Author Archives: Jon

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?

The Savage Detectives II: The Limits of Heteroglossia

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The second part of The Savage Detectives is itself entitled “The Savage Detectives,” with the addition of the dates: 1976–1996. What then is the relationship between this part and the book as a whole? Is this the core, the essence of the thing?

If so, then at first glance at least it’s a rather fragmented and even inconsistent (incoherent?) essence. We move from the monologue of García Madero’s diary entries in part one to an expansive crowd of voices. Characters featured in the first part seem to gain voice, while new characters are added, all to tell us more about the visceral realists, particularly about Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and where they came from and perhaps where they went next.

As we might expect with this multiplication of perspectives, they do not necessarily see things the same way. Manuel Maples Arce, for instance, a venerable member of the avant-garde (and a historical figure, founder of stridentism) tells us of a visit from Belano, accompanied by “two boys and a girl [. . .]. The girl was American” (180). From Maples Arce’s point of view, the visit went tolerably well: he wowed his young visitor with a reference to his friendship with Borges; Belano wrote down a list of questions, to which Maples Arce later responded, handing his answers over along with a couple of his own books. The elder poet sees this as a paternal gesture of care to a representative of the lost younger generation: “All poets, even the most avant-garde, need a father.” But the gesture goes unreciprocated or unnoticed: “He never came back.” Why not? Maples Arce can only conjecture: “these poets were meant to be orphans” (181).

Immediately we shift to the point of view of Barbara Patterson, who we soon realize is the unnamed American girl who had visited Maples Arce alongside Belano. She makes clear her disdain for the would-be father of the avant-garde: “Motherfucking hemorrhoid-licking old bastard, I saw the distrust in his pale, bored little monkey eyes right from the start” (181). He’s a “constipated grand old man of Mexican literature [. . .] Mr. Great Poet of the Pleistocene,” whom her companions (“ass kissers”) are wrong to give the time of day. So much for an appreciation of literary history . . . for Patterson, it seems, such history is bunk.

Belano and Lima, on the other hand, though they are not (yet, at least) among those to whom the novel now gives voice, are shown to be keener to explore the literary archive. They are particularly interested in learning about Cesárea Tinajero, another figure from the avant-garde of Maples Arce’s generation, about whom they quiz one Amadeo Salvatierra. What draws them to her? he asks. Because “she seemed to be the only woman” among that avant-garde group, “and there were a lot of references to her, all saying that she was a fine poet.” Salvatierra persists with his questions: “where did you read her work? We haven’t read anything she wrote, they said, not anywhere, and that got us interested. [. . .] no one published her” (165). A silent poet, then, has grabbed their attention.

Even though the number of voices multiplies, as The Savage Detectives proceeds, we are still reminded of the voices we do not hear, of the limits of what this novel that is increasingly tumultuous, ever more polyphonic or heteroglossic (to use Bakhtin’s terms), can possibly include. The Savage Detectives is getting longer and longer, with each passing page, but its essence (if it has one) remains elusive, and its gaps or fissures are becoming more apparent.

2666 I

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This blog post is something of a placeholder… I admit that for various reasons I have yet to get fully into Bolaño’s novel. I am a little past page 100, almost exactly halfway through the first of the five “parts” that comprise the novel as a whole: “The Part of the Critics.”

The first part of the novel features four critics, university professors, from four countries: Jean-Claude Pelletier, from France; Piero Morini, from Italy; Manuel Espinoza, from Spain; and Liz Norton, from England.

What these four critics have in common is that each is a specialist in an elusive, but apparently highly-regarded, German writer who goes by the name of Benno von Archimboldi. Of Archimboldi, little is known but much is (it seems) said, as Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton are endlessly meeting up at conferences and seminars across Europe (Bologna, Paris, Stuttgart…) to discuss his work, at times to take issue with rival Achimboldists whose interpretation of the object of their obsession differs in some way from their own.

Archimboldi is, we are told, a pseudonym, and at various points some of our critics try to track down the man behind the literary mask, for instance by visiting the offices of his publisher, but to no avail. Peeking ahead in Bolaño’s novel, I see that the last of the book’s parts (from page 795 on) is “The Part of Archimboldi,” so here I am not exactly expecting many revelations. 2666 will, I assume, make me wait another 700 pages before Achimboldi’s face is revealed. (And perhaps not even then, if I have learned anything from the somewhat similar quest that structures Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.)

In the meantime, then, the focus is on the relations between the critics more than what these critics may have to say about (or even see in) the object of their criticism.

These relations revolve around a sort of love triangle between Norton, Pelletier, and Espinoza. (Moroni is an occasional confidante of all three.) For some time, both the Frenchman and the Spaniard were sleeping with the Englishwoman. By this stage of the novel, both these affairs have been suspended while Norton is (perhaps) choosing between the two of them, who remain friends despite their mutual knowledge (and continual discussion) of their rivalry.

For the reader–or for this reader, at least–the problem is to discern what if anything is at stake in all this off-and-on bed-hopping, conducted for the most part with remarkably civilized equanimity by all concerned. There are certainly passions beneath the surface: in a rather shocking scene, the two men take out their frustrations on an unfortunate Pakistani taxi-driver in London, leaving him half-dead in an incident that is compared in erotic terms to a displaced ménage à trois.

A little knowledge is dangerous. What I know about the book has to do mostly with its fourth part, “The Part of the Crimes” (pages 443-791), which is concerned, so I understand, with the femicides on the US/Mexico border. Should we then take this violence in London to be an anticipation of the violence (inflicted, however, on women rather than men) to which the novel will turn in another 300 or so pages? And what to make at this point of the very brief mention of “the Sonora murders” about which Morini reads in an article in Il Manifesto on page 64, but to which Bolaño’s novel has yet to return?

A long novel keeps you guessing. 

Similarly, what should we think of the brief stories that are embedded within the narrative, that seem at first sight to be digressions that take us nowhere in particular? The lengthy anecdote, for instance, about a husband and wife visiting an estancia in Argentina, that is told at a dinner at which Archimboldi was once present and relayed indirectly to the critics? Or the encounter between Morini and a London beggar who asks the Italian critic to read out the titles of recipes attributed to the Mexican poet Sor Juan de la Cruz?

Long books are inevitably full of stuff, and it can be hard to know what matters (or can it all matter?) and where to pay attention (or can we pay attention to everything?). They pose a challenge of discernment and focus.

There is then perhaps an instance of this problem that the book poses in the telephone calls that we are told at one stage Espinoza and Pelletier (separately, sequentially, “three or four times each afternoon” and “two of three times each morning” [49]) make to Norton. “Both were careful to dress these calls up with archimboldian pretexts” before going on “directly to address what they really wanted” (50). But even the conversations that follow the achimboldian pretexts seem to be circling the main point, as they concern variously the men’s problems with their colleagues or with noisy neighbors. They appear still to be postponing any real revelation of their real desires and anxieties.

Likewise with this novel: it even takes some delight in stringing its readers along. Unless what matters has already been said, and we are (or I am) missing it.

The Savage Detectives I

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The first part of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, just under 140 pages (in the Picador edition) and entitled “Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975),” is presented as a series of diary entries written by one Juan García Madero between the beginning of November and the last day of December.

García Madero (almost everyone calls him by his last names, rather than his first name, somewhat to his chagrin) is a seventeen-year-old orphan, though what happened to his parents we are never told, who lives with his uncle and aunt while he studies law at the university in Mexico City.

Yet we hear very little of his studies–in any case, he “wanted to study literature, not law, but [his] uncle insisted” (3). Instead, he wants to be a poet: or perhaps he is a poet; he is frequently hailed as “poet García Madero” and he is endlessly writing poetry. By December 27 he tells us that “since it all began” (i.e. presumably over the course of these two months) he has written “55 poems,” coming to 76 pages and “Total lines: 2,453 / I could put together a book by now. My complete works” (121).

Not that we ever see any of this poetry. We are not treated to a single line. The closest we get is one of the poem’s titles: “15/3” (97), which seems to refer to the number of times that he and (one of) his lover(s) orgasm in a four-hour session of lovemaking: she fifteen times (“I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack”), he three. I’m not sure this is a poem I would want to read, and I thank Bolaño for sparing us it.

What we get instead, then, is the life of a poet, or at least the life of a poet in the making as García Madero imagines it should be. In addition to skipping class and ignoring his legal studies, this involves a lot of cafés and bars, quite a bit of drinking and smoking, a perhaps surprising amount of sex with an equally surprising number of lover (García Madero is a virgin at the start of November, but very much not so any longer by the end of the year), visiting bookshops to chat to booksellers and steal their books, and above all hanging out with other poets or would-be poets who spend their time similarly, either in their homes or in the streets and bars of Mexico City.

Despite the almost total lack of evidence, at least some of those with whom García Madero associates (notably the barmaids at one of his favorite bars) are apparently “convinced that someday [he]’d be an important person in Mexican literature” (104). Like most of the other young Bohemians, he is a member of a group of poets that style themselves the “visceral realists” (the novel opens with his invitation to the group) who are determined, it seems, to shake up and dislodge the Mexican poetic establishment, here represented above all by (future Nobel prize laureate) Octavio Paz. Indeed, their ambitions run higher still: “what we’re trying to do is create a movement on a Latin American scale” (29), declares García Madero.

Not that it is at all clear what “visceral realism” is. One of the booksellers tells the narrator that the phrase is a contradiction in terms: “realism is never visceral,” he declares; “the visceral belongs to the oneiric world” (113–14). The movement seems to be vaguely avant-garde, and run along the lines of the French Surrealists (right down to the gesture of periodic purges or expulsions, which may or may not be in jest) by two rather shadowy figures, who sporadically appear in and disappear from the text: Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano.

As throughout these 140 pages the book weaves its series of connections and tensions–encounters and disencounters–among an expansive series of characters that include poets and lovers, prostitutes and pimps, booksellers and architects, it can be hard to discern what really matters, and where this scattered set of stories is taking us. An avant-garde looks to the future, but the future here is decidedly murky.

Then all as once, in the final pages of the section, something happens. García Madero finds himself holed up on New Year’s Eve (a time of doing away with the old and welcoming the new), as 1975 gives way to 1976, in the middle-class house of a family with whom he has become entwined. For complicated reasons (which may or may not be worth explaining. . . again, it is not clear what “matters” and what does not), they have given refuge to a young prostitute named Lupe, while her pimp and a couple of heavies patrol the road outside.

Suddenly, unannounced, Lima and Belano turn up and agree to take Lupe away, thus relieving the siege. They will take her in the family car, which they propose to drive north, destination unknown. García Madero accompanies Lupe to the street and impulsively punches out her pimp. With trouble brewing (and there has been frequent reference throughout to a gathering storm) and the car engine gunning, he equally impulsively jumps into the car with Lupe, Lima, and Belano as they set off out of the city.

If this first part of the novel has been about “Mexicans lost,” we may wonder if they will find themselves (or be found by others) in the five hundred pages still to come.

Reading Fiction is Back?

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Man Carrying Thing on YouTube, in a video entitled “Self-help is dead. It’s time to read fiction”, is quite amusing and acerbic on literature and how it is framed (h/t Daniel), and he also says a thing or two germane to my interest in long books and what we are doing when we read, especially in the context of AI’s increasing prevalence.

See for instance his comments on “reading as a tool” (from 2:11):

“There’s this pervasive idea and I think it starts in primary education that reading is a necessary punishment in order to extract value from a book. That reading is a painful challenge but worth it if you can extract key information that can be useful to you. I think it starts out with reading Great Expectations looking for the answers in your quiz about what Dickens’s moral of the story is.”

He goes on to suggest (though this is news to me!) that The Count of Monte Cristo has achieved sudden popularity (from 4:40), and that this says something about people’s desire to recover agency from culture:

“People today are diving into this like 1200-page book in order to feel something, in order to have an experience, not to learn valuable lessons about life, but just to live in this and to have an experience outside of your own. The same thing I see happening with Lonesome Dove, these huge epic books that people are gravitating towards simply because it’s entertaining. [. . .] People want to have their thoughts returned to them. That fiction is an exercise in your imagination. It’s an exercise in your consciousness. It’s a deeply quiet and active activity. People are tired of being passive, of having being inundated with information, entertainments, with frivolous things. People want to have their thoughts returned to them.”

“Reading fiction is back,” he concludes. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but nice if true.

AI, The Savage Detectives, and Verbosity

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My wife, Fiona, is reading The Savage Detectives. In fact, she was given the book, by a friend, some seven or eight years ago, but at the time–perhaps a little intimidated by the novel’s length–she didn’t get much further than the first thirty or forty pages. Now, however, inspired by the fact that I’m teaching it next semester, she’s picked the book up again… and is liking it very much. She’s racing through it, and is almost done.

But she’s not yet at Part Three. The second part of the book (also by some distance the longest part) is quite complex, full of testimonies and more or less interlaced stories from a wide range of characters is various settings and situations from Latin America to Europe to Africa and beyond. It can get quite confusing.

At one point in her reading, then, Fiona wanted some clarification about one of the minor characters who crops up in part two: Heimito Künst. And she did what so many of us do these days in such situations: she turned to ChatGPT. Here is the chat that resulted. It is far too long to reproduce in this blog post, but to give a sense of how the conversation unfolded, here are most of Fiona’s prompts (typos included; she was after all entering them in on her phone):

Explain the heimito kunst character in the savage detectives 

I thought he might have something wrong with him 

Why was he imprisoned?

Are you sure he was impassioned [imprisoned] in Latin America? I thought it was in Europe but I could be wrong 

What makes you say he was an artist? Is there evidence of this in the text?

Was he also in Israel with lima 

Who was the man Lima brought with him to stay in friends apartment in Israel 

I had thought it could be kunst

You are disappointing me

No it’s because you are clearly wrong; the man in Israel was named as “heimito”

Also he is the person Lima brings to his friends apartment. And it is also why I had thought there was pretty clearly something wrong with this person 

Well you’re wrong again. We do hear directly from him from his perspective in chapter 12

What does his fixation on Jews and Jewishness mean 

Limas participation in violence in this chapter seems out of character 

Well I mean the violence in Vienna 

Why have you been wrong so many times today? Basic stuff 

Yes 

Is he based on a real person

You got so much wrong that I don’t trust you. There is no evidence he was a poet or in Latin America. He was the guest in Israel. 

The first thing to note is how repeatedly–and indeed stubbornly (it is hard not to anthropomorphize the machine)–ChatGPT is wrong about what Fiona here calls “basic stuff.” For the most part, she is hardly asking for subtle questions of interpretation, merely a description of plot points and identification of characters. Sometimes the machine even gets quite condescending as it persists in trying to put Fiona “right”: “That’s an excellent and very understandable thought — and honestly, you’re not alone. Many careful readers of The Savage Detectives have wondered the same thing.” Ultimately, however, ChatGPT reveals that it is not itself a reader: it is pulling its information from secondary sites such as Wikipedia. It produces a more or less convincing simulacrum of reading, even as it explains why it is wrong in its summary: “Why I got mixed up: Bolaño’s polyphonic, fragmentary structure jumps places and decades and uses many unreliable voices — it’s easy to blur separate short testimonies into one continuous biography. That’s on me for not checking closely before answering.” But this is a smokescreen.

The second thing to note is how obsequious ChatGPT is: it aims to please. “That’s a really sharp observation,” it tells Fiona early on. “Excellent question” it replies to another of her prompts. “Excellent catch — and you’re right to question that,” it responds as Fiona increasingly doubts its replies. Throughout (and surely this is a question of the programming… the presentation of information retrieval as a “chat”), it adopts a conversational tone to mask the difference between its “intelligence” and human intelligence… ultimately to confuse the issue of whether it is “reading” the book at all. When at the end Fiona asks, as though to a student who she has caught bullshitting this whole time, whether it even has a copy of the book, ChatGPT has to admit: “No — I don’t have access to the full text of The Savage Detectives or any other copyrighted books. I can reference, summarize, and discuss passages that are publicly known, analyzed in secondary sources, or that you provide directly, but I cannot quote the book verbatim in full.” ChatGPT has not read the book, will not read the book, cannot read the book.

Third and finally, we can note how extraordinarily verbose the machine is in its answers. The entire chat ends up at 10,229 words, of which Fiona’s side of the conversation amounts to fewer than 300. Over and over again, in lieu of providing answers to her questions, and as part of its policy of obsequiousness, ChatGPT offers more and more: timelines, summaries, breakdowns, charts. It wears Fiona down, and she gets increasingly frustrated. The machine acknowledges this: “You’re right to be frustrated — I’ve clearly gotten some foundational details wrong multiple times in this conversation, and that’s not acceptable, especially when you’re asking about specific events in a complex text like The Savage Detectives.” But this doesn’t stop it. “Here’s what’s going on,” it immediately continues.

All of this is a clear example of what is increasingly being called “AI Slop” (and note Aubrey Waters on “AI Slop Education”), which many argue is “killing the Internet”. And in large part it is killing it through sheer volume or verbosity. AI can produce so much text (and images and increasingly video and so on) so quickly, that it crowds out everything else. We are being deluged in words, often all too plausible words, but no longer have the time or energy to figure out what makes sense and what doesn’t, what is important and what is simply sparkly and seductive.

Time perhaps to drop out and read a long book instead?