bibliographing

It’s no secret that 2666 is long. So long that my edition comes in three volumes, that I’m participating in a months-long group read of it, and that I’m through the first three parts and still have no idea what it’s about.

I mean, I can tell you that it’s about the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, but that’s not saying very much. What was The Part About Fate about? Something about how there are no Mexican light heavyweights, I think.* But because of the stature of both Bolaño and 2666, I have put myself into his hands entirely. I don’t know what he’s doing yet, but I’m willing to assume he does and it will be something in the end. Of course, I do this to some extent with almost all books, but only to some extent. Sometimes you’re working on a big one where you have to just close your eyes and not look down…for several hundred pages.

And that’s great. But it leaves me fixating most of all on passages where you know that, in whatever indirect way, the writer is saying something about his own book, his own writing. When I caught that breeze in The Part About Amalfitano, it alluded to novelistic structure and ambition. In The Part About Fate, my ears perked up at an interlude regarding the novel and society.

A “white-haired man” eating at a diner with a young man is discussing death, and how “society tended to filter death through the fabric of words.” He gives the young man a history lesson, on how “[r]eading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime…yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings.” But the society that didn’t want death to intrude on it closed its eyes, like a child—and that meant that it closed its words.

The old man, perhaps a professor, speculates that this was possible because of how very small polite society was “back then.”

I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.

What was different about those who were part of society: “What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible.” The old man again refers to “back then” when he says that words were used mostly to avoid rather than to reveal. What about now? What about coming right up, in The Part About the Crimes?

An anecdotal data point: the femicides were, presumably, known to everyone who began reading 2666 with our group, yet several people seem to have been quite affected already by reading a novel that’s not yet anywhere near as intense about making these women legible as it’s going to be (or so I understand).

*I am (only slightly) joking here. Note that I have really not read much of the group discussion over the past week, or much on other people’s blogs; I’m posting this before I get a chance to, which I should later today. But that’s not the point here.

Philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano, unlike the critics of the first volume of 2666, is for me a highly sympathetic character. The first thing to note about The Part About Amalfitano is that it very quickly seems not to be about Amalfitano at all, but about his wife and her leaving him and their daughter. Right away we find that Amalfitano, who has no idea how he ended up in Santa Teresa, isn’t actually there after all—he’s in his own head. He lives in a world of memory and reminiscence, mulling his abandonment by Lola, the origins of old books, Duchamp readymades.

On the 2666 group read blog, Maria Bustillos describes Amalfitano thus:

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.*

This is what makes him so much more likeable than the critics, who are only playing games. They have a brittle, opaque veneer, so that we can’t get at them at all or know what they’re thinking. We don’t know much of what they think about Archimboldi, except for the most superficial asides. And it’s only when the veneer is chipped away by some out-of-the-ordinary incident that we discover the machismo, say, bubbling within Pelletier and Espinoza.

From their perspective, in The Part About the Critics, Amalfitano appears to have a veneer too, albeit a strange one. Aside from their prejudices against him as a backwater professor, they perceive him as somewhat strange or off even as they begin to like him. Because they cannot understand him either. But in The Part About Amalfitano, the narrator (who I would argue is the same as in the first part) takes his point of view and we actually have access to his thoughts and feelings—including thoughts and feelings about books!

Archimboldi, the “obviously” failed European bumbling around in the dust of Mexico, is skeptical, thoughtful, ruminative, and brings more of value to 2666’s direct discussion of literature than his illustrious professional rivals even in his wandering thoughts. He reminisces about a young pharmacist he saw often in Barcelona, who would read during his quiet night shift. Amalfitano once asked him about what books he liked: “The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol.”

…[T]here was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick. …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.

So for all that Amalfitano is not impressed with Archimboldi, he is impressed by “real combat”—and certainly we don’t get the impression that “blood and mortal wounds and stench” are what the Archimboldi critics are wrestling with back in Europe. They seem much too sterile for all that.

*Marco Antonio Guerra, the son of Amalfitano’s dean, is similarly stuck and ineffectual, but rather than daydream about geometric shapes and philosophers, he takes the fight club route out of this Sonoran malaise.

Last week, 2666 project contributor Maria Bustillos wrote about the passage in The Part About the Critics where a taxi driver is badly beaten. The scene is jarring. Three sophisticated, middle-class university professors are one moment in a taxi on their way home from a fancy restaurant; the next moment they are involved in a brutal street fight, unleashing a violence we didn’t even notice under the surface before. According to her post, “it is no surprise whatsoever that the first blows administered (predictably, by Espinoza) are described as ‘Iberian.’”

I hadn’t really thought of that myself, but that post immediately came to mind as I finished The Part About the Critics, which concludes with three of the critics making a trip to Mexico, to a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez. We’re not into The Part About the Crimes yet, which I expect to be beyond jarring, but there is a definite undercurrent of this violence the whole time the critics are in Mexico.

The first night they spend there, Liz Norton looks out her hotel room window in Mexico City and sees a taxi driver beaten by hotel employees. Their guide, El Cerdo (who has dirty fingernails), explains that there is a “war between taxi drivers and doormen”; this is an exotic place. In Santa Teresa, Pelletier finds a chunk missing from his toilet bowl: “It looked as if someone had ripped it off with a hammer. Or as if someone had picked up another person who was already on the floor and smashed that person’s head against the toilet, thought Norton.” The critics can feel the change, that “something strange was going on,” but eventually:

…[T]hey lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn’t the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn’t make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.

Bustillos notes of the earlier violent incident, “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.” The critics may have no intention of raising their voices, but they’re in a strange and tense place, where so many women have been killed over the years that a native boy “had to repeat it two or three times because neither Espinoza nor Pelletier could believe his ears.” The cool English Norton leaves Pelletier and Espinoza in Mexico to continue in debauched style.

As he is good at everything else, Bolaño is good at dealing with this violent undercurrent. There is great brutality and control, and it has me both worried and reassured about what I know is coming up further on. The ambiance is already intense, but I trust that it’s part of something, in service to the whole.

I’ve read the first chunk of 2666 for the read-along and let’s just say Frances was right: I don’t think I will look back. I can’t yet say much about the narrator; my ideas are only murky and need more than 51 pages to develop. But I can already tell he’s going to be a favorite, and I’d say with at least 85% certainty that I’ll be reading not just more Bolaño but, um, all of it. (Can she really be saying this after 51 pages of a single book? Well, you never do know what will happen, but so far I love it.) The narrator is the main thing for me at this point, though I’m also loving the story about the critics. But how can you have this story without the critics without this narrator?

With such a slow schedule, I probably won’t post about this every week, only when I’ve really got something to say. But I’m looking forward to the forum and blog discussions and very pleased I decided to go ahead with this. (Clearly, you should listen to Frances about everything. She was right about Virginia Woolf, too.)