Art, Violence, and the Avant-Garde in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

• In Event: Specters of the Vanguard

Abstract

This essay considers the use of the historical avant-garde as a meta-aesthetic referent in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, analyzing the readymade object as a recurring motif across the novel’s multipart narrative. Exploring the significance of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade malheureux, simulacrally reconstructed in the Sonoran desert during the novel, I argue that the readymade serves as a conceptual link between modern forms of aesthetic subversion and globalized structures of capital. Displaced to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and left exposed to the elements, the uncanny presence of Duchamp’s readymade prefigures the appearance of the cadavers of slain maquiladora workers described later in the narrative, linking the novel’s objects of art to its objects of violence and marking a crossroads between transhistorical aesthetic traditions and transnational flows of capital, labor, and violence.

Duchamp’s readymade returns as a specter, in 2666, appearing on the plains of the Sonoran desert at a time when its spirit of radical critique is needed more than ever. Relating the motif of the readymade to traces of the historical avant-garde in Bolaño’s other works, I propose we understand this metatextual referencing as a literary form of traumatic repetition, what Hal Foster describes, in reference to Andy Warhol, as: “a repeating of an image to screen a traumatic real, which is nonetheless returned, accidentally or obliquely, in this very screening.” Juxtaposed against landscapes of violence and globalization that pose to exhaust the possibility of aesthetic subversion, Bolaño’s works repeatedly evoke past vanguards, obliquely revealing the traumatic reality of their absence.

Author

• Travis W Williams, University of Michigan