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.

The chapter analyses Faust‘s work, situating their sound within the diverse Krautrock trend and outlining their history to explain their political and artistic aims as a German music group. Faust‘s music celebrates a disruptive, avant-garde approach to rock music, influenced by dada and fluxus artists to create musical cut-ups and sound collages that blur the difference between noise and music. This methodology positions the band outside the structures of civilization, as per the framework of the Romantic hero, and reflects their conflicted disruption of German identity through the coincident political, phenomenological, and spiritual anxieties present in their music, lyrics, and performances. Faust‘s experimentation and aesthetics have influenced the ways noise has been incorporated into popular music, anticipating the development of industrial music.

The introductory chapter traces Surrealism’s critical legacy across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From its initial emergence out of Dada in 1924, Surrealism became a defining critical and creative concept, and not only for the avant-garde movement penned in its name. It inspired a range of critical enterprises and creative practices, including: Walter Benjamin’s anthropological investigation of the everyday material world; the politics and aesthetics of a number of anticolonial enterprises; James Clifford’s investigations of the ethnographic ambitions of dissident surrealism; the political events of May ’68; the October group’s recalibration of Greenberg’s aesthetic formalism; and, more recently, Surrealism’s influence on new materialism, thing theory, animal/human studies, affect theory, and a plethora of contemporary participatory art movements. Described by Maurice Blanchot as “a brilliant obsession,” Surrealism continues to exert a profound rethinking of the relationship between art, politics, and everyday experience.