Archivos espectrales: escritura, ruina y legitimidad literaria en Los detectives salvajes (1998) de Roberto Bolaño y La más recóndita memoria de los hombres (2021) de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Abstract

This article offers a comparative reading of Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La más recóndita memoria de los hombres, centered on the figure of the disappeared writer as a narrative, symbolic, and political device. In both novels, the plot revolves around a literary search that does not culminate in the revelation of an ultimate truth but instead activates a critique of the mechanisms of consecration, archival authority, and canon formation within the literary field. Through a theoretical framework that articulates archive, ruin, and displaced subjectivity, the article examines how disappearance functions as an aesthetic principle that enables the formation of a spectral community among readers, narrators, and absent authors. The figure of the vanishing writer, rather than simply marking an absence, becomes a generative core for new forms of writing that interrogate the power of the archive, the authority of the canon, and the limits of literary representation. The study argues that in both Bolaño’s and Sarr’s novels, dissident literary genealogies are rehearsed from the margins, critically inhabiting the interstices between history, myth, and literature.