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.)

One Response to “Halfway through The Savage Detectives: mind as a collective”

1. The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy » Blog Archive » Even more Roberto Bolaño: starting The Savage Detectives Says:
   December 30th, 2008 at 6:26 pm

   […] More on this later. « A housewife’s guide: indeterminacy Halfway through The Savage Detectives: mind as a collective » […]

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