Ontology and Crises of State and Finance in Jorge Volpi's En busca de Klingsor

Abstract

This essay examines Jorge Volpi's En busca de Klingsor in an attempt to explain its emergence as a cultural object in the 1990s in Mexico. I argue that the novel turns around what we might call hard indeterminism, ontology, or ‘worlding’ and that its obsession with how worlds are composed is a result of the novel's unique positioning in a moment marked by failed forms of finance-led accumulation and overall systemic financial crisis. Engaging with Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado's recent call for a cultural critique of neoliberalism in Mexico, I argue that in order to account for the emergence of Klingsor in its historical moment and in order to explicate the complicated relationship between the Boom and Crack generations, we need a literary-critical approach that is able to track both changes in the state form and macroeconomic transformations (in this case, the rise of finance).