Roberto Bolaño, Los Detectives Salvages (1998)
…With its front piece quote from near the end of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano:
“Do you want Mexico to be saved? Do you want Christ to be our King?”
“No”
…And transcriptions of the accounts of the crowd of witness, painstakingly reconstructing the scene (‘pay attention’). What have we got to go on so far, one of the crime-busters asks, Not even vaguely anywhere, not even vaguely any day, the other one replies.
What we don’t get, and what we can’t even expect, is the story, such as the myth itself, or anything like it. There are a number of possibilities of course, the usual suspects. For example, here comes The Golden Fleece, the ‘sparkling into the dust’ for instance, which one of the super-sleuths also notices, and you have to take your hat off to them, these detectives don’t miss a thing. Yes, one of them says pointing into the crowd, Put that one in the line-up, agrees the other.
So they bring forward Jason, one of those amechanos kind of men (according to the Greeks), somebody we would judge these days as not lacking in courage, staying power or ambition, not a harmless fool by any stretch, but simply short of the necessary imagination, or perhaps better put, the ‘cunning’ to transform the objective.
Look for any blood on him, one of the detectives says.
They probably find plenty. Some hero of our modern age, they think to themselves, pretending it was he who did it, all blood and fluids and bits of gut on his arms. And the smell! Like the dragon’s teeth, one of the detectives says holding his nose, Right, the other agrees, There is no point keeping him, let him go.
They return to the task, walking slowly around and around, stopping and stooping every now and then to pick up any possible clues, even the smallest pieces, and laying them side by side in rows. What Walter Benjamin called Urgeschichte (‘primal history’), both demonstrating the practice and describing the method of research in his late masterpiece Das Passegen-Werk.