Plato's Phaedo relates the last afternoon of
Socrates, spent in his jail cell with friends, discussing the nature of the
soul.
Borges, in the text of a
lecture he gave towards the end of his life, says that Max Brod says that one sentence
in this dialogue is the most moving that Plato ever wrote. It is spoken by
Phaedo himself as he enumerates the friends who shared Socrates's last hours:
'Of native Athenians there were, besides Apollodorus, Critobulus and his father
Crito, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, and Antisthenes; likewise Ctesippus of
the deme of Paeania, Menexenus, and some others; but Plato, if I am not
mistaken, was ill.'
'Plato, if I am not
mistaken, was ill'. Why did Plato write this inexplicably heartbreaking phrase?
We must surely conclude that, even if he himself were dying, Plato would have
found a way to share his master's last moments. So why did he say he wasn’t
there? Borges offers various readings, among them that it may have been to
allow himself greater creative freedom, as if Plato was asserting 'I don't know
what Socrates said in the last afternoon of his life, but I would have liked
him to have said this', or, 'I can imagine him saying these things.' We might
also take it as a gesture of self-effacement, a suggestion that Plato saw
himself as a mouthpiece, an amanuensis. Borges’ characteristic conclusion is
that Plato simply felt the 'unsurpassable literary beauty' of saying 'Plato, if
I am not mistaken, was ill.'
His brief treatment of this
passage is one of those rare moments when Borges (or Brod) nods, in asserting
that it is the only point in all his writing that Plato mentions himself by
name. There are actually more examples, as when in Apology of Socrates Plato has Socrates cite him as one of the
youths who would have been corrupted by his teaching, or later in the same text
when Plato is mentioned as one of several men who offered to pay a fine to
abrogate Socrates' death penalty. What is true, however, is that this sentence
is the only time in which Plato uses his own name to achieve a certain
narratorial effect.
The nature of this effect
is and will eternally be open to question. But there are two observations we
can make without reservation: that Plato deploys it at a symbolic crux in his
oeuvre, the description of the death of the man whose teaching his lifework it
is to expound; and, secondly, that it serves to create a sensation of his own
absence, his own invisibility, or at the very least to problematize his role as
narrator: if Plato wasn’t there, then where did he get his information from?
What gives him authority to speak? It anticipates in nuce one of the central questions of Western literature, that of
the authorial voice, of the infinite dialectics of presence and absence the act
of writing engenders.
There is a curious echo of
this effect in the penultimate monologue of the second section of Roberto
Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. The
second section of Bolaño’s masterpiece is, of course, an expansive patchwork of
what look like transcripts of monologues, each one portraying a different
moment in the rootless lives of the novel’s two antiheroes, Arturo Belano and
Ulises Lima. Many but far from all of the people who speak are poets or
otherwise related to the literary world; many have lived fully.
The speaker in the
monologue we’re going to look at here is rather a banal, grating character, a
certain Ernesto García Grajales, an academic who claims 'in all humility' to be
the world's only authority on the Visceral Realists. Something occurs in his discourse of which,
depending on your criteria, there are only twenty-five other brief examples in
the book – he apparently repeats a question of an interlocutor.
Now, in the course of all
the long second section of The Savage
Detectives, we intuit but see little evidence for a presence conducting the
interview. The interviewees sometimes address them, as 'señor' for instance, or
by asking rhetorical questions, or checking that they are making themselves
understood. Only very rarely do we come across the journalistic technique of
putting the interviewer's question in the mouth of the interviewee, as if they
were repeating it in order to clarify that they heard correctly. (This
technique is generally employed by transcribers of interviews to avoid breaking
up the text with a subsidiary question: ‘He was a friend of Tom’s. Was he a
friend of mine? I guess you could say he was a friend.')
García Grajales is giving
an account of what the different Real Visceralists ended up doing when the
interviewer apparently interrupts him to ask about Juan García Madero. His response is unequivocal: '¿Juan García Madero?
No, ése no me suena. Seguro que no perteneció al grupo.' ('No, I don't recognise
that name. He definitely didn't belong to the group.') The interviewer
evidently persists, eliciting an indignant reply from García Grajales: 'Hombre,
si lo digo yo que soy la máxima autoridad en la matería, por algo será... Hubo
un chavito de diecisiete años, pero no se llamaba García Madero... se llamaba
Bustamente.' (‘Bro, I'm the absolute
authority on the subject, and if I'm saying it there must be a reason... there
was a kid who was seventeen, but he wasn't called García Madero... he was
called Bustamente.') (551)
What are we to make of this
detail? Perspicacious readers notice it, but I have yet to come across a comprehensive
critical treatment of its ramifications. Consider Juan García Madero. He is the
narrator, in a sense, of the first and third sections of the book, playing a
central role in the proceedings. But he is entirely absent from the second section
of the novel, apart from here. Nowhere else is his name mentioned.
This absence could in part
be explained by the fact that his involvement with Visceral Realism was, in
fact, extremely brief – from the 2nd of November,
1975, to the 15th of February, 1976, after which point he separates from Belano
and Lima, they leave Mexico, and the movement falls apart. Although García
Madero experienced an intense involvement with some of them, we might imagine
that for most of the Visceral Realists he was another hanger-on, another young,
unpublished poet who drifted in and out of the scene, and as such was easily
forgotten or simply unworthy of mention.
The 'chavito' Bustamente,
the kid who García Grajales assumes his interlocutor is thinking of, seems to
have been another such hanger-on. Another character also remembers Bustamente
but calls him Bustamante, and he is not mentioned by name anywhere else in the
novel. It seems that Bolaño wants us to understand that Bustamente and García
Madero were two of a number of essentially interchangeable young poets who
orbited the main Visceral Realists. García Madero's deeper involvement with
Belano and Lima might thus have been a consequence simply of his being in a
certain place at a certain time.
We must ask why it is that
the person who interviewed García Grajales asked him about Juan García Madero,
particularly given that he never published anything (at least not during the
span of the book) and apparently disassociated himself from all of the group's
members after the episode in the desert (had he been present, wouldn’t he have
participated in the forlorn attempts to reform Visceral Realism after Belano
and Lima's departure). Why does Bolaño give this detail such prominence,
breaking from the style which defines most of the second section of The Savage Detectives, at such a key
moment?
The answer is that it is
precisely Juan García Madero who is interviewing the academic Grajales. We may
take the mention of his name – and the denial of his involvement – as a clue
hidden in plain sight by Bolaño. We might even sketch some details of what
happened, of how the interview progressed: irked by Grajales' insistence that
he is the only scholar with any interest in Visceral Realism, and thus the ipso
facto world authority, García Madero asks him about his own existence, which Grajales
denies. The indignant 'Hombre, si lo digo yo...' can only have been elicited by
García Madero's insistence on this point.
And then there is the 'You
didn’t know?' Would it be too much to imagine García Madero's ironic 'Oh,
really?' when the academic tells him about the original Visceral Realists in
the North? García Madero was there, he met the original Visceral Realist, and
then she was killed protecting him. And now this liliputian academic tries to
establish his superiority by sharing this fact with him. Let's imagine García
Madero, his voice dripping with sarcasm which the other man is immune to,
telling him that it must have been a coincidence (how could it possibly have
been a coincidence?).
There are two conclusions
that we are undoubtedly meant to infer from this detail. First, that García
Madero conducted this and, possibly, some of the other interviews which make up
the second part of the book (although he cannot have conducted all of them).
Secondly, that the three months he spent with Belano and Lima in 1975/6 marked
him for the rest of his life: García Grajales' monologue is dated December
1996.
Based on these conclusions,
I would venture a third: that García Madero is, in fact, present throughout all
of The Savage Detectives, but not as
a protagonist. It is he who traces the peregrinations of Belano and Lima, it is
he who conducts the majority of the interviews, editing the texts into
monologues and scrupulously removing all mentions of his name (if, indeed,
there are any), only in this crucial section allowing himself to appear.
The tragedy inherent in the
testimony of García Garjales is that it marks the death knell of Visceral Realism:
the movement has finally been co-opted by everything it fought against and
despised, the world of stale, provincial academia. Garjales himself is the
anti-Visceral Realist par excellence, a vain self-serving academic only
interested in publishing his little book. García Madero's ire is thus twofold –
against what Garjales represents, and against his ignorance of the fact that in
reality it is he, García Madero, who is the world authority of Visceral Realism,
having dedicated his life to documenting the movement and its members, above
all the heroes of his youth, Roberto Belano and Ulises Lima. It is his irritation which
leads him to depart from the meticulous editorial technique he employed in the
rest of the interviews, and allow his own name to appear; a brief, easily-overlooked
shout of defiance, self-affirmation, anguish. Like a Medieval architect, he put
a tiny portrait of himself at the heart of his vast, anonymous cathedral.
It is this detail, combined
with various other slivers of evidence, which demonstrates conclusively that,
far from disappearing, García Madero is in fact present throughout the entirety
of The Savage Detectives. It is he
who traces the peregrinations of Belano and Lima, he who conducts the majority
of the interviews, editing the texts into monologues and scrupulously removing
all mentions of his name (if, indeed, there are any), only in this crucial
section allowing himself to appear.
There is of course no
question that Bolaño was familiar with Phaedo.
Another question is whether this familiarity is grounds enough to hypothesize
that the interjection 'Juan García Madero?' is a conscious echo of 'Plato, if I
am not mistaken, was ill.' It may constitute a leap of faith, but for several
reasons I believe it is indeed a deliberate reference.
First, let us mention that
Mexican critic Oswaldo Zavala has sketched with great elegance the correspondences
that exist between the Salvatierra sections of The Savage Detectives and, precisely, the Symposium (note, though, that even a critic as perceptive as
Zavala pays little attention to the question of Salvatierra’s ‘anonymous
interviewer’).
Then there are the parallels
between the two ‘narrators’, the curators of these texts. Like Plato, García
Madero apparently effaces himself from his own writing – his work is to trace
the biography, to document and re-present the example of his master(s). Like
Plato, he was a youth when he encountered the spiritual authority that was to
give his entire life meaning; Socrates, like Belano and Lima, was persecuted by
society as a corrupting influence. Like Plato, Juan García Madero allows his
name to appear only when death is imminent – in the case of Socrates it is a
literal death, whilst for Visceral Realism it is the conceptual death outlined
above. In both cases, the use of the name serves to highlight through negation
the name of the one person who really was
there, the one person who truly understood the dying master's message. Another
detail supports this possibility. Immediately before, García Garjales had been
listing the names and fates of the core group of the Visceral Realists, just as
Phaedo had been listing the names of Socrates's followers present at his death…
These are all more or less
fanciful conjectures. Their main value lies in showing that, whether or not
this commentator has understood it, there is a vastly complex conceptual
machinery at work below the surface of The
Savage Detectives. They suggest also the extent to which Bolaño is as
sophisticated as he is brilliant an author, a fact that certain readings of his
writing underplay.
Catalan critic Josep Massot
has argued that Bolaño’s similarities to Kerouac are at the root of his success
in the US. This strikes me as a rather facile argument. Misogynist, racist,
nationalist Jack Kerouac’s writing has largely been consigned to the purgatory
of male adolescents’ reading lists, while Roberto Bolaño, the greatest novelist
of his generation in any language, now sits with Sterne and Voltaire in
pacifists’ Valhalla. Kerouac’s artistic reputation is based on one trick, one
voice; Bolaño is as cosmopolitan and encyclopedic as Borges or Joyce. Jack’s
books are flaccid, directionless, episodic; Bolaño’s philosophical and creative
project fuses all of his writing into a breathtaking arc, a total statement of
unique power, vision and complexity. In short, to compare Kerouac to Bolaño is
a little like setting the Sex Pistols against Pink Floyd. It is true,
nevertheless, that it is above all as a ‘Latin American Jack Kerouac’ that
Bolaño has been sold (and his success explained away) in the English-language
market. This would be laughable were it not so insidious.
The fact is that ‘mainstream’
US literary culture remains on the whole unable to process a Latin American
writer on their own terms, too often reducing them to ingenious exoticizers of
an established gringo mode, quaint index of what happens when foreigners play
at being American, like a salsa cover of My Way (consider the reception of the
recent first publication in English of Carlos Velázquez).
Happily, Bolaño’s star is
beginning to wane in the English-language publishing industry. Perhaps once the
enchantment has faded, critics will return to his work with the rigor it
demands, and prove to an English-speaking readership what Spanish readers
already know, namely that Bolaño is as myriad-minded as any of the best writers
of the Twentieth Century, in Europe or the Americas. Both Bolaño’s life and his
writing embody a universalism, a generosity of culture, that bind him to the most
ancient and most humane traditions in world literature, and it is in this light
that his work must be approached.
2016
* John Z. Komurki es editor de Mexico City Lit
* John Z. Komurki es editor de Mexico City Lit
