School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Race, Capital and Desire in Roberto Bolaño: Genre in 2666

Cao, Jack ( 2022)

Roberto Bolano’s posthumously published 2666 is a novel split into five parts without a clear logic of organisation. I argue that its unity lies in the way each section takes up and then dissolves the conventions of a different genre. Before engaging in a close reading of the work, I seek to establish the importance of generic interpretation in contemporary literary criticism by arguing that genres are not simply categories for sorting texts, but names for complex representational mechanics through which a text relates to its social world. Upon this basis, I show that the movement of the novel reproduces the same trajectory in each of its five parts: each section uses the conventions of the genre but only to negate its usual organisation of meaning and therefore relation to history. Ultimately, I argue, these structures of experience decompose in confrontation with the colonial destruction of life. Since there is no single received literary form that adequately represents the transformations of racial violence, Bolano negates a procession of genres as a way of testifying to the complex matrix of power, death and revolt in the contemporary world. (Apologies for absence of accent on Bolano but the system does not let me type them)