The Savage Detectives: Impressions (3)

November 22 in the diary of Juan García Madero is one of the novel's first great set-pieces...where the young poet is treated to an idiosyncratic discourse on the essential gayness of his chosen art form:

"Ernesto San Epifanio dijo que existía literatura heterosexual, homosexual y bisexual. Las novelas, generalmente, eran heterosexuales, la poesía, en cambio, era absolutamente homosexual, los cuentos, deduzco, eran bisexuales, aunque esto no lo dijo.

"Dentro del inmenso océano de la poesía distinguía varias corrientes: maricones, maricas, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones, mariposas, ninfos y filenos. Las dos corrientes mayores, sin embargo, eran la de los maricones y la de los maricas. Walt Whitman, por ejemplo, era un poeta maricón. Pablo Neruda, un poeta marica. William Blake era maricón, sin asomo de duda, y Octavio Paz marica. Borges era fileno, es decir de improviso podía ser maricón y de improviso simplemente asexual. Rubén Darío era una loca, de hecho la reina y el paradigma de las locas..una loca, según San Epifanio, estaba más cerca del manicomio florido y de las alucinaciones en carne viva mientras que los maricones y los maricas vagaban sincopadamente de la Ética a la Estética y viceversa."

The English translation gives us...

"All literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.

"Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Ruben Dario was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak...Freaks were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-steps from ethics to aesthetics and back again."

Still pretty drole, but the polarity between marica and maricón has been lost and 'freak' isn't quite what Mexicans mean when they stigmatise a loca.

The Savage Detectives - Impressions (2)

I wonder how many readers investigate the structure of the books they read before they start with Chapter One? For anyone undertaking Los Detectives Salvajes for the first time, the question of whether or not to suppress this urge to snoop is a matter of more than passing curiosity itself. For the first 15% or so of the novel and the last 15% or so are a series of diary entries by the young Mexican 'visceral realist' Juan Garcia Madero.

The freshness , the likeability of this diarist — perhaps the only true poet in story about poets — is surely a conscious device on the part of the author, aware that the polyphonic middle 70% or so of his novel comprises a multitude of different short narratives delivered by over 50 separate narrators across the two decades from '76 to '96, and that readers anticipating a resumption of Garcia Madero's testimony will experience a kind of extra dramatic impetus through this tangle.

With Kindle editions and audiobooks jumping ahead is of course that much harder. (...and V's usual tactic of starting with the last page becomes highly problematic!) Will the next generation of authors be forced to take this into account?

I think I'm going to start a new regular series on top quality first paragraphs. Bolaño's is as good a place as any to start:

2 de noviembre

He sido cordialmente invitado a formar parte del realismo visceral. Por supuesto, he aceptado. No hubo ceremonia de iniciación. Mejor así.