freshman seminar paper on history in bolano's 2666

7/27/2019 freshman seminar paper on history in Bolano's 2666

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Angela Zhou

Professor Rachel Price

FRS 191

13 January 2013

Roberto Bolanos 2666: The Constellation Star-Map of the Twentieth Century

In Roberto Bolanos 2666, the academic Amalfitano laments those who choose to read

the perfect exercises of the great masters rather than the great, imperfect torrential works;

those who have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that

something, that something that terrifies us all amid blood and mortal wounds and stench

(227). 2666, written in his late years and published posthumously is Bolanos imperfect

torrential [work], his struggle against the visceral and phantom horrors of the 20th century.

Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, an experimental work of history intended to examine a

prehistory of capitalism in Paris, is another masterpiece, an amalgamation of Benjamins ideas

and thoughts on theoretical method. Bolano subtly interweaves historical allusion with fictional

narrative when Hans Reiter coins himself Benno von Arcimboldi after reading about the

Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The historical Arcimboldo painted portraits of the four

seasons as pictorial montages of natural elements and objects like fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

Jonathan Lethem, in his review of2666suggests that the individual elements of 2666 are

easily cataloged, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit,

conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. It is all of2666s multitudes that

combine to form such an Archimboldean, implicit shadow-image of the horrors of the late 20th

century. Bolano, through his constant referencing of modes of representation, also meditates

upon and challenges the very institutions of literature, writing, and readership themselves. In the


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process, 2666validates its own contradictory, fragmented existence through its unmistakable

scope and scale and ability to evoke the impressions it merely suggests. I argue that 2666

employs dual modes of mimetic representation in 2666and its grappling with themes of

historical and contemporary violence, reminiscent of Benjamins conceptions of history as a

series of images and in a constellanic mode of representation.

In 2666, Bolano explores similar certain themes and motifs, varying narrative style across

five loosely connected parts. 2666leaps across genres and continents, zooming in and out in

time as well: Part 3, The Part About Fate, takes place over the course of a few days, while the

final part, The Part about Archimboldi reconstructs the titular characters life across the 20th

century. Bolanos general style blurs traditional distinctions between objective representation

and satirical critique. Over the course of the five parts of the book, he follows the course of

characters, from academics to journalists to writers, along with a myriad of tangential characters

that Bolano sketches into the composition, and their relationship to the serial murders of women

in Santa Teresa. The editors point out that 2666centers in a conceptual and geopolitical sense on

Santa Teresa, a maquiladora-dominated city on the border of Mexico and the fictional

counterpart to the real-life Ciudad Juarez. Bolano refers to, and later foregrounds, the unsolved

serial murders of women in Santa Teresa, setting the so-called femicides against the bloodshot

backdrop of the historical and systemic violence of the 20th century.

Where Bolano draws upon literary montage techniques with in his fragmented narrative

style, Walter Benjamin similarly employs a photomontage methodology in collecting literary

quotations in hisArcades Project. Walter Benjamin was a prolific writer and cultural historian of

the 20th century, noted for his thoughts on history and historical method as well as his writings

on aesthetics and politics. Each convolute represents a topical section or chapter, discussing


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subjects ranging from Prostitution, Gambling to Boredom, Eternal Return, and Baudelaire.

Though Benjamin introduces or comments on some quotations, theArcades Projectis mostly a

collection and re-appropriation of cultural materials and writings of the time. The title refers to

the Parisian arcades, iron-and-steel covered passageways between rows of shops, which

Benjamin referred to as [worlds] in miniature, in which customers will find everything they

need (Benjamin A[1,1]).Arcades Projectconsiders the arcade as not only a physical and

architectural space, but also a conceptual prefiguration and concretization of modernity and

capitalism in Paris. TheArcades Projects representational goals resemble those of Bolanos,

albeit in a historical or encyclopedic, rather than literary, format.

BenjaminsArcades Projectalso represents an application of Benjamins own

complicated conception of and methodology of concretizing history. Benjamins writings endure

in part because of their occasional ambiguities, leaving some of the controversies regarding his

ideas unreconciled; my attempts to reconstruct his ideas on history and language do not even

claim to be attempting to do his oeuvre justice. Still, reconstructing key facets of Benjamins

historical method is essential to understanding what is at stake in the discourse of theArcades

Project. Benjamin introduced his concept of the angel of history in his Theses on the Concept

of History:

Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe

which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,

awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in

from Paradise; ...the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is

turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call

progress (IX)


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Benjamin here argues that the traditionally linear interpretation of history is inherently

limited due to the nature of the present moment and the passage of time itself. That is, history is

only made sense of in the process oflooking back, where causality and historical structure are

reconstructed from the information about what has already happened. His angel of history is

never quite able to make whole what has been smashed, and the passage of time itself becomes

the single catastrophe which inexorably hurls more wreckage at its feet. Benjamin describes

the storm of illusory progress which prevents the angel from piecing together the fragments

and detritus of the past. The progression of time is exactly that which prevents the angel of

history from coming to terms with and making sense of the past. Most significantly, Benjamin

refers to history as a series of dialectical images, where ...the past can be seized only as an

image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again

(Concept of History 5)His method of understanding history based on literary montage

illustrates the construction of dialectical images through the juxtaposition and interaction of

objects and texts, such as the convolutes ofArcades Projectand the quotations and images they

collect. These objects are typically tangential to the literal historical events themselves. Benjamin

also conflates the faculty to represent the whole image of history with the monadic object, the

self-contained cultural artifact or object. Benjamins flashing up of the image emphasizes the

dynamic interaction between the past and the present. In Benjamins concepts of the angel of

history and dialectical image, he asserts that history is not conceived of linear narrative

sequences and easily rendered causalities, but of much more problematic images , dynamic

interactions where the present can never escape or fully grasp the pasts influence. In 2666,

Bolano echoes, through Arcimboldi, this sentiment when Arcimboldi affirms to himself,

history has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with


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one another in monstrousness (794). The Arcades Projectis a prehistory of modern capitalism

in Paris through the examination of cultural and physical artifacts and is notable in developing

Benjamins conception of history as a progression of instants and images rather than discrete

events, a view that Bolano seems to support in his novel as well.

Discussions of the dialectical image point out Benjamins own problematic theory

surrounding its contradictions and ambiguities which result from Benjamins constellanic

nature of thought, leading to, as Tiedemann describes it in Dialectics at a Standstill, its

iridescence. Embedded in the notion of a dialectical image is multiplicity and contradiction

that nonetheless interact together to retain a certain representational agency; it is intrinsically of

dubious ontological stability. Benjamin emphasizes that the place where one encounters [the

dialectical image] is language. Benjamin attributes a certain mimetic faculty to language that

exists in the literal constellanic nature of syntax and meaning, in the seeming fixedness of the

arrangement of the stars reflecting itself in the fixed grammatical and syntactical relationships

between words. But, just as Benjamin acknowledges and employs the dual implications of

constellation in referring to the imaginary symbols invented from the formless field of stars in

the sky, so too does Benjamin attribute to language a mimetic flexibility and faculty arising from

its ambiguities and arbitrariness, from the patterns that others read from it. He affirms that

What matters for the dialectician is to have the wind ofworld historyin his sails. Thinking

means forhim: setting the sails. What is important is how they are set. Words are his sails.

The way they are set makes them into concepts. [N9,6] Benjamin emphasizes the influence of

history on the dialectician, the influence of how words are set in syntax, on the nature of the

thought itself. Because language is itself dynamic, it has the agency to give rise to the entire

range of impressions, even those seemingly beyond traditional mimetic representation. The


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sentence itself is a fair example of the possible imagistic nature that Benjamin refers to and

frequently employs.

I interpret and identify 2666as a possible concretization of the dialectical image as a

global novel, employing the dual modes of narrative and representation through traditional

narrative structure and mimetic experience. 2666portrays the shadow-image of the violence of

the 20th century, making sense of the detritus placed before it by the progress of time, both

through traditional methods of describing some horrors traditional narrative faculty - as well as

describing them in a fashion such that the readers implicitly experience the commonalities and

patterns of violence the mimetic faculty of language. Somewhere in between these two poles of

violence the Santa Teresa murders recent, the Holocaust semi-historical, one systemic and the

other mystifyingly disconnected - 2666also plumbs the tangential effects of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, despite its economic phenomenology, is still specific to the contemporary

moment portrayed in 2666. The term describes the economic deregulation and privatization of

industries that gained prominence in Latin America during the 1990s, intended to address the

crippling debt crises of the 1980s (Chasteen 310). The passage of NAFTA, the North American

Free Trade Agreement, accelerated the rise of the maquiladoras, which were manufacturing

plants in Mexicos designated Free Trade Zones. The maquiladoras and the deregulation of

capital flows out of Mexico, emblems of neoliberal economic reforms, attracted transnational

corporations that relied on cheap, available labor to assemble parts for export. Women and

migrant workers provided much of the cheap labor and were essentially treated as disposable

components of the production process itself. The Mexican government suppressed wages to

encourage the growth of maquiladoras and the accompanying foreign investment (Chasteen 315).


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In 2666, Bolano embodies neoliberalism as the industrial landscape of the novel with the

looming presence of the maquiladoras.

Bolano points out in the Part About the Crimes that many of the murdered women in

Santa Teresa (and their real-life counterparts in Ciudad Juarez) were themselves maquiladora

workers. Thus, he mirrors the economic objectification of women by the maquiladoras with their

sexual and cultural objectification. Bolano overwhelms the reader with the details of crime after

crime, sterilizing the abject horror of the violent crimes through sheer clinical observation and

repetition, employing an opaque narrative technique that replicates the experience of

desensitization to violence for the reader. Across the accounts, Bolanos narration reiterates,

among other such detached statements, that [the victim] was anally and vaginally raped and

the case remained unsolved. The reader is numbed by the sheer velocity with which Bolano

relates these horrors and their abrupt, ambiguous conclusions. The succession of accounts is

interspersed with casual comments from the investigators that illustrate the cultural

objectification of the women illustrating the ways in which this objectification has been

internalized. The young cop, Lalo Cura, observes a tiny cell full of a mass of policemen, noting

that in the other cells policemen were raping the whores (Bolano 401). Bolanos characters

judge women and their occupations immediately by their appearances; Fate is initially confused

by the reporter because she didnt look like a reporter, yet she also didnt look like a hooker

or crazy person (Bolano 296) The police regard another victim, who was single and sexually

active, as practically a whore (460). Another character, observing a woman typing,

immediately judges her as a secretary and notes her skirt and high heels as a sign that she must

definitely be fucking her boss (474). Haas asks a fellow inmate what he thinks of the dead girls;

he responds, they were whores they deserved to be fucked as many times as anyone wanted


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to fuck them, but they didnt deserve to die (490). Bolano deliberately repeats these

thematically charged statements across the hundreds of accounts he relates, forming his own

thematic constellation in part IV to implicitly depict the objectification of women by the

machinery of capitalism.

Bolano also incorporates literary fragments of violence in invoking the figurative and

literal blood and mortal wounds and stench of the 20th century. The maquiladoras act as

specters of global capitalism; the Swabian recounts a conversation with a widow who was

repulsed by her views of Buenos Aires harbor from a distance, by the red of barely cooked

steak, of T-bones, of filet, terrible (Bolano 20). She is relieved afterwards when they instead

stay in some of Buenos Aires most expensive hotels, no longer forced to confront the visceral,

underlying movements and substructures of production. This violence of globalization stands for

the more general hegemony and dominance of economic capital; set in opposition to the more

explicitly hegemonic structures of Nazism. Bolano alludes multiple times to Nazism even before

The Part about Arcimboldi, which details the elusive authors life, including his time as a

soldier in the German army. He also includes brief allusions, such as when the old man with the

typewriter theorizes, In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know

(Bolano 785). The murders in Santa Teresa and their senselessness also recall a historical parallel

in the systemic violence of the Holocaust, in many ways the overwhelming, unintelligible

nightmare of the 20th century. Bolano extends the metaphor of rape as an act of exerting or

claiming power when describing the changing heights of Mexican boxers. He suddenly launches

into a parodic, tangential description of the original Spaniard rape and subjugation of

indigenous Indian women, claiming that they overestimated their semen... You just cant

rape that many people. Its mathematically impossible. Its too hard on the body (Bolano 288).


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illustrate the specter of violence through miniscule narrativepixels of history, themselves

transitory instants, that form an Arcimboldian portrait of violence.

Walter Benjamin and Roberto Bolano, despite living in different time periods, continents,

and working in different disciplines, both explore a conception of history as image or a series

of such images that emphasizes the material artifact or moment. Benjamin emphasized the

constellanic or iridescent nature of writing, writing conflated with thought, wherein his use

of figurative language was essential to concretizing the theoretical techniques he tried to

describe: The Arcades Projectis arguably his work of greatest ambition, his work that attempts

to encapsulate his thoughts on method, history, and the history of modernity. Bolano identifies

and distinguishes between the perfect exercises of the great masters and more challenging texts

that warrant engagement, implying that his own work is one such torrential text. 2666 and

Arcades Projectexplore multiple representational modes of communicating ideas through

outright narration/description, and more challenging implicit illumination of the substructures of

history. Arcimboldos portrait serves as a fruitful visual analogy for acknowledging the big

picture goals of both works, while also preserving the individuality, distinctiveness, and craft

associated with the arrangement of quotations, in Benjamins case, and traditional narrative in

Bolnaos case. WhereArcades Projectexamines a prehistory of capitalist modernity, 2666also

attempts to stave off the historical storm of progress and make sense of the violence of late

capitalist modernity before it is again swept away by another wave of detritus. Bolanos novel

2666presents a literary counterpart to the historical presentation found inArcades Project,

excavating the tangential and discarded images of history to form a nebulous conception and

experience of the contemporary moment and its global, internalized violence.

I affirm that the work here presented is my own in accordance with University regulations.


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Works Cited

Auerbach, Anthony. "Imagine No Metaphors: The Dialectical Image of Walter

Benjamin." Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 18 (2007): n. pag.Image and

Narrative. Web. 14 Jan. 2013.

Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999.

Print.

Bolao, Roberto, and Natasha Wimmer. 2666. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print.

Chasteen, John Charles.Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America. New

York: Norton, 2001. Print.

Lethem, Jonathan. "The Departed." The New York Times. The New York Times, 09 Nov. 2008.

Web. 14 Jan. 2013.

freshman seminar paper on history in bolano's 2666

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