The second part of The Savage Detectives is itself entitled “The Savage Detectives,” with the addition of the dates: 1976–1996. What then is the relationship between this part and the book as a whole? Is this the core, the essence of the thing?
If so, then at first glance at least it’s a rather fragmented and even inconsistent (incoherent?) essence. We move from the monologue of García Madero’s diary entries in part one to an expansive crowd of voices. Characters featured in the first part seem to gain voice, while new characters are added, all to tell us more about the visceral realists, particularly about Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and where they came from and perhaps where they went next.
As we might expect with this multiplication of perspectives, they do not necessarily see things the same way. Manuel Maples Arce, for instance, a venerable member of the avant-garde (and a historical figure, founder of stridentism) tells us of a visit from Belano, accompanied by “two boys and a girl [. . .]. The girl was American” (180). From Maples Arce’s point of view, the visit went tolerably well: he wowed his young visitor with a reference to his friendship with Borges; Belano wrote down a list of questions, to which Maples Arce later responded, handing his answers over along with a couple of his own books. The elder poet sees this as a paternal gesture of care to a representative of the lost younger generation: “All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father.” But the gesture goes unreciprocated or unnoticed: “He never came back.” Why not? Maples Arce can only conjecture: “these poets were meant to be orphans” (181).
Immediately we shift to the point of view of Barbara Patterson, who we soon realize is the unnamed American girl who had visited Maples Arce alongside Belano. She makes clear her disdain for the would-be father of the avant-garde: “Motherfucking hemorrhoid-licking old bastard, I saw the distrust in his pale, bored little monkey eyes right from the start” (181). He’s a “constipated grand old man of Mexican literature [. . .] Mr. Great Poet of the Pleistocene,” whom her companions (“ass kissers”) are wrong to give the time of day. So much for an appreciation of literary history . . . for Patterson, it seems, such history is bunk.
Belano and Lima, on the other hand, though they are not (yet, at least) among those to whom the novel now gives voice, are shown to be keener to explore the literary archive. They are particularly interested in learning about Cesárea Tinajero, another figure from the avant-garde of Maples Arce’s generation, about whom they quiz one Amadeo Salvatierra. What draws them to her? he asks. Because “she seemed to be the only woman” among that avant-garde group, “and there were a lot of references to her, all saying that she was a fine poet.” Salvatierra persists with his questions: “where did you read her work? We haven’t read anything she wrote, they said, not anywhere, and that got us interested. [. . .] no one published her” (165). A silent poet, then, has grabbed their attention.
Even though the number of voices multiplies, as The Savage Detectives proceeds, we are still reminded of the voices we do not hear, of the limits of what this novel that is increasingly tumultuous, ever more polyphonic or heteroglossic (to use Bakhtin’s terms), can possibly include. The Savage Detectives is getting longer and longer, with each passing page, but its essence (if it has one) remains elusive, and its gaps or fissures are becoming more apparent.