Literatura en Exilio: The Savage Detectives

"We were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return, and now those young people are gone, because those who didn't die in Bolivia died in Argentina or Peru, and those who survived went on to die in Chile or Mexico, and those who weren't killed there were killed later in Nicaragua, Colombia, or El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths."
-Roberto Bolaño, 1999 Caracas Address

When I was 21, I joined a creative writing workshop for the first time. I shared my stories and read others. They were all bad. When I was 22 I was part of a group of people like me, people who stank of stale cigarettes and spent too much time reading Wikipedia articles because they got beat too much (or too little) as kids, people who wanted to write and create things and Change The World through their art. We didn't have a unified vision. We didn't have a manifesto or an artistic movement or patron saint or even a name. In fact, less than half of us knew how to read. Before a meeting:

And so on. Those were our Days Of Being Wild, if being wild was being a leech on the national economy but curiously motivated when it came to things that made no money and served no purpose in society. Years later. We weren't as organised as Bolaño's infrarealists, we didn't have a political aim, but we look back on those days with nostalgia, I think.

How does Bolaño feel when he looks back at his former compadres?

How many were still alive when he wrote Los detectives salvajes?

How do we read The Savage Detectives? It's a fragmented, 700-page long epic. The second part famously features 70+ narrators, some voices more distinct than others. On the surface level, it's a story about two detectives searching for Cesárea Tinajero, the mother of first-wave visceral realism. What is visceral realism, even? Why is the novel set in so many countries with so many narrators? Why is sex such a central theme to the novel? Why is Juan García Madero erased in the second part of the novel? Why are there so many narrators and references to real-life writers? What's outside the window?

We need to understand a lot of things to answer these questions. Firstly, Roberto Bolaño's poetics of exile. Fleeing Chile after imprisonment by the fascist Pinochet regime, he didn't return for more than 20 years. But this is a geographical exile. There are more types of exile that are of interest to Bolaño.

Secondly, visceral realism. There are hundreds of visceral realists in the novel. What does it mean to perform visceral realism? We already know that visceral realism is a parody of Bolaño's real-life counterpart, infrarealism. Why do the infra-visceral realists fuck more than they write poetry? What was the point of the movement?

The key thesis here, I think, is that infra/visceral realism is a kind of performance of exile. All of Bolaño's literature is performing exile. But the visceral realists and infrarealists in real life were performing alienation, exile and drawing attention to their erasure (Heinowitz 9).

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INFRARREALISMO: EXILE AS PERFORMANCE ET ETHOS

The visceral realists of Los detectivos salvajes (LDS) are never in one place, always fucking each other, and never writing poetry; not once in the novel is it mentioned what the group actually stands for, it's only alluded to in the name. An adherence to a realismo that is visceral, realism that is realer than real, deeper than the real. The group's purpose is so vague that in one section, the leaders of the movement Belano and Ulises Lima start to purge members for not being real visceral realists as a joke.

Visceral comes from the Latin plural viscera, that which refers to the internal organs of the body. Visceral realism, then, must refer to the underlying layers of reality, society and the superstructure. It's a thinly-veiled homage to Bolaño's own infrarealism (like many things in the novel). Infrarrealismo is similarly comprised of two parts: the Latin infra and realismo, infra: that which is beneath, underneath, below. Infrarrealismo thus has twin meanings. Firstly, the representation of what lies beneath reality, the strange and subaltern. Secondly, it is an embracing of its lower status, beneath that of the Mexican literary establishment.

In Mario Santiago Papasquiaro's (Ulises Lima in the novel) IR manifesto:

WHAT DO WE PROPOSE?

TO NOT MAKE WRITING A PROFESSION

TO SHOW THAT EVERYTHING IS ART AND THAT EVERYBODY CAN DO IT

[. . .]

CULTURE IS NOT IN BOOKS NOR IN PAINTINGS OR STATUES IT IS IN THE NERVES/

IN THE FLUIDITY OF THE NERVES

Mexican literary society in the time of the infrarealists resembled a pyramid, where the literati held public office (Villoro). Santiago and Bolaño's manifestos were dialectically opposed... They sought no public funding or recognition for their works, in fact they actively rebelled against the Mexican literary establishment:

the Infrarealists courted institutional scorn and made art from their marginalization. Hence their famous assaults on official readings and soirées, insulting anointed and aspiring literati, smashing highball glasses, starting fistfights, and staging "happenings"— interventions José Peguero exuberantly describes as "driving a runaway train / through the Avenue leading to the Palace of Fine Art."
(Heinowitz 101)

They famously plotted to kidnap Octavio Paz as well, though the plan never came to fruition. In LDS, this manifests as an encounter between Ulises Lima, now in his forties, and Octavio Paz, twenty years after the peak of the infrarealists.

This exile from mainstream literature was a political and aesthetic act. The aesthetic side would be in finding A CULTURE IN FLESH, as inscribed by Santiago in his memorial. For the infrarealists, there was no barrier between art and life (realismo). To live with passion and convulsion. That's why they fuck so much in the novel. La pasión.

Bolaño continued living this philosophy of exile to the day he died, maintaining his distance from the literary mainstream and a healthy disgust for what he called the courtly spirit. The courtier: the sycophant, the bootlicker and the minion of whoever holds the power. Distant Star's Carlos Wieder, a Nazi who kills female poets and is complicit in the Pinochet regime, is based on Raúl Zurita, a real Chilean poet who opposed the dictatorship.

Zurita, had access to money, to publicity, to cultural events, to publication, to glowing reviews in El Mercurio. Zurita's very success implicated him and the fact that he became a cultural attaché for Chile after the dictatorship would have only worsened Bolaño's opinion of him. [. . .] In 2000, Zurita caused a minor scandal in Chile by dedicating one of his books, The Militant Poems, to the country's incoming socialist president, Ricardo Lagos.
(Valdés 175)

Bolaño's disgust at Zurita's (and other literati) courtly behaviour is hence well-founded, the distancing from the complicit establishment becomes an ethical choice. In By Night In Chile, the protagonist, an Opus Dei priest aiding the Pinochet regime, witnessed the horrors of the regime, yet chose to do nothing. In a famous sequence, he describes wandering into the basement of a literary party, upon which he finds a political prisoner being tortured by electric shock. A true story recounted by Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel. It comes as no surprise, as under Pinochet more than 28,000 Chileans were tortured, with 3,200 others disappeared. What Bolaño draws attention to here, is the complicity of the literary establishment, of figures like Zurita and By Night's fictional protagonist, that selfishness and self-serving behaviour that let them close one eye to atrocities for personal boons.

The surviving infrarealists of Latinoamérica have continued their self-imposed exile from mainstream literature. Juan Esteban Harrington (Juan García Madero in the novel) works as an independent filmmaker today. José Peguero (Jacinto Requena), now 67, still lives with the perspective of infrarealism.

"The perspectives of Infrarealism are still valid. Infrarealism is a way of being, of absorbing life, pleasure, poetry. For me, the movement is still very alive, but the popular perception is that we're all dead. But it was never about institutional recognition, and we're still keeping that sort of belligerent attitude alive."

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WRITERS, WHORES AND ELEGIES

The infrarealists practised an anti-establishment, aesthetic exile from mainstream literature. But what of the geographical, literary exile? Bolaño himself was a political exile. He returned to his homeland Chile for a month at the young age of 20, only to find himself imprisoned after the Pinochet coup. Narrowly escaping, he was unable to return for more than two decades. Auxilio Lacouture (Alcira Soust Scaffo in real life), the protagonist of Amulet, was also a Uruguayan exile.

Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory. The politician can and should feel nostalgia. It's hard for a politician to thrive abroad. The working man neither can nor should: his hands are his homeland.
-Bolaño, Literature and Exile

Geographical exile didn't make a difference in Bolaño's writing. Nationalism was "a statue of shit slowly sinking into the desert", much less any nostalgia for the wretched Pinochet dictatorship in his native Chile. Exile was a return to one's "true size of being" (49), a state of pureness and core.

The writer, by the nature of their work, is an outsider and an exile. Literature is a dangerous undertaking. One of Bolaño's most confusing characters in TSD is Lupe, a young prostitute on the run from her pimp boyfriend who measures his cock with a knife. What does she have to do with the Bohemian poets? Bolaño's essay Exiles sheds some light on it: "The writer is and works in any situation [. . .] Whores, perhaps, come closest in the exercise of their profession to the practice of literature." Both writers/poets and whores are marginalised and exiled, operating in a transactional relationship with society. For Lupe, it's her pimp boyfriend. For the visceral realists, it's a mirror of how the literary elite is funded by the state. Those poets, according to Bolaño, are whores, and the State is their pimp, the State which massacred students at UNAM, the State which tortured political prisoners in the basement of literati parties. The novel imitates this structure of exile in its fragmented, multi-voiced second part. In a sense, it resembles how the poets of Latin America are scattered across the world. In the Bakhtinian sense there is no truth, but many competing narratives.

In the ending sequence of Amulet, Bolaño depicts the child poets of Latinoamérica marching inexorably towards the abyss. It's inevitable: the narrator speaks from the present and the future and the past. And like the lost poets, those characters in the stairwell were exile-alienated from their nature as well. The nihilist filmmaker works at a bank. The Danish engineer returned to Denmark as an engineer. The Filipino poet no longer writes poetry. All assimilated into the superstructure, for good or bad. Capital subsumes all. Of the characters mentioned, only the short story maestro continues to write short stories, albeit at a less prolific pace. The BL enjoyer, of course, still writes yaoi fanfiction. God bless BL. The Filipino poet, the Danish engineer were peacefully assimilated by Capital, alienated from their nature, but what of Bolaño's lost poets? Shot, killed, oppressed, massacred, tortured and erased by dictators, capitalists, juntas, death squads and the complicit literary establishment. This is what lies outside the window. Bones of forgotten youths, la tierra de nada. Voluntary exile into the window, away from the horror. The Savage Detectives is an elegy to those lost in those brutal days, a "love letter or a farewell letter to [Bolaño's] own generation" who chose to live life, with passion and convulsion.