More than one reader has described 2666 as a difficult novel to like. It’s the kind of novel you appreciate for it’s seriousness and inventiveness, but not the kind you develop warm feelings for. In fact, the book could fairly be described as repellent, in a couple of senses: not only does it rub your face in hundreds of pages of ugliness and obscenity, but rather than try to pull you into the story, Bolaño actually seems to be trying to push the reader away, or at least keep him or her at a safe distance. The prose is like a hard exterior shell that you have to keep pounding away at to crack. As often as not Bolaño hurries past events, discouraging the reader from reflecting on them (this is less true in The Part About The Crimes, but there the killings of hundreds of young women are emphasized via blunt repetition). The typical strategies for making a reader “like” a novel–fine writing, complex characters, an ingeniously constructed plot, a sense that the narrator knows how everything fits together, even if he isn’t giving up his secrets–are largely absent from 2666. Instead you get ugly and at times seemingly careless writing, characters that are little more than sketches, innumerable narrative dead-ends, and a narrator who, while able to peer inside characters’ dreams, seems to have not the foggiest idea why anything happens or what it all might mean.
I wonder if there isn’t some connection between the anti-art literary strategies Bolaño employs, and the ethics of fictionalizing the atrocities at the novel’s center? Is Bolaño acting out some version of Theodor Adorno’s famous (and admittedly over-referenced) statement that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”?
Fictionalizing atrocities must be a tricky business, especially when dealing with real and ongoing events. On the one hand Bolaño is bearing witness to a great injustice–the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women in and around Juarez. On the other hand, because he’s doing so in a novel, he’s forced to aestheticize the victims’ experience in some way. Or to confront the challenge of how to represent the murders without aestheticizing them: without making the them more tolerable and digestible by wrapping them in a pleasing literary package, even if it’s the pleasure we take in turning away from something horrible. The standard approach, I think, would be to flesh the characters out, tell the victims’ stories in great detail, restore to them in fiction the dignity they were robbed of in life. To make their deaths mean something by explaining how and why they happened, and holding out hope that some day justice might be done.
Clearly this is not the path chosen by Bolaño. Much of 2666 is written in an ugly, seemingly careless and chaotic style that mirrors the derangement and indifference of a world in which women can be killed with impunity, and in the most barbaric fashion. The narrative voice in the The Part About the Crimes ranges from cynical/ironic to forensic to almost psychopathic in its utter lack of surface empathy (this is not the only narrative voice in 2666, but it’s the predominant one in The Part About The Crimes). Bolaño seems to be striving with all his might not to rouse the reader’s emotions. He’s opted for a dispassionate, reportorial, almost documentary-style recounting of events–like he’s paranoid about the possibility of evoking an easy and, most especially, cathartic emotional response. That said, I thought the final section of this week’s reading, the story of poor 11-year-old Penelope Mendez Becerra, was especially heartbreaking, precisely because of the restraint shown by Bolaño, and the cumulative weight of the murders that preceded it.
I guess the question I’m trying to ask, and doing a poor job of answering, is how well do Bolaño’s formal and stylistic choices serve the subject matter, especially in The Part About The Crimes? Is there something to be gained by staying so seemingly detached from events, and by his heroic refusal, at least by page 404, to make it mean anything? Does it force us to confront the enormity of the injustice being committed in Juarez/Santa Teresa by refusing us the standard literary means for coping with such horrors: encasing them in a fictional package that makes them more digestible and explicable? Or, ironically, does Bolaño end up further dehumanizing the victims by treating them as little more than sketchy details on a police blotter?
Fantastic comment. Pretty much the same thing I was trying to say in my post on this Part, but done much more clearly and eloquently.
I look forward to adding this as one of my 2666 destinations.
Thanks Dan. It was your Avery Edison Moment post that got me thinking along these lines
Correction: The Avery Edison Moment post was Jeff Anderson’s, but thanks nonetheless.
I do think, David, that it’s intentional, and the function I see the narrative structure serving is to place us in Mexico City (or Tucson or Chile) reading about the crimes in the newspaper where there is no assumption of prose and a strange detachment that makes each crime stand alone even as the cumulative effect should be crushing. I sense that Bolano tries not to romanticize or fictionalize the characters because doing so would be grotesque, but also tries to show us our own complicity in allowing these crimes to continue by offering us essentially what has been buried on page 16 most days of every week. He’s pointing out that we’re as terrible as the incompetent, impotent police, by implying that any moron could see what’s going on and could connect the dots, yet the world refuses to.
This cold, unlikeable novel is asking us why we haven’t connected the dots yet.
And I don’t like that.
Thanks for an articulate post on why I’m really disappointed in this novel, despite the glowing reviews. It’s cold and devoid of everything I like about novels. Yet I’m still reading. Why?
Thanks for replying to my post, David. (I’m working on an answer to your comment over at IZ.) I agree with you about some of the ethical implications of writing about the murders, and it’s a tough question that I would expect any author on the subject to have worked out well before publication. I guess I’m just deeply unhappy with the solutions Bolaño seems to have chosen.
I’m almost willing to entertain the idea of 2666 as a particularly acid satire, but I think I don’t have the stomach for it.
And here’s the other thing, now that I think about it (and have got a good head of steam): Alright, like naptime suggests, Bolaño’s taking that back page of the newspaper, wadding it up, and shoving down our throats to make sure we can’t avoid it. Now what are we supposed to do about it? What am I, as a reader, supposed to be able to do to help repair the situation? We get a clear portrait of a city that only partly cares about what’s going on, a police force with no particular interest in solving things, an evidently noninterventionist local government, an uncaring religious establishment, and a lazy media environment. There is no structure I can appeal to; I am literally powerless. (And I don’t want to look to Harry Magaña as an example, because regardless of whatever efficacy he has or hasn’t, he too is a bastard and maybe a monster—somebody had to apply that lit cigarette to the bartender’s testicle on 414, and the bartender’s story sounds an awful lot like walking into a door.) And I’m not very sanguine about the prospect of having all this awfulness rubbed in my face (metaphor change!) without even the hope of a successful plan of action. I mean, what makes this book worth the time to write (and read) it, rather than, say, sustained activism and lobbying and protesting? How does a deliberately unpleasant novel better honor the people it’s ultimately about than does a serious effort to ameliorate their conditions?
Not that it’s necessarily fair of me to criticize Bolaño’s artistic politics on the grounds that he didn’t do what I want him to have done—particularly at such length on somebody else’s blog!—but.
(Wow, that was super long. My apologies.)
Jeff: Mi blog es su blog. Or at least my comments section. Besides, this blog definitely has a shelf life–its unlikely to outlast the group read–so fill it up now!
Well, I guess I’d say that a novelist, by bearing witness to atrocities or crimes, has pretty much done his or her job as a novelist. Their responsibility ends there. If they want to, as an individual and a citizen, also become an activist, all the better, but it’s not required. In that sense I guess 2666 serves the same function as journalism, which is a very worthy function.
And I do think Bolaño’s book has raised awareness of the hellhole that Juarez has become. The surprise with which so many people that I know greeted the story of the recent assassinations of American consular workers in Juarez bears this out. Anyone who read 2666 upon publication wouldn’t have been surprised by this in the least.
It’s true that Bolano doesn’t really offer a plan of action. I can’t claim to have read widely about the drug war in Juarez, but I have digested a few things–some journalism and an excellent radio documentary ( http://bit.ly/brj9SP )–and I will say that the one common thread that seems to run through all of it is just the absolute futility that people feel regarding the situation there. The violence is so bad, the economic conditions so abominable, and the means of redress so miniscule, that 2666 may well be one of the more accurate representations of the state of mind that the conditions there generate in people (after all it does feature a very few people either protesting what’s going on or trying to take action, though of course they are all thwarted).
Maybe what Bolaño has succeeded in doing, through the massiveness of the novel and by forcing the reader to wander half-blind through its labyrinthine structure, is to take a place like Santa Teresa/Juarez, a place that’s on the periphery of so many things–of Latin America and the US, of the global economy, of global consciousness, of History–and placing it, effectively, at the center of the universe. That’s something.
Finally, lets not forget that all this is also filtered through one writer’s consciousness, a guy who was writing furiously, with a death sentence hanging over his head, and who stared into the abyss every time he put pen to paper. THIS, I suspect, is the rock bottom subtext of pretty much everything in the novel.
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These are good comments! Can I add my small thoughts? I feel that the cataloging of the crimes – emphasized really by the narrative’s deliberate and cold focusing on the nastiest aspects of the attacks – provides in itself a kind of literary outrage to the reader that the more poetic elements that are woven throughout this Part and the rest of the book automatically tend to play against. The novel itself – all five parts – is a kind of symphony. There is an underlying dread (the clearest expression of which is the catalogue of murders) over which Bolano’s more playful stories and sketches are cast – a somberness that gives depth and horror to the dreams and explorations and parade of characters. Who, except Archimboldi himself can really sense that underworld (this explored in the last Part). (And in comparison – the description of South American intellectuals). That coldness is perhaps the real crime of the novel – the crime of literature maybe – but without this “crime”, the rest would be simply a game.
Great blog!
sighs: thanks for your comments. Man, you must be reading my mind, because I’ve also been thinking about the book in musical terms. In fact I was thinking of writing a post this week comparing the book to ambient music (Death Ambient—it’s a real sub-genre!), but your description of the book as a symphony is much better, I think. I guess I was fixating on the pervasive atmosphere of underlying dread that you point to. There’s a kind of rancid ambience that saturates this section of the novel, and as you notes acts as a counterpoint to the thoughts and actions of the characters. Good comments. Thanks for stopping by.
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