Slender and childless: an excerpt from Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Madeleine is Sleeping.
Category: ellipsesAuthor: nobody
“When Madeleine sleeps, Mother says, the cows give double their milk. Pansies sprout up between the floorboards. Your father loves me, but I remain slender and childless. I can hear the tumult of pears and apples falling from the trees like rain.
Smooth your sister’s coverlet. Arrange her hair on the pillowcase. Be silent as saints. We do not wish to wake her.”
read comments (0)“When the sun stands striding at high noon,
then up from the waves he comes—
the Old Man of the Sea who never lies—
under a West Wind’s gust that shrouds him round
in shuddering dark swells, and once he’s out on land
he heads for his bed of rest in deep hollow caves
and around him droves of seals—sleek pups bred
by his lovely ocean lady—bed down too
in a huddle, flopping up from the gray surf,
giving off the sour reek of the salty ocean depths…
Now I will tell you all the wizard’s tricks.
First he will make his rounds and count the seals
and once he’s checked their number, reviewed them all,
down in their midst he’ll lie, like a shepherd with his flock.
That’s your moment. Soon as you see him bedded down,
muster your heart and strength and hold him fast,
wildly as he writhes and fights you to escape.
He’ll try all kinds of escape—twist and turn
into every beast that moves across the earth,
transforming himself into water, superhuman fire,
but you hold on for dear life, hug him all the harder!
And when, at last, he begins to ask you questions—
back in the shape you saw him sleep at first—
relax your grip and set the old god free
and ask him outright, hero,
which of the gods is up in arms against you?”
I was a bit surprised to realize that almost exactly the same fight occurs in certain Russian fairy tales, except in those the protean figure is the hero’s lost beloved, and if he can just hold onto her through all her transformations he’ll win her back. He lets go. (Menelaus deals better, here.)
I’m sorry to have been so absent, dear housewives. For one thing I was reading the first two Twilight books, which are much better than expected but don’t inspire much in the way of commentary. (Buffy disempowered at last! Sub-dom manhandling as a substitute for sex! If vampires have no blood flow, then how can they get erections anyway?)
They did inspire a dream, however, in which a crew of vampires was painstakingly disassembling my body for parts—spooling up my intestines, carefully peeling my muscles from the bones and sorting them out, etc. I was conscious and in pain, but quite calm.
read comments (0)Persistent housewives will know I’ve done some theorizing in these pages about the relationship between plot and character. More specifically, I’ve advanced the view that there is not really plot-as-such, but only plot as the phases of the characters, their disclosure in action and event.
Oh, I still believe this. But the trouble is that I believe the reverse simply can’t be true: character cannot be only the source of the plot. (Character can be no more than that, of course, even in good books; but, I ardently believe, not in great ones.) The moment where the character digresses, takes on a private trajectory, becomes the source of no story, serves nothing, is utterly unto itself: that, I think, is what fiction is looking for. A novel is a search for the moment where the self exceeds the structures that define it.
Of course a character has no possibility of exceeding the plot until their symbiosis is established…
(If anyone is waiting for further word on The Savage Detectives, well, I’m pretty near the end, but I’ve been too fluttered of late to read much. And it’s become so cuttingly, terribly beautiful that I’m not sure I’ll be able to write more about it. At this point I’ll just say, Go see for yourself.)
read comments (0)Everyone in the subway car shaves his or her head completely. An individual ziplock bag for collecting the hair is provided to each passenger. An attendant then passes through the car and collects all the bags. As long as each person’s hair is kept separate there is no need for names or numbers.
Then, on a large canvas, the attendant sets the hairs tuft by tuft with tweezers, perhaps using melted wax as an adhesive. The attendant is careful to keep each head of hair distinct: the borders may touch, but the hairs from different individuals must not mingle. The finished piece should give the impression of a quilt of scalps.
Once the canvas is hung several pairs of stethoscopes hang from hooks beside it, so that viewers can listen for the thoughts under each patch of hair. Viewers may write down the thoughts they hear or assign names to the squares on the canvas: the names they had when they were part of a person, and the new names they acquired once they gained their independence.
read comments (0)Ah, I know in my last post I described The Savage Detectives as a conventionally structured, first person, sequential narrative; well, dear housewives, that was true of the first part. Once the second, and longest, section of the book kicks in, though, it changes to unrestrained high-modernism: a fascinating eddying time structure (there are waves of voices; each wave regresses back to January 1976; each succeeding wave laps a bit further forward in time than the wave before) and narration by dozens of separate characters, many, though hardly all of them, people who were mentioned by the hero of the opening section. (Do we still miss modernism so much? Is that why there’s such acute passion for Bolaño now? The literary world seems to treat modernism as a long-ago lover from whose loss it never recovered, and whom it has desperately tried to forget ever since…)
Two of Bolaño’s preoccupations dominate here, as in so much of his work: time, and the sense of literature as a collective, a hive mind. As in Amulet, Bolaño finds opportunities to list the names of writers, both remembered and obscure, until the names become an incantation, the noise of voices joining together in a communal force. (For an example, check this excerpt from Amulet.) The structure of the middle section of The Savage Detectives recreates that hive mind. A swirl of voices (mostly the voices of poets) talk about one another, remember one another, and, while some are individual enough to stand out, others merge, ebb, flux. The poets are formed from each other; literature is formed from those it forgets; those forgotten inform those who are remembered. There’s a kind of unspoken sense, here, that every writer who becomes famous enough to be remembered, even very selectively, contains the remains of dozens who weren’t so lucky. Bolaño is said to have based his characters on people he knew: it’s as if he were listening to the people he loved in anticipation of their deaths, listening to them as a babble of ghosts, and offering himself as a kind of mass grave. It’s tenderly, bitterly beautiful. (And if you’re looking for a Bolaño novel to start with, I think I recommend this one, even though it’s pretty long.)
There’s an interesting, subtle way in which this idea is reinforced through recurrent imagery in which things substitute for other things and contain them, just as people substitute for and support one another. As in:
“He came up and offered me his hand. His grip was peculiar. As if, as we shook, he threw in Masonic code and signals from the Mexican underworld. A tickling and morphologically peculiar handshake, in any case, as if the hand shaking mine had no skin or were only a sheath, a tattooed sheath. But never mind his hand. I said it was a beautiful night and we should go outside and walk. It’s as if it were still summer, I said.”
And:
“Only then did I realize that there was someone beside him. A dark, strong, Indian-looking guy. A guy with eyes that seemed to sort of liquefied and blurry at the same time, and a doctor’s smile, an unusual smile at the Passy Commune, where we all tended to have the smiles of folk musicians or lawyers.”
(And for a previous post on The Savage Detectives, try this.)
read comments (1)From what I’d heard, I expected The Savage Detectives to be a rewarding slog; it was described to me as almost unreadably dense, and then both the short Bolaño novels I’ve read took me some time to get through. Instead I’m finding it brash and playful, with a brightness that persists no matter how dark the story becomes; even, say, when a teenage prostitute is being stalked by her sadistic pimp. Add to that ravenous sexuality, a relative deemphasis on language (his shorter novels took me a long time to read partly because I stopped so often to stroke the prose) and a spattered and unstructured but nonetheless fast-paced plot, and you have something resembling a page-turner. When I’m not reading it, as now, I slightly resent the fact…
It’s also (so far) a lot more conventional than the others I’ve read, without their will to dissolve time into simultaneity. In the first part of The Savage Detectives, the hero Juan Garcia Madero starts college and then stops going, regrets his virginity and then loses it (and then some), immerses himself in bohemian chaos, and hits a pimp, all in sequence. But still I think there’s something about the treatment of experience in The Savage Detectives that anticipates Bolaño’s later trickery with time. In Amulet there’s no distinction allowed between past, present, and future; in By Night in Chile, memory wicks up and drowns the immediate moment. In both cases, I suspect Bolaño was conveying a sense of time informed by his own illness and by the consciousness of coming death. But while there’s still sequence in The Savage Detectives, there’s also a peculiar equalizing of all moments. The wash of idle conversation weighs as much as sex, as much as wandering through bookstores, as much as a beating; causes may have effects, but just as often they eddy and go nowhere, or drowsily reverse themselves. The moments may still be ordered, but their order becomes almost irrelevant. Every moment is so saturated with presence that they’re all constantly on the verge of lifting free of the structure of time. Moments are bubbles of the absolute, each one its own emblem, and it’s easy to imagine that when Garcia Madero thinks about his life he might find himself in the same position as Auxilio in Amulet: subsumed by an infinity of layered moments, all of them still happening.
If it’s an understanding of time infused with death, it’s also a portrayal of sexualized time, in which all moments slide over and through each other. Moments become so vital that they’re almost living things, caught in a soft and constant interpenetration. Bolaño is playing with an animism of the instant.
It’s no wonder to me that Bolaño’s reputation is in such crazed ascent. This is literature like they don’t publish in the United States anymore; literature that has to be vetted abroad before it can appear here. People are so thrilled by this kind of writing because they’ve almost forgotten that it’s possible: that the structuring of a narrative, the texture of language, can be enough to reveal a fresh cult of being…
read comments (1)There are certain days when every word gets bitten off before it can chew. When, at best, the things you try to say turn on you and spit up half-masticated lumps of your tongue. Syllables resemble oily bags full of the odds and ends no one wants, the plastic pull-tabs and dusty cat toys; is it any wonder, with their mouths so full, that no one can guess what they’re trying to say? And besides, it’s probably giving them too much credit to think that they’re trying to communicate at all. They might simply enjoy the noises they make, the patient labor involved in gutting a vowel.
There are tricks for managing this condition. There are certain phrases that your own voice has forgotten how to hear, things that will escape detection long enough for you to say them. So they say is one, that’s the way my mother did it, and, can I help you? Stop, but don’t start. What matters is not that these phrases are irrelevant to the problems at hand, but that they are possible.
Besides, whose skin is it that has suddenly engulfed your right hand and ruined all your fingerprints? Why the impulse to pull up the venetian blinds, and see what might be sticking to the window? There must be a path between all the snowflakes, if only you could make it out. A scant half-animal threads ahead of you, picking up the broken furniture people have thrown from their windows, and even at this distance you can clearly see that there’s no white in her fur.
read comments (0)“It came as something of an epiphany the first time I realized that Mexicans, as one example among many, do not eat Mexican food — they are, that is, simply eating food — and I think it is equally the case that Latin Americans don’t make broad, sweeping, and at times almost caricaturish generalizations about Latin America, at least not unless they are already, like Bolaño’s eager Anglo readers certainly are, outsiders imagining an inside to which their access is structurally impossible because their very imaginative faculty exteriorizes them from that whose very interior they would deign to imagine.”
—Eli Evans, writing on bookslut.com
Faithful housewives will be aware that I’ve lately been on a Bolaño kick; in the course of that kick I poked around some of the commentary available online, and came across Eli Evans’s critique of Amulet on bookslut. Evans looks at a smattering of (admittedly heavy-handed) comments on the nature of Latin Americanness in Amulet, then accuses Bolaño of “fraud” for, essentially, offering us a touristic view of his own experience. I didn’t pay much attention to the lines Evans singles out when I was reading Amulet: in a book full of dizzying prose it would be hard to find comments less distinguished than, say, “In Latin America no one is ashamed of being poor.” And then I take a limited interest in questions of anyone’s cultural identity, including my own. I was far more engaged by what Bolaño had to say, and imply, on memory, on the nature and function of literature, on voice.
But Evans’s critique suggests a breathtaking range of presuppositions about authenticity and self-consciousness, posing them as mutually exclusive. Bolaño’s apparent European influences and the period he spent living in Spain are taken as having given him exactly two options: to adhere to a “birthright” of naive, but genuine, Latin-Americanness, or alternatively to view his heritage from without, slice up this externalized version of it, and offer it up as a commodity to his unsuspecting readers as if it carried all the privileged interiority that he actually abandoned. Evans is demanding innocence. In his view, being authentically Latin-American means never thinking about the nature of Latin-Americanness—never stepping far enough outside of the experience of Latin-Americanness to look back and examine it.
Evans isn’t alone in feeling cheated by the self-consciousness of those he regards. Think, for instance, of the hostility so many men express towards beautiful women who are aware of their own beauty. The words “Yeah, and she knows it,” are delivered with disdain, even indignation. If the girl knows the market value of her own face, how will the speaker ever get it at the bargain price of himself?
The demand for a naive absence of self-awareness in an object is a demand for power over that object. North American writers are, to my knowledge, never criticized for offering a fetishistic, exteriorized look at The Idea of America, as so many of them do—because we don’t presume to insist on innocence in those we regard as our equals. We can think of our mashed potatoes as American food, and eat them, too. There’s an implicit understanding here that the ability to simultaneously live out identity and also think about it is the prerogative of the powerful. Others have to choose. For them, self-awareness inevitably alienates them from “real” experience.
This idea has a strange corollary. It denigrates empathy. If it’s impossible to imaginatively occupy more than one position at a time, then imagining the world, or oneself, from someone else’s viewpoint becomes hazardous in the extreme. If you consider how others might see you, you will find yourself instantly ejected from authentic selfhood. Better stay home, in parochial self-absorption, lest empathy deprive you of your own true essence.
But there are psychologists who regard the ability to imaginatively occupy a variety of positions as the source of selfhood. Mary Watkins has defined the self as “an organization of perspectives.” In her view, the self is created when we engage in precisely this empathic seeing-ourselves-from-without: when we imagine ourselves as others might see us, collect those perspectives, and bring them home. If this is the case, then Evans’s expectations of Bolaño are both unreasonable and cruel. They amount to a demand that Bolaño not form a self at all.
For the Evans review, click here.
For previous posts on Amulet, click here and also here.
For an excerpt, try this.
read comments (0)There are childish shapes with a little spread around the shoulders—spread too bunchy and rumpled to be wings, though. They have outgrown the nest and here and there a limb projects between the sticks. It messes with the nest’s integrity, loosens the whole structure and leaves it bulging and inclined to shed. It could rupture in the night and drop all of you, sleeping and unprepared. The popping of twigs keeps you awake, held by tensile lines of possibility: a rumbling fall and your own shadow gaping wider, like a mouth inside the ground.
If they were ready, their capes wouldn’t crease up like that. They wouldn’t have that washed-out tint. They would be expansive, scarlet and tumid with blood, able to handle whatever overflow of air came their way. But then it’s questionable if their capes will ever catch up with their lumpy hips, spindling arms, general bodily extravagance. You can see it all more clearly in dark like this dark, dark that digs itself into your face like fresh eyes. One of them is even turning hunchbacked. They’re supposed to be children, you know, but at times you can’t quite see them that way. At the very least, they’re getting too old for this.
Wait for morning, anyway. A fighting chance at what you find yourself referring to as a secondary life. A kind of supplement to this life in the nest, to be lived in secondary, almost incidentally flighted bodies. What counts after all is the swollen moment, their crush and sweat as they smear their dreaming faces on their siblings’ stomachs. There’s no compelling reason for a moment to lead anywhere other than the ground.
As the dawn comes around their legs start to glimmer in blue spandex. Perhaps they might have accomplished something exciting. Caught falling airplanes and carried them to safety. But it’s hard to escape the impression that they really won’t amount to much.
read comments (0)Except from ‘No Context: A George Trow Memorial’ by Fort/Da
Text from Within the Context of No Context by George Trow.
Reading by Jon Margulies
read comments (1)So, looking at our two recent posts concerning shadows (a Robert Louis Stevenson poem and an excerpt from Bolano) it’s clear that they’re offering competing ideas of the anatomy of shadows: if you slice a shadow open, what implications will you find inside it?
The Stevenson poem suggests that the shadow is a hole there to catch the rejected aspects of its owner; this is classical shadow anatomy. The shadow’s sporadic enormity (when it “shoots up taller like an Indian-rubber ball”) lets the boy offload his grandiosity and his desire to consume his environment; the shadow’s sharp diminishment in steep light supplies him with an image of the fear of insignificance, which he can then expel. The shadow’s other characteristics (he’s an infantile coward, an embarrassment, a slacker) illustrate the same conception: the shadow is the I-am-not that mocks us with our own shape.
Bolano’s shadows are different; what matters is not their freighted resemblance to the self, but their ability to transform anything into anything else, the “multiplicity of readings” they allow. At first the game is fairly harmless; Farewell describes his rural scene, his whores, his endlessly mutable tree. As By Night in Chile goes on, though, it starts to seem that the two literary critics who are talking in that scene are clinging to shadows as a means of evading a darkness larger than their personal limitations. Once Sebastian becomes complicit in Pinochet’s regime his longing for the instability of the shadows returns in a new form: “Sometimes, at night, I would sit on a chair in the dark and ask myself what difference there was between fascist and rebel. Just a pair of words. Two words, that’s all. And sometimes either one will do! So I went out into the street and breathed the air of Santiago with the vague conviction that I was living, if not in the best of worlds, at least in a possible world…” What matters here is that only Sebastian’s conviction that he he can change words into other words lets him see his world as even possible. If he didn’t use words as shadows, didn’t render them with infinite meanings, the history he participates in would exceed his own capacity for belief.
read comments (0)(This is by Robert Louis Stevenson)
My Shadow
I HAVE a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.
He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.
read comments (1)An excerpt from Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile: a conversation on shadows
Category: ellipsesAuthor: Housewife
“And I: What are those shadows telling you, Farewell, what is it? And Farewell: They are telling me about the multiplicity of readings. And I: Multiple, perhaps, but thoroughly mediocre and miserable. And Farewell: I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I: The blind, Farewell, the stumbling of the blind, their futile flailing around, their bumping and tripping, their staggering and falling, their general debilitation. And Farewell: I don’t know what you’re talking about, what’s happened to you, I’ve never seen you like this. And I: I’m glad to hear you say that. And Farewell: I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, I want to talk, but all that comes out is drivel. And I: Can you make out anything clearly in that shadow play? Can you see particular scenes, or the whirlpool of history, or a crazy ellipse? And Farewell: I can see a rural scene. And I: Something like a group of farmers praying, going away, coming back, praying and going away again? And Farewell: I see whores stopping for a fraction of a second to contemplate something important, then heading off again like meteorites. And I: Can you see anything there about Chile? Can you see the future of our land? And Farewell: That meal didn’t agree with me… I see Neruda’s profile and my own, but, no, I’m mistaken, it’s just a tree, I see a tree, the multiple, monstrous silhouette of its dead leaves, like a sea drying up, it looks like a sketch of two profiles, but actually it’s a tomb out in the open, cloven by an angel’s sword or a giant’s club. And I: What else? And Farewell: Whores coming and going, a river of tears. And I: Be more precise. And Farewell: That meal didn’t agree with me. And I: How odd, it doesn’t look like anything to me, just shadows, electric shadows, as if time had speeded up. And Farewell: There is no comfort in books… If I weren’t so drunk and didn’t have such a gut-ache I’d ask you to hear my confession right now. And I: It would be an honour. And Farewell: Or I’d drag you into the bathroom and screw you good and proper.”
(Oh: This is Chris Andrews’s translation.)
For commentary on the first half of this book, see the previous post…
read comments (2)I’m still on a Bolano kick; now I’m reading By Night in Chile, a swirl of the dying thoughts of a priest and literary critic. Like Amulet, its real subject seems to be literature. But where Amulet presented literature as a source of sustenance, By Night in Chile tends to present it as a disappointment. The peculiarly fluid immortality literature offers (not of individual works or of reputations, but of a kind of intergenerational feeding, a continuity of voices) is the ultimate ideal in Amulet. To the priest in By Night in Chile, the same ideal appears hazy and inadequate, a convulsion of shadows.
At the moment, though, what interests me is the fact that, in both Bolano novels I’ve read so far, the protagonist is an observer of writers rather than a writer him or herself. Auxilio in Amulet is a kind of bohemian hanger-on with a vocation for tending to young poets; Sebastian in By Night mentions his own poetry, but is mainly concerned with refracting other people’s works. I tend to believe that this is to Bolano’s credit. When so many novels resort to the narcissistic (and desperately unimaginative) tack of making the protagonist a writer, too, and thus an obvious stand-in for the author, it’s lovely to see someone choose protagonists that offer, not an occasion for self-absorption, but a vehicle for the contemplation of others. Bolano is fervently interested in literature as a force larger than himself, in how it moves and functions.
He’s keenly aware that almost all writers, even the famous ones, are ultimately dissolved by the flood of other voices. The question present in these two novels is whether it’s correct to regard that dissolution as ecstatic or degrading. Auxilio’s passionate immersion in a literary floating world of nighttime cafes and dying painters suggests a willingness to disappear in voices not her own. Sebastian is positioned at more of a remove, as a friend of other critics and of the already-famous (Neruda figures) and also in his position as a priest, a celibate, and a participant in right-wing politics. He reveals the queasy suspicion that underlines Auxilio’s affirmations: that literature does not provide transcendence, but instead is only a kind of malfunctioning life-support system. He wants to be saved, where Auxilio asks only to be lost.
By Night in Chile is even more deliriously beautiful than Amulet (I’ll post an excerpt soon) but somewhat less engaging, probably because of its narrator’s refusal of belief.
read comments (1)This is a bit of a tangent from our usual mission, but last week I saw Zoe Strauss’s show America: We Love Having You Here at the Silverstein gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea. (Follow the link above to see some photos on her website.) The photos are of desolate, wrenching Americana; an old subject, which made it surprising that they were so fresh and startling. They were pictures, I thought, of loss.
The first image you see, walking in, shows a half-expired inflatable Titanic, canting at an angle that makes it appear to be sinking into the grass. A little girl slides down the deck. The picture is not of the girl, though, but of the girl as a ghost of all the people who sank with the real Titanic. She marks the spot where those lives vanished.
In other images, the subjects look out from their own bodies as if they were conscious that those bodies were slowly devouring them. The body appears as a seething nest of soft, quiet animals. Once they eat their fill they crawl off, one by one.
I thought of America’s interest in superheroes: the idea that our secret identities, and the secret bodies that go with them, are stronger, faster, lovelier, and more coherent than the bodies we present in everyday life. It’s a protective fantasy, an inversion of the truth: Clark Kent’s real secret body is diabetic, dissolute, loosely assembled from sentient rats; he keeps it stuffed in a closet while he goes out to paint a mural of the New York skyline on the side of the local drycleaners. (Another Zoe Strauss photo shows a mural like that: the absence of a city, and of whatever dreams the city might represent to the painter.)
If there’s a hollow in the grass, a pothole in the street, it’s safe to assume that somebody disappeared there. That empty space is the image of their departure.
read comments (0)Houses are especially hard to keep clean when you can’t find them. It was the voice from up the street in the unsoiled floral apron—not your friend at all, not someone who had ever condescended to speak to you before—who came to tell you the news, but she kept just behind your right shoulder the whole time she was talking, and her whispers were coded and hypocritical. You were turning around, trying to see her, when your eyes swept across your own address. The air had a fanged quality. It bristled with inverted rooms, with the gestural spines that might have indicated the path along which children circumnavigated the coffee table—when there was still a house there.
But it wasn’t entirely gone. A fist could still find something to puncture. The trouble might lie in determining what it had hit. Behind you, the spoiled bitch from the house with the white carpets got hung up on a single syllable. She probably intended it to be part of a longer word, but broken off like that, bleated like that, it could be easily confused with the name of your son. At last she got her sounds unstuck, rolled out coherent words, and it started to seem like maybe she was talking about him after all. You thought he was yours, she said, but if you’d been paying attention you’d have noticed that he smells very different now. At the same time there was a moist snuffling, then a pricking wetness on the back of your neck, and you had to bat her away. Was she really about to take a bite out of you?
I don’t have time for this, you told her. I have to get dinner started. You meant it as an insult, but you weren’t clear if the point got across to her. You still couldn’t see her, just feel the little pops of air squeezed out between her teeth.
In the pit where your kitchen used to be, you could hear someone else repeating the same words you’d used to get rid of the bitch—repeating them again and again in a rising cadence, delighted at the joke. But you couldn’t see who was talking. It was dark down there.
read comments (0)Specifically, a bit more about that angel I quoted in yesterday’s post: the one, identified as Auxilio Lacoutre’s guardian, who tends her hallucinations as she hides out for days, dizzy with hunger, in a university bathroom after the army has occupied the campus. The angel who reproaches her when she makes the claim that voices are incapable of listening; all they can do is speak. “You’re wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter,” the angel replies; she may be only a voice with borrowed teeth, but she can still hear what’s said to her, even make notes about it. The important thing here, I think, is the insistence on voices, however disembodied, as essentially reciprocal: a significant idea in a novel about literature, when so many of the writers we love no longer have bodies beyond the paper they’re printed on.
Can they hear us, or can they only speak? And whose guardians are they, anyway?
Bolano’s general slipperiness, his comfort, for instance, with permeable boundaries between memory and immediate experience, between present experience and imagination, suggests that he might also be open to multidirectionality in what appear to be one-way exchanges: for example, when a writer addresses readers who weren’t yet born when he wrote. It’s a particular understanding of what literature does. It suggests that to speak is at the same time to hear—the emotional presence, the valence, of your listener, and how that charge shifts the quality of your words even as you say them.
You play a song you love for a friend, and realize immediately, by how terribly altered for worse the song suddenly sounds to you, that your friend hates it; you hear them hearing it, and it changes. You say something thoughtless on the phone, and your insensitivity appears to you figured by the response they haven’t even spoken yet. Or you hear yourself loved in an equal silence. Does something like this occur in literature: that writers hear distant readers through a seeping coloration?
read comments (1)Excerpts from Roberto Bolano’s Amulet: a conversation with an angel
Category: ellipsesAuthor: Housewife
“I am in the women’s bathroom in the faculty building and I can see the future, I said, in a soprano voice, as if I were being coy.
I know that, said the dream voice, I know that. You start making your prophesies and I’ll note them down.
Voices, I said in a baritone voice, don’t note things down, they don’t even listen. Voices only speak.
You’re wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter…
Cesar Vallejo shall be read underground in the year 2045. Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in the year 2045. Vincente Huidobro shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.
Virginia Woolf shall be reincarnated as an Argentinean fiction writer in the year 2076. Louis-Ferdinand Celine shall enter Purgatory in the year 2094. Paul Eluard shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.
Metempsychosis. Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall manifest itself in a different form…
I haven’t read them, said the voice, and I could distinctly hear the sound of chattering teeth. Do you have teeth? I asked incredulously.
Not real, genuine teeth of my own, no, she replied. But when I’m with you, all your missing teeth chatter for me.”
read comments (2)I picked up Bolano’s Amulet recently, more or less at random. There isn’t much plot, or, apart from the narrator, much in the way of characterization, so the question becomes what makes it so effective? Part of it is textural—a back-and-forth slurring through time where the narrator might follow someone in 1963, then, once her target is out on the street, declare that it is actually 1973, or that she remembers things that haven’t happened yet. The narrative is so minimal that this kind of slipperiness is pretty easy to deal with, and it creates a very effective replication of the immersiveness of memory, the way the past can wick up and drench the present…
But basically, Bolano, at least in this novel, is a guy to read for his prose. Witness: “And I see myself that night, my friends, walking towards Lilian Serpas’s apartment, driven by a mystery that is, intermittently, like the wind of Mexico City, a black wind full of geometrically shaped holes, and at other moments more like the city’s calm, an obeisant calm whose sole propety is that of being a mirage.”
The black wind with its geometric holes plays one obvious trick, juxtaposing something fluid and shapeless with the rigidity of hard-edged forms. It also mixes the wind with the city, pocking it with square windows and round potholes, so that these settled forms start to swarm as if alive—lovely.
read comments (2)(Oh, I know the housewives have been missing for some time, the dishes have piled up, the children turned skittish and translucent. But suddenly here we are, saying that we got caught in traffic on the way home from the hairdresser’s. If someone objects that traffic simply couldn’t have been that bad, we will only look blank and complain about the car’s vinyl seats, and how terribly they chafed our thighs.)
It is much noted that sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is displaced from humans onto vampires; women, indeed, are liberated from their obsessive, saccharine purity only once they become vampires. Also noted is the gender ambiguity of the vampires: male and female, they have sopping vaginal mouths punctuated with pointy phallic teeth; female vampires may thereby penetrate human males; male vampires may suckle human females on blood.
The sexuality is also fugitive, locating itself anywhere but in the genitals. Genital stand-ins can take up residence anywhere, in fact: in the chest punctured by a stake, the throat pierced by teeth. In the latter image both the phallic substitute and the vaginal one are shrunken down to the scale of dollhouse miniatures. Much is made of the daintiness of the holes in Lucy’s neck.
Once seduction becomes so vagrant and ambiguous, the seduced (and the readers) are less responsible, wandering out to the cemetery on the cliff in a trance. The characters may have mastered the defense of genital purity (though Lucy’s explicit wish to marry three men—a detail I was surprised not to see mentioned in the criticism at the back of my Norton critical edition—does suggest that their mastery is not entirely settled) but they can’t withstand these tiny not-quite-genitals that take up residence in odd locations.
The vampires are so hermaphroditic (the teeth forever in the mouths, in diminutive but permanent coitus) that we might wonder why they bother with humans at all.
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