In The Savage Detectives, Artificial Respiration, and Soldiers of Salamis, Bolaño, Piglia et Cercas highlight three questions that we discuss in this study: 1. The novel is a historical object, both as a document and as a mechanism of discourse. 2 Fiction, novel writing, the construction of novels, cannot take place without recourse to memory. 3. Conflict between reality and fiction is the area where contemporary narrative is developing. The starting point of the first chapter is a reflection about the relationship between literature and history in Latin America and Spain; followed by a reflection on the concept of history and the role of the historian in literature, a study on the relationships between the narrator and the object of his or her narration and finally an analysis of literature as transgression. In the second chapter we deal with the notion of memory and its relationship with the the imaginary; the concepts of the duration and image from Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Bergson et Ricœur underpin this analysis. This is followed by an analysis of the tensions between writing, memory and imagination. We examine archives and fictional works to assess the role of writers as fictional characters, memory as imagination, the relationship between the body and memory in the work of these three writers. The third chapter poses the question of whether there exists a new poetics of fiction by studying Brecht's concept of ostranenie as well a the limits inherent in fiction because of the concept of origin, the infinite, the insufficient and the different - the latter through a comparative reading of the work of Didi-Huberman. To conclude, there is a reflection on notions of local, universal, the failed novel and the uselessness of literature. All these notions are considered through specific references to the three novels under study.
