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04.12.2008
So, looking at our two recent posts concerning shadows (a Robert Louis Stevenson poem and an excerpt from Bolano) it’s clear that they’re offering competing ideas of the anatomy of shadows: if you slice a shadow open, what implications will you find inside it?
The Stevenson poem suggests that the shadow is a hole there to catch the rejected aspects of its owner; this is classical shadow anatomy. The shadow’s sporadic enormity (when it “shoots up taller like an Indian-rubber ball”) lets the boy offload his grandiosity and his desire to consume his environment; the shadow’s sharp diminishment in steep light supplies him with an image of the fear of insignificance, which he can then expel. The shadow’s other characteristics (he’s an infantile coward, an embarrassment, a slacker) illustrate the same conception: the shadow is the I-am-not that mocks us with our own shape.
Bolano’s shadows are different; what matters is not their freighted resemblance to the self, but their ability to transform anything into anything else, the “multiplicity of readings” they allow. At first the game is fairly harmless; Farewell describes his rural scene, his whores, his endlessly mutable tree. As By Night in Chile goes on, though, it starts to seem that the two literary critics who are talking in that scene are clinging to shadows as a means of evading a darkness larger than their personal limitations. Once Sebastian becomes complicit in Pinochet’s regime his longing for the instability of the shadows returns in a new form: “Sometimes, at night, I would sit on a chair in the dark and ask myself what difference there was between fascist and rebel. Just a pair of words. Two words, that’s all. And sometimes either one will do! So I went out into the street and breathed the air of Santiago with the vague conviction that I was living, if not in the best of worlds, at least in a possible world…” What matters here is that only Sebastian’s conviction that he he can change words into other words lets him see his world as even possible. If he didn’t use words as shadows, didn’t render them with infinite meanings, the history he participates in would exceed his own capacity for belief.