Investigaciones literarias en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea Figuras del lector en explorador del olvido

Abstract

Inspired by the construction of literary detectives in the works of Ricardo Piglia and Roberto Bolaño, several Mexican writers of the beginning of the XXIst century revisit the topic of the investigation and quest of the forgotten writer, the lost text, the ghosts of literature. They repetitively use a structure – the pattern of the research, of following traces, interpret sign – that is no more an exclusive form of the detective novel and is displaced in other contexts. At the center of the quest of the literary detective there is no crime any more but an absence, an emptiness. What triggers the investigations of the characters of those contemporary novels is the absence of facts, an author’s disappearance, a lost manuscripts. The investigator is a reader who talks to the departed and navigates the murky waters of oblivion, this abyss in which all works inevitably end up. This paper will follow some leads drawn by those characters haunted by the threat of emptiness. In Daniel Saldaña París’s first novel, a university professor follows the tracks and traces of an obscure poet and boxer who disappeared in Mexico at the beginning of the past century, inspired by Arthur Cravan, and will be taken up in an absurd epical adventure that will save him from the boredom of his life. Valeria Luiselli tells in Faces in the crowd (Los ingrávidos) the parallel lives of two Mexican exiles in New York: a young translator obsessed by her own invisibility and the ghost of Gilberto Owen. Juan Villoro explores the figure of the witness in a complex novel whose main character, another professor back from exile in Europe, meets the specters of his past and the Mexican historical past, while working on the life and works of the poet López Velarde. Those narratives decipher the shadows of the past in the present in a disturbing way, showing how deeply our reality is inhabited by the violence that made it possible, and imagining the transformation of the characters who look into the well of oblivion into ghosts themselves.