Beyond
Allegory?
The
intellectual armature of the
(from Stepháne Mallarmé’s Feuillets
du ‘Livre’ sans rapport direct avec le Livre;
quoted in “The Double Session;” Jacques Derrida 230)
Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica,
published in 1983 in
Santiago de Chile at the height of Pinochet’s dictatorship, is a novel
that has not been “read” much since its publication. To clarify: while
Lumpérica is a work that has
garnered valuable critical attention, there have been few explicit
readings of
the text itself, since a great deal of the academic work that engages
it tends
to conjecture thematically and/or allegorically about the textual
elements and
motifs with which Lumpérica is
concerned, rather than approaching the text through a “close
reading.”(1) Why has Eltit’s work, like much
difficult
literature sometimes labeled “hermetic” or “esoteric,”
escaped a close reading; (2) or, why have
readings of Lumpérica tended to read
“around” the text? Is there a textual element that “resists”
reading from within, or is this tendency indicative of the kind of
extra-textual reading that is being done in contemporary literary
criticism and
cultural studies? Put in a larger
context, what happens to “reading” when the text engenders or
demonstrates a resistance to reading, and how is one therefore to read
a text
such as Lumpérica that
simultaneously affirms and denies its allegorical dimension, while at
the same
time exceeding hermeneutical or thematic readings?
One of the most suggestive
treatments of Lumpérica to date may be found in
Idelber Avelar’s book, The Untimely
Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning,
which reads current Latin American fiction in its traumatic
relationship to the
dictatorships that gave rise to a subsequent cathexis of literary
mourning and
allegory. Avelar’s conception
of allegory, elucidated from the work of Hegel, Goethe, Coleridge,
Benjamin,
and de Man, draws upon the Benjaminian and Demanian formulations of
this trope,
in terms of the belatedness of the temporal encounter with the event,
giving
rise to a cryptic representation founded on “[t]he impossibility of
representing the totality…because allegory is a trope that thrives on
breaks
and discontinuities” (11). Linked with mourning, ruins, cryptography,
and
a kind of anamorphic gaze which is both a temporal disjunction as well
as the
possibility of representation, an allegorical reading permits the
contextualization of Lumpérica
in terms of radical generic and mimetic rupture during Pinochet’s
regime,
demonstrating how “[t]he fundamental work performed by Diamela Eltit
has
to do with recapturing, through a violent encounter with writing,
experiences,
and memories irreducible to informational records” (165).
But does Lumpérica
in fact succeed in recapturing “the hope of
providing an entrance into a traumatic experience that has seemingly
been
condemned to silence and oblivion” (10), or is the break with
representation in this “experimental” novel so totalizing as to
deny the possibility of legibility? For Avelar,
[t]he
thrust of [Lumpérica]
is…to highlight that residue of collective labor not containable by any
literary mechanism. This intent explains Lumpérica’s
resistance to being literature, most definitely expressed in its
resistance to
being a novel, and its insistence on a certain inscriptive,
experiential
dimension – let us call it poetic
– that the texts sees as irreducible
to literature’s representation machinery (178).
Given this reading of
“representation,” Lumpérica’s
resistance and “illegibility” – linked in The Untimely
Present (173) to the
concept of the Barthesian “writerly text” – can be seen to
“stage” a genre- (and gender-) rupturing theatricality of this
crisis of linguistic reference and representation, in terms of its
writing,
erasure, and rewriting of a continually originary
cinematic and textual event.(3)
While Avelar´s argument clearly avoids more facile notions
of
literary reaction to censorship that are often invoked to explain a
break with
linguistic referentiality,(4) I would suggest
that it is through an
aesthetic of violent rupture with language’s capacity to transmit the
events of empirical reality that Lumpérica
may be read in/as the experience of illegibility.
The radicalization of
representation and theatricality
in Lumpérica enacts a filmic
performance that evokes the theoretical formulations postulated by
Antonin
Artaud in his essay/manifesto “The Theater of Cruelty.”(5)
Eltit’s text, read with respect to the conceptual framework of
Artaud’s reflections on theater as a mass spectacle overturning the
notion of “re-presentation,” presents cruelty as essential, extreme
action that can be shown to effect a break with the possibility of a
uniquely
mimetic theater of reading in Lumpérica.
Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” articulates the affirmation of
cruelty in a theater-to-be, which is characterized by its collective
spectacularity and non-theological nature, as well as a conception of
language
and speech that seeks to displace a metaphysical, logocentric imitation
and representation that takes center stage,
so to speak, in the “traditional” theater. This last assertion
reveals the necessity of the transformation of speech and writing into
spatialized “gestures” and glossopoeia that do not merely mimic
prior actions or utterances, but rather bear witness to the
revolutionary
reconceptualization of life as a non-representative theater of cruelty:
“I
have therefore said ‘cruelty’ as I might have said
‘life’” (Artaud 114).(6)
If in fact this kind of
radicalized,
rigorous theater of life/cruelty/originary writing mimes no-thing, then
notions
of mimesis are problematized in the possibility of reading Lumpérica
as a non-“representative” entity. (7) Given the complexities of linguistic
“representation” in Lumpérica,
the theater of reading enacted by Eltit’s text does not involve the
re-presentation of an anterior referent that was once present-to-itself
(8)
– and it is this impossibility of presenting a transcendent present
that
leaves traces of meaning in the staging of Lumpérica,
in terms of the extra-linguistic and filmic theatrical effects that
shape and
deform the text. Artaud’s theoretical writings on the theater therefore
highlight the way in which Lumpérica’s
spectacular literary and cinematic (de)construction elaborates a kind
of
allegorical substitution and distortion of Pinochet’s regimental
“cruelty” and torture, which subsequently allows access into a
dimension of the text that perhaps “exceeds” the type of thematism
and direct correspondence with the empirical world that has often
informed
critical approaches to Eltit’s work.
Read in terms of its
relationship to
Pinochet´s military regime, Lumpérica
becomes exemplary in its staging of a real-life theater of cruelty
enacted
by and through dictatorial “performance” – and in this way,
Eltit’s text would present, as Nelly Richard suggests, a post-coup radicalization of representation in
its resistance to the ideological repression and censorship that marked
and
threatened dictatorial literary output. (9) In Richard’s
account of literature under Pinochet, Eltit’s work was a crucial part
of
the neo-avant garde movement known as the escena
de avanzada “[que] desarticuló y reformuló –
explosivamente – el sistema de codificación estética de
la
palabra y de la imagen,” (37) thereby revealing “la herida del
Chile sacrificial” (45). In this way, the institutional control of the
linguistic code gave rise to Lumpérica’s
ambiguous narrative structure that denies “toda
significación-Una” in its rejection of the possibility of
universal truth (38), causing a break with the representation of
cultural
ideology that Julio Ortega discusses in the context of “una escritura
de
resistencia y de alegorización, que disputó al discurso
autoritario no sólo el significado de los nombres sino la misma
significación de nombrar” (Ortega 53).
However, given the way in
which Lumpérica may be read as the
collective staging of the non-transcendent play of non-representative
signifiers – as a heterogeneous text that does not re-present or mime
anything
– Eltit’s work can be seen to exceed the kind of mimetic or
specular correspondence between “text” and “empirical
reality” that would necessarily characterize the temporal formulation
of
allegory. Paul De Man, in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” describes
allegory as “the repetition…of
a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the
essence of
this previous sign to be pure anteriority” (207). But if the originary
radicalization of representation in Lumpérica
is such that it is not miming or re-presenting anything, then the
theater
of reading enacted by Eltit’s text includes a component that cannot be
read as unequivocally allegorical.
While the Benjaminian formulations of allegory in fact incorporate the
discontinuous ruptures that characterize the trope, the degree to which
Lumpérica’s cruelly
(anti)foundational, theatrical language imitates no-thing, no script,
no echo
of phenomenality, suggests that Benjamin’s notion of allegory cannot
completely account for all of the linguistic elements at play in
Eltit’s
text. This is not at all to say that the allegorical readings done by
Avelar,
Ortega, and Richard are “wrong” in their analysis of Eltit’s
complex work, but it is crucial to recognize that there exists another aspect of Lumpérica
that
may be elaborated through a careful examination of the non-transcendent
language of this text, in order to approach Lumpérica
in its rigorous resistances to reading and interpretation.
The radicalization of
traditional notions
of reference in Lumpérica is
indicative of a logic that is developed by Jacques Derrida in his
reading of
mimesis in Plato and its displacement in Mallarmé in the essay
“The Double Session,” from his 1972 book Dissemination.
(10) Taking as his point of departure the
encounter of Plato’s Philebus
and Mallarmé’s Mimique,
Derrida postulates a reading of signifiers and para-linguistic elements
that
exceeds a thematic interpretation of literary texts, and discusses how
the
“quasi-transcendental signifier” in Mallarmé interrupts and
threatens classical schemas of mimetic representation. Derrida
describes the
“re-mark” as written (re)inscription in “The Double
Session,” in terms of an imitation or miming that does not imitate a
prior referent, in a similar way to his reflections on Artaud – a
gesture
that also invokes writing’s simultaneously originary and referential
nature by which the text’s mark, as Geoffrey Bennington suggests,
is remarked as itself (“ceci”)
by a ghostly doubling whereby the mark marks itself as marking, refers
to itself
referring to itself, only by the fact of separating itself enough from
itself
to open the gap across which reference can function:
but the ‘end’ of that
reference, the referent to which that reference is supposed to refer,
is
nothing other than the fact of reference or referring itself (51).
The structure of the mark and re-mark at play in “The Double Session” demonstrates how Mallarmé’s writing problematizes Platonic notions of mimesis, and provides a non-conceptual “strategy” of reading that is a way of theorizing about texts that effect representation in a way that cannot be described by uniquely thematic schemas.
Moving
towards the possibility of exceeding thematic readings, Derrida draws
upon
Jean-Pierre Richard’s emphasis on certain “themes” in
Mallarmé to demonstrate how the inscription of the re-mark
prevents
escape or transcendence from the structure of metaphysics, since no
“Great Transcendental Theme” can be drawn out from a text that
refers to nothing other than itself as itself. The
text is therefore intricately folded
and “grafted” upon itself as the physical spacing of signifiers on
a blank page, some of which emerge to speak on the relationships
between terms
that are joined and separated by the whiteness of spacing. The
signifier blanc becomes exemplary (11) in the rhythm of rising and falling back of
terms in what Richard conceives of as themes, here reformulated by
Derrida as
“quasi-transcendental” in terms of their function as organizing the
other terms in the series as well as their folding back into the series
of
whiteness to which they belong. (12) The “undecidability” of blanc’s
equivocality – as
spacing, quasi-theme, signifier – thus demonstrates “conditions of
both possibility (there can be no theme without a spacing or gapping of
themes)
and of impossibility (just that spacing disallows atomic thematic
identity to
any theme whatsoever)” (
Considered in light of Derrida’s scheme of quasi-transcendentality and “mimicry” in Mallarmé, Lumpérica, as a hybridized text of crisis, suggests its own theory of reading that evades thematics, allegory, and representation through the emergence and persistence of the signifier blanco in the textual field. Blanco, as a term that “organizes” the textual “whitenesses” and spacing in Lumpérica, is offered up as quasi-transcendental in the semantic, syntactic, and filmic dimensions of the text as well as in the sub- and meta-lexical elements of spacing and cinematic cuts. While numerous semantic “interpretations” of this linguistic element are possible in the context of Pinochet’s “theater of cruelty” and torture under military rule, a reading of the signifier blanco as spacing and writing points to the play at transcendentality of this textual element that is both legible and illegible, in terms of the necessary undermining and “targeting” of reference, referentiality, and readability at the level of filmic visuality and textuality in Lumpérica. (13)
A detailed analysis of section 5.3 of Lumpérica as “exemplary” opens up the possibility of a close reading of the textual spaces and “whitenesses” that postulate themselves as marks and re-marks upon the uninhabitable, written (and writing-) space of the plaza, in order to speak on the impossibility of representing empirical reality linguistically. As we will see, reading, in the formulation of a non-hermeneutical or non-thematic frote that is only capable of examining the surface materiality of a non-transcendental language, becomes an act of collecting and losing signifiers that emerge from the text to convey traces of meaning conferred by the metonymic chains of signifiers that will make possible a reading of the illegible.
Section
5.3, like much of Eltit’s text, resists efforts to summarize its action
in a cohesive “plot,” but its central concern may be, for the
moment, reduced to a question of writing and performance in the public
space in
L. Iluminada’s rehearsal and inscription of “dónde
vas” on the ground of the plaza. (14) Her writing and subsequent erasure of
these words, first traced in imaginary letters, is witnessed by the
delighted,
pale spectators:
Teñidas las mejillas se
para
bajo el farol y sobre el metal su dedo caligráficamente escribe
en forma
imaginaria – como los niños – ‘dónde vas’
con letras mayúsculas y con la mano completa borra lo
escrito...Lo
ensaya de nuevo en el centro de la plaza, curvada sobre el cemento
ocupando para
sus letras amplios espacios. Ensaya sus palabras. Los otros la observan
desde
sus lugares. Una y otra vez hasta que la mano enrojece y se despelleja
de tanto
borrado (122).
The
play of color and whiteness is highlighted in these sections, in the
simultaneous embracing of and resistance to whiteness as the lack of
color
– the frote producing the
redness of her hand and cheeks presents a stark contrast to the
physical or
symbolic whiteness of other signifiers in this passage (teeth,
sterility, or
the pallid, white skin of the desharrapados
and L. Iluminada, to name a few examples). In this way, the frote
that attempts to remove the
absence of color and bestow life (and erotic excitement) on the
participants in the text will briefly emerge from the
text to become an act of reading that merely rubs the textual (or
sexual)
surface of the written corpus –
suggesting the way in which the text reads itself reading. (15) Evoking
the frote of section 4.1’s
“Para la formulación de una
imagen en la literatura,” the rejection of textual penetration here
reveals the possibility of a “feminist” body-writing that resists
hermeneutical entry and therefore knowing/deciphering. The
surface-rubbing of
this act of reading/writing is described by Djelal Kadir as a type of
identity-founding discourse indicative of “Eltit’s encounter with
patriarchal specters…[in] a male-dominated canon of precursor images
and
a dictatorial patriarchy engaged in the fratricidal decimation of its
own
people” (189). (16)
The frote, however, may also
be read as a witnessing of the type of hymeneal dialectics that Derrida
describes
in the hymen “INTER Platonem et Mallarmatum” in “The Double
Session” (181). This “vicious and sacred” (216) barrier that
“is to be read both as ‘membrane’ and ‘marriage’
(TN 10; p. 182)” is associated with textiles, in that “its threads
should be interwoven with all the veils, gauzes, canvases, fabrics,
moires,
wings, feathers, all the curtains and fans that hold within their folds
all
– almost – of the Mallarméan corpus” (213). Reading
the textual/textile inscription of this simultaneous preservation and
destruction of virginity and whiteness is part and parcel of the ritual
that
makes, in section 5.1, “[c]ada uno de esos signos…decifrable para
ella. Podría
así tejer innumerables historias tan
sólo decantando la trama de
su vestido de lana gris” (Lumpérica
110; my emphasis).
Similarly,
the act of witnessing and approaching L. Iluminada’s white writing
– rehearsed, woven, and traced upon the plaza floor in the whiteness of
cal and tiza – culminates in the
edification of “grandes letras
que abarcan todo
The
cyclical movement of writing and erasure, both in terms of the writing
itself
and the destruction of the lime used to write with, awaits a reading,
re-writing, and re-marking of the
ritualistic act with the bodies of the spectators:
Ellos, a su vez, comienzan a detener sus
movimientos. Sus labios murmuran la frase
acercándose cada vez más a las palabras, incluso algunos
de ellos
las pisan. Por fin las cubren totalmente con los pies.
Permanecen rígidos encima.
Así nada está escrito sobre el suelo, siguen como
protagonistas
ocupando el cemento (123).
The displacement of the filmic gaze towards these new “protagonists” demonstrates the centrality of writing to Lumpérica’s formulation of reading, in that their destruction of the letters written in lime becomes yet another ritual, unscripted (“improvisado”) dance leading to the re-mark upon the dispersion of the remains left by L. Iluminada. (17) Her radical re-writing within/upon the ruins of the protagonists’ re-writing transforms and folds the whiteness of the cal into a writing in which “[ella] escribe su frase en proporciones aún mayores, dejando grandes blancos entre letras” (123). The play of the signifier blanco is revealed here in its duplicitous movement between unstable meanings, oscillating between the lack of color brought out by other signifiers in the signifying structure, as well as the meta-lexical element of textual spacing. L. Iluminada’s steps between letters effects the fixing of spatial blancos in the inscription of the words “dónde vas,” and mobilizes the physical space between the observers whose spacing mirrors the written words in their fixed place, in relation to L. Iluminada’s mental and cinematic conception of the scene (123-4).
Elevating
the spatializing whiteness to a ritualistic form causes L. Iluminada to
fall to
her knees in the sacred act of erasing her written words with the hem
of her
dress, a gesture which is echoed by the crowd:
Ellos entonces afloran, salen
múltiples y con sus pies confirman la borradura. Están
una vez
más ocupando su espacio en una nueva labor.
Se demoran para hacer un buen
trabajo, aunque claro, la limpieza no será total hasta que
muchas otras
pisadas se lleven los minúsculos pedazos de cal entre los pies
(124).
The introduction of a new
cleanliness and whiteness into the scene – the sacred nature of the
chalk
emphasized by the sacral character of its delivery and reception by the
pálidos – gives rise to
another re-mark upon the ruins of the same white space that bears
witness to
this ritualistic and communal writing:
Se levanta y los mira: acercándose a cada
uno le pasa un trozo de
tiza que va rompiendo entre sus dedos. Con la cabeza baja lo hace y
ellos de la
misma manera la reciben, pero cuidando de no rozarla. Tan sólo
la punta
de sus dedos toca el trozo de tiza (124).
But L.
Iluminada’s intent to decipher the remains of writing and/as
destruction
is echoed by another reinscription of the cycle of mark and re-mark, in
terms
of the constant folding of the text upon itself in the distribution of
words
and fragments of letters perfectly begun by one member of the lumperío and continued flawlessly
by another:
Este lumperío escribe y borra imaginario, se
reparte las palabras,
los fragmentos de letras, borran sus supuestos errores, ensayan sus
caligrafías, endilgan el pulso, acceden a la imprenta.
Se quedan quietos observando y como profesionales
empiezan a tender su
propio rayado en el centro. Es perfecto. Están enajenados en la
pendiente de la letra, alfabetizados, corruptos por la impresión. (124-5)
This linking permits L. Iluminada’s reading of the spectacle and theorizes about this type of reading as the act of spatially contextualizing the whiteness that both separates and continues letters and words. Her convulsive smile produced by the perception of traces of meaning (engendered by the linking of spaces and whitenesses) is a product of having seen “la frase completa” (the finished “dónde vas”; 125) which implies both a complete sentence as well as the notion of a totalizing, transcendental grammatical structure capable of transmitting a meaning that is fixed, stable, and present-to-itself.
L. Iluminada’s ecstasy at having witnessed this singular writing – which at the same time refers back to the marks and re-marks traced and mapped out in the public square – is the masturbational jouissance of the frote that simultaneously affirms and negates the possibility of a fixed meaning: “…ha visto la frase completa y se arrastra sobre ella para frotarse” (125). As elaborated in sections 4.1 and 5.3, the poetics of the frote as a superficial body-writing attempts to preserve the purity, whiteness, and hymeneal membrane of the white textual space by negating the kind of hermeneutical “penetration” outlined through this presentation of metaphysical transcendentality in “la frase completa.” Therefore, the condition of possibility of this “frase completa” is in fact its condition of impossibility: if L. Iluminada attempts to read this sentence as transcending its status as a grammatical linking of signifiers, she is therefore entertaining an interpretative reading that interrupts the rubbing of the non-invasive frote. Given that this scene offers itself up as an exemplary movement in the conception of reading and/as writing in Lumpérica, the frote is necessarily reduced to a perverted repetition compulsion of the penetration inherent in the “coqueteo ritual de las piernas abiertas” (113). This deconstruction of the frote as both an invasive and non-invasive instrument of reading demonstrates the contamination of what at first appeared to be a non-transcendental witnessing of a signifier’s self-postulation as example. Overrun by thematics and hermeneutics, the frote is no longer capable of reading “quasi-transcendentarily” as a hymeneal slippage that would preserve the emergence of the signifier blanco from the text to necessarily return to its non-transcendental status as one signifier among many. In this way, blanco is not to be privileged over any other signifier in Lumpérica, since its quasi-transcendentality is only to be read in reference and relation to the other signifiers in the text. Therefore, blanco becomes exemplary in its status as signifier in Eltit’s text, not at all unlike the Derrida’s positioning of blanc in Mallarmé, in terms of its reference to both the spacing that seems to create themes, as well as rejecting the possibility of their existence as transcendent entities.
The staging of sub-lexical elements in section 8 of Lumpérica permits further elaboration of the quasi-transcendentality of whitenesses and effects of spacing in this text, in their multifarious complicity on several allegorical and non-allegorical levels of signification. One of the most prominent visual and semantic features of section 8 is the spatial corte effected by elements such as the slash, hyphen, equals sign, and numeric and alphabetical lists, which serve both to interrupt and link readings of this heterogeneous, experimental text. Framed by the title “Ensayo General” – which may be read in terms of the play of written inscription on a blank page (as an “essay”), as well as a rehearsal or attempt – this “chapter” opens with a photograph of Diamela Eltit/L. Iluminada and her wounded arms. The three short prose poems that follow the photograph, entitled E. G. 1, 2, and 3, are accentuated by the abundance of blank space at the bottom of each page. (18) The mise-en-scène of Lumpérica’s filmic dimension, in terms of the explicit cinematic portrayal inherent in Eltit’s text, is mirrored at the level of these syntactical marks that may be read allegorically or symbolically as filmic and visual cuts, breaks with traditional literary conventions, or as ruptures with syntax, semantics, and reference.(19) However, a reading of how these visual and spatial devices affect the possibilities of reading Lumpérica exposes a dimension of this text that exceeds and occasionally negates allegory as the dominant trope of reading.
The
first of the three “E.G.’s” confronts the reader with the
following two-line, non-grammatical “verse”:
Muge/r/apa y su mano se nutre
final–mente el verde des–ata y maya se erige y vac/a–nal su
forma (162).
The polysemic valences of each
fragmented
signifier – the “muge/r/apa,” for example, evoking the
Spanish words muge, mugre,
mujer, and rapa, among
others – serve to destabilize and dirty the semantic field of “the
signifier” (as structure) that is also governed by the spatializing
recourse of the slash as hymeneal fold, simultaneously separating and
joining
signifiers and series of semantic groupings. While
it is possible to elaborate a
thematic scheme concerning the confluence of human and animalistic
imagery in
these lines, an examination of the use of connectors that tie and untie
(“des-ata[n]”)
the syntactical order of the sentence demonstrates how they map onto
Derrida’s formulation of textual folding. (20)
The second E.G.
inscription – “Anal’iza la trama=dura de la piel: la
mano prende y la [/] fobia d es / garra” (163) –
offers
similar sexual and animal “themes,” culminating in the phallic
penetration of the textual by the sexual in the insistence of the
linguistic
and imagistic violence of the “d es
/ garra.” The use of the slash is thus indicative of the coupling of
the
incision made on the fragmented textual body with the clawing and
tearing corte and linkage at which a textual
“event” takes place. In
this way, the play of spacing and/as folding demonstrates how the
accumulation
of force along the lines of the slash and hyphen becomes the event of
sexual
orality and corporality suggested in E.G. 3: “Muge/r’onda
corp-oral
Brahma su ma la mano que la [/] denuncia & brama” (164). The
semantic
association and grouping of signifiers –as the way in which the text
appears
to read this non-grammatical phrase – stages the enraged, animalistic
sexuality outlined above, this time in the context of a juxtaposition
of the
sacred Hindu priestly caste with the notion of sexual relations with
their holy
animal, the cow. (21) The cow’s bellowing is
folded upon itself in
the text by the slash, simultaneously drawing together and separating
woman
from animal, a movement which demonstrates how the visual interrupters
are mark
and re-mark on the linguistic condition of non-transcendence that
permeates the
text.
These spatial devices do not
have any
proper “meaning” in themselves, (22) as
liminal re-marks
constituting a fold “that is at once its own outside and its own
inside;
between the outside and the inside, making the outside enter the inside
and
turning back the antre or the other upon its surface, the hymen is
never pure
or proper, has no life of its own, no proper name” (Derrida, “The
Double Session” 229). The slash (or hyphen) therefore
becomes a reading of an element
“under erasure” that is exemplary in its disorganization and
juxtaposition
of heterogeneous signifiers folded into or onto each other, causing a
radical
break with the ghostly presence of a referent that is not really
present, nor
was ever present. The three E.G. “readings” thus do not trace
out a scripted
“rehearsal,” but instead are a written manifestation (not
representation) of the graft or re-mark structure at play in Lumpérica, signaling a
performance of the kind of reading embodied in the confrontation
between and
the deconstruction of the frote and
hermeneutics.
Given our reading of Lumpérica as non-representative theater (that does
not
involve a previously scripted content), what do the ensayos
generales of section 8 rehearse? With respect to the play
of textual folding in Eltit’s “novel,” the mark of the title
that frames this part of Lumpérica
(“Ensayo General”) is complicated by its repetition as a re-mark in the final sentence: “Se
va a iniciar el Ensayo General” (177). If the end of this section
constitutes the inauguration of the “scripted rehearsal” suggested
at the beginning of the chapter, what has actually “happened” in
section 8, if anything? After reading this section, the reader (should
he or
she take seriously the title’s “promise” of an “Ensayo
General”) is forced to return to the beginning of section 8 to (re)read
the part of the text marked as the “Ensayo General.” Each
successive reading therefore engenders the same cycle of reading and
return as
repetition and digression, since the “Ensayo General” remains
suspended in a “text-to-be” that only refers to an earlier
reference in the text and never “appears.” (23) Where this curious textual closure
points to the way in which narrative “can only turn in circles in an
unarrestable, inenarrable and insatiably recurring manner” (Derrida,
“The Law of Genre” 237), the fluidity and movement of the multiple
borderlines and folds that inhabit Lumpérica
highlight the way in which the radical linguistic composition of
Eltit’s
work carries out the erasure of representation and the very possibility
of
legibility. Lumpérica’s
radical unreadability, however, is in
fact what makes it readable: as Derrida remarks in “Living on: Borderlines,” unreadability
“does not arrest reading, does not leave it paralyzed in the face of an
opaque surface: rather, it starts
reading and writing and translation moving again. The unreadable is not
the
opposite of the readable but rather the ridge [arête]
that also gives it momentum, movement, sets it in
motion (116).” (24)
This dynamic formulation of
(il)legibility thus reopens the theater of reading in Lumpérica
to the flow and exchange of non-representative
language, across the folds that mark, but do not strictly delimit,
readability
and unreadability. As we have seen, contemporary criticism has often
approached
Lumpérica’s resistance to
reading through the theoretical formulations of allegory; as a
predominant
trope of reading and writing in dictatorial literature, allegory points
to the
temporal and (non?)signifying ruptures that make impossible the
“timely” coincidence of textual elements and empirical reality. But
given Lumpérica’s
radical deconstruction of “re-presentation” – conceived of in
light of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” and Derrida´s
readings of thematics, mimesis, and folding – it is plausible and even
necessary to read the linguistic disjunction carried out in the text’s
“whitenesses” and spaces as something other than a distortion of
“conventional” language as a reaction to censorship and oppression.
While crises of representation and voice under military rule are a very
real
component of the empirical fact of the aesthetic production of
literature, Lumpérica’s
“illegibility” must also be
read and re-written in the same tenor of radicalized linguistic rupture
with
which the text reads itself as illegible.
The play of textual folding in Lumpérica
thus “targets” allegory in a way that exceeds the process of
conceptualization and thematization, enforcing a theater of reading
that
simultaneously engenders and effaces (non-)sense and (il)legibility.
Notes
(1).
Juan Carlos Lértora’s edited volume, Una
poética de
literatura menor: la narrativa de
Diamela Eltit, including
essays by Nelly Richard, Julio
Ortega, and other noted critics, offers highly insightful
interpretations of
Eltit’s oeuvre, but as a whole
tends not to directly engage the texts themselves. Recent
critical interest in Eltit’s
work has produced a significant amount of theoretical reflection on Lumpérica, mainly in the form of
historico-allegorical readings of writing, repression, memory, and
corporality
under dictatorship, especially in terms of Eltit’s experience as a
woman
writer. Other important studies
include Eltit’s reflections on her own text in Emergencias: Escritos sobre
literatura, arte y política and Conversaciones con Diamela Eltit,
as
well as Djelal Kadir’s comments in The
Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays
in Latin America’s Writing Culture. For
an excellent framing of the escena de avanzada and
CADA (the
“Colectivo de acciones de arte,” of which Eltit was a founding
member) as well as post-dictatorial Chilean artistic expression, see
Nelly
Richard’s Margins and
Institutions. Art in Chile
Since 1973 and
Residuos y metáforas:
ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la
Transición.
(2).
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary
defines “hermetic” as “1. (of a seal or
closure) complete and
airtight. 2. insulated or protected
from outside influences. 2. (also
Hermetic) of or denoting an ancient
occult tradition encompassing alchemy, astrology, and theosophy. >
esoteric,
cryptic. (The Concise OED,
(3).
Several critics, including Avelar, have highlighted the prominence of
visuality
(and the phallic gaze) in Lumpérica,
especially in terms of cinematic or filmic effects of lighting,
staging, and
gender/genre. See Raquel Olea, Sara
Castro-Klarén, and Guillermo García Corales’ essays in Una
poética de literatura menor:
la narrativa de Diamela Eltit,
as well as Robert Neustadt’s “Diamela Eltit: Clearing
Space for Critical Performance.”
(4).
Avelar describes how many so-called allegorical readings tend to
degenerate
into what he calls a “specular reflexivism”: “in
times of censorship, writers
are forced to resort to ‘indirect ways,’ ‘metaphors,’
and ‘allegories’ to ‘express’ what is invariably
thought to be a self-identical content that could remain so inside
another
rhetorical cloak in times of ‘free expression’” (9).
(5).
My reading of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” draws upon
Jacques Derrida’s writings on Artaud in Writing and
Difference: “The Theater of Cruelty
and the
Closure of Representation” and “La
parole souflée.”
(6).
The integration of art into the praxis of life is a clear link between
the
experimental poetics of the historical avant-garde (following Peter
Bürger’s analysis) that explicitly links CADA’s project to
Artaud’s writings. In fact,
in Conversaciones con Diamela Eltit,
Leonidas Morales and Eltit discuss Eltit’s theoretical work in seminars
with Patricio Marchant and Ronald Kay on Artaud, post-structuralism,
and
Lacanian psychoanalysis at the Universidad de Chile, including
representations
of several of Artaud’s plays (89-90; 157).
(7).
For an insightful discussion of Lumpérica’s aesthetics of rupture with respect to
notions of Platonic mimesis, see Dianna Niebylski’s article
“Against Mimesis: Lumpérica Revisited.”
(8). Derrida describes how
Artaud’s formulation of theatrical language (spoken and gestural) does
not involve “the repetition of a present,
will no longer re-present a present
that would exist elsewhere and prior to it, a present that would exist
elsewhere and prior to it, a present whose plenitude would be older
than it,
absent from it, and rightfully capable of doing without it: the being-present-to-itself of the
absolute Logos, the living present of God (“The Theater of Cruelty and
the Closure of Representation” 237).
(9). See Richard’s
essay “Tres funciones de
escritura: desconstrucción, simulación,
hibridación,” in Lértora’s Una poética de
literatura menor: la narrativa de
Diamela Eltit.
(10).
Derrida´s writings in “The Double Session” are neatly
“schematized” in an article by Geoffrey Bennington (“Derrida´s
Mallarmé,” in Interrupting
Derrida.
“…Derrida
is
concerned (1) to explicate a traditional, Platonic, schema of mimesis; (2) to establish the theoretical possibility
of this
schema’s being disrupted by a feature or process he calls the re-mark;
(3) to posit Mallarmé as an exemplary
instantiation of that theoretical possibility; (4) to show (a) that
this
cannot be accounted for by a thematic reading, and (b) that it entails
a
practice of reading which takes more seriously than a thematic one ever
could
the play of (i) syntax, and (ii) sub-lexical items in the text” (47).
(11).
Bennington discusses the logic of Derrida´s designation of
Mallarmé as “exemplary”: “According
to a duplicity which
inhabits the very concept of example, Mallarmé will on the one
hand be
presented as exemplary in the sense that he would be the best
example, or at least a shining example, to that extent more
than just an example, but a sort of
paragon and on the other as really no more than a sample,
exemplifying the disruption of mimesis just as any
text (including Plato´s) might be taken
to exemplify it, an example more or less randomly picked from a whole
range of
possibilities” (45-6).
(12).
Derrida’s specific formulation of the
“quasi-transcendentality” of blanc
in Mallarmé’s poetry is as follows: “…the
blank or the whiteness
(is) the totality, however infinite, of the polysemic series, plus the carefully spaced-out splitting
of the whole, the fanlike form of the text. This
plus
is not just one extra valence, a meaning that might enrich the
polysemic
series. And since it has no
meaning, it is not The blank proper,
the transcendental origin of the series. This
is why, while it cannot constitute a
meaning that is signified or represented, one would say in classical
discourse
that it always has a delegate or representative in the series: since the blank is the polysemic totality
of everything white or blank plus the
writing site (hymen, spacing, etc.) where such a totality is produced,
this plus will, for example, find one of
these representatives representing nothing in the blankness or margins
of the
page. But for the reasons just
enumerated, it is out of the question that we should erect such a
representative – for example the whiteness of the page of writing –
into the fundamental signified or signifier in the series” (“The
Double Session,” 252).
(13).
Blanco, conceived of as
“target,” becomes the crosshairs of rifles and other firearms, as
well as the crosses erected in memoriam of the countless victims of desapariciones and assassinations. Similarly,
in the context of the
neo-avant garde movement of which Eltit was a founding member (CADA),
the plus
sign that framed their motto of resistance, “No +,” may be examined
in terms of the textual gesture of the blanco
as target, as well as a reference to Lotty Rosenfeld’s installation art
exhibit “A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement.” Blanco
could also be read as the collective, traumatic space or gap that
defines
the failure of memory in the face of violence and repression under
dictatorship, thereby constituting an amnesiac forgetting or situating
of
dictatorial inscription “under (psychological and physical)
erasure.”
(14).
The subversion of institutional and generic conventions in Lumpérica
takes place in the space of the public plaza,
which is not without its own significant social codifications and
discourses. For a discussion of power,
public space,
and gender, see the articles in Lértora´s volume
(especially
Guillermo García Corales and María Inés
Lagos´
essays) and Djelal Kadir´s chapter on Eltit in The
Other Writing:
Postcolonial Essays in Latin America’s Writing Culture.
(15).
The vivid sexual poetics of reading that I describe here are especially
resonant in the context of Latin American “neobaroque” writing, an
aesthetic occasionally associated with Eltit’s writing (by
Néstor
Perlongher, for example, in his introduction to the anthology of
neobaroque
poetry Medusario).
(16).
See Kadir´s chapter on Eltit in The
Other Writing, which, along with Lértora’s Una
poética de literatura menor,
includes excellent readings of gender, visuality, and writing in
Lumpérica.
(17).
L. Iluminada´s spectacular inscription in the plaza is also
significant
in its choice of writing material: lime,
as the element scattered in mass
graves to speed decomposition (evoking dictatorial desapariciones
and executions), suggests a fundamental and sacral
link between the theater, reading, writing and death in Lumpérica.
(18).
The abbreviation “E.G.” may also be read in terms of the Latin exempli gratia, which more
“explicitly” points to the exemplarity of this passage.
(19).
A further dimension of violence and cruelty perhaps lurks in the
prominence of
the “slash” in Lumpérica,
in that its semantic cutting action reflects the self-mutilation of the
protagonist as well as the torture and inquisitorial nature of the
Chilean
military regime. The slash – barra
in Spanish – echoes and
distorts the transformation of “barro, barrosa, barroca” that
appears twice in this section of the text (perhaps another nod to the neobarroco and an anticipation of
Perlongher’s muddied neobarroso),
and also re-marks upon the bar separating signifier and signified in
the
Saussurian formulation of the sign (which may no longer be considered
an
adequate theoretical (re)mark in Lumpérica). Interestingly, María
Moliner’s Diccionario de uso del
español highlights the use of the
word barra in Chile
to represent “[el] público de un espectáculo al aire
libre.” Robert
Neustadt’s writings on the filmic and performative dimensions of this
scene provide further insight into the visual mutilatory gesture of the
cut and
its discursive implications in Eltit’s novel.
(20).
Two possibilities that offer themselves up are the linguistic
complicity
between the bovine and the feminine, as well as a reading of the
animalistic
and maternal (milk-giving, recalling the leche
of section 4.5 and CADA’s “Para
no morir de hambre en el arte”) sexuality of the deconstruction of the
word bacanal into vaca and anal.
(21).
Eltit’s text offers up the signifiers Brahma
– the Hindu priestly caste – and brama – the
animalistic rutting season, which also evokes the
verb bramar, meaning “to roar
or bellow.”
(22).
Nor do “signifiers” themselves in Derrida’s reading of
Saussure in the Grammatology, in
terms of the negative diacritical formulation of the signifier – but it
is interesting to note that these para-linguistic elements cannot be
read as
“signifiers,” per se.
(23).
Neustadt identifies this structure with the female reproductive cycle
and other
life rhythms, and correctly highlights the larger cyclical structure of
Lumpérica, locating the movement
of rereading in concentric circles throughout the novel.
(24). A formulation that appears
often in Derrida’s work, in which conditions of impossibility are in
fact
conditions of possibility – see, for example, his discussion of the
postal system in “Le facteur de la verité” (in The
Post Card).
Works
Cited
Artaud, Antonin.
The Theater and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New
Avelar,
Idelber. The
Untimely
Present: Postdictatorial Latin
American Fiction and the Task of
Mourning.
Bennington, Geoffrey. Interrupting
Derrida.
Derrida,
Jacques. “The Law of
Genre.” Trans. Avital
Ronell. Acts
of Literature. Ed.Derek
Attridge.
Continuum Publishing Company,
1979.
---.
“Mallarmé.” Acts
of Literature. Ed. Derek
Attridge.
---. “The Double
Session.” Trans. Barbara
Johnson. Dissemination.
---. “La parole
souflée.” Writing
and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass.
---.
Lumpérica.
Kadir,
Djelal. The Other Writing:
Postcolonial Essays in
Lértora, Juan
Carlos, ed. Una
poética de literatura menor: la
narrativa de Diamela Eltit.
Moliner,
María. Diccionario
de uso del español. CD-ROM. Madrid: Gredos,
2001.
Morales, Leonidas
T. Conversaciones
con Diamela
Eltit. Santiago: Cuarto
Propio,
De Man, Paul. “The
Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness
and Insight: Essays in the
Neustadt, Robert.
“Diamela
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&
Niebylski, Dianna. “Against Mimesis: Lumpérica Revisited.” Revista
canadiense
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La insubordinación de
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---. Margins
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---.
“Tres
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