Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 3

2666 pp185-284

At p.186 we learn that the mysterious Testamento geométrico, despite its having been published as one volume, is ‘really three books’. As we moved, from 2666’s second section and into its third this week, I wonder how many books we feel we’re reading concurrently here. Indeed, if your edition of the novel is anything like mine it contains ‘A Note From the Author’s Heirs’ which lays out the fact that 2666 itself is both one book and five books. How different the reading experience might have been, we think, had we encountered ‘The Part About the Critics’ as a slim 159 page volume. What would we have thought a year later if we’d picked up the second book and reacquainted ourselves with Amalfitano?

As it is, rolling from one section right into the next is an odd experience. Bolaño’s tone doesn’t seem to change, but Amalfitano’s world–his lived experience–is very different to that of Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, & Norton. Even (semi-)omniscient third-person narration of Amalfitano’s life is infected somewhat by the increasing detachment from rationality with which he struggles. We had seen already, in the latter stages of the novel’s opening section, the growing importance of dreams. In the second section Bolaño introduces more than more liminal spaces that blur further the outlines of reality. There are Amalfitano’s strange ideas about jet lag [189] which seemingly reposition his perceptions as the universe’s organising principle. And there is of course the voice by which he is visited. If it is a ghost, as Amalfitano wonders early-on, the life/death dichotomy is permeated just as the sleep/wake one has been.

In an additional twist, we find that the voice is aware of the fact of its existence’s complicating boundaries. It speaks of itself, eventually, as coming from a place ‘where the sinew of the will detaches itself from the rest of the body the way the snake tongue detaches itself from the body and slithers away, self-mutilated’ [209]. This comes in the midst of a metaphor about ‘the studio of a ho-mo-sex-u-al painter’ [ibid], and as such recalls without mentioning his name the artist and self-mutilator Edwin Johns.

Johns is feeling like a more central character to the novel to me, or rather his presence (or rather, primarily, absence) has been felt far more recently than that of Archimboldi, about whom I wonder whether we have much more to learn. ‘And have you asked yourself whether your hand is a hand?’ the voice inquires of Amalfitano — the same question that Johns answered by transforming his own hand into art. In this instance it has the added dimension of being a question posed by a voice the locus of which itself is undetermined. So when the voice asks ‘whether [Amalfitano’s] hand is really a hand’ [210] it also calls for him to answer whether or not the voice asking and answering the question is his own.

And there are yet more liminal shadings. Consider the corridor-like passageway of death, the experience of which prompts the (answered) question, ‘Is it all just a dream, or is it within the realm of possibility?’ [219]. Or consider the concept of telepathy, introduced in a text within the text, and thereby loaded with deeply questionable veracity. One element of the deliberately confusing discussion around telepathy that I found particularly interesting comes in this passage:

‘[H]e began to lose the gift of telepathy, and this loss was accelerated when he went to live in cities’ [222].

Santa Teresa is still very much a presence in Amalfitano’s section of the novel, and a malign one too. He is more forthright than other characters in speaking ill of the place, and attributes a good deal of his ill fortune to his living there. In the above passage it is not Santa Teresa particularly, but cities generally, that are at question, but I found it interesting that it is some force attributed to city life that is blamed for extinguishing a supernatural talent. I’m not sure where that might be heading yet, other than the fact that places in Bolaño’s novel are imbued with the ability to act on people.

I’m taking a break from calling out overwrought similes this week (though there was a doozy involving the bruised skin of an Indian woman that maybe made you cringe like it made me cringe but maybe not), but I would like to call out the novel’s most dire construction yet: a terrible pun!

The girl gave him a piece of paper where someone had written the phone number of a neighborhood funeral home. “They’ll take care of everything,” she said gravely. [232]

I want to be clear that I’m blaming translator Natasha Wimmer for that one, but it did nearly make me throw the book across the room.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programme or pointing out liminal spaces in the novel. As we move into the third section they are just as prominent. We find a movie that plays and is then echoed in a dream such that ‘the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie’ [234], and we as readers experience a strange momentary detachment from the section’s central character as we watch a TV as he sleeps [258].

And what about that character? If you read my notes in week 1 about how I react when authors play up the prominence of coincidence etc. in their works, you might imagine how I felt to encounter a character literally named Fate. I am more than willing to give Bolaño the benefit of the doubt here. After 284 pages he has proven himself utterly unafraid of introducing new strands to his narrative, and as the beginnings of themes emerge and one character or circumstance echoes or mirrors another, I’m beginning to hope that the author intends to weave those strands rather than leave them all loose and ask the reader to make do with the fact that he has hung them from the same needle. Nevertheless, naming a character Fate is either a bold move or a somewhat desperate one. In either case I dislike it because whether it’s the former or the latter it gives at least the impression of the latter.

One particular element that gives me hope is the fact that the third section begins to tackle the subject of metaphor more directly. As soon as I read Seaman’s construction (at 254) that ‘[m]etaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming’ it felt absolutely central to the novel. That is precisely how I feel about 2666 284 pages in: ‘treading water in a sea of seeming’. For the majority of the novel thus far we have spent time we have found the ground under us to be infirm and prone to shifting. This acknowledgement in the text is not so much a lifeline as an assurance that, yes, this is how you’re supposed to feel. In fact, in Fate, we are given perhaps the closest thing we’ve had to an avatar in the text. Fate spends his time visiting with eccentrics in odd circumstances, much as we have been. And he finds himself more or less alone in Santa Teresa, with the place’s oddness surrounding him - much as we have.

As we leave him at the end of the week’s reading Fate is dealing with a shift of his own: a shift in perception that affects his entire sense of identity:

Does this mean that in some places I’m American and in some places I’m African American and in other places, by logical extension, I’m nobody? [283]

Again this returns to the question of how place affects person, and to what extent one’s labels are mutable. When is an African American an American? When is a hand a hand? When is a movie a dream? When is a star a metaphor? And what happens, in each case, when they’re not?

Speaking specifically to place, I was reminded of this quote from Bolaño’s last published interview before his death in 2003:

“my only country is my two children and wife and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me…”

The author is clear here that his sense of ‘home’ is not a stable, physical place, but something less tangible: a collection of things really that comprise his sense of self. It is no wonder then, that in his magnum opus, the concept of identity is malleable and prone to shifting.

I’d like to applaud one of our number, Simon, for getting into the sprit by subjecting his copy of 2666 to the same treatment as Amalfitano’s copy of the Testamento geométrico — if I know Simon we can’t be too far from him trying out one of the meals mentioned in the novel: perhaps one of Seaman’s impromptu recipes?

Finally, for fun, I enjoyed the fact that the voice in Amalfitano’s head evolves from his unconscious experiments in a kind of automatic writing, which produce strange geometric diagrams in which the names of various thinkers and writers etc. are joined to one another along strange and unexplained axes. I wondered what it might look like if we were to construct such a diagram of our own regarding 2666 as we know it to this point, what might that look like?

Send your attempt to [REDACTED] or post to Twitter using #dailypagesclub

That’s it. See you next Sunday.