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.