Roberto Bolaño and the visual imagination: a poetics of the eye

Abstract

The eye was a fetish object for the surrealists, a locus of desire, a portal into the unconscious and the irrational. Roberto Bolaño carried Breton’s savage eye into the center of his own poetics, to see anew. In his work we find the eye as symbol and metaphor, its communicating gesture, its visionary capacity to plumb the depths of dreams, that is able to reclaim the raw, primal nature of perception. We also see the opposite, eyes that cannot see, that are obfuscated, that alight on arbitrary surfaces like stains on the wall or ceiling to open the space of imagination. In Bolaño's work the eye functions as an organizing principle that unifies the components of a poetic system. Shifting signifiers that recur and link and emphasize the thingness of Bolaño’s body of work, making it into an object to be contemplated, una figura sembrada de ojos. We suggest a new way of reading Bolaño. To do so, we look at the text, open the imagination to see Bolaño’s poetic system, his recurring pictograms that act as a second-tier language, geometrical figures that spatialize and constellate, the picture that lay embedded in the language. We locate, bracket, and observe examples of Bolaño’s recurring glyphs, which we call “bolañoglyphs” -windows, triangles, the number three, and the eye providentially casting its spell-shadow-screen– and approach this system through a comparison with another similar system though across the intermedial gulf of image and text; that of Miró’s famous miroglyphs. What happens when we read a painting-poem and look at a novel-poem?

El ojo era un objeto fetiche para los surrealistas, un locus del deseo. Roberto Bolaño llevó el ojo salvaje de Breton al centro de su propia poética, para ver y mirar nuevamente. El ojo como símbolo y metáfora, su gesto comunicador, su capacidad visionaria para sondear el inconsciente, su capacidad para reivindicar la naturaleza cruda y primigenia de la percepción. El ojo opera como principio organizador que unifica los componentes de un sistema poético recursivo que enlaza y enfatiza el carácter de cosa de la obra de Bolaño, convirtiéndola en un objeto para ser contemplado, una figura sembrada de ojos. Se analiza su sistema poético: una serie de pictogramas recurrentes que actúan como un lenguaje de segundo orden, figuras geométricas que espacializan y constelan la imagen que yace incrustada en el lenguaje. Se localizan, colocan entre corchetes y observan ejemplos de los glifos recurrentes en su obra, aquí denominados «bolañoglifos» --ventanas, triángulos, el número tres y el ojo que proyecta providencialmente su hechizo-sombra-pantalla-- y se compara cómo el sistema de glifos verbales trasladó el sistema de figuras poético-pictóricas de Miró, sus célebres miroglifos.