Photography, “A plague without a name”. The “image-imprint” in the narrative by Álvaro Bisama

Abstract

This article tries to approach the novels Estrellas muertas (2010), Ruido (2012) and El brujo (2016) by the Chilean writer Álvaro Bisama to show the presence of an “image-imprint” (Didi-Huberman, 2004) as visual residuality of a political time marked by violence, in an operation that, although it achieves to reproduce the event, does not allow its closure. To achieve this, the author resorts to different representation strategies, such as metaphor, distortion, fragmentation, the diffuse, blurred or stained frames and the photographic image as a disease. The Bisamian texts will start a dialogue with the theoretical approaches of Georges Didi-Huberman, already mentioned, Nelly Richard and Joan Fontcuberta on the image and its uses, and Michel Wieviorka on political violence.