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Research Notes from the Library at Alexandria:
Roberto Bolaño and W.G. Sebald Write the Century's End
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Jessie Ferguson
San Francisco State University
Both
the Chilean expatriate writer Roberto Bolaño and the German
expatriate W.G. Sebald construct first-person narratives out of an
uneasy, hybridized mixture of invention, literary reference, and
historical fact. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in a
review of Bolaño's magnum opus, 2666, Amaia Gabantxo remarks that
"both Bolaño and Sebald were world-weary, slightly disgruntled, awed
by the human capacity for evil and survival; both included ghostly
versions of themselves in their books; and both rejected
straightfoward conceptions of the novel" (Gabantxo 34). This is a
fair thumbnail sketch of similarities between the two writers,
although a fourth point of contact—that both are literary omnivores
and write out of a Borgesian labyrinth of narrative—is equally
crucial to understanding their fiction.
In this paper I will examine the way in which both writers
incorporate literary and documentary history directly into their
fictional narratives, specifically Bolaño's novels La literatura
nazi en América (Nazi literature in America) and Estrella distante (Distant Star), and Sebald's novel Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings
of Saturn). In particular, I will focus on their use of two stories
by Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "Pierre
Ménard, autor del Quijote," both enormously influential models of
intertextual engagement and play between reality and fiction. All
three novels employ a fictionalized, autobiographical narrator whose
position in the world of reality and text is complicated; I argue
that the narrative methods generally serve to cast suspicion on both
fiction-writing and documentary historical writing. The novels
foreground the mechanics of history, time, memory, and violence,
without requiring the reader to accept the substance of the narrative as "fact" or "fiction."
Sebald's break with "straightforward conceptions of the
novel" may be the more extreme case of the two: he writes in a
superficially documentary style and includes photographs and other
visual reproductions (e.g. of passports, journal entries, etc.) to
both underscore and call into question the facticity of his subject
matter. All of his novels deal to some extent with the destruction
of the physical landscape by human and natural acts, and with the
reflection and refraction of this pattern of destruction in the
suffering and troubled memories of the human inhabitants of those
landscapes (most of them in England, Germany, Switzerland, and other
parts of Europe); thus a variety of complex relationships arise
between the fragmented, documentaristic narrative and the themes of
severed and fugitive memories and experiences.
Bolaño,
on the other hand, is a writer consciously embedded in a "Latin
American" literary tradition; his work frequently confronts the
traumas of Latin American political experience during the second
half of the twentieth century, in particular the fall of the
socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile and episodes of
violence in Mexico (the series of unsolved murders in Ciudad Juárez,
on the border with Texas, in the 1990s, or the police invasion of
the Universidad Nacional in 1968 culminating in the Tlatelolco
massacre). He is less concerned than Sebald with landscapes and
physical documentation of history, but equally, if not more,
concerned with literary texts and with the relationship between
literary production and political responsibility, two preoccupations
linked throughout the history of the postwar Latin American
novel.
In La
literatura nazi en América, Bolaño creates an extensively documented
fictional encyclopedia of "Nazi" writers throughout the Americas,
complete with lengthy bibliography and a list of (invented)
publishing houses and journals. 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 and/or serve in the German army. As a
shadow history of European influences in Latin American society, and
of the debates of the 19th and 20th centuries about national and
ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism, and social legitimacy, Bolaño's
narrative has a vast supply of historical models. He spares few
countries, although two sets of Argentinians, "Los Mendiluce" and
"los hermanos Schiaffino," form neat bookends for the encyclopedia,
singling out a nation which shares both an illustrious literary culture and a historically favorable disposition towards the Third
Reich. But the narrative ultimately closes in Chile, Bolaño's
homeland. 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 also murders women, in particular two young
poets whom the narrator knew as a teenager when they frequented the
same salon in southern Chile.
Bolaño
rewrites this final episode and expands it into a separate short
novel, Estrella distante. Here he provides much more detail about
the formative years of the poetic culture in Chile from which he,
Carlos Wieder, the murdered poets, and many others emerged, devoting
several chapters 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 is a book about Latin America,
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 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, as human beings, were violated and abused.
Both
novels 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) historical
circumstances which occasioned very similar books and very similar
personal experiences. The question of the narrator's identity, left
somewhat vague in La literatura nazi, is explicitly addressed in a
preface to Estrella distante: Bolaño (or an individual who refers to
La literatura nazi as "mi novela") invents a conversation with "mi
compatriota Arturo B, veterano de las guerras floridas y suicida en
África" [my compatriot Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America's doomed
revolutions and a suicide in Africa] who told him the story in the
final chapter of La literatura nazi and with whom,
al dictado de
sus sueños y pesadillas compusimos la novela que el lector tiene
ahora ante sí. Mi función se redujo a preparar bebidas, consultar
algunos libros, y discutir, con él y con el fantasma cada día más
vivo de Pierre Menard, la validez de muchos párrafos repetidos. (ED 11)
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 with the ghost, each day more alive, of Pierre Menard,
the validity of many repeated paragraphs.
Pierre Menard is,
of course, the titular "autor del Quijote" from Borges' famous
meditation on authorship, who sets out to reproduce Cervantes' novel
verbatim for a new era.
The
ghost of Pierre Menard is, in fact, fairly animated throughout La
literatura nazi. In Borges' story, the fictional re-author of the
Quijote is presented by way of a curriculum vitae several pages
long. Among other, diverse activities, Menard rewrites the magnum
opus of his friend Paul Valéry, Le cimitiêre marin, in alexandrines,
and collaborates with the Italian futurist Gabriele D'Annunzio in a
tribute to an aristocratic patroness (48-50). Eventually he
proposes a more radical, loftier goal: to rewrite don Quijote
exactly as it was written, by Cervantes, three hundred thirty years
earlier. This undertaking Borges refers to as "the other body of
work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the unmatched," as
opposed to the "visible" oeuvre of the CV (51): and this too is the
conceit of the story, the relationship of literary works to their
historical context, the readerly expectation that ideas enter into
dialogue with other contemporary ideas.
Formally, the story assembles an intricate model of the
literary work and its historical context. There are four levels of
reality here, mediated by quotation: Cervantes is quoted by Menard,
who is quoted by the narrator—who is quoted (in a 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 fictional.1 For the reader (assuming he
is not D'Annunzio's son-in-law), the same is true. What formally
distinguishes La literatura nazi from a fiction like Pierre Menard
is the final episode: to the active archival and fictional players
in the narrative Bolaño adds a third category, the 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 it is only in the
incorporation of the first-person narrative in the Ramírez Hoffman
episode that the literal historical force, which otherwise is only
metonymized by the term "Nazi," can be fully developed.
But in
what way is Estrella distante the product of consultation with "the
ghost, each day more alive, of Pierre Menard"? It is tempting to
note the similarities between the Borges story and the "parent" text
of La literatura nazi, but even within the fictional game set up in
the preface, Estrella distante differs substantially from the
antecedent chapter of La literatura nazi, whereas Menard is the
celebrated fictional "author" of a verbatim (if fragmentary)
rewriting of Don Quijote. 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.
While
Bolaño pays tribute here to Borges' meditation on authorship, Sebald
incorporates a different parable about textuality into his Ringe des
Saturn: namely "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Sebald reproduces
portions of the story almost verbatim at the end of the third
chapter of Die Ringe des Saturn.
Die Welt wird Tlön sein. Mich
aber, so schließt der Erzähler, kümmert das nicht, ich feile in der
stillen Muße meines Landhauses weiter an einer tastenden, an Quevedo
geschulten Übertragung des Urn Burial von Thomas Browne (die ich
nicht drucken zu lassen gedenke). (RS 91)
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).
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 the story is rather peculiarly introduced,
without reference to the author: "Viele Jahre später las ich dann in
der 1940 in Salto Oriental in Argentinien verfaßten Schrift Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius von der Rettung eines ganzen Amphitheaters
durch ein paar Vogel" (87) [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].
Although the text of the story is dated "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: "A veces unos
pájaros, un caballo, han salvado las ruinas de un anfiteatro" (30) [At
times a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an
amphitheatre]. There is little "how" to "read of" in
this terse sentence, and the focus on this single disjointed line
in a story so rich in information and detail is almost comic. And,
soon thereafter:
Die Erinnerung an die damals verspürte
Unsicherheit bringt mich wieder auf die im vorigen schon erwähnte
argentinische Schrift, die in der Hauptsache befaßt ist mit unseren
Versuchen zur Erfindung von Welten zweiten oder gar dritten Grades. (89)
The memory of the uncertainty I then felt brings me back to the
aforementioned Argentinian tale, which is primarily concerned with
our attempts to invent worlds to the second or even third degree.
In Sebald's redaction, the narrator relates his dinner with
Bioy Casares and their discussion of an experimental novel, their
disquieting encounter with the mirror, and the conversation with
Bioy about Uqbar and the sources for information about this
mysterious country—the "world to the second degree," perhaps, to
which Sebald refers. He leaps across the narrative concerning Tlön
into the postscript, "so merkt ein Nachtrag aus dem Jahr 1947 an" (RS 91)
[added to the text in 1947]. Again, Sebald's narrator takes Borges'
dates literally, to discuss the penetration of Tlön into the world.
The final sentences of the redaction are almost direct
translations of the end of the story.
El
jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 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
Argentinian 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 of course 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 text—notably in
Die Ringe des Saturn on page 313—which certainly look like
photographs of the author, and most likely are.) For the
Sebald-narrator to take at face value the dates given by the
Borges-narrator of "Tlön," and to report the experiential elements
of the narrative in place of the speculative, eliminating
discussion 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. Borges' narrator discusses
his translation of Thomas Browne, the very author Sebald's narrator
has just been reading and discussing—as the realm of recollection
and observation on the latter's part drops away, like the absorption
of the former in the nonexistent text about Tlön—so that 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 history, other readings, and other
contexts.
Andreas
Huyssen compares Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur, a critical essay
about the literature of the fire-bombings of German cities, with
Sebald's second novel, Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants):
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 itself. (Huyssen 82)
Although a full treatment of his discussion is
beyond the scope of this paper, Huyssen does connect 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.
Both Luftkrieg and Die Ausgewanderten are sustained and concentrated
examinations of the aftermath of the German war experience as seen
through the eyes of individuals (in the case of Luftkrieg, writers
whose approach to their subject matter and skill with language are
meticulously dissected; in the case of Die Ausgewanderten, four
biographical subjects are examined primarily through documentary
evidence, although the first and last stories depend on a "personal
interview")—but at a considerable narrative remove, framed within
frames within frames. Die Ringe des Saturn is considerably more
expansive: it establishes only a few tangential links to the Second
World War in Germany, but the narrative style is monotonously
consistent with the other texts. The framing of the episodes often
refers to the narrator's frame of mind, however tersely. He does not
surprise the reader by, for instance, revealing that he was once a
circus performer or remarking that between his trip to Lucerne
and his return to Norwich he traded bonds on the London exchange—the
first-person statements in the narrative tend to be almost
transparent. 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.
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 hatchet job on 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. (NHD
56-7)
On wartime articles by Andersch, whom Sebald clearly finds
morally abhorrent and to whom he directs quite a few ad hominem
attacks,
This is not the place to dilate on the material that could
be cited to this effect from almost every part of Andersch's
articles; however, it may be said 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. (NHD 125)
But, in Luftkrieg, he makes positive
statements as well: commending the virtues of a medical report as
against an overwrought, surrealistic passage by Arno Schmidt, he
asserts that "[t]his 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," and pays tribute to
"[t]he informative value of such authentic documents, before
which all fiction pales..." (NHD 60, my emphasis) Still, 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—he is, as a montage
artist, a commanding presence.
Huyssen
sets up his critique of Sebald as a dialogue between generations:
"we clearly have three distinct generational moments: traumatization
through experience with Nossack as adult and with Fichte and Kluge
as children, transgenerational traumatization without the experience
itself in the case of Sebald" (83). He earlier questions a
literary-historical approach which "follows the orderly chronology
of decades and generations, blocking from view the multiple
rewritings and cross-textual relations" (73) with which postwar culture
is saturated, but feels compelled to employ the fixed
generational boundaries above even so. 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 favor.2 We see in the example of Tlön a sustained engagement
with philosophical questions—which come to transform the world—which would seem out of place in any of the works above by
Sebald and Bolaño, or indeed in most works of contemporary fiction.
It is hard to imagine Sebald and Bolaño's haunted, peripatetic
narrators allowing themselves the time for dinner with Bioy Casares
and slow, steadfast work on a translation of Sir Thomas Browne in
the face of cultural apocalpyse; it is easier to imagine them
unsettled by the mirror. Both 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
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. He writes:
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 which
resembles a mythic quest, culminating in a "return from the dead."
It is hard to imagine a conception of literature more alien to the
works I have described above: Bloom's conception of a "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. One cannot easily imagine him at dinner with Bioy Casares
either.
Both
Bolaño and Sebald ably and poignantly illustrate the limitations of
creative autonomy in the face of appalling historical crimes, as
well as the limitations of full participation in literature as a
reader as well as a writer, for analogous reasons. They continue
Borges' work of demolishing the idea of the autonomy of the
writer—but by the present day this work has been continued by a
plethora of other writers, scholars, and artists in every media. So,
at the same time, they confront the ambiguity of his position, a
writer and reader in a world where, if the word is still king, the
role is largely ceremonial. Yet that ceremony has its own power.
Sebald concludes his Luftkrieg essay with a quotation, much as he
did with the conclusion of Die Ringe des Saturn's third chapter,
from Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History—the
famous passage about the angel of history. The words are familiar to
any student of modern German literature; Huyssen even
peremptorily calls it "the familiar long quote from Benjamin's
thesis about the angel of history" (89), but Sebald permits no
truncation or elision: he repeats the passage, until the last
line—"This storm is what we call progress" (NHD 68)—at which point
he and his readers, who have been pronouncing the lines in unison,
both fall silent.
Notes
| 1
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In his "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," this is not strictly true: Adolfo Bioy Casares, a friend to Borges in life, plays a significant role in the narrative, but for all intents and purposes he is a fictional character who shares the name of Borges' friend, like the fictional Borges-narrator.
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| 2
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See, for instance, Beret E. Strong's study of the vanguardia movement from which Borges derived early fame and notoriety, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden, & Breton, in which a youthful Borges writes in favor of "la meta principal de toda poesía, esto es, a la transmutación de la realidad palpable del mundo en realidad interior y emocional (the principal goal of all poetry, which is the transmutation of the palpable reality of the world into inner emotional reality)" (Strong 87). |
Works Cited
Bloom,
Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York:
Oxford
UP, 1973.
Bolaño,
Roberto. La literatura nazi en América. Barcelona: Editorial Seix
Barral,
1996.
---. Estrella distante. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama,
1999.
---.
Distant Star. Trans. Chris Andrews. New York: New Directions
Publishing
Corp., 2004.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996.
Gabantxo, Amaia. "Murders on the Move." Times Literary Supplement 9 Sep.
2005: 34.
Huyssen, Andreas. "On Rewritings and New Beginnings: W.G. Sebald and the
Literature about the Luftkrieg." Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Linguistik 124 (2001): 72-90.
Long, J. J. and Anne Whitehead, eds. W.G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Seattle:
U of Washington P, 2004.
Manzoni, Celina, ed. Roberto Bolaño: La escritura como tauromaquia. Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Corregidor, 2002.
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
Publishing Corp., 1998.
---. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random
House, 2003.
Strong, Beret E. The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Borges, Auden and Breton.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1997.
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