Fuera de foco: ironía y fotografía en Estrella distante, de Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

This article analyzes the photographs described in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante from the paradigm of irony. Either because they are lost, blurred or out of focus, the unreliability of the images implies that they cannot be used as witness of the violence of Carlos Wielder’s acts, a poet-aviator who murders and holds an exhibition of photographs showing the victims in the 1970’s. In fact, instead of acting as a memory archive, those images promote a constant forgetting and, as Paul de Man points out, forgetting is precisely the irony of memory. By examining photographs of brutally murdered twin sisters, a mysterious dictatorship agent, and the picture of a group of young poets, this article will explore how irony is used as a strategy to question the discourses on memory in the context of the post-dictatorship in Chile. Furthermore, the irony’s edge of the photographs will be examined in relation to the ways in which violence is portrayed and how influences what is remembered.