Exile, Fate, and the Blogger as a Young Man.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, good Ol’ James Joyce spends quite a bit of time writing about how he wants to flee Ireland for good. Towards the end of the book, through his proxy Stephen Dedalus, he says, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (171). In other words, if you want to be a great writer/artist, you need to shake off the constraints placed upon you by your birthplace. Joyce’s character believes that one can only understand and write about Ireland by leaving it. He writes that he wants to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (213), and this can only be achieve through self-imposed exile.

As I was working through the last of the Part about the Critics, I found myself vigorously underlining and starring the exchange between Amalfitano and the critics about exile and fate, and thinking about the above Joyce passages. On page 117, Bolano writes:

“Amalfitano looked at them and then at his margarita and said, as if he had repeated it many times, that in 1974 he was in Argentina because of the coup in Chile, which had obliged him to choose the path of exile. And then he apologized for expressing himself so grandiloquently. Everything becomes a habit, he said, but none of the critics paid much attention to this last remark.

‘Exile must be a terrible thing,’ said Norton sympathetically.

‘Actually,’ said Amalfitano, ‘now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought as fate.’

‘But exile,’ said Pelletier, ‘is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.’

‘That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,’ said Amalfitano, ‘But again, I beg your pardon.’”

This exchange, like much of 2666, it much more complicated than it initially appears. What complicates this bit is that mention of habit. What becomes a habit? Life after exile? Telling the story about leaving Argentina over and over? Expressing himself grandiloquently? Or does Amalfitano simply mean that everything that once seems new becomes common with familiarity? I feel like you could make an argument for any of these ideas, but once the rest of the discussion is taken into consideration, it seems that this idea of habit and fate are intertwined.

Amalfitano explains that exile breaks up your life, changes your plans, and forces you to look at things from different perspectives. Pelletier sees this as a terrible thing. It shakes things up, takes you out of the comfort zone, and from doing “important things” (note that at the end of their trip, as Espinoza is trying to sleep with Rebecca [and civilize her {Seriously, what a pig}], Pelletier spends all his time reading books he has already read, over and over, steadfastly refusing to deviate from his plan, though he is shaken by Norton’s choice of Moroni). Amalfitano doesn’t seem to think so. This difference of opinion is important to the book. Archimboldi has, it appears, exiled himself. But it is unclear whether he is like Joyce, trying to gain a new perspective on his work or whether he simply wants to travel (if he left Europe at all). Amalfitano could see this leaving as a natural choice. The critics seek to restore him to Europe. The critics’ views are, in this way, provincial (which is a fantastic irony, because they hold themselves as better, more cultured, than anyone they meet in Mexico).

Still, the book promises a later “Part about Fate.” I’m sure some of these ideas, especially about fate being seemingly synonymous with routine, will be revisited. At this point, I’m glad to see the critics go. They seemed like small, petty people. I’m ready for some folks who are more in touch with reality.

Next week: A post about Thomas Pynchon. Then: THE PART ABOUT AMALFITANO! 

“…until he confessed that London was such a labyrinth…”

And then 2666 really took off. Up until this point, I was a bit unsure how I felt about the book. I liked the tone of the narrator, he or she seemed friendly enough, but the first fifty pages seemed mostly setup. Introductions to characters, their relationships, and this Archimboldi character overtook the first section and I didn’t have much to say. Then the Pakistani cabbie accidently quoted Borges and shit went bananas.

Academia starts bumping up against real life and we begin to see how disconnected from reality these characters may be. After the cabbie let’s the line slip from his lips, Bolano writes that this utterance: “led Espinoza to remark that he’d be damned if the cabbie hadn’t just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrinth—unintentionally of course. To which Norton replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their descriptions of London” (73). This, one suspects, sets the cabbie off. He assumes that the academics are making fun of him and proceeds to call Norton a slut. Obviously, there is some miscommunication (I sense this as a growing theme) here, but it leads to a physical encounter.

Really, there are a couple things going on here (we’ll get to the violence and its implications in a second), first of which being the idea of the palimpsest. A palimpsest is, according to dictionary.com, a “typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.” As it was explained to me, a palimpsest was unique in that one would be writing literally on top of what had already written. This is, of course, a fine metaphor for the idea of intertextuality as frequently practiced by postmodern writers. The bit of Bolano I quoted above is one of the best example’s I’ve ever seen, where you have that dizzying moment where the reader thinks of Bolano writing about Borges writing about Dickens and Stevenson. This is a direction I’m certain that 2666 is headed, towards Bolano writing about writing and the artifice of the novel. It’s one of the most consistent postmodern tropes from Borges to Auster. It is also worth examining whether Dickens and Stevenson did this sort of thing as well (All I can remember of Treasure Island is maybe). Of course, writing about writing is what the academics do for a living. Bolano is highlighting the value and the downfalls of this sort of treatment of literature.

Keep in mind, this first part of the book is the part about the “critics,” not about the scholars. Bolano is already proving to be choosing his words carefully and it’s obvious that he isn’t portraying these folks in a glowing light.

This didn’t become apparent until the academics beat up the cabbie. Up to this point, we are presented with highly “civilized” characters who spend a lot time reading (though it often seems that they can’t do it for long), looking out windows, and going to conferences. But when their academic world bumps up against the real world, weird shit happens. Obviously, Bolano wants to show the disconnect between the enlightened critics and actual working folks. This disconnect is put into high relief when the critics begin kicking the cabbie, yelling “shove Islam up your ass…this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mention seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of New York…and on and on” (74). Bolano is presenting the critics, the most highly trained minds of the Western world, slipping immediately into essentially gang violence because a cabbie was audacious enough to insult the woman they are both sleeping with.

It seems precisely the point of Bolano to show these people, for all their pretense, as uncivilized. Hypocritical as well, it’s mentioned that Espinoza and Pelletier both vote socialist and are screaming about women’s rights, as it would be assumed that they are individuals who would espouse tolerance. So what is Bolano saying? Other than being an academic doesn’t necessarily make you smart, well, I think it’s too early to tell. There’s a long way to go.

Throw in the painter who cuts off his own hand (which I’m not even going to start unpacking), and we have quite a read on our hands. See you next week, nerds.