Chalmers Mehdi E.

Prof. Zanini-Cordi

FOW 5025

April 17, 2021

Literature as rat-poison :
labyrinths, truth and death in Roberto Bolanõ’s The police rat.

One has to be careful when diving into authors like Roberto Bolaño and texts like The police rat,
a short story from The Insufferable gaucho. This is because such a text is unabashedly wrought
with intertextuality, sui-referentiality, and meta-commentary about the artistic project of the
author. This would encourage us to go through with a “postmodernism 101” type of reading,
more so then if we were reading, lets say, realist short stories by Dickens or Leonora Miano. Yet
this is for the least a (mouse) trap, since all literary narratives are open to some sort of open-
endedness that a deconstructionist or abstract-formalist reading might invite to, with or without
the authors winking at us. So for the specific reason that Bolaño is winking at us from behind the
text it might be wise to read the text both with tools that analyse the text as an artefact of
language, a self-actualizing literary apparatus, and as a specific story-about-something, that has
both apparent and symbolic meaning, situated in fiction and the reader’s real world.

The police rat, is for all purposes, speculative fiction, something of another world within some
elements of ours : we don't have the supernatural element of fairy-tale, nor the scientism and
time distortions of sci-fi, but here rodents are roughly anthropomorphized, sentient and
socialized, yet still more or less rodents (or a type of rodent), living in sewers, human sewers,
and, yes, the human world is there somewhere, in the background, barely mentioned as we only
hear of them because they throw things in the sewers (exotic pets, poison for the rats, etc.).

Pepe the cop, the hero of the story, lives in the sewers with his brothers, all of them simply
working and surviving. There is little else, almost no culture and no art, except for a few
marginals like Pepe’s aunt Josephine who was a songstress. Things change when Pepe discovers
a horrific murder, something that never happens. Pepe because he is different (like his aunt)
wants to discover the truth, unlike the other rats who prefer to lie to themselves and continue to
live life as it is. So this is a mystery, a detective story, a short detective story, dark and touching
on horror, much like in the detective stories of the genres forefather, Edgar Allan Poe.

One thing we could ask ourselves is the status and the role of the genre. Obviously it’s not a
simple murder story. If nothing because this is about rats! So the genre itself is a bit difficult to
establish. In francophone academia, one would probably speak of “conte philosophique”
(philosophical tale), another possibility would be satire. Both of those seem unsatisfying. If we
look to a network of similarities, for similar types of speculative, experimental writing, this
would allow us to retrace what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances (a loose set of
characteristics that allows for recognizances without having to suppose a fixed essence). If we
try to limit ourselves, two figures might emerge as the most prominent resembling ones, the most
closely ressemblant members of that family : the first would be Jose Luis Borges, whose
influence is explicit for an author like Bolaño, for an innumerable number of reasons (first that
he declares it, but also the regional and historical proximity, the commonality authors they
admire, the taste for both pastiche and parody and for story about writers and literature, and so
on) ; the other figure is Frantz Kafka, for the virtuosity in the suggestion of angst and anguish,
the philosophical undertone and the taste for animal metamorphosis. In actuality, the text is a sort
of sequel to a Kafka short story, Josephine the songstress or The mouse folk (something we will
have to get deeper into). We could also allude to influences from Lovecraft and Poe. But Borges
and Kafka are already quite enough to explore summarily. Our three authors have a special type
of relationship with allegory, where the structure of stories can be understood as a veiled
description of human condition in general, of some societal problems but always hinting to the
specific conditions of the author and of the status of writing itself.

The specific Borgesian theme that is explored in the Police rat is the labyrinth, one of the main
materials for world-building and the construction of its atmosphere. In Bolaño’s story the
protagonist Jose, the police rat, tells us :

“I spent my time wandering through the sewers, sometimes the main ones, where the
water flows, sometimes the branch sewers, where we are constantly digging tunnels to
gain access to new food sources or provide escape routes or link up with labyrinths that
seem, at first glance, to serve no purpose”(46) ;

And that,

“Patrolling the sewers is a task that requires the utmost concentration. Generally we don't
see or meet with anyone; we can do the rounds of the main and branch sewers, and go
into the disused tunnels originally dug by our people, all without coming across
a single living being.”

In Borges this theme explored differently. For example one of Borges’s character, Asterion, the
inhabitant of a labyrinth explains that :

“It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are
infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as well. Anyone may enter. He
will find here no female pomp nor gallant court formality, but he will find quiet and
solitude.”

The house of Asterion, is a retelling of the greek myth of the Minotaur, where there is an
inversion of animality and monstrosity. We are in the mind of the beast, who sees himself as the
aristocrat that he is (the son of a Queen), a solitary king in his vast house, the labyrinth, he sees
the people outside as commoners. We are thus put in the consciousness of a non-human, who in
aspects is similar to us, and his otherness are more highlighted or exaggerated aspects of our own
identities. The Minotaur is, in a sense, simply man, seen as monstrous, living in (monstrous?)
isolation. Yet the incomprehensible violence of the outside that he must live with, the rejection
of others, his own struggles and ultimately his peace with himself... all of those are more
characteristic of humanity than what the shadowy figures from outside project when they meet
him.

The labyrinth is also a figure of Asterion’s mind, his universe, a symbol of solipsism that, in a
way, all human beings share. Asterion accepts being enclosed (he says is not a prisoner, but he
stays there), he does so to try to keep order in his world. He is perceived from the outside as
something evil and dangerous, yet all he desires is a home, he has a home that he accepts, but he
wishes for a home with less doors and less corridors, and maybe a friend “another Asterion”.
The enclosement of the labyrinth in the Police rat is more of the societal project of the rats, their
collective way of living and how they survive, but the harmony and order they keep by
mindlessly digging is broken by an evil born from inside the tunnels, within them, and none of
them want to accept that such an abnormality can exist among them.

When Pepe insists that the body he found was not killed by a predator but by another rat, no one
wants to believe him, since all want to believe that rats don't kill other rats. As his superior
explains to him, telling him to abandon his ridiculous investigations :

“Real life is complicated enough without inventing unreal things that are bound to throw
it out of joint [...] in life, especially if it's short, as our lives unfortunately are, we should
strive for order, not disorder, and especially not an imaginary disorder. The coroner
looked at me gravely and nodded. I nodded too.”

The world of the rats his seemingly devoid of murder at first, although what his unravelling
might reveal that this is nothing but an illusion. There is also the possibility that this is actually
the first emergence of raticide in their society and that the murderer is a sort of rodent Caïn,
corrupting an innocent world for the first time with what he calls freedom in a very christian
conception of evil as being the result of free-will.

This brings us to the conversation with Kafka, which is in reality central to the subject itself.
Bolaño conceives writing as a sort of mental asylum (and a labyrinth) where writers live with
each other, exchange and live off of each other's sickness, the sickness being life itself, and art
itself. The sickness is life and death, and death inside of life and the different means by which we
strive to ward off the senselessness of our condition. In one of the short stories of The
insufferable gaucho, a story called Literature + Illness = Illness, that is more of an essay, or a
journal entry on his personal sickness (that will end up killing him in 2003) the narrator is clearly
Bolaño in the text, and there is a chapter called Illness and Kafka :

“Kafka understood that the dice had been rolled and that nothing could come between
him and writing the day he spat blood for the first time. What do I mean when I say that
nothing could come between him and his writing? To be honest, I don't really know. I
guess I mean that Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead
nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be
lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be”

This should be key to understanding the importance of Kafka for Bolaño, that Kafka understood
something, and that writing, for him, was doing what Kafka was doing. The Police rat mimics
Kafka’s tone and idiosyncrasies, and the pastiche of that tone strangely makes also one with the
pastiche of the subgenre of Noir fiction that the short emulates.

In his fascinating theory of literary influence (The Anxiety of influence) Harold Bloom1 describes
six stages (or types) of relationship to the source of influence : Clinamen, is the deviation, the
modification, imitation, transformation of what is received from the influencer ; Tessera, is
influence as a completion of a mosaïc, with a unique piece the completes the object ; Kenosis, is

1 Harold Bloom(1930-2019) is somewhat difficult to position on a theoretical map, he is a defender of the

classical Western canon, an enemy of what he calls the “school of resentment” (post-structuralist, feminist
and most left leaning critics) but his theoretical method resembles that hermeneutics and deconstruction,
his influence in Anxiety are explicitly Nietzsche and Freud, and his interest in authors is clearly not limited
to the West nor his it limited an artists political inclinations.
a moment of rejection of the inspiration I received, that goes in pair with elevating the influencer
to an almost divine status ; Daemonization, is a negation of the singularity of the influencer by
making its nature abstract (daemonic) neither human nor divine ; Askesis, is a reducing of one’s
own self and imaginative capacities, that also in turn reduces the living powers of the influence
to something less powerful ; and Apophrades, the influenced writer summons the influencer from
the dead, he holds the influencer under his power, he commands the dead, he becomes the parent
of the influencer with his writing.

As interesting as it would be to try and analyze the whole of Bolanõ’s relationship with authors
he admires through that lens, it would be extremely difficult to pinpoint here the exact stage of
influence in which Bolaño is as a complete artist, either in regards to Borges or Kafka.
Nevertheless, concerning specifically the Police rat, my intuition is that the text is in a position
of Tessera, a substantial transformation that changes and completes the original, changes the
meaning, but not fundamentally attaching a whole esthetic project, all of his own creation to the
whole of the Kafka’s work, something more profound and existential that the other stages seem
to unravel (let us say that Dante’s Divine Comedy is an Apophrades of Virgile’s work, and might
seem to go through all of the different stages throughout the poem).

Josephine the songstress, his about this admired artist that lived in the community of rodents 2.
The narrator explains the fact that the mice folk are not artistic, they have, for some reason,
forgotten what it means to “sing”, yet Josephine fascinates them, even though deep down they
know what she’s doing is not very different from the basic “whistling” they all do in their lives.
This is interesting, here we have a definition of the artist’s activity that posits it’s actually
nothing special, the same as what everybody else does (the equivalent analogy for humans, I
think, would be the relationship between speech and “poetry”). But still, everybody listens to
Josephine. In a way they are humouring her, in another way, there is something special going on
there, even though it’s not that special. And Josephine herself is ambiguous, we do not know
fully if her artistic commitment is only delusion and vanity or something more profound or all of
it.

The whole story as of course, as in Bolaño’s version, as its own logic, it’s own autonomy, it’s the
story of an artist with an incomprehensible cult following. The meditation of the narrator does
invite a reflexion on what art is in our own world. It invites a reflexion on our quest for
individuality and beauty, and mystery. At the same time it questions those concepts, it outlines
their fragility. It shows our finite nature, our painful yearn for transcendence, and how that
transcendence is refused to us. Josephine's nephew replays this quest, in a grotesque way. He is
the closest in personality to his aunt amongst his people and his family. Like in Kafka’s version,
individuality and that singular desire for “more” is very rare among the rodents, but Pepe is not
an artist he is a police rat. This something that is particular to Bolaño, it’s a theme that runs
through many of his works : Bolaño uses the figure of the policeman as an exemplary type of
human that illustrates existential rift as much as the artist (the poet, or the singer, or the painter)
does. In reality in Bolaño there is a trio of figures that are key to allegorizes the fallen state of
human beings : the poet, the prostitute and the policeman. They are fallen figures because they
have a mark, they are more profoundly damned, because they have a calling, a job, that his
bigger than them, that has something to do with truth-seeking, a pure truth that their existence
shows them but refuses them and that soils them at the same time, and whatever they do they

2 Who, actually, are mice, in Kafka’s text… and, strangely, Bolaño’s french translator chose to translate
the spanish “ratas” to the french “souris” (as in “mice” who would have been said “ratón” in spanish). As
we know translators, like God, sometimes work in mysterious ways. But the english translator stayed
faithful to Bolaño’s preference for the more brutish sewer “rats”.
cannot escape what they see, that corruption in themselves and in the world cannot be avoided.
This what we discover in the “dead tunnels” of the sewer, something evil, unavoidable,
something that changes us, and that we must face even if no one else wants to face it, wants to
listen. Pepe, even if he is nothing but a dirty police rat guides us, shows us that there is a courage
in us, that we must follow whether in believing to the end in mediocre “whistle” songs like
Josephine, waiting for Theseus our redeemer like Asterion, or being a good cop for once, just
once.
Bibliography

Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho, Translated from the Spanish by Chris
Andrews, New Directions Book(2010)
Frantz Kafka, Josephine the songstress or The mice folk, Excerpt from Essential Kafka,
translated by Phillip Lundberg,
https://www.kafka-online.info/josephine-the-songstress-or-the-mouse-folk.html
Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Translated by Irby, James
East. New Directions, 1964
Harold Bloom, The anxiety of influence, Oxford University Press, second edition, 1997.