It’s easy to see why New Directions made such a tangible physical object out of Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp by showcasing it in a starkly bound hardcover edition, textured and black like iron; the texts it contains are like sand pouring through one’s hands, and leave the reader grasping desperately for something solid to hold. And as though to taunt the reader’s floundering, the back of the book carries a disproportionately large embossed quotation from Bolaño himself: “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.” Even taking into account that an artist’s assessment of his or her own work should usually be taken with a grain of morphine, when it came to Antwerp, the embarrassment – at least in terms of the book’s challenges to a reader - was all mine.
One knows quickly that Antwerp
isn’t going to follow narrative conventions. This short work of “just loose
pages,” compiled - “written” just doesn’t seem the right word - in 1980, when Bolaño
still thought of himself primarily as a poet, but not published until 2002, comprises
56 linked vignettes offering up repeated signifiers that accrue into a kind of “novel”
(his word, not mine). Did I write “vignettes”? That’s not quite the right word
either, as its root implies a view onto something, whereas Bolaño’s texts are
about as opaque as the dirty windows that recur throughout the book. Antwerp
reads like a writer’s notebook: notes, fragments that might one day find their
way into a novel (and indeed have, since certain elements will be recognizable
to anyone who’s read Bolaño’s later works, thus Spanish critic Ignacio
Echevarria’s frequently quoted observation that Antwerp represents “the
Big Bang” in Bolaño’s literary universe). Even this is a somewhat optimistic
assessment. While many episodes feature straightforward, coherent passages, these
are interrupted by phrases and sentences that crowd upon one another without
linearity or clear connectivity, at times as though William Burroughs’ “cut-up”
technique had been scored for jagged glass and razor wire (indeed there’s
reference to Burroughs on the first page of Antwerp). These ostensibly
unrelated snippets of text clump together in inchoate clusters. Pronouns appear
without identifiable referent. Certain phrases arise inexplicably within
quotation marks as though snatched from overheard conversations or lifted from
a screenplay. Nearly every attempt to logically bridge one free-floating
element to another results in a plunge into an abyss. We’re adrift on a sea of
disconnected texts – or rather, texts that imply connection due to the recurrence
of certain ingredients, but, for all that, don’t point us towards a clear resolution
of their relation. In this Rorschach test of a book, attempts at interpretation
become nearly as atomized as the texts that beg them. A few phrases seem to
play deliberately with the reader’s efforts to penetrate the opacity of the
whole: “The hunchback is your guiding light.” Is he really? Are we supposed to
be attuned to some significance outside the book? Should we think of Quasimodo?
Is it Roberto Bolaño hunched over his desk in his cheap room at night? Might it
be Lichtenberg? Regardless, should we really
follow him, and if we do, where might he lead us - into or out of the forest of
signs?
And what should we make
of the David O. Selznick epigraph that graces the first text in Bolaño’s game of
56-card pick-up? “Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic
of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a façade.” Is Bolaño warning us that the ensuing
texts will be simply a façade too, that behind them (as I once heard someone
charmingly misquote Gertrude Stein’s quip about Oakland), “there is nothing
there, there”? Nearly all of these texts feature a cinematic attribute – a
reference to a shot, a perspective, a screen or projection. But what to do with
this flickering zoetrope of spliced images, this jump-cut fragmentation? Even after
blinkering through these disparate, suggestive pieces and bringing to bear our
own empirical and imaginative responsibilities as readers (one of Bolaño’s
favorite Lichtenberg aphorisms seemed humiliatingly apt to me in my own reading:
"A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, don't expect an
apostle to peer out"), how are we
to put them together and give them a comprehensible form in a work that seems
to be about form itself, the usual rules abandoned in an experiment in what can
be done beyond or without them?
One tenuous foothold is
provided by Bolaño’s 2002 preface, “Total Anarchy” (a title so hyperbolic that
I felt inclined to treat it the way an Amy Hempel character treated her moving
van being swallowed by a landslide upon her arrival in California by noting, “an
omen that big can just be ignored”). Here Bolaño characterizes Antwerp
as a book written “for myself…and of that I’m not even sure” and later as
written “for the ghosts,” lines dashed off nightly in a sort of fever (Jack
Kerouac writing The Subterraneans over three days without sleep came to
mind). The epigraph from Blaise Pascal at the beginning of the book offers
another meager purchase, with its astonishment at the fact of being alive at a
particular moment and place in the eternity of time, “to see myself here rather
than there; there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather
than then.” And indeed Antwerp reads as though the boundaries between
one moment and another, one space and another, have vanished, leaving a “total
anarchy” of place and time.
Except that it’s not
exactly total anarchy. There are no grammatically nonsensical phrases, no patches
of moss or pieces of garbage or cauliflowers, no sudden eruptions of Chinese
calligraphy or mathematical equations or doodles in the middle of a page (well
okay, so there is actually a doodle). There’s a logic to Bolaño’s network of signs
and a perceptible integrity to the episodes and to the work as a whole. While these
texts at first seem haphazardly tossed together in a frenzy of creation, an
accretion begins to form from the repetition of certain conceits, images,
phrases, personages. Waiters walking along a beach. A forest by a highway.
Violence. A nameless red-haired girl. Cops. Colors. Faces without mouths and
mouths unable to speak. The hunchback. Dirty windows. Sand.
Phrases referencing the
futility of words and language also proliferate, and the various origins of
this fragmentation of language in Antwerp are suggested by consistencies
within overlapping spatial and temporal planes: dreams, films, observations in
streets and parks and campgrounds and stations, reflections regarding the
process of writing itself: “Phrases appeared, I mean, I never closed my eyes or
made an effort to think, the phrases just appeared, literally, like glowing ads
in the middle of the empty waiting room…like news on an electronic ticker”…
“Hands in the process of geometric fragmentation: writing that’s stolen away
just as love, friendship, and the recurring backyards of nightmares are stolen
away”… “All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because
reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences”…”There are no rules.”
For all its splintered
jaggedness, what holds Antwerp together (loosely) is this tension
between “total anarchy” and what we can see is surely not “total anarchy.” Bolaño
feeds us just enough to keep us in a maddening state of doubt about the text.
Is there an actual story among these shreds and scraps? Poring through them one
gets glimpses of a story or stories amid the book’s several murders, malevolent
cops, films being made and watched (many of these elements, particularly the
suggestion of literature involving a kind of detective work, will of course
reappear in Bolaño’s later novels).
Why “Antwerp”? One of
the 56 episodes bears that title and recounts a horrific accident outside that
city in which a truck carrying pigs crushes a car and leaves the pigs dead,
injured, or running off down the highway like Bolaño’s own piggly little
insubordinate sentences. Bolaño
might have used any of the other 55 titles for the ensemble. But in picking
this one, #49, distinguished by virtue of its geographical particularity and
imagery, Bolaño succeeds in having the reader’s attention coalesce around it.
Something is buoyed above the sea of other signifiers. But what, exactly, and
why? The only other time the city’s name appears is in the penultimate text,
which recounts the disappearance of an expat girl from the campground and implies
her murder, foreshadowed – if that’s the right word – by earlier texts, including
one that features an account of six young campers shot to death, perhaps by
paramilitaries or police (one recognizes these young people right away – they
group together across the globe as they have for years in parks and on beaches
and in foreign places seeking meaning and solidarity and connection). In this text, we also see the parents of the
disappeared girl driving towards some European city - “On the way to Lyon,
Geneva, Bruges? On the way to Antwerp?” – perhaps on the way to the girl’s
funeral, perhaps oblivious to her death in a foreign land, with their
trajectory loaned an ominous foreboding by the aforementioned absurd accident
“on the death-doomed European highways” – another of the “sad stories” to which
Bolaño refers repeatedly throughout the book.
But in the interstices
of these linked signifiers and sad stories amid swarming stray sentences and disrupted
spatio-temporality, one can see another glue holding Antwerp together:
the motifs that suggest (as helpfully contextualized in Bolaño’s preface)
something of the writer’s own predicament at the time of his writing the book.
A montage, an abstract but discernible portrait of that life emerges – or at
least of a life one can imagine Bolaño having led (there are never equivalences
in this book, only intimations) - a life marked by youth, fear, loneliness,
sadness, poverty, immaturity, vulnerability, loss, working odd jobs to survive,
smoking and writing in cheap rooms, being a stranger in a strange land, glimpses
of and proximity to violence, huddling with other young adrift expats, watching
pornographic movies in theaters and b-films on a sheet strung between trees in
a communal campground, having little but writing and the aspiration to be a
writer to give one the courage to carry on. Some of these elements in the preface
and the texts communicate a youthful sentimentality, pathos and even mild
self-romanticization, particularly the last page, where Bolaño breaks through his
fourth wall and tells us of the life-line of certain phrases and sentences capable
of “grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I’m at the end of my
strength.” Perhaps Antwerp was the one novel that didn’t embarrass
Bolaño because it so honestly represented this time of youthful vulnerability
and aspiration, its unmediated texts given permission to drift upward or
downward at their wont and marking for him the fearful courage - to which he
alludes in his preface with a forgiving kindness towards this early, obliquely
autobiographical effort – of daring his transformation into an artist.
For this reason, Antwerp
may primarily be of interest from the standpoint of Bolaño’s literary origins (Echevvaria’s
“Big Bang” comment may represent the most compelling reason for reading the
book). The curious last line of Bolaño’s preface - “Then came 1981, and before
I knew it, everything had changed” - may denote some event to which we are not
privy, or, more unlikely, may allude to a year of significant change in post-Franco
Spain (where Bolaño lived at the time), or, more likely, may reference Bolaño’s
recognition of his emergence as a fully committed writer. Or, it might simply mark
the arrival of another year, another incremental step away from youth. Regardless,
it asserts a conscious delineation, a line drawn in the sand from across which Bolaño
could move on to grander things, with fragments of these loose pages trailing
behind him.
This post was written as part of the 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge hosted by Rise at In Lieu of a Field Guide.
