I remember reviewing the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and seeing that there was only one novel that I had previously read and analyzed in a seminar about trauma and memory from Mexico, 1968. Therefore, Amulet was very familiar to me but it became unfamiliar when I saw it in this transnational seminar. I could not understand why this novel was transnational because I read and studied it as part of the Culture, Politics and Memory of Mexico. Therefore, in my mind, there was a relation to the trauma perspective and how to define Mexican history and the present. These were some of the most important points for the readings in that seminar–and I thought the only ones–, however I did not find the connection with the transnational idea, other than that the author was Chilean. My first approach to seeing the novel as global happened after reading Global Matters by Paul Jay. The fact that Jay argues in his novel that transnational and global begin when the Eurocentric approach to literature changes to minority and postcolonial ones made me think of Amulet again. However, in the same book, there were some theorists like Said who pointed out the problems to define globalization and its impact with national literatures. At this point, there was a month left to read the novel from a transnational point of view, but I started thinking, perhaps, Amulet was a “hybrid” novel and that it would be possible to study it as the trauma and hallucinations of Auxilio like a national book that tells the world what happened in 1968, and also as a transnational novel.
Perspepolis and Kraniauskas´article also gave me some clues about transnationalism and globalization and after remembering how relevant the sixties were for the world– the murder of Martin Luther King and president Kennedy, the French May…–, I started thinking of these events in terms of their visibility and dissemination to the world and thus, my mind changed from a national to a transnational idea. Mostly, whereas watching the video in class of the two black championship men with their fist raised up in the Olympic Games and discussing in the seminar all the events that taking place in the world in the 60s, I realized that the Mexican movement can be understood as more than a traumatic event for Mexicans. It seems like the rest of the world understood this student protest as a fight for their rights.
Nevertheless, by the middle of October, I had the opportunity to talk about the Mexican movement with Professor Aguilar Mora, one of the Mexican witnesses of the movement of ‘68 and I asked him if he realized how important and global the protest movement was for the world at that moment. He was not sure how to answer me and after a few minutes, he told me: “What do you think? Was it global for you?” I said “yes” because it was a reference for other events around the world, and then, he thought, “Ok, maybe you are right but I did not think about it that way. I was there December the 2nd and then I went to France and I heard nothing about it from there on. I did not know this event went beyond Mexico.” These words impacted me a lot because I had thought like he did at the beginning this transnational seminar: “The student movement was in 1968 and the novels about it are written by telling how to narrate the trauma and give voice to the Mexican people themselves. These kind of novels are total novels because they deal with issues in Mexico, but have nothing to do with transnationalism”, I thought.
However, Amulet was studied at the end of October and I had all of these feelings, thoughts and information in my mind after reading the transnational articles and books: Open City, Borderlands/ La Frontera, Bhabha´s, Appadurai´s, and Jay´s articles… I faced Amulet with new “eyes”, maybe transnational one, and while I was rereading the novel, I did not focus on the plot but the facts which make it transnational: Auxilio was an Uruguayan exile, Elena´s boyfriend was Italian, and some of the poets Auxilio met were from different parts of the world. When I read the novel for the first time I did not even think of Auxilio´s origin but her life as a servant of an important writer, her relationships, when she was trapped in the bathroom on the fourth floor, her hallucinations….This time, however, I read it differently and I noticed all of those transnational nuances, and the fact that a Chilean is the author of the novel makes much more sense for me from a transnational perspective.
Transnationalism embraces many concepts like hybridity, frontiers, in-betweeness, migration, agency, capitalism…and all of them already helped me when re-reading Amulet and reading another novel called Los traductores del viento, (The translators of the wind) from a transnational point of view. That is why I am sure this perspective will help me also in the future. From the cultural view, I would like to add that I also rethought the massacre of Mexico ‘68 this year, unfortunately, with the new massacre in Iguala, Mexico. This time, however, it is different because 1968 “awoke the world,” and nowadays the Mexicans manifested and looked for guilty parties, some of whom are already in jail. Being visible in all countries, the whole world condemned the massacre at that point and the transnational events were clearer with protests and demonstrations everywhere, even from the different political parties around the world.
According to Jay, the best literature is that which transcends historical and national barriers. I add that it is also reflected in the other areas like culture and ways of thinking. The study and knowledge of the concepts above let me think differently about literature, culture and life in general and I will take them into account and apply them in my future readings, essays, conferences and teaching.
Like you, Aída, I had read Amulet years ago and thought of it as a purely Mexican novel written by a Chilean author. Reading it, however, in our Transnational Seminar, helped me see the novel in a different way, in which the narrator, the author and the novel itself carry a rather mobile and unfixed cultural baggage that converged in the bathrooms of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As Paul Jay says, the embrace of transnationalism «has productively complicated the national paradigm long dominant in these [literary] fields, transformed the nature of the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of cultural production that take place in liminal spaces between the real and imagined borders». Through the voice of Auxilio Lacouture, Robert Bolaño creates a déjà vu and a foreshadowing of pre and post 1968 Latin American massacres, as seen in the famous phrase of the novel which goes in the following way: «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». Finally, I find very interesting your discussion of the 1968 Mexican student movement with Professor Aguilar Mora whom, being a first- hand spectator, found no resonance of it in France.
I must say, while the notion that 1968 as representative of a global protest movement, or at least the strong ties, influences, and overlapping of different events and phenomena should be rather obvious, I too must admit that my first reading of Amulet in our Mexico 1968 seminar last fall with Professor Long as well as my general approach to that seminar was from a predominantly national perspective. Granted, the course was focused on the events in Mexico in particular, however I made sure to bring in transnational influences such as rock music and global counterculture into my final paper and it still did not fully sink in. My understanding of the sixties in general has greatly expanded after taking this course, and that is mainly due to a new and broadened understanding of the term “transnationalism” itself and many of its implications. Problematizing linear perceptions of time and space has been most intriguing to me through transnationalism as a structure of analysis, not only in regards to Bolaño’s novel but also to many of the other works we have read and that I have read outside the course. The idea of a “transnational aesthetic,” (while I’m honestly still on the fence about what that actually entails or if I fully buy into it), allowed me to rethink Bolaño’s novel from a transnational perspective that went beyond “oh yeah, the author is Chilean writing about Mexico and there are characters from many different places.” While taking any theoretical perspective to the extreme can be counter-productive, I do believe that transnationalism is an extremely useful analytical and critical tool to expand one’s perspective in many different fields.