"A la pinche modernidad": Literary Form and the End of History in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes

Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes

"Soñábamos con utopía y nos despertamos gritando."

Roberto Bolaño, "Déjenlo todo, nuevamente"

I. The Aesthetic Event

In a lecture entitled "El cuento policial" ["The Detective Story" (1978)], Jorge Luis Borges observes that, "The detective novel has created a special type of reader," and adds, "If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction" (492). Borges's interest in this particular genre, of course, inspired a good deal of his own fictions, though what his remarks will point to here is a more generalizable concept of literature that entails a certain notion of the relationship between reader and text. For Borges, this "special type of reader" confronts literature with such "incredulity and suspicions" that he or she might turn any narrative into a detective story; if "told that Don Quixote is a detective novel," this reader, he contends, will invariably conclude that, "Cervantes was the murderer, the guilty party" (492). Yet, what Borges describes is neither a reader who is liable to a misinterpretation of Cervantes's novel, nor simply some understanding of detective fiction in the sense of literary history or genres. Rather, his account draws our attention to what appears to be an insight into the general ontology of literature that detective fiction provides. For what literature is, according to Borges, is "an aesthetic event" that "requires the conjunction of reader and text" (491); and what the detective story highlights, he suggests, is the way in which the reader—any reader—forms the conditions of possibility for this "aesthetic event." Arguing that, "It is absurd to suppose that a book is much more than a book. It begins to exist when a reader opens it," Borges imagines that the participation of this reader is neither extrinsic nor secondary to but constitutive of the literary text. Thus, to the extent that the distinction between detective fiction and other kinds of fiction is afforded by "the way texts are read" (491)—rather than, say, a set of formal elements found within the work itself—the conceptualization of literary form implicit in this account ultimately requires an insistence on the primacy of this reader. Absent the "aesthetic event"—that is, this encounter between reader and text—the literary itself remains indefinable and indescribable. Borges subsequently maintains that the aesthetic "event" or "phenomenon" "can be similar to the moment when the book was created" (492); as such, the participation of the reader is assimilated to the role of the writer to suggest that both are equally constitutive of the text. For this reason, however, we might say that what is involved in the example of the reader who approaches Cervantes's seventeenth-century text as a detective novel is not so much a form of méconnaissance as it is a kind of rewriting of that same text.

No doubt the somewhat paradoxical conclusions drawn from Borges's remarks are familiar to his own readers and critics alike. Nevertheless, what appears to be as a typical Borgesian anomaly finds a number of ready equivalents in Latin American literature since the 1960s, not least in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives (1998)]. That this novel and Bolaño's work more generally engage the conventional elements of detective fiction certainly offers a means toward explicating this continuity, although a more meaningful set of connections between these and other authors is made available by a shared understanding of what literature is. Indeed, it is the exhaustion of this same conception of the literary that is dramatized, this essay argues, in Los detectives salvajes, a novel in which both the story of a fictional band of poets known as the visceral realists and the history of literary modernism ends in the Sonora Desert in 1976. And as we will see, this exhaustion was precipitated by a continuing crisis in the production of global wealth that has not only had the profoundest consequences for...