Infinite Zombies

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.

I am off the road for a bit. I mentioned some time ago that I thought the opening of The Part About Fate was clearly a nod to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. At page 554 via more of those voices, this time in Lalo Cura’s head, we hear of his family history.

Lalo’s known family history, according to the voice, goes back to 1865 when a nameless orphan is raped by a Belgian soldier and then gives birth to María Expósito. There follows rape after rape through generation after generation until at one time there are five generations of María Expósitos living in an ever expanding house outside Villaviciosa. One of these María Expósitos has the powers of a witch. In the center of this saga about all these generations is planted the story of a brother’s revenge.

This section is short, roughly four and a half pages. It reminded me so much of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. There was the repetition of names through the generations. Some dramatic and passionate blood letting. There was magic.

I am sure that elsewhere in this novel there are other instances where Bolaño mimics other authors, or pays tribute to them if you will, and I did not recognize that for what it was. (Come to think of it, there was a tip of the hat to Borges in there somewhere, but I cannot remember now where it was.) These two examples came through very clearly for me though.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

As we finish up The Part About the Crimes, it seems to me that we have been presented with a pretty vivid picture of the fecklessness of everyone. And I do mean everyone. Not just the cops.

The three medical examiners, whom I myself labeled The Three Wise Men, have breakfast regularly together, do not talk, and then slink away like vultures. Page 549.

The press is paid off for discretion in what they write according to Haas’s lawyer. While our main representative of the press, Sergio González, is apparently not being paid off, there is no reason to pay him off. He cannot write anything at all about the crimes. Page 564.

Yolanda Palacio, the head of Santa Teresa’s Department of Sex Crimes wherein she is the only employee, holds forth on how Santa Teresa is not all that bad for women given the employment opportunities there. Page 568.

In the end the only information that Florita can offer us is that the killers have big faces, swollen faces and that their joys and sorrows are huge. What the hell is that all about? Page 571.

The former police chief of Mexico City opines that the snuff film industry in Santa Teresa does not exist. Page 536. Immediately thereafter we follow an Argentine reporter as he goes to watch one.

And when all is said and done, is not Professor Kessler as impotent as all the rest, almost comically so? Daryl below makes reference to the pomp of his visit, and that is about all there is. He makes visits to crime scenes or other settings related to the crimes ostentatiously taking notes. He sneaks off at times taking elaborate precautions to avoid being tailed, but he is tailed by the police anyway. He seems best at giving lectures to full halls at the University and regaling people at cocktail parties about the movies for which he has consulted. He is a zero in this place because of his outsider status, again as Daryl points out.

Let us not forget to mention Professor Silverio García Correa, the Mexican criminologist, another study in uselessness. Page 578.

This brings me to the charismatic congresswoman, Azucena Esquivel Plata, about whom Daryl has also written below. It is difficult to come to grips with her. Nonetheless, for all her intensity, passion, and determination, the best she can do in the end is demand that Sergio write about the crimes–the reporter who cannot report. As much I like her, I think we must anticipate that her efforts will be to absolutely no effect, as have been the “efforts” of everybody else in this place.

Cynicism rules. My original draft of this entry was far too long because I had collected quotes wherein various characters offer their own particular brands of cynicism. I will settle for only one, which really captures the overall mood. In contrast to the former Mexico City chief of police’s little homily about fighting the good fight at page 537, we find this from Sergio:

But what are good times? Sergio González asked himself. Maybe they’re what separate certain people from the rest of us, who live in a state of perpetual sadness. The will to live, the will to fight, as his father used to say, but fight what? The inevitable? Fight who? And what for? More time, certain knowledge, the glimpse of something essential? As if there were anything essential in this shitty country, he thought, anything essential on this whole self-sucking motherfucker of a planet.

Now that is cynicism. But what more can you expect from people who regularly go to El Rey del Taco for beers and Tex-Mex?

When all is said and done my overall impression is that Haas’s lawyer is correct. Anybody who seriously wished to investigate these crimes ought to follow the money. That is precisely what nobody is able or willing to do.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Do any of our main characters ever mourn these young dead women? Or even give them a serious second thought. Azucena Esquivel Plata does of course in an enraged sort of way. Oddly enough, Juan de Dios Martínez does, too.

. . . and then Juan de Dios Martínez set his coffee cup on the table and covered his face with his hands and a faint and precise sob escaped his lips, as if he were weeping or trying to weep. . . .

Page 534.

Juan de Dios rested his head on the steering wheel and tried to cry but couldn’t.

Page 600.

–Steve Brassawe

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.

I have already described two of the ways in which I have found myself responding to the renditions of the murders in Mexican Zoetrope below. First, the relentless descriptions of the state of one after another after another body that is found brings home the magnitude of the whole thing. Second, however, all seem to blend into one image of a single tortured young woman now dead.

There has been a third response to the details, too. Only occasionally do we hear about the events that led to a particular body’s condition. Even in those few cases when a murderer confesses and describes what he did, the events are only sketchily drawn for us. Usually, we are only given a description of the appearance of the body as it was found and facts from the medical examiner’s report. This is a Hitchcock technique in the sense of making what we do not see much more horrific than anything that we might have been shown.

I do not know how one can avoid imagining the infliction of multiple stab wounds, the mutilation of breasts, the strangulation, the torture while reading this section. If one reads it thoughtfully and attentively and imaginatively, the Part About the Crimes has to be one of the more harrowing sections of any novel out there. How does one avoid becoming introspective with untoward results in the face of this onslaught?

Then in the middle of it we encounter this unexpected piece of wisdom from Epifanio, unexpected because it is Epifanio, after all:

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On a lot of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?

Page 511.

Earlier in the book we had some very quick allusions to this same subject. At page 298 Guadalupe Roncal had this to say:

On the flight here from Hermosillo I wouldn’t have minded if the plane crashed. At least it’s a quick death, or so they say. [Emphasis mine.]

There is a back-handed reference to this idea in the section concerning Harry Magaña:

Harry said his had died four years ago, a few months after he’d finished the course in Santa Barbara. I’m sorry, said the other man. It’s all right, said Harry Magana, and there was an uncomfortable silence until the cop asked how she had died. Cancer, said Harry, it was quick.

Page 440.

Surely, Harry used the term “quick” in a relative sense there.

It appears to me that through Epifanio, the author from his own personal place of torture is sending a message of truth to his readers who have not yet arrived at their own such personal place. Death with dignity is not possible, as the word “dignity” is so often misused to mean “absence of torture.”

The essence of that message is that everyone will get their turn with more or less torture in the nature of things, even the healthiest among us. I am of course using the word “torture” here in the broad sense. One might be tortured by Mother Nature in the form of a growing cancer, for example. One might be tortured by old age. One might be tortured by three thugs in a small, remote room with a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

Moreover, Epifanio suggests that there is no escape in the form of “instantaneous death.” Albert Camus eloquently dispensed with that happy notion in his essay on the death penalty, “Reflections on the Guillotine” in the collection Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays. There is no doubt in my mind at this point that Roberto Bolaño was intimately familiar with Camus if not many others on this same point.

This may be one of those uncomfortable truths about human existence that Bolaño seeks to convey–doubly uncomfortable for those who cling to the illusion that they will be able to purchase “death with dignity” when their own time comes as if it were just another consumer commodity. In other words, the deaths of these young women and the manner of them are in a sense not an aberration but only one part of a larger aspect of human existence.

Although I have repeatedly disclaimed any expertise in matters of Latin American culture, I am convinced at this point, based upon my admittedly limited experience but feverish reading, that a Latin American reader, male or female, would probably be like a fish in the water with this whole concept. The idea of death with dignity would be laughable to the average Latin American reader if the possibility of such were ever presented to him or her. The Latin American reader, I think, would be more apt to aspire to death with courage. For him or her, then, only two questions remain. (1) How long will my own torture last? (2) Will my courage hold out until it is done?

But I could be wrong.

–Steve Brassawe

In considering Karl Haas, we do well to revisit Guadalupe Roncal’s description of him for the benefit of Oscar Fate in the last part. Karl has eyes so blue that he looks blind.

He has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who’s dreaming at great speed. A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams. And that scares me. Do you understand?

Page 300.

Oscar did not understand, nor could I at that point. In this section at page 488, however, I got a peek at one of Karl’s dreams, the most bizarre dream of the countless dreams recounted for us in this novel. In addition to the graphic content of the dream, Karl also features the prison to be a castle on the edge of a bottomless abyss. At the conclusion of his dream he curls up on the edge of the abyss and falls asleep to dream some more.

It is difficult to come to grips with the meaning of his ruminations that immediately follow to the effect that “[r]aping women and then killing them seemed more attractive to him, more sexy” than Farfán and Gómez’s sexual activities. Are we to take this idea to be a self-incriminating one? I do not think so. It can just as easily be taken as a way of expressing his deep revulsion when considering Farfán and Gómez. In any event this leads him to his fantasy about murdering those two men and throwing their bodies in the abyss. “. . .that will be the last of them.”

Whatever the case, Karl Haas is a disturbing man. His dreams have violence and sex all blended together in a truly macabre way. This is displayed in his conduct, also, as we witnessed in the gruesome scene when El Anillo attempted to rape Karl in the prison shower wherein the author finally comes through with the prison rape with blades to which Jeff refers below. Page 484.

Karl illustrates something nicely. Without a confession–and Karl is expert at avoiding that pitfall–the police are essentially powerless to investigate and solve a case.

It is Epifanio who has the lead in the investigation of Karl Haas. On the surface it appears that Epifanio actually does some decent police work for a change. However, I have no faith in the purity of Epifanio’s motives at all. The mere fact that Epifanio is the moving force behind Karl Haas’s incarceration is that which most persuades me that Karl did not commit any of these murders. Karl is a handy scapegoat for the police, and a scapegoat may be just thing that Epifanio is seeking. Obviously, that is saying a much different thing than that Karl is an innocent man, however. There are very few if any innocent men in this book.

Which all brings me back to the observation that I made somewhere else. The issue of who is actually torturing and killing these young working women has become strangely beside the point.

Lastly, there is this intriguing monologue from Karl at page 506 to which Daryl refers below in his discussion of the claustrophobic aspects of this section:

Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I’m on the inside. But someone worse than me and worse than the killer is coming to this motherfucking city. Do you hear his footsteps getting closer? Do you hear them?

So Karl Haas is not Nietsche’s Superman after all. Nietsche’s Superman is apparently yet to come. . .at least that is the way that Karl sees it.

–Steve Brassawe