This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under ejecta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
16.12.2008
“It came as something of an epiphany the first time I realized that Mexicans, as one example among many, do not eat Mexican food — they are, that is, simply eating food — and I think it is equally the case that Latin Americans don’t make broad, sweeping, and at times almost caricaturish generalizations about Latin America, at least not unless they are already, like Bolaño’s eager Anglo readers certainly are, outsiders imagining an inside to which their access is structurally impossible because their very imaginative faculty exteriorizes them from that whose very interior they would deign to imagine.”
—Eli Evans, writing on bookslut.com
Faithful housewives will be aware that I’ve lately been on a Bolaño kick; in the course of that kick I poked around some of the commentary available online, and came across Eli Evans’s critique of Amulet on bookslut. Evans looks at a smattering of (admittedly heavy-handed) comments on the nature of Latin Americanness in Amulet, then accuses Bolaño of “fraud” for, essentially, offering us a touristic view of his own experience. I didn’t pay much attention to the lines Evans singles out when I was reading Amulet: in a book full of dizzying prose it would be hard to find comments less distinguished than, say, “In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor.” And then I take a limited interest in questions of anyone’s cultural identity, including my own. I was far more engaged by what Bolaño had to say, and imply, on memory, on the nature and function of literature, on voice.
But Evans’s critique suggests a breathtaking range of presuppositions about authenticity and self-consciousness, posing them as mutually exclusive. Bolaño’s apparent European influences and the period he spent living in Spain are taken as having given him exactly two options: to adhere to a “birthright” of naive, but genuine, Latin-Americanness, or alternatively to view his heritage from without, slice up this externalized version of it, and offer it up as a commodity to his unsuspecting readers as if it carried all the privileged interiority that he actually abandoned. Evans is demanding innocence. In his view, being authentically Latin-American means never thinking about the nature of Latin-Americanness—never stepping far enough outside of the experience of Latin-Americanness to look back and examine it.
Evans isn’t alone in feeling cheated by the self-consciousness of those he regards. Think, for instance, of the hostility so many men express towards beautiful women who are aware of their own beauty. The words “Yeah, and she knows it,” are delivered with disdain, even indignation. If the girl knows the market value of her own face, how will the speaker ever get it at the bargain price of himself?
The demand for a naive absence of self-awareness in an object is a demand for power over that object. North American writers are, to my knowledge, never criticized for offering a fetishistic, exteriorized look at The Idea of America, as so many of them do—because we don’t presume to insist on innocence in those we regard as our equals. We can think of our mashed potatoes as American food, and eat them, too. There’s an implicit understanding here that the ability to simultaneously live out identity and also think about it is the prerogative of the powerful. Others have to choose. For them, self-awareness inevitably alienates them from “real” experience.
This idea has a strange corollary. It denigrates empathy. If it’s impossible to imaginatively occupy more than one position at a time, then imagining the world, or oneself, from someone else’s viewpoint becomes hazardous in the extreme. If you consider how others might see you, you will find yourself instantly ejected from authentic selfhood. Better stay home, in parochial self-absorption, lest empathy deprive you of your own true essence.
But there are psychologists who regard the ability to imaginatively occupy a variety of positions as the source of selfhood. Mary Watkins has defined the self as “an organization of perspectives.” In her view, the self is created when we engage in precisely this empathic seeing-ourselves-from-without: when we imagine ourselves as others might see us, collect those perspectives, and bring them home. If this is the case, then Evans’s expectations of Bolaño are both unreasonable and cruel. They amount to a demand that Bolaño not form a self at all.
For the Evans review, click here.
For previous posts on Amulet, click here and also here.
For an excerpt, try this.