The Awful Possibilities

in other words, it’s almost over. men on books, 1.3

this is the third and final part of my discussion with my brother timothy about the savage detectives by roberto bolano. read the second part here and the first part here.

from timothy:

hello, friend this will be the last thing anyone will ever say about “savage detectives.” i have finished the book for all time. i’ve been hesitating because i’m trying to put everything into a coherent logical stream, but it doesn’t seem like that is about to happen. so before we avaunt, be on yr guard (give up now).

i don’t have much to say in response to what you last wrote because i really think you encapsulated it quite nicely. if i may put a post-script to what you’ve put forth, i would say that the thing that bolano has done to make a truly global literature, and a great gift to latin american writers is to dislocate the narrative entirely. i would quibble with yr assessment of rushdie as relatable because he is so self-consciously other. bolano on the other hand, unlike the other light of the latin american 20th century, marquez, does not constantly beat you over the head with its latin american-ness. in fact, he even pisses on the idea with barrios (the character, whose name means not just neighborhood, but outskirts) educating the san diegan ex-pats on otherness.

i’ll mostly leave it unsaid how cheeky i am being, but the sentiment remains the same. i know there are many other luminaries, and frankly you know how well-versed i am in latin-american literature (ie not at all). i’ve purposely up to now avoided extemporizing, but the one thing i took from my trip that i feel comfortable saying in public is how much i enjoyed the intentional non-u.s.ness of mexico: the american tourist office that had no english speakers, the punk club that played the sex pistols followed by salsa. it was nice that unlike many europeans they don’t seem to actively define themselves in opposition with the u.s. (though this may be underlying it all, for all i know) and if i can call americans uneducated louts, i think this will do in terms of not being offensive.

how cheeky am i now? i even say cheeky. but it is truly freeing to have bolano actively allowing the reader to read this book wherever he is in life.

and we don’t read in a vacuum (wow, i almost made that seem fluid). i’m into delillo’s great jones street and was struck by this, the lapsed rockstar and his ‘girlfriend’ speaking:

“‘When am I going back to them? I know exactly what you mean. The people. The crowd. The audience. The fans. The followers.”

“The public,” she said.

“When I have something to go back with. Something or nothing. Nothing takes more time.”

maybe not the best way to get extra-textual, but it really helped me develop what i was thinking about sd. throughout the book, we are led to believe that ulises and belano are searching for something within cesarea’s life that struck them. so we construct their narrative: they were inspired by her life and wanted to live with as much meaning. but rather than retrace her steps, they would find cesarea by writing their own life stories.

but then we get to the final section, and we are told that they found cesarea and it’s up to us to decide whether they were inspired or deflated by the experience. i vacillate, but as i addressed in my previous missive, i think that the see-saw is the point. we pull back from one, and find its resting on another see-saw. see-saws all the way down.

kind of like life? exactly the sort of trite statement that made me avoid writing this for so damn long.

but i am old-school, a high-school hippie learning about and railing against deconstruction all at once.

literature can mean something, should be edifying, and is powerful. so what then to make of a cast of characters that are consciously trying to become literature?

‘Nothing takes more time.’- were ulises and belano disappointed or satisfied by their encounter with cesarea? i’ll leave it open-ended because answering it doesn’t suit my purpose. either way it is a deflating experience to search for something and find it; what then?

another unfounded statement on the nature of latin-american life. they (the characters in sd) feel comfortable claiming spain as the u.s. (we) does england (i do enjoy the linguistic shading being a we from us, highschool!!!), and it’s not a stretch to locate don quixote in this text. my memory fails me, but i even believe there is a mention somewhere.

the nature of don quixote, the book and the man, switches when he becomes aware of his biographer. the text folds in on itself. but, as readers we have been with him the whole time. throughout sd, we see ulises and bolano from a distance, except in the final 50 page section. yet readers can be confident that the characters are aware they are being written about. in fact, they live as though there is no other way, such that after his final deflating adventure in nicaragua we hear nothing more about ulises once he returns home. there will be no defeating the suitors.

meanwhile, belano’s story has major gaps, in between his dishwashing days to the days of africa, when he finally becomes the romantic ideal he seemed to be striving for throughout. and we don’t even get to see it. hmmm. nor do we get to see his relationship with arguably the love of his life or the birth of his son, both mentioned in passing. such is the fate of one who authors the content of a story but leaves the structure and purpose up to an editor. except this is a facsimile of real life we are talking about. and belano is bolano’s double, so this is the story as he meant it to be told. and as you mentioned, making yrself the romantic hero going off to yr death in africa is not too shabby.

And Cesarea gave me a look, a brief little sideways glance, and said that the search for a place to live and a place to work was the common fate of all mankind.

Stridentism and visceral realism are just two masks to get us to where we really want to go. And where is that? she said. To modernity, Cesarea, I said, to goddamned modernity…

so what do people do when confronted with a cesarea? well, i struggle with amadeo’s response. he is one of my favorite characters, but i cannot tell if his response comes from not getting it, or getting it all too well. even so, he does not follow cesarea, though it would have been exceedingly easy, which probably turns out to be the right decision for him, allowing him to romanticize this singular figure. but he is nostalgic to the point of paralysis, his writings achieving none of what he had hoped, so maybe it wasn’t the right decision. aquiles, on the other hand, has mostly forgotten cesarea and become a much more successful writer.

and madero either misunderstands or sees an opportunity for excuse-making in taking over the life cesarea has left behind, with the subtle improvement of regular sex. no wangknife? such a disappointment.

and what does cesarea mean to the reader, ulises and belano? is she authoring the romantic life of a poet who was able to escape, a prophet who foresees 2666? or is she a hack who ruminates on minor public policy quibbles? add to this the intentional confusion between her only published poem and madero’s mexican jokes and the final drawings are devoid of authorship. poems or jokes? both? regardless, we have no indication that ulises or belano contacted madero to retrieve the journals, though they knew it was possible.

none of this is to take away from the loaded question that haunts the end of the book. i’m not about to try to answer it. in fact, i could make an argument that everything i’ve written is to declare its unanswerability.

one last thing about intertextuality. something i’ve been skirting for quite some time but it has some resonance with what i’ve written above. there’s an obvious homage to ‘under the volcano’ in the shooting death of mi general in a brothel under vague political pretense. i’ll leave it at that in case you intend to read it someday, but its a fun winknnod, that underscores the character-literature play especially as it happens to a would-be patron of the arts who is noted as not particularly well-read or intelligent.

back with lowry then; the epigram about not allowing mexico to be saved by god. i enjoy the way that religion is so absent from the text (another divorce from trad latin-american lit and culture? as i understand it) and addressed only as myth and poetry, such as ulises’ theory on the camel and needle. one more pisstake, jesus lived his life and let others do the writing, only to have them get one letter wrong and fuck the whole thing up.

“Once Arturo told me that Ulises had his own version of one of Jesus’ parables, but either he couldn’t explain it very well or I’ve forgotten it, or, most likely, I wasn’t paying much attention when he told it to me.”

so, have i said something? nothing takes more time, but that wasn’t what I meant to say.

from me:

while i could tweak this or that of your theses one way or another, you’ve pretty much summed up my emotional/interpretive reactions to the book, and the only place i want to jump in is to clear up my comment about rushdie: i don’t think i got my point about him across in the last post because i agree (both now and when i first wrote it) with your reaction precisely.

and i would add that this book is a mindfuck.

otherwise i’m going to let our own conversation about the book fizzle out with something a lot less consequential (unless, of course, you care to rebut). i want to talk about mechanics. i mentioned a long time ago that i had certain problems with bolano’s technique, and i figured i’d tell you how they played out for me.

first, the book definitely dragged at times, as i suspected it would. what i didn’t expect was how often it dragged even in the final section of madero’s journals. overall, in much the same way that the end of the oral history justified the drag of the middle, the end of the book justifies the drag of the near-end.

but who wants to be justified?

i understand that the whole metapoint of this book is that the center doesn’t hold, no matter where you locate the center (belano/lima, tinajero, madero, the state of global art, life, etc.), but the artistry shouldn’t be sacrificed to the point.

can of worms and shit.

see, most of the criticism i’ve seen tries to skirt the issue by de-emphasizing the artistry behind it and tries to make of that part of the point, but that’s laziness at best and noble-savagizing at worst. there can be no mistaking that bolano put a massive amount of thought and work on behalf of an almost unparalleled talent into the structure and style of this book (as i know you agree). and not just this book. there is so much of 2666 in here (from the cryptic mention of the number itself w/r/t tinajero to the frequent appearance of a writer who sounds a lot like archimboldi, one ostensible focuse of 2666 the novel), as well as references to books that he’d previously published, that it’s hard to imagine that bolano didn’t have some overarching narrative in mind for his whole career. (this is going to get even more confusing as the industry descends on his papers — i’ve heard a sixth section of 2666 was discovered recently.)

i’m not going to deal with all that. it’s a dissertation at least, and we’re abusing the internet enough already.

but assuming this is so (and it has to be, unless he’s the most interesting charlatan of all time), how could he fuck up some of the things he fucked up?

the drag i mentioned is an example, but a hard one to defend. (one man’s drag is another man’s contact high.) since no one’s here accusing me, i’m going to say he knew it was, and is a bully. even if he’s bullying in pursuit of a point. this claim becomes very easy to substantiate in light of section 4 of 2666. i ain’t mad, but he didn’t need to go that far, same with the oral history.

but here is one that i’ll dip in before i leave: the unintentional gaps. i’m not talking about the disappearances of lima and belano (both obviously intentional). i mean, like, who compiled the oral history? i think the obvious candidate is madero himself, particularly in light of Grajales’ “Garcia Madero? He doesn’t ring a bell [...] There was another seventeen-year-old kid but he wasn’t called Garcia Madero. Let’s see … his name was Bustamante.” but then too many things don’t match up.

early (relatively) in the oral history, maria font tells the interlocutor about her first sighting of belano and lima after the suddent departure. she repeatedly mentions the “stolen” impala. at the end, we know madero ended up with it. why wouldn’t madero mention this to her? if she’s only relating a former mindstate (ie, at the time she thought they had the car, but at the time she relates the story she knows madero had it) this should be clear in the syntax. likewise, basically everyone covers ground that they know madero would be aware of (in this chapter, for ex, that quim’s in the bin; in another, angelica points out that pancho was her boyfriend, which she knew madero knew).

this could be a statement about everyone’s tendency to self-mythologize (your notion that the characters live as though they’re being written about, which i agree applies to belano and lima), but i don’t buy it because i see the lack of center and disillusionment as being linked inextricably, and really it would be cheap otherwise. here’s why:

for some reason, tinajero opted out. out of what, who cares. but her collected works amount to a straight line, a wavy line, and a jagged line. you were right in pointing out that madero’s sombrero and window riffs toward the end recall tinajero’s one published poem. doesn’t this suggest a shared mindstate? could madero idolize belano and lima enough to begin tracking their memory down almost immediately? (the interviews begin shortly after these adventures.)

even if you/anyone disagree(s) with that take, there’s still this: if the interlocutor really wanted to preserve the story of belano and lima, why leave so much (meaning the major points, like most of lima’s time in mexico and the love of belano’s life, both of which i’ve mentioned already, but also their poetry, which is absent) out? That’s totally appropriate for a novel, but not for an oral history, which seeks to document.

i have my hunches, but they point to bolano’s point (mentioned ad nauseum) and not to the form. the ideal is to match point and form up, no? and yet bolano is clearly too smart not to realize. i will think about this a lot, i know, just like i will think about the ending and also how it relates to 2666, which i also think about a lot.

but i will not post about it again for a long, long time.

this concludes the part about bolano.

i will resume posting at slightly more internet-appropriate lengths shortly.

thank you, timothy.