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.