Unsettledness and Doublings in Roberto Bolaño's Estrella distante

Soñé con detectives helados, detectives latinoamericanosque intentaban mantener los ojos abiertosen medio del sueño.Soñé con crímenes horriblesy con tipos cuidadososque procuraban no pisar los charcos de sangrey al mismo tiempo abarcar con una sola miradael escenario del crimen.Soñé con detectives perdidosen el espejo convexo de los Arnolfini:nuestra época, nuestras perspectivas,nuestros modelos del Espanto.

Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives helados

The reworking and extension of "Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, el infame," the last of the biographies which form La literatura nazi en América (1996), into the longer work Estrella distante (1996), is an example of the type of operation that Roberto Bolaño frequently executed in the course of his writing days. While La literatura nazi is a story divided into independent but interrelated biographical sketches of a large group of American writers with fascist inclinations, Estrella distante provides a much more detailed account of the poetic culture in Chile during the second half of the twentieth century. This extension preserves the essence of La literatura nazi since Bolaño's narrator also tells about numerous writers and their work—an air force pilot (a major character, as we will see), a French translator of indigenous descent, a gay Chilean poet in exile, a Russian-Jewish émigré saloniste, leaders of literary workshops, twin sisters, and other poets—but this time the examples are drawn from many areas of the political and ethical spectrum. La literatura nazi is a book mostly about Latin America that includes North American writers. Estrella distante, on the other hand, focuses on a group of Chilean poets in a very specific context.

One of the main characteristics of Estrella distante is its intense play with forms of doubling not only as mirror, but also as explosion, through a process not of copying literally the contents of "Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, el infame," but of problematizing and extending the pre-text. Bolaño changes names, adds places, provides details, and incorporates events and characters to a story that at the level of theme and plot remains guided by the pre-text but gains in complexity. Most important, however, the characters, and especially the narrator, are reworked and inserted into a process of doubling that allows for a more challenging exploration of "las prácticas de la moral" to which the author has called attention.² Consequently, the concept of doubling is connected to self-criticism, an operation that makes characters visible to themselves, and their meditations visible to the reader. In Estrella distante the concept of the "doppelganger" stretches out of its literal meaning as a double of a living human and as "an insurance against the extinction of the self" (142), as Freud puts it, towards a projection of different kinds of doubles—characters with parallel lives, role models, shadows, mirror images, stream of consciousness, self-observation, the evil double or herald of impending destruction, double personality, ghosts, nightmares. Estrella distante is not a traditional example of double literature, as we will explore, but the manifestations of this literary motif are so dominant that they cannot be ignored. The examples studied here will lead to a specific understanding of the motif and its functions in the novel, and will pay special attention to the uncanny aspects of the double or doublings.³

A short prologue explains that "El último capítulo de La literatura nazi servía como contrapunto, acaso como anticlímax del grotesco literario que lo precedía, y Arturo deseaba una historia más larga, no espejo y explosión de otras historias sino espejo y explosión en sí misma" (11). The reference to an "explosion of itself" also reaffirms what happens when the text is repeated, not word by word, but as an extension of the former story with the addition of many details and characteristics to the narration; and also an explosion of the figure of the narrator and the characters within the story, leading to a fragmentation and doubling of the original story, creating not only familiar but also...