1

THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR:ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G. SEBALD, AND NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES

A thesis submitted to the faculty ofSan Francisco State University

In partial fulfillment ofThe requirements for

The degree

Master of Artsin:

Comparative and World Literature

by

Jessie Byron Ferguson

San Francisco, California

August 2007

2

Copyright byJessie Byron Ferguson

2007

3

CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Archimedean Author by Jessie

Byron Ferguson, and that in my opinion this work meets

the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of

Arts in Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco

State University

___________________________________________Dane JohnsonAssociate Professor of Comparative and WorldLiterature

___________________________________________Volker LangbehnAssociate Professor of German

4

THE ARCHIMEDEAN AUTHOR:ROBERTO BOLANO, W.G. SEBALD, AND NARRATIVE AFTER BORGES

Jessie Byron FergusonSan Francisco State University

2007

This study examines the representation of reading, writing, criticism and authorship in

three recent novels: La literatura nazi en América [Nazi Literature in the Americas] and

Estrella distante [Distant Star] by Roberto Bolaño, and Die Ringe des Saturn [The Rings

of Saturn] by W.G. Sebald. Both authors pay tribute to the work of Jorge Luis Borges in

their fiction, and I argue that Borges’ short fiction is an important antecedent to the

metafictional, intertextual narrative structure of the three later novels. But those novels

also significantly modify Borges’ fictional model of the interconnected worlds of people

and texts, partially as a response to the traumatic experiences of historical violence which

play a major role in their work, but also as a deeper critique of the position (and

obligations) of the author in time and space. I argue that these practices are productive

not only as a way of negotiating recent literary and political history, but as possible future

models for writers with similar concerns.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

______________________________________________ _________________Chair, Thesis Committee Date

5

PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first debt of gratitude is to my advisors, Volker

Langbehn and Dane Johnson, whose insight and diligence

in reading and criticizing this project have been invaluable.

I would also like to thank Professor Shirin Khanmohamadi,

who gave useful feedback for an early paper on this topic;

the 2005-06 editors of Portals who accepted that paper for

publication; Daniel Medin, for sharing his work on Sebald

(and many other things); and my cohort in general,

particularly Will Arighi, Christy Rodgers, Rachel Gibson

and Olga Zilberbourg, for encouragement and comments. I

have benefited from innumerable conversations about my

work with friends, and from the love and support of my

family, who will all continue to be effusively

acknowledged outside these pages. Finally, Paul Kerschen

gave me inestimable intellectual and moral support during

my degree program; without him this thesis would not have

been possible.

v

6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Chapter One: Beyond Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Chapter Two: Where Stories Begin and End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Chapter Three: From the Air: Maps and Narrative Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51

Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

vi

1

INTRODUCTION

W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and Roberto Bolaño’s

La literatura nazi en América (Nazi Literature in America) and Estrella distante (Distant

Star) are novels about writers and texts— in the former case, mostly English writers and

historical texts; in the latter cases, mostly invented writers and imaginary, belletristic

texts. The first two titles— Estrella distante is a slightly different case— fall into

different bands of a broad spectrum of “encyclopedic” writing, and they freely mix

fiction and fact, author and narrator, firsthand consciousness and secondhand

information. They invite the reader to look over the narrator’s shoulder, as it were, as he

processes an enormous amount of information and ultimately tries to derive meaning

from it. Certain artificial devices common to all three novels, though, hold the same

reader at a distance: most notably, the disjuncture between the author and the first-person

narrator identified with him.

The use of a fictional double for the author in these novels does not, as in some

metafictional writing, have significant implications for the world of the novel itself: that

is, it isn’t especially important either to plot or to other characters that one character is

also “the author.” The doubling affects the relationship with the reader instead. The

authorial narrators play the role of both writer and reader; they are by turns allied with

and opposed to the real reader of the novel. That real reader must therefore attend to

several different levels, and types, of text within the unified whole: those written

originally and explicitly for the external reader (by the author-narrator as writer), and

those recapitulated by the author-narrator (acting as a phantom reader) and taken from

2

either real or fictitious outside sources. In this respect, it doesn’t matter whether those

sources are real or invented; what matters is that the narrator portrays himself as reading

them.

In the first of this study’s three chapters, I suggest that we look at reading,

writing, criticizing, quoting, and similar practices as ways in which people coexist with

texts, and that in the process of coexistence there is more a balance than a hierarchy.

Throughout the three novels, the lives of the majority of characters are interwoven with

texts and experiences with texts; in the case of the narrators, consciously so. The

pressures of this unavoidable coexistence give rise to the formation of ambivalence,

enthusiasms, and nuanced ethical positions. One aim of this study is to trace and describe

that process of formation, particularly in the case of the narrators, and more particularly

regarding the way the narrators relate to their authors and mirror their literary concerns.

As I argue in the same chapter, both Sebald and Bolaño were well aware of Jorge

Luis Borges as a forerunner to the sorts of games they play with authorship and

readership. Bolaño held the Argentine writer in the highest esteem. In a lengthy and

diverse collection of his writing, Entre paréntesis (In Parentheses), Bolaño devoted at

least three complete essays (144-45; 174-75; 289-91) and parts of many others to Borges,

calling him “probablemente el mayor escritor que haya nacido en Latinoamérica”

(probably the greatest writer to have been born in Latin America) (23)1. He obviously

also feels an affinity with Borges’ writerly persona: the young, flamboyant vanguardist

poet turned contentious bibliophile, combining the best distillations of ancient and

modern aesthetics. Sebald comes from a separate, German-Austrian literary tradition, but

Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and his Libro de seres imaginarios (Book of

3

Imaginary Beings) make several appearances in Die Ringe des Saturn. Borges generally

avoided a direct engagement with his own historical milieu in his fiction, however, while

both Sebald and Bolaño take pains to place a history of violence and upheaval near the

centers of their novels. The consequences of this distinction play a large role in my next

two chapters.

In the second chapter I look more closely at a specific practice of reading and

writing— literary criticism— and at how both Bolaño and Sebald incorporate critical

positions and insights into their novels. The critic isn’t permitted to invent something out

of nothing like a fiction writer; he or she has other responsibilities, i.e., towards the

demands of history, the obligation of intelligent judgment, and the obligation to put

aesthetic clarity and acumen to proper use. There is a sharp antinomy between criticism

and fiction writing, and although both authors bring the two practices surprisingly close

together, their novels reveal an ambivalence about both kinds of claim to authority.

Despite this ambivalence, both authors offer a positive view of the experience of a shared

community of readers.

In the third chapter, I look at the roles of geography in these novels: questions of

space, nation, and exile, and identification as a member of a geographically-defined

group. Primarily, the narrators— who share with their authors the experience of exile—

portray their homelands as something troubled, inscrutable, damaged, and abandoned

without the possibility of return. Their exterior positions give them a uniquely

cosmopolitan view of their subject matter, but they retain an anxiety about the past, a

desire to adequately mourn its losses, and above all a sense of inadequacy and

4

helplessness to find a position, either individual or collective, that will let this mourning

take place.

This work is therefore neither a study of only metafiction or intertextuality nor a

study of only memory and historical trauma in recent literature. Both aspects are equally

critical to the force and meaning of these three novels, even if the relationship between

them is often vexingly complicated for the scholar; indeed, the fact that these works

strive to negotiate both aspects at once provides particular motivation for a comparative

study. In spite of distinct traditions, styles, and settings, their worlds overlap

geographically, historically and literarily, and I hope to show that they share an

underlying ethical affinity as well.

To my knowledge, the comparison of Bolaño and Sebald is limited to a single

reference in a Times Literary Supplement review of Bolaño’s 2666, written by a translator

then in residence at the University of East Anglia, where Sebald formerly taught

(Gabantxo 34). The serendipity of this connection, which would not be out of place in

either author’s work, nor in a Borges story, forms a fitting impetus for this study. Sebald

was born in 1944 in Germany but resided for most of his adult life in England, teaching

German literature and writing, until his death in 2001; nearly all of his creative works

were published during the last decade of his life. Bolaño was born in Chile in 1953 but

spent his adolescence in Mexico; after an ill-fated return to Chile a month before the

1973 coup d’etat, he fled first to Mexico and then to Spain, where he and his family lived

until his death in 2003. Both writers grew up in regions haunted by violence and its

aftermath, and both chose to live as expatriates in their adult years, writing a series of

novels in rapid succession during the relatively peaceful decade of the 1990s.

5

The two also occupy an unusual place in their respective (linguistically-unified, if

not “national”) literary traditions, coming years or even decades after a much-honored,

artistically and economically successful generation of postwar writers— in Bolaño’s

case, primarily the Latin American Boom; in Sebald’s, the generation of Günter Grass,

Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Paul Celan, and others.

Neither Bolaño nor Sebald belongs to a similar generation, with similar clout; to the

extent that their work is autobiographical, it shows that they respond as writers far more

to predecessors than to peers. I am sure Bolaño, a voracious reader with an interest in

German literature, encountered Sebald’s work at some point, but I am equally sure that

Sebald had no acquaintance with Bolaño’s work, which wasn’t translated into English (or

any other language Sebald read, to my knowledge) until 2004. Nevertheless, I hope the

dialogue between these works can be a fruitful source for more comparative work on

Sebald, Bolaño, and their interlocutors, and on German and Latin American comparative

literature in general.

6

CHAPTER ONE: Beyond Borges

It may seem perverse to begin a study with Borges, who so deliberately styled

himself, in his writing, as the heir and curator of literatures past. In what way can the

latest link in a long chain of readers and interpreters be seen as an originator? Borges

himself offers one, somewhat cryptic answer in the essay “Kafka y sus precursores”

(Kafka and his precursors):

In the critical vocabulary the word precursor is indispensable, but one must try to

purge it of all connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer

creates his precursors. . . . Within this correlation, the identity or multiplicity of

individuals doesn’t matter at all.2 (Borges, Otras inquisiciones 109)

In this model, there is a unity in an author’s body of work strong enough to be reflected,

backwards and forwards in time, in other writing. The examples of Kafka’s precursors in

the essay transcend genre and language: Borges draws the associative line not through

coincidences in plot or harmony of detail but through a shared gnoseological outlook.3

Borges emphasizes the strangeness of the connections: “the heterogeneous works I have

enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble one another”4

(109). If Kafka, in this Borgesian reading, determines his own precursors, then the set of

stories, utterances, ideas, and tropes we metonymize under Borges’ name can determine

its own successors. Position in time is immaterial.

But I cannot dispatch the question of Borges’ inappropriateness as a starting point

so easily. In a study of Borges’ translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (itself a

highly allusive and intertextual work), Christopher Johnson positions Borges on a line

7

running through Browne and Quevedo5— with whom Borges shares an affinity for

quotation, linguistic play, and great conceptual breadth within a single oeuvre— and

ultimately extends that line through W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn. Johnson,

referring specifically to the Browne translation, makes the strong claim that it “enacts the

seventeenth-century dream of the universal author” (175) on Borges’ behalf, with both

moral and material support from Brown, Quevedo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares:

By making his friend and contemporary Bioy Casares, together with the great

Spanish conceptista poet, Francisco de Quevedo, complicit in his translation of

Browne’s magnificent meditation on funerary practices and mortality, Borges

effectively redefines translation as proof of the notion of the universal author. He

confirms, in effect, what Antoine Berman calls ‘l’étayage de l’acte traductif’, that

is: ‘d’une manière générale, traduire exige des lectures vaste et diversifiées’.

(174)

For Borges, writing fiction also “exige des lectures vaste et diversifiées.” Johnson

seeks to blur the line between the Urn Burial translation, which Borges actually

performed, and the short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which concludes with the

pseudo-Borges narrator translating Urn Burial. In a similar way, I want to show how, in

Borges’ stories “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” a

variety of activities— reading, writing, translating, criticizing— all clearly become

infected with the same paradigmatic questions about the status of literature: questions of

how people and books coexist. My inquiry takes the idea of coexistence seriously, even

if it must restrict its answer by considering only a recent segment of the long lines of

author-reader-translator-critics in world history.

8

What do I mean by coexistence? The question has several parts: first, the way a

book exists as opposed to the way a person exists; second, how these two sorts of

existence overlap in space and time; third, how they interact and change one another

within that shared region. In the first case, individual books are more durable, portable,

and reproducible than individual people, who have lifespans, periods of development and

degeneration, and unique and irreproducible bodies— for Borges this was an enormous

and productive disparity. In the second case, people write books (usually just once, and

sometimes with collaborators); read them (any number of people simultaneously or

sequentially, any number of times— depending on the number of copies and readers of

its language); criticize and translate them (less often, but still potentially more than once),

and produce other books or parts of books, which are then read by other people. These

processes, furthermore, can all be described in writing.

The third aspect of coexistence— interaction and change— is harder to formulate.

The analyses in this study help to document this process in a few selected works by three

writers, which are, if not a statistically significant set of data, still an interesting one,

varied in time, space, language, and culture. For Borges, writing before, during, and after

World War II, a certain aestheticism, and an affirmation of the autonomy of the artist, had

not yet fallen widely out of favor6. As I will show, the example of Tlön exhibits a

sustained mental engagement with philosophical questions— which come to transform

the world— which would seem out of place in the works I discuss by W.G. Sebald and

Roberto Bolaño, or indeed in most works of contemporary fiction. It is hard to imagine

Sebald and Bolaño’s haunted, peripatetic narrators allowing themselves the impassivity

we see in “Tlön”’s narrator’s slow, steadfast work on a translation of Sir Thomas Browne

9

in the face of cultural apocalypse; it is easier to imagine them unsettled by a mirror, like

Bioy Casares at the beginning of the tale (Borges, Ficciones, 13-14). Both Bolaño and

Sebald attempt to strike a balance between an authoritative narrative voice and a formally

restrained, scholarly or journalistic position, but the balance is uneasy. The weight of the

quoted subject matter exerts an immense pressure, against which the author who has

created the novels himself must employ a variety of stabilizing tactics.

In a brief overview of Borges’ work, Paul de Man claims: “the subject of the

stories is the creation of style itself. . . . His main characters are prototypes for the writer,

and his worlds are prototypes for a highly stylized kind of poetry or fiction” (125). The

observation is only half accurate: the analogies of world with book and agent with writer

are ubiquitous in Borges, but he moves from one side of each analogy to the other

without fundamentally privileging either— there are plenty of non-prototypical writers,

poems, and works of fiction in his stories. Just as Borges’ invented worlds can be seen as

prototypes for writing, writing can be seen as a prototype for an uncomfortable sort of

epistemology. De Man claims that each story is built around a central “act of infamy”

(125); he reads this trope of the villain as an allegory of authorship, the catalyst for

Borges’ achievement of his writing style:

This style in Borges becomes the ordering but dissolving act that transforms the

unity of experience into the enumeration of its discontinuous parts. Hence his

rejection of style lié and his preference for what grammarians call parataxis, the

mere placing of events side by side, without conjunctions; hence also his

10

definition of his own style as baroque, “the style that deliberately exhausts (or

tries to exhaust) all its possibilities.7” (128)

This baroque stylistic model— exhausting possibilities one by one, considering

and reconsidering— is also the critical model par excellence: in its drive for

thoroughness it outstrips even the accomplishments of de Man’s essay. Indeed, one

signal feature of “Tlön” and “Pierre Menard” is the subtle allegiance of the narrator (of

experienced events, rather than books) with a reader and critic, and this allegiance will be

fairly constant through the texts I examine. Borges’ word “exhaust” brings to mind the

image of a hunt, which ends only when the quarry is too tired to run and has abandoned

every hiding place and escape route: the elements of life and chance in a story allow the

plot to run its course, while the author systematically bars every exit, working against

development and entropy, until the story’s world stands still. In Borges, an ironic gesture

from the narrator cuts off the mirroring and extension of concepts and texts: the classic

example here is the end of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

In addition to the essay on Kafka, Borges furnishes another odd juxtaposition of

precursors in his essay on Paul Valéry, “Valéry como símbolo” [Valéry as symbol].

Borges maintains that, as with Walt Whitman, whose mythologized self is not identical

with the biographical author, we can best understand Valéry through his alter ego,

Edmond Teste (himself a child of Poe’s fiction: “a derivation of Edgar Allen Poe’s

Chevalier Dupin”8 (Otras inquisiciones 77)). The author and protagonist figure of Valéry

that Borges synthesizes has a transcendent power as an ideal himself: “a man who, in an

era that adores the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion, always preferred the lucid

pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order”9 (78). Teste is not coextensive

11

with Valéry, but the two are radically connected. More to the point, this characterization

of Valéry invites cathexis and admiration: he symbolizes not an aesthetic ideal but an

ideal of the human mind.

Pierre Menard, eponymous “Autor del Quijote,” is presented as a friend of Valéry

(and not of Edmond Teste). We see the following entry on his curriculum vita, a long list

of heterogeneous, scholarly activities:

p) An invective against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul’s Pages for the

Suppression of Reality. (That invective, it should be noted parenthetically, is the

exact inverse of his true opinion of Valéry. The latter understood it as such, and

the old friendship between the two was not endangered.)10 (Borges, Ficciones 51)

The narrator immediately introduces Menard to us as a novelist (47), but there are no

novels in his curriculum vita, indeed no fiction at all. His “invisible”11 rewriting of Don

Quijote suffices to make him a novelist in the eyes of the narrator, but by trade he seems

to have been a poet and critic. Not just poetry but philosophy, chess, Boolean logic, and

linguistics interest and occupy him: like Teste, he seems drawn to “the lucid pleasures of

thought and the secret adventures of order” (Borges, Otros Inquisiciones 78).

In the midst of his plans to write the Quijote, we learn that Menard has dismissed

his initial plan—to take on Cervantes’ life in 17th century Spain— as “fácil” (easy)

(Borges, Ficciones 53). The narrator interjects: “More like impossible! the reader will

say. To be sure, but the enterprise was impossible from the beginning and of all the

impossible ways of completing it, this was the least interesting”12 (53). This passage is

broadly comic, and in a way self-reflexive too. Borges writes (so he says) in a kind of

Baroque style meant to exhaust possibilities, but here he shows his diffident French

12

protagonist choosing among impossibilities on the basis of their difficulty. Borges

portrays his own stylistic process through a looking-glass, and the result is absurd.

Why is Menard in fact French? De Man identifies him directly with Valéry and

Teste (126); Johnny Payne interprets him as “the seeming antithesis of Argentinity and

the Hispanic past” (210) and moreover as a man free from filial anxiety towards

Cervantes. Cervantes is, to use Borges’ term, not an automatic precursor to Menard, who

belongs in a generative line stretching from Poe to Edmond Teste. The narrator,

however, slowly comes to align Cervantes and Menard:

Some nights ago, paging through chapter XXVI [of Don Quijote]— which he

never attempted— I recognized our friend’s style and something like his voice in

this exceptional sentence: the nymphs of the rivers, the sorrowful and humid

Echo. That efficacious conjunction of a moral adjective with a physical one

called to mind a verse of Shakespeare, which we had discussed one afternoon:

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .13 (53-54)

It seems Menard has created a precursor for himself in the narrator’s mind, but he has

done so as a reader and critic, not as a writer. The perceived affinity—of word choice

and grammar, not sensibility or philosophy— between the phrase of Cervantes and the

discussion of Shakespeare corresponds to Menard’s “visible” philological work.

Elsewhere in Menard’s curriculum vita we find essays on symbolic logic, French

prosody, and poetic language, as well as this entry:

n) An obstinate analysis of the “syntactic customs” of Toulet (N. R. F., March

1921). Menard— I recall— declared that praise and censure are sentimental

operations which have nothing to do with criticism.14 (50)

13

His friend the narrator, certainly, will not take this dictum to heart when he praises

Menard’s unfinished labor at the end of the story. Both friends are locked in a reciprocal

vanity of artistic aims: Menard wants to conjure an almost Platonically pure text devoid

of human contamination; the narrator applauds his work as a great technical advance for

readers, who are now free to imagine other texts in the hands of a diversity of identifiable

writers in different historical periods. Both are utopian fantasies— one of transcendental

artistic transparency, the other of artistic meaning determined by place and time— and

neither fantasy survives, even in compromised form, among the two writers to whom I

now turn.

Roberto Bolaño died, in the summer of 2003, after a short but remarkably prolific

career as a prose writer. Apart from one early novel— which he co-wrote with Antoni

García Porta in 1984— no fewer than ten of his novels and collections of stories were

published between 1993 and 2004. His last novel, 2666, appeared after his death in 2004,

as did Entre paréntesis, a collection of book reviews, periodical writing, and

miscellaneous essays. I note the compression of this publication history only because,

given the many connections (of characters, plots, and locations, to say nothing of ideas

and themes) between his novels, it is quite likely that many were written simultaneously

and thus that separations among them are rather tenuous. In La literatura nazi en America

(Nazi Literature in the Americas), Bolaño creates a wide-ranging fictional encyclopedia

of “Nazi” writers from all over the Americas. The invented writers interact with real

ones (for instance, a fictional Cuban writer challenges José Lezama Lima to a series of

duels, although Lezama never shows up); one or two also meet Hitler or serve in the

14

German army. Both La literatura nazi en América and Estrella distante (Distant Star)

were published in 1996; the latter is an expansion of the last “chapter” of the former.

Bolaño explicitly addresses the question of the narrator’s identity, left somewhat

vague in La literatura nazi en América, in a preface to Estrella distante: he— or an

individual who refers to La literatura nazi as “mi novela”— invents a conversation with

“my compatriot Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions and a

suicide in Africa15,” who told him the story in the final chapter of La literatura nazi and

with whom,

according to the dictates of his dreams and nightmares, we composed the novel

which the reader now has before him. My function was reduced to making

drinks, consulting a few books, and discussing, with him and the ghost, each day

more alive, of Pierre Menard, the validity of many repeated paragraphs.16

(Estrella Distante 11)

How is Estrella distante the product of consultation with “the ghost, each day

more alive, of Pierre Menard”? Formally, “Pierre Menard” assembles an intricate model

of the literary work and its historical context. There are four levels of reality, mediated

by quotation17: Cervantes is quoted by Menard, who is quoted by the narrator—who is

quoted (in a slightly different sense) by the author. But the narrator and Menard read

books by other writers outside their acquaintance (like Cervantes), such as Quevedo and

William James and Leibniz; and Menard at least is acquainted with other writers, Valéry

and D’Annunzio, as real to him as the narrator is. For the author, Borges, however, every

person in the story is either archival or fictional18; and for the reader (unless he is

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s son-in-law), the same is true.

15

La literatura nazi shares these four levels of reality with “Pierre Menard”;

formally, then, what distinguishes the two is the novel’s final episode. To the active

archival and fictional players in the narrative Bolaño adds a third category, the political-

historical, in the form of Salvador Allende’s government and the Chilean coup d’etat.

Many of the fictional writers are contemporaries of Bolaño himself (some, in fact, inhabit

the future), but only the incorporation of first-person narrative within the novel’s final

episode allows the historical force, otherwise only metonymized by the term “Nazi,” to

be developed fully .

But even within the fictional game its preface sets up, Estrella distante differs

substantially from the antecedent chapter of La literatura nazi; whereas Menard, by

contrast, is the fictional “author” of a verbatim, if fragmentary, rewriting of Don Quijote.

Belano, like Menard, is a doppelgänger for his author: a writer who tries to demonstrate

the imperviousness of writing to historical circumstance and ends by revealing the

opposite. The parallel is not exact, but it is suggestive. The lesson in Borges’ story is

one of the indifference of the words on the page to their contextual meaning— compared

with lexicon and poetic construction, context and intertextuality do far more work and

exercise an overriding hermeneutic power. The lesson in Estrella distante is slightly

different, given that Bolaño is creating an imitation of himself (Belano) who helps a

second, differentiated imitation of himself (the narrator of La literatura nazi) to rewrite a

text initially told by the first imitation to the second. There are doppelgängers and even

Tripelgängers here, but all are attempting to rewrite a real and increasingly remote

history, from which— far from being multiplied— the voices of writers are

systematically removed. I will return to this point in the next two chapters.

16

Whereas Bolaño pays tribute to Borges’ meditation on authorship, Sebald

incorporates a different parable about textuality into his Ringe des Saturn: namely, “Tlön,

Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the story of an imaginary world based roughly on idealistic

philosophy which eventually intrudes into our own world, and whose epistemology—

mediated by language—threatens to wipe out human languages and understanding.

Sebald reproduces portions of the story almost verbatim at the end of the third chapter of

Die Ringe des Saturn:

The world will be Tlön. But to me, so the narrator concludes, that matters little, I

am further refining, in the leisurely quiet of my country house, a tentative

translation, after Quevedo, of Urn Burial by Thomas Browne (which I do not

intend to have published).19 (91)

The primary context is Sebald’s previous discussion of Sir Thomas Browne, which links

the work of the English polymath with Rembrandt’s painting of a dissection and localizes

a certain dispassionate fascination with physical destruction. But Sebald introduces the

Borges story rather peculiarly, without reference to the author: “Many years later I read,

in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, written in 1940 at Salto Oriental in Argentina, of the

rescue of an entire amphitheatre by a few birds”20 (Ringe des Saturn [RS] 87). Although

Sebald dates the text of the story “1940, Salto Oriental,” a “postscript” dated 1947

contradicts the authenticity of the composition date which Sebald’s narrator cites as fact.

The line about the birds and the amphiteatre reads merely: “At times a few birds, a horse,

have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre”21 (Borges 30). There is little “how” to “read of”

17

in this terse sentence, and Sebald’s focus on this single disjointed line in a story so rich in

information and detail is almost comic. And, soon thereafter:

The memory of the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the aforementioned

Argentine tale, which is primarily concerned with our attempts to invent worlds to

the second or even third degree . . .22 (RS 89)

In Sebald’s redaction, the narrator first recounts his dinner with Bioy Casares and their

discussion of an experimental novel, then their subsequent disquieting encounter with a

mirror, and finally their conversation about the mysterious country of Uqbar and sources

for information about it—the “world to the second degree,” perhaps, to which Sebald

refers. The narrator leaps across the narrative concerning Tlön into the postscript— “thus

reads a postscript from 1947”23: again, Sebald’s narrator takes Borges’ dates literally— to

discuss the penetration of Tlön into the world (RS 91). The final sentences of the

redaction are almost direct translations of the end of the story.

El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), the

collection from which “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is taken, was published in 1941, so

the 1947 date for the postscript is fictitious. Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine

writer and friend to Borges. Although they surely dined together and discussed writing

many times, the dinner and discussion in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is fictional.

Sebald himself has always taken pains to stress that his own narrators are fictional,

although they overlap considerably with his own biography and history. (The narrators

are never named, although in several cases they allude to photographs included with the

text24.) For the Sebald-narrator to take at face value the dates given by the Borges-

narrator of “Tlön” and to foreground the experiential elements of the narrative (rather

18

than the speculative discussion of the metaphysics of Tlön) until it has become a part of

the world of the Borges-narrator, is to take pains to place the two almost on the same

quasi-fictional, quasi-historical plane— to align their positions in the intertextual

hierarchy. As Sebald’s narrator concludes his recollections and observations, Borges’

narrator abandons his absorption in the nonexistent text about Tlön and goes on to discuss

his translation of Thomas Browne, the very author Sebald’s narrator has just been reading

and discussing. For a moment, the two narrators are almost precisely superimposed in a

drastically simplified image of a single reader studying a single text. But the consonance

of the image is fleeting, and like Pierre Menard’s Quijote, it cannot hold its integrity

against the immense perturbation of histories, other readings, and other contexts.

In 1973, the year of the coup in Chile and more than two decades before the

composition of the above novels, the American literary critic Harold Bloom published

The Anxiety of Influence, a study of the development of English poetry.

My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to

wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize;

figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for

nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness,

for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?

(11)

He outlines a six-stage process of negotiating this anxiety that resembles a heroic quest,

culminating in a “return of the dead” (15). It is hard to imagine a conception of literature

more alien to the aspects I have described of the works above: Bloom’s conception of a

19

strong poet (and he treats the whole man, including as evidence not just verse but the

poets’ letters and journal entries [13]) is defined by the imagination: “strength” and

“weakness,” “wrestling . . . even to the death” are wholly psychological processes,

bounded only by metaphoric language. The poet is not solely inferred from his writing:

he is an idealized, heroic figure; his works have mythic resonance.

However, this is not a model any of my three writers consciously, or coherently,

reject. Indeed, I suspect (albeit without proof) that all of them would secretly like to be

such strong poets: their critical work, including Borges’ essays above and the criticism I

will examine in the next chapter from Sebald and Bolaño, evinces a certain amount of

wrestling with precursors. None of them “desires the realization that he has failed to

create himself,” but they come to that realization anyway. The act of infamy, which,

according to de Man, makes stories possible for Borges, may be related genealogically to

Bloom’s struggles of anxiety. Fictions, unlike lyric or epic poetry, must mediate directly

between books and people— between what is lived but unwritten, and what is written but

unlived— and in clearing a space for narrative, they will invariably (and violently) clear

something away. All three writers meet such acts of creation with ambivalence. Borges

was able to generate a series of stories that could thematically embed this anxiety and

turn it to his creative advantage. Neither Bolaño nor Sebald write fictions that deal with

the question of authorship as concisely as, say, “Pierre Menard,” or with the tension

between text and reality as concisely as “Tlön.” Nonetheless, this anxiety permeates their

work, and, as I will show, they ultimately choose different resolutions for it.

20

CHAPTER TWO: Where Stories Begin and End

In Myth and Archive, a study of the Latin American novel, Roberto González

Echevarría advances a sweeping thesis on novels as such:

The most persistent characteristic of books that have been called novels in the

modern era is that they always pretend not to be literature. The desire not to be

literary, to break with belles-lettres, is the most tenacious element in the novel.

Don Quijote is supposed to be the translation of a history written in Arabic . . .

Other novels are or pretend to be autobiographies, a series of letters, a manuscript

found in a trunk, and so forth. (González Echevarría 7)

If González Echevarría is defining “the modern era” to include everything between Don

Quijote and the work of Alejo Carpentier in the 1950s, then it seems unlikely that novels

really “always” pretend not to be literature. However, he explains concisely in a preface

that, within the restricted setting of Latin America, novelists do tend to undercut their

own literary authority with claims to analytic, critical rigor: “Latin American writers all

too often fashion themselves as critics,” and “the complicity between literature and

criticism in Latin America” is ubiquitous, if rarely admitted (ix). His study goes on to

draw a connection between narrative fiction and legal discourse, and notes the

preoccupation among Latin American writers— particularly Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel

García Márquez— with the fallacy inherent in the concept of a “New World” that can lay

down its own laws and generate a stable and lasting social order ex nihilo. New stories

are always pursued by older stories; it falls to them to plead their cases according to

precedent or against it. The simultaneous striving for innovation and its inevitable failure

21

is a mainstay of the novel in Latin America.

Bolaño’s novels often pretend not to be literature, are concerned with precursors

and with the future of Latin America, and set up a stark opposition between writing and

political power, so they seem to conform quite well to González Echevarría’s description.

In providing a narrative for La literatura nazi en América, his pseudo-encyclopedia,

Bolaño clearly fashions himself as a critic as well. But La literatura nazi conforms

almost too well to González Echevarría’s model of archival fiction: it is a kind of hyper-

archive, and its conclusion is one of extreme disintegration. Rather than attempting

innovation and failing nobly, it attempts exhaustion and, in a way, succeeds.

In addition to a series of author profiles (which I will call “episodes”), La

literatura nazi contains an appendix with a list of names (not all of which are profiled in

the main text, although all are mentioned in one entry or another), a list of publications

culled from the entries, and a list of magazines and publishers. These artifacts are

completely invented; Bolaño could have put real authors or real journals on those lists,

too, but he did not. This appendix serves to conclude the book at one level of discourse,

which we can call the encyclopedic. Another, competing level of discourse is prose

fiction, or what González Echevarría calls belles-lettres. Within the body of the

narrative, there are no citations, no sources, no list of contributors, no footnotes. La

literatura nazi doesn’t take the final step into (false) completeness: it only gestures at

being an encyclopedia.

However, it evinces no anxiety about genre, no clear, sharp points of

ambivalence— a quality it shares with Die Ringe des Saturn, which has been assigned to

22

a wide variety of genres25 and given credit for inventing its own. The majority of

Bolaño's novels, including these two, constitute an informal roman-fleuve, which is itself

a way of writing life, of keeping the created work open within the realm of the artifact.

The preface to Estrella distante, which I discussed in Chapter One, implies that Arturo

Belano and the author are part of the same fictional universe. Belano, then, if we can

attribute any personhood to him, belongs to the same world as the characters in La

literatura nazi. It is a world, and it is a world full of other writers, just as the world of

Bolaño, Sebald, and myself is a world full of other writers with competing claims to the

seat of authorship. This is the entry point for criticism and critical discourse: while

neither writer really puts his critical self into the novels— Sebald doesn’t mention his

academic career or Bolaño his literary essays— fiction is the hand that takes away what

the critical hand gives: authority.

But these authors of criticism are still also authors of fiction: two very closely

allied forms of authority, signed by name, scripted by hand. By explicitly giving up

authority in the fiction, the authors can move the focusing eye of the narrative closer to

an Archimedean point beyond the contesting views of other authors. The critical eye

looks down on other writers as well, with a different kind of impersonality: rather than

incorporating the author in the third person, it either avoids person altogether or writes

within a manifestly shared, situated world.

Although Bolaño spares few countries26, two sets of Argentines— “Los

Mendiluce” and “Los Hermanos Schiaffino”— neatly form bookends for La literatura

nazi, thereby singling out a nation which shares both an illustrious literary culture and a

23

historically favorable disposition towards the Third Reich. But the narrative ultimately

comes to a close in Chile, Bolaño’s home country. The narrator (a fictionalized Bolaño,

called by name in the final line of the episode) switches discursive modes to give a first-

person account of Carlos Wieder, a.k.a. “Ramírez Hoffman, el infame.” (Although it is

not made explicit, it’s reasonable to suppose that the narrator of “Ramírez Hoffman” is

the same as the narrator of the foregoing encyclopedia.) Wieder is an avant-garde “poet”

who writes his verses in the sky with a World War II-era German war plane— and who

murders women, in particular two young poets whom the narrator knew as a teenager

when they frequented the same salon in southern Chile.

As a shadow history of European influences in Latin American society, and the

debates of the 19th and 20th centuries about national and ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism,

and social legitimacy, Bolaño’s narrative has an almost inexhaustible supply of historical

models. In a 2005 review of La literatura nazi, José Miguel Oviedo noted the Argentine

Leopoldo Lugones and the Mexican Juan Vasconcelos as two significant examples of

influential right-wing Latin American writers; he also mentions Alcides Arguedas (1879-

1946), a supposedly indigenist Bolivian novelist and essayist who cited Mein Kampf as

an authority on race relations in the 1937 prologue to his book Pueblo enfermo (The Sick

People) (Oviedo 69). David Rock, in an essay on the antecedents of nacionalista thought

in Argentina in the early 20th century, notes the influence of French thinkers like Charles

Maurras (17-19) and the prevalence of forms of reactionary Catholicism (20-24) similar

to the strains of ultraconservatism in Portugal and Spain. In some cases, Bolaño clearly

draws on these historical antecedents, especially when they are particular to a given

country— Juan Mendiluce Thompson could fit easily with Rock’s description of the

24

prototypical Argentine nacionalista (Literatura nazi, 24-26)— but in others, he shows

how an individual’s eccentricity can generate a peculiar, endogenous right-wing

ideology— by, for instance, applying Charles Olson’s theory of projective vs. non-

projective verse to the Bible, via North American evangelism (Literatura nazi, 139-43).

La literatura nazi doesn’t take a uniform tack with its author profiles: some of the

chapters are written in a detached, book-review style (what I have been calling “critical”

discourse), while others more closely resemble short stories in which the author’s literary

output— or the contents of it, at least— plays an ancillary role. Examples of the first

type include the figures in the section entitled “Precursores y antiilustrados” (precursors

and notorious figures); examples of the second might include Luz Mendiluce Thompson,

Irma Carrasco, Amado Couto, and, of course, Ramírez Hoffman (Carlos Wieder).

In Estrella distante, Bolaño provides much more detail about the formative years

of the poetic culture in Chile which produced the narrator, Carlos Wieder, the murdered

poets, and many others. He devotes several chapters respectively to profiles of a

Russian-Jewish émigré saloniste, a gay Chilean poet in exile, and a French translator of

indigenous descent. While La literatura nazi was a book about the Americas, extremely

wide in scope, Estrella distante is less “about Chile” than about individual Chileans.

Prescinded from the literary-historical pseudocontext of La literatura nazi, the narrative

loses the force of its sharp contrast with the silly, parodic literary works that traffic fairly

benignly in awful ideas, but the human sadness of the original episode’s end is deepened

by Bolaño’s eulogies for a nation in which not only literature but writers themselves were

violated and abused.

25

The “Arturo B,” or Arturo Belano, who narrates Estrella distante appears as

Bolaño’s doppelgänger throughout his fiction. The novels Los detectives salvajes and

Amuleto trace his career as a young Chilean poet in Mexico, and he is responsible,

apparently, for relating the story of Estrella distante. Ignacio Echevarría also notes in his

afterword to Bolaño’s final novel, 2666, that among the notes for the novel “one isolated

note reads: ‘The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano’”27 (Bolaño, 2666 1125).) Bolaño

effectively splits his authorial persona in two: he narrates the preface to Estrella distante

as his own amanuensis, while “Arturo B.” is given the authorial role and dictates the form

of the narrative. Why the split persona? Once he gains a separate identity, Belano

(whose first name slyly echoes auteur or artista) also acquires an unfathomable mind:

whatever biographical details he might share with his creator, whatever associations with

Mexico and Chile and Latin American literature, whatever loves and fears and acts of

bravery, his stories are not Bolaño’s stories, and to seek out a one-to-one correspondence

between his world and the author’s is futile. Their relationship is closer to what

Wittgenstein (in a different context), calls “family resemblances”: “a complicated

network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,

sometimes similarities of detail” (32e). In other words, the correspondence exists only as

far as any positive connections do; it provides not totality but an insistent suggestion.

Both La literatura nazi and Estrella distante present two kinds of knowledge:

knowledge of a literary tradition, of what can be found in books, and knowledge of a

personal sort, both of which are presented mimetically at a formally fictional level and

which reinforce one another and undermine (through satire and straightforward

denunciation) the historical circumstances which occasioned very similar books and very

26

similar personal experiences. One signal characteristic of La literatura nazi is the

assumption that none of the authors’ writing is particularly significant or meaningful to

the world at large, including its readers. There are no difficult cases in his book, on the

order of Céline or Heidegger, in which the author’s fascist sympathies fail to overshadow

or bury the mainstream value of the work. The “Nazi” orientation remains marginalized,

just as the political ideology has since the end of World War II; its writers occupy a

shadow world of coteries and infighting and nobly (or ignobly) preposterous artistic

innovations. Bolaño has portrayed for us an autonomous artistic world with which

neither men and women of talent nor the literary establishment can be bothered to

interact: it is an allegory of both artistic and political failure.

But this failure, as we see in Estrella distante, has two sides: on the one is the

ephemeral, yet terrifying art of Carlos Wieder, which remains a brief and sinister memory

in the annals of Chilean history; on the other is the unwritten poetry of the two

Garmendia sisters whom Wieder murders, just as the violence of the Pinochet years

swallows up the artistic community in which Belano, or Bolaño, took part in his youth.

The painstaking documentation of “Nazi literature” is a backhanded denunciation of all

writing that colludes with state violence and of the subcultures that sustain it. Only in the

final chapter of La literatura nazi is the shape of this violence discernable: what has been

left implicit is brought to the fore, and mockery gives way to horror.

W.G. Sebald is also preoccupied with the representation of violence in literature,

but he draws out the theme not only in his own fiction but also through his critical

writing. Unlike Bolaño (or Borges), Sebald held an academic position throughout his

27

literary career in the 1980s and 1990s, and was known as a scholar of Austrian literature

before he began writing poetry and novels. Although even in the academy his academic

work has never been as influential as his creative work, he has published several volumes

of criticism. Probably his best-known essay, “Luftkrieg und Literatur” (Air War and

Literature), began as a series of lectures on the suppression of depictions of German

suffering in the Allied fire bombings of World War II. It is not easy reading: he narrates

the destruction of Hamburg in a telegraphic style but spares no hideous detail (stinking,

parasite-ridden corpses fill the streets; zoo animals die), and he goes on to castigate his

contemporaries for their introjection of sentimentality and “kitsch” in this grisly picture.

A damning essay on the German novelist Alfred Andersch accompanies “Luftkrieg und

Literatur” in the German edition (called simply Luftkrieg und Literatur). The English

translation of both essays appeared in a volume called On the Natural History of

Destruction with two further essays on Jean Améry and Peter Weiss, two writers who

combine the personal and political in their writings on the Holocaust and their critique of

violence.

Andreas Huyssen compares Luftkrieg und Literatur with Sebald’s second novel,

Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), and finds a keen affinity between essay and

creative prose:

I would like to suggest that Sebald’s Luftkrieg essay is itself a repetition, a

rewriting of those earlier texts about the experience of strategic bombing . . .

closely related in its deep structure, its conceptual framework, and in its language

(though not in its narrative complexity) to the narrative stance of Die

Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants] itself. (Huyssen 82, my emphasis)

28

He also connects each of the texts examined in Luftkrieg with a particular moment in the

German public debate about World War II and present-day German literature, arguing

that Sebald’s own treatment of the issue unwittingly continues the series and belongs to

the post-1989 discourse of the first German generation without direct experience of the

war. Indeed, the most striking difference in “narrative stance” between the Luftkrieg

essay (and its companion piece, a critical essay on Alfred Andersch) and Sebald’s novels

is the harshly judgmental, almost savage tone of his literary criticism, which has no

parallel in his fiction. The pseudoautobiographical narrator is melancholy almost to the

point of caricature, confronted with a world he takes pains to reproduce without often

acknowledging, or recognizing, how he alters it. As a critic, however, Sebald is

unrestrained and prolix in his distaste—concluding a harsh reading of an early novel of

wartime destruction, he writes:

It is not easy to sum up the quantities of lasciviousness and ultra-German racial

kitsch Mendelssohn offers his readers (with, we must assume, the best of

intentions), but in any case his wholesale fictionalization of the theme of the

ruined city . . . plunges headlong into more than two hundred pages of trash. (On

the Natural History of Destruction [NHD] 56-57)28

In the essay on Andersch, whom Sebald finds morally abhorrent and to whom he directs

quite a few ad hominem attacks, he writes of Andersch’s wartime journalism that

“linguistic corruption and an addiction to empty, spiraling pathos are only the outward

symptoms of a warped state of mind which is also reflected in the content of his pieces”29

(NHD 125). But, in Luftkrieg, he makes positive statements as well: commending the

29

virtues of a medical report as against an overwrought, surrealistic passage by Arno

Schmidt, he asserts:

This medical account of the further destruction of a body already mummified by

the firestorm shows a reality of which Schmidt’s linguistic radicalism knows

nothing. His elaborate style veils over the facts that stare straight at us in the

language of those professionally involved in the horror[.]30 (NHD 60)

Shortly below this, he refers to “[t]he informative value of such authentic documents,

before which all fiction pales . . .”31 (NHD 60, my emphasis).

It’s worth taking a moment to counterpose this discussion— ostensibly of

“fiction” and “fact,” but really of poetics— with the description of Franz Zwickau’s

poem “Heimat” in La literatura nazi.32 The fictional Zwickau is an enfant terrible of

Venezuelan poetry in the 1960s, whose poem utilizes a detached, quasi-medical

discourse:

Heimat (350 lines) describes, in a curious mixture of Spanish and German— with

a few isolated expressions in Russian, English, French and Yiddish— the intimate

parts of his body with a forensic coldness, while working in the morgue the night

after a multiple homicide.33 (92)

It’s hard to imagine the critic Sebald approving of such a poem, if only because it

removes a poetics useful for conveying bare historical facts— which must necessarily be

shared by all— into a private, inventive realm, in which the objectivity of the “forensic”

discourse only serves to enhance the realistic quality of a merely grotesque fantasy.

(Even if we assume that this fictional poet wrote his fictional poem about a lived

experience, which doesn’t seem to be the case, it is presented as part of an overall

30

aesthetic tendency and a private, eccentric obsession with certain themes.) In Sebald’s

judgment of “Schmidt’s linguistic radicalism,” fiction pales before a medical report for

reasons Sebald wants to locate in the use of language, but which I think are more

generally situational. If we take this passage to imply a broader range of aesthetic

judgments than the small set focused on writing about the Luftkrieg, we can use the

documentary/aestheticism contrast he sets up as a lens for viewing his fiction. Other

critics have in fact remarked on his inconsistency across genres: Simon Ward, responding

to Huyssen’s essay, claims that “If Huyssen is correct, then Sebald’s own works would be

ruled out of court by the standards set in his 1982 essay [on writing and history]” (66).

I would propose, for the sake of argument, that one can look at Sebald’s narrator

as a character in the tradition of realist fiction. A hundred years ago, Die Ringe des

Saturn might have been published with a frame narrative like the one in “The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner,” with a wild-eyed Sebald buttonholing the wedding guest and telling

him about the time he tried to take a walk through Suffolk and stared into the heart of an

immense darkness. The frame narrator might offer physical descriptions of this tale-

spinner and of his environs, which the readers could take as relatively reliable. Imposing

such an archaic novelistic framework provides one view of how Die Ringe des Saturn

functions as a novel: the photographs take the place of the frame narrative, providing a

perspective outside the narrator’s own (even when he seems to have held the camera). I

will continue this line of inquiry in greater depth in the next chapter.

This Sebald-character is a remarkably limited narrative consciousness: his

signature melancholy is ironized by repetition, and the narrative’s sense of doom is

31

alienating and not always persuasive. It is also alienated itself: the narrator’s affect is

always recited, never demonstrated, and recited tersely, e.g.:

I was therefore not in the best of states next morning at the Mauritshuis . . . I was

so out of sorts after my bad night that I was quite unable to harness my thoughts .

. . Indeed, without knowing why, I was so affected by the painting that later it

took me a full hour to recover . . .34 (RS 82-83)

To me, this reticence signals less a kind of objectively overpowering, undefinable malaise

than a restricted vocabulary— one restricted either by (lack of) cognizance or by

formality. Between these recitations and one of the first facts we learn— that the narrator

was hospitalized exactly a year after he began his wanderings through Suffolk, and

suspects the wanderings somehow contributed to his paralysis— we can infer a barely-

expressible traumatic process. But the nonlinearity of the narrative confounds our

attempts to identify with this traumatic response: we are told first the effects

(hospitalization) and then the hypothetical cause (too much reflection on a catastrophic

history). The narrator briefly jumps backwards in time to relate a much earlier sojourn in

Ireland (Ringe 258-76)— as well as routinely jumping centuries or millennia backwards

in documentary time— and concludes the first-person narrative on a single well-

established date, April 13, 1995. The narrator’s internal, unshared experience of

melancholy and trauma structures his narrative, rather than being transmitted through it;

it provides melancholy with an anatomy, but not a dynamic, innervated existence.

This is not to propose an absolute separation of author and narrator. Although the

restrained narrative form of the documentary novels serves almost as a negative to the

positive, univocal register of the critic, Sebald the author does not disappear in his novels.

32

He is, as a montage artist, a commanding presence. Superficially, the reproduced objects,

texts, and conversations are allowed an unusual degree of self-explanatory power; it is

when one looks closer that one finds, as with the citation of dates in the quoted Borges

story, small ruptures and inconsistencies in the documentary surface. The voice of

Sebald the critic is also subtly distinct from the voice that narrates his novels, although

the similarities dominate. The form of the critical essay requires him to set up an

argument, but that argument seems often to depend on sensibility or psychology. In the

introduction to his collection of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des

Unglücks (“The Description of Misfortune,” or alternately “of unhappiness”), he

dismisses the reduction of Austrian literature’s pervasive theme of loss to mere nostalgia

for the Habsburg empire:

The persistence of nature, preserved in life before and after us, is the far more

significant correlative. Melancholy, the contemplation of present unhappiness,

has nothing in common with the death wish. It is a form of resistance. And on

the level of art its function is entirely other than simply relative or reactionary. 35

(Sebald, Beschreibung 12)

Sebald finds another theme in the work he criticizes in this volume: the “crucial

category of teaching and learning”36 (13), more typical of the Austrian than of the

“reichsdeutschen” (German national) tradition. This too, it seems, amounts to a form of

resistance, and he includes in this category both written work and lived experiences of

authors— both a passage from Kafka’s Castle and an episode from Wittgenstein’s life

(13).37 The hermeneutic distinction between work and life is porous: if you are reading

33

books to learn, you can learn as much from a biography as from a novel. In that case the

two genres do the same work.

Die Ringe des Saturn gives the critic a sensibility of his own. He can juxtapose

melancholy books with other melancholy objects in the world: the horrors of the Belgian

Congo can be narrated beside stories and documents from the life of Joseph Conrad.

Early in the book, before the narrator begins recounting his journey around England (the

novel is subtitled “Eine englische Wallfahrt,” “an English pilgrimage”), he recalls two

friends who have died since the journey’s end, both lecturers in Romance languages, the

one after the other. The first he describes as a model, happy scholar who died suddenly;

the second, who seemed bound to the first in “a sort of childhood friendship”38 (16), is a

scholar of the 19th-century French novel, with a distinctive approach:

([She had] in the course of her life developed a sort of private understanding of

the 19th-century French novel, free from any intellectual vanity, always

proceeding from obscure detail and never from the obvious.39 (Sebald, Ringe 16)

Sebald goes on to recount several of these details and interpretations in the voice of this

scholar, as he will do with countless other texts, letters, historical documents,

photographs and stories real and invented over the course of the novel— but it begins

with this potent image of the literary critic at work. The quiet intensity of her work is

linked through parataxis with her quiet devotion to her friend, whose loss, the narrator

speculates, causes her to collapse in illness. It compounds several images essential to a

model of the author and critic to which, I would argue, both Sebald and Bolaño adhere:

the links among writing, reading, and community, the idea of friendships forged through

shared reading and understanding, and the inextricable losses of both ideas and people.

34

This sense of solidarity pushes back against the anxious, self-splintering practice

of the critic, who tries— as in the case of Sebald’s reviews of Andersch and

Mendelssohn, or perhaps La literatura nazi’s “too schematic” version of the Ramírez

Hoffman story— to be more ethical than human. But the critical practice is a powerful

force in both novels, and it provides a very particular, elaborate structure through which

fragments of history, and small remnants of human life, can pass on their way to the

reader’s comprehension and sympathy. The fictionalized narrators, however, in turn

undercut the critical authority of the author by mirroring and displacing him, by showing

inconclusive doubt, worry and confusion: they give the novel’s structure its own voice

and sense of urgency in speaking, and thus make criticism fallible as well as necessary.

35

CHAPTER THREE: FROM THE AIR: MAPS AND NARRATIVE TERRITORY

So far I have examined two sources of external pressure on the narratives of

Bolaño and Sebald: first, the Borgesian model of metafiction and questions of the status

of the author; and second, a critically-oriented, historically motivated practice of ethical

judgment in writing. A third source of pressure derives from geography, broadly

conceived: physical space, nation, political history and its inscription on the physical

world, the itinerancy of individual people, and the experience of exile. Both Bolaño and

Sebald lived for many years outside their native countries: Bolaño lived primarily in

Spain, Sebald in England (which added a linguistic displacement to the geographical

one). To the extent that autobiography helped to form their novels, this fact of exile (or

expatriation) plays a role in the orientation of the narrative. The narrators of both La

literatura nazi and Die Ringe des Saturn share a sense of displacement, or estrangement,

from a circumscribed American or northern European area. (Estrella distante depends

less on a sense of geography, as most of the narrative takes place within a single country.)

Die Ringe des Saturn is subtitled “Eine englische Wallfahrt” (an English

pilgrimage). However, the narrator’s description of his physical travels digresses so

seamlessly into secondhand, historical or fictitious accounts of other lands and other

journeys— all within a somewhat monotonous narrative voice— that the reader finds it

difficult to separate firsthand from secondhand information. The loss of clear boundaries

between a situated, speaking subject and the distinct sources he cites— conversations,

literary biographies, diaries, writing by Borges or Browne, etc.— leaves the narrator

nearly as detached from present reality as the other, distant voices that he allows to speak

36

within the text: they are closer to him than everyday life in England, his adopted home—

to say nothing of the land of his birth, Germany.

La literatura nazi takes an entire hemisphere as its staging ground and uniformly

applies an exogenous political term—“Nazi”— to the contents of the narrative. As a

unifying concept, América is ultimately more effective than Nazi in giving the disparate

episodes in the book some common ground, and I will argue that within the American

continents, Bolaño both identifies his narrator (and thus his viewpoint) with Chile, and

also portrays Chile as a vertiginous, unsteady, and dangerous center of reference, from

which the narrator is fortunate to have escaped.

Each novel sets up an imaginative (if not fully imaginary) geography and marks

its narrator’s homeland as a negative center of violence and instability. From that center

radiates a concern with literary work, solidarity among writers (and just condemnation of

those who collude with violence), and the historical conditions with which writers of any

sort must reckon.

In an essay on the Chilean avant-garde under Pinochet, Nelly Richard refers

several times briefly to a 1982 installation by Raúl Zurita called “Sky Writing,”40

performed over the sky of New York in a plane. (She doesn’t mention what, exactly,

Zurita wrote in the sky.) Zurita, whose other works include a reshaping of the desert only

visible from the air, was part of the Colectivo Accionista de Arte (CADA), which styled

itself as a left-wing vanguard. Richard describes the desert installation as a sort of mirror

image of “Sky Writing”:

37

In August 1993 the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita effected an intervention in the

Northern Chilean desert (fifty-six kilometers inland from Antofagasta) that

consisted of inscribing on its surface a phrase three kilometers long: “Ni pena ni

miedo” [Neither grief nor fear]. [. . .] He re-cited his own poetry that, since his

1979 collection Purgatorio [Purgatory], had used the trope of the Chilean desert

to configure the evangelizing role of a “new writing” capable of transcending the

pain of national crucifixion. And he cited— by inverting its supports— “Las

escrituras en el cielo” . . . (35)

The interpretation Richard gives of CADA’s own goals for its installations carries its own

political ambiguity. In particular, in the passage below, she refers to “a stretch of canvas

that virtually blocks the entrance” of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (27):

To break with the foreclosure of art’s interiority (its inner walls) and accomplish

the avant-garde goal of art’s incorporation into life’s exteriority, the divisions that

render art incommunicable— the walls of a room (= the confinement of art and

the institution as closure)— must be abolished. [. . .] In CADA’s pieces, the

book’s page fades until it finally merges with the Chilean landscape that displaces

and replaces it. The image of the author is deindividuated to the point that it is

lost— multiplied— into anonymity: “Everyone who works, if only mentally, to

expand the spaces in his or her life is an artist.”41 (27)

This is probably not Richard’s own view of CADA’s work, I should emphasize: she goes

on to criticize the inherent assumptions of CADA’s explicit program and concludes on a

note of ambivalence. The idea that the work is fascist, however, is never even suggested.

It’s unlikely that Bolaño had no knowledge of these installations while he was writing La

38

literatura nazi: the parallels between “Sky Writing” and Ramírez Hoffman, or between

the desert “intervention” and Willy Schürholz, are too exact to be coincidental. The

“Willy Schürholz” and “Ramírez Hoffman” episodes of La literatura nazi/Estrella

distante— two of the three total episodes set in Chile— have their own ambiguities and

complications. I will briefly sketch them here and go on to identify key aspects of their

portrayal of space and place as they are developed elsewhere in these texts.

Willy Schürholz was born and raised in “Colonia Renacer” (Rebirth Colony,

roughly), a mysterious colony of German immigrants who arrived in Chile after World

War II. The colony is largely closed to the outside world, and there are rumors of sexual

perversions. Readers familiar with current events in Chile will immediately recognize

the infamous Colonia Dignidad in this portrait: founded by an ex-medic in the Nazi army,

Paul Schäfer, the colony was established in 1961 and probably used as a torture center by

the Pinochet regime, with which Schäfer was on friendly terms42. Although the most dire

revelations were only publicly confirmed in recent years, stories about Colonia Dignidad

had been circulating for decades, and Bolaño was surely aware of the basic facts in the

mid-90s. Still, his description of “Colonia Renacer” ends as a kind of in-joke, or a retreat

from the flirtation with political facts into the safer realm of fictional license:

It was also said that Eichmann, Bormann, and Mengele had secretly been there.

In reality the only war criminal to spend a few years at the Colony . . . was

Walther Rauss, with whom there were later attempts to link certain torture

practices during the first years of the Pinochet regime. The truth is that Rauss

died of a heart attack while watching the televised football game between the two

Germanies during the 1974 World Cup in the Federal Republic.43 (95)

39

In this barely-fictionalized setting, then, we learn that the young Willy Schürholz

didn’t master Spanish until the age of 10. Before that he was subjected to “an iron

familial discipline, work in the fields, and a few singular teachers who combined equal

parts National Socialist millenarianism and faith in science”44 (95), which determined his

character. He is sent to Santiago to study agronomy but immediately becomes an

experimental poet. His poetic work begins as “a mixture of disjointed phrases and

topographical diagrams of Colonia Renacer”45 (96), not just unintelligible but defiantly

uninterpretable. Critics and vanguardists alike try to find various messages in them, but

even his friends in the avant-garde take some time to recognize his right-wing politics

(“that Schürholz holds ideas diametrically opposed to their own”46 (96)). This is,

notably, the only explicit reference to Schürholz’s politics.

An interested professor of Italian literature is the first to identify the referents in

his next series of poems, which are exhibited at the Facultad de Letras at the Catholic

University of Chile: their verses are written inside enormous ground plans of six well-

known concentration camps. A minor scandal follows, which lends Schürholz “the black

aura of a poète maudit which would accompany him for the rest of his days”47 (96-97).

Nevertheless, two of the poems are published elsewhere and followed, in 1980, by a

book, Geometría (Geometry)— page after page of drawings of empty space surrounded

by barbed-wire fences, with phrases scattered within them: “the texts speak— murmur—

about abstract pain, about the sun, about headache”48 (97). Its sequels, Geometría II and

III and so forth, repeat the same pattern: plans of concentration camps superimposed on

plans of Colonia Renacer or of Chilean cities, or simply “installed in a bucolic, empty

40

space”49 (97). The textual content becomes increasingly dialogic, approaching a

Beckettian, fragmentary drama.

In 1985, however, he gains lasting, trans-American fame for a suspiciously

familiar work of art— “the sensation of the Chilean cultural season”50 (98):

With the help of a set of excavators he carves out, over the desert of Atacama, the

plan for the ideal concentration camp: an imbricated net which, if followed on

foot across the desert, resembles an ominous succession of straight lines and, if

observed from a helicopter or airplane, is transformed into a delicate play of

curved lines. The literary portion remains consigned to the five vowels, dug

violently with hoes by the poet himself and scattered arbitrarily over the crusted

surface of the land.51 (97-98)

Buoyed by this triumph, he makes similar installations in the United States and is offered

a small plane by his promotors, “to create a concentration camp in the sky”52 (98). But

Schürholz turns them down: he insists that his work has to be seen from above and

generated on the ground. His final artistic triumph is to turn his personal semi-idiocy to

his advantage and write a children’s book in the persona of Kaspar Hauser; his personal

life ends, apparently well, in Africa, where he works as a photographer and German tour

guide. (One imagines him crossing paths with Leni Riefenstahl.)

The episodes in La literatura nazi are quite heterogeneous in tone and content, as

I have noted: some read like book reviews, others like short stories, while others adopt an

essayistic middle discourse. The form of this episode hews closest to the short-story

model: we are given a protagonist, told what forces shape him, and we follow him in a

miniature picaresque through Chilean art and life— the rise, the fall, the invariance of

41

character throughout. The two signifiers that anchor the story, however, are “Colonia

Renacer” and the “sensational” installation in the desert: that is, Colonia Dignidad and

Raúl Zurita; that is, Chile, in a perverse international context. Why international (and

why perverse)? The same two adjectives could be used for the book as a whole. The

Chilean case, however, is particularly emblematic because all three profiles of Chilean

writers involve some form of elusiveness, incomprehensibility, semiliteracy, or other

more grotesque, annihilating aesthetic qualities (Carlos Wieder’s Nazi airplane, etc.),

which appear only incidentally in the book’s other episodes. They stand in notable

contrast to the Argentine writers, who are depicted as much better-connected and simply

more literary. Edelmira Mendiluce’s supposed masterpiece is a meticulous recreation of

Poe’s room53— a backhanded tribute to Borges and Pierre Menard, particularly given

Poe’s stature in France and France’s stature in Argentina— which is a totalizing

manipulation of space, not unlike the Chilean examples in that respect, but one taken

from an established, domestic, and even quaint paragon of high culture. There is nothing

violent or illiterate in it. With Edelmira Mendiluce and her husband, whose politics

clearly channel Maurras and the nacionalistas, a publishing industry begins: there is no

question in their world of either access to language or power over it.

Not so an earlier Chilean profile, included under the header “Los poetas malditos”

(the poètes maudits). Pedro González Carrera, a supposedly brilliant poet with a hard life

(seven kids; primary schoolteacher in rural areas), publishes a scandalous poem in

Santiago in praise of the fascist Italian army, which the narrator uses to mock the

Chileans, accusing them of considering the Italians “a race of cowards” in part as anti-

Argentine sentiment. His modernist poems, whose images are described in detail, are

42

published in 1947. His poems grow subsequently more terse, more paranoid and full of

images of self-loss in the landscape. He publishes his own book of twelve poems, with a

desolate cover including a swastika and a lost child under the sea, and the cast of

frightening characters now includes Deleuze-like machines. After his death his legacy is

assiduously recovered and praised by a few devotées.

The link between González Carrera’s fear of self-loss/reversion to childhood and

Willy Schürholz’s final incarnation as Kaspar Hauser is clear enough, as is the link

(explicitly stated) between Schürholz and Ramírez Hoffman, whose identity is confusing

only to others, not to him. (Bolaño devotes several pages in Estrella distante to

analyzing the possible meanings, phonetic associations or cryptograms in his pseudonym,

Carlos Wieder (50-51).) While I don’t propose that La literatura nazi seriously be read

as a map of Bolaño’s own personal geography of the Americas, it is interesting that in

these three Chilean episodes, a totalizing sense of violence and victimization, linked with

Nazism, is experienced subjectively and internally by two of the three writers. In the

case of the third, a first-person narrator appears to experience— to react to and process—

the violence committed by Ramírez Hoffman, so the experience of individual

victimization remains a leitmotif of Bolaño’s representation of Chilean literary lives.

The theme of travel in Die Ringe des Saturn has been taken up by several critics,

who arrive at diverse, if not totally divergent, conclusions. John Zilcosky sees a story of

failure to get lost replacing the familiar narrative arc of departure and homecoming (102-

03). John Beck uses the complex patterns of coastlines and ring formation around Saturn

as tropes to illustrate Sebald’s labyrinthine, complicated literary world (85-86), while

43

Simon Ward takes ruins as a similarly paradigmatic image (58). Beck particularly

underscores the difficulty and slipperiness of the text (77-78). If these accounts overlap

anywhere, it is in their shared estrangement from, and amazement by, the shattered and

jumbled travelogue Die Ringe des Saturn provides, and their tendency to take some

portion of the book at face value— the narrator’s melancholia, for instance— even if it

distorts their sense of the rest of the text into something quite unsettling and peculiar. In

the previous chapter, I suggested that it might be useful to look at Die Ringe des Saturn

as a narrative between quotation marks, with the photographs standing outside the quoted

material like a frame narrative. Another plausible association would be with a genre no

doubt quite familiar to Sebald: the academic lecture, complete with visual aids.

(Luftkrieg and Literatur, whose chapters were first given as individual lectures in Zurich,

has a similar layout and structure.) The material process of assembling the data for the

text is itself narrated: at the beginning of chapter V the narrator tells us that he has been

spending time in archives, reconstructing the contents of a documentary he’d slept

through on television; and at various points in the first and last chapters he describes the

process of his research— looking for Thomas Browne’s skull in the hospital, finding a

documentary on the silk industry from Nazi Germany— and reports on the results.

Still, the substance of the narrative belies this formal resemblance. The beginning

and end of the “englische Wallfahrt” are revealed in the first paragraph: the narrator

began what proved to be at least a nine-day54 walking trip through Suffolk in August

1992, and a year to the day later was hospitalized for paralysis, whereupon he conceived

of turning his notes from the trip into a book. The trip was initially planned with some

care. The narrator had visited a few of his destinations in the past— Lowestoft around

44

1977, Southwold on various occasions, Orford in 1972— and may have been revisiting

them for curiosity’s sake. But he planned visits to Somerleyton Hall, Michael

Hamburger’s house in Middleton, the historic home of Edward FitzGerald at Boulge, the

model Temple of Jerusalem at Chestnut Tree Farm, and the dwellings of Charlotte Ives

near Harleston; and may also have intended to walk past the ghost town of Dunwich,

which he relates to a long biographical passage on Swinburne. From an eclectic, and

unreconstructable, assortment of texts, the narrator derived an itinerary for himself,

centered on a particular small region of England. The associations he draws as he walks

through the physical landscape—which move from Ireland to the Congo to China—are

just as far-flung as the connections that built this restricted itinerary. Early on, however,

he begins to suffer from a steady, insistently negative affect, in stark contrast to the

variegated topoi of his thoughts. His melancholy reveals itself in two ways: the recitation

of states of mind (as noted in the previous chapter), and the repetition of certain very

similar sorts of statement about historical atrocities and catastrophes, which culminate in

the final pages on history and mourning. The repetitions add a greater monotony to the

text than even the descriptions of walking (an inherently repetitive act), or the constant,

vertiginous linking of observations to memories to written texts, which flattens the

narrative’s frame of reference to a single, reproducible state of narratorial consciousness.

In Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald notes that, after he concluded his lectures in

Zurich, many Germans sent him documents to prove that people did write about the war.

But he takes pains to underscore the trite phrases within them, suggesting that their

triteness indicates a process of repression and pain at work (LL 89-90). It’s hard to

imagine that the prosaic evidence of melancholy in Die Ringe des Saturn— bathetic as it

45

often is— is not at least somewhat deliberate. To take several examples: in discussing

the Taiping Rebellion, the narrator writes: “Without a doubt the bloody horror then

reigning in the Middle Kingdom exceeds all power to imagine”55 (Ringe 177). About the

Belgian Congo:

The fact is, there is in the entire, mostly still unwritten history of colonialism

hardly a darker chapter than the so-called opening of the Congo.56 (149, my

emphasis)

Korzienowski . . . now experienced the capital city of the kingdom of Belgium,

with its ever more bombastic buildings, as a gravestone rising over a hecatomb of

black bodies, and the people on the street seemed to him as though they bore the

dark Congolese secret collectively within them.57 (154-55, my emphasis)

About the westward movement of the inhabitants of Dunwich as example of a general

rule: “Remarkably many of our settlements are directed, and expand where their positions

allow it, towards the west. The east is synonymous with a lack of prospects58 (Ringe 199,

my emphasis). These statements convey more imprecise attitudes than information, and a

certain hyperbole is common to all. (In the case of the westward expansion of North

American cities and their polarization between eastern destitution and western affluence,

which the narrator goes on to call an “unfailing (unfehlbar)” pattern (199), my own

current home city of Berkeley reverses the pattern exactly.) These complex, difficult

historical events are focalized through a single consciousness, which finds appropriately

vague words for the inexpressible: an unimaginable horror, a dark collective secret, an

unfailing east-west pattern. These sentimental engagements anchor the segments of the

46

narrative; they provide a base of operations for the deployment of facts and recalled

events.

One implication of the melancholia of Die Ringe des Saturn is that it corresponds

to a kind of post-imperial melancholy extending from the old metropolitan centers of

northern Europe into the furthest periphery of their empires. Die Ringe consists, on the

one hand, of the first-person narrative of a walking tour whose narrator, an aging, taciturn

European man, is a collector among disintegrating collections. But the economically

permeable, physically unstable border of eastern England, with its myriad links to the

world beyond, provides a second, complementary organizing schema. Jan-Henrik

Witthaus describes the text as a kind of encyclopedia written not as a project for future

archaeologists (like Diderot’s Encyclopédie), but for “the archivists of destruction, . . .

under the [aegis] of melancholy”59 (158). The narrative’s saturnine tendency— pattern-

seeking, futureless, alternately paralytic and peripatetic— reflects the compromised,

bereft position of the former imperial center, although this “center” is placed explicitly in

the context of imperial competition and war, as well as colonialism and global markets.

Paul Gilroy’s argument in Postcolonial Melancholia takes England as its subject,

but credits an earlier German source, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The

Inability to Mourn (Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern), for the adapation of Freudian theory to

social psychology— the same source to which Sebald refers in Luftkrieg und Literatur

(LL 90) in discussing cliché and omission in German reminiscences of the air war.

According to Gilroy, the Misterlichs’ account ties melancholia, at the national-imperial

level, to “predominantly narcissistic” collective fantasies of omnipotence, which the end

47

of the regime then shatters (Gilroy 99). He goes on to outline the difficult process of

incipient mourning:

The multilayered trauma— economic and cultural as well as political and

psychological— involved in accepting the loss of the empire would therefore be

compounded by a number of additional shocks. Among them are the painful

obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and

to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame [. . .] conducive to the

building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect

of exposure to either strangers or otherness. (Gilroy 99)

This argument, he adds, seems to apply as well to other post-imperial states in Europe—

notably, for this discussion, the Netherlands and Belgium, and one could also add

Germany (Gilroy 100). Sebald is certainly interested in more than Englishness as such in

Die Ringe des Saturn. There are two particular scenes, however, that give a central place

to “exposure to either strangers or otherness” during the narrator’s journey through

Suffolk; each is echoed by a complementary, but not fortuitous, encounter, narrated

directly afterwards.

The first occurs when, having extricated himself from a mazelike heath, he

wanders into Middleton to visit a friend and stops at a store to buy “Mineralwasser”

(Ringe 218-19). As he enters the town, he reflects that he must resemble a traveling

merchant from another time, but his apparent strangeness confutes time and place:

“Certainly every foot traveller— even today, in fact today above all— who doesn’t

conform to the standard image of the vacationing hiker incurs the contempt of the

48

locals”60 (Ringe 219). Indeed, the clerk at the store “simply stared at me with half-open

mouth, as if I were a being from another star”61 (219), and he concludes:

It has frequently occurred to me that at the sight of a foreigner, country people

feel a terror enter their limbs, and even if he has a good command of their

language, they generally understand him only with difficulty and quite often not

at all.62 (219)

The girl fetches him a Cherry Coke instead of mineral water, but it suits his purposes: he

drinks it in a single gulp. There is a good deal of mutual incomprehension in this scene.

The narrator feels, first and foremost, estranged from himself: he tells us so even before

he meets the girl, or anyone— he notes that the town is empty, and only the houses seem

forbidding (218). He proceeds to share this estrangement with the girl upon meeting her.

She does indeed react with alarm and incomprehension and bring him the wrong drink,

but the episode isn’t told as though it reveals anything new to the narrator: he begins

talking about foreignness and estrangement, inserts the anecdote, and concludes the

discussion on an abstract level. Thus, in our reading, the clerk is primed for her role.

This otherwise minor event forms part of a sequence of alienation and

identification, beginning with the labyrinth of the heath and ending with a peculiar

feeling of belonging in the home and company of his friend, the German expatriate poet

and translator Michael Hamburger. Despite the superficial similarities of their lives, the

narrator is at a loss to explain this response to his friend’s dwelling:

But why I had the impression, upon my first visit to Michael’s house, that I lived

or had once lived in his house, and indeed just as he did— that I cannot explain to

myself.63 (Ringe 228)

49

The movement between connection and missed or failed connection recurs in the

next chapter. The narrator befriends a Dutch business traveller, De Jong, with whom he

discusses the rise and fall of England and the Netherlands as world powers long into the

night in the hotel bar in Southwold. Their immediate camaraderie lasts through the

following day, when De Jong gives him a ride near Boulge and shows him the land that

he (De Jong) is hoping to buy. The narrator moves on, “once I had taken my leave of

Cornelis de Jong, with a certain warmth it seemed to me he reciprocated”64 (144), to visit

Edward FitzGerald’s historical family home. Later that night, the narrator awakens from

a dream about FitzGerald, set in an Irish manor where he had stayed some years before:

he recalls one of the young women of the Irish family and his difficult parting from her,

then relates a mysterious encounter with her in Berlin at a club the following year.

Taken together, these four encounters— the clerk, Michael Hamburger, De Jong,

and the Irish girl, Catherine Ashbury— trace a series of felt shifts in the narrator’s

position among other human beings. Curiously, though, the most alienating interaction,

with the clerk, is the least consequential or meaningful of all: it encompasses only a

minor error in a monetary transaction. By contrast the meeting with Hamburger brings

up memories of the war, the destruction of Berlin, and flight from Germany, as well as

the value of literature as a tenuous link to one’s homeland: the two men’s friendship

occurs against a backdrop of destruction and upheaval. The spontaneous friendship with

De Jong incorporates an even more conscious and explicit engagement with historical

circumstances, colonialism (sugar plantations), and international investment (i.e., the land

De Jong wishes to buy in Suffolk); these two men meet as equals, talk frankly, and part

on apparently good terms. Finally, the appearance of Catherine Ashbury in the narrator’s

50

mind is at first literally unconscious— his memory of the inn surfaces in a dream— and

remains vague and fairly incorporeal, although it ultimately reaches closest to home with

the possibly-imagined encounter in a German theater (apparently months after the

original Suffolk journey was completed).

In effect, the narrator must constantly negotiate and renegotiate what I might call

his political identity, in the fullest sense of the Greek term polis, within a world of

increasingly fine gradations of nationality, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and other indicia.

But this is not a task at which he can succeed or fail: it is felt, not measured. Rather than

making strict sense of its perturbations, the narrator gestures at them by relating shifts in

his own state of mind, by using hyperbole, and by seeking out connections among

phenomena with great determination.

Although he claims that the East stands for a lack of prospects, the narrator ends

his account of the journey with an extended meditation on silk and sericulture— moving

from China through Europe and ending, once again, in Germany, before the universal

theme of mourning (for which silk must be worn) closes the book. Silk serves here as an

amazingly versatile figure of international commerce and industry, human cruelty, art,

eccentricity, resource depletion, and much more; but the final meaningful product of

sericulture here is mourning for every monstrosity the generation of such fine threads has

witnessed. The butterfly or moth, in fact, appears in many of Sebald’s other works as a

figure of hope or transcendence— but this final developmental phase is of course cut out

of the productive cycle of sericulture, which kills the caterpillars in their pupae. The

meticulously told material history lends this otherwise trite image a substantial— but

melancholic— power.

51

CONCLUSION

At the end of Chapter One, I suggested that Sebald and Bolaño ultimately chose

different resolutions for the shared anxiety of coexistence with texts. The narrative

strategies of Die Ringe des Saturn, La literatura nazi, and Estrella distante are in fact

quite distinct. La literatura nazi is narrated in a sort of eternal, atemporal present, with

its composition date presumably falling sometime in the future. While it loosely

associates the invisible narrator of most of the text and the first-person narrator of the

final episode, the mind of the narrator as such is not a strong unifying presence. Both Die

Ringe des Saturn and Estrella distante, on the other hand, use a continuous first-person

narrator, although they also allude to episodes of rewriting and reconstruction: in Estrella

distante, the dialogue between the author of La literatura nazi and his informant, Arturo

B., and in Die Ringe des Saturn the narrator’s research and note-taking after his journey

is complete. In La literatura nazi, the existence of texts is foregrounded— the coexisting

narrator takes a back seat— while in the other two novels the emphasis is placed on the

narrators’ first-person experience with other texts and, sometimes, with their authors.

We can further distinguish Sebald’s novel from Bolaño’s two novels in their

respective representations of the writer’s work. Die Ringe is not primarily a book about

writers, even when the writers do appear: Conrad, Swinburne, Michael Hamburger,

Edward FitzGerald, Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne. Writing is clearly figured as one

mode of engagement among many, or perhaps one road to disappointment and despair

among many, and the texts themselves speak in a way they never really do in Bolaño’s

two novels. Sebald is concerned with the effects (and affects) of what is written much

52

more than the effects of writing as such: he depicts Chateaubriand and FitzGerald as

characters in human dramas that ultimately have relatively little to do with art, while he

quotes from Conrad and Browne, and Borges, as fellow-voices. Bolaño dramatizes the

act of writing over and over— specifically the act of being a writer and producing a body

of work. Neither he nor his characters can set texts apart from the people who created

them; writing cannot be extricated from either its labor or its passion. In a sense Sebald,

then, writes under the aegis of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Bolaño under the aegis of

“Pierre Menard,” and their choices of intertexts were not fortuitous.65

In another respect, though, both Sebald and Bolaño manage to pose quite similar

problems for their narratives to confront: put most reductively, the problem of the role of

reading and writing and belles-lettres in a world of annihilating, ongoing violence.

Neither side overcomes the other on balance. Literature consoles its readers— and its

writers. But literature must also be able to uphold the virtues with which the critic

charges it: writing is not enough, reading is not enough, publication is not enough—

without an ethos, it is all worse than useless. But is such an ethos possible? What does it

entail?

The narrators of Die Ringe des Saturn and Estrella distante confront an abhorrent

past and protract the confrontation in writing, as though staring at it for as long as they

can endure. The confrontation is not very long; the gaze can’t poison or ignite its object.

There is an element of absurdity to it, but it is the absurdity of concentration. To the

teller in the midst of the tale, a reader focusing on a single page over and over is absurd;

but the nature of tales, once they end and become artifacts, is to compel revisitation and

revision. Moreover, the experience of reading and writing exists in history and belongs

53

to it, as much as any other experience, and any confrontation with history as such entails

a confrontation with the history of reading and writing as well. In this study, I have

shown how one writer, Borges, set several examples in his short fiction and criticism for

narrating encounters between people and texts within historical time, and then how two

later writers appropriated and incorporated those examples in their own work, but there is

no way to draw more than a provisional conclusion about this process in the abstract. My

reference above to an ethos is the best model I can offer for the difficult relationship

between writing fiction and writing history as it appears in these three novels. The

circumspection of the critic balances the exuberance of the poet, and vice versa; the

bonds of friendship among writers, readers, and others provide a sharp contrast with the

annihilation of human solidarity by regimes of violence, but the lack of solidarity must

(particularly in Sebald) have a fair reckoning as well. By situating the shared existence

of individuals and texts in a more complex and less stable world than even Borges’

parables can show, Bolaño and Sebald provide their own examples for present and future

readers, writers, and critics to follow in making sense of a history shared by texts and

lives.

54

WORKS CITED

Beck, John. “Reading Room: Erosion and Sedimentation in Sebald’s Suffolk.” In W.G.

Sebald—A Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and A. Whitehead. Seattle:University of Washington Press, 2004: 75-88.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1973.

Bolaño, Roberto. La literatura nazi en América. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1996.—. Estrella distante. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1996, 1999.—. Distant Star. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions, 2002.—. Entre paréntesis. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004.—. 2666. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996.—. Otras inquisiciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1979.

Bourbon, Brett. Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Mind and Meaning in Literature

and Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

De Man, Paul. “A Modern Master: Jorge Luis Borges (1964).” Critical Writings 1953-

1978. Ed. Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.123-30.

Gabantxo, Amaia. “Murders on the Move.” Times Literary Supplement, 9 Sept. 2005:34.

Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American

Narrative. Second edition. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Huyssen, Andreas. “On Rewritings and New Beginnings: W.G. Sebald and the Literatureabout the Luftkrieg.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 124(2001): 72-90.

Johnson, Christopher. “Intertextuality and Translation: Borges, Browne, and Quevedo.”Translation and Literature 11.2 (2002): 174-94.

Manzoni, Celina, ed. Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia. Buenos Aires:Ediciones Corregidor, 2002.

Mount, Graeme. “Chile and the Nazis.” In Memory, Oblivion, And Jewish Culture In

Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosín. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005: 77-90.

55

Oviedo, José Miguel. “Nazis de Papel.” Letras Libres (November 2005): 69-71.

Payne, Johnny. Conquest of the New Word: Experimental Fiction and Translation in the

Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Richard, Nelly. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural

Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis. Trans. Alice A. Nelson and SilviaTandeciarz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Rock, David. “Antecedents of the Argentine Right.” In The Argentine Right: Its History

and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present, eds. S. McGee Deutsch and R.H.Dolkart. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1993: 1-34.

Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2006.

Sebald, W.G. Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main:Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1997.

—. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions PublishingCorp., 1998.

—. Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1985,1999.

—. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: RandomHouse, 2003.

Strong, Beret E. The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden and Breton.Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997.

Ward, Simon. “Ruins and Poetics in the Works of W.G. Sebald.” In W.G. Sebald—A

Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and A. Whitehead. Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 2004: 58-71.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rdedition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Witthaus, Jan-Henrik. “Fehlleistung und Fiktion: Sebaldsche Gedächtnismodellezwischen Freud und Borges.” In W.G. Sebald: Politische Archäologie und

melancholische Bastelei, eds. M. Niehaus and C. Öhlschläger. Berlin: E. Schmidt,2006: 157-72.

Zilcosky, John. “Sebald’s Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost.” In W.G.

Sebald—A Critical Companion. Eds. J.J. Long and A. Whitehead. Seattle:University of Washington Press, 2004: 102-20.

56

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.2 En el vocabulario crítico, la palabra precursor es indispensable, pero habría que tratarde purificarla de toda connotación de polémica o de rivalidad. El hecho es que cadaescritor crea a sus precursores. . . . En esta correlación nada importa la identidad o lapluralidad de los hombres.3 Malynne Sternstein brought this unusual, but apposite, word to my attention in a 1999seminar on Central European literature, where it was in fact applied to Kafka and hiscontemporaries (and successors). It refers to the study of the metaphysics of truth; here,to literature that raises and works through epistemological and metaphysical questions.4 las heterogéneas piezas que he enumerado se parecen a Kafka; si no me equivoco, notodas se parecen entre sí5 Borges himself called Quevedo “menos un hombre que una dilatada y complejaliteratura” (less a man than a vast and complex literature) (Otras Inquisiciones, 51).6 See, for instance, Beret E. Strong’s study of the vanguardia movement from whichBorges derived early fame and notoriety, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of

Borges, Auden, & Breton (Evanston, 1997), in which a youthful Borges writes in favor of“la meta principal de toda poesía, esto es, a la transmutación de la realidad palpable delmundo en realidad interior y emocional (the principal goal of all poetry, which is thetransmutation of the palpable reality of the world into inner emotional reality).” (Strong87)7 According to de Man, this quotation is from “the Prologue to the 1954 edition ofUniversal History of Infamy, tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton,1972).”8 una derivación del Chevalier Dupin de Edgar Allen Poe9 un hombre que, en un siglo que adora los caóticos ídolos de la sangre, de la tierra y de lapasión, prefirió siempre los lúcidos placeres del pensamiento y las secretas aventuras delorden.10 p) Una invectiva contra Paul Valéry, en las Hojas para la supresión de la realidad deJacques Reboul. (Esa invectiva, dicho sea entre paréntesis, es el reverso exacto de suverdadera opinión sobre Valéry. Éste así lo entendió y la amistad antigua de los dos nocorrió peligro.)11 The narrator repeatedly refers to Menard’s “visible” work, legible in the form of theCV(Borges, Ficciones 47, 48, 51), as opposed to his rewriting of the Quijote, which iscalled “subterranean” (51).12 ¡Más bien por imposible! dirá el lector. De acuerdo, pero la empresa era de antemanoimposible y de todos los medios imposibles para llevarla a término, éste era el menosinteresante.13 Noches pasadas, al hojear el capítulo XXVI [del Quijote] —no ensayado nunca porél— reconocí el estilo de nuestro amigo y como su voz en esta frase excepcional: las

57

ninfas de los ríos, la dolorosa y húmida Eco. Esa conjunción eficaz de un adjetivo moraly otro físico me trajo a la memoria un verso de Shakespeare, que discutimos una tarde:

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk . . .14 n) Un obstinado análisis de las “costumbres sintácticas” de Toulet (N. R. F., marzo de1921). Menard— recuerdo— declaraba que censurar y alabar son operacionessentimentales que nada tienen que ver con la crítica.15 “mi compatriota Arturo B, veterano de las guerras floridas y suicida en Africa.” (Thetranslation of the phrase “guerras floridas” as “Latin America’s doomed revolutions” isby Chris Andrews, from his translation of Estrella distante as Distant Star (1).)16 al dictado de sus sueños y pesadillas[,] compusimos la novela que el lector tiene ahoraante sí. Mi función se redujo a preparar bebidas, consultar algunos libros, y discutir, conél y con el fantasma cada día más vivo de Pierre Menard, la validez de muchos párrafosrepetidos.17 This “quotational” model of fiction owes much to Brett Bourbon’s philosophical studyof fiction, Finding a Replacement for the Soul.18 In his “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” this is not strictly true: Adolfo Bioy Casares, afriend to Borges in life, plays a significant role in the narrative, but for all intents andpurposes he is a fictional character who shares the name of Borges’ friend, like thefictional Borges-narrator.19 Die Welt wird Tlön sein. Mich aber, so schließt der Erzähler, kümmert das nicht, ichfeile in der stillen Muße meines Landhauses weiter an einer tastenden, an Quevedogeschulten Übertragung des Urn Burial von Thomas Browne (die ich nicht drucken zulassen gedenke).20 Viele Jahre später las ich dann in der 1940 in Salto Oriental in Argentinien verfaßtenSchrift Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius von der Rettung eines ganzen Amphitheaters durch einpaar Vogel.21 A veces unos pájaros, un caballo, han salvado las ruinas de un anfiteatro22 Die Erinnerung an die damals verspürte Unsicherheit bringt mich wieder auf die imvorigen schon erwähnte argentinische Schrift, die in der Hauptsache befaßt ist mitunseren Versuchen zur Erfindung von Welten zweiten oder gar dritten Grades . . .23 so merkt ein Nachtrag aus dem Jahr 1947 an24 Notably, one photograph in Die Ringe des Saturn on page 313 certainly looks like aphotograph of the author, and most likely is.25 As Eric Santner puts it in On Creaturely Life, “The difficulty of categorizing the sort ofliterary practice Sebald engaged in is notorious. The genres and hybrid styles his‘novels’ have been identified with include travel writing, memoir, photo essay,documentary fiction, magical realism, postmodern pastiche, and cultural-historicalfantasy, among others” (xiii-xiv).26 The exact breakdown is eight Argentines; seven U.S. writers; three Chileans; two eachfrom Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia; and one each from Haiti, Uruguay, Guatemala,Mexico, Peru, and Cuba. But many, if not all, move around a great deal, eitherpermanently or as travelers.27 se lee, en un apunte aislado: ‘El narrador de 2666 es Arturo Belano’28 Es ist nicht leicht zusammenzufassen, was alles an Laszivität und erzdeutschenRassenkitsch Mendelssohn (in bester Absicht, wie man annehmen muß) vor dem Leser

58

hier ausbreitet. Jedenfalls [mit dieser] rückhaltlose[n] Fiktionalisierung des Themas derzerstörten Stadt. . . überantwortet sich Mendelssohn über mehr als zweihundert Seitenhinweg blindlings der Kolportage. (Luftkrieg und Literatur [LL] 63) Here I am usingAnthea Bell’s translation of “Air War and Literature” from On the Natural History of

Destruction (NHD), along with the original German Luftkrieg und Literatur (LL). I willindicate the page numbers first in the German, then in the English edition.29 die linguistische Korrumpierung, die Verfallenheit an das leere, zirkuläre Pathos, nurdas äußere Symptom ist einer verdrehten Geistesverfassung, die auch in den Inhalten sichniederschlug (LL 131).30 Hier, in der fachmännischen Beschreibung der nochmaligen Zerstörung eines durchden Feuersturm mumifizierten Leibes, wird eine Wirklichkeit sichtbar, von der Schmidtslinguistischer Radikalismus nichts weiß. Was seine Kunstsprache verbirgt, das starrt unsentgegen aus der Sprache der Verwalter des Grauens[.] (LL 66)31 [d]er Aufklärungswert solcher authentischen Fundstücke, vor denen jede Fiktion

verblaßt. . .” (LL 67)32 We see a second distinction between Sebald and Bolaño, with regard to use of thedocumentary and “facts that stare straight at us,” in their treatment of photography. InEstrella distante, Carlos Wieder’s photographs cause repulsion and fear: the only claritythey provide is a clear window on his pathology, whereas in Sebald’s novels (and indeedin “Luftkrieg”) the photographs sit calmly beside the text, providing a graphic repetitionof the word-pictures in prose. (Almost every photograph is redundantly described in thetext, and never referred to directly; neither photograph nor text acknowledges thepresence of the other.)33 Heimat (350 versos) describe en una curiosa mezcla de español y alemán— conalgunas alocuciones en ruso, inglés, francés y yiddish— las partes íntimas de su cuerpocon una frialdad de forense trabajando en la morgue la noche después de un crímenmúltiple.34 Ich bin daher in einer ziemlich schlechten Verfassung gewesen, als ich am nächstenVormittag im Mauritshuis [stand] . . . gelang es mir in meinem übernächtigen Zustandauf keine Weise . . . irgendeinen Gedanken zu fassen. Vielmehr fühlte ich mich, ohnedaß ich genau gewußt hätte warum, von der Darstellung derart angegriffen, daß ich späterbald eine Stunde brauchte, bis ich mich . . . einigermaßen wieder beruhigte. (Ringe 106)35 “Das Eingehen der uns nach wie vor am Leben erhaltenden Natur ist davon das stetsdeutlicher werdende Korrelat. Melancholie, das Überdenken des sich vollziehendenUnglücks, hat aber mit Todessucht nicht gemein. Sie ist eine Form des Widerstands.Und auf dem Niveau der Kunst vollends ist ihre Funktion alles andere als bloß relativoder reaktionär.” I am freely, and perhaps wrongly, translating “Eingehen,” which has avariety of meanings ranging from “shrink” to “die” to “leave its mark on.”36 so wichtig[e] Kategorie der Lehre und des Lernens37 “Kafkas didaktische Wissenschaft, die wunderbare Szene im Schloß-Roman, wo K.und der kleine Hans im Schulzimmer voneinander lernen,. . . die Hoffnungen, dieWittgenstein in die Dorfschullehrerexistenz gesetzt hat. . .” (Kafka’s didactic gnosis, thewonderful scene in The Castle where K. and little Hans learn from one another in theschoolroom, . . . the hopes that Wittgenstein placed in [taking on a] villageschoolteacher’s existence. . .)

59

38 eine Art von Kinderfreundschaft39 [Sie hatte] im Verlauf ihres Lebens eine von jeglicher Intellektuelleneitelkeit freie, stetsvom obskuren Detail, nie vom Offenkundigen ausgehende, gewissermaßen privateWissenschaft von der französischen Romanliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelt . . .40 “This art would represent ‘the collapse of every form of limitation,’ creating asalvational utopia or a macroliberty that ‘could overcome all forms of conditioning’ andthat could transcend all forms of dependency and subjection. It envisioned a kind ofspace beyond the rules articulating— and regulating— human praxis, as Raúl Zuritaproposed in the manifesto accompanying his ‘Escrituras en el cielo’ [Sky Writing]realized in 1982 in New York.” (Richard 29) The two cited phrases in this passage aredirectly quoted from Zurita’s manifesto (Richard 106, n14 & n15).41 This quoted sentence is taken from the text, reproduced earlier, of fliers which weredropped from airplanes all over Santiago as part of a CADA installation.42 See Graeme Mount, “Chile and the Nazis,” pp. 83-84; and a BBC story online dated 11March, 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4340591.stm (accessed 5/17/07)43 También se decía que allí habían estado ocultos Eichman [sic], Bormann, Mengele. Enrealidad el único criminal de guerra que pasó unos años en la Colonia [. . .] fue WaltherRauss, al que luego se quiso vincular con algunas prácticas de tortura durante losprimeros años del régimen de Pinochet. La verdad es que Rauss murió de un ataque alcorazón mientras veía por la tele el partido de fútbol que enfrentó a las dos Alemaniasdurante el Mundial de 1974 en la República Federal.44 una férrea disciplina familiar, las labores del campo y unos profesores singulares endonde se aunaban a partes iguales el milenarismo nacionalsocialista y la fe en la ciencia45 una mezcla de frases sueltas y de planos topográficos de la Colonia Renacer46 que Schürholz profesa ideas diametralmente distintas de las suyas47 el aura negra de poeta maldito que lo acompañará el resto de sus días48 Los textos hablan— susurran— sobre el dolor abstracto, sobre el sol, sobre el dolor decabeza.49 instalados en un espacio bucólico y vacío50 la sensación del verano cultural chileno51 Apoyado en un equipo de excavadoras rotura sobre el desierto de Atacama el plano delcampo de concentración ideal: una imbricada red que seguida a ras de desierto semejauna ominosa sucesión de líneas rectas y que observada a vuelo de helicóptero o aeroplanose convierte en un juego grácil de líneas curvas. La parte literaria queda consignada conlas cinco vocales grabadas a golpe de azada y azadón por el poeta en persona y esparcidasarbitrariamente sobre la costrosa superficie del terreno.52 para realizar un campo de concentración en el cielo53 Celina Manzoni highlights the intricate textual network of this piece:

If we consider the fact that [the text] reproduces Poe’s instructions, which seem inBolaño’s text to have been copied from the Spanish translation by Cortázar withsmall modifications, it turns out that the magnum opus of this lady from BuenosAires is the description of the construction of the description of the constructionof the text imagined by Poe. A process of writing, rewriting and repetition whichpasses beyond the shadow of Pierre Menard into outright parody. (Manzoni 24)

60

54 Sebald describes nine days of travel in total; he might have left a few uneventful days,like the one he spent resting in Southwold and talking to Cornelis De Jong (241-44), outof the final narrative. Hence my “at least.”55 Ohne Zweifel übersteigt das damals im Reich der Mitte herrschende blutige Grauenjedes Vorstellungsvermögen.56 Tatsächlich gibt es in der ganzen, größtenteils noch ungeschriebenen Geschichte desKolonialismus kaum ein finstereres Kapitel als das der sogennanten Erschließung desKongo.57 Korzienowski. . . empfindet jetzt die Hauptstadt des Königreichs Belgien mit ihrenimmer bombastischer werdenden Gebäuden wie ein über einer Hekatombe von

schwarzen Leibern sich erhebendes Grabmal, und die Passanten auf den Straßenkommen ihm vor, als trügen sie allesamt das dunkle kongolesische Geheimnis in sich.58 Auffällig viele unserer Ansiedlungen sind ausgerichtet und verschieben sich, wo dieVerhältnisse es erlauben, nach Westen. Der Osten ist gleichbedeutend mit

Aussichtslosigkeit.59 die Archivaren der Zerstörung, . . . unter dem [Vorzeichen] der Melancholie60 Schließlich zieht jeder Fußreisende, auch heute noch, ja gerade heute und vor allem,wenn er nicht dem gängigen Bild des Freizeitwanderers entspricht, sogleich den Verdachtder Ortsansässigen auf sich.61 staunte mich mit halboffenem Mund einfach nur an wie ein Wesen von einem anderenStern62 Es ist mir mehrfach schon aufgefallen, daß den Leuten auf dem Land beim Anblickeines Ausländers der Schreck in die Glieder fährt und daß sie ihn, selbst wenn er ihreSprache gut beherrscht, zumeist nur schwer und manchmal überhaupt nicht verstehen.63 Aber warum ich gleich bei meinem ersten Besuch bei Michael den Eindruck gewann,als lebte ich oder als hätte ich einmal gelebt in seinem Haus, und zwar in allem geradesowie er, das kann ich mir nicht erklären.64 [n]achdem ich mich von Cornelis de Jong mit einer gewissen, von ihm, wie es mirschien, erwiderten Herzlichkeit verabschiedet hatte.65 I realize that a single, prefatory reference to “Pierre Menard” hardly qualifies it as anintertext on its own, but it seems impossible to me to overestimate the influence of thatstory in particular, and Borges in general, on La literatura nazi en América.