A multiplicidade de Os Detetives Selvagens

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how the multiple trend represents a key reading of The Savage Detectives, a novel by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. The multiplicity appears in the encyclopedia opening of the novel, in its fragmented nature, in which a miscellany of viewpoint characters tells and describes, each one in their own way, experiences with the leaders of the poetic movement Visceral Realism, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Also the different Belano’s attributions, the alter ego that appears in other novels by the author, unfold from simple ideological reflex to an intertextuality with other works by the author, whose relationship with his other self has implications in the way that similarities and divergences of the historical and social contexts led them from exile to the resulting deterritoriality. Instead of using concepts like autobiography or autofiction to underline the multiple mirroring between author and character, I use the conception of Barthesian biographeme, which makes it possible to establish the connections and interdependence of character/author with the territories. The multiplicity of space is articulated with a multiplicity of voices, configured by a polyphonic system that gives autonomy to these various viewpoint characters, when describing the protagonists idiosyncratically. The plurivocity of these voices creates an unfinished sense about the pair of poets, transformed into floating signs that occupy the empty spaces of the novel. It is on Belano and Lima’s itinerary, marked by this continuous displacement and, therefore, authentic procrastination and proscription, that the reader realizes their competence as a co-participant in the construction of the novel.