de la Torre, Osvaldo - On Loss and Not Losing It

On Loss and Not Losing ItNeruda, Mistral, and Zurita in the Postdictatorship

O s v a l d o d e l a T o r r e

Columbia College Chicago

IN AN AUGUST 1989 CONFERENCE TITLED ENCUENTRO CON GABRIELA

Mistral (Encounter with Gabriela Mistral) held in Santiago, Chilean critic and

philosopher Patricio Marchant presented a paper titled Desolacin (Desola-

tion). Like all conferenceparticipants,Marchantmust havebeenkeenly aware of

and shaken by the surrounding sociopolitical context: some months before the

conference, inOctober 1988,ageneralplebiscitehadbeenheldonorders fromthe

military Junta, which asked the Chilean people to vote Yes or No on an eight-

year presidential term for Augusto Pinochet, and thus effectively on the continu-

ationof the Juntasmilitary rule,whichhadheld political control overChile since

the 1973 coup. Contrary to the Juntas prospect, the results of the plebiscite

showed the opposition coalition (united as the Concertacin de Partidos por el

No [Coalition of Parties for the No]) as having received the majority of votes,

paving the way for a transition to civil government and, more concretely, for

presidential elections to be held inDecember of 1989.1

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2014, pp. 129152. ISSN 1532-687X.

2014 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

1 2 9

This work originally appeared in This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review, 14.1, Spring 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.

Reprinted later in Escritura y temblora selection of Marchants theoret-

ical and philosophical writings edited by Willy Thayer and Pablo Oyarzn

(2000)Marchants conference text appears with the longer title of Deso-

lacin. Cuestin del nombre de Salvador Allende (Desolation. On the Ques-

tion/Matter of the Name of Salvador Allende).2 If the brief yet solemn title of

the conference piece evokes the figure and poetry of Gabriela Mistral (partic-

ularly her homonymous 1922 book,Desolacin), the longer title that heads the

version appearing in Escritura y temblor would seem to attempt a more in-

trepidmove: to bring together two seemingly disparate proper names (Gabri-

ela Mistral and Salvador Allende), and thus to forge a connection between

Mistrals poetics and the sociopolitical context inwhichMarchant, alongwith

the rest of Chile, was situatedwhich, to repeat, was that of the nations

complicated shift from dictatorship to postdictatorship.

By adding to Desolacin the complementary subtitle of Cuestin del

nombre de Salvador Allende, Mistrals poetic output is made relevant, perti-

nent to the Chilean present, thus becoming an essential textual corpus for the

critical conversations generated around the turn of the decade (19891990).

Conversely, the term desolacinwould seem to render this temporal juncture

inherently problematic, anticipating the difficult if not unresolvable issues

that come with the nations attempts to overcome a dictatorial regime while

dealing with its violent and traumatic inheritance. In naming the present via

recourse toMistral,Marchantnames thepresent desolate,marks it as a time

experiencing or sustaining its own form of despair or misery. Desolacin

would thus not only title Mistrals firstand temporally distantpoetry col-

lection; it would describe, forMarchant, the political and cultural agony of the

current and even future social space.

Additionally, Marchants focus on desolacin distances Mistral from the

image of the comforting mother who unifies the nation and consolidates the

idea of a virtuous Chilean community through celebratory poetic accounts of

motherhood and pedagogy.3 Instead, a more dismal Mistral is fore-

groundedaMistralwhomourns rather than sings communalharmony,who

highlights the dissolution, pain, and ultimate incompletion of any project of

community. In the words of Kemy Oyarzn, to speak of [Mistral] may be-

come, in more recent, unorthodox interpretations such as those undertaken

1 3 0 O n L o s s a n d N o t L o s i n g I t


by Marchant and Oyarzn herself, to speak of ourselves, of an us that is not

only plural but highly tensional: rupture of culture, shatters of community,

project of a neoliberal country that fails to project itself (Oyarzn 1998).4

With his bold analysis, Marchant precedes a line of recent criticismencom-

passing theworks ofGrnorRojo, AdrianaValds, JorgeGuzmn, AnaPizarro,

and Kemy Oyarzn, to mention a fewwhich attempts to move away from

potentially conservative, encomiastic, and institutionalizing readings that

rely heavily on biographical data and/or idealizing conceptions of gender.

Marchants text purposely assigns a critical untimeliness to Mistrals po-

etry, a kind of delay in receptivity. In a noteworthy study of Latin American

postdictatorial literary production,TheUntimely Present, Idelber Avelar reads

texts that, in his view, are at all times strangely and uncomfortably situated

within their contemporaneous cultural fields. While the representative is by

definition the dominant, the doxic, that which is in accord with its present,

the texts discussed by Avelar do not conform to the norm; they are unrepre-

sentative, simultaneously embedded yet foreign to their respective literary

and cultural presents.5 Avelar describes these texts, and the fictional opera-

tions that they deploy, as untimely, indicating, in a Benjaminian register,

that the untimely takes distance from the present, estranges itself from it by

carrying and caring for the seeds of time. An untimely reading of the present

will, then, at the same time rescue past defeats out of oblivion and remain

open to an as yet unimaginable future (2021). It is precisely this oddity, this

inability or refusal to fit within the prevailing ideological and literary para-

digm, that furnishes the texts analyzedbyAvelarwith thepotential to imagine

differentlyand perhaps thereby more ethicallythe function of memory

and of literature in postdictatorship Latin America.

Taking inspiration from both Marchant and Avelar, I would suggest that

Mistrals poetry has always been untimely. Thus, with respect to Hispanic

modernismo of the early twentieth century, stylistic and thematic affinities

can be perceived, yet her literary production has never properly fit the mod-

ernistamold. On a formal level, Mistrals poetry, quite simply, has never been

modern; she never broke new ground (seemingly the condition for attaining

the modernist label in the West). Thus, in relation to the avant-gardes of the

1920s and onward, her poetry decidedly failed to join what Octavio Paz fa-

O s v a l d o d e l a T o r r e 1 3 1


mously called the tradition of rupture. Since the 1922 publication of Deso-

lacin (which had to compete with Eliots TheWaste Land andVallejos Trilce,

to mention representative examples from the English- and Spanish-speaking

worlds published in the same year), a certain negative anachronism has been

ascribed to her work, arguably fueled by a bias in favor of formal experimen-

tation in the critical evaluation, valuation, and canonization of avant-garde

poetic works. Following Avelar, I would like to highlight the positives of

Mistrals untimeliness or anachronism, to see in this elusion of apprehension,

in this purported backwardness, in this inability to set the time of Mistral,

the condition and possibility for making Mistral relevant in and for our time.

In his piece,Marchant briefly speaks about this ostensiveMistralian delay

or belatedness. For him, it is as though the postdictatorial Chilean conversion

provided the conditions to undertake a radically different approach to her

work, one which would not rehearse the old interpretative paradigms that

only idolatrize and sediment Mistrals status as a monumental and untouch-

able figure in the Chilean canon. In his highly idiosyncratic style, Marchant

writes: Discovery, in these years, of Mistrals poetry: as if it had needed a

national catastrophe to begin its comprehension, inasmuchas it undoubtedly

gives usand this is indeed the casethe elements to begin this ineludible

task: the commentaryencompassing all aspects of our national dwellingof

our catastrophe (Descubrimiento, en estos aos, de la poesa mistraliana:

como si sta hubiera necesitado de la catstrofe nacional para comenzar a ser

entendida, en tanto ellaen primer, indiscutido lugarnos entregara, y as

es, los elementos para comenzar esta tarea ineludible: el comentarioen

todos los mbitos de la estancia nacionalde nuestra catstrofe [2000, 214;

emphasis in original]). Conversely, it is as though Mistrals poetic corpus

with its generally melancholic force and charged deployment of saudade

provided a conceptual and poetic framework through which to tackle issues

arisingwith particular urgency and intensity out of the postdictatorial period,

such as those of remembrance, relating to the dead, and engaging with the

experience of loss. Meditation of this defeat,Marchantwrites, as if Gabriela

Mistral had written for this moment, for our present defeat, for our present

desolationhastily assuming, of course, what GabrielaMistralmeant by des-

olation (Meditacindeestaderrota: comosiGabrielaMistral hubiera escrito



para este momento, para nuestra actual derrota, para nuestra actual deso-

lacinsuponiendo, en forma gratuita, ciertamente, que se sepa qu en-

tenda Gabriela Mistral por desolacin [2000, 234; emphasis in original]).

Withoutmaking specific references toMistral, several important thinkers

have indeed spoken of the dictatorial period as entailing an engagement with

loss, signifying not only the patent loss of human life and political disappear-

ances resulting from state violence, but also the loss of language, that is, the

inability to find words with which to configure everyday experience, let alone

confront the states discursive apparatus. Thus, for Nelly Richard, the nation

under dictatorial rule endured a semantic stalemate, which presented the

public arena, on the one hand, with the fraudulent language spoken by

official power, and, on the other, with an everyday linguistic practice unable

to challenge the nations pervasive and repressive political structure (2004, 5).

With the postdictatorship, the concept of loss acquires an additional signifi-

cance, one which, importantly, grants a positive qualification to this concept.

With the postdictatorship, the need to sustain and even to affirm loss, to

prevent its disappearance, emerges as a critical and ethical demand. Put

differently: if during the dictatorship the nation undergoes the experience of

loss in the concrete, destructive formof state violence, in the postdictatorship

it bears the imperative to sustain the painful memory of that loss, of that

experience; to not erase or dismiss the wounding violence of the dictatorial

past in the interest of undertaking a complete and successfulTransicin.6 The

threat that haunts postdictatorship Chile is therefore that of the loss of loss,7

which again signifies a successful mourning process that permits the nation

to situate itself on the enticing path to democratic, neoliberal harmony.8

Marchant had already observed the specificmaterialization of this threat

in the way in which, in his view, intellectual practice after the 1973 military

coup continued, in great part, to be practicedwith little change and seemingly

unaffected by social circumstances. Certain intellectuals, for Marchant, lost

that loss: theywere able to keep on speaking andwriting, and,while theremay

have been a change in its content, no change was there in the rhythm of their

speech, of their writing ([se] perdieron esa prdida: pudieron seguir

hablando, escribiendo, y, si cambio de contenido, sin embargo, ningn cam-

bio de ritmo en su hablar, en su escritura [2009, 348]). Nelly Richard, too,



describes this point (the loss of loss) by making specific reference to the

postdictatorial discursive field:

Some languages of the postdictatorship (for example, those of the social sci-

ences) disavowed, hid or disguised the signs of the vulnerability of thought so

as to reconstructas if nothing had happenedefficient discourses: dis-

courses able to reorder the disorder of the social thanks to the technical

character of its quantitative and statistical instruments which processed the

fact of violence but without permitting itself to be disturbed by any breakage

or unfixing of meaning. (2000, 274; emphasis in original)

Other narratives, Richard continues, desperately tried to reintegrate the

disintegrated (the broken emblems of the national-historical and popular)

into new organic wholes synthesizing grand world-viewssuch was the case

of the ideological narratives of the militant left.

Richards last point about the way in which themilitant, Marxist left dealt

with the experience of loss (which can be summarized as a will to supersede

loss by repairing the broken, by symbolically re-erecting the fallen and bring-

ing about the rebirth of what is dead) reproduces the Marxist-inspired re-

demptive framework imagined by Chiles best known poet: Pablo Neruda. As

described in his Canto general (1950), Nerudas understanding of historical

unfolding and of communitys participation within that unfolding ascribes a

prophetic and redemptive power to the poetic voice and imagines a collective

liberation of the oppressed through a violent, catastrophicmoment located in

a coming future. In other words, the Nerudian project is also concerned with

overcoming loss (with losing the loss), with turning abject failure into reso-

nant triumph. In what follows, I will offer a brief outline of this poetics of

redemption as narrated in the Canto general. I will then come back to the

poetry of Mistral and, focusing on a representative poem that lays out a

peculiar understanding of the Christian divinity and its relationship to the

human witness, I will highlight how it differs from the Nerudian vision in its

painful yet affirmative recuperation of defeat and loss. Finally, I will pause on

Ral Zuritas 2004poetry collection INRIofwhich the ostensive theme is the

relation that can be attained in postdictatorial times with those killed or



disappeared by the dictatorship. Focusing on the figure of the fall and on the

fantasy yet ultimate failure of resurrection and homecoming, I suggest that,

despite his ostensive messianic affinities with Nerudas project, Zurita in fact

evokes and convokes the demandput forth inMistrals poetry, which is that of

averting the temptation to reintegrate the disintegrated and to instead

confront the radical pain, death, and desolation inherent in the project of

community. In doing so, Zuritas poetry may be said to corroborate March-

ants provocative suggestion that we can begin to comprehend Mistrals po-

etry only after the experience of dictatorship.

N E R U D A : T H E D A Y A N D C A T A S T R O P H E

As is well known, Canto general represents a major shift in Nerudas poetic

trajectory, which may be roughly outlined as a move from the display of

personal, existential anguish (Residencia en la tierra [Residence on Earth],

1935), to a concern with communitys formation and emancipation. From the

project-less nomadism of the solitary subject, Neruda shifts to the idea of a

future-oriented community that aspires to the liberationof theoppressedand

the distribution of decisive justice. In both Nerudas text and in his extratex-

tual commentaries, the topic of fertilization is decisive, where the tripartite

process of death, pollination, and renewal stands as the natural analog for the

political process of American liberation. The movement of cyclical renewal

ascribed to nature will mirror the resurrection of the collective body, its

blossoming into political participation and change. Neruda insists that the

darkest events of our people must be brought to light. Our plants and flowers

must for once be uttered and sung (quoted in Sant 2000, 19). Historical

eventsmust bemade to participate in the revolutionary struggle. Archive and

utopia, preservation and preparation: the demand for memory includes the

demand tomakememory operative, indeed to releasememory from its claim

tobeing an absolute lawbecause it is based on a record kept by the victors and

naturalized as memory. We are, Neruda continues, the chroniclers of a

retarded birth. . . . Yet it is not only a matter of preserving our culture, but of

offering it all our strength, of nourishing and making it blossom (quoted in

Sant 2000, 19). In other words, for Neruda, chronicling and preserving the



factual record of the past is not sufficient. The archive must be turned into

praxis. It is not simply a question of remembering ormourning, but ofmaking

memoryand the dead that one thereby mournsuseful, of incorporating

them in the reconstructive, teleological process of American unity.

In his retelling of the 1943 revelatory experience at the ruins of Machu

Picchu in Peru, which granted the inspiration for undertaking the Canto

general, Neruda writes: I understood that if we walked upon the same soil we

shared a link with those great enterprises of the American community, that

we could not ignore them, that either our lack of knowledge or our silence

represented not only a crime, but the perpetuation of defeat [continuacin de

unaderrota] (quoted inSant 2000, 21; emphasis added).Nerudas imperative

is then to move the continent and its people beyond the lethargy of defeat; to

imagine, in place of this continuation of defeat, an alternate future of rebirth

and redemption. To do so, the poet undertakes an archeological search for

paternal origins: te busqu, padre mo, / joven guerrero de tiniebla y cobre

(2000, 106; I searched for you, my father, / young warrior of darkness and

copper [1991, 14]). The poet excavates and discovers, exhumes and gives life.

The unearthing of this paternal genealogy has the earth take on the predict-

able role of mother and womb,

ms abajo, en el oro de la geologa,

como una espada envuelta en meteoros,

hund la mano turbulenta y dulce

en lo ms genital de lo terrestre.

Puse la frente entre las olas profundas,

descend como gota entre la paz sulfrica,

y, como un ciego, regres al jazmn

de la gastada primavera. (2000, 127)

[Farther down, in the gold of geology,

like a sword enveloped in meteors,

I plunged my turbulent and tender hand

into the genital matrix of the earth.

I put my brow amid the deep waves,

descended like a drop amid the sulfurous peace,



and, like a blind man, returned to the jasmine

of the spent human springtime.] (1991, 30)

As fue como conociendo,

entrando como a la uterina

originalidad de la entraa,

en tierra y vida, fui vencindome:

hasta sumirme en hombre, en agua

de lgrimas como estalactitas,

de pobre sangre despeada,

de sudor cado en el polvo. (2000, 270)

[And it was, so to speak, by knowing,

by entering the uterine originality

of the womb, in earth and in life,

that I began to die away:

until I immersed into man, into water

teary like stalactites,

like poor gushing blood,

like sweat fallen in the dust.] (1991, 133)

The poet-prophet burrows through the bowels of the earth to find the

buried fragments receptive to his reparative canto. These fragments, repre-

senting Americas oppressed subjects and marginal societies, have suffered

unspeakable violence and annihilation, the reason for which the speaker is

forced to rummage deep beneath the layers of architectural and cultural

destruction. The Canto generals governing logic may be summarized in say-

ing that the greater the suffering endured, themoremagnificent and decisive

the redemption of the formerly oppressed will be. This is where the Biblical

tradition of Christian martyrdom connects with the interpretive powers of

that brand of dialectical materialism in which only massive oppression can

create the objective conditions for the unstoppable rising of the oppressed

masses. Descubridores de Chile (Discoverers of Chile), for example, evokes

the abject origin of this uprising, with the vital nugget of popular resistance

imagined as literally born out of the excrement of Spanish subjection:

El espaol sentado junto a la rosa un da,

junto al aceite, junto al vino, junto al antiguo cielo



no imagin este punto de colrica piedra

nacer bajo el estircol del guila marina. (2000, 169)

[The Spaniard seated beside the rose one day,

beside the oil, beside the wine, the ancient sky,

never imagined this speck of wrathful stone

born beneath the dung of the sea eagle.] (1991, 60)

In his analysis of the notion of the tragic within the evolution and constitu-

tion of the Latin American idea of the nation, PatrickDovewrites that a tragic

view of history and of politics normally stages a violent encounter (polemos)

between two conflicting forces or worlds . . . each of whose internal logic

precisely negates or excludes the claims of the other (2004, 31). Nerudian

history, I would suggest, is by this definition tragic, as it stages a violent

encounter between Spanish colonialism and American revolutionary strug-

gle. Tragic history is catastrophichistory, or a viewof history aspunctuatedby

catastrophes, by sudden ruptures, by a complete (kata) destruction and

overturning (strophe) of theold (2004, 32). Sucha catastrophic viewofhistory

is particularly receptive to the representation of a future,messianic liberation

brought about and consummated in a criticalmoment. In the LatinAmerican

context, Dove writes,

Messianic narratives often begin by making reference to the arrival of the

Spanish conquistadors and the institution of the colonial regime, associating

these events with the death or flight of the gods that ruled over the pre-

Columbian worlds. In a number of cases, the advent of the colonial regime is

registered as a catastrophic collapse of time itself, and as inaugurating a

timeless time ofmute suffering. But the use ofmessianic narratives to symbol-

ize the apocalyptic rupture brought about by colonialism is mirrored by a

parallel intent, which seeks in messianism the symbolic instruments needed

to invoke and awaken a newly constituted indigenous political subject. (2004,

208)

Canto general conceives of history as a process punctured by catastrophe,

where catastrophe signifies an absolute arrival: death and resurrectionthe



arrival of the Spanish conquistador in a remote past, on the one hand; the

arrival of the revolutionary, emancipated subject in amessianic future, on the

other.

For Neruda, political insurrection unites with and presupposes the truth

of resurrection. In spite of its communist inspirationor perhaps because of

itCanto general is in many respects a very Christian text. It describes the

emancipation of the oppressed by alluding to the dies irae of Christian belief.

No renunciis al da que os entregan / los muertos que lucharon (2000, 289;

Dont renounce the day bestowed on you / by those who died struggling [1991,

148]), the speaker demands in a poem titled Llegar el da (The Day Will

Come). Another poem Siempre (Always) describes it as

Un da de justicia conquistada en la lucha,

y vosotros, hermanos cados, en silencio,

estaris con nosotros en ese vasto da,

de la lucha final, en ese da inmenso. (2000, 352)

[A just day conquered in struggle,

and you, fallen brothers, in silence,

will be with us on that vast day,

the final day of our struggle.] (1991, 191)

With the Canto generals imagining of a secular day of reckoning and resur-

rection of the social body, Nerudas text may ironically come across as more

Christian and dogmatic than the more avowedly Christian work of Gabriela

Mistral, and this because the latter reproduces an idiosyncratic version of

Christian belief that is decisively nonredemptive, that dwells on the negative,

desolate aspects of divine passion and its community with the human.

M I S T R A L : T H E N I G H T A N D D E S C E N T

The day will never come for Mistrals Christ. Eternally exposed and deposed,

the Christian god in Mistral is the emblem not of consolation, but of desola-

tion. Here I would like to focus on a particular poem from Tala (1938) titled

Nocturno del descendimiento (Nocturne of the Descent), which from its

very title evokes perpetual night and the impossibility of an awakening or



coming dawn.9 The poem describes a scene wherein a pilgrim beholds the

crucified image of Christ, possibly in a countryside church or on a cross in the

middle of a field. At first, the abject Christian divinity awakens pure shame in

the speaker: Vine a rogarte pormi carne enferma; / pero al vertemis ojos van

y vienen / de tu cuerpo ami cuerpo con vergenza (I came to pray formy sick

flesh; / but when I see you my eyes come and go / from your body to my body

with shame) (1938, 30). Nonetheless, this initial experience of negative affect

turns into active, corporeal participation:

a ti los cuatro clavos ya te sueltan,

y el encuentro se vuelve un recogerte

la sangre como lengua que contesta,

pasar mis manos por mi pecho enjuto,

coger tus pies en peces que gotean.

[the four nails are letting you loose,

and the encounter becomes a gathering of

your blood like an open tongue,

a passing of my hands over my taut chest,

a grasping of your feet like two dripping fish.] (30)

The encounter, initially entailing visual contemplation, distance, and the

paralyzing sensation of shame, turns into the beginning of a descent that

invites solidaritya quasideposition now requiring touch, contact, and

deep physical involvement on the speakers part. And yet this is a deposi-

tion without end in sight, a deposition that does not hold resurrection as

its next horizon; a via dolorosa that leads to the agonizing point of Christs

descent from the cross but fails or refuses to be followed by the comple-

mentary via lucis wherein the stages of the resurrection would be accom-

plished. Like Christs descent, the human subjects supportive function is

suspended; she must, indefinitely, sustain this loss. The narration of this

scene is permeated by images and actions denoting the bodys descent, the

repetition of which convey the effect of perpetual fall and postpone the

bodys arrival to the ground and to its groundthe ground at the foot of

the cross and the burial ground or tomb wherein the body would rest.

Thus, the speaker finds herself



con tu bulto vencido en una cuesta

que cae y cae y cae sin parar

en un trance que nadie me dijera.

Desde tu vertical cae tu carne

en cscara de fruta que golpean:

el pecho cae y caen las rodillas

y en cogollo abatido, la cabeza.

[with your vanquished weight on a slope

that falls and falls and falls without end

in a trance that no one could have told me about.

From your vertical stance falls your flesh

like the peels of a fruit:

the chest falls and the knees fall

and, like a crushed tuber, the head.] (31)

Faced with this incessant falling, the speaker issues an imperative or plea for

conclusion: Acaba de llegar, Cristo, a mis brazos, / peso divino, dolor queme

entregan (Finish arriving, Christ, to my arms, / divine weight that I am

handed). This poignant demand, however, only underscores the fact that the

desired end will not come, obligating the speaker to sustain indefinitely the

weight andmisery of this fall.10 AlonewithChrist, the speakermourns the fact

that she is not joined in her act by any fellow witnesses:

ya que estoy sola en esta luz sesgada

y lo que veo no hay otro que vea

y lo que pasa tal vez cada noche

no hay nadie que lo atine o que lo sepa,

y esta cada, los que son tus hijos,

como no te la ven no la sujetan,

y tu pulpa de sangre no reciben.

[since I am alone in the slanting light

and what I see no one else sees

and what goes on each night perhaps

no one else can comprehend or know,

and this fall, those who are your sons,

since they do not see it they do not uphold it,

nor do they receive the pulp of your blood.] (31)



The speakers complaint about the sons whomiss the fall thus makes this a

poem about community, albeit about a community that has failed to take

account of, and configure itself around, the image and pathos of a failed,

abject Christ. A poemwe could say, alluding to the beginning of this arti-

cleabout the loss of loss.

In the canonical Christian narration, the crucifixion precedes the glory of

the resurrection. Yet in Mistral, the crucifixion remains nothing but a penul-

timate moment; it refuses, to put it differently, to give the step beyond and to

the way of resurrection, to the bodys vertical and jubilant ascent, while

nonetheless simultaneously alluding to that ultimate, transcending event

that is the resurrection: a veritable step (not) beyond. Here, as in other in-

stances, the passion thus finds itself suspended, deferred in and as the deso-

late scene of the crucifixion:

Est sobre el madero todava

y sed tremenda el labio le estremece.

Odio mi pan, mi estrofa y mi alegra,

porque Jess padece!

[He remains on the wood,

and with terrible thirst his lips tremble.

I loathe my bread, my stanza and my happiness,

for Jesus suffers!] (1988, 63)

Cuerpo de mi Cristo,

te miro pendiente,

an crucificado.

Yo cantar cuando

te hayan desclavado!

[Body of my Christ,

I see you suspended,

crucified still.

I will sing when

your nails are pulled out!] (1988, 70)

While Mistral dwells in the penultimate moment of the crucifixion (in other

cases, this penultimate moment is figured as a poetic representation of the



lamentation or the pieta`), Neruda may be said to dwell on the final, cata-

strophic moment when the collective body rises out of its ashes. In this way,

the inspiration and determination of the Canto generalmay be described as a

will to overturn defeat, whats more, as the desire to posit death as something

that can and must be surmounted. In truth, then, Canto general does not

imagine the dead community as truly dead, but rather as lost, and as necessi-

tating the poetic-prophetic injunction to come forth to return and be rein-

tegrated into the social and historical process. As Brett Levinson writes with

respect to a different yet related topic, If the dead can be posited as lost, the

promise of their return remains: the return of the one who hence overcomes

death, who reveals death as overcomeable (2001, 86). I will now turn to the

recent work of Ral Zurita and explore its implicit critique of the Nerudian

imperative to overcome defeat and loss, joining instead the Mistralian call to

sustain it.

Z U R I T A : T H E F A I L U R E O F R E S U R R E C T I O N

A contemporary voice that, like Mistral, dwells on the penultimate moment,

(on the anteparadise of failedutopia, to allude tohis 1982book,Anteparaso) is

that of Ral Zurita. Harking back to the exigency staged in Mistrals poetry,

Zurita may be said to recuperate the injunction to sustain loss, which in his

case is the loss entailed and inherited by the experience of the dictatorship.

Like Anteparaso, his 2004 book INRIwhich I would like to focus on in the

remainder of this articlepresents a compelling narration of what Scott

Weintraub calls a deferred messianic future (2007, 215), that is, a redeemed

time that is constantly evoked but never quite arrives, yetwhose nonarrival or

failure to materialize enables an ongoing openness, engagement with, and

therefore faithfulness to the radical otherness of the disappeared and the

dead. It allows the community to move forward but not arrive at a final

purpose (221); or perhaps, as proposed by the image of Benjamins angel of

history, to advance irresistibly toward the future while having his

face . . . turned toward the past (2007, 25657).

In a text titled Consolation, Desolation, Jean-Luc Nancy establishes a

dialogue with Jacques Derrida on the topic of the memorial address and the



adieu that is literally or symbolically pronounced in the face of someones

death. Nancy andDerrida find that thememorial address inherently contains

the suggestion of a rendezvous with God (both the French a-Dieu and the

Spanish a-Dios convey this) or of ameeting between the living and the dead in

some kind of afterlife (Nancy 2008, 98); the rhetorical operation deployed in

this type of address thereby continues to console the addresser by disavow-

ing the others death (99). Attempting to elude this essentially therapeutic

gesture, Derrida and Nancy wonder if it is possible to think of an address or

adieu that would salute nothing other than the necessity of a possible non-

return, the end of the world as the end of any resurrection. This can only be

achieved if one imagines and articulates ones relation with the dead as a

definitive leave-taking, an irremissible abandonment. The death of a human

being, for Derrida and Nancy, is an abyss to be acknowledged and endured:

Wemust recognize, in eachdeath, the endof theworld, andnot simply the end

of a world: not a momentary interruption in the chain of possible worlds, but

rather the annihilationwithneither reserve nor compensation of the sole and

unique world, which makes each living being a single and unique one. We

must say adieuwithout return, in the implacable certainty that the otherwill

not turn back, will never return. (Nancy 2008, 98)

This, I propose, is the recognition endured in Zuritas INRI, a recent book

which poetically envisions the fate of the desaparecidos (disappeared ones)

while wrestling withyet ultimately disavowinga potent desire for resur-

rection and consolation. The imagery in the book is inspired by the regimes

practice of binding prisoners, flying them over the Pacific Ocean, and throw-

ing them into the waters for a certain and untraceable death. INRImakes of

their literal and swift descent a running leitmotif. The first half of the book

vividly recounts the bodies fall into the waters, where they are uncannily

described as bait for the fish:

Sorprendentes carnadas llueven del cielo.

Sorprendentes carnadas sobre el mar. Abajo el

Ocano, arriba las inusitadas nubes de un da



Claro. Sorprendentes carnadas llueven sobre el

Mar. Hubo un amor que llueve, hubo un da

Claro que llueve ahora sobre el mar.

[Surprising baits rain down from the sky.

Surprising baits on the sea. Below, the

ocean, above, the strange clouds of a clear

day. Surprising baits rain down on

the sea. There was a love that rained down, there was a clear

day that now rains down on the sea.] (2004, 27)

AsDerrida andNancy suggest, each life is here described as the destruction of

a singular universe: Universos, cosmos, inacabados vientos lloviendo en /

miles de carnadas rosas sobre el mar carnvoro de / Chile (Universes, cos-

moses, unfinishedwinds raining down as / countless pink baits on the carniv-

orous sea of / Chile) (20); Hay / universos sin fin en el estmago de los peces

(There are / endless universes in the fishes stomach; 21). The book is also

populated by frustrated acts of love and communication, which contribute to

an overall sense of frustration and cessation. Thus, there are references to un

amor que no alcanz a decirse (a love that could not be uttered), amores

inconclusos (unfinished loves), das claros e inconclusos (clear and unfin-

ished days) (17); palabras que no alcanzaron a decirse (words that could not

be uttered), despedida trunca (truncated farewell), rezo no odo (unheard

prayer), amor no dicho (unexpressed love) (19); amores que ya nunca

(loves that never again) (25); ya no (no longer) (20).

Like Zuritas previous book (Anteparaso), INRI is nonetheless filled with

visions of resurrections and arrivals, which trace the image of a risen collec-

tive body. It imagines the utopian return of thedesaparecidos through specific

references to a certain Bruno and a certain Susanawho stand in for themen

and women disappeared by the dictatorial police. Thus, in the penultimate

section of the book, Una ruta en las soledades (AWay through the Solitude)

the speaker, taking up the function of a John the Baptist, summons these

figures,makesway for their arrival through the jubilant injunction to Come:

Y te amar de nuevo y te dir ven. Y t me amars

de nuevo y me dirs ven. Y el cielo abrindose nos



dir ven que igual que lavas rojas cubriendo las

montaas nuestras carnes nos cubrirn de nuevo

los nevados huesos de todo Los Andes y te amar

de nuevo y ser ven.

[And I will love you again and I will say to you come. And you will love me

again and you will say to me come. And the sky as it opens up will

say to us come and like red lava covering the mountains

our flesh will cover again our snowy bones the Andes

and I will love you again and it will be come.] (145)

Elsewhere in the book, the narration of Brunos and Susanas return takes the

form of a homecoming and functions as another metaphor of resurrection:

Vuelvo a casa, dice Bruno. Susana tambin dice que vuelve a casa (I am

coming home, says Bruno. Susana also says she is coming home) (47); Bruno

dice que ha vuelto a casa, Susana tambin / dice que ha vuelto a casa (Bruno

says he has come home, Susana also / says she has come home); Bruno dice

que ha llegado a casa. Susana tambin lo dice (Bruno says he has arrived

home. Susana says it as well) (133).

On the whole, the topic of the fall pervades the first half of the book while

that of ascent inspires the second. And yet, INRI closeswith a section titled El

INRI de los paisajes (The INRI of the Landscapes), which is comprised of a

single poem titled Eplogo (Epilogue). This final segment demands to be

read in conjunction with the rest of the project, evenor especiallyif it

constitutes the fragment that undoes or ruins the messianic structure

erected by the preceding part of the text. If in Anteparaso, as Weintraub

points out, the utopian project is held in check by Zuritas clever and

pervasive use of the conditional grammatical tense (220), in INRI a similar

frustration is accomplished by this final poem that relays, in a rather

prosaic idiom, the desolating knowledge that the dead are dead and that

the disappeared are irrevocably disappeared:

Cientos de cuerpos fueron arrojados sobre las

montaas, lagos y mar de Chile. Un sueo quizs

so que haban unas flores, que haban unas

rompientes, un ocano subindolos salvos desde sus

tumbas en los paisajes. No.



Estn muertos. Fueron ya dichas las inexistentes

flores. Fue ya dicha la inexistente maana.

[Hundreds of bodies were thrown on the

mountains, lakes, and ocean of Chile. A dream perhaps

dreamed that there were some flowers, that there were

some breakers, an ocean that raised them unscathed out of

their tombs on the landscape. No.

They are dead. The inexistent flowers have now

been said. The inexistent morning has now been said.] (155)

Adopting a detached, factual, empirical, and prosaic standa stand seem-

ingly opposed to the redemptive aspirations of the lyrical modethis frag-

ment can be read as a sustained negation, a prolonged No. The speaker

transmits a cruel knowledge: Hundreds of bodies were thrown on the /

mountains, lakes, and ocean of Chile. Faced with consolation or desolation,

INRI at last wagers on the desolate choice, tempting us with the vision of

paradise, but compelling us in the end to remain in the anguishing space of

anteparadise.

If in critical times, a nation looks on its intellectual and cultural pillars

for support and guidance, in the Chilean case it is then critically important to

engage with the work of its foremost literary figuresPablo Neruda, Gabriela

Mistral, and,more recently, Ral Zuritaparticularly given that these figures

can be regarded as civic poets and have all, to varying degrees, influenced

and shaped the cultural, political, and artistic terrain of the Chilean nation

and of Latin America as a whole.

The speaker of theCanto generalwants to ensure that the poetic utterance

is neither wasted nor wasteful; that the promise of liberation it speaks of is

neither denied nor fails. Amrica, no invoco tu nombre en vano (2000, 379;

America, I do not invoke your name in vain [1991, 212]), he promises to the

continent.He insists on the reality of the promise by giving it the concreteness

of earth: Y no es vino el que bebo sino tierra, / tierra escondida, tierra de mi

boca, / tierra de agricultura con roco (2000, 378; Andwhat I drink is notwine

but earth, / hidden earth, my mouths earth, / earth of agriculture with dew

[1991, 211]). More forcefully still: y no es sueo mi sueo sino tierra (and my



dreams not a dream but earth). The substitution that Nerudas prophet

makes of dream for earth, failure for redemption, death for resurrection, and,

finally, desolation for consolation, is simultaneously evoked and revoked by

Zuritas painfully inadequate Un sueo quizs so unas floresa verse

that, inspired by Mistrals desolate poetics, is careful not to lose the loss nor

fall into facile consolation. A verse that embodies an entire poetics and an

ethics; that remains on this side of desolation; that substitutes, supplants, and

sublates nothing, but rather keeps the dream as dream, the dead as dead, and

the loss as loss.

N O T E S

1. The radical political resemantization of the words Yes and No demands further critical

attention. During the plebiscite campaign, the authoritarian regime appropriated the

affirmative Yes while the political opposition had to work with the seemingly nihilistic

No (Yes or No to Pinochet, respectively). The political logo for theConcertacin shows

a rainbowabove theword NO (the campaigns slogan at the time, incidentally, was Chile,

la alegra ya viene [Chile, joy is coming]). The logo for the Pinochet campaign, on the other

hand, depicts a large SI over the name Pinochet. In this way, the actually destructive

system of the state paradoxically disguised itself behind the discourse of affirmation, while

the regenerative political opposition awkwardly adopted the sign of negativity. As political

andartistic practicesof the left evolvedalongsidemilitary rule after the 1973 coup, a gradual

yet powerful resignifying operation took place, which granted an affirmative import to the

word No and to the idea of negativity. Emergent discursive practices recognized and

sought to portray both the potential dangers of unfettered affirmation and, alternatively,

the potential advantages or uses of weakness, failure, and defeat. The 19831984 artistic

intervention of the artistic group CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) dubbed No + is part

of this resemantization, as is Ral Zuritas pervasive and deliberate use of the word No

and analogous expressions, which I discuss toward the end of this article. Much more

recently, director Pablo Larrains 2012 film No (the last in a trilogy that includes Tony

Manero [2008] and Post Mortem [2010]) focuses on the advertising work around the politi-

cal campaign for theNo. For ahistory of the art groupCADA, including relevant documents

and interviews, see Neudstadt (2001). In a way, the present article may be seen as nothing

but an exploration of this antagonism between Yes and No (affirmation and negation,

success and failure, asolacin and desolacin, resurrection and death, Neruda andMistral/

Zurita) in the Chilean cultural and political contexts, highlighting specifically the possibil-

ities, promises, or ethics offered by the semantic and thematic reverberations of the No.



2. Marchants presentationwas first printed in the second edition of the conference proceed-

ings, with the title Desolacin (Marchant 1997, 5573). It is unclear whether the longer

title underwhich it appears inEscritura y temblor (published in 2000, long afterMarchants

death) is Marchants own or the editors. Oyarzn and Thayer indicate that the text has

been revised for this edition, butmake no specific reference or attribution to that impor-

tant supplement: Cuestin del nombre de Salvador Allende (Oyarzn and Thayer 2000,

18). Whatever the true cause or author behind this change is irrelevant, since what I

foregroundhere is the simple yet significant juxtaposition of GabrielaMistral and Salvador

Allendea juxtaposition explicitly made by Marchant within the body of the text and not

only in the title.

3. For an incisive critique of the discourses of femininity and motherhood, and of the pur-

ported moral superiority of women in Chiles recent political landscape of reconciliation

and consensusparticularly as employed by the campaign rhetoric of ex-president Mi-

chelle Bachelletsee Vera (2009).

4. Unless otherwise indicated in the References list, all translations from Spanish-language

texts are mine.

5. Avelars book includes analyses of prose works by the Argentine writers Ricardo Piglia and

Tununa Mercado, the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, and the Brazilian writers Silviano

Santiago and Joo Gilberto Noll.

6. As Antonieta Vera rightly indicates, The category of transition . . . and the constellation of

sociological debates around its beginning and end appear to be inscribed in a clear direction-

ality toward the future; a neat line toward an unequivocal endpoint: theprogressively inclu-

sivevictory of democracy (112). For this reason, Vera, along with other cultural thinkers,

prefers to employ Postdictadura, a term that is ostensiblymore loyal to the past.

7. See Ivn Trujillos piece, Pensar la prdida (Thinking Loss [2001]) which, as its title

indicates, is a meticulous and evocative reflection on loss inspired by the Chilean postdic-

tatorial condition.

8. To put it in the very psychoanalytic terms that Marchant deploys, this would be akin to the

process of introjection, explained by Idelber Avelar as a successful completion ofmourning

work, whereby the lost object is dialectically absorbed and expelled, internalized in such away

that the libido cannowbedischarged into a surrogateobject, andopposed to incorporation,

a condition in which the traumatic object remains lodged within the ego as a foreign body,

invisible yet omnipresent, unnamable except through partial synonyms (1999, 8). For the

psychoanalytic theory that Marchant employs, see Abraham and Torok (1986).

9. Tala is also imbued by the sense of desolation.Mistral herself saw Tala as a continuation of

her first book: Lleva este libro algnpequeo rezagodeDesolacin. Y el libro que le sigasi

alguno siguellevar tambin un rezago de Tala . . . (1938, 273).

10. This poemmay have arguably influenced the entire formal structure and thematic config-

uration of Ral Zuritas INRI, the very title of which evokes the crucified body of Christ.

Zuritas book conveys throughout the sensations of repetition and suspension bymeans of

devices like parallelism and anaphora.



11. Sorprendentes carnadas (amazing baits) is the description given to these bodies; adjec-

tives like extraas (strange) and asombrosas (astonishing) are also employed. In certain

instances, the phrase raros frutos (strange fruits) is used, very possibly alluding to Billie

Holidays 1939 song Strange Fruit, wherein the phrase represents the lynched body of an

African American person.

R E F E R E N C E S

Abraham, Nicolas; and Maria Torok. 1986. The Wolf Mans Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans.

Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Avelar, Idelber. 1999. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task

of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Theses on the Philosophy of History, trans. Harry Zohn. In

Illuminations, ed. Arendt Hannah, 25364. New York: Schocken Books.

Dove, Patrick. 2004. The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American

Literature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

Levinson, Brett. 2001. The Ends of Literature: The Latin American Boom in the Neoliberal

Marketplace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Marchant, Patricio. 1997. Desolacin. In Una palabra cmplice: Encuentro con Gabriela Mistral,

ed. Raquel Olea and Soledad Fariav, 5573. Santiago: Cuarto Propio.

. 2000. Desolacin. Cuestin del nombre de Salvador Allende (19891990). In Escritura y

temblor, ed. Willy Thayer and Pablo Oyarzn, 21334. Santiago: Cuarto Propio.

. 2009. Sobre rboles y madres. Buenos Aires: La Cebra.

Mistral, Gabriela. 1938. Tala. Buenos Aires: Sur.

. 1988. Desolacin. Santiago: Andrs Bello.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Consolation, Desolation. In Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of

Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, 98103.

New York: Fordham University Press.

Neruda, Pablo. 2000. Canto general. Madrid: Ctedra. Translated by Jack Schmit as Canto

general (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Neudstadt, Robert, ed. 2001. CADA da: La creacin de un arte social. Santiago: Cuarto Propio.

Oyarzn, Kemy. 1998. Genealoga de un cono: Crtica de la recepcin de Gabriela Mistral.

Mdulo Gabriela Mistral. www.gabrielamistral.uchile.cl/estudiosframe.html (accessed

August 19, 2012).

Oyarzn, Pablo; and Willy Thayer, eds. 2000. Introduction to Escritura y temblor, by Patricio

Marchant. Santiago: Cuarto Propio.

Richard, Nelly. 2000. The Reconfigurations of Post-Dictatorship Critical Thought, trans. John

Kraniauskas. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 9, no. 3: 27382.

. 2004. The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and

Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciatz. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Sant, Enrico Mario. 2000. Introduction to Canto general, by Pablo Neruda. Madrid: Ctedra.



Trujillo, Ivn. 2001. Pensar la prdida: 12 epgrafes para Nelly Richard. Escuela de Filosofa

Universidad ARCIS. www.philosophia.cl/antiguos.htm (accessed August 19, 2012).

Vera, Antonieta. 2009. Una crtica feminista a la Madre Pblica Postdictatorial: Los discursos

de gnero en la campaa presidencial de Michelle Bachelet. Nomadas 10: 11129.

Weintraub, Scott. 2007. Messianism, Teleology, and Futural Justice in Ral Zuritas Anteparaso.

CR: The New Centennial Review 7, no. 3: 21338.

Zurita, Ral. 2004. INRI. Madrid: Visor.



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