The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

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.”

More on this later…

(And for a previous post on The Savage Detectives, try this.)

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…

More on this later.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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.

(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.