Corpse Photography in Roberto Bolaño's Estrella distante and Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar

Abstract

This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini (‘morbid spectacularity’), Alain Badiou (‘passion for the real’), Hal Foster (‘return of the real’) and Paul Virilio (‘pitiless art’). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed ‘t(h)an(a)talization’. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real.