The Poets of the Future and the Nightmares of our Children

Over the past several years, one of the better novels I've read was Roberto Bolaño's 2666. It’s also perhaps the only book that has ever given me nightmares. But it did, night in and night out, for weeks on end. And I was recently reminded of this experience. And the reason I was reminded of it was because Bolaño understood something of the difficulty that we will all face in trying to convey a sense of this political moment to future generations.

Bolaño’s novel is quite long and divided into five parts. And the part that gave me nightmares was the fourth part, entitled “The Part about the Crimes.” In this roughly 300 page section of the book, Bolaño doesn’t tell a typical story, as he does in the other parts. Instead, this section is largely comprised of what seem like police department forensic reports. And each report, with 135 in total, describes the scene of a woman’s murder in almost clinical detail. The effect of this is that you end up spending days if not weeks reading a book whose every word recounts a horrible crime scene, but that does so with an almost scientific precision rather than a more “novelistic” descriptive approach.

I think that the reason Bolaño writes this way is in order to convey the magnitude of the tragedy of female homicides in the Mexican province of Ciudad Juárez. These homicides began in 1993 and are so frequent that they have earned the nickname “feminicidio,” which is Spanish for feminicide. And I suspect that Bolaño knew that there was no way that conventional descriptive language could convey the scope of the tragedy, so that he settled upon a more unconventional “quantitative approach.”

Usually, we might think that a clinical and quantitative description of mass murder would be a dehumanizing way of describing a tragedy. Rather than humanizing each victim, rather than conveying a sense of the person that they were, the only thing that we know about each victim is the state of the crime scene at which their body was found. And so, it would be natural to think that Bolaño is dehumanizing these victims by transforming real human beings—although, he is writing of fictional and not real murders—into mere bodies and numbers.

However, Bolaño is a wonderful writer, and the effect is quite the opposite. While one such account might dehumanize its victim by only providing the clinical information about their death, 135 of such dehumanizing accounts instead tells the story of their dehumanization. That is, the sheer volume of these accounts forces us to confront the scope of a tragedy in which hundreds of woman have been reduced to nothing but a crime scene. Consequently, in my own case, the horror of it all manifested itself in several weeks of nightmares. And if nothing else, I think those nightmares testify to how effective Bolaño is as a writer.

It’s been many years since I read this book, but the experience of reading it remains vivid. And, as I mentioned, I was recently reminded of it. But I wasn’t reminded of it by somehow encountering Roberto Bolaño or the tragedy in Ciudad Juárez; I was reminded of it when I came across an entirely unrelated newspaper article about our president conferring purple hearts on 29 war veterans.

The reason that I made a connection between this story and that told by Bolaño was because of the subtitle of the article. As the subtitle explained, the president described these soldiers—soldiers who were being given purple hearts because they had each suffered a brain injury—as suffering from “headaches.” So, our president—a man who has never experienced a day of adversity in his life and who is the textbook definition of someone who repeatedly fails upwards—described these brain-injured veterans as suffering from something for which Tylenol is a cure.

Over these past few years, a common refrain has been to note the sheer volume of cruel absurdities that we’ve been forced to endure. And within that context, this particular story is just a drop in the bucket, and a particularly small drop at that. After all, how can a stupid remark like this compare to putting children in cages or sentencing thousands of Americans to death by reopening the economy too soon. In fact, this story wouldn’t even come close to competing for the worst thing that the president did on that particular day. And yet, if you single out any one of his crimes—even the most egregious, such as children in cages—these solitary crimes fail to convey the sheer scope of the inhumanity through which we’re all living.

And this made me think about the difficulty that we face in trying to convey the inhumanity of these years to future generations. And this is what reminded me of Bolaño. No straightforward account, be it a historical account or a fictional representation, will ever be able to capture this moment in all its ubiquitous cruelty. And yet, Bolaño’s creativity—his ability to discover a form of writing that conveyed emotional content—points a way forward.

Instead of a straightforward account, instead of an account that offers a narrative of the events through which we are living, the poets of the future will have to similarly devise a form of writing that communicates the emotional truth of our era. How else could we communicate the constant assault on decency that this president represents? How else could we communicate the way that insults like the one made towards the purple heart recipients have become such a conventional affair, so mundane in their ubiquity, that the headline flashes before our eyes for only a moment before getting lost in the next story. And herein lies the truth of our era: the stupidity and the cruelty have become so commonplace that it’s impossible to keep up. And it’s this numbness—the resignation that is forced upon us because we simply can’t keep up—that I think most defines this era.

I’m not sure how we might communicate this feeling of moral exhaustion. But when the poets of the future figure out a way, I think that we’ll know their success through the nightmares of our children.