Opening the Savage Detectives
Posted by zunguzungu on June 15, 2009
If you like the old joke that life is just the way that DNA make more DNA — and I do like that old joke — then maybe it would be fair to observe that Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives sees poetry mainly as the way poets make more poets. Which is to say, there’s a stunning absence at the center of this book about poets talking about poetry: poetry itself.
I don’t mean, of course, that there is no poetry in it — there is some — but take, for example, this bit of description from pages 6 and 7:
“The end of class was surprising. Alamo dared Ulises Lima to read one of his poems. Lima didn’t need to be asked twice. He pulled some smudged, crumpled sheets from his jacket pocket. Oh no, I thought, the idiot is walking right into their trap. I think I shut my eyes out of sheer sympathetic embarrassment. There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. But as I was saying, I closed my eyes, and I heard Lima clear his throat, then I heard the somewhat uncomfortable silence (if it’s possible to hear such a thing, which I doubt) that settled around him, and finally I heard his voice, reading the best poem I’d ever heard. Then Arturo Belano got up and said that they were looking for poets who would like to contribute to the magazine that the visceral realists were putting out. Everybody wished they could volunteer, but after the fight they felt sheepish and no one said a thing. When the workshop ended (later than usual), I went with Lima and Belano to the bus stop. It was too late. There were no more buses, so we decided to take a pesero together to Reforma, and from there we walked to a bar on Calle Bucareli, where we sat until very late, talking about poetry.”
The lines “reading the best poem I’d ever heard” and “talking about poetry” leap out at me in their unfinishedness. What was said? What made the poem so good? And compare the incredible deft sensitivity that the novel brings to bear on the ways people (who happen to be poets) interact with other people (who happen to be poets) to foreclosures like this; there’s a world in the paragraph, a rich sketched-out world of human sociality for which “poetry” is more or less the incidental catalyst. The entire book seems to follow that pattern, circling endlessly round and around its principle characters, without ever settling on the thing that brings them together, or rather without the thing they use to bring themselves together ever becoming a settled thing.
I’m still thinking this through; I’m not finished with the book, and a lot is still fairly opaque to me. But the poetry of this novel is a very different thing than the monuments of a certain literary tradition; the poems written by these people seem so fundamentally occasional that the idea of a completed corpus — a poetic body to represent the living one – is not merely absent, but basically refuted. One writes poetry, as someone for N+1 put it, because “[a]t one point you started and now you can’t stop; it’s become a habit and an identity.” But I wonder if this might be no more a cause for despair than is our exploitation by our DNA for its own selfish purposes. After all, Lima’s might be the best poem Juan has ever heard, but he will live to hear more and better ones, and maybe even write them, too.
j. said
a few unconnected thoughts:
a. juan is kind of a kid. maybe knowing kids it’s better to acknowledge the commonality of his reaction to those (certain) more experienced readers could have without blowing it by having to give a poem that could make him just seem like a kid for liking it.
b. i took a lot of the absent-poetry stuff to be kind of a socratic modernism thing, as in, dear reader: this book is about something that you’re going to have to do on your own (and to show it to you would just compromise your doing it on your own).
c. occasional poetry is pretty huge. no harm in admitting it.
zunguzungu said
Occasional poetry is mega huge! I’ll be on about that for the next post, since there’s something really interesting about how the book thinks about form — as a thing which endures — versus poetry as a thing you live and experince, and therefore only existing through its occasions.
And yes, the fact that Juan is a kid is similarly huge. But while I think you’re right for reasons of craft — one of the most impressive things about this book, actually, is how well it works as a novel — I also think there’s more to it than that: the absence of poetry, after all, occurs in the novel of a poet writing a novel about being a poet (in other words, its an absence that occurs on all sorts of different levels, and os, I think, means something).
j. said
the form the prose takes – a diary and historical interviews – is probably meant to complement the preference in favor of occasional poetry. the various characters’ attitudes toward publication are complicated enough that i don’t really have a clear sense of whether anyone whose character or art we were supposed to praise saw publication as better than a necessary evil or a source of money. but just because of bolaño’s attempt to somewhat realistically depict the business dealings and coterie politics involved not just in ‘being a poet’ but in becoming published, i did come away with the feeling that the novel as a whole views publication negatively. (that might not square with its reverence for older or more famous books as a source for poetic inspiration or provocation, though.)
zunguzungu said
That seems right; after all, their hatred of Paz seems to be located at least partially in the fact that he publishes like a maniac (and I think I read Bolano complaining somewhere about Vargos Llosa’s banal newspaper column or something). And they search for that poet whose name I’ve forgotten partially because she was pretty much never published at all. And even the fact that we never hear Belano or Ulises in their own voices buttresses the point, since it is precisely by never having actually *heard* what they say or write, we never hear them say or write anything that could buttress their awesome mythology. We never see behind the mask, as it were? Whereas publication strives for a monumental, a finished, a complete, a perfected version of the poem (see, for example, the discussion of whether 2666 is supposed to be published in five parts or one, and what the “real” version of it is), diaries and historical interviews so foreground their own incompleteness as to make it a constitutive part of what they are (and no longer a problem). You could say the same thing about occasional poetry too, I think.
j. said
as i recall, one of their motives for searching for cesarea was that they imagined she might serve as a sort of ally-forefather (‘foremother’)? something about their desire to make a past for their ‘movement’ – which would make the interest in the unpublished more socially/politically enlightened, depending on who it is that is unpublished. (this then would also permit connections to be drawn between the cesarea quest and the african-journalism subplot.)
i would really rather reread this book to figure some of these things out than finish my dissertation, today!