The night of the senses: literary (dis)orders in nocturno de chile

Abstract

Over the course of the last decade, and particularly in the wake of his untimely death at the age of fifty, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano (1953–2003) has come to be viewed by critics and reviewers as perhaps the greatest Latin American writer of his generation and as a literary phenomenon rivaling the international impact of the Boom writers of the 1960s (Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar).1 No doubt Bolano’s reputation as a poete maudit – which has been cultivated through his own accounts of vagabondism and drug and alcohol abuse, together with his well-publicized and broadly aimed attacks on Latin American writers and literary institutions – has helped to bolster his critical reception outside the Spanish-speaking world, creating a somewhat ironic situation in which a figure renowned for his iconoclastic attitudes and positions emerges as an international representative of what we continue to call ‘Latin American literature’. Although the question of Bolano’s reception is interesting in its own right, I only allude to it as a rhetorical point of departure for what will be my real concern here: the relation between literary language, aesthetics and politics. I begin by rehearsing some arguments advanced by the French thinker Jacques Ranciere concerning the politics of literary aesthetics, after which I will turn to a discussion of Bolano’s 2000 novel Nocturno de Chile, a literary treatment of the 1973–89 military dictatorship.