It has been fifteen years since Roberto Bolaño’s death, in Barcelona, at the age of fifty, but we now have yet another posthumous manuscript in English translation—a youthful and, at times, delirious bildungsroman called “The Spirit of Science Fiction.” As with much of Bolaño’s work, the book emerges from his archive: it was handwritten in three separate spiral notebooks—one yellow, one orange, and another red—and the manuscript shares pages with poems, doodles, maps, calculations, and military annotations from the Spanish Civil War and the battles of Stalingrad, Normandy, and Waterloo.
Though Bolaño dated those notebooks in 1984, a few letters sent to his friend Antoni G. Porta (with whom he wrote his first published novel, “Advice from a Disciple of Morrison to a Joyce Fanatic,” in 1984) show that he meant to tweak it a little more. “My novel has to be finished by 86,” he wrote. “Saint Philip K. Dick, have mercy on me!!!” But there was no new version besides the present one, which was completed during the tourist season in Blanes, Spain, where Bolaño spent the summer selling trinkets out of a shop his mother owned. Bolaño didn’t have a computer at the time, and he was likely engaged by several other projects, including two unpublished novels: “Diorama” and “DF, La Paloma, Tobruk.” Despite this, “The Spirit of Science Fiction” feels like a fully realized work. It’s also a fascinating blueprint of Bolaño’s poetics and of the extent to which he drew from the Beat literature of William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
“The Spirit of Science Fiction” is set largely in Mexico City, in the nineteen-seventies. It is, more than a science-fiction novel, a Cold War one: espionage, superpower antics, and the threat of nuclear war loom large. We follow a twenty-one-year-old named Remo (an alter ego for Bolaño that we encounter in “The Skating Rink” and other unpublished works), who, fleeing detention in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, arrives in Mexico with his comrade, seventeen-year-old Jan Schrella. Jan, an aspiring science-fiction writer, enjoys writing feverish letters to American science-fiction novelists, asking for their help in calling attention to the devastating effects of American and Soviet proxy wars in Latin America.
Jan is another of Bolaño’s alter egos—he once signs off as “Jan Schrella, alias Roberto Bolaño”—and his letters range in tone from comic to earnest. Writing to Ursula Le Guin, he explains that his letters are like the NAFAL (Nearly as Fast as Light) ships in her Hainish cycle of novels, which allow distant civilizations to establish diplomatic relations. He tells the author James Tiptree, Jr., that if his appeals to science-fiction writers fail, he might ask North American retirees to “send letters to the White House demanding an end to the policy of aggression towards Latin America.” And, because he believes that wars can be ended only with religion or sex, Jan tells the science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer that they can coördinate “orgies that future citizens of Latin America and the U.S. can take part in if we take action now.”
These letters are interspersed throughout the first two sections of the novel, which include two intertwined storylines. The first sees Remo and Jan staying in a rickety rooftop dig, meeting a brilliant poet and motorcyclist named José Arco and exploring the city’s suspicious surge in poetry magazines. In the second storyline, which is set at a raucous cocktail party, a prize-winning Latin-American science-fiction writer (possibly Jan in the future) recounts the plot of an alternative-history novel he’s written, in which a counter-offensive against Pinochet’s forces is being launched from a place called the Unknown University. The third and final section, titled “Mexican Manifesto,” was published in this magazine and follows Remo and his girlfriend as they explore the city’s bathhouses. In accordance with Bolaño’s practice of recycling material, the same text closes the second part of his posthumous poetry collection, “The Unknown University.” This seems fitting; Bolaño liked to push the limits between poetry and prose, and “Antwerp,” a novel he published late in life, was included in the same collection.
From 2008 to 2014, during the charged emergence of Bolaño in translation, I worked behind the scenes with the writer’s estate, reading through roughly fourteen thousand six hundred papers in his archive and helping to prepare his posthumous work. Bolaño, it should be said, saved everything. His archive includes notebooks, diaries, letters, magazines, war games, postcards, photos, typescripts, newspaper clippings, and an extensive library. (“I even found one of those paper napkins from a bar in Mexico,” his widow, Carolina López, has said, at a press conference.) The wealth of material makes it easy to locate Bolaño’s fixations at a given time, and much of my efforts involved establishing a chronology of when his work was written—a chronology that became a central part of the first exhibition dedicated to his papers, which I curated together with the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, in 2013.
That chronology also shed light on just how much “The Spirit of Science Fiction” was informed by poetry, and specifically by Bolaño’s reading of the Beats. In 1978, around the time Bolaño first began writing fiction in earnest, he wrote in his diary, “I write verses, dream of a novel.” During that time, he read William S. Burroughs daily and often commented on the writer’s work. (Burroughs was the “ice shard that would never melt,” he writes in his essay collection “Between Parentheses,” “the eye that never closes.”) In an early version of “The Spirit of Science Fiction,” Burroughs was the contact person for the young Chileans. Bolaño was also influenced by Burroughs’s approach to structure; he was fascinated by “Naked Lunch” and by the collage-like experimentation of “Nova Express.” He even borrowed some of Burroughs’s methods, riffing on Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique in his own verse.
Burroughs wasn’t Bolaño’s only focus. His interest in the Beats can be traced back to the early nineteen-seventies, when he began translating several excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s book-length poem “Mexico City Blues.” His choice of excerpts was guided, he wrote, by “the tenderness that I felt when I read these poems.” He returned to those translations in 1977, when he was a twenty-five-year-old night watchman at the Estrella de Mar campground, in Castelldefels, just outside of Barcelona. (It was there that he met a Czechoslovakian boy named Jan, who spent a few days at the campground and sent Bolaño letters over the summer.) In 1978, Bolaño scribbled out an introduction to his translations, which he titled “Jack Kerouac and the Enchantments of Mexico.” In it, he describes Kerouac as a poet who “opens his body and his movement to the sweet enchantments of Mexico D.F, and suddenly the city (the Mexican lunacy) begins flowing through him.” It is not hard to see something similar in “The Spirit of Science Fiction.” At first, Mexico City resists our young Chilean refugees, but it finally relents, absorbing them into its inner life.
There are other, more literal parallels. In 1955, Kerouac, like Remo and Jan, lived in a ramshackle rooftop apartment in Mexico City with an old friend of Burroughs’s, the thief and morphine addict William Garver. While there, Kerouac composed most of “Mexico City Blues.” In his introduction, Bolaño writes of Kerouac’s “need to perturb the neutral spaces of everyday life, transforming them.” This was part of the Beatniks’ famed approach to extemporization—the way Kerouac and his contemporaries transmuted the mundane. Bolaño was fascinated by how Kerouac infused his verse with the register and musicality of the city that surrounded him, and he wanted “The Spirit of Science Fiction” to achieve a similar effect. (When he wrote the novel, in Spain, he was very much nostalgic for Mexico.) Bolaño didn’t deploy the Beats’ “automatic writing” method, but he used many spontaneous techniques. He improvised long poems in his notes and listened to jazz while writing, letting language bubble up in his psyche and onto the page. He would then extract the lines or metaphors that he liked and fastidiously revise them.
He also added, to his reworking of Beat methods, a political dimension where he felt one was lacking. In his introduction, Bolaño suggests that Kerouac, for all his virtuosity, was “the apolitical North American boy combining black jazz musicians, Indian gods and Mexican experiences like others collect stamps. Kerouac developed the discourse of emptiness in order to fill in the spaces shattered by love.” Much of “The Spirit of Science Fiction” can be read as a response to this emptiness. The novel is similar to Kerouac’s novella “Tristessa,” which details Kerouac’s encounter with drug addiction and an impoverished prostitute in Mexico City. But where Kerouac arrives from the north, Bolaño's characters arrive from the south, looking not for the fast life but for a refuge from detention and torture in Chile. They, too, begin integrating into the city’s bohemian counterculture—but as a means of affirming life rather than as an embrace of self-destruction. Throughout the book, they make desperate, if hilarious, attempts to make Americans see how their policies are devastating Latin America.
In short, Bolaño is not the apolitical writer coming down south to have a little fun. In 1984, when he wrote “The Spirit of Science Fiction,” the Berlin Wall was still standing and the arms race was in full force. There had been, in Latin America, several echoes of aggressions abroad. Two years after the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, in Mexico City, when police fired on students and civilians, the National Guard opened fire at American student protestors at Kent State University, in Ohio, and Jackson State University, in Mississippi. A year later, in the Corpus Christi Massacre, élite Mexican forces killed over a hundred student protestors, an event depicted by the director Alfonso Cuarón in his recent film “Roma.” “Arizona was the same as Sonora, New Mexico, Chihuahua, it’s all the same,” Bolaño wrote in his novel “2666.” In “Palingenesis,” a poem in “The Unknown University,” Bolaño chats with the poet Archibald MacLeish over tapas in Barcelona. He writes, “For two poets, though from different languages, still from the same indomitable / New world.”
This is the theme at the heart of “The Spirit of Science Fiction”—the notion that the Americas are yoked together, united in struggle. To make that point, Bolaño borrowed some of the defining aesthetics of American counterculture, using the Beats’ spontaneity, humor, and playful rejection of narrative to study the ravages of the state. The book is not perfect: it gets silly at times, and there are often excessive sentences or stray clunkers. It’s an early novel, and the author is no longer around to make it better. But it also has achingly beautiful passages, and its lessons about the reach of American policy resonate to this day. A superbly talented young man wrote it, in 1984, believing that truth reached through art was the only means to revolution. In this sense, it reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave. “The soul of the dead author” is present in the novel, Bolaño wrote, “along with the other ghosts.”
