The Reader as Detective: Intertextuality in Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives

Born out of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories about the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, the genre of detective fiction centers itself around the phenomenon that is the detective character. A contemporary example of detective fiction, Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives) is a first-person narrative told in three parts about the lives of two poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, and their investigative search for the mysterious founder of a poetry movement. Despite being the protagonists of this search, however, Arturo and Ulises are never actually present in the text. By inverting the two-story narrative structure established by Poe and hiding his protagonists throughout a multitude of narrative voices and intertextual literary references, Bolaño is not only able to foreground Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of social heteroglossia; he is also able to place the reader in the role of the detective. Through a focused analysis of the role of the detective in literature, I hope to show how Bolaño—drawing upon Poe and upon the influence of his Latin American literary predecessor, Jorge Luis Borges—transforms the detective reader into a confused witness, and thus, reinvents the detective genre according to its postmodern and Latin American context.