Ciudad Juárez in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe celerity of Roberto Bolaño’s canonization as one of the avatars of world literature stems from the success of his magnum opus, 2666. This five-part novel is an impassioned indictment of the abdication of ethics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity, an era that saw the rise of both literal and structural gender-based violence. Bolaño offers the city of Santa Teresa—the fictional analogue to the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez—as the paradigmatic example of a city afflicted by such violence, where a network of global factors has conspired to create a milieu in which the murders of young Mexican women have become so frequent as to be banal. 2666 stipulates that violence necessarily attends the rise of Mexican modernity in the twentieth and twenty-first century; this essay will explore five spheres where this modernity takes on violent dimensions: economic and political structures, narratology, ocularcentrism, exile, and literary form.