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Journal of Latin American Cultural

Studies: Travesia
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Los detectives salvajes: Line, loss and

the political
Philip Derbyshire
Published online: 02 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: Philip Derbyshire (2009) Los detectives salvajes: Line, loss and the
political, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 18:2-3, 167-176, DOI:
10.1080/13569320903384558

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 Philip Derbyshire

LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES: LINE, LOSS

AND THE POLITICAL

Los detectives salvajes (hereafter LDS), Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel, has three gestures of
beginning. First there is a question and a flat negation. This is the epigraph, taken from
Malcolm Lowry’s fantasmatic account of 1930s Mexico, which asks: ‘¿Quiere usted la
salvación de México? ¿Quiere usted que Cristo sea nuestro rey?’ The terse rejoinder is
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‘No’. Then there is the title of the first section: ‘Mexicanos perdidos en México’.
Finally, there is a date of the first diary entry, November 2nd. The most obvious
deduction is that this is Bolaño’s ‘Mexican’ novel, that is, it is the novel where he
elaborates a judgement on Mexico, the place of his own exile from Chile (and indeed a
site of multiple exiles) and the place where politics and aesthetics found a particular
fusion in state sponsorship of the arts. But the epigraph also suggests a style that is
constant through the novel, a certain catechistic investigation, a posing of questions that
propels the novel. The novel as a whole is an interrogation, which might make sense of
the title. And it is a novel that opens on the Day of the Dead – unmarked as such, but
infusing the text with a sense of mourning or lament: even as it opens to the future of
its own production it is haunted by the dead and disappeared. The novel moves from a
secure location in Mexico City outwards, and moves from the question of action
implied in the quotation from Lowry to a metaphysical question: the novel ends with a
question and a non-answer: ‘¿Qué hay detrás la ventana?’, followed by a drawing with a
rectangle outlined with a broken line.
This article looks at the ways Bolaño’s aesthetic and political commitments are
articulated and staged through the novel: his sense of political defeat is matched by a
longing for a form of literary production which is also unattainable, poetry. My
contention is that the form of the novel acts out this sense of loss and the flights within
the novel mark a despair in relation to the world that must be confronted after poetry.

Poetry as McGuffin (or objet a)

The structure of LDS is recursive. The diary of Juan Garcı́a Madero (and the echoes of
defeat are already doubly present in this name: Garcı́a Lorca and the assassinated first
president of the post-Dı́az Mexican Republic) chronicles the young writer’s search for a
poetic place and then shifts to the search of Garcı́a Madero, along with the two
established poets he has met in Mexico City, for Cesárea Tinajero, the last survivor of a
group of poets from the years subsequent to the Mexican Revolution. This narrative,
which moves forward from November 1975 to February 1976 in strict calendrical
time, is fractured by the great mass of the novel. This takes the form of a sequence of
monologues by various voices in different parts of Latin America, Iberia, Europe, the

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, Nos. 2–3 December 2009, pp. 167-176
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569320903384558
 168 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Middle East and Africa. This sequence moves forward in time from 1976 to 1996, but
does so erratically, jumping backwards and forwards between times and sites of
enunciation. What unifies this section, itself entitled Los detectives salvajes, are the traces
of the two fugitive poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. The montage begins in the
editorial office of Amadeo Salvatierra in Mexico City and ends in Liberia, where Belano
is last seen vanishing into the bush. The whole of this second section is a consequence of
the fatal occurrence in the third part, Los desiertos de Sonora: the accidental death of
Tinajero. So it is absence, loss and disappearance that provide the minimal plot
dynamic. But what is initially absent is the possibility of poetry and writing poetry.
Garcı́a Madero’s invitation to join the visceral realists is an invitation to join a poetic
fraternity, a social organisation of poetic production, clearly modelled on the
succession of avant-gardes through the twentieth century. But this possibility of poetry
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is subsequently inflected as something lost, past possibility, and this finds its fate in
disappearance. What is lost is a poetic tradition – the authentic poetry of Tinajero –
and it is the two poets who have accidentally destroyed the bearer of the tradition, who
disappear, only to be witnessed in their global wanderings, in some sense living out an
after-life, ghosts in their own novel.
In this sense, the loss or impossibility of poetry is the spur for the production of
prose. But it places prose under a sign of substitution and inadequacy (and later I will
look at how Bolaño attempts to redeem this inadequacy). Even more suggestively, this
inadequacy is staged as a consequence of a parodic matricide, itself doubling a parodied
claim for the origin of modern Mexican poetry from the Uruguayan Auxilio Lacouture.
But if the poetic is the site of value, Bolaño’s novel is reticent in either defining it or
offering examples and disdains any explicit engagement with formal aesthetics. There
are three cited examples of poetry. There is another of the question and answer sessions
in the drive to Sonora, where types of poetic metre and form are under scrutiny. There
are endless lists of poets who are either elect or preterite, or ambiguously ‘maricones’.
There are references to Lima’s poetry review Lee Harvey Oswald. And there are the poets
who circulate as characters or voices within the text – either established (or
establishment) – Maples Arce and Octavio Paz – or avant-garde, such as the various
members of the visceral realist grouping headed by Lima and Belano. In this latter case,
poetry is a form of social existence, a form of bonding by self-proclaimed outsiders and
pretenders. In one way, the social form of literary contestation provides a model for
politics itself. And visceral realism is claimed as the bearer of truth, within that
fundamental modernist gesture of progress and supersession, even if such a claim is
never demonstrated. The poets of the novel are poetically silent.

Poetry in prose

There are examples though. When poetry is included in prose it stands out as poetry: it
interrupts the flow of text and the flow of reading. It separates reading into two
planes – that of the poem and that of the text, since the poem is read in the text. But
prose novelises the poem, including it as one more piece of material1 and breaking the
frame and unity of the poem, even as cited poetry resists the novel it inhabits.
The context of inclusion plays out an inexplicit aesthetic, and a history of the politics of
poetic production.
 LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES 169

The first poem Bolaño includes is ‘El vampiro’ by Efrén Rebolledo, which Garcı́a
Madero reads and masturbates to. This exoticist poet sits outside the canon of Garcı́a’s
teachers and occasions sharp criticism from Octavio Paz in his Signos. But he provides a
sensual climax for the would-be-poet: masturbation is the physical correlate of a
solitary appropriation. Poetry here would be the sign of a privatised pleasure, a form of
decadence that unites body and word in a form of narcissistic satisfaction. The lyric is a
unity that forms the reading subject into a unity. But the poem also offers a model of
poetry, a succubus that enervates as it satisfies. Poetry is temptation and threat,
exhausting the poetic subject in its production.
The second poem the reader encounters in Bolaño’s novel – now in the second
section of the book, so temporally recounted after what we might describe as the fall,
but enunciated before the fall – is by Rimbaud. Here the utopian moment of poetry is
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foregrounded.
As Jean Franco has pointed out,2 one model for Bolaño’s work is the Salvadorean
poet, novelist and guerrilla Roque Dalton. The latter’s fragmentary novel Pobrecito
poeta que era yo (1976) prefigures many of Bolaño’s formal strategies: the diary form,
alternating voices, commentary and incorporated material; but differs precisely in the
voicing of the poet and the citation of the poet’s own work. The autobiographical
elements of Dalton’s work are fused with the fictional work precisely by means of a
poetry that articulates value aesthetically and politically. Dalton’s commitment unifies
his person, persona, poetry and prose. But of course, Dalton was murdered by his own
supposed comrades, marking a particular degradation of the political: where the
guerrilla band turns into a gang, a trajectory well illustrated in other struggles such as
the FARC in Colombia. Thus the Central American armed struggle provides a political
and aesthetic backdrop to Bolaño’s novel: we note that the time line of the outer
sections is just this moment of 1975 –76 when Dalton is killed (May 1975) but also the
moment when the Nicaraguan Revolution is beginning its final push, leading to the
creation of the Sandinista state, whose poetic voice is Ernesto Cardenal, the antipode of
Bolaño’s productive subject
Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Tortured Heart’ is quoted in full, in French, by Lima within
the text. William Rowe has given a close reading of Rimbaud’s poem in relation to the
Paris Commune of 1871, a connection that has also been explored by Kristin Ross.3
For Rowe, Le coeur supplicié is a testament to the eruption of popular democracy after
France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Rimbaud travelled to Paris during the
Commune and wrote letters to Georges Izambard about it, including one with the
above poem. Le coeur supplicié is a hymn to a bacchic outpouring, a dionysiac fenzy
where a new libidinal economy is made manifest against the rhythms of work and self-
sacrifice. ‘[U]n rire general’ breaks out, which Rowe compares with Vallejo’s
invocation of the popular voice of the Spanish revolution, which will be later
suppressed. The poem, then, is a paean to the capacity for revolution, but is also a
question about what is to follow when the resistance of the Commune fails. ‘Comment
agir?’ How do we act?
Bolaño inserts this quotation in a scene in a Mexico City nightclub called Priapo’s,
and the speaker who quotes Lima asks ‘ustedes’, the implied interlocutor of the second
part of the novel, to guess what it is. For himself, the speaker remains unmoved by the
context of Rimbaud’s poem ‘una guerra, no sé qué guerra’ (155) which Lima recounts.
Rimbaud’s testament to revolution and resistance then is translocated to a site of the
 170 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

vulgar commercialisation of sex and vanishes into the smoke-filled encounter between
the speaker and la Piel Divina, a masculine couple who seem to have something of
Rimbaud and Verlaine’s tortured relationship. Bolaño stages a fall from a revolution of
the senses to the commodification of the body. Rimbaud moves from the Commune to
Verlaine, from the poetry of his lyric invocation of utopia to the prose poems of A
Season in hell and Illuminations. Finally he pursues a nomadic silence in Africa, where he
wanders through Southern Arabia and the Horn as a merchant and gun-runner, until he
finally dies of cancer in Marseilles. His literary production is at an end by the time he is
nineteen.
The figure of Belano echoes this trajectory. Sharing his first name, Arturo/Arthur,
with Rimbaud, he wanders through Europe and then Africa, miming Rimbaud’s
incredible Ethiopian journeys, as he travels by land from Angola to Rwanda. Rimbaud’s
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fall into the role of merchant and smuggler is almost a lived parody of the very bourgeois
spirit he mocks in Le coeur supplicié: Rimbaud becomes the colonial capitalist who best
exemplifies the spirit of the post-Commune French empire. Belano’s parodic biography
is more subtle. He returns to the jungle like some Central American revolutionary
taking up his task again, but this time precisely to the jungle scorched by senseless war,
where revolution is merely gangsterism writ large. And he returns as a journalist, a
spectator rather than protagonist. So he is seen in Angola during the interminable civil
war of the ’80s and ’90s, where the liberation struggle had become a struggle over
wealth and power. He travels to Rwanda, the site of massacre and retribution, and ends
up in Liberia, which, along with Sierra Leone, has become a signifier of brutality and
degradation, where politics is acted out on the maimed bodies of unfree citizens. Africa
is a cipher for the impossibility of revolution: where the jungles of Latin America
seemed once to be pregnant with the future of socialism, the jungles of Africa are sites
precisely of interminable and irremediable savagery. Belano is a ‘vidente’ of a post-
colonial Africa of viscerally real destruction that confirms his silence.
For Rimbaud, the defeat of the Commune presages questions of representation and
action, and his existential solution is a turn to the prosaic. For Bolaño, the defeats of a
certain political militancy now entail a questioning of the poetic. The narcissistic unity of
Rebolledo had been superseded by the aesthetic-political unity demanded by Rimbaud,
but this in turn fell away as possibility after the defeat of revolution. What is now
possible? Poiesis seems replaced by mimesis. The transformative possibilities of poetry
and action are replaced by representation and scepticism in regard to representation.
Thus the node formed by Le coeur supplicié ties together the themes of the revolution
betrayed and defeated, and the fall into silence that is a just response to this fact. The
world that persists after defeat is unsayable, or unsayable in the form of the lyric.
The third poem is the only ‘mysterious’ example of the last survivor of the
precursor generation of the visceral realists, Cesárea Tinajero. Tinajero herself became
silent during the ’30s and became, amongst other things we discover, a schoolteacher
in the state of Sonora. In part her silence was a consequence of the sclerosis of the
Revolution, in part a turning away from publishing poetry after a failed affair. Lima and
Belano are shown this last extant poem by the director of a publishing house and
review, before their flight to find her. The poem consists of three images: a straight
line; a gently undulating line; then finally a violently jagged line. Its title is Sión. They
read it as a being a rendering of a boat on an increasingly violent sea, whose agitation
obscures the full version of the title, Navegación. ‘Es una broma’, says Belano. The last
 LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES 171

poem by the la visceral realist, the legacy of the poetic is simply a joke, or rather is read
as a joke.
But this joke covers over some more fundamental truth. At one level, the
exemplary poem marks a retreat from the symbolic, a mistrust of language in its
capacity to mean. Tinajero has moved to literal imagism. This imaging can also be seen
as simple self-reference: the transformation of the line, the basic unit of the poem,
under pressure. The line is deformed not in its direction but in its amplitude: the line
registers and registers, like a seismograph, events elsewhere. And the line is crushed
between origin and future. Perhaps like the line in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a novel
whose relations to Bolaño’s fictions might be explored, there is a connection both to a
certain aesthetics and to the plot of the novel.4 ‘The line of beauty’ is the acme of
romantic sensibility and Bolaño’s line is the beautiful – the harmonious and the
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symmetrical – under crisis. As this crisis intensifies we can imagine the line breaking
and the linearity of advance being confused by the displacement of sections of the line,
thrown forward perhaps, like some nappe rupturing in the close encounter of
continents. Such a rupture would model the crushing of poem into novel, where
Garcı́a’s diary fractures and its last entries are out of sequence. To continue the
geological metaphor, the central sections might then be the contiguous elements of
narrative after sharp folding, fracture and erosion.
This is to posit a hidden moment to Tinajero’s poem but it is merely to repeat
Belano and Lima’s interpretative strategy. They add a rectangle to the drawing, so that
the abstraction of the line is made representational. It is to offer a supplement that
makes the poem make sense. Here we have the contemporary relation of prose to
poetry – one of parasitism and supplementation. Prose paraphrases. Yet the poem
itself retreats from language into image. It is as if a double scepticism or doubt were at
work: poetry itself doubts its own materials at a particular conjuncture, and prose is
doubted as capable of any more than paraphrase, mere re-stating.
Belano and Lima’s interpretation comments on the moment of supplementation
involved in reading, and the reduction that is its consequence. Here there is a fall from
the poetic image into prose and prosaic interpretation. What is staged is the cleverness
of the poets, the idiocy of the critical establishment (for whom this has been supposedly
an outstanding enigma) but also the banality of interpretation. The aura of mystery (and
there is a sense that Tinajero’s legacy has a sacral quality) is turned into a moment of
individual laughter. The ‘rire general’ of Rimbaud’s crowd becomes the private
laughter of the interpreters. The joke is double: the content of Tinajero’s poem and
that interpretation is a joke and the critic always a farceur. But it also shifts
interpretation to the level of the contingent. A simple addition allows the text to mean,
but that addition is haphazard. Chance is invoked here as a key to comprehension. The
truth of the poem is seen, intuited in a change of point of view or Gestalt, a shift which is
neither predictable nor within the capacity of all.

Jokes and their relation to the political unconscious

Such a shift is explored in the later moments of part 3. Garcı́a Madero is driving with
Belano and Lima through the desert exchanging visual riddles with Lupe, one of the
numerous women who march through the text. Various drawings of two-dimensional
 172 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

figures turn out to be Mexicans seen from above. The switch of perception that brings
sudden illumination is humorous (a Mexican riding a bicycle is seen in the figure of a
line and two concentric circles, and so on) and is suspended within the text as a
pastime, something to entertain protagonist(s) and reader. But the humour disguises
a metaphysical seriousness. Illumination is the privilege of the poet, the romantic
moment where reality is suddenly seen and comprehended. An apparently meaningless
trace suddenly takes on form. And these joke figures preface the tragi-comedy of
Tinajero’s death, its burlesque moment, before changing register. Now Garcı́a Madero
asks questions about rectangles which turn out to be frames that mark out an optic on
the world.
Having found Tinajero, Lima and Belano have several conversations with her, at a
distance. Her retreat from public poetry has obvious roots in the decay of the Mexican
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Revolution, and the decay of a love affair with a torero. But she has not given up writing,
and after her death a notebook is found, but full of banalities. Like Rimbaud’s later
writings it is prose of the most prosaic kind, a series of recommendations on education.
She has grown physically huge in her seclusion, as if physical stature were to mark some
kind of election – not exactly monstrosity, but an excess. Archimboldo in 2666 is
similarly huge, a giant: he displays a corporeal excess that is ‘an outward sign of inward
grace’, as the Catholic definition of the sacrament has it. Tinajero joins the nomadic
party, squeezed between Lupe and Madero on the back seat, until they encounter the
nemesis that has tracked them through the badlands. A scuffle ensues and Tinajero is
killed as she attempts to defend Lima and Belano from the arms of law and property
(the representative of the family that owns their stolen car and the accompanying
policeman). But it is moot who fires the shot that kills Tinajero.
It is now that the series of drawings take on their geometric and extra-geometric
ambiguity. The line of Tinajero’s poem becomes continuous, closed in on itself: the
line of poetry or beauty becomes a proscenium, the place where representation
unfolds. But representation is at first only partial: a gestalt shift is required to see a
triangle as the intrusive figure of a partially glimpsed star. Then representation
represents its own impossibility: what is figured is a blanket, an isomorphism of the
space of representation and its occlusion. And finally, the last question of the novel,
where the proscenium is broken, where the space of representation itself is broken
apart, and the gestalt switch or totalising vision becomes impossible. The question
‘what is behind the window?’ now contains a metaphysical charge. The broken line is
the last moment of the novel, posing a final question and quest, and the occasion for
recursion. The form of the second section follows on from the end of the novel as such.
Truth is posed as an enigma: how are these events to be seen? And at the same time,
truth is referred back to a set of perspectives, a series of monologues, which lack any
totalisation or inherent unity. Rather their unity is the arbitrary form of the sovereign
author.

Prose as totalised non-totality

Bolaño’s micro-history of the poetic thus marks a shift from the narcissistic unity of late
romanticism through the central moment of utopian engagement to a last expression of
the impossibility of poetic language as such. In its social form this history could perhaps
 LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES 173

be mapped onto a history of the Mexican avant-gardes and their absorption into a state-
supported apparatus that exchanged truth for status, wealth and power – or their
marginalisation and silence. (This linkage is repetitively satirised in the novel.) Central
to this reading of the poetic is a notion of unity, which echoes Hegel’s distinction
between poetry and prose in the Aesthetics, which itself reworks Aristotle’s distinction
between poiesis and mimesis.
For Hegel the poetic is the site of ‘substantive unity’ and presents ‘all of its
subject matter as a totality complete in itself and independent’. Poetry, however,
presents this ‘all-encompassing unity’ as working outwards from some ‘secret form
within’, and such an apprehension of the world is only ‘contemplative’. Poetry is
‘imagery and . . . pure expression’. By contrast, prose can only yield a set of
relations between externals, providing ‘particular laws for phenomena’; prose as the
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vehicle for Understanding ‘persists in separating the particular existent from the
universal law and in merely relating them . . . the laws themselves fall apart into
fixed particulars . . . presented under the categories of externality and finitude’
(Hegel 1975: 973 – 5). Poetry is the vehicle of transcendent Spirit and exists as an
‘organic whole’, whereas prose is the realm of fallen material. Prose has only an
external unity.
Bolaño’s debt to Hegel becomes apparent in the way he organises his central
section. Garcı́a Madero’s diary has the trivial unity of a witnessing and writing subject
unfolding his material in time. But the central voices are disparate and polyphonic, yet
the very form that Bolaño imposes suggests another reading. These voices are fixed by
the names of the characters who are meant to be speaking and offering their
testimonies: names and times and places of enunciation. Here the arbitrary designative
power of the novelist divides and orders the flow of text. Like God, Bolaño becomes
the origin: his naming and his appropriation of names performs his sovereign control
over the material, which itself is organised as monological.
The various voices then are captured as if by some digital recording device and,
like the cinema that has to specify extra-diagetically what its internal development is
unable to distinguish, the external scaffolding is all that prevents a form of internal
collapse. Within the separate sections time, space and style are confused, as each
witness tells a complex tale of their own life and circumstances and the passage
through them of Lima and Belano. When Bolaño seeks to distinguish the voices, his
imposed indices are crude burlesque: the Latin tags that pepper the speech of the
lawyer who hires Belano in Barcelona or the cod mexicanisms that infect the speech
of an American woman in Paris. This form of anti-naturalism produces a certain
cartoon-like mockery but also makes it clear that Bolaño’s witnesses are not
characters in any obvious sense, however much they may offer speech in the form of
testimonial biography. They are, rather, pastiches of character, moments of a
continuous discourse: fragments of another subjectivity. Despite the constant
repetition of ‘I’, or its productive equivalent in Spanish – all the parts of the novel
are spoken from a determinate first person – the very indistinction of language
suggests that prose itself is in-distinctive, that is, it fails to subjectivise. At a
fundamental level, prose, for Bolaño, belongs to the mass, or, as Heidegger would
have it, ‘das Man’, the ‘one’. His witnesses to the events of the late twentieth
century cannot distinguish themselves through language but only through their
connection to a privileged object, the poet. Lima and Belano only speak through
 174 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

quotation, that is, their speech is couched in the speech of the witnesses – either
Madero in parts 1 and 3, or the multiplicity of part 2.
Prose is the medium for disunity but its heteroclite possibilities are precisely what
is revoked through Bolaño’s architecture. Here we could adduce Bakhtin (Morson and
Emerson 322 –3), for whom prose is a liberation from the constraints of the
monological poetic voice. It is its capacity for inclusion and conflict, its plural
production, that gives prose – and the novel as the acme of prosaic writing – its
aesthetic value. For Bakhtin, the poetic always strives to eliminate the heteroglot,
precisely flattening the differences of voice and language that prose can articulate.
Bolaño’s voices only speak outwards and never inwards, that is, the dialogic moment of
the novel is – if not suppressed – then transcended at the level of form.
Bolaño’s dilemma is clear. On the one hand, he acknowledges the impossibility of
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the poetic even as he stages its pursuit, and on the other, he mistrusts the capacity of
prose for representation, even as he pushes its production to the point of excess and
exhaustion. The very loss of poetry is what propels the production of prose as its
inadequate substitute, and this loss haunts the novel as the attempt to impose a totality
through sovereign means, a forcing of form. In one sense, then, Bolaño’s novel
becomes an anti-novel in that its formal unity is constituted by a melancholy for a form
that it elegises, and the very possibilities of a novel to engage with the ‘unfinishedness’
of the world are denied even as they are performed. A signal illustration of this is the
representation of ‘the novel’ in the text.
Belano, having abandoned poetry (it seems), spends much of his time in littoral
Catalunya writing a novel. His flatmate finally sees the novel, but the reader doesn’t.
Bolaño riffs on the trope of the deranged novelist Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s film The
Shining: is Belano’s novel any more than a voluminous repetition of a single phrase?
The testimonial text assures us that it is not . . . but the reader has to rest content
with the assurance. No evidence of the novel is offered. Of course, Bolaño uses this
strategy throughout his work: Urrutia’s criticism in Nocturno de Chile is never
exemplified; in 2666 Archimboldo’s novels are given only their lush, allusive titles or
bald plot summaries. The gag is Borges’s and Bolaño runs with it. But the Torrance
riff in fact stages a deeper anxiety since it explicitly throws up the relation of prose
and the novel to poetry, the value of prose as such, and the possibility of producing
prose at all.

Conclusion

Bolaño himself offers a comment that the novel is both a long ‘agonı́a’ and a ‘juego’
(Entre paréntesis 325). It is an ambiguous figure. Within it, the poetic trace is the
failure of a certain utopian desire ‘una derrota generacional’. Desire attaches to
sensuality and to politics but loses faith with itself. For Bolaño, poetry has become
impossible: indeed the caprice of the world leads its exponents to silence its last
authentic subject. After Tinajero’s death all that is left is prose – and even this is
inadequate. Between the longing of Reballedo and the enigmas traced in Sonora, the
novel offers a torrent of prose, but a prose that is in some sense brought back
within the unifying power of poetic sensibility by a set of sovereign acts that freeze
the text.
 LOS DETECTIVES SALVAJES 175

And it is as if the subjectivity that confronted a world that could be given form –
and this is at root the Hegelian version of poiesis – and for whom form would then
entail a necessity, a direction, a line of development (a politics), must now deal with
contingency and chance (a motif that becomes central in 2666). For Bakhtin, it is just
contingency that gives prose its opportunity and its power. It is the very unfixedness
of encounter in the novel that allows it to stand for a new democratic moment of
production that transcends the division of poiesis and mimesis, internality and
externality. For Bolaño, contingency is a fatality that provokes a nostalgia for a time
and a preterite unity. Though he is capable of using the resources of prose for certain
political ends – notably his satires and parodies of aesthetic corruption – his
melancholy for the utopian unity figured in Rimbaud creates a desire for totality
perhaps echoed in the imaginary production of Tinajero but most assuredly enacted in
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his performance of poet and novelist as origin: after all it is a poet (another woman
whose death is marked in the text, Laura Damián) who gives Ulises Lima his nom de
poésie. This name echoes with the protagonist of one of the foundational poems of the
West, Odysseus, and the great Cuban poet/novelist Lezama Lima. Naming is the
sovereign gesture and it is the manipulation of names as unities – the text is in part
nourished and propelled by lists of names – that gives Bolaño his power. Yet names
are just the redoubt against signification, as Derrida as argued,5 and perhaps the last
redoubt against an unnostalgic commitment to prose.

Notes
1 This is Bakhtin’s point. For a discussion of Bakhtin and poetry see Gary Saul Morson
and Caryl Emerson (1990) Mikhail Bakhtin: The Creation of a Prosaics, 321.
2 See her contribution to this volume.
3 See William Rowe, ‘Breve prefacio a Arturo Rimbaud’, and Ross, Kristin, The
Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.
4 I owe this point to a discussion with Carol Watts. Also see Watts (2007) The Cultural
Work of Empire: The Seven Years War and the Imagining of the Shandean State, especially
291ff.
5 See his discussion of the name of/and God in ‘Des Tours de Babel’.

References
Bolaño, Roberto. 2004. Entre paréntesis: ensayos, artı́culos y discursos (1998– 2003).
Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Bolaño, Roberto. 1998. Los detectives salvajes. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Dalton, Roque. 1976. Pobrecito poeta que era yo. San José: Educa.
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. Des Tours de Babel. In Difference in Translation. edited and
translated by Joseph F. Graham. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2. Translated by T.M. Knox.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morson, Gary, and Caryl Emerson. 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 176 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Ross, Kristin. 1988. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Commune. London: Verso.
Rowe, William. 2008. Breve prefacio a Arturo Rimbaud. In Rimbaud, el otro, edited by
Miguel Casado. Madrid: Editorial Complutense.
Watts, Carol. 2007. The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years War and the Imagining of the
Shandean State. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Philip Derbyshire is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck,

University of London, working on representations of the Argentine North West and
Andes in different discursive and imaginary regimes.
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