Death to Voltaire! the twilight of the enlightenment in La Literatura Nazi en América by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

This article seeks to establish that La literatura nazi en América, by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1996), is a narrative inscribed in the cultural climate that sociology and philosophy have characterized as postmodern. This would be given by its pretension to show, through what the critic Linda Hutcheon (1993) calls “postmodern parody”, the occlusion of the total discourses that guided the West in the past centuries, giving a solid foundation to the categories that Organization of understanding of political, social and cultural phenomena. Thus, the parody of the encyclopedic text problematizes the basis of world science according to apparently superior criteria, based on a transcendent and divine legality. Bolaño connects, at this point, with the notion of sable / power elaborated by Michel Foucault (2008), staging the twilight environment of universals, where the encyclopedia and encyclopedism have a privileged place, since both were part of the foundational values of the French Enlightenment with the design of the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and D’Alambert and in which Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu collaborate, all authors parodies in the novel.basis of world science according to apparently superior criteria, based on a transcendentand divine legality. Bolaño connects, at this point, with the notion of sable / powerelaborated by Michel Foucault (2008), staging the twilight environment of universals,where the encyclopedia and encyclopedism have a privileged place, since both were part ofthe foundational values of the French Enlightenment with the design of the Encyclopédie,edited by Diderot and D’Alambert and in which Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieucollaborate, all authors parodies in the novel.