Recently in Novels Category
 I've already blogged about how William Makepeace Thackeray's bitchiness to Becky Sharp fouls up his plotting in Vanity Fair. But the more I think about his lack of compassion for Becky, the more compelled I am to take issue with his behavior simply as an affront to women and the poor. Thackeray creates Becky as a creature of few advantages. Her mother dies when she's very young, and her father dies of delirium tremens when she is a teenager. Moreover, [Rebecca] had the dismal precocity of poverty. Many a dun she had talked to, and turned away from her father's door; many a tradesman she had coaxed and wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more. She sate commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk of many of his wild companions - often but ill-suited for a girl to hear. But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old.
(p. 10.) Thackeray bounces orphan Becky from one demeaning environment (Miss Pinkerton's School) to another (the Sedley house, Sir Pitt Crawley's house in Queen's Crawley, Miss Crawley's house in London), marries her to a gambler solider without a penny, promptly revokes the soldier's inheritance, and then gleefully watches Becky make do (dishonestly) in genteel society. Social climbing (particularly in Becky's time and place), of course, is vulgar, and people who do it well are invariably insincere, insecure, shallow and vain. (Becky is all these things.) And, yes, vanity is a sin. But one of the great innovations of Judeo-Christian ethics is proportionality: Inspector Javert, the policeman - not Jean Valjean, the thief - is the sinner in Les Misérables because hounding a man for a lifetime is a disproportionate punishment for stealing a loaf of bread when a man is starving. In the same way, casting vanity on par with murder and cannibalism is hardly in the enlightened Judeo-Christian spirit. Here, for example, is Thackeray giving an account of Becky after she's been ruined: In describing this siren [Rebecca Sharp], singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under the waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, and curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish moralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? When, however, the siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour lost to look into it ever so curiously. They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twanging their harps and combing their hair, and beckon to you to come and hold the looking glass; but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling [sic] and feasting on their wretched pickled victims. And so, when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better.
(p. 620-21 (emphasis added).) I bridle reading this indictment. Becky, without question, exploits those foolish enough to allow her to do so - her lady companion, Briggs, and her landlord, Raggles, in particular (both of whom she ruins financially). She's beastly to her husband, Rawdon Crawley, and utterly cruel to her son. But, frankly, her crimes are the usual run-of-the-mill misdeeds of the impoverished. The fever pitch of Thackeray's accusations is unwarranted. (Besides which, his constant excuses that propriety prevents him from recounting her bloody - as opposed to economic and emotional - crimes is scarcely credible and makes the whole passage seem gratuitous.) Thackeray's excessiveness surprises me because I believe he loves Becky Sharp (in contrast to Amelia Sedley, who I think Thackeray comes close to despising). I don't think Thackeray would've made Becky so beautiful, intelligent, witty and resourceful - nor would he have given her an adventure with so many men and opportunities - if he didn't adore her. And yet, I feel that, in spite of himself - in spite of Thackeray's certainty that those of high birth and spotless reputation are as decrepit in their moral conduct as those of their opposites - Thackeray can't really accept a smart, resourceful, poor woman who isn't a monster. Cerebrally or ideologically, he knows that poor women aren't deserving of especial reprimand; but viscerally Thackeray connects them with terror. (As I discussed in another prior post, I think Thackeray attributes too much power to women, which may relate to this fear he manifests in respect of Becky.) Thackeray's treatment of Becky also put me in mind of another novel about a rapacious, social climbing woman, a woman who exploits and abuses everyone she can, a woman who comes from crushing poverty and who dies desperate and penniless. The book is The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa. The Bad Girl is based on Madame Bovary, an ambitious book with which to compare one's work; and yet Vargas Llosa more than lives up to the company in which he places himself. The reason is his compassion for his bad girl. Despite all her bad behavior, Vargas Llosa made me believe that poverty - not original sin or some other form of damnation - had tarnished her. With this tactic, Vargas Llosa is not simply being sentimental: he's making his story work. Although I never came to like the bad girl, I did feel emotionally engaged in her fate (and that of her steadfast lover) in a way that never happened with Vanity Fair. I read The Bad Girl in a matter of days (not a month, like Vanity Fair), and the bad girl's scar of poverty has resonated with me for years after I finished the book. Speculating about the sources of authorial limitations and strengths is always risky. Nonetheless, I'll hazard the following guess: Vargas Llosa has compassion for the bad girl because he's well-acquainted with his naughty side; Thackeray thought Becky a monster because she was too close to what he didn't want to know about himself. (Image of Melusina from Wikicommons)
 What is William Makepeace Thackeray talking about, in Vanity Fair, when he asserts: If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear Mamma to settle matters with the young man, she must do it for herself. And oh, what a mercy it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener! We can't resist them, if they do. Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same. And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts in the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.
(p. 25 (emphasis in original).) While Thackeray is frequently an uncomfortably insightful critic on matters of human greed and gluttony, on this issue - the supposed freedom women have to select their own husbands - Thackeray appears to me to be a lunatic. Never mind the fact that his assertion is utterly contrary to my own experience: times have changed. Vanity Fair predates feminism and, if feminism has proved one proposition, it is that women (with fair opportunities and without absolute humps) awakened to their own power - freed from their beasts-in-the-field likeness, in Thackeray's parlance - are far from assured of marrying whom they like. No, my sense of Thackeray's lunacy derives from his own depictions of women attempting to marry whom they like. The marital trajectories of Thackeray's own characters contradict his overarching statement. Becky Sharp, for example, begins the novel wanting to marry Jos Sedley. Despite an exercise of her prodigious power, inopportune drunkenness on Sedley's part, followed by an unkind intervention on the part of George Osborne, drown Becky's hopes. Nor does Amelia Sedley's marital history support Thackeray. Amelia, too, exercised her personal powers to show (more than) a "little inclination" to marry George Osborne, but her own efforts would have resulted in spinsterhood. Nothing short of the extraordinary social pressure exerted by Osborne's long-time friend, mentor and source-of-extra-funds-in-a-pinch, William Dobbin, convinced Osborne to take the plunge with Amelia. So I return to my original question: what is Thackeray talking about? One possibility is that Thackeray is just being provocative. At playing provocateur, he excels. Another possibility is that Thackeray just had one of those human lapses that lead to the fervent espousal of contradictory positions. It happens to all of us, even in print, even when editors are supposed to catch that sort of thing before it goes public. Yet a third option is that Thackeray is urging us women on to greater heights. Although Thackeray is too much of a realist and a story-teller to be a severe moralist, he does take a firm stand against one sort of immorality: the refusal to grow. Thackeray can do nothing but frown on Amelia Sedley's steadfast devotion to the unworthy George Osborne; Thackeray has nothing but contempt for Becky Sharp's persistence in her manipulative and degenerative social tactics. However much Thackeray hectors and berates his characters, and punishes their stubborn inertia, they don't change. But perhaps we, the audience, might. Hence, just as Thackeray shows us what not to do, he tells us what we should do: ladies, he admonishes us, stop being cows and start getting what you want from the men you want. In a word: change. I appreciate the sentiment. But I also appreciate that Thackeray didn't show us an example of his idealized woman for a reason: she doesn't exist in Vanity Fair - or, since Vanity Fair is a representation of our own materialistic world, she doesn't exist. Which raises a fourth possible answer to my question of what, exactly, Thackeray is talking about: like most novelists, he too frequently makes things up. (Image of Romola Garai as Amelia Sedley in Mira Nair's film version of Vanity Fair from Garai's website; image of Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp in the same film from The New York Times)
 In a prior post, I speculated about possible reasons for Roberto Bolaño's propensity to create writer characters whose oeuvres remain opaque to the audience. By depriving these writer characters of an oeuvre, Bolaño isolates them from the possibility of literary dialogue with other authors and texts. I conjectured that Bolaño might conceive of such a writer character as a symbol of mortality. Now, however, I have a new theory. I think Bolaño's oeuvre-less writers are a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges. Borges, after all, is the author who (as I highlighted in another prior post) eschewed composing actual novels in favor of imagining them and then commenting on them. Borges' short stories, moreover, overflow with texts that we don't see ( e.g., John of Pannonia's tract against the heresy of the Monotoni in "The Theologians"; Borges' own fantasy tale about the serpent Fafnir in "The Zahir"), and with texts that we don't see completely ( e.g., Benjamin Otálora's tale in "The Dead Man"; Christopher Dewey's tale in "The Man on the Threshold"). Without too much mental gymnastics, one could truthfully describe Borges as a novelist who, instead of having an oeuvre, merely has a commentary on his own imaginary oeuvre. By his own account, Bolaño loved Borges. In The New York Review of Books, Francisco Goldman quotes Bolaño saying, "I could live under a table reading Borges." Knowing of Bolaño's reverence for Borges, and now having read some of Borges' work, I'm inclined to see the protagonist of Bolaño's novel, 2666, the enigmatic writer, Benno von Archimboldi (a/k/a Hans Reiter), as a Borges-like figure. Like Borges, von Archimboldi is a man with a split identity (see Borges' short story, "Borges and I"); like Borges, von Archimboldi is withdrawn from the world; like Borges, von Archimboldi writes imaginary novels; like Borges, others (especially critics and criminals) see von Archimboldi as a figure of power and redemption; and like Borges, von Archimboldi hasn't won the Nobel Prize. Goldman interestingly cites Bolaño's observation that, "[his] life . . . has been infinitely more savage than Borges's." Benno von Archimboldi's life, however, has seen its share of savagery. Perhaps, in Benno von Archimboldi, Bolaño was offering his mentor - who'd always been cagey about his identity as "Borges" - another identity, one less bookish and less focused on the 19th century, one more infused with the lessons that Bolaño had learned from his own life. In Bolaño's hands, Borges could be everything he wasn't in life: a physical presence, a soldier, a killer, a lover - everything, in fact, but a writer with an oeuvre of novels. Even a novelist with an extensive oeuvre like Bolaño's, it seems, has some limits.
(Image of Roberto Bolaño from Maud Newton; image of Jorge Luis Borges from Wikipedia)
 William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair should be a mandatory complement to any Jane Austen reading assignment. Focusing on the same social set in the same country and time period as Austen, Thackeray offers a view of the world depicted in Austen's novels that is less romantic, less hopeful and less moral than the perspective Austen proffers. Thackeray is also unrelenting. I'm a fast reader, and yet Vanity Fair claimed a month of my time. The extended reading period is odd. Without question, I enjoyed the book, and I found Thackeray's authorial voice entertaining. I loved the depth that Thackeray added to my understanding of social dynamics in Britain at the time of Jane Austen. And, as I passed the hours in Thackeray's company, I admired his wit, courage and antics. But the extent to which I dawdled finishing the book is testament to an inherent flaw: the plot didn't function. The plot is the engine of a novel. Just like an engine, a book's plot has to rev up to full speed. As the story progresses, plots should gather momentum like a toboggan hurtling downhill. The plot should pull the reader onto the toboggan for the plunge. When the plot functions, a reader should reach a point - somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through - where he or she feels compelled to finish the book. With Vanity Fair, I never felt that compulsion. A major reason for that failure is Thackeray's unrelenting bitchiness. He is so unsympathetic to his characters that he has disabled the plot in two ways. First, he successfully persuades the reader that the characters in Vanity Fair are not worth caring about. Here, for instance, is Thackeray discoursing about Rebecca Sharp: Miss Rebecca was not . . . in the lease kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treat ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion . . .This is certain, that if the world neglected Miss Sharp, she never was known to have done a good action in behalf of anybody . . . .
(p. 8.) Of course, the world uses ill many good people who drink deeply and undeservedly from the cup of bitterness, but Thackeray early on dismisses any notion that Becky Sharp might belong in that category. Nor is Thackeray satisfied to pass condemnatory judgment on Becky, but he jumps up and down on the point: And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce the, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of. Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; . . . - whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world - Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main.
(pp. 70-71) "[L]et us have at them . . . with might and main"?! When an author recommends to his reader that he or she treat the protagonist thus, what can a reader do but comply? And since Thackerey harangued me into not liking - and therefore not caring about - his characters, I never became invested in the resolution of their stories. Second, Thackeray seems to have gotten so carried away being nasty to his characters that he neglected to plot adequately for them. For example, when William Dobbin wakes up his commander, Mick O'Dowd, in the middle of the night and demands leave so that Dobbin can attend to a personal matter in England ( i.e., Amelia Smedley's allegedly impending marriage), Dobbin's urgency generates momentum that Thackeray completely dissipates by failing to follow through on Dobbin's story line for more than a hundred pages. Similarly, after Becky's disgrace with Lord Steyne, she falls so thoroughly out of society that the end of the book can have no suspense with respect to her plot line: rehabilitation is impossible. A compulsive drinker and gambler, living in flophouses, chased away and stumbling from city in city in Europe, Becky has neither the means nor the motivation to restore her reputation. Thackeray has utterly gutted her plot possibilities both by casting her so low and by giving her a meager living from her ex-husband, Rawdon Crawley. A woman with a regular income may wish the income were higher, but if she can survive on it, she'll adjust to it - which is what Becky does. (By the same token, Thackeray ruins Becky's relationship with her son so early in the book that, by the end, when young Rawdon inherits the family money and title, reconciliation is unthinkable - yet another plot possibility for Becky eliminated.) Thackeray's plotting misadventure is interesting and surprising because, as an author, he's self-aware (and voluble) on the topic of effective story telling, authorial motive and pacing. Here he is, for example, on all three topics: I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade, at Naples, preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.
At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you will not only hear the people yelling out, "Ah gredin! Ah monstre!" and cursing the tyrant of the play from the boxes; but the actors themselves positively refuse to play the wicked parts, such as those of the infames Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in their real characters as loyal Frenchmen. I set the two stories one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language.
I warn my "kyind friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of harrowing villany and complicated - but, as I trust, intensely interesting - crime. My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you. When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine language - No, no! But when we are going over the quiet country we must perforce be calm. A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd. We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight. The present Chapter is very mild. Others - But we will not anticipate those.
(p. 70). And, yet, "sincere" Thackeray's storytelling and pacing did not generate the momentum of Thackeray's "mercenary" brother in Naples. Whether the problem was that, in his enthusiasm for demonstrating his "sincerity," Thackeray went overboard - or whether Thackeray simply enjoys being bitchy too much to resist when necessary for the sake of the plot - the outcome was the same. Bitchiness can be diverting over the course of an evening - but after a month, it gets old. (Image of William Makepeace Thackeray from The Free Library)
 In Roberto Bolaño's novel, 2666, an acclaimed, reclusive novelist, Benno von Archimboldi works as a gardener in Venice. Bolaño acknowledges the unlikeliness of Archimboldi's day job - it sounds like a joke, like being a trash collector in Antarctica. But, no, Bolaño maintains that Archimboldi really is a gardener in Venice, employed by the municipality to tend to its public parks, however few in number or small in square footage. Having just traipsed around Venice for the first time, I have a fresh appreciation for the disbelief that ought to greet any claim to be a gardener in Venice: the city really doesn't have any plants. Indeed, I believe I have identified what has to have been Archimboldi's workplace. Pictured above is the only public park space I saw: four or so trees, clustered with some shrubs, by the Ponte della Accademia. An enterprising Venetian municipal official might consider installing a plaque, "Here worked the mysterious and brilliant novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, according to that other mysterious and brilliant novelist, Roberto Bolaño" - or setting up a walking tour of Venice's public plants, similar to Stockholm's tours of points of interest from the Millennium trilogy. That said, having seen Venice (however briefly), I now feel that Archimboldi's job was not a joke: it was a metaphor. Venice is a has-been metropolis. Its dwindling population survives on the skimpiest of economies: short of seasonal tourism, the city has no industry, no offices, no business, no livelihood. Its buildings are constantly decaying; upkeep and restoration efforts cannot hope to outpace the destructiveness of the rising salt-water. A monument to a Renaissance pinnacle, the city is currently close to a tomb, a symbol of the absurdity and hopelessness of resistance to mortality. Nonetheless, Bolaño doesn't grieve Venice's fate. Everything has its span of existence, and Bolaño doesn't respect attempts at exceeding these limits. Throughout 2666, Bolaño mocks stabs at immortality, whether through his repeated references to burned books or his antipathy to fame: Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Göring was famous. The people he loved or remembered fondly weren't famous, they just satisfied certain needs. Döblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was his joy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
(p. 802.) Like fame, immortality is "rooted in delusion and lies." Immortality is almost always twinned with ambition. And it is reductive; to be immortal is to be diminished, the color stripped from the Greek statues, the music lost from the Greek dramas, the social context irrevocably severed from the surviving fragment. For Bolaño, literature is not about authors who reverberate through the centuries. Rather, tthe point of literature is to help us to accept mortality, to benefit from its gifts, and to husband our energies so that we can avoid wasteful resistance to the inevitable. In 2666, Bolaño suggests that mortality doesn't diminish life, but resistance to it does. Thus, he sends Archimboldi into the world's most beautiful monument to such resistance, Venice, to nurture life and growth in the midst of this blindingly gorgeous hollowness. The task Bolaño gives Archimboldi is one either futility or nobility. In any event, it is the task of any brilliant novelist today.
 Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother is a slim, nasty novel about the devastating consequences of allowing oneself to be too bedazzled by gorgeous painting. The story charts the spectacular destruction of the marriage of Don Rigoberto and Donna Lucrecia, a middle-aged couple in Lima who marry despite Donna Lucrecia's concerns about becoming a stepmother to Don Rigoberto's son, Fonchito. Don Rigoberto focuses so completely on his rich fantasy life - a fantasy life augmented by his reproductions of smutty nudes by the likes of Titian and Jordaens (left) - that he doesn't notice the hazards that cause Donna Lucrecia anxiety. For her own part, despite her awareness of the dangers, Donna Lucrecia doesn't know how to manage the risks and so falls prey to Fonchito, who first seduces her and then exposes her to Don Rigoberto. The novel contains lovely reproductions of the paintings that animate Don Rigoberto's and Donna Lucrecia's sexual fantasies. These fantasies involve detailed narrative accounts of the naughty doings that the paintings portray, narratives that - in their attentiveness to the minutiae of the visual art - contrast starkly with the couple's myopic view of encroaching (and menacing) reality. In his portrayal of Don Rigoberto and Donna Lucrecia, Vargas Llosa is not merely mocking people who devote more energy to their fantasies than to their flesh-and-blood lives. Rather, he takes aim at the narrowness and lack of ambition of the lives (and, consequently, the imaginations) of Don Rigoberto and Donna Lucrecia. Don Rigoberto, for example, engages in an elaborate, nightly pre-sex ritual, during which he secludes himself in the bathroom and devotes obsessive attention to one part of his body each day of the week. One night - ear night (removing wax and tweezing unwanted hairs) - Don Rigoberto muses: "Happiness exists," he repeated to himself, as he did every night. Yes, provided one sought it where it was possible. In one's own body and in that of one's beloved, for instance; by oneself and in the bathroom; for hours or minutes on a bed shared with the being so ardently desired. Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic. It was hidden, a pearl in its seashell, in certain rites or ceremonial duties that offered human beings brief flashes and optical illusions of perfection. One had to be content with these crumbs so as not to live at the mercy of anxiety and despair, slapping at the impossible. Happiness lies hidden in the hollow of my ears, [Don Rigoberto] thought, in a mellow mood.
(p. 29.) I had wondered why Vargas Llosa (and his publisher) had gone to the trouble of reproducing the paintings in In Praise of the Stepmother, since doing so inevitably made the book more expensive. But when I read, "Happiness lies hidden in the hollow of my ears," I had my answer. Anyone who can gaze upon the art slipped between the pages of the novel and yet still conclude that happiness is as confined a condition as may be experienced from wax-free ear canals deserves to have his wife seduced by his son. In Praise of the Stepmother is a condemnation of the Philistine, and particularly of aesthetic pretensions of the nouveau riche. Like a snubbed Yahweh smoting some unfortunate idolaters, Vargas Llosa deals pitilessly with this hapless couple, allowing them to ignore that the powers unleashed by great art are complex and uncontrollable, and ultimately crushing his protagonists under the weight of their ignorance. Though Vargas Llosa's vengeance is confined to the imagined world of his novel, In Praise of the Stepmother stands as an unmistakable warning to those who, rather than blind themselves with paintings, bury themselves in books. (Image of Jacob Jordaens King Candaules of Lydia Showing his Wife to Gyges from National Museum of Sweden website)
 "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. That's my stab at the wayward thoughtful insight. Now for the snarky quip: nuns take a vow of poverty; unless Bolaño advocates that novelists do the same (and Bolaño is an author who switched from poetry to novels in order to make money), the novelist can't afford to go unread. (Images from The Daily Mail and National Museums Liverpool)
 Part of what makes literature "literature" - instead of, say, verbiage of the variety one finds in fine print, junk mail and street signs - is that it's in dialogue with other literary works. Mario Vargas Llosa's, The Bad Girl, wouldn't exist without Gustave Flaubert's, Madame Bovary, nor Jose Saramoga's, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, without the New Testament, but "past performance is no guarantee of future earnings" is impervious to any of the foregoing (to its - and our - detriment). Because of this dialogue, fictional books featuring fictional author-characters often provide examples of the fictional authors' work. A.S. Byatt wrote an entire oeuvre of Romantic poetry for the fictional poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash in her novel, Posession. The World According to Garp, to take another example, contains substantial excerpts from T.S. Garp's fiction. Without these excerpts, LaMotte, Ash and Garp might exist as characters, but readers would be without any idea of how they, as writers, participate in literary dialogue (although readers see how their creators, Byatt and John Irving respectively, engage in such dialogue). In creative writing MFA-speak, without these glimpses of LaMotte's, Ash's and Garp's creative output, Byatt and Irving would merely be telling us about their writing, rather than showing us. Perhaps surprisingly - or, rather, unsurprisingly, since Jonathan Lethem, in his New York Times review of 2666 notes that Roberto "Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules" - in 2666, Roberto Bolaño gives us a writer-protagonist sans examples of his writing. Benno von Archimboldi, the nom de plume of Hans Reiter, is a post-WWII German novelist who, by the late 1990's and early 2000's, is routinely nominated for the Nobel Prize. British and European critics are obsessed with Achimboldi - they fight academic battles over him in journals and at conferences. At one point in 2666, Jean-Luc Pelletier, a French von Achimboldi scholar, remarks that it was surprising, or that it would never cease to surprise him, the way Archimboldi depicted pain and shame.
"Delicately," said Espinoza [a colleague].
"That's right," said Pelletier. "Delicately."
(p. 143.) At another moment, Jacob Bubis, Archimboldi's publisher and a legendary editor, awakens his wife in the middle of the night to declare that they must publish Archimboldi's new novel. "Is it good?" asked [Mrs. Bubis], half asleep and not bothering to sit up.
"It's better than good," said Bubis, pacing the room.
. . . .
At the first light of day [Bubis] woke his wife again and made her promise that when he was no longer head of the publishing house, his euphemism for his own death, she wouldn't abandon Archimboldi.
"Abandon him in what sense?" asked [Mrs. Bubis], still half asleep.
"We have to protect him," he added.
(p. 815.) Such is the information with which the reader of 2666 must make do, on which basis - on which faith - the reader must accept Archimboldi, the character and the writer. My question is: why? Why create a writer of such towering importance - to literary history (in 2666's fictional world) and to the story of 2666 - and simultaneously deprive the reader of any inkling of this writer's literary works? Indeed, Bolaño goes farther than denying Archimboldi any opportunity to show readers his fiction and the dialogue it sparks with other literary works; Bolaño all but tells us that such dialogue is beyond Archimboldi. Largely unschooled and unread, Archimboldi grows up with a single critical text: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, from which he learns about seaweed. The only other book that Archimboldi reads during his formative years is Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. How can a writer with such a sparse and scattershot familiarity with the canon produce literature? With Archimboldi, Bolaño seems to want to create a sui generis author - a novelist who comes out of no literary tradition, who owes no literary debts, who eschews literature as he conquers it. This conceit is obviously the stuff of myth, but perhaps it relates to the way Bolaño saw himself: a high-school drop-out, Bolaño (according to Francisco Goldman in his review in The New York Review of Books) "blame[d] gaps in his subsequent self-education on the layout of the shelving in bookstores that prevented him from shoplifting certain books." The authorial persona Bolaño cultivated (in the words of Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The London Review of Books) is one of "a writer . . . who writes as if literature were all that mattered, and at the same time writes in a distinctly unliterary way." That said, I don't believe that Archimboldi (intentionally or subliminally) is a cast in Bolaño's mold. For one thing, Bolaño, unlike Archimboldi, does not abstain from dialogue with literature; on the contrary, his work is rife with references to literary and other artistic works. Bolaño is not without literary forebears: he openly acknowledges the influence of - and withstands comparison to - Julio Cortázar (especially the novel Hopscotch) and Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño's autodidactic education might have been scattershot, but it's anything but sparse; Bolaño's literary dialogue may be idiosyncratic, but it's at the core of his work - he couldn't write "as if literature were all that mattered" otherwise. For another thing, Bolaño apparently makes a habit of writing about writers whose work remains opaque to the reader. Kunkel describes Bolaño's story "Enrique Martín," the eponymous character of which is a giftless poet about whose poetry the narrator "speaks . . . only with pity and contempt." Similarly, in Bolaño's novel, The Savage Detectives, two poets go searching for a third poet, Cesárea Tinajero, whose body of work has virtually vanished. Archimboldi is simply one of many Bolaño writer-characters whose literary works remain (literally) unwritten. (Whereas Bolaño himself is the prolific progenitor of one book of poems, three story collections and ten published novels, along with at least two novels found among his papers at the time of his death.) Bolaño's choice to leave Archimboldi mute to literary dialogue is plainly more than an amplification of Bolaño's own (possible) personal myths . . . which is not to say that the choice is rational. Patterns that emerge across a writer's oeuvre are often not rational, but visceral, emotional, illogical or subliminal. My guess is that - consciously or unconsciously - the writer-without-an- oeuvre (of which Archimboldi is Bolaño's supreme example) served Bolaño as a symbol of mortality. To any fool who comforts him or herself with the thought that the human body will fail but the written word endures, Bolaño's oeuvre-less authors stand as a sharp reminder that, however much literature may be all that matters, the impermanence of life is a fact that overwhelms all other priorities and silences all dialogues. (Image of Roberto Bolaño from The Telegraph)
 Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is impressive beyond praise that can be offered in modern English. Like Milan Kundera, Bolaño's achievement is utterly unique and un-replicable. At 893 pages in the English edition (apparently over 1,000 in the original Spanish), Bolaño's feat in 2666 is perhaps beyond summarization. But despite its heft and ambition, I think Bolaño's accomplishment is straightforward: he's modern literature's consummate realist. Calling Bolaño a "realist" may strike those familiar with his work as odd. Bolaño, after all, began his writing life as a poet and, as Franscisco Goldman asserts in his New York Review of Books piece, Bolaño seems to have considered himself fundamentally a poet despite his turn to fiction writing. Indeed, reading 2666 (even in translation) evoked the active visceral engagement that usually only occurs with poetry: the book riled up my guts for irrational and inarticulable reasons, the way a poem might make me want to cry without knowing why. Because of Bolaño's power to tap into the subliminal and the unconscious, he might readily be termed a stylist, in the model of Anne Enright, whose The Gathering operates similarly, or W.G. Sebold, whose The Emigrants has been reputed to have like power (though I found it merely boring when I read it six years ago). And, unquestionably, Bolaño's writing classes him among the leading stylists of literature. But Bolaño distinguishes himself from the poet-stylist set in a significant way. Most poets and stylists transport the reader from reality: when their writing works, it grips the reader's viscera and pulls him or her into a realm that departs from the quotidian. The point of such writing is not to depict life realistically, but to evoke (and provoke) feelings, sensations and engagement. Whereas Bolaño uses poetic-stylist techniques to depict reality. Indeed, the reality that emerges from 2666 is more "real" than any other attempt at literary realism I have encountered. As Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The London Review of Books, says of a Bolaño short story called "Enrique Martín": You don't feel that Enrique Martín is a robust character inhabiting a well-made story; you feel - whether or not any real-life original ever existed - something perhaps more powerful and certainly, in fiction, more unusual: namely, that he is simply a person, and that instead of having a story he had a life.
Reading 2666, I didn't feel that I was inhabiting the world of a story: I felt that I caught in the sweep of 20th century history. Common themes and characters abounded, yes, but plot was only what I imposed on the events, and indeterminacy was the only honest conclusion. Composed of five sub-novellas, 2666 can be read in any order. I read it in the order in which the novellas were assembled in the English-language edition, but I'm going to read the book again in a different order. The conviction intrinsic in 2666's construction is the same truth that informs the modern construction of consciousness: however one looks at the facts, doubt must temper clarity because story-lines are imposed, not organic. To use literature as Bolaño does is a departure from the norm. His approach cannot be described as "escapist." My guess is that most people's realities are more escapist than Bolaño's literature. Nor does Bolaño's technique generate pleasure reading. The sub-novella, "The Part About the Crimes," in 2666 is almost unbearable to read - just as life is sometimes unbearable to endure. By depicting reality so . . . realistically, Bolaño has in some sense made the ultimate argument against realism: it's too intense. And yet, enjoyable or no, Bolaño's triumph is impossible not to admire or praise (however inadequate the English language is for the task). In taking reality and wrestling it between the covers of a book, where it stays and performs at the command of the conjurer and the whim of the reader, Bolaño has assumed the mantle of a god. A Greek god, perhaps - flawed and ambiguous and happy to muck around with humans - but the progenitor of one a hell of a branch of literature. (Image of Roberto Bolaño from The New York Times book review)
 I'm going to be reading more of Brad Leithauser's writing. Thus far, I've read only his criticism in The New York Review of Books, but he is also a novelist, poet and verse novelist. Obviously, a major talent (and did I mention MacArthur Fellow?). He is also a very polite critic. His NYRB review of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs caught my attention with its opening paragraph: Lorrie Moore's novels are remarkable for the number of linguistic detours they embark on. Off in the distance, a plot is likely hatching. But its unfolding will patiently have to wait until the characters - nearly all of whom have a penchant for wordplay - have explored the far-flung implications of the language that entertains and envelops them.
"Remarkable" sounds good, but it could also bear less positive connotations ( e.g., remarkably misguided). That the plot is "likely" hatching evinces a positive attitude about what could be a serious failure ( i.e., if the plot didn't materialize). And what must be "patient" with Lorrie Moore is not the plot, but the reader, who like Leithauser (and this reader) "kept looking for someone [in Moore's novel] who didn't parse and pun." As Leithauser observes, Moore's fiction proceeds by "near misses": misapprehensions, mishearings, misidentifications, misunderstandings. An innocent utterance floats out into the atmosphere, which turns out to be a hazardous and transformative medium, everywhere subject to misinterpretation.
. . . .
It's rare in contemporary American fiction to meet a writer so preoccupied with this sort of linguistic dissonance.
The reason for such rarity, I submit, is that stories don't proceed by linguistic "near misses": they proceed by action. The action can be physical, emotional or psychological, but it cannot be solely linguistic. (As Leithauser notes, "poets are another matter." In a sense, poetry is by definition linguistic action: the rhythm of the language stirs our viscera.) The weakness of Moore's approach is plain in her plot, which Leithauser (even with his critical delicacy) highlights. "I turned skeptical, and a little feisty" when the protagonist, Tassie, and her boyfriend break-up (a scene which also caused me grief), Leithauser admits. "Pesky questions of plausibility arose again" when Tassie accidentally poisons her roommate, Leithauser continues. But worse awaits - "an utter suspension of suspension of disbelief," in Leithauser's words - when Tassie climbs into her brother's coffin. To some extent, Leithauser excuses these problems with the explanation that [m]any writers who are led by the ear, as I think Moore is, have little facility for visual detail. But she has an arresting gift for the one-line imagistic simile or metaphor.
While this statement may be true, the plot of A Gate at the Stairs fumbles, not because Moore has little facility for visual detail, but because she's trying to power a plot with linguistic acrobatics - puns, similes and metaphors - instead of action. Moore's is not a methodology worth replicating. Over 322 pages, the experience of verbal-shenanigans-in-search-of-the-plot-in-the-distance is, even for the patient reader, remarkable. (Image of Brad Leithauser from Johns Hopkins University website)
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