Diamela Eltit - Radical projects that dispute the public space, the national interpretation and the role of genres under authoritarian conditions

 

Diamela Eltit, Soul's Infarct, Ronald Christ, Helen Lane Books, 2009.

“Another splendid book by Diamela Eltit, Chile’s most celebrated experimental writer. In collaboration with renowned photographer Paz Errázuriz, Eltit questions the lovers’ discourse—how this magic is born, how it is sustained and nourished—and roots her perspective in those outcasts whom society has condemned to the margins. These abject figures, locked for life in a psychiatric institution for the poor and insane, are the protagonists of this beautiful book about love; they are the guardians of what Eltit describes as ‘that mysterious symbolic disorder’ which nothing in medical science can ever come close to explaining. Soul’s Infarct is certain to embrace the reader who in turn will recall the power of love as a moment in which the senses override the intellect, an instant when we surrender ourselves to the tremulous body of desire, to hunger for the other to reach a transgressive bliss. Award-winning translator Ronald Christ is unique in his ability to tease out the subtle rhythms of Eltit’s text and bring to English-language readers the sublime poetic prose of Soul’s Infarct.”—Francine Masiello, University of California at Berkeley


“Binocular: visual and verbal lenses, individual but parallel in focus, Soul’s Infarct brings up close—brings us up close—to the distanced, the unmentionable, the unsightly: crazy people, who yet are people in love, witnessing their immense emotion before Paz Errázuriz’s welcoming camera, conveying their unknown and unknowable selves and histories through Diamela Eltit’s transformative, recording word. Soul’s Infarct is doubly unique.”—Catalina Parra


While it´s generally accepted that love is a form of madness, are we as ready to admit that the mad can fall in love? In Soul´s Infarct, translated by Ronald Christ for Helene Lane Books in 2009, Diamela Eltit (Santiago, 1949), Chile´s foremost experimental writer, has opened the doors of a provincial psychiatric institution not far from Santiago where poor men and women live, walk through the corridors, stare up to the sky, and indeed, fall in love. Triggered by the photographic images of Chilean artist Paz Errázuriz—which depict inmates in a dignified manner—Eltit crosses literary genres to question the relationship between love and madness, and their connection with marginality and power. Eltit has famously embraced writing as a political practice—and this is political writing at its intimate best. - Cristina Rivera Garza

Diamela Eltit, E. Luminata, Trans. by Ronald Christ and Catalina Parra, Lumen Books, 2008.


"Chile's prize-winning novel of rebellious defiance in revolutionary prose—a feminist triumph of Joycean stature."

"In the preface of this, her first book (published in 1983), Chilean writer Eltit confesses that her works are difficult to read, which must have made translating E. Luminata a daunting task. Christ rises to the challenge, deservedly winning the 1997 Kayden National Translation Award for rendering this work into English. Eltit's experimental novel consists of a series of scenes that include interrogation sessions and events occurring in a public park after dark that one would more likely expect to find in a modern dance performance than in a novel. Eltit interrupts these scenes with analyses that shatter any thoughts that the reader may have been forming regarding what was just read. For its innovative form, remarkable craftsmanship, and the issues raised in its content?the personal and societal effects of dictatorship?this important work is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.?" - Carolyn Ellis Gonzalez
"E. Luminata is an active unworking, a vigorous defying of psychological characterization, chronological story, unequivocal occurrences, and limiting or limited signification. It immediately brings to mind Blanchot's The Madness of the Day and Beckett's The Lost Ones, but refuses the coherence and presence of these equally tenebrous texts. This active unworking makes any sort of metatextual comment, let alone interpretation, difficult: to summarize what "happens" in the novel's ten chapters (just over two hundred pages) - a woman in a gray dress stands looking at a neon sign in the middle of a deserted plaza one night in Santiago - is to say next to nothing. The text agrees to, indeed requires, interrogation and interpretation, while simultaneously refusing and escaping such inquiry.
It is this very act of resisting that the text both "is about" and "is." Eltit sees complicity between critical interpretation and political totalitarianism. She writes, "I am interested in... cracking the monolith of completed stories," and is attracted by "the rebellious circulation of strategic fragments oppressed by official cultures." To Eltit, writing is an "act of liberating meanings and of protecting against the ideologizing of literature." In other words, it is literature's resistance to unequivocal meaning, its refusal to be allegorized, its detachment from significance, that gives it its truly revolutionary power.
I did have some trouble with the novel: Eltit's insistence on the substantiality of the book in her introduction - "An experiment may turn out or not; what I make is a work" - as well as Christ's placing it within a tradition of great (instead of minor) literature in his afterword, belies the novel's fugitive quality. I also had some problems making the connections the text requires: I must confess that I left the novel feeling it just eluded my grasp. Still, it is important to realize that E. Luminata is a text - in the most extreme sense of the word - and as such is profoundly contentious, discomforting, and unstable." - Jeffrey DeShell
"E. Luminata is truly exquisite, preternaturally so. A symbol of existing under vexing duress, this defiant minefield dance ("from my own poor, particular trenches" - Eltit) is a promenade of linguistic efficacy and daring imaginative prowess. The protagonist crosses a public square, as the women protestors once did - dancing as the only allowable form of (silent) protest for the holocaust of the invisible/tortured Chilean men - during the cesspool of Pinochet's dictatorship. From this embankment, E. Luminata apprehends her anguished sphere of existence through the gaze of those who encircle her; those who bear witness as she bewails, bodily, the treacherous, swirling rapids of the city she inhabits. It is textual performance art and embodies the troughs of the infernal prance, with rollicking glimpses of salvific crests, towards a techno-baptismal. The experience of reading E. Luminata is, at once, a starling/refuge and the throwing down of a linguistic gauntlet (as in, la fleur of "a city reconstituted/out of some operetta") - by true wit-mongering maestro(s):
As Diamela Eltit wrote in the Author's Forward, "Writing in that space was something passional and personal. My secret political resistance. When one lives in a world that is collapsing, constructing a book perhaps may be one of the few survival tactics...The part of me that writes is neither comfortable nor resigned and does not want readers who are not partners in dialogue, accomplices in a certain disconformity. The (ideal) reader to whom I aspire is more problematic, with gaps, doubts - a reader crossed by uncertainties...pleasure and happiness, but disturbance and crisis as well."
My acquaintance with E. Luminata brought such unexpected depth to a song that I've always loved by Sting, "They Dance Alone (Cuerca Solo)" -- but never fully appreciated, multi-dimensionally, as I now do (as a teenager in the 80s, the preoccupation was more about Madonna's latest re-incarnation, rather than grasping the political surrealities and nightmares that loomed on distant shores). To read Diamela Eltit, we must travel "...as Portia's suitors come 'as o'er a brook' to see her..." (Shakespeare's Imagery by Caroline Spurgeon), checking our vanity or arrogance at the door and, instead, apprehending - with our hearts - her pencil's portraiture. In the wake of reading this novel, I witnessed our former Great Communicator & President's elaborate state funeral, and had to consider what Chilean women (devoid of the remains of their husbands/fathers/sons) must have thought -- witnessing a shining city upon a hill: the resplendent homage, the bereaved widow -- when they endured silently those inexplicable disappearances, still without a trace, the result of our evil empires clash. A Belmont versus Venice debate (in contrast to our binary wonts for black & white contrasts - or white-washing portrayals; the cry for a more nuanced perspective, a ying/yang distinction)...
Reading Diamela Eltit's novel thrusts us into the very experience of these women and their anguished dances in ways both unsettling and liberating. It also calls us forth, challenges us in our own literary dances with the taboo, our tendency to look askance when faced with linguistic beckonings, pleading that we bear witness to the suffering of others. This literati and her eroticized veterinary/venatorial allusions to mounting for 'top-dog' dominance contextualize Sting's opening lyrics: "Why are these women dancing on their own?/Why is there this sadness in their eyes?/Why are the soldiers here/Their faces fixed like stone?/I can't see what it is they despise/They're dancing with the missing/They're dancing with the dead/They dance with the invisible ones/Their anguish is unsaid." (from: Nothing Like the Sun) E. Luminata, by its stark contrast and avalanche of unfamiliar/ities, displays true bravery amidst great risk and the very real threat of torture and censorship. It's a visceral reading of another time and place, with its profound fragility of consciousness - a Trojan Horse fingerpointing to a ravaged Troy (where the sudden disappearance of innocent/civilian/loved ones can occur before one's very eyes) - something, perhaps, unfathomable to us, collectively, before 9/11.
This reading might mirror back to us - by its bald contrast with our pulp fiction - the dynamics of our often more Pirandellian world: for the most part less tragedy, more problematic comedy, or the tragi-comedy of which we partake, which blurs the real/unreal (think, 'reality tv') of our society and its convention/alities.
This recalls the work of another Latin American writer, Manuel Puig, and his ingenious depiction in the play "Under a Mantle of Stars" - as when we provoke another until at their wit's end, and compelled to scrawl names within yellow wallpaper's mirror, signifying 'how' we occur, if not who we are (as in one case, mine very own - the coinage 'pamelodrama' in fury's hallway scribbled - by an exasperated yet, still collegial/kellner housemate, for my viewing edification each morn, a woefully/truly true tale). After pouring over E. Luminata's text, trying to envision the experience from which it's drawn - the source of Chile's societal madness under dictatorship - I was reminded of the opening quote of Shoshana Felman's book Writing and Madness: "But the gift a man makes of his madness to his fellow creatures, can it be accepted and then returned without interest? And if that interest is not the insanity of the one who receives the other's madness as a royal gift, what might its recompense be?" - Georges Bataille
Certainly Diamela Eltit, within this translation's chrysalis, has made a royal gift - edifying us/U.S. - about the conditions of our military coup, as in my/America's spurious overthrow of their/Latin American democracy, and its anguishing results. Consider that without the artistry of such writers (as Eltit or Isabelle Allende), our collective conscience might have willingly/fully lost its memories. As Ronald Christ writes, in the Translator's Afterword, "Authors, Eltit herself, are different dictators, sayers, governors of words. Her governance resisted still another - deadly - outside as well as inside her book."
In spite of my grandiloquent dances within Zagazig towns, cryptic & baroque (to the utter, grammatical dismay of Wily Sirs), this rare and ground-breaking literary narrative is quite deserving of a broadly attentive English-speaking audience (hearty bards w/ bardic hearts unite): "That light we see is burning in my hall.../How far that little candle throws his beams!/So shines a good deed in a naughty world." - Amazon.com review Diamela Eltit, The Fourth World, Trans. by Dick Gerdes, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
"No one can be closer to another than a mother to her unborn child. No one, that is, except unborn twins jostling for space in the womb. In this concise and inventive novel, a twin brother and sister vie for attention from the reader much as they competed for room before their birth. Their prenatal intimacy and jealousy interlace until they can hardly recognize who is who.
The chaos originating at the very moment of the twins’ conception gains dramatic proportions when they enter the world male and female. From the moment of their births, everything changes. The lives of the family members begin to unwind as they are each consumed by illness, obsession, and insanity. The inevitable and violent dissolution of the family becomes a metaphor in which Diamela Eltit explores the social crises in Chile during the military dictatorship of General Cesare Augusto Pinochet.
Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1949, Diamela Eltit now makes her home in Mexico as Chile’s cultural attaché. The Fourth World, first published in 1988, is her third novel. While other Chilean writers fled the military dictatorship that began in 1973, Eltit found no alternative but to join resistance groups and actively protest the government until democracy was restored in 1989. In the intervening years she learned the dual importance of concealment and discovery in language and the vital connections among story, politics, and personal survival."

"A brief introduction from the translator places this bizarre, often difficult, yet compelling novel in the company of the Chilean Eltit's other work about marginalization. Twins, a nameless sister and a brother named Mara Chipia, narrate their lives. He begins the story, going back to their conception when their brutish father forced himself on their ill mother. In utero, the two compete for space and the competition continues after birth with the twins often hiding their development from each other. She is the first to speak, so he learns to walk first. But from the first pleasurable sloshings in the womb, the two also share a highly erotic relationship. Adolescence brings envy, as she begins to menstruate and ``embarked on a separate journey of uneasiness that I would never experience.'' With its heavy-handed symbolism, the second half of the novelnarrated by the twin sister, now pregnant with her brother's childis much less satisfying. ``We are fiercely prepared for extinction,'' insists the twin sister. The family's obsession is with the ``sudaca'' child and the act the engendered it. Although Gerdes explains that ``sudaca'' is ``used by Spaniards to denigrate Latin Americans,'' the decision to leave this word in the original Spanish makes it hard for English-speaking readers to feel its full sting. Despite some rocky translation problems and a loss of energy in its latter section, this demands attention." - Publishers Weekly
"A younger compatriot of Chileans Donoso, Skrmeta, Allende, and Dorfman, whose narrative device of intrauterine history in Last Song of Manuel Sendero (LJ 1/87) this novella employs, Eltit camouflages the defense of the marginal and disenfranchised (the "Fourth World" of the title) behind a dialectic political metaphor. The first half, narrated in winding discourse by a male twin, chronicles his life from birth through adolescence. The second half, told by his twin sister in shorter phrases but with more personal expression, focuses on the forthcoming incestuous birth of a deformed girl. This third novel by Eltit, first published in 1988, is her first to be translated into English. A disturbing and challenging new voice in Latin American women's literature; recommended for women's studies collections and for larger literary collections." - Lawrence Olszewski
Diamela Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, Trans. by Ronald Christ and Helen Lane, Lumen Books, 2005.
"A victimized woman victimizes by identical means: alienating surveillance, of her son and herself."

“Custody of the Eyes is Helen Lane and Ronald Christ’s brilliant translation of Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994). In the novel, Eltit dramatizes voice, gender, and power in the relationship among mother, son, and father. As translators, Lane and Christ capture the intensity of expression that evokes, calls upon, even preys upon the figure of the mother as the lightning rod of power and repression in an oppressive society. Custody of the Eyes explores the climate of vigilance related not only to gender and familial relations but also to the social fabric torn by the Chilean experience of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Earlier translations of Eltit’s novels, such as Fourth World, Sacred Cow, and Ronald Christ’s E. Luminata, introduced English-language readers to Eltit’s radically experimental prose. Custody of the Eyes brings into English the challenging and questioning linguistic performance that sustains Eltit’s approach to the novelistic genre.” —Danny J. Anderson

Diamela Eltit has “forged what is considered as one of the most risk-taking and consistent narrative projects to emerge in Chile in the last decades.”—Mary Green
Jean Franco describes the goals of Eltit’s fiction: “to act against the authoritarian state, to take literature symbolically into the most marginal of spaces, to work against the easy readability of the commercial text, to foreground the woman’s body as a site of contention, to increase or exaggerate the marginality of art, and juxtapose literature’s marginality to that of prostitutes, vagabonds, and the homeless.”

"The mother of a troubled pre-teen boy gradually reveals her "state of collapse" in anonymous letters that she writes to an unnamed "you" in this 1994 novella from Chilean experimentalist Eltit (E. Luminata). The woman, too fearful to sign her letters, writes from the midst of a horrific Santiago winter during the Pinochet dictatorship. Her addressee emerges, over the course of several missives, as the father of her son; she believes the man to be collaborating with authorities and neighbors in Stasi-like spying and denunciations. When she takes in homeless families who would otherwise perish, the narrator is gripped with the thought that "you" thinks she is taking in lovers, thus sealing her "case" before the shadowy court that, it seems, will judge her. Eltit creates a voice trapped, hysterically, in paranoia and desperation. Framed by several pages of the son's even creepier monologue, this is an elliptical, Kafkaesque cry of utter terror. It is one the last books worked on by late translator Lane, and the first of Lumen's Helen Lane editions." - Publishers Weekly
Diamela Eltit, Sacred Cow, Trans. By Amanda Hopkinson, Serpent's Tail, 1995.


"As the forces of political repression encircle Santiago, the capital of Chile, the narrator raises the question of the relationship between her sexual cravings and fantasies and the domination of women in Chilean society. Sacred Cow is an intense, erotic unveiling of the human psyche."

"The Chilean Eltit (The Fourth World) has a fierce dark side that becomes oppressive in this novel set in Santiago about a woman's obsession with a lover. The narrator is in love with Manuel, a man who has migrated from ``the South'' with his wife. The worse he treats her the more she loves him, and most of this brief novel consists of her eloquent ranting about him. The truth is ephemeral here; the narrator is constantly contradicting herself and others: first she says that Manuel misses the South terribly and talks about it all the time in reverent tones (``City-dweller that I was, his obsession felt foreign to me''); but she then explains that he had really hated the South and had run away from it. When the two are separated, the narrator imagines quite calmly that she is communicating with Manuel by telepathy, making her blind to the oppressive changes taking place in Chile in the '70s because ``With my head thus jammed, it refused to take in the countless changes that were taking place in the city.'' Eventually, she finds herself poverty-stricken and miserable, roaming around ``in pursuit of non-existent jobs.'' The writing here is startling, and often startlingly bloody, and the translation does it justice. As the allegory it clearly is of the position of women in this troubled country, it works well, although on the narrative level it occasionally become repetitive." - Publishers Weekly
"During the Augusto Pinochet years, Diamela Eltit was the leading Chilean writer working in her country, and one that kept exploring new margins of resistance and creativity.
Her novels are radical projects that dispute the public space, the national interpretation and the role of genres under authoritarian conditions. Her most recent books are El lnfarto del alma (heart attack of the soul), a narrative on love in a madhouse, with pictures by Paz Errázuriz, and Los trabajadores de la muerte (death workers), a novel about impoverished peddlers in neoliberal Santiago. Her writing has an avant-gardist’s freedom of forms, a political reaffirmation of margins, and an exploratory and rebellious edge. After working as a cultural attaché for the democratic government in Mexico City, Diamela Eltit now divides her time between Buenos Aires and Santiago, and is a frequent participant in forums and workshops at American universities.
In your 1994 book El infarto del alma, which includes photos by Paz Errázuriz, you show that it is possible for love and eroticism to exist in an insane asylum, and that the desocialized, placeless character of these institutions can provide an added vulnerability and freedom to the discourse of love. If love is in fact an eloquent form of madness, what artistry of love does the asylum promise?- El infarto del alma was a literary experience, a book to which I am still indebted, in the sense that I feel a tinge of regret for not having pushed the writing further. This particular asylum is one of the most extreme in the country—with the understanding that all asylums are extreme places; it is a public hospital that takes in terminal and indigent patients. These are people who carry all of their belongings with them around the hospital; you can imagine the immense daily effort that this entails, and its disproportion to the minimalism of their belongings. It is incredible that these lives, which transpire with such slowness and such effort, should evolve into love affairs. Love in a place like this is a poetic and political act. It laughs in the face of a bourgeois system that turns couples into economic alliances, or commercial enterprises. In the asylum, these social constructs do not exist; they are replaced by the terrible burden of survival and by an unexpected notion of the other. This notion is at the heart of the crisis of these patients, who do not even have a reliable self that they can count on. The art of love is what this space bequeaths to us. The wonderful thing was to be able to reveal the existence of such a subversive union.
In your novels, marginal and decentralized spaces are clearly a privileged position, of speech, of the subject, and for the embodiment of a new order. What do you find and what are you seeking in society’s internal margins?- I find it aesthetically and politically stimulating to work, think, and exist mentally in spaces that are, in a manner of speaking, not “officialized” by the dominant culture. Of course I am thinking of movable places that shift, mutate, and revert back to themselves. In general, official culture softens artistic production and creates a domesticated subject, a sensible literature, and a well-mannered intellectual who functions successfully and comfortably—but whose success is necessarily anodyne—within the dominant system of the moment. In my case, there is a kind of “un-positioning” that is not really part of a deliberate program but which comes about little by little; it is a torsion or distortion that impedes the literature that I frequent from becoming normalized or centralized.
In your novel El cuarto mundo (1988 in Chile; 1995 in the U.S. as The Fourth World) twins converse in their mother’s belly. In Vaca sagrada (1991 in Chile; 1995 in the U.S. as Sacred Cow), a woman bleeds, intermittently and lucidly, throughout the book. In Los vigilantes (1999; The Policemen) a mother and her son are pursued by the ubiquitous police. These narrators speak from the experience of asphyxiation; they are against the wall, on the edge. Is this a reflection of the position of the feminine voice in our society today, or of writing itself?- It’s true, and I’m not exactly sure why, but these characters that appear to me are marked by a sense of being hunted down, and of hunting themselves down. I believe that I function better in a certain dramatic register, though in truth I have a great tendency and vocation for irony. I imagine that the feminine condition is at the origin of this tendency, but I am not really interested in the ideology of the feminine that the system has so cleverly created: a direct, “light,” consumable, and, most importantly, bourgeois femininity. This construction has nullified the possibility of debate, of a space for discussion, and, paradoxically, has promoted silence. I am more interested in the violence that can come out of working within a femininity that transgresses and questions itself. I am not talking about literary militancy. With few exceptions, I am not a fan of literature that is actively and consciously referential. I still think of literature as a thing that can defend itself, of signs as things that can alter the logic of utilitarian language. I think that literature is capable of presenting, through the literary sign, a “feminine” that is more jagged than this and less functional. So I think in literary, rather than in simply sociological terms: if this, then that; if the other, then something else; and if woman is this and the other thing, this is what we owe, or that is our obligation.
One could say that you have composed a significant part of your work “under your breath” during the Chilean military dictatorship, and thereafter in dialogues, forums, and debates. What expectations have been fulfilled in the long transition to democracy? Is present-day Chile capable of recalling all of its recent past?- It has been a truly staggering passage from democracy to dictatorship, and then from dictatorship to democracy. I published under the dictatorship, during those dark, wounding years. And the transition back to democracy has been traumatic. Memory is altered by political interests and by the forces exerted by savage capitalism. Memory is the thing that is most battered by the neoliberal system, which requires an unsatisfactory present in order to oblige the subject to obtain fulfillment through consumption. The only epic dimension within the neoliberalist notion of desire is in purchasing, and the potential for indebtedness. Of course, on the fringes there are solid realities, voices that conserve their memories, mental or social zones that prove irreducible in the process of the globalization of the neoliberal project. Part of me continues to struggle because of the inability to achieve complete justice in the face of the excesses of the past. Pinochet’s imprisonment is a milestone, but the images of the ex-dictator’s captivity pale in comparison to the conditions of captivity of his victims, so the consolation can only be partial. But perhaps we must be satisfied with this minimum. I haven’t yet been able to do so. I don’t believe I ever will.
When you began writing, Latin American art was living its heroic period, through workshops, comunidades de base, discussion groups, and practices of aesthetic renewal. Today, one could say that these writers have stepped forward into the public space of media culture, into the ebb and flow of the market. How do you see these processes, and what place have you found in which to continue to explore freely?- It’s true, when I wrote my first books I was immersed in an antidictatorial epic and ethic. It was a generalized feeling, and in Chile it was called the “alternative” world. Even so, from the beginning my books provoked a certain resistance within the system. My first novel Lumpérica (1983; E. Luminata, 1997) was not what one would call a transparent work. And, later on, if we are going to discuss the difficulties of inclusion, we would have to talk about the central role of the market—by which I mean the overvaluation of commercial literature, and the way that publishers favor this type of writing. But of course this is a result of the neoliberal hegemony. Beyond the costs, the question in this new media-filled reality is, clearly, how to keep desire alive. It may be that there have always been stumbling blocks in literary creation and that today we are experiencing a change in the technology that drives those stumbling blocks. I don’t know, but it’s possible. I try to think in less functional terms, in terms of desire and of the imagined. The truth is that personally I am horrified—as I would be by a horror movie—by the idea of an official writer. I’m partly king when I say this, and I’m caricaturing a bit, but I find the writers who go around proclaiming a series of clichés and banalities to be terribly tragic. They aspire to become portable, recyclable oracles, and in the end they fit perfectly into a market that asks them to furnish more and more truths for their readers. What I’m talking about, beyond the changes that are taking place in the social landscape, are the tensions that exist in the system, the repressions, everything that the system excludes. This is the heart of my work and the marionette string that moves my hand to write.
Tell me about the play that you are currently writing.
- I’m finishing a play that I’m not sure could ever be performed on stage. What matters to me, what interests me, is the writing of a dramatic work as a literary experience. I am still thinking about the body and power, the body and the obligations that are imposed upon it, the body and its desolation. And also the cruel way in which different systems attack the body through refined, painful, and sustained processes, like debt in the case of the neoliberal system. There exists a residue of fascism that I am trying to dramatize. I am working in these genres, and at the same time writing several screenplays about the fascist component of power. These screenplays are non- or anticommercial. I find it interesting to propose an alternative economy, one that is more wild and unexpected, a literary place that is, in appearance, more poor, less populated. I’m not talking about Romanticism or literary essentialism, but rather trying to point out the deliberate and conscious construction of a space that is troubled, ill-conceived, poorly realized.
What are you reading with interest these days?- I’ve been interested in the Portuguese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes because of his aesthetic of emotions; it is an obsessive kind of writing, very extreme in its syntax. In fact—and I find this fascinating—his novels closely resemble one another; only the subject changes, but the construction is the same from one work to the next. This amazes and captivates me. And I’m reading a book that just came out called Cartas de petición, Chile 1973–1989 by the professor and critic Leonidas Morales. He has selected a series of letters written by victims of the dictatorship and their relatives, requests to be set free or inquiries about the whereabouts of family members. It is an extremely moving book, essential for understanding the dimensions what happened in Chile, and especially interesting because the letters are written by common people. Leonidas Morales finds connections between these letters and the petition letters written by the original inhabitants of Chile to the authorities of the Spanish Crown. It is an essential book, though of course painful to read.
You have lived for several years in Mexico City, and now you have moved to Buenos Aires. Is one lifetime enough for those use two cities?- Well, we are talking about a privileged situation. Really, I have lived my whole life in Chile; I only left in 1990. I’ve done things backwards. Mexico City has been very important to me, and I still miss its energy, its mestizo way of life, its vibrant folk art. I have maintained some wonderful friendships which in some measure make up for the daily loss of place. Then I arrived in Buenos Aires and soon found myself caught up in the literary density I sense here. But the tragic reality for me is a kind of provincialism that I feel and cannot leave behind. I’m not talking about patriotism; there are aspects of Chilean society that I consider deplorable: the arrivism, the classism, what amounts to a kind of deliberate ignorance. But beyond that I miss my neighborhood, my block, my friends’ faces, and the political destiny of those in need. But, going back to your question, I counter with my own: what lifetime could be enough to encompass the two fundamental poles of this continent, Buenos Aires and Mexico City?" - Interview by Julio Ortega

"Marginalities: Diamela Eltit and the Subversion of Mainstream Literature in Chile. By GISELA NORAT. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002.This collection of essays is the first book-length study of the novelistic and nonfictional body of work of the contemporary Chilean author Diamela Eltit. Consisting of an introduction followed by six essays, this study offers a critical analysis of the five novels and two non-fictional texts published by Eltit between 1983 and 1995, a period that spans the latter half of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90) and the return of a democratically elected government in Chile. Norat states that the aim of her study is to offer 'a practical tool for first-time or hesitant Eltit readers who seek discussion of a particular book or books' (p. 16). The essays approach her first five novels individually, rather than thematically, and a brief reading of her sixthnovel, Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), is included in the form of an epilogue. In her second essay Norat offers a joint analysis of Eltit's two non-fictional texts: the transcription of the testimony of a vagrant in El padre m[sections]o (1989), and a photo-essay that chronicles the residents of a psychiatric hospital in Chile, El infarto del alma (1994), co-authored with the Chilean photographer Paz Errazuriz. English translations of the titles of Eltit's texts, and of quotations from her work, are included throughout.
This study takes as its starting point the theme of 'marginalities', in terms both of Eltit's marginal position as a woman writer in Latin America and of the intersection of social, political, sexual, ethnic, and gendered categories of marginality that are critically examined in her work. The introduction opens by addressing the labels of 'difficult' and 'cryptic' that have been associated with Eltit's texts since the publication of her first, and radically experimental, novel, Lumperica, in 1983. Norat acknowledges that the fragmentation of language and plot, and the character marginality found in Eltit's texts, may have distanced some readers and critics, but she seeks to redress this by locating Eltit within the postmodernist tendency to interrogate genre boundaries and models of identity. Noting that the female body is central to Eltit's narrative, Norat simultaneously draws on feminist theory in order to construct a general theoretical framework that she describes as a feminist/postmodernist one. The introductory chapter outlines the debates surrounding postmodernism in Latin America, while also exploring the differences and points of intersection that exist between postmodernism and feminism.
Norat uses Eltit's fourth novel, Vaca Sagrada (1993), to exemplify her argument that Eltit's writing is 'undeniably female-centred while at the same time wholly postmodern' (p. 23). This essay examines the textual instability and ambiguity of Vaca Sagrada in terms of postmodernist theories, while exploring the narrative inscription of female experience through the menstrual blood that emanates from the body of the protagonist/narrator, Francisca. While this study examines categories of marginality throughout, other essays veer away from the postmodernist/ feminist slant in order to employ a range of theoretical approaches that emphasize what Norat describes as 'the interpretative richness which Eltit's texts offer the literary critic' (p. 17). Each essay is written to stand alone, but when collated into a book-length study of this kind, the disparate theoretical explorations at times result in a sense of disjointedness.
Throughout the study, Norat aims to initiate a dialogue between Eltit's novels and other Latin American narrative, most notably in the essay on El cuarto mundo (1989), a substantial part of which offers a comparative reading of this novel with Cristobal Nonato, by Carlos Fuentes. A sense of historical moment is given, as the texts are placed within the socio-political and cultural context of the Pinochet dictatorship. Further reference could have been made to the post-dictatorship period in Chile (since 1990), a point that would help to locate Eltit's later texts. Biographical information regarding the author and Eltit's own comments in published interviews regarding her work are supplied, and the bibliography is comprehensive, although Eugenia Brito's Campos minados (literatura post-golpe en Chile) (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1990) is notably absent. However, the clear and detailed analysis of key passages of Eltit's texts and the numerous interpretative possibilities that this study opens up make it a useful and timely introduction for students who are approaching Eltit's work for the first time." - Mary Green
Diamela Eltit: Lumperica
Mary Green: Diamela Eltit: A Gendered Politics of Writing (pdf)
Mary Green, Diamela Eltit: Reading the Mother, Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2007.


"The Chilean author, Diamela Eltit, whose work spans the periods of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and the Transition to Democracy (1990-), is one of the most innovative and challenging writers in contemporary Latin America. This book focuses on the representation of motherhood in Eltit's first six novels and, through a chronological series of close readings, argues that the maternal body and mother-child relations are crucial for an understanding of the critical challenge posed by Eltit's narrative oeuvre, too frequently dismissed as 'hermetic'. An analysis of the novels' structure and language reveals how Eltit seeks to reconfigure the foundations of symbolic structures and so incorporate the mother as a subject. Although the study draws on a feminist psychoanalytic framework to explore Eltit's continuous disarticulation of key concepts that emanate from the West, specifically in relation to the formation of gender and sexuality, the work of the major Chilean cultural theorist, Nelly Richard, is also used to situate Eltit's work within the political and cultural context of Chile. MARY GREEN lectures in Hispanic Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea."