Author: Jeff Anderson

An Eight-Sided Circle

Jeff Anderson2 Comments

“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”

William Blake.

Ah, “The Doubloon.” This is my kind of chapter (ch. 99). It’s all about interpretation, or the search for (and imposition of) meaning. It explicitly dramatizes the process we all go through every day, where we take notice of part of the world (something that is the case) and create a way of understanding it as it relates to our lives. This is a very normal part of the way human beings interact with our surroundings, and is in fact necessary to formulating the narratives we recognize as our selves and our lives.

Note that this is not the argument Ishmael makes in favor of interpretation. He says, “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher.” In his view, what gives the world worth is the significance in it that can be divined by human beings; the world has meaning insofar as it means something to people, but no intrinsic value. This seems to me an extreme anthropocentric view, but not necessarily an uncommon one. Just an unreflective one.

So in the course of this dramatization of interpretation, we see eight different characters all try their hand at “reading” the doubloon that Ahab nailed to the mast at the beginning of their voyage as a guaranty to the sailor who first raises Moby Dick. (Other than the obvious meaning, of course, which is the one they all drank to during that weird ceremony.) Ahab’s interpretation, while dramatic and almost mythologically Norse in its pessimism, is also kind of funny: Looking at the various devices on the coin—mountains with fire, a tower, and a crowing rooster, and a segment of the zodiac—he sees Lucifer, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab, and the unrelieved misery of life, which begins in pains and ends in pangs. But also, it’s not for nothing that Ishmael keeps calling Ahab “monomaniacal.” This is very nearly solipsism in action.

Starbuck starts out as a foil to Ahab in his reading—he sees the mountains as a symbol of the Trinity, so that even when he passes through the dark valley between them, God still strengthens him and the “sun of Righteousness” still shines down on him—but then he remembers that the sun is only up about half the time, on average, which leaves human beings looking for hope and comfort much of the time (wait for it) in the dark. So even though he finds some devotional meaning in the doubloon, it is on the whole a somewhat depressing exegesis for Starbuck. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty clear application of the hermeneutic method involved in reading the Book of Nature, whereby everything created has a theological lesson within it, if you can just find the key.

Then Stubb gets up and sneaks in two interpretations. In the first one, he sees the doubloon as a piece of money, just as good for spending in commerce as any other piece of money. It’s a wonderful puncturing of the portentous mode Ahab and Starbuck both operate in, but it’s also a welcome nod to the fact that objects and experiences are embedded in the world and entangled with other people and places. Both Ahab and Starbuck find insular, self-centered meanings in the doubloon, but Stubb instead immediately recognizes how the doubloon is enmeshed with the rest of the world. Then he looks more carefully, convinced by Ahab and Starbuck’s long faces that there must be a deeper meaning, and descries a very long zodiacal version of the Sphinx’s riddle that supposedly charts a universal course for the life of man. (Women don’t count for much on a whaler, you might have noticed.)

When Flask looks at the doubloon, he literally sees nothing but the monetary value of it. (A special note from my Norton Critical Edition, on Flask’s line “It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars”: “The arithmetic seems shaky.”) Unlike Stubb, he doesn’t seek a deeper meaning; he’s satisfied with his pragmatic observation of “a round thing made of gold.” I see this version as an important recognition of the thingness of the doubloon, regardless of what meanings a more reader-response-type approach yields.

The Manxman uses his special training in esoterica to identify the doubloon as half of a zodiacal prophecy of when the ship will encounter Moby Dick. I read this one as a small parody, actually. Daryl brought our attention to prophecy in the novel, and there’s always the possibility that’s at play here, but this one is so general that I suspect it’s much more like an ancestor of Maslow’s hammer. The Manxman knows something most people don’t, and everything he sees tends to be through that lens.

Queequeg comes in for comic relief, mistaking the doubloon for a fancy button. There may be a point to make here about constructed reality—if Queequeg’s pants lose a button and he sews a doubloon on in its place, that doubloon is now a button (as well as a doubloon and whatever else it may be)—but I wouldn’t want to strain that one too much, so I’ll just say it’s possible.

And then Pip. Pip is a character who makes me very sad, so I’m uncomfortable reading his mad babble anyway, but here it also feels to me like the kind of thing that might mean something if you try very hard to interpret it, but then probably won’t turn out to have been worth the trouble. So I don’t try. (My white flag, I wave it.) His reading of the doubloon can, however, illustrate the troubled extremity of personal meaning-making, since the significance he finds is available to him only. That is, even though he apparently finds some meaningful content in the doubloon, he can’t share it with anyone, because he spends most of his “on-screen” time in an interpretive community of one.

It’s very interesting to me that this chapter comes so late in the book. In a way, it’s kind of a programmatic chapter; it announces the book’s concern with meaning and interpretation by showing characters interpreting an object to create meaning. (I love that trick.) But I have a feeling that passages doing this work so explicitly usually come much earlier in books where they appear, to give the reader fair warning of what’s afoot—and to give us a chance to play along. Curious, then, that it’s only near the end that we’re asked to start looking for Rashomon Dick, the Allegedly White Whale.

Shoots to Branches

Jeff Anderson5 Comments

“And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.”

Richard Wilbur’s “Seed Leaves.”

Here in the heart of the book, it should be clear by now why some of us read it as a book about everything. There’s been plenty of plot, and we’ve had some exciting action (although I wonder whether ch. 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale,” was off-puttingly gruesome on purpose, or whether that’s just unavoidable), but there’s also been a remarkable exfoliation of the text from a story about a monomaniacal sea captain to…well, everything else that’s included. I take my metaphor for this post from Ishmael himself; he excuses his discursiveness at the beginning of ch. 63, “The Crotch” (…I know), with a lovely image to illustrate how the road between one narrative event and the next lengthens under his very feet:

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

Obviously this isn’t the first section of the book where we’ve seen digressions from the plot—I’d call Queequeg’s “Ramadan” the first major one, and that was pretty early—but it seems to me that this week we entered a more technical part of the book, where the digressions took on a different character. Before, they tended to be either apparently disposable set pieces or grand philosophical and historical disquisitions. But starting with ch. 53, “The Gam,” and ch. 60, “The Line,” and then throughout this week’s reading, we get chapters that are more like encyclopedia entries. Now that there’s proper whaling under way, there’s a lot that we reader-lubbers have to learn; and Ishmael has chosen intermittent and telescoping infodumps as the way to solve that problem. These infodumps come in two classes: those about the ship, and those about the whale. In those about the ship, I include explanations of whaling-ship terminology and habits of living, as well as depictions of equipment and techniques (like the chapter-titular explanation in ch. 84, “Pitchpoling”).

The ones about the ship are basically obligatory. The whole action of the book takes place on a ship, and if we didn’t know what things were and how they worked, we wouldn’t be able to understand much of anything. But the ones about the whale aren’t, strictly speaking, necessary. We don’t actually need to know that the sperm whale doesn’t have a real face. Instead of being primarily informative, then, I think the infodumps about the whale serve a different function. I think they’re more in the line of a blazon. On the literal level, it’s true that Ishmael (along with the rest of the crew) is dismembering a whale during this part of the book. He provides a very thorough description of exactly how the whale is butchered and flensed and rendered. But at the same time he takes the opportunity to lavish a lot of poetic language and reverence on the whale and its parts. This isn’t to say anything like “Ishmael is in love with whales”; but in the same way that Ahab sees Moby-Dick specifically as the agent of a mystical force athwart his destiny, Ishmael seems to look on the sperm whale generally as a Romantically sublime creature, imbued with wisdom and power and mystery that make it a fit subject for a blazon, even with the parodic inversion that characterizes (and partly disguises) this blazon.

Of Course You Can’t Trust Him—He’s Narrating

Jeff Anderson9 Comments

“Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”

Adrienne Rich.

It’s funny the way this book works on me: It spends 35 chapters deferring any revelations on the plot, and just as it finally establishes what’s really at stake, I go haring off after the narrator. Specifically, I want to look at the way our whole second section of the book communicates the extent to which the story is mediated through Ishmael’s narration.

Obviously, I’m not saying anything controversial when I note that no narration can be taken at face value. For all that some literature tries to pretend otherwise, there is no such thing as pure, direct truth in any narration; narration is always the result of choices and omissions that inevitably shape it. (Like I said, not controversial.) But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing interesting in the ways a narration differs from The Truth. And in Ishmael’s case, we get such a self-consciously artificial narration that I think it fairly makes the case for meaning as mostly constructed, rather than transcendentally existent.

Paul carefully traces the buildup of suspense about Ahab, and I agree with him, but I think it’s also important to recognize it as part of Ishmael’s narrative strategy. Melville foregrounds the mediated nature of the book by beginning with a narrator who refuses to vouch for the name he gives us. This is explicitly going to be Ishmael’s arrangement of events and his conclusions on their import. Paul describes Ahab as Melville’s “master creation,” which is true, but Ahab is only ever depicted as Ishmael’s creation. The whole book is Ishmael’s telling, the whole story Ishmael’s dramaturgy.

And I use the word “dramaturgy” advisedly—chapters 36 through 40 are all explicitly theatrical. “The Quarter-Deck” (ch. 36), which is by far the most eventful and dramatic chapter up to that point, begins with a stage direction. Then we get three monologues and an unwelcome premonition of Ulysses‘s interminable “Circe” episode, fully formatted as a play. At first I found this chunk of text almost inexplicably strange. I went along for the ride and enjoyed it, but I didn’t know where it came from. Then I looked back and saw that Ishmael had been patiently laying his groundwork for a couple dozen pages at least. Chapter 29 is the first with a stage direction (“Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb”), and as a title, no less. Two pages later comes the “Cetology” chapter (of which more anon)—which truthfully doesn’t much advance my dramaturgy argument, although it does foreground the artificiality of the narrative (that wasn’t the anon I was talking about)—and then at the end of chapter 33, “The Specksynder,” Ishmael gives us a straight-up statement of his mission:

Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direst swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

“I will invent what I have to,” Ishmael says, “to tell the story I want.”

And then a whole chapter that he must have invented! “The Cabin-Table” (ch. 34) describes a whole scene that Ishmael is forbidden to attend. He gives himself a possible out with a throwaway line about “peep[ing] at Flask through the cabin sky-light,” but I’m not convinced. (Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” avails me nothing in the line I’m taking, so I have nothing to say about it outside these parentheses.) After all that preparation for the dramaturgical angle Ishmael intends to approach on, I shouldn’t really have been surprised to see overt drama.

Now: “Cetology.” I love this chapter, because it’s so assured and almost absurd at the same time, and because it’s so obsessively detailed, and because it’s so delightfully bibliophilically artificial. The man categorizes whales by size like paper, and breaks his categorization down by books and chapters. The note on the classification scheme is a pure pleasure: “Why this [Octavo] book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.” The whole scheme is arbitrary; Ishmael announces a definition of “whale,” then proceeds to lay down a division without any express authority. It’s pure ipse dixit, presented as science. This cetological plan is only barely more organized or sensible than the classification in the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. If Moby-Dick, as I’ve asserted before, wants to be about everything, within that ambition is an anti-totalizing recognition that meaning is always constructed, no matter how comprehensive it aims to be. The “Cetology” chapter stands as a perfect symbol of that tension, which is why it’s always meant so much more to me than just a dry taxonomy.

Another Extract

Jeff Anderson7 Comments

“A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.”

Gustav Mahler.

Daryl asked, “Are the extracts required reading?” I say absolutely. In fact, I think they’re so important that I want to add another one to them: the Mahler quotation I opened with. Think of it as a kind of meta-extract, describing what strikes me as Moby-Dick‘s overriding goal and illustrating the way the extracts condense and expose that goal.

What goal is that, you ask, and what way? (I’m so glad you asked.) Moby-Dick is the earliest novel I know of that tries to be about everything. Daniel touches on this in his contribution to the conversation about how the book is modern, and Matt K. takes it as literally the base of his project. For one thing, this is a broadly contextualized and extensively allusive book. Even when it isn’t about, say, the fortress of Quebec (ch. 8) or the assassination of Thomas à Becket (ch. 16), it assumes you know those various subjects well enough that they can be dropped in as figurative language without any explanation. (This is why I appreciate my Norton Critical Edition, even if it does also footnote the very most obvious things in all the world.) Moby-Dick, to paraphrase another writer of the period, is large, it contains multitudes.

That’s essentially a question of style; but the book’s inclusiveness stretches also to the level of content. The opening of the book—this whole first week’s reading, in fact—is awfully leisurely. We’re officially about a fifth of the way in, and Ishmael still isn’t even on the boat. Plot is obviously not the primary concern. I mean, there’s a whole chapter about chowder. The editor of any “normal” novel would have chopped that out right quick. And Queequeg’s “Ramadan” doesn’t appear to have any plot justification, since we get no explanation for it and, at least through chapter 39, no further mention of it. (Where that vigil does come into play is in the book’s critique of domineering Christianity.) While I am excited for the chase after the white whale, I’ve always felt like the plot is more in the line of a vehicle that Melville uses to carry out his other concerns—and in that respect, the most apt vehicle to compare it to may well be a clown car.

To return to the extracts, with a quick detour about their putative compiler, the “painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub”: Daryl wondered why he even exists. I hadn’t considered the question before; I just knew he was about my favorite of literary supernumeraries. But I think Matt B. hit on it with his talk of empathy. That bracketed benediction to the Sub-Sub is so lovely, so affectionate—even if it is a bit condescending for comedy’s sake—that it really helps set the stage for what’s coming. Personally, I find it makes me more receptive to taking in the extracts, after seeing what care went into their assembly.

And there’s quite a lot to take in, by design. The scope of the extracts is intimidating. They’re international: Without researching, it looks to me like there are sources biblical, Greek, Roman, Viking, French, English, Dutch, Scottish, Spanish, Swedish, U.S. American, and German. They include biblical history, folk tales, wisdom, and prophecy; classical science and history; medical lore; poetry; political philosophy; satire; expository prose on slaughter; voyage chronicles; legal commentary; physiology; songs; natural history; fiction; demography; and economic analysis. At least one is invented, smuggled in with the same authority as Pliny. This is a deliberately bewildering mass of information, speculation, commentary, and rhapsody that, if you let it, tells you what you’re in for over the course of the book. It’s like a hologram, containing in one small bit the whole of the completed work.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. There is one thing it leaves for the body of the text to surprise you with: humor. Except for the attribution “Edmund Burke. (somewhere.),” the extracts are significantly less funny than the novel proper. I’ll close with an observation about Melville that never ceases to amuse me. Joan’s got a whole post on the beauty and majesty and suppleness of Melville’s remarkable writing; what I love is that, couched amid all that thoughtful eloquence, he regularly makes time for penis jokes. Ishmael’s nervousness about sharing a bed with a harpooneer (“And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply”) cracks me up every time, and it’s not the only joke of its kind. The incongruity of such silly jokes in such an impressive book makes it all the more enjoyable.

I’m Not Dead Yet!

Jeff Anderson2 Comments

I know Daryl has wiped his hands clean of 2666, and I know I’ve been absent for about a month now, but I wanted to pipe up one last time on that group read before moving on to Moby-Dick. First of all, an apology: I committed myself to this thing and then it eventually got squeezed right out of my week, time and again. I’m sorry for having vanished on y’all.

A couple excuses. The prosaic one is that I simply ran out of time. Let me tell you this sincerely, and may you believe and remember it: The U.S. Census Bureau gets your money’s worth from its employees. (If you read here at Infinite Zombies from someplace beyond our polluted and too-often discouraging U.S. American shores, I’m sure it’s the same by you, mutatis mutandis.) I’m grateful for the employment, but it has pulped me these past weeks, and the 2666 group read was unfortunately not among the residua. I did keep reading, though; I kept my word that far.

Which leads to my next excuse, which is that I simply lost the spirit to continue coming up with narrow, somewhat technical topics to write on. That was about the only tactic that allowed me to grapple with the book—describing only the tail or foot or trunk, willfully blind, leaving the whole elephant studiously ignored in the middle of the room. As I began the Part About Archimboldi, I thought I might finally have a chance to open myself up some to the book. The writing was stylistically…on purpose, there was a plot of sorts, and the deliberate torment seemed to have run its course.

Then came that faggot sea urchin, and I thought to myself, In the context of Nazi Germany—where gay people also were rounded up, sent to work-and-torture camps, forced to wear badges to identify just which kind of disfavored non-citizen they were, and shot when they finally outlived their usefulness to the state—couldn’t Bolaño have laid off that “faggot” shit for a couple hundred pages? But we’ve hashed out the homophobia in this book as well as I think we’re going to, here (although surely the maricón-doesn’t-mean-it-that-way defense is vitiated in a setting outside of Latin America), so I read on. Then came a crucifixion. And then alcoholic children forced to massacre Jews because the grown-ups had killed themselves sick.

I mean really.

And I just couldn’t make myself make time to write about it. Here I admit it: This book defeated me. There were many pleasures in the Part About Archimboldi, perhaps particularly by contrast to what preceded it. But after all that, and with the delicious spice of still more unpredictable brutality with no purpose that revealed itself even to informed investigation, I ran out of things to say. I read to the end, was occasionally moved, and then closed the book with a sigh of relief.

If I even keep it, I doubt I’ll open it again. I’m grateful for the experience of having read it with everyone who participated, I was privileged to read some truly amazing thoughts on the book, and I made some new Internet friends, and that was worth all the rest. But reread 2666? I can’t imagine why I’d ever want to.

(Moby-Dick, on the other hand, I’m raring for.)

A Fudge Packer, a Player for the Other Team, and a Man Limp in the Wrist

Jeff Anderson12 Comments

That Azucena Esquivel Plata is a real charmer, isn’t she? When she first appeared, in the backseat of her Mercedes with her jewelry and nighttime sunglasses (the champagne flute carved whole from an enormous diamond was implied, I feel), I thought she was going to be entertaining. She led off with the impression that she was going to be one of those fabulously ruthless women who gets whatever she wants no matter the cost—you know, Angela Petrelli—but she turned out to be…I don’t know, cranky, and deliberately rude. I mean, Sergio González and Kelly Rivera Parker are literally the only people she has anything good to say about (including the whole population of Mexico). And then I expected her be some kind of avenging feminist firebrand, with that speech about her rage as “the instrument of vengeance of thousands of victims” (626). But all she did was hire a PI and an arts reporter. And she certainly has a way with words: Reality is an insatiable AIDS-riddle whore and the truth is a strung-out pimp in the middle of the storm.

Every time I thought I had a handle on her, she swerved. In that way, I guess she represents the whole book. (A couple other ways too, for me at least: She’s long-winded, often intentionally unpleasant, and disappointing.) But she did lead me to an understanding of something that’s been bothering Dan and me both for hundreds of pages. Her casual and breathtakingly comprehensive homophobia (“This is a macho country full of faggots,” 609) threw me for a loop, but I think it helped me finally come to some kind of conclusion about the book’s apparent attitude toward gays. (And just as Azucena Esquivel Plata talks at such length about her very close relationship with Kelly Rivera Parker—”I grew to like her more and more, until we became inseparable. These things tend to leave a lasting imprint,” 588—and never breathes a word about lesbianism, so too shall I pass over the subject.)

David has an elegant explanation for the phenomenon, and it may well be the best one. Mine is a contextual one instead, and it is: misogyny. The misogyny of the world the book describes is apparent in a number of ways, from the economic expendability of the women at the maquiladoras to the possible snuff film at Chucho Flores’s to Espinoza’s dictate that whores are there to be fucked, not psychoanalyzed to the structural misogyny that permits the femicidias to continue. Q.E.D.

Well, perhaps the homophobia is another, subtler expression. It’s reasonably arguable that most homophobia is based in misogyny. There is some small fraction that I think can genuinely spring from mere disgust (and not just disgust as a cover for unexamined misogyny), but that can’t be the majority, or else we’d expect to see a widespread movement to deny sewer workers their civil rights. The link between homophobia and misogyny comes in conceptions of masculinity. Homophobes of this kind are primarily upset by gay men because gay men 1) are penetrated sexually; and 2) demonstrate a more general fluidity of gender roles. In both cases, this means that they look like men but sometimes act like women, and that can’t be tolerated. Consider how often this kind of attitude coincides with feminization-as-insult (name-calling, “nancy-boy,” etc.). Sexism can’t be news to anybody here, but I think it’s worth pointing out that much of homophobia is ultimately also about misogyny insofar as it’s aimed at what the homophobes see as the womanliness in gay men and at vigilantly ensuring that manliness is never infected and weakened by femininity.

So that’s what I’ve got. It doesn’t make me any happier about the homophobia, obviously, and it doesn’t make it any easier to read, but it at least helps it make some sense.

Studies in Coping Strategies: Avoidance

Jeff Anderson14 Comments

There’s not really anything in this week’s reading or last’s that I want to write a whole post about (in much the same way that Dan’s concerned about harshing the collective buzz, I’m chary of being the bad Zombie), so instead I’m going to backfill and give David a proper response to his comment of a month ago. He says:

This is my second time through the book and I have to say that it never occurred to me to describe Bolano’s attitude toward his characters as contemptuous, although I suppose its fair to characterize the dispassionate, almost reportorial quality of the narrative voice as dehumanizing. While there is more than one narrative register in the novel, for the most part the reportorial voice dominates, and while it doesn’t completely rob the characters of their individuality, it does flatten them out more than a little bit. Also, while its not fair to say that there’s no character development in 2666, there is an almost heroic effort to deprive the characters of the sense of psychological depth and wholeness that is one of the primary pleasures of narrative fiction. So if failing to fully flesh out characters, or to show how their actions fit within some kind of cosmic order, however indifferent or malevolent, equals contempt, then I guess that’s a fair assessment. It just doesn’t feel like contempt to me. More like studied indifference, although maybe indifference is equivalent to contempt when someone is in physical or existential peril.

It’s funny, there’s a similar aloofness towards the genuinely contemptible characters in Nazi Literature in the Americas, but in that case the effect (to me at least) is to humanize them.

I guess I should preface my reply by revising my original remarks to say that they only seem to apply to the Parts About the Critics and Fate. I gave myself a pass there on the Part About Amalfitano (which doesn’t read like entirely good form, on revisiting), but I can’t honestly say that the Part About the Crimes has been contemptuous of anyone; in fact, it’s felt almost psychopathologically dispassionate. So, to crib from the Supreme Court, let me cabin my earlier opinion to parts 1 and 3.

Having said that, I still stand by that opinion. In the first place, Barry Seaman (as an example) is overtly ridiculous. For the narration to present that whole “sermon,” in all its extended nincompoopery, is to invite us to laugh at him. Yet he’s clearly sincere in his belief that this is useful, important advice. Clowns are funny (à chacun son goût, I know) because they willingly make fools of themselves; Seaman we snigger at behind our hands from the pews while he earnestly tries to help. Merolino Fernández (the boxer) doesn’t fare much better: how many pages of buildup? And he’s knocked out in less than a minute. These are characters who are introduced for us to mock.

That’s where I move into the second part of my argument. I’m concerned to find myself double-dipping at the well of authorial intention, but it’s relevant to what David says. I appreciate the distinction he’s making between what is done (the technique of the narration) and what it means (whether it’s contemptuous or not), between the thing and the interpretation of the thing, but I think in this case the one necessarily includes the other. He concedes that the narrating voice may be characterized as dehumanizing—which I think is fair—and to that I say: It was intentionally constructed that way. When “someone is in physical or existential peril,” indifference on the part of the actor who voluntarily put them in that peril must be contemptuous (at least). What bothers me most about the narration’s treatment of (most of) the characters in the first and third parts is that Bolaño has invented these characters in order to make fun of them and to make them suffer. That’s gratuitous and nasty; I’ve given up on authors for it before. (Ex.: Will Self.) It sounds somehow old-fashioned (and a little daffy) even to my own ears to hear myself complaining that the book is cruel to imaginary people who were imagined for the sake of being put through imaginary distress, but that’s basically what it amounts to. I find the introduction of characters for the purpose, among others, of inflicting ridicule and suffering upon them an unsavory practice, and it’s upsetting to read.

And to the objection that I don’t take the same kind of intransigent stance to the degradations that the characters of Infinite Jest undergo—and they are many—I have two related defenses. First, the characters in IJ generally retain their dignity at the hands of the narration, no matter how apparently awful things get. And second, 2666 just doesn’t earn the same slack from me. As Steve aptly put it, “There is not a lick a redemption here nor is there held out the hope of any.” To me, that makes the characters’ sufferings pointless in a way that they aren’t in Infinite Jest.