Apocryphal Memory and Displacing the Chronological Past: Reconfigurations of Time in Bolaño’s Amuleto

• In Event: Specters of the Vanguard

Abstract

Narrated from an indeterminable present, prophetic of the narrator’s impending death, and erratic in its ordering of the past, Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto (1999) presents Auxilio Lacouture’s account of the literary and political scene of the sixties and seventies in Latin America. Through a chronologically unstable lens, Auxilio recalls the details surrounding her captivity on UNAM’s campus in September 1968. My project examines the relationship between memory, temporality, and narrative in this semi-apocryphal history of Latin America’s literary tradition, underscoring how these three elements simultaneously structure and undermine the edifice of the present. I seek to show that, by constructing the present out of an unreliable past, Auxilio evokes and perpetuates a problematic nostalgia for a defiant aesthetic tradition.

Drawing on theories of temporality and narrative by Paul Ricoeur, I address how Bolaño’s work interrogates the correlative roles of narrative in the articulation of chronology, and time in the construction of narrative. Considering these elements alongside Auxilio’s unstable memory, I demonstrate how Amuleto eschews the overtly political agenda of assigning blame for perceived failures of mid-twentieth century utopianism, yet is extremely political in its questioning of chronological narratives. Amuleto’s web of semi-historical, semi-apocryphal recollections spun by a chronologically confused narrator draws attention to the foundation upon which modern idealizations of past aesthetic projects are constructed. My paper underscores the active role of memory, not only in the structuring of this chronological past, but also and more urgently, in the willful construction of the present out of an already anticipated future.

Author

• Tamara L Mitchell, Indiana University