Roberto Bolaño’s Guide to Complicity

A few years ago, getting lectured by an online dictionary blog post about being complicit with evil would have been incredibly bizarre. But we live in bizarre times. As its choice for 2017 Word of the Year, Dictionary.com chose “complicit.” Here is an excerpt from said blog post (which is well worth a read in its entirety) announcing the choice:

As we do the hard work of processing what this all means, we must examine our own behavior and ask ourselves some difficult questions. Could I have spoken out in the past…and didn’t? Did I go along with something because it was the path of least resistance?

Complicity is in the air. Just this month, a Donald Trump campaign ad said that, because of their refusal to fund a wall on the Mexican border, “Democrats…will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.” And last year began with the international Women’s March and ended with #MeToo (and its smaller male cousin, #IWill). It was a year that made people look themselves in the eye and ask how they can do better. One could say that as much as 2017 was the year of “complicit,” it was the year of “publicly refusing to be complicit.”

This is the context in which I decided to re-read ’s . Bolaño’s novella is a psychological portrait of complicity, and the ways in which we rationalize our complicity.. Father Urrutia Lacroix’s account is best read as an apology—not in the popular sense of saying sorry, but in the older sense of “a defense, excuse, or justification in speech or writing.” (Thank you, Dictionary.com.) “One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences,” he says. And yet, he is defiant: “My silences are immaculate.” His prosecutor, such as it is, is a shadowy, surreal figure referred to only as “the wizened youth.”