The+Part+About+the+Detective+and+the+Labyrinth

//I view criticism as a literary creation, not just as the bridge that unites the reader with the writer. Literary critics, if they do not assume themselves to be the reader, are also throwing everything overboard. The interesting thing about literary critics, and that is where I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels, is that he assumes himself to be the reader, an endemic reader capable of arguing a reading, of proposing diverse readings, like something completely different from what criticism tends to be, which is like an exegesis or a diatribe.//

~ Roberto Bolaño, //The Last Interview//

It's difficult to know just how to read Bolaño because his works are so much //about reading//. Everyone is a reader, but only some people call themselves critics. In __The Part About the Critics__, the population of a literary conference is described: what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them — some of them, anyway — where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows ... those eager and insatiable cannibals, their thirtysomething faces bloated with success, their expressions shifting from boredom to madness, their coded stutterings speaking only two words: love me, or maybe two words and a phrase: love me, let me love you, though obviously no one understood.

To me, the joke is that these people believe in Literary Criticism and think that it's a field with certain unique properties (i.e. revolution being possible). Where do we draw the line between Literary Criticism and Literature? Bolaño effectively straddles the division between not only these two genres, but a third as well: poetry (and thus everything). This text intends to do the same. Why play solely within the conventions of Criticism when those conventions have already been dissolved? If I would have been otherwise tempted to play "critic of critics," I'm saved by the relative dearth of English-language criticism of Bolaño. I'm also saved by my inexperience from the task tracking down all of Bolaño's references. It simply isn't possible. I'll leave the complete exploration and mapping of the labyrinth to future explorers. I just want to plunge ahead and get as deep as I can. Call this a preliminary investigation concentrating on the immediate implications. The first problem is simple: "How do we read Bolaño?" Indeterminacy is everywhere, characters (especially critics) are routinely off-the-mark, metafictional exercises are concealed as psychedelic poetry, and vice versa. Theory blends with psychadelia to the extent that it's impossible to find anything solid. I think the best way to get through the labyrinth, at least at first, is to take the author's cues on how to read the text. He offers cues and clues aplenty both in "Déjenlo Todo, Nuevamente" ("Abandon Everything, Again") and in __The Last Interview__, but of course we’re under no obligation to read as he wants us to. We should examine everything from different perspectives. In performing this reading, I’m playing the same game that Bolaño plays in many of his works: detection. We examine reality and various texts and we’re both engaged in the same or similar projects. That project is the opposition to evil by means of detection. Bolaño is the labyrinth builder (the labyrinth is also a map and an ocean). I investigate the texts of Bolaño and others, these texts themselves being artifacts of past investigations. The representations of Juarez that Bolaño received must have been disturbing to him. It is the instinct of the detective, however, to examine the disturbing artifact. This is partly because he feels a desire to plumb the depths, to not turn away from unpleasantness, and party because he wishes to further his own art. The works of Bolaño are, in turn, a disturbing artifact I feel compelled to examine. I, in turn, am crafting artifacts of my own. In this way, the objects of horror become objects of art. The first section of 2666, “The Part About the Critics,” focuses on three professional readers of Benno von Archimboldi. They try to track down the elusive writer, who is later demystified in the final book, “The Part About Archimboldi.” The critics, however, never locate him. I suppose this is another joke at the expense of criticism. As the critics are searching for Archimboldi, they come across a paper which tracks him from Germany to Italy and confirms that he bought a plane ticket to Morocco at a travel agency in Palermo. The paper’s author is called “The Serb.” Belano describes the text as, 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. 

It seems to me that it’s a joke on all of criticism and it carries to its (somewhat) logical conclusion not only the tendency for critics to pretend to scientific exactitude but the insularity of criticism in general. It’s a little horrific in the sense that it’s cold and mechanical and analytical, but it’s also beautiful in a way that’s difficult to describe. In this machine age, this age just years distant from the now-foreshadowed fusion of human and machine consciousness, why shouldn’t man’s gaze imitate the gaze of the camera? Why shouldn't academics search for ever smaller niches into which to insinuate themselves so as to become masters of //something//? The Serb's work, however, is not entirely mechanical. The distinction is between //surveillance// and //investigation//. The Serb’s work is directed toward an end of his choosing, just as the camera lens is always directed by human intent. Both contributes in some small way to the body of human knowledge, the camera itself contributes only to human //information//. This is the archeology of the photocopier in two senses: the cold, lens-like method of reproduction and its place in the multiplicity of tightly focused critical essays. The Serb’s work might seem frivolous to us, when compared with Bolaño’s concern with immediate and ongoing human suffering, but one must keep in mind that the archeologist tends to play a slower game than the detective. Hermann Herlinghaus, author of __Narcoepics__, describes Bolaño’s style as “sober,” and I think this is getting at the same idea. Most detectives aren’t sober all of the time, but the best ones know that there’s a time when sobriety is required. That is to say, the modern detective must have a good reason for choosing not to use the camera. He employs this most notably in The Part About the Crimes, which is stylistically related to the Serb's cold analysis, but directed by a defter hand toward a more important purpose. The critics compare the Serb’s paper to one written by a French critic about the Marquis de Sade which confirms that, “Sade had existed, Sade had washed his clothes and bought new clothes and maintained a correspondence with beings now definitively wiped from the slate of time.” De Sade aestheticized perversion, but what is the Serb aestheticizing? It confers a certain nobility upon work which, in the face of absolute indeterminacy, strives nevertheless for the “ultraconcrete.” The Serb is a detective, as is the Frenchman. In a way, their poetry (because they can’t help but be poetic, even if they don’t want to) is an astheticization of mechanization. It is a modernity so hilariously sterile as to be brilliant, even if its authors did not intend it that way. (This is where we must say, “Never mind, the author really is dead.”) You’ve probably gathered by now that I don’t intend to maintain a “sober” style throughout this entire essay. The closest I’ll come might be in The Part About Juarez and Santa Teresa, which will deal with real-world events. Here I'm motivated by pragmatics: I care more about continuing Bolaño's investigation than about promoting a certain reading of his work. The Serb’s, text, in contrast, proves invaluable to the critics while the critics themselves are of questionable value to humanity. I don’t intend to be of much use to someone looking to “find” Bolaño, but with a little luck I might be of any use to anyone looking to oppose suffering. In terms of planning out a critical methodology, there’s not much more we can gain from following Bolaño’s advice. Is a text “free of ideas” transcendent or impotent? Is “intent to serve as a guide” productive or misguided? Is it good to be, “an eye seeking out the tangible elements,” or should we be strive for something higher? There’s too much indeterminacy in all of this. If we are to follow one of Bolaño’s directives, it should be the one from the Infrarealist Manifesto: “If the poet is mixed up, the reader will have to mix himself up.” That is to say, let’s not worry about planning things out too much. I’d like to note one final joke on criticism, though this time I don’t imagine it’s a failure I’ll be avoiding. This is from the story of Efraim Ivanov, a Communist writer who successfully “plagiarized” the styles of Vladimir Odoevsky and Ivan Lazhechnikov, which he got away with in part because readers had forgotten both writers and "in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing. Yes, I expect that in plenty of instances I’ll fail to extrapolate or make a connection. I’ll probably interpret something as a metaphor without realizing it’s actually a reference. Such failures, I hope, will be understood by future readers to be symptom of this exploration's preliminary nature. What I’m getting at is that there’s actually little to say about my methodology. I’m not going to accept or reject “the archeology of the photocopier” and I’m going to occasionally shift into a more poetic style. [The Part About Juarez And Santa Teresa] draws from a field that’s simultaneously more concrete and more bullshit than literary criticism: economics. Economies of power will prove especially important as we try to understand the reasons for Juarez. To explain certain aspects of that tragedy, however, we require the aid of someone able to speak with less precision, and hence hopefully more truth, than an economist or a psychologist or a neurologist. We need a poet or a detective. So where do we begin? I think we should start with Bolaño’s fictional author, Benno von Archimboldi. As a child in Germany, he is fascinated by __Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region__. In the war, he strides across no man’s land like a diver on the bottom of the ocean. In an Allied internment camp, he murders a fellow prisoner who confesses to taking a key role in the extermination of a group of Jews. He writes books, most notably __The Leather Mask__, __Rivers of Europe__, and __Bifurcaria Bifurcat__a. __2666__ ends as he prepares to depart for Santa Teresa. Bolaño and Archimboldi have a great deal in common: both witness the falls of their homelands into fascism, both soldiers in their youth, both saddled with vast histories of suffering to assimilate, and both journeying in their late days to Santa Teresa, where they hope to learn something about humanity. The critics fail to locate Archimboldi because they search for him with the mistaken assumption that it is possible to really find a person. If they met him and spoke, would they feel as if all of their questions had been answered? Doubtful. Similarly, the relationship between reality and the text makes it impossible for either to produce an entirely accurate representation of the other. Criticism with pretentions of certainty is irresponsible; even the photocopier is not perfect. The wise author creates intentional indeterminacy to mirror the indeterminacy of the world. Consider the differences between Santa Teresa and Ciudad Juarez (which I'll discuss in more detail later on). Some of the things described in Teresa Rodriguez’s __Daughters of Juarez__ are more disturbing than anything Bolaño describes in “The Part About the Crimes,” but in other instances Bolaño’s vagueness leaves more up to the imagination. (__Daughters__ was published in 2007, __2666__ in 2004.) Both Bolaño and Rodriguez mention that the right nipples of a number of victims had been bitten off, so we can presume that Bolaño here drew inspiration from reality. What Bolaño either didn’t know or declines to mention is that in real life a journalist found that “some of the gang members liked to wear the victims’ nipples like trophies on chains around their necks.” Holy shit, right? You can’t make this stuff up. The one thing you’d probably not realize in reading “The Part About the Crimes,” is that the reality is worse. I suspect that part of the reason for the indeterminacy in Bolaño’s work is that it protects him from being wrong. Even indeterminacy, however, isn’t a perfect defense. He’s still forced to leave out those details he didn’t know. The mystery of the bitten-off nipples is left unsolved by necessity due to the author’s own ignorance due in turn to the fact that the truth had not yet come to light. He could only have solved that mystery by going down to Juarez and finding the necklace himself. That’s a lot of work for a dying man, and it wouldn’t have brought him much closer to the true root of the problem. Let’s let the mystery of the bitten-off nipples remind us not to be daunted by the scale of the horrors we’re dealing with. Like any mystery, the question of “whence violence?” is simply a matter of missing knowledge. Unexplained, the missing nipples are the foul product of an unseen mechanism. Explained, they are perverse and sickening, but at the very least //concrete//. As a psychology teacher once told me, “Awareness leads to control.” The nipple-necklace is less horrific than the missing nipples because the necklace is an artifact that can be examined so as to produce concrete theories about the psychology, and thus the causes, behind the violence. In the artifacts of violence, the products of ritualized violence, we find hints of the mechanisms producing said violence. This is a mystery in which the detective cannot rule himself out as a villain and thus must interrogate himself and his own process of investigation. As this portion of my thesis indicates, the process of detection is itself a part of the great mystery. Bolaño’s use of indeterminacy forces us to investigate our own processes of knowing: not just "How do we write?" but "How do we look?" and "How do we read?" Oscar Fate is an American journalist working for a black magazine sent to Santa Teresa on a sports beat, but he becomes interested in investigating the murders. The aftermath of a boxing match sends him on a decadent journey through the city and he arrives at the home of Charly Cruz, where they watch a strange pornographic movie: An old woman with a heavily made-up face looked into the camera. After a while she began to whisper incomprehensible words and weep. She looked like a whore who'd retired and, Fate thought at times, was facing death. Then a thin, dark-skinned young woman with big breasts took off her clothes while seated on a bed. Out of the darkness came three men who first whispered in her ear and then fucked her. At first the woman resisted. She looked straight at the camera and said something in Spanish that Fate didn't understand. Then she faked an orgasm and started to scream.

First, let’s note a couple of things in here. The first woman wears makeup. What is beneath it? We’ll never know. That data was not recorded. Similarly: what did she whisper? What did the men whisper to her? Indeterminacy. She’s called a “whore,” but this is the word of a narrator close to Fate’s point of view (as indicated by the fact that the woman’s Spanish is not translated) and, as I’ll demonstrate later, Bolaño knew that “whore” is a word that’s easily deconstructed. Note also her apparent ambivalence regarding her position and the suggestion that her life may be in danger. This, combined with the prevalence of illusion (the makeup and the fake orgasm), form an intellectual and emotional complex involving the relationship between violence, femininity, and the gaze. I’ll expect you to notice these things in the future. The film continues: After that, the men, who until that moment had been taking turns, joined in all together, the first penetrating her vagina, the second her anus, and the third sticking his cock in her mouth. The effect was of a perpetual-motion machine. The spectator could see that the machine was going to explode at some point, but it was impossible to say what the explosion would be like and when it would happen. And then the woman came for real. An unforeseen orgasm that she was the last to expect. The woman's movements, constrained by the weight of the three men, accelerated. Her eyes were fixed on the camera, which in turn zoomed in on her face. Her eyes said something, although they spoke in an unidentifiable language. For an instant, everything about her seemed to shine, her breasts gleamed, her chin glistened, half hidden by the shoulder of one of the men, her teeth took on a supernatural whiteness. Then the flesh seemed to melt from her bones and drop to the floor of the anonymous brothel or vanish into thin air, leaving just a skeleton, no eyes, no lips, a death's-head laughing suddenly at everything.

The aforementioned complex is here brought to a climax. Note a complication of the indeterminacy: here, the viewer is unable to decipher the language of her //eyes//, the language of her body, a older and more natural form of communication. We know that spoken language is fallible – so the failure of body language is more disturbing to us. When her flesh “seems” to melt from her bones, is this an effect visible on the film (i.e. a special effect) or is it something the viewer thinks he sees? What I mean is, during which act of communication is the seeming first introduced? Between the woman and the lens? During the editing process? Between the screen and Oscar? Or does it only seem that way to the narrator, Arturo Belano? To call the system a “perpetual motion machine” seems inapt if its explosion is imminent. I suppose what’s meant is a machine of actions and counterbalances. The pistoning organs so common in pornography. Pornography is emblematic of the subjugating system, the humiliating system, that promises economic advantage to lure one individual (the woman in this case, but the worker in other cases) into the power of another. This system collapses when the woman collapses, because it cannot exist without her. (I imagine an alternate vignette, a less pleasant one, where a new woman is brought in to replace the old one and the tape loops back to the beginning, continuing as long as the audience cares to watch.) The death’s head laugh at the end suggests that the destroyed woman leaves behind a curse more horrible than the suffering inflicted on her – or else achieves some sort of death-near realization. The tape ends, as much of Bolaño’s poetry does, with a “zooming-out,” a collection of seemingly unrelated images, possibly scenes from Mexico City. I include it below, because with Bolaño it is really hard to know where to begin and end extracting quotes. Everything feels interrelated: Then there was a street in a big Mexican city at dusk, probably Mexico City, a street swept by rain, cars parked along the curb, stores with their metal gates lowered, people walking fast so as not to be soaked. A puddle of rainwater. Water washing clean a car coated in a thick layer of dust. The lighted-up windows of government buildings. A bus stop next to a small park. The branches of a sick tree stretching vainly toward nothing. The face of the old whore, who smiles at the camera now as if to say: did I do it right? did I look good? is everybody happy? A redbrick staircase comes into view. A linoleum floor. The same rain, but filmed from inside a room. A plastic table with nicked edges. Glasses and a jar of Nescafe. A frying pan with the remains of scrambled eggs. A hallway. The body of a half-dressed woman sprawled on the floor. A door. A room in complete disarray. Two men sleeping in the same bed. A mirror. The camera zooms in on the mirror. The tape ends.

This is a sort of putting-in-context of the other events. Suffering is just a thing that happens. It must be important, because otherwise the author would not devote so much time to discussing it, but remains, nonetheless, one of the many states of experience. Somewhere an employee of the government, the government indicted in so much of the horror here, somewhere an employee of this government is staying up late to work. The vain, sick tree is an apocalyptic image, like the implosion of the sex-machine. But still there are scrambled eggs. A world where women are sprawled for unknown reasons. They may be drunk or asleep, but their forms mirror the forms of the dead girls of Sonora. The camera zooms in on the mirror... but what does it see there? What exactly is reflected? It can’t be just a mirror, something is always reflected. The camera zooms in on the mirror as a human might lean in to inspect himself more closely. What does a camera see when it looks at itself? The author does not tell us, and the tape ends. In case my style isn’t clear by now: no, I can’t tell you what the camera sees. So what is going on here? There is a definite element of sadomasochism involved. The women do not quite seem to be willing participants, but she is also somehow complicit in what is going on, this much is indicated by her smile at the end. In addition, she, like many of the Sonoran victims, is penetrated “three ways.” Has she embraced her subjugation? Is she complicit? Or is she just desperate? Juarez is rumored to be the source of numerous snuff films. This makes the suggestion that the woman may have been “facing death” especially ominous. She did not die, but others did. Others who might have been filmed on the same camera or with the same men or by the same director or on videos shown in the same house. She is caught up in it all. A mural in that house’s basement depicts the Virgin of Guadalupe offering riches (“a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed”), with hands spread but one eye closed. This, like the laughing death’s head, suggests that what’s shown comes at a price. A curse? An entrapping land? Or something about the audience, something about the act of taking or even just gazing with desire that could produce a dangerous change, a destabilizing change, and entrapment. The oppressor, you see, the one who watches or buys the snuff film or colonizes Mexico or fucks the old woman, the oppressor can be a victim as well. Or something about Mary, who gives all this away? Is she caught up in it as well? Does her passivity enable it? What about Fate? If there’s a hero here, it’s him. He watches with horror, not pleasure. His gaze is engaging, challenging. He possesses the capacity for resistance. He decides to get out of the house, but first he has to rescue Rosa Amalfitano. She was brought to the house by her boyfriend, Chucho Flores, who courted her with lavish gifts (i.e. economic incentives) and first made love to her at a seedy motel, “the kind of place rich men brought their whores.” This is a kind of machine too. There exists a vast system which enables Chucho’s behavior. Rosa must be indoctrinated with a desire for the commodities Chucho offers and she must not be in an economic condition to acquire them herself. I will address this in [more detail.] Oscar finds Rosa in a sort of drugged-out haze, but she is willing (maybe even eager) to leave with him. He has to knock a man down to get her out, and when he looks at the body he feels that, “He could have looked for hours.” Another instance in which the viewer derives pleasure from looking (in this case a form of pride or sadism), and another instance in which that pleasure might come at a price: introduction into a violent mode, a visceral mode, which might result in entrapment. Of course, Oscar has already decided that, in such an instance, violence is necessary and acceptable. Really, this gaze is a continuation down that path. It is important to examine these things from different perspectives at the same time: both the visceral mode and the sober one. I strive for hyperlucidity: simultaneous awareness of the mechanism of perception its object. We must be able to switch lenses at will. I give you one final quotation: 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.

This metaphor also feels inapt at first. How could the Swabian be Archimboldi’s negative? He didn’t give birth to Archimboldi. Except he did, in a way, because all the critics know of Archimboldi is the image the Swabian gives to them. Archimboldi is an artifact upon which the critics extrapolate, left behind by a man, or rather the memory of a man that fades as they forget him. This functions similarly to the relationship between Bolaño and Belano: both young men in the years of terror and barbarism under Pinochet, both romantic dogs, both poor bastards adrift at the moment one creates the other. Belano is the negative: he remains on file, an unchanging text. Bolaño is a memory, a reconstructed image who grows larger and stranger as we add to him facets of what we presumed him to have been.

 "Positions are Positions and Sex is Sex." Op. Cit. __The Last Interview: And Other Conversations__. Trans. Eliseo Alvarez. Loc. 717, 70%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> “2666.” loc 1839 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Bolaño, Robero. "Abandon Everything, Again." Altarpiece, 2009. Trans. Altarpiece. <[]> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 1412, 6%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Herlinghaus, Hermann. "Roberto Bolaño: From 'Pharmakon' to 'Femicide.'" __Narcoepics__. New York: Bloomsbury. Pg 160. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. "Abandon Everything, Again" <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666.__ Loc. 15693, 76%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Rodriguez, Teresa. __The Daughters of Juarez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border__. New York: Atria Books. Loc. 2700, 85%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 7691, 37%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Ibid. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> From Bolaño’s notes on 2666: “The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano.” [Cite] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 7691, 37%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> //It’s noted in 2666 that the Mexican police find the idea of “three way rape” (i.e. anal, oral, and vaginal) to be compelling to the extent that it becomes official terminology.// Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 10586, 51%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Snuff is an unethical artform by any standard but de Sade’s, but it’s a subject doubtlessly interesting for an artist concerned with the relationship between violence and the avant-garde. For more, look to The Part About New Chilean Poetry. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> For an examination of what it means to be “caught up in it all” or guilty by association or silence, look to The Part About The Basement. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> 2666 loc 7927 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 7781, 37%. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Op. Cit. __2666__. Loc. 1004, 4%.