UNRAVELING NEOLIBERAL NARRATIVES IN ROBERTO

BOLAÑO’S 2666

Mark W. Jacobs May 30, 2012

Roberto Bolaño and 2666

Bolaño’s last novel before his death in 2003

A critique of the problems of modernity both in Latin America and globally

One of the most recent and highest-profile novels to address the Juárez femicides

The border as a site of tension

How does Bolaño represent the borderlands?

How does the border, as both a concept and political-economic institution, structure the narrative in 2666?

Photo collage by Taller Yonke, outside Nogales

Writing against neoliberalism

“The view that individual liberty and freedom are the high point of civilization, and that individual liberty and freedom can best be protected and achieved [through] strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

(David Harvey, “On Neoliberalism”)

Workers at a Juárez maquiladora

President Clinton takes a quesiton about NAFTA

Santa Teresa and its women workers

Juárez’s fictional equivalent “[There were]

neighborhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and, sometimes in the distance, the silhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras.”

(Bolaño, 2666) Women are both instrumental

to the maquila economy, and yet devalued at the same time

Ciudad Juárez, the inspiration for Bolano’s Santa Teresa

The long shadow of modernity

Europe post-1945: a point of historical breach “A man who believed in progress, it goes

without saying. My poor father. He believed in progress and of course he believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing.”

“Those who made revolution and those who were devoured by that same revolution, though it wasn’t the same but another, not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.” (Bolaño, 2666)

Nazi rally at Nuremberg, 1934

Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, 1945

Whose progress? The novel posits a link between the political

economy of the US-Mexico border and Enlightenment-era positivism and European fascism.

“Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide—an ethic—for all human action.” (David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism)

A memorial to the victims of the Juárez femicides

After an uptick in drug violence, a federal police caravan enters Juárez (May 2011)

Leaving positivism out to dry

“Amalfitano took out three clothespins, which he persisted in calling perritos, as they were called in Chile, and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the clotheslines, and then he went back into the house, feeling much calmer.” (Bolaño, 2666)

For Bolaño, the textbook exposed to withstand “the facts of life” symbolizes the eventual crumbling of human rationality in the face of brutality.

DuChamp’s Unhappy Readymade, 1919

The twilight of enlightenment

What is it about the border that serves the logic of neoliberalism?

What does this logic suggest about how we have interpreted the meaning of freedom?

What forms of activism can transform the border into an inventive space of resistance?

Occupy Juárez protestor at the US Consulate

Ni Una Más demonstrators

Works CitedArriola, Elvia R. “Accountability for Murder in the Maquiladoras: Linking Corporate Indifference to

Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera. Ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba with Georgina Guzmán. Austin: University of Texas, 2010. 25-61.

Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Picador, 2008.

Butler, Judith. “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics.” AIBR 4.3 (2009): i-xiii.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. John Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Gaspar de Alba, Alicia and Georgina Guzmán. “Feminicidio: The “Black Legend” of the Border.” Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera. Ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba with Georgina Guzmán. Austin: University of Texas, 2010. 1-21.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Harvey, David. Interview with Sasha Lilley. “On Neoliberalism.” Monthly Review 19 June 2006. Web. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Malpas, Simon and Paul Wake. “Negative Dialectics.” The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. Ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. 231.

McCumber, John. Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought. Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.

Volk, Steven S. and Marian E. Schlotterbeck. “Reading the Popular Culture of Murder in Ciudad Juárez.” Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera. Ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba with Georgina Guzmán. Austin: University of Texas, 2010. 121-153.