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Bolaño & company

Reception of Latin American literature in the age of “world literature”

Epiliterarity: The surfacing of literary identity in the work of Bolaño and other post-Boom writers

One of the empirically identifiable hallmarks of Roberto Bolaño’s fiction is the intensified presence of explicit literary reference—to books, to authors, and to the very acts of reading and writing.

This aspect of his work is adjacent to what Emmanuel Bouju has called “épigraphie,” or a “surface writing…in which the play of quotes, allusions, and rewritings makes the discourse of literature appear on the surface of the text,”1 which is one characteristic of the contemporary mode he calls epimodernism. I call the tendancy “epiliterarity” because it exposes the aspiration to and identification with “literariness” in a way that was not the case, for example, in most of the major novels of the Latin American Boom.

Epiliterarity is a referential paradigm that distinguishes Bolaño’s fiction from that earlier “global” moment of Latin American literary history, which suggests, I would argue, that Bolaño represents a new and distinct model for access to the global.2 But it also locates him within a corpus of prominent contemporaries, seeming to suggest a more general shift in the referential paradigm that attaches a large swath of post-Boom Latin American literature back to the even earlier influence of Jorge Luis Borges.

On this page I try simply to render visible3 one dimension of this potential shift, a dimension I call “literary proaïretics.”4

Literary proaïretics

I use the term literary proaïretics to describe how, in the post-Boom corpus, the most important activities of literary life—writing and reading—infiltrate the “proaïretic code,” that nexus of activities that constitute the narrative action of a story. In simpler terms, characters write and read a lot more in these novels than in the Boom novels, a fact which the mere measurement of the relative density of the verbs "leer" and "escribir" makes immediately apparent.

Taking the short stories of Borges (the titles in green)—with their recurrent images of libraries and abundant metaliterary reflections on textuality and authorship—as a kind of benchmark for literary proaïretics, we can observe that:

  1. With the exception of Cortázar's Rayuela the Boom novels (the titles in red) fall well below that threshold.
  2. The novels in our epiliterarity corpus (the titles in blue) and Bolaño’s (the titles in orange) largely surpass the standard set by Borges and some—like Bolaño’s Estrella distante, Mario Levrero’s La novela luminosa, and especially Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial—eclipse it by an order of magnitude or more.

Verb Density Graph

But not all reading and writing is equivalent. The graphs below present an analysis of the occurrences of the verbs “leer” (to read) and “escribir” (to write) in emblematic Boom novels, as well as in two novels by Bolaño and two of the least epiliterary works in our corpus. If we make an exception, once again, for Rayuela, the results show clearly a marked increase, when you move from the Boom to the later generation, of the most literary forms of these activities, including these categories:

  • Literary: When character is portrayed explicitly as reading Tolstoy, for example, or writing a poem.
  • Scholarly: When a character is portrayed as reading or writing a non-literary work of philosophy, sociology, or some other science or intellectual discipline, activities which I would characterize as literary-adjacent.
  • Ambiguous: When a character is portrayed as reading or writing without other specification, which is often a proxy for literary reading and writing.

For more information and examples regarding the different categories, see the methodology section below. You'll also find a dropdown that allows you to visualize literary proaïretics within individual works including the relative density of “leer” and “escribir,” the breakdown of the different forms of writing and reading, and all the sentences in which these verbs appear along with the category labels I've assigned to each sentence.

I used the Spanish language model from the Python library spaCy (es_core_news_sm) to identify all sentences containing one of these verbs. Each excerpt was then manually annotated to be classified into one of the following categories:

  • Literary: The sentence or context explicitly indicates that the text being read or written is a novel, poem, play, song, etc. For example: “Dice que una vez un autor de cuentos fantásticos que lo vino a visitar de Buenos Aires le preguntó si nunca pensaba escribir una novela.” (Glosa).
  • Scholarly (non-literary): The sentence or context explicitly indicates that the text being read or written is a philosophical, historical, anthropological, sociological, psychological, or other scientific text (including articles in scientific journals). For example: “El Matemático había tenido la oportunidad de ver una de esas obleas; se la había mostrado un viejo militante trotsquista que coleccionaba documentos con el fin de escribir una historia de la clase obrera en la provincia.” (Glosa).
  • Religious: The sentence or context explicitly indicates that the text being read or written belongs to the scriptures or the writings of saints, when they are read in a religious setting, not as philosophical texts.
  • Periodical: The sentence or context explicitly indicates that the text being read or written is a newspaper or non-academic magazine article. However, scholarly reviews published in non-academic periodicals are classified as “scholarly non-literary.” For example: “Viajó leyendo en el diario lo que ya había leído de mañana en la cama de la pensión.” (El astillero).
  • Correspondence: The sentence or context explicitly indicates that the text being read or written is a letter, an email, a note, etc. For example: “La carta dirigida a José Arcadio Buendía estaba escrita en términos muy cariñosas.” (Cien años de soledad).
  • Literacy: The sentence or context explicitly refers to the process of learning to read or write. For example: “Decidí irme al Colegio, a estudiar o leer.” (Los ríos profundos).
  • Miscellaneous: The sentence or context explicitly refers to varied forms of reading or writing, such as road signs, shopping lists, comic books (the latter may sometimes be classified as “literary”), etc. For example: “Brígida ahora aprisionaba mi mano como si estuviera leyendo las líneas de mi destino.” (Los detectives salvajes).
  • Ambiguous: The immediate context does not allow us to infer the category. For example: “Mientras los esperaba me dediqué a leer y a escribir.” (Los detectives salvajes).

Sentences containing references to multiple types of texts are double-coded. For example, this sentence is coded as both literary (Shakespeare, Goethe) and scholarly non-literary (Nietzsche, Hölderlin): “Y en las tardes lluviosas me iba a la Biblioteca Nacional a leer, mucho Nietzsche, mucho Hölderlin, mucho Shakespeare, mucho Goethe, pero también mucho Insúa y Vargas Vila y García Sanchiz y Villaespesa y Emilio Carrere.”

The Boom graph includes Cien años de soledad, Paradiso, Los ríos profundos, La casa verde, and La muerte de Artemio Cruz.

Literary proaïretics in individual works

Footnotes

  1. Emmanuel Bouju, Epimodernes, Montreal, Codicilles éditeur, 2020, p. 11. ↩︎
  2. In my dissertation, I argue that explicit referentiality is the first discursive layer regulating a text’s potential for resonance with different audiences. While, in the most widely circulated novel of the Boom, >One Hundred Years of Solitude, this potential depends in part on the near-total absence of extratextual reference, Bolaño's is a function of his overinvestment in the referential universe we might call international literary culture. ↩︎
  3. Allowing us to visualize previously abstract concepts is, according to Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk, one of the essential contributions of the digital humanities. “...‘polyphony’, ‘Pathosformeln’, ‘minor characters’—nowadays, these abstractions can literally be seen...” (Franco Moretti & Oleg Sobchuk, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Data Visualization in the Humanities,” The New Left Review, 118, 2019, p. 86-115). ↩︎
  4. In my dissertation, I discuss other dimensions of epiliterarity like the density of explicit literary referentiality and how, in Bolaño in particular, the strategy of contextualization with regard to explicit references seems to presume an identification with literary culture on the part of readers in the same way that many others works, as I try to show, appear to presume a specific national identity. ↩︎
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