Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño by Jeffrey Lawrence (review)

Perhaps more than any other single writer, Roberto Bolaño has encouraged a hemispheric consciousness in scholars of the literatures of Latin America and the United States, a point that Jeffrey Lawrence ably demonstrates in Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño. To be clear, Lawrence elects to concentrate on Hispanophonic and US literatures here, to the exclusion of other traditions. Further, both Bolaño’s and Lawrence’s use of the term “North American” oddly makes no reference to Canada, the most northerly and largest country in the Western hemisphere (6). In any event, citing Sarah Pollack, Lawrence observes that, through a “market logic of substitution” (4), Bolaño’s “visceral realism” has replaced the “magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez as a stereotypical marker for Latin America.

Bolaño wrote extensively on US literature, authoring critical essays that examine both high-canonical writers such as Twain, Burroughs, and Cormac McCarthy and important ones drawn from popular fiction like Patricia Highsmith and Walter Mosley. Further, his fiction is well-populated with American writer characters: for example, the poet Barbara Patterson in Savage Detectives (1998) and journalist Oscar Fate in 2666 (2004). Curiously, the well-travelled Bolaño, a long-time resident of Mexico City, never set foot in the US. This fact anchors Lawrence’s thesis. Bolaño’s construction of American matters derives from readerly engagement rather than direct experiential knowledge. Indeed, for Lawrence, he falls within a long tradition of text-fixated, bibliophilic Latin American writers that stretches back to Borges, a tendency captured by the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama in the figure of the letrado, the well-read man of letters, in his La ciudad letrada (1984). As foil to the writer-intellectual, to the “writer as reader” (8), Lawrence identifies a long American tradition of the “writer as experiencer.” While these contrastive tendencies have prevailed for a very long time, it is Lawrence’s claim in his epilogue that much contemporary fiction achieves something like a higher synthesis involving an informed melding of the two.

Anxieties of Experience is at its root a study of intercultural literary relations between Latin America and the US as developed primarily through fiction but also life writing, criticism, poetry, and journalism, among other forms. In the first part of his study, Lawrence repudiates a long-established inclination to emphasize the “common grounds” (23) approach to the study of the “literatures of the Americas.” In his view, a major break occurs in the early twentieth century under the weight of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, for example, and postwar US imperialism in various hemispheric quarters. For Lawrence, Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900) powerfully shapes the literary-political imaginary of Latin America. Rodó draws from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, establishing a counterpoint between the spirituality of Ariel and the materialism of Caliban. While Rodó does not explicitly align the former with Latin America and the latter with the US, the “subsequent ‘arielista’ movement” (60) uses the distinction to create an influential hermeneutic of the Latin writer as an intellectual reader and the American writer as an adventurous experiencer.

Most of Anxieties of Experience details this counterpoint. (The author acknowledges the Bloomian echo.) Over the course of the twentieth century, a great many well-known American writers ventured to Latin America, including Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Wallace Stevens, Eugene O’Neill, and Zora Neale Hurston. Lawrence chooses to focus on three figures in particular who, he effectively argues, most importantly interani-mate Latin American-US literary relations: Waldo Frank, who toured Latin America extensively in 1929 and 1930, lecturing on American literature; Katherine Anne Porter, who lived in Mexico for much of the 1920s and early 1930s and wrote about it in various short stories; and Ernest Hemingway, a long-time Hispanophile who was familiar with Spanish culture on both...