El arte de la desorientación. Humor, ambigüedad y juego en la narrativa de Roberto Bolaño
Authors: Trojanowski Aleksander 
Published: May 2024

The object of the present study is the strategy of “disorientation” in Roberto Bolaño’s fiction. By “disorientation” we understand a specific narrative strategy, which is a play with reader’s expectations. Its main aim is to influence the reader by producing disorientation–this is to say, undermine his initial expectations–in the process of reading. The goal is achieved in two ways that stand as the two aspects of disorientation: firstly, by the so called mechanism of humor, i. e. a process which begins with arousal of certain expectations that are consecutively refuted. And secondly, by the so called mechanism of ambiguity, i. e. a process in which the expectations are simultaneously aroused and undermined by the information provided by the text. The objective of the investigation is to reconstruct the implicit reading of Bolaño’s texts, i. e. the reading presupposed in the strategy conceptualized as “disorientation”. To this end, the study offers a series of detailed analysis of the techniques aimed at the arousal of certain expectations, as well as the techniques that subvert those expectations. The main theoretical context of the analysis is Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics. Apart from that, due to the importance of the pragmatic orientation of the research, the influence of the narrative strategy on the process of reading is being studied. An additional contexts to grasp the mentioned influence is Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history. The main theoretical contexts that have been used in the conceptualization of the analysis are: (a) in the aspect of the structure of the process of reading: Iser’s receptions aesthetics; (b) in the aspect of the mutual relations between the reader and the text: Umberto Eco’s notion of textual cooperation and Model Reader; (c) in the aspect of interpretation and the management of the incongruity of interpretations due to the effects of the disorientation techniques: the theory of humor of Hurley, Dennett and Adams; (d) Benjamin’s philosophy of history, working as an additional context that helps in the problematization of the conclusions, i. e. the implicit reading of Bolaño’s texts presupposed in the strategy of disorientation. The book is divided into three parts: the theoretical part, the analytical part and conclusions. The first one (chapters 1 and 2) provides an outline of the theoretical context indispensable to understand the forthcoming analysis. In the first place, the object and the objective of the study are defined. Then, the hypothesis is presented; it states that the very way Bolaño’s narrative technique works is by subverting previously aroused expectations of the reader. Consequently, any reading of the text the reader might come up with, turns out to be inconclusive and incomplete. In the second place, the term “disorientation” is conceptualized as a narrative play that manifests itself in the form of humor and ambiguity. In order to provide theoretical ground for the conceptualization, Iser’s concepts of the process of reading, the text model and narrative gaps are introduced. The text model, built by the reader, is the fundamental resource to concretize the narrative gaps, which leads to a fruitful reading of the text. Ultimately, the theoretical part mentions the two ways in which Bolaño’s narrative strategy subverts initial reader’s expectations. In the context of the theory of humor of Hurley, Dennett and Adams, humor and ambiguity are presented as two mechanism of reader’s disorientation. The second part of the book is dedicated to the analysis of the two strategies of disorientation: the first, based on the mechanism of humor and the second, based on the mechanism of ambiguity. In both cases, we begin with the analysis of the techniques that arouse certain expectations and we move on to the techniques that subvert them and to the consequences of the former to the reading process. The analyzed corpus are the novels The Savage Detectives (humor) and By Night In Chile (ambiguity). The last part of the study summarizes the specific conclusions that have arisen in the course of the research and contextualizes them with the use of the notions from Benjamin’s philosophy of history. Firstly, the analytical part that provided a series of examples of subversion of the text model by narrative techniques seems to confirm the hypothesis of the study. Consequently, the pragmatic effect of Bolaño’s narrative strategy (disoriented reading) manifests itself in two ways: firstly, as abandonment of the reader (as opposed to textual cooperation) and secondly, in the form of reading as a simulation of social and ethical agency. Such a specific mode of reading imposed by the strategy of narrative disorientation is linked with tow notions from Benjamin: the now-time [Jetztzeit] and the weak messianic power. The crucial conclusion lays in the reconstruction of the influence that the narrative strategy has on the reader, who is confronted with a number of techniques that impede a formulation of a complete and conclusive reading of the text. By making reference to the work of Benjamin, such a strategy is problematized from the point of view of the social and ethical function of literature. In the case of Bolaño, the function may be expressed with his own phrase that literature is an “exercise in tolerance”. Thus, literature is ultimately a space in which the reader can confront objects of real marginalization.