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 Bookspiece, 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.
"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago. I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought. She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.
I was dubious, as I am of all claims that society is getting dumber. From what I can see, society has always been composed of a healthy majority of idiots. In any event, I've never been convinced by comparisons between today's reading population and that of times past because literacy rates are so much higher now. You can't expect literate morons to gravitate to the same fare as literate non-morons, and incorporating so many of these morons into the literate population (a development which I fully endorse) was bound to change the overall mix of reading options.
But I continued to mull Gabi's question, and I was still mulling when Daniel Mendelsohn published his review of Ben Yagoda's book, Memoir: A History, in The New Yorker. Mendelsohn, like Gabi, suggests that the recent glut of memoirs "may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture." Although Yagoda apparently doesn't speculate about why such a displacement is occurring, Mendelsohn has a theory. Televised talk shows, reality TV and the confessional Internet culture, Mendelsohn conjectures, may be creating an audience that cannot identify with protagonists who don't claim to be "real":
Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?
Although, as numerous recent memoir fakes have demonstrated, "real" protagonists often tread into fictional territory, modern audiences (according to Mendelsohn) may find such protagonists easier to sympathize with (and to forgive) than fictional characters.
I am as intrigued by Mendelsohn's explanation, but ultimately as skeptical of it as I am of Gabi's. Certainly, "real" stories have an allure that the fictional will always lack, but the notion that an audience's ability to relate to characters depends on the claimed truthfulness or fictional nature of the story doesn't (intuitively) strike me as persuasive.
More likely, in my opinion, is that people are becoming conditioned to expect certain narratives in certain media: quite possibly people are gravitating towards TV and Internet content that delivers some semblance of "the real" - 24 hour news stations, reality TV, infotainment, documentaries, nature programming and, of course, talk shows. Television and dynamic Internet leave less room for the imagination than a book; demanding that such media deliver narratives that, likewise, are composed of more facts and less fantasy is (to my mind, misguided, but nonetheless) an understandable expectation.
But if people aren't becoming too stupid for novels, and if television and Internet narrative expectations aren't infecting books, then what explains the recent outpouring of published memoirs? The most credible supposition, to my mind, builds on a point Judith Shulevitz made in her review of Yagoda's Memoir in The New York Times Review of Books. She argues that memoirists, whether liars or oracles (or, more likely, something in between), appeal:
(1) because [they] might become . . . friend[s]; (2) because we might learn something useful; and (3) because we can't help being curious about the ways other people go about reflecting on themselves and justifying their existence.
At this historical moment, those last two reasons are intensely salient. The modern world demands much of its denizens. People must be educated and informed. They must be physically fit and attractive. They must be healthy and engaged in the world. They must have families and jobs. They must be sexy and productive. They must be prosperous and environmentally-sound. They must be free of prejudices and self-aware. They must be mobile and simultaneously rooted in family and community.
No other time in history has demanded as much of its people. Typically, in past ages, societies have been content to let their women occupy one limited realm, their soldiers another, and they restricted similarly their wise men, merchants, rulers, wealthy and poor. These groups all had roles that were, generally speaking, well-defined; and these roles required skill sets that were, generally speaking, within the capacities of their players to learn within a relatively short time. Not so today: "unbounded" is le mot just with respect to social roles. Everyone must be everything. And the necessary skills for such high-level functioning require more time, training and experience to acquire than most of us will ever have.
The current popularity of memoirs, to my mind, relates to these social demands. Memoirs tantalize readers with the promise of answers to their stress-inducing question: how do you do it? How do you meet social expectations in this day and age? Can someone else - someone successful enough to merit a published book about their life - tell me what I'm supposed to do?
Historically, of course, seekers of such information turned to (among others) the witch doctors, elders, gossips and teachers of their day. They might also seek second opinions in the works of their relevant epic poets, myth makers, and story tellers (playwrights, novelists, etc.).
Usually, of course, the advice of the witch doctor contingent was oral and unrecorded, so quite possibly we undercount the extent to which it was relied on by past generations. Today, of course, the modern equivalents of the witch doctors (Jack Welch, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, etc.) have many mass platforms and outlets on and by which to promote and record their answers to the pressing question: how do you do it? So perhaps we now overcount their importance.
Regardless, if today we are seeing a supposedly ahistorical reliance on the witch doctors, et al., and a corresponding decline in reliance on the epic poets and their ilk, perhaps the reason is not the audience's intelligence, nor its capacity for identifying with fictional characters, but the content of the fiction on offer. Surely fiction that enfolds the breadth of this global moment and provides fodder for rumination about the modern predicament is not penned by MFA graduates enjoying suburban lives underwritten by their jobs teaching in MFA programs?
(Image of title page of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the website of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
When reading fiction, the temptation to finger some fact or occurrence as "the truth" is strong, and those writing about Karen Blixen are apt to capitulate to it. Judith Thurman, Sara Wheeler and Errol Trzebinski all do it, citing some snippet of her fiction for a clue about how she might have thought or felt or responded to x or y situation.
Reading Winter's Tales, I myself felt the pull of such interpretive methods. "The Pearls," for example, dares you to understand the story as an account of her marriage. The groom, Alexander, in "The Pearls," has a twin sister; Karen Blixen's husband, Bror, had a twin brother. The bride, Jensine, is happy to honeymoon with her husband in the wilderness; Karen and Bror no sooner married than they were living in Africa. "The gossips of Copenhagen would have it that [Alexander] had married for money, and [Jensine] for a name" (p. 108); and, indeed, such gossip circulated about Karen and Bror - he, who was always in debt, and she, who was in love with being called "Baroness."
These correspondences lead the reader (or at least, this reader) to draw similar parallels about other nuggets in the story. "[V]ery soon after he marriage, Jensine realized - as she had perhaps dimly known from their first meeting - that he was a human being entirely devoid, and incapable, of fear." (p. 110.) Ah-hah, I thought, upon reading this passage: so that's what Bror was like.
"[Jensine] recalled the fairy tale of the boy is sent out in the world to learn to be afraid, and it seemed to her that for her own sake and his, in self-defense as well as in order to protect and save him, she must teach her husband to fear." (p. 111.) An insight into Karen Blixen's attitude towards her husband, no?
By the end of the story, when "[t]o her own deep surprise . . . . Alexander . . . had become a very small figure in the background of life; what he did or thought mattered not in the least. That she herself had been made a fool of did not matter" (p. 123), I was inclined to believe that I was reading Karen Blixen's personal opinion about having been married to an adulturer who'd humiliated her in front of Nairobi society.
Had I read "The Pearls" in isolation, perhaps my opinion of Karen Blixen's marriage would have settled into that comfortable category of "stuff I know without needing to retain citations" that resides in a hazy corner of my memory. But I kept reading. And, annoyingly, characterizations resurfaced, but now in less comfortably identifiable situations.
For example, in "Alkmene," the title character is a gorgeous girl adopted by a childless couple. "The first thing [Gertrud, Alkmene's adopted mother] told me about [Alkmene] was that she seemed to be altogether without fear. . . . So [Gertrud] made it her first duty as a mother to teach her child, as in the fairy-tales, to know fear." (p. 200.) Uh-oh. Is Alkmene also supposed to be Bror? Because later on in the story, Alkmene dresses up in a regal silk gown and parades around the woods - and dressing up, as well as theatrical behavior, were characteristics of the young Karen Blixen.
This coincidence of fearlessness in a character reminded me that extracting facile assumptions about the author's life based on her fiction is crap-quality literary criticism, a lesson I should've known so intimately from my own writing that I'd be in no need of reminding. From my own creative methods, I know that facts are an input to a process - the inner workings of which are veiled even to me - the outcome of which is (hopefully) entertaining, (hopefully) linguistically acute and (hopefully) insightful into the human condition, but never reliably accurate a reflection of my own biography. I don't "hide" my truth in the novels I write, but instead transform the raw factual material of reality into stories.
If Karen Blixen did anything similar, then the only conclusion to draw from her fiction is doubt about the possibility of extrapolating backwards from her fancy to the facts that formed its basis.
Call me defensive, but I'm an honest woman, and I resent the fact that the two great artistic loves of my life are both associated with lying. I used to be an actor, which many people think synonymous with lying for a living. (Or, at least, lying on the casting couch; but resenting that the two great artistic loves of my life are both associated with whoring is another blog post.)
"I'm a very good actor," is allegedly what Sir Jock Delves Broughton said to the prosecutor, after a jury acquitted Broughton of the murder of Joss Hay, Earl of Erroll - a murder that Broughton almost certainly committed. When I read statements like that, I'm in anguish: why smear actors? Acting is a noble profession, a rigorous craft, with an esteemed history (Shakespeare, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier). We're not clowns, for Christ's sake.
Fiction is - obviously - also problemmatic. Writing down stuff that you make up is - to some people's way of thinking - a lot like lying (or the practice of law; "liar, oh sorry lawyer" used to be the favorite joke of one of my brothers). So imagine my despair to see Mario Vargas Llosa embracing - yes! embracing - the accusation of lying in his novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.
An investigation into the life of an imaginary (but based on real-life) Communist revolutionary by an imaginary (but based on real-life) Peruvian novelist, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is salted with confrontations between the novelist and his skeptical audience. "It won't be the real story, but, just as you say, a novel," the nameless novelist assures one interviewee, "A faint, remote, and, if you like, false version." (p. 66.) "'Because I'm a realist, in my novels I always try to lie knowing why I do it,'" the novelist elaborates. (p. 67.)
To another interviewee, he protests, "I only want to garner as much information, as many opinions about [Alejandro Mayta] as I can, so that later I can add a large dose of fancy to all that data, so I can create something that will be an unrecognizable version of what actually happened." (p. 81.)
"[A]ll stories mix truth and lies," he concludes. (p. 118.)
Nonsense! The sloppiness - of thinking, or word usage - of confusing fiction writing with lying makes me bristle with indignation. Detective work involves following a factual path to the truth; fiction writing - and acting, as well - entails discovery of an imaginary path to the truth. Writing fiction is the creation of a description or account that makes the reader recognize: yes, this is just what life is like.
Lying, by contrast, is not about truth, but deceit. While fiction aims for the enlightenment that comes from being able to accept reality, lying achieves its purpose by tricking people into remaining ignorant.
Of course, I'm so in love with Vargas Llosa's work, that I'll forgive him anything - even a difference of opinion. His repeated insistence on his own lies in Alejandro Mayta is meant to illustrate a larger social phenomenon: "Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary." (p. 246.)
Nonetheless, I think Vargas Llosa is selling himself short; taking refuge from reality in an illusion is quite different than what Vargas Llosa is doing: confronting the reader with the desolation and despair that they might otherwise deny. And I suspect that Vargas Llosa understands the difference. As his novelist protagonist responds to one tough customer, who demands: "'Does it make any sense to be writing a novel with Peru in this condition and Peruvians all living on borrowed time?' Does it make any sense? I tell him it certainly does, since I'm doing it." (p. 140.)
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.
