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Scenes from the Global South: Women’s Bodies as Waste in Bolaño’s 2666
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2019
Abstract
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.
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References
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.
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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.
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40 Bolaño, 2666, 582.
41 “All is lost, unless …”