Deckard in Juárez

Toward a Unified Theory of Roberto Bolaño and Philip K. Dick

The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same….

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

-Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

[Philip K.] Dick was a schizophrenic. Dick was a paranoiac. Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage.

-Roberto Bolaño, “Philip K. Dick”

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

-Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”

It wasn’t inevitable that Roberto Bolaño would become one of world literature’s best-kept secrets. The reception of his posthumously-published epic 2666 (2004 in Spanish; 2008 in English translation) suggested that he was destined for immediate canonization – even in the U.S., where the broad literary culture is often reluctant to embrace work in translation. The novel won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Time crowned it book of the year; it was inescapable in bookstores. For a moment, the name Bolaño carried the same sheen as García Márquez or Neruda. His status as a literary ambassador for Latin America seemed assured.

Then, something happened. Instead of a banner name, Bolaño became a cult figure. Previously untranslated material – novels, stories, poetry, nonfiction – continued to appear, but mainstream interest steadily diminished. The reading public, by and large, moved on, leaving only a small coterie of diehards to continue tending the flame.

Maybe that’s for the best, though. Enthusiasm for 2666 aside, Bolaño was always just a little too weird and a little too dark for his mainstream success to endure. Much of the appeal of his work is in the mystery, the magnetic quality of his prose: his voice is direct but mysterious, intelligent yet conversational, both gravely serious and wickedly funny. His fictions often feature writers and detectives; writers operating as detectives; detectives hunting down elusive writers; past, present, and future holocausts; the perversions of everyday life under authoritarian regimes and degenerated states; the pretensions, ambitions, and occasional moral crimes of vagabond artists; and the grand farce of literary culture and academic life. Bolaño’s work is cryptic and digressive, at times deeply disturbing, often alien, always unclassifiable – and thus, more at home on the margins. After all, as Bolaño understood, exile has its perks. “To be exiled,” he wrote, “is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self.”

It should be noted that, for Bolaño, exile was not academic, nor was his interest in it merely theoretical. He was an exile in the most straightforward sense of the term, driven from his native Chile in 1973 by the Pinochet military dictatorship. Bolaño felt the condition of exile intimately, and he treated it with seriousness. But, while he directly explored the political context that produced his exile in both fiction (By Night in Chile, Distant Star) and nonfiction (“Literature in Exile,” the above-quoted “Exiles”), his writing was never constrained by it, nor by the narrow prism of his own lived experience. Bolaño’s exile was not only expulsion from a polity, not mere excommunication, but a literary phenomenon – that is, a matter of style.

In “Exiles,” Bolaño lays this out plainly. Exile of almost every duration, character, quality, and intensity is endurable; it can be adopted or discarded according to need; in a sense, it doesn’t even exist. The only constant is that exile is an essential condition of literary value, the means by which writers and readers alike arrive at whatever truth, beauty, or insight lies waiting to be found. The exile may lose their place in the world; their displacement may be temporary or permanent. But, in being dislocated, they gain perspective, a kind of clairvoyance that allows them to peer without flinching into the depths of the void. It hardly needs to be said that, for a writer, this ability is an asset.

Philip K. Dick, Bolaño wrote, “knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile.” This placed him in rare company – in an edition of his newspaper column “Between Parentheses” devoted to Dick, Bolaño compared him favorably with such exemplars of exile as Kafka, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Thoreau. But the exact meaning of this phrase, “disturbances of exile,” is left to the reader to uncover. For Bolaño, as for any genuine poet, the truth can be found in the evocativeness of a phrase, but the reader must play detective, at least if they want to piece together this particular truth for themselves.

Dick’s specialty was science fiction exploring the ways in which reality and perception are distorted – by drugs, by technologies both human and alien, by religion, by derelict governments, by corporate malignancies. In contrast to George Orwell, who took on totalitarianism in its totality, Dick kept himself laser-focused on the moment when “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia” becomes “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” Hence, the key word in “disturbances of exile” is not “exile,” but “disturbances” – the particular moments in which the condition of exile is troubled by the intervention of an outside force. In this, the fictions of Bolaño and Dick share an interest in what might be called the ephemeral epiphany – the precise moment at which a so-called “reality” is ruptured – and the fallout that results.

Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is a case in point. Near the end of Androids, which would help hoist him from semi-obscurity after it was adapted into Blade Runner (1982), android hunter Rick Deckard travels to the border of California and what was once Oregon – which, following a nuclear World War III, has become a nuclear wasteland. He has just dispatched six “andys” in a single day, a monumental achievement for an android hunter, but his self-perception has been damaged in the process. Deckard’s state of mind is wrecked, his sense of purpose ruined. “Everything about me has become unnatural,” he thinks. “I’ve become an unnatural self.”

Part of Deckard’s trouble is that he’s begun to feel empathy for the androids he’s tasked with “retiring,” or destroying. The feeling is first sparked by an encounter with another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, whose zeal for his work sparks a previously unknown revulsion in Deckard; it’s later accelerated by Rachael Rosen, a sophisticated “Nexus-6” model android who, after some effort, successfully seduces him. The weight of the fundamental contradiction is too much, and even before his work is finished, Deckard begins to daydream of some other life more in line with his newly ascendant values – at least, until he consults with religious guru Wilbur Mercer, who encourages him to press on with his task. “You will be required to do wrong wherever you go,” the old man says. “It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity…. [T]his is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.” After hearing this, Deckard is able to follow through with his mission and dispatches the final three androids, but the damage has already been done. Existence now seems too much like a trap with no way out.

That is, until it doesn’t. A shift occurs when, in the barren wasteland, Deckard sees a toad. This should not be, because a border shared with a nuclear wasteland is no place for a living thing; this cannot be, because toads have gone extinct. Yet the toad is there, and discovering it jolts Deckard into action. With a newfound sense of perspective, he begins to plot a new path for himself:

So this is what Mercer sees, he thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box [containing the toad] shut – tied it again and again. Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer’s eyes, I probably will never stop.

The toad is the catalyst for a new state of being, a Beckettian moment of “I can’t go on… I’ll go on.” It doesn’t even matter to Deckard that the toad turns out to be artificial, making its discovery far less significant. Finding it was enough – that, and believing, at just the right moment, in its authenticity. The toad has already served its function: it’s a lightning rod for the new reality, a totem by which Deckard acquires the means of continued existence. By changing his perception, the toad changes his world.

We can find echoes of this basic sequence – dejection, discovery, and a resultant shift of perspective – repeated in 2666. In the second of the novel’s five sections, philosophy professor Óscar Amalfitano discovers a geometry textbook, Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geométrico, among his books.¹ He’s never seen the book before; neither he nor his daughter Rosa has any recollection of it; and he has no interest in geometry. Unsure of what else to do, Amalfitano decides to hang the book from the clothesline in the backyard, “just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate.” Though he expects the book to be destroyed, it unexpectedly holds its own against the elements – and while Amalfitano is pleasantly surprised, there’s something about the Testamento’s resilience that’s somewhat unsettling:

In the mornings, before he left for the university, Amalfitano would go out the back door to watch the book while he finished his coffee. No doubt about it: it had been printed on good paper and the binding was stoically withstanding nature’s onslaught…. One morning, as he was waiting for the bus to the university, he made firm plans to plant grass or a lawn…. Another morning he thought that any work he did to make the yard nicer would ultimately be pointless, since he didn’t plan to stay long in Santa Teresa. I have to go back now, he said to himself, but where? And then he asked himself: what made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn’t seen yet? Because I really just want to die? And then he looked at Dieste’s book, the Testamento geométrico, hanging impassively from the line, held there by two clothespins, and he felt the urge to take it down and wipe off the ocher dust that had begun to cling to it here and there, but he didn’t dare.

What makes it so disturbing to see the Testamento there, dangling from a clothesline in Amalfitano’s backyard? Only the attention it draws to its surroundings – that is, to Santa Teresa, the border town where Amalfitano lives and teaches. Like Androids’ California-Oregon border, Santa Teresa is a desolate wasteland, but it is not only that. It is also, for Amalfitano, a direct threat to the continued existence of his family; that is, to his daughter’s life. The city is a site of horrific violence, a place where hundreds of women – many around Rosa’s age – have for years been disappeared and murdered, their killers never caught.² For Amalfitano, the nonsensical image of the hanging Testamento is a clear reminder of the nonsensicality of the brutal, violent world – so clear, in fact, its presence is vaguely menacing.

This sense of danger never leaves Santa Teresa; if anything, the city only grows more nonsensical. The longer Amalfitano remains there, the closer he comes to having a complete mental breakdown, and it’s in this context that the significance of the hanging Testamento changes. Soon, it becomes one of the only things in town that does make sense:

When they got home it was dark but the shadow of Dieste’s book hanging from the clothesline was clearer, steadier, more reasonable, thought Amalfitano, than anything they’d seen on the outskirts of Santa Teresa or in the city itself, images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.

Instead of disintegrating as expected, the Testamento geométrico has instead become an avatar of stability. Amalfitano derives no particular comfort from this moment of clarity, because clarity is the only thing Dieste’s book can offer. Outside of Amalfitano’s sense of perspective, nothing much changes: he remains in Santa Teresa, the crimes continue, and none of it ever congeals into sense – even, so far as Bolaño reveals, after Rosa leaves town. Amalfitano continues to fail; all the Testamento can offer, in Beckettian terms, is a chance to fail better.

If a connection can be drawn between Deckard and Amalfitano, it’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek – Amalfitano is ultimately a comic figure, after all – but they do share the same sense of what might be called post-apocalyptic melancholia, tempered only by the appearance of the stabilizing totem. There’s a touch of optimism here. Each “ephemeral epiphany” allows Deckard and Amalfitano, and by extension Philip K. Dick and Roberto Bolaño, to find new life, even in the heart of desolation.

But life is not the same as hope, at least not for the exile. Neither Deckard’s toad nor the Testamento geométrico guarantees anything more than a temporary change. The individual moments of clairvoyance they offer can be significant, but it’s also all they can offer – the contradiction Mercer articulates is no less true for Deckard’s having discovered the toad, and for professor Amalfitano, Santa Teresa’s hostile ambiance always remains. The appearance of stability is just that, an appearance, and the illusion engendered remains indefinitely on the cusp of being shattered.

Reality, to both Roberto Bolaño and Philip K. Dick, is an illusion, or at least highly contingent on individual perspective. In their fictions, the relationship between the perceived and the real is extremely tenuous, always poised for unexpected change; the world is at best a lie, at worst an unrelenting horror, with no obvious method for interpretation or means of navigation. Such a grim perspective is the cost of exile – of being driven out of one’s country by the threat of authoritarian violence or out of one’s mind by psychedelics and paranoia. The world that produces the exile is a world that, to the exile, can never make sense.

But, despite this inherent darkness, the world can still be interpreted and navigated, as both Androids and 2666 show. What appears may not be “reality” as such, but it can provide fuel for continuing on, or at least a glimpse at the outline of truth. The means of navigating illusion may itself be an illusion, but it is nevertheless a means, capable of ensuring both survival and self-discovery. After all, both are the same thing.

1. Notably, another unfinished novel featuring Amalfitano, The Woes of the True Policeman, is dedicated “To the memory of Manuel Puig and Philip K. Dick.” This post isn’t meant to be a comprehensive look at Roberto Bolaño and Philip K. Dick – such a task would be impossible without access to Bolaño’s papers (which is itself impossible), and even with access, my monolingualism would obstruct a thorough contribution – but any comprehensive attempt would have to account for Woes.

2. These crimes, which Bolaño modeled on a series of real, unsolved murders in Ciudad Juárez, form the heart of 2666. The novel’s fourth section chillingly and meticulously catalogs the crimes with the impersonal precision of a police report.