The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

“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…

More on this later.

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.

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.

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.

(more)

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?

“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.”

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.

More on this later.

(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.