Writing with the Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility, and Justice in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star

Abstract

In the short preface to Distant Star (1996), Roberto Bolaño frames his novel as a revised version of the story of Lieutenant Ramírez Hoffman told at the end of his fictional encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). Citing the dissatisfaction of “a fellow Chilean, Arturo B., a veteran of Latin America’s doomed revolutions” (1)¹—Bolaño’s fictional source and alter ego—he promises an expansion of the “grotesque” story of that infamous poet turned pilot and serial killer around the time of the coup of 1973. The result, he adds, “rather than mirroring or exploding” former versions, would be “in itself a mirror and an explosion” (1). The terms used to frame this supplementary exercise immediately place us on Borgesian grounds, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s collaborative “discovery” (also thanks to “a mirror and an encyclopaedia”) of the grotesque universe of “Tlön” (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones 13). ² “Tlön” offers a fantastical image of the universe as seen through the normative principles of Enlightenment rationality. It also represents the monstrous distortion of those principles under the conditions of fascism. That Bolaño should evoke Borges in a postdictatorship context signals an effort to develop Borges’s reflections for an understanding of the Chilean present.