By Night in Chile

Alienation haunts Urrutia’s recollections, deepening the text’s exploration of The Past as Mutable and Uncertain. At Là-bas, he remembers himself apart from the conga line, prohibited by his vows from dancing. In his childhood house, he remembers his formative estrangement from the spectral, serpentine shadow of his father—far from the warm, assuring presence a father should be. This alienation also affects Urrutia’s relationship with himself. As he recalls these memories, a voice prohibits dialogue, a voice he recognizes as his superego, “the super-I driving a refrigerated truck down the middle of a road engulfed in flames” (23).

Meanwhile, he writes, his “id groaned and rambled on in a vaguely Mycenaean jargon. My ego, of course, was sleeping. Sleeping and toiling” (23). In retrospect, Urrutia sees this internal conflict; however, neither then nor in retrospect does he fully understand it. The imagery of his superego navigating peril suggests the intense fear he has of deviating from the path established, in the absence of his father, by the substitute father figure of Farewell. Urrutia feels compelled to follow the road of literary criticism modeled by Farewell; to deviate, to listen to his id, would be to leave the refrigerated protection of the truck and risk living without a compass.

Another reason Urrutia pursues literature is that he longs to escape a country and people he finds crude and barbaric, invoking The Illusion of Literary Immortality. Casting himself as a beneficent figure, Urrutia dreams of “preparing a body of poetic work for posterity” (24). To Urrutia, this lofty goal distinguishes him from other Chileans. However, this intellectual vanity is common in writers in the novel: Reyes’s petulant spurning of the Guatemalan painter for not reading his novel is one such example. However, a split soon occurs within Urrutia himself, signaling the decline of his idealistic, poetic ambitions. His critical alter-ego, “H. Ibacache,” becomes the pragmatist to Urrutia’s idealist. Urrutia tries to compensate for this concession of his creativity by asserting that his work as H. Ibacache has a civic value: “[T]o elucidate our literature, a reasonable endeavour, a civilized endeavour, an endeavour pursued in a measured, conciliatory tone, like a humble lighthouse on the fatal shore” (24-25). Poetry is a fraught pursuit for Urrutia, as he believes it brings him to places he doesn’t want to go, into the “hell and chaos” (14) he denigrates as the artistic focus of the wizened youth.

This section introduces more literary and historical allusions. The shadow play on the restaurant wall after Farewell and Urrutia’s dinner is the clearest allusion to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” an allusion that runs through By Night in Chile. Through this allusion, Bolaño introduces the motifs of shadow and light, which he uses to thematize the conflict between literature and truth. Two generations older than Urrutia, Farewell has become disillusioned with literature, which once held the promise of immortality. He despairs that books are “nothing but shadows” (47). This metaphor establishes fiction as the analogue for the shadows that Plato’s cave-dwellers mistake for truth. Like one of Plato’s cave dwellers confronted by the true nature of things in the sunlight outside the cave, Urrutia retreats back into the security of the cave and the comfort of shadows, ignoring the lesson Farewell tries to teach him about the true, disappointing nature of literature.

The allusions to Dante in Reyes’s initial meeting with Jünger raise the theme of damnation and The Problem of Complicity in Dictatorships, including the complicity of writers in fascist regimes. The embassy in which they meet appears as an opulent enclave: An Italian princess guides Reyes through a series of salons that open “one on to another like the mystical rose that opens its petals to reveal a mystical rose that opens its petals to reveal another mystical rose and so on until the end of time” (26). This beauty is superficial: Lurking behind it is the destruction of World War II and the Holocaust, underscored by the fact that it is Jünger—in his Wehrmacht uniform—whom Reyes meets after traveling through this series of rooms. The princess’s talk of Dante evokes the image that she is not guiding him through a series of rooms, but through the circles of hell, as Virgil guides Dante in The Inferno (1307).

Bolaño further develops the theme of complicity in violence through Reyes and Jünger’s meeting in the Guatemalan painter’s attic. In an indication of Urrutia’s failing memory and muddled state of mind, he contradicts himself, saying first that this meeting happened days after their initial meeting, then saying it happened months after. Reyes and Jünger’s indifference to the Guatemalan painter’s plight represents their acceptance of the violence of Nazi Germany. In his Wehrmacht uniform, Jünger expounds on the nature of art and evil as the painter wastes away in the corner. Neither writer notices the similarities between “Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn” (30) and the Paris that the painter obsessively contemplates through his window.

Combined with the painter’s emaciation, the “blurred skeletons” (30) and desolated landscape the painting depicts conjure images of the Holocaust, not Mexico City. Instead, Reyes is moved because he thinks the painting is an expression of the painter’s artistic defeat. Reyes’s artistic sensibility is self-centered and callous: He willfully ignores the incomprehensible suffering devastating Europe because to see it would be to acknowledge his complicity in it as the diplomat of a neutral country.