“No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them”: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is the Stuff of Nightmares

As I make my way through Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, I come to a striking realization: this is a book about the ends of worlds.

            Not the end of the world, which is far too… Hollywood.  But the ends of worlds, the systemic cancelling of perspectives.  Lives burn out in surreal hallucinations, often delivered in lengthy, detailed dream sequences: swimming pools that descend to Tartarus, glowing forests, metallic oceans out of which vague statues grow.  The novel’s first section is a fever dream, structured around the intellectual and erotic pursuits of four Germanist literary critics.  As the section winds on, it becomes clear that the critics not only seek knowledge pertaining to the identity and whereabouts of the mysterious contemporary German writer, Benno von Archimboldi; they seek knowledge about the dread that rises from the fissures in the earth.  They impose meaning on the miraculous, subject the threshing of life to the vagaries of narrative interpretation.  In short, they intuit the sacred—or perhaps profane—conspiracy from the workings of the cosmos.

            All this makes 2666 sound like a bleak vision of total death, but it’s also a very funny book.  For instance, take the following ramble delivered by the Mexican professor Amalfitano, whom the protagonists visit in their search for Archimboldi:

An intellectual can work at the university [of Santa Teresa], or, better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better.

Academics enjoy no immunity in Bolaño’s work, and 2666 is relentless in its often sarcastic, sometimes incriminating depictions of the modern literary intelligentsia.  These are not heroes to be emulated but selfish and self-absorbed critics, paranoid interpreters whose confirmation biases rule their conclusions.  They aren’t the sages we so often imagine established intellectuals to be, but fools.  The metaphor of the ivory tower looms large in the novel, although largely unspoken; instead its presence is implicit, manifest in the critics’ interactions with non-academics, including their violent encounter with a taxi driver.

            I haven’t finished the novel yet; but already halfway through it, I feel compelled to write something about it.  Bolaño’s final work, 2666 was published posthumously.  No one knows why it’s titled 2666.  If you think you hear an apocalyptic ring to that number, you’re not alone; in a review for the New York Times, Larry Rohter notes “oblique references in his writing indicating that Bolaño thought of that year as a sort of apocalypse.”  The number never appears in the novel itself, but that doesn’t change the fact that the text seems pregnant with revelatory meaning, teasing the thrilling edges of biblical wisdom without delivering.  The novel’s many plots revolve around the horrific, possibly systematic killings of women in the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa—a feature that Bolaño adapted from the ongoing and unsolved real-life murders in Ciudad Juárez.  It’s clear that the violent crimes in Central America are central to the novel as a whole, although their warp and weft aren't yet clear: “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”  The text doesn’t specify who speaks these lines; the character who hears them, Oscar Fate, is unable to tell from whom they come.  The uncertainty drives the surrealism at the heart of the novel, pulling readers into the whispering insanity—which might be pure, unadulterated rationality—that emanates from the pages.

            Some readers might raise an eyebrow at the explicit misogyny exhibited by the novel’s predominantly male characters.  I certainly did.  2666’s men are confused by women, distrustful of them, aggravated by them, and occasionally violent toward them.  If the backdrop of femicides in Santa Teresa isn’t enough to set your teeth on edge (although it should be), the presentation of the primary female characters—always refracted through the eyes of the men around them—ought to be enough to make you think.  I’m always hesitant to salvage books that I like from the ubiquitous rationalization of reflexivity: It knows it’s being misogynist, It’s the characters who are misogynist—not the author, etc.  In the case of 2666, I’m comfortable not defending it and letting others come to their own conclusions; and I’m happy to have that discussion at another time.  For now, all I’ll say is that the novel’s misogyny, whether intentional or accidental, hews appropriately close to the depravity that runs throughout the book.  By turns funny and horrifying, 2666 is a mysterious vision of something incomprehensible, and that just happens to be one of my favorite kinds of narratives.

            At the risk of giving away anything more, I’ll leave you with a brief excerpt—the closing lines of a dream sequence, experienced by one of the literary critics in the novel’s first section.  As he and his colleagues circle the absent center that is Benno von Archimboldi, they begin to suffer strange and disturbing visions, usually at night, such as the following oneiric manifestation:

And then he spied a tremor in the sea, as if the water were sweating too, or as if it were about to boil.  A barely perceptible simmer that spilled into ripples, building into waves that came to die on the beach.  And then Pelletier felt dizzy and a hum of bees came from outside.  And when the hum faded, a silence that was even worse fell over the house and everywhere around.  And Pelletier shouted Norton’s name and called to her, but no one answered his calls, as if the silence had swallowed up his cries for help.  And then Pelletier began to weep and he watched as what was left of a statue emerged from the bottom of the metallic sea.  A formless chunk of stone, gigantic, eroded by time and water, though a hand, a wrist, part of a forearm could still be made out with total clarity.  And this statue came out of the sea and rose above the beach and it was horrific and at the same time very beautiful.

The ruins of a past civilization?  Premonitions of a climatically changed future?  Perhaps both—after all, dreams can have multiple meanings.  Maybe by the end, Bolaño will give us the holiest of holies, open the seventh seal, as it were… but I doubt it.  In 2666, Bolaño lets his dreams speak for themselves.