Posthuman Worlds: Roberto Bolaño's Narrative and Virtual Reality [1 ed.] 9781793649874, 9781793649881

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POSTHUMAN WORLDS

ROBERTO BOLANO'S NARRATIVE AND VIRTUAL REALITY ADOLFO CACHEIRO

Posthuman Worlds

Posthuman Worlds Roberto Bolaño’s Narrative and Virtual Reality

Adolfo Cacheiro

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cacheiro, Adolfo, author. Title: Posthuman worlds : Roberto Bolaño’s narrative and virtual reality / Adolfo Cacheiro. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Posthuman Worlds: Roberto Bolaño’s Narrative and Virtual Reality is a literary, psychoanalytic, and philosophical investigation of the representation of subjectivity and reality in the context of the relationship of Europe to the Americas as represented in Roberto Bolaño’s narrative”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021056728 (print) | LCCN 2021056729 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793649874 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793649881 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bolaño, Roberto, 1953-2003—Criticism and interpretation. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Fiction—Technique. Classification: LCC PQ8098.12.O38 Z58 2022 (print) | LCC PQ8098.12.O38 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056728 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056729 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my father, who loved literature and owned a bookstore.

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Autobiographical Phenomenology

xiii

1 The Force Field of the Real: Imaginary and Symbolic Identification in Distant Star 1 2 Fidelity to the Event in “Labyrinth”

21

3 The Savage Detectives and Fate

43

4 Amulet as a Posthuman Text

59

5 Transnational Allegory as a Prelude to Brexit

67

6 The Part about Heidegger

87

7 Bizarro World

107

8 Virtual Reality and the Revolutionary Subject

143

9 “Redemption to the Redeemer”

177

Conclusion: Ontological Considerations

215

Bibliography 217 Index 227 About the Author

237

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Preface

I used the resources of the New York Public Library and libraries at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Florida, Queens College, and Wayne State College to do research for this book. When I started working on Roberto Bolaño, I had a Marxist theoretical approach, but after reading several of his novels, I realized I would have to go beyond Marxism in order to proceed with my research. Bolaño’s novels are political, but when interpreting these works, it does not hurt to be extensively engaged with world literature, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy. Lacanian concepts about the formation of personal identity helped me to understand the dynamics of interpersonal relations in several of Bolaño’s works, particularly Distant Star. Mythology played a role in my interpretation of the relationship between Latin America and Europe in The Savage Detectives and the representation of Europe in 2666. Two texts were crucial here: the Oresteia in the former case and Parzival in the latter. The predominant tendency in my reading of 2666 is to unify the often disparate components of this text into a coherent whole. Hegel’s speculative dialectic as exemplified in The Science of Logic provided a useful model in this regard. As Bolaño’s works progress in order of publication, there is an evolving concern with causality that seems to move in the direction of metaphysics. Thus, while not abandoned in 2666, the preoccupation with naturalistic forms of psychological motivation manifested Distant Star is diminished in favor of a fantastic, supplemental type of causality characteristic of science fiction. Upon closer examination, this form of causality is understandable within the context of the virtual reality of a computer simulation. I have limited the selection of texts in this investigation to those that, in my opinion, best exemplify the aforementioned trends in Bolaño’s writing. I have also selected texts that manifest the impact of transnational European politics and ideology. ix

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Preface

“Labyrinth,” The Savage Detectives, and “The Part about the Critics” (the first part of 2666) are crucial in this regard. My contention is that these texts are relevant to understanding the formation of transnational European ideology and—in the case of “The Part about the Critics”—the cultural and historical situation that resulted in Brexit. Furthermore, I contend that, from an existential point of view—to the extent that 2666 exemplifies global literature—the world presented therein is not an invariant postmodern reality, but rather a world divided into regions where different forms of causality prevail, attributable to the insertion of the former into an ontological situation determinative of the latter.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Yasuko Taoka and David Graber for supporting my research. Thanks also to Holly Buchanan, the editor of Education and Literary Studies at Lexington Books, for taking on this project; to Martín Sorbille for his valuable suggestions on the draft of what became chapter 1 of this book; and to my wife, Norzeena, who served as an adviser. The following chapters are revised versions of previously published articles: Chapter 1 is a revision of “The Force Field of the Real: Imaginary and Symbolic Identification in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante,” Confluencia, volume 25, no. 2, 2010, 131–46. Chapter 2 is a revision of “Fidelity to the Event in Roberto Bolaño’s ‘Laberinto,’” L’Érudit franco-espagnol, volume 4, 2013, 86–100.

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Introduction Autobiographical Phenomenology

In a life characterized by geographical displacement, the displacement most profoundly reflected in the thematic content of Roberto Bolaño’s writing is moving from Latin America to Europe. My contention is that the textual manifestations of this displacement serve to give a sense of coherence to the fragmented narrative discourse of The Savage Detectives and, in a larger sense, to his literary works. For Bolaño these works were, as one of his interviewers remarked, “different approaches to the same world, a world of writers, of rather marginal people who are between obsessive and losers.”1 In terms of the relation of Europe to Latin America, the phenomenology of this world exists on a continuum between the former and the latter: it is European to the extent it is not Latin American and vice versa. That this type of divide reflects Bolaño’s conception of Europe in relation to Latin America is suggested in the following remarks he made to an interviewer about a nude woman he observed on the Ramblas during his first night in Barcelona: She was a woman who was walking around totally naked, and was talking. A fat woman. People let her talk, some listened to her and continued on their way, until a policeman approached her. I thought he was going to detain her. But instead of detaining her all he did was cover her with a kind of blanket. At that moment I realized I was in Europe. I have lived in Latin American countries where the violence is horrible. In some of these countries a police car would have stopped, they would have put the naked woman in the car, they would have taken her to a field to rape her and then kill her. Nothing happened here. Damn it, the difference is abysmal.2

xiii

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Introduction

As Bolaño’s writing progresses from Distant Star (1996) to 2666 (2004), his interest in politics, metaphysical themes, and virtual reality is evident. The last of these, virtual reality, becomes more important in the novels published after Distant Star, and the characteristics of the phenomenological divide between Europe and Latin America become clearer. Bolaño was born in Chile in 1953. He came from a working-class family. His mother, Victoria Ávalos, was a schoolteacher. His father, León Bolaño, was a boxer and a truck driver. Victoria Ávalos had asthma and, on the advice of a doctor, went to Mexico to be treated for that disease. The treatment was successful, but she had to make several trips to Mexico because her disease would recur when she returned to Chile. For this reason, the family moved to Mexico City in 1968.3 Bolaño had several reasons for moving from Mexico to Spain in 1977. To begin with, his mother lived in Barcelona after separating from his father. There was also his unhappy love affair with Lisa Johnson (an American poet portrayed as Laura Jáuregui in The Savage Detectives), which he talked about in an interview referred to by Montserrat Madariaga Caro:4 “I left because I could not stand so much heartbreak, as the ranchera would say. If I stayed in Mexico, I was going to hang myself, I knew I was going to die.”5 As an exponent of infrarrealismo, an avant-garde literary movement in opposition to the Mexican literary establishment, Bolaño was marginalized and ostracized by that establishment. He was able to have his poems published in anthologies of infrarrealista poetry, such as Pájaro de Calor: Ocho poetas infrarrealistas (1976), but he was not able to earn a living by means of his writing. As Madariaga Caro has observed, this was not the case in Spain: It must be recognized that the literary scene in Spain and, in general, in Europe is infinitely friendlier than in Mexico and Latin America. In the eighties, Bolaño was able to live from his writing thanks to the multiple competitions that were held, however, in Mexico the division between official and underground culture was still difficult to overcome. Ergo, infrarealism had reason to continue its struggle.6

Whatever his reasons for immigrating to Spain, Bolaño was similar to other working-class immigrants from third-world countries to the extent that he responded to a lack of opportunity to earn a living by immigrating to a wealthier, more developed country. As is evident in novels such as The Savage Detectives and 2666, Bolaño’s engagement with globalization is based on the lived experience of transplanting himself from one part of the world to another. To varying extents, the principal texts interpreted in this book deal with traveling from Latin America to Europe or Europe to Latin America. Of course, they are much more than travelogues. What is of particular interest in

Introduction

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terms of my interpretation is the political real as it is represented in Distant Star, “Labyrinth,” The Savage Detectives, Amulet, and 2666. By political real, I mean forces that have socioeconomic effects. These forces, while not completely resistant to symbolization, are similar to the Lacanian real in that they are uncanny and a source of anxiety for the subject. Distant Star can be described as a search for personal identity within a historical conjuncture that takes place between 1973 and 1994, encompassing the transition from dictatorship to neoliberal democracy in Chile. An unnamed narrator who has much in common with Roberto Bolaño leaves Chile after Salvador Allende is deposed in 1973 and immigrates to Spain. He is hospitalized after a medical/ mental health crisis. The psychological component of this crisis consists of a depressive episode caused by a loss of personal identity corresponding to the reversals suffered by the Left in Latin America, including the coup in Chile, and the aftermaths of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the FMLN insurgency in El Salvador. The narrator overcomes his emotional crisis by reconstituting his left-wing political identity and collaborating with a private investigator in tracking down Carlos Wieder, a poet and a serial killer. Even though he narrates from a European vantage point, the narrator’s newfound identity is better understood as a response to the Latin American problematics of a transition from right-wing dictatorship to democratic neoliberalism. At the conclusion of Distant Star, the relationship of the narrator’s ideology to the European political context of the 1990s is open to question. More so than Distant Star, “Labyrinth,” a story from the anthology The Secret of Evil (published posthumously in 2007), engages with the theme of political ideology as it relates to a European context. The writers and academics portrayed in this text are affected by dreams and mysterious sounds that turn out to be manifestations of an event in the Badiousean sense of the word. “Labyrinth” represents how fidelity to this event makes possible the construction of a transnational European identity. In this text, Latin America is represented by a Central American who is perceived as a threatening outsider from a troubled region of the world. The overarching theme of The Savage Detectives (1998) is the movement from societal degeneration to a transnational entity based on fidelity to the event of Van Gend en Loos. Arturo Belano moves from taking the law into his own hands in Mexico to identification with the law of the European Union in the episode of the wolf’s cave in Spain. Amulet (1999) is based on an episode of The Savage Detectives in which Auxilio Lacouture hides in a bathroom for thirteen days in order to avoid being arrested after the University of Mexico was occupied by the army and the police in 1968. The enclosure of Auxilio is a metaphor for the self as an “autopoietic” system in a posthuman setting. A struggle between the forces of good and evil, to be understood in Schelling’s sense as universal

xvi

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competing forces, is an input to this system. This struggle assumes the form of an interpenetration of the self by external forces that manifest themselves in a virtual reality. Within this reality—which assumes the form of a narrative representing the effects of a computer program that can rearrange time into nonchronologically ordered sequences—the salient features are the socioeconomic decadence of Latin America and a concomitant longing to escape from the American continent in an eastward direction. 2666 has much in common with The Savage Detectives. It is a lengthy work, has many characters, and the action of the novel takes place in a global setting. In contrast to The Savage Detectives, the starting point is Europe and the protagonists of the first part of the novel (“The Part about the Critics”) travel from Europe to Mexico. Another resemblance has to do with the temporal structure of these texts. Both novels have parts that either take place in the first half of the twentieth century (2666), or refer to this period of time (The Savage Detectives), and deal with political, literary, and artistic themes that are thematically intertwined with those parts of the novels that take place closer to the end of the twentieth century, and in 2666, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Both have to do with the failure of the modernist project as progressive government and social justice in the Americas and the renewal of this project in Europe. 2666 goes into greater depth than The Savage Detectives as far as the historical context of this project in Europe, given that a substantial portion of the last part of the novel takes place in Europe during the years leading up to and including World War II. In 2666, the use of religious symbolism in “The Part about the Crimes” and “The Part about Archimboldi” is indicative of the contrasting fates of the modernist project in the Americas and Europe: in the first case religious iconography is profaned in the episodes dealing with the Penitent, destroying any sense of a religious aura as a premonition of the progressive transformation of society. In the second case, a Romanian soldier prays as he contemplates the crucified body of General Entrescu, a military officer who fought on the German side in World War II. Because of the religious aura of this episode, the symbolism of the crucifixion is associated with the concept of resurrection: something positive will come out of the carnage of the war. In terms of a political project, this was the rebirth of Europe as a transnational entity that would unite the Germans and Romanians who gaze at the crucified body of Entrescu. Throughout 2666, there are textual elements characteristic of science fiction and fantastic/horror/gothic fiction. A key to understanding 2666 is the contrast in the way these elements are deployed in those parts of the novel that take place in Santa Teresa and in “The Part about Archimboldi.” There is a feeling of uncanniness that pervades Santa Teresa that is not dispelled by the repetitious bureaucratic language of the police reports on murdered women that punctuate “The Part about the Crimes,” an uncanniness attributable to,

Introduction

xvii

for example, details of the aforementioned reports that do not make sense— such as incongruous juxtapositions of murder victims with the locations of their bodies, or the condition of the clothing they are wearing. This incongruity can be accounted for by considering these victims to be manifestations of virtual reality. Héctor Hoyos uses the term “Aleph,” the eponymous object in Borges’s short story that contains the universe, as a metaphor to designate strategies used by authors to represent the experience of globalization. In 2666, Bolaño’s Aleph is the world as a computer simulation. From the outset, I should state that in this book “virtual reality” refers to a simulation of the aforementioned type—that is, a simulated world in which the subject is not a biological entity distinct from the simulation, but rather part and parcel of the simulation, as both are produced by a computer program. Hoyos defines globalization as “a long process of world integration that has both an economic and a cultural dimension.”7 In 2666, the prevailing impression is not so much of economic and cultural integration as it is of a division of the world into parts in which each region is subject to different ontological realities. In “The Part about Archimboldi,” the uncanniness attributable to virtual reality is as circumscribed as the field of bones surrounding Entrescu’s castle. The representation of the struggle between fascism and communism is bestowed with the dignity of history, understood as the unfolding of materialistic forces interacting with a reality created by human beings. A form of materialism is also in play in those parts of 2666 that take place in Santa Teresa, but one that can be more readily understood in terms of a virtual reality colonized by forces external to humanity. The femicides of Santa Teresa are a subset of a neoliberal reality embedded within a postmodern reality that is ontologically segregated from the rest of the world. During the last decade of Bolaño’s life, the political economy of Europe was also neoliberal, but not affected in the same way as the Americas by neoliberalism, given the beneficial effects of the social democratic welfare states of Western Europe and the progressive social regulations of the European Union. In 2666, Europe is threatened by neoliberalism, but its history bypasses the postmodern simulacrum of history in effect in Latin America and the United States. There are individuals who do what they can to prevent the femicides, such as the congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata, the seer Florita Almada, the policeman Lalo Cura, and the journalist Oscar Fate, but it is not enough. History should be created by humans rather than extraterrestrials. Humans who create their history earn the respect of the gods. The Soviet war against fascism preempts the colonization of reality by supplemental causality (a form of causality attributable to virtual reality), a colonization that is ongoing in 2666 in Santa Teresa and the United States during the time of the femicides. Modern Europe is the result of the carnage of World War II, a terrible history, but nonetheless, a man-made one. Santa Teresa and the United States, as represented in 2666,

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are something else: the playthings of beings that have little affection for that part of the world and participate in murdering women. To quote Shakespeare, “As flies to wanton boys are [they] to the Gods; They kill [them] for their sport.”8 .

NOTES 1. Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo, “La literatura no se hace sólo de palabras,” in Bolaño por sí mismo: Entrevistas escogidas, ed. Andrés Braithewaite, 2nd ed. (Santiago, Chile: Universidad Diego Portales, 2011), 66 (my translation). 2. Roberto Bolaño, “Balas pasadas,” interview by Miguel Esquirol, in Bolaño por sí mismo, 120 (my translation). 3. Mónica Maristain, El hijo de Mr. Playa: Una semblanza de Roberto Bolaño (Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca: Almadía, 2012), 31. 4. Montserrat Madariaga Caro, Bolaño infra 1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes (Santiago, Chile: RIL, 2010), 89. 5. Lina Meruane, “La Estrella distante de las letras chilenas,” Caras, no. 285, February 20, 1998, 96 (my translation). 6. Madariaga Caro, Bolaño infra 1975–1977, 132 (my translation). 7. Héctor Hoyos, introduction to Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2015), 5, https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​ .7312​/hoyo16842​.4. 8. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. John Russell Brown (New York: Applause Books, 1996), 4.1. 36–37.

Chapter 1

The Force Field of the Real Imaginary and Symbolic Identification in Distant Star

In the preface to Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño indicates that the original version of this text, the final chapter of Nazi Literature in the Americas, entitled “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman,” was narrated “perhaps too schematically.” By means of “Arturo B” (Arturo Belano: an alter ego of Bolaño) he expresses the desire for “a longer story that, rather than mirror or explode others, would be, in itself, a mirror and an explosion.”1 The mirror and explosion foreshadow something in chapters 4 and 5 of Distant Star that does not exist in the corresponding part of “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman”: a narrator with multiple imaginary identities. Nazi Literature in the Americas is a fictional encyclopedia of writers with fascistic tendencies throughout the Americas. The thematic unity and stylistic virtuosity of this parodic anthology are reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy. In terms of infamy considered as evil, the serial killer-poet of “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman” is closest to the Borgesian model. The narrator of the preface to Distant Star informs the reader that Arturo B told him the story of Ramírez Hoffman and that the writing of Distant Star was a collaborative effort in which his (Bolaño’s) role was limited to “preparing refreshments, consulting a few books, and discussing the reuse of numerous paragraphs with Arturo and the increasingly animated ghost of Pierre Ménard.”2 This implies that Arturo B is the unnamed narrator of Distant Star. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” a fictional twentieth-century writer reproduces several chapters of Don Quijote word for word. A difference between the original and its reproduction is at the level of the signified: the meaning of a literary work changes according to its historical context. Borges’s story is emblematic of this concept. Reference to “Pierre Menard” in the preface suggests that Distant Star is a text about meaning within a historical conjuncture, an affirmation not inconsistent with Myrna Solotorevsky’s 1

2

Chapter 1

Barthean comments on the many literary and historical references in Bolaño’s novel: “It is not at all a writerly text, with a set of signifiers that attempt to free themselves from signifieds, but, on the contrary, an excess of signifieds, an excess of referents.”3 More specifically, Distant Star is about the renewal of Latin American political identity in a time of transition to an uncertain future. This would seem to be a topic that held little interest for Bolaño, who, when asked “What bores you?” responded the “empty discourse from the left. I take for granted the empty discourse from the right.”4 In “The Caracas Speech” (his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize) Bolaño maintained that he considered the Latin American Left to be politically and intellectually bankrupt.5 Nevertheless, Bolaño, who had been a Trotskyite in his youth, was not an apolitical aesthete, as is suggested by the following sentence in “Carnet de baile” (a short story with autobiographical components): “I think of those works that might allow the left to emerge from the pit of shame and ineffectiveness.”6 My thesis is that Distant Star represents the Left’s emergence from this “pit” at the individual level in terms of a renewal of leftist identity. In an interview with Eliseo Álvarez, Bolaño remarked that as a leftist, as in other aspects of his personality, he was a contrarian: when he was with Stalinists he became a Trotskyite, with Trotskyites an anarchist.7 After arriving in Spain, he adds, “I found many fellow anarchists and I started to cease being one myself.”8 He does not specify what he became, but what takes place in the political development of the narrator in Distant Star is a turn to Stalinism. This conclusion will be upsetting to some, but it is consistent with the contrarian trend in Bolaño’s political development. The identity of the subject is always decentered in the process of identification: “to achieve self-identity, the subject must identify himself with the imaginary other, he must alienate himself—put his identity outside himself, so to speak, into the image of his double.”9 According to Jacques Lacan, imaginary identification is initiated in the “mirror stage,” in which the infant recognizes her specular image as herself, in this way forming a primary identification with her body. Thus, at the core of imaginary identification is the assumption of the other by the self as mirror image of the self. It is in this sense that imaginary identification functions in Distant Star as “in itself, a mirror.”10 Jeremías Gamboa Cárdenas considers that “the problem of the projection of the double is central to the construction of Distant Star.”11 In Distant Star, the significance of characters that seem to be repetitions of previous characters, or seemingly unrelated characters that complement each other in ways that are not apparent, can be understood in terms of a Lacanian reading. Distant Star combines a detective story centered on the hunt for a serial killer with stories about individual Chileans forced into exile for political reasons after Salvador Allende’s socialist government was overthrown. The

The Force Field of the Real

3

novel is to some extent based on the author’s experiences in Chile and as an expatriate, although the narrator (in contrast to the narrator of “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman”) never explicitly identifies himself as Bolaño.12 The action of Distant Star takes place mostly in Latin America and Europe between 1973 and 1994, a period of time that extends beyond Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (which ended in 1990) and includes the restoration of democratically elected governments in Chile. In the years following the 1973 coup, neoliberal policies put in place by the military junta—including the privatization of public sector companies and services, the rollback of state-welfare institutions, business deregulation and the removal of trade barriers for foreign investment—had much in common with economic policies existing in several Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s. This economic model was maintained by the center-left governments of the Concertación coalition that governed Chile after 1989, although there was increased spending on programs targeting the poorest sectors of the population.13 Although Distant Star is much shorter than The Savage Detectives (Bolaño’s next novel in order of publication), the two works have several things in common. In The Savage Detectives, Arturo Belano reappears as a protagonist but not as a narrator. Like Distant Star, The Savage Detectives is about Latin Americans who become expatriates.14 One of the most striking differences between the novels is the difference in tone. Distant Star is a rather grim work because of the treatment of the subject matter, including the sexual frustration of the narrator and his associates. The Savage Detectives, though not bereft of violence and pathos, is a humorous work. In Distant Star, the protagonist is called Carlos Wieder rather than Carlos Ramírez Hoffman. After the coup against Allende, Wieder, an officer in the Chilean Air Force, becomes famous as a skywriting poet. He is forced to leave Chile after displaying photographs that make it evident he is a mass murderer. Wieder is a “distant star” in several ways. At first, he covers up his true personality and then becomes literally distant after leaving Chile. Like a star, he exerts an attractive force on others. When Wieder makes his first appearance in the novel, calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, he joins a poetry workshop composed of leftist students. Among the workshop members who have prominent roles in this novel are Verónica and Angélica Garmendia (beautiful and talented poets), Juan Stein (the leader of the workshop), and Bibiano O’Ryan (a close friend of the narrator). Bibiano and the narrator envy Ruiz-Tagle because he is sleeping with the Garmendia sisters. As is evident in the following passage, the narrator suspects there is something Ruiz-Tagle is trying to hide: What was missing from Ruiz-Tagle’s flat was something unnameable (or something that Bibiano . . . considered unnameable, but palpably present), as if

4

Chapter 1

the host had amputated parts of the interior. Or as if the interior were a kind of Meccano that could be reconstructed to fit the expectations and particularities of each visitor.15

That which is missing is compared to a “Meccano” (a model construction kit) that changes form according to “the expectations and particuliarities of each visitor.” It is something unnameable but present and palpable. Considered in terms of the mutual attraction of the narrator and Bibiano to the Garmendia sisters, this missing element is the void of their desire, captured by Wieder as “the subject presumed to know.” However, no fantasy can adequately represent the “unnameable” essence of the object of this desire. According to Lacan, the acquisition of language by means of entrance into the symbolic order eliminates this possibility, given that the use of language separates the subject from a state of nature, posited by the subject as a time of pre-symbolic enjoyment, henceforth experienced as lacking. In Lacanian terms, this lack is the void of the real seen from the perspective of the symbolic order.16 The subject cannot experience the real directly but can perceive its imaginary objectifications, suggested in Ruiz-Tagle’s house by empty spaces, noises behind a closed door, and a pungent odor (7–8). Phenomenologically, the real can be perceived as a “realer” form of reality, since it can displace and transform the symbolic order (the intersection of reality and language) by means of its effect on the subject.17 At the same time, it is by definition (as a state of being that can be posited but not directly experienced) inaccessible, since it can only be referred to (whether conceptually or in terms of fantasy) in terms of the symbolic. As previously noted, the content of fantasy depends on the subject and never coincides with the real as such, given that, according to Slavoj Žižek, “The Real is . . . simultaneously both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency.”18 Bibiano informs the narrator that inside Wieder’s house, he felt like Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby, when she visits the Castevets’ apartment for the first time and notices hooks and clean spaces left behind by the removal of what turn out to be paintings of satanic rituals (7). Like the subject’s fantasy about what is missing or behind the door in Ruiz-Tagle’s house, these paintings are attempts to express an impossible jouissance, an enjoyment not only inaccessible to the subject but also present as the representation of an absence. The Lacanian designation for the structure exemplified by these phenomena is the objet petit a, which Žižek has described as this point of Real in the very heart of the subject which cannot be symbolized, which is produced as a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation, a hard core embodying horrifying jouissance, enjoyment, and as such an

The Force Field of the Real

5

object which simultaneously attracts and repels us—which divides our desire and thus provokes shame.19

To paraphrase Lacan, it is this object that is in Wieder more than Wieder which makes the concept of a force field relevant to a reading of Distant Star;20 he is perceived by others as having privileged access to the real. Why this is so and the modification of this perception are fundamental themes of Distant Star. After the military coup, Wieder is able to indulge in his homicidal impulses by participating in the state-sanctioned murder of leftist “subversives” such as the Garmendia sisters. The first person he kills in the novel is their aunt, who takes the place of the sisters’ mother after she dies in a car accident. Although Wieder is responsible for the deaths of many victims, his only murder directly represented in the text is that of the symbolic equivalent of the mother. This offers a clue as to the origin of his identity as a serial killer. Desire for the mother, effectively renounced in the oedipal process, is a constitutive part of infantile subjectivity. In Freudian theory, the father not only prohibits the male child’s desire for the mother but also makes it possible for the child to identify with him, in this way facilitating the construction of a permissible desire. Wieder’s father—a former landowner—makes an appearance during his son’s photographic exhibition of torture victims. These images, primarily of dead women, are displayed in Wieder’s bedroom. Most of his guests—his father, young air-force officers, a pair of reporters, and a woman from a prominent military family—are upset by these photographs, and some of them leave. The father acts as if nothing extraordinary has happened (90). For him, like Wieder, women are disposable objects of the death drive. Wieder’s symbolic murder of the mother signifies that his relationship to women is based on the supplanting of a permissible desire by the death drive. The narrator distances himself from the events at this exhibition by having them narrated in the fictional autobiography of one Julio César Muñoz Cano, a lieutenant.21 He describes Wieder’s father as being on “the edge of the abyss” (90), an abyss that leads from aesthetic pleasure to what we would find if we could enter the real as Wieder’s guests can enter his bedroom: the place Lacan designates alternatively as “impassable or as the site of the Thing”;22 a materialization of jouissance that inextricably involves evil—in terms of its connection to the death drive: “The drive as such, insofar, as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be if it is not a direct will to destruction?”23 As a psychological term, “the Thing” designates the maternal body for the neonatal child: “To begin with, it is in relation to that mythic body that the aggressive, transgressive, and most primordial of instincts is manifested, the primal aggressions and inverted aggressions.”24 The death

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drive is among the primordial instincts manifested in the frustrated child’s sadistic urge, motivated by a lack of access to the object of his libidinal need—the mother’s breast—to destroy the maternal body. In this early stage of development, there is already an intermingling of libidinal drive with the death drive. That Wieder is fixated at this infantile level of object relations is implied by the narrator when, during his encounter with him at the conclusion of the novel, he describes him as follows: “He seemed adult. But he wasn’t adult, I knew that straightaway” (145). A phone call asking for Lucho Álvarez that absurdly interrupts the gathering, a voice that goes on talking about someone who is not there, is the objet petit a: a remnant in the symbolic order of the absent (impossible) kernel of jouissance emanating from the abyss (89–90). The absence of the intended recipient accentuates the characteristic of exclusiveness associated with Wieder’s guest list, suggesting that under the conditions of dictatorial repression represented in the text, there is an attempt to privatize the connection to the real, to reserve it for a select few. Wieder’s exclusion from this more exclusive list (he is not the one being called for) signifies the beginning of the end for him. Jacques-Alain Miller and Juliet Flower MacCannell have argued that as a result of the undermining of traditional theocentric values and a disavowal of the cult of the ancestor that took place in the Enlightenment, we live in a postpatriarchal, postoedipal time, “where semblants of the Father now reign.”25 Following up on Miller and MacCannell, James Mellard considers that in postmodern culture, “in place of the oedipal, patriarchal father, we now have the brother. In place of oedipal desire, we now have narcissistic jouissance”26: The brothers’ law mimes not the disinterested Symbolic gaze of the benevolent patriarch who permits our oedipal (erotic, reproductive) desire but the narcissistic drive to jouissance of the phallic or primordial father of Totem and Taboo, a father who arrogates all desire to himself.27

In place of oedipal desire (constrained by castration), Wieder is driven by thanatic jouissance (thus denying the constraints of castration).28 In place of the family structure underlying the traditional community, Wieder belongs to what Mellard describes as the “neototemic regime of bonded brothers,”29 as is implied when one of his associates describes him as a hard-working young man who treated his men like younger brothers (109). The brother who arrogates enjoyment to himself denies it to others by repressing them. Until he is disgraced and forced to leave Chile, Wieder is perceived as a proprietor of jouissance, access to which is longed for and denied to everyone else who plays a significant role in this text. As Yannis Stavrakakis has observed, “It

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is the prevention of jouissance that sustains desire, a prevention which keeps the dream of attaining it alive.”30 Wieder’s “first poetic act” is skywriting verses from Genesis as he pilots a World War II fighter of German origin: “IN PRINCIPIO . . . CREAVIT DEUS . . . CAELUM ET TERRAM” (25). These are read by political prisoners (including the narrator) in the courtyard of a detention center, one of whom remarks that World War II has returned (26). This episode parodies an event that took place in 1982, when Raúl Zurita, a poet and leading member of the Chilean neo-avant-garde, had fifteen verses of his poem La vida nueva written by five airplanes across the sky over New York City. The World War II metaphor places Wieder’s repression within the context of a left-right political conflict in which he represents neoliberal fascism. The message imparted by the juxtaposition of the heavenly verses with their leftist recipients is that, in the new order, heaven will be reserved for fascists, and la vida nueva of the Chilean left will take place in prison, where they will be the objects of fascist jouissance. Throughout Distant Star, direct and indirect references to World War II are used to develop a political allegory of left-right conflict in Latin America from 1973 to the mid-1990s. In Distant Star an effect of this conflict is represented as a search for personal identity in a time of political instability. The starting point for this journey is a room full of maps in Juan Stein’s house (49). The maps thematize the question of “Which way to go?” In chapters 4 and 5 of Distant Star, starting with Stein, several individuals are described who were forced to leave Chile for political reasons. All of them should be considered in relation to Ivan Chernyakhovsky, a Red Army general during the World War II. Stein and the narrator describe Chernyakhovsky, at length and in ideal terms, as the best general of the World War II (50–54). Chernyakhovsky is not mentioned again in Distant Star, but his influence (or lack thereof) plays a crucial role in the psychological development of the narrator in the remainder of the text. Aside from dwelling on his military talent, Stein affirms that Chernyakhovsky “was loved by his men” (50). The narrator lists the numerous awards and honors he received (53). Nevertheless, a sense of distance from Chernyakhovsky is created when Stein’s companions ask him how he, a Trotskyite, could have lowered himself by asking the Soviet embassy for a photograph of him. Stein explains that the photograph was given to him by his mother, who was Chernyakhovsky’s cousin: “I don’t know why I’ve kept the photo, Stein said to us. Maybe because he was the only really important Jewish general in the Second World War and he came to a tragic end” (53).31 Žižek’s conception of the “master-signifier” as the point de capiton through which the subject is ideologically interpellated provides a theoretically productive way to understand the passages under consideration.32 For someone susceptible to communist ideological interpellation, Chernyakhovsky could

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represent a subject supposed to know what defeated Nazi Germany as the referent of signifiers such as the Soviet Union, the Red Army, the Communist Party, and Stalinism, with Stalinism as the master-signifier that determines the ideological meaning of these signifiers. The limit imposed in Stein’s affirmation that Chernyakhovsky “was loved by his men (in so far as the rank and file can love a general)” (50) suggests an inaccessible object-cause of desire in the real that would tend to encourage identification with these signifiers by means of identification with Chernyakhovsky. Within this libidinal economy the “numerous, countless medals” (53) awarded to the general are suggestive of gold and function on two levels: as so many glittering, imaginary objectifications of the possibility of jouissance, in terms of the function of gold as a universal equivalent that can purchase all pleasures, and also as metaphoric equivalents of excrement that are manifestations of the objet petit a, the inaccessible object of desire. Nevertheless, Stein admires the general as a military strategist but does not identify with him at an imaginary level. Chernyakhovsky’s image does not represent someone he would like to be: he does not know why he has his photograph. “Lacanian theory . . . maintains that belief is always belief through an Other,”33 which implies that Stein does not identify with the master-signifier associated with Chernyakhovsky and that no ideological interpellation takes place: he continues to be a Trotskyite. After leaving Chile, Stein assumes the role of a revolutionary activist (57). From a Marxist point of view, most of the struggles in which Stein participated, including the civil war in Angola, the FMLN insurgency in El Salvador, and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, ended in failure. The episode of “Stein’s double” at the conclusion of the chapter on Stein makes it questionable if he ever left Chile, other than in the imaginations of Bibiano and the narrator. In the process of trying to find out more about him, Bibiano visits a house where Stein’s mother lived and interviews the current occupant, “one of the most beautiful women Bibiano had ever seen” (62). She informs him that Stein never left Chile, that they were only casually acquainted, and that he died of cancer. The establishment of a sexual relationship with a substitute for the mother recompenses for the castration endured by the male subject as a result of renunciation of desire for the mother and entrance into the symbolic order. Stein’s inability to establish such a relationship with a woman who literally takes his mother’s place symbolizes his inability to establish sexual relationships with women in general—that is, his de facto (as opposed to symbolic) castration. The next identity is that of the bourgeois-intellectual expatriate as permanent tourist, represented by Diego Soto. Formerly acquainted with the narrator in Chile, he makes a living as a professor of literature in France and is described as “a Latin American tourist” (70). He is living the fantasy that he can be a disengaged observer of the society he inhabits. This fantasy

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is terminated when he is murdered in the process of defending a homeless person from neo-Nazis. Soto is the translator of a story by Pedro Pereda, a fictional writer who, according to the narrator, writes a story about a woman who becomes a monstrous sexual organ that consumes everyone in a brothel before escaping into the dessert (67). The neurotically repressed subject externalizes the symptom of the unrepresentable kernel of enjoyment in the real as a devouring/castrating vagina. The proliferation of characters in chapters 4 and 5 of Distant Star poses the question of who this subject is. As will be demonstrated, there is good reason to believe that it is the narrator (Arturo B). This passage confirms the centrality of the role of fantasy as a structural component in chapters 4 and 5 of Bolaño’s text. Finally, there is the story of Petra, who “in a way . . . is to Soto what Juan Stein’s double is to the Juan Stein we knew” (72). Petra’s original name is Lorenzo. He is a young, impoverished homosexual whose arms had to be amputated after being accidentally electrocuted. The removal of his arms makes explicit what is suggested by Juan Stein’s double: the theme of castration. After leaving Chile, Lorenzo leads a picaresque existence in Europe as an aspiring artist. He changes his name when he finds employment impersonating Petra, the mascot of the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona. When the artist Javier Mariscal (the creator of Petra) offers him a chance to use his studio, he declines, as he is perfectly happy impersonating Petra. In terms of artistic ambition, the trajectory leading from aspiring artist to dancing mascot is a descending one. As the narrator sees Petra on television from his vantage point in a hospital bed “with a clapped-out liver,” he finds something to laugh and cry about. But the narrative tone is detached, as it was with Stein and Soto: Sometimes, when I think of Stein and Soto, I can’t help thinking of Lorenzo too. Sometimes I think he was the best poet of the three, but usually I see them all together [my emphasis]. (76)

This detachment is ironically subverted by the narrator’s health, which is at its low point relative to the beginning and conclusion of the novel. His physical prostration suggests that although he never explicitly identifies himself with these characters, he has something in common with them. The narrator sees them together (in the same place) as different imaginary identities. This episode in a hospital does not appear in “The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman.” Neither does the character of Lorenzo/Petra. The journeys that occupy the middle of Bolaño’s text are essentially defenses against castration anxiety, closely linked to the failure of the revolutionary project of the 1960s and 1970s and the failure to identify with the master-signifier of Stalinism. The primary importance of this identification is not in the positive content it

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would add to the subject’s field of symbolic sense, but rather that it would fulfill his need to reorient himself with respect to other signifiers that structure his sense of himself as psychologically immobilized. These successive identification acts—Stein as revolutionary activist, Soto as permanent tourist, and Petra as marginalized artist—can be read as variations of the narrator’s imaginary identity as he unsuccessfully attempts to “traverse the fantasy” in order to reach an identification that includes the real of his symptom (castration). Fantasy is the medium used by the subject in an attempt to cover over the lack created by the loss of jouissance. The character most reminiscent of Chernyakhovsky in Distant Star is Abel Romero. Before leaving Chile, he was a talented detective who became famous after solving several sensational crimes and participating in a daring police raid. He is hired to kill Carlos Wieder by an unidentified person. Like Chernyakhovsky, he is represented as a man of action who was successful in his field and was honored by the government of his country for this success. In Barcelona, Romero offers the narrator a considerable amount of money for his help in finding Wieder, but it is evident that the narrator admires Romero and wants to help him. From this point onward, the narrator becomes an active participant in the pursuit of Wieder. Previously, Bibiano had been the principal investigator of Wieder’s literary activity. The narrator becomes a literary detective. In terms of identification, the difference between Romero and Chernyakhovsky is equivalent to the difference between symbolic and imaginary identification. Here the distinction Žižek makes between “imaginary identification [as] identification . . . with the image representing ‘what we would like to be,’ and symbolic identification, [as] identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love” is useful.34 It is identification with the symbolic vantage point of the man of action who was rewarded by Allende’s government that terminates the narrator’s passivity and determines his imaginary identification with Chernyakhovsky as a communist who defeats the fascists. Romero informs the narrator that he is employed by an individual who became rich in the neoliberal social order of post-Allende Chile (137). Nevertheless, within Chile and in exile there were many, like the narrator and Romero, who had not benefited nearly as much as the upper class from this social order. During the 1990s, the meager rise in wages of the Chilean proletariat was outpaced by an increase in income inequality with the dominant classes, converting Chile into the country with the second most unequal distribution of income in Latin America.35 At the same time, as a result of neoliberal adjustment, public sector employment, which constituted the backbone of the urban middle class in many countries, declined significantly . . . This loss was not

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compensated by growth in formal private employment, forcing displaced former employees to create their own economic solutions through petty enterprise.36

Romero, who plans to return to Chile and become a funeral director, would join the ranks of these displaced workers who swelled the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie not just in Chile but throughout Latin America. When, several months after meeting the narrator, he informs him about his plans, the narrator thinks he is joking and tells him to stop pulling his leg (138). Romero’s assurance that his business will be successful is ironic, given that the intertextual antecedent to his projected funeral home is “Ataúdes Limbo,” a collaborative venture between Ambrosio and Hilario Morales in Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en la catedral that ends with the liquidation of the business.37 This intertext functions like a textual unconscious that undermines Romero’s belief in his get-rich-quick scheme. Thus, when the narrator asks him if he was hired by Bibiano, Romero responds as follows: “My client, he said, lowering his voice and adopting a falsely confidential tone, is someone who has real money, if you see what I mean” (140). (“Mi cliente, bajó la voz hasta darle un tono confidencial que sin embargo sonaba a falso [my emphasis], tiene dinero de verdad, ¿entiende?”)38 I included the original Spanish version of the text to make the following discussion clearer. At first sight, the negation of “verdad” by “falso” would seem to imply that Romero’s client is not so rich, but what also takes place here is the negation of confidencia (“confianza estrecha e íntima [confidence]”)39 in “tono confidencia[l] [my emphasis]” by “a falso.” In a deeper sense, what is false about “the tone” of Romero’s response is that voice does not function as the objet petit a; it is a falso. The suggestion of the boundless wealth of the Other is disconnected from desire because Romero is consumed by anxiety and does not believe he can be a successful entrepreneur. He is a candidate for left-wing ideological interpellation. In Distant Star, Chernyakhovsky (in contrast to Allende) is the embodiment of a trait that would have been attractive to the Chilean proletariat and former members of the middle class displaced by neoliberal adjustment, as well as other Latin Americans disheartened by the defeats of the Left in the 1970s and 1980s: winning for the Left. The narrator’s imaginary identification with Chernyakhovsky is on behalf of the gaze in the Other that would be attracted to this trait. Romero’s class position only serves to reinforce his role within the political allegory of left-right conflict in Distant Star. This role comes more sharply into focus when the narrator thinks, shortly after Romero emerges from Wieder’s building, presumably after having killed him, that Romero resembles Edward G. Robinson (148). Joaquín Manzi has noted the resemblance between Romero and Wilson, a detective played by Robinson, who finds the Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler living in a New England town under a

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false identity in Orson Welles’s film The Stranger (1946).40 Even more significant, in terms of establishing Romero’s left-wing significance within the political allegory of Distant Star and his connection with Chernyakhovsky, is Robinson’s role as the narrator of the English-language version of Ilya Kopalin and Leonid Varlamov’s documentary Moscow Strikes Back (1942), which tells the story of the Soviet counteroffensive against the Germans that began at the gates of Moscow in December 1941. Robinson “would eventually suffer for [his] efforts during the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] inspired ‘Red Scare’ of the postwar era.”41 During his investigation, Romero comes across some pornographic films in which he suspects that the cameraman is actually Wieder, a suspicion motivated by his disappearance after the cast of the films is found murdered in a villa (125). Subsequently, Romero interviews Joanna Silvestri, a porn actress who worked with English before the murders. The interview takes place in a clinic in Nîmes, where the bedridden and terminally ill actress resides. Romero describes her to the narrator as the most beautiful woman he had ever seen (126). This is reminiscent of an earlier interview, on the subject of Juan Stein, between Bibiano and a woman who is described by the narrator in the same terms (62). The most interesting parallel is between the couples Juan Stein—earlier woman (woman A) and Abel Romero—Joanna Silvestri. Stein is castrated, has no sexual relationship with woman A and dies. Romero has no sexual relationship with Silvestri, but she is the one who dies. No specific information is given as to the nature of her illness, but if her disease were to be diagnosed based on the “symptoms” she displays during her interview, the conclusion would have to be that the cause of death is insertion into the symbolic order: “She liked to talk. . . . She was always reading or writing letters or watching television with the headphones on” (127). This implies that Romero, who wants to have sex with Silvestri, but is also inserted into the symbolic order, is, as he informs the narrator, castrated: “I felt like the most helpless, useless, miserable man in the world. I don’t know how to explain it” (126). In formulating a demand, the subject himself becomes a signifier representative of a desire that always means something beyond what can be articulated through the signifier.42 Entry into the symbolic order is the “trespassing of death on life.”43 Given that Romero represents the narrator’s ego-ideal in the symbolic order, his symbolic castration vis-à-vis Silvestri subverts the binary opposition between the narrator’s ideal ego in the imaginary order— Chernyakhovsky as the subject presumed to know—and Stein as castrated. The implication is that, as with Stein, there is also something missing in the imaginary identification with Chernyakhovsky: he is as separated from the real of jouissance as Romero. Imaginary identification is no less alienating than symbolic identification. The subject and the other are both constructed around the void of the real and separated from jouissance. Nothing can fill

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this hole in the symbolic order. In the analogical relationship formed by the minor terms Stein−woman A and Romero−Silvestri, the rule that can be abstracted from the second term (Romero−Silvestri) is that all subjects are castrated in the symbolic order. This rule can be applied retroactively to woman A in the first term. Which is why when she reappears in the guise of Joanna Silvestri, it is not as the bearer of plenitude but as the representative of death. Romero and Silvestri exemplify the Lacanian idea that “there is no sexual relationship”: they are essentially talking signifiers who can never become one within a sexual relationship.44 Romero and the narrator find Wieder living in Lloret, a small town on the outskirts of Barcelona. They approach the building where he lives, which is mostly unoccupied. Nevertheless, the narrator thinks Wieder is looking at him; the void of the real is represented by a vacant apartment building likened to a fossilized bird (142): as Hegel wrote, “The being of Spirit is a bone.”45 Death (the signifier) is the being of Spirit (the self) in that it must be superseded but always already lives on in the movement of becoming of Spirit. The subject is visually dominated by the gaze of the real (a sensation that he is being looked at) but, in contrast to Bibiano in an earlier episode that took place in Wieder’s house, does not conceive of this emptiness as a projection of his desire. Now the real is simultaneously identified with nothingness and Wieder, indicating the narrator’s realization that it is as inaccessible to Wieder as it is to himself, thus signifying his identification with the symptom of castration as an intrinsic aspect of the relationship of the self to the real. The narrator, who has not seen Wieder in twenty years, is given the task of visually identifying him in a bar where he is a regular customer. He does so without Wieder recognizing him. The nauseating feeling the narrator experiences when he imagines himself “almost joined to him, like a vile Siamese twin” is an indication that he acknowledges Wieder—or what he represents—the real of jouissance and the death drive—as part of himself, in this way becoming conscious of himself as a subject who is essentially split and alienated (144). Given this acknowledgment, the use of Bolaño’s alter ego Arturo B as the implied narrator of Distant Star is understandable as a literary device used by the author to maintain his distance from uncomfortable psychological material. Nevertheless, as Manzi has observed, indirect references to the author’s name occur throughout the text, most obviously in the initials of the original name of El bebé de Rosemary (Rosemary’s Baby): RB.46 To pass the time and avoid attracting Wieder’s attention, the narrator reads from the complete works of Bruno Schulz, a talented Polish-Jewish writer killed by an SS officer in 1942. This episode signals a transformation of the narrator’s relationship to the death drive:

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But Bruno Schulz’s words had momentarily taken on a monstrous character that was almost intolerable. I felt that Wieder’s lifeless eyes were scrutinizing me, while the letters on the pages I was turning . . . were no longer beetles but eyes, the eyes of Bruno Schulz, opening and closing, over and over, eyes pale as the sky, shining like the surface of the sea, opening, blinking, again and again, in the midst of total darkness. No, not total, in the midst of a milky darkness, like the inside of a storm cloud. (144)

The narrator’s identification with the symptom of castration and his acknowledgment of the death drive as part of himself create a psychological space for an idealization of his motives for participating in the killing of Wieder, in this way ameliorating feelings of guilt (146–47) that are tinged with hysteria, as when he tells Romero, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt” (141). “Wieder’s lifeless eyes” are supplemented by “the eyes of Bruno Schulz . . . shining like the surface of the sea”: the real of the death drive is sublimated by displacing it with the memory of a victim of fascism. For Freud sublimation implies a change in the direction of the drive toward an aim other than sexual satisfaction. According to Stavrakakis, Sublimation raises an object to the dignity of the Thing, it is thus directly related to the real. This is because here the Thing is the lost/impossible real whose place is reoccupied by imaginary or symbolic objects—the ethical ideal being just one of them—without, however, any of them being able to compensate us or cover over this loss which is a product of this same symbolisation.47

Stavrakakis is interested in the function of sublimation on a collective/societal level. He considers sublimation within the context of a Lacanian analysis of the political as a construction that involves the “subjective registration of normative symbolic structures.”48 Within this process, fantasy, as an attempt to cover over the lack in the big Other (the symbolic order), belongs initially to a social reality that is lacking and in which enjoyment is only partial. Politics, which like social reality is constituted at the symbolic level and supported by fantasy, represents an attempt to restore plenitude to the social order conceived of as a well-functioning totality. In a way that is analogous to the excess of the real over reality, the real associated with political reality is “one of the modalities in which we experience an encounter with the real; it is the dominant shape this encounter takes within the socio-objective level of experience.”49 In Stavrakakis’s account of the relationship between the political and the real, the articulation of a new political discourse takes place in the context of the dislocation of the preceding sociopolitical order or ideological space by the structural effect of the real. The lack revealed by this dislocation causes the desire for a new discursive articulation.50 To

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paraphrase Stavrakakis, in the transition from Wieder’s gaze to the eyes of Bruno Schulz, it is the traumatic moment of the political as an encounter with the real that initiates the “ever-present hegemonic play between different symbolisations of this real.”51 The political significance of Bruno Schulz is connected to the narrator’s imaginary identification with another Jew, Chernyakhovsky. The distance between Schulz and Chernyakhovsky, that is to say, between a victim of the Nazis who was a writer and a military officer who was instrumental in defeating them, is reminiscent of the relationship between alternate realities in Schulz’s story “Cinnamon Shops”; at first sight Schulz and Chernyakhovsky would seem to represent two realities that are closely linked but incompatible: “they are two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet.”52 This is Žižek’s preliminary description of his concept of the “parallax gap,” based on his interpretation of the Kantian antinomy as an alternation between different perspectives on the same phenomenon “which can never be dialectically ‘mediated/ sublated’ into a higher synthesis, since there is no common language, no shared ground, between the two levels.”53 The experience of being Jewish would seem to provide such a ground, but for Žižek, the possibility of this higher synthesis taking place depends on the dialectically materialist process of displacing a difference between the higher level (“the universal”) and the lower one (“the particular”) into the lower one, in this way making it possible to establish a “speculative identity” between the levels54: “Here, ‘speculative’ means ‘what tends to reconstitute identity,’ in sum, to return to unity through surpassing dichotomy.”55 Being Jewish does not represent a dichotomy between these individuals. That Chernyakhovsky represents a “higher level” than Schulz is a statement reminiscent of the argument Cervantes makes in the discourse on arms and letters in Don Quijote, in which he considers the profession of the soldier to be superior to that of the man of letters (part 4, chapters 37−38). In the “Caracas Speech,” Bolaño refers to the discourse on arms and letters, presents himself as a former leftist militant, and as such, identifies with Cervantes, who was a soldier in his youth. For Bolaño, literature, like war, “is a dangerous occupation”: writers must be willing to take creative risks that do not always succeed.56 Like soldiers, they have a dangerous profession, although the degree of danger is greater with soldiers. Danger would seem to provide a “shared ground” between the two realities represented by Schulz and Chernyakhovsky, but in Distant Star this function is fulfilled more dialectically by the death drive. For example, if the difference between the eyes of Wieder and the eyes of Schulz is conceptualized as being internal to Schulz by juxtaposing the unsublimated death drive with literary creativity (much in the same way as the narrator does when he imagines these individuals looking at him at the same time) in a first approximation in which “the opposites are not reconciled

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in ‘higher synthesis’—rather, their difference is posited ‘as such,’”57 then the difference between Schulz (a writer) or Wieder (a serial killer who is a writer) and Chernyakhovsky can be recast as the dialectical conversion of a particular into a universal. In other words, it is possible to resolve the negation of Chernyakhovsky by Schulz/Wieder by means of a dialectical “explosion” of the imaginary other––that is, by converting Chernyakhovsky into a metonym for the Red Army as representative of a collective praxis (including writers as agents of this praxis) that contains a core of the inhuman within the human: as well as defeating the Nazis, many soldiers in the Red Army raped and committed other crimes. This praxis is collective in the sense that its collective achievement was the defeat of Nazi Germany. It is universal in the sense that it is a totality that is realized in its particulars, consisting of individual soldiers and officers who may also have been writers, doctors, factory workers, among others. Given that the realization of this notion is a “not all” exceeded by the real as expressed through the symptom of the death drive, in the development of the notion, the Red Army is not reduced to an ideological master-signifier representing the collective praxis of humanity. It functions as a signifier for the truth in the concrete situation of the war against Nazi Germany. In Bolaño’s text, the death drive is the common denominator between the levels represented by Chernyakhovsky and Schulz. The unsublimated expression of the death drive resulting in evil is the difference between the universal and the particular, whose displacement into the particular is the prerequisite for the reconstitution of the universal by means of the development of the notion. As the particular of a universal that signifies the defeat of fascism, the eyes of Bruno Schulz symbolize the political real that is repressed in the post-Allende neoliberal social order. Compared to their brilliance, the lack of this social order, symbolized by the deadness of Wieder’s eyes, becomes evident. This lack stimulates the desire for a new political order. What is new is implied in the transition from Schulz to the narrator’s imaginary identity, that leads by historical reference from a military officer to the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, from the defeat of fascism to a vindication of MarxismLeninism as a liberatory political force by means of a commemoration of “the greatest military victory in history”;58 opening and closing in a creative sublimation of the death drive, as in a repetition compulsion whose underlying motivation is the “will to begin again,” to renew reality by destroying what exists;59 “shining like the surface of the sea” that in a “parallax shift” become the Red Army, Schulz’s eyes produce flashes of light like bursts of artillery fire that illuminate the “milky darkness” of the fog of war. At the conclusion of Distant Star, published a few years after the “death of communism,” it is Marxism-Leninism that is most alive as an emerging political force. The political and ethical dimensions of Distant Star are best understood as a sublimation of the death drive into the equivalent of what was dislocated

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by the fantasy of the end of history: a renewal of the Marxist project. The subject’s hard-earned identification with the symptom provides him with the psychological freedom to make his social practice correspond with the necessity of recreating a Latin American political identity. That this particular subject is a Chilean exile with no intention of returning to Latin America is an example of a tendency toward heterotopia, considered by Patricia Espinosa to be characteristic of Bolaño’s fiction: “Here the local emerges as a mobile and impossible site. Mexico, Spain, Santiago, Africa. Sites where it is always possible to find a particular type of individual.”60 Considered in terms of ethical necessity, the killing of Wieder represents the bringing of justice to a fascist whose crimes were facilitated by the defeat of the Left in Chile. This act is the result of a process that begins as a search for personal identity in a time of political instability. Distant Star is thus an ironic title. Like Espinosa’s conception of the local that exceeds national boundaries, the wellsprings of personal identity are in the final analysis closer to home: within the subject by means of the imaginary other. The void of the real is their common denominator. NOTES 1. Roberto Bolaño, preface to Distant Star, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2004), 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Myrna Solotorevsky, “Estrella distante, una novela de Roberto Bolaño,” Alba de América 26, no. 49/50 (2007): 359 (my translation). 4. Roberto Bolaño, “The Last Interview,” interview by Mónica Maristain, in The Last Interview and Other Conversations, trans. Sybil Perez (New York: Melville House, 2009), 113. 5. Roberto Bolaño, “The Caracas Speech,” trans. David Noriega, Triple Canopy, June 3, 2008, https://www​.canopycanopycanopy​.com​/issues​/2​/contents​/the​_caracas​ _speech. 6. Roberto Bolaño, “Carnet de baile,” in Putas asesinas, 12th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2014), 215 (my translation). 7. Roberto Bolaño, “Positions are Positions and Sex is Sex,” interview by Eliseo Álvarez, in The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 76. 8. Ibid., 80. 9. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; repr., London: Verso, 1999), 104. 10. Bolaño, preface to Distant Star, 1. 11. Jeremías Gamboa Cárdenas, “¿Siameses o dobles?: Vanguardia y postmodernismo en Estrella distante de Roberto Bolaño,” in Bolaño salvaje, ed. Edmundo Paz Soldán and Gustavo Faverón Patriau (Barcelona: Candaya, 2008), 212 (my translation).

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12. In a New York Times article Larry Rohter casts doubt on whether Bolaño was in Chile during the coup that bought Pinochet to power: “Several of Mr. Bolaño’s Mexican friends, some of whom were in Chile themselves during the Allende years, say that the writer was in Mexico during the time he claimed to have been in Chile.” Larry Rohter, “A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past,” New York Times, January 27, 2009, Books, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/01​/28​/ books​/28bola​.html?​_r​=1. Rohter compares Bolaño to recurring types of characters in his novels: “writers who have vanished from history or who cloaked themselves behind murky versions of their pasts.” Whether or not Bolaño was in Chile during the coup, his intention in Distant Star was not to vanish from history (like Carlos Wieder), but rather to create a fictional version of himself (the narrator) as a witness to history. 13. Peter Winn, introduction to Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, ed. Peter Winn (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004), 4. 14. The title Distant Star refers to the status of these Chileans as expatriates by referring to the Chilean flag, which has a star, as being distant. 15. Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2004), 7. Text references are to pages of this edition. 16. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992; paperback edition, 1997), 120–21. Citations refer to the paperback edition. 17. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 169. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 180. 20. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 268. 21. According to Muñoz Cano, the photographs are arranged in order to produce an aesthetic effect: “There was a progression, an argument, a story (literal and allegorical), a plan” (88). This is the most extreme example of a basic theme in Distant Star: the morally ambiguous nature of art. Art is capable of transforming evil into an aesthetically pleasing form, as in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the 1934 Nazi Party Congress, Triumph of the Will. 22. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 213. 23. Ibid., 212. 24. Ibid., 106. 25. James M. Mellard, Beyond Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 180. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 180–81. 29. Ibid., 180. 30. Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), 45. 31. Chernyakhovsky was killed in action in 1945. He died from wounds received outside of Königsberg at the age of thirty-seven. 32. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 101.

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33. Matthew Sharpe, “Jacques Lacan,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 8, 2021, https://iep​.utm​.edu​/lacweb/. 34. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 105. 35. Winn, Victims of the Chilean Miracle, 56. 36. Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change During the Neoliberal Era,” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 48, https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/1555434. 37. Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversación en la catedral (México, DF: Alfaguara, 1999), 680. 38. Roberto Bolaño, Estrella distante (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000), 148. 39. Diccionario de la lengua española, s.v. “confidencia,” https://dle​.rae​.es / confidencia?m=form. 40. Joaquín Manzi, “Mirando caer otra Estrella distante,” Caravelle, no. 82 (June 2004): 138, https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/40854120. 41. Hal Erickson, “Review Summary of Moscow Strikes Back,” New York Times, Movies, accessed August 12, 2008, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/reviews​/movies (content removed from site). 42. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 294. 43. Ibid. 44. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998; paperback edition, 1999), 9, 33. Citations refer to the paperback edition. 45. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findley (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 208. 46. Manzi, “Mirando caer otra Estrella distante,” 132n 16. 47. Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, 131. 48. Ibid., 51. 49. Ibid., 75. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 73–74. 52. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 5. 55. Tom Rockmore, Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel’s Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 71. 56. Bolaño, “The Caracas Speech.” 57. Žižek, The Parallax View, 299. 58. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 374. 59. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 212. 60. Patricia Espinosa H., “Estudio preliminar,” in Territorios en fuga: Estudios críticos sobre la obra de Roberto Bolaño, ed. Patricia Espinosa H. (Santiago, Chile: Frasis, 2003), 30 (my translation).

Chapter 2

Fidelity to the Event in “Labyrinth”

Roberto Bolaño’s The Secret of Evil is a compilation of texts published posthumously. As Ignacio Echevarría explains in an introduction to this work, this compilation is based on four files containing numerous texts that were found on Bolaño’s computer after his death. Most of the texts selected by Echevarría from these files are short stories; several of them are unfinished or have inconclusive endings. It cannot be established with certainty when these texts were written, as none of them were dated by the author. One story— “Scholars of Sodom”—blends essayistic and narrative content. Other stories include autobiographical content. There are also two conference papers. Echevarría explains this selection of heterogeneous texts by noting “a marked tendency, in Bolaño’s late collections, to include non-narrative pieces, with the obvious intention of enriching the genre of the short story by blurring its boundaries.”1 At nineteen pages in length, “Labyrinth” is the longest story in The Secret of Evil. Based on a description of a photograph taken in Paris around 1977, it is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of Camilo José Cela’s novel La colmena (1951), consisting of diverse narrative sequences focused on the characters appearing in the photograph. The narrator’s use of specific details inside or outside of the photograph as the starting point for imagining these sequences is reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s story “Las babas del diablo” (1959). In his book The Century, Alain Badiou considers the last twenty years of the twentieth century to be a time of counter-revolutionary political resurgence “fallaciously in thrall to the idea that nothing begins or will ever begin.”2 I will demonstrate how “Labyrinth” contradicts Badiou’s characterization of this period of time after 1980 by representing the consequences of a European Court of Justice case-law as a progressive political development whose effects were to be acknowledged in the 1980s and beyond. To 21

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paraphrase Badiou negatively, “Labyrinth” is a text in thrall to the idea that something begins. The way in which this is expressed in Bolaño’s text is relevant to Badiou’s theory of “the event,” Lacanian theory, and an understanding of the role of law in the construction of the European Union. Throughout “Labyrinth,” repeated references to the void suggest the proximity of an event: a possibility that becomes more certain as the text progresses. However, it will be demonstrated that fidelity to the event in question does not imply a political stance stereotypically associated with Badiou—that is, an ultra-leftist distance from the established order, but rather working within the state to achieve progressive goals. In this sense, “Labyrinth” differs from Distant Star, which represents the renewal of leftist identity in terms of Marxism-Leninism. Badiou defines an event as follows: “An event—of a given evental site . . . is the multiple composed of: on the one hand, elements of the site; and on the other hand, itself (the event).”3 In order to understand in what sense “multiple” is used in this quotation, it is necessary to refer to the ontological concept of the one. For Badiou, the one exists solely as a mathematical operation exemplified by counting the elements of a set as belonging to a set, and not as presentation: “The one is not” (23). Thus, the world consists of multiples—that is, multiplicities of multiplicities that are infinitely decomposable. In order for an event to be classified as such, a subject must intervene: “I term intervention any procedure by which a multiple is recognized as an event. . . . An intervention consists . . . in identifying that there has been some undecidability, and in deciding its belonging to the situation” (202). Initially, the event is not presented in the situation; it is something new in the sense that its consequences are not fully recognized or developed. This does not prevent the subject from deciding that it belongs to the situation and enacting a conscious or unconscious fidelity to the event, a process that consists of deciding which multiples among the sets of presented multiples depend on the event and sustaining their consequences (232). For Badiou, to sustain these consequences is also to affirm the truth of the event. Here it is important to clarify that, in his parlance, “truth is first of all something new,” distinguished from knowledge as repetition through its supplementation by an event.4 The philosophical problem pertaining to truth is the problem of “its appearance and its becoming.”5 A correct interpretation of the faithful subject’s course of action within a sociohistorical situation presents the outcome of a wager that the event took place based on a process of the subject’s verification of the outcome of that wager as truth. For Badiou, love, art, science, and politics are capable of generating truth procedures, which is to say that these four fields can generate events linked to indiscernibles not presented in the situation: “All sorts of other practices—possibly respectable, such as commerce for example, and all the

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different forms of the ‘service of goods,’ which are intricated in knowledge to various degrees—do not generate truths” (340). If an event has occurred, history validates it retroactively by confirming that it took place. Given that an event consists of all the elements belonging to the evental site plus the event itself, this decision does not change the ontological status of the event. For example, the French Revolution is more than the innumerable list of happenings that occurred in France between 1789 and 1794. It is rather something bound up in this assemblage, which the term “French Revolution” specifically names. But when we try to specify what this extra something is, we find ourselves again confronted only with the assemblage of happenings—plus that elusive addendum. The Revolution is not simply the narrative of what occurred, but it cannot be filtered out from this narrative either.6

The Revolution as such has no objective existence; it only “emerges along with the subject who recognizes it, or who nominates it as an event.”7 “Labyrinth” is about a photograph that takes on a life of its own. Neither the location nor the identity of the narrator is specified, and he does not intervene directly in the fictional events he describes. These events involve relationships between eight people sitting around a table in the aforementioned photograph, mostly intellectuals that correspond to real people who will be referred to by name in this chapter. Some of them, such as Julia Kristeva, are described as looking at things outside of the borders of the photograph: Kristeva “appears to be looking straight at the camera, but in fact she’s looking at the photographer’s stomach, or to be more precise, into the empty space beside his hip.”8 “The empty space” is the first of several references to the void. Another example is when a narrative sequence about one of the characters “ends or freezes in an empty space where appearances gradually fade away” (53). Finally, there is the following description: “And then the night ends (or a small part of the night, at least, a manageable part)” (57), the unmanageable part being the void. Unmanageable as it is, the irreducible emptiness at whose border the event takes place. The association of the event with the void is due to the event being an unpresented multiple in relation to the situation in question (Being 175), in this case, represented by the photograph. An event that hints at its existence in a dream in which J.-J. Goux hears a voice that warns him of the devil’s presence (55),9 through an unusual noise in a parking garage (56), and by means of an unspecified object beyond the borders of the photograph that provokes reactions of recognition and insecurity in Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and Carla Devade (55).10 This object later becomes a Central American in the imagination of the narrator (57), and he is described as a young intellectual investigating the French literary scene.

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The Central American visits the editorial office of Tel Quel and talks with Marc Devade and Phillipe Sollers.11 During his visit, which is possibly motivated by the desire to be published (57), the first person to greet him is Devade (in real life, a painter and a member of the editorial board of Tel Quel). As he follows him to his office, the Central American sweats profusely: a manifestation of an anxiety motivated by the desire to please. The market is the formal result of the utilization of this desire for the practical purpose of connecting with the desire of the customer. The identification of the Central American’s desire with this desire takes place by means of Devade, who precedes him “talking about something or other—the weather, money, chores—with that elegance that only certain Frenchmen seem to possess” (58). Devade is an elegantly self-referential literary manifestation of Lacan’s maxim: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other”; a desire that produces ceaseless innovation formally related to Devade’s topic-surfing avoidance of dwelling on anything for too long that could be construed as boring or cause his guest to be uncomfortable. The Central American’s interview with Sollers, framed by his flattering appraisal of the latter as “one of the century’s most brilliant minds” (59) and of “the matchless beauty and grace of French women” (59), parodies Devade’s mercurial volubility, as in talking about the French literary establishment, he switches from Kristeva to Marcelin Pleynet and then to Denis Roche. This interview, which Sollers finds boring, condenses flattery with a parody of market innovation as literary analysis that reveals the repressed desire animating the postmodernist worship of difference as the desire to gratify capital. The narrator’s dislike of the Central American is evident in the description of his awkward interaction with Sollers. Nevertheless, there is more than dislike here. As the Central American is leaving the office, he runs into Réveillé, and she notices, gazing into his eyes, an expression of horror and fear (60). The source of this horror becomes clearer a few pages later when the narrator speculates that the Central American could become a killer: “This Pol Pot won’t kill anyone in Paris. And actually, back in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, he’ll probably end up teaching in a university” (63). A link to the United States is established when this individual is compared to Pol Pot. As Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have observed, there is a relationship of cause and effect between the genocidal effect of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and Pol Pot’s genocide.12 The connection to the United States is reinforced by the selection of countries to which the Central American could be returning. The subjugation of Honduras to the United States climaxed in the 1980s when the “central feature” of its national life became its occupation as “Washington’s forward military base” in Central America. 13 Given the history of El Salvador during the 1970s and 1980s—including the involvement of American-trained troops in human rights abuses—becoming a killer is more likely for the Central American were he to return to that country.14

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25

The association of the desire to please capital with the image of the university professor as killer in the context of indirect reference to American foreign policy inserts the text into a set that includes the United States. Within this set, the combination of the desire to please capital with the brutality of the killer professor is sublimated in the day-to-day functioning of the university discourse as a vehicle for capitalist recuperation, as shown by a fascination with deconstruction in literature departments in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, which in turn led to the postmodernist conception of the subject as an effect of a market-based clash of discourses. In short, a predominance of the symbolic order over the Lacanian real that, for example, Ed Pluth considers to be characteristic of Judith Butler’s work.15 The symbolic emerges from the “primordial Real,”16 which, according to Lorenzo Chiesa, is the point of creation ex nihilo of the signifier and history: “The points of creation and destruction (of history) are a strict logical ‘necessity,’ but they can be posited only through either retroactive or anticipatory mythical speculations.”17 The real of history (the event) can never be posited in its unconscious actuality. In “Labyrinth,” the killer professor is a symptom of the postmodern attempt to obliterate the unconscious through a repression of the real resulting from symbolic identification with the Other, a repression that conforms to a tendency whose telos is historical amnesia and the production of the stupefied, ideologically constrained subject of postmodernism. The event becomes gradually evident in a series of dreams. In one of these, Sollers dreams he is walking on a beach in Brittany accompanied by a scientist who has the key to the destruction of the world (62). Suddenly, he becomes aware that he is the scientist and that the person walking with him is a murderer.18 This identification with the ability to destroy the world is equivalent to the assumption of the death drive, which can also lead to creativity, since it necessitates a new beginning. The murderer is the Central American who, as we have seen, functions as a symptom not only of the desire to gratify capital but also of proximity to the void, which in Sollers’s dream is associated with something new by means of the death drive. The night before teaching a seminar, Kristeva dreams about a German town where she participated in another one and Julia Kristeva will dream of a little village in Germany where years ago she participated in a seminar, and she’ll see the streets of the village, clean and empty, and sit down in a square that’s tiny but full of plants and trees, and close her eyes and listen to the distant cheeping of a single bird and wonder if the bird is in a cage or free, and she’ll feel a breeze on her neck and her face, neither cold nor warm, a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom, and then she’ll remember her seminar and look at her watch, but it will have stopped. (62)

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The interposition between the seminars—one in the past and another one that will take place in Paris—of a German town combines national difference with sameness (the repetition of seminars and time as represented by the stopped wristwatch) and is a reminder of the European Union—known as the European Community in the 1970s—in the sense of the inclusion of national difference within the same. Kristeva wonders if the bird she is listening to is free or in a cage. This question of freedom should be considered in relation to critical discourse, since by way of the seminars, this is a subject of the dream. By means of the Central American, postmodernist critical discourse is represented as not free because of subjection to the ideological constraints of capitalism. In contrast, Kristeva’s discourse is associated with freedom. This is understandable, as in her discourse, she integrates Lacan’s teaching with regard to the impact of desire on the divided subject in a way that is incompatible with ideological constraint. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), she explores the connection between writing and bodily drives expressed as affects, concluding that the disruption of the symbolic order by unconscious drive subverts ideological repression: In other words, poetic language and mimesis may appear as an argument complicitous with dogma—we are familiar with religion’s use of them—but they may also set in motion what dogma represses. In so doing, they no longer act as instinctual floodgates within the enclosure of the sacred and become instead protestors against its posturing. And thus, its complexity unfolded by its practices, the signifying process joins social revolution.19

Kristeva relates “the empty soul or psyche of the postmodern world” to a disconnect between words and affects.20 The relationship between a project involving the liberation of human potential by reconnecting affect to language and the opposition of a wild bird to a caged bird in Kristeva’s dream is clear, but a more specific political message is implied by the content of this dream. The parallel between Kristeva and the bird is clear: she is sitting in a tiny square, which brings the image of a birdcage to mind. This would seem to imply captivity. The fact that the square is not really a cage and the imaginative freedom represented by “a perfect breeze, perfumed with lavender and orange blossom” (as neither flower is characteristic of Germany, particularly the orange blossom, which is more typical of Spain) tip the balance in favor of liberty. As to the question of political content, the juxtaposition of Kristeva’s work with freedom in the context of seminars in Germany and France, sensory experiences characteristic of southern Europe, and the theme of civic order represented by clean streets and a garden suggests that a correlative of this freedom corresponds to a pre-2008 idealized conception of European unification as conducive to political freedom.

Fidelity to the Event in “Labyrinth”

27

Bolaño, who died in 2003, did not live to see the socioeconomic crisis of the European Union that began in 2008. In terms of the history of the European Community, the mention of a stopped watch can be interpreted as referring to the “Eurosclerosis” of the 1970s–that is, to the political paralysis of a decade “dominated by member-state politics, a policy-making system that was paralyzed by its own complexity and the inability of the main actors to develop sufficient momentum to launch new policy initiatives.”21 The association of orange blossoms with Spain suggests a connection to 1986, the year that country was admitted into the European Community. The signing of the Single European Act by member states of the European Community in 1986 gave a renewed impetus to European political integration that would result in the Treaty on the European Union (Maastricht Treaty) in 1992.22 The past is represented by the location of seminars in Germany and France: two countries that formed the nucleus of the European Coal and Steel Community, established in 1951, and the first organization in a series of supranational organizations that culminated in the European Union. With the present taken as corresponding to the 1970s, Kristeva’s dream condenses the past, present, and future of the European Community within the context of European unification as productive of a community conducive to a non-repressive academic discourse and political freedom. In other words, she is represented as becoming subjectivized by means of supporting the consequences of a political process (a support embodied by the metonymy of an imaginative freedom—“a perfect breeze”—that includes political freedom as the outcome of a choice between captivity and freedom), which formally complements Badiou’s concept of subjectivization by means of fidelity to an event. If proximity to the void in Sollers’s dream is proximity to that event, showing that this undecidability belongs to the situation will involve showing that a form of “the service of goods” that is “intricated in knowledge” (the European Community) generates a truth. This is a contradictory proposition according to Badiou (340–41), but one that for Oliver Feltham, who describes the evental site as “an intersection of heterogeneous situations,”23 should not prevent this determination from taking place. To name the event in “Labyrinth,” the reader must look elsewhere besides Kristeva’s dream. This is to be expected, given that in order for the causality of lack to exert itself, all terms must be split.24 That is to say, the absent cause of the event produces a series of traces scattered throughout the structure under consideration (in this case, a text). Some of these have already been discussed, such as proximity to the void in Sollers’s dream and subtle allusions to the history of the European Union mediated by the event in Kristeva’s dream. Other examples are provided by the closing lines of “Labyrinth,” as Jacques Henric (in real life, a writer and a member of the French Communist Party) walks in a very dark parking garage (“párking oscuro”25). At first, he is

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apprehensive, but fear gives way to serenity as he recollects what took place that day: Jacques Henric is walking through a dark parking garage, which echoes to the sound of his boots on the cement. A world of forms is unfolding before his eyes, a world of distant noises. The possibility of fear is approaching the way wind approaches a provincial capital. Henric stops, his heart speeds up, he tries to orient himself. Before, he could at least glimpse shadows and silhouettes at the far end of the parking lot; now it seems hermetically black, like the darkness in an empty coffin at the bottom of a crypt. So he decides to keep still. In that stillness, his heartbeat gradually slows and memory brings back images of the day. He remembers Guyotat, whom he secretly admires, openly pursuing little Carla. Once again, he sees them smiling and then he sees them walking away down a street where yellow lights scatter and regroup sporadically, without any obvious pattern, although Henric knows deep down that everything is determined in some way, everything is causally linked to something else, and human nature leaves very little room for the truly gratuitous. He touches his crotch. He is startled by this movement, the first he has made for some time. He has an erection and yet he doesn’t feel sexually aroused in any way. (65)

I have included the original Spanish version of the text for the sake of following analysis: Jacques Henric camina por el interior de un párking oscuro y sus botas resuenan sobre el cemento. Ante su mirada se despliega un mundo de contornos, un mundo de ruidos distantes. La posibilidad de sentir miedo se acerca como se acerca el viento a una capital de provincias. Henric se detiene, su corazón se acelera, busca un punto de referencia, pero si antes consiguió vislumbrar al menos sombras y siluetas en el fondo del párking, ahora la oscuridad le parece hermética como un ataúd vacío en el fondo de una cripta. Así que decide no moverse. En esa quietud, su corazón paulatinamente se va serenando y la memoria le trae las imágenes de aquel día. Rememora a Guyotat, a quien admira secretamente, cortejando sin tapujos a la pequeña Carla. Los ve sonreír una vez más y luego los ve alejarse por una calle en donde las luces amarillas se quiebran y se recomponen a ráfagas, sin ningún orden aparente, aunque Henric, en su fuero interno, sabe que todo obedece a algo, que todo está causalmente ligado a algo, que lo gratuito se da muy raras veces en la naturaleza humana. Se lleva una mano a la bragueta. Ese movimiento, el primero que hace, lo sobresalta. Está empalmado y sin embargo no siente ninguna clase de excitación sexual.26

Fidelity to the Event in “Labyrinth”

29

In “Labyrinth,” Carla Devade has an affair with the writer Pierre Guyotat, a member of the Tel Quel group. As Henric thinks about Guyotat and Devade, anxiety is trumped by courage. Fear of the void is replaced by the security of being able to master the disruptiveness of the advent of the real, a security produced by the conviction “deep down” (“en su fuero interno”) that the apparently disordered yellow lights follow a nonapparent (indiscernible) order. A meaning of fuero is a compilation of laws.27 Another indication that some kind of legal order is involved is provided by the closing sentence, where Henric notices that he has an erection, but does not feel sexually excited. An erection without sexual excitation is akin to the Lacanian phallus, which is, “as symbolic object +/– par excellence, always an object that lacks (something).”28 As the symbol of the differentiality proper to the symbolic order, the phallus at once signifies the lack of the real and the transcendent law of symbolic castration in its role as the signified of the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier that substitutes for the Desire-of-theMother during the Oedipus complex.29 A Lacanian interpretation of Henric’s erection has a role to play in this reading of “Labyrinth,” but of more immediate concern is the likelihood that the law in question names the event. That it pertains to the European Union is suggested by the anachronistic content of the passage under consideration as it relates to disorder. The signifiers Jacques Henric and párking oscuro, which occur in the sentence immediately preceding the paragraph quoted above, contain the following letters: a, u, e, e, n, i, p, r, n, o, u, o. These letters can be rearranged to form Unión Europea, the current name of the European Community. When they are arranged in this manner, they can be used to solve the puzzle hinted at by the apparently disordered lights in the following paragraph. In other words, there is an order underlying the apparent disorder: these lights correspond to the yellow stars of the European Union flag. By referring to the European Union in the proximity of the void, and to the faithful subject (confident in the existence of an underlying legal order as truth in relation to the European Union), the signifiers párking oscuro and Jacques Henric determine the legal order of the European Union as the evental site in “Labyrinth.” Given that the faithful subject represents the law in relation to the European Union as a truth corresponding to the event, this suggests that the name of the event corresponds to a law or legal ruling. If a theme of the passage under consideration—a representation of the evental site—is the relation of the apparent disorder of this site to order by means of a law or legal ruling that names the event, is there a component of this passage (a “split” term or semiotic trace of the event) that can be added to the set of the imperfect anagram of the evental site and relate it to order in terms of the event?30 The set in question is composed of Jacques Henric and párking oscuro; to be consistent with its semantic and thematic content—reference to

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a person inside a garage based on the concept that it is only by means of the intervention of a subject in relation to an evental site that an event is classified as such—a requirement for inclusion is that the added term name a person referred to by the narrator in the passage under consideration—all of whom are inside the garage, either literally (Henric) or in terms of Henric thinking about them. There is only one garage in this passage, which is already included in the set, and thus it cannot be added to the set. If the component that can be added to the set is restricted to the aforementioned type of signifier, there is one that satisfies the requirements for inclusion: the signifiers that refer to the woman who inspires Henric’s fidelity to the event —pequeña Carla. When these are added, the following is the result: Jacques Henric párking oscuro pequeña Carla (Devade); a, e, s, e, n, n, g, o, o, ñ, l, d, v. I have included Devade because Carla Devade is the woman Henric is thinking about. By omitting the tilde in pequeña, these letters can be rearranged to form Van Gend en Loos, the Dutch name used to refer to Van Gend & Loos v. Netherlands Inland Revenue Administration, a landmark 1963 decision of the European Court of Justice.31 Van Gend en Loos established the principle of direct effect for European Union law, according to which its provisions created individual rights that the courts of European Union member states are bound to recognize and protect.32 Other than pequeña Carla—after the addition of Devade and the subtraction of a tilde—there are no other signifiers that name a person in the passage under consideration that contain the letters v,d,n,l—each of which appears at least once among the words that form Van Gend en Loos—which can be used to form an imperfect anagram of the case-law in question. These letters appear more than once in the words leading up to Henric thinking about Devade, for example, in capital de provincias, but in the context of Henric trying “to orient himself” in the darkness, which only happens when—by means of Devade—he associates them with and becomes subjectivized by the event—symbolically finding his way out of the labyrinth represented by the garage, whose exit is graphically represented by the paragraph break between the sentence that contains the components of imperfect anagram of the evental site and the concluding paragraph of “Labyrinth.” In the three sequential sentences that include the one that refers to Carla Devade, the semantic nucleus of the text (its “hypogram”) is graphemically disseminated throughout the sentences33: “En esa quietud, su corazón paulatinamente se a va serenando y la memoria le trae las imágenes de aquel día. Rememora a Guyotat, a quien admira secretamente, cortejando sin tapujos a la pequeña Carla. Los . . . [my emphasis].”34 Reference to Carla triggers reference to lo at the beginning of the next sentence—the pair of letters that are necessary to complete the dissemination of the name of the event. Also: why “pequeña Carla [my emphasis]”? Regardless of the motive, the eñ in pequeña refers to en, the Dutch word that translates and. It appears in the name of the case-law and signifies addition, strengthening the case for adding pequeña Carla to the

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set of the imperfect anagram of the evental site. In isolation, none of the textual components discussed above name the event. It is only when considered in relation to each other that this takes place, a type of relationship referred to by Henric when he reflects on the role of causality in existence, and understood by Pascal, who wrote, Since everything then is cause and effect, dependent and supporting, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail.35

The imperfect anagram formed by the inclusion of pequeña Carla refers to the apparent disorder that is a theme of the passage under consideration. Only by reordering letters contained within this set does it unequivocally refer to the case-law that provides the foundation for the legal order of the European Union and thus refer to order. That this is the legal order in question is confirmed by the fact that Jaques Henric párking oscuro—a set that represents this legal order as an evental site—is included as a subset in the set of the imperfect anagram of the event. Thus, by referring to order in terms of the legal ruling that provides the foundation for the legal order of the European Union, the multiple Jacques Henric párking oscuro pequeña Carla (Devade) is semantically, thematically, semiotically, and mathematically (by means of set theory) related to the passage under consideration and overdetermined as an imperfect anagram Van Gend en Loos. According to Morten Rasmussen, The Van Gend en Loos judgement constitutes one of the core doctrines underpinning what is often described as a European “constitutional legal order.” But it does much more than that. It occupies a key position in the canon of European law, used by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in celebrations and Festschrifts, and taught to young students of EU law as the most basic part of the curriculum. The Van Gend en Loos judgement is consequently not just a historical event of limited importance for contemporary affairs. It constitutes a focal point for a rich patchwork of constantly reproduced historical memory and myths used for ideological purposes.36

Antoine Vauchez considers that one reason case-law became a principal force producing Europeanization is that in the context of inter-governmental rivalries in Brussels, ECJ case-law was regarded as a more tangible and lasting form of European integration. . . . The

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ECJ appeared to be available to all Euro-concerned interests (be they expressed by individuals, interest groups, companies, etc).37

According to Karen Alter, as the supremacy of European Community law over national law became accepted as national doctrine, the European Court of Justice became more willing to make “substantive rulings affecting important state interests,” such as the 1990 Barber v. Guardian Group ruling in which the European Court of Justice “forced the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher to equalize its retirement age for men and women.”38 In the European Union, private citizens can invoke European law in national courts to challenge national law. By means of the European Union law’s preliminary ruling mechanism, these courts have the option to refer cases to the European Court of Justice for a final determination of the case in question (Article 177 of the EEC Treaty): a formal equality of rights and privileges that suggests the viability of the European Court of Justice as a democratic institution. This viability is the subject of Quoc Loc Hong’s article on constitutional review in the European Union, in which he argues that “the ECJ’s competence to review and invalidate legislation is, in fact, indispensable for the democratic legitimacy of the EU’s legal system as a whole,” given, in the limit case which proves the point, the role of constitutional judges as protectors “of permanent minorities, that is to say, minorities whose political agendas are so ‘different’ from the rest of society ‘that they are virtually excluded from all attempts at coalition building.’”39 The conception of constitutional judges as essential participants in the process of determining the democratic viability of a polity can serve to link Kristeva’s dream, in which the European Community is associated with freedom, with the specification, in the episode of the párking oscuro (through reference to Van Gend en Loos), of the supremacy of European Union law as interpreted by the European Court of Justice (an institutional determinant of that freedom). The relationship of the law to an event is a topic explored by Badiou in Meditation 32 of Being and Event, which is based on a reading of Rousseau’s The Social Contract. Rousseau distinguishes between decrees pertaining to particular objects, such as those that create privileges for specific individuals, and laws, which always consider “subjects collectively and actions abstractly, never an individual person or a particular action.”40 For Rousseau, the law is a manifestation of “the general will,”41 which, in Badiou’s reading, is “the operator of fidelity which directs a generic procedure” (346)42: In truth, the pact is nothing other than the self-belonging of the body politic to the multiple that it is, as founding event. ‘General will’ names the durable truth of this self-belonging: “The body politic . . . since it owes its being solely to the sanctity of the contract, can never obligate itself . . . to do anything that detracts

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from that primitive act . . . To violate the act by which it exists would be to annihilate itself.” (346)

Equality is what the people have in common in their dual role as sovereign and subject in relation to the law: “General will never considers an individual nor a particular action. It is therefore tied to the indiscernible” (347). Thus, as a declaration of the general will, law is tied to an indiscernible that “refers back to the evental character of political creation” (347). Hong relocates the source of law’s legitimacy from the traditional Rousseauian ideal of popular self-legislation at the national level to the liberation of law subjects, as manifested in the opportunity provided to outvoted minority members to liberate themselves from unwanted laws by means of a transnational legislative process and constitutional review by a transnational court.43 This lower level of “reciprocal solidarity”44 is still a form of solidarity, and is, in my opinion, subject to social contract theory. Here the contract would be the self-belonging of a body politic consisting of citizens of the diverse nations comprising the European Union to the multiple that it is, not as a founding event, but rather as an effect of Van Gend en Loos. As case-law that is also a declaration of the general will affirming that European Union law confers rights and obligations to the population of the European Union that member states are obligated to recognize and enforce, regardless of the individual or action involved, it is tied to an indiscernible that refers to an event. However, in this case, the law names the event: a reflexivity experienced by the subject as “a minimal difference” (Žižek) between a reductionist limitation of Van Gend en Loos to law and its status as an event. This difference should be understood according to Žižek’s conception of “the parallax gap” as the result of a subjective shift between different perspectives due to libidinal investment by the subject in an object (in this case, the event as productive of the faithful subject’s lifeworld) that divides the object from itself;45 an investment of a type that will become evident upon further analysis of Kristeva’s dream. The “supernumerary multiple” named Van Gend en Loos is something composed of this case-law and contingent factors not evident when it was promulgated. For example, its subjectivization at the national level of the lower-court judiciary that used the preliminary ruling mechanism as a means of asserting the prerogatives of lower courts vis-à-vis higher courts by referring cases directly to the European Court of Justice for a final determination.46 This transformation in the role of the lower courts would figure positively in an inquiry classifying multiples connected to the name of the event. According to Badiou, these multiples cannot be “determinant of the encyclopaedia” (i.e., knowledge) because that would negate their condition as truth connected to the event: “The faithful procedure is random, and

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in no way predetermined by knowledge” (337). The political power of the European Court of Justice—as exemplified by the transformation of the role of national courts in the European Union—was not predetermined in the aftermath of Van Gend en Loos. In the 1960s, the decade in which this ruling was promulgated, the court was relatively weak politically.47 Thus, a faithful procedure seeking to connect the aforementioned transformation to an event at the time the political power of the European Court of Justice started to become evident in the 1970s would be “random” in the sense of not being foreseen or foretold in advance. Similarly, in “Labyrinth,” Kristeva’s dream and the conclusion in the parking garage are examples of multiples positively connected to the event: seemingly disparate textual components whose interrelatedness—unclassified by knowledge—is demonstrated by means of reference to the event. Returning to Henric’s erection in the last sentence of “Labyrinth,” its relationship to the Lacanian concept of the phallus has already been noted. The relevance of this relationship to a reading of “Labyrinth” becomes evident by juxtaposing the parking garage episode with Kristeva’s dream and describing the relationship between these episodes in terms of Lacan’s formula of the master’s discourse from Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: S1 → S2 $…a

The following analysis owes much to Alenka Zupančič’s discussion of the master’s discourse in an essay on Seminar XVII. S1, the master-signifier, corresponds to the phallus represented by Henric’s erection, an appropriate signifier for an event named after a case-law. Henric is the divided subject $, who is symbolically castrated and determined by S1 (a determination which is an ideological consequence of fidelity to the event). Kristeva corresponds to S2, the place of the other signifying the conjunction of knowledge that binds with the master-signifier and work.48 Objet a corresponds to a residue left over by the subject’s loss of jouissance upon entry into the symbolic order. In Seminar XVII, Lacan describes this residue or waste product as “surplus jouissance”: a by-product of a process of signification in which—according to Lacan—a “signifier . . . represents a subject with respect to another signifier.”49 Throughout Seminar XVII, Lacan often poses an equivalence between work and enjoyment based on a conception of work as a signifying process.50 In the subject, the repetitive oscillation between work-related signifying processes by means of the signifier and the desire for jouissance occasioned by this immersion in the symbolic order leaves objet a as its residue, thus tying the signifier to the desire for jouissance, which is in itself a form of

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jouissance. Kristeva’s dream includes the manifest content of public space, academic work, and the theme of liberty (62). These are presented in the context of a sense of pleasure that pervades the dream and culminates with the caressing lavender and orange-blossom scented breeze. It is at this point that she remembers her seminar (that is to say, her work). Before this, the following takes place: she hears a bird cheeping and feels the aforementioned breeze. The cheeping corresponds to objet a in its manifestation as voice, and the breeze—to the extent that a lavender and orange-blossom scented breeze in Germany gives form to an impossibility that distinguishes jouissance from pleasure—is the jouissance corresponding to objet a. The preceding sequence can be understood retroactively as a by-product of the recollection of work— that is, as an instance of repetition whereby the subject moves between jouissance and that which occasions it: the immersion in work-related signifiers. The latent content of Kristeva’s dream signifies that a consequence of fidelity to the event is not the conversion by capital of surplus jouissance into surplus labor or exchange value in the form of consumer products, but rather the existence of surplus jouissance as an indicator of satisfying work on a continuum that includes political freedom and public space as a positive image of the commons. Given that, for the subject, this continuum is predicated on fidelity to the event, the existence of this jouissance is also an indicator of the subject’s libidinal investment in the event. The master’s discourse foregrounds the role of ideology in the formation of the subject. There are repressive ideologies, such as anti-Semitism or heteronormativity, but ideology can also serve a nonrepressive function. Žižek provides a pertinent example of how master-signifiers can determine the horizon of totality of an ideological field in a nonrepressive manner. He describes the Laclau/Mouffe project of radical democracy as an articulation of particular struggles (for peace, ecology, feminism, human rights, and so on), none of which pretends to be . . . “the true Meaning” of all the others; but the title “radical democracy” itself indicates how the very possibility of their articulation implies the “nodal,” determining role of a certain struggle which, precisely as a particular struggle, outlines the horizon of all the other struggles.51

The more determinant this role is, the less repressive it becomes the dialectical paradox lies in the fact that the particular struggle playing a hegemonic role, far from enforcing a violent suppression of the differences, opens the very space for the relative autonomy of the particular struggles: the feminist struggle, for example, is made possible only through reference to democraticegalitarian political discourse.52

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The same dynamic is at play in “Labyrinth,” as is evident in the positive correlation between Van Gend en Loos as represented by a master-signifier and the association of work with the ideal of liberty in Kristeva’s dream. In fact, one of the results of the supremacy of European Union law, as called for by the stipulations of Van Gend en Loos, has been the consolidation of workers’ rights throughout the European Union. The Council of the European Union directives prohibiting gender discrimination with regard to remuneration for the same work (Directive 75/117/EEC of 10 Feb. 1975) and discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation with regard to employment (Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 Nov. 2000) are relevant in this regard, as is the legally enforceable right to a four-week paid vacation (Directive 93/104/ EC of 23 Nov. 1993). The enhancement of religious, gender, and sexual orientation equality in the workplace represents an increase in the liberation of workers from certain kinds of discrimination. Similarly, guaranteed vacations represent the freedom to escape from the stress of overwork. The directive on gender discrimination dates from 1975, before the period of time in which “Labyrinth” takes place. The directive on paid vacations dates from 1993, and the one on racial and sexual orientation discrimination from 2000, so both were promulgated after the historical period represented in the text. Nevertheless, they could be said to form part of the text if Badiou’s concept of “forcing” is taken into account. Forcing can be conceived of as a subject in a situation sustaining the consequences of an event in such a way as to transform the situation.53 Even though the last two of the aforementioned directives did not exist in 1977, there is nothing to prevent the faithful subject from concluding that such directives will have been promulgated on a supranational level in her lifetime, thus reinforcing the connection of the event to freedom. In Kristeva’s dream, this reinforcement as a result of forcing tips the balance in the wager between deciding whether the birdsong is emanating from a caged bird or a wild bird in favor of the second choice—that is, freedom. That it is a question of forcing is evident taking Kristeva’s stopped wristwatch into account, which is the first thing she notices after remembering her work. In a temporality characteristic of forcing, it symbolizes the transposition of the present into the future anterior in such a way as to affect the present. In other words, underlying the association of work with freedom represented by Kristeva’s dream is the transposition by the subject of her present situation into the future anterior, with the result of changing the subject’s situation in the present. The master’s discourse has developed the reputation of being an authoritarian discourse for, among other reasons, its association with the dialectic of the master and slave in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. For those who find it objectionable on these grounds, there is no better riposte than the following by Žižek: “There is . . . no reason to be dismissive of the discourse of the

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Master, to identify it too hastily with ‘authoritarian repression’: the Master’s gesture is the founding gesture of every social link.”54 The establishment of a social link pertaining to the European Community by way of the ideological consequences of fidelity to an event is a brief but accurate description of the sociopolitical content of “Labyrinth.” This social link is represented by the unification of separate sentences that mention the characters that appear in the photograph on which “Labyrinth” is based—immediately preceding the concluding episode in the parking garage (64–65)—into a single sentence of enormous length that includes these characters and concludes with Kristeva’s dream (61–62). In tandem with those textual components that correspond to the terms of the formula for the master’s discourse (the conclusion in the parking garage and Kristeva’s dream), the unification of separate sentences into one is retroactively understood as the textual embodiment of a social link. The analysis of “Labyrinth” by way of Badiousian and Lacanian concepts yields the conclusion that its political content is represented as being emancipatory within the context of working within the political system of the European Community. That is to say, what takes place in this text is the representation of a series of equivalences, mediated by the event, between the political system of the European Community, liberation in work, and the liberation of subjectivity. Not to mention the labyrinthine process involved in naming the event, “Labyrinth” is difficult to interpret because it does not conform to reader expectations. This is also a source of considerable fascination with this text. For example, the Central American is not simply a representative of an oppressed culture or a victim of discrimination. He is principally a representative of the ideology of free-market capitalism, which qualifies him as a menace within the context of the emancipatory themes of “Labyrinth.” In “Labyrinth” Europe is not used as a vantage point to focus on Latin American issues, such as the human rights abuses of the Dirty War, as in Bolaño’s story “Sensini,” or “the preocupation with the origins of the literature and history of Latin America,” which, according to Sandra Garabano, is the defining characteristic of The Savage Detectives.55 Nor is this a case of a Latin American writer affirming his universalistic aspirations: a type of writer considered by Jorge Volpi to be typical of the generation of Latin American writers born in the 1970s, and for whom Bolaño, who was older, is a precursor. For Volpi, the best Latin American literature belongs to a tradition “that has always promoted an open and inclusive cosmopolitanism.”56 “Labyrinth” is not so much a cosmopolitan text as it is a European text. To put it in Badiousian terms, in “Labyrinth,” Europe is a “self-belonging multiple”: it is there to be considered for its own sake. The geographically limited and relatively backward region of Latin America represented by the Central American serves as a foil to highlight the superiority of the European Union’s sociopolitical system

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and remind the reader of the menace of unregulated capitalism emanating from the United States. It seems unfair, if not biased, to select two of the poorest countries in Latin America to underscore the advantages of living in Europe. Nevertheless, given that some of these advantages—such as the jurisprudential foundation of satisfying work—are represented as consequences of fidelity to an event, this may well have an explanatory value as signifying that a primary source of the persistence and viability of the European Union, beyond the limited selection of countries directly referred to in “Labyrinth,” may well have more to do with the ideological and political ramifications of the subject’s response to an event than any reductively economic causality. NOTES 1. Ignacio Echevarría, preliminary note to The Secret of Evil, by Roberto Bolaño, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2012), ix. 2. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 140. 3. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006; paperback edition, 2007), 506. Citations refer to the paperback edition. 4. Alain Badiou, “On the Truth-Process,” (lecture, European Graduate School, August 2002), https://www​.lacan​.com​/badeurope​.htm. 5. Ibid. 6. Peter Dews, review of Being and Event, by Alain Badiou, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2, no. 18 (February 2008), https://ndpr​.nd​.edu​/news​/being​-and​ -event/. 7. Ibid. 8. Roberto Bolaño, “Labyrinth,” in The Secret of Evil, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2012), 51. Text references are to pages of this edition. 9. In “Labyrinth,” the narrator speculates that J.-J. Goux is called Jean-Jacques (48), but the J.-J. Goux in the photograph on which “Labyrinth” is based is JeanJoseph Goux, a former member of the Tel Quel group who is currently a professor emeritus of French Studies at Rice University. 10. Marie-Thérèse Réveillé is Pierre Guyotat’s lover in “Labyrinth.” Carla Devade is Marc Devade’s wife in “Labyrinth” (61). 11. Sollers, a French writer and critic, was editor in chief of the avant-garde journal Tel Quel. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tel Quel was instrumental in creating the impression that “[Jacques] Derrida was the French thinker to be reckoned with.” Jeffrey Mehlman, “From Tel Quel to L’Infini,” in The Columbia History of TwentiethCentury French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006), 745. Tel Quel’s Maoist phase took place between 1971 and 1974. During this time, Sollers—a convert to Maoism—broke with Derrida on political grounds. Mehlman, “From Tel Quel to L’Infini,” 746. In 1974, editorials criticizing Derrida and Louis Althusser for proposing philosophies of idealism were published

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in Tel Quel. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack, “Chronological History of Tel Quel,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack (London: Routledge, 1998), 15. The break with Derrida resonates in “Labyrinth” in that Sollers’s interview with the Central American represents a rejection of the cultural/intellectual progeny of poststructuralism as embodied in the Central American’s postmodern worship of difference. 12. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 264–65. 13. James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1988), 521. 14. Ibid., 401. 15. Ed Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2007), 148. 16. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 131. 17. Ibid., 138. 18. The conflation of Sollers with a scientist possibly alludes to scientificity as a characteristic of Tel Quel’s discourse, a topic discussed in ffrench and Lack’s introduction to The Tel Quel Reader, where it is affirmed that the emulation of science “functions in relation to . . . what Foucault called ‘initiatory’ discursive practices, the discourses founded by Marx, Freud and Saussure.” ffrench and Lack, introduction to The Tel Quel Reader, 3. 19. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, trans. Margaret Waller, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 112. 20. Kelly Oliver, “Julia Kristeva,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, 561. 21. Andreas Staab, The European Union Explained: Institutions, Actors, Global Impact, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2011), 15. 22. Ibid., 18–21. 23. Oliver Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2008), 99. 24. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 71. 25. Roberto Bolaño, “Laberinto,” in El secreto del mal, ed. Ignacio Echevarría (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007), 88. 26. Ibid., 88–89. 27. Diccionario de la lengua española, s.v. “fuero,” https://dle​.rae​.es/​?id​ =IYqmDg8. 28. Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 88. 29. Ibid., 88–92. 30. An imperfect anagram is a word or words that contain a rearrangement of the letters of another word or words, but that does not contain the same letters as the original word or words, either because it has fewer, more, or different letters than the original word or words. In my approach to anagrammatical interpretation, I have been guided by the consideration that, as Lacan wrote, discourse has a contrapuntal

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aspect: “It suffices to listen to poetry, which Saussure was certainly in the habit of doing, for a polyphony to be heard and for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a musical score.” Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006), 419. Lacan supports his statement about Saussure by referencing the latter’s notebooks on anagrams in an endnote. Lacan, 440n12. 31. Van Gend & Loos v. Netherlands Inland Revenue Administration, EUR-Lex, Case 26–62 (ECJ, 1963), https://eur​-lex​.europa​.eu​/homepage​.html. 32. John McCormick, The European Union: Politics and Policies, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), 175. 33. “Hypogram came into use among 20th-c. semioticians to describe the ‘theme word’ (mot-thème) or absent text, seme, or presupposition that furnishes a nucleus from which a poem’s ‘given’ structure . . . takes its form.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), s.v. “Hypogram,” https://muse​.jhu​.edu​/book​/30475. Literary critics have utilized the concept of the hypogram to analyze narrative as well as poetry. See, for example, Stamos Metzidakis, “Replacing Literary History: With Hypograms or Paragrams?” L’Esprit Créateur 49, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 19–20, https://muse​.jhu​.edu /article/367693. 34. Bolaño, “Laberinto,” 89. 35. Blaise Pascal, “Penseés,” in Pensées, The Provincial Letters, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 26–27. 36. Morten Rasmussen, “Revolutionizing European Law: A History of the Van Gend en Loos Judgement,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 12, no. 1 (January 2014): 136–37, https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/icon​/mou006. 37. Antoine Vauchez, “The Transnational Politics of Judicialization: Van Gend en Loos and the Making of EU Polity,” European Law Journal 16, no. 1 (January 2010): 24, HeinOnline. 38. Karen J. Alter, “The European Court and Legal Integration: An Exceptional Story or Harbinger of the Future?” in The European Court’s Political Power: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 34. 39. Quoc Loc Hong, “Constitutional Review in the Mega-Leviathan: A Democratic Foundation for the European Court of Justice,” European Law Journal 16, no. 6 (November 2010): 695, 702, HeinOnline. 40. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right,” in The Essential Rousseau, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Meridian, 1975), 34. 41. Ibid. 42. A generic procedure consists of an investigation of the terms of the situation with the goal of grouping together those that are positively connected to the event. Badiou, Being and Event, 335. 43. Hong, “Constitutional Review,” 709–13. 44. Ibid., 704. 45. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 17–18.

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46. Karen J. Alter, “The European Court’s Political Power: The Emergence of an Authoritative International Court in the European Union,” in The European Court’s Political Power, 99–101. 47. Alter, “The European Court and Legal Integration: An Exceptional Story or Harbinger of the Future?” 33–34. 48. Alenka Zupančič, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), 163. 49. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), 19–20. 50. Zupančič, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus Value,” 162. 51. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; repr., London: Verso, 1999), 88. 52. Ibid., 88–89 53. Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011), 187–88. 54. Slavoj Žižek, “On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes,” Lacan​.com​, accessed April 3, 2021, https://www​.lacan​.com​/zizbadman​.htm. 55. Sandra Garabano, “Los detectives salvajes y la novela del archivo cultural latinoamericano,” Dissidences 2, no. 4 (November 2012): 10 (my translation), https:// digitalcommons​.bowdoin​.edu​/dissidences​/vol2​/iss4​/8. 56. Jorge Volpi, “El fin de la narrativa latinoamericana,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 30, no. 59 (2004): 40 (my translation), https://www​.jstor​.org​/ stable​/4531302.

Chapter 3

The Savage Detectives and Fate

Stylistically, Roberto Bolaño has more in common with the twentieth-century Argentine writers Borges and Cortázar than he does with Boom writers, such as García Márquez, and post-Boom writers, such as Isabel Allende. There is very little resembling magical realism in his work. He is a neomodernist writer who rejected his immediate literary precursors of the Boom and PostBoom and was inspired by writers who formed part of the modernist and avant-garde cultural movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I include Baudelaire and Rimbaud in this group, as well as Mark Twain and, closer to our time, Jack Kerouack. He was also influenced by science fiction, especially by Phillip K. Dick, and the literature of classical antiquity and the middle ages. The typical Bolaño novel alternates realism and fantasy. These works produce the impression that mysterious forces are at play just beneath the surface of reality. The Savage Detectives (1998) is a long novel with three parts. It begins as the diary of the seventeen-year-old Juan García Madero. The second part is a series of first-person narratives of people who are acquainted with the protagonists Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The novel concludes as it begins, with the diary of García Madero. It has been described as a Mexican novel because part of it takes place in Mexico, many of its characters are Mexican, and it uses Mexican slang. The author lived in Mexico from 1968 to 1976, and some of the content of The Savage Detectives is autobiographical. Arturo Belano is Roberto Bolaño’s alter ego. Ulises Lima, Belano’s friend, is based on Mario Santiago, a Mexican poet who was a close friend of Bolaño. As well as Mexico, The Savage Detectives takes place in Central America, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Israel. As Sharae Deckard has noted, the narratives of the second part of The Savage Detectives represent Bolaño’s “reformulation” of the post-Boom 43

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testimonio narrative into a form of “collective testimonio.”1 An effect of these serial narratives is to obscure the thematic content of The Savage Detectives and, as is often the case with Bolaño, to turn the reader involved in ascertaining this content into a literary detective, tasked with reconfiguring the broken world represented by these narratives—which corresponds to the cultural and ideological displacement of Belano and Lima—into a coherent weltanschauung. My contention is that the overarching theme of The Savage Detectives is the movement from societal degeneration to a transnational entity based on fidelity to the event of Van Gend en Loos. Arturo Belano moves from taking the law into his own hands in Sonora to identification with the law of the European Union in the episode of the wolf’s cave in Spain. His trajectory is similar to that of Orestes in the Oresteia. In place of the gods, the political real of Bolaño’s novel is in the final analysis governed by el azar or fate, a force that affects the destiny of individuals and nations. The first part of García Madero’s diary takes place in Mexico City and recounts his experiences with the visceral realists, a literary gang headed by Belano and Lima. The visceral realists modeled themselves on estridentismo, an avant-guard literary movement founded by the Mexican poet Manuel Maples Arce in 1921. In fact, Bolaño and Mario Santiago were the leaders of a literary movement similar to visceral realism called infrarealism. Infrarealism was more of an attitude toward life than a set of aesthetic principles. Bolaño’s “Infrarealist Manifesto,” written in 1976, presents some of the basic principles of infrarealism, such as leaving everything behind, seeing the world, and finding poetry in life.2 The infrarealists opposed the Mexican literary establishment headed by Octavio Paz.3 García Madero gets involved in rescuing a prostitute named Lupe from her pimp, Alberto. This happens because his girlfriend, María Font, is friendly with Lupe, and María’s father, Quim Font, is having an affair with Lupe. Quim gives her shelter in his house to protect her from Alberto. In the conclusion of the first part of The Savage Detectives, Alberto and his henchmen, including corrupt policemen, lay siege to Quim’s house in an effort to recover Lupe. Quim’s family is joined by Belano and Lima in an effort to protect her. At the conclusion of part one, Belano, Lima, García Madero, and Lupe manage to escape from Quim’s house in his Impala.4 In The Savage Detectives, Quim’s upper-middle-class family represents Mexican society. The fact that a representative slice of this society in the form of visceral realists passes through or inhabits the sizeable Font-family compound adds weight to this assertion. Quim, who is mentally ill, is a weak father who symbolizes the inability of the patriarchy to protect Mexico against the forces of societal degeneration, represented by Alberto and his henchmen. In her book The Regime of The Brother: After the Patriarchy, Juliet Flower MacCannell theorizes that we live in a postpatriarchal society where the role of the father

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in the traditional Oedipal family has been devalued. This change is supposed to have taken place during the Enlightenment.5 According to MacCannell, in modernity, power has shifted to the brother at the expense of the father.6 “Under Oedipus,” boys obtained their identity by acknowledging their genital difference with respect to girls and identifying with the father.7 Girls had the option of having no identity or identifying with the father and eventually having children, who, in psychoanalytic theory, perform the role of the phallus required by a male identity.8 In the “regime of the brother,” the boy narcissistically constructs his own identity without the help of the Other and does not acknowledge the need of his sister to construct an identity based on her genital difference: At this point the full poignancy of the situation becomes evident: not only the girl-child, but the boy has no clear means of attaining identity in the post-Oedipal frame: the “patriarchy” in modernity is less a symbolic than an imaginary identification of the son with the father he has completely eliminated even from memory. He has thrown off the one—God, the king, the father—to replace it with the grammatical and legal and emotionally empty fiction of an I who stands alone and on its own: “his majesty the ego.” Self-created, however, he is only a figment of his own and not the father’s desire. This is the dilemma he simply refuses to acknowledge: he makes the law. But we know, after Lacan, that every law is the repression of a desire, and it creates a drive; the brother’s desire to deny his real dependence on his sister’s difference operates as a new fundamental fantasy (incestuous relations with her) that must be disavowed, fuelling a drive to forget her, to taboo her—or do away with her altogether. . . . The brother denies his sister her identity, affirming his own.9

In Oedipus, according to MacCannell, at least a girl had the option of identifying with the father. In modernity, her individuality is not acknowledged by the boy, and the girl is “absorbed into a general brotherhood.”10 Of course, the term “brotherhood” does not have a positive connotation for MacCannell. At its most extreme, what she has in mind is based on the model of the brothers in the primal horde of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, who kill their monstrous father in order to enjoy the women he monopolized.11 In accordance with McCannell’s concept, Alberto and his henchmen can be seen as a neo-totemic clan of brothers with total disregard for the law and the institutions of society. Alberto reacts violently when Lupe affirms her individuality by trying to enroll in a dance school instead of working in the afternoons as a prostitute. His attempted murder of Lupe precipitates her escape from him (95). Bolaño has been described as writing from a masculine perspective and being insensitive to the concerns of women. However, this characterization is

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inaccurate. It would be more correct to say that his writing reflects the reality of a culture where male domination is in effect. In The Savage Detectives, this does not prevent him from portraying women who rebel against this domination, such as Cesárea Tinajero, a prototype of feminist consciousness, and Xóchitl García, a mother, who, rather than being dependent on a man, sublimates her desire by creating a life-affirming identity connected with writing. These individuals are exceptions to the rule in a male-dominated, corrupt society, where the rule of law is weak. In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño portrays the economic and social deterioration that took place in Mexico from the midseventies to the late 1980s. In 1976, when the novel begins, although the first signs of an economic downturn had appeared, Mexico was a relatively prosperous country thanks to the legacy of state-directed development that industrialized Mexico after 1940.12 By 1987, the year of Quim Font’s last narrative, economic mismanagement, overreliance on oil exports, and capital flight produced economic stagnation and deteriorating living conditions for everyone but the very wealthy.13 After returning from an insane asylum where he lived for several years, Quim can no longer walk around his neighborhood without fear of being mugged, which happens to him (401). The connection between the social deterioration of Mexico and Belano and Lima’s decision to leave that country for Europe is understandable by way of Cesárea Tinajero, a fictional poet who founded visceral realism in the 1930s and left Mexico City shortly afterward for Sonora in northern Mexico. Eventually, all trace of her was lost. The Savage Detectives takes its name from the investigative work done by Belano and Lima in trying to find the whereabouts of Cesárea. As the novel progresses, a connection is established between Cesárea and modernity, defined as sociopolitical progress. In an episode narrated by Amadeo Salvatierra, a former poet who is interviewed by Belano and Lima on the topic of Cesárea, she demonstrates her feminist orientation by defending her friend, Encarnación Guzmán, when she expresses her opinion during a meeting of estridentista poets and is brutally insulted (284–85). Cesárea never marries and is disillusioned when Encarnación gets married. Amadeo tries to dissuade her from leaving Mexico City by asking her what will happen to the magazine she publishes and visceral realism, but she laughs: “Cesárea laughed like a ghost, like the invisible woman she was about to become” (487). Becoming a ghost or invisible is her way of dealing with a society that treats womens’ individuality as nonexistent. Amadeo tells her that Sonora is a cultural wasteland and that if she stays in Mexico City, she will help build Stridentopolis, a utopian city envisioned by Mexican intellectuals of the 1920s (375). He recalls that “she smiled, as if [he were] telling her a good joke but one she already knew,” whereupon she informs him that “she’d always been a visceral realist, not a stridentist” (488). Amadeo’s response is important for understanding the political message of the novel:

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“And so am I, I said or shouted, all of us Mexicans are more visceral realists than stridentists, but what does it matter? Stridentism and visceral realism are just two masks to get us to where we really want to go. And where is that? she said. To modernity, Cesárea, I said, to goddamned modernity” (488). In a political sense, the concept of modernity referred to by Amadeo is inextricably associated with Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. According to Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, “These were years when Mexican economists avidly read Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes and learned that full employment required state intervention.”14 For the Cardenistas, the following were essential components of Mexico’s future: social justice, including agrarian reform; the promotion of labor rights, including the right to strike; the creation of an internal market capable of sustaining the development of a national industry; limiting foreign ownership of national resources; and less reliance on the exports of primary goods in order to avoid economic dependency.15 Cesárea, it is evident, does not think Mexico is headed to the future envisaged by the Cardenistas. The future she envisages for Mexico becomes somewhat clearer in the third part of the novel. Aztlán, the legendary ancestral homeland of the Aztecs, was possibly located in northwestern Mexico or the southwestern United States and is associated with the supernatural in Bolaño’s text, as is evident in García Madero’s description of the town where he and his companions find Cesárea: “The town of Villaviciosa is a ghost town. The northern Mexico town of lost assassins, the closest thing to Aztlán, said Lima” (639). In Bolaño’s works, especially The Savage Detectives and 2666, northwestern Mexico and the southwestern part of the United States close to the Mexican border are regions where apparently supernatural forces produce effects. These forces have worldwide impacts, but they are more pronounced in Sonora. Watching an episode of Ancient Aliens is a suitable way to get into the proper frame of mind for enjoying this aspect of Bolaño’s writing. As previously mentioned, Bolaño was an avid reader of science fiction, and his alter ego, Arturo Belano, loves reading books of a pseudo-scientific or pseudo-historical type, for example, about the Knights Templar and the mysteries of the Gothic cathedrals (168–69). Supernatural forces are evoked in the diary entry dated January 29, in which García Madero interviews a teacher who was friendly with Cesárea. She describes her impression of something abnormal taking place while visiting the room where Cesárea lived in 1946 (632–33). When the teacher notices Cesárea has a switchblade and asks her why she needs it, she answers that she has received death threats, and then she laughed, a laugh, the teacher remembers, that echoed past the walls of the room and the stairs until it reached the street, where it died. At that moment it seemed to the teacher as if a sudden, perfectly orchestrated silence

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fell over Calle Rubén Darío: radios were turned down, the chatter of the living was suddenly muted, and only Cesárea’s voice was left. (633)

After this unreal episode, the teacher’s attention is drawn to a plan of a canning factory, where Cesárea worked, pinned to the wall of her room. When the teacher asks her why she drew the plan, Cesárea talks about “days to come” and “times to come,” which will be “sometime around the year 2600,” a clear reference to the title of Bolaño’s last novel, 2666 (634). As Raúl Rodríguez Freire has noted, the factory prefigures the maquiladoras (“garment factories” or “sweatsops,” according to Freire) that, several decades after the meeting with Cesárea, will employ many victims of the femicides before their demise.16 Quim Font is in contact with supernatural forces when he learns of Ulises Lima’s disappearance, fifteen days before his daughter tells him about it, by means of a resident in the insane asylum where he lives; a resident who is not acquainted with Ulises and who, on the face of it, would have no reason to know that Quim has anything to do with him.17 When Quim observes that black clouds are covering the sky and concludes that he should take care of himself (381), this should be interpreted in a literal sense, as describing a situation similar to what takes place in the movie The Truman Show, which features a town that, unbeknownst to the protagonist, is actually a stage set with artificially created weather that is used to modify his behavior. Like Truman, Quim becomes aware that he is being manipulated. Unlike Peter Weir’s movie, in Bolaño’s novel, the whole world is the stage set, and the forces manipulating it are not of human origin. Quim’s theory about these forces is that human behavior is controlled by el azar,18 which is Spanish for fate or chance (406). Both meanings of the word are operative in the concept of el azar as it functions in Bolaño’s novel. When Quim drops his glasses in the garden of his house, as he sees his Impala slowly moving down the street, he realizes he was not aware that he wore glasses: “I thought: my glasses have fallen off. I thought: until a moment ago I didn’t know I wore glasses. I thought: now I can perceive change” (405). The sentence that follows the preceding quotation is quoted in English and Spanish for the sake of the ensuing analysis: “And knowing that now I knew I needed glasses to see, I was afraid, and I bent down and found my glasses” (405). (“Y eso, saber que ahora sabía que necesitaba gafas para ver, me hizo temerario y me agaché y encontré mis lentes.”)19 In Spanish, it is not always necessary to state subject pronouns. A better translation of the preceding sentence is “And knowing that now he knew he needed glasses to see made me reckless and I bent down and found my glasses.” The subject pronoun he in the previous sentence refers to Quim’s doubles: now Quim knows that Quim knows that Quim knows. He can perceive “change”: he moves away from himself even as he is affected by

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the double. One way to define insanity is the consciousness of this splitting. His location in a particular version of simultaneously existing versions of himself is a matter of chance. What happens to that particular version—such as seeing his Impala for the first time in years—is affected by predestination or fate. The impact of el azar in The Savage Detectives becomes clearer in the narrative of Andrés Ramírez, a Chilean immigrant who moves to Barcelona in 1975, two years after the coup that deposed Salvador Allende. As he walks on the Ramblas he sees visions of the numbers 0, 1, 2, and 3. He associates these with the soccer pool, a game of chance that involves predicting the outcome of several soccer games at the same time. He decides that 0 represents a tie, 1 a victory for the local team, and 2 a victory for the visiting team. He writes a sequence of numbers that he perceived on the playing card for the soccer pool, submits it, and wins 950,000 pesetas by correctly predicting the outcome for fourteen soccer games (411). The three represents the Trinity (i.e., the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit). The association with religious ideology is reinforced by a previous episode in the narrative of Mary Watson, a British traveler, in which Arturo Belano has a conversation with “two older men and a teenager, maybe grandfather, father, and son” (264). This is clearly a reference to the Trinity, given the narrator’s perception of “la mano de alguien, de la casualidad o de Dios” (“the hand of someone, of chance or of God [my translation]”) and the spatial orientation of Belano in reference to the three men who are above him on a bridge as he looks up “hacia un cielo muy azul” (“towards a very blue sky [my translation]”).20 In Spanish, el cielo can mean the sky or heaven. Notably, there is an association in this episode of chance with God. Ramírez notices that his ability to perceive numbers depends on what part of the city he is in. When he stops seeing them in the Gothic Quarter, he goes to a different neighborhood and sees them again. This is what occurred on a larger scale when he emigrated from Chile to Spain, except that he never saw the numbers in Chile. The lucky numbers are not for Pinochet’s Chile. He starts seeing them again soon after looking at drawings on the side of a church tower that remind him of geometry and mathematics (414). It can be affirmed that the narrative of Andrés Ramírez creates the impression that Bolaño’s text is a virtual text. N. Katherine Hayles defines virtuality as “the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns.”21 The perception of these patterns is culturally mediated. Thus, the numbers in the narrative of Andrés Ramírez are symptomatic of “the sense, pervasive in the late twentieth century, that all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the World Wide Web.”22 But this sense is framed by a culturally based religious sensibility that predates the twentieth century and relates the numbers to

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“higher powers” that affect the destiny of the subject. Much the same distinction is in play in 2666, as will become evident in the analysis of that text. Mathematics is used to transmit the patterns of information perceived by the “antenna man.” These patterns include 0 and 1, the basis of the binary code used in computer programming. This, in combination (symbolized by 2) with the religious overtones in the narrative of Mary Watson, reinforced by the inclusion of three among the numbers perceived by Ramírez, leads to the conclusion that some higher power is manipulating the action in The Savage Detectives by means of a computer program, a conclusion supported by Nick Bostrum’s contention that it is statistically probable that we are living within a computer simulation—that is, “that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive.”23 Bostrum has speculated that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest that it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.24

In The Savage Detectives the simulation involves the political fate of the Americas, symbolized by Cesárea Tinajero’s demise. She dies taking a bullet for Ulises Lima by protecting him from Alberto with her body. Her death symbolizes the death of the modernist project as sociopolitical progress in Latin America, which is foreshadowed when she leaves Mexico City as a result of her loss of belief in the ideology of this project. The year of her death—1976—places it in the historical context of the defeats suffered by the Left in Latin America during the 1970s—including the coup against Slavador Allende’s socialist government in 1973 that was witnessed by Arturo Belano in Chile (201). Alberto and a policeman followed Belano, Lima, García Madero, and Lupe to Sonora with the intention of recapturing Lupe. When they confront them on a road, Belano and Lima take the law into their own hands by killing them (642). Belano and Lima’s situation is similar to that of Orestes in Agamemnon, the first part of Aeschylus’s trilogy the Oresteia. In Agamemnon, Orestes kills his stepfather and mother because they killed his father, Agamemnon. As a result, he is pursued by the Furies, avenging spirits in Greek mythology, for the crime of matricide. In The Eumenides, the conclusion of the Oresteia, Orestes escapes to Athens, where he is judged by a jury and the goddess Athena and is declared not guilty. A theme of the Oresteia is the transition from personal vendetta to a system of justice based on law. The influence of this theme is evident in The Savage Detectives. Lima thinks he is pursued by assassins (369). In the narrative of Luis Sebastián Rosado, Luscious

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Skin, a visceral realist, confirms that Lima’s fear of being assassinated is connected with the death of Cesárea when he tells Rosado that it began after Lima and Belano’s trip to Sonora in 1976. After that trip, they fled to Europe. Lima returned to Mexico after several years, but the killers were still pursuing him, and he was forced to escape again (369). The assassins are reminiscent of the Furies that pursue Orestes after the murder of Agamemnon. By means of killing Alberto, Belano and Lima are indirectly responsible for the death of Cesárea Tinajero, “mother of the visceral realists” (489)—that is, they are symbolically guilty of matricide; they find Cesárea “only to bring her death” (643). In this sense they are like Orestes. They are also like Orestes in the sense that their violence is for a good cause: the protection of Lupe. Belano goes from societal degeneration and lack of respect for the law, symbolized by Alberto, toward the law of the European Union, represented by Rome and the ideology of the wolf in the narrative of Xosé Lendoiro. This is another parallel with the Oresteia. Lendoiro is a reactionary Spanish lawyer who intersperses his narrative with legal phrases in Latin. He narrates from the vantage point of the Baths of Trajan, a bathing and leisure complex built in ancient Rome, where he recounts the following incident that took place in a campground in Castro Verde, Galicia: the grandchild of one of the campers fell into chasm. A camper is lowered into the chasm by means of a rope and tries to rescue him, but is terrorized by an inhuman howl that emerges from the cave, similar to the howling of a wolf (456). Fate reserves the heroic rescue for one man: the camp watchman (el vigilante in the original text), who happens to be Arturo Belano.25 This episode is based on Pío Baroja’s short story “La sima.” Lendoiro narrates in 1992 from Rome, which in antiquity was the center of the Roman Empire, but the action takes place in Spain in Galicia. What is the relationship between these settings? The Maastricht Treaty, which founded the European Union, was signed in 1992.26 The European Union represents the economic, monetary, and legal unity of Europe. It is the new Roman Empire. Galicia was part of the Roman Empire. Now it is part of the European Union. Lendoiro represents the law, which is a theme of his narrative. The law of the European Union enters the narrative in the following way: the chasm represents the political real, a real that produces anxiety because it represents a dislocation of the existing sociopolitical order by the unknown.27 In this case, a wolf connects the real with the foundation of a new superstate by referring to the founding myth of Rome: it was founded by Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a she wolf. Badiou’s concept of the event is relevant here: the first time it occurs, an event is always unknown because no one knows it has occurred, or no one realizes the importance of the event. What turns it into an event is that it changes the world. For these reasons, the event belongs to the category of the real.

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In this case, the event is a legal one: the promulgation of Van Gend en Loos, which established that the law of the European Community could be imposed at a transnational level in that community. This case-law was promulgated by the European Court of Justice in 1963.28 As in “Labyrinth,” reference to Van Gend en Loos is found in Lendoiro’s narrative by means of an imperfect anagram. The letters that form the name of this law are found in the following names: Xosé, Lendoiro, vigilante, and Belano. The underlined letters (o, s, e, l, e, n, d, o, v, g, a, n, a) can be rearranged to form Van Gend en Loos. In other words, Belano’s adventure in the chasm commemorates the legal event of Van Gend en Loos—that resulted in a better Spain than the one portrayed in Baroja’s “La sima,” in which the child who falls into the chasm is not rescued by the superstitious shepherds. Belano’s adventure is a product of fate, something out of the ordinary, diabolical or supernatural, produced by nonhuman forces that propogate the effects of the event in Spain. None of the thirty-eight narrators of the second part of Bolaño’s novel have the combination of v and g in their names that is contained in vigilante and is required to produce the anagram in question. This is a way of signifying anagrammatically that fate reserved the adventure of the wolf’s cave for el vigilante. Lendoiro’s association with the imperfect anagram that refers to Van Gend en Loos is understandable in the sense that he represents the law; he and Belano were predestined to meet, as he implies at the scene of the wolf’s cave: “He [Belano] looked at me and smiled as if we’d met before” (456). Nevertheless, as a reactionary nationalist, Lendoiro is associated with the “old” laws of Franco’s Spain and does not understand that the howling of the wolf—which he hears, oneirically or otherwise, not just throughout Spain (470), but also in Rome from where he is narrating (473)—signifies a new Europe coming into being. Subsequently, Belano has a duel with Iñaki Echevarne, a fictional version of the literary critic Ignacio Echevarría. He is convinced Echevarne is going to write a hostile review of a novel he recently published, and this angers him enough to cause him to challenge Echevarne to a duel. He accepts the challenge and a duel with sabres take place. This seems to be a reversion to a lawlessness that contradicts identification with the law of the European Union, but the duel—fraught with danger—devolves into ritualized combat in which the participants—likened to “two stupid children”—take turns striking each other on the shoulder with the flat of the blade of their swords, and no one is injured (512). Clearly, this episode drives home the point that the kind of behavior indulged in by the duelists belongs to the childhood of the human race and is out of place in the European Union. As a result of an unhappy love affair, Belano goes to Africa as a freelance journalist, where he becomes involved in the First Liberian Civil War, a conflict that took place from 1989 to 1997. In Liberia, in an isolated

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town in the countryside surrounded by sharpshooters, he has a revealing conversation in the early-morning hours with a Spanish photographer named Emilio López Lobo. The conversation is overheard by the narrator, a journalist named Jacobo Urenda, who tries to piece together what the two men are talking about. Urenda is disconcerted by the different languages he hears spoken around him, including African languages, Portuguese, and Spanish, which seem “detestable” to him; the whispering is only “a vicarious way of preserving our identity for an uncertain length of time” (576). He is undergoing an identity crisis. Identity is created with language. Urenda detests language and identity. It is not necessarily a bad thing to lose one’s identity. Identity protects us; it gives us answers as to how we should proceed in life. But identity, a concept related to ideology, can also be harmful. If an ideology is too rigid, its discrepancy with reality can become too obvious and it needs to be changed. The first part of the conversation Urenda listens to is about people’s names and proper nouns. In other words, Belano and López Lobo are talking about language and identity. Afterward, Belano tells López Lobo that when he arrived in Africa he wanted to die. When López Lobo asks him why, Urenda is barely able to hear him say that he had lost something. Of course, what he lost is his identity, a conclusion supported by the aforementioned commentary on language, identity, and names by the characters involved in this episode. For example, Urenda hears Belano say the following: “It was unforgivable to be called López Lobo, unforgivable to be called Belano. . . . We’re all afraid of going under” (577). At first Belano laughs about this loss, and he is possibly talking about an Andalusian woman he had a relationship with, a relationship that is described in the narrative of María Teresa Solsona Ribot, but López Lobo doesn’t laugh. He reacts as if it were something serious. Identity is something serious and funny at the same time. Belano laughs about his obsession with this woman, part of his identity, because he realizes that this obsession is ridiculous. Then López Lobo dominates the conversation and tells Belano that in his youth he was opposed to Franco, that he was happily married and had two sons. One of his sons, “a very smart boy,” became ill and died. López Lobo blames himself because he thinks he infected the boy with a communicable disease he picked up during his travels. After getting drunk he leaves his son’s ashes in a subway car in New York and his wife divorces him (580). This happened two months before meeting Belano in Africa. Ideologically, as is suggested by the surname Lobo (wolf), López Lobo is a son of the European Union: he is the wolf’s son, as is his son. But his son dies. The death of wolf’s son suggests that the ideology of the new Europe does not correspond to reality, that this reality does not fulfill the promise of ideology. In turn, as will be demonstrated, Belano’s loss is also an ideological loss: he loses faith in the ideology of the European Union.

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In light of Urenda’s narrative, it can be understood retroactively that Solsona Ribot’s narrative, which precedes it, is also about ideology. She was Belano’s roommate and friend before he left Spain. She wants Belano to dedicate himself to writing, to his son, and to forget about his Andalusian girlfriend. Her ideology, based on bodybuilding and social life (545–46), gives her all the answers to the problems of life. In a word, she is ideologically rigid. Belano tells her he is overwhelmed by her common sense (“tú sentido común me apabulla” in the original text).29 She and her bodybuilder friends represent an image of the Spanish working class in the decade before the popping of the housing bubble in Spain in 2008 and the socioeconomic crisis of the European Union that became evident that year. This image is characterized by an excess of confidence and blindness before the advent of the crisis. “Menos lobos”30 (fewer wolves) she says to Belano when he talks about his girlfriend, using an expression translated as “don’t give me that” (553), but that also foreshadows challenging times for the ideology of the wolf. Belano’s problems with his girlfriend are symptomatic of his ideological crisis. He wants to be a good lobo, that is to say, a writer and a father who is a productive member of Spanish society and the European Union, but he is in a precarious position between a divorced wife and a woman he loves but who rejects him: again the failure of the family is symptomatic of wider social problems in The Savage Detectives. When María Teresa advises Belano to forget about his girlfriend, she ignores, as Žižek has observed, that what sustains any ideology is the relationship with a libidinous element that produces pleasure, in this case something pertaining to the problematic relationship with the Andalusian.31 If that is eliminated, the ideology collapses. After visiting his girlfriend, Belano’s train trip to Catalonia foreshadows hard times for Spain: the Talgo, a high-velocity train, is on the point of derailing, an appropriate metaphor for the overheated Spanish real-estate market, the “bubble” that would pop in 2008. The train has to be stopped until a loose metal plate at the bottom of the train is repaired: after increasing from 1985 to 1991, housing prices were relatively stable between 1992 and 1996.32 Solsona Ribot’s narrative is dated 1995. After 1996, prices began to increase again.33 The price of housing is a subtext of Solsona Ribot’s narrative. She meets Belano because she needs to rent a room in her apartment (541). She offers to help him pay the rent when she senses he needs money (552). As Solsona Ribot states, The only passenger who got off the train and walked along the tracks . . . was Arturo himself. Maybe it was at that moment, as the ticket inspectors were looking for the plate or sheet coming loose from the underside of the train, that he started to go crazy and think about escape. (553)

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He senses imminent disaster. In Africa, Belano’s death wish, underscored by his decision to accompany López Lobo and a group of soldiers on a very risky incursion into enemy territory, can be understood in light of his ideological crisis. It should be pointed out that even though Belano has a death wish, he has been taking his medicine and is mentally and physically healthy (561). This contradiction can be explained in terms of the death drive, which, according to Freudian theory, is opposed to sexual or life instincts. But the opposition to the life instincts is not definitive: according to Lacan, the death drive is fundamentally the desire to destroy everything and begin again.34 In short, it is a version of life instincts. Thus, it is understandable that Belano does not really want to die. He wants to become someone else. The question of who that is is not fully answered by Bolaño’s novel. The message of the conclusion of the second and largest part of The Savage Detectives is acknowledgment of the vicissitudes of life: of openness to change and the necessity of letting go of outmoded ways of being. It ends in a loss that is a new beginning. NOTES 1. Sharae Deckard, “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 353, https://doi​.org​ /10​.1215​/00267929​-1631433. 2. Roberto Bolaño, “Déjenlo todo, nuevamente: Manifiesto infrarrealista,” in Nada utópico nos es ajeno: Manifiestos infrarrealistas, ed. tsunun (León, Guanajato, México: tsunum, 2013). 3. Montserrat Madariaga Caro, Bolaño infra 1975–1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes (Santiago, Chile: RIL, 2010), 66–67. 4. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 139. Text references are to pages of this edition. 5. Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1991), 12. 6. Ibid., 2, 13. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. Ibid., 25. 9. Ibid., 26–27. 10. Ibid., 26. 11. Ibid., 17. 12. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Mexico: Why a Few Are Rich and the People Poor (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2010), 147, 152, 159. 13. Ibid., 165–66; Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change During the Neoliberal Era,” Latin

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American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 60, 62, https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /1555434. 14. Ruiz, Mexico, 128–29. 15. Ibid., 132–38. 16. Raúl Rodríguez Freire, “Ulysses’s Last Voyage: Bolaño and the Allegorical Figuration of Hell,” in Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, ed. Ignacio López-Calvo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 98. 17. Ulises’s dissapearance—recounted in the narrative of Hugo Montero (349– 60)—takes place during a literary conference in Nicaragua in which he participates. Subsequently, Luscious Skin—a member of the visceral realists—relates that Ulises did not return to Mexico from Nicaragua because he was afraid of being assassinated (369). Two years later, Ulises returns to Mexico and describes a trip through Central America (387–88). 18. Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (New York: Vintage Español, 2010), 383. 19. Ibid., 382. 20. Ibid., 255. 21. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 13–14. 22. Ibid., 14. 23. Clara Moskowitz, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” Scientific American, April 7, 2016, https://www​.scientificamerican​.com​/article​/are​-we​-living​-in​ -a​-computer​-simulation/. 24. Ibid. 25. Roberto Bolaño worked summers as a night watchman in a Barcelona campground from 1978 to 1981. Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat, Understanding Roberto Bolaño (Columbia, South Carolina: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2016), 2. Arturo Belano is a night watchman at a Barcelona campground in the narrative of Mary Watson, which takes place in 1977 (253−69). Thus, it is reasonable to surmise that the episode of el vigilante—which is not set in Barcelona—takes place sometime after 1981, before Spain’s entry into the European Community in 1986. 26. Treaty on European Union, February 7, 1992, OJC 191, 29.7. 1992, https://eur​ -lex​.europa​.eu​/collection​/eu​-law​/treaties​/treaties​-founding​.html. 27. Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), 75. 28. Van Gend & Loos v. Netherlands Inland Revenue Administration, EUR-Lex, Case 26-62, (ECJ, 1963), https://eur​-lex​.europa​.eu​/homepage​.html. 29. Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, 523. 30. Ibid., 521. 31. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; repr., London: Verso, 1999), 124–25. 32. María Arrazola, José de Hevia, Desiderio Romero, and José Félix Sanz-Sanz, “Determinants of the Spanish Housing Market over Three Decades and Three Booms: Long Run Supply and Demand Elasticities,” Chair in Public Finance: Working Paper

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Series 2014.13, Victoria University of Wellington, September 2014, 24, http://hdl​ .handle​.net​/10063​/3604. 33. Ibid. 34. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992; paperback edition, 1997), 212.

Chapter 4

Amulet as a Posthuman Text

Amulet is a novel based on an expansion of Auxilio Lacouture’s narrative in The Savage Detectives. The real becomes a theme of Amulet early in the text when Auxilio thinks that the books and a vase in Don Pedro Garfía’s library conceal hell or one of its secret doors. She is afraid to put her hand in the vase because, as she puts it, “If it isn’t Hell in there, it’s nightmares, and all that is lost, all that causes pain and is better forgotten.”1 The main subject of this chapter is the content of this painful loss. Amulet creates the impression that there are forces in play manipulating the setting that are not natural and that are not under human control, as when Auxilio believes she is being followed by the shadow of death and notices “a breath of warm and slightly humid air that conjured up unstable geometries, solitudes, schizophrenia, and butchery” (67). There is a correlation between elements of the preceding and corresponding textual or contextual components. I contend that the unstable geometries correspond to something nonhuman that can cause change. The solitude corresponds to Auxilio’s isolation as a narrator who not only is located in a bathroom in the University of Mexico, but is also evocative of vast distances. The schizophrenia corresponds to a narrative that alternates realistic description with unrealistic inputs similar to hallucinations, such as the abovementioned geometries. The butchery corresponds to the Tlatelolco massacre of students by the Mexican military and police that took place on October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico. As a result of student protests, the Mexican Army occupied the National Autonomous University of Mexico in September 1968. This occupation is described from the perspective of Auxilio, who hides in a bathroom stall in the university to avoid being detected by soldiers.2 At this point, the narrative creates an impression that she is in a virtual reality by describing a divergence 59

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in time and incorporating geometric imagery related to the unstable geometries previously mentioned: A special kind of silence prevailed . . . as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously. . . . And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and . . . I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin. (30)

Time running in different directions simultaneously bears a relationship to the concept—well known in science fiction—of singularity, conceptualized by Vernor Vinge in an influential paper as an event that divides human history into what came before and an unforeseeable future determined by the exponential acceleration of artificial intelligence.3 In spite of the idea that the postsingularity future is unforeseeable, there are many writers “who have made constructions of the post-Singularity narrative one of the most noteworthy features of contemporary sf.”4 In Amulet, the before-and-after event is triggered by an item that results in divergent narratives—alternate worlds. In this case an alternate world could be one in which Auxilio is detected by the soldier looking for “subversives.” The item that correlates with divergent narratives is the rhombus, a quadrilateral whose four sides all have the same length. Rhombi can form a Penrose tiling, a tiling generated by a set of tiles arranged in a nonperiodic manner. “A tiling is created when a collection of plane figures (tiles) fills a plane such that no gaps occur between the tiles and no two tiles overlap each other. Tilings can be either periodic or nonperiodic.”5 Tilings within a nonperiodic tiling cannot be shifted without rotation to a new location in the tiling and produce a tiling symmetrical to the tiling in which they originated.6 Thus, this type of tiling can be characterized by repetition, associated with rotational symmetry, and difference, associated with lack of translational symmetry. At least two different rhombi are necessary to form a tiling of this type. “Tessellations [tilings] can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries.”7 This can be done by means of a computer program where combinations of tiles within the nonperiodic tiling correspond to alternate realities. Another way to conceptualize this is to regard different combinations of tiles within the mosaic as combinations of zero and one, the numbers that are the basis of the binary code. Virtuality was defined as the “cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated

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by information patterns.”8 There is no doubt that this perception is at play in several of Bolaño’s texts, particularly in Amulet—for example, when Auxilio considers the wind of Mexico City to be replete with geometrically shaped holes (129)—and in 2666, where one of the principal characters—Klaus Haas—is in the business of selling computers. “Mutation” is the term N. Katherine Hayles uses to designate the event where an information system evolves in a new direction. For Hayles, mutation “names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction.”9 Auxilio Lacouture experiences this new direction as a birth: “The birth was over,” she narrates, after the soldier leaves the bathroom without detecting her (31).​ In what follows, there is the sense that her reality is the result of a program run on a cosmic computer. Her enclosure in a bathroom for thirteen days is a metaphor for the self as an autopoietic system in a posthuman setting. The term “autopoiesis” was coined by the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Hayles quotes their definition of that term: “It is the circularity of its organization that makes a living system a unit of interactions, and it is this circularity that it must maintain in order to remain a living system and to retain its identity through different interactions.”10 Hayles explains that “each living system thus constructs its environment through the ‘domain of interactions’ made possible by its autopoietic organization. What lies outside that domain does not exist for that system.”11 This is all true in relation to Auxilio—she is alive, and while she is in the bathroom, what lies outside of the bathroom does not exist for her in terms of the way she interacts with it

Figure 4.1  A Penrose Tiling. Inductiveload, “File: Penrose Tiling (Rhombi).svg,” Wikimedia Commons, accessed December 14, 2021, https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​.php​ ?curid​=5839079.

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inside the bathroom. Nevertheless, if she is “alive,” it is not in the biological sense of the word, but rather as a component of a computer simulation, since her existential parameters are determined by that simulation (i.e., she exists as “a program on someone else’s hard drive”). Auxilio spends much of her time in the bathroom thinking about the past and the future. The images associated with these thoughts emerge from the lake that is associated with the aforementioned rhombus and forms a conduit between the autopoietic self and the virtual environment. The form of time that emerges from this interaction is characterized by discontinuity and dislocation: “The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976” (32). Even though she never leaves the bathroom, she is virtually transported in time and space, returning periodically to the baseline year of 1968. She is aware that she is in two times at once: “I started thinking about the teeth I had lost, although at the time, in September 1968, I still had all my teeth, which is odd, to say the least, even on reflection” (32–33). At times she is disoriented by the passage of time: “And once again I don’t know if I’m in 1968 or 1974 or 1980. . . . I know that time and not, for example, space, is making something happen” (127). The arrangement of time, out of Auxilio’s control, is an input to the autopoietic system from a computer program that can rearrange linear time into nonchronologically ordered sequences. The interface with an external force is suggested in an episode in which Auxilio sees movie images through an opening in the wall of the bathroom in which she remains for most of Amulet. The arrangement of time does not seem to follow a discernible pattern, other than the return to 1968. Within temporal sequences reality is sometimes rearranged, as in Time out of Joint, a Philip K. Dick novel where a character reaches for a light cord that does not exist and wonders why he remembers a light cord when what he sees is a light switch12: “Sometimes, thinking back, I can see a big thunderstorm moving in from the north toward the center of Mexico City, but my memory tells me that there was no thunderstorm that night, although the high Mexican sky did descend a little” (101). In Amulet, there is a sense of impending doom that is communicated by means of abnormal noises and nature imagery. Auxilio is aware of something odd as she has coffee in a café with Arturo Belano and some friends, “a sort of noise, wind or breath, blowing up through the foundations of the café at irregular intervals” (56), which she considers be a harbinger of collective catastrophe (56). This sense of doom is connected with a struggle between good and evil, which are seen by Auxilio as contradictory forces present within the subject: The conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is

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bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting against the Enlightenment since the beginning of time. (108–09)

“The irrational stain” refers to Schelling’s ground in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom as the particularity that combines with the “ideal principle of light” in the subject.13 For Schelling, human freedom includes the capacity to choose whether to subordinate particularity (self-interest) to universality or not, in other words, the capacity to do evil.14 It is precisely this freedom of choice that is in question in Amulet. If the perspective is restricted to the individual level, for example, to Auxilio, it is clear that she is not malignant; she is generous and funny. Nevertheless, in the aggregate—that is, on the sociopolitical level, Amulet, produces the impression of a geographically restricted, permanent subordination of universality to particularity—that is, of the triumph of evil. None of Auxilio’s time travel is to a place inconsistent with this subordination, and she always returns to 1968. The message—a pessimistic one—is that no matter what anyone does, in Latin America it is always 1968, the year of Tlatelolco (115). In Bolaño’s text, Tlatelolco functions as a metonym for the triumph of the Right over the Left, including the coup that deposed Salavador Allende in Chile in 1973. That Bolaño was not impressed with the actually existing Latin American Left of his time is suggested by this quotation from his essay “The Myths of Cthulhu” that conflates right- and left-wing political leaders: God bless Fidel Castro’s concentration camps for homosexuals and the twenty thousand who disappeared in Argentina and Videla’s puzzled mug and Perón’s old macho grin projected into the sky and the child-killers of Rio de Janeiro and Hugo Chavez’s Spanish which smells of shit and is shit, since I created it.15

A loss of faith in the Left is a theme of Amulet, embodied in the character of Arturo Belano, a changed man since his return from Chile after the 1973 coup; Auxilio notices that he has become less talkative and less concerned about the impression he makes on others (76–77). The change that took place in Belano is attributable to his abandonment of communist ideology. The theme of loss of faith is announced early in Amulet with a parody of Miguel de Unamuno’s Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, when Auxilio describes Pedro Garfias, a professor of literature from Spain. She compares his eyes to sad and tranquil mountain lakes (11), a description comparable to the following sentences from Unamuno’s novel, whose protagonist struggles with a loss of religious faith: “Everything has been about Don Manuel: Don Manuel, with the lake, and the mountain”;16 “I saw a kind of deep sadness in his eyes that were as blue as the water of the lake.”17 The loss of faith in a political solution to Latin America’s problems is underscored by the fact that, as

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previously noted, Auxilio never narrates from a place that, in the long run, gives much room for hope. Take—for example—her adventure with Arturo Belano in which he and Ernesto San Epifanio rescue Juan de Dios Montes from the King of the Rent Boys, a pimp who enslaves homosexual prostitutes. The King is one of a series of villains in Bolaño’s texts that exemplify characteristics of the post-patriarchal, postoedipal brother, as conceptualized in Juliet Flower MacCanell’s The Regime of the Brother. In Distant Star and The Savage Detectives, the coupling of the brother with a deficient father (Carlos Wieder and his father in the former, Alberto and Quim Font in the latter) signifies societal degeneration. In the case of Juan de Dios Montes, paternal deficiency is evident in his father’s lack of involvement in the crisis involving him. The King’s relationship to the brother is established in Juan’s first appearance in the text, when he is described as possibly being the King’s nephew (i.e., his brother’s son) (93). Throughout the episode of his rescue, the following underscore the lack of freedom of the actors—that is, that the unfolding action takes place within a virtual reality not completely under the subject’s control: (a) the King and the “chancellor of the kingdom” (the King’s accountant) talk and are understood by Belano and San Epifanio without moving their lips or making a sound (95); (b) Arturo, feeling dizzy, sits on “a chair that hadn’t been there before” (97). The story of Erigone, recounted to Auxilio by Carlos Coffeen Serpas, reintroduces and develops the theme of the brother (141). In Greek mythology, Erigone is the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. When Agamemnon, the king of Argos and Clytemnestra’s husband, returned from the Trojan War, he was murdered by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. They were murdered by Orestes in order to avenge the death of his father. Orestes impregnates his half-sister Erigone after the murders. He is encouraged by his sister, Electra, to kill Erigone, since she and Orestes will be the only surviving blood relatives of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. He plans to do so, but instead, he forces her to leave Argos. The relationship of these mythical figures to the theme of the brother is clear: Aegisthus is the weak/usurping father and Orestes is the brother who takes his place. He commits the crime of matricide and his relationship with his half-sister is incestuous. For the first of these infractions, he is pursued by the Furies, whose duty it is to punish any violation of the ties of family piety. His case is, however, more nuanced than that of the King of the Rent Boys: he avenged the death of his father. He leaves Argos, pursued by the Furies, eventually arriving in Athens, where he is tried and acquitted of his crime. Erigone and Orestes can only solve their problems by leaving the kingdom of Argos. In Bolaño’s text, Orestes speaks to his sister about the life he wants to lead, “wandering through Greece with his friend Pylades, becoming a legend. Hippies, with no ties to hold us, turning our lives into art” (143–44). This reads like a description of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima,

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who also left the “kingdom” (i.e., Mexico), in Belano’s case permanently. In The Savage Detectives, Belano has something in common with the brother: he is the leader of a literary gang financed through drug dealing. He leaves Mexico after murdering a pimp. As in Orestes’s case, there are extenuating circumstances. Auxilio has a recurring of vision of a valley that she decides must be the valley of death, since, as she puts it, “Death is the staff of Latin America and Latin America cannot walk without its staff” (75). In effect, her final vision is of a horde of young people, united in their “courage and generosity” walking cheerfully to their death as they fall into an abyss at the end of the valley (184). They represent members of Bolaño’s generation who perished in the counterrevolutionary violence of Latin America. The abyss is meant to recall the chasm that appears in the sea in the final moments of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, one of the first examples of science fiction;18 as she looks at the abyss, Auxilio thinks she is going crazy and wonders, “Is this the madness and the fear of Arthur Gordon Pym?” (180). Poe was influenced by John Cleves Symmes’s hollow-earth theory.19 In Poe’s text, the shrouded figure that appears by the chasm is probably a member of another civilization that lives inside the earth. The allusion to Poe’s text reinforces the impression that in Amulet, there are forces emanating from unknown sources—such as an extraterrestrial civilization—that affect the reality represented by the text. Amulet suggests that the only solution to the problems of Latin America is to leave Latin America. For where? A hint is provided when Auxilio wonders why the original inhabitants of America emigrated eastward rather than westward, since the east is “where night comes from” (54). Then she realizes that the east is “also where the sun comes from. It all depends on when the pilgrims set out on their march” (54). The next sentences are about Auxilio’s friend Elena, who is thinking of going to Italy. Another hint is provided when Auxilio sees a quetzal, a New World bird, and a sparrow, an Old World bird, perched on the same branch, just before she notices the abyss at the conclusion of the novel. She approaches the birds and looks at the young people walking toward their death. Then she looks for the birds: “They were not on the branch. I presumed that the birds were a symbol or an emblem” (183). The birds probably left for the same place as Arturo Belano: the Old World or Europe. NOTES 1. Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 9. Text references are to pages of this edition.

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2. The character of Auxilio LaCouture is based on Alcira Soust Scaffo, an Uruguayan teacher and poet who hid in a bathroom of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for fifteen days when it was occupied by the Mexican army in 1968. 3. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era,” (paper, Vision-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, OH, March 1993), https://edoras​.sdsu​.edu/​~vinge​/misc​/singularity​.html. 4. Brooks Landon, “That Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Plurality of Singularity,” Science Fiction Studies 39, no. 1 (March 2012): 5, https://www​.jstor​.org​ /stable​/10​.5621 /sciefictstud.39.1.0002. 5. Kyle Schultz, “Penrose Tilings,” (web page), accessed November 24, 2019, http://jwilson​.coe​.uga​.edu​/emat6680fa05​/schultz​/penrose​/penrose​_main​.html. 6. Niles Johnson, “Aperiodic Tilings,” (web page), accessed October 25, 2020, https://nilesjohnson​.net​/aperiodic​-tilings​.html. 7. Wei Chang, “Application of Tessellation in Architectural Geometry Design,” (paper, 4th International Conference on Energy Materials and Environment Engineering, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, April 2018), 1, https://doi​ .org​ /10​ .1051​ / e3sconf​/20183803015. 8. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 13–14. 9. Ibid., 33. 10. Ibid., 136; Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1980), 9. 11. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 137. 12. Phillip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012), 24, 26. 13. Saitya Brata Das, “Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed March 29, 2021, https://www​.iep​.utm​.edu​/ schellin/. 14. Ibid. 15. Roberto Bolaño, “The Myths of Cthulhu,” in The Insufferable Gaucho, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2010), 160. 16. Miguel de Unamuno, Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, trans. Armand F. Baker, website for Armand F. Baker, accessed April 26, 2021, 2, http://www​.armandfbaker​ .com​/translations /unamuno/san​_manuel​_bueno​_martir​​.pdf. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Edgar Allan Poe, chap. 25 in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838), https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/51060​/51060​-h​/51060​ -h​.htm. 19. Robert F. Almy, “J. N. Reynolds: A Brief Biography with Particular Reference to Poe and Symmes,” The Colophon 2, no. 2 (1937): 234–38, http://posner​.library​ .cmu​.edu​/Posner/.

Chapter 5

Transnational Allegory as a Prelude to Brexit

The opening pages of “The Part about the Critics”—the first of five interrelated texts that comprise 2666—are relatively lighthearted in tone. They present a realistic version of student life in Paris during the 1980s. Jean-Claude Pelletier, an impoverished graduate student of German literature, lives in a chambre de bonne and shares a filthy bathroom with fifteen others. This does not prevent the inhabitants of this garret from moving to better living quarters or graduating and getting on with their lives. The few that stay end up by “vegetating or slowly dying of revulsion.”1 A worse fate can be imagined. Pelletier is not overjoyed to be living in a garret, but he is sustained by the joy that he derives from his work as a student and his conviction that he will have a brilliant future as a professor of literature. By 1986, he is a professor of German in Paris who specializes in the study of Benno von Archimboldi, a fictional twentieth-century German novelist. In what follows, the reader is introduced to three other academics who specialize in Archimboldi: Manuel Espinoza (from Spain), Piero Morini (from Italy), and Liz Norton (from England). Pelletier becomes acquainted with them by attending European literary conferences on the topic of German literature. In a conference that takes place in Bremen in 1993, a polemic develops between two groups of critics, one of them consisting of Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, and Norton, and another of three German critics, on their divergent interpretations of Archimboldi. This polemic is described in terms of the language of war; Pelletier, Morini, and Espinoza are compared to Napoleon, and Norton is compared to Louis Desaix and Jean Lannes, two of Napoleon’s generals. The response of their German colleagues is likened to a counterattack (12). On the topic of the allegorical meaning of the relationship between the critics allied with Pelletier, David Kurnick is of the opinion that “more than representatives of their countries of origin, the ensemble of 67

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critics functions as an image of a federated Europe, where differences have become cultural inflections on a sturdier continental identity.”2 The allegorical meaning of the polemic is clear enough: Pelletier et al. represent a unified Europe against the forces of nationalism represented by the German critics; Archimboldi’s Germanness indexes not Europe’s historical demons but a distance from national chauvinism: hence, Espinoza affiliates to Archimboldi against the Iberian dogmatism of his peers in Madrid, who write about Baroja, Ortega y Gasset, or Cela; hence, also the Archimboldians’ major academic antagonists are the Teutonic team of “Schwarz, Borchmeyer, and Pohl.”3

The historical demons are not fully exorcized: the metaphor of the Napoleonic wars recalls an attempt to unify Europe whose most durable legal legacy was the adoption of the Napoleonic Code in most of the countries that formed part of the Continental System, but it is also reminiscent of the Nazi attempt to unify Europe during World War II. This contradiction sets in motion a train of thought that concludes with the European Union. The bellicose metaphor is a playful commentary on one of the greatest achievements of the second half of the twentieth century: the political, legal, and economic unification of much of Europe by peaceful means. Rather than being settled on the battlefield, the conflict between the representatives of European unification and national chauvinism is settled by intellectual jousting. In the remainder of “The Part about the Critics,” the positive image of Europe created in the opening pages of 2666 and the subsequent allegory of European unification is threatened by forces that manifest themselves in dreams, allegorically, or by means of fantastic textual elements. The first example of fantasy occurs when, in the midst of a passage describing Liz Norton’s reaction to one of Archimboldi’s novels, the narrator compares the sky above a quadrangle to a robot/god’s grimace (9). This is followed by a description of an incomprehensible conversation—likened to a crystallized spider web—that seems to be taking place between the grass and the soil of the quadrangle (9). What is the relationship between the realism used to introduce the protagonists of “The Part about the Critics” and the panpsychic interregnum described above? There is something ominous about the spider web and the robot/god, as if the latter were a predator ready to consume something caught in its web. The conversation between the grass and the soil is indicative of a panpsychic mental state in the act of processing the information provided by the robot/god in order to create a web. Norton reacts to Archimboldi’s novel by running, a physical act that symbolizes freedom in the context of a web with the potential to end that freedom, a potential that can only be actualized by something external to the causal determinism

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corresponding to the realism of the opening of 2666. In short, fantasy is indicative of a causal determinism not based on the epistemological principle of the Enlightenment that “objects must conform themselves to human knowledge rather than knowledge to objects.”4 In 2666, the distinction between animate and inanimate matter is subverted, and the range of objects that affect reality is extended beyond the domain of possible experience to include speculative objects of thought, such as a godlike robot. The fragility of the crystallized web indicates that the menace of this powerful being will not be actualized yet. Before the conclusion of the first part of 2666, this menace is associated with neoliberalism, but it cannot be reduced to an economic system, given that the harmful effects associated with this system can be magnified by the destructive capacity of an agent that is external to the system. The web, crystallized or not, is below the threshold of consciousness. Were its effects to be actualized, they would take the form of some type of distortion of reality, such as occur in the fourth part of 2666, “The Part about the Crimes,” a narrative based on police investigations of femicides in Ciudad Juárez (Santa Teresa in 2666) between 1993 and 1997.5 Discussing the murder of Margarita López Santos, a maquiladora worker who met with a terrible fate walking home from work, the narrator speculates that something went permanently wrong during her walk (375). The Spanish version of the text has the verb torcerse, which translates as to twist or turn, and is evidently connected to causality: “En alguna parte del trayecto algo ocurrió o algo se torció [my emphasis] para siempre.”6 Assuming the second possibility is a transformation of reality by means of the supplemental causality described above, the mechanism whereby this type of transformation takes place is suggested in a conversation between Harry Magaña, an American sheriff in Santa Teresa investigating the murder of Lucy Anne Sander, and an associate named Demetrio Águila, who thinks that there are objects, animals, and people that apparently want to disappear, but is convinced that God will not permit that to occur (421). However, these types of disappearances are permitted in “The Part about the Crimes,” given that within it there are people, such as Mónica Durán Reyes—a secondary school student—who both seem to want to and do disappear. Her friends told the police they had seen her willingly enter a car. Instead of screaming, she waved goodbye to one of them (412). The Spanish version of the text is useful for understanding what happened to Mónica: En la investigación posterior algunas amigas dijeron haber visto subir a Mónica a un coche negro, con las ventanas ahumadas, tal vez un Peregrino o un MasterRoad o un Silencioso. No daba la impresión de estar siendo forzada. Tuvo tiempo para gritar, pero no gritó. Incluso, al divisar a una de sus amigas, se despidió de ella haciéndole una señal con la mano. No parecía asustada.7

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In the first sentence of the preceding quotation, the clause “dijeron haber visto subir a Mónica a un coche negro” is unusual because of its word order. Mónica is the direct object of haber visto and the subject of subir. However, because the subject follows rather than precedes the verb, this creates the impression of a missing subject—that is, an action that no (known) subject corresponds to. What her friends witnessed was an effect produced by an absent cause. A cause with a real effect: the death of Mónica. There is also a stone that disappears and reappears in a different place. Epifanio Galindo notices this stone while investigating the murder of Estrella Ruiz Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old maquiladora worker. Galindo, a policeman, interviews Sandoval’s friend, Rosa María Medina, who is sitting on a stone that is located in a garden in front of her house. Galindo is intrigued by the shape of the stone, which resembles a chair without a back. Rosa tells him that her father found it Casas Negras and carried it back to his house (468). (“Le preguntó a la muchacha dónde había sido encontrada esa piedra. La encontró mi papá, dijo Rosa María Medina, en Casas Negras, y se la trajo para acá a puro pulso.”)8 The use of the passive voice in the first sentence of the Spanish version of the text quoted above establishes the stone as a subject. The subject becomes human in the second sentence, but the last clause of the second sentence could also be written without the reflexive pronoun se. In the context of the preceding sentence, the use of a third-person pronominal verb subliminally suggests that the stone continues to be the subject—that is, that it is responsible for its own disappearance and movement. This impression is heightened when Medina states that her father fell in love with the stone (469), suggesting a reciprocal interaction between both. This brings to mind Lacan’s maxim: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”9 The phrase “a puro pulso” can be translated as “by one’s own effort,” but the word pulso (“pulse”) suggests the repetitive circling of being around lack that is central to the Lacanian conception of drive, which strengthens the association of the stone with the Other, given that for Lacan, both desire and drive are structured by the relationship to the Other, the structure proper to a desire that thus proves to model it at an unexpected depth—namely, the desire to have his desire recognised. This desire, in which it is literally verified that man’s desire is alienated in the other’s desire, in effect structures the drives discovered in analysis, in accordance with all the vicissitudes of the logical substitutions in their source, aim [direction], and object.10

If desire is alienated in the Other’s desire, to desire involves trying to ascertain the Other’s desire; Rosa’s father found the stone in Casas Negras, where Estrella’s body is subsequently found. After Rosa tells Galindo that her father fell in love with it, she tells him that he died (468–69). The juxtaposition of

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Estrella’s death with the stone in terms of the Lacanian structure of desire suggests that, in this case, the answer to the question of what the Other wants—the Lacanian “Che vuoi?”—is the subject’s death. The Other wants nothing so much as to destroy the subject, a desire confirmed by the death of Rosa’s father subsequent to finding the stone, and finally, by her friend’s death in proximity to the place where the stone was found. In “The Part about the Crimes,” the menacing potential symbolized by the crystallized web in “The Part about the Critics” becomes a reality. My contention is that this potential is unleashed in those places most closely associated with neoliberalism in 2666: Santa Teresa and the United States. They function as a space-time continuum where a fantastic type of causality is in effect in which perceptible causes do not quite account for effects. Between cause and effect something else intervenes, producing what seems to be an incoherent reality. In “The Part about the Critics,” Europe is threatened by neoliberalism, nevertheless, naturalistic causality prevails, and Europe remains within the confines of historical continuity that can be analyzed in terms of this causality.11 A series of phone calls between the protagonists of “The Part about the Critics” provides a good example of this type of causality. One critic calls another and inquires about Morini’s health. The recipient of this information calls another critic, who in turn calls Morini (a paraplegic) and inquires about his health. The phone calls are repeated in a continuous loop. As well as talking about Morini, the critics make small talk about work, the weather, cinema, and Archimboldi’s novels. As the calls progress, the conversations becomes more recondite: the causal link leads to an engagement with textuality described as a “reconquest of the verbal and physical territoriality in the final pages in Bitzius [a novel by Archimboldi]” that is equated with “talking about film or problems of the German department or . . . clouds”—in other words, talking about reality (14–15). The reconquest of territoriality that is the attachment of the subject to its domain grows out of a relationship between cause and effect mediated by the agency of the subject. Within this causal determinism, there is no room for panpsychic manifestations of causality of the type that come into play in the murder of Estrella Ruiz Sandoval. In this sense, the relationship of the subject to the world can be categorized in terms of a relationship between animate and inanimate entities no different than that described by Proust in Remembrance of Things Past: Certain minds which are fond of mystery maintain that objects retain something from the eyes that have gazed upon them, that monuments and pictures are visible to us only through the perceptible veil woven for them by the love and contemplation of many worshippers throughout the centuries. This fantasy would become true if they would transfer it into the field of the only reality that exists for each of us, our own sensitiveness to impressions.12

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The obverse of ascertaining the Other’s desire is the creation of self-conscious desire. Proust rejects the notion that inanimate objects have self-consciousness, and thus he rejects the notion that they can have self-conscious desire. For Proust’s narrator, “Something we looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with the look we cast upon it, all the images it conveyed to us at that time.”13 The subject bases his or her relationship to material objects on the recollection of memories connected to them. Other than serving as a catalyst for these memories, these objects play a passive role in this relationship. Nevertheless, in 2666, if material objects seem to be inanimate, that is because their animistic potential is curtailed and imperceptible to the subject, as in the conversation between the grass and the soil previously referred to. The universe of 2666 is similar to Horselover Fat’s panpsychic conception of the universe in Phillip K. Dick’s VALIS, based on hylozoism—the doctrine that all matter has life: Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes: 1) Each object is independently alive. 2) Everything is one unitary entity; the universe is one thing, alive, with one mind. Fat had found a kind of middle ground. The universe consists of one vast irrational entity into which has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisticated mimicry; thereby as long as it cares to it remains—by us—undetected. It mimics objects and causal processes . . . not just objects but what the objects do.14

The middle ground referred to above—the “vast irrational entity into which has broken a high-order form of life”—is an accurate description of the universe that corresponds to 2666. The notion of a “middle ground” has a political resonance in relation to Bolaño’s text. The situation of each object being independently alive is analogous to the right-wing ideology of individual freedom and self-reliance, and that of the universe as a unitary entity with one mind, to the left-wing ideology of a state-controlled centrally planned economy. The middle ground corresponds to the situation of a capitalist economy subject to the regulatory intervention of a social-democratic state. In 2666, it is never stated that European social democracy is a superior form of sociopolitical organization. This can be inferred by what does not take place in “The Part about the Critics”: the destructive intervention of a higher-order life form as manifested in the fantastic type of causality that is in effect in “The Part about the Crimes.” In 2666, this intervention is correlated with purer forms of neoliberal capitalism of the types that are in effect in Santa Teresa and the United States. In a more religious time, this type of intervention would

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be categorized as divine wrath. What kind of god would punish women and children, who are the most notable victims in Santa Teresa, rather than the evildoers who commit the crimes against these victims? I will propose an answer to this question after a more comprehensive examination of 2666 that includes the final part of the text, “The Part about Artchimboldi.” Although not subject to the destructive forces unleashed in the Americas, Europe is threatened by them. In 2666, the point of entry for possible contamination by these forces in England. This can be mapped with some precision in Bolaño’s text by means of a close reading of textual components symptomatic of neoliberal savagery. The notion of savagery in a British context is introduced by Norton, who refers to her ex-husband as a monster who never takes action (40). He is allegorically representative of that segment of the British public with no interest in the ideals of a transnational European culture, a type of personality that comes more clearly into focus with the character of Alex Pritchard, Norton’s male companion, who makes philistine comments about German literature in the company of Norton and her academic friends, tries to start a fight with Espinoza, and calls him a Spanish fucker (67). The hostile reference to German literature in the context of a discussion on Archimboldi represents an affirmation of national chauvinism. For Pritchard, European unity, as represented by Norton and her companions, is something monstrous, and he advises Pelletier to beware of the Medusa (69). Pelletier thinks Pritchard identifies with Perseus, the mythological Greek hero who beheaded Medusa, a woman with snakes instead of hair, and he fears for Norton’s life (69–70). The snakes represent foreigners from the nations of the European Union and elsewhere, and Norton, as a representative of transnational ideology, is the Medusa who threatens England with their venomous presence. The association between snakes and foreigners occurs earlier in the text, in a passage dealing with a Spanish-speaking couple (observed by Espinoza, Norton, and Pelletier) who see a snake in Kensington Gardens (60). What is interesting about Pritchard’s xenophobia is that Norton describes him as a man of the Left with political ambitions who teaches in a secondary school with many students from immigrant families (70). He is a left-wing representative of xenophobia that in Britain cuts across the political spectrum and is rooted, according to Julian Vigo, in “its historical relationship with its colonial past.”15 Margaret Boe Birns has noted a connection between savage neoliberalism and episodes of “The Part about the Critics” dealing with Edwin Johns: And then there is the strange story of Edwin Johns, an English painter who cuts off his hand because, Morini assumes, “he believed in investments, the flow of capital, one has to play the game to win, that kind of thing.” This suggestion speaks to a neoliberal paradigm that will reverberate throughout the novel and especially find brutal expression in Santa Teresa.16

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Following the structural logic of 2666, a “Full Monty” implementation of neoliberalism in Britain would trigger a supplemental causality of the type in effect in the Americas. Johns is the originator of an artistic style known as “the new decadence or English animalism” (52). He becomes rich by selling his paintings at an exhibition. The centerpiece is a painting that has the mummified remains of his severed hand attached to it. From the British point of view, he symbolizes that point in the text where savagery is joined to capitalism bereft of the benefits of European Union membership opposed by the Conservative Party “in principle and practice—EU treaty guarantees of workers’ rights, environmental standards that British governments have consistently failed to meet, and EU consumer protection laws far stronger than any UK legislation.”17 That is a concise summary of the concrete implications of a capitalism that destroys more than it creates, like Johns who becomes insane and ends his life by falling into a chasm (150). Neoliberal ideology played a major role in the campaigns leading up to the Brexit referendum. According to John Weeks, “mainstream Remainers” (conservative and center-left) used neoliberal economic arguments about the benefits of free trade to promote European Union membership. His conclusion is that “a majority of British voters cast their ballots to leave because the pro-EU campaign consciously avoided the activities of the European Union that benefit the vast majority”—the “consumer, environmental and workplace protection” provided by EU treaties and laws.18 Bolaño died thirteen years before the referendum, and he could not have known about this political event. Nevertheless, “The Part about the Critics” deals with British xenophobia, nationalism, insularity, and Britain’s ambivalent relationship to Europe. These issues—evident long before the publication of 2666—set the stage for Brexit. Thirteen years is a short time in the life of a culture: “Europe” as associated with the EC/EU has arguably accounted for many of the demons in British mythology about the outside world in the past 70 years and has certainly carried a load of negative connotations. In some political quarters and increasingly so in recent decades, projections of the EU as the hostile other are regarded as a principal means of buttressing the British state.19

According to Zack Beauchamp, The pro-Leave camp claimed that Britain needed to quit the EU to close its borders to more EU migrants, that the country had reached a “breaking point,” and that it needed to shut its doors. Pre- and post-election polling suggests that this was the pro-Leave argument that most resonated with British citizens, and was in large part responsible for Leave’s victory.

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Immigration has surged in the UK in recent years. The number of foreignborn people living in the UK has gone from 2.3 million in 1993 (when Britain joined the EU) to 8.2 million in 2014. This is a new thing for the UK. The surge was a result (in part but not in whole) of EU rules allowing citizens of EU countries to move and work freely in any other EU member country. Pro-Leave campaigners, and sympathetic observers in the media, argued that this produced a reasonable skepticism of immigration’s effects on the economy—and Brexit was the result. Yet there’s a problem with that theory: British hostility to immigrants long precedes the recent spate of mass immigration [my emphasis].20

To support his contention that British xenophobia is irrational, Beauchamp cites a chart produced by Oxford University’s Scott Blinder, based on polling data from 1964 to 2014, that shows that a majority of Britons believed there were too many immigrants in their country decades before mass migrations began, “even when there were too few to have appreciable effects on the British economy.”21 British attitudes to Europe and the European Union have been characterized by ambivalence. David Gowland writes, From an insular perspective, the idea of “Europe” as a parallel universe or separate entity finds expression in the view that Britain is alongside Europe only as a result of geographical accident and not because of any deep-seated affinity with mainland Europe. At root, the British historical experience in this frame is altogether different from that of continental Europe, notably in escaping foreign occupation for some 950 years and with borders settled for a longer period of time than any of its continental neighbors.22

Gowland provides the following example that is useful for understanding the contradictory British response to the European Union: In the summer of 1964, Con O’Neill, the British ambassador to the EC in Brussels, sent a despatch to the Foreign Office in which he observed that at one extreme the EC could be regarded as the most hopeful experiment in international relations embarked on for generations and one that Britain should be proud to join for both idealistic and interested reasons. At the other extreme, however, the EC could be regarded as constituting potentially, and already to some extent in fact, the kind of European structure against which Britain has repeatedly throughout its history gone to war. For those who take this view, O’Neill added, the EC has almost succeeded, by stealth, in achieving what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by force: a Europe united without Britain and therefore against her. The problem, as

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O’Neill concluded, was that there was some truth in both extremes and also in all possible views in between.23

I will argue in the remainder of this chapter that Liz Norton’s interaction with her colleagues allegorically signifies British resistance to domination by continental Europe even as it signifies a racially qualified identification with the European Other. The impending neoliberal threat is the subject of a dream in which Pelletier sees what is left of a gigantic statue, of which only a hand, a wrist, and part of a forearm are clearly discernible, emerge from the sea and position itself over a beach. Before seeing the statue, Pelletier feels dizzy and panics. He calls out Norton’s name, but she does not appear (78–79). All of the critics are attracted to Norton, but it is a troubled relationship, like that of the European Union with England before Brexit. Norton sleeps with Pelletier and Espinoza, but she is emotionally distant and has commitment issues (32, 33–34). In any case, they do not mind sharing her (123–24). At the conclusion of “The Part about the Critics,” she decides to live with Morini. In their role as representatives of a transnational allegory, the critics are not immune to the faults of human nature, which is highlighted when Espinoza and Pelletier beat up a Pakistani taxi driver who insulted them in the presence of Norton. Afterward, they are regretful. As Espinoza and Pelletier recapitulate their reasons for engaging in this act, the narrator mentions Medusa, reinforcing the previously established association between the latter and xenophobia (76). This episode underscores that human beings are capable of engaging in barbaric behavior in even the most highly developed societies. In contrast to the climate of impunity that prevails in Santa Teresa, the critics are afraid of being arrested and do their best to cover their tracks. The critics are determined to meet Archimboldi, who is notoriously elusive. They are informed by a Mexican student that he is in Mexico (99, 102). After speculating on why he would be there, they decide to go there and try to find him. Morini stays behind for reasons of health. The student who relates the story about Archimboldi—Rodolfo Alatorre—informs Morini that in Mexico City a German-speaking writer named Almendro, known as El Cerdo, received a call from Archimboldi, who had been detained by the police for an unspecified reason and needed his help. El Cerdo was able to extricate Archimboldi from this situation because of his status as a government functionary. He has a conversation in German with him in a bar and is sure that the reason no one insults him is that he has a gun and works for the government, a train of thought that he associates with Voltaire and working as an ambassador in Europe (101). El Cerdo establishes a causal link between his status as a government official and the way the bar’s patrons treat him. This link corresponds to an empirically based conception of causality of the

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type advocated by Voltaire in opposition to a “rationalist epistemology” that detaches “dialectical reasoning” from “brute empirical facts.”24 The causality Voltaire satirizes in Candide is a by-product of Leibnizian optimism (the doctrine of the best of all possible worlds) and is associated with the aforementioned rationalist epistemology. Within the textual logic of 2666, El Cerdo’s desire to be in Europe is understandable as the desire to be in a place where the reality of causal determinism corresponds to naturalistic causality. After arriving in Mexico City, Espinoza, Norton, and Pelletier head for Santa Teresa, where, based on Alatorre’s information, they think Archimboldi is located. At first, the critics feel they are in an environment that excludes their existence and whose “language” is unrecognizable to them (112). Heidegger’s ideas on the concept of “world” are useful here. For Heidegger, world is understood primarily in relation to Dasein (there being), an existential concept that pertains to human beings. In Being and Time he writes, “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.”25 World is understood “as that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live.’ . . . Here again there are different possibilities: ‘world’ may stand for the ‘public’ we-world, or one’s ‘own’ closest (domestic) environment.”26 According to Patrick Dove, “World refers not to a collection of objects and beings but to a structure of reference that logically precedes the entities that populate a world and brings them together, allowing them to be perceived (and act) as beings.”27 In 2666, the structure of reference referred to by Dove is imposed upon the subject. It determines the parameters and limitations of the subject’s existence within the world inhabited by the subject. An example is the structure of causality as it exists in 2666. There are two principal worlds in 2666: Europe and the Americas. In terms of worldhood, the division between Santa Teresa and the United States is illusory. In the European world, naturalistic causality prevails; in the American one, supplemental causality. A good example of the latter occurs during the critics’ first day in Santa Teresa, when they observe a group of tourists from the United States who are on the terrace of a hotel. As a Willy Nelson song is playing, one of them shouts, gets up, but surveys the street instead of dancing. There is no perceptible cause for him to behave as he does. Thus, Espinoza and Pelletier are puzzled and say that the tourists are crazy. For Norton, it is the latest in a series of logically unexplainable occurrences that have taken place before and after arriving in Mexico. The examples she mentions relating to Europe deal with Alatorre and an airport in Paris, and have to do with traveling to Mexico in search of Archimboldi. Thus, they are premonitions of being in Santa Teresa (113). During their first night in Santa Teresa, the critics have a series of dreams. Pelletier dreams about a bathroom. He noticed earlier that the toilet bowl was missing a semicircular chunk that seemed to have been hammered off, or

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removed by smashing someone’s head against the toilet (111). In his dream, Pelletier enters the bathroom and sees bloodstains on the floor. The bathtub and shower curtain are stained with excrement. He is more disgusted than frightened and wakes up (114). Espinoza dreams he is watching a scene unfold in a painting of the dessert on the equivalent of a big-screen television. He sees men riding horses in a very well-lit setting. Their movements are barely perceptible, as if they were from a different planet. He hears voices saying, among other things, “our culture . . . our freedom” (115). These are reminiscent of the ghostly voices in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. Norton dreams that she sees herself reflected in two mirrors, one in front of her and another one behind her. She is well dressed and ready to leave the room. Suddenly, she notices the woman reflected in the mirror is not her. She wonders where Espinoza and Pelletier are and thinks about Morini, but only sees an empty wheelchair. Norton is frightened, wants to leave, and looks around to see where the other woman is but does not see her. The mirror image reflects Norton’s gestures, but the facial expressions are different. Norton decides that the woman she is looking at is like her, but that she is dead even though she continues to move (115–16). When the dreams are interpreted in sequence, they provide information about Heideggerean characteristics of being in the world of Santa Teresa. Within the preexisting structure of reference corresponding to a degraded world characterized by criminality, the toilet bowl in Pelletier’s dream signifies a world that has “gone down the tubes” and that being in this world will negatively affect the destiny of its inhabitants. The most notorious crimes are the murders of young women, mostly maquiladora workers and lowerclass transients, murdered with impunity by killers who are rarely brought to justice. Birns has written about the sense of evil that pervades Santa Teresa, a city with a “hellish” taco joint, “sunsets that resemble a carnivorous flower and whose population of birds is largely black vultures.”28 The criminologist Albert Kessler, who investigates the femicides, concludes that the inhabitants of Santa Teresa should abandon the city and cross the border (267). In Espinoza’s dream, the signifiers our culture and our freedom refer to the collective and individual destinies of the inhabitants of the Santa Teresa world. The television screen introduces a technological element. The essence of Dasein “lies . . . in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own.”29 Within the limitations of the ontological parameters of a given world, each individual in this world has his or her own particular way of being. In 2666, whatever or whoever imposes these limitations uses technology to impose them. They originate from a source extrinsic to reality as perceived by the subject. Thus, they are converted into a transmittable structure of reference that is capable of affecting human beings without causing them to lose their minds. This accounts for the slowing down of time in the

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images perceived by Espinoza. The existential parameters of the Santa Teresa world are represented by voices: “Quickness, urgency, speed, agility. . . . The word freedom sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom” (115). These words are all applicable to effects produced by the implementation of a computer program that gives form to the “dead flesh” of the Santa Teresa world like roots giving form to a plant (115). The roots in question are “viral” roots that bring to mind a virtual reality infected with a computer virus. Freedom has a negative relation to the preexisting structure of reference of the frontier world in terms of referring to a fantastic causality that limits the agency of the subject. The mirror in front of Norton corresponds to the source of her imaginary identity. The one behind her corresponds to the source of her symbolic identity—that is, “the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love.”30 The difference between what she sees in the first mirror and what she is accustomed to seeing signifies an identity corresponding to being in Santa Teresa. The woman in the mirror is well dressed, but her hat is out of style, a relic of the 1950s. She has a swollen vein on her neck and changing facial gestures that alternate smiles with expressions of fear, despair, anxiety, impassivity, nervousness, resignation, “and then all the expressions of madness” (116). In the context of the preceding dreams, the swollen vein suggests the stress associated with violence. Considered in terms of Norton, high blood pressure and manic mood swings are attributable to a wardrobe malfunction; Norton is not eager to identify with this other, as she does not want to have a bad hat day: she rejects the other for reasons of style. Moreover, the Other(s) are not there to approve of her new identity. That is the meaning of the absence of her companions. She asks herself where they are and decides she has to escape. When she thinks about Morini, she sees an empty wheelchair in front of a forest that she recognizes as Hyde Park (116). She leaves Santa Teresa and, as previously mentioned, starts living with Morini. In reference to the love triangle between the critics, Oswaldo Zavala writes, “Pelletier is perplexed by Norton’s apparent coldness, while Espinoza, when Norton reveals that she is divorced, discovers that he simply does not know her.”31 To support his contentions, he quotes a passage that describes how depressed Espinoza becomes when Norton talks to him about menstrual cycles, the moon, and black-and-white horror movies (34). The passage referred to above takes place after Espinoza and Norton have sex. According to Zavala, this episode exemplifies certain aspects of Norton’s behavior in relation to Espinoza and Peletier: As in this episode, Norton’s actions often diverge from those of Pelletier and Espinoza. While they manifest more predictable virile emotions (jealousy,

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possessiveness, insecurity), Norton is much more open to ambiguity and to exploring aspects of her own subjectivity that she herself does not know.32

There is nothing particularly virile about jealousy, possessiveness, and insecurity. Men and women are equally capable of having these emotions. In the context of Norton’s postcoital conversation with Espinoza, resorting to ready-made topics, such as menstrual cycles, the moon, and black-and-white horror movies, reveals nothing about Norton’s subjectivity other than that she is emotionally distant. One arrow on the feminine side of Lacan’s graph of sexuation points to phi (the signifier of the desire of the Other),33 indicating, among other things, a willingness to be the phallus for the subject on the male side in a process designated as the “masquerade” by Lacan: It is in order to be the phallus—that is, the signifier of the Other’s desire—that a woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the person to whom her demand for love is addressed.34

The other arrow points to the barred Other, indicating receptivity to different ways of being that is sometimes necessary to be the phallus for a particular male subject. In Lacanian terms, Norton’s emotional distance indicates that she is resistant to being the phallus for Espinoza, that is to say, his body is not the locus of the signifier of her desire, but, in the end, what prevails in the representation of the relationship between the critics is the allegorical dimension of this relationship. Thus, the relationship between Espinoza and Norton cannot be satisfactorily understood without considering this dimension. Espinoza, who is a full professor and department chair, is farther along in his career than Norton, who has not finished her dissertation and has no reason to believe that she will become a department chair (13). Morini and Pelletier are also full professors (12). Pelletier chairs his department (13). Given the power differential between Norton and her colleagues, what the latter—particularly Pelletier and Espinoza—represent is the domination of England by continental Europe within the framework of the European Union, which she resists, even as, for the time being, she accepts transnational European unity. Judging from her reaction to the mirror image she sees in her dream, Norton is not very receptive to otherness. She identifies the big Other—as represented by Espinoza, Morini, and Pelletier—with what she is accustomed to: European culture. Espinoza and Pelletier are more receptive to their new environment than Norton and do not leave Mexico. Espinoza has no trepidation about identifying with the image he sees in the bathroom mirror: he thinks that his

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appearance is changing and that he looks like another person who is younger and more attractive (149). In Santa Teresa, Espinoza has an affair with Rebeca, a young woman who sells souvenir rugs and sarapes for a living. On a regular basis, he helps her and her brother set up their souvenir stand in a crafts market. He also visits her mother and is well received (147). It is evident that he is comfortable being in Mexico and interacting with Mexicans. In short, he treats Rebeca well and she enjoys his company. He does not decide to marry her, probably because of social differences. In any case, having an affair with someone does not create a moral obligation to marry that person. Pelletier does not seem to be as successful as Espinoza in adapting to life in Santa Teresa. For the most part, he stays in his hotel. He spends much of his time rereading Archimboldi’s novels. Nevertheless, he does not seem to be particularly unhappy. If “success” is measured in terms of which critic is “closest” to Archimboldi at the conclusion of the first part of 2666 (the critics never find him), the answer seems to be Pelletier. One day, after knocking on the door of his hotel room and receiving no response, Espinoza and a receptionist finds him lying in bed. Fearing the worst, Espinoza awakens him. Pelletier recounts a dream about going on vacation to the Greek islands and meeting a boy who spends the whole day diving in water that is “alive” (155). Pelletier’s dream refers to Archimboldi’s stay in the Greek islands after World War II and to the beginning of “The Part about Archimboldi,” in which Hans Reiter (Archimboldi’s name of birth) spends time freediving in northern Germany. He is fascinated by seaweed and has a spiritual connection with these organisms. At birth, he resembles a strand of seaweed (639). The identification of animate being with seaweed also takes place in a science fiction novel written by Efraim Iavanov. Reiter learns about this writer by reading the papers of Boris Ansky. He finds them in the Russian village of Kostekino while serving as a soldier in the German army during World War II. One of the characters in Ivanov’s novel is an extraterrestrial who also resembles a strand of seaweed (718). Reiter’s attraction to seaweed and his physical resemblance to these organisms suggests that there is something extraterrestrial about him. The specific nature of his connection to the extraterrestrial will be considered in chapter 9. What is important in terms of Pelletier is that his dream has to do with a theme that is essential in understanding Reiter: his childhood fascination with the sea as a place of panpsychic manifestations. After she leaves Mexico, Norton communicates with her colleagues by e-mail. In a long letter, she recounts, among other things, how she had a crush on a student named James Crawford while she was in primary school (142). This contrasts with Espinoza’s love affair with a Mexican woman and underscores what is suggested by Norton’s dream: she is more comfortable interacting with Europeans, preferably Anglo Saxons, as is suggested in another dream Norton had in Santa Teresa, in which she dreams about an

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English oak tree that she picks up and moves around (131). After her troubling dream in the hotel, where the big Other that validates her transnational European identity is “missing in action,” Norton is in the process of being interpellated by a nationalistic ideology based on the master-signifier of an English oak tree. She is unperturbed by the racist roots of this tree, which are like the “snakes or the locks of a Gorgon,” previously associated with xenophobia (131). For Norton, it is only a question of where to plant the tree—that is, when and where to stabilize her emerging identity. In this connection, it should be noted that James suggests the Court of St. James, the royal court for the sovereign of the United Kingdom. A notable reference to English culture occurs in Norton’s mirror dream, when she thinks about Morini and sees his wheelchair and Hyde Park (116). It takes a few minutes to walk from Hyde Park to Buckingham Palace, the British royal palace. This reinforces Norton’s connection to national allegory. The wheelchair motif is developed in subsequent pages leading to the conclusion of the first part of 2666. It is evident that, for Norton, Morini is, above all, a wheelchair-bound person. She usually refers to him in connection to his wheelchair (124), or, on one occasion, as being motionless (126). In her letter to her colleagues, Norton writes that after joining Morini in Turin, she saw his shadow in a hallway and had a fleeting impression of seeing him standing up. Morini is aware of her fixation on the wheelchair. When he tells her that she must have been dreaming, she gets upset and insists that the wheelchair was looking at her while he was ignoring her. Morini tries to assuage her anger by telling her that he understands why she would be upset if he lied about his paralysis (155–56). In Lacanian terms, it seems that Norton wants to be the phallus for Morini as the signifier of his desire. In this context, his erect posture is a phallic symbol and indicative of desire, but Norton is frustrated by the fact that Morini has turned his back on her. Nevertheless, the preceding interpretation is beside the point. What Norton really wants is for Morini to be looking at her in the wheelchair, as if they were “a single person or a single being” (156). Morini lied because in the dream he is no longer defined by his wheelchair. The wheelchair is useless without Morini occupying it. This makes sense in terms of national allegory. England (Norton) prefers to relate to European nations on its own terms. After Norton meets Morini in Turin, one of the first things they do is talk for hours about social issues and politics. Although Norton considers these topics to be depressing, she is not depressed, because she is talking to a representative of a nation who is defined by a wheelchair, which in this context represents weakness: the opportunity for England to have its way on a variety of issues such as the resurgence of fascism in Europe, immigration, terrorism, among others (153). One should not attribute too much delicacy of feeling to a woman who has multiple orgasms as she witnesses the beating of a Pakistani taxi-cab driver (74).

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In her letter Norton recounts how the day after arriving in England she went for a walk and, without intending to do so, ended up in front of a gallery hosting an exhibition of the work of Edwin Johns (146). She enters the gallery and is convinced that everything she will see and feel afterward will have a decisive impact on her life. Her unreserved admiration for one of Johns’s landscapes—painted “as only the English can paint them”— is expressed in terms of national chauvinism, signifying that she no longer represents European unity. She is about to leave when she notices a poster of Johns’s “masterpiece”—the painting with his severed hand (148). Norton refers to Archimboldi only once in her letter (153). She seems to have lost interest in him and, by extension, in what he represents—the unification of Europe. Her admiration for Johns’s art is significant because his masterpiece signifies neoliberal savagery. It is valid to conclude that the allegorical message of this episode—and in a more general sense of “The Part about the Critics”—is that savage neoliberalism will enter Europe through England (Norton) and have a decisive impact on the lives of the people of that nation. NOTES 1. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 4. Text references are to pages of this edition. 2. David Kurnick, “Comparison, Allegory, and the Address of ‘Global’ Realism (The Part about Bolaño),” Boundary 2 42, no. 2 (May 2015): 120, https://doi​.org​/10​ .1215​/01903659​-2866611. 3. Ibid., 120. 4. William Bristow, “Enlightenment,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017), https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/fall2017​/entries​/enlightenment/. 5. The femicides of Ciudad Juárez began before 1993 and continued after 1997, but in “The Part about the Crimes” the narrative describes the remains murder victims found between 1993 and 1997. 6. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, 7th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 470. 7. Ibid., 516. 8. Ibid., 586–87. 9. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 235. 10. Jacques Lacan, “Variations on the Standard Treatment,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006), 285. 11. In this book, the term “naturalistic causality” refers to Kant’s conception of the connection between cause and effect resulting from the empirical perception of this connection as formed by the a priori concept of its logical necessity. Graciela

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De Pierris and Michael Friedman, “Kant and Hume on Causality,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018), https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/ win2018​/entries​/kant​-hume​-causality/. 12. Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, trans. Frederick A. Blossom (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1932), 212. 13. Ibid., 212. 14. Philip K. Dick, VALIS (Boston: Mariner Books, 2011), 72. 15. Julian Vigo, “Xenophobia in the UK,” Counterpunch, July 1, 2016, https:// www​.counterpunch​.org​/2016​/07​/01​/xenophobia​-in​-the​-uk/. Vigo’s article was published in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016. He considers the Labor Party’s lack of resistance to the anti-immigrant Leave campaign, and in particular, the Lexit [Left exit] rationale associated with that party, to be symptomatic of xenophobia: “Over the past week I have witnessed what resembles a quasijuvenile rebellion against ‘the system’ from some on the left who have zero sense of Realpolitik and a lesser sense of solidarity with people who are not British and not white. Make no mistake, this is not a victory of the people—this was merely an unspoken alliance with the right to piggyback a ‘victory’ while Lexiters taciturnly turned their backs on the mounting racism and xenophobia at home.” 16. Margaret Boe Birns, “666 Twinned and Told Twice: Roberto Bolaño’s Double Time Frame in 2666,” in Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, ed. Ignacio López-Calvo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 78. 17. John Weeks, “Brexit: Reflecting the EU’s Neoliberal Shift,” Prime, November 25, 2016, http://www​.primeeconomics​.org​/articles​/brexit​-reflecting​-the​-eus​-neoliberal​-shift. 18. Ibid. 19. David Gowland, Britain and the European Union (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2017), 25. 20. Zack Beauchamp, “Brexit was Fueled by Irrational Xenophobia, not Real Economic Grievances,” Vox, June 27, 2016, https://www​.vox​.com​/2016​/6​/25​ /12029786​/brexit​-uk​-eu​-immigration​-xenophobia. 21. Ibid.; Scott Blinder and Lindsay Richards, “UK Public Opinion toward Immigration: Overall Attitudes and Level of Concern,” The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, November 28, 2016, revised January 20, 2020, 3–4, https:// mig​rati​onob​servatory​.ox​.ac​.uk/. 22. Gowland, Britain and the European Union, 21. 23. Gowland, introduction to Britain and the European Union, 12. 24. J. B. Shank, “Voltaire,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015), https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/fall2015​/entries​/voltaire/. 25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 33. 26. Ibid., 93. 27. Patrick Dove, “Literature and the Secret of the World: 2666, Globalization, and Global War,” CR: The New Centennial Review 14, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 146, https://www​.jstor​.org /stab​le/10​.1432​1/crn​ewcen​trevi​.14.3​.0139​. 28. Birns, “666 Twinned and Told Twice,” 76.

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29. Heidegger, Being and Time, 32–33. 30. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; repr., London: Verso, 1999), 105. 31. Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015), 158 (my translation). 32. Ibid., 158 (my translation). 33. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998; paperback edition 1999), 78. Citations refer to the paperback edition. 34. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits, 583.

Chapter 6

The Part about Heidegger

“‘The Part about Amalfitano’ is a philosophical thriller.”1 I contend that it is, for the most part, a Heideggerian thriller. The main character is the literature professor Oscar Amalfitano. In “The Part about the Critics,” the dean of the School of Arts and Letters of the University of Santa Teresa assigns him the task of showing the visiting critics around the city. Dean Augusto Guerra informs the critics that Amalfitano is an expert on Archimboldi. Amalfitano was born in Chile and taught at a university in Barcelona before coming to Santa Teresa. Initially, Amalfitano makes a bad impression on the critics, who associate him with some kind of beast: A melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border. Espinoza and Pelletier saw him as a failed man, failed above all because he had lived and taught in Europe, who tried to protect himself with a veneer of toughness but whose innate gentleness gave him away in the act.2

The critics interact with Amalfitano in the first part of 2666, but readers are not informed about why he left his job in Barcelona until the second part of the novel, in which the critics do not make an appearance. We learn that his contract at the University of Barcelona expired and that Silvia Pérez, a professor he met in Buenos Aires who works at the University of Santa Teresa, invited him to join the faculty there (199). This account of why Amalfitano moved to Santa Teresa differs from the one provided in Los sinsabores del verdadero policia, a posthumously published novel by Bolaño, in which Amalfitano plays a leading role. In that text, Amalfitano 87

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has a sexual relationship with a male student and is forced to resign from his position as a professor. His reason for leaving the job is much clearer than in 2666, where the reader can only speculate as to why Amalfitano’s contract was not renewed. Although it is entertaining to read about a professor having an affair with a student, this is a demeaning episode that tarnishes the image of Amalfitano and distracts the reader’s attention from what Heidegger considered to be a universal characteristic of human existence. I am referring to the concept of “falling.” By leaving his life behind in Europe to go to Santa Teresa, Amalfitano evades his destiny as a teacher-scholar in the European world. It is a form of career suicide. By not specifying why Amalfitano lost his job, Bolaño makes his experience universal. Very few people have had the experience of being a professor while having an affair with a student, but losing a job is something everyone can relate to. To begin with, “the Other is proximally ‘there’ in terms of what ‘they’ have heard about him, what ‘they’ say in their talk about him, and what ‘they’ know about him.”3 For Heidegger, being with others (the “they”) is an essential characteristic of Dasein: “These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by Others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with” (164). An authentic relationship to Dasein involves coming to terms with “the ownmost possibility of its Being”—death (301). The relationship to the “they” tends to occlude this form of being inasmuch as “proximally and for the most part Dasein is absorbed in the ‘they’ and is mastered by it” (210). According to Heidegger, “averageness” is an existential characteristic of the “they”: “The ‘they’ maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it” (165). Initially, Amalfitano’s Dasein is defined in terms of what the “they,” as represented by Espinoza, Norton, and Pelletier, think about him. By their standards he is a failure because he is a professor at the University of Santa Teresa instead of a European university. Subsequently, their opinion of him improves when they learn that he speaks German and has translated Archimboldi. At a social gathering, they see him in the company of an attractive young man who is Dean Guerra’s son and assume he is having an affair with him. Subsequently, they change their opinion: They discovered, or believed they discovered, that the bond between the Chilean professor and the dean’s son was more socratic than homosexual, and this in some way put their minds at ease, since the three of them had grown inexplicably fond of Amalfitano. (130)

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What is significant about these episodes is the alternation between favorable and unfavorable opinions of Amalfitano that never quite gets resolved. The predominant mood is one of ambiguity. According to Heidegger, Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its “there.” . . . In these, and in the way they are interconnected in their Being, there is revealed a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the “falling” of Dasein. (219)

Curiosity and idle talk as everyday ways of being lead to ambiguity, in which “everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genuinely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though at bottom it is not; or else it does not look so, and yet at bottom it is” (217). In the case of Amalfitano, falling would be indicated by an identification of his Dasein within the range of possibilities that is the subject of speculation by the critics. There is an indication of how this takes place in the following interaction between the critics and Amalfitano in which he explains his conception of exile: 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 of as fate.” (117)

“They” (the critics) step into the void left by the abolition of destiny and come up with ways of being based on their opinion of the subject. If “everything becomes a habit,” that is because there is a void created by falling that is filled by Amalfitano’s identification with a way of being that conforms to the critics’ opinion of him as a provincial hack: someone who knows something about Archimboldi but not enough to threaten their status as experts. As Heidegger observed, falling is tranquilizing for all parties concerned because it is based on the supposition “that one is leading and sustaining a full and genuine ‘life’” in “which everything is in the best of order” (222). The critics feel affection for Amalfitano as long as he does not challenge their worldview. In a more general sense, he reaps the benefits of not rocking the boat and being accepted by the establishment of Santa Teresa—a level of material comfort that reinforces his identification with bourgeois property values, as is evident from the following description of his house:

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He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch. . . . He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers. . . . There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary. (163)

The preceding passage is preceded by the following: I don’t know what I’m doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitano said to himself after he’d been living in the city for a week. Don’t you? Don’t you really? he asked himself. Really I don’t, he said to himself, and that was as eloquent as he could be. (163)

The passage about the house that immediately follows partially answers his question; he has come to have a comfortable existence, a place to live. There is nothing wrong with the desire to have a roof over your head. In fact, to affirm otherwise is a form of bourgeois idealism, as Cesárea Tinajero implies, in The Savage Detectives, when Amadeo Salvatierra asks her what she is going to do in the “cultural wasteland” of Sonora after having lived in Mexico City as the leader of the visceral realists: Do you have relatives in Sonora? I said. No, I don’t think so, she said. So what will you do then? I said. Look for a job and a place to live, said Cesárea. And is that all? I said. Is that all fate has in store for you? . . . And Cesárea gave me a look, a brief little sideways glance, and said that the search for a place to live and a place to work was the common fate of all mankind. Deep down you’re a reactionary, Amadeo, she said.4

Cesárea and Amalfitano have different reasons for leaving the cultural centers they lived in. In Cesárea’s case, the reason is disenchantment with the reality of the modernist project. In Amalfitano’s, it is the loss of a job. What both situations have in common is the universal need for food and shelter, which, in Amalfitano’s case, indicates that his experience, the experience of falling, is connected to fear resulting from an unstable existential situation in which it is not clear how basic needs for food and shelter can be fulfilled. Fundamentally, this is the fear of death: “As falling, everyday Being-towardsdeath is a constant fleeing in the face of death” (298). For Heidegger, an authentic relationship to Dasein involves the subject fulfilling his or her “potentiality-for-Being” (347). It is clear that in this regard, the sine qua non of authenticity is the most self-fulfilling relationship to a project possible for the subject within a “Situation” (346–47) corresponding to the Dasein of the subject, whether this project be composing symphonies or

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working on an assembly line.5 This relationship takes place within a temporal framework. If there is a self to be fulfilled, this concept of fulfillment implies the unity of past, present, and future; the “having-been” of the subject’s destiny pre-exists the subject and implies the future. The future, in turn, affects the present, given the subject’s being-in and awareness of Dasein (373–74). Fundamentally, for Heidegger, existential authenticity involves an awareness of death as “the end of Dasein”—that is, as “Dasein’s ownmost possibility— non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped” (303). This awareness should produce a healthy amount of anxiety and incite the subject to achieve his or her potential. For Heidegger anxiety and “freedom towards death” based on the acceptance of death are not incompatible (311). He distinguishes this anxiety from the fear of death characteristic of the “they” that results in the attempt to evade it. This form of being seeks tranquility by doing everything possible to avoid death, including avoiding the topic of death, securing employment, staying healthy, not working too hard, going on vacation, among others. In the process, this everyday Dasein disregards its potential for self-fulfillment. It should be evident that for the average person this is the default way of being. That is Heidegger’s point. Our natural tendency is to fall into an “inauthentic” existence based on the fear of death. An authentic relationship to Dasein means losing this fear even if it means jeopardizing one’s health.6 Although he never admits it, Amalfitano is concerned that he is too afraid of death. This is why after thinking about courage, he is described, by means of free indirect style, as reassuring himself about his valor: “And it was even possible that he wasn’t a coward” (198). Amalfitano is not as afraid for himself as he is for his daughter. It is not just a question of fearing for her life in a dangerous city. It is a more basic fear connected to her being with him and their troubled relationship with his former wife: “He had a daughter named Rosa who had always lived with him. Hard to believe, but true. Sometimes, at night, he remembered Rosa’s mother and sometimes he laughed and other times he felt like crying” (163–64). Lola, Rosa’s mother and Amalfitano’s wife in Spain, left him when Rosa was two years old. Rosa stayed with Amalfitano. After Lola leaves Amalfitano, she keeps him informed about her life by means of letters. The influence of Don Quijote is evident in this part of Bolaño’s text. Lola’s quest is to “liberate” a poet she loves from an insane asylum in Mondragón.7 Lola abandons Amalfitano and Rosa in order to engage in this project. Her partner is Inmaculada, who goes by the name of Imma. She is short, rarely has anything to say, and is just as insane as Lola. Her shortness of stature recalls Sancho Panza, as does her taciturnity, by way of contrasting with Sancho’s loquaciousness. The passage where Lola and Imma visit the poet in the asylum and Lola describes their escape plan to him and the life they will lead in Paris is reminiscent of those parts of the Quijote, such as the battle of the sheep (part

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2, chapter 18) and the episode of the enchanted lake (part 4, chapter 50), that combine elaborate fantasy with an accumulation of detail to humorous effect (172). Lola is too authentic. She represents a parody of an authentic relationship to Dasein. Her fearlessness in the face of death is highlighted when she makes love to Larrazábal in a cemetery (175). He picks her up while she is hitchhiking. His fetish is to make love in cemeteries. Lola progresses from making love in a cemetery to sleeping in one when she is evicted from the room she is staying in because of her inability to pay the rent. She finds an empty cemetery niche to sleep in (176). Lola is totally focused on removing the poet from the asylum and living with him, even though he is not interested in her. She does not let mundane considerations about money, food, and shelter interfere with her uncompromising dedication to her project. This is what Amalfitano finds most threatening about her and why he is concerned that she might influence her daughter: “Madness really is contagious. . . . It was in these words, years before, in a letter with no postmark, that Lola had told Amalfitano about her chance encounter with Larrazábal” (177). Amalfitano is concerned that Rosa’s well-being could be threatened by insanity: For five years, Amalfitano had no news of Lola. One afternoon, when he was at the playground with his daughter, he saw a woman leaning against the wooden fence that separated the playground from the rest of the park. He thought she looked like Imma and he followed her gaze and was relieved to discover that it was another child who had attracted her madwoman’s attention. (181)

For Amalfitano, Dasein is a practical matter, to be approached in terms of a cost-benefit analysis that will secure the optimum outcome for him and Rosa. Heidegger describes this utilitarian approach to Dasein in the following terms: “Everydayness takes Dasein as something ready-to-hand to be concerned with—that is, something that gets managed and reckoned up. ‘Life’ is a ‘business,’ whether or not it covers its costs” (336). The subject’s awareness of the compromises involved in this utilitarian approach to Dasein gives rise to guilt. In Amalfitano’s case this is manifested by a persistent selfquestioning as to what he is doing in Santa Teresa (163, 196) and a need to reassure himself that he is not a coward (198). For Heidegger, this feeling of guilt is the result of conscience and is associated with the phenomenon of the “call”: “If we analyze conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-guilty” (314). In “The Part about Amalfitano,” the Heidegerrian phenomenon of the call is humorously parodied in a series of conversations between Amalfitano and a disembodied voice. Initially, the voice assures him that it means no harm to

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him. Of course, he considers this voice to be uncanny and thinks he is going crazy (201–02). Before hearing this voice, Amalfitano spent time drawing diagrams that have to do with philosophical themes (192–94). These include geometrical shapes and the names of various philosophers. Previously, as is narrated in “The Part about the Critics,” he had hung a geometry book—Testamento geométrico by the Spanish poet Rafael Dieste—from a clothes line. He explains to his daughter that he has done this “to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate” (191); he is searching for overarching epistemological principles that can withstand the test of reality. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp had his sister hang a book outside of her apartment window in Paris. The narrator quotes a version of Calvin Tomkins’s description of this episode:8 Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages” (191). The reference to the wind portends the theme of panpsychism, which returns forcefully in the following passage that takes place as Amalfitano is sleeping: At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano’s shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter’s underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind. (202–03)

In this passage there is a manifestation of panpsychism: the wind that circulates through Santa Teresa learning what it can about the city and looking for things that might be useful to it. The juxtaposition of the causality of this intelligent being—manifested in its capacity to move objects—with the discovery of a murder victim, suggests that the range of this causality extends to the capacity to commit murder. The wind becomes the principal “suspect” in the murder of the adolescent. No matter how effective the investigative techniques of the police, or how honorable their intentions may be, there is no way they can apprehend the perpetrator of this crime, or even be aware of the identity of this perpetrator, other than as the subject of speculation. The Lacanian distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of

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the enunciation is useful here. The subjects of the enunciated in the first and second clauses of the long sentence quoted above are, respectively, the police and the wind, but the subject of the enunciation of the sentence is the wind as the perpetrator of a crime. The detailed description of the wind’s activities in the adverbial clause that begins with as if suggests that these activities are not contrary-to-fact embellishments of a neoliberal reality, but rather the reality itself. In reading 2666 as fantasy or science fiction, this exemplifies a general principal applicable to other textual components, such as the conversation between the robot and the grass in “The Part about the Critics”: in 2666 the seemingly fantastic is real. Even if it were possible for the police to arrest all of the criminals in Santa Teresa, the murders of women would continue. It is indeed a reality that is cursed. That is the message conveyed by Marco Antonio Guerra—Dean Guerra’s son—to Amalfitano. Guerra informs Amalfitano about the sociopolitical situation in Santa Teresa. He is of the opinion that the politicians do not know how to govern and thinks too many people are looking for work in the maquiladoras. He proposes burning a few of them down and using the army to impede the flow of people (215). Oswaldo Zavala provides a cogent summary of Luis Astorga’s analysis of the Mexican government’s loss of control of drug traffickers during the period of time of the femicides in Ciudad Juárez: As the sociologist Luis Astorga explains, the PRI presidential machine controlled entire generations of drug traffickers for seven decades. It was not a relationship of complicity or tolerance, but rather a total subordination of organized crime to political power. With the fall of the PRI in 2000, narcos ceased to be part of the official agenda of the federal government. And while Bolaño wrote his novel at the end of the 1990s, the country was already waking up to a deep crisis of governance with the fragmentation of political power and the weakening of the state that resulted in the consolidation of neoliberalism as the only structure acceptable to the government.9

From a historical point of view, this summary is correct, but in 2666 the etiology of violence in Santa Teresa cannot be reduced to a set of empirically materialistic causes. These are at play but should be understood within the context of another type of causality that ultimately determines the content of this reality. Marco Antonio Guerra expresses a despairing reaction to being immersed in this reality in the following passage that takes place during a dinner at the house of the rector of the University of Santa Teresa: At some point during the dinner Amalfitano thought he noticed a rather murky exchange of glances between the rector and his wife. In her eyes he glimpsed

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something that might have been hatred. At the same time, a sudden fear flitted as swiftly as a butterfly across the rector’s face. But Amalfitano noticed it and for a moment (the second flutter of wings) the rector’s fear nearly brushed his own skin. When he recovered and looked at the other dinner guests he realized that no one had noticed the slight shadow, like a hastily dug pit that gives off an alarming stench. But he was wrong. Young Marco Antonio Guerra had noticed. And he had also noticed that Amalfitano had noticed. Life is worthless, he said into Amalfitano’s ear when they went out into the garden. (220)

In addition to the wife’s hatred as cause and the husband’s fear as effect, something—connected to the simile of the pit—intervenes and amplifies the husband’s terror in what would otherwise be a conventional situation. It is as if he saw a monstrous butterfly behind his wife. The supplemental cause, whose effects are noticed by the husband, Amalfitano, and Guerra, deeply saddens Guerra, to the extent that he thinks life is worthless. His despair is understandable, as supplemental causality subverts the agency of the subject: it can affect the subject, but the subject cannot affect it or rationally explain it. Guerra fulfills the role of a one-man Greek chorus, providing Amalfitano and the reader with information they need to know in order to understand life in Santa Teresa. His interaction with Amalfitano forms the context within which the latter hears the voice we have described as the call of conscience, and he plays an essential role in determining Amalfitano’s response to this voice. The first time Amalfitano hears the voice he is frightened and procures a knife—presumably to defend himself—that he places next to a history of German and French philosophy from 1900 to 1930 (201). The reference is to Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926). The concept of the call of conscience is, of course, an integral part of that text. Given a geometry book hanging from a clothesline and a knife placed next to a history of continental philosophy, it is easy enough to affirm that Bolaño is lampooning Western philosophy, or has a critical intention toward it, except that as well as engaging in a parody of this heritage, he is deeply attracted to it. Many of the concepts that determine the content of the second part of 2666 are derived from Being and Time. The concept of supplemental causality, intertextually related to science fiction, can be related to Heidegger’s later work, in particular, the concept expressed by the aphorism “It gives time,”10 which is quoted in German (“Es gibt Zeit”) in the prologue to Testamento geométrico11 and in 2666 (189).12 In a previously quoted passage that describes the impression Amalfitano makes on the visiting critics, he is associated with a beast “that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border” (114). The association is ironic, given that, in a philosophical sense, it is Heidegger who swallows Amalfitano. The voice

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does several things in the process of talking to Amalfitano. It accuses him of being a homosexual, which he denies (208). In this way it encourages him to have the courage to come to terms with his sexuality. It encourages him to be self-reliant by pointing out that in life everything betrays us, including love and friendship. Only calm, in the opinion of the voice, is reliable. When Amalfitano challenges the voice by affirming that neither courage nor love for one’s own children betray us, he feels calm, and it becomes evident that for the voice, calm implies courage in the face of the uncanniness of life (208). In relating to Amalfitano, the voice uses two approaches: it does not chastise him for what he has in common with the “they,” but it urges him to go beyond this and fulfill his potential for an authentic relationship to Dasein. Lostness in the “they” is addressed when the voice suggests that he buy seeds and plants in order to cultivate his garden (209). Of course, the reference is to Candide, and it represents a preoccupation with one’s own needs characteristic of the “they.” The voice urges him to go beyond this shallow self-absorption when it affirms that he has not thought about whether his hand is really a hand: You teach Wittgenstein? said the voice. And have you asked yourself whether your hand is a hand? said the voice. I’ve asked myself, said Amalfitano. . . . And you’ve also thought about your daughter, said the voice, and about the murders committed daily in this city . . . but you haven’t thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand. That isn’t true, said Amalfitano, I have thought about it, I have. If you had thought about it, said the voice, you’d be dancing to the tune of a different piper. (209–10)

Amalfitano’s anxiety about his daughter represents a realistic acceptance of the notion that death “is possible at any moment” (Being, 302), but this is not enough for the voice, which is more interested in Amalfitano’s hand—that is, his creativity. The reference to Wittgenstein is appropriate, given that he criticized nominalists for “interpreting all words as names, and so . . . not really describing their use.”13 In the context of 2666, the link between hand and creativity is established in the first part of the text, in episodes dealing with Edwin Johns, the artist who cuts off his hand for money. The semantic content of hand also includes savage neoliberalism of the type that threatens England and is in effect in Santa Teresa. By taking this range of meanings into account, it becomes evident that the voice wants to know about Amalfitano’s situation in regards to a creative project—presumably involving writing— that goes beyond being preoccupied with his house and daughter and that has something to do with neoliberalism. This could be a minimalist description of 2666, which is not surprising, considering that, as Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat has observed, “There is something of Bolaño himself” in Amalfitano.14 He

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supports his contention by pointing out similarities between them, such as being Chilean men of letters who were arrested after the military coup and, at some time in their lives, marginalized immigrants. Bolaño spent much of his life as an obscure writer. Amalfitano was academically marginalized after he left Barcelona. As far as being ready to engage in a project as ambitious as 2666, Amalfitano is not there yet, which the voice recognizes when, despite his protestations to the effect that he has thought seriously about his hand, it replies that “if you had thought about it . . . you’d be dancing to the tune of a different piper.” As if to prove the validity of the voice’s negative appraisal, instead of trying to write something after communicating with the voice, Amalfitano devotes his spare time to reading a strange book entitled O’Higgins is Araucanian. This purported work of history, written by Lonko Kilapán and published in Santiago by Universitaria in 1978, makes extravagant claims about the Araucanians, such as that they communicated by telepathy (221), spoke a language closely linked to Greek (223), and that Bernardo O’Higgins, Chile’s independence hero, was the son of Ambrosio O’Higgins and an Araucanian woman instead of the illegitimate son of O’Higgins and Isabel Riquelme (225). The initial reaction of the reader is to question why, after receiving the call of conscience, Amalfitano is reading this weird little book, instead of trying to be all that he can be as a philosopher or a writer. One possible answer is that Amalfitano needs more death before getting into the right frame of mind to think about a creative project. Marco Antonio Guerra gives him what he needs in the form of a near-death experience. After suddenly emerging from the shadows and thoroughly frightening Amalfitano in an empty campus building, he and Guerra walk toward the light at the end of a dark hallway. This experience reminds Guerra of the stories of people who’d been in comas or declared clinically dead and who claimed to have seen a dark tunnel with a white or dazzling brightness at the end, and sometimes . . . even testified to the presence of loved ones who had passed away, who took their hands or soothed them. (219)

He asks Amalfitano if people who are on the verge of dying invent these visions or if they are real. Amalfitano, who is still recovering from the shock he experienced because of Guerra, displays little interest in what the latter is saying and says that he doesn’t know. Guerra responds that in his opinion the visions are not real: “People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath” (219). Guerra considers the visions in question to be hallucinatory manifestations of the “they’s” tranquilizing relationship to death. By his lack of interest in these visions, Amalfitano distinguishes himself from this

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cowardly horde. Of his bravery, there can be no question: despite the shock administered to his system by Guerra’s emergence from the shadows—a test of Amalfitano’s response to the danger of sudden death (which “is possible at any moment”)—he reacts with valor by slapping the impertinent young man twice (218). Having demonstrated bravery in the face of death, but at the same time retaining a prudent anxiety in the face of its inevitability, Amalfitano is in an ideal position—from the Heideggerian point of view—to devote himself to a creative project. His response is to continue reading Kilapán. This seems to be anticlimactic, but there is a difference between how he reads before and after his encounter with Guerra. Before this encounter Amalfitano was interested in what Kilapán’s book has to say about Chilean society, such as the attitude of complacency or pity on the part of Chilean historians when dealing with the topic of Bernardo O’Higgins’s illegitimate birth, or the acceptance of the abusive treatment of Indian women (217). Amalfitano reacts to Kilapán’s book with laughter and sorrow but does not include himself in the object of his criticism. After the encounter with Guerra, his critical interest in Kilapán’s text is unabated, but he does include himself in the reality represented by the text. This process of inclusion begins by speculating that Lonko Kilapán is a straw man for the real author of the book, who the narrator thinks could be a military man or a factotum working on his behalf. The narrator who, according to Ignacio Echevarría, is Arturo Belano,15 invokes Cortázar’s “active reader” as he describes what he considers to be a productive way to read Kilapán: “The active reader—the reader as envisioned by Cortázar— could begin his reading with a kick to the author’s testicles, viewing him from the start as a straw man” (224). The reference is to Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, where, in chapter 79, Morelli distinguishes between the active reader (“lector cómplice”) and the “female reader” (“lector-hembra”).16 Zavala has noted an apparent reference to this distinction in the following sentence from the first part of 266617: “For her [Norton], reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths, as Morini, Espinoza, and Pelletier believed it to be” (9). He explains the distinction between lector-hembra and lector cómplice in the following manner: “As is known, that distinction suggests that the ‘female reader’ behaves in a unidirectional, passive, and conventional way in relation to the literary text, while the ‘active reader’ interacts with the multidirectional and contingent experimentation of the avant-garde novel.”18 Without designating Norton as a “female reader” (that would be too sexist), Zavala affirms that her “intuitive” (Barthean?) approach to reading Archimboldi surpasses “the epistemological limits” of her (male) colleagues, who are clearly “active readers.”19 Nevertheless, “as the reading progresses,” it is Pelletier (and not Norton, as Zavala would have it, without offering any evidence)20 who is successful in

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observing (through the intuitive modality of a dream) one of the “the real referents active in the work of Archimboldi”21: the sea as a place of panpsychic manifestation (155). Judging from the results obtained by the critics in the first part of the novel, and Arturo Belano’s endorsement, the most productive way of reading in 2666 is to be an “active reader.” In the section of the text under consideration, the narrator casts a wide net. He goes from speculating that someone in the Chilean military or someone working for him could have written Kilapán’s text to speculating—by means of describing Amalfitano’s thoughts in free indirect style—that it could have been written by just about any literate Chilean, including Pinochet, several presidents of Chile elected after the coup, communists, neo-fascists, and even Patricio Lynch, a nineteenth-century Chilean naval hero (225). Eventually Kilapán’s prose is associated with a postmodern simulacrum of Chilean reality: The Atacama desert and cattle grazing, the Guggenheim Fellowships, the Socialist politicians praising the economic policy of the junta, the corners where pumpkin fritters were sold, the mote con huesillos, the ghost of the Berlin Wall rippling on motionless red flags, the domestic abuse, the good-hearted whores, the cheap housing, what in Chile they called grudge holding and Amalfitano called madness. (225)

This hodgepodge includes Amalfitano, Roberto Bolaño, and Arturo Belano. Amalfitano recognizes his inclusion when he realizes that his mother and Bernardo O’Higgins’s officially recognized mother share the last name Riquelme: “He was briefly startled. For five seconds, his hair stood on end. He tried to laugh but he couldn’t” (225). Roberto Bolaño and Arturo Belano are included because “there is something of Bolaño himself in Amalfitano” and Arturo Belano is an alter ego of Roberto Bolaño. The resentment that Amalfitano calls madness is due to being a product of a postmodern simulacrum of reality in which the logic of equivalence is in effect: “Not only did Lonko Kilapán’s prose encapsulate all of Chile’s styles, it also represented all of its political factions, from the conservatives to the Communists, from the new liberals to the old survivors of the MIR” (225). There is no historical development in this type of reality because there is no dialectical change. Contradiction cannot take place at the phenomenal level when there is no negativity and everything is equal to everything else. In this situation—the zero degree of historical materialism—supplemental causality completely replaces dialectical materialism, which is not quite the case in Santa Teresa. In 2666 these kinds of regions—outside of history and dominated by neoliberalism—are exemplified by the United States, as will be demonstrated in chapter 7. In Kilapán’s text, the telepathic power of the Araucanians

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mimics the role of supplemental causality in Santa Teresa. Telepathy is a paranormal activity that produces real effects but is not understood by the dominant peninsular Spanish culture. It originates outside of this culture, is imposed on it, and is attributed to “traffic with the devil” (221). Given that Amalfitano lives in Santa Teresa and is affected by supplemental causality, it is not surprising that the first sentences that refer to Kilapán’s text in 2666 are, “He thought about telepathy. He thought about the telepathic Mapuches or Araucanians” (216). Amalfitano responds negatively to Kilapán’s text. This in itself can be interpreted as signifying the beginning of a creative project—that is, as signifying the beginning of an attempt to contextualize, find an alternative to, and escape imaginarily from the suffocating environment of Santa Teresa that has much in common with the postmodern reality represented in Kilapán’s text. The negation of this text culminates in a literary discussion with Guerra, much commented on by the critics, in which Amalfitano recalls a pharmacist who expressed a preference for shorter literary works that exemplify perfection of form and content, such as The Metamorphosis; Bartleby, the Scrivener; and A Simple Heart. Amalfitano is more interested in longer works, such as The Trial, Moby Dick, and A Tale of Two Cities: What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench. (227)

Amalfitano’s preference for longer, more profound novels, initiates a negation of the process of negation that began with the narrator’s “active reader” critique of O’Higgins is Araucanian and concludes with the pharmacist’s preference for shorter literary works. Amalfitano might as well include 2666 in the preceding passage. Moreover, it is at this point in the Hegelian process of negativity, in which Bolaño and Amalfitano overlap, where the outlines of a creative project commensurate in scope with 2666 become visible. The negation of the negation leads back to Kilapán’s text: “This negativity is as self-sublating contradiction the restoration of the first immediacy, of simple universality; for the other of the other, the negative of the negative, is immediately the positive, the identical, the universal.”22 Universality here should be understood in terms of concrete universality; in the movement of the concept, it is the preservation of Kilapán’s text as it relates to its other:

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The universal is therefore free power; it is itself while reaching out to its other and embracing it, but without doing violence to it; on the contrary, it is at rest in its other as in its own. Just as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness, for it relates to that which is distinct from it as to itself; in it, it has returned to itself.23

Kilapán’s text manifests itself in 2666 in several ways. Both texts take place in a global setting with particular emphasis on specific regions of Latin America and Europe. Germany and Greece play important roles in these texts. Kilapán identifies the Araucanians with the Aryans who—by his account—were Araucanians who migrated from Chile to India—where they were called Aryans—and proceeded from there to settle in what are now Germany and Greece (222). Of course, after Nazism, a myth of origin that involves identification with Aryans has a fascist connotation. As previously noted, Archimboldi spent several years in the Greek islands after World War II. In determining the relationship of Greece to 2666, the influence of Greek thought should also be taken into account. This influence is manifested indirectly through Heidegger. In On Time and Being Heidegger claims that “thinking remains bound to the tradition of the epochs of the destiny of Being.”24 In the modern, technologically dominated world, “it is . . . Being as presencing in the sense of calculable material that claims all the inhabitants of the earth in a uniform manner.”25 For Heidegger, the relationship to technology obscures the original presencing of being referred to by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides as aletheia or the unconcealment of being.26 Heidegger conceives of being as a gift the giving of which “prevails concealed in unconcealment”;27 “Being is not. There is. It gives Being as the unconcealing of presencing.”28 The kind of giving that belongs to It is “giving as destiny”29 through the “Appropriation” of the subject. The latter term encompasses the Appropriation of being in terms of the interaction of the past, present, and future of destiny. What is the source of Appropriation? Heidegger affirms that “man belongs to Appropriation,”30 but adds that “appropriation neither is, nor is Approriation there. To say the one or to say the other is equally a distortion of the matter, just as if we wanted to derive the source from the river.”31 If the river is a metaphor for the role played by the interaction of the past, present, and future in the destiny of the subject—that is, in the Appropriation of the subject, to affirm that the source of Appropriation cannot be derived from the river is to affirm that It as well as Appropriation precede the existence of the subject. Thus, the It that gives being cannot be reduced to the existential “there” of the subject, but rather precedes this existence. As the subject of speculation for philologists and philosophers of language, “the area of meaning meant by the It extends from the irrelevant to the demonic.”32 My contention is that in 2666 the It corresponds

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to an entity that determines the destiny of the world. This entity is responsible for dividing the world into regions of naturalistic or supplemental causality. Heidegger uses the term “opening” to designate an existential modality that grants the possibility of access to the unconcealment of being. He compares the opening to a forest clearing that allows for the visibility of light and darkness.33 Here, light and darkness should be understood as metaphors for presence and absence within the context of the interaction of the past, present, and future. Light also illuminates the truth of being: The opening grants first of all the possibility of the path to presence, and grants the possible presencing of that presence itself. We must think aletheia, unconcealment, as the opening which first grants Being and thinking and their presencing to and for each other. The quiet heart of the opening is the place of stillness from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, presence and perceiving, can arise at all.34

The stillness described by Heidegger is the calmness extolled by the voice in its conversation with Amalfitano as the only thing in life incapable of betraying us. This stillness is a predominant characteristic of a passage in “The Part about Archimboldi” that describes Hans Reiter and two of his friends—Hugo Halder and Noburo Nisamata—as they experience the opening in a several prewar Berlin cabarets: Sometimes, however, as they sat on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity. (663–64)

The silence leads to a calmness that does not betray; the confluence of past, present, and future leads to an extended present, the “presencing of presence” and the receiving of being. By means of the association of calmness with the opening, the opening with the gift of being, and this gift with the One who gives it, the destiny of the diverse global regions that comprise the setting for 2666 can be said to be determined by the One. The influence of Heidegger aligns 2666 with Kilapán’s text in another way. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party between 1933 and 1945, and certain aspects of his philosophy have been associated with radical right. For example, the notion that authentic Dasein involves submission to fate is connected by Johannes Fritsche to the fascist concept of the subservience of the

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patriotic German to the collective destiny of the Volksgemeinschaft—a Nazi term for a community of people bound by blood and heritage.35 Heidegger’s philosophy is in many ways representative of irrationalism—another term associated with fascism. This irrationalism is manifested in Heidegger’s reliance on concepts that cannot be verified—such as “It gives Being” or “the opening.” Thus, an uncritical reception of Heidegger’s philosophy is an uncritical reception of a form of right-wing irrationalism. As previously noted, it is Amalfitano who is consumed by Heidegger and not the other way around. The deployment of Heideggerian thought in 2666 leaves as a residue a right-wing tendency in Bolaño’s text, of which the sublation of O’Higgins is Araucanian in 2666 is symptomatic. “The Part about Amalfitano” concludes with Amalfitano’s dream in which Boris Yeltsin makes an appearance. He is described as “the last Communist philosopher of the twentieth century” (227). In the dream, Yeltsin states that life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to, but that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play. (228)

This dream is part of the negation in the movement of the concept we have been describing in relation to O’Higgins is Araucanian. The facet of Kilapán’s text that reappears here is telepathy, something that can be subsumed under the category of magic. Alexis Candia organizes El “paraíso infernal”—his book on Bolaño’s narrative—in terms of the ingredients comprised in “magic” in the above quotation: epic, sex, Dionysian mists, and play. Considered separately or as a mixture, there is nothing magical—that is, paranormal, about these ingredients. In 2666, they become magical through the intervention of the One in terms of their effect on history by means of supplemental causality. Candia is certain the One has no role to play in the narrative of Bolaño: “Under no circumstances does Bolaño’s narrative aim to achieve some harmony with the primordial One. Transcendence is not part of the equation Bolaño’s novels attempt to address, which deny, again and again, the role divinity may play. Nor does the relationship that man may have with nature have the slightest importance.”36 Candia is too anthropocentric. He relates the categories of the epic, the sexual, the Dionysian, and the ludic entirely to man, who is described by Marco Antonio Guerra as “the closest thing there is to a rat” (219). In 2666 what prevents life from ending up in the “garbage pit of history” is the entertainment value man has for the One. The gods pick winners and losers based on this value. The best example

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is the lovemaking session of General Entrescu and Baroness von Zumpe in “The Part about Archimboldi.” The One is so pleased by this performance that Entrescu is transformed into a Christ-like figure who atones for the sins of fascist Europe. One of Bolaño’s models for the science-fictional aspects of 2666 was Phillip K. Dick’s Ubik, which Bolaño read.37 Ubik deals with virtual consciousness and the telepathic distortion of reality in ways that are closely related to the subject matter of 2666. Ubik appears in Dick’s novel in different guises, among them as the ingredient in a spray can that reverses the effects of aging. In the epigraph to the last chapter of the work, it assumes the form of the One: I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.38

There is enough evidence in 2666 to affirm that the reality represented in Bolaño’s novel is under the control of a transcendental mind. This will become increasingly evident after an examination of the interaction of the diverse components that form the global reality of 2666. NOTES 1. Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat, Understanding Roberto Bolaño (Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2016), 174. 2. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 114. Text references are to pages of this edition. 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 219. Text references are to pages of this edition. 4. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 488. 5. Heidegger does not dwell on the specific types of Situations possible in Dasein. He considers that to be the task of a “thematic existential anthropology” rather than a “study of fundamental ontology” such as Being and Time (348). 6. A good example of “freedom towards death” is Bolaño: “Speculation abounded after Bolaño’s death as to whether he had put off scheduling a liver transplant in order to finish 2666.” Natasha Wimmer, introduction to The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, xxii. It is incontrovertible that he was gravely ill during the last ten years of his life: “By the time he published The Savage Detectives, Bolaño was sick, and had been for some time. In 1992, he had been

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diagnosed with a fatal liver desease, which meant that nearly all his fiction was written under the threat of death.” Wimmer, xviii. 7. According to Oswaldo Zavala, the reference here is to the poet Leopoldo María Panero, who was also interned in an asylum. Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015), 164. 8. Calvin Tomkins, The World of Marcel Duchamp 1887–1968, rev. ed. (New York: Time-Life Books, 1972), 78. 9. Zavala, La modernidad insufrible, 185. Quotations from this text are my translations. 10. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 18. 11. Domingo García-Sabell, prologue to Testamento geométrico, by Rafael Dieste (La Coruña: Ediciones del Castro, 1975), 11. 12. Bolaño quotes García-Sabell’s translation of “Es gibt Zeit”: “hay tiempo” (2666, 7th edition [Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006], 244), which is translated by Wimmer as “there is time” (189). Stambaugh’s translation (“It gives time”) is more consistent with the philosophical content of Heidegger’s text and useful for an interpretation of 2666 as science fiction; It suggests a demonic being in control of time. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophical Investigations I,” part 1 in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. N. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), §383. 14. Gutiérrez-Mouat, Understanding Roberto Bolaño, 170. 15. “Among Bolaño’s notes for 2666 there appears the single line: ‘The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano.’” Ignacio Echevarría, note to the first edition of 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 898. 16. Julio Cortázar, “Rayuela,” in Obras completas, ed. Saúl Yurkievich (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2004), 3: 458–59. 17. Zavala, La modernidad insufrible, 157. 18. Ibid., 157. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 157–58. 21. Ibid., 157. 22. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 746. 23. Ibid., 532. 24. Heidegger, On Time and Being, 9. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ibid., 67–68. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Ibid., 6. 29. Ibid., 19. 30. Ibid., 23. 31. Ibid., 24.

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32. Ibid., 18. 33. Ibid., 65. 34. Ibid., 68. 35. Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 65, 67. 36. Alexis Candia, El “paraíso infernal”en la narrativa de Roberto Bolaño (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2011), 195 (my translation). 37. Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis, 4th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009), 183. 38. Phillip K. Dick, Ubik (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012), 226.

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LACK OF AGENCY If the influence of Heidegger prevails in the second part of 2666, much the same could be said about Lacan in “The Part about Fate.” Thus, I would qualify Gutiérrez-Mouat’s categorization of “The Part about Fate” as a “Beat road novel”1 by specifying that it is a Lacanian-Beat road novel. It begins in New York City. The protagonist is Quincy Williams, also known as Oscar Fate. He is an African American journalist who writes about politics and social issues for a magazine called Black Dawn. A principal theme of this part of 2666 is agency, in terms of Fate (Quincy Williams) making a difference or doing something to improve a bad situation. The situation in question is the murderous rampage against women in Santa Teresa. Fate’s preoccupation with agency begins long before his trip to Santa Teresa and is the referent of the first sentence of “The Part about Fate”: “When did it all begin?” which is answered in the first-person narrative voice: “Maybe it all began with my mother’s death.”2 His mother dies alone in her apartment. Her neighbors find the body, call a hospital, call the police, and provide Fate with information about what funeral home to call (231–33). Fate is under a lot of pain as a result of his mother’s death (231). This is understandable, but the excessive amount of pain he feels is attributable to being in a situation where he feels powerless and other people do the work that he should be doing. In a word, his pain is attributable to his lack of agency. This suspicion is reinforced by a dream he has while sleeping in the apartment of his dead mother, whose body has yet to be picked up by workers from the funeral home. He dreams about a movie he saw and is disturbed that the movie in the dream is not the same: Everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The 107

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plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it didn’t necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and that if the movie he’d seen was the real movie, then the other one, the one he had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare. (234)

Criticism involves agency using language, which in turn involves symbolic castration. Fate’s pain is ultimately due to his problematic insertion in the symbolic order. The specific question involved is the “foreclosure of the phallic function” in the symbolic order.3 According to Lacan, the psychotic lacks the signifier designated as the “Name-of-the-Father”4 that, by signifying the phallus—the signifier of the law of symbolic castration,5 enables the nonpsychotic subject to identify with the father and participate meaningfully in the symbolic order. Thus, the psychotic subject is “passively inhabited” by the phallic signifier.6 As a result, “in psychotic experience . . . the signifier and the signified present themselves in a completely divided form,”7 as in Fate’s dream. Not that Fate is notably psychotic. In the “Part about Fate” psychosis seems to be so widespread among the population of the United States that Fate seems to be like everyone else in that respect. The impression that there is widespread psychosis is produced by allusions to auditory and visual hallucinations of a type that are symptomatic of psychosis.8 The first one occurs when Fate is about to enter a taxi on the way to the airport and hears what sounds like a gunshot. He asks the driver if he also heard it. He replies, “Every day you hear more fantastic things in New York” (239).When Fate asks him what he means, the driver, who has a Spanish accent and does not speak English very well, responds, “Exactly what I say, fantastic” (239). A meaning of fantastic is unreal or imaginary. The likelihood that the driver is an immigrant reinforces the notion that everyone in the social fabric experiences hallucinations. On an airplane on the way to Detroit, Fate overhears two passengers talking about ghosts, which are visual hallucinations (240). Fate goes to Detroit in order to interview Barry Seaman for an article to be published in Black Dawn. Seaman is a fictional version of Bobby Seale, the founder of the Black Panthers. In Detroit, before the interview, he sees a mural that captures his attention: It was circular, like a clock, and where the numbers should have been there were scenes of people working in the factories of Detroit. Twelve scenes representing twelve stages in the production chain. In each scene, there was one recurring character: a black teenager, or a long-limbed, scrawny black

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man-child, or a man clinging to childhood, dressed in clothes that changed from scene to scene but that were invariably too small for him. He had apparently been assigned the role of clown. . . . The mural looked like the work of a lunatic. The last painting of a lunatic. In the middle of the clock, where all the scenes converged, there was a word painted in letters that looked like they were made of gelatin: fear. (241)

The mural represents the meaning of work for the working class in the neoliberal United States. It puts work in relation to a passage of time that always juxtaposes work with the clownish figure of the black adolescent. The message is that no matter what time it is or how much time goes by, to work is to end up as the equivalent of a malnourished, developmentally challenged adolescent clown. This is an appropriate metaphor for workers in the United States, given that, since the 1970s, because of wage stagnation, the cost of living has outstripped the purchasing power of wages9 (a situation nicely symbolized by the adolescent who is too big for his clothes). The working-class response to this disparity, in terms of unionization or other social movements intended to challenge the power of the ruling class, has been inadequate, accounting for the infantile and clownish appearance of the adolescent. The word fear, at the center of the mural, signifies what many workers feel when confronted by the unfettered power of management. If poor infantile clown is considered to be the signified of work, this is an example of that cleavage between signifier and signified that Lacan considered to be characteristic of psychosis, except that in this case, regardless of the sanity of the artist who painted the mural, or of any particular individual, it is the reality itself that is insane. Thus, to be in this reality is to partake of insanity. In fact, the mural makes a valid statement about the working class in the United States after the advent of neoliberalism. Fate thinks the mural is the work of a lunatic because he is in denial about the socioeconomic reality of the United States. As represented in 2666, this reality is heightened by supplemental causality. The process of production is the cause, but its effect is always the same: the immobilization of the working class and its exit from history into a simulacrum of history. This is not just a postmodern conceit: the working class is literally immobilized in an endlessly repeating loop of time. Fate’s interview with Antonio Ulises Jones, referred to as the last Communist in Brooklyn and a member of the Communist Party, is a reminder of the fictional status of 2666 (258). Presumably, Jones is a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Fate does not state when his interview with Jones takes place, but assuming it was anytime between 1991 (the year of the fall of the Soviet Union) and 2000, there was never a time in those years when there was only one Communist

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in Brooklyn. The CPUSA was not the only Communist party in New York City between 1991 and 2000; there were other Marxist organizations whose members lived in Brooklyn, among other places, such as the Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist). For the RCP the fall of the Soviet Union was a welcome development. Within the narrative of the third part of 2666, the disappearance of Communists in Brooklyn signifies the irrelevance of Communism tout court. It reinforces the notion of working-class immobility by depriving the working class of a master-signifier that provides a “quilting point” for the creation of revolutionary ideology. At this point in the text, the reader can only speculate as to why supplemental causality is in effect in “The Part about Fate” and take note of the similarity with the type of causality prevailing in Santa Teresa. In both cases, there are forces beyond the comprehension of the subject that affect reality. In the case of the United States, this is suggested by an anecdote that Fate overhears immediately after listening to a conversation about ghosts, as he is flying into Detroit, concerning someone named Bobby from Michigan whose boat capsized in a remote part of Lake Huron (240– 41). In this type of situation, the usual sequence of events is that someone connected with the individual in question notices that he or she is missing and notifies the authorities, who organize a search party. Bobby is in the water suffering from the effects of the cold. He has almost given up hope when he notices some lights in the sky and thinks that it is a helicopter searching for him. Then he sees an airplane in flames pass overhead and crash into the lake. Shortly afterward he is rescued by the search party sent out in helicopters to rescue the victims of the crash, who are all dead. In a dream-like way, the preceding conversation about ghosts associates the supernatural with airplanes, suggesting the intervention of the supernatural in the concatenation of events that conclude with Bobby’s rescue. Through the intercession of supplemental causality in the guise of the supernatural, Bobby’s accident is perceived as the cause of the airplane crash, which in turn causes his rescue. The disparity between cause and effect suggests the enormity of the forces at work. The story of the boater is a parable about work in the United States. The airplane passengers and Bobby represent the community. The search-and-rescue mission represents work. Rather than benefiting the entire community, work benefits an individual community member who represents the owners of the means of production: by means of the intercession of supplemental causality, he initiates a process of production that only benefits him. This episode relates to the episode of the mural that follows in terms of a disparity between signifier and signified in the process of production. In this case, work signifies the destruction of the community and profits for the super-rich.

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THE SEARCH FOR A MASTER-SIGNIFIER Seaman makes his living giving lectures and is the author of a cookbook. Fate goes to one of his lectures, which takes place in a church. Seaman’s lecture is divided into five parts that correspond to the following themes: danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness. In this lecture, there is an attempt to produce an ideological master-signifier that is contradicted by a tendency toward the dispersal of meaning of the signifier. After introducing himself, he tells the audience that he and Marius Newell (a fictional version of Huey Newton) were the founders of the Black Panther Party. For a moment, it seems like the ghost of Newton is in the room, but instead of talking about Newell, Seaman switches the topic of conversation to Newell’s mother and states that “a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution” (247). He keeps the discourse at the level of the imaginary by means of identification with the mother as the other, rather than, for example, with himself and Newell as, respectively, ego-ideal and ideal ego, the type of identifications that would be necessary in order to produce a master-signifier. He does return to Newell and represent him in a positive light, saying, for example, that he was murdered for resisting the drug trade, but the principal signifier that he associates with him is the sea, which is not convincing as a master-signifier, given that Seaman associates it with death (248–49). As far as the legacy of the Black Panthers, Seaman has the following to say: Marius told me things had changed in California. There were many more black police now, for example. It was true. It had changed in that way. But in other ways it was still the same. And yet there was no denying that some things had changed. And Marius recognized that and he knew we deserved part of the credit. The Panthers had helped bring the change. (248)

An increase in the number of African American policemen is a particularly weak argument to make as evidence for progress in race relations. Huey Newton died in 1989. The Los Angeles riots, sparked by the videotaped beating of Rodney King, took place in 1992. As noted by Anjuli Sastry and Karen Grigsby Bates, the United States is still struggling with social issues that were not resolved in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots. They quote the University of Southern California professor David Armour to the effect that nothing has changed since then: That shocking, grainy video of his [Rodney King’s] beating would be just the first of a long line of police brutality videos to go viral. That and issues such as racial profiling are as evident now—in places such as Baltimore, Ferguson and other inner cities—as they were in 1992 Los Angeles,

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says Armour, the USC professor and author of a book about what he calls the1992 “uprising.” “Ain’t nothing changed but the year it is,” he says.10

In the part of the lecture entitled “Money,” Seaman advises poor people who come into money to be charitable, endow scholarships, send their children to college, adopt orphans, and start small businesses that will benefit their communities (249). If implemented, this advice—based on petty bourgeois ideology—would not have the slightest effect on solving the deeply entrenched problem of poverty in the African American community, since in order to put these admirable platitudes into effect, it is necessary to have money, and Seaman gives no indication as to how the poor can acquire it. Having failed to articulate an ideology that corresponds to the existential situation of the lower class—and of the African American lower class in particular—in the rest of Seaman’s lecture there prevails, as if in admission of defeat, a psychotic tendency to prioritize the signifier in relation to the signified.11 For example, in the part of the lecture entitled “Stars,” he talks about five different topics related to this signifier: stars outside of the solar system, sports stars, meteors, starfish, and the sun. In “Usefulness” Seaman continues talking about the sun, then talks about smiles, food, reading, and jail. He concludes by talking about a book entitled An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, which he says is particularly meaningful to him. This is not the first time Voltaire is mentioned in 2666. Because of the proliferation of unrelated topics, and the signifier in relation to the signified, Seaman’s discourse concludes by verging on the meaningless. In this context, Voltaire’s advice to tend our own gardens acquires the unexpected meaning of an injunction to remain at the imaginary level of identification, cultivate the “thousand flowers” of the dispersal of the signifier, and be psychotic. Before leaving Detroit, the sports editor of Black Dawn contacts Fate and asks him to write about a boxing match in Mexico in which one of the boxers is Count Pickett, “a promising Harlem light heavyweight” (262). The reporter who usually covered boxing was murdered, so the editor asks Fate to go to Mexico instead of him. He accepts. He flies to Tucson and rents a car to drive to Santa Teresa. On the way there, he stops to eat at a restaurant where he overhears a conversation between a young man named Edward and an older man he refers to as Professor Kessler (264–67). Albert Kessler is a criminologist who reappears in “The Part about the Crimes.” He is a fictional version of Robert K. Ressler, an FBI criminologist who visited Ciudad Juarez in 1998 to consult on the femicides. Kessler and Edward are talking about these murders. During this discussion, Kessler says that these types of murders are nothing new and that throughout history society has distinguished between noteworthy victims of violence and those who are not worth noticing. In the

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first category, he includes anyone from the upper class of any given society. For the second category, he gives the examples of victims of the slave trade and members of the Paris Commune who were killed by government troops. Zavala is correct in noting the parallel between Kessler’s ideas and Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the role of the “part of no part” represented by the disenfranchised social classes of any given society: the negativity that is constitutive of the totality of society through its exclusion from the community by means of “the networks of power that dominate the community life of the polis,”12 but there is something curious about the conclusions Kessler derives from his analysis of the situation in Santa Teresa. These are as follows: (a) Everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus; (b) the crimes have different signatures; (c) the city seems to be booming, it seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and cross the border. (267)

Kessler does not state that part of Santa Teresa is part of no part of society, but rather that all of it is part of no part of society. The obvious interpretation of this statement is that Santa Teresa is so terrible that it does not count as a society, which is a dubious proposition. From a logical point of view, if all of Santa Teresa is part of no part, the entire city has something in common; it is a totality with a positive consistency. In terms of naturalistic causality, this totality is impossible, that is to say, no empirically existing agency can constitute a consistently positive social field. Nevertheless, to put it in Heideggerian terms, within the world it is “thrown” into by the It—that is, within the world that corresponds to the existential situation of Santa Teresa, subjected as it is to supplemental causality, the logical implications of this type of totality correspond to an existential situation that is possible. Assuming that this totality is the starting point—that is, that the population of Santa Teresa is like the persecuted Christians, this situation would call its own negativity into being, given that these Christians cannot be conceptualized without their Roman persecutors. They are both parts of a whole, and to think of one is to think of the other. As Hegel put it, Likeness is only in a reflection which compares according to the unlikeness and is therefore mediated by its other indifferent moment; similarly, unlikeness is only in the same reflective reference in which likeness is. –Each of these moments, in its determinateness, is therefore the whole. It is the whole because it also contains its other moment; but this, its other, is an indifferent existent; thus each contains a reference to its nonbeing, and it is reflection-into-itself, or the whole, only as essentially referring to its nonbeing.13

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Each moment—positive and negative—is contained in a whole that consists of the positive referring to its nonbeing as the negative and the negative to its nonbeing as the positive. If the population of Santa Teresa were to consist entirely of persecuted Christians, by referring to their nonbeing in terms of their persecutors, they would become the persecutors, and these, in turn, by referring to their nonbeing in terms of the Christians, would become the Christians. There would be a continuous oscillation between positivity and negativity: “To each side, therefore, there belongs indeed one of the two determinacies, the positive or the negative; but the two can be interchanged, and each side is such as can be taken equally as positive or negative.”14 In replacing the positive, the negative becomes the positive, and vice versa. What are the existential implications of this situation? If the persecuted Christians are conceptualized as including all of the social classes of Santa Teresa, as would be the case if they represent the entire population, this means that every class has an equal chance of prevailing in a struggle to the death against its antagonists. This conclusion follows from the consideration that, in this case, the interchangeability of positivity and negativity implies equivalent power. In other words, rather than the defeat of the Christians in the circus being a foregone conclusion, they become equivalent in power to their oppressors. Given that the totality of Santa Teresa includes positivity and negativity, if positivity is assigned to the women who become murder victims in Santa Teresa, and negativity to their murderers, and if the women in question, many of whom work in maquiladoras, are conceptualized as metonymic representatives of the working class, and their killers, some of whom seem to be connected to the most powerful families in Santa Teresa, as metonymic representatives of the ruling class, the following can be concluded: the equality of positivity and negativity implies that in a revolutionary struggle within the Santa Teresa world, the working class has an even chance of prevailing over the ruling class and putting an end to the femicides. With this “heaven sent” opportunity, all that is necessary for the working class of Santa Teresa to have a fighting chance of prevailing is to rise up against their oppressors. Nevertheless, the machista culture of Mexico impedes the formation of a revolutionary subject in Santa Teresa. At the political level of resistance against the murders, men are noticeable by their absence. In “The Part about the Crimes,” protests against the murders are organized by feminist groups, such as Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace (WSDP) (454), the principal politician who takes action against the murderers, Azucena Esquivel Plata, is a woman, and the few labor organizers who are mentioned are all women. None of this adds up to a revolutionary response. As is the case with men in the political response to the murders, the Far Left is noticeable by its absence. Esquivel Plata makes fun of the machismo of one of her former

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lovers, who confuses having sex with a revolutionary act; a fatal error in regards to revolutionary aspirations, and one that is not limited to him: Hopelessly stupid, arrogant men, who lose their wits when they come across an Esquivel Plata, want to fuck her right away, as if the act of possessing a woman like me were the equivalent of storming the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace! They, who couldn’t even cut the grass of the Summer Dacha! (600)

Américo Paredes quotes the Mexican folklorist Vicente T. Mendoza on the topic of the distinction between “authentic” machismo and “false” machismo: “There are two kinds of machismo: one that we would call authentic, characterized by true courage, presence of mind, generosity, stoicism, heroism, bravery,” and so forth and “the other, nothing but a front, false at bottom, hiding cowardice and fear covered up by exclamations, shouts, presumptuous boasts, bravado, double talk, bombast . . . Supermanliness that conceals an inferiority complex.”15

According to Paredes, “Mendoza’s ‘false’ machismo . . . is what all other writers on the subject would call the ‘real’ machismo”—a form of cowardice.16 He considers that “what Mendoza calls ‘authentic’ machismo is no such thing. It is simply courage, and it is celebrated in the folksongs of all countries.”17 For Angel Nuñez, the machista needs to prove his masculinity to other men by dominating women. For married women this means doing all the housework, being subjected to beatings if they displease their husbands, and a sexual double standard that allows husbands to engage in adulterous relationships while forbidding them for wives. If for some reason the husband’s friends have the impression that he is dominated by his wife, he is regarded as a pendejo (coward).18 It does not require a lot of courage to dominate women in a machista society. For men in such a society, it would require courage to resist machismo by refusing to participate in it. Given that the machista engages in the socially sanctioned abuse of women because of his fear of losing face, instead of doing the right thing and rejecting machismo, he is a coward. The femicides of Santa Teresa, especially those attributable to supplemental causality, are a call to action, a test for the working-class residents of that city, which they seem to fail. There is too much machismo, and in general, too little willingness to fight back: in a word, too much cowardice. Kessler senses that they have failed this test and thinks they should run away, along with the rest of the population of Santa Teresa, to the United States. Another way to conceptualize this mass movement of people is as a performative act that draws attention to how much the working classes of Santa Teresa and

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the United States have in common. Much of the critical literature dwells on the distinctions between Santa Teresa and the developed world. For example, Sharae Deckard writes, “2666’s bordertown setting makes profoundly tangible the tragic asymmetries and experiential contradictions of the periphery’s relation to the core.”19 Nevertheless, the working classes of Santa Teresa and the United States are in some respects the mirror image of each other. Both seem to be too riddled with fear to effectively resist their oppressors. Both lack a revolutionary ideology in circumstances where it is truly necessary. Moreover, both are vitiated by social phenomena that weaken the cohesiveness of their social formations. These are machismo in Mexico and racism in the United States. However, in “The Part about the Crimes,” it becomes evident that, unlike the United States, there is a potential for the formation of a revolutionary subject in Santa Teresa. A RACIST JOURNALIST As an African American, Fate is keenly aware of racism. This is evident in an episode that occurs after he arrives in Santa Teresa and is with a group of journalists from the United States who are there to report on the boxing match. One of them—who is not named—tells a racist story about a Mexican fighter named Hércules Carreño, and this infuriates Fate, who has to be restrained to prevent him from attacking the journalist. Fate’s thoughts after he hears the story are particularly interesting: The others laughed and then they all assumed expressions of penitence. Twenty seconds of silence to remember the unfortunate Carreño. The faces, suddenly solemn, made Fate think of a masked ball. For a brief instant he couldn’t breathe, he saw his mother’s empty apartment, he had a premonition of two people making love in a miserable room, all at the same time, a moment defined by the word climacteric. What are you, flacking for the Klan? Fate asked the reporter who had told the story. Watch out, looks like we got ourselves another touchy jig, said the reporter. Fate tried to lunge at him and get a punch in (though a slap in the face would’ve been better), but he was blocked by the reporters surrounding the man. He’s just fucking around, he heard someone say. We’re all Americans here. (289)

What is unusual about Fate’s reaction is what goes through his mind before the journalist calls him a “jig” and Fate attempts to assault him. Here the Spanish text is crucial: “Los rostros, repentinamente serios, provocaron en Fate la sensación de un baile de máscaras.”20 (“The faces, suddenly serious, caused Fate to perceive a masked ball [my translation].”) Sensación de can

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be translated as perception of. Thus, Fate thinks of a masked ball, as in the English translation, but he also perceives one, which is consistent with a hallucinatory psychotic episode. This is followed by becoming breathless, having a vision of his mother’s empty apartment and two people making love in a rundown room, all of which occur at the same time, “a moment defined by the word climacteric,” which means critical period; critical in the sense that what takes place within this time has an essential connection to the way Fate perceives the behavior that triggered the psychotic episode. Fate thinks about his mother quite often. He never mentions his father. There are two episodes that include imaginary allusions to a father figure. The passage quoted above is one of them. The other one occurs while Fate is driving to Santa Teresa and remembers a dream about a bus trip he went on as a child to upstate New York with his mother and sister (270–71). During this trip he sees a man walking along the edge of a forest. Fate is so troubled by the loneliness of the man that he wants to stop looking at him and embrace his mother. Before seeing the man, Fate sees an urban landscape that reappears after traversing the forest. In relation to the forest, the urban landscape signifies the symbolic order. The forest is a state of nature that signifies the real. The man walking by the forest symbolizes Fate’s missing father. His loneliness is Fate’s imaginary projection of his own sense of deprivation in relation to the Nameof-the-Father, as he is bereft of the signifier that is necessary for the subject to avoid psychosis. In the imaginary, his ego “is constituted as an illusory incorporation of the other.”21 Thus, Fate desires to embrace his mother: the image he has of himself in the imaginary is of his mother, an image that gives him a sense of security by protecting him from the psychological intrusion of an Other who evokes frightening feelings of deprivation. This indicates that Fate spent some time with his father as a child and was traumatized by his interaction with him, possibly because of neglect of his physical and emotional well-being. Being raised by a single mother is not in itself a reason to become psychotic. The bus returns to an urban landscape: Fate’s psyche incorporates the Lacanian registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. However, in his case, an imaginary relation to reality prevails and the interaction between the registers is deficient because of the foreclosure of the signifier that binds them together (Lacan Seminar XXIII). The couple Fate thinks about after listening to the journalist’s story can be associated with his mother and father. Rather than thinking about his father impregnating his mother, Fate has a “premonition” about an anonymous couple having sex, signifying an impairment in his ability to process “the signifier father at the symbolic level” (Lacan). He needs to be able to do so in order to defend himself against the emotional onslaught occasioned by the journalist’s story, but Fate’s response remains at the imaginary level. Lacan is instructive on the role of the imaginary in this type of response:

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Let’s suppose that this situation entails for the subject the impossibility of assuming the realization of the signifier father at the symbolic level. What’s he left with? He’s left with the image the paternal function is reduced to. It’s an image which isn’t inscribed in any triangular dialectic, but whose function as model, as specular alienation, nevertheless gives the subject a fastening point and enables him to apprehend himself on the imaginary plane. If the captivating image is without limits, if the character in question manifests himself simply in the order of strength and not in that of the pact, then a relation of rivalry, aggressiveness, fear, etc. appear.22

As objectionable as the journalist’s diatribe is, what gives it an additional impact is Fate’s lack of participation in the pact referred to by Lacan—the triangular Oedipal arrangement whereby the son accedes to the symbolic order by identifying with the Other even as he maintains his identification with the other—thus changing his relationship with the father from one excessively vulnerable to “rivalry, aggressiveness, fear, etc.” to one characterized by identification. After listening to the journalist, Fate perceives his racism as an intrusion by the Other that triggers an association with the physical and emotional neglect he experienced at the hands of his father. Thus, he perceives it as a direct attack on him, given the predominance of the imaginary order in his psyche, rather than the “reciprocal exclusion” unaffected by “imaginary capture” characteristic of “specular confrontation” in the symbolic order.23 For a healthy ego, specular confrontation involves the self-referentiality of the imaginary, but it does not necessarily lead to imaginary capture, since it can be offset by the reciprocal exclusion of the subject and the other within a dyadic imaginary relationship made possible by the use of language within the symbolic order to talk about someone or something outside of this relationship. In other words, if Fate had succeeded in identifying with his father, he would not necessarily have to assume that the journalist was attacking him directly. When the journalist notices how upset Fate is, then he does attack him personally by referring to him as a “jig.” The preceding episode demonstrates a connection between Fate’s behavior and his relationship to language. Lacan had this to say about the particular relation of the psychotic to language: In my talk on Freud a fortnight ago I spoke of language insofar as it’s inhabited by the subject who to a greater or lesser extent speaks out in language with all his being, that is, in part unknowingly. How can one fail to see in the phenomenology of psychosis that everything from beginning to end stems from a particular relationship between the subject and this language that has suddenly been thrust into the foreground, that speaks all by itself, out loud, in its noise and

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furor, as well as in its neutrality? If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed by language.24

The predominance of the imaginary in psychosis is conducive to a predominance of the signifier over the signified. In the language of the psychotic, there is a tendency to dwell on the signifier “for its qualities, its particular density—not for its meaning, but for its meaningfulness. The signified is empty, the signifier is retained for its purely formal properties, which are used for example to form series.”25 An example of this tendency occurs after Fate reads a passage from a book by Hugh Thomas about the slave trade, which was given to him by Antonio Jones26: Sometimes the European merchant preferred to have remittances from the West Indies in bills of exchange than to have sugar, indigo, cotton, or ginger in exchange for the slaves, because the prices of these goods in London were unpredictable or low. What pretty names, he thought. Indigo, sugar, ginger, cotton. The reddish flowers of the indigo bush. The dark blue paste, with copper glints. A woman painted indigo, washing herself in the shower. (268)

What is telling about this passage is the separation of the signifiers that capture Fate’s attention from the referential context of the slave trade. They become part of a personal fantasy enclosed by the limits of the imaginary. Within the dyadic, specular relationships consistent with this fantasy, he is the painted woman in the shower. There is some evidence that Fate is struggling with issues related to masculinity. For one thing, his editor thinks he is working too hard and advises him to have sex more often. When Fate responds that he has thought about it, the editor says, “That isn’t the kind of thing you think about, it’s the kind of thing you do” (294). It is notable that Fate, a thirtyyear-old man, does not engage in or mention any specific sexual relationship he engaged in throughout “The Part about Fate.” The narrator makes one indirect reference to his sex life when he was a student: “When Fate was a student at NYU, he never got drunk or slept with prostitutes (in fact, he had never in his life been with a woman he had to pay). His free time was spent working and reading” (301). Stating that he never solicited the services of a prostitute is not equivalent to stating that he had sex with women. In Santa Teresa he spends the night at a bar with some Mexican acquaintances, one of whom—a woman—he kisses: As he and the dark-haired girl who had come with Rosita Méndez were kissing, he heard something about pyramids, Aztec vampires, a book written in blood, the inspiration for From Dusk Till Dawn, the recurring nightmare of Robert Rodríguez. The girl with dark hair didn’t know how to kiss. (281)

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Would it be more accurate to say—given Fate’s tendency to dwell in the imaginary when responding to discourse—that he is the one who does not know how to kiss? In other words, by means of free indirect style, the narrative voice is representing Fate’s identification as a sexually inexperienced woman. This is plausible given his ambivalent sense of masculinity. After leaving the bar, Fate is followed by Chucho Flores—a Mexican journalist— and his girlfriend Rosa Méndez. Flores asks him if he is all right and offers to help him return to his motel. Fate declines the offer. The episode has a paranoid quality due to Fate’s impression that Rosa is looking at him as if he were “some kind of exotic specimen” (281) and his speculation as to whether Flores is gay. Again, the real subject of this episode is Fate, more specifically, his paranoia about being regarded as a homosexual. A few days after arriving in Santa Teresa, Fate experiences what could well be a hallucination in the form of a car that almost runs him over. He is about to cross the street to buy something to eat in a gas station: Outside, trucks passed by now and then heading north and south, and across the road were the lights of the service station. Fate headed that way. When he was crossing the road, a car almost hit him. For a moment he thought it was because he was drunk, but then he told himself that before he crossed, drunk or not, he had looked both ways and he hadn’t seen any lights on the road. So where had the car come from? (282)

The issue of distinguishing between a hallucination and reality diverts attention from another possibility: an apparent hallucination as the product of supplemental causality; the car is real and unreal at the same time. It can have a real-world impact but is a product of virtual reality, and as such, not explainable by any mechanism that is empirically evident to the subject. The creator of this reality is testing the inhabitants of Santa Teresa. The murders of women in Santa Teresa are part of this test. It wants to see how the inhabitants of Santa Teresa respond to these murders. Some of these inhabitants have the characteristics of robots or androids. The influence of science fiction is evident in this aspect of the text. One example occurs after Fate declines Flores’s offer to help him return to his motel. Inside of his car as he is leaving, Fate notices the following: Rosa Méndez had her hands on her hips in what struck him as a completely artificial pose, and she wasn’t looking at him or his car as he drove away but at her companion, who stood motionless, as if the night air had frozen him. (282)

Another example of this type occurs as Flores is driving Fate to a restaurant: “Chucho Flores smiled and his smile remained stamped on his face as he kept driving, not looking at Fate, facing forward, as if he’d been fitted

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with a steel neck brace” (301). The characters with robotic behavior are mostly male, are part of the virtual reality of Santa Teresa, and in the course of “The Part about Fate,” it is suggested that they are directly involved with the murders of women. TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN At Count Pickett’s news conference in Santa Teresa, an American reporter asks his manager if there are any women in Count Pickett’s retinue. Some of the Mexican journalists are angered by this question and threaten the reporter (285). Subsequently, Fate asks Flores what the manager and the reporters were talking about, and Flores explains that they were talking about the killings of women in Santa Teresa. Before Pickett’s news conference, Fate showed no interest in the femicides. Flores compares the killings to a strike, in the sense that when there is a wave of killings, there is more media coverage of the killings and, as a result, public interest increases and people stop going to work until they lose interest and return to work (285–86). The role of the killings in the virtual reality of Santa Teresa is to incite a revolutionary response by the working class of a type that includes strikes. Given the inadequacy of the working-class response—succinctly characterized by the word that is at the center of the mural in Detroit previously referred to—that is to say, fear, the revolutionary situation does not materialize. Thus, the murders continue as punishment for inaction, retroactively signified by “the crack of the whip in an empty classroom” that forms part of Espinoza’s dream in “The Part about the Critics,” whose effects are nevertheless palpable to the virtual “students” that comprise the population of Santa Teresa (115). Flores presents Fate with the following summary of the socioeconomic situation in Santa Teresa: “This is a big city, a real city,” said Chucho Flores. “We have everything. Factories, maquiladoras, one of the lowest unemployment rates in Mexico, a cocaine cartel, a constant flow of workers from other cities, Central American immigrants, an urban infrastructure that can’t support the level of demographic growth. We have plenty of money and poverty, we have imagination and bureaucracy, we have violence and the desire to work in peace. There’s just one thing we haven’t got,” said Flores. Oil, thought Fate, but he didn’t say it. “What don’t you have?” he asked. “Time,” said Chucho Flores. “We haven’t got any fucking time.” Time for what? Thought Fate. Time for this shithole, equal parts lost cemetery and garbage dump, to turn into a kind of Detroit? (286)

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Data on urban inequality for Mexican cities is hard to obtain, but there is data for Mexico. In 2000, the GINI inequality index for Mexico was 0.526 and the index for Detroit was 0.439. In 2010, the figures for Mexico and Detroit were 0.489 and 0.456, respectively.27 Thus, over a ten-year period whose midpoint roughly corresponds to the year 2666 was published (2004), Mexico and Detroit became more alike in terms of income inequality. Mexico is the United States’ second-largest trading partner. In this relationship, both countries fulfill different functions. The United States is a center for international finance capital, whereas Mexico is a manufacturing center dependent on the United States for the investment of capital. In another version of her Modern Language Quarterly article on 2666, Deckard has summarized the key events in the neoliberal economic history of the relationship between Mexico and the United States: The Mexico borderlands have historically served as a laboratory for neoliberal policies and structural adjustments subsequently employed across the Third World. In 1965, the Mexican government introduced the Border Industrialization Program, a precursor to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that legalized North American foreign investment and duty-free import of raw materials assembled in maquiladora export-factories. The industrialization of the Mexican-US border regions was accompanied by a hemorrhaging of capital into the hands of North American investors. In 1982, in response to the Mexican debt crisis that threatened New York City investment banks, the Reagan administration used the IMF to impose structural adjustment on Mexico, pioneering the practice of extracting surpluses from the periphery in order to pay off international bankers in the core. In 1994, NAFTA executed a further round of privatization, deregulation, and land appropriation to remove the barriers to multinational capital.28

In 2666, the United States and Santa Teresa are regions of Neoliberal World, which could just as aptly be designated Bizarro World; regions where, in the United States, people see ghosts, a stranded boater causes an airline disaster, and the working class never improves its economic standing no matter how productive it is or how much profit it produces for the owners of the means of production. In Santa Teresa, a young girl goes happily to her death, a murderous rock dispatches another girl, a butterfly casts a horrifying shadow, and sinister androids are cause for concern. The United States and Mexico form parts of a whole characterized by “uneven structural relations” in which capital in the United States extracts profits from manufacturing in Mexico and elsewhere. This has lessened the amount of manufacturing done in the United States and lowered wages for workers in that country. These interlocking socioeconomic realities are two sides of a coin, parts of the same

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reality subjected to supplemental causality. In reference to the epigraph at the beginning of 2666, Santa Teresa is the “oasis of horror,” in the “desert of boredom” that is Neoliberal World, that was selected by the One for one more try at fomenting revolution. The last time there was a revolutionary situation in North America was in the 1960s, and it ended in failure in the United States and Mexico. As he leaves a gas station after buying food, Fate is conscious that, in a certain sense, when he crossed the border he never left the United States: Then he went out with his beer and hot dog. As he waited by the highway for three trucks to go by on their way from Santa Teresa to Arizona, he remembered what he’d said to the cashier. I’m American. Why didn’t I say I was African American? Because I’m in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn’t even take very long? 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? (283)

As well as “unevenness” in 2666, there is an “evenness” or identity that is not an identity of opposites between the United States and Mexico, in the sense that both are parts of Neoliberal World and are affected by supplemental causality. In fact, the most evident manifestation of this similarity is that, even though the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it has extreme economic inequality, a high poverty rate, and the highest rate of incarceration in the world.29 In short, among the developed nations, the United States is the one that most resembles a developing nation. Some of this resemblance is evident in Fate’s visit to Detroit, which includes scenes of urban deterioration, references to poverty, and the African American prison population. Because of racism, Fate can never forget that he is an African American in the United States. In Mexico, he feels less defined by his racial origin and does not feel compelled to refer to it when identifying himself. Nevertheless, he is still in Neoliberal World, which includes part of the Americas. Thus, his identification functions on two levels: (1) he omits reference to his racial origin even as he affirms he is an American, and (2) he affirms that he is in the same world as his interlocutor. If he were in a region outside of this world, he could omit reference to his racial origin when identifying himself, but, at an existential level, it is not clear what being in a different world would imply. Thus, he wonders if he would be nothing in that world. At this point, Fate is not far from thinking of himself as unreal, or as the product of someone else’s mind, which he does after crossing the border and returning to the United States at the conclusion of the third part of 2666: “All of this is like somebody else’s dream, thought Fate” (347). One

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of the more dream-like episodes in this part takes place near Fate’s motel in Santa Teresa: When he stepped onto the landing outside his room he saw three blond kids, almost albinos, playing with a white ball, a red bucket, and some red plastic shovels. The oldest must have been five and the youngest three. . . . When he started the car one of the albino children got up and stared at him. Fate smiled at him and waved. The boy dropped his ball and stood to attention like a soldier. As the car turned out of the motel parking lot, the boy lifted his right hand to his visor and stood that way until Fate’s car disappeared to the south. (284)

The child treats Fate like a military leader, an appropriate role for waging war against the criminals who are murdering women. This indicates that Fate’s destiny is somehow connected to the femicides. The albino children foreshadow Klaus Haas, the albino giant interviewed by Fate and Guadalupe Roncal at the conclusion of “The Part about Fate.” Fate becomes interested in the femicides after Chucho Flores tells him about them. Given that he writes about social and political issues, his interest is understandable. Fate calls his editor from the Hotel Sonora Resort and asks him for permission to stay in Santa Teresa for one week after the boxing match in order to do the necessary investigation for the story. His proposal is to write “a sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world . . . a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story” (294–95). His editor turns down his proposal because, in his view, it has nothing to do with African Americans. Fate is angered by this response and hangs up the telephone. The original Spanish text has “un aide-mémoire”30 instead of “a piece of reportage.” The use of the term aidemémoire is unusual in this context. It translates as memory aid (e.g., a tickler or a tip sheet). In terms of Fate’s article, the question that arises is, what is it that needs to be remembered? “The Part about Fate” largely revolves around a pair of missing signifiers: the ideological master-signifier that Barry Seaman fails to produce in his lecture and the Name-of-The-Father that is absent from Fate’s psyche. Fate’s projected article could result in the production of a master-signifier of the first type. His project would then involve placing the “sketch of the industrial landscape of the Third World”—and by extension of the United States, since it has a lot in common with the Third World—in an ideological context. Given his interest in Barry Seaman and Antonio Jones, who played roles in revolutionary politics, this would probably be a progressive ideological context. His article could then be a “memory aid” in the sense that it helps the reader to “remember” what was forgotten in postmodernism: revolutionary consciousness. Fate’s anger with his editor

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creates the impression that he will defy him and stay in Santa Teresa after the fight to write the article. This would seem to be Fate’s destiny. Things turn out differently. After Fate finishes talking with his editor, he notices a young woman smiling at him. She asks him if he is interested in the femicides. Fate surmises that she listened to him talking to his editor. The woman is Guadalupe Roncal, a journalist for a prominent Mexico City newspaper. Her assignment is to write about femicides. She inherited this task from her predecessor, Sergio González (a fictional version of the author of Huesos en el desierto), who was assassinated for being too aggressive in his investigation of the femicides. Roncal is consumed with fear that she will also be killed. She explains to Fate that she had to accept this assignment because “women can’t turn down assignments” (297). She has no experience doing investigative journalism. Whatever the merits of Roncal as a journalist, it seems evident that the principal reason she was assigned to write about the femicides is the cowardice of her male colleagues, among whom it would stand to reason that there is no shortage of experienced investigative reporters. Roncal is going to interview the principal suspect of the femicides, who is in jail. He is Klaus Haas, Archimboldi’s nephew and a U.S. citizen. She asks Fate if he would like to accompany her and interview him as well (299). He agrees. Roncal has seen photographs of Haas that were in Sergio González’s dossier. She describes him as being very tall and thin with blue eyes and blond hair. Roncal says Haas “has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who’s dreaming at great speed. A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams. And that scares me. Do you understand?” (300). She perceives that Haas is connected to forces she does not understand that are affecting the reality of Santa Teresa. If he were merely deranged, she would have no reason to fear his dreams. As he talks to Roncal, Fate is under the impression that some construction workers are looking at him, even though they are too far away to see him: “Some workmen leaning on beams or sitting on piles of bricks were looking at them, or so Fate thought, although it was impossible to say for sure because the figures moving around the unfinished building were so small” (296). His reaction to the workers reinforces the impression that he is paranoid. THE CIRCLE AND THE CROSS As we have noted, during his time as a university student Fate did not socialize during his spare time. On Saturdays, he went to a writing workshop (301). He took his vocation very seriously. Fate’s all-consuming relationship to his work has therapeutic effects, in the sense that it enables him to avoid becoming completely psychotic. According to Stephanie Swales,

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It is also possible, as in the case of James Joyce (see Lacan’s Seminar XXIII), that a psychotically structured person can avoid an active episode of psychosis altogether. Such individuals are able to find something, such as creative work, to provisionally stand in for the paternal function.31

By means of his writing, Fate is able to provisionally bind the imaginary, symbolic, and the real. Lacan designated the structure formed by the knotting together of these registers “the Borromean knot”: Lacan links three circles—representing the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary—in such a way that each circle passes over and under the next one twice. And he calls this structure “Borromean” because, like the knot of that name, they are linked in such a way that if one register is loose and breaks free, the whole construct falls apart.32

How is the Borromean knot registered in Fate’s writing? One of the most important themes of his writing is the struggle against racism. Two of his interviewees—Seaman and Jones—played roles in this struggle. Fate also interviews Khalil, the leader of the Mohammedan Brotherhood, a group with an ideology based on conspiracy theories (e.g., the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a CIA-FBI operation). The Ku Klux Klan is the leading exemplar of racism in Fate’s imaginary: the hate group that stands in for all the rest. He refers to it during his interview with Khalil. When he says that Blacks are oppressed by Jews, Fate replies, “You won’t see a Jew in the Klan” (292). Fate also refers to the Klan when, after listening to the journalist’s racist diatribe previously referred to, he asks him if he is “flacking for the Klan” (289).33 The name Ku Klux Klan is “apparently . . . derived from the Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English ‘circle’; ‘Klan’ was added for the sake of alliteration.”34

Figure 7.1  The Borromean Knot. Levi R. Bryant, “Notes on the Borromean Clinic,” Larval Subjects (blog), December 4, 2008, https://larvalsubjects​.wordpress​.com​/2008​/12​ /04​/notes​-on​-the​-borromean​-clinic/.

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The cross plays an important role in the iconography of the Klan. The Celtic cross combines a circle and a cross and is a symbol used by the Klan and other white supremacist groups.35 Interestingly enough, it is identical in shape to the illustrations of the Borromean knot in Lacan’s Seminar XXII: RSI and Seminar XXIII: Le sinthome.36 Lacan conceived of the loose ends of the cross as extending into infinity, in this way creating a secure knot. Tom Dalzell describes how Lacan converted this knot into the version of the knot pictured above: “By joining up the loose ends of the cross, conceived as infinite straight lines, Lacan was able to construct the three rings and knot them together in a borromean way.”37 Dalzell argues that “the reason [Lacan] can claim that Finnegans Wake is structured like a Borromean knot is the presence in the text of circles and crosses.”38 Lacan was aware that Joyce used these symbols in Finnegans Wake.39​ Given the association between the Klan, the Celtic cross, and the Borromean knot, Fate’s tendency to conflate racism with the Klan is an indication that his thinking on racism, as expressed in his writing, the activities associated with it, and his emotional life, has the effect of provisionally binding together the registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic in a Borromean way. Fate uses his writing, in a way first conceptualized by Lacan, to create an ego, a sense of self that takes the place of the Name-ofthe-Father and makes the difference between having a psychotic tendency and becoming insane. According to Dalzell, “In paranoia, now called delusional disorder, it is the Symbolic that is at risk of breaking free, as happened in Freud’s Schreber case.”40 What is it about Fate’s writing that enables him to hold his “subjective knotting” together? In order to understand the process involved in repairing the Borromean knot, it is necessary to discuss

Figure 7.2  The Sinthome. From Jacques Lacan, “L’ego correcteur,” Le séminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 152.

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the concept of “the sinthome,” introduced by Lacan in his seminar on Joyce. Dalzell defines the sinthome as “a psychical prosthesis constructed by the subject to repair a structural vulnerability to psychosis.”41 According to Dalzell, Lacan distinguished between the neurotic symptom as resulting from the interaction of the symbolic with the real, and the sinthome, which has the connotation of sin, as in sin of the father, and of “without the ptoma, Fall [of the father].”42 Dalzell summarizes Lacan’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Joyce as follows: he affirms that for Joyce the vulnerability to psychosis involved a deficient binding of the imaginary to the other registers. The sinthome he created deals with this vulnerability by knotting together the real and the symbolic in such a way that prevents the imaginary from slipping away. This sinthome was, in effect, a new ego that compensated for the deficiencies of his father as a father:​ Joyce’s “making a name for himself” as an author, rather than as the son of John Joyce, acted as a compensation for the fact that his father had not been a father for him, for the paternal resignation which brought about in him the Verwerfung of the Name of the Father. Joyce’s solution was to have his name recognised the world over as something proper to himself rather than inherited from his father. By creating a new “ring” at the specific place of failure in his subjective knotting, he was able to repair himself. This ego, by going over and under, over and under—over the Symbolic twice and under the Real twice—corrected the error in a borromean way. It knotted the Real and the Symbolic in him in such a way that his Imaginary was also held secure. That is to say, it restored the paternal function for Joyce after his father had let him down.43

As we have noted, Fate is the paranoid type of psychotic. In his subjective knotting, it is the symbolic that can break free. Were this to happen, he would be psychologically engulfed by his mother and become delusional. In terms of the structure of the Borromean knot, Fate’s imaginary crosses over and under the real and under the symbolic twice, making it possible for the symbolic to break off. In a well-constructed Borromean knot, the imaginary crosses over the real, under the symbolic, over the real again, and under the symbolic again. This prevents any of the rings from breaking off. According to Lacan, the knot created by Joyce to tie together the real and the symbolic follows the same pattern described above: over, under, over, and under. Assuming Fate’s sinthome repairs his Borromean knot, this knot would also follow the same pattern, except that it would fasten the imaginary to the real in such a way that the symbolic would also be held secure. In Le sinthome, Lacan quotes Joyce as saying that he wanted academics to keep themselves busy with him for three hundred years.44 He wanted to be remembered. Does not the concept of aide-mémoire have a similar

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connotation for Fate? He intends to be remembered for writing “a serious crime story,” an intention that is a result of the ego he has constructed by means of his writing. Nevertheless, it is evident that he distances himself from this intention on the morning of the fight, when he decides that he will not interview Klaus Haas: “Why interview a suspected serial killer if he couldn’t write about it?” (302). The night before making this decision Fate spent time thinking about his mother washing the dishes and the concepts of sleepiness and peacefulness, and he concludes that sleepiness is “the wellspring and also the last refuge of peacefulness.” He continues thinking about these concepts: “But then peacefulness isn’t just peacefulness, thought Fate. Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending” (302). For Fate’s mother, the movement in question is the work involved in washing the dishes. Peacefulness is the result of working and resting after the work is completed. In her case, peacefulness is an accelerator, leading to an incrementally greater engagement with life by means of the transition from inactivity to activity. Due to the provisional nature of the connection of the Lacanian registers in Fate’s psyche, he has a tendency to revert to becoming his mother in the imaginary. The sense of tranquility he feels as he thinks about/identifies with her is deceptive because it involves the danger of being psychologically engulfed by her should the real overlap his imaginary to a greater extent. This is always possible, given that in his subjective knotting the imaginary crosses over and under the real once. Without the sinthome, the circles representing the imaginary and the real would be connected in an unstable configuration and capable of intersecting to a greater or lesser extent. Lacan located the jouissance of the Other in the intersection of the real and the imaginary.45 Being engulfed by the mother entails an overexposure to this jouissance, which is equivalent to being consumed by the death drive. For Fate, the peacefulness resulting from identification with his mother is a brake (“desacelerador [decelerator]” in the original Spanish text)46 because it leads in the direction of psychic regression rather than engagement with life. It is significant that Fate has one of his many vomiting fits after thinking about his mother and right before going to bed: “The next day he got up at two in the afternoon. The first thing he remembered was that before he went to bed he’d felt sick and thrown up” (302). Although he spent the night drinking, he was not drunk before going to bed, “he was sober again, as if instead of drinking real alcohol Mexicans drank water with short-term hypnotic effects” (302). Neither is there any indication that he was suffering from the effects of a hangover. Due to the psychological proximity of the mother, it is plausible to interpret his malaise as an emotional state resulting from the anxiety produced by proximity to the real.

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THE SEARCH FOR A NEW IDENTITY The following exchange on the topic of clouds, between a clerk and Fate, is an indication that Fate is thinking about identity: The sky was a deep blue, broken only by a few cylindrical clouds floating in the east and moving toward the city. “They look like tubes,” said Fate from the open door of the lobby. “They’re cirrus clouds,” said the clerk. “By the time they reach the heights of Santa Teresa they’ll have disappeared.” “It’s funny,” said Fate, still standing in the doorway, “cirrus means hard, it comes from the Greek skirrhós, which means hard, and it refers to tumors, hard tumors, but those clouds don’t look hard at all.” (303)

The tube-shaped clouds do not live up to their name; they are not hard. They are a deficient representation of the phallus that corresponds to the “foreclosure of the phallic function” in Fate’s psyche. As a well-educated psychotic, he can think about the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus, but never have them; hence, the evanescence of the clouds. By means of the sinthome, Fate has found another way to create an ego that will serve him in good stead as his identity evolves. His comments on the clouds indicate that he is preoccupied with modifying this identity in such a way as to make his access to the symbolic order more secure. His new identity is a result of falling in love with Rosa Amalfitano, Oscar Amalfitano’s daughter. This identity is not evident when he meets her at the boxing match between Lino Fernández and Count Pickett. It becomes evident later, in Chucho Flores’s apartment. When Fate meets Rosa she is with Charley Cruz, Chucho Flores, Rosa Méndez, and someone named Juan Corona (309). Rosa Amalfitano is described as being “extremely beautiful.” Her ability to speak English is an indication that she is better educated than Rosa Méndez. Part of Fate’s attraction to her seems to have something to do with the impression that Rosa is of a higher social class than her companions. At one point, Fate is tempted to ask her what she is drinking, but he changes his mind because of this impression: Rosa Amalfitano lifted a paper cup, probably full of water or vodka or tequila. Fate thought about asking her which it was, but right away he realized it was a bad idea. You didn’t ask women like Rosa Amalfitano that kind of question. (311)

Count Pickett wins the fight, and Fate and his companions depart to have supper at a tacquería called El Rey del Taco. Fate had planned to leave

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Mexico after the fight, but his companions invite him to join them for supper and he accepts. Fate is aware that the only reason he stays in Mexico is because of Rosa: “Why am I here, eating tacos and drinking beer with some Mexicans I hardly know? thought Fate. The answer, he knew, was simple. I’m here for her” (314). The taquería is somewhat reminiscent of McDonald’s, but decorated with images of El Rey del Taco, a young boy who wears a crown and carries a scepter, and his burro. Some of these, such as the ones that show the boy and the burro falling into a ravine, or tied to a funeral pyre, or the boy pointing a gun at the burro, have a demonic quality. The waiters are miserable: The young waiters radiated exhaustion, although they smiled at the customers. Some of them seemed lost in the desert that was El Rey del Taco. Others, fifteen-year-olds or fourteen-year-olds, tried in vain to joke with some of the diners. . . . Some of the girls had tears in their eyes, and they seemed unreal, faces glimpsed in a dream. (312–13)

Fate tells Rosa Amalfitano that the restaurant is “like hell” and that he has lost his appetite. Rosa, less upset by the disturbing manifestations of child labor, agrees, but tells him that as soon as he has a plate of tacos in front of him he will regain his appetite. Her class privilege insures that she will never have to work in a place like El Rey del Taco. Fate is also bourgeois, but within the dream-like virtual reality of Santa Teresa his destiny is to be a leader that children will look up to. Was he not recognized as such by the albino child when he saluted him like a military officer? Here, in El Rey del Taco, the children, who wear military uniforms, and about whom the narrator affirms that “this was certainly no victorious army,” recognize they are leaderless. The only reason Fate is there is because of Rosa. After Charly Cruz talks about the sacred, which he associates with old movie theaters, the Latin Mass, and family stability (314–15), Fate asks himself, “Do I see the sacred anywhere? All I register is practical experiences. . . . An emptiness to be filled, a hunger to be satisfied, people to talk to so I can finish my article and get paid” (316). The sense of mission he had, rooted in a search for constructive ways for the African American community to eliminate, as he put it, “the endless variety of ways we destroy ourselves,” is gone (293). After supper, the group goes to various discotheques. For the benefit of Fate, Rosa Amalfitano adds information about her racial origin to her social class profile when she informs him that she is Spanish, not Mexican, which is another way of saying she is white, not mestizo. Fate thinks about asking her the inevitable “What part of Spain are you from?” which is a way of dwelling on her whiteness, of specifying it, but he is distracted by a man hitting a

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woman, who proceeds to kick her in the stomach after she falls down. Fate tries to intervene, but an unspecified person detains him (317–18). As this is happening, Rosa Méndez is smiling and being affectionate with Juan Corona. Rosa Amalfitano, who is in a drug-induced haze, has nothing to say about the incident. This episode is one of the most striking examples of the widespread acceptance of violence against women in Santa Teresa. The group heads to Charley Cruz’s house after visiting the discotheques. Here Fate sees a mural in the garage that represents the Virgen of Guadalupe in the middle of a landscape with abundant manifestations of wealth in the form of rivers, forests, mines, oil rigs, corn fields, cattle, among others: The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin’s eyes was open and the other eye was closed. (320)

The Virgin is an emissary from the One, who offered Fate an abundance of riches in the form of his destiny as the writer of a great work of journalism, but he has abolished this destiny. The closed eye leads to another reality where the wealth represented by the mural is nowhere in sight. That is Fate’s reality; the abundance of riches corresponds to an alternate Fate in another world who made the decision embrace his destiny. TRAUMA REVISITED Inside the house Fate watches a film with Charley Cruz while Rosa Amalfitano goes to a different room with Juan Corona and Chucho Flores. There is another man with Fate and Cruz who is not named. The film in question has been described by some critics as a snuff film, but this is inaccurate. It is a pornographic film in which the death of the main actress is simulated. By means of special effects, her flesh falls off her bones while she is having sex and she is reduced to a skeleton (321). After watching the film, Fate looks for Rosa Amalfitano. In the process, he enters several rooms of the house, among them a bathroom with a coffin. In another room, he finds Rosa Méndez who is asleep or very drunk, but leaves her alone. Fate thinks she looks like a prostitute, and he has no interest in prostitutes (316). As he continues looking, he hears Juan Corona and Chucho Flores arguing. Previously, they looked at Fate in a hostile manner, as if they did not want him to be there, so it is evident that Fate’s presence annoys them. Fate thinks that Flores and Corona are probably arguing about who will go to bed with Rosa and that they could be arguing about him (323). If this is the case, it is

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probable that they perceive Fate as a rival. Fate enters the room where the argument is taking place: Now I have to try to be what I am, thought Fate, a black guy from Harlem, a terrifying Harlem motherfucker. Almost immediately he realized that neither of the Mexicans was impressed. “Where’s Rosa?” he asked. Chucho Flores managed to point to a corner of the room that Fate hadn’t seen. I’ve lived this scene before, thought Fate. Rosa was sitting in an armchair, with her legs crossed, snorting cocaine. “Let’s go,” he said. (323)

Rosa goes willingly with him. As they are leaving the room, Corona grabs his arm and takes out a gun: [Fate] turned around and dealt Corona an uppercut to the chin, in the style of Count Pickett. Like Merolino Fernández earlier, Corona dropped to the floor without a sound. Only then did Fate realize Corona was holding a gun. He took it away from him and asked Chucho Flores what he planned to do. “I’m not jealous, amigo,” said Chucho Flores with his hands raised at chest height so that Fate could see he wasn’t carrying a weapon. (324)

Fate decides that he and Rosa should leave the house. He probably thinks she is not safe there, or he is jealous of Corona and Flores. In the passage quoted above, all of the components of his new identity are evident. Here it is useful to keep in mind the distinction between imaginary identification and symbolic identification. Fate’s ideal ego or imaginary identity is easy to determine: it is Count Pickett. Fate makes the connection himself when he desires to be a terrifying “black guy from Harlem” with the boxing skills of Count Pickett (who is also from Harlem). Fate’s ego-ideal or symbolic identification is harder to determine. A clue is provided by his feeling of déjà vu pertaining to his interaction with Flores, Corona, and Rosa. This feeling is attributable to the retroactive temporality involved in the process of identification. The “scene” of identification extends back to Fate’s traumatic response to a racist story about a Mexican boxer. It includes the boxing match between Count Pickett and Lino Fernández and continues with the passages quoted above. The traumatic response exposed his vulnerability to the Other: he could not listen to a racist story about Mexicans without feeling personally attacked. In other words, the connection established between the symbolic and the imaginary by his sinthome is defective, and he needs to reinforce it by means of symbolic identification—that is, by the ability to identify with the Other. The unnamed journalist who tells the story about the Mexican boxer Hércules

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Carreño says that the reason the U.S. boxer Arthur Ashley beat him is that Carreño is genetically inferior, because, like most Mexicans, he is the result of intermarriage between European Spaniards and indigenous Mexicans. In addition, he says that upper-class Mexicans tend to look for wives in the United States and send their sons to universities in California hoping they will marry women from the United States for the sake of improving the race— that is, having offspring who are taller and whiter than they are (287–88). The journalist does not state the race of Arthur Ashley, so it is possible he is African American. The name Arthur Ashley is close enough to Arthur Ashe, the famous African American tennis player, to reinforce this possibility. The journalist says that in his fight with Carreño, “the Sadist [Ashley] took his time, he was in no hurry, picking the perfect spots to land his hooks, turning each round into a monograph, round three on the subject of the face, round four on the liver” (289). As well as physically overpowering Carreño, Ashley has more mental discipline and tactical ability than his opponent. He is a more intelligent boxer. Fate’s imaginary identification with Count Pickett is the result of his symbolic identification with the vantage point of the racist journalist: Fate cannot be white, but he can be like Arthur Ashley: taller, stronger, and smarter than most Mexicans. This qualifies him for “honorary white” status and makes him worthy of a white woman. I use the term “honorary white” in a metaphorical sense to indicate the existential condition of being able to participate in white privilege. In this regard, it is relevant to note that in 1973, when Arthur Ashe became the first black man to play in the South African Open, he agreed to participate in the tournament on the condition that “he would not have ‘honorary white’ status, rather he would be recognized by white South Africa as a black man.”47 Of course, in South Africa, the term “honorary white” had a legal, as well as existential significance. With his symbolic identity in place, Fate can listen to racist stories about Mexicans without feeling threatened. The role of the boxing match in the construction of this identity centers on Rosa Amalfitano. Fate responds to his desire for her by ceasing to be threatened by the Other as he consolidates his identification with its vantage point. Count Pickett takes the place of Arthur Ashley as someone the racist journalist would admire, Fate identifies with, and Rosa will find attractive. In Heideggerian terms, Fate undergoes the experience of falling: he falls to the level of the “they,” the spectators who pin their hopes for the vindication of Mexico’s honor on Lino Fernández, except that he wants Count Pickett to win. After the fight, Juan Corona senses a connection between Fate and Count Pickett that goes beyond the fact that they are both African Americans: “Corona was looking at him . . . as if trying to scare him off with his stare or blaming him for the defeat of the Mexican fighter” (314). Henceforth, Fate’s identification with the Other will play a greater role in the formation of his ego than his sinthome. By the time Fate decides to leave

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Charley Cruz’s house with Rosa Amalfitano, his imaginary identity as Count Pickett has already been formed. His decision merely brings it into play. After Rosa and Fate leave Charley Cruz’s house, they go to the Las Brisas motel. There, Rosa tells Fate about her relationship with Chucho Flores and how she ended it because of his possessiveness (326–37). Before the end of the relationship, Flores visited Oscar Amalfitano with Rosa Méndez and Charley Cruz. On this occasion, they talked about various topics, among them zoetropes. A zoetrope is a device that produces an optical illusion by displaying a rapid sequence of drawings or photographs. The zoetrope in question, referred to by Cruz as “a magic disk,” has a disk that alternates a drawing of a laughing drunk with a prison cell to create the illusion that the drunk is in prison. Amalfitano comments that “in a way, we all have millions of magic disks floating or spinning in our brains” (334). This is true, in the sense that the unconscious interacts with consciousness and affects our behavior in ways we do not perceive. Amalfitano states that “el borrachito . . . se reía, tal vez porque él no sabía que estaba en una prisión.”48 (“the drunk . . . was laughing, maybe because he didn’t know he was in jail [my translation].”) El borrachito is like Fate, who, instead of fulfilling his destiny as the writer of a transformative article, has, unbeknownst to him, become ideologically imprisoned by identifying with the racist oppressor even as he thinks he has found himself. Cruz does not know how to react to Amalfitano’s statement about el borrachito and, for a brief instant, reveals what he really is: a robot. The passage describing his reaction is extraordinary, but too long to quote in its entirety: For a few seconds, remembered Rosa, Charly Cruz’s gaze altered, as if he were trying to see where her father was going with all this. Charly Cruz, as we’ve already said, was a relaxed man, and for those few seconds, although his poise and natural calm were unshaken, something did happen behind his face, as if the lens through which he was observing her father, Rosa remembered, had stopped working and he was proceeding, calmly, to change it, an operation that took less than a fraction of a second, but during which his gaze was necessarily left naked or empty, vacant, in any case, since one lens was being removed and another inserted, and both operations couldn’t be carried out simultaneously. (334)

Amalfitano does not notice the change in Cruz’s appearance, but Rosa does, and it nauseates her. Amalfitano has another interpretation of el borrachito’s laughter: In fact the prison is drawn on the other side of the disk, which means one could also say that the little old drunk is laughing because we think he’s in prison, not realizing that the prison is on one side and the little old drunk is on the other, and

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that’s reality. . . . In fact, we could even guess what the little old drunk is laughing about: he’s laughing at our credulity, you might even say at our eyes. (335)

El borrachito is laughing at the limitations of empirical knowledge. Amalfitano, who thinks he is talking to a human being when he is talking to a robot, is an example of these limitations. Rosa’s reaction suggests that the inhabitants of Santa Teresa would be highly disturbed to learn that they are living in the midst of robots who are probably involved in the murders of women. These robots exist almost beneath the threshold of consciousness. Nevertheless, they are robots and 2666 is a work of science fiction. Of course, 2666 consists of too many different genres—national allegory, philosophical thriller, road novel, detective novel, Kũnstlerroman49—to be pigeonholed into one literary category, but the unifying thread that ties together these different genres is science fiction. Apparently, this was Bolaño’s opinion. In an interview that, as Franklin Rodríguez has noted, was published in 2001, when Bolaño was fully engaged in writing 2666, he stated that “it is a work of science fiction.”50 After Rosa tells Fate her story, she asks him if he fell in love with her, and he says, “Maybe” (339). He does seem to be in love with her, but there is never any physical intimacy between them. Later on, Fate fantasizes about Rosa and asks himself if he made love to her in the Las Brisas motel. He responds, “Of course not” (346). Fate respects Rosa because of her social standing and because he is in love with her. Nevertheless, there is something strange about the aforementioned question and emphatic answer and his need to draw attention to this aspect of their relationship; as if he were forbidden from having sex with her because of the restrictions of a puritanical superego, or subject to ongoing doubts about his masculinity. Fate leaves the motel with Rosa after learning that the police are looking for him, and they go to Amalfitano’s house. Amalfitano decides that it would be best for Rosa to leave Mexico and return to Barcelona. He asks Fate to take her to the United States and accompany her to the airport, and he agrees. When Fate asks Amalfitano if he thinks Chucho Flores is involved in the femicides, he responds, “They’re all mixed up in it” (343). As this conversation is going on, a black Peregrino of the type associated with the murders is parked outside of Amalfitano’s house. Amalfitano steps outside, and as Rosa and Fate leave the house, Amalfitano talks to the driver, with whom he is acquainted. The description of their escape from the house is noteworthy: They crossed the yard and the street and their bodies cast extremely fine shadows that every five seconds were shaken by a tremor, as if the sun were spinning backward. When he got in the car Fate thought he heard a laugh behind him and he turned around, but all he saw was Amalfitano and the young man still talking in the same position as before. (344)

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The trembling shadow is the product of a virtual reality that encompasses Fate and Rosa. The laughter heard by Fate (there is no indication it is heard by Rosa) is an auditory hallucination characteristic of psychosis that indicates his continuing vulnerability to the manifestations of this disorder. Thus, the passage combines the general situation of a disordered reality with an individual case of a psychological disorder within this reality. JUDGMENT Fate decides to accompany Guadalupe Roncal to the Klaus Haas interview. He and Rosa meet her at the Sonora Resort. On the way to the prison, Rosa calls Rosa Méndez and nobody answers. She speculates that she is dead. Fate responds that they—he and Rosa—are still alive, and she says that they are alive because they have not seen and do not know anything (345). In fact, they know enough to realize it was a good idea to leave Charly Cruz’s house and that they are probably alive because of that decision. Whatever else may be said about Fate, he has physical courage. The conclusion of “The Part about Fate” juxtaposes sections that describe a visit to the Santa Teresa prison with sections that describe a return to the United States. Fate’s observation to the effect that all of what he sees after he crosses the border seems to be like somebody else’s dream occurs in the context of the aforementioned dream-like, nonlinear narrative, and suggests that the content of the juxtaposed narrative segments is also part of that dream. Fate is no longer writing an article on the femicides and has no need to visit the prison. His possible motives for doing so include curiosity and the desire to protect Guadalupe Roncal. Even so, Klaus Haas makes a profound impression on him and he remains in his thoughts after he returns to the United States (348). Back in prison, the prelude to Haas’s entrance is a sandstorm accompanied by ominous clouds (347–48). The narrative returns to the United States and describes Fate’s thoughts as he drives to Tucson with Rosa. He begins by remembering that his mother or her neighbor used to tell him that he should never ignore a woman’s fears. Then he thinks about scales, like the scales of Blind Justice, except that instead of two platters, there were two bottles, or something like two bottles. The bottle on the left was clear and full of desert sand. There were several holes in it through which the sand escaped. The bottle on the right was full of acid. There were no holes in it, but the acid was eating away at the bottle from the inside. (348)

The women’s advice functions like a superego injunction in the context of the theme of justice, which means that Fate is judging himself. After his mother died, he thought she would have said to him, were she still alive, “Be a man

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and bear your cross” (234) which in the context of “The Part about Fate” is a cross combined with a circle—the Borromean knot. The bottle with the holes represents the ego corresponding to Fate’s sinthome. It is found to be wanting, vulnerable to the Other and unwilling to fulfill its destiny. In the short run (in Mexico) the bottle filled with acid outweighs the leaky bottle filled with sand. It corresponds to an ego based on Fate’s identification with the symbolic Other. In this case, the Other is a racist. In the long run (in the United States), the corrosion that will destroy the bottle is the self-hatred produced by someone who exists as the object of institutional racism, and thus cannot be racist, identifying with a racist mentality.51 As Fate continues driving he “remembered the words of Guadalupe Roncal. No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them” (348). He is not sure whether Guadalupe Roncal or Rosa Amalfitano talked about “the secret of the world.” He finally decides that he heard about it from Klaus Haas (348). That makes more sense, because, as the nephew of Benno Von Archimboldi, who is the principal embodiment of the secret of the world in 2666, he is in more of a position to know about it than Guadalupe Roncal or Rosa Amalfitano. The “secret of the world” is that it is a virtual reality consisting of different regions where either naturalistic or supplemental causality prevail. Roncal lives in one of the latter. The femicides are the result of, among other things, supplemental causality. Thus, they are a manifestation of the secret of the world. “The Part about Fate” concludes in prison. As he approaches Roncal, Fate, and Rosa for the interview, Haas sings in German about being a lost giant in the middle of a burned forest who will be rescued by someone. He is popular with the prisoners, who encourage him as he approaches Fate and his companions. Fate thinks he sounds like a polyglot woodcutter “who speaks English as well as he speaks Spanish and who sings in German” (349). Cutting down trees suggests the revolutionary activity of clearing out the old order to make way for the new; however, he is lost without his uncle. Haas greets the visitors in Spanish and requests that they proceed with their questions. He elicits the following reaction: “Guadalupe Roncal raised her hand to her mouth, as if she were inhaling a toxic gas, and she couldn’t think what to ask” (349). The extraterrestrial origin of the secret of the world is suggested by the toxic gas, reminiscent of the atmosphere of another planet, which Roncal seems to be reacting to. “The Part about the Crimes” divulges the secret of the world by representing the mechanism that produces the virtual reality of the simulated world. NOTES 1. Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat, Understanding Roberto Bolaño (Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2016), 174.

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2. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 231. Text references are to pages of this edition. 3. Laure Westphal and Thierry Lamote, “The Clinic of Identifications in the Different Processes of Metamorphosis into Woman,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (October 22, 2018): 11, https://doi​.org​/10​.3389​/fpsyg​.2018​.01463. 4. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grig (New York: Norton, 1997), 306. 5. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 92. 6. Westphal and Lamote, “The Clinic of Identifications,” 8. 7. Lacan, The Psychoses, 268. 8. Flavie Waters, “Auditory Hallucinations in Psychiatric Illness,” Psychiatric Times, 27, no. 3 (March 3, 2010): 2, https://www​.psychiatrictimes​.com​/cme​/auditory​ -hallucinations​-psychiatric​-illness. Waters includes nonverbal auditory hallucinations “such as music, tapping, or animal sounds” within the range of auditory hallucinations experienced by psychiatric patients. 9. Drew Desilver, “For Most U.S. Workers, Real Wages Have Barely Budged in Decades,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, August 7, 2018, https://www​.pewresearch​.org/. 10. Anjuli Sastry and Karen Grigsby Bates, “When LA Erupted in Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots,” NPR, April 26, 2017, https://www​.npr​.org/. 11. Lacan, The Psychoses, 255. 12. Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015), 177 (my translation). 13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 368. 14. Ibid., 369. 15. Américo Paredes, “The United States, Mexico, and ‘Machismo,’” Journal of the Folklore Institute 8, no. 1 (June 1971): 18, http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/3814061; Vicente T. Mendoza, “El machismo en México al través de las canciones, corridos y cantares,” Cuadernos del Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Folkloricas 3 (1962): 75–76, https://revistas​.inapl​.gob​.ar /inde​​x​.php​​/cuad​​ernos​​/arti​​cle​/v​​iew​​/2​​98​/79​. 16. Ibid., 19. 17. Ibid. 18. Angel Nuñez, “Chauvinism or Machismo,” 25 Years Ago on Ambergris Caye (Blog), accessed January 10, 2020, https://ambergriscaye​.com​/25years​/men​.html. 19. Sharae Deckard, “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 354, https://doi​.org​ /10​.1215​/00267929​-1631433. 20. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, 7th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 366. 21. Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 90. 22. Lacan, The Psychoses, 204–05.

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23. Ibid., 205. 24. Ibid., 249–50. 25. Ibid., 255. 26. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440– 1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 440. 27. “GINI Index for Mexico,” FRED Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed January 12, 2020, https://fred​.stlouisfed​.org​/series​/SIPOVGINIMEX; Francesco Andreoli and Eugenio Peluso, “So Close yet so Unequal: Reconsidering Spatial Inequality in U.S. Cities,” Econstor, no. 55 (2017): 67, http://hdl​.handle​.net​ /10419​/170652. For an informative analysis of income inequality in The United States and Latin America see Andreoli and Peluso, “Study: US Cities have Worse Inequality than Mexico, with Rich and Poor Living Side by Side,” The Conversation, June 1, 2017, United States Edition, https://theconversation​.com/. 28. Deckard, “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” 2–3, accessed June 9, 2021, https://www​.academia​.edu/. 29. Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Yes, U.S. Locks People Up at a Higher Rate than any other Country,” Washington Post, July 7, 2015, Politics, https://www​.washingtonpost​ .com/. 30. Bolaño, 2666, 373. 31. Stephanie Swales, “Psychosis or Neurosis?: Lacanian Diagnosis and Its Relevance for Group Psychotherapists,” Group 34, no. 2 (June 2010): 134, https:// www​.jstor​.org​/stable /41719272. 32. Tom Dalzell, “A Lacanian Reading of Paternity in James Joyce,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 10 (2018), http://www​.journal​-psychoanalysis​.eu/. 33. In “the Part about Fate” the word Klan appears eight times. Other whitesupremacist groups are not mentioned. 34. Encyclopaedia Britanica, s.v. “Ku Klux Klan,” accessed May 26, 2020, https:// www​.britannica​.com​/topic​/Ku​-Klux​-Klan. 35. “Hate Symbols Database,” ADL (website), accessed May 26, 2020, https:// www​.adl​.org /educ​ation​/refe​rence​s/hat​e-sym​bols/​celti​c-cro​ss. 36. Lacan, RSI, Ornicar? no. 2/5 (1975); Lacan, Le sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 32. 37. Dalzell, “A Lacanian Reading of Paternity in James Joyce.” 38. Ibid.; Lacan, Le sinthome, 168–69. 39. Lacan, 143–44. 40. Dalzell, “A Lacanian Reading of Paternity in James Joyce.” 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Lacan, Le sinthome, 16. 45. Yorgos Dimitriadis, “The Psychoanalytic Concept of Jouissance and the Kindling Hypothesis,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (September 21, 2017): 6, https://doi​ .org​/10​.3389​/fpsyg​.2017​.01593. 46. Bolaño, 2666, 382.

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47. Cecil Harris, “Remembering Arthur Ashe,” Boxscore World Sportswire, January 8, 2011, https://boxscorenews​.com​/remembering​-arthur​-ashe​-p32027​ -296​.htm. 48. Bolaño, 2666 , 422. 49. Gutiérrez-Mouat, Understanding Roberto Bolaño, 174. 50. Franklin Rodríguez, Roberto Bolaño: el investigador desvelado, (Madrid: Verbum, 2015), 233; Bolaño, “Entrevista con Roberto Bolaño: Sobre el juego y el olvido,” by Silvia Adela Kohan,” La Nación, April 25, 2001 (my translation), https:// www​.lanacion​.com​.ar/. 51. Marquaysa Battle, “Can Black People be Racist? Here’s Why They Can’t,” Elite Daily, May 30, 2017, https://www​.elitedaily​.com/. Battle’s article contains an informative discussion on the topic of institutional racism in the United States.

Chapter 8

Virtual Reality and the Revolutionary Subject

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND “The Part about the Crimes” is close in form to a detective novel, except that most of the crimes are never solved. This contrasts with Bolaño’s other novels that have something in common with the detective novel, such as Distant Star and The Savage Detectives, in which the investigators find the person they are looking for. In fact, the perpetrators of many femicides in Ciudad Juárez have never been brought to justice. In The Femicide Machine Sergio González Rodríguez discusses the reasons for the impunity of these perpetrators, including “complicity between criminals, police, military, government officials, and citizens who constitute an a-legal old-boy network.”1 The most economically powerful form illegal activity in Mexico is the drug trade. The a-legal network mentioned by González is a by-product of the one-party state created in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution that attempted to regulate the drug trade by means of cooperative arrangements with drug kingpins even as the illegal status of this trade was formally maintained.2 As Luis Astorga has noted, these arrangements increasingly went beyond cooperation to the extent that government officials, police, and businesspersons became leaders of the drug cartels: If at first there seems to have been a certain indifference or tolerance towards growers and traffickers, afterwards the high profitability of the business and the high degree of impunity seem to have released certain ethical inhibitions of some groups within powerful corporations and governmental circles, as well as those of many other powerful groups within civil society, which decided to participate more actively and most likely to control and direct the business from less risky but indispensable positions for its successful operation.3 143

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According to Astorga, whose book El siglo de las drogas was published in 2005, regarding Mexico, “what is publicly known about drug trafficking, traffickers, their support and their partners is minimal, compared to what is known on the same subject in Colombia, Italy and the United States.”4 He attributes this situation to the code of silence or omertà followed by Mexican drug traffickers when they are imprisoned, and which, according to him, is universally observed. The penetration of the criminality of the drug trade into all levels of Mexican society with a concomitant weakening of the rule of law is an essential component of the “femicide machine,” Sergio González’s designation for an interrelated set of social features and characteristics that made Ciudad Juárez a lethal place for women. In his opinion, these women were murdered “for the pleasure of killing women who were poor and defenseless.”5 The femicides first attracted widespread notice in 1993, but “there is evidence these crimes began years before.”6 The women were killed by “drug traffickers complicit with individuals who enjoy political and economic power.”7 He quotes an FBI source to provide a more specific classification of the killers: “Who’s behind the murders? At least one or more serial killers, a couple of drug dealers, two violent and sadistic gangs and a group of powerful men.”8 Ciudad Juárez has a source of expendable labor that is constantly replenished by migrants. As low as the salaries are in the maquiladoras, they allow the women who work there a certain amount of independence, to the extent that they are not tied to the home, are less dependent on men, and have more recreational options. As González Rodríguez has observed, this independence has provoked the hatred of men, an integral part of a femicide machine “composed of hatred and misogynistic violence, machismo, power and patriarchal reaffirmations that take place at the margins of the law.”9 The “The Part about the Crimes” takes place between 1993 and 1997. During those years the governor of Chihuahua State, in which Ciudad Juárez is located, was Francisco Barrio Terrazas, a politician affiliated with the National Action Party (PAN). His election as governor in 1992 marked the end of more than sixty years of control of Chihuaha’s governorship by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Astorga considers that “it is not fortuitous that the increase in the levels of violence related to drug trafficking in the 1990s was initially observed in some states where the political opposition became the government.”10 Drug trafficking in these states was controlled by the PRI, whose loss of power led to “more autonomy in the field of drug trafficking with respect to political power”11 and an increase in violence, which continued in Ciudad Juárez beyond 1997: “When the PRI regained the governorship of Chihuahua [in 1998] . . . the violence associated with drug trafficking did not diminish, but was concentrated even more in Ciudad Juárez, a city governed by the PAN.”12 From the mid-nineties onward, the Juárez Cartel, headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, was at war with the Gulf and the Tijuana

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Cartels.13 The Juárez Cartel was protected by elements of the Chihuahua state government and the Ciudad Juárez city government. In Huesos en el desierto González Rodríguez writes about two high-ranking police officials in this regard: Antonio Navarrete and Francisco Minjárez. Victor Valenzuela—an informant who was a former member of the Chihuahua State Police—identified the perpetrators of the femicides and accused Navarrete and Minjárez of protecting them: On June 18, 1999, the newspaper Reforma reported an atrocious attestation . . . The dozens of girls and women victims of kidnapping, rape, mutilations and death over almost a decade were, at least in part, the product of a group of subjects engaged in drug and jewelry smuggling. Some police officers and officials of the state of Chihuahua protected them, for convenience or common business.14 The protectors of the murderers were two senior police officers from the state of Chihuahua. [Victor Valenzuela] gave their names and surnames. Antonio Navarrete, who was then operational commander of the municipal police in Ciudad Juárez. And Francisco Minjárez, a former commander of the PJECH Anti-Kidnapping Task Force. They represented the governmental power behind the murderers.15

In his correspondence with González Rodríguez, Bolaño sought “ayuda técnica” (technical help) for the writing of his novel.16 Marcela Valdes interviewed González Rodríguez, who explained to her that Bolaño needed “help with the details of the murders and the police investigations”: “He wanted to know exactly how murder cases were written up. He wanted a copy of a forensic report. . . . It is this language that appears in ‘The Part about the Crimes.’”17 According to Alice Driver, the relationship between González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and 2666 “proves pivotal because Bolaño’s fiction feeds off the reality and statistics of feminicide violence as researched and documented by González Rodríguez.”18 THE SIMULATED WORLD Abdul Latif Sharif, an Egyptian-born American chemist, was the chief suspect in the Juárez femicides. González Rodríguez did not believe that Sharif was involved in the killings and thought that he was scapegoated by the Juárez police in order to avoid incriminating the real culprits.19 In 2666, the character of Klaus Haas is based on Sharif. Like Sharif, the German-born Haas is an American citizen. He is a shady character with a criminal record, but there is no proof he

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is a murderer. Before arriving in Mexico, Haas was accused of attempted rape in Tampa but never convicted.20 In the United States, he had also been accused of exhibitionism, indecency, and soliciting sex with prostitutes (478). Like Sharif, Haas gives a press conference in jail in which he professes to name the true perpetrators of the femicides. Before his arrest, Haas was a successful small-business owner who sold consumer electronics for a living. He owns two stores in Santa Teresa and one in Tijuana. Estrella Ruiz Sandoval, the adolescent he is accused of murdering, had an interest in computers, which is the reason she goes to one of Haas’s stores in Santa Teresa and becomes acquainted with him. The computer motif is significant in 2666. It is an indication that the reality represented in the text is a virtual reality. The key episode in this regard occurs when Epifanio Galindo, a police officer, inspects Haas’s downtown store in Santa Teresa. “The place” is much larger than he expects, with rooms full of boxes of computer parts. He is struck by a contrast between two bathrooms, one of which is very neat, and the other one very filthy; a contrast that seems to be purposively illustrative of “an asymmetrical and incomprehensible phenomenon” (478). The bathrooms are understandable in the context of the computer components mentioned in the narrator’s description of the store. The contrast of the clean bathroom with the filthy one can be conceptualized as cleanliness contrasted with absence of cleanliness, which in turn can be symbolized as 1 contrasted with 0, a reference to the binary code which forms the basis of computer language. “The place,” in 2666, encompasses planet Earth. The phenomenon referred to above is an unconscious “cultural perception that material objects are,” as N. Katherine Hayles put it in her definition of virtuality, “interpenetrated by information patterns.”21 The asymmetry of this phenomenon is due to the irregular composition of the computer generated virtual reality in which the inhabitants of the Earth are immersed, of which the principal manifestation is the contrast between naturalistic and supplemental causality. In 2666, naturalistic causality is reserved for Europe. Less fortunate regions of the world, such as the United States and Latin America, are subject to supplemental causality. European reality is just as much of a virtual reality as the rest of the world, except that it is not evident because, in terms of causality, there is nothing extraordinary about that reality from an existential point of view: it does not draw attention to itself as something that can be explained in terms of a computer-generated simulacrum. Nevertheless, the link to the binary code and to virtual reality is there, in the chambre de bonne inhabited by Jean-Claude Pelletier as a student (4). In the passage referenced above, there is a transition from the insalubrious situation of sharing a sink with fifteen people to the even filthier one of sharing a bathroom likened to a cesspit. The missing contrast between cleanliness and lack thereof characteristic of the bathrooms in Haas’s store becomes retroactively significant as the occlusion of one and the presence of zero because of the connection established between bathrooms and virtual reality in the crucial episode in the basement of Haas’s store, which is not surprising,

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given the connection between a bathroom and virtual reality in Amulet. The specific number of people using this bathroom implies the multiplication of sixteen by zero, or zero. Nevertheless, the sixteen people do not disappear, which implies the existence of another number associated with sixteen that maintains the existence of the latter. This number can be derived by considering zero as an exponent of sixteen—that is, by raising 16 to the 0 power, or 160, which yields the multiplicative identity, or 1. In that case, the numbers in question are 16, 1, and 0; 160 = 1, but 16 * 0 = 0. Sixteen (16) biologically based people drop out of the picture and the remainders are one and zero. As the essential components of the binary code, they can be used to construct a virtual reality that includes the residents of the chambre de bonne. Thus, the reality represented in “The Part about the Critics” is also a computer-generated virtual reality, symbolized by the relation of sixteen filthy people to the essential components of the binary code: one, zero. Haas evinces an unconscious “cultural perception” of this reality during his interrogation by the police, when, after being told that only swine have sex with menstruating women, he responds, “In Europe we’re all swine” (480); an outrageous statement, but one that references the chambre de bonne in question as a symbolic manifestation of the totality of the virtual reality of the European world. The concept of reality as a computer simulation is not limited to science fiction. In a highly influential article originally published in 2001, Nick Bostrom proposed that it is within the realm of probability that human beings are living in a computer simulation. Drawing on the philosophy of mind and probability theory, Bostrum argues that it is highly probable that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future and that later generations might use this power to run detailed simulations of their forbears or of people like their forbears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones.22

The position in the philosophy of mind referred to by Bostrum is that of “substrate- independence,” the idea that mental states are not tied to a specific physical substrate: “It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick

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too.”23 In terms of human consciousness considered as such, Hayles is resistant to concepts of the relationship between information and materiality not based on (biological) embodiment, opining that to conceive of information in this context as anything other than a byproduct of this type of embodiment is a form of idealism: Central to this argument is a conceptualization that sees information and materiality as distinct entities. This separation allows the construction of a hierarchy in which information is given the dominant position and materiality runs a distant second. As though we had learned nothing from Derrida about supplementarity, embodiment continues to be discussed as if it were a supplement to be purged from the dominant term of information, an accident of evolution we are now in a position to correct [my emphasis].24

Nowhere in How We Became Posthuman does the term that designates the relevant concept here—substrate-independence—appear. In terms of this concept, the distinct entities are not information and materiality, but rather different forms of materiality (e.g., “carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium” or “silicon-based processors in computer”) that interact with information in a feedback loop that subverts the distinction between materiality and information. Which is to say that Hayles’s assertion “that in the computational universe, everything is reducible, at some level, to information” is wrong.25 By privileging biological bodies over other forms of materiality in the process of the interaction between information and materiality, Hayles is herself engaging in a form of idealism—particularly if the bodies in question are well-fed, privileged ones! Posthumans capable of simulating worlds would, in effect, be gods: Although all the elements of such a system can be naturalistic, even physical, it is possible to draw some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world. In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are omniscient in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens.26

VIRTUAL THEOLOGY AND PROGRAMMING ERRORS Haas is not religious. In jail, he likes to meditate on the inexistence of God for at least three minutes and on the insignificance of human beings for at least

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five minutes (562). Nevertheless, the numbers three and five are part of the Fibonacci sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on. In VALIS (“acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System”), the Fibonacci sequence, as well as the Fibonacci ratio (1.618034) are used as identification signs by an organization called “The Friends of God.”27 In The Divine Invasion, the second novel of the VALIS trilogy, Zina and Emanuel describe the Fibonacci ratio in the following terms: “The ratio,” she said to Herb Asher, “is that used in playing cards: three to five. It is found in snail shells and extragalactic nebulae, from the pattern formation of the hair on your head to−” “It pervades the universe,” Emanuel said, “from the microcosms to the macrocosm. It has been called one of the names of God.”28

As the Fibonacci sequence progresses, the quotient of the successive numbers approaches 1.618034 as a limit. The numbers mentioned by Zina (three and five) are the same as those mentioned by Haas in the passage referenced above. The quotient of five and three is 1.666667, which includes 666, a number that is also included in 2666. In chapter 13 of the New Testament, this number is referred to as “the number of the beast.” It has traditionally been associated with the devil. If the allusion to the Fibonacci sequence in Haas’s thought process is an indication that, contrary to appearances, a case can be made for an interpretation of 2666 that involves some kind of god (i.e., the director of the simulation) as the creator of the universe, the association of this god with 666 suggests that it has the capacity to be evil as well as good. In 2666, there is no indication of Gnosticism—that is, a “fall” that results in “a rupturing of the Godhead” and competing deities, as in Dick’s VALIS trilogy.29 In Bolaño’s novel, good and evil are attributes of a unitary god: the director of the simulation. This god has a capricious, unpredictable nature. Above all, it wants to be entertained. This is supported by the prominent role of spectacle in 2666: a boxing match as the raison d’être for Fate’s trip to Santa Teresa; the simile of the ancient Christians in the Roman circus to describe the existential situation in Santa Teresa; the torture and killing of the gang members of Los Caciques, witnessed by many in the Santa Teresa prison, some of whom are arranged in a spatial orientation similar to that of a Roman circus; and the lovemaking of General Entrescu and Baroness von Zumpe, witnessed by Archimboldi and a German soldier named Wilke from a hidden passageway with walls containing peepholes. The reader of 2666 can also respond to the spectacles represented in the text and record his or her response in written form, which can in turn be read and interpreted by another reader in a conceptual process that ends with the last reader of the penultimate interpretation. Reader response to

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textual spectacle suggests the virtual analogue, discussed by Bostrum, of the creators of ancestor simulations being themselves the product of such a simulation, part of a series of simulations that begins and ends with the “basement level” simulation created by a posthuman life form, or life forms, more or less equivalent to God. In this case textuality would be analogous to virtuality, except that God would be both the first and last reader, given that, like VALIS, “space and time don’t exist for it, VALIS can be anywhere and anytime it wishes to,”30 not unlike the One that is both outside and inside of time and space in Plato’s Parmenides. Between the fundamental level of reality and the most recent simulations, Bostrum envisages a series of demigods under the control of the most powerful god: “All the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”31 Depending on its mood, the most powerful god could also tolerate the misbehavior of its subordinates, like the ventriloquist who makes an appearance on An Hour with Reinaldo, a television variety show that in 2666 is the venue for the pronouncements of Florita Almada. He is self-taught, like Bolaño, and thinks his dummy is alive. The analogy between a ventriloquist’s dummy and an author’s literary characters is clear. More pertinent to this analysis is the conception of puppets as self-conscious beings who, like the inhabitants of a simulated world, are convinced they are alive and engage in rebellious behavior. According to the ventriloquist, Andresito tried to escape or kill him several times. He states that there is nothing unusual about dummies being alive and that they stay alive by means of a parasitic relationship to their environment that includes sucking the blood of their ventriloquists (435). The notion of blood-sucking dummies draining their masters’ bodily fluids aligns nicely with the possibility, discussed by Bostrum, that at some point, the successive simulations created by the inhabitants of ancestor simulations could entail such an expenditure of computing power for the basement-level simulation that it could result in the termination of a higher-level simulation when it is about to reach the posthuman stage.32 The term “posthuman,” as used in this book, can be deduced from the preceding as pertaining to someone who has the capacity to use a computer to create a simulated world whose inhabitants are convinced they are alive in the biological sense of the word. But I also consider “posthuman worlds” to be worlds inhabited by simulated beings, whether the latter have reached the posthuman stage or not. This book is also an investigation of the existential properties of these worlds as represented in Bolaño’s narrative. Florita Almada, the herbalist and seer who appears on Reinaldo’s show and gives advice on topics such as the health benefits of a diet restricted to rice and fruit, provides comic relief in 2666. She does, however, raise public awareness about the femicides, and her pronouncements blaming the government for its inaction have considerable ethical ballast. In terms of virtual

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reality, the most intriguing parts of the episodes involving Almada occur in her first appearance on Reinaldo’s show and in a subsequent interview with Sergio Gonzáles. During that first appearance, regarding the structure of reality, she says that the world changes every hundred feet and is comparable to a tremor (430). Almada’s thoughts are not inconsistent with the notion of the world as interpenetrated by a grid that makes it possible to distribute changes to the physical laws determining the structure of reality. The computer program determining reality can modify the laws applicable to the grid on a regional basis. In one region, for example, the laws of probability can be suspended and the next-to-impossible can be integrated into the chain of causality, as when, in “The Part about Fate,” a stranded boater is rescued because an airplane crashes in his vicinity. A tremor is an involuntary movement in an animate or inanimate entity, something that attests to the fact that the entity in question is affected by forces beyond its control. In terms of a computer simulation, a tremor signifies a breach in the system, a breakdown in the computer language that distorts the reality it determines and attests to its material origin. The evidence of these types of tremors is scattered throughout “The Part about the Crimes”: dead bodies that end up in unexpected, difficult-to-access locations for no apparent reason, given the impunity of the perpetrators of the femicides, or female murder victims who have been raped and mutilated but are nevertheless carefully dressed with little or no evidence of damage to their clothing. The incongruous juxtaposition of murder victim and clothing or place is like a faultily designed web page that juxtaposes print and visual images, or has its images located in the wrong place. The fully dressed body of Beverly Beltrán Hoyos is an example of the first type of juxtaposition. She was raped, and her body had multiple stab wounds. Nevertheless, her clothes were not ripped and were free of bullet marks (504). The most curious thing about the description of the clothing is the mention of bullet marks. Considering that the victim was stabbed to death, the expectation is that if her clothing were not damaged, it would be free of bloodstains rather than bullet marks. This expectation overdetermines the impression of a malfunction in the representation of reality. Not only is there no connection between the crime and the condition of the victim’s clothing, the type of crime committed does not even correspond to this condition were there to be evidence of a connection between the former and the latter. Jazmín Tores Dorante is another example of a murder victim who is stabbed to death and is found fully clothed, this time without any mention of perforations or stains on her clothing (546). As if to reinforce the virtuality of these bodies, the body of the next murder victim after Torres Dorante, Carolina Fernández Fuentes, is naked, although a bloodstained bra is found in the vicinity (546). The unexplainable location of an unidentified murder victim in a construction site provides an example of the second type of incongruity, involving

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the juxtaposition of bodies and locations. Given the risk of falling downstairs without a railing, or of being noticed by the police or security guards on streets that are well-patrolled at night, the narrator wonders why the body of a woman who was not from the neighborhood was left on the second floor of a building under construction, when it would have been much easier to leave it in the desert or a garbage dump (425). Sergio González explains to Inspector José Márquez that he believes the femicides follow a pattern in which women are kidnapped, murdered, and disposed of in separate places (560). He is puzzled as to why a murder victim, Michele Sánchez Castillo, was attacked and killed where she was found in the rear grounds of a bottling plant. Márquez explains to him that the killings do not all follow the same pattern and that there is no logical explanation for the crimes: “It’s fucked up, that’s the only explanation” (561). The key to a logical explanation of the femicides is, of course, Almada’s concept of the world as a kind of tremor, the aforementioned “breach” in the operating system of the computer that gives rise to deficient representations of reality, which in turn indicate that these are part of a computer simulation. The tremor is metonymical, a part that represents the whole by indicating a breakdown that is only explainable in terms of the whole, a relationship to totality not unlike that pertaining to the Heideggerian concept of Dasein. BATHROOMS AND ONTOLOGY González interviews Almada for an article he is writing on the femicides. He is a rationalist who does not believe in seers, and she does not impress him, so he leaves the interview early. Nevertheless, some of Almada’s answers to his questions are relevant in terms of a speculative interpretation of 2666. She associates “ordinary” murders with lakes or wells that grow calm after being disturbed and serial killings with smoldering metals or minerals (571). When González asks her if she can see the killers, she responds that they have big, swollen faces (571). When asked if she can hear them, she responds affirmatively, adding that she does not understand what they are saying, since they speak a language that is for the most part incomprehensible to her (572). As Gonazález prepares to leave Almada’s apartment, she talks about the joys and sorrows of the killers (572). In the passages referenced above, Almada refers obliquely to the provenance of the virtual simulation of Santa Teresa: the serial killers are associated with metals or minerals, materials—such as silicon or heavy metals—used in the manufacture of computers. These materials create a smoldering image, a reference to the toxicity of some of them. Thus, the swollen faces and incomprehensible language referred to by Almada are among the

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many indications in 2666 that the femicides take place within a simulated reality that is distinct from a biological/naturalistic one. After the Alamada interview, there is a summary of the case of Sabrina Gómez Demetrio, who was abducted, stabbed, and shot. Before dying, she recalls being locked in a Suburban and says “something” about a pig-faced man (573). In the context of the Almada interview, the indefinite pronoun something suggests a difficulty in the comprehension of language and is thus an echo of Almada’s impression of a mostly incomprehensible language. The pig face refers to the swollen faces mentioned by Almada. The placement of these references to textual elements of the Almada interview indicative of a simulated reality immediately after that interview strengthens the case regarding the representation of reality in “The Part about the Crimes” as a computer simulation. The association between ordinary murders and wells and lakes seems to refer to the category of biological life, based as it is on water. Nevertheless, in Amulet, when Auxilio Lacouture tries to conceal herself from the soldiers who have occupied the University of Mexico, she establishes an association or equivalence between a lake and a rhombus when she relates that her face and the face of a soldier who enters the bathroom looking for her are “embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake.”33 Afterward a singularity divides the narrative into divergent parts. In one of them, the soldier looks for and possibly finds Auxilio. The other one, which becomes the focus of attention of the narrative, consists of Auxilio’s time travel. The textual element associated with these divergent narratives is the rhombus which, as we have noted in chapter 4, can be used to form Penrose or nonperiodic tilings. The characteristic feature of these tilings is that they are composed of tiles that lack translational symmetry. Combinations of tiles within Penrose tilings composed of two different rhombi are visually analogous to combinations of zero and one, the numbers that form the basis of the binary code. Having established the relationship of the rhombus to virtuality, the equivalence of the rhombus to a lake suggests that what is considered to be biological life, associated with water, is also virtual—that is, interpenetrated by information patterns and, in the final analysis, not biological, but rather a component of a computer simulation. The subversion of the distinction between biological life and virtuality in Amulet suggests that the opposition between ordinary murders/biological life and serial killings/virtuality in 2666 can also be subverted. As in Amulet, the subversion involves bathrooms, but this time on a planetary scale, comprising the filthy bathroom of the chambre de bonne, associated with zero, and Almada’s bathroom, associated with her, or one. Sergio González uses Almada’s bathroom before he leaves her house. He notices two potted plants on the floor (572). Two refers to the number of bathrooms involved, one in Europe and one in Almada’s house; to the two bathrooms in Haas’s store; to the opposing categories of the joys and sorrows

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of the killers; and to the number of digits comprising the binary code. The potted plants symbolize that biological life as well as “inanimate” matter, the plants as well as the pots, are the products of this code. Thus, all aspects of experience—ordinary murders as well as serial killings, lakes as well as computer parts, are the products of this code and, in that sense, ontologically equivalent. In this regard, the most evident intertext is VALIS: It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system . . . we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms.34

Why make such paltry things as bathrooms a key to understanding the ontology of the world of 2666? In the Parmenides, the eponymous philosopher asks Socrates if he would extend his doctrine of idealism to “vile and paltry” things such as hair, mud, and dirt.35 Socrates insists that he would not, that such things are only as they appear, although he is not sure about this. He is then rebuked by Parmenides for “exhibiting an unphilosophic temper,” which he attributes to his youth: The time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you, and then you will not despise even the meanest things; at your age, you are too much disposed to regard the opinions of men.36

Benjamin Jowett’s commentary on this exchange is pertinent: Here is lightly touched one of the most familiar principles of modern philosophy, that in the meanest operations of nature, as well as in the noblest, in mud and filth, as well as in the sun and stars, great truths are contained.37

What truths are contained in a toilet bowl? In reference to 2666, the truth is about history and is best expressed in terms of the well-known expression “going down the tubes.” This is a reaction to the lack of agency of the subject in the construction of history. Even in those parts of the world, such as Europe, where supplemental causality is not in effect, this is not because of the agency of the subject, but rather because the subject has incurred the favor of whoever is running the computer simulation that pertains to that part of the world; as we have noted, this superhuman being seems above all to want to be entertained: its decisions about the world are arbitrary and not based on any consistent moral principles. In light of the preceding considerations, it is understandable why Archimboldi thinks that history is a whore, but he considers it to be common knowledge that it “has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants,

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brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness” (794). It is common knowledge for whom? Archimboldi’s thoughts about history give too much credit to common knowledge, which may not be a repository of information about 2666, or, to be more specific, about the possibility that what is a proliferation of brief periods of time in the world of the simulators might be a proliferation of extended periods of time in ours—or vice versa. This possibility is heightened by Hans Reiter speculating, in “The Part about Archimboldi,” about the inhabitants of dimensions beyond the fourth dimension who have a radically different perspective on the world than that which is shared by human beings (666). Thus, Archimboldi’s conception of history is one of many examples scattered throughout Bolaño’s oeuvre of a literary trap. Even as it sheds some light on the work in question, it misleads readers. In connection with the conception of history operative in 2666, the tendency to reduce events to spectacles should be noted. These spectacles, like the lovemaking of Entrescu and Von Zumpe, become the basis of historical change. When the spectacles involve conflicts between opposing sides, like World War II, “the whore” of history/superhuman being may choose not to take sides and “let the best man win” by reinforcing naturalistic causality, or it may take sides and punish specific regions of the world by means of supplemental causality. In the case of the Americas, the sides in question are the ruling class and the working class. As represented in “The Part about Fate,” in the United States supplemental causality exists mainly to punish the working class: there is little or no hope of a revolution taking place there. In Santa Teresa, the purpose of supplemental causality is to create a revolutionary situation by means of a computer program that generates femicides and reinforces their association with the power structure of Santa Teresa. The One is entranced by the resistance to fascism in the European theater of World War II. It is an entertaining spectacle, thematized in the form of a war game in Bolaño’s novel, El Tercer Reich. It would like to see something similar, but on a smaller scale, take place south of the border, in Santa Teresa. Any interpretation of 2666 that overemphasizes disorder and chaos at the expense of unifying the diverse components of this text is only partially correct. As with the philosophers who scorned the “meanest operations of nature,” not noticing the “great truths” contained therein, this type of interpretation fails to notice that the whore of history is also a goddess, with all this implies in terms of imposing a certain structure on existence that makes it possible to be “on the right side of history”—that is, to be on good terms with the whore, to be favored by her, as Archimboldi is. This is what Franklin Rodríguez fails to notice about Archimboldi in his reading of “The Part about Archimboldi”: In the Bolañesque künstlerroman Archimboldi does not aspire to the victory of literature, of his narrative or of a vision of history, what he shows is incredulity,

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the questioning of an education that emphasised horror, disorder and chaos as the principal attributes of fragmentary existence.38

Archimboldi may not aspire to the victory “of his narrative,” but he is victorious as a writer; he may not express a coherent vision of history, but his trajectory as a man and a writer embodies the systematic deployment of historical forces. It is significant that the first literary work he reads is Parzival, a poem about a hero lacking in self-knowledge. Whether he is aware of it or not, Archimboldi becomes a signifier around which there gravitates a constellation of signifieds, such as the rebirth of Europe, the rejection of fascism, the possibility of revolution and redemption, with him in the role of the redeemer. COMPONENTS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT In what follows, we will examine diverse components of “The Part about the Crimes” that exemplify the simulation of reality or the creation of a revolutionary situation. The starting point is the proliferation of cars that are unique to 2666 and associated with the femicides, such as Peregrinos, Spirits, and Master Roads. In the text, there are also cars used to abduct women that have real-world equivalents, such as Suburbans. In spite of the fact that witnesses often notice females who are later murdered being abducted by men driving Peregrinos, or some such other sui-generis type of vehicle, in subsequent police investigations this never leads to an identification and apprehension of the owners of these vehicles.39 This lends an uncanny presence to these cars, as if they were emanations from another world. These unreal vehicles serve as a bridge between fantasy and reality. Their first appearance in 2666 is in “The Part about Fate.” A Spirit and a Peregrino are parked outside of Amalfitano’s house (343). The Spirit belongs to his neighbor and the Peregrino to a cop. Other than the names of these cars, there is nothing unreal about them or their owners. In “The Part about the Crimes,” they become associated with the fantastic, then with rich kids (530), and, eventually, with narcorranchos (narcotics ranches) as the vehicles of choice driven by the bodyguards of the variegated collection of businessmen, bankers, politicians, and drug traffickers who attend parties at the narcorranchos (627). The pattern traced by the deployment of these vehicles in 2666 is as follows: reality is negated and becomes fantastic, which in turn is negated and returns as the apparently real—that is, as simulated reality. The events surrounding the disappearance and murder of Lucy Anne Sander and the subsequent investigation into her death by Harry Magaña, the sheriff of Huntville Arizona, exemplify many of the characteristics of the simulation of reality in “The Part about the Crimes.” Lucy Anne also lives in Huntville

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(a fictional place name), which is 50 kilometers from Santa Teresa. She visits Santa Teresa with her friend Erica Delmore to enjoy the nightlife. They go to several downtown clubs. In one of them a twenty-two-year-old Mexican named Miguel tries to pick them up, first Lucy Anne, and then Erica. He does not succeed and leaves. Afterwards, Lucy Anne and Erica drive through the city, and, according to Erica’s subsequent testimony, are not followed or bothered by anyone. They head toward a plaza with the intention of looking at a bandstand. Lucy Anne gets out of the car as Erica looks for a parking spot. After Erica parks, she returns to where she left Lucy Anne, and her friend is gone. After searching for her, Erica presents a missing person report to the police and Kurt Banks at the American consulate. Erica also spends time visiting hospitals to see if her friend ended up in one of them. As she is engaged in this activity, she reflects on the likelihood that she would have heard something if her friend had been involved in an accident (408). The lack of noise is uncanny and reminiscent of the case of Mónica Durán Reyes, discussed in chapter 5, who goes willingly to her death by entering without being coerced into a Peregrino or another vehicle of the same type. The silence and lack of witnesses to her abduction in a public place suggest that Lucy Anne literally disappeared, a specific example of a general situation referred to by Chucho Flores in a conversation with Fate about the femicides when, in answer to Fate’s question about how the women are killed, he responds that they vanish, only to reappear as corpses in the dessert (287). At the last hospital Erica visits, a nurse suggests that she try looking for Lucy Anne in a private hospital, but she replies sarcastically that they are blue-collar workers. The nurse, who speaks English, tells her that they have that in common. As they have coffee, the nurse informs Erica about the femicides. After Erica tells her that the same type of crimes occurs in the United States, the nurse assures her that the problem is worse in Santa Teresa (408). The nurse emphasizes her solidarity with Erica by pointing out that she is also part of the working class. It is debatable whether the problem of violence against women is worse in Ciudad Juárez than in the United States. According to the researcher Molly Molloy, Female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women. Ciudad Juárez is experiencing profound social distress, and the elevated violence in the city is a continuing crisis. But this idea that Juárez is a place of disproportionate violence against women is a misperception.40

Molloy refers to a statistical study by Pedro H. Albuquerque and Prasad Vemala to support her contention that “the commonly accepted story of the

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Juárez femicides is a myth.”41 Assuming this to be a valid conclusion, what is of primary interest in this book is how Bolaño makes use of this myth. This can be ascertained by examining certain aspects of the contrast and similarity between the United States and Santa Teresa in 2666. The starting point is the theme of working-class solidarity, a subtext of the interaction between Erica and the nurse. This solidarity seems to imply that the destinies of these workers from Santa Teresa and the United States are intertwined, when what occurs in Bolaño’s text is that they are separated; the working class of the United States is defeated, while that of Santa Teresa is held in suspension, separated from, and treated differently by the One than its analogue across the border, in order to try its luck in creating a revolutionary situation. It is in this context that the femicides are “worse” in Santa Teresa than the United States. They are worse by design because they are more likely to create a revolutionary situation. Fear of Abandonment The relationship between the One, causality, and a revolutionary situation is the subtext of Sergio González’s first visit to Santa Teresa, where he is on assignment to write an article about the Penitent, a disturbed individual who vandalizes churches by copiously urinating in them and destroying religious artifacts. The incredible amount of urine produced by the Penitent is in itself a simulacrum, only possible in a simulated reality (362). The Penitent’s sacrilege signifies the emergence of supplemental causality as cause of evil. This is experienced existentially as fear of abandonment by God. It is what underlies the words of Demetrio Águila to his associate Harry Magaña about animate and seemingly inanimate entities that apparently want to disappear. He asks Magaña if he believes in God (421). The religious theme is evident in the opening page of “The Part about the Crimes,” when two policemen find two women praying by the body of Esperanza Gómez Saldaña (353). Causality is the theme of an episode in which González observes policemen playing a game in which they place bets with jumping beans and pronounce strange-sounding words that he associates with the names of gods (378). The combination of gods and jumping beans (i.e., beans that jump without a visible cause) is a perfect illustration of the philosophical principle that great truths are contained in the meanest operations of nature and highlights the theme of supplemental causality. Revolution is the subtext of Sergio González’s interview with a priest who informs him about the femicides and summarizes the existential situation of the proletariat in Santa Teresa. He tells him that hundreds of migrants—whom he refers to as desperate Christians— arrive daily in Santa Teresa from Mexico and Central America. Their goal is to find work in the maquiladoras or cross the border. For some of them,

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the alternative to working in a factory is starvation, so they desire the very low wages paid at the maquiladoras. According to the priest, after reaching the border, the migrants pray or celebrate by dancing, among other activities, until they are exhausted and fall down (379). The maquiladoras are the most obvious manifestation of neoliberalism in “The Part about the Crimes.” They play a role in laying the groundwork for the revolutionary situation desired by the One and are correlated with supplemental causality. In and of itself, this causality would merely lead to the decimation of the female working class in Santa Teresa. The countervailing tendency to the preservation of the working class is due in no small measure to the maquiladoras. They pay miserable wages, but enough for workers to have a modicum of leisure time and the ability to enjoy it, as is evinced by female factory workers in “The Part about the Crimes” who enjoy the nightlife of Santa Teresa in their spare time. The migrants who make it to Santa Teresa have enough energy to reach the border and dance until they fall down from exhaustion. Their ability to get up and continue dancing is contingent upon them finding employment. Their jobs at the maquiladoras enable them to continue the dance, literally, and as a metaphor for having the energy necessary to engage in revolution. These jobs enable them to do more than merely survive but are terrible enough to motivate them to want something more. The femicides are instrumental in converting this desire for social mobility into a desire for revolution. They are perceived by the lower class as signs of social degeneracy and abandonment by God. Almada gives voice to the indignation of the people when she talks about the femicides during her appearances on television (459). Her connection to the people is demonstrated when Sergio González asks a maquiladora worker whose daughter was murdered about her. She is convinced that Almada tried to explain the hidden cause of the crimes to the people of Santa Teresa but that they were not receptive to her message (562). The people hear what Almada has to say but do not understand the hidden cause of the crimes; they do not understand that they are living in a virtual reality. However, when González asks his interlocutor if people are afraid, she replies that the mothers and some of the fathers are, but that the people—as a collective subject—are not, which is a useful mindset for a revolutionary subject (561). Revolution and degeneracy are among the topics discussed by Sergio González, Macario López Santos, and General Humberto Paredes, a former police chief of Mexico City. The journalists interview the general on the subject of snuff films, which it was rumored were being shot in northern Mexico during the time of the interview (1996). When Macario López asks the general what he thinks about the snuff industry in Santa Teresa, he replies that he has never seen a snuff film and is not sure they exist. The reporters speculate that maybe when he was on the job, that genre had not emerged. His thought-provoking response is that pornography reached its high point

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before the French Revolution and is essentially the repetition of “an alreadygazing gaze” on a subject matter that was “set” before 1789 (536). For the gaze of postrevolutionary ideologues in France, the pornography referred to by Paredes was an aspect of the sexual degeneracy of the old regime that contributed to causing the French Revolution.42 This is the gaze incorporated by the already-gazing gaze of the posthuman simulator of the femicides: sexual degeneracy as motive for revolution. The López interview foregrounds the connection between the former and the latter as a repetition of a previously established structural relation set before 1789. An Interloper Lucy Anne Sander is found stabbed to death two days after she disappeared (409). Erica Delmore is informed and she calls Harry Magaña, who drives from Arizona to Santa Teresa to meet Erica. He takes her back to Huntville and promises to find out who killed Erica. Magaña returns to Mexico and befriends Demetrio Águila, a sixty-five-year-old former field hand who lets Magaña stay in an apartment he owns in Santa Teresa. Magaña is of Mexican ancestry, speaks Spanish with an accent and a limited vocabulary. He plays the role of a tough guy from the United States who is not intimidated by the perpetrators of the femicides. He thinks that with a combination of brutality and detective work he can find out who killed Lucy Anne. His brutality is evident when he assaults a prostitute who seems reluctant to tell him where Miguel Montes is living and threatens to kill her (416). Montes is the person who tried to pick up Lucy Anne and Erica in a nightclub before Lucy Anne was abducted. Among the topics of conversation between Magaña and Águila is the continuity between the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Águila thinks Arizona, Sonora, New Mexico, and Chihuahua are the same, and Magaña disagrees (420–21). In terms of the computer-simulated reality of 2666 and the denouement of the Magaña episodes, he and Águila are both right. For Magaña, the same type of reality is in effect in Santa Teresa as in the United States. This reality is designed to punish residents of the latter for their failure to overcome neoliberalism—or “for any reason whatsoever.” As a representative of the United States, Magaña is punished with failure and death for having the impudence to interfere in the workings of supplemental causality by really trying to solve the murder of Lucy Anne Sander. A different fate awaits Mexican police, such as Juan de Dios Martínez, who make an earnest effort to find out who is responsible for the femicides.43 They are not punished by the director of the simulation for their efforts. In terms of virtual reality, for them, northern Mexico and Arizona are not the same, as will become clearer after examining the outcome of Martínez’s investigation into the abduction and murders of Estefanía Rivas and Herminia Noriega.

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Magaña finds out Miguel Montes’s address and breaks into his house (419–20). He finds two framed photographs of Montes and four Polaroids. What is particularly noticeable in this episode is the predominance of the number two. Aside from the photographs of Montes, there are Polaroids of a house in the desert with two windows, of two women, and of two men. There is a fourth Polaroid of an airplane on a landing strip in the desert. Three out of the four Polaroids refer to the number two. Magaña spends two nights waiting for Montes, gets tired of waiting for him, and leaves. He thinks that he may have had to leave town in a hurry or that he may be dead. He removes three types of objects from the house: a knife, letters, and photographs. In the preceding summary, even numbers predominate over odd numbers. The contrast between even and odd numbers references Borges’s detective story “La muerte y la brújula,” described by Alexander Coleman “as a game between even numbers and odd numbers,” which he identifies, respectively, with reason and life.44 The relationship to Borges’s detective story will become clearer at the conclusion of the Magaña episodes. For now it can be affirmed that Magaña is not as cerebral as Lönnrot, the protagonist of Borges’s story; he is passionate about his desire to catch Lucy Anne’s killer and cannot be exclusively identified with even numbers or reason. Nevertheless, like Lönnrot, he persistently and methodically applies his investigative skills— that is, his reasoning ability, in an effort to find out who is responsible for Lucy Anne’s murder. In this sense, he can be identified with even numbers or two. The criminal or criminals Magaña pursues are always one step ahead of him, and in the end—like Lönnrot—he falls into their trap. Magaña reads the letters he removed from Montes’s house and is interested in a love letter he received from a girlfriend in Chucarit. He goes to that town and finds the girl who wrote the letter, María del Mar Enciso Montes, a seventeen-year-old cousin of Miguel Montes. He earns her trust, and she takes him to the house where Montes’s family used to live on the outskirts of Chucarit. Next to the abandoned house there is a pigsty, a corral, and a henhouse. Magaña enters the house and, after smelling dead animals that turn out to be birds, he has a presentiment. When he shines his flashlight toward the ceiling, he sees part of the attic and unidentifiable objects or excrescences within it. He enters another room that is darker but that smells of life, a form of life that he associates with “life suspended, fleeting visits,” and “cruel laughter” (439). In this episode, the number two reappears as the opposition between death and life, which can be represented as zero and one—that is, as a reference to the binary code that becomes retroactively evident by means of the opposition between filth and cleanliness in Haas’s bathrooms previously related to the binary code and virtuality (478). Thus, Montes’s house suggests that Magaña’s investigation is part of a virtual reality. Magaña’s presentiment will turn out to be a premonition of his death. The suspended life and fleeting

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visits are references to simulated life, which can come and go, appear and disappear, according to the wishes of the director of the simulation. Magaña proceeds to Tijuana and obtains the assistance of Raúl Ramírez Cerezo, a policeman who helps him to locate Chucho, the writer of one of the letters in Magaña’s possession. In a conversation during lunch, Ramírez and Magaña agree that in life, things are not always as they seem and it is necessary to ask questions. However, Ramírez advises Magaña to beware of the types of questions he asks because there are questions that can lead to trouble (442). This foreshadows Magaña’s impending doom, but he is undeterred. Chucho informs Magaña that Montes is living with Elsa Fuentes in Santa Teresa, and Magaña returns there. He goes to the bordello where Fuentes works and obtains her address, not before attracting the attention of a middle-aged man in a suit who makes a comment to the effect that Magaña is a stubborn gringo (444). This suggests that individuals connected to Lucy Anne’s death are aware of Magaña’s investigative activities, a suggestion that is reinforced when, after leaving Fuentes’s house, he is followed by two men in a Rand Charger. They pass his car without showing any interest in him (446). After he breaks into Fuentes’s house, Magaña finds ten thousand dollars and a notebook with names and phone numbers, including Miguel Montes’s number. Fuentes does not return and he leaves. He takes a nap in Demetrio Águila’s house and has a dream in which he examines documents that seem to be written in the language of another world (447–48), which suggests that Magaña is involved in a simulation that is not taking place on earth and is of extraterrestrial origin. He calls information to find out what address belongs to Montes’s phone number and finds out that it is registered to Francisco Díaz. Magaña proceeds to that address and breaks into the house, in which everything is completely wrecked. He soon becomes aware that he is not alone and regrets that he is only armed with a knife. He looks inside a bedroom and sees a man dressed in the official overall of a maquiladora with a plastic-wrapped bundle that he has pulled from out from under a bed. The man looks at him without surprise, and Magaña becomes enraged and fatalistic at the same time, as he imagines that he is not in Francisco Diaz’s house, which he associates with the unreality of being in no one’s house, but rather in a shack like the one with a corral and a henhouse he visited on the outskirts of Chucarit, which he no longer locates in a specific location. The two men who followed Magaña in the Rand Charger enter the house, and they approach him as he lunges at the man with the bundle with the intention of stabbing him (448–49). The passage referred to above ties together various thematic strands of the Magaña episodes and 2666. As previously noted, the house on the outskirts of Chucarit is connected to the theme of virtual reality. By imagining he is in this house rather than in Francisco Diaz’s house,

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Magaña suggests that he is aware that he is as unreal as Diaz. Magaña is “somewhere else”; the house on the outskirts of Chucarit is not really a house and is not really on the outskirts of Chucarit (448). It is part of computer simulation that could well be taking place on another planet inhabited by posthuman descendants of the human race or extraterrestrials who enjoy simulated worlds inhabited by humans. The function of this house—house A—is to make Magaña aware that he and everything he is associated with is unreal. “The Part about the Crimes” is above all a text that draws attention to itself as a representation of the unreal. House A fulfills that function and is instrumental in extending the awareness of that unreality to Harry Magaña. In Francisco Díaz’s house—house B—the bundle pulled out from under the bed by the short man—presumably a murder victim—is foreshadowed by the unidentifiable objects or excrescences noticed by Magaña in the attic of the first room of house A. These unreal objects become “surplus” victims of the femicides whose identity is never determined: “dead women who were literally sprouting from the dessert of Santa Teresa.”45 The suspected perpetrators of the femicides or their associates who literally vanish, like Miguel Montes or Francisco Díaz, correspond to the suspended life and fleeting visits of the second room of house A—simulated life that exists in order to kill women. These life forms differ from “ordinary” perpetrators of domestic violence against women who murder their wives, are identified, and apprehended. There are several examples of these in “The Part about the Crimes.” They are no less unreal than the killers who drive Peregrinos, as they are all part of a virtual reality, but this type of violence against women—as symptomatic of machismo as the serial murders—is not perceived by the people as rulingclass-drug-related sexual degeneracy. The man dragging the bundle in house B wearing the official overall of a maquiladora is a reminder of the connection of the femicides to neoliberalism. The number two, associated with reason, predominates in Miguel Montes’s house. In house B, Magaña is overwhelmed by three men. Ultimately, three, connected with life in Borges’s “La muerte y la brújula,” prevails over two. As well as representing reason, Magaña represents the relationship of the United States to supplemental causality. In this capacity, his investigation into the murder of Lucy Anne Sander can be read as an effort to make sense of and overcome supplemental causality. At the end, all he has to show for it is a sense of being unreal followed by his disappearance. He is never heard from again, nor is his body ever recovered. For Magaña, being disliked by the director of the simulation means being defeated by life. Nothing positive comes out of his interaction with supplemental causality, an outcome that in 2666 is—in a more general sense—applicable to the United States and indicative of the inability of that country to resolve its cultural, social, economic, and political problems.

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The Death Drive and the Working Class The outcome of the investigation into the murders of Estefanía Rivas and Herminia Noriega has something in common with Magaña’s investigation into the murder of Lucy Anne Sander: the killer, or killers, are not identified or apprehended. Nevertheless, there are notable differences in these investigations that are attributable to the contrasting functions of supplemental causality in the United States and Santa Teresa. As previously noted, for Magaña supplemental causality functions as if he were in the United States during his investigation in Mexico. He is punished for his activities. This is not the case for the investigators of the murders of Estefanía and Herminia. The latter are kidnapped as they are walking to school by a man who emerges from a car (527). The girls’ two younger sisters witness the abduction, return home, and, after not being able enter their house because their parents are at work, go to a neighbor’s house and tell her what happened. The girls’ parents work in a maquiladora, and so does the neighbor who takes them in. She gets another neighbor and uses a public phone to call the maquiladora where Rivas and Noriega’s parents work, the mother as an “ordinary” worker and the father as a security guard. The operator of the maquiladora tells her that personal calls are forbidden and hangs up. She calls again and gives the name and job title of the girls’ father, thinking that it will make a difference, since he is of a higher status than the mother, a lowly worker who can be dismissed for any reason. However, the operator keeps her waiting for a long time, and the call is cut off when she runs out of coins (527–28). In what follows, the despondency of this woman and her companions is eloquently described as resulting from a characteristically Latin American form of helpless neglect, likened to being in purgatory, with the exception of the threat of imminent death that overturns all routines (528). For maquiladora workers, neglect means living on subsistence wages and being treated as disposable objects with no job security. The threat of imminent death that upsets all routines transforms workers’ despondency into despair and anger, necessary precursors for a revolutionary transformation. These emotions play a role in determining what the neighbor who called the maquiladora is thinking about after the call. To express her anger, she would like to fire a gun into the air as she shouts viva México, and then dig a hole in which she buries herself forever (528). Žižek has described the death drive as “the last resort of our resistance.”46 For him it is equivalent to the compulsion to repeat and “lies at the heart of negativity.”47 He takes the Lacanian position that it is not the will to “self-annihilation in which the subject would rejoin the fullness of the maternal Thing,” but rather a perpetual circulation around the hole of the real in an endless reenactment

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of the loss of the Thing.48 When the subject is dominated by the death drive, it produces a change in her subjective experience that assumes the form of the prolongation of a particular moment: At its zero-level, negativity is not a destructive annihilation of whatever there is; it rather appears as a sudden immobilization of the normal flow of things—at some point, things get stuck, a singularity persists beyond its proper term. . . . This is how, according to Deleuze, the New arises through repetition: things flow, they follow their usual course of incessant change, and then, all of a sudden, something gets stuck, interrupts the flow, imposing itself as New by way of its very persistence.49

This type of prolongation takes place in the passage referenced above, when the neighbor fantasizes about digging a hole and burying herself in it forever. The structure of the passage is based on negation: the femicides as the negation of the routine of life, revolutionary anger as the negation of the femicides, and the negation of this negation as the subject’s awareness of the compulsion to repeat—that is, to hold on to her anger forever, or until such time as a revolutionary transformation mitigates the need for this anger by eliminating its cause and inaugurating an emergence from the purgatory of neglect and despair. The girls’ father takes them to a police station after he arrives home from work, where, after they describe the car involved in the kidnapping, it is decided that the car in question is a Peregrino or Arquero. Juan de Dios Martínez takes a leading role in the subsequent investigation, which is more thorough than usual. The policemen involved in it feel like they are in a time warp where they are always defeated (529). This refers to the experience of being in a virtual reality and also to that reality as productive of the repetition characteristic of the death drive, foreshadowing the likelihood that something new, in the Deleuzian sense of the word, will emerge from this investigation. The turning point in the investigation is an anonymous call that alerts the police to shots fired inside a house on Calle García Herrero (530). Two policemen go to the house, and they are informed by a neighbor that he saw a black Peregrino parked outside the house. They knock on the door with no results, radio the police station for backups, and are joined by two more policemen, Juan de Dios Martínez and inspector Lino Rivera. Martínez instructs the policemen to break down the door of the house. Subsequently, they find Herminia’s body in a bedroom and Estefanía’s body in a bathtub. Both girls had been raped, tortured, and shot. Martínez finds out that the house belongs to an absentee landlord, an old woman who owns various properties and lives off the rents. Her tenant at the house where the bodies are found is named Javier Ramos. He paid his rent through the bank six months

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in advance, and no one has seen him since depositing the money for that payment. Subsequently, Martínez finds out that many of the houses in the vicinity of the old woman’s house belong to some of the most powerful people in Santa Teresa: Pedro Rengifo (a drug lord), Lorenzo Juan Hinojosa (a straw man for the drug lord Estanislao Campuzano), José Refugio de las Heras (the mayor of Santa Teresa), one of the mayor’s children, and Pablo Negrete (the rector of the University of Santa Teresa and brother of Pedro Negrete, the police chief of Santa Teresa). Martínez suspects that it is more than a coincidence that the house where the murders took place is surrounded by houses belonging to these men but considers that anyone who commits these type of crimes near or on his own property would have to be crazy (533). Two days later, there is a meeting—probably about the femicides—at a country club attended by José Refugio de las Heras, Pedro Negrete, Pedro Rengifo, and Estanislao Campuzano. The day after there is an extensive police search for Javier Ramos that leads nowhere (534). The individuals mentioned above belong to the Santa Teresa version of the “a-legal old boy network” in Ciudad Juárez, described by Sergio González in The Femicide Machine as consisting of “criminals, police, military, government officials, and citizens.” According to González, the impunity of the perpetrators of the femicides was due, in no small measure, to their complicity with this network. Given that the Santa Teresa network is a fictional version of the Ciudad Juárez network as described in Huesos en el desierto and The Femicide Machine, Martínez’s suspicion that Rengifo et al. are mixed up in the femicides is correct: the involvement of the Santa Teresa old-boy network in the femicides is fictionally true. THE CONVERGENCE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT The inability of the police to locate Javier Ramos or to produce “a convincing sketch” of him is reminiscent of the unreality of Francisco Díaz in the conclusion of the Harry Magaña episodes (448, 534). This connection with Díaz suggests that the function of Ramos within the computer simulation is to kill Herminia and Estefanía and cause Martínez to investigate their murders. Afterward, Ramos literally disappears. In contrast with Magaña, Martínez does not feel unreal as a result of his investigation. The function of supplemental causality in this case is to give Martínez a greater understanding of his reality by making him aware of who might be responsible for the femicides. Thus, Herminia and Estefanía were not killed by any of the property owners Juan de Dios is thinking about. They were killed by a simulated life form designed to draw his attention to their complicity in the femicides. Martínez

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represents the transition from the perception of the femicides as sexual degeneracy without specific social agents to sexual degeneracy attributable to specific members of the ruling class. The consequences of this transition extend beyond Martínez’s investigation and are essential for the creation of a revolutionary subject in the sense of giving the people specific targets for their rage. The need to determine who is responsible for the femicides motivates the activities of womens’ rights organizations, ranging from demonstrations to press conferences and television appearances. Representatives of a feminist group called Women in Action appear on a television program, demand that the central government get involved in investigating the femicides, and cast doubt on the culpability of Klaus Haas, whom they consider to be a scapegoat (512). “The Part about the Crimes” presents, in a fragmentary way, different moments in the creation of a revolutionary subject. This subject includes members of a variety of social groups and classes, such as the police, the working class, prisoners, and the bourgeoisie. Among the police, Juan de Dios and Lalo Cura stand out because of their integrity, professionalism, and lack of misogyny. As Oswaldo Zavala has observed, in the context of a “criminal-police state,” these are revolutionary attributes.50 There are a significant number of law-enforcement personnel in Santa Teresa who are not machista. Some of these would oppose the ruling class in a revolutionary situation. Opposing attitudes toward women are evident in the response of a group of policemen to a series of misogynistic jokes as they have breakfast in a coffee shop. The cops who do not laugh look in silence at the cops who do, associate misogyny with corruption, and are opposed to both (553–54). After breakfast, Gonzáles, the policeman who told most of the jokes, is challenged to a fight by Lalo Cura. These fights are regular events and are attended by the police. They are a form of ritual combat that allows cops who are involved in a dispute to express their anger toward each other in a nonlethal manner. There is no explanation of what the dispute between González and Lalo Cura is about, but the occurrence of the fight after González’s jokes has the effect of casting Lalo Cura as the representative of the police faction opposed to machismo and corruption. The fight foreshadows a conflict that would take place, on a larger scale and in a more lethal manner, between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary factions of the police in a revolutionary situation. One of the most direct references to class consciousness in 2666 occurs when Sergio González is contradicted by a prostitute, who assures him that it is factory workers rather than prostitutes who are being killed in the femicides (466). The theme of class struggle is the subject of a story Reinaldo (the host of An Hour with Reinaldo) relates to Sergio González about a Mexican who had been trying to enter the United States illegally and had been arrested and deported 345 times. Reinaldo was accompanied by a suicidal television host when he saw the migrant being interviewed on television. When the person interviewing him asked him

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if he was going to keep trying to get across the border, or if he was tired and wanted to return to his village or look for a job in Tijuana, he responded that he would never give up on the idea of living in the United States and that once he had an idea in his head he could not get rid of it. Reinaldo tells González that after the interview the host changed his mind about killing himself. He compares the “toadlike” migrant to a lump of coal that could have been a diamond in another reincarnation and considers him to be responsible for the fate of Mexico (567–68). The migrant is dominated by the death drive. That is the most cogent explanation for his obsessive compulsion to repeat. For him the new is represented by the United States. This episode is connected to the theme of class struggle by means of the reaction of the television host and Reinaldo. The advent of the new dispels the compulsion to commit suicide, as the death drive has more to do with life than death, but, in this case, what is the new for the television host and Reinaldo? It is encapsulated in the proposition that the migrant/lump of coal could have been a diamond. How? By staying in Mexico and converting his compulsion to cross the border into a compulsion to engage in revolutionary class struggle. It is suggested that the fate of Mexico, for which the migrant and others like him are responsible, depends on this conversion. The toad/lump of coal/diamond Reinaldo associates with the migrant are shifting designations that signify movement, circulation around the hole of the real, and indicate that Reinaldo and the talk show host, in anticipation of forthcoming social disorder, are under the sway of the death drive—that is, the urge to repeat that is the psychological mainspring of the revolutionary subject. The Lumpenproletariat The inmates of the Santa Teresa prison represent the lumpenproletariat, a sector of the lower class that in traditional Marxism includes criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes, and is thought to have no class consciousness or revolutionary potential. Frantz Fanon disagreed with this position and contended that in a colonial situation the lumpenproletariat in the shanty towns of the urban periphery constitutes a revolutionary force: The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.51 The lumpenproletariat constitutes a serious threat to the “security” of the town and signifies the irreversible rot and the gangrene eating into the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, when approached, give the liberation struggle all they have got, devoting themselves to the cause like valiant workers.52

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At first Haas is afraid of the prisoners in the Santa Teresa prison. His fear is based on the belief that they will kill him in revenge for the femicides. He is correct in his assumption that the prisoners are not insensible to the plight of the women who are being murdered but soon realizes that they do not blame him for these crimes (490). He establishes amicable relations with them and earns their respect. Three prisoners act as his bodyguards. He inculcates them with his ideology, based on entrepreneurial notions of self-reliance (485). These beliefs are consistent with Haas’s background as a small-business man. There is a connection here with the conclusions Albert Kessler derived from his analysis of the situation in Santa Teresa (267). In discussing these conclusions in chapter 7, it was noted that, from a logical point of view, Kessler’s statements suggest that the ruling class and the proletariat have an equal chance of prevailing in a death struggle or revolutionary situation. If this is the case, then there is no guaranteed outcome and the proletariat will need every resource at its disposal in order to prevail, including the lumpenproletariat. In addition, the collective strength of the revolutionary forces must, in the final analysis, be founded on the self-reliant strength of as many of its members as possible if they are to overcome the power structure. Haas is treated like a leader by the prisoners and accorded special privileges by prison administrators, such as organizing press conferences. One journalist reports that he controlled the prison (489). Haas dreams that he tries to say something to “a legion of miniature Klaus Haases,” but his lips are sewn shut, and there is an unaccustomed object in his mouth. He rips out the threads and spits out the object, which is a penis. He makes sure that his penis is still attached (488). The penis he spits out belongs to another version of him, perhaps from another computer simulation that impinges on his consciousness, as if to remind him that things could have turned out differently for him in prison. At some level of his being, Haas is aware that he is part of a computer simulation, as is suggested in a conversation between him and Sergio González in which he distinguishes between real life, likened to “a separate order of things,” and a dream that he and the other prisoners are part of, on which there impinges a noise from the aforementioned order (490). This distinction corresponds to the distinction between the reality of the director of the simulation, extimate to those within the simulation, and the simulation. The noise described by Haas refers to the perception of supplemental causality. In “The Part about Fate,” Guadalupe Roncal tells Fate that the prison is like a dream, and she compares it to a woman who was “hacked to pieces” (299); there is no hard-and-fast distinction between the inside and the outside of the prison. Inside and outside intermingle, as if through the spaces between the dismembered parts of a woman’s body. The extimacy of Haas’s dream is the defining characteristic of the existential situation of every subject

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within the simulation. Haas envisions that his role within this simulation is to be the leader of an army of miniature Klaus Haases: he wants to be part of a dual power that will challenge and overturn the ruling class (488). He is not the supreme leader of this power. That role is reserved for “the giant,” Benno von Archimboldi. The prisoners complain because Haas awakens them at night by ranting about how a monstrous giant will rescue him and kill his enemies (482, 506). Archimboldi is a signifier for the rise of the European Union. He is not a political leader in any sense of the word. In another version of reality, revolution in Mexico would not necessarily be contingent on his arrival in Santa Teresa, but for the director of the simulation in question, it is. For Haas also, the defeat of the power structure of Santa Teresa depends on Archimboldi’s arrival because, as he is aware, he is living in a dream subordinate to the reality of “a separate order of things,” which, in the final analysis, is a reality determined by the director of the simulation. Thus, all questions regarding the sequence of revolutionary development connected to the arrival of Archimboldi, or why his arrival is connected to revolution, are secondary, in terms of the principle of sufficient reason as the basis for determining the cause for a sequence of historical epochs53: For Heidegger . . . one cannot speak of a “why.” Only the “that”—that the history of Being is in such a way—can be said. Thus in the lecture “The Principle of Sufficient Reason” the saying of Goethe is cited: How? When? and Where?—The gods remain silent! Then stick to Because, and ask not about Why? The “because” in the lecture is what endures, what maintains itself as destiny. Within the “that” and in the sense of the “that,” thinking can also ascertain something like necessity in the sequence, something like an order and a consistency.54

Consistent with the role of a leader of the revolutionary faction in a situation of dual power, Haas raises public consciousness about the femicides. In his final press conference, attended by journalists from local newspapers, he accuses Antonio and Daniel Uribe, cousins and the sons of millionaire parents, of being serial killers. Antonio’s father owns a fleet of trucks used to transport merchandise from maquiladoras, and Daniel’s father is a property owner. The cousins are protected by Fabio Izquierdo, who works for a more powerful drug lord, Estanislao Campuzano (586). Haas’s accusations— which are based on information he learns in prison—are credible. Antonio and Daniel disappeared before the press conference, and, when contacted by the reporters present at the press conference, their family members provide only the vaguest information about their whereabouts. One of the reporters

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who publishes a story about Haas’s accusations disappears. Nevertheless, the police and the major newspapers deny the credibility of the accusations. By leveling his accusations against specific individuals, Haas goes one step further than Juan de Dios Martínez and gives the people specific targets within the power structure against whom they can direct their anger. His actions are an essential part of a sequence of events within a computer simulation designed to create a revolutionary situation. Haas lives somewhere between two worlds, that of the designer and that of the simulation. It is with the perspective of the former that he gazes at his lawyer and lover after the press conference: “observing her with scientific rigor, not from that prison room but from the sulphurous vapors of another planet” (607). Division within the Ruling Class The Mexican congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata is an upper-class ally of the revolutionary subject: although not a revolutionary herself, she is angry enough about the femicides to foster the type of division in the power structure that leads to a crisis of governance—a necessary precondition for a revolution. Initially her anger is motivated by the disappearance of her friend, Kelly Rivera Parker. Subsequently, her rage is fueled by the femicides in general, and it is then that she makes common cause with the women of Santa Teresa (626). Along the spectrum ranging from fantasy and science fiction to realism, the episodes dealing with Esquivel Plata are closer to the later. By means of the investigations that she instigates into Kelly Rivera’s death, suspects are named, and a picture emerges of drug kingpins, businessmen, bankers, politicians, and law enforcement officials who take part in orgies in isolated ranches where women—among them Kelly Rivera—are killed as part of the proceedings (621, 626, 629). The urge to adopt a naturalistic existential orientation is evident in Esquivel Plata. When Luis Miguel Loya, the lawyer she hires to investigate Kelly’s disappearance, tells her that he thinks that it is possible to be more or less dead in Mexico, she explodes in rage and rejects the notion that there is a distinct Mexican ontological reality that can be understood in terms of Pedro Páramo (624). The same resolve to find answers based on empirical fact is observable in Esquivel Plata’s admonition to Sergio González—whom she hires to replace Loya after his death—to “strike human flesh” in his articles about the femicides (631). Perhaps her indignant response to Loya is a reaction to the suspicion that she, along with everyone else in Mexico, is, if not a ghost, unreal, a suspicion bolstered by an experience she has in a hotel room in Santa Teresa (621). In this room, there are two mirrors at opposite ends of the room but not entirely opposite from each other, an arrangement similar to that of the mirrors in Liz Norton’s hotel room in Santa Teresa in “The Part about the Critics.” By standing in a

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certain part of the room, Esquivel Plata can see the mirrors reflected in each other, but in contrast to Norton’s dream, she cannot see her image. In the play of mirrors representing the interaction between symbolic and imaginary identities, the subject is absent, signifying its status as a simulacrum in a virtual reality. TIES THAT BIND Some of what Esquivel Plata says to Sergio González has to do with courage. She is a courageous woman who is willing to take on the establishment of the PRI in her struggle against the femicides. She addresses the theme of courage indirectly by ridiculing the machismo of men who think having sex with her is a revolutionary act (600). Courage—defined by Mark Twain as “resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear”55—is more directly addressed in a conversation Esquivel Plata relates to Sergio González that took place between her and Loya shortly before the latter’s death of cancer. She asks Loya if he is afraid because she is afraid, which is natural, considering the powerful enemies she makes as a result of the investigation into Kelly’s death. Loya, who is afraid to die and not complete his investigation, senses Esquivel Plata’s fear and asks her about it. She overcomes her fear and assures him that she is not afraid in order to reassure him that the work he began will continue and to enable him to overcome his fear of death, which he does (632). The bond between Esquivel Plata and Loya is an example of how, in the interaction between self and Other, courage can result in affective ties that, on a larger scale, lead to the solidarity of a revolutionary subject that includes the poorest residents of Santa Teresa, as in the concluding description of the Christmas holidays in Santa Teresa. As Zavala has observed, courage is evident in the form of laughter in spite of the menace of death, and solidarity in the role of laughter as a beacon that, even in the poorest neighborhoods, guides community members and strangers through darkened streets likened to black holes (633).56 If, as previously noted in chapter 7, Kessler’s analysis of the situation in Santa Teresa indicates an equal chance for the proletariat or the ruling class to prevail in a revolutionary struggle, the concept of a beacon that can escape from a black hole suggests that the proletariat will have the advantage in this struggle, as there is no evidence of anything associated with the ruling class—more divided against itself than the proletariat and, in the final analysis, politically weaker—being able to accomplish the same feat. Thus it is that “The Part about the Crimes” concludes with a sense of optimism about the destiny of the proletariat.

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NOTES 1. Sergio González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine, trans. Michael ParkerStainback (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 11. 2. Luis Astorga, El siglo de las drogas: El narcotráfico, del Porfiriato al nuevo milenio (México, DF: Plaza Janés, 2005), 161–64. Quotations from this text are my translations. 3. Ibid., 124. 4. Ibid., 125. 5. González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine, 71. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 74; Diana Washington Valdez, The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women (Burbank, CA: Peace at the Border, 2006), 235–40. 9. González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine, 11. 10. Astorga, El siglo de las drogas, 163. 11. Ibid., 162. 12. Ibid., 163. 13. González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, 3rd ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010), loc. 1041of 5858, Kindle. Quotations from this text are my translations. 14. González Rodríguez, loc. 2488 of 5858, Kindle. 15. González Rodríguez, loc. 2512 of 5858, Kindle. 16. Roberto Bolaño, Entre paréntesis, 4th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009), 215. 17. Marcela Valdes, “Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” The Nation, November 19, 2008, https://www​.thenation​.com​/article​/archive​/alone​-among​ -ghosts​-roberto​-bolanos​-2666/. 18. Alice Driver, “Risks, Challenges and Ethics of Representing Feminicide: A Comparative Analysis of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” FIAR: Forum for Inter-American Research 8, no. 2 (September 2015): 166, http://interamerica​.de/. 19. González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, loc. 2934 of 5858, Kindle. 20. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 477. Text references are to pages of this edition. 21. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 13–14. 22. Nick Bostrum, “Are We Living in a Computer Similation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (April 2003): 243, https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/1467​-9213​.00309. 23. Ibid., 244. 24. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 12. 25. Ibid., 241. 26. Bostrum, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” 253. 27. Phillip K. Dick, VALIS (Boston: Mariner Books, 2011), 191–92, 200–01. 28. Phillip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 141. 29. Dick, VALIS, 90; Dick, The Divine Invasion, 142.

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30. Dick, VALIS, 204. 31. Bostrum, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” 253–54. 32. Ibid., 253. 33. Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 30. 34. Dick, VALIS, 102. 35. Plato, “Parmenides,” in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. and ed. Benjamin Jowett, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1892), 4: 35, https://oll​.libertyfund​ .org/. 36. Ibid., 35n3; Plato, 35. 37. Jowett, introduction to Parmenides, by Plato, 12. 38. Franklin Rodríguez, Roberto Bolaño: el investigador desvelado (Madrid: Verbum, 2015), 305 (my translation). 39. There are no cars with fictional names, such as Peregrinos, in González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto. 40. Molly Molloy, “Q and A with Molly Molloy: The Story of the Juárez Femicides is a Myth,” interview by Christopher Hooks, The Texas Observer, January 9, 2014, https://www​.texasobserver​.org​/qa​-molly​-molloy​-story​-juarez​-femicides​-myth/. 41. Pedro H. Albuquerque and Prasad R. Vemala, “Femicide Rates in Mexican Cities along the US-Mexico Border: Do the Maquiladora Industries Play a Role?” .com​ /abstract​ Social Science Research Network (November 9, 2015), https://ssrn​ =1112308. 42. Sean M. Quinlan, “Physical and Moral Regeneration after the Terror: Medical Culture, Sensibility and Family Politics in France, 1794–1804,” Social History 29, no. 2 (May 2004):161, http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/4287075. 43. Juan de Dios Martínez’s forename—Juan de Dios—is literally a name of God and indicative of being in the good graces of the director of the simulation. 44. Alexander Coleman, ed., Cinco maestros: Cuentos modernos de Hispanoamérica (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 40 (my translation). 45. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, 7th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 701 (my translation). 46. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 101. 47. Ibid., 493. 48. Ibid., 639–40. 49. Ibid., 501. 50. Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015), 184–85 (my translation). 51. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 81. 52. Ibid., 81–82. 53. “The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground.” Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Martin Lin, “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” in The

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018): https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/ archives​/spr2018​/entries​/sufficient​-reason/. 54. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Jean Stambaugh (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 52. 55. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, in Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (1969; repr., Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1985), 138. 56. Zavala, La modernidad insufrible, 196.

Chapter 9

“Redemption to the Redeemer”

THE MYTH OF ATLANTIS “The Part about Archimboldi” begins with physical limitation: Hans Reiter’s mother, who is blind in one eye, and his father, who is lame. The image of the one-eyed woman hearkens back to the mural of the Virgin with a closed eye in the house where Fate rescues Rosa Amalfitano.1 Her closed eye signifies the concealment of another destiny, as yet unknown, for Fate, who has fallen in the Heideggerian sense and is unworthy of the plenitude depicted in the mural. In the context of the mural of the Virgin, Reiter’s mother’s blindness signifies the lack of an alternative destiny; Reiter will be a soldier and a novelist, but above all he has one destiny to fulfill: to signify political and social change. Whether it is the change from fascism to social democracy in Europe, or the advent of revolution in Mexico, Benno von Archimboldi— Reiter’s pen name—becomes a signifier for the aforementioned signifiers. Archimboldi is not a master-signifier in the ideological sense of the word. Other than at a personal level (Archimboldi hates Nazis), its connection to political and social themes is immanent to the textuality of 2666 and is thus in need of critical exegesis. The father’s lameness refers to Hephaestus, the god of fire and smiths and craftsmen in Greek mythology. In Plato’s Critias, the eponymous statesman describes how the world was divided into regions, each of which was allotted to different gods who peopled these regions and tended to their population “as shepherds tend their flocks . . . like pilots from the stern of the vessel.”2 Athena and Hephaestus are described as “being united . . . in the love of philosophy and art.”3 Athens belonged to them: “There they implanted brave children of the soil, and put into their minds the order 177

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of government.”4 Hephaestus was also the god of volcanoes. A humorous reference to this occurs when Reiter’s father is in a hospital after losing his leg in battle during World War I. He offers a cigarette to a soldier who is wrapped in bandages and immobilized in the bed next to him. After Reiter’s father sticks a cigarette in his mouth, smoke starts pouring out between the bandages as if the spaces between them were volcanic vents (637). Athena and Hephaestus teach the Athenians to order their state in a virtuous manner. The island of Atlantis, allotted to Poseidon, becomes the enemy of Athens. Atlantis is much wealthier than Athens, but at first its inhabitants are virtuous. However, their wealth intoxicates them, and they become “full of avarice and unrighteous power.”5 As a result, Zeus intends to punish them and calls the gods together in order to do so. Critias is an incomplete fragment and breaks off at this point. According to Jowett, some have regarded “the island of Atlantis as the anticipation of a still greater island—the Continent of America.”6 It is not difficult to see the Critias as a source for what would become 2666: the world as divided into regions administered by nonhuman powers, the contrasting destinies of these regions, and the subordination of the aforementioned powers to the One. Within this schema, Atlantis corresponds to the Americas subject to savage neoliberalism and punitive forms of supplemental causality, while Athens is a metonym for a well-governed transnational European state defending itself against savage neoliberalism. From a very early age, Reiter gave the impression of not belonging on earth. Besides resembling a strand of seaweed, he feels most comfortable underwater on “that other earth,” the seabed (639). He is a representative of another world: the world of the simulators. By means of his connection to this other world, he serves to define its boundaries—that is, the extent of its intrusion into naturalistic experience. In those parts of 2666 that take place in Europe, this intrusion is more limited than in those that take place in the Americas. In “The Part about Archimboldi” it is mostly limited to the sea bottom, the castles associated with General Entrescu, and Reiter and his environment. Supplemental causality precedes naturalistic causality before and during Reiter’s childhood. Examples of the former include the hospital patient who turns into a human volcano and a town that moves away from the mountains and closer to the forests (644). The use of magical realism in these episodes creates an effective contrast with subsequent episodes of “The Part about Archimboldi”—such as the story of the war criminal Leo Sammer—written in a more sober, realistic style. The seaweed at the bottom of the sea that Reiter finds so moving is pansychic life capable at any time of transitioning into a higher-order life form, like the extraterrestrial in Boris Ansky’s novel or Reiter, but to no avail, as it is predestined to remain apart from humanity.

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THE GRAIL BEARER Reiter stops attending school after his teachers complain about his lack of interest and absenteeism (652). After being fired from three jobs, he finds employment as a servant in the country house of a Prussian baron. There, he sees the comings and goings of the baron’s daughter and his nephew, who, if he is in the house, always leaves whenever the daughter visits. The servants think Hugo Halder is in love with her, but Reiter knows better; after observing him reading history books in the baron’s library and sleeping afterward, what he says when he awakes has nothing to do with being in love, but rather with being in a state of existential confusion because of a shift in the ontological structure of the world (654). Given Halder’s preoccupation with history, this shift is, of course, correlated with an intuition of the conceptual dislocation that occurs in transitioning from a naturalistic, biologically based world, to the world as a computer simulation in which his cousin, the baron’s daughter, will have an important role to play; a dislocation that is vaguely perceived, in a time of insufficient technological progress, in terms of the anxiety generated by a trap. In the final analysis, this dislocation renders inoperative Franklin Rodríguez’s facile opposition of “The Part about Archimboldi” as a künstlerroman characterized by chaos and disorder to those examples of the genre that manifest a sense of “order or universal harmony,” such as Henry von Ofterdingen.7 In the last part of Bolaño’s novel, Boris Ansky, who has his own experience of the world, perceives chaos and disorder, but they do not reflect the totality of his experience. The order that generates chaos, which is the order of virtual reality, is reconstructed by the reader from the fragmentary experience of the characters of 2666, who are empty vessels that acquire their significance in what amounts to a computer game. Archimboldi is aware of this when, at the conclusion of 2666, he visits his sister Lotte for the first time in years, and she tells him about the dreams Klaus Haas has in which he appears as a giant who will rescue him from prison. When she tells him that he does not look like a giant anymore, he responds that he was never a giant (890). The ascendancy of Europe is the long-term outcome of the virtual reality of 2666, but only at the cost of a global conflagration that brings Hugo Halder’s world to an end, nicely symbolized by his total disappearance after World War II. Access to literature is an indispensable part of Reiter/Archimboldi’s artistic evolution, but the interpretation of texts is also a means by which the reader makes sense of 2666, regardless of Reiter/Archimboldi’s pronouncements or thoughts on a variety of topics (such as history, which repels him [654]). Thus, literature is imbued with the double significance of the protagonist’s artistic medium and the raw materials processed in the formation of reader response to the text. The first literary text Reiter reads is Wolfram von

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Eschenbach’s Parzival, which Halder convinces him to read. Before reading it, Halder explains to Reiter that literature can be used to fill a void (657). In reference to Parsifal, the concept of the void is suggestive of the Grail in the medieval genre of Grail romances. In Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Grail is a stone, but it is more often some type of vessel, as in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval or Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’ Arimathie.8 According to A. T. Hatto, “All that the Grails of medieval romance have in common is the function of indicating a goal worth striving for or preserving, and in content at least a modicum of sanctity.”9 In Eschenbach’s Parzival, and in Wagner’s nineteenth-century operatic version of it, the Grail provides sustenance to the community of Montsalvat. As previously noted, to the extent that they are part of a computer simulation, the inhabitants of the world of 2666 are “vessels” whose content is part of a computer program created by an independent agency. Reiter/Archimboldi is the “chief vessel”—that is, the Grail, whose content has an important bearing on the destiny of the other vessels, even if it is not immediately apparent in his actions or statements. This makes his confession to his sister that he was never a giant all the more understandable: he is a means to comprehending the reality of 2666 but not the primary agent in the creation of that reality. He always maintains a certain distance from it, as is evident in the narrator’s summation of Reiter’s reaction to Parzival, which has mostly to do with his admiration of Wolfram von Eschenbach and little to do with his role as the representative of “a goal worth striving for”: the creation of a transnational European state. His readers, as represented by Pelletier and Espinoza, are conscious of this distance; making him their life’s work does not lessen their distance from him or enable them to share his emotions (29). To the extent that their lives need to be filled, the metaphor of the vessel is as applicable to them as it is to Archimboldi. In and of itself, the Grail is devouring emptiness and will always maintain its distance, inasmuch as no physical proximity to this emptiness will change the existential situation of the subject. It is only through the mediation of the One that Archimboldi becomes more than a place holder and life acquires a positive content, enabling the subject share his joy or sadness, as Liz Norton, who reads for pleasure, does, and, when the totality of the existential situation of the subject is taken into account, all of the critics presumably do. Nevertheless, as will be evident, Reiter identifies with the protagonist of Eschenbach’s poem. BEYOND THE THIRD DIMENSION The One can oscillate between being outside of time and a more anthropomorphic relation to temporality in which it experiences the present in relation to the past and the future. Within the later temporal framework, the illusion

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of free will exists for the subject of the simulation, and the One, as we have noted, derives jouissance from the spectacles provided by its subjects and can reward or punish them according to their choices. Reiter is aware of the potential subordination of the world he inhabits to another world. He expresses this awareness in a conversation with a famous conductor in prewar Berlin during a social gathering that he attends with Halder, who has become his friend. The conductor, who is described as being young, attractive to women, and also venerated, is probably a caricature of Herbert von Karajan. He is of the opinion that there is a fourth dimension, a spiritual realm apparently accessible to him, that is expressible through classical music and superior to the other dimensions, inhabited as they are by beings preoccupied with the mundane necessities of life. Reiter responds by speculating about the inhabitants of dimensions beyond the fourth dimension for whom music would be like the noise of burning books. When the conductor objects, Reiter responds that reality is a burned book (664–66). For Reiter, even the higher dimensions are burned books, an attitude traditionally associated with anger toward God. In this respect, he is not too distant from Parzival, who has a problem with God: “Alas, what is God?” asked the Waleis. “Were He all-powerful—were God active in His almightiness—he would not have brought us to such shame!”10 I am deeply resentful of God, since He stands godfather to my troubles: He has lifted them up too high, while my happiness is buried alive.11

Reiter/Archimboldi’s devaluation of reality should come as no surprise, considering that he is living in Nazi Germany—as is underscored by the reference to burned books— and is, to some extent, conscious of his ontological status as an “empty vessel” manipulated by beings or a being he despises: the whore of history (794). Reiter is drafted in 1939 and assigned to an infantry regiment. During the invasion of Poland, he imagines that he is wearing a madman’s garb under his uniform (670). The reference is to Parzival. For Reiter, it is very amusing that at times Parzival is dressed like a madman under his armor (659). Clearly, Reiter identifies with Parzival, which suggests that he is on a quest involving the Grail. If, as I have suggested, Reiter/Archimboldi is the Grail, it is not evident why this is so at the beginning of the war. Reiter never articulates that he is on a quest. He keeps his identification with Parzival to himself, much like the imaginary garb under his uniform. My contention is that he finds the Grail in the process of reading Boris Ansky’s notebook. Reiter’s quest becomes retrospectively evident as a process of self-discovery involving interaction with the Other (Ansky). He becomes (in an allegorical-metaphorical sense)

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and thus finds the Grail in the process of this interaction. This process is the necessary precondition that, in turn, converts Archimboldi into the object of a quest—that is, the Grail, which is the subject matter of “The Part about the Critics.” The Ansky episodes are preceded by a predominantly realistic portrayal of military life. The exceptions to this realism are all in some way connected to Reiter, who seems to be surrounded by an aura of invincibility in battle. He is so tall, that his commanding officer, Captain Gerke, thinks he will be targeted by the enemy. This happens, but all the bullets miss him, inspiring a superstitious fear in the Poles. When Gerke asks how Reiter avoided being killed in a skirmish in which he took part, a sergeant responds that he acted as if the enemy fire was not directed against him (672). Reiter is conscious of having an indispensable role to play in a reality that forecloses his premature elimination. He is a virtual Parzival, not subject to the laws of naturalistic causality, whose destiny it is to find the Grail he bears within himself. If “madman” is an accurate description of Reiter, the source of this madness is the contradiction between his awareness of a privileged role within reality and the unreality of that reality, which is subordinate to, and derives its content from, dimensions beyond the third dimension. A good example of this subordination is provided by a story Reiter hears about a soldier in his division. The soldier is lost in the tunnels of the Maginot Line. After walking for several miles through the tunnels, he falls asleep and imagines that he sees God in human form, who tells the soldier that if he sells him his soul—which belongs to him anyway—he will get him out of the tunnel. God asks him to sign a contract formalizing the transaction. When the soldier asks what he should use to sign it, God tells him to use his own blood. Shortly afterwards the soldier is rescued. Subsequently, the soldier tells his best friend about the dream. The friend thinks it is nonsense, but the soldier reassures him that if he was rescued, it was because he saw God in a dream (675–76). Four days later, the soldier is run over by a German car and killed. The soldier’s dream foreshadows the naturalistic causality that will prevail in Europe during and after World War II. The tunnels of the Maginot Line represent imprisonment within threedimensional space-time. The soldier wants to escape from this enclosure. God is from a place beyond these dimensions. The soldier’s soul really does belong to God, as he is a simulacrum in a virtual reality created by God. The contract signed by the soldier to procure his release formalizes the interaction of the three dimensions with the higher dimensions represented by God. Nevertheless, the type of reality that will prevail as a result of this interaction is revealed by the blood—used to sign the contract—that flows from the soldier’s palm when he cuts it with a penknife: it will be a simulacrum of biological life subject to naturalistic causality. As if to underscore

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the undesirable aspect of this interaction, before he wakes up, the soldier sees apples on the trees surrounding him that have dried up and look like prunes or raisins. He also sees columns of smoke rising from a village in his proximity. These are veiled references to burned books, the metaphor Reiter used to characterize three-dimensional reality in his conversation with the conductor. What the soldier does not realize is that the agreement he signed stipulates the withdrawal of God from reality. God is not dead, he merely lets things in the European region take their course. Thus, no higher force, which the soldier seems to believe is on his side, will save him from mistakes, like not being careful enough when crossing the street. COINCIDENCE AND CAUSALITY Nevertheless, this force does not totally withdraw, as is evident in the case of Reiter, who is under its protection. The role of coincidence in the text should be mentioned in this connection. It is striking how Baron Von Zumpe’s daughter shows up at different moments of Reiter/Archimboldi’s life, even though during the period of time encompassing these moments they have no long-term relationship. She seems to make an appearance during a gathering of general staff officers. During this meeting, Reiter notices a woman in a car who closely resembles Baroness Von Zumpe (671). Later in the war she and Reiter stay in the same castle as General Entrescu. She reappears after the war as the wife of Jacob Bubis, Archimboldi’s publisher. She becomes Archimboldi’s lover and literary muse, even though she does not read much. In isolation, any of these episodes involving Reiter/Archimboldi and the baroness could be considered to be the result of coincidence. In their totality, they produce the impression of being the result of causality. Baroness Von Zumpe’s most important role in 2666 is to be a sex object for the One. As such, she affects the structure of supplemental causality in her tryst with General Entrescu. This is what Hugo Halder cannot stand about her. In his dreams, he intuits that she will have a disruptive effect on a subject matter of great interest to him: history. He finds it disturbing that such a weighty matter as history can be affected by someone who, in his opinion, is as insignificant as his cousin. Thematically, Von Zumpe and Reiter/Archimboldi are two sides of the same coin as, respectively, the motive for historical change and the representative of that change. The reader can choose to acknowledge this interrelation or disregard it. In this respect, the intertext is Pascal’s Pensées, specifically, the affirmation that God both conceals and reveals himself: “All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides Himself. Everything bears this character.”12 According to Pascal, the true believer acknowledges God’s

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presence, while the nonbeliever disregards it. Moreover, there is a moral difference between them: The prophecies, the very miracles and proofs of our religion, are not of such a nature that they can be said to be absolutely convincing. But they are also of such a kind that it cannot be said that it is unreasonable to believe them. Thus there is both evidence and obscurity to enlighten some and confuse others. But the evidence is such that it surpasses, or at least equals, the evidence to the contrary; so that it is not reason which can determine men not to follow it, and thus it can only be lust or malice of heart. And by this means there is sufficient evidence to condemn, and insufficient to convince; so that it appears in those who follow it, that it is grace, and not reason, which makes them follow it; and in those who shun it, that it is lust, not reason, which makes them shun it.13

In terms of a theology relevant to the world of 2666, where the director of the simulation is analogous to God, a dividing line between those who have “grace,” like Reiter, and those who are driven by “malice of heart,” corresponds to the opposition between the belief that reality is explainable in terms of causality and the belief that it is explainable in terms of coincidence. In 2666, the principal exponent of the latter belief is the painter Edwin Johns, who, in a conversation with Piero Morini in “The Part about the Critics,” considers himself to be in communion with a God that he equates with coincidence (90). If there is causality in Johns’s theory of coincidence it is senseless—that is, not subject to explanation beyond producing a random series of effects. Franklin Rodríguez has commented extensively on this theory, which he considers to be essential to understanding the world of 2666: Johns’s observations propose the crisis of ideas associated with certainty, order and progress. . . . Johns proposes that one does not advance towards a goal by means of a rational, unified and organized plan. He has no confidence in the values of a modernity that advances under the auspices of the ideals of enlightened reason. A more unintelligible, one could even say chaotic, vision of society is proposed, which is taken to the extreme in the proposition of coincidence as an “incomprehensible God.”14

In his commentary, Rodríguez also mentions Graham Greenwood, a secondary character from Distant Star and “a member of the Phillip K. Dick society who collects literary oddities,”15 who explains serial killings as “explosions of chance.”16 Johns’s theory of coincidence does not correspond to the forms of causality that are in effect in 2666, which are supplemental causality or

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naturalistic causality, with the latter being a by-product of the former, given that both forms of causality are the result of a computer simulation. These forms of causality may appear to be bizarre in their effects, or difficult to explain, based as they are on the whims of the director of the simulation, but they are not senseless. Nor are the creatures on the receiving end of these forms of causality senseless. They make informed decisions and can be rewarded for those decisions by the director, a situation otherwise known as being on the right side of history. These decisions and rewards are not the result of coincidence. Reiter is a rebellious subject of the director, whom he compares to a whore, but he never denies that he is the subject of this whore. His role model is Parzival. Thus, at some level of his being, he is aware that no matter what his opinion of reality is, he is on a quest. The protagonist of 2666 has a destiny, which as it turns out, is not negated by coincidence. He may not advance toward his goal (finding the Grail) by means of a “rational, unified and organized plan,” but this does not eliminate the goal and does not make the achievement of that goal—which affects history—a coincidence. According to Rodríguez, in 2666, “Coincidence is postulated as a force that destroys and changes destiny without consent.”17 He supports his contention by using the examples of Amalfitano, Fate, and the four critics in the opening chapter of 2666. It is notable that he does not use Reiter/Achimboldi as an example here, given that it would be difficult to make the case that his life is the result of coincidence. In the case of Amalfitano, he quotes him to the effect that exile tends to abolish destiny, a position contradicted by the Heideggerian authenticity of Amalfitanos’s commitment to fulfilling his Dasein—that is, his creative destiny as an alter ego of Bolaño. In the case of Fate, coincidence has nothing to do with his decision to abandon the project of writing a transformative article on the femicides in Santa Teresa. This decision is a result of his unstable identity and his excessive preoccupation with practical matters, such as the lack of a publisher for his article (302) or what he needs to do in order to obtain his next meal and paycheck (316), a preoccupation subsumable under the Heideggerian category of falling. “The Part about the Critics” is above all a transnational allegory with a political message. The relationship of that part of 2666 to the philosophical/existential themes of 2666 comes into focus retrospectively, after reading the novel, and it does not support the contention that coincidence is the primary form of causality at play in the world of 2666. Rather than Johns’s vision of reality, for Europe, a relationship of cause and effect mediated by the agency of the subject prevails (14–15). The likelihood of the Pensées as an intertext for 2666 is strengthened by Bolaño’s familiarity with this work. When asked by Rodrigo Pinto if he had ever been tempted to become religious, in case it was true that God existed, he had the following to say:

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That is the proposal, or rather the wager, of Pascal: play all the horses. Well, I believe that if God exists, there would be no problem. And the bet can be formulated in the opposite sense: if God exists, even if I do not believe in him, he does believe in me, since I am his child, and he will not allow me to lose myself.18

Bolaño is not enough of an atheist to discount the possibility of God’s existence. His (possible) relationship to God is a reasonable facsimile of Reiter’s relationship to the One. If God exists, he “believes” in Bolaño, who is his “child,” just as the One believes in Reiter. In Pascalian terms, they both have enough grace to acknowledge the possibility of their subordination to a sentient being that has something in common with human beings but is at the same time something other than a human being. This is the crucial way in which they differ from Edwin Johns, who, if not the most evil character in 2666, is, as someone whose conception of God is indistinguishable from a denial of the existence of God, in Pascalian philosophical terms, the principal representative of “malice” in 2666: “a senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures” is an impotent God who might as well not exist, as his agency is negated at every step along the chain of being and is thus equivalent in its outcome to the aleatory effect of a roll of the dice (90). Johns, who evidently considers everyone to be senseless except for him, sets himself up as a god who is in communion with coincidence and effect. He is a liberator of liberated chance, like the serial killers imagined by Graham Greenwood in Distant Star, or Anton Chigurh in the movie No Country for Old Men, who decides whether his victims should live or die based on a coin toss, but Johns refrains from mutilating anyone but himself. The missing term that reinforces Johns’s connection to serial killers is neoliberalism. Johns, who cuts off his hand for profit, is the embodiment of savage neoliberalism. As such he exemplifies certain characteristics of the neoliberal mindset, such as (a) a hostility to any external regulatory agency—the ultimate regulator being God—that is in a position to terminate the neoliberal project; (b) a desire to replace God, as manifested in the belief—shared by serial killers— that they are in “communion” with coincidence and therefore immune from its effects but entitled to expose their victims to them; and (c) an irrational drive to make a profit even if it results in self-destruction, concretely manifested in climate change due to neoliberal capitalism’s systemically mandated over-reliance on fossil fuels. In order to ascertain why, in 2666, the One hates neoliberalism, it is not necessary to go beyond the components of the neoliberal mindset summarized above, particularly the desire to replace God. After Reiter’s division is transferred to Romania, he and some soldiers from his division are sent to “Dracula’s castle,” the former dwelling place of Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracula. There, Reiter is surprised to see Baroness Von Zumpe among the guests staying in the castle. She remembers

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him from the time he was a servant at her father’s house. Apropos of the unexpected meeting, another guest, the young scholar Paul Popescu, comments that once again fate has triumphed over “the hydra of chance” (680). Von Zumpe’s role as a motive for historical change that will have taken place is validated by her interaction with the representative of that change: thus, Reiter is destined to cross paths with her in the castle. In light of this consideration, Popescu’s statement about fate discredits the notion that the world of 2666 can be understood primarily in terms of coincidence. It also reinforces the connection between chance and evil by comparing the former to the hydra, a monster from Greek mythology. Popescu would probably agree with what Abel Romero, a Chilean detective who appears in various works by Bolaño, has to say about coincidence in The Savage Detectives. Rather than directly identifying chance with evil, Romero opines that if evil occurs by chance rather than being purposeful, that makes it more difficult to defeat, since there is no discernible cause that can become the object of resistance.19 Demonic Foreshadowing On the evening of their arrival at the castle, some of the guests, including Reiter, who serves as a footman, stay after dinner and talk about topics that foreshadow aspects of the text that have to do with Stalin, Boris Ansky, and General Entrescu. Previously at dinner, Baroness Von Zumpe talked about the painter Conrad Halder (her uncle and Hugo Halder’s father) and the subject matter of his paintings: dead women (683). This is an indirect reference to the femicides of Santa Teresa. In conjunction with the subject matter of Dracula and the lovemaking of Von Zumpe and Entrescu, reference to the femicides converts the castle into a space that brings together past, present, and future in a demonic way. Because he resisted the Turks, Popescu regards Dracula not only as a Romanian patriot but also as the protector of Europe (685). To which Entrescu replies that heroic historical figures are often regarded as villains (685). Entrescu, who also talks about Christ and wonders if he had any conception of how he would change history or an accurate conception of the world he inhabited, will himself be transformed into a Christ-like figure that affects the destiny of the virtual world. Afterwards, he changes the topic of conversation to Flavius Josephus, the sycophantic and cowardly Roman-Jewish historian, who is a luckier version of Efraim Ivanov, the science-fiction writer in Boris Ansky’s notebook. Ansky, Ivanov’s ghostwriter, is foreshadowed by the lesser Greek-philosophers-for-hire employed by Flavius Josephus to polish his writing (686). Popescu follows with a story about a mathematician who goes insane trying to find mysterious numbers that interpenetrate much of reality (i.e., virtual reality) (687). After the mathematician goes crazy, Popescu visits him in an

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insane asylum, and the mathematician explains that he is there for his own protection because he saw something that he should not have seen (688). On another occasion a doctor describes to Popescu a frightened look on the face of the mathematician that he compares to a Tatar horseman’s empty skin of water (689). The function of a reference to virtual reality in this section of 2666 is to indicate that the foreshadowing that takes place during the after-dinner conversation suggests how the virtual reality under consideration will evolve. Thus, the Tatar horseman, represented by an empty skin, is a synecdochic representative of a larger vessel, whose content will be filled, not by the Crimean Tatars, persecuted by Stalin for perceived collaboration with the Germans, but rather by the modern equivalent of the Mongol conquerors of Eastern Europe, the Red Army. Likewise, Dracula does not foreshadow a fascist leader protecting Europe against the “eastern hordes,” but rather Stalin, regarded by many as a monster, but also as the leader of “the greatest military victory in history,” which liberated Europe from the Nazis.20 In short, in the context of reference to virtual reality within a space—the castle—not subject to the limitations of naturalistic causality, the guests see something they should not see: the impending Soviet victory before it is apparent the Germans are losing. The Divine Peepshow After the guests retire for the night, Reiter and another soldier named Wilke explore a secret passageway in the castle. A peculiar feature of this passageway is that it runs through the stone walls of the castle and has peepholes that allow viewers to look into rooms adjacent to the passageway. Reiter and Wilke intend to find Baroness Von Zumpe’s room and surreptitiously observe her activities. In order to gain access to this passageway, they must first traverse a labyrinthine series of passageways with bifurcating pathways, the entrance to which is hidden behind a mirror. They are joined in this traversal by two other soldiers, Kruze and Nietzke, who leave before Reiter and Wilke find the passageway with the peepholes. The soldiers agree that it is strange that they do not see a single rat because there are usually rats in such passageways (690). After Reiter and Wilke are alone, Wilke thinks he hears footsteps behind him. Subsequently, they find the entrance to the passageway they are looking for, which is off to the side and very narrow. This passageway symbolizes a higher dimension from which it is possible to observe life within three-dimensional space. The absence of rats signifies that the passageways traversed by the soldiers are outside of the domain of conventional reality and are a way to connect to a higher dimension. The footsteps heard by Wilke suggest that he and Reiter are being observed from an even higher dimension, since, if someone is following them, he is invisible from their vantage point. When they find Von Zumpe’s room, they observe

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her making love to Entrescu, who has a prodigiously large penis (691). Their lovemaking is violent in its intensity, and the baroness bites the palm of her hand until she draws blood in order not to scream as Entrescu penetrates her. At first Reiter is alarmed by her cries but soon realizes they are cries of pleasure (691). Wilke and Reiter are sexually stimulated by what they observe and proceed to masturbate. The narrator affirms that the significance of their lovemaking extends beyond Romania, Baron Von Zumpe’s estate, Germany, and Europe. It transcends Wilke and Reiter’s notions about love and sexuality. Apparently, that is not the case with General Entrescu, who seems to be listening to music of a celestial origin between lovemaking sessions (692). The mention of a Baron Von Zumpe’s estate refers to Hugo Halder and, in reference to the baroness, to his dreams in the library of the estate, which have to do with her role in history. In the episode under consideration, Bolaño put a lot of effort into emphasizing that this is not an ordinary representation of sexual intercourse, and its importance should be acknowledged in an interpretation of 2666. He puts the reader in the position of God, who is in the proximity of the peeping Toms, but cannot be seen by them, as they, in turn, observe the objects of their lust. The reader/God is the invisible specter that follows Reiter and Wilke and sees everything they see. As such, her/his interpretation and summation of the spectacle that (s)he observes could be as follows: In the world of 2666, naturalistic causality is the equivalent of freedom and is something that has to be earned. Once granted, it can be taken away and a punitive form of causality put in its place. Thanks to Baroness Von Zumpe and General Entrescu, the Third Reich avoids this fate. The effect of their lovemaking transcends geographical boundaries and reaches the One, who is pleased. I (God) could have reacted to the repellent Nazi regime by punishing Nazi-occupied Europe, but I am so entranced by Von Zumpe and Entrescu’s performance that I will be even-handed with the Nazis. They will be allowed to lose the war on their own terms, without being ignominiously shoved into defeat by means of supplemental causality. The One will also allow them and their associates to expiate their sins by means of General Entrescu, who will be crucified so that they can be absolved from the evil they committed and Europe remain within the domain of naturalistic causality. As is foreshadowed by the subject matter of Conrad Halder’s paintings, Dracula, and the blood shed by Baroness Von Zumpe, this evil will assume the form of violence against women. It will be visited upon Santa Teresa and integrated into a structure of supplemental causality. By the way, I (God) do not perceive three-dimensional reality as the equivalent of burned books, and I am writing to you from the twelfth dimension. The problem with Reiter is that he is ungrateful. He does not appreciate how much I have done for him, but even he has to admit that what he saw, from the symbolic vantage point of a higher dimension, has nothing to do with burned books.

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EXISTENTIAL CRISIS After Reiter’s detachment leaves the castle, he obtains two leaves to visit his parents. Back in his village, he spends time with Lotte, to whom he is attached. He also visits Berlin twice. He is subject to frequent bouts of depression in which he thinks everything is meaningless and resists the temptation to commit suicide (694). It is not difficult to surmise what he is depressed about. On one of his visits to Belin, he meets Ingeborg Bauer, who becomes his girlfriend, and whose father is a Nazi. She insists that Reiter swear that he will not forget her and that he swear on something. She rejects several of his oaths because she is not satisfied by what he swears on. When he asks her if he can swear on books, she responds negatively because in her house there are only books written by Nazis or on subject matter of interest to the Nazis (696). Among the books her father’s collection could include are Otto Rahn’s Crusade towards the Grail (1933) and Lucifer’s Court (1937), both of which are about his quest for the Holy Grail. After the publication of the first one, Rahn came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who was fascinated by the occult and sponsored his quest. Awareness of Nazi interest in occultism—as engendered, for example, by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)—has been part of popular culture since the World War II. This awareness could well have led Bolaño to conceive of Reiter as depressed about the contradiction between his quest for the Grail and his role as part of the Nazi war machine. Thus, the root of his crisis is existential, rather than any preoccupation with his ontological status within virtual reality. If this is correct, then it is reasonable to conclude that Reiter—even though it does not become completely evident until after the war—hates the Nazis.21 During his existential crisis, Reiter gives signs of turning to religion, an indication that he is feeling guilty about something. When at Ingeborg’s request he begins a lengthy series of oaths, he swears by God. She responds by telling him that she does not believe in God. When Reiter finally asks her what he should swear on, she responds that he should swear on storms or the Aztecs. He chooses the Aztecs, suggesting his connection with Mexico and a type of god who requires human sacrifice. After his leaves, Reiter joins his division in the attack on the Soviet Union. In combat, he engages in his usual reckless behavior, which is interpreted as bravery by his companions, but which Reiter admits to himself is suicidal. When he talks about his suicidal impulses with Wilke, the latter makes a joke to the effect that good Christians should have no compunction about masturbating but should not commit suicide. Reiter thinks that this joke expresses a hidden truth; nevertheless, he does not change his mind (701). What could be the hidden truth that, if anything, strengthens Reiter’s resolve to commit suicide? The reference to masturbation reinforces the impression that he is struggling with guilt. Aside

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from feeling guilty about serving the Third Reich, he is depressed about not finding the Grail. As someone who is convinced that he has an indispensable role to play within reality, for him, having an experience that validates this role and makes it meaningful is the equivalent of finding the Grail. He has not had this experience and has no idea how to go about doing so; his identification with Parzival is meaningless and likely to remain so. Thus, he suspects he is no longer indispensable. If he is not, then his premature elimination is not foreclosed and he will no longer be protected in battle. That would make him just another Christian masturbator subject to naturalistic causality, like the soldier who escapes from the tunnels of the Maginot Line, only to be run over by a car. That is the hidden truth behind Wilke’s joke. Although Reiter suspects he has been abandoned by the One, he does not believe in the Christian god of forgiveness: all the more reason for him to commit suicide. He is almost successful during an attack on Sevastopol, when he stands up in the trenches and is shot in the chest and throat. His wounding is preceded by masses of Russian sailors appearing out of nowhere, which Reiter interprets as a portent of his approaching death. Previously, in an episode reminiscent of similar encounters between mortals and immortals in Greek mythology, he felt compelled to question a statue of what seems to be a Greek goddess that he finds in the middle of a forest, suggesting an attempt to negotiate his status as a favorite of the gods (703). For Reiter, Sevastopol is transformed into the reincarnation of a mythological creature with red mouths. This is also a portent, not of his imminent death, as it is a vision of renewal, but rather of his wounding as a necessary step in the fulfillment of his destiny, which is tied to the rebirth of Europe and predicated upon feeding the mouths of a monstrous being with the casualties of war. Thus, rather than merely comparing Sevastopol, like his fellow soldiers, to an inert mechanical thing, a “bone crusher” that puts an end to life without generating new life, it is for Reiter, however monstrous, a living thing (704–05). Just before he is wounded, Reiter gazes at the stars. Does this not signify that his wounding is “written in the stars”—that is, predestined? (705). Only by losing his invulnerability in battle does he gain the opportunity to withdraw from combat and fulfill his role within the destiny of Europe by finding and reading Boris Ansky’s notebook. THE REALM OF THE GRAIL Reiter spends some time in a hospital recovering from his wounds, one of which results in the loss of his ability to speak. He is sent along with three other wounded soldiers to the village of Kostekino by the Dneiper River in Ukraine. There he takes up residence in an empty farmhouse. The village

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is mostly depopulated. Other than Reiter, the only Germans there are the convalescents he came with and a few engineers. From them he learns that a possible reason for the disappearance of the villagers, who were mostly Jews, was their extermination by a detachment of an Einsatzgruppe that passed through the village (706). After he finds Boris Ansky’s notebook in a hiding place of the house he lives in, he learns that Ansky was born in the house and that his parents were Jewish. The first part of the notebook is autobiographical and recounts Ansky’s experiences in the Soviet Union during the twenties and thirties. As a youth, he enlisted in the Red Army and led an adventurous life traveling to far-flung regions of the Soviet Union. He finally settled in Moscow, where he participated in the rich cultural life of the capital in the years leading up to the Great Purge. During that time, Ansky, who joined the Communist Party, was imbued with revolutionary optimism and thought it would not be long before the revolution abolished death (710). He meets a science fiction writer, Efraim Ivanov, befriends him, and tells him about his concept of the abolition of death. Ivanov, who considers death to be a necessary part of life, tells Ansky that it is impossible to abolish it (710). This exchange of ideas introduces a salient theme in Ansky’s notebook: the conflict between desire and necessity. When he meets Ivanov, Ansky believes it is possible to transform reality by means of desire. He tells Margarita Afanasievna, a female acquaintance who accuses him of confusing reality with his desire, that reality and desire can be one and the same thing (715). Ansky gives the example of a hunter whose sexual organs were torn off. Once a week, the hunter went into the forest to look for his missing parts. As long as he continued to search for them he looked his age. After he decided to stop looking for them, he seemed to age twenty years overnight. He begins to look for them again and recovers his former appearance. Ansky believes that the hunter managed to disregard fate and transform reality, including the reality of the people in his life (716). Afanasievna responds that she likes Ansky’s story but that she is too experienced to believe it, to which Ansky replies that the story is not about belief, but rather about “understanding, and then changing” (716). The weakness of Ansky’s position is that while anyone can understand the hunter’s desire, not everyone will necessarily change to accommodate it. Some might consider him to be ridiculous, or less physically attractive as a result of his injury. His obliviousness of fate does not change his fate, which imposes certain limits that can be ignored but not exceeded. After Ansky meets Ivanov, the latter, who is struggling to revitalize his literary career, decides to utilize him as a ghostwriter. The first product of their collaboration is a science fiction novel entitled Twilight that, in general, is well received by readers and the leading members of the intelligentsia. The plot summary of Twilight takes up several pages of 2666. The story centers on a boy of fourteen who is abducted by extraterrestrials after he is wounded

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in battle fighting against Pyotr Wrangel’s troops during the Russian Civil War.22 He and several other wounded soldiers are put in orbit around the Earth inside an alien spacecraft, where their wounds are rapidly healed. They are addressed by an extraterrestrial who looks like a strand of seaweed (718). The reference to Reiter is clear and reinforces the impression that within the virtual world he is a representative of an alien world. The extraterrestrial asks the soldiers a series of questions about the origin of the stars and the size of the universe. After one of the soldiers responds that God created the universe, he is tossed into space. The elimination of the soldier symbolizes the negation of the Christian conception of God, who, as the completion of a Hegelian triad by means of the negation of the negation, returns in a different form as the director of the simulation, or the One. Desire and Necessity Twilight develops the theme of the relationship between desire and necessity that Ansky had been thinking about during the period of time leading up to the writing of the novel. After the boy falls asleep, he wakes up in a room in New York City twenty years after the battle in which he was wounded. He goes to a window and becomes ecstatic after gazing at New York, a city with a seemingly unlimited potential for the fulfillment of desire where “anything is possible” (719). This desire is contradicted by the hardships he encounters there. He meets a jazz musician who tells him about people who are encouraged by governments to raise chickens that talk and think. The musician adds that, even though they are raised to be eaten, that is how they obtain their revenge on world leaders (719). In the jazz player’s culture, which is the culture of the United States, chickens are associated with cowardice. If world leaders want multitudes of thinking chickens (i.e., cowardly people), that is because they associate cowardice with subservience. But the chickens have the upper hand, given that the director of the simulation tends to disdain cowardice and reward bravery. Were a nation to be populated by too many chicken-hearted people—such as the United States in “The Part about Fate”—its destiny, including that of its ruling class, could be to be punished by the One, and the chickens would have their revenge (cf. Atlantis in Critias). The object of the boy’s desire assumes a more specific form when he meets a woman who works as a hypnotist in a burlesque show. He falls in love with her and she disappears shortly thereafter, demonstrating the elusiveness of the object of his desire. He hires a Mexican detective who had been a soldier of Pancho Villa’s to help him look for the woman. The detective believes in the existence of numerous parallel universes accessible by means of hypnosis. In terms of the world of 2666, these correspond to different computer simulations that

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exist simultaneously. Within them, the subject can be moved in time and space, as is the case with the young boy. He and the detective set out to find the hypnotist, who is in Kansas City. When they find her, she tells the boy that she cannot grant his requests, which are either to return to the battlefield he came from by means of hypnosis or to have a relationship with her (719). After this answer, the boy begins to understand the limitations of his desire and of desire as such. No matter how much he wants to, he cannot obtain the object of his desire, or use it to change the world around him in a way that contradicts the necessity of his existence in the here-and-now. In desperation, he leaves the woman and walks for hours until he sees the extraterrestrial. They talk about a variety of topics. Some of them have to do with Marxism, and others with science fiction, such as the difference between changes measured in stellar years and Earth years, and a void that contains the discovery of America conceived of as a spectacle involving masks and a stage setting (720). The latter two topics—the difference between stellar and earthly time, and the discovery of America as a spectacle—are pertinent to the conception of the world of 2666 as a virtual reality. What could be a brief interval for Archimboldi’s whore of history, who is on stellar time, could well be a much more extended period of time for earthlings. For her, the discovery of America could take place in an instant and on a stage setting where the actor/voids wear masks and participate in roles assigned to them by her in her capacity as the director of the simulation. The narrative transitions abruptly to a later time in the protagonist’s life when he is a twenty-five-year-old journalist working in Moscow. In spite of the difficulty and danger involved in travelling to China, he accepts an assignment to interview a Communist leader in Peking who has many enemies. In China, the journalist decides to help the leader, who looks like the Mexican detective, escape the country. The physical resemblance and his repetition of the questions about the origin of the stars and the size of the universe the extraterrestrial asked the abducted soldiers at the beginning of the novel suggest that he is another actor/void wearing a mask and performing a role within a simulation. During their escape attempt, the journalist and the Chinese leader are physically ill and have to cover long distances through a snow-covered wilderness. The journalist is certain that he will die before he completes the journey, but there seems to be a way for him to avoid this fate. He imagines that he hears a voice telling him that by closing his eyes he can return to New York and see the hypnotist again. He does not close them and continues his journey (721). In the struggle between accepting the necessary hardships associated with the completion of his project and escaping from necessity by means of desire, the journalist chooses the former, if only because after the experience of being with the hypnotist, he knows the latter is impossible.

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Stalin is among those who read Twilight, and he considers it to be suspicious. This is not surprising, considering that belief in ideologies, such as communism, is, according to Žižek, motivated by their connection to an inaccessible object-cause of desire in the real. Thus, the subordination of desire to necessity is, in effect, a demotion of the primacy of ideology, and more specifically, of communist ideology. In the final analysis, necessity is subordinate to desire, but it is the desire of the director of the simulation, which appears in the form of necessity to the subject of the simulation. Ivanov is arrested during the purge of 1936, released, rearrested, and executed. Afterwards, the narrator notices a change in Ansky’s writing; his notes become more chaotic even though they have a certain structure (728). The structure in question is determined by the consideration of a variety of ethical and philosophical themes, such as courage, respect for the Other, the relationship between appearance and reality, and order and disorder. For Ansky, the French realist painter Gustave Courbet—who participated in the Paris Commune even as the majority of the French intelligentsia did not—exemplifies courage (730). In spite of being an enemy of the State, Ansky intends to emulate Courbet’s courage by joining the resistance against the Germans, and he draws a map for that purpose in his notebook (736). He relates in extensive detail a story about an incident that took place between several French scientists and an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe in Borneo (731–34). One of the scientists knowingly violated a taboo of the indigenous culture by attempting to make eye contact with a tribe member while shaking his hand, and as a result, he was killed by another tribe member. As the scientist shook his hand, the terrified native uttered a word in his language that signifies cannibal: he was afraid of being incorporated by the Other. The relationship of this incident to the existential structure of 2666 is evident: the arrogant representatives of western culture are analogous to the simulators who “colonize” the world by incorporating virtual semblants of its inhabitants into their simulations. Appearance and Reality Ansky refers to the contradiction between appearance and reality in his description of Ivanov’s state of mind between the publication of Twilight and his expulsion from the Communist Party, when the appearance of Ivanov’s success is threatened by the reality of imminent disgrace (723). Reiter also thinks about this theme when he contrasts the reality of his love for Lotte with the appearance of conjugal love—which is often intermingled with jealousy and disputes about money (741). He considers National Socialism to be “the ultimate realm of semblance” (741). (“el reino absoluto de la apariencia”)23 The contradiction between reality and appearance is subverted when the narrator, referring to Ivanov’s situation, considers that the appearance of

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the reality of imminent disgrace was real (722). Nineteen pages later, Reiter describes appearance as an occupying force that pervades every aspect of subjective and objective reality (741). The passage referred to above is an extended paraphrase of the famous formulation of the relationship between reality and appearance in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance.”24 Nevertheless, Reiter makes an exception for the fourteen-year-old Ansky’s wandering, which he does not consider to be appearance (741). Two attitudes toward appearance and reality are evident in Reiter’s thinking: (1) appearance and reality can be separated to the extent that some forms of reality are more “real” than others and do not partake of appearance, (2) all of reality is appearance. These two positions correspond to the Hegelian distinction between the understanding and reason. For the understanding, there is a distinction between reality and appearance. For reason, they are reconciled and reality is appearance. For Reiter, the opposition between the understanding and reason is apparently unresolved—neither one is definitively associated with “truth”—but appearances can be deceptive. Infinity and Reason The aforementioned opposition is useful for comprehending Ansky’s thought in relation to the mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the concepts of order and disorder. The contemplation of Arcimboldo’s paintings lifts Ansky’s spirits (729). He thinks they express the end of appearance (734). Appearance is a theme of the Arcimboldo paintings referred to by Ansky, which consist of portraits composed of images of objects. A good example is Spring, which can be perceived as the profile of a man or a collection of plants. These paintings are the end of appearance in the sense that this end occurs in the transition from the individual images of which they are composed to the image that they compose, and then again in a return to the individual images. In each case, a limit is reached that corresponds to the end of a particular appearance. But this finality exists within the context of the transition to another appearance, which in turn devolves into a return to the image of which it is composed in a process that can be infinitely repeated. The end of appearance is thus inseparable from endless appearance: This yields, then, the scandalous unity of the finite and the infinite—the unity which is itself the infinite that embraces both itself and the finite—the infinite, therefore, understood in a sense other than when the finite is separated from it and placed on the other side from it. Since they must now also be distinguished,

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each is within it, as just shown, itself the unity of both; there are thus two such unities.25

The relation of Arcimboldo’s paintings to the Hegelian concept of infinity, their being representations of the infinite in the Hegelian sense of the word, is only strengthened by the effect, already noted, they have on Ansky’s state of mind: “At the mention of the infinite, soul and spirit light up, for in the infinite the spirit is at home, and not only abstractly; rather, it rises to itself, to the light of its thinking, its universality, its freedom.”26 For Hegel, true infinity is characterized by lack of restriction, thus its connection to freedom: “The infinite is, in a more intense sense then the first immediate being; it is the true being; the elevation above restriction.”27 Hegel opposes true infinity to “bad infinity,” which is always a restricted form of infinity: It is essential to distinguish the true concept of infinity from bad infinity, the infinite of reason from the infinite of the understanding. The latter is in fact a finitized infinite, and, as we shall now discover, in wanting to maintain the infinite pure and distant from the finite, the infinite is by that very fact only made finite.28

Bad infinity has the form of an alternating determination of the finite and the infinite in which each is the negation of the other, and thus connected, but each is also “attributed an independent existence over against the other.”29 In bad infinity, the unity of the finite and the infinite is not immanent to its conceptual representation as it is in Archimboldo’s paintings. In those paintings, infinity does not correspond to “a nebulous, inaccessible distance outside which there stands, enduring, the finite,” but rather to a relation between the finite and the infinite in which “each contains its other in its own determination.”30 For example, the alternation between the determination of Spring as a head or a collection of plants, which is infinite, is inseparable from the finitude of the plants and the head composed of these plants. Likewise, the determination of the finitude of these plants and the head is inseparable from the infinity of their alternation. “Everything in everything” sums up the impression The Four Seasons makes on Ansky and, according to him, the vitally important lesson learned by Arcimboldi (734). Everything in everything: as Hegel remarked, the finite and the infinite contain each other in their own determination. This truth, an affirmation of order, the truth of reason, and its association with freedom, is this vitally important lesson. Was it also learned by Reiter? Apparently so, if he agrees with Ansky’s impression of The Four Seasons. Nevertheless, on the last pages of the notebook, Ansky writes about the chaos of the universe, says that “only in chaos are we conceivable,” and apparently affirms that

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there are no definitive answers about reality because every answer leads to another question. According to the narrator these notes were written during World War II and conclude with a map sketched by Ansky to join the guerrillas (736). In the passage summarized above Ansky traverses the cognitive modalities of the understanding and reason. The notion that we are only conceivable in chaos corresponds to the understanding, which, according to Hegel, is a necessary but preliminary stage in the process of cognition.31 This notion of chaos, associated with the idea that there is a question behind every answer, is an example of a bad infinity, given that the progression of questions and answers is endless, but not immanent to a self-contained totality. The association between the aforementioned idea—and its more overblown version that involves indisputable answers and even more complex questions—and a preliminary stage of cognition is only reinforced by its provenance in popular culture (i.e., “the peasants of Kostekino” [736]) and makes Ansky laugh, as he undoubtedly recalls the unquestionable truth of the lesson learned by Arcimboldo: the infinite as the home of the spirit, where “it rises to itself.” The Nazi onslaught is necessarily perceived as chaos by the understanding in its preliminary work of “fixing, isolating, and analysing”32 the situation created by the invasion of the Soviet Union. Cognition rises to the level of reason by means of “conceptual and reflective thought” in order to “comprehend total unity, breakdown false or limited distinctions, and resolve conflict.”33 The outcome of this process is the transition from the perception of chaos to the necessity, unquestionable in the light of reason, of the “purposive activity”34 of joining the guerrillas and resisting the Nazi invasion. The lesson learned by Ansky is the primacy of reason over the understanding. That it was also learned by Reiter can be surmised from an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the former and the latter similar to the one presented in the analysis of the relationship of Amalfitano to Lonko Kilapán’s text. In his dreams, Reiter sees Ansky as an anonymous person moving westward who dies in combat (737). He becomes obsessed with the thought that he shot him (737). Subsequently, he dreams that he finds the body of a dead Red Army soldier, agonizes about possibly having killed Ansky, and is relieved to see that he and the corpse have the same face. When he wakes up, his voice has returned, and he thanks God for not being the one who killed Ansky (738). Within their dialectical relationship, it is productive to consider Ansky and Reiter not only as individuals but also as nameless representatives of the totality of the German and Russian forces opposed to each other. The first terms in the Hegelian triad are the Germans. They are negated by the Red Army. In order for the negation to be sublated, the negation of the negation, symbolized by Ansky’s death, must take place. Reiter recognizes the necessity of his death—how else to explain his certainty at having found his corpse?—but does not want to be the one who killed him. This logical and

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affective stance is commensurate with the sublation of the negation, for it recognizes the necessity of negating the Other even as it aspires to preserve him: The universal is therefore free power; it is itself while reaching out to its other and embracing it, but without doing violence to it; on the contrary it is at rest in its other as in its own. Just as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness, for it relates to that which is distinct from it as to itself; in it, it has returned to itself.35

In Ansky’s spirit, Reiter has returned to himself: Ansky’s corpse has his face and he finds his voice after he wakes up from his dream. If it is true that Ansky becomes part of Reiter, then the lesson learned by Ansky about the primacy of reason is also learned by Reiter. In a wider sense, it becomes part of the totality formed by the German and the Russian forces. This totality is a metonym for Europe free to develop in the light of reason by means of dialectical materialism within the context of naturalistic causality. As was noted in connection with the German soldier lost in the tunnels of the Maginot line, this involves the withdrawal of God from a reality that is a simulacrum of biological life subject to naturalistic causality, an existential situation that enhances the agency of the subject. Europe is rewarded with this privileged status by the director of the simulation (“God”) as a result of being pleased by the performance of General Entrescu and Baroness von Zumpe in Dracula’s castle, by the courage of the Russians in overcoming fascism, and by Reiter’s successful quest to find the Grail. As a result of this quest, Reiter becomes a signifier for the aforementioned totality and thereby becomes the Grail. To understand Reiter/Archimboldi is to understand the existential situation of the European world. Thus, he becomes, like the Grail, the object of a quest, in the intellectual and literal senses of the word, by the allegorical representatives of Europe in the first part of 2666. It can be concluded that Reiter affirms the primacy of reason. Thus, returning to the previously noted opposition between reason and the understanding in Reiter’s thought—that takes place after he reads Ansky’s notebook—it can be affirmed that statements such as everything is appearance except for Ansky’s wandering (741), Reiter’s love for Lotte is not appearance (741), and others of a similar type that are in unresolved contradiction with reason, are, in effect, a test of reader response: those who comprehend these statements as false and accept the primacy of reason have access to the realm of the Grail. Those who accept them at face value are excluded from this realm. That is the symbolic meaning of the placement of this contradiction within the text of 2666. Reiter’s identification with Parzival is reaffirmed during the Ansky episode when he returns to his division wearing his madman’s garb under his uniform (738). He takes Ansky’s notebook with him. Subsequently,

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he returns to Kostekino, leaves it there for someone else to find, and joins German soldiers who are retreating from the Red Army. DIABOLICAL AND RADICAL EVIL In Romania, they come across General Entruscu’s crucified body, surrounded by some of his soldiers and an assortment of Romanians. Entrescu was crucified by soldiers under his command who were demoralized by his lack of leadership and maddened by the privations they had to endure. After a conflict is avoided between the Germans and Romanians, they gather peacefully around the crucified body, and, in an incident reminiscent of the opening of “The Part about the Crimes,” a fifteen-year-old Romanian soldier prays (746). The crucifixion episode is formally equivalent to a rite whereby Entrescu takes on the sins of fascist Europe and atones for them by his death. He is granted this privileged death by the One as a reward for his performance with Baroness von Zumpe in Dracula’s castle. Entrescu’s crucifixion takes place outside of another castle whose grounds are riddled with bones. After the war, this is related to Hermes Popescu, who had been Entrescu’s secretary during the war, by one of Entrescu’s former soldiers. He wonders why there are so many bones around the castle and why—when seen from a distance— Entrescu’s cross was rippling (854). The soldier refers to aspects of the crucifixion episode redolent of the horror novel and science fiction. The interred bones signify diabolical evil as cause and effect of supplemental causality. The grounds surrounding the castle are a repository for this type of evil. The rippling cross has the function of separating Europe from the aforementioned evil and transmitting it beyond its boundaries, where it will eventually manifest itself in the femicides of Santa Teresa. In the ritual of the crucifixion in the presence of the Grail (Reiter), the purging from Europe of diabolical evil associated with supplemental causality and the dissemination of the existential benefits he has obtained for that region to that region are “certified” by the One—that is, granted the status of concrete totalities recognized by the One. Again, there is nothing “coincidental” about Reiter’s predestined and necessary presence at the scene of the crucifixion. As previously noted, in 2666, World War II takes place primarily within the context of naturalistic causality. This accounts for a qualitative difference in the representation of evil in “The Part about the Crimes” and “The Part about Archimboldi.” In the former, the femicides are inextricably associated with diabolical, apparently metaphysical forms of evil, while in the latter, regarding the Holocaust, a naturalistic, Kantian form of radical evil prevails. The primary example is Leo Sammer, a Nazi administrator responsible for murdering hundreds of Jews. Reiter meets him after the war in a

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prisoner-of-war camp (748). Sammer is not a fanatical Nazi. He would rather not kill the Jews that are mistakenly sent to him instead of Auschwitz, but he has most of them murdered because he is ordered to do so. He is a cowardly man who is primarily motivated by self-interest, which accounts for his need to remain in good standing with his superiors. Bolaño contrasts Sammer’s access to tasty food with the horrible privations endured by his Jewish prisoners in order to highlight Sammer’s selfishness and lack of empathy. Such is Reiter’s aversion to Sammer that he strangles him to death (767). He is not implicated in the murder and is able to escape from the prisoner-of-war camp. BREAKING THE CHAIN After the war Reiter goes to Cologne, where he finds a job as a doorman at a bar. He resumes his relationship with Ingeborg Bauer after she finds him at the bar. They become lovers. He begins to work on his first novel. During one of his conversations with Ingeborg, he tells her that he murdered Sammer and that the police might be looking for him (776). The resumption of the ReiterBauer relationship is presented within the context of a realistic portrayal of life in postwar Cologne, an impoverished city with few undamaged buildings left standing because of extensive aerial bombardment. The narrative continues in this realistic vein until the episode of the fortune teller, an old woman Reiter meets at the bar where he works. She knows more about him and his family than is possible for someone who is not well acquainted with him. This gives the episode its fantastic quality. The old woman tells Reiter that he killed someone. When he responds that he was a soldier, she clarifies that the killing did not take place during the war and follows up with the suggestion that he change his name in order to “break the chain” (778). Ostensibly, this means he should disconnect himself from his identity as Reiter in order to avoid detection by the police. In another sense, as part of the process of the emergence of Archimboldi as the signifier of European unity, breaking the chain signifies disconnection from the cycle of intra-European violence that characterized European history up to that time. Allegorical evidence that this process is underway is provided by the events pertaining to a leather jacket the fortune teller gives to Reiter, telling him that it has been waiting for him since the death of its owner (778). The old woman is not sure who gave her the coat. Among the owners she mentions are a Gestapo agent, a communist, and an English spy. Subsequently, Ingeborg becomes sick and is visited by an English doctor. He notices Reiter’s leather jacket and asks him where he bought it. The distraught Reiter, who is upset about Ingeborg’s illness, lies by responding that he bought it in Berlin at a shop called Hahn & Förster, to which the doctor responds that the jacket looks like a leather jacket

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manufactured in 1938 in England by the Manchester coat makers Mason and Cooper. This increases the likelihood that the jacket belonged to the English spy, that it was, in fact, a jacket manufactured by Mason and Cooper, of a type well known to the doctor, since he owns one. For him, the coats manufactured by Mason and Cooper are comparable to works of art that keep up with history even as they resist historical tendencies (780). The allegorical meaning of the jacket episode is clear. Given that its previous owner was the English spy, Europe’s future will not be fascist or communist. It will not be a postmodern emergence from history, but rather will keep up with history even as it breaks the chain of intra-European violence by means of European unification. The idea of unification is on the doctor’s mind after Reiter gives him his jacket and tells him to look at it as long as he wants. In the doctor’s mind, Reiter’s jacket becomes his jacket, and, for a moment, the distance between England and Germany is annulled, as if by traversing this distance the doctor were going home. Thanks to the Grail/Reiter—for whom the jacket had been waiting—Cologne, or potentially anywhere in Europe, is the doctor’s home (780–81). The doctor concludes that life is a mystery, but there is nothing mysterious about how the jacket came into the possession of the old woman. Reiter did not buy a jacket made in Germany that inexplicably happened to be the same as one manufactured in Manchester. It was bought in England and taken to Cologne by an English spy who gave it to the old woman. In other words, the way in which she became the owner of the jacket can be described in terms of naturalistic causality. What is mysterious is the confluence of Reiter/Grail/jacket, which signifies that the causality associated with the jacket will prevail in the European region. The fortune teller also plays a role in Reiter’s literary education, by giving him books, including the complete works of Novalis and Friedrich Hebbel’s Judith. WRITING AND DESIRE After Reiter finishes his first novel, Lüdicke, he goes in search of a typewriter. He finds an old man who is willing to rent one to him. When he asks Reiter what his name is, he responds Benno von Archimboldi, which is the first time he refers to himself as such in the novel (784). The last name Archimboldi— connected as it is with Ansky’s thought—is an indication that Reiter has chosen Ansky as an ego-ideal, a process already underway when, in Ansky’s house, he would occasionally stare into the fireplace as if seeking the approval of his ghost (738). Archimboldi will endeavor to live up to Ansky’s ideals—the primacy of necessity over desire, and reason over the understanding in the construction of freedom—by means of his literary work. The old man—who believes that all Germans were to a greater or lesser extent guilty

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of acquiescing to the crimes of the Nazis—expresses this point of view and finds a willing listener in Archimboldi, who shares his hatred of the Nazis. He also talks about literature, more specifically, the notion that minor works are versions of masterpieces written by secret authors (785). The old man informs Archimboldi that he was a writer who stopped writing when he came to the conclusion that he was incapable of creating a masterpiece (785). For the old man, the crucial distinction between great writers and minor writers involves appearance. Minor writers only appear to be the authors of their works. In reality, they “take dictation” from a secret writer (785–86). The minor writer mimics the design of a masterpiece even as the masterpiece in question is never revealed (786). The old man concludes that no one ever sees “what is being tamely mirrored back” (787). If no one ever perceives the masterpiece, then, in an ontological sense, it partakes of indeterminate being, but, as Hegel affirms at the beginning of the Greater Logic, “pure being and pure nothing are . . . the same.”36 In order for the masterpiece to exist, it must have determinate being: “Existence corresponds to being in the preceding sphere. But being is the indeterminate; there are no determinations that therefore transpire in it. But existence is determinate being, something concrete.”37 Given that existence is determinate being, if the masterpiece exists, then it follows that it is appearance, since “the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance.” In other words, the masterpiece is not somehow more “real” than the minor work. It is also an appearance whose production is attributed to a writer who is just as “hollow”—that is, just as much of an appearance as a minor writer, since the masterpiece is also characterized by intertextual relationships to other texts. In any case, who, when all is said and done, is not an empty vessel in the world of a computer simulation? As Archimboldi listens to the old man talk about appearance, he thinks of Ansky (786). He does not respond verbally, but it can be surmised that he does not agree with his train of thought, given that the old man utilizes the concept of appearance in terms of the understanding, and that the lesson Archimboldi learned from Ansky was about the primacy of reason over the understanding. In a self-congratulatory mood, the old man compares his decision to give up writing to losing his virginity, as if it satisfied his desire (788). As Lacan affirmed, desire can never be fully satisfied, and, “from an analytic point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.”38 By giving up writing, the old man incurs this guilt. His nonchalance is similar to Enrique Martín’s, the eponymous protagonist of Bolaño’s short story, when he informs Arturo Belano that he no longer writes poetry: “When I looked at him he was smiling, as if to say I’ve grown up, I’ve realized that you can enjoy art without making a fool of yourself, without keeping up some pathetic pretense of being a writer.”39 Martín ends his life by committing suicide. The logical outcome of removing great works from the

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category of existence and relegating them to pure being is that they, and by extension, their authors, do not exist. This removal indicates that the old man has removed himself from the continuum that exists between minor writers and great writers. No one ever became a great writer by giving up on his or her desire. It is not so much lack of talent that separates Enrique Martín and the old man from great writers, but rather the renunciation of desire. The old man tells Archimboldi that in his youth he attended several lectures by someone he considered to be a great writer. Subsequently, he accompanies a friend of his to the university morgue, where he meets a worker who bears a striking resemblance to the writer. This worker had spent many years working in the morgue, taking bodies in and out of refrigerated vaults. When his visitor attempts to have a philosophical conversation with him about fate and the brevity of life, the morgue worker replies, “I don’t have much time” (790). “Morgue worker” is a metaphor for writer. The work of a writer involves manipulating the written word, which is “the trespassing of death on life,” since it relates to the living as it relates to the dead: it takes their place by referring to them, but is lifeless and inert. To continue with the metaphor of the writer as morgue worker, the great writer spends years perfecting his or her craft in the uncomfortable, chilly environment of the morgue, by engaging in a process that cannot take place without intertextuality—that is, the manipulation of corpses residing in mortuary vaults. Irrespective of talent, what makes a writer a great writer is the relationship to time, which, as Heidegger affirmed, is also the relationship to death. The morgue worker is aware that he doesn’t have much time; in Heideggerian terms, rather than covering up the finality of death, he accepts it as an incentive to complete his work (relate authentically to Dasein) before he dies. In the old man’s parting comments to Archimboldi, he uses the metaphors of the masterpiece and minor works to compare Jesus to the thieves who were crucified with him, adding that the role of the thieves was to hide the crucifixion (790); the concept of the relationship of minor works to the masterpiece has evolved: minor works no longer completely conceal the masterpiece. The thieves and Jesus have something in common, given that they are human, even though the latter is also God. Humanity is also an attribute of a great writer. He or she, like all humans, is an empty vessel, an emptiness that in time, because of an authentic relationship to Dasein, becomes the locus of an unprecedented intertextuality, a new way of relating to previous texts that distinguishes the major writer from the minor one, and the masterpiece from the minor work. Archimboldi’s first novel, Lüdicke is accepted for publication by the Hamburg-based publisher Jacob Bubis. In Hamburg, Archimboldi meets Bubis and his wife, who is Baroness von Zumpe. Archimboldi and Von Zumpe make love, and he tells her about Entrescu’s death. Von Zumpe and Entrescu played a role in determining the destiny of Europe, and notions

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about European identity, politics, and culture are never far from the surface in the narrative of the initial phase of Archimboldi’s life as a published author. Shortly before he visits Bubis, Archimboldi thinks about a time that can either pass very slowly or very quickly. He equates the former with a paradise in which people and objects barely move and the latter with a hell in which they move extremely rapidly. He has no desire to live in either one (800). The slow time corresponds to a conservative lack of change, and the fast time to radical change. For himself (i.e., for Europe), Archimboldi rejects either option. Europe will not be reactionary or revolutionary, but rather a socialdemocratic amalgam of capitalistic welfare states. Archimboldi’s meditation on time is reminiscent of a story recounted by Ulises Lima in The Savage Detectives, after he returns from Central America, about a visit to two islands, one whose inhabitants live entirely in the past, and another one where they live entirely in the future.40 In terms of virtual reality, slow and fast times correspond to simulated times. Archimboldi would rather live in a world that has, at least, the appearance of a biologically based reality where naturalistic causality prevails. Bubis had been a publisher before the war, but was forced to leave Germany because he was Jewish. He returns to Germany because his publishing house is there and because of his connection to a network of booksellers throughout the country. Nevertheless, as he thanks one of them for not having burned books with his logo during the war, it becomes evident that for Bubis, being an editor has an esoteric significance that extends beyond Germany, goes back in time, and is mythological (806). The role of editors and booksellers as transmitters of the written word connects them to the dawn of a concept of Europe based on the vindication of the rule of law in the Oresteia. Bubis senses Archimboldi’s connection to respect for law as embodied in the myth given literary form by Aeschylus when he comments that The Unlimited Rose, his second novel, vaguely resembles a police investigation and is about Europe and Greek mythology (815). Of course, the term that lends credence to the preceding affirmations is “police investigation,” an indirect reference to The Savage Detectives. In that novel, that parodies a police investigation, Arturo Belano moves from lawlessness to the rule of law as embodied in the European Union. The Oresteia is an intertext of The Savage Detectives and 2666. Like Orestes, Belano, and Archimboldi are the perpetrators of “justifiable” homicides, and both follow a trajectory that identifies them with the rule of law in the legal sense of the word. In Archimboldi’s case, as in Belano’s, the destination of that trajectory is European unification undergirded by the principle of the direct effect of European Union law. After consuming a snack, Bubis comments that “we need something more restorative,” but he asks himself what it is and what should be done with it once it is found (816). As the embodiment of the Grail, Archimboldi provides the answer to

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the first question. The answer to the second one is to publish Archimboldi’s books. This spreads the power of the Grail throughout Europe by validating the relationship of the European subject to the domain of naturalistic causality, a relationship that will be the foundation for European unification. Given his privileged role as the Grail, it is not surprising that, disregarding the narrator’s (misleading) assertion to the effect that he considered his writing to be valueless, Archimboldi considers it to be in a (higher?) category of its own, only tenuously connected to the works of writers he admires, such as Döblin and Kafka, or “the Horde” of lesser writers (817). For him, writing is a game in which he derives pleasure like a detective in pursuit of a killer (817). However, the killer is Archimboldi: his texts are permutations of ways to obtain access to the beneficent power of the Grail. WHO IS SISYPHUS? More information about Archimboldi’s novels is provided when Bubis and several other guests, including Baroness Von Zumpe, a writer from Mainz, and his wife, visit the literary critic Lothar Junge, a professor of literature at the University of Heidelberg who is “at least six foot three” and lives in a tiny house by the edge of a forest (818). When Bubis asks him what he thinks of Archimboldi, Junge is uncomfortable and responds that he does not know, whereupon he begins to make faces that accentuate his resemblance to the writer’s wife. Because of their resemblance, Bubis thinks they must be siblings or lovers, for it is common knowledge—according to Bubis—that, over time, lovers acquire similar opinions and mannerisms, which he considers to be “superficial trappings” that human beings are forced to put up with like the rock of Sisyphus until they die (820). In the narrative before the preceding episode, after Baroness Von Zumpe informs the wife mentioned above that the dress she is wearing was purchased in Paris, she makes an expression of resentment that the narrator compares to a history of the insults inflicted on the city of Mainz (819). The wife has a point of view that is limited not just by German interests but also by those pertaining to a specific region of Germany. She is a signifier for German provincialism, and Junge is identified with this outlook when it is affirmed that he and the wife resemble each other. This is significant because Bubis continues to ask Junge about Archimboldi, and he replies that he considers him to be an African or an Asian author rather than a European one (822). Given his association with German provincialism, reinforced by the incongruity between his tallness and his tiny house, what Junge really means is that Archimboldi’s novels are not German enough for him. There is something about them that transcends Germany and perturbs Junge. After Bubis notices the resemblance between Junge and the wife, there

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is an abrupt transition to the myth of Sisyphus, which the narrator presents in considerable detail. Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to spend eternity in hell rolling a rock up a hill that rolled down the hill as soon as it neared the summit of the hill. Albert Camus considered Sisyphus to be the epitome of the absurd hero, because, as terrible as his punishment is, “his fate belongs to him.”41 He “teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks,” thereby achieving a tragic dignity as “the master of his days.”42 Bubis trivializes the gravity of Sisyphus’s punishment by equating it to the “superficial trappings” of human existence, an indication that, in the context of 2666, the temptation to regard Sisyphus as a culture hero or an alter ego of Archimboldi should be resisted. To begin with, there is the existential and political content of the narrator’s version of the myth. Sisyphus managed to put Thanatos, the god of death, in chains, and during the time he was in chains, no one died on Earth. A golden age ensued in which men were freed from the “anxiety” of death. According to the narrator, one of the benefits of this situation is that men had more time than usual to pursue intellectual activities. He considers this surplus time devoted to reading and thinking to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of a democracy. Zeus puts an end to this situation by freeing Thanatos. Consequently, Sisyphus dies (821). Is it not rather—as Heidegger taught—the awareness of death as a limit not to be exceeded that incites the subject to achieve his or her potential? Furthermore, democracy is a desirable thing. But what good is having democracy for a limited period of time—even if it is a golden age—if it results in being forced to push a rock up a hill for eternity, a task that in its laborious futility represents the very negation of the benefits of democracy, among them surplus time? In the world of 2666, it does not pay to rebel against the gods. If Europe occupies a privileged place in that text, it is not because of a rebellion against the One, but rather because the representatives of Europe—Entrescu, Von Zumpe, and Archimboldi—have pleased the One. Archimboldi may not have a very high opinion of the One, but he does not rebel against It. An indication of this is that he never really identifies with Sisyphus. Archimboldi engages in petty theft in order to survive when he and Ingeborg are in Italy (835). At the same time, Baroness von Zumpe, who is also in Italy, goes to one party after another. In combination, their behavior represents a dispersal of Sisyphus’s proclivity to steal and engage in festivities, an emerging identity that never congeals or becomes part of a hybrid identity consisting of Parzival and Sisyphus, and is terminated by the death of Ingeborg, who drowns, probably as a result of—pace Camus—suicide; she was emotionally unstable and, on a prior occasion, had participated in what Archimboldi suspected might have been attempted suicide (771, 830).43 Rather than dispelling death, the tendency to identify with Sisyphus hastens it, a clear sign that it is displeasing to the One. Accompanied by a

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journalist, the baroness travels to a remote Italian village to find out more about Ingeborg’s death and—as they compile a list of dead family members and friends—she becomes almost totally preoccupied by the subject of death (836). In the village, the baroness ascertains that Ingeborg’s body was never found and that Archimboldi left shortly before her arrival. From this point onwards, the baroness’s days of partying a La dolce vita are over. As for Archimboldi, there are no more reports about him engaging in petty theft. After Ingeborg’s death, Bubis brings up the topic of Sisyphus in a letter to Archimboldi, who is living in the rocky hills of the Greek island of Icaria. They remind Bubis of Sisyphus’s punishment, and he relates that information to Archimboldi in the letter (846). In his reply Archimboldi surprises Bubis by writing about how Sisyphus tricked Hades into letting him out of hell again, whereupon he returned to earth, lived happily for a long time, died, and returned to hell, where—according to Archimboldi—he is “hatching new schemes” to escape the punishment of the rock (847). Who, if anyone, does Sisyphus represent in 2666? It is not Bubis, who ridicules his punishment by comparing it to a grimace. It is not Archimboldi, who never identifies with him in the first place, surprises Bubis by referring to him, and who “cultivates his own garden” by becoming a gardener after renouncing theft—that is, he minds his own business and does not rebel against God (841). Who, associated with 2666, is a modern-day culture hero that shares some Sisyphean characteristics, such as cleverness, rebelliousness, and a proclivity to engage in gratuitous theft? The most convincing answer is Roberto Bolaño, the infrarealist revolutionary, contrarian, renovator of Latin American literature, “morgue worker” par excellence, and thief. What does Bolaño steal? His readers’ time; by leading them down blind alleys, such as suggesting Archimboldi killed Ingeborg, or that he is Sisyphus after they are convinced he is Parzival, which upon further investigation turns out to be the case: he is Parzival. Bolaño was lonely. He wanted company in the morgue (the writer’s workshop). Bubis and Archimboldi extend his invitation to join him there by referring to Sisyphus and involving the reader in a time-consuming process that leads to the morgue. This is what makes 2666 dangerous. This is not an invitation to partake in the “pleasure of the text,” where all is playful competition between competing codes. With Bolaño, the reader becomes invested in a certain interpretation, only to be sucker punched as s(he) takes a pratfall. Why would Archimboldi, who is, in 2666, the character least preoccupied with the “superficial trappings” of human existence (i.e., “falling”) become preoccupied with the avoidance of death? This is a case of Bolaño using a literary character to address, in the mode of wish fulfillment, in the mode of—dare I say it?—falling, his own preoccupation with failing health and imminent death by means of a version of the Sisyphus myth in which Sisyphus can cheat death again and escape the punishment of the rock.

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THE ONE IS . . . Bubis has no doubt that Archimboldi fulfilled his hopes (838). These do not involve his literary talent, of which he is sure, but rather something vaguely connected to a religious subject matter that he finds threatening. The connection between Archimboldi and God is more important to Bubis than his literary talent, but he does not want to know too much about it because he believes it is dangerous to know too much about God (838). His trepidation is consistent with a sinister conception of God, of which there is evidence in 2666. Perhaps the most striking episode in this regard is a story Ingeborg tells Archimboldi about Mrs. Dorothea, who worked as a secretary when the Nazis were in power. In the offices where she worked, there were rows of secretaries who, with one exception, seemed to type at the same speed as if the typewriters had “one voice,” even though they were typing different documents (824). The exception is Mrs. Dorothea, an old woman who sits at a desk in front of the secretaries corresponding to her status as the most senior secretary. In a very long sentence, the narrator describes a big painting of Hitler “with something futuristic about him” hanging from the ceiling behind the secretaries, Mrs. Dorothea’s entrance, and the reaction of the secretaries and Ingeborg to her entrance. Upon sitting at her desk, the secretaries greet Mrs. Dorothea in unison but without looking at her. Ingeborg cannot decide whether this choral greeting is beautiful or horrible. Nevertheless, she feels like she is in church (825). Ingeborg is entranced by the sound of Mrs. Dorothea’s typing, which guides the typing of the secretaries; sometimes she types more slowly than them in order to let them catch up to her, but usually, more quickly, as if she were setting an example for them to follow (825–26). In considering the religious import of the Dorothea story, it should be noted that the name Dorothea is derived from the Greek name Dorotheos, “which meant ‘Gift of God.’”44 In terms of the relationship of the components of the story to each other, the reference is to the Parmenides, specifically the consequences of developing the thesis that the one is.45 Among these is the following: if one is, it must partake of being: “Then the one will have being, but its being will not be the same with the one.”46 In the Dorothea story, the secretaries represent parts of being attached to the one. Initially, Mrs. Dorothea (the one) is not at her desk. Her absence does not prevent the one from attaching to the secretaries; the typewriters have “one voice”: “The one attaches to every single part of being, and does not fail in any part, whether great or small.”47 The sum of being and one considered as nouns is two: “When I speak of being and one, I speak of them both. . . . And must not that which is correctly called both, be also two?”48 By means of addition and multiplication, one

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and two can be used to generate an infinite amount of numbers.49 The ontological consequence is multiplicity of being: “But if there is number, there must also be many, and infinite multiplicity of being; for number is infinite in multiplicity, and partakes also of being.”50 The one has alternative determinations: “Then the one if it has being is one and many, whole and parts, having limits and yet unlimited in number.”51 The parts of the one are contained by the whole and the one is the whole.52 Thus, the one is the parts of the one and the whole, and the one is contained by the one.53 But the whole is not in any of its parts because it would no longer be a whole:54 “The one then, regarded as a whole, is in another, but regarded as being all its parts, is in itself; and therefore the one must be in itself and also in another.”55 If not Mrs. Dorothea, who then, or what, represents the one as a whole? Clearly, the portrait of Hitler. The implications are disturbing, but not inconsistent with the moral standing of the one, given its responsibility for the role played by supplemental causality in the femicides of Santa Teresa. In effect, to be happy with the regime of the one (a futuristic Hitler) is to have something in common with Luz Mendiluce, the authoress of the poem Con Hitler fui feliz (With Hitler I was Happy) in Bolaño’s story “Luz Mendiluce Thompson.”56 In the Dorothea episode, the expressionistic blending of religion and bureaucracy is reminiscent of Kafka, particularly K’s interview with the Superintendent in The Castle. It is notable how the typing of the secretaries and Mrs. Dorothea is not totally synchronized. These differing rates of productivity never lead to any serious discrepancy in the output of what they produce. Discrepancies in output are also characteristic of the bureaucracy of the Castle: In such a large governmental office as the Count’s, it may occasionally happen that one department ordains this, another that; neither knows of the other, and though the supreme control is absolutely efficient, it comes by its nature too late, and so every now and then a trifling miscalculation arises.57

If absolute efficiency is equivalent to invariably perceiving what is in error, this can only take place in a situation where “the one [‘the supreme control’] attaches to every part of being.” SUBSTRATE INDEPENDENCE The conclusion of “The Part about Archimboldi” centers on Lotte and her efforts to free her son Klaus Haas from prison in Mexico. By this time (the 1990s) Archimboldi was a potential Nobel recipient whose works had been translated into the principal world languages (887). On her way

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to Mexico to visit Klaus, Lotte buys a novel by Archimboldi entitled The King of the Forest, and, upon reading it, notices details of the plot having to do with her family that could only be known to her brother. She concludes that Archimboldi is Hans Reiter. After reading the novel, Lotte thinks that “the stories” lead nowhere, which is interesting from the point of view of Archimboldi’s evolving significance as the Grail (887). Within an American context, the mediation of causality by the agency of the subject breaks down. Nevertheless, when she meets him in Germany for the first time in many years, and asks him if he will take care of everything, it can be surmised that she is reasonably certain that Archimboldi will improve Klaus’s situation (891). Before this meeting, while she was in Santa Teresa, she dreamed about a blond giant emerging from a tomb (888–89). Given that Archimboldi becomes a signifier for the creation of a revolutionary situation in Mexico, the awakening of the giant as the sine qua non of this situation is contingent on the movement of the Grail from Europe to Santa Teresa, whereupon the signifying and causal functionality of the Grail is restructured in accordance with its new environment. This much is vaguely foretold by Haas in a series of dreams about the arrival of a giant who will vanquish his enemies. The day before leaving for Mexico, Archimboldi eats a Fürst Pückler, which is a chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream. As he sits in the terrace of a bar overlooking a park and eats it, he has a conversation with a descendant of Alexander Fürst Pückler, for whom the ice cream is named. He informs Archimboldi that his ancestor was a brilliant man who was a botanist and a writer, but that no one reads his books anymore, and that he had no idea that his memory would live on because of an ice cream (892). In terms of virtual reality, the incongruity between the subject Fürst Pũckler and the signifier associated with him (which, nevertheless, is his name) is suggestive of some body part not usually associated with subjectivity as the seat of consciousness. Such is the computing power available to the director of the simulation that this can be any part, such as an earlobe, a finger, a nail, etc. Lack of awareness of this would not change the fact that after death, if the subject’s memory lives on, it is, for example, thanks to a toenail, since, if it had not been the seat of consciousness in the first place, there would be no memory of the subject. Thus, the Fürst Pückler episode contains a veiled reference to the concept of substrate independence in relation to consciousness. The conclusion of “The Part about Archimboldi” reinforces the impression that this text represents a virtual reality: After the park lights came on, there was a moment “of total darkness, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg” (893). This darkness suggests the momentary darkness of a computer screen when the computer is booting up.

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NOTES 1. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 320. Text references are to pages of this edition. 2. Plato, “Critias,” in The Dialogues of Plato, 3rd ed., trans. and ed. Benjamin Jowett (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1892), 3: 598, https://oll​.libertyfund​.org/. 3. Ibid., 598. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 607. 6. Jowett, introduction to Critias, by Plato, 595. 7. Franklin Rodríguez, Roberto Bolaño: el investigador desvelado (Madrid: Verbum, 2015), 262–63 (my translation). 8. A. T. Hatto, preface to Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, trans. A. T. Hatto (1980; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2004), 7–8. 9. Ibid., 8. 10. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 172. Parzival blames God for being cursed after he fails to ask Anfortas the question that would heal him. 11. Ibid., 235. 12. Blaise Pascal, “Pensées,” in Pensées, The Provincial Letters, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 183. 13. Ibid., 184–85. 14. Rodríguez, Roberto Bolaño: el investigador desvelado, 257–58 (my translation). 15. Ibid., 259 (my translation). 16. Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2004), 102. 17. Rodríguez, Roberto Bolaño: el investigador desvelado, 259 (my translation). 18. Roberto Bolaño, “Nunca creí que llegaría a ser tan viejo,” interview by Rodrigo Pinto, in Bolaño por sí mismo: entrevistas escogidas, ed. Andrés Braithewaite, 2nd ed. (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2011), 94 (my translation). 19. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 420. 20. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 374. 21. Otto Rahn, who was also a conflicted Grail-seeker, came to detest the Nazis when he realized the extent of their brutality. He was a homosexual of Jewish ancestry. Rahn committed suicide after he found out the Gestapo was after him. For an informative article on Rahn, see John Preston, “The Original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the Temple of Doom,” The Telegraph, May 22, 2008, Culture, Film, https://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk/. 22. Wrangel was a commanding General of the anti-Bolshevik White Army. 23. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, 7th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 926. 24. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findley (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 89.

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25. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 115. 26. Ibid., 109. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 113. 30. Ibid., 111, 115. 31. Sebastian Gardner, “Hegel: Glossary,” accessed March 12, 2020, 4, http:// philosophyfaculty​.ucsd​.edu​/faculty​/ewatkins​/Phil107S13​/Hegel​-Glossary​.pdf. 32. Ibid., 4. 33. Ibid., 3. 34. Ibid. 35. Hegel, The Science of Logic, 532. 36. Ibid., 59. 37. Ibid., 84. 38. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992; paperback edition, 1997), 319 (citations refer to the paperback edition). 39. Roberto Bolaño, “Enrique Martín,” in Llamadas telefónicas, 5th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 41 (my translation). 40. Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, 388. 41. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (1955; repr., New York: Knopf, 1969), 123. 42. Ibid., 123. 43. The supposition that Archimboldi killed Ingeborg based on his interaction with Fritz Leube, someone who confesses to killing his wife (834), is untenable, if only because Parzival—Archimboldi’s role model—would never kill a woman. After some episodes of youthful immaturity, he follows Gurnemanz’s advice: “Hold the ladies in high esteem: that heightens a young man’s worth. Do not forsake their cause for a single day.” Eschenbach, 96. Trevrizent’s advice on women is consistent with Gurnemanz’s: “If you wish to make something fine and truly noble of your life, never vent your anger on women.” Eschenbach, 255. Violence against women is denounced in Parzival. 44. Behind the Name, s.v. “Dorothea,” accessed February 4, 2020, https://www​ .behindthename​.com​/name​/dorothea. 45. To be consistent with Plato’s text, I use the lower case o to spell one. 46. Plato, “Parmenides,” in The Dialogues of Plato, 4: 54. 47. Ibid., 58. 48. Ibid., 56. 49. Ibid., 56–57. 50. Ibid., 57. 51. Ibid., 59. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid.

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55. Ibid. 56. Roberto Bolaño, “Luz Mendiluce Thompson,” in La literatura Nazi en América (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996), 27. 57. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Modern Library, 1969), 77.

Conclusion Ontological Considerations

The thematic content of the works analyzed in this book trends in the direction of a theology based on technology, a theology underpinned by philosophical concepts presented in Nick Bostrum’s article on the world as a computer simulation. In this process—well underway in The Savage Detectives and more highly developed in 2666—the Badiousean ontology of “Labyrinth,” based on the premise that the One is not, is replaced by an ontology based on the premise that the One is. 2666 can be read as a much longer version of Borges’s story “The Circular Ruins,” in which a wizard tries to create a man, only to find out that he is a figment of someone else’s dream. Both of these works subvert the belief expressed in Protagoras’s statement that “man is the measure of all things”—which is theocentrism in another guise since it replaces God with man. This replacement is characteristic of modernity from the Renaissance onwards. Freud and Lacan move away from an idealistic conception of man’s role in the world: man is the subject of the unconscious or the Other. Bolaño takes this decentering one step further: man is an afterthought of, or entertainment for, the director of the simulation. This leads to the situation where the ontological freedom of the European world is pathologically contingent on the One’s fascination with the lovemaking of Entrescu and Von Zumpe: a paradoxical mixture of the rational and the irrational. On the other hand, the immoral ontological oppression of Santa Teresa by means of supplemental causality is the result of a rational calculation by the One that it will contribute to the creation of a revolutionary situation, a calculation predicated on the One being favorably disposed to such an outcome. If there is any consolation in the vision of the world expressed in 2666, with its inextricable blending of the rational, irrational, and immoral, it is 215

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that, at its best, the simulated world is a good infinity in the Hegelian sense, where the spirit “rises to itself, to the light of its thinking, its universality, its freedom”; a place where we can feel at home and never notice we are living in a simulated world. This is no small consolation: the possibility of such a world makes life worth living.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. abandonment, fear of, 158–60 absence, 102 Aegisthus, 64 Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 50–51; The Eumenides, 50; Oresteia, 44, 50–51, 205 African American, working class, 112 African Americans, incarceration of, 123 Agamemnon, 64 agency, 107–10, 154, 185 agrarian reform, 47 aide-mémoire, 124, 128–29 Albuquerque, Pedro H., 157–58 Aleph, xvii aletheia, 101, 102 Allende, Isabel, 43 Allende, Salvador, xv, 2–3, 10, 50, 63 Alter, Karen, 32 Althusser, Louis, 38–39n11 Álvarez, Eliseo, 2 Amulet, xv–xvi, 153; biological embodiment in, 153; freedom in, 63; geometries in, 60–61; good vs. evil in, xv–xvi, 62–63; political real in, xv; as posthuman text, 59–66; time in, 62–63; virtual reality in, xvi, 147, 153

anagrams, 29–30, 39–40n30, 52 Angola, 8 anxiety, 91, 129 appearance, 195–96, 203 appropriation, 101 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 196–97 Armour, David, 111–12 artificial intelligence, 60 Ashe, Arthur, 134 Astorga, Luis, 94, 143–44 Athena, 177 Atlantis, myth of, 177–78 autobiographical phenomenology, xiii–xviii autopoiesis, xv–xvi, 61, 62 “autopoietic” system, self in, xv–xvi Ávalos, Victoria (mother), xiv Aztecs, 47, 190 Aztlán, 47 Badiou, Alain, 21–22, 27, 32–34, 36, 37, 51, 215 Barcelona, Spain, xiii, 49 Baroja, Pío, “La sima”, 51, 52 Barrio Terrazas, Francisco, 144 Bates, Karen Grigsby, 111 Baudelaire, Charles, 43 Beat road novels, 107 227

228

Index

Beauchamp, Zack, 74–75 being. See Dasein, unconcealment of binary code, 146–47, 154, 161 biological embodiment, 148, 153 Birns, Margaret Boe, 73–74, 78 Black Panthers, 108, 111 Blinder, Scott, 74–75 Bolaño, León (father), xiv Bolaño, Roberto, xiv; background of, xiv; described as writing from masculine perspective, 45–46; “Infrarealist Manifesto”, 44; as a leftist, 2; literary traps in his works, 155; loss of faith in political solutions in Latin America, 63–64; as neomodernist, 43; political development of, 2; as a Trotskyite, 2. See also specific works Boom writers, 43 Borges, Jorge Luis, xvii; Bolaño’s stylistic similarity with, 43; “The Circular Ruins”, 215; “La muerte y la brújula”, 161, 163; “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, 1– 2; A Universal History of Infamy, 1 Boron, Robert de, 180 the “Borromean knot”, 126–29, 126, 138 Bostrum, Nick, 50, 147–48, 150, 215 bourgeois idealism, 90 bourgeoisie, 89–90 Brexit, 67–85, 84n15 Britain, 73–74, 82; Brexit and, 67–85, 84n15; European Union and, 75–76; xenophobia in, 74–75 Butler, Judith, 25 the “call”, 92–93 Cambodia, 24 Camus, Albert, 207 Candia, Alexis, 103 capital, 122; gratification of, 24, 25 capitalism, 38, 72–73. See also neoliberalism

“The Caracas Speech”, 2, 15 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 47 Cardenistas, 47 Carrillo Fuentes, Amado, 144–45 castration, 108 causality, xvii, 76–77, 83–84n11, 93, 100, 110, 158; coincidence and, 183–89; naturalistic, 83–84n11, 102, 113, 146, 182–85, 191, 199, 202, 205–6; supplemental, 95, 100, 102, 110, 113, 120, 123, 146, 154, 159, 163–64, 169, 178, 183 Cela, Camilo José, La colmena, 21 Celtic cross, 127 Cervantes, Miguel de: discourse on arms and letters, 15; Don Quijote, 15, 91–92 chaos, in 2666, 155–56, 179 Chernyakhovsky, Ivan, 7–12, 15–16 Chiesa, Lorenzo, 25 Chihuahua, Mexico, 144–45 Chihuahua State Police, 145 Chile, xiv, xv, 2–3, 63, 99; dictatorship in, xv, 3; neoliberalism in, xv, 3, 10–11 Chomsky, Noam, 24 Christians, persecuted, 113–14 the circle, 138 Ciudad Juárez, femicides in, 69, 94, 143–46, 157–58 class consciousness, 167–68 class struggle, 168, 172. See also bourgeoisie; ruling class; working class Clytemnestra, 64 coincidence, in 2666, 183–89 Coleman, Alexander, 161 communism, 63, 195, 202 Communist Party, 8, 10, 109–10, 195 computer simulation, xvii, 50, 150, 195, 211, 215; consciousness and, 147–48; reality as, 147–48; in 2666, 160–63, 166–67, 169–72, 185, 193– 94. See also virtual reality

Index

consciousness: computer simulation and, 147–48; substrate-independence and, 211 Cortázar, Julio: “active reader” in, 98; Bolaño’s stylistic similarity with, 43; “Las babas del diablo”, 21; Rayuela, 98 cosmopolitanism, 37 Courbet, Gustave, 195 the cross, 126–28, 138 Dalzell, Tom, 127, 128 Dasein, 77, 78, 88, 90–93, 102–3, 152, 204; authentic relationship to, 91–92; unconcealment of, 101, 102 death, 104–5n6, 204, 207, 208. See also death drive; Thanatos death drive: in The Savage Detectives, 55; in 2666, 164–66, 168; working class and, 164–66 decentering, ontological considerations and, 215–16 Deckard, Sharae, 43–44, 116, 122 Deleuze, Gilles, 165 democracy, 207; radical, 35–36 demonic foreshadowing, in 2666, 187–88 Derrida, Jacques, 38–39n11 desire, 195; in “Enrique Martín”, 203–4; Lacanian structure of, 70–72, 81, 82; in 2666, 193–95, 202–6 detective novel form: in Distant Star, 2–3; in 2666, 143 Devade, Carla, 23, 29–31 Devade, Marc, 24 the diabolical, 200–201 dialectical materialism, 199 Dick, Phillip K., 43, 184; Time out of Joint, 62; Ubik, 104; VALIS trilogy, 72, 149, 150, 154 dictatorship, in Chile, xv, 3 Dieste, Rafael, 93 difference, 24 discontinuity, 62 discrimination, 36

229

disorder, 155–56, 196–97 Distant Star, xiv, xv, 22, 143, 184, 186; castration and, 13–14; comparison with The Savage Detectives, 3; death drive in, 5–6, 13–15; as detective story, 2–3; expatriates in, 3, 8–9; fascism in, 16; imaginary identification in, 1–19; jouissance in, 5–7; Latin American political identity in, 2; left-right conflict in, 7, 11–12, 16; Marxism in, 16–17; the maternal in, 5–6; personal identity in, 17; politcal and ethical dimensions of, 16–17; political ideology in, xv; political real in, xv, 16; postpatriarchal society in, 64; projection in, 2; sublimation of death drive in, 16–17; symbolic identification in, 1–19; World War II and, 7–8, 16 the double, 48–49 Dove, Patrick, 77 Dracula, 187, 200 drive, 70 Driver, Alice, 145 drug trade, in Mexico, 143–44 drug traffickers, 143–44, 156 Duchamp, Marcel, 93 Echevarría, Ignacio, 21, 52, 98 Electra, 64 El Salvador, xv, 8, 24 El Tercer Reich, 155 embodiment, biological, 148, 153 empirical knowledge, limitations of, 136 “Enrique Martín”, 203–4 equality, 33, 36 Erigone, 64 Eschenbach, Wolfram von, 213n43; Parzival, 156, 179–82, 185, 199, 207, 208 Espinosa, Patricia, 17 estridentismo, 44, 46–47 Europe, 185, 188, 199, 200; ascendancy of, 179; Latin America and, xiii–xv,

230

Index

xvi; naturalistic causality and, 146; neoliberalism in, xvii; rebirth of, 156; rule of law and, 46, 205; unification of, 26–27, 30–32, 67–85, 201, 202, 205–6. See also European Union; violence in, 201 European Coal and Steel Community, 27 European Community, 26, 27, 30–32, 37, 52 European Court of Justice, 21–22, 30–34, 52 European identity, 205 European Union, 26, 27, 30–34, 37–38, 51, 53, 74, 170, 180; British ambivalence about, 75–76; Council of, 36; law and, 36, 51; neoliberalism and, 73–74, 76, 178; supplemental causality and, 154 “Eurosclerosis”, 27 the event, Badiou’s theory of, 21–23, 25–27, 32–34, 36, 37, 44, 51 evil, xv–xvi, 62–63, 200–201 existential crisis, 190–91 expatriates, 3 factories, 48, 122, 144, 158–59 falling, 88, 185, 208 Fanon, Frantz, 168 fascism, xvii, 10, 82, 101–3, 155, 156, 199, 202 fate, The Savage Detectives and, 43–57 FBI, 144 Feltham, Oliver, 27 femicides, 112–16, 120–25, 136, 143–46, 157–59, 165–67, 185; the diabolical and, 200–201; as myth, 157–58; neoliberalism and, 163 Fibonacci sequence, 149 FMLN insurgency, xv, 8 Foucault, Michel, 39n18 Franco, Francisco, 52, 53 freedom, 26, 36, 37, 63, 72, 79, 91, 104–5n6 French intelligentsia, 195

French literary establishment, 23–24, 29, 38–39n11 French Revolution, 23, 159–60 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 215; Schreber’s case, 127; Totem and Taboo, 45 Freudian theory, 5, 55 Fritsche, Johannes, 102–3 Furies, 50 Gamboa Cárdenas, Jeremías, 2 Garabano, Sandra, 37 García Márquez, Gabriel, 43 geometries, 59–61 God, 182–86, 188–89, 193, 199, 208, 209, 215. See also the One González Rodríguez, Sergio, 143, 145, 151, 152, 159, 166–68 good, xv–xvi, 62–63 Goux, J.-J., 23 Gowland, David, 75–76 the Grail, 179–82, 185, 190–92, 199, 202, 205–6, 211 Grail romances, genre of, 180 Greece, 101 Greek mythology, 50–51, 64, 65, 177– 78, 187, 206–8 Gulf Cartel, 144–45 Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo, 96–97, 107 Guyotat, Pierre, 29, 30 hallucination, 120, 137, 139n8 Hayles, N. Katherine, 49, 61, 146, 148 Hebbel, Friedrich, 202 Hegel, G.W.F., 113, 197–98, 203; Phenomenology of Spirit, 36–37, 196 Heidegger, Martin, 78, 87–106, 105n12, 113, 152, 170, 177, 185, 204, 207; Being and Time, 77, 95, 101; Nazism and, 102–3 Henric, Jacques, 27–31, 34 Hephaestus, 177–78 Herman, Edward S., 24 heterotopia, 17 history, xvii, 155 Hitler, Adolf, 209, 210 Honduras, 24

Index

Hong, Quoc Loc, 32, 33 Hoyos, Héctor, xvii human rights violations, 37 hylozoism, 72 Iavanov, Efraim, 81 idealism, 148, 154 identity, xv, 53, 130–32. See also imaginary identity; symbolic identity ideology, 35–36, 53, 54, 195 the imaginary, 117–20, 126–29, 126, 133 imaginary identification, 10, 134 imaginary identity, 80, 172 immigration, 74–75, 82 inequality, 122, 123 infinity, in 2666, 196–200 information, 148 information systems, mutation of, 61 infrarealismo, xiv, 44, 208 insanity, 49, 109 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 143, 144 irrationalism, 103 Johnson, Lisa, xiv Josephus, Flavius, 187 jouissance, 5, 6, 34–35, 129, 181 Jowett, Benjamin, 154 Joyce, James, 126–28 Juárez Cartel, 144–45 judgment, 137–38 justice, 50–51 Kafka, Franz, 206; The Castle, 210 Kant, Immanuel, 83–84n11 Kerouack, Jack, 43 Keynes, John Maynard, 47 Kilapán, Lonko, 198; O’Higgins is Araucanian, 97–101, 103 King, Rodney, 111–12 Knights Templar, 47 knowledge, limitations of, 136 Kopalin, Ilya, Moscow Strikes Back, 12 Kristeva, Julia, 23–27, 32–37 Ku Klux Klan, 126–27

231

labor rights, 47 “Labyrinth”, xv, 52; fascination with, 37–38; fidelity to the event in, 21–41; ontological considerations in, 215; political ideology in, xv; political real in, xv; reader expectations and, 37–38 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 4–5, 24, 26, 39–40n30, 107–9, 203, 215; on “Borromean knot”, 126–29, 126; on distinction between subject of the enunciated and subject of the enunciation, 93–94; formula of the master’s discourse, 34–37; graph of sexuation, 80; on psychosis, 126; on relation of the psychotic to language, 118–19; on role of imaginary, 117– 18; Seminar XVII, 34–37; Seminar XVIII, 117; Seminar XXII, 127; Seminar XXIII, 127–29, 127 Lacanian analysis, 14, 22, 25, 37, 55, 70, 72, 117, 126–29, 164–65 Lacanian structure of desire, 70–72, 80, 82 Laclau, Ernesto, 35 language, 108, 118–19 Latin America: Europe and, xiii–xv, xvi; left-right conflict in, 63; loss of faith in political solutions in, 63–64; political identity in, 2. See also specific countries law, 30–34, 36, 44, 46, 50–51, 205 the Left, 22, 50, 63 liberation. See freedom likeness, 113 literary traps, in Bolaño’s work, 155 literature, in 2666, 179–80 Los Angeles riots, 111–12 lumpenproletariat, 168–70 Lynch, Patricio, 99 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 6, 44–45, 64 machismo, 114–15, 144, 167 Madariaga Caro, Montserrat, xiv magic, 103

232

Index

magical realism, 178 male domination, 45–46 Manzi, Joaquín, 11–13 Maples Arce, Manuel, 44 maquiladoras, 48, 114, 122, 144, 158– 59, 164 Marx, Karl, 47 Marxism-Leninism, 22, 110 Marxists, 110 masculinity, 115, 119–20, 136 “masquerade”, 81 master’s discourse, 34–37 master-signifier, 7–9, 34–36, 82, 110–16 master-slave dialectic, 36–37 masturbation, 190, 191 materiality, 148 mathematics, 50, 187–88 Maturana, Humberto, 61 Mellard, James, 6 Mendoza, Vicente T., 115 Mexican literary establishment, 44 Mexican Revolution, 143 Mexico, xiv, 47; drug trade in, 143–44; economic and social deterioration in, 46; femicides in, 69, 94, 112–16, 120–25, 136, 143–46, 157–59, 165–67; inequality in, 122; literary establishment in, xiv; machista culture in, 114–15; supplemental causality and, 146; Tlatelolco massacre in, 59–60, 63; United States and, 47, 122–23 military life, realism and, 182 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 6 Minjárez, Francisco, 145 misogyny, 167. See also femicides; violence against women modernist project, xvi, 50 modernity, 44–47 Molloy, Molly, 157–58 Mongols, 188 Mouffe, Chantal, 35 mutation, 61 “The Myths of Cthulhu”, 63

“Name-of-the-Father”, 108, 117, 127, 130 Napoleonic Code, 68 Napoleonic wars, 68 narcorranchos, 156 National Action Party (PAN), 144 national allegory, 82 National Autonomous University of Mexico, 59–60 nationalism, 68 naturalistic causality, 83–84n11, 102, 113, 146, 182–85, 191, 199–202, 205–6 Navarrete, Antonio, 145 Nazi Germany, 68, 181, 188, 198, 203, 209 Nazism, 101–3, 177, 189–92, 195, 200– 201. See also Nazi Germany necessity, 193–95 negation, 100–101, 103 negativity, 113, 114, 164–65 neoliberalism, 94, 159, 178; in Chile, xv, 3, 10–11; European Union and, xvii, 73–74, 76, 178; femicides and, 163; in 2666, 71–74, 82, 94, 107–41, 186; in the United States, 109, 122–23 neurotic symptoms, 128 New Testament, 149 Newton, Huey, 111 Nicaragua, xv, 8 No Country for Old Men, 186 the nonhuman, 59 nonperiodic tilings, 60, 153 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 122 Novalis, 202 Nuñez, Angel, 115 objet a, 4, 34–35 occultism, 190 Oedipal complex, 5, 29, 45, 118 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 97–99 the One, 103–4, 132, 155, 158, 178, 180–81, 186, 193, 200, 207

Index

ontology, 152–56, 215–16 “opening”, 102 order, 196–97 Orestes, 44, 50–51, 64, 65 the Other, 25, 45, 70, 72, 81–82, 88, 117, 129, 133–34, 138, 159, 181, 195, 199, 215 Pájaro de Calor: Ocho poetas infrarrealistas, xiv Panero, Leopoldo María, 105n7 pan-psychism, 72, 81, 93–94, 178 parallax gap, 15, 33 parallel universes, 193–94 paranoia, 127, 128 Paredes, Américo, 115 Paris Commune, 195 Parmenides, 101, 154 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 183–86 patriarchy, 44, 144 Paz, Octavio, 44 peacefulness, 129 Penrose tilings, 60, 61, 153 the phallus, 29, 34, 45, 81, 82, 108, 130 Pinochet, Augusto, 3, 99 Pinto, Rodrigo, 185–86 Plato: Critias, 177–78; Parmenides, 150, 154, 209–10 pleasure, ideology and, 54 Pleynet, Marcelin, 24 Pluth, Ed, 25 Poe, Edgar Allan, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 65 poetry, xiv police, 145, 167, 205 the political, the real and, 14–15 political change, 177 political ideology, xv political real, xv, 16 Pol Pot, 24 pornography, 159–60 Poseidon, 178 positivity, 114 post-Boom testimonio narrative, 43–44 post-Boom writers, 43

233

posthumanism, 59–66, 150 postmodernism, 6, 24, 25, 124 postpatriarchal society, 44–45, 64–65 “potentiality-for-Being”, fulfillment of, 90–93 poverty, 123 presence, 102 PRI, 94 programming errors, virtual theology and, 148–52 Protagoras, 215 Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, 71–72 psychoanalytic theory, 45 psychosis, 108, 109, 112, 117–19, 125–30, 137 quetzal, 65 racism, 116–21, 123, 133, 134, 138 radical democracy, 35–36 Rahn, Otto, 190 Ranciere, Jacques, 113 Rasmussen, Morten, 31 reader response, 149–50, 199 the real, 4–5, 14–15, 25, 51, 126–29, 126, 164–65 realism, military life and, 182 reality, 109, 117, 120, 137, 181–83, 195–96; appearance and, 195–96; as computer simulation, 147–48; devaluation of, 181; hallucination and, 120, 137; simulation of, 156 reason, 196–200 Red Army, 8, 16 redemption, 156 “regime of the brother”, 45 repression, 25 Réveillé, Marie-Thèrése, 23 revolution, 156, 159 Revolutionary Communist Party, 110 revolutionary consciousness, 124 revolutionary situation, in 2666, 156–66

234

Index

revolutionary subject, 143–75; components of, 156–66; convergence of, 166–72; creation of, 167 rhombi, 60, 153 the Right, 63, 72 Rimbaud, Arthur, 43 Robinson, Edward G., 11–12 Roche, Denis, 24 Rodríguez, Franklin, 155–56, 179, 184, 185 Rodríguez Freire, Raúl, 48 Roman Empire, 51, 52 Romania, 200 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, 32–33 Ruiz, Ramón Eduardo, 47 Rulfo, Juan, Pedro Páramo, 78, 171 ruling class, 109, 113, 114, 155, 170–72 the sacred, 131. See also God; theology Sandinista Revolution, xv, 8 Santiago, Mario, 44 Sastry, Anjuli, 111 Saussure, Ferdinand, 39n18, 40n30 The Savage Detectives, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 37, 43, 50, 59, 104–5n6, 143, 187, 205; bourgeois idealism in, 90; death drive in, 55; expatriates in, 3; fate and, 43–57; identity in, 53; justice in, 50–51; law in, 50–51; Mexico in, 47; movement from societal degeneration to transnational entity in, 44–57; ontological considerations in, 215; police in, 205; political real in, xv; postpatriarchal society in, 64, 65; simulation in, 50–51; temporal structure in, xvi; transition from retributive justice to justice based on law in, 50–51 Schelling, Friedrich, xv–xvi, 63 “Scholars of Sodom”, 21 science fiction, 47, 60, 95, 120, 192–93 Seale, Bobby, 108 The Secret of Evil, xv, 21–41 self-reliance, 72

Sharif, Abdul Latif, 145–46 simulation, xvii, 195; history and, 155; in The Savage Detectives, 50–51; simulated times, 205; in 2666, 138, 146–48, 156–66, 193. See also virtual reality Single European Act, 27 singularity, 60, 153 the sinthome, 127–29, 127, 130, 133, 134, 138 Sisyphus, myth of, 206–8 slave trade, 119 social change, in 2666, 177 social degeneracy, 159–60 social mobility, desire for, 159 societal degeneration, in The Savage Detectives, 44–57 Socrates, 154 soical justice, 47 solidarity, 33 Sollers, Philipe, 24, 25, 27, 38–39n11, 39n18 Solotorevsky, Myrna, 1–2 Soust Scaffo, Alcira, 66n2 Soviet Unon, 8, 188 Spain, xiii, xiv, 2, 52–54 spectacle, 149–50, 155, 181, 194 splitting, 48–49 Stalin, Joseph, 188, 195 Stalinism, 8, 9 Stavrakakis, Yannis, 6–7, 14–15 subject, lack of agency in, 154 subject formation, ideology and, 35–36 subject of the enunciated, vs. subject of the enunciation, 93–94 sublimation, 14 substrate-independence, 147, 148, 210–11 the supernatural, 47, 48 supplemental causality, 154, 155, 159, 163, 164, 169, 178, 183 Swales, Stephanie, 125–26 the symbolic, 126–29, 126 symbolic castration, 108 symbolic identification, 10, 133 symbolic identity, 80, 172

Index

symbolic order, 4, 12–13, 29, 108, 118 Symmes, John Cleves, 65 Tatars, 188 technology, 78–79, 101 telepathy, 103 Tel Quel, 24, 29, 38–39n11, 39n18 territoriality, 71 terrorism, 82 tessellations, 60–61, 61 Testamento geométrico, 95 testimonio, 43–44; “collective”, 44 Thanatos, 207 Thatcher, Margaret, 32 theology, in 2666, 183–84 Thomas, Hugh, 119 Tijuana Cartel, 144–45 tilings, 60–61, 61, 153 time, 62–63, 204; discontinuity and, 62; the One and, 180–81; running in different directions simultaneously, 60; simulated, 205 Tlatelolco massacre, 59–60, 63 Tomkins, Calvin, 93 transnational entities, 44–57. See also European Union trauma, 132–37 Treaty on the European Union (Maastrict Treaty), 27, 51 Troyes, Chrétien de, 180 The Truman Show, 48 truth, 196, 203 Twain, Mark, 43, 172 2666, xiv, xv, 47, 48, 177–214; appearance in, 195–96; bourgeoisie in, 89–90; capitalism in, 72–73; causality in, 76–77, 110, 158, 183–89; chaos in, 155–56, 179; circle and cross in, 125–29; class consciousness in, 167–68; class struggle in, 168, 172; coincidence in, 183–89; computer simulation in, 160–63, 166–67, 169–72, 185, 193–94; dangers for the reader in, 208; death drive in, 164–66, 168; demonic foreshadowing in, 187–88;

235

desire in, 193–95, 202–6; detective novel form of “The Part about the Crimes”, 143; disorder in, 155–56; European integration in, 67–85; European Union in, 170; evil in, 200–201; existential crisis in, 190– 91; fantastic/horror/gothic fiction elements in, xvi–xvii; as fantasy, 94; fascism vs. communism in, xvii; femicides in, 185; geometries in, 61; God in, 185–86, 188–89, 193, 199; Heidegger in, 87–106; historical background, 143–45; the imaginary in, 117–20; infinity in, 196–200; judgment in, 137–38; Lacanian structure of desire in, 70–72, 81, 82; literature in, 179–80; lumpenproletariat in, 168–70; magical realism in, 178; masculinity in, 119–20, 136; master-signifier in, 111–16; materialism in, xvii; mathematics in, 50; misogyny in, 167; myth of Sisyphus and, 206–8; naturalistic causality in, 182–85, 191; necessity in, 193–95; negation in, 100–101, 103; neoliberalism in, 71– 74, 82, 94, 107–41, 186; the One in, 186; ontology in, 152–56, 215–16; political change in, 177; political real in, xv; psychosis in, 125–30, 137; reader response and, 149–50; reality in, 137, 181–83, 195–96; reason in, 196–200; religious symbolism in, xvi; revolutionary situation in, 156–66; revolutionary subject and, 143–75; ruling class in, 113, 170–72; the sacred in, 131; science fiction elements in, xvi–xvii, 94; search for new identity in, 130–32; simulation in, 138, 146–48, 156–66, 193; social change in, 177; spectacle in, 149–50; supplemental causality in, 183; technology in, 78–79; temporal structure in, xvi; theology in, 183–84; transnational allegory as, 67–85; trauma in, 132–37;

236

Index

uncanniness in, xvi–xvii, 156–57; unificaiton of diverse components in, 155–56; universality in, 100–101; virtual reality in, xvi–xvii, 137, 138, 143–75, 179, 188; virtual theology in, 148–52; working class in, 110, 113, 115–16, 121–22, 159, 164–66, 168–70, 172; writing and, 202–6 Unamuno, Miguel de, Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, 63 the uncanny, 156 the unconscious, 215 United States, 71; bombing of Cambodia, 24; capitalism and, 38; Communist Party in, 109– 10; Mexico and, 47, 122–23; neoliberalism in, 109, 122–23; as spectacle, 194; supplemental causality and, 146, 155, 163, 164; violence against women in, 157–58; work in, 110 universality, 100–101 unlikeness, 113 Valdes, Marcela, 145 Valenzuela, Victor, 145 Van Gend & Loos v. Netherlands Inland Revenue Administration, xv, 30–31, 33, 36, 44, 52 Varela, Francisco, 61 Vargas Llosa, Mario, Conversación el la catedral, 11 Varlamov, Leonid, Moscow Strikes Back, 12 Vauchez, Antoine, 31–32 Vemala, Prasad, 157–58 Vigo, Julian, 84n15 Vinge, Vernor, 60 violence against women, 132, 145, 157– 58, 213n43. See also femicides Virgin of Guadalupe, 132 virtuality, 49, 153; definition of, 60–61, 146

virtual reality, xvii, 150, 205, 211; in Amulet, xvi, 147; revolutionary subject and, 143–75; in 2666, 137, 138, 143–75, 179, 188. See also computer simulation virtual theology, programming errors and, 148–52 visceral realism, 44, 46–47 Volksgemeinschaft, 103 Volpi, Jorge, 37 Voltaire, 76, 112; Candide, 77, 95 Wagner, Richard, 180 Weeks, John, 74 Welles, Orson, The Stranger, 11–12 Western philosophy, 95 Wimmer, Natasha, 104–5n6, 105n12 women, perspective of, 45–46 work: freedom and, 36, 37; as signifying process, 34–35; in the United States, 110 working class, 114, 155, 157–58; African American, 112; death drive and, 164–66; in Spain, 53; in 2666, 109, 110, 113, 115–16, 121–22, 159, 164–66, 168–70, 172 world, 77, 78 World War II, xvi, xvii, 7, 16, 68, 155, 188, 200–201 writing, 202–6 xenophobia, 82 Yeltsin, Boris, 103 Zavala, Oswaldo, 80, 94, 105n7, 167, 172 Zeus, 178, 207 Žižek, Slavoj, 4–5, 7–8, 10, 15, 33, 35–37, 54, 164–65, 195 zoetropes, 135 Zupančič, Alenka, 34 Zurita, Raúl, 7

About the Author

Adolfo Cacheiro is a professor of Spanish at Wayne State College. He is the author of Reinaldo Arenas: Una apreciación política (Lanham: International Scholars, 2000) and articles on Latin American literature published in journals such as Confluencia, L’Érudit franco-espagnol, Hispania, and Revista de estudios hispánicos.

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