Monsieur Pain, by Roberto Bolaño

between the agonies of History and the labyrinths of the fiction

Abstract

This article approaches the novel Monsieur Pain, by Roberto Bolaño, analyzing the combination that is made of elements related to the real and historical experience with those of the fictional and subjective dimension. In the narrative under study, the narrator-protagonist, named Pierre Pain, tells the story of his connection with a medical case of a Latin American man named Vallejo, whose illness is unknown to the doctors. A mesmerist therapist, Pain is called to collaborate in the patient's treatment, but ends up joining a plot permeated with threats and mysteries, involving political persecutions related to Spanish fascism, traumas of the First World War and foreshadowings of the Second, more interlocutions between occult practices and scientific research. As is common in his writing, in this novel Bolaño explores the imaginary and subjective dimensions of History, making reality rise more from the repercussion of events in the unconscious of the narrator-protagonist than from the facts themselves. In this way, the Chilean writer does not simply document and retell History, exposing it as it would have been, and not merely fictionalizes it, forging another reality detached from the factual and lived one. His writing, in truth, penetrates the labyrinths of subjectivity while traversed by those of History and the Unknown, collecting the traces of the lived experience and giving them a spectral dimension. In so doing, he reveals the incomprehensible and incurable pathos of historical experience. Articulating theoretical and critical references situated between literature and psychoanalysis, this study seeks to examine how, in Bolaño's narrative, reality and fiction interpenetrate, first in the tormented mind of the protagonist, then in his narration, thus exposing the subjective lacerations that mark the history experience.