“Con la cabeza en el abismo”: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666, Literary Guerrilla, and the Maquiladora of Death

Abstract

In this essay, I examine The Savage Detectives (published in 1998, and translated in 2007),¹ a novel that received the XVI Herralde Novel Award and launched Bolaño’s professional literary career (shortened by liver failure in 2003), and 2666 (released posthumously in 2004 and translated into English in 2008), the novel that occupied the last five years of his life. In the first novel, he explores the cult of the literary figure and an emerging anarchic literary guerrilla group named the “real visceralistas.” The plots of the two novels revolve around the search for writers in the city of Santa Teresa, pseudonym of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Cesárea Tinajero, in The Savage Detectives, and Benno von Archimboldi, in 2666. In this essay, I examine The Savage Detectives and 2666 in the light of an imaginary locus alluding to Ciudad Juárez and the north of Mexico as a fictional space that absorbed Bolaño, particularly in view of the femicides in Ciudad Juárez (a topic that has generated several novels, documentaries, and films).² These femicides were the tragic preamble to a slaughter by drug trafficking groups that has annihilated eleven thousand people in this city of one million inhabitants. Finding the missing literary figures, however, is not as important in these novels as the quest itself and the narration of the crimes committed.

El mundo era un ataúd lleno de chirridos.

—2666, 572