A Nazi Diagram: Roberto Bolaño’s Pseudo-Alternate History “Nazi Literature in the Americas”

This article attempts to capture the forces and structures that operate within Roberto Bolaño’s breakout novel “Nazi Literature in the Americas.” Via a structural reading of this fictional encyclopaedia of naziphilic writers, the study introduces and transforms the Deleuzian concepts of the “diagram” and the “blur,” taken from the philosopher’s course on painting in order to map Bolaño’s deep engagement with late forms of fascism, with their circulation and their artistic and political failures. Furthermore, the text argues that the excavation of the complex structure, i.e., the Nazi diagram, operating within a seemingly postmodern fictional encyclopaedia, gives access to the crucial position of the critical witness. It is precisely the witness’ knowledge and ethics that the article examines in detail by showing how “Nazi Literature” shifts the focus towards the myriad (conceptual, ethical, political, etc.) pitfalls contained within the subject of unmasking, spectating, or even complying with fascistic discourse and actions. Finally, the article introduces the concept of “cruft” as a specific literary tool used by Bolaño to traverse the phantasms of late fascisms that still populate the contemporary psychosocial milieus. Thus, the present research functions as a structural reading of a Bolañean work of fiction, which is little known in the Bulgarian context. It also serves as an attempt at offering a non-trivial trajectory for thinking a phenomenon (late fascism) that has become incredibly porous, i.e., cluttered and clichéd, in contemporary discourse.