“The great masters in real combat”

“The great masters in real combat” is an expression for the risks of literature that does more than display formal mastery: it confronts the unknown and the forces that unsettle its readers. In 2666, Amalfitano’s reflection makes the phrase a critique of preferring perfect, manageable exercises to expansive works that enter “real combat,” while the novel’s own scale gives that distinction structural force.

Amalfitano’s Paradox

After speaking with a book-loving pharmacist, Amalfitano reflects on the growing prestige of short, neatly shaped novels. He sets celebrated compact works such as Bartleby the Scrivener and The Metamorphosis against the more ambitious Moby-Dick and The Trial. The contrast is not simply between short and long books: it is between formally contained exercises and works willing to blaze paths into the unknown.

Amalfitano sees a paradox in the pharmacist’s literary preferences. The pharmacist can admire great masters yet shrink from the kind of work that tests what literature can confront. In Amalfitano’s formulation, such readers want to watch masters spar, but have no interest in the struggle that constitutes real combat. The phrase therefore distinguishes admiration of artistic skill from engagement with the risks and uncertainties that ambitious literature brings into view.

The Meaning of Real Combat

The expression’s force lies in its shift from literary comparison to a language of danger and struggle. Amalfitano describes the unknown as something that frightens and cowes people, even as it spurs them on. The struggle is not a contest for its own sake; it marks the encounter between a work and what resists easy mastery. The prospect of blood and mortal wounds belongs to the passage’s figurative intensity, not to a separate event in the plot.

The alias “Books that blaze paths into the unknown” emphasizes the outward movement of such writing. These books do not merely satisfy expectations of elegance or finish; they venture beyond familiar territory. Against them, the “perfect exercises” offer the safety of observing accomplished technique without entering the more unsettling questions that make literary ambition consequential.

The Expression and the Novel’s Form

The accompanying account of 2666’s publication argues that its five parts can be read independently but share recurring motifs and a common end. It presents the decision to publish them together as consistent with the work’s colossal conception, length, and spirit of risk. Amalfitano’s defense of expansive, imperfect books thus echoes the formal ambition of the novel containing his reflection: the parts remain open to different arrangements, yet are also drawn toward a shared whole.

That whole is gathered around the enigmatic title, 2666, described as a date and a vanishing point that helps the separate parts fall into place. Santa Teresa, where the five parts ultimately converge and the crimes form the novel’s stark backdrop, is identified as a possible physical center; the accompanying account leaves the proposed hidden center open to interpretation. In this context, “The great masters in real combat” supplies a literary principle rather than a plot resolution: the novel’s scale and openness enact the appetite for difficult, imperfect work that Amalfitano defends.