Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

ISSN: 0011-1619 (Print) 1939-9138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20

Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics

of Reading in Roberto Bolao's The Savage
Detectives

Tania Gentic

To cite this article: Tania Gentic (2015) Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading
in Roberto Bolao's The Savage Detectives, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56:4,
399-414, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2014.930014

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2014.930014

Published online: 14 Aug 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 73

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vcrt20

Download by: [University of Bath] Date: 16 March 2016, At: 09:58

 Critique, 56:399414, 2015
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online
DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2014.930014

TANIA G ENTIC
Georgetown University

Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading in

Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

This article argues that Bolaos novel deploys a modified form of realism that both evidences the
reality effect defined by Roland Barthes and contributes to the democratization of the reading
process theorized by Jacques Rancire. The novels language and address of the reader thus mimic
the politics of the Latin American avant-garde tradition but situate that politics in the realm of
realistic detail, rather than within an avant-garde literary sensibility.
Keywords: Roberto Bolao, realism, reading, roman clef, politics

In recent years, the posthumous and rapid translation of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaos work
into multiple languages other than his native Spanish has made him one of the darlings of global
literature for critics and everyday readers alike. Belonging to a post-Boom generation, Bolao
produces tongue-in-cheek examples of the roman clef, playing with readers expectations of
mimesis, the omniscient narrator, and the line between the real and the literary. For some critics,
this playfulness means his works are antirealist or postmodern metafictions, calling attention to
their own processes of production (Medina 550). As Patricia Espinosa Pacheco has written, for
example, his texts evidence a dramatizing of, or making manifest, the relationship between reality
and fiction, crossing through both concepts with [: : : ] a constant simulacrum that destabilizes the
dichotomy (22). Elena Santos further writes that in his novels reality is merely a referential
sign and [h]is [literature is], therefore, a metanarrative [: : : ] putting into evidence its organizing
mechanisms and letting the artifice that sustains them be seen (37). Yet, as Santos has also
pointed out, like other recent works by Rodrigo Fresn, Alan Pauls, and Juan Gabriel Vsquez,
Bolaos texts, at the same time, return to a more traditional form of narrative, without entirely
falling back into a nineteenth-century mode of realist writing as mimetic (33, 37). Alberto Medina
has similarly argued that despite Bolaos thematic exploration of the avant-garde, his aesthetic
means make [his novels] readable for everyone just interested in good stories (549). Javier Cercas,
for his part, has suggested that the transparent legibility and narrativity of Bolaos novels are
the two most visible characteristics, if not of the dominant Spanish narrative [: : : ] at least of a
certain dominant current in serious narrative written in Spanish over the last few years (26).1
It is this seeming transparency of Bolaos narrative style and its relationship to the politics of
reading that interests me here.

399
 400 Critique

Despite critics recognition that Bolao consistently plays with reality in a way that suggests
an avant-garde sensibility, I take as my point of departure the transparent literary style that is
present in his texts. Although, as the quotes above suggest, readers have identified this mode of
writing in his works, to date few critical interventions have analyzed the political ramifications
of it. I argue that Bolaos writing style not only contributes to the production of an avant-garde
politics, but it does so by deploying a modified form of realism, the main characteristic of which
is what Roland Barthes has called the reality effect (141). As I will show, Bolaos The Savage
Detectives (1998) is replete with irony and the use of lesser-known rhetorical devices such as
epanorthosis, yet these literary techniques appear alongside a consistent use of realist detail that
contributes both to the novels seemingly transparent language and to what Jacques Rancire
has called a democratization of the reading process.2 That is, by muting the literariness of
narrative language at certain points in the text, the novel both creates reality effects that, on
the surface, confound an overtly leftist, vanguardista (avant-garde) discursive style, and yet also
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

inscribe the reader into a politics of aesthetics that is aligned with the anti-authoritarianism of
the Latin American avant-garde. In this sense, the realist aesthetic itself becomes an avant-garde
gesture.
Bolaos novels, from La senda de los elefantes (1984, later published as Monsieur Pain) to
the posthumous Los sinsabores del verdadero polica (Woes of the True Policeman, 2011), blur
the line between realism and surrealism, history and fiction, and materiality and representation. To
some degree, this blurring results from the Borgesian way in which Bolao inscribes fictional and
nonfictional characters into historicized contexts that share referents either with established literary
movements or with biographical details of his own life; he then repeats these references from novel
to novel.3 In the process, Bolao plays not just with intertextuality but also with the presumed
mimetic relationship between lived experience and literary fiction. In The Savage Detectives, for
instance, Bolaos alter ego, Arturo Belano,4 and his friend Ulises Lima have founded a literary
movement known as realismo visceral (visceral realism), a fictional reflection of the avant-garde,
virtually unknown infrarrealista (infrarrealist) movement that Bolao and Mario Santiago created
in Mexico in the 1970s.5 As Andrea Cobas Carral has explained, infrarrealismo was a marginal
movement in Mexico that was largely defined by its opposition to state-supported poets such as
Octavio Paz; as a result, it was isolated and had few published outlets (12). The novel details
this marginality by illustrating in chapter after chapter the difficulty of defining visceral realism
in any definitive way.6 With its complex and contradictory narrative structure, the text also resists
the possibility of pinning down a history of the movement. The novel combines diary entries from
1975 and 1976 by Juan Garca Madero, a newly minted visceral realist poet, with the testimonies
from 1976 to 1996 of over fifty other characters. Some of these characters are historically real,
whereas others are fictional. Although multiple storylines emerge in the text, the book focuses
principally on retracing through these testimonies the poets search for their inspiration, Cesrea
Tinajero. This detectivesque plotline is paralleled by Garca Maderos search for Belano and Lima,
as well as more generally the characters and readers search for evidence of what, exactly, the
visceral realist movement is. Thus, from the first page Garca Madero admits that although he has
accepted an offer to be part of the group, Im not really sure what visceral realism is (Savage 3).
Another visceral realist poet, Rafael Barrios, repeats this line several years later (364).7 Moreover,
although throughout the novel Belano and Lima are referred to as revolutionaries or poets, at
other times they are made out to be simple drug dealers or vagabonds (328); the only evidence
of their ars poetica is filtered through others memories of them. It is therefore common to read
lines such as Claudia said that Ulises had said (306) or Belano was already a phantom author
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 401

(314)statements that draw attention to the divergences in the numerous narrative constructions
of the poets and their poetics rather than suggesting that the novel can mimetically reproduce a
fixed historical referent.
Furthermore, within the narrative Cesrea is an almost mythical figure who has been for-
gotten by the literary establishment but who is the proclaimed muse of the real visceralistas.
At the same time, she is narratively tied to an extratextual and historicized reality defined by
the multiple estridentista (Stridentist), surrealist, and Dadaist writers, painters, and poets who
are invoked by the novels characters as interlocutors. Trotskys great-granddaughter, the poet,
Vernica Volkow; avant-garde writer Alice B. Toklas; the French electric poet Michel Bulteau;
and Mexican poet Manuel Maples Arce, the founder of the estridentista movement, among others,
are all mentioned and at times given voice in the novel. One fellow poet of Cesreas who claims
to have spoken with Belano and Lima even suggests that in her first and only edition of the
journal Caborca, Cesrea Tinajero had published works by Maples Arces, Arqueles Vela, Salvador
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

Novo, Andr Breton, and other known avant-garde artists, as though the fictional characters
Bolao invents inhabited the same plane of reality as these historical literary figures did (Savage
282).
The effect of this somewhat twisted roman clef representation of reality is to locate the
fictional realismo visceral in a longer history of European and Latin American avant-garde politics
and aesthetics, suggesting that at stake in the story of the poets project and disappearance is
a larger interest in the power of representation and language in society.8 The Latin American
vanguardistas of the late nineteen-teens and twenties often cited by the text are largely de-
fined historically by their attempts to destabilize institutions of power. They were influenced by
surrealism, Dadaism, bruitism, cubism, and other international avant-garde movements, which
they reflected in manifestos that provided both aesthetic and political justification for their art.
Following close on the heels of the Mexican Revolution, for example, Manuel Maples Arces
estridentista program in Mexico, which is frequently referenced in the novel, rejected prior
aesthetic subsets of the broader avant-garde program such as Creationism, Dadaism, Paroxysm,
Expressionism, Synthetism, Imagism, Suprematism, Cubism, Orphism, etcetera, etcetera, [these]
isms in favor of a quintessential and purifying synthesis of all these florid tendencies
(Maples Arce, Manifiesto 193).9 Although it is difficult to reduce this broad spectrum of
transatlantic poetic movements to a single feature or political ideology, in general they linked
artistic experimentation and a critique of outmoded artistic practices with an ideological critique
of bourgeois thought and a desire for social change (Suleiman 12). Their techniques included
mixing media in order to call into question the stability and possibility of linguistic representation
and, at the same time, somewhat paradoxically, privileging an intellectualist, poetic language as
an alternative to the supposed transparency of popular language (Rashkin 22).
The Latin American literary tradition Bolao plays with in his works, including The Savage
Detectives, has followed in the footsteps of these initial links between experimental art and an
increasingly leftist politics. However, as Nelly Richard has shown in the Chilean context, writers
and visual artists throughout the twentieth century transformed their

critique of power in representation (the official powers totalitarianism) into a critique

of representations of power [: : : ] This passage from one model of social critique to
another [set] the stage [: : : ] for learning how to resituate the strategies of cultural resis-
tance in a much more plural and diversified field of forces than under authoritarianism.
(49)
 402 Critique

Bolao himself drafted an infrarrealist manifesto in 1976 that not only returned to the multiplicity
and rejection of authoritative discourse first practiced by the early avant-garde poets but also
presumed to create a new lyricism that linked poetry to the movement of travel: the poem as
journey and the poet as a hero who unveils heroes (Djenlo n. pag.). Both recuperating this ideal
of the viaje ( journey) in its Kerouac-like description of the real visceralistas road trip across the
desert and populating the novel with avant-garde figures from throughout the twentieth century,
The Savage Detectives inverts the real visceralistas fragmented avant-garde poetic tradition into
a historical continuity in which the context for Limas and Belanos fictional poetic movement is
literary history itself.
Despite this thematic focus on avant-garde writers and poetics, but consistent with its tongue-
in-cheek commentary on the troubled narrative production of literary history, the novel achieves
its historicizing effect in large part through the use of realistic detail, which contributes to the
perceived transparency of the texts language. Importantly, in the novel this language is not as
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

transparent as it seems. As Roland Barthes explains, in realist literature seemingly innocuous and
even useless details produce a referential illusion that functions as historical discourse does to
produce a verisimilitude, which Barthes defines as speech-acts justified by their referent alone
(147). The signifying function of language, he argues, is seemingly discarded in favor of aesthetic
details that say nothing but this: we are the real (148). Unlike vanguardista projects that draw
attention to the instability of language as a signifying tool, realism presumes direct representation
of an extratextual referent.
The Savage Detectives evidences the doubleness and overlap of realist and realistic
language because it both references and reformulates the aesthetic of nineteenth-century realism
that was a precursor to the vanguardista movement (realist) and employs a transparent kind of
language that suggests verisimilitude (realistic). To that end, the novel is filled not only with the
historical referents described above but also with accounts of characters walking through modern
cities and providing specific geographical details about their journeys. These details suggest a
realist style and, in turn, a link between the novels setting and an extratextual historical and
spatial reality. Just one example is Edith Osters walk through Los Angeles: I walked along
Pico Boulevard to Valencia and then turned left and walked along Valencia back to Wilshire
Boulevard, a two-hour walk in all, without hurrying, stopping in front of buildings that might
have seemed uninteresting or carefully watching the flow of traffic (445). Similarly, Andrs
Ramrez narrates with great detail the names of Barcelona streets he traverses on his way to work
(385, 408), and poet Juan Garca Madero engages in various descriptions of Mexico City that
mimic the examples Barthes gives of Flauberts quintessential realist writing. In one case, he writes
of the bar in which he hopes to encounter the real visceralistas: We went into a kind of long,
narrow storage room piled with cartons of bottles and cleaning supplies for the bar (detergent,
brooms, bleach, a squeegee, a collection of rubber gloves) (16). As Barthes argues, details such
as these have no other apparent function than to show that the real is [: : : ] self-sufficient, that
it is strong enough to belie any notion of function (147). Perhaps because of the proliferation
of such meticulously narrated passages in The Savage Detectives, it seems, at least at first, as
Alberto Medina has suggested, that Bolaos texts [contain] no linguistic experimentations, no
temporal displacements, no radical recontextualizations or schizophrenic interior monologues. The
aesthetic radicalism of the infra-realist manifesto is nowhere to be seen (Medina 549).10
Yet The Savage Detectives often creates voids in signification that suggest that a more subtle
relationship between representation, politics, and reality is at play in the texts transparent style.
The multiple first-person narratives that make up the text contribute to the invisibility of poetic
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 403

language, in that they reproduce an orality that aids in the readers perception of the text as
realistic. Vernica Volkow, for instance, is not voiced poetically or politically but rather as a
moviegoer engaged in an everyday dialogue with two youths whom she neither knows very well
nor respects: As I was about to goI was only with them for a minuteBelano looked at me
more carefully and recognized me [: : : ] Hows the poetry going? he said. I didnt know how
to answer such a stupid question and I shrugged my shoulders (346). At the same time, the
multiplicity of narrative voices plays on early avant-garde perspectivism while also exaggerating
the realist tradition of nineteenth-century writers, who created similarly detailed accounts of dozens
of characters lives in their works. Furthermore, by replacing first-person narratives by Cesrea,
Lima, and Belano with first-person narratives of other characters talking about them, the novel
converts realist literatures interest in its protagonists psychological development into an always
moving destabilization, rather than affirmation, of their identity and subjectivity.
In this sense, the novel achieves its detectivesque form not solely through the content of its
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

plotline (the disappearances of and search for the three poets and the realismo visceral movement)
but also by destabilizing referentiality and specifically converting material, historicized and real
signifieds into referential voids covered over by language, rather than illuminated by it.11 Barthes
concludes that the reality effect of narrative detail works because it destroys the triangular structure
of representation by eliminating the signified and instead linking the signifier directly to its external
referent: the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the
very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced [: : : ] in order to make notation the pure
encounter of an object and its expression (148).
In The Savage Detectives, however, Cesrea Tinajero, Lima and Belano, and el realismo
visceral are all converted into signifiers that presume referentiality with an external reality precisely
because their signifying function within the text is compromised. The name Cesrea Tinajero, for
instance, is a signifier of the fictional visceral realist aesthetic and political movement she is
supposed to represent, which in turn is meant to reflect the early twentieth-century estridentista
movement. Yet her name, which evokes the image of both a Cesarean section (Cesrea) and a
pair of scissors (tijeras/Tinajero), implying the brutality of the cut, is a floating signifier that is
both fragmented and inscribed in a chain of references (Cesrea-estridentismo-realismo visceral-
infrarrealismo) whose primary referent (Cesrea herself) is absent for the bulk of the novel: until
the end of the text, it is not clear if she even exists. Over time, then, Cesrea Tinajero becomes
nothing more than a sign of the poets desired realismo visceral, rather than evidence of its
existence. Given this string of empty referents, the contrast is strikingly ironic, even humorous,
when the poets finally do meet her: there was nothing poetic about her. She looked like a rock
or an elephant. Her rear end was enormous and it moved to the rhythm set by her arms, two
oak trunks, as she rinsed the clothes and wrung them out (Savage 63940). The fleshy solidity
of her body contrasts with the sketchy discursive representation of her that fills the bulk of the
novel, not to mention the town where they discover her, which, perhaps in a nod to Mexican
novelist Juan Rulfo, is a ghost town (639). This intertextual wink at the reader further removes
Cesrea from a stable and historical referentiality, literary or otherwise. The contrast between her
overly solid body and the discourses about her that have populated the narrative to this point thus
draws attention to the difference between a historical materiality and the narrative representation
the novel seems to connect to reality through its detailed roman clef narrative mode. It also
plays into the persistent joke in the text that the viscerality of visceral realism is paradoxically
not definable as a poetic gesture. Instead, it seems to reside in the materiality of non-discursive
actions and existence, as poetry becomes an action or a sensation rather than a literary aesthetic.
 404 Critique

In parallel to this bifurcated representation of Cesrea, Lima and Belano are also floating
signifiers whose romanticized lack of representational stability contrasts with the conclusion of
the novel, which suggests that they have disappeared not as part of any grand poetic gesture
embodied by the viaje but because they have been party to murder. The novel ends with yet
another exhaustive narration when they, along with Garca Madero, a prostitute named Lupe, and
the now-found Cesrea Tinajero, run into Lupes pimps, whom Lima and Belano kill. Cesrea,
who still has not been directly quoted, other than when she tells Garca Madero to wait in the car,
also dies in the scuffle; the two visceral realist poets take off in the pimps vehicle, presumably
on the run for the crimes they have committed. As with Cesreas fleshiness, then, the bodies
Belano and Lima leave in the desert call attention to the vacuous representations of subjectivity
the novel depicts up until that point. When the novel ends, instead of resolving the mysteries
implied throughout the story, all that remains is doubt over whether Belano and Lima are poetic
revolutionaries, or if they are simply drug-using miscreants on the run from the law. Also called
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

into question is the connection between the idea of Cesrea Tinajero as an important literary figure
and the woman, as body, who has just died in the desert.
Moreover, the realismo visceral that is so often mentioned but so little defined for most
of the text turns out to be the reiterated absence of a fixed poetics underneath the prolific and
proliferating narrative. The closest approximation of the movements ars poetica offered by the
novel is the character Rafael Barrios explanation of what their disciples do after Belano and
Limas disappearance:

Our visceral realist activities after Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano left: automatic
writing, exquisite corpses, solo performances with no spectators, contraintes, two-
handed writing, three-handed writing, masturbatory writing [: : : ] N theater of the
proletariat : : : We even put out a magazine : : : We kept moving : : : We kept moving
: : : We did what we could : : : But nothing turned out right. (Savage 22122)

As Barrios discourse suggests, the real visceralist poets cannot ground their aesthetics or politics
in one manifesto or poetic practice, but, as a result, nor can the readers ground their interpretation
of the term realismo visceral in a stable signifying system or historical referentiality. Similarly,
in the conclusion, realismo visceral is shown to be not simply a literary movement but a praxis
of murder and violence hidden behind the sign of a desired, but never fully visible, avant-garde
poetic project.12
Paradoxically, then, it is precisely because there are no fixed signifieds corresponding to
Cesrea, Lima, Belano, or realismo visceral that could act as mediators between these signifiers
and external real referents that the novel actually promotes the reality effect and mimics a pre-
avant-garde literary realism. The novels compromised referential structure converts its readers into
travelers who themselves follow the poets lead, moving from one doubtful signifying structure
to another. It is this movement that contributes to readers attempt to conflate the characters
names with the real Bolao and Santiago, or Cesrea with the historical estridentista project.
The absence of fixed signifieds in the text, in other words, allows the reader to substitute history
and reality for the literary signification that is lacking in the story itself.
The texts ironic joke about what is real and what is not resides in this substitution of history
for fiction, made possible by the novels transparent language. In a sense, then, the novels
proliferation of signs that are at once linked and delinked from their material and historical
referents carries out a different project from that of 2666, in which, as ngeles Donoso has
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 405

argued, the multiple vignettes about dead bodies in the desert function cumulatively to insist on
existence, in the same way that photographs of the disappeared in Chile were meant to (135).
The Savage Detectives insists instead on absence, while also calling attention to a materiality that
cannot be inscribed in discourse. By interpellating the reader into the (impossible) production
of meaning, the text underscores the avant-garde recognition of the impossibility of a singular
production of discourse by a voice of authority. The novelistic structure of the roman clef
and the transparent language remain, but a fixed referentiality that would make for easy and
consistent identification of the novels referents with historical, material realitiesbe they diegetic
or extradiegeticdoes not.
By simultaneously producing absence in literary signification and forcing the reader to move
between fiction and a presumed material or historical real to interpret the story, the text compli-
cates expectations of what Jacques Rancire calls the muteness of realist discourse. According to
Rancire, the detailed language of realism is mute because its perceived transparency contrasts
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

with the chatty nature of florid, poetic discourse that confounds easy signification; I would
suggest that experimental avant-garde literature falls into the category of chatty language. As
Rancire further explains, paradoxically it is literary languages excessive complexity that lends
itself to symptomatic readings that seek adequation between poetic language and an external
political or historical reality. The seeming muteness, or lack of poetic language, on the other
hand, displays the power of the mute letter [: : : which] upsets not only the hierarchies of the
representational system but also any principle of adequation between a way of being and a way
of speaking (Dissensus 163).
At stake in Rancires definition of realism as mute is the notion that by eliding symptomatic
readings, realism does not produce a mimetic relationship between text and material reality, as
is traditionally believed, but instead signals to the reader the very difference between the two.
He argues, for instance, that Flaubert makes art invisible through the realist style, separating
this form of literature from the material power of class struggle implied by a more overtly poetic
representation:

his prose had to go overboard on the muteness of common life. That new kind of mute
writing would no longer be the silent language engraved in the flesh of material things.
It would fit the radical muteness of things, which have neither will nor meaning. It
would express, in its magnificence, the nonsense of life in general. The prose of the
artist distinguished itself from the prose of everyday life insofar as it was still muter,
still more deprived of poetry. (Dissensus 16566)

In Bolaos case, the text calls attention to the nonsense of life in general by eliding the
experimental rhetoric that defines chatty literary language and using realist prose in a way
that emphasizes the difference between the text and the materiality of the readers everyday life,
all the while teasing the reader into connecting the two. This takes place, as I showed above,
within a narrative that also forces the reader to question the efficacy of the reality effect and the
possibility of adequation between text and lived experience. In just one scene that exemplifies this
process, the main character, Juan Garca Madero, takes an avowedly non-poetic narrative style
that is humorous in its banality, but which creates a metanarrative comment on the possibility
of representation. He explains that searching through another characters house in the dark one
night is an ordeal too long and nerve-wracking to describe in detail (plus I hate details) (Savage
 406 Critique

56). Yet, despite his affirmation to the contrary, he gives an exhaustive description of a meal he
prepares while there:

I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a tall glass of milk, and made myself a ham
and cheese sandwich with oyster sauce and Dijon mustard. When I was finished I was
still hungry, so I made myself a second sandwich, this time with cheese, lettuce, and
pickles bottled with two or three kinds of chilies. [: : : ] In a plastic container on the
bottom shelf of the refrigerator, I found the remains of a chicken mole; in another
container I found riceI guess they were leftovers from that days dinnerand then I
went looking for real bread, not sandwich bread, and I started to make myself dinner.
(57)

The excess of detail in this passage follows in the tradition of realist narrative that not only
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

exemplifies Barthes notion of the reality effect but also, as Rancire suggests, appears mute
because of the simplicity and orality of its narrative style, and because it suggests there is no
hidden meaning behind it to be deciphered by the reader.
Importantly for Rancire and for the current reading of Bolaos text, though, the muteness
that paradoxically makes realist adequation impossible also contains the possibility of an ideo-
logical commentary. As Georg Lukacs argued, by incorporating details of the everyday into their
texts, realists participate in a totalizing referentiality that can

depict the vital, but not immediately obvious forces at work in objective reality.
They do so with such profundity and truth that the products of their imagination
can potentially receive confirmation from subsequent historical eventsnot merely in
the simple sense in which a successful photograph mirrors the original, but because
they express the wealth and diversity of reality, reflecting the forces as yet submerged
beneath the surface, which only blossom forth visibly at a later stage.13 (Realism
4748)

Within the broader context of a novel dedicated to disappearances and a repeated lack of detailed
and accurate information, this segment on the refrigerator seems to call into question the possibility
of identifying a totalizing, submerged ideological force such as the one Lukacs suggests. After
all, the texts attention to detail seems to forego the possibility of a symptomatic reading. However,
the abundance of mute language in this scene draws attention both to the texts excessive narration
as it conflicts with the materiality of the readers daily life and to the structural gaps of signification
that pepper the narrative thread of the novel. Replacing detailed descriptions of realismo visceral,
Cesrea Tinajero, Arturo Belano, and Ulises Lima with a preponderance of minutiae such as we
see above, the novel creates an aesthetic contrast between transparent and opaque representation
that calls attention to the limits of realism in the work as a whole.
Thus the novel converts detail, one of the staples of transparent, realist discourse, into a
metanarrative commentary on the effect of literary language that, in its excess, bleeds into
postmodernist antirealism; I would suggest that this is the axis on which the novels politics
of reading turn. I understand politics not as a specific ideological stance, but rather in terms of
what Rancire describes as a conflict rooted in the presumption of adequation between realist
literature and external reality. He argues that while literary or poetic language substitutes the
deciphering of the mute meaning written on the body of things for the democratic chattering of
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 407

the letter and results in a reading of poetic signs [as] historical symptoms (163), the muteness
of realist language crosses democratically between the letter and material inequality precisely
because it appears to be mute. It democratizes reading by calling on the reader to note the contrast
between the text and lived reality. Poetic or chatty language, though, closes off this attention to
the readers reality by encouraging a particular symptomatic interpretation that equates what is
presented in a novel to a historical situation, with all the ideological underpinnings that a more
elitist reading would imply. Bolaos novel similarly situates realist language at the intersection of
a transparent aesthetic and a symptomatic, ideological reading. In the process, the text inscribes
the reader both into the seemingly mute, common language of the texts presumed realism and,
at the same time, into the avant-garde politics of open-ended, anti-authoritarian interpretation.
In other words, the idea that realism is ideological converts the transparency of realist language
into a symptomatic reading of literature that makes the text undemocratic because it is exclusionary,
because only an elitist writer and reader can interpret its symptoms, and because this elitist realism
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

reaffirms the political structure of power already in place in society by seeking adequation between
language and politics. As Rancire puts it, the discourse contrasting interpretive change and real
change is itself part of the same hermeneutic plot as the interpretation that it challenges (167). A
more democratic politics, however, emerges in a kind of reading that does not presume adequation
between literature and lived experience: The politics of literature turns out to be the conflict of two
politics of the mute letter: the politics of literariness and the politics of symptomatic reading.
[: : : ] The evil done by democratic literariness has to be redeemed by the power of a writing
engraved in the very flesh of things (16465). Rancire clarifies this idea in The Flesh of Words,
when he explains that a democratic politics of reading emerges in the constant movement between
mute (realist) language and a material reality not perceived as transferable to it but that the text
always strives to reach. This is because that movement addresses the reader as engaged with
both the poetic wordiness of literature and the lived materiality that a transparent, less poetic
language evokes directly, without fully achieving adequation between the realist aesthetic and a
historicalpolitical context.
This complex intersection between realist language, material reality, and ideology is delineated
in The Savage Detectives by the constant movement that is both a recurrent theme in Bolaos
works and also a stylistic technique figured through the use of irony, humor, and epanorthosis: the
on the road narrative of the text is echoed in the poetic structures that underlie its seemingly
realist prose. Even within the transparent language of orality, for instance, there are parenthetical
comments and qualifications that, at the same time as they mimic everyday speech, rupture the
smooth transmission of narrative and contribute to the tongue-in-cheek tone of the text. This
technique once again draws attention to the instability of representation and the difficulty of
producing a symptomatic reading of the texts politics, as we see in one of Garca Maderos few
attempts to define realismo visceral:

It occurred to me that Id had too much to drink and hadnt eaten in hours, and I
wondered whether the alcohol and hunger must be starting to disconnect me from
reality. [: : : ] If Im remembering right (though I wouldnt stake my life on it), it so
happens that one of the visceral realists basic poetry-writing tenets is a momentary
disconnection from a certain kind of reality. (10)

Garca Maderos qualifying statements such as If Im remembering right and the parenthetical
(though I wouldnt stake my life on it) rupture the linear voice of the narrator and create an
 408 Critique

ironic break from the certain kind of reality that, he claims, visceral realism seems to value.
Because of the parenthetical and self-doubting interruptions in the text, the reader cannot so
easily accept the definition of realismo visceral as directly referential, and the irony of the poets
projectthe fact that there is no set projectbecomes clear. At the same time, by making that
assertion through a use of realist, transparent language that suggests direct referentiality between
narrative and lived reality, as well as between literary and oral language, the novel also opens
itself up to a symptomatic interpretation that would undemocratize the text. Simultaneously, the
narrative conflict imposed by irony, a staple of realist writing, redemocratizes it by confounding
any authoritative reading of the scene that would link the text to an extratextual reality. The novel
plays out two opposing functions at the same time: one that democratizes text, and one that does
not.
Moreover, irony not only confronts the texts relationship to an external material reality, it
validates the narratives separation from the readers lived experience. As Mario Ortiz-Robles has
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

shown in his analysis of the realist novel, irony, a fundamental part of its aesthetic, interrupts
the direct adequation between signifier and referent that Barthes had signaled and that Rancire
views as inscribed in political discourses of power, precisely because it blurs the line between
literary form and its extratextual referents: As interruption, iterated throughout and across the
[realist] novels structures of reference, becomes a permanent feature of its discourse, [irony]
ceases to count as either form or content, not least because it becomes impracticable, not to
say impossible, to tell them apart (20). Similarly, with the interruptive statements in the quote
from The Savage Detectives above, the texts irony reproduces Garca Maderos doubt about what
realismo visceral is, which in turn becomes the readers doubt about whether or not the movement
exists, blurring the line between fiction and reality. In the process, irony also confounds the
presumed binary opposition of form, or style, and contentwhether historical or fictionaland
makes the realist aesthetic, not just the extratextual referent, a fundamental part of any ideological
commentary.
The doubt produced by irony is further signaled toward the end of the novel when Garca
Madero, whose diary entries frame the beginning and end of the work, confounds the temporality
of the production and reception of his narrative about the real visceralistas: Today I realized
that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today [: : : ]. What I write today Im really writing
tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an
invisible day. (Savage 591). The temporal displacement of the diary ruptures the presumption
of a linear chronologyand historicityby the novels structure and calls attention to the chain
of displacement between the events the novel supposedly represents and their reception first by a
writing subject (Garca Madero) and later by the reading subject receiving his words. While doubt
is present both in the text and in the reader, these do not match in a way that would presume
adequation or mimesis. The reader does not engage in a symptomatic reading of history that
would produce an ideological understanding of the text, but rather in a reading of aesthetic form
that confounds all authoritative signification.
Another rhetorical device that contributes to the simultaneous fusing and separation of textual
representation and the external history it initially seems to invoke is epanorthosis, which is
metanarratively explained in the last section of The Savage Detectives. Garca Madero spends
much of the trip through the Sonora desert on the hunt for Cesrea Tinajero quizzing Lima,
Belano, and Lupe on poetic devices with which, he had suggested at the beginning of the novel,
too many poets and critics are unfamiliar. In one case, [s]o I asked them whether they knew
what an epanorthosis was, which is a figure of logic that consists of restating whats been said
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 409

to qualify or amend or even contradict it (592). Within the novel, epanorthosis appears in most
narrators discussion of events, as they backtrack, retrace, or rethink out loud their commentaries
on Belano and Lima, creating a realistic tone meant to suggest the characters doubt about the
whereabouts of the real visceralistas and destabilizing meaning at the same time. A structural
epanorthosis is also evident when the narrative switches from one testimony to another, creating
the perspectivism I mentioned earlier.
With the metanarrative reference toand subsequent explanation ofepanorthosis, Bolao
puts into words the phenomenon of constant contradiction that defines the style of the entire novel
and that, as an exaggeration of mimesis and psychological realism, has effectively disappeared
both visceral realism and infrarrealism as stable referents, at the same time as it has maintained a
mute aesthetic representation of them. In a typical metanarrative wink at the reader, he incorporates
this logic of contradiction into his very definition of epanorthosis: to qualify or amend or even
contradict it (Savage 592, emphasis added). The result is a further muting of poetic language under
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

the guise of a narrative style that is transparent both in its mimetic representation of orality and in
its seeming attempt to define the poets literary practice in terms of extratextual, historical events.
The novels use of epanorthosis also addresses the reader as inscribed in a material everyday
reality that cannot be adequately produced by the text, despite a style and tone that would suggest
otherwise. In the character Luis Sebastin Rosados discussion of Latin Americas best-known
(nonfictional) contemporary cronista Carlos Monsivis, for instance, the novel paratextually talks
around something that happened between him and the visceral realists, without specifying what it
is: still, something happened to him during his meeting with the visceral realists, and everybody
knows it, everybody who secretly loves or hates Monsi (Savage 157). By alluding to something
that everybody knows without specifying the details, the book creates a gap between the mute
aesthetic that seems to transparently flesh out details and mimetically represent a characters
testimony, and what the readerwho, if he knows who Monsivis is, is presumably part of the
everybody the book referencesdoes not know: the something that took place. Moreover,
in a move that parallels Barrios description of what realismo visceral is not, when Monsivis
speaks later in the novel, this absence of any signified or referent is recreated when he talks only
about what did not happen: No ambush, no violent incident, nothing like that (164). Here, the
epanorthotic structure preserves its aesthetic form of constant doubt but retains an absence at the
center of the referential structure that interpellates the reader by addressing him as the one who
may wish to presume a mimetic relation between narrative and everyday life beyond textuality,
but cannot.
A general use of epanorthosis throughout both the structure and language of the novel, then,
contributes to the ironic, referential absences that simultaneously interrupt and produce the appear-
ance of the reality effect of the narrative. It also coincides with Rancires concept of muteness
as part of an implicitly politicized aesthetic sphere that crosses between literature and politics by
opening the text up to an interpretation that rejects an authoritative or symptomatic ascription of
meaning to it and instead paradoxically shows just how far the text is from representing material
reality.14 Epanorthosis and irony, as realist elements that require the reader to read beyond the
seeming muteness of their language, thus sow the seeds of doubt that produce the basic mystery
of The Savage Detectives: the question of what is real and what is not.
The humor these moments of conflict produce, moreover, enforces the novels address of the
reader as part of a broader democratic readership that echoes the avant-garde attempt to destabilize
authority. On multiple occasions Bolao mentions Dadaism, and the end of the novel includes
comical drawings that seem to reference the caligramas (concrete poetry) and other ludic mixed
 410 Critique

media that initiated vanguardismos break with the institutions of art and literature. Specifically,
he references the avant-garde politics suggested by Duchamps works The Large Glass and Nude
Descending a Staircase (Savage 504). He then inscribes Dadaisms mixing of art and humor
into the text by including a detail that, at first glance, is useless and therefore both realist and
realistic: Garca Madero witnesses the murder scene through the window of the car (641).
In the scene, the window leads to a series of detectivesque suppositions and maybes, but
not a definitive testimonial of how the murder occurred: I guess Alberto swore at them [: : : ],
I guess Belano told him to come get her [: : : ]. Maybe then Cesrea said they were going to
kill us (Savage 641, emphasis added). Grnor Rojo reads this scene as a symbolic exorcism of
the avant-garde precursor to realismo visceral and, therefore, of a particular kind of modernity
associated with it, such that afterwards Lima and Belano will be able to create their own poetic
movement free of historical influences (7374). Yet I would argue that by inserting the window,
the large glass, as a transparent detail into the scene of the murder, Bolao voids the narrative
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

of its capacity to mimetically reflect anything other than the narrators doubt. The transparency of
the window, and the doubt it creates, echoes the effect the transparent language of the novel has
on the reader, whose doubt becomes political because it questions the referentiality of language.
The narrative also produces the democratizing movement between mute realist language and
the readers experience by using the conflicting temporality of Garca Maderos suppositions
about how the murder occurred to create the reality effect. His suppositions are in the present
tense (I guess), but the actions they attempt to describe are in the past (swore, said). These
opposing temporalities conflict with the temporality of the reading moment, forcing the reader
to question the possibility that a referential, historical reality can be shared by both reader and
text. This questioning occurs because of the realist detail of the narrative, rather than because
of a destabilization of it. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the car window mentioned
as a realist detail foreshadows the novels unquestionably avant-garde conclusion, in which the
narrator directly interpellates the reader into what appears to be a joke, or ironic wink, by showing
three drawings and asking before each one, Whats outside the window? (Savage 648). Emilio
Sauri has argued that this conclusion marks the exhaustion of aesthetic and political possibility
afforded by the literary, a possibility Boom writers valued by privileging readers as detectives or
accomplices in the production of meaning (422). Nevertheless, I would suggest once again that
what is exhausted is a particular conception of the literary as poetic or chatty, while the seemingly
transparent realist aesthetic is revalued as a political tool.
Indeed, the novel models for the reader a form of reading tied not just to doubt but to
irony as a form of liberating movement between textuality and external reality that overturns
even literary critics tendency to read literature as adequated to historical reality. Lima and
Belano laugh at the one poem by Cesrea Tinajero they finda text called Sinwhich, in the
avant-garde tradition of concrete poetry, consists of three drawn lines.15 They obtain the poem
from Amadeo Salvatierra, whoalthough he pertains to the estridentista avant-gardeironically
seeks adequation between the poem and some outside referentiality to create meaning. Yet Lima
and Belano dismiss the idea of referentiality as though speaking as well to any reader seeking
a signifying (or symptomatic) relationship between the novel and a historical reality: Because
it had to mean something, didnt it? And the boys looked at me and said no, Amadeo, a poem
doesnt necessarily have to mean anything, except that its a poem, although this one, Cesreas,
might not even be that (Savage 397). Instead, they offer that its a joke, Amadeo, the poem is a
joke covering up something more serious, but they never specify what that something is, as the
narrative instead returns to a realist description of seemingly unnecessary detail:
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 411

Then one of them got up and went to the kitchen, and I fell into a doze [: : : ] because
by then it was very late and wed had a lot to drink, although from time to time Id
hear them walking, as if they were moving to stretch their legs, and every once in
a while I would hear them talking, asking and telling each other who knows what,
some serious things, I suppose, since there were long silences between question and
answer, and other less serious things, because they would laugh [: : : ]. (398)

The joke, I would suggest, lies in the intersection of three conflicting aesthetics: the novels
seemingly realist representation of the scene, produced by the orality of the narrative; the poets
avant-garde sensibility, evidenced when they cannot affirm that the poem is even a poem; and
the novels inability to faithfully record the poets conversation overheard by Amadeo, drawing
attention to the rupture between discourse and material or lived historical experience.
In the sense that Lima and Belano, as well as Bolao and the text itself, accept and celebrate
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

this fundamental instability of representation, The Savage Detectives seems to embody what Walter
Benjamin described as the power of the surrealist joke to create a leftist politics: in the joke [: : : ]
in invective, in misunderstanding, in all cases where an action puts forth its own image and exists
[: : : ] the long-sought image sphere is opened [: : : ] in which political materialism and physical
nature share the inner man, the psyche, the individual [: : : ] with dialectical justice (19192). In
this scene, Amadeo still seeks adequation between the image sphere created by the text and an
external reality that can verify its significance. The reader, however, is left in the democratic position
of interpretation Rancire identifies as being between the politics of literariness and the politics
of symptomatic reading, both accepting that the texts seeming transparency is an elusive and
inadequate representation of external reality and recognizing the existence of a fleshy materiality
beyond it. As this scene makes clear, then, a confounded referentiality is no longer just at the center
of the novels language, but at the center of a reading that is political, in the same way avant-garde
poetic language strives to be, because it rejects a relationship of adequation between representation
and some extratextual, material essence, be it a material referent or even a meaning that can be
expressed in language. The difference is that, in this novels narrative structure, this democratic politics
takes place in the realm of realistic detail rather than via a closed, avant-garde literary sensibility.
Finally, the suggestion made by Lima and Belano to Amadeo Salvatierrathat an anti-
authoritarian politics occurs in the instability of meaning represented by the jokeis reinforced by
the novels only vignette about literary criticism. Twenty years after their disappearance, literary
critic Ernesto Garca Grajales speaks about the meaning of the visceral realists poetics and
politics, inserting them into a critical narrative that would fix them in literary history. Only Garca
Maderos account offers an explanation of the disappearance of Lima and Belano, but Garca
Grajales dismisses the very existence of Garca Madero, the one narrator who had described the
murders: Juan Garca Madero? No, the name doesnt ring a bell. He never belonged to the group.
Of course Im sure. Man, if I tell you so as the reigning expert on the subject, its because thats
the way it is [: : : ] (Savage 585). Since the novel is not structured chronologically, the critics
comment is cited as being from 1996 but appears before the 1976 murder scene. It therefore
turns the entire last section of the book into the epanorthotic voice of a phantasmagoric narrator
whose narrative corrects for the reader the authoritative critical interpretation that had tried to
silence him. The critic, the novel suggests, is missing the key piece of informationthe murders
of Tinajero and the pimpsnecessary for understanding the poetic and political intersections of
violence at the center of the real visceralist movement, at the same time as he seeks to exert
his authority over it. Bolao suggests, then, that literary criticism also produces a symptomatic,
 412 Critique

closed reading of literary history of the sort Rancire describes. Literary criticism, in other words,
paradoxically values a symptomatic logic of adequation between literature and political discourse,
closing off a democratic reading in the process. The subtle suggestion in the novel is that when
literary criticism itself becomes a search for the roman clef adequation between literature and
politics, it reaffirms precisely the politics of authority it seems to resist.
I would therefore propose that it is not so much, as Medina writes, that the infrarrealist
manifestos techniques are nowhere to be seen in Bolaos texts, it is that they are converted
into a language that is political precisely because it is in plain sight, precisely because the novel
on the surface adopts a transparently realist narrative style, which is, ironically, the formal literary
equivalent of Duchamps Dadaist glass and the novels concluding, avant-gardist window drawings.
The novel suggests that the political relationship between aesthetics and lived materiality Benjamin
describes as founded in the avant-garde aesthetic of surrealism is fundamental to realist aesthetics
as well. In fact, as Ortiz-Robles avers, a political-ethical reading emerges in ironys interruption of
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

symptomatic adequation, which, I would suggest, is evidenced here by the instability of transparent
representation and epanorthosis that realist detail makes possible:

Interruption, therefore, also becomes a condition of possibility for reading ethically,

since the constant oscillation between the order of cognition and the order of perfor-
mance assures that whatever certainties representation, on the one hand, and perfor-
mative violence, on the other, seem to guarantee are at best ephemeral and unstable.
Ethical reading in this regard entails the absolutely unscripted, open-ended, and ever
incalculable conditions irony creates in the novel. (20)

By creating an open-ended and unscripted possibility of interpretation for the reader, The Savage
Detectives converts realist language and the interruptions evidenced by irony and epanorthosis
from an aesthetic form into an ethics or politics of reading that also interrupts a closed, symp-
tomatic, ideological interpretation of literature. The novels politics thus paradoxically lie in its
transparent languages seeming aversion tobut, in fact, subtle praxis ofthe open-endedness of
interpretation that avant-garde literature traditionally values.
In its adoption of a mute realism as conflicted, in movement, and therefore democratic, The
Savage Detectives is, then, a reformulation of both realism and the politics of avant-garde literature.
Realist language not adequately tied to literary or historical referents and produced by epanorthosis,
doubt, irony, and instability becomes a more viable option for producing a political stance than any
avant-garde manifesto can be. In this sense, Andrew Gibsons commentary on Rancires under-
standing of politics and aesthetics seems to hold true for Bolaos novel as well: In [literatures]
preservation of the conditions, even the spirit of democratic conflict, and its call to the future
precisely because of the limit of realismliterature remains exemplary for us (Gibson 68).

Notes
1 Cercas further insists that Bolao does not reject the Boom, as some critics have noted, but rather incorporates
elements of Borges, Cortzar, and especially Vargas Llosa into his works. He is therefore not a detractor of the boom,
but rather precisely its most disciplined follower (26).
2 Due to limitations of space, in this article I cite only Natasha Wimmers English translation of Bolaos novel, not

the original Spanish text with which I undertook this analysis. All English translations of scholarly texts are mine.
3 Of particular importance for his biography is the topic of exile, which, as Medina explores, straddles the divide

between Bolaos experiences as a Chilean leftist during the dictatorship and the discourses he produces in his novels.
For more on the integration of Bolaos biography into his texts, see Rother.
 Realism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Reading 413

4 Bolao also invokes Belano in the preface to Estrella distante (Distant Star) and left notes after his death indicating

that Belano was the narrator of 2666.

5 Bolaos tendency to confound the relationship between fiction and nonfiction by appealing to readersand

criticsproclivity toward biographical readings of literature has become more ironic since his death, as attempts
are made to decipher the connections between his novels and his life. A recent exhibit of Bolaos archive at the
Centre de Cultura Contempornea de Barcelona, which I visited on June 23, 2013 (http://www.cccb.org/en/exposicio-
arxiu_bolano_1977_2003-41449), included a list of eighteen names, written in Bolaos hand, of the real visceralistas in
the novel and their correspondence to the names of his friends, furthering the illusion that the novel is a roman clef.
6 Matas Ayala has taken the link between Bolaos infrarrealista past and his writing a step further, suggesting that

Bolao encodes his creative writing process in his poetry, which thus becomes an intertextual referent for understanding
novels such as The Savage Detectives.
7 The novel regularly plays with visceral realism and real visceralism, often inverting the two terms. The double

name of the movement contributes to the destabilization of signs that, as I argue later in the article, defines the novels
aesthetic and politics.
8 Bolao also plays with this crossing between history and fiction in La literatura nazi en Amrica (Nazi Literature
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

in the Americas), an apocryphal encyclopedia of Latin American writers.

9 Reflecting this desire for synthesis, one former estridentista in the novel, Amadeo Salvatierra, states, [A]ll of us

Mexicans are more visceral realists than stridentists, but what does it matter? Stridentism and visceral realism are just two
masks to get us to where we really want to go. And where is that? [: : : ] To modernity (Savage 460). For more on the
history of Maples Arces estridentismo, see Gallo.
10 Areco has argued that the real visceralistas use the same strategies as the Mexican estridentistas, but without

writing any manifestos.

11 On the reader as detective, see Farfn Gmez, Trelles, and Trellez Paz.
12 The topic of violence in Bolaos work has been widely discussed but is too broad to examine closely here. For a

review of the topic, see Burgos, Cabrera, Candia, Farred, Galdo, and Gonzlez, as well as the introduction by Paz Soldn
to Bolao salvaje.
13 For more on Lukacs theories of realism, see Essays on Realism and the Theory of the Novel.
14 At the same time, as Daniuska Gonzlez has argued in her analysis of Estrella distante (Distant Star), the mutism

of the letter uses the instability of the written word to make torture and blood flesh, giving evil an embodied presence (29).
15 In Bolaos Amberes (Antwerp), composed in 1980 but not published until 2002, the protagonist reads those same

lines in a dream and concludes, I suppose very little aesthetics is left in me (53). For more on the relationship between
Antwerp and The Savage Detectives, see Cobas Carral and Vernica Garibotto.

Works Cited
Areco, Macarena. The Savage Detectives de Roberto Bolao y el juicio a la vanguardia. Anales de la Literatura Chilena
8.8 (2007): 18597.
Ayala, Matas. Notas sobre la poesa de Roberto Bolao. Paz Soldn and Favern Patriau 91102.
Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. Surrealism. Reflections. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978. 17792.
Bolao, Roberto. 2666. 2004. New York: Vintage Espaol, 2009.
. Antwerp. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: New Directions, 2010.
. Djenlo todo, nuevamente. Primer manifiesto infrarrealista. Nada utpico nos es ajeno [Manifiestos infrarreal-
istas]. Mxico, D. F.: Tsunun, 2013. 5162.
. Estrella distante. 1996. New York: Vintage Espaol, 2010.
. La literatura nazi en Amrica. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010.
. The Savage Detectives. 1998. Trans. Natasha Wimmer New York: Farrar, 2007.
Bolao, Roberto, and Ignacio Echevarra. Entre parntesis: Ensayos, artculos y discursos (19982003). Barcelona:
Editorial Anagrama, 2004.
Burgos, Carlos. Roberto Bolao: La violencia, el mal, la memoria. Nuevo Texto Crtico 22.4243 (2009): 12344.
Cabrera, Roberto. Literatura C enfermedad D 2666. Taller de Letras 36 (2005): 187201.
Candia, Alexis. El Paraso infernal en la narrativa de Roberto Bolao. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2011.
Catalan, Pablo. Roberto Bolao: un laberinto narrativo. Moreno 5367.
Cercas, Javier. Print the Legend! Babelia [Cultural suppl. to El Pas] 14 Apr. 2007: 26. 20 Feb. 2012 <http://elpais.com/
diario/2007/04/14/babelia/1176507550_850215.html>.
 414 Critique

Cobas Carral, Andrea. Marginalidad y derrota: la poesa infrarrealista de Roberto Bolao. Actas del II Congreso
Internacional Transformaciones culturales. Debates de la teora, la crtica y la lingstica. Buenos Aires: U de
Buenos Aires, 2008.
Cobas Carral, Andrea, and Vernica Garibotto. Un epitafio en el desierto. Poesa y revolucin en The Savage Detectives.
Paz Soldn and Favern Patriau 16390.
Corral, Will H. Roberto Bolao: Portrait of the Writer as a Noble Savage. World Literature Today 80.6 (2006): 4750.
Cuadros, Ricardo. La escritura y la muerte en The Savage Detectives. Moreno 15964.
Donoso Macaya, ngeles. Esttica, poltica y el posible territorio de la ficcin en 2666 de Roberto Bolao. Revista
Hispnica Moderna 62.2 (2009): 12542.
Espinosa Pacheco, Patricia. Roberto Bolao: Metaficcin y posmodernidad perifrica. Quimera 241 (2004): 2123.
Farfn Gmez, Carlos. Los detectives ausentes. Texto Crtico 16 (2005): 16369.
Farred, Grant. The Impossible Closing: Death, Neoliberalism, and the Postcolonial in Bolaos 2666. Modern Fiction
Studies 56.4 (2010): 689708.
Galdo, Juan Carlos. Fronteras del mal/genealogas del horror: 2666 de Roberto Bolao. Hipertexto 2 (2005): 2334.
Gallo, Rubn. Un caligrama desconocido de Manuel Maples Arce. Revista Iberoamericana 74.224 (2008): 66772.
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 09:58 16 March 2016

Gonzlez, Daniuska. Roberto Bolao: El silencio del mal. Quimera 241 (2004): 2831.
Lpez Badano, Cecilia. Roberto Bolao entre el ensayo y la ficcin: Desde Catalua, con la memoria en el Cono Sur.
Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contempornea 15.39 (2008): xxixxxxviii.
Luakcs, Georg. Essays on Realism. Ed. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1983.
. Realism in the Balance. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and Politics. Trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor.
London: Verso, 1980. 2859.
. Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1971.
Maples Arce, Manuel. Actual No. 1. Schwartz 19098.
Medina, Alberto. Arts of Homelessness: Roberto Bolao or the Commodification of Exile. Novel 42.3 (2009): 54654.
Moreno, Fernando, ed. Roberto Bolao, una literatura infinita. Poitiers: Universit de PoitiersCNRS, 2005.
Ortiz-Robles, Mario. Local Speech, Global Acts: Performative Violence and the Novelization of the World. Comparative
Literature 59.1 (2007): 121.
Paz Soldn, Edmundo. Introduccin. Paz Soldn and Favern Patriau 1130.
Paz Soldn, Edmundo, and Gustavo Favern Patriau, eds. Bolao Salvaje. Barcelona: Editorial Candata S.L., 2008.
Rancire, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum, 2010.
. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Rashkin, Elissa. The Stridentist Movement in Mexico: The Avant-Garde and Cultural Change in the 1920s. Lanham:
Lexington, 2009.
Richard, Nelly. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis. Trans.
Alice A. Nelson and Silvia Tandeciarz. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Rojo, Grnor. Sobre Los detectives salvajes. Territorios en fuga: Estudios crticos sobre la obra de Roberto Bolao. Ed.
Patricia Espinosa. Santiago de Chile: Frasis, 2003. 6575.
Rother, Larry. A Chilean Writers Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past. New York Times 28 Jan. 2009. 18 July
2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28bola.html?pagewantedDall&_rD0>.
Santos, Elena. ltimas noticias de la narrativa latinoamericana. Guaraguao 13.30 (2009): 2938.
Sauri, Emilio. A la pinche modernidad: Literary Forms and the End of History in Roberto Bolaos The Savage
Detectives. MLN 125.2 (2010): 40632.
Schwartz, Jorge. Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos programticos y crticos. Mxico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura
Econmica, 2002.
Suleiman, Susan. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
Trelles, Diego. El lector como detective en Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolao. Hispamrica 34.100 (2005):
14151.
Trellez Paz, Diego. El lector como detective en la narrativa de Roberto Bolao. Moreno 14757.

About the Author

Tania Gentic is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. She
is the author of The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin
American Newspaper Chronicle (State University of New York Press, 2013).