From Our Hearts to Our Necessities: A Little Bit About the Void in Roberto Bolano's Poetry

 

Read any given article about Roberto Bolano written since 2666's English debut, and you'll probably notice two points laid out again and again:

 1) Bolano's ouevre is massively intertextual, a kind of compact Philip Jose Farmer cosmology-- out of 2666's hundreds of characters, for instance, we see children from his novellas turned into hard-nosed border cops, recurring novels, off-hand references to menage-a-trois with old protagonists. Even the narrator, as Bolano had remarked in his working notes, is in fact the hero of an earlier work. Just as each of 2666's five parts read fine as individual novellas but are vastly enriched as a whole, Bolano's entire body of writing infuses and reinforces itself.

2) 2666 revolves around the problem of an absent center, or a "false" center (the novels of Benno von Archimboldi, the city of Santa Teresa) and a mysterious "secret" center Bolano leaves ambiguous.

With that out of the way, I've been surprised to see how little attention is paid to The Romantic Dogs, the only English collection of Bolano's poetry. Bolano famously considered himself more of a novelist than a poet, but his poems still demonstrate a distinct if abstract narrative bent. And, surprise surprise, it isn't any kind of stretch to read his poetry as both a vital segment of Bolano's overall meta-masterpiece, and as a definite expression of Bolano's fascination with false, missing, or hidden centers-- spiritual and narrative voids.

Most of the elements laced through 2666 are just as frequent and stressed in The Romantic Dogs-- we see the perverse Hegelian relationship between Mexico City, the U.S., and the towns along the Mexican border, a kind of pressure system that turns that strip of land into a kind of worst-case synthesis thunderhead of American and Mexican culture. In, for example, The Donkey:

...and with that Mario Santiago and I

Leave Mexico City, which is the extension

Of so many dreams, the materialization of so many

Nightmares, and retake our positions

Always headed north, always on the road 

Of coyotes,...

As well as his concept of the Latin American ethos as one intrinsically self-destructive, informed by a violence turned catastrophically inward:

Thousands of guys like me, baby-faced

or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,

brushing cheeks with death.

Travel, in these poems, is never fulfilling, the traditions of Latin American literature is never fulfilling, both of these as well as sex, friendship, history, are false centers, Bolano's poetry suggests-- heavy with the suggesting of meaning, but ultimately as flimsy and transient as any other symbolic anchor. 

...a spit in Religion's face,

A silk stab in the back of Happiness,

Sustenence of Morals and Ethics, the forward escape...

As the hunch-backed speaker of My Life in the Tubes of Survival puts it.

These two themes come together most powerful in a long poem titled The Worm, about a grotesque and potentially murderous figure making his through through Mexico:

I saw him with my own eyes: he looked like a worm with a 

straw hat

and an assassin's glare

and he traveled through the towns of Northern Mexico

as if wandering lost, evicted from the mind,

evicted from the grand dream, everyone's dream,

and his words were, madre mia, terrifying.

This traveller neatly sums up the same dynamic Bolano dug into in Part III of 2666, the idea of violence and cultural self-loathing as a kind of eidolon, a weary point of pride. At points the traveller exhorts the speaker to embrace poverty, embrace violence, even acknowledging the pointlessness of it-- suggesting images of Santa Teresa's chief of police shooting at wild dogs in a junk-yard.

 However, whereas the cynical Bolano of 2666 seems to have little hope for art as a redeeming force (consider how many artists and poets turn up in insane asylums, how the only instance in which the critics really act freely is in beating a defenseless cab-driver, and the self-destructive metaphor of the artist who cuts his hand off), Bolano the poet is a bit more optimistic. The Outsider Ape seems to scoff at the possibility of a painting inspiring real emotion, but at least acknowledges its heroic grasping at reality (shades of Ansky and his obsession with "semblences"). Twilight in Barcelona features a similar ambiguity-- what's more beautiful, the painting of Satie or the landscape that evokes its memory? Here's that conflict between apparent and hidden centers again-- representation is a seduction or a threshold-- whether the real signified by art is accessed through it or prohibited by it is up to the viewer. 

Poetry is his exception; free from the obligations of representation (I guess?), Bolano seems to see poetry as a kind of artistic collagen, binding impressions and moments together, making them stronger against obfuscation and despair. Ironically, in the same poems where Bolano rails against the romanticizing of cruelty, he makes poetry out to be a little too courageously transversive. Still, it's hard not to want to cheer him on in lines like these, again from The Worm:

I saw him and told him get out of my tracks, you prick,

poetry is braver than anyone,

the soils watered with blood can suck my dick, the 

evicted Mind

hardly rattles my senses.

From these nightmares I'll retain only

these poor houses,

these wind-swept streets,

and not your assassin's glare

Yeah, fuck you Baudelaire! The figure in The Worm is described as both dragging his despair behind him, and devouring it, a concise representation of the kind of masochism so much "realistic" art thrives on (and which, in my opinion, Bolano is sometimes guilty of himself).

A final example is in a suite of five poems; Dirty, Poorly Dressed, The Detectives, The Lost Detectives, The Frozen Detectives and Fragments. The immediate thought is of his second longest novel, The Savage Detectives. And sure enough, just as in his novels, these poems deal with a simultaneous stumbling after a hazily defined goal (what crime are these detectives trying to solve? I like to think maybe the Santa Teresa murders...) and struggle to escape an ad-hoc urban labyrinth. The search for truth is futile, and recursive, and pretty shabby, and ultimately a psychological issue more than anything: the speaker comes across his heart in the middle of the road, being eaten by red and black ants, while the detectives sit catatonic in pools of blood, afraid to disturb the crime scene. Images repeat themselves in slightly modified phrasings throughout these pieces, circular and circumspect.

 We are, in the end, left without much of a clue about the crimes, the detective, the speaker, or what it all means, despite covering the same ground over and over, in tighter and tighter loops. As in 2666 we circle around what looks like a center but never get any closer to meaning-- because meaning is elsewhere, or under our noses, or totally gone. Bolano doles out clues, but doesn't give away the ending-- this isn't Agatha Christie, where murder and blackmail have their place in a neat, morally tidy universe in which the man with the prim moustache always sets things straight. The reader is left lingering, hands overflowing with both beauty and ugliness, poetry and banality, all of the clues, some of the questions, and none of the answers.