Nacionalismos e espaços de pertencimento na obra de Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

The present work aims to research the literary policies promoted by Roberto Bolaño in the representation of the Latin American writer, being considered by his critical fortune (VOLPI, 2006; ECHAVARRÍA, 2013) the first author to break with the “boom” paradigm in the world imaginary. To carry out this task, we will start from the demands of the publishing field of the 1990s – extremely conformed to the aesthetics of magical realism – to note that not only Bolaño, but also other writers denounced a division of knowledge and themes to be addressed by literature of peripheral and hegemonic countries. In the case of our writer, considering the historical moment of Latin American dictatorships and the rise of neoliberalism, nationalisms are read in contiguity with the hegemonic pattern of power (QUIJANO, 2002), as a rule, white, capitalist and heterosexual. It is, therefore, about taking a stand of its own in the face of universalglobal and regional-national opposition, as these instances are continuously perceived in Bolaño’s critical interventions. However, on the other hand, as a reader of the Latin American canonical tradition, the author performs an interpretation that perceives it as an exit space, that is, the necessary abandonment of formal aspects, but the indispensable resumption, in an unorthodox way, of some of its utopian and anticolonial aspects. Thus, we propose to follow a path in which the writer, on one hand, forges a literary movement through fiction – Realvisceralism – to promote a reckoning with the Latin American tragedies of the 20th century (ROJO, 2004), but also to stage the abandonment of the Latin American writer's place, proposing other lines of interpretation for literary practice. On the other hand, repositioning the Latin American referent in different horizons of expectations, Bolaños’s work has a worldwide literary map. In it, the Latin American factor ceases to signify territoriality or consanguinity (among many other conservative uses) to gain the historical contours of this experience in the world, emphasizing the Latin American factor as a result of a failed global modernity or as a particular repetition of the violence with which different peoples were integrated into the modern world system.