Vogel

And then there was the tourist Vogel, a man with so much optimism, so much faith in the innate goodness of mankind, that he is nearly unbearable. Also, a great believer in masturbation.

Vogel saves young Hans Reiter's life on one of the two occasions that Hans nearly drowns. Vogel had initially mistaken Hans for seaweed. When he recollects this later, it perplexes him to no end. Page 646.

And then: in what sense can a boy resemble seaweed? And then: can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?

Indeed.

Good question.

Can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?



Laminaria digitata

Prussia Rises from the Depths

The opening pages of The Part About Archimboldi are in one sense typical of a novel that tells a man's life story and in another sense completely disorienting. The passages relating to Hans Reiter's childhood are poetic, but it is poetry of a very distinctive flavor. I come back repeatedly to this paragraph, set off by itself, and consider who else would have or could have written anything like it:

When his one-eyed mother bathed him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn't lifted him back up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of an eye, a calm, dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them.

Page 639

Remember Amalfitano's voice? Calm will never let you down. That must hold true only in the terrestrial world. Here, under the water, there is only movement. And what is the movement from childhood to adulthood if it is not in great part a movement from poetry to prose?


* * * * * * * * * * * *

The Part About Archimboldi features a cast of extraordinary characters, characters that remind me of those of John Irving at his very best. The first whom we encounter is the one-legged man who lost his leg in the first world war and later becomes Hans Reiter's father.

Upon his return home from the war, the one-legged man seeks out the one-eyed girl before he either washes or shaves. He goes to her house. I love this that occurs there:

When the girl saw him standing at the door to her house, she recognized him instantly. The one-legged man saw her, too, looking out the window, and he raised a hand in a formal salute, even a stiff salute, though it could also have been interpreted as a way of saying such is life.

Page 638.

Such is life.

The one-legged man is of the opinion that all nationalities and ethnic groups are swine except the Prussians. But Prussia no longer exists. Later this occurs, which from my point of view is a truly beautiful image.

Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths.

Page 644.

Goddamn, I like that!

The Mummy

With that overview of The Part About Archimboldi, let us take a look at some of the details.

The part opens with a description of “the mummy” in the bed next to Reiter's father in that military hospital of long ago. This figure, the mummy, is eerily reminiscent of “the man in white” in the hospital bed next to Yossarian in Catch 22. You remember that man in white. He had a jar connected to a tube that dripped fluid into him and another connected to a tube that eliminated liquid waste.

When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty, and the two were simply switched quickly so that stuff could be dripped back into him.

Catch 22, page 18.

It is difficult for me to believe that Bolaño was not familiar with Joseph Heller's man in white when he wrote these passages about the mummy.

Overview of the Part About Archimboldi

[The following was originally written with the intention that it be my final contribution regarding the novel at Infinite Zombies. For several reasons I have decided to post it here and move on to comments on details in that last Part.]

A month-long visit in April to the United States of America interrupted my reading of 2666 along with others in attendance here. This was actually my second reading of the novel but not the last. So here I am again at the end of the last week of the reading schedule for the book laid out at www.bolanobolano.com. There is a distinct echo in the room here now, but I am going to put up one last entry anyway.

When I first encountered The Part About Archimbaldi, I groaned. I have read more than enough literature centered around Hitler, Nazi Germany, and the holocaust for a lifetime. Admittedly, some of it great literature. The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas comes to mind immediately as one of the best in my experience. But still. Enough is enough. I had no intention of reading any more. I was disappointed that in The Part About Archimboldi, the part that I had looked forward to with anticipation for 633 pages, Bolaño had chosen to mine this already well-mined material one more time in telling the story of Hans Reiter.

To tell you the truth I am still a bit disappointed with that decision, but I must admit he told a good story, a piece of literary fiction in a form we are comfortable with as if once again to demonstrate that this, too, he can do.

We are told the facts of Hans Reiter's life from his early youth into his eighties. We learn much about him. He was a prolific writer with a body of work of Nobel Prize caliber. Just for fun I made a rough outline of Archimboldi's writings with little notes on what we know of each work. One learns nothing from this, by the way, other than that he wrote a lot.

Embedded within this story of Hans Reiter's life are a great number of other stories. His great friend, Hugo Halder, whose ne'er-do-well father, by the way, collected paintings of dead women. The story of the Russian leftist Boris Abramovich Ansky in which is embedded in turn the story of the science fiction writer--or whatever you wish to call the genre—Ivanov. Stories within stories like Russian nesting dolls.

What was Ivanov afraid of? . . . Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good.

Page 722.

There is the love story involving Ingeborg, which has the ring about it of A Farewell to Arms but this time featuring not one of Hemingway's vapid females but rather a tender, insane, brilliant, terminally ill sexual skyrocket.

There is the excellent story of Archimboldi's patron, the German Jewish publisher, Mr. Bubis, a survivor, and the irrepressible—I cannot help but smile at that choice of word—Baroness Von Zumpe. (Why did I think of Andrei Codrescu's The Blood Countess whenever I encountered the Baroness Von Zumpe?) The Baroness did not waste time reading any of the books she published after taking over Bubis's business upon his death. Actually reading the books obviously had nothing to do with the success of the business under her leadership.

All of this is very colorful, very good stuff. But what about the true nature of Hans Reiter?

As a young man he became intimate with the arts of violence. He was awarded the Iron Cross, apparently deservedly so. Hans Reiter repeatedly imagined that under his Wehrmacht uniform he was wearing “the suit or garb of a madman.” Page 670.

One story within a story that I did not mention above is that of Leo Sammer, alias Zeller, and the murder of the Greak Jews, or Jews that may have been Greek. I found this story to be quite a masterful portrayal of the banality of evil. The banality of evil is not a new subject, of course. The subject itself has been around longer than the phrase, but it is treated here as well as in any other treatment that I have encountered. After Sammer confides his story to Hans Reiter, Hans Reiter strangles him in what we can believe is a kind of weird vengeance for Ansky's death, a man Reiter knew only through his notebook. It is this murder that sends Reiter on the run and ultimately transforms him into Archimboldi.

I shall get to the point now.

Back on page 481we have this exchange between Klaus Haas and his cellmate, the rancher who had strangled his wife and shot his two children:

Don't cover your head, he said aloud and in a booming voice, you're still going to die. And who's going to kill me you gringo son of a bitch? You? Not me, motherfucker, said Haas, a giant is coming and the giant is going to kill you. A giant? asked the rancher. You heard me right, motherfucker, said Haas. A giant. A big man, very big, and he's going to kill you and everybody else. You crazy-ass gringo son of a bitch, said the rancher. . .A little while later, however, Haas, called out to say he heard footsteps. The giant was coming. He was covered in blood from head to toe and he was coming now.

Finally, we come to the story of the dream-ridden Lotte Reiter's adult years. She had never had any doubt that her brother, Hans, would survive the war and return. She was always alert for “the sound of his footsteps, the footsteps of a giant. . . .” Page 865. There follows multiple references the Hans Reiter's status as giant, at least in Lotte's mind's eye.

At last Hans does return after Lotte confides in Countess Von Zumpe concerning her son's predicament. He does not look like a giant anymore. Over eighty years old, he denies that he ever was one. Page 890. Lotte asks,

“Will you take care it all?”
“A beer,” he said.
“I don't have beer,” said Lotte. “Will you take care of it all?”

There is then the delightful interlude concerning ice cream in the park that Maria Bustillos discusses over at www.bolanobolano.com followed by the last line of the novel.

Soon afterward he left the park and the next morning he was on the way to Mexico.

We have no clue what this eighty-year-old man will accomplish in Mexico, but by the end of The Part About Archimboldi we know that he is capable of accomplishment. After 893 pages of the most grim, the most cynical, the most fatalistic fiction one will ever encounter, the novel ends on this twisted note of optimism and of hope.

I thought back to that great line toward the end of Ansky's notebook:

In one of his last notes he mentions the chaos of the universe and says that only in chaos are we conceivable.

Page 736.

Less reckless than Harry Magaña. Wiser than Oscar Fate (with a steadier stomach too boot). Acquired of a less feckless madness than Amalfitano's. Add the additional edge of being at the end of his life anyway. If there is any man capable of effectiveness within that chaotic conception, it is Hans Reiter, the great writer known as Archimboldi. I think that I can be forgiven for believing that there is one more remarkable episode in his story.

Aesthetic Ruminations

I have developed my own dearly held theories about reading fiction, idiosyncrasies that I have acquired through the years. The most dearly held of these is this. When I read a novel, I consider it no longer to belong to the author. It is mine at that point. It may have belonged to the author as he was conceiving it, laboring over it, and revising it with his editor. However, when he turns the finished product over to the publisher, in a very real sense he is giving it away to his readers, if any.

I say that I consider it mine when I read it because it is obviously my reader's brain that must supply the cognition that gives it form and substance at that point. The images and ideas have to take form in my brain. The same can be said for any artist and art in any other field. This is not some new aesthetic theory. It is the theory of aesthetics. It is as old as Aristotle. Nor is it in any sense intended to demean the effort of the writer, or any other artist for that matter, when I say that it is my brain that brings the work to life however imperfectly my brain may do that. It is just that I am not a writer. I am a reader. As a reader, I am jealous of my own prerogatives as such.

In other words, I do not consider a work a fiction, in this case a novel, to be a communication medium in the sense that we usually think of communication. The author does not communicate with me. Rather, the author has created what he hope is a piece of art and turns it loose. I pick up that piece of art—an object, a book—and give it life with my brain. The author is out of the picture. Long gone. Not to put too fine a point on this, I never give a fuck about what the novelist had in mind when he wrote a novel. The only thing I care about is what I have in my mind when I read it. This is admittedly a perfectly solipsistic regard for fiction.

As a result, I have come to certain conclusions. The work, if it is art, must speak for itself. It must stand alone. This is the very reason that so often good writers are reluctant or impatient with the idea of discussing the “meaning” of their own work. I agree with them in that reluctance. They bust their ass to create a piece of art and hand it over to readers and then they are asked to explain what it “means.” I can imagine that I might be a bit impatient with that, too. And I am fond of writers who decline to invade my reader's province in that way. I do not wish to be told what the damned thing means.

Moreover, “meaning” is a very slippery thing. Meaning resides in the reader's mind, and there can be different meanings in different readers' minds based on those readers' own life experiences that have nothing to do with the author's. Sometimes meaning may not take up residence in a reader's mind at all for any number of reasons. In my own case Finnegan's Wake's secrets remain secret, and I feel not the least bit a deficient reader as a result.

There is some duty, for lack of a better word, to himself or herself on the reader's part to be rational in deriving his or her personal meaning from a novel, but beyond that, who's to say? By "rational" I mean, for example, that Charles Manson's interpretation of the Beatles' composition Helter Skelter was not a valid one. I must say that I do not find Harold Bloom's interpretation of Shakespeare any more cogent than that either, to cite another example.

I become a bit impatient with efforts to paw through the author's biography for clues to his “meaning.” First, that simply ought not be necessary. Second, and just as importantly, I think that one can arrive at interpretations of a work based upon events in the author's life that are too pat, too facile. Lastly, it short changes the part that the reader's own brain and experience play in this whole thing we call “fiction.”

This is not to say that I do not become curious, as everyone does, about the author of a book that I like a lot. That is a different thing and good that it is a different thing. I can admire and enjoy the images I derive from Ernest Hemingway's novels and the ideas they generate while at the same time appreciating that personally he was an asshole and not get the two concepts mixed up.

Where does this leave the idea of “universality” as a measure of good fiction? I do not think that when we use the term “universality” in connection with a work we actually mean that it has exactly the same meaning for a large number of people. Rather, I think that we are saying that it has important meanings for a large number of people. The only thing universal about a good work of fiction is that the individual interpretations of various readers of significant number add some new dimension to their understanding of their own existence, usually their understanding of their own existence vis à vis the existence of others. Is not that what it is all about? In the end?

Many readers in the vicinity have limned their dislike of this novel repeatedly. I certainly understand that. There is not much to “like” about it. I cannot say that I myself “like” the novel. As I have mentioned elsewhere, when the book comes up in conversation, I am careful to recommend that others not read it. 2666 is not an entertainment. While there is not necessarily anything unsatisfactory about novels that are entertainments, this novel is not one of those.

I will say this though. I am utterly fascinated by it. I cannot help but think that Roberto Bolaño undertook something of great magnitude in a very original way. Because I believe that, as a reader I have tried to give it the effort that I think Roberto Bolaño's own great effort deserves.

I have also come to realize that one of the primary reasons for my fascination is that the book has, late in my life, caused me to question and rethink every single thing that I have written above. I have not yet changed my mind about any of these ideas. As yet, I am only rethinking them, and I hope that perhaps, thanks to this novel, I will ultimately be able to clarify further or maybe even refine those ideas in my own mind.