Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 8

2666 pp685-784

Firstly, a note. My local library wanted their copy of the novel back (after I’d had it for 2 months), so page numbers in this (and next) week’s newsletter are based on the Kindle edition. Where (as is increasingly common) real page numbers are provided in Kindle editions, I find them to be pretty accurate. However, depending on one’s font settings, line-spacing settings and so on the pages obviously don’t break in the same place as in the dead tree versions - so if I’m a page out you’ll forgive me.

Now, I don’t know about your copy of the novel but the blurb on the back of the one I had in my possession until this week promised a story about missing people, crime, Mexico… I forget the exact wording, but that was the gist. I’m 100% confident, however, that it didn’t mention Dracula, the Aztecs, spaceships, Lenin, a talking rat, or jungle tribes. Bolaño is really letting his hair down in the novel’s final section, and I feel like more than ever we’ve been whisked around from place to person to era.

I was impressed by some of the ways in which the author affects these shifts too, my favourite of which being Reiter’s discovery of the hiding place in Ansky’s family home into which he disappears, and then pulls off a kind of second disappearance into Ansky’s papers. Therein we get a novel’s worth of characters and plot, condensed. The way it fits inside these moments and this space that Bolaño has created (and Reiter has found) in the (novel’s fifth section’s) primary narrative is impressive. I wonder whether the author is doing it here, as he has done elsewhere (remember the story of the ranch hand told by the old lady to the festival organiser, relayed to a central character by an incidental character?), to a larger purpose? As we’ve moved through the fifth section of the novel I’ve let go of the idea that Bolaño intends to bring together the novel’s narrative threads. I am almost certain we will now learn no more about Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, Norton, Edwin John, Amalfitano, Fate, The Penitent, Elvira Campos… the list is long. Until quite recently in the reading I had been working under the unconscious assumption that all of them were cogs in a larger narrative of the novel, to be revealed in the final 200 pages. Even to me this now seems like a faintly absurd thing to have anticipated, but in my defence it is precisely the manner in which David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is constructed, and perhaps that played into my thinking here too. Wallace’s game is to set in motion a thousand tiny pieces, and then to bring them together in harmony. Considering how discursive Infinite Jest is (both in terms of writing style and its employment of nested footnotes) it’s a minor miracle that there isn’t an irrelevant sentence in the whole ~1,100 pages. Which is not to say that Bolaño is frivolous or less careful in 2666, but rather that he’s working to a different end. I’ve become increasingly convinced that the methodology of 2666 is that of panorama, or of collage. Bolaño allows for diversions into secondary and tertiary plots precisely because he’s less interested in writing a water-tight narrative than he is in painting on a large canvas. The novel’s size, its scope, the variety of people and places and circumstances that are touched upon within it are a large part of the point — are the goal of the novel itself in some respect. (This is not to say that Bolaño’s entire goal is to write a long novel; I do believe that there are central themes he wants to treat and we’ll get to that.)

As the tendrils of the novel creep outward, always seeking new people and places and time periods to tell us about, the book’s investigation of the porousness of barriers between these things also continues. As the author is happy to plunge us and Reiter into Ansky’s life through the medium of the latter’s notes, so elsewhere are scattered more portals through which we might step, and further hints at the lack of solidity between things. We have the case of the Romanian mathematician, declared insane for engaging in his search for numbers everywhere and between places. (We might sympathise with this guy if we’re still engaged in the pursuit of piecing together a holistic narrative in 2666.) There are the opportunities to peep into others’ lives and bedrooms by entering a passage that requires essentially stepping through a mirror. And there are the little moments and observations here and there that boundaries are being transgressed:

He seemed to be dreaming, or, more accurately, momentarily breaking through the massive black walls that separate waking from sleep. [692]

or that meaning is as malleable and indefinite as reality:

The shrugs could mean he didn’t know or that reality was increasingly vague, more like a dream, or that everything was going badly and it was best not to ask questions [693]

What of this last? Reiter seems somewhat destabilised by the possibility as it relates to art:

As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth [722]

and also to politics, and to war, and to love:

National Socialism was the ultimate realm of semblance. As a general rule, he reflected, love was also semblance. My love for Lotte isn’t semblance. Lotte is my sister and she’s little and she thinks I’m a giant. But love, ordinary love, the love of a man and a woman, with breakfasts and dinners, with jealousy and money and sadness, is playacting, or semblance. Youth is the semblance of strength, love is the semblance of peace. [741]

It is interesting perhaps that a great part of the novel’s final section occurs in the midst of war: surely the most destabilising endeavour in which mankind can be engaged. The thoroughness with which it calls into question the solidity of things—of borders, of nations, of the value of lives—is unequalled and makes it the obvious backdrop for Bolaño’s final investigation of the topic. Having been witness to the descriptions of dozens of rapes and murders in the previous section, how is the reader to react when encountering Sammer’s story. The manner in which murder becomes, for him, a numbers game:

Fifteen, all right. Thirty, fine. But when one reaches fifty the stomach turns [766]

His attempted compartmentalisation of responsibility:

I was a fair administrator. I did good things, guided by my instincts, and bad things, driven by the vicissitudes of war. [767]

We are presented here with abuse and murder as a process enacted coldly by a bureaucratic machine:

far from impersonal but rather objective, as if once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse had been achieved everything else was unacceptable theatricality. [772]

And so we are asked to contrast it with the ‘crimes of passion’ we witness elsewhere in the novel. I don’t believe Bolaño is asking us to make an evaluative judgment; conversely I think he is folding his patchwork tapestry so that the two subjects sit one on top of the other for a time.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been looking for it a bit more following the change in how I’m looking at the novel, but in amongst all of the liminality and the breaking down of distinctions, I’ve found more hints toward the idea of unity. As above I’m suggesting that Bolaño offers two forms of violence and, in the comparison, suggests they are aspects of the same thing. So too there are instances where the lack of ‘spatiotemporal coherence’ (p.782) is read as a unifying rather than a destabilising force. In Ansky’s papers Reiter reads of the artist Arcimboldo and the manner in which his paintings are designed with a dual nature, to present two ways of reading a scene:

Everything in everything, writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance. [734]

See also Reiter’s musing on the dual (and seemingly, though not necessarily, exclusive) statuses that one might hold simultaneously:

The rescued, thought Reiter, and the rescuer. The survivor and the victim. [707]

Dotted here and there in the text I’m noticing more hints at this theme of underlying unity, which though subtle are shifting my reading of the novel. Perhaps my favourite thus far is Reiter’s simple observation that ‘all seas were ultimately the same sea’ (p.704).

A side-effect of reading the novel through this changed lens is that when Reiter begins the composition of his first novel at p.774, or ten pages later when he first claims the name Archimboldi at p.784, it feels less like a central piece of a puzzle being manoeuvred into place and more like another fold in the tapestry - the novel’s fifth section reaching back to its first like an ouroboros: the ancient symbol used to indicate ‘introspection, the eternal return or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself. It also represents the infinite cycle of nature’s endless creation and destruction, life and death.’

I’m going to drop this in here because I came across it this week and it chimed with the novel for me:

Kirchner, Self Portrait As A Soldier (1915)

Finally, a housekeeping note: next Sunday’s newsletter will be the last and will cover the remainder of the novel. Initially I had said that the reading would end on 30 Jul and the final newsletter would be sent out a week later. However, for various reasons this makes less sense to me now. So, PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: please don’t read next week’s newsletter until you’re finished the novel.

Enjoy the last week of this summer’s read-along.