In Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘The Kiss’, the character Ryabovich, an army officer, described as “most timid, the most modest”, loses his way in a General's house and is unexpectedly caressed, embraced and kissed in the dark by some “soft, fragrant, . . . feminine arms”. Ryabovich, is taken aback by this unanticipated kiss, and the event changes his character, if only for momentary period of time.
Similarly in Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, the narrator recounts the event of someone who’d gotten lost inside the house of Maria Canales, the aspiring writer, and his husband Jimmy Thompson, the American-agent working in Chile for the dictator General Pinochet. Taking a wrong turn, the guest finds himself in the basement of the house that happens to be a torture cell. On seeing this, the guest, retraces his steps and goes back to the literary party taking place on the upper floor.
The trope of people, like these, like us, getting lost within the labyrinthine houses of those who wield power, in the traditional sense of the word, becomes a crucial point in trying to understand the paradoxes of narratives, where almost everyone gets lost or loses itself/oneself, in what we usually refer to as History. In other words, in the houses of the Generals, the agents, the bureaucrats, where History seems to be crafted, one usually finds oneself lost. No matter how innocent we think we are, no matter how far we think we are from the people who actually participate in politics, we are always already there, in their magnificent houses, finding a way perhaps to go back to the party, a literary gathering. The way we tend to visit malls, go to cinema, to restaurants, to prisons etc., - to give ourselves the idea that we aren’t those and somehow we are outside the machine. Our complicity is however, ingrained within all this. Perhaps, all the cultural attempts to escape these enclosures are performed by us so as not to think about the crime we have committed together or are still committing. The only difference that remains is that, some among us, like Ryabovich, aren’t able to state the momentous event as significantly, expressively and meaningfully as he has experienced it, while some like Maria Canales deduce a momentous novel out of it. There is then an incongruity between life as lived and life as literature. Being conscious about it, like Ryabovich, at the end of the story, who has a chance yet again to go the General’s house, but dissuades himself from it, is perhaps its only cure. Gazing at the abyss, as Albert Camus would refer it, is perhaps less important than decorating the abyss these days, claiming responsibility and thereby acknowledging complicity for our actions.
