This essay explores the relationship of literature and perversity in Roberto’s Bolaño’s short fictions “The Secret of Evil,” “The Insufferable Gaucho,” and Distant Star. While literature within the history of Latin American letters often provides a critique of or antidote to political and economic atrocities, in Bolaño’s texts literature is complicit in the very horrors it depicts. In Bolaño’s view, any effort to pit fiction and social actuality against each other in the interest of rescuing either represents a means to avoid the disturbance that, for Bolaño, defines contemporary existence.

Throughout his life, Borges was concerned with the identity of his nation. The model of the gaucho from nineteenth century letters was replaced by faith in the criollos, who Borges in the 1920s believed should join forces with immigrants to create a democratic and progressive model for the nation. In the 1940s and 1950s, Borges took up a position against right-wing nationalists including General Perón. Later, after he had declared support for the military coup of 1976, Borges acknowledged his mistake and expressed a utopian vision of a world modelled on the Swiss Confederation.

Gauchesque literature has a central place in the Argentine canon, and Borges wrote repeatedly on the subject, with particular reference to works by Sarmiento, Hernández, and Guiraldes. ’The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ houses some of his most mature critical assessments, as part of the ongoing debate about national literature. Borges edited collections of gauchesque poetry and of literary criticism of the kind. In his creative corpus, ’The End’ attempts to do away with an outdated archetype, and ’The South’ is his acknowledgement that the gaucho now exists only in literature.