What am I doing? What was I doing? I was supposed to be writing something, wasn't I?I was writing something that was supposed to carry me from day to day and string those days together, making meaning of them. Supposed to aim all these days in a single direction – but what was it?
Weakness: I fall below the ability to write. I'm tired, tired … So I finish the two books I was reading instead of writing. The Savage Detectives, the longest of books, was finished off yesterday lunchtime in the office. I've finished it at last, I thought. I can't believe I got through it, I thought. I decided I deserved an award. But then, almost immediately, that I deserved no award, that I'd been self-indulgent enough of late. So I set myself the task of reading reviews of the book I just read, to make sense of it, to make sense of myself, to replace that stringing of days and hours together like beads on the long thread of my writing.
Bolano! Too many people have read him. He's too celebrated! There's too much on the net! Curious, then, that you can still invent a private Bolano. Still set up a small shrine, your own. I have my own Bolano, made up of scraps of what I read in the long biography-reviews (all the reviews seem to turn into biographies), at the heart of which is his friendship with Mario Santiago (who becomes Ulyses Lima in The Savage Detectives).
That friendship, and with it, other friendships too -infrarealist (visceral realist) friendship. Friendship whose third term is Life, a great and ferocious vivacity – Life like a firework bursting in the sky. Life: that's what binds them together, life as broad and distant as the sky. Life upon which you can make no impression. Life against which your own life bats itself meaninglessly.
Is there a tragic vision to Bolano? A tragedy behind the many stories through which Belano (Bolano's own double) and Lima pass in the second long section of the novel? Tragedy … but the great broad vivifying tragedy of life in general, the life of everything, the life of stones and stars …
What am I on about? What is this all for? For no reason. Just blast up like a rocket and explode. The Savage Detectives. Overlong? Vastly so, and yet … Boring? Without question, and yet … Life, tragic life celebrates itself through the hundred stories of the second part (the middle panel of the triptych). Life beyond any particular voice (though it seems particularly close to some: step forward, Quim, mad Quim in the asylum …)
As I read, often bored, often distracted, I still kept the impression that there was a great sky, a great Day beyond these particular voices. A Day beyond days, as in D.H. Lawrence's The Flying Fish (and isn't there something like the exuberance of Lawrence, his riotousness in Bolano's book?). A kind of apocalypse, everything revealed, the great judgement day of Life upon we can make no impression. Life = the Sonora Desert.
Life, for Bolano = that expanse in which the narrative runs out in the third part. I've heard 2666 (a title already prefigured in The Savage Detective) heads into the Desert again. No surprise. It's Bolano's topic, his great topic. But let me come back to friendship, to Bolano's friendship with … what was his name? Santiago.
Bolano said he wrote the book so that Santiago and he could laugh at it together. A book to make his friend laugh. His friend, who'd published … barely anything. A single book of poems, I think, but wasn't that beside the point? Isn't Bolano's great theme Life, and not poetry? Life and not Literature (capital 'L'). Life that laughs at silly Juan Garcia Madero, narrator of the first and second sides of the triptych. Life that poetry, Literature (capital 'L', the usual modernist Literature; Lautreamont, Breton, all that …) burn up towards but never reach.
Bolano published a couple of things before he left Mexico for Europe. He appeared in some anthology or another. He cowrote a novel. So what? What does it matter? As with Santiago's production (his non-production), literature was a name for Life and Life was elsewhere. Did both men leave their South America? Was it only Bolano (Belano) who headed off for France and Spain and Israel and Liberia (Liberia!)? I'm not sure. The reviews and profiles would tell me.
But what I wanted to say (what started me off here), was that the book was written to make his friend laugh, but that the same year it was published, The Savage Detectives, in 1998, his friend died in a 'mysterious' car accident. Mysterious in inverted commas, Bolano's, I'm not sure why. And that that moved me: that's what I wanted to say. Moved me, the thought that this literary furore, the comet of Bolano's oeuvre that is passing through our skies, was all about friendship, and what was shared between two friends and a group of friends (the infra-realists, the Visceral realists).
It was about laughter. It was about a crazy, nonsensical world. It was about the absurd glory of Life, about writing, about fucking, about the roads that disappear in the Sonora desert, which is to say all roads, including this one, the one I'm on …
A tragic vision. A tragic, laughing vision. A vision in which no hero, no heroine rises up to face their great destiny and the greatness of its limits. A vision, instead of the futility of life, of all things, a laughing futility, a drunken futility, but futility nonetheless … The desert is opening. The desert is here, right between us, those of us for whom the flag of Literature is buffetted by the winds of Life.
The desert: here it is, because none of this matters, none of it, not Literature, not writing (or not writing), publishing (or not publishing) … it's all futile, laughable, we're heading into the same desert. We're all riding in the same Impala into the desert and laughter and madness and bleached, exposed bones in the sand. Bolano was dying and we're dying and everything is dying, and in the meantime … what else is there to amuse our friends and ourselves? What left but to close the door on the world and write to make our friends laugh and roll on the floor laughing and coughing up blood and spitting blood all the way to death …?
Lars Iyer's Blog 