Broken Bodies, Broken Nations: Roberto Bolaño on Neoliberal Logic and (Un)Mediated Violence

Abstract

The present study attends to the metaphorical role of geometry and photography throughout Roberto Bolano's oeuvre in relation to the author's persistent interrogation of authoritarian politics and aesthetics in Latin America. In a comparative reading of four works, focusing particularly on Estrella distante (1996) and 2666 (2004), I posit that Bolano grapples with the shifting norms of waning national modernity and burgeoning neoliberal globalization across his literary corpus. My reading of these works shows how the female body is figured as a metaphor for the body politic of the nation. I maintain that Bolano revisits and re-presents the same scene across multiple novels, deploying a revisionist aesthetics that seeks to comprehend and render legible the shifting dynamics of politics in the present. In this way, the aesthetic authority of the photographer stands in for the political sovereignty of the nation state in the earlier works, a relationship that is later supplanted in 2666. This comparative reading unfolds via two principal inquiries: by examining the space in which female bodies are disclosed in each narrative and by considering the role of aesthetic mediation in that disclosure.