He’s standing at the lookout point, looking away. It’s winter, off-season. The Panthers are young, none of us even twenty-five. We’re all armed, but we’ve left our weapons in the car, and you can see the deep dissatisfaction on our faces. The sea roars. Then I go up to Marius and I say let’s get out of here now. And at that moment Marius turns and he looks at me. He’s smiling. He’s beyond it all. And he waves his hand toward the sea, because he’s incapable of expressing what he feels in words. And then I’m afraid, even though it’s my brother there beside me, and I think: the danger is the sea.
Trevor:
Where did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get a way? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind?
With the above quote, another auspicious beginning. And a new character. Here we find Quincy Williams. As we settle into the part, Quincy, a thirty-year-old American (or African American, as he sometimes refers to himself, wondering if sometimes he is nothing at all), learns that his mother has died. He’s unmoored at her loss, numb. When asked what kind of funeral his mother should have, Quincy says his mother “belonged to the Christian Church of Fallen Angels. Or no, maybe it had another name. He couldn’t remember. You’re right, said Mr. Lawrence, it does have a different name, it’s the Christian Church of Angels Redeemed.” Which is Quincy?
The story takes a rather sudden turn when Quincy finds himself back on the job at Black Dawn, a magazine that covers subjects determined of interest to the black community. At his job, everyone knows him as Oscar Fate, which is how I think of him. It’s here that Fate’s journey begins, and we can see him as some kind of fated being, driven to a point of confrontation. “Fate” comes up often in 2666 (and Bolaño’s other work) as an abstract force. Personally, I’m still wrestling with just what Bolaño means by it. Is it the driving force, determining our lives, all sense of control just an illusion? It seems lack of control is incidental to something else, neither good nor bad, just there.
One of Fate’s first tasks after his mother has died is to travel to Detroit to complete a story on Barry Seaman, a kind of stand-in for the actual founder of the Black Panthers. There, he hears Seaman’s strange — at times fascinating — sermon. Some have suggested that this is similar to Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby-Dick, and the allusions to water, to the sea (and to the seaman) certainly bolster this claim. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael is likewise unmoored, contemplating suicide even, when he steps into Father Mapple’s church.
In Father Mapple’s sermon, he talks about Jonah who was swallowed by that big fish:
Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters — four yarns — is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah’s deep sealine sound! What pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.
Is Oscar Fate a Jonah? Is his fate to go into the belly of the beast, the slime of the sea about him, to find deliverance? I think it works. On his way to Mexico to cover a boxing match, Oscar Fate becomes a kind of prophet of the gloom, unbeknownst to him. He sees this: “The horse was black and after a moment it moved and vanished into the dark.” His journey begins in symbols — here, likely, the third horseman, Famine — and those symbols become real. After the critics and Amalfitano shrunk into their own skulls, here we have a character who dives in and who grows, who doesn’t descend into abstraction but rather ascends into the world of the concrete. This isn’t to suggest the world of the concrete is subjectively better: here the murders of Santa Teresa cease to be mystic happenings on the fringe and proceed to cluster around center stage which they’ll occupy in the next part.
And this part ends with a prisoner coming down the hall singing a German folksong, and we are taken back to Archimboldi.
I didn’t see most of this stuff the first time I read through 2666. To me then, this was a rather weak section (it still is not my favorite), a pulpy, almost crass section. But within this structure — which I think is appropriate (and Lee does a great job of explaining why below) — is a rather heavy load. I love it. I hate it also because I see that a second read is still going to be absolutely insufficient.
Lee:
USEFULNESS. But the sun has its uses, as any fool knows, said Seaman. From up close it’s hell, but from far away you’d have to be a vampire not to see how useful it is, how beautiful.
Be a man and bear your cross.
Part 3: The Part About Fate is where 2666 fell into place for me during my first read. I already knew — there was no way of avoiding it, the media coverage of the book often spent an inordinate time on the fact — that Part 4 was utterly horrific and deeply upsetting and concerned a long, relentless catalogue of murders, the details of which were painstakingly and unflinchingly set down. With that in mind, and with the first two parts fresh in my memory, I saw, I thought, what Bolano was doing.
I think Part 3 — my favorite part I admit, and the part which is, from what I can gather, often cited as the book’s weak section — is Bolaño’s mashing up what works in hard-boiled American fiction, cinematic as well as literary. There’s more of an elegiac, romantically bruised essence to it than the other parts. There’s a terror and upfront grandiosity to it all the more potent for it being endlessly elusive and never segueing out its perfectly drawn druggy jazz feel. It’s a kind of narcotized half-dream; when reading it on both occasions it lulled me into a sense of hypnotic discord. It deals with a man called Oscar Fate, except he isn’t; he’s called Quincy Williams, but this name, which he is referred to by, is assumed at the moment his waking dream begins. He sleeps on his mother’s dead couch and when he awakes, he’s shed a skin and his journey as Oscar Fate has begun. The dividing line is that clear and that abrupt. He’s deranged and off-kiltered, slightly, by grief, in a way that’s redolent of Amalfitano, perhaps, but Fate is a man of action — and I think this is where Bolaño has chosen to wield benevolent influence on this bloody, fetid landscape. He’s given it a certain kind of hero familiar from the novels of Chester Himes, David Goodis, James Ellroy, Raymond Chandler, etc. Maybe a hint of James Baldwin. It’s reminiscent of Philip K. Dick at times: strangeness is treated with equanimity. It’s the mid-section and it’s a pause of sorts, during which Bolaño plays with his concept of a certain kind of fiction by throwing a few shots of tequila down its neck and cutting loose a little. It slides into a kind of prose poetry on occasion, with an eye on more conventional literary thrills than any other 2666 section, and it’s a small, nauseated, bitter triumph before a seismic tragedy. It’s Bolaño saying: this victory of sorts, up against what’s ahead, what does it mean to you? And the answer for me was resounding: plenty.
Fate is playing a role: he isn’t “Oscar Fate” for a start, and he takes his behavioral cues from outside himself, not inside as with Amalfitano. He is a black man; a man grieving; he’s an ad-hoc boxing journalist who spies an opportunity, and we’re not really, in the end, sure what that is. He adheres to something external, an idea of himself, and follows it. Is he lucky? Is he strengthened by his circumstances? Is he more acclimatized to the nature of men than Amalfitano?
It’s the most vivid section, from my point of view, as it’s cinematic in a slightly unhinged, portentous way, and throws a few curve-balls into the 2 a.m. mists of its queasy midst — it just doesn’t play it straight. When you think it’s about to, it shifts off . . . and yet, whatever happens, you’ve got that perfectly deployed sense of one-paced, inescapable nightmare. Here, I think, Bolaño shows his absolute mastery of voices: dazzling, funny, odd dialogue exchanges that evoke after-hours cop shows, bizarre lurches that he gets working and which become part of a weird nocturnal logic, a peculiar, frantic stupor, as though nothing is ever going to fall into step, anything is possible, and the spell is cast, the subject, you, anesthetized and ready for the operation and ordeal of Part 4, an ordeal worth undergoing but best after this primer.
After two sections during which the subjective has been the vantage point — deeply idealistic critics trying desperately to apprehend the world by dragging it towards themselves and failing; Amalfitano burying himself in his head and in the world of ideas, which become scrambled and useless — Bolaño readies us for Part 4 and, I think, makes his grand statement in The Part About Fate by first of all peeling back those subjective layers. This is a much more objective world. Death is no great tragic irruption here — it’s humdrum. Fate’s mother is dead — it prompts strange thoughts and behavior, though not à la Almafitano — and instead of vanishing into himself he instead deals with it by heading out into the maelstrom. And by doing so falls into the potentially doomed orbit of Rosa Amalfitano.
And: I think this is the key to Bolaño’s philosophy here and elsewhere. He says, using Fate as an exemplar or emissary of the underworld, that in order to survive we must face “it” and take the blows, as objectively as possible; this, Bolaño says, is the only way to truly live and experience the euphoric consolations of existence. It’s a tricky one: but majesty and magic and death and carnage and terror must all be entertained likewise by the human mind for it not to unravel.
I believe that Part 4 is nothing less than a gruelling extrapolation of this concept. He renders death and murder an almost mythically strange idea in our minds, the concatenation of details that become an absurd, surreal repetition whose objective is to desensitize us from the unspeakability of such abundant murder by observing a kind of mantra of exposing ourselves to the absolute worst in order to be as alive as we can be. As such, I think Part 3 is his induction to this kind of psychological environment. Bolaño knows, I think, that in order for Part 4, the lengthiest, most provocative part, to work, this part needs to lay some groundwork. That groundwork, for me, is him saying: Wake up — there is magic. It can go as wrong as it can right at all times, and you know nothing. Accept nothing and throw away nothing. It’s all one and the same. It’s as good as it is bad, and the good, in such a world, is not a miracle — it’s part of a unified inescapable transient implicity. The world will not change. You can’t create your own in your head. What you can do is: live, with all of it, awake, knowing the hell in order to know the heaven. It’s a call to arms, if you will, that demands susceptible involvement.
So the surreality we feel when Fate is in the midst of a perilous rescue mission is the surreality of unadorned variability. He strips everything back and leaves Fate exposed to the live moment. And Fate is the most alive fictional creation in 2666. He’s not having a great deal of fun, granted, but there’s consolation in Bolaño having drawn such a character. He’s the necessary hope in the void.
Questions:
- What or who are the ghosts Fate talks about in the opening moments of Part 3?
- What do we make of the story Fate overhears on his way to Detroit, where a man nearly drowns but is rescued by workers coming to rescue those in a downed plane? They’re disappointed he was not on the plane, though their acts did save him.
- What’s the significance, if any, of Barry Seaman’s late and unlikely popularity as a chef?
- What is the the significance of Seaman’s sermon on Danger, Money, Food, Stars, Usefulness?
- Is machismo a significant issue in this part?
- What is Rosa doing, with the obvious risks involved, in such company?
- How does this quote fit into the larger themes of 2666: “Does this mean that in some places I’m American and in some places I’m African American, and in other places, by logical extension, I’m nobody?”
Just wanted to make a shout-out and let you know that I love what you guys are doing, I only noticed this blog (and purchased this book) recently, but I’m currently reading it. I’m still in Part 1 but I’m eagerly trying to catch up with these posts. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’!
Trevor – I am taken by your first two paragraphs and am stopping right there to think. I noticed but didn’t notice Bolano’s insistence on the man’s quandary – whether his mother’s church was the one of “Fallen Angels” or “Angels Redeemed”.
When I began Part 3, I thought – this is important – but then forgot about it as I tried to rush forward and place just who this Oscar Fate was and where this impossible book was going now.
Your second paragraph notes that “fate” is important, but that Bolano does not give us a road map. You remark, “It seems lack of control is incidental to something else, neither good nor bad, just there.”
Bolano is peppered with dualities and multiplicities, as in whether these parishioners of Fate’s mother’s church are fallen or redeemed.
There is something in this about point of view. Do you take everything about life as just a situation that just is, or do you, despite the impossibility of it, engage with it, observe it, and respond? Do you engage regardless of the impossibility of answering that question – are we fallen or redeemed? (If that is the language you choose to use – although I think the idea could as well be phrased other ways – as in, for instance – is social media really connection or is it disconnection….I say as I write here in the office, my husband being in the other part of the house in his office.)
Anyway, your “something else” – could one possibility be engagement or disengagement? As in Amalfitano on the one hand, paralyzed, and Fate on the other, responsive.
Or as in the artist who engages what is “terrifying to us all” v. the one who skirts about its edges.
There is in the one church the idea of people limp and knocked out, as in a boxing match, and in the other, people getting up, regardless, allowing some kind of energy to breathe life. I am interested in the way “redeemed” has about it the suggestion of kidnapping and the ransom required for those kidnapped – given that lurking in the background are all these kidnapped women of Santa Teresa. What is that ransom going to be? What is that redemption going to be? Money does not seem to be what will turn the lock.
Which brings me to this: it seems that in the name Santa Teresa there is also a duality – on the one hand there is Santa Teresa of Avila, or Spain, who was born in 1515, and Santa Teresa of the Andes who was born in Santiago, Chile in 1900. But the fact is both women were writers. As is Fate, as is Bolano, as is Amalfitano, no matter how arrested. Santa Teresa of the Andes died young, as did Bolano – although Teresa was just 20. Nevertheless, there is something there about confronting death (or fate, in all its guises) through writing.
But I didn’t say – Bolano is always playing with the multiplicities. So there are always the multiplicities beyond a simple duality.
For instance – there is the emphasis on geometry – which is the study of not just the line, with its implicit duality if you put a point on that line, but is also the study of the way lines intersect to create geometric forms and infinite multiples of angles.
In geometry you have not just dualities but multiplicities -n the angles of the forms, and perspectives of those angles.
Therefore – angels fallen and angels rescued are merely a duality. What is beyond that – if life is not just a line but also has shape – as in geometry? then life is not simply one either/or – there are alternatives – what would that third (or fourth ) alternative be? – angels – in action?
Geometry, Santa Teresa – these are all choices Bolano has made.
We’re in the middle of a 2666 readalong so it’s fairly predictable that it should be dominating my thoughts just now, but having listened to an interview with Richard Flanagan the other day I can’t help but attribute this particular quote as apt commentary on Bolano.
“The job of the writer is to find the universe in their soul through stories…I think that murder, death, horror, hate, these things are buried within us as deeply as love, kindness, compassion and empathy, and not only that, I think they’re closely entwined. And really only the evil and bad novels pretend otherwise.”
Well I persevered and managed to finish Pt 3, but I still have reservations about this novel. I feel it’s worthy and has some great qualities, yet still find it not entirely to my taste. Sorry to post another discordant note.
I’ve read the erudite and ingenious comments, led with panache by Lee, Trevor and Betsy, with interest tempered with occasional awe – there’s some intriguing exegesis going on here. But I still keep finding reading the text a bit of a chore.
I did find Pt 3 slightly less heavy going, maybe because there’s more of a conventional plot, as Lee suggests. I notice recurring themes in the comments: elusive, druggy, jazzy; narcotized, deranged, dreamlike; fall and redemption, life v paralysis; engaged artist v disengaged (critics?)…Fate as an existentialist hero/Marlowe-like tough-guy investigator (who’s not too good at investigating, and not especially tough).
I find myself ‘unmoored’ in reading. The narrator seems to invite us in to a coherent section, then subverts it with every other sentence. Most comments so far have been attempts to explain what the hell it all means or might mean; as Joyce gleefully said about F Wake, it’ll keep the professors busy for years. If there’s a serious intent I find it too elusive to merit the effort in identifying its nature. There are noticeable motifs: much seems dreamlike (the word ‘oneiric’ describes a thought, ‘How simple it all is’ – oh yeah?!), or a fugue or scenes in a movie; nothing seems real or to connect with other elements in the narrative. There’s another quest going on, it seems, and the murders are becoming ever more unignorable. But quite what Rosa thinks she’s doing with these lowlifes (Rosa agrees they aren’t ‘friends’), as Lee asks in one of several questions about bafflingly enigmatic sections (the downed plane? Ghosts?), defeats me.
There’s a cop (or is he?) in a Peregrino (another pilgrim reference); Fate vomits or feels sick a lot – but these are just signs; their significance is obscure to me.
I’ll try to explain my misgivings (with hesitant admiration for the technique) by looking at another short section fairly closely.
It starts at the bottom of p. 347-end of Pt 3 p. 349. Fate, Rosa & co. are in the prison, about to meet the murder suspect. There’s ‘a sandstorm or a rainstorm or an electric storm.’ Precision is impossible, variation endlessly possible. Threatening clouds ‘cast a pall on the landscape’ – a deathly metaphor yet again. ‘A miserable morning.’ Whose words are these? Miserable for whom, and why? Not clear.
Then Fate remembers an aphorism: ‘You have to listen to women’ – but isn’t sure who said it, maybe his mother. Then he imagines a weird ‘set of scales’ like those of Blind Justice, but with two bottles in place of platters. One is full of ‘desert sand’, the other, acid. Surreal. Defiant of interpretation. Time? Mutability? If so, why?
Fate is disorientated as he travels the route he’d taken earlier, but in the opposite direction. Left is now right, ‘and there are no points of reference. Everything is erased.’ Is RB having what mock Cockneys (mockneys) call ‘having a laugh’? It all sounds portentous (good word, Lee), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (clearly; all is unmoored).
They stop at yet another diner full of enigmatic customers and random, mysterious description. Fate recalls the words of Guadalupe Roncal, that the killings get no attention, ‘but the secret of the world is hidden in them.’ Or was that Rosa? Every statement undermined by the next. (The highway is ‘like a river’, meanwhile – whose thought is this?) Maybe it was the suspected killer who said it, thinks Fate. Is this meant to be funny?? That’s a serious question.
When the giant German albino sings his weird woodcutter song the narrative voice flies off, inhabits everyone, the pronouns slip around, unhinged: Fate thought ‘he might still be dreaming.’ Then ‘I’m a giant…only I know where I’m going, only I know my destiny.’ Whose words are these? Fate’s or the German’s? The narrator’s style becomes ever more paratactic, with piled up ‘And thens’, ‘And yet..’, ‘Then…’ as if there were a sort of sequential logic here somehow. All is tacked together loosely.
The closing line is a description of Roncal raising her hand to her mouth ‘as if she were inhaling a toxic gas, and she couldn’t think what to ask.’
I know exactly how she feels…
A fantastic sequence of comments and a further addition to many far from convinced considerations of this hefty, slippery old tome.
It’s an interesting one, on the lack of precision, and the narrative dislocation as it were. I think Bolano is certainly putting himself in a susceptible position with the style, but I find I’m quite happy with the layers of uncertainly and bi- or trifurcative descriptive threads. He really is, to me, offering us the illusion of participation, and drifting us into a kind of helpless state of disorientation. ‘Do people have choice, ultimately?’ I think! Who knows really? But I always get that sense, and it falls into step with the whole gestalt as I take it, and the way the book is sequenced. Fate thinks he’s making a proactive objective choice. Put that up against the uncertainty and malaise and the grasping interventions of a narrator who is not really in control (so the illusion goes) of what’s unfolding and you see Fate as admirable in wrestling with his ‘fate’, a fate that not even the pervasions of a novelistic ‘voice’ seems privy to. I think it’s a device; if you’re looking for it, it may mean that the text yields a little too far in the wrong direction.
I think that Bolano is wrestling with ideas of omniscience to a degree, ultimately. It’s all very meta but it works for me.
Similarly with those unanswerable elements you refer to. It’s a slow avalanche of tenebrous implication. We’re hurtling towards the fiery pit and everything we know loses traction. If we look at part three as an ‘induction’ so to speak, Bolano is warping everything and throwing everything out. Its a little bit like Pedro Paramo, the complete transformation of time and perception in order to evince such unmoored alienation. We’re being readied for part four, and only something particularly suitably estranging and vividly odd will do it, if part four is to be anything other than unbearable repetition. What’s the best way to do that? Provide something seemingly conventional, with a lot of familiar and recognisable tropes, and then render it unmistakably deranged. I think the techniques Bolano employs are highly effective in doing that – but I certainly sympathise with those finding it unsatisfying or loosely wrought.
I ran aground at the end of Part 3, and I need to get back into the book. Maybe all the shadowing of Part 4 has been *too* effective? Anyway, I admit to finding the book intermittenly exhilarating and ultimately exhausting. I think I mentioned it before that holding everything in mind is just too big a challenge for the neophyte reader, yet I can’t help trying to do just that – possibly counter-productive to my reading.
I would love to read more thoughts on the Seaman “sermon” – I was very taken with that. A totally egregious comparison popped into my head, with the central, also Detroit-based section of The Sportswriter, when Bascombe has a long, unsatisfactory but somehow epiphanic interview with the washed-up ex-champ (a boxer, I think?).
As for the rest of Fate’s odyssey, I agree with Lee’s assessment of a deliberate strategy by Bolano to subvert or convolute the apparent normality of even sinister situations – I felt I could be reading descriptions of scenes from Lynch movies (even down to lighting and decor). And what of Fate / Quincey’s own heritage and backstory? Nothing (and I am coming to underdstand that that “nothing” is even more all-encompassing than I would assume on first read) in the book is there “by chance” as it were – Bolano is being quite deliberate in all things, although as is said above by Tred, to what end is not always apparent.
Onwards.
I just finished “The Part About Fate” ~ but I have to admit that I am leaving the 5 Seaman sermons until last.
Oscar Fate’s quest for peace leapt out at me. throughout the 150 pages, he revisits thoughts about his mother, and increasing, the word peace appears. When he realizes how much danger Rosa is in, he offers his hand. When she takes it, he further realizes he had felt dead, and now he feels alive.
Trevor – I want to echo other people’s remarks about how helpful this discussion is that you and Lee are leading. This is a book I could not possibly do without the focus that you guys are giving the book.
Simon, I found lots in your post just above (pages 347-349). This one comment, however, leapt out at me:
“When the giant German albino sings his weird woodcutter song the narrative voice flies off, inhabits everyone, the pronouns slip around, unhinged…”
I have noticed this narrative peculiarity – that pronouns slip around – in other places as well, with the result that I could not place just who was having what thought.
What does Bolano have in mind here? I offer this possibility:
When we cannot tell who is thinking what thought, it feels as if Bolano is underscoring that many thoughts we think are thoughts that society itself is having, or thoughts of some writer or some movie that we are echoing, or thoughts of some friend that stick with us, but that we are mostly unaware of the vast web of communal thought of which we are a part.
This communality of thought would be (I think) holding up a mirror to the communality of responsibility we have in a society where murder or torture or the limitation of rights occurs. Just as there is a communality of thought, there is also a communality of volition in our society’s wrong doing. The Germans, interestingly, have tried to confront their communal responsibility for the madness of the holocaust.
I think it is important to remember that when Pinochet overtook Chile, Bolano was 20. Regardless of whether he was in Chile at the time, He was Chilean. At that time,the entire population of Chile was about 10 million. The Pinochet regime was responsible for about 3,000 dead or disappeared. The population of Juarez (the model for Santa Teresa) is about 1 million. So the percentage of dead and disappeared to the rest of the population is about the same. The fact that he names Juarez Santa Teresa – after a Chilean saint – points to the fact that he is not just talking about Juarez and Mexico.
There is a reverberation between Santa Teresa and Pinochet-Chile, as well as one with Nazi Germany, obviously.
What does one do with the impossibility of the question – “who is responsible for the deaths in Chile – Germany – Juarez (and by extension – Uganda – Cambodia – the middle east – )?
I think the constant qualification that the narrator (Arturo Bellano) offers after any assertion is a way of saying – it is hard to say anything with certainty. I think the drifting syntax that causes us to wonder who is thinking is a device to force the idea that when you’re pinning blame – it is hard to know how many of us are actually partly to blame. After all, in any society where people are “disappearing” – everyone knows someone, everyone hears something, everyone can smell the rat, so to speak. Perhaps just that intuition is culpability.
So – where you can’t quite ever tell who is who and what is what – and nevertheless you smell a rat – what do you do?
I am reluctant to suggest that Bolano is saying you do nothing. In Part 2. Bolano was certainly is worried about Amalfitano’s paralysis. In Part 3, we learn just how seriously Amalfitano’s paralysis has endangered his daughter.
And then suddenly, in contrast, despite his own sorrow over his mother, despite the confusions over his career, with no Hamlet-like deliberation, Oscar Fate gets Rosa out of there.
I think it’s important that he doesn’t have any idea what the actual dirty business that Chucho, Charly Cruz and Corona are involved in. He sees them feeding Rosa cocaine and that’s enough for him. He acts.
It’s as if the boxing match is Bolano’s play within a play. What we see in the boxing match is the transformation of violence into diversion and fun and misplaced “investigation”.. What we see in Oscar Fate is a sudden uppercut to Corona’s chin that knocks him cold, a sudden decisive action that takes only a second, but that means Rosa might possibly be rescued.
Oscar Fate acts, even though he does not have all the facts. His intuition tells him has no other choice.
With this as back-drop, we will then begin “The Part About the Crimes” – and see what kind of action/inaction-deliberation/paralysis-accusation/admission goes on.
And – it will be curious to see if this narrative device of pronoun confusion continues.
“When we cannot tell who is thinking what thought, it feels as if Bolano is underscoring that many thoughts we think are thoughts that society itself is having, or thoughts of some writer or some movie that we are echoing, or thoughts of some friend that stick with us, but that we are mostly unaware of the vast web of communal thought of which we are a part.
This communality of thought would be (I think) holding up a mirror to the communality of responsibility we have in a society where murder or torture or the limitation of rights occurs. Just as there is a communality of thought, there is also a communality of volition in our society’s wrong doing. The Germans, interestingly, have tried to confront their communal responsibility for the madness of the holocaust.”
I’ll go along with that – we’re back to volition and passivity and responsibility again. Great thoughts, Betsy.
Thank you, Lee. thank you for encouraging us.
I’m reading the sermons. I started with the last one: “Usefulness” – pages 254-256. What a trip. Just when you think you have no idea where Bolano is going – you read a stretch like this and don’t care where he is going. You’re just glad you’re along for the ride.
USEFULNESS. (254-256
Seaman talks first a little bit about how you can’t trust people, how people engage in a lot of useless activity for the sake of status, and he treats us to a wonderful entire recipe for Brussel sprouts. Here of course, he is saying that good food is useful to the body. We think of Rosa and what she is feeding her body – cocaine and “classes”.
And then comes the meat of the sermon. Seaman says, “You have to read books.”
Reading is, in the end, what is truly and completely useful. I have to say that I read parts of this hymn to reading with a sense of exhilaration – Seaman appeared to be reading my mind, even down to the sense that reading frees you from your various “prisons”.
Seaman says he has read, at times, “as if each sentence or word were something good for my whole body, not just my brain.”
Seaman says, “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”
And then he says – the book that brought him peace “at one of the most desperate moments of [his] life” was “An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire.”
(Among other things, Voltaire (France: 1694-1778) championed the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and freedom of religion, as well as also taking confrontational positions against organized religion and slavery. One Complete works of Voltaire in English runs 634 pages.)
While Bolano’s link to Voltaire is probably important, it is out of my wheelhouse. it is this hymn to reading for the sake of its pure “USEFULNESS” that is significant to me, as well as Seaman’s explanation that a particular author could bring him “peace”.
Oscar Fate, the man who is interviewing Seaman, is himself seeking peace, but finds it in a different arena – rescuing Rosa.
So when we think about rescue, what do we imagine Seaman would think of the way Oscar Fate rescued Rosa Amalfitano? I think he would say that is only the beginning. I think he would say she’d better begin eating her broccoli and Brussel sprouts, and after she did that, she’d better start reading in earnest.
What would he say about Oscar Fate feeling alive after he rescued Rosa? I think he would say – that’s just the beginning. Now you had better start a regimen of real nourishment – focused listening&reading&writing.
But how would Fate answer him? Fate would say – I did listen. And I acted. I did what was required. I listened to my mother, who said, “Be a man and bear your cross.” (234)
What would Seaman say to Amalfitano? He would say – get that book off the line and get yourself reading – anything – because – after all – it’s like praying – something Amalfitano seems in need of, given that he is so completely not at peace.
But Amalfitano’s voices are not guides in the manner of Fate’s mother – they are hysteric versions of reality, and they are driving him crazy. It is true that at the last minute, Amalfitano does act and is a man. when Fate appears with Rosa to get her passport, he gives them a kind of blessing in the roll of bills he brings out. But Rosa is going to need more than a roll of bills.
In a way, Seaman in this particular sermon is doing what Amalfitano is unable to do. He is giving guidance. He is being a guide. He is leaving behind some words to live by. I had the feeling Bolano was talking to his own kids here.
How do we know this whole riff on USEFULNESS is not ironic? not satiric? I think it’s that Oscar Fate treats Seaman with such interest and respect.
Fate has a file going on Seaman when his mother dies, and directly after her funeral, he travels out to Detroit to interview the old man. And when Fate is ready to fly to Mexico on another assignment, Fate goes to see the old man to say good-bye, and they embrace (as a father and son do, or as do close friends) upon parting.
Later, when Fate laughs out loud thinking of Seaman’s Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, I don’t think it is a mean laugh. I think it is a laugh of surprise, affection, and recognition.
And what Fate does, before he leaves Detroit, is go to a bookstore to buy a book that another old man had recommended to him a while ago – a book by Hugh Thomas entitled “The Slave Trade.”
So what’s going on here is that Fate is distinguishing between ghosts and guides. Marx, I think, is a ghost. Seaman and Antonio Ulises Jones are guides. And telling the difference between ghosts and guides is difficult. It’s disorienting to be lost. Fate is nauseous for most of Part 3. He vomits regularly.
The nausea reminds me of Sartre’s novel, La Nausee. The hero of La Nausee loses all pleasure in the things that had once pleased him, which is suggestive of Amalfitano’s passivity. In contrast, although Fate feels continually dazed, he takes an actively physical part in the nausea – he vomits regularly, until finally, he acts. I would love to hear more from someone else about La Nausee and Bolano and the active/passive diad.
And actually, all of Bolano is so challenging, I’d welcome an argument on anything I’m saying here.
But that brings us back to reading. Fate does not actually read his new book on the slave trade. He seems to use it more as a talisman. What he really does is be present to Santa Teresa. He absorbs the territory and the people, he observes what’s going on, he reads it, he begins to respond to it. (He asks an American reporter who tells a rambling story in a racially suggestive and offensive manner if he is “flacking for the Klan”, and he makes a lunge for him “to get a punch in”.) It is as if the talisman, book on the slave trade, is speaking to him.
But at the moment there is no reading going on. Fate does think about his writing class, and how he chose to make money at Black Dawn rather than try and write fiction and not make money. So the whole question of what’s next for Oscar Fate is up in the air. More flacking for the hack magazine? or maybe more reading and writing? After all, he is the one who realizes that the murder of the 300 women is worth a serious look.
So. Is “reading” your environment reading? To an important degree, it is. This is something Amalfitano is not actively doing. We discover that he has been observing Santa Teresa. He says to Fate (when Fate asks him if Chucho Florez could be mixed up in the murders) “They’re all mixed up in it.” (343) So he is reading the place – but he is mostly not responding.
At the same time, I think Bolano is pointing out that in order to cope with the world you need to actively seek out your guides. Jones has Marx and Hugh Thomas; Seaman has Voltaire. Fate has Seaman and Jones.
So what I’m trying to say is that there is a lot going on in the 3 page USEFULNESS sermon.
I scribbled all kinds of notes for part three, I can’t tell you…I think in part Bolano is talking about how we’re constructed, how we need to maintain our own history by constantly paying pilgrimage/deference to it by installing our minds with the correct memories and thoughts. The emancipation that ‘Usefulness’ brings: the usefulness that comes from keeping yourself alive, keeping your mind stocked, bearing your cross, whatever that is (and you don’t necessarily choose it). Being ready for something that may never come but: the peace that comes from preparation and exercising and exorcising the mind and body. Not the cannibalisms of the literary world; nor the self-destruction of total insularity. Making yourself strong in and out; the mutual usefulness of mind and bodily health. It all feels a little Eastern at times, very Samurai: observing a series of protocols in order to best ‘read’ the world and act in it.
Or: I completely agree.
And this idea of reading and writing: it’s not remotely just on the page. It’s on the world, its own story, and yours.
‘Ghosts and guides’ – again, building your own world before it builds you.
Sorry, just to correct myself a little – not build your own world (I once naively thought this was possible) but build your best you with which you can be of use, to yourself and others
And I forgot to say – I really do think he is speaking to his children. I think most observers might overlook something like that – but I think he is.
Well. Lee, as a ghost or a guide, I find Barry Seaman a conundrum.
He and Marius Newell are obviously based on Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the founders of the Black Panther Party. Founded in 1966, by 1967 the Party had evolved an ambitious, socially conscious platform of goals necessary to improve the lives of American Black people.
But they were initially and primarily motivated by white police violence against Black citizens.
The Black Panther Party were a very conspicuous force for a few years: they wore uniforms, they followed the police, they carried guns, and they became embroiled in violent, deadly confrontations with the police.
Newton was convicted in 1967 of killing a white police office, but his conviction was overturned. During this period, the Panthers attracted not only the negative attentions of the FBI but also the open admiration of leftists around the world.
The Panthers also ran food and health programs, somewhat along Maoist insurgency lines.
The Panthers rocketed to fame, but they didn’t last. They were essentially gone by the eighties, due to problems with severe infighting, infighting that lead to several Panther on Panther deaths. Infighting with its own women members did not help, nor did the taint of both what was and what appeared to be criminal behavior.
The most famous event associated with the Panthers was the murder of Alex Rackley, a murder that Bobby Seale was accused of having ordered. Seale walked.
There are various views of the Black Panthers, one of which was that ironically, it was the guns that killed the movement. But there are some telling indications that many Americans understood and sympathized with what drove the Panthers, which was having to live in a difficult and dangerous environment. To me the most important were not the famous people, like Jane Fonda, who publicly supported them. It was the fact that later, when a civil rights group acting on behalf of elders decided to name themselves “The Gray Panthers”.
So woven into the story of Black Panthers are a whole lot of uncomfortable truths – about the nations, about the panthers themselves, and, inevitably, about how change occurs.
Why does Bobby Seale/Barry Seaman appear in Bolano’s novel?
One answer has to be – because Martin Luther King does not.
When the Panthers are founded in 66, King is still alive. He had, together with Lyndon Johnson, made the Civil Rights Act of 1964 happen. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize. His bravery had inspired and changed the way many white Americans understood race in America. But two years later, a primarily white police force was still in power. There was a vacuum that the Black Panthers naturally filled.
Barry Seaman, as the old man that Oscar Fate seeks out, makes a living on his barbecue book, his reputation for cooking, and giving inspirational lectures. He is a peaceful ghost of his formerly violent past. He speaks about finding peace in Voltaire.
Here we have the echo of King’s ghost – the man who stands, together with Mahatma Gandhi, for non-violent confrontation, and a man who also stands for Christian action. King is the ultimate in peaceful confrontation. But Bolano, by specifically not mentioning him, is dismissing him. When he has Seaman say he found peace in Voltaire, there is an implicit endorsement for Voltaire’s stance – that he opposed all organized religion (although he believed in religious freedom).
So – as a ghost, or guide, or unlikely angel, Seaman appears to represent the necessity, under certain conditions, for violence. It is important to note that after Fate leaves Seaman, he goes to report on a major boxing match (a shadow play), and then he has his own boxing event. first he “spars” with a reporter whose loose language is racially offensive. Then he knocks out Corona, someone who appears to be mixed up in some very bad business, and someone who is part of Rosa Amalfitano’s ‘abduction’. Fate acts decisively and violently and at some danger to himself.
I hold Martin Luther King in reverence. That I had to look up Bobby Seale to remember who he was explains how I feel about him. Bolano’s choices are on the one hand inexplicable to me (to lionize Bobby Seale and Huey Newton) and on the other hand self-evident.
I must digress to the the recent murder of 27 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Despite the location of a mass grave, very little progress has been made in this case. Local police have bloodstains in the back of their pick-up truck. The mayor’s wife connected by her family and brother to a drug cartel.. The mayor and his wife have now also disappeared, although the idea is they are probably in hiding.
“Everyone knew about their presumed connections to organized crime,” Alejandro Encinas, a senator from the mayor’s Democratic Revolution Party, told The Associated Press. “Nobody did anything, not the federal government, not the state government, not the party leadership.” (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cartels-corruption-and-the-case-of-43-missing-mexican-students/)
This scene feels reminiscent of Bolano’s Santa Teresa. Perhaps Bolano is not so much dissing Martin Luther King as saying the scale of violence and corruption is different in Mexico, more like that in pre-WWII Germany. Perhaps he is (figuratively) saying that an uppercut to the jaw is the only way to begin to deal with such a situation.
Curiously, it is in one of these 5 sermons that Seaman discusses metaphor. (STARS, pp 253-254)
“Really, when you talk about stars, you’re speaking figuratively. That’s metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You’ve used a metaphor. Say, the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, yuou say he’s seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are a way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeing. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. Really, there’s just one star….the sun.” pp253-54
To a degree, Seaman here is a metaphor; the Black Panthers here are a metaphor – a call to action.
Seaman also speaks of meteors – which “have something to do with the notion of breaking away”. p 253
That, of course is what Fate really does – he is a meteor who breaks away and takes Rosa with him.
But the peace which is to be found in Part 3 is not peaceful disobediance. It is found after the violent action – after Fate rescues Rosa.
I welcome discussion/amplification/argument on this topic.
Oh boy — do I love how folks have dug in here! Once again, I’m very behind in following the argument, but I love that it’s going on. I will catch up!
Horses for courses, Betsy…(until the course changes, or the horse does).
Or perhaps even more frivolous-seeming (but not intended to be): how about the lyrics from The Flaming Lips’ ‘Fight Test’?
The test begins, now
I thought I was smart, I thought I was right
I thought it better not to fight, I thought there was a
Virtue in always being cool, so when it came time to
Fight I thought I’ll just step aside and that the time would
Prove you wrong and that you would be the fool
I don’t know where the sun beams end and the star
Lights begins it’s all a mystery
Oh to fight is to defend if it’s not
Now than tell me when would be the time that you would stand up
And be a man, for to lose I could accept but to surrender
I just wept and regretted this moment, oh that I, I
Was the fool
I don’t know where the sun beams end and the star
Lights begins it’s all a mystery
And I don’t know how a man decides what right for his
Own life, it’s all a mystery
Cause I’m a man not a boy and there are things
You can’t avoid you have to face them when you’re not prepared
To face them,
If I could I would but you’re with him now it’d do no good
I should have fought him but instead I let him, I let
Him take it
I don’t know where the sun beams end and the star
Lights begins it’s all a mystery
And I don’t know how a man decides what right for his
Own life, it’s all a mystery
The test is over, now
The Flaming Lips were an exceedingly hippy outfit who evolved to encourage, under the right circumstances, not simply standing aside. They are as pacific as it gets, I thought. And then here they were, changing tack a little, or just emphasising that one size just doesn’t fit all. Plus, that does sound like a song that could easily be dedicated to Oscar Fate.
I go off at such potentially dangerous tangents entirely, I hope, in keeping with part three. When I first read it, something clicked into place (and was confirmed in part five, more on that later) about Bolano’s sense of absurd eclecticism. I remember first reading it and saying aloud afterwards, “Eating ribs with Barry Seaman…” and wondering, in such a serious book, what on Earth Bolano was upto? I instinctively found this slip into something so potentially throwaway, this brief, unexpected resurgence in trivial celebrity, very funny and confusing, but also bold, proof of his daring.
First thing: I now think it’s partly Bolano’s dual comment on evolving to fit ‘usefulness’ in a world that just isn’t going to budge an inch. Black Panther to rib specialist. The recycling machine of the world at its best: a massively serious political movement now down to hawking recipes. An icon against oppression, marginalisation; a pivotal member of a seismic movement.
And yet, as Seaman says, the Panthers were initially mainly “traffic cops” in the neighbourhood, or food-parcel shippers. Usefulness?
The Panthers ate themselves, as you say: in-fighting, egos, dissolution of purpose until they fizzle out. They had a moment, and the moment passed. They were a mutated cell out of countless others, an evolved transient carrier of a message, and the message was absorbed and reconstituted. They became a faux-edgy conversation piece, and were invited to the kind of places they never would have got near had they not been recognised as an eroding collective with an eye on attention. If you’re eating canapés over at Jane Fonda’s, there’s no way back.
So what happened? The world happened. Things changed; they helped to exacerbate those changes but were then disposable caricatures.
So what then for Barry Seaman? He can’t go back to that, and is smart enough to evolve and stay alive, unlike his co-founder, who clings on and disappears.
“So – as a ghost, or guide, or unlikely angel, Seaman appears to represent the necessity, under certain conditions, for violence.”
He’s a living example of the absolute necessity to evolve to fit what the world needs from you.
“Really, there’s just one star….the sun.”
The Panthers chased celebrity. Here on one hand is a concession to the Panthers as a momentarily useful band that became obsolete. It’s also a kind of ‘making peace’ for Seaman. He knows his limitations; he no longer needs a mindset that won’t permit boundaries, that can’t to succeed. We’re all stuck on Earth, perpetuated by a warming sun, but that’s never enough: we have to ‘fight’ with ideas of purpose and personal substance. His meeting with Fate heralds his final acceptance of that, and a passing the flame to Fate. Fate has to go through his ‘fight’ in order to rest.
Fate’s time is now: he is formed, through circuitous changes and his own private evolution, all imposed by the world, into someone equipped for what Santa Teresa is. This is no place for messianic spokesmen or grand gestures: it’s a place of cartilage, bone, blood, sweat, murder, terrible, unheeding violence. It’s beyond saving: it needs warriors. Whether he likes it or not, Fate is heeding an unequivocal call here, marshalled by Bolano, to make use of himself. Ideologies and principles and poetry won’t take hold: this place is “shit”. It’s too late to fix it: who’s going to get their hands dirty?
Bolano, as a parent, can no longer reconcile his leftist ideals re: peacefulness (if he ever held them) with the instinct to want to protect his children from monstrosities he is all too aware of. We’re all potential right-wingers when it comes to our kids, aren’t we?
On Mexico utterly riven with terminal drug corruption: Ed Vuillamy’s brilliant and terrifying ‘Amexica’ covers plenty of impossible-to-believe ground, all of which turns out to be horribly true. Rival gangs slaughter opposite members and make jokes out of the slaughter: that’s where we’re at. We’re in Nazi territory. Creatively arranged corpses are the sites of visual humour. Every attempt at curtailing the madness is absorbed: people are paid off or shot, basically, or activity simply relocates. Those involved in covering everything up is terrifyingly wide-ranging etc.
“Seaman also speaks of meteors – which “have something to do with the notion of breaking away”. p 253”.
Or: breaking away from one iteration of your evolution into another, to effect change, or to accept that you no longer can and pursuing such ends is self-defeat. We can still be useful in the kitchen, and none of us really knows what the bigger story is.
Lee – that Flaming Lips song seems so apt to the reader of 2666 – in particular –
“I thought I was smart, I thought I was right
I thought it better not to fight, I thought there was a
Virtue in always being cool, so when it came time to
Fight I thought I’ll just step aside and that the time would
Prove you wrong ”
It is almost as if the boxing metaphor mixes with other ideas in the novel about preparedness.
Hoping to locate “Amexica”, too.
I find your discussion of the necessity for evolution completely apt.
The whole post, Lee, great stuff.
Thanks Betsy – you keep raising the bar on here with some formidable analysis and I hope it continues!
On Barry Seaman’s second sermon: MONEY. (pp 249-250.
How money actually works, says Seaman, is “ultimately a mystery.” I would concur. There’s a lot we understand now about 2007-2008, when hundreds of thousands of people lost their shirts. But at the time it was like getting caught in a tidal wave. And, ultimately, there’s a lot we still don’t know. Why, for instance, haven’t the bankers gone to jail? Why, for instance, did the regulators look the other way? Why, for instance, are there still too many 25-35 year olds underemployed? Why, for instance, is there still not adequate low income housing? Money – the big picture – is like the sea – opaque, full of mysteries, too big to divine all at once, and subject to storm and tidal wave.
So money is another one of the human environments where we never see the big picture, but all the same, we have to swim in it. Money is where we must inevitably be always at sea yet make the best of it.
MONEY is the shortest of the 5 sermons, running about one page. Seaman himself calls the sermons “subjects”.
But we are with Fate and Seaman in a Christian church, (and we are probably revisiting Melville’s Father Mapple), so it seems appropriate to call these subjects – sermons.
Above, Lee was talking about the necessity for for personal evolution. This particular sermon about money feels to be an evolution of the golden rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; Love thy neighbor as thyself.)
Seaman’s version of the golden rule: “When poor people make money, they should help their neighbors.”
What’s interesting here is that we were all, everyone of us, once poor – we were, after all, born without money. So Seaman’s instruction is as global as the golden rule. But Seaman updates it by his specificity. When we use the money we must earn to survive, we should simultaneously help our neighbors at the same time as we help ourselves. Adopt an orphan, he suggests, cavalierly. Lend money to small businessmen and women. Reinvest in the community. Give scholarships.
So, I think Seaman’s sermon on money is an update on the golden rule.
Why is the sermon on money so short?
It does not directly address, for instance, the way Northern Mexico is presently “squeezing money from rocks”. What we encounter in 2666 is the way northern Mexico answers the demand for cheap labor, as well as how it answers the demand for marijuana and cocaine, as well as how it answers the demand for prostitution.
One of Oscar Fate’s preoccupations is the slave trade – the tremendous economic engine that drove Boston as well as the southern plantation. The slave trade had several strands: the demand for cheap labor, the demand for opium; and the demand for sugar and rum. Fate buys the book Jones recommended about the slave trade, and he opens it – but Mexico itself proves more compelling.
Mexico is an evolution of the “triangular trade” of slaves, opium, and rum. Slavery has evolved into “cheap labor”. Opium has evolved into cocaine. Rum has evolved into marijuana. Just as the triangular trade was immense and immensely profitable, so is the present set-up. It is the immensity of it that I think Bolano is addressing.
If Fate is going to swim in this sea – being aware of the history of the slave trade is useful. Being in good shape is also useful. Having your eyes open is especially useful. Like a boxer, he needs to be quick on his feet. The thing he does – rescue Rosa Amalfitano – is a relatively small act. But it is an act. I think Bolano is emphasizing the importance of individual acts in the presence of immensity.
I wish to speculate about money and education – one of the good works that Seaman recommends.
Money from the triangular trade in slaves, rum and opium made various Americans and Europeans rich. Some of that money help build Harvard, Yale, and Oxford.
In a bizarre way, Bolano here has two audiences. One audience is the faithful in the Black church, which includes, by the way, “five boys in black jackets and black berets and dark glasses, none of them older than twenty.” And a second audience is the Mexican cartel. Why else have a formerly murderous Black Panther giving a sermon in a church? He is saying – you have the means – do it. Act on it. Educate an orphan. Assume some “dignity”.
How could Bolano possibly be talking to the Mexican cartel? How could slave trade money have ended up at Harvard or Oxford or Yale or William and Mary?
In a bizarre way, Bolano is suggesting that the cartel get a little dignity, much the way the old moguls of the triangular trade did.
Bolano’s insistence on using a Black Panther as a hero underlines this fact: although the Black Panthers engaged in criminal activity, they also were part why conditions and situations changed in the United States. Who will overturn the violent conditions in Mexico? The police? the citizens? some renegade part of the cartel? some part of the cartel that decides to assume a little dignity?
At the same time, Seaman’s sermon is directed at the huge American and European corporations that are running on cheap labor. Ironically, he’s telling also the suits to assume “a little dignity”. Reinvest in the community, reinvest in the orphans, reinvest in scholarships.
Swimming in this vast sea I welcome amplification, correction, outright disagreement, or qualification.
“When poor people make money, they should also help their neighbors,” says Seaman. He’s talking an evolved golden rule to the church goers, and to the five nascent black panthers in the corner, and I think he’s also to the huge corporations and to the huge drug cartels. If he’s not talking to the corporations and the cartels, there would have been no need for the Hugh Thomas book of “The Slave Trade”.
Just want to add that Bobby Seaman on money and offspring reminds me of Warren Buffett. Of course, some of the drug cartel fortunes are huge, like Warren Buffett’s. Of course, Bolano also is suggesting that the corporations have as their children Mexican children.
On Barry Seaman’s first sermon: DANGER (pp 246-249)
Seaman’s rhetorical style is quite rambling. He talks about growing up in California, talks about the seductive paradise that California is, admits to being a founder, along with Marius Newell, of the Black Panthers. (The two founders were actually Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Allowing himself the liberty of fictionalizing these two real people gives Bolano the freedom he needs to use owe they worked in American society for the purposes of 2666. I don’t see that he is disrespectful of the trust, but I may be missing something.)
He talks very specifically about mothers, saying that they are a “precious thing.”
And then he tells us how Marius Newell died. Because the topic is so freighted, Seaman rambles, memorializes, and speculates.
He makes the point that Marius chose to return to California, and that he thinks the killer tracked Marius. There is a little echo of the way Martin Luther King’s killer tracked him down. I am troubled by the way Bolano confuses King and Newton, but I am sure he means this confusion purposely.
Now – as for me – I idealize MArtin Luther King. It is hard for me to idealize Huey Newton/Marius Newell. But I get Bolano’s point. Some situations are unknowable and lethal. King’s situation was lethal. That’s obvious, especially if you watch the old videos of his life. So – to confront a corrupt police force? That’s lethal.
Anyway – Seaman says that Marius died in Santa Cruz, where he had gone for a few days to enjoy the sea. Seaman says, “I think: the danger is the sea.”
So what does the sea mean? More than one thing, I think. In one way, the sea is life itself. Life itself is the danger. If you are going to live life, it’s dangerous.
But in another way, the sea is suicide. Seaman made the point that Marius chose to return to California, as if he hadn’t returned, the killer might not have tracked him down. But – one needs to recognize the fine line between life and death, between life and suicide. Newell was perhaps going up against the drug trade, and perhaps the kingpin ordered his assassination. One is put in mind of Jesus continually seeking out the Sea of Galilee, and his eventual assassination. Newell was attracted to the beauty of the sea – the beauty of life, the beauty of the fight, the beauty of not knowing, the beauty of the wildness. There lies suicide, so to speak.
Somehow, the argument being made here is that to knowingly embrace all that life requires, one embraces the possibility of not surviving.
Once again, we come up against the French – the question of whether life is meaningless, and if so, should suicide be the natural answer. Bolano is positing (I am suggesting) that only if you are willing to risk death for what you believe is life worth living. To do that – some would say – is suicide.
Now – here’s the thing. Newell dies, and Seaman – the sea-man – is still alive. But I would suggest that Seaman – who has lived to tell the tale (like Ishmael) risks death as well. The 5 young men in their black jackets and black berets might be there out of adulation or they might be there because they think he is an old, pork chop pandering fool.
To be a sea-man, for one thing, you have to still be alive. You have to live to tell the tale. So is Roberto Bolano’s alter ego really Arturo Belano? Or is it really Bobby Seaman?
Where does Amalfitano fit in? He is clearly suicidal. But to no purpose. The difference is in the clear sighted purpose.
And then there’s FOOD: Seaman’s third sermon, which begins with him getting out of jail.
Seaman says several important things – that pork chops saved his life – which is very funny – and that his sister “helped him selflessly” – which is not funny at all but very honest. And he says, ” I learned to combine cooking with the thankfulness and confusion I felt at the kindness of so many people…when I say confusion, I also mean awe.” Of course, at this time, Bolano is already very sick. Perhaps Seaman is speaking for him here, too.
Seaman had reached a point where he had no place in the world. The Panthers were “nobody”.
He describes how hard it is – given that we live in a sea of “uncertainties” and “impermanence”.
And it’s then that he realizes he could write a book of barbeque recipes – as Bobby Seale actually did. But ~
“I couldn’t live forever on my recipes for ribs, my famous recipes. Ribs were not the answer. You have to change. You have to turn yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you are looking for.”
And then he talks, in detail about how to make duck a l’orange.
Here’s the thing. He’s talking t the good church ladies, but he’s also talking to the 5 teenagers dressed in black jackets and dark shades. And, I think, he’s talking for Bolano to the various criminals in the cartels – and the people who aid and abet them. “You have to turn yourself around and change.” After all, some do.
All this time, Fate has been sick and has been vomiting. Nothing is nourishing him. And all this time, but little do we know, Rosa Amalfitano has been ingesting cocaine. Later, in the STARS sermon he goes back to the subject of food – of what the body needs for nourishment. Vegetables, for instance, beautifully prepared.
And books.
So – using this rambling folk voice, Bolano is able to get at some important things.
But notice: he doesn’t use these words: love, sacrifice, redeem, words that perhaps Bolano thinks have been overused into meaninglessness. But Bolano does have Seaman say very directly what can matter to a man of the people.
It’s important to notice that it isn’t the critics speaking the truth.
It isn’t the teacher/philosopher – Amalfitano.
And so far, anyway, it isn’t Archimboldi who is being the seer, either. .
It is someone who’s been to jail, and who perhaps has done some very bad things.
It is Seaman (semen) – everyman. So I take it that Bolano means Seaman’s ideas to be seminal to understanding 2666.
“Uncertainty” – “Impermanence” – “You have to change” and “selflessly”.
Seaman’s sister, who helped him “selflessly” – “was one of God’s angels.”
but I think he is speaking metaphorically or hypothetically or, maybe, hopefully.
Curious really – evangelical Christian language would have it to be born again.
Seaman says instead: You have to turn yourself around.
Curiously, he says it in an Ayn Rand kind of way,
but at the same time, he allows us to understand that in his sister’s selflessness
(and also the in “the kindness of so many people”) there was a kind of foment,
a kind of fomenting force. .
So there’s a kind of ferocious rewriting of/ evolution of/ religion.
I think it is important to contrast the kind of church where Seaman is speaking to
the kind of church that Bolano might have been familiar with (if only tangentially)
in Chile or Mexico or Spain. This is a church where Seaman can speak his irreligious, unconventional mind from the pulpit
and nobody has any objection.
I will respond more fully to your further fine thoughts, Betsy, but for now, here’s a quote I thought you might quite like re: this discussion, from someone mentioned more than once in 2666.
“We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a “handicraft.” “Craft” literally means strength and skill in our hands. The hand is a peculiar thing. . . . Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.
But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives, and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands are folded into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness.
The hand is all thing, and this is the handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think – not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every hearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper time.”
Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 1968.
Help me out, Lee. How do you see this quote from “What is called Thinking? fitting into what we have read so far?
How does Bolano incorporate Heidigger into 2666? I see “Heidigger” on p193 in Amalfitano’s drawing 4. Otherwise, I am at sea as to where else Bolano specifically mentions Heidigger or his ideas.
I think Heidegger is apt for the entirety of 2666: I can’t pinpoint other mentions precisely, but they are in there (I will at some point find out exactly – pretty sure he pops up in part five).
Think of Edwin Johns: an artist severing his hand.
Oscar Fate: a hand as a fist.
A hand that greets; a hand that kills; a hand that writes.
Heidegger: “The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign.”
How much are such acts information, and what is it saying? What ‘sign’ is man in 2666?
(Apologies about the time-constrained relative brevity here, Betsy – to be continued.)
Hi Lee. Thank you for this nicely specific outline. I am not a reader of philosophy, and I appreciate your guidance. I see the relevance of where you are going with this. And I welcome more explication of this theme. I think you are on to something.
At the same time, I need to disagree with you about how Bolano may be using Heidegger. Forgive me. Disagreement here at Mookse and Gripes should be polite and should be thought out. I hope I have managed both.
For my information about Heidegger, I am relying on a book review written by Adam Kirsch that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Book Review on May 7, 2010. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Kirsch)
The book under review (by Emmanuel Faye) is entitled “The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935”. It is important to note that Kirsch disagrees with Faye’s ultimate conclusions. It is Kirsch’s summary of Heidegger’s life that is useful to me, not so much the book under review. Also, I am familiar with Kirsch’s writing and am comfortable with him.
This is a long post – so I will sum up my points first.
1. Heidegger was a Nazi, he publicly supported the Nazi cause in his role as the Rector of Freiburg University, and he profited from being a Nazi.
2. Kirsch says that Heidegger was then able, post war, to rehabilitate his reputation and “[detach] his work and reputation from his Naziism.”
(I would comment here that it would have been nice if my husband’s grandmother and great aunt could have “detached” themselves from the concentration camp (most likely Therienstadt) where they most likely disappeared. )
3. My point regarding Heidegger and 2666 is that he is similar to the Barry Seaman (Bobby Seale) character. Both men “adapted” to a changing political situation and survived. What is different about the two men is that Seale/Seaman went to jail before he changed his spots. Another difference is that the Panthers mostly killed each other. The Nazis killed as many outsiders as they could catch, and the numbers were staggering..
I am not comfortable with the idea that Bolano expects us to embrace Heidegger. Even if it is true that he helped another Jewish student with whom he had had an affair escape from Germany, Heideggar is no Bonhoeffer. Regardless that Bolano makes reference to Heidegger’s philosophy, I don’t get the feeling that Bolano is embracing the man, and I am not sure that he is referencing the philosophy without irony.
But I stress that my complete ignorance of philosophy makes me a poor reader of this theme.
4. Heidegger the man to me more resembles the shadows that inhabit “The Part About the Crimes” – the businessmen, the drug lords, the bought policemen, the corrupt politicians, the bankers, all of whom are “adapting” to the environment of Santa Teresa. . Heidegger also adapted. He did well for himself during the Nazi era. So do all these “players” in Part 4.
5. The ultimate irony for me regarding Heidegger is that he is the real “banality of evil”, not Eichman. Eichman is a monster. Heidegger is a far more garden variety of whatever evil is. He is more like you or me trying to sort out how we are going to live with our own government’s goals and methods.
6. My question, Lee, is this. If Heidegger were living in Santa Teresa, what role would he play?
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Below I have spelled out some of Adam Kirsch’s book review.
((http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Kirsch)
For those unfamiliar with Heidegger, this is a quick introduction to the man, not his philosophy.
A few salient facts from Kirsch about Heidigger:
There has been substantial discussion over many years regarding the meaning of Heidegger’s Nazi beliefs and actions.
He was probably about 35 when he had an affair with Hannah Arendt, a Jewish student 15 years his junior.
He was about 44 when he was appointed to be be Rector (or head) of the Freiburg University.
Kirsrch says, “The fact that Heidigger was a Nazi was never in dispute.”
Kirsch cites a sentence from a speech Heidigger made to the student body in the fall of 1933, in which Heidigger said, “the Führer and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law”.
Kirsch spells out Heidegger’s involvement with Naziism:
“The philosopher, it is now clear, was a committed National Socialist for many years, an admirer of Hitler who purged Jewish colleagues, presided over a book-burning (though it seems rain may have prevented any books from actually being burned) and — unlike genuine dissidents — continued to teach, publish and travel throughout the Nazi period.”
Kirsch then makes the point that Heidegger was able, post war, to rehabilitate his reputation and “[detach] his work and reputation from his Naziism.”
Later, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Arendt went on West German radio to “explain” Heidegger’s Nazi past.
Kirsch is clearly not sympathetic to Arendt’s apologia for Heidegger. Kirsch says that for Arendt, the former lover, Heidegger’s Nazi past “was an ‘escapade,’ a mistake, which happened only because the thinker naïvely ‘succumbed to the temptation . . . to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.’ The moral to be drawn from the Heidegger case was that “the thinking ‘I’ is entirely different from the self of consciousness,” so that Heidegger’s thought cannot be contaminated by the actions of the mere man.”
Arendt’s position is important, in that, as Kirsch points out, there has been substantial discussion of what Heidegger’s Nazi past means for his philosophy. Emanuel Faye goes so far as to argue that the affair with Nazism invaded his philosophy and thus invalidated it. Kirsch argues strongly against such an extreme position.
So here we are, Lee – at opposite ends of an argument – with you holding the longer straw, given that you are familiar with Heidegger’s philosophy, with me holding the short straw, given that I am implicitly questioning whether in a novel Bolano can reference the philosophy without referencing the man as well.
I still would argue that there may be an element of irony in Bolano’s use of Heidegger.
Lee – I hope this reads to you as someone who is establishing a line of questioning – not someone who wants (like a Nazi) to impose a rigid position. I know I would benefit from more information. There is clearly much more to this debate (regarding Bolano’s use of Heidegger) than is easily reached in a day or two.