Advertisements for Myself: Horacio Castellanos Moya at Guernica Magazine
An essay by the Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya that I translated with Wes Enzinna is up today at Guernica Magazine. Moya is an old friend of Roberto Bolaño’s, but his essay takes on the darker side of the Bolaño myth in the U.S.:
Albert Fianelli, an Italian fellow journalist, parodies a quote often attributed to Herman Goering and says that every time someone mentions the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but neither do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity that moves on its own according to mysterious laws. The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S. I say this because the central idea of [Sarah] Pollack’s work is that behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.
An earlier interview Wes did with Moya can be found here.
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Bobby, great work. In the photo, is that Bolano in El Salvador, or Moya with him in Mexico (not that I’d recognize Moya)? It wouldn’t a photo from Chile, I assume, or is it. Any idea who some of the other handsome writers in the group are? I love group pictures of writers.
Am I the only one who immediately started looking for Bobby in that photograph? Someone get on Photoshop stat.
Robert Baird (initials RB) is in the back row, second from right.
Kent, I’m pretty sure that’s Mexico. Moya’s not in the photo, but you can identify the others in the original at the website Moya mentions in the essay.
Isn’t it normal for artists to be marketed bizarrely? I guess I don’t get Moya’s surprise. And speaking as a naive Anglophone reader of Bolaño, approaching him from reviews in ordinary sources, I don’t think these things had much effect on me. Does Moya really care what Paste Magazine says?
The point really isn’t what Paste or any other magazine on its lonesome says. A massive marketing effort, helped by “reviews in ordinary sources,” went into establishing Bolaño as The Latin American Novelist That Americans Read Now. I’m sure that’s part of what’s itching Moya’s skin: why the definite article? (It itches mine at least, this presumption that Americans can only handle one foreign writer per year, be he–usually he–Marías, Sebald, or Bolaño.) But he follows Pollack to take the point further, and says, what does the choice of Bolaño tell us about American prejudices and reading habits?
The New Yorker’s Book Bench has a little post on the essay here.
I guess my point is — taking all Moya’s points, what does he want? Things are bad, sure, but does he have a change to propose, or even to envision? Failing that, a book to recommend?
New Directions is not United Fruit Company. That said, the fluid dynamics of literary fashion deserve relentless cui bono examination.
It’s easier to praise/bury a dead author, always. Also easier to get those all important seven mentions into every last reader’s head if you’re only pushing one book a time. And then there’s the ongoing dialogue among what few book review publications are left.
This will sound ridiculous coming from a publicly acknowledged fellow traveler of flarf, but I couldn’t take the skeeviness of Savage Detectives. I read enough to get what’s good about Bolaño — but who exactly was I supposed to, not even root for, but be curious about? I stopped caring somewhere in the middle of that long middle. The first section, total tour de force. Then pfft.
Jordan, I took that middle as the “tour de force” in the equivocal sense (worthy of admiration if not enjoyment) — meeting a technical narrative challenge, memories around figures who remain opaque. By “skeeviness”, are you referring to the characters and their circumstances?
> are you referring
Aye, Vance, I am indeed trumpeting my ignorant habit of considering a narrative a little world I inhabit while I read.
On second thought, I’m no trumpeter — better say I’m tromboning my ignorant habit.
I take your point about the technical challenge. I don’t much care about technical challenges in arts other than those I practice myself. Another failing announced (oboed).
Gotcha. I’ll certainly acknowledge a vicarious thrill in stories of the skeevy, which is essentially the same bad habit you confess. Did it strike you, though, speaking of readerly identification, that B has a distinctive solution to the perennial problem of how to interest readers in his characters’ work lives — he just makes all his characters poets?
@VM, responding to your question way back up there about what Moya wants: you’d have to ask him. But I’d guess his answer would be something like a/ some division of all that marketing effort among more than one translated author, and b/ if we can only have one author at a time, then how about someone who less predictably conforms to American stereotypes about Latin Americans.
@JD: Given that ND is Moya’s publisher, and given this, I doubt HCM would say ND is UFC either. Andrew Wylie, maybe.
And sure, I take your point about the ease of marketing unities, though I’m not content to accept that as the standard by which we measure the justice of the fluid dynamics. (Not saying you are.)
But on the matter of TSD, I agree completely, or almost. The middle of the novel is just plain soft (I don’t see the met challenge, VM). I do think it does get more interesting at the end, mainly because it throws a retrospective irony on everything that’s come before. I confess to being swayed by exactly what Moya predicted that I, as an American, would be swayed by: the disillusionment, dispersal, etc. of getting older. Here’s my more extended take.
(Edmond Caldwell–see here and here–thinks this is a bastardized reading of the novel, and thinks that the Moya essay supports his point. But he’s wrong: Moya’s not quarreling with the reading, he’s arguing that it’s completely predictable that an American audience would like a novel that supported such a reading.)
Last thing, JD: Christ, don’t apologize, even in jest, for “considering a narrative a little world I inhabit while I read.” Especially for a novel like TSD, which begs for that kind of reading. We’re not talking about Pale Fire here. As with Lowell, I think it’s perfectly possible to talk about Bolaño’s artistry without denying that the novel thrives on the pretense of (self-presentation as) novelized truth.
Robert:
Thank you for linking to my arguments on the reception of Bolano by critics and reviewers (focusing on the particular instance of James Wood) in the US.
For what it’s worth, the part of Moya’s argument that I think “supports my point” is where he’s quoting Sarah Pollack’s Comparative Literature article on the “Bolano myth.”
It’s also true, however, that I don’t think the main thrust of SD is just “mature” disappointment, dispersal, disillusionment. Please forgive me for quoting myself, and for doing so — like a self-centered bore at a party — at length, but I’m deeply lazy on top of all my other flaws and it’s so much easier to cut & paste, so here’s what I wrote (from the second of the two links you kindly provided) on a reading of SD that’s an alternative to the “US-friendly” disappointment meme:
“Contra [the 'disappointment' interpretation], The Savage Detectives articulates the stubborn persistence of a utopia of poetry (poetry in its broadest sense, not just verse but the subversive transformation of daily life by the ‘marvelous’) in the face of history’s sharpest disappointments. This utopia persists precisely to the extent that it has not appeared; it is the ‘absent center’ of the novel itself. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the trägers, the bearers, of ‘poetry’ for young Juan Garcia Madero and many the novel’s other characters, just as, in a kind of infinite regression, Cesárea Tinajero of the original Visceral Realist generation is poetry’s träger for Lima and Belano. Yet the pair’s rediscovery of Tinajero leads to her demise, and Belano and Lima themselves fade away. Nobody therefore really occupies ‘the place of poetry,’ but it is this very fact which keeps poetry alive as a radical possibility, as – to switch to a different idiom – une promesse de bonheur. At another level, the death of Tinajero and the play of Bolaño-Belano in the context of the absence from the novel of the alter-ego’s point of view all suggest an effacing of author-as-authority. Could ‘the author,’ even a nominally radical author, really be a kind of caudillo that needs to be displaced? If this is the case, then if anything perishes in the course of the novel it is the elitism that was such a prominent if problematic feature of much twentieth-century aesthetic and political vanguardism, here giving way not to restorationist ‘maturity’ but to an ostensibly more radically democratic and indigenous aesthetic, ‘from below.’ And in fact we can see precisely this sort of working-out of a historical and cultural dialectic in the very form of The Savage Detectives. On the one hand, the novel’s comprehensive, epic ambitions – it is nothing less than the life-cycle of a generation – and its carnivalesque juggling of voices and chronologies call to mind the great ‘high modernist’ novels of El Boom – of Marquez and Cortazar, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. These novels were the products of a period of Latin American optimism and self-assertion in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Yet Savage Detective’s most fundamental structuring device is the testimonio, the first-person testimonial-style narrative that came to occupy an important place in Latin American prose in the period after the Boom.[3] This was the period not of revolution and self-assertion but of reaction and retrenchment, of dictatorships and death-squads, and its predominant literary mode is correspondingly both more chastened and more populist – a bedrock of fugitive resistance. The Savage Detectives, then, may be read as a Boom novel filtered through, and revised by, the post-Boom testimonial, in the service of creating a new form that includes its own prehistory. It’s a feat of insurgent literary zapatismo.”
Whew! Thanks again for your patience! Anyway, that’s my SD and I’m sticking to it, even if Moya himself might not see it that way (altho’ it does jive in a broader sense with his view in the Guernica piece of Bolano as the perennial anti-establishment non-conformist.)
Thanks for the note, Edmond. I wish you were right–that’s a fascinating book you describe–but that reading doesn’t describe the SD I read.
This is a great question for any writer: “Could ‘the author,’ even a nominally radical author, really be a kind of caudillo that needs to be displaced?” (Kent, are you listening?) Junot Díaz spoke brilliantly on the subject at the Key West Literary Seminar a few years back–the podcast is here and is definitely worth a listen.
Still think I’m right about Moya, though. Here he is, toward the end:
Hi Robert:
Thanks for the response. Oh, I’m not disputing that biographical bit at all (which, I’d add, has been included in most of the coverage I’ve read about Bolano, and even in a way that rehearses the very morality or cautionary tale some people are finding in SD itself), I’m just saying that the fact of it — that finally a la Flaubert he had to ‘live like a bourgeois so that he could write like a god’ or whatever — doesn’t exhaust/explain the novel itself. The novel doesn’t endorse an easy “wild-man” romantic avant-revolutionary myth, but neither does it endorse the myth that is in fact the very complement (rather than, strictly speaking, the opposite) of the first, that of a sentimental education into sober bourgeois ‘maturity’. But to see that means attending to the form of the novel (the telescoping of the “Boom” novel by the testimonio, around an ‘absent center’) as well as its content.
I hope Edmond won’t mind. Here is a most interesting essay by him on the state of current fiction. Thought its consideration might add to the great back and forth here :
http://radicalnotes.com/journal/2009/10/17/correspondence-pamphlet-no-2-bad-paper/
Edmond doesn’t mind. Thanks, Kent!
neither does it endorse the myth…of a sentimental education into sober bourgeois ‘maturity’
Well, sure, but mostly because “endorse” is such a strong word. I don’t think RB is saying anything broadly prescriptive, no matter how deep you dig. More like: Hey, this is the kind of shit that happens.