The classicist in the cave: Bolaño's theory of reading in By Night in Chile.

In his novels, Roberto Bolaño explores different forms of reading Greek and Roman literature by presenting fictional characters that relate to ancient texts in antithetical ways. In this article, I focus on one specific example of Bolaño's approach, namely the experience of reading Greek texts by a conservative Latin American man of letters presented in By Night in Chile. In this novel, Bolaño narrates the pseudo-confession of Sebastia´n Urrutia Lacroix, a literary critic and Hellenist who supported Augusto Pinochet. From his complicity with the dictatorship, a conflict of consciousness arises that the protagonist seeks to obscure with a particular way of interpreting Greek literature. Bolaño dramatizes this hermeneutics of concealing through Urrutia's struggle to suppress a disturbing image of himself that emerges while reading Plato's Republic and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. In this article, then, I investigate Bolaño's theory of reading, as it unfolds in By Night in Chile. I argue that Bolaño operates with a dualistic model in which there are bad and good practices of reading. The first consists of concealing the reader's vantage point, while the second leads to a recognition of the reader's self and his sociopolitical location in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]