THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR: ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G.

SEBALD, AND NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES

A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The requirements for The degree

Master of Arts in: Comparative and World Literature

by Jessie Byron Ferguson San Francisco, California August 2007

Copyright by Jessie Byron Ferguson 2007

CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Archimedean Author by Jessie Byron Ferguson, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University

___________________________________________ Dane Johnson Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature

___________________________________________ Volker Langbehn Associate Professor of German

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

Jessie Byron Ferguson San Francisco State University 2007

This study examines the representation of reading, writing, criticism and authorship in three recent novels: La literatura nazi en Amrica [Nazi Literature in the Americas] and Estrella distante [Distant Star] by Roberto Bolao, and Die Ringe des Saturn [The Rings of Saturn] by W.G. Sebald. Both authors pay tribute to the work of Jorge Luis Borges in their fiction, and I argue that Borges short fiction is an important antecedent to the metafictional, intertextual narrative structure of the three later novels. But those novels also significantly modify Borges fictional model of the interconnected worlds of people and texts, partially as a response to the traumatic experiences of historical violence which play a major role in their work, but also as a deeper critique of the position (and obligations) of the author in time and space. I argue that these practices are productive not only as a way of negotiating recent literary and political history, but as possible future models for writers with similar concerns.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ______________________________________________ Chair, Thesis Committee _________________ Date

PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first debt of gratitude is to my advisors, Volker Langbehn and Dane Johnson, whose insight and diligence in reading and criticizing this project have been invaluable. I would also like to thank Professor Shirin Khanmohamadi, who gave useful feedback for an early paper on this topic; the 2005-06 editors of Portals who accepted that paper for publication; Daniel Medin, for sharing his work on Sebald (and many other things); and my cohort in general, particularly Will Arighi, Christy Rodgers, Rachel Gibson and Olga Zilberbourg, for encouragement and comments. I have benefited from innumerable conversations about my work with friends, and from the love and support of my family, who will all continue to be effusively acknowledged outside these pages. Finally, Paul Kerschen gave me inestimable intellectual and moral support during my degree program; without him this thesis would not have been possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 Chapter One: Beyond Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Chapter Two: Where Stories Begin and End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Chapter Three: From the Air: Maps and Narrative Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

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INTRODUCTION

W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and Roberto Bolaos La literatura nazi en Amrica (Nazi Literature in America) and Estrella distante (Distant Star) are novels about writers and texts in the former case, mostly English writers and historical texts; in the latter cases, mostly invented writers and imaginary, belletristic texts. The first two titles Estrella distante is a slightly different case fall into different bands of a broad spectrum of encyclopedic writing, and they freely mix fiction and fact, author and narrator, firsthand consciousness and secondhand information. They invite the reader to look over the narrators shoulder, as it were, as he processes an enormous amount of information and ultimately tries to derive meaning from it. Certain artificial devices common to all three novels, though, hold the same reader at a distance: most notably, the disjuncture between the author and the first-person narrator identified with him. The use of a fictional double for the author in these novels does not, as in some metafictional writing, have significant implications for the world of the novel itself: that is, it isnt especially important either to plot or to other characters that one character is also the author. The doubling affects the relationship with the reader instead. The authorial narrators play the role of both writer and reader; they are by turns allied with and opposed to the real reader of the novel. That real reader must therefore attend to several different levels, and types, of text within the unified whole: those written originally and explicitly for the external reader (by the author-narrator as writer), and those recapitulated by the author-narrator (acting as a phantom reader) and taken from

either real or fictitious outside sources. In this respect, it doesnt matter whether those sources are real or invented; what matters is that the narrator portrays himself as reading them. In the first of this studys three chapters, I suggest that we look at reading, writing, criticizing, quoting, and similar practices as ways in which people coexist with texts, and that in the process of coexistence there is more a balance than a hierarchy. Throughout the three novels, the lives of the majority of characters are interwoven with texts and experiences with texts; in the case of the narrators, consciously so. The pressures of this unavoidable coexistence give rise to the formation of ambivalence, enthusiasms, and nuanced ethical positions. One aim of this study is to trace and describe that process of formation, particularly in the case of the narrators, and more particularly regarding the way the narrators relate to their authors and mirror their literary concerns. As I argue in the same chapter, both Sebald and Bolao were well aware of Jorge Luis Borges as a forerunner to the sorts of games they play with authorship and readership. Bolao held the Argentine writer in the highest esteem. In a lengthy and diverse collection of his writing, Entre parntesis (In Parentheses), Bolao devoted at least three complete essays (144-45; 174-75; 289-91) and parts of many others to Borges, calling him probablemente el mayor escritor que haya nacido en Latinoamrica (probably the greatest writer to have been born in Latin America) (23)1. He obviously also feels an affinity with Borges writerly persona: the young, flamboyant vanguardist poet turned contentious bibliophile, combining the best distillations of ancient and modern aesthetics. Sebald comes from a separate, German-Austrian literary tradition, but Borges story Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and his Libro de seres imaginarios (Book of

Imaginary Beings) make several appearances in Die Ringe des Saturn. Borges generally avoided a direct engagement with his own historical milieu in his fiction, however, while both Sebald and Bolao take pains to place a history of violence and upheaval near the centers of their novels. The consequences of this distinction play a large role in my next two chapters. In the second chapter I look more closely at a specific practice of reading and writing literary criticism and at how both Bolao and Sebald incorporate critical positions and insights into their novels. The critic isnt permitted to invent something out of nothing like a fiction writer; he or she has other responsibilities, i.e., towards the demands of history, the obligation of intelligent judgment, and the obligation to put aesthetic clarity and acumen to proper use. There is a sharp antinomy between criticism and fiction writing, and although both authors bring the two practices surprisingly close together, their novels reveal an ambivalence about both kinds of claim to authority. Despite this ambivalence, both authors offer a positive view of the experience of a shared community of readers. In the third chapter, I look at the roles of geography in these novels: questions of space, nation, and exile, and identification as a member of a geographically-defined group. Primarily, the narrators who share with their authors the experience of exile portray their homelands as something troubled, inscrutable, damaged, and abandoned without the possibility of return. Their exterior positions give them a uniquely cosmopolitan view of their subject matter, but they retain an anxiety about the past, a desire to adequately mourn its losses, and above all a sense of inadequacy and

helplessness to find a position, either individual or collective, that will let this mourning take place. This work is therefore neither a study of only metafiction or intertextuality nor a study of only memory and historical trauma in recent literature. Both aspects are equally critical to the force and meaning of these three novels, even if the relationship between them is often vexingly complicated for the scholar; indeed, the fact that these works strive to negotiate both aspects at once provides particular motivation for a comparative study. In spite of distinct traditions, styles, and settings, their worlds overlap geographically, historically and literarily, and I hope to show that they share an underlying ethical affinity as well. To my knowledge, the comparison of Bolao and Sebald is limited to a single reference in a Times Literary Supplement review of Bolaos 2666, written by a translator then in residence at the University of East Anglia, where Sebald formerly taught (Gabantxo 34). The serendipity of this connection, which would not be out of place in either authors work, nor in a Borges story, forms a fitting impetus for this study. Sebald was born in 1944 in Germany but resided for most of his adult life in England, teaching German literature and writing, until his death in 2001; nearly all of his creative works were published during the last decade of his life. Bolao was born in Chile in 1953 but spent his adolescence in Mexico; after an ill-fated return to Chile a month before the 1973 coup detat, he fled first to Mexico and then to Spain, where he and his family lived until his death in 2003. Both writers grew up in regions haunted by violence and its aftermath, and both chose to live as expatriates in their adult years, writing a series of novels in rapid succession during the relatively peaceful decade of the 1990s.

The two also occupy an unusual place in their respective (linguistically-unified, if not national) literary traditions, coming years or even decades after a much-honored, artistically and economically successful generation of postwar writers in Bolaos case, primarily the Latin American Boom; in Sebalds, the generation of Gnter Grass, Heinrich Bll, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Paul Celan, and others. Neither Bolao nor Sebald belongs to a similar generation, with similar clout; to the extent that their work is autobiographical, it shows that they respond as writers far more to predecessors than to peers. I am sure Bolao, a voracious reader with an interest in German literature, encountered Sebalds work at some point, but I am equally sure that Sebald had no acquaintance with Bolaos work, which wasnt translated into English (or any other language Sebald read, to my knowledge) until 2004. Nevertheless, I hope the dialogue between these works can be a fruitful source for more comparative work on Sebald, Bolao, and their interlocutors, and on German and Latin American comparative literature in general.

CHAPTER ONE: Beyond Borges

It may seem perverse to begin a study with Borges, who so deliberately styled himself, in his writing, as the heir and curator of literatures past. In what way can the latest link in a long chain of readers and interpreters be seen as an originator? Borges himself offers one, somewhat cryptic answer in the essay Kafka y sus precursores (Kafka and his precursors): In the critical vocabulary the word precursor is indispensable, but one must try to purge it of all connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his precursors. . . . Within this correlation, the identity or multiplicity of individuals doesnt matter at all.2 (Borges, Otras inquisiciones 109) In this model, there is a unity in an authors body of work strong enough to be reflected, backwards and forwards in time, in other writing. The examples of Kafkas precursors in the essay transcend genre and language: Borges draws the associative line not through coincidences in plot or harmony of detail but through a shared gnoseological outlook.3 Borges emphasizes the strangeness of the connections: the heterogeneous works I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble one another4 (109). If Kafka, in this Borgesian reading, determines his own precursors, then the set of stories, utterances, ideas, and tropes we metonymize under Borges name can determine its own successors. Position in time is immaterial. But I cannot dispatch the question of Borges inappropriateness as a starting point so easily. In a study of Borges translation of Thomas Brownes Urn Burial (itself a highly allusive and intertextual work), Christopher Johnson positions Borges on a line

running through Browne and Quevedo5 with whom Borges shares an affinity for quotation, linguistic play, and great conceptual breadth within a single oeuvre and ultimately extends that line through W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn. Johnson, referring specifically to the Browne translation, makes the strong claim that it enacts the seventeenth-century dream of the universal author (175) on Borges behalf, with both moral and material support from Brown, Quevedo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares: By making his friend and contemporary Bioy Casares, together with the great Spanish conceptista poet, Francisco de Quevedo, complicit in his translation of Brownes magnificent meditation on funerary practices and mortality, Borges effectively redefines translation as proof of the notion of the universal author. He confirms, in effect, what Antoine Berman calls ltayage de lacte traductif, that is: dune manire gnrale, traduire exige des lectures vaste et diversifies. (174) For Borges, writing fiction also exige des lectures vaste et diversifies. Johnson seeks to blur the line between the Urn Burial translation, which Borges actually performed, and the short story Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which concludes with the pseudo-Borges narrator translating Urn Burial. In a similar way, I want to show how, in Borges stories Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, a variety of activities reading, writing, translating, criticizing all clearly become infected with the same paradigmatic questions about the status of literature: questions of how people and books coexist. My inquiry takes the idea of coexistence seriously, even if it must restrict its answer by considering only a recent segment of the long lines of author-reader-translator-critics in world history.

What do I mean by coexistence? The question has several parts: first, the way a book exists as opposed to the way a person exists; second, how these two sorts of existence overlap in space and time; third, how they interact and change one another within that shared region. In the first case, individual books are more durable, portable, and reproducible than individual people, who have lifespans, periods of development and degeneration, and unique and irreproducible bodies for Borges this was an enormous and productive disparity. In the second case, people write books (usually just once, and sometimes with collaborators); read them (any number of people simultaneously or sequentially, any number of times depending on the number of copies and readers of its language); criticize and translate them (less often, but still potentially more than once), and produce other books or parts of books, which are then read by other people. These processes, furthermore, can all be described in writing. The third aspect of coexistence interaction and change is harder to formulate. The analyses in this study help to document this process in a few selected works by three writers, which are, if not a statistically significant set of data, still an interesting one, varied in time, space, language, and culture. For Borges, writing before, during, and after World War II, a certain aestheticism, and an affirmation of the autonomy of the artist, had not yet fallen widely out of favor6. As I will show, the example of Tln exhibits a sustained mental engagement with philosophical questions which come to transform the world which would seem out of place in the works I discuss by W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolao, or indeed in most works of contemporary fiction. It is hard to imagine Sebald and Bolaos haunted, peripatetic narrators allowing themselves the impassivity we see in Tlns narrators slow, steadfast work on a translation of Sir Thomas Browne

in the face of cultural apocalypse; it is easier to imagine them unsettled by a mirror, like Bioy Casares at the beginning of the tale (Borges, Ficciones, 13-14). Both Bolao and Sebald attempt to strike a balance between an authoritative narrative voice and a formally restrained, scholarly or journalistic position, but the balance is uneasy. The weight of the quoted subject matter exerts an immense pressure, against which the author who has created the novels himself must employ a variety of stabilizing tactics.

In a brief overview of Borges work, Paul de Man claims: the subject of the stories is the creation of style itself. . . . His main characters are prototypes for the writer, and his worlds are prototypes for a highly stylized kind of poetry or fiction (125). The observation is only half accurate: the analogies of world with book and agent with writer are ubiquitous in Borges, but he moves from one side of each analogy to the other without fundamentally privileging either there are plenty of non-prototypical writers, poems, and works of fiction in his stories. Just as Borges invented worlds can be seen as prototypes for writing, writing can be seen as a prototype for an uncomfortable sort of epistemology. De Man claims that each story is built around a central act of infamy (125); he reads this trope of the villain as an allegory of authorship, the catalyst for Borges achievement of his writing style: This style in Borges becomes the ordering but dissolving act that transforms the unity of experience into the enumeration of its discontinuous parts. Hence his rejection of style li and his preference for what grammarians call parataxis, the mere placing of events side by side, without conjunctions; hence also his

definition of his own style as baroque, the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities.7 (128) This baroque stylistic model exhausting possibilities one by one, considering and reconsidering is also the critical model par excellence: in its drive for thoroughness it outstrips even the accomplishments of de Mans essay. Indeed, one signal feature of Tln and Pierre Menard is the subtle allegiance of the narrator (of experienced events, rather than books) with a reader and critic, and this allegiance will be fairly constant through the texts I examine. Borges word exhaust brings to mind the image of a hunt, which ends only when the quarry is too tired to run and has abandoned every hiding place and escape route: the elements of life and chance in a story allow the plot to run its course, while the author systematically bars every exit, working against development and entropy, until the storys world stands still. In Borges, an ironic gesture from the narrator cuts off the mirroring and extension of concepts and texts: the classic example here is the end of Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. In addition to the essay on Kafka, Borges furnishes another odd juxtaposition of precursors in his essay on Paul Valry, Valry como smbolo [Valry as symbol]. Borges maintains that, as with Walt Whitman, whose mythologized self is not identical with the biographical author, we can best understand Valry through his alter ego, Edmond Teste (himself a child of Poes fiction: a derivation of Edgar Allen Poes Chevalier Dupin8 (Otras inquisiciones 77)). The author and protagonist figure of Valry that Borges synthesizes has a transcendent power as an ideal himself: a man who, in an era that adores the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion, always preferred the lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order9 (78). Teste is not coextensive

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with Valry, but the two are radically connected. More to the point, this characterization of Valry invites cathexis and admiration: he symbolizes not an aesthetic ideal but an ideal of the human mind. Pierre Menard, eponymous Autor del Quijote, is presented as a friend of Valry (and not of Edmond Teste). We see the following entry on his curriculum vita, a long list of heterogeneous, scholarly activities: p) An invective against Paul Valry in Jacques Rebouls Pages for the Suppression of Reality. (That invective, it should be noted parenthetically, is the exact inverse of his true opinion of Valry. The latter understood it as such, and the old friendship between the two was not endangered.)10 (Borges, Ficciones 51) The narrator immediately introduces Menard to us as a novelist (47), but there are no novels in his curriculum vita, indeed no fiction at all. His invisible11 rewriting of Don Quijote suffices to make him a novelist in the eyes of the narrator, but by trade he seems to have been a poet and critic. Not just poetry but philosophy, chess, Boolean logic, and linguistics interest and occupy him: like Teste, he seems drawn to the lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order (Borges, Otros Inquisiciones 78). In the midst of his plans to write the Quijote, we learn that Menard has dismissed his initial planto take on Cervantes life in 17th century Spain as fcil (easy) (Borges, Ficciones 53). The narrator interjects: More like impossible! the reader will say. To be sure, but the enterprise was impossible from the beginning and of all the impossible ways of completing it, this was the least interesting12 (53). This passage is broadly comic, and in a way self-reflexive too. Borges writes (so he says) in a kind of Baroque style meant to exhaust possibilities, but here he shows his diffident French

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protagonist choosing among impossibilities on the basis of their difficulty. Borges portrays his own stylistic process through a looking-glass, and the result is absurd. Why is Menard in fact French? De Man identifies him directly with Valry and Teste (126); Johnny Payne interprets him as the seeming antithesis of Argentinity and the Hispanic past (210) and moreover as a man free from filial anxiety towards Cervantes. Cervantes is, to use Borges term, not an automatic precursor to Menard, who belongs in a generative line stretching from Poe to Edmond Teste. The narrator, however, slowly comes to align Cervantes and Menard: Some nights ago, paging through chapter XXVI [of Don Quijote] which he never attempted I recognized our friends style and something like his voice in this exceptional sentence: the nymphs of the rivers, the sorrowful and humid Echo. That efficacious conjunction of a moral adjective with a physical one called to mind a verse of Shakespeare, which we had discussed one afternoon: Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .13 (53-54) It seems Menard has created a precursor for himself in the narrators mind, but he has done so as a reader and critic, not as a writer. The perceived affinityof word choice and grammar, not sensibility or philosophy between the phrase of Cervantes and the discussion of Shakespeare corresponds to Menards visible philological work. Elsewhere in Menards curriculum vita we find essays on symbolic logic, French prosody, and poetic language, as well as this entry: n) An obstinate analysis of the syntactic customs of Toulet (N. R. F., March 1921). Menard I recall declared that praise and censure are sentimental operations which have nothing to do with criticism.14 (50)

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His friend the narrator, certainly, will not take this dictum to heart when he praises Menards unfinished labor at the end of the story. Both friends are locked in a reciprocal vanity of artistic aims: Menard wants to conjure an almost Platonically pure text devoid of human contamination; the narrator applauds his work as a great technical advance for readers, who are now free to imagine other texts in the hands of a diversity of identifiable writers in different historical periods. Both are utopian fantasies one of transcendental artistic transparency, the other of artistic meaning determined by place and time and neither fantasy survives, even in compromised form, among the two writers to whom I now turn.

Roberto Bolao died, in the summer of 2003, after a short but remarkably prolific career as a prose writer. Apart from one early novel which he co-wrote with Antoni Garca Porta in 1984 no fewer than ten of his novels and collections of stories were published between 1993 and 2004. His last novel, 2666, appeared after his death in 2004, as did Entre parntesis, a collection of book reviews, periodical writing, and miscellaneous essays. I note the compression of this publication history only because, given the many connections (of characters, plots, and locations, to say nothing of ideas and themes) between his novels, it is quite likely that many were written simultaneously and thus that separations among them are rather tenuous. In La literatura nazi en America (Nazi Literature in the Americas), Bolao creates a wide-ranging fictional encyclopedia of Nazi writers from all over the Americas. The invented writers interact with real ones (for instance, a fictional Cuban writer challenges Jos Lezama Lima to a series of duels, although Lezama never shows up); one or two also meet Hitler or serve in the

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German army. Both La literatura nazi en Amrica and Estrella distante (Distant Star) were published in 1996; the latter is an expansion of the last chapter of the former. Bolao explicitly addresses the question of the narrators identity, left somewhat vague in La literatura nazi en Amrica, in a preface to Estrella distante: he or an individual who refers to La literatura nazi as mi novela invents a conversation with my compatriot Arturo B., a veteran of Latin Americas doomed revolutions and a suicide in Africa15, who told him the story in the final chapter of La literatura nazi and with whom, according to the dictates of his dreams and nightmares, we composed the novel which the reader now has before him. My function was reduced to making drinks, consulting a few books, and discussing, with him and the ghost, each day more alive, of Pierre Menard, the validity of many repeated paragraphs.16 (Estrella Distante 11) How is Estrella distante the product of consultation with the ghost, each day more alive, of Pierre Menard? Formally, Pierre Menard assembles an intricate model of the literary work and its historical context. There are four levels of reality, mediated by quotation17: Cervantes is quoted by Menard, who is quoted by the narratorwho is quoted (in a slightly different sense) by the author. But the narrator and Menard read books by other writers outside their acquaintance (like Cervantes), such as Quevedo and William James and Leibniz; and Menard at least is acquainted with other writers, Valry and DAnnunzio, as real to him as the narrator is. For the author, Borges, however, every person in the story is either archival or fictional18; and for the reader (unless he is Gabriele DAnnunzios son-in-law), the same is true.

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La literatura nazi shares these four levels of reality with Pierre Menard; formally, then, what distinguishes the two is the novels final episode. To the active archival and fictional players in the narrative Bolao adds a third category, the politicalhistorical, in the form of Salvador Allendes government and the Chilean coup detat. Many of the fictional writers are contemporaries of Bolao himself (some, in fact, inhabit the future), but only the incorporation of first-person narrative within the novels final episode allows the historical force, otherwise only metonymized by the term Nazi, to be developed fully . But even within the fictional game its preface sets up, Estrella distante differs substantially from the antecedent chapter of La literatura nazi; whereas Menard, by contrast, is the fictional author of a verbatim, if fragmentary, rewriting of Don Quijote. Belano, like Menard, is a doppelgnger for his author: a writer who tries to demonstrate the imperviousness of writing to historical circumstance and ends by revealing the opposite. The parallel is not exact, but it is suggestive. The lesson in Borges story is one of the indifference of the words on the page to their contextual meaning compared with lexicon and poetic construction, context and intertextuality do far more work and exercise an overriding hermeneutic power. The lesson in Estrella distante is slightly different, given that Bolao is creating an imitation of himself (Belano) who helps a second, differentiated imitation of himself (the narrator of La literatura nazi) to rewrite a text initially told by the first imitation to the second. There are doppelgngers and even Tripelgngers here, but all are attempting to rewrite a real and increasingly remote history, from which far from being multiplied the voices of writers are systematically removed. I will return to this point in the next two chapters.

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Whereas Bolao pays tribute to Borges meditation on authorship, Sebald incorporates a different parable about textuality into his Ringe des Saturn: namely, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the story of an imaginary world based roughly on idealistic philosophy which eventually intrudes into our own world, and whose epistemology mediated by languagethreatens to wipe out human languages and understanding. Sebald reproduces portions of the story almost verbatim at the end of the third chapter of Die Ringe des Saturn: The world will be Tln. But to me, so the narrator concludes, that matters little, I am further refining, in the leisurely quiet of my country house, a tentative translation, after Quevedo, of Urn Burial by Thomas Browne (which I do not intend to have published).19 (91) The primary context is Sebalds previous discussion of Sir Thomas Browne, which links the work of the English polymath with Rembrandts painting of a dissection and localizes a certain dispassionate fascination with physical destruction. But Sebald introduces the Borges story rather peculiarly, without reference to the author: Many years later I read, in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, written in 1940 at Salto Oriental in Argentina, of the rescue of an entire amphitheatre by a few birds20 (Ringe des Saturn [RS] 87). Although Sebald dates the text of the story 1940, Salto Oriental, a postscript dated 1947 contradicts the authenticity of the composition date which Sebalds narrator cites as fact. The line about the birds and the amphiteatre reads merely: At times a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre21 (Borges 30). There is little how to read of

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in this terse sentence, and Sebalds focus on this single disjointed line in a story so rich in information and detail is almost comic. And, soon thereafter: The memory of the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the aforementioned Argentine tale, which is primarily concerned with our attempts to invent worlds to the second or even third degree . . .22 (RS 89) In Sebalds redaction, the narrator first recounts his dinner with Bioy Casares and their discussion of an experimental novel, then their subsequent disquieting encounter with a mirror, and finally their conversation about the mysterious country of Uqbar and sources for information about itthe world to the second degree, perhaps, to which Sebald refers. The narrator leaps across the narrative concerning Tln into the postscript thus reads a postscript from 194723: again, Sebalds narrator takes Borges dates literally to discuss the penetration of Tln into the world (RS 91). The final sentences of the redaction are almost direct translations of the end of the story. El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), the collection from which Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is taken, was published in 1941, so the 1947 date for the postscript is fictitious. Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine writer and friend to Borges. Although they surely dined together and discussed writing many times, the dinner and discussion in Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is fictional. Sebald himself has always taken pains to stress that his own narrators are fictional, although they overlap considerably with his own biography and history. (The narrators are never named, although in several cases they allude to photographs included with the text24.) For the Sebald-narrator to take at face value the dates given by the Borgesnarrator of Tln and to foreground the experiential elements of the narrative (rather

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than the speculative discussion of the metaphysics of Tln) until it has become a part of the world of the Borges-narrator, is to take pains to place the two almost on the same quasi-fictional, quasi-historical plane to align their positions in the intertextual hierarchy. As Sebalds narrator concludes his recollections and observations, Borges narrator abandons his absorption in the nonexistent text about Tln and goes on to discuss his translation of Thomas Browne, the very author Sebalds narrator has just been reading and discussing. For a moment, the two narrators are almost precisely superimposed in a drastically simplified image of a single reader studying a single text. But the consonance of the image is fleeting, and like Pierre Menards Quijote, it cannot hold its integrity against the immense perturbation of histories, other readings, and other contexts.

In 1973, the year of the coup in Chile and more than two decades before the composition of the above novels, the American literary critic Harold Bloom published The Anxiety of Influence, a study of the development of English poetry. My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself? (11) He outlines a six-stage process of negotiating this anxiety that resembles a heroic quest, culminating in a return of the dead (15). It is hard to imagine a conception of literature more alien to the aspects I have described of the works above: Blooms conception of a

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strong poet (and he treats the whole man, including as evidence not just verse but the poets letters and journal entries [13]) is defined by the imagination: strength and weakness, wrestling . . . even to the death are wholly psychological processes, bounded only by metaphoric language. The poet is not solely inferred from his writing: he is an idealized, heroic figure; his works have mythic resonance. However, this is not a model any of my three writers consciously, or coherently, reject. Indeed, I suspect (albeit without proof) that all of them would secretly like to be such strong poets: their critical work, including Borges essays above and the criticism I will examine in the next chapter from Sebald and Bolao, evinces a certain amount of wrestling with precursors. None of them desires the realization that he has failed to create himself, but they come to that realization anyway. The act of infamy, which, according to de Man, makes stories possible for Borges, may be related genealogically to Blooms struggles of anxiety. Fictions, unlike lyric or epic poetry, must mediate directly between books and people between what is lived but unwritten, and what is written but unlived and in clearing a space for narrative, they will invariably (and violently) clear something away. All three writers meet such acts of creation with ambivalence. Borges was able to generate a series of stories that could thematically embed this anxiety and turn it to his creative advantage. Neither Bolao nor Sebald write fictions that deal with the question of authorship as concisely as, say, Pierre Menard, or with the tension between text and reality as concisely as Tln. Nonetheless, this anxiety permeates their work, and, as I will show, they ultimately choose different resolutions for it.

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CHAPTER TWO: Where Stories Begin and End

In Myth and Archive, a study of the Latin American novel, Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra advances a sweeping thesis on novels as such: The most persistent characteristic of books that have been called novels in the modern era is that they always pretend not to be literature. The desire not to be literary, to break with belles-lettres, is the most tenacious element in the novel. Don Quijote is supposed to be the translation of a history written in Arabic . . . Other novels are or pretend to be autobiographies, a series of letters, a manuscript found in a trunk, and so forth. (Gonzlez Echevarra 7) If Gonzlez Echevarra is defining the modern era to include everything between Don Quijote and the work of Alejo Carpentier in the 1950s, then it seems unlikely that novels really always pretend not to be literature. However, he explains concisely in a preface that, within the restricted setting of Latin America, novelists do tend to undercut their own literary authority with claims to analytic, critical rigor: Latin American writers all too often fashion themselves as critics, and the complicity between literature and criticism in Latin America is ubiquitous, if rarely admitted (ix). His study goes on to draw a connection between narrative fiction and legal discourse, and notes the preoccupation among Latin American writers particularly Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel Garca Mrquez with the fallacy inherent in the concept of a New World that can lay down its own laws and generate a stable and lasting social order ex nihilo. New stories are always pursued by older stories; it falls to them to plead their cases according to precedent or against it. The simultaneous striving for innovation and its inevitable failure

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is a mainstay of the novel in Latin America. Bolaos novels often pretend not to be literature, are concerned with precursors and with the future of Latin America, and set up a stark opposition between writing and political power, so they seem to conform quite well to Gonzlez Echevarras description. In providing a narrative for La literatura nazi en Amrica, his pseudo-encyclopedia, Bolao clearly fashions himself as a critic as well. But La literatura nazi conforms almost too well to Gonzlez Echevarras model of archival fiction: it is a kind of hyperarchive, and its conclusion is one of extreme disintegration. Rather than attempting innovation and failing nobly, it attempts exhaustion and, in a way, succeeds.

In addition to a series of author profiles (which I will call episodes), La literatura nazi contains an appendix with a list of names (not all of which are profiled in the main text, although all are mentioned in one entry or another), a list of publications culled from the entries, and a list of magazines and publishers. These artifacts are completely invented; Bolao could have put real authors or real journals on those lists, too, but he did not. This appendix serves to conclude the book at one level of discourse, which we can call the encyclopedic. Another, competing level of discourse is prose fiction, or what Gonzlez Echevarra calls belles-lettres. Within the body of the narrative, there are no citations, no sources, no list of contributors, no footnotes. La literatura nazi doesnt take the final step into (false) completeness: it only gestures at being an encyclopedia. However, it evinces no anxiety about genre, no clear, sharp points of ambivalence a quality it shares with Die Ringe des Saturn, which has been assigned to

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a wide variety of genres25 and given credit for inventing its own. The majority of Bolao's novels, including these two, constitute an informal roman-fleuve, which is itself a way of writing life, of keeping the created work open within the realm of the artifact. The preface to Estrella distante, which I discussed in Chapter One, implies that Arturo Belano and the author are part of the same fictional universe. Belano, then, if we can attribute any personhood to him, belongs to the same world as the characters in La literatura nazi. It is a world, and it is a world full of other writers, just as the world of Bolao, Sebald, and myself is a world full of other writers with competing claims to the seat of authorship. This is the entry point for criticism and critical discourse: while neither writer really puts his critical self into the novels Sebald doesnt mention his academic career or Bolao his literary essays fiction is the hand that takes away what the critical hand gives: authority. But these authors of criticism are still also authors of fiction: two very closely allied forms of authority, signed by name, scripted by hand. By explicitly giving up authority in the fiction, the authors can move the focusing eye of the narrative closer to an Archimedean point beyond the contesting views of other authors. The critical eye looks down on other writers as well, with a different kind of impersonality: rather than incorporating the author in the third person, it either avoids person altogether or writes within a manifestly shared, situated world.

Although Bolao spares few countries26, two sets of Argentines Los Mendiluce and Los Hermanos Schiaffino neatly form bookends for La literatura nazi, thereby singling out a nation which shares both an illustrious literary culture and a

22

historically favorable disposition towards the Third Reich. But the narrative ultimately comes to a close in Chile, Bolaos home country. The narrator (a fictionalized Bolao, called by name in the final line of the episode) switches discursive modes to give a firstperson account of Carlos Wieder, a.k.a. Ramrez Hoffman, el infame. (Although it is not made explicit, its reasonable to suppose that the narrator of Ramrez Hoffman is the same as the narrator of the foregoing encyclopedia.) Wieder is an avant-garde poet who writes his verses in the sky with a World War II-era German war plane and who murders women, in particular two young poets whom the narrator knew as a teenager when they frequented the same salon in southern Chile. As a shadow history of European influences in Latin American society, and the debates of the 19th and 20th centuries about national and ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism, and social legitimacy, Bolaos narrative has an almost inexhaustible supply of historical models. In a 2005 review of La literatura nazi, Jos Miguel Oviedo noted the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones and the Mexican Juan Vasconcelos as two significant examples of influential right-wing Latin American writers; he also mentions Alcides Arguedas (18791946), a supposedly indigenist Bolivian novelist and essayist who cited Mein Kampf as an authority on race relations in the 1937 prologue to his book Pueblo enfermo (The Sick People) (Oviedo 69). David Rock, in an essay on the antecedents of nacionalista thought in Argentina in the early 20th century, notes the influence of French thinkers like Charles Maurras (17-19) and the prevalence of forms of reactionary Catholicism (20-24) similar to the strains of ultraconservatism in Portugal and Spain. In some cases, Bolao clearly draws on these historical antecedents, especially when they are particular to a given country Juan Mendiluce Thompson could fit easily with Rocks description of the

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prototypical Argentine nacionalista (Literatura nazi, 24-26) but in others, he shows how an individuals eccentricity can generate a peculiar, endogenous right-wing ideology by, for instance, applying Charles Olsons theory of projective vs. nonprojective verse to the Bible, via North American evangelism (Literatura nazi, 139-43). La literatura nazi doesnt take a uniform tack with its author profiles: some of the chapters are written in a detached, book-review style (what I have been calling critical discourse), while others more closely resemble short stories in which the authors literary output or the contents of it, at least plays an ancillary role. Examples of the first type include the figures in the section entitled Precursores y antiilustrados (precursors and notorious figures); examples of the second might include Luz Mendiluce Thompson, Irma Carrasco, Amado Couto, and, of course, Ramrez Hoffman (Carlos Wieder). In Estrella distante, Bolao provides much more detail about the formative years of the poetic culture in Chile which produced the narrator, Carlos Wieder, the murdered poets, and many others. He devotes several chapters respectively to profiles of a Russian-Jewish migr saloniste, a gay Chilean poet in exile, and a French translator of indigenous descent. While La literatura nazi was a book about the Americas, extremely wide in scope, Estrella distante is less about Chile than about individual Chileans. Prescinded from the literary-historical pseudocontext of La literatura nazi, the narrative loses the force of its sharp contrast with the silly, parodic literary works that traffic fairly benignly in awful ideas, but the human sadness of the original episodes end is deepened by Bolaos eulogies for a nation in which not only literature but writers themselves were violated and abused.

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The Arturo B, or Arturo Belano, who narrates Estrella distante appears as Bolaos doppelgnger throughout his fiction. The novels Los detectives salvajes and Amuleto trace his career as a young Chilean poet in Mexico, and he is responsible, apparently, for relating the story of Estrella distante. Ignacio Echevarra also notes in his afterword to Bolaos final novel, 2666, that among the notes for the novel one isolated note reads: The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano27 (Bolao, 2666 1125).) Bolao effectively splits his authorial persona in two: he narrates the preface to Estrella distante as his own amanuensis, while Arturo B. is given the authorial role and dictates the form of the narrative. Why the split persona? Once he gains a separate identity, Belano (whose first name slyly echoes auteur or artista) also acquires an unfathomable mind: whatever biographical details he might share with his creator, whatever associations with Mexico and Chile and Latin American literature, whatever loves and fears and acts of bravery, his stories are not Bolaos stories, and to seek out a one-to-one correspondence between his world and the authors is futile. Their relationship is closer to what Wittgenstein (in a different context), calls family resemblances: a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail (32e). In other words, the correspondence exists only as far as any positive connections do; it provides not totality but an insistent suggestion. Both La literatura nazi and Estrella distante present two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of a literary tradition, of what can be found in books, and knowledge of a personal sort, both of which are presented mimetically at a formally fictional level and which reinforce one another and undermine (through satire and straightforward denunciation) the historical circumstances which occasioned very similar books and very

25

similar personal experiences. One signal characteristic of La literatura nazi is the assumption that none of the authors writing is particularly significant or meaningful to the world at large, including its readers. There are no difficult cases in his book, on the order of Cline or Heidegger, in which the authors fascist sympathies fail to overshadow or bury the mainstream value of the work. The Nazi orientation remains marginalized, just as the political ideology has since the end of World War II; its writers occupy a shadow world of coteries and infighting and nobly (or ignobly) preposterous artistic innovations. Bolao has portrayed for us an autonomous artistic world with which neither men and women of talent nor the literary establishment can be bothered to interact: it is an allegory of both artistic and political failure. But this failure, as we see in Estrella distante, has two sides: on the one is the ephemeral, yet terrifying art of Carlos Wieder, which remains a brief and sinister memory in the annals of Chilean history; on the other is the unwritten poetry of the two Garmendia sisters whom Wieder murders, just as the violence of the Pinochet years swallows up the artistic community in which Belano, or Bolao, took part in his youth. The painstaking documentation of Nazi literature is a backhanded denunciation of all writing that colludes with state violence and of the subcultures that sustain it. Only in the final chapter of La literatura nazi is the shape of this violence discernable: what has been left implicit is brought to the fore, and mockery gives way to horror.

W.G. Sebald is also preoccupied with the representation of violence in literature, but he draws out the theme not only in his own fiction but also through his critical writing. Unlike Bolao (or Borges), Sebald held an academic position throughout his

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literary career in the 1980s and 1990s, and was known as a scholar of Austrian literature before he began writing poetry and novels. Although even in the academy his academic work has never been as influential as his creative work, he has published several volumes of criticism. Probably his best-known essay, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature), began as a series of lectures on the suppression of depictions of German suffering in the Allied fire bombings of World War II. It is not easy reading: he narrates the destruction of Hamburg in a telegraphic style but spares no hideous detail (stinking, parasite-ridden corpses fill the streets; zoo animals die), and he goes on to castigate his contemporaries for their introjection of sentimentality and kitsch in this grisly picture. A damning essay on the German novelist Alfred Andersch accompanies Luftkrieg und Literatur in the German edition (called simply Luftkrieg und Literatur). The English translation of both essays appeared in a volume called On the Natural History of Destruction with two further essays on Jean Amry and Peter Weiss, two writers who combine the personal and political in their writings on the Holocaust and their critique of violence. Andreas Huyssen compares Luftkrieg und Literatur with Sebalds second novel, Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), and finds a keen affinity between essay and creative prose: I would like to suggest that Sebalds Luftkrieg essay is itself a repetition, a rewriting of those earlier texts about the experience of strategic bombing . . . closely related in its deep structure, its conceptual framework, and in its language (though not in its narrative complexity) to the narrative stance of Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants] itself. (Huyssen 82, my emphasis)

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He also connects each of the texts examined in Luftkrieg with a particular moment in the German public debate about World War II and present-day German literature, arguing that Sebalds own treatment of the issue unwittingly continues the series and belongs to the post-1989 discourse of the first German generation without direct experience of the war. Indeed, the most striking difference in narrative stance between the Luftkrieg essay (and its companion piece, a critical essay on Alfred Andersch) and Sebalds novels is the harshly judgmental, almost savage tone of his literary criticism, which has no parallel in his fiction. The pseudoautobiographical narrator is melancholy almost to the point of caricature, confronted with a world he takes pains to reproduce without often acknowledging, or recognizing, how he alters it. As a critic, however, Sebald is unrestrained and prolix in his distasteconcluding a harsh reading of an early novel of wartime destruction, he writes: It is not easy to sum up the quantities of lasciviousness and ultra-German racial kitsch Mendelssohn offers his readers (with, we must assume, the best of intentions), but in any case his wholesale fictionalization of the theme of the ruined city . . . plunges headlong into more than two hundred pages of trash. (On the Natural History of Destruction [NHD] 56-57)28 In the essay on Andersch, whom Sebald finds morally abhorrent and to whom he directs quite a few ad hominem attacks, he writes of Anderschs wartime journalism that linguistic corruption and an addiction to empty, spiraling pathos are only the outward symptoms of a warped state of mind which is also reflected in the content of his pieces29 (NHD 125). But, in Luftkrieg, he makes positive statements as well: commending the

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virtues of a medical report as against an overwrought, surrealistic passage by Arno Schmidt, he asserts: This medical account of the further destruction of a body already mummified by the firestorm shows a reality of which Schmidts linguistic radicalism knows nothing. His elaborate style veils over the facts that stare straight at us in the language of those professionally involved in the horror[.]30 (NHD 60) Shortly below this, he refers to [t]he informative value of such authentic documents, before which all fiction pales . . .31 (NHD 60, my emphasis). Its worth taking a moment to counterpose this discussion ostensibly of fiction and fact, but really of poetics with the description of Franz Zwickaus poem Heimat in La literatura nazi.32 The fictional Zwickau is an enfant terrible of Venezuelan poetry in the 1960s, whose poem utilizes a detached, quasi-medical discourse: Heimat (350 lines) describes, in a curious mixture of Spanish and German with a few isolated expressions in Russian, English, French and Yiddish the intimate parts of his body with a forensic coldness, while working in the morgue the night after a multiple homicide.33 (92) Its hard to imagine the critic Sebald approving of such a poem, if only because it removes a poetics useful for conveying bare historical facts which must necessarily be shared by all into a private, inventive realm, in which the objectivity of the forensic discourse only serves to enhance the realistic quality of a merely grotesque fantasy. (Even if we assume that this fictional poet wrote his fictional poem about a lived experience, which doesnt seem to be the case, it is presented as part of an overall

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aesthetic tendency and a private, eccentric obsession with certain themes.) In Sebalds judgment of Schmidts linguistic radicalism, fiction pales before a medical report for reasons Sebald wants to locate in the use of language, but which I think are more generally situational. If we take this passage to imply a broader range of aesthetic judgments than the small set focused on writing about the Luftkrieg, we can use the documentary/aestheticism contrast he sets up as a lens for viewing his fiction. Other critics have in fact remarked on his inconsistency across genres: Simon Ward, responding to Huyssens essay, claims that If Huyssen is correct, then Sebalds own works would be ruled out of court by the standards set in his 1982 essay [on writing and history] (66). I would propose, for the sake of argument, that one can look at Sebalds narrator as a character in the tradition of realist fiction. A hundred years ago, Die Ringe des Saturn might have been published with a frame narrative like the one in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with a wild-eyed Sebald buttonholing the wedding guest and telling him about the time he tried to take a walk through Suffolk and stared into the heart of an immense darkness. The frame narrator might offer physical descriptions of this talespinner and of his environs, which the readers could take as relatively reliable. Imposing such an archaic novelistic framework provides one view of how Die Ringe des Saturn functions as a novel: the photographs take the place of the frame narrative, providing a perspective outside the narrators own (even when he seems to have held the camera). I will continue this line of inquiry in greater depth in the next chapter. This Sebald-character is a remarkably limited narrative consciousness: his signature melancholy is ironized by repetition, and the narratives sense of doom is

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alienating and not always persuasive. It is also alienated itself: the narrators affect is always recited, never demonstrated, and recited tersely, e.g.: I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the Mauritshuis . . . I was so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to harness my thoughts . . . Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the painting that later it took me a full hour to recover . . .34 (RS 82-83) To me, this reticence signals less a kind of objectively overpowering, undefinable malaise than a restricted vocabulary one restricted either by (lack of) cognizance or by formality. Between these recitations and one of the first facts we learn that the narrator was hospitalized exactly a year after he began his wanderings through Suffolk, and suspects the wanderings somehow contributed to his paralysis we can infer a barelyexpressible traumatic process. But the nonlinearity of the narrative confounds our attempts to identify with this traumatic response: we are told first the effects (hospitalization) and then the hypothetical cause (too much reflection on a catastrophic history). The narrator briefly jumps backwards in time to relate a much earlier sojourn in Ireland (Ringe 258-76) as well as routinely jumping centuries or millennia backwards in documentary time and concludes the first-person narrative on a single wellestablished date, April 13, 1995. The narrators internal, unshared experience of melancholy and trauma structures his narrative, rather than being transmitted through it; it provides melancholy with an anatomy, but not a dynamic, innervated existence. This is not to propose an absolute separation of author and narrator. Although the restrained narrative form of the documentary novels serves almost as a negative to the positive, univocal register of the critic, Sebald the author does not disappear in his novels.

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He is, as a montage artist, a commanding presence. Superficially, the reproduced objects, texts, and conversations are allowed an unusual degree of self-explanatory power; it is when one looks closer that one finds, as with the citation of dates in the quoted Borges story, small ruptures and inconsistencies in the documentary surface. The voice of Sebald the critic is also subtly distinct from the voice that narrates his novels, although the similarities dominate. The form of the critical essay requires him to set up an argument, but that argument seems often to depend on sensibility or psychology. In the introduction to his collection of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglcks (The Description of Misfortune, or alternately of unhappiness), he dismisses the reduction of Austrian literatures pervasive theme of loss to mere nostalgia for the Habsburg empire: The persistence of nature, preserved in life before and after us, is the far more significant correlative. Melancholy, the contemplation of present unhappiness, has nothing in common with the death wish. It is a form of resistance. And on the level of art its function is entirely other than simply relative or reactionary. 35 (Sebald, Beschreibung 12) Sebald finds another theme in the work he criticizes in this volume: the crucial category of teaching and learning36 (13), more typical of the Austrian than of the reichsdeutschen (German national) tradition. This too, it seems, amounts to a form of resistance, and he includes in this category both written work and lived experiences of authors both a passage from Kafkas Castle and an episode from Wittgensteins life (13).37 The hermeneutic distinction between work and life is porous: if you are reading

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books to learn, you can learn as much from a biography as from a novel. In that case the two genres do the same work. Die Ringe des Saturn gives the critic a sensibility of his own. He can juxtapose melancholy books with other melancholy objects in the world: the horrors of the Belgian Congo can be narrated beside stories and documents from the life of Joseph Conrad. Early in the book, before the narrator begins recounting his journey around England (the novel is subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt, an English pilgrimage), he recalls two friends who have died since the journeys end, both lecturers in Romance languages, the one after the other. The first he describes as a model, happy scholar who died suddenly; the second, who seemed bound to the first in a sort of childhood friendship38 (16), is a scholar of the 19th-century French novel, with a distinctive approach: ([She had] in the course of her life developed a sort of private understanding of the 19th-century French novel, free from any intellectual vanity, always proceeding from obscure detail and never from the obvious.39 (Sebald, Ringe 16) Sebald goes on to recount several of these details and interpretations in the voice of this scholar, as he will do with countless other texts, letters, historical documents, photographs and stories real and invented over the course of the novel but it begins with this potent image of the literary critic at work. The quiet intensity of her work is linked through parataxis with her quiet devotion to her friend, whose loss, the narrator speculates, causes her to collapse in illness. It compounds several images essential to a model of the author and critic to which, I would argue, both Sebald and Bolao adhere: the links among writing, reading, and community, the idea of friendships forged through shared reading and understanding, and the inextricable losses of both ideas and people.

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This sense of solidarity pushes back against the anxious, self-splintering practice of the critic, who tries as in the case of Sebalds reviews of Andersch and Mendelssohn, or perhaps La literatura nazis too schematic version of the Ramrez Hoffman story to be more ethical than human. But the critical practice is a powerful force in both novels, and it provides a very particular, elaborate structure through which fragments of history, and small remnants of human life, can pass on their way to the readers comprehension and sympathy. The fictionalized narrators, however, in turn undercut the critical authority of the author by mirroring and displacing him, by showing inconclusive doubt, worry and confusion: they give the novels structure its own voice and sense of urgency in speaking, and thus make criticism fallible as well as necessary.

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CHAPTER THREE: FROM THE AIR: MAPS AND NARRATIVE TERRITORY

So far I have examined two sources of external pressure on the narratives of Bolao and Sebald: first, the Borgesian model of metafiction and questions of the status of the author; and second, a critically-oriented, historically motivated practice of ethical judgment in writing. A third source of pressure derives from geography, broadly conceived: physical space, nation, political history and its inscription on the physical world, the itinerancy of individual people, and the experience of exile. Both Bolao and Sebald lived for many years outside their native countries: Bolao lived primarily in Spain, Sebald in England (which added a linguistic displacement to the geographical one). To the extent that autobiography helped to form their novels, this fact of exile (or expatriation) plays a role in the orientation of the narrative. The narrators of both La literatura nazi and Die Ringe des Saturn share a sense of displacement, or estrangement, from a circumscribed American or northern European area. (Estrella distante depends less on a sense of geography, as most of the narrative takes place within a single country.) Die Ringe des Saturn is subtitled Eine englische Wallfahrt (an English pilgrimage). However, the narrators description of his physical travels digresses so seamlessly into secondhand, historical or fictitious accounts of other lands and other journeys all within a somewhat monotonous narrative voice that the reader finds it difficult to separate firsthand from secondhand information. The loss of clear boundaries between a situated, speaking subject and the distinct sources he cites conversations, literary biographies, diaries, writing by Borges or Browne, etc. leaves the narrator nearly as detached from present reality as the other, distant voices that he allows to speak

35

within the text: they are closer to him than everyday life in England, his adopted home to say nothing of the land of his birth, Germany. La literatura nazi takes an entire hemisphere as its staging ground and uniformly applies an exogenous political termNazi to the contents of the narrative. As a unifying concept, Amrica is ultimately more effective than Nazi in giving the disparate episodes in the book some common ground, and I will argue that within the American continents, Bolao both identifies his narrator (and thus his viewpoint) with Chile, and also portrays Chile as a vertiginous, unsteady, and dangerous center of reference, from which the narrator is fortunate to have escaped. Each novel sets up an imaginative (if not fully imaginary) geography and marks its narrators homeland as a negative center of violence and instability. From that center radiates a concern with literary work, solidarity among writers (and just condemnation of those who collude with violence), and the historical conditions with which writers of any sort must reckon.

In an essay on the Chilean avant-garde under Pinochet, Nelly Richard refers several times briefly to a 1982 installation by Ral Zurita called Sky Writing,40 performed over the sky of New York in a plane. (She doesnt mention what, exactly, Zurita wrote in the sky.) Zurita, whose other works include a reshaping of the desert only visible from the air, was part of the Colectivo Accionista de Arte (CADA), which styled itself as a left-wing vanguard. Richard describes the desert installation as a sort of mirror image of Sky Writing:

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In August 1993 the Chilean poet Ral Zurita effected an intervention in the Northern Chilean desert (fifty-six kilometers inland from Antofagasta) that consisted of inscribing on its surface a phrase three kilometers long: Ni pena ni miedo [Neither grief nor fear]. [. . .] He re-cited his own poetry that, since his 1979 collection Purgatorio [Purgatory], had used the trope of the Chilean desert to configure the evangelizing role of a new writing capable of transcending the pain of national crucifixion. And he cited by inverting its supports Las escrituras en el cielo . . . (35) The interpretation Richard gives of CADAs own goals for its installations carries its own political ambiguity. In particular, in the passage below, she refers to a stretch of canvas that virtually blocks the entrance of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (27): To break with the foreclosure of arts interiority (its inner walls) and accomplish the avant-garde goal of arts incorporation into lifes exteriority, the divisions that render art incommunicable the walls of a room (= the confinement of art and the institution as closure) must be abolished. [. . .] In CADAs pieces, the books page fades until it finally merges with the Chilean landscape that displaces and replaces it. The image of the author is deindividuated to the point that it is lost multiplied into anonymity: Everyone who works, if only mentally, to expand the spaces in his or her life is an artist.41 (27) This is probably not Richards own view of CADAs work, I should emphasize: she goes on to criticize the inherent assumptions of CADAs explicit program and concludes on a note of ambivalence. The idea that the work is fascist, however, is never even suggested. Its unlikely that Bolao had no knowledge of these installations while he was writing La

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literatura nazi: the parallels between Sky Writing and Ramrez Hoffman, or between the desert intervention and Willy Schrholz, are too exact to be coincidental. The Willy Schrholz and Ramrez Hoffman episodes of La literatura nazi/Estrella distante two of the three total episodes set in Chile have their own ambiguities and complications. I will briefly sketch them here and go on to identify key aspects of their portrayal of space and place as they are developed elsewhere in these texts. Willy Schrholz was born and raised in Colonia Renacer (Rebirth Colony, roughly), a mysterious colony of German immigrants who arrived in Chile after World War II. The colony is largely closed to the outside world, and there are rumors of sexual perversions. Readers familiar with current events in Chile will immediately recognize the infamous Colonia Dignidad in this portrait: founded by an ex-medic in the Nazi army, Paul Schfer, the colony was established in 1961 and probably used as a torture center by the Pinochet regime, with which Schfer was on friendly terms42. Although the most dire revelations were only publicly confirmed in recent years, stories about Colonia Dignidad had been circulating for decades, and Bolao was surely aware of the basic facts in the mid-90s. Still, his description of Colonia Renacer ends as a kind of in-joke, or a retreat from the flirtation with political facts into the safer realm of fictional license: It was also said that Eichmann, Bormann, and Mengele had secretly been there. In reality the only war criminal to spend a few years at the Colony . . . was Walther Rauss, with whom there were later attempts to link certain torture practices during the first years of the Pinochet regime. The truth is that Rauss died of a heart attack while watching the televised football game between the two Germanies during the 1974 World Cup in the Federal Republic.43 (95)

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In this barely-fictionalized setting, then, we learn that the young Willy Schrholz didnt master Spanish until the age of 10. Before that he was subjected to an iron familial discipline, work in the fields, and a few singular teachers who combined equal parts National Socialist millenarianism and faith in science44 (95), which determined his character. He is sent to Santiago to study agronomy but immediately becomes an experimental poet. His poetic work begins as a mixture of disjointed phrases and topographical diagrams of Colonia Renacer45 (96), not just unintelligible but defiantly uninterpretable. Critics and vanguardists alike try to find various messages in them, but even his friends in the avant-garde take some time to recognize his right-wing politics (that Schrholz holds ideas diametrically opposed to their own46 (96)). This is, notably, the only explicit reference to Schrholzs politics. An interested professor of Italian literature is the first to identify the referents in his next series of poems, which are exhibited at the Facultad de Letras at the Catholic University of Chile: their verses are written inside enormous ground plans of six wellknown concentration camps. A minor scandal follows, which lends Schrholz the black aura of a pote maudit which would accompany him for the rest of his days47 (96-97). Nevertheless, two of the poems are published elsewhere and followed, in 1980, by a book, Geometra (Geometry) page after page of drawings of empty space surrounded by barbed-wire fences, with phrases scattered within them: the texts speak murmur about abstract pain, about the sun, about headache48 (97). Its sequels, Geometra II and III and so forth, repeat the same pattern: plans of concentration camps superimposed on plans of Colonia Renacer or of Chilean cities, or simply installed in a bucolic, empty

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space49 (97). The textual content becomes increasingly dialogic, approaching a Beckettian, fragmentary drama. In 1985, however, he gains lasting, trans-American fame for a suspiciously familiar work of art the sensation of the Chilean cultural season50 (98): With the help of a set of excavators he carves out, over the desert of Atacama, the plan for the ideal concentration camp: an imbricated net which, if followed on foot across the desert, resembles an ominous succession of straight lines and, if observed from a helicopter or airplane, is transformed into a delicate play of curved lines. The literary portion remains consigned to the five vowels, dug violently with hoes by the poet himself and scattered arbitrarily over the crusted surface of the land.51 (97-98) Buoyed by this triumph, he makes similar installations in the United States and is offered a small plane by his promotors, to create a concentration camp in the sky52 (98). But Schrholz turns them down: he insists that his work has to be seen from above and generated on the ground. His final artistic triumph is to turn his personal semi-idiocy to his advantage and write a childrens book in the persona of Kaspar Hauser; his personal life ends, apparently well, in Africa, where he works as a photographer and German tour guide. (One imagines him crossing paths with Leni Riefenstahl.) The episodes in La literatura nazi are quite heterogeneous in tone and content, as I have noted: some read like book reviews, others like short stories, while others adopt an essayistic middle discourse. The form of this episode hews closest to the short-story model: we are given a protagonist, told what forces shape him, and we follow him in a miniature picaresque through Chilean art and life the rise, the fall, the invariance of

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character throughout. The two signifiers that anchor the story, however, are Colonia Renacer and the sensational installation in the desert: that is, Colonia Dignidad and Ral Zurita; that is, Chile, in a perverse international context. Why international (and why perverse)? The same two adjectives could be used for the book as a whole. The Chilean case, however, is particularly emblematic because all three profiles of Chilean writers involve some form of elusiveness, incomprehensibility, semiliteracy, or other more grotesque, annihilating aesthetic qualities (Carlos Wieders Nazi airplane, etc.), which appear only incidentally in the books other episodes. They stand in notable contrast to the Argentine writers, who are depicted as much better-connected and simply more literary. Edelmira Mendiluces supposed masterpiece is a meticulous recreation of Poes room53 a backhanded tribute to Borges and Pierre Menard, particularly given Poes stature in France and Frances stature in Argentina which is a totalizing manipulation of space, not unlike the Chilean examples in that respect, but one taken from an established, domestic, and even quaint paragon of high culture. There is nothing violent or illiterate in it. With Edelmira Mendiluce and her husband, whose politics clearly channel Maurras and the nacionalistas, a publishing industry begins: there is no question in their world of either access to language or power over it. Not so an earlier Chilean profile, included under the header Los poetas malditos (the potes maudits). Pedro Gonzlez Carrera, a supposedly brilliant poet with a hard life (seven kids; primary schoolteacher in rural areas), publishes a scandalous poem in Santiago in praise of the fascist Italian army, which the narrator uses to mock the Chileans, accusing them of considering the Italians a race of cowards in part as antiArgentine sentiment. His modernist poems, whose images are described in detail, are

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published in 1947. His poems grow subsequently more terse, more paranoid and full of images of self-loss in the landscape. He publishes his own book of twelve poems, with a desolate cover including a swastika and a lost child under the sea, and the cast of frightening characters now includes Deleuze-like machines. After his death his legacy is assiduously recovered and praised by a few devotes. The link between Gonzlez Carreras fear of self-loss/reversion to childhood and Willy Schrholzs final incarnation as Kaspar Hauser is clear enough, as is the link (explicitly stated) between Schrholz and Ramrez Hoffman, whose identity is confusing only to others, not to him. (Bolao devotes several pages in Estrella distante to analyzing the possible meanings, phonetic associations or cryptograms in his pseudonym, Carlos Wieder (50-51).) While I dont propose that La literatura nazi seriously be read as a map of Bolaos own personal geography of the Americas, it is interesting that in these three Chilean episodes, a totalizing sense of violence and victimization, linked with Nazism, is experienced subjectively and internally by two of the three writers. In the case of the third, a first-person narrator appears to experience to react to and process the violence committed by Ramrez Hoffman, so the experience of individual victimization remains a leitmotif of Bolaos representation of Chilean literary lives.

The theme of travel in Die Ringe des Saturn has been taken up by several critics, who arrive at diverse, if not totally divergent, conclusions. John Zilcosky sees a story of failure to get lost replacing the familiar narrative arc of departure and homecoming (10203). John Beck uses the complex patterns of coastlines and ring formation around Saturn as tropes to illustrate Sebalds labyrinthine, complicated literary world (85-86), while

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Simon Ward takes ruins as a similarly paradigmatic image (58). Beck particularly underscores the difficulty and slipperiness of the text (77-78). If these accounts overlap anywhere, it is in their shared estrangement from, and amazement by, the shattered and jumbled travelogue Die Ringe des Saturn provides, and their tendency to take some portion of the book at face value the narrators melancholia, for instance even if it distorts their sense of the rest of the text into something quite unsettling and peculiar. In the previous chapter, I suggested that it might be useful to look at Die Ringe des Saturn as a narrative between quotation marks, with the photographs standing outside the quoted material like a frame narrative. Another plausible association would be with a genre no doubt quite familiar to Sebald: the academic lecture, complete with visual aids. (Luftkrieg and Literatur, whose chapters were first given as individual lectures in Zurich, has a similar layout and structure.) The material process of assembling the data for the text is itself narrated: at the beginning of chapter V the narrator tells us that he has been spending time in archives, reconstructing the contents of a documentary hed slept through on television; and at various points in the first and last chapters he describes the process of his research looking for Thomas Brownes skull in the hospital, finding a documentary on the silk industry from Nazi Germany and reports on the results. Still, the substance of the narrative belies this formal resemblance. The beginning and end of the englische Wallfahrt are revealed in the first paragraph: the narrator began what proved to be at least a nine-day54 walking trip through Suffolk in August 1992, and a year to the day later was hospitalized for paralysis, whereupon he conceived of turning his notes from the trip into a book. The trip was initially planned with some care. The narrator had visited a few of his destinations in the past Lowestoft around

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1977, Southwold on various occasions, Orford in 1972 and may have been revisiting them for curiositys sake. But he planned visits to Somerleyton Hall, Michael Hamburgers house in Middleton, the historic home of Edward FitzGerald at Boulge, the model Temple of Jerusalem at Chestnut Tree Farm, and the dwellings of Charlotte Ives near Harleston; and may also have intended to walk past the ghost town of Dunwich, which he relates to a long biographical passage on Swinburne. From an eclectic, and unreconstructable, assortment of texts, the narrator derived an itinerary for himself, centered on a particular small region of England. The associations he draws as he walks through the physical landscapewhich move from Ireland to the Congo to Chinaare just as far-flung as the connections that built this restricted itinerary. Early on, however, he begins to suffer from a steady, insistently negative affect, in stark contrast to the variegated topoi of his thoughts. His melancholy reveals itself in two ways: the recitation of states of mind (as noted in the previous chapter), and the repetition of certain very similar sorts of statement about historical atrocities and catastrophes, which culminate in the final pages on history and mourning. The repetitions add a greater monotony to the text than even the descriptions of walking (an inherently repetitive act), or the constant, vertiginous linking of observations to memories to written texts, which flattens the narratives frame of reference to a single, reproducible state of narratorial consciousness. In Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald notes that, after he concluded his lectures in Zurich, many Germans sent him documents to prove that people did write about the war. But he takes pains to underscore the trite phrases within them, suggesting that their triteness indicates a process of repression and pain at work (LL 89-90). Its hard to imagine that the prosaic evidence of melancholy in Die Ringe des Saturn bathetic as it

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often is is not at least somewhat deliberate. To take several examples: in discussing the Taiping Rebellion, the narrator writes: Without a doubt the bloody horror then reigning in the Middle Kingdom exceeds all power to imagine55 (Ringe 177). About the Belgian Congo: The fact is, there is in the entire, mostly still unwritten history of colonialism hardly a darker chapter than the so-called opening of the Congo.56 (149, my emphasis) Korzienowski . . . now experienced the capital city of the kingdom of Belgium, with its ever more bombastic buildings, as a gravestone rising over a hecatomb of black bodies, and the people on the street seemed to him as though they bore the dark Congolese secret collectively within them.57 (154-55, my emphasis) About the westward movement of the inhabitants of Dunwich as example of a general rule: Remarkably many of our settlements are directed, and expand where their positions allow it, towards the west. The east is synonymous with a lack of prospects58 (Ringe 199, my emphasis). These statements convey more imprecise attitudes than information, and a certain hyperbole is common to all. (In the case of the westward expansion of North American cities and their polarization between eastern destitution and western affluence, which the narrator goes on to call an unfailing (unfehlbar) pattern (199), my own current home city of Berkeley reverses the pattern exactly.) These complex, difficult historical events are focalized through a single consciousness, which finds appropriately vague words for the inexpressible: an unimaginable horror, a dark collective secret, an unfailing east-west pattern. These sentimental engagements anchor the segments of the

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narrative; they provide a base of operations for the deployment of facts and recalled events. One implication of the melancholia of Die Ringe des Saturn is that it corresponds to a kind of post-imperial melancholy extending from the old metropolitan centers of northern Europe into the furthest periphery of their empires. Die Ringe consists, on the one hand, of the first-person narrative of a walking tour whose narrator, an aging, taciturn European man, is a collector among disintegrating collections. But the economically permeable, physically unstable border of eastern England, with its myriad links to the world beyond, provides a second, complementary organizing schema. Jan-Henrik Witthaus describes the text as a kind of encyclopedia written not as a project for future archaeologists (like Diderots Encyclopdie), but for the archivists of destruction, . . . under the [aegis] of melancholy59 (158). The narratives saturnine tendency patternseeking, futureless, alternately paralytic and peripatetic reflects the compromised, bereft position of the former imperial center, although this center is placed explicitly in the context of imperial competition and war, as well as colonialism and global markets. Paul Gilroys argument in Postcolonial Melancholia takes England as its subject, but credits an earlier German source, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs The Inability to Mourn (Die Unfhigkeit zu trauern), for the adapation of Freudian theory to social psychology the same source to which Sebald refers in Luftkrieg und Literatur (LL 90) in discussing clich and omission in German reminiscences of the air war. According to Gilroy, the Misterlichs account ties melancholia, at the national-imperial level, to predominantly narcissistic collective fantasies of omnipotence, which the end

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of the regime then shatters (Gilroy 99). He goes on to outline the difficult process of incipient mourning: The multilayered trauma economic and cultural as well as political and psychological involved in accepting the loss of the empire would therefore be compounded by a number of additional shocks. Among them are the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame [. . .] conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness. (Gilroy 99) This argument, he adds, seems to apply as well to other post-imperial states in Europe notably, for this discussion, the Netherlands and Belgium, and one could also add Germany (Gilroy 100). Sebald is certainly interested in more than Englishness as such in Die Ringe des Saturn. There are two particular scenes, however, that give a central place to exposure to either strangers or otherness during the narrators journey through Suffolk; each is echoed by a complementary, but not fortuitous, encounter, narrated directly afterwards. The first occurs when, having extricated himself from a mazelike heath, he wanders into Middleton to visit a friend and stops at a store to buy Mineralwasser (Ringe 218-19). As he enters the town, he reflects that he must resemble a traveling merchant from another time, but his apparent strangeness confutes time and place: Certainly every foot traveller even today, in fact today above all who doesnt conform to the standard image of the vacationing hiker incurs the contempt of the

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locals60 (Ringe 219). Indeed, the clerk at the store simply stared at me with half-open mouth, as if I were a being from another star61 (219), and he concludes: It has frequently occurred to me that at the sight of a foreigner, country people feel a terror enter their limbs, and even if he has a good command of their language, they generally understand him only with difficulty and quite often not at all.62 (219) The girl fetches him a Cherry Coke instead of mineral water, but it suits his purposes: he drinks it in a single gulp. There is a good deal of mutual incomprehension in this scene. The narrator feels, first and foremost, estranged from himself: he tells us so even before he meets the girl, or anyone he notes that the town is empty, and only the houses seem forbidding (218). He proceeds to share this estrangement with the girl upon meeting her. She does indeed react with alarm and incomprehension and bring him the wrong drink, but the episode isnt told as though it reveals anything new to the narrator: he begins talking about foreignness and estrangement, inserts the anecdote, and concludes the discussion on an abstract level. Thus, in our reading, the clerk is primed for her role. This otherwise minor event forms part of a sequence of alienation and identification, beginning with the labyrinth of the heath and ending with a peculiar feeling of belonging in the home and company of his friend, the German expatriate poet and translator Michael Hamburger. Despite the superficial similarities of their lives, the narrator is at a loss to explain this response to his friends dwelling: But why I had the impression, upon my first visit to Michaels house, that I lived or had once lived in his house, and indeed just as he did that I cannot explain to myself.63 (Ringe 228)

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The movement between connection and missed or failed connection recurs in the next chapter. The narrator befriends a Dutch business traveller, De Jong, with whom he discusses the rise and fall of England and the Netherlands as world powers long into the night in the hotel bar in Southwold. Their immediate camaraderie lasts through the following day, when De Jong gives him a ride near Boulge and shows him the land that he (De Jong) is hoping to buy. The narrator moves on, once I had taken my leave of Cornelis de Jong, with a certain warmth it seemed to me he reciprocated64 (144), to visit Edward FitzGeralds historical family home. Later that night, the narrator awakens from a dream about FitzGerald, set in an Irish manor where he had stayed some years before: he recalls one of the young women of the Irish family and his difficult parting from her, then relates a mysterious encounter with her in Berlin at a club the following year. Taken together, these four encounters the clerk, Michael Hamburger, De Jong, and the Irish girl, Catherine Ashbury trace a series of felt shifts in the narrators position among other human beings. Curiously, though, the most alienating interaction, with the clerk, is the least consequential or meaningful of all: it encompasses only a minor error in a monetary transaction. By contrast the meeting with Hamburger brings up memories of the war, the destruction of Berlin, and flight from Germany, as well as the value of literature as a tenuous link to ones homeland: the two mens friendship occurs against a backdrop of destruction and upheaval. The spontaneous friendship with De Jong incorporates an even more conscious and explicit engagement with historical circumstances, colonialism (sugar plantations), and international investment (i.e., the land De Jong wishes to buy in Suffolk); these two men meet as equals, talk frankly, and part on apparently good terms. Finally, the appearance of Catherine Ashbury in the narrators

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mind is at first literally unconscious his memory of the inn surfaces in a dream and remains vague and fairly incorporeal, although it ultimately reaches closest to home with the possibly-imagined encounter in a German theater (apparently months after the original Suffolk journey was completed). In effect, the narrator must constantly negotiate and renegotiate what I might call his political identity, in the fullest sense of the Greek term polis, within a world of increasingly fine gradations of nationality, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and other indicia. But this is not a task at which he can succeed or fail: it is felt, not measured. Rather than making strict sense of its perturbations, the narrator gestures at them by relating shifts in his own state of mind, by using hyperbole, and by seeking out connections among phenomena with great determination. Although he claims that the East stands for a lack of prospects, the narrator ends his account of the journey with an extended meditation on silk and sericulture moving from China through Europe and ending, once again, in Germany, before the universal theme of mourning (for which silk must be worn) closes the book. Silk serves here as an amazingly versatile figure of international commerce and industry, human cruelty, art, eccentricity, resource depletion, and much more; but the final meaningful product of sericulture here is mourning for every monstrosity the generation of such fine threads has witnessed. The butterfly or moth, in fact, appears in many of Sebalds other works as a figure of hope or transcendence but this final developmental phase is of course cut out of the productive cycle of sericulture, which kills the caterpillars in their pupae. The meticulously told material history lends this otherwise trite image a substantial but melancholic power.

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CONCLUSION

At the end of Chapter One, I suggested that Sebald and Bolao ultimately chose different resolutions for the shared anxiety of coexistence with texts. The narrative strategies of Die Ringe des Saturn, La literatura nazi, and Estrella distante are in fact quite distinct. La literatura nazi is narrated in a sort of eternal, atemporal present, with its composition date presumably falling sometime in the future. While it loosely associates the invisible narrator of most of the text and the first-person narrator of the final episode, the mind of the narrator as such is not a strong unifying presence. Both Die Ringe des Saturn and Estrella distante, on the other hand, use a continuous first-person narrator, although they also allude to episodes of rewriting and reconstruction: in Estrella distante, the dialogue between the author of La literatura nazi and his informant, Arturo B., and in Die Ringe des Saturn the narrators research and note-taking after his journey is complete. In La literatura nazi, the existence of texts is foregrounded the coexisting narrator takes a back seat while in the other two novels the emphasis is placed on the narrators first-person experience with other texts and, sometimes, with their authors. We can further distinguish Sebalds novel from Bolaos two novels in their respective representations of the writers work. Die Ringe is not primarily a book about writers, even when the writers do appear: Conrad, Swinburne, Michael Hamburger, Edward FitzGerald, Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne. Writing is clearly figured as one mode of engagement among many, or perhaps one road to disappointment and despair among many, and the texts themselves speak in a way they never really do in Bolaos two novels. Sebald is concerned with the effects (and affects) of what is written much

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more than the effects of writing as such: he depicts Chateaubriand and FitzGerald as characters in human dramas that ultimately have relatively little to do with art, while he quotes from Conrad and Browne, and Borges, as fellow-voices. Bolao dramatizes the act of writing over and over specifically the act of being a writer and producing a body of work. Neither he nor his characters can set texts apart from the people who created them; writing cannot be extricated from either its labor or its passion. In a sense Sebald, then, writes under the aegis of Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Bolao under the aegis of Pierre Menard, and their choices of intertexts were not fortuitous.65 In another respect, though, both Sebald and Bolao manage to pose quite similar problems for their narratives to confront: put most reductively, the problem of the role of reading and writing and belles-lettres in a world of annihilating, ongoing violence. Neither side overcomes the other on balance. Literature consoles its readers and its writers. But literature must also be able to uphold the virtues with which the critic charges it: writing is not enough, reading is not enough, publication is not enough without an ethos, it is all worse than useless. But is such an ethos possible? What does it entail? The narrators of Die Ringe des Saturn and Estrella distante confront an abhorrent past and protract the confrontation in writing, as though staring at it for as long as they can endure. The confrontation is not very long; the gaze cant poison or ignite its object. There is an element of absurdity to it, but it is the absurdity of concentration. To the teller in the midst of the tale, a reader focusing on a single page over and over is absurd; but the nature of tales, once they end and become artifacts, is to compel revisitation and revision. Moreover, the experience of reading and writing exists in history and belongs

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to it, as much as any other experience, and any confrontation with history as such entails a confrontation with the history of reading and writing as well. In this study, I have shown how one writer, Borges, set several examples in his short fiction and criticism for narrating encounters between people and texts within historical time, and then how two later writers appropriated and incorporated those examples in their own work, but there is no way to draw more than a provisional conclusion about this process in the abstract. My reference above to an ethos is the best model I can offer for the difficult relationship between writing fiction and writing history as it appears in these three novels. The circumspection of the critic balances the exuberance of the poet, and vice versa; the bonds of friendship among writers, readers, and others provide a sharp contrast with the annihilation of human solidarity by regimes of violence, but the lack of solidarity must (particularly in Sebald) have a fair reckoning as well. By situating the shared existence of individuals and texts in a more complex and less stable world than even Borges parables can show, Bolao and Sebald provide their own examples for present and future readers, writers, and critics to follow in making sense of a history shared by texts and lives.

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WORKS CITED Beck, John. Reading Room: Erosion and Sedimentation in Sebalds Suffolk. In W.G. SebaldA Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and A. Whitehead. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004: 75-88. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Bolao, Roberto. La literatura nazi en Amrica. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1996. . Estrella distante. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1996, 1999. . Distant Star. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2002. . Entre parntesis. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004. . 2666. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004. Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996. . Otras inquisiciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1979. Bourbon, Brett. Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Mind and Meaning in Literature and Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. De Man, Paul. A Modern Master: Jorge Luis Borges (1964). Critical Writings 19531978. Ed. Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 123-30. Gabantxo, Amaia. Murders on the Move. Times Literary Supplement, 9 Sept. 2005: 34. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Gonzlez Echevarra, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Second edition. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Huyssen, Andreas. On Rewritings and New Beginnings: W.G. Sebald and the Literature about the Luftkrieg. Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 124 (2001): 72-90. Johnson, Christopher. Intertextuality and Translation: Borges, Browne, and Quevedo. Translation and Literature 11.2 (2002): 174-94. Manzoni, Celina, ed. Roberto Bolao: La escritura como tauromaquia. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2002. Mount, Graeme. Chile and the Nazis. In Memory, Oblivion, And Jewish Culture In Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosn. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005: 7790.

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Oviedo, Jos Miguel. Nazis de Papel. Letras Libres (November 2005): 69-71. Payne, Johnny. Conquest of the New Word: Experimental Fiction and Translation in the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Richard, Nelly. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis. Trans. Alice A. Nelson and Silvia Tandeciarz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Rock, David. Antecedents of the Argentine Right. In The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present, eds. S. McGee Deutsch and R.H. Dolkart. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1993: 1-34. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sebald, W.G. Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1997. . The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1998. . Die Beschreibung des Unglcks. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1985, 1999. . On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003. Strong, Beret E. The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden and Breton. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Ward, Simon. Ruins and Poetics in the Works of W.G. Sebald. In W.G. SebaldA Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and A. Whitehead. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004: 58-71. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Witthaus, Jan-Henrik. Fehlleistung und Fiktion: Sebaldsche Gedchtnismodelle zwischen Freud und Borges. In W.G. Sebald: Politische Archologie und melancholische Bastelei, eds. M. Niehaus and C. hlschlger. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2006: 157-72. Zilcosky, John. Sebalds Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost. In W.G. SebaldA Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and A. Whitehead. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004: 102-20.

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Notes

1 2

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. En el vocabulario crtico, la palabra precursor es indispensable, pero habra que tratar de purificarla de toda connotacin de polmica o de rivalidad. El hecho es que cada escritor crea a sus precursores. . . . En esta correlacin nada importa la identidad o la pluralidad de los hombres. 3 Malynne Sternstein brought this unusual, but apposite, word to my attention in a 1999 seminar on Central European literature, where it was in fact applied to Kafka and his contemporaries (and successors). It refers to the study of the metaphysics of truth; here, to literature that raises and works through epistemological and metaphysical questions. 4 las heterogneas piezas que he enumerado se parecen a Kafka; si no me equivoco, no todas se parecen entre s 5 Borges himself called Quevedo menos un hombre que una dilatada y compleja literatura (less a man than a vast and complex literature) (Otras Inquisiciones, 51). 6 See, for instance, Beret E. Strongs study of the vanguardia movement from which Borges derived early fame and notoriety, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, & Breton (Evanston, 1997), in which a youthful Borges writes in favor of la meta principal de toda poesa, esto es, a la transmutacin de la realidad palpable del mundo en realidad interior y emocional (the principal goal of all poetry, which is the transmutation of the palpable reality of the world into inner emotional reality). (Strong 87) 7 According to de Man, this quotation is from the Prologue to the 1954 edition of Universal History of Infamy, tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton, 1972). 8 una derivacin del Chevalier Dupin de Edgar Allen Poe 9 un hombre que, en un siglo que adora los caticos dolos de la sangre, de la tierra y de la pasin, prefiri siempre los lcidos placeres del pensamiento y las secretas aventuras del orden. 10 p) Una invectiva contra Paul Valry, en las Hojas para la supresin de la realidad de Jacques Reboul. (Esa invectiva, dicho sea entre parntesis, es el reverso exacto de su verdadera opinin sobre Valry. ste as lo entendi y la amistad antigua de los dos no corri peligro.) 11 The narrator repeatedly refers to Menards visible work, legible in the form of the CV(Borges, Ficciones 47, 48, 51), as opposed to his rewriting of the Quijote, which is called subterranean (51). 12 Ms bien por imposible! dir el lector. De acuerdo, pero la empresa era de antemano imposible y de todos los medios imposibles para llevarla a trmino, ste era el menos interesante. 13 Noches pasadas, al hojear el captulo XXVI [del Quijote] no ensayado nunca por l reconoc el estilo de nuestro amigo y como su voz en esta frase excepcional: las

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ninfas de los ros, la dolorosa y hmida Eco. Esa conjuncin eficaz de un adjetivo moral y otro fsico me trajo a la memoria un verso de Shakespeare, que discutimos una tarde: Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . . 14 n) Un obstinado anlisis de las costumbres sintcticas de Toulet (N. R. F., marzo de 1921). Menard recuerdo declaraba que censurar y alabar son operaciones sentimentales que nada tienen que ver con la crtica. 15 mi compatriota Arturo B, veterano de las guerras floridas y suicida en Africa. (The translation of the phrase guerras floridas as Latin Americas doomed revolutions is by Chris Andrews, from his translation of Estrella distante as Distant Star (1).) 16 al dictado de sus sueos y pesadillas[,] compusimos la novela que el lector tiene ahora ante s. Mi funcin se redujo a preparar bebidas, consultar algunos libros, y discutir, con l y con el fantasma cada da ms vivo de Pierre Menard, la validez de muchos prrafos repetidos. 17 This quotational model of fiction owes much to Brett Bourbons philosophical study of fiction, Finding a Replacement for the Soul. 18 In his Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, this is not strictly true: Adolfo Bioy Casares, a friend to Borges in life, plays a significant role in the narrative, but for all intents and purposes he is a fictional character who shares the name of Borges friend, like the fictional Borges-narrator. 19 Die Welt wird Tln sein. Mich aber, so schliet der Erzhler, kmmert das nicht, ich feile in der stillen Mue meines Landhauses weiter an einer tastenden, an Quevedo geschulten bertragung des Urn Burial von Thomas Browne (die ich nicht drucken zu lassen gedenke). 20 Viele Jahre spter las ich dann in der 1940 in Salto Oriental in Argentinien verfaten Schrift Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius von der Rettung eines ganzen Amphitheaters durch ein paar Vogel. 21 A veces unos pjaros, un caballo, han salvado las ruinas de un anfiteatro 22 Die Erinnerung an die damals versprte Unsicherheit bringt mich wieder auf die im vorigen schon erwhnte argentinische Schrift, die in der Hauptsache befat ist mit unseren Versuchen zur Erfindung von Welten zweiten oder gar dritten Grades . . . 23 so merkt ein Nachtrag aus dem Jahr 1947 an 24 Notably, one photograph in Die Ringe des Saturn on page 313 certainly looks like a photograph of the author, and most likely is. 25 As Eric Santner puts it in On Creaturely Life, The difficulty of categorizing the sort of literary practice Sebald engaged in is notorious. The genres and hybrid styles his novels have been identified with include travel writing, memoir, photo essay, documentary fiction, magical realism, postmodern pastiche, and cultural-historical fantasy, among others (xiii-xiv). 26 The exact breakdown is eight Argentines; seven U.S. writers; three Chileans; two each from Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia; and one each from Haiti, Uruguay, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Cuba. But many, if not all, move around a great deal, either permanently or as travelers. 27 se lee, en un apunte aislado: El narrador de 2666 es Arturo Belano 28 Es ist nicht leicht zusammenzufassen, was alles an Laszivitt und erzdeutschen Rassenkitsch Mendelssohn (in bester Absicht, wie man annehmen mu) vor dem Leser

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hier ausbreitet. Jedenfalls [mit dieser] rckhaltlose[n] Fiktionalisierung des Themas der zerstrten Stadt. . . berantwortet sich Mendelssohn ber mehr als zweihundert Seiten hinweg blindlings der Kolportage. (Luftkrieg und Literatur [LL] 63) Here I am using Anthea Bells translation of Air War and Literature from On the Natural History of Destruction (NHD), along with the original German Luftkrieg und Literatur (LL). I will indicate the page numbers first in the German, then in the English edition. 29 die linguistische Korrumpierung, die Verfallenheit an das leere, zirkulre Pathos, nur das uere Symptom ist einer verdrehten Geistesverfassung, die auch in den Inhalten sich niederschlug (LL 131). 30 Hier, in der fachmnnischen Beschreibung der nochmaligen Zerstrung eines durch den Feuersturm mumifizierten Leibes, wird eine Wirklichkeit sichtbar, von der Schmidts linguistischer Radikalismus nichts wei. Was seine Kunstsprache verbirgt, das starrt uns entgegen aus der Sprache der Verwalter des Grauens[.] (LL 66) 31 [d]er Aufklrungswert solcher authentischen Fundstcke, vor denen jede Fiktion verblat. . . (LL 67) 32 We see a second distinction between Sebald and Bolao, with regard to use of the documentary and facts that stare straight at us, in their treatment of photography. In Estrella distante, Carlos Wieders photographs cause repulsion and fear: the only clarity they provide is a clear window on his pathology, whereas in Sebalds novels (and indeed in Luftkrieg) the photographs sit calmly beside the text, providing a graphic repetition of the word-pictures in prose. (Almost every photograph is redundantly described in the text, and never referred to directly; neither photograph nor text acknowledges the presence of the other.) 33 Heimat (350 versos) describe en una curiosa mezcla de espaol y alemn con algunas alocuciones en ruso, ingls, francs y yiddish las partes ntimas de su cuerpo con una frialdad de forense trabajando en la morgue la noche despus de un crmen mltiple. 34 Ich bin daher in einer ziemlich schlechten Verfassung gewesen, als ich am nchsten Vormittag im Mauritshuis [stand] . . . gelang es mir in meinem bernchtigen Zustand auf keine Weise . . . irgendeinen Gedanken zu fassen. Vielmehr fhlte ich mich, ohne da ich genau gewut htte warum, von der Darstellung derart angegriffen, da ich spter bald eine Stunde brauchte, bis ich mich . . . einigermaen wieder beruhigte. (Ringe 106) 35 Das Eingehen der uns nach wie vor am Leben erhaltenden Natur ist davon das stets deutlicher werdende Korrelat. Melancholie, das berdenken des sich vollziehenden Unglcks, hat aber mit Todessucht nicht gemein. Sie ist eine Form des Widerstands. Und auf dem Niveau der Kunst vollends ist ihre Funktion alles andere als blo relativ oder reaktionr. I am freely, and perhaps wrongly, translating Eingehen, which has a variety of meanings ranging from shrink to die to leave its mark on. 36 so wichtig[e] Kategorie der Lehre und des Lernens 37 Kafkas didaktische Wissenschaft, die wunderbare Szene im Schlo-Roman, wo K. und der kleine Hans im Schulzimmer voneinander lernen,. . . die Hoffnungen, die Wittgenstein in die Dorfschullehrerexistenz gesetzt hat. . . (Kafkas didactic gnosis, the wonderful scene in The Castle where K. and little Hans learn from one another in the schoolroom, . . . the hopes that Wittgenstein placed in [taking on a] village schoolteachers existence. . .)

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eine Art von Kinderfreundschaft [Sie hatte] im Verlauf ihres Lebens eine von jeglicher Intellektuelleneitelkeit freie, stets vom obskuren Detail, nie vom Offenkundigen ausgehende, gewissermaen private Wissenschaft von der franzsischen Romanliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelt . . . 40 This art would represent the collapse of every form of limitation, creating a salvational utopia or a macroliberty that could overcome all forms of conditioning and that could transcend all forms of dependency and subjection. It envisioned a kind of space beyond the rules articulating and regulating human praxis, as Ral Zurita proposed in the manifesto accompanying his Escrituras en el cielo [Sky Writing] realized in 1982 in New York. (Richard 29) The two cited phrases in this passage are directly quoted from Zuritas manifesto (Richard 106, n14 & n15). 41 This quoted sentence is taken from the text, reproduced earlier, of fliers which were dropped from airplanes all over Santiago as part of a CADA installation. 42 See Graeme Mount, Chile and the Nazis, pp. 83-84; and a BBC story online dated 11 March, 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4340591.stm (accessed 5/17/07) 43 Tambin se deca que all haban estado ocultos Eichman [sic], Bormann, Mengele. En realidad el nico criminal de guerra que pas unos aos en la Colonia [. . .] fue Walther Rauss, al que luego se quiso vincular con algunas prcticas de tortura durante los primeros aos del rgimen de Pinochet. La verdad es que Rauss muri de un ataque al corazn mientras vea por la tele el partido de ftbol que enfrent a las dos Alemanias durante el Mundial de 1974 en la Repblica Federal. 44 una frrea disciplina familiar, las labores del campo y unos profesores singulares en donde se aunaban a partes iguales el milenarismo nacionalsocialista y la fe en la ciencia 45 una mezcla de frases sueltas y de planos topogrficos de la Colonia Renacer 46 que Schrholz profesa ideas diametralmente distintas de las suyas 47 el aura negra de poeta maldito que lo acompaar el resto de sus das 48 Los textos hablan susurran sobre el dolor abstracto, sobre el sol, sobre el dolor de cabeza. 49 instalados en un espacio buclico y vaco 50 la sensacin del verano cultural chileno 51 Apoyado en un equipo de excavadoras rotura sobre el desierto de Atacama el plano del campo de concentracin ideal: una imbricada red que seguida a ras de desierto semeja una ominosa sucesin de lneas rectas y que observada a vuelo de helicptero o aeroplano se convierte en un juego grcil de lneas curvas. La parte literaria queda consignada con las cinco vocales grabadas a golpe de azada y azadn por el poeta en persona y esparcidas arbitrariamente sobre la costrosa superficie del terreno. 52 para realizar un campo de concentracin en el cielo 53 Celina Manzoni highlights the intricate textual network of this piece: If we consider the fact that [the text] reproduces Poes instructions, which seem in Bolaos text to have been copied from the Spanish translation by Cortzar with small modifications, it turns out that the magnum opus of this lady from Buenos Aires is the description of the construction of the description of the construction of the text imagined by Poe. A process of writing, rewriting and repetition which passes beyond the shadow of Pierre Menard into outright parody. (Manzoni 24)

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Sebald describes nine days of travel in total; he might have left a few uneventful days, like the one he spent resting in Southwold and talking to Cornelis De Jong (241-44), out of the final narrative. Hence my at least. 55 Ohne Zweifel bersteigt das damals im Reich der Mitte herrschende blutige Grauen jedes Vorstellungsvermgen. 56 Tatschlich gibt es in der ganzen, grtenteils noch ungeschriebenen Geschichte des Kolonialismus kaum ein finstereres Kapitel als das der sogennanten Erschlieung des Kongo. 57 Korzienowski. . . empfindet jetzt die Hauptstadt des Knigreichs Belgien mit ihren immer bombastischer werdenden Gebuden wie ein ber einer Hekatombe von schwarzen Leibern sich erhebendes Grabmal, und die Passanten auf den Straen kommen ihm vor, als trgen sie allesamt das dunkle kongolesische Geheimnis in sich. 58 Auffllig viele unserer Ansiedlungen sind ausgerichtet und verschieben sich, wo die Verhltnisse es erlauben, nach Westen. Der Osten ist gleichbedeutend mit Aussichtslosigkeit. 59 die Archivaren der Zerstrung, . . . unter dem [Vorzeichen] der Melancholie 60 Schlielich zieht jeder Fureisende, auch heute noch, ja gerade heute und vor allem, wenn er nicht dem gngigen Bild des Freizeitwanderers entspricht, sogleich den Verdacht der Ortsansssigen auf sich. 61 staunte mich mit halboffenem Mund einfach nur an wie ein Wesen von einem anderen Stern 62 Es ist mir mehrfach schon aufgefallen, da den Leuten auf dem Land beim Anblick eines Auslnders der Schreck in die Glieder fhrt und da sie ihn, selbst wenn er ihre Sprache gut beherrscht, zumeist nur schwer und manchmal berhaupt nicht verstehen. 63 Aber warum ich gleich bei meinem ersten Besuch bei Michael den Eindruck gewann, als lebte ich oder als htte ich einmal gelebt in seinem Haus, und zwar in allem geradeso wie er, das kann ich mir nicht erklren. 64 [n]achdem ich mich von Cornelis de Jong mit einer gewissen, von ihm, wie es mir schien, erwiderten Herzlichkeit verabschiedet hatte. 65 I realize that a single, prefatory reference to Pierre Menard hardly qualifies it as an intertext on its own, but it seems impossible to me to overestimate the influence of that story in particular, and Borges in general, on La literatura nazi en Amrica.

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