THE COLLAPSIBLE SPACE BETWEEN US: HYPHENATED IDENTITIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

One of the many pivotal scenes in Roberto Bolaño’s galaxial novel 2666 takes place at a lavish and decadent Nazi dinner party in a German castle, in the early days of the Second World War. One of the guests, a Romanian general named Entrescu, asks the assembled company whether Jesus Christ could have had any understanding of the global reach, in the twentieth century, of the church that was built in his name. Could he have suspected, he asks, that ‘his church would spread to the farthest corners of the Earth?’ Did Christ even have ‘what we today call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese, and to the west the primitive peoples of America?’. Entrescu answers his own question, by remarking that of course Christ had no such idea, that such geographical knowledge was unavailable to him, notwithstanding his alleged omniscience. But Entrescu qualifies his own reply. ‘In a way’, he says, ‘having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one’s village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one’s eyes’ (p. 686).