Chile's Limited Passport Into The Global Literary Market

"It's possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one's writing."

—Roberto Bolaño (2004)

It seems reasonable to agree with Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's metaphorical take on the distinctiveness of passports. The same way quality may allow an author's written work to cross national borders—that is, garner interest from international readers—the principal function of a passport is to enable transnational mobility. Yet what is quality writing? For Bolaño, quality is the direct result of an author's fearlessness; it consists of "the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking" (2004, 34). A more cynical interpretation of Bolaño's definition, however, could correlate quality with a writer's ability to engage with the global market of literary production. In fact, this is what Bolaño has unintentionally achieved shortly after his premature death in 2003.¹ Long after the end of the so-called Boom era (Latin America's first entry into the "international literary map" in the 1960s and 70s²), Bolaño almost single-handedly managed to reshape the reception of Chilean and Latin American literature in the world. As put by critic Ilan Stavans: "Not since Gabriel García Márquez… has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño" (2007). Receiving the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Venezuela for his novel The Savage Detectives (1998), for which Bolaño recited the above-quoted acceptance speech in 1999, was only the beginning of his international stardom.

Bolaño's statement in respect to passports and writing quality hints at a paradoxically limiting effect of another basic function of passports: to provide national identity. The quality of an author's writing may very well pave the path towards far-reaching circulation around the world. However, the national identity indicated by the author's passport might also restrict access to that very same path since there is an unspoken quota, a limit to the number of writers that consumers of mainstream literature expect to read from a certain country. Likewise, passports legitimize mobility across international boundaries, but they also make individuals subject to their nationstate. Through passports, citizens become "dependent on states for the possession of an 'identity'" (Torpey 2000, 4). By way of the passport system, governments have the power to designate and monopolize those individuals that legally belong to the nation-state and those who are excluded.

For instance, about two months after the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's socialist government on September 11, 1973, a decree-law empowered the government of Augusto Pinochet to deport Chileans and foreigners "when the noble interests of the state so require" (Rettig Commission 1993, 98). A list of Chileans whose re-entry was restricted was made and as a result, their passports were marked with a hand-written "L," which stood for Limitado para circular (Limited Circulation).³ During Pinochet's military reign (1973-1990), around 200,000 Chileans were expelled.⁴ In solidarity or fear of being targeted by the military regime, some writers like José Donoso chose voluntary exile. Yet in 1981, Donoso returned to Chile. Like Donoso, Carlos Cerda, who initiated his writing career while living in forced exile, returned and resettled in Chile in 1985, that is, also during Pinochet's regime. Donoso, whose work has been translated to more than fifteen languages, is often considered a central figure of the Latin American Boom, alongside García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar. Cerda, who lived in East Germany from 1973 to 1985, is much less known outside of Chile, even though his writings have been translated to English and German. Focusing on these two authors, I will draw here a connection between the transnational reception of Chilean exiles and Chile's place in world literature during the dictatorial regime, a period that coincided in part with the so-called...