Thesis+Prospectus

__ Roberto Bolaño: Horror, Beauty, and the Infrareal __ // One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation... He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he choseBartlebyoverMoby-Dick,he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench. //

// - Roberto Bolano, __2666__ //

What can I say about Bolaño? He was a master. By the time he wrote //2666//, he was within his rights to acknowledge it. It is imperfect and torrential, made more so by its posthumous publication. By his request, I’ll tackle it as the centerpiece of this analysis. What is my purpose? I’ll be honest: I don’t know. Each of his texts functions as a single node in a vast web of interrelated work. I could pin notes and quotes to a corkboard and map out ever-madder webs of meaning... but what purpose would it serve? It is counterproductive to propose a thesis at this point, and it might turn out to be antithetical to my purpose to propose one at all. The only way to begin is to read.

The difficulty is this: Bolaño has constructed a labyrinth of great depth and breadth, filled with numberless puzzles and traps. To say, “These are the coordinates at which we will descend” is foolish. We won’t know where the labyrinth is deepest until we have descended far beneath the surface. We can note a few essential paradigms. His texts are situated in various histories: violence, art, Latin America among them. He is constantly in dialogue with other artists. The real, the infrareal, and the visceral are all prominent modes. He reappropriates “genre” forms – horror and detective fiction, for example – as literary tools.

He is by turns both anarchistic and political. //2666// seems to be both a plea for action and an admission that nothing can be done. His prose is limpid and hallucinatory at once. He is sometimes didactic but mostly beyond meaning. Any search for meaning is at best a fool’s errand and at worst an insult. Any strong statement I might make fizzles at once, as if his work is imbued with a will to resist any commentary that is not poetic. Any but the most specific and incisive analysis is doomed to fail. But I do not intend to perform such an analysis. I intend to fail.

In dealing with the problems of Bolaño’s, we are halted at once by the challenge of constructing a critical methodology. Any traditional method of analysis seems inadequate. How is criticism possible when meaning is an illusion? I imagine myself stymied at every turn by the will of the author. With this in mind, I refuse to face Bolaño as a philosopher, scientist, or theorist. These roles might be perfectly adequate to other critical tasks, but in this project they seem doomed to fail. I am certain that a great part of Bolaño’s work must be //felt//. For this reason, I intend to treat criticism as an art, a process of creative reflection. I will read as a writer.

It is futile to try and map a shifting labyrinth of illusions and paradoxes. To enter it intending to search for a center is to misstep from the start. Because Bolaño’s texts often function as indices (to his own oeuvre, Latin American literature, and the global canon) a certain amount of cork-boarding will be necessary. This in turn will bring our attention to a number of noteworthy puzzles which, if solved, may allow us to descend deeper into the labyrinth (or else force us to return to the old passages in search of useful devices we’ve overlooked). It’s necessary to remember that the paradigms of thought responsible for bringing us to any point might prevent us from advancing beyond it. It’s also necessary for me to remember that I am a stranger in a strange land. I can brush up on my Spanish to study his poetry in the original language, but I can’t //be// Latin American. The best I can do is think as a citizen of the world. What’s clear is that I’ll have to break from tradition to make any sense of things. Perhaps Bolaño himself puts it best in the First Infrarealist Manifesto: “If the poet is mixed up, the reader will have to mix himself up.” I certainly agree. I’ll begin without a thesis – for now, direction only sets me on edge. The only way to begin is to descend.

REFERENCES

Bolano, Roberto. First Infrarealist Manifesto. Trans. Timothy Pilcher. La Universidad Desconocida. 12 May 2010. Web.

Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print.