Twenty years after 2666 — R.K. Hegelman

Carlos Rossmann de Leverkühn y Lucientes has been a stalwart of the Mexican poetry scene for over fifty years. One might be tempted to call him a heavyweight, no less owing to the notoriety of his belles-lettristic pugilism, if his particular machísmo did not predilect to martial rather than sporting metaphors. A warhorse, then. Rossmann professes to have first known Roberto Bolaño as a co-conspirator in that gadfly-then-switchblade upon the face of Mexican poetry, Infrarrealismo. ‘Professes’ since Rossmann is altogether absent from the avant-garde group’s two major anthologies and its party organ Correspondencia Infra. Meanwhile, attempts to independently establish his involvement through the ex-Infrarrealistas Verónica Volkow (Trotsky’s granddaughter) and Rubén Medina elicited no response and a sneer respectively. His career becomes less murky with the conclusion of Infrarrealismo’s heroic phase, after the self-imposed exiles of its Politburo—Bolaño, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, and Bruno Montané. Following the movement’s subsequent and fractious schism into Left and Right Infrarrealismo, he became an especially vocal partisan of the Left wing, largely defined by its screeds against the octosyllable, in his words ‘the greatest scourge upon Mexico since Pizarro’s smallpox’. Left Infrarrealismo suffered a further split within a year, when Rossmann became the de facto leader of the Sidereal Realists against the Telluric Realists. The aims and ideals of the Sidereal Realists were strikingly similar to those of their former nemeses the Right Infrarrealists. Is it even necessary to state their principles? What are the beliefs of any literary clique but a thin veneer upon the personal pettiness underlying all internecine strife? But then what is literature anyway but the wretched shadow-boxing of bloated egos, a ridiculous parlor game of empty proclamations and obnoxious tirades? And so: the Sidereal Realists advocated the restored reputation of David Huerta, that bugaboo of the original Infrarrealists, albeit for political not poetic reasons. They continued to spurn Octavio Paz, irrelevant perhaps insofar as this is the single continuity of all post-Pazian Mexican poetry. They advised the reading of Amado Nervo for being edifying in his badness; and against that of Pere Gimferrer for being stultifying in its brilliance. They encouraged the reading of Villaurrutia up unto a point—the third poem of Décima Muerte where his Baudelaireanism was said to lapse into crypto-Catholicism. They claimed the caesura was not merely a downbeat or breath but literally a gap in the fabric of being. This is all trifling insofar as Sidereal Realism was to last barely six months anyway, a sad and fleeting afterglow of that Mexican summer of 1981. In the four decades that followed, Rossmann resigned himself to those inveterate habitats of all minor Mexican literary has-beens—the cafés, salons, and workshops of Coyoacán; the callow esteem of young writers before they learn better; the unread pages of middlebrow reviews ever-scrawled with the same dross—a lifestyle that, if certainly not ordained the laurels of success, is neither such an outright failure as to leave the taste of the pistol’s muzzle, or a noose fashioned from one’s drawstring, as the only self-respecting exits. Indeed, such figures are apt to proclaim more loudly than anyone their integrity, their principled abstention from a game they have in fact quite clearly lost. They see this ‘integrity’ as a literary virtue tacitly compensating for the one thing they always lacked: talent. Among Rossmann’s most well-known collections are Blitzkrieg contra la juventad (1982), A la sombra de Rubén Jaramillo en flor (1985), Putas vírgenes (1991), Putas blasfemas (1992) and Jacinto y cielo (1997). The essay translated here was originally published last year in the journal Todo Derecho. The translator kindly thanks its editors for their kind permission to reprint the essay, and to Sr. Rossmann for his invaluable feedback in producing this English version.

It is now twenty years since Anagrama published 2666, the last testament of the Chilean poet Roberto Bolaño. Perhaps we are still reeling. Perhaps after two decades all we can say of it, definitively, is that we recognize it, obscurely, to be a ‘great’ work of art. Obscurely insofar as every great work comes to us cloaked in a peculiar opacity: they are the glass through which we see darkly, encircling our present, coming to us from a literal past and approaching us from a spectral future. They confound our critical categories because they come to us from this inscrutable hereafter. Inscrutable because this futurity does not present itself as prophecy, a simple prediction of things to come. ‘Great’ literature is only incidentally prophetic. The inferno of 2666’s Santa Teresa—the nameless dead that strew it, the pallid living that stalk it in lunatic slumber—might well be an auspicious emblem of our disquiet 21st century, but worldly verification is not the arbiter of literary merit. Soothsaying is a quack’s game. ‘Greatness’ announces a work that is both of and aloof from this world: it haunts all works to come as their obscure condition, an alterity in the future perfect to all future works, a demonic not-yet that, unlike the banal fruition of a prophecy, cannot suffer the indignity of our acquaintance.

Greatness typically invites pat metaphors of magnitude. Such works are the peaks commanding our literary landscape, their half-shadowed summits modulating the play of light and dark below: they illuminate new routes of ascent for the ingenue, and gullies of habitation wherein lesser works may wallow. Perhaps. Yet 2666 is not a work of illumination. Light is axiomatically foreclosed from it: whether the book’s prolific murders are the doing of the maniac Klaus Haase, the gangster Daniel Uribe, or a supernatural agency beyond human comprehension, is a false problem. The novel spits on the notion that this revelation even matters. The irrevocable foreclosure of light, the impossibility of revelation, is the only strict definition of hell, which is Bolaño’s sole subject. 2666 is a thick description of the texture of its blackness, the anti-cartography of a labyrinth without center. It disregards those sunlit paths unto the summits of literary glory as the gawdy arena of the vain, knowing instead that the true task in this landscape is to embroil oneself in the selva oscura enfolding its base. It spurns those provinces of light as the preserve of ‘good taste’, which Bolaño’s god, Baudelaire, proscribes as inimical to literature.

This darkness confirms Bolaño’s status as a hermetic writer: throughout his work, he is monomaniacally fixated upon a secret at the heart of literature, a so-called “secret of evil”. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” In his posthumous notes, we find the cryptic reference to 2666’s “hidden center.” And yet, what is at stake is not a repeal of our ignorance, a tidy answer absolving us of mystery. The answer, or even whether there is an answer, is moot. What could be more insane than a hermeticism without a god? And yet literature is precisely this fool’s errand. Unconcerned with the coarseness of ‘solutions’, it is a research programme into the logic, texture, and oblique eloquence of darkness. It is a measured yielding to the Sirens’ summary call issuing from that black, the beckons we intimate in Josephine’s whistle or the quiet rustling of Odradek. The conventional trappings of greatness—the grandiose or enlightening—are foreign to a work like 2666. It insinuates literature’s mandate beyond the prattle of words, words, words as a tarrying with an inhuman agency far in excess of our ken, inviting us into a descent without end or purpose.

Indeed, any talk of ‘greatness’ rings in our ears with an unavoidable dilettantism. We live in an awkward age uncomfortable with greatness. This is not handwringing, a fatuous lament for bygone greatness: the only persona more pitiful than the second-rate artist is the second-rate critic buoyed only by scorn for his times, as if the ubiquity of bilge were not a transhistorical fact. It is banal to note that for every Kafka there are umpteen Gerhart Hauptmanns lauded in their time. And yet it is perverse to conclude that Kafka’s greatness resides in this exceptionality, when his work is fundamentally a sabotage of all claims to greatness, a gainsaying of literature as ‘monumental history’. Greatness is after all only one kind of literary merit: refinement, speed, spontaneity, measure, precision… there are as many attributes of literature as there once were names of God. To say that greatness wanes in our day is not to deny the existence of extraordinary works, albeit as rare in the vast desert of mediocrity as they are in any era, but only that greatness—the shades of Olympian pomp that attend it—is an anachronism, bristling in our twenty-first century ears with a certain crassness. It is the grist of those critics bumbling through 2666’s first part, mired in a pedantry that blinders them to the horror that is the tenor of their beloved books.

To be both of and aloof from this world: bromides of prophecy, illumination, or grandeur notwithstanding, greatness is perhaps only truly evinced by its specific temporality, a trembling equivocation between history and its Other: it is the consensus that a work is obscurely in touch with something beyond the timely vagaries of consensus. And, in this obscure sense, 2666 is somehow great. Not by the typical mechanism: it does not bring down to earth the eternal forms of Truth or Beauty, masquerading as an idol of human ‘enterprise’ or ‘spirit’. Ironically, it is a work of our time since it is premised on our era’s wallowing in the twilight of those idols. It is out-of-joint with it insofar as it ventriloquizes the untimely darkness heralded by their flight, a stark vision of hell superposed upon worldly collapse.

***

Greatness is a hangover of the nineteenth century’s portentous myth that man might fashion his own destiny. 2666, freighted with the grim retrospect of a twentieth century ravaged by this myth made monstrously incarnate, emblematizes the twenty-first. It is ingrained with a rebuff to two centuries’ vain designs: that the Death of God never heralded the ascent of Promethean Man but our recoil into the idiocies of a new dark age; that, most ignominious of ironies, our fantasies of self-determination were thwarted by the very technologies we devised to furnish it; that Progress is a shill and utopia only the secret name of its inverse. The royal road of modern politics shepherded us to no manumission from bondage but only the bleak realization of our perverse appetite for it in ever more grotesque forms. Literature, in turn, is disabused of its doe-eyed vocation to espouse the era’s ideals and so paint its preening self-image.  It may either uphold these ideals at the expense of becoming propaganda, or lamely resign itself to painting the age’s ‘accelerated grimace’ in a maundering key of pastiche, fragment, and melancholy. Or, even worse, it is overrun by the pablum spawned when literature abdicates risk entirely: as 2666’s Amalfitano claims, this is an age that has no interest in “the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown” but wants the safety of “perfect exercises”. We spurn the ardor of our Éducations Sentimentales for the neatness of our MFA-sanctioned Trois Contes, while the alien majesty of a Bouvard et Pécuchet is perhaps altogether inconceivable for us. We 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.”

And yet, we must again be careful not to slip into the handwringing of the grousing critic. If the august image of greatness is an anachronism, then so is too that of greatness earned by “real combat”. The tortured artist-martyr, ensnared in bloody agon with his time, is the obverse face of that same tawdry heroism, albeit of one who does not encapsulate society so much as swindle dignity by sleight of his failure—a futility that becomes pathos, he a sovereign ‘outsider’. The poète maudit was a fine stopgap measure for the artist who, faced with the iniquity of his times, could only save face in histrionic opposition. And yet the poète maudit—and Bolaño is ever clear on this—is a cretin. Modern literature cannot escape its origin as the ruse of a fumbling Quixote. Edwin Johns, 2666’s emblematic figure of artistic sacrifice, adorns his masterpiece with his own severed hand. Years later, as he wastes away in a sanatorium, the critic Morini asks him why he did it, why he mutilated himself for art. Johns whispers something in his ear. Morini then disappears for weeks. Is this an initiation? Has the artist-priest Johns disclosed to the lay Morini the vaunted, unbearable secret of literature? Hardly. Money, is what Morini later reports Johns said. He did it for money. This most outwardly radical of artistic acts is neither subtended by a grand secret, nor even an infantile lashing-out at the world. It was simply committed with the same base intention and paucity of scruples we know all too well amongst most so-called artists.

If there is a secret of literature, it is obviously not some whispered shibboleth. Literature is not a game of Chinese Whispers. The secret is uninterested in any ‘answer’. Bolaño’s hermeticism, his absorption with literature’s secret, abuts the question of greatness insofar as greatness might be reframed as a matter of who precisely can heed this secret, and so who may scrounge in the furrows of the deadening present the out-of-jointness that is greatness’s mark. And this heeding entails the knowledge that the secret is not simply a prelude to revelation, a prospect lampooned by Johns’s arch-cynicism. Instead, in hell, where we are proscribed absolution from ineluctable dark, a different kind of ethic is required to abide by the secret’s summons. If this is no longer the prerogative of the artist-hero, be he grand master or maudit, then whose is it? It is a question embodied in the paradigmatic figure of the detective in Bolaño’s world. Detectives throng it in their common gravitation to its ‘hidden center’, all tragic figures insofar as the crime itself is inscrutable and justice a laughable absurdity.

This is a sidelong variation on that otherwise most embarrassing of questions: what is the relationship of a writer to his times? Embarrassing not only because it invites such incredible banalities, but also because of its latent presumption that the masses might somehow hang on the pronunciamentos of our great littérateurs, who bravely assume ‘responsibilities’ thereby. Literary merit is defiled by a direct equivalence with political power. Literature is inextricable from politics but it is also irreducible to it: journalism is a fine hobby but has nothing to do with literature. A man truly and courageously imbricated with his times becomes a militant not a writer. And yet the opposite position, the aesthete’s haughty disdain of profane cares, is equally deluded. When we encounter the unbridled horror of “The Part about the Crimes”—each of whose 112 femicides, lest we forget, are all recounted from real police reports—it is just as inhuman to take it as some literary device to pornographically gawk at as it asinine to take it as some activist call to arms. 2666’s contention is oblique to our culture’s pat binary that the writer’s ethic proceeds from either immersion in or remove from our world. Those 112 corpses are at once a statement of fact that must morally outrage us, just as they are a testament to our complicity, proscribing any high-handed judgment. 2666 unsettles us insofar as it endeavors only to stare us down barefacedly and tell us, with plainspoken candor, without self-righteousness nor the begging of an excuse, who we truly are as writers in the twenty-first century: ‘hypocrite lecteur’.

Again, a solution, exculpation, is not the point. The great work is neither entirely of this world nor blessedly out of it, persisting in the obscurity of the future perfect. The hell of 2666 is undeniably our own and yet a direct equivalence with it, that might make of the book a sermon, is impermissible. Vanity, vanity, all is writerly vanity: you, Scriptor, are no moral Atlas, upholder of rectitude in a fallen world, just as you have no high vocation to stand above it. There is, without doubt, an ethical task indentured to writing, but its values are neither of this world nor entirely ulterior to it. Our incessant blathering over ‘the role of the writer in society’ is bound by a false choice between the two lame heroisms of saintly withdrawal or worldly commitment. Both brandish a false moral purity, be that the pretensions of the ‘beautiful soul’ entranced by Beauty or the punch-drunk Jacobinism of moral principles. You must abandon all hope: literature is utterly unconcerned with redemption, be it of this world or from it. On one hand, it is premised on a gesture of abrogation—one does not write except out of disappointment, that this debased world might be otherwise—a minimal act of withdrawal, the provision of a clearing that is the condition for all fiction… and yet one that also cannot offer total, beatific escape. That primary gesture is called irony. Hypocrisy is not the preclusion but the condition of our literature, at once its origin and original sin, just as it is the essential problem of our politics. This is why literature is at once inextricably political and yet inextricably must fail to be. The purity of vindication in, or transcendence from, history are forbidden to it when it must roil upon the rack of this world and its ghostly other. If there is anything like literary greatness today, it is only in the sober confrontation of this limbo. And recall that limbo without the prospect of exit is only another name for hell.

***

This is the landscape of Bolaño’s entire corpus. Its protagonists, antagonists, and curio bit-parts are all played by writers precisely because it dramatizes this quandary, interrogating what ethics are available to a writer in the twenty-first century. The literary bestiary that populates his work—its sell-outs and waylaid bohemians; its charlatans and upstarts; the careerists of its workshops and drop-outs of its bars; the virtuous revolutionaries without a drop of poetry in their blood and the fascists bequeathed it in their very marrow; the pedants, mandarins, and darkling prodigies—compels because it also a political typology. Poetry and revolution are mutual metaphors in Bolaño; the poet and militant twin figures of a foreclosed possibility: twentieth-century Latin America embodies perhaps more pointedly than anywhere both the failure to achieve the dreams of a really-existing socialism and the grotesqueries of counterrevolution that arose in its place; poetry, meanwhile, is as rare as it was in any age. Bolaño avers our time as one where revolution is solely an object of nostalgia, and poetry, if not to become wholly barbaric after the twentieth-century, must grapple with the prospect of its irrelevance. They are, like greatness, anachronisms that have become precious, perhaps ridiculous, this being one source of the deep and silent humor that pervades all his work. And yet that work is not cynical either: farce may well follow tragedy—we all feel our age to be a drawn-out punchline, its affect an aching rictus—and yet a work like 2666 compels us insofar as it asks what might then follow farce’s impossible predicament.

Of course, Bolaño gives no direct answer. Yet in 2666’s final act, the coda of both the novel and his entire corpus, we have the barest intimations in the figure of Archimboldi, who embodies not the maudit but that other side of Baudelaire, the flâneur. Today Baudelaire’s arcades, those prescient symboles of nascent capitalism, have metastasized into a world-system gasping under its inhuman dominion. The private escapism of the paradis artificiel has tumefied into the popular anesthesia of mass technological culture, where the freedom of eros has turned in upon itself into a hangman’s knot of libidinal frenzy and Sodom’s boredom. The poetic reverie of phantasmagoria has necrotized into a universal psychosis from which we cannot wake. Baudelaire’s Paris has become Archimboldi’s nightmare of history, 2666 being bookended by the paradigmatic atrocity of the twentieth century, the Second World War, and that of the twenty-first, emblematized by Santa Teresa, his final destination. In a lifeworld bereaved of its utopian prospect, a world where the scantest shade of another is no longer legible, the flâneur loses his emancipatory trappings of freewheeling desire, his studied posture of aloofness, to become what he always was at his core: a spatial strategy—on one hand a ‘line taking a walk’, conscientious objector of teleology in a historical era bereft of any, but also thereby a wanderer haunting a labyrinth without outside, soberly disabused of an exit. The flâneur today is a figure of submission before Fate, that great motif of all Western literature since its inception. He is the disillusioned inmate of the prison-house of poetry become general state of affairs.

For the so-called house of fiction, with its vantage of a million windows upon the world, is today shuttered. The architectural ideal of art and politics is obsolete: just as society envisioned freedom in the construction of its own environs, only to become hapless prisoner of the same technologies meant to emancipate it, so too is the novel deprived of its vocation to allegorize this self-sovereignty by furnishing society its reflective self-image. The world must be at least as obscure to fiction as it has become to itself: a commerce neither entirely severed, as the aesthete might have it, nor unproblematic, as  the moralist assumes. The flâneur is one possible vector of these shifting analogical coordinates of art and life. He is the cast-down excommunicant of a system that has outstripped him. The house of fiction has collapsed and we are trapped in its glowering aftermath, consigned to either survey its ruins or else, trapped beneath its rubble, wander the labyrinth of its crypt. The ruins and the labyrinth: 2666 epitomizes the two major topoi of our era’s literature, of structure gone awry either by collapse or mad proliferation. If the major-phase novelist was an architect, the happy genius of his creation, the flâneur is an architectural gnostic: midst the wreckage of history, the wreckage of the novel, the flâneur is a disbarred panoptic vision over his world; incarcerated within, it is legible to him only in piecemeal hieroglyph, without any ultimate prospect of coherence. Stripped of a map or means of reckoning, the flâneur wanders a postlapsarian Architecture cast in photonegative, witness to the threadbare evidence of a magnitude become subterranean. This is, of course, similar terrain to what the Americans call their ‘systems novels,’ and yet these, with typical Yankee stolidness, see that subterranean order as something merely human, an avatar of Conspiracy. In 2666 it is something more metaphysical: who is Amalfitano but Job? Oscar Fate but Jeremiah? The novel’s unrelenting violence but the left hand of a brutal God?

To claim that we may only fathom the sublime in its obscurity, greatness by its wreck, is to perhaps only recapitulate the old dictum that all great works must either found a genre or dissolve one. All great art bodes a destructive function that we feel primarily in its confounding of our critical categories, before we retroject this confusion as a reformation, the congealing of a new form. Without doubt, 2666 confounds generic boundaries. Like War and Peace it is as much a novel as a speculative Geschictsphilosophie, burgeoning to interrogate the structure of that grandest narrative, history. And like La Chartreuse de Parme it is just as much a historical burlesque, a smirking denigration of history’s pretense to any meaning. Like The Aesthetics of Resistance, it is a prosaic history, an act of documentary witness, Santa Teresa being a thin pseudonym for Ciudad Juárez’s ‘femicide machine.’ Like the Recherche it is an author’s Apologia pro vita sua—Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s nom de plume, is 2666’s narrator according to one of the last items scrawled in his notebooks. And like Bovary, it is a novelistic act of catharsis, a dissolution of the self in a labyrinth of its own making. Archimboldi, c’est moi. And beyond genre, 2666 muddies traditions. It confirms what we have always known: despite the incidental that he wrote in Spanish, Bolaño was in fact a German author. He might have explicitly claimed to be a son of Roberto Arlt and Osvaldo Lamborghini, but his real patrimony, his secret history, resides in the names of Büchner, Trakl, and Grimmelshausen (2666’s Ur-text), certain pages of Stifter, every page of Kleist.

Ruins are both the remains of the past and the material from which we construct our future, and so the site where art meets nature’s most unimpeachable law: that all forms must pass out of being as they come into it, and that these, generation and destruction, are mutual and necessary conditions. A work like 2666 is therefore an especially pointed paraphrase of the question implicit in any artwork—What is Art? What is a novel?—begging the mechanism by which literature, which cannot go on, must go on. This is why 2666, like The Man Without Qualities or Kafka’s novels, must remain unfinished not incidentally but constitutively, by virtue of its inner mandate: “The Part about the Poets” must never see the light of day, let alone might not even exist, insofar as this finale must be a thousand different things simultaneously and so, in essence, nothing. It is perhaps nothing more nor less than the literature of our century, to which 2666 is therefore the prolegomenon, a prelude to hell incumbent upon its ellipsis. To resort to the cliché that ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ is typically a cop-out, except in those rarest cases where that silence becomes eloquent, where that silence is fortuitously and brutally earned.

And so 2666 fades to silence as it cedes to the clamor of our century. The aborted apocalypse of the twentieth century, that of the Bomb, for all its revelation of terrible power, was meant to occur in a single, silent, infinitesimal instant. Its sublimity was, at least, a mercy. The apocalypse of the twenty-first is a drawn-out agony, no less incomprehensible but all the more horrifically so for its obscene visibility, the world excruciated into a psychotic burlesque of itself. This is to say that our age is baroque and 2666 is paradigmatic of it precisely because it is a baroque novel. It is a paragon of that most frank yet curdling realism, the realism that is a stringent consignment to reality, however insane. A realism that is premised on the impossibility of the salvation in an alternative reality, which is to say the realism of 2666 is the realism of hell, whose sober and thorough inquisition is the baroque vocation.

***

And what better description of the Baroque than the novel’s epigraph: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” The entirety of 2666 is perhaps nothing but a gloss on the Baudelairean axiom. 2666’s oft-cited fraternity with the panoramas of Bosch is only half the story. Its vista is more capacious, zooming out from these visions of atrocity so that they become figures dwarfed by a wider if no less terrifying landscape: a horizonless flatland razed by the twin anti-muses of cynicism and exhaustion, where only the punctual irruption of horror may relieve us of its stultifying monotone. Horror, which was once an affront to meaning, has now perversely become the last site of its possibility. The horror of the twentieth century negated history’s pretense to reason and so came to us under the banner of the absurd. In the twenty-first, so far removed are we from the illusion of history’s intelligibility, that it is the absurdity of atrocity itself, the literal corpses that are the symbolic corpse of meaning, that remains as meaning’s final luster before eternal night. In its agony, the final vestiges of meaning are only available in the guise of absolute, horrific meaninglessness. Horror that must increase in depravity and spectacle if it is to persist in the dying light.

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. There is no better definition of the Baroque. The Baroque is a mode that binds certain eras—late antiquity, the mid-seventeenth century, our own—in their common encounter with this horror: suffering not only maniacally profligate but disabused of meaning; mass psychosis spawned by the discombobulation of time and space; civilization itself belied as no immaculate exit of the State of Nature but this an illusion veiling its botched exorcism. The Baroque thus acknowledges the repressed truth of history—that sovereignty resides alone in the vulgar display and exercise of power.

The Baroque, in its most common usage, is a style. 2666 is not stylistically baroque in the usual sense. The laconism of Bolaño’s sentences is at odds with Byzantine sprawl. It is, however, informed by the same, subtending worldview—one of selves interminably splitting, the pathos of division and divagation. Bolaño’s stylistic baroqueness manifests instead through that hallmark of the painterly Baroque: chiaroscuro. His prose is that of the pinhole lens, where what submits to the evidence of light is simultaneously enveloped by a larger darkness. It is prose chaperoned by the sense of an always-elsewhere. It is haunted, as we might put it more conventionally. This is the precise sense in which the Baroque is fundamentally an allegorical mode and Bolaño a hermetic writer: every story is the occasion of its secret, inarticulable other. Barry Seaman’s sermon upon barbecue, Amalfitano’s dream of Gorbachev, Archimboldi’s final encounter with the inventor of the Fürst Pückler: all are non-sequiturs whose arbitrariness is apt to make us laugh at first. And yet that laugh does not relieve us. No clear punchline is forthcoming so that this laugh slowly draws itself out to become a nervous one, a laughing unease of incomprehension as we begin to suspect that these absurdities, what seemed at first bad jokes really, might in fact have a meaning, a meaning not only obscure but even inauspicious as we begin to feel that this meaning is one that we do not want to know, one that we viscerally do not want to know at all costs, and whose horror we therefore cannot tell is because of or in spite of its being unknown to us, a meaning that therefore discomfits precisely because of this ambiguity, and whose only certainty is evinced in this darkness enfolding us, a certainty felt in our inexorable anxiety, stalked as we are by the terrible knowledge of its existence as we choke on and on beneath that ailing laughter. The model is K falling asleep before Bürgel in Kafka’s Castle, the humdrum story slowly detaching from the occluded, oneiric twin that is its truth, drifting away forever out of earshot. The model is the underwater forests of seaweed that span the murky floors of the Baltic and obsess the young Archimboldi, these the dwelling-place of an enticing, impenetrable darkness alluded to only in the chiaroscuro play of light across its canopy.

The Baroque is a temporality. Melancholy, which is the Baroque’s definitive affect, is a preternatural sensitivity to time, a crestfallenness at its implacable passage manifesting alternatively as resignation or despair, boredom or horror. The Baroque, as per the novel, is “a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell[.]” These are the two temporalities upon which our age is crucified. The empty time of anomie and the blitzed frenzy of hypertechnological consumption. And today we know that this Paradise is a hoax. Its pristine stasis is a simulacrum grounded in its opposite: the ‘bliss’ of inertia is today afforded only in the exhaustion of total flux, psychotic speed that blends all experience into flat morass, a boredom that is the paltry grist sifted from ubiquitous horror.

The Baroque is a spatial logic, that is to say an ontology. The fear of time is unanimous. It is bound up in that simplest animal affliction—the fear of death. The fear of infinite space, that exquisite terror invited by those who permit themselves to hear their footfall echo in its eternal silence, is on the other hand a mark of the utmost refinement. Yet so far as the Baroque is concerned, this is not the horror vacui but that of the plenum. Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele, which adorns the cover of the gringo edition of 2666, could not be more apt: Semele, priestess and lover of Zeus, who perishes in a fit of beatific excess before the revelation of her god, who unveils himself whole in his devastating magnitude. The Baroque is the horror of surfeit. Against the security of Spinoza’s enclosed infinity, the involuted image of parochial repose, the Baroque confronts Leibniz’s infinite multiplication of monads. Disabused of Enlightenment’s baseless optimism, today we know that this multiplication forecasts no cosmic harmony, as Leibniz thought, but the haywire of compound chaos. Latin-American literature is paradigmatically the literature of the labyrinth, and Bolaño and Borges—that other great Latin-American author of the last century—represent two polar conceptions of the maze’s infinity: if Borges is a Spinozist, attempting by the ruses of literature to hold infinity in the palm of his hand, Bolaño is Leibnizian, consigned to the horror of an infinity that brooks no limit. His is an ontology of metastasis that  subverts all pretense to stable form through unstaunched addition. It is the horror of an inexorable and indiscriminate expansion that does not crest us unto new frontiers but asphyxiates us beneath the curdling bulk of its deadpan mass.

The Baroque is a historiography, history being the confluence of space and time, of collective consciousness become nightmare. The Baroque is thus one name for the end of history, a culmination not of cosmopolitan unison but interminable fracas. It is a name for “that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.” It is a historiography of boredom insofar as it proscribes any Event for an overwhelming groundswell of events. This is not to say that nothing ‘happens’ in the end of history. To the contrary. In this unending serial of events, each is no less a spectacle of horror, and each tumesces with the prospect of more. Every event entails a ratcheting of horror’s depth and range—a capacity endlessly expanding, surpassing itself, which is the actual and perverse meaning of Progress. The Baroque names a monstrosity that incestuously breeds upon itself, an insane parthenogenesis devolving horror upon horror in fractal diffusion. It is history as a slaughterhouse of forking paths. Our holocaust is not that of apocalypse but one dealt by a thousand cuts.

And finally, the Baroque is a theology. Theology is history’s wager, a roll of dice that must announce either comic revelation or tragic exile of the divine. 2666 contains a theology insofar as it does a historical finality: the revelation that is an anti-revelation—the impossibility of salvation that is synonymous with hell—and that makes of it a wager of the most insane kind… a wager that cannot be won, a wager over what has already been definitively lost. Yet it is not, however, the pronouncement of the deus absconditus. The Baroque is not a testament to an absent or dead god but something far worse. Divine inexistence is a neurosis only of piety. Think of Dostoyevsky prostrate before Holbein’s Dead Christ: the horror of divine flight is solely available to those who assume his benevolence. Encumbered with a high idealism and witnessing the extremes of worldly depravity, they would rather sacrifice than curse Him, see Him dead than defile the summum bonum. Freethinking is a mode of the Enlightenment: if done with God it is still entranced with the mirage of a cosmic Good. The Baroque, meanwhile, is a reaction to Enlightenment. Its faith is perverse yet more rigorous, divested of gullible optimism but also of the blasphemy that loves Goodness above God. No dupe of freedom, it is wholly resigned to the reality of His stricture, the totalitarian dominion of a God whom we may know only by His horror. It knows that absolute contingency and ubiquitous perdition are only disproof of Providence where we arrogantly presume it to bend to our service. Providence is in fact the expression of an incontrovertible and capricious Will, its defiance of all reason and ethic the most perfect incarnation of an omnipotence unbowed before any principle except its own power. The highest fidelity must see in horror not god’s absence but the inscrutable machinations of an apodictic whim profaned by any pretense to justification. The joke played upon us is that what seemed the foreclosure of revelation is in fact its total fruition. Before the horrific manifestation of Being, the oblivion of Nothing would be a merciful release: Seigneur, mon Dieu! [...]Vous qui êtes plein de motifs et de causes, et qui avez peut-être mis dans mon esprit le goût de l’horreur pour convertir mon cœur, comme la guérison au bout d’une lame. The Baroque is the apparition of the God of Baudelaire. He is the God of poets. He is my God. And he is a bastard.  Julie, Les fleurs du mal, Les chants de Maldoror, Héliogabale, Tombeau pour 500,000 soldats, 2666: these are not strictly his Gospel. His Word is illegible to us, and only barely more palpable to his prophets, those poets excruciated by His secret. Their works are no Annunciation but glosses, wounded and raving, upon that most simple expression of animal terror—Help! They are a galled inversion of the Saviour’s last words: my God, why have you not abandoned me? I hear Him in the silent harmonics that hover over their bleeding squalls. He speaks to me sometimes in my sleep. He is devoid of succor save the Horror of his awful commandment and its mandate towards Boredom—the agony of going on and on and on and on

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