Author: Daryl L. L. Houston

Disembodiment

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

In our second swath of reading, I began to notice lots of cases of disembodiment, sometimes figurative and other times literal. I don’t have time for any sort of obsessive synthesis of these things right now, but I thought I’d publish a little list.

  • Medusa/Gorgon and snakes found in England and the Medusa’s disembodied head as a weapon
  • Edwin Johns and mutilation (and Morini’s relationship to it as a man not himself whole of body)
  • Morini’s disembodied voice on the phone message (p. 93)
  • Archimboldi’s book entitled The Head mentioned in this section
  • don’t forget Arcimboldo and his pictures of things made of other things, in particular heads made of bodies.
  • ghost on 98 as a spirit separated from its earthly body
  • synechdoche as a sort of disembodiment? (the head as representative of the whole?)
  • question of whether or not Archimboldi really bodily exists (along with the Marquis de Sade)
  • silhouettes (65)
  • blow you to pieces (60)
  • “bodies and faces” on 84
  • “weren’t you supposed to have disappeared?” (102)
  • Morini is at the U. of Turin; makes me think of the shroud of Turin, a link to another elusive body

There may be more. I had been thinking of trying to tie in the bachelor/brides reference I’ve written about before. Along with lots of instances of disembodiment (or at least attention to bodies and parts of bodies or absence thereof), we see escalating violence in this section. This all seems connected.

La Machine Célibataire

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

In a short paragraph spanning pages 56 and 57, our French critic is considering a text sent to him by a Serbian Archimboldi hunter, and he drops the phrase “machine célibataire,” which translates to “bachelor machine.” Taken on its own within Pelletier’s reflections on the probable life of an old bachelor, and coming from a Frenchman, it’s easy enough to pass the phrase by. But the oddness of his brief rumination along with the detail with which Bolaño provides an account of the Serb’s case for having tracked down the elusive Archimboldi prompted me to take a closer look.

Marcel Duchamp, probably best known for displaying a urinal as part of an art exhibit and for drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa and naming it L.H.O.O.Q. (which pronounced in French translates to something basically like “she’s got a hot ass”), worked for some time on a piece entitled La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires, Même, or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. See the wikipedia entry for some background and a small image of the large piece. In a nutshell, the work consists of two panels of mixed media framed behind glass. The top panel represents the bride, and the bottom panel represents nine bachelors and the bachelor machine to which Pelletier obliquely refers. This machine is something of a joke, really, for what would a bachelor machine be for a bachelor cut off from his would-be bride but a masturbatory device? The two panels are separated from one another by an intervening frame, and this circumstance is typically (so I read) interpreted to suggest isolation of the two parties and the unfulfilled desire of the bride for the suitors and vice versa (hence the necessity for a masturbation machine). According to this source, The Large Glass (as it is also called) “constitutes a diagram of an ironic love-making machine of extraordinary complexity in which the male and female machines communicate only by means of two circulatory systems, and without any point of contact.” The relevance of such a device (with its implications of disconnectedness and with the work’s suggestion of polyamory) to our love triangle seems pretty clear.

The piece has a set of companion documents called The Green Box, sort of a binder of notes and drawings that Duchamp accumulated while assembling the work. Further, in 1934, Duchamp announced the publication of 320 painstakingly-made reproductions of the companion piece. Stephen Jay Gould, of all people, contributed to a 1999 article investigating the background story of the production of these replicas, about which (the replicas) Duchamp released the following statement:

I wanted to reproduce them as accurately as possible. So I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris. Then we cut out three hundred copies of each lithograph with the help of zinc patterns that I had cut out on the outlines of the original papers.

Gould, et al, discovered many differences among the replicated documents, some of them clearly intentional (as evidenced by, e.g., notes to the printer to enlarge a section here or there and by very obviously different types of paper and ink used on different copies) and counter to methods that Duchamp would have known would have produced better facsimiles. The authors go on to suggest that Duchamp sought to “create enough small, perceivable differences between each copy (and its original document) to force us to ask whether we encounter here a new category and strategy of reproduction — not a true ‘facsimile’ (‘to make similar’) but now a ‘facvarious’ (‘to make different’).” That scholars took Duchamp’s statement of purpose and method at face value and even paraphrased it in their own assessments of the work turns out to be another of the piece’s jokes; Duchamp may, the authors of the paper assert, have been taking a little jab at the scholars who didn’t even bother to check the claims of an artist known for bucking convention and for, well, silliness.

Wikipedia’s entry on The Large Glass points to modern criticism of the piece positing that it is “a critique of the very criticism it inspires, mocking the solemnity of the explicator who is determined to find the key.” This, taken with the older criticism that reads the work as an exploration of sexual desire, plays very nicely into the themes Bolaño is exploring in this first part of 2666. It can’t be coincidental that Pelletier and his comrades begin to see the efforts of the Serb (and those putting forth similar “critical” efforts) as examples of single-minded fanaticism (p. 55) while their own lofty efforts are well worth a lifetime of world travel and obsession. A critique of criticism indeed.

And then there’s Pelletier’s lingering on the old bachelors, or machines célibataires, themselves (of which he imagines the Archimboldi of the Serb’s account to be one) jetting around the world looking for fulfillment. He views them with scorn but then catches himself wondering why he’s thinking about it (looking at his own hands, perhaps for the liver spots that have just come to his mind — this is on page 57). This sort of jetting about is, of course, more or less what he himself does, though we’re learning that his gusto for scholarly enterprise is waning. It’s not long after the publication of the Serb’s text that Pelletier and Espinoza begin serially patronizing prostitutes, presumably as stand-ins for the bride (in Norton) with whom neither bachelor can quite make a proper connection.

But wait, there’s more.

The phrase “machine célibataire” is tied to Duchamp’s work and to Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” by one Michel Carrouges, who noted a similarity in the designs of the bachelor machine and of a torture machine that appears in Kafka’s story. In the penal colony, the punishment machine is composed of a bed below (to which the punished is strapped) and a device above that tattoos the offender’s offense and his sentence onto his body, a long, painful process that culminates in death. From the link from which I learned of the tie:

For Carrouges, the similarities between these two machines resides first in the fact that they both operate as closed circuits and second as the action of one zone upon another. In both of these machines a message from the upper zone is inscribed upon the lower one. The fact that one is about sex while the other is about death underscores the importance of the modern myth of the bachelor machine, a sort of new technological version of the mirror of narcissus, in which is played out the interferences of machinism, of terror, of eroticism, and of religion or anti-religion.

As Bolaño ramps up to discuss the Serb’s article, he makes reference to the Marquis de Sade, suggesting (I think?) that there had been at some point doubt as to his bodily existence. Perhaps he’s merely pointing out that Archimboldi, as the marquis did, writes under what Pelletier and company assume is a pen name but that evidence of a real man’s existence was sought and found in the case of the marquis (and now, apparently, maybe, in the case of Archimboldi). In any case, the proximity of that reference to the marquis to the casual mention of a term that pairs Kafka’s sadistic story with the Duchamp work that can be taken as a comment on both sexuality and criticism — key themes in this part of Bolaño’s book — seems fortuitous at least. That the sexualization of violence (or the violencing of sexuality) plays a role in Bolaño’s description of the beating Pelletier and Espinoza administer to the Pakistani cab driver and that in fact the incidence of sexual and violent content in general rises in this week’s swath of pages makes this proximity seem all the more intentional. And that the book treats of often sexualized violence in the part about the crimes would seem to seal the deal.

What do you think? Am I making much ado about nothing (I’ve done it before) or has Bolaño, by casually dropping the phrase “machines célibataires,” unleashed a whole slew of associations designed to reinforce some of the themes prevalent in this section of the book in particular and throughout?

Dream Tracker

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

I volunteered to be a dream tracker for Matt over at bolanobolano. As I understand it, I’m basically a secretary of sorts and am just keeping an analysis-free log of dreams. My first listing was posted today. I’m a little conflicted regarding whether to cross-post them here or not. For now, I’ll just post the link and encourage any readers who for whatever reason haven’t been following Matt’s blog to do so, for you’ll find there not only what flotsam I generate but also great posts by Matt, Maria Bustillos, and no doubt others yet to be revealed.

Arcimboldo and the Composite Character

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

Whether or not it ever becomes explicit that Archimboldi’s name is a reference to 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, it is certainly a strikingly similar enough name that one is tempted to infer a link. The paintings for which Arcimboldo is most famous will be familiar enough to most of us, I think. After looking them up during my first read of the book a year ago, I was surprised to learn that a friend had had small prints of them hanging on a wall for years. I had simply never known who had painted them. The paintings are composite portraits whose parts are things like vegetables and fruits and fish and other people. Get a look at them here. (Side note: I learned while clicking around today that the familiar or spirit (or whatever; in any case, a humanoid whose body is composed of vegetables) who helps the chef cook soup in the movie The Tale of Despereaux is named Boldo after the artist who inspired that character’s composition.)

From the beginning of my first reading of the book, it occurred to me that the four Archimboldians seem to move and function almost as a single unit. Early on, they can always be found talking to one another in various permutations or walking together with one or another pushing Morini’s wheelchair while the others walk along beside or behind. If Pelletier’s not bedding Norton on a given night, Espinoza is, and for the life of me, I can’t keep the particular attitudes and traits of those two men straight. Norton stands out because she’s a woman and Morini because he’s crippled, but the other two are virtually interchangeable. Matt Bucher suggests that the way Bolaño tosses these people — all of different nationalities, recall — together points to a porousness of national borders, perhaps a comment on the degree to which nationality matters at all to this Chilean author who was himself a man more, in a way, of other countries than of his own. Arcimboldo too was a multi-national, Matt points out.

It strikes me that in the part about the critics (at least early on), it’s less the individual characters Bolaño has given us than the sum total of their collective experience as critics that is interesting. Maybe I’m just a cold fish, but I don’t have much feeling for any of the characters; still, I find their adventures intriguing, their slightly different introductions and approaches to Archimboldi of some interest. But it’s the composite of them all that I’m drawn to, I think, and the good-natured derision that I think attends the descriptions of some of their activities. It’s the critics and not any one critic whose story pulls me along. That they should spend their lives pursuing an author whose namesake seems to be a painter who created composites seems only fitting.

The parts of the book are listed as follows:

  • The Part about the Critics
  • The Part about Amalfitano
  • The Part about Fate
  • The Part about the Crimes
  • The Part about Archimboldi

Note that three of the five sections refer to things in the singular. Since we all know by now that the book is at least in part about a bunch of murders, I don’t believe it’s really so much of a spoiler  to give away in advance that a bunch of bodies will pile up in the part about the crimes and that, as with the critics (though to a more pronounced extent), the particulars of the crimes and their poor offended bodies will begin to run together. Thus the part about the crimes also becomes a composite of sorts, the bodies constituent parts of something bigger (though exactly what, who knows? Evil? The human condition? That oasis of horror in a desert of boredom that Bolaño invoked in the epigraph?). And so, again, the reference to Arcimboldo, with his composite images, seems fitting.

Archimboldi’s portrait of Eve depicts her wearing a low-cut bodice (whether or not immodest for the period I can’t say) with a rose and red bows. In her hand she holds the fateful apple, her pinky upraised (phallic or just dainty?). Her face, in profile, is composed of what look to me like children cavorting, some in possibly sexual attitudes. One has his back turned and his hand apparently down in his lap. Others are embracing. One is bent over, as if presenting for rear entry (though to be fair, he or she is the cheekbone, so the pose may be more pragmatic than risque). In the portrait of Adam, the children seem younger and more innocent (perhaps in keeping with some readings of the Bible in which Adam is lured by temptress Eve), though here and there a hand does seem to be exploring a crotch. Of note with respect to our critics, Adam is cradling a book and wielding a rolled paper, almost as if he’s holding forth (perhaps, paradoxically, from a scripture that didn’t yet exist?), looking for all the world like some literary critic.

I imagine Bolaño working backward from these images of bodies made of bodies, with the Cuidad Juarez murders in mind, and constructing a composite of horror using the pile of murdered bodies and a composite of academic endeavor (with its fun and its follies) from the four critics. It’s a weird intersection of knowledge in the Biblical sense and knowledge in the academic sense. I think it may be useful, as we move forward, to consider our attitudes to reading both sections and what effect the blurring and blending of critics/victims (a parallel Bolaño must have seen if not written purposefully) has on our take on the different portions of the text.

Duality

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

Almost exactly a year ago, as the first bolano-l group read of 2666 was getting sparked up, I wrote the following post about the opening sections of the novel:

It’s hard not to bring up twinning. Specifically, there’s a sort of  twinship between the Swabian and Archimboldi because even before Morini  suggests that they may be the same person, it occurs to you. Then of course there’s Pelletier and Espinoza. And in a way, there’s Liz as a doppelganger to herself, as she conducts these oddly separate but also oddly related romances (or whatever they are) with Pelletier and Espinoza, many aspects of which are similar but some of which are different (e.g. speaking different languages, different post-coital habits).

Also interesting to me is the horror movie whose plot Espinoza relates to Pelletier (p. 30). As I was thinking about twinhood, I recalled the two teenage girls as twins, though they’re not portrayed explicitly as such. The girls’ different reactions to the story about the boy who sees the face reminds me of the publisher Bubis’s wife’s spiel about art and the art critic and how one author’s work depressed him but made her cry. In the horror movie bit, it also stands out to me that there are two channel 34s that the boy seems to think must be the same but that are actually very different.

Let’s call it not twinhood but duality.

A bit later (p. 45), there’s the bit about Morini as a sort of Eurylochus, with the two divergent stories about him. (Side note: It
struck me that the Bolano fakes imprecision here — “Zeus or whichever god it is” — but you know darned well he knows the myth and wouldn’t just neglect to look it up and be precise about it if he didn’t mean to be imprecise. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, but it piqued my curiosity, and I’ll be looking for similar thing throughout.)

“Nothing is ever behind us,” Morini says to himself in response to Liz’s email about resolving her issues with her ex-husband. Later, in Morini’s dream (when he’s fleeing from an inevitable, evil thing [or maybe not evil, he decides] behind him), she  says “There’s no turning back” and paradoxically turns back. The way Bolano (or the translator) specifically mentions the face of the stranger who turns out to be Liz took me back to the horror movie and the white-faced woman telling the boy he was going to die (a fate from which indeed there is no turning back).

The last bit in this section puts (Piero) Morini in the Italian Garden reading to a London bum recipe titles from a book by Angelo Morino, and the bum points out the similarity in names (which Morini shrugs off; this makes me think back to the confusion of Archimboldi’s name with the artist earlier in the book).

The final bit of duality I guess I’ll point to I think has already been called out: We have all these non-German people converging to study a German author who himself has a weird hybrid sort of name.

So there you have it. There’s lots of doubling going on. I don’t have a thesis as to what it means or anything, but it seems intentional and probably significant.

Facebook Tracker

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

For the first installment of Infinite Summer, I wrote a little Facebook app that allowed people to track their progress and have their page count and percentage complete show up in their Facebook streams. Infinite Summer proper seems to have gone AWOL, but I’ve updated the Facebook app to accommodate multiple books and have added 2666 to the list. I’ve also enhanced the little story that gets posted to the wall by adding a thumbnail of the book in question and links back here and to the web site for the book in question (in this case, http://bolanobolano.com). Basically it’s a way to annoy most of your Facebook friends by littering their news feed with information about your reading. But maybe you’re into that. If so, you can check out the app here. Note that in order for it to post stories to your wall, there’s a link you have to click within the app giving it explicit permission to do so. If you don’t do this, it still tracks your status privately within the app, but you don’t get to annoy your friends.

An Oasis of Boredom in a Desert of Horror

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

Early on in the first installment of Infinite Summer, I blogged about front matter in David Foster Wallace’s books. The things I’ve read over the last ten or eleven years always seem in some way to circle back to Wallace — so much of my reading has been at the recommendation of people on the wallace-l discussion list — and 2666 is no exception. It’s fitting, then, that I return to front matter to kick off blogging my reading of 2666.

Or, to be a smidge more accurate, let me start with top matter. I own the three-volume boxed set, and the top of the box is emblazoned with the following review excerpt from The New York Review of Books:

[Bolaño’s] masterwork… An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force (though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel’s narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Cuidad Juarez, in the Sonora Desert of Mexico.

If it’s on the jacket (or box), it can’t be considered a spoiler to bring up before a milestone, so I’ll confirm (having read the book a year ago) that much of the book does in fact center on the horrific murders in the Sonora Desert, so that the desert becomes in a very real way the desert of horror I refer to in my title. But my title is an inversion of the book’s epigraph, a quote from Baudelaire’s The Journey:

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

Of Baudelaire’s poem, which Bolaño named the most lucid of the 19th century, our author said the following (source):

The voyage that the crewmen undertake in Baudelaire’s poem resembles the voyage of the condemned. I’m going to travel, I’m going to lose myself in unknown territory, to see what I find, to see what happens….The voyage, this long and accidental voyage of the 19th century, is like the trip the patient makes on a stretcher, from his hospital room to the operating room, where beings with faces hidden behind masks are waiting, like bandits from the Hashishin sect.

and, of the line I’ve inverted:

There is no diagnosis more lucid that expresses the sickness of modern man. In order to get free from boredom, to escape the dead zone, all we have at hand….. is horror, that’s to say evil.

So, then, maybe we can take from this epigraph, in concert with the disturbing subject matter we know the book takes on, that Bolaño seeks to tell a story about the sickness of modern man. Whether an oasis of boredom in a desert of horror would be more welcome to Bolaño than the referenced oasis of horror in a desert of boredom we’ll just have to monitor as we go along.

2666 Group Read Schedule

Daryl L. L. Houston13 Comments

Ok, it’s settled. Matt Bucher is going to coordinate a group read of 2666 over at his Bolano blog, as announced here. If Infinite Summer spins up in the mean time, he plans to defer to that venerable program’s schedule and such, but since so many are eager to get started, Matt’s stepping up. If you want to blog your read here, please leave a comment. The first milestone is January 25, so you’ve got time yet to get the book and read the first section.

2666

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

Nobody seems to be able to get any info out of the Infinite Summer organizer re the proposed reading of 2666. Organizing such a group read is a lot of work, so it’s hard to blame the guy for letting it drop, if in fact that’s what has happened. Several members of the bolano-l mailing list are chomping at the bit to do a group read, though, so if you’re interested, you might want to consider joining that list. Dates don’t seem to be finalized just yet. Somebody has proposed a January 16 start date (proposed schedule here), and I think somebody else has proposed January 23. Still others are suggesting that we hold out a little bit longer to see if Infinite Summer comes through. Matt Bucher (of wallace-l fame and also the founder of bolano-l) runs the bolanobolano blog and has said he’ll coordinate something there if nothing materializes at the IS blog soon. Once I know that anything’s formalized, I’ll post an update. Anybody who wants to sign up as an official 2666 blogger here and hasn’t mentioned it already in one of my prior calls for posters, please leave a comment.

Chi-Meh-ra

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

I just put down Barth’s Chimera and found it, as my too-clever title suggests, kind of meh. At times, it’s delightfully irreverent (Barth likes a good dick joke; or a bad one; really, any dick joke will do) and really funny. At other times, it’s just kind of dull or labored or, well, too clever. It falls into the category of books that I didn’t enjoy a whole lot or find earth-shattering but that I’m ultimately glad I read. If it had been much longer, I might have put it down. There’s more Barth I want to read, but I think I’ll give him a rest for now. I read The Sot-Weed Factor and the early novellas earlier this year.

After starting Chimera, I was given former Mets pitcher Ron Darling’s book The Complete Game, and I took a mid-book break from Barth to read it. Great literature it wasn’t, but I enjoyed it. Darling recounts a dozen or so innings from his career, giving insight into what’s going on in a pitcher’s mind (or his, at least) during/before/after various game situations. It was a pretty fun read, though I wish he had generalized some of the information a little more. I had hoped to learn more about pitching strategies at large from the book and didn’t pick up a whole lot in that way. The book turns out to be something of a downer, but it’s good reading nevertheless for the baseball fan who’s interested in a twist on standard sports biography.

What’s up next I haven’t decided yet. I think I’m going to cleanse the old palate with a reread of Gaddis’s brief Agape Agape, which I did a pretty crummy job of reading a few years ago. After that, I’m debating rereading either Gaddis’s The Recognitions (I’d really prefer to reread JR, but I’ve been through it a few times and sort of nodded through parts of The Recognitions during my only time reading it) or rereading Moby Dick, an old favorite that I haven’t touched in probably six years. Or maybe I’ll find something new. I’d like to read more McCarthy, and — I’ll be honest — Infinite Jest is already calling out to me again.