Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (10 page)

If I had to name a single quality that makes Roberto Bolaño’s fiction compelling, it would be his capacity for stringent, hard-nosed sympathy. This is not the same as universal empathy or divinely inspired forgiveness or any of that softheaded nonsense. Bolaño is never blind to the crimes of humanity and of particular humans. They are, after all, his major subject. But he is able to create fictional works that enter equally into his own mind and the minds of others, even when those others are killers, or hypocrites, or madmen, or literary critics. It is not that he leaves behind notions of good and evil, but that he makes them seem inadequate as categories. There is a continuum that links his monsters and killers, on the one hand, and his writers and dreamers, on the other—or rather, a mirror, with those on opposite sides twinned in the reflective surface.

Overtly and covertly, the idea of twins and other paired figures pervades Bolaño’s universe. Sometimes he gives us a fictional stand-in for himself, a character named Arturo Belano. More often the narrator himself is a Bolaño-like figure who gets paired with someone else. At the end of
Distant Star
, for instance—a short novel about a right-wing Chilean killer named Carlos Wieder, in which twins, mirrorings, and pairings have riddled the plot—the Bolaño-esque narrator is sitting in a café in Catalonia, reading Bruno Schulz:

Then Carlos Wieder came in and sat down by the front window, three tables away. For a nauseating moment I could see myself almost joined to him, like a vile Siamese twin, looking over his shoulder at the book he had opened … He was staring at the sea and smoking and glancing at his book every now and then. Just like me, I realized with a fright, stubbing out my cigarette and trying to merge into the pages of my book.

“Sympathy” is too paltry and flaccid a word for the state of mind this describes. It is a powerful and unwilled form of identification, a Houdini-like vanishing act that allows Bolaño to merge with his scariest and most repellent creations as much as with his likable ones.

Nowhere in his work is this strategy clearer than in
By Night in Chile
, a short masterpiece published just three years before his death. The whole novel is a rant, or contemplation, or act of memory taking place in the mind of its main character, Father Urrutia Lacroix, also known as the literary critic H. Ibacache (he is his own twin, in other words, like all the other double-named villains in Bolaño’s work). Now on his deathbed, Father Urrutia is recalling his experiences as a Chilean literary figure before and after the coup. He thinks back on an encounter with Pablo Neruda; he remembers various figures of the left and (mostly) right; and he recounts—not just once, but three times—his glimpsed or imagined vision of the basement torture chamber where an American agent interrogated suspects during his wife’s literary salons. All of this is done in a vibrantly alive yet hushed voice that floats somewhere between willed stupidity and luminous knowledge, between self-communion and self-justification, between exhilaration and despair.

That there is indeed a hidden connection between despair and exhilaration is made explicit by a character in another novel, the female narrator of
Amulet
: “And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, silly girl, you and everyone else…”
Amulet
, which was written immediately before
By Night in Chile
, was like a dry run leading up to the greater work. Bolaño made two advances in the later novel: he put the narrative into the mouth of a dislikable character, and he eliminated himself entirely from the book. There is no Arturo Belano in
By Night in Chile
. There is no Bolaño figure of any kind, unless we count the “wizened young man” of whom the priest seems so afraid, but he could be anybody, including Death. In
By Night in Chile
, the author has finally done exactly what he feared so greatly in
Distant Star
: that is, merged bodily with his most despicable character. Without even the separateness of “vile Siamese twins,” they have become a single person, a frightened and dying man living off the memories of his Chilean past, dreading the annihilation of himself and all his writings. There could be no character less like the real Roberto Bolaño than Father Urrutia—a member of Opus Dei, a smarmy literary careerist, a right-wing snob, a religious hypocrite, a worm in the service of Pinochet. And yet for the duration of
By Night in Chile
we are horribly and, yes, exhilaratingly inside him.

It is rightly said of W. G. Sebald, a writer with whom Bolaño is sometimes compared, that all his characters are essentially versions of their author. This, I think, is a flaw in his novels, particularly
Austerlitz
, which purports to be about someone else. A similar flaw afflicts an even greater writer, Franz Kafka, whose strongest works are almost unbearable because of the airlessness of their self-enclosure. Roberto Bolaño is an author who risks exactly this charge and then triumphs over it. Finally, it is not that all his creations are projections of himself, but the opposite: in his novels, he becomes a mere figment of his characters’ reality, a shadow in their dreams. Like the French surrealist poets he so admires, he carefully sets up the trick mirrors, constructs all the cunning aesthetic parallels, assures us that he is playing with us—and then smashes the whole construction to bits. When the dust clears, all that’s left (but it is more than enough) is a moment of true feeling.

*   *   *

The desire to innovate is not what lies at the heart of books like these. If it were, they would feel much flimsier, morally and aesthetically, than they do. In each case, the author’s primary aim is to reveal the truth, and the novelty of form is just a by-product of that aim. This is the paradox that lies behind formal inventiveness: you can only achieve an exemplary kind of novelty if it is not, primarily, what you are trying to achieve. As an end in itself, stylistic innovation is merely a way of showing off, a useless if mildly entertaining trapeze act; only when harnessed to the author’s fervent truth-telling does it become significant.

To tell the truth in literature, each era, perhaps even each new writer, requires a new set of authorial skills with which to rivet the reader’s attention. We are so good at lying to ourselves, at lapsing into passive acceptance, that mere transparency of meaning is insufficient. To absorb new and difficult truths, we need the jolt offered by a fresh style. Yet what is startling at first eventually hardens into either a mannerism or a tradition. Even Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” if read too early and too often (in a classroom setting, say), can come to seem a mere example of Satire. So every writer—every
good
writer, every writer who really has something to say—must figure out for herself a new form in which to say it. The figuring need not be conscious, and the innovation need not be dramatic or obvious; we can be affected by style without necessarily perceiving the sources of the effects. But if we do perceive them, they cannot detract from our sense of the writer’s seriousness (a seriousness that, in the case of an innovator like Mark Twain, may partake of a great deal of humor). The structural and stylistic eccentricities must seem—and be—essential, not merely ornamental.

Take
Moby-Dick
, for instance. Reading that novel (if it is indeed a novel, and at times I have my doubts), we do not say to ourselves, “Oh, that Melville is such a show-off.” The informational chapters that interrupt the tale, the ones with titles like “Cetology” and “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” and “Jonah Historically Regarded,” do not strike us as expert research fetched up by the super-smart Melville from his vast library of whale knowledge. There is no Melville here. He has faded completely into his story, becoming “a nonentity, like Shakespeare,” as William Carlos Williams astutely put it. The grandeur of
Moby-Dick
stems partly from the fact that it seems larger than any individual author—larger than the self-described Ishmael who is supposedly telling us the story, but also larger than the real author we know must lie behind him. (But we know it only with the purely rational side of our brains: we do not feel it, just as we do not feel Shakespeare pulling strings behind the stage, nor Milton directing Adam and Eve toward their predestined fates.) It may seem tedious at times to plow through the masses of information that punctuate Captain Ahab’s quest for the great white whale, but eventually we come to realize that they
are
the story, just as much as the quest is. No clever game is being played with us, no puzzle is being presented for our ingenious and self-satisfying solution. We are simply being dropped into a new kind of reality, in which we will either sink or swim; by the end, perhaps, we may have learned to do both.

For a very different approach to literary innovation, consider James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. This is a novel that has always gotten on my nerves. I admit that part of what is annoying is how much other people love it and praise it, when it leaves me completely cold. I vastly prefer the youthful author of
Dubliners
, and even the slightly pushier fellow behind
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, to the highly self-conscious innovator who wrote
Ulysses
. By the time he reached that point, Joyce had begun to congeal into the artist who would eventually produce the nearly unreadable
Finnegans Wake
, and the obvious source of the rot was his overweening desire for a great literary reputation. This trumped all other literary desires on his part, so that things which had mattered to him earlier—the creation of believable human figures, the portrayal of a particular moment in Dublin’s and Ireland’s history, the use of language as an element in our common experience, the reliance on real as opposed to fabricated emotions—all gave way to this one enormous wish: to be the greatest, most impressive writer of his generation. This is not a literary impulse but a self-promotional one, and you can sense it in every chapter, almost every line, of
Ulysses
. We are meant to admire each
tour de force
for its cleverness and its brilliance. We are meant to recognize and applaud the skillful scene-by-scene parallels between the heroic Homeric tale and its reduced Dublin version, the chortlingly amusing imitations of other literary forms, the archetypal renderings of Jew and Catholic and man and woman. Woman! Don’t get me started. If I hate anything more than the rest of the book, it’s that ridiculously orgasmic Molly Bloom soliloquy with which Joyce concludes—a ventriloquist’s dummy masquerading as a character. Reading her breathy Yeses, I can hear her all-too-evident author congratulating himself on his literary genius.

Finnegans Wake
may be less hateful in part because it is more of a noble failure. Here the effort to charm the reader through a flamboyantly displayed intelligence has tipped over into something weirder, more willful, more insistent on having its own way to the exclusion of all else. This myopic intensity presents us with a more interesting project than the slyly clever
Ulysses
, but it is still too self-regarding to be convincing as literature. Authorial performance, rather than being simply the novel’s primary method, has become its
raison d’être
: there are no characters to be violated, no readerly sympathies to be toyed with, no fake emotions to be evoked, because all these old-fashioned novelistic elements have been jettisoned in favor of the desire to speak in a new kind of language. As poetry,
Finnegans Wake
may have value. As a novel, it does not really work, and only the most sympathetic Joyceans (myself certainly not included) have managed to make it all the way through.

At least one of those sympathetic readers was a great writer himself, and his reading of
Finnegans Wake
influenced him so heavily that his own innovative work grew out of it. I could be speaking about Samuel Beckett (who worked for a time as Joyce’s secretary and absorbed the influence at first hand), but in this case I’m actually referring to Thornton Wilder. His 1942 play
The Skin of Our Teeth
was a direct response to Joyce’s late work—almost a borrowing from it, or a translation of it into understandable dramatic form. The play is indeed more coherent than Joyce’s novel, but it too is gigantic in its aspirations, attempting to encompass the whole history of mankind, not to mention all the various functions of the theater, in its brief evening-length range. And it too now seems a bit of a noble failure, though it did win the Pulitzer Prize for its year.

The ironic fact is that Wilder had already created his most formally ingenious and original work a few years earlier, in a play that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with Joyce, or indeed with any other piece of writing I’ve ever encountered.
Our Town
, like
Moby-Dick
and all other truly innovative works of literature, seems to have no direct ancestor but itself. Often disguised as a somewhat sentimental piece of Americana (particularly when it is performed at the grade-school and middle-school level, as it so often is), Wilder’s play about Emily Webb, George Gibbs, and the other small-town inhabitants of Grover’s Corners is actually a quietly radical piece of theater. I might never have realized this, had I not seen the revelatory production that was directed by David Cromer at the Barrow Street Theater in 2010. Assembled with the other onlookers who were seated on bleachers surrounding and even among the performers, I understood for the first time that we too are the ghostly presences to whom and of whom Emily is speaking in her final, after-death soliloquy; we too belong with the temporarily living characters who will someday be numbered among the dead. And Cromer, by taking on the role of the Stage Manager (the role that, in both its novelty and its down-to-earth practicality, most clearly pinpoints Wilder’s revolutionary technique), actively helped me toward this realization. Delivering those perspective-shaping lines in his own flat, Midwestern, non-actorly voice, occasionally standing among and even touching the audience members as he spoke, David Cromer personally cemented the connection between the play’s reality and our reality, for we knew that as the director he really
was
the play’s stage manager.