A needed answer to “Bolaño Inc.”
However, there’s one thing doesn’t exactly get said in this article, but occurred to me upon reading “Bolaño Inc.” Castellanos Moya and Edmond Caldwell and their ilk see an uncomfortable tension in the way Bolaño has been received in America: he’s been decontextualized — stripped of the literary and political content of his works, his revolutionary politics and tastes reduced to penny-adventure fun and games — but at the same time he’s become the token for the whole of Latin American literature.
This is probably a fair accusation. But it’s not much of an insight. Anything that finds any success in translation in the US is treated as though it’s the emanation from the deepest soul of a country — or continent, or other-half-of-the-world, or whatever. Half of a Yellow Sun is compared to V.S. Naipaul, because, uh, Adichie is also a post-colonial writer, I guess. But she’s also compared to Dickens. Any Central or Eastern European writer is, inevitably, either resisting Soviet oppression, dealing with the aftermath of Soviet oppression, or conspicuously avoiding engaging with Soviet oppression.
So that all sucks. But lazy references and generalizing are useful tools for reviewers and readers: it helps anchor an unknown work in a relatively small pool of common knowledge. The point is to get people to read the fucking book, and once the fucking book gets read, all of the vapid associations and generalizations cease to matter. Anybody who reads The Savage Detectives or 2666 isn’t going to think “I just read the only important thing to come from Latin America since Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” They’re going to think, “Shit, I know nothing about Mexican modernist poets, and they seem pretty cool. I wonder if I can find something in translation?
Generalizing and decontextualizing are bad, of course, and one popular author in translation probably won’t act as a leading edge for literature from his or her place of origin. (Pamuk isn’t exactly driving a renaissance in Turkish lit in America.) But the idea that Bolaño is somehow special in the way he’s been hijacked and repackaged — and the idea that his books won’t stand up to the marketing — seems to me more than a little naive. Smash the market and all that, but given the way the world is going, we should be glad that inventive radical lit is making it to a mass market at all. Right?
