Pseudo-Real Referents and Their Function in Santa María de las flores negras by Hernán Rivera Letelier and Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño

A trend in post-modernism is to blur the borders that separate, for example, fiction from reality, history from literature, and literary genres from each other. But if post-modernism is to achieve the rupturing effect it seeks, I believe that it is fundamental for that border to remain, thus preserving the distinction between the spheres it keeps apart. To give a particular example, the effect of metalepsis (see Genette 234-36) requires a clear awareness of the different levels whose borders are being trespassed: extradiegesis, diegesis, metadiegesis.

I attach the highest importance to the demarcation, in my opinion ontologically sound, between reality and fiction—a boundary that bases the differentiation between history and literature.

In line with Martínez-Bonati (1981), I consider literary works to be fiction and believe, as this critic does, that the fictional nature of the literary text stems from the imaginary character of the language that constitutes it.

Thus, I assume the principle of ontological homogeneity espoused by Doležel:

As non-actualized possibles, all fictional entities are ontologically homogeneous. Tolstoy's Napoleon is no less fictional than his Pierre Bezuchov and Dickens's London is no more actual than Lewis's Wonderland. The principle of ontological homogeneity is a necessary condition of the coexistence and compossibility of fictional particulars; it explains why fictional individuals can interact and communicate with one another. A naïve view which presents fictional individuals as a mixed bag of "real" people and "purely fictitious" characters is explicitly refuted. Ontological homogeneity epitomizes the sovereignty of fictional worlds.

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I advocate calling these apparently pre-existing referents, pseudo-real referents (in opposition to real referents). They spring from the text and do not escape the fictionality that encompasses the referents, the depicted world, the narrator, the implied reader, the implied author, and the ideas processed in the literary work.

I even conceive the possibility of false pseudo-real referents: the text, taking its illusion of mimesis to an extreme, constructs as real the referents it invents, thus cheating the candid reader. This happens in the 1999 text by Roberto Bolaño entitled La literatura nazi en América (The Nazi Literature in America), in which non-existent authors are easily taken for real authors by the non-initiated reader.

I intend to compare how pseudo-real referents operate in two novels written by Chilean authors, both inscribed in the so-called Latin American "post-boom": Santa María de las flores negras (Holy Mary of the Black Flowers), by Hernán Rivera Letelier (2002) and Amuleto (Amulet), by Roberto Bolaño (1999b). These two works are similar in that, from an ideological point of view, they denounce a crime which serves as the basic pseudo-real referent: the killing of saltpetre workers in Santa María de Iquique in northern Chile in 1907, in Letelier, and the killing of university students in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, in 1968, in Bolaño. Both novels place an imperative on the act of remembrance.¹ However, they also differ from each other in that the former clearly subscribes to an aesthetic of totality, whereas the latter plays, on some levels, the game of instability and decentralization.²

Assuming that pseudo-real referents tend to perform a mimetic function, to create an illusion of reality, it will be of interest to examine the ways in which this purpose is reconciled with the notion of decentralization.

The narrators, from whose perspective the world is configured, are the fundamental vehicles of totality in Santa María de las flores negras and of decentralization in Amuleto.

Santa María de las flores negras has two omniscient narrators, a feature that enhances the certitude of each of their accounts. One narrative voice is heterodiegetic and the other is homodiegetic. The latter is a collective voice which corresponds to the first-person plural "we." It emerges abruptly and identifies with the strikers, who are linked to a pseudo-real referent.

The use of the pronoun "we" denotes...