HOMOPHOBIA

There’s a good discussion of the homophobia in 2666 going on right now. Dan at Bleakonomy has been largely responsible for driving it to the forefront of discussion. A few weeks ago I posited that it was part of the toxic atmosphere that saturates Santa Teresa, and that somehow enables the crimes. Jeff teased out the connection between homophobia and misogyny. Dan at Bleakonomy finally lost his patience with the seemingly gratuitous use of the word “faggot” and declared Bolaño a homophobe. And Dan at Imagined Icebergs, kind of agrees with Dan at Bleakonomy, and looks at the role homophobia plays in the book’s attitude toward machismo.

Curiously, the homophobia in 2666 (and to some degree in Savage Detectives) has gone largely unremarked upon in most mainstream commentary about the book. It’s been a while since I’ve read any reviews, but I don’t remember it featuring prominently in any I read, and I confess to not giving it too much thought until Bleakonomy Dan forced the issue (if anyone knows of instances where it is discussed, please leave a link/citation in the comments). In my and others’ defense, I suppose if you did a quantitative analysis of the book (there must be software for this) homophobia would be a relatively minor theme. I suspect lots of people probably read the homophobic sections like I did–thought “WTF is that all about?”, casually assumed that it somehow fit with the grand conception of the novel (whatever that is), and then just moved on to all of the other things they found compelling about the book. Also, the book is far more saturated with misogyny than homophobia, so it was easy to assume that it’s just all of a piece, and no one, to my knowledge, has accused Bolaño of being a misogynist, though I have to agree with Jeff and both Dans that the homophobia–chiefly, but not solely, in the form of the use of the word “faggot” as a term of derision–feels far more gratuitous than the ultra-frequent use of the word “whore” to describe women.

In any event, what follows is a slightly expanded version of a lengthy comment to (Imagined Iceberg) Dan’s latest post, Machismo v Machismo. I’m basically plagiarizing myself here, but I wanted to give this issue a more prominent place on my own blog.

It seems to me there are three questions at issue: a) Is the book homophobic? b) Is Bolaño homophobic? c) What’s the role of homophobia in the overall conception or “argument” of the book?

Clearly the book is homophobic. Dan at Imagined Icebergs cites a number of the more notable instances of homophobia in the novel, but these just skim the surface. While homophobia may be a minor presence in the book statistically, qualitatively the book is obsessed with homosexuality, gay sex, and “faggotry.” (note: I’m, not endorsing the use of the word “faggotry” as a term to describe effeminate behavior on the part of men, gay or straight, only noting that this is how 2666 seems to conceive of it; part of the problem with the way Bolano deals with gay characters is the assumption that effeminacy and homosexuality are inevitably twinned). While this hasn’t gone completely unnoticed in commentary on the novel, it’s been pretty much ignored in most mainstream reviews of the book. But the fact is it’s a pervasive presence in the book, and one that needs examining.

As (Icebergs) Dan and Jeff note, 2666 is also obsessed with misogyny, and seems to be critiquing it, and as I’ve argued there is a way to see the misogyny and the homophobia as two components of the same toxic stew of misanthropy pervading Santa Teresa. But I’m not by any means married to this idea. And as Jeff notes, there’s an organic connection between misogyny and homophobia, and it’s possible to see homophobia as a species of misogyny–on the one hand a kind of transference onto gay men of negative attitudes about women, and also a more disturbing (to homophobes) rupturing of the prevailing script of gender relations. But, ultimately, homophobia can’t be reduced to misogyny, and it seems pretty clear to me that the homophobia in 2666 has a role independent of its connection to misogyny.

As to whether or not Bolaño himself is a homophobe, it’s hardly beyond belief. I’m reluctant to say definitively yes he is, just because a) the book is so inscrutable in so many ways that I’m hesitant to assume I know definitively what he’s up to at any one time b) I’m still unsure just who is narrating the book, though I do argue in a recent post that the book is a kind of memoir–a highly sublimated record of Bolaño’s struggle with his own terminal illness; it could be that he’s also airing his own homophobia c) there’s a least a little counter-evidence, both inside and outside the text. For example there are not unsympathetically drawn gay characters in both 2666 (Reinaldo and his circle) and Savage Detectives (Luscious Skin)–I won’t necessarily say they are skillfully drawn, but they don’t seem invented to be ridiculed (at least not any more than anyone else); A quote from an interview in Bomb Magazine where Bolaño says that in his younger days being a poet meant being a revolutionary which meant being “completely open to all cultural manifestations, all sexual expressions, being open to every experience with drugs.”; The fact that he was apparently a big admirer of Pedro Lemebel “an openly gay Chilean essayist, chronicler and novelist” [Wikipedia] (His book My Tender Matador can be sampled on Google Books–the word “faggot” pops up on page 2). But look, all of these things are compatible with homophobia, especially for someone steeping themselves in the psychology of a culture steeped in machismo, of which homophobia is a prominent element.

Dan at Imagined Icebergs hints, tantalizingly, at “a moment near the end of the book…that…offers the biggest contrast to the novel’s norms for addressing homosexuality”, so I’ll be on the lookout for that. But, assuming that things don’t get much better, or that the moment he refers to doesn’t decisively reframe all the homophobia that’s preceded it, one interesting question Dan raises is what is the role of homophobia in the overall “argument” of the book? Dan posits, on the one hand, that it may not play such a role, that it’s possible that Bolaño “just thinks its funny.” I think this is probably too simple an answer, but admittedly there are still remnants of the old infrarealist tendency to do whatever it takes to freak out the squares in Bolaño’s writing, and I sometimes wonder if Bolaño isn’t animated by Jean Genet’s dictum that art is “the capacity to make you eat shit and like it.”* But Dan wonders if the homophobia isn’t somehow tied in to the book’s critique of the general passivity and inaction with regard to the crimes. In other words that Bolaño is essentially, gendering homosexuality feminine, reading femininity in antiquated terms, as passivity, and then using anti-gay epithets as a way to either deride characters for their passivity or to goad them into action. “And”, Dan writes, “this is a problem, because it suggests that Bolaño’s solution for combating machismo and the culture of violence it perpetuates is another kind of machismo.” I guess I hadn’t quite considered the idea that homophobia as fear of that which is (stereotypically)womanly in man might be tied to the revulsion at the passivity of most Santa Teresan’s in the face of the seemingly unstoppable climate of violence. Ironically, the ultimate macho response, some kind of cleansing act of violence, is something Bolaño denies you, at least in The Part About the Crimes. I suspect many readers are half hoping for some kind of macho response.

Finally, one section in this week’s reading struck me as odd and especially phobic, though I don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s the story on page 731-34, of the French Anthropologists in Borneo, who are trying to introduce the western custom of the handshake, “two hands that grasp and pump or shake, faces impassive or friendly or surprised, eyes that frankly meet each other’s gaze” etc, to a group of indigenous people, who have their own custom for shaking hands: who, when they shook hands, stood sideways, did not meet each others’ gaze and passed their right hand under their left armpit or vice versa. Anyway, when one of the anthropolgists tries to force one of the Borneans to shake hands the western way, all hell breaks loose, and they later find that the word the Bornean screamed, “dayiyi”, means (in the novel), among other things, “cannibal who fucks me in the ass and then eats my body”. A charitable reading would be that this is an expression of some kind of primal anxiety about homosexuality, irrational and difficult to eradicate. An uncharitable reading would be that Bolaño in some way endorses this reaction. As is true throughout this novel, he doesn’t give much away.

In any event, the point is that even if Bolaño is a homophobe (and I’m not saying definitively that he is), and assuming that the book has some kind of underlying agenda (even if Bolaño was only half aware of it when writing it) then the role of homophobia in the book bears investigating. This, true, would give it a “literary” justification, but I don’t know why calling something “literary” somehow magically exalts or excuses it.

*I’m actually quoting film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s characterization of Genet’s dictum. Edmund White translated it this way: “poetry is the art of using shit and making you eat it”