A thing intercepting the light. Displaced figures of the book in Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

Barthes points out that subverting the material regularity of the work is tantamount to threatening the very idea of literature. We follow this approach with a caveat: where Barthes says work, we say book, in the hypothesis that infringing upon the materiality of the object itself is also a way of threatening the traditional idea of literature. We speak of figures as the possibility of theoretically and aesthetically elaborating alternative versions of any thinkable object. In Bolaño’s writing these figures appear as displacements of books from their common usages, so we present them by nominally indicating the direction. Thus we have the book-obstacle, the book-brick, the book-food, the book-prosthesis, the book-thing and the non-book. By splitting a distance, by operating a displacement between the object and its functions, Bolaño’s gesture unsettles crystallized senses around the book, metonymically restoring to literature its constitutive intransitivity, its power for creating lines of flight.