Today is the birthday of Chilean writer and poet Roberto Polanio.
Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, Bolaño was born in 1953 in Barcelona, Spain, at the age of fifty. He began writing novels at the age of nearly forty, but the number of works was staggering, leaving behind ten novels, four short story collections, and three poetry collections. After his death, his works were excavated and published one after another, and they were highly praised. Winner of The Highest Literary Award in Latin America, the Romulo Gallegos International Fiction Prize, and the 2009 American Book Critics Association Novel Award.
Roberto Bola o (28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003)
Among the more than twenty works published by Bolaño, the 1998 publication of "Wilderness Detective" caused a sensation in the Latin American literary scene, and his posthumous work "2666" set off a "whirlwind of Bolanio". Poet Hu Xudong recalls that in the late fall of 2008, he went to a small town in the Midwest to participate in an international writing program. One day, in a bookstore called "Prairie Light" located in a wide cornfield, he saw that the window next to the street was suddenly filled with "2666", the book was quite expensive, but many people entered the bookstore without the slightest hesitation to take a checkout book and leave.
"I knew I had hit a big thing. Then another dramatic event occurred: within a few days, Bolaño was suddenly withdrawn. The shop window was lined with the book of David Foster Wallace, who had a huge readership in the United States, who committed suicide on September 12 of that year, and the bookstore sold another book through his suicide. I later learned that they are the two most important writers who have swept the desks of young literary people in various countries after 2000, and if you don't have "2666" and "Endless Jokes" on your bookshelf, you can't say that you understand literature, so these two people are very interesting classic cases after entering the 21st century. ”
Bolaño's 2666 is a landmark work on the literary map. Five-part, five short stories, five narrative pieces, emotional tones, narrative syntax, revolve around a mysterious writer until his appearance in the fifth part. As Professor Dai Jinhua said: "Reading '2666' is a literary wandering, but also a visit to the 20th century that is gradually drifting away. Today, Movable Type Jun shares with book lovers Hu Xudong's article "2666: Literature in Literature".
2666: Literature within Literature
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Hu Xudong Wen
This article was originally published in "Caixin Blog - Hu Xudong's Blog"
January 2, 2012
Passage | Photo by Ilker Karaman
In the literary history of many countries and regions, there will be some "peak generations" with ups and downs and masters, such as the 27th generation in Spain, the Silver Age in Russia, etc. These "peak generations" often overdraft the literary vitality of a piece of land, resulting in their literary descendants becoming "weak generations" with relatively scarce literary creativity. As far as Spanish America is concerned, from the 1930s to the 1960s, two dazzling "peak generations" (Latin American avant-garde and the so-called "explosion generation") erupted in an extremely rare succession, releasing huge literary influence while forcing later generations of Spanish-american writers to be placed in a long literary "weak generation".
People in China who like to read translated Spanish-American literature may have this feeling: in the so-called "post-explosion" Spanish-American classics, whether it is "Ghost House", "Just Like Water on Chocolate" or "Kiss of spider women" and "Postman", it is difficult to find the domineering spirit of "this book is out, who fights" in the last two "peak generations" such as "Pedro Paramo", "Hopscotch" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and some works even seem to put the "peak generation" A version of the classic Chicken Soup for the Soul that has been mixed with a clumsy dilution.
As the work of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, and especially his most important work, 2666, comes into view, we may be able to boldly assert that, at least in Bolaño, a unique individual, the fatalistic "weak generation" aura has finally disappeared. Born in 1953, the powerful writer repeatedly emphasized that 1953 was "the year in which Stalin and Dylan Thomas died," perhaps implying that his bipolar left-wing complex and apocalyptic aspirations were inherited from stalin and Dylan Thomas at the same time, and that the complementary magical powers of reincarnation created the ideological/aesthetic impact of a perpetual motion machine in his work.
Bolaño in Mexico
For most of his short life at the age of 50, Bolaño lived a self-exiled blind life like the various charlatan men in "The Wilderness Detective" and "2666", between Chile, Mexico and Europe, between otaku reading and macho provocation, between cockroach-like living conditions and starry-like writing patterns. He loved to read the pedigree Borges, but the books he read were largely stolen; he admired Julio Cortázar's literary vibrancy that dazzled reality, but he was more aggressive than cortázar, who loved boxing. As a young man, he dismissed and lashed out at Paz, who was already a world-class poetry mogul, and later mocked the "stinking" magic realism of his literary fathers and The "keen to talk deeply with so many presidents and archbishops." He despised isabel Allende, the eldest sister of Chilean literature known as the "García Márquez in a skirt", and openly declared that she was "not so much a writer as a commercial writer", and the enraged Isabelle Allende also repaid with a poisonous tongue, saying without mercy at the time of Bolaño's illness that even death would not turn him into a good person.
In the last decade of his life, in order to improve his embarrassing livelihood, Bolaño wrote ten novels and three collections of short stories at an astonishing acceleration, which were the high-powered engines that propelled him to the position of global heavyweight writer, but what should not be overlooked is that he was a poet for a long time. In the notes of 2666, Bolaño mentions that the narrator of the book is the poet Arturo Bellano, who is also one of the protagonists of The Wilderness Detective, and a projection of Bolaño himself: Bellano is a rewrite of Bolaño, and Arturo is a Spanish transcription of the French name of Artil Rimbaud, one of the originators of modern poetry to which Pollanho is obsessed.
In 2666, Bolaño carries a lot of poetry-related bootlegs. Borrowing from a soy sauce student who loved to read Trakl, he said, "Only poetry has not been polluted, only poetry is still outside of commerce... Only poetry— not all poetry, of course, is healthy food, not stinky. The novel's university professor, AmarFitano, has been fascinated by a mysterious work called The Geometric Testament, which is set to be written by a mathematician poet, and it is not known whether Bolaño is paying tribute to his youth idol, the advocate of "anti-poetry", the Chilean mathematician poet Nicanor Pará.
Understanding Bolaño's poet status is more important for reading "2666" in that the narrative dynamics and unfolding of this novel actually have a lot to do with Bolaño's poetic ideals. In the mid-1970s, Bolaño and his literary "good friend" Mario Santiago (i.e. Ulises Lima in "The Sergeant in the Wilderness") launched a poetic movement called "Infrarealismo" in an attempt to reactivate French Surrealism in the spirit of Mexicanized Dadaism, and in his First Manifesto of the Presentians, Polanio wrote that "the true poet must continue to give up, [His focus] never spends too much time in the same place, like a guerrilla fighter, like a UFO, like the wandering eyes of a prisoner in prison for life. Looking back at 2666, its cobweb-like narrative and intricate language are the enhanced reproduction of his realistic sublime poetic appeal in the novel.
The five parts of 2666 are actually five one-shot novels conceived by Bolaño during his lifetime. The book has an ostensibly ultimate boss, the deeply reclusive German writer Achenpoldi, whose works are in the international literary world, but few people have seen him. The first part, Literary Critics, tells the story of four Achenboldi researchers in Europe, telling how the three men and one woman have a four-corner love affair, how they ran to santa Teresa, Mexico, to watch Achenpoldi's empty story, which is reminiscent of David Lodge's "Small World", in which the anti-establishment habits of Polanho are quite anti-establishment in the mainstream international academic community. The second part, "Amalfitano", is written in a way that Canetti confronts his inner life, and in the previous part, Amarfitano, a literature professor in the Mexican town of Santa Teresa, who is in the position of playing soy sauce, jumps to the heart of the narrative, and this theoretical monster has been immersed in some strange books, and at the same time, as the vicious crime of women being raped and killed in Santa Teresa has intensified, the strange coffee has been worried about the safety of his daughter. The third part, "Fat," shifts the perspective to an African-American journalist named Fate ("fate" in English), who accidentally travels to Mexico to cover a boxing match on behalf of others, and because of his curiosity, he is caught in the pit of serial rape and murder, and gets mixed up with the daughter of Professor Amalfitano. The fourth part, "Crimes," takes up a lot of space in the book, and this part is expected to drive many readers crazy, basically all of which are more than two hundred criminal records of heavy-tasting rape and murder, and magically combine the daily lives of the investigators with the statements of the cases, taking on what Deleuze calls the "tuber" form of the tree-like structure. In the fifth part of "Achenpoldi", the ostensible ultimate boss, Archimpoldi, finally appears, and Bolaño (or Arturo Bellano) uses a tone of compressed 20th-century complex history and black humor to tell the bizarre life of the reclusive writer Archimpoldi in his book, while also explaining the connection between the serial rape and murder of women: one of the suspects is his nephew.
The plot summary of the previous paragraph may be completely invalid from another point of view, because the way "2666" is written is in a sense anti-plot and anti-overview. The charm of it is precisely that the narrator, like Hrabar's "Babidars", often tirelessly and unrestrainedly carries out "narrative spillover", and at any unexpected time node, even if it is an extremely soy sauce-playing character, a large section of "nonsense" can be stretched out in the heavens and the earth. These dense "nonsense" covers the huge and complex materials from the Black Panther Party to Lin Biao, from Duchamp to Gorky, from the nun Saul Juana to Yeltsin, making the novel have a super large capacity and disorder similar to the real world itself. For this reason, many critics see 2666 as the best practice for Vargas Llosa's idea of "novela total," which more than Llosa's own novel embodies the "total novel" vision of the "total novel" that allows words to spread uncontrollably like cancer cells to replicate an all-encompassing total world.
Another very striking feature of "2666" is that it contains a lot of self-referential references to literature: many of the characters in the book are writers, critics, poets, poets, journalists, and literary lovers of all kinds, and even literary "flesh and blood", some of whom are fictional, and some of whom are well-known or strange real people; its writing is wrapped in a large number of other works, such as "The Cookbook of Sister Juana", "Oykins is Alauco", "Flora and Fauna of the Coastal Regions of Europe", The secret manuscripts of the Soviet Jewish writer Andrei, etc., although many of these works are as purely fabricated as all the works of the writer Achenpoldi, there are also many secluded texts; the books are also mixed with a lot of speculation about literature, such as the ridicule of Cortázar's "active reading", the analysis of the language of poetry and the language of the novel, the affirmation of "riptide imperfect masterpieces", and so on. These virtual and real high-intensity self-referential references to literature make "2666" the most vivid in the sequence of "meta-novels" opened by Xiang Di Biography, and at the same time, they also give Bolaño and the Borges he admires more similarities beyond the broad reading spectrum: the "literary quadratic" effect achieved by Borges in short stories through his commentary on fictional works is infinitely magnified by Bolanio in tomes such as "2666", if Borges is true or false" because of the truth and falsehood" intertextuality" and earned the title of "writer of writers", and What Polanio wrote was "literature within literature".
Who is the murderer of Mexican women in "2666"? Does the number 2666 have any other explanation than the few words that Bolaño gave in another work? Is there a super-ultimate boss beyond Archimpoldy or Arturo Bellano in this grand narrative labyrinth? Readers of similar questions will certainly ask a whole bunch when reading "Red Dead Detective". These questions, far from hindering our understanding of 2666, deepen our pleasure of reading—this is what Polanho is alluring about, who is adept at turning the act of writing literature itself into a puzzle full of excitement, and even the author can disappear and become "a secret writer who accepts instructions for only one masterpiece" (this is what an old soy sauce-playing writer in the fifth part of "2666" says to Archimpoldy). Many years ago, Bolaño expressed his recognition of "puzzle writing" in a poem called "Un paseo por la literatura": "I dreamed that I was an old, aging detective, and I had been searching for missing people for a long time. Sometimes I happen to see myself in the mirror, and I recognize it, and that's Roberto Bolaño. ”
Hu Xudong (1974-2021), studied at the Department of Chinese of Peking University from September 1991 to July 1996, studied for a master's degree in the Department of Spanish Languages of Peking University from September 1996 to July 1999, and studied for a doctorate in the Department of Chinese of Peking Chinese University from September 1999 to July 2002. He once served as the deputy director of the Brazilian Cultural Center of Peking University, a researcher of the Institute of Chinese Poetry of Peking University, an advisor to the Brazilian-Chinese Friendship Association in Brasilia, and a director of the Latin American Society of China. In 2006, he was awarded the Shuren College Of Peking University Teaching Fellowship, and in 2014, he was awarded the Huang Tingfang/Xinhe Outstanding Young Scholar Award of Peking University.
Since staying at the school, Mr. Hu Xudong has devoted himself to teaching, and has successively taught postgraduate courses such as "Special Topics in Latin American Literature" and "Special Topics in Literature in Portuguese-Speaking Countries", as well as undergraduate courses such as "Introduction to European and American Poetry in the 20th Century", "20th Century Foreign Literature in Movies", and "The Wonders of Pluralistic Symbiosis: Brazilian Culture", which are deeply loved by students. He has carefully educated people, paid attention to improving students' independent thinking ability on literature, art and social phenomena, and trained a number of master's degree students in the direction of world literature and comparative literature, and some students have taught in first-class universities in China, making positive contributions to the teaching development and talent training of the college.
From October 2003 to January 2005, Professor Hu Xudong visited the National University of Brasilia in Brazil, teaching courses such as "Chinese Culture", "Chinese Modern and Contemporary Literature" and "Comparative Literature", which were highly praised by the university, the Mainland Embassy in Brazil, the Brazilian Embassy in China and other institutions.
| he makes the world interesting through his poetry and personality
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