La Memoria En Espiral: Poéticas Del Trauma En Amuleto De Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

My article advances the notion of trauma as a synecdochic event in Amulet (1999) by Roberto Bolaño. I will showcase how Amulet functions as a false memory or testimony by focusing on aspects of ekphrasis, surrealism, and trauma within the novel. The main character, Auxilio Lacouture, suffers from fractures of memory, which renders her enunciation both ambiguous and ambivalent. This ambivalence demonstrates both a lack and an overabundance of poetry. Bolaño intends to recapture the events that precede and follow the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico. In doing so, he exhibits the traumatic potentiality of State-sanctioned violence as a source for poetry. By recreating and fictionalizing these unnamed events, Bolaño dismantles the symbolic production of order and modernity brought forth by the government's ideologues during the time leading to the Olympic games and the institutional silencing of the witnesses amid the massacre. Moreover, the narration of trauma becomes a paradoxical enterprise, because the fragmentation of the self becomes an unavoidable totality that erases coherent narrative and fills its vacuums with memories of suffering, endless repetition, and reiteration.