Third Go-Round: Roberto Bolaño’s "2666"

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.  Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.
                                                 2666, pg. 209, "The Part About Amalfitano"

In a book full of bitter jokes, this is perhaps the most brutal.  It also bolsters the view of 2666 as the curdled and disconsolate mirror image of the vibrancy of The Savage Detectives, though upon a recent re-reading of the latter novel, there is a heavy sense of loss hanging in its margins.

I've been thinking lately that another ironic twist, though perhaps not a bitter one, is that 2666 may, strangely, come to be even more appreciated as a work of fiction than it already is.  This may sound grandiose, given that the novel was annointed as a masterpiece even before its English publication, but the publication of so many of Bolaño’s shorter works since his death has changed things a bit.  In these shorter works, especially Amulet and the short story collection Last Evenings On Earth, the author's mastery of his craft is so full-fledged and visible, that it throws the sprawl of his two major novels into a different light.  A common criticism of both 2666 and The Savage Detectives is that they indulge in literary "excess," but this misses the point I think.  The author's self-stated ambition (in both the essay collection Between Parentheses and as told anecdotally by friend and co-conspirator Rodrigo Fresán) was the Total Novel, something all-encompassing and reflective of life itself, in all its grandeur and squalor.

It's obvious in the shorter works that Bolaño could turn out tightly structured narratives of unified form.  But it's also obvious that he felt the need to stretch his legs a bit, and he was very aware of how risky that is.  He even has a character in 2666 rhapsodize about how readers prefer the smaller, perfect works to the more unwieldy and ambitious tomes (in the novel the comparison is between Melville's Bartelby The Scrivener and Moby-Dick).

As a sucker for enormous books, this is right in my wheelhouse, and I realize that a novel like this suits my literary biases quite well, and that this could color my interpretations.  But on this re-reading I'm noticing just how much of the craft and careful structure of the shorter novels finds its way into 2666.  When people say "excess" I take that to mean a work haphazardly arranged, fraught with tangents that lead nowhere and lacking a cohesive internal structure, and that is simply not the case with this novel.  In its own way it is as finely aligned as a solar system, and in fact when I visualize the structure I see an array of elliptical orbits in which the five individual parts of the novel and the myriad characters revolve around the inscrutable black hole which serves as their gravitational center - the city of Santa Teresa, and all the horror and violence contained within it.

This elliptical structure manifests itself a number of ways.  Its in the dreams that the four eponymous literary critics in "The Part About The Critics" wander in and out of, where details of their actual lives are warped and reorganized, only to reappear later in the waking world.  Its in the numerous stories-within-stories, where one character recounts meeting another character wherein the second character begins telling their own story which includes a third and fourth character, each with their own story.  And the structure fundamentally shapes the overall impact of the narrative as well; this is a novel where nearly every character, as well as the very narrative itself (and trying to explicate the narrative voice is worthy of its own essay), is constantly circling around some destination without ever quite arriving there.  The critics search for Benno von Archimboldi but never find him.  Professor Amalfitano seeks a remedy for his encroaching madness but fins only a web of reflexive self-doubt.  Oscar Fate wants to protect Rosa but can't quite get close enough to her to even understand what exactly it is that endangers her.  Lalo Cura aims to solve the mystery of the Santa Teresa murders but his logic and zeal is thwarted at every turn by corruption and indifference.  And finally, Archimboldi himself, nee Hans Reiter, seems to live his very life at a remove from himself and unable to grasp conclusively anyone or anything around him, whether lovers or family, and the tangled web of his life - which spans all the horror of the late-20th century - still draws him, in the end, inexplicably back to Mexico, and back to Santa Teresa.

Perhaps the most poignant detail I've noticed this time is just how close the critics come to locating their literary idol.  Norton leaves Santa Teresa to join Morini in Turin, the two of them convinced the quest was a fool's errand, while Espinoza and Pelletier are left to ruminate on their failure.  And they come to agree - against a backdrop of a tennis match reminiscent of Antonnioni's Blow-Out - that Archimboldi is indeed somewhere in Santa Teresa.  They've discovered his real name, his physical attributes, they've doggedly tracked down his previous locations, but still he eludes them.  They won't get any closer, and they'll never know just how close they did come.  The conclusion of "The Part About The Critics" serves as an apt summation of the tricky game that 2666 plays with meaning and interpretation:

"I believe you," he said, and he really did believe what his friend was saying.
"Archimboldi is here," said Pelletier, "and we're here, and this is the closest we'll ever be to him ."