The Wounded History. On Roberto Bolaño's Amulet

Abstract

The article proposes a reading of Amuleto (1999) by Roberto Bolaño as a retrospective novel oriented to the elaboration of a mourning. Amuleto is part of a novelistic cycle formed by La literatura nazi en América, Estrella distante, Los detectives salvajes and itself. With these novels, published between 1996 and 1999, Bolaño founded a literary project with strong definitions of the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Among the four stories there is in turn a structural relationship that I propose to call “underlining”. Just as Estrella distante marks an “underlining” on La literatura nazi en América in order to indicate how to read the previous novel in the light of the one that follows it, Amuleto does the same in relation to Los detectives salvajes. This article analyzes this procedure of recapitulation in order to affirm that this retrospective link can be related to the psychoanalytic concept of “resignification”, insofar as it consists of projecting a new light on a past event so that it can be perceived in a different way. We propose, in short, to read Amuleto as a story of resignification and elaboration that seeks to settle accounts with the erased memory of what Bolaño considered a lost generation. It is a novel that explores the collapse between the expectations of that generation and the experience (of defeat) of the survivors.