ABSTRACT
Bilbao-New York-Bilbao , published originally in Euskera and widely translated thereafter, takes place over the course of a transatlantic voyage from Bilbao to New York, passing through Frankfurt, and is composed of a stitched-together mosaic of anecdotes, observations, and recollections of three generations of the narrator’s family history in the small fishing village of Ondarroa, located just to the east of the Basque Country’s capital. In this chapter, the author argues additionally that the textual constitution of a BwO in the novel occurs through movement across a network whose nodes each exert transformative effects on the narrator’s written body, with affect understood in Spinozist terms as capability to act. The transatlantic flight is a metaphor for the author own departure from his family’s limited horizon of experience and expectation to find a literary language that might capture a broader range of worldly experience. The novel argues, therefore, that properties of writerliness are embedded within potentialities of seafaring, and vice versa.
