Chapter 28 - Fictions of the Avant-Gardes

Summary

Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is a narrative reenactment of a poetic reenactment of the historical avant-gardes: a novel from the 1990s that combines modernist and avant-garde narrative techniques to revisit an experimental poetic group from the 1970s as they reprise and research and recover practices and figures from the 1920s to their present. At the same time that its protagonists investigate forgotten works from the past, they also form a community that generates work in the present tense (“poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry”, as Bolaño put it in a 1976 manifesto), that aims to interrupt the generation of what they see as unproductive forms and practices (incarnated in Octavio Paz and the peasant poets), and that reaches out to a broader international horizon of experimental poetics, primarily Peru and France but also alluding to North American, Argentinean, and Chilean experiments. This article elucidates and unpacks the novel’s handling of these various legacies and affiliations, while also underlining how it points, elliptically but continuously, to what is left out of the record of even the most encompassing histories of the avant-gardes: their female artists, whose legacy here flares up before flowing into the expanded monologue of Amulet.