Roberto Bolaño's Fiction by Chris Andrews

Author:Chris Andrews
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

And I would add one further trait:

5. Once the fight has begun, it is experienced as a liberation, and produces a neutralization of affect.

Not all of the characteristics enumerated above appear in each of the stories of violent conflict, but Dorfman convincingly constructs an “ideal type” whose most complete realizations are to be found in “The South” and “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz.” In “The South,” Juan Dahlmann, who lives in Buenos Aires, goes to his ranch to convalesce after an operation. He is insulted by some laborers in a bar, and one of them challenges him to a fight. An old gaucho throws Dahlmann a dagger, and from that point on, violence seems inevitable: “It was as though the South itself had decided that Dahlmann should accept the challenge.”14 He experiences a neutralization of affect: “while there was no hope in Dahlmann, there was no fear, either” (179). By accepting the challenge and his probable defeat, he corrects his humiliating, passive “death” in the sanatorium (which he has perhaps never left: like “The Other Death,” this is the story of a “forking in time”).15 Dahlmann’s probable death is a personal affair because it is the dignified end that he would have “dreamed or chosen” for his life. The “young thug” is a mere instrument:

As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they’d stuck that needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen. (179)

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