On the Superiority of Latin American Literature

Earlier this week, Andras Kisery responded to a note by Naomi Kanakia about W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and its influence on Ben Lerner with the following observation:

Andras himself makes an important point here. There are many scholars who have done excellent work on various forms of contemporary “transnational” American literature. Just in my own field of hemispheric literary studies (i.e. those who focus on US and Latin American literary relations), I could mention plenty of names: Lois Parkinson Zamora, Deborah Cohn, María Pilar Blanco, Harris Feinsod, Rachel Galvin, Emilio Sauri, Ryan Kernan, Sarah Pollack, Edgar Garcia, etc., etc. Yet in the main currents of American literary studies, it remains relatively common to assume that literary influence continues to move mostly along national lines. As James Tussing pointed out in response to one of my own notes, even Canadian Nobel-Prize-winnerAlice Munro has an uncertain status in debates about contemporary US literature, despite the fact that she shaped a generation of American short story writers.

In any case, I felt compelled to respond to Andras because my academic book, Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño, was in part an argument about why Roberto Bolaño had become such a key figure in US literary circles in the early 21^st century. My claim in the book was that, post-Bolaño, American writers were finally opening up to Latin American literature in a way they hadn’t before, albeit with a good deal of self-consciousness about how unprepared many of them were for such cross-cultural encounters. Below I’m including a pre-publication excerpt from the book’s conclusion on Lerner and Benjamin Kunkel.

As I said in my own note, it’s been amazing to see how many young writers on Substack are finding Bolaño and responding to him enthusiastically. Yet I continue to believe that, outside of certain academic circles, we are still far from recognizing just how “epoch-making” a writer he was. For the record, the title of this section, “On the Superiority of Latin American Literature,” alludes to Gilles Deleuze’s essay “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” and is meant to be playful (one reviewer took it seriously, and suggested that I was moralizing about how great Latin American writers are—after my recent posts, I don’t think anyone will make that mistake again).

If you’re interested in reading more of Anxieties of Experience, you can get a reasonably priced paperback on the Oxford University Press website. I also highly recommend my colleague David Kurnick’s The Savage Detectives Reread, one of the best books on Bolaño out there, and also one of the smartest takes on what it means to read his work as a gringo.

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On the Superiority of Latin American Literature

In April, 2010, I attended a symposium at Princeton University entitled “Poetry of the Americas,” a one-day event convened to consider the viability of a trans-American poetics. In addition to the many Americanist, Latin Americanist, and inter-Americanist academic panelists, the US poet Kenneth Goldsmith was invited to give a reading and participate in the discussion. Over the course of the day, it became clear that Goldsmith, a prominent figure associated with the conceptual movement in contemporary poetics, considered Borges to be an important precursor to his notion of “uncreative writing.” But it also seemed clear to me that Goldsmith had little familiarity with Latin American literature and culture beyond the work of a few old masters. My suspicion was heightened during Goldsmith’s reading performance, which included a verbatim recitation of Salvador Allende’s radio announcement delivered shortly before his death in 1973, reproduced (by Goldsmith) entirely in Spanish. Hearing the heavily aspirated h’s and excessive gringo intonations, and knowing Goldsmith’s penchant for self-dramatization, I assumed he was trying to caricature his own ignorance of the language. Goldsmith’s reading of Allende’s speech simultaneously performed his ignorance and made of this ignorance a literary act. At the time, the reading struck me as sensationalist, self-aggrandizing, and tone-deaf. Yet I also must admit that after witnessing a number of far more earnest attempts at hemispheric cultural exchange in the years since, Goldsmith’s performance has stayed with me as a vivid demonstration of the extent to which the Hispanic world’s language, literature, and culture remains beyond the grasp (and the tongue) of so many Anglo-American writers. The symposium’s ostensible aim was to establish a hemispheric dialogue, but Goldsmith’s performance forcefully demonstrated that we couldn’t even rely on a common language. Was this how we should be talking when we talk about the literature of the Americas?

The sense that US writers miss something significant by failing to engage with Latin American literatures and languages is itself nothing new. The mainstream US literary establishment’s “discovery” of Borges and the boom writers in the 1960s and 1970s led to numerous admonitions against overlooking writers from the South. What changed in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, however, was the degree to which US writers began to suggest that contemporary Latin American literature was, in its totality, more interesting and important than literature produced in the United States. One of the more surprising proponents of this view was David Foster Wallace, who frequently accompanied his diagnosis of the sickliness of postmodern American literary irony with prescriptions for reading more literature from the rest of the hemisphere. In a 1994 article on Zbigniew Hebert, he blasted the “whole spectrum of American poetry—from the retrograde quaintness of the Neoformalists and New-Yorker-backyard-garden-meditative lyrics to the sterile abstraction of the Language poets” while arguing that “only writers from Eastern Europe and Latin America have succeeded in marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require.” At a time when twenty-first-century US fiction has increasingly been criticized by mainstream and academic critics for failing to engage with other linguistic and national traditions—“too insular, too isolated,” as Swedish Academy secretary Horace Engdahl controversially put it in 2008; “improperly worlded,” in the influential definition of Bruce Robbins—the command of multiple literatures displayed by many contemporary Latin American writers has seemed like a distinct advantage. After a long period during which Latin America (and the Spanish-speaking world in general) figured in the US literary imagination as a region of cultural sparseness, we may now be witnessing a paradigm shift in which American novelists and poets not only recognize the broad merits of Latin American literature but also feel an acute sense of inferiority vis-à-vis writers in the Spanish-speaking world. This phenomenon, which might be termed “Bolaño envy,” has manifested itself in various ways, from preemptive gestures meant to demonstrate some familiarity with Hispanic culture to a self-conscious fictional thematization of the lack of reciprocity between Latin American and US writers. In the midst of what Caren Irr has identified as the rise of the US geopolitical novel in the twenty-first century, Bolaño’s work is not the only model, but it may be the most influential one.

The strongest sense of cultural inferiority to Latin America has appeared, I would argue, in the works of a group of mostly white, male, and Ivy-educated contemporary US writers and critics who see themselves, either explicitly or implicitly, as belonging to the main currents of American literary history. The persistent discourse about what Bolaño and other Spanish-language writers “offer American readers” in literary magazines such as n+1 speaks to this urgency to transcend the boundaries of the US literary field. The trajectory of n+1 founding member Benjamin Kunkel, whose Indecision (2005) was hailed by many as a generation-defining novel, is indicative of a writerly milieu in which Latin America increasingly figures as the scene of cultural awakening. In Indecision, the protagonist’s epiphany that neo-conservatism and neoliberalism are the same thing occurs as he ingests mushrooms in the rainforests of Ecuador—a trope that fits squarely within the US literature of experience. Yet Kunkel’s post-Indecision explorations of Latin American literature and culture have been more sustained. Several years after moving to Buenos Aires as a form of “self-imposed exile,” Kunkel produced a long essay on Argentina’s bicentennial that ended with his assertion that he was happy to be outside the United States as its institutions crumbled. Kunkel’s preference for Latin America over the United States has so far been voiced in primarily politico-economic rather than literary terms: he saw the rise of the Kirchners in Argentina and of other leftist governments in twenty-first-century Latin America as infinitely preferable to the US neoliberal order. Yet if Kunkel has publicly stated that he took time away from fiction to concentrate on his introduction to contemporary political theory, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis (2014), it seems likely that his next work of fiction will entail a mode of incorporating Latin American literature similar to that of Goldman, Díaz, or Menéndez.

A strenuous effort to imbibe Hispanic literary tradition pervades Leaving the Atocha Station (2010), the picaresque first novel by the New York−based writer-poet Ben Lerner. A semiautobiographical account of the year Lerner spent on a Fulbright Fellowship in Madrid in 2004, it tells the story of the charming yet flat-footed poet Adam, whose time in the city coincides with the horrific March 11 attacks on the Atocha train station. It might seem strange to include Leaving the Atocha Station in a discussion about the relationship between the United States and Latin America, since it takes place almost entirely in Spain, but I analyze it here in part because of an extraordinary interlude midway through the novel about American writers in Mexico. The scene, related in the form of an instant messenger exchange between the Madrid-based Adam and his friend Cyrus back home, centers on a trip to Mexico taken by Cyrus and his girlfriend, Jane. In the words of the narrator, “they’d driven to Mexico in her pickup with little money and no real plan in order to acquire experience, not just the experience of experience sponsored by my fellowship [in Spain].” The trip to Mexico turns tragic when Cyrus and Jane witness the accidental death of a young Mexican girl―but the strangest part of the episode is that Jane, an aspiring writer, “seemed excited” by the tragedy because it certified that she “had had a ‘real’ experience.” As Cyrus puts it to Adam by e-mail: “I had this sense . . . that the whole point of the trip for her—to Mexico—was for something like this, something this ‘real’ to happen. I don’t really believe that, but I felt it, and I said something about how she had got some good material for her novel.” Through its knowing recapitulation of the tropes of the US literature of experience in Mexico, the scene suggests an alternative literary trajectory that Adam himself might have followed. This scene, and Adam’s subsequent declaration, “I hate new experience,” highlights the degree to which the novel we are reading presents the US literature of experience as an exhausted paradigm, a dead end for the American writer in the Spanish-speaking world. If for Burroughs the experience of Latin America was the catalyst for his writerly transformation, for Lerner’s Adam, that experience promises nothing but literary bad faith.

In an interview about Leaving the Atocha Station from 2013, Lerner claimed: “I am sure Spanish language writers like Javier Marias, Roberto Bolaño and José Camilo Cela are important influences for me, but I’m not sure I could pinpoint how.” I believe, however, that we can pinpoint the novel’s relationship to Bolaño’s work, not only in how it takes up the Bolañian formula of novelizing the life of the avant-garde poet but also in the way it represents the Madrid of the early twenty-first century as a hyperliterary urban metropolis rather than an exotic ecology. Hemingway’s valiant matadors and earnest peasants are nowhere to be seen: the madrileños meet in galleries, watch Citizen Kane, and compare the narrator’s poetry to Spanish writers exiled during the Franco years. Adam’s near complete ignorance of Spanish-language literature, however, precludes him from following through on the fellowship project that had brought him to Spain in the first place: a “research-driven” poem about the influence of the Spanish Civil War (“about which I knew nothing”) on a generation of Franco-era writers (“few of whom I’d read”). The specter of this alternative academic-sounding project continues to haunt him until the final scene of the novel, when he confuses the names of the famous Spanish poets Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez at a heavily attended conference on literature and politics, proving, in the most egregious way, that “[t]he celebrated American fellow cannot get four names deep into the list of the most famous Spanish poets of the twentieth century.” At the diegetic level, the scene exemplifies Adam’s failure to relate culturally, as opposed to merely touristically, to the Spanish literary world. At the extradiegetic level, the scene becomes a kind of apologia for the novel we are in the process of reading, a novel that not only doesn’t relate Spanish literature to the Spanish Civil War but also cannot really deliver on its implicit promise to give us some insight into the Atocha bombings themselves. Here is where Lerner parts company with Bolaño, whose novels are charged with precisely this desire to trace the complicated and often sinister strands connecting literature, history, and politics.

A blurb on the back of Lerner’s book touts him as a “homegrown version” of Bolaño, but I would describe him as a prototypical example of the contemporary American writer who is attuned to all the reasons he cannot be Bolaño. Lerner’s novel assumes a sort of humility—not unmixed with resentment—toward the Spanish and Latin American writer who reads everything and can still view literature as a matter of importance and even of life and death. The power of Leaving the Atocha Station arises from the way Adam’s linguistic and cultural failures compel the narrator—and the novel itself—to revisit the idea of experiential immersion that dominates the US literature of experience from Hemingway, Porter, and Hughes through Kerouac and Burroughs. The instant message interlude about the reality-seeking US writer who goes to Latin America to “experience” it is the most poignant reminder of the literary expectations Adam cannot meet. At times he believes he can pull together the experiential demands of the US literary field and the bookish demands of the Hispanic literary tradition: “reading, instead of removing me from the world, intensified my experience of the present.” Yet the novel ultimately rests on failures rather than successes, failures that may in part be strategies of representation, but which also speak to anxieties that go beyond the written page. If Adam makes clear that a Hemingwayesque sense of adventure no longer suffices for a description of the Hispanic world, he also leaves us wondering whether he himself is up to the task.