Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 6

2666 pp485-584

What a week. Given that, in most part, these last 100 pages have continued the pattern set in the previous week’s reading, I don’t want to go over too much of the same ground. Let me say though that my reading remains largely unchanged: these endless descriptions of dead women still hit me the same way - which is to say, that I start a paragraph, realise what is coming, want to rush through it, want to skip it, feel repelled by it and worn down and a little bored. As I suggested last week, this remains the same effect as though we were reading the reports in a newspaper day on day. I remain of the opinion that Bolaño is trying to wear us down.

We do get a rather more colourful depiction of sexual violence this week, in the tale of Farfán & Gómez. It’s not immediately obvious to me why Bolaño makes this inclusion (though the characters to recur in an equally graphic prison torture scene later), except perhaps to help paint a picture of the prison in which Haas (who seems to be becoming somewhat of a more important figure) resides. It also instigates a short paragraph (on p.488 (and which I don’t reproduce here because frankly I’m amazed that some of the quotes in last week’s edition didn’t get me flagged & banned from MailChimp, and I don’t want to push my luck) in which Haas ruminates on the kind of moral relativism of rape - thinking of male on female rape as ‘attractive’ and ‘sexy’. It reminds us perhaps that, as little as we know about the victims of these crimes before their bodies are discovered, we are yet pretty sure as to the motives of their abusers and murderers. The crimes of The Penitent required some puzzling over, and their motivation remains not entirely resolved for us. And yet, though we don’t know the identity(/ies) of the serial rapist(s) and murderer(s), the sickening fact is that their motivations aren’t questioned. Of course these crimes are the result of men acting to fulfil their unchecked sexual desires — what more motivation is needed? This glimpse inside Haas’s mind is the closest we come to addressing it, but it comes in a passage the actual purpose of which is to address Haas’s feelings about Farfán & Gómez.

I feel as though Bolaño’s commentary on this phenomenon of unchecked, pervasive misogyny, is more powerful because unspoken. The epidemic of violence against women is presented as largely unadorned fact - a fait accompli. Here, Bolaño seems to say, this is what happens in a society that denigrates women thoroughly and consistently - this is the logical conclusion. (I should say that I don’t know enough about Mexican / South American culture and history, or Bolaño’s own biography, to say with confidence whether this is a critique by the writer particularly of the countries in which he was raised and in which he lived, but it serves equally as a parable-esque format in which Santa Teresa stands in for any and all places in which the denigration of women is accepted as part of daily life, and the primacy of masculinity (and the freedom of its expression) is left without boundaries.)

(There is this, which bears mentioning: the thoughts of a nameless woman peripheral to one of the kidnappings:

Despondent, she went back to her house, to the other neighbor woman and the girls, and for a while the four of them experienced what it was like to be in purgatory, a long, helpless wait, a wait that begins and ends in neglect, a very Latin American experience, as it happened, and all too familiar, something that once you thought about it you realized you experienced daily [528]

It is twinned with this description of the crimes’ aftermath:

the policemen, moving wearily, like soldiers trapped in a time warp who march over and over again to the same defeat, got to work

How depressingly accepted the futility is here - both that these things will continue to happen, and that the authorities are powerless to really do anything about it.)

One of the clearest instances of the theme in the week’s reading is the litany of misogynist jokes at page 552. That many of the punchlines hinge upon acts of violence against women, and that all of them take the stupidity of women as their starting point, is disturbing enough. That they are being told by a group of people who are in the midst of witnessing a seemingly endless epidemic of violence against women, and who bare official responsibility for resolving it, is even more so. In this scene Bolaño allows a glimpse of the society from another angle, and suggests that this is one of the roots from which the virulent weed of violence against women grows and feeds.

You can perhaps tell from the preponderance of parentheticals that this argument for the novel remains somewhat amorphous for me. Now more than ever 2666 feels to me to be sprawling and meandering and disjointed, and I’m at a loss to understand how all that we’ve witnessed over the nearly 600 pages thus far will be pertinent in the final 300. When, between paragraphs listing the defilements of another woman’s body and another woman’s body, I think back to the time we spent with the Archimboldi critics in all those European cities, or I remember the poets and painters we’ve visited in asylums, and even Fate crossing the border to report on a boxing match, I feel a sense of vertigo as though looking down from a very high window and feeling as though I barely remember the lower floors I can see down there let alone what it’s like to stand on the street and look up.

At this juncture also the structure of the novel seems increasingly strange to me. I am struck by how disjointed a series of five novels it would have made: imagine reading the ~60 pages of Amalfitano’s section as a standalone piece, and then waiting a year for the novella-length ‘Part About Fate’. And then imagine waiting another year and being served up the nearly 300 page section we’re currently enduring! I also simply cannot imagine what the 5 hour stage version would have been like, nor how the proposed filmic adaptation would function at all.

I’m rambling. Before I sign off for the week I did want to briefly mention a couple of other things that I found interesting.

First, what are we to make of medical examiner Emilio Garibay professed grounds for atheism?:

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? [550]

Again, without meaning to draw undue conclusions, I find that sentiment to have more weight having been written by a novelist who knew he was not long for the world. I also found it particularly interesting when mirrored by Haas’s thoughts a dozen pages later:

Haas liked to sit on the ground, against the wall, in the shady part of the yard. And he liked to think. He liked to imagine that God didn’t exist. For three minutes, at least. He also liked to think about the insignificance of human beings. Five minutes. If pain didn’t exist, he thought, we would be perfect. Insignificant and ignorant of pain. Fucking perfect. [562]

It is an interesting diptych: the absence of God as either indicative of a lack of purpose or as a release from obligation — it tells us quite a bit about the two men in question.

Second, it occurred to me for the first time this week that Florita’s plight is kind of our plight. She too is visited against her will be an endless succession of depictions of violence against women. In-narrative seer as avatar for reader is an interesting dynamic, though I’m not sure it’s something Bolaño is intent on developing here.

Third, late in the week we get the introduction of both Albert Kessler and Antonio Uribe. Dare we hope that this pair of arrivals marks the progression of the plot!? What a treat that would be. Was it Uribe of whom Haas spoke when he said:

the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside. But someone worse than me and worse than the killer is coming to this motherfucking city. Do you hear his footsteps getting closer? [506]

At this point I would both applaud the introduction of a totemic evildoer as a welcome return to something more genre novelistic and magical-realist, and also decry it as a cheap deus ex machina to resolve this troubling stretch of the novel.

We’ll see. We’ll see together. Thanks for sticking with this through what has been a very difficult couple of weeks. No one has a gun to your head, you can throw the book in the sea. But you didn’t, and I appreciate the company. In a few days we’ll be out of ‘The Part About the Crimes’, and personally the return of the Archimboldi plot is something I’m now absolutely desperate for!

See you on Sunday.