Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 7

2666 pp585-684

OK, first and relatively quickly because I want to write about it about as much as I want to re-read it: let’s tie up ‘The Part About the Crimes’. What is it that we’ve experienced here? A litany of horrific crimes; some newly introduced characters struggling in various ways to cope with the aftermath and the continuous threat of those crimes; the police response, heedless and ineffectual for the most part in the face of the crimes; a man accused of those crimes who says he knows who actually committed them; a sketch of the underworld of narcos and madames and prostitutes, bodyguards, parties, wastelands, through which all of this violence moves; a similar sketch of the desire for power and control, of greed and money, and the tendency to treat everything as property that either belongs to one or does not, and the fear of losing it all.

I don’t feel that I came away from the novel’s fourth section with many answers. I guess at no point was I under the impression that Bolaño was writing a detective novel, but the introduction of Albert Kessler made me think for a while that we’d get at least a partial resolution. In retrospect that was probably optimistic; in the wider picture of the novel the epidemic of savagery in Santa Teresa is just an aspect of the panorama Bolaño is painting: an imposing, dark streak that runs across the canvas, but still an element of the background and not the subject of the painting itself. (It makes me think again about the author’s stated wish to have 2666 published over the course of five years as separate volumes: how unsatisfactory ‘The Part About The Crimes’ would be presented alone; how little—in sum, and taken from our current vantage point—it seems to add to the novel overall.)

Things did get a little more personal and focussed towards the end, with the twin missing-person narratives of the congresswoman & Kelly Rivera Parker, and Hernández Mercado & Mary-Sue Bravo. Unless I’m missing something from earlier, these were not cases of the author re-introducing previously alluded-to narrative threads, but instead of bringing the aperture of the chapter’s sweep a little narrower in the last 50 pages, showing specific people living in the uncertain turbulence of Santa Teresa. I also felt the magical-realist tint of the novel (and particularly the porousness of non-physical borders) creeping back in, with moments like this:

Do you mean you think Kelly is dead? I shouted. More or less, he said without losing his composure in the slightest. What do you mean, more or less? I shouted. For fuck’s sake, you’re either dead or you’re not! In Mexico a person can be more or less dead, he answered very seriously. [624]

That’s it, done. I’m through talking about section four. May it never trouble us again.

More happens in the opening two pages of ‘The Part About Archimboldi’ than has happened in the previous 200 pages of the novel. The variety of the new settings, the colourful new characters, the relative gallop of the narrative: the fifth section feels like a whole new novel out of the gate. The text feels so re-invigorated that we even get the authorial pyrotechnics of a multi-page sentence, which we haven’t seen since pp.18-22! And yet it also feels closely tied in with the preoccupations of (in particular) the latter part of section one, and section two of the book.

This is where I start talking about liminality (yay!). In my defence, Bolaño and his characters also seem preoccupied with it, and in this section thus far it also has a moral dimension that (at least to me) has been less clear up to now. Of Hans Reiter (whom, I’m going to put my neck out there and say, bears a strong physical resemblance to Benno von Archimboldi) we are told:

He didn’t like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. [639]

Of the optimist Vogel we are told:

He believed in the intrinsic goodness of humankind, he claimed that a person who was pure of heart could walk from Moscow to Madrid without being accosted by anyone [645]

In the former case there is a moral aspect attributed to the surface, and in the latter to the transition between spaces. And there are suddenly a lot of delineations to transgress: Pig Village, Egg Village, the Village of Blue Women, the Village of Red Men, the Town of the Fat, the innumerable foreign lands with their concomitant types of swine.

There are also several occurrences of characters simply wandering in liminal spaces given physical form: the baron silent and ceaselessly in motion in the abandoned wing of his mansion, Hans in the apartment corridors, the lost soldier in the Maginot tunnels. In each of these cases the physical spaces are affected by the characters’ psychology, and lose their physical certainty (particularly in the latter case).

The early-going of the chapter also contains multiple occasions of explicit discussion on metaphysical points like this. For instance, the conductor at Grete von Joachimsthaler’s apartment who espouses on the subject of the fourth dimension:

The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. [664]

In the conductor’s estimation the fourth dimension is music, but we might take his model of how it operates and supplant dreams for music to find a reasonable explanation of how some earlier parts of the novel have operated.

There’s also a preponderance of mirrors starting to creep back into the book. We saw this before, perhaps most memorably in a scene with Nolan at p.115:

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.

In the latter stages of ‘The Part About the Crimes’ the congresswoman has her own moment with a pair of mirrors:

I paced the room. I noticed there were two mirrors. One at one end and the other by the door, and they didn’t reflect each other. But if you stood in a certain place, you could see one mirror in the other. What you couldn’t see was me. [621]

And in the fifth section they are here and there employed primarily figuratively, or as metaphor. Hans Reiter experiences the young Baroness Von Zumpe’s desire for a ‘redemption that smelled like mirror’ [654]; a doctor who treats Reiter wonders whether the preponderance of drug-addicted soldiers he encounters is better understood as ‘the mirror of our fate or the hammer that will shatter mirror and fate together’ [677].

A couple of small bits and pieces that caught my eye:

First, what’s with all of these artists voluntarily dismembering themselves? Earlier we had the example of Edwin John who removed his own painting hand to make it part of a piece, and now we encounter Conrad Halder:

the pretender to the hand of my father’s sister, who, far from shooting at my father, chose a part of his own anatomy, I think it was his left arm, and shot himself point-blank. [677]

Second, if (and I realise it’s still an ‘if’ regardless of the fact of the chapter titled ‘The Part About Archimboldi’ so far being a kind of bildungsroman of a newly-introduced, similarly-proportioned character) Reiter is to become Archimboldi, one particular moment that we have with him so far struck me as at odds with what little we know of the older Archimboldi (absent) of the novel’s first part. It is this:

Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so malleable, so warped—of friendship. [661]

If this is the same man whose famous reclusiveness is one of the inciting incidents of the novel’s opening section, what happened to him between this early incarnation and the latter one? How does someone who greatly values friendship end up absent of any discernable human connections?

Finally for this letter I’d like just to quote what are almost the closing words of the week’s reading. It’s another of the chapter’s metaphysical multi-party conversations, and I was struck by how nakedly Bolaño was using it to air the concerns of the novel and its author. What is culture? What is pleasure? What is life? What is man’s relationship one to the communal? As befits the panoramic sweep of 2666 there are no answers here, but many voices partaking of the conversation:

The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry. The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. … General Entrescu, who was highly amused by the general staff officer’s claim, said that for him, on the contrary, culture was life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar [683]

See you next week.