Giobany Arévalo > Gabriela Torres Olivares >Anuar Jalife - Literal

LIBROS BOOKS CD RECORDS
IMAGINARY EXTREMIST
Rogelio García-Contreras
Maps of concentration camps superimposed
on a Map of Colonia Renacer–Rebirth Colony–or
any other city in the Americas, from
Valparaiso to Concepcion, or just situated in
a rural empty space, as empty as the never
ending Pampas. A vivid reference to Harry
Sibelius’s detailed description of the political
structure of Hitler’s America, in spite of–
or precisely because of–his fascination with
Russian Literature. The family clan behind the
publication of a magazine called The Fourth
Reich in Argentina and later the creation of
a publishing house under the same name.
The revelation before our eyes of advocates
for the re-establishment of the Inquisition,
corporal punishment in public, a permanent
war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans
or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for
the Argentinean nation; polygamy or the extermination
of the Indians to prevent further
contamination of the Argentinean race. And
also in this book the reference to J.M.S. Hill’s
Homenaje al maestro © Florinda Power
Roberto Bolaño
Nazi Literature in the
Americas,
New Directions,
New York, 2008.
Translated
by Chris Andrews
fi rst novel describing one of Quantrill’s Raiders
crossing the state of Kansas at the head
of 500 cavalrymen; fl ags inscribed with a sort
of primitive, premonitory swastika; rebels
who never surrender; a Confederate philosopher
whose fanciful dream was to establish
an ideal Republic in the vicinity of the Artic
circle.
Whether through the recompilation of
fantastic stories or the elegant and poetic
presentation of short biographies of imaginary
authors, Roberto Bolaño offers a twisted
and intelligent account of the Nazi and Neo-
Nazi presence in the Americas. The introduction
to a family of publishers, whose love for
Hitler started after their fi rst encounter with
the fuhrer; the reference of a bunch of poets
born in the Americas but nurtured by fascist
Europe either through their direct experience
or their own idealize version of the beloved
continent; his admiration for speculative and
science fi ction, or his view of virulent mercenaries,
magicians or miserable creatures; a
parade of monsters, as he ended up calling
them. The book, I must say, is a wonderful
literary piece. Through the eyes, ideas and
actions of his set of imaginary extremists,
Bolaño does not only provide an encyclopedic
account of intense right-wing writers–as
the back page of this edition warns us–but it
reveals the human side of the beholders of
this position, their beauty, their certainty, and
even more drastically, their genuineness and
conviction.
Bolaño’s creativity and imagination has
no limits and Nazi Literature in the Americas
is vivid proof of this statement. Right wing
52 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2009
extremist writer, Harry Sibelius has read Arnold
J. Toynbee’s Hitler’s Europe. Sibelius is
fascinated by the work of the English historian
so much, that he decides to base his own
novel “The True Son of Job” on the book of
his new literary hero. In fact, the fi rst part of
Toynbee’s work entitled “The Political Structure
of Hitler’s Europe” becomes, in Sibelius’s
“The Political Structure of Hitler’s America”.
Nothing is hidden then, and Sibelius decides
to start a novel with a powerful and disturbing
supposition: Nazi Germany has won the
war; but what difference does it make? Bolano
asks, this is just a novel and as we all
know novels are not a work of history, right?
But what if, like Carlos Fuentes would suggest,
novels are the reliable cousins of history?
What if Sibelius is right: “the historian’s
view is conditioned, always and everywhere,
by his own location in time and place; and,
since time and place are continually changing,
no history, in the subjective sense of the
word, can ever be a permanent record that
will tell the story, once for all, in a form that
will be equally acceptable to readers in all
ages”. And it is here, probably, that Bolanos’s
work abandons the safe realm of fi ction to
penetrate into the obscure, overwhelmingly
rouge and frankly depressive realities of Aryan
brotherhoods, of the American Christian
Movement, of the pathetic Haitian writer excited
by the idea of being a Nazi poet while
continuing to espouse a certain kind of negritude.
Despite its monstrosity, Bolaño reminds
us that reality transcends fi ction, that his story
is not that fantastic and that history–or at
least what we know about it–is by no means
an attempt to understand the past, but an
effort to justify the present. Only a writer
with such a postmodern view of our civilization
and all its shortcomings can describe
with so much precision, cynicism and humor
the novel written by Segundo Jose Heredia,
the impetuous Venezuelan, who wrote in
Saturnalia about the violence of rape scenes,
sexual and workplace sadism, incest, impaling,
and human sacrifi ce in prisons crowded
to the physical impair. Foucault’s genealogy
of history cannot be explained any better,
and I imagine Dostoyevsky would be praising
Schiaffi no as much as Borges would be
praising Bolaño.