“No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” Roberto Bolano, 2666, p.348
Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow and Roberto Bolano's 2666: A Discussion on Society
By Armando Ortiz
A few months ago I met up with some old acquaintances for lunch and to catch up on life. Back in 2004, we had spent time in China traveling, studying and hanging out. Now it was 2011, and at some point in our conversation I told them about the author, Roberto Bolano and his last book, 2666, but then drifted to talking about Aldous Huxley's writings. I was not prepared to talk about the books or the authors, but for some reason I told them that they were worth reading. The brief dialogue left me wondering why they were important, but then the thought disappeared, and I went on with life.
Nevertheless, today while coming back from a long walk I was reminded why they are important. Something had triggered a memory that connected to what I had read in the recent past. As I walked, at a distance, there was a man riding on the back of an electric wheel chair. The driver was handicap, of course, but the man riding on it was not. The man on the back of the wheelchair had a dark blue sweater and stood on the batteries. Some of his hair fluttered, since the electric chair seemed to move at a stead 15 miles per hour. That reminded me of two things, one, a scene/story that I read in a book, and two, Profesor Morini, a character in 2666.
I couldn’t quite remember in what book the strange tale was in so, I wondered if it possibly had been Oscar Wilde’s last short story that I had read, but it wasn’t. I was tempted to stop and ponder, but I’m a multi-tasker, and figured it’d do me some good to seriously think for a bit and briskly walk. I tried remembering the title of the story, but failed to pin point the name. So I so I kept on with my power walk. Realizing it wasn’t Wilde I began to mentally retrace the story and thought about Huxley’s Point Counter Point, but it wasn’t that story because I’d never come across anything of Huxley’s that’s as dark as the story I was trying to remember, so I thought. Then it hit me, it was Huxley’s Crome Yellow.
About the authors:
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was born in England and is best known for his novels Brave New World, Point Counter Point, Island, and numerous essays that touch on topics of culture, society, the human body, medicine and religion. At some point in his life he saw his house and everything in it burn to the ground. He continued to write all the way up to his last days. Though he is not widely discussed in our perspective society he’s had a significant impact on the way many of his readers approach life.
Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) was born in Chile, but spent part of his life in Mexico, and briefly visited El Salvador before moving to Spain. There he had several odd jobs before having success with his writing. In between his travels, temporary jobs, and writing he became addicted to drugs, but managed to get himself clean. All throughout his time he managed to create a new literary circle which was labeled Infernal Realism, and though it was a short lived circle of writers, each took it upon himself to write in that newly created genre. His hugely successful Savage Detectives, Distant Star, and Nazi Literature in the Americas catapulted him to the top of the literary world and caught the attention of international critics all along going at his writing as usual. In between his writing he spent hours devouring the great writers and those unknown. He was a writer’s writer.
Why Huxley matters:
In Crome Yellow there is a story that is told by one of his characters where a dwarf ends up inheriting the family house along with the family fortune. What was strange about the dwarf was not his size or the fact that everyone around him was regular sized. It was the manner he went about transforming everything around him to conform to his inner ideals and desires. His parents loved him and gave him the best education that was possible. Then his family began to die, making him thinking about his life and the legacy, if any, that would be left after he died. The dwarf’s preoccupation with marriage and having children made him start dating, but in his mind stature was a problem. For a time he dated a woman that was of normal height and they got along well, but that still didn’t satisfy him. He didn’t want to live in a world that reminded him of his short stature. So he paid a match maker to go out and look for a woman that was about his height and came from a respectful and decent household.
The matchmaker ended up finding a fair woman who also was also a dwarf, and soon she was brought back to the estate. They soon married and managed to live two years together without having children, since he was preoccupied with the fear of having regular sized kids or worse, dwarf kids. The man of the house went about reducing everything inside to fit their size. The tables and chairs were reduced in height, and the doors and beds as well. He also proceeded to slowly fire his servants and replace them with servant dwarfs. The couple also found ponies to replace the regular horses. By the time their first and only baby son was born the whole mansion and people living there had been transformed.
The baby grew, and by the time he was a few months old they knew he would be a regular sized person. What had kept them from having children in the first place came to be. All the work that they had put into their house thinking that they’d live a dwarf’s life became a bit problematic. Nevertheless, the kid grew and went to school and by the time he was eight years old was as tall as his father. Instead of dealing with the problems the child would face living in a dwarf’s house, the parents decided to send him to boarding school. The kid’s primary and secondary education were spent studying somewhere else, but of course the kid returned home for the holidays and for summer vacation. As time passed, his visits and his attitude grew more and more aggressive towards them. He’d purposely broke things and mistreated the dwarf servants. The story continues to unfold and eventually leads to some very unfortunate and sad events, but I will let the reader finish the story themselves.
In the book, Huxley briefly mentions the Nazi, but this short story found in the novel Crome Yellow can be seen as an allegorical allusion to what the Nazi would do in the years to come. The Nazi government and everyone that took part in all the atrocities during World War Two tried to change their society to the extent that they began removing Jews from the general population, then the handicap, then gypsies, then homosexuals, and even then some Jehovah Witnesses. They were moved into ghettos and then into concentration camps to be separate from the German population initiating the attempt at the slow eradication of their populations.
The Nazi believed in a pure and strong race where every German idealized quality that was prized could be seen in its people. Yet, Huxley’s story begs a question- what if they would have been successful in their attempts, and they would have cleansed their society of every perceived ill or threat? Would evil and prejudice itself have disappeared from society? What would have become of their society? Would less criminal activity exist? Would prostitution have been eradicated? Would everyone have had equal access to goods and services? Would poverty have been wiped out? Would the violent and mentally ill no longer exist? Would the chronic poor no longer exist? Huxley points to the son that the two dwarves produced and says no. Human beings are too complex to define them as this or that. Yes, there are people that have different cultural backgrounds, but to have the certainty that by ridding society of certain groups of people for the sole reason that they have some marked difference or strange tradition will never be a valid reason to exterminate other humans. Though, of course, history is riddled with such events and not one piece of land on this earth has been immune to this reality. Instead of focusing on the things that mattered in life, the dwarf focused on changing things around him, though he could not control how his own son would grow up to be.
Trying to alter your surroundings in such a way that it meets your idealized vision of how the world should run will never work. Even today with all the technological advances that we have has proven that humans still need to go out and work, and be active or else they turn into something that disturbingly unnatural. One thing remains certain, and that is the randomness and serendipitous nature of life and human nature and the human spirit. Good and evil cannot be walled in or put into an ivory castle because no matter how good a society might be or think it is there will always be an element of evil and deviance in human nature. Huxley suggests that things ought to be left alone and that we ought to just live life. Living with the aim of being aware of what is going on in our society and being the change we want the world to be.
Why Bolano matters:
An aspect of Roberto Bolano's 2666 is that he makes us see characters that we usually over look by presenting characters that are not your common every day folk. Of course, characters that are made up by writers will usually be out of the ordinary, though in this case it seems that Bolano has purposely chosen these characters to bring home his message. At times, society can also be oblivious to the life of their marginalized population. Huxley talks about changing our surroundings, while Bolano focuses on how our contemporary surroundings and the margins of society are affected by society at large. It is either society or the powers that be that create a collective amnesia, making us blind to what really is happening to our communities.
The electric wheel chair made me think of the short tale within Crome Yellow, but it also reminded me of 2666. A reason for thinking of Bolano's book was that one of the characters that he creates is the handicap professor Morini, who is an expert on the literature of the elusive German, Benno von Archimboldi. He also happens to be the chair of one of the academic circles that oversees which papers make into the academic journals. Morini seems to have an interest in outsider art and is particularly interested in the life of a marginal artist who at one point in his artistic career decides to cut off his hand and turn it into an art piece. In the novel, the artist briefly appears in a dialogue with the professor, and explains to him that the reason for chopping off his hand was for shock value and monetary gain.
Bolano’s characters are people who we usually don’t think about and in many ways are the forgotten people of a community that is stereotyped. When we think about authors, when we think about experts, when we think about status or power we don’t consider the characters he writes about. The novel is riddled with writers of all sorts. These are struggling writers that are barely making ends meet, but they are publishing books and articles- though in small time publications. Life for these artists is tough, but they have committed themselves to the life of a writer.
Oscar Fate is an American from the east coast, and works for an African American magazine. Though he isn't big on writing investigative articles circumstances force him to explore the seedier side of Santa Teresa's criminal underworld. On one occasion he visits the training compound of a boxer and there he finds another black man that’s from Los Angeles and is working sparring partner. Though much isn’t said about him one gets the impression that he prefers Mexico to the US. There are several Chicano characters that appear in the novel. There is the writer, Josue Hernandez Mercado, who was born in Mexico, but raised on the US side of the border and works for a small community newspaper. The books he's written and published are a written in an unorthodox manner, with a strange mixture of Spanish and English, making him an intermediary character on the crossroads of two cultural fringes. A small time literary company from Texas has published two volumes of his poetry and two novels.
Though both these men never meet they take it upon themselves to uncover the murders and atrocities that are happening on the border city of Santa Teresa. Oscar manages to escape in time with Rosa, but it seems that Josue has been murdered. The person who picks up from where Josue left off is a Chicana writer from Phoenix, who is also a writer for a small time newspaper, Mary-Sue Bravo. All of these characters point to a larger and more serious issue. The problems of a society though intimately known by the marginalized ghetto dwellers will never get resolved and understood unless the powers that be take action and find practical solutions to the ills that affect the poor.
Bolano, being the clever author that he was, reveals that this might not be possible, because in the end it is the powerful that are letting the murder of women and the disappearance of males happen. Nevertheless, one of the broader themes that he deals with is precisely the life of the poor and wanderers who live on this earth. The over looked are left to fend for themselves and to find some type of concrete solution to their daily survival, which turns into fear of being involved in anything that might jeopardize their lives. Though there are crimes and violence being perpetuated in Santa Teresa it is mostly ignored and usually gets the attention of sensationalist magazines or simply too taboo to talk about the subject. It makes one wonder how many crimes really happen in marginalized areas of our contemporary cities that never get solved or get the attention they deserve. Witnesses to crimes prefer to run away so as to not get involved and be implicated in a crime. Cops and doctors rarely show up on time, preferring to let time pass so as not to have to go through the whole process of questioning people around or not hear anything that the dying victim might say.
It seems that there is an abundance of jobs in Santa Teresa, but not enough time to get stuff done, and not enough income; pay minimal at most or delayed at worst; to rest. There is a sense that people are able to sustain themselves, but not in the manner that is intended for humans to further develop ie socially, communally and culturally. There is also a constant influx of people into the city, partly due to its proximity to the border with the US, and due to the demand for cheap labor. In essence, the fictional city of Santa Teresa is representative of the pressures that developing nations confront in their societies. The need to make enough income to survive for the day, but also finding the ways and means to make ends meet.
Another example that he uses towards the end of the book is of the soldiers that are used to fight in the Russian front. Most of them are descendants of the very same German peasants that fought the wars of the powerful and returned to their hometowns maimed and handicap attempting to resume their “normal” peasant lives. Just like some of the cops that are members of the police force in Santa Teresa that come from the chronically poor parts of Mexico, and whom allegiances fluctuate between government officials and powerful narcos, both groups are given food, pay and gun to kill or protect higher ups. In the end these cops are also powerless.
Somehow, we are also accomplices to this problem, because ignore certain ills that exist in our perspective societies. At times we fail to see the big picture and the forces behind why people migrate and why the poor fight wars for their countries. Why is it easier for the media to talk about a girl that was kidnapped somewhere in the Mid-West, yet not talk about the numerous women that get disappeared in South Los Angeles? Why does a hot dog eating contest winner get more air time on television than a war veteran who’s returned from abroad? There are those that do look at the other side of life, the grimy and overlooked side, but those eyes are few and the voices have yet to reach the ears of the general population. The people that are out there trying to serve the underrepresented come across the characters that Bolano describes.
Conclusion
Both authors touch on subjects that are rarely discussed. In 1921, when a young Huxley wrote Crome Yellow one could only gather hints as to what would happen in Europe in the next few decades, yet he was able to embed his criticism of society within his writings and look ahead to the on coming problems. Eighty-three years later, when 2666 was published, Bolano, though no longer alive, managed to touch on many issues that are over look these days. Both point to something that ought to be considered when thinking about trivial matters such as the end of the world or humanity's collective destruction via nuclear war or some type of catastrophic religious or race war. As long as humans walk this earth the greatest concern and fear is not what might become of us, but of what we are now and have been for centuries - human.
Metaphorically speaking cannibalism does exist in our societies, and everyday people are being exploited and used for economic and political gain, more specifically undocumented immigrants, the chronic poor and women. The machine continues to churn and devour those whose voice is not heard. In the past, concentration camps segregated certain segments of the community, which in turn were sent to gas chambers and pyres. In Europe, Jews were seen as expendable, and these days its people that are deemed illegal aliens and have no rights. There will always be oppressed and ignored people and those in power will try to rid themselves of the unwanted by using force or nowadays the media with its endless entertainment will create a collective stereotype and amnesia of people that lack political and economic power.
In the past, Empires exercised force, and everyone knew empire was being created at the expense of other societies. In the 20th century empire and conquest began to take a new shape, being that the media became more refined via film, radio, magazines and newspapers. During the first half of that century those in power knew what was going on and Huxley suggested that force and elimination of the unwanted solved nothing. Now, Bolano shows us where the ills of society are. People in the Americas know that the economy of the US is what moves us and that it dominates most economies in the Americas. Yet what happens to people outside of the US becomes the insignificant collateral damage of something that is beyond our present realities The Oscar Fates of the United states have no idea that we are benefiting from the fruits of the terrible exploitation of human and natural resources around the planet, but there comes a time when chance and time reveal these things, but the irony is that all around the world, the poor and marginalized, the invincible, are the ones who become keenly aware of the forces that affect the lives of other invisible populations. To them what happens in the streets in nothing new, but what was happening in Santa Teresa and is happening in real life in parts of Mexico is shocking.
