{"id":155627,"date":"2021-11-02T13:05:59","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T17:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=155627"},"modified":"2021-11-18T07:32:33","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T12:32:33","slug":"games-of-taste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/11\/02\/games-of-taste\/","title":{"rendered":"Games of Taste"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Diego Delso, Interior of the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City , 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

A few years ago, I attended an academic conference where a prominent scholar of Latin American litera\u00adture announced that he hated The Savage Detectives<\/em>, a novel he considered overwritten and overrated. The statement provoked enthusiastic hooting from the back of the room, as if in glee at a taboo being broken. At the coffee break, I approached the critic and confessed I was a fan of the novel. Bolan\u0303o is a one-trick pony, he replied, and his trick is to parody and empty out the genres of Latin American literature\u2014the dictator novel, the novela negra<\/em>, the novel of testimony, and so on. This trick organized his writing at the level of the sentence, the chapter, and the novel. I said this sounded like an interesting trick, at least; he conceded that it was true Bolan\u0303o was a master at this exercise\u2014but once you saw the trick there was nothing else, and hispanophone writers were no longer interested in his work. He claimed, happily, that the Latin American sales of Bolan\u0303o\u2019s books were down. I asked him why he thought U.S. readers, who mostly lacked familiarity with these Latin American literary traditions, had embraced Bolan\u0303o. This, he told me, was the result of a clever marketing campaign: Bolan\u0303o\u2019s big books had been released alongside new editions of Kerouac, and American readers were encouraged to understand the Chilean writer as a Southern Cone Beat. I expressed skepticism: Did anyone remember that mar\u00adketing campaign? Was Kerouac selling well? My interlocutor was losing patience. Critics love Bolan\u0303o, he said, because they can pour whatever theory they please into his work. He told me Bola\u00adn\u0303o\u2019s work was an excuse for American readers not to read any other Latin American literature. When you read The Savage Detectives<\/em> you\u2019re not enjoying yourself, he said, as much as you think you are.<\/p>\n

There was a lot going on. I was struck by the high-handedness of these proclamations, but I wasn\u2019t sure they were wrong. This uncertainty was partly just a matter of how artistic judgment works. Taste, precisely because it\u2019s an intensely subjective mat\u00adter we feel compelled to make others agree with, is awash in bad feeling. The buzzkill always has the advantage over the ardent fan, an advantage the literary theorist G\u00e9rard Genette called the \u201cauthority of the negative.\u201d The question \u201cHow can you like this?\u201d is, he noted, always more disturbing than \u201cHow can you dislike this?\u201d The quickest way out of this bad feeling is to imitate your naysayer: surrender your taste, learn to despise, or to believe that you despise, what you had previously enjoyed. (More bad feel\u00ading, of a new variety, ensues.) In my case, the bad feeling was as much a matter of geopolitics as of aesthetics. My enjoyment of Bolan\u0303o wasn\u2019t quite real, my new acquaintance said, and the part of it that felt real was a function of American ignorance.<\/p>\n

The conversation didn\u2019t end my pleasure in Bolan\u0303o, but it stayed with me. It crystallized something that was becoming vis\u00adible in the academic and academy-adjacent social worlds I inhabit: Bolan\u0303o, and especially The Savage Detectives<\/em>, had become shorthand for a certain brand of American cluelessness. In a 2018 essay in n<\/em>+1<\/em>, Nicol\u00e1s Medina Mora, a Mexico City native living in the United States, reported on a trip home during which he sat in a caf\u00e9 listening to an expat gringo couple discuss plans to rent a house on Oaxaca\u2019s beach-lined coast. Medina Mora invents their backstory: they\u2019re bien-pensant<\/em> gentrifiers, the kind of peo\u00adple who insist on calling their Brooklyn neighborhood by the Spanish name used by the Puerto Ricans they\u2019ve displaced. Soon it becomes clear that their enclave is being overrun by finance types, and they decide to push on to fresh frontiers. \u201cThey were getting tired of going to magazine parties and gallery galas where they disliked most of the people. And then one day he stumbled on his old copy of The Savage Detectives<\/em> and found himself thinking: Why don\u2019t we just move to Mexico City?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Medina Mora doesn\u2019t say Bolan\u0303o\u2019s novel is bad. But he sug\u00adgests that it\u2019s peculiarly liable to being liked in bad ways. A lot of Bolan\u0303o skepticism turned on this fine distinction. In the aca\u00addemic world, a 2009 essay by Sarah Pollack, a specialist in Latin American literature, offered a carefully argued version of Medina Mora\u2019s point. Pollack made it clear she considers Bolan\u0303o a writer of \u201cgenius,\u201d but maintained that this was only one component in the runaway anglophone success of The Savage Detectives.<\/em> Pollack claimed that Bolan\u0303o\u2019s compelling biography\u2014his youthful wan\u00adderings and poetic experimentation, his experience of Pino\u00adchet\u2019s dictatorship, his death at fifty, just a few years after he began to achieve massive international recognition\u2014had played a part in his renown. So had his press\u2019s publicity campaign: Bola\u00adn\u0303o\u2019s previously translated work had all been brought out by New Directions, the independent publisher with a pedigree in foreign and experimental fiction, but the contract for The Savage Detec\u00adtives<\/em> had gone to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which had a bigger marketing budget. FSG decorated the novel\u2019s jacket with a photo of Bolan\u0303o at twenty, long-haired and skinny and standing on what looks like a Mexico City rooftop. This picture, Pollack wrote, was \u201ca nostalgic memento that for U.S. readers evokes the rebellious counterculture of the sixties and seventies,\u201d and it facilitated the reception of the novel as escapist fantasy: \u201cThanks to Bolan\u0303o, U.S. readers can vicariously relive the best of the sev\u00adenties, fascinated with the notion of a Latin America still latent with such possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pollack wasn\u2019t wrong about the exoticism characterizing much of the anglophone reception of Bolan\u0303o. The worst offender may have been a New York Times<\/em> piece on Between Parentheses<\/em>, the 2011 English translation of Bolan\u0303o\u2019s 2004 collection of essays and talks. The book showed Bolan\u0303o to have been a searching reader of a large swath of world literature (page through it and you\u2019ll find discussions of Baudelaire, Borges, Highsmith, and the Gon\u00adcourt brothers; Pepys, Perec, Pin\u0303era, and Walt Whitman). But the Times<\/em> writer, a normally thoughtful Dwight Garner, sounded as if he were reviewing The Mark of Zorro<\/em>: \u201cThe swashbuckling Bolan\u0303o could declaim and brawl at the same time,\u201d he proclaimed. \u201cHe was a lover and a fighter.\u201d Reading Between Parentheses<\/em>, Garner averred, was \u201cnot like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Sen\u0303or Bolan\u0303o. It\u2019s like sitting next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco, after he\u2019s con\u00adsumed a platter of Pisco Sours. You may wish to make a batch yourself before you step onto the first page.\u201d (The online version takes this last limp joke weirdly literally, offering a hyperlink to Epicurious\u2019s recipe for the frothy beverage.) There is indeed an unbuttoned quality to Bolan\u0303o\u2019s style, but it hardly demanded this cartoonish rhetoric. It was difficult not to feel that the pan-Latin whateverness of Garner\u2019s review expressed a particular condescension to Spanish-language writing\u2014hard to imagine the Times<\/em> recommending Manischewitz to accompany your Roth, a wheel of brie with your Houellebecq.<\/p>\n

Such patronizing praise could obviously tell nobody much of interest about Bolan\u0303o as a writer. But just for this reason, I was wary of letting the critique of the Bolan\u0303o phenomenon stand in for a reading of Bolan\u0303o\u2014wary, that is, of letting an interpreta\u00adtion of this novelist\u2019s work be captive to the stupidest things some Americans had said about it. As a fan, I of course had my own reasons not to want to see myself in Pollack\u2019s and Medina Mora\u2019s diagnoses. But beyond my own investments, there were questions to be asked about the logic of their arguments. As often in criti\u00adcism that speculates about audience motivation, the interpretive claims didn\u2019t always follow cleanly from the established facts: Who knows how many readers of The Savage Detectives<\/em> bought the book because they saw the author photo? Who can say whether those readers wanted, as Pollack claimed, to \u201crelive the best of the seventies\u201d (whatever that was, and if they had lived through them the first time), and whether that fantasy took them through the novel\u2019s 647 pages?<\/p>\n

More striking still was the way these writers black-boxed their own assessment of Bolan\u0303o\u2019s work while they attended to the reviews, blurbs, and promotional material that sold or distorted it. Even when they explicitly claimed admiration for his work, the arguments about Bolan\u0303o\u2019s bad readers seemed to hint that the author himself was at fault. The suggestion was crystallized in Pollack\u2019s \u201cthanks to Bolan\u0303o,\u201d with its ambiguous sense that the novelist had engineered the misreadings, or at least not armored his work against them. Soon I saw this slippery sense of causality everywhere. In 2015, the translator and critic Veron\u00adica Esposito reiterated the worry that Bolan\u0303o\u2014a writer she loved\u2014was loved by American readers for the wrong reasons. Bolan\u0303o\u2019s major novels, Esposito wrote, \u201cplayed off liberal American politics and curiosity about our Latin American neighbors\u201d\u2014a formulation suggesting that the books had been purpose-built to cater to Americans (in addition to intimating that curiosity about other parts of the world is blameworthy). Esposito\u2019s verbs did a lot of quiet conflating, so that the work\u2019s success was consistently described as the author\u2019s plan: Bolan\u0303o didn\u2019t just become a best-selling author but \u201cwas able to take advantage of and become a major commodity\u201d; in a global market favoring books that could be translated with relative ease, \u201cBolan\u0303o turned such a style to his advantage\u201d; in a literary field increas\u00adingly defined by well-publicized international prizes, \u201cBolan\u0303o both anticipated and profited from these developments.\u201d<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to believe in the disinterested purity of the Artist to be struck by these critics\u2019 faith in their demystifying logic: the suggestion is not just that most successful writers angle for success but that Bolan\u0303o\u2019s big success was the result of his big skill as an angler. The picture that emerges is of a canny self-marketer. This logic\u2014whereby suspicion of the work\u2019s readers shades into disdain for the writer\u2014reached its oddest moment in a 2009 essay entitled \u201cQuestions for Bolan\u0303o\u201d by the eminent scholar of Latin American literature Jean Franco. The piece\u2019s inquisitorial title was a rhetorical gesture: Bolan\u0303o, dead six years at the time of the essay\u2019s publication, was evidently not going to be responding to these questions anytime soon. The essay is nonetheless incisive about the formal and political meaning of his work. Franco establishes the kinship of The Savage Detectives<\/em> with formally jumpy, art- and politics-obsessed novels by Julio Cort\u00e1zar and Roque Dalton; she is acute, and dubious, about what she calls Bolan\u0303o\u2019s \u201cromantic anarchist\u201d politics\u2014his pre\u00adoccupation with friendship as the most meaningful unit of social and ethical life, the absence in his fictional worlds of explicit appeals to state reform, a fatalism that can feel apolitical. But the essay\u2019s ambivalence goes beyond the usual scholarly skepticism; its insights are laced with animus. Near the opening, Franco describes Bolan\u0303o\u2019s major novels as \u201ctwo huge teasers\u201d\u2014a descrip\u00adtion she awards because of their failure to reach traditional clo\u00adsure (a peccadillo commonplace in most twentieth-century experimental fiction). She jokes that his prolificacy in life and the steady pace of posthumous publication make it reasonable to \u201csuspect that Bolan\u0303o may not be a person but a company.\u201d Finally, after noting that Bolan\u0303o is popular in a moment in which \u201cTwit\u00adter replaces commentary,\u201d Franco jumps to the startling claim that \u201cBolan\u0303o has turned illusion into a doctrine, twitter [sic<\/em>] into a life project.\u201d Never mind that Bolan\u0303o died three years before Twitter\u2019s debut. The retrocausal logic of Franco\u2019s swipe makes this writer not only a wily PR genius, shilling his product from beyond the grave, but a posthumous devotee of one of the twenty-first century\u2019s more toxic media inventions.<\/p>\n

Other writers followed suit. There was a piece decrying the \u201cBolan\u0303o Myth,\u201d another warning of the \u201cRoberto Bolan\u0303o Bub\u00adble.\u201d The latter, in The<\/em> New Republic<\/em>, regretted high-mindedly that when such a small percentage of books published in English is translated from other languages\u20143 percent is the commonly floated number, 0.7 percent if you just count literary fiction and poetry\u2014Bolan\u0303o was taking up more than his fair share, espe\u00adcially with the posthumous publications: \u201cWe have enough,\u201d the piece concluded. Worse, this writer claimed, Bolan\u0303o\u2019s popular\u00adity had \u201chidden costs,\u201d among them the risk that anglophone readers will think \u201cthat he is the only Latin American writer of importance to emerge\u201d since Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. A curious cultural protectionism suffused these responses, a concern with a vola\u00adtile product getting into the wrong hands. A kind of novelistic vibranium, Bolan\u0303o\u2019s work apparently had the ability to obliterate continents of literature. This notion that the way to counteract American ignorance about Latin American literature would be to curb American enthusiasm for a major Latin American author was peculiar. That the Bolan\u0303o craze might result in increased interest in hispanophone writers among English readers was rarely mentioned as a possibility. (But as some of these same writers would later concede, there is a case to be made that this is just what happened: a host of writers about whom Bolan\u0303o had said nice things in print\u2014C\u00e9sar Aira, Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n, Alan Pauls, Carmen Boullosa, Juan Villoro, Sergio Pitol, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Mario Bellatin, Andr\u00e9s Neuman, Horacio Castellanos Moya\u2014have arrived in English or seen the number of their books in English translation increase since his death, almost always with Bolan\u0303o\u2019s stray comments used as jacket blurbs. And a host of writers too young for him to have read\u2014Alejandro Zambra, Valeria Luiselli, Samanta Schweblin, Yuri Herrera, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Fernanda Melchor, \u00c1lvaro Enrigue, Gua\u00addalupe Nettel\u2014have been published in English to widespread attention, in a wave of interest in Latin American literature that has been plausibly traced partly to Bolan\u0303o\u2019s prominence.)<\/p>\n

And yet the skepticism remains intriguing despite the factual shakiness of some of its predictions. The wariness with which these writers expressed their admiration, the careening quality of their disdain\u2014now aimed at American readers, now at pub\u00adlishers, now at Bolan\u0303o\u2014all of it bespoke a distress that wasn\u2019t utterly clear about its origins or meaning. A few lines in Esposi\u00adto\u2019s essay hinted at the emotional and political energies swirling around this crisis of taste. Decrying the romanticizing coverage of Bolan\u0303o\u2019s death, in particular the speculation that the liver dis\u00adease that killed him was the result of a (probably apocryphal) heroin addiction, Esposito strikes a satirical pose: \u201cThe writer who boldly leaps where none have leapt before, who mixes passion and love together into art. This is the Bolan\u0303o we love to read\u2026 Our sweet hearts flutter at the thought of artists who \u2018die too soon,\u2019 and they absolutely purr for a man who lived a self-destructive life because he wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quite apart from the content of the claim, one notices the expression of self-contempt\u2014parodistically expressed but vivid nonetheless. I was unpleasantly sensitive to these tones of self-blame: He did die too soon<\/em>, I thought to myself. What\u2019s wrong with saying so?<\/em> I was pretty sure Esposito felt the same way, scare quotes notwithstanding. Whence this eagerness to ridicule a fairly unremarkable sense of regret for the loss of a figure you admire? Why the desire to see literary appreciation under the most contemptible aspect? Rarely had the principle of de gusti\u00adbus non est disputandum<\/em> felt so disputable; rarely had the space for liking something felt so besieged by a worry over what that liking might say about you. If aesthetic judgment is particularly vulnerable to \u201cgames of influence\u201d (Genette), the game here seemed to be operating according to rules nobody wanted to state openly. The sense you got was that it was embarrassing to be caught liking Bolan\u0303o, even if it was hard to say why.<\/p>\n

And in truth, I could relate. It was<\/em> embarrassing to be an American who liked Bolan\u0303o, and not just because in doing so one may have become a dupe of marketers or indulged in exoti\u00adcizing projections. It was embarrassing because, for anyone remotely alert to the distribution of world power, being Ameri\u00adcan is itself embarrassing. And being an American consumer of cultural products from abroad underlines that geopolitical shame with an intellectual one: impossible to disburden oneself of the phantom image of the Ugly American, trampling over local customs, missing cultural cues, expressing even in one\u2019s apprecia\u00adtive curiosity (especially there) an offensive entitlement. Even thus overdrawn, the picture has its basis in fact. As important, it forms an inevitable, if infrequently remarked upon, psychic accompa\u00adniment to any act of mildly self-aware North American cross-cultural consumption: the American ignorance and arrogance exposed by the Bolan\u0303o skeptics was in no way surprising, as any\u00adone who has participated in the competitive anti-Americanism among Americans abroad knows. For every asshole traipsing through Mexico City brandishing The Savage Detectives<\/em>, there was someone else who knew enough to bury his copy deep in his luggage and, if asked, to pretend never to have heard of it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Kurnick is associate professor of English at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. He is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel\u00a0(2012). His writing has appeared in the\u00a0<\/em>Village Voice,\u00a0<\/em>Public Books, and the\u00a0<\/em>Chronicle of Higher Education, and his translations from Spanish include Julio Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires\u00a0(2014) and work by \u00c1lvaro Enrigue.\u00a0<\/em>The Savage Detectives Reread will be published on February 1, 2022.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>The Savage Detectives Reread<\/a> by David Kurnick. Copyright (c) 2021 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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