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Roberto Bolafio's Estrella distante (1996) weaves the story of a fictional fascist poet, Carlos Wieder, into the fabric of Chile's recent history of dictatorship, democracy and diaspora. The anonymous narrator, from his position of prolonged exile in Europe twenty-some years after the 1973 coup that began Augusto Pinochet's bloody sixteen-year regime, intertwines the invented story of Wieder's fall from glory with tales of exile, quiet abandonment of the leftist idealism that had marked the presidency of Salvador Allende (1 970-73), and privately funded revenge against the perpetrators of human rights abuses. Critics have examined this enigmatic novel through the lenses of genre theory and trauma theory, memory and mourning, and changing theories of avant-garde aesthetics.1 Central to all of these is the complex intertextuality of history, fiction and literature created by the novel's deferral of authorship and narrative authority through playful literary games of doubles, alter egos, and biographical references throughout the text. I suggest, however, that the tropes of mourning and the politics of postmodernism are insufficient to fully rethink the possibilities for literature after dictatorship that the novel presents. The politics of the fictional Wieder's fascist performances in post-coup Chile expose not only the violence of the new era ushered in by Pinochet, but also the misogyny of authoritarian discourse. Likewise, the stories of lives devastated by Wieder himself or by the regime more generally point the reader toward the myriad silences of official history, stories that belie the injustices perpetuated by the regime and ignored by the succeeding governments of the democratic transition. This paper examines the politics of Wieder's performances as narrated in the novel and utilizes insights from performance theory to elucidate the narrative itself as a kind of peformance: a narrative act of storytelling that reinvests aesthetic creation with an ethical imperative and confers the ultimate responsibility for agency with the reader.2
The tensions between narrative and performance are palpable throughout the novel and the textuality of performance allows for a dynamic reading of the multiple layers of performative acts, written accounts of those gestures, and the spontaneity and distinctly oral quality of a self-reflexive narrative that constantly undermines its own authority and questions the validity of the very stories it tells. WB. Worthen, in an essay that examines...