This will probably be a bit scattered. I feel like Antwerp is an intensely layered book, and I’m having a hard time conceiving of discussion points for it that don’t leave out a lot of the other things that were so interesting. Anyway, I hope what follows has at least a grasping point for some further readings that I’m very interested in reading about.
Antwerp :
1. Filmic
2. Hallucination
3. How to approach? Is it like an excerpt from an unfinished novel?
In thinking about Antwerp and the way it composes itself, as these prose blocks/prose poems (what are these? do we care?) unfold, as a collection of hallucinatory films.
1. Film and film, filminess, filmicness
The book sways between two modes for me—one that is filmic, takes on a movie-like quality, takes on that language explicitly, and a second that operates through a film/screen, again, sometimes explicitly, but also often atmospherically.
Filmic:
Here, I’m interested in the idea of writer-as-cameraman, observer-as-moviemaker. It’s an intentional move, with phrases like “fade to black” and “synopsis” appearing several times throughout the book, but I’m curious about exactly what effect this gives. For me, at first, it made me feel as though the “speaker” of the text (are there one, or a few?) was moving toward a position as a kind of director, but this didn’t last long, as we are consistently bombarded with scenes that the observer is only a watcher to—not implicated directly, but somehow vaguely associated with the girls in the scenes. I’m thinking particularly about pieces involving a girl having sex with a cop, like page 37. The cop in this scene, as a cop, has “overcome all the risks of the gaze” which enables him to take full part in the scene, as he has the ability to turn out a light, tune out the photographs, and carry on. The position this places the speaker in, then, is one of a kind of ultimate-gaze. The speaker is forever lights-on, which makes me wonder if he’s some kind of victim of the scene.
Filmy:
While the speaker, for me, has an ultimate-gaze in that he is forever and irreversibly the gazer, he is also constantly gazing through a kind of screen. Sometimes its hair—blonde hair pops up constantly (the hair of the Mexican girl, who he is in love with? Who Bolano is in love with?) and overtakes the vision of the scene. Some scenes are “fuzzy,” (36) and on page 22:
“On the wall someone has written my one true love. She puts a cigarette…”
The barrier between the wall and the love seems to be the writing, which becomes a screen and a transition marker, and each time this woman appears, she appears through this lovescreen. On 25, similarly, we have a fuzzy beach scene whose details are guessed at, at best. The ultimate-gaze seems to stop at these points, seems to be disrupted, and for me, makes an otherwise pretty choppy, sharp book take on these murky, aqueous qualities, which makes me feel like I’m reading it through
water.
2. Hallucination/Dream/Memory/Perception
There’s some dreaming going on here. Specifically, dreams of mouthless women (15). And often, I get the impression that some places here are more spectral or more real than others. When there are campgrounds and battlefields, these seem somehow more real than named places. We know that technically it is in Barcelona, and sometimes travels to Portugal and thinks about Antwerp a lot, but the named places seem like little more than their name to me. This brings my reading back to the idea of hallucination. I almost feel as though these places are complete fabrications in the world of this book.
3. How do we piece this together?
I had a hard time finding a lot of reference material for this, and one of the more amusing things I came across was some dude’s blog review. (http://www.mikeettner.com/04/2010/antwerp-by-roberto-bolano/).
He finds that there isn’t much storyline to latch onto like other Bolano novels, though I doubt that this matters to any of us. If it does, please do tell.
He finds that only devoted Bolano fans will like it. Hmm. I disagree.
He also cites the preface, and Bolano’s scattershot approach. This added to my impression of being in a kind of hallucinatory bubble—there is, for me, this constant shift between pieces of the way that scenes are perceived, with only threads in common to connect them—a Mexican girl, a redheaded girl, the hunchback, etc.
Anyway, what the blogger is curious about is how exactly to piece the book together. My approach was akin to watching choppily put together early films like Battleship Potemkin where scenes are spliced, dramatic pans in and out are par for the course, and the drama is high, yes, but the scenes are still almost syrupy in their drama, slow and dreamlike.
This is getting too long, but other things I’m interested in hearing about:
1. The hunchback
2. Who is Bolano in the world of this book?
3. I found Antwerp to be really unique in regards to what we've been reading so far. That is, there wasn't an immediate comparison for me between it and others we've read stylistically. In regard to thematic links, I think we deduced, when comparing Reines and Zurita, that smart, creative people can basically make connections between anything--so I'm interested in hearing about some of those as well. It isn't particularly my natural reading-mode personally.
Thanks for the great post Amy; your thoughts totally echoed mine in a bunch of places here but the one that stands out to me most is the filmic/filmy aspects, so that’s where I’ll go. (Sorry I don’t have anything to offer about the hunchback, other than maybe the recognition that the speaker/writer/Bolano is aware of the hunchback’s actions at times when he is not capable of seeing or witnessing him, which suggests again this sort of hallucination-syrupy-dream aspect of the book where intimate actions which cannot have been witnesses become foregrounded and seen through the filmy veil of words on a page…)
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading Antwerp, I was immediately taken in by these filmic aspects; last semester I learned a healthy appreciation for the silent film from my German cinema course, and as I was reading Antwerp, scenes from these films were flashing back through my mind in a more sinister and yet equally appealing light—I won’t go so far as to say that all of Antwerp functions as a silent film, does but there are numerous comparisons which I think bear discussion.
It’s said that when the first viewers went to see the first movies, many people fainted or had to leave the already short films early, because their brains simply could not take the rush of image from such a foreign medium and they all developed massive headaches. This is Antwerp all over again—or Antwerp is the introduction of the silent film all over again, in yet another new medium, transforming the elements which shocked and overwhelmed audiences on a silver screen in a dark theatre into ink words between black covers with silver screening. Film students last semester were quick to inform me that film filled a niche which no other form of art can imitate—theatre but even better, because film preserves eternally the single, supposedly edited and perfected performance—visible in a way that literary forms traditionally are not. Bolano’s novel challenges this notion, collapsing the two forms to produce prose (poems) which rely on film gestures to convey meaning or image. The effect is as remarkable and simultaneously fragmented as you’d expect.
And yet the fragmented/dream-like/filmy nature of the text slots almost neatly into the construction of a silent film (of film in general): although we have now traveled into the digital film age, the traditional format for film is the one we all remember, a series of stills on a strip, played so quickly one after another that spectators saw them as moving pictures, rather than individual glimpses—but inspecting the film strip physically reveals the trick; the human eye cannot travel from image to image on the strip fast enough to perceive the movement, and what we are left with are ghostly jumps, an arm in one place and then in another, with a thousand points of articulation left out in between. Bolano’s Antwerp IS this, is the jumps between nameless girl with the cop, nameless girl on the street, Englishman at the campground, the blurry photographs, the hunchback—these elements interact like stills on a film strip, impossible to grasp physically but encouraging (exuding) the belief that a coherent narrative arc exists somewhere just outside our ability to perceive it, that the mystery of these characters’ relations and the death that haunts the text can be solved—if we could hold this book up to a projector, blow it up in a way that closes all the haunting gaps between frames.
ReplyDelete(But we can’t. There is no way to convert the words of Antwerp into a film, and if someone were to try I wouldn’t want to see it.)
The filminess which Amy talks about also fits into this sort of bizarre transference of medium: a film reel itself is half transparent, always a pale reproduction, capable of being cut up and stuck back together with scissors and tape and operating in this edited, fractured manner as if it were whole. This sort of “screen” that Amy perceives I see as a sort of eye scanning the stills, the distance between the one responsible for editing the film—or the one playing it—and the one depicted in the film. In the amateur business and in the past, actors are/were often also directors or editors of the work, tasked with excising images of themselves, remembering their personal failures and re-sorting the successful takes into a single, coherent body.
Antwerp feels like the first reel, with the mistakes very purposefully left in, all the “cut!”s and accidental lines, all the personal things that were supposed to be off-screen still there, the director’s voice (the speaker) rolling over it all, synopsizing and taking things back. The transitions are abrupt, the characters purposefully undefined, haunting the spaces provided—the beach, the campground, the city—with unclear motivations, conflicting aims, and extrasensory knowledge… all of which unsettle us as spectators, distance us from the immediate action by asking us first to consider the construction.
Two other (connected) things in the text brought silent films to mind for me: first, most obviously, the dreams of mouthless women. This is the silent film to the extreme, an evolution of the human body reflecting art, the women as grotesque as they are likely to be alluring, incapable of speech and yet capable of existing, presumably of acting, of furthering a dream as characters in a film further the narrative (or destroy it). A woman with no mouth in today’s age would be unfailingly disturbing; a woman without a mouth in a silent film could be a source of awe like whales and dolphins in the sea—evolved beyond the vestigial structure of the tongue, more closely suited to her artificial purpose.
ReplyDeleteLastly, the text in quotes, which interrupts and often ends the prose (poems) seemed to operate for me the same way intertitles work in silent films; that is, these are not “voices”—we read them to ourselves but cannot hear them, and there is very little evidence to suggest that those directly within the work hear them either—they exist very intentionally as words on the page, given quotation marks not to indicate a vocalization but to indicate difference, a multitude of additional information interjected into the images and actions to fortify (or complicate) this mystery which exists just outside of our total perception. The characters sprayed across the pages—the ones with mouths, at least—seem to be full of these voices, their film stills covered over by black screens and silver words to proclaim the sounds they themselves cannot make.
This is getting long enough, so I’ll leave some of the other points up to everyone else to discuss… One thing that did interest me though, which wasn’t mentioned, was the role of monsters in this book: the transparent dragon from earlier on, the Nagas which appear at the end, even the hunchback—these things seem significant, but I am not sure how to make sense of them all. Monsters = silent films?
I concur with Amy and Amanda. The book had a explicit cinematic aspect to it. Bolano invariably employs movie vocabulary. On 27, a “camera zooms out” on a couple in a cozy room. There’s a “purple-tinted scene” on 47, and a “scene of policeman rushing into a grey building” on 62. Surely, there’s more, but I’ll cease supplying examples and commence articulating insights (hopefully).
ReplyDeleteThough the book may borrow heavily from movie discourse, the book is not a movie. It’s a text. We are reading it and not watching it. What is the difference? There is materiality and definiteness to the film medium. Watching a girl get her asshole fingered by a police officer is decidedly different from reading about a girl getting her ass probed by a cop. If Bolano’s literary executives turned this book into a movie, it would probably be considered pornography. There’s a fair amount of detailed sex. Not just the fingered-asshole girl, but also the girl on all fours (22), and another girl who gets vibrated by another cop. Showing this on a big screen externalizes the sex and would make it communal -- everyone could see it. We’d all be in a sordid movie theater in 80s New York commenting on the features of the girl and the sadistic attributes of the policeman. The communal conversation would be enabled by the actual, tangible images – we’re all seeing the same thing.
But in book form, we’re not all seeing the same thing. There is no concomitant physicality. If I’m reading about a girl on all fours (as opposed to watching her) and my BFF is reading the same book about the same girl on all fours we could have completely different ideas about what she looks like. She could have small elbows, large elbows – three scabs on her knee or only one scab on her left knee. The absence of exteriority and tangibility enables an infinite amount of possibilities for how the girl looks, the hunchback looks, the Jewish girl looks. Joan Didion said that writing invades the most private space. I concur with her. But it’s a consensual invasion. Bolano, during the period I read the book, took over my mind. The graphic sex scenes did not take place outside in society where people like Barack Obama and Thomas Friedman live. The scenes took place in my mind, a mysterious place that is immune to all laws, because there is no materiality to pure thoughts. You cannot exhibit a thought in a court case, and no one can picture the hunchback the way that I pictured the hunchback, which renders me special, and literature special as well. Because only I know how the hunchback should properly look.
Though Antwerp does have some materiality to it, it doesn’t exist on air. It’s a hardback, compact, book with gold on the front, back, and spine. The design of the book complimented its contents. The back mixed with gold is odious. It reminded of me of drug-dealers – black boys with gold chains (that is not racist, by the way, as I harbor only admiration for blacks boy with gold chains, especially black boys with gold chains who can rap like no others). Also, the black-coloring as night. Night is mysterious, it’s dark, it’s hard to see things clearly. This is what happened while I was reading the book. I found it hard to discern from one cop to the next. Were they all the same? Were they all different? Did Bolano create a legion of cops whose primary purpose is to have sex with girls? The girls, too, lacked names. We have nameless cops and nameless girls getting it on. So they’re strangers, there’s an alienating affect. The estrangement is emphasized by Bolano’s constant use of film diction. It’s like he’s trying to trick us, to get us to believe that we’re NOT reading a book -- that we ARE in a movie? In this sense, Bolano harnesses the Rhizome ethos – he is pointing towards something else. He’s not content with only making a book, he wants to make a movie as well. The warlord-aspect of the Rhizome is evinced in Bolano’s huge prose blocks. The chapters, the longs ones, are like massive columns of armies marching across the page. There are no paragraph/line breaks – no chance to get some oxygen or wave a white flag (like Germany WWI and II). It’s an enveloping form: once you begin it, you have to keep going until it reaches the end.
ReplyDeleteI feel much the same way about Antwerp – multi-layered and somewhat difficult to talk about esp after one read – I think this book requires several readings – I felt lost in the images – less guided and more immersed or drowned in the images and words… the quotes too – I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with them. All the pieces/poems seem like vignettes – (for me) reminiscent of The House on Mango Street – structurally – given bits and pieces of a story though I’m not sure what that larger story is… I also felt unsure of the setting – where I was – not necessarily geographically but more locale – a city? The desert? Small town(s)? all the vignettes seemed to morph into one another – undulate and reflect and reoccur… I also must say that I felt a little resistant when I started to read because Bolaño’s indictment of Zurita – in Distant Star – which I have not read – but felt wary all the same if that makes sense?
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree – filmic and hallucinatory – and yeah – I do think that it feels like an unfinished novel – the most extreme in medias res – both beginning and ending in the same way – in the middle without tethers or ropes or links to anything else it seems. I think approaching it as a series (I use the word “series” quite loosely) of vignettes is the only way that I can make sense of it – the recurrence of characters or people – such as the red-haired girl and the hunchback and the cop make me think that I’m looping in time or in a way I keep driving around the block and but each time I go around I run into a different scene – if that makes sense? and each of those constitutes a vignette.
In regard to filmic-ness I’m kind of thinking along the lines of the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin – I’m not sure how that makes sense – but something relating to the sequencing of the montage which seems to be an unsequenced-sequence much like Antwerp is a sequence-unsequence of vignettes though the images move in a sort of disconnected way that feels like montage – all the ellipses leave room for missing material and connections that the reader must make the jump between much like a montage which jumps from scene to scene – there are tight ellipses and the viewer must make the link between the images. However, I do find that it is much more difficult to make the connections/links/jumps in Antwerp than in a visual sequence. The poems are also like jump cuts in film – each vignette is perhaps a different angle of the same scene or perhaps different eyes on the same scene. There is definitely a hallucinatory quality to the work – I think that part of it is the kind of jump cut discontinousness in the narrative that makes the scenes all very dreamy and hallucinatory. The ellipses make for a dream-like quality making a certain floaty-ness in the text rather than the speed of the Odessa steps montage – rather it gives a sense of lingering on an image/word and then slowly then abruptly cutting away. And the quotations seem to be disembodied - the voices come from nowhere and no one – they overlap with one another because they are disconnected from a very specific voice – they’re not necessarily assigned to characters (perhaps they are but there are no designations) - making the voices spectral/ghostly. I’m not sure that there is a central speaker in the novel/poems either which also adds to the effect of vignettes – I feel like the voices overlap though I’m not sure if they’re a cohesive one. I feel like the voice is cycling and recycling itself but it is not quite the same voice as before or after…
I remember that line too – “overcome all the risks of gaze” I wondered about that and that idea that the gaze in film is often the male gaze – Laura Mulvey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey - or maybe is should say – *is* the male gaze. So I was wondering if he was somehow resistant to this gaze as a form of domination - but also thought of the line through film as if somehow the gaze within film had somehow erupted into reality –spilled over into another dimension so to speak so that there is no longer a film world but a kind of film/reality – reality/film world that’s all mashed together – much like the vignettes and voices in the poems.
ReplyDeleteYes and I also like this idea of screens – or I’m thinking more along the lines of filters for a lens – much like the eyes – rose colored glasses per se – but you get the gist I’m sure – all the scenes are filtered – even kind of distilled to a point with all the drops collected in different bottles and mixed to create discontinuous scenes – all fuzzy and dreamy/hallucinatory – as Amy aptly says: aqueous.
I disagree with the dude too – think that there is a lot more than just threads though I cannot exactly say what – there is a sense of continuity that comes with vignettes – much like The House on Mango Street – the scenes are connected – and for some reason – The Bluest Eye was like that for me too – or at least in my memory it functions more like vignettes than a cohesive novel. There are more than characters that connect these scenes – and those characters are more than threads throughout the poems – I think it’s over simplifying the book to narrow down the characters to threads and to present the poems as disparate pieces.
I wondered who the hunchback was too – and what they represented – who they represented and what the purpose of the hunchback was. I became more aware of the hunchback through the second half of the book – as well as the red-head … more later…
1. I approached antwerp with zero expectations, not in the sense that I thought it might be bad, but because it seemed incomparable before I even opened it. like seth, I had an intense reaction to the visual aesthetic of the book object, but mine was just the opposite – I like that the object (at least my copy) doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be – this pocket-sized hardcover black and gold embossed volume evokes poetry book/fancy literary fiction/bestselling novel/bible/gang-initiation guide/etc. & all at once.
ReplyDeletethe day I finished it I carried it around chicago with me all day because it matched my outfit perfectly. re-purposed as an accessory, the book, which is already both in and outside of it’s own “realm,” so to speak, took another step into the margins of functionality. I’m really interested in amanda’s comments about the possibility of the monster as or as representative of silent film in the sense that I think the book-object (which encompasses the text-object) could be a kind of monster, the star of its own silent film.
antwerp exists in a fragmented, collaged, looping moment of time, like a soundless film reel skipping, a sort of initiation rite. the reader/viewer is coerced by the text precisely because it cannot exist at any fixed point on the grid of accepted social structure, so the reader/viewer is pulled into the same liminal space as the book and becomes a like being.
so in this sense the text is vampiric – it engages/bites, infects, forces the spectator outside of their body/space and into a refigured body/space that is determined by the reality of the text. the infection-ritual of reading this fragmented text creates a culture unto itself that can only exist inside of it. so, the cop that has transcended gaze so that he may fully participate in the sex act can do so because he exists inside of a reality that is determined by the internal glitches of a text (which is internal, both in the physical sense that it is inside of the book but also because it is of the exterior “reality”) which create their own exterior.
I think the process of reading the book is really similar. it’s difficult to parse out this text in “normal” terms because it isn’t a normal text, it’s a monster – an active one, one which doesn’t adhere to the systems in which we are generally enmeshed.
2. antwerp seems inherently dissociative, a quality which carries with it a lot of designations/stigma/gut-reactions. the dissociative is always fragmented, “spacey,” disabled. dissociative beings cannot rely on their own memories because memory is the specific organ that is altered by dissociation. how important is the memory of a text? in antwerp, it seems crucial. the plot, so to speak, operates based on a series of dissociative ticks. the text remembers a fragment of an experience but it is not locatable, so the text must generate a new location in which to position the regurgitated memory. so every new block of text is an entirely new location but it is also a reappropriation of an existing space, a translation through a sort of filmic medium. because of this the book as a whole is not actually locatable. it isn’t “in” or “of” a “genre” or accepted formal structure. it has a definite body which should be recognizable as a Book but ultimately is not.
3. I think it was kim who mentioned that this feels like an unfinished novel. I’d like to posit that perhaps it is not unfinished but simply unconcerned with becoming-finished, or perhaps “finished” is a term that either doesn’t exist or bears an entirely different meaning in the reality of the text. surely one can imagine each of these prose-poem-like-entities being expanded into “whole” chapters, the plot being “fleshed-out,” the narrative coming to an “end,” everything nearly tied and packaged into a total experience for the reader/spectator. that book could exist but that book would not be antwerp. part of antwerp’s identity is its monstrosity, its dissociation, its non-locateability.
Thanks, Amy and everyone else, for your insights thus far. I’ll do my best to respond to some of these really fascinating points and contribute to the discussion.
ReplyDeleteAmy describes the text as having a kind of “atmospheric” quality, and I very much agree. This is a book with its own weather. In thinking about the filmi(c)ness of the text (and Amanda’s discussion of silent films), I was reminded of the “breathing gaze” described in Ventrakl: “a gaze that empties itself of speech, of words, a breathing gaze, where surfaces and faces contract on the inhale, expand on the exhale, a breathing gaze, a blue pond” (67). (While Hawkey is describing here the “the silence of one who could speak, but chooses not to” or “the silence of one who chooses to speak for things which have no words, no language, no human language,” Bolano’s text presents these mouthless or speechless faces in dreams: “I dream of faces that open their mouths and can’t speak. They try but they can’t. Their blue eyes stare at me but they can’t”) (Hawkey 67, Bolano 61)).
Antwerp feels dank to me—as if this “breathing gaze” might be producing a kind of crupe (sounds expelled and/or disconnected from bodies: a barking cough becomes part of this textual weather). We become, as Carina and Kim have suggested, entrenched in this liminal realm—just as the redheaded girl is tethered to the fog (“She says to the fog: ‘it’s all right, I’m staying here with you’…”) (48). Wind registers here as a presence through the absence of stillness; bodies bud with goosebumps and quake with shivers (49). Footsteps, too, indicate, an image in silence or a sound in space—if that makes sense, suggesting both presence and absence across the text, as might be the case here on page 25: “There’s something written in the sand. Maybe it’s a name, maybe not, it might just be the photographer’s footsteps.” The book (as Carina suggests) is coercive—and also (like Ventrakl, I think) coarse in its texture and materiality. Amanda has already suggested that the quotations mark not vocalization but difference (and Seth makes a good point about the book as an object); here I was drawn to the passage on page 30 in which we have a visual—inarticulatable representation (though I could imagine the gesture that might convey this frequency/sea) contained in quotes “‘When I was a boy a boy I used to dream something like this [I can’t replicate it here].” In this sense, the text is tethered to the book—the object itself is both stagnant and urgent.
I wonder if it might be possible, then, to consider Antwerp as a kind of wake (“the secret sickness” that comes to signify that “the foreigner ‘isn’t well’”—“the sickness is a wake,” writes Bolano in “Summer”). The author appears and we have, “‘The summer somewhere,’ sentences lacking tranquility, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the still lens of the camera” (69).The sickness is directed but it’s also determining. If a wake is a kind of gathering over a body (corpse) as well as a kind of purgatorial state (a ritualistic endeavor involving an (impossible) attempt at piecing together which is at once both collective and individual like the kind of cuts of the same scene Kim discusses—a presence figured in the negative space of absence somehow, demanding a kind of ventriloquizing), it is also a stillness as well as a trace. (This swerving passage seems to do this kind of work: “An obsessive boy. Actually, what I mean is, if you knew him, you couldn’t stop thinking about him”—as the body/character is inverted or exposed somehow—a tearing apart which is becoming part of the weather of the book—a ghosting, if this makes sense? (49)). The word “kaput” registers this way for me across the text—a kind of magic presence-absence, a defuncting but not a falling away.
Interesting discussion so far. Thanks for a nice lead Amy. I am very much in agreement with the points made. Antwerp felt to me like a hallucinogenic crime journal. There is this concrete feel of the policemen, the war, the women, rooms, hunchback, etc., but in some strange beautiful way the grittiness of a policeman’s voice is laced into some surreal fantasy. So it left me unsure of who was speaking or physical location of the speaker? The writer is a dirty man, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat, hauling barrels of garbage. He’s also the waiter a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach… (p. 69) It seems to me the speaker transforms himself into all concrete imagery within the book. In some way he is the film being played against a sheet in the woods and this meets right up with Amy’s insights on the filmic qualities of the book.
ReplyDeleteI couldn’t help but try to figure out what place the writer was speaking from. I very much wanted to feel Antwerp in a book called Antwerp and was really disappointed that it didn’t match up with my own memories. The closest I seemed to get was the girl from Brussels and a pig truck killing pigs and humans alike. But something Jen wrote sparked the idea that he did paint Antwerp in a very surreal, distant way. Jen talked about this “dank” quality or feel. My memories of Antwerp are nothing but flatness, Rembrandt and bicycles. If you took away the bicycles you’d still just have this flatness. Kind of like the flatness of the sheet used as a movie screen. So maybe in some far reach, Bolano did paint the city after which the book was named.
Lastly, I’d like to compare Antwerp and David Lynch. This book reminded me a bit of Inland Empire in the surreal quality of physical space and speaker’s identity. What the book more closely reminded me of was the TV series Twin Peaks by David Lynch. Twin Peaks is basically a crime story that follows a police/FBI investigation of a young girls murder in a small town. I’m including some links below for anyone who might be interested. I chose the links in hopes of illustrating some similarities.
I see four themes that can be found in both stories. First, are the crime/police elements. The second shared imagery is the portrayal of the natural world. There is an odd peace in the woods scene in Antwerp butts up against the modern or technical elements of man. As in Twin Peaks, the beauty of that surrounds the town clashes with the brutality of the human activities. The third is the similarity in the mysterious figures with physical characteristics that are labeled as abnormalities, the hunchback for Bolano, and for Lynch there is the giant man and the dwarf. These characters are observers who go unnoticed in the day-to-day, but in some mystical stream hold all observations and carry the answers and wisdom to solve whatever puzzle. The giant and the dwarf know who killed the young girl and much more. Just as the hunchback knows what killed the Belge girl and what is in the silence. The fourth link is the blurriness of identity or knowing another’s identity. As Amy asks “who is Bolano in this book?” I’m still not sure, reminding me of the final scene of Twin Peaks, who is Agent Cooper? And how is Annie?
Twin Peaks First Episode: (Sets the Crime Scene)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFbUPzu_jc
Twin Peaks Black Lodge Scene: (The Surreal Seers)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMiXphbCR04&feature=related
Twin Peaks Last Scene: (Blurred Identity)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rjJ51N7qZY&feature=related
Yes, insanely good book...my first taste of Bolano actually, and all things considered that might be a good thing. That is to say, if it is really in some way a 'big bang' of his work, as someone or other said about it in one of the back pages.
ReplyDeleteThis 'big bang' metaphor was one I latched on to and was really taken with. Surely it's a clever and accurate way of contextualizing Antwerp in the landscape of the rest of Bolano's work, but I also set it on my shoulder so to speak when thinking about the nature of the book. I agree with whoever said that 'incomplete' doesn't feel like an accurate description. 'Fragmentary' is tempting but again this implies some past or future 'whole' that I don't think is present. I like 'monster' in some sense but it feels too powerful to me--in a way I can't really articulate the word 'crippled' comes to mind, though that also denotes some whole that has been undercut. It feels almost impossible to use any language that feels right without using something that calls back to some whole that has been broken.
So I feel left with the big bang, which makes the easy leap in my mind to an idea of stars, their light / visibility; what I mean to say is I feel in Antwerp that there are many more stars somewhere sending their words but they're too far away, haven't survived the time/distance of the lightyears between us and have become the dark interstitial patches in the sky--the more I think on this metaphor the more it works for me, the weird way things go together but don't--think of your peripheral vision picking up faint stars you can't see looking directly at them. Some light isn't making it through the atmosphere (yes, it's so very atmospheric, I'm obsessed with it's 'weather').
Like the real big bang, the certainty of it / the absolute mystery of it, Antwerp feels like something that will never add up, even if there were really more pieces we don't have access to (something that feels true and false, equally, to me, thus all my trouble articulating my thoughts on it). Interesting to think about the conventions of the crime novel genre, the way all details are potentially important, the 'whodunit' ending turn so pivotal, and these things completely lost and surpassed in Antwerp but more abstract presences.
I found the many many filmic language markers interesting to a degree, but the text never felt like a cinematic experience to any degree at all, which made those markers perhaps all the more interesting. Strange there's an audience occasionally with applause / noise / whatever, but as the reader I certainly never felt part of it, like I was a tertiary spectator. I felt like an omnipresent viewer, present but invisible though not 'omni' really as of course we're never in total control of what we see.
I was floored by the many 1-/2-/3- liners, their aphoristic kick without the feeling of closing anything off / labeling anything too narrowly.
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ReplyDeleteThanks Amy for great start
ReplyDeleteLike Amy, I also saw filmic quality in Antwerp; but it’s a film that keeps puncturing itself to show that this writing is on page, paper, that implies the binding of literary references (Shakespeare), but it again rejects that binding and brings us back to the scene, when we already lost the belief in transparency, its imitation of cinema; we are aware of artificial absorptive quality of this piece, yet like being sucked into dreams, we are again seeing the cinema. This medium-aware writing, again agreeing with Amy, was almost hallucinatory, the “fuzzy”ness reminded me of the time when I had to walk to the health center in undergrad, feverish; oddly aware of my body’s movement, everything floating and oddly artificial—some oddly clear&3D movie like, some fuzzy&remaining as background out of focus—and I seemed to know everybody passing by, recognizing everyone to be somebody I know.
This relates to the recurring figures issue. I too saw connections between recurring figures without names but social status, job, and gender. In a way, everybody is mouthless, not just the women; there is “the voice” that interrupts people with speech without body; there is intentional confusion and disorientation from where the voice is coming from; there is nameless girl spreading her legs instead of opening her mouth(37); hunchback—the deformed person the gender of which we do not know – who speaks with (or does he?) with the voice “asking himself”(18), and of course he/she becomes the fuzzy image that retreats; even the job like cop deprives the character of its physical mouth but symbolic body.
In a similar way, spatial references --other cities seemed to be actively (and literally) disorienting the reader, just like when the readers are at loss at who is speaking, crippling them and making them transported with the train that goes to the wrong way. This disorientation gives illusion of body, constant presence, “(cough)” and “(Applause)”: ironically, the stage-direction-like writing is giving the illusions of present body. Medium has already eaten our bodies. Most deceptively(in a good interesting way, I mean), the stutter, deformed tongue/language gives the illusion of body: “you c-c-can’t g-g-go b-b-back.” Speaking this there is a struggle to the right way, the speaker wants to speak “you can’t go back”. It is the realization that the train is going to the “wrong” way, supposedly knowing there is right way. Stutter resists disorientation, and stutter belongs to foreigner who seems to be wanting to stay. And the voice without stutter easily orders “Go back.” the illusion of the body through struggling tongue is instantly extinguished. Likewise the sense of direction is taken away.
There is, no doubt, rhizomatic writing at work, rhizome crawling over our brain that registers spatiality, temporality, medium and supposed “reality”, spreading its spore everywhere, blooming and eating up everything. Our brains are gone, the locations that register are gone; media ate them all. Disguises of quotation marks, voices, mouths...I’m interested in rhizome as simulacra-lies, that eats up the boundary between so-called-reality and medium(simulacra) and lies (artifice, untrustworthy unlike the “reality”, quotation marks). I’m really excited about this work and want to explore more.
There is a spectrum of scope in the poems in Antwerp which ranges from direct close ups on particular scenes all way to panoramic views. I would argue however that whatever the scope of a particular poem, all of the poems in this book individually unfold so that its scope widens as it unfolds. An example of the former type of poem, the close up, is 11, because of the way narrative works to tell the story of a man’s quest for a woman. ( Though this thought can be undermined by the two things: The dream, and the stories he writes). Nevertheless, the narrative feature serves to widen the scope of our conception of the him of the poem as a character. The other type of poem, what I’m calling the panoramic view, an example of which would be 20, does not focus on a narrative but brings into focus a number of themes/ things that come up in other poems...the narrative is not driven by plot, character or narrative, but by gathering as much divergent material into its focus as possible. But, like the more narrowly narrative poems, poems of this type widen in scope as they progress. For example, we begin with a “synopsis” and a report on the hunchback. But then we jump to Barcelona (is that where the hunchback is?) and the South American begets cops begets wind. Causality is not direct but what is captured in the frame.
ReplyDeleteI’m thinking of the book as a newscast on a gigantic screen, with lots of little boxes (akin to those in the corner of a regular newscast) all playing simultaneously, and some of them overlap, and some boxes pause & restart at their own whim, and all the while you are trying to make sense of the large screen, but it is directing you one of the smaller ones, but as your eyes move downwards they are caught by another image and you try to watch the visually interesting one and the one to which you were directed but only catch 10% of either of them. This type of viewing experience is akin to how I experience this book by way of narrative, because I can try to paste things together, but with the bevy of decontextualized fragments I have been handed, such an action seems nigh impossible.
I, too, am taken with the gaze that guides us in Antwerp. And the movement. And how everything is happening on a grid, along straight lines, butting up against dense blinding chunks of opacity/transparency; against which the foreground presents as indistinct moving shadows; through lenses blurred/hazed by smoke, filth, discontinuous story-scenes; blurred and relief-sharpened by a synesthesia. The close-up center is where outside edge of inside meets outside edge of outside, is the mostly visual sensory of this man, our character, who registers the environment as his intimate/filled in and emptied out, with projections/reflections of his close experience, panned out to extrapolate a data piece, maintaining a pace, a momentum steady and unhurried in midst of a constant immanent tense. Running commentary indistinct from description (indistinct of from the interior-self or from an observer/describer-other) indistinct from scene/setting, which rides in like tiny anchor points to plot out the faint outline of the Story that occurs tangential to his interior, which he is internally always far from and right up against at the same time, flung out and tethered, but never in a desperate, always in a control through a thin nihilism edged by a drama.
ReplyDeleteWe are plunged into a movement and consciousness pregnant with a History.
It isn’t front faces or full views, it is tangential glances and backs of backs and purposefully partially obstructed sight lines, no view held for a length, or jerked away from. A sight arises and leaves like the natural life cycle of a transitory thought, like when one rides a train, passing through them like landscape. The ubiquity of the cigarette and the cigarette lighter used for myriad purposes (to enable stranger connections, to provide light, a half-conscious gesture filling in ambivalent spaces between movements with a throw-away intentionality) render scenes and fragment dialogues and memories and (-un, or) inhabited perspective as equal combustibles—separate and distinct and inert as discrete units unfurling in a rhizomatic pattern.