Con-formation of Bolaño-merchandise. The editorial life of Roberto Bolaño according to Jorge Herralde

Abstract

In his text “Roberto Bolaño’s editorial life”, published only two years after the author’s death, the Spanish editor Jorge Herralde traces the coordinates to read Bolaño’s work in light of the various editorial processes to which he was subjected. The scheme of life that Herralde draws is the object of a real subsumption to the artificial form that he calls “editorial life”, which we could understand less as a mercantification of life than as an anthropomorphization of the work. From an interdisciplinary perspective based on Bolívar Echeverría’s critique of culture, this article aims to show how this con-formation of Bolaño’s life around his editorial life constitutes a first and decisive step for the paradigm of the production, circulation and consumption of authors in Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century.