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Mónica VanBladel
Amid its myriad insights to abstract truths-the vulnerability of literature to power, for example, or the psychology of complicity with violence-it is abundantly clear that Roberto Bolaño's Nocturno de Chile (2000) is a historically situated novel, embedded in the particularities of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990. The novel is the deathbed narration of Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean Opus Dei priest turned literary critic who becomes increasingly implicated in networks of authoritarian power and abuse. This semi-confessional narrative begins, uncharacteristically for the genre, with a proclamation of moral purity that the remainder of the novel attempts to substantiate: the priest proclaims that it is recent "infamias" spread by an unnamed joven envejecido that have prompted him to chronicle "aquellos actos que me justifican". This allegedly guilty joven envejecido remains a spectral presence and the narrative motor for the majority of the novel, which constitutes Urrutia's attempt to both disprove and erase his accuser.
Though critical consensus has established el joven as Urrutia's alter-ego or guilty conscience, I read him as an independent historical subject: a tortured victim of the Pinochet dictatorship, whose full identity becomes clear when he emerges as cadaver at the novel's conclusion. This reading opens up a new understanding of the final scene as one of ethical recognition, in which Urrutia sees himself in the previously spectral other, a victim he vehemently sought to occlude. This encounter is far from peaceful: upon acknowledging this other, Urrutia is overcome by a whirling host of faces from his past, and the narrative ultimately concludes in an apocalyptic, novel-ending "tormenta de mierda" (150). With this paradoxical confessional buildup and its unexpected, repulsive finale, the novel dramatically reconfigures two concepts from Catholic orthodoxy: eschatology (the end of times) and sacramental confession, also known as reconciliation. In this essay, I trace Bolaño's polysemic mobilization of both theological terms, arguing that the novel thereby resignifies the concepts of truth and reconciliation that were so central to Chile's postdictatorship period-developing them beyond their juridical parameters and political connotations.1 Attending to Bolaño's reconfiguration of Catholic confession and eschatology establishes the novel's abject apocalypse as affirmative, intersubjective relation, rather than grim punishment for the historical revisionism of a solitary, dying wrongdoer; this reading shows Nocturno de Chile to be more historically representative and socially just than is registered in existing criticism. Finally, I describe how this aesthetic shift constitutes a new representative paradigm for dictatorship among literature about the period.
