Academic Barbarism and the Literature of Concealment: Roberto Bolaño and W. G. Sebald

Abstract

If there are any writers who describe the experiences of graduate students, adjuncts, early career academics, and soon-to-be-retired academics working on the fringes of the academy as forms of academic barbarism, they are W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño. No author’s work has more literary critics than the work of Roberto Bolaño and no writer’s protagonists are as caught up in research as those of W. G. Sebald. The researchers and academics of Bolaño’s and Sebald’s novels display a devotion to the literary search, the archive, and the intertext that often sees them promoting a literature of concealment through a form of academic barbarism that conceals “the book that really matters” [“el libro que realmente importa” (2666S 983)]. Their modes of enquiry into their cultural and literary histories focus our attention on their authors’ different renderings of the Information Age’s institutionalization of the archive as fortress of knowledge or as pastiche of literary formalism and academic hubris. Their protagonists are either left stranded, like Sebald’s Austerlitz, in the new Grande Bibliothèque, “Schatzhaus unseres gesamten Schrifterbes” [the treasure-house of our entire literary heritage], feeling like “einen potentiellen Feind” (A 404) [a potential enemy (A1 398)], or, like Bolaño’s academics, they are left in a site of barbarism unaware of how their academic work conceals the literature that really matters—[“el libro que realmente importa” (2666S 983)], the “magic flower of winter!” (2666E 786) [“la flor mágica de invierno!” (2666S 983)].