2666

One More Po

Jeff Anderson9 Comments

I want to add another rogue to Steve’s lineup. Like he did, I invite you all to chime in if you disagree—I’m curious about counterarguments. The fellow I’m talking about has actually been getting some positive press this week (in Steve’s post as well), so I expect some pushback. I refer, of course, to Harry Magaña.

Here’s what I recognize as admirable about him: He tenaciously pursues some kind of redress for Lucy Anne Sander’s murder. He works his connections to try to get to the bottom of things. He puts himself to an awful lot of inconvenience in the process, when he’s not really obligated to do so. He seems to be a nice friend to Demetrio Águila. He misses his dead wife.

And I think that’s it. On the other side of the ledger, he’s corrupt, violent, and larcenous, he’s willing (at least) to torture, and he evidently feels he’s above the law.

Look at his first appearance:

When the bartender left work Harry Magaña was waiting for him outside, sitting in his car. The next day the bartender couldn’t come in to work, supposedly because he’d been in an accident. When he came back to Domino’s four days later with his face covered in bruises and scabs, everyone was shocked. He was missing three teeth, and if he lifted his shirt he revealed countless bruises in the most outrageous colors on his back and chest. He didn’t show his testicles, but there was still a cigarette burn on the left one. (414)

The bartender’s explanation is that he was jumped by a group on the street and they beat him up. Yes, I’m sure a cigarette to the scrotum happens all the time in street beatings. I strongly suspect this is our hero’s handiwork, and it’s appalling. We know he whips Elsa Fuentes with a belt to get information from her, threatening to mark her face and even to kill her. He breaks into three houses, cavalierly helps himself to whatever’s there, puts the make on a 16-year-old who’s in love with someone else, and lets his cohort—a police officer—pull a knife on a pimp to get more information. Have I missed anything?

The way he acts in this section, he’s just another lawless cop who thinks that what he’s trying to do is more important than the principles of law and justice he’s supposed to uphold. Are we supposed to be cheering him on? I understand the impulse to root for the only person who seems to be on track to accomplish something (you know, until he disappears), but surely his dehumanizing methods indicate caution there. I read his behavior as more than just dismaying, but as of a piece with (if not, obviously, as horrendous as) the pervasive narcissistic discounting of other people’s humanity that permits the conditions in Santa Teresa to arise. To me it’s clearly problematic to acclaim Harry Magaña in contradistinction to the people he’s trying to catch when they’re in some ways so similar. I’m reminded of the chemotherapy Magaña’s wife may have undergone: It’s effective in its fight, but that doesn’t make it less destructive and dangerous.

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.

Of Bladders and Blasphemy

Jeff Anderson4 Comments

Up through last week, I turned each page of this book with dread, knowing that every one I left to the left was one fewer between me and the Part About the Crimes. As that wall of pages visibly thinned, I tried to steel myself against the ghastly proceedings to come. Traces of the feminicidios wisp through the first third of the book like fish in a mirror, coalescing around Oscar Fate and rerouting his part of the book. That we will encounter the deaths is obvious; that they will make for distressing reading is suggested by (among other things) the flat brutality of Pelletier and Espinoza’s battery of the cabbie, and by the garish sordidness of Charly Cruz’s den.

I mentioned last week the aggressive shock that the Part About the Crimes begins with—blammo! Here’s a dead body—but after the initial jolt, it’s not as crudely executed as that. I want to highlight Paul’s and Maria’s takes on the start of this part, because my own reaction shares in both. Maria captures the defensive inattention that I find myself wrestling, and Paul is surprised like I am at the strictly comparative ease of reading in this section.

But more surprising than that, for me, is the story of the Demon Penitent. It was only when the “church desecrator” appeared that I finally understood the awkwardness of the title of the Part About the Crimes. Why not “The Part About the Murders”? I had been unwittingly wondering. The answer: Because they’re not the only crimes under discussion. And so far I very much like that the Demon Penitent is included. I find him (his plot thread, etc.) interesting, but I also think he’s very useful to the book.

Dan makes the argument that it is preposterous and ghoulish to aestheticize the situation in Santa Teresa (particularly because of its factual basis), and to a certain extent I see his point. We probably all agree that it would be disgusting to turn the actual violent deaths of the actual women and girls of Ciudad Juárez into a symbol or object to serve some literary purpose. Nobody gets to claim those deaths for personal use. At the same time, the importance and, yes, utility of shining a light on them seems obvious; to draw attention is (hopefully) to inspire or force action. So in making the valid choice to write about those deaths, Bolaño has put himself in a bit of a bind with respect to what he can actually do.

That’s where the Demon Penitent enters the picture. He most blatantly provides authorial cover for Santa Teresa to not care about its women, but that’s pretty gracelessly done. Yes, I get it, the people of Santa Teresa are more concerned with offenses against an incorporeal god than with the murder of those they walk among. The addition of a clumsy countersubject does not improve my outlook on the matter nor increase the artistry with which the point is made.

The best possibility the Demon Penitent opens up is the symbolic, and that’s where he really adds to the section. In the first place, the story of a man who relentlessly imposes his bodily functions on spiritual places is inherently a symbol of the tension between the physical and the supernatural. His focus on serial desecration through excretion, as well as the sheer volume of his bladder, is so outlandish and unusual that it acquires a kind of literary charge; it must mean something, because it’s just too peculiar to be mere plot. With regard to Christianity (the religion I’m most familiar with), there’s a lot we could say about the church(es) in terms of continual appeals to the supernatural as an authority over the physical—look at sacerdotal and conventual celibacy, for one very conspicuous example—and the Demon Penitent draws all this into play. Additionally, he at least activates associations with the religious function of conceptualizing and managing the afterlife; one of the things religion has always been concerned with is the transition from physical to no-longer-physical existence, which is a transition that’s been happening an awful lot in Santa Teresa lately.

In an interesting way, though, the Demon Penitent is also an attack on the symbolic. His intent, remember, is to leave his waste all over the church and behead or destroy statues; the killings are essentially incidental. His goal is to deface the symbols of his faith, and he in fact adapts his methods in order to minimize the chances of feeling forced to harm anyone. I may be pressing the point a little too hard (or the next 250 pages may befool me), but I see his profanations as an assault on the value of any kind of symbolism, at least in the context of Santa Teresa. Facts in that city must be addressed, and to withdraw to a second-order experience of them, to see them as anything other than stark reality, is to refuse to confront them. Symbolism is cold comfort when it substitutes for action or tries to organize a set of events that are so immediate and horrible. In this sense, the Demon Penitent makes the same argument that the Part About the Critics does regarding criticism: The enormity of the events in Santa Teresa requires engagement. There is no neutrality or aloofness in the matter, because more will die without wide-scale intervention.

* I know that should be “sacrilege” in the title, but think of the sonority!

Vampires

Daryl L. L. Houston10 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!

Disjointed Post Is Disjointed

Jeff Anderson7 Comments

(Wow, I wonder what lolañocats would look like. “Foreboding, I has it.”)

Being busier this week than I’ve become accustomed to, I find that most of the coherent interesting bits from this week’s reading have already been pretty ably covered by my fellow Zombies and readers-along-with. So it’s the blogger-laggard’s way out for me, with a miscellany!

My strongest feeling about this section is relief for Rosa Amalfitano. When she was first introduced in the Part About Amalfitano (“Hard to believe, but true”), I found myself suddenly very afraid for her. After all, the Part About the Critics clearly takes place after (at least most of) the Part About Amalfitano, but when the critics visited Óscar at his home, there was no mention of Rosa or of the house’s apparently being inhabited by a young woman—even though Oscar Fate observes in the house “a clearly feminine air” when he goes there (342). So maybe it was just the critics being supremely unobservant, but maybe it was something much more sinister. Without having the timeline much cleared up (quick, where does Fate and Rosa’s getaway fit in with the timing of the critics’ trip to Santa Teresa?), I at least now have the comfort of knowing Rosa got out of the country alive.

That ending was a lot of fun. In a way it reminds me of the end of Infinite Jest, actually. We’ve got a buildup to an event—the interview with the prisoner, in this case—and the aftermath of that event, but the text denies us the event itself. (Because it’s good, I direct interested readers to Jeff Paris’s discussion of the similarly structured ending of IJ.) I have my doubts about the conclusiveness of anything Fate and Rosa and Guadalupe Roncal might have learned from the prisoner, mostly because I find it straight-up derisible that an imprisoned American would be responsible for the killings of all those Mexican women. How convenient for the authorities! (As long as they’re willing to push a Big Lie.)

But I do think it’s very interesting, formally, that Bolaño hops around the interview so much, slingshotting right past it at first and then avoiding it so assiduously that it starts to acquire this amazing gravitational pull. Then just when it has finally bent the text toward it so that we readers arrive right at the brink, and the prisoner invites Guadalupe Roncal to ask him whatever she wants—such openness, such possibility finally for some damn information, some direct answers—there’s that extraordinary hitch at the threshold of revelation: “Guadalupe Roncal raised her hand to her mouth, as if she were inhaling a toxic gas, and she couldn’t think what to ask.” Immediate curtain down on the Part About Fate, turn two pages, and boom: “The girl’s body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores.” We can certainly think of things to ask, and we’re plunged right into what I suspect will be more answers than we could possibly want. It’s a great trick, writing-wise, and I think it might be the most impressive thing for me yet about this book.

And actually, I think that’s a nice place to end. Makes up for last week and puts a tighter bow on the post than I expected. I am Jeff Anderson, and I approve of the very last bit of the Part About Fate.

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.

My Avery Edison Moment

Jeff Anderson12 Comments

Yes, that moment. More precisely, I’m having a crisis of faith in this book. I’m afraid that whatever it amounts to after 900 pages will be a nasty something. Outside of Quincy Williams’s dislocation at the beginning of the the Part About Fate—which I think we can reasonably interpret as grief—I’ve barely even seen anything humane in this first third of the book. (Perhaps I should exclude the Part About Amalfitano; easy enough to do, as much as I like it, since it makes up so very little of the book.) Sure, there are funny bits, but every time I’ve laughed, it’s been in what Mario Incandenza would recognize as a way that isn’t happy. And I don’t expect to find much comfort during the 300-plus pages we’re going to spend slipping down the drain.

I take Steve’s point that these concerns hang on a short nail, but I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say that what I have read of the book (everything up to the current spoiler line) is deeply pessimistic, maybe nihilistic, with respect to the idea that the world can be improved or even understood. And I also don’t think it’s unfair of me to say that I see no indication that the book will suddenly swing sails and beat back into this wind of hopelessness. My apprehension may prove to be incorrect, but it’s hardly unfounded.

When I was contemplating this post, before Daryl struck up the conversation about a successor book, I already had my single reading of Gravity’s Rainbow in mind. That novel seems similarly skeptical of ordering the world, except it takes paranoia as its model rather than pessimism. (By which I mean the world is equally meaningless if it never had any meaning as it is if there have been so many meanings piled onto each other that there’s no viable way to choose one.) It’s hardly an uplifting book: It’s got more than its fair share of rape, torture, and coprophagy (I wonder what a fair share would be), and it was all I could do to get through the extended fantasia of Through the Toilet-Bowl, and What Slothrop Found There. But that book at least had lingering pleasures—the octopus attack, the Kenosha Kid fugue, the divinely silly image of a hot-air balloon fighting back against a warplane with cream pies. It was, in enough places anyway, funny, and it surprised me with its reverence for love. Through everything, it struck me as a basically humanist book. (Folks who’ve read it more carefully or often than I have, speak up.) I don’t have the same impression of 2666 because I don’t see that it cares for anyone. (Naptimewriting’s comment has more.) At least not anyone who’s still alive.

It’s not that I require a book to have a positive message; it’s that I’m distressed by a book that seems so contemptuous of practically every person in it. If the point is merely to show that people are brutish and nasty, and that as one global race we permit and perpetrate atrocities so we’re all complicit—I got that, thanks. I hope that’s not the extent of what the book is going to have to say about the condition of living in the world as a human being. If there’s nothing more, then art’s just for suckers, and there’s no point in writing. I don’t believe Edwin Johns is correct, but my reading so far suggests that the book might.

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.