EA: Soon Nazi Literature in Latin America comes out.
RB: … in the Americas. It’s the whole continent. There are several North American authors, I assure you.
EA: I’m convinced.
RB: It’s just that I’ve seen it written as Nazi Literature in Latin America, not Nazi Literature in the Americas. The trouble is that there aren’t any Canadian authors. I had a Quebecker in mind but they were cut in the end for lack of merit.
EA: Is there a Cervantean influence in this book?
RB: I think all writers who write in Spanish have or should have a Cervantean influence. We are all indebted to Cervantes, in large or small part, but we are all indebted. The genealogy for Nazi Literature in the Americas does not come from there. This book, I’ll give it to you in descending order, owes a lot to The Temple of Iconoclasts by Rodolfo Wilcock, who is an Argentine writer but who wrote the book in Italian.
Argentine author, critic, and translator Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919–1978) spent time working at nearly every major Latin American literary magazine. His work The Temple of the Iconoclasts, available in English, was a seminal text for Bolaño. He claims “buy it, steal it, borrow it, but read it.”
EA: He’s almost a cult writer.
RB: It’s just that he is an exceptional writer; he is a major writer. He is a writer who, I think, has done nothing but grow since death. Wilcock keeps growing. At the same time, his book The Temple of Iconoclasts itself owes a debt to A Universal History of Infamy by Borges, which is not surprising at all because Wilcock was a friend and admirer of Borges. Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy, too, owes a debt to one of his teachers, Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican writer who has a book I think called Real and Imagined Portraits—my memory is in torpor. It’s just a jewel. Alfonso Reyes’ book also owes a debt to Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, which is where this all comes from. But at the same time, Imaginary Lives owes a major debt to the methodology and form of certain biographies perused by encyclopedic types. Those are the uncles, parents and godparents of my book, I think, which is without a doubt the worst of the bunch, but there you have it anyway.
The French author Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a precursor to the surrealists. His major work is Imaginary Lives (1896).
EA: Following the enormous critical impact The Savage Detectives had, were you certain then you were going to dedicate yourself to this forever?
RB: No, I had been certain before — certain in the economic sense — that I could live from literature, as a matter of fact I had been certain years before. I started to live from literature starting in 1992 and Savage Detectives was published in 1998. Starting in 1992, which coincides with a grave illness, my income has been exclusively gained from literature.
EA: There is a general contempt that writers have toward critics, but you ask for improvement from criticism.
RB: Literary criticism is a discipline that represents something more for me than literature. Literature is prose, novel and short story, dramaturgy, poetry, and literary essays and literary criticism. Above all, I think it is necessary that there be literary criticism — without accident — in our countries, not ten lines about an author the critic will probably never read again. That is to say, it’s necessary to have criticism that mends the literary landscape along the way.
EA: I know many book jacket critics.
RB: I’ve practiced literary criticism myself, and one could say a lot about that.
EA: Within mass media, there is a tendency to limit the importance of genre.
RB: Perhaps, but I think it is very important. I view criticism as a literary creation, not just as the bridge that unites the reader with the writer. Literary critics, if they do not assume themselves to be the reader, are also throwing everything overboard. The interesting thing about literary critics, and that is where I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels, is that he assumes himself to be the reader, an endemic reader capable of arguing a reading, of proposing diverse readings, like something completely different from what criticism tends to be, which is like an exegesis or a diatribe. For me, Harold Bloom is an example of a notable critic, although I am generally in disagreement with him and even enraged by him, but I like to read him. Or Steiner: The French have a very long tradition of very creative critics and essayists who are very good, who illuminate not just one work but a whole era of literature, sometimes committing grave mistakes, but us narrators and writers also commit errors.
EA: One of your characters says, “One has the moral obligation to be responsible for one’s actions and for one’s words but also for one’s silence.”
RB: One of my characters says that? It sounds so good it hardly seems written by me.
EA: Is that also fair to say about writers?
RB: No, for writers that isn’t fair, but without a doubt, in predetermined moments, yes. If I’m walking down the street and see a pedophile molesting a kid and I stop and silently stare, not only am I responsible for my silence but I am also a complete son of a bitch. However, there is a certain type of silence in which—
EA: Are there literary silences?
RB: Yes, there are literary silences. Kafka’s, for example, which is a silence that cannot be. When he asks that his papers be burned, Kafka is opting for silence, opting for a literary silence, all in a literary era. That is to say, he was completely moral. Kafka’s literature, aside from being the best work, the highest literary work of the twentieth century, is of an extreme morality and of an extreme gentility, things that usually do not go together either.
EA: And what of Rulfo’s silence?
For more on Juan Rulfo, see this page.
RB: Rulfo’s silence, I think, is obedient to something so quotidian that explaining it is a waste of time. There are several versions: One told by Monterroso is that Rulfo had an uncle so-and-so who told him stories and when Rulfo was asked why he didn’t write anymore, his answer was that his uncle so-and-so had died. And I believe it too. Another explanation is simple and natural and it is that everything has an expiration date. For example I am much more worried about Rimbaudian silence than I am about Rulfian silence. Rulfo stopped writing because he had already written everything he wanted to write and because he sees himself incapable of writing anything better, he simply stops. Rimbaud would probably have been able to write something much better, which is to say bringing his words up even higher, but his is a silence that raises questions for Westerners. Rulfo’s silence doesn’t raise questions; it’s a close silence, quotidian. After desert, what the hell are you going to eat? There is a third literary silence — one doesn’t seek it — of the shade which one is sure was there under the threshold and which has never been made tangible. There stands the silence of Georg Büchner for example. He died at twenty-five or twenty-four years of age, he leaves behind three or four stage plays, masterworks. One of them is Woyzeck, an absolute masterwork. Another is about the death of Danton, which is an enormous masterwork, not absolute but quite notable. The other two — one is called Leonce y Lena, I can’t remember the other one — are fundamentally important. All before he turned twenty-five. What might have happened had Büchner not died; what kind of writer might he have been? The kind of silence that isn’t sought out is the silence of … I do not dare call it destiny … a manifestation of impotence. The silence of death is the worst kind of silence, because Rulfian silence is accepted and Rimbaudian silence is sought, but the silence of death is the one that cuts the edge off what could have been and never will be, that which we will never know. We’ll never know if Büchner would have been bigger than Goethe. I think so, but we’ll never know. We’ll never know what he might have written at age thirty. And that extends across the whole planet like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.