I like N+1, both specifically and generally. Specifically in that usually I enjoy the articles infused with the scathing wit that could earn any writer the moniker of Captain Contrarian. Generally in that I support the idea of having a publication that isn’t afraid to upend convention wisdom and challenge the cultural sages.
(Those rhetorically trained can sense the impending cliff, the inevitable transitional “but,” that will follow such praise. So here it is.)
But I find their article last week on Roberto Bolano to be less than convincing.
Two early points in the essay note that a translation doesn’t cover the full wordplay occurring in the Spanish, and also that Bolano’s stripped, bare prose is a reaction against former literature and politics:
It fell to writers like Bolaño to complete the dryingout of literary prose already accomplished in other languages by writers like Hemingway and Camus. Bolaño can write page after page without indulging in a single metaphor, or adding a dab of rhetorical color to the account of a dinner party or a murder. Of course you can find perfect sentences in Bolaño, and crazy metaphors too, but for the most part he proceeds as if literature were too desperate an enterprise to bother with being well written. The rationale for his antieloquence belongs to the internal dynamic of any modern language: an idiom encrusted with poeticisms needs a solvent bath. But for Latin Americans of Bolaño’s generation there may also be political grounds for preferring writing degree zero to purple haze. One more disgusting feature of the Argentine junta (it is Argentines who predominate in Bolaño’s gallery of imaginary Nazi writers) was the generals’ magniloquence.
Comparing Bolano to Camus and Hemingway is more compliment than critique, even when followed up with the insinuation that Bolano doesn’t write well. But even though Bolano writes spare prose, with few metaphors, he does change styles fairly frequently, shifting through modalities of prose in each section of 2666, and sometimes in the middle of sections (the stacatto rhythms of the police procedural in Book Four versus the high-flying prose of the visionary woman also of Book Four). So I don’t think it’s that easy to corrall of his prose together under one roof, although I admit that most of the time his prose does seem to resemble the “degree zero” writing mentioned above.
More decisive is that neither fiction writer writes as if he believes in fiction. Our canonization of these writers implies a sense, even a conviction, that you can’t be a really important novelist anymore unless you can’t really write novels. […] Both writers are striking for the documentary or testimonial, as opposed to fictional, feel of their productions.
I think that this is less of a turn from fiction to documentary/testimonial, than a postmodern technique of collage of pasting together multiple forms of literature/writing to form the whole. So Bolano also includes poetry, also includes journalesque writings. Dividing into the binary of Fiction/Nonfiction is less helpful than seeing it as an interwoven multiplicity of forms.
However (And here comes rhetorical step #2, where I turn back and concede that they are right about one small thing, so I appear to be judicious), I admit that N+1 is correct to argue that too often our “great” novels are dependent upon seizing the sentiment-inducing moments from history and building narratives around them, which means the Holocaust and Nazi’s have received not only a disporportional amount of fictional prose but also that the referees of literature have been inclined to crown such ‘heavyweight’ fiction with award belts.
I just think that in this case — with Bolano focusing not only on South American/Central American dictators and travesties, but also on the Nazis — that it would seem arbitrary to have that disqualify him somehow from canonization.
One thought on “N+1 on Bolano”
n plus one simply equals a naive integer….