The Forensic Novel: Event, Archive, and Violence after Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

• In Event: Sobre el género policíaco

Abstract

Almost twenty-five years have passed since Roberto Gonzalez’s Echevarría, in his now classic Myth and Archive, proposed the archival fiction as the founding figure for a history of Latin American narrative. From a present day perspective, Gonzalez Echevarría’s reading of the novel as a genre that mimics the language of authority – be it the law, science or anthropology – seems, however, to run the risk of becoming outdated. His literary history, with its emphasis on myth, history and identity, seems to have been written from the perspective of a reader of the total novel of the Latin American Boom. The contemporary innovations of the Latin American novel ask for a revision of his central thesis regarding the relationship between the novel and the archive. Taking Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 as its point of departure, and in particular the section entitled La Parte de los Crímenes, my paper proposes the figure of the forensic novel as the contemporary literary artifact capable of structuring the novel’s always productive relationship to the archive. The forensic novel – a literary inheritor of the Latin American testimonio, the Borgesian review and the Walshian investigative journalism – figures a new triptych between history, archive and novel, one which no longer takes myth as its basis, but rather depicts the violent emergence of the historical event within the archive. Between the event and the archive, the forensic novel then becomes the paradigmatic archival fiction for a generation obsessed with the literary possibility of historical experience.

Author

• Carlos Fonseca Suárez, Princeton University