The Departed

[Dave Monroe]

The Departed
By JONATHAN LETHEM
Published: November 9, 2008


In Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story "The Preserving Machine," an
impassioned inventor creates a device for "preserving" the canon of
classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of
Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device
that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles
and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the
classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor
means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human
commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value.
Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one
another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his
creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal
themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the
originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences —
irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to
begin with?

Dick's parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence
toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes "masterpieces" embody in the
human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If
we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit
of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby
lives? Con­versely, if on investigation such works, and their makers,
are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects
as the rest of what we've plopped onto the planet — all these cities,
nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first
place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being
useless in either case.

Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than music or the
visual arts, which can at least play at abstract beauty. ­Novels and
stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff:
language, history, squalid human incident and dream. When so many
accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives
the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the
brutalities of animal instinct and time's remorseless toll, books may
seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could such losers cobble
together anything particularly sublime?

The Chilean exile poet Roberto Bolaño, born in 1953, lived in Mexico,
France and Spain before his death in 2003, at 50, from liver disease
traceable to heroin use years before. In a burst of invention now
legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature, and rapidly
becoming so internationally, Bolaño in the last decade of his life,
writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health,
constructed a remarkable body of stories and novels out of precisely
such doubts....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html