The Last Interview and Other Conversations

III. “POSITIONS ARE POSITIONS AND SEX IS SEX”. INTERVIEW BY ELISEO ÁLVAREZ

FIRST PUBLISHED IN TURIA,

BARCELONA, JUNE 2005

ELISEO ÁLVAREZ: Did your parents influence your love of literature, books?

ROBERTO BOLAÑO: No. In terms of genealogy, the truth is I come from two families: one that dragged with it 500 years of constant and rigorous illiteracy and the other, maternal, that dragged with it 300 years of laziness, just as constant and as rigorous. In that sense I’m the black sheep of the family. I suppose that they would have preferred any other thing. The truth is I’m fifty years old and knowing what I know now I wouldn’t want my child to be a writer either. That isn’t to say I would want him to continue with 500 more years of illiteracy, but why not 300 more years of laziness? It’s quite hard to be a writer, although, let’s not exaggerate. My mother read some books, and my father read Westerns occasionally. He read those little novels that are made to keep in your back pocket, because there was no television. My mother did read more, but if I had formed my mother’s tastes I’d be a Marcelo Serrano- or Isabel Allende-type today. On the other hand, that wouldn’t be so bad because I wouldn’t have known the troubles of a writer but I would have known sweet millions, which seen with perspective is not a bad exit.

Chilean author Marcela Serrano (b. 1951) is a standard bearer of new Latin American fiction. Her major works include Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (1991) and Para que no me olvides (1994). Her translated works include Antigua and My Life Before (2001).

Perhaps the most famous female Chilean author, Isabel Allende (b. 1942) is an extremely prolific part of the magical realism movement. Bolaño considered her work “bad, but it’s alive. It’s anemic, like many Latin American authors, but it’s alive.” Her major works have been translated into English and include The House of Spirits (1982) and Paula (1995).

EA: It would be ideal to get a mix of both.

RB: I think a good mix is very difficult to obtain, especially for people of my generation, because we were very radical and we believed the sooner we got to the limit the better, and that’s how it went for us.

EA: How did you discover reading?

RB: Surely because I was a very sensible kid, a very sensible adolescent. My father was a courier. He was also a professional heavyweight boxing champion in southern Chile. The only thing fit to do before that man was to be stronger than him — otherwise it was to opt for homosexuality. If he had depended on me, I would have opted for homosexuality, which seems to me a magnificent aesthetic escape, but it wouldn’t have been natural. I’m heterosexual. So all that was left was film and books, and from childhood I dedicated myself to watching lots of film and reading lots of books basically and, evidently, trying to kill my father. Of course my father has always loved me very much, like all fathers. Now my son intends to kill me. I’ll be the first to tell him: Kill me, son. Here is my neck. It’s like the joke about the Jewish mother: In a fit of madness, the son cuts off his mother’s head, flees, then stumbles, and while he’s stumbling — with his mother’s head still in his arms — the head says, “Son, are you all right?” A father’s love for his son is similar. I suppose that within his brutality and his courage — he is a very courageous man — my father loved me as I love my son. In the end, one could talk for hours about the relationship between a father and a son. The only clear thing is that a father has to be willing to be spat upon by his son as many times as the son wishes to do it. Even still the father will not have paid a tenth of what he owes because the son never asked to be born. If you brought him into this world, the least you can do is put up with whatever insult he wants to offer.

EA: Do you agree with those who say that a child leaving the house is life’s happiest and most dramatic moment?

RB: I don’t agree with that. If it were up to me, I’d live to 100 and always protect my child. I don’t think reason has anything to do with parent-children relationships, not at all. Perhaps from the perspective of a child, reason does impose itself, but from the perspective of a parent, it’s very difficult to impose reason. One acts viscerally, in accordance with accumulation of fear and anguish. For example, when I was not yet a father, it was very difficult to injure me. I thought that I had finally acquired a type of invulnerability. But that all changed the moment my older child was born; that is to say, all of the fears and terrors I experienced as an adolescent re-emerged and duplicated, multiplied themselves by 100. See, I can put up with them myself, but I do not want my child to have to go through them. It’s frightening, and now I have a daughter besides. I won’t say anymore. I’ll start to cry. The only explanation I could give would be to start to cry. It’s beyond the beyond.

EA: Your family left for Mexico when you were fifteen-years old. Why?

RB: Basically, my mother had been to Mexico a couple of times and was familiar with the country and she convinced my father. My mother has always been an anxious person. She convinced my father that the best thing to do was to leave Chile and to go to Mexico. My parents were always separating and getting back together. Their relationship was stormy throughout my childhood and in a way Mexico was a small paradise, a place where they could start over. It was fun for them at first, although no fun at all for me. On the first day of school in Mexico, some guy challenged me to a fight just because I happened to be Chilean; we hadn’t said a word to each other. He was a Mexican kid who didn’t know how to fight very well and was short besides. I was certain that with two punches I could knock him to the ground, but I realized that if I knocked him down all the others would come after me and that’s when I got smart: I grasped the situation in the act, and I directed the fight to a tie. I came off very well and he made good friends with me and no one ever wanted to fight me again. It was like a baptism in Aztec thought, quite disagreeable, but I realized where the shots were heading and the underlying message of the fight.

EA: Mexico was as dynamic as Chile was on its way to being when you arrived.

RB: Mexico was of a different dynamism. Look, in that era, Mexico City had 14 million inhabitants and it was a separate planet, it was the city where everything was possible. For me, because I came from a small town in Chile, a southern town besides, I exchanged a small town for a metropolis. I was never a resident of Santiago; I was born in Santiago, but I never lived in Santiago. I knew Santiago only from visiting.

EA: What were the strongest differences? The ones that cost you the most to get used to.

RB: Very few. Mexicans are really very hospitable. Since I was only fifteen-years old, I quickly Mexicanized myself. I felt totally Mexican. I never felt like a stranger in Mexico, except for that first day in school. There wasn’t anything I had trouble getting used to.

EA: How did you arrive at Trotskyism?

RB: Just by being a contrarian I think. I did not like the priestly, clerical unanimity of the Communists. I’ve always been a leftist and I wasn’t going to turn right just because I didn’t like the Communist clergymen, so I became a Trotskyite. The problem is, once among the Trotskyites, I didn’t like their clerical unanimity either, so I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank God, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely. Whenever I realize that the whole world agrees on something, whenever I see that the whole world is cursing something in chorus, something rises to the surface of my skin that makes me reject it. They’re probably infantile traumas. I don’t see it as something that makes me proud.

EA: That’s curious, because from what you’re saying, unanimity is what was missing from your home.

RB: There was never any unanimity in my home. Not ever.

EA: How did you see the experiment with the socialism of the Chilean way?

RB: When I returned to Chile, shortly before the coup, I believed in armed resistance, I believed in permanent revolution. I believed it existed then. I came back ready to fight in Chile and to continue fighting in Peru, in Bolivia.

EA: Allende must have seemed like a conservative grandpa to you guys.

RB: To us, in those years, Allende was a conservative. What happened is that his figure, in what concerns me, has changed vastly over time. I remember September 11, 1973: in one moment, I’m waiting to receive weapons to go and fight and I hear Allende say, in his speech no less, “Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.” In that moment, it seemed terrible to me, almost like a betrayal committed by Allende against those of us young people who were willing to fight for him. With time, that’s one of the things that has ennobled Allende: saving us from death, accepting death for himself but saving us from it. I think that has made him huge in an immense way.

EA: But they detained you.

RB: I was detained, but a month and a half later in the south. The other thing happened in Santiago.

EA: And friends from school helped you escape.

RB: Friends from high school. I was detained for eight days, although a little while ago in Italy, I was asked, “What happened to you? Can you tell us a little about your half a year in prison?” That’s due to a misunderstanding in a German book where they had me in prison for half a year. At first they sentenced me to less time. It’s the typical Latin American tango. In the first book edited for me in Germany, they give me one month in prison; in the second book — seeing that the first one hadn’t sold so well — they raise it to three months; in the third book I’m up to four months; in the fourth book it’s five. The way it’s going, I should still be a prisoner now.

EA: Did you have doubts about being able to make a living as a writer?

RB: I had many doubts. In fact I worked at other things. Economic doubts for many years, always economic; never vocational. What interested me, at twenty years old, more than writing poetry, because I also wrote poetry (in reality, I only wrote poetry), what I wanted was to live like a poet, even though today I wouldn’t be able to specify what it meant to me to live like a poet. Anyway my basic interest was to live like a poet. For me, being a poet meant being revolutionary and completely open to all cultural manifestations, all sexual expressions, in the end, being open to every experience with drugs. Tolerance meant — much more than tolerance, a word we didn’t much like — universal brotherhood, something totally utopian.

EA: Doesn’t prose make that sensibility more profound?

RB: Prose has always demanded more work. We were against work. Among other things, we were tirelessly lazy. There wasn’t a single person who could make us work. I worked only when I didn’t have any other choice. Also, we accepted living life with very little. We were complete Spartans, with meager means, but at the same time we were Athenians and sodomites enjoying all aspects of life, poor but luxurious. This was all related to the hippies, the North American model, May of ’68 in Europe, to many things in the end.

EA: Do you owe your sentimental education to Mexico?

RB: More than anything I owe Mexico my intellectual education. My sentimental education? I owe that more to Spain, I think. When I came to Spain, I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. I arrived thinking I was already a man — through and through — and that I knew everything there was to know about sex, and for me a sentimental education is almost synonymous with a sexual education. In reality, I knew nothing, which I quickly realized with the first girl I met. I knew many positions, but positions are positions and sex is sex.

EA: It’s one thing to know methodology—

RB: Exactly. My sentimental education begins at age twenty-three in Europe.

EA: Have you not wanted to return to Mexico for fear of finding a completely different country from the one you left and having lost your connection?

RB: Yes, that’s true. But it’s also true that, although I’ve traveled a lot, I don’t recognize many countries from afar, and between getting to know a new country and returning to Mexico, a country I love but which is swarmed by ghosts, among them the ghost of my dead best friend, and where I believe I would have a very bad time, I prefer to go to other places. I’ve gotten too comfortable to go around choosing to spend a bad time in a particular place. I used to love to go to places where I knew I’d have a bad time. But, now, for what?

EA: Were you an anarchist when you arrived in Spain?

RB: Yes. I found many fellow anarchists and I started to cease being one myself. How did it occur to them? What kind of anarchy was that?

EA: In Spain, the people were coming out from under a dictatorship, and they had the power.

RB: Yes. The trouble is that in Barcelona I didn’t just find Catalan people, who I found to be magnificent, but also people from everywhere in Spain and Europe and South America too. There were people who had come from all over the world, above all from the West, to understand us. One lived very well. There was work. In 1977 and ’78 there were jobs that paid very little but that allowed you to subsist. State pressures had started to relax. Spain had begun to be a democratic country and there were wide margins of liberty. For a foreigner like me, that was a gift for which I will endlessly be grateful.

EA: Did you already believe that Chilean literature revolved around Pablo Neruda?

RB: I thought that even before. The problem is that this isn’t exactly how it is. For me, Chile’s great poet is Nicanor Parra and after Nicanor Parra there are several others. Neruda is one of them, without a doubt. Neruda is what I pretended to be at age twenty: living like a poet without writing. Neruda wrote three very good books; the rest — the great majority — are very bad, some truly infected. But he already lived like a poet and not just like a poet: he performed like a sun poet, like a poet king.

EA: The thing that happened with Neruda — the type of man who appeared to be against the establishment but then lives off the state — hasn’t that happened with many Mexican writers? Let’s use Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes as examples.

Born in 1914, Octavio Paz is one of Mexico’s most important writers and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been outspoken in the realm of Mexican politics and served as the Mexican ambassador to India from 1962–1968.

One of the most prolific and outspoken writers in twentieth century Spanish language literature, Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928) was also one of the first modern Spanish language writers to garner real success in the United States. Born in Panama City, Panama, Fuentes was also steeped in the magical realism movement. His 1985 novel Gringo Viejo was adapted into a Hollywood film.

RB: It’s because in literature, the only country where this doesn’t happen, at least from what I can tell, is Argentina. What happens in Mexico happens in all of the other countries in Latin America; in Chile a little bit less but it happens there as well. In Argentina, there is a level of professionalism expected of writers and that the state tries to ignore, but in other countries it is asked of writers that they be independent yet also that they charge the state, which reminds one of a phrase from Mexico’s President Echeverría, who said, “neither to the right, nor to the left, nor in a static center, but onward and upward.” If the writer can’t ask the state for money, he gets mad and will protest the lack of help using his platform like the profoundly independent writer that he is. Besides, that type of direct help translates into all kinds of cultural advances, including jobs.

EA: Are you more on the side of the Mexicanness of Paz or the universalism of Fuentes?

RB: I think Octavio Paz is more universal. The truth is, until the moment I lived in Mexico, Fuentes and Paz were, as one would say in Spain, “a partir un piñon,” intimate friends. One was the tsar and the other the tsarevitch; they were very fond of one another. I would guess that Fuentes even loved Paz, if it’s possible for Fuentes to love someone, which is another topic; and Paz probably loved Fuentes, if Paz has ever loved anyone, which is again another topic. Evidently, I don’t side with either of them.

EA: This thing with intellectuals saying things to one another, it’s quite Mexican.

RB: It depends on what’s being said. Yes, it’s not unusual in Mexico. Intellectual life — artistic life — in Mexico is very active, as are all aspects of life in Mexico. Mexico is a tremendously vital country, despite the fact that, paradoxically, it’s the country where death is the most present. Perhaps being that vital is what keeps death so close. I feel as distant from Fuentes as I do from Paz. I recognize the writer in Paz, above all, in his essays. He is more interesting as a prose writer than Fuentes is as a prose writer. As a poet, there are four poems by Paz that I could still reread without losing interest, there’s even one I still like a lot. The truth is, in general, Mexican poetry tends toward pride, toward starchiness, although there are notable exceptions evidently. There is Mexican poetry I like very much. I like López Velarde a lot, I like Tablada; among the modern writers I like Mario Santiago, who was my friend. But, look, back to your question, if I had to sit near one of them, I’d sit closer to Octavio Paz than to Fuentes.

Considered one of the fathers of modern Mexican poetry, Ramón López-Velarde (1888–1921) was beloved in his country yet garnered little attention outside its borders. Writing during the Mexican Revolution and the turmoil of the years after, he had a profound effect on a generation of Mexican writers. A collection of his work, Song of the Heart: Selected Poems by Ramon López-Velarde, is available in English.

Mexican poet, novelist, and playwright José Juan Tablada (1871–1945) left Mexico in 1914 for the United States. His polemical and satirical writings during the Mexican Revolution angered many important politicians and military officials. Choosing exile, he spent time in Texas, New York City, and Japan. He is credited with introducing the haiku to Spanish-language literature.

EA: Must we speak of Macedonio in order to speak of Borges?

RB: Piglia believes so; I don’t. Piglia believes that Macedonio is very important. Macedonio seems to me to be very important, but I think he is important only as measured by his proximity to Borges. In fact, Borges illuminates a ton of writers and painters. For example, Xul Solar, who, if it weren’t for Borges, would probably only be known in Argentina. Perhaps Solar’s paintings deserve only to be known in Argentina, but by being touched by Borges, through the Borgian experience, they become paintings that transcend the limits of Argentina. I think Xul was capable of seducing anyone; he was a very seductive type. And Macedonio seduces Borges perhaps by his courage. Borges is a man who loves courage, who looks for it in people and who knows how to appreciate it besides, and I believe Macedonio is one of those writers, one of the most courageous beings Borges knows. He is a man truly without duplicity. Borges knows he can always rely on Macedonio and if there were ever a moment when that wouldn’t be possible, he knows he would hear it directly from Macedonio himself. Macedonio, the Borgian Macedonio that comes to us through Borges’ prose at least, incarnates the ideal Argentine, he makes possible the impossible Argentine, the Argentine with a little Creole in him, who lives for many years in a little room, who is a Spartan in his habits, the man who is always mourning over a woman, which is something that seduces Borges, something that would seduce anyone of this era. Because it isn’t just Borges who is head over heals for Macedonio, there are a ton of writers of Borges’ generation who are awestruck by him. Borges was awestruck by those Creole things of his, because he was a Creole who left in order to speak of Schopenhauer, and speak well besides. He was of an exquisite logic. But, for me, what’s important is Borges.

An icon in Argentine metaphysical literature, Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952), known to most as simply “Macedonio,” was a mentor to the young Jorge Luis Borges. An English translation of his novel The Museum of Eterna’s Novel will be available in 2010.

An Argentine writer, professor, and literary critic, Ricardo Piglia (b. 1941) is one of the foremost authorities on Latin American literature. Author of several novels and short story collections, he has been a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, the University of California at Davis, and Princeton. His English works include Artificial Respiration (1980) and Money to Burn (1997)

An Argentine painter of European descent, Xul Solar (1887–1963) was a key member of the avant-garde movement in Buenos Aires in the 1920’s. Spending the years 1912–1924 in Europe, Solar’s return to Argentina in 1924 found a burgeoning artistic movement eager to combine the Argentine avant-garde with that of Continental Europe. Solar had a deep affinity for language, which led him to create several of his own languages and work on the creation of an international language.

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.