Abstract
If there are any writers who describe the experiences of graduate students, adjuncts, early career academics, and soon-to-be-retired academics working on the fringes of the academy as forms of academic barbarism, they are W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño. No author’s work has more literary critics than the work of Roberto Bolaño and no writer’s protagonists are as caught up in research as those of W. G. Sebald. The researchers and academics of Bolaño’s and Sebald’s novels display a devotion to the literary search, the archive, and the intertext that often sees them promoting a literature of concealment through a form of academic barbarism that conceals “the book that really matters” [“el libro que realmente importa” (2666S 983)]. Their modes of enquiry into their cultural and literary histories focus our attention on their authors’ different renderings of the Information Age’s institutionalization of the archive as fortress of knowledge or as pastiche of literary formalism and academic hubris. Their protagonists are either left stranded, like Sebald’s Austerlitz, in the new Grande Bibliothèque, “Schatzhaus unseres gesamten Schrifterbes” [the treasure-house of our entire literary heritage], feeling like “einen potentiellen Feind” (A 404) [a potential enemy (A1 398)], or, like Bolaño’s academics, they are left in a site of barbarism unaware of how their academic work conceals the literature that really matters—[“el libro que realmente importa” (2666S 983)], the “magic flower of winter!” (2666E 786) [“la flor mágica de invierno!” (2666S 983)].
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Notes
Jonathan Long argues that Sebald’s “view of historical process […] is characterized by a negative teleology in which entropy, both literal and metaphorical, results in the decline of cultures, the diasporic scattering of peoples, environmental destruction, and the inexorable decay of matter.” His works function then “at the level of form, to counteract the dispersal, dissipation, and rupture inherent in the historical process” (137). See Long, J. J. “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten,” Modern Language Review 98 (2003), 117–37.
Roberto Bolaño. La literatura nazi en América. (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2010) [LNA];
Roberto Bolaño. Nazi Literature in the Americas. (London: Picador, 2010) 96 [NLA]. Hereafter both cited by page number.
Roberto Bolaño. Entre paréntesis: Ensayos, artículos y discursos. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2013). [EP];
Roberto Bolaño. Between Parentheses; Essays, Articles and Speeches. (London: Picador, 2004). [BP]. Hereafter both cited by page number.
Indeed Todd Samuel Presner argues that the destructive forces of the “modernist war” are the “condition of possibility” for the realism of historical novels such as Sebald’s where the “boundaries between fact and fiction, history and literature, real and imaginary are blurred.” See Presner, Todd Samuel. “What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals: Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. Sebald’s Realism” Criticism 46.3, (Summer 2004), 341–60.
Roberto Bolaño. Estrella distante. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2013). Distant Star. Trans. Chris Andrews. (London: Vintage, 2009).
Roberto Bolaño. Los detectives salvajes. (Barcelona: Vintage Español, 1998). [LDS] Savage Detectives. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. (London: Picador, 2009). [SD] Hereafter both are cited by page number.
W. G. Sebald. Schwindel. Gefühle. Frankfurt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009).
W. G. Sebald. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. (London: Vintage, 2002).
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© 2016 Michael O’Sullivan
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O’Sullivan, M. (2016). Academic Barbarism and the Literature of Concealment: Roberto Bolaño and W. G. Sebald. In: Academic Barbarism, Universities and Inequality. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137547613_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137547613_4
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