Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and The Literatures Of Extraction In Contemporary Latin America

As we have seen, the stakes of transcultural materialism reach beyond the disciplinary confines of Latin Americanism into World Literature. For a remarkably successful critical trend, the revival of the latter over the last three decades has made few explicit pronouncements about its future. Although no one knows for sure where present-day tendencies are headed, they often feature visions of what is to come. The startling thing about the critical discourse surrounding World Literature is how effectively generative it has been despite—or perhaps because of—its very modest projections. What currently defines the telos of World Literature is its own dynamism, rather than a specific goal, even one broadly defined. At best, this amounts to a celebration of the converging creative energies of scholars; at worst, one sees a bias toward action for its own sake, scholarly busyness. I will approach the problem of projection through a related phenomenon: abjection. To that end, I shall draw from a constellation of theoretical referents and from several literary examples, with a nonexclusive emphasis on contemporary Latin American fiction. My goal in this chapter, building on the work done so far, is to propose an orientation toward the corpse as a viable telos for world—and, of course, Latin American—literature.

In the sections to follow, I will first speculate about the implicit telos of the worldlit movement to situate my ideas. Second, I analyze corpse narratives, in Roberto Bolaño and other sources, that embrace the abject and point critical practice toward materiality. Finally, I will draw conclusions from the chapter’s various discussions. Purposefully cacophonous, I occasionally adopt the suffix “-ism” (as in “worldliteraturism”) to keep in mind that we are dealing with one approach among others, as opposed to a metatheory. Similarly, as I mentioned in the introduction, I stress the caps in World Literature to refer to the more institutionalized, mainstream avatar of the phenomenon, as represented by the Journal of and the Institute for World Literature (full disclosure: I count myself a collaborator of the institute). I find it useful to estrange all cognate terms surrounding Weltliteratur, lest we adopt them acritically. Thus, I will occasionally continue to use the more colloquial term “worldlit,” following increasingly common usage in the field, based on the template of the hitherto widely used “complit.” The crux of my Latin America–centered argument is to contribute to World Literature with affinity for the emerging paradigm, while also questioning some of its developments and offering a more defined sense of finality for the movement consistent with transcultural materialism.

Some may have no quibble with conceiving of worldlit criticism as purely autotelic. Increased exchange among critics who were previously not in conversation is a good thing. The reasons why such conversation should revolve around World Literature, and not any other encompassing category, are less apparent. But that could be secondary if the conversation, in itself, is worthwhile. In such a nominalist approach, “World Literature” could be replaced by any other catchphrase that spurs the conversation. Différance served similar purposes back in its heyday. And yet the critical trend we came to know as deconstruction, to continue with the example, had very concrete ideas about what it sought to achieve—namely, debunking binarisms.1 Meanwhile, there is a symptomatic void of goals, let alone theory, in such otherwise enlightening reference works as Theo D’haen’s The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012).² That volume does a formidable job at telling the “story” of World Literature, from the influential aphorization of the term by Goethe, through Curtius and Auerbach, leading to Moretti, Casanova, and contemporary debates. Non-European, pedagogical, and translation topics are also explored. However, this capacious account of the past and present of World Literature lacks a section devoted to imagining the future of the paradigm, as well as a general conclusion. (Each chapter ends with bullet-point conclusions intended as takeaways for the student.) I see in this conspicuous absence an affirmation of the intrinsic good of worldliteraturism.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen makes this more evident in Mapping World Literature (2008), where he notes: “The important aspect of the future of world literature is the way in which it is being used to make institutional changes in a situation where fields of research are being redefined, and curricula are being determined to some degree by the idea of what will be relevant to the future.”³ Note the circularity in this reasoning, best described as self-referential reformism: World Literature deserves to be taught because it is worth studying. There is not much room left for literature outside of institutions, or for the referential in literature, that is, how it connects to the world at large, to be front and center. Later work by Rosendahl Thomsen is more nuanced, and I shall return to it later on. But this early formulation illustrates the point: either these are tautological, read ideological, pronouncements, or, as I prefer to think, the markings of a leap of faith.

In the first case, we face what Žižek would call a sublime object of ideology, that is, those “signifiers without signified” that constitute political communities who identify “with the very gesture of identification.”⁴ There is some traction to that assessment, to be developed elsewhere. But ultimately, World Literature comes across as a rather benign sublime object of ideology, if it registers as such at all. The worst possible ideological fallout that can be imagined is very far removed from the calamitous scenarios that might ensue in society at large from manipulating discursive elements like, say, “security.” Additionally, as David Damrosch notes, “cross-cultural literary relations” predate modern nations and literary institutions by many centuries, as exchanges along the Silk Road or the Indian Ocean illustrate.⁵ Such factual observations would dispel the fear that, in the final analysis, “there is no there there”: circulation is something we can point to and call World Literature. This leaves open the question of whether a critic’s task is to provide accounts of the circulation of textual and oral traditions, past and present. However, as focusing on circulation produces, well, more circulation, the self-fulfilling prophecy is then complete. In other words, autotelic axiology and virtuoso exhibitions of connoisseurship replace discussions about finality.

The leap-of-faith option is not unproblematic. Projection without content, moored in self-affirmation and institutional expansion, excludes by fiat. Regardless of a remarkably (and salutary) inclusive ethos, the risk is to exclude through inclusion, mutatis mutandis, like the Catholic Church does. This is an ironic turn, given Goethe’s Lutheran background and polytheistic sympathies, but the “invisible church” of World Literature tutors he hoped for in the 1830s sits more squarely with the Church of Rome.6 Catholicism is a host of contradictions, notes Carl Schmitt, for “there appears to be no antithesis it does not embrace. It has long and proudly claimed to have united within itself all forms of state and government…. But this complexio oppositorum also holds sway over everything theological.”⁷ World Literature is open to all literatures, sidestepping the thornier question of opening itself to incompatible visions of what literature is. One could argue that such differences can be hammered out along the way, but first we need to “sit at the table.” The counterargument would be: Why that table in the first place? Canonization, a secularized theological notion like the state structures that Schmitt had in mind, is increasingly about complexio oppositorum. This, of course, gives certain privileged institutions an outsized role in orchestrating the whole affair, with pontifical nudges in lieu of party lines. Convening power becomes power tout court. (It might also be the reason why the paradigm feels most at home in partially overlapping readers, genealogies, and surveys than in major monographs with a sustained line of scrutiny.) I am not keen on restating here familiar arguments that have been made against World Literature. Rather, I seek to underline the recursive structure that leads to the absorption of opposing views within the paradigm.

The most notorious example is Emily Apter’s thoughtful and suitably entitled Against World Literature (2013), a case for recovering what is lost in translation.8 It is an exercise both in refutation and in loyal opposition. As Gloria Fisk aptly puts it, “While Apter pretends to fire against world literature like an enemy, she leans against it like a plank on a wall to join a critical conversation.”⁹ The contagious enthusiasm of World Literature transcends stark methodological differences: Apter stresses “traditional” theorization in her works, while others emphasize erudition or sociological analysis. These approaches would normally be incompatible, if not outright antagonical, were it not for the very wide institutional umbrella above them. Faith in dynamism for its own sake can also be seen in Amir Eshel’s work, which advocates for futurity (openness) without utopia (prescription, per his account), and in Damrosch’s claim that that “true history [of world literature] lies in the future rather than in the past.”¹⁰ What future?, one may ask. Answers are less forthcoming. The gist of the project is creating the frames, not filling them, or in a different metaphor, establishing a minimal set of rules of a game for others to play.

This same spirit is to be found in the founding charter of the Journal of World Literature. The aspirations of bringing together scholars, creating a forum, and fostering “wider and deeper” discussions feature prominently in the journal’s masthead.¹¹ As befits an ecumenical publication, there is little in the way of the prescriptive or the axiological other than, respectively, going beyond the national and favoring a cosmopolitan approach. There is plenty about the how (collaboration, networks) and precious little about the what. Unless by the latter we understand: everything. Now, this all-encompassing agenda is prone to suffering from an expansive version of what Gerald Graff described in 1986 as “taking cover in coverage.”¹² A more capacious account of the facts of literature on a global scale would allow scholars to leave uninspected, to put it in terms Graff borrows from Norman Foerster, “the theory upon which their practice rests.”¹³ In this context, “everything” is a logical impossibility. Absent an Aleph, the Borgesian imaginary object that shows all points in the universe and all points of view at the same time, things happen in succession.¹⁴ The elusive quid of World Literature would be a variedly infinite task that, nonetheless, we must promptly undertake.

The basis for this paradoxical, hypergenerative endeavor is already present in Goethe’s most-cited dictum on the matter: “The epoch of World-literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”15 Compare this statement to “Godot is coming; quick, we must tidy up the house now!” “At hand”—or “upon us,” as it is also translated—is an der Zeit; “hasten” is beschleunigen. They are both, unequivocally, about speed. This oft-quoted phrase remains elusive. If the epoch is already here, then why hasten it? “Everyone must hasten its approach” acts like a critical-mass resort to self-validation: indeed, if nearly everyone does, the epoch would have, in a sense, arrived. But if that threshold is not met, dynamism suffers. Hospitality entails risks, including the possibility that guests do not show up—or, in this case, join in the active expectation of the new era. The weak spot of convening power is that it is required, in fact, to convene. Its strength is that no one wants to be left without an invitation. Everyone must. Goethe’s dictum instills enthusiasm (begeistert), inaugurating a theme that runs all the way through JWL. This coincides with what Pheng Cheah, in a kindred intervention, has rightly called “spiritualism”: the tendency to think that literary exchange configures a higher, spiritual order.¹⁶ Autotelism flies high.

We cannot expect Johann Peter Eckermann’s recollections of his conversations with Goethe, or the romantic poet’s scattered mentions of the term, to become an oracle for contemporary scholarship. Piecing together what Goethe meant or figuring out what we want to do with it make for fascinating pursuits. So should debating the baggage of his aestheticist classicism, a retreat from the politics of his day that Adorno regarded as compromise and Benjamin as capitulation.¹⁷ (A few lines down, in fact, Goethe invokes the Greeks as ahistorical representation of the beauty of mankind—no need to hurry there.)¹⁸ For present purposes, suffice it to note, with a different German thinker, that when dealing with Weltliteratur we appear to be dealing with a thing of beauty. “Beauty,” says Kant, “is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose.”¹⁹ Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck is an apt description for the enthusiasm that is World Literature. A sunset or a poem does not need to exist in the way that a hammer does. Like the hammer, they appear to serve a purpose, but not one in particular. The same can be said about World Literature. As with beauty at large, we will do well in taking it with a grain of salt.

Take the following case in point: genealogies of World Literature such as D’haen’s downplay the role that postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the linguistic turn play in the 1990s emergence of the paradigm. (Instead, they prefer longer historical-critical timeframes and focus on seemingly converging themes across cultural traditions.) Others are better suited to weigh in on the posts. As pertains to the linguistic turn, before there is “world and literature,” we must problematize “world and language.”

World Literature can be infinite in one sense and completely flat in another, limitless in coverage but absolutely limited in referentiality, if it does not take this problem into consideration. Thinkers ranging from Laozi in sixth-century-BCE China, through medieval European scholasticism, leading to Wittgenstein and Kristeva in the twentieth century have all, in multiple ways, explored how the relationship between world and language is not one to be taken for granted. Literature takes part in such inquiries, “from Faust to Hollywood films, and from the Babylonian court of Šulgi in the twenty-first century BCE to the global Babel of our own twenty-first century today,” as Damrosch has put it.20 How can these works “connect” to the world? One short answer is that they cannot, but that is no reason not to try. Another is that they always already do. These answers are not incompatible, so long as we do not try to solve the referentiality problem by falling into dualism, imagining there is a world “out there” that literature across the epochs manages to render somehow, like a series of maps or miniature paintings.

I am briefly reminded of the Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s famous 1949 prologue to The Kingdom of This World, where he formulates the highly influential notion of lo real maravilloso americano (roughly “magical realism”). There a narrator enumerates his travels through China, Islam (sic), and the USSR, before returning to Latin America to better understand the region’s marvelousness and specificity.²¹ No list, no matter how long, will ever re-present the world. And none leaves it unchanged, either: lists affect readers, broadening their horizons, establishing new connections, transforming others. The same is true of lists of authors, recipients of minimally renewed, already differentiated attention. Lists communicate the power of language despite its limited referentiality. They share an important additional trait, aptly identified by Umberto Eco in the context of discussing one of his later works: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”²² I suspect that fear of death is a driving force behind the rebirth of World Literature, a paradigm riddled with ars-longa-vita-brevis anxiety or, in words Damrosch borrows from the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, the predicament of not having “world enough and time.”²³ If life is too short to read an expanded canon of books from various cultures, then at least we can approach them more or less superficially.

But what if, instead of retreating at the sight of death, we face it? “Death” we never really see, for it is already an abstract, spiritualist notion. The more radically materialist move is to turn toward the corpse, which the rest of this chapter sets out to do. “A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death,” says Kristeva. “Without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”24 I am reintroducing a notion to which preworldlit students were no strangers: the abject, that which is cast off. Lacanian psychoanalysis holds it as a basis for subjectivity, which defines itself in opposition to what it rejects.²⁵ “To every ego its object, to every superego its abject,” notes Kristeva a few lines above.²⁶ Spiritualist, aspirational World Literature, by merging the represented and the real, inflicts upon itself the violence of thoroughly disowning its own refuse. In an image, the superegoic, deathless ideal critic contemplates monuments of culture, forgetful of the rotting flesh that marble, in a sense, outlives. All along, the corpse teaches how to navigate the tension between literature and world.

I am taking my cues from the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), a strong gravitational force in World Literature and the entryway into global relevance for a broader canon of Latin American writers, contemporary and otherwise. Passionate, traveling women and men of letters are his favorite characters; their passion is equal parts eros and thanatos, be it death wish or killer instinct. In Bolaño, literature is always a matter of life or death until, paradoxically, the futility of it all sweeps in, and readers are struck by how little literature can contribute to repairing the world’s woes. Therein lies the constitutive aporia in Bolaño’s writing: he sees literature as a historically situated, politically charged vital impulse, flanked by death, both fruitless and indispensable. Drawing, yet also departing, from my earlier work, the following sections present an original, encompassing theory about the Chilean’s oeuvre from the vantage point of the corpse.

Consider the following parable, a secondary plotline in Nocturno de Chile (2000; trans. By Night in Chile, 2003), a novella about a dying priest who is also a prominent literary critic. A Viennese court shoemaker, out of equal parts patriotic zeal and the desire to increase his social status, spends all his modest fortune in building a cemetery and sculpture park for the heroes of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He finds a suitable plot of land for that purpose and calls it “Heldenberg” (Heroes Hill). The joke is on the shoemaker, it seems: he has himself buried there before the outbreak of World War I, with no way of knowing that there would be no more heroes of the Austro-Hungarian empire, nor any empire at all. When Soviet tanks roll in—note the ellipsis—they find his vault-like crypt atop the desolated hill, and inside, his corpse, with “eye sockets empty…and his jaw hanging open, as if he were still laughing after having glimpsed immortality.”27 Alas, the joke is on us, readers who embark on similarly futile enterprises, equally unaware of historical contingency, and will perish all the same. Cadáver, Spanish for corpse, originates in the Latin verb for “to fall.” This corpse perched upon a hill emphasizes the collapse of high and low, the unavoidable abjection in projection, the decomposing carnality of imagined futures. Reinforcing this idea, the novella’s main storyline features the recurrent motif of a body tortured by the Pinochet regime that haunts the priest’s last-hour recollections. The suppressed memory of that corpse surfaces in the denouement, as in a book-length fictionalization of habeas corpus.

Other than setting the stage for those somber revelations, the shoemaker parable lambasts the petty search for greatness and subservience to fickle politics that, allegedly, underwrite literary history. Bolaño’s fiction has very unflattering things to say about critics and idolizes unprofessional readers. (He exaggerates.) The Chilean allows for, even cultivates, a naively vitalist, almost anti-intellectual reading of his work. In that vein, Bolaño’s answer to the “ars longa, vita brevis” conundrum would be to live more and to read less. But of course, that moment is part of a more complex operation: some of his most memorable characters are such passionate readers that they read in the shower.²⁸ On a different level, Bolaño is summoning the powers of horror, as Kristeva calls them, to infuse global literary history with a renewed attention to materiality. The literary and cultural transactions across locales that populate the pages of his books, both the hefty and the thin ones, are all about bodies, not just ideas, traveling. In fact, one can regard the entirety of Bolaño’s writing as permutations, often extreme, of three elements: sex, literature, and travel.²⁹ For a brief illustration, consider a deranged poet who roams the American Southwest in La literatura nazi en América (1996, trans. Nazi Literature in the Americas, 2008). He imagines a centenarian Ernst Jünger and a nonagenarian Leni Riefenstahl, practically corpses, furiously making love: “bones and dead tissue bumping and grinding.”³⁰ It’s a harrowing image, to say the least, somehow aggravated by the figures’ fascist proclivities—reminders, like the fine boots the shoemaker made, of the heteronomy of literature. The point here is that World Literature cannot be about pure souls.

Bolaño furthers this idea both subtly and forcefully. He swiftly became the darling of World Literature spiritualists even when, upon closer inspection, his work is a source for the critique of this very tendency. As Sarah Pollack has demonstrated, Bolaño’s initial success was due to a much-hyped Latin American rebelliousness, allegedly present in Los detectives salvajes (1998, trans. The Savage Detectives, 2007)—consider it an extension of the realm of the spirit to the playful South.31 The serious materialist thrust can easily go unnoticed amid the often-playful tone and the plot-twisting enthusiasm. I regard this as something of a Trojan-horse move: once admitted into the citadel of literary history, Bolaño changes the rules of engagement from within. Rather than merely an author whose work may belong to a canon, or to several, Bolaño is an event that both exposes and unsettles canon formation itself. The necessity of World Literature in this day and age stems from the interdependence witnessed foremost not in novels or epics but in finance, migration, and communication, fields that more readily acknowledge imperialism, cultural or otherwise, than the generally more hopeful, utopian enterprise of studying literature beyond narrow national frames. Bolaño contributes to the debate by problematizing the historicity and referentiality of World Literature, its realpolitik and its troubled rapport with geopolitics.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory provides the conceptual backbone to many modern approximations to World Literature.³² The Bolaño phenomenon evidences the great extent to which such approximations downplay an important facet of Wallerstein’s oeuvre, namely, the fundamental role the thinker attributes to 1968 in his later work. In a piece he published in the annus mirabilis 1989, too close to the fall of the Berlin wall and its spectacularization by Fukuyama acolytes to have been adequately assimilated, he puts forward theses such as the following: “1968 was a revolution in and of the world-system” and “Counter-culture was part of revolutionary euphoria, but was not politically central to 1968.”³³ This late Wallerstein is, quite simply, antisystemic. He also seems to subscribe to a school of thinking about 1968 as more than mere youth revolt, but rather a profoundly transformative event with implications the world over. In a related fashion, Salvador Allende, the brutally overthrown Chilean president and Bolaño’s inspiration, gave a speech in Guadalajara in 1972 in which he posited that “to be young and not a revolutionary is a contradiction, even a biological contradiction.”³⁴ Stopping short of politicizing life itself, here the socialist posits youth as a form of antisystemic resistance.

A few years apart from soixante-huitards, Bolaño writes time and again about the violent fate of Latin Americans who were close to twenty years of age at the time that Allende died, to paraphrase the short story “El Ojo Silva” (trans. “Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva”).35 Bolaño does politics where he knows best, in fiction. He is not one to ignore the unsavory aftermaths of the sixties, nor one to throw away the baby with the bathwater. His writing does not so seek to represent a narrowly defined political position but to activate the social politicity of literature. Bolaño exacerbates tension and contradiction in the realpolitik of World Literature—in 2666, as I will show below, by cultivating the aura of an apocryphal lost German classic to shed light on the women assassinated in the Sonoran Desert. The book is not reducible to a human rights plea, however, no matter how urgent the massive feminicide it denounces. Rather, it exposes the frailty of both human life and literature, seeking to make art at their limits.

If the goal is to revitalize an antisystemic, global youth politics à la 1968, the means are rekindling historical avant-gardes. In particular, the Chilean deploys a critical stance similar in many ways to Georges Bataille’s base materialism. A potent set of images that stimulate a certain kind of thinking rather than a rigorous philosophical doctrine, base materialism confounds high and low, sophisticated and crass, head and ass. In one deft movement of recurrence, it sets free the agency of language to derail meaning even while it deploys it to produce meaning. Ramifications of these ideas are more familiar to contemporary readers through the work of Jacques Derrida or Philippe Sollers. As it happens, the latter is a character, alongside the rest of the Tel Quel group, in Bolaño’s short story “Labyrinth.” (There Bolaño imagines an interloping Central American outside the frame of an iconic photo of the group; the story itself is an act of self-inclusion within, and disruption of, cultural capital.) But the key thinker behind Bolaño’s writing is the earlier figure, Bataille.

The Frenchman, in turn, channels Francisco de Quevedo, the Spanish seventeenth-century classic. Bataille may well have drawn inspiration from the underexamined, mordant Gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo, approximately Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Asshole (circa 1628). (This is just the kind of work Bataille had access to as custodian of the enfer of censored books in the National Library in Paris). Quevedo compares the centrality of the anus with that of the sun; he calls attention to the fact that every one of us readers is endowed with an anus. “More necessary is the lonely eye of the ass than those in the face,” says the Spanish bard, “for one may live without eyes in the latter, but without an eye in the former neither defecate nor live.”36 Crassly humorous, but insightful. Globalization has renewed the search for universal truths, to little avail—here is one. This basic common denominator conjures both pleasure and pain, not to mention compassion and community, across classes, races, even species. Bolaño, as we shall see, takes note.

For his part, Bataille transforms this ethos into broad theorizations of the bodily. His thought experiments with human sacrifice include having everyone in his headless collective, Acéphale, pledge to be a sacrificial victim, provided someone else in the group would be the victimary—a role nobody undertook, in the end. This provocation intervenes in the power dynamics within avant-garde movements and turns the individual body of every participant into a touchstone for speculative thought. In this vein, Bataille’s uncategorizable prose poem–essays of 1931 and 1933—respectively, “The Solar Anus” and “Base Materialism and Gnosticism”—provide a defense of baseness and a purposefully failed attempt to think the cosmos through the body. In the first text, Bataille imagines “organic coitus of the earth with the sun” or the terrestrial globe “covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.”³⁷ Idiosyncratically, cryptically, he fancies the earth jerking off with an eruptive force that accumulates in the underclass: “As in the case of violent love, [erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations] take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.”³⁸

In the ultimate expenditure of energy, Bataille’s narrator wants his throat slashed as he violates a girl he calls the Night. The text’s peculiar envoi is an eclipse of sorts: “The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.”39 Clearly, there is no easy methodological takeaway here. However, note how the final image interrupts the thrust toward totalization, from body parts and workers to earth and cosmos. Bataille builds on the force of the word “revolution,” but the absolute indexical necessity of the individual body forecloses transcendence. The delirious sacrificial storyline explores its own logical constraints. In the words of Benjamin Noys, Bataille “argues that any attempt to reach the heights is doomed to an inevitable fall back into the dirt.”⁴⁰ One thing that Bolaño will achieve by recuperating the motif of the solar anus is similarly countering the idealist totalizations of World Literature practitioners who, in their abstractions, forget individual bodies or do not otherwise bound their thinking, inextricably, to the body.

There are two ways in which Bataille leaves his mark on Bolaño: through implicit solar economy and explicit, if often subtle, allusion to anuses. For Bataille, the sun is an image of perfect expenditure: it burns away, and gives, without retribution. Expenditure is a trait of life, an exuberant drive that cannot be contained. Bolaño’s final years of illness and copious writing paid tribute to this idea. In his aptly titled lecture “Literature + Illness = Illness,” he claims literature itself puts up a useless, valiant fight.⁴¹ Here Bolaño purports that traveling made him ill and equates traveling with living. Since his travels, and those of his characters, configure the global picture one gets from reading Bolaño, it is safe to conclude that worlding in his oeuvre is expenditure, too. He wrote from the affect of a dying sun; the writing reflects this. Earlier narrative work is measured, consistent with genre conventions. His novellas read like novellas. Later work such as the novel 2666, by contrast, reads as expenditure of the novel genre itself. There is also the often-cited anecdote, whether authorial legend or fact, that Bolaño, formerly a young poet, set out to write fiction upon learning of his illness. Reportedly, he did so in order to sustain his family, having solar and home economy bear upon each other.

I dare posit that the entirety of Bolaño’s oeuvre is written under the sign of the anus. Its discernment of global transactions, and its concomitant appeal to the all-encompassing project of World Literature, stems from no other place—hence the recurrent motif. There is the autobiographical character in The Savage Detectives, a naive aspiring poet, “Belano” (beautiful anus). Or the aforementioned “El Ojo Silva,” a Spanish pun for “the whistling [read farting] eye.” By Night in Chile has but two paragraphs, the first straddled across a hundred odd pages, the second a single line: “And then the storm of shit begins.”42 Early article collections on Bolaño by Karim Benmiloud and Raphaël Estève, and by Patricia Espinosa, took up the motif of melancholic black suns (astres noirs) in Bolaño. Their bodily dimension as anuses is no less important, for it speaks to the base condition of all agents in World Literature, potentially victims or victimaries. Bolaño’s less-than-heteronormative take on Bataille’s motif presents free association under different, equally transgressive garb. Having witnessed the twentieth century, it is arguably less jovial about violence. Still, it cultivates its aesthetic in order to open new paths at the expressive limits of language. These limits include the untimely, literal death of the author, from liver failure, at age fifty—clearly, a limit we are making headways into overcoming. But for every path Bolaño’s work continues to open, there is only one it seeks to shutter close: a World Literature of pure souls.

One may briefly recall the character Auxilio Lacouture’s bathroom-stall account of the breach in university autonomy that accompanied the Tlatelolco massacre (Amuleto 1999; trans. Amulet, 2006;). The delirious character, a clairvoyant, self-proclaimed Uruguayan mother of Mexican literature, portrays the bathroom as the last stronghold of autonomy in the university.⁴³ The language of her internal monologue constantly compares the breach with rape. Bolaño’s oblique take on the much-depicted Tlatelolco events foregrounds the problem of artistic autonomy in Mexican and Latin American literature; his oeuvre extends the gesture to World Literature at large. Bolaño names his characters in ways that expand, rather than narrow, meaning. For one, “Auxilio Lacouture” is a bilingual pun for “I repair the stitch”—and yet an anus is open by definition. The notion of aporia, with its etymology of pores and pathlessness, is doubly pertinent. Autonomy must be and cannot be; complete autonomy would entail irrelevance and removal from the world; complete heteronomy leaves no room for the imagination. Neither ivory tower nor weapon of class warfare, the bathroom stall embodies the precariousness of literature. The anus, in its openness and fragility, is indispensable. Ditto for novels. Lacouture evokes the textile and the textual, as well as the suture between subject and language introduced by Lacanian psychoanalysis. The moment one is inclined to map a center-periphery World Literary system onto Bolaño’s poetics, with an anus for the sun, is the moment when that very enterprise is disavowed. There is no single anus, but multitudes.

Kristeva establishes a connection between anuses and corpses in the chapter “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination,” from The Powers of Horror, notably in a section entitled “Waste-Body, Corpse-Body.” There we read, “Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection.”44 The difference between refuse and the corpse is one of degree. The idiom “shitting oneself from fear,” identical in Spanish, speaks the truth: the odd use of the reflexive there (“oneself”) is about the objectness of the body itself, already intuited in our rapport with corpses and refuse. “We are what we eat” is a platitude more easily adopted than its logical consequence (what we excrete). Throughout Bolaño’s oeuvre, there is an underlying emplotment of abjection that plays out in multiple registers, some tragicomical, others downright ghastly. What’s most striking about this macro-storyline is not just what it thematizes but the use of language it deploys. Considering this aspect in some detail will shed light on the referentiality or “literature and world” conundrum.

Take Bolaño’s short story “El retorno,” from Putas asesinas (2001), translated by Chris Andrews as “The Return” in an eponymous 2010 collection. (The hilarious B-movie connotations of the original book title, “Murderous Whores,” fall flat in English.) Like Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by the Brazilian master Machado de Assis, it is a first-person account of a deceased person. It is also a story of necrophilia, and a love story at that: the ghost of an unnamed party animal, knocked down by a heart attack on the dance floor, witnesses his body being smuggled from the morgue to a Parisian mansion. There, Jean-Claude Villeneuve, a celebrated fashion designer, has sex with his corpse. The ghost confronts him; apologies are made and accepted. As the story comes to a close, the morgue smugglers come to pick up the corpse. The ghost-narrator chooses to stay in the mansion, while the lonely necrophiliac confides in him or talks to himself, endlessly. The tale is reminiscent of Derrida’s “La loi du genre” in its simultaneous unsettling of genre and gender—genre because it effectively blurs the boundaries between a fantastic ghost story (like Machado’s) and a realist, very straightforward story; and gender because it maps a coming-out confession, a pervert’s lot in Western psychiatry pre-DSM-IV, onto a sort of coming-in perversion: a straight man turns gay, a necrophiliac turns domestic partner. As Villeneuve strokes the dead man’s genitals, the ghost thinks of Cécile Lamballe, “the woman of his dreams,” who left him dead at the disco.⁴⁵

In the Lacanian tradition, corpses and bodily excretions always mediate between world and language—and, therefore, literature. This is the case here, on a metalevel. Readers are not confronted with the real (unless they should choose to have a reading séance at an actual morgue) but read about it. Still, the story conveys to some degree the limit case for language that corpses are. Signification is at a loss. The protagonist ruminates: “My body or my ex-body (I don’t know how to put it)”; he utters the impossible phrase “my corpse”; he talks about the remains in the first person, with dark humor (“I didn’t have the stomach to watch them open me up”) only to totter back into the third.46 This is verisimilar because “he” is only just getting used to being dead, just as it is plausible, within the economy of the short story, that the protagonist should forgive and oddly befriend Villeneuve, because “his” body is not his anymore, and ultimately, a ghost is neither a “he” nor a “she.” The conceit confronts us with the arbitrariness of the signifier, not just pronouns and possessives but the word “corpse” itself. As Natalie Depraz reports in The Dictionary of Untranslatables, the German triad Leib/Körper/Fleisch can only be rendered as carne/cuerpo in Spanish or as the rather awkward lived-body/body/flesh in English.⁴⁷ Saying “Please fetch a chicken corpse from the refrigerator” is both elucidating, as conscientious eaters know well, and ominous. It is funny too, in a nervous-laughter sort of way: again, we are what we eat.

While the story builds upon the strong connotations of a word like “corpse,” it also relies on smart, silly puns. Read “el retorno” as el re-torno, a rewriting of the famous potter’s wheel (torno) scene in the 1980s Hollywood drama Ghost, a film the protagonist mentions in passing.⁴⁸ Or read “Cécile Lamballe” as ceci l’emballe, “this wraps or covers it,” which becomes all the more meaningful in light of Villeneuve’s profession as “wrapper of bodies,” as one might call a fashion designer. Emballer is also used colloquially for seducing, exciting, or making someone get onto a police car, all usages that multiply the possible readings of the story, whether Bolaño intended them or not. Further clues can be found when the narrator recounts how Villeneuve contemplates (his) corpse and presumably wonders about the hopes and desires that “had once agitated the contents of that plastic body bag.”⁴⁹ Also in a thought-provoking passage from the morgue, before the mansion, is the following: “In life I was afraid of being a toy (or less than a toy) for Cécile, and now that I was dead, that fate, once the cause of my insomnia and pervasive insecurity, seemed sweet, and not without a certain grace [elegancia] and substance: the solidity of the real.”⁵⁰

In the metaphorical sense of “being a toy for someone,” the passage provides characterization of the timid narrator-protagonist, who remembers his lover as a femme fatale. She may even have been literally fatal, for all he knows, adding yet another layer, in more ways than one, to her enveloping last name. But the parenthesis is puzzling: something less than the animistic attachment of children to objects is hard to imagine. One reading is that Cécile, the imagined child in the metaphor, plays with him whenever she wants. Another points at a more elementary rapport between a living human and an inanimate object. Not coincidentally, the protagonist yearns for human touch, a common trope in ghost stories, foretelling the sexual acts to follow. I see here Bolaño using all the literary resources at his disposal to try to convey something that lies beyond words, a very primordial chiasm between language and world. Note the overall telos of this story, relevant for World Literature at large: toward the unassailable, uttermost, basic actuality of matter.

The cult of youth and vitality in Bolaño has its heights in the exuberant literary movement at the onset of The Savage Detectives, which I have analyzed in detail elsewhere, and its abysses in the brutally murdered women in 2666—lives, futures literally wasted.51 It’s a slow, violent arc from real visceralismo, as the movement is called, to scattered viscera; from “savagery” to savagery. A gargantuan, unfinished novel, 2666 is a grimly cosmopolitan affair, over a thousand pages in length, that transcends the lighthearted countercultural appeal of the not-quite-as-extensive, but still-very-sizable, six-hundred-odd-page earlier work. The two books share an antisystemic, political take on the World Literary transactions they depict—a scale model for a different Weltliteratur. Crucially, they focus on bodies desired, desiring: alive, dead, and everything in between.

Their open-ended main storylines revolve around a similar quest to find an imaginary author (dead or alive?): first Cesárea Tinajero, then Benno von Archimboldi, avatars of what Lacan would call objet petit a, a punctum for desire, impossible to satisfy. Both are worlding novels that sweep readers away to places as distant as Bersheeba, Cologne, Kostekino, and Managua, to name a few. African and especially Asian locales are less represented, because Bolaño’s worldview is Latin America–centric and also, presumably, for verisimilitude, given how less common literary exchange between the regions has been until very recently. (A great number of events in his fiction take place in Western Europe, but this is also the case for Latin American literature at large: see Cortázar’s Hopscotch.) Bolaño captures one form of the drive toward World Literature, which, first and foremost, he himself participates in—the quest for genius—and does something of a “bait and switch.” In the earlier novel, the Mexican mother of all avant-garde poetry is finally found, but dies; in the posthumous novel, the German master of twentieth-century literature ultimately peters out. Bolaño did not have “world enough and time” to see himself become a missing author too.

This six-degrees-of-separation novel ultimately shows that, in an interconnected world, there is someone who knows someone and so on who knows a victim or a Nazi or a narco perpetrator. Then it asks the question of what is left of compassion or outrage across this long chain of missed connections, providing the probing ground for an ethics of globalization, a politics of World Literature, and vice versa. A growing scholarship on the novel has explored these issues.52 Presently, I would like to underline that, if the long-winded premise of this irresolute novel has been able to move a generation of readers, it’s because the common denominator is the body.

Consider, from “The Part About the Critics,” the story of the Pakistani cab driver whom a Frenchman and a Spaniard, in the presence of an Englishwoman, beat “until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head, except the eyes.”53 At this point in the novel, violence erupts to release narrative tension and let off steam from the characters’ frustrations, notably the unrequited love of Liz Norton, the Englishwoman. The triggers are a rapid succession of translation-related misunderstandings: the passengers laugh at the driver’s missing a Borgesian reference of London as labyrinth, which he takes as an insult to his taxi-driving skills, insulting them in turn after mistaking the trio’s flirtations for proxenetism, or outright regarding them as such. To the credit of the novel’s robust suspension of disbelief, readers find it not preposterous but terrifying when the aggressors, cosmopolitan scholars of literature, kick him once for Salman Rushdie, twice for Valérie Solanas, and so on. This open-ended parable thematizes the liberal West’s tormented relations with Muslims—while kicking him, they ask the man to shove Islam up his ass—and gives expression to the political unconscious of World Literature. The setting, a long, protracted joke along the lines of “A Frenchman and a Spaniard enter a taxi,” provides a Freudian return of the repressed in cosmopolitanism.

Competing for the love of Norton, whose last name not for nothing evokes the prominent anthology, condenses and displaces the quest for canonization that is the main theme in the first of five sections, “The Part About the Critics.” Such a contest presents a rather grim view of the realpolitik of World Literature, which foretells the even darker, apocalyptic mood of the later “Part About the Crimes.” Given the paratactical unfolding that is characteristic of Bolaño’s prose, it is telling that the cabbie scene, a Borgesian Aleph rendered violent potlatch, sits roughly halfway between the petty politics of a literary congress and a more brutal beating of a different taxi driver in Mexico. Compare these two instances of violent exclusion, one implicit and institutionally sanctioned, the other explicit and symptomatic of utter institutional breakdown:

Beyond insinuating that conference organizers are white-glove hoodlums, Bolaño is sickening his readers into realizing the full weight of literary and political inequality. Against the grain of the predominantly celebratory discourse of World Literature revival, Bolaño cultivates a timely malaise. After the assault on the Pakistani man, Norton stops frequenting her devotees for a while, because she has to “think this over.”⁵⁶ She could have denounced them, admitted some degree of complicity, or finally fallen in love with them, à la wisdom for Nietzsche, who infamously wrote that “[wisdom] is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.”⁵⁷ Eventually, Norton, the Medusa-gazed anthology in this open-ended allegory, will wisely choose Morini, a decent suitor in a wheelchair (not a warrior), but not before travelling with the other two to Mexico, a place where numb doormen beat cab drivers to favor a certain taxi company over another. There she has a crisis in front of two mirrors, looking at herself, a woman like those women disappeared there.⁵⁸ It dawns on readers, on the one hand, that Western women’s long-fought-for right to self-determination—even basic personal safety—is relatively rare on the world stage. On the other hand, one realizes that such inequalities are part of a broader and more complex state of affairs. As recent news demonstrates, lives lost to terrorist attacks on European soil are exponentially more telegenic than forty-three missing Ayotzinapa students or countless Syrian military “casualties.” 2666 compels World Literature not to forget structural inequalities.

As a case in point, the cosmopolitan European academics in “The Part About the Critics” casually compare their lecturing at small university in northern Mexico to a massacre, and themselves to butchers, gutters, and disembowelers.⁵⁹ Fittingly, a few pages earlier, they are treated to barbecue:

The rapport between lecturing and murder is not causal, but neither is it casual. Their proximity in the plot is about allowing the stench of death to permeate all the seemingly impervious realms of culture. Two aspects bring this point home: the hyperaesthesia of women’s “clothing and skin” impregnated with the smell of meat, and the poignant ambiguity of “piel” referring both to animal hide and to human skin. Speaking of home, it is there that European critics can return, waving their privileged passports the moment something starts to smell bad. Other legally sanctioned traveling bodies, in the broad spectrum of precariousness that is 2666, don’t have it so easy. When Rosa and Fate—What’s in a name?—are crossing the border into the United States at the end of the third part, a policeman sizes them up. They are an attractive woman and a black man. When the policeman learns from their travel documents that they are not Mexicans but Spanish and U.S. passport holders, “a shadow of frustration crossed [his] face.”⁶¹ The subtext here, a lesson in intersectionality, is that they cannot be messed with as much as they could be if they were Mexicans. They flee to safety, we are led to believe, while their travel companion, Mexico City journalist Guadalupe Roncal, goes on to interview Haas in prison. In a feverish dream of that prison, Fate thinks about the killings and hears “shouts, as if a bachelor party were being held in one of the prison chambers…. Distant laughter. Mooing.”⁶² Sounds and smells render northern Mexico a prison, the prison a slaughterhouse.

And then the novel plunges into the scattered atrocities of “The Part About the Crimes.” The experience of reading this section of the novel is a multifarious succession of moral outrage, guilt by omission, morbid fascination, disgust, and anaesthesia. There is dread and ennui, as the book’s epigraph (from Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage”) suggests: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” An often unbearable, relatively plotless mass of corpse narratives dominates the section, as police, journalists, and bereaved family members try to make sense of mauled corpses. This is an exercise in purposely excessive, redundant storytelling that engages the book as an object. In the pre-internet, bygone era of analog communication, you could get a sense of how big a city was by holding its telephone directory in your hand. In something of a gothic reversal, you gain an awareness of the magnitude of femicide by starting to flip pages on the unbearable, still-fictional account provided by Bolaño. “Respite” is offered by disquieting stories from Haas’s imprisonment and his time behind bars. The reader totters between assuming the roles of forensic detective and criminal defense lawyer. However, besides trying to discern means and motives, there is also, at a purely diegetic level, a question about how the events at hand connect to what came before, if at all—what even holds the novel together. Could Haas be the same diabolically tall German author? Only much later will we know this to be a red herring.

While the forensic clues in desert corpses already speak to atrocity, this is the most graphic and violent moment up to this point in the novel: a sick scene of potty training. There is no returning to the merry gallops of Arturo Belano—a beautiful anus, a beautiful soul—after this. Things will arguably get worse, but this is the first occasion in which the pact of verisimilitude established earlier, with those gallantly perverse academic love stories, gives way to something so grim. Other than the damage inflicted upon the fellow inmate, it is the display of mastery and subordination that takes readers aback. This is all the more meaningful because, throughout Bolaño’s oeuvre until this point, the anus has stood for something ostensibly more playful. The apocalyptic last novel is willing to expend even this. The solar economy of Bolaño’s writing is expletive, hypergenerative: the name Haas (“hate” by homophony) remits to an earlier character, in By Night in Chile, whose last name (Etah in English, Oido in Spanish) is an anagram for hate. Bolaño is cannibalizing his own motifs, driving them to exhaustion via compulsive ars combinatoria. In this decisive moment, fear touches the anus.

Worlding in Bolaño’s writing is linked to anal fixation. In the monograph Cosmopolitan Desires (2014), Mariano Siskind has convincingly demonstrated that an urge to belong in global modernity has been a determinant factor in twentieth-century Latin American literature. Such cosmopolitan desire is also present in Bolaño, with two important qualifications: Bolaño complicates desire itself, notably through perversion, and speaks to the cosmopolitical rather than to the cosmopolitan. The Chilean, multinational author never allows his readers to forget that, on the world stage, some bodies matter more than others. Some make headlines, their lives celebrated; others die in anonymity. As Rosa Amalfitano puts it, commenting on the effectiveness of narco-assassins: “We’re alive because we haven’t seen anything and we don’t know anything.”64 Bolaño reminds readers of their privilege and its precariousness, both conditions of possibility for the social practice of literature at a global level. Adorno asked the poignant question of whether there could be poetry after Auschwitz. Mutatis mutandis, the question here is: Can we talk about the travels of literature when the mobility of actual bodies is so regimented?

Bolaño’s sexualization and abjectification of global literary transactions gives pause. Imagine a perfectly thorough sociology of worldwide literary cultures. A transnational team of scholars achieves a complete description of the social dynamics at festivals, publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, and so on—even their own collaboration. Could such a project account for the why of literature? The closest that Bolaño’s oeuvre comes to answering that eternal question is by framing it in terms of desire and bodily engagement. It’s the reason why his literati characters recurrently encounter various forms of eroticism, including perversions ranging from the kinky to the mass murderous. The defining testament is the drive to live and to survive, in literature as elsewhere. The unit of meaning is always an individual lifespan, contingent upon a body. Against the trend toward the autonomization, institutionalization, and professionalization of World Literature that underwrites literary encyclopedias, Bolaño constantly reminds us that fiction, and art more generally, is a fragile, heteronomous affair, embedded in lay forms of life.

If, pace Eco, above, we make lists out of fear of death, then what to make of a list of forensic reports, the urtext of “The Part About the Crimes”? As a list, it would provide comfort to readers, who contemplate from a safe distance, many times removed, much like museum goers experience the sublime painting of a harrowing storm at sea. But the contents of that list are horrendous, resulting in veritable commotion. The fictional peeling of layers of separation from horror builds the novel’s suspense. This movement brings readers closer to the aweful corpse—in the etymological sense of “awe” as that which inspires reverential fear—and reveals the insurmountable distance from it, in a different metaphor, like a dolly zoom. I leave it to biographers to speculate on the import of Bolaño’s writing about botched bodies (corpses) while his own was fatally failing him. There is, however, an obvious commitment to the cause. Bolaño dedicates what little life he may have left to writing the Juárez femicide into literary history. He does not know he is going to die so soon—an organ transplant was coming—and cannot anticipate the importance of his work—he is one of many talented contemporary Latin American authors writing on the subject. But he is willing to wager the entire solar economy of his oeuvre in telling that one story that is many stories. We read the following:

A discarded corpse is a thing without history. But corpses, as forensic specialists and archeologists know well, tell stories. Bolaño, building upon such arts, tries to give the corpse una historia, in the double sense of “history” and “story.” Someone else may have done things differently. Bolaño knew that the corpse of the character in the passage, Guadalupe Guzmán Prieto, corresponds in real life to Brenda Mejía Flores.66 One could imagine, say, a documentary biopic that tried to piece the girl’s life together, reach out to any acquaintances, give a face to a bigger tragedy, appeal for viewers to relate. Instead of questioning the subject-object divide or the irrepresentability of such horror, that hypothetical work would adopt the representation conventions of its day, turn the object into a subject inasmuch as possible, and hope for the best. Well, this is not the practice of 2666, and someone could legitimately criticize it for this. The novel does try to singularize every victim on its pages in its own way. It dryly registers the impossibility of going any further, as in the case of unnamed corpses, but also, for the most part, chooses not to focalize on the bereaved families of named victims. Bolaño wants to get at the systemic, historical dimension of these deaths, while still doing his literature. Rather than shift registers or media (into activist filmmaking, in the counterfactual scenario), he incorporates the problem of representability at the metalevel and explores what happens to his anal craft of fiction when exposed to these events.

Meanwhile, World Literature deals with phenomena on a global scale, and of transnational historical significance, all the time. Whether tackling the expansion of the novel form across the continents or the transcultural resonances of epic, scholarly work is increasingly at home among networks and complex interconnections. At the same time, six women are assassinated in Mexico every day, which is already a staggering statistic, but the phenomenon is much larger worldwide: according to the UN, Mexico ranks sixteenth in the world in femicides.⁶⁷ Why shouldn’t literary scholars, then, engage with something as significant, prevalent, rhizomatic, and urgent? One blasé answer would be that we are not activists, journalists, criminologists, or forensic experts. Neither is Bolaño, as we have seen, but he assimilates all four discourses to a significant extent, both in the research behind the novel and in the writing itself. Without ceasing to be a work of literary art, however narrowly we wish to construe one, 2666 stretches the limits of the novel form so as to rub against those other domains. The forensic hermeneutics in the passage above is a case in point: in a mise en abyme, coroners “read” cadaveric fauna for clues while readers do the same.

The embeddedness of “The Part About the Crimes” within 2666, and within Bolaño’s writing at large, provides an illustration of what it might mean to bank the future of World Literature on a search for justice, always the more pressing concern than global literary historiography. Bolaño is no social realist, and neither is the agenda for World Literature I advocate. More important than thematizing atrocious deeds, there is the question of what to do, not just in terms of advocacy: What needs to happen to form? This is something critics can adapt and adopt for their own practice and methods, again, whether they are activist scholars or not. In my mind, a significant part of what distinguishes wordlit approaches is a certain transcendental condition: namely, that we write with a renewed awareness of the world, as if in the presence of more and less distant peers who have deeper knowledge of other traditions and languages. This chapter has been making the case to invigorate that awareness with the bodily: alive, suffering, dead. Writing literary history and engaging with the world should not be an either/or proposition, but neither are these poles easily bridged.

Bolaño’s model is encapsulated in an image: a book Óscar Amalfitano hangs out to dry on a clothesline in the second section of the novel, at the mercy of the sandy winds of the Sonoran Desert—and of the smell of barbecue, one supposes. “It’s a Duchamp idea,” he explains, “leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life.”68 The book is a work of poetry he acquired while in Europe, Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geométrico, that he would have forgotten all about had there been a mugging, a car accident, or a “suicide in the subway” on his way home when he acquired it. In that case, he ruminates, “I would remember whatever had made me forget the Testamento geométrico.”⁶⁹ Hanging the book is clearly a futile act, much like literature and the arts, coldly considered. Doing so either calms Amalfitano’s nerves—he fears for his daughter—or evidences that he is unravelling. With this fictional ready-made, Bolaño situates creation at the crossroads of desperation and solace, escapism and commitment. A few lines down, Amalfitano fancies his “ideas or feelings or ramblings” (read literature), not unproblematically, as vicarious experience: they turn “the pain of others into memories of one’s own.”⁷⁰ Bolaño also impossibly approximates his pages to the stench of death. He does so with ample qualification, obviously, because something as banal as one’s minor car accident can wipe the memory of reading about another’s atrocity. This is a different formulation of the referentiality problem in World Literature, and again, no reason not to try to make words count.

Understatedly, as to avoid impossible comparison, 2666 traces an arc from genocide to femicide. Explicit mentions of the Shoah are scarce, but the novel evokes it through the Nazi barbarism that surrounds Hans Reiter, Archimboldi’s given name. Bolaño may have drawn inspiration from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and certainly from their impulse to call into question the entirety of Western civilization in light of the horrors of their day. After a careful close reading of perpetrator rationale in Sade, they note: “The [purported] explanation for the hatred of woman as the weaker in mental and physical power, who bears the mark of domination on her brow, is the same as for the hatred of the Jews.”71 There is no room to do justice here to their very nuanced argument, but it is worth remembering that they regard anti-Semitism as an unfolding of the contradictions of Enlightenment thought, which they in turn seek to truly enlighten. If the comparison between Bolaño and Adorno and Horkheimer holds, then future readings of the novel will do well in looking for insights about the broad cultural dynamics that pave the way to femicide (of brown, impoverished, global factory workers in particular). As far as the present argument is concerned, the takeaway is that Bolaño’s thrust to approximate the symbolic and the real, however impossible a task to complete, drives him all the way from Hollywoodesque necrophilia into facing a major social issue. It is a phenomenon whose comprehension, let alone resolution, still exceeds us. Bolaño writes the shortest, most modest global Latin American novel necessary to approximate the scale and world historical significance of its horror.

The feminicides in Juárez are an extreme case for the moral imagination, which struggles to understand suffering at the same time in its singularity and multiplicity, with one pole in the dialectic not eclipsing the other. In that regard alone it is akin to the Shoah, a singular horror that, nonetheless, unavoidably informs discussion of mass exterminations of a different scale.⁷² In “The Part About Archimboldi,” a verbose man who rents a typewriter to the writer—who has used for the first time his nom de plume during the transaction—muses over a cup of tea: “Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame [realzar] the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”⁷³ The geometrical, symmetrical disposition of three crucified bodies asks us to take in from a distance, as an artistic composition, something that, up close, is ripped flesh and necrotized limbs. Christianism tries to repair the gap between individual and collective suffering, singularity and Church. Bolaño, via a base materialist negative theology, gives readers, instead, an open wound.

Form follows suit. So open-ended is “The Part About Archimboldi” that in the end it doesn’t really matter who the lost author is. Approaching its thousandth page, the novel disavows its own conceit. The section reads as that which comes after the end of the world: a long, barren epilogue. And yet it is rich in more ways than I can address here. It’s worth noting that the solar economy is out of whack. There is a story within a story within a story, a third-level mise an abyme, of a peaceful indigenous tribe that turns violent when a Frenchman abruptly shakes one native’s hand, presumably a grave offense. The native yells “dayiyi,” which translates (note the double quotation marks) as “ ‘man who rapes me in the ass,’ or ‘cannibal who fucks me in the ass and then eats my body,’ though it could also mean ‘man who touches me (or rapes me) and stares me in the eyes (to eat my soul).’”74 A made-up word, a third-hand parable, a parody of colonization, colonoscopy, and cultural difference: the combinatory possibilities of the anal motif have come to this. If the novel and the oeuvre were a body—a corpus—this body would already be decomposing.

And yet neither the novel nor Archimboldi is quite a body. While there were more bodies than names among the corpses of Juárez, the mysterious writer has more names than body. Né Hans Reiter, he “becomes” Benno von Archimboldi, is at one point thought to be identical to Klaus Haas, and even appears briefly in The Savage Detectives as J. M. G. Arcimboldi. The von particle confers nobility; the last name sounds Italian, though it is actually French Huguenot (38); the upbringing is German: this man seems to summon all the powers of European high culture combined. His notoriety largely exceeds his individual body; the corpses of “The Part About the Crimes” remain, despite the novel’s efforts, an anonymous mass. The flesh to notability ratio speaks to a fundamental injustice that lives on in language. Cultural milestones are built, among other things, upon deficits of attention: some individual bodies are conferred inordinate amounts of attention, others hardly any.

There are two, complementary nonhuman allusions that reveal the kind of body that Archimboldi is, illustrate the peculiar proliferating structure that 2666 is, and, more broadly, emblematize the telos of Bolaño’s unfinished oeuvre. One is the insistent and rather bewildering identification of Archimboldi with seaweed—alga in Spanish. Algae drift across national borders, multiply sexually and asexually, are essential to life. They aren’t companion species and cannot be easily anthropomorphized in the imagination. Archimboldi’s taking to the water creature befits his cold, saturnine, distant personality, his rootless cosmopolitanism. If previously he appeared as more than human, he now fancies himself as less or other than. After the horrors in the fourth section, and the horrors of World War II obliquely narrated in the fifth, 2666 renounces humanity. The Chinese character for algae, I learned serendipitously, is 藻, which is also the character for literary talent. This is the final ars poetica: Bolaño, who has been shown to write under the aegis of the constellation and the rhizome, turns in the last moment to the spore. Its “flesh”—the green, gooey stuff, inanimate and nurturing—is everywhere and nowhere: democratic, viscous, promiscuous, making sunlight breathable via photosynthesis. Autotrophs like algae, plants, and many bacteria produce their own sustenance from the environment. In other words, they have no need for an anus. The mind reels from imagining where Bolaño could have taken this premise. My suspicion is that, as in the present volume, the author saw the need to imbricate natural and human history.

The above is an illustration of the painting’s mirroring effect (figure 3.1) Bolaño is a maximalist. He works by overdetermination, accumulation, iteration. See here (smell) the Mexican barbecue; a ghost made of flesh—a corpse—popping up behind the theater curtain; Hans Reiter—writer, horseback rider—an impossible approximation of representation and referent; a topsy-turvy world; the intromission of war at home, of the military among civilians; surrealism—and real visceralismo—avant la lettre; a rumination on singularity and collectivity; the eerie proximity of “a woman or an adolescent’s” living hand and the suckling pig’s dead head; Benjamin’s dictum that “every document of civilization is a document of barbarism.”⁷⁶ Archimboldi, the great, sought-after author, is purportedly an Event at a time when Authors are not really events anymore, when chasing them with blind humanist zeal or belleletristic devotion is particularly inane, both in itself and in light of more pressing, terrible events. This is a contradiction Bolaño, and the present argument, must gingerly embrace. The only way not to overly spiritualize art and culture is to regard them as monuments of flesh.

The most famous sentence in the novel is as follows: “No one pays attention to these killings [in Juárez], but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”⁷⁷ It would be a fool’s errand to give a narrow interpretation to this ars poetica. Chris Andrews, Osvaldo Zavala, and others have pointed to the enormous economic forces unleashed along the border as the novel’s real culprits;⁷⁸ Sergio González Ramírez, who wrote the original account (2002) of the dead that Bolaño overlays his fictional narrative upon, had already done so for the crimes themselves.⁷⁹ Be this as it may, one thing that is certain about this “secret” is its double etymology of things unsaid and of things secreted. 2666 confronts literary culture with its refuse. Meanwhile, Gloria Fisk remarks that World Literature “has worked historically to map the lines of inheritance—cultural and otherwise—that separate high from low, smart from dumb, timeless from temporary, haves from have-nots.”⁸⁰ Bolaño’s global Latin American novel, and the whole and hole of his oeuvre, work in the opposite direction.

For a brief overview, consider Rosero’s Los ejércitos (2006; trans. The Armies, 2008), a jarringly musical portrayal of paramilitary violence in the Colombian backlands, which purposefully involves corpse abuse in ways unfit to describe here. The novel extends readers’ capacity to take in the horror of history while remaining empathetic.81 Or take Feinmann’s lighthearted short story “Dieguito,” where an idiot child by that name sews back together the corpse of global football icon Diego Armando Maradona. When his father asks him what he is up to, he explains: “Dieguito Armando Maradona.”⁸² It is a hysterically funny punchline if one is familiar with the uses and abuses of the Spanish gerund, as in armando: to assemble. Thought-provokingly, the abject figure may be synecdoche for Argentina. For her part, Eltit, an immensely influential figure whose translations into English unfortunately lag behind, has pegged her writing to the suffering real in numerous ways, resulting in dense, experimental works like Impuesto a la carne (2010). The title is already informative, wordplay for “a tax on meat” and “an imposition on the flesh.”⁸³ Rey Rosa’s El material humano (2009) fictionalizes Guatemala’s criminology archives to produce a textured collage of past and present violence, while Halfon’s short story “Han vuelto las aves” (2015), which I will revisit in the conclusions of this book, subtly hints at the corpse of an assassinated community leader, via negativa, by dwelling on the overgrown coffee plants left behind in the family plot.⁸⁴

Even works that deal with the living body describe it in forensic detail, in several registers, from the sophisticated exercise in fictionalized autobiography in the Mexican Guadalupe Nettel’s The Body Where I Was Born (2011) and in her countrywoman Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth (2014) to the scandalously masculinist “dirty realism” of the Cuban Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, of Tropical Animal (2000) repute.⁸⁵ It is not unfair to say that the lead characters in each of these books is defined, respectively, by one body part: an eye, teeth, the penis. For dying, as opposed to dead bodies, look no further than the epoch-defining novel of the 1990s, Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, which deals with a decommissioned salon turned into a moridero: a place where marginalized subjects go to die from an unnamed sexually-transmitted illness.

Meanwhile, honorary Latin American writer Patti Smith, a well-known punk rocker and memoirist, dedicated her hundred-verse, stanzaless poem “Hecatomb” to Roberto Bolaño. (She has also championed the Argentine César Aira on numerous occasions.) A few relevant lines include the following: “A poet’s coat is skin”; “A poem of perpetual death / Trumping the Greeks / In the precinct of the muse.”86 Smith is clearly ruminating on the corpses of Juárez’s women, fictionalized in Bolaño’s Santa Teresa (“a city shaped like a dress”), and on the author’s reputation, which caught like wildfire after his death (“we the worthless / unsolicited revelators / cash in our chips”). Lest anyone think that an orientation toward the corpse is all about macabre realism, Colombian draughtsman José Antonio Suárez, in a beautifully illustrated 2013 booklet by Medellín’s Ediciones SML, re-edited in 2015 by Bogotá’s La Casa del Doctor and Cologne’s Walther König, renders the sacrifice of one hundred oxen in the poem as brightly colored, deceivingly naive iterations of pierced cattle. Both Suárez and Smith take something from the playbook of Roberto Bolaño: the slow building up of a sensibility toward human “flesh” by way of “meat.” Through his sister, Suárez quite understandably declined to grant reproduction rights for the auratic drawings in this very singular art book: picture a white cow midair against a textured gray backdrop—dark sky or rising mud?

If the return of World Literature has arguably been dominated by the visionary, idealist tenet of Don Quixote, the present chapter has emphasized down-to-earth, materialist Sancho Panza. “Panza” means “belly” and stands for irreducible corporeality. Even the most materialist of thinkers shy away from fully considering literature in this embodied way. We read, as part of the brief reflection on Weltliteratur in the Communist Manifesto, that as international commerce expands, the “spiritual products” of individual nations become “common property”: Gemeingut.87 Corpse narratives put the gut back into Gemeingut, pun intended. Translation, a sine qua non of World Literature Marx and Engels neglect, entails more than the accumulation of capital and meaning. There is also the potential for their dispersion and disruption—hence my projecting Gregory L. Ulmer’s notion of the “puncept” across languages.⁸⁸ Transnational literary relevance cannot be entirely scripted, cultural hegemonies notwithstanding. World Literature as dynamic principle gains with the realization that ideas are, in one way or the other, bound to actual bodies. This does not entail reducing literature to goods, as the humanist may fear, or neglecting the commercial aspects of circulation and copyright, so prominent in the Frankfurt or Guadalajara book fairs. It is rather a call to setting ideas in conversation with the corporeal, including the surfaces, membranes, and contact zones where transaction takes place.

The narrativization of corpses provides a bridge between the agency of language and the agency of (other) matter. The words “corpse” and “meat” have an almost totemic quality: they prescribe a differentiated behavior between human and nonhuman animals and their remains. Denaturalizing the use of such terms can have powerful effects. It would be callous to refer to a loved one’s corpse as “corpse”—let alone “meat”! There one would rely on an impossible possessive, saying “her” and “his” body, although bodies must be alive to merit the name, and ownership too requires life. The abject and its misnomers bring us closer to humanity in a nonhumanist sense: rather than exceptionality from the rest of nature, they underscore the continuity. It is safe to generalize that World Literature, an influential trend among several, has been overly humanist. Meanwhile, other contemporary trends are markedly postanthropocentric, be they animal studies, new materialism, posthumanism, and so on. It is time to have these trends bear upon each other.

For one, Rosendahl Thomsen’s The New Human in Literature (2014) has done so persuasively regarding the thematization of posthuman topics—prosthetics, living longer lives, and so on. Through readings of Woolf, Achebe, Céline, DeLillo, and others, the study makes an eloquent case for how literature can contribute to thinking critically about biomedical innovation, and conversely, how modern science can inform hermeneutic practices.89 However, the more fundamental question of the relationship between world and language, and therefore literature, holds. The same is true of Vilashini Cooppan’s timely proposal for a nonlinear history of World Literature, understood as nonhierarchical description of the phenomenon as networked flow. My proposal supplements, rather than contradicts, the latter approach, albeit with a different approach to death, which she addresses via Friedrich Kittler.⁹⁰ Where she notes that all books are books of the dead, I would—and the difference, as we have seen, is not negligible—emphasize that they are books of the corpse.

Cheah has warned us against the “teleology of the concept,” a trait of Hegelian Eurocentrism. As he puts it, “As spirit, the concept develops itself by externalizing itself in the sphere of objective existence that is other to it.”⁹¹ A spiritualist telos for World Literature would see its job accomplished when the world becomes legible to itself at the level of abstraction, as if the word “corpse” could produce the same impact that contemplating one such human thing does. Leaving the institutional project of World Literature with no clear sense of direction, as purposeless enthusiasm, opens the door for the prevailing ideologies of the present to determine the whole enterprise. The productive dispersion of attention, blindly exclusionary ecumenism, over-professionalization, and trickle-down economies of cultural prestige rank high on the list of teloi this would impose. Instead, we could take a closer look at the soil under our feet. My interest in corpse narratives falls within transcultural materialism and its efforts to blur the line between nature and culture. World Literature has yet to assimilate how much of the world is not human; the abject, in its liminality, is a useful starting point. Only then can we return to the corpse’s Other: the youthful living body, protean like algae or bound like our own, whose preservation and plenitude inform our practice as necessary condition and indispensable, if ultimately unfulfillable, goal.

Deconstruction and poststructuralism saw each word as a potential pun, its disseminating energy waiting to be liberated. Building on corpse narratives, a subtext to this chapter has been a similar attempt in regard to “World Literature.” All permutations are welcome: world and literature, world or literature, war literature, worm literature—iteratur. Such errancies will bring us closer to the real than reifying the notion would. Contemporary Latin American literature, a fascinating field of study that increasingly welcomes global readers through better, timelier translations, bears this out. Let the literatures of the world theorize, as they are theorized upon. Just temper Goethe’s haste and its teleology of progress with a dialectical, paradoxical image, one that Bolaño brings to the table on several occasions, namely, “los grandes cementerios a la velocidad de la luz” (the great cemeteries at light speed).⁹²