In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai argues that globalization is a contemporary phenomenon, a rupture from the past and what he calls a «Global Now» enhanced –in part– by recent technological innovations, the eruption of electronic media and what he defines as «new sources and disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds» (3). But can this definition be so totalizing as to impede other theorists to dig back in time and realize that globalization is not an extant episode in history?

This seems to be Paul Jay’s argument. In Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, the English professor advocates for a revision of history and the phenomenon of globalization, and confronts Appadurai’s take on it with other scholars such as Roland Robertson which, in Paul Jay’s words, argues that globalization «predates modernity and has been evolving since at least the fifteenth century» (36). And so he provides the five phases of globalization according to Robertson which consists of the following: «germinal» (1400 – 1750), «incipient» (1750 – 1875), «take-off» (1875 – 1925), «struggle for hegemony» (1925 – 69) and «uncertainty» which, according to Robertson «runs from 1969 to the present» (36).

With this is mind, let us go back to the year 1492, the year in which Spain consolidated itself as the new powerhouse with the discovery of the New Continent and becomes the first global empire in the history of human kind (it gained for itself colonies in all five continents), making Spanish the lingua franca, which eventually would be spoken by one hundred million people.

If globalization is defined as the back and forth of goods and ideas, then we can agree with Robertson and Paul Jay and even argue that the first world encounter with globalization, or the «germinal» stage, takes place when Spain connects the world by means of language and the opening of new routes for the traveling of products such as the cocoa bean, a native seed of Mesoamerica and parts of South America, unknown until then in Europe, and coffee reaches the New Continent from Arabia via Spain.

Literature also had its share in it. Spanish literature begins to be translated in an unprecedented way and we find iconic novels translated almost immediately to other European language such as Amadís de Gaula and La Celestina. But the literary piece that would be most benefited by this germinal stage of globalization would be Cervantes’ Don Quixote, written in 1605 and translated into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612, into French in 1614 by César Oudin, into Italian in 1622 by Lorenzo Franciosini and into German in 1648 by Pasch Basteln.

Prompted to reflect on how the idea of globalization being not a recent phenomenon but one that has been going on since what scholars now call the Early Modern Period, it’s impossible not to see literature, specially literature from the Golden Ages, that is, Spanish literature from the 16^th and 17^th century with different eyes. In those centuries, Spanish letters traveled in an unheard-of velocity and the transnational view helps observe this uniqueness with ample theoretical tools.

Even more: The «take-off» stage, which coincides with the Industrial Revolution, can be seen as the other global moment of Spanish Literature, this time coming from Latin America but greatly influenced by French poetry. Spanish Modernism will not only have a great impact in the now independent colonies but also in Spain in writers such as Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Here we see a triangular communication between France, Latin America and Spain that best describes that traveling of ideas that transnational theorist insist as being a trademark of globalization.

As a student of Spanish Medieval and Golden Age literature it has been revealing to be able to pin down the global phenomena implied in the diffusion and expansion of the Spanish language and its literature through the transnational and global lens. Such tools can help make conjectures as to why such peculiarities took place in two eras that are often seen as distant, unconnected and uncommunicated with the rest of the world. But as Paul Jay sustains, «it is a mistake to approach globalization itself as a contemporary phenomenon and that it makes much more sense to take a historical view in which globalization is dated as beginning in at least the sixteenth century and covering a time span that includes the long histories of imperialism, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism». (3).

If one is impelled to summarize Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill, one can say that it is a metaphor of a society the refuses to grow up and accept the abyss that their parental negligence has created for their children. Mifti, a sixteen year old teenager immersed in a world of drugs and sexual excesses, writes in her diary about what has turned her life into a whirlpool of lavishness: a schizophrenic and destructive mother and her absent father, a well-off artist hardly present in her life. Adrift and neglected by her father and abused by her mother, she experiences the club scene of Berlin which offers Mifti hardcore drugs including cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy, among others.

About her «schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, neurotic, sadistic» mother she adds that «putting up with her corporal punishment was a relatively bearable state of affairs because then our roles were clearly defined and my position was clear-cut: just being the weak one for a change» (172). Mifti even goes far by saying: «I am less than existent in German culture. I’ll just let you know you have your world and you let me have mine» (177).

And so we witness page after page how the lack of care of a generation of parents have pushed their children to immerse themselves in an underground world that seems to be the everyday life of contemporary Berlin. For Mifti, Berlin’s pop culture is the club scene, drugs and sex, but she does not forget to mention what pop culture was for her parents’ generation, references that are made throughout the novel in which we find the names of Bob Dylan, , Madonna, Donnna Summer, Roberta Flack, etc.

If we live in world in which ideas flow back and forth and end up affecting everyone’s lives, there is an immediate antecedent to Mifti, more specifically a character found in the Swedish trilogy Millennium, published in 2005 by the late Stieg Larsson: Lisbeth Salander, who survived a traumatic childhood and was declared incompetent by the Swedish State and is then appointed to Nils Bjurman, the guardian who sodomizes her and is one of the key reasons why she abuses drugs and lives a promiscuous life.

Taking one step back in time and with the strong argument the literature has reached a transnational level that crosses borders, time and space, it is difficult not to mention another antecedent to Hegemann’s novel: Julio Cortázar’s short story «Axolotl», a story that literally let the world know about this Mexican animal unknown in other countries. Here, we find it quite impossible that Helene Hegemann did not hear about Cortázar’s short story particularly because she is the daughter of Carl Hegemann, a well-known dramaturg and Cortazar’s story had been translated into all European languages including German, and some of his other stories were made into movies.

In describing the Mexican pink salamander as she looks at it in an aquarium (again the flow of ideas in a mass media controlled world), Hegemann’s description reads as follows: «It has funny little tentacles, beady blue eyes and the friendliest smile I’ve ever seen… it’s really low-maintenance and it reaches sexual maturity without ever undergoing metamorphosis out of the amphibian stage – it just never grows up» (133).

Cortázar’s protagonist also contemplates the salamander in a Parisian aquarium. For several weeks of perhaps months he visits the aquarium until one particular axolotl attracts his attention. He realizes that the animal feels sad and this feeling allows him to create a bond with the animal. At the end of the story we realize that the narrative voice belongs to the axolotl as if in the bonding process man and salamander have exchanged consciousness.

Such a transit of a consciousness, from one being to another, regardless of time, space and physical constitution, although considered a trademark in Cortázar, could be traced to Romanticism, when the poet claimed that intuition was a state of consciousness in contact with nature and the divine forces.

Diminished, reduced in Cortázar’s story to a transit between a specific and rare animal and a human, this romantic consciousness dies in Hegemann’s Berlin. Only a metaphor remains in her novel. Mifti sees a possible symbiosis between the axolotl that never grows up with a German a generation of parents that does exactly the same.

Julio Cortázar’s narrator states that «In the library at Sainte-Geneviève, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank». But unlike Cortázar’s protagonist who becomes an axolotl himself, Mifti is unable to escape, even through an axolotl, from her consciousness and therefore, from her rage and pain.

Even more: You can say that the exchange of consciousness in Cortázar is either denigrating or humoristic, but the fact is that the narrative voice keeps its integrity until the last word of his short story. Salamander or human, the voice narrating the story does not suffer changes: we feel the same loneliness, same discreet, stoic, curious and objective tone. Mifti, the heir of the unified Berlin, born in one of the most developed countries of the planet, can narrate her story of fragmentation but to a certain point only where actions become dislocated and her voice sinks and disappears inside them.

With obvious differences, Mifti’s contemplation of the axolotl in a Berliner aquarium resembles Cortázar’s protagonist pondering on the same animal and this intertextuality seems to be a salutation to the renowned Argentine writer. About the uproar caused by the accusations of plagiarism in Hegemann’s novel, it is always a good idea to look back in history and learn that in the Middle Ages the notion of originality did not exist. We see stories like the life of Alexander the Great and Tristan and Isolde being written in different countries and in different languages but what was important in each version was not originality itself but the nuances that the author brought to a preexisting story.

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.

In early twentieth century, based on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin drew attention toward the figure of the Flâneur, the indolent stroller who, amidst the streets of Paris, contemplates with disenchantment and apathy the gigantic transformation of the city caused by the Industrial Revolution. With large crowds of people flooding the cities, its bazars, shops and the now rapid mediums of transportation, the new urban spectator saw the imminent alienation in an era now defined by consumer capitalism. It was the end of the nineteenth century.

In Latin America, the recently liberated colonies were now able to consume the literature of their choice. With the disestablishment of the Casa de Contratación de Sevilla or House of Trade –the entity that regulated any form of communication within the colonies and Spain–, the new nations began to import French literature in an unprecedented way, a behavior that would have a direct impact in all the Spanish speaking nations, including Spain, the agonizing superpower.

Globalization and transnationalism had taken, in the last decades of the Romantic era, a heightened meaning only comparable to the impact of electronic media in today’s society, a rupture that redefined the lives and behavior of people. About these ruptures between the old and the new is something many scholars have highlighted before.

In Global Matters, Paul Jay states that «it is a mistake to approach globalization itself as a contemporary phenomenon and that it makes much more sense to take a historical view in which globalization is dated as beginning in at least the sixteenth century and covering a time span that includes the long histories of imperialism, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism» (3). He further defines globalization as a «complex back-and-forth flows of people and cultural form in which the appropriation and transformation of things –music, film, food, fashion– raise questions about the rigidity of the center-periphery model» (3).

What better place for that «back-and-forth» of people, ideas and commodities than the city of New York, the modern Babel that agglomerates more than eight million people from the most unimaginable places in the World? In it, a new Flâneur has emerged, as it is seen in the novel Open City by Teju Cole.

Heartbroken by the recent separation with his girlfriend, Julius, a Nigerian immigrant and psychiatry student wanders in the streets of New York City, encountering people from different cultures: an African taxi driver, a Caribbean security guard, a Mexican or perhaps Central American marathon runner, an Indian surgeon, a Polish poet (among others) in a city that could easily be referred to –using the name of a play by Calderón de la Barca– The Great Theater of the World.

Julius or, we should say, the Flâneur of the contemporary globalized world, runs into places where cultures meet and clash under the least expected terms. And so he says: «I took a detour and walked for a while in Harlem. I saw the brisk trade of sidewalk salesmen: The Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls. There were self-published books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa» (18).

It is then obvious that massive migrations or deterritorrialization aim toward the big cities, creating new encounters and the rise of a new culture or perhaps new cultures in a world in constant motion, more so now than ever before. Julius observes this and informs us about it in the vignettes he gives us as he strolls around the streets of New York City. He perceives that culture is no longer a homogenous concept tied to a specific nation or country but something transformed into multiple faces when people of different backgrounds find themselves living in the same place.

Culture or rather the adjective «cultural», Arjun Appadurai tells us, «moves into a realm of differences, contrasts, comparisons that is more helpful… we have moved one step further, from culture as a substance to culture as the dimension of difference, to culture as a group identity bases on difference, to culture as group identity based on difference, to culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity» (12-15).

Julius, the Flâneur, cannot escape from melancholy in every encounter, often reminiscent of his native Nigeria. Like Baudelaire, he cannot avoid reflecting on the issues of his time: migration as one of the major concerns in today’s world and how to tolerate the differences in a society that does not belong to one group but many.