Affections of Sadness: Representations of Pain/Melancholy in Nocturno de Chile

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze the novel by Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile (2014), from a philosophical perspective based on Baruch Spinoza's ideas about the sad passions or affections of sadness, pain/melancholy, as outlined in his Ética. Likewise, the ideas of “resentment” and “bad conscience” outlined by Friedrich Nietzsche, from the active and reactive forces, will be examined to establish a relationship of continuity between the thoughts of both philosophers on pain. In this way and following this line of connections, the article focuses on the main character of Bolaño’s novel, Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, as a literary personification of a body filled with pain that decomposes between silence and literature, based on the sad affections and passions mentioned by Spinoza and framed in the Mela-cholé: black bile, to, finally, become a “resentful” affected by Nietzsche's active and reactive forces that unfolds between the “joven envejecido” and guilt.