Roberto Bolaño: Poetry as the unexpected path or a pavilion of the “Unknown University.”

Abstract

This article analyzes Juan Villoro's novel El testigo (The Witness) through the lens of Giorgio Agamben's concept of the "absolute witness" in What Remains of Auschwitz. The author proposes that the notion of "possession through loss" structures both the narrative configuration and the ethical dimension of the novel, insofar as testimony can only emerge from that which no longer fully exists and whose memory is fractured. Through the protagonist, Julio Valdivieso, Villoro constructs multiple figures of the witness—survivor, biased, protected, impartial—that allow for an exploration of the tensions between memory, history, and fiction within the contemporary Mexican context. The analysis argues that the narrator assumes the role of the absolute witness by representing the untestifiable, that is, that which cannot be directly narrated by those who lived it to the extreme. In this sense, the novel problematizes the very act of bearing witness and shifts ethics to a "beyond" official history, unsettling it and rewriting it through literature. Furthermore, the article highlights the use of the chronicle, poetic intertextuality—particularly with Ramón López Velarde—and the reinterpretation of the historical archive as strategies for articulating a critical reflection on democracy, impunity, and collective memory in Mexico. In conclusion, El testigo is presented as a work that exhausts and reformulates the concept of testimony by transforming it into a central aesthetic and ethical problem.