Classical Receptions Journal Vol . Iss. () pp. –
The classicist in the cave: Bolaño’s
theory of reading in By Night in Chile
Jacobo Myerston*
Introduction
Roberto Bolaño was as concerned with formulating a theory of literary criticism as he
was with developing his own aesthetics. He achieved the former by introducing numerous literary critics, poets, writers, and painters into his novels, thus developing a
metaliterary discourse. Bolaño’s literary theory, which is coded in allegories and dense
symbolism, should be of interest to classicists for two reasons. First, on several occasions, Bolaño’s characters are classical philologists, classics amateurs, and poets inspired
by ancient Greek and Roman texts. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Bolaño
developed his own reception theory with an emphasis on ethics, an orientation that is
*Correspondence: Literature Department , University of California, San Diego,
Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA -. jmyerston@ucsd.edu
In Amulet, Bolaño integrates the Mexican classical philologist Rubén Bonifaz Nuño,
famous for his translation of the Aeneid, and the poet, dramatist, and essayist Alfonso
Reyes, whom Bolaño calls the ‘Greek of Cuernavaca’ for his rewriting of Homer; also the
protagonists of three novels are well versed in the Greek and Roman literature, including
Juan Garcı́a Madero in The Savage Detectives to whom Horace appears in an epiphany.
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In his novels, Roberto Bolaño explores different forms of reading Greek and Roman
literature by presenting fictional characters that relate to ancient texts in antithetical
ways. In this article, I focus on one specific example of Bolaño’s approach, namely
the experience of reading Greek texts by a conservative Latin American man of letters
presented in By Night in Chile. In this novel, Bolaño narrates the pseudo-confession
of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a literary critic and Hellenist who supported Augusto
Pinochet. From his complicity with the dictatorship, a conflict of consciousness
arises that the protagonist seeks to obscure with a particular way of interpreting
Greek literature. Bolaño dramatizes this hermeneutics of concealing through
Urrutia’s struggle to suppress a disturbing image of himself that emerges while
reading Plato’s Republic and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In this
article, then, I investigate Bolaño’s theory of reading, as it unfolds in By Night in
Chile. I argue that Bolaño operates with a dualistic model in which there are bad and
good practices of reading. The first consists of concealing the reader’s vantage
point, while the second leads to a recognition of the reader’s self and his
sociopolitical location in the world.
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
Bolaño and the classics: some background
In his novels, the Chilean writer makes reference to a number of classical authors.
This is most notable in The Savage Detectives (), Amulet (a), By Night in
Chile (), and (a). Recently, scholars have begun to explore these
references. Blanck, for instance, describes the allusions made in Amulet to
Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and to Plato in . Rodrı́guez Freire has called attention
to the fact that Homer’s Odyssey is one of the main intertexts of The Savage
Detectives. Here Bolaño follows Joyce in bringing the figure of Odysseus to the
level of the ordinary man; but this time the reader is confronted with a Homeric hero
in the guise of a Latin American immigrant.
For those interested in a Latin American critique of traditional interpretations of
classical texts, By Night in Chile offers perhaps the most important example. The
novel presents the figure of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix as the paradigm of the politically conservative reader in general, and the bad reader of the classics in particular.
In political terms, he is located on one extreme of a continuum: on the side of the
victimizers and orchestrators of political crimes. He is placed opposite those on the
other extreme: the victims of violence such as Auxilio Lacouture, the main character
of Amulet, Bolaño’s Greek novel. Importantly, Urrutia and Auxilio Lacouture are
Blanck ().
Rodrı́guez Freire ().
Bolaño (b: ) described Auxilio Lacouture as a ‘Uruguayan woman with a Greek
vocation’.
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absent from most philological discussions. In his own brand of reception theory, Bolaño
saw mainly two types of readers: the bad and the good. The first is characterized by
resistance to the crossing of interpretative horizons as, for instance, those evoked by the
ancient text and those produced by the modern reader. This resistance is rooted in a
‘lack of courage’ by the reader who fails to contemplate the mirror images that emerge
from the intersection of ancient and modern perspectives, what Bolaño refers to as
the crossing of ‘gazes’. In this sense, reading the classics is not necessarily pleasant; on
the contrary, it can often be a painful experience that reveals negative aspects of reality.
The good readers, on the other hand, are willing to accept whatever the interpretative
horizons mediated by ancient texts arouses in them.
Thus, Bolaño does not conceive the interpretative horizons that emerge from
ancient texts as disclosing objective truths but as troubling manifestations that have
the capacity to destabilize the reader’s self-representation. This destabilization of
vantage points opens access to unsettling aspects of reality, which the good reader
will accept and the bad will repress. In this article, then, I explain how Bolaño
unfolds this theory of reading in By Night in Chile. In this novel, the main character,
a mixture of priest, poet, literary critic, and classicist, fights against a latent image of
himself, which is conjured by two classical texts, namely Plato’s Republic, specifically
the allegory of the cave, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
JACOBO MYERSTON
Bolaño (a).
Unfortunately, we do not know whether Bolaño planned to associate the third novel of
the trilogy he never completed with some themes related to Greece, but we can be certain
that these two novels build a unity in what concerns the location of the characters in the
Latin American political spectrum and their relation to Greek literature. As Bolaño said
in an interview: ‘By Night in Chile has the same structure as Amulet and another novel I
may no longer write, whose title was going to be Corrida. They are musical novels chamber music - and also plays written in one voice, unstable, capricious, devoted to its
destiny, in dialogue with its destiny and perhaps, although the latter has probably failed,
in dialogue with the three-dimensionality that is part of our destiny. This trilogy has not
been finished, and remains a duet’ (b). See also Lepage ().
The Massacre of Tlatelolco took place in Mexico City in and cost the lives of about
young protesters, and it was the subject of intense discussion among Mexican
writers. On Tlatelolco, see Poniatowska (); Sánchez Fernández ().
The tension between Auxilio Lacouture and Urrutia’s literary canons is the subject of an
article I have in preparation. For Bolaño’s subversion of Bloom’s ideas of the Western
canon, see Gras ().
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the protagonists of two narratives in which classical literature plays a prominent role.
Both have in common their interest in the poets and writers of Hellas, but they
approach Greek literature from opposing perspectives, which are differentiated by
social class and gender. While Auxilio reads the Greeks from the angle of a poor
poetess who lives at the margins of society, Urrutia does it from the vantage point of
a ‘prudish and clerical’ wealthy Chilean man. Intriguingly, Bolaño conceived both
Amulet and By Night in Chile as part of an unfinished trilogy that aimed to interpret
recent Latin American political history.
Urrutia’s antithesis, Auxilio Lacouture, who had emigrated from Uruguay to
Mexico in the s, makes her living as an informal worker who offers a variety
of services to faculty in the Humanities Division at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico. Sometimes she cleans the professors’ houses, other times
she does small jobs like typing lectures (Amulet ). Her permanent but informal
presence in the institution allows her to overhear academic discussions and to
become involved in university life, but participating from the periphery. As an
outsider, she not only reads and studies the Greeks but lives her life as an ancient
seer in the style of Cassandra, warning about such future disasters as the massacre of
Tlatelolco. Thus, her reading of Greek literature is a marginal but vigorous one,
which has consequences for the interpretation of her own reality. Contrariwise,
Urrutia reads the Greeks from the standpoint of a conservative critic who submissively accepts the canon; he is deprived of the power to reflect on contemporary
realities. From an elitist perspective, he sees the mastering of the Western classics as
a matter of status, a list of authors to be dominated and controlled. With this
hermeneutic approach, which he not only applies to Greek texts but also to his
own biography, Urrutia seeks to conceal from his consciousness the crimes that he
has helped commit. For instance, after a military coup, he had assisted the Chilean
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
Archiepiscopal College to eradicate Marxist priests (). He had also personally
lectured against Marxism to the Military Junta when the Chilean dictatorship was
orchestrating a plan — most likely the Condor Operation — to exterminate
Marxists in several Latin American countries. In what follows, I will examine
Urrutia’s practice of reading, how it is developed in the novel, and the implication
this practice has for Bolaño’s dualistic model of reading.
By Night in Chile
See Boero Vargas (a) and Berchenko ().
Compare, for example, the narrative tone of Callejas () in her memoires and that of
Urrutia.
This is how Bolaño has portrayed his return to Chile in his short stories, novels, and
interviews. However, in an article in the New York Times, Larry Rohter ( January
) reports that some of Bolaño’s friends in Mexico claimed that he was not in Chile in
. However, Maristain () has corroborated Bolaño’s account in a series of interviews with Bolaño’s acquaintances.
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By Night in Chile is a short novel in which an aged and dying Urrutia goes through
his memories seeking justification for his acts. In the form of a monologue, the
narrator relates his life in seven episodes or short stories. In each of these stories,
the literary critic and priest sees himself reflected in either a metaphorical or direct
manner. At the end of the novel, nonetheless, he fails to find redemption from the
guilt that has arisen from the crimes that he committed but refused to accept. The
novel, rich in imagery of psychological repression, explores the mind of a totalitarian
regime collaborator and is closely related to the historical confessions and testimonies delivered in Chile during and after the Pinochet era (–). The book was
published in , two years after Bolaño’s first visit to his homeland after twentyfive years of absence. In , at the age of fourteen, Bolaño had emigrated with his
parents to Mexico due to economic hardship. In he returned to Chile, wanting
to participate in the socialist project led by Salvador Allende, who had been democratically elected president in . Shortly after Bolaño’s arrival in Chile, General
Augusto Pinochet ousted Allende in a coup, and Bolaño, like many others, was
imprisoned. Upon being released, Bolaño went into political exile; first he returned
to Mexico where his parents lived and then to Europe where he pursued his career as
a novelist.
As Adriana Castillo-Berchenko has pointed out, in By Night in Chile Bolaño
reflects on his conflicting impressions left by the reunion with his homeland in
, a country in which democracy had been restored but where the echoes of
the military dictatorship could still be felt. Bolaño articulates this reflection around a
fictional character, Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix. This fictional name is a coded
reference to Father José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois, one of the main literary critics in
Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship who became famous for the reviews that he
published in El Mercurio newspaper. Another central character in the novel is Marı́a
JACOBO MYERSTON
Urrutia
To understand what Bolaño has to say about conservative appropriations of the
classics in Latin America in By Night in Chile, we need to pay attention to the
political and class-related attitudes of Urrutia. In addition to being an intellectual
and Hellenist, Urrutia is an Opus Dei catholic priest, and above all a man with
aristocratic pretensions:
My name is Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix. I am Chilean. My ancestors on my father’s side came
from the Basque country, or Euskadi, as it is now called. On my mother’s side I hail from the
gentle land of France, from a village whose name means Man on the Earth or perhaps
Standing Man, my French is failing me as the end draws near. ()
Notice the phonetic and semantic similarity between the names Marı́a Canales and
Mariana Callejas (Canales means ‘channels’ and Callejas ‘streets’). Bolaño is very consistent when elaborating code names for the characters of the novel; for instance, the last
names of Urrutia Lacroix are Basque and French as are also the last names of his historical referent Ibánez Langlois. The nom de plume of Urrutia’s mentor, Farewell, is also
based on the pseudonym ‘Alone’, which the famous Chilean literary critic Hernán Dı́az
Arrieta, predecessor of Ibánez Langlois, used for the publication of his articles in El
Mercurio. Ibánez Langlois succeeded Dı́az Arriete as the main literary critic of the aforementioned Chilean newspaper.
For the historical referents of the novel see Berchenko ().
See Boero Vargas (a); Olguı́n (); Soto () on the role of Opus Dei in the
ideological development of the military and economic elites in Chile from to .
Notable is the contribution of Soto who interprets the poem of Ibáñez Langlois as part of
a programme for legitimizing the violence that lead to the military coup. Boero Vargas,
on the other hand, clearly shows that Bolaño used the books of Ibánez Langois as sources
for the creation of Urrutia Lacroix.
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Canales, a code name for Mariana Callejas, a minor writer who became famous for
her crimes and not because of her literary work. In fact, she was an agent of the secret
police and participated in multiple political assassinations during the dictatorship.
In addition to these two characters there are other historical figures in the novel,
including Pablo Neruda, the writers Salvador Reyes and Ernst Jünger, and even
Pinochet. As with Urrutia’s and Callejas’ names, the Spanish title of the novel,
Nocturno de Chile, also points to a specific time in recent Chilean history: the ‘intellectual blackout’ that was marked by the emigration of the intelligentsia after
Pinochet’s coup. At the narrative level, the story focuses on those literati who remained in Chile and were sympathetic to the regime. This situation of complicity
evokes the memory of Nazi Germany, a resemblance that Bolaño exploits through
the figure of Ernst Jünger, the German writer who participated as Wehrmacht officer
in the occupation of France. At the conceptual level, By Night in Chile explores the
relationship between literature, reality, and ethics, something that Bolaño achieves
by drawing on Plato’ allegory of the cave, as I will show.
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God’s will be done, I
said. I’m going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then
moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea
(wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of ,, Chileans . . . I read
Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos
and Stesichoros of Himera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of
Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then
the nitrate and steel industries . . . and Pérez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was
killed and . . . the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans,
and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene
and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were
shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long lines for food and Farewell’s estate
was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s
Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in
New York ().
In this excerpt the conservatism of the reading is expressed in two different ways.
First, Urrutia reads ‘respecting the tradition’; this means ‘beginning with Homer’.
Second, he does not attempt to establish any connection between what he reads and
The choice of the last names Urrutia Lacroix is not unmotivated, since it mimics the
surnames of Urrutia’s historical referent, Ibánez Lacroix (see note ). In the Chilean
imaginary, as Bolaño reproduces it here, non-Castilian European last names are perceived as markers of upper class status. This finds confirmation in discussions about class
and names in Chilean internet blogs and fora. See, for instance, Uribe ().
Auxilio Lacouture would begin her own Greek canon with Sappho, a woman.
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Three aspects define Urrutia’s personality. The first one, which becomes clear from
this quotation, consists of his identification with a traditional upper class that is
proud of its European and colonial ancestries. The enunciation of European origins
constitutes an act of distinction, in the first place from mestizos and ultimately from
the indigenous population. The second and third crucial aspects of Urrutia’s
personality, as I will show below, are his indolence, expressed in his disdain for
social transformations, and his hatred of the poor. These three aspects are clearly
manifested in his approach to ancient literature.
The effect of Urrutia’s class consciousness on his reading of the classics comes to
its best expression towards the middle of the novel when he falls into a melancholic
state, a result of the many transformations that Chile began to undergo by the mid
s. During that time, a series of reforms were implemented that aimed to redistribute land and wealth among certain groups that had been traditionally marginalized. When this process begins, Urrutia stoically withdraws, seeking refuge in the
Greek classics. In the following passage, which I have abbreviated but is almost three
pages long, he intercalates with a telling detachment the readings of Greek authors
and significant events of his time:
JACOBO MYERSTON
. . . and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the
rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaus that traverse the time-darkened pages of
Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians,
harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon
where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon
Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread
Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often),
and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a
cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende’s naval aide-de-camp was
assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and
then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup
d’état, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing
was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in
silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last.
In this succession of historical events and classical texts, only Thucydides can
break Urrutia’s ataraxic posture. For the Athenian historian locates his implied
readers in distant times and conceives his work as a tool for interpreting future
events, as he expresses it in the famous passage:
It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to
the ear: but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those who will want to have a clear
understanding of what happened –and, such is the human condition, will happen again at
some time in the same or a similar pattern. It was composed as a permanent legacy, not a
showpiece for a single hearing (Thuc. .. trans. Hammond).
Despite all the problems that such a trans-historical claim may bring, Thucydides
may be unquestionably right on this occasion. In fact, the internecine wars of the
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major social transformations that were impacting his world. In other words, he
contemplates with distance and coldness events that changed the course of Chile
and profoundly impacted Latin American history. These events were as important
as a land reform in a country with a large number of landless people (pobladores), not
to mention the nationalization of the copper industry, which still finances a significant part of public expenditure in Chile. Of equal importance was the restoration of
diplomatic relations with Cuba during the Cold War, a sign of political autonomy in
a time when the USA exercised control over most South American countries.
Similarly, the bored mention of the assassination of political leaders is an expression
of the critic’s indolence. With equal apathy the Chilean man of letters couples his
disengaged reading of the Greeks with the shortages and inflation that were induced
by local elites and the US government, paving the way for the coup. For Urrutia,
then, the reading of the Greeks is just an immersion into a frigidly imagined classical
world that strongly contrasts with the distress of his social reality. Only on one
occasion does he allow the Greek text to speak to him on a deeper level, which leads
him to feel threatened:
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
When writing this passage Bolaño was, most likely, thinking of the stasis of Corcyra that
Thucydides describes in .-. Urrutia could have established some analogies between
the clash at the heart of the ancient polis and the political polarization of Chile. The
division of Corcyra into factions of democrats and oligarchs, who were entangled in a
deadly confrontation, and the intervention of foreign powers that fuelled the conflict
could certainly be transposed to the Chilean situation of the s.
Farmers are continuously present in the minimalist canvas of the Thucydidean campaigns but are rarely the focus of attention. Here again, Bolaño is pointing to the marginal. While in Thucydides the speeches of ambassadors, generals, and politicians are
located at the centre, the farmers’ fear for their fields is most often pushed into the
background. Bolaño’s reference to ‘civilians harvesting grapes’ is too diffuse to have a
specific parallel in the Thucydidean corpus, but, like Aristophanes in the Acharnians, the
Chilean author sees violence from the perspective of farmers who, in the Greek context,
cultivate the vines of Dionysus, the god of community and peace.
With the mention of the ‘horizon’, Bolaño may be alluding to Hans Robert Jauss’ work.
Cf. Jauss (, ). As Bolaño acknowledged in an interview, he spent a considerable
amount of time reading literary criticism. See Maristain ().
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Greeks could set into motion a series of associations when compared with the
Chilean crisis of the s. In this context it is difficult not to associate those
Greek farmers (as imagined by Bolaño) with the civilians against whom Pinochet
directed his coup. They were among the victims of a military violence that in Chile
included kidnapping, incarceration, torture, and death. The image that Urrutia
finds most troubling when reading Thucydides is that of the farmers who look at
the distant horizon. In Bolaño’s reading, this horizon is none other than the future
that the Greek historian once discerned and the situation in which the Chilean
philologist now stands. Thus, the direct gaze, the eye contact with both the victims
(Greeks and Chileans) and the observer (Thucydides) is something that Urrutia
finds terrifying. This is so because looking straight into the gaze of the other implies
an act of courage that, as Bolaño would put it, has the potential of revealing Urrutia’s
own complicity with Pinochet’s regime. In other words, Thucydides’ text turns into
an unsolicited mirror in the process of reading.
Urrutia’s reluctance to embrace the vision that his reading of the History of the
Peloponnesian War has incited is symptomatically connected with a sense of radical
difference that permeates Latin American elites. This sense of separation is continuously conveyed in By Night in Chile through the priest’s hatred and disgust for
poor peasants as well as indigenous people, specifically the Mapuches, and even the
middle class of Chile’s capital, Santiago. We can already see this in the first story that
Urrutia tells during his pseudo-confessional monologue. As a youth when he aspired
to become a man of letters, he visited the well-established literary critic Farewell in
his country house. There, by accident, he comes across some old peasant women
who rapidly recognize him as a priest, and consequently want to touch his hand. To
the gesture, Urrutia responds with fear and disgust (). Also, when facing a poor
child with a runny nose in a similar scenario, he quickly averts his gaze in an attempt
JACOBO MYERSTON
to overcome an overwhelming nausea (). He feels comparable loathing for middle
class workers he meets in the Café Haiti in Santiago’s Downtown, whom he calls the
‘scum of the city’ and compares to pigs (). In the same vein, he refers to a
Mapuche nanny as ‘hideous’ and ‘of dark ways’ (, ).
Shadows of reality
For this comparison, Bolaño used as a source Ibáñez Langlois’ poem Ideas in which one
reads about the left-winger that ‘He does nothing but eat and fornicate. / However, it is
not a pig: / He has a greater gift that redeems him: his ideas / Although his soul rots.’
Ibáñez Langlois (: ). See also Boero Vargas (a: ).
See Benjamin ().
Estève ().
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To illustrate Urrutia’s predisposition against the crossing of the horizons of the
literary text and his own life, Bolaño systematically draws on Platonic imagery. In a
setting similar to the imaginary exchange with Thucydides, Urrutia finds himself
involved in a discussion with his new mentor, Farewell, in which both interlocutors
obliquely refer to Plato. In this conversation, the priest mentions the Greek philosopher in a situation that is reminiscent of the allegory of the cave in the Republic.
The allusion to the famous text takes place after Urrutia’s homoerotic initiatory
travel to Farewell’s country house, a journey full of allusions to Dante’s Divine
Comedy and Stoker’s Dracula in which the authority of literary criticism is passed
from Farewell to Urrutia. After this encounter, the critics convene again in the
house of the Chilean diplomat and writer Salvador Reyes. There, Reyes narrates
the time he spent in Paris as Chile’s ambassador during the Nazi occupation when he
met Ernst Jünger, the controversial German writer whom Walter Benjamin
denounced once as a fascist.
The central part of this story takes place in the atelier of a hungry Guatemalan
artist whom the Chilean diplomat sporadically visits. In the artist’s studio, Reyes
meets a Jünger in military uniform who is closely ‘examining a two-by-two-meter
canvas, an oil painting that Reyes had seen innumerable times and which bore the
curious title Landscape: Mexico City an hour before dawn’ (). The whole episode is
marked by the contrast between the well-nourished figures of the German officer
and the Chilean diplomat, and the starving painter. As Estève has pointed out, the
scene mirrors the Nazi concentration camps in which prisoners could be clearly
differentiated from their guards due to their undernourished bodies. And indeed
something similar to a concentration camp is portrayed in the painting of Mexico
City, in which ‘there were no human figures, but, here and there, one could make out
blurred skeletons that could have belonged to people or to animals’ (), resembling
‘an altar for human sacrifice’ (). Also blatant is the attitude of Reyes and Jünger,
who do not seem to feel empathy for the starving painter and do not recognize that
the city represented is not Mexico City, but the occupied Paris in which they are
living. After having a conversation about art, and having agreed that the Guatemalan
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
See Szlezák () with references.
In Bolaño also draws on the allegory of the cave to question the lack of ethics of
Mexican writers sponsored by the government, see Blanck ().
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will not survive the winter, both writers go to dine in Reyes’ house, where they
discuss ‘literature sitting in comfortable armchairs’ and where ‘the meal was balanced . . . in gastronomic as well as intellectual terms’().
Since there are repeated allusions to Plato’s allegory of the cave in the section
about the hungry artist, as well as in the dialogue between Urrutia and Farewell that
follows, and the final part of the novel, it may be useful to summarize here the text in
the Republic (–b). At the beginning of Book VII, Socrates tells Glaucon to
picture a group of prisoners who are confined in a subterranean cave. These prisoners are in chains and are facing forward, unable to look back. Behind them is a fire,
and in-between the fire and them there is a wall. There are people behind the wall
who are carrying all kinds of figures, the shadows of which are projected in front of
the prisoners. Because they have been living this way since they were small children
and have never seen anything else, the prisoners believe that the shadows depict real
things and represent the only truth. If any of the prisoners are released and led
towards the fire, so argues Socrates, they will turn and flee back into the lower cave,
unable to gaze at the fire directly. But if a prisoner is coerced to leave the cave, he will
gradually grow accustomed to the brightness of the outside world. After a period of
adaptation, the former prisoner will be able to directly see the Sun, the ultimate
cause of all things, which for Plato is none other than the idea of the Good itself. In
this process of being freed, the prisoner will recognize that the shadows he once
believed to be real are but poor representations of real things.
As I mentioned before, Bolaño’s first attempt in By Night in Chile to appropriate the
Platonic allegory takes place on the part of the Guatemalan artist. With the purpose of
exploring the relationship between writers, literature, and reality, Bolaño positions the
true world (outside of the cave) in the context of human suffering, this is, in a
European continent desolated by the war. This is the equivalent of Plato’s Sun,
the origin of light that the prisoners will find outside of the cave. There is an obvious
difference between Plato and Bolaño however: for the latter 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. The cave is then represented by the attic of the
hungry artist, which looks through a single window over the French capital.
The Guatemalan painter, a true artist in Bolaño’s imaginary, acts as the mediator
between the two writers and reality. He sits for hours at the window and continuously watches the City of Light, transposing the horror of the war into an allegorical
picture. One possible reason for this transformation of reality into allegory is that
Jünger and Reyes, prisoners of their illusion, are not ready to divert their gaze from
the shadows. Only the Guatemalan painter has grasped the true nature of the situation to offer Jünger and Reyes an image ("4dwlon) in which they can see real things
reflected. Hypothetically, if they were to become accustomed to this reflection, they
JACOBO MYERSTON
And when [Reyes’] eyes discovered the transparent line, the vanishing point upon which the
Guatemalan’s gaze was focused, or from which on the contrary it emanated, well, at that
point a chill shiver ran through his soul, a sudden desire to shut his eyes, to stop looking at
that being who was looking at the tremulous dusk over Paris . . . (–).
To some extent, Jünger and Reyes are the mirror images of Urrutia and Farewell,
who had also failed to realize the deep misery they had fallen into when they supported and collaborated with Pinochet’s dictatorship. After leaving Reyes’ house
and hearing the story about the Guatemalan artist, Urrutia and Farewell go to a café
to further discuss literary issues. Their conversation takes place in the middle of an
electric storm that produces random shadows, a sort of shadow play that Farewell
associates with the meaning of books:
[Farewell]: What’s the use, what use are books, they’re shadows, nothing but shadows. And
I: Like the shadows you have been watching? And Farewell: Quite. And I: There’s a very
interesting book by Plato on precisely that subject. And Farewell: Don’t be an idiot. And I:
What are those shadows telling you? Farewell, what is it? And Farewell: They are telling me
about the multiplicity of readings. And I: Multiple, perhaps, but thoroughly mediocre and
miserable. And Farewell: I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I: The blind,
Farewell, the stumbling of the blind, their futile flailing around, their bumping and tripping,
their staggering and falling, their general debilitation ().
The two critics are also modelled here as the prisoners in Plato’s cave. They sit in a
café (the traditional cave of Latin American intellectuals) looking at shadows produced by the lightning (Plato’s fire), trying to make sense of random images that
have undetermined referents, signs that they cannot decipher. Urrutia and Farewell,
however, are not bound in chains like Plato’s prisoners. Instead, they could divert
their gaze from the shadows and look straight at reality, if they wished to do so. But
they cannot because they are trapped by their inability to relate literature to their
own social reality:
[Urrutia]: Can you make out anything clearly in that shadow play? Can you see particular
scenes, or the whirlpool of history, or a crazy ellipse? And Farewell: I can see a rural scene.
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could gradually turn their gaze to the things that are being mirrored: a conquered
Paris, and by extension a Europe full of human sacrifices. However, Reyes and
Jünger, the educated recipients of the painting Landscape: Mexico City an hour
before dawn, completely fail to understand what is beyond the canvas: they look at
the image of the Latin American city in the same way that the Platonic prisoners
contemplate the shadows projected in the lower cave, unable to establish the correct
referent. While Jünger has no access to the vantage point of the painter, most likely
because of his ideological connection to Nazism, Reyes’ inability to leave his current
state of mind and pass to one of recognition is the result of an internal weakness and
lack of courage:
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
And I: Something like a group of farmers praying, going away, coming back, praying and
going away again? And Farewell: I see whores stopping for a fraction of a second to contemplate something important, then heading off again like meteorites. And I: Can you see
anything there about Chile? Can you see the future of our land? . . . Can you see our Palatine
Anthology in that shadow play? Can you read any names? Or recognize any profiles? And
Farewell: I see Neruda’s profile and my own, but, no, I’m mistaken, it’s just a tree, I see a
tree, the multiple, monstrous silhouette of its dead leaves on the ground, like a sea drying up,
it looks like a sketch of two profiles, but actually it’s a tomb out in the open, cloven by an
angel’s sword or a giant’s club (–).
The cave of Marı́a Canales
The symbolism of the Platonic cave is further developed and reaches its most forceful
form in the final part of the novel, an episode that takes place in the house of Marı́a
Canales, the writer and hostess of literary soirées. After Pinochet’s coup d’état had
taken place and the dictatorship was fully established, Urrutia begins to frequent the
literary parties that Canales throws in her three-story house, located in an affluent
neighbourhood in the outskirts of Santiago. The gatherings are held at night during
the curfew; this requires the participants to arrive early and leave the next day after
the curfew has ended. Canales’s residence is a typical Chilean upper-middle class
home and is described as ‘a big house, surrounded by a garden full of trees, a house
with a comfortable sitting room, with a fireplace and good whiskey, good cognac, a
house that was open to friends once or twice a week, even occasionally three times a
week’ ().
These get-togethers, and everything that happened there, are the most unequivocal historical reference in the novel. The house actually existed, and well-known
celebrities of Santiago’s literary scene met there. In real life, it was the home of
Mariana Callejas, an unexceptional writer and far-right terrorist who describes with
detail the place in her autobiographical narrative Siembra vientos, memorias. In her
book, Callejas confesses the crimes she and her American husband, Michael
Townley, committed at the service of Pinochet’s secret police DINA (Dirección de
Rodrı́guez (: ); Boero Vargas (a: –), (b: –).
Peña ().
Bolaño used Callejas () as a source for the writing of By Night in Chile.
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Perhaps the most interesting part of this passage is Farewell’s difficulty in making
sense of these images, his failure as a critic and a mantic, especially about the future
of Chile. Although the Chilean theme emerges superficially, with a reference to a
local ‘Palatine Anthology’, a ciphered allusion to Chile as a social entity occurs on a
deeper level in the symbol of a tree with dead, fallen leaves. But this symbol is
beyond Urrutia and Farewell’s comprehension. As scholars have already noticed, in
this novel Bolaño uses the image of a dead tree barren of leaves to symbolize a
betrayed Chile dominated by death and exile, which is also described as a ‘sea
drying up’ and a ‘tomb out in the open’ ().
JACOBO MYERSTON
It is possible to believe that many of these guests did not really know where they were, but
most of the country knew the vulturish flapping of cars without plates. These DINA taxis
that collected passengers during the curfew. All Chile knew and said nothing, something had
been told, something was said, some chat in a cocktail, some gossip of a censored painter.
Everyone looked and preferred not to look, not to know, not to hear these horrors that were
leaked through the foreign press. These barracks upholstered with plugs and bloody hooks,
those graves of twisted bodies. It was too terrible to be believed. In this country so welleducated, of writers and poets, those things do not happen, pure sensationalist literature,
See Berchenko (); Castillo-Berchenko ().
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Inteligencia Nacional). She hosted parties, raised her three children, and played the
role of a traditional housewife in a house that was actually an undercover headquarter of the military intelligence. The family lived on the third floor where the
literary workshops took place, while the second floor was used as an office in which
the elimination of political dissidents was planned. In the square meter backyard that Bolaño describes as ‘a garden full of trees’, there was also a laboratory in
which specialized personnel experimented with sarin gas that was used in several
assassination plots. In that house, the communist Carmelo Soria, a member of the
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, was
tortured to death.
Although some historical details in By Night in Chile have been changed, the
dramatic structure that the house evokes remains the same. Bolaño condensed the
three-story building and the external laboratory into one single space divided into an
upper floor and a basement, which replicates, but at the same time inverts, the
cosmic dimension of the below and the above of Plato’s allegory. In Bolaño’s account, the intellectuals celebrate and read their poetry on the upper floor, while the
torture centre is in the basement. These two worlds would have remained disconnected if it were not for the drunken guests, who at times get lost and open the wrong
doors. In addition to the drunkards, there are other characters who freely move
between levels, including Canales’ husband, the man in charge of the torture centre.
Servants and children too, as in Buñuel’s Le journal d’une femme de chambre, can
cross boundaries and see the whole picture: the combination of a comfortable life
and the state-implemented terrorism that often lay at the foundation of modern life.
Bolaño then expands on the metaphorical handling of Canales’ house as an inverted version of Plato’s cave. In the Republic the prisoners are below, underground
in a cave, and the real world is above. By contrast, the Chilean intellectuals are in the
upper floor of the house, and the true world resides in the basement below. It is
precisely there, in the inferno, where reality is located. Above, in the comfortable
living room of the literary soirée, illusion or, more precisely, neglect reigns. It is not
just a matter of the guests not knowing that they are gathering in a torture centre, as
these facilities abounded at that time in Chile: it is simply that they do not want to
know it. As the poet Pedro Lemebel wrote:
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
pure Marxist propaganda to discredit the government, said Mariana raising the music
volume to silence the strangled moans that leaked from the garden.
Bolaño exemplifies this intriguing attitude of the Chilean conservative intelligentsia
in a masterful manner when he writes about a guest who got lost in the halls of
Canales’ house:
And later he retells the descent to the inferno from a different perspective:
He opened the door and saw the man tied to the metal bed, blindfolded, and he knew the man
was alive because he could hear him breathing, although he wasn’t in good shape, for in spite
of the dim light he saw the wounds, the raw patches, like eczema, but it wasn’t eczema, the
battered parts of his anatomy, the swollen parts, as if more than one bone had been broken,
but he was breathing, he certainly didn’t look like he was about to die, and then the theorist of
avant-garde theater shut the door delicately, without making a noise, and started to make his
way back to the sitting room, carefully switching off as he went each of the lights he had
previously switched on ().
In both passages, the act of concealing what has been discovered is striking. The
person who has seen what is really taking place in the house ‘retraces his steps’
returning to the party, pretending that he has not seen anything ‘without saying a
word’. And after ‘carefully switching off as he went each of the lights he had previously switched on’, he makes his way back to the sitting room (Plato’s cave)
without making a noise. The undoing of the path from the realm of truth to that
of illusion runs parallel to the initial pain and inertia that the Platonic prisoner
experiences when he is first liberated and turned towards the light that generates
the shadows:
And if he were forced to look at the light itself would his eyes not be in pain, and would he not
turn away and flee to those things which he is able to discern and regard as in reality were
more clear than what is revealed? (e.- ed. Burnet)
Thus, the instinct of the person who has just been set free is to return to his previous
position, to what he is accustomed to: in the Platonic imaginary this means to the play
of shadows; in Bolaño’s it means to a world of conformity that is sustained by denial.
With his appropriation of the allegory of the cave, then, Bolaño flays those who have
seen Evil but do not transform their vision into knowledge, failing to put into
Lemebel ().
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He arrived at that door at the end of a dimly lit corridor, and opened it and came across that
body tied to a metal bed, abandoned in that basement, but alive, and the playwright or the
actor shut the door stealthily, trying not to wake the poor man who was recuperating from his
ordeal, and retraced his steps and returned to the party or the literary gathering, Marı́a
Canales’s soirée, without saying a word ().
JACOBO MYERSTON
articulated speech what has been unveiled. And although Urrutia denies having seen
the basement, it is he who reports about the lost guests who had access to the lower
levels of the house. This being considered, one would be tempted to assume that
Urrutia shares some responsibility for the crimes committed in the infamous house.
For he knew what was taking place there and he neither opposed nor denounced it.
Accordingly, this would be the crime that torments the priest’s consciousness and
determines the narrative tone of the whole novel; but this is not the case.
The actual crime
Besides the allegorical meaning of these personifications, which imply that Urrutia was
driven in his action by Fear and Hatred, these two names may also evoke the political
slogan ‘juntemos odio’, ‘Let’s unite our hate’, that was used in a psychological operation in
preparation for the coup. See Benmiloud (: ); Berchenko (: ).
Marta Harnecker is one of the most influential Marxist thinkers of Latin America with
more than eighty publications. She was involved in the Cuban revolution, and has acted
as a consultant in the recent Bolivian and Venezuelan processes.
Boff (: ).
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Despite all appearances, Urrutia’s most significant offense is not just to have become
a collaborator by not speaking out the truth. On at least two occasions, Bolaño tells
us that Urrutia was deeply involved in activities that contributed directly to the
assassination of leftist militants. Prior to the military coup and some time thereafter,
a couple of gloomy characters, who seem to work for a foreign intelligence service
and for the elites involved in the conspiracy, approach Urrutia with two troubling
propositions. First Mr. Odeim and Mr. Oido, whose names are palindromes of the
Spanish Miedo (fear) and Odio (hatred) send Urrutia to Europe with the purpose of
learning how to neutralize some troublesome pigeons, which were polluting catholic
churches with their excrement. On the old continent, the Chilean priest studies a
counterinsurgent strategy based on the use of falcons for annihilating the offending
birds. After the coup, Odeim and Oido invite the critic to teach Pinochet and other
generals about Marxism as part of a concerted action against the socialists. In his
lectures to them, Urrutia explains the work not only of Marx, but also of the Chilean
theorist Marta Harnecker who was forced into exile after the fall of Allende.
The story of the pigeons and falcons is, as one may suspect, an allusion to the fight
that Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger led against liberation theology, based
on a Latin American interpretation of the New Testament. As Boff has put it, this
theology is ‘an examination of the whole scripture from the viewpoint of the oppressed’, which accordingly regards Jesus as the first revolutionary, a model fighter
for the poor and liberator from oppression. Perhaps the most important aspect of
this allegory is the way in which Urrutia embellishes, or more precisely, twists the
truth about an important episode in his life, projecting onto Europe a violence that
was planned in the ‘first world’ but that was in fact executed in Latin America.
According to his fantasized version of the events, it was not in Chile and the rest of
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
the Americas where conservative priests spiritually lead falcons (the military) against
pigeons (leftist priests) and their followers (the starlings). This is best exemplified
when Urrutia recounts a visit to Avignon where he observes the following:
This allegorical image begins with the falcon Ta Gueule, a name with a double
reference. By phonetic similarity, it alludes to Father Tagle, Archbishop of the city
of Valparaiso and Pinochet’s supporter. By the meaning of the French expression,
the name Ta Gueule (Shut Up!) is an unequivocal reference to the Vatican censorship of rebellious priests. As we know, during the last decades of the twentieth
century prominent liberation theologians were prohibited by the Catholic Church
from discussing their writings, teaching in universities and seminars, and saying
mass. On the other hand, the attacks of the bird of prey on the pigeons and the
starlings point to the assassination of priests and parishioners, who are symbolically
represented in the story as ‘swarms of flies’. This clearly refers to the assassinations
of priests and their followers by military forces that occurred not only in Chile but
also in other parts of Latin America at roughly the same time. In Chile, one of the
most notorious cases was that of Father Antonio Llidó, who was imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared in . The assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero
and the failed attack against the theologian Jon Sobrino in Central America may also
have resounded in Bolaño’s mind when writing this passage.
As in the case of the painting of the Guatemalan artist, the geography of the event
has been dislocated: the Latin American tragedy has been projected into Avignon.
This time, however, it is not with the purpose of facilitating an understanding of a
reality, but of concealing it. And there is a good reason why Urrutia would not look
straight at his actions, since his engagement in theorizing persecution and advising
of the military had transnational consequences and implications that not only affected Chile, but the whole continent. Although Urrutia is fictional, Bolaño makes
See Estève () for the symbolic relationship of the falcon and the military in By Night
in Chile.
See Amorós ().
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[The falcon] Ta Gueule in full flight, scattering not just flocks of pigeons but also flocks of
starlings . . ., appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and
swooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening
the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was
bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and <the> afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a
deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the
passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and
sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta,
gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the bloodstained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing color like an abstract expressionist
painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident or as unequivocal as in
Avignon ().
JACOBO MYERSTON
The critique of the literary system
At end of the novel, confronted with the problem of responsibility, Marı́a Canales
says to Urrutia in reference to the use of her home as a torture centre: ‘that is how
literature is made in Chile’ (), implying that literary production involves a selective perception of a social reality built on questionable foundations. To this
Urrutia adds:
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. That is how literature is made. Or at least what we call literature, to keep ourselves
from falling into the dump ().
With this, Bolaño wants to make sure that the reader does not confine to Chile his
critiques of the literary system, a system composed of writers and readers, and
everything that has repercussions in literary production. The confluence of legitimization of power, torture, and denial in which intellectuals have often been
involved is, in his view, a central issue in the Western world. Bolaño emphasizes
Oral communication of Professor Jaime Concha.
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clear that the story has a historical framework that allows a series of quasi-historical
inferences about the novel’s characters. Even if the consequences of Urrutia’s actions cannot be directly associated with the shocking events we know, those of his
referential double, priest and critic Ibáñez Langlois, may have had a true impact on
Pinochet’s and other totalitarian governments of the region. In fact, it is rumoured in
Chile that Ibáñez Langlois gave in actuality such lectures on Marxism to Pinochet.
Moreover, the historical referent of Urrutia published several books against liberation theology. In the introduction to his Teologı́a de la liberación y lucha de clases
(), he admits the possibility that his writings could have instigated political
persecution. But although he ponders the possible implications of his intellectual
work, Ibáñez Langlois, like Urrutia Lacroix, prefers to deny it with convoluted
arguments.
But although concealment may reveal a certain sense of guilt, a tension between
repentance and pleasure pervades the shadowy image of the self that Urrutia has
created. Even if the purpose of the ‘pigeon allegory’ is to conceal the priest’s participation in the bloodbath, the comparison of the falcon with an expressionist
painter at the end of the quoted passage betrays the joy that the critic and priest
experienced when visualizing the extermination of liberation theologians and their
followers. It is precisely this image of the self that is threatened by the crossing
of gazes when reading the Greeks, since the merging of the historical horizons of
ancient texts and the modern readers implies, to some degree, the discovery of the
self in the other. Thus, Urrutia’s simulacrum, as Bolaño wants us to think, is fragile;
it is vulnerable to the destabilizations that engaged reading could produce.
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
Villalobos-Ruminott (), for instance, has wrongly identified Bolaño’s voice with that
of his negative characters, introducing the idea of co-belonging. According to this critic,
for Bolaño ‘Literature does not save but condemns us to be part of the very logic of global
violence, and this exhaustion of hopes in literature.’ But this interpretation misreads
Bolaño’s dualist cosmology in which there is a clear separation between good and evil that
divides the literary world. Cf. Bolaño (b). Bolaño’s archaic dualism may indeed be
disappointing to postmodernist theorists.
Bolaño (b).
Ibid.
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this point many times in By Night in Chile by linking Chilean and European fascism,
highlighting the role of the Vatican in the persecution of liberationist movements,
and by pointing to the involvement of the USA in the coup against Allende and the
torturing of Chilean dissidents; this last aspect is made clear through the figure of
the American husband of Marı́a Canales who runs the secret prison in the basement.
That being said, it may also be wise not to fully identify Urrutia’s voice with
Bolaño’s, who championed a different kind of literature, one that does not turn its
back to the real as it manifests itself, for instance, in the victims of torture. For
Bolaño ‘the good writer must have the courage to look in a black mirror’, this means
to recognize where he stands on ethical terms. In this sense, neither Marı́a Canales
nor Urrutia are good literati nor is what they call ‘literature’ true literature. As
Bolaño said in an interview, true literature must be reflexive, this means ‘texts
must have mirrors where they look at themselves; where the text will look at itself
and also see what is behind it’. These mirrors are not only the intratextual and
intertextual relationships, but also the mirrors of the reader’s consciousness and the
referential relationship between the text and the historical reality of the reader. And
here it is precisely where Urrutia’s writing, reading, and thinking fails to be true
because he as a reader is incapable of seeing himself reflected in the mirrors that both
literature and his own biography offer to him. In failing to acknowledge the implications that both the Thucydidean and Platonic texts have for the exploration of his
own situation in the world, Urrutia confines himself to a sort of hell in which he
identifies with the crimes he has helped to commit, but at the same time is tormented
by guilt. The Platonic allegory, if used as a mirror, would have allowed him to see
himself in the lower part of the cave, as he actually is, gazing at illusory shadows.
Turning his head back to the light would have had revealed to him those ‘barracks
upholstered with plugs and bloody hooks, those graves of twisted bodies’ that were
produced by the political system he endorsed.
To conclude, in By Night in Chile Bolaño explores what constitutes a poor reading
of literature, its implication and its mechanics. Interestingly, he articulates his exploration around the reading of Greek texts in a novel that was part of an unfinished
trilogy in which he hoped to address issues related to Latin American political
history. Fortunately, Bolaño was able to finish Amulet, a work that examines the
antithesis of Urrutia’s attitude towards literature and politics. In Amulet, Auxilio
JACOBO MYERSTON
Lacouture, a homeless poetess, brings to its last consequences Bolaño’s proposed
mirroring practice of reading: she reads the Greeks from Sappho to Seferis, from
past to present, turning herself into a Latin American Cassandra who predicts and
condemns the chain of retributive violence that men like Urrutia have set in motion.
Acknowledgements
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The project from which this article has emerged was presented for the first time at
the Rhetoric and Poetics Workshop at The University of Chicago. I have benefited
greatly from the comments of Mark Payne, Michèle Lowrie, Sarah Nooter, Bill
Olmsted, Danielle Raudenbush, Jaime Concha, and Tobias Joho. The translation of
the passages of By Night in Chile discussed in this article is that of Chris Andrews,
published by New Directions Publishing, . All other translations are mine, if
not otherwise indicated.
THE CLASSICIST IN THE CAVE
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