Title: Fidelity to the Event in Roberto Bolaño's "Laberinto"
Abstract:Roberto Bolano’s El secreto del mal is a compilation of texts published posthumously. As Ignacio Echevarria explains in an introduction to this work, this compilation is based on three files containin...Roberto Bolano’s El secreto del mal is a compilation of texts published posthumously. As Ignacio Echevarria explains in an introduction to this work, this compilation is based on three files containing numerous texts that were found on Bolano’s computer after his death. Most of the texts selected by Echevarria are short stories: several of them are unfinished or have inconclusive endings. It cannot be established with certainty when these texts were written, as none of them was dated by the author. One story—“Sabios de Sodoma”—blends essayistic and narrative content. Other stories include autobiographical content. There are also two conference papers. Echevarria explains this selection of heterogeneous texts by noting “la acusada tendencia de Roberto Bolano a intercalar en sus ultimas colecciones de relatos textos de naturaleza no narrativa, con el evidente proposito de confundir las fronteras del genero, y fecundarlo” (9-10). At twenty-five pages in length, “Laberinto” is the longest story in El secreto del mal . Based on a description of a photograph taken in Paris around 1977, it is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of Camilo Jose Cela’s novel La colmena (1951), consisting of diverse narrative sequences focused on the characters appearing in the photograph. The narrator’s use of specific details inside or outside of the photograph as the starting point for imagining these sequences is reminiscent of Julio Cortazar’s story “Las babas del diablo” (1959). In his book The Century , Alain Badiou considers the last twenty years of the twentieth century to be a time of counter-revolutionary political resurgence “fallaciously in thrall to the idea that nothing begins or will ever begin” (140). I will demonstrate how “Laberinto” contradicts Badiou’s characterization of this period of time after 1980 by representing the consequences of a European Court of Justice case-law as a progressive political development whose effects were to be acknowledged in the 1980s and beyond. To paraphrase Badiou negatively, “Laberinto” is a text in thrall to the idea that something begins. The way in which this is expressed in Bolano’s text is relevant to Badiou’s theory of “the event,” Lacanian theory, and to an understanding of the role of law in the construction of the European Union. Throughout “Laberinto,” repeated references to the void suggest the proximity of an event: a possibility that becomes more certain as the text progresses. However, it will be demonstrated that fidelity to the event in question does not imply a political stance stereotypically associated with Badiou (that is, an ultra-leftist distance from the established order), but rather working within the state to achieve progressive goals. In this sense, “Laberinto” differs from Estrella distante (1996), a Bolano novel that representsRead More
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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