Fotografías narrativas: el archivo multimodal en Desierto sonoro de Valeria Luiselli

Abstract

Published in English in 2019, Lost Children Archive was translated into Spanish as Desierto sonoro. In this novel, Valeria Luiselli weaves the story of a family’s journey across the United States with echoes of the massacre of Apaches throughout the nineteenth century and the hardships of thousands of Central American migrant children who try to reach the country of the “American dream.” With clear references to road trip novels, one of the most important elements in this novel is the archive as a literary theme and composition procedure. In line with various studies carried out on Desierto sonoro, in this article I propose an approach to the work based on the “archival paradigm,” which multiple contemporary artistic productions are part of, but focusing mainly on the visual elements that appear in the book: drawings, maps, and photographs. Also, to address the significant tensions produced between text and images, I resort to some of the proposals of multimodal studies applied to literature. In this way, I carry out a brief analysis of the structure of the work to then outline some of the elements of archive poetics, linking them with certain proposals of multimodal studies applied to literature.