64 pages • 2-hour read
By Night in Chile
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of torture, death, antigay bias, and racism.
Shadow and Light/Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”
The motifs of shadow and light allude to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” speaking to both The Illusion of Literary Immortality and The Past as Mutable and Uncertain. The allusion to Plato’s allegory becomes explicit during Farewell and Urrutia’s dinner, when a lightning storm projects the shadows of passersby on the restaurant wall. In the ensuing conversation, Urrutia insolently jokes that Plato has an excellent book on their topic of discussion (referring to Book VII of the Republic).
Plato’s allegory is about the falsity of sensory perception and the truth of philosophy. He imagines a group of people who have grown up shackled in a cave, forced to look at shadow play on the cave wall. The shadows are created by people behind the prisoners, but since the prisoners cannot see the people themselves, they mistake the shadows for reality. Even if a prisoner escapes into the sunlight to see things as they really are, the people in the cave will still cling to their old understanding of the world. For Plato, uneducated people are like the prisoners. Only through philosophical education (i.e., stepping into the sunlight) does Plato believe one can understand the true, abstract nature of the world, and thereby understand the nature of the good.
As professor Jacobo Myerston observes, Bolaño inverts Plato’s idea of truth. In By Night in Chile, truth isn’t knowledge of the good or knowledge of the true world beyond appearance; instead, “there is no idea of Good outside the cave, but instead a horrific war, one that in Bolaño’s poetics is an unconcealed manifestation of the idea of Evil” (Myerston, Jacobo, “The classicist in the cave: Bolaño’s theory of reading in By Night in Chile,” Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 0, Issue 0, 2016, p. 10.) The truth that the cave-prisoner Urrutia avoids is not the abstract forms of things revealed by the sun, but the material reality of violence and chaos that he ignores for the abstract truths of books.
In the restaurant, Farewell and Urrutia enact parts of the dialectic from the “Allegory of the Cave.” The setting likens them to Plato’s cave dwellers when they are exposed to light. Farewell acts as the cave dweller who acknowledges the illusion of shadows: “What’s the use, what use are books, they’re shadows, nothing but shadows” (47). This threat to Urrutia’s faith in the salvatory power of literature provokes him to turn away in pain and fear. Urrutia dismisses “the multiplicity of readings” Farewell interprets in the shadows as nothing but “the stumbling of the blind, their futile flailing around, their bumping and tripping, their staggering and falling, their general debilitation” (47). Here, Urrutia appropriates Plato’s reasoning, arguing that there is an elite group of people (for Plato, philosophers; for Urrutia, literary critics) capable of discerning truth. This aloofness and intellectual arrogance are two of Urrutia’s main flaws.
Later in the narrative, as political violence rocks Chile and right-wing elements threaten democracy, Urrutia returns to the shadowy, abstract comfort of books, reading Plato as Pinochet overthrows Allende (75). In a divergence from Plato’s allegory, Urrutia’s obsession with shadows isn’t caused by a lack of education, but instead the opposite: Sequestering himself in literature, Urrutia ignores the “hell and chaos” destroying his country (14), choosing the abstract world of literature over the violence of material reality.
Falconry (Complicity of the Church)
As professor Jacobo Myerston notes, the use of falconry in the preservation of historic Catholic churches in Europe is an allegory for the persecution of Latin Americans who followed liberation theology in the final quarter of the 20th century: “[C]onservative priests spiritually led falcons (the military) against pigeons (leftist priests) and their followers (the starlings)” (Myerston, Jacobo, “The classicist in the cave: Bolaño’s theory of reading in By Night in Chile,” Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 0, Issue 0, 2016, p. 16).
The motifs of blood and purification develop the repressive undertones of Urrutia’s church preservation project. In Avignon, France, the falcon Ta Gueule attacks a flock of starlings (one of three instances in Urrutia’s project when a priest uses his falcon just for the sake of watching it kill). Ta Gueule appears as “the abstract idea of a lightning bolt,” bloodying the starlings that “[come] out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering” (66). Urrutia relishes this violence, describing Ta Gueule as a painter splashing color (blood) across the sky, pacifying the landscape. Ta Gueule has a phonetic similarity to Bishop Tagle of Valparaíso, who was a Pinochet supporter. (See Background for more on Pinochet and liberation theology.) As Professor Myerston also notes, in French ta gueule means “shut up,” a reference to the Vatican’s censorship of Latin American priests who espoused liberation theology (Ibid., p. 16).
The falconry allegory may seem disconnected from Chile itself because it’s set in Europe; however, Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah propose Urrutia’s study of falconry so that he may bring that knowledge back to Chile. The implication is that, under the guise of cultural preservation, Urrutia must go to the Old World to learn these fascistic methods of repression. Moreover, Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah’s involvement introduces Urrutia’s underlying motivations of fear and hate (their surnames are ananyms of those emotions). Urrutia hates the Indigenous people of Chile, the Mapuche, and thus hates liberation theology because it advocates justice for colonized peoples. In the church preservation project, Mr. Etah and Mr. Raef offer Urrutia a way to oppose the social movements he despises as cultural decay.
Sordello
Sordello da Goito was a 13th-century Italian troubadour with strong political convictions who, as Farewell notes, holds an esteemed place in the history of literature, appearing in Dante’s Purgatorio (1316) (among other works). The motif of Sordello echoes through Urrutia’s recollections, tracing the trajectory of his poetic ambitions from their idealistic beginnings to their compromised, withered end.
After Farewell tells Urrutia the romantic story of Sordello, Sordello becomes to Urrutia the paragon of poetic greatness. Sordello is everything Urrutia wants to be: A courageous and passionate man, he fraternizes with the important men of his time and, after his death, is immortalized in literature. Farewell’s mocking words, “Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello?” (15) become a refrain that drives Urrutia’s poetic ambition.
In Europe, Sordello replaces faith as Urrutia’s guiding light. Urrutia delights in walking the Provencal countryside where Sordello once wandered, seeing poetry in the way the falcon Ta Gueule attacks pigeons that threaten the church in Avignon. In this way, the church preservation project intwines poesy and Catholicism, the twin pillars of Urrutia’s character. However, at the end of the project, disturbing visions afflict Urrutia, portending his loss of faith. Urrutia turns to his remaining consolation: Sordello. Bolaño suggests this psychological shift by juxtaposing the punchline of his dream, in which the German theologian wryly expresses his surprise at Christ’s historical existence, with Urrutia’s refrain: “Ah, so Jesus really existed? Sordel, Sordello, that Sordello, the master” (73). Sordello replaces Christ as Urrutia’s guiding light.
Subsequently, Urrutia’s poetic idealism, symbolized by Sordello, declines alongside Chile. When Urrutia realizes that no one cares he taught Marxism to Pinochet, he visualizes the moral decay of himself and his fellow Chileans:
The country was populated by hieratic figures, heading implacably towards an unfamiliar, grey horizon, where one could barely glimpse a few rays of light, flashes of lightning and clouds of smoke. What lay there? We did not know. No Sordello. That much was clear. (93-94)
No longer able to maintain the dissonance between his sheltered literary fantasy and the “hell and chaos” destroying his country (14), Urrutia relinquishes his hope for literary greatness. Sordello’s flight from Urrutia’s mental landscape signifies the death of these idealistic hopes.
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