From Civitavecchia, With Love: Dreaming Beyond Reason and Literary Afterlife in Roberto Bolaño’s Tres and Entre paréntesis

FROM CIVITAVECCHIA, WITH LOVE: DREAMING BEYOND REASON AND LITERARY AFTERLIFE IN ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S Tres AND Entre paréntesis1 David Francis Harvard University “What threatens is indeed writing.” —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology “Yo soy responsable de todo. Mis silencios son inmaculados.” —Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile “Siempre tuve un problema con Venezuela. Un problema infantil, fruto de mi educación desordenada, problema mı́nimo pero problema al final y al cabo. El centro de este problema es de ı́ndole verbal y geográfica [ . . . ] Era su capital. Para mı́ lo más lógico era que la capital de Venezuela fuera Bogotá. Y la capital de Colombia, Caracas . ¿Por qué? Pues por una lógica verbal o una lógica de las letras. La v del nombre Venezuela es similar, por no decir familiar, a la b de Bogotá. Y la c de Colombia es prima hermana de la c de Caracas. Esto parece intrascendente y probablemente lo sea, pero para mı́ se constituyó en un problema de primer orden, llegando en cierta ocasión, en México, durante una conferencia sobre poetas urbanos de Colombia, a hablar de la potencia de los poetas de Caracas, y la gente, gente tan amable y educada como ustedes, se quedó callada a la espera de que tras la digresión sobre los poetas caraqueños pasara a hablar de los poetas bogotanos . . . ” —Roberto Bolaño, “Discurso de Caracas” In 1999, when he won Venezuela’s prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) received the award with a deeply ironic acceptance speech entitled “Discurso de Caracas.” Now published in a collection of Bolaño’s shorter prose pieces (Entre paréntesis: ensayos, artı́culos y discursos (1998–2003) (2004)), the talk honors fellow Latin American writers while troubling the notion of nationality, of the authority of Bolaño’s own voice, and of those who gave him the award, listening to him (or reading him) without criticizing or fully appreciating his work.2 This paper stems from Bolaño’s double-edged cracks at many jokes in his speech in order to explore his poetics of criticism concerning literary fame and nationalism at the crossroads of world and Latin American literature and its authors.3 Rather than focusing on those texts by Bolaño that critics have more extensively explored and celebrated, my argument pays credence to the author’s call for critique by focusing on the very speech in which he C  2014 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 13 The Latin Americanist, March 2014 describes it. In doing so, I refer to the intersection of lesser-addressed texts he wrote in genres also less analyzed in his oeuvre: the poem, the letter, and the essay. In place of outright definitions of these terms, the purpose of this article is to explore how they work—as seen in Bolaño’s Tres (2000) and Entre paréntesis—and, in so doing, to come through Bolaño’s circuitous logic to a less fixed understanding of genre (as applied to the author’s publications) and a vision of how this one Latin American writer used his rhetoric skillfully as a mode of deferral—across genres—that playfully beckons the reader to keep reading him and other writers. In Doris Sommer’s words, such rhetoric “reach[es] out to privileged readers in order to keep us at arm’s length” (528, emphasis added).4 Mapping Border Publics, According to Bolaño Bolaño’s constructed play between distance and proximity— celebration and critique—simultaneously creates and deconstructs rhetorical borders5 by touching on the notion of what it means to be defined by one’s nationality within Latin America. According to the section of the Chilean’s speech cited above, his audience sees (or hears) the credibility and value of an author who perhaps knows more than a Mexican audience does about the difference between urban poets (of two Latin American countries), who are defined by the names of the cities and nations in which they were born. At the end of his speech in Mexico, not sure he offered an accurate depiction of Bogotá’s poets...