Author: Daryl L. L. Houston

Dead Center

Daryl L. L. Houston7 Comments

Here we are at pretty much the dead center of the book this week, and Bolaño drops this on us in Florita Almada’s meditation on a poem that she mistakenly figures must be about little Benito Juarez:

(1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it’s human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall

A couple of pages later, she says that in her visions, she had seen dead women and dead girls in a desert, an oasis like those seen in films about the French Foreign Legion and the Arabs (this I suppose is a nod to French imperialism of the sort that Benito Juarez fought as president of Mexico and that I can’t help thinking of alongside Bolaño’s promiscuity of nationalities in this book, though what he’s doing with it I can’t say). The really kind of lovely little poem she talks about also addresses boredom:

O resting flock, who don’t, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you’re never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you’re calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom.

Let’s think back to the front matter of the book, whose epigraph Bolaño borrows from Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!”

Florita Almada, whose very name means something like “little flower,” is well-versed in the application of plants for food and medicinal purposes. She’s one heckuva gardener, you might say. And the poem she speaks about calls to mind the story of the garden of Eden, the unfortunate acquisition of knowledge — and with it boredom — that resulted from the consumption of fruit from the wrong tree. Incidentally, I can’t help thinking of Florita’s role as seer and of the Greek Cassandra, whose ears were licked clean by snakes so that she could hear the future. Yet Cassandra proved an untrustworthy prophetess in a way, because her curse was that no one would believe her.

The trustworthiness of La Santa is also sort of up for grabs, I think. She clearly has a more or less correct pipeline into something about the killings; her visions are presented as accurate and legitimate. But consider her speeches. The first is full of  lyricism (I’m thinking of the pastoral poem in particular) and nuggets that at least resemble wisdom. Her second long spiel breaks down into garrulousness and even a sort of transparent egotism:

[I]t made her even more frightened and angry, and this she had to say here, in front of the cameras, on Reinaldo’s lovely show [insert here a list of the virtues of the show, and its wonderful catalog of guests]… and now that she was here, she said, it was her duty to take this opportunity to speak of other things, by which she meant that she couldn’t talk about herself, she couldn’t let herself succumb to that temptation of the ego, that frivolity, which might not be frivolity or sin or anything of the sort if she were a girl of seventeen or eighteen, but would be unforgivable in a woman of seventy, although my life, she said, could furnish material for several novels or at least a soap opera, but God and especially the blessed Virgin would deliver her from talking about herself, Reinaldo will have to forgive me, he wants me to talk about myself, but there’s something more important than me and my so-called miracles, which aren’t miracles, as I never get tired of saying… my miracles are the product of work and observation, and possibly, I say possibly, also of a natural talent, said Florita.

How much time can you really spend talking about how you’re not going to talk about yourself? She’s a loud-mouthed old lady back-pedaling from talking about her virtues while talking about her virtues. It’s comic. She got a taste of fame during her first visit to Reinaldo’s show and has returned to drink up some more. We scoffed at Barry Seaman earlier in the book, and much of La Santa’s speech resembles his, even down to the subject matter (food, dreams, heavenly bodies, how to live). Given a pulpit, they’ll just belch out whatever they have to say, and even though some of what they say may be wise (whether simple regurgitation of conventional wisdom or not), the power of their word is undercut by their method of delivery. They discredit themselves, in a way, at least to discerning readers like the lot of us.

The matter of the agency of (and thus trustworthiness of) voice is reinforced in this week’s reading by the appearance of a ventriloquist who believes his dummy is a living creature. Like La Santa and Seaman, he’s an autodidact. “Deep inside,” he says, “all of us ventriloquists, one way or another, know that once the bastards reach a certain level of animation, they come to life.” La Santa is something of a ventriloquist’s dummy to whatever spirit fills her with her visions. She’s overtaken by her trances, seized, possessed. And like the ventriloquist’s dummy and perhaps moved a bit by the desire for fame (maybe by weariness of her own boredom?), she comes back for that second visit and shoots off a bit at the mouth. Having reached a certain level of animation, she has come to life.

As I read about her trance and considered it in light of the ventriloquist’s peculiar belief about his dummy, I couldn’t help thinking of two lines of poetry that have always stuck with me. The first, from Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, reads “Who is the potter, pray, and who the pot?” The other is from Yeats: “How can we know the dancer from the dance.” Where, in other words, do you draw the line between agent and output, and at what point does one overtake the other? I’m reminded also of my childhood Ouija board experiences, my skepticism about the occult tested by the curious ability of the thing to spell out answers to things I didn’t think my older sister could know the answers for and yet reinforced by the perhaps more curious inability of the thing to move with just my hands resting on it.

I think Bolaño is toying here with trustworthiness of voice and of authority. La Santa has what seem to be authentic visions, and yet she herself isn’t immune to certain human tendencies to provide embellishments here and there, especially when a captive audience is present and all ears. We saw the same with Seaman. We see reporters covering subjects they know nothing about. We see reporters who should be doing more to cover the murders failing to do so (it’s implied, at least, that the exposure of this stuff isn’t great). And we see critics who decide they’re not sure they know what they’re saying, who have warred with other factions of critics about things they’ve made pronouncements about and later figured out they may not understand. Bolaño distrusts people who try to package things for you.

Of course, one can’t escape the fact that he too is a repackager. Just as the thoughts that seize a shepherd can gallop away with him, so can the thoughts of a seer, or of a reporter, or of a critic, or of an author.

A Rare Moment of Real Connection

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

So many of the human connections in 2666 are superficial. Even Pelletier and Espinoza, whom we think of as a strange mix of bosom buddies and rivals, have a brief chat about loyalty and (if I recall correctly) how it’s not worth much. Their relationship with Norton is strange, at times urgent and yet at other times disposable. Norton and Morini’s getting together was something of a bolt out of the blue and still, frankly, seems kind of strange, as if it fit formally the arrangement Bolaño wanted to create but with no real believable basis in the text itself.

Fate sees some moments of connection at his mother’s neighbor’s apartment, but he’s not really involved in them. He’s not exactly close to Guadalupe and in fact almost abandons her. Rosa Amalfitano he develops something of an across-the-room crush on, and he does wind up rescuing her, but I don’t know that there’s anything to that acquaintance that I’d call an especially close or connected relationship. Rosa’s father and mother are about as distant as can be imagined, and though Lola begins living with her graveyard lover, it seems to me that it’s as much a financial arrangement as one of true and lasting affinity. Lola’s connection — a very close one in her mind — with the poet she pursues is imagined.

In last week’s reading, we met Juan de Dios Martinez and Elvira Campos. He desperately wants connection, but she keeps him at arm’s length. Sure, she’ll nail him on a rigid twice-monthly schedule, but forget pillow-talk afterward, much less anything gesturing in the direction of a meaningful relationship.

The backdrop for all this aloofness, it should be noted, is a series of grisly crimes perpetrated as acts of unwanted connection.

At last, on page 408, we have a real connection. Erica Delmore is looking for her friend Lucy Anne Sander, who is later found murdered. She finally starts going to hospitals to ask if any American women have been admitted. At the last one, she has this experience:

[A] nurse suggested she try the Clinica America, a private hospital, but she answered with a burst of sarcasm. We’re blue-collar workers, honey, she said in English. Like me, said the nurse, also in English. The two of them talked for a while and then the nurse invited Erica to have coffee at the hospital cafeteria, where she informed her that many women disappeared in Santa Teresa. It’s the same in the United States, said Erica. The nurse met her eyes and shook her head. It’s worse here, she said. When they parted, they exchagned phone numbers and Erica promised to keep the nurse posted on any developments.

It seems an empty enough gesture. How often do we say, even to people we consider to be fairly close friends, that we’ll call, with no real intention of doing so? But get this: Just a couple of pages later, after they’ve found Erica’s friend, she calls the nurse to let her know the body has been found. When she gets to the morgue to identify the body, the nurse has, unasked, come to help her through it:

As they were waiting in a corridor in the basement, the nurse appeared. They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. Then she introduced the nurse to Henderson, who greeted her distractedly but wanted to know how long they’d known each other. Twenty-four hours, said the nurse. Or less. It’s true, thought Erica, just a day, but I already feel as if I’ve known her for a long time.

It’s tempting to call this a Good Samaritan moment, though I’m not sure the politics of the different cultures (somewhat distrustful of one another) in Bolaño’s vignette quite lines up with those in the source material. Still, it’s a nice little moment of human connection, an oasis of friendliness in a desert of aloofness.

Vampires

Daryl L. L. Houston12 Comments

As I write this, I have the strangest notion that somebody has beat me to it, that somebody else has mentioned vampirism with respect to 2666, but if so, I can’t find the reference. If I’m inadvertently ripping you off, please speak up and take appropriate credit in the comments. Maybe I just have the Infinite Summer read of Dracula still on the brain.

The things I’ve noticed (probably not an exhaustive list; I found these in a quick skim after reading this part a week ago):

  • There’s the obvious draining of life force from industrious women.
  • The man held in connection with the crimes is a tall, pale man. Even though he’s locked up, the crimes mysteriously continue. He’s obviously sneaking out at night as a bat.
  • In a bit of mischief running parallel to the murders, we have an elusive sacraphobic breaking idols (Dracula hates a cross, don’t you know?).
  • The Penitent pees in prodigious amounts. Vampires drink lots of blood. Vampire bats, which can consume half their weight in blood within a 20-minute feeding, begin to pee within a couple of minutes of feeding. One assumes they pee in impressive volume.
  • Inmates at the mental hospital are made nervous by the wind. I’m reminded of the storm that preceded Dracula’s arrival to England and his later association with a mental hospital in Stoker’s novel.
  • The director of the asylum has small, sharp, white teeth.
  • The filmmaker Rodriguez, probably best known for his vampire film From Dusk till Dawn, is featured in the prior section of the book, with a credit on what seems to be a snuff film oddly premonitory (or emblematic) of the killings in Santa Teresa.
  • One victim has a stake driven through her. Usually we think of this as the vampire’s fate, but then, vampires spread the love to others who must also be staked.
  • The left hand of one victim rests on some guaco leaves, which are supposed to be good for mosquito bites. Mosquitos are another blood sucker.

I’m not saying this is a vampire novel, or a vampiric section of the novel. The bits about the pee in particular are almost certainly a stretch. Still, there are some pretty evocative images and circumstances that a credulous reader like me can find a way to tie together in a post about vampires. Boo!

What’s Sacred?

Daryl L. L. Houston7 Comments

Here just a long quote of a passage I really liked that I think bears repeating (page 315):

What’s sacred to me? thought Fate. The vague pain I feel at the passing of my mother? An understanding of what can’t be fixed? Or the kind of pang in the stomach I feel when I look at this woman? And why do I feel a pang, if that’s what it is, when she looks at me and not when her friend looks at me? Because her friend is nowhere near as beautiful, thought Fate. Which seems to suggest that what’s sacred to me is beauty, a pretty girl with perfect features. And what if all of a sudden the most beautiful actress in Hollywood appeared in the middle of this big, repulsive restaurant, would I still feel a pang each time my eyes surreptitiously met this girl’s or would the sudden appearance of a superior beauty, a beauty enhanced by recognition, relieve the pang, diminish her beauty to ordinary levels, the beauty of a slightly odd girl out to have a good time on a weekend night with three slightly peculiar men and a woman who basically seems like a hooker? And who am I to think that Rosita Méndez seems like a hooker? thought Fate. Do I really know enough about Mexican hookers to be able to recognize them at a glance? Do I know anything about innocence or pain? Do I know anything about women? I like to watch videos, thought Fate. I also like to go to the movies. I like to sleep with women. Right now I don’t have a steady girlfriend, but I know what it’s like to have one. Do I see the sacred anywhere? All I register is practical experiences, thought Fate. An emptiness to be filled, a hunger to be satisfied, people to talk to so I can finish my article and get paid. And why do I think the men Rosa Amalfitano is out with are peculiar? What’s peculiar about them? And why am I so sure that if a Hollywood actress appeared all of a sudden Rosa Amalfitano’s beauty would fade? What if it didn’t? What if it sped up? And what if everything began to accelerate from the instant a Hollywood actress crossed the threshold of El Rey del Taco?

A few pages earlier (302), we see this, which came to mind because of the reference to speed (check also page 300 for such a reference, which recalls Espinoza’s dream about the painting whose figures seem to move imperceptibly, as if time is slowed):

He thought about his mother and what she must have thought about at night in Harlem, not looking out the window to see the few stars shining in the sky, sitting in front of the TV or washing dishes in the kitchen with laughter coming from the TV, black people and white people laughing, telling jokes that she might have thought were funny, although probably she didn’t even pay much attention to what was being said, busy washing the dishes she had just used and the pot she had just used and the fork and spoon she had just used, peaceful in a way that seemed to go beyond simple peacefulness, thought Fate, or maybe not, maybe her peacefulness was just peacefulness and a hint of weariness, peacefulness and banked embers, peacefulness and tranquillity and sleepiness, which is ultimately (sleepiness, that is) the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness. But then peacefulness isn’t peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending.

Coatlicue redux

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

Those who played along for the first installment of Infinite Summer may recall my post about the weird little reference in Infinite Jest to something dubbed the Coatlicue complex. Well, Coatlicue makes an oblique return in Bolaño’s novel in the form of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whom we see depicted in a mural in Charly Cruz’s garage. Wikipedia (I know, I always cite wikipedia; I’m lazy) suggests that some take the Virgin of Guadalupe to be a simplification of the Coatlicue myth. I don’t know that the Coatlicue baggage would really benefit Bolaño’s story very much, so I’m not going to lean too heavily on the vague association, but I was amused to discover the connection.

The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe does seem at least somewhat relevant to our story, though. In a nutshell, the story goes that one Juan Diego was out for a stroll one day 400 or 500 years ago when he spotted a vision of a 15- or 16-year-old girl in a nimbus of light who asked to have a church built in the area in her honor. Somehow, Diego figured out based on her request that she was the Virgin Mary. When he went to the bishop with the news, the bishop (ever the skeptical lot, those old religious folk) asked Diego to return and ask for a miracle to prove her identity. She told Diego to gather some flowers (though it was wintertime) on the hill where they met. He found some Castillian roses (indigenous to the bishop’s home but not the immediate locale). She then arranged the flowers for him on his cloak, which he presented to the bishop only to have the Virgin’s image appear on the cloth of his cloak.

This icon is of great importance to Mexican Catholics.

For our purposes, I suppose it’s worth noting that we’re talking about the ghost of a young woman roaming about Mexico. If the Coatlicue angle contributes anything at all, it’s also worth noting that Coatlicue is a mother goddess associated with life, death, and rebirth.

It’s also interesting to note, given the lack of much in the way of first-hand physical evidence of the person Archimboldi, that the existence of Juan Diego, in spite of his being integral to such an important piece of Mexican religion and culture, is heavily disputed.

Cruz’s painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe differs from the original icon in that it has one eye closed. On page 348, Bolaño brings up blind justice, and I can’t help drawing an association with this image, except that instead of blind justice, the image, in light of the negative portrayal of the police in this section and coming up and the fact that hundreds of murders of young women have gone unsolved, somehow represents justice closing one eye, looking the other way. And what better place for such an image than the garage of a man who displays a film associating violent (maybe nonconsensual) sex and death, a house in which Rosa Amalfitano later speculates her friend Rosa Mendez (a convenient sort of pre-double representing what Rosa A. seems destined to become) is probably dead.

As Fate is rescuing Rosa from her friend’s probable future fate by taking her away from Cruz’s house, he gets another look at the mural and notices that the open eye seems to follow him everywhere. Interestingly, some photographers and ophthalmologists have reported seeing figures reflected in the eyes of the original icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This, of course, is considered further proof of the miracle. But for us, maybe it means something different, that just as we can see justice (or a saint of virginhood, if you prefer) watching us, if we look closely enough, we can see ourselves reflected there, somehow implicated. We’re all, through our inaction, through our complacence, by indulging in art void of meaning or reference to social justice (take Johns’s selling of his body for money rather than for a higher purpose) — we’re all somehow culpable.

Maybe. I don’t know. I’m still noodling on it.

That we meet another character named Guadalupe who bears the heavy weight of the murders seems not insignificant. That she and Fate share an interest in finding out more — in doing something besides settling for inaction and complacence, something that I take to be a mission of Bolaño’s in this book as well — underscores the happy naming congruence.

Also of possible note is the fact that Spain has a Lady of Guadalupe as well. In that story, a virgin appeared to a shepherd and asked him to dig at the site of her appearance. When he did, he found a sacred statue. This virgin is one of only a few black representations of the Virgin Mary and so shares with Fate the privilege of being something of a rare specimen. The existence of virgins of Guadalupe on different continents with which Bolaño not only had ties but which figured in this novel and had been home to Rosa Amalfitano seems relevant given all the doubling in the book and its transnational porousness.

Thar She Blows

Daryl L. L. Houston23 Comments

A few weeks ago, before I had ever gotten wind that 2666 intersected with Moby Dick via a sermon by Barry Seaman resembling a sermon by Father Mapple, I found myself playing with the idea of proposing Moby Dick as the next Infinite Summer read. I’m not sure how I feel about it now, frankly. The IS crowd seems to dwindle with every book, and I now imagine myself trying in some way to lead or guide a group read only to discover that I’m the only one interested, that I’m doing the work for the benefit of no one but myself. Which would be fine (benefitting only myself), were it not public and, in its failure, embarrassing. So I thought I’d take your temperature on the matter, Internet.

I think that part of the reason Infinite Jest was such a popular read was because it was one of those books that smart people had been meaning to read forever but had put off. Here was kind of a kick in the collective pants to read the thing. I suspect that many have passed over Moby Dick as well and that a subset of those folk would enjoy doing a group read of it. Misery loves company, I guess. (Though there’s not much of misery in reading Moby Dick. I don’t understand why people don’t like it or think they won’t like it. You’ll watch an hour of How It’s Made or follow over the course of several months the labors of the Sea Sheperd or of the ships on Deadliest Catch, but you can’t bring yourself to read this dramatic, tender book that encompasses elements of those shows, but in high literary style and with humor, passion, and compassion?)

Another thing that made Infinite Jest a good pick was its emotional appeal. The people who love this book really love it. Many who give it a chance wind up feeling emotional about it. Moby Dick is one of my favorite books, but I don’t feel emotional about it in the way that I do with Infinite Jest. So maybe that’s a strike against Moby Dick‘s shot at being a successful group read selection.

What do you think? If I were to line up a schedule and see if I could find the occasional guest writer or define a set of themes, a la Matt, to track, would you be interested in participating? Or should I just read at my own pace and blog my thoughts if and when inclined?

The African-American Picturesque

Daryl L. L. Houston10 Comments

@naptimewriting didn’t like this week’s reading, finding the portrait of Barry Seaman to be a caricature:

Really, my first thought was, what does this Chilean author, who has been masterful with southern Arizona and northern Mexico (what I know of them, anyway), know about aging Black Panthers in Detroit? Yes, some people, particularly those in political and social movements, are caricatures. But seriously?

One of my great flaws as a reader is that I’m over-credulous. I’m too ready to take what the narrator says at face value, and I’m too slow to make judgments of characters. Maybe I lack an innate radar that some have for deciding whether a character is likable or true. At some point during college, I figured out that you couldn’t always trust the narrator or accept a straightforward reading of a character, and I began reminding myself that I had to really think and ask myself whether or not I thought I was intended to like a character. Sometimes when a character is a rascal, you’re not supposed to like him; other times you are. I bring all of this baggage to my reading of 2666. So I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it hadn’t occurred to me that Seaman was a caricature (though in retrospect I suppose it’s obvious; can’t you just imagine Dave Chapelle with a powdered head mugging and talking about poke chops in a grotesque, almost Uncle Remus-like impersonation of this character?).

Upon reading @naptimewriting’s post, I thought of another line that follows shortly after Seaman’s lecture. Having leafed through the volume of The Slave Trade that Antonio Jones had given him and realizing that the author was white, Fate reflects on the reaction to his story about Jones:

To most of his colleagues, Fate noted, the story was little more than a venture into the African-American picturesque. A loony preacher, a loony ex-jazz musician, the loony last member of the Brooklyn Communist Party (Fourth International). Sociological curiosities.

It occurs to me that our critics from the first part of the book are caricatures of a sort as well, providing a glimpse of the academic picturesque. Still, while someone on the fringes of academia can provide this latter glimpse reasonably enough (and nobody complained that Bolaño was off key in part 1), it does seem, as @naptimewriting points out, that Bolaño may be a bit out of his element in trying to portray an aging Black Panther.

But is it possible that he’s doing it for effect, that Seaman is a caricature not because Bolaño happens to be writing about something he shouldn’t and so hits the highlights with none of the nuance but precisely because Bolaño means to be writing about something he shouldn’t? Maybe, that is, he’s missing the note on purpose, with the aim of saying something about the untrustworthiness of writing. He meditates on this later, saying “society tended to filter death through the fabric of words… Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear.”

Words can’t necessarily be trusted, and the story you get about a character or event can’t necessarily be trusted. What Fate’s colleagues recognize as something of a caricature, his readers receive well enough that he’s hired on as a staff writer. What you’ve read about Mexico, what you’ve heard about coyotes and crummy conditions and squalor across the border may not be trustworthy. What you may have read in bits and pieces about the St. Teresa (née Cuidad Juarez) murders probably isn’t right, certainly isn’t enough; if filters out too much of the horror. Here’s a portrayal of an aging Black Panther reduced to a doddering old man passing out conventional wisdom and recipes, with all the fear and grit of his life filtered out. Coming up next, I can imagine Bolaño thinking, is a more trustworthy account of the set of horrors central to the book, with a much different, much more permissive, filter.

The Magnanimous Cuckold

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynk wrote a play entitled The Magnanimous Cuckold (sometimes translated The Magnificent Cuckold). Its protagonist (if it can be said to have one; let’s call him an antagonist in a play with no real protagonist) suspects his wife of cuckoldry and, through mounting paranoia and a bizarre need to confirm his suspicions, forces his innocent wife into cuckolding him with not only his brother (I believe it was his brother) but with the whole village, including himself in disguise. On a side note, the staging for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of the play bears some resemblance to certain elements of Duchamp’s machine céibataire, whose topic is at least obliquely (perhaps inversely) related to the idea of a cuckolding.

Having set myself up last week to establish a seating in literary tradition or convention (e.g. comedy for the first section of the book) and with Crommelynk’s play in mind, I latched onto Amalfitano’s cuckolding. It’s not exactly a convention, but it is certainly a recurring theme in literature. And for lack of anything more solid to latch onto, I decided to explore the topic a little more deeply.

Before I go on, I’m going to posit that there’s a relationship between the way a man feels about his daughter’s purity and his wife’s fidelity. The disturbing phenomenon of the purity ball takes the idea rather to the extreme, but it’s really no coincidence that we joke about shotgun weddings or polishing the (phallic, by the way) shotgun when dear daughter’s boyfriend comes to pick her up for a date. The deflowering of a man’s daughter is often taken as an assault on the man’s honor (of his property, really, I suppose), and so it seems to me like a variant of cuckolding.

That Amalfitano is raising a nubile daughter in an environment saturated with the fear of sex crimes perpetrated on young women makes him doubly and justifiably afraid of a filial cuckolding. We learn on page 198 that he feels spied on. On page 196, he asks himself why he brought his daughter to this horrible place. On the next page, he confides in Pérez that he’s a nervous wreck with fear for his daughter. Later, the voice in his head tells him to do something useful for his daughter. On page 202, we’re told that the wind is slipping into Rosa’s underpants.

But there are other significant things that are more suggestive of a fear of infidelity (of a sort) on the daughter’s part that goes beyond typical fatherly hand-wringing. Imma reads for the poet Lola is chasing a poem about Ariadne lost in a labyrinth. Ariadne, recall, was the daughter of King Minos, who kept a horned beast in his labyrinth. She betrayed her father first by helping Theseus kill the beast and second by eloping with the same lad. Ariadne’s name is figured by some to come from a word meaning “utterly pure.”

Later, after Amalfitano has learned to embrace the voice he hears, Bolaño tells us he feels like a nightingale. Oscar Wilde wrote a story (perhaps informed by Persian literature, which tells of the nightingale’s love for the rose?) entitled “The Nightingale and the Rose” (remember that Amalfitano’s daughter’s name is Rosa) about a professor’s daughter’s refusal to dance with a student and subsequent faithlessness to the student once he offers her the rose she requires. She opts instead to favor a man who sens her some jewels, ruining the notion of true love for the student and abandoning frivolously what we can assume must have been the sort of true love one would expect a father to want for his daughter.

Even the separation of Amalfitano from his daughter in airports because of their different citizenships points to a sort of infidelity (if not one she’s really culpable for), as he goes through one line while his daughter is frisked by strange men (one can imagine) in another.

And then there’s the voice’s repeated exhortation for Amalfitano to do something useful for his daughter. He is essentially telling Amalfitano to snap out of it and be a man, a reasonable enough suggestion for a character who displays nothing of manhood anywhere so far in the book. Professor Pérez all but throws herself at him (dressed like a ’70s movie star, caressing his face, touching his thigh, taking his arm as if they’re lovers), but he’s ever a cold fish. Several times, he considers planting a tree in his yard, an act that would produce fruit and demonstrate fertility and a lapse the voice reminds him of, but he never follows through, with telling symbolism.

I believe it’s even worth considering whether or not Rosa is Amalfitano’s child. The origin of of the word “cuckold” lies in the habit of the cuckoo of laying its eggs in another bird’s nest. Lola expresses a desire to carry the poet’s child, and at some point she has her son Benoît. Having left a child in Amalfitano’s nest before running off to seek the poet, has Lola in fact left behind Amalfitano’s child or the child of another with whom she’s cuckolded him? (“Lola” is a diminutive form of dolores, meaning “sorrows.” On pages 204 and 210, we see references to “birds of sorrow” and to “tiny little eggs.” Is it reasonable to put these things together to give weight to the Lola-as-cuckoo and Rosa as bastard conceits?) The lack of anything like passion in descriptions of their interactions or their history certainly leaves the possibility open.

Yet Amalfitano takes his matrimonial cuckolding in very gracious stride. Lola writes to him of her experiences with the poet, but he doesn’t seem angry. It’s clear that he loves her (that beautiful image he has of her typing him a letter, reflected in the sky outside an office window), and after her long-overdue return, he sends her away with most of his savings when she leaves. He is the very definition of a magnanimous cuckold.

Much has been made over whether or not Amalfitano is gay, and whether Guerra is gay. (Incidentally, back on the matter of the cuckold as a man with horns, I had trouble not imagining the Guerra of page 218, decked out like a cowboy and jumping out to sort of attack Amalfitano, as a man in conquest of a bull.) Although he seems passionless, I don’t think of Amalfitano as gay. He’s more sexless, something of a bachelor (remember Pelletier’s meditation on the machines célibataires as he himself contemplated aging and the search for fulfillment?) unsure of his relation to the women in his life. Or, for that matter, to the men. Amalfitano seems to me like Prufrock without the yearning.

I can’t quite find a way to bring this to a tidy conclusion. The cuckold is usually a comic figure, and yet Amalfitano is, to me, a sad, sympathetic man. Maria may have it right that Bolaño is saying something, with Amalfitano, about how alien homosexuality is to a virile Hispanic man. But this seems an awfully heavy section of the book for describing what seems to me to wind up being a pretty shallow cultural artifact. In a follow-up comment, Maria says “We do know that it’s men, not women, who are abducting a ton of girls and then torturing and killing them in that strange, sad border town. And this is a real thing that is really happening, in a real border town, to this day.” And maybe that is what really lies at the heart of the Amalfitano section. He’s more or less as helpless to do something useful for his daughter as he is to keep his wife from abandoning him and screwing around on him. What does it mean to be a man in a world in which men are so powerless to hold onto and protect those they would cling to?

The Part about the Critics as Comedy

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

In her post for this week, Sarah says, probably correctly, that if this part of 2666 had been published on its own as Bolaño had instructed his heirs to do, it would have been something of a disappointment. Chatter generally has been that though the critics themselves have seemed kind of aimless and homogeneous, the writing is pleasant enough. Still, is vaguely pleasant writing enough to sustain a book in which the characters aren’t really all that compelling?

After reading Sarah’s post, I read Jeff’s comment on my long piece about the dreams. He says:

When I finished the Part About the Critics, I thought I was unsurprised to find Norton with Morini because I had no expectations to be overturned—the characterization had been so opaque that I didn’t have any feeling of what might have been out of character or unpredictable.

Suddenly it occurred to me — what if we regard this section of 2666 as a comedy , not in the Seinfeldian sense (necessarily, though it often enough applies) but in a literary sense?

Consider the following excerpted matter from the passage about comedies of manners in A Handbook to Literature:

The stylized fashions and manners of [members of an artificial, highly sophisticated society] dominate the surface and determine the pace and tone of this sort of comedy. Characters are more likely to be types than individuals. Plot, though often involving a clever handling of situation and intrigue, is less important than atmosphere, dialogue, and satire… Satire is directed in the main against the follies and deficiencies of typical characters… A distinguishing characteristic of the comedy of manners is its emphasis on an illicit love duel, involving at least one pair of witty and often amoral lovers.

Just try to tell me we don’t see a lot of these things in 2666 so far!

My college Shakespeare professor described comedy in the Elizabethan sense as the sort of literature in which there is some problem in the beginning (e.g. mismatched pairs of lovers, political problems) that can be resolved by a the proper alignment of and marriage of a pair or pairs of lovers. (Tragedy, by contrast, is when there’s a problem that a strategic marriage would solve that goes unsolved when the marriage falls through; Romeo and Juliet, within this set of definitions, is comedy turned tragedy.) All’s Well that Ends Well, which describes the nature of the Shakespearean comedy in its title, is a comedy. As You Like It is another. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is yet another.

Dreams in the summerish climate of Mexico are what finally tie Norton and Morini together after several attempts at mismatched relationships within 2666. In comedy, there really are, to borrow a phrase from Jeff, no expectations to be overturned.  Shakespeare’s plays are pretty transparent from the beginning about which pairs should and will line up and get married at the end to resolve the central conflict.  Bolaño isn’t up front about the proper pairing, but upon analysis of the dream content binding Norton and Morini together, it becomes obvious (I contend, if obvious only in retrospect and with a bit of digging, which I suppose isn’t in fact all that obvious after all) that they are destined from the beginning to come together. Whether or not their union resolves any central conflict besides the Pelletier/Espinoza/Norton love triangle is debatable.

(Consider comedy on the big screen today, though. I defy you to name a Hugh Grant or Julia Roberts movie in which the characters you know in the beginning will get together don’t get together in the end. These movies pay lip service to there being some larger central conflict — a life ruined by tabloid photographers, a chain store edging the little guy out of business, etc. — but they are ultimately about resolution of the relationship. I suppose we want to expect more of Bolaño, but maybe we shouldn’t; maybe the point for him is that focus on atmosphere and satire that the venerable editors of the Handbook describe.)

In any case, Bolaño seems in some way to be influenced by the old convention here. I wonder, then, if it’s not useful to think of this part of the book as a sort of comedy in that old sense (I also raised the question in a comment somewhere of whether or not part 1 was something of a picaresque). If so, I wonder also if each part of the book will emerge as a take on another subgenre of literature, and I wonder how those parts will play together.

Dreams in The Part about the Critics

Daryl L. L. Houston7 Comments

The first section of 2666 gives us boatloads of dreams, most of them vivid and several of them downright disturbing. It’s hard to write about dreams before the section is done with while avoiding spoilers, since some of them anticipate other dreams or events in the story. So, while I’ve been cataloguing dreams over at the mother ship, I’ve held off on any sort of heavy duty analysis. Frankly, I’m a little skeptical about doing much in the way of real analysis. To speculate about the meanings of or purposes for events corresponding to the reality of the story as set out in the book puts one on shaky enough ground from a critical perspective; to speculate about the meanings of or purposes for bizarre dreams may be even shakier. Still, a number of little motifs appear in many of the dreams, and I think one can fairly safely draw conclusions about how they support certain impressions about some of the characters and their relationships to themselves and to others.

First, I’ll dump out a catalogue of some of the motifs I spotted. I may have missed some, and I may be making mountains out of molehills for others (for example, the age discrepancy one, the crowd one, and the distance one). After I’ve dumped them out, I’ll end with a few impressions the dreams have helped me to form.

Non-Dreams and Maybe-Dreams

Technically, this little sub-list isn’t a catalogue of motifs so much as a collection of instances in which dreams or dream-like states were referenced, suggesting that even when dreams aren’t real dreams, they’re a pervasive element within the text.

  • 14, Morini: May have dreamed a horrible unrecollected dream
  • 22, Frisian lady: Has trouble sleeping
  • 34, Norton: Enters a hypnotic, post-sex state
  • 35, Morini: Has a weird experience with temporary blindness that it’s conceivable (though not suggested explicitly) could have been a dream.
  • 40: Norton’s ex existing only in dreams
  • 76: beating the Pakistani is said to have taken place during a dreamlike state
  • 94: After Morini’s absence after meeting with Johns, Pelletier describes his reappearance as having been like waking from a bad, baffling dream

Fluid

  • 35, Morini: Awakened from his maybe-dream by perspiration (and light)
  • 45, Morini: Dreams of Norton diving into a huge pool with oily patches. Fog appears and the pool empties.
  • 78, Pelletier: Lives with Norton near a cliff overlooking a beach, which is later seen to butt up to metallic water. Later in the dream, he sweats and sweats, as if sweating from a spigot you couldn’t turn off. The tremor he spots on the sea makes it look (he thinks) as if the water is also sweating.
  • 114, Pelletier: Dreams of shit and blood in the bathroom containing his broken toilet.
  • 115, Norton: Swollen, pulsing vein in the reflection’s neck makes one think of the blood coursing through that vulnerable spot.
  • 155, Pelletier: Dreams of a boy diving into water that turns out to be alive.

Supernatural Abilities

  • 45, Morini: Norton speaks to Morini via telepathy
  • 78, Pelletier: Can sometimes soar like a seagull.
  • 114, Espinoza: People in the painting move slowly, as if living in a different world in which the speed was different
  • 115, Norton: The woman Norton sees reflected in the mirror isn’t Norton, and the reflection behaves very strangely.

Sounds

  • 78, Pelletier: Metallic sea is associated with a humming of bees and then an awful silence.
  • 85, Espinoza: Dreams of a distant moaning as of a child or a sheltering animal
  • 114, Pelletier: A muffled noise wakes him up (within the dream)
  • 114, Espinoza: Hears barely audible voices. The word freedom sounds to him like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom.
  • 115, Norton: Hears a noise in the hall and thinks someone may have tried to open the door. Later, there’s total silence.
  • 155, Norton: A thunderclap wakes her up (whether in real life or only in her dream she doesn’t know)

Trees

  • 45, Morini: Norton walks away into a forest giving off a red glow.
  • 131, Norton: She plants and replants an oak tree that sometimes has no roots and that at other times trails “long roots like snakes or the locks of a Gorgon”
  • 115, Norton: When thinking about Morini, she sees his empty wheelchair and an impenetrable, dark green forest that turns out to be Hyde Park. She also has a sense that a fire is raging nearby; the juxtaposition of these two images seems noteworthy given Morini’s dream (45) that Norton walks off into a forest giving off a red glow.

Weird Word Stuff

  • 78, Pelletier: He’s reading Archimboldi papers written in French rather than in German
  • 85, Espinoza: Dreams of some indecipherable words a prostitute said to him, and the point of the dream seems to be to try to remember them. The prostitute in the dream is reading some words written on the wall and spelling them out as if she doesn’t know how to read.
  • 114, Espinoza: Words “tunneled through the rarefied air like virulent roots through dead flesh”
  • 114, Espinoza: Recognizes just a few stray words all conveying urgency or haste.
  • 115, Norton: Begins taking notes as the woman reflected in her mirrors cycles through the varying grimaces of madness.
  • 131, Pelletier: Dreams of a page he can’t decipher no matter which way he turns it.

Faces, Facelessness, and Backs Turned

  • 35, Morini: In his maybe-dream about blindness, as he’s trying to compose himself, he thinks of (among other things) still shots of faces.
  • 45, Morini: Dreads the evil woman who wants him to turn and see her face (it turns out to be Norton, who says “there’s no turning back”; earlier, Morini [not in the dream] has said that nothing is ever behind us). Let’s not forget that Norton is described as the Medusa.
  • 78, Pelletier: Norton is more or less a sort of background noise; she’s there but never really quite seen or heard in a meaningful way; when he cries out for help, she’s nowhere around.
  • 115, Norton: Her front is reflected in one mirror and her back in the other; she’s unable to say whether she’s about to move forward or backward. As the head in the mirror turns, she realizes that if it keeps turning, its owner and Norton will eventually see one another’s faces. The reflected face makes a grimace of fear, causing Norton to look behind her for the source.
  • 155, Norton: Morini’s back is to her, a fact that particularly upsets her. His wheelchair is facing her, and the chair and Morini are described almost as if they’re facets of the man himself; this resonates with the duality of Norton in her dream about the mirror.

Dark/Light

  • 35, Morini: He’s awakened from his maybe-dream by light (and perspiration)
  • 78, Pelletier: He doesn’t sleep much, and he sometimes, while trying to sleep, looks at the beach and sees it as a black canvas or the bottom of a well that he searches for the hint of a flashlight or a flicker of fire.
  • 85, Espinoza:  Bulbs are burnt out in his prostitute dream.
  • 114, Pelletier: Someone had turned on the bathroom light.
  • 114, Espinoza: “bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes”
  • 115, Norton: dreams of herself reflected in dim light (later described as ashen); the dream itself deals with the infinity seen between two mirrors, a trick of light.

Age Discrepancies

  • 45, Morini: Dreams of a much younger Norton
  • 115, Norton: Dreams of herself dressed in the style of the 50s.
  • 131, Espinoza: Dreams of the young girl selling rugs
  • 155, Pelletier: meets a boy who spends the whole day diving into living water.

Madness

  • 115, Espinoza: The slowness of the painting in his hotel room was what kept whoever was watching it from losing his mind.
  • 115, Norton: The woman reflected cycles through a series of expressions of madness.

Sadness

  • 45, Morini: Feels “deeply and inconsolably sad”
  • 78, Pelletier: He weeps
  • 115, Norton: Begins to cry in sorrow or fear. Later, the reflection grimaces in despair. Norton takes notes on the reflection’s expressions as if her happiness depends upon it.

Rocks/Jutting

  • 45, Morini: A rock juts from the enormous pool.
  • 78, Pelletier: Once the people leave the beach Pelletier and Norton live near, all that’s left is a “dark form projecting from a yellow pit,” which turns out to be a horrific/beautiful statue

Crowds

  • 45, Morini: People begin to leave a crowded area
  • 78, Pelletier: People are always on the beach he and Norton live near, doing frivolous things. Eventually, they desert the beach. He has the impression that they move as a crowd, arriving each morning as if for work, or that they live at the beach.

Fear/Defenselessness

  • 45, Morini: Thinks of the the figure wandering at the bottom of the pool (whom he had thought might be Norton) with sadness, as if she’s his lost love wandering in a labyrinth. He also imagines himself, with legs that still worked, lost on a hopeless climb.
  • 78, Pelletier: People begin to leave the beach, some clinging to bushes or stones and others climbing the cliff. He wonders if he should bury the thing projecting from the beach, “taking all necessary precautions.” Later, he shouts for help, but it’s as if the silence following the water’s tremor and buzzing sound swallows up his cries.
  • 114, Pelletier: He’s more revolted by the shit than afraid of the blood smeared in his bathroom.
  • 115, Norton: the stillness of her body reminiscent of defenselessness; later, a grimace of fear on the face of the reflection causes Norton to look behind her.
  • 131, Espinoza: He dreams of the girl he bought a rug from and wants to tell her something and spirit her away, but the perpetual motion of her arms keeps him somehow from doing it.

Distance

  • 45, Morini: The pool is 1000 feet wide by 2 miles long
  • 78, Pelletier: Thinks about how far he’d have to walk to get to the beach; the people in his dream never get very far from shore.

And now for some analysis (or maybe it’s synthesis).

It’s straightforward enough to suggest that the various weird word issues among the dreams speak to insecurities about the particular dreamers’ critical fitness. While they sit in the thrones of their academies and look down upon the third-rate critics who flock around them throughout this section of the book, they, like all of us, wonder about their own capabilities. Pelletier dreams about turning a text this way and that and trying to reread and reread it without success only to find himself lounging about the hotel reading and rereading the Archimboldi books he has brought with him.

For Espinoza, words are secondary somehow to flesh and life and crisis. He seeks to understand the writing on the wall (with all its Biblical freight?) but  only to unravel the mystery behind a probably obscene comment during sex that he’s reminded of when he sees a love bite on his thigh. In other dreams, he seems to hear cries of urgency, and in a dream about the girl who sells rugs, he wants to rescue her from something but can’t (captivated, in a way, by the physical flesh of her thin, dark arms). Even his attempt to decipher the writing on the wall is a sort of rescue, as he tries to save an illiterate prostitute by figuring out what it is she’s trying unsuccessfully to read. Espinoza is the Romantic, perhaps the poet (here the interpreter of arcane knowledge) of the bunch. Recall that he wanted to be a writer rather than a critic. He’s got that Spanish machismo that Maria wrote about (remember that Pakistani cab driver), and the little bit of insight we have into his dreams backs up her assessment of his hot-blooded, sort of heroic, persona.

Norton’s writing in one of her dreams is that of a college student hoping to please. She takes notes as if cramming for an exam, but the exam she’s cramming for has no right answers, for it’s one of identity. Her dreams are of mirrors and faces, uncertainty and fear (noises in the hall and jolting thunderclaps). She explores, in her dreams, where she stands (literally) in relation to herself and to Morini. As she has different personas with Espinoza and Pelletier in the boudoir, so too is there ambiguity about her self-identity within her dreams. Insecurity about who she is (is she the she she sees in the mirror?) manifests itself in that most insecure of instruments for female characters: the mirror, in which she goes so far even as to appraise the outfit the her she doesn’t think is her happens to be wearing.

Pelletier becomes something of a lone wolf as the book moves forward, choosing to read in solitude rather than to go out with Espinoza. When he dreams of living with Norton, she’s background scenery, and even the water begins to sweat when he sweats. The world he looks out over from his house on the cliff is as one constructed for his benefit, the beach-goers showing up as if for a job, filling roles he expects to see filled out on the shore day after day in the world of his making. He can sometimes soar like a seagull. In Pelletier’s dreams, he’s a sort of god. He’s more worried about the dirtiness of shit smears than the dark implications of blood smears (and why not be, for gods are immortal but not necessarily immaculate). Still, he has his insecurities, particularly with respect to his abilities as a critic, as evidenced by the weird word dream incidents outlined above. And it was Pelletier, recall, who demonstrated a fear of being an old bachelor ; the fear rears its head again as he dreams about watching a boy diving over and over into the water. Whether Pelletier sees the boy as an incarnation of youth gone by or as the quarry of a confirmed old bachelor is left to the reader’s imagination (though I tend to favor the former interpretation). When imagining Pelletier as a self-styled god alongside his dream image of a time-worn statue projecting from a vast expanse of beach, I can’t help thinking of Shelley’s “Ozymandius”:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Morini too dreams of a form projecting from the vicinity of a body of water. The form in his dream I suppose is phallic, a rock nearly lost in the enormous landscape of a drained pool, the owner of that phallus (and the dream) an incomplete man ever in need of a helping hand, confined to his home while his male companions run off to Mexico with his would-be lover to consummate at last the ménage a trois that has seemed inevitable for 100 pages.  It’s fitting, given their final reunion in this section of the book, that Morini and Norton’s dreams are the most disturbing, and that they’re linked in a vaguely supernatural way. She finds herself staring at his back in her later dream, where he found himself stared at from behind in his early dream. He and his chair are a single, fractured being in her later dream as she is at one point the woman walking in the bottom of the pool and at another the woman behind him in his dream, and, further, as she is (and isn’t) a reflected woman in her own dream.  Pritchard characterizes Norton as the Medusa, and Morini is afraid to look at her face in his dream. Yet after their gazes do finally meet in his dream, she walks off into a glowing red forest; when she thinks of Morini during her mirror dream, she pictures a dense, green forest and has a sense of nearby fire, and she’s trying (but is unable) to make an exit. As they’re connected in their dreams, so they come together in real life.

It’s not all quite that tidy, of course, but these are some impressions I’ve formed after living with and reflecting on these dreams over the last few weeks. The dreams seem to me to reinforce certain currents that run throughout the book (despair, squalor, crowding, madness, sex, fear), but they also provide color for these characters who, minus their dreams, have seemed awfully homogeneous and flat.