibilization of labor and surplus value, an examination of the role of the supermarket in reifying gender roles, and a study of its architecture as a means to channel desire and optimize consumption. In conversation with later works by Aira that reflect on supermarkets, namely the short story “El carrito”

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(2004) and the novel El mármol (2011), one may turn to La prueba to see how the supermarket becomes an Aleph. The nouvelle tells the story of punk teenagers Mao and Lenin, a lesbian couple from Buenos Aires, who try to persuade insecure, simpleton Marcia into having an affair with them. Marcia is shocked by the invitation, but she gradually and inexplicably overcomes her reticence as the couple offers her a “proof of love”: they lock up and shake down a corner supermarket, conduct a massacre, and flee with the cash.54 The violent act is recounted in a tragicomical, pulp fiction register and is the last of a series of unexpected twists. Always stern, Mao only smiles when she announces the proof: It was the first and only time she did it, and Marcia, who in no way could be sure if that was a smile, knew without a shadow of doubt that Mao had smiled to her. . . . It made her think, perhaps due to an association of names, in a picture of Mao Tse Tung, one of those official portraits that are reproduced blurrily in a newspaper, in which not even with the greatest perspicacity one can decide if there is or not a sketch of a smile in the face of the Chinaman.55 Aira appropriates and diverts the Chairman’s iconic half-smile, always on the brink of not being, paradoxically singular in its mechanical reproduction.56 Perhaps due to an association of names, Marcia would stand for Marx, and the violent outcome that results from putting together such a constellation of figures assimilates abrupt love into the movement of history. But even if the novel gives grounds for a simplistic, allegorical reading, interpretation becomes the starting point for reflection, not the end. Marcia is not Marx, and Mao is a lesbian teenager from Buenos Aires. The jarring effect of the names accentuates the riddle-like quality of the work, consistent with the operation of revealing the supermarket as a space of possibility. It is retail turned on its head: while normally the supermarket affirms gender roles, private property, and transparency of meaning, here it destabilizes sexual orientation, ownership, and reference. If indeed the final scene suggests revolution, it also implies that there can

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be no revolution without the transformation of subjectivity. The opening line translates into a straightforward question: “Wanna fuck?”57 This sudden proposition alters Marcia’s world entirely, suggesting “everything could happen.”58 Similarly, the final scene reveals “the fantastic potential for transformation that everything has.”59 As José Mariano García has examined in a book-length study,60 Aira writes his way in and out of several literary genres in each of his works. Consistently, La prueba fuses a story of sexual initiation with one of political consciousness-raising, leading to a bombastic sci-fi finale: amid the chaos, a housewife melts away, like a candle.61 Form accompanies content, as the book stretches its pact of verisimilitude to its very limit, becoming purposefully absurd at times. Truly, it seems that anything can happen to Marcia, to the supermarket, and to the workings of a single narrative. Commercial space is essential to “the proof ” that another world is possible. Mao and Lenin exert violence merely by virtue of being;62 they remain unclassifiable, despite Marcia’s attempts to identify them as punks (a signifier she fails to grasp) or even as feminists.63 After meeting at a neighborhood park in Flores, and before heading to the supermarket, the three youths convene at Pumpernickel, a local restaurant in the image of American fast-food chains. Their presence there leads to a confrontation, as they are not willing to consume (why would they?) or to observe a dress code and a code of conduct that only become visible through their transgression. Similarly, at the supermarket, the hyperbolic destruction they unleash reveals the inherent violence in an orderly mechanism for the reproduction of surplus value and gender stereotypes. The reader learns to see gondola displays as props for annihilation: “ ‘Look there,’ said [Mao], pointing to the left. Lenin had appeared over the dairy counter, with a bunch of gas containers in one hand. ‘Those who want to come out through the other side of the gondolas will be incinerated.’ ”64 One may contrast the opaque yet powerful characters in this novel to “the Darlings,” the nickname that Chisholm gave to the women who boycotted U.S. supermarkets in the late sixties. Introducing his already cited marketing manual, Chisholm claims “the Darlings” gave a shock treatment to merchants, and calls for new salesmanship practices. He defines,

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with unconcealed sexist language, the task of the merchant as that of “wooing and winning” the “wonderful” women of the nation, further described, through casual use of alliteration, such as “faithful and fickle, dazzling and diverting.”65 The narrative of salesmen seducing their female clientele is an extreme example of the gender politics that La prueba seeks to subvert. Characters assume the names of revolutionaries because they reinvent gender roles at a site that contributes to their reification. While the act of love in Chisholm’s heterosexual establishment is the internalization of subservience, in Aira it stands for the very opposite: revolution. This stance could be seen as a variation on Carol Hanisch’s often quoted phrase “the personal is political,” with a caveat. It is not that lesbian youths vindicate housewives, but, as Patrick O’Connor argues in a perceptive essay, they call taxonomies into question, especially categories such as “lesbian,” “punk,” and “feminist.”66 By doing so, they challenge the fundamental organization of society. Supermarkets neatly categorize and separate products and peoples; each one is a microcosm governed by consumption, a scale model for capitalist society.67 In La prueba, the supermarket is a boundless image of the world, and piercing it entails a radical transformation of the whole. It remains ambiguous whether the totality that Aira is alluding to is the prevailing economic model, a certain worldview, or a specific value system. This cultivated ambiguity carries over in two other works, “El carrito” and El mármol. The former seems to engage in ideology critique, targeting the prevailing economic model and its fantasies; the latter addresses the current form of globalization by taking place in a “Chinese supermarket” in Buenos Aires. “El carrito” receives its title from its protagonist: a shopping cart that can move at will, at night, in secrecy. The story begins in the playful key of the fairy tale and ends, abruptly, with the cryptic, thought-provoking denouement of a short story by Kafka. The shopping cart breezes through “its domain” when no one is watching. The narrator is the only one who knows, and he takes a liking to it; it becomes “a friendly object” or “an object friend” (un objeto amigo). But as the narrator kneels down to listen to what the shopping cart has to confide, what he hears comes as a chilling

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surprise. The short story ends with the shopping cart’s statement: “I am Evil”—in the original, “Yo soy el Mal.”68 What, then, to make of this perplexing tale? While it would be easy to dismiss the ending as the punchline to a joke, we would do well to take it seriously. Perhaps we may ask for the effects of the shopping cart, of its very existence, on daily life. Is it not an extension of the supermarket? As Schwedt reports, the shopping cart was invented by Sylvan Goldman in 1937, as a means to facilitate the transit between the store and the private vehicle.69 It is difficult enough to see this common object as an invention, let alone appreciate its function as a replacement of worker labor, since once an employee had to carry the purchases before its widespread implementation. But Aira sees the emptiness inside the shopping cart as an inner void the customer has to fill; he renders the object not as a tool but as a despotic master. Urban sprawl and shopping carts go hand in hand—around the world, wherever the shopping cart goes, an economic structure follows. Hence the comparison, hidden in the terse language of the fairy tale, to a (neo-colonial) ship sailing in search of adventure. In a Luddite, anarchist line of reasoning, shopping carts truly are evil. While El mármol (2011) is much too complex to analyze in detail here, the general tenets of its plot suggest that in this novel, too, Aira joins Eltit and Fuguet in representing the supermarket as a world onto itself. Aira is seemingly aware that globalization entails the sum of migratory patterns, economic changes, and cultural transformations, among other factors, but that it is also a phenomenon that exists in language. With the nonsensical-yet-insightful humor of a Lewis Carroll, the Argentine appears to generate the plot around the word “globalization” itself. In a “Chinese supermarket” in Buenos Aires, whenever the cash registers run out of change, customers are offered a choice from an array of knickknacks, the cheapest of which are “marble globules,” or glóbulos. In this wordplay, the very term “globalization” becomes currency, of a devaluated sort. One farcical turn of events follows another: the Chinese turn out to really be beings from another planet (a hyperbole of foreignness),70 and the supermarket, tottering over a precipice of evanescent marble, becomes a portal to alternate realities.71 At one point, the protagonist falls asleep:

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“There, inside the dream (but it was an inside that was outside, outside of everything), the world broadened, like an inflating balloon [globo], colors faded out, transparency augmented, the surface that contained the whole dissolved . . .”72 Aira revisits a long-standing motif. In the early modern era, Calderón de la Barca compared life to a dream (La vida es sueño, 1635), while Shakespeare likened the world to a stage: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, 1623). Contemporary Latin American writers instead represent the world as a supermarket, and all people merely as shoppers. Combining the elements in this family of metaphors, their hope is to awaken us from consumerist enchantment. Is globalization leading to an expanding world, richer in possibilities and exchange? Or is it more like a bigger, ever-growing supermarket, with more products and less humanity? Imagining the world as supermarket is an exercise in estrangement. It calls for a different globalization—one that needs not occur under the dominance of market capitalism. NOTES FROM THE INFR AMARKET

A seismic shift in daily life took place in Latin America in recent years. After gathering and weighing evidence from years 1990 through 2000, social scientists report that “Latin America [has] seen in a single decade the same development of supermarkets that the United States experienced in five decades.”73 The surge is as sharp as it is uneven; supermarkets control three-fourths of food retail in Brazil, compared to only one-tenth in Bolivia. But the trend is clear: “global multinationals constitute [read: own] roughly 70 to 80 percent of the top five chains in most countries.”74 In light of these developments, it comes as no surprise that contemporary Latin American representations of the supermarket are numerous and varied, with a tendency to comment on issues of national autonomy. At a regional level, these representations converge in two ways: first, by responding to a shared literary history, which takes after figures like Borges and accounts for the baseline affinities among these narratives, as well as among those I discuss in other chapters of this study. The second

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characteristic is the critique of the common denominator to the diverse experiences of the rise of supermarkets, which is neoliberalism. On this point we should tread carefully, however. For if the well-known critique against neoliberalism lies in its reduction of all social life to the workings of the market, there would be little benefit in casting works of literature as mere commentaries on that economic model. At worst, that reductive reading would practice within criticism what it seeks to denounce elsewhere. After 1989, Latin Americans were thrown upon the rapid flows of globalization on the precarious vessel of neoliberalism. But how to narrate that story, which seems to take place in the distant, rarified environment of international finance, but also in the most ordinary settings? To some extent, the supermarket bridges that gap. However, as I have shown, the theme allows writers to go beyond the narrowly economical and to give a human face to globalization, not only (as might be expected) by building solidarity with supermarket workers, but by condensing social contradiction into fictional aisles of produce. They take a site that has been stripped bare of its non-transactional properties—as a gathering space, for instance—and reinvest it with some of the whimsicality that open-air markets had until not so long ago. At least in the imagination, these spaces are de-privatized, once more belonging to the commons. And if the supermarket truly is a world in miniature, this fictional takeover could have global implications. It would be as if all of us, everywhere, could hear the malevolent whisper of a shopping cart. These are, to be sure, peculiar fantasies. It bears stating the obvious: no stage or supermarket will completely hold the world. As we imagine otherwise, we reveal ourselves. When Shakespeare imagined that the world is essentially reducible to a stage, he demonstrated how important performance—of social virtues, for instance—was for his times. Similarly, when today the supermarket assumes that function, it shows to what extent consumption has become a defining element of our times and lives. There are two operations at stake here, not one: totalizing, by taking a small portion for the whole, and particularizing, implicit in “miniaturizing” the whole into that small portion. These are the familiar forms that lead to Borges’s Aleph, but also to Aira’s glóbulos, Fuguet’s Jumbo, and Eltit’s

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“súper.” In the supermarkets of the global Latin American novel, what is being played out is the tension between concrete individuals and a worldwide system of exploitation. Narrative affords us the opportunity of seizing that tension “from below,” recreating discrete experiences and putting us in the shoes of others. If the architects of economic globalization see the world from above, to the point of losing empathy, fiction can veer in an opposite direction. Again, this does not amount to saying that the supermarkets in the global Latin American novel are pedagogical or even reducible to a straightforward political cause. Fuguet is a case in point, as he at least cavorts with neoliberalism as much as he interrogates it—or, more precisely, gives readers an occasion to do so. One could say that his novel presents a critique of the economic child of Pinochetism despite itself. For her part, Eltit might come across as more Brechtian, but there is little in the way of prescription or immediate political action on her part. Aira’s politics are clearly at the farthest from the sort of commitment we came to expect of the earlier, Boom generation of Latin American writers in the 1960s and 1970s. None of them follows the testimonio paradigm of the 1990s, for even when Eltit’s narrator speaks on behalf of butchers, there is a self-questioning as to the possibility of that witnessing.75 It is not that they may not individually be interested in the emancipation of floor workers or in lending the subaltern a voice, but the emphasis is not there. In other words, none of these authors conforms to Third World stereotypes about what it means to think geopolitically. They speak from a post-heroic horizon and focus on a quotidian experience that is increasingly worldwide. After all, wage laborers are consumers, too. The real contribution of these narratives lies in revealing the underlying politics and the long history of the supermarket. To the impoverished, presentist language of marketing, they respond with a rich, textured contemporaneity. It is difficult to imagine that supermarkets will one day become a thing of the past, or that there will be other ways of organizing the food supply. And yet these works gesture towards that possibility. In so doing, they suggest a program for world literature, which may carry out on a broader corpus the kind of analysis this chapter has put forward—namely,

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one that, through close readings, binds the spaces of globalization with the literary forms that capture their contradictions. What may surface is a common story with different national and regional configurations, one that leads us to revisit some of the more unexamined moments of daily life. Finding Chilean fruit and wine or Argentine beef and dulce de leche thousands of kilometers away from their sources should be the beginning, not the end, of enquiry. One might want to consider, for instance, to what extent they compare to the works of fiction we “consume.”

4 ICONOCRACY AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF NARCONOVELAS

Narcotrafficking is one of the most revisited transnational phenomena in contemporary Latin American fiction. One may compare it to the prevalence of espionage and related themes during the Cold War. With hindsight, it is easy to appreciate how spy novels from that period simplified geopolitics to the fight of good versus evil and reinforced a vision of the world as dominated by two poles—the United States and the Soviet Union, each with its “allies.” The ideological blueprint for spy novels is plain to see: the very name of the organization “SPECTRE,” which Ian Fleming’s James Bond is up against, evokes what Marx famously called “the specter of communism.” Equipped with numerous consumer cultureinspired gadgets, the individualist hero faces off against the fearsome collective. (He also overplays Britain’s role in the postwar world order, hence the nostalgic hyper-Britishness.) There is an analogous worldview for the narconovela. While spy novels mapped onto Cold War bipolarism, these later Latin American works depict an increasingly multipolar, interconnected, post-1989 world order. But how are we, contemporaries to the phenomenon, to appreciate its ideology? Marx had a different drug in mind when he remarked, in an equally familiar passage, that religion is the

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opium of the people. Here it appears that opium—or cocaine, rather—is the people’s new religion. This chapter explores the conflicting, still-forming globality of narconovelas, provisionally defined as works of fiction that revolve around the illegal drug trade. I focus on the religious subtext that very often underlies the genre, exemplified in such works as La Santa Muerte (Holy Death, 2003), by Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, and Our Lady of the Assassins (La Virgen de los sicarios, 1994; trans. 2001), by the Colombian author Fernando Vallejo. It is common to depict drug lords, alternatively, as patron saints or demons, drug enforcement as a righteous crusade, and so forth. A short explanation as to why religion and narcotrafficking so often go together in contemporary fiction is that any realist novel would pick up on the religiosity of daily life in Latin America. Drug bosses and their henchmen are known for their displays of devotion, often strikingly at odds with the brutality of their trade. Yet mimesis does not suffice, for religion is not merely part of the lexicon of narconovelas, but a central element of their grammar. The deeper explanation, I propose, has to do with the visual apparatus that sustains the War on Drugs. Policing the trade, as opposed to preventing consumption or addressing its underlying social causes, is a political decision that hinges upon the asymmetries of the current world order. (An anti-narcotic strategy that caused such a high death toll in the North would be unacceptable, while it has become part of the status quo south of the Rio Grande.) For this religion to justify itself, it needs its holy war, one that media cover as much as they reproduce. Drug consumption and commerce occur outside of public view, while narcoculture, with all its bombast and gaudiness, is very visible. Heuristically, it is useful to compare that “visual paradox” to religious icons, which give a visible face to the invisible mysteries of faith. Along those lines, I examine, in conversation with Marie-José Mondzain’s notion of iconocracy and Carl Schmitt’s concept of political theology, narconovelas that intervene in established forms of visuality and power. Narconovelas have the power to disrupt the iconocratic operations that define the hold that the drug war has on our imaginations. As with spy novels, most narconovelas are entertainment products that reinforce a prevailing ideology;

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read against the grain, however, some works offer us a unique opportunity for cultural critique on a global scale. Given their sheer proliferation, narconovelas might very well head the list of emerging world literary genres. At the same time, however, they also have a relatively long tradition in Latin America. For this reason, they provide a natural bridge between Latin Americanism and world literature, and are consequently a valuable case study for this book. Moreover, they allow me to make an important point: construing something as world literature can either affirm or challenge hegemony. It is how we read them that matters. Narcofiction deserves to be regarded as world literature, but the way we frame the matter has implications for geopolitics and for literary institutions: for the former, by offering different narratives of the powerful forces at play, which transcend borders and impact societies in numerous ways; for the latter, by challenging expectations about cultural flows, which, in this case, emanate from the peripheries to the center. The Latin American narconovelas considered in this chapter offer worlds in miniature, as those I have discussed in the preceding chapters, but with an added dimension: they reveal aspects of, and allow us to reframe, the global phenomenon of narcotrafficking. A CIVIL WAR ON DRUGS

When Fernando, the moody grammarian protagonist of Our Lady of the Assassins visits the shantytowns of Medellín for the first time, he has a peculiar epiphany: “On the way up I saw the graneros, those dirty little mini-marts where they sell yuccas and plantains, behind bars. Is it so nobody can make off with their misery? I saw the football pitches sticking out over the precipices. I saw the maze of streets and the steep steps. And down below the other city, in the valley, full of sound.”1 Fernando Vallejo, the author of this influential early narconovela, is of course evoking Borges’s Aleph with the labyrinth and the reiteration of the verb “to see.” Recall “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 pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London).”2 While the

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Aleph provides a secular revelation, Vallejo’s book is steeped in Catholicism. The passage is about the contemplation of misery, not the joys of paradox. And yet the slum is also an artifact that can reveal the entire universe at once—or, at least, the present world order, as Mike Davis claims in Planet of Slums.3 Indeed, we could regard the slum as the unacknowledged punctum of the so-called war “on drugs,” which is not really about substances but about people. The Aleph-in-a-slum moment in Vallejo exemplifies the potential that narconovelas have for unsettling the prevailing narrative of the War on Drugs and the ways of seeing that come with it. It invites us to situate its spectacular violence within a broader social context, a tradition of literary representations of globality, and a complex apparatus of iconocratic practices. In her studies on the expansion of early Christianity through the power of religious figures, Marie-José Mondzain defines iconocracy as an “organization of the visible which provokes a belief.”4 For the scholar, the establishment of an empire of the gaze is a key element in the globalization of Christianism. By representing holy figures as “space-occupying physical beings,” the Church prescribed a series of relational practices that converts came to adopt and internalize. (Although not part of the scope of her book, one could also see this process in the evangelization of the Americas.) Icons are powerful two- or three-dimensional figures; their power lies not in themselves but in the social interactions they preside over. One could destroy an idol—say, a given rock or statue that an imaginary people worshipped. But an icon is indestructible because it is never singular, but part of a larger economy of images. Iconoclasts and iconophiles battle not only over individual altars—although many were indeed set ablaze— but over the control of iconic production. Borrowing this vocabulary, one could say there is a defining iconicity to the War on Drugs. In fact, its very legitimation requires an iconocratic operation at mass-media scale. Consider the role that images of Pablo Escobar and more recently of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán have in our mediascape. Before the Internet, Escobar’s image was predominantly under the control of iconocrats who cast it under a negative light, such as through the wanted poster (figure 4.1).5 Exhibiting Escobar’s image, and attributing the toll of war to him

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Figure 4.1 “Wanted” poster of Pablo Escobar, 1992. Courtesy of Semana.

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alone, was a form of pedagogy and social control. Yet there was some iconophilia, too, as in the famous photos where he poses as a gangster and as Pancho Villa (figure 4.2), but not to the extent that the post-Internet era has made of Guzmán. Vallejo is certainly aware of the power of such images when he writes the following: I heard the shots from the balcony of my apartment: ra-ta-ta-ta-tat. Two minutes with the odd burst of machine-gun, and then, bingo,

Figure 4.2 Pablo Escobar posing as Pancho Villa, with Jack Daniels whiskey in lieu of tequila, circa 1981. Courtesy of Semana.

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Don Pablo and his legend bit the dust. They felled him on a rooftop, fleeing like a cat in disgrace. Only two bullets got him, both on his left side: one hit his neck, the other hit his ear. He came crashing down like the aforementioned cat “on the tiles,” his hot tin roof, consuming, between him and his twenty-five thousand pursuers, more than a million [tiles] during the long chase. I didn’t win the reward, but I was only three blocks away from it. The chief contractor of hitmen being dead, my poor Alexis was left without work. It was then that I met him. And in this way national events are linked to personal ones, and the poor, common lives of the humble intertwined with those of the great.6 Fernando’s “explanation” of how his life fits into the historical context is really a metonymic displacement from the grand récit of the drug war to the petite histoire of his unfortunate, successive love affairs with two underage hitmen—the latter of which, as he painfully discovers, has murdered the first. He is unimpressed at the downfall of a man who was once so powerful, symbolically and otherwise, as to offer paying off the country’s foreign debt in exchange for not being extradited. He claims that Escobar “and his legend” are over, when in fact the opposite is the case: the dramatic ending to the drug lord’s life actually consolidated his status as a legendary outlaw. Recall the well-known, gory photo of Escobar’s corpse on that rooftop: bloody and on his side, with his face covered and his shirt half-lifted from the fall. The picture documented the manhunt, while its compulsive reproduction involved desecration, triumph, even relief. Or recall the by now equally famous painting that Fernando Botero devoted to the theme: Escobar floating in mid-air, just struck, about to fall. An iconophile, Botero renders his subject in the style of sacred painting, offering us a grandiose, larger-than-life kingpin, annoyed at the insect-like bullets that bring him down. He reinforces iconicity through caricature. By contrast, Vallejo opts for mockery, comparing Escobar with a domestic animal, and evoking, absurdly, Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on the Hot Tin Roof and its film adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor. In Spanish, the syntax used to describe his fall is willfully archaic, siglodeorista: bullets hit him “por el su cuello” and

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“por la su oreja.” Vallejo, with rhythmic prose and supple metaphor, transforms the over-determined corpse of the drug lord—a trophy, a monster, a martyr—into an estranged constellation of pet, mortally-wounded knight, and movie diva. The immediate effect is character development: we learn about Fernando’s sense of superiority, consistent with his later quip that Death is his errand boy. More significantly, this is an attempt to interrupt the iconic regime of the powerful image of Pablo Escobar. Vallejo, with the Virgin Mary as with Pablo Escobar, is an iconoclast. Our Lady of the Assassins is rich in critical reflections about Colombia’s interconnected democratic and iconocratic regimes. Lacking purpose after Escobar’s death, Alexis, Fernando’s first lover, watches television all day. That is, until Fernando, overwhelmed by the general loudness of the city, threatens to commit suicide—then the hitman shoots at the television set, putting an end to the high-pitched, droning voice of the president. This murder in effigy amounts to a challenge against democratic institutions. From that pivotal point onward we move away from love in closed quarters (eros) to rampage in the streets of Medellín (thanatos). We enter into a space where the only laws are violence and retaliation. It is obvious that Vallejo wants to criticize the doublespeak of the Colombian establishment, which characterizes military actions as policing and claims to defend a rule of law that, at least in the city portrayed in the novel, did not quite exist: approximately five hundred policemen were assassinated in 1990–1991, while some 150 car bombs were detonated.7 Situated against this backdrop, Fernando’s diatribes against the state are especially inflammatory, as is the novel’s careful subversion of iconocratic regimes. From being the horresco referens of Colombian media, Our Lady of the Assassins situates the image of Escobar within a constellation that includes Luis Carlos Galán, President César Gaviria (1990–1994), the Virgin of Sabaneta, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the sicario, the ominous term for a cartel hitman, now used in Mexico. Being interpellated by all of these figures was a defining experience for Colombians in the 1990s.8 Vallejo captures a crucial trait of iconoclasm: it is most effective when it diverts, not opposes, the power of the icon. As Mondzain notes, “the definition of the idol is nothing other than an image that must be killed.”9 While

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iconoclasts consider that the reverence of the image is idolatry, or barbarism, iconophiles consider that the destruction of the image barbaric. In this sense, a direct attack at the iconic figure cancels itself out. One cannot challenge the belief in Christ by destroying crosses, as this only reinforces existing certainties. One could bring in a new figure or god to take the place of the previous god, but the structure of allegiance would remain the same. Vallejo prefers to divert the power of the icon instead of trying to destroy it. This is why, in Our Lady of the Assassins, Escobar meets his death with an air of Liz Taylor (figure 4.3)—more akin, as it happens, to Botero’s later painting on the subject (figure 4.4). The same kind of defamiliarization of an iconic figure is at work in the title of the novel. Colombian Catholics are devout to many vírgenes: the Virgen del Carmen, the Virgen de Chiquinquirá, and so forth. The coinage “Virgen de los Sicarios” provocatively binds the sacred and the demonized. The title may be alluding to the Virgin of Sabaneta, whose shrine in Medellín the hitmen paid their respects to in the 1980s through 1990s. They often asked for forgiveness in advance of committing a crime, prayed for the prospective victim or victims, asked to have their weapons blessed, and relied on the Virgin Mary for marksmanship and personal safety.10 Yet the title can also allude to Fernando, the middle-aged queen who in one of the final scenes of the novel holds the corpse of his beloved boy, evoking a mater dolorosa.11 When Fernando looks into the corpse’s open eyes, he sees God’s evil (“la sobrecogedora maldad de Dios”). Note, however, that if Wílmar’s eyes are a mirror, Fernando then is the evil God. In this way, the anonymous perpetrator becomes the singular victim, while Mary, an image of feminine love, becomes one of androgynous hate. This understatedly new, queer deity challenges traditional values of Colombian society, notably heteronormativity and what historian Tico Braun has called convivialismo, namely pacifism through denial, a conciliatory discourse that does not match the reality of social conflict.12 While both the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart placate social unrest by visually reinforcing the promise of otherworldly rewards—the poor’s is the kingdom of heaven—the Virgin of the Hitmen fights fire with fire. Our Lady of the Assassins is a book of prayer to the matron of death who

Figure 4.3 Elizabeth Taylor, in the role of Maggie Pollitt, lies on a bed in a poster for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Directed by Richard Brooks, 1958. Movie poster by Reynold Brown. © 2014 Estate of Reynold Brown / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Robert Casas.

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Figure 4.4 A visitor walks past the painting Death of Pablo Escobar (1999), Fernando Botero’s second, un-messianic take on the subject. Museo de Antioquia, Medellín. © Raúl Arboleda / AFP / Getty Images.

would deliver humans from each other. Its idiosyncratic theology results from not seeing the sicarios’ faith in the Virgin of Sabaneta as a folly, but as a sound practice that can replace earlier forms of national devotion. Contrastingly, the novel opens with a nostalgic invocation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Fernando reminisces and offers an explanation, addressed to readers and to “foreign tourists,” on a defining image from his childhood. His family congregates to send off a balloon: What do you people know about balloons? Do you know what they are? They’re diamonds or crosses or spheres made out of flimsy rice paper and inside they have a small lighted candle which fills them with smoke so’s they rise. People say the smoke is their soul and the candle their heart. When the balloons fill up with the smoke and start to tug, we, the ones who’re holding them, let them go up and the balloon soars, up to heaven with its heart lit up, palpitating, like the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Do you know who he is? We used to

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have one in the living room; in the living room of the house in Calle del Perú in the city of Medellín, capital of Antioquia; in the house where I was born, in the living room, enthronized or rather (because I know you won’t know the word), blessed one day by the priest. My country, Colombia, is consecrated to him.13 The markers of familiarity are lost: expatriate Fernando must explain the most mundane elements of a Colombian upbringing. The child learns that the world is round, for the balloon never comes back, and neither does childhood. A metonymic displacement goes from childhood to balloon, earth, and finally back to the nation. The tension between immanence and transcendence plays itself out in the contrast between the breezy movement of the balloon and the bounded, geometrical, targetlike centrality that the Sacred Heart occupies within a series of ever larger circles: a room, a house, a block, a street, a city, a province, and so forth. One could rephrase this as “the only way for anything Colombian to sublate is to go up in flames.” The icon stands at a threshold. Just as the Sacred Heart welcomes the visitor to many a Colombian home, the image of the red balloon/Sacred Heart greets the foreign tourist to Vallejo’s novel, which is about an impossible return home—not just because the idyllic Sabaneta is transformed into something of a war zone, but because the protagonist cannot abide by traditional Christian values like heterosexual male ascendancy and the holiness of maternity. Thus steps in a new icon, apt for modern times: the Virgin of the Hitmen, whose rule irradiates from Medellín across Colombia and the world. Devotions to the Virgin Mary and to the Sacred Heart of Jesus are rooted in Catholic corporatism, the social doctrine that Pope Leo XIII devised as an alternative to both socialism and liberalism. From 1886 to 1991, the Colombian Constitution was heavily influenced by that doctrine. The encyclical Quod apostolici muneris (1878) states that the Virgin Mary “does all she can to help [the poor]; she provides homes and hospitals where they may be received, nourished, and cared for all the world over,” and introduces the rhetorical question: “who does not see that this is the best method of arranging the old struggle between the rich and

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poor?”14 Similarly, in Catholic iconography the Sacred Heart stands for “God’s love for mankind.” Up until the constitutional reform, Colombia was officially consecrated to the Sacred Heart: “In 1898, a year before Leo XIII promulgated an encyclical in which he offered all humankind to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the government of Colombia issued a law acknowledging the ‘social reign’ of Jesus Christ.”15 The image mediates between private, national, and global realms, placing Colombia at the “avantgarde” of Catholic humanism and investing traditional family values with a claim to universality. A sharp rebuttal of this maternal mechanism of social consolation accounts for Fernando’s misogyny, particularly his condemnation of motherhood. Fernando does not see any contradiction in celebrating the shooting of pregnant women and praying devotedly to the Mother of God. This attack against a religiously co-opted notion of motherhood suggests that Fernando would like to undo the results of Leo XIII’s reactionary ideas and their correlation in Colombian Regeneración conservadora, except that, in his typically self-contradictory manner, he is at the same time profoundly nostalgic for the ways of the old constitution. Note, however, that what Fernando hates in women are their wombs, as he hates penises in men: the two times his lovers take off their shorts, their guns fall to the ground, assimilated by proximity as sexual organs; when he sees the penis of a dead man, he claims it is “incapable of begetting children, of doing any more evil.”16 In other words, for Fernando, human reproduction, particularly that of humans in poverty, is intrinsically bad. Vallejo gives a literal sense to criticizing the reproduction of the social order.17 Previous studies have addressed the religious elements in the text as literary or as cultural references. Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Pablo Restrepo-Gautier discuss, respectively, how they constitute literary references to Dante and to the gothic novel. As cultural references, they belong to a constellation of elements such as the three scapulars sicarios carry or the “balas rezadas” (blessed bullets) they prepare before a hit. Their interest, however, goes beyond verisimilitude or literariness, for religious images are themselves a threshold between the local and the global, between regional religiosity and the worldwide structure of a church that

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plays a crucial role in defining Colombian national identity and in mediating between the country and the world. The visual regime of the religious icon counterbalances that of television, contributing to the book’s aporetic exploration of the contradictions of the global, ultimately making way for an aggravating resolution of such contradictions. Crucially, the novel’s iconoclasm connects two realms: the political history of Colombia and the visual apparatus of the War on Drugs. First, it shows that Pablo Escobar and other images of the conflict mediate between the local and the global much like the Sacred Heart of Jesus once did for Christianity; secondly, it allows us to appreciate the political theological dimension of the drug war. It is fitting that the narrator constantly addresses foreigners, such as the ill-advised traveler who expects to find toilet paper in the Medellín airport bathrooms or “the Swiss,” as idealized First World citizens. Describing the murder of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán (1943–1989), who was stepping onto a platform to deliver a speech when Escobar’s men shot him down, Fernando reports: The marionette [muñeco] went down and his hero’s ambitions [afán de protagonismo] with him. Dead he achieved what he sought in life. The rumble on the dais went all round the world and caused the name of my country to ring out. I felt so very, very proud of Colombia. . . . “You,” I said to the Swiss, “are practically dead. Observe the images before you: that is life, pure life.”18 Whereas the Swiss people represent the epitome of a boring, predictable, well-regulated life, Fernando stands as an authoritative voice able to guide them as they take a peek into the sort of chaos that could allegedly liven up their lives a little. Through the Swiss, any reader is called upon, as the passage underscores the contrast between the violent story being told and the rather peaceful activity of sitting down to read a novel. Such emotional appeal is among the many more or less obvious rhetorical devices that the keen grammarian—and, one assumes, rhetorician—deploys throughout the text. Later on, Fernando states that Galán “achieved in death that he wanted in life,” as if the candidate’s goal was not to become

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president or to put forward a certain political program, but to appear on global television. However, Galán’s death actually paved the way for the deep (if insufficient) political reform that led to the configuration of an assembly that would draft the new national constitution.19 It is significant then that Our Lady of the Assassins should transform this sacrificial structure by conjoining Galán’s transit from life to death to a transit from flesh to screen, equating the praxis of local politics with media exposure and identifying figuration at the global level with transcendence. Along the same lines, Fernando playfully assimilates existence itself to being on television: “neither he nor I had ever been on television, which is to say we practically didn’t exist.”20 Under this antinomic logic, Galán finally “existed,” only to cease existing. Behind Our Lady of the Assassins’s caricature of the Swiss, made extensive among others to a “japonesito,” lies the topsy-turvy world of “the most criminal country on earth” looking down on nationalities that are often favorably portrayed. Through this inversion, the novel inquires about the grammar of the negatively-charged name “Colombia” in the global imagination and about the place that the country occupies in the epic tale of the War on Drugs. Colombia’s marginal position in the world is such that Galán’s assassination will not go down in history as, say, Robert Kennedy’s, while Pablo Escobar’s infamous legend can in fact rival that of Al Capone. Envisaging Medellín in the early nineties as Hell is not a particularly huge leap of the imagination in the sense that, as Carl Schmitt claims, there is a structural identity between “the metaphysical image of the world a particular age creates” and “the form of a political organization.”21 The drug war is just such a political “organization,” and Our Lady of the Assassins’s underworld captures its corresponding metaphysical image. The novel also conforms to the asymmetries in the commerce of images of the War on Drugs in that Galán is only an icon in Colombia (figure 4.5), while Escobar has global appeal. In terms of political theology, Our Lady of the Assassins’s fundamental critical intuition is that the global in the media’s imagination is, too, a “secularized theological concept,” like those “significant concepts of the modern theory of the state” that Carl Schmitt had in mind in the 1920s.22

Figure 4.5 Campaign ads and billboards where Galán lends his iconic standing to soonto-be-president César Gaviria. Pereira and Bogotá, 1990. Courtesy of Matthew S. Shugart.

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Colombia’s relatively recent past proximity between state and church affairs, and the living remnants thereof, have an underlying affinity with the operation of imagining, through the mediation of visual culture, a polity that extends beyond one’s immediate surroundings. Colombia has never been a theocracy, yet the Sacred Heart remains an image of social significance, in an increasingly secular country, because the image gained a life of its own. It is without a doubt part of a simulacrum, a fundamental disconnection between the law and reality, the written word and the world, and the image and the national subject. Similar disconnections underwrite the relations between local and global realms, which alternatively serve as the unreachable thing in itself that the other desires. Media cater to, yet do not fulfill, this desire. The contest for the nomos of the earth carries on in television screens. Vallejo disrupts this, intervening in the general perception of the place of Colombia in the world, and in so doing, renegotiating its standing in world literature.23 THE HORRORS OF POPUL AR FAITH

There are other icons of the (holy) war on drugs. In recent years, la Santa Muerte (figure 4.6) has become associated with Mexican cartels. Homero Aridjis exploits this connection in a work he names after the icon, imitating Vallejo in a lower key.24 His pulp-fiction style of writing owes a great deal to the detective genre—for instance, a scapegoat dons a gorilla costume, evoking Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders on the Rue Morgue.” Reporter Miguel Medina is invited to the fiftieth birthday party of Santiago López, a cappo di cappi who lavishes his guests with extravagant gifts, especially foreign prostitutes. Medina saves his own neck by trading door keys with the drunken gorilla man, who is meant to receive the sexual services of one such woman as opposed to getting murdered. Medina sleeps next to her, without having sexual relations for fear of the consequences, and is ultimately spared from death. However, earlier that night, while opening and closing doors around the mansion like in a game of Clue, he finds himself spying on a human sacrifice that the drug lord’s inner circle is officiating. It takes place in a secret chapel dedicated to the deity, unequivocally

Figure 4.6 La Santa Muerte Blanca, devotional statuette. Photograph by Robert Casas.

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identified with the epithet “la imagen de la muerte violenta”—the icon of violent death.25 López presides, surrounded by a subordinate drug lord, a Texan businessman, a state governor, high-ranking military officials, a judge, the bishop of Sinaloa, Miss Veracruz, and a bare-chested modelpriestess, among other prominent conspirators.26 With this motley tableau, the narconovela is producing a symbolic resolution to a real-life problem. The imagery is disquieting and repulsive—insects crawl out of the skull’s sockets, the victim is pierced by a dagger—but it also offers the comfort of explanation. At long last, the invisibles of the drug war are made visible in the familiar form of transmogrified Aztec sacrifice. And the hierarchy is clear: the powerful are all in cahoots, following the master criminal and praying to their dark lady. If only things were this simple! The most obvious course of action would be to ban the abhorrent religion, chase down the criminals, and fight corruption at all levels. But the intoxicating icon is at the center of it all. In a related passage, López orders xipeua, a Nahuatl (or, in his words, “ancient Mexican”) word for skinning a man alive, and specifically asks his thugs to have the drugged victim contemplate the icon: “Show him the icon [imagen] of Holy Death. Offer him a few hours of frantic terror, have him suffer, become hopeful, see himself turned into an abject corpse, shit in his pants, wish he were a chair, a window, a fucking [pinche] flower vase. Let him hallucinate with the icon.”27 While in Vallejo the rhythmic, prayer-like prose puts the image into question, Aridjis adopts the language of incantation to capitalize on its power. A passage about fascination that itself expresses fascination, it is nonetheless a noteworthy response to current events. In contemporary Mexico, the terror of the War on Drugs is ever-present; harm, it seems, can come from any and every direction. Objectification of the victim and the ritual display of body parts have become a haunting sight, as gangs torture, dismember, and leave the remnants of their enemies where they are sure to be found. Journalists must perform a difficult balancing act between informing the public, reluctantly or carelessly reproducing the cartels’ terrifying admonitions, and preserving their own lives. Forty-four journalists have been killed in the six years before 2012, while covering a war

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that at that point had already claimed the lives of more than fifty thousand people.28 The drug cartels seek to control the press and the public imagination in an iconocratic contest against the state and private media. Aridjis captures this zeitgeist of terror through the voice of the kingpin López, who fancies his enemy wants to become an object. The statue becomes more real than the victim. It is unclear whether the author is appealing to the reader’s sadomasochistic impulses or seeking to provoke moral horror. In that regard, he reproduces, through the eyes of his protagonist, the conundrum of journalism in Mexico today. Attraction-repulsion structures the plot, as readers wonder how close Medina can get to the source of evil without suffering the consequences. The journalist delivers his promise; he penetrates the sancta sanctorum of the house without taking (again, penetrating) the Polish sexual worker—an objectified human, a luxury good in a global economy—he has been offered. The protagonist’s purported dignity and bravery lie in not participating in this “gift exchange” with López, who then must spare his life. As Miss Veracruz will convey upon exiting the mansion, “nobody leaves here without a gift.”29 Schmitt notes that the sovereign is he who decides over the exception. To Aridjis’s credit as a storyteller of crime fiction, his endgame leads to a paradoxical outcome: López, in order to uphold his own rules, must exercise his sovereign power through pardon. Such is the only possible exception in the faith of Santa Muerte, where punishment is the rule. Devotees of the matron saint have a different story to tell. For thousands of practitioners, Aridjis’s novel would join Rafael Ramírez Heredia’s La esquina de los ojos rojos (2006)30 and other sensationalist media in a campaign of vilification of Santa Muerte. True, numerous narcotraffickers have been found with the ghastly images of the popular saint, but more often than not they prefer to wear brand name clothes and expensive jewelry—the acquisition of which seems to me a more important factor in their recourse to crime. It is difficult to distinguish urban legend from fact when it comes to alleged human sacrifices committed in her name, and it bears asking whether such instances, statistically insignificant amidst the ongoing crisis, typify a murderous religion or constitute the work of

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a few deranged members. In 2009, the Mexican army bulldozed several Holy Death shrines near the country’s northern border in an attempt to intimidate traffickers.31 This act of iconoclasm was the last straw for practitioners, who already faced the opposition of the Catholic Church and mounting voices that called for a nationwide prohibition of Santa Muerte worship. They came out in force. Under banners blazoned with mottos such as “I worship Santa Muerte and am not a narco,” hundreds demonstrated in the main squares of Mexico City and other urban centers. For a day, the state of exception of the country gave way to broader discussions about civil liberties, including freedom of religion. For the most part, Santa Muerte followers are working-class Catholics with unsatisfied spiritual needs. A syncretism of pre-Hispanic Coatlicue, Christian, and Yoruba traditions, the Santa Muerte practice rekindles devotion to la Virgen de Guadalupe—whose garb she literally borrows— and extends some aspects of Día de los Muertos throughout the year. One among several genealogies says that Santa Muerte has been around since the fifties, but has only become a mass phenomenon since a devout woman, known as Doña Queta, established a shrine in Tepito, Mexico City, in 2001.32 The ritual has all the markings of a profound religious experience, combining gravitas and celebration. Devotees face death (their own and human fate in general) and entrust themselves to its mysteries. The Catholic Church has often turned a blind eye on many popular practices that have traditionally functioned as benign travel companions to its sanctioned dogma. Its condemnation of Holy Death comes from the association with narcotrafficking, but arguably also from assuming its role as an ideological state apparatus and from fear of losing its flock. Church spokesmen have characterized the phenomenon as an aberration when in fact one could think of many precedents, from Hamlet staring into Yorick’s skull to late medieval danses macabres. The vilification of Santa Muerte is consistent with the iconocracy of the War on Drugs. Both call for the suppression of the popular and the invisibilization of the poor. The drug war is a top-down initiative, while the devotion has the force of a grassroots movement. Narcoculture operates as a return of the repressed, with the caveat that labeling the phenomenon as

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“narco” is already part of a mechanism of domestication and suppression. The evocatively Aztec climactic scene in Aridjis points us in this direction. While it is visually striking to contemplate the popular, syncretic icon next to the colonial cathedral and republican buildings of the zócalo, as could be seen during the devotees’ protests, the sight can be interpreted in several ways. To viewers trained in the culprit-seeking, scapegoating mentality of mainstream narratives of the War on Drugs, it signals social decay: “narcos” are taking over. To practitioners, it is a coming out of the shadows and an act of legitimation. To exploitative, self-appointed pontifices like “Father” David Romo, it may even be good for business (he was arrested in 2011 on charges of kidnapping and money laundering). Be this as it may, it is clear that Aridjis has little critical distance from the visual apparatus of the War on Drugs, and instead reproduces its stereotypes.33 As a result, La Santa Muerte portrays narcoculture as something of a guilty bourgeois pleasure. It cites full stanzas of narcocorridos, tallies López’s wealth in its many forms—horses, luxury cars, a private plane— and relishes displays of masculinist power that the resolution only partially disavows. There is nothing truly drug-specific about these elements, just popular music with crime themes, kitsch, and machismo. Then there is the imminence of violence, which produces another layer of morbid appeal. Significantly, the complicit gaze comes to an abrupt stop when readers face Holy Death herself. For practitioners, the icon, affectionately called “La Flaquita” or “La Niña Blanca,” is an instrument of mediation, as other images are. This became apparent when citizens toted their statues to the main square, standing up for their civil rights. In La Santa Muerte, the image is not a threshold but a shut door; it is a sign of otherness. It is the one image that would allow us to distinguish “good” popular forms from “evil” ones—those of narcoculture. Medina, the alter ego of former diplomat and environmentalist Homero Aridjis, thematizes the fear of giving in to a low aesthetics. Lidia Santos has observed in a different context that cursi (tacky) acts as a social barrier. In this case, the rejection of kitsch leads Aridjis to offer a one-sided account of the popular faith.34 If the popular must always be excessive, devotion to the icon is only taken seriously because it is a deadly affair.

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As Andrew Chesnut notes, La Santa Muerte evokes the lavish celebrity wedding of Niurka Marcos, officiated by Romo in 2004.35 Aridjis, who told Chesnut in an interview that there was little fictionalization in his novel,36 could have considered a different kind of celebration, such as those taking place in Tepito. But in López’s mansion, all is discipline and punishment. As in the Marquis de Sade’s novels, the many surrender their will to the pleasures of the few. Meanwhile, the Santa Muerte shrine in Tepito holds a collective, all-volunteer, peaceful feast on the Day of All Souls; Doña Queta reportedly cooks 120 kilos of chicken on this holiday.37 At his birthday party, it seems that not a leaf falls from a tree without López’s knowledge, while at the Holy Death celebration, there is no rigid script. Doña Queta comes across more as a facilitator than a priestess, exhibiting the heterogeneous, Heavy Metal-inspired icons produced by the faithful and defending the right to practice “como a ti te nazca” (as you feel like).38 (Unlike Romo, who allegedly devised a new icon, “the Angel of Death,” to benefit from its commercial reproduction.) Writing for the New Yorker, Alma Guillermoprieto identifies that laxness as part of the faith’s appeal for narcotraffickers, whose sins Santa Muerte condones.39 Yet in the novel, it is portrayed as a rigid, martial order. Narcotraffickers are the enemy in a holy war, a disciplined army of infidels. They are not, as is often the case in real life, underprivileged people who may at one point turn to crime. Aesthetic qualms with the popular aside, La Santa Muerte expresses a deeply ingrained anxiety about the future of Mexico. Religion, in the etymological sense of re-ligare, to bind together, can serve as an indicator of the cohesiveness of a society. Yet it is not the case that a majority of Christians is battling against a vicious minority of pagans, as the novel’s subtext would have us believe. It is the secular social tissue that has been torn. Fantasizing about state-sanctioned single religion is a displaced, regressive attempt to repair it. The forces that separate Mexicans from each other are primarily economical, not faith-based. This is why political iconomy and theology allow us to unmask the ideology of the War on Drugs, explicate its appeal for cultural production, and eventually take steps to stop its dynamic as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Against the grain of Aridjis’s narrative,

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we could see in the image of Holy Death not a goddess of the infidels, but an alternative popular iconocracy that builds constitutive power from the bottom up. Santa Muerte has the potential of organizing the social against, not around narcotrafficking. Mexican civil society desires that the criminal portion of her faithful show themselves in public so that they may be apprehended. Giving visibility and agency to the broader base of her followers could actually contribute to this task. Consider the authoritative study Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005), in which anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz establishes a connection between all-powerful death and sovereignty. Death has such a strong presence in Mexico, the argument goes, because the country is something of a failed empire—its losses throughout the nineteenth century, territorial and otherwise, were the United States’ gains. The ubiquitous imagery of death is about disseminated power; they constitute a scattered, symbolic reserve of the nation. Death is part of daily life in the weak Mexican nation-state, while it is less prevalent in Europe or the United States, for those locales have conquered death, or at least rationalized its inevitability. The new collective investment in the image of Santa Muerte would be an analogous mechanism of compensation, a reaction to an even weaker state. While I agree with Lomnitz that decorated sugar skulls and papier-mâché skeletons render Mexicans visible in the global imaginary, I also think that a vilified Santa Muerte marginalizes them. Such dynamics occur both sub- and transnationally. “Mexico is becoming the Tepito of the world,” observes a local.40 While in Our Lady of the Assassins Fernando invites us to see the world in a slum, in La Santa Muerte Medina passes through a Potemkin ghetto on his way to the mansion. Indeed, López has built the facades of poor houses (“casuchas despintadas”) to hide his suburban estate behind them.41 These representations of poverty differ significantly. Vallejo’s rabid alter-ego claims that overpopulation, by which he means the reproduction of poor people, leads to chaos. The assessment is so blunt that most readers presumably distance themselves from it and examine their own prejudices. By contrast, La Santa Muerte reduces poverty to a superficial manifestation of narcotrafficking, when the opposite would be more

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accurate: narcotrafficking is an epiphenomenon of social difference— fueled, of course, by prohibition. Aridjis forces Santa Muerte into iconocratic alignment with a world order in which the faulty premises of the War on Drugs make sense. Vallejo leverages on the icon of the Virgin Mary to exacerbate underlying contradiction. In both cases, as in other narconovelas I now turn to survey, the religious element is a prism for the transparency of narco-crime and the opacity of its social logic. In approaching such works, it is essential that we, critics and general readers, do not turn a blind eye to that logic or assume that it is the spectacularity of crime that defines this global genre. If we were to do that, at best we would foreclose the possibility that such works tell us something about the world that we did not know already. At worst, we might become complicit with the geopolitical structures that have led to the lamentable present state of affairs. CRITICAL NARCOCARTOGR APHIES

Narconovelas allow for a better understanding of the stakes of thinking and reading globally. Skulls and Madonnas on altarpieces can be reduced to local color for page-turners—call it narco-kitsch—or we can consider them as symptoms of broader visual and social structures, as I have attempted to do here. As I see it, the form of the narconovela, with its particular iconocratic operations, captures social contradiction on a world scale. Therein lies its value for both Latin American and world literature. It is a sprawling, diverse terrain. Some Latin American narconovelas are “born translated,” to borrow Rebecca Walkowitz’s influential coinage: “a novel that does not simply appear in translation, but in important ways has also been written for translation.”42 As the allusions to foreign tourists in Our Lady of the Assassins demonstrate, in some cases this original act of translation is self-critical. Meanwhile, other cultural products related to narcotrafficking, which Alejandro Herrero Olaizola has insightfully analyzed in Bourdieuan terms, simply yearn to be consumed; as he puts it, they perform “Colombia for export.”43 Indeed, a growing body of Colombian and Mexican novels aspire to become the best-selling spy novels, or

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narcothrillers, of our day. To that end, they present highly readable stories, which above all do not question the narratives and visual structures of the War on Drugs, itself a function of geopolitics, or of the major underlying issue that is the growing transnational social gap. Questioning such things would be, so to speak, bad for business. Another way of thinking this distinction is to say that some narconovelas make us pause, while others merely offer entertainment value. (The second type could be the perfect example of Tim Park’s “dull global novel.”44) The difference is less a matter of taste as it is a reflection of how much plotlines, characters, and other narrative structures can distance themselves from the mainstream account of the War on Drugs as a clash between good and evil—which it may be, but not exclusively—or between brave heroes and powerful villains. To my mind, the drug war is such a case study for the delusions of ideology that one may comfortably stand by this categorical division. For instance, a work like the Spaniard Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s La reina del sur (2002),45 essentially an adventure novel featuring an antiheroic female protagonist, humanizes and singularizes the criminal by giving the reader a taste of her underworld—and little else. It is a work of empathy that communicates the hardships and glories of banditry, but also one that ultimately reinforces the ideology of the War on Drugs rather than call it to question. There is some social commentary, as well as a more or less achieved critique of machismo through the empowerment of a female subject—similar, in that regard, to the Colombian Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras (1999).46 But there is little in the way of bringing the reader to appreciate the historical contingency of the penalization of narcotics, sanctioned under Nixon in 1971 and Reagan in 1986, and further reified with Plan Colombia and Iniciativa Mérida. The same applies to narcocorridos, narcotelenovelas, and the more commercially successful products of so-called narcoculture. They converge around an existential claim to a life of hardship that perhaps we should call “narcofatalism.” Often focusing on the rise and fall of criminals, they subscribe to the logic of “the higher they climb, the harder they fall.” By doing so, they assimilate civil order with occupying a fixed place in the social hierarchy. They are ultimately stories of hubris. “If only drug

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lords and ladies had remained loyal to their humble origins,” they seem to imply, “this or that tragedy could have been prevented.” Yet it is precisely those economic disparities, coupled with the penalization, which fuel the trade to begin with. Religion appears in those works as a straightforward continuation of an agonist rationale: perpetrators are satanical or godly, plebeian or royal—witness Pérez-Reverte’s “queen” or Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del reino (2004).47 “Se escapó el Chapo Guzmán” says a corrido, “el dinero hace milagros / ahí se pudo comprobar.” The song ironizes about corruption using a religious metaphor. Money makes miracles, but miracles make money: the drug trade is a form of primitive accumulation sanctioned by international policies. Traffickers profit from their product as much as they do from the restrictions to its circulation. Contrast this mode of cultural production with the thoughtful iconoclasm of Our Lady of the Assassins, above. Its Christian motifs may be part of an emerging narco-style, but there is a depth to its religious experience, including that of apostasy, that communicates the precariousness of the drug war. Although one could consider this work one of the first examples of the genre, even a foundational text, it veers from the commonplace tropes that, many years later, led all the way to entertainment products like the telenovela El cartel de los sapos (Caracol TV, 2008). I agree with my colleague Franco Moretti in that the novels we remember the most are not necessarily the most representative of a given genre, but those that test the limits of its conventions. Arguably, in time we will pay less attention to a clever thriller like Balas de plata (2008),48 by the Sinaloan writer Élmer Mendoza, and look more at how Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous 2666 (2004)49 situates itself in the outer rim of the narco-genre—a point I merely insinuate here. Reflective narconovelas do not spell out an argument against the War on Drugs or espouse any sensible alternative such as, in Paul Gootenberg’s words, “domesticating” the consumption of cocaine in first world markets.50 But they may conjure a global polity in ways that entertainment is not set out to do. The prefix “narco-” is constantly expanding its scope. From the crime ballads of “narcocorridos” to the over-elaborate forms of “narcoarquitecture,” from the recent “narcotelenovela” to the umbrella term “narcoculture,” such coinages replicate at the noun-level the equivocal nature of the

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expression “war on drugs.”51 Some of these phenomena coalesce around themes, such as crime and its consequences, or certain aesthetic values, such as bombast and defiance. For the most part, however, they are not about drugs, so “narco-” becomes something of an idle modifier. Analogously, the war “on drugs” awkwardly conjoins public health campaigns with actual combat against the transnational networks that distribute illegal substances. Consequently, I think we should use the term “narconovela” with a grain of salt. Although such novels make up part of a constellation of works that have to do with narcotrafficking, they could equally belong to other, different categories. Instead of replicating in criticism the exceptionalizing and moralizing effects of the prefix “narco-,” I propose we appreciate these narratives within a longer history of power and powerlessness, including the deployment of constitutive power at the global level and through iconic images. The latter does not amount to saying that there is not an emerging style and sensibility that one could label “narco.” In various media, artists themselves vindicate the category—not unlike that of “gangsta.” This suggests a research agenda, carried forth exemplarily by a special number edited by María Fernanda Lander for Revista de Estudios Hispánicos entitled “Narcogeografías,” where authors naturalize the notion of “narco” and proceed to generate positive knowledge about its culture.52 Mapping out narcoculture is a valuable critical task, but I find that embracing the positivist turn is less so. We need to engage with the negativity of these works, and inquire about the contours of the concept and its historical conjuncture. Lander, Gabriela Polit, and Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, among others, have wondered about the narcotization of taste, but do not question the narcotization of criticism. We should be asking of “narco” some of the same questions we ask of other contemporary phenomena: parse it out—if at all—from popular forms like “chicha,” investigate its conflicting exchanges with highbrow modes, distinguish the depiction of violence from exuberant displays of social mobility, and question the role of the critic in its circulation. Postulating the narconovela as a world literary genre in these terms complements my discussion of the global Latin American novel. To be

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clear, I find that the narconovela is a subset of that broader concept, to which this book is devoted (and of which Bolaño is but one practitioner). At the same time, I have proposed that the narconovela could be seen as a world literary phenomenon. These two positions are in tension, because the first emphasizes the Latin American specificity of narconovelas, while the second provides a platform for comparison with cultural products from elsewhere. I find this to be a fruitful tension, for I consider that future world literature studies should read the multiple cultural manifestations of narcotrafficking around the world after the narconovela, a phenomenon that originates in Latin America and is extensively discussed in Latin Americanism. The options are either to affirm a hegemonic model where Latin America provides the raw literary materials and metropolitan academia does the criticism, or to engage with a semi-peripheral critical tradition that may shed light on the literary works from different coordinates. It is easy to forget that narcotrafficking is an undercurrent of globalization. The illegal transnational networks that sustain it are distorted mirror images of corporations, among other legal structures. Drug lords are CEOs without the suit: their “mergers” and “hostile takeovers” are considerably more hostile. As Thomas Cash, a DEA special agent, candidly put it, “Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.”53 Narconovelas are primordially about power and accumulation, about fabulously successful capitalists who, perhaps paradoxically, have no place in the established capitalist world order. The literary type of the “narco,” like fabled bandits before him, gives readers the thrill of breaking the law—except there is a legal framework that is still taking shape and is potentially global in reach. If we probe into the conditions of verisimilitude for tales of narcotrafficking, we may end up asking what kind of world we want to live in, a global society of control or a community of transnational citizens. Rebecca Biron presses this point, by positing that sicarios are “endpoint examples of global finance work.”54 Per her argument, they carry to their ultimate consequences the dehumanizing effects of neoliberalism. Much of this chapter points in this direction as well. And yet, beyond representations of the most obviously morally

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repulsive assassins, narcofiction can also be about personal empowerment, social mobility, and the upending of social hierarchy. It is too soon to say whether a moment of so much instability, in criticism as elsewhere, leads to a concentration or to a redistribution of symbolic and material wealth. The surge of narcofiction all around the world, from big-budget to low-budget productions, from the sophisticated to the crass, is but one case of literature responding to a world market—and an illegal one at that. Although it is logical to make the inference that wherever there is drug trade (i.e., everywhere) there will be some form of narcofiction, it does not follow that these forms converge. Point of view matters a great deal, particularly when it comes to representing a rarefied, taboo, and yet virtually ubiquitous subject—more importantly, one fueled by precariousness and inequality. For a final example, consider that the popular U.S. television series Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), with its premise of a cancer-struck suburban high school teacher’s gradual transformation into a ruthless drug lord, can be seen as an attempt by the American middle classes to finally own a problem they have created, in part, by disowning it.55 Viewers get to look in the eye—in an unrealistic, romanticized (if gory) way—the mess that grew while they were looking in a different direction. Symbolically, suburbanites can also claim a piece in the action that, in the short but robust tradition of narcofiction, belonged to drug entrepreneurs from the Global South. Cancer is the shibboleth into the underworld, and here it works as the displaced, self-justifying taste of the desperation that drives the disempowered into a deadly business. A new take on the self-made American businessman emerges as the ruling icon, or in a different metaphor, as the card that trumps all others. These include, as viewers of the series will recall, two egregious twin Mexican hitmen, lean Terminator-like killing machines that pray to Santa Muerte. A full picture of the world of narconovelas will only emerge once we supersede both the genre and the present status quo—conceivably, once an international health campaign approach is adopted over policing as the chief way of curtailing drug consumption. However, one can approximate

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the worlding effect that narconovelas presently have, as this chapter has shown, by engaging them as sites of visible contradiction between the local and the global, between fantasies of reversing the world order and aspirations of beating capitalism at its own game of entrepreneurship and surplus value.

5 ON DUCHAMP AND BEUYS AS LATIN AMERICAN WRITERS

The appeal of contemporary art is strong in present-day Latin American literature. Manifestations of this phenomenon range from conventional storytelling that takes art as its topic to practices that integrate performance and the written word. Among the former, one could count the perverse exhibition narrated in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star (Estrella distante, 1996; trans., 2004), where a torturer exhibits photographs of his victims, or the performance from the author’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, analyzed in chapter 1, where a military pilot traces ominous verses in the sky above the Atacama Desert. An example of a more radically symbiotic supratextual relationship between art and literature would be the work of Bolaño’s countryman, Pedro Lemebel, who presents his own body as an art object within performances of sorts that later resurface in his prose. (His art collective, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis [Mares of the Apocalypse], with its defiant acts of public transvestitism in times of Pinochet, paved the way for his later writings as an urban chronicler.) Indeed, not since the vanguardias has there been in Latin American literature, and more recently also in its criticism, such a meaningful exploration about the relations between different creative media.1

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Beyond the obvious explanations for this state of affairs—that contemporary art has become more important in the region and broadened its public worldwide—there are two interconnected motivations for Latin American authors to turn to art. First, by adopting the conventions of the “art world,” authors transform their inscription within international literary circuits. In this sense, as the loci of enunciation of contemporary Latin American literature seek recognition beyond the realm of the national, they find in art compensation for some of the limitations of their traditional, more local readerships. The second motivation for the rise of “art statement novels” in the region owes to a more formal concern: assimilating contemporary art allows narrative to represent global culture in radically new ways. This chapter addresses these two components of the broader turn to art by showing how representative works by two central figures of contemporary Latin American literature, César Aira and Mario Bellatin, recur to conceptualism and performance, respectively, to formulate critical visions of globality. Given that avant-garde, cross-media experimentation has a long history in the region, one may ask: what distinguishes this later wave? My tentative hypothesis is that it takes place against the backdrop of a recognizable, transnational canon of contemporary art. Duchamp is a household name, in Latin America and elsewhere. He has the status that, say, Michelangelo or Goya had before him. While his standing is more subject to debate than those of the most revered masters from the past, his work and legacy are already staples of global culture, circulating within rarefied intellectual circles and as mass-market reproductions (including all sorts of museum gift-shop knickknacks). Consequences include an obvious risk of trivialization, as well as of a reconcentration of cultural capital in Northern cultural institutions, which have the capacity to broker for a world market and often promote a U.S.-Eurocentric account of avant-garde movements. As I will show, contemporary Latin American writers who intervene in this terrain challenge the domestication and delocalization of contemporary art, offering literary forms that Latinamericanize and revitalize the spirit of historical avant-gardes. That subversion of the workings of the art world, in turn, transforms their inscription within world literature.

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PARIS AIR IN THE POLLUTED SKIES OF MEXICO CIT Y

As was made evident already in the supermarket tales analyzed in chapter 3, idiosyncratic fables constitute the heart of Aira’s books. Readers are often invited to make sense of the events narrated, and just as often to appreciate the aesthetic, ludic quality of their carefully constructed nonsense. True to form, “Duchamp en México” (1997) follows the peculiar shopping spree of an Argentine tourist, who kills time in Mexico City by buying multiple copies of a certain coffee-table book on the French artist. The protagonist is a man of modest means; under the influence of an unusually favorable currency exchange, he becomes something of a compulsive shopper. Because every purchase is less expensive than the previous one, he believes he gains the difference, regardless of the net amount he ends up spending; this leads him to consider himself “negatively” a rich man. Indulging in fantastically detailed numerical calculations of his “wealth,” he imagines enlarging the receipts and binding them into a book. Ambiguously, he takes the receipts, the arithmetic operations, and the fictional Duchamp en México, as a whole, as the formula or outline that authors will use in a distant future for the private pastime of writing novels—“as if painting on a coloring book.”2 The story ends when the narrator, trapped in repetitive calculations and seemingly unable to stop buying the book, wishes for that future writer to review the numbers and fare better than he has. As we shall see, Aira carries out a cultural critique of global capital through a displaced continuation of Duchamp’s project. “Duchamp en México” prefers mischief over gravitas, but its intellectual agenda is an unmistakably serious one, as the story seeks to estrange our relation with the book object, undermine essentialist discourses of Latin American culture, and ultimately counter the exoticist-consumerist impulse that fuels economic globalization. Aira activates the legacy of Duchamp by adopting the concerns and methods of conceptualist art at large, but also weaves in references to specific pieces by the artist. However, the emphasis is on process rather than product: what matters most is the trajectory of the coffee-table book as luxury item and tourist souvenir to its reinvented

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standing as a conjectural object within an art collection. Not the objet trouvé, but its dialectical coming to be. Consider how the traces of Duchamp’s work unfold in the text. There are three pieces that are likely to have served as inspiration for Aira: Trap (1917), Paris Air (1919), and Box in a Valise (1935–1941). The author confounds the élan of these works in his writing, overlapping Trap and Box in a Valise in the opening scene and in various other moments throughout the story, even though the latter is Duchamp’s retrospective take on half of his life’s work; seemingly, he also reorganizes the corpus of Duchamp’s creation around Paris Air, a piece that with minimal resources explores the experiential dimension of souvenirs and travel. At the onset of the nouvelle, the protagonist falls into the “trap” of an explosive jack-in-thebox that also drags along city sights3. Although no apparent change befalls the protagonist, who carries on with his Mexican tour, with this peculiar exercise of the imagination Aira calls attention to the physical books that readers hold in their hands, which would “contain” the character like a genie in a bottle—a glimpse at the exploration of the status of the bookobject that comes with the multiple coffee-table books and their receipts. Aira’s trampa combines the ideological operations of Trap with the use of containment in Box in a Valise and Paris Air, subjecting them to the seriality and repetition that would be prevalent in later practices of conceptualism, including those by Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub, among others. As Sandra Contreras rightly notes, Aira “situates himself historically as if he were an avant-gardist at the origins of the avant-garde.”4 This “as if ” does not mean ignoring the developments that have taken place in art and literature after Duchamp, but instead turning these traditions on their heads. Trap (figure 5.1) is central to Duchamp’s critique of capitalism. It is more commonly known by its French name, Trébuchet, because of its allusions to an endgame in chess and to a military device that resembles a catapult. The artist recalls the piece as a “real coat hanger that I wanted someone to put on the wall and hang my things on but I never did come to that—so it was on the floor and I would kick it every minute, every time I went out—I got crazy about it and I said the Hell with it, if it wants

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Figure 5.1 Marcel Duchamp, Trébuchet (Trap, 1917/replica, 1964). Assisted readymade: coat rack, 19 x 100.1 x 11.6 cm. The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem © 2014 Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

to stay there and bore me, I’ll nail it down.”5 Why, if the coat hanger made him so crazy, did he not take the reasonable measure of nailing it on the wall, where it clearly belonged? And how is this “art,” if he did not really do anything? (Duchamp’s answer to this last question would be that it is not art, precisely.) We could linger in puzzlement for a long time, for the work is true to its name both in making us trip with our thoughts and in catapulting them ahead. Additionally, Duchamp dodges expectations that his discourse about the object were not part of the work but something that precedes and supersedes it. Neither is it something that brings the work to a closure (“what I really meant to say is that . . . ”), but rather a call for further unproductive speculation. This unproductive mechanism is a key to understanding Duchamp’s, and Aira’s, critiques of capitalism, which are not quite abstract as they are practical: in appreciating their work, viewers and readers glimpse what it would be like to suspend themselves from capitalist labor relations and utilitarianism.

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Duchamp was a “perverse Taylorist,” much as Aira is a “perverse neoliberal.” Trap hijacks the rationality of Taylorism, also known as “scientific management,” Frederick Taylor’s (1856–1915) enormously influential methods for enhancing productivity. Taylorism reorganized the workplace and the household, privileging efficiency over any other concern. As Helen Molesworth argues, Duchamp followed the principles of this doctrine in order to disrupt them. The true Taylorist would ensure that the coat hanger is within arm’s reach once one goes through the door, yet not so close as to obstruct the door’s movement; Duchamp “calculates” the most encumbering spot and plants the hanger there. Aira’s “Duchamp en México” does to narrative space what Trap does to a room: if walking toward a coat hanger on the floor gives the impression of climbing a wall, reading Aira is like being thrust forward by the fast-paced tempo yet “remaining still,” in the sense that nothing much seems to happen. In economic terms, the work maximizes unproductivity, stretching its pact of verisimilitude in much the same way as conceptualist practices challenge the limits of art (hence the rising suspense that accompanies the nonsensical accumulation of “negative capital”).6 While Trap singularizes an object that plays a part in a daily ritual of the separation of the public and the private—you hang the coat to signal that you are home, where work is supposed to end—Aira’s trampa straddles the threshold between work and travel. Duchamp exposes how leisure becomes maintenance labor, that is, a necessary link in the chain that makes it possible for modern life to revolve around work; Aira further exposes tourism as a privileged form of maintenance labor in a globalized economy, where life revolves around market exchange.7 Despite these similarities, Duchamp’s subversion of scientific management differs from Aira’s perverse neoliberalism in that neoliberalism proper has less of a doctrinal body than its historical antecedent. Neoliberalism contributed to economic globalization by incorporating labor from vastly disparate regions into streamlined circuits of supply and demand—a Taylorist world order where the transnational relocation of factories and consumers maximizes profit.8 But while Taylorism was the stuff of manuals, neoliberalism is a minimal set of fundamental beliefs, such as deregulation, privatization, and laissez faire. David Harvey aptly

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defines it as “the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action.”9 Could we not describe the rationale behind the protagonist’s perambulations exactly in those terms? From this vantage point, it becomes clear that this story is about market forces unleashed, represented in a shopping spree that takes a life of its own and in feverish financial operations that lose all rapport to labor. The protagonist’s sudden rise in buying power results from the contrasting economic situations of Mexico and Argentina. The story is set at a time when the former was going through a dire post-NAFTA devaluation, while the latter was in the heyday of “Ley de Convertibilidad,” which established by decree that one peso would equal one dollar.10 Empowered by a strong currency, the Argentine tourist could roam the world like never before . . . unaware of the resounding collapse of free-market optimism that would take place in 2001. Visitors to Mexico could indeed “become richer” during their visit; sobering figures include “the largest depreciation of the currency in one year, from about 5.3 pesos per dollar to over 10 pesos per dollar between December 1994 and November 1995.”11 Aira seeks to capture the fundamental absurdity of the ups and downs of international finance markets. After calculating the astronomical value of his “savings” by buying multiple books—197,136 million pesos worth, to be exact—and declaring that it was still practically nothing due to the devaluation of the Mexican peso, the protagonist then remarks that the daily wage of a construction worker is twenty-three pesos.12 Clearly, absurdity here is a way of denouncing the casualties of the world economic order. Aira turns to Duchamp again when it comes to representing these inequalities, for the artist’s work allows the writer to establish a link between discrete transactions and macroeconomic narrative. In formulating its critique of global capital, “Duchamp en México” conflates Paris Air (figure 5.2) with the later Box in a Valise, accentuating the tension between profit and devaluation that was already present in the earlier piece. Upon quitting France for the United States, Duchamp asked a pharmacist to empty a glass ampoule, to let it fill with air, and then to seal it up again: “I thought of it as a present for [Walter] Arensberg, who had everything money could buy. So I brought him an ampoule of Paris Air.”13 A satirical

Figure 5.2 Marcel Duchamp, Paris Air (1919). Sculpture (50 cc of Paris air). Glass ampoule (broken and later restored). Height: 5 1/4 inches (13.3 cm). The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. © 2014 Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

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reflection on the condition of Paris as an object of desire, the resulting piece is extremely fragile—an act of thievery that turns gratuity into gain—yet also “cures” a rich man, the artist’s life-long patron, from the condition of being beyond a gift economy. By contrast, Box in a Valise, conceived during his artistic stardom, unequivocally champions selfdevaluation.14 A collection of miniatures of his most renowned works to date, including Paris Air and the famous Fountain (1917, after a urinal), the Box is Duchamp’s attempt to avert the mystification of his own prior creations. If the originals, which were not “original” in the first place—the ampoule belonged on the pharmacist’s shelf, the urinal was designed for a more utilitarian purpose—were themselves an attack on the one-of-akind masterpiece predominant in Western art historiography, the miniatures carry this process one step forward. Through a double evocation of Paris Air and Box in a Valise, Aira’s protagonist binds commodity fetishism and international financial speculation: The secret of the tourism industry, to which this country gives so much importance, lies in miniaturizing national treasures, so that the visitor can buy them and take them in his suitcase. This is what makes tourism function in a consumer society. Modes of miniaturizing are very varied. . . . With landscapes one can make jigsaw puzzles, with mountains, pendants. Already my revered Duchamp, that precursor, put air of Paris in a glass ampoule. And if what a country has to offer is the giveaway life of its beaches, it suffices to make a reduced-scale representation of time. An extremely practical short circuit is to miniaturize the value of the currency. With Lilliput money even poor tourists like me are in condition to buy every miniature they fancy, and even some more to take as gifts.15 Here Aira presents a literal rendering of the time-space compression that, according to Harvey, characterizes advanced capitalism.16 Capitalism may “turn the world into a smaller place,” but it does so at a human cost; devaluation, the “miniaturizing” of currency, is a form of expropriation. Aira’s tourist reveals the collateral damage of the global financial market

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by investing his idiosyncratic souvenir with some of the qualities of Duchamp’s work. “Duchamp en México” replicates the artist’s gesture by trying to capture the air of Mexico City, or assemble Mexico in a Valise. But the plot inverts the fiction of the souvenir as something that captures reality, instead offering a view of the tourist caught in the souvenir. Here souvenirs estrange us from our memories (when they are supposed to bring them back to life) and from other human beings as well (when they are supposed to “connect” us with them). The shopping spree, an idealized liberating experience, is the ultimate trap. Aira fantasizes with a commodity that could transform consumer culture, becoming a model for the internal collapse of the system, or “una maqueta de implosión.”17 Here institutional critique—the practice of changing art institutions from within, through the effects of works of art—becomes ideology critique.18 As Dierdra Reber has noted in regard to a different novel, Aira writes from within consumerism, confounding our libidinal attachment to souvenirs and commodities. Primeval bargain, project-novel, and mathematical calculations are all part of this destabilizing operation, which plays out both in the mind of the reader and in the delirious series of events that unfold. Hence the enigmatic passage in which, out of the blue, someone hands the Virgin Mary’s viscera to the protagonist.19 The narrator claims so emphatically that this random episode (“historieta intercalada”) has nothing to do with the master plan of the project-novel that one is led to believe that it is actually its climax, that moment when the religion of global capitalism is revealed and commodity fetishism becomes idolatry proper. This interpolation of the religious relic into the realm of commercial relics parodies, through nonsense, the convertibility of capital and currency. If anything, sacred or profane, can be measured according to its exchange value, then in some sense anything can turn into something else. Indeed, the religious relic, described as a “precious factory,” later becomes a turtle’s viscera.20 As before in the “reduced-scale representation of time,” speculation eclipses labor. Countering the invisibilization of labor requires self-awareness about the acts of reading and writing. In this regard, Aira draws from the broader tradition of conceptualism, the tendency in art, anticipated by

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Duchamp, where the concept “behind” a work of art comes to the foreground and even takes its place. Classic examples are a group exhibition at Seth Siegelaub’s gallery in 1965 that consisted solely of the catalogue for that exhibition; Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), in which he placed side by side a chair, a picture of a chair and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word “chair”; and the painting by René Magritte famous for the jarring effect of presenting a drawing of a pipe and the caption “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (1968).21 Whereas conceptualism steered art away from the emphasis on the finished plastic form into the realm of language and concept, Aira interrupts with a conceptualist gesture of his own: the regular operations of a medium already based on language and concept so as to return to it with a new outlook. Hence the invitation to regard “Duchamp en México” as an incomplete project. One may more easily imagine the Siegelaub catalogue being turned into a more “physical” exhibition than one of Aira’s novelitas being turned into something “more real,” but it is precisely this perplexity that Aira is aiming at. The conceptualist nature of Aira’s endeavor comes across most forcefully by contrasting Sol LeWitt’s 1967 manifesto with the “definition” of the project-novel: In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.22 Truly [en realidad], it is a new and promising genre: not the novels, of which nothing can be expected, but their master plan, so that someone else writes them. . . . There will be no more novels, at least not as we know them: what will get published will be outlines, and the developed novels will be private exercises that will not see the light of day. And the publication will have sense; one will buy books to do something with them, not just read them or say that one reads them.23 Aira follows the conceptualist call to postpone the audience’s encounter with the work of art. These are paradoxical gestures, since Aira’s text is

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a loosely narrated nouvelle and not the outline for a future novel, while LeWitt’s statement is an execution and not something “perfunctory” in a strict sense. In both cases, the emphasis on process over product is about foreclosing the possibility of art itself becoming a commodity. Aira must unwrite his way out of consumerism, and he does so by sidestepping the institutionalized place of ready-mades and conceptualism in the historiography of Western art, preferring instead the frailness of their inception—or as he puts it elsewhere, art “on the very verge of not being.”24 The story reverts the process that leads to the coffee-table book, which stands at the endpoint of a trajectory that turns art into readily available, consumable information. There is no irony left in a luxury object that cancels out the creative forces “still” to be found in Duchamp; it signals the emptiness of a project. The project-novel rises as its antagonist: whereas in the coffee-table book commercialism has triumphed over creation, in the project-novel there is a restitution of the contradictions between creation and commercialism that originally informed Duchamp’s practice and the work by later conceptualists. The author cannot actualize Duchamp’s critique of capitalism without desacralizing the artist’s figure and, to a certain extent, without bastardizing his work. This accounts for Aira’s hodgepodge of artistic references, which desingularize particular pieces and foreground the affinity of their method with conceptualism at large. However, a deeper provocation is the mutual Latin Americanization of Duchamp and the reconceptualization of Latin American art that underpins the story’s narrative arc. How often are the words “Mexico” and “Duchamp” even in the same sentence? For many readers, the expectations that come to mind in relation to the name “Marcel Duchamp” conflict with those evoked by “Mexico.” As the protagonist notes, “one is supposed to buy Mexican books when coming to Mexico. . . . And this was an imported book, a large hardcover art book about Duchamp. Not Rivera, or Orozco, or Frida Kahlo, or Dr. Atl, but Duchamp.”25 Fittingly, the actual book cover features Nuestra imagen actual (1947), by the one great Mexican muralist left unmentioned, David Siqueiros. In the painting, a barechested man with a stone for a head with his hands held out, the palms open, as if begging—a representation of an impoverished, faceless Mexican people (figure 5.3).26 Aira heightens the contradictions between

Figure 5.3 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Nuestra imagen actual (1947). © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

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nativism and exoticism by presenting the anodyne coffee-table book as more representative of contemporary Latin America than solely of Mexican art, which would be, in turn, just as commodified as the French artist’s oeuvre. Aira’s open-ended narratives often leave more questions than answers, and “Duchamp en México” is no exception. A tale that so keenly emphasizes the status of the book as a possible art object invites further reflection on the presence of that particular work by Siqueiros on the fictional book’s cover. Is Aira replicating the theme of defacement? This is plausible, if Aira’s Duchampian method is at odds with the politically engaged, figurative, and monumental practice of muralism. Moreover, the internal monologue of a petty bourgeois tourist in Mexico City could not be further away from the openly revolutionary project of Siqueiros, a committed Stalinist who notably plotted to assassinate Trotsky. Perhaps Aira is one to dwell in contradiction, marveling both at the smallness of Paris Air and at the enormity of muralist art; perhaps there was no authorial intervention in the choice of cover. Be this as it may, Aira clearly sides with the Euro-North American conceptualist tradition when it comes to interpellating readers or raising issues about “Latin Americanness.”27 This aesthetic option for non-pictoric, “contemporary” artforms serves the cause of perverse neoliberalism, which achieves a political effect through more subtle means that sharply distinguish themselves from the epic style of muralism. But can Aira’s narrative conceptualism counter commodity fetishism? In the novel’s language: is there any chance that the “scale model of implosion” (“maqueta de implosión”) led to an actual collapse? Global capitalism would implode if our naturalized link to commodities became as estranged as that in the story. Then “reality would become real,” as the protagonist wishes for the future novelist in his final statement.28 However, in an earlier passage Aira offers a humorous—and vaguely disparaging—take on the import of this project: “Praxis, as any Marxist knows, requires leaving selfinterlocution. That is, I should see through the other side, the ‘backside,’ into my depression, my pessimism, like an obese dancer that had himself filmed to see himself, hopelessly trying to improve his technique.”29 The image of the protagonist as an obese dancer does an ill favor to that of the reader and potential writer—and who would stand for the camera,

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perhaps? The passage is exemplarily obscure, yet it is also highly legible in that syntax; tempo and pun all compel the reader to read on. If it were at all to call for political action, it would do so à la Duchamp, whose unproductive devices transcend their time. UNHEALING THE DEAD HARE

Duchamp is to Aira what Joseph Beuys is to Mario Bellatin: an internalized art practitioner-cum-historical figure that provides key elements to the author’s expressive vocabulary and serves as a point of articulation for the critique of globality. Bellatin is a Peruvian-Mexican writer born in 1960, while Beuys was a German conceptual and performance artist who lived between 1921 and 1986. We must be mindful of these distinct cultural horizons, seizing dialectically both the affinities and the insurmountable gap between writer and artist. Bellatin’s book entitled Lecciones para una liebre muerta (Lessons to a Dead Hare, 2005) may direct one’s unmediated attention to How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), the quasi-homonymous performance by Beuys, but what surfaces in the book (Beuysian as it may be) is the método mariótico, a personalistic creative practice that takes after the writer’s first name.30 Bellatin and Beuys share “social sculpture”; the organic transformation of relic and performance; an interest in infiltration as an aesthetic category; a commitment to shamanistic pedagogy; and the decided purpose of turning their bodies into quizzical art objects. The events that took place in Düsseldorf in 1972 demonstrate the notion of social sculpture, where “by inventing social conditions instead of analyzing them, you can contribute to their change.”31 Upon learning that Beuys had been laid off from his teaching position, students occupied part of the university with the artist himself, and demanded to speak to the administration. As tensions arose, a government functionary issued a spontaneous public statement about why he would not show up at the site: “I cannot and should not let myself be made into a possible art object.”32 The climactic moment of this simultaneous confrontation, performance, and public lesson came when police threatened to forcibly

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remove the professor and his students from the premises. Beuys then “sculpted” a unique situation, documented by a famous picture that shows the smiling, unemployed sculptor, trailed by his students, walking past the representatives of the law. The image hit the newspapers and moved the public opinion of its time, and it speaks volumes even today. A handwritten caption across the middle of the picture reads: Demokratie ist lustig— democracy is funny. Of course, the latent authoritarianism in 1970s West Germany is not the target of Bellatin’s contemporary social sculptures. The latter seek to transform the social conditions of literary practices, particularly—but not exclusively—those of Latin American literature on the world stage. This goal informs three interconnected realms: individual literary works, globalized public appearances, and local lessons at a sui generis writing school in Mexico City. The fluidity between these realms is conditioned by the relationship between relic and performance, and serves the purpose of renegotiating the relationship between Latin American tradition and its metropolitan counterparts. Consider the status of the Spanish-French bilingual volume Escritores duplicados: Narradores mexicanos en París / Doubles d ’écrivains: Narrateurs mexicains à Paris (Duplicated Writers: Mexican Narrators in Paris, 2003) within the continuum of Bellatin’s creations. The book contains texts by authors who prepared an earlier performance, along with documentation of the preparations, but nothing of the actual event. What Bellatin orchestrated was the impersonation, at the Mexican Institute in Paris, of four heavyweights in Mexican letters— Salvador Elizondo, Sergio Pitol, Margo Glantz, and José Agustín—by a public servant, an artist, a dancer, and a theater director. The book is both a relic of the performance and material for written re-elaboration. Glantz’s reflections on training her male impersonator become one of the myriad storylines dispersed through the 243 aphoristic entries of Lecciones: “But no. The cloning experience undertaken by mario bellatin [sic] for the art gallery could not be more than a game, thought margo glantz. And yet there she was. Lying in bed at dawn, transformed into a future lawyer” (figure 5.4).33

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Figure 5.4 Gabriel Martínez studies Margo Glantz’s portrait and prepares his impersonation. Escritores duplicados, 2003. Courtesy of Mario Bellatin.

The opening adversative clause, which accentuates the fragmentary character of a narration already fragmented, readily gives way to a narrative arc that parodies Kafka and rearranges the elements of Bellatin’s ongoing synthetic artistic-literary practice. A re-elaboration of both the performance and of Escritores duplicados, the passage exemplifies Beuysian fluidity between action and relic, ephemera and invested objects that become witnesses of sorts. In Beuys, a sequence of artworks illustrates this principle, beginning with the performance Homogeneous Infiltration for Grand Piano, the Greatest Contemporary Composer is the Thalidomide Child (1966; figure 5.5). The event itself was an irruption of silence, with Beuys occupying the stage of a concert hall by introducing a grand piano wrapped in felt. The primary relic of the event—that is, the intervened piano—stands as a remainder, reminder, and sculpture in its own right. But the afterlife of the performance carries on in Skin (1984), where the artist had the deteriorated felt wrapping exhibited as an “independent” piece that Caroline Tisdall fittingly compares to “an elephant skin” (figure 5.6).34 As it turns out, Margo Glantz is the equivalent sculptural element in Bellatin’s work.

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Figure 5.5 Joseph Beuys, Homogeneous Infiltration for Grand Piano (1966). Pompidou Center, Paris. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

This continuity between relic and performance determines a certain “transformation within sameness” prevalent in the author. Structurally, the relations between episodes and the ensemble of the book mimic those between the book and the work as an open whole. Diana Palaversich and Reinaldo Laddaga have characterized this structure in different terms: for the former, intertextual references among Bellatin’s works obey an internal logic that postulates the oeuvre as a world in itself, analogous to nouveau roman and to Barthesian “writerly” prose; for the latter, Bellatin’s textuality is a “navigatable space” comparable to the Internet.35 Whereas these views both hold true, I think that the specificity of Bellatin’s continuum is best appreciated, after Beuys, as a function of relic and action. Other than his method, Bellatin incorporates central themes from Beuys, such as infiltration. In the disturbing presence of the muted piano, Beuys wrote the following on two blackboards:

Figure 5.6 Joseph Beuys, Skin (1984). Georges Pompidou Center, Paris. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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IN THE ROOM OF THE THALIDOMIDE CHILD PENETRATED DOES THE MUSIC OF THE PAST HELP HIM?? ???? SUFFERING WARMTH SOUND PLASTICITY36 Thalidomide was once a familiar and painful reality: between 1956 and 1962 this drug was prescribed for nausea during pregnancy, causing severe birth defects and malformations in newborns around the world. The feltwrapped piano evokes impossibility of movement, limited human potential, and missing limbs. In German, the word for “grand piano” is Flügel, that is, “wing”: the shut piano lid attests to a lost opportunity for “flight,” something Beuys reinforces through pathetic appeal by “setting free” a quacking, flapping toy duck. It does not take much biographical speculation to appreciate how Bellatin, who has a prosthesis for a right arm, may identify with the greatest contemporary composer, that is, the thalidomide child (figure 5.7). In Bellatin, infiltration affects the textual body and those of the characters, standing as much as a sign of our times as it was before for Beuys. Interspersed with stories about characters with missing limbs, such as the orphaned Kuhn twins, who have no legs and no arms, the reader of Lecciones encounters a storyline about the mysterious transactions that take place between “universales” and the sick people secluded in the “ciudadela final”: The universals that stayed in the countryside were not selected to be enprisoned in the final citadelle. For that reason, they must have kept on approaching the fence at night and insisting in the exchange of blood for drugs. Somehow this scene makes me remember of certain works of the artist joseph beuys, especially those from the postwar.37

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Figure 5.7 Mario Bellatin. Taller Regional de Literatura CIELA Fraguas, Aguascalientes, Mexico, November 2007. Photo © Edilberto Aldán.

While the imagery vaguely resembles the post-apocalyptic tribes of films like Mad Max (1979), it also contributes to a narrative arc that poetically explores pointed contradictions of the present: the universals, who roam freely across the territory, offer drugs in exchange for the poisoned blood of prisoners/patients who are, paradoxically, better off than they are. The passage transfigures essential qualities of our globalized world, where the ability to travel—as examined in previous chapters—across borders is a socially stratifying factor. Recall that, unlike thalidomide, drugs like cocaine are illegally produced by local underpaid labor, immensely profited upon by traders, and consumed by global markets. Bellatin overdetermines the symbol of the fence (“la alambrada”), as it represents the limits of law and country yet also serves as the mirror where the tourist and the illegal immigrant stare at each other in the face, as well as functioning as a membrane through which infiltration takes place. This last point is, of course, the key to appreciating how the passage is reminiscent

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of Beuys: the fence evokes the role that felt had in the performance, that of being warm and enveloping but also unbearably asphyxiating, at once womb-like and tomb-like. Beuys also plays a crucial role in shaping Bellatin’s exploration of intimacy and public exposure, among other central themes; borrowing a catchphrase Donald Kuspit uses to describe the artist, one may regard Bellatin as “a shaman and a showman.”38 But the writer distinguishes himself from Beuys in more ways than his frequent nods to the German master may lead one to expect. Bellatin inverts the sign in Beuysian healing: he sickens for a purpose, exceeding a certain frame of make-believe on which the artist relies, as well as the sacrificial horizon that goes along with it. If Beuys had the audience imagine itself as the thalidomide child in order to articulate social criticism with empathy for the victim, Bellatin forecloses the possibility of identification and manipulates empathy in the interest of cultural critique. A more obvious difference between the two is that Bellatin’s revisions of the legacy of Euro-North American conceptualism are firmly rooted in the Latin American tradition, as detailed references to the writings of José María Arguedas suggest; they also respond to site-specific concerns, as his collaborative projects with several local artists indicates, most notably Ximena Berecochea and Aldo Chaparro, who provide the photographic dossiers for Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción (2001) and Perros héroes (2003; trans. Hero Dogs, 2006), respectively.39 The método mariótico responds to distinctly literary concerns, such as the status of the book-object, the embeddedness of literature within a wider set of more or less ritualized practices, the commercialization of authorship, and in a related way, the place of the Latin American author in the world. We must then speak of asymmetrical correlations in the personal mythologies of these two creators, such as the hat and the prosthesis. As a result of an aeronautical accident while serving in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War, Beuys had a metal plate inserted in his skull. As the story goes, he needed to cover his head so that the plate would not heat up under the sun, which led him to adopt the felt hat that became part of his signature as an artist. Whereas the hat is a sign of penitence for having served the Nazi regime, and various performances from the postwar

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years serve as collective ceremonies of reconciliation, Bellatin’s narrative elaboration of his birthmark is unheroic and does not subject history to a sacrificial order. So Lecciones para una liebre muerta is not a recasting of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (figure 5.8). Just as the lower caps used for proper names in Escritores duplicados questions the transparency of referentiality, Lecciones only alludes to the performance in opaque ways. The event featured the artist, head covered in honey and gold leaf, lovingly walking the animal through the gallery, letting it “touch the pictures with its paws,” as a spectator recounts.40 Bellatin’s book, on the other hand, nourishes no one, but stages lengthy explorations of subtle forms of submission. Sadism was already present in Beuys’s acts of exhibition—presumably, the hare did not die from old age—but Bellatin largely bypasses its dialectical relation with tenderness and consolidates a rather grim vision of humanity, where a character (“la hermana literata”) adopts a child only to later become bored by her disinterest in reading and take her back to the orphanage,41 or where a father tells gruesome bedtime stories about deadly accidents to his unsuspecting toddler,42 among numerous possible examples. These are “lecciones” in the most punitive overtones of the expression “dar una lección” (“to give a lesson”): to discipline, to restrain, to reprimand—suffering with no redeeming value. The pedagogy still holds, however, and Bellatin sees himself as much as a teacher as Beuys was. The artist taught “sculpture” at Düsseldorf just as the writer does not teach how to write at the Escuela Dinámica de Escritores, a self-described anti-literary workshop that spouses the immersion in the arts writ large as a means to bolster creativity, turning away from the kind of productive immediacy expected from established writing programs. Housed in the Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl and affiliated with the Cities of Asylum network, this “institution” of creative exchange assumes the paradoxical task of serving as a site for on-going institutional critique, while simultaneously constituting a grand collaborative artwork curated by its head writer.43 Always a teacher, Bellatin imparts lessons at diverse venues, if less sadistically than his characters. As Edmundo Paz-Soldán recalls, when Bellatin was invited to speak at Cornell and Harvard in 2002, he played a recording of his lecture, and only then took the microphone

Figure 5.8 Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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for questions. In this alternative take at the theme of Escritores duplicados, the lesson was not about the reparation of postwar wounds, as might have been the case with Beuys, but about the place of the Latin American author in the world. By estranging the very means through which a literary reputation is established, Bellatin seeks to transform the institutional framework for the “transmission” and “recording” of literature, Latin American literature in particular. It bears noting that the sort of immersion in German conceptualism that allows Bellatin to populate his literary universe would scarcely have been possible for a Peruvian author based in Mexico who practiced in Beuys’s time. Increased air travel, new media technologies, and greater accessibility of images, among other traits of contemporary experience, are the conditions of possibility for Bellatin’s “globalized” creation. There is a constitutive asynchronicity in reaching out to Beuys from the present, but this backward gaze could not take place without the simultaneity, relative to what the norm used to be in previous decades, between Latin American creators and the metropolis. In other words, Bellatin speaks from a time when the likes of Beuys—and conceptual art at large, along with many other cultural products that for the most part originate in the First World—are in some form available to a broader base of Latin Americans. Conspicuously, the author seeks to resignify the history of Latin American literature from this paradigm of cultural simultaneity. Bellatin’s books offer a textual space for multiple “transhistorical” references that resituate the reader in regard to the past: To this day i listen to my grandfather’s words, telling me that, sitting under the poster of bruce lee, the maestro espín held out a pencil and a sheet of paper. He began to draw the last movements in the life of macaca, from the first screening of the movie until the last gardener was fired. He leaned in over the sheet a lot. Maestro espín always wore a black felt hat. As i recall, my grandfather spoke about that hat recurrently.44 The felt hat betrays Joseph Beuys, transfigured in the character “maestro espín”—espín for “espina,” thorn—while its proximity to the famous

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martial artist provokes a jarring effect, as it were, of incommensurable cultural realms colliding. By this point in the plot, Lecciones has associated the figure of the grandfather with that of Arguedas, inviting readers to come to the German artist by way of the Peruvian anthropologist and novelist. The grandfather’s baffling anecdotes seem to follow such a rationale: “arguedas” recounts that “espín” (Beuys) was expelled from his position as a primary teacher “in the Quechua-speaking regions” because he used his students as guinea pigs in pedagogic experiments that ultimately led him to do all their homework. Could one assimilate visually—or culturally, as other entries imply—the dance of a “danzante de tijeras,” Arguedas’ crucial literary motif, to Bruce Lee’s stiff-legged acrobatics in the cult film Enter the Dragon (1973)? Seen under this light and suspended in midair, with his legs fully extended and brandishing sharp blades, the dancer starts to look a bit like Bruce Lee. Bellatin challenges our understanding of cultural referents: his Beuys-like process is constantly recombining them to reveal unexpected trajectories in global cultural exchange. Call it a “cross-exotization,” or, in the spirit of Beuysian mythology’s chemical process of “infiltration,” a process similar to “cross-contamination”: something clicks when one realizes that danzaqs are not only part of Peruvian national cultural patrimony or a living traditional artform, as they are justly regarded, but also examples of martial art—in that respect also not unlike capoeira, for instance. Similarly, noting that Arguedas and Beuys were both invested in artforms that emphasized the transformation of lived experience calls for a cosmopolitan re-positioning of the reader/ viewer. These new constellations, which are perhaps the pinnacle of the lengthy build-up that takes place in Bellatin’s atmospheric writing, reveal the affinities between cultural artifacts that we often ascribe to utterly different categories. Although in the context of his argument he is drawing a connection between standing structures like the Great Wall of China, the Chrysler Building, and the Sistine Chapel, Kwame Anthony Appiah makes a statement that aptly characterizes Bellatin’s cosmopolitanism: “One connection [the cosmopolitan wants to reminds us of ]—the one neglected in talk of cultural patrimony—is the connection not through identity but despite difference. We can respond to art that is not ours;

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indeed, we can fully respond to “our” art only if we move beyond thinking of it as ours and start to respond to it as art.”45 Bellatin shows how the response to art “that is not ours” can be in itself a creative endeavor. At the same time, he offers a view of such response that is not conciliatory like Appiah’s is; negotiating different cultural referents can in some sense be painful, especially when one deals with specificity and with the rooting of art in lived experience. The writer does not “mediate” between cultural legacies, but sets the stage for their confrontation, as well as for the reader’s involvement in this process. The resulting literary work is more than the sum of its parts; its form is profoundly marked by (inner) struggle, which may easily come across as deliberate obscurity. Beuys himself was criticized for allegedly creating art for experts and demanding from his audience absolute allegiance to his aesthetic creed. Some of this criticism can very well apply to Bellatin, whose hermeticism is a recurrent subject among reviewers; by the same token, vindications of Beuys apply to Bellatin as well: comprehensibility is foreclosed both for the “expert” and for the layperson, which in a way puts them on equal ground rather than widening the gap between them. Readership and audience thus do not have “control” over meaning, and perhaps neither do creators. Projects that simultaneously invoke such disparate cultural realms—for example, later in life Beuys turned to Celtic folklore—require opacity so as not to become mere theme parks. Orchestrating impersonations in Paris or triangulating Arguedas, Beuys, and Bruce Lee belong among several artistic operations whose goal is to intervene in the past, present, and future relations of Latin American literature and its others. At his most Calibanesque, Bellatin bastardizes the language of Euro-North American conceptualism and uses it to curse his masters, whose interest in Latin America was, at best, incidental.46 Bellatin seems to take to heart Wai Chee Dimock’s dictum, “Literature is the home of nonstandard space and time”; from a Latin American standpoint, the writer traces meaningful trajectories within a broad archive of world literature—distant and near, ancient and recent, highbrow and popular.47 Postmodern pastiche is not entirely out of purview, but the emphasis is on

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a dynamic articulation of world consciousness that borrows from art to destabilize established patterns of literary consumption. BEYOND THE PAR ADIGM OF THE PAGE

In her ethnography of the art world, Sarah Thornton cites a revelatory statement by Eric Banks, a senior editor at one of the most influential magazines in its field, Artforum: “If I’m reading something by, say, Roberto Bolaño, I’ll find very few people to discuss it with. Reading takes a long time and it’s solitary, whereas art fosters quick-forming imagined communities.”48 Perhaps Banks would reconsider his example in light of the recent success of the Chilean author; he speaks at a time when Bolaño was just at the threshold of consolidating an international reputation—already part of a larger conversation, but not yet the focal point of an established readership. Regardless, it follows that other Latin American writers should tap into the “ease of sociability” of art in an attempt to pass the threshold themselves. In this sense, performance art and conceptualism belong to the praxis of writing for a global audience from contemporary Latin America; they constitute strategies of recognition, attempts at refashioning the Republic of Letters after the conventions of a neighboring construction, “the art world.” As this chapter has argued, the turn to contemporary art obeys factors that go beyond the Realpolitik of the circulation of Latin American literature. In a time of globalization and virtuality, we rediscover conceptualist anxiety about objectivity and performance art’s concern with depth of experience. These elements resurface beyond the authors studied here, in the work of younger writers such as Andrea Jeftanovic and Alejandro Zambra (Chile), Vivian Abensushan (Mexico), and Carolina Sanín (Colombia), to name but a few.49 There are also plastic artists who venture into fiction writing, notably the Argentine painter Alfredo Prior, whose Cómo resucitar a una liebre muerta (2006) is an alternative Latin American response to Beuys.50 The political potential of modes of writing that estrange the book-object and the presence of the author lie in their

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contributions to what Jacques Rancière might call a redistribution of the sensible—in short, a transformation of the ways of listening and looking that define our roles and shape our actions. We live under “the paradigm of the page,” but literature need not belong there. When readers encounter books as relics of a broader creative process, there is a spark of possibility, of going beyond that paradigm into a reformulation of the most basic components of the social pact. The potential consequences for world literature include a complete reorientation of the field. Working against the dominant trend of regarding works from the periphery as derivative, contemporary art-infused writing and criticism from Latin America may well assume a position of creative leadership. Aira and Bellatin are not followers of an aesthetic movement initiated elsewhere, but beacons for emerging global forms. The dilemma is better appreciated if we recall the anecdote of how André Breton, in his visit to Mexico in the late 1930s, declared it “the surrealist place par excellence.” As Humberto Schwarzbeck rightly observes, this comment leads to the misapprehension, not least of all among Mexicans themselves, that Breton was construing the country as a noble savage, a backwater that matched the recent aesthetic triumphs of Europe with its innocence and eccentricity.51 Breton was, in fact, finding in Mexico—with its unique blend of art and revolution—the way of the future. Mutatis mutandis, what Aira and Bellatin have to offer are new ways of inhabiting, transforming, and performing world literature as Latin Americans. This is an angle that has been underappreciated, to return momentarily to the most renowned global Latin American author of the day, in Roberto Bolaño. Of the numerous storylines that populate the sprawling 2666, there is one where a book, the “Testamento Geométrico,” is hung out to dry on a clothesline, like a shirt. The character of Amalfitano says he got the idea from Duchamp’s sojourn “in Argentina (when in fact it takes after the geometry book Duchamp hung on his Paris balcony, in the now lost Unhappy Readymade, 1999).” We are told, foreshadowing the gruesome crimes that occupy the later portion of the novel, that “it’s silly to worry about it when much worse things are happening in this city than a book being hung from

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a cord.”52 Amalfitano’s overdetermined, Duchamp-inspired installation comes to stand for art and literature as a whole, “suspended” in the face of atrocity. It does not stand heroically, as in front of an abyss, but rather on the verge of nonsense—on a cord, in a mundane brick hut, next to a washing machine. Indeed, with characteristic Bolaño humor, what makes the suspended book a “geometric testament” are its idiosyncratic figures, where emblematic personages of Western civilization, some better known than others, are somehow related. To give just two examples, we see a right triangle with the names of Aristotle, Plato, and Heraclitus in each of its angles; or a hexagon with Kolakowski, Whitehead, Vattimo, Spencer, Feyerabend, and Guyau in each of its own (figure 5.9). The majority of these names could (and might already) appear on the ornate facade of a public library. Instead, here they are the butt of a childish joke. The mind trips when trying to verbalize the relations these geometrical figures insinuate, evocative of Duchamp’s Trap. The drawings belong

Figure 5.9 Roberto Bolaño’s geometric figures. Page 193 of his novel, 2666.

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within the broader installation the text alludes to, and the burden is on the reader to offer an interpretation. The “testament” in the title, rather than narrowing possible geometric meanings, brings along its own connotations of sacrifice, witnessing, and possibly redemption. Could one see the book, left to the elements, as “crucified”? While different readers will have different interpretations, the overall thrust of the fictive installation is clear: all of Western civilization should be revised in light of the femicide along the U.S.–Mexico border. In other works, like Adorno, Bolaño wonders whether there could be poetry after Auschwitz. Without insinuating any symmetry or equivalence, here he poses a similar question regarding the horrific murders committed in Juárez since the early nineties, which to this day amount to several hundred.53 What is similar to Adorno is the will to investigate how culture may have taken us to this point, and also, dialectically, what resources it may offer us to counter that situation. This could be a tall order for Latin American literature, particularly if it does not enjoy a standing in world literature as a source of theoretical reflection. However, such is the space that Bolaño, Aira, and Bellatin carve out in their works, and they do so, among other ways, by mobilizing the cultural prestige and the thought-provoking forms of contemporary art. Their renegotiations of the place of Latin America in the world are often subtle and open-ended, yet strongly evocative, in the manner of Duchamp. Consider how Bolaño gives another turn of the screw to another famous image of Duchampian productive improductivity. He imagines travelling multitudes of European retirees, “thousands, hundreds of thousands of machines célibataires crossing an amniotic sea each day, on Alitalia, eating spaghetti al pomodoro and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed, positive that the paradise of retirees isn’t in Italy (or, therefore, anywhere in Europe), bachelors flying to the hectic airports of Africa or [América], burial ground of elephants. The great cemeteries at light speed.”54 A dialectical image of stasis and velocity, the burial grounds of single machines cover the Third World. Meanwhile, the spirit of the avant-garde lives on right on its surface; so does a different kind of chaos than that of the First World War, which led to historical avant-gardes. The coexistence of these ruins, made present by fictive installations, leads

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to a reassessment of global culture. In the words of Sergio Villalobos, “the worldly condition of Bolaño’s narrative is both the result and the disclosing of a planetary articulation of the world through global war.”55 Not everyone will be persuaded about the potential of the turn to art in contemporary Latin American fiction. After all, “art statement novels” flourish in the region as dictator novels did not long ago: it is a conscious, coordinated effort by a group of authors. In one of the last numbers of Punto de vista, Martín Kohan quoted the late Rodolfo Fogwill’s warning against the possible commodification of such practices. He fantasized that if he were to put his signature on a telephone book from the touristy mountain region of Calamuchita, Argentina, add the subtitle “A Listing of Names,” and write on the back cover the legend “an avant-garde operation,” he could probably sell “well-around fifteen hundred copies through Planeta,” the publishing house.56 Fogwill’s witty remark constitutes a valuable caveat against facile pairings of art and literature, but the object he chose to make his point—a rural directory—opens different, perhaps unintended, interpretative possibilities. Is regional culture, particularly when distant from metropolitan centers, too native for conceptualism? Is the transformation of information into institutionalized artforms the only option available for writers today? If so, the act of reading would be reduced to descriptive valuation, a strategy that Aira and Bellatin successfully resist. Their involvement with Duchamp and Beuys is not about transplanting elements from art into literature or presenting literature as art, but about achieving something of the unsettling effect that those artists had in their times. Back then, what they did was not art; it’s just our understanding of art grew to consider their actions as such. It is in this sense that such literary endeavors hold the promise of an expanded notion of the literary.

CONCLUSION The Promise of Multipolarism

No single study should aspire to analyze every aspect of contemporary literature’s attempts to represent the totality of the world or the intensified interconnection of globalization. My modest contribution began with the two, connected premises that, on the one hand, the world obviously does not “fit” into a book and, on the other, the transformation of the global order that has taken place roughly since 1989 is qualitatively different from what came before. The first premise led to a valuation of the maladjustment between the world and the work—a call to explore the negativity of this relationship. The second premise led to an appraisal of the historical specificity of post-1989 works, particularly ones from Latin America. The two strands of world and globalization converge in the notion of multipolarity. Before 1989, when the Cold War had not yet thawed, there were two geopolitical blocks that organized world consciousness, leading to concepts as equivocal, and vastly adopted, as “Third World.” Now past that period, there is hope that the old bipolar structure will be superseded, and new, multiple centers—or nodes, rather—will consolidate. Meanwhile, when organizing the world literary field, there have been centerperiphery models, where culture irradiates outward from one point, and

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bipolar models, where commerce privileges two locales, be it the New York–London axis that de facto structures many English departments, or any other. These models match geopolitical structures that permeate daily global life, recognizable in the sense that the one important conversation on the world stage is between Western Europe and the United States, while the rest of the world mostly listens. For those who have recently come to advocate this latter bipolar vision, even Moscow falls out of the spotlight of history. The critical correlate of this short narrative is the arc that spans Fredric Jameson’s well-known proposal for Third World texts to be read as national allegories to Pascale Casanova’s proposal to organize world literatures into what she calls its combative and non-combative variants.1 In a departure from her earlier work, this more recent formulation places less emphasis on center-periphery relations, presumably because doing so unavoidably reifies what it seeks to criticize, and instead describes how, trading her former Bourdieuan approach for a Maussian one, there are literatures that already have an established global standing and are therefore nonengaged, while others are combative because they are emerging to the fore. This would explain the prevalence of assertions of national origin in combative literatures and the relative lack of those assertions in pacified, comfortably “universal” forms. This book has shown a different phenomenon. Yes, contemporary Latin American literature is emerging and combative, but it is not particularly keen on nationalism. In a peculiar, sublated return to Jameson, one could say it trades national allegories for global allegories. However, inspired by Borges, these are negative allegories, in that they signal their own impossibility and the limitations of the written word. In their recursivity, they postulate a dynamic, nonreified relationship between the local and the global, and across any other bipolar, center-periphery structure. Between Jameson and Casanova, and parallel to this book, there has been a trend to de-politicize the study of literature on a world scale. There are those who more or less openly believe that literature, being one of the arts, is above the pettiness of international politics or historical processes. But a cursory examination of the availability and circulation of cultural

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products from relatively weaker locales dispels that illusion. For a quick, real-life illustration from the field of Latin Americanism, consider that the U.S. embargo on Cuba also affects the circulation and conception of its literature, or that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s economic policies increase the price of imported books in Argentina, which in turn affects the country’s cultural politics and intellectual life in general. When talking about world literature, then, it is useful to consider circulation alongside such historical conjunctures. Still, if the illusion persists, just consider the disparities in literary historiography and institutional clout, or turn to the plastic arts to see how flows of capital, transnational prestige, and many other factors give structure to what is known there as the “art world.” That construction leads to questioning any clear-cut distinction between autonomy and heteronomy in art.2 Yet in its differing configuration from what is variously known as the World Republic of Letters or Weltliteratur, it also allows us to reevaluate the workings of those other constructs, including their qualified claims to autonomy. This is where the Global Latin American novel, as a form that embodies the intensification of cultural interdependence in the post-1989 period, conceiving totalities from its own historical coordinates, comes in. It seeks to turn Latin America into one of the poles that structures the ensemble. To that effect, it conceives of Alephs, paradoxical representations of the world as a whole, which destabilize, and thus reveal, world consciousness. Its effects are extraliterary, in the way that influential works of art often have. Borges’s short story affects how a reader from any tradition, in any language, would conceive of Buenos Aires. As this book has shown, today there are multiple sites for Latin Americanism that come together in a coherent picture: Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Medellín, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, among others. It would be a stretch to see in these locales budding global cities like those Saskia Sassen has so adequately described.3 However, one could extrapolate her point that New York, Tokyo, and London have transformed themselves in conjunction with and in response to their prominent roles in global commerce. More than individual cities, what has changed in Latin America is the lettered city, to adopt Ángel Rama’s famous coinage.4 The novels studied in this

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book document this transformation, not necessarily by thematizing it or by making it the object of their storytelling, but by embodying it in their form. In my reading, these works seek to bring about a change in world consciousness by resignifying the last wave of globalization and by capitalizing on the promise of multipolarity. Such is the logic that underwrites the unconventional works discussed in this book. It is also the reason why it is essential that Roberto Bolaño does not become, via the synecdochal structures of world literature, the sole representative of a phenomenon that, almost by definition, cannot (and should not) be reduced to any one voice. His Global Latin American novels provide many memorable moments, certainly, such as the sexualized take on globalization in The Savage Detectives or the construction of a parallel fascist world in Nazi Literature in the Americas. Yet they should serve as ports of entry to a broader corpus, several of which were analyzed in the chapters of this study. It includes novels that revise the politics of escapism in a globalized world, such as Buarque’s Budapest; works that reveal supermarkets as sites of globalized capitalism, such as Eltit’s Mano de obra; stories of drugs and religion that demonstrate the demonization of poverty underlying international narcotrafficking, such as Vallejo’s Our Lady of the Assassins and Aridjis’s La Santa Muerte; and works that use techniques from the art world to subvert world literature, such as Aira’s “Duchamp en México” and Bellatin’s Lecciones para una liebre muerta. There is often a thought-provoking, unsettling quality to the worlds of the contemporary Latin American novel. They allow us to critique dominant, received ideas about the global, be it Euro- or U.S.-centrism, the assimilation of world and market, the assumption that liberal democracy under the tutelage of Western powers is the natural telos for world integration, and the expectation that the First World brokers transactions between Southern locales or sanction their relation to world historical events, among several other ideologemes that I have discussed throughout this book. Future studies, from within or without Latin Americanism, may revisit the idea that the global novel captures in its form the contradictions of a slowly emerging, or at least everyday more plausible, planetary society. Methodologically, as the chapters of this book have illustrated, this allows

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us to rekindle a rich tradition in critical theory that has been less present in world literature debates than is perhaps desirable, while at the same time making space for the necessary eclecticism that dealing with works from different provenances calls for. There are many orientations and methodologies that converge around the project of world literature, some descriptive and others prescriptive, plus some prescriptive by way of a weighted description. Diverse as they are, they agree less in what they are than in what they are not. Not theory-driven, they suspend the hermeneutics of suspicion that informed a significant portion of criticism during the twentieth century. They are also not in favor of specialization when it comes to fields, though they may be when it comes to methods, as some approaches require a literacy in digital technologies that can be, for structural reasons, hard to come by. Meanwhile, Latin Americanism is by definition a specialty field; it is often suspicious of ideology and is more analog than digital, as the use of electronic institutional archives, if not the archives themselves, for better or for worse, lags behind. Regardless of the digital humanities angle, which should be taken up by a different study than this one, it is important to note that the two constructs of world literature and Latin Americanism have much in common. For one, as already noted, they are both “isms”—that is, critical currents. The coinage “World Literature” conceals this; it might be more precise to call it “worldliteraturism,” in lower caps, and recognize its inchoate nature. In presenting itself as a new horizon, or even as a new era, it erases its own internal struggle. Unlike prefix-based constructions like “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or “deconstruction,” its robust noun structure cancels out the debt to any immediate critical past. It seems perfectly suited to make the leap into the past, prior to the contentiousness that followed bellelettrism, and rekindle the classics without calling them by their name. It also announces a new, post-conflict future, with an expanded view of the canon that incorporates some classics of the Other. And yet even the recent past is rich in conflict, from scholars who made the case that popular culture and testimonios were worth studying to those that showed how English or French literatures existed beyond the geographical confines of the First World. It seems too early to dismiss those

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confrontations, or to ask of them a mere takeaway, some edifying lesson, or in other words, a list of works to add to the existing canon in order to be able to keep on doing business as usual. Latin Americanism, it is plain to see, is an “ism,” but it is also a horizon and a principle to organize the study of literature and culture. Like world literature, its premise is that integration is better than dispersion. But better for whom? Some cultural forms and national traditions appear more ready for integration than others; they often have more to gain. Arguably, metropolitan-oriented traditions like the Borgesian Argentine fare better than those of other locales or aesthetic orientations within the region. One could ask a similar question regarding the integration of local forms, be it via regional agglutination or not, into world constructs. Latin Americanism not only models a functional, multipolar relationship between the local and the regional, but the field also provides a few examples of excess, where certain cultural products of a few locales have claimed the site of enunciation of the entire region. At stake is the always difficult matter of cultural value, which is context specific—except contexts may shift, too. Sometimes the whole can be contained in the part, as the Aleph suggests. Latin American locales have a strong affinity to each other, but they are not identical. Similarly, Latin America itself is too similar to the West for exoticization, yet too different for incorporation. Its literature can serve as a reminder of the limitations of totalizing projects, as an inassimilable remainder. HALF-MUTTERED SHIBBOLETHS

Beyond Bolaño, there are numerous Latin American authors and cultural initiatives that gesture toward the global. Consider the Bogotá 39, a grouping of thirty-nine authors under thirty-nine years of age brought together in 2007, under the auspices of the city and of the U.K.-based Hay Festival (which would go on to sponsor the Beirut 39 in 2010). Media attention tends to accompany these events, which reflect favorably on the tourism industry of the host city and can lead to hotly debated anthologies. Everyone taps into their recognition, including detractors. In a smart protest against the allegedly over-commercialized, nepotistic, and whitewashed

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Cartagena version of the Hay Festival, dissident writers convened a “No Hay” Festival—in Spanish, “There Is No Festival”—in the shantytowns far from the city’s glamorous center. Or consider Jorge Volpi’s pronouncement at the Mexican embassy in Beijing the previous year that “Latin American literature does not exist.”5 One could regard “Bogotá 39,” “not Latin American literature,” or “not magical realism” as brands that seek international recognition. Earlier, this same kind of operation could be seen in the manifesto-like texts of Chávez et al.’s Crack (1996) and Alberto Fuguet and others’ McOndo movements (2000), both puns on García Márquez and others’ “Boom” of the 1960s and 70s, and, in the case of McOndo, a playful evocation of the highly visible brands McDonalds and Macintosh, coupled with an appropriation of the literary name “Macondo.”6 If only Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha” sounded more like a corporation! There is little surprise that in this day and age authorial poetics should combine self-publicity with the successful tactics of marketing. What is surprising is how little effect they have had in terms of securing a global readership. It is not that the numerous works that one could group under a label like McOndo are all superficial. Some embody the ideal of changing the way that Latin Americans see the world and vice versa. Past the advertising gimmicks, there is a serious attempt to think about the realities of globalization. Perhaps it is more achieved in some authors than others, but still, this does not explain why so very few Latin American authors have become household names around the world, like Roberto Bolaño has. Any explanation of why Bolaño succeeds where others fail is bound to be reductive, unless we subscribe to some form of aesthetic determinism or think that literary reception is as simple as, well, brand recognition. My own compromising hypothesis has been that Bolaño is particularly good at making art of globalization—he speaks to the times in meaningful ways. The rest is what markets, literary or not, do best: they give more to those who already have and take away from those who do not. Bolaño is a distinguished proponent of what I have called the Global Latin American novel, but he is far from the only one. A central component of this book is devoted to bringing back Bolaño to the literary culture that got lost in

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his ascent to literary stardom. I have not been exhaustive, but have traced a meaningful constellation of his contemporaries. By contemporaries I understand, with Agamben, “those who neither perfectly coincide with [their time] nor adjust themselves to its demands.”7 Some self-promoters do make those adjustments and seek that coincidence, which leads to unmemorable presentism. One could also read Bolaño through that lens, as indeed his detractors do. I agree with the familiar criticism that Bolaño’s prose is all too easy to consume, but I do not think that its contemporaneity lies there. The philosopher puts it more lyrically: “the contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.”8 Along those lines, I espouse the view that Bolaño is one among several figures who allow us to think critically about a prominent feature of the contemporary, namely, globalization. For uncritical takes on globalization, consider at face value the celebratory words of Alberto Fuguet in his 2001 essay “Magical Neoliberalism.” There he describes his generation’s sensibility as “global yet rooted,” and ponders a suitable name for it: “perhaps [this sensibility] can be called the FTAA way, but maybe the wise thing is to leave it unnamed.”9 Since the venue is the journal Foreign Policy, it is hard to miss the endorsement of free-trade policies and the underlying view of globalization as the happy, desired outcome of recent capitalism. Indeed, at the time there was heavy lobbying for NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, to extend across both American continents as the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas—an initiative that most South American governments rejected. At face value, Fuguet exemplifies an uncritical take on globalization, one which even adopts, almost compulsively, transnational brand recognition as an aesthetic strategy: McOndo, magical neoliberalism, FTAA sensibility, etc. Short of lobbying for greater free trade, the essay does seek to harmonize literary and cultural production with new economic realities, most conspicuously by focusing on the joys of consumption and not on the vicissitudes of production. At the same time, however, there is much to gain by reading such texts against the grain. The rosy pictures Fuguet paints can be revealing. For one, in his texts we can appreciate how the sensoria of Latin Americans

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have become co-opted by publicity, or how entire literary phenomena may be reducible to catchphrases. But there is more to Fuguet, as I showed in chapter 3, which illustrates how texts may articulate visions of the global while at the same time serve as unwitting hosts for alternate visions. This is yet another illustration of the critical potential of a dialectical approach that reveals the contradictions and social tensions that inform literary works. Sometimes one writer’s dreams of globalization are another one’s nightmares. All the more reason to have a special appreciation for works that reveal, question, or estrange our sense of the global. Everyone has a more or less conscious—and more or less elaborate—vision of the world, shaped by numerous factors, including experience, education, travel, reading, and politics. This fact becomes apparent when confronted by cultural products that imagine the world differently, upsetting that vision.10 Those moments of unfamiliarity are precious, for they reveal the limits of the imagination. Works of fiction can reinforce or challenge our views; they can situate themselves in their coordinates or challenge the grid altogether. Consequently, I have engaged literary works as artifacts that lead to questioning received notions of globalization. This is not a matter of authorial intent. For instance, Buarque’s novel is likely to have originated, to some extent, in the excitement at the rise of Brazil in a global economy. Its mainstream reception has certainly couched it in those terms. At the same time, however, the novel thematizes—despite itself—the questionable underside of that triumphalist narrative. As you will recall, I made that case by combining traditional rhetorical analysis with the more varied tools of cultural studies. In my reading of Budapest, as with every other work throughout this study, I have approached texts as novels—attending to the specifics of their form—and as cultural products. To further characterize this second aspect and advance the conclusions of the volume, I will briefly mention two advertisements that, like those works, allow the critic to unmask the ideologies of the global. The first is a picture I took at the regional airport of Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2011 (figure con.1). My first reaction to this piece of institutional advertisement was one of disbelief. The slogan, loosely translated as “Global Bucaramanga is here

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Figure Con.1 “Bucaramanga Global.” Municipal campaign. Bucaramanga Airport, August 2011. Photo by the author.

already!”, seemed so emphatic that the opposite just had to be the case: this highland city, in the northeast region of the country, was so provincial that it desperately claimed not to be. The location of the ad, greeting visitors at a port of arrival, indicated a desire for modernity and delusions of grandeur. Driving through the unfinished streets of the city (home of extended family members of mine) admittedly confirms this impression. Be this as it may, the ad is a good example of how ideologies of the global operate. The local government is building a brand for the city, promoting it as a tourist destination of national—eventually international!—appeal. “Global” is the key word that verbalizes this desire to scale up. At the same time, it is true that Bucaramanga is more integrated with the world than it was before the proliferation of modern media technologies—or rather, more exposed to it while the world takes about as little notice as before. The bottom-right corner features the slogan “Bucaramanga: Everyone’s Company,” which straightforwardly redefines citizenship in terms of entrepreneurship and includes the logo of the Inter-American Development Bank (a sponsor of “sustainable” urban growth programs). As a screen for collective social aspiration and an affirmation of a capitalist development model, this simple, over-optimistic ad revealed itself to be a rather complex cultural artifact. The second illustration is based on a successful advertisement for one of the world’s largest banks, Brazil’s Itaú, featured on the back cover of The Economist (figure con.2). Juxtaposing this image of a polo-playing “global

Figure Con.2 Sandra Gamarra’s drawing inspired by the Itaú campaign, “El que no tiene de inga . . . ” Pencil on paper. 24 x 32 cm. 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

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Latin American” with the Colombian example already elicits defamiliarization. Globalization is not the same in these two cases because there is significant variation in the role that different Latin American locales and institutions play within the international order. For all the cathectic investment that proud bumanguenses may put into the (co-opted) image of their city, the stock photos and amateurish layout of this municipal ad campaign reveal a lack of sophistication. On the other hand, the paulista ad is all about sophistication, with its smart use of contrasting, simple colors (orange over black) and the canny choice of Argentine polo player Nacho Figueras as the brand’s front man. The term “Global Latin American” denotes those winners in globalization who come from the region, but excludes its “losers”—say, the maquila workers that sustain it, or the supermarket employees that Diamela Eltit writes about in Mano de obra. Figueras stands proud, front and center, an accomplished practitioner of an elite sport. Somehow, this kind of ad would not work with a more popular sport—it is hard to picture a soccer player filling this role. The Itaú campaign models globality from the top-down. The world is already an integrated place, it conveys, thanks to the coordinated efforts of a global elite of investors and the customers who follow their lead. Novels share with a variety of cultural products, advertisements included, a role in formulating, contesting, and transforming ideologies of the global. Reading fiction is more involved than responding to an advertisement, and speculating about the many cultural strands that come together in novels is a more complex task than decoding publicity. However, these two examples provide us with useful simplifications. Itaú and the municipality of Bucaramanga speak of globalization as a fait accompli to better advocate for a certain model of transnationalism. This is not that different from what Bogotá 39 was hoping to achieve: integration by fiat. Some novels, such as Budapest, carry out a similar operation, while others, like Mano de obra, remind us that the world is not integrated to begin with. Still others, like the multi-character Nazi Literature in the Americas, give us a vicarious experience of a historical transformation larger than any individual life. And so on. The point is that the novel as form is especially capable of capturing the intricacies of

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this still-unfolding process, so long as we engage it through close reading, theoretical consideration, and cultural critique. Throughout this book, my method has been dialectical and reflexive. I have regarded works of fiction as subjects of theory as opposed to objects to theorize upon. The difference is a matter of emphasis; it does not involve a complete suspension of critical agency—for clearly, fiction is not theory. In one sense, my intent has been to make manifest the latent theorizations of globality present in a series of works; in another, I have used these sources as case studies that support the approach I am outlining now. As I see it, understanding the multifarious relationship between literature and globalization requires dwelling on texts, one at a time, which is something that our fast-paced publication and academic milieus do not always allow themselves. I advocate for a labor-intensive critical practice, a form of rereading that restores texts to a meaningful—in this case, global—context. The mention of labor may seem odd in this context, but consider how distant reading advocates “outsourcing” close reading to national literature departments or literary labs. As previously stated, those interpretive strategies do not work for contemporary works from the semi-periphery. A distinct advantage of this dialectical approach is that the critic’s own ideologies of the global are not hidden. I, for one, consider that globalization can be a good thing for literature and culture, as it can be eviscerating—particularly if a narrow, economistic worldview prevails, leading to sameness and dullness. My cautiously optimistic position is evident in the very choice of my object of study, and in the way I have carried it forward. By contrast, the world literature paradigm does not assume its own ideology. It seeks to describe literature as a world, and yet it imagines itself to be outside of that world. The act of reading turns into a one-way street, where critics read the corpus but the corpus, in turn, does not reveal something about critics and their time. In plain words: reductivist, informationcentered approaches to the study of world literature impoverish our awareness of the world as a whole. Our true task should be to amplify, not to reduce. If this means that we cannot capture the changes in world literature at a glance, or quickly describe what a certain genre or literary epoch “are all about,” then so be it. If anything, mappings of literature

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should help us better get lost in that unpredictable terrain, not find a way out of it. This is particularly the case when dealing with contemporary Latin American literature, which competes not only with fiction from other places and times, but also with multiple media and with the numerous distractions of modern life. I share with several of my contemporaries the view that criticism must adapt to the realities of globalization. We have been working long enough in a nation-state-centered model that does not match the underlying conditions of culture anymore. Yet, as compilations like Connell and Marsh’s Literature and Globalization suggest, the most influential scholarly tendency is that of imagining a different product of criticism, not a different praxis. We confuse two separate issues: the consolidation of a singular literary history—hypercanonization, “big picture” teleology—with the consideration of literary representations of the global. I have moved from the former to the latter approach in the present study. My goal has been to show how sophisticated literary works grapple with the new, emerging totality of our time. Roberto Bolaño has served, to some extent, as a catalyst for that operation. When considered through the lens of world literature, Bolaño is the token contemporary Latin American writer, the one who stands out. In that model, representativity and reduction are unavoidable, often in the interest of clarity and perspicuous representation. In contrast, I have favored a somewhat “messier” model, which does not make haste in finding resolutions to a still-unfolding problem. To reiterate, one of the advantages of my approach lies in its engagement with ideology. Top-down theorizations of globalization and literature tend to speak from a site of unassumed ahistoricity. They imagine themselves above the contradictions of the global, as if critical acts were always objective, descriptive, and nonpartisan. I have been a partisan of Latin Americanness as an organizing principle that affords specificity while allowing comparison, as I have underscored the historicity of texts and what they can tell us about our present conjuncture. Is the relationship between geopolitics and literary discourse one of causality, affinity, homology, or analogy? This is, of course, the million-dollar question—to express the matter with an American idiom that, like many aspects of the

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works studied here, does not travel well in translation. The answer is . . . it depends. The emergence of the global in the literary imagination calls for a case-by-case, from-the-bottom-up critical study. I have attempted to do this here. In the process, a series of concepts and forms of the global have emerged: fantastic Nazism, impossible escapism, supermarket worlds, transnational narconovelas, and contemporary art-statement fiction, among others. Each of these resists the facile, homogenizing projections of totalizing world literature-like paradigms. They do so, precisely, by offering their own totalities—their Alephs. Borges belongs in this discussion for several reasons. Aside from the central insight that his work attempts to represent the world as a whole, there is also an obvious aesthetic affinity. Borgesian motifs are not only numerous in Latin American fiction, but also vital to their host narratives. One could refer to many contemporary works by their Borgesian affiliation: Vallejo’s novel would be “Aleph in a Slum,” Bolaño’s “Universal History of Nazi Tlön,” Volpi’s “The Theme of the Scientist Traitor and the Scientist Hero,” Padilla’s “Garden of Forking Railways,” Buarque’s “Buarque and I,” and so forth. That this naming game is possible suggests a more serious recombination occurring within a tradition. The tokenistic integration into a global canon of giants like Borges—and, more modestly, Bolaño—misses out on the many “intermediate” steps that unfold within the Latin American narrative tradition, be it through direct influence or serendipitous coincidence. Borges is a red thread in the region and elsewhere; Bolaño is a meeting point for the comparatist and Latin Americanist readerships of this volume; the works by several other authors analyzed in this study thematize global sentiment and summon us to rethink our ways of analyzing global cultural production. For Aira, another close-reader of Borges, the relationship between globality and literature is one of homophony and mutation. Recall how the haphazard narrative of El mármol results from a series of variations on the word “glóbulo,” leading to a fragile “globo” or balloon of a plotline that may burst at any moment—until it does, spectacularly. This is a useful reminder that the problem of globalization and literature is chiefly about creativity and art, not taxonomy and efficient classification. Literature,

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lest we forget in this impetuous digital age, is not information. A summary of the Aleph does not replace (and cannot summon) the experience of reading the piece; summary is, in fact, beside the point. Similarly, there is a dwelling in the contradictions of the global that takes place as one reads works like The Savage Detectives, whose wandering characters crisscross the world. Or consider how the paratactic unfolding of fascism in Nazi Literature in the Americas makes readers question their own, unacknowledged narratives of transnational cultural ascendancy. Or take the case of supermarket tales which, read in conversation with relevant critical theory, estrange a common daily life experience of globalized capitalism. As I see it, the task of the critic is to reveal the potential that literary works may have for ideology and cultural critique of the global. This does not amount to reducing works of art solely to their social content, but rather, to appreciating how these two elements bear upon each other. In this regard, my debt to the thought of the Frankfurt School has been made clear, as have been the reasons for my working archive to remain heterodox and heterogeneous. The issues on the table are different: while Bolaño looks back upon the mid twentieth-century clash between communism and fascism, his stories serve as a commentary on the regimes of presentday transnationalism. While Bellatin and Aira revisit the avant-gardes, their late, mediated adoption of their practices amounts to an intervention in an established global network where literature and the arts have meaningful, sustained conversations. Buarque’s Budapest is, well, not that of Lukács. Narconovelas play out the ongoing struggle between a transnational society of control and equally transnational popular alternatives. Put together, these referents tell a story of integration and resistance to the single-literary-history narrative that has accompanied the triumph of global finance capitalism since 1989. There are several paths forward. One, already anticipated, would be to question distant reading and sociologies of literature, since they miss crucial knowledge that comes from traditional, if critical and cultural theoryinformed, close reading of a few key works. Along those lines, this book has established a small canon of contemporary Latin American works with a series of attributes. First, they present a cohesive, distinctive corpus

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within Latin Americanism. Other works, some of which I have marginally alluded to, could also be read as global Latin American novels, while different groupings would speak meaningfully to subnational, ultra-local constituencies that deserve their own study (for instance, regionalismo could be revisited after the present argument). The second attribute is the same when regarded from a comparative framework: the works assembled here demand a level of field-specific awareness that questions the pertinence of the more encompassing, yet vague, world literature model; they constitute themselves as privileged objects to reflect upon the global condition. In this sense, my intervention has consisted in extending the mediatory powers of Bolaño to a constellation of his contemporaries. The third attribute, a corollary to the previous ones, is that the institutional organization of Latin Americanism cannot be subsumed under that of comparatism—otherwise, we would have no one to report at an adequate level of “detail.” This last point, which may seem irrelevant for the several thousands of scholars who attend the now annual Latin American Studies Association conference, does matter a great deal. There are those who seek to repopulate the discipline of comparative literature by adopting the paradigm of world literature, as well as those who consider metropolitan theory and disciplinary comparatism as the only authorized fora for discussions on the global.11 A different path forward finds less of an antagonism between Latin Americanism and comparatism and more of an opportunity for complementarity. The scale and scope of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova’s previously examined studies are different from those of this volume, as they do not focus on the contemporary. Moretti does express concern that the object of academic inquiry is shrinking in the United States, engaging contemporary American works and ignoring other national literatures.12 The implication is that we need to focus on the long history of other national histories. But what about expanding academic inquiry to their contemporaneity? This, I think, is a way in which metropolitan academia can contribute to reversing the inequalities of the world literary system. It is structural to transnational literary institutions that semi-peripheral works do not receive as much concentrated critical attention “in real time”

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as central texts do. Academia alone cannot reverse this trend, as publishing houses and economic disincentives for translation have their own inertia. But we can certainly oppose these forces with a renewed praxis. It is useful to situate this argument in regards to the response that Moretti gives to Christopher Prendergast and Efraín Kristal’s counterarguments. Prendergast claims that Moretti and Casanova are providing a “naturalized winners’ history.” Their application of evolution and worldsystems theory to the study of a global literary space—in Moretti more quantitative and in Casanova more speculative—would merely give sociological or quasi-scientific validation to what we already know. Moretti responds, convincingly, that his graphic representations of literary evolution show that there are many possible paths that literary evolution could have taken. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became the preeminent detective writer, effectively cancelling out his literary rivals, due to a multiplying effect of the market—again, giving more to those who already have—that Moretti’s methods can make evident. This finding, he concludes, empowers the critic to reassess the past. While I agree, I also find this outcome problematic, for two reasons: one, for its obvious privileging of the past over the present; second, for its radical separation of what literary markets do with what critical judgments do. The meteoric rise of Roberto Bolaño illustrates how critics are powerful forces within the market as well. Because it is such a recent phenomenon, we can describe it while it is still “in the making,” as Sarah Pollack, whom I discussed in my introduction, has done. Centers of the literary world have a responsive feedback loop between reviewers, scholars of various persuasions (including theorists), presses, and the market in general. Uneven development, however, dictates different rules in the semi-periphery: I know from experience that trying to find Nocturno de Chile (2000; trans. By Night in Chile, 2003) in Santiago is quite an ordeal because it must be imported, at an unfavorable conversion rate, from Spain. The mechanisms for the reproduction of cultural capital, in the most material sense, are not in place everywhere. By contrast, it would seem that Shakespeare needs no advocates—although he does have them, as critical pieces, theoretical ruminations (see Derrida’s Aphorism Countertime), and com-

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mercial editions all appear to succeed each other and multiply naturally. The semi-periphery cannot afford the density or unity of purpose of the center, which can effectively coordinate the efforts of multiple different actors. Its contemporary manifestations are especially at a disadvantage, for they have relatively weak cultural institutions to promote them. For every Bolaño, there are numerous other Latin American authors who are, borrowing a phrase I heard from Michelle Clayton, “lost until in translation.” In a boomerang effect, this further debilitates their standing in their own places of origin. I don’t find farfetched the conspiracy theory that Bolaño’s untimely death facilitated his global reception, not only for auratic reasons—the allure of a lost genius—but because he could thus be unrooted from any pre-existing, if relatively modest, critical tradition. But Prendergast is right when it comes to the contemporary. Here omission or lack of recognition paves the way for the consolidation of big cultural capitals and the dissolution of small ones. In the contemporary, to borrow Moretti’s metaphor, scholars can in fact “cultivate” the branch of a tree, and not just reflect forensically on why it never grew or give it a vicarious afterlife. This I have done; I have restored some of the extended literary family of an author who made it into English as a mere isolated phenomenon, and given consistency to Latin Americanist scholarship on the contemporary. Contemporary Latin American authors are often not read across this wide region due to various practical limitations, let alone reread or theorized. My hope is that the concept of the global Latin American novel, as the figure of Bolaño himself, may mediate between several meaning-making communities within Latin Americanism.13 Adopting this concept is a way of realizing that the region does contribute to global discourse, and does not just produce the primary material that others read with fascination under that paradigm. (In the context of the present argument, it may not be irrelevant to note that, biographically, I have the good fortune of shuttling back and forth between North and South America.) As a concept and a grouping of authors, the Global Latin American novel demands to be a part of the contemporary. Moretti concludes the defense of his study with a statement I take issue with: “Theories will never abolish inequality: they can only hope to explain it.”14 Again, this does not

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apply to the contemporary. To theorize contemporary Latin American literature—to theorize along with it—does transform the ensemble. It restores an actuality that is lost to belated translation, weak cultural institutions, neglect, and market forces. I have aligned, then, contemporariness and globalization. Were this not a time of globalization, the works considered here would not be contemporary. Yet the answers to the questions “can Latin American literature be global?” and “can it be contemporary?” are isomorphic. I have been circumventing the idea that our current epoch begins at the later round of increased integration following the year 1989. But this would be a self-fulfilling prophecy along the lines of old-style philological thinking. One could pick any date in time, organize cultural production around it in such a way that gives it symbolic value, and find the premises of the argument mirrored in its conclusions. 1989 is important, and I do think it must be regarded as a crucial turning point. 2001, as Beverley has argued, signals another important inflection in time. But neither date operates in a before-and-after, clear-cut fashion. They instead act as markers that reveal the contemporary, and globalization within it, as an open problem. Still, the emergence of globality as an important theme in Latin American literary imagination and the cultural production of the last twentysomething years coincide. Alternatively, one could claim that works of the early nineties belong to an earlier era, and reserve other categories for those of the 2000s. However, I find that such an option would ill-serve a historical moment only now coming into its own. “Globalization” was the academic buzzword of the nineties, blazing a trail of publications that did not take into full consideration the literature of the region. Within Latin Americanism, the postmodernism and subalternism debates had the standing, in some respects even the role, that globalization had in other fields. Now we have the chance to synchronize these lines of inquiry. The goal is not to produce critical obsolescence, but to have the findings of those enterprises come to bear on pressing issues that literature, among other arts, seeks to address. Globalization is a defining element of our epoch, desirable— interconnectedness and budding cosmopolitanism—and undesirable

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aspects—a sprawling war on drugs, the impositions of a common market, new forms of inequality—included. As I have shown, Latin American novels speak to these profound contradictions, both through their themes and with their form. Their distinct contributions come to light when we regard them as our contemporaries, despite a structural bias to relegating them, pace Casanova, to an always-already past condition. The present volume, then, has sought to make these works truly contemporary. Can Latin American literature ever be contemporary? Lionel Ruffel notes that “contemporary” is a non-category, always contingent to what Foucault would call an “ordre du discours.”15 The critic, who explores in detail the complex processes involved in the designation of something as contemporary, underlines the importance of the personal pronoun: when we say “our” contemporaries, we choose, discern, and exclude by default. Accordingly, by “contemporary” I mean, in the etymological sense, those we share our times with. Latin American literature is never contemporary to itself, let alone to the metropolis. In other words, for structural reasons, it cannot take part on equal footing in a global attention economy. And yet Bolaño is a global author, which means that many regard him as “their” contemporary. Why not skilled creators as pertinent as Aira or Vallejo? The short answer is cultural hegemony. As Casanova argues, the literary present is axiological, not temporal. There is a positive feedback loop between Bolaño’s contemporaneity and his globality—the more his fiction speaks to the global condition, the more actuality it gains—that one should extend to other authors before, so to speak, the narrow space reserved in the attention span for Latin Americans is full and closed. This cannot be done by sociological, taxonomical, or promotional fiat, but through acts of reading that lay down bridges between Latin Americanism, metropolitan theories, and localized, sometimes untranslated, texts. To be contemporary of those authors is to share with them the recent historical experience of the intensification of transnational interconnectedness. This, too, is a circuit of accumulation, but one that goes against the more established ways of cultural hierarchies. From here on, we may do one of several things. A modest outcome would be to expand the site afforded to the hypercanonical, within a global attention economy, to

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contemporary Latin American authors other than Roberto Bolaño. A more radical version of this project would consider the literary cultures of authors who not only are marginalized within international circulation, but those with local limitations to begin with. If, in a loose sense, an author like Jorge Volpi is “subaltern” to his middlebrow, equally potentially best-selling counterparts from the First World, there are also many other Mexican cultural actors, one could argue, that he in turn eclipses. Those subalterns to the subalterns of world literature require not one, but many future studies. Yet hypercanons cannot just grow to accommodate them. On the contrary, their very presence suggests the need to overcome the competition-centered epistemology of world literature, and to question its two main pillars: the notion that literature is relatively autonomous—while it is a remarkably heteronomous affair in most places—and the narrow definition of literature as genre-codified, text-centered cultural production. Given the scope of my present argument, I limit myself to pointing in the direction of this meaningful aporia. Another possible ramification of this study would be to compare global Latin American novels with similar works from other parts of the world. One example is Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang’s thought-provoking compilation, Global Chinese Literature. The volume contributors address similar topics to those discussed here, namely the insertion of national tradition within more encompassing literary historiographies, the politics of recognition beyond nation-states, and so forth. Equally interesting examples could arise from the Middle East, the post-Soviet sphere, and from other areas where the post-1989 reconfiguration of the world order has had a profound impact on culture. Meta-comparative approaches of the sort insinuated here could further unsettle cultural hierarchies, stimulate a new era of critical cross-fertilization, and even potentially stimulate the imagination of writers themselves. At the same time, the caveat is not to reproduce the power structure at work in the notion of hyphenated identities, where, to draw an example from the U.S. context, “American” is always a more authoritative label than “Armenian-American,” “IranianAmerican,” or any other “x-American”—x being a variable for any other national origin. Mutatis mutandis, “Global-y”—where y stands for Latin

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American or Chinese, for example—could operate in a similar way. We must remain vigilant not to reify center-periphery models or to trade critical concepts for fixed taxonomies. Because “Latin American” can be both a utopian orientation and an instrument of strategic essentialism, its deployment and conversation with other designations cannot be analyzed a priori. In its totality, the world is still illegible to most of us, bound as we are to a concrete historical and geographical experience. Why would world literature, comparatism, or even Latin Americanism be otherwise? “Of all the concepts Moretti has received from the devil,” says Elif Batuman in a witty essay published in n+1, “ ‘world literature’ is one of the slipperiest. At times it suggests an entity that transcends national literatures; at times it suggests the sum total of the literatures of all nations.”16 Batuman has a point. The first sense is that of the hypercanon, and its logic is that of selection and representativity. The second is a much broader archive, a radical unknown. And yet even the most basic, arbitrary, and modestsized hypercanons provide a vast terrain to get lost in. Latin Americanism, of course, has its share of hypercanons and all-encompassing archives. If one were to pick a representative literary work from each Latin American nation, one would still end up with a rich selection, let alone if one were to consider the production of the region in its entirety. This book has presented a mere partial hypercanon of recent novels, but wishes to gesture at those broader terrains. I have elucidated the representation of globality in contemporary Latin American literature, but have not exhausted the topic. Other works could make part of this constellation. There are those that deal with the impact of the World Wide Web and other media technologies. Among these, Edmundo Paz Soldán’s El delirio de Turing (2003; trans. Turing’s Delirium, 2006), whose protagonist is a Bolivian computer hacker, stands out.17 There are also works that reflect on immigration and transnational citizenship. These works could include many titles, but I would single out Fruta podrida (Rotten Fruit, 2007), by the Chilean author Lina Meruane. Migration itself has changed: what for several decades used to be a unidirectional flow toward the metropolis

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(the “brain drain”) now involves more comings and goings. For instance, there are cases of Ecuadorians and Argentinians, who left to Spain looking for favorable economic conditions, returning to their places of origin or trying their luck elsewhere following the economic downturn. Meruane is one among several novelists to reflect on this new reality, and also one of the few to extrapolate from it on what it means to belong in the world.18 A third category that could receive similar attention is transnational partnerships, such as Words Without Borders (2007). The anthology, confronting the fact that “50 percent of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but only 6 percent are translated into English,”19 features original translations of short texts by more than twenty authors, spanning five continents. These writers include the Latin Americans Mario Bellatin, Juan Villoro, Ambar Past, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Marcela Solá, Juan José Saer, and Juan Forn. Bellatin also participated in a similar initiative hosted by the journal Meet (2007) of the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs de Saint-Nazaire, which assembled in the special issue “Mexico et Sarajevo” texts by authors from both cities in their original languages and in French translation. He was joined by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Carlos Monsiváis, Sergio Pitol, and Natalia Toledo, among other Mexican writers. There are similar issues pairing Trieste and Buenos Aires, San Salvador and Tbilisi, Berlin and Caracas, and so on.20 Arguably, such initiatives avoid the pitfalls of operating like “the forum of a ‘literary world cup,’ ” as Benedict Anderson once described Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters.”21 Latin American institutions also host similar initiatives, as exemplified in the Festival de Poesía de Medellín, Colombia, and the Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty, Brazil. Moretti makes the suggestive observation that “the way we imagine comparative literature is a mirror of how we see the world.”22 Inasmuch as this book has imagined a form of comparatism within Latin Americanism, it has also envisioned a globality that places Latin America at its center. Other locales could follow a similar path. Such conscious acts of partiality strengthen multipolarity and facilitate a truly transnational debate. Globalization does not entail the dissolution of local identities,

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but an opportunity to rethink them relationally. More than ever, “Latin American” signifies through differentiation—that is, by indicating that something is not Asian, African, or European. More comprehensive scholarship should revisit the problem of how such differences, as well as any pertinent similarities, articulate a sense of belonging to a broader, worldwide community. Institutional configurations of literature mirror how we see the world, but this gaze looks back at us, reaffirming what we thought we would see. Only if we allow the work to read us back, so to speak, might we interrupt this circuit of recognition and be surprised once more. Models for the study of literature on a world scale operate according to structural, ideological, and institutional preconditions—ways in which visions of the global become operative for the study, reproduction, and dissemination of fiction. As I have demonstrated in the chapters of this book, the Global Latin American novel invites a reconfiguration of received ideas about global culture and remediates the relations between world literature and Latin America. The relative disadvantage of Latin American locales vis-à-vis the major hubs of global culture factors into narratives themselves. In turn, those narratives seek to affect the ensemble. They appeal to readers’ unacknowledged, not entirely conscious portraits of the world, and of the place of Latin America therein, calling them to question. Indeed, because ideologies of the global underlie critical practices, one can only hope to be flexible of mind and allow one’s sense of belonging in the world to be transformed by reading. This is not very different from appreciating works of institutional critique in the realm of the arts. The works I have studied resemble the initial gesture of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), that remarkable Trojan horse, which sought to change the museum and the art institution from within. The global Latin American novel seeks to do just that, and no less, to world literature. In this spirit, consider an art piece that synthesizes many of the arguments I have put forward in this volume: Shibboleth (2007), by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. This piece does something spatially that previously analyzed works achieve through novelistic form: it invites critical reflection on the global condition. It produces a different effect than that of economistic campaigns like Itaú or Bucaramanga Global, or that of

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cultural initiatives like Bogotá 39. There is much to gain from appreciating the family resemblances between these phenomena as well as their differences, for this operation solidifies an understanding of the many ways in which cultural production shapes globality. Shibboleth (figure con.3) was a sui generis installation, sculpture, and art intervention displayed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern of London. Salcedo received what is perhaps the most prestigious commission in the art world: a carte blanche to use the space where, in the museum’s previous incarnation as a power plant, one would find enormous electric generators. From before its inception, the artwork was conditioned in many ways. The Tate Modern is a high church of contemporary art housed in a relic of industrial London. It faces St. Paul’s Cathedral, which rivals it in size, and sits across a bridge at the opposite bank of the Thames. The occasion was openly corporate-sponsored—part of the Unilever Series—and was surrounded with media hype and critical expectation. Salcedo, whose work has frequently dealt in non-figurative ways with the violence in Colombia, was the first Latin American artist to ever be featured in the series, which opened in 2000 with Louise Bourgeois and has since summoned the biggest names around (among them Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Bruce Nauman, and Rachel Whiteread). In sum, Salcedo faced a unique combination of artistic autonomy within rigid cultural coordinates, a situation not unlike that encountered by contemporary Latin American writers. She responded with a giant, harrowing crack in the floor. Barely perceptible upon entering the gallery space, it gradually widened as it snaked along the room for 548 feet, or 167 meters.23 A few inches wide and around two feet deep, it resembled an earthquake fissure, calling for contemplation and communicating a sense of vulnerability. The media picked up on the stories of a few spectators who, despite warnings, tripped and hurt themselves. In a publicized interpretation of her own work, Salcedo readily offered a key to the puzzle, mentioning the biblical story that tells how the Gileadites would kill those who crossed the Jordan River if they were unable to pronounce the “sh” sound in “shibboleth,” since that would prove that they spoke a different dialect and thus were enemies. Using this narrative as a springboard, the artist directed the response to the piece

Figure Con.3 Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007). Concrete and metal. Length: 548 ft / 167 m. Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, October 9, 2007–April 6, 2008. Photo by Marcus Leith / Andrew Dunkley. Image courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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towards broad contemporary issues, including war, xenophobia, and the experience of immigrants. Certainly, one can read the work along those lines and appreciate how Salcedo transformed the lived experience at the Turbine Hall into a renewed understanding of such issues, compelling us to confront the Gileadites of today. But there is more to the installation. Perhaps seeking to escape the familiar burden of particularism, in her public statements Salcedo mentioned “the situation in Colombia” sparingly, as if pointing at the chasm that threatens us all and not at some distant abyss—and here one may recall Our Lady of the Assassins—that makes our comfort all the more comfortable. Had the artist let go of her life-long engagement with her home country’s problematics at the peak of her international recognition? In fact, her work responded in one deft movement both to global and to local concerns, creating a space where these would not have to be one or the other. At a formal level, this happened within the crack itself, which was made of concrete cast of a Colombian rock face. Likewise, when one considers the artist’s oeuvre as a whole, one will find in the use of concrete a recurrent element that has served elsewhere to transform household items into objects that assimilate the exterior and the interior, as in the cabinets and beds “filled with concrete” of the series La Casa Viuda (figure con.4)—an assessment of the “weight” of national events over daily life in the country. Through this material logic, her work transformed the floor of the Turbine Hall into that of an overgrown Colombian household. At the same time, Salcedo’s reflection partakes in metropolitan theoretical debates, given how the name and theme of the installation allude to the eponymous essay by Jacques Derrida on Paul Celan’s “The Meridian.”24 Shibboleth is aware of its conditions of production and does an institutional critique of the art world—much like Aira’s novelitas do, mutatis mutandis, in regard to the literary establishment. The title ironically evokes the artist’s admittance to a very small circle: she has pronounced the password correctly. One could also see “Bucaramanga Global,” Itaú’s “Global Latin American,” and “Bogotá 39” as less reflexive—and less successful— passwords into world standing. Salcedo’s work, on the other hand, ponders the experience of going from the periphery to the center, except it spatializes

Figure Con.4 Doris Salcedo, Untitled (1995). Wood, concrete, cloth, glass, steel. 63 3/4 x 39 1/4 x 14 1/2 in. / 162 x 99.5 x 37 cm. Image courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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such movement as a different metaphor, that of going from the bottom up. This intervention was neither in-your-face nor self-indulgent (as arguably Eliasson’s had been a few years back when he made a working artificial sun). Shibboleth avows yet underexploits its condition as immigrant art, bearing the national plight and dragging the spectator in while also uttering the password that makes the building—the institution—crumble. Salcedo’s pedagogism can at times make the installation seem unidimensional, but its richness lies in its power to, as it were, concentrate historical contradiction around a single object that, although readily apprehensible, creates a lasting impression and elicits critical thought. This is just the kind of operation I have attempted to historicize in the case of contemporary Latin American writers. Salcedo confronts the workings of an existing public sphere and orchestrates its transformation; her creation does not leave the audience unchanged. One may trace this performative quality in phenomena like Bellatin’s Paris impersonations, but also in their developments and precedents within their works of fiction. Likewise, the reader does not experience the global in the same way after having imagined the alternative totalities or parallel globalizations put forward by Vallejo’s iconocratic subversions or by Bolaño’s elaborate, fantastic global Nazi conspiracy. In turn, Aira finds his strand of conceptualism in a different branch of a tree that has Duchamp at its root and Salcedo not too far away—or rather, in a rhizome that binds them all together. Although the works considered here deal with specific problematics inherent to their texts and circumstances—varying widely from post-dictatorship to sicariato—they all share the common denominator of making art of their inscription in the global. This has been the reason why understanding the production of the global in their works and finding their place within the global are not separate endeavors. In situating themselves in the world, contemporary Latin American writers are finding new forms of expression or reinventing others, questioning the limits of traditional literary media, raising important questions about how we conceive the global, and challenging literary institutions. This brings to mind Graciela Montaldo’s critique of the paralyzing effects of a rigid understanding of “world literature,” and her “suspicion” that what we call literature is often but

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“mere institutionalization of a practice.”25 Are the Alephs of contemporary Latin American literature the kind of disruptive element needed to prevent the inflexibility Montaldo warns against? This question must remain open, given that this book happens within an institutional frame, too.26 Doris Salcedo’s intervention in Turbine Hall reminds us that globalization is not written in the stars. The world is not one place; there is no telos that naturally leads to the consciousness of the world as a whole, nor is there a path that naturally takes to the constitution of a “world literature” that harmonizes the global and the local. One can always stop and hear the dissonance. After all, “shibboleth” is a risky word, best pronounced perhaps with a heavy accent. EPILOGUE: THE CASE FOR CRITICAL HOSPITALIT Y

There is a different concept in Derrida that could just as well underpin Salcedo’s intervention and accompany this book’s trajectory from Aleph to Shibboleth. In short, it is the idea that true hospitality is always excessive—the host always risks turning the house over to the guest. (One could say the Aleph leads to the destruction of the house on Garay Street.) An invitation can transform the abode forever; it may irrevocably alter the rules of the household. I find that the indispensable risk implicit in the act of welcoming aptly describes the logic of the relationship between world literature and Latin Americanism. But who is the host, and who the guest? It seems that is a question that could only be answered with time, for the institutional configurations for the study of literature on a world scale are still taking shape. Or are they? For one, Latin America has hosted “universal” literature for many years, as any cursory examination of the region’s college curricula would reveal. Brazilian university students read Dostoyevsky in Portuguese translation; Chileans avidly read the Greek and Roman classics, if not in the original then in popular Spanish translations by the Spanish publisher Gredos; in Colombia, Norma edited a successful series of illustrated children’s books with “The Seven Best” stories from India, China, Japan, and the Celtic tradition, among others.27 Meanwhile, influential emerging institutions like the Institute for World Literature,

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directed by David Damrosch from Harvard, assume a different, more centralized role as hosts, if not as arbiters and brokers. In these terms, I have argued for Latin Americanism to host world literature and vice versa, not symmetrically or apolitically, but in a critical, informed manner. The latter can certainly turn the furniture in the house of Latin Americanism on its head—that is the more common phenomenon. But the opposite should also be the case, and this book has been devoted, in part, to that cause. Doris Salcedo makes a crack in the floor of a hospitable space, subverting the rules of hospitality. Similarly, in keeping with the house metaphor, one could say that literary Latin Americanism is a house with many rooms (or national traditions), some more outward looking than others. Hosting is one of the things that bring tenants together—there is a Latin American way of reading, say, the Icelandic sagas, which owes to Borges. Conversely, it is crucial that world literature recognizes Latin Americanism as a self-sustaining unit. This point might seem trivial to readers based in Latin America, but it is an important one to make for academia in the United States, which is, in any case, very much connected to the region. If world literature does not recognize that Latin Americanism can be as much a host as a guest, then university administrators might be inclined to close Spanish and Portuguese departments. (In my own host institution’s nomenclature, the equivalent is the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures). If we tread further down that path, we will stop teaching in so-called “target languages” and instrumentalize them as some German and French departments already do with the languages within their purview. Someone could object that the skirmishes of academic administrations have nothing to do with, for instance, how we read the work of Roberto Bolaño. But it does. Bolaño can be domesticated by English departments and by their many cognate institutions in the culture industry because there is a dialectic between reading and institutions. He can also get plucked from his contexts, and be declared “a discovery.” The point is not to chastise readers, but to reveal some of the structural limitations for a richer hospitality. In a literal sense, globalization brings about more invitations and interactions among readers, critics, and the public. “Flying in” authors to

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give a series of talks is more economically viable than it used to be. For example, in 2013, Coetzee was in Bogotá and the bogotano author Juan Gabriel Vásquez was in several Western metropolises. Yet we seek to preserve the aura of a distant writer even when they can, de facto, play as locals. Institutions have not caught up with this new reality. Bolaño’s conspicuous absence from the scene of his international success makes him ideal to prolong a quasi-mythic structure where Latin America is somehow further away than it really is. In different ways and degrees, every other author considered in this book is accessible for an international audience. But is there a transnational readership ready for them? Synchronicity solves some problems and causes others, as weaker cultural economies must collaborate, but also compete, with stronger ones. Turning the tables on hosts and guests can bring about a more textured present—an informed, rich synchronicity. The Mexican thinker Alfonso Reyes famously demanded that Latin America occupy its seat at “the banquet of civilization.” For contemporary Latin American literature and its counterparts, this task would be more like a game of musical chairs, where guests and hosts trade places, unmindful of table manners. The rising paradigm of world literature could benefit from this playful exercise, and also from its more serious consequences. These include the specific operations described in the chapters of this book, such as defamiliarizing transnational literary circulation from the point of view of contemporary art, or using Alephs, supermarkets, “Nazi” tales, stories of impossible escapism, or narcoreligion as critical tools to understand a multipolar, global present. Extrapolating, the advantages of critical hospitality include a greater exposure to different ways of doing criticism, alternative literary historiographies, and to more or less incompatible aesthetic values. World literature may be a byproduct of globalization, but it does not need to reproduce the cultural homogenization that drives some of its manifestations. If guests behaved exactly like hosts, they would not be guests at all.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: GLOBALIZATION AS FORM 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, ed. John King (London: Verso, 1993). Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 280–81. Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005), 1: 665; Borges, “The Aleph,” 282. Borges, “The Aleph,” 283–84. “El diámetro del Aleph sería de dos o tres centímetros, pero el espacio cósmico estaba ahí, sin disminución de tamaño. Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo. Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, . . . y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.” Borges, “El Aleph,” 666–67. Sarlo would concur: “Afirmación de la novedad como valor y remisión a una tradición cultural preexistente, reivindicación de lo “característicamente argentino” y perspectiva cosmopolita. . . . La tensión populismo/modernidad o nacionalismo/ cosmopolitismo informa acerca de un hecho significativo, casi una constante de la cultura argentina del siglo XX. Precisamente sobre estos ejes se fueron produciendo los grandes debates culturales que convirtieron al campo intelectual en escena de disputas ideológicas e institucionales. Finalmente, la resolución de las tensiones planteadas por ellos, o precisamente el tema de su contradicción, produjeron muchos de los textos decisivos de la literatura argentina contemporánea.” “Vanguardia y criollismo: La aventura de Martín Fierro,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 8, no. 15 ( January 1982): 68–69.

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Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); John Tomlinson, “Globalization and Cultural Analysis,” in Globalization Theory, eds. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007), 148–68; Gayatri Spivak, “Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization” (lecture, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, February 25, 2010). 8. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. As is well known, there are two rather incompatible strands in Moretti’s criticism. Oversimplifying, it is possible to describe one strand as qualitative and the other as quantitative, though both are invested in systematizing grand narratives of literary change. For the most part, my book polemicizes with the second strand. 9. A capacious account of the evolution of the concept—which, however, does not inquire about its own historical necessity—can be found in David Damrosch’s “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 481– 95. Pheng Cheah offers an insightful commentary of Goethe in “What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008): 26–38. 10. For a detailed discussion of this concept, see Román de la Campa’s now-classic Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). I follow Alberto Moreiras’s definition of Latin Americanism as “the sum total of academic discourse on Latin America, whether carried out in Latin America, the United States, in Europe, or elsewhere” (The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies [Durham: Duke University Press, 1999], 1). 11. For a different critical view of world literature based on the limits of cross-cultural translation, see Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013). 12. There are several excellent article compilations that allow one to navigate this sprawling terrain. See in particular Haun Saussy, ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and the more upto-date Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, eds., Literature and Globalization: A Reader (London: Routledge: 2010). For a longue durée perspective, see Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s World Literature: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2013), which features relevant texts from 1782 to 2010. These books participate in the invention of a tradition, in the double-sense of inventio as stumbling upon and as creating. 13. An invaluable source for Latin Americanist responses to world literature debates— especially to Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova—can be found in Ignacio M. Sánchez-Prado, ed., América Latina en la “literatura mundial” (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006). See also Jeffrey Cedeño, ed. "Literatura y globalización en América Latina," Dossier, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 34, no. 69 (2009): 9–261, and Francisca Noguerol et al., eds., Literatura más allá de la nación: De lo centrípeto y lo centrífugo en la narrativa hispanoamericana del siglo XXI (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2011.). 14. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Para una teoría de la literatura hispanoamericana y otras aproximaciones (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1975), 45. Quoted in Hugo Achugar, “Local/Global Latin Americanisms: ‘Theoretical Babbling,’ apropos Roberto 6. 7.

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

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Fernández Retamar,” in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, eds. Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 677. Gerald Martin goes as far as to claim that “Latin American literature confirms the existence of Latin America, not the other way around.” I agree with the observation he makes later in the essay that “Latin America’s special contribution to our planet” is “a unique dialectic between nation and continent, individual and collectivity.” “The Novel of a Continent: Latin America,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1: 635, 666. Thanks to John Pedro Schwartz for directing my attention to this text. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Djelal Kadir, “Comparative Literature in a World Become Tlön,” Comparative Critical Studies 3, no. 1–2 (2006): 125–38. Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (2005): 89. Jessie Ferguson brought to my attention a likely basis for Bolaño’s character: the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer (1896–1966), a member of the Nazi Party who fought for the Wehrmacht. See Wolfgang Fleischer, Heimito von Doderer: Das Leben, das Umfeld des Werks in Fotos und Dokumenten (Vienna: K&S, 1995). Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009). Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, 72; Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998), 83. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, 573. Ibid., 456. “Iñaki Echavarne, bar Giardinetto, calle Granada del Penedés, Barcelona, julio de 1994. Durante un tiempo la Crítica acompaña a la Obra, luego la Crítica se desvanece y son los Lectores quienes la acompañan. El viaje puede ser largo o corto. Luego los Lectores mueren uno por uno y la Obra sigue sola, aunque otra Crítica y otros Lectores poco a poco vayan acompasándose a su singladura. Luego la Crítica muere otra vez y los Lectores mueren otra vez y sobre esa huella de huesos sigue la Obra su viaje hacia la soledad. Acercarse a ella, navegar a su estela es señal inequívoca de muerte segura, pero otra Crítica y otros Lectores se le acercan incansables e implacables y el tiempo y la velocidad los devoran. Finalmente la Obra viaja irremediablemente sola en la Inmensidad. Y un día la Obra muere, como mueren todas las cosas, como se extinguirá el Sol y la Tierra, el Sistema Solar y la Galaxia y la más recóndita memoria de los hombres. Todo lo que empieza como comedia acaba como tragedia.” Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, 484. See Ignacio Echevarría, Desvíos: Un recorrido crítico por la reciente narrativa latinoamericana (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2007). There are also other Alephs in Bolaño, most notably in the remarkable short story “El Ojo Silva,” translated by Chris Andrews as “Mauricio (‘the Eye’) Silva” in the collection Last Evenings on Earth (New York: New Directions, 2006; originally in Putas asesinas, 2001). The title itself is a saucy joke, alluding to the “whistling eye,”

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28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

INTRODUCTION or a farting anus. True to form, the subject of the story is darkly scatological, involving a Chilean expat who, from a bench park in Berlin, recounts how he wound up “rescuing” orphan children from a brothel in a grievously and purposefully indistinct Indian city. “To rescue” is too strong a verb for this understated and jarring tale about empathy, moral obligation, kinship, and the gradual unfolding of solidarity across continents. Worlding, literature, and sexuality are as intimately connected here as in The Savage Detectives, if arguably more violently. I am grateful to Ximena Briceño for pointing out the affinity of the story with my reading of the novel. She and I explore the crossroads of aesthetics and politics in Bolaño in “‘Así se hace literatura’: Historia literaria y políticas del olvido en Nocturno de Chile y Soldados de Salamina,” Revista iberoamericana 76, no. 232–233 (2010): 601–20. See Cecila Manzoni, ed., Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2002); and Gustavo Faverón and Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Bolaño salvaje (Barcelona: Candaya, 2008). Sarah Pollack, “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States,” Comparative Literature 61, no. 3 (2009): 362. Pollack elaborates her sociology of the U.S. reception of Bolaño in a later article, where she examines how the themes of “the extreme romantic ethos of the Latin American poet and the violent, apocalyptic representation of the region” are the hallmarks of a Bolaño-inspired promotion of other writers from the region. “After Bolaño: Rethinking the Politics of Latin American Literature in Translation,” PMLA 128, no 3 (2013): 661. For an example of this kind of discourse, see the special commemorative number of Time magazine, “1989: The Year that Defined Today’s World,” November 17, 2009. In this so-called “global” issue, the editors failed to mention, even in passing, the epochal transformations that were taking place in Latin America. Much more disconcerting is the recent case of Richard Lane’s anthology Global Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 2013), which does not include any texts from the region. See Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and Neil Larsen, Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). See Niels Brügger, ed., Web History (New York: P. Lang, 2010). Benedict Anderson traces a longer trajectory of globalization by focusing on the political effects of earlier communication technologies, including the telegraph, in Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2006). John Beverley, Latinamericanism After 9/11 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. “In the post-September 11 world, Latin America finds itself consigned to the periphery: it is not a global power center, but nor are its difficulties so immense as to warrant immediate U.S. concern. In many ways, the region, at least in terms of U.S. attention, has become once again an Atlantis, a lost continent.” Jorge Castañeda, “The Forgotten Relationship,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 3 (2003): 70. See also Michael Reid, The Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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36. Bourriaud, The Radicant, 7. 37. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 8. 38. My understanding of the crossroads of globality and Latin Americanism is owed to Alberto Moreiras’s discussion of “savage hybridity,” a notion he in turn derives from Homi Bhabha, in the chapter “Hybridity and Double-Consciousness,” The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 289–300. 39. Tim Parks, “The Dull New Global Novel,” NYRblog (blog), New York Review of Books, February 9, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/feb/09 /the-dull-new-global-novel/; Chandrahas Choudhury, “English Spoken Here: How Globalization is Changing the Novel,” Foreign Policy, November/December 2009, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/english_spoken_here. 40. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 81. 41. Jean Franco, “Globalisation and Literary History,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, no. 4 (2006): 441; Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir, eds., Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” in Obras completas, 1: 282–89; Arturo Ardao, Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina (Caracas: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1980). 42. Francine Masiello, The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Reinaldo Laddaga, Espectáculos de realidad: Ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2007); Aníbal González, ed., “Más allá de la nación en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XXI,” Dossier, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 46, no. 1 (2012). 43. For elaborations of this temporal dimension, see Héctor Hoyos and Marília Librandi-Rocha, eds., “Theories of the Contemporary in South America,” special dossier, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 48, no. 1 (2014): 97–217. 1. NAZI TALES FROM THE AMERICAS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 1.

2.

For an informed discussion of the transnational turn in the study of fascism, see the articles collected by Stein Ugelvik Larsen in Fascism Outside Europe: The European Impulse Against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion Of Global Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001). Of special interest for comparative Latin Americanism is Federico Finchelstein’s Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Borges’s “Deutsches Requiem” is another one of the short stories featured in El Aleph (Madrid: Alianza, 1971). See “Deutsches Requiem,” in Obras completas, 1:617–22. For a historical study of relations between Nazism and Latin America, see Sandra Carreras, ed., “Der Nationalsozialismus und Lateinamerika: Institutionen, Repräsentationen, Wissenskonstrukte,” Ibero-Online 3, no. 2 (2005),

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

1. NAZI TALES FROM THE AMERICAS http://Ibero-Online.de. Also of interest is the journalistic account of Carlos Basso Prieto and Jorge Camarasa, América Nazi (Bogotá: Norma, 2011). Carmen Boullosa notes that actual philo-fascist Latin American writers included several prominent names, such as the Mexican José Vasconcelos, whose journal Timón often espoused antisemitic views, and the Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra, who apparently had a fascist “phase.” Boullosa also observes that “most of the real Nazi authors from Latin America have slipped into obscurity, their books gone out of print, like the novel El derecho de matar (The Right to Kill), a longforgotten bestseller by the eccentric millionaire Raúl Barón Biza.” See Carmen Boullosa, “A Garden of Monsters,” trans. Samantha Schnee, La letra de medusa, March 13, 2008, http://www.laletrademedusa.com/2009/10/garden-of-monsters -by-carmen-boullosa.html. A strategy game based on World War II is the central motif of a manuscript that Bolaño wrote in 1989 and left unpublished. It appeared, posthumously, as El Tercer Reich (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010); Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, http://www .nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/jun/22/ur-fascism. Taking a more synthetic approach, Paxton defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), 218. Eco, “Ur-Fascism.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Obras completas, 1:461–74; and Historia universal de la infamia in Obras completas, 1:303–67. Like Bolaño, Borges resorts to anachronism. He dates the “Postscript” of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” to 1947, even though the complete short story appeared in Sur in 1940 and in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan in 1941. Both authors mention other real-life figures—in Borges’s case, most notably, Bioy Casares. In an interview with Andrés Brathwaite, Bolaño asserts that Literatura nazi en América owes a great deal (“muchísimo”) to La sinagoga de los iconoclastas by Rodolfo Wilcock, which in turn is in debt to Borges’s Historia universal de la infamia, itself an heir of Retratos reales e imaginarios by Alfonso Reyes, which itself is an offspring of Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires. In the author’s words, those would be the “uncles, parents and godparents” of the book. (Henceforth, translations from Spanish and Portuguese sources will be mine, unless otherwise indicated.) Roberto Bolaño, Bolaño por sí mismo: Entrevistas escogidas, ed. Andrés Braithwaite (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2006), 42. Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2008), 128; Roberto Bolaño, La literatura nazi en América (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996), 127.

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10. On Mariquita Sánchez de Mendeville, see in particular the section “Criando hijos y formando una nación” in Lucía Gálvez, Las mujeres y la patria: Nuevas historias de amor de la historia argentina (Buenos Aires: Norma, 2001). See also Jorge A. Zavalía Lagos, Mariquita Sánchez y su tiempo (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1986). For a cultural history of Victoria Ocampo’s role in the Argentine and international literary scenes, see Rosalie Sitman, Victoria Ocampo y Sur: Entre Europa y América (Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2003). 11. Bolaño, La literatura nazi, 127. Karim Benmiloud, “Transgression générique et transgression idéologique dans La literatura nazi en América de Roberto Bolaño,” in Les littératures en Amérique Latine au XXe siècle: Une poétique de la transgression?, eds. Laurent Aubague, Alba Lara-Alengrin, and Jean Franco (Paris: Harmattan, 2009), 331. 12. María Gabriela Mizraje, preface to Intimidad y política: Diario, cartas y recuerdos, by Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2003), 13. 13. Bolaño, La literature nazi, 23. 14. Jean Paul Sartre, “Orphée Noir,” in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, ed. Léopold Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), xiv. 15. Bolaño, Nazi Literature, 35–36. “El poema, de intención épica, narra dos historias que constantemente se intercalan y yuxtaponen: la de un guerrero germano que debe matar a un dragón y la de un estudiante americano que debe demostrar en un medio hostil su valía. El guerrero germano sueña una noche que ha matado al dragón y que sobre el reino que éste subyugaba se impondrá un nuevo orden. El estudiante americano sueña que debe matar a alguien, que obedece la orden que le ordena matar, que consigue un arma, que se introduce en la habitación de la víctima y que en ésta sólo encuentra una «cascada de espejos que lo ciegan para siempre». El guerrero germano, tras el sueño, se dirige confiado a la lucha en donde morirá. El estudiante americano, ciego, vagará hasta su muerte por las calles de una ciudad fría, reconfortado paradójicamente por el brillo que provocó su ceguera.” Bolaño, La literatura nazi, 42–43. 16. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 258. 17. See Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 1991). 18. As Klaus Hofmann has shown, that claim results from a misunderstanding of Adorno’s aporetic method. See “Poetry After Auschwitz—Adorno’s Dictum,” German Life and Letters 58, no. 2 (2005): 182–94. 19. Alberto Moreiras, “La piel del lobo: Apuntes sobre la categoría de lo reaccionario,” Archipiélago 56 (2003): 8–9. 20. The epitome is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). There is an uncanny anticipation of some of his arguments in Octavio Paz’s Pequeña crónica de grandes días (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990). 21. This historiographical stance coincides with the work undertaken by Michael Rothberg in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke devotes a chapter to Miguel Serrano, the Chilean Nazi who was a likely source of

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

1. NAZI TALES FROM THE AMERICAS “inspiration” for Bolaño, in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002). Bolaño, La literatura nazi, 142. Ibid., 181. Gareth Williams has studied these two works as an ensemble: “fraternal texts grounded explicitly in the question of enmity and the limits of enemy recognition.” According to Williams, “Bolaño’s inability to contemplate the political from a place other than the friend/enemy divide . . . defines the melancholic paralysis of [these] narratives.” This argument is all the more persuasive in a field where the dominant mode of reading Bolaño is hagiographic; a valuable critique, it is grounded in a cogent analysis of the representation of sovereign exception in these works. However, one may object by noting that Bolaño does not seek to “contemplate the political,” but rather to engage in politics—petty, literary, and otherwise. Similarly, one may see frustration and indignation in lieu of “melancholic paralysis.” Bolaño writes from a horizon of impunity, before the belated prosecutions of Pinochet’s cohort. His works may “disavow the construction of the enemy’s true face” and even describe the cyclical reassembly of the friend/enemy divide, but their thrust is critical rather than conformist. Williams’ reading confirms, not denies, this fundamental trait. “Sovereignty and Melancholic Paralysis in Roberto Bolaño,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2009): 129, 138. Bolaño, Nazi Literature, 97–98. Bolaño, La literatura nazi, 184; Raúl Zurita, Anteparaíso (Santiago: Editores Asociados, 1982), 11. In the prologue to the English edition of Anteparaíso, which includes a graphic register of the action, the poet affirms that “the fifteen verses written in Spanish against the blue sky over New York City were composed as a homage to minority groups throughout the world, and more specifically, to the Spanish-speaking people of the United States.” Raúl Zurita, Anteparadise, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), i. Ina Jennerjahn, “Escritos en los cielos y fotografías del infierno: Las ‘acciones de arte’ de Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, según Roberto Bolaño,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 28, no. 56 (2002): 74. Willy Thayer, “El Golpe como consumación de la vanguardia,” in El fragmento repetido: Escritos en estado de excepción (Santiago: Metales pesados, 2006), 15–46. Insiders can read an attack on Zurita’s messianism and CADA’s isolationism between the lines here. Jennerjahn frames the debate in the following terms: “Habría que preguntar si el discurso de la crisis no se habría movido constantemente al borde del gesto coqueto y pseudo-elitista de la distinción, recurriendo al arte como sucedáneo de un diálogo democrático y político-cultural ya no existente. Además, cabe cuestionar la visión notablemente reduccionista de formas de expresión culturales que al parecer es resultado también de la no consideración de la producción artística del exilio y el debate internacional al respecto” (“Escritos en los cielos y fotografías del infierno,” 77). Bolaño’s parabolizes his dispute with Escena de Avanzada in “El pasillo sin salida aparente,” his chronicle of a dinner party he attended at Diamela Eltit and Jorge Arrate’s house. Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos, y discursos (1998–2003), ed. Ignacio Echevarría (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004), 71–78. For several years, this de facto autarkic state had the favor of nearby residents, who benefitted from employment and elementary education, until it came to public

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30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

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awareness that Schäfer committed child abuse and hosted a torture center for Pinochet’s regime (Guy D. Garcia, James Graff, and Laura Lopez, “Chile Colony of the Damned Bizarre allegations plague a West German settlement,” Time, May 16, 1988). A real-life Schürholz would have been Schäfer’s potential victim as well, for he sexually abused many children from the hamlet. In contrast, the narrator suggests that Schürholz’s work, written in Santiago, represents his desire to return to an idyllic, rural childhood. Disturbingly, Schürholz’s last published work is a children’s book published under the pen name “Gaspar Hauser,” after the famous lost boy found in Nüremberg in 1828. Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph,” in Obras completas, 1: 660. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 284 (emphasis added). “—¡Bravo! —aúlla de nuevo, como si una cámara fuese a inmortalizar sus encías y sus dientes cariados.” Jorge Volpi, En busca de Klingsor (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999), 12 (my translation). This scene does not appear in the English edition, presumably because the author rewrote significant portions of the book before Kristina Cordero translated it. Ilan Stavans observes that the plot eventually becomes “improbable,” making “the whole construct collapse” in the end. “En busca de Klingsor,” World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (2000): 678. See José Manuel López de Abiada, Félix Jiménez Ramírez, and Augusta López Bernasocchi, eds., En busca de Jorge Volpi (Madrid: Verbum, 2004). Ibid., 368. Ignacio Padilla, Amphitryon (Madrid: Espasa, 2000), 187. In Greek mythology, Zeus assumed the shape of Amphitryon in order to lie with the latter’s wife. A similar mythic reference underwrites Volpi’s novel, as “Klingsor” is a character in Wagner’s Parsifal. See André Lottaz, “Huellas de Parsifal en En busca de Klingsor, de Jorge Volpi,” in En busca de Jorge Volpi, eds. José Manuel López de Abiada, Félix Jiménez Ramírez, and Augusta López Bernasocchi (Madrid: Verbum, 2004), 208. Padilla, Amphitryon, 189. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 287–88. Padilla, Amphitryon, 133. Andreas Huyssen, “Figures of Memory in the Course of Time: German Painting, 1945–1989” (keynote presentation, Visual Memories Symposium, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, May 9, 2008). Other works that could belong in this constellation are Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Los informantes (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004; trans. The Informers, 2008), which offers a novelistic take on the detainment of German citizens in Colombia during World War II; Hernán Neira’s Un sueño inconcluso (Santiago: Planeta 1999), which tells the story of a Chilean of Dutch descent who joins the Irene Brigade in fighting against the Nazis, only to later return to Chile and become, by an act of fate, a torturer; and Gloria Dünkler’s Füchse von Llafenko (Santiago: Tácitas, 2009), a narrative poem about a Chilean of German descent who travels to the Vaterland to join the war on the Nazi side, where he becomes nostalgic for southern Chile. Dünkler’s title is a pun on Rommel’s nickname, “the Desert Fox,” as Füchse is German for “foxes,” and Llafenco (with

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“c,” in Spanish) is the name of an actual town in the Araucanía Region. I thank Neira for bringing his work and Dünkler’s to my attention. 43. Roger Ebert, review of The Sum of All Fears, May 31, 2002, RogerEbert.com, http://www .rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sum-of-all-fears-2002. 44. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 45. Christopher Hill, “Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2011): 75–105. 2. THE COSMOPOLITICS OF SOUTH–SOUTH ESCAPISM 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 85. Bauman opposes the tourist to the “vagabond,” a category that encompasses immigrants, refugees, and other geographically displaced populations. I prefer the latter terms for their more descriptive quality. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 31; Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Borges, “The Aleph,” 276. In the equally famous “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” Borges claims that Argentine writers need not engage in local color to be Argentine. He supports his point with this analogy: “Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there were ever any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab.” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” trans. Esther Allen, in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), 423. Note the mordant comparison of camels and the ubiquitous cattle of gauchesca, as well as the implication that Borges’s metaphysical tales, short of cows, are truly Argentine. As it happens, there are camels in the Koran (as Borges was probably well aware), but more importantly, camels are also in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his purported source of authority. One of the wonders in Mahomet’s life is that a camel complained to him. See The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Campbell, 1994), 5: 269. In a similar spirit of lightheartedness and crass exoticism, generic “Middle Eastern” garb was a favorite costume during early carnivals. For cultural histories of Brazilian carnival, see Roberto Paulino, Do Country Club à Mangueira (Rio de Janeiro: Letra Capital, 2003), and André Diniz, Almanaque do carnaval: A história do carnaval, o que ouvir, o que ler, onde curtir (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2008). Rita Olivieri-Godet, “Estranhos estrangeiros: Poética da alteridade na narrativa contemporânea brasileira,” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea 29 (2007): 237. Chico Buarque, Budapeste: Romance (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 115; Chico Buarque, Budapest: A Novel, trans. Alison Entrekin (New York: Gove, 2004), 119. See, especially, Leonardo Boff, “Chico Buarque e a cultura humanista e cristã,”

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9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

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in Chico Buarque do Brasil: Textos sobre as canções, o teatro e a ficção de um artista brasileiro, ed. Rinaldo de Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2004), 83–94. Rinaldo de Fernandes, “Conformadas e recolhidas: análise de ‘Mulheres de Atenas,’ ” in Chico Buarque do Brasil: Textos sobre as canções, o teatro e a ficção de um artista brasileiro, ed. Rinaldo de Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2004), 374. Ibid., 383. Sônia L. Ramalho de Farias, “Budapeste: As fraturas identitárias da ficção,” in Chico Buarque do Brasil: Textos sobre as canções, o teatro e a ficção de um artista brasileiro, ed. Rinaldo de Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2004), 387–408. Ibid., 408. Buarque, Budapeste, 45. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 111–12. Ibid., 141. Buarque, Budapest, 178. “E uma noite, na cama, saltei sobre Kriska, atirei longe o livro [“Budapest”] segurei-a pelos cabelos e assim quedei, arfante. O autor do meu livro não sou eu, queria lhe dizer, mas a voz não saía da boca, e quando saiu foi para falar: é só a ti que tenho. E Kriska susurrou: hoje não; o menino dormia logo ali, no berço ao pé da cama, porque tinha de mamar de meia em meia hora.” Buarque, Budapeste, 169–70. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1983), 134–36. Buarque, Budapeste, 37. Ibid., 174; Buarque, Budapest, 183. Buarque’s next novel, Leite derramado (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009), continues exploring the motif of bodily fluids, from its title onwards. For a psychoanalytical reading of that work, see Lucília Maria Sousa Romão, “Entre limites e giros da memória,” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios 45 (2010), http://www.ucm.es /info/especulo/numero45/limites.html. Karl Marx, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 133n. Buarque, Budapest, 59. By contrast, women forced into prostitution overseas and where they do not speak the local language are limited to the perfunctory bedroom talk—and to the violation of intimacy—that comes with their imposed means of survival. For a glimpse at this particularly nasty underside of globalization, see Louise Shelley’s eye-opening Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha edited an important volume on Brazilian carnivals whose title builds on the pun of festa (party) and fresta (breach): Carnavais e outras f(r)estas: Ensaios de história social da cultura (Campinas, Brazil: UNICAMP, 2002). Contributors explore the potential of the carnivalesque for interrupting or subverting the social order, the classical theme of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 119 (my emphasis). Ibid., 129.

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28. Bauman, Globalization, 2; Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 93. 29. Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur 118 (August 14, 1952): 14. 30. Buarque, Budapeste, 5, 66–67; Buarque, Budapest, 1–2, 66–67. 31. Gonzalo Aguilar notes that the name Costa e Silva also alludes to the president of Brazil at the time of the plot (October 18 and 19, 1967), whose illness facilitated the rise of military dictatorship. The protagonist’s involvement with guerrillas leads Aguilar to describe the novel as “tale of political eroticism” (relato de erotismo político). Along such lines, one could fittingly describe Budapest as a tale of a-political eroticism. See Gonzalo Aguilar, “‘Dame un beso, mi amor’: Configuración cultural del guerrillero en el pasaje de las políticas (El beso de la mujer araña de Manuel Puig y Stella Manhattan de Silviano Santiago),” Ciberletras 16 (2007), http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v16/aguilar.html. Also relevant is Susan Canty Quinlan, “Cross-Dressing: Silviano Santiago’s Fictional Performances,” Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, eds. Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 208–32. 32. Buarque, Budapest, 177. “E quando não passava um vídeo nem dava o peito para o menino, Kriska lia o livro.” Buarque, Budapeste, 169. 33. Buarque, Budapeste, 13. 34. Ibid., 76. 35. Ibid., 117, 145 (my emphasis). 36. Ibid., 103. 37. Jorge Luis Borges, “Coleridge’s Flower,” trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, in Selected NonFictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), 240. 38. Buarque, Budapeste, 6. 39. Sandra Kogut, a Brazilian videographer of Hungarian descent, requested a Magyar passport in the late nineties. Her personal documentary about the many bureaucratic obstacles that ensued, and her reflections about nationality, can be found in Um passaporte húngaro: Un passeport hongrois, DVD, directed by Sandra Kogut (2001). There is a film adaptation of Budapest by director Walter Carvalho (2009), which features several cameos of Buarque himself. The script accentuates escapism: dining at a luxurious restaurant overlooking the Danube, Kriska (played by the Hungarian actress Gabriella Hámori) tells Costa, “Fora de Budapeste nada existe”—nothing exists outside of Budapest.” The line is not in the novel. 40. Douglas Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Doyle and Tom Moylan (London: Verso, 1997), 94. 41. Buarque, Budapeste, 156–57. 42. Ibid., 155. 43. Ibid., 156. 44. Buarque, Budapest, 165. “Era um palmo mais alto que eu, meus olhos batiam no seu peito, e por instantes imaginei que poderia decifrar os hieróglifos ali tatuados. Depois olhei os olhos com que me fitava, e eram olhos femininos, muito negros, eu conhecia aqueles olhos, Joaquinzinho. Sim, era meu filho, e por pouco não pronunciei seu nome; se eu lhe sorrisse e abrisse os braços, se lhe desse um abraço paternal, talvez ele não entendesse. Ou talvez soubesse desde o início que eu era seu pai, e por

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45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

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isso me olhava daquele jeito, por isso me encurralava no muro. E fechou o punho, armou o golpe, acho que ia me acertar o fígado, quando umas vozes surgiram ao meu lado.” Buarque, Budapeste, 156–57. Héctor Hoyos, “Three Visions of China in the Contemporary Latin American Novel,” in One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Ignacio López-Calvo (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Ibid., 166, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 190. Olivieri-Godet, “Estranhos estrangeiros,” 237. Borges, “The Aleph,” 283. Ibid., 284. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge: 1984), 335; Borges, “The Aleph,” 396. Beth Kowitt, “For Mr. BRIC, Nations Meeting a Milestone,” CNN Money, June 17, 2009, http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/17/news/economy/goldman_sachs_jim _oneill_interview.fortune/index.htm. “Dow Jones BRIC 50 Index,” Investopedia. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d /dowjones_bric50_index.asp#axzz1XC1O7lQ5.

3. ALL THE WORLD’S A SUPERMARKET (AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY SHOPPERS) 1.

2. 3. 4.

“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177128. “This place [the supermarket] recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It’s full of psychic data.  .  .  . The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet.” Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985; repr., New York: Penguin, 2009), 37–38. Other examples include the pop artists’ 1964 collective exhibition The American Supermarket in New York and, across the Atlantic, the mesmerizing travelling sequence of revolution at a supermarket in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 Tout va bien. See Allan Johnston, “Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation,” College Literature 32, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 103–26. Georg Schwedt, Vom Tante-Emma-Laden Zum Supermarkt: Eine Kulturgeschichte Des Einkaufens (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 2006), 3. Diamela Eltit, Mano de obra (Santiago: Planeta, 2002). The decision to include a table of contents is questionable as legibility is a problem, not a premise, throughout Eltit’s work. Mutatis mutandis, this is similar to the push to include genealogical trees in later editions of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Mexican Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) edition includes Mano de obra alongside Los vigilantes (1994) and Cuarto Mundo (1988) under the umbrella title Tres novelas (2004). In that volume, an overly pedagogical prologue seeks to normalize interpretation.

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Eltit, Mano de obra, 86. Ana Del Sarto, Sospecha y goce: Una genealogía de la crítica cultural en Chile (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2010). 7. Patrick Dove, “Living Labour, History and the Signifier: Bare Life and Sovereignty in Eltit’s Mano de obra,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (March 2006): 77. 8. “Me torno ajeno. Desorientado busco un norte, cualquier miserable referencia entre esta multitud que me avasalla y me golpea con sus carros. Y como si fuera un guerrero capturado me empujan hasta el centro de la arena. A combatir (entiendes, supongo, de qué hablo, comprendes que me refiero a mi puesto de trabajo).” Eltit, Mano de obra, 71. 9. Ibid., 145. 10. Ibid., 35. 11. Susana Draper convincingly argues that, in the novel, the supermarket is a space of awakening from the end of history. I cautiously agree, especially with her reading of Benjamin and her interpretation of his thought within Chilean cultural critique. However, I take exception to the tendency to regard the supermarket in Eltit in isolation from other novelists, and I question whether Benjaminian shock—a prominent element in the rest of Eltit’s oeuvre—plays a central role in Mano de obra. But more importantly, I disagree with Draper’s characterization of the súper as “the neoliberal site par excellence, [which becomes] a utopia of absolute exploitation.” Although I share the thrust of this argument, this strikes me as overstating the case. Pegging Eltit to neoliberalism, even in the negative sense, is reductive. Susana Draper, “The Question of Awakening in Postdictatorship Times: Reading Walter Benjamin with Diamela Eltit,” Discourse 32, no. 1 (2010): 100. 12. I derive this notion from James Clifford’s “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2 (1983): 118–46. 13. Eltit, Mano de obra, 34. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Ibid., 39. 16. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 12. 17. Mónica Barrientos has made a similar argument in “Vigilancia y fuga en Mano de obra de Diamela Eltit,” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 31 (2005). For a Rancerian reading of the novel that analyzes the transformation of capital into image, see Christopher Kark, “Espectáculos laborales: Primacía de imágenes y cosificación en Mano de obra de Diamela Eltit,” Nuevo texto crítico 24–25, no. 47/48 (2011/2012): 225–239. 18. “Debajo de la materia contaminante del plástico, los alimentos están entregados a un desatado proceso bacteriano. (Los lácteos se destruyen a una velocidad que jamás me hubiera imaginado si no lo hubiera visto transcurrir delante de mis ojos.).” Eltit, Mano de obra, 54. 19. For a comprehensive study of the earlier period, see Fernando Ortiz Letelier, El movimiento obrero en Chile (1891–1919) (1956; repr., Santiago: LOM, 2005). The study features an extensive appendix that lists numerous worker publications—a likely source for Eltit. 5. 6.

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25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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Eltit, Mano de obra, 157. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 101. Dianna Niebylski, “Hacia una estética de la carencia: Estrategias formales de resistencia en Diamela Eltit.” Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico 10, no. 38 (2005): 479–500; Cynthia Tompkins, “La somatización del neoliberalismo en Mano de obra de Diamela Eltit,” Hispamérica 33, no. 98 (2004): 115–23; Paloma Vidal, “Usos políticos del espacio en Lumpérica y Mano de obra,” Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico 10, no. 38 (2005): 635–44. Richard puts forward the argument in the following terms: “Working with the remains of this fractured link of nation-woman-orderdislocation, the government of the democratic transition needed to hyperbolize the discourse of family to forge new links of community stability that would be responsible for naturalizing the reencounter of the country with itself. The base of the family unit, in the postdictatorship, was intended to ‘unite, to reunite the social bond’ with the help of ‘the rites, symbols, and associations representative of union and integration.’ The ideologeme of the family would thus repair the political and ethical damage of death committed in the military regime’s past against the material and affective integrity of the person and at the same time ward off the moral damage committed, in the present, by economic neoliberalism, whose globalizing rhythms dissolve community values that moral traditionalism tries to symbolically safeguard in the family institution.” Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues, trans. Alan West-Durán and Theodore Quester (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 132. Raquel Olea, “Mano de obra: La disolución de lo social, acerca de la novela Mano de obra de Diamela Etit,” Crítica.cl, June 16, 2002, critica.cl/literatura/ mano-de-obra-la-disolucion-de-lo-social. “Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war— either it uses its police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, ‘seizes’ and ‘binds,’ preventing all combat—or, the State requires an army, but in a way that requires a juridical integration of war and the organization of a military function. As for the war machine in itself, it seems irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 352. Eltit, Mano de obra, 75. Ibid., 169. Dove, “Living Labour,” 84. Eltit, Mano de obra, 8. Despite our differing views on the import of the publication headings, I concur with Dove on Eltit’s critique of consensus: “the text’s silence with regard to the experience and memories of dictatorship reflects the foreclosure of the past—as history or memory—as an integral component of the post-dictatorship state of ‘consensus’.” Dove, “Living Labour,” 83. Both of our analyses, as those of many others, take after Nelly Richard and Alberto Moreiras, who valorize the residue in the thinking about postdictatorship in Chile. See also Idelber Avelar’s unsurpassed The Untimely Present:

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34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

3. ALL THE WORLD’S A SUPERMARKET Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez, eds., McOndo (Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996). Alberto Fuguet, “Magical Neoliberalism,” Foreign Policy 125 (2001): 66–73. On McOndo, see Kelly Hargrave and Georgia Smith Seminet, “De Macondo a ‘Mcondo’: Nuevas voces en la literatura latinoamericana,” Chasqui 27, no.2 (1998): 14–26. For a critical take on the operation of relating writers from the 1990s and the 1970s, while omitting scores of other figures, see Jorge Eduardo Benavides, “Del Boom a McOndo: ¿Y la generación anterior?” in Entre lo local y lo global: La narrativa latinoamericana en el cambio de siglo, 1990–2006, ed. Jesús Montoya Juárez and Ángel Esteban (Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2008), 157–64. Fuguet, “Magical Neoliberalism,” 68. Alberto Fuguet, Mala onda (1991; repr., Santiago: Punto de lectura, 2003); Alberto Fuguet, Bad Vibes, trans. Kristina Cordero (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). “Las acérrimas polémicas que ha desatado la ‘Nueva Narrativa Chilena’ han redundado en calificarla de ‘literatura comercial,’ argumento adelantado por sus más virulentos detractores. . . . El auge y la decadencia del prestigio de esta etiqueta literaria se pueden rastrear a través de dos fórmulas: ‘Los chilenos necesitan leerse’ y ‘Éstos son los vendidos’. Tal oscilación tiene sus raíces en lo que Martín Hopenhayn definiera como una ‘esquizofrenia cultural en la que conviven mercantilismo light y tradicionalismo moral’ (Hopenhayn 80), según él, característica del contexto de la Transición y de sus gestiones en materia de políticas culturales.” Stéphanie Decante Araya, “Del valor material al valor simbólico: Tensiones y negociaciones con el horizonte de expectativas en el Chile de los 90. El ‘Caso Fuguet,’ ”Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 9 (2005), 182. Fuguet, Mala onda, 245. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 247. Fuguet, Bad Vibes, 239. “—¿Te sirves? —me pregunta una promotora bronceada por la nieve. —Bueno, pero poco. No me gusta demasiado el Martini. —Pero éste es italiano. Auténtico. —Está bien: me llevo dos botellas. La mina queda feliz. Un gesto amable no cuesta nada, como dice la propaganda. Empujo el carro hacia donde está el resto de los tragos. Hay dos promotoras más: una ofrece Pisco Capel y la otra una selección de licores Mitjans. Miro la oferta, casi toda importada. Saco botellas a destajo: Johnny Walker Etiqueta Negra, Stolichnaya, tres Tanqueray, un Napoleón, Cointreau, ron Bacardi, tarros de cerveza Heineken, dos tequilas con gusanos al fondo.” Fuguet, Mala onda, 249. Both authors build upon the cultural specificity of the supermarket. C.f., “Nonplaces: hypermarkets, shopping malls, airports, petrol filling stations, multiplex cinemas, bank lobbies filled with automatic cash dispensers. These all, at first glance, particularly with the passing glance of the consumer (or the anthropologist) in tran-

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44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

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sit, suggest a level of abstraction, impersonality, and even alienation. But of course, all such places inevitably generate, or become colonized by, their own cultural interactions.” John Tomlinson, “Globalization and Cultural Analysis,” in Globalization Theory, eds. David Held and Anthony G. McGrew (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007) 148–54. Fuguet, Mala onda, 251. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 226. For an analysis of the representation of masculinity in Fuguet’s oeuvre, see Cristián Opazo, “De armarios y bibliotecas: Masculinidad y tradición literaria chilena en la narrativa de Alberto Fuguet,” Revista chilena de literatura 74 (2009): 79–98. Opazo makes a cogent argument about Fuguet’s investment in what he calls diversions (“desvíos”) of heteronormativity: “la [lengua] de la narrativa de Fuguet es . . . una lengua doble: así como conoce los mecanismos para “enmendar” sus desvíos, también conoce las tácticas para gozar más allá de las reglas” (91). According to Opazo, the father figure behind Fuguet’s tales of homoerotic incest is none other than José Donoso. Monroe Friedman, Consumer Boycotts: Effecting Change Through the Marketplace and the Media (New York: Psychology Press, 1999), 77. Ibid., 79. Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 219. “The political significance of supermarkets remained an undercurrent in narratives that instead highlighted the importance of women’s desires in stores’ operations. The disavowal of the political qualities of supermarkets can be understood as itself political; these were spaces in which the discourses that marked postwar liberalism and gender relations were reified, enforced, and linked. To ask for individualized treatment or to complain loudly to a clerk was to put at risk one’s femininity and access to the benefits of postwar shopping. Asserting independence came, literally, at a very high cost.” Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise, 184. Cesár Aira, La prueba (1992; repr., Mexico City: Era, 2002). See also my study of how Naomi Klein channels Aira’s politics: “Aftershock: Naomi Klein and the Southern Cone,” Third Text 26, no. 2 (2012): 217–28. Violence and the supermarket are coupled in other works of Latin American fiction, at times even more explicitly, such as in the Uruguayan Rafael Courtoisie’s Tajos (Slashes). Raúl, the maladjusted and bereaved protagonist, uses a blade to so thoroughly destroy the products at a supermarket that the police think a bomb had detonated inside the store. He uses a blade to “ruin a bunch [of tomatoes], castrate a watermelon, stab potatoes, perforate eggs” (my emphasis). Rafael Courtoisie, Tajos (Montevideo: Alfaguara, 1999), 12. The choice of verbs foreshadows the denouement of the nouvelle, when the blade-wielding young man ventures outside the realm of inanimate objects, and beyond the supermarket, to harm animals and people. Aira, La prueba, 53–54 (my emphasis).

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56. The “sonrisa seria” is a recurring motif in Aira. Iconoclastically, it evokes Mao as well as Mona Lisa; it emblematizes the author’s playful yet thought-provoking style. See, for instance, Cesár Aira, El juego de los mundos: Novela de ciencia ficción (La Plata: El Broche, 2000), 71. 57. Aira, La prueba, 7. 58. Ibid., 14. 59. Ibid., 69. 60. José Mariano García, “Una especie de metáfora: Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira y El juego de los mundos,” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 23 (2003), http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero23/mgarcia.html. 61. Aira, La prueba, 69. 62. Ibid., 23. 63. Ibid., 31. 64. “—Miren allí —señaló [Mao] hacia su izquierda. Sobre el mostrador de lácteos había aparecido Lenin, con un racimo de bidones de nafta en la mano—. Los que quieran salir de entre las góndolas por el otro lado serán incinerados vivos.” Ibid., 61. 65. Robert Chisholm, The Darlings (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), 1. 66. Patrick J. O’Connor, “Cesar Aira’s Simple Lesbians: Passing La prueba,” Latin American Literary Review 27, no. 54 (1999): 31. 67. Beyond the Latin American context, Michel Houellebecq claims that the role of modern architecture—with its depersonalized use of glass and steel, and its favoring modularity and flexibility over permanence—has its roots in a desire to “build the gondolas of the social hypermarket.” For the French writer, advertisement wants to become desire itself, and Schopenhauer’s notion of the world as will power becomes scattered. For this reason, he parodies the German philosopher’s famous title as “the world as supermarket and derision.” Unlike will power, desire is disperse, unsatisfiable, multiplied, and never-ending; will power succumbs to the multitude of stimuli. For Houellebecq, always the individualist, the only hope lies in “a cold revolution”: to step aside from social machinery and strive for immobility. Michel Houellebecq, Interventions (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 63. 68. Cesár Aira, “El carrito,” Canecalón: La revista de comunicación de Peluca Films ( June 2005), http://www.canecalon.com/canecalon01/biblioteca.htm. 69. Schwedt, Vom Tante-Emma-Laden Zum Supermarkt, 42. 70. Cesár Aira, El marmól (Buenos Aires: La Bestia Equilátera, 2011), 105. 71. Ibid., 129. 72. “Allí adentro del sueño (pero era un adentro que estaba afuera, afuera de todo) el mundo se ampliaba, como un globo inflándose, los colores se aclaraban, aumentaba la transparencia, la superficie que contenía el todo se disolvía . . .” Ibid., 90. 73. Thomas Reardon, Peter Timmer and Julio Berdegue, “The Rapid Rise of Supermarkets in Developing Countries: Induced Organizational, Institutional, and Technological Change in Agrifood Systems,” Electronic Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics 1, no.2 (2004): 170. 74. Ibid., 171–72. 75. For a useful compendium on the testimonio debates, see Georg M. Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

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4. ICONOCRACY AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF NARCONOVELAS Fernando Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, trans. Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001), 93. “Vi al subir los ‘graneros’, esas tienduchas donde venden yucas y plátanos, enrejados ¿para que no les roben la miseria? Vi las canchas de fútbol voladas sobre los rodaderos. Vi el laberinto de las calles y las empinadas escaleras. Y abajo la otra ciudad, en el valle, rumorosa.” Fernando Vallejo, La Virgen de los sicarios (1994; repr., Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1998), 86. 2. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 283. “Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres).” Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph,” El Aleph (1949; repr., Madrid: Alianza, 1971), 192. 3. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 4. Marie-José Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” Hypatia 15, no. 4 (2000): 59. 5. For a work of visual journalism that doubles as an iconography of Escobar, see James Mollison’s remarkable The Memory of Pablo Escobar (London: Chris Boot, 2007). I thank Caroline Egan for bringing this text to my attention. 6. Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, 64–65 (modified). “Desde las terrazas de mi apartamento oí los tiros: tatatatatá. Dos minutos de ráfagas de metralleta y ya, listo, don Pablo se desplomó con su mito. Lo tumbaron en un tejado huyendo, como a un gato en desgracia. Dos tiros tan sólo le pegaron, por el su lado izquierdo: uno por el su cuello, otro por la su oreja. Se despanzurró como el susodicho gato sobre el ‘entejado’, su tejado caliente, quebrando, entre él y sus veinticinco mil perseguidores, más de un millón de tejas en la persecución. La recompensa no me la gané yo, pero estuve a tres cuadras. Muerto el gran contratador de sicarios, mi pobre Alexis se quedó sin trabajo. Fue entonces cuando lo conocí. Por eso los acontecimientos nacionales están ligados a los personales, y las pobres, ramplonas vidas de los humildes tramadas con las de los grandes.” Vallejo, La Virgen de los sicarios, 71–72. 7. Forrest Hylton, “Medellin’s Makeover,” New Left Review 44 (2007): 82–83. 8. Cf. “Viewers engage devotional images through looking to the embodiment of the gaze in sympathy and empathy; from the use of images as a statement of gender ideals and the experience of friendship to the interrelations of word and image in popular religious and avant-garde art; from the placement of images in the home and their significance in ritual to the image’s articulation of memory. Vision, passions, gender, friendship, representation, cultural hierarchy, domestic space, ritual, memory—we can easily condense these subjects into a smaller configuration of social categories.” David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 203. 9. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 185. 10. In his influential No nacimos pa’ semilla: La cultura de las bandas juveniles de Medellín (Bogotá: CINEP, 1990)—or Born to Die in Medellin, trans. Nick Caistor (London: Latin American Bureau, 1992)—Alonso Salazar documented some of the rites and system of beliefs that Vallejo revisits in his novel. Salazar began his career as an 1.

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

4. ICONOCRACY AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF NARCONOVELAS investigative journalist, but would later serve as the mayor of a now-resurgent city from 2008 to 2011. Vallejo, La Virgen de los sicarios, 130–31. Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, 1–2. “¡Pero qué saben ustedes de globos! ¿Saben qué son? Son rombos o cruces o esferas hechos de papel de china deleznable, y por dentro llevan una candileja encendida que los llena de humo para que suban. El humo es como quien dice su alma, y la candileja el corazón. Cuando se llenan de humo y empiezan a jalar, los que los están elevando sueltan, soltamos, y el globo se va yendo, yendo al cielo con el corazón encendido, palpitando, como el Corazón de Jesús. ¿Saben quién es? Nosotros teníamos uno en la sala; en la sala de la casa de la calle del Perú de la ciudad de Medellín, capital de Antioquia; en la casa en donde yo nací, en la sala entronizado o sea (porque sé que no van a saber) bendecido un día por el cura. A él está consagrada Colombia, mi patria” (my emphasis). Vallejo, La Virgen de los sicarios, 7–8. Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Socialism, December 28, 1878, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, The Holy See, http://www .vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_28121878 _quod-apostolici-muneris_en.html. Patricia Londoño-Vega, Religion, Culture, and Society in Colombia: Medellín and Antioquia, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53. Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, 129. I offer an expanded analysis of the theological foundations of Vallejo’s writings across several of his works in “La racionalidad herética de Fernando Vallejo y el derecho a la felicidad,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 35 (2010): 113–22, http://res.uniandes.edu.co/view .php/637/1.php. Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, 40–41. “Cayó el muñeco con su afán protagónico. Muerto logró lo que quiso en vida. La tumbada de la tarima le dio la vuelta al mundo e hizo resonar el nombre de la patria. Me sentí tan, pero tan orgulloso de Colombia. . . . ‘Ustedes—les dije a los suizos—prácticamente están muertos. Reparen en esas imágenes que ven: eso es vida, pura vida.’ ” Vallejo, La Virgen de los sicarios, 47. John C. Dugas, “The Origin, Impact and Demise of the 1989–1990 Colombian Student Movement: Insights from Social Movement Theory,” Journal of Latin American Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 808. Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins, 89. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 46. Ibid., 34. Consistently iconoclastic, Vallejo confronts the national hero of Colombian letters, Gabriel García Márquez, head on. In “Cursillo de orientación ideológica para García Márquez,” a mordant open letter, he berates the celebrated writer for supporting Fidel Castro despite the latter’s known homophobic policies. The charge is ambiguous, however. At one point Vallejo muses that the Revolution Defense Committee is defending the revolution from the birds, and goes on to tell his imaginary interlocutor: “Vos me entendés porque vos sos un águila.” In this context, being an eagle could stand for being a grand gay man, a revo-

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

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lutionary zealot, or even an imperialist. Regardless of possible interpretations, note how Vallejo reformulates the place of an iconic, global writer. El malpensante 11 (1998), http://elmalpensante.com/index.php?doc=display_contenido&id=2352. Homero Aridjis, La Santa Muerte, sexteto del amor, las mujeres, los perros y la muerte (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2004). I focus on the first part of this sextet, which can be regarded as a stand-alone novel. Pablo Boullosa considers each of these parts, indistinctly, as “capítulos o relatos o novelas o crónicas.” “La Santa Muerte de Homero Aridjis,” in “La luz queda en el aire”: Estudios internacionales en torno a Homero Aridjis, ed. Thomas Stauder (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2005), 251. Aridjis, La Santa Muerte, 125. Diana Palaversich explores how several narconovelas set in Mexico denounce the corruption of the Mexican state in “The Politics of Drug Trafficking in Mexican and Mexico-Related Narconovelas,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 85–110. “Muéstrenle la imagen de la Santa Muerte. Regálenle unas horas de terror frenético, que se angustie, que se esperance, que se vea a sí mismo convertido en cadáver abyecto, que se cague en los calzones, que prefiera ser una silla, una ventana, un pinche florero. Déjenlo que se alucine con la imagen.” Aridjis, La Santa Muerte, 121. Karla Zabludovsky, “Mexico Photographers Found Dead in Veracruz State,” New York Times, May 3, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/world/americas/mexico -photographers-found-dead-in-veracruz-state.html?_r=0. Aridjis, La Santa Muerte, 148. Rafael Ramírez Heredia, La esquina de los ojos rojos (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2006). See Jo Tuckman, “Mexican ‘Saint Death’ Cult Members Protest at Destruction of Shrines,” Guardian, April 10, 2009, http://mexico.cnn.com/nacional/2012/03/30 /autoridades-arrestan-a-ocho-acusados-de-realizar-sacrificios-humanos. Claudio Lomnitz finds the origin of the cult in the devotion to San Pascual Bailón, and mentions the role of Jurek Páramo, a dentist, in its modern form. See Death and the Idea of Mexico (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2005): 483–91. Critical distance was not a luxury that Aridjis could afford. One of the appendices in his later Sicarios (2007) is a letter to former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo from PEN Club authors Paul Auster, Jamaica Kincaid, Ariel Dorfman, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others, requesting presidential protection to Aridjis, who was the target of anonymous death threats. Ironically, during the worst of times in Medellín, Vallejo lived securely in pre-drug war Mexico. For a differing view, see Pablo Boullosa, who considers that Aridjis makes a timely critique of commonplaces about death and Mexicans. (Clearly, he has Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude in mind.) For the critic, La Santa Muerte calls into question three bastions of national identity: Mexican folklores of death, traditionalist family values, and the irreproachability of popular music. Boullosa, “La Santa Muerte de Homero Aridjis.” R. Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12. Ibid., 105. Claudia Reyes Ruiz, La Santa Muerte: Historia, realidad y mito de la niña blanca (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 2010), 98.

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38. Aridjis, La Santa Muerte, 26. 39. Alma Guillermoprieto, “Days of the Dead: The New Narcocultura,” New Yorker, November 10, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa _fact_guillermoprieto. 40. Quoted in Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico, 496. 41. Aridjis, La Santa Muerte, 22. 42. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “Comparison Literature,” New Literary History (Summer 2009): 569. 43. Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, “ ‘Se vende Colombia, un país de delirio’: El mercado literario global y la narrativa colombiana reciente.” Symposium 61, no. 1 (2007): 43. 44. Tim Parks, “The Dull New Global Novel,” NYRblog (blog), New York Review of Books, February 9, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/feb/09 /the-dull-new-global-novel/. 45. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, La reina del sur (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002). 46. Jorge Franco, Rosario Tijeras, 1st North American ed. (1999; repr., New York: Siete Cuentos Editorial, 2004). 47. Yuri Herrera, Trabajos del reino (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2004). 48. Élmer Mendoza, Balas de plata (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2008). 49. Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004). Oswaldo Zavala claims that 2666 represents narcotrafficking as an integral part of hegemonic power. His recent article, “Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives,” is a valuable contribution to the literature, particularly to elucidating the ideological content of narratives set in Mexico. Comparative Literature 66, no. 3 (2014): 351. 50. Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), xiii. 51. See Nick Stillman, “Narco-Architecture and its Contributions to the Community: Luis Molina-Pantin,” BOMB 110 (Winter 2010). 52. María Fernanda Lander, ed., Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 42, no. 3 (October 2008): 505. See also Gabriela Polit’s richly documented comparative study, Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2013), and Hermann Herlinghaus’s thought-provoking Narco-Epics: A Global Aesthetic of Sobriety (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.) 53. Quoted on Frontline, “The Godfather of Cocaine,” season 13, episode 4, written and directed by William Cran, PBS, March 25, 1997, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages /frontline/shows/drugs/archive/godfathercocaine.html. 54. Rebecca E. Biron, “It’s a Living: Hit Men in the Mexico Narco War,” PMLA 127, no. 4 (October 2012): 832. 55. A testament to the unpredictable flows of culture, Sony Pictures and the Colombian producer Teleset adapted the series, primarily for the U.S. Hispanic market. In Metástasis (2014), Walter White is Walter Blanco, Jesse Pinkman is José Miguel Rosas, the RV meth lab becomes a school bus, and the Colombian middle class, strikingly, takes the place of its U.S. counterpart. This cultural reversal or outgrowth merits close attention. 5. ON DUCHAMP AND BEUYS AS LATIN AMERICAN WRITERS 1.

Discussions on art and Latin American literature are regularly featured in the journal Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, as well as in the magazines Otra parte:

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Revista de letras y artes; Ramona: Revista de artes visuales; Bomb; Planet; and, until its closing in 2008, Punto de vista. Cream, a multivolume series on emerging artists published by Phaidon Press, has featured literary texts by César Aira and Martín Rejtman. Nuevo texto crítico devoted a special issue to Pedro Lemebel, whose artistic performances and related narrative works bear on local gender politics and participate in postdictatorship debates in Santiago, Chile; see Nuevo texto crítico, 22, no. 42–43 (2009). For recent historiographical revisions of Duchamp’s influence on Latin America, see Raúl Antelo, Maria con Marcel: Duchamp en los trópicos (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2006), and Graciela Speranza, Fuera de campo: Literatura y arte argentinos después de Duchamp (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006). For an integrative approach to recent Latin American literature as another one of the arts, see Laddaga, Estética de la emergencia: La formación de otra cultura artes (Buenos Aires: Ariana Hidalgo, 2006). 2. César Aira, “Duchamp en México,” in Taxol: Precedido de “Duchamp en México” y “La Broma” (Buenos Aires: Simurg, 1997), 16. 3. Sandra Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2002), 15 (emphasis added). 4. “De turista en México, ¡otra vez! ¡No puedo creerlo, la reputísima madre que lo parió! ¡Otra vez! ¡Otra vez la trampa . . . ! El cofre con la cabeza de payaso que salta, pero al revés: con el resorte apuntado para adentro, y yo con él. Un palacio, ¡clac! ¡Adentro conmigo! Una iglesia, ¡clac! Un museo, ¡clac! Se cerró la tapa, y yo la miro desde el fondo, atontado, incrédulo. ¿Cómo pude caer otra vez en la misma trampa?” Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 7. 5. Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 283, quoted in Helen Molesworth, “Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 56. 6. Diego Vecchio gives a convincing account of how Aira’s Duchampian unproductivity owes itself to a use of homophony inspired by the work of Raymond Roussel (“Procedimientos y máquinas célibes: Roussel, Duchamp, Aira,” in César Aira, une révolution, eds. Michel Lafon, Cristina Breuil, and Margarita Remón-Raillard [Grenoble: ELLUG, 2005], 167–80). In turn, Reber draws from affect studies when she claims that, in Aira, “mental activity mimics the logical process of a productive subject, but instead establishes a committed and rational engagement with unproductivity.” Dierdra Reber, “Cure for the Capitalist Headache: Affect and Fantastic Consumption in César Aira’s Argentine ‘Baghdad,’ ” MLN 122, no. 2 (2007): 380. 7. See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976). For a more recent work analyzing tourism, see Marc Augé, L’Impossible voyage: Le tourisme et ses images (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1997). 8. “La mondialisation peut être quantitativement analysée dans la simple continuité de la taylorisation du travail direct de production.” Thierry Baudoin, “Les territoires de la mondialisation,” Futur antérieur 35–36 (1996): 178. 9. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3. 10. Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho, “Argentina: Slow Death or Resurrection?” (paper presented at the “Making Financial Markets Work for Development” expert meeting. World Economy, Ecology and Development (WEED), Berlin, Germany, November 28–30, 2003).

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Aldo Musacchio, “Mexico’s Financial Crisis of 1994–1995” (working paper, Harvard Business School, May 8, 2012): 4. 12. Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 37. 13. “Paris Air,” in The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Arturo Schwarz (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 1: 676. 14. If consistency and pacing build the prestige of an author’s output, one could say that self-devaluation is a constant in Aira, who publishes multiple novels a year: “La superproducción, la multiplicación, implica desde ya y por sí misma una devaluación. . . . Aira lo publica todo, indiscriminadamente: las novelas buenas y también las malas (las dudosas, las tontas).” Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira, 133. 15. “El secreto de la industria del turismo, a la que este país le da tanta importancia, está en miniaturizar los tesoros nacionales, para que el visitante pueda comprarlos y llevárselos en la valija. Eso es lo que hace funcionar al turismo en la sociedad de consumo. Los modos de miniaturizar son muy variados. . . . Con los paisajes se pueden hacer rompecabezas, con las montañas dijes. Ya mi venerado Duchamp, ese precursor, metió aire de París en una ampolla de vidrio. Y si lo que tiene para ofrecer un país es la vida regalada de sus playas, basta con hacer a escala reducida una representación del tiempo. Un cortocircuito sumamente práctico es miniaturizar el valor de la moneda. Con dinero de Liliput aun los turistas pobres como yo están en condiciones de comprar todas las miniaturas que se les antojen, y hasta algunas más para llevar de regalo.” Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 30–31. 16. Harvey observed in The Condition of Postmodernity that “the experience of timecompression in recent years, under the pressure of turning to more flexible modes of accumulation, has generated a crisis of representation in cultural forms.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 322. In his novels, Aira responds to this crisis. 17. Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 32. 18. Contreras holds a different view: “no se trata, en la poética de Aira, de la vanguardia como autocrítica de la ‘institución arte’ sino antes bien de la vanguardia entendida, primordialmente, como reinvención del proceso artístico.” Contreras, Las vueltas, 16. I do not think that these two functions are incompatible or that “reinvención” should have the upper hand. Although the appropriation of art that takes place in Aira’s poetics does not foreclose a criticism of the institution of art, it mostly saps art’s energy and drives it into a criticism of the institution of literature. On the concept of institutional critique, see Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005): 278–83. 19. Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 36. 20. Ibid., 37. 21. See Joseph Kosuth and Gabriele Guercio, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), and Seth Siegelaub, “On Exhibitions and the World at Large,” in Idea Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1973), 165–73. For an account of conceptualism as a global, as opposed to a primarily European or American, phenomenon, see Luis Camnitzer et al., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999).

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22. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 80. 23. “En realidad, es un género nuevo y promisorio: no las novelas, de las que ya no puede esperarse nada, sino su plano maestro, para que la escriba otro . . . ya no habrá más novelas, al menos como las conocemos ahora: las publicadas serán los esquemas, y las novelas desarrolladas serán ejercicios privados que no verán la luz. Y la publicación tendrá un sentido; uno comprará los libros para hacer algo con ellos, no sólo leerlos o decir que los lee.” Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 16–17. 24. Aira uses these words in a monographic study on Copi (1991). Art curator Carlos Basualdo includes a section of this book in Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (London: Phaidon, 1998). 25. Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 15. 26. The stone head lies in the background, while the hands seem to protrude toward the viewer. This effect is amplified by the “polyangular” pictorial technique that Siqueiros used to make his mural subjects visible from several angles. For a compilation of texts by the painter, see David Alfaro Siqueiros, Releer a Siqueiros: Ensayos en su centenario (México: CONACULTA, 2000). On Mexican muralism in general, see Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros (New York: Universe, 1994). 27. As Mari Carmen Ramírez points out, there is a sensorial quality to Latin American conceptualism that distinguishes it from its hegemonic counterparts, one “bent on completely distilling aesthetics.” “Global Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, eds. Luis Camnitzer et al. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 127. In Aira, sensualism and intellectualism go hand in hand. 28. Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 44. 29. “La práctica, como lo sabe cualquier marxista, requiere salir de la autointerlocución. Es decir que debería ver por el otro lado, por la ‘espalda’, a mi depresión, a mi pesimismo, como un bailarín obeso que se hiciera filmar para poder verse, con la inútil esperanza de mejorar su técnica.” Aira, “Duchamp en México,” 20. 30. Mario Bellatin, Lecciones para una liebre muerta (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005), §81. 31. Stefan Germer, “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys,” October 45 (Summer 1988): 66. 32. “Im Wissenschaftsministerium erklärt Minister Rau auf die Frage, warum er nicht selbst in die Akademie gehe, um mit Beuys zu verhandeln: ‘Ich kann und darf mich nicht zum möglichen Kunstobjekt machen lassen’.” Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys (Köln: Dumont Buchverlag, 1994), 166. 33. “Pero no. La experiencia de clonación llevada a cabo por mario bellatin [sic] para la galería de arte no podía ser más que un juego, pensó margo glantz. Sin embargo allí estaba. Acostada en su cama al amanecer, convertida en un futuro abogado.” Bellatin, Lecciones, §115. 34. See David Thistlewood, ed., Joseph Beuys: Diverging Critiques (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). 35. Laddaga argues that authors engage elements from beyond the literary field, defined in narrow terms, as a reaction to the overabundance of information in the present era. This would account for their embrace of aesthetic values such as improvisation, immediacy, textual mutation, and the induction of thrill (in Spanish, trance). As a result, contemporary audiences, practiced in surfing freely and speedily across

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various channels and media, create new spaces for solidarity as they read. Reinaldo Laddaga, Espectáculos de la realidad: Ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de las últimas dos décadas (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2007), 151. However, persuasive as this theory may be, it ultimately supposes a baseline technological optimism. It assimilates performance art practices into “multimedia” and “interactivity,” when in fact, in terms of attention economy, the likes of “multitasking” stand at the opposite end of the spectrum to Beuysian social sculpture. While new technologies chiefly enhance the productive dispersion of attention, performance brings about highly intensified moments of unproductive attention. My thoughts on this matter owe a debt to three sources: Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo’s observations on “continuous partial attention” and the nostalgia embedded into human relations that take place primordially in virtual realms (The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002]. 13); Jonathan Beller’s argument on how new media optimize the “cinematic mode of production” —or, bluntly put, the capitalist exploitation through the capture of our senses; and David Thistlewood’s description of Beuys’s performances as a “momentary arresting of forms or actions for special and particularly energized attention” (Joseph Beuys: Diverging Critiques [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995], 1). Reaching out to contemporary art may be a response to information oversaturation, but art alone will not make the clutter go away. 36. Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys, Die Aktionen: Kommentiertes Werkverzeichnis mit Fotografischen Dokumentationen (Ostfildern-Ruit: G. Hatje, 1994), 112. 37. “Los universales que permanecieron en el campo no fueron seleccionados para ser recluidos en la ciudadela final. Deberían por eso seguir acercándose por las noches a la alambrada e insistir en el intercambio de sangre por drogas. De alguna manera esta escena me hace recordar a ciertos trabajos del artista joseph beuys, especialmente los realizados en tiempos de la posguerra.” Bellatin, Lecciones, §151. 38. Donald Kuspit, “Joseph Beuys: Between Showman and Shaman,” in Joseph Beuys: Diverging Critiques, ed. David Thistlewood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 27–49. 39. One may draw relations to other renowned international artists, Duchamp being an obvious first choice; Bellatin entitled his book El gran vidrio (2007) after the artist’s famous eponymous work. Laddaga finds affinities between Bellatin and Tino Sehgal, and one can also think of Andrea Fraser and Mel Chin. In the performance “Art Must Hang” (2001), Fraser reenacted verbatim and with identical gesticulation a speech that the artist Martin Kippenberger had drunkenly delivered in 1995. See Make your Own Life: Artists in and Out of Cologne, ed. Bennett Simpson (Philadelphia: ICA/University of Pennsylvania, 2006). Diana Palaversich observes that, while the caption of a picture of Shiki Nagaoka reports the disapproval of the fictional author’s family toward his decision of embracing religious life, the newspaper clipping that appears in the picture itself is actually a Japanese ad for the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. This substitution is reminiscent of Mel Chin’s interventions in the set of the popular series Melrose Place in the late nineties; the project, called “In the Name of the Place,” placed props within the show with political messages, such as when “a container of Chinese food smuggled slogans [in Mandarin] from the Tiananmen Square protest onto primetime television . . . [and] a pregnant Allison

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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(played by Courtney Thorne-Smith) is shown working on a large quilt, but the image that unfolds is the chemical structure for RU486—the controversial abortion pill.” See “Mel Chin in ‘Consumption,’ ” Art21, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/chin /card1.html. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art, 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 69. Bellatin, Lecciones, §33. Ibid., §180. Bellatin—cited as the “coordinator,” not as the editor—compiles syllabi of courses imparted at Escuela Dinámica in El arte de enseñar a escribir (Mexico City: FCE and Escuela Dinámica de Escritores, 2007). He describes the institution as a text among others (“un texto más”) in “una escuela como una instalación artística,” Otra parte: Revista de letras y artes 11 (2007): 22–25. For an informed elucidation of Bellatin’s multimedia practices vis-à-vis similar phenomena in Latin America, see Natalia Brizuela’s Uma literatura fora de si, trans. Carlos Nogue (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2014). “Hasta el día de hoy escucho las palabras de mi abuelo diciéndome que, sentado bajo el póster de bruce lee, el maestro espín sacó un lápiz y un papel. Empezó a trazar los últimos movimientos de la vida de macaca, desde el estreno de la película hasta el despido del último jardinero. Se agachó mucho sobre la hoja. El maestro espín usaba todo el tiempo un sombrero de fieltro negro. En mis recuerdos mi abuelo se refería a ese sombrero en forma recurrente.” Bellatin, Lecciones, §86. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 135. As Graciela Speranza points out, Duchamp, who lived for nine months in Argentina between 1918 and 1919, found the place “innocuous.” Speranza, Fuera de campo, 4. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: Norton, 2008), xiv. See Vivian Abenshushan, El clan de los insomnes (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2004); Andrea Jeftanovic, Escenario de guerra (Santiago: Alfaguara, 2000); Carolina Sanín, Todo en otra parte (Bogotá: Seix Barral, 2005); Alejandro Zambra, Bonsái (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006). I thank Adam Morris for bringing this text to my attention. His article “Micrometanarratives and the Politics of the Possible,” is a valuable contribution to the literature on Bellatin. He lucidly examines Bellatin through the lens of Alexander Galloway’s notion of the distributed network as a staple of control societies. CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 91–117. Humberto Schwartzbeck, “Breton en México: Una apostilla,” Letras libres (August 2002): 90–91. See also Ilona Katzew, “Proselytizing Surrealism: André Breton and Mexico,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 28, no. 51 ( January 1, 1995): 21–33. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 196. Damien Cave, “Wave of Violence Swallows More Women in Juárez, Mexico,” New York Times, June 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/world /americas/wave-of-violence-swallows-more-women-in-juarez-mexico.html. For a collection of writings by women on these and other issues, see Debra A. Castillo and

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María-Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba, Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002). Jean Franco discusses 2666 and makes the suggestive claim that Bolaño does not want to defend any given utopia, but instead wishes to rekindle “youthful idealism,” in Cruel Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 54. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 57. “Miles, cientos de miles de máquinas solteras cruzando a diario un mar amniótico, en Alitalia, comiendo spaghetti al pomodoro y bebiendo chianti o licor de manzana, con los ojos semicerrados y la certeza de que el paraíso de los jubilados no está en Italia (y por lo tanto no puede estar en ningún lugar de Europa) y volando a los aeropuertos caóticos de África o de América, en donde yacen los elefantes. Los grandes cementerios a la velocidad de la luz.” Bolaño, 2666, 81. 55. Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, “A Kind of Hell: Roberto Bolaño and the Return of World Literature,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18, nos. 2–3 (December 2009): 194. 56. Martín Kohan, “Más acá del bien y del mal: La novela hoy,” Punto de vista 83 (2005): 21. CONCLUSION: THE PROMISE OF MULTIPOLARISM 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text (1986): 69, and Pascale Casanova, “Combative Literatures,” New Left Review 72 (2011): 133. In a position paper followed by an influential book-length essay, Josefina Ludmer proposes the notion of “post-autonomy” as a key feature of Latin American literature in the 2000s. She posits that not only is there presently a revolving door between literature and market, but there is also one between fiction and reality (“realidadficción”). The corpus of her study partially overlaps with mine, though with a different emphasis and national distribution. I take issue with her idea that the loss of autonomy and the weakening of emancipatory potential go hand in hand, because I think that it is possible to change markets and institutions from within. See Josefina Ludmer, “Literaturas postautónomas,” CiberLetras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura (City University of New York, July 17, 2007), and Aquí América Latina: Una especulación. (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010). Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Ángel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Rama extended this term from colonial centers (ciudad amurallada or “walled city”) to the literary establishments (ciudad letrada) constituted there. Initiatives such as Bogotá 39 suggest that, much like in colonial times, such centers broker with the international realm. Efraim Medina Reyes, “Hay y no hay festival,” Página 12, January 25, 2007, http://www .pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/subnotas/5187-1779-2007 -01-25; Jorge Volpi, “La literatura latinoamericana no existe,” Revista de la Universidad de México (Sept. 2006): 90–92. See also Guido Tamayo, B39: Antología de cuento latinoamericano (Bogotá: Ediciones B, 2007).

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See Diana Palaversich, De Macondo a McOndo: Senderos de la postmodernidad latinoamericana (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2005). 7. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40. 8. Ibid., 44. 9. Alberto Fuguet, “Magical Neoliberalism,” Foreign Policy 125 (2001): 73. 10. In the most thoughtful work on Latin American–world literature relations to date, my friend Mariano Siskind coins the term “novelization of the global” to refer to “the production of images of a globalized world as they are constructed in specific novels” (Mariano Siskind, “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World Literature,” Comparative Literature 62, no. 4 [2010]: 338). He goes on to contrast this with “the globalization of the novel” in the interest of exploring the cosmopolitan potential of world literature. While I agree with several of Siskind’s claims—especially with his reading of Sarmiento, García Márquez, and Ladislao Holmberg—I do not share his rejection of particularism, preferring instead an informed, critical particularism. 11. As Graham Huggan puts it, “debates around World literature are often simultaneously debates around the future of Comparative literature.” He also observes that “world literature institutionally supports what it claims ideologically to oppose,” for “it represents the cultural Realpolitik of globalization masquerading as either a ‘worldly’ cosmopolitanism of reading (Damrosch) or a transnational study of form (Moretti).” “The Trouble with World Literature,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, eds. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2011), 491. The criticism could extended to Casanova as well. 12. John Sutherland, “The Ideas Interview: Franco Moretti,” Guardian, January 8, 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/09/highereducation.academic experts. 13. Writers themselves turn to Bolaño as a meeting point. In the aftermath of Bogotá 39, Volpi claims that authors of that generation admire the Chilean’s work, whereas older authors find it overvalued. “El paraguayo admira a Bolaño, los argentinos admiran a Bolaño, los mexicanos admiramos a Bolaño, los colombianos admiran a Bolaño, la dominicana y la puertorriqueña admiran a Bolaño, el boliviano admira a Bolaño, los cubanos admiran a Bolaño, los venezolanos admiran a Bolaño, el ecuatoriano admira a Bolaño, vaya, hasta los chilenos admiran a Bolaño. . . . Lo más curioso es que, en efecto, los escritores que tienen más de treinta y nueve años, once meses y treinta días—con las excepciones de algunos hermanos mayores, en especial el trío de rockeros achacosos formado por Fresán, Gamboa y Paz Soldán—por lo general no admiran a Bolaño, o lo admiran con reticencias, o de plano lo detestan o les parece, simple y llanamente, ‘sobrevalorado’ (su palabra favorita).” Jorge Volpi, “Bolaño, epidemia,” El Boomeran(g): Blog literario en español, July 13, 2013, http:// www.elboomeran.com/blog-post/12/13953/jorge-volpi/bolano-epidemia/. 14. Franco Moretti, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (March-April 2003): 77. 15. Lionel Ruffel, “Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?” in Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, ed. Lionel Ruffel (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), 10–13. 16. Elif Batuman, “Adventures of a Man of Science: Moretti in California,” review of Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, by Franco Moretti, 6.

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

CONCLUSION n+1 3 (Fall 2006). http://nplusonemag.com/issue-3/reviews/adventures-of-a-man -of-science/. See J. Andrew Brown, “Hacking the Past: Edmundo Paz Soldán’s El delirio de Turing and Carlos Gamerro’s Las Islas,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 10 (2006): 115–29. For a generational grouping based on the insightful figure of “forced global citizenship,” see Brantley Nicholson and Sophia McClennen, “The Generation of ’72: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens,” A Contracorriente 10, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 11–17. Their analysis underscores the precariousness of aspiring for a world standing from a Latin American vantage point. Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Feldman, and Samantha Schnee, eds., Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers (New York: Anchor, 2007), xi. Similarly, the British Council and 98.5 UN Radio, the radio station of the National University of Colombia, hosted a bilingual radio emission broadcast in London and in Bogotá that featured oral narratives from both cities. See Vasos comunicantes, radio broadcast. Benedict Anderson, “You Who Read Me, Friend or Enemy: The Choices of the Third World Novelist” (Southeast Asia Lecture Series, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, October 3, 2002), quoted in James F. English, Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 312. Moretti, “More Conjectures,” 81. “The Unilever Series—Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth,” Tate Modern, http://www.tate. org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-doris-salcedo-shibboleth. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth for Paul Celan,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, eds. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–64. Graciela Montaldo, “La expulsión de la república, la deserción del mundo,” in América Latina en la “literatura mundial,” ed. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006), 267. By way of metaphorical elucidation, one may recall how, in terms of Klingsor’s folk physics, the instrument of measurement, both unreliable and indispensable, changes the place of the particles it seeks to measure (Heisenberg’s principle). In terms of a different, nonscientific analogy, there is an effect to the perplexing lapse it takes for an unusual gesture to be absorbed again by language. Pablo Katchadjian, the author of El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph, 2009), captures the spirit of this operation most eloquently. He transcribes the roughly 4,000 words of Borges’s short story, intermeshing his own prose to bring the final text to 9,600 words. A familiar passage appears as thus: “A la vez, cada objeto está conformado por infinitos puntos . . . Y cada uno de los puntos es infinito en sí mismo . . . Eso, insisto, no se puede describir. Pero como toda descripción recorta sobre el infinito un capricho, la lista siguiente es la que la literatura me permite en este momento, por lo demás histórico. Así que vi el populoso mar con sus barcos hundidos, vi el alba y la tarde en Budapest, vi un serrucho, vi las muchedumbres indígenas de América sometidas a la explotación y el hambre, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide que no pude identificar, vi un laberinto roto a martillazos (supe que era Londres)” (Pablo Katchadjian, El Aleph

CONCLUSION

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engordado [Buenos Aires: Imprenta Argentina de Poesía, 2009], 41). My emphasis highlights one of the moments in which Katchadjian, successfully, challenges literary institutions—to the point of getting sued by María Kodama, Borges’s heiress, for plagiarism. See Juan Caballero, “The Borgesian Monad Contaminated and Buenos Aires Photobombed: Pablo Katchadjian’s El Aleph engordado and Pola Oloixarac’s Las teorías salvajes,” Lucero 22 (2002): 1–17, http://lucerojournal.com/Files/Papers_Edition /36.pdf. See, for instance, Melba Escobar, Los siete mejores cuentos árabes (Bogotá: Norma, 2004), and Andrés Manosalva, Los siete mejores cuentos japoneses (Bogotá: Norma, 2004).

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INDEX

Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations Adorno, Theodor W., 45, 90–91, 187 affect theory, 245n6 Agamben, Giorgio, 196 Aira, César: and “art world” construct, 28, 158; and capitalism and globality, 97, 124, 159–66, 168, 203–4; and conceptualism, 166–68, 247n27; global importance of, 7, 18, 92, 185–88, 209, 244–45n1; use of genre, 119 Aira, César, works by: “El carrito,” 120–21; “Duchamp en México,” 28, 159–71, 192; El mármol, 118, 120–22, 203; Una novela china, 86; La prueba, 117–20 “Aleph, The” (Borges), 2–4, 60, 191, 252n26 Aleph concept, 2–5, 66–67, 191, 194, 203–4, 219; in Budapest (Buarque), 89–91; in Nazi literature, 12, 16–18, 36, 52–53, 59; in Our Lady of the Assassins (Vallejo), 128–29; supermarkets as, 97, 99, 118 Aleph engordado, El (Katchadjian), 252n26 Allende, Salvador, 105, 113

“Allocation of Selling Space in the ‘Ideal’ Supermarket” (Chisholm), 103–4 Althusser, Louis, 107, 109 American Supermarket exhibition (New York, 1964), 235n1 anachronism, 29, 80, 106, 228n8 anarchism, 109, 121 Anderson, Benedict, 212, 226n33 Andrade, Oswald de, 88 Anteparaíso (Zurita), 230n26 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 182–83, 243n33 architecture, 240n67 Arendt, Hannah, 26, 57 Arensberg, Walter, 163 Argentina, 9, 22, 94, 117, 163, 191. See also Borges, Jorge Luis “Argentine Writer and Tradition, The” (Borges), 232n4 Arguedas, José María, 178, 182–83 Aridjis, Homero, 28, 127, 142–50, 192, 243nn33–34 “Art Must Hang” (Fraser, 2001), 248n39 art statement novels, 28, 157–71, 188, 203 “art world” construct, 28, 158, 184, 191– 92

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“ ‘Así se hace literatura’ ” (Hoyos and Briceño), 225–26n27 attention economy, 247–48n35 Aztec culture, 144, 146–47. See also Mexico Bakhtin, Mikhail, 39, 233n25 Banks, Eric, 184 barbarism and civilization, 18, 44–47, 70, 134 Barrientos, Mónica, 106 Barthes, Roland, 71, 174 Batuman, Elif, 211 Bauman, Zygmunt, 65, 76 Beatniks, 43 Bellatin, Mario, 171; and “art world” construct, 28, 158; and conceptualism, 158, 178–81; and critique of the global, 204; drugs and work of, 176–77; and global recognition, 7, 18, 192, 212; and José María Arguedas, 178, 182–83; and Joseph Beuys, 171–83; and Marcel Duchamp and Tino Sehgal, 248n39; método mariótico, 171, 178; as shaman, 171, 178; and teaching, 179–82, 249n43 Bellatin, Mario, works by: Escritores duplicados, 172–73, 173, 213; El gran vidrio, 248n39; Lecciones para una liebre muerta, 29, 171–72, 179–83, 192; Perros héroes, 178; Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción, 178 Beller, Jonathan, 247–48n35 Benjamin, Walter, 26, 39, 44, 96, 100, 236n11 Beuys, Joseph, 28–29, 171–84, 180, 188, 247–48n35 Beverley, John, 21, 208 Biron, Rebecca, 154 Bizarro (Superman character), 40, 42 bizarro concept, 40–53 Bloch, Ernst, 27, 66, 76, 84 Boal, Augusto, 70 Bogotá 39 writers, 194–95, 200, 214, 216, 250n4, 251n13 Bolaño, Roberto: global popularity and success, 4, 18–20, 29–31, 184,

195–96, 226n29; and Latin American literature as world literature, 7, 192, 202–7, 209; translation of works, 23, 29–31 Bolaño, Roberto, works by: Distant Star, 47, 157; Nazi Literature in the Americas, 26, 36–53, 58–59, 157, 192, 200, 204; Nocturno de Chile, 206; “El Ojo Silva,” 225n27; The Savage Detectives, 12–20, 23, 37, 192, 204; El Tercer Reich, 228n3; 2666, 152, 185–88, 186, 244n49, 249–50n53 “Bolaño, epidemia” (Volpi), 251n13 books: in Bellatin’s work, 172–74, 178–79, 181; in Budapest (Buarque), 81–84; chapbook, 40; children’s books, 219, 230–31n29; comic books, 40–43; as commodities, 191; in “Duchamp en México” (Aira), 159–60, 163, 167–70; and plastic arts, 184–87 Borges, Jorge Luis: global and regional influence, 3–4, 29, 191, 203, 220; influence on “Nazi” literature in the Americas, 36, 39, 44, 54, 56, 58–60; and modernity, 67; and The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), 15–16; use of anachronism, 228n8; use of multiple genres, 39 Borges, Jorge Luis, works by: “The Aleph,” 2–4, 60, 66–67, 89–90, 191, 252n26; “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” 232n4; “Borges and I,” 71; “The Circular Ruins,” 44; “Deutsches Requiem,” 36, 227n2; “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 56; Historia universal de la infamia, 39, 228n8; “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” 54; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 39 bossa nova, 69 Botero, Fernando, 132, 134 Boullosa, Carmen, 227–28n2 Boullosa, Pablo, 243n24, 243n34 Bourdieu, Pierre, 112, 150, 190 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 14, 21 Box in a Valise (Duchamp), 160–66 Brazil, 9, 22, 67–73, 84, 88–95, 122

INDEX Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (Perrone and Dunn), 69 Breaking Bad (television series), 155 Breton, André, 185 BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), 93–95 Briceño, Ximena, 225–26n27 Buarque de Hollanda, Chico: and Aleph concept, 89–91; and escapism, 27, 84, 86–92, 192; and ethnicity and foreignness, 68, 77, 81, 84–85, 87–88, 95; and gender roles and sexuality, 70–76, 78–79, 85, 89–90, 93, 234n31; and globalization, 80, 84, 95, 192, 197, 200, 204; global recognition of, 7, 18, 192; and power and violence, 70–74, 85–87, 90, 93 Buarque de Hollanda, Chico, works by: Budapest, 27, 67–95, 82–83, 192, 197, 200, 204, 234n31; “Mulheres de Atenas,” 70 “Bucaramanga Global” campaign, 197–98, 198, 200, 213, 216 Budapest (2009 film), 234n39 Budapest [Budapeste] (Buarque), 27, 67–95, 82–83, 192, 197, 200, 204, 234n31 CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), 48–51, 101, 105, 230n28 capitalism: Alberto Fuguet on, 196; and attention economy, 247–48n35; Marcel Duchamp and César Aira on, 160–63, 170; in narconovelas, 156, 204; as prostitution, 75; supermarkets as critiques of, 96, 103, 122, 192, 204 Carnavais e outras f(r)estas (Pereira Cunha), 233n25 “carrito, El” (Aira), 120–21 Casanova, Pascale: criticism of ideas of, 212, 224n13, 251n11; models of world literature, 13–14, 23–24, 32, 62, 190, 205–6, 209 Casa Viuda series (Salcedo), 216, 217 Catholic Church, 109, 129, 133–40, 142, 146, 166. See also religion

275

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958 film), 132, 135 “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (Magritte), 167 center-periphery: information flows, 25–26, 62, 181, 211; world literature models, 13–14, 32, 35, 62, 190, 211. See also metropolis Césaire, Aimé, 40 Chesnut, Andrew, 148 Chico Buarque do Brasil (National Library of Brazil), 69 Chile: labor and political resistance, 20, 48–50, 62, 99, 101, 105–12; in literature and other arts, 9, 22, 39, 48–52, 184, 211, 229n21, 231n42. See also Bolaño, Roberto; Eltit, Diamela; Fuguet, Alberto; Zurita, Raúl Chin, Mel, 248n39 chino en bicicleta, Un (Magnus), 86 Chisholm, Robert, 103–4, 119–20 chivalry, 12, 68–70, 89 Choudhury, Chandrahas, 23 “Circular Ruins, The” (Borges), 44 close reading, 10–11, 18, 22, 70, 125, 201, 204. See also literary theory and criticism Coatlicue tradition, 146 Cold War, 6, 19–20, 84, 126 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81 Colombia: economy and politics of, 19, 137–38, 197–200; writers of, 9, 86, 88, 184, 212–13, 219, 242n23; in literature and other arts, 20, 22, 133–42, 150–51, 214–16, 231n42. See also Vallejo, Fernando commerce and commercialization: of authorship and literature, 29, 168, 178, 188, 194; commodity fetishism, 165–66, 170; consumerism, 27, 114, 122, 168, 196; kitsch and commercial literature, 91–92, 112, 147, 150; in narconovelas and narcotrafficking, 127, 140, 147, 150–51 comparatism, 10, 205, 211–12 conceptualism, 28–29, 117, 166–68, 178, 181, 184, 246n21, 247n27

276

INDEX

Concertación (Chile), 106–8 Condition of Postmodernity, The (Harvey), 246n16 contemporaneity, 29, 67, 196, 198, 207– 10 convivialismo, 134 Cordero, Kristina, 113–14 Cornejo, Sandra, 110 cosmopolitanism, 66, 75, 87, 92–95, 182–83, 208, 251n11 cosmopolitics, 66, 92–93 Courtoisie, Rafael, 239n54 Crack: Instrucciones de uso (Chávez et al.), 195 criollismo, 3–4, 39, 43, 47, 52, 90 critical theory, 193–94, 204. See also literary theory and criticism Cuadra, Pablo Antonio, 227–28n2 Cuba, 96, 191, 242n23 cultural capital, 29, 158, 206–7 cultural globalization and imperialism, 8, 33–36. See also globalization culture industry, 220 “Cursillo de orientación ideológica para García Márquez” (Vallejo), 242n23 danzaqs, 182 Death and the Idea of Mexico (Lomnitz), 149 Death of Pablo Escobar (Botero), 136 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 232n4 Deleuze, Gilles, 107 DeLillo, Don, 97, 235n1 Demokratie ist lustig (Beuys), 172 derecho de matar, El [The Right to Kill] (Barón Biza), 227–28n2 Derrida, Jacques, 206, 216, 219 Der-wei Wang, David, 210 detective genre, 36, 57, 142, 206. See also genre; specific works “Deutsches Requiem” (Borges), 36, 227n2 Día de los Muertos, 146 Dimock, Wai Chee, 183 distant reading, 5, 201, 204. See also literary theory and criticism

Distant Star [Estrella distante] (Bolaño), 47, 157 Dove, Patrick, 101, 108, 237n31 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 206 Draper, Susana, 236n11 drugs: in Mala onda (Fuguet), 112; in work of Mario Bellatin, 176–77. See also narcotrafficking; War on Drugs Duchamp, Marcel, 28, 157–71, 185–88, 192, 213, 218, 244–45n1, 248n39 “Duchamp en México” (Aira), 28, 159–71, 192 “Dull New Global Novel, The” (Park), 23 Dünkler, Gloria, 231n42 Dunn, Chris, 69 Ebert, Roger, 61 Echevarría, Ignacio, 17 Eco, Umberto, 37–38 Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx), 75 Economy of Prestige, The (English), 16 Eichmann, Adolf, 26, 51, 56–58 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Arendt), 26, 57 “El que no tiene de inga . . . ” (Gamarra), 199 Eltit, Diamela, 7, 31, 48, 97, 124, 237n31; Mano de obra, 27, 99–110, 112, 114, 192, 200 English, James, 17 enigma de Qaf, O (Mussa), 88 Enlightenment, 4 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, 45, 46 Enter the Dragon (1973), 182 Entrekin, Alison, 69, 74, 85 escapism: in Budapest (2009), 234n39; in Budapest (Buarque), 27, 84, 86–92, 192; and global literature and travel, 27, 65–67, 89, 93–94; in Mala onda (Fuguet), 114 Escena de Avanzada (Chile), 39, 50, 101, 230n28 Escobar, Pablo, 129–34, 130–31, 140

INDEX Escritores duplicados: Narradores mexicanos en París (Doubles d ’écrivains: Narrateurs mexicains à Paris) [Duplicated Writers: Mexican Narrators in Paris] (Bellatin), 172–73, 173 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] (Laddaga), 25, 247–48n35 estrangement as conceptual tool, 25–26, 184, 197; in “Duchamp en México” (Aira), 159, 166, 170; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 105; in El mármol (Aira), 122; of the supermarket and the global, 97, 204 ethnicity and foreignness: and Budapest (Buarque), 68, 77, 81, 84–85, 87–88, 95; and international travel, 66; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 100; in El mármol (Aira), 121; in La Santa Muerte (Aridjis), 147 Eurocentrism, 22, 34, 54–55, 60, 158, 192 evil: in Budapest (Buarque), 90; in El carrito (Aira), 121; in narconovelas, 126, 134–36, 138, 145, 147, 151; in Nazi literature, 43, 51, 54, 56–58, 60 evolution theory, 15, 206 family resemblance concept, 37–38 family values and motherhood, 106, 113, 138, 243n34 Fascism Outside Europe (Larsen), 227n1 Fernandes, Rinaldo de, 70 Fernández L’Hoeste, Héctor, 138, 153 Figueras, Nacho, 200 Fleming, Ian, 126 foreignness. See ethnicity and foreignness Fountain (Duchamp), 165, 213 Franco, Jean, 19, 24, 249–50n53 Frankfurt School, 45, 91, 204 Fraser, Andrea, 246n18, 248n39 Frye, Marilyn, 73 FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), 196

277

Füchse von Llafenko (Dünkler), 231n42 Fuera de campo (Speranza), 244–45n1, 249n46 Fuguet, Alberto, 27, 97, 110–16, 124, 195–97, 239n47 futurism, 50–51, 63 Galán, Luis Carlos, 133, 139–41 Gamarra, Sandra, 199 Gamboa, Santiago, 86, 92 gangsta culture, 153 García Márquez, Gabriel, 9, 19, 195, 242n23 “Garden of Forking Paths, The” (Borges), 56 “Garden of Monsters, A” [La letra de medusa] (Boullosa), 227–28n2 Gaviria, César, 133, 141 gender roles: in Budapest (Buarque), 70–76, 78–79, 85, 89; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 100; in narconovelas, 138, 147, 151; in La prueba (Aira), 117–20; radical and gender politics, 107, 244–45n1; in work of Alberto Fuguet, 239n47. See also sexuality genre: César Aira’s use of, 119; detective genre, 36, 57, 142, 206; Jorge Luis Borges’s use of, 39; literature as genrecodified, 210; narconovela as, 28, 128, 150, 153–55; Nazi literature as, 35, 63 Gibbon, Edward, 232n4 Ginsberg, Allen, 97, 235n1 Glantz, Margo, 172–73 Global Chinese Literature (Tsu and Wang), 210 globality: in Budapest (Buarque), 95; and Jorge Volpi, 54; and The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), 23, 204; and social class, 95; use of term, 2–33, 251n10; and work of Jorges Luis Borges, 3–4; and work of Mario Bellatin, 181–82 globalization: and Budapest (Buarque), 192, 197, 200, 204; and centerperiphery information flows, 25–26; and Cold War’s end, 1, 19–22, 47;

278

INDEX

globalization (continued) and consumerism, 27, 122, 165–66; and cultural homogenization, 221; in “Duchamp en México” (Aira), 159–63; and literary theory and criticism, 10–12, 24, 31, 33–36, 184, 201–4; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 192; and market capitalism, 8, 23, 29, 97, 122, 206–7; and the media, 181, 194, 198, 211, 214; and narcotrafficking, 154; and Nazi literature, 58–64; and 9/11 attack, 208; as post-historical, 64; and The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), 192; supermarkets as critique of, 27–28, 96–98, 102–4, 109, 121–25, 192; and technology, 226n33; use of term, 4–6; and work of Mario Bellatin, 177, 204 global novel, 6–7, 22–25, 151, 153–54, 192, 200 Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, 54, 56 “golpe como consumación de la vanguardia, El” [“The coup as the consummation of the avant-garde”] (Thayer), 50 gran vidrio, El (Bellatin), 248n39 Graphs, Maps, and Trees (Moretti), 15 Guattari, Félix, 107 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 148 Guzmán, Joaquín “El Chapo,” 129–32 Harvey, David, 162, 165, 246n16 Heisenberg uncertainty principle, 54 Hill, Christopher, 62–63 Historia universal de la infamia [A Universal History of Infamy] (Borges), 39, 228n8 historicity, 44–52, 63–64, 91, 181, 202 historiography, 26, 31, 35, 45, 165, 168, 191 Hollywood Nazi imagery, 53–55, 60 Holocaust, 61. See also Nazism and fascism Homogeneous Infiltration for Grand Piano, the Greatest Contemporary Composer is the Thalidomide Child (Beuys), 173–76, 174 homosexuality, 15, 73–74, 78–79, 85, 134, 242n23. See also sexuality

hospitality (Derrida), 219–21 Houellebecq, Michel, 240n67 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare performance (Beuys), 171, 179, 180 Huggan, Graham, 251n11 Hurley, Andrew, 2 iconocracy, 127–29, 133, 146–47, 149 ideology: and capitalism and globalization, 11, 86, 96; Ernst Bloch on, 27, 76, 84; ideology critique, 10–11, 92, 120, 166; in writing, 76–77, 120, 201–4 idolatry, 134, 166. See also religion “Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War” (Zavala), 244n49 immanence, 12–14, 27, 77, 137 immigration, 65–66, 77, 93, 177, 211–12, 216, 218, 232n1 impersonations, 172–73, 173, 183, 218 Impossible voyage, L’ (Augé), 245n7 impostores, Los (Gamboa), 86 Inda, Jonathan Xavier, 247–48n35 infiltration, 171–78, 182 informantes, Los [The Informers] (Vásquez), 231n42 information overabundance, 247n35 In Search of Klingsor [En busca de Klingsor] (Volpi), 36, 231n32 installation art, 109, 185–88, 213–19 institutional critique, 246n18 Inter-American Development Bank, 198 International Brigades (Spanish Civil War), 40 Internet, 20, 32, 79–80, 129–31, 211. See also media interruption, 117, 133, 167–68, 213, 233n25 “In the Name of the Place” (Chin), 248n39 inventories and catalogues, 58–59 Itaú Unibanco advertising campaign, 198–200, 213, 216 Jameson, Fredric, 190 Jennerjahn, Inna, 50, 230n28 Joseph Beuys (Thistlewood), 247–48n35

INDEX Kadir, Djelal, 13, 24 Kafka, Franz, 120, 173 Kant, Immanuel, 4 Katchadjian, Pablo, 252n26 Kellner, Douglas, 84 kitsch, 147, 150. See also commerce and commercialization Kogut, Sandra, 234n39 Kohan, Martín, 188 Kosuth, Joseph, 160, 167 labor and labor movement, 27, 99–110, 161–66, 177. See also social class Laddaga, Reinaldo, 174, 244–45n1, 247n35, 248n39 Lanata, Jorge, 94 language use: in “Duchamp en México” (Aira), 171; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 101–2, 112; in Our Lady of the Assassins (Vallejo), 132–33; in work of Alberto Fuguet, 111 Latin Americanism, 8–10, 191–94, 205–12, 220, 224n10, 227n1, 227n38 Latin American literature: accessibility of and attention paid to, 23–24, 29–31, 124, 188, 195, 205–12, 247n35; and contemporary art, 157–58, 170, 184–88, 247–48n35; and globality, 1, 8–12, 25, 58–64, 158, 184–88, 190–94; and globalization, 194–221; and hypercanonization, 202, 209–11; and immigration, 211–12 Lecciones para una liebre muerta [Lessons to a Dead Hare] (Bellatin), 29, 171–72, 179–83, 192 Lee, Bruce, 181–82 Lemebel, Pedro, 157, 244–45n1 Leo XIII (pope), 137–38 LeWitt, Sol, 167–68 Ley de Convertibilidad (Argentina), 163 liberalism, 137–38, 192 Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History (Kadir and Valdés), 24 literary form: in “The Aleph” (Borges), 89; in Budapest (Buarque), 89; during

279

the Cold War, 19; and globality, 26, 31, 91, 93, 125, 200; in work of Roberto Bolaño, 17 literary inequality, 13, 16, 206–7, 210, 212 literary theory and criticism: close reading, 10–11, 18, 22, 70, 125, 201, 204; critical theory, 193–94, 204; distant reading, 5, 201, 204; and globalization, 5–6, 24, 31, 33–36, 184, 201–4; and Nazi literature, 17–18, 63–64 Lomnitz, Claudio, 149 love: in Budapest (Buarque), 68, 71, 75–76, 80–81, 84, 87, 89–90; in Mala Onda (Fuguet), 113, 116; in Nazi literature, 33, 47; in Our Lady of the Assassins (Vallejo), 132–34, 138; in La Prueba (Aira), 118, 120 Mad Max (1979), 177 “Magical Neoliberalism” (Fuguet), 110–11, 196–97 magical realism, 111, 195 Magnus, Ariel, 86, 92 Magritte, René, 167 Mala onda [Bad Vibes] (Fuguet), 27, 112–16 Mano de obra [Labor] (Eltit), 27, 99–110, 112, 114, 192, 200 Marian references, 133–34, 136–37, 146, 166. See also religion market forces, 18, 23, 29, 96, 122, 162–63, 177, 206–7. See also capitalism mármol, El (Aira), 118, 120–22, 203 Martin, Gerald, 225n15 Martínez, Gabriel, 173 Marx, Karl, 75, 126 McHale, Brian, 4 McOndo (Fuguet and Gómez), 110–11 McOndo movement, 195 media: in Budapest (Buarque), 75–79, 89; and globalization, 181, 194, 198, 211, 214; Internet, 20, 32, 79–80, 129–31, 211; in narconovelas and War on Drugs, 28, 127, 129, 142, 145 Meruane, Lina, 211–12 Metástasis (television series), 244n55

280

INDEX

metonymy, 114, 132, 137 metropolis: and center-periphery information flows, 25–26, 62, 181, 211; and center-periphery world literature models, 13–14, 32, 35, 62, 190, 211; and literary and academic domination, 154, 194; metropolitan theory, 205, 209, 216; and regional literatures, 6–8, 30, 172, 188 Mexico: economy, 163; writers of, 9, 13–14, 22–23, 150, 184, 210, 212, 221; in writing and other art, 54–55, 142, 144–49, 155, 185, 243n26. See also Aridjis, Homero; Bellatin, Mario; “Duchamp en México” (Aira); Escritores duplicados (Bellatin); Volpi, Jorge “Mexico et Sarajevo” (Meet, 2012), 212 Mignolo, Walter, 24 modernity, 67, 198. See also contemporariness Molesworth, Helen, 162 Mondzain, Marie-José, 127, 129, 133 Monroe Doctrine, 19 Montaldo, Graciela, 218 Moreiras, Alberto, 47, 224n10, 227n38, 237n31 Moretti, Franco, 5, 15, 62, 152, 205–7, 211–12, 224n8 Morgan, David, 241n8 motherhood and family values, 106, 113, 138, 243n34 MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), 69, 95 “Mulheres de Atenas” (Buarque and Boal), 70 multipolarity, 7, 19, 30, 189–94, 212 muralism, 170 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 163, 196 narcocorridos, 147, 151–52 narcoculture, 153–56 “Narcogeografías” (Lander), 153 narconovelas, 28, 127–28, 150–56, 204. See also specific works narcotrafficking, 28, 126, 145–46, 154–56, 192, 244n49

national identity and literatures, 25, 139, 201, 205, 210–11, 243n34 Nazi Literature in the Americas [La literatura nazi en América] (Bolaño), 26, 36–53, 58–59, 157, 192, 200, 204 Nazism and fascism: ideology of, 14, 36, 60, 63–64, 228n5; Second World War, 26, 34–35, 43, 54–55, 59–61, 178–79; and writing, 14–15, 26, 33–36, 40–55, 58–64 Négritude, 43 Neira, Hernán, 231n42 neo-avant-garde (1970s Chile), 39, 48–50, 101 neoliberalism: and Alberto Fuguet, 124, 196–97; and César Aira, 162–63; in Chile, 27; cultural resistance to, 25; and Diamela Eltit, 105–6, 236n11; and narcotrafficking, 154–56; and “Nazi” Latin American literature, 63–64, 97; supermarkets as critiques of, 123–25 “New Life” (Zurita), 49 Niebylski, Dianna, 106 9/11 attacks, 21, 208 1989 and aftermath: and Budapest (Buarque), 80, 84; and literary and cultural criticism, 13, 30–31; and literary periodization, 19–21, 189–91, 226n30; and Nazi literature, 63–64; and world economy, 6, 96, 123, 208 Ni pena, ni miedo (Zurita), 49 No nacimos pa’ semilla: La cultura de las bandas juveniles de Medellín [Born to Die in Medellin] (Salazar), 241n10 novela china, Una (Aira), 86 Nuestra imagen actual (Siqueiros), 168, 169 O’Connor, Patrick, 120 “Ojo Silva, El” [“Mauricio (‘the Eye’) Silva”] (Bolaño), 225n27 Olea, Raquel, 107 Olivieri-Godet, Rita, 68, 88 One and Three Chairs (Kosuth), 167 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 19, 235n4

INDEX O’Neill, Jim, 93 orientalism, 86–88 Our Lady of the Assassins [La Virgen de los sicarios] (Vallejo), 28, 128–42, 144, 192, 216 Padilla, Ignacio, 26, 36, 53, 55–58, 64, 203 Palaversich, Diana, 174, 243n26, 248n39 Paris Air (Duchamp), 160–66, 164 Park, Tim, 23, 151 paronomasia, 39–40 particularism, 22, 216, 250–51n10 passaporte húngaro, Um (2001), 234n39 Paz Soldán, Edmundo, 179, 211 Pereira Cunha, Maria Clementina, 233n25 Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, 151–52 performance art, 28–29, 157–58, 184, 247–48n35 Perrone, Charles, 69 Peru, 9, 182. See also Bellatin, Mario Pinochet, Augusto, 20, 48–52, 105–8, 112–13, 157 political theology, 28, 127–28, 140, 148 Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, The (Frye), 73 Pollack, Sarah, 18, 206, 226n29 post-autonomy, 250n2 postmodernism, 4, 6, 183, 193, 208 power: of authors and critics, 25–26, 205– 6; in Budapest (Buarque), 70–74, 87, 93; and consumerism, 97, 117; and labor relations, 100, 104, 109–10; in narconovelas, 129–34, 144–45, 147, 149, 151, 153–55; and national relations, 93–94, 192, 210, 226n35; in Nazi literature, 40, 61; and sexuality, 16, 71–74 Prendergast, Christopher, 206–7 prostitution, 74–75, 100, 233n24. See also sexuality protest, 20, 116–17, 119–20, 147, 157, 248n39 prueba, La [The Proof ] (Aira), 117–20 publishing industry, 13, 18, 29, 196, 212, 219 Queta, Doña, 146, 148

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Quod apostolici muneris (Leo XIII), 137 Rabelais, François, 40 race. See ethnicity and foreignness Rama, Ángel, 191, 250n4 Ramalho de Farias, Sônia, 71 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 247n27 Rancière, Jacques, 103, 107, 185 real visceralismo, 14, 16 Reber, Dierdra, 166, 245n6 regionalismo, 205 reina del sur, La (Pérez-Reverte), 151–52 religion: in “Duchamp en México” (Aira), 166; in O enigma de Qaf (Mussa), 88; global networks of, 28, 129; in narconovelas and narcotrafficking, 127, 133–42, 145–50, 152; and social control, 109 république mondiale des lettres, La [The World Republic of Letters] (Casanova), 13–14 Réveillon (Brazil), 67–68, 79, 88 Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 25, 153 Reyes, Alfonso, 221, 228n8 Richard, Nelly, 27, 106, 237n31 Romeo and Juliet archetypes, 76 Romo, David, 147–48 Rosaldo, Renato, 247–48n35 Ruffel, Lionel, 209 Sacred Heart of Jesus, 133–34, 136–39, 142. See also religion Sade, Marquis de, 148 Said, Edward, 87 Salazar, Alonso, 241n10 Salcedo, Doris, 213–19 Santa María de Iquique massacre (Chile), 105, 108 Santa Muerte, 142–50, 143, 155 Santa Muerte, La [Holy Death] (Aridjis), 28, 127, 142–50, 192 Santiago, Silviano, 78 Santos, Lidia, 147 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 18, 47, 250–51n10 Sarto, Ana del, 101

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Sartre, Jean-Paul, 43 Sassen, Saskia, 191 Savage Detectives, The [Los detectives salvajes] (Bolaño), 12–20, 23, 37, 192, 204 Schmitt, Carl, 28, 127, 140 Scholte, Jan, 4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 240n67 Schwedt, Georg, 98, 121 science fiction, 39 sexuality: in “The Aleph” (Borges), 90; in Budapest (Buarque), 73–76, 78–79, 85, 90, 93, 234n31; in Mala onda (Fuguet), 114, 116; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 100; in Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño), 43; in Our Lady of the Assassins (Vallejo), 134; and political protest, 157, 242n23; in La Santa Muerte (Aridjis), 145; in The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), 15–16, 192 Shadow Without a Name [Amphitryon] (Padilla), 26, 36, 53, 55–58, 64 Shakespeare, William, 122–23, 146, 206 Shibboleth (Salcedo), 213–19, 215 sicario, 133 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 168–70, 247n26 Siskind, Mariano, 251n10 Skin (Beuys), 173, 175 social class: and globality, 66, 76, 95; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 27, 99–110; in narconovelas, 148–56; in work of Marcel Duchamp and César Aira, 117, 161–66; in work of Mario Bellatin, 177 socialism and communism, 75–76, 96, 105, 113, 126, 137–38, 191, 242n23 social pact, 117–20, 185 social sculpture, 171–74, 247–48n35 “sociolicist,” 14 Sospecha y goce: Una genealogía de la crítica cultural en Chile (Sarto), 101 South–South relations, 72. See also escapism “Sovereignty and Melancholic Paralysis in Roberto Bolaño” (Williams), 230n24

Soviet Union, 7, 19, 60, 77, 126. See also Cold War; 1989 and aftermath Speranza, Graciela, 244–45n1, 249n46 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 4, 102 spy novels, 126 Stella Manhattan (Santiago), 78 subalternism debate, 208 sueño inconcluso, Un (Neira), 231n42 Superman comics, 40, 41–42 “Supermarket in California, A” (Ginsberg), 97 supermarkets: and gender and class, 102– 4, 116–17, 119–20; and globalization critique, 27–28, 96–98, 102–4, 109, 121–25, 192; in Mala onda (Fuguet), 112–16; in Mano de obra (Eltit), 99–110, 114; origin and development, 96–99, 106–7, 122 Tajos (Slashes) (Courtoisie), 239n54 Tate Modern (London), 214 Taylor, Elizabeth, 132, 134, 135 Taylorism, 162–63 technology, 66, 181, 193, 198, 211, 226n33, 247–48n35 teleology, 6, 26, 35, 62–63, 202 Tercer Reich, El [The Third Reich] (Bolaño), 228n3 testimonio, 124, 193, 240n75 thalidomide, 173, 176–78 Thayer, Willy, 50 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 26 Third World, 20, 70, 75, 77, 189–90 Thistlewood, David, 247–48n35 Thornton, Sarah, 184 Thousand Plateaus, A (Guattari and Deleuze), 107 Tiananmen Square protests, 20 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges), 39 Tomlinson, John, 4 Tompkins, Cynthia, 106 tourism, 76, 87, 93, 162, 165, 177, 194, 245n7 trahison des images, La (Magritte), 167 transcendence, 27, 77, 137, 140

INDEX translation: “The Aleph” (Borges), 2; Budapest (Buarque), 68–69, 74, 85; and global literary access and inequality, 23, 29–31, 206, 209, 212; The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), 12, 15, 23; In Search of Klingsor (Volpi), 231n32 transvestitism, 157. See also sexuality Trébuchet [Trap] (Duchamp), 160–66, 161, 186 Tsu, Jing, 210 2666 (Bolaño), 152, 185–88, 186, 244n49, 249–50n53 Unhappy Readymade (Duchamp), 185 Unidad Popular (Chile), 105–6, 108–9 Unilever Series (Tate Modern), 214 United States, 9, 34, 98, 116, 119, 158, 192 Untitled (Salcedo), 217 utopianism, 27, 66, 75–77, 84–87, 92, 94, 249–50n53 Vallejo, Fernando, 7, 18, 28, 203, 218; “Cursillo de orientación ideológica para García Márquez,” 242n23; Our Lady of the Assassins, 28, 128–42, 192, 216 Vasconcelos, José, 227–28n2 Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, 231n42 Verba roja (Valparaíso, Chile), 109, 111 Vidal, Paloma, 106 Villa, Pancho, 131 violence: in “The Aleph” (Borges), 90; in Budapest (Buarque), 72–73, 85–86, 90; in Colombia, 214–16; and fascism, 228n5; and narconovelas, 133, 147–48, 153; in La Prueba (Aira), 117–19; of the state, 237n26

283

virtuality, 184, 247–48n35 Visual Piety (Morgan), 241n8 Volpi, Jorge, 26, 53–55, 195, 203, 210; “Bolaño, epidemia,” 251n13; In Search of Klingsor, 36, 231n32 Wahrheitsgehalt, 90 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 150 War on Drugs, 20–21, 127, 129, 139–40, 144–47, 151–53 Weltliteratur, 7, 11, 31, 191 White Noise (DeLillo), 97 Williams, Gareth, 230n24 Wimmer, Natasha, 12, 15, 23 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 37, 103 Words Without Borders, 212 World Cup (Brazil 2014), 94 world literature: center-periphery models of, 13–14, 32, 35, 62, 190, 211; and globalization, 201–5, 210–13, 219–21; and Latin American literature, 8–12, 29–32, 185–87; and literary inequality, 23–24, 29–31, 188, 205–7, 209–10, 212, 247–48n35; and multipolarity, 189–94; teaching and study of, 190–91, 219–20; usage of term, 6–9 World Republic of Letters, 13, 23, 62, 191, 212 world-systems theory, 206 Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Las (Mares of the Apocalypse), 157 Zavala, Oswaldo, 244n49 Zurita, Raúl, 48–50, 230n26, 230n28