Infrastructural Mourning and Life Writing: Archive, Body, and Language in Contemporary Chilean Narrative

This article introduces the concept of infrastructural mourning to rethink life writing in contemporary Chilean narrative. Through the analysis of Voyager by Nona Fernández, Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, and Nervous System by Lina Meruane, it argues that mourning should not be understood as a response to an identifiable loss but as a structural condition shaping subjectivity. Using a theoretical-interpretive approach based on close reading and comparison, the study examines three key dimensions: the archive as a form of failed memory, the body as an opaque surface of inscription, and the gap between experience and language. These works do not represent prior losses; rather, they expose the impossibility of fully capturing lived experience. In this framework, life writing no longer operates as restitution but as a practice that reveals a constitutive failure. Engaging with theories of thanatography, spectrality, and subjectivation, the article shifts mourning from a thematic to a structural level, offering new insights for studies of memory, autofiction, and contemporary Latin American narrative.