Zhou 1

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 of 2666 suggests 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 of 2666s 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

Zhou 2

process, 2666 validates 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 2666 and 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. 2666 leaps 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 2666 centers 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 his Arcades 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

Zhou 3

subjects ranging from Prostitution, Gambling to Boredom, Eternal Return, and Baudelaire. Though Benjamin introduces or comments on some quotations, the Arcades Project is 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 Project considers the arcade as not only a physical and architectural space, but also a conceptual prefiguration and concretization of modernity and capitalism in Paris. The Arcades Projects representational goals resemble those of Bolanos, albeit in a historical or encyclopedic, rather than literary, format. Benjamins Arcades Project also 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 the Arcades 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)

Zhou 4

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 of looking 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 of Arcades Project and 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

Zhou 5

one another in monstrousness (794). The Arcades Project is 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 of world history in his sails. Thinking means for him: 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

Zhou 6

sentence itself is a fair example of the possible imagistic nature that Benjamin refers to and frequently employs. I interpret and identify 2666 as 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. 2666 portrays 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 - 2666 also 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).

Zhou 7

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

Zhou 8

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).

Zhou 9

Bolano slips this historical reference in, seemingly unrelated; the past indeed interrupts the progression of the present like Benjamins dialectical image, only to sink back into the obscurity of time as the reporters return to describing the prizewinning fighter. In addition to interweaving and suggestively depicting violence through the narrative arcs of the book, Bolanos narrative style frequently incorporates brief, violent imagery in otherwise mundane settings as a concretization of Benjamins theorized dialectical image. His violent images are shocking enough to interrupt narrative flow yet transitory enough to be soon swept away by the continuation of narrative as usual. Characters think of other characters in violent terms, or describe aspects of other people with violent imagery - one character describes another very casually with lifeless lips, lips that one could slash with a knife and from which one could be sure not a single drop of blood would fall (Bolano 788). In the first part, the most insular and self-contained part that followed the relationships among the four critics of Arcimboldi, the two critics beat up a Pakistani cab driver who, after eavesdropping on their conversation, insulted them, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head (Bolano 74). Bolano satirically describes the incident to cast it in a surreal, hysterical light, and describes it as if theyd finally had the mnage a trois theyd so often dreamed of, conflating such violence with sexual gratification. In depicting violence with the most mundane and banal abnormalities of human thoughts, and also the monstrous evil of the Santa Teresa murders in the Part About the Crimes, Bolanos representations seem to contradict each other: these representations call attention to the pervasive multiplicities of violence. These moments are in and of themselves parts of 2666s overall dialectical image depicting violence. Bolano suggests that the systemic violence of late 20th century capitalism has been internalized and is now a simple condition of existence when he desensitizes the reader to a brutal series of murders; thus he is able to

Zhou 10

illustrate the specter of violence through miniscule narrative pixels 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 Project is 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 Project explore 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. Where Arcades Project examines a prehistory of capitalist modernity, 2666 also 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 2666 presents a literary counterpart to the historical presentation found in Arcades 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.

Zhou 11

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.