By Night in Chile

Bolaño illustrates that, far from a pure, artistic pursuit, literature is as susceptible to moral bankruptcy as anything else. Writers, and by extension literature, can be fickle: Their allegiance sometimes isn’t fixed to a moral compass derived from their artistic sensibility. The central example of this fickleness is that of many Chilean authors under Pinochet, but Bolaño also draws a parallel between Pinochet’s Chile and Hitler’s Germany through the story of Salvador Reyes meeting Ernst Jünger in occupied Paris, using both historical examples to highlight the problem of complicity in dictatorships. 

Bolaño’s message is clear: Farewell, Urrutia, Canales, Reyes, and Jünger exalt literature and literary fame over life itself, becoming complicit in dictatorships. Reyes’s story is an embedded narrative that ironizes Urrutia’s later acceptance of Pinochet’s abuses. To Urrutia, Reyes’s story is a romantic tale of meeting a writer, Jünger, who has attained literary fame. However, outside of Urrutia’s romantic vision, Reyes’s story appears as an account of the banal callousness of two writers who do not care about the victims of World War II. The Guatemalan painter’s spartan, prison-like attic—in which Reyes and Jünger ignore the suffering painter to talk about art—is a microcosm of how some intellectuals accepted the privation of millions of people under Nazism. Reyes and Jünger’s indifference to the painter’s incipient death and their willful ignorance of the true subject of his painting—the desolation of Europe and the Holocaust—illustrate how easily literature can coexist with flagrant insensitivity to suffering and death.

Bolaño draws the parallel with Hitler’s Germany to illustrate that Chilean authors’ complicity in Pinochet’s regime was not an isolated moral failure in the history of literature. Bolaño then takes this point further, asserting that violence and literature have always been bedfellows: As Urrutia finally acknowledges, “That is how literature is made in Chile, but not just in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico too, in Guatemala and Uruguay, in Spain and France and Germany, in green England and carefree Italy” (115-16). Partly, this is because authors, like everyone else, live in a world in which violence and injustice are endemic. Complicity in this horror results when authors, such as Urrutia, Reyes, and Jünger, believe that literature, and by extension themselves, exists above this horror.

Not only does Urrutia believe that literature is separate from everyday human affairs, he also believes that great writers don’t write, as the wizened youth does, about “hell and chaos” (14). Instead, he believes, great writers evoke the eternal, the sublime, and in doing so transcend the mundanity of the world. Broadly, Urrutia’s artistic sensibility aligns with the credo of 19th-century Aestheticism: Art’s sole purpose is to be beautiful, not instructive or political. Bolaño voices the hazard of such a view through Urrutia’s dismissal of politics: “The right, the centre and the left, one big happy family. A couple of ethical problems, admittedly. But no aesthetic problems at all” (94, emphasis added).

Urrutia’s downplaying of Chile’s “ethical problems”—systematic repression, torture, and murder—illustrates how severely his aestheticism and hankering for literary fame warp his morals. Through the wizened youth, Bolaño counters with his own credo: Art is inherently political. Avoiding worldly issues is itself a type of political statement, a statement of passivity. Literature must tackle “hell and chaos” (14)—that same part of life Urrutia denigrates as debasing literature.