VIOLENCE

2666 is a novel about violence. Obviously. And while there is doubtless more violence to come, now that we are leaving The Part About the Crimes I thought it might be useful try to take stock of the role of violence in the book so far. In what ways is 2666, and The Part About The Crimes in particular, “about” violence?

Well, first and most obviously, it’s a fictionalized recounting of the brutal and sadistic murders of hundreds of young women in Ciudad Juárez. So it’s filled with representations of real, ongoing acts of violence, and the descriptions of these acts have an appropriately documentary feel to them. Whether this “forensic” quality to the narrative is driven, as I wondered earlier , by some sort of ethical imperative not to over-dramatize or sentimentalize the crimes, is still an open question. But the documentary techniques Bolaño employs satisfy what David Shields calls the “reality hunger” that permeates the culture today, and give the representations of violence the feeling of being closer to “real life” than something completely fabulated (ironically, however, we rarely experience acts of violence in the narrative present of the novel–the accounts are almost always retrospective, second hand descriptions, something someone witnessed and is reporting back on, an account pieced together from partial evidence. I guess this is much like how we experience violence in real life).

The book is almost pornographic in its representations of the ways in which a woman’s body can be tortured, violated, brutalized, humiliated. It’s a kind of catalog of methods of brutalization, although at the same time it’s hardly an exhaustive catalog because the killers seem to have a relatively limited range of techniques (this, in part, helps keep alive the idea of a serial killer). As I argued in an earlier post, Bolaño has long been fascinated by the connection between crime and creativity, and there may be some kind of argument buried in here about the relationship between art/culture/the creative impulse and crime/brutality. Maybe the subplot about the snuff film supports this in some way, although more likely it simply implicates the reader as a voyeur.

As important as the physical violence in the novel is the symbolic violence that Bolaño portrays. This kind of violence is perhaps even more prevalent than the physical violence. By symbolic violence I don’t necessarily mean psychological violence, because as far as I can see there’s not a lot of psychology in the characterizations in the novel. With very few exceptions (La Santa) you never feel like you are inside a character’s head, and you don’t get a vivid sense of characters consciously and deliberately manipulating each other for dubious ends, as you do in, to grab two random examples that are mentally close at hand, novels like Lolita or Revolutionary Road.

By symbolic violence I mean the set of invisible but nonetheless coercive social/cultural/political/economic structures (norms, habits, laws, conventions, degree to which one’s life is ruled by necessity etc.) that govern the way we think and act. All people, in other words, can be said to be subject to coercion, to “violence,” all the time. All of us are forced, or strongly encouraged, to act and think a certain way “against our will,” not in the sense that we consciously and openly object to the way things are, but in the sense that we are thrown into a world not of our own making, and often find it difficult to imagine, much less bring into being, a radically different state of things. We have a hard time seeing beyond the limits set by culture and ideology, and indeed our very subjectivities (which are as fluid as they are fixed) are created and defined by culture and ideology.

What I think you get a very vivid sense of in 2666 is the way these otherwise invisible structures press on people and force, or strongly encourage, them to compromise their better impulses. There are innumerable examples of this that are obvious to readers of 2666 by now: the force of the mysogonystic strain in the culture; the way the economic limitations of young women’s lives put them in harm’s way; I could go on and on. As Eric Pulido put it in the comments to one of Jeff’s posts, the feeling that in places like Juarez/Santa Teresa “there is no justice,” and the general feeling “that everything will remain like this forever, which in the end makes everybody numb to the problem, even if there are by some estimates 4000 missing girls as of today.”

I’m wary of engaging in a negative romanticization of the situation in Juarez/Santa Teresa by a) overstating the lack of agency that people there have and b) making myself feel good about myself by feeling exceptionally bad for the people who live there. But it does seem to me that the problem of the violence there is a complicated and relatively intractable one, and that one of the things Bolaño is doing is narrating the various forms of structural/cultural/psychological “coercion” that allow people to live with it.

Finally, I think 2666 is a book about the way violence, and images of violence, cycle through society and culture. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some kind of argument buried deep in the subtext of the book about the ways we consume violence, and the various ways in which images of violence cycle through society and the culture, and the way this allows people to cope with, tolerate, live with violence, including, in a place like Santa Teresa/Juarez, mass murder. First of all, as noted above, we rarely see acts of violence take place in “real time” in the novel. Most of our encounters with violence are either retrospective or second hand: the descriptions of the crimes; La Santa’s visions of the crimes; the way the violence works its way into people’s dreams; the ways the crimes are consumed and recycled by the media (from the bored and skeptical reporters at Klaus Haas’ press conference to La Santa’s appearance on Reinaldo); then there’s the whole subplot about the first snuff film, which apparently wasn’t a real snuff film at all, but which a) implicates the reader as a kind of voyeur, as someone consuming violence and b) shows how a desperate attempt to market the film may have spawned a macabre subgenre.

The thing is on any given day many of us consume an incredible amount of violent imagery, and these images are designed to be consumable–either because they are cast in formulaic/genre terms (Hollywood violence), or because of the decorum that prevails in the mainstream media, either out of respect for the victims of violence or due to the fear of alienating readers and viewers (I mean, let’s face it, we all want to get on with our lives and the living have a vested interest in domesticating death). So, on some level, in a world awash in images, and where images cycle through the culture at increasing speed, we learn to process images of violence the way we learn to process any other piece of information–fit it into an existing narrative and file it away. Is there some way in which 2666 can be said to narrate and possibly critique/subvert this tendency?

POLITICS (pages 513-564)

The novel’s politics rise a little closer to the surface in this section. They’ve been there all along but there’s a sense of people’s eyes being opened to the structural/political sources of the violence in this week’s reading, which I’d characterize as follows (Naptime has also been digging into the politics, and has an excellent post here):
a) The Maquiladoras are the quintessential expression of neo-liberal economic policies (NAFTA/Free Trade). They become a magnet for impoverished workers, especially young women, for whom they are a source of potential social and economic empowerment, or, perhaps more accurately, the best of a bad set of options. At the same time they create tremendous opportunities for their victimization.
b) A toxic stew of misanthropy/misogyny/homophobia permeates Santa Teresa, devaluing women’s lives especially, and making young women easy targets (murders aside, the book reaches what may be the apex—or nadir–of its portrayal/critique of misogyny in the section on pages 552-53 where a police officer tells an endless series of offensive jokes about women).
c) Class divisions also influence who becomes a victim–there’s little-to-no redress for the poor women who are killed, but when Linda Vazquez, a young woman from a wealthy and connected family is murdered, the killer is horrifically dispatched as soon as he arrives in prison (prison is the one place in the novel where you witness the brutalization of men).
d) The drug trade and the corruption of the political system and the police force creates an environment, as Steve so astutely puts it in the comments to this post, in which the state has ceased “exercising its monopoly on violence to protect its citizenry”, and “we are being confronted with a situation in which the social contract has broken down at every level.” This fuels the violence and enables the killers to act with impunity.

Admittedly Bolaño’s political analysis is hardly earth shattering–you learn nothing you couldn’t learn much more quickly by reading journalistic accounts of the situation in Ciudad Juárez, but that’s true of just about any topical novel. The point is not to tell the reader something she doesn’t already know, but to evoke the social-political conditions in a way that traditional journalism either can’t or won’t–to fictionalize the events in order to get at a presumably deeper truth. Or at least to entrench them more firmly in the reader’s brain.

One of the main thrusts of The Part About the Crimes, obviously, is to dramatize all the things that either blind people to the victimization of women in Juarez, or that make such a thing tolerable, and by tolerable I don’t mean acceptable, but rather something that you live with because you feel powerless to stop it–either because the consequences of trying could mean your own swift and ignominious end, or because you lack power and a platform. But I was struck by this quote from Charles Bowden in an excellent NPR doc on Juárez, because it suggests that Bolaño’s focus on the murdered women is itself a form of obfuscation (transcript here):

Mr. BOWDEN: People are interested in the dead women of Juarez because it’s a way not to look at Juarez. If you say it’s young girls, 16 to 18, being killed by a serial killer or rich guys for fun or whatever, then you have a finite problem and you don’t have to look at the city. And you can ignore the fact that, well, one to 300 women have vanished, depending on who’s counting; 2,800 people have died. You can ignore the fact that 700 men have disappeared in the same period. You can just pretend that really the only problem in Juarez is this bizarre slaughter of young girls, and then you’re safe. And you don’t have to deal with the fact that this economic idea we had of border factories, etc., is a goddamned disaster, that it’s killing people, that no one can live on the wages, that workers leaving American factories spend two hours getting home to a cardboard shack and they’re working 44 to 48 hours a week and you wonder why they get violent.

If you have questions about what the global economy will eventuate in, go to Juarez. The global economy–what we call the global economy, no tariff barriers, etc., has been running there since the late ’60s. You’ve got a 40-year record. And what it’s produced is one of the most violent cities in the world.”

I don’t know if this was Bolaño’s intention, but I wonder if he’s hinting at a second level of blindness, one that implicates readers of the novel–the way the focus on the murders of the young women, which enables the idea of a serial killer, obscures the larger climate of violence of which they are a part, and the structural/political forces that make this slaughter possible.

Oh Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood Dept: I am NOT arguing that violence against women is not a particular and distinct subset of violence in general, or that it’s improper to view the feminicidios apart from the larger violence of the drug war, just as I would not argue against hate crimes legislation because there are already laws against assault and murder on the books. But it does seem like they are an integral part of this larger climate of violence, and I do wonder if Bolaño is aware of what he screens out in narrowing the focus to the murders of women. Maybe the joke’s on us: we think that we are seeing THE harsh reality by exposing ourselves to Bolaño’s relentless accounts of the murders of young women, but in narrowing our focus to these crimes we miss or ignore the larger political critique Bolaño is trying to put forward.

The Ghost in the Narrative Machine

Maria, over at Las Obras de Roberto Bolaño, recently pointed to a blog, Caravana de Recuerdos, that’s packed with smart commentary about 2666. So I went over and poked around a bit, and while there’s a lot to be learned there, one observation in particular leapt out at me:

“…it’s clear from the outset that either Santa Teresa or death is really the main ‘protagonist’ of this section. Unlike other parts of the book, this one is the only one where a deed, ‘the crimes,’ takes the place of a named human being in the title.”

The idea that the protagonist of The Part About The Crimes is death, or the trans-historical, almost metaphysical force behind the crimes, helps answer a question that’s been in the back of my mind for some time—just who is narrating this novel?

As I noted in an earlier post, while the dominant voice in this section is the documentary/reportorial/forensic voice, it actually contains numerous narrative registers. The commentators at Caravana note this as well, and further point out the “fluidity and ease” with which Bolano shifts between the third and first person in the section devoted to Florita Almada.

Anyway, I thought that if the protagonist of the section is death or the crimes, then death or the crimes, or whatever malevolent force is ultimately behind them, must also be narrating the section to a degree. So, of the many voices that speak up in this section, one that frequently hijacks the narration is the mocking, misanthropic, misogynistic, homophobic, you-name-it force that saturates the environment of Santa Teresa. Numerous examples of this voice taking over the narration could be cited, but here are two: the disheartening (to say the least) discussion of the numerous ways to rape a woman that Steve cites, and Dan’s observation that the description of Harry Magaña as a “self-sucking faggot” seems dropped into the narration out of nowhere. Jeff, of course, rightly points out that Magaña is a less honorable character than we first assumed (he’s one of the few characters seeking to right a wrong, but he commits more than a few of his own in the process), but I do think this is one of those instances where the force behind the crimes inserts itself in the narration and mocks and slanders someone trying to stem the tide of violence engulfing the city. And in Magaña’s case the mocking (if not the particular epithet) is doubly deserved because his methods partake of and perpetuate the very thing he’s trying to fight.

Art, Extravagance and Impunity

One of the most obvious characteristics of the murders—both the fictionalized versions and their real-life analogues—is the absolute impunity with which they are committed. No one ever seems to get caught, and no one ever bothers to hide a body. The murders are committed behind closed doors, but the bodies are disposed of pretty much out in the open. They are tossed by the side of the road, or dumped in vacant lots, or dragged a few hundred yards out into the desert, where they will be easily discovered. The almost certain discovery of the bodies doesn’t seem to disturb the culprits, because whoever is committing the crimes, and its obviously no one single person, knows that they will almost certainly never be held to account.

This leads to yet a further level of impunity—the absolute lack of restriction or scruples the killers have about how they treat their victims. The victims are subject to unspeakable torture and sexual violation. Often as not they are mutilated, and there’s at least a hint that the mutilations occur after the victims are already dead. And, when the bodies are finally disposed of, some of them seem almost staged—the woman with her head buried in the sand, the woman with the stake through her torso, the woman left on the second floor of a building under construction: “ the woman wasn’t from the neighborhood, so why dump the body in the upper part of the city, on streets assiduously patrolled at night by the police or private security guards? Why go to the effort to leave the body on the second floor of a building under construction with all the risks that entailed…” (425) The killers know they won’t get caught, and this leads to a brutal extravagance in their methods.

This train of thought reminded me of the section in book 1 featuring the Swabian (p. 17-23). As you’ll recall the Swabian claimed to have hosted Archimboldi on one of his book tours of the German provinces, and to have dined with him and some other village notables. At the dinner a woman tells a story of a trip she and her husband, a former cavalry officer, once took to Buenos Aries. While there they are invited to dinner at a local rancher’s home, and as part of the festivities, there are a series of horse races, which the rancher arranges for the woman’s husband to win. The throwing of the race is described as a gesture of hospitality, of selflessness. Everyone is on board with the deception, except for a ranch hand’s son—the “little gaucho”—who, furious at being forced to lose, reveals the deception to the widow “with the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and slice up to the breasts…” Archimboldi describes the fixing of the race as a gesture of “selflessness. In other words, he [the rancher’s son, who also lost to the cavalry officer] chose extravagance, carried away by the impromptu festivities that he and his father had arranged. Everything had to be squandered, including his victory, and everyone understood it had to be that way…Everyone except the little gaucho…If you’d spent any longer with him, I think he would have killed you, which would certainly have been an extravagant gesture in its own right.” (23) Extravagance, in other words, can be both generosity and murder. Murder is being extravagant, rather than miserly or conservative, with existence–squandering it, throwing it away.

Bolaño is without question a man of the left, but one thing that seems to have obsessed him throughout his writing life is the connection between art (and/or culture) and right-wing politics. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a rogues’ gallery of fictional right-wing writers and artists. The protagonist of Dark Star (probably the best introduction to Bolaño for someone wary of tackling The Savage Detectives or 2666), is a Chilean death squad leader who is also a poet and conceptual artist, and who turns his murderous political activities into a kind of macabre art project.

I guess that one of my unexamined assumptions about art is that it is, for the most part, on the side of the angels. That even “transgressive” art, even ugly art, is somehow trying to shine an edifying light upon the darker corners of existence. Bolaño seems to be arguing that art, and the creative impulse, is a more ambiguous impulse than we might normally suppose. And I think that maybe, just maybe, he’s positing some sort of connection between the gratuitousness of art (or whatever primal impulse lies behind the gratuitousness of art) and the extravagance and brutality of the crimes.

Art serves many functions, but one of its essential characteristics, at least for people like myself, who tend to treat it as a surrogate religion, is its gratuitousness. A big part of what we value about it is its non-utilitarian nature. This is not to say that art doesn’t have its uses (it’s got a million of them, and even its spiritual/psychological uses are still uses) or that art that turns a profit ceases to be art (2666 is a bestseller after all). But it is to say that even today, long after the divisions between high and low culture have been demolished, it’s something that’s valued because of the way it stands outside the realm of necessity that governs and defines so much of our daily lives. This is part of the basis of claims that art is intended to elevate, and one of the things that help make a work of art seem (potentially) timeless. There’s something sacred about its uselessness, its gratuitousness, its extravagance.

So, question: is the link between art, extravagance, and crime, which seems to me to be in the novel, something Bolaño put there deliberately, or something that found its way into the novel on its own? Or am I chasing a phantom? And, if it is there, what does it all mean anyway? What, if anything, is Bolaño saying about the relationship between art, impunity, extravagance, gratuitousness, neo-liberalism, and mass murder?

Why 2666 Is A Difficult Novel To Like (And What This Has To Do With The Part About The Crimes)

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?