A camel, a weasel or a whale? A ball in the clouds

Abstract

"What you can't talk about, you have to be quiet," Wittgenstein says at the end of Tractatus. Roberto Bolaño shares this paradox. In the case of Estrella distante, the novel on which the analysis will focus, his habitual verbalism is restricted, leaving only a few brief passages where bolañismo resurfaces as an exception. It is evident that the Chilean author knows how to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the narrative discourse devoid of verbalism but also exhausts them; then he has to face the dilemma of how to continue speaking without extending the text. The solution he finds is to introduce another discourse that will mainly draw on the realm of the visual. The idea is to make a mixed system work that goes beyond the traditional functions of echrastic description of images and visual illustration of words, and forms a sui generis construct that plays a leading role in the work.