2666 VI: Between Parentheses, Naturaleza Muerta

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At one point in “The Part of Archimboldi,” the 325-page section with which 2666 concludes, we find ourselves something like four, five, or even six or more levels of narrative deep, as digressions and parentheses accumulate with no clear end. We might find ourselves in danger of losing sight of the whole, embedded as we are in so much detail within detail. 

Hans Reiter, the protagonist of this section, has yet (despite his name) to become the writer Benno von Archimboldi, who gives this part its title, which itself returns us to “The Part of the Critics,” in which the critics Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton travel to Santa Teresa in search of the elusive Archimboldi. Earlier I called this quest a “macguffin”: a gimmick that merely serves to get us to Santa Teresa, site of serial femicides and setting for this book’s central “Part of the Crimes.” But as such, the search for Archimboldi is also the novel’s frame narrative, and here we return to it. The critics may never track down their man (and indeed they are not once even mentioned in “The Part of Archimboldi”), but we do ultimately discover why the novelist may have made his way to Sonora and the US/Mexico borderlands: it turns out that Klaus Haas, imprisoned suspected author of at least some of the Sonoran crimes, is his nephew. As the book ends, Archimboldi is therefore en route to Mexico. 

But before Achimboldi, there is Reiter. And if the broad plot of the novel’s frame involves the search for Archimboldi, we could say that this section tells the story of how Reiter became Archimboldi, which is equally the story of how Reiter became a writer. This narrative therefore takes us from Reiter’s birth, in 1920, in rural Prussia, child of a one-eyed mother and a crippled father who had lost his leg in the First World War, to his nomadic existence as a successful novelist and concerned uncle.

But before he becomes a writer, Reiter is a reader. Bolaño (or whoever our narrator may be… a brief Afterword to the novel, by Ignacio Echevarría, tells us that a note discovered among Bolaño’s papers states that “The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano” [1125/898]) marks Reiter’s birth with a double literary reference, to Elias Canetti “and Borges, too, I think,” who both, supposedly, claimed that “the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited” (797/639). In this case, however, these esteemed authors are wrong: the young Reiter is a creature of the water rather than the forest, and particularly a creature of the watery depths of lakes, rivers, and seas in which he likes to dive, inspired and informed by a stolen book that becomes to him something like a Bible: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Indeed, we are told that his diving and his reading are one and the same activity: “The book [. . .] was stamped on his brain, and while he dove he would slowly page through it” (799–800/641). Reiter learns to “read” the submarine world as he learns how to name things in this world through the pages of a book, which he later copies as he fills a notebook with drawings of seaweed and their Latin nomenclature: Chorda filum, Leathesia difformis, Ascophyllum nodosum . . . . This may be no book or stories (neither Bolaño nor Reiter seem particularly preoccupied by the usual structure of beginnings, middles, and ends), but it literally provides him with a language of description and reference that provides a sense of order to a chaotic and unfamiliar environment.

Reiter never completes his schooling–his headmaster declares that “the boy wasn’t fit for school” (“no estaba capacitado para estudiar”) in 1933, “the year Hitler seized power” (810/649). But he is sent to work at the local country house of an absentee baron, where he is tasked with dusting the books in the house’s immense library, and where he meets and strikes up a strange friendship with the baron’s nephew, who spends much of his time reading in the library. The nephew, Hugo Halder, introduces young Hans to the idea of genre, and the difference between history and literature. Why, asks Reiter, does Halder seem to focus on history books in his reading? “‘It’s because I don’t have a proper grasp of history,’” Halder replies, “‘and I need to brush up.’ / ‘What for?’ asked Hans Reiter. / ‘To fill a void.’ / ‘Voids can’t be filled,’ said Hans Reiter” (820/657). And indeed, as Reiter starts to expand his reading beyond his cherished Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, we see exactly how his reading opens up voids rather than filling them.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, sent as an infantryman to the Eastern Front, Reither finds himself in a village on the banks of the Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine, where in an abandoned farmhouse he finds a sheaf of papers or notebook hidden in the hearth. This turns out to be the work of the farm’s former inhabitant, a Jew named Boris Abramovich Ansky, and Reiter sits himself down in the hidden spot where he found it, “until well into the night, until his joints were stiff and his limbs frozen, reading, reading” (884/708). He also takes the notebook with him as he goes out and about, and as he is sent to the Crimea even as the Russians steadily advance West: sheltering from their artillery and airforce, he “pass[es] the time reading Ansky’s notebook and sleeping and watching things grow or burn around him” (925/740). He reads it from the moment he wakes up, “opening it at random” (921/737). He “ceaselessly read[s] and reread[s] Ansky’s notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky” (928/742). He even dreams about the thing, with a vision in which now reading and diving no longer combine so neatly as in his youth, or perhaps they combine all too well as the notebook is imagined “reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever, half of [it] stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves” (929/743). The book has become his obsession, and he envisages it dissolving into his fluid surroundings, but not without leaving a physical residue on his body. 

Reiter’s account of what he constitutes then a third narrative level, which continues off and on for fifty pages or so, when Reiter finally returns to the village and, before he then abandons its farmhouse for good, returns Anksy’s “notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. Let someone else find it now, he thought” (929/744). He passes the book on to future readers, just as the novel itself reproduces its content for us, who become thereby readers by proxy. Indeed, we read much more of what Reiter himself reads than we ever read of what he writes, in that even by the end of Bolaño’s novel we have very little sense of the content of Archimboldi’s own work. Any sense of what counts as literature (and literary value) comes either from Reiter/Archimboldi’s discussion of the topic, or from what we understand to have moved him first to write.

Ansky’s narrative in some ways mirrors Reiter’s own story: it is a tale of nomadism and displacement occasioned by the violence that sweeps across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. The difference is that, where Reiter fights with the German Wehrmacht, Ansky signs up at a young age (in fact, long before World War Two) with the Russian Red Army.

It is not long, however, before Ansky’s story is interrupted (much, again, like it itself interrupts Reiter’s). After a tour of duty in Siberia and the Arctic, he travels to Moscow where he meets a writer named Efraim Ivanov, whose tale now briefly takes over before being told roughly in parallel with Ansky’s own. We are now therefore at a fourth embedded narrative level. Ivanov’s story concerns the fate of a writer in the nascent Soviet Union, but perhaps more generally the problematic relationship between writing and politics, even (or perhaps especially) a politics of the Utopian Left. For Ivanov had long been a true believer–a “party member,” we are told, “since 1902” (888/710), even before, one must assume, the 1903 split that led to the division between Menshevik and Bolshevik. Before the 1917 Revolution he was still no more than a “promising writer” (888/711), fruitlessly in search of new literary forms to match the political experiments that were on the horizon. After the Revolution, he turns to science fiction as a genre suitable to the Communist sense of futurity. 

At this point, then, we are given a fairly detailed account both of the short story with which Ivanov makes his name, and of a subsequent novel whose reception turns out to be much more mixed. With the extended description of both texts, then, we are now entrenched in a fifth nested narrative layer. Russian dolls indeed! Moreover, the short story, entitled “The Train through the Urals,” itself revolves around a similar nested structure. It tells the tale of a boy in 1940 (i.e. some twenty years in the future at the time that the story is written), who travels to meet his grandfather, a scientist and former Red Army soldier, whom he asks “tell stories about the revolution and the war against the Whites and the foreign intervention” (890/711). The grandfather’s stories, therefore, constitute a sixth and (for now at least) final narrative level: they are stories within a story (written by Ivanov) within a story (told by Ivanov) that is in a story (written by Ansky) within a story (Reiter’s) that itself is an element of the grand story that is Bolaño’s 2666. 

We might here add, however, that 2666 itself could be described as the proliferating elaboration of a hint provided in another of Bolaño’s novels, Amulet, which is the only place in his fiction where the date 2666 is otherwise mentioned (it never once crops up in 2666 itself). And Amulet in turn expands upon a chapter (chapter four) from Part II of The Savage Detectives, as one of a series of interviews that interrupt that progression of what is arguably that book’s main plot, which involves the search for forgotten visceral realist poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Or alternatively, the fourth chapter of The Savage Detectivesmight also be seen as a development of a story first found (at least in literary/written form) in a very short section of Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco.

In other words, the grandfather’s stories of the Russian Revolution are arguably nine or even ten levels deep–or, if you prefer, within nine or ten sets of parentheses–within an over-arching narrative that concerns either the search for a poetic ur-text in the mid 1970s or the repression of Mexico’s student movement (and by extension, of all Latin America’s radical youth movements) in the late 1960s. Which is apt in so far as these same stories, asked of a grandfather by his grandson, similarly involve a return to a mythic past (which is actually the then present projected into a future that is now past), as well as the recovery of how political radicalism may be seen in years to come.

All of which shows how 2666, and Bolaño’s work as a whole, concatenates and expands, not via a process of extension but through intensification. After all, the story that this massive novel tells from beginning to end lasts less than twenty years: from November 1980, the first date to be mentioned on its first page, to some time in or shortly after 2001 (a date that occurs on page 1111), which must be when Archimboldi decides to leave for Mexico. The book expands not by linearly adding to the end, or by going back to begin ever earlier, but from the middle, via digressions that follow and mirror (and complicate) its main themes, in a search for a secret (Santa Teresa and the killings that take place there as holding “the secret of the world” [439/348]) that we will later see has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Finally, it in Ansky’s notebook, and so in this digressive expansion in medias res, this opening up or escape through and beyond the middle of the work, that Reiter comes across Arcimboldi, who we are told was an Italian artist (and a real one at that), even though the first mention of his name immediately leads to a digression about Courbet, which then is followed by a joke as told to Ansky by Ivanov (and as told to Ivanov by Soviet anthropologists at a party) about a misencounter between (French) anthropologists and natives in Borneo. . . And Ansky (or perhaps Reiter’s summary of Ansky’s account) is surprisingly brief when he returns to Arcimboldi (or Arcimboldo, as he’s also here called, and is more generally known). We learn, however, that “When he was near despair, Ansky returned to Arcimboldo.” Moreover, that “the Milanese painter’s technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of semblance. [El fin de las aparencias] [. . .] Everything in everything [Todo dentro de todo], writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance” (917–18/734). The joy or happiness that Arcimboldi provokes has something to do with what here is translated as a refusal or limit to appearance, and with a strange capaciousness (everything in or, perhaps better, within everything) that might remind us of Bolaño’s own technique, as described here hitherto. Everything is (already) in everything, so no need to seek it elsewhere (isn’t this Belano and Lima’s mistake in The Savage Detectives?); everything is immediately at hand, if you know how to look.

What Ansky (or Reiter, or Bolaño) doesn’t tell us is the substance or content of Arcimboldo’s paintings. They are in fact at first sight all about appearance, about its ephemerality or fleetingness. He is known for still lifes, what in Spanish are known as “naturaleza muerta”–that is, paintings of flowers, vegetables, meat, and the like–whose elements are (wholly unnaturally) arranged to produce the effect, from a distance at least, of portraiture. Alternatively we might say that he painted portraits whose elements turn out, on closer inspection, to be merely disconnected items that bear only a synecdochic relationship to the whole that they purport to represent. Thus his portrait of a librarian comprises what turns out to be a stack of books. His portrait “The Admiral” is composed of fish and other marine animals and shells. The same goes for his more abstract pictures, such as “Summer” or “The Sense of Smell,” which turn out, upon closer inspection, to be precarious conjunctions of (respectively) elements associated with the season, or items that are fragrant or pungent in one way or another.

Again, is this not all about appearance? Or does it rather take us to the limit (the endpoint) of appearance, by showing us the forced proximities upon which resemblance rests? Is not all resemblance or representation a form of trompe-l’œil, a trick played on the eye?

And it is of course Arcimboldo, plucked from Ansky’s journal, who gives Reiter his pen name, when he finally turns to writing. But it may be that Bolaño, too, has also learned the “single lesson, but one of vital importance” that Arcimboldo teaches, a lesson that has something to do with distance and scale. The closer we get to Bolaño’s text (perhaps any text?), the more its claims to depict a broader figure dissolve, but also the more other universes and worlds open up. From the illusion of the portrait we move to stranger, vegetal worlds of what is “still life,” but not necessarily life as we know it.

The Savage Detectives VI: Reading with AI

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As an experiment (and in preparation for an upcoming discussion of reading with AI, in the context of reading The Savage Detectives), I thought I would ask ChatGPT a few questions about the book, and see what it came up with. You can find the transcript of the resulting chat here: https://chatgpt.com/share/69c7928a-1ac0-832b-a01f-d991cb125134. Note that, because I am on the free tier of ChatGPT usage (i.e. I do not pay for it), I was only able to ask it ten questions. I may or may not continue the experiment later.

In sum, in some ways I was quite impressed with ChatGPT’s responses. On the whole, in general terms, it came up with some quite plausible readings… though I would emphasize that these are readings, plural, in that when pushed it would change its tune, albeit without fully acknowledging its shifts in interpretation. Moreover, the more detail I asked of it, the more it seemed likely to make mistakes, or to hallucinate. Again, while the overall sense it made of the book was often reasonable, and sometimes even revelatory, it still made several basic errors, and continued to make errors even when I tried to correct it. To put this another way (and drawing on Dan McQuillan’s description of AI as a “bullshit generator”; see also Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit): it came up with some quite high-quality bullshit that, as is generally the case with bullshit, had more than a kernel of plausibility or truth, but when pressed it tended to contradict itself or even to start to fall apart altogether.

Of course, in that (as we know) ChatGPT cannot “read” a text in anything like the conventional sense of reading, it draws its interpretation from what others have already said. So it was perhaps equally worrying that when, at the end of the chat, I asked it for its sources, its response was somewhat vague and evasive, even though at the same time it did provide some reasonable avenues for further study. But the worry is that, on taking up elements of ChatGPT’s proposed interpretation of Bolaño’s novel, I would be inadvertently plagiarizing the work of some other scholar, whose identity the AI bot could not help me to locate. At the end of the day, after all, LLM AI applications constitute the large-scale capture of intellectual, cognitive, and linguistic labor, whose origin they (necessarily) obfuscate.

It is possible that some of the less helpful or more worrisome aspects of the interaction with ChatGPT could be mitigated by better attention to the prompts I was giving it. For instance, if I continue this experiment in the future, I am tempted to ask it both for specific references to the text to support its claims, and for references to secondary criticism throughout the process. This might encourage a more grounded (and more transparent) interpretative process. Alternatively, rather than asking it directly about the text, one might begin at least with a review of the secondary literature on which it is drawing. That might keep it (and me, as a reader of ChatGPT’s “reading”) more honest.

Briefly to go through the questions I asked it…

First, I asked simply for it to provide me with the novel’s plot. It did a pretty good job of this, albeit that it had more to say about the book’s narrative structure than about the plot per se. The plot, after all, is not told linearly, and yet it kept to the order of the narration (the “discours” in Genette’s terms), rather than helping to reconstruct the story’s “histoire.” Having done this, it went further (beyond, indeed, what it had been asked) to advance some proposal’s as to the novel’s overall meaning. But in general, just about everything it said in response to this question was pretty much reasonable and defensible, and to some extent what I would even call insightful: the notion, for instance, that in the broadest terms the book’s plot involves a failed or futile search for origins, followed by “dispersal and disappearance.” Similarly, the summary of the novel’s themes as “literary ambition,” “friendship and exile,” and “the mythology of the avant-garde” makes sense, even if it is not necessarily the whole story–but then what summary is?

I did, however, feel it a little odd that this plot summary omitted the role of Amadeo Salvatierra, who is a recurrent voice in Part II of the novel, and who is important for the plot in that it is he who provides Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano with the information about Cesárea Tinajero that motivates and enables the road trip to Sonora around which the whole book revolves. So second, then, I asked ChatGPT about him…

In response, the chat implicitly recognized its error in omitting Salvatierra by saying that “he plays a crucial symbolic and structural role in The Savage Detectives” and that “he is actually the hinge between myth and history in the novel.” I was somewhat surprised, however, that ChatGPT should in fact spend more time on Salvatierra’s thematic or conceptual significance than on his function in the story. Indeed, the more that the chat edged towards concrete description, the more likely that it flirted with outright error. Hence, although its broad claims continued to be defensible and even perhaps enlightening (if not altogether unarguable), when for instance it states that “Amadeo possesses (or remembers) the only surviving work by Tinajero,” this is at best misleading: Amadeo very definitely possesses the surviving copy of the journal in which Tinajero’s poem is published. This is not simply a matter of memory: he shows it to Lima and Belano, so they can read it for themselves. More fundamentally, the chat is simply wrong with basic details when it claims that “Amadeo is an aging poet whom García Madero, Belano, and Lima visit early in the novel.” García Madero does not accompany Belano and Lima in this visit. And to say that it takes place “early in the novel” is again misleading: the account of the visit is threaded through Part II (and does not come to an end until page 588), although to be fair we can reasonably assume that it takes place at some point during the time period of Part I, the final weeks of 1975 as narrated by García Madero… but he never mentions the visit, presumably because he is most likely unaware of it.

I then asked for more information about the fates of the novel’s key characters.

ChatGPT’s response about García Madero was mostly to the point, albeit again somewhat misleading when it said that “García Madero is almost never mentioned” in Part II. In fact, he is mentioned precisely once… and it is surely important to describe that sole mention, not least because it comes when the so-called expert on visceral realism denies that anyone with that name had ever belonged to the movement.

What it had to say about Lupe was also OK, and even insightful. Again, it is notable (and surely somewhat surprising) how quick ChatGPT jumps to interpretation, rather than description. Perhaps this is because it is drawing above all on interpretations in the secondary criticism? But its conclusion about her fate is fair enough, albeit that this is surely a fate shared with (rather than opposed to that of) García Madero: “Not just absence from literary history, but from the kinds of stories that get told at all.” Eager to please, ChatGPT also offered to expand this discussion via a “compar[ison] to women in other Bolaño novels (like 2666), where this question of disappearance becomes even more central and more disturbing.” This in fact sounds like an interesting direction for further enquiry (and it’s perhaps intriguing that ChatGPT should offer to take me down that route), but here I was sticking with The Savage Detectives…

It was upon being asked about what ultimately happened to Lima and Belano that ChatGPT really started falling apart. Its top-level (i.e. “bullshit”) analysis remained for the most part quite impressive. For instance, the notion that these two characters become transformed into myth, and that there’s an irony in the failure of their mission to track down (what we find out is) the all too material and corporeal Cesárea in Part III, which may indeed lead to the conclusion that “to pursue literature absolutely may mean vanishing from it.” This was one of the ideas that ChatGPT gave me that I quite liked. And yet again, there was the sense that the chat was weak on description and detail. For example, when it says that “At one point, [Belano] travels to Africa and is possibly present during a conflict,” this is at best wishy-washy, almost as though it didn’t want to be pressed on what exactly happened. (In fact, after all, it’s not just “at one point” that Belano is in Africa, but this is where he is last seen. And more than being “possibly present during a conflict,” he is discovered in the thick of the Liberian Civil War.) If we were to anthropomorphize the machine (and it’s hard not to), we might say that this is the answer of a student who has only a hazy recollection of the text and wants to hedge their bets with their answers.

And indeed, when I pressed it further for answers, ChatGPT really started to struggle. Projecting its own confusion onto the text, for instance, the chat said that Belano “travels to Africa (often read as Liberia or Angola, though the novel is oblique).” In fact, however, there is nothing oblique about it: we are told quite clearly that he is in both Angola (Luanda, to be precise) and Liberia (a short distance from Monrovia). With Lima, things got still worse, and ChatGPT started to make multiple errors, even when I tried to zero in on them. 

It’s not necessarily worth detailing these errors, though it’s interesting, first, that the app’s tactic when pointed out its mistakes is to concede without fully giving ground. After I observed that it was wrong to a greater or lesser extent about the fates of both characters, it responded: “You’re right to push back—both of those ‘last sightings’ are more precise (and more interesting) than my previous answer suggested. Let me correct and sharpen things.” Yet it is not simply “more precise” to note that Lima is last seen not in Europe (as the chat had claimed) but in Mexico: it is right, where the chat was wrong. Second, moreover, as it made mistakes about the details it also started to make more obvious errors of general interpretation. For instance, in that Lima is located in Mexico City by our visceral realist expert at the end of Part II, it is simply not the case that “he simply fades out of the record altogether, more completely than anyone else in the novel.” There are plenty of other characters (most obviously perhaps, García Madero) who are more fully erased from the record… as indeed ChatGPT had already observed (when it said that, by contrast with Lima and Belano, he “undergoes a kind of negative initiation–into obscurity rather than legend”). The machine is by now contradicting itself, though unsurprisingly enough without acknowledging the fact.

After all, the chat’s tone remains consistent: it retains its aura of confident authority, so much more so that in reading it, one is tempted to doubt oneself… If I had not finished the novel only this week, I might easily have been more prepared to go along with its account, and to question my own memory rather than catching the app’s hallucinations.

For my next question (and by this time I was running out of my allocation), I returned to conceptual issues more than concrete details, in fact feeding it questions about length and endings that I had put to my students in class. Again I feel that its answers were illuminating even (if we can say this of a machine) “thoughtful.” These could definitely have been useful contributions to the discussion we had in class… I had a twinge of regret that perhaps I had missed a trick or two. Put it this way: if ChatGPT had been a student or (as a more likely scenario… and the worry of educators today) if a student had read out ChatGPT’s responses and presented them as their own, they would have been among the more insightful and valuable voices in class. I even like some of its turns of phrase. For instance, I like the notion that “If The Savage Detectives were shorter, it would be a story. If it were longer, it would be an archive.” This formulation is at the same time provocative and neat. Likewise with the notion that what we have here is “a myth of literature built out of fragments, ending exactly where it has to–at the moment when the search reveals that there was almost nothing to find.” In class, I said something similar, or at least similar enough–I put things differently, in that my suggestion was that at the end García Madero at least finds “nothing” in the more substantive sense that he touches and perhaps even falls (or jumps) into the void that lies beyond the “window” of representation. But still, there are some sentences and phrases in ChatGPT’s interpretation that I perhaps wish I had said or considered en route to my own conclusion, or which could usefully have been put to the students as alternative considerations. Could ChatGPT become a valued interlocutor in the classroom?

Yet by this point, seeing the chat’s weakness on points of concrete detail, to be honest I had started to lose faith or trust in ChatGPT altogether. Worse, this sense of distrust had become generalized: I no longer felt confident about either its reading or (to be even more honest) my own. After all, if my reading overlapped to some extent with that of a machine that had just shown some fundamental ignorance of basic issues of plot, then did that not cast shadow on my own interpretation, too?

So the last of my permitted questions was about its sources. I figured I would be better off looking to where ChatGPT was getting its “thoughts” than continuing to engage with the chat itself. Here, however, the app was both honest and unhelpful: “What I’ve given you is a synthesis drawn from general knowledge of The Savage Detectives, familiarity with Roberto Bolaño’s work, and the broad critical conversation around it.” In other words, the AI is drawing on a cloud of more or less established readings, without being able to pin down or lead me directly to who first established those readings, or what debates they had led to. It had, as it were, anonymized the critical conversation, obscuring the identities of those on whose intellectual labor it relies. To be fair, it did then provide some bibliographic references, and ended also with a note of caution that there are indeed “other strong readings that [it] ha[d]n’t foregrounded”… or even, if it were more truthful, mentioned at all. Its appropriation of intellectual labor, in other words, is selective and unequal. It’s notable, for instance, that it acknowledges that among the readings it had ignored were those inspired either by queer theory or by feminism. 

And perhaps it would have been helpful if at the very start it had stated upfront that what it was “giv[ing me] is not the interpretation, but a coherent, recognizable strand within Bolaño criticism.” Though of course it had done all it could to make this “recognizable strand” appear to be all its own work, appealing to our technological fetishism that attributes to the machine the qualities of agency and intellect that more properly belong to those who feed it… which is, in the end, you and me.

The Savage Detectives V: Was it Worth It?

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And so, after some 450 pages, with Part III of The Savage Detectives we are back with García Madero, who along with Belano, Lima, and Belano is barreling along the highway in Quim Font’s borrowed Chevy Impala, heading north to Sonora, in search (we now know) of the forgotten avant-garde poet and original visceral realist, Cesárea Tinajero. An instant has passed, with the clock ticking over from 1975 to 1976. It turns out that the whole of Part II took place not only over the twenty years of Belano and Lima’s itinerant wanderings, nor even only over the eight to ten hours of late night drunken conversation with Amadeo Salvatierra, but in the seconds that separate the old year from the new.

If anything, the end of Part I and the beginning of Part III overlap, as García Madero explains in the his entry for January 1: “Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday, I really wrote today.” Time, indeed, seems to have gotten out of joint (almost as though we were back also in Auxilio Lacouture’s time-travelling bathroom reverie): “What I write today I’m really writing tomorrow, which more few will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day” (591). By declaring this lapse of time to be insignificant or invisible, it is as though García Madero were unconsciously taking his revenge on his own invisibilization during the entirety of Part II.

For, after several hundred “interviews” in that “invisible day,” in conversation with over fifty informants, taking us from Mexico City to Paris, Austria, Israel, Africa, we are firmly back with García Madero as narrator, in a series of diary-style entries. Before long, we perhaps feel as claustrophobically ensconced with him, his thoughts, and his limited point of view, as if we were squished in the back seat of the car between him and Lupe.

Have we missed him? If we have, I suspect we very soon tire of him again, as he returns to the game (though no doubt he himself doesn’t see it as a game) with which he started the novel (way back on page four), of testing people on their knowledge of obscure rhetorical and poetic terms: “what is free verse? [. . .] a testrastich? [. . .] a sestina? [. . .] a hempiepes [. . .] a mimiambic [. . .] a zéjel” (591, 592). “Oh, Jesus,” says Lima (591). If this is García’s idea of fun, perhaps we’d rather he were banished from Part III, just as he was from Part II.

The others, however, get their own back (not that García Madero necessarily notices) by asking him in turn about his knowledge of street slang. Lupe starts turning the tables by asking “All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?” Belano instantly replies that it’s “a toke of weed,” but García Madero seems to be clueless. Similarly when he is asked for the definitions of “lurias” (“crazy”) “jincho” (“Indian”), “la grandiosa” (“jail”), and so on (597). We have a feeling that such terms are going to be of more use to this quartet than the arcane terminology of aesthetics that García Maduro has to offer them. 

For they are not only hunting a poet but also on the run from Alberto, Lupe’s enraged ex-pimp, and whatever reinforcement he has managed to bring with him. Phoning the Fonts back in Mexico City, they discover that, though they thought they had shaken him on the outskirts of the capital, he had gone back to Quim and got from him the name of their destination. The threat of violence hovers around their endeavours. Belano buys a knife. We may be in the last act rather than the first, but still the weapon is much like Chekhov’s famous gun: we know it will be wielded in anger sometime in the few pages that still lay ahead of us.

And so, behold, the book’s dénouement is indeed tragic–perhaps better, a tragicomedy of errors. In a dramatic confrontation on a dusty desert road, a confrontation ensues as Alberto and his policeman sidekick catch up with them now that Lima, Belano, et. al. have finally located the mythical (but ultimately, almost monstrously physical–visceral, if you like) Cesárea Tinajero. 

In a confused “blur” seen from García Madero’s limited perspective forever in the back seat (the only thing Tinajero ever says to him is “don’t move”), Lima and Belano end up killing both their aggressors and also Tinajero herself (641–42). García Madero overhears Belano telling Lima “that we’d fucked up, that we’d found Cesárea only to bring her death” (643). The two friends split from García Madero and Lupe, set to bury the bodies and head back down south. Perhaps it’s not now so far-fetched to think that their constant traveling, as documented in the novel’s Part II, is at least initially because they are on the run from the law–or, more likely still, from Arturo’s criminal associates if they ever got wind of why their buddy never returned from Sonora.

In the meantime: was it worth it? We can ask this question both of the book and also of the quest that has structured it. Lima and Belano get to meet and talk to Tinajero, but (seeing everything as we do from García Madero’s perspective), we have no idea what they may have said. Lupe, for now, has escaped her pursuers.

And García Madero’s final diary entries go from a list of placenames that presumably indicate ongoing peregrinations through remote towns in the desert north (“El Cuatro, Trincheras, La Ciénaga” [646]) to picture puzzles that remind us both of Tinajero’s sole published poem (“Sión”) and also the joke representations of “Mexicans” from above with which he had earlier passed the time with his companions. Either way, his earlier facility with language (or rather, with the meta-language of aesthetic terminology, as well as with the narcissistic self-reflection of the diary form) is replaced first by mere names, and second by line-drawn riddles.

“What’s outside the window?” are the last words of The Savage Dectectives (648). They are followed by a broken rectangle, or a rectangle of broken lines: a dissolving frame perhaps, an illusory or precarious dividing line between inside and outside, between the thing and what holds the thing in place. What’s outside the book? Well, at last this long one is at an end, so maybe we’ll find out.

2666 V: Narrative Necrosis

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Drawing on narrative theory (Genette, Barthes, Todorov, Culler, etc.) Bede Scott argues that the fourth part of 2666, “The Part of the Crimes,” induces what he calls “‘narrative necrosis,’ whereby the tissue of the narrative itself undergoes a process of decomposition” such that “this necrosis fatally compromises the narrativity of Part Four, if not the entire novel, and thus serves as a discursive correlative for the decomposing bodies it describes” (“Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Serial Murder and Narrative Necrosis” 309, 316). Bolaño’s repetitive, relentless catalogue of the discovery of murder victims in and around the city of Santa Teresa, whose cases are closed almost as soon as they are opened, puts an end to any attempt to craft a story out of the events it registers.

Part Four takes us from 1993 to 1997, and describes 110 murders (strictly, 109 murders and one suicide), of which only 10% are resolved. Moreover, as the text breaks off, there is no end in sight. We are told that the “The last case of 1997” involves a body found “by the dirt road that runs along the border and then forks and vanishes when it reaches the first mountains and steep passes. The victim, according to the medical examiners, had been dead for a long time. She was about eighteen, five foot two and a half or three. [. . .] Both this case and the previous case were closed after three days of generally halfhearted investigations” (632, 633). And yet life continues: The Christmas holidays in Santa Teresa were celebrated in the usual fashion” (633). As Scott puts it, by the time we reach this point, we may have “the (perfectly justified) impression” that between this case and the first documented one, back in 1993:

there has been no transformation whatsoever in the intervening four years and 280 pages. At the end of the section, the various detective figures—who scarcely require individuating—are either dead or no closer to solving the crimes than they were at the beginning. The women themselves are still being raped and murdered with the same metronomic regularity. [. . .] And this is also why we have an ending that merely replicates the beginning—because the dialectic of resemblance and difference that makes a genuine conclusion possible has been destroyed; because this is a narrative in which closure uncloses and nothing comes to anything; and because both the beginning and the end of Part Four are ultimately arbitrary, neither inaugurating nor concluding the “narrative” they ostensibly frame. (315)

It is no surprise therefore that the Part simply stops, rather abruptly. Life goes on in Santa Teresa, but so does the series of murders and deaths. We should not expect any satisfactory resolution. In so far as the causes of the femicide are social (and even this is not exactly a case that is conclusively made), Mexico remains the same: all the conditions that enable and give rise to the crimes (machismo, migration, maquiladoras, drug traffic) are still in place. Resolution was always destined to elude the police and other state authorities–even granted that they put their full effort into investigating the crimes, which to be fair they sometimes do. The frustrated investigation into the case of Kelly Rivera Parker (whose body in fact never turns up), instigated and funded by her childhood friend, who is now a congresswoman, shows that not even political clout or money can make much headway in providing clarity or identifying those who are responsible. We learn more about Rivera Parker’s secret life (organizing orgies at isolated ranches owned by cartel kingpins), but information in itself is no solution. Indeed, we hardly lack for information over the course of what are almost 300 pages in which we are simply deluged with it. What we lack are the tools to determine what is significant or not. This, of course, has been a problem to which the book has been pointing since page one.

So the crimes continue into an indeterminable future. What then can put an end to this catalogue if not the author’s own death? Here, the knowledge that 2666 is a posthumous book (a fact to which a brief prelude, a “Note from the Author’s Heirs,” has alerted us to at the outset) puts the body of the author at the center of this (non)narrative. Alongside the women’s bodies that the text describes, as well as the body of the text (as Scott argues), there is the ailing body of Roberto Bolaño, writing in the “realiz[ation] that death might be near.” No doubt we have this sense of authorial mortality in reading any posthumously published text, but perhaps especially so here. The prefatory note establishes that the novel has not been published exactly as Bolaño himself intended (above all, in that it has been published as a single volume, rather than five), but does not tell us much more about the state of (in)completion in which the author might have left the manuscript. Perhaps he pretty much wrapped everything up in time. Perhaps there were further editorial interventions by his family or his publisher. Still, it is only death (the very literal death of the author) that puts an end to a catalogue of deaths that otherwise knows no end. 

The Savage Detectives IV: A Chill Descends from the North Pole

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Part Two of Bolaño’s novel ranges far and wide, both temporally and geographically. As its subtitle indicates, it covers the period from 1976 to 1996. And it takes us from Mexico to Europe (France, Spain, Austria…), the Middle East, and then Africa (Angola, Rwanda, Liberia).

Yet in another sense, all this is encompassed in a single night in a Mexico City apartment, sometime presumably in November or December, 1975, in which Amadeo Salvatierra talks to the “boys,” Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, about the forgotten poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Part Two opens with Salvatierra’s account (apparently recorded in January 1976): “My dear boys, I said to them, I’m so glad to see you, come right in, make yourselves at home” (143). We also periodically but consistently return to their conversation as Part Two continues, breaking what is otherwise the chronological order of events and interviews. And it ends back in Salvatierra’s apartment, with the dawn breaking and the streets outside the windows beginning to fill up with people, with one of the boys (we do not know which) leafing through the magazine containing Tinajero’s sole published poem, and the other asleep or half-asleep on the sofa but still somehow responding to Amadeo’s query as to why they want to find Tinajero now: “we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. [. . .] we’re going to find Cesárea Tinajero and we’re going to find the Complete Works of Cesárea Tinajero” (587–88). This, however, elicits a “shiver” from Salvatierra, and the sense, as one of the boys puts it, that “the North Pole had descended on Mexico City” (588). Part Two ends with a chill, perhaps a blast of cold air sweeping over the boys’ youthful ambitions. Or are those ambitions themselves the source of the chill that seeps into Salvatierra’s apartment? Or is it that the aged Salvatierra, looking around the wreckage not only of one drunken night but also of a lifetime (“my books, my photographs, the stains on the ceiling”) knows that the path Lima and Belano are taking will lead them only to failure and disillusion?

The book is not yet over (we still have Part Three to come), but Lima and Belano’s stories are now done by the time Part Three ends. Their fates, and that of the other visceral realist group, are briefly summarized by one Ernesto García Grajales, who claims to be “the foremost scholar in the field, the definitive authority” but also “the only person who cares” (584). Not that García Grajales seems to care all that much: all this is merely fodder for a “little book” that he hopes “will do well” (585). And so he goes down the list: “María Font lives in Mexico City. [. . .] Shte writes, but she doesn’t publish. Ernesto San Epifanio died. [. . .] Ulises Lima still lives in Mexico City. [. . .] About Arturo Belano I know nothing” (594–85). And of course, of our voluble narrator from Part One of the novel: “García Madero? No the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never belonged to the group. Of course I’m sure. Man, if I tell you so as the reigning expert on the subject, it’s because that’s the way it is” (585). So much for expertise, of course. (We know otherwise, and better.) But also so much for García Madero, so full of hope and expectation when we last caught sight of him, over 400 pages ago, but who has been completely lost to memory, either official or unofficial, almost as though he had never existed.

What mark does our passage through this world leave? What impact do we have on those around us, or even on fate or destiny? What remains of us when our story comes to an end? Who will tell our story when we are gone? These, I think, are some of the questions Bolaño asks us, and his answers may sometimes leave us chilled.

2666 IV: A Snowball in the Sun

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All roads lead to Santa Teresa: is that the “fate” of the “Part of Fate,” which inexorably leads us ever closer to “the killings in Sonora” first glimpsed by the critic Morini in an article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. That article was written, we were told, “by an Italian reporter who had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas.” On reading this, it had 

struck [Morini] as odd that she had gone to Chiapas, which is at the southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in Sonora, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, was in the north, the northwest, on the border with the United States. [. . .] He imagined her in the Mexican capital. Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. (64/43)

Something similar happens to Oscar Fate, the protagonist of this, the third part of Bolaño’s novel. He, too, finds himself waylaid (in fact, repeatedly so) and inexorably drawn towards the US/Mexico borderlands, and the terrible crimes that seem to have impregnated the entire landscape there. He, too, arrives in Mexico for another purpose but ends up equally fascinated and horrified by these killings that hide (we are told, almost at the end of this section) “the secret of the world” (439/348). Perhaps, as the novel proceeds, we will come to have a better idea of the nature of this secret.

In the meantime, we continue to fumble our way onwards. Fate is a New York journalist, who writes for a magazine called Black Dawn, based in Harlem. His normal beat is “political and social issues” (354/279)–we are told that the first story he had published in the magazine was the last Communist left in Brooklyn, a story which resonates with a dream that Amalfitano has had about the “last Communist philosopher” (290/227). This sense that it is the end of the line for a politics of liberation, or at least that the forms in which such a politics took in the twentieth century are now almost unimaginable, resonates with the vision with which Bolaño’s Amulet ends. Politics seems to be in abeyance. No wonder that the Italian journalist turned from covering the Zapatistas. Nor is it too surprising that Fate is shifted abruptly to covering sport, and sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match between a promising heavyweight from Harlem and a Mexican counterpart.

Once in Mexico, however, various sources tell Fate about the murdered women. Tired of pretending to be a sports reporter–and in any case, the fight turns out to be a dismal washout–Fate contacts his editor back home to pitch him the story: “This is more important,” he tells him. “The fight is just an anecdote. What I’m proposing is so much more. [. . .] A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world [. . .] a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake” (373/294–95; translation modified). Yet the editor turns the proposal down, on the basis that this is a story about Mexicans rather than the Black men that are the magazine’s principal preoccupation. If there are no “brothers” involved, the editor is not interested.

Fate describes the boxing match as an “anecdote.” The irony is that 2666 itself often feels like a book of anecdotes, with its countless stories within stories. Here, for instance, we are reintroduced to Rosa Amalfitano, Oscar’s daughter, who meets Fate at a party and who subsequently tells him tales she herself has been told by a friend who was also at that same party, or recounts conversations between her father and her lover about a “magic disk” that, thanks to the brain’s habit of persistence of vision, can make two unrelated images appear to overlap. All these stories no doubt have some bearing on the novel’s broader theme (it is hardly a coincidence that the example given of a magic disk involves a “little old drunk [. . .] laughing because we think he’s in prison, [. . .] laughing at our credulity” [423/335]), but still they are surely anecdotal in nature, and they sometimes feel as though they were taking up time and space, postponing “the part of the crimes” that is yet to come.

At the end of this part, however, even though Oscar Fate has failed to convince his editor that he should be writing about more than a boxing match, he accompanies another (Mexican) reporter, who is writing about the killings, as she visits Santa Teresa’s jail to meet a putative author of the crimes, imprisoned awaiting trial. The suspect turns out to be a German-speaking “giant”–shades, in short, of the mysterious literary author, Archimboldi, of the “part of the critics”–who sits down in front of the journalist and tells her: “Ask whatever you want.” But as the very last words of this section recounts, “she couldn’t think what to ask” (440/349). All that suspense, but when we finally think we may be at the very heart of this Mexican darkness, words fail us.

Not that words fail Bolaño: by this point we have read plenty of them, and we are still not even halfway through the novel. (In fact, almost two thirds of it remains.) Elsewhere, when Fate first learns of the killings, he is told that “Every so often the numbers go up and it’s news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work” (362/285–86). Presumably therefore the question is how to produce words (sentences, pages, books) that will not simply melt once the sun comes out, words that will stick in the mind and perhaps even change something somehow. Does a longer book have more weight and heft? Or is it no more than a larger snowball, that will merely leave a bigger mess once it melts? And once it does, it flows back into what the novel elsewhere, in a critique of metaphor, calls a “sea of appearances” (322–23/254; translation modified). Is this every novel’s fate?

The Savage Detectives III: A Joke Covering Up Something More Serious

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A little over half-way through The Savage Detectives (on page 369 of 648), it feels as though things may be starting to come together. According to Luis Sebastián Rosado, it is Luscious Skin who at last outlines the structure of this “unlikely story”: “Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. [. . .] they’d gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero” (369). This, of course, is the journey with which part I of the novel concludes. At last we understand why Lima and Belano were heading out of town. And our knowledge (or our knowledge of Lima and Belano’s knowledge) of Tinajero is bit by bit being filled in as we read Amadeo Salvatierra’s testimony (which opens most if not every chapter in part II) about his drunken night with the boys, digging into the archive of the Mexican poetic avant-garde. We may be beginning to see why Lima and Belano should be drawn to track down Tinajero. But it seems as though something must have gone wrong somewhere in the Sonora desert.

As Luscious Skin puts it, “After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately.” This, too, we have seen, as reported through the various interviews or testimonies that comprise part II, and which relate the traces of the two friends as they pass through variously Paris and Barcelona, campsites and caves in rural Catalonia (which may turn out to be “the last time [they] see each other” [279]), then in Lima’s case Israel and Vienna before he is arrested and then returns to Mexico. In Luscious Skin’s account, Lima comes back home because he thinks the coast is finally clear: “Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again.” Hence it is that Lima takes a solidarity trip with other Mexican writers to revolutionary Nicaragua, only to disappear almost as soon as he gets there.

But can there really be “killers” on the trail of Lima and Belano as a result of whatever happened in their search for an aged avant-garde poet? Rosado doubts it, and pushes back on Luscious Skin’s convoluted and conspiratorial story: “When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn’t know. You didn’t travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn’t. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who’d told him (he explained who María Font was), and she’d gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font’s father was in an insane asylum” (369). This is a much-mediated story whose original author, it turns out, is certified insane. This sends “a shiver up [Rosado’s] spine. And I felt pity too, and I know I was in love” (370).

But we of course know (as certainly as we can know anything in this book) that someone did indeed accompany Belano and Lima on their trip north: García Madero and Lupe, of whom we have still heard absolutely nothing in any of the proliferating accounts that have taken up now 250 pages (what would otherwise be a full novel in itself) of part II. If we could hear from them, perhaps more light would be shed on things.

What we do get, thanks again to Salvatierra’s accounts, is a better sense of Tinajero, as we finally read a visceral realist (at least, a first generation visceral realist) poem… “her only published poem” (397). Still, the fact that we can read her poem does not entirely dispel the suspicion, voiced also by Luscious Skin in an earlier passage from Rosado, that “Belano and Lima might have made her up” (373). For the poem, “Zion” (though the title here is untranslated: “Sión”), is wordless and looks rather more like a child’s drawing than a poem. It consists of three horizontal lines, in each case with a little rectangle attached. The first line is flat. The second is gently undulating. And the third is a zig-zag.

“It’s a joke,” the boys comment to Salvatierra. “The poem is a joke covering up something more serious.” “But what does it mean?” (398) insists Salvatierra, even though Belano and Lima have just told him that “a poem doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, except that it’s a poem, although this one, Cesárea’s, might not even be that” (397). Readers push for significance even when they are warned not to.

Might similarly Bolaño’s novel also be “a joke covering up something more serious”? If so, what is it covering up? And might it, too, not “necessarily have to mean anything”? If not, what is it doing?

2666 III: Order with the Possibility of Suicide

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“The Part of Amalfitano” is, at almost exactly eighty pages, the shortest of the five parts that make up 2666. It expands on the character, circumstances, and history of Oscar Amalfitano, a professor at the University of Santa Teresa and “expert in Benno von Archimboldi” (150–51), to whom we have already been introduced in “The Part of the Critics.” He is, we could say, the fifth critic, though his part in no way advances our knowledge of Archimboldi, who is not even mentioned in this section of the book. It looks as though Bolaño is going to make us wait quite some time before the mystery of Achimboldi is resolved. . . if indeed it ever is.

Meanwhile, if this book’s first part was relatively disparate and uncohesive, then its second part is even more so. There are perhaps three main elements to it. First, there is the tale of Amalfitano’s wife, Lola, who, when they are living in Barcelona with their young child, takes off hitchhiking with a friend (Imma) in pursuit of a poet who turns out to be interned in an insane asylum in the Basque Country.

At the asylum, Lola (who is relating her adventures to Amalfitano via a series of letters) and Imma meet a doctor who tells them he is writing a biography of the poet. “Someday,” he explains, 

all of us will finally leave Mondragón, and this noble institution, ecclesiastical in origin, charitable in aim, will stand abandoned. Then my biography will be of interest and I’ll be able to publish it, but in the meantime, as you can imagine, it’s my duty to collect information, dates, names, confirm stories, some in questionable taste, even damaging, others more picturesque, stories that revolve around a chaotic center of gravity, which is our friend here, or what he’s willing to reveal, the ordered self he presents, ordered verbally, I mean, according to a strategy I think I understand, although its purpose is a mystery to me, an order concealing a verbal disorder that would shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it, even as spectators of a staged performance. (224–25; translation, page 174)

This description of uneven and varied stories that “revolve around a chaotic center of gravity” seems to be almost equally apt for the book (2666) that we ourselves are reading, though perhaps we are still unsure even as to what that center of gravity is for Bolaño’s novel. Are we being kept from it precisely because it would “shake us to the core if ever we were to experience it”? Is this why the true subject of 2666 (if indeed this book, or any other, can be said to have a “true subject”) has to be postponed so long?

The second element of “The Part of Amalfitano” comes when the professor has relocated to Santa Teresa and stumbles across a book in the boxes of books he has had packed up and delivered to his new abode, but this is a book that he cannot remember ever buying or owning. It is written by a Galician poet, Rafael Dieste, though rather than poetry it is a book of geometry, with the title Testamento geométrico or “Geometric Testament.” We are told that on its front flap the book is described as “really three books, ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’” (240; 186). Again, we may wonder whether, with this description of a book within the book, Bolaño is also telling us something about the book that we ourselves are reading. Are all books within books metaphorical in this way? Or would that be synecdochal: a part for the whole? Which may then make us wonder about the roles of the “parts” in this long book. What is the “whole” that is 2666? Is it more than its parts?

In the case of Dieste’s Testamento geométrico, Amalfitano comes up with a novel reading (or non-reading) strategy, albeit not quite so novel in that we are told that the idea comes from Duchamp: he hangs it up on a clothesline in his garden, exposing it to the wind and the sun, and presumably also to whatever rain may fall in these dry latitudes. He puts it to the test of everything that is summed up in the (very Bolañoesque) word, “intemperie”: “bad weather, the outdoors, the open sky, the elements.” As he explains to his daughter: “I hung it there just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate” (246; 191). But this “just because” is already something more than a “just because”: hanging the book on the line also stages a conflict between literature and nature, perhaps between civilization and a (barbaric?) climate hostile to human habitation. Or as Duchamp is said to have put it of his own experiments in hanging books out on a line: “in its exposure to the weather, ‘the treatise seriously got the facts of life’” (246; 191).

Meanwhile, we are told that Amalfitano has other strange little ideas, beyond this one of treating a book like an item of wet clothing. He has some “idiosyncratic” thoughts about jet-lag, for instance: that people in other time zones in fact do not exist, or are at best permanently slumbering, such that 

if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. (243; 189)

We are told of such odd “ideas or feelings or ramblings” that they

turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. (244; 189)

Is this then another clue to what this novel is doing–or what novels do, on the whole, if they come to comprise a whole? They create “neatly structured stor[ies]” out of “incoherent howl[s] with no beginning or end,” but at the price of madness or suicide, freedom that turns out to be (a line of) flight? Is Bolaño trying to give us some insight into the process by which “order” is processed out of “chaos,” even as inevitably we look for that order and prefer to suppress or pass over the enabling substrate that is its chaos, which the order that prose brings both reveals and represses?

Finally, the third element (though in truth there are plenty of others) in this “Part of Amalfitano” concerns the university rector’s son, Marco Antonio, who appears out of nowhere on the street one day and takes Amalfitano to a rather dubious bar on the outskirts of town and gets him to try a brand of mezcal called Los Suicidas: 

drink up and enjoy, said Marco Antonio. At the second sip Amalfitano thought it really was an extraordinary drink. They don’t make it anymore, said Marco Antonio, like so much in this fucking country. And after a while, fixing his gaze on Amalfitano, he said: we’re going to hell, I suppose you’ve realized, Professor? (275; 215)

Los Suicidas: The Suicides. This oddly-named drink is, incidentally, the same brand of mezcal that, at the outset of the second section (or part?) of The Savage Detectives, Amadeo Salvatierra serves to Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano when they come to interview him about the forgotten poet, Cesárea Tinajero. But is this repetition or resonance only incidental? Is anything incidental in Bolaño? Or is, by contrast, everything no more than one incident after another, from which we are forced (as is our habit, as readers of novels) to find significance in their mutual interconnection, as we seek to fabricate a cohesive and unified story where in essence there is none?

2666 II: Machine Reading

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Upon reaching the end of “The Part of the Crimes,” it is hard to see how it could have stood on its own. And yet, according to the note that prefaces the entire novel, that was Bolaño’s plan, communicated just “days before his death” to his publishers: that the various parts of the book should be published separately.

To me, at least, it does not feel as though things have really started getting going, even by page 207. Perhaps that is because I do not feel truly invested in what is the ostensible plot of this part of the book: the relations between the various critics, Pelletier, Espinoza, Norton, and Morini. I do not much care about the love triangle between the first three, nor do I feel there is much sense of resolution or even surprise when (it ultimately turns out) Norton picks Morini over either of the erstwhile rivals bidding for her bed.

Meanwhile, the other plot point, the search for the elusive writer, Archimboldi, which takes three of the four of them to Santa Teresa, in the northern Mexico state of Sonora, also leaves me cold. I did not expect them to find Archimboldi (and indeed, they do not), and always felt that at best the quest was what film director Alfred Hitchcock famously called a “macguffin”: “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” It was a gimmick that simply set the characters in motion. But it is not as though they found much else along the way: they stumble upon the femicides plaguing the city and its environs, but this theme has yet to be developed.

I am left still with the sensation that the key to this first part of the book may lie in one of the many smaller, apparently insignificant stories with which this part of the book is stuffed: the tale of the artist Edwin Johns, for instance, which recurs more than once. Johns’s obra maestra, we are told, is a piece in which he frames his own amputated right hand (his painting hand). At one point several of our critics, on a diversion from one of their unending workshops or conferences on Archimboldi, seek Johns out in the Swiss asylum in which he has been interned. Later, when Norton stumbles across a retrospective exhibition of Johns’s work, we discover that in the meantime he has apparently died. But it feels that this story of the self-mutilating artist, the artist who puts an end to the possibility of further art, still has more to give.

Or maybe the story that truly drives 2666 has gotten going elsewhere, for instance in one of the many dreams that the characters have. Certainly their conscious intentions and preoccupations hold relatively little interest, whether they revolve around hunting down Archimboldi or around finding a new partner with whom to share their otherwise (frankly) rather shallow lives. Perhaps instead it is to the unconscious, as revealed in dreams or mistakes, that we should look.

Or perhaps the error here is precisely the reader’s (this reader’s) own search for hidden meaning. For a “part” of critics, there is remarkably little said here on criticism, with one exception: a brief discussion of a Serbian critic’s proposal for a new approach to Archimboldi. He calls for an “ultraconcrete critical literature, a nonspeculative literature free of ideas, assertions, denials, doubts, free of any intent to serve as guide, neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier” (79; translation, page 55).

The article in which the Serbian critic’s proposal comes catches the other critics’ eye: Pelletier sends copies to the other three. But what interests them is mostly a detail in which the Serb somehow tracks down an airline reservation in Archimboldi’s name, for a flight from Sicily to Morocco. They remain hung up on the biographical, and on their obsession to meet their author in flesh and blood.

But it may be worth pausing a little longer on this “ultraconcrete” and “nonspeculative [critical] literature free of ideas,” an “archaeology of the facsimile” and “of the photocopier.” Is this not the kind of criticism that AI might produce? Indeed, if we were to turn this suggestion away from the elusive texts of Archimboldi (about which we known next to nothing) and towards instead the very substantial text that we have in our hands: is Bolaño hinting (with a wink or otherwise) that his own work is best read not by a human, but by a machine?