Week 7: Big Black Car

by Maria Bustillos

There’s a feeling of having arrived at a destination when the book begins to describe the crimes.  I’d somehow gotten the impression, having read about 2666 off and on before I tried it myself, that this section was an even drier kind of catalogue, almost without narrative.  It’s not really like that.  There is a catalogue of murders here, and it’s as numbing as advertised, but here’s the thing.  The layering-up and rewriting and twisted, doubled-over reportage mirrors Bolaño’s treatment of other phenomena like books and authors (some of the victims described being real ones, and others, I think, fictional, though I have not looked up every single victim, and perhaps all their names wouldn’t appear on the Internet?  I should welcome intelligence on this point, if we’ve got any.)  In any case, it appears that some of what is being described is real, and some not.  The nature of 2666 invites us to investigate these things for ourselves, gets us thinking about how much of what we’re being told in other writings, other media, is likewise being distorted, exaggerated, invented or just left out completely.

Clearly, we’re meant to be numbed here before we are shocked into consciousness.  The clinical nature of these multiple accounts deadens the attention, too, and deliberately so.  This mirrors the way we are numbed and deadened by all the other real horrors we hear about every day, in faraway places we’ve never been like Baghdad and Mosul and Kabul, or even in places we may have been, like Washington D.C. or Fort Hood or New Orleans.

We might become so numb that we even miss the elusive patterns in the flood of similar horrors described in this novel; many but not all of the victims are tall, are young, have been multiply violated and strangled—but some have been stabbed, or not raped, and sometimes the perpetrator is caught, and turns out to have been involved with the victim for a long time.  There is an evil truth underneath all these incoherent, jumbled accounts, however.  A mass murderer who drives or is driven in a black Peregrino—I’ve never heard of such a make, and Google offers no enlightenment—but I guess it is the same one waiting outside Amalfitano’s house when Fate and Rosa make their escape.

I never met Lily Burk, the 17-year-old girl who was abducted and killed last summer here in Los Angeles, but she was an acquaintance of my daughter’s.  This murder was more along the lines of a botched robbery; the murderer was a recently paroled drug addict who was found just a few hours after killing Lily, high as a kite, we heard, and in possession of her keys and other effects.  Practically everyone I know has some connection with the Burk family through temple, school or work, and for many months we were all laser-focused on this disaster, talked about it constantly, read about it in the papers, learned everything we didn’t already know about the victim and her family.  This is just one lovely child who was killed, the tenderly-raised daughter of a professional family, raised in an atmosphere where all the moms are very concerned together about such things as planning school fundraising events, and we also know how each kid is doing, because we’ve known them all since they were little, and we also have firm ideas about what the “in” appetizer is to bring to a party, and where the best Pilates studio is, and where to buy good dessert wine.  All of which seems simply obscene, or crazy, or both, in the face of the unbelievable shit that goes on.

It will be impossible for any of the victims in Santa Teresa to receive anything like the   kind of attention accorded to the murder of Lily Burk (for what that’s worth, if anything,) or for the perpetrator to be caught and put away so quickly (which is worth something.)  The murder of a young girl doesn’t really shock anyone in Santa Teresa, because it happens once every few days.  They’re even number than we are; they have to be.  The community has no resources for preventing the next murder.  At this stage of the novel, they haven’t really even figured out yet that there is a pattern; the police, even if they are willing, are operating in an absolute circus of disorder, corruption and mismanagement; they are powerless.

I am having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the idea that this is a real thing, that it started in the early 90s, and that it’s still going on right this minute.

8 Comments

Matt, March 10th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 6: Dream dreams the dreamer

by Maria Bustillos

Michael Mullen wrote an extraordinary reply to an earlier post, and I’d like to draw attention to it.

****************
Seaman’s sermon I’ve mostly re-read already, because it’s stunning and strange and raises so many questions that I can’t answer, and cuts so far down to the bone of what it is to be a sentient being. The passage about stars [p. 152] alone is so connected with other things that have been talked about already.

This leads to a discussion of metaphor that seems related to things Maria wrote earlier about Plato’s cave. “Metaphors are our ways of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.” Stars are metaphoric reflections of the one real star, the sun of our solar system. And that star is real, why? Because if it weren’t we’d be dead? Because it can burn up astronauts in bad sci-fi movies, but isn’t that treading back toward metaphor? Because it’s the ideal from which other stars and their qualities are extrapolated?

The novel is full of dreams, and dreams within dreams, beneath a dreamlike surface, a swirling narrative. We’re trying to make sense of this all, and hoping to grasp the life jacket that won’t cause us to sink.

The stars that may be dead remind me very much of Amalfitano’s belief that places don’t exist when you leave them. That jet lag comes not from you being tired, but from the place you’ve arrived at working extra hard to constitute itself. As soon as you leave again, it slips back into semblance.

And with all of this sort of metaphysical questioning, I still believe that the novel is pointing toward the realities of injustice and exploitation, as you’ve all discussed above. You can’t go to Santa Teresa and expect not to be implicated in the crimes, or some attempt at their solution.

*****************

This approach to this book, through its poetics rather than through its politics, seems essential. If the novel were only a call to action, demanding that we “do something” about the crimes, it would surely be something quite different, would be a pamphlet in blazing red letters or a call-in radio show. Now that we’re reading something like a police procedural (in the next section,) I’m starting to appreciate the difficulties of the “pragmatic” approach to this subject a lot more. The clarion call alone would not be enough to change anyone’s mind; that kind of writing only separates us from the reality, sets us apart from it. We have to think about what it means to be human in a bigger sense in order to understand both the dream and the waking.  If we could really understand it–maybe only then would we have a shot at changing how the world works.

All this by way of observing that throughout, both Oscars have been grappling with an attempt to make sense of, or to synthesize, the physical and the metaphysical–culminating at the end of this section in the successful rescue of Rosa Amalfitano. Could they have saved her if they’d been “men of action,” openly concerned with the outward manifestations of things in Santa Teresa?  Wouldn’t we have seen some kind of Sam Peckinpah bloodbath if they’d gone in all macho and confrontational?  The very dreaminess of their conduct seems to have disarmed the bad guys, both literally and figuratively.

5 Comments

Matt, March 5th 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 6: More than Meets the Eye

by Maria Bustillos

Here’s a rundown of the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, via Wikipedia.

According to official Catholic accounts of the Guadalupan apparitions, during a walk from his home village to Mexico City early on the morning of December 9, 1531, Juan Diego saw a vision of a young girl of fifteen to sixteen, surrounded by light. This event occurred on the slopes of the Hill of Tepeyac. Speaking in the local language of Nahuatl, the Lady asked for a church to be built at that site in her honor. From her words, Juan Diego recognized her as the Virgin Mary. When he told his story to the Spanish bishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the bishop asked him to return and ask the lady for a miraculous sign to prove her claim. The Virgin then asked Juan Diego to gather some flowers from the top of Tepeyac Hill, even though it was winter when no flowers bloomed. There, he found Castilian roses (which were of the Bishop’s native home, but not indigenous to Tepeyac). He gathered them, and the Virgin herself re-arranged them in his tilma, or peasant cloak. When Juan Diego presented the roses to Zumárraga, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe miraculously appeared imprinted on the cloth of Diego’s tilma.

This same alleged tilma is still on view in the Basilica of Guadalupe, and over five million people make a pilgrimage and/or attend the festival there every year.  It’s the most visited Catholic  shrine in the world, according to the Vatican (http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/ZSHRINE.HTM).

One of the weirdest aspects of the cult of Guadalupe is the idea that images of people appear in her eyes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhScF5BBHzE Most commonly, it seems, these images are thought to reflect the scene at the moment the image appeared on the tilma in 1531.  Even ordinary people’s eyes exhibit such reflections, which are called Purkinje images.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_images Difficult though it is for gringos to believe, Mexico is chockablock with people who literally believe this tilma to be a supernatural object, made from unearthly materials and pigments, literally not painted by human hands, its subject literally containing the reflections of 16th-century personages in her eyes.  Attempts to force the object and the story to yield to scientific and/or historical inquiry have been many, and futile.  That people see what they wish to see in the image of Guadalupe speaks directly to the mysterious, multifarious nature of Mexico itself.

Bolaño transposes this supernatural image, Mexico’s most durable and iconic image, onto the cement wall of Charly Cruz’s garage. It’s not at all surprising that such an image would appear in such a lowly place, by the bye. Those of us who live in L.A. or other places with a large Mexican population will be familiar with this image, which appears on everything from t-shirts to pencils to murals on a thousand restaurants here in Los Angeles alone. But the image has been distorted in Charly Cruz’s garage:  one eye is open, and one closed.  I don’t doubt that this is of major significance to our narrative, but I’m not convinced of any of my own ideas about it, which are as follows:

1. “One eye open and one closed” is a figure of speech in Spanish, indicating something along the lines of, “more aware than I appear to be.”

2. Or it’s a deliberately blasphemous image, in which the Virgin is winking at what is going on here.

3. Maybe the Virgin doesn’t like what she sees, and is closing at least one eye against it.

4. Given that Charly Cruz and his pals are up to a lot of questionable things, maybe he doesn’t want the Virgin seeing him, and that’s why he caused the picture to be painted this way. Or he’s painted it shut, in order to conceal his own reflection.

5. Since we are getting closer to the truth, but can’t see it completely yet, and since the Virgin is a redemptive figure, a figure symbolizing Mexico itself, maybe she’s just starting to open her eyes on our behalf, or Mexico is starting to open its eyes.

    In any case, the whole passage is full of mirrors, and reflections, and eyes, and cinema—“optical illusions,” if you like.  Much of it is about mistrusting what we see with our own eyes.  Amalfitano points out to Charly Cruz that “images linger on the retina for a fraction of a second.”  We carry the impress of what we see with us; it’s recorded in our eyes, but our eyes can also deceive, and we can willfully blind ourselves, “refuse to believe our own eyes.”

    Then we have the story of the “borrachito” or “little old drunk,” a description of a different kind of optical illusion, one in which a spinning disk convinces us that the laughing little old drunk is behind bars, although the bars of the prison are drawn on the opposite side of the disk; Amalfitano concludes that the little old drunk is laughing at our credulity, because he’s not really in jail at all.  Or we could say, we don’t know what side the bars are on.  Charly Cruz seems to be suggesting, I think, that Amalfitano himself is in jail.  But Amalfitano isn’t going down so easily.  Maybe he is less clueless than he seemed at first.

    And indeed, so he turns out to be.  But I’m really worried about what happens to him after Fate and Rosa take off.

    9 Comments

    Matt, March 2nd 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    Week 5: Now We’re Cookin’

    by Maria Bustillos

    Barry Seaman is a reimagining of Bobby Seale, who founded the Black Panthers with Huey Newton.  There are significant breaks with the real story; for example, Newton was murdered in Oakland, not in Santa Cruz.  I don’t really know enough Panther history to compare point by point, but I have just ordered a copy of the real book, Barbeque’n with Bobby (pub. 1988.)

    This is the second author we’ve met who brought himself back to reality by writing a cookbook; the first, as you will recall, was Sor Juana.  Another fighter for freedom, and also another oppressed person.  Another incarcerated person, you might say; Sor Juana in a convent, and Bobby Seale in a conventional jail.  My understanding is that both of these cookbooks are very highly regarded qua cookbooks, that is to say, they are the work of serious cooks, not just some kind of literary joke, in either case.  I sympathize greatly with this view of the world.  Preparing and eating food really does bring people back to reality.  It restores perspective.

    The underlying message I’m seeing so far in this book is:  art and literature can be made to liberate us, and to show us reality in its true colors, but we’ve built up a million dodges to prevent this from happening.  In The Part About the Critics, the murders in Santa Teresa are completely abstract to the critics, whose concerns are almost entirely selfish, personal; the reality of the crimes is totally distant from them, even when they get to Mexico, until they begin to make contact with Amalfitano.  I think that Bolaño is saying is, what they really ought to be doing, what we all really ought to be doing, is concentrating with all our hearts on the fact of these murders, and doing something about it.  It bears thinking about that traditionally in Latin America, poets and writers have been activists as a matter of course–sometimes, even revolutionaries.  And that is going back to the likes of José Martí. What else could possibly be more important than preventing all these atrocities? Intellectuals in Spain and Latin America see themselves as having a political destiny in a way that we don’t seem to, here in the States. Of course quite a number of them have gotten themselves thrown in jail or even shot, for their pains. Which is a subject for another day.

    Amalfitano, getting back to the story, is a little closer to reality than are the critics.  He has been kind of immune to all this blathering about Archimboldi, even though he is a professor of literature.  This is because the dodges of the academy aren’t working, here in Santa Teresa.  Reality is getting harder to ignore, for him.

    And now we come to Oscar Fate, who is making the move toward reality, not away from it.  Barry Seaman, or Bobby Seale, is very close indeed to the workings of reality.  Dedicated his life, in however flawed a manner, to redressing the wrongs of the world, in the approved manner of a Latin American intellectual.  Bobby Seale’s political activities were questionable, I believe … are we hearing a Latin American revolutionary who is giving a man like Seale too much the benefit of the doubt, I wonder?  Seale renounced violence, in the end.  His books are said to be worthy.  I will start with the cookbook.

    13 Comments

    Matt, February 22nd 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    Week 4: Clueless

    by Maria Bustillos

    Oscar Amalfitano is a bewildered man. He’s got no idea how he even wound up in this horribly dangerous town. Young girls are getting abducted and killed here, all the time, and he has got the sole care of a young daughter. My own daughter is about the same age as Rosa Amalfitano, and if we were living in Santa Teresa, you can bet your sweet bippy that that kid would not be just blithely waltzing around to the movies, not unless she were under armed guard. What is he thinking?!

    Notice, though, how Amalfitano has consistently been at the total mercy of these women. So Lola wants to go off with some poet, Oscar peels off some cash for her. Rosa wants to go to a movie, hey okay, see you later. Part of the trouble with Amalfitano is, he’s like Hamlet, kind of. He’s stuck, largely because he has no faith in the significance of his own actions, so it’s like he just can’t move. He is outside all these games everyone else is playing; he can’t understand them. For example, he is neither macho, nor is he gay. He likes Archimboldi just fine, but his head wasn’t turned by Archimboldi as the heads of the critics were. He’s not doing any of that stuff; he’s just a human being, just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Professor Pérez’s attempt at romancing him meets with near-total bafflement. Unlike the other men we’ve seen so far (with the possible exception of Morini,) Amalfitano’s basic interface with the world is not sexual (or gender-derived, I should maybe say.) Plus he is nice. He won’t say to anybody such phrases as, the hell you will! Over my dead body! etc.

    So he’s not really equipped to deal with this reality.

    Amalfitano loved Lola, and he loves Rosa; is this the weakness that makes him incapable of protecting them? You love them, so you can’t say no to them?  But they’re putting themselves in such danger. (As I read this all my mom-feelings were going absolutely wild. Go after her! I’m inwardly shrieking.) I have to say, I completely part company with the author, here, if he’s trying to tell me that love weakens men, makes them incapable of protecting, as in, love means never having to prevent a crazy woman from hitchhiking out of a town full of murderers. (?)  Then scan the paper with your heart in your throat for some kind of horrible news the next day (echoing the faux-plane crash of Espinoza, remember? Another horror that failed to materialize.)

    Because there are all these women getting killed in Santa Teresa. How do you deal with this? Maybe it is, in fact, impossible. You’re up against it, and you have to keep on and hope for the best. About eighteen years ago, my own city, Los Angeles, was basically going up in flames. As in, on fire. It’s hard to believe now, but in fact we really did all behave as if it were a minor inconvenience, tried to get on with our lives, and quite a lot of that meant ignoring the enormity of the smoke in the air, guys with guns on the roof, the burnt shell of what had been a shopping mall. The place I’m thinking of (on Pico, near La Brea) is a tidy supermarket now, it has got a Bank of America in front just as if nothing had happened. There’s not the smallest sign. You let the elements have their way with you, and hope for the best. At some point, though, for some people, the reality won’t let you do that.

    In this way, I think the volume of Dieste is a symbol for Amalfitano himself. A rational book, a book about geometry, to serve for a rational man, the Unhappy Readymade: http://www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/Unhappy%20Readymade.html

    The book, like the man, is the plaything of the elements. That’s why Amalfitano is in such a panic about the book’s fate, every time he comes home. There is horror and dread kind of circling him, inexorably, and circling the book, and maybe that is what is driving him mad. How he can be spending even one moment making these incomprehensible diagrams of philosophers when he ought to be locking his daughter in her room while he buys them a pair of plane tickets out of there is beyond me. I have not been able to make head or tail of these diagrams, at least not yet, but I hope someone else here has worked on them, and will enlighten us. It really irritates me, though, that Plato should be below Aristotle in the first diagram, when clearly Plato is always above Aristotle, always the in higher, more rarefied, more ethereal air.  I guess that is the one diagram that kind of makes sense, because Heraclitus really kind of gave birth to both Aristotle and Plato, you could say?

    Now, Lola. I’ll be coming back to her but for the moment, I will say that Lola is another person who has been driven straight off her trolley by literature. She’s the flip side of the critics. Her fangirlhood has literally made her lose contact with reality completely. Just like them. More on that tomorrow.

    15 Comments

    Matt, February 17th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    The Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Affect

    by Maria Bustillos

    Quite early in these proceedings, Terrell Williamson wrote in a comment:

    In reading the portions about Edwin Johns, it occurred to me that Johns’s cutting off the hand with which he painted “for the money” is akin to Bolaño’s giving up writing poetry to focus on fiction “for the money” to support his family.

    I’ve been wondering about that ever since, increasingly, as we’ve come to know something more about the sad case of Edwin Johns, and also about the sad case of Roberto Bolaño. Difficult though it is to believe, this book is the work of a gravely ill man. He was waiting for a liver transplant. Accounts differ as to the source of Bolaño’s illness: Benjamin Kunkel (of all people) stated quite flatly (in a highly MFA-flavored 2007 piece in LRB) that Bolaño’s liver had been damaged as the result of addiction to heroin; Bolaño’s family disputes this account. There is doubt, it looks like. Bolaño was very young, certainly, to have been suffering from liver disease.

    Loads of interesting details are available in this recent NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28bola.html (Highly recommended.)

    It’s clear from a piece that appeared in El Mundo right after his death that Bolaño had been hopeful about getting through the transplant surgery okay. I’ve translated the relevant bits below. Spanish readers will find a number of interesting links on the page.
    http://www.elmundo.es/elmundolibro/2003/07/15/protagonistas/1058255270.html

    PADECÍA PROBLEMAS HEPÁTICOS
    El escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño fallece en Barcelona a los 50 años

    El escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño, de 50 años, ha muerto a las 2.30 horas en Barcelona tras sufrir complicaciones en una enfermedad hepática que padecía y para la que se preparaba para un trasplante, según ha informado el diario chileno ‘La Tercera’ y han confirmado fuentes cercanas a la familia.

    Precisamente por esta operación -un trasplante de hígado-, Bolaño, una de las plumas chilenas más brillantes de la última década, pospuso su próxima novela, titulada ‘2666′, de la que él mismo dijo que sería su obra más ambiciosa.

    “No estoy para hacer el trabajo que exige la novela. Son más de mil páginas que tengo que corregir, es un trabajo como de minero del siglo XIX”, dijo el escritor al diario La Tercera a mediados de junio.

    “Procuro ahora hacer un trabajo más reposado. Voy a corregir la novela sólo después de la operación”, había señalado al matutino chileno.

    En la entrevista, Bolaño se refirió a la esperada operación de trasplante: “El doctor dice que me va a avisar cinco horas antes y en ese tiempo tengo que pedir perdón, hacer mi testamento y poner mi alma en funciones. Estoy tercero en una lista para recibir el trasplante”.

    Tras residir en Chile, México y Estados Unidos, Bolaño se trasladó a España en 1977. Pasó sus últimos años en la localidad gerundense de Blanes, donde vivía con su mujer Carolina López y sus dos hijos. En los comienzos se vio obligado a realizar diversos trabajos eventuales, desde comerciante hasta vigilante nocturno.

    HE SUFFERED FROM LIVER PROBLEMS
    The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño succumbs at age 50

    The writer Roberto Bolaño, aged 50, died at 2:30a.m. in Barcelona after suffering complications of an illness of the liver, for which he was preparing for a transplant, according to the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, and confirmed by sources close to the family.

    Precisely because of this operation, a liver transplant, Bolaño, one of the most brilliant literary lights of the last decade, postponed his next novel, entitled ‘2666′ which he himself said would be his most ambitious work.

    “I’m in no shape to do the work the novel requires. There are over a thousand pages that I have to correct, it’s a job akin to being a miner of the 19th century,” said the author to La Tercera in mid-June.

    “I’m looking to do more restful work. I’m going to correct the novel after the operation.”

    In the interview, Bolaño referred repeatedly to the expected transplant.  “The doctor says that he’s going to let me know five hours beforehand, and in that time I must ask pardon [for my sins,] make my will and activate my soul.* I am the third on a transplant list.”

    After living in Chile, Mexico and the United States, Bolaño relocated to Spain in 1977.  He spent his last years in the area around Blanes, where he lived with his wife Carolina López and their two children. At first he found himself obligated to do odd jobs, from trader to night watchman.

    ********

    Returning now to Edwin Johns. The four critics are joined in a certain way over the painter, but in a manner different from their communion over Benno von Archimboldi. Norton introduces the other three to his work; to Morini directly, and to Pelletier and Espinoza through Morini. Morini is fascinated by the story, so much so that he makes a pilgrimage to the insane asylum to question the weirdly intimidating Johns. “I’m not an artist,” he tells Johns, who replies, “I’m not an artist either. Do you think you’re like me?”

    “Honestly, I don’t know,” Morini replies.

    One thing is certain: Bolaño depicts a substantial divide between artists and others. I suspect that this is an authentic conviction for him, that is, he himself believes this, rather than observing it to be a commonly-held or noteworthy belief. But what is he saying constitutes an “artist”?

    One way of looking at this is, Johns is considered an artist simply because he lopped his own hand off. Absolutely, this act created, for him, a succès de scandale. The world outside the novel does not lack for parallel examples, the most obvious being the performance artist Chris Burden, who in 1971 staged his own shooting as a sort of art-happening (admittedly, one with less permanent consequences.) For Johns to mutilate himself, not in a performance but “for money” as he claims, focused the world’s attention on both himself and his painting. Can we assume that he cared deeply enough about the latter to relearn how to do it with his remaining hand? Was his self-mutilation really just cynical, mercenary? Self-loathing? Just a show? Or was it the final existential shriek that brought public attention to something of genuine value, something that he was so committed to, so much that he was ready to make any sacrifice in order to get that attention?

    A simpler, really kind of banal reading is: the hand symbolizes the artist’s talent. In order to find fame the artist has to betray his own gift. In this reading, we’re looking at shorthand for pandering.

    A third reading is that it really is a heroic act to cut off your own hand. It requires balls, people will be scared shitless of you forever, and you wind up in a comfortable Swiss chalet with nobody to bother or hassle you, attended by charming women, surrounded by a gorgeous landscape.  So which is it?

    * the phrase is “poner mi alma en funciones,” a phrase you would ordinarily use not of a soul but more like, say you are president, and you’ve hired someone to do an important job but they haven’t really started working yet. So you say, “I’m going to put this guy in the game.”  As in, crank it up.

    6 Comments

    Matt, February 15th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    Week 3: What a Trip

    by Maria Bustillos

    We’re parting company with the critics at the moment where Norton has made her choice: she’s in bed with Morini. I certainly did not see that one coming! For all the bed-hopping that goes on in this section, it isn’t even entirely clear to me that the relationship between Norton and Morini is in fact sexual, though I suspect it might be (?) The author has been pretty silent on the subject of Morini’s personal habits, capacities etc., in contrast to those of Espinoza and Pelletier, but he’s presented as something of a sensualist, all the same.

    When the three critics dashed to Mexico to find their hero, I thought we might come to learn more about Archimboldi himself, but we really don’t. They don’t even really seem to put their backs into finding the man. They don’t visit any libraries or bookshops, which would be the first place I’d try. If he’d spent any time there at all, he would have gone to both for sure. The critics don’t make what I would consider a concerted attempt to enter into the intellectual life of this place in order to identify possible contacts—to the point where they’re introduced to all the local luminaries and promptly forget all their names. In short, I didn’t get the feeling they wanted to find Archimboldi very badly at all.

    What we know of Archimboldi’s actual books doesn’t amount to much, we haven’t heard much about the plots or characters, we don’t know how long they are, or in what style they are written, or what effect they were intended to make. We know tangential things, distanced things, for example that the critics are scandalized to hear that Amalfitano finds Archimboldi no more talented than Günter Grass. (How bad would that be?) By this time maybe the reader feels more comfortable with Amalfitano’s literary judgements than with those of the critics, and we can sympathize with that—after all, we’ve only just heard of Archimboldi ourselves! (plus in Europe, I guess, you don’t get to be a distinguished professor of literature without feeling scandalized on behalf of your subject at the drop of a hat.)

    In any case, Amalfitano’s glorious allegory of the cave and the stage has a strangely cathartic effect on these three. After having been dismissive and even contemptuous of this hick littérateur, they come to like him—admire him, even. I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that even though Norton is confused by the allegory of the cave, the meaning of this passage has kind of sunk into the three of them by osmosis. The world has come nearer to them; they see the mouth of the mine. There’s been this lack of contact between the critics and the world outside, a theme repeated over and over in the section. This might seem weird, but I submit that hanging around in Mexico (and even more so, Africa) has itself the effect of bringing reality inexorably, excitingly, and sometimes even frighteningly closer to a person.

    So contact with Mexico and/or with Amalfitano begins to thaw the three of them out, a certain amount. They respond to the relative nearness of the world in very different ways, though. Pelletier just sits around reading Archimboldi, the same books over and over, when the author himself could very well be nearby. This seems to me somewhat to symbolize the futility of European academic life. Pelletier withdraws into his intellect, becomes more insular than ever before, rereading, reinforcing his old idea of himself, locking himself up in his mind with Archimboldi, only more so; Espinoza goes quite the other way, headlong into pure carnality; he forgets all about Archimboldi and engages in a blindly lustful sexual escapade, one that is really pretty sordid, I think, because he himself seems to know that it is going nowhere, he’s mindlessly buying rugs and lingerie and obsessing on this poor kid (that beautiful, terrible line about how she’s nothing more than “a tremor in his arms” by the time he’s done with her … and it’s no accident how no mention is made of how she feels about him, about what they’re doing together … how come he doesn’t make some moves to ensure that she can go to nursing school? It’s like he sees her only in relation to himself, his own needs. No chance is he thinking about marrying her, not really. I reckon that’s just not his nature.)

    And finally, Norton weirdly flees the premises, rejecting both Pelletier and Espinoza, whose curious, bizarrely shared attachment to Norton is just so strange and difficult for me to understand. I finally came to the conclusion that the two of them were just sugarcoating their real feeling for Norton which is really your basic bestial attraction, pretending to “love” her and want to marry her and whatnot, telling her to choose between them. If a man wants to marry a woman, are we to believe that he would have sex with her, in the same room with his rival? Impossible, surely–? Plus, what the heck is she thinking?! Maybe she has been reading these wacky magazine articles about “polyamory” or whatever? I will welcome everyone’s views on this point.

    By the way, I take Norton’s dream of the two mirrors this way: one mirror is Espinoza, the other is Pelletier. The woman reflected therein is both herself, and not herself. She panics and thinks how she’s got to get the hell out of there, which she does. The real Norton is in there, at least, and struggling to get out.

    The three dreams after Amalfitano’s allegory are prophetic. Pelletier dreams of reading the same page over and over, which he does; Espinoza dreams of visiting the rug seller and mindlessly buying rugs, ditto; Norton, of scrambling around trying to find a place for the English oak, herself, for she sees herself as both traditionally English, and rootless (or the roots are Medusa’s locks, and she’s already been compared to that dreadful figure.) Which she finally does, as well, go off scrambling to the next place, and planting her roots with Morini.

    I can’t tell whether Morini can really help her, though. Is their attachment real, will the roots sink down, or is it just another series of poses, like what she went through with Pelletier and Espinoza?

    18 Comments

    Matt, February 11th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    Week 3: Institutionalized

    by Maria Bustillos

    After getting a sense of the rhythms of Bolaño’s sly humor, you can tell that something is up right away when he describes the critics’ first impression of Amalfitano:

    […] a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field …

    Since the critics are generally (but not always) depicted as a pretty oafish crew, we can begin by assuming that there will be more to this character than meets the eye.  As indeed there proves to be.  The first serious conversation between the four scholars concerns the possible whereabouts and motives of Archimboldi.  Has he come to Mexico to visit a friend?  What if Almendro lied to them?

    Almendro who?  Héctor Enrique Almendro? said Amalfitano, who goes on to say that he wouldn’t bet much on a tip from that guy.  Why not?

    Well, because he’s a typical Mexican intellectual, his main concern is getting by.

    Now Amalfitano launches into the most extraordinary flight of fancy: a series of volcanic, wild, beautiful, splendid lamentations on the subject of the intellectual milieu in Mexico.

    “Literature in Mexico is like a kindergarten,” he begins.  (Bolaño slips from “they” to “you” in this passage, indicating that Amalfitano to some extent reckons himself to have been a member of this fraternity.)

    You sit in a park and read Valéry (not by accident a big “establishment” figure, protégé of Mallarmé, member of the Académie française, correspondent of Gide and of Einstein,) and then you go hang out with friends.

    «Ayant consacré ces heures à la vie de l’esprit, je me sens le droit d’être bête le reste de la journée.» Paul Valéry.

    (“Having devoted [some] hours to the life of the mind, I feel I have the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”)

    “And yet your shadow isn’t following you anymore.”

    This surprising shadowlessness is getting at the loss of some essentially human component, something lost by contact with the conventions of intellectual life, with institutions.  But it’s more than that.  The whole passage is full of poetic conceits, none of them arbitrary.  In the case of the lost shadow, we’re looking at the loss of an ability to matter.  A loss of realness, yes, but recall that one writer may live in the shadow of another, that a writer may cast a long shadow; in short, the shadow represents the chance to leave one’s mark.  (And is there a suggestion of vampirism, as well?)

    In any case, dude is just getting warmed up, here!!  I could go line by line and show you some startling new insight or beauty in this passage, which consists, mind-blowingly, of a single paragraph.  But let us get on to the main event:  a complete recasting of the tale of Plato’s cave, adding a whole new level of deafness, blindness and powerlessness to the proceedings.

    The intellectual (“you”) arrives on a kind of stage, without his shadow, and starts to “translate reality, or reinterpret it or sing it.”  The intellectual is facing outward, toward an audience, and behind him is a tube which leads to a mine.  “Let’s call it a cave.” (!!)  That is to say, intellectuals could be looking into the cave, even bringing people out of there, maybe; at the very least they should be investigating the cave, mining the reality of the human condition and then showing the results to their audience.  If you can get even partway out, that is what you are supposed to be doing!  But no!  These shadowless intellectuals can’t grasp anything from the cave but “unintelligible noises.”  They’re quite cut off from the reality of what it is to be human, even though the occupants of the cave are making a big racket, “syllables of rage or of seduction  or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and  moans.”  The intellectuals don’t really understand a bit of it; they’re just enjoying the spotlight.  “They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane.”  They make animal noises because they can’t begin to conceive of the enormity of the beast within.

    The stage on which the intellectuals ply their trade is comfortable and pretty, but it’s shrinking, which is to say, less and less people in Mexico care about literature because these guys are not saying anything of true interest; they’re not really interpreting correctly what is going on in the cave.  The audience for TV, by contrast, is enormous.  They don’t know what the hell is going on in there, either, but no matter, the audience grows and grows.  Once in a while they let a shadowless intellectual on there.

    Man, Mexico is not the only place where this is happening.  I mean, WHOA.  Utterly, wiglet-blastingly brilliant.

    There’s so much here, but the predominant message is that artists, writers, could be connecting people with reality, could be articulating for us what it means to be human, could be leading us out of the cave, and yet they do not.  The intellectuals themselves know that there is something missing.  At night one may “wander off course” and drink mezcal and he thinks:

    […] what would happen if one day he.  But no.

    Naturally, our own European intellectuals can make neither head nor tail of this blazing fusillade.

    “I don’t understand a word you’ve said,” says Norton.

    “Really I’ve just been talking nonsense,” said Amalfitano.

    Bolaño’s retelling of this story presents an underlying call to arms, not at all unlike what I remember of Plato’s original one.  In his own sad, funny, clever way he’s saying that aware, thinking people have a real responsibility to engage with the world, and to improve it if they can.

    21 Comments

    Matt, February 8th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    Week 2: Mucho Macho

    by Maria Bustillos

    Unfortunately, the reaction of Espinoza and Pelletier to the Pakistani cab driver’s insults came as no surprise to me. The admirable Anglo technique of dealing with insults from other men by means of contempt, ridicule or boredom (q.v. The Scarlet Pimpernel) requires a certain detachment uncommon among those of the hotter blood. And in this case, the offense was huge, manifold: the cab driver insulted the woman under their protection,* as well as each man’s own moral character, and then, that of his friend. My first thought as I read was, oh no no, yikes, I wonder if this cab driver would have said such stuff if he’d had the faintest clue about that difference. Did American readers know, as I did, that there was going to be a fight as soon as the word “whore” was spoken? It was inevitable, any of the men in my own family would have done exactly the same thing, though they’re not alike in much else. This is about the worst thing you could say to a Latin guy, crazy as that may sound, and it is no surprise whatsoever that the first blows administered (predictably, by Espinoza) are described as “Iberian.”

    That complex of characteristics both admirable and deplorable, composed of pride, sensitivity, insecurity, potency and belligerence, that is called machismo in Spanish–this exists in every culture, of course, but the Spanish flavor is very pronounced. I think that Bolaño is saying, here, that machismo is a literally uncontrollable source of violence; that no matter how “civilized” a man is, he will always be in some danger of a catastrophe like Espinoza’s (pencil ‘v. true’ in the margin on that one, I reckon.)

    The dry, sardonic humor in this passage really is a torment, in kind of a Solondzian way. Why the hell didn’t they stop kicking the guy?! Oh god, why bring Salman Rushdie into it?! The thing that made me really nuts was Espinoza’s subsequent rationalization of the whole thing. The Pakistani guy “had it coming.” If we had a nickel for every time we’ve heard that one!

    What a wonderful passage though, 100% insane and 100% credible, funny, terrible, sad. It’s a very deft thing to show us these guys, clownish and absurd and even unhinged and dangerous as they are, and yet evoke sympathy. That to me is the mark of the most skilled novelist: Dostoevsky territory.

    * You bet that is how these two think of it, no matter how ‘modern’ they are.

    17 Comments

    Matt, February 4th 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read

    Week 2: Bolaño and the Academy

    by Maria Bustillos

    The academy in 2666 is very meticulously observed, and yet I cannot find much detail out there about Bolaño’s own formal education. Nobody online seems to mention any specific institutions where he worked, taught, or wrote. It seems almost inevitable that if there were any such institutions, their representatives would have been very keen to claim such an association. So it appears that we are looking at an autodidact? A very, very learned autodidact, who lived all over the world, and who was superconnected in Spanish and Latin American literary and political circles. (Please comment, if you know more on this point!)

    I’d like to know more about the apparent difference between the American literary world and the European/Latin American one that Bolaño was part of. “Serious” writers in the US seem in general to be more closely tied to the academy, though “establishment” figures like the Nobel-winning Octavio Paz taught at a whole lot of fancy schools. But Bolaño was a socialist, in some sense a revolutionary, and I think we can extrapolate beyond that to conjecture that he saw his contribution to literature (as to the world at large) as subversive, anti-authoritarian—as, generally, the work of an outsider.

    So, as I was saying … despite the fact that Bolaño was not of the academy, he seems to have understood its workings very well indeed. The critics of 2666 are very like real academics in all their ambition and their weird intellectual competitiveness, shot through with a real and passionate desire to read, and understand, and to write, and be understood.

    With all this in mind, let’s have a look at the following mind-blowing, virtuoso passage from the novel, quite possibly my favorite so far. It speaks clearly to Bolaño’s rejection of the academic life, and of institutions generally. This rejection comes on all fronts: societal, cultural, political and intellectual.

    (And at this point it must be said that there’s truth to the saying make your name, then sleep and reap fame, because Espinoza’s and Pelletier’s participation in the conference “Reflecting the Twentieth Century: The Work of Benno von Archimboldi,” not to mention their contribution to it, was at best null, at worst catatonic, as if they were suddenly spent or absent, prematurely aged or in a state of shock, a fact that didn’t pass unnoticed by the attendees used to Espinoza’s and Pelletier’s displays of energy [sometimes brazen] at this sort of event, nor did it go unnoticed by the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them—some of them, anyway—where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows, and although they noticed a there and a not-there, an absence-presence in the fleeting passage of Pelletier and Espinoza through Bologna, they were incapable of seeing what was really important: Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s absolute boredom regarding everything said there about Archimboldi or their negligent disregard for the gaze of others, as if the two were so much cannibal fodder, a disregard lost on the young conferencegoers, those eager and insatiable cannibals, their thirtysomething faces bloated with success, their expressions shifting from boredom to madness, their coded stutterings speaking only two words: love me, or maybe two words and a phrase: love me, let me love you, though obviously no one understood.)

    Despite his fire-breathing (and hilarious) condemnation of these conventional representatives of the Life of the Mind, I don’t mistake Bolaño for any kind of “art for art’s sake” idealist, or for a sniffy or superior “radical,” either. He distinguishes between those who love criticism more than literature in a manner that suggests very clearly that there is a right side of that question to be on, but he doesn’t really tear these guys down in order to put himself above, in the manner, say, of Henry Miller, or Harold Bloom, or James Wood, even. There’s compassion in it, as well as a smackdown, and the ego quotient is not high. Indeed I have formed the impression that there was not one self-regarding bone in this guy’s bod. Just as an aside, because I know that there are so many admirers of David Foster Wallace here: it’s no surprise to me that so many Wallace fans are drawn to Bolaño, because of this pre-eminent quality of intellectual humility, plus low bullshit-tolerance.

    (So I had written the above, and then I happened across the most beautiful illustration of this!)

    Rodrigo Fresán’s eulogy of Bolaño (http://www.letraslibres.com/index.php?art=8981) is a lovely, gentle, rather elaborately worded remembrance of his friend. He paints Bolaño as a passionate and lively companion, but most of all, as a writer through and through; a man completely dedicated to and steeped in the literary life.

    Toward the end, Fresán’ quotes a remarkable email that he received from Bolaño:

    Yo no sé cómo hay escritores que aún creen en la inmortalidad literaria. Entiendo que haya quienes creen en la inmortalidad del alma, incluso puedo entender a los que creen en el Paraíso y el Infierno y en esa estación intermedia y sobrecogedora que es el Purgatorio, pero cuando escucho a un escritor hablar de la inmortalidad de determinadas obras literarias me dan ganas de abofetearlo. No estoy hablando de pegarle sino de darle una sola bofetada y después, probablemente, abrazarlo y confortarlo. En esto yo sé que no estarás de acuerdo conmigo, Rodrigo, porque tú eres una persona básicamente no violenta. Yo también lo soy. Cuando digo darle una bofetada estoy más bien pensando en el carácter lenitivo de ciertas bofetadas, como aquellas que en el cine se les da a los histéricos o a las histéricas para que reaccionen y dejen de gritar y salven su vida.

    (This is my own translation … please let me know if I’ve botched anything.)

    I don’t know how there can be writers who still believe in literary immortality. I understand that there might be those who believe in the immortality of the soul, and I can even believe there are those who believe in Paradise and Hell and in that freaky intermediate station that is Purgatory, but when I hear a writer speak of the immortality of definite works of literature I feel like slapping him. I’m not talking about really belting, so much as just one slap, and afterwards, probably, hugging and comforting him. In this I know that you won’t be in agreement with me, Rodrigo, because you are basically a non-violent person. As am I. When I say, deliver a slap, I’m more thinking of the palliative character of certain slappings, like those in the movies that are administered to hysterics so that they will react, stop screaming, and save their own lives.

    11 Comments

    Matt, February 2nd 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in 2666 Group Read
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