Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness and eight other books, has written a piece about the “construction of the ‘Bolaño myth’ in the United States” that contrasts this myth with the man he knew.
Moya claims that Bolaño would probably be amused by the “marketing operation” in which his reckless youth has been played up at the expense of his sober, productive final decade, when “the greater part of [his] prose work” was written, when his “major preoccupation was his children, and that if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family.”
But he’d be less amused, Moya continues, at what this operation implies, as far as crafting a new narrative by which North Americans will understand Latin American literature.
American readers, with The Savage Detectives, want to confirm their worst paternalistic prejudices about Latin America … like the superiority of the Protestant work ethic or the dichotomy according to which North Americans see themselves as workers, mature, responsible, and honest, while they see their neighbors to the South as lazy, adolescent, reckless, and delinquent. Pollack says that from this point of view The Savage Detectives is “a very comfortable choice for U.S. readers, offering both the pleasures of the savage and the superiority of the civilized.”
Moya’s piece is based on an essay by Sarah Pollack, who teaches at CUNY Staten Island.
[Thanks to the Center for the Art of Translation for blogging about the essay.]
3 responses
I read the Moya piece, and my main reaction is: What the hell is he talking about?
Most people who read literary fiction in the U.S. get recommendations from word of mouth, or read reviews of books. I read “The Savage Detectives” because it was so enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times, the Nation, the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, and other reputable sources. I read it because it was supposed to be a great book, not because I’d seen an author photograph of Bolaño with long hair. And as I read the book my mind was filled with its characters, story and themes, not Bolaño’s biography. Of course, once I was finished, I wanted to know more about the author, but every piece I read made clear that he wrote all his fiction during the last, settled ten years of his life — a fact that Moya says “No North American journalist (has) highlighted.” And if Bolaño’s death adds to his legend, it’s because he managed to write “2666” while fatally ill, not because of what he died of.
Moya may legitimately complain that North American readers tend to pick a single author or movement and take it as the whole of a regional literature. But this sounds to me like people who are worried that a child’s enthusiasm for reading will end when he’s finished the Harry Potter books. In my opinion, it’s more likely that reading Bolaño will lead to reading the authors who influenced him, like Julio Cortázar. Geez! Give people some credit.
I somewhat agree, Mark, though I would have to read the paper he cites throughout to really know how off-base it is. Because I do think Moya has a point about a certain romantic reputation preceding the truth: I’m well-informed about literary culture, but up to about a couple months ago, when I seriously looked into Bolaño for the first time, my impression of him was pretty much as Moya describes: “oh yeah, that scraggly genius guy who lived all over Latin America and died young, probably from drugs or something.” It’s not that I’ve been living in a bubble; I’d known about Bolaño all along, just hadn’t read much. But somehow that image was all that filtered through, and I admit, piqued my interest.
It is definitely true that Bolano has a myth about him that is not the sum of the man… but my only question is, isn’t that true of most famous authors? I posted some thoughts on this over here but I wonder if Moya and Pollack are drawing too man conclusions from par for the course artistic mythology. Or perhaps not separating the consequences of the mythology from the intentions or reasons it started?
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