Abstract
Abstract Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet explores the writing of history as an attempt to construct a narrative from a multitude of unreliable and conflicting sources. As a result, any attempt at historiography is also plagued by the problems of representation found in literature. More particularly, not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable. By examining the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Amulet this paper will discuss Bolaño’s use of the tropes of metaphysical detective fiction and how they help foreground the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction. This will, in turn, highlight the intersection between detective fiction and historiographic metafiction and how by combining these two genres writers can reimagine historical contexts and find new meanings and significance.
Highlights
Via free access historiographic metafiction outside it – correcting, clearing up and, perhaps most important of all, finding rhythms and symmetries that we don’t encounter elsewhere” (DeLillo as cited in Block and Norris 2017)
Not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable
A novel by Roberto Bolaño (2010), is a first-person account of Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman living in Mexico, who spent a miserable two weeks hiding in a bathroom of the Department of Philosophy and Literature during the Mexican army’s occupation of the National Autonomous University between 18th and 30th September 1968
Summary
Critics who attack postmodernism for being what they see as ahistorical (as do Eagleton in The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), Jameson in Postmodernism (1991), or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), and Newman in The Postmodern Aura (1985)), seem to be working from a very rigid definition of what constitutes “postmodern’’, for surely one could argue that historiographic metafiction, like postmodernist architecture and painting, is overtly and resolutely historical – its ironic approach problematizes and thereby acknowledges that history is not the transparent record of any sure “truth” (Hutcheon 1988, 5). I thought, the two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being found” (as cited in Marostain 2009, 54) These reflections on the act of writing highlight the constructed nature of narrative and, by extension, established history and historical narratives. By drawing the reader’s attention to and questioning the assumptions and conventions of narrative and how it transforms reality, Bolaño repositions the historical event that he is describing. Forgotten voices are celebrated and the minor narratives of history are given the same weight as established history Another metafictional technique that is employed is the rejection of conventional plot structure, which makes the novel sometimes difficult to read. The text abounds with literary allusions both established and well known and obscure and fictional, which adds to this disorientation and forces the reader to pay attention to history as an intertextual fabric of sources and stories
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