patrick iber

I have a chapter in Jonathan Beck Monroe’s edited volume, Roberto Bolaño in Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. I set his work in the context of the Cold War, examining how he moved beyond established divisions of Cold War literature.

It was after his return to Mexico that Bolaño helped found the Infrarrealist poetry movement (represented in The Savage Detectives as “visceral realism”). His friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (the basis for the character of Ulises Lima from Bolaño’s works), wrote in a manifesto: “WHAT DO WE PROPOSE? NOT TO MAKE A CAREER OUT OF ART.” Bolaño’s own manifesto, written the following year, was playfully militant: “As Saint-Just told me in a dream I had some time ago: even the heads of the aristocrats can be our weapons.” It was titled “Leave it all behind, again.” In the Savage Detectives, a young poet who has just joined the “visceral realists” writes “Our situation (as far as I could understand) is unsustainable, trapped as we are between the reign of Octavio Paz and the reign of Pablo Neruda”. It was a rejection of the literary camps created and sustained by the Cold War politics of literature, in its international and national dimensions. The infrarealists, member Rubén Medina has written, were part of a neovanguard that declared itself against “the whole system of literary and cultural power”. Ulises Lima’s determination to finance the magazine Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, by selling weed, represents a determination to steer clear of official sources of patronage.

Much more in the volume, and in the other excellent essays as well.