2666

by Roberto Bolaño

She was incapable of setting herself a goal and striving steadily toward it. At least, no goal was appealing or desirable enough for her to pursue it unreservedly. Used in a personal sense, the phrase “achieve an end” seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it’s therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths,

It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.

(Pelletier delivered a paper titled “Heine and Archimboldi: Converging Paths”; Espinoza delivered a paper titled “Ernst Jünger and Benno von Archimboldi: Diverging Paths”),

Paths converge ad diverge ad nauseam throughout the book.

Both Pelletier and Espinoza respected Morini’s work, but Pelletier’s words (spoken as if from inside an old castle or a dungeon dug under the moat of an old castle) sounded like a threat in the peaceful little restaurant on the Rue Galande and hastened the end of an evening that had begun in an atmosphere of cordiality and contentment.

Decscription followed by more specific description

throwing caution to the winds and enthusiastically yielding to the festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival (or penultimate carnival) exegesis upheld by Pelletier and Espinoza.

Stylistically, Bolaño loves to choose a word (ultimate) and then modify to a more specific word (penultimate) in his metaphors and descriptions

Liz Norton appeared, heaven-sent, and demolished the counterattack like a Desaix, like a Lannes, a blond Amazon who spoke excellent German, if anything too rapidly, and who expounded on Grimmelshausen and Gryphius and many others, including Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus.

Esoteric literary references. Bolaño hallmark

finally, as they walked the wet, bright streets (bright only intermittently, as if Bremen were a machine jolted every so often by brief, powerful electric charges),

the four of them laughed at the little animals of Bremen, which watched them or watched their shadows on the pavement while mounted harmoniously, innocently, on each other’s backs.

Espinoza calling Norton and having a conversation along essentially the same lines, and Norton calling Pelletier, and Pelletier calling Morini, with the whole process starting over again days later, the call transmuted into hyperspecialized code, signifier and signified in Archimboldi, text, subtext, and paratext, reconquest of the verbal and physical territoriality in the final pages of Bitzius, which under the circumstances was the same as talking about film or problems in the German department or the clouds that passed incessantly over their respective cities, morning to night.

Pelletier’s paper focused on insularity, on the rupture that seemed to separate the whole of Archimboldi’s oeuvre from the German tradition, though not from a larger European tradition.

Do we ever get a true sense of what BVA's books are like?

no biography of him existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as in the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers, and where his work was beginning to circulate widely, no longer just in German departments but on campus and off campus, in the vast cities with a love for the oral and the visual arts.

it’s common knowledge that a conversation involving only a few people, with everyone listening to everyone else and taking time to think and not shouting, tends to be more productive or at least more relaxed than a mass conversation, which runs the permanent risk of becoming a rally, or, because of the necessary brevity of the speeches, a series of slogans that fade as soon as they’re put into words.

Swabian remembered Archimboldi’s jacket more clearly than the novel crammed into its pocket, a little novel with a dirty, creased cover that had once been deep ivory or a pale wheat color or gold shading into invisibility, but now was colorless and dull, just the title of the novel and the author’s name and the colophon of the publishing house, whereas the jacket was unforgettable, a black leather jacket with a high collar, providing excellent protection against the snow and rain and cold, loose fitting, so it could be worn over heavy sweaters or two sweaters without anyone noticing, with horizontal pockets on each side, and a row of four buttons, neither very large nor very small, sewn on with something like fishing line, a jacket that brought to mind, why I don’t know, the jackets worn by some Gestapo officers, although back then black leather jackets were in fashion and anyone who had the money to buy one or had inherited one wore it without stopping to think about what it suggested,

the lady went up to the little gaucho, who was left standing alone, holding his horse’s reins in his left hand (at the other end of the long yard the little gaucho’s father headed off toward the stables with the horse the German had ridden), and told him, in an incomprehensible language, not to be sad, that he had ridden an excellent race but her husband was good too and more experienced, words that to the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher,

a distant cousin of the rancher appeared (or a mistress whom the rancher had lost in the deep folds of memory),

they thought the Swabian must be some kind of impostor), his reserve, his discretion, which verged on the improbable omertà of an old Nazi who smells danger.

When he got up to shake hands, it occurred to both Espinoza and Pelletier that he must be gay. “That faggot is the closest thing to an eel I’ve ever seen,” Espinoza said afterward, as they strolled through Hamburg. Pelletier chided him for his comment, with its markedly homophobic overtones, although deep down he agreed, there was something eellike about Schnell, something of the fish that swims in dark, muddy waters.

Espinoza and Pelletier were much more interested in the photographs, which were almost all of writers they disdained or admired, and in any case had read: Thomas Mann with Bubis, Heinrich Mann with Bubis, Klaus Mann with Bubis, Alfred Döblin with Bubis, Hermann Hesse with Bubis, Walter Benjamin with Bubis, Anna Seghers with Bubis, Stefan Zweig with Bubis, Bertolt Brecht with Bubis, Feuchtwanger with Bubis, Johannes Becher with Bubis, Oskar Maria Graf with Bubis, bodies and faces and vague scenery, beautifully framed.

Bubis = Boobies

When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn’t cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down.

“For example, I love Grosz’s work,” she said, gesturing toward the Grosz drawings on the wall, “but do I really know it? His stories make me laugh, often I think Grosz drew what he did to make me laugh, sometimes I laugh to the point of hilarity, and hilarity becomes helpless mirth, but once I met an art critic who of course liked Grosz, and who nevertheless got very depressed when he attended a retrospective of his work or had to study some canvas or drawing in a professional capacity. And these bouts of depression or sadness would last for weeks. This art critic was a friend, but we’d never discussed Grosz. Once, however, I mentioned the effect Grosz had on me. At first he refused to believe me. Then he started to shake his head. Then he looked me up and down as if he’d never laid eyes on me before. I thought he’d gone mad. That was the end of our friendship. A while ago I was told that he still says I know nothing about Grosz and I have the aesthetic sense of a cow. Well, as far as I’m concerned he can say whatever he likes. Grosz makes me laugh, Grosz depresses him, but who can say they really know Grosz?

Average intelligence and sloppy scholarship are easy to understand. What did he mean by epileptic character, though? that Archimboldi had epilepsy? that he wasn’t right in the head? that he suffered attacks of a mysterious nature? that he was a compulsive reader of Dostoevsky? There was no physical description of the writer in the piece.

Mrs. Bubis’s eyes lit up. As if she were at the scene of a fire, Pelletier told Liz Norton later. Not a raging blaze, but a fire that was about to go out, after burning for months.

it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis’s house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war.

Liz Norton was a passionate lover, although her passion was of limited duration. Not having much imagination of her own, she abandoned herself to any game her lover suggested, without ever taking the initiative, or thinking she ought to. These sessions rarely lasted more than three hours, a fact that occasionally saddened Pelletier, who would gladly have screwed till daybreak.

“So what do we do now?” asked Espinoza. “Leave it all in the hands of fate,”

!!! Or ???

Archimboldi was a candidate for the Nobel that year, not only cause for great joy among Archimboldians everywhere but also a triumph and a vindication, so much so that in Salzburg, at the Red Bull beer hall, on a night of many toasts, peace was declared between the two main factions of Archimboldi scholars, that is, between Pelletier and Espinoza and Borchmeyer, Pohl, and Schwarz, who from then on decided, with respect for each other’s differences and methods of interpretation, to pool their efforts and forswear sabotage, which in practical terms meant that Pelletier would no longer veto the publication of Schwarz’s essays in the journals where he held sway, and Schwarz would no longer veto the publication of Pelletier’s studies in the journals where he, Schwarz, was held in godlike esteem.

In the British Isles, it must be said, Archimboldi remained a decidedly marginal writer.

Then the lady murmured the name Benno von Archimboldi, as if biting a gold coin to test it.

According to Morini, the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed photograph that keeps looming larger, becoming more powerful, more oppressive, without ever losing its link to the negative (which undergoes the reverse process, gradually altered by time and fate), the two images somehow still the same: both young men in the years of terror and barbarism under Hitler, both World War II veterans, both writers, both citizens of a bankrupt nation, both poor bastards adrift at the moment when they meet and (in their grotesque fashion) recognize each other, Archimboldi as a struggling writer, the Swabian as “cultural promoter” in a town where culture was hardly a serious concern.

The second conversation, radically longer than the first, was a conversation between friends doing their best to clear up any murky points they might have overlooked, a conversation that refused to become technical or logistical and instead touched on subjects connected only tenuously to Norton, subjects that had nothing to do with surges of emotion, subjects easy to broach and then drop when they wished to return to the main subject, Liz Norton, whom, by the time the second call was nearing its close, both had recognized not as the Fury who destroyed their friendship, black clad with bloodstained wings, nor as Hecate, who began as an au pair, caring for children, and ended up learning witchcraft and turning herself into an animal, but as the angel who had fortified their friendship, forcibly shown them what they’d known all along, what they’d assumed all along, which was that they were civilized beings, beings capable of noble sentiments, not two dumb beasts debased by routine and regular sedentary work, no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they’d been together they’d have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack of celebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise of eternal friends...

Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. For an instant, Morini felt a wild desire to travel with the reporter. I’d love her until the end of time, he thought. An hour later he’d already forgotten the matter completely.

Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they’d been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us.

Sometimes she thought Pelletier was the more skillful lover. Other times, Espinoza. Viewed from outside, say from a rigorously academic standpoint, one could maintain that Pelletier had a longer bibliography than Espinoza, who relied more on instinct than intellect in such matters, and who had the disadvantage of being Spanish, that is, of belonging to a culture that tended to confuse eroticism with scatology and pornography with coprophagy, a confusion evident (because unaddressed) in Espinoza’s mental library, for he had only just read the Marquis de Sade in order to check (and refute) an article by Pohl in which the latter drew connections from Justine and Philosophy in the Boudoir to one of Archimboldi’s novels of the 1950s.

Pelletier, on the other hand, had read the divine Marquis when he was sixteen and at eighteen had participated in a ménage à trois with two female fellow students, and his adolescent predilection for erotic comics had flowered into a reasonable, restrained adult collection of licentious literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In figurative terms: Pelletier was more intimately acquainted than Espinoza with Mnemosyne, mountain goddess and mother of the nine muses. In plain speech: Pelletier could screw for six hours (without coming) thanks to his bibliography, whereas Espinoza could go for the same amount of time (coming twice, sometimes three times, and finishing half dead) sheerly on the basis of strength and force of will.

the cattle of Zeus or another powerful god are grazing peacefully on the island of the Sun when they wake the powerful appetite of Eurylochus, so that with clever words he cajoles his friends to kill the cattle and prepare a feast, which angers Zeus or whichever god it is no end, who curses Eurylochus for putting on airs and presuming to be enlightened or atheistic or Promethean, since the god in question is more incensed by Eurylochus’s attitude, by the dialectic of his hunger, than by the act itself of eating the cattle, and because of this act, or because of the feast, the ship that bears Eurylochus capsizes and all the sailors die, which was what Pelletier and Espinoza believed would happen to Morini, not in a conscious way, of course, but in a kind of disjointed or instinctual way, a dark thought in the form of a microscopic sign throbbing in a dark and microscopic part of the two friends’ souls.

So the neighborhood didn’t frighten him. He fell in love with it, actually. He liked to come home at night and walk for blocks and blocks without seeing anyone. He liked the color of the streetlamps and the light that spilled over the fronts of the houses. The shadows that moved as he moved. The ashen, sooty dawns. The men of few words who gathered in the pub, where he became a regular. The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

From his armchair, Morini admired Norton’s sitting room—her books and her framed prints hanging on white walls, her mysterious photographs and souvenirs, her preferences expressed in things as simple as the choice of furniture, which was tasteful, comfortable, and modest, and even in the sliver of tree-lined street that she surely saw each morning before she left the apartment—and he began to feel good, as if he were swaddled in these various manifestations of his friend, as if they were also an expression of affirmation, the words of which he might not understand but that brought him comfort nevertheless.

The words old man and German he waved like magic wands to uncover a secret, and at the same time they supplied the stamp of ultraconcrete critical literature, a nonspeculative literature free of ideas, assertions, denials, doubts, free of any intent to serve as guide, neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier.

Here we should clarify in the interest of properly (or improperly) understanding the Serb’s text.

Who's narrating?

Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.

And: it’s possible, too, that she might have hated me, found me pedantic, cold, arrogant, narcissistic, an intellectual elitist. The term intellectual elitist amused him.

Amusing because it's merely a façade

Espinoza arrived, and during lunch Norton told him that Pelletier had thought he was in the plane that went down. Espinoza laughed but gave Pelletier a strange look, which Norton didn’t notice, but Pelletier caught immediately.

The woman bent down and something beneath the leaves slithered toward the lake. “It does actually seem to be a snake,” said Pelletier. “That’s what I thought,” said Espinoza. Norton didn’t answer but she stood to get a better look.

Snake...garden...

One day, when more than three months had gone by since their visit to Norton, one of them called the other and suggested a weekend in London. It’s unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call. In theory, it must have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a strong sense of any such virtue.

Their virtue from a few pages ago was false.

Both of them paid it lip service, of course. But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization.

his fingers, long as a spider’s or a pianist’s,

Pritchard’s muteness was at least that of the observer, equal parts distracted and engaged, and Espinoza’s muteness was that of the observed, sunk in misery and shame.

Pelletier and Espinoza took pains, however, to make it clear there in front of each other that the ideal thing for them, and they imagined for Norton too, was that she ultimately and in a nontraumatic way (try to make it a soft landing, said Pelletier) choose one of them, or neither of them, said Espinoza, either way the decision was in her hands, Norton’s hands, and it was a decision she could make whenever she wanted, whenever was most convenient for her, or never make, put off, defer, postpone, draw out, delay, adjourn until her deathbed, they didn’t care, because they were as in love with her now, while Liz was keeping them in limbo, as they had been before, when they were her active lovers or colovers, as in love with her as they would be when she chose one of them or the other, or when she (in a possible future that was only slightly more bitter, a future of shared bitterness, of somehow mitigated bitterness), if such was her wish, chose neither of them.

When they left Norton’s apartment, they would often take a walk near the hotel, usually in silence, frustrated, somehow exhausted by the goodwill and cheer they felt required to display during these joint visits.

Burying their frustration (unconsciously?)