Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture

by Oswaldo Zavala

In the posthumous novel, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (Woes of the True Policeman, 2011), Bolaño, via one of his characters, says: “[he] seemed to subscribe to the maxim of De Kooning: style is fraud.”30 More than a mere provocation, Bolaño takes up one of Borges’s most famous maxims from his essay, “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader.” Instead of the “perfect page,” as if under museum glass, whose delicate order cannot stand alteration, Borges admires the fluid and volatile work that keeps its meaning alive: “The page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process.”31 Thus, if “style is a fraud,” in Bolaño’s poetics, this involves literary practices that aim to produce discontinuities that are unafraid to disarm narrative structures, sacrifice plot, and neglect characters as long as critical discovery and transcendent meaning is found in the end.