Aura Estrada : Borges, Bolaño and the Return of the Epic

Aura Estrada Borges, Bolaño and the Return of the Epic

Translated from the Spanish by T.G. Huntington

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=BorgesAndBolano



Aura Estrada Borges, Bolaño and the Return of the Epic

Translated from the Spanish by T.G. Huntington

"Clean civilizations cleanse their territories of any signs of the dirty . . . For is not cleanliness next to Godliness? And are not the cleaners members of God's crew . . ."
--El Colonel, "A Weed is a Plant Out of Place"

Below appears an excerpt from the final section of this long and excellent essay by Aura Estrada, who, as the notes below tell, died tragically in a swimming accident in 2007, barely 30 years old.
I never knew Aura Estrada or anything of her before reading her essay; it's linked and quoted from as Thank You for her remarkable work and a Tribute to her memory.

; what especially interested me here is the "unkempt prose of Cervantes" that Borges speaks of and poetry as the "idiot song of ghosts" in Bolano's words.
Both Borges and Bolano echo the famous list of Rimbaud’s, with its 'debased" elements in which he finds poetry, and also the Duende of Garcia Lorca, a powering forth of the inner deepest soul through the cracked battered off-key voice e of an aging Flamenco singer in a form that no "perfect" singing and singer can ever approach. As Borges puts it:

Conversely, any page that has an immortal vocation can endure the fire of errata, of approximate versions, of distracted reading, of incomprehension, without leaving its soul behind in the proofs.



The arrival at the existence of a cracked battered, off-key voice of the Duende has a story in it and with it, igniting the visions of Borges and Bolaño that in an unkempt prose may be a conjunction with poetry, and a return to the epic, the poet as story teller.

Bolano's idea of such a poet is "valiant" and "lucid," courageous in the face of disaster; and he would hire such a poet to help him rob the most secure bank of Europe. Borges chooses Don Quixote as the figure of the valiant poet--the "sorrowful knight" who emerges as a "real poet" from the wreckage his figure as a satire of the tales of valiant knights, courageous rescues, the daring of the "impossible dream."

Bolano notes Joyce as a great contemporary example--a poet who turned to writing epics which directly take Homer's epics as examples.

In essaying to create the epic "Legend of Duluoz" Kerouac also chose the unkempt style and raged against "craft."

The ongoing expansion of the absolutely immense industry in the USA of writing programs, poetics programs, workshops, retreats, walks with poets, talks with prose persons via chat --the drive is n the opposite direction--towards craft, at expense often of two detested elements--a story, and the unkempt jumble of "content" that lies all around one.

The emphasis on Formalism, craft, style, opacity, smoothness of surfaces--a cleanliness--a lack of detritus and uncomfortable elements--historically has often been associated with the aesthetics of Fascism A "style" widely found in Totalitarian reactionary regimes is the elevation and celebration of "clean presentations" of "elegant configurations." The geometry of massed elements a al Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, organized and in full uniform and professional attires, holding the symbols of the different crafts practiced by the "peop0le."
(
Busby Berkeley n the US at the same time was using geomtric massed formations in quite different ways, of the kinds which the Reich was from day one against as "degenerate.")

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness," as the saying goes, and so in American writing of today, the cleanliness is often the scrubbing out, erasing, eradicated built over, rebranded non-presences of actuality's stories in favor of craft and the ever greater movement towards mass and group conformism, which swerve as the smooth surfaces on which Deleuze and Guattari's War Machine may function without a hitch.

(In Visual Poetry also, the Clean has almost completely eliminated the traces of the Dirty.; though to be sure there always a few spots that :nothing can remove.”)

The War Machine functioning so well on these smooth surfaces, erases the Wars from the spheres of Craft and Cleanliness, and puts a big kabosh also on the “valiant” poet or figure critiquing the language of a “Civilized, “Stylish” society which unquestioningly enables War Crimes, Apartheid, genocides ethnic cleanings, torture, and the conformities demanded by Fear.



Aura Estrada writes (below)of Bolano
What he wanted to reveal with his narrative surpassed the limits of elegance or good taste. He sought to unmask the atrocities committed in the name of "elegance" and "good taste." In his universe, these were pseudonyms of Civilization and Power. His characters were marginalized, desperate beings who, in the end, lost their style. Elegance, perfection, and correctness mattered little to him; what he found transcendent was the plot, the destiny of his characters.






The territory marking my generation is one of rupture. It is a highly rupturist generation, a generation that wants to leave behind not only the boom but what the boom has generated, which is a generation of very commercial writers. It is the territory of parricide on one hand. And on the other, it is the territory of the Borgesian. One must investigate every fringe, every path that Borges has left behind.

For Bolaño, the writing of his predecessors was somewhat profane, its most obvious expression being its unprecedented commercial success. Like Kafka, Bolaño understood literature as an intense mode of Prayer. At times even a hypnotizing cadence can be heard in his prose, as if it were a litany sung while exposed to the elements.

His aesthetic values do not include "writing well." What he wanted to reveal with his narrative surpassed the limits of elegance or good taste. He sought to unmask the atrocities committed in the name of "elegance" and "good taste." In his universe, these were pseudonyms of Civilization and Power. His characters were marginalized, desperate beings who, in the end, lost their style. Elegance, perfection, and correctness mattered little to him; what he found transcendent was the plot, the destiny of his characters. This "lack of style" is another form of rupture distancing him from his immediate precursors--the crystalline, correct prose of García Márquez or the hyperrealism of Vargas Llosa--and from his more distant ones, such as Flaubert, for whom the acoustics of prose was consubstantial to its efficiency, its beauty.

On this note, in "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader," Borges attacked the "vanity of style" and aspiration to "perfection," taking up as his banner the unkempt prose of Cervantes:

Changes in language erase lateral meanings and shades of meaning; the "perfect" page is one consisting of these delicate values that can be worn down with greater ease. Conversely, any page that has an immortal vocation can endure the fire of errata, of approximate versions, of distracted reading, of incomprehension, without leaving its soul behind in the proofs.

What lasts, Borges argues, cannot be found in style, in form, but rather in a deeper space: the space of mystery, the inexplicable, all that language doesn't manage to say. Human experience, time.

V.

Like Borges--whose stature as a poet within the Latin American literary tradition Roberto Bolaño, on several occasions, attempted to vindicate--Bolaño began his career as a poet, but, to be precise, as a poet maudit. He founded an ephemeral school called "infrarealism" that was both ephemeral and dispersed. Bolaño's new start as a narrator did not make him lose his passion for poetry, which he knew well and followed closely. He once declared that the best poetry of the twentieth century had been written in prose, citing Joyce as an example.

The figure of the poet is a central, almost mythical figure in his novels. In them are encoded lucidity and bravery. In his article "La mejor banda" ("The best gang"), he writes these lines to justify the plots of one of his one of his major novels, Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives):

If I had to rob the most secure bank in Europe and could freely select my partners in crime, I would definitely choose a group of five poets. Five true poets, Apollinean or Dionysiac, it's all the same, but real ones, that is to say, with a poet's destiny and life. There is no one in the world more valiant. There is no one in the world who can face disaster with greater dignity and lucidity... like astronauts lost on planets with no possible escape; or in an exile without readers or editors, only verbal constructions or idiot songs sung not by men, but by ghosts. In the writers' guild they are the most prized and least coveted of jewels. When a crazed youth decides to become a poet at age sixteen or seventeen, it's a surefire family disaster.

In this paragraph is encoded the plotline of Detectives, a novel in which a group of young poets set out in search of Cesárea Tinajero, a mysterious avant-garde Mexican poet who disappeared from the literary scene in the early twentieth century. During their quest, some go mad, others prostitute themselves, others die; but all fervently read or write or admire or detest poetry.

In Bolañesque mythology, poets are beings who have nothing to lose. Only from that detachment can true literature be born. Warning: when he talks of poets, Bolaño isn't thinking of the respected Pablo Neruda or the dreaded Octavio Paz, he's thinking Borges, Roque Dalton, Gabriela Mistral, Enrique Lihn, Rodrigo Lira, and above all, Nicanor Parra, who was according to him the poet by antonomasia. Yet for all his love of poetry, Bolaño never forgets to tell a story in his novels. In this sense, he shares with Borges a classic vision of the novelist as maker, as storyteller.

In one of six famous talks Borges gave at Harvard University in 1967, Borges spoke of the novel's future and said:

There is something about a tale, a story, that will be always going on. I do not believe men will ever tire of telling or hearing stories. And if along with the pleasure of being told a story we get the additional pleasure of the dignity of verse, then something great will have happened. Maybe I am an old-fashioned man from the nineteenth century, but I have optimism, I have hope; and as the future holds many things-as the future, perhaps, holds all things-I think the epic will come back to us. I believe that the poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not think they are different in Homer or in Virgil.

Borges felt anachronistic in all his optimism that autumn in '67, and so Bolaño would have felt during the decade of the 90's, writing epics while many of his contemporaries set sail on the ship of postmodernity with their erudite and avant-garde games. Bolaño didn't fully subscribe to either of these two affiliations, but he made use of his resources in order to return to themes as old as exile, war, and the struggle between good and evil. In his most ambitious novels (The Wild Detectives, 2666) he sang the adventures of Latin America, not because he considered tragedy a resource exclusive to that continent, but as a means of exploring the world, human fortune and misfortune.

Next to Borges, Bolaño's prose reminds us that literature, when it isn't aspirational, when it isn't servile, unleashes another literature, in which the values of profane, a-literary reality do not function (that is to say, in those exceptional cases when it isn't made to serve a social, economic, political, ideological or personal system ((public or secret)) ). What are we to make of despising worldly success for a parcel of literary nirvana that doesn't sell? It is a suicide-mission that few writers, poets, or novelists are willing to join. Yet these are the cases that renovate literature, opening up new paradigms. Theirs are not examples to follow, but to be read.

Categories: Spanish, Nonfiction, Cities, Americas, From 1950 to 2000, Argentina, Chile, Aura Estrada, T.G. Huntington, October 2006, Literature


Aura Estrada

Aura Estrada is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University. She has published reviews and crónicas in Bookforum and the Mexican magazine DF, and fiction in www.letralia.com. She rides the F train every day from Carroll Gardens to the Upper West Side.

IN MEMORIAM (1977-2007):
Aura Estrada, a very talented young writer whose radiant intelligence, gleeful wit, and beautiful smile will never be forgotten by all of us who had the joy of knowing her, lost her life in a swimming accident last week. (7/31/07)