| dc.description.abstract | According to Georges Bataille, Literature consists of a stubborn search for freedom, never
bowing to the order and rules imposed by constituted societies, always standing in the antipodes
of the duration and the project of preservation of life proposed by modernity. Literature,
therefore, would respond to the demands of a world of Evil, a world contrary to harmony and
durable existence, postulant of disaster, shamelessness and negativity. At the center of these
relations between Literature and Evil, the object of our study is the Chilean author Roberto
Bolaño Ávalos (1953 - 2003), an authoritative work produced from the end of the 1980s until
the beginning of the 2000s, consolidated, in part, by the mythical figure of the author. Early
dead, Bolaño was included as the main name of the Latin American post-Boom, a new wave of
Latin American writers that caught the attention of critics from the 90s, with singular works in
relation to the productions of Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Donoso, Cortázar, Fuentes and
Carpentier. Functioning even in opposition to the consecration of these authors, Bolaño's
generation is situated between the trauma of dictatorships in America, the need for exile and
the primordially urban production, oblivious to the fantastic realism that characterized Latin
American literature. These traumas appear in the work of the Chilean author as a reverberation
of a deep Evil, which is announced in the impotence of his characters, in his writing at the same
time fragmentary and mighty, in the various historical episodes that are confused with smaller
private stories in poets and writers who become detectives or assassins, in the transgressive
experiences that lead subjects to ruin without postponement. To reflect on these issues in our
dissertation, in addition to Bataille, we use Blanchot (2011, 2002), Barthes (2005), and other
authors to address the symbolic flashes of Evil in the Chilean’s writer work. Amuleto is an
unfolding of one of several narratives contained in Detetives Selvagens (1998), masterpiece of
Roberto Bolaño; here, Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan exiled in Mexico, recounts her
adventures with Mexican poets and intellectuals while she was besieged in the bathroom of the
Autonomous University of Mexico on the day the institution was invaded by the military in
1968. This novel is central in Bolaño's work for bringing issues present throughout his work
and serving as a parallax view of all dimensions of this writer's Literature, also working for our
approach to the figures of evil in his books. | |
