University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2013-2014: Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Violence Research Fellows 5-2014 Ciudad Juárez: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 Shaj Mathew University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2014 Part of the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons Mathew, Shaj, "Ciudad Juárez: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666" (2014). Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2013-2014: Violence. 6. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2014/6 This paper was part of the 2013-2014 Penn Humanities Forum on Violence. Find out more at http://www.phf.upenn.edu/annual-topics/violence. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2014/6 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Ciudad Juárez: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 Abstract Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño owes much of his current literary celebrity to the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, 2666. The novel comprises five parts, which ultimately coalesce to create a harrowing portrait of violence against women in a Mexican border town. As this grisly scene unfolds, Bolaño implicates the novel's characters—and, more broadly, the reader—in a crime equally disturbing: inaction, indifference, and thus complicity. However, Bolaño offers artistic solutions to the bleakness of the modern condition: reading and writing. In creating this utterly sui generis novel—and violating established literary norms in the process—Bolaño thus enacts the very solution that he offers to the problems of modernity, a time in which "poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated." Keywords Roberto Bolano Disciplines Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Comments This paper was part of the 2013-2014 Penn Humanities Forum on Violence.