By Night in Chile

The wizened youth is a complex phantom who haunts Urrutia’s recollections. Accosting Urrutia on his threshold one “stormlit night” with accusations of complicity in Pinochet’s regime (3), the youth provokes Urrutia’s nightlong apologia. This detail of the youth as a sort of accusatory confessor intimates that he is the personification of Urrutia’s conscience. The entire narrative can be interpreted as Urrutia’s feverish dialogue with his withered yet persistent conscience.

The scant biographical details of the wizened youth’s life resemble Bolaño’s own. Both the wizened youth and Bolaño are born in southern Chile near the Bío-Bío river in the 1950s, and both lambast the Chilean literary establishment for its complicity in Pinochet’s regime. They are also both writers, and Urrutia’s description of the wizened youth’s work can also apply to Bolaño’s own: “There’s aimless wandering, street fights, horrible deaths down back alleys, the obligatory doses of sex, obscenity and indecency, dusk in Japan, not in Chile of course, hell and chaos, hell and chaos, hell and chaos” (14). However, the wizened youth isn’t completely an authorial insert (for one, none of Bolaño’s stories are set in Japan); the wizened youth is also the personification of Urrutia’s conscience.

The epithet “wizened” suggests neglect. Urrutia leaves his conscience to wither and die, forsaking it out of fear, hate, and self-interest. Nonetheless, his conscience persists. The wizened youth flashes through Urrutia’s mind when he recalls fateful moral decisions. When Urrutia greets with callousness the peasants’ appeal for help with a dying child, the wizened youth appears. When, to condemn the Church’s use of falconry, Father Antonio raises himself up on his elbow “just as [Urrutia] was to do years later, aeons later, two or three minutes later,” Urrutia tries to evade this condemnation (68). Suddenly, the wizened youth appears “like a bolt from the blue” (68). These appearances are emergences of the conscience that Urrutia represses. Its relegation to the subconscious becomes clearer when Urrutia situates it in the dream world he finds himself somnambulating through after his dinner with Farewell: “[M]y mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then” (51). By the novel’s end, Urrutia can no longer ignore what the wizened youth represents, and dies in agony.

Farewell is the bastion of the Chilean literary guard, a critic who believes that it’s more important to have an encyclopedic knowledge of literature than to write literature oneself. Like many of the other characters, Farewell is modeled on a historical figure, the Chilean literary critic Hernán Díaz Arrieta, who wrote under the pseudonym “Alone.” Like Farewell, Alone was the preeminent critic in mid-century Chile, writing for the Santiago newspaper El Mercurio from 1939-1978. The similarities don’t end there: Like his historical referent, Farewell is a tastemaker, deciding which Chilean authors are worthy of praise and which aren’t. Like Alone, Farewell is Catholic, staunchly anticommunist, and supportive of Pinochet’s 1973 coup. In By Night in Chile, this historical allusion sharpens Bolaño’s condemnation of the Chilean literary establishment under Pinochet.

Farewell first appears on the second page of the novella as an imposing yet debonair figure. His bespoke English garb, country estate, and non-Castilian surname distinguish him as a member of Chile’s upper class, in which European ancestry is prized. To Urrutia, Farewell is both a substitute father figure and an object of desire, both in that Urrutia is attracted to Farewell and that he wants to become the ideal literary figure whom Farewell personifies. Farewell is unashamed of being gay and makes frequent advances on Urrutia, who, in contrast, represses his gay identity. Through his prejudiced anti-gay lens, Urrutia groups Farewell’s unabashed gayness with his hedonism, criticizing (among other things) Farewell’s voracious appetite and bacchanalian behavior. As a foil to Urrutia, Farewell highlights the former’s repression and inner turmoil.

The other main difference between Farewell and Urrutia is, of course, generational. Though he vehemently supports Pinochet, Farewell is, by the time of the coup, too old to be selected to teach the junta Marxism. Urrutia replaces Farewell, and by the time Urrutia begins attending Canales’s salons, Farewell is too senile—and too forgotten—to attend. Thus, while Farewell does support Pinochet, his support isn’t as egregious as Urrutia’s. Nonetheless, as Urrutia’s literary progenitor, Farewell sets Urrutia along the path on which literature and violence become inextricable.

Nominally importers, Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah are members of Opus Dei who approach Urrutia at his weakest to recruit him to assist with an ostensible church preservation project. Then, having brought Urrutia on-side, they compel Urrutia (at least in his telling) to teach Pinochet and his junta Marxism. Just as fear and hate motivate people to do things their conscience would otherwise prohibit them from doing, Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah—whose names are ananyms of “fear” and “hate”—convince Urrutia to debase himself. The men explain their strange names with foreign origins (Mr. Etah claims his name is part Finnish, part Lithuanian). Their foreign origins and shadowy employment alludes to the foreign (mostly American) operatives who secretly facilitated Pinochet’s rise to power and dictatorship.

Despite Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah’s philistinism, Urrutia begrudgingly accepts their proposals, viewing the men, paradoxically, as his patrons. When they propose the church preservation project, an assignment tailor-made for Urrutia, Urrutia refers to Mr. Raef as “my Maecenas” (59). Urrutia aggrandizes himself with this historical reference, painting Mr. Raef, an Opus Dei functionary clandestinely supporting Pinochet, as the great Roman patron of literature, Gaius Maecenas. By implication, Urrutia compares himself to the poets—Virgil and Horace chief among them—who enjoyed Maecenas’s patronage. While aggrandizing, Urrutia’s allusion isn’t entirely inapt: Maecenas lived under Augustus, who, like Pinochet, curtailed republican freedoms and consolidated power. Urrutia sees Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah through the nostalgic lens of history, and only later does this rosy facade crumble enough to reveal who the men truly are: functionaries for a dictator.