Uncomfortable Reading
Section Four of 2666 is incredibly dark. The Sonora murders, herein referred to as the Santa Teresa murders, embody the apprehensions of mayhem, helplessness and terror that plague the characters, most of whom are intellectuals by trade, in Parts One, Two and Three, but Four is “The Part About the Crimes.” It is horrific. I have described it as a litany of deaths, over two hundred pages. Many women’s names were never known; many are similar in appearance and must be differentiated by the few items of clothing in which they were found; many were victims of similar crimes—vaginal and anal rape, murder by strangulation and fracture of the hyoid bone. Bolaño writes about each case with great care. It is fiction but he seems to take great pains to present every available detail, which nevertheless rarely takes up more than a page and a half of space. The bodies pile up, the women begin to blend together, but still it continues. The stories of the police inspectors, interwoven with those of the women (none of the inspectors are women) take up more space. The inspectors undergo training, pursue romantic involvements, solve other cases. No one solves the murders, at least not so far, and I’m about halfway through.
This morning on the subway I read an account so unsettling I almost fell over. It is about a bunch of young gangsters, recently jailed, locked up and tortured in the prison laundry room by a group of inmates, while the guards look on. I won’t quote from it because the passage is intricately constructed and extracting one or two of the more immediately disturbing lines would sensationalize the writing. But my stomach dropped as I read, my knees felt week, and I had to stop and rest the galley on my hip while drawing a few deep breaths. We were under the East River. I spent the day wondering whether I should be reading such things. How is this sort of reading any different from tabloid consumption or reality TV? Does reading about atrocities make us callous, or does it help us understand? Are responses beyond the knee-jerk “this is bad” even necessary? We know the murders are bad, and we know, to use a similar case of recent nonfiction writing, that the torture Philip Gourevitch describes in Standard Operating Procedure is bad. Is there any point in pushing beyond that?
The thought that I come back to is that if, too use a metaphor that’s perhaps simplistic, there is really a monster under your bed, ready to attack, you’d best pull up the covers and get a good look at it. Then it may turn out to be only a pile of dirty socks and junk mail, no monster after all. Or, is the case here, it may be that the accretion of familiar objects has really coalesced into a malignant creature, and maybe you can disassemble it or at the very least remain separate by maintaining your ability to see, really see it.
Also that, in writing the horrific, narratives, at least traditional narratives that purport to make sense of things, may read like arrogant nonsense. A recitation, hewing as closely as possible to the bare facts, is all we can swallow. As Bolaño’s novel draws closer and closer to the murders, it seems less and less like a fiction.
