Bolaño, Roberto. By Night in Chile

By Night in Chile takes the form of a recollection of crucial events in the life of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, who believes he is dying. Urrutia is a Chilean priest, literary critic, poet and Opus Dei member, who lived through the Pinochet dictatorship. His deathbed confession/rant/vindication starts with the account of his mentorship under the eminent literary critic Farewell, commencing his own career as critic and poet; the former more successful than the latter. Later in life Urrutia is recruited by the enigmatic ‘Mr Raef’ and ‘Mr Etah’, who send him on a bizarre quest chronicling European priests’ attempts to save their churches from decay by pigeon excrement through falconry. On his return to Chile, Allende has come to power, whose policies disgust Urrutia; he retreats from public life and reads Greek tragedy through the Allende days. After Pinochet’s rise to power, Urrutia is asked to teach the General and some of his top staff a crash course in Marxism. Urrutia obliges, setting his brief moral objections aside, ultimately regarding Pinochet as a good student. The novel climaxes in the account of a literary saloon led by an aspiring writer, María Canales. The saloon’s attendants—Chile’s surviving literary elite, compliant with Pinochet’s rule—discuss and drink the night away after curfew, having heady conversations about aesthetics and literature. It turns out that the basement of the very same house is used as torture room for Pinochet’s secret police; the saloon’s host’s husband is a member of the DINA. Urrutia, in his typical fashion, claims he “didn’t know until it was too late.” (122)

The novel can be read as a biting satire, criticizing the supine reaction of Chile’s literary elite to the Pinochet dictatorship. A central theme is the critique of aesthetic withdrawal from moral responsibility; painting a vivid portrait of a morally complicit man. It is told through Urrutia’s eyes, who is wrestling with—and mostly denying—the notion of his own complicity: “One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences” (1).

As a portrait of a man complicit in the dictatorship’s atrocities, By Night in Chile is useful as a meditation on complicity, and as a depiction of the Pinochet dictatorship. It refuses to make clear distinctions between perpetrator, bystander, collaborator or enabler; challenging an essentialist view of these categories. Urrutia himself is a realistic—if highly unreliable—depiction of a man attempting to come to terms with his own place on the spectrum. The novel hence functions as an excellent study in complicity, either on its own or in a larger body of work; in a classroom or as its own discrete subject.

Author of this entry: Martijn Loos.

Bolaño, Roberto. By Night in Chile. Translated by Chris Andrews. London: Vintage, 2003.