2666 As Sublimated Memoir

I’ve been having much more fun lately reading and commenting on other people’s posts than composing my own, but I’m determined to keep to my quota of a post a week, so here are some meandering thoughts containing undercooked ideas that hopefully provide a morsel of food for thought. Raw food is supposed to be good for you, right?

Two things I tend to forget about this book:
-It’s an unfinished novel
-It was written by a dying man

I’m increasingly inclined to think of 2666 as a kind of sublimated memoir. Almost all fiction is sublimated memoir, to some degree. The writer either writes about what he knows, or comes to know what he writes about, and even when a story and characters are completely fabulated they are filtered through the author’s experience and sensibility. Of course it’s an elementary mistake to assume that the narrator or characters are equivalent to the author, but it’s an equally elementary mistake to assume they have little-to-nothing to do with each other.

Fictions are more or less sublimated accounts of an author’s beliefs, values and experiences. Some, like for example Gary Indiana’s roman a clef Do It In The Dark, feel as close to memoir as they do to fiction. Others, like Nabakov’s Lolita, are ways of exploring the psyche of a character that (hopefully) is as far away from that of the author as could possibly be. But I suspect there’s more than a bit of Nabokov in Humbert Humbert, though hopefully not the part about desiring to kidnap and molest little girls (probably more like the jaundiced eye Humbert casts on 50′s conformity and conventionality).

Anyway, 2666 is a book that
-blurs the line between “fiction” and “reality”
-has a documentary feel and employs documentary techniques
-frequently comments on itself

In the same vein, I think its clear that the novel is, more or less, about Bolaño’s struggle with his own terminal illness. While there are doubtless innumerable examples of Bolaño dealing with his own condition in the language, subject matter, imagery and symbolism of the novel, here’s one example where he seems to speak directly to the reader about his own condition:

“Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone…The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. The sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then too, then too, then too.” [661] (Of course Bolaño is also talking about Hans Reiter here, but I excised the 4 very short sentences about Reiter to highlight the degree to which Bolaño may also be talking about himself).

I’m not sure how fruitful Bolaño-David Foster Wallace comparisons are, but I can’t resist playing the game, so here’s one: Both 2666 and The Pale King are unfinished novels written by men who were staring death in the face as they wrote. Both are, doubtless, commenting on and grappling with their own terminal condition. Obviously there’s a crucial difference, in that Bolaño was dragged unwillingly into the abyss, whereas David Foster Wallace took his own life, although the question of how much agency a suicidal person has is an open one to be sure. It’s probably inaccurate to say that Wallace was “staring death in the face” the whole time he was writing The Pale King, since he worked on it for 12 years. Also someone with suicidal tendencies is not staring at death so much as staring at their own wavering ability to summon the will to remain among the living. But the two books are posthumously published unfinished works by men actively grappling with their own mortality.

As anyone who’s ever known someone faced with imminent death, especially death at an early age, knows it’s not a uniformly dignified process. It’s as much about dealing with anger and rage as it is about coming to terms with the inevitable. It’s as much about settling scores or breaking ties with those one considers inessential as it is about spending time with your loved ones. This is pure thumbsucking on my part (hey, this IS the blogosphere after all), but I wonder if one of the things we are seeing in this novel, in a more or less sublimated fashion, is someone with a more porous barrier between the murky waters of the id and the face he presents to the world than someone who unconsciously feels that he has acres of time stretching out before him.