Intertextuality and Bodies in Agony in Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain

Abstract

In Monsieur Pain by Bolaño we assist to a process of mourning of modernity under the form of the return of a repressed traumatic memory. Using the neo-detective genre together with features from the fantastic genre, Bolaño brings up an aesthetic of the sinister in order to express the ominous, the devastating effects of the Spanish Civil War. César Vallejo´s dying body becomes the future exquisite corpse in this tour through the mausoleum of memory, therefore, representing the death of Latin American poetic avant-garde. It is proposed that the topic of the dying body in a hospital together with the criticism of modern medical knowledge are both prefigured in the poem “The windows were shaken” by César Vallejo, being this novel a kind of tribute and homage to the Peruvian poet, as a symbol of the orphan nature of exile and the subordinate and peripheral nature of Latin American avant-garde art, one of the utopias of modernity.