Bolaño con Deleuze: El hipo como enfermedad de la historia en Monsieur Pain

Abstract

Evil and violence characterize Roberto Bolaño’ narratives and are unthinkable without the historical motor that unfolds them. History contains them and thus represents the key feature from Bolaño’s poetics, which is here examined with a reading of Monsieur Pain. The argumentation begins by shedding light on an intertextual dialogue with fantastic short stories from the nineteenth century and afterwards shows that the thematizations of an instant of shock and empathy stand in for an immanent core from which history is configured. This core allows to reconstruct the fictional treatment of history and memory and, lastly, leads to an ethics of memory and its antagonistic stance towards an illustrated conception of history.