The Part of the Exile: Displacement and Belonging in Bolaño's Putas asesinas

Roberto Bolaño has been hailed as one of Latin America's most global writers, and his works have been characterized as postnational and deterritorialized. Bolaño is also noted for his ability to depict specific locations and cultural spheres, such as the literary world of Mexico City in novels such as Los detectives salvajes (1998) and Amuleto (1999), Chilean culture under dictatorship in Estrella distante (1996) and Nocturno de Chile (2000), and locations as diverse as Europe during World War II and Northern Mexico under globalization in 2666 (2004). Although his writings are full of intricate details about such places, Bolaño also writes as an outsider, a stranger who looks upon each of these worlds with a sense of irony and bewilderment. As a Chilean expatriate living in Mexico, and later in Spain, Bolaño was uniquely positioned to experience and write about the condition of global displacement of our time.

Critics have noted how Bolaño uses a deterritorialized Spanish language full of regionalisms from different areas, which eludes a single national idiom.¹ Such global Spanish could be seen as consistent with Bolaño's identification as Latin American (rather than as Chilean, Mexican, or Spanish) and with his preoccupation in his fiction with diverse Latin American diasporas. In the short story collection Putas asesinas (2001), however, Bolaño also pays significant attention to how Latin American migrants – particularly Chileans – cross paths with migrants from other cultures, and explores the forms of affect that displaced individuals share. In this sense, Putas asesinas anticipates transnational themes that are more fully developed in 2666.² These stories pose questions about what it means to imagine a community that is no longer national, and thus no longer the extended national community of exile or diaspora, but rather a global community of strangers and wanderers.

Perhaps the term cosmopolitan captures both the worldliness of Bolaño's project and the author's faithfulness to the idea of literature as a form of chosen exile, wandering, or vagabundaje. Robbins (1998) argues that cosmopolitanism has proven an increasingly complex and versatile concept. In recent years, he says, it has acquired "a new cast of characters": "North Atlantic merchant sailors, Caribbean au pairs in the United States, Egyptian guest workers in Iraq, Japanese women who take gaijin lovers" (1). These characters no longer correspond to the older idea of cosmopolitanism as a detached, universalist, and primarily Western experience.³ Bolaño's texts support the idea that cosmopolitanism has a new cast of characters: maquiladora workers, prostitutes, football players, political exiles, reporters, detectives, traveling artists, wandering poets and revolutionaries abound in his works.

Against this background, the character of the Chilean exile plays an important part. He represents what is partial, incomplete, even provincial. Through characters that often mirror the author's younger self, Bolaño dramatizes the tension between the (displaced) local and the transnational. The transnational, however, cannot be successfully imagined or represented as a community. It is at this point that fantasy – in particular Bolaño's penchant for dark humor, delirium, and flights of orientalist fancy – fills in the gaps, highlighting the tension between closeness and distance (or between strangeness and familiarity) in the everyday experience of transnationalism. In this essay I will discuss three short stories from Putas asesinas: "El Ojo Silva," "Vagabundo en Francia y Bélgica," and "Buba." My intention is to relate these stories to Bolaño's views on literature and exile, to discuss his representation of the Chilean exile community, and to explore his construction of otherness as a reflection of the narrator/protagonist's necessarily partial perspective vis-à-vis the global.

Exiles and Wandering Fighters

–El exilio debe ser algo terrible –dijo Norton, comprensiva.

–En realidad –dijo Amalfitano– ahora lo veo como un movimiento natural, algo que, a su manera, contribuye a abolir el destino o lo que comúnmente se considera el destino.

(2666, 157)

Bolaño repeatedly makes the point in his essays and works of fiction that exile, in particular the writer's exile, should not be...