1333 + 1333 ≠ 2666

I’m rereading 2666 and Nazi Literature in the Americas by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Both are part of group reads: 2666 is ongoing over at bolanobolano.com while discussion of Nazi Literature by Bolaño Shelfari group starts on April 1. I'm still catching up with the 2666 group read. Still making progress (I think) though I'm left behind in the middle of "The Part About Fate." Here's a rather long rambling post of my thoughts so far.

Rereading a book by Bolaño is, to use his words, like going back to the scene of the crime. Like entering the yellow tape-obstructed door and looking for possible clues that the early detectives may have overlooked. His books can be tagged as crime and detective novels. They are usually about a search for a mysterious artist or a killer or a poet, or a combination of any of them. He uses various styles to make this search a complex examination of human natures. I think his success in this genre is due in part to reader participation encouraged in the books. I don’t mean to say that Bolaño solicits participation. The act of reading itself is participation. But his books involve the reader into the narrative in such a way that the reader is part of the detection. The momentum of narratives and the cross-references practically implicate the reader to a more active role. The reader is left to ponder, trying to put two and two together. Hidden mysteries sustain him. The clues in the novel are misplaced and the elements of a crime (motive, means, and opportunity) and its unfolding (interview, investigation, and resolution) are not ticked off one by one. Sometimes, the case is embedded in the numbers. Numbers betray the novelistic design. As noted before, an alternative interpretation to the numeric title "2666" (apart from it being a futuristic/apocalyptic year) is as the summation of two sets of pages of a history book, each of which totals 1,333 pages. The metaphor came from Nazi Literature in the Americas wherein one of the encyclopedia entries on "Harry Sibelius" (1949-2014), under the section "Magicians, Mercenaries, and Miserable Creatures," makes reference to Sibelius’s 1,333-page novel titled The True Son of Job, "darkly mirroring" the book Hitler’s Europe by the (real) historian Arnold J. Toynbee.

... the British professor’s [Toynbee’s] aim is to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist [Sibelius] seems to believe that "somewhere in time and space" the crime in question has definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalogue it.

It appears that the books by Sibelius and Toynbee share only structural similarities. The True Son of Job also seems to be a book wholly unlike 2666. As with most imagined titles described in the playful entries of this encyclopedia of Nazi literature in the Americas, Sibelius's book can be considered a joke, being a pastiche of stories borrowing characters from several books (by Hemingway, Faulkner, Walt Disney’s Bambi, Gone With the Wind, etc.). One can even say that the book in question, made up of hundreds of stories not following any principle or overall vision, is the complete opposite of Bolaño's novel, its parody. Curiously, in its original Spanish the novel 2666 ran to around 1,126 pages. Had he lived to edit and finish the book to his liking, Bolaño probably would have written more pages to stretch it to 1,333. Nah, I'm just stretching this idea. But anyway, the idea of a pseudo-history book with 1,333 pages (following the structure of another book) could be correlated to Liz Norton's dream in "The Part About the Critics" which borrowed Borges's image of two mirrors. I believe this dream offers a central perspective to the book, not least because there is a counterpart of double mirrors to "reality" (that is, the two mirrors exist in Norton’s hotel room). Here is the entire dream sequence:

In Norton's dream she saw herself reflected in both mirrors. From the front in one and from the back in the other. Her body was slightly aslant. It was impossible to say for sure whether she was about to move forward or backward. The light in the room was dim and uncertain, like the light of an English dusk. No lamp was lit. Her image in the mirrors was dressed to go out, in a tailored gray suit and, oddly, since Norton hardly ever wore such things, a little gray hat that brought to mind the fashion pages of the fifties. She was probably wearing black pumps, although they weren't visible. The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia and also of defenselessness, made her wonder, nevertheless, what she was waiting for to leave, what signal she was waiting for before she stepped out of the field between the watching mirrors and opened the door and disappeared. Had she heard a noise in the hall? Had someone passing by tried to open her door? A confused hotel guest? A worker, someone sent up by reception, a chambermaid? And yet the silence was total, and there was a certain calm about it, the calm of long early-evening silences. All at once Norton realized that the woman reflected in the mirror wasn't her. She felt afraid and curious, and she didn't move, watching the figure in the mirror even more carefully, if possible. Objectively, she said to herself, she looks just like me and there's no reason why I should think otherwise. She's me. But then she looked at the woman's neck: a vein, swollen as if to bursting, ran down from her ear and vanished at the shoulder blade. A vein that didn't seem real, that seemed drawn on. Then Norton thought: I have to get out of here. And she scanned the room, trying to pinpoint the exact spot where the woman was, but it was impossible to see her. In order for her to be reflected in both mirrors, she said to herself, she must be just between the little entryway and the room. But she couldn't see her. When she watched her in the mirrors she noticed a change. The woman's head was turning almost imperceptibly. I'm being reflected in the mirrors too, Norton said to herself. And if she keeps moving, in the end we'll see each other. Each of us will see the other's face. Norton clenched her fists and waited. The woman in the mirror clenched her fists too, as if she were making a superhuman effort. The light coming into the room was ashen. Norton had the impression that outside, in the streets, a fire was raging. She began to sweat. She lowered her head and closed her eyes. When she looked in the mirrors again, the woman's swollen vein had grown and her profile was beginning to appear. I have to escape, she thought. She also thought: where are Jean-Claude and Manuel? She thought about Morini. All she saw was an empty wheelchair and behind it an enormous, impenetrable forest, so dark green it was almost black, which it took her a while to recognize as Hyde Park. When she opened her eyes, the gaze of the woman in the mirror and her own gaze intersected at some indeterminate point in the room. The woman's eyes were just like her eyes. The cheekbones, the lips, the forehead, the nose. Norton started to cry in sorrow or fear, or thought she was crying. She's just like me, she said to herself, but she's dead. The woman smiled tentatively and then, almost without transition, a grimace of fear twisted her face. Startled, Norton looked behind her, but there was no one there, just the wall. The woman smiled at her again. This time the smile grew not out of a grimace but out of a look of despair. And then the woman smiled at her again and her face became anxious, then blank, then nervous, then resigned, and then all the expressions of madness passed over it and after each she always smiled. Meanwhile, Norton, regaining her composure, had taken out a small notebook and was rapidly taking notes about everything as it happened, as if her fate or her share of happiness on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up.

The nightmare's "minor effects" are plenty here: the dim light, the gray suit and hat, the dead woman reflected in the mirror who was distinct from Norton, the reflected woman’s swollen vein (which grows), the woman’s head turning, the clenched fists, an empty wheelchair, the dark forest of Hyde Park, the woman’s gaze, her smile and twisted grimace and expressions of madness. The images are all deployed from the perspective of reflection, in the two mirrors. Many interpretations are put forward as to the dream’s meaning and in fact all of these interpretations are plausible. Because it can be argued that the (literary) language of dreams can be interpreted in any number of ways, in the same way that two mirrors facing each other reflects each other infinitely. This dream among many other dreams in the book can hold a clue to the book’s title as a 2,666-page history book and to the books "reflective" design. It is arguably the creepiest and certainly the longest dream described from among the three critics dreaming their own dreams at the same time. The interesting part for me is the mention of Norton’s note-taking at the end of the dream, just before she woke up. This can correspond to the cataloging of crimes and evil deeds as a valid (ethical) response of an artist when confronted by horrors. The dead woman reflected in the mirror (who looks like Norton but was not her) could be standing for the murdered women of Sta. Teresa, Mexico. The swollen vein and the grimace and gestures of madness evoke the horrors of distress, torture, and suffering. The woman turning her neck is quite scary enough; I couldn’t help but think of The Exorcist! Norton’s response to the dream, to take notes furiously, reflects that role of a writer (a novelist or a journalist) to catalogue everything and to write and describe the cold facts around her, to make a written report of it if only to bear witness to the terrible crimes (its naked truth, brutality, and horror), if not to try to understand them. So while Norton is oblivious to the crimes happening around her, she is haunted by this dream of a dead woman reflected in the mirror. The litany of deaths is cataloged in "The Part About the Crimes" and the novelist’s unflinching response to what is happening around her defines the role of the novelist in the face of evil. The ethical dimension of the persistence of poetry after the triumph of evil had been argued before, in Adorno’s dictum, and rejected in several ways by uncompromising and sublime writers such as W. G. Sebald. The moral position of these writers is absorbed in the lambent quality of their works. And so the inevitable question. Does Bolaño have a moral position? A writer puts forward his position through the objective clinical treatment of undeniable hard facts, through exposing the crimes and retrieving it from the censorship of horrible and heinous things. Unspeakable rapes and murders are spoken. Bodies are counted. Injuries are described dispassionately. Irony heightened to accompany the violence. The fragmented truth held to the light. The brutal scalpel of fiction serving as an instrument to the autopsy of victims. A victim’s body after body paraded if only to remind us, constantly and unforgiving, over and over and over, that sick things happen and they are the doings of our fellow human beings. And thus, the image in the mirror and its reflection. The historical novel and its reference, the history book that is full of dark momentous events. The historical book and its negative twin book, both of which when taken together constitute a book of a certain number of pages. The restless waking life reflected in a restless nightmare. In the labyrinth of reflecting mirrors there is clearly a double-layer of double-meaning: a double-image, a double-reflection in the metaphors of twinning and twin mirrors, images of images. Nightmares could be cries from hell, nightmares could literally take place in hell, Borges said in his lecture on nightmares. In his last interview, when asked of his description of hell, Bolaño said that it is "like Ciudad Juárez, our curse and mirror, a disturbing reflection of our frustrations, and our infamous interpretation of liberty and of our desires." And so to illustrate the reflection of reality in nightmares, of images in mirror, of hell in the void (a gaping black hole capturing all the light, essentially the image of the negative), 2666 (like Nazi Literature, Distant Star, and the other books) is riddled with references to mirrors and reflections, twins and image negatives. Thus, the glass shards in Amalfitano's neighbor's fence reflecting each other's light. And then the metaphor of a "negative image" early in the book when the critics speculated on the identity of the Swabian (a cultural promoter) who claims to have seen Benno von Archimboldi (the missing novelist):

According to Morini, the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed photograph that keeps looming larger, becoming more powerful, more oppressive, without ever losing its link to the negative (which undergoes the reverse process, gradually altered by time and fate), the two images somehow still the same ...

Another clue is perhaps left by the novelist in "The Part About Amalfitano," where a reference to another year can be stretched by our reading. The following passage comes from a book that Amalfitano was reading, "scarcely one hundred pages long, [written] by a certain Lonko Kilapán, published in Santiago de Chile in 1978." The title of the book is O'Higgins Is Araucanian: 17 Proofs, Taken from the Secret History of Araucania.

Kilapán wrote: "Killenkusi was a Machi priestess. Her daughter Kinturay had to choose between succeeding her or becoming a spy; she chose the latter and her love for the Irishman; this opportunity afforded her the hope of having a child who, like Lautaro and mixed-race Alejo, would be raised among the Spaniards, and like them might one day lead the hosts of those who wished to push the conquistadors back beyond the Maule River, because Admapu law prohibited the Araucanians from fighting outside of Yekmonchi. Her hope was realized and in the spring of the year 1777, in the place called Palpal, an Araucanian woman endured the pain of childbirth in a standing position because tradition decreed that a strong child could not be born of a weak mother. The son arrived and became the Liberator of Chile."

The year 1777 is of course just incidental. Or not? It is convenient that Bolaño allow Amalfitano to choose this book of Kilapán's, gaining a correspondence to the book's title. The childbirth could have happened at some other year, of all years. The historian could have recorded some other innocent year. The probabilities are interesting. Trebling the 7 is not so different as trebling the 6 in the novel’s title and also the halving of the 6's and thus the trebled 3 in the number of pages of a "fake" history book in Nazi Literature. The politics of history is never more fleshed out than in this book by Kilapán which Amalfitano thinks was published as a propaganda material by a dictatorship regime. Note also that a child mentioned in the book was named Lautaro, sharing the name of Bolaño's son, to whom, along with Bolaño's daughter, the novel 2666 is dedicated. Note also that the year 1777 was an extended form of the number in the subtitle, "17 Proofs." Bolaño's deadpan tone with respect to describing the book's contents relegates this book O'Higgins Is Araucanian to something like a joke, so much so that one could excerpt the entire passage of Amalfitano's "literary criticism" to be included as an additional entry to the Nazi Literature encyclopedia. But it turns out to be a real book. An unusual history book dealing with myths, magic, telepathy and racial issues. Can this be tied up to the intellectual responsibility of writers and the political regimes’ manipulation of literature to serve their totalitarian purpose, etc.? Maybe. Some useful background and great discussion of the Araucanian book can be found here.

We also find in an entry in the novel Nazi Literature a reference to another year, in a description of a book of poems called The Destiny of Pizzaro Street (second edition) by Andrés Cepeda Cepeda, aka The Page:

What does The Page propose [in his book of poems]? To what is he committed? A return to the Iron Age, which for him coincides roughly with the life and times of Pizzaro. Inter-racial conflict in Peru (although when he says Peru, and this is perhaps more important than his theory of racial struggle, to which he devotes no more than a couplet, he is also excluding Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador). The ensuing conflict between Peru and Argentina (including Uruguay and Paraguay), which he dubs "the combat of Castor and Pollux." The uncertain victory. The possible defeat of both sides, which he prophesies for the thirty-third year of the third millennium. In the final three lines, he alludes laboriously to the birth of a blond child in the ruins of a sepulchral Lima.

The year referred to is the year 2033, no three-peat in the digits but only in the way the year was described (33rd year of the 3rd millennium). It is possible this is just another incidental year in a book filled with hypothetical years. But it is hard not to compare this with the event in 1777 since in both years, a birth of a child was prophesied, a child who furthermore may (or will) play an important role in history.

There is certainly reference to the year 2033. In the novella Amulet one finds something from among a string of years "remembered" by the hallucinating imagination of Auxilio Lacouture: "For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033." That is hardly helpful, and one thinks that the thirty-third year of the current millennium is just a random, arbitrary year, in the same way that 2666 or 1777 is arbitrary. Not unless if, in search of lost time, we think hard of Proust's works on memory and things past. (Thus in Amulet, the meaning may not be stretched and we just go to the default interpretation of a futuristic, prophetic year 2033, without succumbing to any apocalyptic tendency. The years in Auxilio’s mind are still instructive in that we are treated to some privileged prophecies regarding the fate of literature and books: "Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become [an] Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101" and this bold takes on the future state of letters goes on for a few more pages, with writers being reincarnated or rediscovered or falling into oblivion.)

This fixation on mirrors and numbers belies the fragmentation of 2666. The fragmentation arises from scattered images and characters, found objects and readymades. The books (real, imaginary, or something in between), can make detectives out of readers. But readers are consigned to not solve the case, to not find all the answers to the questions. Why are we still reading? Or as Czesław Miłosz asked more explicitly, what is poetry that does not save nations or people? Beats me, I imagine Amalfitano answering and then shrugging his shoulders. And then the professor might have relented and given his answer, in the way he described what he saw in the City of Sta. Teresa, "images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments."

As if his fate or his life on earth depended on it, Bolaño made a dash to finish his posthumous book. What he came up with are fragments, fragments that will not save nations or people. Pages and clues that do not give a puzzle-fit solution. Fake (fictional) books that mirror the horrible century. A whole unequal to the sum of its discrete parts. For it could be greater. For the reckoning could always be delayed. Say, 2667. Or the pages lengthened by an afterword.

2666, double mirrors, and Borges

Having reread the first two parts of 2666, I’m reviewing my notes on it so far. I reiterate the conjecture on Borges’s direct influence on Bolaño with regard to the role of nightmares and dreams in the book. It is certain that Bolaño was influenced by Borges’s ideas on dreams, derived from Groussac and Coleridge and other poets. In the lecture of Borges on "Nightmares" (from the book Seven Nights, and also collected in Everything and Nothing), Borges mentioned that, although we might wish otherwise, in dreams what is important is not the images but the impressions produced by them: "The images are minor; they are effects." And also two ideas: first, dreams are part of waking life; and the other idea, the splendid one, the belief of the poets: that all of waking is a dream. Borges then mentioned that there is no difference between these two ideas. He gave some brilliant examples from literature and if I recall it right, an example in real life. Borges ended this lecture, first delivered in Argentina, with a speculation about the particular horror of nightmares, which is beyond the horror of the waking life, and which can be expressed by any story, a horror that has something more to it (the flavor of the nightmare).

Borges’s theological/supernatural speculation at the end of his lecture is also scary: "What if nightmares were cries from hell? What if nightmares literally took place in hell? Why not? Everything is so strange that even this is possible."

I think that these hypotheses by Borges are what Bolaño borrowed as frameworks for the dreams and nightmares permeating 2666. Nightmares as a reflection of the waking life ("reality"). Nightmares impinging on real lives.

A proof of this was the conspicuous image of the two mirrors which was both present in Liz Norton's hotel room in Mexico (in reality) and in her dream. It was clearly a nod to Borges who included this image in his story "The Aleph" and also in the above-mentioned lecture on nightmares itself where Borges said that all it takes are two mirrors to construct a labyrinth.

In Norton's room there were two mirrors instead of one. The first mirror was by the door, as it was in the other rooms. The second was on the opposite wall, next to the window overlooking the street, hung in such a way that if one stood in a certain spot, the two mirrors reflected each other.

This was how the double mirrors were described (in reality) and their vivid reappearance in Norton's nightmare made them more significant. Later on she wrote about them in a letter to the other two critics Pelletier and Espinoza ("I remember I thought about the hotel. In my room at the hotel there were two very odd mirrors that frightened me the last few days. When I felt myself dropping off, I barely had the strength to reach out and turn off the light.")

In "The Aleph" Borges suggested a metaphysical meaning for the mirrors:

Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), … saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly ...

After seeing a lot of images aside from the mirrors, "The Aleph" ended the passage thus: "I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe. Near the end of "The Part About the Crimes" the image of the two mirrors recurs. There was an indication that the labyrinth created by the two mirrors contains the evil reflected in reality. That the book was a dying man's attempt to articulate the inconceivable universe in nightmares which come alive in dreams and in waking life.

Reading literature is a dangerous occupation

I'm trying to get back on track with the 2666 Group Read that is unfolding over at Las Obras de Roberto Bolaño. I've been avidly following along for the first several weeks but has unfortunately fallen by the wayside. I don't know. I got sidetracked when I started with "The Part About Fate." The L'Etranger-like beginning of that part got to me. Coming on the heels of the dissembling Amalfitano, I just find it so sad. I may already have withdrawal symptoms. I'm pretty sure I will not be picking this book up again (cover to cover) in the future.

I've read 2666 the past year and was just consumed by it. This time around, the same species of horror (hardly more understandable) creeps into the page and it's hard to look at its writhing form.

Let me just say kudos to the theme trackers of the group read. Their thematic explorations are a big help to the floundering reader. Their tenacious readings and courage allow one to form ideas and impressions on the book and on what Roberto may be up to. I find this whole group read experience a meaningful exercise. I'm not giving up. I'll pick "Fate" up again and get back to the main blog site and the discussions. I know I will trudge through again some of the evil deeds of the twentieth and the present centuries. I know that at the same time I will be treated with the consolation of the raw power of writing. Literature is a dangerous occupation, says Roberto. So is reading it, maybe.

2666: The part about the title

Previously, the only connection that I found between the Roberto Bolaño novels 2666 and Nazi Literature in the Americas was the character of General Entrescu who appeared in "The Part About Archimboldi" and whose name was listed in Nazi Literature's "Epilogue for Monsters." Recognizable because of the mention of the general's “asset” and his cinematic (if weird) death.


A clue to the book's title can be found from the epigraph of 2666 taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Le Voyage”:

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

The original poem in French and several English translations can be found in here. The exact quote from the book comes from the version of Geoffrey Wagner; it is the last poem in the above link.


In part VII of “The Voyage”, the first stanza reads in full:

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

The last line ends in an exclamation here and the thread is explicit in the futuristic aspect of the year 2666: “today / Yesterday, tomorrow, always …” The implication is that 2666 is just an arbitrary year, albeit a convenient and conscious choice as the number refers to the mark of the beast, thereby invoking an apocalyptic resonance. The Quarterly Conversation's great review of 2666 interpreted these extended lines of the epigraph as a direct evocation of the heinous crimes in Santa Teresa. The translator Natasha Wimmer, in her biographical essay on B, points out from these poetic lines the literal health hazard posed by a long and arduous travel in the desert.


The book’s subject matter supports the notions of apocalypse and the futuristic in the enigmatic title. Throughout the book, individual and collective histories are given a chilling treatment, from the world wars to the holocaust to unsolved mass murders in Santa Teresa. Human struggles and the persistence of evil are the voids that characterize the desert of human heart. The traveller’s journey, into the “desert of boredom”, will invariably lead him and his thirst into “an oasis of horror”. A pure black vision.


The notion that evil is here to stay, that it is a permanent feature of existence, is terrifying and, what’s more disturbing, it is of our own making. Because by our silence and omission, we manifest our refusal to act against the tides of injustice and crime. Etc., etc.


Anyway, what strikes me is that the lines quoted can very well constitute the general framework of 2666. The world that men created here on earth, at this time, at any time (past, present, future), is just a reflection of human folly. It just “shows us our reflections.” This phrase of Baudelaire’s occur in other translations as “shows us our image”, “The horror of our image will unravel”, “we see / ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday”, “The small monotonous world reflects me everywhere”, “So terrifying that any image made in it / Can be splashed perfunctorily away”, “where trite oases from each muddy pool / one thing reflect: his horror-haunted eyes!”


Our reflections. In terms of Jared’s chosen quote in Nazi Literature, the novel’s pages are “darkly mirroring” a book of history.


To contextualize further the intertextuality between 2666 and Nazi Literature, I'm quoting in full Jared's brilliant take on it:

In Nazi Literature in the Americas, the entry on Harry Sibelius contains the following quote describing Harry's own monstrously-sized (and -charactered) novel: "Then the novel proper - The True Son of Job - begins: 1,333 pages darkly mirroring Arnold J. Toynbee's Hitler's Europe."

Which is interesting. This "novel" is a kind of negative image of Toynbee's, it is in fact "darkly mirroring" it, which is to say that it presupposes another alternate set of 1333 pages, totaling out to 2666 of them.

Further down the page, another interesting passage materializes: "In the final analysis, the British professor's [Toynbee] aim is to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist seems to believe that 'somewhere in time and space' the crime in question has definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalogue it."

These two sets of quotations easily reminded me of the novel 2666, especially of the 2nd volume's exhaustive and brutal account of the murders in Sonora. The sheer amount of ink devoted to the individual murders is vastly unsettling, and leads the reader to question why Bolano would have him/her sit privy to such a bloody catalogue. The first hypothesis mirrors Toynbee's motivation: perhaps Bolano wants to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. And I believe that this is a part of it. But the answer seems more complicated than that, too. Bolano touches on each murder case with the cold but meticulous gaze of a forensics expert, devoid of judgment, but casting an extremely intimate eye, infringing on the privacy of each character with the kind of omniscience that only an author can possess. And yet there's a public aspect, too, in which the sheer frequency of the publicizing resembles newspaper articles. The great paradox of news media is that horrific events are prodigiously reported, but that such reports reported in such magnitude lose their emotive effect; the public becomes numb to violence, and reports become mere catalogues. Bolano, I think, takes this paradigm to its most taut logical extension: around 250 pages (I admit, I haven't read the book in about 6 months' time) of brutality, daring you not to wince, daring you to ignore it. This, to me, is one aspect of 2666, the theory of narrative strategy: if one wants to write about horror, the horror of history or the recurring horrors behind it, how does one most effectively communicate that horror? To testify sometimes seems naive, and too overtly subjective; perhaps even too optimistic at this point. Perhaps selection is more important: instead of using declamatory statements or opining or rallying, one ought to simply record, record, record, organize, and publish. If the criminal horror exists, if it already exists and will continue to exist up to the year 2666, one might as well write about it and leave it at that.

Or something.

Elsewhere in Baudelaire’s poem, one can associate the main character in 2666 with the desert traveler: the novelist Archimboldi, perennial dreamer in sleep, disappearing without a trace:

… the true travelers are they who depart
For departing's sake; with hearts light as balloons,
They never swerve from their destinies,
Saying continuously, without knowing why: "Let us go on!"

These have passions formed like clouds;
As a recruit of his gun, they dream
Of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,
Whose name no human spirit knows.

And the poem’s ending can also loosely refer to Archimboldi, a bold diver of the depths of the sea, welcoming Death should it join him swimming amid the seagrasses and seaweeds:

O Death, my captain, it is time! let us raise the anchor!
This country wearies us, O Death! Let us make ready!
If sea and sky are both as black as ink,
You know our hearts are full of sunshine.

Pour on us your poison to refresh us!
Oh, this fire so burns our brains, we would
Dive to the depths of the gulf, Heaven or Hell, what matter?
If only to find in the depths of the Unknown the New!

Ah sunshine! The sun whose metaphor so suffuses the book in many instances. And there is certainly a hope that in the horrifying depths of the Unknown (void), something New can still be found. It does not matter whether the discovery of the (shocking) New is for the good or bad. So long as the sunlight accompanies the journey.


In her essay, Wimmer also quoted Bolaño about the closed-looping relation of the Unknown to the New (which in effect is the Cure):

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.

How elusive the cure. Meanwhile we can read more books, we can take leave and travel, and then we make love.

The Romantic Dogs (Roberto Bolaño)

The first book of Roberto Bolaño that I have read was The Savage Detectives. I was impressed with a book review of it that I asked C., a friend of mine, to hunt me down this book of Bolaño in Manila. That was last year.


And like a drop of mercy, The Savage Detectives was found in a used book shop. When it arrived I did not start reading it immediately. It’s quite hefty. The bulk of it warned me it’s one of those tomes that you would need to be very committed in order to finish.


It was not a breezy read. It took me about 5 months to finish. But in the midst of reading the book, the simple sentences acquired an undeniable power. The narrative became more and more inevitable. Something was coming alive and felt in the guts. The multitude of voices crowded in my head and a poetic universe opened up. Something just clicked in my mind, rearranged the atoms in me, and crystallized a certain resolve. I told myself, I have got to collect all of this author’s books.


After a bit more of my friend’s sleuthing, a copy of Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth was spotted in a bookstore. It was an anthology of short stories. I must really be lucky as his books were sold out in bookstores at that time. There must be a few copies available in the first place.


The Savage Detectives is about a group of young poets traipsing around the desert landscape of Mexico. The first part of the book (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”) is in the form of a journal of one aspiring young poet. It introduces the major characters (all poets) in the book. It is a straightforward narrative charged with poetry recitations and with sex. Not a single poem of the characters is really written up in the book. And the sexual encounters are either awkward or interrupted. This part ended with the poets on a journey with a prostitute in tow to help her escape from the wrath of her pimp-lover.


The second part of the book (the novel’s title “The Savage Detectives”) is a series of interviews of dozens of characters scattered all over the Americas and Europe. The poets’ mission is revealed: to find a poetess who is believed to be the founder of "visceral realism," a literary movement that is being resurrected by the young poets. This section of the book spans two decades (1976-1996) of “detective work” and covered vast grounds of raw emotional feelings and mental wreckages.


The final part (“The Sonora Desert”) picks up the journal entries from where the first part left off, the poets still in search of the missing poetess while the betrayed pimp-lover is hot on their heels. The book which started on All Souls Day in 1975 ends here, in apocalyptic manner, a day after the Valentines Day of ’76. The unusual structure of the novel is something like a freestyle journal writing at the bookends with a chorus of tragedies and comedies in the middle. It's the stuff of poetry of high and low seriousness.


When I heard of another Bolaño book coming out, with the devilish title of 2666, I couldn’t let the first opportunity pass. I asked R., a friend of mine who is a book seller in the US, to secure a copy for me. It arrived beautifully, in a three-volume boxed set edition, just a few days after the New Year. I knew then that 2009 is going to be a good reading year for me.


2666 is a much longer (close to 900 pages) work and with a more non-linear plotting. Surprisingly, I find it an easier read than The Savage Detectives. If The Savage Detectives is a chorus, then 2666 is a concert. It is a concert of five subtly interconnected parts, whose fragmentation belies the singular design of its construction. At the time of its publication 2666 is considered unfinished, but a definitive version of each part is already prepared by the author before his death in 2003.


Yet again, in this brave book of visceral power, Bolaño plays with the novel form to populate a canvas with multiple characters. The characters are of different nationalities, they come and go like chess pieces, and they play against each other and against some of the darkest periods of twentieth century history. The book tells of another search for a missing writer, this time a novelist.


(This persistent theme of Bolaño, the obsessive search for a writer, is emblematic of his view of mythmaking and myth-breaking. It seems to suggest that the mere sight of the writer in question will cure the searchers’ obsession of the writer. As if the books read by the obsessives were not enough to produce the desired effects, as if seeing the writer of the admired books in full view, in motion, speaking to you, is the culmination of a literary journey. But we intuitively know this to be untrue. The search calls for something deeper than the satisfaction of literary curiosity. The search is only a metaphysical symptom of a lack of authentic experience. If Bolaño was still alive today, will readers have to search for him, too?)


At the start of 2666, we find four scholars in pursuit of the last traces of this vanished writer, again in the Mexican desert. The trail eventually went cold, and the book was suddenly flung in another direction. Defiantly digressive, the novel supplies new characters (all equally "lost") and new tangents of plot. The connection of each new part with the previous ones appear to be superficial at first, but it takes on a sinister shape once the novel completes its twisted knotting of the plotlines. The book's affinity with unspeakable and unnameable acts and silences is palpable. A monster is hiding in the barren desert.


What is remarkable with 2666 is its consistent standing in the large body of work that is Bolaño’s. The novels are for the most part concerned with writers and artists, and the characters appear from one novel to the next. They are recycled, reused, and reduced to different aspects of the same project. The books are self-referential and interlocking. Important motifs are given in one book and they recur or are amplified in the other texts. There are so few modern writers who are gifted with this ability to constitute an oeuvre that is its own complete universe. Who come to mind are W.G. Sebald and Javier Marías and, to some extent, J.M. Coetzee.


(To illustrate this allusiveness of Bolaño’s books currently available in English translations: The characters in 2666 appeared previously in works such as Nazi Literature in the Americas, the last chapter of which is expanded into the novella Distant Star. Amulet is also a reworking of a long monologue in The Savage Detectives, the characters in the latter also appearing Amulet and in Bolaño’s short stories collected in Last Evenings on Earth. The intriguing title of 2666, referring to a portentous year in the future, is also prefigured in Amulet and at the end of The Savage Detectives.


This leaves us with By Night in Chile, with no apparent connection with the rest of the books. But then this novella (the first book of Bolaño to appear in English and in its compact form is considered his most perfectly constructed work) quintessentially tackles the ethical roots of collaboration with the Pinochet regime. Evil, Nazism, and their slippery intertwining with letters and poetry are the prominent arcs of Bolañoland. By Night in Chile is hardly a fluke in the author’s visceral universe as it shares with the rest of his works the perpetual struggle of poets against historical and personal circumstances. Besides, Pablo Neruda appears hysterically in this book, and Bolaño has this intimate love-hate relationship with Neruda.)


For posterity’s sake, Bolaño in 2666 has given us a credo, or more precisely an exhortation, in which to measure literary ambitions for the present and future practitioners of the novel:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Bolaño stretches the novel form to accommodate his fatalistic vision of men as self-destructing and destructive creatures. At the center of 2666 is the deployment of a brute force method of writing, to describe a series of murder reports on the violence inflicted against hundreds of women in the City of Sta. Teresa in Mexico. The gruesome mass-murder and rapes are based on the actual events in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The book unflinchingly depicts the graphic violence and its horrid details.


To see evil in the eye then, “amid blood and mortal wounds and stench,” is Bolaño’s abiding and dangerous preoccupation here. His poetic licence is devoted to the annulment of human complacence through numbness and a numbing experience of reading in discomfort. We are the missing witnesses of these heinous crimes and our testimonies are direly needed. It is cruel. It is offensive. And most important, it is human.


Horror is not the sole feature of the book. There are many facets to it that will feed a lot of bookish readers. Comedy is also present. It is potent and, well, comic. There are passages to incite horror, and forgiving passages to assuage the tedium. Sympathy, most of all, is not lacking. It is sympathy, tolerance, and human understanding that lift Bolaño’s book from the ruts of storytelling. It is the perennial absence of goodness that makes it more conspicuous. Albeit distributed in small measures, comedy and goodness functions like the lost poetry that is still remembered in the recesses of the mind.


In this matter, 2666 is comparable to The Savage Detectives whose non-inclusion of the characters’ own poems seems like an insidious joke. There are only three or four poems quoted in The Savage Detectives and the way they are delivered is probably timed to provoke a hoot. The first is a poem by Octavio Paz called “The Vampire,” after the reading of which, the narrator of the story couldn’t help to jack off. Another is a poem in French attributed to Rimbaud. The only "original" work in the novel is hardly a poem. It is a visual curiosity composed only of squiggles and lines. The joke, well-calculated, implies that surely there is really something serious and postmodern going on behind those lines.


Poetry in absentia functions like the hidden talisman that interprets everything that is lacking in The Savage Detectives. Poetry won’t save the world. And there is no indication yet that it can prevent the characters (and the readers) from completely becoming savages.






Which brings us to The Romantic Dogs, Bolaño’s first collection of poetry. This is a collection of nearly two decades of poems from 1980 to 1998. The translation into English is by Laura Healy and it came out last year. There are forty-odd poems presented in a bilingual edition, which makes it more transparent for Spanish speaking readers to deduce meanings that are otherwise lost in translation.


Bolaño was first of all a poet before branching out as a prose writer. This forced change in literary form was motivated by the practicalities of the writing trade. His stature as a novelist has somewhat eclipsed his outputs in verse. Despite the forced division between the two, the continuity in his literary projects can be viewed as occupying its proper niche. Whether in free verse or in free indirect style, his distinctive voice is heard in suspense. He may have articulated in The Romantic Dogs, for example, what his other poet-characters might have uttered in their romantic dreams.


The first poem, the title poem, speaks of a dream won by the poet, aged twenty, after having just “lost a country.” It announces a calling, presumably a poetic one, and hints that this collection will be autobiographical and will chart experiences of “growing up” which “back then … would have been a crime.”


Clearly this is a collection of love poems whose chosen emblem is a dog, man’s best friend but a lowly animal still. Politics and regimes, its cloak, are inescapable from the experience of poetry because the experience is a Latin American one. But at the same time, the tone strives for freedom from the ideological banality of history because the experience is also universal and, in the light of the poet’s path-breaking prose, bridges the global post-national territory.


The poems are about ceaseless and aimless wanderings, encounters with friends and lovers, casual sex, poverty, isolation, and dialogues with established poets. The existential baggage is delivered through the oblique telling of the anecdotes and loves of the twenty/twenty-something poet. The idealism and innocence of youth are being tested.


It is notable that the poet’s efforts at a conscious artistry, for such a highbrow subject as poetry and a dangerous calling as living on the edge, is peopled with individuals coming from low standing (prostitutes, vagrants, homosexuals, emigrants, and exiles), lowlifes who in their pathetic fates and decadence are pictured sympathetically in poetry even as they also took centerstage in the novels. Clearly the inner workings of Bolañoland are metaphorical identifications with the oppressed and their progress in this hostile civilization.


The backdrop of the poet’s romances is the dark undercurrents of history (Nazism, dictatorship, torture, kidnapping), which is often likened to a horror movie. The escape is often through sexual trysts but the comfort they bring is ephemeral, sometimes fake, and oftentimes they do not really bring comfort at all.

An unforgettable love
Beneath the rain
Beneath the sky bristling with antennas in which
17th century coffers coexist
With the shit of 20th century pigeons.
And in the middle
All the inextinguishable capacity to inflict pain,
Undefeated through years,
Undefeated through loves
Unforgettable.
Yes, that’s what she said.
An unforgettable love
And brief,
Like a hurricane?
No, a love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head,
The head of a king or Breton count,
Brief like beauty,
Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world’s majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love.
(“La Francesa”)

(“Shit of birds”: In By Night in Chile, we encounter several episodes where the blood of birds was literally falling from the sky after being preyed upon by falcons. This massacre of the birds is undertaken by falconers, who are priests, to prevent the birds from defecating inside the old Catholic churches.)


Another major theme in the poems is the figure of the “detective,” who fastidiously contemplates the scene of the crime. Frozen and lost, desperate and crushed, this portrait of the poet as a detective is also a romantic notion as it borders on obsession. The detective, in various guises, is always present in the novels and novellas. In Distant Star, a detective was hired to hunt down an assassin poet who has been killing other poets. And who else will assist the detective but another poet commissioned to track down the whereabouts of the assassin by identifying his works in magazines and publications? In The Savage Detectives, the detectives are unidentified, but they can easily be the interviewers of the many characters (witnesses) in the second part of the book, or the interviewed people themselves, or the poet-characters who were in search of the missing poetess. They may even be the readers of the book who can't help but attempt to decipher the layers of meaning in it. Also teeming with detectives is 2666, most notable of which are a neophyte detective who was accidentally plunged into the action of the novel, another who tracks down a notorious serial transgressor of churches, and the detectives who are investigating the serial killings and violation of women.


For Bolaño, poetry (and by extension, his writings) is not so much a political statement but an ethical one. He is establishing the roots of his fiction and his art in various ways: as a detective, as a poet, and as a romantic. Each of these figures is the face of the same individual who sometimes finds himself at a loss while contemplating the modern horror movie that is constantly unfolding in the theatre of the living. The poet/detective/romantic is always on the road in search of the completion of a lost humanity, his and those of his kind.


In poetry as in prose, Bolaño is first rate. The Romantic Dogs shows that the novelist’s essence dwells in his poetry. It is possible to dissociate the poems from his novelistic writings, but the writings take on new meanings when read side by side with the poetry. Even if the book of poems is intended to be self-contained, its echoes and reverberations in the novels gravitate toward the comprehension of an incomplete and unfinished poetic universe. It may be entirely justified to treat the poems without reference to the torrential works of prose. But to do so is to remove the fuel from the fiction machine, to admit the defeat of true poetry.

The defeat of true poetry, which we write in blood.
And semen and sweat, says Darío.
And tears, says Mario.
Though none of us is crying.
(“Visit to the Convalescent”)

Yet the defeat is still one of two options. With so much disappointments and lost loves, the book can choose to end with the lost idealism of youth, with the loss of innocence, or with the plain lost of youth. But one can feign to detect a positive note ringing in the last poem “With the Flies”:

Poets of Troy
Nothing that could have been yours
Exists anymore


Not temples not gardens
Not poetry


You are free
Admirable poets of Troy

Perhaps a declaration of freedom is the only necessary thing for the modern poet to survive damning upheavals. His lost possessions are irretrievable, yet his verses are still intact. Here to stay with the romantic dogs.

Bolaño and Pacquiao

The latest conquest (more than a week ago) in the ring by Filipino fighter Manny Pacquiao reminded me of the third part of Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666. The segment, called "The Part About Fate," is about one sports journalist, Oscar Fate, sent down to Sta. Teresa, Mexico, to cover a boxing bout. He was commissioned to cover the fight as a last minute replacement of a colleague who died.

What particularly struck me between the two fights (the real and the fictional) is the similarity with which they prematurely, and definitively, ended. The report by the Los Angeles Times contained this one-paragraph summary of the fight:

The fight summary is one paragraph. Pacquiao knocked Hatton down twice in the first round, dominated the second and caught Hatton with a vicious left hook as the round ticked down. Hatton's eyes rolled back and his body fell, like a sack of potatoes, flat on his back. Referee Kenny Bayless knelt over him for several seconds, then waved his hands, with one second left in the round, to signify that the fight was over.

Here is how the fight transpired in Bolaño's book:

The fight was short. First Count Pickett came out. Polite applause, some boos. Then Merolino Fernández came out. Thundering applause. In the first round, they sized each other up. In the second Pickett went on the offensive and knocked his opponent out in less than a minute. Merolino Fernández’s body didn’t even move where it lay on the canvas. His seconds hauled him into his corner and when he didn’t recover the medics came in and took him off to the hospital. Count Pickett raised an arm, without much enthusiasm, and left surrounded by his people. The fans began to empty out of the arena.

Both fights ended in the second round via a knockdown. In both instances the boxing watcher and the novel reader, after relishing every bit of the swift action, asks himself, That's it? That's the fight? One couldn't help shaking his head at what Pacquiao in the ring, and Bolaño on the page, just accomplished. It's as if the climax of the two matches is also its anticlimax.

The effectiveness of Bolaño's single paragraph is evident from its deadpan delivery and impeccable timing. The context of this passage is similar to the lengthy hype prior to the Pacquiao-Hatton tilt. A documentary by HBO, “24/7,” featured the rigid training of the two fighters, their daily regimen, their personal lives, and the assessment of their respective combative trainers. In the book, the hype also builds up as Oscar Fate interviews the fighters, their trainers, and the bettors ready with their fearless forecasts.

The paragraph is all the more telling because it announces the meeting of Oscar Fate with Rosa Amalfitano, the daughter of Prof. Amalfitano, the main character of the second segment of the book. From then on, there is no more talk of boxing in the rest of the story.

In the same way that Pacquiao emerged as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport, does Bolaño carve for his own a portrait of the artist as a prizefighter? Why not? The boxer and the writer are tacticians in their respective fields. If they are any good, they have the instinct to smell it and then go for the kill. It’s just a matter of the right combinations of feints and punches deployed not a second too late. In the ring, as in the page, perfect timing is the key.

The savage reader (2009)

JANUARY 18

I’ve began reading 2666 after finishing my morning class in Mathematics. I was wary at first. I checked my pulse, and then I finally flipped the first page. There was no other way.

 

JANUARY 19

The book is a tease. It knows it is important and yet is humble to concede to imperfection. It started innocently, in much the same way W. G. Sebald constructs his opening sentences. That is, it started coherently before it rambles into a labyrinth.

I am now halfway to the first of the five books, “The Part about the Critics”. This first book knows its boundaries and yet it soars from its solitary confinement. Bolaño’s stylistic tics are distinctive and surprising. The part about the critics is a maelstrom of conferences attended a group of global citizens who are all connected to Archimboldi, the missing novelist at the heart of the book.

 

FEBRUARY 15

I finished the book. There is nothing more to say of it. It is an unfinished book, but I finished it.

 

APRIL 16

I began typing the first of the above entries in earnest. I sought to write a daily account of my impressions of 2666. The structure that I had in mind is something spontaneous, so I followed the narrator’s lead in Bolaño’s earlier novel The Savage Detectives. As you can see, I was not able to follow this plan. I was only able to write 3 entries, the last of which is when I finished the book. I was so absorbed with the book that between the second day and the last day – a span of almost one month – I did not care to write a single word about it. I read the book intermittently, haphazardly. My aim is to finish it as soon as I can. There were days when I have to put it down due to busy schedule. There were also days when I made significant progress and was able to read large blocks of text.

I have read too many reviews of the book after I finished it. Too many for my own good, I think. I thought of resurrecting my initial plan to write about 2666 in journal fashion. But this is no longer a suitable framework for me. One of these dog days I will begin to consolidate my random thoughts and see if anything coherent will come of it. I seem to be still infected by the book's toxic beauty.

(Cover image from covers.fwis.com)