Project Overview            

 

Many US readers were excited and moved by Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (1998), an exciting picaresque tale of poets chasing life, love, and other poets:  the novel's two protagonists set out in 1976 to find a lost woman poet of the Stridentist literary movement of the 1920s.  In turn, many enthusiasts of the novel have retraced the steps of Arturo Belano and Mario Santiago and their friends through 1970s Mexico City. Bolaño kept his characterization so close to his actual friends and acquaintances that even the Wikipedia page devoted to the novel confidently provides a table of real-life equivalents to the novel's characters.  Bolaño expanded one chapter of the book into a separate novella, Amulet (1999), which is sometimes oneiric, sometimes just as realistic, in its protagonist Auxilio Lacouture's urban wanderings, meeting real figures of Mexico City's 1960s and '70s, mostly other expatriates such as Pedro Garfias, Felipe León, Remedios Varo, Lilian Serpas, and Carlos Coffeen Serpas.  Recreating and mapping elements of that now-lost city is the first part of this project.

 

Simultaneous to Bolaño's own project, however, and continuing into the present, many other contemporary novelists have rendered homage to the poetic avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s in their own historical fictions.  Two of the novelists of Mexico's "crack Generation" writers, Jorge Volpi and Pedro Palou, expressed their complicated feelings of nationalism and cosmopolitanism by writing novels about poets of the Contemporáneos movement, who were branded at the time as insufficiently Mexican:  Jorge Volpi's In Spite of the Dark Silence (1992) narrates the life, nervous breakdowns, and death of the poet Jorge Cuesta; Pedro Palou's En la alcoba de un mundo (In the Bedroom of a World, 2003) follows the public and private life of poet Xavier Villaurrutia. (In an interesting variation on this theme, though not useful for our project, the young expatriate Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli's first novel, Los ingrávidos (2012, translated as Faces in the Crowd, 2014) retraces the itinerary of the Contemporáneos poet Gilberto Owen through the New York City of the 1930s.  Likewise, Cristina Rivera Garza also engages in a literary-historical rescue of the writer Amparo Dávila in her 2002 novel La cresta de Ilión, but given Dávila's fantastic aesthetic her stories would be impossible to map.)  Bolaño invented a fictional member of the Estridentista movement, Cesárea Tinajero, but it will be fascinating to retrace and map the itineraries of Concha Urquiza (the woman he based her on), her fellow Stridentists, versions of whom appear in Bolaño's novel (Manuel Maples Arce and Rodolfo Sanabria), and the itineraries of these Contemporáneos rivals who engaged with them in the polemics of post-Revolutionary Mexico City.

 

These two related projects map the '20s-'30s and the '60s-'70s.  The natural complement to this project would be a project mapping the crónicas (those long-form journalistic pieces in high literary style so characteristic of Latin American prose) from the '40s and '50s by Salvador Novo.  Novo's early career and clandestine sexual life in the Mexico City of the 1920s was also mapped and retraced, by the later cronista and gay intellectual Carlos Monsiváis, who edited and published Novo's attempt at autobiography, La estatua de sal (1948/ 2008).  But Novo himself maintained a very visible presence as the narrator and chronicler of Mexico City throughout the '40s and '50s.  He produced a huge archive of texts, and while I myself am unlikely to engage in it, it would make sense to invite a collaborator to join this project of mapping the poets and intellectuals of "post-Revolutionary Mexico City."