Is Roberto Bolaño Dark Academia?

in a better world this would be a buzzfeed article

Last summer, when I was about four pages into The Savage Detectives, I tweeted as a small joke that Roberto Bolaño was the greatest dark academia author of all time. I was about four pages into By Night in Chile last week when I realized I needed to write that tweet out in a thousand words to say it more fully.

Dark Academia is much more an “aesthetic” genre than it is a literary genre. Dark academia is walking by old college buildings discussing death. Dark academia is drinking tea by a rainy window thinking of the plight of Penelope in The Odyssey. It’s consumed primarily through images, or paragraph long tumblr writing, rather than novels. Its standard bearer novel is The Secret History by Donna Tart, because the aesthetic is about books and they have to read at least one book. I have not read this book but I have osmosized that it centers around a group of classics majors who murder one of their classmates as a result of extreme views they develop from their study of classics. There’s a few other books the dark academia Goodreads lists include for completion’s sake that I think are essentially knockoffs of The Secret History, and sometimes people read those.  It’s also pretty much the ideology of Dead Poet’s Society.

In my anthropological experience, what attracts people to dark academia as an aesthetic is the dignity with which it imbues the world. In the dark academic world, books are taken immensely seriously for the heights of passion to which they take readers, study and discussion of books for the sake of that emotional depth is taken for granted. Knowledge of books is taken for granted as a prerequisite for entering the emotional world of beauty and purity. Worlds and images like these attract young people who crave that sort of beauty because it contains the instruction manual for how to access it.

All of this exists in the world of Bolaño. Knowledge of authors like Huysmans and Baudelaire are taken for granted, two poets settle a long grudge with a duel on a beach, characters go on long intense journeys to try to meet minor literary figures. 2666, Bolano’s final novel, separated into five parts, opens with “The Part About the Critics”, Bolano’s most strongly dark academic writing. Three male European critics and one female critic obsess over the life of a mysterious German author named Archimboldi, who rarely makes public appearances. They study him, visit various locations from his life. The male critics have intense emotions about their relationships with the female critic and each other. The part ends with the reveal that the primary two male critics have been so caught up with their feud over the female critic that they miss that the third reticent and handicapped critic has been in love with her the whole time, and she has chosen him.

This is Bolano’s main work that fits the traditional definition of dark academia. Bolaño’s other dark academia is missing one central aspect that most other dark academia centers: the college campus. Bolaño rejects the college campus as a place with the necessary purity and depth for true literary pursuits. The first part of 2666 becomes a joke as the book goes on to increasingly brutal moments and you see how detached from reality the critics are. The narrative progresses to brutal murders of women in a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez, and the real life struggles through World War II of the mysterious Archimboldi author that these critics study, and it becomes clear that the critics have no sense of what the world really is, as a direct result of their time in academia. The same refutation of university as a place for authentic passionate learning is also in The Savage Detectives. At the start of The Savage Detectives, protagonist Juan Garcia Madero is attending university for law, but is drawn to poetry and very quickly drops out upon meeting a group of rebellious poets called the “visceral realists”. The visceral realist poet movement to contrast the rigid university is extremely emotional, sometimes extremely well-read, but not meaningfully technically versed. Juan is very technically savvy, and recites many terms that the visceral realists have no interest in, but it’s because of his passion for real literature that first took him to college and them brought him to the visceral realists.

In that fear of college campuses is the seeds of Bolano’s wider repudiation of the ideals of dark academia. Bolaño, in his plots and images, always leaves those who relentlessly search for truth and beauty in art searching. In The Savage Detectives, we show up late to the visceral realist scene, with the movement at its peak, but alreading fragmenting as a group. Throughout the plot members die, some members never write anything meaningful. Protagonist Juan Garcia Madero vanishes from the movement to spend his life on something better extremely early in the book chronologically. It’s a running joke throughout the book that the group exists as a front to sell marijuana. The visceral realists betray each other and betray the change in the world they wish to see, they had no capacity for growth. 

By Night in Chile has a similar anti-academia anti-art morality. The novel is about a literary Jesuit priest who teaches Marxism to Pinochet, who is present at literary parties at a luxurious Chilean estate where in the basement captives are tortured and killed. He’s a likable character, who has intense conversations with “one of the greatest critics in Chile” but he has no moral consistency to impact the real world. He betrays the change towards beauty he wishes to see through his own passivity, his own inability to confront evil, as he always retreats to his books.

But it’s hard to trust Bolaño in his rejection of dark academia ideals in the way that continuously revisits them. If there was nothing there, he wouldn’t write three books about it. Bolaño demonstrates an unrivaled ability to fill pages with names of obscure Latin American authors in By Night in Chile and in The Savage Detectives. He also has the incredible talent inserting real human authors as characters into his stories with effortlessness and believability. Octavio Paz is a character in The Savage Detectives, and Ernst Junger and Pablo Neruda are characters in By Night in Chile, and they all feel real in a way that’s only possible for someone who spent time talking with literary and knowledge people with respect and empathy. Biographing Bolaño isn’t something I’m qualified to do, but in these three books I’ve read he shows a love for the dark academia world of dignity through serious art, alongside his attempts to reject it.

So, back to my original thesis, that Bolaño is the greatest dark academia author of all time. The greatest always know the limits and pitfalls of the forms they work in. I’ll end by talking about a moment from 2666 that I really love. The increasingly senile Mexican philosophy professor Amalfitano takes a math textbook and hangs it out in the rain “to show it what the world is all about”. Theory and beauty and idealism must confront the brutality and constancy of reality, but that itself is part of the image of idealism. A rain-soaked book is pretty.