Unearthing the desert: mirages in the waste land

Abstract

This paper aims at comprehending the image of the desert in the work of Roberto Bolaño, focusing mainly on the novels Los detectives salvajes and 2666. His writing is understood within a framework that forces the binding of two different readings of the desert, their origins tracing back to separate genealogies. On the one hand, the desert that resumes the image of the terre gaste of Chrétien de Troyes and the waste land of T.S Eliot; on the other hand, the desert that inscribes itself within the motifs of exiles and wandering, associated to the nomadic quest for the other, in which the desert figures as a promise. This second desert enables an escape from the contemporary deserts of fiction, whereby literature sows (in an ambivalent manner) the waste land.