Abject Spaces and the Hinterland in Bolaño's Work

Summary

Abstract: In her article “Abject Spaces and the Hinterland in Bolaño's Work” Stacey Balkan discusses magical realism, the trope of the return (to a precolonial utopia), and the use of the quixotic in Bolaño's texts. Bolaño's signatures are “visceral realism” and global contexts which represent a transnational imaginary over and against the precolonial. The ambiguous borderlands emphasized in “Macondo” literature are herein replaced by a new epistemological horizon. The border is no longer a fixed point, but is, instead, a shifting hinterland that separates the objective real from the subjective imaginary, an imaginative horizon over and against a specific geopolitical mapping. More amorphous than its previous incarnation, Bolaño's transnational Latin American borderland is a polycentric spatial matrix that resists normative categorization because it relies on new conceptions of geography and identity. Balkan postulates that a focal point in Bolaño's texts functions as a commentary both on traditional notions of colonialism and globality and on their representations in the Latin American literary canon.

Introduction

If “world literature” implies a mode of circulation (see Damrosch)—read often by comparatists as an ordered system conceived within a global paradigm that insists on the centrality of Anglophone scholarship and the alterity of the non-English speaking Other—it follows that it likewise implies a specifically colonial cartography that posits an educated and civilized urban space (i.e., Angel Rama's “lettered city”) against a rural hinterland characterized by premodern savagery or the non-English speaking other. This is why David Damrosch in What is World Literature?