Herlinghaus - Pharmakon To Femicide - Narcoepics

Herlinghaus, Hermann. "From “Pharmakon” to Femicide: 2666 (Roberto Bolaño).
" Narcoepics:
A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 157–232. Bloomsbury
Collections. Web. 13 May 2023. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472543721.ch-006>.
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6
From “Pharmakon” to Femicide:

2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
I did not feel indebted to the boom in any way.

Roberto Bolaño
Thinking from the “Pharmakon,” approaching

literature otherwise
New books, to the extent that they become pathbreaking, tend to realign interpretive
endeavors and concepts along their imaginary trajectories. This happens all the more
avidly, the more these books stand in the way of proven categorial conventions. In other
words, there cannot be an equilibrium between a formative narrative energy as it unfolds
under the impact of obsession, illumination, and—to put it in a more visceral way—
“hunger,” and the existing academic and advertising apparatus of sense-making. Roberto
Bolaño continues to incite, especially since his tragic demise, an increasing academic
interest that, not surprisingly, carries the weight of progressive specialization. Interpreters
have placed his works alternatively within the parameters of detective fiction—or the
black novel—or within a new cosmopolitan Latin American prose, built on the ruins of
national cultural values, a literature of redemption, or even late sequels to Julio Cortázar’s
Rayuela and Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosaires.1 There is an ongoing search for
metaphors that can help capture the provocative aspects of the writings of the Chilean
author. Nevertheless, the astonishment that results from Bolaño’s imaginings, fused into
a strange narrative “machinery,” persists.2 It seems that there is no single, specialized
approach that can make Bolaño’s adventure accessible to interpretation, an adventure
that is somatic and conceptual, fictional and existential, dialectical and pedagogical at
the same time. Among the novels that we have discussed so far, 2666 is the one that
relates, perhaps most provocatively, to the dialectic expressed in Benjamin’s comment on
Brecht—it leads us to focus on a work and an attitude that resemble “a total absence of
illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.”
1
See Heinrich von Berenberg, Jorge Herralde, Ignacio Echeverría, Rodrigo Fresán. “Roberto Bolaño:
adalid de una nueva literatura,” 74.
2
See ibid., 75.
9781441121981_Ch06_Final_txt_print.indd 157 12/18/2001 2:15:04 PM

158 Narcoepics
The international literary market of the last decade has been in obvious need of a
new Latin American prodigy of the stature of Gabriel García Márquez. Roberto Bolaño,
who died at the age of 50 in 2003, has been selected to fill this gap. This is not the main
criterium for including his posthumous novel in my study. My interest is heading toward
an in-between space. The “novel” 2666, instead of providing one of the decade’s three
most salient cases of the master genre of prose, conveys a narrative experience, as well as
a mystical adventure of different scope. Let us remember the “pharmakon,” the way this
concept emerged in Greek mythology and philosophical thought. Plato, in his Phaedrus,
drew on the ambivalence of the term whose meaning oscillates between “poison,”
“philter,” and “cure” (see Chapter 1). Socrates’ and Phaedrus’ famous yet still perplexing
dialogue revolves around the affective and the cognitive status of speeches and written
texts, both viewed as “pharmaka,” whose inherent powers become a matter of debate. As
we will show, Bolaño’s novel falls under the rubric of narcoepics, not primarily because it
relates to hemispheric narcotics conflicts (which it does, as well) but owing to the complex
inscriptions that suggest that we actualize the concept of the pharmakon. Plato’s use of
the word “pharmakon” in relation to the seductive, as well as addictive, powers of either
masterfully constructed and delivered speeches or of “logography” (speech writings)3
is not the only reference point in Greek culture, as far as the ambiguity of the term is
concerned. Its genealogy relates, in considerable part, to the narrative and epistemological
reservoir that has been discussed by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant in relation
to the concept of “metis.”4 When analyzing Bolaño’s novel, we will eventually apply the
term “pharmakon” to refer to the concept of “cunning intelligence,” and we will address
the figure of the scapegoat—“pharmakos”—that we introduced in the first chapter.
Derrida, in Plato’s Pharmacy, argues in such a way as to displace rhetoric in favor of
the art of writing, which he has set out to put in its “proper” place (that of deconstruction).
His reading of the classical Phaedrus gives a value of ultimate ambivalence to the written
text under the signs of presence and intention, not representation: writing is both
drug and play.5 Derrida, debating the discourse of Socrates, becomes a sophist himself
when he approximates the “pharmakon” to writing, on the basis of an equivalence of
the “pharmakon” and ambivalence. According to this view, the “pharmakon” is the
expression of a preexisting condition, one that precedes all oppositions, and is called
contamination. The “pharmakon” appears as that medium in which oppositions are
dynamically at play with one another—speech / writing, inside / outside, good / evil,
body / intellect.6 Against the classical idea that speech comes first and writing second,
Derrida argues that nothing comes before the “pharmakon” whose enactment of the
movement of ambivalence relates more to the arbitrary sign (Saussure)—written, or
otherwise “encrypted” signs—than to oral rhetoric, since living speech is “finite” while
the sign can outlive death.7
3
See Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 77–80.
4
See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, 96,
note 48.
5
See Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 126–127; see also Derrida. “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” 24.
6
See Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 127.
7
See ibid.

From “Pharmakon” to Femicide 159
What Derrida is less concerned with is an anthropological, often body-related,

“preexisting quality” of the “pharmakon”: psychoactives as a “means” of life and survival,
as well as weapons of struggle and “conflict management,” all of which is limited neither
to the written sign nor to oral rhetoric. The sophistic shifting between writing and
speech is not the only problem when it comes to addressing the “pharmakon” as a
first-rate yet widely forgotten conceptual tool. Both speech and writing are susceptible
to being “overturned” by the pharmakon, or to becoming “pharmakological media”
themselves. In Greek mythology, for example, the “pharmakon” surfaces in relation to
“nectar and ambrosia,”8 substances to which the gods owed their vitality and eternal
youth. Pharmaka were of high “use value,” as well, in the struggles between the gods
and the titans and, time and again, in the conflicts between humans and gods. Their
potency was appreciated in those situations in which sheer violence was of no help. The
cunning knowledge about how and when pharmaka could be beneficially applied was
a matter of both wisdom and political intelligence. In Plato’s dialogue, revealingly, the
pharmakon relates not only to speech and to writing, but to a heterogeneity of things, for
example, to several forms of behavior, and to four types of divine madness among which
we find the oracular wisdom (the gift of prophecy) received from Apollo, the mystical
rites of Dionysus, poetry conferred as the gift of the Muses, and erotic intoxication.9
In other words, the ambiguity of the pharmakon is a physiological, anthropological,
mystical issue (and, of course, poetic), one not necessarily resting on the matter of
the ambivalent sign’s speculative or mediatic status. Today, neurophysiological findings
have given evidence that “intoxication” and “addiction”—in their difficult ambiguity of
“poison” and “cure”—can be issues of either drug consumption or specific, culturally
inflected practices like religious prayers or ritualistic dances, for example, even as
they can also be induced by certain effects ascribed to mass communication and
electronic media.10 Thus, the conceptual origins of the “pharmakon” can help us better
understand an often paradoxical complexity, which a belligerant discourse on drugs
tends to conceal.
At this point we are touching, again, upon the scope of our concept of narcoepics.
Writers in the Americas have become increasingly concerned with the realm of drug
traffic and its human and socio-ecological consequences, and about the contradictory
role of narcotics economies as part of the neoliberal design of contemporary
capitalism. Nevertheless, as these writers also show, the problematic of “psychoactives”
(a term that can and must be correlated with the Greek “pharmakon”) is far more
complex than the trade and consumption of substances, and its present-time violent
outgrowths across the hemisphere, could indicate. If we recall our discussion of
Benjamin’s “dialectics of intoxication,” at stake is a pathology of modern life in ample
terms, and not only as far as its “abject” deviations are concerned. Drugs are major
agents of psycho-physiological states, cultural practices, political conflicts, and
economic developments and, at the same time, these developments are connected
8
See Marcel Detienne and Jean Paul Vernant. Cunning Intelligence, 120, 123, 126.
9
See Plato. Phaedrus, 26–7, 33–4.
10
See Bernard Stiegler. Von der Biopolitik zur Psychomacht, 52.

160 Narcoepics
with addictive ways of life that are not biochemically but culturally induced, as well
as nurtured, by economic factors and technological media. Under the guise of similar
complexity, “modern” writers and artists have often dealt with the issue of narcotics.
At the same time, the anthropological-political density of the conflicts surrounding
intoxication and addiction might not sustain a belief in the power of literature as the
ultimate “poison” or “cure.” The perplexing issue is that literature cannot, perhaps,
have the last word about the pharmakon, but it can certainly offer a unique agency of
perception and understanding. Literature can have a role not as “literature,” but as a
kind of “pharmakon” itself, due to which a novel, or a poem suddenly approximates
“narcotic” imagination—implying a spiritual impact on the body through which affect
resonates—rather than resembling an artistically codifiable text. In Roberto Bolaño’s
case, we will address his strategy of “sobriety” that helps pierce through several layers
of intoxication. This literary strategy is certain to cunningly outplay, or expose, the
destructiveness and exhaustion of the experience of the contemporary. Bolaño assumes
the ubiquity and the contradictions of the pharmakon in his own way. Other writers
of narcoepics have done this as well, including, for example, Fernando Vallejo. Vallejo
is not a virtuoso of “sobriety” but, instead, of verbal aggression and religiously charged
rhetoric and, from there, of a strategy of “intoxication,” staging a scenario in which
violence is fictionalized as both “poison” and “cure.”11 What approximates Bolaño and
Vallejo in terms of critical perspectivization, however, is not a similar sense of reality
and history, nor a comparable style, but rather their enactment of literary writing as a
(“pharmacological”) agency of transgression and affective “transport.” It is in the sense
of that formulation that we come close to Socrates’ use of the word “pharmakon.”
Affective transport, as Benjamin has argued in his comment on Auerbach’s Dante
(see Chapter 2), is not simply a matter of emotion or sentiment, but an aesthetico-
political strategy. Foregrounding the concept of the “pharmakon”—poison, philter, or
cure without clear boundaries between these “agents”—and perceiving Bolaño’s 2666
in a close relationship to it, the question should be how this novel engages the creative
borders of literary writing and pushes reflection toward the thresholds of the possible.
Writing, while trying to “live up” to the ambiguity of the “pharmakon,” endeavoring to
compete with the “drug that is not a drug,” is about to cross its own boundaries, and is
thus taken by surprise. At the same time, writing, to the extent that it becomes a practice
of both somatic involvement and disengagement of the body, is thrown into that
dimension of experience that the dialectics of intoxication is all about. In a word, 2666
is of interest as a tectonic “presence” that “resurrects” the body, an attempt to achieve
a singular “being-in-the-world” and, from there, historical intuition and memory, in
whose wake follows insubordinate silence, and perhaps wisdom, and only from here
can we speak of a global, transcontemporary Latin American novel of its own kind.
Bolaño’s sober narrative is a way of “beginning,” cutting a swath in a terrain—the real-
life “utopia” of global capitalism’s ludicrous excesses—where beginnings are believed
to be henceforth impossible. As we should remember from Edward Said’s reading of
11
“Curation,” in Vallejo, is classically related to a figure of sacrifice; see my analysis “Inverted
Christianism: A Sacrificial Romance” in Violence Without Guilt, 156–65.
12
See John F. Schumaker, The Age of Insanity: Modernity and Mental Health.

Vico, a “beginning” can be understood as a genealogical attitude under circumstances

whose ever-accelerating presentism—or should we say, the overintoxication due
to consumption and all kinds of pressing anxieties in our “age of insanity”12—have
blocked our perception of “untoward” living and thinking.
“Globalized” academics in the wake of cosmopolitanism
The novel 2666 consists of five large sections that, taken together, conform an opus
of 1119 pages in Spanish, and 893 pages in the English translation:13 “The Part About
the Critics,” “The Part About Amalfitano,” “The Part About Fate,” “The Part About
the Crimes,” and “The Part About Archimboldi.” The narration starts in Europe and
ends, not precisely in “Mexico,” but in a visionary “Ciudad Juárez” called Santa Teresa.
At the extremes of a huge narrative grid that extends across territorial and temporal
displacements, as well as transnational encounters, we find three major scenarios that
are incongruent with one another, allowing Bolaño to construct a reign of startling
interconnections. First, there is a group of intellectual characters from Western
Europe—literary critics who find their joint purpose in the search for a German
novelist named Benno von Archimboldi; second, but conforming the final part in the
novel, we encounter a stunning, twentieth-century-wide caleidoscope of the life of
Archimboldi himself (whom the critics never succeed in finding); third, the ghostly
world of “Santa Teresa,” an urban nightmare at Mexico’s northern border modeled
upon Ciudad Juárez and its present-time reality of hundreds of femicides—“Mexico’s
most merciless and unpunished crimes”14—rises up to become the center of attention.
We will begin by exploring the first two parts—“The Part About the Critics” and “The
Part About Amalfitano”—in which the uncanny tension between modern and global
perceptions of the “self ” of the academic literary critic takes shape.
Four European literary specialists, Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Liz Norton,
academics who excel through intelligence and determination, turn out to be masters
of projection. At one side of the libidinal map that guides their endeavors, there is
the vision of a novelist, an image that provides them with the foundational myth to
nurture their enlightened selves. The enigmatic, always absent Benno von Archimboldi
is deemed by them the greatest post-war German writer and should, therefore, be a
candidate for the Nobel Prize. Their utmost satisfaction would be to find Archimboldi,
giving him proof of their genuine understanding of his work, and leading the evasive
writer to public presence and recognition. Speaking in terms of the “pharmakon,”
Archimboldi functions as a placebo text15 for the “Critics.” At the same time, when the
13
According to Jorge Herralde, Bolaño’s original idea was to publish the novel as one single piece,
not as five separate books. See Jorge Herralde, Para Roberto Bolaño, 57. See also Marcela Valdes.
“Introduction: Alone Among the Ghosts,” 16.
14
Víctor Ronquillo. Las muertas de Juárez: Crónica de los crímenes más despiadados e impunes en
México.
15
For a discussion of the term “placebo text,” see Richard DeGrandpre. The Cult of Pharmacology,
122–37.

162 Narcoepics
four academics—the Archimboldian apostles—meet the Chilean literature professor

Amalfitano who, in his exile from dictatorship, has become stranded in the Mexican
“Santa Teresa,” the Europeans derisively declare this Latin American colleague (who
is a specialist on both Heidegger and Archimboldi) to be a disaster—“a nonexistent
professor at a nonexistent university” (2666, 114). The need for an inferior Other
complements their search for a superior object of desire, much like the tidal movement
reveals, and turns invisible, the face of the dark earth beneath the water. Pelletier,
Norton, Morini, and Espinoza, regular attendees at academic events across Europe,
at one point decide to make a trip to Mexico, after meeting a Mexican student at a
seminar in Toulouse who reports that Archimboldi was recently spotted on his way
from Mexico City to Hermosillo. “‘Imagine’, said Pelletier, ‘Archimboldi wins the Nobel
and at that very moment we appear, leading him by the hand,’” back to Europe and into
public light (ibid., 105). Bolaño, however, subverts the game of cultivating otherness
through projection. Their travel to the Mexican–US border leads the European
academics to the edges of their way of life as constantly self-referential, worldly subjects
of higher thought. What unfolds is an implicit critique that contrasts the novel 2666
with that part of modern and postmodern “travel writing” at whose symbolic center
there reigns the “sovereign” cosmopolitan perspective of the Western subject, even if
its individual representatives end up failing.16 Bolaño affords much irony to Western
cosmopolitan self-consciousness, although—at first glance—a worldly predestination
of his heroes appears to be the main topic of his fiction. The cunning game by which
Bolaño’s narrator, in 2666, takes “the critics”—the “Archimboldian apostles”—out of
their stable world unfolds on the gentle soles of a Socratic coup.
In the face of this gigantic and uneven novel, our reading will have to work across
different layers. Conceptually, this requires probing the focus that we have opened
through the “pharmakon.” Remember that Phaedrus is Plato’s only text placing Socrates
outside [the city] of Athens, where he finds a countryside inhabited by nymphs and
spirits. At the beginning of the dialogue, the interlocutor Phaedrus is surprised to find
Socrates outside the city (“you never leave town to cross the frontier nor even, I believe,
so much as set foot outside the walls”). Socrates responds: “You must forgive me, dear
friend; I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything,
whereas men in the town do. Yet you seem to have discovered a drug for getting me
out.”17 The philosopher admits that this time Phaedrus has led him into an exception:
the speech on the matter of love that he brings from Lysias acts like a “pharmakon”—a
drug—on Socrates who says: “A hungry animal can be driven by dangling a carrot or
a bit of greenstuff in front of it; similarly, if you proffer me speeches bound in books I
don’t doubt you can cart me all around Attica, and anywhere else you please.”18 Socrates
follows Phaedrus but, in fact, he follows the “pharmakon” of Lysias’ artful speech that,
in the form of a scroll, Phaedrus hides under his tunic. Sickness of obsession is what
draws the philosopher out of his confines, as he wants to learn about every good
16
I have dealt with the concept of cosmopolitanism in “Zur neuen Krise der kosmopolitischen
Imagination” (On the New Crisis of Cosmopolitan Imagination).
17
Plato. Phaedrus (230 d), 7.
18
Ibid.

(speech) writing available. The issue is less anecdotical than it might seem. Intellectual
curiosity and the drive toward cognition, together with the search for “representational”
righteousness—a more active term than “legitimacy”—are deeply resonant with bodily
desire. In order for them to become forces of action, a dry idea would be insufficient
unless it worked as a placebo. What the wisdom of Plato’s early text implies seems to
partially invert, on the side of the Socratian argument, Plato’s more mature ideas. In
contrast with the classical hierarchy in which thought and abstraction rank highest (a
norm that Socrates will, at last, pretend to obey), the “pharmakon” teaches otherwise.
Those substances and artifacts that can simultaneously unleash forces of poisoning and
curing are of the highest value among a contemporary intellectual elite (e.g. Bolaño’s
European “Critics”), as well as for those agents who can compensate—in the best of
cases—for their lower status with knowing about pharmaka. Socrates should know for
sure, and contemporary neuroscience could testify to this matter more generally.
There is a certain postcolonial sarcasm in Bolaño’s leading us to compare the superb
scholars Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton, an avant-garde academic group at
a time of harsh and divisive globalization, to the “hungry cattle,” alias Socrates, who
would let the “pharmakon” drag him across Attica. “Hunger” for the extraordinary, from
which the need for a mediating placebo, to nurture a superior mission, arises, is a more
suiting trope for understanding the contradictions of intellectual labor and identity than
has been admitted so far. At least, this is Bolaño’s own experience, one which we find
disseminated across the entirety of his writing. In 2666, “The Part About the Critics”
helps him settle accounts with a segment of the European intellectual heritage, in that
it brings the visceral side of the “modern critic’s” identity to the fore. Discourse and
rational or sublime artistic logic are the ornaments—the flowers in the crown of the
enlightened habitus that has been stabilizing, against all odds, the course of a ship called
Western “literary humanities.” But the actual driving forces for the late modern critic,
in addition to the self-understood desire for a life backed by the academic institution,
have been connected to a perpetual, delirious reinvocation of the fleeting saint—the
literary or theoretical super hero. In other words, we can speak of a deep, secularized
desire for “religious” experiences. Amalfitano, the Chilean professor relocated and
stranded in Santa Teresa, is less obsessed with the literary saint Archimboldi than is the
group of European academics, since he inhabits the precarious site of the global fabric of
symbolic powers that makes him more vulnerable, as well, to affective marginalization.
His reasons for ending up in Santa Teresa are entirely different from that of the neatly
established critics. Amalfitano will experience a kind of “pharmacologico-religious”
passage that is not mythically charged, as in the case of his European colleagues, but of
a peculiar, profane mysticism. In “washing away”—to be read, as well, as a physiological
metaphor—the melancholy of the deterritorialized professor, it liberates a deintoxicating
force. Meanwhile, hunger for the living saint known as Benno von Archimboldi (the
“Placebo text”) is what pushes “the Critics” on their way toward the unknown, and it will
leave them ashore in the late twentieth-century Mexican–US borderlands, a territory of
violence, exhaustion, and human as well as communitarian erosion. But to decipher the
novel’s paradoxes, we have to move more slowly. Let us first approach the presence of
the “pharmakon” in Bolaño’s narrative in a more explicit way.

164 Narcoepics
Perhaps not by chance, it is through Amalfitano, the academic from the Latin
American periphery and a Chilean like Bolaño himself, a “loser” in the eyes of
the four Archimboldian apostles, that the reader encounters the novel’s “primal”
pharmacological scene. Amalfitano, after Pinochet’s military coup, had exiled himself
to Spain, where he married a Spanish woman, Lola, in Barcelona, and their daughter
Rosa was born. A major portion of “The Part About Amalfitano” is dedicated to Lola’s
eventual abandoning of husband and daughter, and her subsequent relationship with a
Basque poet whom she keeps visiting in an asylum. Here, Bolaño weaves a tale in which
images of Almodóvar’s All About My Mother resonate. Lola’s peripeties are told—as
happens with many others in Bolaño’s book—in a cool and dry manner, without a
wallowing of the narrative voice, and without raising tones in any kind of dramatic
manner. Lola, after deserting Amalfitano and Rosa, loses herself in an existence
where she spends her nights at cemeteries or in the street, indulging in fleeting sexual
relationships, and not disturbed by either destitution or excess. After an absence of
seven years, she suddenly reappears before her husband to tell him that she has another
child, that she has AIDS, and that she will soon die. Shortly afterwards, Amalfitano,
whose contract at the University of Barcelona is about to end, leaves Spain with Rosa
and moves to Mexico to become a professor at the University of Santa Teresa. Similar
to a famous scene in Almodóvar’s movie, there is a male character who weeps in silence
in the face of utter misfortune, while women do not flinch from the terrible (see 185).
After Amalfitano has lived in Santa Teresa for several years, he is suddenly struck by
a fleeting memory that is evocative of Socrates’ fascination with the pharmakon. One
day, a dubious Mexican “friend” mentions the Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl
to Amalfitano. Trakl, a pharmacist, was drafted into the German army at the beginning
of World War I, and he committed suicide in 1914 by taking a drug overdose. The
sudden naming of Trakl makes the Chilean professor think about a drugstore near
where he had lived in Barcelona, and he remembers that in this store, “a young
pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, . . . would sit
up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours” (227).
One night, Amalfitano asked what books the young man liked. The response was that
he liked books like The Metamorphosis (Kafka), and Bartleby (Melville), among others.
For Amalfitano, there was something frightening about
the taste of this bookish young pharmacist [the Spanish original reads “enlightened
young pharmacist,” 289] who in another life might have been Trakl or who in
this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian
counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones.
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick,
. . . (227).
“What a sad paradox,” thought Amalfitano. “Today, not even enlightened pharmacists
have enough courage to confront the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze
paths into the unknown” (trans. modified; Spanish, 289). These young pharmacists
prefer the perfect exercises of the great masters. “They want to watch the great masters
spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against

that something, that something that terrifies us all . . ., amid blood and mortal wounds
and stench” (227; Spanish, 290). Amalfitano, in his preference for the allegedly
imperfect, for the crude side of the “great masters,” may sound somewhat pathetic, or
naïve. However, he implies that “pharmacists” with a vital inclination toward literature,
in particular, should know that venturing into the unknown, walking on perilous
grounds, is what marks the “combates de verdad” (the real battles), where there is
“blood and mortal wounds and stench.” As for Trakl, it was his inner struggle with the
experience of a pathological, decadent bourgeoisie, and with the shock of the World
War I, that had led to his taking the drug overdose that killed him. We will later see that,
in the case of the European critics, the pharmakon seems to work, with the exception
of one violent scene, as a “benevolent,” sublime force. However, Amalfitano holds that
the “pharmakon” has to do with “real” intoxication, as “that something that terrifies
us all,” on both the part of the creative (individualist) mind and a more “objective,”
material “it” that leads consciousness out of its learned self-containment. Due to the
ambivalence of the “pharmakon,” there can be more or less subtle interpretations. The
young Catalan pharmacist practices a mild yet ongoing “cure” by devouring the “minor
works” of the masters, which excel simply as decent exercises in the métier of writing.
Amalfitano, in turn, shows himself skeptical about texts (and readers) that cultivate
the art of intellectual containment, or sublimation. He instead judges “great works” by
dint of their imperfection, their zest to become involved with poisonous, intoxicating
experiences, to the extent that these can shatter (the imagination of) life itself. The
memory of the drugstore conveys an associatively rich juncture, contrasting with a
notion of literature as it is held in the reifying and canonizing tradition, as well as with
the status of criticism as an “objectifying” agency. On the one hand, there is the allusion
to an altered state of consciousness as it nourishes the most intense experiences in
the work of artists, musicians, and writers. On the other, for Amalfitano, reality itself,
especially in its conflictive, transformative movements, generates dangerously altered
states of mind. In other words, the appearance of the pharmakon in Bolaño’s narrative
shows how crucial intellectual and existencial matters are susceptible to turning into
mind-altering forces, like in the Greek mythological conflicts over life and death,
knowledge and power, beauty and deformation, or the annihilation of creaturely
bodies. A hermeneutical attitude is required here, going beyond (or beneath) the dual
distinction between the subjective and the objective. The “pharmakon” shatters, or
“preexists,” the dualism. Amalfitano, struck in his destiny by personal and political
disaster, cannot expect much help from Socratic wisdom and the promise (in Phaedrus)
that the power of the pharmakon could be sophistically negotiated. However, he is
closer to Socrates, the philosopher who was unable to leave a written work and who
became a martyr,19 than he would probably admit. Amalfitano’s obsession with books
is, in the end, an excentric one, and the idea of the pharmakon will help us untangle
what otherwise might look like a crazy game.
In the eyes of the four critics, Amalfitano, who will give his European “colleagues”
a hand in their search for Archimboldi after they arrive in Mexico, appears like “the
19
See Johann Georg Hamann. Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten: Aesthetics in nuce, 69–73.

166 Narcoepics
unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism” (114). On the one hand,
Amalfitano feels pushed by the forces of destiny, the exile that leads through Europe
and to what seems to him to be the most inverosimile place, to the extent that he does
not understand why the hell he and Rosa are in Santa Teresa—that densely-populated
city standing “in defiance of the desert on the border of Sonora and Arizona,” where the
“University [. . .] was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain” (185). In any
case, he earns a monthly salary working there (163). On the other hand, and against what
readers might take as primary evidence, Amalfitano is a conceptual figure, a character
whose fictional life world comes close to being a Brechtian scenario of “hopelessness,”
representing someone who has sunk to the bottom, so that we can see the bottom of
things (134). The Chilean professor whom destiny has taken to the opposite end of the
Latin American continent, to one of the “hellholes” he had not known before, now lives
in a little one-storey house in “Colonia Lindavista” (199), in a barrio with neighbors he
never sees because of their high entrance gates and an ominous state of abandonment of
the houses, giving the impression that the neighbors might have “left in a hurry, with no
time even to sell” (ibid.). Relocated to this place, Amalfitano brought with him his now
17-year-old daughter Rosa, with whom he shares the house, and books from different
periods of his life. One afternoon, the professor stumbles over a volume that he does
not remember ever buying (185), Testamento geométrico (actually published 1975) by
Rafael Dieste, a Galician poet (133, 186), mathematician, and speculative thinker. How
did this book end up in his library? How was it possible that it had disappeared from
his memory? (188) His musing about this strange occurrence functions as a narrative
device that helps him remember situations from the past and thus adds pieces to the
puzzle of his shattered trajectory. When the closeness of the Testamento geométrico
becomes unbearable, Amalfitano converts the book into a “readymade” à la Duchamp.
The professor himself is not free from the burden of a controversial “pharmacological”
question—the one he had in mind when he was talking to the young pharmacist in
Barcelona—the question of what it takes (or risks) to turn chaos into order, especially
if this occurs at the cost of what is commonly held as “sanity” (189). Not knowing how
Dieste’s book ended up in the middle of his intimate space increases his perception of
chaos. Reestablishing a primary sense of personal order implies turning the dangerous
proximity of the Testamento geométrico into “freedom, even if freedom meant no
more than the perpetuation of flight” (189). The book is moved, in an odd ritualistic
gesture—or in a flight of madness?—from the center of his home—his “home office”—to
its edge, the yard. “The idea, of course, was Duchamp’s” (190). Amalfitano
walked into his devastated front yard . . ., and he gripped Dieste’s book tightly . . .
And then he looked up at the sky and saw the moon, too big and too wrinkled,
although it wasn’t night yet. And then he returned to his ravaged backyard and for
a few seconds he stopped, looking left and right, ahead and behind, trying to see
his shadow, but although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the
west, toward Tijuana, he couldn’t see it. And then his eyes fell on the four rows of
cord . . . It was the clothesline. [And he clamped the book with three clothespins]
and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling
much calmer (190).

Regarding the ludic idea of exposing the book-object to “nature,” the Surrealist artist
Duchamp was reported to have liked the idea of humiliating “the seriousness of a book
full of principles,” saying that, in that way, the treatise would indeed learn the facts
of life (191). Amalfitano pretends he is performing the same kind of experiment—
being curious about how the volume will endure the assault of the desert climate of
northern Mexico. Yet the issue turns into a double-edged event, and the professor will
soon be seduced into a ritual—a hunger for illumination—that becomes the focus of
his daily life. The Geometrical Testament’s relocation to the margin creates the effect of
a new crucial space, in addition to being an allegory of Amalfitano’s own destiny. The
professor falls into the habit of inquiring, the first thing in the morning and whenever
it occurs to him during the day, if the book exposed to the desert wind, the sun and the
other elements has “learned” anything about real life (see 195).
What happens, instead of changes affecting the book, is that Amalfitano starts to
perceive forces that act upon him. The intertextually inclined reader might think of
a passage in Benjamin’s “Surrealism” that speaks of the “revolutionary energies that
appear in the outmoded” things, pointing to a genuine Surrealist way of transforming,
for example, “enslaved and enslaving objects” into (a perception of) “revolutionary
nihilism” (W. B., 210, vol. 2.1). But Amalfitano’s personal and political map, his nihilistic
grounds so to speak, are different from both Breton’s and Duchamp’s. His working on
or with the hidden energies that (can be made to) operate in “his” world, if we want
to apply this mystically charged expression, is susceptible to being contaminated by
terrestrial winds and atmospheric spirits, as they have mingled with social conflict, and
violence along the hemispheric border. The geometry book starts speaking back in a way
that gets Amalfitano away from his usual thought patterns and into drawing Borgesian
figures on paper (192–4). These are drawings that include hypothetical groupings
(“taxonomies”) of names that he perceives as the product of his affected mind. He
draws simple geometric shapes, triangles, and a rectangle, “and at each vertex he wrote
whatever name came to him, dictated by fate or lethargy or the immense boredom
he felt” in the heat of his Mexican environment (191–2). The names that appear at
the corners of his figures are mostly those of renowned European philosophers, but
he suddenly adds others such as those of the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca, the
Argentine physicist Mario Bunge, the German surgeon Trendelenburg, and the critic
Harold Bloom, and even Vladimir Smirnov, “who disappeared in Stalin’s concentration
camps in 1938” and, at the opposite end, the name of Mikhail Suslov, Soviet party
ideologue and statesman (194). What Foucault had perceived as a dissolution of the
ordering epistemes of Western thinking (“our age-old distinction between the Same
and the Other”20), linked to the intent to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge
when referring, in Les mots et les choses, to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” by
Borges, becomes, in the character Amalfitano, a kind of gnostic distancing from, or a
sarcastic take on, the genealogical project of deconstructing modern philosophy while
maintaining its discursive bases intact.
20
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, xv.

168 Narcoepics
At first sight, we might find in Amalfitano, a strain of modern (Nietzschean) nihilism

together with epistemic chaos and, conversely, an orderly map of self-referential
discourse and mythic fables, Self and Other, in the Archimboldian critics, as hegemonic
counterparts of the doomed Chilean academic. Nevertheless, Bolaño will send
the search of the European academic missionaries into a no-man’s land where they
encounter nonknowledge, noisy silence, and fear. Amalfitano’s search is a gesturing
toward “imperfection,” in which the lesson of the “great writers’” struggling with crude
life—its forces of intoxication and violence—resonates between existential exhaustion
and a stubborn reflexive attitude. In his doomed and often sad gestus, Amalfitano is
nevertheless more spirited than Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, and Norton. As we will see,
one of the major thematic foci in Bolaño’s novel is the places that the diverse protagonists
occupy on a map on which insanity spreads across the globe. Amalfitano is aware of
his desire for an ordered state of mind to better organize his chaotic living, but he also
senses the closeness of this order, this guarantee of a neatly working consciousness, to
a hidden virus of insanity (189). Asking for a fictional map of “insanity” requires that
we move back from Amalfitano to (The Part About) the “Critics,” and then forward to
the final “Part About Archimboldi,” before eventually discussing “The Part About the
Crimes.” Roberto Bolaño is looking for the “big picture,” one of the reasons why 2666
has been called a hallmark of global fiction in the wake of the twentieth century. Yet, it
is the novel’s virtue that it defrauds us of any expectation of fictional “fulfillment.” Can
the contemporary world be imagined as an apocalyptic one? On Bolaño’s side, there
are only some metaphors that could chrystallize the apocalypse, such as the dream
image of the crater that befalls several characters. We might expect that the suffocating,
terrible everyday of Santa Teresa will condense into symbolic form. However, there are
“only” narrative identities21 and numerous traces—each one being more disconcerting
and frightening than the other. There is, in addition, an awareness of violence as deeply
ingrained in the history of the globalized earth, as well as in its present-time pulsations
that are, insanely, saturated with boredom and the most pointless of routines. Thus
Bolaño is skeptical of the aesthetic “pharmaka” of sublime horror, or pathetic drama,
or other cathartic dispositifs in relationship to violence.
Amalfitano, the most precarious subject among the protagonists, becomes ethically
and aesthetically a threshold figure. Forced exile is one of the compelling factors that
can push people into depression. Amalfitano’s odyssey seems to embody this; the way
he experiences loss marks the condition of an intellectual fallen into “hopelessness”
(loneliness, sarcasm about everything concerning Chile, his homeland, self-doubt,
boundless sadness, 114, 134). Hanging the Testamento geométrico from the clothesline
in the yard of his new home, a nonplace in an alien land, means mimetically doubling
his own existence as a vagrant “ready made,” exposed to the forces of the environment,
and with no protection other than his learned “humanistic” competence. By hanging
the book in the back yard—far enough away so that observation from inside the
house is possible—Amalfitano also performs an act of dissociation. He has invented a
scenario that allows him to exteriorize an important part of himself (his bookishness)
21
See Paul Ricoeur’s framing of the term in Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, 246–7.

and thus start looking at his “self ” anew. The performance has a centrifugal effect on
his lettered “self.” What derives from the object is a magical power, taking power away
from what the book should (but could not) represent—the ordering, centripetal mind
of the academic. The mimetic procedure is similar to the relationship that Taussig
described as “out-fetishizing the fetish.”22 The scenario of the “excommunicated” book,
instead of providing a case of schizophrenia, opens an unexpected way for dealing with
pending “insanity.” Insanity is understood as a profound mental disorder, the opposite
of “psychological well-being” in existence, invisibly connected to the state of affairs of
the real world.23
One night, Amalfitano is assailed by a voice. It says, “Hello, Óscar Amalfitano,
please don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong” (201).24 Here we have the voice of an
invisible authority whose “purpose” is to bring about a transformation in the called-
upon subject. Thus far, one could presume that the Testamento geométrico, still
hanging in the yard, might resemble an idol, even a “totemic” fetish—the “object” of
a curing process, as it is “attended” on a daily basis. But could it “speak back” with a
voice as the sign of its invisible embodiment, or just an energy? The professor feels
deeply alarmed and rushes through the house and yard . . . but finds nothing wrong.
Soon the voice returns: “I beg you to forgive me. I beg you to relax. I beg you not to
consider this a violation of your freedom. Of my freedom? thought Amalfitano . . .”
(202) The man’s ensuing night is one of disrupted sleep traversed by an image of his
deceased wife Lola standing behind a high fence and waving at him (202). A (formally)
omniscient, immanent narrator reports that that same night, at dawn, the Santa Teresa
police discover the body of another teenage girl, mutilated and killed, disposed of in
a vacant lot in the outskirts of the city. This is followed by a filmic, atmospheric image
connecting, as in a parallel montage or a very large tracking shot, different spaces in
the city.
. . . a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to
the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through
Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the
wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano’s shirts and
pants and slipping into his daughter’s underpants and reading a few pages of the
Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be
of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses
through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind (202–3).
Additional perceptions that reveal an uncanny, “cosmically” charged aspect of the
environment follow the next day, when Sylvia Pérez, a colleague from the university,
takes Amalfitano and Rosa on an excursion. Sonora presents a landscape that
overwhelms Amalfitano—violent formations of basaltic rock, tuff and sandstone, . . . “a
landscape that seemed best suited to the young or the old, imbecilic or insensitive or
22
Michael Taussig. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 1, 2.
23
See John F. Schumaker, The Age of Insanity, ix, x.
24
This associates the reiteration of the clause “do not be afraid” in the Gospel of Luke (The New
Testament).

170 Narcoepics
evil and old who meant to impose impossible tasks on themselves and others until they
breathed their last” (205). As far as the United States on the other side of the border
is concerned, a dream image—the professor falls asleep in the car—depicts Mexico’s
northern neighbor in the shape of “quicksilver” arising from the autochthonous
landscape of prehistoric rocks—“the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and
constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain” (206).
When Amalfitano returns from the outing he realizes that “the shadow of Dieste’s book
hanging from the clothesline was clearer, steadier, more reasonable . . . than anything
they’d seen on the outskirts of Santa Teresa or in the city itself, images with no handhold,
images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments” (206).
The relationship is nevertheless “dialectical.” The object becomes a foothold when it is
set vis-à-vis petrified nature—it becomes spiritualized. At first, Amalfitano’s reaction
to the imbecilic landscape and its timeless, violent formations seems to convey a
sentiment of “planetary abandon.” But the shadow of the hanging book, the image of
the imaginary object, insinuates a locus that, rather than being independent of the
outside world, will help gather mystical energies in order to open our perception to a
hidden side of reality—the world of the crimes.
With the eventual return of the nightly voice, Amalfitano believes himself close
to madness. “Don’t worry,” says the voice, you have not lost your mind, “all you’re
doing is having a casual conversation. So I haven’t lost my mind, said Amalfitano. No,
absolutely not, said the voice” (209). Hermeneutically speaking, one tends to cling to
the referential aspects of a speech, rather than to the mode of experience that is enabled
by an utterance or a dialogue. A mode of experience25 is not necessarily an issue of the
consciously involved subject, but of a something that works “through” the subject, goes
beyond it, or is immanent in the speaking subject so that, under certain conditions,
“what” is said is secondary in relationship to the way in which the utterance itself takes
on an interactive life. An interactive agency, or a sort of “flow,” starts to occupy the
place of the speaking subject, as with the iterative clause “so I haven’t lost my mind, said
Amalfitano. No, absolutely not, said the voice.” This mode of reconfirmative address,
in which the subject, instead of producing his (Amalfitano’s) own message, gives in to
a contractual linguistic relationship, characterizes several exchanges between the voice
and the professor. There is a Brechtian tone to Amalfitano’s situation that, however, is
less Brechtian than it is prone to a mystical trope—the trope of learning how to get
lost.26 But was not Brecht’s “method” of Verfremdung (estrangement) a way of gaining,
for example, a sense of transformative knowledge from Chinese wisdom—a knowledge
that was supposed to “theatrically” enact the loss of learned preconceptions? This
enactment would not work through discourse (messages to the public), nor through
catharsis, but instead would rely on a pedagogically conceived space for transgression,
similar to the strictured “dialogic spaces” that Michel de Certeau describes as the
condition of possibility for mystic speech.27 The Chilean professor, in Bolaño’s novel,
25
For a discussion of Spinozean, and Deleuzean ideas regarding “modes of experience,” see Daniel W.
Smith. “The Place of Ethics in Deleuze’s Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence.”
26
See Michel de Certeau. “Mystic Speech,” 80, 81–3.
27
See ibid., 91, 92.

understands ending up in Santa Teresa as “getting lost”—losing the formative and

identitarian reference points of his life, except for the presence of his daughter. At the
same time, beginning with his “excommunication” of the geometry book, he starts
experiencing a more active way of “getting lost,” although it might just be a case of
losing his preconceived forms of knowledge. This procedure, which we could view as
one of several of Bolaño’s incursions into the mode of mystical writing, is “dialectically”
linked to the way the nightly voice starts speaking “through” Amalfitano. This enables
Amalfitano to start looking “through” the things (in German: etwas durchschauen).
Here we cannot evoke mysticism as if the mystic texts from the dawn of modernity
were at issue. Today, there are many ways of addressing the relationships between literary
writing and altered states of consciousness, although interpretive knowledge has remained
precarious in that regard. There is a “profane mysticism” at work in Amalfitano’s situation,
one in which his alien, northern Mexican environment acquires a “plasticity” that his
learned philosophical ideas and ordinary knowledge would have prevented him from
perceiving. It might, however, be helpful for us to scrutinize some historical contexts of
Western mysticism for basic analogies. If, according to de Certeau, the mysticism of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided the historical trope for an epochal loss—
the decadence and falling apart of the Christian world, both as belief and as experience—
Bolaño’s novel hints at a global state of affairs of similar dimensions. The mystics’ place in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their historical status and situations, belonged to
“social milieux or ‘factions’ in full retreat,” affected by the consequences of socioeconomic
degradation, or marginalized by progress or by war (see Certeau, 84). Among those
milieux we find singular experiences of people embarking on a perilous walk that turned
into a spiritual journey. Particular practices of writing, performed in specific places and
under certain ethical, physiological, or communal rules, could lead to situations that
transform loss into intensely illuminating endeavors that could “work back” on the
real world. These experiences were, in the full sense of the term, a matter of the “event.”
They could, for example, arise from the existentially threatening, culturally erosive, and
sometimes singularly empowering situation of gifted minorities “with no assurances for
the future” (ibid., 85). “The present, for them, was the restricted scene upon which the
drama of their doom was enacted . . . They had nothing left but present exile” (ibid.).
Mystical writing as a genre of literature, as understood by de Certeau, transforms an
experience of fundamental or existential dimensions—for example, disaster—into a
mode of utterance that excels through its unusual powers of imagination, an imagination
that affects the body in the same way that it can influence the surrounding world. We
are talking about singular (“sacred”) confluences of consciousness and energy, forms of
plenitude that can help people survive under the most adverse of circumstances, generate
effects of healing, or create a sense of spiritual-somatic freedom.
After Amalfitano placed the Testamento geométrico among the forces of “nature,”
and from the way the professor is being spoken to by the “voice” (2666, 208), a peculiar
Gelassenheit28 (letting-be attitude) emerges, together with an alertness. The voice offers
Amalfitano a “mutually beneficial relationship” (208). It says that the condition for this
28
See ibid., 81 (on Meister Eckhart).

172 Narcoepics
relationship to work out is “calmness” (“it’s absolutely crucial that we stay calm,” 208).
Let us look into this mystical “colloquium.” The voice:
Calm is the one thing that will never let us down. And Amalfitano said: everything
else lets us down? And the voice: yes, that’s right, it’s hard to admit, I mean it’s hard
to have to admit it to you, but that’s the honest-to-God truth. Ethics lets us down?
The sense of duty lets us down? Honesty lets us down? Curiosity lets us down? Love
lets us down? Bravery lets us down? Art lets us down? That’s right, said the voice,
everything lets us down, everything. Or lets you down, which isn’t the same thing
but for our purposes it might as well be, except calm, calm is the one thing that never
lets us down, though that’s no guarantee of anything, I have to tell you. You’re wrong,
said Amalfitano, bravery never lets us down. And neither does our love for our
children. Oh no? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano, suddenly feeling calm (208).
Again, a Brechtian outcome. Now the exchange about madness ensues, in which
Amalfitano is told that he has not lost his mind. He recapitulates: “So everything
lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the
voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end” (209). One cannot but feel estranged at such
an antilogical fiat that reveals the author’s inclination to turn ambivalence into a
“methodical tool.” The expression “everything lets us down” is not a statement of truth,
but part of a “methodical” alienation of the familiar, in order to establish a “foothold”
in hopelessness, which is understood as a particular state of “sobriety” in the absence
of the certainties that a “normal” state of affairs was once supposed to provide to the
sovereign citizen. Brecht’s early aesthetics was conceived in the varying terms of a
strategy, in which a variety of paradoxical moves and heterotopian figures emerges
through estrangement as an intrusion into the numbness, the false familiarity of
the everyday. Bolaño does not have to be a connaisseur of Brecht in order to make
Amalfitano a conceptual figure. An overall question that resonates throughout 2666
has to do with the search for aesthetic energies that can help to productively engage
with the negative. What happens to Amalfitano as he keeps arguing with the voice—the
“it”? He becomes irritated when “it” reveals a sexist spin (the voice “asked him, begged
him, to be a man, not a queer,” 207), a possible hint at Bolaño’s interest in the masculine
figure of the artist-detective, or at his corroding approach to a certain artistic posture.
“What is it you have against homosexuals? whispered Amalfitano. Nothing, said the
voice. I am speaking figuratively, said the voice” (209). The voice is sarcastic regarding
a certain habitus bound to artful chaos, a sublime chaos used by some artists as a mask
to cover up what is just a desire for “anesthesia” (209). But there is an implicit allusion
to the femicides in Santa Teresa, and what Amalfitano perceives, especially when his
daughter is mentioned, as a warning to be on the alert. (“You’ll have to be careful, my
friend, things here seem to be coming to a head,” 210). Past midnight, perhaps around
two or three o’ clock, the professor steps onto the porch and sees that someone has
been watching the house from a black car. He can even make out the features of the
driver as he drives off—“a fat man with very black hair, dressed in a cheap suit with no
tie,” 210). “When he was gone, Amalfitano came back into the house. I didn’t like the
looks of him, said the voice the minute Amalfitano was through the door” (210).

In the mystic voice a scurrilous rhetoric reverberates, pertaining either to a

declassified prophet or a preposterous detective, or both, shot through with a
paternalistic pathos, all of which exerts a strong effect on the exiled professor (“Do you
understand that you have nothing to fear from me? Yes, said Amalfitano,” 210). In an
odd yet intense manner, the voice becomes “therapeutic” in order to lead the professor
out of his unacknowledged fear and his lethargy, thus producing a de-intoxicating
effect. “There is no bad blood between us. The headache, if you have a headache, will go
away soon, and so will the buzzing in your ears, the racing pulse, the rapid heartbeat.
You’ll relax . . .” (210). After the departure of the suspicious observer in the black car
in the street, the voice tells Amalfitano to do something useful. “Something useful like
what? asked Amalfitano. For example, wash the dishes, said the voice. And Amalfitano
lit a cigarette and began to do what the voice had suggested” (210). After Amalfitano
has done quite a bit of nightly washing, cleaning, and tidying up and—like an addict—
looks for additional things to take care of but cannot find anything left, he goes to sleep
without undressing (211). When Rosa wakes him three hours later, it had been a long
time since Amalfitano had slept so well. Amalfitano’s classes that morning would be
entirely incomprehensible to the students—an additional hint that he had experienced
another state of consciousness, as well as the sudden absence of his melancholy.
Psycho-physiologically speaking, there is nothing sensational about the energies that
this nightly “event,” the encounter with the voice, has provided Amalfitano. As Aldous
Huxley stated in his essay, The Doors of Perception, there are proven methods at hand
that allow us to change our “ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know,
from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.”29
However, the places that can give way to experiences of illumination will always remain
precarious, or stunningly distinct, from the worlds where ordinary men and women
live. As for Bolaño’s character Amalfitano, it is not his spiritual—both somatic and
mind-opening—experience as such that is extraordinary, since plenty of Western artists
and writers have been interested in the borders of consciousness. Rather, the singularity of
his experience lies in the geographical, sociointellectual and narratological background
against which it is staged. It is the “peripheral intellectual” who breaks the spell of
sophisticated blindness, “words are uttered, but fail to enlighten” (Huxley), whereas the
Archimboldian apostles, the “Critics,” protagonists in the first part of the novel, will seek
this experience in vain. Actually the Europeans are much more alert to this general
deficit of “illumination” than Amalfitano, which is why they obsessively pursue the
writings and existential traces of Archimboldi, the literary “barbarian” whose work is late
in emerging from the avatars of an overburdened twentieth century. But the “Critics,”
as they approach the “mystery” of Archimboldi, will never succeed in tapping it, while
Amalfitano is the threshold character who—through his own transformation—helps
tear away the veil from the mythified literary genius. The particular interest that Bolaño
shows in the trope of the detective novel becomes understandable. Any expectation
that the big referential enigmas of 2666—Archimboldi’s “real identity” and that of the
perpetrators of the femicides of Santa Teresa—will be solved is bound to fail. In fact,
29
Aldous Huxley. “The Doors of Perception,” 2.

174 Narcoepics
the detective novel only makes sense as a precarious trope that helps launch different
kinds of narrative personnel on their inquisitive journeys into the no-man’s-land. In the
face of an “incomplete” secularity, both violent and “civilized,” of a global state of affairs
toward the end of the twentieth century, as reimagined by Bolaño, the energies that
suggest tearing away the veil of mythification will start to build when critical perception
meets mystical experience. This is what lends Bolaño’s novel its genuine stature in
contemporary literature and, as we have been arguing, this is what starts to come to the
surface when we think about the “estrangement-effect” to which Bolaño submits the
basic tropes of his book (human empathy through shared dialogue, the wordly project
of the European critics, a narrative habitus derived from the black novel, the longing
for an affective solution to fundamentally tragic situations and inhuman realities, and a
new, a “sober” kind of hero).
We begin to realize that it may not be the legitimate academic voices from
renowned universities that will help uncover the novelistic personality—or the
heuristic narratological function—of Benno von Archimboldi but, rather, the character
Amalfitano, at the moment when he abstains from melancholy and fear by recognizing
his “minor self.” Keeping in mind Benjamin’s reading of Brecht’s dialectical dramaturgy,
Amalfitano “makes use” of hopelessness when he overcomes the thickness of the doom,
the silent pulsation of tragedy, which his daily exhaustion and latent nervousness have
imposed on him. He really hits bottom, something that—in another state of body and
mind—could quickly end in a nervous breakdown or other severe pathological state.
Amalfitano, astonished, realizes that he is excited by what he has just lived (“I feel like
a nightingale . . .” 211). Of course, as the voice said, that is no guarantee of anything. It
is, perhaps, comparable to the trope of the “nihil volo”30—that special disposition in the
mystics’ experience in which unflinching will unites with an “emptiness” of purpose,
thus opening an enhanced subjective perception of the things or forces to come—a
sobering experience by which an active disposition is created, instead of an “action”
based on the rational or the customary mind. Here we find an example of “nihilism’s”
invigorating ambivalence. Different from a Nietzschean nihilism, as it is, for example,
read by Hannah Arendt,31 the purpose of Amalfitano’s turn has nothing to do with an
abstract philosophical judgment of the world. When the voice asks the professor to
rediscover “the perspective of the simple things in life” (209), this means speaking in
clues. Recalling another moment, in which the nightly voice interpellates Amalfitano,
“you haven’t thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand” (210). If what
resonates is nothing less than the perspective of “life itself ”—“a simple and antiquated
and ridiculous sentiment” (211), at issue is an awareness that is commonly obstructed
by both the disembodied intellect and the rules of conduct interiorized via common
sense at a given time in a given context. This is why an academic intellectual may be
spellbound by situations of danger and catastrophe, yet unable to (re)act. Amalfitano
breaks that spell with his newly acquired awareness. His “awakening” translates into an
alertness without fear, that is, without the previously looming nervous breakdown that
the Santa Teresa environment seemed to impose on the exiled philosophy professor.
30
See Michel de Certeau. “Mystic Speech,” 92.
31
See Hannah Arendt. The Life of the Mind. Part Two, 169–70.

The perspective of “life itself ” could, for example, be a matter of survival. It could also
be a matter of “sanity,” to the extent that it looks behind those ordering powers that
have proffered life its modern, and cynically violent destination.
Amalfitano, in his materialist leanings, discards the possibility that the voice
belongs to a superior or divine spirit. Perhaps it is a “lost soul” (212), or was there
a connection to the saint from Hermosillo, Madame Cristina? This woman seemed
capable of piercing through the morass of Santa Teresa’s violence. It is the time, or
the state of perception, that makes the professor see, in dream images (210) and daily
ocurrences, that the disappearances and killings of women are a subterranean part of
the entire city’s “life world.” His colleague, Professor Sylvia Pérez, together with a group
of feminists, participates in the organization of protests that demand transparency
in the investigation of the murders. Their posters say “No to impunity” and “End
to corruption” (213). Yet an occult force in late twentieth century has invaded the
everyday life of a city that appears as urban and agitated as it also seems inevitably to
belong to the desert. Paraphrasing Michail Romm’s film title, The Ordinary Fascism,
one might say that Amalfitano feels the ordinary presence, the atrocious immanence,
of the Santa Teresa femicides (in Spanish “feminicidios”)32, even in his private and
academic environments (see 215).
His is a sobering experience that makes him alert and more practical, on the one
hand, and more sarcastic, on the other. Getting his daughter Rosa out of this country
becomes his primary concern. When Rosa says goodbye to her father and joins “Fate,”
the black American journalist from New York who came to Santa Teresa to report on
a boxing match and is now about to return to the US, focalization and description
converge to give way to a downcast scenario (344). It is a filmic image, as we can “recall”
from a series of contemporary movies: the moment before the two young people
depart on their trip, Professor Amalfitano leaves the house where the book is always
hanging in the backyard, wearing a very wrinkled white shirt and jeans, bare-foot, his
hair mussed up, and crosses the street, to start talking with a neighbor, while his body,
seen from behind, is retreating. It is not just this undramatically sad image, whose
posture is similar to those of the final scenes of Amores Perros (Mexico) and Un Oso
Rojo (Argentina), in which the figure of the father moves into an inscrutable void.
Amalfitano is somehow close to the characters of the ex-guerrillero and outcast “el
Chivo,” a former university professor from Mexico City, from Amores Perros, and “el
Oso,” a man from Buenos Aires’ lower-middle-class who got involved in crime in order
to provide for his wife and daughter. In all three cases, a father abandons himself to
a “hopeless” destiny, but before doing so, he has conscientiously enabled or secured a
future for his female child, trying to guarantee a place of unfettered citizenship for the
daughter by distancing her from the precarious, dangerous world of the father himself.
These scenarios belong among the calamities of neoliberal development, whose
pressure on parts of the academic middle-classes in Latin America have been growing
increasingly. A nonmelodramatic, silently tragic yet antisublime gesture resounds
32
On the programmatic change of the term “femicidios” into “feminicidios” see Marcela Lagarde y de
los Ríos, “Sinergía por nuestros derechos humanos,” 63–84.

176 Narcoepics
here. As an outsider, Amalfitano is not concerned about getting an alternative for

himself. Neither is he simply driven by external circumstances that he cannot evade.
As a character who has found his foothold in (the “stoic” attitude of) the Geometric
Testament, facing an alien environment yet taking elementary precautions to protect
his female child, the professor may look old-fashionedly, benevolently patriarchal. This
active nihilism, acting from hopelessness, however, is one of the marks of a stunning
narrative figure from the periphery that articulates the position of the intellectual’s
planetary homelessness.
Let me introduce a prolepsis, so as to better illustrate the hinges that Bolaño installs in
his multilayered, open-ended, dark “odyssey.” Amalfitano occupies a place—the threshold
of the normal—to which the book’s main characters are drawn: Santa Teresa on the
Mexican border, facing the “sad American mirror of wealth and poverty” to the north.
The point is not that the philosophy professor will directly meet all those characters,
although he does encounter most of them. Rather, his transformation into someone who
“sees” helps him get closer to the underside of the discursive world. The structure of
detective fiction tends to create an expectation that enigmas will eventually be solved.
But Bolaño’s purpose is to approximate uncanny scenarios and to let them press on one
another. A breathtaking loop that folds far distant moments of world history together
becomes transparent when Rosa is leaving Santa Teresa. She knows Guadalupe Roncal, a
feminist reporter from Mexico City, whom she decides to accompany to the Santa Teresa
prison before leaving the country. At this same time a German, Klaus Haas, is accused of
committing several of the Santa Teresa femicides and is held in a Mexican state prison
during an endless series of half-finished trials. Later, toward the end of the novel, it turns
out that Klaus is the nephew of Benno von Archimboldi, whose original, pre-artistic
name was Hans Reiter. This last section of the novel, “The Part About Archimboldi,”
reveals the writer’s former role—as an ordinary, young recruit who was drafted at the
beginning of World War II—in the crimes that the German occupation army committed
in Poland and Russia. Much, much later, when Archimboldi is over 80-years-old, he will
embark on what is presumably his last trip. From an unknown place in Europe, perhaps
Italy, he travels to Mexico City, then to Hermosillo, and from there to Santa Teresa in
order to see what he can do to help his imprisoned nephew. The European critics, who
are always after the writer, trying to track him down and make him a public figure,
cannot understand, however, that his last journey forges the “impossible” link in the
historical picture of the twentieth century. It brings a particular outline, even a blueprint
of modernity’s global historicity of violence to the fore. This connection reaches from
Europe to today’s Western hemisphere or, more specifically, from fascist Germany to the
Mexican–US border, generating a vision in which the links between barbarian crime,
suffering, and desire in ordinary people, moral anemia and psychic exhaustion in the
better-off middle-classes, the socially infectious impact of political corruption, and the
erosion of a cosmopolitan intellectual ideal have come to converge in one single picture.
Here, pain is a matter of nontragic, antisublime aesthetics. Hans Reiter’s “journey” takes
him from his being a soldier in World War II, across Western Europe in the postwar
years, where he becomes “Archimboldi” the writer, and then toward the end of his life, to
Mexico’s northern border, one of today’s most extreme sites in terms of the proliferation

of violence, together with the casualties that uneven globalization keeps sending forth in
the Western hemisphere. Ironically, Reiter’s nephew, Klaus Haas, falls prey to the judicial
mockery that plays out in Santa Teresa at the end of the 1990s.
Thus it occurs to the Mexican authorities from the state of Sonora to set up a trial
in order to convict a man who appears, in Bolaño’s imagination, as a deterritorialized
version of the classical “pharmakos.” The “pharmakos” is that figure that possesses,
or acquires, a specific capacity for being turned into a scapegoat to be sacrificed or
punished, to strenghten the others, or to get rid of a problem. In his physical appearance,
Klaus is a younger version of his uncle “Benno von Archimboldi,” alias Hans Reiter.
He is a German of gigantic stature, blond hair, and timid manners who came to Santa
Teresa from New York to open a computer supplies store. When narrating the scene
in the Santa Teresa prison where Guadalupe Roncal and Rosa meet the accused Klaus,
Bolaño takes care to give this character an aura of the ogre of mythic tales, so as to
make him suit the role not of the guilty man but of the typical “pharmakos” who, in this
case, plays his part with a semblance of mockery. From the visitors’ room, both women
hear the footsteps and noises signaling that a portentous creature is nearing.
The footsteps came closer [. . .]. Suddenly a voice began to sing a song. It sounded
like a woodcutter chopping down trees. [. . .] I am a giant lost in the middle of a
burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me, Rosa translated the suspect’s
string of curses . . . And then the footsteps and the laughter could be heard once
more, and the goading and words of encouragement of the inmates and the guards
escorting the giant. And then an enormous and very blond man came into the
visitors’ room, ducked his head [. . .] singing the German song about the lost
woodcutter and fixing them all with an intelligent and mocking gaze. (349)
The appearance of the prison giant at the end of the third part of the novel forebodes
a perception of the actual Archimboldi (who will supposedly “come to rescue” Klaus),
although we do not yet know that the writer is the imprisoned man’s uncle. The only
aspect we can intuit is that, in both men, the imposing stature seems to cover an
incalculable and vulnerable personality, a contrast whose prospective meaning can be
illustrated by a formulation of Northrop Frye. “The pharmakos is neither innocent nor
guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything
he has done provokes, like the mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche.
He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society . . ..”33 The words in
the prisoner’s song, “I am a giant lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone
will come to rescue me,” are not only an anticipation of the uncle’s final appearance
in Santa Teresa (which will remain invisible) but apply to Archimboldi’s own identity,
especially his mocking of the literary critics in their intent to “rescue” his excentric,
real-life appearance for the sake of academia and public fame.
Archimboldi, the German “alien” writer, and Amalfitano, the exiled Chilean
philosophy professor, are the intellectual nomads of the novel, yet they never meet.
Their exposure to precarious existence and to becoming “victims” or, in the case of
33
Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, 41.

178 Narcoepics
Klaus Haas, accused of being a perpetrator of crime in the greater political story seems
to lead both men into forms of spiritual transgression. This confers on them, on each in
his own way, a peculiar wisdom of how to survive. Amalfitano and Archimboldi both
stand for a sobering dimension of subjectivity, which is not properly modern yet global
in the crude sense of the word. Following this somber vision, to be an “intellectual”
means having no home and getting the closest possible awareness of the violent state
of affairs that has so deeply infected the world. It can also mean, as we will see in the
case of Archimboldi’s story, becoming an “amphibian” and hiding, like the cuttlefish
that shoots its ink as protective “pharmakon,” from both his enemies and academic
admirers.
Placebo intellectuals
After presenting this overall examination of the novel, we will now take two steps
backward, in order to pay closer attention to its beginning, “The Part About the Critics,”
which allows us to look into the ambivalent spheres of that part of the world that
is said to represent a “balanced,” Western European modernity. There is a tendency,
especially among students and scholars of Latin American literature, to read 2666
with the major emphasis on part four, “The Part About the Crimes,” which focuses
on the most disturbing acts of violence inflicted upon women along the US–Mexico
border, and overlooking those that are just “normally disturbing.” This is because of the
vibrations of veracity that emerge from this huge, novelistic section in which Bolaño
displays, notably drawing on Sergio González Rodríguez’ book of testimonios and
documents, Huesos en el desierto (2002, Bones in the Desert), a monumental corpus of
documentary representations. These elements are fused into a narrative that unfolds
with paratactical intensity: fragments of newspaper reports, forensic descriptions of
the mutilated corpses of women, articulations of feminist civil activism, together with
numerous references to the dehumanizing aspects of the maquiladora system and
economic accumulation throughout the border regions, the violence committed by
police and organized crime, narcotics traffic, and state corruption. Yet the centrality of
the experience of violence at the US–Mexican border does not give the novel a mark of
geographic exceptionalism. 2666 is a book about a planetary state of affairs, pointing to
the heart of everyday existence as a figure in which the uneven development generated
by global modernity translates into particular pathological scenarios, spanning diverse
human groups including both the well-established European literary critics and the
phantom characters of bestially murdered young women from Santa Teresa, most
of whom were unskilled workers in the maquiladora factories. In the background
of a map in which subjective trajectories of Chileans, Mexicans, US-Americans, and
Europeans flow together, or diverge, there lurks the phantasma of the German writer
Benno von Archimboldi. If the Chilean professor Amalfitano serves as a threshold
figure regarding the spiritual design of the novel, Archimboldi will turn out to be the
actual “connecting figure.” But the roads for the hypothetical “detective”—a person

who exists only as an immanent force in the narrative—who would want to resolve
the big enigmas of the plot are closed. Therefore, we must continue disentangling that
intensive yet sober stream of transcontinental experiences and visceral inquietude that
constitutes the subversive heart of 2666. Let us look more closely into “The Part About
the Critics.” Why has Bolaño chosen the somewhat frivolous undertakings of a group
of academics from the humanities, of European descent and professional status, as the
initial staging ground from which his novel sets out to become a global odyssey?
In some ways, 2666 can be perceived as a book about academics, dealing with
the desires of a group of European scholars to indulge in the uniqueness, not only
of their masterful literary understanding, but of substantial intellectual life during
times that seem to erode any idea of persistence of avant-garde purpose. It should
be noted that Bolaño’s own generational experience is not that of the “Critics.”
Having left Santiago de Chile, as did his character Amalfitano, shortly after General
Pinochet’s coup d’ état, and going into continental and transatlantic exile, Bolaño
was propelled out of the context of the socialist political culture that marked Chile
and other countries of the Southern Cone during the 1960s and early 1970s, to
find himself reemerging in global space, in an ongoing struggle for survival that
included several ruptures. The “Critics,” in turn, experience a different displacement.
Driven by their search for Archimboldi, theirs is a voluntary, temporary move
from an always-contested yet economically privileged, and thus relatively stable,
Western metropolitan life world, to the savage territories of Santa Teresa. When
they spend a prolonged period in this environment along the Mexican–US border,
Pelletier, the professor from Paris, and Espinoza, his colleague from Madrid, make
their “headquarters” in a central hotel of the city where Pelletier passes entire
weeks rereading Archimboldi’s novels and drinking cocktails by the swimming
pool area, while Espinoza distracts himself by acting as the benefactor of a modest
family with one of whose daughters he entertains a dalliance. It is from this rather
“genteel” cosmopolitan positioning that these visitors to the Hemispheric South can
view Amalfitano, who offers to help in their search for Archimboldi, as a “loser,” a
“non-existent professor at a non-existent university.” Bolaño might have vitriolic
contempt for the self-assured Western Europeans, but he is never caught employing
explicit judgment. Rather, the notarial tone that characterizes his immanent
narrator keeps even irony, in overall terms, at a sober level—a borderline aesthetic
attitude, so to speak. Intellectually, the Europeans and Amalfitano share the same
admiration for the late lamented German writer, and they may be close to each
other in their artistic preferences and personal philosophical libraries. However,
Amalfitano’s experience—as was Bolaño’s—is marked by “disaster capitalism.”
This explains his spiritual affinity with Archimboldi, the German outsider turned
into a writer and “nationless” creature in the course of the belligerent twentieth
century. Intellectual affinities between vehemently “globalized” academics, such as
Amalfitano, and an always cosmopolitan liberal critical elite notwithstanding, it
makes a world of difference if someone is not generically part of the well-to-do,
academic middle-class of the West. And it may occur that, at this point, the affective
spirit of the novel calls for an unusual posture of criticism—as happened in the

180 Narcoepics
life and thinking of Walter Benjamin, and as we might find in the imagination of
Roberto Bolaño, as well. What we perceive has to do with an attitude of “humiliating
sobriety” as a matter of an aesthetics at a threshold, and perhaps as a philosophy of
intellectual survival.
But what is “The Part About the Critics” actually all about? How can we approach
the habitus of intellectual “self-fashioning” as it is exposed in the initial part of the
novel? What was often understood as a primary focus regarding Western rationalism
and modernity was the idea of a “higher end,” from whose vantage point means and
methods to achieve that end could be derived and justified. A prevailing concept of
subjectivity was influenced by a similar logic: what usually matters for the subject’s
identity is what makes “the subject” an individual “author.” What counts is production
and achievement from a pre-established prospective vantage point: “first, perceiving
the image or shape (eidos) of the product-to-be, and then organizing the means and
starting the execution.”34 In other words, and we draw on Arendt here, the emphasis lies
on a critical approach to the famous “what” by which homo faber came to tendentially
occupy the place that was once held by God, based on the Platonic separation of
knowing and doing. Is not the work of the critic, as well, supposed to be concentrated
upon a worldly matter (literature, culture), that can be objectified through the analysis
and interpretation of texts and guiding ideas or of discursive constructs? Is not the
quality to be achieved and upheld by the academic interpreter of texts predetermined
by an expectation of the uniqueness or the singular importance of his or her object of
study? And is there not a subconscious power at work that seems to suggest, for example,
that scholars in the humanities do good by choosing and reinterpreting the gallery of
intellectual founding figures and geniuses from Plato to Derrida, or their equivalents
across fields, instead of independently exploring the realms of minor literatures and
less codified conceptual and cultural articulations? On the other hand, if this were
viewed as a matter for debate, we might wonder if the famous “what”—what one thinks
and writes in terms of a projected autonomous quality, that of “the-author-subject”—
determines the individual subjectivity of “who” one actually is.
From here on, I want to discuss the paradoxical issue of “who” the four literary
critics are—those academics whose endeavors stand at the center of the first section
of Bolaño’s opus. Taking into account that “academic striving,” scholarly habitus, and
intellectual identity are crucial topics throughout Bolaño’s work, what is the status that
he confers to the debated norm of the “idem”35 in his book? What can we make—with
Bolaño’s help—of the powerful convention that the work of the literary critic depends
on the weight and uniqueness of his or her object, linked to the aspiration that the
critic can become an auteurist as well? Is not, in the end, the literary-critical enterprise
supposed to make a difference where the hermeneutic and ethical appropriation and
redeployment of experience in the wide sense of the word is concerned? But our novel
might also instigate, at some point, the question of whether the institution of academic
literary criticism is not especially susceptible to the cultivation of misconstrued
34
Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, 225.
35
See the distinction between “idem” and “ipse” in Paul Ricoeur. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, 246–7.

identities. This concern is intertwined with particular cartographies of scholarly action

and legitimacy. Bolaño’s “Critics”—Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, and Norton—represent,
from the beginning, a position in the “real” as well as in the symbolic world, which
was not afforded to someone like the Chilean professor Amalfitano. They never reflect
about the legitimacy of their own existence as critics, which situates them at a select (or
perhaps a dead?) end of Bolaño’s narrative map. Now, how did it all begin? And how, in
fact, does the novel begin? This is the way it starts.
The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was
Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German
literature. The book in question was D’Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn’t realize
at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed
The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly
French-themed D’Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse or bibliographical lacuna,
attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and
admiration that the novel stirred in him (3).
A few observations come to hand. The simple fact that the novel begins in a conventional
realist fashion does not say much about its rationale, apart from the observation that
Bolaño seems to be free of the ambition of high literary experimentation. Imaginary
transgression is not pursued as a matter of aesthetic introversion in the first place.
As readers might notice with a certain surprise, there is the inclination of a French
man toward a contemporary German writer, an attitude that will also characterize the
ambitions of the other protagonists of the first part—three young literary critics from
Italy, Spain, and England. Strangely, the German novelist bears the name Benno von
Archimboldi. His works, judging by their titles (for we will never know much more
about them), are thematically atypical, slightly bizarre, being as they are committed
to nonGerman, or excentric topographies. But above all, the project of the literary
critics-to-be to focus their work on the admired master’s fiction—the way their search
is narrated—is, and will remain, unconcerned with any kind of specific artistic qualities
of Archimboldi’s books. The more intense the fascination of Pelletier and his colleagues
with Archimboldi becomes, the less we will get a chance to learn about the fictional
cosmos of the German novelist. This is not a kind of creative “mistreatment” of artistic
matter by a self-conscious writer (which is fairly common in modern and postmodern
prose), nor does Archimboldi simply function as narrative bait in the manner of
detective fiction. Bolaño is skeptical about a presumed transcendence of literary
representation. Paraphrasing Arendt, he is concerned not about “what” Archimboldi
has written as an acclaimed novelist, but about “who” this person is as the medium
of a life story that becomes tangible ex post facto. A similar mechanism applies to the
narrative construction of the critics as well. “Who somebody is or was we can know
only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other
words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and
left behind, tells us only what he is or was.”36 Now, the “Critics” have made it their project
36
Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, 186.

182 Narcoepics
to find out, interpret and publicize “what” Archimboldi “is or was.” This is their job, so
to speak, but the “artistic” content of this mission is either exchangeable, or irrelevant
for closer examination in 2666. Bolaño narrates, extensively, the academics’ routine
commitment to the “what” of their subject in order to actually expose their “who,” as if
their scholarly project and entire existence were a sort of occupational therapy. There is
a latent irony at work when the “Critics” also try to reconstruct Archimboldi’s personal
trajectory and decide to embark on their own journey to Mexico, to meet the writer
in person. However, the “who” of Archimboldi is what they cannot uncover, and it is
this “dialectical” procedure of “exposure by omission” that allows Bolaño to mount a
both subtle and pointed critique of Western European, academic self-modeling. The
Archimboldian apostles remain stuck in the famous Platonist search for the “idem.”
Their unsuccessful project to discover the “ipse” is reflected back upon themselves, and
their own identity will become recognizable as being based on the placebo principle:
they need, as exemplary academics, the “pharmakon” of a literary giant who always
remains at a distance, in order to fulfill their most basic needs and bodily desires,
starting with their daily bread. That is to say, by building on a literary (or philosophical)
myth, and abstracting from a “real story” that has no “author” but only a precarious
hero “without heroic qualities”37 (the artist as a physical and socio-anthropological, a
“speaking and acting,” being), one can, as a scholar and under certain circumstances,
make a good living.
This discussion regarding “The Part About the Critics” is of an epistemic nature. I
do not mean to reduce to dry theory the brilliance of the “Critics’” purpose and their
hermeneutic obsession of making an outsider part of the distinct canon. In the end,
we are reflecting about desire and intoxication and, from there, sobriety, all of which
makes us now return, for the sake of the “story factor” that Bolaño is indebted to, to
the metropolitan life world of Pelletier and his befriended colleagues. Still a student in
the German Department, Pelletier decides to become an Archimboldian, which means
creating a framework for constructing a literary celebrity almost from the start, since
none of his professors has ever heard of the writer. So the young enthusiast writes
to the Hamburg press that published Archimboldi’s works, undertakes, at the age
of 22 (2666, 4), the translation of D’Arsonval from the German into French, to then
develop his dissertation from there, and a few years later translates other books by the
adored novelist in order to eventually become the accepted authority on Benno von
Archimboldi in French academic and editorial circles. When Pelletier was still “young
and poor” (4), he felt that he needed to be an “ascetic,” hunched over his German texts
“in the weak light of a single bulb, thin and dogged, as if he were pure will made flesh,
bone, and muscle without an ounce of fat, fanatical and bent on success” (5). This
worked on him “like a drug” (5), a drug that helped remove obstacles by setting his
emotions in the right condition, between tears, rage, and whatever else.
Archimboldi’s work, even when still that of a barely known writer, is the “pharmakon”
that sets the young Pelletier on a brilliant career (5). When we speak, from here, of
the placebo-text principle, this means, first, that a drug that unites body and mind in
37
Ibid.

an altered state does not have to be of a chemo-biological nature, such as nicotine,

alcohol, or LSD. Books, and the images that they (are made to) produce of their creator,
together with their “pneuma,” their “disembodied spirit,” can figure among the most
powerful drugs in modern times. It means, second, that to become an aficionado who is
uncompromisingly bent on his or her project implies a daily praxis, a life style, and all
the necessary incitement and pressure to be put on the “self,” which can then result in a
neurological and physiological disposition that results in a particular type of addiction.
Again, addiction does not have to be a primordial matter of ingesting harmful narcotic
products. When a book comes to play a “narcoticizing” role, there is no uniqueness per
se about this book, but rather an aura that is formed through complex yet concrete
relationships, in which physiological realities play their unacknowledged part, even in
the case of works that produce their effect through fame, or mythic appeal. In the first
part of 2666, the enigmatic writer Archimboldi and his books are a steady reference.
When the novel abstains, nevertheless, from any particular incursion into Archimboldi’s
literary universe, it shuns, in a sense, the famous “narcissistic” or postmodern literature’s
search for metafictional construction. Bolaño’s opus is obsessively dedicated to critics
and writers, yet his is not properly “metafiction” the way it has been understood in
postmodern literary thinking. In that way, “The Part About the Critics” seems to make
the point that it is the “pharmakon” that works as the movens for the Western scholar—
something that cannot be reduced to the metareflexive mind. What the pharmakon
helps to enforce, in agreement or in tension with preexisting, more specialized aesthetic
references, is curiosity, astonishment, latency of desire, image-making, associativity, and
temporary release from life’s profane pressures, together with a craving to continue the
adventure. Any literary universe with the powers to satisfy an inherent craving, or even
hunger for gratification in the reader and, in the given case, the scholar, can turn, under
circumstances, into a “placebo text,” working as a drug. Of course, more subtle intellectual
motives are at issue, as well. However, in Archimboldi’s case, the “Critics’” point is merely
that his work is “different” from anything else known, conveying a mystical oeuvre at the
margins of contemporary, lettered sophistication. But could this not be said of many
others of today’s imagined, and actual, writers? Had Bolaño specified the outstanding
concerns and aesthetic qualities of Archimboldi’s writing, the sense of autonomous value
might have created a legitimacy in and for itself. In that case, select ideas and figures of
the sublime would appear to be the moving forces of the Archimboldian apostles. But
2666 is dedicated to a spontaneously “Socratic,” rather than an Aristotelian oeuvre of
Archimboldi. If we remember the Phaedrus, the “pharmakon” that can help us feed on
one or another sphere of “divine madness” can be stronger—reading between the lines
of Socrates’ cunning speech—than abstract ideas or artistic values.
The careers of the three other critics are variations, and suddenly almost replicas,
of Pelletier’s story. The scholar Piero Morini, a teacher of German literature at the
University of Turin who, although he had first read Archimboldi four years before
Pelletier, did not translate the first novel of the German author into Italian until five
years after the Frenchman had already embarked on his respective effort (5). Morini’s
translations in Italy had to overcome greater obstacles than Pelletier’s in France, but
persistence and eloquence helped him succeed, even though he had been diagnosed

184 Narcoepics
with multiple sclerosis and was left permanently in a wheelchair. The third of the
academic “musketeers” (possessing “iron wills,” 8), is Manuel Espinoza from Madrid.
His approach to the field of German literature leads via a frustrated reception of the
writings of Ernst Jünger. His career is marked by several detours, but by the year 1990,
Espinoza has also become a regular participant in German literature conferences
across Europe. “Like Morini and Pelletier, he had a good job and a substantial income,
and he was respected (to the extent possible) by his students as well as his colleagues.
He never translated Archimboldi or any other German author” (8). The fourth “Critic”
is a woman from London by the name of Liz Norton, whose discovery of Archimboldi
was the “least poetic” of all. Being notably younger than the three male Archimboldians
of great drive, she came across one of Archimboldi’s novels in the house of a German
friend when she was living in Berlin for a few months in 1988. In addition, she was
more suspicious, and her mindset less focused as far as the adamant drive toward one
single literary authority is concerned. Besides, and “used in a personal sense, the phrase
‘achieve an end’ seemed to her a small-minded snare” (8). Is this why Liz Norton, at one
point, shows the closest though fleeting “aesthetic” perception of one of Archimboldi’s
books? Reading the novel Bitzius, on a rainy London day, makes Norton run out into
the park, where “the grass and the earth seeemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their
incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized
vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton
had drunk a steaming cup of peyote” (9). The hint of the book as “a drug”—an “agent”
that substitutes the narcoticizing peyote experience—could barely be more suggestive,
“But the truth is that she had only had tea to drink and she felt overwhelmed, as if a
voice were repeating a terrible prayer in her ear . . .” (ibid.).
A significant momentum does not arise from the ways in which the “Critics” meet
each other (we have already suspected that their encounter happens at academic
congresses on German literature); rather it is due to the fact that they discover their
joint spirit during an epochal threshold at which Europe and the world cease to be
what they were during the four post-World War II decades. In fact, the entire novel
sets out from this scenario of drastic change. We are talking about the years of 1989–91.
Pelletier and Morini meet at a literature colloquium in Leipzig in 1989, “when the GDR
(German Democratic Republic, 1949–90) was in its death throes, and then they saw
each other again at the German literature symposium held in Mannheim in December
of the same year (a disaster, with bad hotels, bad food, and abysmal organizing)” (10).
There reverberates, on changing German soil as well as among the “Germanists,”
a certain sense of chaos. On the one hand, an existing academic vocabulary has
become paltry and volatile but, on the other, a spirit of a decline of critical thinking
seems to be latent wherever the “Critics” go. They do not perceive this situation as a
problem, since their actual “hero,” Archimboldi, is neither canonized nor has a major
discursive field—for example, postmodernist, interculturalist, gender-oriented, or
postmarxist—crystallized around the interpretation of his works. Thus, the “Critics”
are more like a kind of secret brotherhood, those select few who really know about
the German’s oeuvre as the “great black shark” of contemporary literature(11). In 1992,
Pelletier and Espinoza meet Morini, and all three full professors meet Liz Norton, a

26-year-old doctoral candidate at that time, at a symposim in Bremen, in 1993. What

initiates their deep mutual affinity is, only randomly sketched, a polemic that unfolds
between our Archimboldians from Paris, Madrid, London, and Turin, and, at the
opposite end, a group of eminent German critics—“Pohl, Schwarz, and Borchmeyer”
(11, 12). The German Archimboldi specialists are bound to their own, constrained
background, comparing the novelist to Böll, Dürrenmatt, and Grass. They speak, for
example, of “suffering,” of “civic duty,” and of “humor” (12), which meets the sarcastic
affront of the nonGerman scholars.38 The “Critics” seem to hold up—and here the
narration conveys bits of scholarly discourse only indirectly, or in ironic allusions—a
Nietzschean posture regarding Archimboldi’s work, one that, in addition, emphasizes
a certain dreary energy stemming from Medieval and Renaissance literature. That is,
while the “usual Germanists” apply either a national, mainly West German (as well as
Swiss, in the case of Dürrenmatt) framework of reference, the group of the “Critics”
perceives in Archimboldi’s work a terrible, unrelenting side, together with an atypical,
“trans-German” core.
This barbarian aspect resonates from the background of those years, in which
Eastern European state socialism is dismantled, and that which is widely advertised as
“revolution” turns out to be the economic incorporation of the East European countries
“not into the European Community on somewhat equal terms, but into a global
capitalist system already in the process of restructuring according to neoliberal rules
that marked the end of an era of social democracy.”39 Bolaño, a Chilean writer who had
embarked on his diaspora almost two decades earlier, at a time when Pinochet started
to impose what would become the South American, neoliberal economic model on
dictatorial grounds, is, apparently, sensitive toward these European and global changes.
But he doubts that there can be one single, succinct narration capable of representing
the “transitions” that he has been experiencing as violent and monstrous. If we perceive,
in the “Critics’” craving for Archimboldi’s work, a sense in which a larger climate of
intellectual depoliticization could be encapsulated, then the story of Archimboldi’s
life itself, emerging to light at the end of the 898-page novel, is stunningly political,
although in an uncomfortable way. Let me show how the years 1989–91 are condensed
into an imagination that is disturbing, also one of the rare moments where satire takes
the lead. It is not the “Critics” facing these changes from a close yet alienating distance
but, again, Amalfitano, the diasporic outsider who was left ashore in Santa Teresa, who
is the “seer,” the one who sees through the suffocating surface of the modern-global
everyday. In a ghostly dream, the Chilean professor meets the abject image of the “last
Communist philosopher of the twentieth century” (227). The man is singing a song
in Russian, but it is not always the same, for there are words in French and English
as well, even pop melodies and tangos, ballads that heighten drunkenness or love
(228). “When the last Communist philosopher finally reached the crater or latrine,
38
See also the laconic report on a 1995 international literature congress in Amsterdam, in which a
hegemonic “English” and “Anglo-Indian” rally-like presence is referred to with mockery, and where
the German-literature discussions are viewed as “more productive” (17).
39
See S. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 229.

186 Narcoepics
Amalfitano discovered in astonishment that it was none other than Boris Yeltsin”
(228). Yeltsin takes a look at the professor as if it were he who had invaded his dream,
then gives him a little instruction, starting with “listen carefully, comrade”:
I am going to explain what the third leg of the human table is.. . . And then leave
me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils
down to, but that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from
collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing
into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand
+ magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic, and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists
and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater of the latrine and . . . took a flask of
vodka out of his suit pocket and said: “I think it’s time for a little drink.”
And after he had drunk and given the poor Chilean professor the sly squint of a
hunter, he began to sing again . . . And then he disappeared, swallowed up by the
crater streaked with red, . . . and Amalfitano was left alone and he didn’t dare look
down the hole . . . (228).
The dream-image reveals an allegorically sharp perception of that populist politician, if
we remember that Yeltsin, before becoming the head of the Soviet state in the process
of its undermining, was notorious for his drinking escapades and sexual affairs. His
actual merit was to embark, after completing an instructional visit to the United States,
on ethnically based, nationalist demagogy, inventing a new political legitimacy that
eroded the remnants of perestroika40 in an overall situation of the collapse of socialist
regimes in Eastern Europe. In her overview of the main factors that marked the
transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the years 1989 and 1990, Susan
Buck-Morss argues that what was publicized, by Western satellite media, as a popular
revolutionary quest for “democracy and freedom” were in fact new forms of civil
society emerging inside the old Party regimes, under the effect of the radicalization of
various dissenting forces. But soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “outstretched
arms of the West” carefully transmitted a corrected meaning: instead of radical reform
and incorporation of the East as equals, economic and political subordination under
the neoliberal breeze of global market ideology was strategically at issue. Located in
such a contextual framework, with which Bolaño was closely familiar, the novelist
reminds his readers of Yeltsin’s recipe by which the politician captured, for Russia’s sake
and beyond, the world’s most pervasive, globally unifying forces: “supply + demand
+ magic.” Why is “magic” so important, in order to prevent market society from
collapsing into a hole (a “garbage pit of the void”) of historically emptied life worlds,
which pulsate endlessly in their reproduction of the meaningless? Here we might
recall, again, Benjamin’s little-known fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” in which he
thinks of capitalism, in a bold conceptual vision, as a cultic-religious phenomenon
40
Perestroika is briefly synthesized by Buck-Morss as “market reform within the framework of the
socialist economy and democratic reform within a one-party political system” (of the Soviet Union;
226).
41
Walter Benjamin. “Capitalism as Religion,” 288.

without a specific body of dogma or theology. What makes capitalism permanent is

the freedom to consume as an ever-repetitive, cumulative yet “purely cultic religion,
perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.”41 And yes, “epic and sex” are part of the
cult that impregnates daily routines with their dependence on capital as its god. In
other words, the fetishistic (“magic”) quality into which “supply and demand” have
been elevated—a form of low-level, self-perpetuating ecstasy—obscures the opposition
between use value and exchange value, so that the utilitarian and ritual dimensions
of market societies become inseparably linked. Yeltsin was keenly aware, as Bolaño
implies, that the triumphant capitalist coup in Russia and beyond relied on that
duality. The novelist also calls on his readers not to overlook the dint of cynicism in the
image of the execrably Dionysian Yeltsin. After having completed his political duties,
the monstrous colporteur takes his place in the entrails of the latrine of history—not
without the “sly squint of the hunter.” It is this type of “spectral criticism,” working with
sometimes chilling, sometimes grotesque visions and dream-images, which signals the
sites of crisis in the contemporary, globalized world whose furthest boundaries are
hard to establish, but which will come into transatlantic perception in the liminal space
of Santa Teresa.
In the meantime, the Archimboldian critics, relatively unmoved by a changing
Europe that, in turn, is strongly affecting Amalfitano, pursue their mission with
enhanced energies. This is because of the spirit of the newly constituted group, which
Liz Norton—a “blond Amazon” who speaks fluent German—has not only become part
of but where she is turning into a Muse-like medium of desire. There is an intertextual
moment to it. If we remember Benjamin’s interest, in “Surrealism,” in Auerbach’s
figure of the “mystical beloved,” it has to do with a dialectical concept of love in which
“the lady . . . matters least.” What bespeaks is a gift—a moment of “divine madness,”
summoning Socrates’ zest in Phaedrus once more—which incites illumination rather
than providing a down-to-earth, sensual pleasure. That way, “chastity” can become
a “transport” of surprising force. We know that Benjamin was imagining a certain
analogy between Dante’s Beatrice and Bretón’s Nadja, the issue being that—beyond the
well-explored, masculine fascination with a female, nonrational “essence”—the physical
absence of a beloved creature can still enable an energetic relationship, thereby causing
a transgressively sensual effect on imagination, the original intertextual clue that led
Benjamin to formulate his “dialectics of intoxication” (see Chapter 2). At such a point,
ecstasy became thinkable, for Benjamin, from a condition of “sobriety.” In addition,
one of Bretón’s perceptions regarding the character of Nadja says: “When I am near
her I am nearer things which are near her.” In Benjamin’s reading: “He is closer to the
things that Nadja is close to than to her.”42 But what are these things, or why are certain
things so difficult to rescue from an “authoritarian quotidian” existence? For the male
Archimboldian apostles, in 2666, Liz Norton is the creature that seems to lead them
closer to Benno von Archimboldi, because she is the least methodical and calculating
of them all. It is not that she has a deeper knowledge of Archimboldi’s work, nor is
she aware of the master’s distant undertakings. Yet she is more intuitive and, in a way,
42
Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism,” 210.

188 Narcoepics
more undecided than her male colleagues. The intertextual irony lies in that our male
“Critics” are unable to respect a female mystical potential that might then produce, in
the best of cases, actual illumination, as fleeting as it might be. In the end, the male
scholars all long (and eventually succeed in that longing) for a sexual relationship with
Norton, and they also long, each deep within his ego, for a petit-bourgeois marriage
(children, a nice house, and an end to too much group-bonding).43 The irony points in
this and in another direction: was not the matter of “sobriety” the weakest link, even in
the Surrealists’ conception of love? It’s not about avoiding sex, to be clear. In fact, sex
would not stand in the way of a life philosophy of sobriety, as Benno von Archimboldi’s
“narrative identity” will later show. The issue is rather how to overcome the restraints,
that is, the egocentric anxieties of the individualistic subject. At stake, for example, is
ascetism together with those forces that could compete with the dominant emanations
of myth (“Yeltsin’s” magic, for example), but also with a comforting, almost conformist
indifference: a smooth, “humanistic” self-assurance that a certain academy seems to
guarantee to (or require from) those who are legitimately dedicated to their metier—
such as the life of the “Critics’” flowing conveniently in accord with the “placid river of
European university German departments” (40).
There is an ocurrence, during which Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s adoration of their
gorgeous female colleague, shaped by a “greater force” (17) finally collapses into
an egoistic explosion of violence. Sexist and racist modes of empowerment, or
“subjectification,” can become particularly pervasive when projection is at work.
Pelletier and Espinoza have come from Paris and Madrid to visit Norton, asking her if
she still loved Pritchard, an intimate London companion of hers. Her answer is “no,” or
perhaps “yes,” but why this kind of question, the young woman wonders, perhaps out
of jealosy? Upon which both men reply that it was “almost an insult to accuse them
of being jealous considering the nature of their friendship” (73). This implies that
the nature of their bond is linked to a superior project. Then they go out for dinner,
talking cheerfully like children, until night falls, about the “desastrous” consequences
of jealosy, and the sweetness of certain open, “delectable wounds” (ibid.). The three
academics are still engrossed in their conversation after leaving the restaurant, taking
a taxi and passing Harmsworth Park and the Imperial War Museum, and other sites
alongside the nightly streets of London. The cab driver, a Pakistani, looks as if he
cannot believe what he is hearing. Norton calls his attention, indicating that he has
lost his orientation, and the driver confesses that “London was such a labyrinth.” This
causes Espinoza to
remark that he’d be damned if the cabbie hadn’t just quoted Borges, who once said
London was like a labyrith—unintentionally, of course. To which Norton replied
that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their
description of London. This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a
Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous
43
After having sex with Pelletier and Espinoza, respectively, and after a “detained period of reflection,”
Norton decides to commit herself to a relationship with Morini, the professor from Torino in the
wheel chair, who is impeded from being as self-serving as the others.

Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets
as well as he should, . . ., but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and
by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking
in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the
same word they had for it in London as it happened, and the word was bitch or slut
or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents,
weren’t English, also had a name in his country and that name was pimp or hustler
or whoremonger (73).
The “Critics,” taken totally by surprise, need a moment to react, and then tell the driver
to stop his wretched car (74). Which the Pakistani does, not without pointing to the
meter to settle the account. This seemed ok to Norton and Pelletier who wanted to leave
the issue there, but it was an unbearable affront to Espinoza, “who stepped down and
opened the driver’s door and jerked the driver out, the latter not expecting anything
of the sort from such a well-dressed gentleman. Much less did he expect the hail of
Iberian kicks that proceeded to rain down on him” (74). Pelletier joins in kicking the
Pakistani who was down, “curled into a ball on the ground,” despite Norton’s shouting
that violence wouldn’t solve anything . . . The kicking continues,
shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie
(an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mention
seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop,
Norton was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to
kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a
bitch, and on and on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in
the head, except for the eyes (ibid.).
A day later, a local television station reports that the driver’s body was found with “four
broken ribs, a concussion, a broken nose, and he’d lost all of his top teeth” (77). At the very
moment of the event, when the “Archimboldians” stop kicking the defenseless man
they were sunk for a few seconds in the strangest calm of their lives. It was as if
they’d finally had the ménage à trois they’d so often dreamed of. Pelletier felt as if
he had come. Espinoza felt the same, to a slightly different degree. Norton, who
was staring at them without seeing them in the dark, seemed to have experienced
multiple orgasms. A few cars were passing by St. George’s Road.. . . (74)
Bolaño, by constructing this scene, goes beyond recasting those academics as violent
perpetrators, which means that he does more than expose how the respectable and
educated can step into the abyss of punishing an “uncivilized” intruder, thus arriving
at the verge of their humanistic habitus, and meeting their colonial unconscious. The
ocurrence is linked to the novel’s deeper core of violence. Let us pay attention, again,
to the matter of intoxication through violence, one of the single most controversial
aspects where the “aesthetics of violence” are concerned. What can we make of Bolaño’s
exposure of the “group orgasm” of his critics? It might be helpful to hark back, for
a moment, to Auerbach’s thoughts about medieval and early-modern literatures. The
philologist’s interest in violence is stylistic, yet he is also taken in by the transgressive

190 Narcoepics
effect that a violent event can exert at the point at which it is depicted in the form of
“brute, pictorial realism.” Two realms intersect—the (allegedly) intoxicating effect of a
“brute and sensory,” violent experience as such, and art’s capacities to either capitalize
on such an “anthropological” effect, or to raise a critical awareness, or both. The example
Auerbach provides is taken from chapter 8 of book 6 of Augustine’s Confessions, where
Augustine refers to Alypius, a student of law in Rome who, in his intention to uphold the
worldly purpose of education and rational perfection abhors the Roman gladiatorial
spectacles. One day Alypius is drawn, by his fellow-students, into an amphitheater in
which that kind of terrible and deadly shows takes place. The context is different from
Socrates’ situation in Phaedrus, when Socrates desires to be seduced by the “pharmakon”
of Lysias’ speech, however, the epistemic issues at stake are somewhat similar. Alypius
states his resistance to bloodthirsty violence and “enmaddened” mass spectacle like this:
“Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give
my mind and lend my eyes to these shows? Thus shall I be absent while present, and so
shall overcome both you and them.”44 The “humanist” student pretends that, even when
coming in close contact with the “inhuman sports,” he will not relinquish his educated
moderation, his rational self-discipline, and inner distance to such badness. As we can
foresee, this is wishful thinking, a rational illusion. Alypius, who decided to close his
eyes during the show, is suddenly seduced by the outbursts of the crowd to “unlock”
his eyes to see “that blood,” and to “imbibe a sort of savageness,” “drinking in madness
unconsciously,” and being “delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the
bloody pastime.”45 We are facing, once again the problem of intoxication and eventually
of addiction, without the matter being linked to the ingestion of drugs. Do not Bolaño’s
literary critics fall, when they beat up the Pakistani, into ecstasy by imbibing “a sort of
savageness,” as well?
It is revelatory that the novelist foregrounds the issue of intoxication through violence
in relationship to the European academics, before moving the narration entirely to Santa
Teresa in “The Part About the Crimes.” What the second citation shows is the way the
violent act functions as a release, an unchaining of refrained desire: “It was as if they’d
finally had the ménage à trois they’d so often dreamed of.” But since Liz Norton’s role,
in 2666, is more tricky than that of a female “object of desire,” we have to note that the
possibility for her to turn—like Bréton’s Nadja—into the “mystical beloved” fails. It fails
not only because of the possessive interests of her male colleagues but also due to her
own fascination with different dalliances, her “down-to-earth” undecidedness. This does
not pose a problem for Liz, nor for the men, since they all share a sense of having a
superior mission—their secret, erudite closeness to the literary saint Archimboldi. This
attitude, directed at an experience of totality, never becomes an issue of reflexivity among
the critics. They never question themselves. What had begun as an academic affinity
evolved into a transcendent project of quasi-religious dedication. At this point one can
associate Arendt’s synthesis of the Platonic tradition of means and ends. In numerous
modern contexts, not only politics but also life is thought of in terms of “superior ends,”
44
Erich Auerbach. Mimesis, 59.
45
Ibid.

and “he who wants an end must also want the means” (229). Apart from the libidinal
discharge that accompanies the “Critics” ’ brutal beating of the Pakistani taxi driver, there
is an assumption that is shared by Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton. It implies the principle
of the pro-domo righteousness of the liberal democratic tradition of European standards
vis-à-vis the fundamentalist outgrowths belonging to certain people and cultural
attitudes from Islamic countries. Remember the justifying “consecration” of the kicks
they gave the defenseless body, devoting them to “the feminists of Paris,” “the feminists of
New York,” or Salman Rushdie. It is not that the Archimboldi-scholars would act as overt
racists and defenders of anti-immigrant policies; in that case, the driver would have been
susceptible to being turned into a “pharmakos,” a scapegoat. The “Critics,” following their
brutal behavior, feel remorse and temporally “out of place.” However, they also feel that
theirs is the pivotal space, the core of a sublime and enlightened humanity, its heigher
ends. A deeper symbolic order speaks out of their subconscious that can make them
forget the ugly “means” that are sometimes an inescapable part of existence. Owing to
the concatenation of circumstances, the taxi driver had the bad luck to unwillingly touch
upon a topic that was “sacred” to Espinoza and Pelletier, and thus the Pakistani, as well,
was turned into a “placebo”—a body of projection upon which an unfulfilled desire, or an
obscure anxiety, was acted out to get the men’s troubled sexual affairs straight.
The “Critics’” dedication to the work and the myth of Archimboldi is not removed
from the dilemmas of “this” world, as far as their artistic interest is concerned. In fact,
they can perceive how radically, and how enigmatically the German’s fiction focuses on
the experiences of violence and loss, on the one hand, and a chilling sense of plenitude,
on the other. There must be something in the fictional Archimboldi’s novels—if we are
allowed the speculation—that resembles the somber spell that certain medieval and early
modern literatures had cast on Auerbach: a mode of writing that could clothe the “subject’s
immersion in horror and distortion, power and destructiveness, hatred of the world, or
humility, ascetism and love in an “extravagantly pictorial style,”46 a paradoxical realism
that we find so stunningly restaged, as well, in several of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films. Still,
the “Critics” remain distant from what might be the clue to understanding Archimboldi:
a mode of sobriety that, by forging a genuine link between life experience and aesthetic
invention, makes the fragile human creature—the one that in the twentieth century
becomes affected by disenfranchisment, war, diaspora, together with physical, sexual, or
affective marginalization—sink to the bottom, so that we can get to the bottom of things.
Benno von Archimboldi, the “Amphibian”
We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday
world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the
impenetrable as everyday.
Walter Benjamin
46
See Erich Auerbach. Mimesis, 57.

192 Narcoepics
We are facing an immense, multilayered novel that is rich in narrative ploys and
images, whose gruesome aspects are neither based in pictorial realism nor sensual
excess. Bolaño, in the way he introduces the untoward and unexpected into the
ordinary and lets it resound from there, brings Borges to mind. To assume that the
extraordinary faces of the everyday world call for an exploration of the fantastic
element of existence, implies that “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side
of the mysterious takes us no further.”47 Looking at the “pharmakon,” we might ask
how it is possible to “make sense” of this concept without giving in to, and getting
lost in its boundless ambiguity? Ours is a reflection that itself performs a decentering
move. Testing the conceptual challenges of the “pharmakon” against the density of
Bolaño’s 2666 meant approaching the novel less as a literary composition, properly
speaking, but instead to look at it sideways—through “pharmacological” glass. When
we recalled the use of the “pharmakon” in Plato’s Phaedrus, it did not mean favoring
a universal symbolism of classical philosophy or philology. Rather, the association
was inspired by a “mechanism” that could reveal sudden coincidences: nonhistoricist
“legibility” emerging from a few astonishing thought-images. The historicality of
concept-images is a volatile issue, but it still has its point in the way it was once
developed in contrast to Heidegger’s abstract phenomenology. Benjamin, in The
Arcades Project, emphasizes an indexicality of thought images versus the “essences” of
Heidegger’s historical hermeneutics.
These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the “human
sciences,” from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index
of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all,
that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding
“to legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior.
Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each
“now” is the now of a particular recognizability. [. . .] It is not that what is past casts
its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image
is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a
constellation.48
Benjamin wanted to access an associative energy paired with the momentous clarity
of visual-reflective perception, which could be effective as a counter-narcotic. He
called classical historiography the “strongest narcotic” of the nineteenth century and
sought to summon up a counterveiling force. Our earlier discussion of the “dialectics
of intoxication” implied that contesting a narcotic historicism49 would not lie in what
Horkheimer and others held as strictly secularist critical theory. At stake was a
“method” that would not mark the opposite side of intoxication but could rather be
a form of “mêtis,” dealing with intoxication in the interest of sobriety. Can we now
perceive the aura that accompanies Archimboldi in the clues of a literary-aesthetic
mode whose force lies in sobriety? Although this character has a life story of his own,
47
48
Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project, 462–3.
49
See ibid., 463.

his main role in the novel is perhaps that of a “medium.” Archimboldi is certainly
not the singular hero or antihero of the book, yet he is the “organizing ghost” that
moves—for the readers, if not for some other fictive characters—from nonpresence
to presence. In doing so, he remains the one whose existential attitude is that of the
evanescent person. After all, even for the people who meet him in passing, he becomes
an “image” eventually devoid of the personality traits that we would expect to belong to
a renowned writer—he exists as a very tall man’s shadow.50 Our following observations
are guided by an assumption. There are moments of an “historical index” ingrained
in the memories of the twentieth century, which might become “legible” only from
the way in which tensions and connecting points arise between 2666’s fictional edifice
as a whole, and the part that is dedicated to the life story of Hans Reiter/Benno von
Archimboldi. How does the Archimboldi figure “attain to legibility” by resisting the
implicitly historicist conventions of interpretation, such as that of national philologies
and the extraction of global experiences from there (German literature vs. Mexican
literature, for example), or the postmodern cultural-contact models of approaching
the transgression of spatial and temporal boundaries from an angle of hybrid and
flexible identities? 2666 escapes both interpretive traditions.
I suggest recalling, as well, Benjamin’s sarcasm regarding the “dilettantish”
optimism of certain social-democratic poets during the 1920s, an optimism based on
“moral metaphors” fusing together desires for reconciliation and change. Instead, the
“call of the hour” was the “organization of pessimism”: “to organize pessimism means
nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political
action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images. This sphere, however,
can no longer be measured out by contemplation.”51 Citing these words associates a
concept of imagination that was deduced from the attitudes and actions of the Paris
Surrealists. To “organize pessimism” reminds us, as well, of Benjamin’s understanding
of the early Brecht’s “aesthetics of poverty.” In our novel there is a sphere in which
the enigma called Archimboldi can only be accessed through images, not through the
mythical vision constructed and upheld by the “Critics,” images of a personal political
destiny as constellations that are strangely immune to moral metaphors. If we ask
more straightforwardly yet speaking in paradoxes, can Archimboldi be imagined as a
genuine figure of the German/European “subaltern,” one whose destination, however,
will be the Western hemisphere.
Consonant with an ongoing mode of estrangement, the myth and the life story of the
German writer with an Italian name provide the phantasmatic thread that permeates
Bolaño’s transnational narrative. If cosmopolitan imagination has a paradigmatic
modern core, it spans two seemingly discrepant sides—concrete experiences of
travel, displacement, or any other kind of “de-provincializing” adventure in the realm
of metropolitan or trans-metropolitan life, on the one hand, and the projection of a
50
Mrs. Bubis, the former Baroness von Zumpe and one of the two women who have known Reiter
best, when asked by the “Critics” what Archimboldi is like, laconically replies: “Very tall, very tall, a
man of truly great height. If he’d be born in this day and age he likely would have played basketball”
(28).
51

194 Narcoepics
disembodied self, on the other. In the so-called travel narratives and their scalings
of “transculturation,” we repeatedly find this contrastive matrix, and it is often the
“observer-self,” including the autobiographical narrative mode, that seeks to guard the
dream of nonparticular if not universalizing (sovereignty over concrete) experience. In
2666, one of the outstanding cases of a novel of displacement and globalized experience
in the wake of the twentieth century, the described matrix is led into erosion. Chakrabarty,
in 2000, writes in Provincializing Europe, that Europe has already been provincialized by
history itself. “European history is no longer seen as embodying anything like a ‘universal
human history.’”52 The author goes on to argue that what he intends to decenter is rather
an imaginary figure of Europe, one that in several academic disciplines still characterizes
clichés of universal political modernity.53 Focusing on this imaginary that has often been
renewed as a target for postcolonial criticism, but without paying equally deep attention
to the more recent universal attempt of a US-based cultural hegemony, has jeopardized,
to a certain extent, an interest in the borders and heterogeneous aspects of the European
cultural and intellectual geographies. Cultures speak to us in plural, and do so suddenly
from unfamiliar places. What about Europe’s local or subaltern histories that extend
beyond the well-known romantic or high-cultural literary visions, providing, instead,
outlines in which globalization is prefigured in more tragic and paradoxical ways than
have been considered thus far? I am not referring to life and literature under East
European state socialism that do not play a visible role in the novel, but to a Europe
whose contemporary global predicament, its “other” modernity, starts taking shape, in
the eyes of Bolaño, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Surprisingly for a novel
committed to the force of perspectivation as it arises today from the Hemispheric South,
its most complex character, the German Hans Reiter (alias Archimboldi) will acquire his
actual “education,” the one that marks him for the rest of his life, in both Germany and
the Soviet Union, that is, as a German soldier during World War II who becomes a “seer”
after being wounded and coming into contact with the life story of a murdered Russian
Jew by the name of Boris A. Ansky. Nevertheless, the experiential world of Archimboldi
does not become a modern construct of disembodied subjectivity, a “sovereign observer,”
or an introspective “stream of consciousness,” nor is it reduced, on the other side, to
the image of a “merely empirical” individual. Few novels defy our received notions of
literary fiction as radiography of experiental history in the way that 2666 does.
It was into utterly precarious, personal, and political constellations that Hans Reiter
was born in 1920. It might not be an exaggeration to read the way in which Bolaño sets
up the images of the new-born Reiter’s home in the allegorical terms of one of several
German “Tragic Dramas.” Reiter’s mother was blind in one eye, his father was lame,
having lost a leg in the World War I, and both came from poor peasant families. We get
a sense of the matter when the immanent, stoic narrator, at the beginning of “The Part
About Archimboldi,” relates how the father survived in a military hospital near Düren
(North-Rhine Westphalia)—by smoking. “A soldier’s tobacco is sacred” (637). Reiter’s
father, while recovering in a hospital, offers this divine sensation to a “mummy”—one
52
Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 3.
53
Ibid., 3–4.

of his totally impaired comrades, lying in the bed next to him (“He had black eyes like
two deep wells.”)
He lit a cigarette and tried to find the mummy’s mouth among the bandages.
The mummy shuddered. Maybe he doesn’t smoke, thought the man, and he took
the cigarette away. The moon illuminated the end of the cigarette, which was
stained with a kind of white mold. Then he put it back between the mummy’s
lips, saying: smoke, smoke, forget all about it. The mummy’s eyes remained fixed
on him, maybe, he thought, it’s a comrade from the batallion and he’s recognized
me. But why doesn’t he say anything? Maybe he can’t talk, he thought. Suddenly,
smoke began to filter out between the bandages. He’s boiling, he thought, boiling,
boiling.
Smoke came out of the mummy’s ears, his throat, his forehead, his eyes, which
remained fixed on the man with one leg, until the man plucked the cigarette
from the mummy’s lips and blew, and kept blowing for a while on the mummy’s
bandaged head until the smoke had disappeared. Then he stubbed the cigarette out
on the floor and fell asleep (637–8).
When the man wakes up in the morning, the mummy had died and been taken away.
It was not the destiny of the earlier mentioned Trakl, but perhaps that of one of his
terrible shadow images.
In Hans Reiter, Bolaño weaves several questions together. How do we approach
the biographical and ethical design of a subject that emerges from constellations of
disenfranchisement and banality, and whose trajectory will not conform to what Jean
Franco labels “The Magic of Alterity”?54 Can we understand the contradiction that
someone who acted, during World War II, as a “good German” (a Mitläufer, who although
not evil, goes along with atrocities and killings, not rebelling against them), later becomes
not only one of society’s radical outsiders but a figure, as well, that provides a sense of
a different kind of “humanism”? Thirdly, if this literary character helps blend together
scenarios of violence and biopolitical apocalypses that are commonly kept separate from
one another (Europe during and after World War II; the Mexican–US border during the
1990s), what would be—if there were one—Bolaño’s deeper concern? And, last, how does
this novelistic vision that, at first sight, seems to be infested by an obsession with German
culture, become the complex, self-reflexive approach of the Chilean-Latin American
novelist to the violent junctures of Western modernity and globalization? Remarkable
segments of the more than 250-pages long “Part About Archimboldi” have to do with
Reiter’s childhood and youth, his “getting lost” in the German occupation army in Russian
territory, his post-war vagrancy and contact with an influential, left-wing publishing
house in Hamburg, his becoming an extraordinary writer under the pseudonym of Benno
von Archimboldi while virtually disappearing from the map of personal, let alone public
relationships, and, having reached his eighties, his leaving Europe and moving to one of
the most frightening places in the world—Santa Teresa, alias Ciudad Juárez.
54
See Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 159 f.

196 Narcoepics
Reading about Hans Reiter’s childhood in a small town close to either the Baltic or
the North Sea,55 which “smelled of dirty clothes” and “pissed-upon earth” (643), while
his one-legged father dreams of a Prussia that no longer exists (643, 673), but who is
fiercely skeptical of the rising National Socialists’ zest for a “Greater Germany” (652),
may somehow connect us to the atmosphere that emanates from scenes in Michael
Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009). Bolaño does not lack the talent to make readers
shudder when he paints, with allegorical brushes and in laconic, awkward sequences a
local scenery, ghost towns, that seemed to be inhabited by the living dead. Thirteen years
old when Hitler seizes power, Hans leaves school because of his apathy and idling and
is sent to work in the country residence of a Prussian baron where his task is to dust the
books in a huge library (653), and where he occasionally meets the baron’s nephew, a
young cleptomanic from Berlin by the name of Hugo Halder, son of a painter, who was
used to drinking cognac and smoking while devouring history books, and his nerves
were always near the breaking point (654–6). The baron’s nephew introduces Reiter
to “good literary books” (657), and it may be that the “devil had it that the book Hans
Reiter chose to read was Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival” (658). Halder’s comment,
when observing that Eschenbach was the writer in whom Hans would encounter the
closest resemblance to himself, sounds like an omen.
Of course, there were German medieval poets more important than Wolfram von
Eschenbach. [. . .] But Wolfram’s pride (I fled the pursuit of letters, I was untutored
in the arts), a pride that stands aloof, a pride that says die, all of you, but I’ll live,
confers on him a halo of dizzying mystery, of terrible indifference, which attracted
the young Hans . . . (659).
What Hans Reiter liked most about Parzival, who according to the narrator was a lay
and independent knight living in vassalage, with no lands and only a few protectors,
“what made him cry and roll laughing in the grass [while reading Eschenbach’s
book], was that Parzival sometime rode (my hereditary office is the shield) wearing his
madman’s garb under his suit of armor” (659). This does not mean, to be aware of a
necessary distinction, that Reiter’s life story would come close to a picaresque model.
Thanks to Hugo Halder, when the baron closes the country house in 1936, Hans finds a
job in Berlin that provides a tiny wage, and then works as a watchman in a rifle factory
(661), sending almost all of his meager earnings to his parents and sister. Halder also
takes him to the “worst cabaret in Berlin” as well as to the Café des Artistes (662),
where Hans gives the impression, to an acclaimed German orchestra conductor, that
he was “an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the
moment least expected.” To which the narrator adds, with the mocking laconism that
Bolaño holds dear, “Which was untrue” (666).
In 1939 Hans Reiter is drafted. A few months later the war begins, and as a soldier in
a light infantry regiment he sees himself, without understanding, crossing the border
into Poland, imagining that “under his Wehrmacht uniform he was wearing the suit or
55
The closeness of the sea coast is crucial for Reiter’s childhood, and Bolaño, who names his village
allegorically, makes allusions to both the North and the Baltic Seas.

garb of a madman” (670). Bolaño dedicates almost 100 pages to Reiter’s involvement
in the war, which can be read as a novel within a novel, disturbing and extraordinary.
Reiter will indeed embody the “madman,” and part of the consternation arising from
these pages owes to the tension between experience and action. He is unable to conceive
of what is happening, but officers and recruits of the seventy-ninth Infantry Division,
to which his regiment belongs, view him as a very courageous soldier. Reiter senses that
he is going to end up being shot (694), and he hopes for it the sooner the better. One
of the sergeants notes about his behavior that Reiter, of course, was the same person as
always, but when going into combat, it was “as if he wasn’t going into combat, as if he
wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him” (672). Neither did he refuse to follow the
orders, nor was he caught in the kind of trance that often resulted from most soldiers’
heightened fear—it was rather something else that happened with him. The sergeant
could not say what it was, “but Reiter had something evident even to the enemy, who
shot at him several times and never hit him, to their increasing dismay” (ibid.). What
crystalizes are sudden perceptions, images linked to aspects of possible distortions, or
adivinations of the improbable, but there are no coherent links whatsoever between
a dramatic logic and (the motives or affects of) human behavoir. The artistic tension
arises between particular images and a caustic yet nonlinear narration. If madness is
an issue, it is not backed by a respective set of behavioral or dramatic patterns, nor is
it focalized in an introspective way. It is both a latent possibility in an insane world,
and—in Hans Reiter—a rare dispositif, as we will see. We have already discussed that
Reiter’s ambivalence invites some of the novel’s characters, for example, the Critics who
later (yet earlier in the novel) get to know him from a distance, to perceive him as
a mythical being. However, and acknowledging that Bolaño skillfully plays with this
possibility, Reiter’s transgressive “self,” a not-self to an unusual extent, is of a different
character.
Given Hans Reiter’s childhood, adolescent experiences and precarious education, it
is out of the question to consider the possibility of his consciously opposing the Nazi
occupation of Polish and Russian territories. What he does ponder, fleetingly, is that
a better education and a different place in society would perhaps have prevented him
from the worst. When his regiment is temporarily stationed in Normandy, he comes
close to deserting. What could he do under those circumstances? The vision of the
19-year-old sounds awkward. After deserting, he would live
like a tramp in the Normandy, finding a cave, feeding himself on the charitable
offerings of peasants or small thefts that no one would report. I would learn to see
in the dark, he thought. In time my clothes would fall to rags and finally I would
live naked. I would never return to Germany. One day I would drown, radiant
with joy (677).
This drowning with joy is not a ludicrous idea but rather an actual clue. It relates to an
underground image that can lead us in the direction that we have hinted at when naming
this subchapter “Archimboldi the Amphibian.” We need to take a second look into Reiter’s
childhood. After he was born, he looked less like a child than like a “strand of seaweed”
(639). What the child felt attracted to, from the moment he could sense visions, was the

198 Narcoepics
“seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren’t plains and valleys that weren’t valleys
and cliffs that weren’t cliffs” (ibid.). In other words, Hans did not and would not inhabit
the metaphors that Germans felt drawn to. When his one-eyed mom placed the baby in a
washtub, he slid from her hands and sank to the bottom, with open eyes, contemplating
the wooden cove as if it wanted to remain underwater. Reiter, raised in a village close to
the Baltic (or the North) Sea, started to swim when he was four (640), and he was far too
tall for his age and unsteady on his feet. “Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because
he moved across the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor” (ibid.).
The narrative voice that animates the letters in Bolaño’s fiction recounts that, when Hans
discovered a seaweed forest for the first time, he was so touched that he started to cry
underwater (641). He came close to drowning several times when he was eight and nine.
The first time, he was saved by a tourist from Berlin who at first mistook his head bobbing
in the waves for a clump of seaweed (645). The tourist, Vogel, was tormented by the
delusive image, asking himself afterwards how he could have mistaken a boy for seaweed.
He also asked himself if a boy and seaweed could have anything in common (646). In the
end, Vogel resolves that he must pay more careful attention to his mental health.
When Reiter is a recruit of the Wehrmacht and stationed in Besneville in Normandy,
he often goes swimming and diving bare-faced in the Atlantic, no matter how cold the
water is. It was not so much a matter of swimming but of floating underwater and losing
himself to a state that offered him safety and radiant calmness, together with a kind of
consciousnessless, cosmic embodyment, sometimes paired with a “strange, powerful
despair” that threatened to keep him at the bottom of the sea forever (676–7). At these
moments, and in order for him to survive, it was necessary to come up to the surface
of the water quickly. Medical staff who one day visit his company find Hans completely
healthy, except for his eyes that were excessively red as a result of their exposure to
salt water. Not knowing about Reiter’s preferred habit, the doctor assumes that the
young man was probably a drug addict. (“How is it that in the ranks of our army we
find young men addicted to morphine, heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs?” 677). The
physician’s presumption is not entirely mistaken, since the bottom of the sea of cold
waters (the Baltic, the North Sea, or the Atlantic) clearly has an intoxicating effect on
Hans. Reiter’s rare transgressive condition, his seaweed syndrome, so to speak, puts him
in a paradoxical light. In some sense, and in the eyes of people who are close to him, he
is “untouchable,” that is to say, always somewhat detached from the rhythm of common
behavior and speech. At the same time, his is a peculiar vulnerability, regarding both
sensual perception and practical carelessness in relation to some of life’s needs. During
the events of the war, it looks as if he can get closer to death than other people, showing
neither visible fear nor certain rational precautions against imminent danger, sometimes
surviving like in a miracle. In a way, he has, as a young man drafted into the Wehrmacht
and sent into foreign territories, given up on the world of humans around him. We read
that “all he sought was a bullet to bring peace to his heart” (701). All this would perhaps
amount to the invention of another character in the gallery of eccentric persons and odd
outsiders, marked by modernity’s violent predicaments or self-exiled from the existence
of ordinary people, if it were not for the constellations that make Hans Reiter a “diver”
into the worst spheres of historical, as epochal and dismal, prophetic experience.

Using a distinction that was made by Aldous Huxley, we could say that the “Critics,”
whom we have met mainly in the first part of the novel, exist by giving faith and stamina
to the principle cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), whereas Reiter appears as a
creature that seems to respond to the principle cogitor ergo sum (I am being thought,
therefore I exist).56 From this, one could presume that the Nazi apparatus of domination
can so easily determine the fate of the young man Hans, lacking “consciousness,”
and make him an instrument in the war against Russia. There is, of course, no easy
comparison between epochs and constellations as different as those of the “late modern”
literary critics and of Hans Reiter, who was born in the aftermath of World War I.
However, Bolaño is not at all convinced that the state of identity and mind described
by Huxley as the self-centered, ego-driven personality that lives in “verbal sunshine,”
self-perpetuating habits and abstract yet prejudiced notions at the problematic center
of the sociable human species57 would actually do better regarding individual political
decisions and the rational-ethical organization of life. On the contrary, the Chilean
writer is alert to the dubious side of advanced civilization’s “rational” culture, and
Huxley’s words come surprisingly close to his skepticism—“this world of light and
air is also a world where the winds of doctrine howl destructively; where delusive
mock-suns keep popping up over the horizon; where all kinds of poison comes pouring
out of the propaganda factories and the tripe mills.”58 It is for some reason that the
excellent literary scholars Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini, whose lives unfold long after
the war, make a peregrine German writer’s imaginary—that part of Hans Reiter that
will condense his experiences into his post-World War II novelistic work—the center
of their obsession, their placebo par excellence. Although we learn almost nothing
about the content of Archimboldi’s later novels, these are supposedly works written by
an “amphibian,” a writer who inhabits several incommensurable universes,59 and whose
“embodied spirit,” his “not-self ”—the human that moves across the surface of the earth
like someone floating along the seafloor—will play tricks on a self-centered or fanatic
or exhausted realm of subjetivity where insight that ends should never justify means60
is still far away.
In the winter of 1941–2, with the Soviet counterattack setting in, the soldier Hans
Reiter is severely wounded and sent as a convalescent, after leaving the military hospital,
to the Ukranian village of Kostekino, on the banks of the Dnieper River (705). This is the
place where he discovers a force that actually pushes him into drowning, a submersion
from which he will not recover, in terms of his existential and intellectual horizon.
He becomes drowned when he starts to read the notebooks, written in German, of
a Russian Jew, which he discovers in a farmhouse in Kostekino. Most of the houses
are empty, a result of the attack on the civilian population, earlier that same year, by a
56
See Aldous Huxley, “The Education of an Amphibian,” 17. Aldous Huxley, in his essay, writes these
remarkable words: “Living amphibiously, half in fact and half in words, half in immediate experience
and half in abstract notions, we contrive most of the time to make the worst of both worlds” (ibid.,
4).
57
Ibid., 1–7, especially 3.
58
Ibid., 3.
59
We are paraphrasing Huxley’s expression, see, “The Education of an Amphibian,” 1–4.
60
See Huxley, ibid., 15.

200 Narcoepics
squad of the “Einsatzgruppe C” which eliminated all the Jews in the village (706). One
of Reiter’s wounds was in his throat, and he cannot speak, but only see and read. It is
winter, and the village resembles a “frozen paradise” (707). While other convalescents
gather in the main house, made of bricks, where the fire is always lit and there are huge
pots of soup, smelling of cabbage and tobacco, Reiter withdraws to one of the empty
wooden houses, not knowing if he is searching for something or deciding to slowly
freeze in the cold since “there was no hope” (706). Taken as a Brechtian allegory—there
was no way of sinking deeper, this was the bottom. The house has a straw roof, which
Reiter starts scrutinizing while he is shaken by nightmares and objects floating in the
candlelight, spawns an indefinable air of “femininity.” Looking for something to use
as a bandage for his throat, he finds the papers of Boris Abramovich Ansky. These
notebooks are also the source, in their final sections, of Reiter’s first acquaintance with
what will later become his artistic name—Archimboldi (see 729, 734–5).
As he recovers from his wounds in a place that must be more than an utterly remote
spot in relationship to his original, northern German homeland, a place beyond time,
an extraterrestrial orbit, with the unspokenness of its catastrophe, the 22-year-old
soldier learns that Ansky had a special fascination with the Italian painter “Josephus
Arcimboldo or Arcimboldi (1527–1593)” (729). A spirit of simplicity, a combination of
minimalism with “pure bliss” in the art of Arcimboldi, can be “happiness personified”
(734). This spirit helps Ansky to cope, for moments, with the sadness that has taken
over the atmosphere of Moscow, where this Jew from Kostekino had become a
member of the “party,” but where he was turned, with Stalin’s rise, into “an enemy of
the state” (737). “When I am sad or in low spirits, writes Ansky, I close my eyes and
think of Arcimboldo’s paintings and the sadness and gloom evaporate, as if a strong
wind, a mentholated wind, were suddenly blowing along the streets of Moscow” (735).
Bolaño puts the adjective “mentholated” in italics, as if pointing to a pharmacological
phenomenon. Reiter also learns that the simplicity in Arcimboldo’s paintings is not
a matter of harmony because it can include horror (734). So we have a particular
constellation taking shape among notions of “low spirits”/ “sadness,” ecstasy (“bliss”),
“simplicity” and “mentholated wind,” shot through with narrative testimonies of two
extreme historical scenarios of the twentieth century—the Stalinist turn in Soviet life
from the 1920s to the 1930s, and the “Einsatzgruppe C’s” depopulating Jewish villages at
the turning point of the German occupation of the Soviet Union. This is what Benjamin
would have called an image of singular historical indexicality: a “dialectical image,” in
which the (fictional) experience of the German character Reiter, when meeting his
daimon (“Arcimboldo”) produces, like in a flash, that moment of “legibility” that can
become an element of today’s critical, noncodified imagination.
Ansky’s notebooks should presumably have been written in first-person narration,
but they are not presented in that way. Rather, Reiter’s third-person voice laconically
puts the elements of this story together, interrupted only by the soldier’s short
situational references about his stay in Kostekino. The content of these notebooks
occupies a considerable part of Reiter’s testimony about the war years. Attention is
paid to how the young Jew from Kostekino was involved in the tasks of the Bolshevik
Revolution, first becoming a Red Army soldier and travelling across Siberia, and

two years later being drawn in by the effervescence of the artistic and intellectual
climate of the capital, Moscow. He became a cultural activist, cofounder of a theater,
participating in the foundation of several magazines in Moscow, Leningrad, and other
cities, working at the same time as a journalist and literary critic. What helped him to
set foot in Moscow’s intellectual and creative circles during the 1920s was his contact
with a mature writer by the name of Ivanov, a mediocre artist but agile inventor of
science fiction stories with a spin that engrossed the Russian reading public. Bolaño,
or better the shadowy narrative agency that would be a quotation-marked “Bolaño,”
touches upon, in an overall notarial, sometimes parodic and suddenly sarcastic style a
nerve of the Soviet situation during the 1920s and 1930s. Cultural politics, on its way
to both conceiving of and bringing about a proletarian culture, was open to a wide
array of projects and artistic interventions, but it was at the same time dedicated to
channeling their impulses into the practical-political field. Among writers, painters,
and audiovisual artists, especially during the early 1920s, a utopian enthusiasm loomed
large, fusing technological visions, industrial prospects, hopes for a communitarian
society of a new type, and even for the future “inmortality” of the human species into
the most daunting or abstruse expressions, driven by the spirit of superlatives that
the revolution had unleashed. Ivanov, the science fiction writer and party mentor of
the young Ansky (who would later fall victim to the Stalinist purge), is among those
who create unheard-of fairy tales, whereas the Russian avant-garde experiments
with all kinds of formal and metaphysical ruptures, seeking genuine condensations
of artistic energies in the pulsating stream between the primitive, the “suprematist”,
the minimalist, and the folkloric. Reporting on Ansky’s undertakings during those
frenetic years, “Bolaño is able to capture an inner dynamic, and the eventual tragedy
of the early Soviet intellectual and artistic atmosphere, and its actual tragic turn.
Utopian energies and liberating narratives “became legitimating ones, as fantasies of
movement through space were translated into temporal movement, reinscribed onto
the historical trajectory of revolutionary time.”61 Ansky, like other Russian intellectuals
of his generation, is not opposed to serving a revolutionary state ruled by the party
of the formerly dispossessed; he is instead wildly enthusiastic about all that which
seems to lead him into an authentic “future.” But the ecstasy of artists and intellectuals,
as both spiritual awakening and dream experience, has a logic that allows it to reach
beyond the normative containment that marks the pragmatic turn, and the ideological
domestication of revolutionary social and cultural change by systemic state politics.
Although the narration does not reach into the spheres of Stalin’s rise to the role of
the “divine sovereign”—to paraphrase Schmitt—it follows Ansky’s being caught by a
destiny close to that of the “young Russian Jews who made the revolution and who now
(this probably refers to 1939) are dropping like flies” (728–9).
One of the episodes conveys a critique of the hierarchic sexualization of revolutionary
politics. On the day he becomes a party member, Ansky is taken to the writers’ restaurant
in Moscow to celebrate. One of his sponsors is Margarita Afanasievna, a biologist at
a Moscow institution, “who drank like a condemned woman” (714) and who, in a
61
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld . . . , 45.

202 Narcoepics
moment of orgy grabs, “with her tiny hand,” Ansky’s penis and testicles. “Now that
you are a Communist, she said, . . . you’ll need these to be of steel” (715). Does the
woman’s “condemnation” lie in serving masculinist cultural hegemony? Her allusion
to symbols of a phallo-mythic exaltation seen in some official Soviet monuments and
a corresponding style in the refashioning of public spaces as revolutionary cityscape
is unequivocal. What is interesting is Ansky’s reaction to the patronizing gesture and
to the older woman’s reproach that he, the “Jewish brat,” confuses desires with reality
(that he is a dreamer instead of a “realist”). Ansky calmly replies to Margarita that
“reality can be pure desire” (715). And he tells the bizarre story of a Siberian hunter
“whose sexual organs had been torn off ” so that he was forced to pee “through a little
straw, sitting or on his knees” but who manages to “impose his desire on reality,”
first by getting married, and then resuming his wanderings in the forest and across
the frozen steppe, to become a forger of life by transforming “his surroundings, the
village, the villagers, the forest, the snow, . . ., utterly oblivious of what we call fate”
(716). But Ansky himself will not be able to escape the fate that strikes from the phallic
delirium of degenerated authority, although he is determined to hide from the eyes
of Stalin’s secret forces, and will finally travel back home to Kostekino. We remember
Reiter’s sense of the “feminine” air that hovered in the house of Ansky’s parents—the
house that he found emptied by death. Hans Reiter imagines, when reading Ansky’s
notebooks in the winter of 1941–2, that his parents were taken, along with the entire
Jewish population of Kostekino, to a German concentration camp, “toward us, toward
death” (737), he says to himself. “He saw Ansky in his dreams too. He saw him walking
across country, by night, a nameless person heading westward, and he saw him felled
in a hail of gunfire” (ibid.).
“Sexualization” can mean the narcoticization of daily life under circumstances of
severed survival. For Ansky it was the year 1936, when his mentor, the science fiction
writer Ivanov, became a victim of Stalin’s first great purge. Ansky meets the student
Nadja Yurenieva, and they make love only a few hours after running into each other.
They make love, excessively and self-forgotten, suspended in a rhythm that performs
the communion of gift and desperation as if they had only a little time left to live.
Actually, Nadja Yurenieva fucked like many Muscovites that year of 1936 and Boris
Ansky fucked as if when all hope was lost he had suddenly found his one true love.
Neither of the two thought (or wanted to think) about death, but both moved,
twined their limbs, communed, as if they were on the edge of the abyss. (725)
As Reiter reads the testimony, he finds that the pages are repeatedly overwritten by
marginal notes regarding the question of sex (revealingly, not of love). “Only sex,
nothing but sex?” Ansky asks himself, or in a slightly different reading, sex always
seems to linger, in one way or another. But what was its secret, if there was one? Is there
a mystical core, a question evocative of Auerbach’s, and hence Benjamin’s, musings on
a mystical conception of love? Ansky ponders the ubiquity of the matter of sex, joking
about Lenin’s sexuality, writing about the “American continent of sex,” discussing
homosexuality, mentioning Döblin, the drug addicts in Moscow, the sick, his parents
(728). Sex is the matter that Hans Reiter is about to discover for himself, and that he

will practice in the decades to come, as a form of drugged madness, a secret space of
human encounter in loneliness, a triumph over the masculine forces of the violent ego,
an actual possibility of bliss in a sunken world. Reiter, when he becomes Archimboldi,
will know that one of the liberties that the ruling powers have not yet entirely subdued
and normativized has to do with the mysticism of the genitals, nurtured by either
physical communion with an enchanting body-spirit (a person, even a group), or
through the miraculous energies that can be brought to life between people making
love across a distance of space and time. This is the encapsulated meaning of Ansky’s
hunter story. This is, at the same time, that which Archimboldi the amphibian will
discover as the movens that can be turned into writing, as that communion of entirely
different states and practices that “makes sense” of the powers of the pharmakon.
The years during that Ansky lived obsessed with his work as a cultural activist and
literary critic were, according to the vision emanating from his testimony, marked by
a changing logic that accompanied the Bolshevik Revolution in its tensions between
transgression and “establishment.” Ansky belonged among those who, intellectually
and artistically, made the revolution and were devoured by it, although it was no longer
the same revolution, “not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids
of the dream” (729). However, all this material, handwritten in German, has a quasi
utopian impact on the wounded soldier Hans Reiter, so much so that the Russian Jew
from Kostekino appears in the potential contours of Reiter’s alter ego, although there is
no alter ego, properly speaking, due to the antiphallic, “feminine” side of the emerging
affinity between both men. We might speak of a tragic yet energizing experience of
intellectual “mentorship,” that takes shape from the moment at which the German is
drawn in by the hidden manuscripts of Ansky, the Jew who wanted to be a communist
claiming the actuality of a future, hoping to touch a blissful world with his own hands.
We can perceive the affinities between both men in their natural propensity to loosen
the self and to experience everyday outlets of madness. There is this other, properly
intellectual part that lay dormant in Reiter from the beginning and which was at the
point of being killed when he became a soldier, following the orders of the Nazi regime.
But there are energies that are still awake in Hans’ outlandish simplicity—a natural
loneliness without feeling lonely, an inborn, heightened sense of the eros (his feminine
perception), a capacity to recover, from death, that which is life in its most intense and
yet sober sense—the testimony of the other one, so intimately close and so violently
distant at the same time. For several days Reiter was haunted by the thought that it
was perhaps he who shot Ansky62 (737). A feeling that made him believe he was dead.
And every so often he opened one of the notebooks at random, and started reading
again.
Ansky’s notebooks are full of names. Names, names, names (717) that Reiter has
never heard of in his life, writers, artists, painters—not only Russians but Europeans,
62
Reiter will then discover, in a dream image, that it was not he who shot Ansky. His dream shows
him somewhere in Crimea, coming upon a Red Army soldier, facedown, fearing that the dead man
would have the face of Ansky. He discovers, “with more relief than surprise, … that the corpse had
his own face” (738). At this moment his voice, that was blocked by the injury returns: “Thank god, it
wasn’t me!” (737)

204 Narcoepics
such as Sade and Lapishin (728), Mayakovski, Malevitch, Evgenia Bosch, Ivan Rajia,
also Gustav Landauer and Alfred Döblin, and many others, including Gorki, the
controversial proponent of “socialist realism.” Names that will mark potential signposts.
If there is a way to recover a substantial part of the lives and the historical imagination
that were destroyed, or devalued, in the course of the twentieth century, together with
an unending stream of erring subjectivities—“erring” viewed as suspension between
modernity’s olympic promises and its violent predicaments—there is the possibility of
reading and rereading the secret materials written by the unruly spirits that practiced
intoxication in order to change the world. These materials are “secret,” not because they
cannot be accessed, although it might take rigor and faith to dig up that which lingers
in irrelevance, such as that which we have seen in the case of the “Critics” who make
Archimboldi’s works known across academia, and among wider circles of readers. “Secret”
has that other meaning that harks back on the “amphibian” condition. Who or what can
provide the clues, not for understanding once and for all a deeper poetic meaning, but
for an entirely different “hermeneutics,” one that makes the ecstatic practice of reading
a sobering experience itself—an experience of sinking to the bottom in order to access
the bottom of things (“auf den Grund der Dinge gelangen”)? This would be a kind of
“secrecy” that is set, according to Bolaño’s novel, to unravel and to resist the powers of
destruction and exhaustion, and of arrogance and contempt, evil powers that work with
the tools of intoxication, as well, and which can only be tricked with the weapons of
“metis”—a sobering intelligence that is capable of walking through intoxication in the
conflicts of a degraded, humiliated world. By reading Boris Ansky’s notebooks, Hans
Reiter consciously discovers his own condition as an amphibian, awaking to humiliating
sobriety. He, the one who perceives invisible feminine airs in the environment (770),
is also the one through whose amphibiousness the voices and bodily energies of the
murdered women of Santa Teresa, Mexico, will resonate.
In Bolaño’s novel, there is one ferociously “sentimentalist” character, a high-ranking
Nazi officiary who is begging for compassion after the end of the war, and whom Hans
Reiter meets in an American prisoner-of-war camp close to the town of Ansbach (747).
After deserting when the few remainders of his division were fleeing the Soviet Union
and Poland just ahead of the advancing Red Army, and trying to hide wherever he
could, Reiter surrendered to American soldiers in May 1945. In the camp, a man excells
among the prisoners who possesses an “enviable serenity” (749) but who, after trying to
find out how Reiter’s interrogation by American officers went, shows dispair. The aim
of the interrogation is to seperate the low-level soldiers of the defeated Wehrmacht
from those who were suspected of being war criminals (750). The above-mentioned
Nazi whose name is “Sammer,” but who presents himself as “Zeller,” served not in the
military but “on the economic and political battlefield” (751). He was a government
functionary, given an administrative structure and stationed in a Polish town during
the war, where he was responsible for “supplying workers to the Reich,” forced labor,
destined primarily to work in the armament factories. Since this person shares a place
in a shelter with Reiter, Hans has to endure Sammer’s nightly confessions, as though
the Nazi longed for atonement in the presence of the young German, while trying to
elude interrogation by the American troops. This is also one of the moments in 2666 in

which there is a connection between distant events that form part of one and the same
drama—the spirit of the “detective” has interfered in the plot, so that Reiter again runs
into the fate of the Ansky family through an abject “testimony.” It turns out that Sammer,
during the growing chaos resulting from the defeat of the German troops throughout
1944, is faced, in the Polish town that is under his administrative rule, with the “delivery
of five hundred Jews, men, women, children” by train (752)—a “misdirected” train that
was supposed to go to Auschwitz (758). Most resources are thrown toward the front
that is receding westward, and Sammer is assigned to “resolve” this problem by his own
means. Authorities from Warsaw speak of “disposing of the Jews.” What ensues for over
ten pages is Sammer’s self-centered, self-righteous, although lamentful account of what
happened from there, presented in the first-person singular. Let us remember that Boris
Ansky’s notebook was presented in third-person narration. Sammer’s confession is a
mixture of the autobiographical report of a haunted person and black farce, propelled
forward by the man’s intention that he was always concerned with a “rational solution,”
one that would be as ordered and measured as possible. In the end, however, he was
left with no choice other than to form a gang, including the police chief of the town
and a group of impoverished, drunken Polish adolescents, to carry out the slaughter.
A historical narrative and a sordid, sinister tale blend. Bolaño unfolds this story with
an amazing grasp of abject abyss that lingers in Sammer’s personality, a reading that is
hardly bearable. The destiny of the Ansky family is not directly addressed but is present
at every moment of the account. Why does the novelist present this account with such
shocking explicitness and length, combined with the inanity of Sammer’s utterings?
Are we touching upon a narrative that, in addition to World War II, points toward
the present, toward the Santa Teresa femicides? Could this be a way of addressing
the fact that the violent disposal of “undesirable” elements of the population is not
only an issue of the past, but can point to large-scale, biopolitical nightmares at the
end of the twentieth century, as well? One morning in the prisoners’ camp, Sammer is
found dead, close to the latrines, strangled. Among the prisoners who are interrogated
is Hans Reiter, who says that he did not hear or see anything unusual during that past
night (767).63
There might be no way of tracing Reiter’s experiential, often outlandish and highly
associative, journey after the war, without presenting an additional excursus, which
must be left to another study. What remains to be addressed, however, is the trope of
transformation. In the postwar years Hans Reiter, who was 25 in 1945, suddenly ceases
to exist. Benno von Archimboldi is born. The scenery in which the new name takes
over is both contingent and cunning in the way it is set up, not by Reiter, but by the
shadowy narrator “Bolaño.” One day, while trying to survive in Cologne, a city half
in ruins, working at night as a doorman at a bar that had a clientele of American and
English soldiers, and writing in a notebook during daytime, Reiter intends to buy a used
typewriter from an old man, who says he was once a writer but gave it up (784). Asked
for his name, Reiter spontaneously responds “Benno von Archimboldi.” The old man
63
A few years later Reiter admits to a girlfriend that it was him who killed Sammer (775–6), and was
afterwards interrogated in the camp but got away since nothing could be proven.

206 Narcoepics
realizes that this is a lie, and he takes a closer look at the young “poet.” “Archimboldi’s”
eyes were blue, “tired, strained, reddened.” These eyes looked nevertheless “young and
in a certain sense pure,” although the old man had long stopped believing in purity.
“This country,” he said to Reiter, who that afternoon, perhaps, became Archimboldi,
“has tried to topple any number of countries into the abyss in the name of purity
and will.. . . Thanks to purity and will we’ve all, every one of us, hear me you,
become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the same. Now we sob
and moan and say we didn’t know! We had no idea! It was the Nazis! We never
would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper.. . . There’ll be plenty of
time for us to embark on a long holiday of forgetting. Do you understand me?” “I
understand,” said Archimboldi (784).
The older man addresses the irrelevance of a principle that maintains the “intrinsic
goodness of human beings;” one can certainly believe in this goodness, “but it means
nothing,” an allusion to the feebleness of Kantian ethics (785). Sentimentally speaking,
he says, even killers can be “good,” and there is a German situation that shows how
perpetrators, misguided citizens, and even victims unite in tears while listening to a
Beethoven symphony. “Our culture tends inexorably toward sentimentality. But when
the performance is over and I am alone, the killer will open the window of my room
and come tiptoeing in like a nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry” (785). At this
juncture, it seems that Hans Reiter’s giving up his German name and adopting, with
a slight modification, that of the Italian Renaissance painter Arcimboldo shows both
cultural nihilism and an intellectual intuition. Fear is at stake as well—the American and
German police could decide to renew the investigation into Sammer’s death (see 801).
But a deeper driving force is present in Reiter, and it is linked to the desire to assume
his amphibian not-self more conscientiously, together with the sobering experience
that marks his emergence from the war. His decision is rigorously anti-sentimental,
driven, at the same time, by an attitude that was born when he met the ghost of
Boris Ansky, who came to occupy the space of an “alter ego,” with insistence on the
quotation marks. As we now know, Reiter was the one who strangled Sammer in the
prisoner-of-war camp, and it has also been revealed that Reiter, during the war, was
almost killed many times but did not kill anyone himself (777). There is an implicit
rejection of purity in the gesture of taking on the Italian name, one that comes from
Ansky’s notebooks, a Jewish connection, so to speak. The often invoked, but always
displaced model of detective fiction would warrant a name change in the interest
of escaping the consequences of Reiter’s killing Sammer, the mass murderer of the
Jews, but this might not have been—as the matter is left inconclusive—Reiter’s actual
motive. However, Reiter has learned to hate the Nazis, and he has learned—from an
old woman, a fortune teller—to not assume the role of the scapegoat, to not “make the
classic English whodunit mistake” (ibid.).
Writing his first novel, Lüdicke, took Archimboldi 20 days but finding a publisher
in postwar Germany was almost impossible. The only house from which he received
an encouraging answer regarding the manuscript that he had mailed off to several
places, was directed by a man who had escaped the concentration camp by going

into exile. Mr Jacob Bubis, the “great editor” (800), had published books of the German
Left until 1933, when the Nazi government closed down his business (792). He was able
to reopen it in 1946 and to become a symbol of independent, democratic, high-quality
publishing (801). Bubis says that, after returning from exile, he acquired the habit of
personally meeting the authors he was going to publish, and it thus happens that “Benno
von Archimboldi” was invited to Hamburg. While “Bolaño” continues to accompany
Archimboldi in third-person narration, a one-page section is suddenly intercalated in
which Mr Bubis talks about himself in first person. While in London during the war,
compelled to watch the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids, Bubis tells a nonexistent listener—an
associative anticipation of his talk with Archimboldi—that before 1933 he had published
many promising young German writers. Later, in the solitude of exile, “I set out to pass
the time by calculating how many of the first-time writers I published had become
members of the Nazi party, how many had joined the SS, how many had written for
rabidly anti-Semitic newspapers, how many had made a career in the Nazi bureaucracy.
The result almost drove me to suicide” (802).
When the young Archimboldi meets Mr Bubis, the publisher is 74, and has a
“profound sadness” in his eyes since the times of Döblin, Musil, and Kafka, not to
mention Thomas Mann were gone, but several new writers, beginning to emerge
“from the bottomless quarry of German literature” (808), were not so bad. “What’s
your real name?” is the first question that Mr Bubis asks Archimboldi. “That’s my
name,” is Benno von Archimboldi’s answer (808). Not much of a lettered irony can be
found in the entire novel, although there are now and again flashes of dark satire, but
the ensuing dialogue is marked by the benevolent mixture of irony and wisdom, on
Bubis’s side, and of irritated stubbornness, on Archimboldi’s part. “Do you think the
exile has made me stupid?” Bubis replies. He adds that, to begin with, to be called
Benno is suspicious. Archimboldi does not get the point. Bubis: “Why, because of
Benito Mussolini, man! Where’s your head?” (809) Archimboldi boldly replies that
they called him Benno after “Benito Juárez,” the Mexican liberal president and national
hero of the nineteenth century. Bubis’ ironically contained amazment is growing, and
he wonders where the young man, this tall, skinny, blue-eyed German, has gotten all
this from, but replies, “I thought you were going to tell me it was in honor of Saint
Benedict” (ibid.). Archimboldi, baffled and uncomfortable, just clings to his name,
waiting for an opportunity to make his way out of the room. (“That’s what I’m called.”
Bubis: “No one is called that.”) Bubis, of course, is aware of the grotesque realism of
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the sixteenth century Italian painter. Now, what is still left for
him to “clarify” is the word “von.” Is its function to prove that there is some element
of Germanness left in the young man’s name? This is the moment when Archimboldi
is about to flee, assuming that his chances as a credible newcomer have vanished in
the air; and it becomes plain that he is implacable, not wanting to reveal the “Jewish
connection” of his name to the famous Jewish publisher. He does not seek favors. Mr
Jacob Bubis, an outstanding intellectual, is curious and experienced enough to not
let him go, but introducing the writer-to-be to his young wife, who is supposed to
have a fine intuition. And, indeed, this scene turns out to be the beginning of a long
professional relationship in the course of which Archimboldi, who will not see Bubis

208 Narcoepics
again, feels himself supported by the famous publisher, even in the most precarious
moments of his errant future life.
“The Part about the Crimes”—Another Almanac of the Dead
. . . literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection
nor noticing a thing.
Roberto Bolaño
To claim that, say, Auschwitz is beyond tragedy is to say that unless we react to
its horror with our familiar responses of pity, outrage, compassion, and the like,
we risk being collusive with its inhumanity—yet that at a different level these
common-or-garden responses are shown up by the event as really quite irrelevant,
so that only a humanity which had passed beyond humanity, and in doing so had
become more rather than less human, would be on answerable terms with it.
Terry Eagleton
On June, 18, 1999, the newspaper La Reforma of the Mexican capital registered
an atrocious testimony. An informant declared that behind the major criminal
scenario in contemporary Mexican history—the serial femicides in Ciudad Juárez,
Chihuahua—there was the figure of the police assassin.
Sergio González Rodríguez
When discussing “The Part About Archimboldi” before the section that is dedicated
to Santa Teresa, we did not trace Bolaño’s compositional scheme. In 2666, “The Part
About the Crimes” (hereafter “The Crimes”) precedes the life story of the German
writer. By placing the “historical” Archimboldi at the end, Bolaño may have insinuated a
distancing gesture, a move not away, perhaps, from present-time hemispheric scenarios
into remoter zones of history, but from the immediacy of violence in today’s global
wastelands to constitutive moments of a violent twentieth century made accesible
through the experiences of an untoward, nomadic intellectual. This is an intellectual
whose habits as “not-self ” are, from a certain angle, tremendously timely, bearing an
unusual ethical fascination. Bolaño may have wanted to let this timeliness—a proactive
and, for some vital reason, partly concealed stance, performed from “hopelessness”—
resonate “back” into the present from a twentieth-century odyssey. The final Archimboldi
story can be read in different ways. First, it can be taken independently from the other
four parts of the novel. Secondly, it marks the counterpoint in relationship to “The Part
About the Critics.” That is, it contrasts the sublime myth of the German writer, invented
by the “Critics,” with the “real” trajectory of the erratic Hans Reiter. At the same time, it
serves as a fissured screen, through which the exhaustion of (literary) critical discourse
meets the epistemic vitality of the “negative subject”—the contemporary not-self
turned into an “amphibian.” There is a third possible approach: both parts, the one
about the Crimes and the one about Archimboldi, can be mirrored upon the other,
and the hinge between them leads us to conclude with that constellation of violence, in
whose center we find the scapegoat—the pharmakos. The title of the present chapter,

“From Pharmakon to Femicide,” is built on the hypothesis of a literary yet conceptual

imagination that leads from pharmakon to pharmakos. This is a figuration that moves
our attention to layers of violence that seem both half-buried like the destroyed
female bodies, and boundless, like an epidemic force. To show how the scapegoat is
first constructed and then annihilated, how that terrible burden is imposed upon
certain individuals, and groups and, above all, upon a large, gendered collective, is what
marks the novel’s secret center. This is what “The Crimes” can help us uncover, and the
subsequent “Part About Archimboldi” can now, as well, be understood “backwardly.” In
short, the novel has no end, but rather a final “part” that forms a constellation with the
previous ones –a “now” of cognizability64.
Acts of violence, their unspeakable outbursts, defaced bodies and lacerated lives,
today’s geographies of fear, as devastating as they may be, are not self-evident, even in
their most compelling expressions. The violent “real” has an “unreality effect.” Beneath
this paradox lurks the most difficult aspect of violence—its disguised core. The visible
part, increasingly taken care of by corporativized media is not necessarily what helps
to gain experience and insight. How can we manage to step back without losing sight of
what is most striking? How is it possible, at the same time, to disengage from the lure
of the kind of representations that suggest that the Ciudad Juárez murders cannot find
adequate treatment in language? How can we access the forces of the underground—
that uncanny web of relationships and mechanisms—from which the crimes have
been occurring by the many hundreds during the past two decades? What is the
contribution of 2666 to disentangling those obscure networks? “The Crimes” extends,
in the English version, across almost 300 pages, by virtue of third-person recounting
of what sound like bits of police reports, forensic filings, and press coverages regarding
the circumstances under which the remains of murdered and disfigured young women
have been found, since January 1993, in various sites in Santa Teresa. The narration
is tuned down in order to elude the signs of a narrator’s “subjectivity,” and there is
an impression that the events tell themselves. A seemingly endless chain of killings,
consisting of variations within a similar pattern, continuing from one month to the
next with almost none resolved by the identification of the actual murderers, is told as
a succession of accounts like the following:
. . . in May, a dead woman was found in a dump between Colonia Las Flores and
the General Sepúlveda industrial park. In the complex stood the buildings of four
maquiladoras where household appliances were assembled. [. . .] In the dump where
the dead woman was found, the trash of the slum dwellers piled up along with the
waste of the maquiladoras. The call informing the authorities of the discovery of
the dead woman came from the manager of one of the plants, Multizone-West, a
subsidiary of a multinational that manufactured TVs. [. . .] The dead woman spent
that night in a refrigerated compartment in the Santa Teresa hospital and the next
day one of the medical examiner’s assistants performed the autopsy. She had been
strangled. She had been raped. Vaginally and anally, noted the medical examiner’s
assistant. And she was five months pregnant (358–9).
64
See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463.

210 Narcoepics
Set among such pro-documentary statements, we meet almost 40 actors on the

scene of Santa Teresa’s life, peculiar personnel whom we will address later, scattered
across the narrative like “wandering” signifiers. None of these characters actually
becomes the bearer of empathy, or of an encompassing vision, or will lead us to a
reflective distance. The relationship between the reports about the corpses is iterative,
in that there seems to be no visible (“hypotactical”) progression toward uncovering
perpetrators or motives, nor is an enhanced reflexivity at hand, which touches
upon the heart of the matter. The sensation of a spiral-like, murderous machination
arises, viscerally ingrained in the destiny of the city and its surroundings. This is not
to say that reflexivity is absent, but it is alusive, indirect, and linked to a mode of
disenchanted narration. This gesture concerns the subject matter itself, the crimes and
their inconceivable presence. It must be observed that in contrast with other critics’
thoughts about Bolaño’s alleged “fatalism,” the character of his disenchanted, laconic
telling of bits and pieces of a picture that apparently lacks “sense,” accompanied by the
confusion of genres—literary fiction/police reports/press coverage—is not a giving
up of the search for truth. It is a sober way of approximating actions and meanings
that have moved beyond modern society’s explanatory system. “The Crimes” gives
testimony that “reality” outplays literature’s capacity to (re)create experience in
a unique form. Reality appears, confoundingly, under the sign of the unbearably
“normal.” When Bolaño wrote the novel, the killings in Ciudad Juárez had been
happening for an entire decade, impressing a recognizable pattern about the marks of
bestiality and the disposal of the victims’ bodies onto media-created public knowledge,
without encountering either public forces or institutions that would be able, or
willing, to stop the nightmare, let alone take the perpetrators to court for legal and
public consequences. Under the signs of that terrible normalcy, inconceivable from
the perspective of optimistic political modernity and its investment in the principal
right of citizenship, the “unreality effect” of violence flourished. For Bolaño, taking
the full measure of this situation meant avoiding any attempt to fix the drama in
narrative terms. Somewhat similar to Benjamin’s highlighting of a concept of history
based on the “tradition of the oppressed,” Bolaño seeks to bring about a sensorium
of emergency, questioning the self-fulfilling drive of the “current amazement that the
things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.”65 Therefore,
the fictive world of Santa Teresa emerges from paratactical insistence and iteration,
leading readers to come across, again and again, in one- to three-page sections,
another murdered woman, strangled in most cases, raped vaginally and anally, her
body covered by dozens of stab wounds, with shattered bones, at times with one breast
cut off and the nipple of the other torn off.
If we speak of Roberto Bolaño’s (syn)aesthetic minimalism, that is especially
powerful in “The Part of the Crimes” we might associate the more recent video- and
installation works of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. Thematizing a chilling
presence of the Juárez femicides in the daily living spaces of the border, Margolles’ art is
minimalist in its formal surfaces. It finds its “space” beyond conciliatory symbolization
65
Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” 392.

(as well as a tired habitus of political art) as it addresses violent death by combining
forensic evidence with materials, and images of desert space, and other “urban”
exterritorialities. What, in Bolaño, appears as paratactical narrativization in order to
counter the atrocious, ongoing “disposal” / “disposability” (Wright) of female bodies
is translated into figurations of space and objects by Margolles. Regarding Margolles’
installations, Cuauhtémoc Medina holds that at issue is not a documentary principle
but the application of aesthetic heterodoxy and ethical exploration, taken to their
limits.66 A similar remark would hold for Bolaño’s approach to the “feminicidios.”
In the novel, there is a “chronology” that is not a chronology. We read at the
beginning of “The Crimes” that the killings of women began to be counted in January
1993. “But it’s likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim
was Esperanza Gómez Saldaña and she was 13. Maybe for the sake of convenience,
maybe she was the first to be killed in 1993, she heads the list” (353). Once we discover
that Bolaño draws on Sergio González Rodríguez’ Huesos en el desierto (2002), a
book based on articles and reports that the Mexican journalist had published in the
newspaper Reforma, the date of the “beginning” becomes pertinent. It relates to the
“serial” killings in Ciudad Juárez, as they came to be categorized, from the moment that
the Federal District Prosecutor’s Office (Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito
Federal) started to meet with its local counterpart, the Prosecutor’s Office of the State
of Chihuahua, generating an official chronology of the crimes.67 This happened under
the pressure of a local organization called “Grupos de Mujeres Contra la Violencia,”
and against the unwillingness of the local judicial, police, and other state authorities to
deepen and professionalize the investigation.68 According to González Rodríguez, in
mid-1997, when there had been 87 registered femicides since 1993 showing the signs
of a systematic mysogenist vendetta,69 the resistance of responsable state institutions,
including corporate journalism, as well as President Ernesto Zedillo himself, to face the
issue continued.70 It is not a coincidence that the novelistic part “The Crimes” begins
in January 1993 and comes to an end, without concluding, in December 1997: “the
last case of 1997 was fairly similar to the second to last, except that the bag containing
the body wasn’t found on the western edge of the city but on the eastern edge . . . Both
this case and the previous case were closed after three days of generally halfhearted
investigations” (2666, 632–3). The years 1993–7 have cast a hitherto unknown shadow
of savagery over the lifes of women in Ciudad Juárez and across the border region.
If reality outplays “fiction,” Bolaño makes perceive the invisible “alliance” between
fear, common desires for relief, and actual blindness. What can literary fiction, guided
by a bet on sobriety and a rejection of psychological scenarios, achieve in that light?
According to a common assumption that seems to hold for both historical discourse
and literary representation, it is not enough for historical matter that it deserves a
66
Cuauhtémoc Medina (ed.), Teresa Margolles. What Else Could We Talk About?, 2009.
67
See Sergio Gonzálz Rodríguez. Huesos en el desierto, 55–6, 62–3
68
Ibid., 61, 63.
69
See Marcos Fernández and Jean-Christophe Rampal. La ciudad de las muertas, 15 ff.
70
See Sergio González Rodríguez, 63.
71
See Hayden White’s seminal study, The Content of the Form, 5.

212 Narcoepics
certain sensible handling of evidence. Authentic events must also be narrated as if

they possessed “a structure, an order of meaning.”71 The “very distinction between real
and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction
presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with the ‘real’ only insofar
as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.”72 Narrativity, according to
the logic laid out by Hayden White, becomes a trope for “deeper understanding” on
the basis of its structural symbolism—a sort of unique, hermeneutic instance. Bolaño’s
construction of “The Crimes,” in turn, is averse to this equation, challenging the notion
of reality’s narrative plausibility and thus, closure. What is so disconcerting about
this part is its narrative strategy that organizes the res gestae as if they were “telling
themselves.” Stylistically speaking, and alluding to Auerbach’s relevant studies, this
places Bolaño’s narrative near the “genre” of medieval annals, which does not display a
properly “narrative” structure, that is, annals do not tell a story. Unlike chronicles, they
follow the chronological order of the original ocurrence of real events consisting, in
fact, “only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence.”73 There are just loose
ends, paratactically linked, without any major clue or plot which, to a modern reader,
seems either frustrating or naïve. In Bolaño, the paratactical mode works like this: “The
first dead woman of May was never identified . . ., etc.” (359); “The last dead woman
to be discovered in June 1993 was Margarita López Santos.. . .” (374); “In September
another dead woman was found . . .” (389); “In the same month, two weeks after the
discovery of the dead woman in the Buenavista subdivision, another body turned up . . .”
(390); “The next dead woman appeared in October, at the dump in the Arsenio Farrell
industrial park . . .” (391); “In October, too, the body of another woman was found in
the desert . . .” (391); “In the middle of November, Andrea Pacheco Martínez, thirteen,
was kidnapped . . .” (392); “On December 20, the last violent death of a woman was
recorded for the year 1993” (392); “The first dead woman of 1994 was found by some
truck drivers on a road off the Nogales highway, in the middle of the desert” (399);
“The next dead woman was Leticia Contreras Zamudio” (400); “The next victim was
Penélope Méndez Becerra” (402); “The next dead woman was Lucy Anne Sander.. . .”
(406); “The next dead woman was found near the Hermosillo Highway . . .” (411); “Two
weeks later, in May 1994, Mónica Durán Reyes was kidnapped on her way out of the
Diego Rivera School . . .” (412). Bolaño has chosen to not use the authentic names of the
victims, trying to eschew the possibility of voyerism. The narration makes “notarial”
evidence its coordinates, however, to decipher the web of underlying mechanisms is a
call that weighs heavily on the novel’s readers.
These statements, just the beginnings of which we have cited, combine forensic
details with information about where the “dumped” corpses were found, as well as
some routine measures taken by the police; they are interposed with other sections
in which storytelling is not absent but helps to weave a map of indicators, none of
which, however, permits a conclusive vision. Regarding the central matter of female
human beings who are kidnapped, violated, and disposed of, paratactical drama74 is
72
Ibid., 6.
73
Ibid., 5.
74
On the concept see Herlinghaus. “Parataxes Unbound.” In Violence Without Guilt, 57 ff.

the main principle that organizes the inner structure of “The Crimes.” Bolaño’s refusal
to connect the authentic material hypotactically owes to the politicization of the
question of “truth,” which could hardly be more frightening than in the case of Ciudad
Juárez. It is the “plausible scripts,” plotting the guilt of certain persons and seeking to
divert public opinion, that are put in doubt. The search for “truth” and the types of
“investigation” and punishment that have been carried out by the Chihuahuan state
apparatus and some of its mighty allies, have turned out to include well-staged theatre
coups, such as the accusation of Abdul Latif Sharif Sharif75, an Egyptian chemist and
US citizen in order to create “narratable” versions with intelligible tragic contours. As
has been explored in a growing number of first-rate studies, the juridical apparatus
in Chihuahua, fueled by the maneuvers of extremely influential, “well-connected”
regional and (trans)national actors, including US-based Mexican entrepreneurs, has
continued playing its role as manufacturer of “stories,” so that an undeclared “state of
emergency” could be covered up.76 While struck by the paratactical “naivité” of Bolaño’s
text, we have to look for the reflexive moment that is built into the tension between
“parataxis” as a style, evocative of certain medieval texts, and parataxis as a concept
consciously directed against hypotactical closure. In other words, there is no point
in attributing constraints that characterized medieval annal, for example, the lack of
insight into the causes or connections between recorded events, to the novel 2666.
Nevertheless, a strange affinity exists—in both cases the paratactical mode applies to
the concatenation of events that are extreme, events that threaten human groups with
violent death, war, devastation, and the like.
This affinity is telling, and it can also be misleading if no attention is paid to how
ambiguity is articulated aesthetically. War, the annihilation of communities, hunger,
floods, and other catastrophes were mythically charged in many cases of “historical”
imagination, perceived as signs of destiny, provoked by the wrath of the gods. After
an unmeasurable catastrophe had struck, how could the affected groups and persons
confront the situation in a rational and proactive way? Fear, psychic exhaustion, and
long-lasting “epidemic affects” were likely to have saturated (intoxicated) the social
climate to the point that it would have been imperative to break the negative fascination
of evil. Thus, the loss of life or its destruction can produce, among the surviving, a
demand for narrative closure, and it is here that mythical imagination can play its part.77
Brute violence, when it silences resistance, has a tendency to enter a delirium of being
“god-like,” spreading the poison of its own myth. It is here that Bolaño’s writing risks
forcing the ambiguity. Paratactical narration, on the one hand, could signal the spread
of a mythical force of violence, from which there is no escape, nor can this violence
be explained; it just demands open-ended endurance. At the same time, by instigating
75
See Sergio González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, 13–26; Diana Washington Valdez, Cosecha de
mujeres: safari en el desierto mexicano, 145–156.
76
See Marcos Fernández and Jean-Christophe Rampal. La cìudad, 87–116; Diana Washington. Cosecha
de mujeres, 117–41, 143–75.
77
This has continuously created difficulties for local, and international activist groups that reject the
politics of appeasement and keep scrutinizing the drama beyond the official versions imposed to
“close” the tragedy. See Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso. “Víctimas de crímenes sexuales … más allá de
las estadísticas,” 50–55.

214 Narcoepics
mindfulness through the almost mimetic reiteration of “events” that are condensed
in the reports, paratactical narration can also turn the unbreakable cycle of violence
onto itself. From here, and remembering that the “dialectics of intoxication” has been a
major trope throughout our study, the paratactical drama that Bolaño uses to structure
“The Part of the Crimes” comes close to that image of “humiliating sobriety,” by which
ecstasy is reflectivly contrasted. Given this ambivalence we can think of “The Crimes”
as an almanach—combining the ancient meaning of the word with global reflexivity—
and taking up and into the twenty-first century the critical spirit of Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). Bolaño, having experienced General Pinochet’s
geopolitical dictatorship in Chile, and its sequels, as well as its aftermath, is skeptical
that there could be an enlightened humanity that wins the game or passes from chaos
to order. This might explain his interest in, and occasional obsession for configurations
that help articulate violence poetically, which is a matter of countering the powers
of the oppressive “real.” In his literary vision of Ciudad Juárez’ drama, paratactical
narration becomes such a device. Parataxis, unceasingly and almost rhythmically
opposes “evidence” of the murders to narrative, and aesthetic techniques of closure
and redemption. It becomes most uncomfortable. This “poetic violence” is a way to
reject both enlightenment and relief. Here we speak of “enlightenment” as rationalized
culture that proclaims its superiority to barbarism in life and in politics. At issue is,
instead, the novelist’s sensitivity helping to unravel that which keeps eluding both the
law and proven logics of explanation.
“The Crimes,” rather than entering into the familiar catalogue of testimonial
narratives, displays testimonial insistence of its own kind. Santa Teresa becomes
the novelistic space into which “Ciudad Juárez” has metamorphosed, presenting a
quasi-documentary account of every murdered woman from 1993 to 1997. At first
glance, Bolaño’s attention to the forensic details might seem morbid. However, his
“mimetic” gesture of forcing into memory, as the narration moves from month to
month, the reports of the disfigured corpses, together with the ages, social backgrounds
and (modified) names of the women is a “methodical” procedure that presents an
aesthetic, anti-cathartic source of energy set against the background of the general
failure of the state and the mass media to take due responsibility during those years.
Such detailed, chronological listings, in relation to which the novelist has only changed
the names of the victims are not provided in González Rodríguez’ book, which, driven
by a more “enlightened” purpose, focuses on accounts and information drawn from
various perspectives and condensed into eighteen narrative units containig analytical
approaches, as well. Huesos en el desierto belongs among a new, postoptimistic
spectrum of novel-length works of a narrativizing, analytic journalism whose famous
precursor was Carlos Monsiváis. It seems that in the documentation to which Roberto
Bolaño had direct or indirect access, there were the materials assembled in 1998 by
the Vice-Prosecutor’s Office of the “Estado Zona Norte.”78 The work of activists such as
78
Informe de homicidios en perjuicio de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, 1993–1998,
Subprocuradoría de Justicia del Estado Zona Norte; febrero de 1998 (reference in Julia Estela
Monárrez Fragoso. “Víctimas . . . ” , 56, note 12).
79
See ibid., 53, 56. See also Víctor Ronquillo. Las Muertas, 48f.

Esther Chávez Cano, a feminist analyst and social worker of the “Grupo 8 de Marzo”
who dedicated herself, together with scholars from the Universidad Autónoma de
Ciudad Juárez, to systematically documenting the femicides,79 has been of crucial
importance. Marcela Valdes tells us that Bolaño had already traveled to northern
Mexico during the 1970s, but he never visited Ciudad Juárez, and “his knowledge was
limited to what he could find in newspapers and on the Internet.”80 There is no doubt,
however, that given the novelist’s connections among Mexican artists and journalists,
his research on Ciudad Juárez was meticulous.
While in most of the cases of femicides registered from 1993 to 1997 police
investigation was said to lack sufficient evidence, or was not carried out correctly,
readers perceive that there is an underground sphere. The novel’s narrative embraces
three areas in which violence against young women is a daily reality, with a tendency
to suggest massive proportions. What are the constant threats that hover over women’s
bodies and lives? The perhaps most pervasive realm can be labeled “family affairs”; it
is associated with the custom that makes the punishment of “misbehaving” wives and
girlfriends a matter of masculinity that is widely tolerated. Since—in the cases presented
in the novel—punishment is directly exercised on the female body, the husband or
boyfriend seizes his customary privilege to become a biopolitical aggressor, a “private”
sovereign. If this leads to the killing of the woman, the man faces legal prosecution, but
the slope is slippery, and it often suffices, in Santa Teresa, that the perpetrator leaves
town or crosses the border, for a case to be closed. Then there is a second terrain, one in
which mysogenist excesses acquire forms of outright monstrosity. Savage violence has
become established in the unwritten codes that sustain the functioning of drug-trade
networks, as well as other blood-thirsty fields of informal, cross-border business, such
as organ traffic and the manufacturing of “snuff-movies.”81 Thirdly, a symptomatic
trait, regularly mentioned in the accounts of the defaced corpses, usually in the cases in
which the victims’ identity could be determined, points to the role that maquiladoras
play in the game of femicides throughout the Juárez region. “The Crimes” insinuates
that tying together these “loose ends” will not necessarily help readers conclude their
search for truth. However, there is no way for the search to avoid traversing these
territories, either. Let me begin discussing the above-mentioned, symptomatic realms
by paying attention to the maquiladora phenomenon along the border.
When Bolaño wrote “The Crimes,” it is evident that the reality that drew him in as
a novelist was related to machinations of violence that had vampirized life in Ciudad
Juárez, spreading like bizarre spiderwebs. The design of the Santa Teresan novelistic
section is set to undermine the model of the master plan, applied, for example, in
the course of the official verdict imposed on the alleged “serial killer” Abdel Latif
Sharif Sharif, which served as an instrument by which Chihuahua’s judicial apparatus
attempted to reestablish “order.”82 As we already laid out, the figure of Archimboldi’s
nephew, Klaus Reiter, appears as the literary version of the authentic Sharif Sharif.
80
Marcela Valdes. Roberto Bolaño, 13.
81
See Roberto Bolaño. 2666, 540–5.
82
See Sergio González Rodríguez. Huesos . . . , 182 f., 160 f.
83
See in Marcela Valdes.

216 Narcoepics
Roberto Bolaño used to remark, toward the end of his life, that Ciudad Juárez appeared
to him as the perfect secularization of evil.83 He meant, as “The Crimes” suggests, that
the powers of destruction remain in hiding, while guilt has become ubiquitous and
omnipresent. The maquiladora issue becomes revelatory in that regard, for it uses the
mask of economic objectivity and social demand for work. People in Juárez had to learn,
after 1993, that many of the victims were women who had been working in one of the
global assembly plants. Paragraphs like the following show how the incommensurable
is taken to extremes through the nondramatic representation of “fact.” Attention to
the maquiladoras is crucial in 2666, equivalent to an alert to the ghostly side of the
economy and to certain unwritten rules rampant on the global playground.
The last dead woman to be discovered in June 1993 was Margarita López Santos.
[. . .] Margarita Lopez worked at K&T, a maquiladora in the El Progreso industrial
park near the Nogales highway . . . The day of her disappearance she was working
the third shift at the maquiladora, from nine at night to five in the morning.
According to her fellow workers, she had come in on time, as always, because
Margarita was more dependable and responsible than most, which meant that her
disappearance could be fixed around the time of the shift change and her walk
home. But no one saw anything then, in part because it was dark at five or five-
thirty in the morning, and there wasn’t enough public lighting. Most of the houses
in the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. The roads
out of the industrial park, except the one leading to the Nogales highway, also
lacked adequate lighting, paving and drainage systems: almost all the waste from
the park ended up in Colonia Las Rositas, where it formed a lake of mud that
bleached white with the sun. So Margarita López left work at five-thirty. That much
was established. And then she set out along the dark streets of the industrial park.. . .
somewhere along the way something happened or something went permanently
wrong . . . Forty days later some children found her body near a shack in Colonia
Maytorena (374–5).
Images emerge, captured like by a wandering camera, in which the desolate earth,
the dumping of industrial waste next to the survival zones of poor communities (the
“colonias”) and the appearance of remnants of the mutilated women are fused into one
and the same “still life.” With the paratactical intensity that we have described above,
Santa Teresa’s environment is painted as wastelands that could, as well, resemble the
aftermath of a planetary catastrophe. Is there a link between the killings, the dumpings
of the corpses in grisly refuse areas, and the maquiladoras? Regarding the murders,
in particular, their invisible relationship with the global factories seems to possess
a programmatic spin, since the environs of the factories appear as general dumping
grounds for the defaced bodies—it does not matter in which of the many plants the
victim had been working. “The next dead woman appeared in October, at the dump in
the Arsenio Farrell industrial park. Her name was Marta Navales Gómez. [. . .] The odd
thing about the case was that Marta Navales Gómez worked at the Aiwo, a Japanese
maquiladora located in the El Progreso industrial park, but her body was found in the
Arsenio Farrell industrial park.. . .” (391)

Before discussing possible connections between female, low-wage employment,

kidnapping, and murder, and the proliferation of “global” waste, let me first draw
on the contextual situation. Maquiladoras are manufacturing facilities dependent
on the movement of global capital—export-processing assembling plants that testify
to the drastic forms of exploitation on which the international division of labor has
depended, especially after the implementation of NAFTA. The story of Ciudad Juárez
begins long before NAFTA. The city, located across the Río Grande/Bravo from El Paso
(Texas), was the official birthplace, in 1965, of Mexican “maquilas” (the short term for
maquiladoras).84 Since then, Juárez has become an international “leader in low-cost,
high-quality, labor-intensive manufacturing processes. Its adjacency to the United
States and the constant inflow of migrants from the Mexican interior contributed to
this city’s popularity among corporate executives seeking to cut factory costs while
maintaining quality standards and easy access to the US market.”85 This describes one
of those regional, “third-world” cities that was coopted into the rise of neoliberalism,
turning into a paradigmatic locus of the Global South. However, functional terminology
tends to hide that the global economy, by singling out the “South” as the most “timely”
orbit for “deregulation,” systematically counts on the sacrifice of human life. This is not
to say that the economy is directly responsible for the massive femicides, but it has a
stake in making young women disposable resources in the cheap labor market, and
probably instigates other forms of aggression that, in one way or another, ensue from
the “production” of the disposable body.
Melissa W. Wright discusses the forces that, under the guise of market freedom, exert
violent pressure on human lives by both discursive and structural means. It has become
commonplace throughout the world that global corporations must rely on third-world
factories in order to remain competitive. Much “know how” has been invested in making
specific discursive assumptions into general knowledge so that they can circulate
in a self-evident way, being repeated by government officials, media commentators,
company spokes-persons, and competing professionals alike. One of these discursive
constructions is the “myth of the disposable third world woman” (Wright, 2006, 1), a
sort of post-contemporary lore regarding young, unskilled yet dexterous women from
the South, who can be made to generate “widespread prosperity” through their own
destruction. Wright suggests the allusive figure of the “Dialectics of Still Life,” pointing
to the double logic of physical disposability (the women’s status as a living “form of
industrial waste;” ibid., 2) and the high value that is extracted from her temporary,
“low-skilled,” and extremely energy-consuming work. The lives of the maquila workers
appear “stilled by the discord of value pitted against waste” (72). This metaphor of the
“still life” is thought of in the terms of a feminist-Marxian political economy, and it is
discussed in relationship to the mechanism of “turnover”: the fast coming and going
of female workers into and out of jobs, due to the quick dissipation of their value. The
bodies of female workers in the Juárez maquiladora industry are monitored according
to bio-economic criteria, including the surveillance of their menstrual cycles (and
84
See Lester Langley. MexAmerica, 35 f.
85
Melissa W. Wright. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, 72.

218 Narcoepics
pregnancy tests, 85), bodily postures, dexterity, ability to concentrate, docility, with
the result that, in the case of Mexican women, the turnover logic assumes a natural
connection between a fleeting work ethic and the eventual stiffening of “her nimble
fingers,” together with the loss of focus of her “sharp eyes” (78). Since most female
workers are “not susceptible” to receiving training and skills, their “corporate deaths”
(their leaving one maquiladora after one or two years, and entering another in an ever
more debilitating journey, Wright, 74) are attributed to “hazardous forces intrinsic to
the disposable third world women” (6): an ingrained lack of discipline, ambition and
loyalty (81, 82), backed by the image of excessive heterosexuality (“overactive wombs,”
86), all of which sums up as “cultural inevitability” making impossible “even the cost of
her own social reproduction” (86, 16–17).
In other words, the factories are not responsible for the extremely profitable speed
with which female workers are turned into industrial waste. The Mexican woman
entering the low-cost, global labor market
might be subverting some cultural traditions by working outside the home, but
her culture will ensure that she not go too far afield by inculcating her with a
disposition that makes her impossible to train, to promote, or to encourage as a
long-term employee. The maquilas are helpless to divert the forces of a culture that,
in effect, devours its own, as women’s careers are subsumed to such ineluctable
traditional pressures. (86)
What is ascribed to terse cultural custom, to the extent of supporting anthropological
fatalism, is astutely “manufactured” on the psychosymbolic scale—the image of
Mexican women’s particular susceptibility to serve as a docile workforce and ultimate
provider of energy, thus supplying the life blood that fuels the assembly line. To say
that this work is low-skilled and labor-intensive is only half of the truth. If its character
were described from a neuro-cultural viewpoint, we would speak of the exploitation
and the wasting away of unique resources of embodied intelligence. Those interactions
that, through dexterous hands, communicate with the brain and from there, that
is, from embodied image-knowledge with the environment, are appreciated under
different prerogatives as perhaps the most powerful healing tools. This association is
not a random one; it helps the reader reflect on the role of an important “secondary”
character, the enigmatic seer of Santa Teresa. We are speaking of Florita, La Santa from
Hermosillo, and Bolaño affords some irony when, after making the journalist and
writer Sergio González Rodríguez one of the novel’s characters, as well, he takes Sergio’s
literary “alter ego” to its limit. In “The Crimes,” we read about the “journalist Sergio”
who is incapable of making sense of the allusions that Florita is conveying to him in
an interview, and instead perceives the old woman as “a charlatan with a heart of gold”
(2666, 571, 572). However, if we exempt Klaus Haas, the nephew and physical replica
of Archimboldi who is forced into the role of the scapegoat and who, as a prisoner,
makes crucial discoveries,86 Florita is one fictive person in the novel who “knows” how
to place the different registers into one single picture (see 562). It is through Florita’s
86
These are only indirectly revealed to the reader.

visions that we may get a sense of the immanent closeness of the femicides to the places
pertaining to either the maquiladoras or to the contaminated earth into which these
big plants have converted their environment. The “corporate death” of female workes,
at the point when they become useless for the factory, is, biologically speaking, an
existential burnout, a sort of vampirism that needs large numbers of victims, not just
individuals. The victims are obviously not killed in, or in the interest of, the maquilas,
but their “being wasted” leaves them in a state of exposure that equals an elemental
vulnerability. In the actual terms of (class-dependent) Western citizenship, the right
to have rights is, at least tendentially, a matter of establishing an autonomous self (the
status to guarantee a private life, indulging in its whims, and making it a sphere of
“recreation”) that, in turn, depends on the distinction between “qualified life” and
“bare life.” The uncanny feeling that is created by Florita’s visions is not far from the
impression that representations from the European imaginary of Marx’ time, and the
preceding century, have given the experience of primitive (in German, “original”)
accumulation of capital. The killings are
such a burden, said Florita.. . . she said that an ordinary murder (although there
was no such thing as an ordinary murder) almost always ended with a liquid
image, a lake or a well that after being disturbed grew calm again, whereas serial
killings, like the killings in the border city, projected a heavy image, metallic or
mineral, a smoldering image . . . (571).
The “heavy image,” metallic, mineral, smoldering, crystallizes into a war-like,
predatory force, which might also resemble the metaphoric of capital accumulation in
its savage stage, when it was perceived as a nature-like force, being either miraculous
(the disproportional fantasies of progress) or unholy and threatening, with a bestial
capacity to not only amass property and wealth but to convert human beings into
waste by extracting their life force. Not very distant from this is Marx’s imagination of
capitalism as cannibalism,87 although he was wrong in assuming that this system must
devour itself. It devours living labor to an increasing extent, as global “bioderegulation”
shows,88 “and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”89 Wright draws a relationship
between the Juárez femicides and the corporativized myth of the disposable female
workforce from the South.
At the heart of these seemingly disparate stories [the murder narratives and the
“turnover” discourse of the maquilas] is the crafting of the Mexican woman as a
figure whose value can be extracted from her, whether it be in the form of her
virtue, her organs, or her efficiency on the production floor. And once “they,” her
murderers or her supervisors, “get what they want from” her, she is discarded (87).
87
See Jerry Phillips. “Cannibalism qua Capitalism: The Metaphysics of Accumulation in Marx,
Conrad, Shakespeare and Marlowe,” 185.
88
Teresa Brennan writes: “The ruling economy requires sacrifice of human life in order to feel buoyant,
and it obtains it through what I am terming bioderegulation. Deregulation has a liberating sound to
it …” (Globalization and its Terrors, 19).
89
Jerry Phillips. 185.

220 Narcoepics
What this explanation, using the abstract concept of value, does not address is a ritualistic
power that we believe inheres in both spheres, although it seems to work from different
ends of the ritualistic phenomenon. Bolaño’s perception of evil is related to what one
might characterize as a disjunction of ritualistic logic. The “value” that is massively
extracted from young female workers, as it is taken away from women who are killed
in bestial ways, is the sacred value of bodily life. In view of the absence of conclusive
explanations regarding the Juárez trauma, we are led to think, once again, of an ancient
meaning of homo sacer, as it points to a person (or an animal) that is in a “situation”
from which it will, or can, be sacrificed. Bracketing the juridical meaning of homo sacer,
as it is expounded by Agamben, and speaking more generally, practices of sacrifice
in millenial history did not occur randomly but have built on diverse mechanisms
of preparation and special codification (consecration) of bodies, before these were
sacrificed. A particular phenomenology within ritualistic practices and traditions
points to the construction of the scapegoat—the pharmakos. And some epistemological
insight can be gained from cultures that the modern mind has termed barbarian. Le
Marchant, referring to the accounts of Harpokration, writes that pharmakoi used to be
exposed to practices of expulsion from the community before being executed.90 What
was associated in ancient times with a codified exorcising of evil by a community living
in awe, or under imminent danger, has become more sophisticated over time, and
the exemplary, or better said vicarious, sacrificial killing of human beings may have
been overcome, or replaced by other “technologies” of violence. At the symbolic level,
however, a common denominator of ancient and modern practices of scapegoating
is the regulation of those affective energies that transcend secular knowledge and
experience. As for the status of “irrationality” today, does not a hierarchic and uneven
global modernity excel by the singular, “advanced” mechanisms of holding irrational
forces at bay, which it has unchained over the centuries? In essence, we are dealing with
mechanisms of redistribution of guilt for a certain order, or rule, or status quo to be
kept intact (or, as it also happens, to be tumbled).
Mechanisms of “subjection” that require the creation of subjects destined to carry
the burden for others, or to carry the negative affects of a ruling society in times of
crisis and pressure, or to turn “savage” territories into manageable and profitable
reservations, have been described, not only as belonging to the past but as constitutive
“rituals” that have allowed Western modernity to function under the prerogatives of
a cunningly “contained” civilization. The crucial notion here, reevaluated by Teresa
Brennan by critically rereading Freud, is “projection.” Projection allows the flexible
configuration of affective marginalities, consisting of those individuals or groups,
or larger communities that are forced into “carrying the negative affects for the
other,”91 into acting as potential or imagined trespassers that allow governing desires
and anxieties to occupy a morally safe place. Regarding the maquilas in Juárez, and
concluding from Wright’s deconstruction of the official “turnover” narratives, the
assumption that unskilled female workers from the South must, per force of an inborn
90
See A. Le Marchant. Greek Religion to the Time of Hesiod, 25–6.
91
Teresa Brennan. The Transmission of Affect, 15.

logic, be “turned over” after showing exhaustion, equals a preestablished condition of

“guiltiness” that is rooted in their natural disposability. Can the role of young Mexican
women, whose life energies are devoured by global factories, even be imagined as
present-time pharmakoi? Does their being “turned over” not associate that kind of
resymbolization of their existence prevalent in the devastating “evacuation” of the
pharmakos from the spaces of the legitimate citizen—his or her being given with that
repute, or contingency, under which anyone can harm him, or abuse of her? When we
speak, in relationship to the maquilas, of a disjunction of the ritualistic logic, at issue
is a power of proscription, of de facto consecration, not a final act of sacrifice. In other
words, the sacrifice is virtual, as it becomes symbolically immanent to the bodies of the
female workers. In this situation that makes women homeless regarding both the social
contract and the traditional sexual contract built on patriarchal familial culture, other
predatory “actors” and forces can “step in” to become the executors of the crimes—the
actual, bloodthirsty sacrifices. Compared with traditional understanding, the paradox
traversing the Juárez femicides is this structural separation—anthropologically
speaking—of proscription and “preparation” of the bodies, on the one hand, and the
life-destroying violent acts, on the other. Roberto Bolaño is one of the very few who
recognizes this separation—which we will call the diabolic abyss—as a logic that “can
be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and
is never seen again.”92 The image is seen only by Florita, the healer from Hermosillo,
giving way to that kind of literary association that can call upon shamanic perception
to peer through hemispheric history’s blood-stained windows. In this way Bolaño
comes closest to Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.
Let me now touch upon the other above-mentioned spheres, in which violence
against young women has become a daily experience—the one that we have called
“family affairs” and at the same time associated with the biopolitical trend that is
expressed in a proliferation of new vulnerabilities. Extensive networks of manufacturing
plants, as they infiltrate territories of the South, and serve as dynamizers of corporate
capital and epitomes to the global economy, cannot be held literally accountable for
the crimes. They have even been called a blessing for the “new,” third-world woman.
By 1985, Ciudad Juárez had 180 plants, employing 80,000 workers, of whom over 50
percent were female,93 a number that kept growing during the following decades. Juárez
became notorious, on both sides of the border, for a “different” Mexican woman, but not
one whose social situation and public image had substantially improved. Rather, new
forms of poverty and semi-poverty have been emerging along with the dismantling of
the state’s traditional redistributive and protective functions.
Too many of them had given birth at fifteen or sixteen, then after another child had
been deserted or left with supporting an unemployed male. Absorbed into one of
Juárez’ textile or electronic maquilas, they have to live in an adobe pesthole in one
92
Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” 390.
93
Lester Langley. MexAmerica, 35–6.
94
Ibid., 38.

222 Narcoepics
of the city’s dirt-street colonias. There idle men with even less education than they
can harrass them.94
We find in Bolaño a seemingly endless chain of story fragments testifying to this reality.
Few places in the world are more symptomatic of the neoliberal makeover than Ciudad
Juárez. In Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of a change that was made manifest by a segment of
Latin American prose during the 1990s, regarding a furor of mysogenist violence, at stake
is a “crisis of masculinity” related, for example, to the disruption of traditional familial
roles. It relates to the crisis of the “providing man” that is connected to the entrance of
new generations of women into the labor market.95 This is especially telling in the cases
of women of lower social and spacial-ethnic background.96 A “destabilization” of the
existing sexual contract by neoliberal factors prevails at a major scale, and brute practices
of male violence are perceived by Pratt as a reaction to this crisis. More specifically, as
articulated in a considerable group of novels97 and explored in “The Crimes,” the character
of this violence is not incidental and spontaneous but foundational, and thus irrational
in its perverse, calculating drives. Violence is practiced in order to inaugurate new,
male-bonding spaces, capable of performing an allout punishment of female agency. We
are reminded of an exclamation by the intellectual protagonist of the Colombian novel La
Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins). Fernando Vallejo’s literary “alter ego,” the
conspicuous grammarian “Fernando,” when sealing a sacrificial pact with the adolescent
sicario Alexis, says: “. . . for me it was as if women didn’t have souls. Empty upstairs . . .”
(Vallejo, 14–15), as he stigmatizes the poor neighborhoods as outrightly degenerate and
female procreation under precarious conditions as the guiltiest of all imaginable states.
Or, as he continued: “. . . here a dissipated life is defeating death and kids are emerging
from everywhere, from any hole or vagina, in the same way rats come out of the drains
when they’re overcrowded and there’s no more room” (76). In the Colombian novel, the
homoerotic, violent aristocratism, stigmatizing the female sex as contamination, pertains
to an imagination that is different from “The Crimes.” However, there is a shared matrix
from which the execution of female humans of nonupper-class descent is imagined as
both a foundational and a sacrificial act. The main targets of such acts are the pharmakoi,
disposable creatures or communities upon which negative affects and blame can be
projected and which, in their general vulnerability, function as the victims of unwritten
tragedies. Vallejo’s autobiographic narrator, the intellectual voice of the novel, acts as a
violent accuser of the contaminated majority of the human race, mainly lower-class
women, whereas 2666 leads intuition toward the unholy presence of the scapegoat in
some of the most violent scenarios of the twentieth century, unraveling what we have
described as the “diabolic abyss”—the implicit incrimination of the female pharmakos.
The third realm in Santa Teresa’s drama, in which mysogenist violence is rampant,
connects with the narcotics business, as it has generated grids of power by drawing in
state functionaries, segments of the police, together with major players in finance and
the economy. In fact, Bolaño points to the ethical and political decadence, together
95
See Mary Louise Pratt. “Tres incendios y dos mujeres extraviadas,” 97–8.
96
See also Marcos Fernández and Jean-Christophe Rampal. La ciudad . . . , 15.
97
See Miguel López-Lozano. “Women in the Global Machine: Patrick Bard’s La frontera, Carmen
Galán Benítez’s Tierra marchita, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood.”

with psycho-cultural brutalization, that exists, not in terms of “narco-violence”

properly speaking, but on the part of those actors and institutions, such as the police,
the apparatus of the state, and influential politicians, whose vampirizing on the illegal
cross-border business has jeopardized its large-scale, both juridical and economic,
eradication. In “The Crimes,” there is no single character who could come to our aid as
a guide or as the bearer of a sympathetic quality of individual suffering. Unlike other
artists, who sought to examine the individual tragedies of the victims, and their families,
such as Lourdes Portillo in her documentary film Señorita Extraviada (2001), Bolaño
resists giving his characters a sympathetic face. Two groups can be set out among the
literary personnel of “The Crimes,” apart from a larger series of peripheral characters.
First, there are the journalist Sergio Rodríguez, Florita, the Saint from Hermosillo, and
the accused German, Klaus Haas. Not part of the apparatus of terror, all three are in
one way or another affected by it. The other group includes, above all, police officers
and agents of the government, acting at different levels and in diverse roles. The clues
that can be gained from this second group are both indirect and higly allusive.
So, the fragmented presence of the German Klaus Haas, Archimboldi’s nephew, has
to be brought into perspective. If Haas’ story turns out to be the literary appropriation
of the authentic history of Sharif Sharif, what precisely is the covert affinity between
the real case and the reimagined one? We are dealing with the transformation
of an individual into a scapegoat—a human being, who bears certain untoward
characteristics, is converted, by means of violence, into a transgressive creature.
From a literary viewpoint, we are rather accustomed to tolerating “authenticity” in
the guise of fictive difference, and Bolaño’s is indeed the weaving of an extraordinary
map of improbable coincidences. While Archimboldi, the “amphibian-”like German
writer, has learned to metamorphose into seaweed, in order to escape the powers that
are eager to subdue him, Klaus Haas, his younger “replica,” is trapped on Mexican
territory by an improbable destiny. The above-mentioned, covert affinity between the
authentic (the case of Sharif Sharif) and its renarration (Haas) points to an “aesthetic
state of affairs” that is part of the “real,” not a literary invention. As for a particular
“logic” accompanying the scapegoat, the author assumes the proximity of “fact” and
renarration, and fictive difference tends to become secondary—it is overlaid with
irony. We are speaking of “tragic irony,” in the way in which this phenomenon was
described by Northrop Frye. The subject of tragic irony “does not necessarily have any
tragic hamartia or pathetic obsession: he is only somebody who gets isolated from his
society.”98 In contrast with the Aristotelian model, this is not an aesthetic strategy that
features an essential truth of the tragic situation. The covert “truth” of the figure of Klaus
Haas (as that of Sharif Sharif) consists of the abject assymetry between his situation
and the catastrophe that strikes him. Put in Hegelian terms, the affected subject is
unsuited for tragedy: “irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness.
If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason.”99 This
substantial inadequacy characterizes the constellation that looms over the “random
98
Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, 41.
99
Ibid.

224 Narcoepics
victim,” the pharmakos or scapegoat. For Bolaño, sobriety as a way of fictionalizing and
a politics of style means avoiding the elevation of the hero to a sublime (tragic) state,
and instead bringing the “irony” that is inherent in a political plot to the fore. Irony
inheres in “informal” political machinations that are as deadly as they are in the case of
the femicides; they help us look more closely at the pandemonium against which, and
from which—accepting Bolaño’s strategy—the femicides should be viewed.
Into sharper perspective comes the raison d’etre of the “other” victim. Klaus Haas was
born in Bielefeld, in former West Germany, in 1955, and immigrated to the United States
in 1980, where he became a citizen (2666, 478). In 1990, he relocates to Mexico, where
he successfully opens several computer stores in northern Sonora and Tijuana. It is at
the Santa Teresa downtown store that Haas, in September 1995, receives the unexpected
visit of Epifanio Galindo, a policeman with special authority. Epifanio, the “watchdog”
of Santa Teresa police chief Pedro Negrete, is a cruel routinier. He is derogatory
of the many women who were killed and whose bodies were dumped in the urban
environment; for him, the female workers of the maquilas, along with other unmarried
women, could simply be characterized as prostitutes. While investigating the murder
of “Estrella Ruiz Sandoval” (476, 469–70), Epifanio learns that the young woman had
visited Haas’ store several times (469). After the watchdog starts observing the German
from a distance (“His arms are long and strong,” thought Epifanio, alluding to the fact
that most victims had been strangled), makes inquiries about him among employees,
and studies his police records, “everything” becomes “much clearer” to Epifanio. While
interrogating Estrella Ruiz, one of her former friends, Epifanio can already envision “a
very tall, very blond man walking in the dark, along a long, dark passageway, back and
forth, as if waiting for him,” 470). The policeman is eager to imagine Haas’s body locked
up. His fantasy is driven by moments of envy and admiration, a blend of arrogance and
distrust toward the stranger, nurturing his obsessive craving to see and sense the blond
giant in prison. Epifanio is the same man who organizes, on behalf of Santa Teresa’s chief
of police, “protection” for Pedro Rengifo, a wealthy narcotraficante. Young Lalo Cura,
a neophyte among the policemen, who are assigned to protect the house of Rengifo, is
startled by that revelation: “So Pedro Rengifo is a narco? asked Lalo Cura. That’s right,
said Epifanio. I can hardly believe it, said Lalo Cura. Because you are still a fledgling,
said Epifanio” (472). Epifanio adds, “Why did you think he had so many bodyguards?
Because he’s rich, said Lalo Cura. Epifanio laughed” (473).
Epifanio, ordained to uphold on behalf of “law,” actually champions an authority
through which the “separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is
suspended.”100 Arguments in Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” written in 1921,
become an involuntary prophecy of, or even a “critical compendium” for reading what
Rafael Loret de Mola describes as the “remaking” of Mexico’s recent history by crime
and sacrifice.101 In “The Crimes,” practices of sacrifice become manifest, especially
when a “resolution” of the problems posed by the femicides to the legal system as the
government’s main contractual institution and a regulator of both conflicting interests
100
Walter Benjamin. “Critique of Violence,” 243.
101
See Rafael Loret de Mola. “Tiempos de barbarie.” In R. L. de M. Confidencias peligrosas, 23–4.

and the status quo threatens to expose parts of that very institution. In other words, the
institution has to “protect” itself against being contaminated by “nonlegalistic” practices
of violence, as well as the large-scale corruption associated with the illegal drug trade.
Therefore, the “special forces” of the police, the executive “arm” of the Prosecutor’s
Office of the regional state, can rampage unhindered over the spheres of civil life in
Santa Teresa. The fact that, for the agent Epifanio, the “state of emergency” is simply
not an issue shows that the life world of Santa Teresa as a whole has become a locus
of exception. How is it possible that Klaus Haas has no chance to escape the destiny
that Epifanio has chosen for him, based on the policeman’s “epiphany” that the blond
giant is a unique pawn for his and his superiors’ plans? Let us recall Frye’s observation,
based on his studies of Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy, and others, that the pharmakos “is
neither innocent nor guilty. . . . He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty
society.” Police records tell that Haas
traveled to the United States every two months [. . .]. He had lived for a while in
Denver and left because of woman trouble. He liked women, but as far as anyone
knew he wasn’t married and he didn’t have a girlfriend. He frequented clubs and
brothels downtown, and he was friendly with a few owners. [. . .] As a boss, Haas
was fair and reasonable and he didn’t pay badly, although sometimes he got angry
for no good reason and might hit anyone, no matter who it was. The boy [who
responds to the agent’s interrogation; my emphasis] had never been hit, but he
had been scolded for coming in late to work a few times. Who had Haas hit then?
A secretary, the boy said. Asked if the secretary he’d hit was the current secretary,
the boy said no, it was the previous one, a woman he hadn’t met. Then how did he
know she’d been hit? Because that was what the oldest employees said, the ones at
the warehouse, where the güero stored part of his stock (476).
When the young clerk from Klaus Haas’ store speaks to Epifanio about his boss, he
has to resort to what others have said about Haas in the past, and when shown a
picture of the victim, Estrella Ruiz Sandoval, the boy says that “her face was somehow
familiar” (ibid.). A few days later Klaus Haas is arrested. An ominous awareness
characterizes the way in which Haas reacts to his being put behind prison walls. He
may be panic-stricken at the sudden loss of his civilian standing but he remains almost
speechless, his utterings limited to a few partly laconic, partly abrupt expressions (see
477, 479). His awareness has to do with his perception of the inner ugliness that radiates
from Epifanio, a perception of evil from someone who knows how to move—and to
use violence—without showing any hint of emotion. It seems as if this is, on Haas’s
part, also an intuition about the existence of a totalitarian underground—a “system”
underneath the system—against which declarations of innocence are useless. At the
police station, Haas is interrogated for four days, develops a high fever, and has to be
treated “for cuts and bruises to his eye and right eyebrow” (480) that result from the
beatings in a soundproof room. Haas’s surprising energy, and capacity to temporarily
“escape” reality, his provocative remarks (479–81), his injuries (482) all uncanningly
resonate with the literary image of the Pharmakos drawn by Northrop Frye. Haas is
later transferred to the Santa Teresa prison, where Epifanio visits him to suggest a deal.

226 Narcoepics
If Haas pleads guilty to the murder of Estrella Ruiz Sadoval and of some other women,
says Epifanio, “he would see to it that he be transferred to Hermosillo, where he would
have a cell to himself, a much better one than this. Only then did Haas look him in the
eye and say don’t fuck with me” (482).
Looking back at the circumstances that punctuated the troubled life of the authentic
character, Sharif Sharif, we find in Sergio Rodríguez González’s Huesos en el desierto
the following account:
On October 3, 1995, the Ciudad Juárez police detained the Egyptian Abdel Latif
Sharif Sharif, a chemic who had recently moved to Juárez after having spent
several decades in the United States. He was 49 years old and his penal antecedents
made him suspicious from the beginning: fourteen accusations at U.S. courts for
attempts at violation . . . .102
Diana Washington Valdez provides a more specific account. Due to Sharif Sharif ’s
penal records, “an immigration judge in El Paso ordained, on September 28, 1993,
Sharif ’s deportation to Egypt, but Sharif appealed against the decision. He withdrew
the appeal in June 1994, and left the U. S. for Ciudad Juárez.”103 Bolaño, in the novel,
is fairly meticulous about making the Haas (alias Sharif Sharif) story a narratological
counterpoint to the paratactical seriality of the crimes. “In May 1996, no more bodies
of women were found. [. . .] The mayor of Santa Teresa announced to the press that the
city could relax, the killer was behind bars and the subsequent killings of women were
the work of common criminals” (508). In June, other bodies of massacrated women
turned up . . . (see 509). Diana Washington, in Cosecha de mujeres (2005; Harvest of
Women, 2006) provides a revelatory detail about Francisco Villareal, who was the mayor
of Ciudad Juárez during that time: “Francisco Real, . . . expressed to his assistant, Irene
Blanco, his assumption that Sharif was a fabricated victim.”104 The mass media in 1995
and 1996 were basically drawn to establishing a discourse in which the captivating image
of the “serial killer” was brought to the fore, “supported” by the fact that the crimes, due
to the compelling techniques of raping and strangling, bore a “personal signature” (471).
Bolaño renarrates, in a journalistic mode, that in July 1996,
in Mexico City a feminist group called Women in Action (WA) made a TV appearance
denouncing the endless trickle of deaths in Santa Teresa . . . the problem was too
much for the Sonora police, who were incapable of handling it, if not complicit.
On the same show the question of the serial killer was addressed. . . . The show’s
host mentioned Haas who was in prison and whose trial date still hadn’t been set.
The Women in Action said Haas was probably a scapegoat and they challenged the
show’s host to come up with a single piece of evidence incriminating him. (512)
Already on April 19, 1996, Sharif Sharif had succeeded in speaking to journalists
during a press conference, an unusual custom made possible by the work of diverse
102
Sergio González Rodríguez. Huesos . . . , 16.
103
Diana Washington Valdez. Cosecha de mujeres, 145–7.
104
Ibid., 146.
105
See Sergio González Rodríguez, 20.

groups of social activism in the Juárez area. The “Egyptian,” as he was henceforth called,
insisted on his absolute noninvolvement in the crimes.105 The narrative voice, in “The
Crimes,” records that “Haas’s press conference was a minor scandal” (489), that Haas
reaffirmed his innocence, and that he was subjected to “physical, psychological, and
“medical” torture” (489). Among numerous details,106 Washington Valdez notes that
Maximino Salazar, who was one of the lawyers defending Sharif Sharif and risking his
career by challenging the government of the state of Sonora, expressed that “in Sharif,
the authorities had found the perfect scapegoat. He was a foreigner who did not speak
Spanish, did not have a supporting network in Juárez, and provided the perfect penal
antecedents.”107 Juan Fernández, another lawyer, regarded Sharif a victim of politics,
owing to the pressure that was exercized on the authorities to clarify the crimes.108
A chilling moment arises when the novel presents the pharmakos’s own feelings
when he is behind penitentiary walls, perhaps the only situation in the narrative
in which Klaus Haas, mostly immersed in trance, or stupor, confesses his visceral
sentiment of fear. It is a fear that evokes the ancient myths of the sparagmos, or “the
tearing apart of the sacrificial body.”109 Haas feels that he has entered a terrain in which,
at any moment, the ritual “completion” of his destiny could take place through acts
of social revenge, such as the rage of a prison mob. The literary text includes a phone
conversation between the journalist Sergio González Rodríguez and Klaus Haas, the
prisoner, made possible by a supportive lawyer. Haas confesses,
Here in prison, the first few days, I was afraid. I thought the other inmates, when
they saw me, would come after me to avenge the death of all those girls. For
me, being in prison was exactly like being dumped on a Saturday at noon in a
neighborhood like Colonia Kino, San Damián, Colonia Las Flores. A lynching.
Being torn to pieces. Do you understand? The mob spitting on me and kicking me
and tearing me to pieces. With no time for explanations. But I soon realized that in
prison no one would tear me to pieces. At least not for what I was accused of. What
does this mean? I asked myself. . . . Here, to a greater or lesser degree, everyone is
sensitive to what happens outside, to the heartbeat of the city . . . (490).
Haas tells Sergio on the phone that, when he asked one inmate if he thought he had
killed the “dead girls,” the answer was “no, not you, gringo, as if I was a fucking gringo.”
“What are you trying to say to me? asked Sergio González. That here in prison they
know I’m innocent, said Haas” (ibid.). Paradoxically, the unmasked background of
the crimes which is so hard to uncover amid the squalor of the city of Santa Teresa, is
familiar to some of the members of the prison population (see 490). And Klaus Haas
starts scrutinizing in the dark.
The final part of 2666 is split into four narrative branches that alternate with one
another: there is the account of the prisoner, Haas; there are the undertakings of the
journalist Sergio González Rodríguez; there is the arrival of an American criminologist by
106
See Diana Washington Valdez. Cosecha . . . , 147 ff.
107
Cited in Washington Valdez, 147.
108
See ibid.
109
See Northrop Frye. Anatomy . . . , 148.

228 Narcoepics
the name of Kessler, a “real” detective; and there are the press clips that continue reporting
on the appearance of murdered women. Even if there were a chance that a narrativized
investigator could pierce through the morass of appearances and the official attempts
to bring this unbearable killing spree to an end, it would only offer a soporific parody.
There is, however, a figuration of truth, one that comes out of forcing the unnameable.
In fact, there are several roles replacing that of the hypothetical detective. The most
stunning is that of Klaus Haas, Archimboldi’s nephew, himself. He is not the only person
to be accused, but he is charged with being the mastermind of the crimes. Under his
guidance, according to the story distributed to the press by the prosecutor’s office, several
gangs, starting with the young “The Rebels” gang110 continue to slaughter women while
Haas is behind bars. What evidence can Klaus Haas offer to prove his innocence? What
can he do to resist his own deformation in prison, where surviving means that he must
become involved in abject practices himself? Against hyperbolic visions of “hell,” the
prison scenario enveloping Archimboldi’s nephew is painted as an arena of insanity and
perverse violence, and yet it is depicted as a place where Haas is able to look through
the nightmare image of an inverted society, where otherwise inaccessible knowledge lies
hidden among those that are punished by the law. Bolaño is careful to avoid literary
moments of the obvious—the psychological disaster that befalls a person exposed to the
bestiary of prison space. The focus is on Haas’s involvement in some of the practices of
the strongest inmates in order to find out what is actually happening. With his lawyer’s
help and the pressure of activist groups in Santa Teresa, he will finally obtain permission
to give a series of press conferences. There he tries to draw attention to several members
of the local elite, part of the frontera mafia who have vanished from the Santa Teresa
orbit, but who afterwards have been seen in Tucson, Phoenix, and even Los Angeles.
Haas names “Antonio Uribe” as one of the killers. The reporters in attendance shrug their
shoulders, they laugh; one asks, “Do you know this Uribe?” (579).
I saw him only once, said Haas. It was at a club . . . (He was) sitting at a table,
with people who knew some of the people with me. Next to him was his cousin,
Daniel Uribe. . . . they seemed like two polite kids, they both spoke English and
they dressed like ranchers, but it was clear they weren’t ranchers. They were strong
and tall, . . . you could tell they went to the gym . . . They had three-day-old beards
. . . they had the right haircuts, clean shirts, clean pants, everything brand-name
. . . two modern kids, all in all (582–3).
“So what proof do you have, Klaus, that the Uribes are the serial killers?” asks a journalist
from Phoenix. “You hear everything in prison,” said Haas. “Not true, Klaus,” said the reporter.
“It is true,” said Haas. “No it isn’t,” said the reporter. “It’s an urban legend, a movie invention”
(591), “a false substitute for freedom” (ibid.). Haas stands there, ridiculed, with a pale face, a
“haughty and at the same time relaxed face (how could anyone be haughty and relaxed at the
110
Here, Bolaño uses the authentic name of the group that was imprisoned in 1996, young men involved
in several sorts of delictive activities of the informal, or semi-legal sphere. According to Diana
Washington, the accused members of the gang who rejected the capital charge of femicide were
reported to have been tortured by the police to make them sign previously constructed declarations.
See Diana Washington Valdez. Cosecha de mujeres, 153–4.

same time?” thinks the woman who is Klaus’s lawyer, while he is observing her “with scientific
rigor, not from that prison room but from the sulfurous vapors of another planet” (607). A
week later, the journalist from Phoenix learns that the only “reporter who had covered Haas’s
vaunted and ultimately disappointing declaration had disappeared . . .” (615).
Alternating with Haas’s truncated attempts to make his findings public is the arrival in
Santa Teresa, in 1997, of Albert Kessler, a character modeled on Robert Ressler, about whom
González Rodríguez had written in Huesos en el desierto. Ressler was a criminologist and FBI
(behavioral) profiler dedicated to the psychology of serial killers, and he was enlisted by Mexican
officials to instruct the local agencies that were dealing with the Ciudad Juárez femicides. Some
reporters, in 2666, ask why an eminent American investigator had to be brought in. Why did
Prof. Silverio García Correa, the best psychologist at UNAM, with Master’s degrees from NYU
and Stanford, not get the job? The narrator has García Correa speak.
Mr. Albert Kessler is a highly qualified professional, said Professor García Correa. .
. . No, I don’t feel offended because I wasn’t given the job. . . . Being a criminologist
in this country is like being a cryptographer at the North Pole. It’s like being a
child in a cell block of pedophiles. It’s like being a beggar in the country of the
deaf. It’s like being a condom in the realm of the Amazons . . . Mr. Albert Kessler,
as I was saying, is a highly qualified investigator. As I understand it, he works with
computers. Interesting work. He’s also a consultant or adviser on some action
movies. . . . according to my grandson, they’re plenty of fun and the good guys
always win, said Professor García Correa (578–9).111
While other dead bodies are being found in Santa Teresa’s outer neighborhoods, the
reporter Sergio Gonzalez Rodríguez, relocated to México City, does not write about
the killings in Santa Teresa any more. The narration, however, brings him into sharper
light when he is suddenly set on a new trail. Roberto Bolaño moves this character to
the foreground when the novel is beginning to end. There had actually been an intense
relationship between Bolaño and this Mexican author and arts journalist whose name
appears unmodified in 2666. González Rodríguez worked for the newspaper Reforma,
and became interested in Ciudad Juárez when he read the news about Sharif Sharif ’s
imprisonment during the summer of 1995. He was assigned to report on the situation
in Santa Teresa, starting with the press conference that Sharif Sharif was going to give
in prison, in April 1996.112 González Rodríguez interviewed Sharif Sharif, published
an article, and was then asked to join a special investigations unit that Reforma sent to
Juárez. For several years, he moved back and forth between Ciudad Juárez and Mexico
City. In 1999, his “reporting began to suggest that the policemen, government officials
and drug traffickers of Juárez were all connected to one another, and to the femicides.”113
In Huesos en el desierto, González Rodríguez recounts how, after his investigations
became more pointed, he was kidnapped and beaten in Mexico City. According to
Marcela Valdes, Bolaño contacted González Rodríguez around the time when Sergio
111
Regarding Kessler’s actual undertakings in Santa Teresa, see 2666, 605–6.
112
See Marcela Valdes. “Introduction,” 23.
113
Ibid., 25.

230 Narcoepics
was about to write his book on the Juárez killings. The book would trace, in a detailed
manner, the process of coming to understand that what he first expected to be the
work of a Hollywood-style serial killer, and eventually became visible as a spider web
of impunity that protected some of Mexico’s worst criminals, “a system that implicated
the police and judicial institutions of the city, the state and the country.”114
González Rodríguez recalls that Bolaño needed help with the details of a world
about which press reports were not explicit enough:
he wanted to know how the narcos in Juárez operated, . . . what he liked was
precision. He was also interested in connecting with the mentality of Chihuahua’s
police to understand . . . their conduct and misconduct. He wanted to know exactly
how murder cases were written up. He wanted a copy of a forensic report. González
Rodríguez unearthed one in the papers he’d gotten from a defense lawyer . . . .115
According to Marcela Valdes, Sergio remembers that Bolaño “wanted to believe that
there was a rational power that could conquer the criminal” (in fact such a ratiocinator
appears in Bolaño’s other novels). Valdes writes that “the parallels between the stories
in “The Part About the Crimes” and the conclusions in González Rodríguez’s book
Huesos en el desierto . . . are startling. . . . Bolaño . . . read the manuscript for Huesos
months before it was published—but he refashioned it all to suit his own ends.”116
Finally, Bolaño decided to make Sergio a character in his novel.
And thus, the end of 2666 is told through the eyes of the character Sergio González
Rodríguez and, more specifically, his learning about a drama in the life of the PRI
congresswoman, Azucena Esquivel Plata, “the María Felix of Mexican politics” (2666,
584). Curiously, this grande dame who approaches the journalist to offer her help in
his further investigations into the Santa Teresa nightmares, tells Sergio about much of
her life, shaped as an ironic, sometimes sarcastic glance into Mexican-ness—regarding
(the rottenness of) morals, sex, politics, and life. Shortly after this, the reporter learns
that her best friend, a woman by the name of Kelly Rivera Parker, had disappeared
in Ciudad Juárez, after which the congresswoman hired a trusted detective to find
out about Kelly’s fate. What surfaces at this point is the phenomenon of the so-called
narcorranchos: places in the middle of nowhere in the desert that, once in a while,
are awakened to life by exorbitant nightly celebrations, orgies of the powerful and the
rich. It is in one of these places that the trail of the politician’s friend, a member of
the upper class, gets lost and, at the same time, where local women of more humble
background seem to have also disappeared. “What is it I want you to do?” Sergio is
asked by Azucena Esquivel Plata. “I want you to write about this, keep writing about
this” (631). The last paragraph of the book contains another discovery—another dead
female body that is found, this time on the eastern edge of the city, in December, 1997.
The case was “closed after three days of generally halfhearted investigations” (633).
114
Ibid., 28.
115
Ibid., 30.
116
Ibid., 33.

In the end, the part of the beautiful, disenchanted, and yet truth-seeking
congresswoman could inspire at very least a substantial film script, combining
individual drama and horror, crossing the line between the public secret and savagery
at its most terrible; however, one might ask if this would be an adequate treatment
if reality “itself ” is more terrible and continues to use cunning strategies against so
many peoples’ longing for relief? If “The Part About the Crimes” were simply read as
a political thriller, Bolaño seems to imply that it is not about impunity. This is what
Florita, the saint from Hermosillo, had once responded to Sergio’s questions about
the terror in Santa Teresa: “It has nothing to do with impunity.” How could this be?
How could the murders be explained through the failures in a system of order and
punishment, if the mightiest players belonging to that system capitalize on them? In
this light, “impunity” itself might seem to be a euphemism, suggesting that there would
indeed be a concerted, profoundly ethical as well as integrally structural interest in
punishing the perpetrators of the crimes. Perhaps the novel is about infamy on a yet-
to-be imagined scale in late modern existence. As harsh as this may be, 2666 avoids the
common responses of pity and compassion. It does not give in to a longing for relief;
it gives the tortured spirit no rest. Nor has Bolaño created another metaphysics of evil,
an ontology of absolute darkness. In his book, the answers are all there; they do not
have to be given, since the actual problem is not finding “truth,” but rather the burial
of truth. We are dealing with the imagination of a state in which the main driving
forces are fear, ethical exhaustion, and an avalanche of “common responses” located
between dissociation and repression, forces that in one way or another have adapted
to the seemingly hermetic grid of “pure” and hidden violence of different kinds. Jorge
Heralde views Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as the first great classical novel of the twenty-first
century.117 If this is the case, it relies on the borderline aesthetics that the concept of
sobriety has helped us address. There is no doubt that we find in Bolaño “a total lack
of illusion about the age combined with an unlimited commitment to it.” This is the
crucial paradox of 2666, and of many-narcoepics, that we have discussed by tracing this
map of a global aesthetics of sobriety.
117
Jorge Heralde. Para Roberto Bolaño, 55.


Herlinghaus - Pharmakon To Femicide - Narcoepics

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Herlinghaus, Hermann. "From “Pharmakon” to Femicide: 2666 (Roberto Bolaño).

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From “Pharmakon” to Femicide:

I did not feel indebted to the boom in any way.

Thinking from the “Pharmakon,” approaching

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What Derrida is less concerned with is an anthropological, often body-related,

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Vico, a “beginning” can be understood as a genealogical attitude under circumstances

“Globalized” academics in the wake of cosmopolitanism

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four academics—the Archimboldian apostles—meet the Chilean literature professor

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At first sight, we might find in Amalfitano, a strain of modern (Nietzschean) nihilism

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understands ending up in Santa Teresa as “getting lost”—losing the formative and

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In the mystic voice a scurrilous rhetoric reverberates, pertaining either to a

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here. As an outsider, Amalfitano is not concerned about getting an alternative for

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identities. This concern is intertwined with particular cartographies of scholarly action

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an altered state does not have to be of a chemo-biological nature, such as nicotine,

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26-year-old doctoral candidate at that time, at a symposim in Bremen, in 1993. What

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without a specific body of dogma or theology. What makes capitalism permanent is

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Benno von Archimboldi, the “Amphibian”

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