Abstract
This article examines the first part of Roberto Bolano’s novel 2666 with regard to the strategy of telling a multilingual story in a monolingual narrative. Discussing the motives behind, and implications of, this flattening of the text’s linguistic surface, it argues that to dismiss the tension between story and discourse as a defect is to overlook one of the novel’s principal proposals and to deny a key aspect of Bolano’s narrative poetics. The article shows that in ‘La parte de los criticos’, effortless communication is confined to a utopian communicative space, which provides a level playing field for characters from different cultural-linguistic backgrounds. The novel’s approach to multilingualism and translation, for which Bolano may have found support in his readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggests that to him, languages matter not for what separates them but for what they have in common as a generic means of communication. The article contends that the novel’s linguistic flatness is programmatic, ...
Highlights
This article examines the first part of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 with regard to the strategy of telling a multilingual story in a monolingual narrative
I subject the first part of 2666 to a close examination of the strategies employed in conflating the multilingual story into a monolingual narrative, trying to expose the motives behind, and implications of, this flattening of the linguistic surface
The article will argue that to dismiss the tension between multilingualism at the story level and monolingualism at the discourse level as a defect of the novel is to pass over one of 2666’s principal proposals and to deny a key aspect of Bolaño’s narrative poetics
Summary
This article examines the first part of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 with regard to the strategy of telling a multilingual story in a monolingual narrative. In many cases they presume acts of linguistic translation of the characters’ (imaginary) instances of language use; this is consistently the case in ‘La parte de los críticos’ of 2666.
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