In 2005, as Bolañomania was about to erupt on the international literary stage, the New York Times published a review of his posthumous novel 2666, which fueled the myth of Roberto Bolaño as a tragic, adventurous writer. The newspaper alluded to a meeting between Bolaño and the Salvadoran author Roque Dalton that never actually took place, but which perfectly illustrates the interweaving of fact and fiction that drove his entire oeuvre.
The reference to Dalton came when the NY Times introduced its readers to the exciting life of an author who had it all to become the new global icon of Latin American literature. As stated amid a broad reconstruction of his youth: “After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible.”1 Travels across Central America, guerrillas, bohemian lifestyles, French words reminiscent of the decadent atmosphere of the Belle Époque… It seems that the portrait of Bolaño that North American readers got leaped from the pages of his own fictional tales in The Savage Detectives.
Looking at the facts, Bolaño did spend some time in El Salvador during his twenties. He may have effectively met poets and artists close to the Salvadoran guerrilla. What is extremely unlikely is that he met either Dalton or his comrades. Although it would be harsh to accuse the NY Times reviewer of intentionally misleading his readers, he did fall naively into the trap of Bolaño, not only taking his words at face value but also blowing them out of proportion.
After all, it was Bolaño himself who evoked his travel to El Salvador in a 1998 interview with the Spanish magazine Lateral. Still a relatively unknown figure to the broader public, Bolaño anticipated in this interview some of the motifs that would later establish his posthumous fame as the quintessential Latin American troubadour. He evoked his youth as a nomadic poet who worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, and garbage man, among other haphazard jobs, and described his travel from Mexico to Chile in 1973, “to make the revolution.”2 After mentioning a short but intense period of activism against dictator Augusto Pinochet, including the episode of his arrest and liberation by two policemen whom he knew from high school, Bolaño planted the seed that eventually led the NY Times to imagine his meeting with Dalton: “I met several of the people who killed Roque Dalton. I lived in El Salvador before the civil war began, and four of the ten main comandantes were writers.” He even said he met guerrilla leader Fermán Cienfuegos, nom de guerre of José Eduardo Sancho Castañeda, who “wasn’t a bad poet, but compared to Roque Dalton, he had nothing.”3 Bolaño wondered “whether there wasn’t even a little bit of literary animosity there,” describing the murder of Dalton as the outcome of a clash between the nonconformist ethos of the poet and the utilitarian dogmatism of political militancy: “As though they were a band of gangsters. And they said, ‘Let’s kill him now that he’s sleeping because he’s a poet, so he won’t suffer.’ That’s literally what they said.”
Bolaño turned the assassination of Dalton at the hands of his own comrades into an episode of poetic jealousy. As romantic and intriguing as this tale sounds, the episode actually had more prosaic reasons. As scholar Barbara Harlow has clarified, the murder “came at the height of a debate within the ERP concerning the relative priorities of military struggle versus popular organization. Dalton supported the imperative of grassroots work among the masses against the emphasis on the part of others in the group on the primacy of armed vanguards.”4
Moreover, it would not be too unfair to argue that Dalton himself contributed to the radicalization of discourses on revolutionary politics and armed struggle that partly explain his murder. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, following the Cuban Revolution, Dalton joined the Communist Party of El Salvador and was subsequently imprisoned and exiled. He later quit the Party, joined the guerrilla, and participated in the early stages of the Salvadoran civil war. His contributions to the iconic Cuban magazine Casa de las Américas are ideal to understand the ideological force capable of turning an experimental poet into a self-sacrificing revolutionary fighter. As he said in a 1969 roundtable with other renowned Central American writers: “The moral dilemma of the Latin American intellectual, who can finally comprehend the real urgencies of the Revolution, can only be resolved through revolutionary practice, through revolutionary militancy.”5 It might seem paradoxical that it was a writer such as Dalton himself who questioned the social role of literature altogether. In his words, matters of culture and aesthetics had to take a back seat once the intellectual became aware of his historical mission: “Is it really relevant to finish my so-and-so-important novel? Or should I accept the dangerous task commanded by the Party, the guerrilla, the Front, and during whose execution I might lose not just the precious time of two months but the whole time I have left?”
Dalton thus embodied the figure of the revolutionary intellectual who privileged direct political action over artistic creation. His words echoed the climate of ideas that followed the intensification of armed struggle across the continent and the idolization of figures such as Che Guevara. As expressed in the General Declaration of the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana, an event whose significance for anti-imperialist and third-worldist politics cannot be overstated: “The Congress recognizes in Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara the supreme example of the revolutionary intellectual, who leaves his position and privileges behind to fight for the oppressed of the world.”6
Evoking the figure of Dalton at the turn of the century, Bolaño takes us back to a decisive epochal juncture when left-leaning Latin American intellectuals faced the challenge of living up to the example of the man of action. Fair to say, Dalton did follow his own command and stopped publishing literature. He published his last literary book, Tavern and Other Places, in 1969, approximately six years before his murder. However, thanks to the research of Horacio Castellanos Moya, we now know that Dalton never stopped writing. Among the letters that Dalton sent to his intimates during his period in the guerrilla, several told his partner Miriam about the progress of a novel based on his own family, tentatively titled Dalton and Co. As he wrote as late as October 1973: “I already have the ‘theoretical guidelines’ and a draft, just a broad draft. I think that if I ever have a relaxed month, I’d be able to write it in one go, at least a first version. The one about my father is more complex, as I’ll need a lot of archival materials.”7
After all, with his ambiguous allusions to Dalton and El Salvador, Bolaño did not just blur the boundaries between fact and fabrication to consolidate his public persona as a fearless writer willing to sacrifice his life to literature. He also brought the question of literature back to the posthumous fate awaiting Dalton as another victim of the often tragic history of Latin America. And the fact that the NY Times published an inflated retelling of his own inflated tale was nothing but proof of the imaginative power of his oeuvre to renew our understanding of the political past.
- “A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career” (New York Times, 2005). ↩︎
- “Entrevista a Bolaño” (Lateral, 1998). ↩︎
- As elaborated in his article “Roberto Bolaño en El Salvador,” Miguel Huerzo Mixco took it upon himself to cross-check and finally debunk Bolaño’s account of this episode: “In February 2011, I asked Cienfuegos if he remembered a possible meeting, in 1974, with the young Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. He said no. Cienfuegos had enough reasons not to join any gathering: the police had put a price on his head” (Frontera D, 2011). ↩︎
- After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (Verso, 1996). ↩︎
- “El intelectual y la sociedad” (Casa de las Américas, 1969). ↩︎
- “Declaración General” (Congreso Cultural de La Habana, 1968). ↩︎
- Roque Dalton: Correspondencia clandestina y otros ensayos (Random House, 2021). ↩︎
Leave a Reply