From the Temples to the Venter: The Immanent Ethics of Violence in “El Ojo Silva” by Roberto Bolaño

Abstract

This paper unearths the immanent ethics that underlie the thematization of violence in Roberto Bolaño’s “El Ojo Silva”. To provide an encompassing reading and reveal the inte-rrelationship between a notion of immanence and a narrative structure, this paper takes as point of departure stylistic features and concludes with theoretical speculations. In this manner, it is possible to position the short story in relation to a long literary tradition, as well as show how the imaginative iterations engrained in the narrative structure tune practical reasoning through generalizations, history, and fiction. The argumentation is divided in four parts that intertwine: a case posited by resorting to the “winning of goodwill” from classical rhetoric, the exile depicted as historical experience and an allegory, a violent event as immanent core, and, lastly, sovereign violence as key element in poetics of exception. This itinerary shows to which extent a text’s ethic and aesthetic dimensions are imbricated.