Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 4

2666 pp285-384

“What are you proposing?” “A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world,” said Fate, “a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake.” [294-5]

What are we dealing with here? 384 pages (~40%) into this novel and the pieces seem to me to still be shifting, like so many jigsaw puzzle pieces that Bolaño is moving around slowly and purposefully. And just as purposefully it seems to me that he’s keeping some of those pieces face down so that the reader stands little chance of seeing, at this point, what the whole picture may be. In a way 2666 is all of those things that Fate proposes to his editor, but it’s also a lot of other things besides and their relative importance is still to be determined. It’s one of the luxuries of a long novel to read scene after scene, each divorced from each other, and simply enjoy the ride knowing (hoping) that one is not supposed to know the shape of the thing yet.

(Not to get too inside baseball here, but of the four novels that Daily Pages Club has tackled over the last four years the construction here is most akin to Infinite Jest. The ambitious scope in each asks the reader to trust the author’s intentions and his ability to weave a tapestry from all of the threads he has cast. David Foster Wallace’s version of this magic trick remains perhaps the most astounding I’ve encountered, so vertiginous and seemingly diversionary are some of the paths he leads the reader down. I’m excited to find out what Bolaño is capable of here, in a novel that he requested be published over the course of five years.)

In this regard it’s a bit of a tease that Bolaño starts the novel with a kind of missing-persons case (where is Archimboldi?) and makes increasingly central the epidemic of disappearances and murders in Santa Teresa — this is only partly a novel about these things, and we should not expect a neat resolution in the manner of a work of genre fiction. In microcosm this plays out in Fate’s chapter wherein the boxing match is a kind of nexus toward which the action flows—it is the inciting incident for Fate’s presence in Mexico, it is the reason people are brought together, it is the topic of conversation, it animates where Fate goes and what / who he sees—and then the fight itself is played out in one brief paragraph, and more or less forgotten about. In 2666 these dramatic acts are merely backdrop (cf. the sudden, senseless violence on the periphery at p.318), instead the focus—warped by heat haze and fugue as it may be—is on the people we’re introduced to and their relationships to each other and to the places they inhabit (both physical and mental).

It has become apparent that, both in the world of the novel and in the text itself, very little is reliably concrete. Actually, Bolaño has a keen eye for detail, and many of his locations in particular are built out of descriptions of carefully chosen physical elements; these do seem to have fixity. Their gestalt, however, less so - and particularly for us as readers when it is filtered through the perceptions of characters who are finding themselves somehow affected by the places themselves. I spent a lot of time in liminality in last week’s letter, and I don’t wish to tread the same ground. I did, however, like the description of the cirrus clouds (at p.303): their very existence dependent on their inhabiting a very precise elevation. A handful of pages later we learn of Rosa Méndez’s lost memories of Veracruz [310], as though their existence also depended on temporal or a geographic circumstance. Similarly it is Fate’s anticipation that after Santa Teresa it will be in New York that things ‘would take on the consistency of reality again’ [313].

The way in which Santa Teresa acts upon Fate builds slowly, starting as a mere sense of placelessness that any visitor to a different country may feel, but ramping up with increasing velocity towards the end of our time with him. When he thinks to himself ‘[n]ow I have to try to be what I am’ (at p.323) we are reminded of the slippage of his identity that had begun to happen at the end of last week’s reading (…and in other places, by logical extension, I’m nobody? [283]). The latter stages of the novel’s third section are increasingly dreamlike / nightmarish and impressionistically disorienting. When we are given the image of a magic disk (at p.334-5) it’s tempting to read its modus operandi (the coalescing of disparate images, wholly separate, into one image: itself a misperception) as that of the novel as a whole at that point. Dream and reality blur, and different incidents are given to us out of sequence so that Fate seems to be in two places at once, or in neither. And key to this same sense of strange unmooring is the perfect description of Fate and Óscar Amalfitano’s meeting:

For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground [342]

For me this was one of those moments where Bolaño perfectly anticipates how the reader feels when they come to this place in the book, and in holding up a small mirror reassures us with a wink that he knows what he’s doing. It’s less reassuring for Fate, who seems by this point to have been deeply affected by his experiences in Santa Teresa. We have witnessed characters before (eg. Morini) slipping in and out of dreams, but in Fate we find the sense of disorientation squared:

All of this is like somebody else’s dream, thought Fate. [347]

To be lost in one’s own dreams is one thing, but someone else’s another entirely. We might fear that even a return to New York, concrete in more than one way, may not be enough to turn things around for him.

What used to be my right is my left, and there are no points of reference. Everything is erased. [348]

The fourth section of the novel (at least in its first 30 pages) seems to be the most straight-forward. The litany of violence with which it opens is not easy to read, and is the first time really that Bolaño lingers on this stuff. It becomes apparent quite quickly however, that even here the novel is more interested in people and place. The crimes bring together Elvira Campos and Juan de Dios Martínez, and the focus shifts to them and their relationship. It’s early, so I haven’t much more to say about these two just yet, but I did like the last section of the week’s reading in which Campos lists fears and explains them to Martínez. Several are interesting, though the central one is that that Campos considers the mysterious Penitent to have: sacrophobia - the fear / hatred of the sacred. Bolaño points here to what is becoming apparent is one of the novel’s larger themes. It has been presaged by Charly Cruz’s lament, to Fate, on the loss of the sacred a little earlier:

Then, Fate remembered, he began to talk about the end of the sacred. The end had begun somewhere, Charly Cruz didn’t care where, maybe in the churches, when the priests stopped celebrating the Mass in Latin, or in families, when the fathers (terrified, believe me, brother) left the mothers. [315]

It reminded me of a theme in Bolaño’s acceptance speech, when he was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999 for the best novel written in Spanish, (for The Savage Detectives):

to a great extent everything that I have ever written is a love letter or a letter of farewell to my own generation, those of us who were born in the ’50s and who chose at a given moment to take up arms (though in this case it would be more correct to say “militancy”) and gave the little that we had, or the greater thing that we had, which was our youth, to a cause that we believed to be the most generous of the world’s causes and that was, in a sense, though in truth it wasn’t.

See you next week.