2666

Any Two Points Define a Line Segment

Jeff Anderson10 Comments

I know this is late, but let’s talk about the Testamento geométrico. It seems to have captured some interest, and I want to push it a bit. As a preliminary matter—even though I’m disinclined to trust any text that tells me something is obvious—Amalfitano appears to be probably correct when he says the book “obviously” came from Santiago de Compostela rather than Santiago de Chile. The phone numbers for the bookstore are plausible phone numbers for the Spanish province of A Coruña (also La Coruña, which are both the names of the province’s capital city as well), where Santiago de Compostela is located. How the book got from there to Santa Teresa remains a mystery, but it is at least a confirmable known unknown.

The Contents
The three sections of the book are laid out on p. 185: “Introduction to Euclid, Lobachevsky and Riemann,” “The Geometry of Motion,” and “Three Proofs of the V Postulate.” Euclid is of course the Father of Geometry; his Elements is one of the monuments of mathematics. Lobachevsky formulated the first non-Euclidean geometry, in which lines that are parallel are not equidistant from each other at all points. And Riemann formalized nonhomogeneous non-Euclidean geometry (which to my mind—having no formal math training beyond the first rank of college calculus—sounds like a similar-magnitude advance over Lobachevsky to that which Lobachevsky accomplished over Euclid).

The geometry of motion I have no information on; it seems like it might just mean nontransformative movements, the things you may remember from junior high as translation (sliding, and how’s that for a loaded technical term in our discussions?), reflection (flipping), and rotation (spinning). If that’s the case, though, I have no idea how it could possibly be worth an entire section of a book. I basically don’t know what’s in this part, or how to figure it out. The hazards of trying to expatiate on the contents of a nonexistent book.

“V Postulate” I originally read as the letter V, but it’s actually a Roman numeral, and this section of the Testamento thus purports to offer three proofs of the fifth postulate of the Elements. (“Amalfitano had no idea what the V Postulate was or what it consisted of, nor did he mean to find out.” This is what we call a red flag.) The postulate says that if two lines intersect a third line at angles that sum on one side of the third line to less than 180°, when you extend those two lines in the direction of the side where the angles sum to less than 180, those two lines will eventually intersect each other. Seems intuitively obvious, but there’s more to say about it.

The Point
Personally, although I’m viscerally repelled by the abuse of a book, I think the idea of teaching a geometry book a thing or two about the real world by hanging it on a clothesline is very funny. (I actually thought much of the Part About Amalfitano was quite funny, while at the same time dread-full.) And people have already remarked on the book’s symbolism of Amalfitano himself, utterly passive with respect to their environments.

This V Postulate thing, though, bears some scrutiny. Like I said, it sounds plainly manifest to the intuition, but it gave geometers and philosophers about two thousand years’ worth of trouble. (Here’s an easy 90-year-old article on the subject.) Partly that’s because of its complexity; the other four postulates are as simple as “All right angles equal one another” and “There is such a thing as a circle.” Because of this complexity, the fifth postulate seems more like a proposition (the items that Euclid proves by doing geometric constructions based on his definitions and postulates), and thus like it should be provable rather than just assumable. But the proofs have been notoriously slippery, using hidden assumptions that amount to rewordings of the very thing they’re trying to prove.

Schopenhauer (in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) thought it was basically stupid to try to prove the fifth postulate, because the necessity of a proof indicated a prioritization of logic and derivation from first principles over direct, sensory impression. The attempts to prove the postulate, though, created some very interesting and useful results. One of the most productive of these attempts was by Lobachevsky, who began (as many did) by supposing the postulate to be false and looking for a resultant contradiction. What he found instead was a wholly consistent geometry that did not function according to the Euclidean rules that were assumed to order the universe.

And here’s where I’m going with this: The V Postulate, which the Testamento seeks to prove, doesn’t seem to be provable. It is, however, a necessary assumption to one of the foundational systems of human understanding of the world. Loosely put, it is an optional rule that, when adopted, yields a highly useful system of convention; when it is discarded, the result is an equally consistent but very different system. In this way, the postulate is like any number of social rules that are not, sensu stricto, necessary but are essential to the orderly and humane functioning of human interaction; there are modes of human interaction that do not follow those rules, and they can be incomprehensible if seen through the lens of those rules. Some of these rules differ from culture to culture (shades of 2666‘s prodding of national identity), like the cabbie’s view of Espinoza and Pelletier as Norton’s pimp. Others seem like they ought to be reasonably panhuman—no killing young women on a whim. I think we’ve seen lots of examples so far in 2666 of this kind of social Jenga, and the various ways human relationships collapse (and the new and unfamiliar shapes they take) when certain fundamental bases are removed: Espinoza and Pelletier beating the cabbie; Edwin Johns and his hand; lots of what happens with Lola; the general atmosphere of Santa Teresa. I’m sure there’s more. How economical of Bolaño, to figure the whole thing in an object that’s already doing multiple duty as a symbol.

It’s All in the Details

StephenBrassawe2 Comments

Here is what I mean when I say that there is really no macro approach to this part. It is all in the detail, detail that can affect us as readers if we are vulnerable. Our reactions are subjective, of course, but can be idiosyncratic in fact. That is the reason that it is difficult to make sweeping statements about The Part About Amalfitano. This also, by the way, makes it difficult to discuss.

Robert Bolaño can get into your head if you do not keep an eye on him. He fires off shotgun loads of rich images with the hope that a few hit you in the head. I have started to think that it would be a good idea not to get hit.

Admittedly, this is all about me. I am The Solipsist after all, and I spend a lot of time gazing at my own navel. But I write this as a public service. I write this as an object lesson. I have alluded to parts of this elsewhere, but here is the whole story.

I started this book while house-sitting for an acquaintance who was off in Mexico City on business. I was alone there for several days with an old dog. I read the book in long sittings in the sun in an interior courtyard bordered on two sides by a high wall with glass shards embedded along the top. This is a very common home security device here if you cannot afford an alarm system and bodyguards. A wall with glass shards on the top and a dog–preferably two dogs. I took in this book in big gulps, which was my first mistake.

In The Part About Amalfitano there was this:

He walked to the back of the yard, where his wooden fence met the cement wall surrounding the house behind his. He had never really looked at it. Glass shards, he thought, the owner’s fear of unwanted guests. The edges of the shards were reflecting the afternoon sun when Amalfitano resumed his walk around the desolate yard. The wall of the house next door was also bristling with glass, here mostly green and brown glass from beer and liquor bottles.

Page 187.

Nicely done, I thought. Shortly thereafter there was this regarding the book on the clothesline:

Well, pretend it’s mine and take it down, said Rosa, the neighbors are going to think you’re crazy. The neighbors who top their walls with broken glass? They don’t even know we exist, said Amalfitano, and they’re a thousand times crazier than me. No, not them, said Rosa, the other ones, the ones who can see exactly what’s going on in our yard.

Page 197.

That is when it first sunk in that Amalfitano’s yard was open to the outside. He does not live in a classic Mexican house closed in with high cement or brick walls with an interior courtyard. Like the one I was in.

Then this after the voice begs him not to consider the voice a violation of his freedom:

Of my freedom? thought Amalfitano, surprised, as he sprang to the window and opened it and looked out at the side yard and the wall of the house next door, spiky with glass, and the reflection of the streetlights in the shards of broken bottles, very faint green and brown and orange gleams, as if at this time of night the wall stopped being a barricade and became or played at becoming ornamental, a tiny element in a choreography the basic features of which even the ostensible choreographer, the feudal lord next door, couldn’t have identified, features that affected the stability, color, and offensive or defensive nature of his fortification. Or as if there was a vine growing on the wall, Amalfitano thought before he closed the window.

Page 202.

Feudal lord? The offensive or defensive nature of his fortification? How the hell can it be offensive? Okay. Anyway, it had become an ornament at night rather than a barricade. Fine. But I was taking breaks now and staring at the glass shards above me on the top of my wall, which does have vines growing on it. Instead of my navel for a little change of pace.

Now who knows what this all means. Amalfitano was spooked by that voice that was so real. Perhaps at this point the poor guy was thinking that if he had cement walls around his yard with glass shards along the top like any sensible Mexican’s house does,  that damned voice would not have gotten into his.

As for me, it was always in my mind that Rosa lived there, too. That was when I was still house sitting alone, and it could get a bit spooky at night. I was not sure that old dog–Zumm is his name–would be worth anything in a crunch. It was silly. But I’ll tell you, I have been through about 37 theories concerning Bolaño’s glass shards since, usually while staring up at them here.

Then came this:

Young Guerra’s voice, breaking into flat, harmless shards, issued from a climbing vine, and he said, Georg Trakl is one of my favorites.

Page 226.

I bumped into shards again in The Part About Fate.

They can indeed be pretty at night. Just last evening I saw colored shadows on the wall of a room, shadows of the glass shards on an exterior wall outside, backlit by a streetlight. Guess what I thought about. To tell you the truth, I would rather not think about it anymore.

All I am saying is, be careful out there in Bolaño land, young people.

The Magnanimous Cuckold

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear of Fluids in Mexico, Sentimentalism in the Alps

Jeff Anderson8 Comments

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Daryl has the gold-star post of these first three weeks. (And I swear on a stack of Infinite Jests that I’m not saying that because I got linked and block-quoted; that’s just gravy.) That makes more sense of the Part About the Critics than anything else I’ve read or thought so far. It also makes me feel better about a slight post, since I know Daryl’s got us all covered.

Before I get to the part of this week’s reading that stuck in my brain, though, I want to make a quick mention of a delightful bit of horror: That toilet in Pelletier’s hotel room. I’m haunted by that toilet. Even before it became an oneiric avatar of body horror, it was menacing. Any toilet that somehow gives the impression that it was damaged by having a human head smashed into it by someone else is a scary piece of plumbing, and it’s one of my favorite extras in the whole book so far.

But to the point: I kind of loved the montage that closes the Part About the Critics. You know the part I mean—where, in a film version, you’d hear Norton’s voice-over (Emma Thompson would be a lovely choice, although Emily Blunt is probably more like it) reading the e-mail she sent to Pelletier and Norton, while the visual action shows how those two spend their days in Santa Teresa. It was beautifully structured, and nicely told. Yet there was one false note that I keep rehearing in my mind, and I can’t quite make sense of it. When Norton writes about Edwin Johns’s death, she thinks about “his hand, now doubtless on display in his retrospective, the hand that the sanatorium orderly couldn’t grasp to prevent his fall, although this was too obvious, a false representation, having nothing to do with what Johns had actually been” (151). And that just sounds ridiculous to me. How melodramatic: Johns slipping off his rock, the orderly leaping to his rescue, grabbing desperately for his hand—and closing his fingers on empty air where a hand used to be, inches from the truncated end of Johns’s arm. All it’s missing is for the orderly to actually grasp the hand and then watch in a confused instant while Johns continues to fall and the wrist end of the plastic prosthesis slips out of his coat sleeve. Picture the aghast orderly accidentally waving goodbye to Johns’s receding body with the stump of Johns’s own fake hand, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s almost comical.

In plain terms, I don’t trust the narration here. (And not in the “I fear this narrator may be unreliable!” kind of way. Every narrator’s unreliable.) The book has obviously not been maudlin up to this point; if anything, it’s been disconcertingly blasé. And although she’s been presented as intellectually quirky, Norton hasn’t been a sentimental kind of character either. I may be misreading, but I take the “false representation” from the quote to refer not to Norton’s imagined scene falsely representing the real scene—that is, not as a disclaimer of the reconstruction—but to Johns’s hand as artistic artifact representing the man himself. (That’s where “what Johns had actually been” comes into it, in my reading.) So I keep trying to figure out what this little line is for, and I’ve got nothin’. Maybe it’s just a wrong step by Bolaño. That’s not a very satisfying explanation, but I haven’t yet come up with an intentional reason for him to have included such a clanging insincerity with the rest of the book’s matter-of-fact whimsy. And it’s bugging me.

Also: Happy Olympics!

The Part about the Critics as Comedy

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreams in The Part about the Critics

Daryl L. L. Houston7 Comments

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

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

Non-Dreams and Maybe-Dreams

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

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

Fluid

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

Supernatural Abilities

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

Sounds

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

Trees

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

Weird Word Stuff

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

Faces, Facelessness, and Backs Turned

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

Dark/Light

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

Age Discrepancies

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

Madness

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

Sadness

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

Rocks/Jutting

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

Crowds

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

Fear/Defenselessness

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

Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disembodiment

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

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

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

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

What Would They Criticize?

Jeff Anderson13 Comments

There’s an awful lot of interesting stuff in the second chunk of reading on our schedule (how my tune changes in just 51 pages!), but I want to fly over everything in the middle and focus on the material that basically bookends the section: the story of Edwin Johns. Over at the Bolaño mothership, Brooks suggests that Johns may be based on a performance artist called Pierre Pinoncelli, and I can see where the self-mutilation invites the link, but I think of him much more as Damien Hirst. (Obviously, there’s the taxidermy, but there’s also his nationality, his age, his rebelliousness, and his outrageous sales.)

First I want to talk about the situation of the artist in the art market. We have received a Romantic idea of the artist as a brilliant male creator, receiving inspiration from external, divine sources (alright, the Muses are older than Romanticism) and struggling heroically against the world to produce great, pure testaments to his genius and skill. Art is the extension into this world of that which is divine and unsullied, and any other purpose behind the making of art—for money, for example—taints both the result and the artist. We have the stereotype of the starving artist, nobly refusing to follow any star but his art, regardless of petty concerns like lunch or rent.

And all that of course is a load of crap, foisted on the world by men who didn’t have to earn their bread or their keep, and were thus able to ignore the economic considerations that most everyone else has to take into account when deciding how to pursue their careers. (Not that they were above accepting money for their work; it just had to be a formal afterthought.) I don’t discount the expressive and aesthetic drives that lead a creative person to art, but I want to emphasize that most people have to balance the satisfaction of those drives with meeting the first one or two levels of needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. And to that extent, art must be an economic activity; it cannot be isolated from the flow of money. In truth, it can never be: the actual artist must buy her supplies from somewhere, and must have someplace to do her art (which place she either rents or pays property taxes on). But even outside the inescapable embedment of all living in economic activity, artists need to sell. To be a professional artist is to support yourself through the sale of your work.

I’m going to skip a discussion here of “selling out,” because I don’t think it’s particularly interesting. What I want to say instead is that it seems to me that the critical apparatus—the critics themselves, their reviews, their journals—is a necessary part of this situation, at least in the case of new art. (Like Edwin Johns’s.) After a certain time, artists and kinds of art and individual pieces acquire reputations, so that their relative values (both monetary and “artistic,” by which I suppose I mean a combination of aesthetic and intellectual) are reasonably apparent. With new art, though, it’s often useful to have someone to put it in context; indeed, for the purposes of market valuation, it’s essential. Basically, in my representation here, it is a purpose (among others) of the critical establishment to tell people what new art is worth.

And I say Edwin Johns’s breakthrough exhibition, the one Norton tells Morini about on 52 and 53, is included in 2666 as a straight-up indictment of that critical establishment. The man chops off his own hand and puts it in an art show, and rather than recoil, the public buys up every single piece, “although the prices were astronomical.” That’s disgusting, and something that a responsible critic would feel obligated to oppose; societies obviously can’t afford to extend financial incentives for mutilation, and a critic who cares about the field he works in (or about people at all) ought to be horrified at the idea of his discipline as a beachhead for the practice. But rather than revulsion, Johns’s exhibition inspires a whole artistic movement. Not one of amputation, true, but I think it still has to be seen as the fruit of a poisonous tree. (I’m concerned that I’ve come to sound terribly moralistic here; I hope instead I just sound firmly convinced that chopping off your own hand for monetary gain is a bad kind of business.)

And if we believe Morini, Johns did it specifically for the money, “because he believed in investments, the flow of capital, one has to play the game to win, that kind of thing” (97). That’s so deeply cynical that it feels utterly sane. And it succeeded—he played the game very well, which I can’t help but see as proof that all the players must be corrupt and monstrous, whether or not they intend to be. Of course, the correspondence between their intentions and their actions is the kind of thing critics are supposed to investigate, and here’s where I come again to the failures of the critics in this scenario. I find this whole episode so savagely…critical…of criticism that it’s almost breathtaking, and I don’t think it’s balanced out by what I see as the tenderness and affection of page 72’s characterization of outré literary criticism as a cry for love. Lots of readers identified a kind of gentle mocking of academia in the first week’s reading, but this week is much more vicious on the subject.

There are two possible mitigations here (outside of the fact that I may be taking this much too far anyway). The first is that Johns is in a mental hospital. I’m surprised at the text’s implication that there was a process of going mad involved, because I’d have said the amputation was proof that he was a danger to himself. But in any case, he may be untrustworthy. Even more, though, Morini himself may be untrustworthy. He tells Norton “he thought he knew why Johns had cut off his right hand” (my emphasis); I don’t know where Morini’s uncertainty comes from, because the text is pretty clear that Johns whispers something into his ear. Then again, that scene (on 91) undercuts itself by pointing out that it’s too dark for Pelletier to see what happened. Maybe Johns never even answered the question. It looks like we can’t be sure. But it all seems pretty sordid to me.

What do y’all think?

Bemusings

Jeff Anderson10 Comments

Well I must say I’m a bit at a loss with this book so far. It’s pleasant enough reading—the tone, particularly, which I guess I would call “warmly distant”—but I don’t really have any idea yet why I’m reading. Things just sort of happen (when they happen), and as a reader I feel kind of like I’m just floating along in an undifferentiated sea of…stuff. I don’t come to the book with too many expectations, but given the places I’ve seen it praised and recommended, I had thought it would be more stylistically striking. Instead, it reads like a mash-up of If on a winter’s night a traveler and Life: A User’s Manual, but without the metaliterary verve or great heart.

Which certainly all sounds like I dislike the book, but that isn’t true. I’m enjoying it. I just don’t know what to do with it. But I wonder whether that isn’t the point. I note (like Madame Psychosis) that this first section is called “The Part About the Critics,” and that, whatever its lacks, there are all kinds of readings to pry out of it. So I’m going to suggest that maybe this part is written the way it is on purpose, that it’s intentionally depriving the reader of the things we might usually expect (plot, character, style, etc.) in order to put us in the critical stance, trying to mine every rift for ore. That the Part About the Critics is the part where we learn how to be the kind of critic the book demands. (I’m assuming things change.) Since we don’t really have any of the features we’re used to orienting ourselves in a text with, we have to pick up stones here to pile up a cairn and carve markers in a tree trunk there to find our way. It’s certainly been fun so far seeing the different routes that the readers in this group read have started to pick out for themselves, and in the back of my mind I feel a tiny smirking presence of the author waiting to see how we end up building our own traps for later on…

I also want to make a quick mention of probably my favorite bit so far: the Swabian’s retelling of the Frisian lady’s story. For one thing, I’m a sucker for hypodiegesis (and for the word itself). For another, though, that’s perhaps the only time in reading this first portion that I’ve felt like something was stylistically at stake, with the four-page sentence. The episode was good enough in a number of ways that I expect to be surprised later on by how much the book drops off and deepens like the lobster-waters off the North Shore.

Dream Tracker

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

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