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ABSTRACT The lives that inhabit Roberto Bolaño's fiction serve as a contestation to the tenets of the Enlightenment. In this respect, water plays a key role in the author's poetics: a metaphor for defeat and madness which both reflects and muddies the horrors of Reason. By examining Bolaño's ability to create complex fictional biographies, this article identifies how these characters' encounters with watery metaphors reveal the depths of Bolaño's critique of the Enlightenment belief in an all-knowing and all-seeing Reason. To achieve our goal, we explore the lives of characters from four of his novels: 2666, Monsieur Pain, Amuleto, and Nocturno de Chile. This article demonstrates how Bolaño conceives characters who are asked to take a stand in a world of diminishing certainties and changing tides. In doing so, he superimposes characters with minimal variations on the same backdrop of an ethically compromised world, like a scientist without a fixed method, an obstinate experimenter trying to pinpoint without measuring instruments the exact moment that got us to where we now are.
That Roberto Bolaño invested his creative energy in cultivating and developing a craftsmanship in writing fictional biographies becomes evident after even a quick glance at his oeuvre. From the counterfactual biographies of cultured-yet-infamous poets in La literatura nazi en América (1996) to the horrors of femicides and dismembered lives in 2666 (2004), Bolaño explored a wide variety of narrative devices to show how history is entangled in the very act of narrating one's own life. Biographies are the bread and butter of Bolaño's fiction; his stories are rife with "minimal biographies" (Manzoni, "Biografías") like, for instance, the lives of poets who either profited or suffered from Pinochet's dictatorship in Estrella distante (1996) and Nocturno de Chile (2000), or the lives of teenagers who once founded a literary movement and slowly drifted apart in Los detectives salvajes (1998). These biographical accounts articulate Bolaño's ever-expanding reflections on the limits between memory, history, and fiction, a limit that-as we will see-is consistently discussed in his narratives and is never portrayed as static, but potentially violent, like a blade (which we could call "Bolaño's razor") that is always kept sharp and honed by literature on one side and history on the other.1 Its swings are directed against...