Epifanías e inminencia en los cuentos de Roberto Bolaño

In Stephen Hero, James Joyce adopted the liturgical term epiphany and applied to an emotional and cognitive phenomenon that the writer had a duty, so he believed, to record and preserve: “a sudden spiritual manifestation” triggered, in the majority of cases, by some element of daily life (an object or an event). In a number of Roberto Bolaño’s short stories we can identify epiphanies of this type. Sometimes they fall into the category that Günter Leypoldt has dubbed “realist epiphanies,” in which case they yield a definite meaning. But sometimes the movement towards the articulation of that meaning is interrupted. And in some cases the meaning is unrecoverable or ineffable. The epiphanies in Bolaño’s stories are usually moments of intense lyricism and climactic moments in the plot. They have an unquestionable narrative efficacy, but should not be seen as mere tricks, aimed solely at producing a short-term effect on the reader. In their variety, they reflect the complex relations between emotion and cognition, and designate the feeling of imminence as a necessary condition of intellectual and practical creativity.