Hauntology: Spectral Realism in Literature, Film and Art

(University of Texas Press.)                                   (Duke University Press.)

“What remains to be said about an absence that cannot be undone?”

Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence

“The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living in it from day to day.”

Roberto Bolaño

One dark and storm night, I wanted to find way into the densely obscure and hermetic writing of the late Spanish novelist and essayist Roberto Bolaño and I made it halfway there by sating my obsession for the late American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, his brother from another mother. They were temporal siblings of sorts, eminently talented thinkers and hyperactive writers who ravished their readers with words calculated to astonish and exhilarate. Both were writing concurrently on opposite sides of the world, the first in Chile originally and the second in multiple locations in America. The rest of the way into Bolaño’s gorgeous and terrifying literary dimension I was vouchsafed, as usual for me, via the most unexpected of alternate routes. An additional signpost leading to the capital city of both Bolaño’s and Wallace’s heart was the twin apparition of two books that pointed the circuitous way further in: Haunting Without Ghosts by Julia Martinez and Baroque New Worlds, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup.

Each in its own unique way offered me access to the labyrinth of Bolaño and Wallace. Wallace hit his stride in 1996 with Infinite Jest and Bolaño was hot on his heels with Nazi Literature in the Americas that same year, and in 1998 with The Savage Detectives. Both of them were, while operating in parallel cultural domains of New Chile and Old America, easily the two most fascinating authors of the end of a century of fascinating literary achievements. They both elegiacally capped off that most incendiary of stylistic booms, postmodern literature, in a way that still reverberates in the corridors of our own rather paltry century, and is likely to do so for some time to come. In the meantime, my roadmap to grasping their true stature, especially Bolaño’s, has been clarified somewhat by two paired concepts: "spectral realism" (Martinez), and "the global neo-baroque" (Zamora and Kaup).

Both died young: Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at 46 and Bolaño died from chronic liver disease in 2003 at 50. Having written extensively on Wallace, and since I have a book on his life and literature in progress, I’ll focus more attention here on the equally prodigious Bolaño, especially in light of the fact that as a Latin American writer he even more graphically embodied both the notion of spectral realism brought to light by Martinez in Haunting Without Ghosts, as well as the neo-baroque postcolonial sensibility illustrated by Zamora and Kaup. Both these late authors were, however, equally embedded in the post-postmodern style they shared as respected cultural competitors and both explored their own interactions with a haunted past via an immersive mode of intense spectral realism. Bolaño in particular deserves to be appreciated by a much wider reading audience, perhaps in light of the fact that the dazzlingly meteoric and histrionic Wallace seem to many to have sucked all the air out of the literary rooms, both fiction, academic and journalistic, which he so restlessly occupied before succumbing to a chronic depression that he didn’t shy away from spotlighting in many dazzling essays. I will say, though, that both these brilliant authors were equally preoccupied with what Yukio Mishima called "the secret pact with the problem of beauty," about which more later.

Martinez sets the stage very effectively, pointing out that for more than half a century, Colombia, her primary zone of interest, has laboured under the weight of magical realism--above all, the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where ghosts tell stories about the country’s violent history and warn about a similarly gruesome future. But eventually the creative resources of magical realism were somewhat depleted, the inevitable outcome of super-popularity, of course, and in their wake there has arrived a new mode which she identifies as spectral realism. Martinez outlines how many recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers and artists (all names which are new to me, I might add) such as Evilia Rosero, William Vega, Beatriz Gonzalez and Erika Diettes, share a formal and thematic concern with the specter but shift the focus from what the specter is to what the specter does.

Martinez, a professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University in Washington, D.C., asserts:

These writers, artists and filmmakers offer their works as uncanny repositories for the voices and lives stifled by decades old conflict and they create haunting spaces that point to the loss experienced by so many. By following the path of the specter and making their works welcoming spaces for uncanny encounters with collective mourning, they show that contrary to Ludwig Wittgenstein, we must keep looking for ways to speak of the unspeakable.

In an issue of French Studies, Colin Davis clarified what Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 essay “Spectres de Marx,” identified as “an urgent need to move towards a science of hauntologie (a play on ontology), a framework that seeks to transform normative narratives by channeling the disruptive force of the specter as a trend in recent critical work, which has rapidly become one of the most controversial and influential ideas.” Martinez proposes a blueprint to address literature in which, as she puts it vividly, “horror has gorged itself.”

These writers and artists do not speak of or with ghosts per se, but instead use the specter to “destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology.” The result is still a confrontation with her country’s violent past, by seeking justice for the disappeared, but also to seek what amounts to a new spectral aesthetics. It is this wider, deeper and broader aesthetic which interests me most, apart from the opportunity to learn about so many intriguing artists, filmmakers and writers, and has resulted in the realization that spectral aesthetics is a phenomenon that originates in but extends far beyond the borders of Latin America. For example, I’m fairly certain that it can also apply to an American cinema icon like David Lynch and a European painter like Anselm Kiefer, as well as a gifted Chilean novelist such as Bolaño, truly a novelist who chronicles a domain in which horror has gorged itself.

As such, spectral realism as a style (and I will assert the Bolaño is the past master of this tactic) presents an alternative to classical realism, in which, as per the American theorist Peter Brooks, “the careful registering of the external world counts most. ” If anything, spectral realism of Bolaño’s variety offers us instead a menu of ideas and feelings with a meticulous registering of his/our interior world. It also appears to escape the trapping of nostalgia, except for that unique variety which longs for a present. Bolaño is an ideal example of a novelist who longs for a present, if only because his days among us were so drastically limited by a progressive disease which not only shortened his life but also tampered with his writing. He was thus haunted not only by his past in a volatile Chile but also by a future which now will happen.

Zamora and Kaup emphasize that:

Neo-Baroque has been useful in cultural contexts with a history of baroque representation. Theories must be appropriate to the contexts they intend to elucidate, and this is particularly so in Latin America. The Neo-Baroque shares the imperative to address lived experience. Neo-Baroque and magical realism overlap: magical realism is akin to the neo-baroque in its European origins and its recent application to Latin American fiction. It’s an anti-objectivist representation as opposed to classical objectivism, and is an open form with a capacity to accommodate contradictions and generate tensions among disparate elements which underpin the theory of magical realism. This formalist account remains the indispensable paradigm shift in the process whereby over the course of the twentieth century the Baroque would be recuperated for modern use.

Few novelists recuperated the opulent, immersive, sensory overload experience of the Neo-Baroque quite as brilliantly as Roberto Bolaño.

Broadening the context for understanding the culture darkness that informs much of his work (which includes the literal lacuna aspect of a national plague of disappearances and dictatorship which is the true specter roaming through his novels), Bolaño, in Between Parentheses, situates his perspective this way:

A literature of doom has to exist, but if nothing else exists, it is the end of literature. Like solipsistic literature, so in vogue now, a literature of the I, of extreme subjectivity, of course must and should exist. But if all writers were solipsists, literature would turn into the obligatory military service of the mini-me, and then again, literature would cease to exist. I don’t believe in exile, especially when the word sits next to the word literature. We all have an idiot ancestor. He’s a specter, but he’s also our brother, and he lives deep inside each of us under different names that express our degree of implication in the crimes of fear, indifference, blindness, cruelty.

Martinez also offers useful guidance for distinguishing between the stylistic tendencies: 

Spectral realism should not be confused with the fantastic, or with its famous ‘magical’ predecessor. Spectral realism is a mode of storytelling that takes the ghost seriously but not literally. Rather, it formally assumes the disruptive potential of the specter, shifting the focus from what the ghost is to what the ghost does. It is an aesthetic which seeks ways to counteract erasure, silencing and forgetting that eschews melancholic attachment to loss.

In a variety of examples of artists, filmmakers and authors, she explores what she refers to as a discourse revealing that the characteristics associated with ghosts make the spectral ideal for this disruptive task. She also clarifies that spectrality does not entail a belief in the supernatural at all. Instead the specter makes the familiar unfamiliar (unheimlich) or uncanny.

Bolaño was born in 1953 in Santiago, Chile; his family moved to Mexico City in 1968, where he dropped out of school (to which he always had a dyslexic allergy), worked as a journalist and became active in left-wing politics, after which he returned to Chile to support the Democratic Socialist government of Salvador Allende. After Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing military coup, Bolaño was arrested and briefly imprisoned on suspicion of being a terrorist. Upon his release he traveled overland from Chile back to Mexico, where he concentrated on being a Bohemian poet, literary enfant terrible and professional cultural provocateur. He eventually shifted to writing fiction in his forties, saying that it would be a better way of making a living for his family than poetry.

Equally beloved by writers, literary critics and everyday readers of uncanny stories, and frequently compared to Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, Bolaño burst onto the cultural scene (after gestating privately as a largely unknown poet for many years) with several mind-altering excursions into surreal sagas composed when he was under siege by the diagnosis of his fatal illness.

(New Directions Books.)

Certainly the most incendiary salvos he sent out were his 1996 imagining of life as lived, Nazi Literature in the Americas, which reprised a disconcertingly poetic exploration of the radical edges of the extreme right wing, and The Third Reich, which he had completed in 1989 but which did not see the light of day until it was discovered among his posthumous papers. Nazi Literature in the Americas (which shares content with Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from 1999), is a truly fanciful fabula consisting of totally fabricated biographies of non-existent authors, a staggering satire worthy of Laurence Sterne or Cervantes. Presented as a “biographical encyclopedia,” it is a fever-dream escapade into the lives and works of fictional fiction writers, poets and editors who espouse extremely fascistic political perspectives. It became the first of his books to reach a wide (and stunned) public and has since been lauded as a tour de force of black humour and imaginary erudition.

At a literary conference in Seville six weeks before his passing in 2003, while working at a furious pace on his serial novels which came to be combined in his posthumous opus, 2666, his fellow Latin American novelists declared him the most important literary figure of his generation. Natasha Wimmer, translator of both The Savage Detectives and 2666, has observed cogently the overall creative arc of his remarkable career: 

With The Savage Detectives Bolaño became a cult figure, from critics he received the kind of acclaim that marks a shift in the landscape, acclaim for a novel that readers have unwittingly been waiting for. As Bolano said in his acceptance speech for the Gallego Literary prize, "All of Latin America is sown with the bones of its forgotten youths," and in The Savage Detectives he brings those youths back to life: the story of two poets on an obscure quest. Their passion for poetry is Bolaño's passion for poetry and their years of wandering are Bolaño's years of wandering.

The two friends, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are both members of an obscure, and mythical, literary society called (appropriately enough for someone I’ve designated as a spectral realist) the Visceral Realists. As the translator of his two most important novels, Wimmer is the closest one could be to his core:

Bolaño’s short novels are tightly controlled models of precision, but his two big books were intended to be something else: works encompassing rough edges, loose ends, lapses, faults. Here at last life bleeds fully into art and vice versa, allowing even for the final rupture of death, that great inconsistency in the fabric of existence. Given that immortality can come only can after death. Bolaño rehearsed its coming exhaustively. 

Like both Wallace and Mishima, two novelists who are somewhat parallel and perpendicular to him, Bolaño struggled with "the secret pact with the problem of beauty," meaning that (according to Mishima) when beauty exists in art it is pure, even perfect, but when true beauty manifests in reality it can only do so as a crime. The explanation for this obscure notion can only be arrived at in their fiction itself.

Wimmer notes his outsider status no matter where he went: 

Throughout his career, Bolaño has had a contentious relationship with the Chilean literary establishment, which wasn’t quite sure whether to consider him one of them or not. After the coup, he didn’t return to Chile until 1998, and he wasn’t welcomed warmly in all quarters.

Indeed, the sense of exclusion and exile follows him like a shadow that always finds its way into whatever book he happens to be writing. As Wimmer observes: 

A creeping sense of conspiracy permeates 2666, the novel that occupied Bolaño for the last years of his life and was published in 2004 after his death. If The Savage Detectives is a journey outward, then 2666 collapses inward on itself. The dread that flickers in Bolaño's earlier fiction is concentrated, the essence of evil made visible. In a sense, it’s the story of two ghosts, men lingering in the afterlife. Their persistence in the myths and memories of friends mirrors Bolaño's own persistence in the minds of his readers.

Both books are actually about the minds of his readers.

Roberto Bolaño.

His translator also offers this helpful guidance for grasping how Bolaño is in fact a specter of himself, as well as that of Latin American literature in general: 

In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolaño indicates the existence in the work of a "hidden center" concealed beneath what might be considered the novel’s "physical centre." Might it not represent the date upon which the whole novel rests?

She then astutely reminds us that in an earlier (1999) novel called Amulet, a character walks down a certain Avenue Guerrero, which at that time of night looked

more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974, or in 1968 or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

I guess that explains everything.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.