Poe was one of the greatest technicians of modern
literature. As Valéry pointed out, he was the first to attempt the
scientific story, a modern cosmogony, the description of pathological
phenomena. These genres he
regarded as exact products of a method for which he claimed universal
validity. In this very point
Roberto Bolaño sided with him, and in Poe’s spirit he wrote “The time is not
distant when it will be understood that a literature which refuses to make its
way in brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a murderous and
suicidal literature. The detective
story, the most momentous of Poe's technical achievements, was part of a
literature that satisfied Bolaño’s postulate. Its analysis constitutes part of the analysis of Bolaño’s
own work, which has three of its decisive elements as disjecta membra: the victim and the scene of the crime, the
murderer, the masses. The fourth
element is lacking—the one that permits the intellect to break through this emotion-laden
atmosphere. Bolaño went without this because, given the structure of his
instincts, it was impossible for him to identify with the successful detective.
Okay, I didn’t write that paragraph, not
really. And it isn’t really about
Roberto Bolaño. It’s a paragraph
from Walter Benjamin’s Charles
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, with Baudelaire’s
name changed to Bolaño, and a few other minor syntactical tweaks and omissions
here and there. The method is
something I’ve ripped off from Benjamin Friedlander’s brilliant book of 2004, Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism. In that book, Friedlander set out (in
his words) to undertake “the creation of
criticism through the strict recreation of an earlier critic's text (or, more
precisely, through as strict a re-creation as the discrepancy between my source
text and chosen topic would allow).” So the experiments in criticism consist of
things like following the argument and phrasing of Jean Wahl’s A Short History of Existentialism to
write a short history of language poetry.
Sometimes the criticism ended up saying things that Friedlander himself
disagreed with, which is interesting: he’s really following Roland Barthes in
erasing the author, and the author’s opinions, and replacing that figure with a
“scriptor,” Barthes’ figure whose only power is to mingle different kinds of
writing—in the case of Simulcast, the
writing of Jean Wahl (and others) and the writing of the objects of criticism,
like the language poets.
In the little paragraph above, where
I hijack Benjamin to talk about Bolaño, I’ve done nothing near
as bold as Friedlander does, because I actually agree entirely with the
statement the paragraph makes about Bolaño. I mean, the pervading atmosphere of Bolaño’s writing, from Nazi Literature in the Americas to The Savage Detectives, from The Romantic Dogs to Tres, and certainly in 2666 is a kind of noir desolation. When there aren’t literally faced with
victims and crime scenes, we’re still dealing with people who are in some way
damaged, living in environments that reflect that damage. The people we get to know in his work
are always at odds with the great mass of people in society, and over
everything there hangs a sense of a great wrong that has been done. There’s never any real resolution, no
true and satisfying success for any detective or searcher, though: in fact,
there’s rarely anything specific at which one could aim one’s investigation. Bolaño
is a writer of mood, and that mood is despair—the mood of an Edgar Allan Poe
detective story without a detective to solve the crime. I imagine this has to do with Bolaño’s
generational experience: his is the generation of the Chilean revolution that
failed, his is the generation of poets who could never come into the spotlight
like their Latin American poetic predecessors had done, at least not in their
lifetime. He has a lot in common
with an alienated outsider like Baudelaire, who could never quite find a social
or political program into which he could channel his discontent for long. I suppose that’s why when Benjamin
nails it about Baudelaire, he nails it about Bolaño, too.
