The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

(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?

One Response to “On Roberto Bolano’s Amulet: a bit more”

1. The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy » Blog Archive » Reading Roberto Bolano’s Amulet: a stab at how it works. Says:
   November 18th, 2008 at 1:39 am

   […] More on this later. « Vagrant sexuality: thinking about Dracula Excerpts from Roberto Bolano’s Amulet: a conversation with an angel » […]

Leave a Reply