2666

Arcimboldo and the Composite Character

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

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

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

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

The parts of the book are listed as follows:

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

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

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

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

About a Part of the Part About the Critics

Madame Psychosis2 Comments

On page 27, Mrs. Bubis (the widow of Archimboldi’s publisher) poses a question. She asks how well anyone could really know another person’s work. She shares an anecdote: She and an art critic friend were discussing the artist Grosz, and their two very different reactions to his work. It makes her laugh; it depresses him. The crux of the matter comes several paragraphs later: Which of the two actually knows his work? If presented with a painting that is supposed to be Grosz, and she laughs but he is not depressed—which of them is right?

The question of who is right is a little amusing. How could a reaction, an opinion, be correct? And yet, this new painting—it is either Grosz, or it’s not. Is the critic correct? Or the woman who simply enjoys looking at his paintings for the joy it brings? I don’t know. But it could be the woman, right? But then—what is a critic? Is a critic an expert? Or just another person with another opinion? Since the first section of the novel is called “The Part About the Critics,” it seems worthwhile to entertain the idea that, here, Bolano seems to questions the validity of this entire profession. These four critics value the work of Archimboldi above all else. They have dedicated their lives to it. And yet, the one review we see of his work (p26-27) states that another critic found it average, sloppy. Who is right? Does it matter?

I have an unrelated question. On page 13, the four pals are hanging out at a convention. Something struck me as peculiar: “[T]hey talked about future conferences, especially a strange one at the University of Minnesota… though Morini had reason to believe the whole thing was a hoax.” What? Why would it be a hoax? What could this possibly be referring to? Is this baffling or is it just me?

I would be remiss not to mention the three oddest, most surreal scenes I’ve read in a while. In quick succession, we go from Eurylochus, to Morini’s dream, to the Italian Gardens. “[B]ecause of the feast, the ship that bears Eurylochus capsizes and all the sailors die, which was what Pelletier and Espinoza believed would happen to Morini…” (p45) My goodness! No wonder those two had allowed Morini to fade from their lives! But why do they feel this way? We know that the two of them are equal in the eyes of Norton; are they jealous of her unique affection toward Morini?

Bolano then escorts us directly from this odd perception of a friend to the friend’s odd nightmare. The entire dream sequence is weird, but I’m particularly struck by, “She isn’t bad, she’s good. It isn’t evil that I sensed, it’s telepathy, he told himself to alter the course of a dream that in his heart of hearts he knew was fixed and inevitable.” Whoa. That seems awfully… final. And it’s a brand new view of Norton, that I’m not quite sure I understand at this point. Sure, she’s confused, she’s sleeping with two close friends, she obviously has both friendship and relationship issues. But that isn’t the perspective I’m seeing in this dream. He is truly frightened of her, of what she is.

And then we get the third bizarre scene: Morini visits Norton and stops at the park. He thinks to himself that “sometimes people are staggeringly ignorant of what’s under their very noses” and I can’t help but think he is referring to more than the ethnicities of the other patrons. To the stranger’s story about the type of mugs he likes to make, I can only repeat Morini: “I don’t know.” It obviously means something. Is it simply nostalgia for days past? I can’t imagine that is all there is to it; I just don’t feel like I thoroughly understand. I’m looking forward to reading what you guys thought!

Cheers!

Duality

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

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

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

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

Let’s call it not twinhood but duality.

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Tracker

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

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

An Oasis of Boredom in a Desert of Horror

Daryl L. L. Houston3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and, of the line I’ve inverted:

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

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

2666 Group Read Schedule

Daryl L. L. Houston13 Comments

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

2666

Daryl L. L. HoustonLeave a comment

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