Stacy Hardy reviews Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas
NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS
By Roberto Bolaño.
(Chris Andrews, trans.)
New Directions, 2008 (1996)
Rodrigo Fresán, the Argentinean writer and journalist, relates a story about his long-time friend, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. It starts in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Barcelona, a favorite haunt of immigrants – South Americans, Asians, Africans – hungry for a taste of home.
The year is 2001 – two years before Bolaño’s death at 50 and seven years before he would be resurrected as the new darling of the international literary scene. The pair eat and part company. Fresán heads home to sleep. Soon after he is awoken. It is Bolaño, soaked by the storm and wild-eyed. “I’ve killed a man,” he tells Fresán. “Should I turn myself in?”
Fresán is shaken. He invites Bolaño in. Thinks about it. No – what chance would Bolaño, an immigrant, a literary vagabond have against the legal system? As Fresán tells it: “I said he shouldn’t. Bolaño looked at me with infinite sadness and said that he couldn’t keep writing with a death on his conscience.” Moved, Fresán offers to accompany him to the police station; to which Bolaño responds: “What? You’d turn me in just like that? An Argentinian writer betraying a Chilean writer? Shame on you!”
Finally, sensing Fresán’s despair, Bolaño laughs, one of those “little cracked laughs” of his. It’s a prank: “you know I couldn’t kill a mosquito … How could you believe a story like that?”
The answer is easy. Bolaño – with his friends, as with his readers – was a motherfucker, an enigma, a committed revolutionary, a breathtaking storyteller yet a postmodern trickster, a literary mischief-maker in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges.
Like Borges’, his books are full of tricks, tropes and booby traps. But while Borges’ games play out in the labyrinthine realm of the metaphysical, Bolaño has a taste for bloody paradoxes: ruthless practical jokes and pranks that lampoon sanctimoniousness and self-glorification. “I believed in literature,” he tells us. “Or rather, I didn’t believe in opportunism… the whispering of sycophants.”
Nazi Literature in the Americas is such a prank aimed at the jugular of literary sycophants. Described by Bolaño as “a vaguely encyclopaedic anthology of the philo-nazi literature written in the American continent from 1930 to 2010”, it’s a fake textbook; at once bio- and biblio-graphical. It documents a collection of fascist writers, provides detailed synopses of their lives and describes their careers.
It masquerades as an imaginary library in the Borgesian sense, only this library is finite, infinitely finite. The writers it contains are mostly nothing but punks, conmen and murderers. They are only incidentally artists: third-rate, failed ones at that. Most die sordid, whimpering deaths. Their actual writing is absent. And Bolaño’s prose – usually so restless, relentless, so generous; a digressive, tic-marked elegiac tide – is emptied out. It starts out formal but quickly distends form and begins to sag as the reductive force of summary after summary takes effect.
It’s exhaustive, exhausting. More than 30 writers are featured and categorised such as “Figures of the Anti-enlightenment”, “Mercenaries and Miserable Creatures”, and “The Aryan Brotherhood”, among others. Each is afforded a full bibliography. By the time you meet Luz Mendiluce Thompson, an obese, alcoholic Argentine who penned ‘I was happy with Hitler’, you’re yawning. You still have Luiz Fontaine Da Souza, a Brazilian who writes eye-wateringly lengthy refutations of Sartre to get through, as well as Zach Sodenstern, a science fiction writer obsessed with a German Shepherd possessing Nazi tendencies. Does it ever end? No, there’s Mirebalais, a ceaseless plagiarist of both Nazism and negritude; The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman, a failed poet-cum-skywriter and a ruthless murderer; and then still a full chapter devoted to publishers, magazines and places.
There’s no escaping it, Nazi Literature in the Americas is tiring. It’s banal. Crap of the worst kind. Not stinky or putrid – scatological. Not B-grade: expensive or explosive. Just shit shit. It’s full of characters, yet devoid of life. There is no terror here, no shame, no horror, hope or love. None of the things Bolaño usually champions: tenderness, respiration and heat, structures that devour themselves, insane contradictions, words of wonder and rage. There is no literature here, no poetry.
And here’s the prank. This is the encyclopedia that would have been written if the Nazis had won – the shit celebrated by fascists, the drivel that passes as literature in dictatorships. And Nazi Literature not only documents banality, but also embodies it – a tribute to its own mediocrity. This is Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” enacted.
Bolaño’s legions of fascist wannabes demonstrate again and again (and again) that politics is murderous. Power stinks. Literature that seeks it out reeks of banality – the banality of power, its vulgarity. Only the fleeting can be trusted. “The true poet is the one who is always abandoning himself,” Bolaño writes in his Infrarealist Manifesto. “Leave it all behind, again. Take it to the road.”
Here Bolaño takes a clear swipe at the fascism of the literary machine: the academy, the market, the vanguard and its rearguard. Those in power write history. They determine what great and important literature is. Yet they are more often interested in a writer’s biography than their books. Thus a canon is created out of ass-kissing, opportunism, the whispering of sycophants, suppression, lies, murder, platitudes and narcissism.
The final punchline hits when you examine the Nazi writer’s death dates documented in the book: some only die in 2017, 2029, even as late as 2040. This book knows the future. This is our literary fate.
Ironically the critics lap it up. Riding the wave of Bolaño worship, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda finds Nazi Literature “imaginative, full of a love for literature… exceptionally entertaining.” Todd Shy of the San Francisco Chronicle isn’t shy in his praise: “blistering, dark comedy”, he calls it.
Michael Saler of the Times Literary Supplement sings its praise: “at once funny, furious, and frightening”. Frightening? Sure, if fascist German Shepherds scare you. Funny? Well, yes, but the joke is on you. The joke is also on the system that now celebrates Bolaño posthumously; on Paste magazine’s Daniel Crimmins who declares: “Meet the Kurt Cobain of Latin American literature.” The joke is on the New York Times, which describes Bolaño as a “consensus book-world discovery”.
Can you hear Bolaño laughing? That “little cracked” laugh of his rising up from the grave.
This story, and others, features in Chronic Books, the review of books supplement to Chimurenga 16 – The Chimurenga Chronicle (October 2011), a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present. In this issue, through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
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