Hugo Burel. Diario de la arena

Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives has the effect of the widening gyre; its centre is Mexico City and the haphazard poetry movement visceral realism, but the centre is falling apart. At every level, the narrative gives way to an empty place that obfuscates meaning. Critics have attempted to address the ambiguity by insisting that the novel correlates precisely to Roberto Bolaño’s tumultuous years as a poet, a 577-page prosaic flagstone under which to bury the author’s bygone poetic ideals and aspirations. More generally, the inconclusive novel mirrors the loose ends left by a generation of Latin Americans who struggled against dictatorships, many of whom were exiled, or worse, disappeared. The novel is about losing focus; as the gyre widens and the narrative spans the globe over twenty years, little remains of visceral realism but the traces of an absence. This thesis develops the empty place in The Savage Detectives and that undermines the milieu of context as the central lack of desire, that which is opened up at the centre of the dialectic of the subject and the Other. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically the psychoanalytic criticism of Slavoj Žižek, the empty place in The Savage Detectives is identified as an abyss to which the subject is returned when the object of desire is found to be a partial object, not the source of fulfilment. The partial object anguishes the youngest of the visceral realists and the novel’s earliest narrator when it emerges in himself for the Other, disrupting the supposed unity of the self. The narrator is included in his own narrative as a stain whose obverse is emptiness. In the second section of textual analysis, the drive is developed as desire in its final instance, wherein the subject avoids the seemingly arbitrary procession of partial objects but enters a lethal dimension when returned to the economy of desire. Finally, both desire and drive are shown to support a reality that affords the subject consistency, yet a radical dimension exists beyond these supports, which are a kind of fantasy. This unreal reality is the empty place where The Savage Detectives concludes; the way it appears to first interrupt and then ultimately consume the narrative is described in this thesis as a type of writing that mirrors the psyche and perplexities of the Lacanian subject.

Thinking Narratively

Io nlyo ffer modi res considerandi,n ew possible ways of lookinga tt hings.I invitet he reader to try them on themselves, to see whether they ares uccessful in yieldingf ertile visions;e ach person, then, by virtue of their intimatea nd faithful experience, will verify their truth or their error. (OrtegayGasset) 1E very Novel Is Don Quixote As OrtegayGasset peremptorilyp ut it in his Meditations on Quixote,t he novel and the epic "are exactlyo pposite".¹ Apart from the caseo fDon Quixote, which is the uniquelyo riginary moment of the genre, Ortegaw as referringt o the modern novel, which developedand reached its apex in the nineteenth century.I nMeditations,a sw ell as his later work, Notes on the Novel (1925), Ortega openlyand bitterlypolemicised with Croceand his Aesthetics,excluding from his analysis romance, picaresque, and fantastic novels, which he considered to be closer to the epic and the ancient novel, respectively,b oth in terms of function and characteristics.The genre is thus limited to the realist novel, as Auerbach would later understand it,aserious representation of the everyday. Ortega'se xclusive conception of the genre begins with the estrangement and completeo pposition between the two terms "novel" and "epic".H ed oes so more radically than Hegel in Lectures on Aesthetics,² which postulated aform of relation or continuitybetween the twob yr eferringt othe novel as a "modern bourgeois epic", and also more radicallyt han the "Hegelian" Lukács in Theoryo ft he Novel. Accordingly,whereas the epic narrates an idealised past,the novel describes apresent caught up in reality.This also means that, whereas the epic is essentially action and adventurous improbability,o nt he contrary,t he novel is "atmosphere" and "contemplation",r eaching its extreme in the Proustian Recherche  OrtegayGasset 2016,1 10.The translation is ours.D ue to the ongoingh ealth emergency, retrievingt he original texts has sometimes provede xtremelyd ifficult; however,wed id our best to check the original version of the texts quoted.  Hegel1 997, 1223. OpenAccess. ©2 022R affaello Palumbo Mosca, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Bajo Palabra Revista De Filosofia, 2010

This work has a double purpose: 1) to examine Wolfgang Iser"s concept of Literary Actualization and contrast it with the theoretical approach of E.D. Hirsch and Stanley Fish, and 2) to illustrate Iser"s concept through a short story by Roberto Bolaño. While contemporary theorists of literature cannot deny the importance of the reader in the construction of meaning and significance, postmodern literature has also acknowledged the theoretical presence of the reader within the literary process. "Dos cuentos católicos" exemplifies through its diegetical structure the endeavors of the author to recognize the importance of the reader"s reception.

Hispanofila, 2017

2015

This paper argues that Leonardo Padura’s historical novel El hombre que amaba a los perros presents a continuation of sorts of the detective genre. In emphasing an inverted order of time and a witness’s investigation into the past of Trotski’s assassin, Padura construes a logic of defeat both for the witnesses and the actors of world history. The witness turned writer, the politician, and his assassin become victims of manipulative states, and the “new” historical novel, instead of capturing the aftermath of great historical events, is relegated to documenting the failure to adjust of the individual subject.

Seminar, 2013

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2017

European Romantic Review, 2010

This essay examines features of the German Romantic novella and discusses the cognitive work the novella does. The novella presents an unheard-of event, but does so in such a way which induces the reader to find an appropriate context explicating and rationalizing the event so that it "makes sense." As a result, the event loses its quality of being a true and radical event. The radical event is thus both posited and undermined by the novella. The search for context, while the work of the reader, is prefigured by the novella through various contextualizations, justifications, and inquiries already occurring in the text. This essay proposes a cultural dynamic of transforming actions into reactions as the cause for the popularity of the novella in Germany. When actions can be explained as mere reactions, the novella can be seen as operating in the service of a self, a construct under pressure to excuse itself and to limit its responsibility. The article ends with considerations about the evolutionary origins of fiction. pretense in the form of captions for the hasty reader, the kind of reader anticipated by these early novellas, often printed in newspapers such as Kleist's Berliner Abendblatter. I believe that these arguments start from a somewhat agreeable consensus, originating from less contentious ground, and move only slowly to more speculative, but hopefully not unheard-of, hypotheses. In order to proceed by means of argumentation as opposed to the interpretation of individual texts, I will place my abbreviated readings of specific novellas into footnotes where appropriate. Most descriptions of the novella situate the event as the center of their considerations, which is not that surprising considering that many novellas boast events that deserve to be called "unheard-of' events, as Goethe famously articulates it in his conversations with Eckermann (January 29, 1827). In what follows, I will capitalize this kind of "Event" to indicate its proximity to the name: it is singular, requires an act of recognition by the reader, and, in its singularity, may well escape our understanding. We can think of Peter Schlemhils wundersame Geschichte; Hoffmann's Sandman (181617), with its primal event of an alchemical experiment gone wrong; and Goethe's novella Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder (1809), where the attempted suicide of a young woman triggers a young man to declare his love to her "without knowing what he was saying or doing" (Goethe 440). Yet as I wish to show, the case of the event is far from clear. Other novellas, including Goethe's Der Mann von funfzig Jahren (1807-29), Stifter's Abdias (1842), Grillparzer's Der arme Spielmann (1848), or Morike's Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (1856) do not at first glance offer a clearly marked central event, though closer examination may reveal one. In addition, more than a few of these Events do not strike readers at the moment of their occurrence in the plot or text (neither in narrated time nor in narrative time), but become "unheard-of" in that they radically become disjointed with previous events and provoke puzzlement only retrospectively. 1 These retrospective reflections are distinct from the after effects of an event that follow a cause-and-effect logic. When the event-earthquake causes destruction, and this destruction frees someone from prison, this is not yet a retrospective reflection. If, however, the prisoner then starts to rationalize his improbable, lucky escape as divine intervention, he enters the realm of a reflective construction of the Event. In general, the Event is marked by an aura of uncertainty and doubt. Most novellas do not simply present an Event, if even retrospectively, but work hard to negotiate and discuss it, place it in a legal framework, debate it controversially, reflect on it hermeneutically, position it in contexts, frame it, repeat it, or debate it in some other form. These later reflections on the Event do not merely constitute some echo chamber containing the combustion of the Event. Rather, they are somehow part of it; they effectively turn the event into the Event by giving it the attention required for it to unfold or even come into being. Goethe, in his most condensed reflection on the novella, namely, his late text Novelle (1828), draws attention to the constant construction and change of events after the fact. Symbolic of the many turns is the dramatic attack of the tiger, which, shortly after the attack

História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, 2020

This article analyzes the problem of referentiality in the historical novel, based on a comparison between its classic and contemporary forms. The first section addresses the “mixture of history and invention” that, following Alessandro Manzoni, was the foremost characteristic of the realist historical novel. The next section discusses how the meta-historical novel of the second half of the 20th century - for example, Disgrace(J. M. Coetzee) and El entenado (Juan José Saer)-eclipsed the problem of referentiality by assuming that the historical novel should operate by its own procedures, and not those of history. The following sections discuss the referential turn in 21st century literary narratives, focusing on three novels: El material humano, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; K. Relato de uma busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, and Jan Karski, by Yannick Haenel. The article concludes that the inversion of these two poles—from non-referentiality to the predominance of referentiality—is an unexpected facet of the elasticity of the concept (and practice) of fiction, which by denying itself ultimately enriches itself.