Anti-Climacus

The Part About 'The Part About Archimboldi':

I've been re-reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666 recently, for at least three reasons. First, it's an excellent novel in my preferred style, which is to say long and complex. Though I have a general belief that it takes at least two readings to begin understanding any text, it's especially true in this case: a first reading is so often dedicated to sorting out what, exactly, is going on, that finer points and subtleties can be lost--subtleties being so much easier to lose over 900 pages. Second, I am relatively certain there's a paper/article waiting to be written about it. My first belief--that despite portraying Ciudad Juarez/Santa Teresa as a Moloch of globalization, Bolaño is cosmopolitan and therefore actually somewhat pro-globalization--has some confirmation in the essays found in Between Parentheses, but I'm concerned that this take, like the pure anti-globalization take, is too simple and reductive.

Third, I wonder whether it might be worth teaching in a politics-and-literature type of course. By Night in Chile is the more obvious choice from Bolaño, as it's shorter and makes its main point in a startling, hard-to-miss manner. The flip side of those advantages is the concern that there's not that much more to grasp about the novella: once you get its point and have out an argument about whether the point is correct or not, there's not much left to discuss. Better something more ambiguous that might permit of more, and more complicated, readings.

Thus 2666. It has the novel-wide joke of Archimboldi and his critics: when the reader gets to the final section on Archimboldi, it becomes obvious how little his critics--academic interlocutors who argue fiercely for and against particular interpretations and understandings of his work--understand the author they have read so long and so lovingly. That's a proper cautionary note for any political theorist, or anyone else in the humanities: they spend so long reading themselves back into the works they love that they fail to notice they've stopped talking about the books at all. Then there's The Part About the Crimes, which one could very easily assign along with some literature about moral responsibility--say Norm Geras' "The Contract of Mutual Indifference" and Richard Rorty's Amnesty Lecture on human rights--to demonstrate how easy it is to become detached from and indifferent to human suffering even when presented in quite graphic terms.

The Part About Archimboldi was of interest to me this time around because a large portion of his story involves his time as a German soldier during World War II. This is the sort of thing Bolaño rarely lets pass without comment, but my memory was that he did not comment. The question was then: what's missing? Is it a cleverly concealed satire? A comment on art's relation to politics? (which it better not be because that would require Bolaño changing his mind)

I had forgotten, after my first reading, a key scene about halfway through, when Archimboldi is in a prison camp after the war is ended, and hears an extended monologue from a man who is attempting to hide his identity because he was responsible for the murder of about 500 Jews near the end of the war. Spoiler alert, but if you've made it this far, you're probably interested: Archimboldi ends up strangling the man to death later that night, which is reported in the book only after the man is found the next day, and which Archimboldi confesses to 30 or so pages later, to his wife, as part of an admission that he only ever killed one man.

For anyone else, this would unambiguously make Archimboldi one of the good guys: killed a man who killed Jews, came to see the deep corruption in Germany, never killed anyone else. In this case, though, something is still missing. Archimboldi is portrayed throughout his section as something of a moral autistic: exactly four characters ever receive more than a couple pages of attention. His war experience is written as half War and Peace meets The Charterhouse of Parma and half The Thin Red Line--some of it is confusing, and in parts Archimboldi seems concerned with anything in the world other than war. But there are no complicated reflections on the nature of being a German soldier, either on Archimboldi's part or Bolaño's: nothing on why he's in Poland, then in France, and then again on the Russian border; no reaction when passing mention is made of the extermination of Jews. Only in defeat, and only when personally confronted with someone trying to justify their unjustifiable action, does Archimboldi act or form an opinion.

In this respect I think of the end of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, in which he prints some of the letters he received after writing Survival in Auschwitz and his responses. Many of the letters (from Germans) make claim to some moral outrage at what happened, claim ignorance, etc etc. Levi has no patience for it, and diagnoses something morally troublesome in the behavior of people who could have done something but did not, and now, when it is safe, feel guilt or shame or just want to forget the whole thing. And so I'd like the broach the possibility that Archimboldi is a stand-in for postwar Germany, the generation that would rather forget (and so also a stand-in for Latin American literature, which attempts to scrub away both its own difficult political histories and the complicated politics of its great authors); and his moral autism is a much sharper reminder than By Night in Chile that terrible people can produce great works of art, and valorizing from the art to the man is a mistake.