Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.Reading this Bolano book feels like being dipped in a vat of particularly sticky, particularly unhealthy, foul-smelling goo that somehow seeps into your skin and makes you feel like garbage. And yet it is a good book. This feeling I have felt with other South American authors. I think that 2666 will be the end of my South American kick, at least for a while. From Garcia-Marquez to Borges to Allende to Bolano, with several others in between, I have found these Spanish-writing authors to be good, but very dark and sticky, like molasses. I am not sure what has driven so many of them to dirty their hands like they do, but it seems to be a trend. I think thus far, Borges was my favorite.
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. 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.
Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. Nothing, I mean to say, that his wife, at a given moment, might recognize. He writes like someone taking dictation. His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!
When you know something, you know it, and when you don’t, you’d better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.
Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? He asked himself.
Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.
I don’t have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don’t have much time, I have to breathe, eat, drink, sleep. I don’t have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don’t have much time, I’m busy living. I don’t have much time, I’m busy dying. As you can imagine, there were no more questions.
It was a golden age for dentists in America. Black folks, of course, were always smiling. White folks smiled. Asian folks. Hispanic folks. Now, as we know, our worst enemy might be hiding behind a smile. Or to put it another way, we don’t trust anybody, least of all the people who smile, since we know they want something from us. Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they’re good people, that they’d never hurt a fly? No again. The truth is they don’t’ want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they ask for in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that’s all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshiped.
Standing where we are, we look. We see from our eyes, we see a world spinning around us, almost incomprehensible. Although, we feel comprehension. We recognize, as if dimly in the dust or fog, things we have felt in ourselves. But what is it to truly see from another's eyes? It is rare, that much is sure.
Bolano lets us do this rare thing. From the protagonist's eyes, you think you know a character. You think this man has these motives, these thoughts, does these things, he is known by this name, but the truth is there is no such man, rather there is an interaction, a relation.
In storytelling, all the faces of characters are interactions, or you might call them relations. Bolano had a character named Archimboldi. He is a writer. But there never is any Archimboldi. There are Amalfitano-Archimboldi and Haas-Archimboldi and Bubis-Archimboldi. The story goes and we meet one of these relations, but later we meet another, and even though half or some portion (not all relations are birelational) of the relation is the same, it really is nothing at all like the other relation. And it is the experience of meeting these many and varied relations that allows our minds to slip out of the cages that so commonly hold them and run about in a world where glimpses through other people's eyes are possible. It takes five novels slowly dancing about some invisible date to even bring this thought up close to the surface of the water.
I wanted to apply this sort of thought to life, to say that we don't exist as individuals but as relations, but that isn't always true. I think in many cases we mostly exist as relation, but there are times when perhaps we truly are individuals. In writing however, because of the added dynamic of the reader, no character is ever anything but a relation. Perhaps, even, that is the definition of a character, a relationship between the mind of the reader and the words of the page. You could almost believe that a character is not the same character when we are looking at different relations of that character.
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