Roberto Bolaño’s novel Amulet introduces the reader to a female narrator/protagonist by the name of Auxilio Lacouture. Auxilio opens her tale with a warning to the reader. “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection, and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that” (Bolaño 1). Indeed, throughout her narration the promised episodes of malice never materialize definitively. Instead, they are obscured, whether intentionally or not, by a series of remembrances and digressions, which themselves meld assorted locations, people, and times into an accounting of the significance of the happenings of September 1968.

The convergence of time and literal and metaphorical space in Amulet can be traced to a single location and span, namely a toilet cubicle in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. It is in this setting that Auxilio witnesses the occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on September 18, 1968. By a fortunate chance, she finds herself sequestered in the bathroom and has the wits about her to remain hidden while students, faculty, and staff are beaten, arrested, and carted off to unknown fates. More than a hiding place, this bathroom becomes her “timeship from which [she] can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are” (Bolaño 56). It is a temporal epicenter, from which her story races in multiple directions, and back to which it inevitably returns. One might see in this fractured timescape a rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Like cracks spreading across the surface of a damaged mirror, Auxilio’s thoughts expand laterally into the future and the past, from Uruguay to Mexico and beyond.

Herself a native of Montevideo, she is unsure of the exact date of her arrival in Mexico City. In trying to pin it down, she sets reference points according to the deaths of writers she has encountered. “Hold on, let me try to remember. Let me stretch time out like a plastic surgeon stretching the skin of a patient under anesthesia” (Bolaño 2). In her description, she imparts not only a physical quality to time, but also a pliable one. Time is subject to change; it can be repaired to account for aesthetics. Throughout the novel, Bolaño plays with this malleability of time through Auxilio’s recollections. She often offers ranges of years when recounting meetings with various (usually) literary figures, sometimes blurring when one or the other actually lived.

The same flexibility is true of nationality, as seen in her often-hesitant declaration of herself as the mother of Mexican poetry. Later, she describes some Mexican clay figurines given to her as a gift. “…[T]hey were just figurines made by Indians in Oaxaca, who sold them to traders, who resold them at much higher prices at markets and street stalls in Mexico city” (Bolaño 12). Especially in the second example, nationality and its part in identity formation undergo a sort of evolution. The figurines, created by the indigenous people, become Mexican merely by virtue of an economic transaction.

Location, in the form of nationality, also clashes with time in some of Auxilio’s stories. One of her friends who makes frequent appearances in her thoughts is Arturo Belano. An alter ego of Bolaño himself, Arturo is also Chilean. Auxilio grapples with the disconnect of Arturo’s non-Mexican identity, which complicates his inclusion in either the “young poets” or “new generation” in Mexico. Further problematizing the constraints of canon by means of location versus time, Auxilio ponders a “what if” meeting of two poets, Darío and Huidobro. She speculates that Darío might have been able to establish “an island…between modernism and the avant-garde” (Bolaño 60), a metaphorical ground between two literary epochs.

Auxilio also extracts physical spaces from their real-world locations and brings them together in the non-fixed time of her thoughts in the bathroom. One striking example is the Clover Hotel, where she travels with Arturo to help free another friend from impending sexual slavery. She finds the hotel’s neon sign “funny, in a way, since it was like finding an establishment by the name of Paris in the Calle Berlin…” (Bolaño 90). The improbable Irish name is compared to the almost antipodal relationship between France and Germany, all within the confines of Mexico City. Similar juxtapositions are suggested through language. When listing the places she visited with her friend Elena and her love interest, many seem to have origins in indigenous tongues, though the orthography is clearly Spanish. On another occasion she comments on the return of Arturo’s Chilean accent after he has spent some time in his home country, and wonders if she might experience something similar were she to return to Montevideo.

While the actual time Auxilio spent in the bathroom at UNAM is revealed to be approximately twelve days, the trauma of the military occupation she witnesses clearly skews her experience. Hours, days, and even years swirl together with her memories leading to sometimes contradictory storylines. One could argue that this altered perception of time calls into question her reliability as a narrator. However, I believe that Bolaño’s choice to unanchor his protagonist from the constraints of linear time frees her to better convey the importance of 1968. Her recollections push the boundaries to encompass the time before and after that year, much as Sarah Waters and Martin Klimke and Joachim Shcarloth do in their discussions of 1968 as a truly transnational phenomenon. The main setting in Amulet—the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor—as a non-linear, non-locational focal point for Auxilio’s stories echoes the events of ‘1968’ as they occurred and rebounded around the globe.

It would be difficult, I think, to see Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet as other than allegory. In a novel whose narrator is both named Auxilio (“help” in Spanish) and claims to be the “mother of Mexican poetry,” it becomes impossible to see the narration as working on a purely “individual” level, or rather, not on a symbolic one. Nonetheless, I would hesitate to categorize Amulet as the type of third-world national allegory that Fredric Jameson wants to define in his “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

In that controversial essay, Jameson asserts that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, even when, or perhaps . . . particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (69).  This statement, I would argue (as others already have), is problematic in a number of ways, but perhaps primarily in its conception of “third-world texts.” In the end, I would probably agree with Aijaz Ahmad’s objections to it: “I shall argue,” Ahmad writes, “that there is no such thing as ‘third-world literature’ which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge.”[1] I think Jameson’s assertion here becomes even more problematic, though, in relation to Latin American literature. In his thesis, for example, Jameson equates “first world” (or not-third-world) with “western” (which is, I think, a slippage, though not an uncommon one). While Jameson would likely categorize the majority of Latin American countries as “third-world” (especially in 1986) – would he also categorize them as “non-western”? Latin America is certainly not “eastern”… although perhaps, in the formulation “the West and the Rest” one might think of Latin America as being part of “the Rest.” These ambiguities only get more complicated when we consider Jameson’s categorization of the novel as “western machinery,” and then consider the complex roles of Spain, Spanish and Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Latin America.

Bolaño’s Amulet, in particular, presents other problems for this (reductive) category of ‘third-world literature’ (including, among other issues, recent contentions that Chile, Bolaños’ country of origin,  has “ascended” to the first world)—but, more importantly, it also seems to disrupt Jameson’s concept of national allegory as it relates to the third world.

Jameson outlines the difference between “allegory” in first world literature and “national allegory” in third-world in four parts, but I’ll just focus on the first two for now:

1. Jameson contends that in the first world cultural tradition, the political is usually recast as psychological. It is common, he offers as an example, to interpret “60s revolts in terms of Oedipal revolts.” In the third world, on the other hand, this formulation is reversed and the psychological (or libidinal investment, as he terms it) is recast as political. Here, his example is of a character’s oral fixation—it’s cannibalism—being recast in terms of a national/social oral fixation (and cannibalism).
2. He then argues that in “first world” tradition of allegory, “figures and personifications” are assumed (even if incorrectly) to be static: they can be “read against some ‘one-to-one’ table of equivalences.” In other words, we see each animal in Orwell’s Animal Farm is symbolic of one “type” of person (or even real person) in the real political world. In third world allegory, though, there isn’t “one-to-one” equivalence. To illustrate, Jameson gives Lu Xun’s novel as an example, where more than one character symbolizes China itself (thus casting China itself as an unstable, multivalent, entity).

To combine these two points—if I am not being too reductive (and I might be)—Jameson is more or less contending that in the third world, all individuals are representative of the nation, whereas in the first world, while the nation can be cast as an individual for the purposes of art, analysis, etc., each first world individual is allowed to be a private entity and isn’t representative of the nation.

(I could say many things about this, but I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent. I will say that in general, I find this formulation frustrating, reductive, … But, I would also mention that I realize that there are several recent defenses of Jameson’s argument—and I haven’t read them, but knowing that they exist makes me think that I am perhaps missing some of the nuances of Jameson’s contention.)

So, according to Jameson, to be a third world national allegory, Amulet’s allegory would need to be multivalent—or rather, various characters would need to represent the nation–and, more importantly, those would need to be related first as individuals with various psychoses, and then, one could cast those characters/their psychoses back on the political sphere to determine the character of the nation.

To me, Amulet doesn’t do that. In fact, I would argue that Amulet’s allegory it fits better into Jameson’s category of first world allegory.

From the start, as mentioned above, Auxilio Lacoutre’s name and role as “the mother of Mexican poetry” sets her up as a symbol. While it’s a bit hard, at first, to pinpoint what exactly she’s symbolizing—Mexico itself? The student movement?—she seems to reveal it more clearly to readers in the fourteenth chapter: “I thought: I am the memory”(174). Auxilio Lacouture, it would seem, is the nation’s 1968, or rather, Mexico’s memory of 1968 and its student movement.

Indeed, like a memory, perhaps what is most noticeably/immediately strange about Auxilio is her relationship with time; by the second page, she’s already unsure of her arrival year in Mexico. It soon seems clear to the reader that she holds 1968 as a sort of ground zero. That “ground zero”, though, is constructed by future events—or rather, the future shapes the memory of 1968. But the past also overlaps with 1968, or spans out from there, so that the past and the future happen at the same time in the memory of 1968. So, for and in Auxilio, future/past/present become indistinguishable. Auxilio, or the memory, is, as Martin Klimke notes in thinking about the memory/legacy of 1968, “in a constant state of transformation”; “previously coherent forms of group memory have now been substituted by locations of memory with no particular hierarchical or narrative order”(18).

Other connections seem to come out of the woodwork: By the early 70s, Auxilio has, like the student movement, and/or the memory, lost her teeth. She covers her mouth when she speaks, conjuring the image of Mexican student protesters with tape over their mouths: “I covered my depleted mouth with the palm of my hand,” she writes, “a gesture that…was taken up and imitated in certain circles.” Indeed, her next statement, “I lost my teeth but not my sense of propriety”(33), evokes Claire Brewster’s narrative of the September 1968 silent student march: “their silence was a protest against the lack of public dialogue, and to show the students’ discipline in contrast to the violence used against them” (153). Auxilio’s life takes place at night. Her own narrative is inextricable from her interaction with poets. Auxilio—the mother of Mexican poetry—later attends “the birth of History.” And finally, finally, Tlatelolco’s presence/memory enters Auxilio’s narrative (though not by name), as she sees/hears “the children, the young people…singing and heading for the abyss” (183).

Thus, in the end, I would argue that Mexico’s nationhood—or more specifically, the Mexico’s social/political memory of 1968—is recast in terms of a narrator’s psychoses… and not vice versa. The nation is cast as an individual, while the individual only really ever exists in the novel as a symbol of the nation.

Frederick Jameson´s article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, offers a different perspective that expands our understanding of transnationalism, contributing to some of the debates held in our class. More specifically, Jameson interrogates how Western thought has been determined by the fundamental division between the public sphere and the private realm, a dichotomy that has been extensively studied in a number of different fields. For example, Susan Bordo draws on Carlos Guillen to support the argument that during the Renaissance, European culture “became interiorized”, bringing about the proliferation of oppositions, including divisions “between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between self and world” (45).  Jameson focuses on the radical split between public and private and the way this separation distinguishes Western thought from “third-world” texts, particularly literary texts.

I would like to argue that Jameson´s illustration of the epistemological distinction between the private and the public spheres through his allusion to two of the most influential thinkers of our time -Marx and Freud- serves us as a staring point in order to examine the different approaches we have seen so far in our class. For example, while Bhabha´s central concepts are strongly influenced by psychoanalytical theories, Appadurai or Appiah are mainly concerned with the psychological dimension, as well as the different ways in which individuals are affected by transnational processes. However, I consider that in some cases, their emphasis on the psychological causes them to overlook a materialist analysis that could take into account the impact of external forces. On the other hand, Ong´s Flexible Citizenship aims to combine a Foucaltian approach that pays attention to the specific power contexts that enable certain practices and imaginings.

Jameson attempts to bridge this epistemological breach through his theory of a third-world literature, which according to him, provides us with a breakout from Western binaries. As an example of how theory can become more inclusive when dualisms try to be overcome he mentions the “cultural phenomenon of subalternity” as theorised by Gramsci: “not in that sense a psychological matter, although it governs psychologies … When a psychic structure is objectively determined by the economic and political relationships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a baleful and crippling residual effect” (76).  In this particular example, we can see how psychological forces cannot be separated from external elements. Although this is not a new thing, Jameson gives a step further when he suggests that this awareness is more visibly manifested in third-world literature.

In other words, third-world literature, as well as third-world intellectuals, merge theory and practice, conceiving literature as a political act. In this sense, Amuleto can be read as an excellent instance of Jameson´s concept of the allegorical. But not only Amuleto, I also consider that to some extent Open City blurs the lines between fiction and epistemology, art and politics, turning literature into a political act. “third-world national allegories are conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective relationships of politics to libidinal dynamics” (80). The historical awareness  exhibited by these literary works characterises “third-world” literature, at the same time that distinguishes them from Western narratives. Jameson refers to their situational consciousness and how that cannot be separated from the collective, and, as a consequence, from politics. “Third world must be situational and materialist despite itself. And this is finally which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture” (84).

The allegory he uses to parallel Western and third world literature to Hegel´s Master-Slave relation summarises his convincing argument about third-world writers not being able to escape the “nightmare of history” -as it is obvious in Cole and Bolaño´s novel-.This impossibility or reluctance to ignore material circumstances provides them with a larger vision that reminded me in certain ways of Sandra Harding´s idea of the “epistemic privilege”. As Jameson claims, “only the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is precisely to that that he is condemned” (85).  Despite Jameson´s important contribution, his idea of a “third-world literature” is quite problematic, for even if it is acknowledged that these properties emerge from different historical circumstances, I still feel that there is a certain degree of essentialisation as far as his thesis of the so-called “third-world literature” is concerned.

Bordo, Susan . “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought”. Signs 11 (31). pp.  439-456, 1986.

What better sum of the traveling and crossing of boundaries of ideologies and political upheavals in Latin America than Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet? The hypotheses for understanding the Latin American 1960s are many and simplicity is out of the spectrum of possibilities, so let’s propose an idea or two.

In early 1960s a left-wing guerrilla was founded in Uruguay under the name of Tuparamos or Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Movement). Latin America was under siege by the most violent military dictatorships in its history: Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in Dominican Republic, the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Juan Domingo Perón (followed by the Revolución Libertadora or Liberating Revolution) in Argentina and Alfredo Stroesssner Matiauda in Paraguay, just to name a few, all of which would directly contribute to the literary genre called Novela del dictador or Dictator novel.

The Tupamaros was an urban guerrilla that robbed banks and distributed the goods among the poor in Montevideo but soon was repressed by the Uruguayan government as many of its members identified themselves very closely with the Cuban Revolution and its leader Fidel Castro.

The two possible countries for suspicious people seeking exile in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America were either Venezuela (perhaps the richest country at the time in South America due to its oil production) or Mexico, which then lived its own version of a dictatorship under PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and repressed any objection to its political hegemony. However, it inexplicably embraced a great number of left-wing intellectuals like Luis Cernuda and Gabriel García Márquez, among others.

But Venezuela’s president, Rómulo Betancourt was emphatic in blocking any Cuban intervention in his country and publicly said: «Tell Fidel Castro, that when Venezuela needed liberators, she did not import them, she birthed them». So Mexico became the best option for dissidents to escape repression and possible torture in his or her country.

Roberto Bolaño’s protagonist, Auxilio Lacouture, arrives in Mexico City in 1967 (though she does not clearly remember the exact year), just around the time when members of Tupamaro where heavily persecuted in Uruguay. Could she had been a member or at least sympathized with the guerrilla movement? The possibilities are high as she empathizes with the student movement in Mexico. When referring to the massacre in Tlatelolco she affirmatively says: «¡Ese nombre que quede en nuestra memoria para siempre!» («Let that name remain in our memory forever!») (28).

Hidden in the restrooms of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Auxilio Lacouture witnesses the army entering the campus by force on September 18^th 1968, violating the Mexican Constitution, an act the she inextricably associates with the massacre that would take place a few days later on October 2^nd in Tlatelolco. This memory becomes a leitmotif throughout the novel and plays a central role in the intersections of time and spaces seen in the novel.

In remembering the events, she overlaps different years and events saying that «El año 68 se convirtió en el año 64 y en el año 60 y en el año 56. Y también se convirtió en el año 70 y en el año 73 y en el año 75 y 76» («The year 68 became the year 64 and the year 60 and the year 56. And it also became the year 1970 and the year 73 and the year 75 and 76»).

In Latin American history 1964 was the year that the Tupamaros gained notoriety as a guerrilla and political movement in Uruguay. It was also the time in which the American Daniel Mitrione introduced systematic torture under the guidance of U.S. State Department in Uruguay); 1956 was the year that Colombian dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinillas killed an unknown number of people at the Plaza de Toros; 1970 was also the year that Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera raided the Central University of Venezuela to remove Venezuelan guerrilla leaders who became enthusiastic with Castro’s ideals, so not only does Auxilio Lacouture witnesses the repressions that took place in previous years but also becomes a kind of prophet of later massacres that would take place in Latin America

1973 in the year that Pinochet overthrew the socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile (and here we must not forget that although Auxilio Lacouture is from Uruguay her creator, that is, Roberto Bolaño is from Chile and that hidden in the restrooms of the university she foresees that horror that will take place at the National Stadium of Santiago where Pinochet gathered thousands of people and killed many, including the famous songwriter Víctor Jara). More so, Auxilio Lacouture foresees the brutal dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, which started as a coup de’état that deposed Isabel Martínez de Perón, in which, according to human rights groups 30,000 people «disappeared», including the son and pregnant daughter-in-law of world renowned poet Juan Gelman, who sought political asylum in Mexico.

In the eyes of Auxilio Lacouture the restrooms of the National Autonomous University of Mexico became the transnational epicenter of clashing ideologies that were crossing boundaries in a continent then divided between the extreme right and the extreme left.

Roberto Bolano’s Amulet certainly transcends the world of transnational spatiality.  Although this book takes place within almost exclusively Spanish-speaking communities, the fact that many instances of language barriers arise within these communities of Uruguayan, Mexican, Spanish, and Chilean individuals indicates the fact that, even within the same language, the problematic “untranslatability” still arises and impedes cross-cultural connection.

When Auxilio Lacouture first explains her background as a Uruguayan self-exile in Mexico City, she says, “…I come from Montevideo—although when I get nostalgic, when homesickness wells up and overwhelms me, I say I’m a Charrúa, which is more or less the same thing, though not exactly, and it confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans too” which reinforces the idea of her identity as a member of an imagined community in the sense that Charrúa, as an identity, only exists within the imaginations of a very select group of Spanish-speaking individuals (2). The fact that this word not only “confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans” and that it is “more or less the same thing” as someone who comes from Montevideo can only manifest itself as doubt and confusion for a reader who is not also from Montevideo, Uruguay.

This self-identification confirms that A) a non-Uruguayan, even a Spanish-speaking reader cannot completely comprehend her meaning nor her identity and B) that the untranslatability of the niche of this Uruguayan slang where Auxilio finds her identity, therefore impedes our understanding of her as a character.  I believe that Bolaño purposely elects to maintain this untranslatable word in his novel exactly because it cannot be translated.  If Auxilio were to say that she is more or less from Montevideo or even this sentence’s translation in Spanish (in the original text), the reader would create a false intimacy and false comprehension of Auxilio’s identity.  The fact that this text was originally written in Spanish only furthers the idea of the untranslatable, as, even in its native language this word is marginalized, much like Auxilio herself.

Auxilio Lacouture’s status as a Uruguayan immigrant is only the first in a myriad of degrees of separation that exist between her transnational identity and the reader’s comprehension of it.  Auxilio’s frequent references to herself—to her greying blond hair, to her blue eyes—create a giant question mark in the reader’s mind in regard to her age and her ethnicity, further complicating her identification.  For me, gender and nationality were also elusive.  The name Auxilio was unfamiliar to me and the fact that its final letter is an “o” led me to believe that she was a male character for the first few pages of the novel.  Auxilio’s surname only complicates matters of her identification, as, although she says she “comes from Montevideo,” Lacouture is a traditionally French name, which, therefore, lends yet another dimension to Auxilio’s already muddled though thoroughly transnational identity.

Auxilio’s nomadic existence, her close bonds with the male Spanish poets in Mexico City, and her masculine name bestow on her a certain amount of gender androgyny as well.  When coupled with her mysterious age which is never indicated clearly but given somewhat contradictory references—she has greying hair but lives a nomadic life usually undertaken by youth and she hangs out at the university—this androgyny creates a cloud of ambiguity that, as a reader, I was not able to penetrate throughout the rest of the book.

Whether he does so accidentally or intentionally, Bolaño’s creation of Auxilio as a transnational and otherwise diversified protagonist seems almost too appropriate in such an intercultural and global narrative.  Bolaño, as a male Chilean author, writing a book about a Uruguayan woman with a French surname living in Mexico City but spending the majority of her time with illustrious Spanish poets is also extremely reminiscent of Teju Cole’s novel, Open City.  Like Julius, Auxilio lives a marginalized existence as someone who seems to exist on the border of every identity: she is neither young nor old, neither nomad nor citizen, neither overtly gendered to be masculine nor feminine and her story, like Julius’, exists more as the manifestation of others’ stories than her own.  As Julius recounts the stories of his past, of his parents, neighbors, and international acquaintances as well as 9/11, terrorism, and war, Auxilio talks more about the Spanish poets than herself and, ultimately, her story becomes the voice for the 1968 student massacres in Mexico.

Even though they are both novels, both Open City and Amulet have contained a lot of this genre hybridization where the author represents real events—9/11, the student massacres, etc.—through a fictional, androgynous, almost neutral narrative and I wonder if this sort of hybridization will become more and more popular as the world grows in its transnationalism.

The concepts of temporality and spatiality reoccur throughout Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. Both issues arise in the initial pages of the text, when the narrator writes, “I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me” (2). As Auxilio introduces herself, immediately the reader is introduced simultaneously to transnationalism, seeing as she is from another country and now lives in Mexico. “My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I am Urugayan—I come from Montevideo—although when I get nostalgic…I say I’m a Charrúa…and it confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans too” (2). This confusion surrounding time and space engages the reader at the very commencement of the novel, demonstrating perhaps the lack of importance of specificity in regards to the when and where about which people are so often concerned, as well as the dynamic, innovative, and unusual structure to the text. While utilizing the first person is considered “normal” to texts, the narrator subverts this norm by expressing her thoughts in a manner more akin to a stream of consciousness, and later, expressing dialogue without quotation marks (as we saw in Cole’s Open City).

The narrator begins to explain her involvement in the events of 1968 on page 21, as she sits in the bathroom in the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Yet after realizing the chaos that was occurring outside of the restroom, Auxilio specifically notes that “five seconds later, someone, maybe the son of a b**** who had spoken before, opened the door of the bathroom and came in” (27). So at this point, time and even space as Auxilio (“I estimate that I must have spent about three hours sitting there” (31)) sits in the stall are clearly marked for the reader; however, her time remaining in the bathroom becomes speculative. “Time folded and unfolded itself like a dream” (32). Auxilio’s memories (if the reader can be assured of the authenticity of said memories since she mentions over and over her confusion regarding them) become skewed, changing from the 60’s to 1956 to the 1970’s, and she leaves the reader hanging in the balance of the time spent in the bathroom, as she moves her narrative along, changing in time and space to discuss her specific rendezvous with Arturo Belano at the Encrucijada Veracruzana in 1970.

The reader is returned to that unspecified amount of time, thus a vague temporality, spent in the bathroom (here, a place firmly entrenched in spatiality) in September 1968, this time through the narrator’s own personal transnational lens: “I thought about those Asians crossing the Bering Strait, I thought about the solitude of America, I thought about how strange it is to emigrate eastward rather than westward” (54). Auxilio’s transnational lens (here, her affinity for British poets) reappears in her thoughts concerning poets, those who were teachers and pupils and those who didn’t live to become either. “I thought about the dead poets, like Darío and Huidobro, and about all the encounters that never occurred. The truth is that our history is full of encounters that never occurred. We didn’t have our Pound or our Yeats; we had Huidobro and Darío instead” (63).

Auxilio also touches on the idea of transnationalism in a paragraph discussing Mexico City’s poets’ voices. “No one could understand those voices, which were saying: We’re not from this part of Mexico City, we come from the subway, the underworld, the sewers, we live in the darkest, dirtiest places…” (78). Clearly, this vision of transnationalism does involve crossing countries’ borders, but rather focuses on the idea of a completely different culture of people (poets) living within Mexico City, explicitly different from the city’s other citizens.

Returning again to the concepts of temporality and spatiality, Auxilio’s use of the word “frozen” seems to represent a sort of “time standing still” situation. “The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds” (105). In taking apart the phrase, the reader recognizes aspects of time and space, i.e. “everyday” as something temporal, “frozen” in regards to space, and also “transparency,” which relates again to spatiality in that the everyday may exist, but if it’s transparent, ergo no one can see it, is it truly there? Does it, in fact, belong in the genre of spatiality? This confusion regarding space and time arises yet again in Auxilio’s thought process later on. “And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still…” (126). While time here can once again be “frozen,” as noted before (an impossible characteristic of temporality), it is called an “image.” An image can be interpreted as a picture or a photo, and if viewed as such, the image therefore becomes a concrete object, thus rooted in the concept of spatiality.

In his novel, Open City, Teju Cole conveys temporality–through both its form and its content–as an impersonal, indifferent, multi-directional, volatile force against which people struggle to maintain themselves.  Time is reflected as a dynamic expanse, comprised of material and reflected layers—the earth and it’s weather patterns, man-made structures, sound, memory, text, stories, and so on. These layers and reflections are constantly shifting; at any moment, in any space, or mind, a sudden fissure may break open, allowing the earth below to surge upward and overtake the surface. Although the newly emerging matter has always been there, supporting the surface, its new position alters the entire landscape. People have to navigate this unstable expanse. Some times, some people can sense a fissure—a blatant presentation of simultaneity.  They take note of shifts.  Other people, at other times, misinterpret them, or fail to notice them at all.  Apart from brief moments, or at least perceived experiences of a ‘bird’s eye view’ of this expanse, people are deeply and irretractably immersed in the landscape. Above, around, and within this expanse, with its moving people, is the inhuman, the elements—the sky, the cosmos, water, and life force.  It continues on, indifferent, yet directly impacting the traversal of people over the expanse.

Here, I will articulate four layers of the novel upon which the reader might ‘stand.’ Hopefully, in doing so, I will reflect how Cole’s volatile, simultaneous, histories cause the reader to lose her footing almost as soon as it is assumed to be gained.

1. Un-human Temporality

Throughout the novel, the narrator, Julius, directs the reader’s attention to un-human forces. These forces not only impact people, but influence their motions, shape what is perceive and how it is perceived. What is more, this un-human influence run so deeply that the motions of humanity itself, are reflected as an other-than-human mechanism.  In reference to cosmic and natural elements, such as the time of day, the season or the weather, Julius uses descriptions such as “unresponsive night” (54) and the “indifferent winter” (183).  In contrast to the impervious elements, the decisions and actions of Julius and his general trajectory, are highly responsive to those elements, in return.  Just as much, if not more,than his own mood or preference, the rain, wind, light and dark drive him from one street or interior to the next.  He takes note of these influences often.  In the Spring he writes, “I have noticed how much the light affects my ability to socialize” (193).  Recounting his father’s funeral, he remembers the impact of the stifling hot weather (224).  Julius is also influenced by people. He is repelled away by the gallery security guard and compelled toward others, such as the Czech woman in Brussels. Julius seems at times, to mindlessly float along these capricious paths motivated by external influences.  At others, he seems to do so with an accute awareness: “how petty seemed to me the human condition…this endless being tossed about like a cloud” (146). In one moment, as he lay in an ally, having been brutally beaten and mugged, the materiality of temporality, became viciously clear: “As I lay there, time became material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled, like a stain” (212). As the reader follows this narrator, who merges, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes jarringly, through others voices and other times, the novel begins “spreading…like a stain.” This spreading, upward and across, creates the sense for the reader, that she trapped in the limited perspective of a person deeply immersed.

2. Led by the Senses: Layers of Sound

Woven throughout Open City, the perceptions and actions of weather-affected human-machines are also described as being dependent on the senses. One of the senses of focus is the auditory. The novel is brimming with competing noise—the radio, the clatter of a briefcase, the symphony, and the rain on the roof.  These noises, like the temporal landscape, approach and recede, combine and separate or repulse or attract.  Even the absence of noise, seems at one moment, to be crippling, and at another, suggestive of some sort of posthuman connection.  Depending on a person’s situation, predisposition, preference, and the circumstance of that very minute, he/she will tune in or tune out, respond or not respond, to sound.  Competing noises in this “open city” sound uncertain, ethereal conflicts.

When Julius hears the chant of protestors, speaking out against violence against women, he closes the window (24).  But, as if their cries had drawn him into his past, beckoning his reach, he calls his ex-girlfriend. Her voice, in contrast with the self-assertion of the protesters, is “strained,” singular and distant. At moments like these Julius seems to be feeling something, but it is not clearly articulated to the reader, or perhaps, to himself.  At other moments, most specifically in relation to music, sound both constructs his mood in one sense, and shelters him from embedded emotion, in another.  Toward the beginning of the novel, Julius’ reaction to music playing overhead at a record store, further immerses him into his perceived present, fostering connections and pathways: “…every detail had somehow become significant…somehow seemed a part that intricate musical world” (18).  Yet toward the novel’s end, in the present tense, he has an emotional response to a symphony that seems to draw him out and up.  Over the world.  Both of these responses, nevertheless, inspire a response.  Yet when faced with words of conflict, such as Moji’s rape accusation, he responds not only with external silence, but with internal silence as well. He says and writes nothing.  Not to her.  Not to the reader.  Instead he leads into chatter about Camus (246), to fill the silence.

3. Perceived Volition of Humans across Layers

Within the novel, we are alerted to how people select–sometimes with intention, but most other times via causes outside of their control–how they will negotiate time.  People write papers, books, tell stories, post words, and name word. Julius tells his reader, “Names matter.  Everything has a name” (233).  It is difficult to know if Julius is critical of this “matter,” or is indifferently naming it as a reality. There is a moment wherein he thinks that the human forced resolve to self-knowledge, or to put it in his words, to “articulate ourselves to ourselves,” is “perhaps…what we mean by sanity” (243).  And in the same way that donors donate to put their names on buildings, to be not only named, but named as heroic, Julius suggests that sane, articulate, people must make themselves the heroic protagonist of their own story, not only for themselves, but for others. To earn their own trust and the trust of others, or, the “sympathy of an audience” who is “ready to believe the best about us” (243).  Julius successfully earns his own trust; he assesses himself as “hewed close to the good.”  And he may have successfully earned the trust of his reader. He narrates this concept of sanity and self-heroism right before (potentially) violating the reader’s trust by recounting Moji’s rape story.

The reader cannot know if her story is true. We know nothing, but that Julius has nothing to say. That being said, suddenly moments in previous chapters emerge in our memory, reshaping how we interpret the present.  The reader is becoming one of the people being tossed around through the pages. As the humans being depicted lose their place as the master of the universe, the reader finds it difficult to project blame. Because, In which direction would it be launched? Julius, and the “open city” are always on the move.  And each place and moment alters perspective.  Julius goes from the 3^rd floor of the professor, to the subway below ground to M’s apartment on the 29^th floor.  But even within one level, the experience changes, from on train to another, from one day to the next.  The heterogeneity not only spreads, but also collapses. The narrator describes the layers of the city.  He uncovers time past, that is still in the present, only lying, unacknowledged, below.  Time passed also rises above, layers of history piled high, in the midst of swarming people too caught up in their perceived present to notice: “the grand columns and arches irrelevant to the fatigued immigrants who rarely raised their heads to look above street level” (235).

The human memory is also presented as unreliable and unpredictable–unplaceable. In almost the same manner that one cannot predict how the weather will change history, the human cannot know within which time he/she is functioning.  In a memory, a launch into a past that is thrust upon the narrator, and his reader, we are brought to his mother’s response to her husband’s funeral.  Within that memory the reader is launched into her memory, which recedes further and further.  She speaks in “a faraway voice, because it could not talk about the death that had just shattered us, had begun to describe long-ago things” (79).  Although circumstances can uncover hidden pasts, like an ATM number, it can also veil them, like the rape of a friend’s young sister (167).  Temporality becomes dependent on what humans can access, what they are willing to access. Yet, how can one access a moment in time, when time is in constant simultaneous motion?  Different pasts suddenly collide, like the “echo” of Moji and Nadège: “two individuals separated in time and vibrating on a singular frequency” (61). Julius critiques the view that time is a continuum, saying that “The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float” (155).  And suddenly all of these reflections and assertions of the past that creates the present, are mere reflections of nothingness: “the world doubled in on itself.  I could no longer tell where the tangible universe ended and the reflected one began” (192).

The author simulates this folding over in time, its confusion, by using dialogue without quotations, that merge into the dialogue of others as well as non-spoken thought.  How could these voices be clearly distinguished? They are layers of reflection, with an absent author, putting the words of fictional characters into the mouth of another fictional narrator, who dictates to an unknown reader.  How is the reader to designate one, true voice or story?  Perhaps she shouldn’t.

4. The Ephemerality and/or Fiction of Seeing from the Outside

There are brief glimpse in the novel of an outside, an apartness from the volatile landscape.  If not homogenous, or overarching, it is a frictionless calm and is something that Julius seems to privilege. Throughout the narrative, Julius expressed enjoyment in high vantage points, where he can “take in, in a single glance, the dwellings of millions” (240).  Toward the end of the novel, after Julius begins speaking in his present, he describes a brief moment of wherein he experiences a sense of the vastness and depths of history.  This experience–created by a combination of the emotional high from hearing a symphony, the bodily rush of being high up on a fire escape and having an uncommonly clear view of a starry sky– lead Julius to understand that, despite his inability to perceive them all, there was a vast expanse simultaneously existing stars: “But in the dark spaces between the dead, shining stars were stars I could not see, stars that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices” (256). Cosmic matter and human history merge together, and the reader is ready for the novel to articulate connection, finality.  But, the moment is quickly lost: “I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away” (257). Julius looses, once again, his sense of proximity. And the reader is bellied a fastened, stabilizing summation of the story.  Because it simply cannot be.

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The above article appeared in the German Bildzeitung on October 22^nd, 1967, with the headline translating roughly to ‘Eggs against Demonstrators’. The supporting image shows the snapshot of a student protest occurring in the United States. As can be expected from any sensation-seeking tabloid, the global protest phenomenon was described as an “army of opposition… extending to the capital of the United States (Washington D.C.).” It continues to list (mostly peaceful) student demonstrations in cities such as Munich, Paris, Oslo, and Amsterdam.

I specifically chose the above article in an attempt to visually portray that both benefits and limitations can be found in viewing the events of 1968 as a transnational occurrence. After the many discussions we have had thus far on notions of transnationalism, I immediately felt a strong opposition to the thought of historicizing the events that occurred in 1968 into the scope of a single year. Starting with the stark contrast that several scholars place between transnationalism and the advent of globalization, in addition to the heated debate of the role that the past should or should not have in examining the contemporary and beyond, I have come to an understanding of the term ‘transnational’ that includes broad historical contexts and narratives that span across real and imagined borders.

In 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism, Klimke and Scharloth speak in support of situating the events of this year within the historical framework that led up to what we now collectively call 1968. Above all, they make a valid point in arguing that “The roots of many of these movements reach back to the beginning of the 1960s and the previous decade.” In their opinion, the year 1968 “thus stands as a metaphor used to capture the broad history of European protest and activism “ (Klimke and Scharloth 3). I absolutely agree with positioning these events within a broader historical context; one that shaped the imagination and agency of protestors for years prior. However, a considerable fault can be found in their focus on events that unraveled exclusively in Europe. While historical context plays a large role in understanding the transnational, the movement of ideas across borders may hold the same, if not greater, valence. Klimke and Scharloth do support a semi-transnational framework by mentioning that “Mediated exchange between student organizations from all over Europe lead to a permanent diffusion of ideas (Klimke and Scharloth 4).” However, how ‘transnational’ can such an assumption be without considering the diffusion of such ideas beyond European borders? While the introduction of the internet and rise of social media strongly facilitate imagination and collective identity across borders in the 21^st century, such an exchange is also made possible and demonstrated in 1968 through means of media such as the Bildzeitung. It is crucial to remember that ideas move back and forth between borders fluidly, creating a productive exchange. So just as the German readers of the Bildzeitung gained a sense of transnational unity from the reports of protestors across the globe, consumers of media outside of Europe gained the same sense of solidarity by their consumption of media coverage about the European movement.

While considering 1968 as a sole temporal standpoint has proved problematic as situated above, it cannot be denied that focusing solely on the year 1968 in regards to transnationalism reaps the benefit of giving agency to a collective movement of people sharing similar perspectives. While the idea of agency is not always parallel to choice, these movements and protests transcended borders by standing in a simultaneous opposition to differing oppression. The transnational reality of this movement was further enhanced by what Appadurai coined as the ‘mediascape’. In this context, the above article from the Bildzeitung demonstrates the ability of the media to transform our imagination of reality. The main actors during the 1968 movements found strength in seeing and thus the imagining of social lives and social projects across the Atlantic. Witnessing these other ‘elsewheres’ created a sense of community in protesting injustices on a transnational scale. In Revisiting the Revolution: 1968 in Transnational Cultural Memory, Klimke describes the result of this collective imagination as giving “rise to a collective identity based on political orientation, socio-cultural allegiance and the vaguely defined image of generational cohort” (Klimke 32). Through circulation of these mediascapes, we thus see the imagining and creation of an identity that stands in solidarity against oppression, an identity that transcends both borders and time.

To summarize, it becomes apparent that regarding 1968 as a temporal standpoint in a transnational framework holds both benefits and limitations. The prominence of the year 1968 cannot displace the fact that many vital events occurred prior to, and led up to, the culminating key movements. However, the focus on the events of 1968 also gives this movement an unprecedented agency by understanding how the exchange of ideas across transnational borders facilitated a collective imagination of opposition.

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*For those that may be interested in German media coverage of 1968 events, Axel Springer published a searchable database that includes media coverage, comments, letters to the editor, political cartoons, reports, and interviews from 1966 to 1968. You can find it here.

            For one who studies France, the events of 1968 certainly hold a place of prominence.  However, and I may be exposing a bit of historical ignorance in admitting this, it has been very interesting to learn the extent to which the 68 protests spread beyond France, beyond Europe, and the similarities and differences that exist in the way in which the spirit of 68 manifested itself.  As a moment of global protest, it is understandable why this year holds such an appeal in transnational studies.  Appadurai’s Modernity at Large excitedly discusses the beginning of a transnational change becoming possible due to advances in mass media technologies, but this report comes nearly thirty years following the events of 68.  These protests, and the cultural, economic and political shifts that they provoked, occurred in a greatly different landscape for technology and media.  The spirit of 68 also did not necessarily involve the movement of any people in particular, nor was it an ideology spread through a specific intellectual work.  The spread of protests in 68 was of a very immaterial nature, and thus represents an intangible transnational process.  To study the events of 68 is to analyze a much less visible transnational phenomenon than people crossing borders or using the Internet to speak to one another.  1968 was a very visible moment, not dependent on any particular location, people, or means of communication, but I believe its true value is symbolic.  1968 is the representation of a diffuse and broadly applicable moment of transnationalism.

That the year 1968 is so evocative of rebellion and protest for so many people, regardless of national or cultural boundaries, is in itself reason to consider what it adds to the idea of transnationalism.  As Martin Klimke notes in Revisiting the Revolution, the general memory of 68 is something that goes beyond borders.  He notes “…there is, in addition to our national recollections, also a transnational pool of memories.  In fact, icons, images, references, and experiences associated with ‘1968’ have been circulating across national borders ever since this turbulent decade.  They have created a loose, but nonetheless potent generational identity as well as a firm imprint in popular culture that transcends national boundaries (27).”  I believe it is fair to say that 1968 is a broadly shared memory held by people regardless of location, and even by those who were not there.  However, despite the broad spread of events in 1968, not all manifestations of 1968 were reacting to the same thing, or working towards the same goal.  In Reading Mexico 1968, the author cites a fictionalized German participant from Luis González de Alba’s Los días y los años who states that the demands of a Mexican student participating in a protest in the year has demands that are, to the German, incomprehensible (303).  The effects of 68 were broad, and are held by a great variety of people, but care must be taken when analyzing it so as not to take the great deal of similarities as indication that 1968 represented a unified vision.

Another potential hurdle in choosing one year to be representative of a transnational process is coming to terms with the fact that a broad phenomenon cannot sit so neatly in a well-defined spatial and temporal context.  Though 68 is the emblem of national and transnational protest in the 1960s, it cannot be removed from the context of what occurs before and after.  In 1968 in Europe, Klimke and Scharloth note the metaphorical significance of 1968: “The roots of many of these movements reach back to the beginning of the 1960s and the previous decade, making a strong case for extending the general periodization to the ‘long 1960s,’ dating roughly from 1956 to 1977.  In this book, ‘1968’ thus stands as a metaphor used to capture the broad history of European protests and activism… (3).”  Sarah Waters similarly notes the strength of 68 being applied more metaphorically: “Thus, recent comparative studies use a wide historical lens, taking 1968 as a symbol for a far larger moment in time (Introduction: 1968 in Memory and Place 2).”  The use of a specific year like 68 in analyzing a transnational phenomenon should thus be done carefully, with more regard to a defining moment in a larger process rather than a specific moment that exists in a vacuum.

The interest in 68 is important for the study of transnational processes.  It shows that something as abstract as the idea of protest can spread through national boundaries, and can do so without Twitter or Skype to facilitate communication.  It shows that transnational movement is not dependent on the current mass media landscape.  It has existed, continues to exist and presumably will continue to evolve and manifest itself.  However, there are pitfalls in limiting the study of transnationalism to such a specific time.  As noted, care must be taken to avoid generalizations.  Though 1968 was defined by global student protests, what these students were protesting for is not at all uniform.  Nor is 1968 a specific moment that exists out of time.  It is situated in a much longer history of rebellion and protest, and it is important to consider it in context of what lead to it and what changes it caused.  Still, for the study of something as broad, diffuse and potentially transparent as transnationalism, I believe that there is value in using specific emblematic moments of change.