Returning a year after the publication of Amulet to the site of the historical trauma of his generation, Bolaño’s 2000 novella By Night in Chile resumes the challenge of a coming-to-terms with the 1973 coup which he had made his sustained focus, four years earlier, in Distant Star. Combining Distant Star’s focus on poiesis with that of Amulet on aesthesis, By Night in Chile completes Bolaño’s trilogy of short novels of poetic apprenticeship by exploring the conjunction of poiesis and aesthesis in a single character who figures both, the Catholic father/priest and poet-critic Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix/H. Ibacache. Mirroring the central protagonist’s dual identities as poet (Urrutia Lacroix) and critic (Ibacache), the text inscribes, through its uninterrupted monological structure, a maximal tension between acts of writing and reading. Pivoting in the novella’s final pages to an explicit focus on politics, pedagogy, and the making of literature, Bolaño suggest the extent to which relations between readers and writers, history and literary history, ideology and critique remain to be determined through the dynamic interplay of aesthesis and poiesis, an increasingly accelerated process that carries within it the potential, though far from a guarantee, of more democratic, non-binary configurations to come.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.

In its synecdochic mapping of two rival poetry scenes run by the Chilean poets Juan Stein and Diego Soto in the two years between Salvador Allende’s election and Augusto Pinochet’s September 11, 1973 coup, and its story of the rise and fall over the next two decades of the enigmatic avant-garde poet Carlos Wieder, Bolaño’s 1996 Distant Star continues and deepens his investment in the novel as a form for exploring poetry and politics, history and literary history, by other means (“de otra manera”). Characterized by Marta Posadas, a medical student and aspiring Marxist critic who writes prose poems, as the poet who will “revolutionize Chilean poetry,” Wieder is the central figure of a novel of poetic apprenticeship at once national and transnational, aesthetic and political, focusing on the choices aspiring poets of Bolaño’s generation faced from their late teens through their early forties. In the transatlantic arc of the novel’s final three chapters, which takes the detective Abel Romero’s search for Wieder from Chile to Spain, Bolaño figures both the ambivalence of his attraction to detective fiction at the expense of a more exclusive orientation toward poetry, and the irresistible pull of his work in that direction.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.

With the publication of The Savage Detectives, and a year later his much more condensed Amulet, Bolaño turns his full attention as a novelist to poetic interpellation and apprenticeship in Mexico. Narrated by the aesthesis-aligned “mother of Mexican poetry,” “mother of all the poets,” Auxilio Lacouture, Amulet provides a complementary narrative to Distant Star’s mapping of poetic apprenticeships in Chile through the equally gendered, poiesis-aligned figure of Carlos Wieder. Returning again and again to Lacouture’s act of reading (and no longer being to read) a book of poems by the aging poet Pedro Garfias in the bathroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters on September 18, 1968, the date the army and riot police came to occupy UNAM, Bolaño stages a profound tension between a Marxist narrative of historical progress and a Nietzschean model of eternal return. Arcing in the end toward the mythological temporality of ancient Greece, Amulet’s Poe-inflected “horror story,” as Lacouture describes it at the outset, figures history as “another recurring and terribly Latin American nightmare,” at its most decisively utopian moment affirming, through Lacouture’s prophecies, the vision that “Poetry shall not disappear. Its non-power shall make itself visible by other means, in another form.”