When analysing literary criticism historically, one realises primarily one thing: it becomes increasingly serious. For a long time, criticism was merely what it has always been: a chat among friends. Criticism was pure chatter, a conversation in a coffee-house or a pub (often the prelude to a brawl); in that sense it is revealing that Samuel Johnson, often considered the greatest critic of all time, hated writing: his greatest works were the conversations transcribed by his friend Boswell. With the democratisation of media and the subsequent professionalisation of critics, came the first phase of its decline; criticism was no longer used to provoke or entertain a friend but to provoke or entertain the audience of a newspaper — a simpler and more trivial affair. Professionalisation was followed by institutionalisation: university professors became critics, and the result was that critics became university professors, with which that primordial coffee-house or pub conversation acquired the solemn tone of a class or lecture. Soon after, in an act of rebellion against the authority of professors, criticism was taken over by the so-called «literary theorists,» those for whom doing criticism is synonymous with making a revolution; it is known that Robespierre ended up guillotining his friend Danton. Only when the torches of the revolution began to extinguish, a new class of bureaucrats filled the power vacuum. There they remain: repeating the gestures of their predecessors, over and over again, in an office with artificial light, without noise, with a perfunctory laugh, silently typing on a desk on which, among a mountain of papers, one sees a file labeled F…

 

I like to imagine that when, following the success of his novels Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño was offered a columnist position for a newspaper in Girona, he stopped to reflect on what it meant to be a critic in his time. He thought about professors, newspapers, his provincial newspaper, and revolutionary aspirations, and he laughed. He laughed because he understood the irony of criticism having such pompous and solemn pretensions at the very moment when literature was heading towards social, cultural, and artistic irrelevance. I think this must have seemed like a great joke to him, and that this joke inspired him to become a critic. And since literature was anything but irrelevant to Bolaño, he took the exercise very seriously, but in the sense that for him, not being serious was a really serious thing. I like to imagine that he remembered Boswell chatting with old Johnson in an ancient London pub, recreated the atmosphere, the flickering candlelight, the laughter of the drunkards, the lively conversations, and thought about reclaiming the idea of criticism as chatter. Chatter not in the sense of talking nonsense or falling into commonplaces, but as the art of chatting, the art of taking one’s own words and those of others as an end in themselves and not as a means to construct political, cultural or didactic speeches.

 

Bolaño also wrote about political and cultural issues, but one suspects that those were not his actual target. Even when he talked about Chile and the tragic fate of his generation, or when he attacked the commercial writers whom he despised — «their only merit is selling books» — one feels that his ultimate goal is not so much moral enlightenment as literary enlightenment. Or if you will, the illumination of the morality of literature, for which he could be a rigorous moralist. I mean that even the combative function of the critic that he took so seriously and that caused him so many disagreements seems to be subordinate to something more essential. As if beneath that firm will to shake up the panorama of contemporary Spanish literature lay an even greater impulse to use that energy for literary purposes, that is, to recreate a pub brawl in an opinion column. As I see it, this is what oneperceives in his critical work, above all didactic, informative, or even combative inclinations: that irrepressible desire to create interesting characters, to tell entertaining stories; one senses that «reality» bored him, or at least was not enough for him. I don’t think he was interested in what in the anglosphere is known as non-fiction, the label usually given to literary criticism. One feels that he would have been incapable of it, that if he had been asked to write an instruction manual, he would have written it in the style of a pirate novel.

 

It is worth insisting that, as a critic, Bolaño is not a literary immoralist, a kind of acolyte of the doctrine of art for art’s sake. I don’t think anyone could think that. He has a moral, but his moral is that of a child, that is, to rebel against limits. He is a child who rebels against the journalist, the professor, the literary theorist, even against morality itself. He rebels but never makes a revolution: he is merely a child situating his boundaries. One can see that in «Exiles,» one of the articles compiled in the collection Between Parentheses. In this text, Bolaño takes exile and literature as his theme, a recurrent topic in the literary theory of the second half of the 20th century, but where the theorist would elaborate an abstract commentary on the loss of meaning through the use of language, Bolaño talks about valor, a Spanish term meaning both valour and values. For Bolaño, exile is above all about valor, in the sense of a chivalry or pirate novel, and only then comes valor in the philosophical sense, in the sense of ‘values’: «Exile is valor (valour). Real exile is the radical valor (value) of each writer. At this point I must say that, at least as far as literature is concerned, I don’t believe in exile. […] For some writers, to go into exile is to leave the parental home, for others to leave the village or city of their childhood, for others, more radically, to grow up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to leave, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet earth.» If Bolaño is a moralistic critic, he is so in that space wherevalour and values meet, that is, at the point of intersection of adventurous fiction and its vital sense. If Bolaño is a mature critic, he is so at the point of intersection of the adult perspective, for whom exile is to escape a brutal dictatorship, with the child’s perspective, for whom exile is an opportunity to become an alien.

 

Bolaño, who had in a way exiled himself from Chile, did not believe in exile. «For some writers, exile is, […] more radically, to grow.» It seems fair to say that Bolaño never grew. One senses it even in the texts in which he displays his enormous erudition, when he gives the impression of having read everything, when he was at greatest risk of being perceived as a respectable old man. Bolaño’s erudition is not like Borges’s, the highest model of literary scholarship and constant reference of the former. If Borges is the professor who has surpassed mere knowledge and become a sage, Bolaño is the student who has disdained mere knowledge and remained a child. This is not to say that his erudition is not real, but that it has something childish about it: when he comments on the writers and philosophers he has read, he doesn’t come across so much like an enlightened literate as like a kid who collects football league cards and boasts of knowing everything about each player, each game. That’s why Bolaño can be frivolous, or his intellectual antics can betray the desire he had to impress his readers; he can even be irritating, but he always remains charming, at least in the way that a mischievous child is charming. I believe Borges says somewhere that charm is the most important thing in a writer, and that’s what we return to when we have forgotten everything else.

 

Earlier I spoke of criticism as a conversation between friends. Who were Bolaño’s friends? He had a certain complicity with his audience, as he preferred readers to writers, but that’s not quite what I mean. It’s not accidental either that Between Parentheses is edited by his close friendIgnacio Echevarría. Or that his novels are populated by his friends, including Echevarría himself, who often make appearances in his fiction (although one feels that in this case, «appearing in fiction» is not entirely accurate, that from the outset the charm of his friends was necessarily a fictional charm, that from the very beginning he must have seen them as literary characters). But now I mean his friends as a critic, those with whom he would meet when he went to his imaginary pub, and I think it can be said here that those friends were the texts, authors, and characters he criticised. They were friends in the childlike sense of friendship, in the sense that childhood friends are often rivals and even enemies. The poet and soldier Archilochus, who was not valorous but had great value; the Renaissance adventurer Alonso de Ercilla; Enrique Vila-Matas, digger of tunnels in Spanish literature; Moby Dick; Borges, the Oedipal father; the tragicomic character Mario Santiago; the unfortunate Roberto Arlt; the modern adventurer Rodrigo Rey Rosa; the intermittent Miguel de Cervantes, who declared arms superior to art… It is in the light of his encounters with them that Bolaño’s friendship is revealed, where he is revealed as a true critic. I believe that in this sense it is fair to assert that friendship, which is so easily confused with love, was what dominated Bolaño’s practice as a literary commentator and what set him apart from the critics of his generation. Bolaño loved literature, not in the general and banal sense of loving books, but in the sense of loving “the bookish”, of loving that which removes the heavy layer of arbitrariness from life, that which allows the ordinary to become extraordinary. It seems to me that this love is what lies behind the energy that prevented him from being a conventional critic, one more of the literature bureaucrats who fill our newspapers and magazines.

 

A final note. Earlier I mentioned that Bolaño turns his critiques into literary exercises, into brawls, chivalrous excursions, and childish antics. I believe that if one takes this premise seriously, it is almost impossible not to reach the conclusion that Bolaño’s true critical works are his novels. It is there where the friends I described earlier are most powerfully present, even if they are not explicitly named in the texts. It is there where his conversation with tradition, where his erudition takes on its most authentic form. In the «Caracas Speech,» a piece he read after winning the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives, Bolaño declared that «everything I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell to my own generation.» As someone who spent his life chatting with the dead at least as much as with the living, like Boswell and Johnson in that old pub, one wonders what he really meant by «my own generation.» But that is a topic for another occasion…

 

Essay published as part of ¿Qué hay detrás de la venta? (Homage book by Fondo de Cultura económica)