Abstract
This chapter reads Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as an effort to understand what the contemporary has meant to both the Latin American novel and the region as a whole. I contend that the Chilean author’s 1000-page tome invites us to consider what happens to the novel when the conditions of possibility for social and economic modernization within the formerly developing world have been radically altered—if not altogether eliminated—by a deepening crisis in the global economy. Bolaño’s work, I argue, ultimately dramatizes the degree to which that crisis has not simply altered the region’s sense of the present, but in so doing, also provided the literary with an unexpected political valence in the form of an autonomy after autonomy.
A version of this chapter originally appeared in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 42.2 (December 2015). I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint the essay here.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
- 2.
As Mariano Siskind (2010) shows in “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World Literature,” this is particularly true in the case of the novel : “Because of the kind of experiences that the novel afforded to the readers of the colonial and semi-colonial peripheries, Latin American intellectuals immediately realized the important role that the consumption, production, and translation of novels could play in the process of socio-cultural modernization ” (339). Ericka Beckman (2013) traces a similar dynamic in what she calls the “capital fictions of the Export Age” (xviii) in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Latin American intellectual production by drawing on the Marxian tradition for which “the radically different social systems produced by global capitalism do not result simply from the ‘incomplete’ absorption of bourgeois mechanisms, but instead are the concrete outcome of different strategies of accumulation used at different moments in different settings” (xvi).
- 3.
Eugenio Di Stefano and I (2014) have addressed Ludmer’s conception of “postautonomous literature” in greater detail in “Making it Visible: Latin Americanist Criticism, Literature, and the Question of Exploitation Today.”
- 4.
Casanova’s conception of world literary space, as is well known, draws on Bourdieu’s (1984) conception of the “field of restricted production,” the autonomy of which “can be measured by its power to define its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products.” This is the sphere in which symbolic goods are manufactured for those producers who establish the criteria of aesthetic value, “internal demarcations [that] appear irreducible to any external factors of economic, political or social differentiation” (115) including literary categories and criteria.
- 5.
We should remember that Jameson understood his essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986) not only as sketching a “theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature,” but also as one that “forms a pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperialism of the first world and above all of the United States” (87–88, n. 26). This might begin to explain Alonso’s skepticism toward any application of Jameson’s model to the contemporary Latin American novel , and may also begin to explain the distinction Volpi draws between an earlier generation of writers and his own. And this distinction becomes even clearer if we recall Roberto Fernández Retamar’s (1989) response in 1971 to a similar question—”Does a Latin American culture exist?” (3)—in “Caliban,” an essay that belongs to that era of third-world nationalism Jameson’s 1986 essay describes.
- 6.
See, for example, Thomas Friedman ’s The World Is Flat 3.0 (2007).
- 7.
For an elaboration of this reading of The Savage Detectives, see my essay “‘A la pinche modernidad’: Literary Form and the End of History in Roberto Bolaño ’s Los detectives salvajes” (Sauri 2010).
- 8.
The phrase “compensatory modernity” is taken from Julio Ramos (2001).
- 9.
Considering the connections 2666 draws between the femicides in its fictional Ciudad Juárez and the Holocaust, it is perhaps not surprising that Adorno’s claim that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” even as “literature must resist this verdict” (84) resonates with Bolaño’s concerns in here.
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Sauri, E. (2017). Autonomy After Autonomy, or the Novel Beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 . In: Brouillette, S., Nilges, M., Sauri, E. (eds) Literature and the Global Contemporary. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63055-7_3
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