New York Times Book Review: Characters Humbled By Love

Postmodernism is now a rather unmeaning term, dulled by overuse, and unfit to describe a new group of authors of varying ages and nationalities who are often lumped together under its umbrella: Ben Lerner, Sophie Calle, Teju Cole, Tom McCarthy, Alejandro Zambra, Siri Hustvedt, Michel Houellebecq, Sheila Heti, W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Enrique Vila-Matas, the sexagenarian Barcelona-based writer who, with over 20 novels to his name, is perhaps the most prolific yet least-known of them all.

Call them, instead, the Reality Hunger generation, after David Shields’ ingenious and prophetic 2008 manifesto on contemporary writing. For Shields, novels that employ the traditional conventions of narration, plot, and story no longer make sense. Reality is fiction, and fiction is reality. For a more accurate reflection of how we experience this reality, we ought to think of novels the way we think about art. “A novel, for most readers—and critics—is primarily a ‘story,’” writes Shields. “But a work of art, like the world, is a living form. It’s in its form that its reality resides.” So if form is now all-important—more so than content—what is the form that contemporary works of art so often take? Collage. This also happens to be the form of Reality Hunger. In addition to outlining the future of artistic production, Reality Hunger doubles as a blueprint for it: It is a pastiche, a series of intentionally “plagiarized” aphorisms, presented without quotation marks. (The original sources are listed in the index for legal reasons, but Shields encourages the reader to cut them out of the book.)

But in the years since Reality Hunger was published, fiction has evolved and adopted its own post-Shields specificities. While all of these novelists (Lerner, Calle, Cole, etc.) are transparently their narrators, there tends to be a specter of trauma in the background as well: Zambra writes in the shadow of the Pinochet coup in Chile, Sebald excavates the memory of the Holocaust, and Lerner documents the aftermath of the 3/11 train bombings in Madrid. Above all, this genre is marked by its generic porousness, its willingness to embrace a collage of forms—Zambra’s Ways of Going Home and Lerner’s 10:04 become poems, while other novels dialogue with music and theater. Many of these novels include moments of essayistic prose or literary criticism within themselves—the sadly untranslated Jorge Carrión even inserts a fictional piece of literary criticism in his novel The Dead. (This last genre-merging technique may stoke the anxieties of literary critics: How do you say something new about a book that writes its own criticism?)

Most significantly, these novels intersperse their prose with photographs and paintings. At first, these additions seem to pose a basic question of realism: Can the novel compete with the “reality effect” of the photograph or texture of the painting? In this, the writers are channeling W. G. Sebald, who deploys visual art not as a supplement to the text but as inspiration for it. Sebald’s photographs, as Teju Cole put it in an interview with Aleksandar Hemon in BOMB Magazine, “propose a dare. ‘Look, this is all testimonial,’ he seems to be saying. And we almost believe it—until we notice the slight fracture between the claim in the text and the photograph. … [H]is photos … create the uncanny, destabilizing mood of his books: it must all be true, we think, but we know it can’t all be true.” Sophie Calle’s novel Suite Vénitienne/Please Follow Me—a diary of photos she surreptitiously took of a stranger she followed to Venice—takes Sebald to another level: Photos provide the main action, while the text, her diary, serves as a interlude—almost like a caption.

In addition to the insertion of actual art within the novel, many of these reality-fictions feature scenes in museums or at contemporary art exhibitions. The opening scene of Lerner’sLeaving the Atocha Station takes place at the Prado, where the narrator finds the reluctance of the museum guards to close in on an erratic visitor more moving than the actual paintings. Sheila Heti spends three days at Art Basel in How Should a Person Be?, and Michel Houellebecq lampoons the contemporary art world in The Map and the Territory. Siri Hustvedt’s novel What I Loved begins with the discovery of a painting, while her most recent effort, The Blazing World, lays bare the systemic bias against women in the art world. Orhan Pamuk’sThe Museum of Innocence literally became a museum in Istanbul.

The art world has seeped into the literary world in other ways. Most art fairs, including Frieze London and Frieze New York, feature talks by writers in their programs. Hustvedt, the author of a well-received book of art criticism as well, has lectured at the Prado and the Met. And in aninterview published this spring (also in BOMB), the novelist Tom McCarthy described how falling in with a crowd of visual artists in his twenties gave him a more sophisticated understanding of literature’s possibilities: “These people generally had a much more dynamic engagement with literature than most ‘literary’ people … and their work seemed to be actively addressing the whole legacy of literary modernism (in the same way that Bruce Nauman works through questions posed by Beckett, for example, or Cage with Joyce). … [T]he art world—to a large extent—provides the arena in which literature can be vigorously addressed, transformed, and expanded.”

This literary coalescence around visual art seems increasingly less coincidental and more and more the entire point. The avant-garde writers of today aspire to be conceptual artists, and have their novels considered conceptual art. This may be literature’s Duchampian moment. Welcome to the readymade novel.

Just as Marcel Duchamp asked if a urinal could be art, the readymade novel asks what literature can be, and what it should be in the future. Instead of trying to understand reality via a slew of concrete details, omniscience, multiple viewpoints, or anything else that we’ve traditionally expected from fiction, the readymade novel poses an idea or raises a question. It is more interested in the concept behind a work of art—behind itself—than its execution. The readymade novel underlines the chief virtue (or curse) of conceptual art: Unlike traditional visual art, you don’t actually need to see a readymade to “get it.” But if you do go to see it, it’s just as if you’ve opened up a readymade novel: You’re not merely a passive viewer of art, but an active participant in its formation.

Two newly published books by the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas show just how deeply this literature-as-conceptual-art trend has permeated avant-garde contemporary literature. In Vila-Matas’ latest novel, The Illogic of Kassel, the writer has literally become a contemporary art exhibition. The novel lightly fictionalizes Vila-Matas’ real-life experience at the Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, where he was invited to participate in a week-long writer-in-residence program in 2013. The curators of Documenta ask him to spend the week writing in the corner of a small Chinese restaurant. Vila-Matas finds this absurd, and spends most of his time at the (real-life) Dschingis Khan restaurant sleeping, inventing conversations between the German and Chinese people around him, and actively avoiding the one crazy person who approaches him. Despite seemingly wasting his time in the restaurant, Vila-Matas becomes the piece of performance art that the curators of Documenta hoped he would be: “Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” one curator tells him.

Vila-Matas is also the author of A Brief History of Portable Literature, originally published in 1985 and jointly released this summer with The Illogic of Kassel. A Brief History of Portable Literature is the rawer of the two books, a whimsical romp based on the peregrinations of a secret literary society of “Shandies” (as in Tristram Shandy). It is perhaps best (self-deprecatingly) described within its own pages as “a journey that sought no goal, no fixed object, and was clearly futile.” This book is a catalogue of the avant-garde—with allusions to Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Man Ray, Georgia O’Keeffe—that is composed in a style that teeters between funny and obnoxiously in-the-know. There is a mockumentary retrospective feel to it: a piecemeal investigation into the events that precipitated the demise of this gloriously short-lived secret society, which required its members to make portable art, i.e., readymades a la Duchamp’s box-in-a-suitcase.

Read together, these two novels, published some 30 years apart, demonstrate the evolution of Vila-Matas’s thinking on the relationship between contemporary art and literature. A Brief History of Portable Literature, on one hand, simply ventriloquizes this gaggle of Duchampian disciples. It’s almost like highbrow fan fiction. But in The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas doesn’t merely tell us how great artists attempted to create portable art—he becomes part of the portable art. Sulking in the Chinese restaurant, writing or merely pretending to do so, Vila-Matas was an official exhibition at Documenta 13, whose Writers’ Residency “sought moments of ‘chorality’: instances of mutual commitment, whether loud or muted; the possibility that voices could meet and join together, without the outright demand that they should.” The concepts or questions—what if we make the solitary act of writing a public performance? Can we have privacy in a public space?—outstrip their execution in importance.

That’s not the sole project of the readymade novel, however: Vila-Matas also reminds us that we don’t live like nineteenth-century French novelists anymore, so we should stop writing according to their demodé, quasi-scientific conventions of realism: “We loath the realist who thinks the task of the writer is to reproduce, copy, imitate reality, as if, in its chaotic evolution, its monstrous complexity, reality could be trapped and narrated,” writes Vila-Matas in The Illogic of Kassel. “We are amazed by writers who believe that the more empirical and prosaic they are, they closer they get to the truth, when in fact the more details you pile up, the further that takes you away from reality.”

Our reality, instead, lies in something more akin to conceptual art. In The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas is fond of repeating a line that Mallarmé told Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect that it produces.” In other words, the effect of art has now become more important than the canvas. It’s not surprising that this line is repeated so often in the novel: In The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas is very much painting the effect that art produces. The reader has unvarnished access to his rich interior life—all his anxieties, opinions, and experiences of viewing installations at Documenta. Indeed, Vila-Matas demands an active reader: Just as the conceptual art installations at Documenta demanded viewer participation to form meaning, Vila-Matas asks the same of his readers. “Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” the Documenta curator reminds us. Grapping with competing interpretations, processing your various associations, feelings, and theories—this is the work of art in the new millennium.

The “readymade” writers are, of course, still on the fringes of contemporary literature. Only Pamuk and Sebald are currently internationally famous. Cole and Lerner are on their way to greater recognition, and one hopes their future novels will create more buzz, but Vila-Matas and Zambra will have to wait for more English-language translations of their work to get their proper due; Sophie Calle may be perpetually too avant-garde. Regardless of their varying commercial successes, the emergence of these writers suggests at least a small audience with an interest in how we experience art today. And it seems likely that the younger writers of this generation will continue to write similar books in the future. The “readymade” novelists may inspire a few readymade imitations of their own.

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The New Republic: Why Did Borges Hate Soccer?

[Published on June 19, 2014 in The New Republic; Translated into Italian on June 28, 2014 in Movimento Libertario]

Soccer is popular,” Jorge Luis Borges observed, “because stupidity is popular.”

At first glance, the Argentine writer’s animus toward “the beautiful game” seems to reflect the attitude of today’s typical soccer hater, whose lazy gibes have almost become a refrain by now: Soccer is boring. There are too many tie scores. I can’t stand the fake injuries.

And it’s true: Borges did call soccer “aesthetically ugly.” He did say, “Soccer is one of England’s biggest crimes.” And apparently, he even scheduled one of his lectures so that it would intentionally conflict with Argentina’s first game of the 1978 World Cup. But Borges’ distaste for the sport stemmed from something far more troubling than aesthetics. His problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense. (“There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me,” he once wrote.) Borges opposed dogmatism in any shape or form, so he was naturally suspicious of his countrymen’s unqualified devotion to any doctrine or religion—even to their dear albiceleste.

Soccer is inextricably tied to nationalism, another one of Borges’ objections to the sport. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity,” hesaid. National teams generate nationalistic fervor, creating the possibility for an unscrupulous government to use a star player as a mouthpiece to legitimize itself. In fact, that’s precisely what happened with one of the greatest players ever: Pelé. “Even as his government rounded up political dissidents, it also produced a giant poster of Pelé straining to head the ball through the goal, accompanied by the slogan Ninguém mais segura este país: Nobody can stop this country now,” writes Dave Zirin in his new book,Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. Governments, such as the Brazilian military dictatorship that Pelé played under, can take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support, and this is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.

His short story, “Esse Est Percipi” (Latin for “to be is to be perceived”), also may explain his hatred of soccer. About halfway through the story, it’s revealed that soccer in Argentina has ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spectacle. In this fictional universe, simulacra reigns supreme: the representation of sport has replaced actual sport. “These [sports] don’t exist outside the recording studios and newspaper offices,” a soccer club president huffs. Soccer inspires a fanaticism so deep that supporters will follow nonexistent games on TV and the radio without questioning a thing:

The stadiums have long since been condemned and are falling to pieces. Nowadays everything is staged on the television and radio. The bogus excitement of the sportscaster—hasn’t it ever made you suspect that everything is humbug? The last time a soccer match was played in Buenos Aires was on 24 June 1937. From that exact moment, soccer, along with the whole gamut of sports, belongs to the genre of the drama, performed by a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.

This story goes back to Borges’ discomfort with mass movements: “Esse Est Percipi” effectively accuses the media of complicity in the creation of a mass culture that reveres soccer, and, as a result, leaves itself open to demagoguery and manipulation.

According to Borges, humans feel the need to belong to a grand universal plan, something bigger than ourselves. Religion does it for some people, soccer for others. Characters in the Borgesian corpus often grapple with this desire, turning to ideologues or movements to disastrous effect: The narrator of the story “Deutsches Requiem” becomes a Nazi, while in “The Lottery in Babylon” and “The Congress,” small, innocuous-seeming organizations quickly transform into vast, totalitarian bureaucracies that dole out corporal punishment or burn books. We want to be a part of something bigger, so much so that we blind ourselves to the flaws that develop in these grand plans—or the flaws that were inherent to them all along. And yet, as the narrator of “The Congress” reminds us, the allure of these grand narratives often proves too much: “What really matters is having felt that our plan, which more than once we made a joke of, really and secretly existed and was the world and ourselves.”

That sentence could accurately describe how millions of people on Earth feel about soccer.

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Guernica: Forugh Farrokhzad: Poetry as Life, Life as Poetry

[Published in Guernica Magazine on February 26, 2014]

By Shaj Mathew

“Poetry is my God,” Forugh Farrokhzad once wrote in a letter to her father. “I am happy when my soul is content and poetry satisfies my soul, whereas if I have all these good things that people kill themselves for and am deprived of writing poetry, I will kill myself.” Farrokhzad encapsulates this life-or-death relationship to her art in “Another Birth,” the titular poem of a collection that by turns modernized and scandalized literary Tehran when it was published 50 years ago in the spring of 1964. Its first line—“My whole being is a dark chant”—affirms the Persian littératrice’s artistic credo: poetry as life, life as poetry.

This was a revolutionary stance for a woman living in mid-century Iran. After all, men dominate the entire Middle Eastern literary tradition, so much of which is organized around the tension between the active male lover and the passive female beloved. The paradigmatic example of this is of course the centuries-old story of Leyli and Majnun, a sort of proto-Romeo and Juliet that figures prominently in the history of Middle Eastern and South Asian art and literature. (Briefly: The two are forbidden to marry, leading Majnun, which literally means mad, to go crazy, move to the woods, and write poetry; in the end, Leyli dies, as does Majnun.) Originating in the verse of the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami, this legend of star-crossed lovers still permeates Middle Eastern literature. But many later interpretations of the story dwell on the point-of-view of the moon-struck Majnuns and never the Leylis with whom they are helplessly besotted.

Here’s where Farrokzhad offers a corrective: Another Birth, as well as her three earlier collections, The Captive, The Wall, and The Rebellion, inverts this patriarchal dynamic, privileging Farrokhzad’s own feminine voice above all others.

Many scholars take Farrokhzad to be the speaker of “Another Birth,” which begins by observing how poetry has the power to preserve the people who make a life so meaningful—and painful: “in this chant / I grafted you to the tree, / to the water, to the fire,” she writes, probably alluding to one Ebrahim Golestan, doubtless the “E.G.” to whom the volume is dedicated. That’s at least the interpretation of Michael Hillman, the professor of Persian whose excellent book, A Lonely Woman, is one of the few English-language treatments of Farrokhzad’s life and poetry.

Golestan, a prominent Iranian filmmaker and intellectual, was married with kids, but that didn’t stop the two from beginning a sensational affair that was the talk of the Tehran literary set in the 1960s. Farrokhzad did little to quell the gossip: in fact, she offers her side of the story in “Another Birth.” According to Hillman, Golestan would leave Farrokhzad to go home to his family every night and return in the morning, an experience Farrokhzad seems to describe in “Another Birth”:

I know a sad little fairy
who lives in an ocean
and ever so softly
plays her heart into a magic flute
a sad little fairy
who dies with one kiss each night
and is reborn with one kiss each dawn.

This affair with Golestan suffuses Farrokhzad’s poetry with a melancholy reminiscent of Plath. Farrokhzad did have more than enough reason to feel low. At 18, after she divorced her husband—the satirist Parviz Shapour, who she had begged to marry two years earlier—she was forbidden by law and by her husband’s family from seeing her young son ever again. This event would haunt her later verse and likely figured in her decision to adopt a child from the leper colony that she filmed in her acclaimed documentary, The House Is Black, which Golestan produced.

The specter of Golestan aside, “Another Birth” is very much a paean to the quotidian. That’s where real life takes place, the individual moments of the day to day—which are occasionally punctuated by things not so ordinary:

Life is perhaps
a long street through which a woman
holding a basket passes every day.
Life is perhaps
a rope with which a man
hangs himself from a branch.
Life is perhaps a child returning home from school.
Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose
between two love-makings

This focus on the single moments of the present shortly gives way to a preoccupation with linear time and literary legacy. Farrokhzad wonders aloud: Is her poetry good enough to make a dent in “the line of time?” Will she endure?

Today Farrokhzad’s popularity is such that the prospect of her fretting about her future reception seems absurd. She was widely read during her lifetime, and scholars now consider her one of the most important Persian poets of the 20th century. She continues to influence Iranians and the diaspora in this century as well, including the likes of Shirin Neshat, who adapted a Farrokhzad poem for a visual piece in the New York Times in 2011. “The epitome of what the Islamic Republic wanted to eradicate, Farrokhzad is now the Iranian equivalent of a rock star,” writes Farzaneh Milani in the Washington Post. “An industry has developed around her name.”

Tragically, Farrokhzad would not live to see this legacy. In 1967, just three years after the publication of Another Birth, she died in a car accident, aged 32. The actual details of the accident are apocryphal: some say that she swerved to avoid hitting a school bus full of children, while others (even more dubiously) claim it was a suicide. In any case, many have noticed that her poem “Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season” seems to eerily presage the season and manner of her death:

Ah,
who’s looking out for accidents at the intersection
when the whistles are shrilling Stop!
…
I said to my mother, “It’s all over now”
I said, “The accident always occurs before there’s time to think—
we have to send condolences to the obit page”

Even in these lines, it seems Farrokhzad was mulling her poetic afterlife. In an interview she gave three years before her death, she waxed philosophic on this subject:

“Poetry for me is like a window that opens automatically whenever I go toward it. I sit there, look out, sing, shout, cry, merge with the image of the trees, and I know that on the other side of the window there is a space and someone hears me, someone who might live two hundred years hence or lived three hundred years ago. It makes no difference—it is a means of connection with existence, with existence in its broader sense.”

Farrokhzad’s comments recall both Sappho (“You may forget but / Let me tell you / this: someone in / some future time / will think of us”) and T.S. Eliot, whose essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” emphasizes the simultaneous order in which all literature—present, past, and future—traffics. Farrokhzad did not pretend to know her place in the literary pantheon, but the poem’s last lines, flecked with Sufi imagery, suggest someone who might: Hafez. “No fisherman shall ever find a pearl / in a small brook that empties into a pool,” writes Farrokhzad, alluding to a poem by 14th-century Sufi poet. The pearls are in the ocean. You might find them, you might not. But if you want to write great poetry, you have to take the plunge.

Read “Another Birth” here.

Shaj Mathew has contributed to the New York Times, The New Inquiry, Lapham’s Quarterly, Sports Illustrated, and The Millions. He attends the University of Pennsylvania, where he is an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum.

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Guernica: The Part About Bolaño’s Archive

[Published in Guernica Magazine on September 5, 2013.]

By Shaj Mathew

Ten years after his death, the craze over Roberto Bolaño appears to have subsided. The Third Reich, serialized two years ago in The Paris Review, met largely tepid reviews. Critiques of Woes of the True Policeman regularly ascribed a mixtape quality to the work. The New York Times called it “a collection of outtakes” while The New Republic argued that “the continued publication and popular packaging of his incomplete work may actually be diluting his reputation as a writer of varied talents and fearless ambition… We have enough.”

These disappointing, occasionally strident reviews might normally discourage the release of even more of Bolaño’s writing but a recent exhibition of his unpublished manuscripts, photos, letters, and even web history makes an extremely compelling case for exactly that. “Archivo Bolaño,” which was on display at the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center (CCCB) earlier this year, was curated by Valerie Miles, the editor of Granta en español, and Juan Insua, a veteran curator at the CCCB, with the collaboration of Bolaño’s widow, Carolina López. The exhibit attempts to set the record straight on the life of a man who embraced, and even cultivated, myths about himself. Did he actually do heroin? (No.) Did he prefer poetry to fiction? (No: “We’re less young every day, fortune with some, poverty with others: I write verses, dream of a novel,” he scribbled in a notebook from 1978.) Was he in Chile during the Pinochet coup? (Nope.) While the literary community may be experiencing Bolaño fatigue, López and the curators felt that these speculations about his work and life deserved the more critical take offered by their exhibit, which charts three separate stages of Bolaño’s literary development during the years he lived in Catalonia (1977-2003).

“We’re trying to reorder some of the myths based on the documents,” said Miles, who guided me through the exhibit for nearly two hours. According to Miles, who has spent the past four years looking through Bolaño’s notebooks, López wanted visitors to “have a look at the archive and then speak for themselves.”

Despite the minor backlash against a perceived Bolaño overload, it’s clear to Miles that Bolaño wanted his unpublished work to see daylight. “He had the sense that he was doing important work,” said Miles. “He was a packrat. He kept everything in order. He was organizing his archive.” The handwriting in his notebooks, Miles notes, markedly improved during the latter period of his life. Woes of the True Policeman was on his desk, ready to go, when he died. And if there was any further doubt about whether Bolaño wanted posthumous attention, consider this scene from one of his notebooks from 1983, in which a woman discovers a set of manuscript pages in a bookshelf drawer:

She picks up one page at random: “Sometimes I’m immensely happy!” The writing is small. She has a sip of beer and keeps reading (no need to mention it right now but she doesn’t feel she’s violating anything by reading these sorts of notes, life diary, or whatever). The important thing, the really important thing I want to say is that the beer’s getting warm and the moon pops up over the alley for just a few seconds.

This might not seem like much, but the metafictional significance of this passage (quoted in Miles’ essay, “A Journey Forward to the Origin,” from the exhibit catalogue) becomes clear after one learns that the phrase “I’m immensely happy” is all over Bolaño’s notebooks. Simply put, this passage is about someone discovering Bolaño’s archive. “It’s another little Bolaño twist: he’s saying, ‘I’m speaking from the future,’” said Miles, who felt as if she was being described on the page. In that moment of discovery, she was reading Bolaño writing about her experience of reading Bolaño.

After poring over Bolaño’s notebooks, which also feature impressively sketched self portraits of “San Roberto de Troya,” a nickname he gave himself, and notes of encouragement to himself, Miles and Insua classified Bolaño’s development in Catalonia into the exhibit’s three stages: “The Unknown University” (Barcelona, 1977-1980), “Inside the Kaleidoscope” (Girona, 1980-1984), and “The Visitor from the Future” (Blanes, 1985-2003). In Barcelona, writing by hand, Bolaño developed his voice, doing unusual writing exercises—he wrote stories based on the art on his matchboxes, among other things—to produce different styles. Bolaño found Barcelona too distracting and was unable to publish much, so he moved to Girona where he isolated himself completely and wrote Monsieur Pain and three still unpublished novels on a mechanical typewriter: Diorama, The Spirit of Science Fiction, and DF, La Paloma, Tobruk.

Girona saw the emergence of Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic technique, which produced writing many American critics have misunderstood as a substandard pastiche of his previous work. In particular, Bolaño began to experiment with metalepsis; that is, he began to use characters from his previous works as starting points for new writing. For example, Distant Star emerges from the last chapter of Nazi Literature in the Americas, just as Amulet springs from chapter four of The Savage Detectives. Likewise, American critics have observed that Woes of the True Policeman tells the familiar story of a key character from 2666.

But this is no mere “collection of outtakes,” as the Times would have you believe—Bolaño’s intertextual continuity throughout these works is intentional, for it creates a self-referential literary terrain in which the reader, surrounded by so many recognizable signs and symbols, can arrive at several different readings of the work. Miles describes Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic process, and its effect on the reader, in her essay “A Journey”:

Bolaño didn’t leave things behind, but threw them back into the stew, this evolving project of a multidimensional universe turning like a grand kaleidoscope of symbols and metaphors and themes and meanings with secret passageways, wormholes back and forth in time and place, occult intentions and shadowed suggestions, placed and replaced in different orders or alongside different texts. Like Melville’s Moby Dick, the metaphors and themes are untethered in the end, unanchored by a single authorial interpretation. The signs and signifiers are occult, mysterious, secret because they belong individually, and each reader brings a different experience to the interpretive act.

When Miles and I were discussing this in the Blanes section of the exhibit, a man in his early twenties—perhaps a fellow Bolaño disciple—hushed us as he hovered over a nearby vitrine containing Bolaño’s model for 2666. “Too loud,” he said. Miles explained to the man in Spanish that she was one of the curators of the exhibit, but he simply responded, “too loud” again and continued eying the manuscripts. This is what he saw: a very roughly drawn diagram resembling a living, breathing, and wholly unclassifiable organism—at once human and alien, with lines like blood vessels sprouting out of a small, circular saucer. I imagine that these vessels represent the five parts of 2666, which intersect at the saucer, the center that coheres the novel. Think of it as a self-enclosed, self-sustaining environment: each individual vessel or part of the book tells its own story; taken together, these vessels create a whole novel. But the diagram also looks like many other things: A crustacean that evokes the nautical motifs of the Gaudi houses in Barcelona, or a cell diagram. Its ineffability is quite apposite: a novel like 2666 demands a structure equally sui generis, one that recalls some form of life.

“Archivo Bolaño” imparted a tremendous amount of casual knowledge to its visitors: The fact that Bolaño wrote poetry on graph paper, much of which hasn’t been published, and that he actually played the war games that the narrator of The Third Reich loves so much, sending in game pieces by mail. But that was only a piece of the exhibit’s appeal. As you walked around peering at the collection, you heard whooshes, cascading waves, foreboding beeps, screams, a typewriter clacking away, a meow seemingly uttered by a something other than a cat—all of which collectively mimicked the movement, terror, and wonder of a Bolaño novel.

As we ambled out of the exhibit, Miles told me that after Bolaño’s death, the novelist’s widow, López, who was separated from Bolaño when he passed, felt that “people who thought they knew him didn’t know him as well as they think they did.” “Archivo Bolaño” allowed readers to make such a judgment themselves, and in so turning over the reigns to the visitor, inviting them to examine how both truth and myth are constructed, the exhibit further enacted the experience of reading Bolaño. For always Bolaño’s detectives/readers/visitors don’t just interrogate criminals—they interrogate facticity itself.

Shaj Mathew has contributed to the New York Times, The New Inquiry, Sports Illustrated, The Millions, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and McSweeney’s. He attends the University of Pennsylvania, where he is researching Bolaño as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum.

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How Naguib Mahfouz Explains the Egyptian Revolution

[Published July 16, 2013 in The Huffington Post]

The coup that toppled Egyptian President Morsi has inspired a slew of op-ed columns around the world attempting to make sense of the latest from Tahrir Square. Instant analysis, however, is an oxymoron. If only David Brooks, who lamented that Egyptians “lack even the basic mental ingredients” for democracy, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which hopes that the new government takes after Pinochet, knew that. Perhaps it would behoove these pundits to look beyond the literal truths of the situation, which can yield only so much insight (or stupidity). Experiential truth — that is, fiction — can remind us of the ambiguity of a situation and the subtlety that any critical take demands. In uncertain times, we ought to remember our novelists, and luckily for Egypt, the oeuvre of Naguib Mahfouz can help illuminate the unrest in Cairo.

For Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, life after a revolution is necessarily cantankerous; while a polyphony of voices shouts for attention, none are heard to the extent they desire. That’s at least the case in Miramar. In this 1967 novel, Mahfouz’s characters grapple with the aftermath of a different revolution: the political and economic idealism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policy of “Arab Socialism.” Four of these characters, each representing a different ideology, come to stay at the eponymous Pension Miramar and narrate the same series of events from their respective points of view, Rashomon-style. They are Amer Wagdi, an octogenarian ex-journalist with sympathies for the Wafd Party; Hosny Allam, a young, wealthy nihilist cut off from his educated family; Mansour Bahy, a Marxist radio announcer prone to bouts of melancholy; and Sarhan al-Beheiry, a socialist, cynic, opportunist, and lothario.

Mahfouz characterizes this diverse political lot with texture absent from most contemporary news analyses: Following last week’s coup, some networks have reduced the Egyptian political landscape to a clash between the Muslim Brotherhood and everyone else. But in the next presidential election (that is, should there be one), expect a Miramar-esque struggle among a number of fissiparous political parties. “Where once they were barely heard,” the BBC wrote last year, “now some Egyptians are starting to complain of the cacophony of competing voices.” The four narrators of Miramar predict a post-revolutionary descent into political dissensus, as they contradict, complicate, and interfere with each other’s stories. But unlike some modern takes on the matter, their interactions reflect the Egyptian political sphere for its nuanced, imperfect self.

Back at the pension, the arrival of Zohra — the attractive, nubile chambermaid who symbolizes an Egypt in flux and in search of direction — creates rivalries between these four narrators and sets the plot into motion. It also signals Mahfouz’s (ever-important) commentary on the status of women in the Egypt: Zohra is the novel’s protagonist, and yet she is denied the opportunity to tell her own story. While Zohra receives both advice and abuse from these male narrators, we can only speculate about her thoughts and feelings, for her psyche is totally inaccessible. That Mahfouz instead provides the perspectives of four men to narrate the novel is a damning assessment of gender equality in Egypt in the ’60s. Since then, Egyptian women have made strides, especially with regard to education, but the hundreds of sexual assaults reported in Tahrir Square in the past two weeks suggest that a much larger change in attitudes towards women is necessary for progress to continue. If Mahfouz wrote Miramar today, it’s unclear whether Zohra would get a chance to tell her story even now.

The ouster of Morsi has by turns enthralled and infuriated many Egyptians, but ultimately promises nothing. If Egyptians are feeling exasperated by this latest political upheaval, they would do well to heed one of Miramar‘s last lines. Zohra, a stand-in for Egypt, has endured a torrid time at the pension, but Amer Wagdi tells her,

Remember that you haven’t wasted your time here. If you’ve come to know what is not good for you, you may also think of it all as having been a sort of magical way of finding out what is truly good for you.

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