A literary critic whose name escapes me once described Don Quixote as half of a character. The other half being, of course, his faithful companion Sancho Panza. Quixote, falling into caves and chasing giants while poor Sanzho followed behind, carrying the Don’s satchel.
The critic meant that, in earlier eras of the epic tale, the natures of Quixote and Sancho would be fused in a single heroic character, one who quests and believes and fights, as well as one who doubts and hems and haws. The man in full. By splitting those tendencies and siphoning them into discrete characters, Cervantes presaged the modern character as fragmented, incomplete, a part of an unattainable whole.
One cannot help but think of Quixote and Sancho when reading The Savage Detectives, the tragicomic epic novel by the late Roberto Bolaño. Like the great novel that forms the basis of all Hispanic literature, The Savage Detectives features two lead characters, their fates twinned. They are named Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. They are also based on real-life people, much in the way of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, where Dean Moriary is a stand-in for Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx a stand-in for Allen Ginsberg. Arturo Belano is Bolaño’s own alter ego, and indeed, the arc of the character follows rather closely that of his author, from birth in Chile to youth and adolescence in Mexico, travels throughout Europe, and eventually settling in Spain, where Quixote himself roamed four centuries earlier. Ulises Lima is the fictionalized version of Mario Santiago, Bolaño’s close friend from his youth. They were not knights, however. Their delusions were far greater, and they believed themselves to be something far more outlandish: poets.
In Mexico City in the 1970s, Arturo and Ulises form their own scrappy avant garde poetry movement, calling themselves the visceral realists. The actual aesthetic precepts of visceral realism are left pleasingly vague. This is based on the actual movement Bolańo and Santiago started, called ‘infrarealism.’ The precepts of which were also vague, but that didn’t stop them from making noise about it. In the poetry circles of the time, the infrarealists were infamous for disrupting more conventional readings, standing up in the middle and shouting their own poems to the shock and dismay of the crowd. A kind of poetry as performance art.
Their quest to remake Mexican poetry in their image is, indeed, quixotic. But this raises the question. If Arturo and Ulises are questing across Mexico in homage to the Man of La Mancha, then which one of them is Quixote, which one Sancho? Is Arturo/Belano the Quixote equivalent, as he is the actual author of the book here, and Ulises/Santiago the Sancho figure? Or does that get it exactly backwards? Perhaps, since Arturo/Bolaño lived to tell the tale, that makes him the Sancho character, carrying on Ulises/Santiago’s memory as Sancho did with Quixote after the Don’s death at the end of the novel.
Wait a minute, though. I’ve gotten my fractions wrong.
Arturo, you see, is the Quixote character here—and so is Ulises. They each form a half, or perhaps a quarter, of the famously halved Quixote character, the character whose halvedness invented the novelistic concept of character. Which means that the Sancho equivalent is found elsewhere. Beyond the confines of the book, actually. For in The Savage Detectives, it is Arturo and Ulises who combine, Voltron-like, to serve as the Quixote character. So who is Sancho, then?
Why, the reader, of course. You are Sancho Panza, atop your donkey, trying to keep up with your muddle-headed master.
Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the protagonists of The Savage Detectives, yes, but for long stretches of time, they disappear from the story. This is a result of the novel’s unusual yet intuitive structure, in which the story of Arturo and Ulises is told by everyone other than them.
The book is divided into three parts: Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975); The Savage Detectives (1976-1996); and The Sonora Desert (1976). Part One consists of a diary written by a young man named Juan Garcia Madero, a law student in Mexico City. Garcia Madero wants to be a poet, however, and so he takes a poetry workshop at his university. During one class, two poets, intense young men, come and read their poems. Garcia Madero is extraordinarily impressed. He is invited to join the two poets’ literary movement, visceral realism. What is visceral realism, exactly? He doesn’t really know, and he never really learns.
He sure does have some adventures, though. He meets lots of interesting people, including several young women with whom he enjoys spirited bouts of lovemaking. He becomes enmeshed in the family life of an architect, who helped design the visceral realists’ magazine. His social life becomes so full, actually, that Arturo and Ulises soon recede, off to pursue their own agendas. As best as Garcia Madero can tell, those pursuits consist of looking for lost poets, and selling marijuana. The latter bankrolling the former, presumably.
Grimness sets in, however, when Arturo and Ulises shelter a young woman, a sex worker, named Lupe. Her pimp has become dangerous and possessive, and she needs to leave Mexico City. On New Year’s Eve 1975, Arturo, Ulises, Lupe and Garcia Madero leave town in the architect’s car, while the pimp pursues them.
That is part one. It runs about 140 pages, a solid novella in length1 Part Two runs for more than four hundred pages. Arturo and Ulises appear throughout, but Garcia Madero is entirely absent. Rather, a chorus of different people who knew the poets at different points in their lives offer their accounts of them, how they met them, what business they pursued together, for however long or short.
Part Two consists of 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. Appropriate for two poets. At the start of each person’s entry, you have a name, a location, and a date, as in this passage.
Felipe Müller, Bar Centrico, Calle Tallers, Barcelona, May 1977. Arturo Belano stayed with his mother when he came to Barcelona. His mother had been living here for a few years. She was sick. She had hyperthyroidism, and she’d lost so much weight she looked like a skeleton.
You see how this works. It is remarkably intuitive, really. It’s almost as if we’re watching a documentary, and a series of talking heads appear onscreen to share their memories of the visceral realists.
The Savage Detectives is a novel of voice, in the manner of As I Lay Dying and A Brief History of Seven Killings. Every voice in the world is found here, seemingly. Every voice, except that of Arturo and Ulises, the characters whose story the novel tells.
In the midst of the voices and their remembrances, a mystery emerges. At the end of 1975, when Arturo and Ulises fled Mexico City, there was speculation that they were on a quest to find a long-lost poet from the 1920s, a woman named Cesarea Tinajero. (No one recalls the presence of Garcia Madero riding along with them. One can be close to legend—in the backseat, literally—and still go unremembered.) No one knows what exactly happened on that trip to the Sonora Desert, the vast, arid expanse in the north of Mexico, a landscape also traversed by such eminences of fiction as Padre Jose from The Power and the Glory and Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. But every interview subject who mentions it suspects that it wasn’t good. That it was, perhaps, tragic.
So we get four hundred pages of remembrances, adventures, romances, elegies. This places each subject as a kind of Sancho Panza in relation to the twinned Quixote of Arturo and Ulises as each of them travels the world, trying to write their poems, to live up to their youthful ideals of revolution in art and in life, but mostly working odd jobs and ending up in jail. This also demonstrates one of the odd political resonances of Bolaño’s work. He was a committed leftist, a son of Allende and Guevara, yet as a writer, he only came into his own as an elegist for the ideals of his youth, which never materialized. Is the fate of every revolutionary to lament the revolution that never was? Am I saying that Arturo is as much Saw Gerrera from Andor as he is Don Quixote?
Very well then, I say it.
The third and final part, The Sonora Desert, returns us to 1976, to that cliff we were hanging from four hundred pages ago. Arturo, Ulises, Lupe and Garcia Madero flee Mexico City and search the desert the sign of Tinajero, the lost poet. At the same time, Lupe’s pimp is hot in pursuit. The poets find Tinajero, and the pimp finds the poets, at which point, tragedy inevitably ensues.
A tragedy, it becomes clear in retrospect, that the poet spend the rest of their lives running away from. The moment when their dream became all too real and took the form of nightmare. In this, they are truly the Quixote of midcentury Mexico, trying to treat reality as fantasy, only to be disappointed, mortally so, when the becomes fantasy takes on a life of its own, and leaves the dreamer behind.
The novella was Bolaño’s true form, arguably. He wrote several, including Distant Star, By Night in Chile, and Amulet. And really, one could argue that his massive novel, 2666, is actually a collection of five novellas wearing a trench coat.
This was excellent. I have been circling The Savage Detectives for the past year and Quixote for decades. You may have inspired me to finally read both.