Work and Time in Roberto Bolaño: Outline of the Structure of The Savage Detectives

Abstract

Two decades after the death of Roberto Bolaño, the work of literary criticism seems to be focused on the task of highlighting some of the possibilities that—due to the inevitable exhaustion it suffered given its global popularity—remain for the study of his work. However, far from being a problem of criticism, both the exhaustion and the possible paths that open from it seem to be more a matter of Bolaño’s own work, which, as is known, gives a preponderant place to the literary in both its social and material aspects. In this article, we propose that this intuition is not only contained in Bolaño’s work itself but is represented very clearly in the poetics of action that Cesárea Tinajero’s work provokes, precisely in the encounter between work and time from which a transformation arises. This transformation is indeed what Bolaño assigns, as a destiny, to all human work. Using a diagram of the structure of the novel The Savage Detectives, we will propose to graph the way in which characters, objects, and mysteries are related to the material and formal instances of Bolaño’s work, proposing that the study of its transformation must necessarily pass through these channels.