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 The
Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño is a sprawling, swirling, 600-page
sprint of a novel. It charts the lives of two experimental
poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, and expands to reveal
a whole culture that arose among the impoverished artists
of Mexico City in the 1970s. The novel is widely regarded
as Bolaño's masterpiece, and it appears on many Best
of 2007 lists. But after the hype has faded away, The Savage
Detectives will be remembered as the place where poetry
and prose challenged each other to a fight to the death, and
prose won.
Bolaño's
novel is filled with characters who live and breathe poetry.
Ulises and Arturo are the leaders of a gang—called the
"visceral realists"—that stays up late and scribbles
verse, or drinks tequila and screams about literature. They
use their poetry to define the chaotic world around them.
This is a daunting task, especially since Mexico City is full
of sex, literature, and political revolution—three things
that seem to defy simple definitions. Still, they try. One
of the visceral realists, San Epifanio, explains how to organize
all the poets in history:
Within
the vast ocean of poetry, he identified various currents:
faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs,
and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots
and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet.
Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a
faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene,
or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and
simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak,
in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
"In our language, of course," he clarified. "In the wider
world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous."
Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse
flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and
queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics
and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and
at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén,
Alexaindre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a
butch, and a queer, respectively. As a general rule, poets
like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada,
Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was
a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry….
This
discussion goes on for another three pages, and although Bolaño
keeps it interesting with plenty of obscure names and noisy
opinions, nothing is ever resolved. San Epifanio, by attempting
to catalog all of the poets in history, loses the thread of
his argument and fails to describe anything. The Savage
Detectives is a litany of similar attempts and similar
failures. Bolaño's characters are always trying to
capture the essence of the world in a few short definitions.
At one point, an eminent Mexican poet and his friends are
almost arrested by a Nicaraguan police inspector over a pack
of cigarettes:
Álamo
took out his pack of Delicados and offered it around.
Labarca and I each took one, but the inspector waved them
away and lit a Cuban cigarette. These are stronger, he
said with a clear hint of irony. It was as if he were
saying: we revolutionaries smoke strong tobacco, real
men smoke strong tobacco, those of us with a stake in
objective reality smoke real tobacco. Stronger than a
Delicados? said Labarca. Black tobacco, comrades, genuine
tobacco. Álamo laughed under his breath and said:
it's hard to believe we've lost a poet, but what he really
meant was: what do you know about tobacco, you stupid
son of a bitch? You can kiss my ass with your Cuban tobacco,
said Labarca almost without batting an eye. What did you
say, comrade? said the inspector. That I don't give a
shit about your Cuban tobacco. Where Delicados are lit,
let the rest be put out. Álamo laughed again and
the inspector seemed to hesitate between turning pale
with rage and looking confused.
This
may seem like a trivial conflict, but it's made harrowing
by the fact that the police inspector is a loyal Sandinista
at a time when Nicaragua is trying to quell the Sandinista
rebellion, and some of the visiting Mexican poets are secretly
on the other side. Arguing over the classification of cigarettes
is a way of masking the real conflict over politics and war.
Bolaño's characters use poetry to classify the world
in their own terms. For people who are mired in poverty, political
oppression, or sexual repression, the ability to do this can
mean the difference between life and death.
With
dozens of narrators and long, strung-together sentences, The
Savage Detectives is a rambling novel. But its digressions
contain a kind of poetic logic. Bolaño gives us elegant
lists of the various elements of sexual, literary, and political
revolutions. Sometimes all it takes is a subject heading a
few line breaks to turn Bolaño's prose into a collection
of related items:
ANIMALS
HEARD AT NIGHT IN SAHUARIPA, MEXICO
Wolf spiders
Scorpions
Centipedes
Tarantulas
Black widows
Desert toads
MISMATCHED
PLACES
Trieste and Sydney
Cordoba and Helsinki
Naples and Bocas del Toro
Limoges and New Delhi
Glasgow and Monterrey
SUBJECTS
OF CONVERSATION AT A BAR IN VIENNA, AUSTRIA
The prayer of the bones
The yearning for health
The virtue of danger
The tenacity of the forgotten
The limits of memory
The wisdom of plants
The eye of parasites
The agility of the earth
The merit of the soldier
The cunning of the giant
The hole in the wall
These
lists often feel poetic, even though they appear in prose.
It makes sense that a book obsessed with organizing the world
into categories would also be a book about poets. A poem is
like a good list: It selects and arranges the essential parts
of a much bigger idea. In The Savage Detectives we
often see poets agonizing over their work. But, with the exception
of a few diagrams that turn out to be more like visual puns
than poems, none of these poems appear on the page.
As the
book reaches its sad and violent end, Ulises and Arturo fail
to revive the visceral realist movement, and this failure
becomes a kind of poetic statement of its own—a beautiful
list of many failures that add up to something more. "I saw
our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure,"
a mentor says to Ulises and Arturo, "and that failure was
called joy." Poetry, in the end, lets us down. The entire
novel is written in prose. But the amazing feat of The
Savage Detectives is how Bolaño turns every object
into a signifier, every statement into a philosophy, and every
word in these speedy 600 pages into the kind of insightful
detail that one would normally find in a poem. Bolaño
was a struggling poet before he became a famous novelist,
and it shows. His novel teases the world apart and re-organizes
it so that each word stands out like a bulleted item on a
carefully assembled list.
When
the world is divided into revolutions and counter-revolutions,
it's essential to know where everyone stands, and which list
everyone belongs to: us or them, lover or oppressor, reader
or critic. To draw those distinctions is to impose a neat
poetic form on a chaotic world. But poetry—like lovers
and political agendas and whichever brand of cigarettes is
fashionable—falls behind in the constant upheaval of
everyday, prosaic life. Some of our basic distinctions have
to be tossed aside as life goes forward. "All of us Mexicans
are more visceral realists than stridentists," says an old
poet, "but what does it matter? Stridentism and visceral realism
are just two masks to get us to where we really want to go."
The
Savage Detectives a colossal literary achievement because
Bolaño knows that everyone aspires to poetry, but we
all have to settle for prose.
(January,
2008)
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