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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2019
This essay reads the landscape of Roberto Bolaño’s fictional Santa Teresa through a new materialist lens. In the fourth section of Bolaño’s epic novel 2666, “The Part about the Crimes,” the bodies of 112 women, victims of a series of unsolved murders, accumulate as part of a postglobal dystopic narrative of material and existential waste. Critics have especially noted the text’s clinical narration of events, which effectively reduces the victims’ bodies to interchangeable parts of a larger assemblage that also includes the factories (maquiladoras) where the women work, the northern capital that funds them, the police force that repeatedly fails to solve the murders, and the trash heaps and landfills where many of the bodies appear. It is, however, the women’s inert, mutilated bodies that animate Bolaño’s novel. Dehumanized by the text, the bodies’ materiality paradoxically gives human heft to an otherwise mechanistic account of undifferentiated carnage.
1 Epigraph: see Bolaño, Roberto, 2666, trans. Wimmer, Natasha ([2004]; New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 206Google Scholar, emphasis added. See also López, Alfred J., “Contesting the Material Turn; or, The Persistence of Agency,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.3 (2018), 371–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For a partial list, see for example, Reinares, Laura Barberán, “Globalized Philomels: State Patriarchy, Transnational Capital, and the Femicides on the US-Mexican Border in Bolaño’s 2666,” South Atlantic Review 75.4 (2010), 51–72Google Scholar; Fourez, Cathy, “Entre transfiguración y transgression: el scenario especial de Santa Teresa en la novela de Roberto Bolaño 2666,” Debate Feminista 17.33 (2006): 21–45Google Scholar; Driver, Alice Laurel, “Más o menos muerto: Bare Life in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 23.1 (2014): 51–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frantzen, Mikkel Krause, “The Forensic Fiction of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58.4 (2016), 437–48Google Scholar; Livingston, Jessica, “Murder in Juárez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 25.1 (2004): 59–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mathew, Shaj, “Ciudad Juárez in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57.4 (2016): 402–16Google Scholar; Olivera, Mercedes, “Violencia Femicida: Violence against Women and Mexico’s Structural Crisis,” trans. Furio, Victoria J., Latin American Perspectives 33.2 (March 2006), 104–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peláez, Sol, “Counting Violence: Roberto Bolaño and 2666,” Chasquí: revista de literatura latinoamericana 43.2 (2014), 30–47Google Scholar; and Raghinaru, Camelia, “Biopolitics in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, ‘The Part about the Crimes,’ ” Altre Modernitá 15 (2016): 146–62Google Scholar. The most trenchant of these critiques, however, has arguably been Grant Farred’s “The Impossible Closing: Death, Neoliberalism, and the Postcolonial in Bolaño’s 2666,” which I had the pleasure of curating for a 2010 Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies.
3 The figure is far from definitive, as Part 4’s narrator establishes early on: “From then on, the killings of women began to be counted. But it’s likely there had been other deaths before” (353). This is consistent with the real-life femicide of Ciudad Juárez; depending on who is counting and how, some estimates put the number of victims since 1993 at nearly 500. One researcher avers that due to “the justice system’s deficiencies … no one is even sure of the number of murders in Mexico generally.” See Olivera, “Violencia Femicida,” 112.
4 Laura Barberán Reinares, for example, notes the narrative’s “impassive repetition of the horror,” its “aseptic, disengaged language” depicting “countless corpses that keep appearing showing signs of torture and sexual violence throughout”; Cathy Fourez likewise references the narrative’s “repetitive style” [“índole repetititiva”] that would suddenly [“de manera repentina”] transform the novel’s “everyday violence into nightmare” [“violencia cotidiana hacia la pesadilla”]. See respectively Reinares, “Globalized Philomels,” 52, 56–57 and Fourez, “Entre transfiguración y transgression,” 35. See also Driver, “Más o menos muerto,” 57–59.
5 Bolaño, 2666, 206.
6 Bolaño, 2666, 568.
7 Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York, Columbia University Press, 2011), 4 and 7, respectivelyGoogle Scholar.
8 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Fowkes, Ben, vol. 1 ([1867]; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2004), 798CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums (London, Verso, 2006), 199Google Scholar.
10 Chowdhury, Kanisha, “(En)countering the Refugee: Capital, Óscar Martínez’s The Beast, and the ‘Problem’ of the Surplus Population,” Postcolonial Text 12.3/4 (2017): 2Google Scholar.
11 Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus, Martin ([1858/1939]; reprint, New York, Vintage, 1973), 399Google Scholar.
12 Chowdhury, “(En)countering the Refugee,” 5.
13 Marx, Capital, 798.
14 Bolaño, 2666, 568.
15 Marx, Capital, 863.
16 See Caputo, Philip, “Juárez: City of Death,” VQR Online 83.3 (2007)Google Scholar.
17 See Livingston, “Murder in Juárez,” 59–60, 64.
18 By the early 2000s, at least half of Juárez’s population flows come from three Mexican states: the city’s own state of Chihuahua (26 percent), Durango (15 percent), and Coahuila (9 percent). This source does not account for busloads of workers brought in from more distant states—Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca—by the companies themselves to work in the maquiladoras. See Fragoso, Julia Monárrez, “Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2001,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 28 (2002): 156. 278-295Google Scholar
19 See Livingston, “Murder in Juárez,” 62.
20 See Raghinaru, “Biopolitics in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, ‘The Part about the Crimes,’ ” 146.
21 The women’s paradoxical status as both indispensable and disposable, marginalized and foundational to the system’s very structure, is reminiscent of Derrida’s supplemént in his famous essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” See Jacques, Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967), trans. Bass, Alan (1967; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–94Google Scholar.
22 Bolaño, 2666, 358.
23 Bolaño, 2666, 359.
24 See Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi–xvii, 1–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Because this this not a quotation from Bennett’s text but a parody of it, the italics are obviously mine.
26 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4.
27 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
28 See Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects: Embodied Subjects and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 10Google Scholar.
29 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects.
30 Bolaño, 2666, 372–73, emphasis added.
31 See Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (1995; Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press)Google Scholar.
32 See Wright, Melissa, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006) 57Google Scholar.
33 Bolaño, 2666, 358–59.
34 Bolaño 602–03, emphasis added.
35 The term arcana impèrii most literally translates to “secrets of power” or “principles of power” or “of the state.” Agamben’s use of the term stems from two second-century works of Tacitus: Histories (I, 4) and the Annals (II, 36).
36 Bolaño, 2666, 605.
37 Bolaño, 2666, 605–06.
38 Bolaño, 2666, 606.
39 Bolaño, 2666, 581.
40 Bolaño, 2666, 582.
41 “All is lost, unless …”