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?
