Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations
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CB: When we were young poets, teenagers, and shared the same city (Mexico City in the seventies), you were the leader of a group of poets, the Infrarealists, which you’ve mythologized in your novel The Savage Detectives. Tell us a little about what poetry meant for the Infrarealists, about the Mexico City of the Infrarealists.
RB: Infrarealism was a kind of Dada á la Mexicana. At one point there were many people, not only poets, but also painters and especially loafers and hangers-on, who considered themselves Infrarealists. Actually there were only two members, Mario Santiago and me. We both went to Europe in 1977. One night, in Rosellón, France, at the Port-Vendres train station (which is very close to Perpignan), after having suffered a few disastrous adventures, we decided that the movement, such as it was, had come to an end.
A poet and old friend of Bolaño’s, Mario Santiago (1953–1998) was a member of Bolaño’s inner circle and one of the founding members, along with Bolaño and others, of the infrarrelismo movement of the 1970s. Bolaño immortalized Santiago in The Savage Detectives as the Visceral Realist Ulises Lima.
CB: Maybe it ended for you, but it remained vividly alive in our memories. Both of you were the terrors of the literary world. Back then I was part of a solemn, serious crowd—my world was so disjointed and shapeless that I needed something secure to hold onto. I liked the ceremonial nature of poetry readings and receptions, those absurd events full of rituals that I more or less adhered to, and you were the disrupters of these gatherings. Before my first poetry reading in Gandhi bookstore, way back in 1974, I prayed to God—not that I really believed in God, but I needed someone to call upon—and begged: Please, don’t let the Infrarealists come. I was terrified to read in public, but the anxiety that arose from my shyness was nothing compared to the panic I felt at the thought that I’d be ridiculed: Halfway through the reading, the Infras might burst in and call me an idiot. You were there to convince the literary world that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously over work that wasn’t legitimately serious—and that with poetry (to contradict your Chilean saying) the precise point was to throw yourself off a precipice. But let me return to Bolaño and his work. You specialize in narratives—I can’t imagine anyone calling your novels “lyrical”—and yet you’re also a poet, an active poet. How do you reconcile the two?
RB: Nicanor Parra says that the best novels are written in meter. And Harold Bloom says that the best poetry of the twentieth century is written in prose. I agree with both. But on the other hand I find it difficult to consider myself an active poet. My understanding is that an active poet is someone who writes poems. I sent my most recent ones to you and I’m afraid they’re terrible, although of course, out of kindness and consideration, you lied. I don’t know. There’s something about poetry. Whatever the case, the important thing is to keep reading it. That’s more important than writing it, don’t you think? The truth is, reading is always more important than writing.
A Chilean poet born in 1914, Nicanor Parra greatly influenced Bolaño’s poetry and early fiction writings. Considered modernist, Parra’s language resembles the much later work of the American Beat poets. Bolaño considered him “the best living Spanish language poet.” A collection of his work Anti-poems: How to Look Better & Feel Great is available in English.
“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.
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 al
so 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.