The building of an order satisfies the human need for certainty in knowledge as well as in social practices, but behind it lies the danger of violence and dogmatism. The aggregation and disaggregation of the cities across the centuries could be intended as a part of a greater order which periodically loses and finds its centre, oscillating between unity and multiplicity: between the ‘one’ and the ‘many’ of classical and Platonic thought.

In the course of history we can observe some periods in which the role of the city is replaced by the increasing power of the countryside (see for instance the change over from Antiquity to Middle Ages, or from Middle Ages to Modernity and, in some respects, even from Modernity to the contemporary “global village”). This article is based upon an analogy between (a) the foundation of the cities and (b) the philophical attempt to give a formally ordered account of the world. Bolaño, on the contrary, adopts Joyce’s accretive method of composition resulting in the creation of his two multi-plotted, multilingual, and multi-voiced gargantuan masterpieces, Los detectives salvajes (1998 The Savage Detectives) and 2666, which can be read as protracted late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American analogues of Ulysses. Borges showcases his aesthetic of brevity as the antithetical response to Joyce’s epic legacy.

The second part of the article arguea that as Borges and Bolaño gradually shift from the youthful tone of their early writings to the fictional canonicity of their later prose, their respective attitudes towards Joyce develop accordingly. It is also significant that their respective involvements with Joyce’s work was preceded in both cases by an effervescent avant-gardist period: Borges played a pivotal role in the founding and consolidation of the Spanish avant-garde movement Ultraísmo, while Bolaño has been hailed as the founder of Infrarrealismo, a neo-avant-garde minor poetic movement dubbed as ‘dadá a la mexicana’. The first part of this article focuses on Borges’s and Bolaño’s formative years as writers, a period during which both openly and self-consciously endorse a Joycean aesthetic: Borges with his pioneering 1925 review of Ulysses and historic Spanish translation of ‘Penelope’, and Bolaño with his lavishly entitled debut novel, Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984 Advice from a Disciple of Morrison to a Joyce Fanatic), which offers a contemporary, hardboiled version of Joyce, where literature communes with the world of drugs, alcohol, sex, and rock and roll.

El llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo