Strange News from a Distant Star

"'All this light is dead,' said Ingeborg. 'All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It's the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn't exist, life on Earth didn't exist, even Earth didn't exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It's the past, we're surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can't do anything to stop it.'

'An old book is in the past too,' said Archimboldi, 'a book written and published in 1789 is the past, its author no longer exists, neither does the publisher or the ones who read it first or the time when it was written, but the book, the first edition of that book, is still here. Like the pyramids of the Aztecs,' said Archimboldi."

-- Roberto Bolaño, 2666, pg. 831

Although never explicitly referenced in the text, the year 2666 looms like a powerful, hostile star over Roberto Bolaño's final novel. It is that cruel vantage point under which the narration and the entire horizon of history unfolds; not an unwavering gaze of final judgement, but an eye that, for wanting to forget something, has ended up forgetting everything.

In the "The Part about the Crimes," we are subjected to a numbing 300 pages detailing in excruciating forensic detail the serial killings in Santa Teresa: that nebulous black hole that ensnares all of the plots' disparate orbits. Yet, for all of their gravitational weight, the murders are a structural red-herring.

Lurking on the peripheries of the novel are faint and not so faint references to past events - the human sacrifice practiced by the Aztecs, the cruel punishments exacted by Vlad Ţepeş - which radiate down upon us, divorced of all human particularity. For Bolaño, 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." No one remembers Vlad Ţepeş, let alone the names of any one of his victims. Aztecan human sacrifice is a glib historical anecdote. And so too will the atrocities of Santa Teresa and Nazi Germany, events seared into our consciousness, recede into time and lose their singularity. They will become moments as distant and as alien to us as the light from a dead star.

Yet for Bolaño, this despair is a manifestation (or perhaps the wellspring) of literary anxiety.

Throughout 2666, Bolaño conflates texts and humans. Just as the Santa Teresa victim vanishes into the Sonora desert leaving behind only an inexplicable scrap of clothing, so too will Bolaño disappear from the historical event horizon, leaving behind a work that is bound to become an uncanny artifact for future generations, like Duchamp's readymade of a geometry book suspended over a clothesline.

From the totalizing vantage point of 2666, everything is ash:

"What would those who lived in the tenth dimension, think of music, for example? What would Beethoven mean to them? What would Mozart mean to them? What would Bach mean to them? Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books.

At this point the conductor raised a hand and said or whispered confidentially:

'Don't speak of burned books, my dear young man,'

To which Hans responded:

'Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.'"