"Utterly futile" is not a bad description of all (my) attempts to blog about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. A blog post is simply too flimsy a format for any proper address of Bolaño's monumental achievement. Bolaño's 2666 requires depth and thoughtfulness from the attendant critical commentary, and a blog post (virtually by design) scrupulously avoids either. The snarky quip is indigenous to the blog post; the piquant insight is almost always lost and alone in a blog post, having arrived in such foreign territory only after a wrong turn routed it from The New York Review of Books or like journal.
By which preamble I mean to introduce a follow-on thought to my last post about Bolaño's 2666. In that post, I pondered - ineptly - Bolaño's choice to present a writer-character, Benno von Archimboldi, without providing any examples of Archimboldi's work. I speculated that the writer-without-an-oeuvre might be a symbol of mortality, a subversion of the writer's (Romantic) aspiration of immorality through his or her works.
Because a blog post is not a format conducive to exhaustive consideration of alternatives, I did not mention in my prior post another hypothesis that, on reflection, strikes me as more probable than my initial conjecture. Instead, I am now devoting this blog post to my alternate theory: that Bolaño left the reader without examples of Archimboldi's writing because Archimboldi's importance lies in his existence, not in his novels.
As Baroness Von Zumpe, Archimboldi's publisher, admits:
she had never bothered to read any of [Archimboldi's novels], because she hardly ever read "difficult" or "dark" novels like the ones he wrote. . . . When Archimboldi wanted to know why she kept publishing him if she didn't read him, which was really a rhetorical question since he the answer, the baroness replied (a) because she knew he was good, (b) because Bubis [her deceased husband] told her to, (c) because few publishers actually read the books they published.
(p. 863.)
In the world of 2666, the priority is to bring the good book into existence. What happens thereafter - whether the book becomes a bestseller or tops out at only 500 copies sold - is irrelevant. The novelist writing and publishing is good for the world, even if the novelist is unread.
This perspective strikes me as quasi-religious, echoing traditions of contemplative nuns who withdraw from the world and pray for particular causes. As Mother Carmela of Child Jesus, a Thai convent, says, "Through prayer we are responsible for society and the world." Believers may never see or interact with these nuns, but may nonetheless find solace in the knowledge of the cloistered nuns' prayers.
In the same way, Bolaño suggests that by writing and publishing, Archimboldi (and novelists generally) is (are) responsible for society and the world. The importance of Archimboldi is that he exists, writing and publishing and thereby taking responsibility for the good of humankind.
Like contemplative nuns, Archimboldi has withdrawn from the world - he's a "vanished" writer - and his writing (again like the prayers of the nuns) is invisible to us. Yet Bolaño wants us, the readers, to find solace in the fact of Archimboldi's efforts, just as Catholics find succor in the fact of the contemplative nuns' prayers. The writing itself, like the text of the nuns' prayers, is besides the point.
"Utterly futile" is not a bad description of all (my) attempts to blog about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. A blog post is simply too flimsy a format for any proper address of Bolaño's monumental achievement. Bolaño's 2666 requires depth and thoughtfulness from the attendant critical commentary, and a blog post (virtually by design) scrupulously avoids either. The snarky quip is indigenous to the blog post; the piquant insight is almost always lost and alone in a blog post, having arrived in such foreign territory only after a wrong turn routed it from The New York Review of Books or like journal.
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