the constant pressure of my education is always at odds with my abnormally short attention span (which prefers to flit from one scintillating passage to another, never quite consuming the whole of a text). in the hopes of surviving as a scholar, i've developed a couple strategies to combat my attention-deficit tendencies; i study poems rather than novels. it is far more manageable to parse out fifty lines of a complete poem than to connect fifty pages of some epic novel to the other 340 pages i have yet to read. yes, poems are practical, satisfying. they serve as some of the few aesthetic objects that i believe the human mind can fully internalize without neglecting contradictions or details. this is not to say studying poetry is easy; rather, it allows me the luxury of proceeding with the utmost precision in my analysis of a poet's art.
what about novels, you might ask? yes, i read novels too, although i rarely finish them in a timely manner. i like novels. i do; but i so often find them unmanageable, hard to wrap my head around entirely. for this reason, i make loved ones read novels for me. thus far, my dad has been the primary victim of my novel-foisting. every year since i was about 10 years old, i've picked out two or three books that i'd consider reading, wrapped them in shiny paper and given them to my dad for christmas. when choosing books for my dad, i typically aim to pick out what i believe will be the longest or most tedious reads. see, my dad has an EPIC attention span. what i have in intense creative bursts, he has in an unstoppable intellectual drive that can only be interrupted by the need for food or sleep. while i doze off after 100 pages of reading just about anything, my dad devours long, difficult novels like a tween reading twilight. i've seen him sit down and read crime and punishment AND the aenied in one sitting. i kid you not. while i'm not so sure my dad has come up with brilliant readings of any of the hundreds of classics that are always in and out of his book shelves, i trust him to be an impeccable reader for content, and for that reason, i have made him my trusted novel-minion.
this past christmas, in the hope of picking a novel that might confound my dad for at least a little while, i swiped roberto bolano's fat-ass 2666 off a shelf at keplers. this behemoth of a 'novel' clocks in at 898 pages of translated genius. the last of bolano's works, 2666 was his race against impending liver failure which amounted in 4 1/2 sections of a story loosely revolving around a writer, some murders, love and grief. i haven't read it, but my dad is on his third lap through the beast. he claims its pretty good, but he also has very little to say about it when i ask him for a detailed synopsis or preliminary analysis. my dad likes to say that "he hasn't been trained to produce criticism, leave him alone" or "you do it" (naturally, i don't leave him alone and hold him captive on the phone until he gives me what i consider to be an at least somewhat satisfying reading).
thus far, however, my dad and my conversations about 2666 have been swimming around in unproductive circles. first of all, i need to read this book before i make any claims about it that should be taken seriously; that being said, i think the fact that neither me (based on my dad's observations) nor my dad can come up with meaningful or explanatory criticism suggests that something interesting is going on with the novel.
if there is anything prof. H.S. has taught me, it's that you can't judge a book by its content or its cover or its editorial apparatus, at least not on its own. as thomas r. adams and nicolas barker so eloquently propose in their essay "a new model for the study of the book," multiple factors besides the author and reader must be taken into consideration when seeking critical approaches to texts. they call these factors "the communications circuit" which they believe consists of a sort of circle of influenced starting with an author, moving to a publisher, then to printer, and to booksellers, not to forget the external influences of the historic/political context.
from the lovely diagram they include in their essay, adams and barker map out how they see various factors affecting what a text is and how it might be interpreted.
how might all this be relevant to bolano, then? well, i've been doing a lot of work with posthumously published texts lately (particularly those of mr. gerard manley hopkins), and i've come to see that more often than not these texts are riddled with ontological complexity (i.e. they exist in multiple--and often contradictory--forms, sort of like resonance structures for chemical compounds). bolano's 2666 was posthumously published in 2004 by "editorial anagrama". in some of the notes included with the text, a reader finds that bolano originally thought 2666 might be multiple novels rather than one large work. despite these authorial intentions, his publisher went ahead and released bolano's edited manuscript as a whole work, which has received lots of critical acclaim and is no disappointment to bolano-lovers... i can't help but wonder, though, how much of a hand bolano's editors, publishers, and translators had in shaping his originally 1100 page manuscript into the 900 page text we read in the English-speaking world. the fact that my dad (and i) is so stumped as to how to fit bolano's text into his understanding of the world makes me think that along the way of releasing bolano's text to the world, some one messed up... and either added too much or left out something that readers may have needed to hold onto. i still need to read the book... but i wish i could have a look at bolano's original type-script, the marks his editors left on it, and the notes of the translator before i read the full text and come to any conclusions about it.
to read a novel well, to read it as an complex construction of influences and revisions, is a life-consuming project, and so i stick to poetry, but i think i might take 2666 for a spin this summer, and if you, dear reader, should consider doing the same, i challenge you to think about the problems that destabilize its existence as a 'text.'
Props for using resonance structures to explain yourself. I always felt that we humanities people could grasp the concept of a molecule being "this AND this" more readily than the average techie. Also your dad seems pretty cool.
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