Television is Furniture

A bit of context, for what its worth: The book takes place in the Zone, the war zone of Europe at the end of World War II and the months immediately following Germany’s surrender. Lieutenant Tyrone Slothtrop (of the Massachusetts Slothtrops) is shooed out of London because no one quite knows how to make sense of the fact that every time the guy gets laid in city, that part of town gets hit by a rocket. He’s sent by a sinister man named Pointsman out onto the continent in search of the S-gerat, an item supposedly stored in the body of one of the German rockets (no one even knows whether or not the rocket in question was ever fired). This is much too brief to even be a plot synopsis for such a complex book, but it a start.

Well, what’s the point? If one does even the most casual search of the online archive surrounding Pynchon’s mammoth Gravity’s Rainbow there are interpretations and thematic explanations from literati high and low, people well versed in the subtleties of Tarot, the A2, the A4, physics, religion. Everything. All more qualified than your correspondents here at TiF to tell you what it’s “about.” If you want an answer take a look at your search results in Google. But instead of cribbing the discussion from someone else’s brains let’s just plow ahead and talk rainbows for a moment.

The rainbow has a duality. It has its romantic lore and its decidedly unromantic and reductive  science. We can ask what is a rainbow and talk to someone about light and atmospherics, yawn, or we can talk about the spectacular beauty of those fading indefinite pinks, greens, and blues, colors streaking across the sky, disappearing somewhere before landfall. We can think back to our own memories of our own rainbows, maybe when we were 8 and let out by our babysitters, pushing our swings as squeaking high as our flimsy father-built sets would allow when we looked up at the apex of our latest push to the nearby hillside behind our family’s house, and saw our very first one. There was no end it. It reached out from somewhere invisible in a long dewy arc, sparkling colors against the clearing afternoon sky, and down past our field of vision. We were transfixed, for that single instant, with something greater than science. Rainbows are beautiful not because of the science that creates them, but for the romantic notions they inspire in us. Carry that tidbit with you if you’re going to read this book.

*****

Gravity’s Rainbow also works in its own dualities. Us and Them, or They as Pynchon often puts it. The They always in control, condescendingly and forever allowing the story’s pawns their illusion of freedom. They’s power lay in controlling world markets and capital and industry and governance. They create the Weimar economy, the Depression, FDR’s election, circumstances for war, and They manufacture the tools used to fight it. And They, after enough of Us have been destroyed, after enough progress has  been made in science and enough fear and mourning generated, roll up their tanks and troops and open the Zone for Their own approaching peace. Nothing for them is unforeseen or unaccounted for. The representative of Us, for the duration of the book, is Slothtrop, but no one is immune to Their control. Everything is connected because They connect it. It is a paranoiac’s world. And the Zone is a paranoiac’s paradise.

And Tyrone Slothtrop, uber-paranoiac and he of the giddy, rocket-impacting erections, comes early to understand that They control him. It begins in Nice with the Pavlovian Octypus attacking Katje. Slothtrop begins to see the marionette’s hands and the strings spraying down from the aether into the Zone. His paranoia grows as his search for the S-gerat continues. Nothing can promise him control of his own inertia. The rockets stop falling upon reaching the continent, but the glowing white corneas of They continue in the darkness, Prime Movers of Slothtop’s search for Rocket #00000.

But control in Gravity’s Rainbow is not only the invisible They. S&M returns again and again to the fore. General Pudding, a leader of the Allied Command, can be found in a London basement, early in the book, begging with all his masochist heart to be defiled and humiliated. And Katje’s unrequited need to be punished. Their punishment for her is to leave her wanting more of it. She will always exist, wanting to be destroyed. Greta, who in her submission during von Goll’s film brought her a daughter, a young woman who became the perfect object of submission. There is, throughout the book, a hunger by characters for their own personal release, their final destruction which would allow an escape from control. It is the sole and stated cultural mission of the tribe representing the black Schwarzkommando, whose tenets dictate that the dignity of freedom can only come when their kind finally cease to exist on Earth.

Slothtrop is both a threat and a slave. As much black-and-white racism as there is in this book, it is Slothtrop who represents the truest slave, and in turn represents what slaveholders feared most: the uprising. He could seemingly dictate the rocket’s flight, and therefore in some way held sway over Death. Their control of Slothtrop is a means for Them of attempting to control Death, to cheat it.

But these heretics will be sought and the dominion of silence will enlarge as each one goes down…they will all be sought out. Each will have his personal Rocket. Stored in its target-seeker will be the heretic’s EEG, the spikes and susurrations of heartbeat, the ghost-blossomings of personal infrared, each Rocket will know its intended and hunt him, ride him a green-doped and silent hound, through our World, shining and pointed in the sky at his back, his guardian executioner rushing in, rushing closer…

In this one lovely passage Pynchon finds his refutation for the heresy of They and control. The rocket is of course literally an agent of Death, but also, in a personal way for each of us, Death itself. It is the Rocket we are all born with. We will never know when or where its impact will come. Some of us, like Slothtrop, might be thrilled by it, aroused by it, while others might hide from it, eschewing smoke and drink, taking up yoga, jogging, filling quiet spaces with noise so as not to hear it’s knocking. Built for us and launched at birth, each rise and fall unique to pitch and yaw rates of our own lives. Slothtrop’s search for the 00000, the rocket containing the S-gerat, is the search for his end, the search for a way to cut the puppeteer’s strings.

In response to Mr. Borland’s post on 2666.

One of the great, well-trod themes of Roberto Bolaño’s was his endless flouting of the literary rule book (from NYTimes.com “…Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules…”). The obvious example from 2666 (and others) is that of the writer-as-principle. Bolaño makes it work by never touching the third rail—ignoring the hand-wringing act of writing itself, or even the protagonists’ concern with it—and focusing instead on Archimboldi’s life when he is not at his typewriter, out in the ordinary world. Or he does so by creating a panoramic, focusing on others with whom Archimboldi shares it.

Benno von Archimboldi is never seen at his typewriter, pounding out strange titles or thumbing his yellow-paged thesaurus, but neither is he seen brushing his teeth or wracked by self-doubt or worried for his livelihood. And it is as much true for the poets in The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile as it is in 2666. The artists Bolaño imagines are dispassionate about ordinary life the way a judge is intended to be about the law. His artist-characters interact with people, but Bolaño manages to make the spheres of interaction between writers and “ordinaries” as small as might be the intersection of circles in a Venn Diagram. There is, in Bolaño’s world, a firm and permanent separation between the artist and the world he inhabits (and reacts to, interprets, ignores, disdains, etc.). Artists move among us, but are not of us.

And I think, after reading a few of his books, that there is a motive in Bolaño’s separation. By decrying, and I’ll nod to John here, that all in the world collapses into pain eventually—the ultimate implication being that we must scrounge our meaning/pleasure/redemption where we can—Bolaño makes his case for the relevance of art. And it is a strong argument, written with more imaginative eloquence than most philosopher/novelists (think Kundera with more of everything, including, in 2666, misogyny) will likely ever muster. But it also betrays a serious bias by Bolaño. Artists, to Bolaño, are crazy, but crazy in the way prophets might be thought of as crazy. The prophet, after all, is distinguished not only by his message (or art, as it were), but also by his presenting it as something universal. By subjecting themselves to criticism and ostracism and ridicule of others, all in the service of this impelled need to create a universal or deliver a message, the artist and the prophet both reach toward something that might be characterized as divine. And it if you take it for granted as I do that God is very much a figment of humanity’s imagination, it very well may be that art is the only honest-to-goodness universal we can share and that also endures. And so all of this sounds pretty darn reasonable. Like I said, Bolaño makes a good case.

But.

There remains the sticky issue of everything collapsing into pain. It’s this premise that, as I thought about Bolaño and 2666 (and John’s post), I found was what I just could not abide. To put it very broadly: existence, to Bolaño’s characters, is the experience of pain and the experience of finding ways to negate that pain. And so, for Bolaño’s artists, everything collapses into pain, and they in their collapse offer up art in the same way Jesus offered his body: a sacrifice for the rest of humanity. The prophet turned martyr. When you stop to think about it, it’s no wonder why so many other writers are exalting this guy. His writers are demigods. And I don’t like it.

And it’s not that I just don’t like it. I disagree with it. The people that say existence is forever collapsing into pain are only slightly more interesting to me than those who are always building it up toward a heavenly eternity (ok, the collapsing into pain folks are a lot more interesting, but only because the God/life-is-good folks are just so abhorrent that I felt the need to add this parenthetical about them). Both pain and pleasure, suffering and redemption, are experiences in life, but neither is what it’s all about. And before you ask “Okay smart guy, what’s it all about?” think for a moment about what it’s all about to you. I personally like to think that maybe it’s about nothing. Maybe existence is neutral, neither a moral good or bad, and therefore entirely up to us as [relatively] liberated agents to define. Bolaño’s premise doesn’t work for me because I don’t think existence is as bleak as he did. And even if it is, just because artists create something universal doesn’t make them, as human beings, in anyway more valuable or better than anyone else. Which gets me to my second point.

The more I think about it, the more I find it a little condescending. While exalting artists on the one hand, Bolaño seems intent on destroying all things ordinary (And before you quibble about “what’s ordinary?” let’s just call it everything not artist-related). The normal, average souls in 2666 are raped and brutalized into unidentifiable pulp. The rest, those somewhere above serfdom but below the demigods are to varying degrees mad, cold, indifferent, depressed or blandly passive. The relationship between the psychiatrist and detective walled off into a barely verbal, almost animal experience. The critics of the first section have devoted their lives not to creation, but reaction to Archimboldi’s creations. They are frivolous acolytes. Love for them is as elusive as their object of study. The professor who slips into madness worrying about his daughter. The reporters too weak to cover the murders. The American detective from across the border who blunders into his own death. These people are all assailable. The artist Archimboldi, however, strolls through battlefields without the slightest worry in the world. He cannot be touched. But the quietly content, hardworking factory girls can be. Over and over. The earnest can be. Those with aspirations only of living an ordinary life, whatever that is, are invisible, and therefore expendable. All the while the truly invisible Archimbaldi remains safely off-camera. And true, Bolaño takes pains acknowledge tragedies both great and small, but he also, in his never shying away from them, in his almost relish of describing them, seems at the same time to be shrugging and saying “Well, it happens.” He would rather be a demigod remembered for all time, or be dead, than be somewhere in the middle, just another ordinary guy who appreciates the smallness of his own existence.

In which we ponder the question: Why, in 2666, does Roberto Bolaño link the Santa Teresa murders and the vanished German writer, Benno von Archimboldi?

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them, thinks Oscar Fate, and wonders where he had heard this. The frightened Mexico City reporter, terrified she will be killed for writing about the Santa Teresa slayings? Or the giant fucking albino German, imprisoned for the crimes?

No one pays attention, but they affect everything and everybody. They are the gravitational center of Bolaño’s book, a singularity, unobservable in their truest nature, at the moment of their commission; like a black hole, they are visible only through their effects on the world around them, and through the debris they leave behind. Mutilated corpses, visions of pain and suffering, copycats and conflicting theories. A city that twists itself in psychological knots not only to assimilate the events, but to render them horrifyingly mundane.

If Santa Teresa alone was the sum of 2666, the novel might be an explication of Bolaño’s original reference, in Amulet:  “a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” But instead, twin threads tie the novel’s parts together: the murders, and the mysterious German writer, Archimboldi, whose nephew is ultimately accused of the crimes, and whose presence in Santa Teresa is felt but never seen.

* * *

Late in the final part, already withdrawn from society, his wife dead, his legend growing, Archimboldi meets a French essayist who tells him of a home, a refuge, for vanished European writers. They travel there together and find the other writers watching television, playing petanque and drinking wine, collapsing at the dinner table (though in truth the writers are not writers at all, or at least not in the sense imagined; Archimboldi discovers he has been brought to a sanatorium, and these are ordinary people, simply old or crazy). The essayist lives in a small room with only a single element of personality displayed, an apple on a plate, which at night, when the lights are out, “smells as strongly as Rimbaud’s Voyelles.” Yet it too, like everything, will collapse in the end, the old man explains. “Everything collapses in pain, he says. “All eloquence springs from pain.”

The old man’s apple, the knowledge or wisdom of the writer: Everything collapses in pain, and from this tragedy can be constructed something beautiful, eloquence, art, perhaps even an illusion of meaning. But this construction is no more permanent than its source. It too, like everything, collapses. This doesn’t mean that art is futile; indeed, without it there might be only pain. Nor does it eliminate or justify the original pain. It is only part of a cyclical process of creation and recreation, a temporary aestheticization of the experiences of life.

Writers vanish – perhaps because they understand this process too well? Or because they remember what society has tried so hard to forget, and this makes it impossible to live a life in public? Archimboldi keeps in touch with only a single person, the Baroness, the wife of his publisher (who becomes his publisher), who has never read a word he has written. She presses him to come back to Germany, to reappear, to speak to journalists. “In my worst nightmares,” he tells her. If he returns, people will ask him questions, ask him to explain, ask him for answers. But he doesn’t have answers, knows (as they don’t) that isn’t the point. He has given them his books, and that is all he has.

* * *

Archimboldi is a Prussian, born of an age to be drafted into the Nazi army. In Germany, fighting across the Soviet Union, reading the journals of a vanished Jewish writer, finally murdering a hapless Nazi functionary who had ordered hundreds of Jews killed because he could think of nothing else to do with them; across all this stretch of 20th century history, he is able to witness atrocity, to be in it but not of it. He walks through firefights, his commander says, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him, and nobody can hit him despite his height. He watches, and rarely even goes so far as to judge. He sees pain, and from it comes eloquence, but the price is his own identity. He loses his name, and then he vanishes from the world, leaving only his books behind, and an idea of himself, his nephew’s dream, a giant rescuer who never quite arrives.

Women vanish, killed in terrible ways. Writers vanish, Archimboldi vanishes, perhaps because the knowledge gained in transmuting experience into eloquence, and seeing this collapse back into pain, is too much to share.

* * *

Bolaño left notes that indicated his belief in a “hidden center” beneath the “physical center” of the novel. We as readers can’t see the killings as they happen, or the pain and terror of the murdered women.  We can’t read Archimboldi’s books, or even (with a few minor exceptions) discern their subjects. Even Archimboldi himself, though we follow the external course of his life and see the objects of much of his thought (the sea, Ansky’s journals, his half-mad wife), remains largely mysterious to us.

What we see are the effects of these things on the world, the way that unseen experiences become part of the texture of others’ lives. In Santa Teresa, we see the police and residents cope with increasingly unforgettable horror, see the twisting of society that takes place as the reality of unimaginable pain slips slowly past people’s defenses, and colors their everyday thoughts. For the critics of the first, almost innocent, portion of the novel, the truth of Archimboldi’s life is unknowable, but they too are changed by the process of probing this blank spot, of chasing him finally to a place which has nothing to do with his biography, and everything to do with who he is.

No one in this novel experiences true revelation, in the sense of understanding even so much as their own private corner of the world. Flashes of illumination are fragmentary, hallucinatory or dreamlike. Even Archimboldi, confronted with the essayist’s apple, fails to understand the old man’s words. Understanding entails a reference to meaning, and the cycle of pain, its rebirth in eloquence and re-collapse into pain has no external meaning beyond its own existence. Art can never justify pain, can never serve as an apologia for something as terrible as the Santa Teresa murders, or the killing of hundreds (or tens of millions) of Jews on the edge of a Polish village, or even the crucifixion of a megalomaniac, horse-hung Romanian general. Archimboldi can only offer a dream of rescue, not the reality.

But without Archimboldi, without the eloquence, we have only Santa Teresa. And that is a thought more horrible than its alternative.

I’ll speak for myself. We’ll talk about books here, some that we read together, some that we won’t, some ambitious, some not, some beautiful and some that we’d already have forgotten unless we took the time to put our thoughts down.

If something comes of it, good. Reading is enriched by writing about it afterward, or arguing, or even just relating the story to an interested listener. Doors open, scenes unfold more subtly than at first glance, ideas flower from seeds.

I don’t pretend to be a critic. Sometimes there will be analysis here, more often questions explored or paths of associations followed until they run out in some dusty cul-de-sac.

Comments are welcome, though the public nature of this blog is more a convenience than a performance or display. Readers aren’t expected. But a conversation would nonetheless be a lovely thing.

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