I seem to remember one critic describing the books that comprise 2666 as like tectonic plates rubbing up against each other. The relationship between the parts, at least so far, seems more like the reverberations set off by contact between massive but distinct entities, than like a set of closely connected parts that can be unlocked with a master key. This, for me, is part of what makes the book both a blast to read and an exercise in frustration bordering on futility. The balance Bolano strikes between chance and deliberation in the construction of the novel makes it feel both rich in meaning and maddeningly opaque. That said, there are certainly themes and preoccupations that resonate throughout the various parts of the novel, and as Dan at Imagined Icebergs notes, placing a section set in Europe during World War II immediately after the section set in Santa Teresa begs the question of what Bolano is trying to say about the relationship between Mexico under the cartels and Europe under the Nazis.
The first thing that struck me when reading this section was that, ironically, the Santa Teresa section felt more violent than the section set during World War II–one of the greatest conflagrations in human history. Part of this has to do with the fact that the Archimboldi section spans a longer period of time, but, as Paul’s recent commentary at I Just read About That made me realize, part of it has to do with the way the violence is presented. There’s just as much violence in The Part About Archimboldi as there is in The Part About the Crimes . It’s just that the narrative tone of the Archimboldi book is not as uniformly grim as the tone of the Crimes section. Also the violence in The Part About the Crimes is parceled out in small doses over 250ish pages, whereas the violence in the Archimboldi section feels more concentrated (the crucifixion of Entrescu, Sammer’s extermination of the Greek Jews, Mickey Bittner’s description of carpet bombing). The effect of this, I think, is to increase the gravity of the crimes in Santa Teresa (and by extension Juarez) in the reader’s mind, and to bring the moral weight of what’s been happening in Mexico for the past decade closer to the level of an atrocity of world-historical importance like the Holocaust.
Another thing that struck me is how little overt antisemitism there is in the Archimboldi section. It’s there, to be sure, but Bolano doesn’t really present us with any one character or set of characters that are meant to crystallize the antisemitism at the heart of Nazi ideology, and you rarely hear the foot soldiers express antisemitic sentiments. Antisemitism pops up fairly regularly, to be sure–in Ansky’s story, and in the conversations about war guilt, but at that point the defeated Germans are running away from it or trying to disavow it–but at best it’s there as a kind of background noise, and moreover noise that plays at a pretty low volume compared to the ambience of misogyny in The Part About The Crimes . In The Part About The Crimes you get a very vivid sense of a rancid atmosphere of misanthropy/misogyny/homophobia hovering over the city and turning people’s thoughts and actions in the direction of either violence or resignation. Maybe you could say that Bolano is doing the same thing with ideological violence that he did with physical violence: ratcheting up the volume in Santa Teresa and lowering it in war-torn Europe, so as to bring the two closer together in historic importance.
And then there’s the question of collaboration. One of the things that drives readers to distraction about The Part About The Crimes is the almost willful blindness of the citizens of Santa Teresa to the atrocities being committed in their midst, and the seeming unwillingness, or inability, of anyone to do anything about it. My guess is that the unwillingness flows from the inability: due to the level of corruption and collaboration between the narcos, the police force and the politicians, it seems pretty much impossible to wage an effective protest against the violence, and those who do run a very real risk of becoming victims themselves. The book seems to me to both understand and deplore this. Santa Teresa under the narcos, perhaps, has some of the psychological characteristics of life in a totalitarian state. Obviously this comparison only goes so far, and the differences are far greater than the similarities, but both Santa Teresa and Nazi Germany are, effectively, ruled by criminal regimes that extract swift vengeance on opponents and dissenters, or anyone who threatens their power. So, are the passive citizens of Santa Teresa somehow like the “Good Germans” of World War II? Is neutrality in the face of injustice or atrocity always equivalent to complicity? Is passivity a form of guilt in an environment where most avenues of redress are closed off, and where the institutions of civil society have been so thoroughly dismantled, and the ideological climate so thoroughly contaminated, that one’s conscience might almost cease to function?
Dan at Imagined Icebergs tries to get at the relationship between Santa Teresa and The Holocaust through Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. And he notes, correctly I think, that Sammer, the Nazi administrator charged with the disposal of 500 Greek Jews, embodies a lot of what Arendt intended by this concept, which she coined in her classic work Eichmann in Jerusalem, about Israel’s 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for crimes against humanity. My first thought on reading the Sammer section was, this guy is Eichmann for sure: a little man, motivated less by a driving hatred of Jews than by a desire to do his job well, to impress his superiors, and to rise in the party hierarchy. Eichmann was the Nazi official charged with managing the deportation of Jews from the Reich. Eichmann, however, in Arendt’s telling, claimed to bear Jews no ill-will whatsoever, and even portrayed himself as something of a Zionist. Arendt, ultimately, portrays him as thoughtless, as half-consciously employing a number of mental tricks in order to avoid confronting the moral consequences of his actions. The case of Eichmann suggests that one of the most frightening things about Nazism was that it’s crimes were carried out, to a great degree, not by diabolical monsters, or vicious antisemites, but by petty bureaucrats almost mindlessly doing what petty bureaucrats do every day. Eichmann was evil, to be sure, but in this case evil came in an unexpectedly unexceptional form. And Arendt doesn’t argue, I don’t think, that Eichmann was SIMPLY a cog in a machine, although he certainly was that (and she doesn’t argue that, to the extent that he was a cog, he deserved to avoid punishment). He actively and enthusiastically carried out his duties. But his motivations boiled down less to ingrained Jew-hatred than to the pettier motivations of the careerist—doing your job well, impressing your superiors, getting ahead. In any event there’s more than a few shades of Eichmann in the character of Sammer.
There’s a good introduction to the thesis of Arendt’s classic work, as well as an account of the controversy that erupted on its publication, in this article from The Nation. The piece also highlights the debt Arendt owed to Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg. One of the more controversial aspects of Eichmann in Jerusalem was Arendt’s attempt to assess the “guilt” of Jews who helped administer the forced emigration of Jews within Europe. Her take on this is deeply problematic, but it definitely helps you appreciate how murky the question of guilt during wartime (or under a reign of terror) can be.
Having finished the book, I see it like a collage, with carefully composed scenes being placed next to each other in order to say something about evil and our response in the face of it.
While Bolano’s prose may seem opaque, his structural choices leave no doubt that he sought to point to a semblance between the Juarez murders and the Holocaust. The semblance he saw is not necesarily in the details of the crimes, but in the complacency of society itself.
Most intersteing of all is that the vehicle by which he has chosen to connect these two seemingly unconnected events is Art. Art which seeks to create beauty even as evil flourishes alongside it. Bolano’s Archimbaldi has withdrawn from an immoral world. But, according to Bolano, his art (and implicitly, all Art) fails to inspire morality in others. It feeds our asestheic needs, but fails to evoke real outrage and action. This, apparently, is his vision of the human condition.
Powerful stuff – and in my opinion, it isn’t opaque at all.
JW: Awesome reading. You pull all the strands together quite well and, not having finished the book, this is as good an interpretation of Bolano’s aims and execution as I’ve read yet. The way art fits into all this is something I’ve been attuned to but sort of baffled by, but this makes perfect sense. I’m going to reserve any final judgement until I finish the book–and probably for awhile after that–but, just thinking out loud here, while I like your idea that Bolano’s take is that art “fails to inspire morality in others…[and] feeds our asestheic needs, but fails to evoke real outrage and action”, I think there’s another dimension to this, which is the idea that art is also somehow connected to our darker and more diabolical impulses–I’m thinking beyond 2666 to Nazi Lit and Distant Star. Like the creative impulse is an impulse that’s beyond morality somehow, or ultimately amoral, and is just as compatible with evil as with good (I hate putting this in such manichean terms, but I’m not thinking particularly subtly right now). Art, in other words, isn’t simply about creating beauty (in other words the folks making snuff films and the killers staging bodies are artists in their own way, as is Carlos Wieder from Distant Star).
As to collage and opacity: I agree that there’s an overall design, and I definitely agree that there’s an argument in the link he’s trying to make between Santa Teresa/The Crimes and Nazi Germany/The Holocaust, but I do wonder if the things that are opaque or ambiguous about the novel (the lack of psychological depth that characterizes most characterizations, the innumerable narrative dead ends, the often inscrutable metaphors and dream sequences, the way the text frequently whizzes off into rapturous whorls of prose) don’t embed an ineradicable kernel of uncertainty in the book. I’m not married to this position, but I suppose this could be a kind of bid for literary immorality–the more open to interpretation your novel is, the more likely critics are to keep arguing about it indefinitely (aside from all the other reasons writers lately seem to be committed to ambiguity and open-endedness). As to the collage-like structure, I’ve also been thinking about this and I guess I’d argue that there’s always a certain amount of chance involved when creating a collage. Obviously this is more the case with a collage composed of found objects, and 2666 is not a literary collage on the level of, say, Naked lunch, where otherwise self-contained vignettes are stitched together into an aesthetic whole (Burroughs said Naked Lunch could be read profitably in any order). I suppose there are any number of ways to do this but presumably when you create a literary collage that is not composed of found objects you: a) write a number of discrete sections/prose pieces/blocks of text and b) then cut them up and parcel them out or arrange them in some kind of consecutive if not linear order. It seems to me (though I could be wrong) that there’s inevitably going to be a certain amount of chance, or at least fortuitousness, in how these are stitched together. This is just a gut feeling, rather than something I can defend in great detail at the moment.
I definitely agree with you that its hard, or maybe in some ways impossible, to understand Bolano’s authorial choices. Sometimes authors just like playing around, and the trend these days is to indulge them. Regarding the lack of depth, my guess is that Bolano wanted to write about a social/cultural reality and was less interested in exploring personality. If we consider 2666 as a collage, then mabye the narrative dead ends are not there to further the plot but to give flair and color to the author’s vision of society. As for the dreams – I think that in this case, less would have been more. I get the impression that dreams and what they might suggest meant alot to Bolano, and he saw them as an integral part of the whole.
Perhaps the work would have benifited from another round of editing.
As for the collage metaphore, I agree that an artistic collage must have some degree of chance regarding the placement of the pieces. But I think that Bolano really knew what he was doing here.
The more I think about this novel, the more the ambiguous and frusterating elements seem entirely intentional. For example, the character of the Baroness – at first she’s hanging out with the Nazis and after the war she marries a Jew. Isn’t that kind of oppotunism – which plays out with no regard to moral considerations, exactly what Bolano is portraying in Juarez?
By the way – did you look at the Cythia Ozick essay?
It is relevant to your comments about the relationship between art and evil.
JW: running out the door, so perhaps more later, but regarding the Cynthia Ozick essay–not yet, but it’s on my literary todo list. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten super busy at work (and in life) lately, so all I’ve been able to do is pound down 2666 on the subway and frantically scribble half digested thoughts in the morning before heading off to work. Hopefully I can track it down and read it before offering my final thoughts on the novel. Thanks again for the reference.
JW, if you are still out there: so I finally got around to tracking down the Ozick essay. I read the first 5 pages while standing at the top of a ladder at the Strand before I decided it was so good that I should just climb down and buy the damn book. It really is an eye opener, and it clarifies a lot of what I was groping towards in my thoughts about what Bolano seems to be saying about the amorality (in Ozickian/Bloomian terms, even Satanic nature) of the creative impulse. Also, I’ve never read Bloom, so it was a good introduction to his interpretative system. In any event I hope, hopefully by Monday, to have a final post that makes use of the insights in the essay, and I just wanted to say thanks for the pointer.
One quick thought regarding the narrative dead ends. I think futility is a big theme in 2666, and it seems to me that you could fairly describe the book’s “plot” as labyrinthine or mazelike (I know that reaching for the Borges reference is the lazy man’s way to read Bolano, but in this case it feels apt). Perhaps all the narrative dead ends were intended to embed the sense of futility in the very material structure of the book.
David–I hadn’t really thought about the issue of the relative (considering the circumstances) lack of over antisemitism in this last part, although I think it is tied to what I was trying to say about Reiter and his father: both have a relation to war where they really are just there because they don’t have a choice, nor do they care about the cause. The section actually reminds me of most post-WWI literature, and some WWII lit a la Vonnegut and Heller, in its sense of the absurdity of war from the perspective of the mass of soldiers.
But, ok, I didn’t write about this before because the reading hadn’t progresssed that far, but let me ask this: what are we to make of Reiter killing Sammer? (No wishy-washy moral haziness for him.) Is this Reiter succumbing to the violence, or is this sanctioned given the circumstances?
It also strikes me that this is just the kind of vigilante justice that always goes horribly wrong in The Part About the Crimes, but here it doesn’t have much effect on Reiter. I mean, he writes under a pseudonym, but that isn’t much (and actually I found that almost a joke as the revealed reason for the pseudonym).