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Abstract
The article starts from the premise that much of the critical work dedicated to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 centres upon the idea of depersonalisation, generally understood as a subtraction of what is most properly personal in the human individual. The thesis put forward is that Bolaño’s style and technique of characterisation, particularly in the passages dedicated to the victims of human rights abuses, is best appreciated by recurring to the idea of “impersonality”, conceived as a third pole between personality and depersonalisation. The first section of the article is dedicated to connecting the idea of literary incorporation to that of human rights, thus showing how historically situated conceptions of “person” often influence readers’ expectations of what would constitute a dignified and just rendition of victims of real abuses in fiction. In the second section, it is suggested that Bolaño’s project intentionally diverges from the aims of literary incorporation and is more finely attuned to the philosophy of the impersonal which is to be found in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Simone Weil. The article concludes by interpreting Bolaño’s literary gesture in relation to existing critiques of human rights discourse.
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Notes
1 Human rights scholar Samuel Moyn, for example, has noted that “the transformation from the era of the welfare state to that of neoliberal economics now appears the most important setting for recounting the vicissitudes that ‘human rights’ (…) experienced in the later twentieth century” (Citation2018, x). For accounts that highlight traits of causation and co-dependence between neoliberalism and human rights, see also Klein (Citation2007, 146–147), Marks (Citation2013, 226), and Whyte (Citation2019).
2 The notion of “the third world disposable woman” is the subject of Melissa W. Wright’s (Citation2006) Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, which I further discuss below. The word “monument”, in relation to 2666, echoes John Kraniauskas’s reading of the novel as “A Monument to the Unknown Worker” (Citation2016).
3 Glen S. Close provides a useful overview when he writes that “it has been called anaesthetised, affectless, cold, frigid, detached, disenchanted, distant, impassive, impersonal, indifferent, insensitive, mechanical, neutral, noncommittal and rigorously formal” (Citation2018, 142–143). He attributes each of these judgments to the corresponding critic in note 3, p. 198.
4 Many critical treatments of 2666 have noted that it can be read through the lens of Agamben’s Homo Sacer: that is, as a tale of subjects that are reduced to the state of “bare life”, in that their existence bears no political relevance and they can be exterminated without any consequences. While I am convinced that Agamben’s terms are certainly applicable to 2666’s renditions of the Mexican feminicides, I see the novel mainly as an interrogation of what lies at the other end of the equation – what really is a “person” – and not only a denunciation of what happens to the individual body when it is bereft of rights and political relevance. Representative treatments of Bolaño’s work in relation to Agamben include Elmore (Citation2008), Farred (Citation2010), Loy (Citation2018), Merchant (Citation2015), and Stockwell (Citation2019).
5 It is most evident in The Savage Detectives, Distant Star, and By Night in Chile.
6 It has been suggested that it could correspond to no subject-position at all, a point of view on which I further elaborate below: “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” (Herlinghaus Citation2013, 209).
7 The terms “neuter” and “neutral” are used interchangeably in Susan Hanson’s translation of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation.
8 For a complete and thorough schematization of the parallels between the victims described in each book, see Andrews (Citation2014, 205–229).
9 Here both my partial agreement with and distance from Fabricio Tocco’s reading of the novel is evident. In reference to the relationship between “The Part About the Crimes” and Blanchot’s writings on the nature of literary language, Tocco writes: “But, if Santa Teresa’s depersonalisation and unintelligibility are shown to benefit a patriarchal and oppressive order, is the opposite also conceivable? (…) Perhaps, the destruction of personification and individualism has the potential to subvert the oppressive dimensions of market and the state, whose laws pretend to be impersonal, but are all too often racialized and gendered. Perhaps the destruction of personhood enables a truly impersonal and emancipatory form of collective justice” (2021, 103). I concur that the novel’s language both mimics the depersonalising effects of market and the state and highlights the possibility for a form of justice which lays beyond personality, and yet I insist that the two effects should be considered as distinct. Tocco seems to maintain that depersonalisation and impersonality are coessential, as when he writes that “far from unpremeditated, this impersonal use of se is a morphological articulation of depersonalisation” (94). To the contrary, it is not “the destruction of personification and individualism” that brings impersonal justice forth, as the latter should be understood as a way of looking at the individual that transcends the person/object dichotomy – i.e. alternative to it, and not in direct opposition. I expand on this below, in my treatment of Simone Weil’s thought on the impersonal.
10 Sharae Deckard writes that “the forensic language of homicide has invaded the subjectivities and speech of every character, while affect has been emptied out”, so much so that, in 2666, “characterisation is minimal and psychological insight rare” (Citation2012, 364). David Kurnick also notes that “in 2666 romantic individualism is entirely residual: the novel refuses the orienting perspectivalism of character” (Citation2015, 117).
11 Gareth Williams has proposed a reading of 2666 in light of Weil’s thought that is based on a different conception of the impersonal from the one articulated in “Human Personality”. As a result, our conclusions differ dramatically. Williams refers to “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, in which “Weil calls force that impersonal x that turns anybody subjected to it into a thing, making a corpse out of him or her. In this sense, she refers to force as techne, as the simultaneous positing of the human as both subject and object” (Williams Citation2020, 150). The critic proceeds to explore the role of force understood as “diastasis”, or the ceaseless splitting of form and content that takes place in the novel. He builds on Brett Levinson’s argument that it is repetition that causes endless interruptions in the narrative, thus compromising the intelligibility of its meaning. This is intimately connected with the status of characters in the novel: “It is not the subject (Fate, the critics) as character who withdraws from the tale. What dissolves is the subject as principle of unity. Narrative explodes not events but their relationship: meaning” (Levinson Citation2009, 182). This prevents the text from offering any satisfying political or aesthetic resolution to the evils it registers. No literary, or metaphoric, restoration is ever possible, and Williams concludes that “if the freeing of the regime of metaphor that we inherit grants presence to the clearing of a possible transformation or turning toward the impersonal, then 2666 ends with the demand for a clearing but fails to provide it itself” (Williams Citation2020, 162). Conversely, my reading proceeds from a definition of the impersonal in Weil’s thought as a quality pertaining to the sacredness of the individual. As it will be argued in the passages below, I see 2666 as proffering this variety of impersonality as a viable form of ethical, aesthetic, and political redemption.
12 For a more in-depth analysis of Weil’s argument, see Hamilton (Citation2005): “paradoxical and unhelpful as it sounds, there is a sense in which Weil claims that there is nothing about this man that makes blinding him evil. That is, there is nothing about the fact that this man is this man that makes it evil” (189).
13 See Weil and Miles (Citation2005, 69–98).
14 In “On the Jewish Question”, an essay written in the autumn of 1843, Marx writes: “[L]iberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. (…) None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice” (Marx and Engels Citation1978, 42–43).
15 In her analysis of Ignatieff’s apology for human rights, Wendy Brown notes that negative liberty is to be understood as the prerogative of being left alone, unimpeded by society, to do as one wishes: a kind of liberty which encourages the individual to conceive of one’s own development as something that not only does not occur in the realm of politics, but can only take place in spite of the latter’s influence (2004, 456).
16 “[A]lmost all Mexican men are afraid of women” (Bolaño Citation2009, 382).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leonardo Bevilacqua
Leonardo Bevilacqua has recently completed a PhD (DPhil) in Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. The present article is an abridged version of a chapter of his book Impersonal Selves: Flat Characters in the Neoliberal Novel, which is currently under review with Oxford University Press.