El secreto del mal es un secreto

Conflict is endemic in Bolaño's fiction and has to be faced because certain characters are driven by the will not just to dominate but also to destroy the lives of others. Bolaño narrates many occurrences that conform to Claudia Card's secular definition of evils as “reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs.” These come about through the actions of four kinds of characters, which are studied in this article: the accomplice, the dictator, the sociopath and the administrator. The dictator Pinochet (By Night in Chile) and the sociopath Wieder (Distant Star) are portrayed from a distance, through the eyes of others, in satirical and fantastic modes respectively. The administrator Sammer (2666) and the accomplice Urrutia Lacroix (By Night in Chile) speak for themselves, drawing the reader into their mental worlds, but signally failing to justify what they have done. Bolaño's work presents an anatomy of evil, distinguishing its varieties and showing how they can interact “symbiotically” to produce atrocities. Yet this naturalistic anatomizing does not get to the bottom of the phenomenon. Distant Star leaves open the possibility that the evil embodied by Carlos Wieder may be not only sociopathic but also diabolical in the archaic sense of the word. Similarly, in 2666, the “secret of the world,” which is somehow hidden in the crimes of Santa Teresa, according to Klaus Haas, has a supernatural resonance that is subtly sustained by the inclusion of uncanny details. The short story “The Secret of Evil” breaks off before delivering what its title promises: the key to the darkest, innermost space of Bolaño's fictional universe. For reasons that relate both to practicalities in his represented worlds and to narrative technique, there is a secret of evil in his writing that must remain a secret.