The International Writers Magazine: Review

The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolano • Mathew Clews The question of the source of literary authenticity, a modern literary argument, is central to the work of Bolaño:  Does a writer have to have had lived through his experiences to write about them or should his imagination be entitled to free reign?

 

Or another way of putting it – does life mimic art or art mimic life?  Bolaño answers this in The Savage Detectives, perhaps more so than in any of his other books.  His answer is quite clearly that the two are inseparable. To take an aphorism from Nietzsche – life should be lived as if it were a work of art.  Bolaño, who does reference Nietzsche in his works, along with almost anyone of any intellectual importance in the last two centuries, perhaps took note of that one aphorism more than any other.

 

The structure of the book is broken down into three separate chapters.  The first is a chronological narrative in diary form (which is the 'story' in the novel), following the exploits of the impressionable seventeen year old poet, Garcia Madero, in Mexico City in the seventies. It is a bildungsroman into the climate of the Mexican literary scene during that time.  Madero is abducted by the two founding members of the visceral realists at a poetry workshop at university – a poetic movement comprised solely of rebellious and idealistic late adolescents and young adults.  These two kingpins are Arturo Belano (Bolaño's literary alter-ego) and Ulises Lima. 

 

The prose style in this chapter is simple and ambivalently wavers between self-consciousness and preposterous arrogance, perfectly fitting for a teenager pursuing the dream of a bohemian poet.  There are plenty of insightfully funny moments in this section as Madero tries to lose his virginity and crank out of the poems.  At that point in his young life – sex and poetry are two planets that revolve around each other:

 

As we ate he told me that Arturo had ordered the first purge of visceral realism.

I was stunned.  I asked him how many he’d kicked out.  Five, said Requena.  I assume I wasn’t one of them, I said.  No, not you, said Requena.  The news came as a great relief.  Those purged were Pancho Rodriguez, Luscious Skin, and three poets I didn’t know.

While I was in bed with Rosario, it occurred to me that Mexican avant-garde poetry was undergoing its first schism.

Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine.

 

Some parts of this chapter have cinematic qualities, such as the unrealistic action sequence at the end of the chapter, though this was quite obviously intentionally done by Bolaño.  In his book 2666, there is a scene where the characters talk about Roberto Rodriguez' first film (I'm not sure whether or not it is an actual film – perhaps it is just urban legend) which shows Bolaño had an appetite for some pop culture as well as his high-brow tastes. 

 

Like 2666 where the chapter cataloguing the killings of Santa Teresa is the core upon which everything else orbits, so is the thematic structure of The Savage Detectives with the second (and largest) chapter, which tracks the lives of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima as they depart Mexico City to travel across Europe from the mid-seventies to the late nineties.  This is done in a kind of documentary/confessional way – as if someone had placed a dictaphone next to the narrators and asked them to talk about their lives and their connection to Belano or Lima.  Bolaño simply states the persons name, their location and the date before each monologue.  Some of the narrators only talk about their lives without mention to Belano or Lima (or if they do, only in a small way).  Belano and Lima are seen through everyone's eyes but their own – they are denied a voice and so we catch their refractions through the prismic perspectives of over fifty narrators who have encountered the two throughout their lives.  Bolaño did something quite unique here in regards to subjectivity – although it may seem that he has eliminated (his) subjectivity here completely by denying himself a first-person narrative, even though it would have given greater insight into the character of Belano, he has in fact amalgamated subjectivity and objectivity into a new synthesis of meaning by seeing himself through the eyes of everyone else.  He had to empathize with them whole-heartedly to paint an authentic portrait, even taking a view of himself that could be deemed quite negative at times or dealing with sensitive, personal issues through the Other – such as his spates of impotence throughout the chapter.  There is something very humbling about this form of writing.

 

Whilst the optimism and spirit of youth is explored in the first chapter – the second chapter could be said to chronicle its decay.  The real world comes intruding into the lives of a lot of characters as the offer of a stable life and good pay proves too hard to resist in the face of squalid living conditions and a career in poetry that is going nowhere.  Other characters fall pregnant or die under tragic circumstances.  Belano and Lima, portrayed as the only real poets and intellectuals of the visceral realists (Madero for example is asked to join the group before they had even seen a poem of his), stay true to themselves as writers and poets with the outcome being quite different for the two.  Belano is in a poor state of health and finances at various parts of this chapter, but continues to write and at one point Ulises Lima goes missing amongst the guerillas and left wing revolutionaries in Nicaragua. 

 

The prose style zooms in on the everyday talking of the characters with its syntax, rhythm and colloquialisms.  The narrators talk (for it doesn't sound like writing) free of inhibition – often recalling irrational dreams, fantasies and strange perceptions, usually employed via Bolaño's mystical simile conjunction – as if:

 

Other times he seemed like an extraterrestrial.  He smelled strange.  This I know, this I can say, this I can attest to because on two unforgettable occasions he showered at my house.  More precisely: he didn’t smell bad, he had a strange smell as if he’d just emerged from a swamp and a desert at the same time.  Extreme wetness and extreme dryness, the primordial soup and the barren plain.

 

It is through these instances that Bolaño shows the mimesis of art in life and vice versa, through the reflective waters of 'as if'. 

 

Bolaño in this chapter catalogues the failure of the poets and writers that never made it to print, a lot of them based on his friends and mercifully sparing them the abyss of obscurity – by showing how their lives were art.  Whilst he makes his intentions quite clear in this regard, he also alludes to the fact he only spared some of the people he met, those people that happened to come into contact with him during his life – but that others around the world are continually propelled into the abyss of obscurity, often indirectly by the hands of a complacent, elitist, conservative and bourgeoisie literary scene which he attacks frequently throughout the book, with the prime target being Octavio Paz – the villain of the visceral realists.  Not even the Latin American literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez escapes unscathed.  This chapter is filled with some fantastic stories and characters and one of the most memorable scenes I have a read in a long time, where Arturo Belano has a duel with swords against a literary critic on a beach.

 

The final chapter goes back to the diary narrative of Garcia Madero and to the mid-seventies in Mexico, concluding the second part of Madero's story.  He is with Belano, Lima and a prostitute in Northern Mexico, simultaneously on the run from the girl's pimp and in a search for the roots of visceral realism by trying to locate the enigmatic Cesárea Tinajero, a poet from the '20s that first coined the name of the movement before disappearing into obscurity.  This chapter is an examination of what went wrong, an investigation to find the metaphysical tumor that announced the start of the decay of the visceral realists; of the shattering of their idealism and their gradual slide into obscurity and sometimes ridicule.  It is perhaps where the title comes from – a detective who looks amongst corpses and crime scenes with steady resolve, reading between the lines, looking for that one clue that will unravel the whole mystery.  Poets could be said to be detectives of reality.  Bolaño perhaps implied that they approached it recklessly – hence The Savage Detectives – a tragic necessity in the face of mediocrity, complacency and false authenticity.

 

© Matthew Clews August 2010
mattclews at hotmail.com       

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