Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 2

2666 pp85-184

This week’s reading crossed a divide between the book’s opening section and the second, concerning Amalfitano. It also seemed to me to shift a little on the spectrum of realist novel to magical-realist novel: things are getting weirder, our central characters seem less in control, dreams have increasing prominence, the actions of others are increasingly difficult to fathom, and communication is breaking down.

Perhaps this is flagged early in the week with the visit to see Edwin Johns [EJ] in his convalescence (and before the week is out we will have visited too such places, tellingly both inhabited by artists… if, that is, you believe a word of what you’re being told by that point). John’s, who early in the meeting declares that “The whole world is a coincidence” [89] has an interesting speech regarding the operation of the phenomenon:

“Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.” [90]

I’m always a little suspicious of novels that fly the flag for coincidence or happenstance. The reader is keenly aware of the story as a composition, within which the author has taken great care to orchestrate cause and effect. That the same author should have his characters espouse the power of coincidence feels at best a little like a clumsy attempt at sleight of hand, and at best an attempt at a cover-up. Should the reader later find the plot progressing in some less-than-believable direction the author can throw his hands up (or have his characters throw up theirs) and disclaim: “mere coincidence, see! I told you!”.

Nevertheless, Bolaño is effective here at making the encounter with Johns feel genuinely strange and off-kilter. He acts particularly stranger in respect of his interactions with Morini [M], whose hand he does not shake, and in whose ear he whispers the response to a question. Why Pelletier [P] & Espinoza [E] don’t (at least to our knowledge) ask M what Johns’s response was is–to this reader at least–more than a little annoying.

Sidebar: some of these similes are truly getting out of hand. There are those that are ridiculously overwrought, such as at 93 when E experiences someone talking to him about M’s disappearance:

in a voice that didn’t sound like his but rather like the voice of a sorcerer, or more specifically, a sorceress, a soothsayer from the times of the Roman Empire, a voice that reached Espinoza like the dripping of a basalt fountain but that soon swelled and overflowed with a deafening roar, with the sound of thousands of voices, the thunder of a great river in flood comprising the shared fate of every voice.

And then there are those that fail as similes simply because they fail to evoke any appreciable sense of what is being experienced. One particularly oblique example involves M’s dissolving sense of self, which he apparently experiences:

like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it’s burning. [107]

That fails for me on a couple of levels, the most basic of which being that those examples are of non-sentient things definitionally incapable of losing their sense of self. (And secondarily, in the case of the river: stopping being a river is something that happens to literally every river on the planet — it’s what rivers do!) Perhaps I’m being too rational about it, but stuff like this really pulls me out of the text.

I thought it was amusing the speed and subtlety with which the critics communally disregard the suggestion that Archimboldi is Mrs Bubis:

I think Archimboldi lives in Greece, said Dieter Hellfeld, and the author we know by the name of Archimboldi is really Mrs. Bubis. “Yes, of course,” said our four friends, “Mrs. Bubis.” [106]

The use of ‘our four friends’ there is a nice little nod as to how the collective feels and how we should too.

This book seems to be a dangerous place to be a taxi driver.

Dreams have seemingly increased in prominence in the text. Often I react to this in the same way that I do to characters talking up the power of coincidence: the liminal lawlessness of dreams is often employed as too easy a space in which an author can parade out all of a novel’s thematic undercurrents like so many slightly hammy actors. For the most part, if the writer is not up to the task of making his themes felt through their presence underpinning the main narrative, dreams are a crutch. I’m not sure yet whether that’s the case with Bolaño here. For one thing, the dreams (like some of his similes (zing)) seem near unintelligible. As such they perhaps work as a kind of impressionistic picture of the characters’ evolving mind-state. As their time in Santa Teresa seems to change each of the critics, the dreams which visit them with increased frequency allow us a small insight into their state of mind if not their actual thoughts and feelings.

Norton’s [N] is perhaps the easiest to interpret should we wish to do so:

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. [115]

We can read this as N wrestling with her position betwixt P & E. The ménage à trois, the mere deferred prospect of which threatened to derail relations between all three last week, is shortly to follow this dream and happens largely off-page. N is then, soon after, to leave Santa Teresa and thereafter play a lesser role in P & E’s lives, as her dream seems to presage.

P & E, however, remain in Santa Teresa (which, BTW, is based on the real Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez wherein an epidemic of violence against women has persisted for decades: ‘Since the early 1990s, approximately 370 girls and women have been murdered and at least 400 women have been reported missing’) and the experience seems to change them both.

E begins a relationship with a local woman, which starts innocently enough but soon finds him trying to change her, to dress her differently and to dominate her sexually. And although he is self-aware enough to detect a change in himself, it something different that he sees:

I look like a gentleman, he said to himself sometimes. I look younger. I look like someone else.

Perhaps his ‘adventures in prostitution’ [81] were a beginning of a change for E wherein he sees himself and women differently, and N’s leaving both himself and P is further catalyst. It seems telling to me that a little later E is described as experiencing reality only momentarily:

When he got back to the hotel he left the rugs on the bed he didn’t sleep in, then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep. [153]

And on to the novel’s second segment. It is early but I have questions. What are we to make of the unnamed poet in the asylum? The mere fact of the novel’s including two artists in psychiatric institutions invites comparison, and the fact that Bolaño has constructed the narrative so that we arrive at all knowledge of the poet via the (seemingly very dubious) narration of Lola certainly raises other questions.

In fact, it struck me how little of the opening of the section titled ‘The Part About Amalfitano’ is… about… Amalfitano. It is largely his estranged wife’s narrative, and given in long multi-page paragraphs of winding exposition. I found it quite enjoyable to read, but experienced the distinct feeling of being on shifting ground throughout. It builds to some scenes of genuine strangeness towards the end of the week’s reading, not least of which that at the asylum where the poet in turn sits between and fights with other inmates who smoke, fight, fall down and masturbate. I kept returning to a picture of poor Amalfitano sat at his kitchen table reading these letters from Lola, and what he must be thinking.

Bolaño also uses this section to introduce the idea that ‘[m]adness is contagious’ [177]. Along with the detectable effects of life in Santa Teresa on P & E, perhaps the reader might wonder whether it is not coincidence (as Johns would have it) but something more pervasive and directed that is warping the book’s greater story. Relatively early in the novel M experiences the course of a dream as ‘fixed and inevitable’ [47], and as the reality in Santa Teresa feels increasingly suffused with dreams, it to seems guided down some intractable path over which coincidence might hold lesser sway. (This is guesswork at this juncture; the real powers moving the novel’s plot forward remain opaque for me 184 pages in, so feel free to call me on this if it is ultimately way off the mark!)

Let me introduce one further piece of evidence however, a quote from Argentinian writer Rodrigo Fresán on Bolaño:

Roberto emerged as a writer at a time when Latin America no longer believed in utopias, when paradise had become hell, and that sense of monstrousness and waking nightmares and constant flight from something horrid permeates 2666 and all his work.

A short note on the fact that although literary criticism played a much diminished part in this week’s reading I enjoyed Bolaño making room–having commented on French, Italian, German, and English literature last week–for thoughts on Mexican literature:

like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me [121]

and the Spanish literary class:

social climbers, operators, and ass kissers [174]

That’s it for this week. I’ve had comments from a couple of you about what you’re thinking of the novel thus far, but keep them coming to @dailypagesclub or use #dailypagesclub and I’ll catch them. A picture of you reading the book in the sun somewhere? Are you reading anything else at the same time? Who’s your favourite / least-favourite character?

See you next Sunday folks. Enjoy your week.