Walter Benjamin, in his essay, ‘The Storyteller’, argued that the art of storytelling lay in retelling. This rich technique of layering is – in Marxist fashion – associated with an artisan class: ‘Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’, declares Benjamin in a well-wrought simile. Yet, by 1936, the ‘art of storytelling is coming to an end’. The killer? The twin forces of urbanisation and secularisation which have broken up the tight-knit rural communities that allowed for the exchanging of tales. Quoting Paul Valéry, Benjamin argues that ‘modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated’. He then reaches more damning conclusions:

He has succeeded in abbreviating even storytelling. We have witnessed the evolution of the ‘short story,’ which has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitute the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings.

Roberto Bolaño excels in retelling, weaving his ‘layers’ like a good artisan, in that very form Benjamin uses to diagnose the decline of storytelling – the short story. This is nowhere on better display than in this new collection. It brings together authoritative translations from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer and comprises several of Bolaño’s collections, namely, Last Evenings on Earth (2006), The Insufferable Gaucho (2010) and The Return (2010) – alongside posthumously published stories. Benjamin’s argument about the historical shifts in how we relate stories, and the media it shapes, holds much currency. But Bolaño is testament to the endurance of the short story as a sound vehicle of storytelling.

I will try to be a good artisan too and further interweave Benjamin with Bolaño. Benjamin’s conception of the storyteller is an authorial one: a figure of wisdom, retelling exotic tales in their rural community. But in Bolaño’s fiction retelling is narratological. He is of course retelling a story as an author, but his characters – perhaps more richly – also spin their own, internal tales. This is where his ‘transparent layers’ work their magic. Transparent, because you don’t even notice them.

‘William Burns’, a short story from The Return, opens: ‘William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman in Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me.’ Within a deceptively simple sentence, Bolaño is already up to his storytelling tricks. Notice how the titular figure is displaced within the very first sentence: ‘Burns […] told this story to my friend’. Next, this tale is passed on again, and spun further: ‘who passed it on to me’. (Notice, too, the geographical journey from America to Mexico – that will come in use later.) Bolaño one-ups Hamlet here, presenting a telling within a telling within a telling – a dizzying mise-en-abyme. The story continues with: a stolen dog, paranoid premonitions, insanity, a home invasion, cigarettes under the stars, savage murder and spade-dug burial – all classic blood-and-guts Bolaño. Many of the stories in this collection deal with retellings, including that of: dreams (‘Mauricio “The Eye” Silva’, ‘Meeting with Enrique Lihn’); diaries (‘Anne Moore’s Life’); deaths (‘Dentist’); film, pornographic or otherwise (‘Prefiguration of Lalo Cura’, ‘The Colonel’s Son’); afterlives (‘The Return’); football rituals involving phlebotomy (‘Buba’); imaginary adventures (‘The Insufferable Gaucho’); the murder of women (‘Crimes’); the story behind a photo (‘Labyrinth’). These retellings can frame the story, like in ‘William Burns’, or be embedded within them; the stories can be related from character to reader or character to character before the reader. Whatever the case, Bolaño is interested in this exchange of narrative, the sleight of hand of fiction, these delivered tales or texts, which can slip from a wider fictional mosaic and crystalise themselves as fragments.

There is a mirror-shattering moment in ‘Detectives’. During General Pinochet’s coup of 1973, Bolaño claims to have been briefly imprisoned in Chile. He was freed by two former classmates who recognised him among the prison crowd. ‘Detectives’ is an autobiographical tale, retold from the classmates’ perspective, who work for the state. Bolaño appears as his usual alter-ego, Belano:

‘When [Belano] got to the corridor with the mirror, he looked the other way.’

‘He was afraid to look at himself.’

‘Until one day, after finding out that his old schoolmates were there to get him out of that fix, he felt up to it. He’d been thinking about it all night and all morning. His luck had changed, so he decided to face the mirror and see how he looked.’

‘And what happened?’

‘He didn’t recognise himself.’

A moment of fortuitous recognition – like Odysseus’s scar – is followed by a shattering misrecognition. Shattering, because it threatens mimesis itself: Bolaño cannot recognise himself in his own fiction, in his own story. Later a phantasmagoric ‘swarm of faces’ is visible behind this mirror. It seems to turn the mirror into the page itself before us, as Belano stares out at us, his future readers. Bolaño’s layering – retelling the tale from the detectives’ perspective – has turned from a Benjaminian transparency to a more intricate opaqueness. The teller becomes estranged from the incidents of his very own story. The handprints of this potter (to reuse Benjamin’s simile) cling to the clay vessel and then dissolve to leave a more haunting artefact. Such metafictional tricks of authorial cameos and two- way mirrors all show the short story’s endurance as a vehicle of storytelling, even if the teller has lost the plot. Specifically, a political plot of a coup that has caused youth and friendship to go awry. ‘Jesus, we really have fucked up’, one detective admits.

Bolaño shows something haunting can still be achieved between the story and the teller – within a fragmentary misrecognition, a slip of fiction. This dwelling in a suspended, uncanny space, is there throughout Bolaño’s works. In life, Bolaño was always on the move across borders: Chile (and prison), Mexico, Spain. One gets the sense that Bolaño is at home only as an exile. As he pens in a revealing essay, ‘Literature and Exile’, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’: ‘Books are the only homeland of the true writer.’ As in life, it is in the fragmentary that Bolaño excels as a storyteller – between nations, retellings and narratives. Remember the opening to ‘Williams Burns’, the retelling of that story finds itself in a place between America and Mexico, between tongues. Reading the stories of this collection provides the glee of eavesdropping on tales that have been passed and polished through a dozen hands and cities.

Benjamin understands retelling as placing a variety of perspectives on top of one another. In Bolaño’s later stories there are still intricately woven layers within his storytelling, but of texts and subtexts rather than perspectives. The diaries, dreams and photos that exist within the fictional world of the short stories – fictions within fictions – interact with the form that contains them in mesmerising flickers. In ‘The Grub’, the titular figure tells a tale, indeed a retelling, of the ouroboros: ‘He said that snakes had even been known to swallow themselves whole and if you see a snake in the process of swallowing itself you better run because sooner or later something bad is going to happen, some dislocation of reality.’ It seems an apt metaphor for Bolaño’s own storytelling, which at moments of strange, beautiful dislocation see the subtext enter and become text – the tail engulfed in the mouth.

Like its title suggests, ‘Labyrinth’ takes us through an inescapable fictional maze. The whole short story – if we can call it that – is ekphrastic: it describes a photo depicting a coterie of French intellectuals associated with the magazine Tel Quel. It gets interesting (and strange) when Bolaño begins, ‘let’s imagine’. Bolaño breathes life into the photo, animating each subject with a past and future. We witness their walks, dinners and sexual activity. It all has the air of a lucid dream: one figure, J.-J. Goux, is followed ‘down the steps and the story ends or freezes in an empty space where appearances gradually fade away. Who was J.-J. Goux waiting for?’ The quest to know this figure ends, it is at its imaginative limit, and we move onto the next subject. Then, having moved your hand along this smooth ekphrastic prose, there’s a disturbance: ‘Literature brushes past these literary creatures and kisses them on the lips, but they don’t even notice.’ This is the literature we read now, no? Bolaño anthropomorphises his own fiction, makes it a self-aware agent, allows it a kiss of another text: a photograph. The kiss is Bolaño’s most sharp and delicious move, to flow between the two layers – literary and photographic – and stay in that abyss between them. It represents a desire to know this image, to know the lives behind it – and the admission that only fiction, an imagined retelling, allows such an intimacy. It is fiction kissing and consuming itself, chasing its own tail, locked in its own self-referential ouroboros (‘they don’t even notice’). It is similar, as any reader of Bolaño will know, to the hunt for Cesárea Tinajero in The Savage Detectives or Archimboldi in 2666. No one else like Bolaño captures our desire to know, hunt (and never find) the writer behind the work.

Another story in this collection, the ‘Prefiguration of Lalo Cura’ follows the son of a once pregnant porn star. An unreal narrative perspective opens within the womb. The son imagines a past when he was in utero: ‘All dreams are real. I wanted to believe that when those cocks had gone as far into my mother as they could, they came up against my eyes.’ This was many years ago. Now an adult, at the end of the story, Lalo has tracked down an old actor who worked with his mother, Pajarito Gómez. He is watching a film, then:

Ignacio López Tarso and Pajarito Gómez looked at me: stone-like patience. The pair of them gone crazily dumb. Their eyes full of humanity and fear and fetuses lost in the immensity of memory. Fetuses and other tiny wide-eyed creatures. For a moment, my friends, I felt that the whole apartment was starting to vibrate. Then I stood up very carefully and left.

Tarso is an actor within the film Gómez is watching. So, both Gómez, and the fictional actor on the screen, are looking at the narrator. There is a metalepsis here as the layer of the fictional film within the short story seems to become active, to ‘vibrate’ – much like the idea of a personified ‘literature’ kissing the subjects of the photograph in ‘Labyrinth’. While in ‘Labyrinth’, literature stoops down to kiss the subtext, here the subtext – the film – seems to erupt through like a premature baby. Benjamin’s ‘transparent layers’ takes on another sense, not in terms of a slick movement between retellings, but now in terms of how the subtextual layer can emerge through – gaze through even – a transparent text that contains it. This generates a hallucinogenic, uncanny fading between Tarso and Gómez, screen and scene, fiction and reality – so often a realm we enter at the end of Bolaño stories.

Yet, this breaking of the fourth wall – the actor gazing out of the film at the narrator – is still contained within a sealed, wider fiction (the narrator does not stare out at us). An opened box within a closed one. This metafictional trickery outdoes even Jorge Luis Borges. Thus, the images of ‘fetuses’: bodies contained by a wider material, being prefigured, waiting to be born. It seems a perfect metaphor for Bolaño’s own fragmentary retellings and texts, pregnant in his short stories, which burst out of the enveloping wombs, or narratives, that contain them. Its such moments, the ruptures, which generate his surrealistic and knowing style. These are the final lines of the short story. We are left abandoned and dumbstruck in an unreal narrative space: a penetrated womb, a Klein bottle of fiction where narrative layers interpenetrate with no distinction of the internal and external. Bolaño has certainly woven his layers well. The short stories in this collection cannot, therefore, be read as lesser examples of Bolaño’s novels. (The dustjacket reads: ‘Bolaño’s short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels.’) Though, as Benjamin notes, the short story is an ‘abbreviation’ of storytelling, it has its own rich layers. A knowing artisan, like Bolaño, can do much with them. He can stare you in the face, make a film come alive or even have literature kiss a photograph.

 

Tommy Gilhooly is a writer from Northamptonshire and recent English graduate of the University of Cambridge. He was runner-up in the review category of The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2023. His writing has appeared in Literary Review, The Telegraph, The Fence and Engelsberg Ideas.