CONNECTING THE DOTS: Evil as an intertextual communicator in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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Örebro University School of Humanities,

Education and Social Sciences May 22 of 2018

CONNECTING THE DOTS:

Evil as an intertextual communicator in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

MA Thesis Journalism Connected Supervisor: Johan Nilsson Author: Mariano Ribeiro

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Abstract

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous book 2666 is often considered his masterpiece. As it was a race against his own death, Bolaño won it while leaving a dominant statement behind, a supreme landmark of our new post-national world, where everything seems entwined (Lethem, 2008). In this five-part narrative, intertextuality plays a crucial role. The common link between all these stories is a series of murders in a Mexican city. The narrative of 2666 happens in around ten countries, and their characters are from a dozen more, with every story being somewhat tangled into a reality where violence is abundant. The references to the natural essence of evil set the atmosphere. In 2666, we have the opportunity to explore the condition of evil in a globalized world (Macaya, 2009). The aim of this dissertation is to better understand how the underlying ideologies of globalization and capitalism unify the different parts of the novel, establishing a dialogue between them, while creating a comment on our over connected postcolonial world.

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To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts.

That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. —Sontag, Susan Sontag Finds Romance

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Introduction

I first started reading Roberto Bolaño more than ten years after his death. His fiction and poetry became a sort of holy grail for me, as it was hard at the time to find translations, but nevertheless I search for them and by the time of these writings I have read most of his oeuvre. After his work, my reading concentrated in what critics and reviewers had to say about him, and it was in these appreciations that I found odd the amount of studies regarding violence, horror, evil, even Apocalypse (Raposo, 2016) in his fiction, mainly after his

posthumous novel 2666 (2004) (which its own title already carries a wicked meaning), with a kind of content that gives the reader quite a lot to digest about the current state of our

globalized world.

The importance of studying the work of Bolaño lays not only in its content as an artistic object, but also in the images it builds for us to see, working as a comment on several ideologies concerning the globalized society of the late 20th century and early 21st century. Since the dawn of humanity art has been the tool to express all the parts of the human experience, from its social and political components to psychological and emotional

sensations. Alongside with science, art and culture have been the engines of our civilization carrying us forward, and it is still through culture that we can grasp and better understand some seemingly undecipherable nuances of our social and human behaviour. Could we possibly quantify the impact of Crime and Punishment in the idiosyncrasies of the Europe of the 19th century? Haven’t we learned from Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopian possibilities? As a journalism and communication student I found the opportunity to do this research on Bolaño interesting and important mainly for two reasons. The first one was of personal interest, out of curiosity for reading closely and discovering meaning on the text, the second one was in regard of media and communication, as I couldn’t help but notice the globalized nature of this novel. In our current world and ages, journalists are oftentimes found writing about realities that are not their own, cultures that are as strange to them as the language in which they are practiced. The narrative of 2666 happens in around ten countries, and their characters are from a dozen more. Every story is somewhat tangled into a reality where it does not belong. In this particular novel, Evil is the outcome of a globalized postcolonial world (Macaya, 2009). Bolaño’s book offers us a chance to better understand the corrosiveness of an over-entwined society, sentenced by its capitalist consumptions.

As a reader, the pleasure of reading Bolaño resides in the “ad infinitum multiplication” of connecting dots between narratives, references and objects (Espinosa, 2006, p. 72), a connectivity so extensive that becomes almost absurd. Each element in the story carries the

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potentiality to burst at any given point, of taking the flow of the storyline to a place unknown. The uncertainty of the storyline, that can suddenly diverge and digress, is what makes it so convincing (Raposo, 2016, p. 79).

At first glance, I would also argue that the connectivity is produced by a sense of emerging fear. A sense of rising horror, as Patricia Espinosa would put it in her essay from 2006. The idea of Evil in literature as a literary device has been around now for well more than a hundred years, and the presence of Evil in literature itself exists since the dawn of times, when literature was an oral tradition (Bataille, 2012). Theorists like Walter Benjamin (1919), George Bataille (1957) and Gilles Deleuze (1975) have explored this concept and developed some ideas that I will later apply to Bolaño’s 2666.

Thus, the aim of this dissertation is to propose a reflection on the novel, in an attempt to see how this book mirrors our very own society of the 21st century. Roberto Bolaño’s take on this matter, both as an immigrant and as a world traveller, are of great importance, as they include in the conversation the voice of Latin America, a continent oftentimes reduced to its own stereotypes (Lethem, 2008). Furthermore, this theoretical work will approach the idea of Evil in the novel, as it works as the element that ties together the five different parts of the book, and in a way, compresses the entirety of the 20th century into this particular narrative.

Five different parts, and not chapters, that can be read autonomously, in a more fragmented way, or as interconnected pieces of a single work. Each and every part takes the reader to a Mexican city called Santa Teresa, near the border with the United States in the Sonora desert, where a series of feminicides have occurred and where a lost writer seems to have disappeared. In between these two situations, there are several subplots that allude to World War II, pogroms, the Spanish invasion of South America and other circumstances that are clearly characterized by its violence. Genocide, xenophobia and sexual violence set a sombre tone that spreads across the novel, as if the author could only portray our modern world as a permanent walk on the edge of an abyss, showing the reader the appalling reality we face but without letting him or her fall down. The procedures that led to this feeling are present in every part of the novel, creating a sense of cohesion across it. An intertextual dialogue that ties every section with each other.

To analyse the intertextuality of Evil across 2666, and given that the book has numerous examples, I will choose from three different sections, after presenting a brief summary. These sections will be the very first line (the epigraph that opens the book), a conversation between Mexican police officers in “The Part About the Crimes”, and Hans Reiter’s father experience in World War I, in “The Part About Archimboldi”.

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I would like to end this introduction and start the dissertation itself saying that

pointing out and analysing atrocities or evil scenes in 2666 does not aim to characterize them as literary devices, even though they are, I would rather urge the reader to consider them as representations and alternatives to deal with a forthcoming world, where everything is tied and inter-connected but human nature is somehow weakened or at least overlooked by a numbed population. It is expected to find in this research, not only the evident connections in the book to evil, but positively a way to comprehend a world where hate, fear and evil grow each and every day. As said in the beginning of this introduction, art and culture have always been tools used to express the upmost subtle mechanisms of society. Hopefully, in the engine 2666, we might find the cranks and flywheels that recreate human condition so well.

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Literature Review

I decided to divide the theoretical framework of this research in the three parts that structured my search of literature. The first one will be evidently the author, as I needed to know what the specialists say about Bolaño’s oeuvre and his possible relation to the concept of Evil. The second part consists in my research on the term Evil and its link to literature: how does it work, why is it there, what is its purpose. Finally, before the methodology, I included a summary of 2666 which demonstrates part of its intertexuality. Additionally, a research done on the novel that might work as a foundation to find the link between Evil and 2666 was included.

The Author

According to Jonathan Lethem in his review of 2666 for the New York Times (2008), the individual elements of 2666 can be categorised in a fairly easy way. The composite result of the work, however, the element that ties together all its loosen parts, remains obscurely implicit, conveying a certain strength to the story that would not be possible with other, perhaps more direct, strategies. Lethem argues that a novel with the characteristics of 2666 works as a “preserving machine”, encapsulating this whole world where different characters following different storylines are somehow entangled in their own existence, “hidden behind and enshrined within them.”

The notion of entwined realities is somehow present in Bolaño’s own life. Born in Chile in 1953, he lived in Mexico, France and Spain before dying from liver disease in 2003. The last years of his life were spent “in a burst of invention” considered now legendary in contemporary fiction, writing with the urgency of a dying man a novel that would rapidly ascend into a landmark of literature in Spanish language (Lethem, 2008).

His close relation to death is perhaps a reason for the gloominess of 2666, but so is the ironic loss of hope in a fair world, a world where cause and effect could be related, but are not. Deckard (2012) argues that this novel reformulates the aesthetics of realism, as it questions the hermetic nature of literature in a world where globalization keeps pushing us and our problems together. Globalization, therefore, instead of moving society forward, exposes our most barbaric realities, and literature, instead of playing a redemptive role, contributes to the evil state of our contemporary society (López-Vicuña, 2009). “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” Walter

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Benjamin said, almost a hundred years ago (1919). According to Espinosa (2016), in a world where civilization and barbarism are so close together, the search for a mirror to reflect the image of humanity becomes urgent. To Bolaño and Benjamin, that mirror can be Literature. Walter Benjamin’s idea about civilization and barbarism strongly resonates in this novel. Barbarism not only as a political stance but as a profound tendency marked across all the Western civilization. What Bolaño writes about is in the ascent of the insidious presence of Evil in our social relations, in our culture, in human behaviour (López-Vicuña, 2009).

As for the will of the author, in a concluding way, we can argue that disease and the fear of a new world order impossible to grasp by an exhausted literature are the catalysts for this novel (Raposo, 2016).

Literature and Evil

In his collection of essays from 1957 about the relation of Evil with Literature, Georges Bataille defends that Literature is not innocent, as it uses its complicity with the knowledge of Evil in order to communicate in its utmost intensity. Bataille says that

Literature is communication (2012, p. 8), and as communication it requires loyalty, or at least a moral stance that faces the knowledge of Evil, a reaction to the action that is all the foul aspects of human nature. This sort of Saussurean binary opposition will help us determine what we consider “Evil”, at least for the purpose of this research focused on Bolaño’s work. Thus, we shall define Evil as the axiological opposition to Good, therefore something morally wicked when juxtaposed to our social conventions of nobility.

The idea of López-Vicuña (2009) and Raposo (2016) about a terrifying new world order full of horrors not yet deciphered by literature is best explained in The Transparency of Evil (2009) by Jean Baudrillard, a collection of essays on the extreme phenomena of our present-day society. Baudrillard begins to describe the present state of affairs as a moment where modernity exploded in every conceivable sphere. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of art and criticism have been accomplished. Revolution has happened and

humanity is left with a question: what to do now? The proposition is simple, once every goal has been accomplished we are left with a principle of uncertainty. This uncertainty is battled with simulations, redundant recreations of what has already happened. Everything now will tend to “disappear through proliferation (…) by becoming saturated” and by dispersing its value, in a sort of “inescapable indifference” (2009, p.4). The mortality of ideas and ideals comes as a result of its fractal dispersion.

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Although Baudrillard attacks what he considers to be the result of losing meaning due to social simulations of the past, and therefore the concept of Evil inevitably disappears into several forms: terrorism, racism, violence, etc., the idea of a complex world saturated by recreations is not far from what Bolaño presents in 2666.

With these two ideas in mind, the first one being that in order to communicate with intensity and to portray an image of reality, Evil is needed in Literature, and the second one that we live in a fragmentised world condemned to repeat itself, we can begin to close-read Bolaño’s 2666, understanding that reading this novel is reading horror, violence and death, but as said before, these themes will only work because they are juxtaposed to humour, to justice, to life (Espinosa, 2006). This binary opposition throughout 2666 will work as a text organiser (Raposo, 2016), and just as Georges Batailles wrote in 1957 about Kafka, Emily Brontë or Baudelaire, what turns this book into great fiction will be its complicity with Evil.

2666

Roberto Bolaño’s last novel consists in five different parts that can be read

independently, as separate volumes or as interconnected, linear groups. Every part mentions, even if slightly, the bordering Mexican city of Santa Teresa, where multiple women have been murdered. Other themes are the disappearance of a writer, the nature of dreams and Evil itself (Macaya, 2009). According to Patricia Espinosa (2006, p. 76-78), in 2666 the author plays with “the metaphysical tradition of the ungraspable”, the secret of the act of writing and with our almost desperate need for references.

The novel 2666 originally has more than 1200 pages. In its English translation, this number is shortened to 900, but it is nevertheless a major work. Its structure is divided into five different parts. “The Part About the Critics” is the first one, and it tells the story of four literary critics specialized in the writer Benno von Archimboldi. After hearing rumours of his possible location, three of them travel to Santa Teresa searching for Archimboldi. Once there, they become aware of the assassinations of hundreds of women in the region. “The Part About Amalfitano” is about a quite nostalgic Philosophy teacher based recently in Santa Teresa, who follows the murders of women in the city and is afraid of what might happen to her daughter Rosa. “The Part About Fate” narrates the trip of a journalist to Santa Teresa to write about a boxing fight, but, when he finds out about the feminicides, he decides to investigate the crimes. “The Part About the Crimes”, the fourth and lengthiest part of the novel, works as a forensic log of all the women murdered in Santa Teresa. Finally, “The Part

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About Archimboldi” tells us the story of Hans Reiter, a Second World War German soldier who will later become Benno von Archimboldi, a somewhat obscure writer, who travels late in his life to Santa Teresa to help his nephew, who is in jail as a suspect of the series of feminicides in town (Bolaño, 2004).

As one can see in this brief summary, violence spreads around the novel as a disease. Disease here is the right term, as Baudrillard would put it about our current times. Not only in the intense and vivid description of the murders of “The Part About the Crimes”, but also the depiction of the Jewish genocide, of the atrocities of war, of the Latin-American dictatorial regimes, of the clueless Eurocentric beliefs of the critics. Violence adapts into several shapes throughout the book, with the purpose of echoing a rising fear, a sense of Evil that culminates in the streets of Santa Teresa (Raposo, 2016).

Besides violence/fear, there is an obscure and implicit element, that according to journalist Jonatham Lethem (2008) is what conveys the strength that this story possesses. This idea of occultism as a way to create meaning is similar to Walter Benjamin’s notion of

enigma. In a 1920 essay about Mystery and Enigma, Benjamin argues that an enigma is born when an intention is insistently oriented toward the sphere of the symbolic-significant. The mystery of a symbol is strengthened by the fact that it will never find a resolution. Therefore, the relation of enigma-resolution is not different than the one of signified and signifier. It is possible that Bolaño’s work finds its vigour in this relation. Disease as a synonym of fear, and fear as a synonym of enigma. It seems to be around the sphere of the unresolved, or at least of the unknown, that this novels orbits.

Finally, I would like to quote the author himself, Roberto Bolaño, in an essay called Literature + Illness = Illness, where he reflects about his last days on earth and the role of literature for humanity. There is a sentence that resembles the feeling of 2666, of

understanding fear in order to see the beauty of life, of immersing oneself in evil/disease in order to see the perks of being alive:

"While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where we can find the cure." (Bolaño, 2010)

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Methodology

As it was mentioned above, for the dissertation, the best method to approach the research question will be a close reading of the novel in order to find thematic examples of Evil and how all these parts intercommunicate with each other.

A semiotic analysis of signs will be the first step to be presented, as examples to see the symbolic quality of Evil as well as the meaning and importance of recurrent images across 2666. The narrative construction of the novel will also be analysed according to the formalist concepts in an attempt to understand how the text is organised differently from plot and storyline.

Inspired by the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis, a breakdown of the linguistic mechanisms that transport the reader to the semantic world of Evil across the novel will follow, analysing the social, political and ethical views portrayed through the characters and through the narration, aiming to find those that compromise the notion of Good and endorse somehow Evil. Politics and ethics in 2666 (and possibly in the entirety of Bolaño’s oeuvre) are oftentimes expressed through the opinion of the narrator (Raposo, 2016). In 2666, even though the narrator does not send a determined message as a moral path to follow, he still comments on the actions of the characters, judging them with a somewhat ironic tone, through the rhythm of the narration, the mentioned details or the circumstances he chooses to analyse (Globalization, Sexism, War, Capitalism) (Muniz, 2009).

There are plenty critical analyses to 2666 and it won’t be difficult to understand where the specialists stand on that in order to establish the foundations of my research. Perhaps the most difficult part will rely in applying the concepts of Bataille and Baudrillard to this particular novel, explaining with strong references how Evil can work as an

intercommunicator in this work. Another limitation of this research can be the qualitative nature of the investigation, as a confirmation bias toward the hypothesis of Evil being the bonding element across the different parts of this work might cloud other possible alternatives that are not immediately detectable. Nevertheless, in order to shed some light in this matter, a comprehensive set of references and examples from the novel is, of course, needed.

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Analysis

Social and historical context of 2666

A puzzle piece by itself has no proper meaning. The drawings in it carry no sense, the shape is strange and it has apparently no purpose. As an object, a puzzle piece has no obvious reason to exist. However, when confronted against other puzzle pieces, when confronted with the empty space that forms the exact same shape of it, the piece gains all its meaning. I believe that this is the best way to approach the famously fragmented work of Roberto Bolaño, especially 2666. Known for its multiple storylines and innumerous plots and subplots, dispersed in more than a thousand pages, 2666 narrates five different stories that will eventually culminate in the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa:

1) Four expert literary critics looking for the author Benno von Arcimboldi in the first section.

2) A Chilean teacher who has recently moved to Santa Teresa in the second section.

3) An African-American journalist sent to Mexico to cover a boxing story in the third section.

4) The description of a series of murders in Santa Teresa in the fourth section. 5) The life of Benno von Archimboldi, mainly as a World War II soldier and

then as an author, in the fifth and final section.

As mentioned before, this theoretical work aims to weight the impact of Evil in the pages of 2666, as an intertextual connector in the novel and as a portrait of a fundamental category in the coexistence of human beings in our time and ages. Therefore, before any analysis to the discourse of the work and its phenomenological characteristics, I believe to be crucial to understand where 2666 stands as an artistic and social object, that is, what is the context behind the book. According to Lainck (2014, p. 15), besides being a literary creation, 2666 is an appreciation of the historical context and possibly a theoretical approach towards the horrors of the 20th century, aspiring to give a vision of our condition in the new

millennium. In the work of Bolaño we can observe a parallelism between the New World and the Old European World, giving a thoughtful importance to the delayed horrors deriving from the Occident and having its first expressions in the Americas in the last couple of centuries

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(Lainck, 2014). It is important to mention that the postcolonial cultural and political elites of Latin America aspired to the European tradition, aiming to close the gap between the Creole burgeoeisie and the higher classes of the old continent. It is not coincidental the parallelism in the novel between the Jewish genocide of World War II and the feminicides in Santa Teresa, it works in the novel as an opportunity for the author to portray the quasi-feudal structures of Mexico mixed with the aggressive neoliberal capitalism of North America, that are slowly destroying the city before the numbed citizens that cannot or do not know how to act. (Raposo, 2016, p. 30)

After Auschwitz, probably the clearest example of industrial dehumanization of the human being, as Primo Levi would put it in If This is a Man (1959), the possibility of an ethical monstrosity amidst a quiet or indifferent population is not impossible. It is actually quite possible. The murders in the fictional city of Santa Teresa (that somewhat resemble the feminicides of the actual city Juarez) are part of the unanimous victims of the past history. The crimes, that seem to have no single responsible and are never resolved, appear as a sort of symptom of a disease, as a collateral damage of a socio-economic practice in an unsustainable system. Bolaño’s take, in fiction, on this kind of Evil, an Evil with no apparent reason or intention, resembles what one would naïvely call “real life”, a systemic and anonymous Evil that acts on the masses, not being registered under the economic reports of financial growth, but being nevertheless latent on the sexist, violent and xenophobic behaviour of society. What is then the reason for this obsession with an anonymous form of Evil?

As mentioned in the Literature Review, Walter Benjamin (1919) has argued and presented useful explanations between Civilization and Barbarism. The truth is that inhuman experiences, such as war, disease or plain death are closely related to high art, to developing societies and intellectual evolution in social and natural sciences. We could use as examples the bloody reign of the Borgia family during the flourishing Renaissance or the Modern expressions of Art during the World War I. Bolaño examines this close relation between Art and Evil in our current times, as it is the element that ties together our history, no matter how abject or atrocious it could have been. (López-Vicuña 2009)

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Summary of 2666

1) The Part About the Critics

“The Part About the Critics” comprises a deceptively humorous immersion to what will eventually become the core of the book. Four literary critics from different parts of Europe discover independently the work of a mysterious German writer that signs with the pseudonym “Benno von Archimboldi”. They are pulled towards the oeuvre of this author but their search for him will eventually become circular, or at least self-referential, as it ends up revealing more about them than about Archimboldi’s work. A foreboding sense haunts these 159 pages, with at first seemingly random references to violence, slowly unravelling to what waits for these four critics in the city of Santa Teresa. We could argue that the leitmotiv of this part discusses the problem of literary criticism, but researchers such as Lainck (2014 p.38) or Raposo (2016, p.117) say that this is simply an ironically pompous prelude to the carnage that awaits at the core of the story, a sort of way to expose the hollowness of the academic activity when compared to the barbarity of the “real world”. Within few pages, “The Part About the Critics” establishes a connection with a sense of Evil that will only increase

throughout the novel. Mentions to Nazi happenings, fights breaking for no apparent reason, a painter that cut his hand and hanged it on a canvas for the sake of an artwork. Violence works as a sort of first unexpected suffocation, that will augment the further through the novel the reader travels (Espinosa, 2006). All of these references are just signs of worse to come. Once the critics arrive to Santa Teresa in search of

Archimboldi, they will fight their worst inner nightmares, a big farce that descends into chaos and compromises their own beliefs and sense of purpose, ultimately leaving them helpless at the pool of the resort where they spend their nights, amidst a barbaric city that surrounds them.

2) The Part About Amalfitano

Amalfitano is a Chilean teacher who regrettably moved to Santa Teresa with his teen daughter. This character works as a link between the first two parts of the novel, as he introduces the critics to the city. Amalfitano is characterized as being extremely neurotic and worried about the safety of his daughter Rosa amidst the murders in town. The reader later finds out that Amalfitano and Rosa were left by her mother,

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Lola, as she disappeared in order to meet an obscure poet in an asylum in Spain. Amalfitano’s behaviour increasingly becomes psychotic and his actions are portrayed around this part as making so sense whatsoever. Madness is a key element in this section, as every member of Amalfitano’s family seems to suffer some sort of disorder.

3) The Part About Fate

This section opens, similarly to the one of Amalfitano, with a series of questions imposed by the main character. Beginning with a nightmare where the character is surrounded by pain and ghosts from his past. This part is a tale about an African American activist journalist, Oscar Fate, who is sent to Santa Teresa to write about an uninteresting boxing match. Discrimination and racial persecution are the topics to where this part orbits. Conflict between social classes, between black, white, and indigenous communities, communists, jihadists, anti-Semite, Ku Klux Klan and Black Panthers emerge throughout the pages of the third part. Oscar Fate gradually arises as a sort of prophet of the gloom, seeing Evil in first hand, although he does not realise it. After the critics disappear in their own irrelevance and Amalfitano is consumed by his madness, Fate emerges as the first character to actually face the facts of the city. A character that instead of descending in a spiral of abstraction and triviality ascends to the world of the concrete: the murders of Santa Teresa. The part about Fate is the first moment in the novel were the murders cease to be peripheral and mysterious

happenings and become the centre of the narrative that will eventually lodge the following part. The third section ends with a prisoner (accused of the feminicides) coming down the hall singing a German folksong, taking the reader back to Archimboldi.

4) The Part About the Crimes

The structure of this part encourages the reader to try and solve the mystery of the murders in Santa Teresa, only to understand later on that it is an impossible task to achieve. The narrative structure of this part becomes clear very early on: a corpse, a forensic description, information about the victim, case unsolved. The emotional detachment from the narration, the disregard before the destruction, becomes

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depicted in approximately 300 pages). Several parallel and minor stories work as the scenery behind all these murders that are slowly being added to the total amount, without a linear plot to unify them, leaving the reader with the question: what is the purpose behind this unacceptable dose of brutality?

5) The Part About Archimboldi

The title of this part works as a promise, as if the narrator would finally clarify the mystery of the missing author the books opens with. The final part of 2666 is a fabulist biography of Benno von Archimboldi during his formation years and his life throughout war. The transgressive quality of the prose leaves the reader with a strong sense of irony, as the fun tale of the life of the author is surrounded by a decadent Europe affected by war. The narration follows Hans Reiter all the way from his childhood to his years as a German soldier to his considerable success as a writer with the pseudonym “Benno von Archimboldi”. In the last pages of the novel, an aged Hans Reiter discovers that his nephew is incarcerated in Santa Teresa, accused of killing several women. He then decides to travel to Mexico and help him get out of jail.

A Peak of Evil

After that brief summary, I believe it becomes evident to the reader how Evil is structurally positioned in 2666, but I will take a moment to explain what I mean with this affirmation. Throughout the book, the reader is given queues to complete his or hers assumed ignorance about the murders. It is evident that the first part focuses on a seemingly irrelevant issue (the importance of criticism in art and literature) instead of immediately referencing what will eventually be the theme of the book, nonetheless throughout the narration, some referential elements will pave the way toward the killings of Santa Teresa. If we consider the fourth part, the part of the murders, as the centre from where everything revolves, as the evil component that ends up tying everything, one could see the storyline of the five parts as an ascending and descending route, where “The Part About the Crimes” works as the peak of the novel, later descending to the biography of Archimboldi and his formation as an author. This orientation helps Bolaño establish the link between art and Evil, between this book and the

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atrocities of our contemporary world (Macaya, 2009). Evil, which is the same as saying the murders, positioned in the centre of the novel, spreads to the other sections as a disease, not only contaminating the five parts but also unifying them as a whole. I will elaborate more on that with the following examples, namely found in the epigraph and in the fourth and fifth parts, that illustrate the relation between Evil and the story of 2666.

Epigraph

“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom” — Charles Baudelaire

Retrieved from Baudelaire’s magnum opus The Flowers of Evil (1857), the poem from where 2666 epigraph comes is called “Le Voyage”, translated to English as “Travelers”. The first and most logical assumption is that this quote references an actual place, as Santa Teresa is placed in the desert of Sonora, but in the poem by Baudelaire the quote alludes from a physical place to a state of mind:

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage! The monotonous and tiny world today

Yesterday, tomorrow, always shoes us our reflections, An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

The desert is the stage where the five parts of this novel reunite, and it is mentioned right away in the epigraph. Thus, it is in the middle of this desert (the Mexican desert) that we find an oasis of horror: hundreds and hundreds of women murdered and a neutral, an almost apathetic voice that describes these murders (Lainck, 2014). In his essay Literature + Illness = Illness, Bolaño briefly discusses the quoted poem by Baudelaire, arguing that “to escape boredom, to escape a dead end, the only thing available, close to us, is horror, that means Evil. (…) An oasis will always be an oasis, especially if we are leaving a desert of boredom.” (Bolaño, 2010). Characterizing horror, hence, seems to be where this literature finds its place.

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The oasis is nothing more than a voice silently wandering through the corpses of all those women in the desert.

The boredom that surrounds this horror is nothing more than the mundane lives of those living in and coming to Santa Teresa. The author succeeds in portraying evil in an otherwise tedious landscape, juxtaposing the stillness of everything to the grotesque nature of the killings (Macaya, 2009, p. 136-137). Using the desert as a core metaphor to where he drags the peculiar horrors of all his characters is probably the greatest achievement of 2666.

The Crimes

This section is the only one in the book that alludes to evil itself in its title. Scott Esposito (n.d), in the review he made of 2666, compares “The Part About the Crimes” to Picasso’s Guernica, classifying it as a “difficult, unflinching work that breathes the black smoke of atrocity and circulates tar as lifeblood, (…) a genuinely horrible and singular take on pure evil.” But what turns the narrative so repulsive to the reader in this section is the numbingly apathetic, emotionless, almost journalistic voice that narrates the findings of the corpses. The narration never falls on the lives of these women, rather on the circumstances of their death.

Additionally, the reader witnesses the outcome of a tedious, exploited border town that has fallen victim of a murderous epidemic. A circus of secondary characters appear rambling through these pages in the shape of subplots: police officers, U.S. journalists, private

detectives, gangbangers and a mysterious German immigrant (that the reader will later find out is Hans Reiter’s nephew), overarching across this section. The stories are told somewhat chronologically, in block of texts of approximately one and a half pages in length describing specific murders that have happened in Santa Teresa. “The Part About the Crimes” strikes as a piano player constantly playing the same horrifying chord, which sound will slowly and gradually expand to the other parts.

The straight contact with the absurdity of death works as a way to explore the senseless lack of morality in the neoliberal global capitalist environment of Santa Teresa (in other words, of the Mexican border) (Raghinaru, 2016). Most of the women killed are workers from factories, or prostitutes whose clients are either the Mexican police force or tourists from the United States. Death extends to these women as a mere condition of being. Moreover, the root of these deaths stays unsolvable, as if an unavoidable death is the expected outcome for this community. I decided to take a very specific moment of “The Part About the

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Crimes”, that shows how violence against women gains an epidemic tone, as if the victims of the killings were victims of a disease, a condition without a possible response. In this excerpt, the narrator speaks about a group of police officers that tell a series of jokes about women amidst the murder crisis:

And many of the jokes were about women. (…) How many parts is a woman’s brain divided into? Pues, that depends! Depends on what, González? Depends on how hard you hit her. (…) What’s a man doing when he throws a woman out of the window? Pues, polluting the environment. And: how is a woman like a squash ball? Pues the harder you hit her, the faster she comes back (…) And: how long does it take a woman to die who’s been shot in the head? Pues, seven or eight hours, depending on how long it takes the bullet to find the brain. (…) And if someone complained to González about all the chauvinist jokes, González responded that God was the chauvinist, because he made men superior. (p. 552 – 553)

The absence of a resolution, or at least the lack of signs of progression on the murders, while the nameless and purposeless bodies keep piling up, is a clear reflection of the city of Santa Teresa and of evil as an insurgent, faceless power. The force that should protect these women is part of the problem, showing that the misogynous behaviour that killed them has contaminated the very same institutions that should protect them. Once again Evil emerges from the cracks of the ground, expanding toward the beginning and the end of the novel.

War

Nonetheless, in 2666, violence against women goes beyond the desert and the city of Santa Teresa. In the final section, there are several episodes that show how this behaviour goes beyond time and space. To illustrate, during war, Hans Reiter sees how German soldiers

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rape women, or when he and his spouse Ingeborg flee Germany, his landlord in Austria confesses to have killed his wife by pushing her on the peak of a mountain. Evil, or violence, floods from the part about the crimes into the other sections, adapting into new shapes and contexts. In “The Part About Archimboldi”, Evil is brought as war. While the tell-tale

biography of Hans Reiter is being told, showing his early years and his first steps as a soldier, a conference of horrors is being displayed simultaneously, creating a strong sense of irony, not unlike the one the reader might feel while reading about the life of the inhabitants of Santa Teresa.

Correspondingly, this state of affairs takes us to what Baudrillard described as an “inescapable indifference” (2009, p.4). Ideas, but mainly ideals, lose their intensity in a world overcharged by stimuli. Moreover, recreations of what has already been developed is what characterizes our time, masking the lack of actual progress. Evil grows as a result of the social immobilization of the last decades of western society (Baudrillard, 2009, p. 73), adapting into new several forms such as misogyny, xenophobia and war. Evil is received with inescapable indifference, almost as a collateral damage expected by every civilian. The inhabitants of Santa Teresa see murder as an inevitable or at least an expected outcome, German citizens, by the eyes of Hans Reiter (a.k.a Benno von Archimboldi), have accepted the misery of warfare as a natural state to live in. A clear illustration of this hopelessness appears on the very first page of this segment, where the narrator tells an episode of Hans Reiter’s father, an amputated war veteran, when he was hospitalized during World War I:

In the bed next to him there was a mummy. He had black eyes like two deep wells. “Do you want a smoke?” the man with one leg asked. The mummy didn’t answer. “It’s good to have a smoke,” said the man with one leg, and he lit a cigarette and tried to find the mummy’s mouth among the bandages.

The mummy shuddered. Maybe he doesn’t smoke, thought the man, and he took the cigarette away. (…) Then he put it back between the mummy’s lips, saying: smoke, smoke, forget all about it. The mummy’s eyes remained fixed on him, maybe, he thought, it’s a comrade from the battalion and he’s recognized me. But why doesn’t he say anything? Maybe he can’t talk, he thought. Suddenly, smoke began to filter out between the bandages. He’s boiling, he thought, boiling, boiling.

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Smoke came out of the mummy’s ears, his throat, his forehead, his eyes, until the man plucked the cigarette from the mummy’s lips. (…) Then he stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and fell asleep.

When he woke, the mummy was no longer there. Where’s the mummy? he asked. He died this morning, said someone from a different bed. Then he lit a cigarette and settled down to wait for breakfast. (p. 637-638)

While this episode does not show the rawness of the excerpt of the police jokes in the previous part, it certainly demonstrates the easiness of accepting suffering and an unjust death, generally understood as Evil in its highest measure, as something inevitable. Hans Reiter’s father, after learning about the passing of the soldier next to him in the hospital, quickly moves on to his daily routine, smoking and waiting to start the day.

It can be understood from this excerpt how any form of Evil, despite being so overwhelming, tends to be a stage where human nature quickly adapts. In “The Part About Archimboldi”, Bolaño uses examples from World War II to characterize Evil as a growing force, but as previously said, the centre of the story, the centre of Evil itself in the novel, are the crimes from the border city of Santa Teresa.

According to Raghinaru (2016, p.147-148), who analysed the biopolitical structures of neoliberalism in 2666, “The Part About the Crimes”, which is what I have mentioned above as the peak of Evil in the novel, deals with Law under an aggressive neoliberal capitalism. Law turns into a mean of expropriation and violence, and violence, echoing colonial

tendencies, is a tool to contain a surplus of humanity. One could argue that what Bolaño aims to recreate as the highest point of Evil, the tumour that spreads along different parts of this story (and different moments in history) as a disease, is a product of the postcolonial capitalist practices of our times. When considering this conclusion, the image of a modern globalized world where human nature is undervalued, weakened and overlooked in favour of financial

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profit, works not only as the creative device used by to author to set the story, but also as the reality we as members of a society are forced to see. Correspondingly, the different parts and subplots of the story are the over entwined world where we live, and Evil as a consuming, unsustainable and unhuman status is the system we are accepting to live with.

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CONCLUSION

In the introduction of this work, I wrote that this research aimed to comprehend how the concept of evil unified the different parts of 2666, establishing a dialogue between them while attempting at the same time to create an image of our own postcolonial society of the 21st century.

After researching on the purpose of Evil as an intertextual communicator, it can be concluded that Roberto Bolaño’s take in 2666 tries to portray a singular episode as the root of all the violence and death that eventually spreads to the other parts of the book. The murders from Santa Teresa work as a Pandora’s box that gradually floods the other sections of the novel. The sombre tone set by genocide, xenophobia and sexual violence, spread across the book, but what can be obtained from this research is the origin of that Pandora’s box. The murders of Santa Teresa are the outcome of a city chastised by the aggressive form of capitalism that characterizes the actual cities from the Mexican border.

Bolaño successfully creates the image of a modern globalized world, a world that already goes beyond nations and is set in the postcolonial principles ruled by a

financial/corporative system. Consequently, that unsustainable system is the source of a misogynist culture that undermines the value of life, and brings the notion of Evil to the story. The feminicides, the crucial and final form of Evil in 2666, are the component that tie all the subplots and all the characters of the books to the narrative, just like globalization ties every inhabitant of the world with each other.

I believe this concept to be extremely pertinent, namely for how the author excels at portraying how quickly a society adapts to Evil. For instance, if journalism aims to describe reality, in 2666 we have an opportunity to see how, despite being severely catastrophic, a society can quickly incorporate an unsustainable behaviour (take, for illustration purposes, the behaviour of the police officers in Santa Teresa).

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Evil works as an intertextual communicator, creating a dialogue between the five parts, but taking the reader always back to Santa Teresa. When comparing the activity of the critics in “The Part About the Critics”, all four of them are very focused on their intellectual activity regarding Archimboldi’s oeuvre, but with the tremendousness of the crimes they find in Mexico, their work quickly becomes futile and almost hollow, as the barbaric nature and seriousness of the carnage is simply overwhelming when compared with the ludic activities of their research, being that none of them can quite grasp the immensity of the crimes.

To summarise, 2666 succeeds in giving the reader the image of our corrosive over-entwined world, a world where globalization has taken its toll in the citizens from places like the Mexico-U.S. border, where human life is undervalued and overlooked in favour of financial profit, like a collateral damage of the socio-economic practices of our unsustainable system. I approached the research on this book from the point of view of a journalist rather than a critic, trying to interpret Evil not only as the literary tool that links this story, but also as the glue that sticks this time in history to our past. This point of view helped me realize what I believe to be Bolaño’s bigger message in 2666, and with which I would like to end this dissertation: when we as citizens accept to live in an unsustainable and unhuman system, where our consumerism takes its toll in people from other parts of the world, hardly we differ from the numbed inhabitants of Santa Teresa carrying on with their lives amidst the atrocious murders, hardly we differ from those who take part on an oasis of horror in a desert of

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CONNECTING THE DOTS: Evil as an intertextual communicator in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666