2666: The Part About the Critics

An edition of 2666 in Chinese, one of the few major languages

 that doesn't appear in "The Part About the Critics"

“The Part About the Critics,” the first of the five parts that make up Roberto Bolaño’s sprawling 898-page work, 2666, may seem familiar to anyone who’s read his earlier novel, The Savage Detectives. Three men and a woman set out to track down an elusive, almost mythological writer, and their search, peripatetic and wayward, and ringed by suggestions of violence, eventually takes them into the Sonoran desert of northern Mexico. Only in 2666, this gang of four differs from that of the earlier book almost to the point of parody. All four are academics, for one thing, and their search is punctuated by literary conferences, papers, readings and re-readings, and translations – lots of translations, one assumes, since the four come from England (Liz Norton), France (Jean-Claude Pelletier), Spain (Manuel Espinoza) and Italy (Piero Morini) and their common link – the writer Benno von Archimboldi – is German. Their lives also entwine romantically and sexually, imbued with a near constant, adolescent anxiety about where they stand in relation to one another that occupies nearly as much of their attention as their quest for every shred of information about the mysterious Archimboldi.

Benno von Archimboldi’s existence, like that of the poet Cesária Tinajero in The Savage Detectives, is entirely constructed by unreliable sightings and contradictory clues, most of which – not unlike Olive Oyl’s song in Robert Altman’s Popeye in which all she can think of to describe Bluto is that he’s “large” – tell us little about Archimboldi other than that he’s “tall.” The four critics “could read [Archimboldi]. They could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers.”  The writer is, in a word, missing; so, at least for the readers of 2666, is his writing. For all the attention the four critics lavish on Archimboldi’s work, the only glimpse Bolaño provides of it is some book titles. Omission is a frequent tool in Bolaño’s kit, but here the entire oeuvre of a writer, one in line for the Nobel Prize no less, stays just off stage, invisible to Bolaño’s readers (though the crumbs Bolaño throws us, these twenty-odd titles, allow 2666 to make a rather outsized contribution to the Invisible Library).  

This omission is not as great a loss as one might think, since Bolaño himself helps fill in the gaps by employing these four academics as vehicles for a delirious array of anecdotes, digressions, literary references, and miscellaneous sparks and tatters of text, writing that remains deeply compelling despite offering little that is cohesive or conclusive. Strung upon the plot line of the academics and their search for Archimboldi, Bolaño’s flights of writing signal one another across the text, sometimes coalescing into intimations, suggestions, pieces of a puzzle or puzzles that lead to no solution. Bolaño also begins, quite early in the novel (page 43 in my edition), to carefully drop into his story hints of horrors to come that accrue insidiously, creating an increasing atmosphere of dread. I wish to spoil nothing for those who haven’t read the book, but take it as assumed that those approaching it know that the center of gravity of 2666 is the series of horrific murders of hundreds of women perpetrated in and around Ciudad Juarez, Mexico beginning around 1993.

The academics’ passing interest in the snippets of information they hear about the murders is repeatedly displaced by the consuming interest they show in Archimboldi.  Morini, the first to hear about them, fantasizes about traveling with the reporter whose article he has read, but “an hour later he’d already forgotten the matter completely.” Towards the end of “The Part About the Critics,” Pelletier and Espinoza hazily recall, from being drunk the night before, a Mexican boy telling them about the scale of the serial killings – over two hundred women, perhaps more – but the matter gets intellectualized by the hung-over Espinoza, who’s equally interested in the boy’s having read Archimboldi in French without really knowing the language. In the bathroom to puke, he’s too obtuse to connect his illness with anything more than having had too much to drink, wondering, “…why should I have been upset?”

Yet while these murders remain on the periphery of 2666 for most of this first part, violence does not. Two significant episodes of abject violence (among a host of other more minor episodes and allusions) feature prominently in “The Part About the Critics.” The first is directed at a Pakistani taxi driver in London who has had the audacity to make some disapproving comments about the propriety of Liz Norton’s behavior as a single woman out with two men, the generally mild-mannered Pelletier and Espinoza, who in response suddenly transform into enraged, out-of-control thugs, beating and kicking the cab driver and leaving him by the side of the road (and stealing his taxi too). The penalty they pay? Liz Norton suggests a brief hiatus in their seeing one another.  

The second prominent display of violence – and here we enter fully into Bolaño territory - appears as part of an artwork, one of several conceptual art pieces featured in 2666. Liz Norton recounts the story of a painter friend, Edwin Johns, who, before ending up in a sanitarium in Switzerland, had severed his own hand and placed it dangling within an assemblage/painting (“an ellipsis of self-portraits, a spiral of self-portraits”) displayed in a gallery. Unbeknownst to Norton, the three other academics visit Johns, who whispers to Morini a mysterious response to the question as to why Johns had cut off his own hand, a silent exchange (another omission) ostensibly linked to Morini’s temporary disappearance. The other critics cannot locate him, and their initial concern gives way to a kind of shrugged-off assumption that he’s okay and will turn up. Though we’re not privy to what Johns has told Morini or why it may have resulted in Morini’s dropping out of sight, Morini later suggests to Norton that Johns may have cut off his hand for money. But again, the suggestion is just that, providing no solid conclusion, like many elements in 2666 offering just another turn of the screw, another hint aimed at trying to gain some understanding of violence and barbarity, but left fluttering in the wind, awaiting, later in the novel, further echoes of it to appear.

The generally calm and safe world of literary academia – one of conferences, papers, insular debates about intimate details of writers and their works – may seem far removed from the monstrousness in the world.  But that distance is an illusion. As Bolano suggests in “The Part About the Critics,” violence is but a hair’s breadth away. It may erupt from within. Or, by a simple tug on a thread – in this case the rumored appearance of Benno von Archimboldi in the northern desert of Mexico – one can be drawn into the maelstrom. “The Part About the Critics,” which began with the academic’s innocent obsession with a mysterious writer, ends, by a curious trick of geometry, with Bolaño having physically moved us to the epicenter of barbaric atrocity, the murders of women that will be so central to 2666.

This post is written as part of the 2666 group read hosted by Richard at Caravana de recuerdos.

A New York Bachelor: Photographs 1956-1965

I’ve written a published foreward. It’s to Robert Decker’s intriguing collection of found photographs, A New York Bachelor: Photographs, 1956-1965, and the book is available here. 

It Will Do: Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's Sara Videbeck

“It is said that a light veil hangs suspended before the future of Europe and prevents us from observing clearly the forms that beckon to us from within…” writes Swedish writer Carl Jonas Love Almqvist in his preface to his 1839 novel, Det går an; un tavla ur livet (translatable as “It will do,” “It can be done,” or “It’s acceptable”; “A picture from life,” though the English translation settles for the more pedestrian Sara Videbeck). With extraordinary explicitness and forward-thinking, Almqvist defines the writer’s role in trying to discern these mysterious new contours:

We must first learn to know people themselves, observe them in all their nooks and corners, listen to their innermost sighs, nor scorn to understand their tears of joy. In brief, what we need are true stories or sketches from life: examples, contributions, and experiences.

In other respects, though, Almqvist’s preface is remarkably opaque, and walks on eggshells around his radical subject: the liberation of sexuality. For readers with their antennae out, it’s hard to miss Almqvist’s euphemisms - “happiness,” “material interests,” “a glimpse of heaven on earth” - and the sexual imagery of the preface’s final lines abandons most, if not all, pretext. But Almqvist needn’t have obfuscated; Det går an dropped onto Sweden like a bomb, igniting a furor concerning marriage; helping add fuel to women’s rights efforts; inspiring later Swedish authors in their presentation of social material; even launching a new literary genre – Det går an literature – that challenged Almqvist’s ideas and occasionally reworked them to reveal his story as naïve or prurient male fantasy (conveniently, Almqvist appears to leave children out of his utopian picture of relationship). It also led to Almqvist himself being branded as a corruptor of youth and morals. The invaluable site nordicwomensliterature.net has a fascinating short piece on the reception of Det går an.

Given Almqvist’s straightforward intentions, it’s hardly surprising that Det går an tethers itself to an equally straightforward plot, one traced by the journey of Sara Videbeck and an infatuated non-commissioned officer, Albert, as they meet and travel together, first by boat and then overland, from Stockholm to Videbeck’s home province of Västergötland, with Almqvist using their developing relationship to explore a range of issues in male/female relations. But Almqvist provides more than a simple polemic; Det går an succeeds as a richly imagined story touching on marriage, the position of women, the stratification of Swedish society (Almqvist cleverly uses the ship’s hierarchical accommodations to comment on Swedish class structure, even inserting a memorable depiction of the typical bourgeois family), and above all the impediments to individual happiness placed by tradition and convention. While foregoing the more daring literary acrobatics present in the one other Almqvist work I’ve read, his exhilarating 1834 "fugue,"  The Queen’s Tiara, in favor of a stricter focus on social concerns, Det går an nonetheless displays Almqvist’s idiosyncratic imagination; rich, realist description (one could duplicate the trip without a map; even the Yngve Frey’s departure hour is drawn from its actual schedule); astute psychological observation; incisive commentary on class and regional manners and differences; and wry humor, including - as in The Queen’s Tiara - the narrator’s occasional interruption of the narrative to comment upon the story or explain himself.

Videbeck, her chaperone aunt having comically missed the boat by seconds (as in The Queen’s Tiara, Almqvist revels in eliciting comic potential), is making her way home from a business trip. She forms a striking silhouette among the middle class passengers, and the slightly cartoonish Albert has a difficult time trying to pigeonhole her into a particular social stratum. Bemused and befuddled by Videbeck’s apparent non-conformity, Albert expresses his confusion by fussing irritably with the boat’s serving girls and displaying an obsession with cigars that might have caused Freud to reassess his famous caveat. But in Albert’s persistent attempts to get to know Sara, he is as deferential and awestruck as he is mystified by her uncompromising sense of herself.

Videbeck is a glazier, having taken over the business from her deceased father but prevented, by rigid guild rules, from continuing in the trade once her sick mother expires and takes along certain widow’s rights. Yet Videbeck is confident in her future, having invented an improved commercial glazier’s putty and also planning to open a shop where she can sell decorative glass boxes and mirrors. She describes her work using the confident, competent tones of a professional, even noting that she herself supervises special jobs as she cannot trust “the boys” – her employees – to be sensitive in manipulating the diamond. Videbeck also asserts her independence by insisting on paying her own way, even when Albert invites her to lunch. Further, she shows no sense of embarrassment about being on familiar terms in public with a young man she barely knows, culminating one night at a hotel where, with only a single room available, she suggests Albert share it with her.

As Albert and Sara’s relationship develops, the former begins to learn the vision Sara has for the ideal relationship, one born from witnessing the experience of her poor mother, driven nearly to suicide by an alcoholic husband.  When Albert suggests that as an unmarried woman, Sara will nonetheless be unprotected and vulnerable, she replies,

We shall see. On the contrary, if I had a husband as unsober and irritable as my mother’s was, I should be defenseless and miserable. No, I tell you, I shall get along just as I am.

To Albert’s credit, he rises to meet Videbeck’s calm assertiveness, emboldened rather than intimidated by her complexity:

Quite unexpectedly and boldly he answered: “I am just wondering whether any person has ever kissed that mouth.”

A quickly flitting smile was her only answer, and she looked away over the Mälar waters. In so doing, there was not the slightest coquettishness or glimmer of mischief discernible in her eye, but, on the other hand, nothing exactly romantic or dreamily divine. It was an intermediate something of an incomprehensible character. Not at all ugly, nor yet profoundly beautiful. It was of the kind concerning which we are wont to express ourselves with a happy countenance: ”Oh, it will do!”

At a subsequent hotel room, the narrator suggests that relations have become warmer than warm (in this delightfully subtle passage, the metaphorical text flies at such a high altitude that it may leave some readers behind), and all that remains is for the couple to find a form for their relationship going forward.

That form is apparently what caused Det går an to explode with such impact. Videbeck makes clear she has no interest in marriage (the narrator, with Almqvist’s trademark tongue-in-cheek drama, refers to it as “humanity’s greatest problem”), proposing instead an arrangement that will guarantee both her and Albert’s independence and the long-term vitality of their affection for one another. With gently ascending courage and respect for Sara Videbeck’s individuality, Albert - and Almqvist - step through that veil into the future. One can only hope to see more of this remarkable writer’s work translated into English.

Revisiting Jules Verne, Part II: The Golden Volcano

Rather disappointed by Jules Verne’s Master of the World (1904), I thought I’d give him another try. After all, Raymond Roussel had been so zealous about Verne as to forbid people in his presence from even mentioning the writer’s name lest it be sullied, and Verne’s clever linguistic games – presumably absent in English translation – had been an influence on the complex linguistic underpinnings of Roussel’s own narratives. I knew too that older translations into English of Verne’s works had a poor reputation, so perhaps the fault lay there. Skeptically, I embarked on his posthumous novel The Golden Volcano (1906) – its first complete English translation, issued in 2008.

The Golden Volcano helped revive for me - a bit - the spell I’d once experienced reading Verne. If not exactly a page-turner, the novel provided a moderately engrossing story of two Montreal cousins who inherit a Klondike gold mining claim and head west to see what it’s worth. Adventures ensue. Some of the trudging style from Master of the World persists here: Verne takes a full third of this 330 page book to describe, again in strictly linear narrative and encompassing granularity, the trip from Montreal to the mining claim outside the Klondike capital of Dawson City. A lot of numbers get bandied about in The Golden Volcano - claims, populations, monetary figures, geographical coordinates - amounting to a formidable display of research skills. I particularly liked a lengthy list of prices for commodities and services in Dawson City, culminating in reference to “an ordinary bath” costing $2.50, but a Russian bath costing $32.00 (that’s the one I would have wanted). But this informational accretion also weighs down the narrative, the quest for inclusiveness sometimes resulting in an awkward, Dan-Brown-style grafting of factual specifics onto the story. It’s reasonable to assume that Verne provides such meticulous detail - most of it employed in exposition leading up to his main story - partly to point out the fragility of human endeavors and the folly of greed, since all of that effort, as he illustrates at the end of the novel’s first part, can be wiped out by a sudden, indifferent act of nature.

But it’s clear too that Verne is attempting to transmit an enduring portrait of the hardship and human hysteria involved in the gold rush. I had expected adventure in Verne, but not such sweeping historical and social interest. With an attention to realistic portrayal that calls to mind Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, Verne vividly depicts the difficulties of the trek of thousands of fortune seekers to the remote gold fields of the Klondike, and the wretched conditions of the miners’ camps, boom towns, and perilous routes. While far more laconic than Dreiser (with whose descriptions a reader could have followed the route without need of map, compass or guide), Verne displays a similar attention to the downtrodden, most memorably in this instance, the women and children collapsing along the mountain passes or freezing to death in the towns and camps, completely unprepared for the ferocious Arctic winter.

The second part of the novel departs significantly from this naturalistic account. The cousins, possessing a crudely sketched map and a legend left them by a dying Frenchman (Franco-centrism seems to appear like a watermark in Verne’s books), head north to the Arctic sea in search of a legendary volcano of gold, and also into territory much more like the adventurous Verne that I’d remembered. One of the pleasures of reading Verne, despite his one-foot-in-front-of-the-other narrative style, lies in the fuzzy zone between realism and fantasy, most evident here in his cartoonish description of the volcano itself. Golden Mount, perched at the edge of the Arctic Ocean at the mouth of the MacKenzie river, rises straight from the tundra, with sides of “at least a 70 degree angle” and a flat plateau on top from which the travelers can gaze into a caldera “75-80 feet in circumference” (in other words, a mere 25 feet across), from which smoke belches and flames flicker. Verne’s understanding of geological processes seems comical; an earthquake strong enough to change the course of a river is felt an entire mile away, and the functioning of the volcano seems more akin to a case of nausea than to a geological process (Verne says as much when a character later compares an eruption to an emetic). But the conception is too appealing to dismiss - or would be to young readers, anyway - a volcano that “would throw out the gold-bearing substances, nuggets, and gold dust along with the lava and slag,” such that one could “simply gather them up.” Nifty. Verne seems to have understood what Hollywood special effects makers, decades later, would know so well: that verisimilitude is entirely dispensable if one can manage to induce a willing suspension of disbelief.

The characters in The Golden Volcano have limited psychological complexity, but the situations in which they find themselves provide enough mystery, suspense and rich historical detail to maintain a modicum of interest, and enough amusing creative touches (“Stop” – what a perfect name for a dog) to elicit a few smiles. If revisiting Verne may have been disappointing overall, I could nonetheless appreciate that I might well have loved these books - The Golden Volcano in particular - if I’d read them at the right age. That age gap intrigues me; after all, other books from childhood - Treasure Island, Captain Blood, Tove Jansson’s Moomin books – have held up well under rereading. Jules Verne’s magic, however, seemed to me relatively diminished. Maybe I’ve become relatively diminished. In any case, I found enough engagement on this second attempt to eventually try one of Verne’s works in the original French. After all, there’s an entire bookshop in Paris devoted to him, and perhaps those French readers, even those lacking Raymond Roussel’s fanaticism, are accessing something I am not.