What’s the definition of a good essay? Is it one that’s right from start to finish? Or one that goes astray in certain places and is all the more interesting for it?
“The Online World Is Also on Fire,” which Loren Goldner wrote in 1995, falls into the latter category. Subtitled “How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It),” it’s a meditation on a fin-de-siècle slump so deep that for many of us the hit TV sitcom “Friends” (which premiered in 1994) stands out as the cultural high point. Goldner’s article is bitter and scornful as befits a Marxist who believes that intellectual ferment must go hand-in-hand with any sort of working-class upsurge and who is dismayed that thinking has gone so flat. But while Goldner had high hopes for allied fields such as history and cultural studies, his essay argues that the novel had fallen hopelessly behind.
Why? The culprit is the 1960s, that tumultuous decade that was too much even for a form as expansive as the novel to take in. As late as 1964 or ’65, the literary culture of the immediate postwar period was still going strong according to Goldner. Such was its prestige that no one “would voluntarily admit to an ignorance of Kesey, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Salinger, Jean Genet, J-P Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Unamuno, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Kafka, Mann, Aldous Huxley, Proust, Henry Miller, Michael McClure, Leroi Jones and many other names one could provide.”
But the coming super-storm would sweep them all away. “The Online World Is Also on Fire” describes the “incredible kaleidoscope of events” that did literature in, beginning with the Berkeley free speech movement and continuing on through “the bombing of North Vietnam, the assassination of Malcolm X, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the Watts riots, the emergence of LSD, riots on Sunset Strip, the break in rock associated with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” and so forth. Where once there were Democrats and earnest ACLU liberals, now there were “Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Young Lords, Black Panthers, White Panthers, Hell’s Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Up against the Wall Motherfuckers….”
It was dramatic and thrilling, not to mention crazy and absurd. “And yet,” Goldner writes, “no serious literary expression of that earthquake was written either in the midst of it or subsequently … no one wrote a novel of any importance about it, not here, not in France, not in Germany, not in Italy or Britain or Japan, similar countries where a similar break occurred around the same time.” Instead, the emerging radical generation turned its attention to such nonfiction writers, thinkers, and revolutionaries as Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Trotsky, C.L.R. James, or Rosa Luxemburg:
“One can agree or disagree with someone like [Christopher] Lasch, but can one argue that there is any contemporary novelist who has come close to his analysis of American culture and its malaise in the past 30 years? Can one name one post-1965 novel which has captured the imaginations of 60s people (or anyone) as did E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class?”
There is no doubt that Goldner was onto something. One can quarrel with some of the details. Remarkable novels did come out, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) or One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). But while a few dealt glancingly with the radical scene—E.L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel (1971) is one that comes to mind—it’s indeed difficult to think of a single top-flight work, written during the sixties or after, that confronts it head on.
So far, so good. But then “The Online World Is Also on Fire” runs into trouble. Once sixties radicalism finished its mugging of great literature, it says, the politically-vacuous seventies and eighties completed the job by ushering in an “hour-glass” economy that left “only yuppies and the homeless in cities like Manhattan” while “devastating the life conditions of the urban working class and marginal bohemia.” Since it is the interplay between the bohemian intelligentsia and the urban flotsam and jetsam that often provides the basis for great literature, the hollowing out of late-capitalist society led a “decline of reading” that made it impossible to produce good literature at all, not only about sixties radicalism, but about anything.
The death of the novel had been announced many times before, but this time Goldner says it’s true. He informs us that “the ‘plugged in’ daily reality of the American middle class … offers little possibility for a novel of the stature of Light in August or Studs Lonigan.” A growing social breakdown in which “children exchange gunfire across America [and] marauding guerrilla bands without ideology or purpose are razing city and countryside like locust hordes in Angola and Liberia and Afghanistan” makes the outlook even bleaker. Thanks to social decay and the rise of glamorous Manhattan lifestyles based on high finance, hyper-consumption, and high-pressure jobs, “it is difficult to cultivate the state of mind into which one enters through, among other things, great literature.” The novel was as much at odds with the times as the epic poem or the courtly masque.
But writers should think twice before they leap because such sweeping judgments were already being proved wrong.
The evidence is Roberto Bolaño’s great 900-page novel 2666, which the Chilean-Mexican-Spanish poet began working on the same year that Goldner wrote his essay. Bolaño described the work in progress in a letter to a friend as “a demented tangle that surely no one will understand.”1 But he was evidently able to straighten out the kinks in time for it to be hailed as a masterpiece when published in Spanish in 2004—a year after the author’s tragic death in Barcelona at age 50 from liver failure—and then in English translation in 2008. Reviews were ecstatic. Jonathan Lethem wrote in the New York Times that Bolaño had “become a talismanic figure seemingly overnight” while the Argentine writer Rodrigo Frey compared him to Cervantes, Stern, Melville, and Proust. Sales were through the roof, and Bolaño’s widow and two children were left very well off.
But what makes 2666 especially relevant from a Goldnerian viewpoint is its politics. It’s not merely a case of an unexpectedly great writer emerging out of an obscure corner of Europe, but one emerging out of the same left-oppositionist milieu that Goldner inhabited, a milieu, of course, that the literary establishment dismisses as hopelessly obscure and marginal but which had just produced a work that it now celebrated. Neither man knew of the other’s existence, of course, since Goldner by that point had largely given up on literature. But 2666 can be read as a counter-thrust to his argument that it was no longer possible.
Fittingly, Goldner and Bolaño’s lives ran on parallel tracks. Born in 1947, the former grew up in Berkeley, became a Trotskyist by age 20 (albeit of the unorthodox Tony Cliff variety), and then cycled through various left tendencies: the ex-Trotskyist Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees (Goldner left after LaRouche launched “Operation Mop-Up,” an insane campaign of physical violence against Communist and Trotskyist opponents), then Luxemburgism, and then the writings of the Italian ultra-leftist Amadeo Bordiga. It was a life devoted to reading, writing, meetings and discussions, and passionate engagement with history and Marxism.
Bolaño was six years younger. Born in Chile in 1953, he moved with his family to Mexico City in 1968, just in time for the Tlatelolco massacre in which troops shot down dozens of student leftists and arrested hundreds more. He was also a passionate reader who began as a poet before turning to short stories and novels. In the 1970s, he took part in a radical literary movement known as “Infrarealism,” which had at least two Trotskyists in its ranks, and was much taken with the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art that Trotsky wrote with André Breton in Mexico in 1938. But the Third World nationalism of his day left him burned out and bitter. “The truth for me … is that the idea of revolution had already been devalued by the time I was twenty years old,” he told a Chilean newspaper in 1999. “At that age, I was a Trotskyist and what I saw in the Soviet Union was counterrevolution. I never felt I had the support for the movement of history. To the contrary, I felt quite crushed.”2
It’s a feeling that other veterans of the period know all too well. Bolaño claims to have been arrested in Chile following the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, a story that friends in Mexico later dismissed as unlikely, and to have met the leftwing Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, subsequently executed by his comrades in the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, or ERP, a meeting that has also been debunked.)3 In 1998, he published Los Detectives Salvajes, translated into English as The Savage Detectives in 2007, a sprawling novel about bad-boy literary rebels in Mexico City in which Trotsky’s great-granddaughter, the poet Verónica Volkow, makes an appearance. A half-dozen years later came 2666, which rocketed him into the literary stratosphere.
2666 is divided into five books centering on the northern Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a stand-in for Ciudad Juárez, sister city of El Paso, Texas. The first concerns a quartet of literary scholars searching for a publicity-shy German author named Benno von Archimboldi who is said to be in line for a Nobel. They discuss Archimboldi at academic conferences in Bologna, Zurich, and Toulouse, they jet back and forth from Paris and London to Madrid, and eventually wind up in Santa Teresa where the Archimboldi trail goes dry. The second concerns a Chilean-born philosophy professor, a refugee from the Pinochet coup, who has also wound up in Santa Teresa, while the third is about a black American journalist who falls in love with the professor’s daughter. Book number five is about Archimboldi himself, an 80-year-old Wehrmacht veteran who, in the book’s very last sentence, boards a flight for Santa Teresa too.
In between is book number four, “the part about the crimes,” which serves as the novel’s political and dramatic pivot. Its subject over the course of nearly 300 pages is the scores of women and girls, some as young as twelve, whose raped and mutilated bodies have been cropping up in garbage dumps, behind warehouses, and in alleyways. More than just a crime in the old-fashioned Agatha Christie sense, the “femicides,” as they came to be known, were a bourgeois horror story in a city defined by giant maquiladora assembly plants that have been spreading like mushrooms since NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect in January 1994. The maquilas turn Santa Teresa into a boom town, a drug entrepot, and a killing zone. Unions are suppressed, Yankee plant managers pay off the police, while the cops themselves while away the hours telling misogynist jokes that are not just crude but violent and hateful. (“A woman’s path lies from the kitchen to the bedroom, with a beating along the way … women are like laws, they are made to be broken.”)
Scattered along the way are detectives, prostitutes, politicians, and journalists plus the women themselves whose torn and broken bodies are described in the plainest of prose. “The victim exhibited facial trauma and minor lacerations to the chest, as well as a fatal fracture of the skull just behind the right ear,” reads one. “She was thin but not skinny, and she had long legs, full breasts, and hair past her shoulders,” reads another. “There was both vaginal and anal abrasion. After she was raped she had been stabbed to death. According to the medical examiner, she must have been between eighteen and twenty.”
And so on. Amid it all, a medium goes into a trance on local TV: “It’s Santa Teresa! It’s Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. They’re killing my daughters. My daughters! My daughters! … The police do nothing … the fucking police do nothing, they just watch, but what are they watching? what are they watching?”
What makes it all so extraordinary is that 2666 is a portrait not of individuals or of a particularly violent episode, but of a historical period marked by the same social breakdown that is the subject of Goldner’s essay. “No one pays attention to these killings,” one 2666 character remarks, “but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” The political perspective is left-oppositionist, i.e. critical of official Communism, third-world nationalism, or bourgeois liberalism, but from a leftwing viewpoint. Its modernism is striking. Bolaño eschews “the political violence of the dictator novel,” to quote one critic, and zeroes in on “the systemic violence of millennial capitalism” instead.4 “Dictator novel” in this instance refers to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and The General in his Labyrinth, which, for all their brilliance, imply that dictators are the source of evil and that everything will be better once they’re gone. From a left-oppositionist perspective, this is so much reformist twaddle since it assumes that society is otherwise normal. Get rid of that aberrant individual or outside force and harmony will return. But the Santa Teresa of 2666 is not normal. Rather than extrinsic, the violence emerges out of the system itself, one whose essential elements are NAFTA, the drug war, the IMF and international debt, plus sexism so vicious as to be nearly incomprehensible. Conditions may seem legalistic enough on the surface, but they’re out of control below,
Another left-oppositionist stand-out is 2666’s internationalism. America looms like a colossus, yet the impression it gives is that the gringos are more than happy to subcontract self-degradation to the locals, who are fully capable of doing the job themselves. 2666 is counter-patriotic. It features a prominent politician who recalls a past lover as “an asshole who thought he was a revolutionary. Mexico has an abundance of these assholes. Hopelessly stupid, arrogant men, who lose their wits when they come across an Esquivel Plata, want to fuck her right away, as if the act of possessing a woman like me were the equivalent of storming the Winter Palace.” It tells of a 1930s Moscow poetry reading in which a “bad Soviet poet (as oblivious and foolish and prissy and gutless and affected as a Mexican lyrical poet, or actually a Latin American lyrical poet, that poor stunted and bloated phenomenon) reeled off his lines on the steel industry (possessing the same crass, arrogant ignorance as a Latin American poet speaking about his self, his era, his otherness) ….” It has the professor asking at one point: “Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn’t seen yet?”
“So far from God, so close to the United States”—so goes the famous Mexican expression. To which 2666 responds in so many words: baloney. The trans-border nightmare is an international system in which the Mexican ruling class fully participates. 2666 is wearily cynical in terms of what has been done in the name of revolution so far, but is warily hopeful with regard to what might be done in the future. While staggering through the even worse hellscape of the Eastern Front during World War II, a German soldier named Hans Reiter, the future Benno von Archimboldi, has an epiphany in a deserted kolkhoz when he discovers notebooks hidden away by a Jewish Bolshevik named Boris Abramovich Ansky: “In 1930, said the notebooks, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union (although he was actually expelled in 1929, a mistake attributable to the lack of transparency in the Russian press) and Ansky’s spirits began to flag. In 1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide. By 1930, no matter how naïve or foolish one was, it was clear that the October Revolution had failed.” Reiter-Archimboldi’s last image is of Ansky leaving his hiding place, dodging the Einsatzgruppen, or Nazi death squads, and heading out to join the Soviet partisans. He still has hope even though he ends up being “felled in a hail of gunfire.” Reiter also has hope, and so, perhaps, did Bolaño too.
2666 and “The Online World Is Also on Fire” thus book-end one another. For those of us who knew Goldner, he was a remarkable figure, a linguist who spoke everything from Persian to Korean, an inveterate world traveler, and an intellectual whose idea of relaxation was to bury himself in some abstruse historical study or other, “Amazonian shamanic medicine, Jewish mysticism in 13th-century Barcelona, [or] the impact of alchemy on the history of science,” to quote his essay. Based on the innumerable literary references in 2666, Bolaño also seems to have read everyone and everything. Despite reports that he was a hard-living ex-heroin addict, his widow describes him as a homebody who drank mainly tea, ironed his clothes, ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and watched TV with the kids. (The titles of 2666’s five books, “The Part about the Critics,” “The Part about Amalfitano,” etc., are undoubtedly taken from “Friends,” whose installments are entitled “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate,” “The One with the Sonogram at the End,” or “The One with the Thumb.”) Bolaño thus also had a taste for the plebeian that Goldner most definitely did not. Still, it’s fun to imagine them meeting in some wine-dark Barceloneta dive discussing Pico della Mierandola, Bede, Augustine, and Lichtenberg, all of whom make an appearance in 2666, far into the night.
For both, the emphasis was on Marxism not as dogma but as an open-ended tool for exploration. 2666’s description of a 1920s Moscow editor seems apropos: “a dialectical and methodical and materialist and in no way dogmatic Marxist, a Marxist who as a good Marxist hadn’t studied only Marx but also Hegel and Feuerbach (and even Kant) and who laughed heartily when he reread Lichtenberg and had read Montaigne and Pascal and was relatively familiar with the writings of Fourier.”
It is a form of omni-voracious Marxism that both men subscribed to. Bolaño and Goldner approached the problem of capitalist decay from different angles and ended up with different results. But their Marxism was equally capacious.
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Mónica Maristain, Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (New York: Melville House, 2009), 12.↩︎
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Maristain, Roberto Bolaño, 46–47.↩︎
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https://www.nytimes.com/2009–01/28/arts/28iht-novelist.1.19745848.html?searchResultPosition=34, http://venepoetics.blogspot.com/2007–03/poor-poets-roque-dalton-and-roberto.html.↩︎
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Sharae Deckard, “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (September 2012), 354.↩︎