Military dictatorship in Chile

The military dictatorship in Chile is recalled not through a direct account of government or repression, but through the afterlife of a book published in 1978 and through Oscar Amalfitano’s explanation of his own exile after the coup. These separate references meet in a meditation on how political power shapes cultural production and how a national history can become so saturated with competing voices that authorship itself grows uncertain. In the novel, the dictatorship is both a concrete historical pressure and the setting for Amalfitano’s suspicion that even apparently independent writing may speak in the language of power.

Publication Under the Dictatorship

As he watches Dieste’s geometry book hanging outside the window, Amalfitano imagines the circumstances surrounding a 1978 publication by Lonko Kilapan, a figure presented as a historian and Indigenous intellectual. The year matters: the book appeared during Chile’s military dictatorship, and Amalfitano reads its imagined production as marked by triumph, loneliness, and fear. He pictures Kilapan negotiating with the printers at Editorial Universitaria on Calle San Francisco in Santiago, trying to bargain down the cost of printing. The scene connects political conditions to the material circumstances of publishing: the author’s claims to distinction depend on a press, a price, and the possibility of securing a place in the public record.

Amalfitano’s imagined account makes the book’s authority unstable rather than simply affirming it. The publisher is told that Kilapan already has two further works finished and edited, on Araucanian and Greek legends and on the origins and kinship of the American peoples. Yet Amalfitano also considers whether Kilapan wrote the book at all, whether Kilapan exists, and whether the Indigenous Confederation of Chile and the Academy of the Araucanian Language named in connection with him exist. From this angle, the author and institutions might be inventions, and Kilapan might even be a pen name for Augusto Pinochet. The suggestion is presented as one possibility among several, not established fact: Amalfitano also considers Aylwin, Lagos, Frei, and other political voices as possible sources for the prose.

Authorship, Authority, and National Language

The imagined book begins by identifying Chile geographically and politically with the Greek state, a deliberately jarring claim that intensifies Amalfitano’s doubts about its authority. He considers whether its author might be a functionary serving an intelligence officer or a general who sees himself as an intellectual. His speculation broadens into a bleak account of public life in which military men behave like writers, writers like military men, politicians like both, and diplomats, doctors, and lawyers are assigned similarly corrosive roles. The passage does not resolve who wrote the book; instead, it makes the uncertainty itself a way of reading political culture, where the boundary between scholarship, official ideology, and fabricated authority is difficult to trust.

Amalfitano’s most sweeping conclusion is that Kilapan’s prose could belong to almost any political faction, from conservatives to Communists and from new liberals to surviving members of the MIR. It seems to contain not a single authorial position but the cadences and contradictions of Chilean public language. In that catalogue, the country’s history and everyday life coexist: the Atacama desert, political figures, the Berlin Wall’s lingering image, domestic abuse, cheap housing, and familiar foods. The dictatorship is therefore not isolated as a discrete episode in Amalfitano’s thought; it belongs to a national vocabulary that can carry incompatible politics and social experiences at once.

Exile and the Coup

Years earlier, Amalfitano had been living in Argentina in 1974 because the coup in Chile obliged him to choose exile. When the European critics ask why he was in Argentina, he gives that explanation plainly, then apologizes for sounding grandiloquent. He remarks that repeated explanations become habitual, while Liz Norton responds sympathetically that exile must be terrible. Amalfitano, however, says that he now sees exile as a natural movement that can, in its way, help abolish what is generally understood as fate. The coup is thus not only a political event in his biography: it is the cause of a displacement whose meaning changes with hindsight.

That retrospective interpretation sits beside the imagined fear surrounding the publication of Kilapan’s book. One passage approaches dictatorship through the atmosphere and institutional pressures Amalfitano attributes to a publication in 1978; the other names the coup as the reason he left Chile and lived in Argentina in 1974. Together they show political rule through both cultural uncertainty and personal consequence, without converting either into a comprehensive history of the regime.

Historical Memory and the Limits of Analogy

Elsewhere, the novel places Amalfitano’s reflections alongside a discussion of how societies make some deaths legible and leave others outside public attention. A speaker contrasts the thousands killed during the Paris Commune with individual murders that received extensive newspaper coverage, and notes that the deaths of enslaved people transported on ships likewise failed to provoke comparable public alarm. This is not an account of Chile or a direct analogy with the dictatorship. It does, however, echo the novel’s concern with whose experiences enter public language and whose are obscured, a concern that also informs Amalfitano’s doubts about institutions, authorship, and official narratives.

The dictatorship’s significance in these passages lies in that unresolved relation between power and what can be said. The 1978 publication scene allows Amalfitano to imagine writing as vulnerable to political appropriation; his account of exile records a specific consequence of the coup; and his later reflections suggest that neither national language nor personal memory offers a simple route to certainty. The novel keeps these strands distinct while placing them in conversation, so that Chilean political history is felt through a book’s contested authorship and a life redirected across borders.