Abstract
The fiction of Roberto Bolaño produces a peculiar effect: although Bolaño’s themes are grave and dark (disappearance, loss and failure), his prose is energizing, as many readers have testified. The article proposes three elements that contribute to an explanation of this paradoxical effect. First, on the psychological level, the failures of Bolaño’s characters are rarely willed or chosen: the “taste for failure” (Freud) is rare in his fictional world. Even as his characters engage in struggles that will eventually fail, they are affected by a joyous passion. The second explanatory element is formal: Bolaño’s fiction is literally expansive; it grows by dilating the already written, without diluting it. This growth by expansion manifests a contagious vitality. The third element relates to a recurrent theme: investigation. Many of Bolaño's characters are investigators: they decipher signs and pursue persons. The semiotic aspect of the investigations is characterized by a tendency to overinterpretation: the investigator is prone to apophenia, discerning unmotivated connections and endowing them with weighty meanings. This hermeneutic effervescence is not limited to Bolaño’s own storyworlds. It also affects his readers, and filters into works in which Bolaño himself appears as a secondary character. The article demonstrates this contagious effect by examining three recent books in which the writer Roberto Bolaño plays a crucial role: Soldiers of Salamina, by Javier Cercas, Movimiento único by Diego Gándara, and Blanès by Hedwige Jeanmart.
Translated title of the contribution | Wild detection |
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Original language | French |
Title of host publication | Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle No. 1070-1071-1072: Roberto Bolaño |
Place of Publication | France |
Publisher | Europe |
Pages | 159-169 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Print) | 9782351500958 |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- Bolaño, Roberto, 1953-2003
- criticism and interpretation
- Latin American fiction