Amulet: The era of madness and the literature as salvation

KIM Hyeon Kyun

doi:10.21049/ccs.2010.21..31

Even though Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet was inspired by a historical account, it significantly rewrites the story as well as redefines the people who witnessed the history. This novel focuses on the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, the self-anointed “mother of Mexican Poetry”. She is trapped in a bathroom at the UNAM in Mexico City for thirteen days while the army storms the campus for the repression of the student movement, which was decreed by the sinister Díaz Ordaz and culminated in the holocaust of Tlatelolco. In the space isolated from the outside world, Auxilio attempts to reconstruct the past and to describe the future through an illogical exercise of times. In the meantime, her temporal recollections finally approach the definition of a generation whose historical experience is crucially marked by the key year of 1968, when the novel is set. The only one who remained on the campus, she defends the university's autonomy only by reading and writing poetry. The novel ends in a scene densely imbued with allegorical imagination, by which the author endeavors to justify her generation, more concretely, “the peoples without history”, as defined by bohemian poets. The protagonist represents, in some sense, an allegory of the innocence and truth of the history. Her existence per se manifestly demonstrates the power of literature because the literature within this novel in short becomes the most resilient amulet resisting the political violence in an era of increasing madness.

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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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