This is a passage taken directly from Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. Normally I wouldn’t take the time to do this, but this single unbroken passage struck me as so monumentally important that I felt like there was nothing I could do except retype the entire thing to present to you here.
Like the Grand Inquisitor scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, this is one of those unique literary phenomena in which the entire book - as well as, to some degree, the author’s entire Weltanschauung - is synecdochally contained within just a few pages.
If you have the time, if you feel like you can handle it, read the whole thing twice. Then, if you haven’t read the book, go out and find yourself a copy and read it. If there were a way to guarantee such a thing, I would have the whole world read it, because what Bolaño says here is some of the truest stuff I’ve ever read.
(Also - for all you Tumblrites who hate monstrous posts clogging your dashboard - sorry this is so long.
—-
“I was a writer,” said the old man.
“But I gave it up. This typewriter was a gift from my father. An affectionate and cultured man who lived to the age of ninety-three. An essentially good man. A man who believed in progress, it goes without saying. My poor father. He believed in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. I too believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing. In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know. So what? I might spend a night drinking with a killer, and as the two of us watch the sun come up, perhaps we’ll burst into song or hum some Beethoven. So what? The killer might weep on my shoulder. Naturally. Being a killer isn’t easy, as you and I well know. It isn’t easy at all. It requires purity and will, will and purity. Crystalline purity and steel-hard will. And I myself might even weep on the killer’s shoulder and whisper sweet words to him, words like ‘brother,’ ‘friend,’ ‘comrade in misfortune.’ At this moment the killer is good, because he’s intrinsically good, and I’m an idiot, because I’m intrinsically an idiot, and we’re both sentimental, because our culture tends inexorably toward sentimentality. But when the performance is over and I’m alone, the killer will open the window of my room and come tiptoeing in like a nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry.
“My poor father. I was a writer, I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self, one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren’t unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn’t consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works. I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. I was wrong. There’s actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn’t Mr. X or Mr. Y. Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there’s no question about that, and they struggle and toil and publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a book that isn’t unworthy of the paper it’s printed on, but those books or articles, if you pay close attention, are not written by them.
“Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. The poor man’s wife can testify to that, she’s seen him sitting at the table, bent over the blank pages, restless in his chair, his pen racing over the paper. The evidence would seem to be incontrovertible. But what she’s seen is only the outside. The shell of literature. A semblance,” said the old man to Archimboldi and Archimboldi thought of Ansky. “The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.
—-
(c) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer. All rights reserved, including the right to ask me to take this down at a moment’s notice.
My dashboard today has been full of Bolaño, which is never a problem. I’ve cut this quote down, partly so as to save my followers a clogged up dashboard, but also so as to urge everyone to click through to daddahrednaxela’s original post. He deserves credit for writing this out after all. It’s an amazing extract, I remember trying to tell someone else about this particular point not long after I first read it but I could never convey how fascinating it comes across as Bolaño writes it.
I’m intending to reread 2666 over the summer, though considering how much else I want to read I might not get round to it. If I do however, be prepared for a mammoth amount of posts on it.
