Dante’s Comedy is a work of theology, done by way of a fictional journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Did Dante really make that journey? Of course he did. The journey is made by way of the fictional narrative describing it, and this way of enacting a truth by way of its description shares something with the sacramental act that makes to be so that which it signifies, or perhaps better, in the sort of way that the interpretation of Scripture is part of the efficacy of the scriptural word. Dante needed poetry to record that journey, and the poetry was how he traveled. In this way his poetry is a lived interpretation of a Christian journey, and the journey recorded is the journey made.

That psychologists, among others, have sought to contain identity in one way or another stands to reason; it is important, at times, to get hold of what we can. It is equally important, however, to recognize and avow the existence of phenomena that resist this getting-hold and that therefore require something else, something better suited to the phenomena in question. In the case of identity, this something, I suggest, is literature, broadly conceived. In offering this perspective, I make no claims at all about the coherence or continuity of identity. Nor do I seek to specify what form of literature is required. Some identities may lend themselves to comparatively smooth beginning-middle-end tales; others, to more modern or post-modern forms; others still, perhaps, to the free verse of poetry. It all depends on the questions one asks, the person doing the questioning, and, not least, the history that precedes us, uncontainable and unnamable though it is. Whatever else identity may be, it remains something of a mystery. Rather than this being cause for despair, however, it is cause for celebration – quiet celebration, founded in the unending inspiration of what we do and cannot know about our own deepest strata.

Cormac McCarthy’s interest in science and association with the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute is well remarked. Scholars less regularly explore how scientific theories inform his work, with critics more often noting his generally negative figuration of advanced technologies. On April 20, 2107, after decades of publishing only fiction, plays, and screenplays, McCarthy contributed an essay on linguistics, dream, and the unconscious to the online science journal Nautilus. “The Kekule Problem” occasioned notable critical reactions online, with McCarthy responding in a second essay. This chapter considers these essays while providing an overview of the influence of science and technology on his creative work. McCarthy’s interest in scientific theories promises rich territory for future scholarship, particularly to complement attention to dreams and to figurations of technology. Ultimately, McCarthy’s speculation on lingusitics proves less valuable to that field, of course, than as insights into his own writing process. Open scientific inquiry and speculation run alongside the power of dreams and tecnological skepticism throughout his creative work.

Returning a year after the publication of Amulet to the site of the historical trauma of his generation, Bolaño’s 2000 novella By Night in Chile resumes the challenge of a coming-to-terms with the 1973 coup which he had made his sustained focus, four years earlier, in Distant Star. Combining Distant Star’s focus on poiesis with that of Amulet on aesthesis, By Night in Chile completes Bolaño’s trilogy of short novels of poetic apprenticeship by exploring the conjunction of poiesis and aesthesis in a single character who figures both, the Catholic father/priest and poet-critic Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix/H. Ibacache. Mirroring the central protagonist’s dual identities as poet (Urrutia Lacroix) and critic (Ibacache), the text inscribes, through its uninterrupted monological structure, a maximal tension between acts of writing and reading. Pivoting in the novella’s final pages to an explicit focus on politics, pedagogy, and the making of literature, Bolaño suggest the extent to which relations between readers and writers, history and literary history, ideology and critique remain to be determined through the dynamic interplay of aesthesis and poiesis, an increasingly accelerated process that carries within it the potential, though far from a guarantee, of more democratic, non-binary configurations to come.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.