Civilisation or barbarism? Rhizomatic and abyssal spatial imaginations of Europe and Latin America in Roberto Bolaño’s

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show some reiterated imaginary figurations of space in Roberto Bolaño’s works. On the one hand, the European territory, which is described as a rhizome and operates as a line of flight that protects, in a sense, the Latin American migrant, as it appears in Los detectives salvajes (1998), El Tercer Reich (2010) and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011). On the other hand, hell and the abyss as figures of the subcontinent represented by Ciudad Juárez, 2666’s Santa Teresa (2004), where violence dominates and subjects are destroyed within the framework of capitalism’s third stage, global and digital.