Writing & Society Research Centre Seminar

How was Roberto Bolaño able to write so much genuinely inventive fiction between 1996, the year in which he published Nazi Literature in the Americas, and his death in 2003? A partial answer can be found by reading his novels and stories genetically, that is, by looking for traces of compositional procedures or processes in the finished product. Three procedures and a process stand out. (1) Expansion: Bolaño “exploded” his own published texts, blowing them up by adding new characters and episodes as well as circumstantial details. (2) Metarepresentation: he included representations of imagined texts within his novels and stories. (3) Circulating characters: he allowed characters to migrate from text to text, sometimes altering their names and properties. (4) Overinterpretation: some of his characters and narrators are overinterpreters: they seize on minor details, invest them with weighty significance and invent stories to connect and explain them. It is often through overinterpretive scrutiny of the factual that Bolaño’s fiction achieves full autonomy and his characters come to stand for something beyond their particularities, taking on the features of recognizable types. This paper will concentrate on the process of overinterpretation and show how it works in stories whose characters or narrators use photographs of real French writers as starting points for the construction of imaginary lives. Chris Andrews teaches in the School of Humanities and Communication at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He has published a critical study — Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge (Rodopi, 1999) — and two collections of poems: Cut Lunch (Indigo, 2002) and Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012). His translations include Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star (New Directions, 2004), César Aira's Varamo (Giramondo, 2012), and a segment of Valérie Mréjen's Citrus (Cambridge Literary Review, 2011). All welcome. RSVP/info writing@uws.edu.au