Abstract
As a literary parallel to the largely unsolved violence against maquiladoras workers in Ciudad Juárez, México, the city of Santa Teresa in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 reveals waves of ghostly, and largely feminine, voices. When these spectral presences attempt to communicate with visiting international intellectuals, however, their desperate pleas illicit scant scholarly attention. This chapter argues that the possibility of resolving Santa Teresa’s “femicide” depends upon reading the ghostly signs of these crimes rather than privileging a wholly impractical hunt for the existentially empty figure of an obscure German novelist.
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Notes
- 1.
Derrida ascribes this self-contemplation to a kind of “echo” that responds to the physical nature of putting pen to paper (74).
- 2.
In this sense, ghosts form an immediate affinity with Bolaño’s postmodern sensibility, according to Kokaly Tapia. Whether referring to the borders supposedly separating high/low culture or “good/evil,” Kokaly Tapia places Bolaño firmly within a decentralized aesthetic.
- 3.
In the Southern Cone, for instance, Avelar saw its realism as a “cliché-saturated form” that did not respond satisfactorily to its social exigencies (52).
- 4.
In fact, McCann argues that Bolaño accomplishes both goals with a novel that establishes a global niche and posits a cultural and existential danger that demands readers’ attention (“Eventfulness of Roberto Bolaño” 79).
- 5.
This separation between Bolaño and one defining Latin American origin speaks to the sense of “ posnacionalismo” that Pera underlines in Bolaño’s aesthetic production. Volpi, however, adopts a wistful tone in the face of Bolaño’s death when he volunteers the latter as the last truly Latin American author. From a comparative perspective, Novillo-Corvalán relates Bolaño’s defiance of borders to Joyce’s “aesthetic of expansion” (351). This cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, only seems to provide a false aesthetic freedom from McCann’s perspective. Indeed, these global movements of writers only obscure the utilization of low-paid workers who facilitate this jet-setting lifestyle (“Discrepant Cosmopolitanism” 135).
- 6.
In fact, Bolaño’s “Discurso de Caracas,” which celebrated his acceptance of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2003, demonstrated clearly this anxiety regarding the wasted creative potential in Latin America: “Todo Latinoamérica está sembrada con los huesos de estos jóvenes olvidados” (Paz Soldán 40).
- 7.
Both characters, according to Solotorevsky, function as a part of searches that aim toward hopefully decoding them. Still, Espinosa counters by reminding critics that the actual discovery of Cesárea is emblematic of the death and defeat that greet the end of these searches in Bolaño’s novels (78–79).
- 8.
For a more nuanced view of the intersection between globalization and the overwhelmingly female identity of maquiladora worker deaths on the Mexican border, see Staudt’s book. To explore the economic use value of these workers’ bodies, refer to Monárrez Fragoso’s essay. Finally, Olivera’s article delves into the contradictory situation of Mexican border women who see more available jobs outside the home and yet still find themselves facing an angry machista (and often unemployed) workforce.
- 9.
As noted by González González, this intellectual capital and the privileges inherent to it obscure a profound feeling of personal failure and professional uselessness on the part of these professors (La escritura bárbara 86).
- 10.
Corral traces this general uneasiness with the literary industry to a specific critique of the “boom” and other Latin American efforts to transform literature into a commodity (47).
- 11.
Nguyen observes that these intellectuals’ ultimately aimless trips are doomed by a patent unwillingness to surrender their “sovereignty” to the welcomed unpredictability of travel and cultural discovery.
- 12.
This quality of literary globalization , which unites the world’s readers around certain novels (among them 2666), is cited by Pope as a shared purpose of these scholars as well (160).
- 13.
Revealingly, Daniuska González González explores an important connection between Bolaño’s negative perspective toward literary criticism and excrement itself as a symbolic elaboration of its worth (“El mar de la mierda” 363).
- 14.
Franco argues that this intellectually myopic perspective held by European critics is standardized by a “universalism” of cultural heterogeneity that originates, revealingly, in the European academy itself. Thus, Norton’s misreading of this discourse originates in a more general European tendency to “filter” Latin American texts through a distinctly European point of view (Decline and Fall 15).
- 15.
Dekhard, however, envisions these processes as intimately interrelated. That is, globalization dominates and subdues both author and worker as a means of ultimately serving the raw needs of capital .
- 16.
Walker, for one, argues that only this detached perspective is possible in the description of these crimes patently incapable of human comprehension (101).
- 17.
Rodríguez perceptively highlights the border itself as the ideal laboratory for cultivating these deaths in the sense that “spectral characters” can navigate this sprawling, lawless area without putting down roots (164).
- 18.
This combination of an influx of economic “others” in maquiladoras and their judicial vulnerability outside the home in Mexico’s border regions creates a collective masculine frustration that, in turn, translates into a larger number of abuse and feminicide cases, according to Olivera.
- 19.
According to Monárrez Fragoso, this body is a thoroughly “ commodified” one whose fluid interchangeability with others renders women in Ciudad Juárez as imminently expendable when their value as capital expires (59–65).
- 20.
Elmore adds that this attribution of “authorship” to murder is a part of a larger confusion between killing and writing that returns to the enigmatic figure of Archimboldi (259).
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Schulenburg, C.T. (2018). Literature as Ghost Whisperer in 2666: Narrating the Impossible. In: Botero, B. (eds) Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68158-0_2
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