Ciudad Juárez: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2013-2014: Violence
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Roberto Bolano
Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
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Mathew, Shaj
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Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño owes much of his current literary celebrity to the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, 2666. The novel comprises five parts, which ultimately coalesce to create a harrowing portrait of violence against women in a Mexican border town. As this grisly scene unfolds, Bolaño implicates the novel's characters—and, more broadly, the reader—in a crime equally disturbing: inaction, indifference, and thus complicity. However, Bolaño offers artistic solutions to the bleakness of the modern condition: reading and writing. In creating this utterly sui generis novel—and violating established literary norms in the process—Bolaño thus enacts the very solution that he offers to the problems of modernity, a time in which "poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated."

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2014-05-01
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This paper was part of the 2013-2014 Penn Humanities Forum on Violence. Find out more at http://www.phf.upenn.edu/annual-topics/violence.
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