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Eros, mourning, and transcendence in Raúl Zurita’s Canto a su amor desaparecido a
Barbara Fraser-Valencia a
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Program of Latin American Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Published online: 18 Feb 2015.
To cite this article: Barbara Fraser-Valencia (2014) Eros, mourning, and transcendence in Raúl Zurita’s Canto a su amor desaparecido, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/ Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, 39:2, 282-298 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2014.1000154
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Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2014 Vol. 39, No. 2, 282–298, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2014.1000154
Eros, mourning, and transcendence in Raúl Zurita’s Canto a su amor desaparecido Barbara Fraser-Valencia*
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Program of Latin American Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (Received 3 December 2013; accepted 3 February 2014) This article discusses the political uses of eros and mourning in Raúl Zurita’s 1985 work Canto a su amor desaparecido (Santiago: Metropolitana). I argue that the poet relies on eros and mourning as the few remaining sources of shared meanings in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, which was characterized by a breakdown in communication. Zurita’s critical strategy exploits two paradoxes: the reality of eros as both spatializing and universal, and the disappeared as both temporal and intemporal presences/absences. The situational conflation of these two paradoxes allows love to act as a refraction against the regime’s appropriation of history and public discourse. At the same time, Zurita’s work distinguishes itself from that of his contemporaries writing against the dictatorship by proposing love as a transcendent, objective reality: a Tao or universal which neutralizes the regime’s aims. Cet article décrit les usages politiques de l'éros et du deuil dans l'ouevre Canto a su amor desaparecido (Santiago: Metropolitana) du poete chilien Raúl Zurita écrit en 1985. Je soutiens que le poète se appuie sur eros et le deuil comme sources restantes de significations partagées au Chili pendant la dictature de Pinochet, qui a été caractérisée par une rupture de la communication. La stratégie esentielle de Zurita exploite deux paradoxes: l'eros comme spatialisation et universel, et les disparus comme présences / absences temporelles et intemporelles. La fusion situationelle de ces deux paradoxes permet que l'amour agisse comme une réfraction contre le l'appropriation de l'histoire et le discours public par le regime. A la meme fois, le travail de Zurita se distingue de ceux de ses contemporains à proposer l'amour comme une réalité objective transcendante: un Tao ou universelle qui neutralise Les objectifs du régime. Keywords: Raúl Zurita; Canto a su amor desaparecido; Chile; Dictatorship; 1973–1990; desaparecidos; eroticism
On 23 September 1973, 12 days after the Chilean coup d’état that installed the 17-year military regime of Augusto Pinochet, Pablo Neruda succumbed to cancer in a Santiago hospital. Several days later, the procession leading his casket from his ransacked home at the foot of San Cristóbal hill swelled into a public demonstration as the poet’s comrades trickled into the group of mourners and began shouting slogans against the coup and the military. The burial of Chile’s poet, occurring so soon after the coup itself, is read primarily in the domain of political and historical symbolism and prefigures the dynamic between love, grief, and language that would develop in Chile during the Pinochet years.1 As William Rowe points out, Pinochet’s regime came closest to the image of totalitarianism created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four (2004), in which the state functions through repression as well as a pervasive media presence that attempts to “re-write” history and its own activities through the appropriation of public discourse. The result was an immolation of the schema of *Email:
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referents, signs, and narratives that compose national identity on both the individual and collective levels. To speak of what had occurred was to do so from a kind of collective aphasia in which language forms could no longer communicate along common lines of understanding. Expressions of private grief, funerals, cemetery visits, and the carrying of photographs would come to acquire political significance. The families of persons sequestered and “disappeared” by the military would use these expressions of grief as a way to give testimony, not only to affirm the existence of people whom the dictatorship had tried to erase but also to expose the regime’s own covert actions. Raúl Zurita’s poetry, much of which he wrote during the dictatorship years, draws out that dynamic between love, grief, and language. The text Canto a su amor desaparecido, written in 1985 as a tribute to the families of the disappeared, attempts to bypass the regime’s mechanisms of appropriation as well as recover a common language using love, loss, and landscapes as touchstones of human experience. The poems have three functions: to evoke the presence of the desaparecidos through the dialogic enclosure of intimate language; to render testimony against the regime by turning these enclosures into “tombs” for the disappeared; and to reunify the nation by integrating the universality of eros and Chile’s national geography. These three objectives rely on the sustained tension between two paradoxical functions of erotic love in poetic discourse. Eros is both a spatiality and a universal. Lover and beloved are simultaneously isolated into a discursive enclosure and made members of a human communion that nullifies social barriers. In Zurita’s text, the spatiality of eroticism renders present the desaparecidos as individuals, giving testimony to their existence and loss, while the universality of eroticism allows a singular testimony to speak collectively. In Zurita’s text, indeed, in much of the oppositional literature produced during the regime, one cannot speak of eroticism without mourning. And this circumstantial pairing of love with loss creates a temporal paradox that follows the spatiality paradox as a kind of shadow. The disappeared exist in two temporalities as phantasmal evocations of a past that irrupt into a present. Zurita himself describes them as “unburied”: “tipos que no han sido enterrados [. . .] penan permanentemente en el eje de la lengua” (quoted in Rowe 2000, 282). The erotic couple/couples at the center of Canto a su amor desaparecido include the living and the dead. In this article, I will explore the socially critical functions of eros in Zurita’s 1985 work in relation to these spatial and temporal paradoxes. I contend that erotic love, with its “universal particularity”, provided one of the few remaining sources of collective discourse in a Chile atomized by political upheaval, repression, and radical privatization, and that Zurita’s text emerges as part of a larger literary and social movement that recognized this potential. Where Zurita’s text departs from his contemporaries, however, is that he uses these paradoxes as platforms to promote a metaphysical view of love, proposing it as a kind of Tao, or transcendent absolute which could guide the nation toward its healing.
The erotic paradox Before getting into Zurita’s text, the concept of erotic love, and how it manifests as “paradoxical”, needs to be addressed. By eros, I refer to the “socialization of desire”, described by Octavio Paz in his Un más allá erótico: Sade (1993) and later expanded upon in one of his final works, The Double Flame (1995). In the text on Sade, Paz makes a vital distinction between eroticism and sexual desire, describing the former as “socialized” and “historical” while referring to the latter as the animal instinct towards reproduction. Eroticism is a form of the “social domination of instinct”, whose purpose is to both stimulate and manage desire: “irrigar el cuerpo social sin exponerlo a los riesgos destructores de la inundación” (1993, 20). In Double Flame, Paz expands on his distinction between eros and sex by drawing out the “imaginary” quality of the former, underlining its relationship to poetry and to language. “Nor
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is eroticism mere sexuality; it is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor. The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination” (1995, 3). Paz then goes onto make a third distinction of “love”, referring to it as an “exception within that larger exception that eroticism is to sexuality” (1995, 33). Love transforms eros from a “desire for an erotic object” to a “mysterious and passionate attraction toward a single person; that is to say, the transformation of an erotic object into a free and unique subject” (1995, 34). This personalization of love is the source of its spatiality. The loving subject’s passionate attraction towards another subject creates a dyadic enclosure in both language and encounter; a universe for two in which the couple relates exclusively to each other. Interpersonal erotic love becomes what Paz calls a “space magnetized by encounter” (1995, 33). As the lovers’ discourse reduces the world to “I/ Thou”, it isolates lovers from the gregariousness of social communication, even as this same discourse emerges through a social imaginary.2 This spatializing tendency of love explains the poetic association of amatory feeling with both solitude and subjective reflection, the reason Roland Barthes describes the lovers’ discourse as one of “extreme solitude” in which the lover is “exiled from all gregarity to the backwater of the unreal” (1978, 2). It is also why Paz himself intuitively describes eros as “singular”, in his treatise on Sade (1993, 18). Yet Paz also recognizes the lovers’ discourse as the manifestation of a universal affective experience, a view that pits him against Denis de Rougemont’s (1983) historicization of love in Love and the Western World. Paz describes de Rougemont’s view – that “love”, as understood in the West, emerged as the product of medieval Provençal poetry – as “untenable”: First of all, a distinction must be made between the amatory sentiment and the idea of love adopted by a society and a period. The former belongs to all times and places; in its simplest and most immediate form it is the passionate attraction we feel toward one person out of many. The existence of an immense literature whose central subject of love is conclusive evidence of the universality of the amatory sentiment. I emphasize the sentiment, not the idea. (1995, 34)
This passage is not only a defense of love’s universality, it is also an exposition of its paradox. The amatory feeling that “belongs to all times and places” is also the one that creates an “immediate attraction [. . .] toward one person out of many”. It is this paradox that Zurita draws upon. The Chilean poet recognizes the personalizing and spatializing effect of amorous language, using it to counter the dictatorship’s “depersonalizing” acts of disappearance and contingent appropriation of public discourse. At the same time, Zurita, whose poetry draws on Dante, considers this universality as indicative of love as a transcendental absolute. We see this more in the short work Amor de Chile (Zurita 1987), written two years after Canto, the long prologue of which defends a poetry of love and beauty: “que se pudiese oponer, [. . ..] a la transitoriedad terrible del crimen y del daño” (1987, 7). In this prologue, Zurita hints toward a view of love as something beyond mere sentiment or desire. Zurita situates love as a Tao or Supreme Law coded in the elements of nature, which transcends temporal contingency: “La hoja de un árbol está al lado de otra hoja porque se aman y los pastos se mecen al unísono bajo el viento porque se aman. Esa constatación simple, elemental, es el mentís mayor a cualquier forma de exterminio” (1987, 7). This same idea of transcendental love is also found in Canto a su amor desaparecido. It preserves the lovers against the regime’s erasure of dissidents and undermines its effect on social discourse.
The triangulations of torture: erotic love in Chile post-1973 The 1973 coup, in which democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende was ousted by a military junta under Pinochet’s command, is often discussed as a communicative
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as well as a social tragedy. René Jara describes the three-year period following the election of Salvador Allende in 1970 and ending in the coup itself as a “tragic sequence”, beginning with a “triunfo dionísiaco” and culminating in an “apocalyptic defeat”: “con todo lo que el apocalípsis tiene de revelación y terror cósmico, de mutación brutal en el orden de los fenómenos naturales y culturales, de paso repentino del orden al caos” (1985, 1). This “apocalypse” interrupted what Jara calls the “semantic circuits” of “comprehension”, “communication”, and “socialization” (1985, 1). Sociologist José Joaquin Brunner (1988) describes Chilean society during the dictatorship as caught in the grip of two communicative regimes struggling to control the production of meanings: that of the broad Left who had supported Allende’s Unidad Popular, and that of the authoritarian regime that usurped it. The latter, centered on the military government, operated through a combination of repression, the free market, and mass-media dissemination. The former, much weaker, operated through multiple “centers of articulation” and was centered on the opposition. Thus, almost the only language and art to survive what Nelly Richard calls the “catastrophe of meanings” belonged to these orders: the “fraudulent language” of official power and the “ideological mold of militant art serving the culture of political parties” (2004, 5). What Richard calls “contestatory art”, the oppositional literature created by supporters of the Unidad Popular, “takes revenge on the dictatorial offence by plotting – in symmetrical inverse – an epic of resistance that would be the photographic negative of the official ‘take’” (2004, 5). Zurita and his contemporaries inside Chile took a different approach.3 As William Rowe explains, Zurita’s poetry is an intervention into “less obvious dimensions of language than the battle of communicative stances unleashed in 1973” (Rowe 2000, 297). Rowe and Zurita himself recognize that the dictatorship’s Orwellian discursive practices “attempted to monologize language, turning its interlocutors, quite literally, into its message” (Rowe 2000, 297). Pinochet’s regime lacked the means to alter the entire morphology of language, settling instead for the “disappearance” of the interlocutors themselves, plus the imposition of a state censorship that, through the threat of violence, became “self-censorship”, such that “ejercer la lengua ya es un castigo” (Zurita 1983, 9). What Rowe underemphasizes, however, is the role that eros plays in the art that would problematize that totalitarian discursive structure. Rowe, evoking the collectivist Whitman, defines love as a “continuum of the erotic and the social [. . .] as what binds human beings together” (2000, 287). This definition ignores Zurita’s evocation of love as a spatiality, ironic considering Rowe’s own analysis looks at the different spatial vectors in Zurita’s writing. At the same time, Rowe also fails to establish any contextual relationship between Zurita’s love poems and the use of erotic discourse by the regime’s opposition, both inside the country and outside. As Nelly Richard explains, artists were faced with the challenge of naming “fragments of experience that were no longer speakable in the language which had survived the catastrophe of meaning” (2004, 5). Embodied and erotic experiences were primary sources of these fragments, as the body and memory of individual lovers, witnesses, and survivors bore both the “memories of trauma” and the “linguistic memory of the clashes born of the disarming of meaning” (2004, 6). Erotic language not only flourished during the regime, but also provided a record of the scarring of state violence upon the body and of its distortion in the realm of language. René Jara, in particular, dedicates a great deal of time to discussing the distortion in the language of eros. Jara explores the distortion of eros as it pertains to “coup” novels such as Fernando Alegría’s (1978) Coral de guerra, a prime example of what Marjorie Agosín describes as “the metaphor of the dictatorship through an assaulted body” (2009, 68). The novel is a trilogue of voices: torturer/victim/husband. As Jara notes, “El trigrama y la actividad del receptor coralizan la confusión semántica provocada por el golpe. De pronto sin aviso, la escritura sugiere que los militares parecen de haber descubierto que
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amor rima con terror, consentimiento con resentimiento, y que tortura alitera con ternura” (1985, 43). The presence of the lover’s absence, however, points to the deformation of eros as a sign, the “traces of distortion”; in Jara’s terms, “la tortura del vocablo, del discurso” (1985, 44). Novels and writings of the opposition, such as Coral de guerra, Isabel Allende’s (1982) La casa de los espíritus, or even Carmen Rodríguez’s (2011) recent novel Retribución, repeat this gendered triangulation in which the duality that opposes male torturer to female victim – indeed, Agosín notes that “we don’t find texts where a woman is a torturer, just the constant allusion to women as victims” (2009, 68) – is offset by the presence (or memory) of the victim’s lover or husband. The presence of the beloved as torture victim and the present absence of the lover as “disappeared” imply between them the entire totalitarian edifice, the regime’s violence against lover, beloved, nation, and language. This triangulation is also evident in the opening passage of Canto a su amor desaparecido: Canté, canté de amor, con la cara toda bañada canté de amor y los muchachos me sonrieron. Más fuerte canté, la pasión puse, el sueño, la lágrima. Canté la canción de los viejos galpones de concreto. Unos sobre otros. decenas de nichos los llenaban. En cada uno hay un país, son como niños, están muertos. Todos yacen allí, países negros, áfrica y sudacas. Yo les canté así de amor de la pena a los países. Miles de cruces llenaban hasta el fin el campo. Entera su enamorada canté así. Canté el amor. (Zurita 1985, 11)
Zurita’s text opens with the testimony of a single voice, a female singer whose “love song” is filled with tombs, niches, bunkers, and nations “dead like children”. The love song begun in this introductory long-lined poem sets the framework of the text itself, as these aforementioned elements appear in subsequent poems, either as references or textual forms. This passage also draws out the triangulation between torturer, victim, and lover by employing the testimonial voice of a female lyrical speaker. Indeed, Paula Thorrington’s reading of this passage interprets it as a scene in a prison camp, which implies a triangular dynamic: the singer as beloved, the lover as an inference drawn from the possessive phrase “su enamorada”, and the torturers as “los muchachos que sonrieron” (2011, 136). The young men’s ludic reaction in the face of her agonized performance manifests both the “collective aphasia” of Chile under the dictatorship and the latter’s stranglehold on language. The young men’s response turns back upon the singer, attempting to wrest enunciative control over her creation and render it a purely erotic performance. She no longer gives testimony, but rather becomes a romantic trope of the suffering beloved: Norma, lamenting the love betrayal of Pollione with Adalgisa; or Donna Elvira swearing to tear out Don Giovanni’s heart if he does not return to her. The lover’s presence/absence, however, problematizes the torturers’ enunciative control over the song. Zurita evokes him as what Richard terms a “strange body”, kept afloat as a “hybrid recollection” composed of “shredded newspapers, fragments of extermination, syllables of death, commercial phrases, pauses of untruth, names of the deceased that together speak about the infection of memory that contaminated [Chileans] through a deep crisis of language” (2004, 6). The lover as the discursive center of the song is replaced by fragmented signs implying violence, torture, and the wounding of the nation. These include “viejos galpones de concreto”, “países”, “nichos”, and “cruces”, all gathered up and sustained by the identifying phrase of the beloved, “su enamorada”, a “su”, which, as Rowe points out, reads polysemically in Spanish: “theirs, his and yours, in multiple reference both to the mothers and others close to the disappeared, and to those who died in prison and in
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torture” (2000, 287). The “love song” evokes through its amorous language the presence and absence of the lover, an absence the cause of which is similarly present and absent, spoken and silenced. Zurita’s poem calls to mind a similar strategy of “silent articulation” carried out in Chile by the families of the disappeared called Cueca Sola (Rojas Sotoconil 2009). As Araucaria Rojas Sotoconil describes, the Cueca, a dance of erotic/patriotic significance was appropriated and reinscribed by the spouses and family members of the disappeared in public performances, beginning with a recital held in the Teatro Caupolicán in March of 1978. The dance, in which a male–female couple call and respond to one another without making physical contact, became an articulation of loss: “la brutal ausencia del compañero de baile y vida trasunta en la escenificación de la cueca sola una literalidad que pone al descubierto lacerías y dolores” (2009, 60). At the same time, both the Cueca Sola and Zurita’s opening of Canto exploit the “amatory paradox” described above, the spatialization of erotic discourse manifest in the agonized memory/performance of Zurita’s singer, and the I/Thou lyric of the Cueca as quoted by Rojas: En un tiempo fui dichosa apacible eran mis días mas llegó la desventura perdí lo que más quería Me pregunto constante ¿dónde te tienen? y nadie me responde y tu no vienes. (2009, 59)
This spatialization is not a complete enclosure, but is left half open by the ruptures in intimate dialogue created by the regime’s violation of the body and its distortion of eros. The love song of Zurita’s lyric voice is intercepted by “fragments of extermination”, which both replace and evoke the beloved interlocutor, while the Cueca’s I/Thou erotic space, indeed the spatiality of the dance itself, is broken by the beloved’s status as a phantasmal absence/presence. As a result, these erotic constructions flow into the domain of the erotic social/universal, while simultaneously retaining their spatiality and its personalist effects. The result is a state of suspension between the realms of public and private, and consequently between past and present. This is the middle state, both of disappearance4 and of post-dictatorial allegory. Zurita’s political use of love is therefore part of a larger context of writers, artists, and families of the disappeared, drawing on the one remaining source of common experience and memory in a repressive and atomized society for whom forgetting was a mandate. Nevertheless, Idelber Avelar, in his discussion of post-dictatorial fiction and mourning, warns against explaining away the links between memory and allegory – in our case the allegory of the tragic love story – as “specular reflexivism”; rhetorical strategies born out of the need to avoid censorship (1999, 9). Indeed, drawing on Avelar, one can read the erotic spaces in Zurita’s writing as “allegorical ruins”, through which, in the absence of monuments to the dead, “postcatastrophe literature reactivates the hope of providing an entrance into a traumatic experience that has seemingly been condemned to silence and oblivion” (1999, 10). Allegory in Avelar’s terms is primarily the “aesthetic face of political defeat [. . .] The petrified images of ruins, in their immanence, bear the only possibility of narrating the defeat” (1999, 69). Avelar draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of “eternal transience” as “that interval when history is suspended and contemplated in the starkness of its ruins. Nature becomes an emblem of death and decadence, a way of depicting a history that can no longer be grasped as a positive totality” (1999, 69).5
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Zurita’s “love songs” are compositions of immanent ruins and articulations of a defeat that contain the temporal flow of events, the only temporal flow which can be reconstructed without interference from the regime’s historical revisionism. At the same time, Zurita responds to the lack of “monuments to the dead” by creating textual tombs in which monumental space, erotic space, and geographical space flow in and out of each other. As monuments they are inscribed with the paradoxical temporality of ruins, as “erotic spaces” they manifest the dual nature of love, its personalist isolation and universality, and as geographical spaces, they manifest the transcendental expansion of that universality, the concept of love as Tao.
Tombs for the disappeared Zurita’s poems are an alternating pattern of two types of textual constructions. First, a series of “niches” – square-shaped textual enclosures – evoke the niche-tombs of Latin American cemeteries. Second, the text includes a series of long-lined passages preceded by hyphens which I call “memory-scapes”. The niches interfuse monumental space, the space of ruins, with erotic space, the enclosure of lovers, and thus simultaneously link the erotic paradox of personalism/universality with the temporal duality of allegory/ruin. The memory-scapes are larger textual spaces in which the reader is able to “enter” a singular/ collective traumatic experience that has seemingly been condemned to silence and oblivion through the narration of the witness. Fue el tormento, los golpes y en pedazos nos rompimos. Yo alcancé a oírte pero la luz se iba. Te busqué entre los destrozados, hablé contigo. Tus restos me miraron y yo te abracé. Todo acabó. No queda nada. Pero muerta te amo y nos amamos, aunque esto nadie pueda entenderlo. (Zurita 1985, 11)
In this first niche, the “tomb” is opened by the violence of the regime’s agents, “el tormento, los golpes”, but is further given shape by the gestures and words of the lover seeking and embracing the beloved, whose actions frame the first phrases of the middle three lines of the passage: “Te busqué entre los destrozados,/hablé contigo./y yo te abracé”. Therefore, the “niche” is both a tomb created by state-sanctioned killing and an erotic enclosure created by lover and beloved seeking to communicate with each other through their remains. The erotic spatiality created by the couple’s seeking and embracing of one another preserves their personhood against the attempted erasure by the regime’s acts of murder and burial. The couple seeks and responds to one another, even through their remains. Zurita’s conflation of monumental and erotic space thus both renders testimony of the cause of the lovers’ deaths and at the same time affirms the irreducible personhood of the lovers themselves. By transforming the tomb created by violence into erotic space, the poet undermines the state’s discursive power to confuse amor and terror. This “undermining” is evidenced in two ways. First, we see it in the poet’s use of predicates: verbs referring to loving or loving gestures make up the majority of the poem, softening and eventually neutralizing the violence of the first line. Second, it is also evident in the poem’s temporal make-up: the “eternal transience” of love’s ruins becomes a way for it to undermine temporal violence. The “present/eternal” temporality of eros, “te amo y nos amamos”, contrasts with the “preterit time” of both acts
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of death (“fue la tormenta”, “nos rompimos”, “todo acabó”) and the lovers’ final gestures (“te hablé, te abracé”). This juxtaposition of temporalities creates two effects: it both neutralizes the temporality of the preterit events leading to the death of the lovers, suspending the events in time as testifying ruins, while at the same time expresses eros as an eternal reality that transcends temporal contingency. The beloved’s expression of love, uttered after death, “muerta te amo y nos amamos”, undermines the “todo acabó” of the lover’s extinction. Eros renders the regime unable eliminate or erase the lovers, and thus unable to completely control history. The lovers’ presence/absence is a refraction that unsettles their endeavor. This temporal duality is integrated with the singular/collective paradox of erotic love, explored further in the first narrated memory-scape following the niche: –Si, si miles de cruces llenaban hasta el fin el campo. –Llegué desde los sitios más lejanos, con toneladas de cerveza adentro y –ganas de desaguar –Asi llegué a 1os viejos galpones de concreto. –De cerca eran cuarteles rectangulares, con sus vidrios rotos y olor a pichi, –semen, sangre y moco hendian. (Zurita 1985, 11)
Zurita’s memory-scape is not a temporal narration, but an intemporal impressionistic composition of bodily sensations, speech fragments, visual impressions, codenames, dreams, and prayers. It is, in Nelly Richard’s terms, a composition of “the discard”, of “marks to be recycled via the precarious economy of the fragmentary and the trace”, and a “field of citations, crisscrossed as much by continuity (the various forms of supposing or imposing an idea of succession) and discontinuity (by cuts that interrupt the dependence of that succession on a predetermined chronology)” (2004, 2). The lack of chronological succession in the witnesses’ impressions undermines the tendency towards a memorialization predicated on linear narrative structure. As Jean Franco points out, disappearance represented a “triple deprivation – of a body, a mourning and a burial” (2013, 196). Zurita recognizes this. While his “tombs” attempt to provide the disappeared with something of a burial site, these burials are also inadequate. The disappeared have no niche. To posthumously create a tomb inscribed with a linear narrative chronology is to gloss over the absolute physical, social, linguistic, and temporal violation that disappearance represented. The memory-scapes respond to this issue with memorialization by creating “zones of encounter” or spaces where the reader is forced to, in Avelar’s words, “enter” into the “traumatic experience” of the disappeared. These “zones” are fields of embodied, sonic, and visual traces which the witness narrates: “a belly full of beer, a full bladder”, the sight of “los viejos galpones de concreto”, “thousands of crosses on the cold-storage unit”, and “rectangular bunkers” covered with “piss, semen, blood, mucus”, all composing an image of the dehumanizing brutality of the regime out of its fragments and making palpable the degradation and torture experienced by the witness. The witness is both a singular victim of the regime and a representative of the disappeared as a group. And eros provides the vehicle for this paradoxical suspension between singular and collective. When the soldiers blindfold the witness’ eyes, dream and memory images blend with external sense impressions, populating the memory-scape with fragments of the witness’ own subjective, inner life. This is also the point at which eros enters: –El teniente dijo “vamos,” pero yo busco y lloré por mi muchacho –Ay amor –Maldición, dijo el teniente, vamos a colorear un poco.
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–Murió mi chica, murió mi chico, desaparecieron todos Desiertos de amor. (Zurita 1985, 11)
The blindfolding and evocation that her beloved creates causes the beloved’s gender to shift, rendering the lyrical “I” polysemic, a single person of a singular love who is also, simultaneously, multiple, every witness and survivor who laments the death of his/her “chica” or “chico”, and that “they all have disappeared”. The polysemic “I” of the witness, however, is not a collective subject, a Whitmanian “philadelphic” I speaking on behalf of the people, but a spatialized, personalized, erotic self speaking to the disappeared beloved. The witness’ experience is reconstructed through the body, which registers the traces of military brutality. As she remembers her lover, however, her subjectivity multiplies via the universality of eros and the fact that the regime’s crimes affect multiple lives. Loving and remembering become multiplicitous while simultaneously remaining in a dyadic state, which sustains a tension between embodied and collective reality so that her subjectivity and its wounding is not dissolved into collectivized effects and absorbed into political symbols which could be appropriated or punished by the regime. The reader is forced to confront the witness’ violation nakedly without the cold comfort of mass emotion, faced with Richard’s “not easily processed signs” which “conserve[e] in their interior a linguistic memory of the clashes born from repeated disarmings of meaning” (2004, 6). Both spatial and temporal paradoxes work to keep the lived experience of the disappeared both vivid and refractory, a trauma which can be neutralized and assimilated through neither temporal narration nor ideological collectivism, but must be painfully confronted. The second niche and memory-scape builds on the relationship between these two sets of dualities established in the first. Here the spatial and temporal paradoxes manifest through a dynamic of repetition, continuity, and change. This second pair of poems repeats many phrases and descriptions of the prior in order to establish both temporal continuity and a sense of repetition. The temporal continuity expands on the individual story of the witness, while temporal repetition collectivizes her as one of many who shared the same experience: Ay amor, quebrados caímos y en la caída lloré mirándote. Fue golpe tras golpe, pero los últimos ya no eran necesarios. Apenas un poco nos arrastramos entre Los cuerpos derrumbados para quedar Juntos, para quedar uno al lado del otro. No es duro ni la soledad. (Zurita 1985, 12)
The relationship between repetition and difference in the first and second pair of niches is a way to collectivize the witness(es) while retaining the singularity of erotic subjectivity. The word-changes between first niche (Zurita 1985, 11) and second niche (Zurita 1985, 12) demonstrate this paradox, corresponding to the semantic variations between multiple witnesses observing the same event, as well as establishing a continuity of experience for the loving witness whose voice shapes the text as a whole. “Ay amor” reiterates the ruptures of “Fue el tormento”, graphically denoting these ruptures through hyphenated breaks in the words “caída”, “golpe”, and “necesarios”. These ruptures are both similar and different to the prior niche. “Fueron los golpes” becomes “golpe tras golpe”, stretching the temporality of the beating to include the idea of a protracted and meaningless violence in which the lovers are beaten beyond the point of death. Similarly, the loving gestures shift from those of the beloved alone (“te busqué, te hablé”) to the couple moving in unison: “nos arrastramos entre los
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cuerpos para quedar juntos”. In terms of the temporal paradox, once again preterit gestures are framed by the eternity of love. In the first niche that “eternal love” was expressed as a paradoxical verse, reading as a kind of k’oan: “muerta te amo y nos amamos”. In the second it becomes a spatialized expression, a “landscape” that is, in Rowe’s terms, “an occurrence” as well as a “zone of occurrence” (Rowe 2000, 282). “Todo mi amor está aquí y se ha quedado/ – pegado a las rocas, al mar y a las montañas” (Zurita 1985, 12). Rowe spends much time discussing this particular antiphon. For him, it denotes love’s “inscription” on and in the landscape: “there is both an adherence to the surface of the earth – ‘ha quedado adherido en las rocas’ – and some degree of penetration or incrustation of the surface resulting in the marking in it by love” (2000, 284). Yet, more than love “embedding” or “marking” the Earth, the antiphon is an articulation of love’s transcendent nature as expressed through the conflation of erotic and geographical space. Love’s inscription on the landscape collectivizes it to an absolute degree, making it – as we saw in the example from Amor de Chile’s prologue – an intrinsic element of material being. In this antiphon, Zurita ascribes to love the temporality and spatiality of the Earth itself. This transcendental temporality and spatiality of love was vaguely intimated in the first niche through the paradoxical phrase “muerta te amo y nos amamos”, and now has expanded to encompass both the human and the geographical. In the second niche, the eternity of eros is rendered through a present-perfect phrase (“se ha quedado”) that moves beyond the “present tense” of the first niche so as to encompass all of time, compressing past into present. At the same time, eros’ eternity blends into a spatial omnipresence, a fixed “here” from which there is no distance. The “rocas”, “mar”, and “montañas” become not merely expressions of emotion or places where love becomes “permanent”, in Rowe’s terms, but signs of the transcendent absolute nature of love, its nature as Tao. –Cómo te llamas y qué haces me preguntaron. –Mira tiene un buen cul. Cómo te llamas buen culo bastarda chica, me –preguntaron. –Pero mi amor ha quedado pegado en las rocas, el mar y las montañas. –Pero mi amor te digo, ha quedado adherido en las rocas, el mar y las –montañas. –Ellas no conocen los malditos galpones de concreto. –Ellas son. Yo vengo con mis amigos sollozando. (Zurita 1985, 13)
The antiphon “mi amor se ha quedado pegado a las rocas, el mar y las montañas” is repeated three times: before the memory-scape, in the middle portion, quoted above, and then again right at the end. In between the antiphon’s repetitions, the second memory-scape includes images and a language of violence that go much deeper than the previous poems. Rowe describes the antiphon and the images of violence as “unsignalled transitions between words which are acts of violations and others which express openness to tenderness”, claiming that the effect of this schizophrenic movement is that “one finds oneself thrown from extremes of defensive closure to extremes of tender vulnerability. The poem takes the risk of actually confronting the erotics of violence, instead of using it as a means to capture readers into passivity” (2000, 288). Rowe’s reading is insightful, but beyond mimicking the torturers’ strategies, the antiphon also creates its own erotic spaces of inassimilable difference, where the violent distortions of the regime are driven out by love in its nature as Tao. In the above-quoted passage from the second memory-scape, the antiphon enters just as the violence towards the witness turns sexual. It follows the line “¿Cómo te llamas buen culo bastarda chica?” The witness counters the erotic violence of the soldier’s words by appropriating them as a pathway back to the Tao through the antiphon, contradicting him in the following line with the conjunction “but”, and continuing on for the next four lines. The eros
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of the Tao cannot be affected or distorted by a sexualization of violence under totalitarianism. It penetrates into the memory-scape, forcing the signs of violence to retreat, and flooding the field with tenderness. Later on, something similar occurs during one of the soldier’s attempts at appropriating the language of eros: –Oh sí, lindo chico, –Claro – dijo el guardia, hay que arrancarlo de raíz. –Oh si, oh, si. –El hombro cortado me sangraba y era olor raro la sangre. –Dando vueltas se ven 1os dos enormes galpones. –Marcas de T.N.T., guardias y gruesas alambradas cubren sus vidrios –rotos. –Pero a nosotros nunca nos hallarán porque nuestro amor está pegado a –las rocas, al mar y a las montañas. (Zurita 1985, 13)
Here, the soldier intervenes in the witness’ words to her disappeared lover, with the word “Claro” at the beginning of his utterance in the passage’s second line. This interjection forces an enjambment with her own utterance in the line before it, displacing the lover as interlocutor and redirecting the message to himself. The soldier then uses the context of an appropriated erotic phrase to repeat one of the regime’s tropes about creating a new world by pulling out the “Marxist Cancer” by the root. The relationship between the soldier’s words, the witness’ sensory impressions and the antiphon recreates the triangulation of torturer, victim, and lover. But it does so in order to expose the “tortura del vocablo”, the “traces of distortion” in erotic language that comes from the regime’s praxis. Zurita sustains the verbal lie, the fragments of speech produced by the torturer – “hay que arrancarlo del raíz” next to the sensual truth that “El hombre cortado me sangraba y era olor raro la sangre”, “enormes galpones”, and “guardias y gruesas alambradas” (1985, 13) – in a manner that recalls George Orwell’s description of the “Ministry of Love”: a “really frightening” building without windows, inaccessible due to “a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons” (2004, 6).6 The body of the torture victim registers all that is disarticulated from the soldier’s phrases of affirmation and purpose. It exposes through its sense impressions the actions of the military and the hellish space they create, impregnated by imposing bunkers, armed guards, barbed wire, darkness, and the sound and smell of human degradation. The antiphon irrupts into this tension, reintroducing love and undermining the soldier’s power to remake the world. The couple will never be appropriated or absorbed by the regime’s distortions. The Tao’s transcendent nature makes it, and the couple’s love, untouchable. Zurita is much more optimistic than Orwell, for whom totalitarianism eliminated eros through a violent invasion of mental space. Zurita avoids the solipsism that situates love completely within the subject, so ensuring its destruction, as in the dénouement of Winston and Julia’s relationship in Orwell’s novel. Instead, he conceives of love as something objective, which exists both beyond the mind and beyond preterit reality. By transcending the temporal, transitory nature of totalitarian violence, love can act, endure, and resist. In the third and fourth sets of niches and memory-scapes, the spatial and temporal paradoxes of the prior two sets shift from mere circumstantial elements of eros under totalitarianism to characteristics of the Tao. The third set also expands the number of niches from one to four, which can be read, as in the progression between first and second niches, as both linear and multiplicitous repetitions: the voice of the loving witness as one and multiple. The first line of the top-left niche describes the military’s attempt to bury the lovers’ bodies by piling “lime and stones” on them. Through this burial, the couple revisits and expands on its
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own death and temporal erasure from the first niche: “Sentí las piedras aplastándote y creí que gritarías, pero no. El/amor son las cosas que pasan. Nuestro amor muerto no pasa” (Zurita 1985, 14). This phrase – “El amor son las cosas que pasan. Nuestro amor muerto no pasa” – reflects an awareness of love’s paradoxical existence as both the dyadic, temporal love of the couple (which dies) and the Tao, which is eternal. The “eternity” of the Tao precludes the regime’s temporal erasure of the couple. The “ghostliness” of the disappeared lovers, in which they remained suspended in the gap between extinction and eternity, has been transformed through the Tao into a transcendence of time itself. The couple is embraced by the eternity of love, which nullifies their own erasure. At the same time, the line “el amor son las cosas que pasan” evokes a quasi Thomistic, theological idea of the Tao, as the sum of all things that “happen” or move in time, of everything that passes from potentiality to actuality. The Tao acts on the universe as a prima mobilae or unmoved mover. The bottom-right niche elaborates: El dulce y no. Fue el ultimo crujido y ya no hubo necesidad de moverse. Todo ahora se mueve. Tus pupilas están fijas, pero cuatro ojos infinitamente abiertos ven más que dos. Por eso nos vimos. Por eso nos hablamos. (Zurita 1985, 14)
In their death and burial, the lovers’ temporal movement is absorbed into the Tao, a vital, omnipresent fixity that moves everything else. The tomb, which had been the couple’s erotic space in the first two niches, is now the cosmos of the Tao in which the couple can “see each other” and “speak to each other” to continue being even after their bodies’ extinction. The Tao is thus a Borgesian infinite: something that cannot be encompassed, only inhabited, a “concept which corrupts and upsets all others” (Borges 1964, 109). It is thus utterly useless for, indeed counter to, the territorializing purposes of totalitarianism. The Tao, like the “infinite straight-line” that is also a “circle”, “a triangle”, and a “sphere” (1964, 109), can only be articulated through its paradoxes, now three: fixed mover, preterit eternity, and singular collective. The top-left niche expresses these Taoist paradoxes through another axiom: “Ahora todos son caídos menos/ nosotros los caídos./Ahora todo el universo eres tú y yo/menos tú y yo”. These lines situate the paradoxical quality of love in two couplets that turn on the word “menos”: enjambed at the end of the first line of the first couplet, and beginning the second line of the second. The first line allows for a dual reading that incorporates the redemptive quality of the Tao – “Ahora todos son caídos menos” – and the paradox of life from death: “menos/nosotros los caídos”. The word “menos” virtually turns on its own negativity, subtracting death from the equation and moving the pair from life to life. The second couplet lets the end-line emphasis fall on “eres tú y yo”, foregrounding the dyadic couple as the universe, while the “menos tú y yo” of the second line abstracts them from the collective by their erotic space. The fallen are both in a collective, “todos son caídos”, and abstracted from the collective by their erotic space, “menos nosotros, los caídos.” In the third memory-scape, erotic space with its grounding in the infinite appropriates not only geographical space but also the spaces created by totalitarianism. –Ay, grandes glaciares se acercan, grandes glaciares sobre los techos de –nuestro amor. –Eh ronca, gritó mi lindo, los dinosaurios se levantan. Los helicópteros
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–bajan y bajan. –Donde yacen los viejos galpones, las paredes muy altas con torres de –T.V –Tú podrías aparecer en las pantallas, oh sí amor –En mis sueños enciendo el dial y allí apareces en blanco y negro. (Zurita 1985, 14)
In a rather curious reversal of modernist poetics, Zurita has eros appropriate “technological space” and the totalitarian regime appropriate “natural space” in the form of glaciers. Like the Cueca, glaciers are an integral element of Chile’s symbolic geography, of its national self-conception. The symbol of the glacier, however, becomes affected by the regime, becoming symbolic of the spread of totalitarianism. The glacier imagery appears several times in the memory-scape, set in opposition to the couple’s love. The language of eros also enters at various intervals, imprinting itself on the field, integrating itself into the lines, and appropriating military images. The speaker’s beloved uses the fact that “helicopters [are] descending” as an excuse to call out to her, addressing her with the term of endearment “ronca”, and to make a poetic/political jest about “dinosaurs rising”. The lyrical speaker, meanwhile, appropriates the image of television towers atop bunkers, which calls to mind the regime’s use of television to disseminate its totalitarian discourse, to associate it with the face of the beloved and converting the dream/imaginary space of the television into an erotic space. The monochromatic image also expresses the loving encounter as one between the living and the dead, between past and present. This progressive appropriation by eroticism and its contingent personalization is seen further on in the memory-scape as the lyrical speaker responds to the torturer’s attempts to diminish one of his victims: –¿Fumas marihuana? ¡Aspiras neopren? iQué mierda fumas rojo asqueroso? –Pero son lindos. Aun así yo me reglo de verlos, mojo la cama y fumo. –Yo me enamoro de ellos, me regio y me pinto entera. Envuelta en –lágrimas los saludo. (Zurita 1985, 15)
The lyric voice counters the words of the torturers with a combination of physical and verbal expressions of love, such that her entire body labors in bringing it forth. Indeed, the intensity of the torturer’s language is met with equal intensity. The lyrical speaker’s love makes “beautiful” the “rojo asqueroso”, while her erotic response to his attractiveness matches and undoes the unspoken acts of torture implied by the soldier’s interrogation. Thus, in the third memory-scape interjections of love take up increasing space and progressively appropriate and transform it. While the glacier imagery gives the sense that totalitarianism might be an implacable force threatening the Tao through its attempted erasure of the fragments, the transcendence of the Tao is revealed not only in the fact that the lovers are able to transform the memory-scape but also in the fact that the spatiality of love is multidimensional. The glaciers can expand only in a linear fashion, “covering” the lovers’ ruins and remains. The Tao can be manifested through various realms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity: through the lovers’ bodies, through their dreams, fantasies, and imagination. The lyrical subject’s singular affective voice counters the violence of her immolation by means of a loving affirmation of her beloved “lindo chico” as well as her entire generation. That singular voice, with its aching tenderness, comes to shape the entirety of the memory-scape, encompassing it in the voice of the Tao. Thus it is the affective Tao, rendered through the singular voice of the loving witness, and not the glaciers, that determine the memory-scape’s vectors. Everything, including the torturers and their words and actions, is contained within it.
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The Tao also dissolves the distinction between individuals and nations, imagining all of the region’s countries to be entombed like the couple. By humanizing the nations, Zurita uses eros to create a problematizing refraction not only against totalitarianism but also against all artificial forms of transcendence, including patriotic mass emotion. As Rowe indicates, patriotic narratives that sacrifice human beings in order to create an essentialist national identity are overturned in the act of making countries into “violated human beings” (2000, 289). Giving nations a body in this way involves them in the signifying game of the poem’s “love song” structure as substitute beloveds, reflecting the Tao as the ground of both human and nation. It also maintains the intimacy of the erotic utterance, ensuring it is not subsumed into the mass emotion of patriotic discourse. At the text’s opening, the singer includes entire nations at the center of her song: “Canté del amor así a los países”. From the fourth set of niches and on to what could be called the book’s climax – the revelation of the poem’s “galpones” as two mausolea representing Africa and South America – the song is re-oriented towards nations themselves. As with landscapes, nations become inscribed with human traits, possessing bodies, living, dying, and being loved, a conflation of large and small spatialities through which the transcendent dimension of love is made evident. This incarnation of nation into erotic space is then interfused into the allegorical space of the monuments. In the fourth set of niches, the nations – simultaneously erotic spaces and subjects – lay buried in mausolea to be mourned by the witness: “Los países están muertos/ Un Gal/-pon se llama Sudamérica y el otro Africa” (Zurita 1985, 16). The transformation of nation into beloved conflates private and public mourning. As a result, the lines in this fourth set of niches combine love song, political chant, and psalm of lament: “Tormento me dio la vista, me dije abriéndome. En response cantamos”. The verb “cantamos” evokes a congregational call-and-response, while the use of a psalmic structure of address emphasizes an overlap between intimacy and collectivity, as well as personal and political. Psalms are a form of prayer which bring together all of these. They are extremely personal – a dyadic conversation between the suffering or rejoicing psalmist and God – and also integrated into communal liturgy. They speak of private mourning, joy, or repentance, and also of public realities, of war, famine, and slavery. In the bottom-left niche, the song moves from psalm to anthem, from the spiritual to the political: La Internacional de 1os países muertos creció subiendo y mi amor puse. Todo el amor paisa, todo el lloro mío sumé y sonó entonces la General de 1os países muertos. Así desangré yo la herida y al partir rojo sonó el canto a mi amor desaparecido. (Zurita 1985, 16)
The lyrical speaker injects her grieving love song into a collective political chant, an “Internationale” and a “General” for the countries that have died. But Zurita prevents it from fully entering the realm of mass emotion: the song’s content and expression retain personal elements. The singing originates not from a collective, but from a singular mourning voice. Rather than raising the lyrical speaker’s grief up into the “Internationale” and sublimating it, collectivized grief is brought down to the intimate level. The “Internationale” and “General” are integrated into the bloodletting love song of the witness. Thus, while the niche-sets collectivize mourning, it is only so as to incarnate the nation and bring it into an intimate mode, preserving the embodied and personal sense of loss experienced by the family members of the disappeared.
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The final niche-soundscape pair and the 30 niche poems that make up the text’s continental “Galpones” emphasize the dyadic, the embodied, and the personal, even as they give voice to the collective losses and political realities. Indeed, the poetic movement is consciously inward, from multitude to beloved: “Todos los países natales se llaman del amor mío, Es mi lindo y caído” (Zurita 1983, 23). The galpones themselves, after expressing the sorrow of every oppressed nation, synthesize the tragedy of the multitude into the affective, erotic voice of the female witness speaking to her disappeared beloved. ¿Llamai tumba del amor de 1os países? ¿Por duelo me llamaste? ¿Por puro duelo fue? ¿Por duelo fue el amor que lloraron tanto? Que tanto me iban diciendo que se acaba, que se acaba todo y fue el sueño el que se acababa. Perdiendo dice paisa te vi por pastos que se iban, paisitos dice el nicho. Perdiendo negro todo se va desaparecido por islas, países y nombres sí; ¿me llamas? ¿Me llamas tú? (Zurita 1985, 23)
The opening word, “llamai”, and the anaphoric repetition of the question “You called?” orient the poem as an oral expression of affective language emerging from the loving voice of the witness. The first of these affective questions employs a distinctly Chilean form of address, the voseo “llamai”. This intimacy is then offset by the noun phrase “tumba de amor de las naciones”, which, as in the introduction, displaces the disappeared beloved as the interlocutor of the loving witness. He is buried in the “tomb of love” and “nations”, therefore the loving witness directs her song to him through them. Zurita’s use of repeated questions makes the poem a field of sonic disturbance, of lilts in the lyric voice framed by silences and lacunae. The beloved, or beloveds, never answer back. The question of his call remains hanging at the end of the poem. Again, Zurita allows us to read this as one voice and as many; indeed the two readings dovetail into each other. Each “llamai?”, “llamaste?”, “llamas” is asked by one witness and many. The nation’s collective grief and the lacuna left by the disappeared are integrated into the beloved’s partial erotic love and loss. At the same time, the witness(es)’ imagined perception of the beloved’s voice in these anaphoric questions represents what Nelly Richard calls the “fantasmalidad” of the disappeared. For Richard, the disappeared themselves are a question, a suspension between life and death: “how to interpret the dual ghostliness of the bodies and the destinies of the bodies and the destinies of these victims of ‘presumed deaths’ that materially lack the traces of a proof of truth to confirm the objective outcome of the dilemma of life-death?” (quoted in Franco 2013, 201). Zurita doesn’t provide an answer, but rather blesses that fantasmagoric ambiguity in which the disappeared and the nation as a whole are suspended. He inscribes it with the love of the Tao.
Conclusion: intimations of transcendence against the dictatorship Zurita’s Canto a su amor desaparecido uses eros in ways which are both similar and different to his contemporaries in opposition to the dictatorship. Like the writers discussed by René Jara, and like the Cueca Sola, Zurita exposes through the conflation of eros and mourning the regime’s covert actions and disappearances as well as its appropriation and distortion of language. The utterances of love that make up his niches and memory-scapes evoke the
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disappeared as presences and at the same time as absences, and this dual nature of the beloved’s presence/absence acts as a kind of allegory, a temporally suspended ruin in which one contemplates that which the regime forbids remembering or articulating. In the absence of a functional common language in which, as William Rowe explains, “the pain of recent Chilean history [can] be purged”, the dual nature of erotic discourse, its spatiality and universality, makes it useful for speaking against totalitarianism and the regime’s strategy of disappearance. Where Zurita differs from his contemporaries, however, is in the intervention of the Tao. This transcendental concept really is the ultimate extension of the two paradoxes under consideration. The Tao is intemporal, inscribed in geologic or monumental time, thus it contains and suspends both past and present, forbidding temporal erasure and undermining preterit violence. At the same time, the Tao, at least in Zurita’s poetic cosmos, is really nothing more than the totality of erotic love, the universe-sized spatiality that exists as a composite of the mini-erotic spaces created by lovers and by the movement of nature. In spite of its metaphysical pretensions, however, for Zurita the Tao exists primarily to reassure the families of the disappeared that their loved ones will not be forgotten, and to console compatriot readers that there is something more powerful and more ultimate than the dictatorship.
Notes 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The account of the funeral in Volodía Teitelboim’s Neruda: An Intimate Biography (1992), Matilde Urrutia’s intimate memoir Mi vida junto a Pablo Neruda (1997), Fernando Alegría’s “The State and the Poet: An Art of Resistance” (1980), and Isabel Allende’s novel La casa de los espíritus (1982) draws out its collective significance. Teitelboim, for example, refers to it as “the first demonstration to take place in Chile against those who struck down the government on 11 September 1973. One more virtue of the poet – he went on fighting even after he had died” (1992, 477–478). Alegría renders it as the poet’s “final lesson” to the collective: “just as in life he endured the avatars of injustice and never yielded to the tricks of power nor to any reward that compromised his freedom, in the same way, at the end, he resisted the most powerful and implacable State of all, turning his last act of resistance into an art” (1980, 9). Other historical and theoretical works on the discourse of love have also made this connection with spatiality. Duby and Ariès, in the second volume of A History of Private Life, for example, make the connection between the discourse of courtly love and the development of private spaces in the medieval household, which opened up chinks in the gregariousness of feudal life for solitude and self-reflection (1988, 509). Zurita was involved in the group CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), later called “Escena de Avanzada”, a neo-avant-garde artist collective whose intention, in Thorrington’s words “was to disrupt the military order through their creative productions” (2011, 92). Thorrington elaborates: “the members of the Escena de Avanzada used their art to put sense and meaning back into society since the military order had violently ruptured with the past and erased any residual symbols of Allende’s socialist Popular Unity. They carved new spaces into the circumscribed, institutionalized order with their ‘acciones de arte’, guaranteeing the artistic message’s continuity with the spectator, whose role it was to intervene in the work and thus complete its heterogenous meanings” (2011, 95). Jean Franco, drawing on Nelly Richard’s reflections on the photographs of the disappeared used in protests against the regime, speaks of a “haunting” or dual temporality that emerges from the images: “The faces of the disappeared, frozen in time, inadvertently introduced an unwelcome reminder of the past into the glamour of the market economy” (2013, 196). Interestingly, Avelar is somewhat critical of Zurita’s (2009) post-dictatorial poetry following 1982’s Purgatorio. This is not only because of his poetry’s Christian elements, which allowed it to be absorbed into a conservative Catholic hermeneutic thanks to its favorable reception and promotion by the El Mercurio arts critic Fr. Ignacio Valente, but also because the writings of him and his contemporaries “overcodified themselves into allegorical machines”, becoming “cryptified” by the writers’ engagement with critical theory and the visual arts (Avelar 1999, 168). Zurita’s concrete poems in Canto a su amor desaparecido, however, provide a concise
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B. Fraser-Valencia application of the theory of allegorical ruin and its relationship to memory, a relationship which Avelar seemingly misses in his criticism of Zurita’s “postdictatorial clichés” (1999, 168). Taken from the First World Literary Society Online Edition. Originally Published in 1949.
Notes on contributor
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Barbara Fraser-Valencia recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia and presently teaches there as an instructor in the Program of Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections between politics, esthetics and emotion in Latin American poetry of the twentieth century.
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