The beginning of the 1980s in Chile seemed like an unlikely time for the spirit of Godard’s maxim to flourish. In 1980, the vote in favor of the military regime’s new constitution won (albeit almost certainly fraudulently) by a landslide, ensuring that Chile became the world’s first constitutionally neoliberal country. As harrowingly documented in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, the literary establishment—an intellectual rump given the number of writers who went into exile—responded to the dictatorship through a mixture of capitulation and support. This servility was cultivated through political violence: days after the coup, the two biggest cultural figures in Chile, the poet Pablo Neruda and the singer Victor Jara, were murdered. Both were avowed communists. Writers who did not acquiesce were muzzled by the threat of imprisonment, disappearance, or death.
Despite these conditions, a few young artists and writers—many of whom were students at the time of the coup—discovered that the absence of political literature did not entail the absence of making literature politically. The Colectivo de Acciones De Arte (Collective of Art Actions, or CADA), was a collective of artists, academics and writers who disrupted and reformulated the dominant forms of cultural production in Chile—moving art and literature away from established institutions towards public spaces that incorporated the marginalized. Culture became the primary site of political action where traditional means were unavailable: as Raúl Zurita wrote, “there was no congress, no political parties, no unions, no student federations, so art and poetry were in charge, they had a responsibility. Both were the most radical way of expression.”
It is in this context that Diamela Eltit—along with Zurita, one of CADA’s founding members—emerged as a writer. CADA’s publishing venture, Ediciones del Ornitorrinco (Platypus Publications), began as a means to publish Eltit’s first novel, Lumpérica (1983). Before it was published, Eltit read extracts from the novel inside a brothel. The attentive audience consisted of sex workers, punters, locals and some of Eltit’s collaborators. Her performance was not merely a subversive act—an explicit rupture with literary conventions that understood readings as a polite affair for an educated few—but also a restorative one: just as the marginalized and oppressed were the subject of her work, so too could they be its audience.
For some critics, however, the inclusivity of her readings contrasted with the exclusivity of the text due to its difficulty. The radically experimental style and disorienting structure of the novel allowed it to bypass censors as swathes of it were categorized as “no se entiende”—not understood. Through this, Eltit was able to publish one of the most subversive novels of the dictatorship. Lumpérica—a play on lumpen, America, and perica (a pejorative term for women)—revolves around a homeless woman, L. Iluminada (L. Illuminated), who spends her night in a plaza illuminated by an omnipresent neon light. The novel avoids narrative, instead repeating the aforementioned scene through a variety of viewpoints and styles. Through and within each chapter the text shifts: from clinical naturalism to richly embodied streams of consciousness, from traditional prose to a police interrogation or a screenplay, replete with cinematographic instructions. Near the end of the novel, Eltit includes a photograph of herself staring down into the camera with lacerated arms.
Through her experimental style, Eltit manages to capture at the level of form the fragmentation and degradation that the military dictatorship inflicted upon the Chilean people. In this way, the subject of Eltit’s novel is language itself—for language to express violence, violence must be done to language itself. In the case of the coup and the ensuing military dictatorship, it was only by demonstrating the insufficiency of language—by deforming it and taking it to its limits—that language could be rendered sufficient. It is through these interventions that Eltit’s novel fulfilled its political function: it was not enough to subvert literature as an institution through CADA’s inclusive collectivist practices, the way one wrote had to change, too. In doing so Eltit brought the truth of Godard’s proclamation outside of the realm of filmmaking, for how could one write about the collapse of culture and civic life in conventional prose?
Although Lumpérica remains her most formally ground-breaking novel, Eltit has continued to write transformative and gripping works for the past forty years. She has continued to focus her work on those who exist on the margins, with subjects including sex workers, street vendors, and individuals who find love inside a psychiatric institution. Her novel most recently translated into English, Never Did the Fire, was translated by Daniel Hahn and published by Charco Press. Here, she forcefully captures the collapse of an elderly militant couple’s relationship after the loss of their child and the failures of the movements that once defined them. Hahn’s translation diary was published alongside it. Given that Chile has yet to escape the specter of the dictatorship—despite initially rejecting the Pinochet-era constitution in a referendum in 2020, the failure of two successive constitutional conventions to present an alternative has led the country back to where it began. Even so, Eltit's work continues to have considerable presence in her home country. For all of us, however, she continues to be a beacon for those who seek a literary sensibility and practice beyond the confines of the market and state.
—Sebastián Sánchez-Schilling, Assistant Interview Editor
Before you published your first novel Lumpérica (1984), you were a literature student and founding member of Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA). Extracts from Lumpérica were first read as part of a performance piece which took place in a brothel. Could you tell us about the impulses and interests that led you to become a writer and an artist, and how these two roles emerged together?
What drove me in those days was a literary, aesthetic, social desire. And in the social sphere, the peripheries marked by exclusion and even non-existence (like today), in a way, mine was more of an off-CADA position, because the idea of the collective was to develop anti-dictatorship interventions that engaged dissident citizens. What I mean to say is that for me literature had other impulses. My novel—this was my desire—invoked some higher literary art, but also the sub-proletarian, decentralized one, and so I gave a reading in a brothel in a really poor area. I invited a very small number of artists, the rest were the people who populated that place: prostitutes, children, serving people, alcoholics, all inhabitants of that space. The interesting thing was the silence and the intense attention that was generated was like reading in a big public library, really. The sexual exchange became a cultural exchange. The truth is that I didn’t feel like an artist, I just wanted to pass literature and the voice through other territories.
Your desire to appeal both to radical literary tastes and the marginalized goes against the (nowadays increasingly common) belief that an experimental style is elitist and exclusionary. The attention your work received in the brothel contradicts this. What would you say to those who believe in this? Do you think it corresponds with the reception of your work?
The subject you address is a complex and necessary one. But, beyond my position in the literary firmament, I think that literature has survived because of the internal turning points it has experienced. I’m thinking of Don Quixote, published in 1605, with its uncertain narrator who is separate from the characters. A narrator who does not know or does not want to give the precise place where his protagonist lives and is even undecided about the name. This narrator has pursued a course over time, taking their position to the extreme, by means of different strategies, forming zones of both opacity and light. Similarly there are moments of narrative twists and turns, unexpected styles that allow the novel to maintain its validity. On the other hand, I think that certain forms of narrative, even very interesting ones, were taught and imitated by others and, as a result, they become serial and bureaucratic in nature. In my particular case, I was able to circumvent this pedagogy of narrative by searching for a literature that demanded writing. Of course I was able to understand that this desire and this literature was a minority one, and thereby placed my books in a minority position. But in my case, the most important thing is writing. To that I would have to add that I am a female author, and an off-center one, and so there are gender issues that intensify my peripheral position. But this consideration cannot be understood as a “complaint,” because the truth is that I continue to emphasize the privilege that writing is for me, being able to think about writing, time, the escape from everyday life, the underpinnings of literature.
Lumpérica is renowned for its experimental style and structure. While its difficulty had practical import—as it allowed you to bypass censors—you’ve also previously suggested that this opacity allows the reader to co-create meaning along with the author. What do you think is the importance of challenging writing—both for the reader and the writer?
Yes, I thought and I continue to think that reading a literary work demands a pact between the text and the reader. By that I mean the reader reads out of their own experience, whatever that may be, because literature has the ability to create images with words, but it is the reader who reorganizes these images and gives them new meanings according to their own creativity. They reorganize and make their own sense of the novel.
Is this pact between the reader and the text a purely personal one? What role does criticism and a literary education—be it through workshops (talleres) or the university—play in this pact?
I think that a pact with the reader is necessary, that moment that I could define as intimate where the cerebral reading eye reconstructs the text and alters it with the emotion of the encounter. I see the reading of a novel like a “blind date” but led by the vision that induces and expands into an unexpected dimension. Of course, the date may turn out to be unsuccessful. Naturally, literary studies make it possible after the reading to establish greater poetic and aesthetic relationships, just as criticism contributes more understanding to the text.
In general, literary workshops work with texts in progress, but personally, having taught workshops for many years, I have always maintained that the author has the power over the text beyond the questions or readings that emerge. Of course, this is valid for my own observations too. An author does not emerge whole from a literary workshop but rather from their persistence, their obsessions, and their passion.
The novels you wrote after the end of Chile’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), such as Los vigilantes (Custody of the Eyes; Editorial Sudamericana Chilena, 1994) or Los trabajadores de la muerte (The Workers of Death; Editorial Planeta Chilena, 1998), retain your formally innovative style but are not as experimental as your work from the 80s. How do you feel the transition to democracy influenced your work—which pressures remained, which changed? Did new ones emerge?
Without a doubt the political transition defined new turns in my writing, though it was a very complex time politically as Augusto Pinochet remained a presence, first as Commander-in-Chief of the army and later as a Senator. His arrest in London in 1998 marked the end of his role in the state, which lasted twenty-five years in total. And of course today he still has great symbolic importance for the political right. I think—in response to your question—that perhaps it was a kind of internal journey, from the city of dictatorship to the city of inequality.
One feature of your work that has remained constant has been your focus on the marginalized and oppressed. Your two most recent novels, Fuerzas especiales (Special Forces; Editorial Periférica, 2015) and Sumar (Summing Up; Editorial Planeta Chilena, 2018), feature as protagonists, respectively, a sex worker and a collective of street vendors. What moves you to write about these figures? Do you do any research or community engagement in preparation for writing these characters?
No, as a matter of fact I don’t engage in any kind of research; it is a question of images that prowl around me like street hawkers on city sidewalks, bodies that are practically invisible, more of a sculptural landscape of the city. But, when I start on a novel I enter a space that starts to take shape beyond me; in a sense the novel is autonomous, it exceeds me. It is interesting because I don’t take notes, nor do I have any narrative plan, everything simply occurs and unfolds as it comes together, and in a way the novel performs its own journey. But, once it is populated, once it is has taken shape, I correct a lot, over and over in order to maintain a coherence even within its incoherence.
Alongside your focus on people, your work is also defined by an acute awareness of how the spaces we inhabit define us—how marginalization is a process that affects places as much as it does people. Lumpérica revolves around a single public plaza populated by the homeless. El infarto del alma (Infarct of the Soul; F. Zegers, 1994), your collaboration with Paz Errázuriz, deals with couples who fall in love while in psychiatric hospitals together. Where does this spatial awareness come from? Is it influenced by your work as a performance artist?
After decades of writing, I dare to believe my imagination draws me along a literary path that is not crisscrossed by, shall we say, bourgeois spaces. But despite this difference, I also realize that vulnerability is very widespread and this pushes me to a new vulnerability, to another zone of poverty, to enter via an identical edge that, at the same time, is different. It’s actually challenging for me, it’s a risk, but they are spaces drawn by words. As a person, I can’t do anything about it.
When I read your work, I am reminded of Godard’s proclamation that we shouldn’t make political films, but rather make films politically. Your works are deeply political yet rarely explicitly feature political processes or subjects. Given that your work has always featured as part of your wider social and political engagements, does Godard’s proclamation resonate with you?
That’s right, my idea was to generate a politics of writing, I don’t know if I’ve ever achieved it. In my view, it’s not about a writing that illustrates politics, but about a searching for words (I’m still doing it) that evades the boundaries of teaching in the sense of how we are supposed to write a given kind of fiction, that escapes such mandates, beyond what is determined by the market and its movements.
Given how literature is becoming increasingly commercialized—with a small number of conglomerate publishers dominating the industry—what advice would you give to young writers who seek to escape the mandates of the market? What kinds of practices do you think are necessary to do this? Relative to places like the UK and US, in Chile much of the literary culture manages to exist outside of academia and the mainstream, with self-publishing and literary workshops being very common.
You are absolutely right, the dominance of the big publishers is indisputable. Personally I have the sense that these mega-publishers “write” the books they publish; I mean, their decisions determine what is written. And you are also right that this excludes many or even most writers and that independent publishers do not have the means to position and set out their texts in visible locations on the literary chessboard. On the other hand, the neoliberal political situation forces a group of authors to become managers of their own books, to travel, to generate networks, to make their way into cultural supplements, to merge with and even become their own books. In this way literature can become a sort of micro-business for authors. I find that exhausting and uncertain. As a result the literary sphere is shot through with anxiety and that is painful because the joy of writing is left behind, which is a joy that justifies the hours of work and the uncertainty, the pain in the back, the hands. But for now there is no way out. Or there is one, hiding in a crevice somewhere. Or there will be.
Since 2019, Chile has undergone some of its most politically transformative moments since the end of the military dictatorship, with the estallido social, the failures of the constitutional convention, concerns over crime and immigration, the rise of the Republicanos, and the military occupation of Wallmapu. Being in Santiago for most of this year, I found the mood quite bleak compared to the jubilance I saw during 2019 and 2020. How have you found the tumult of these past years and how has it impacted your work?
You’ve been in Chile during this febrile period that still hasn’t ended. I think there is a nationalist, right-wing curve that is dominating a part of the world, and we Chileans are no exception. The estallido social, which was a kind of micro-revolution, was a response to the radical neoliberalism that rules the country and imprints itself on people’s bodies. An objectified society, tied to perpetual debt. Health, education, housing, wages—the same problems as always—have been gravely impacted. Rights of women, of sexual dissidents, toxic geographies. The pandemic, lockdown, the impetus of the hegemonic system put a halt to the estallido and led to the new constitution being rejected in 2022. The thousands of illegal immigrants living in inhuman conditions—overcrowded isn’t even the word for it. Social inequality is abysmal. Meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore the spread of sicarios and murders among narco gangs—a new phenomenon in Chile. All of this is very complex if we consider the loss of prestige of the political parties. In short, we are going through a very difficult period, but we will have to wait and see. I recently published a novel, and now I am reading.
What do you think the role of the literary avant-garde in Chile ought to be in these times? Do you think a group like CADA would be able to emerge nowadays, or was this only possible through the organized opposition against the dictatorship?
In Chile we have experienced a number of political movements, something like earthquakes that shake us or move us from one side to the other. Without question we are experiencing a digital revolution that is intertwined with material factors that are always in play but that dominate these times, such as standards of living, health, education, housing, work, pensions. Chile was described as a neoliberal laboratory decades ago due to privatization and the dominance of the market, the objectification of society, inequality. In 2019 the country exploded and the unrest was contained not by political leadership but by the COVID virus that led to lockdown. The virus unleashed death on the poor, thousands of deaths, especially among the working class. And an extraordinary shortage. In that space arose Delight Lab, a collective formed by two brothers who make light art, who in that terrible time of confinement, disease, and poverty projected on a tall building the word HUNGER, visible for miles around, and which was then reproduced across social networks, because they put on the public stage a word denied by the Chilean neoliberal system. I find that public intervention exciting. Every period needs its interventions that bring together aesthetics, politics and poetics.
Following on from Godard, could you tell us more about the importance of film to your work? Its influences on Lumpérica are evident and in 2017 you had two of your screenplays published by Sangría Editores in Chile.
I’m actually quite a cinephile. I used to go with my mother or my friends to the cinema in my neighborhood where they would show three films in a row, it was exciting because some of them were very, very good and since it was a neighborhood cinema there were no restrictions for the minors we were at that time. And I’m still the same today, I watch a lot of auteur films. I wrote scripts for medium-length films for the artist Lotty Rosenfeld, which are in the book you mention, and a script for a feature film that a Chilean filmmaker commissioned from me and which got made.
It is interesting that you call yourself a cinephile because earlier on in the interview you mentioned that some of your novels begin with images that haunt you. Is your literary imagination typically visual? Are there any directors whose work has inspired your writing?
That’s right, I remain a cinephile. I watch British, French cinema, I follow Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Kaurismaki, a lot of them. But as an attentive film viewer from my earliest literary work I took refuge in short dialogues, sometimes very short, precise, taking the shape of cinematography. I relied on the context as a great space to validate the economy of the dialogues. I also owe to cinema the organization and editing of scenes. A certain fragmentary rather than a linear approach was very important to me. And the need to pay attention to details.
Daniel Hahn, who translated Never Did the Fire (Charco Press, 2022), published a diary of his experiences while translating your book. How did you find this experience and how do you find being translated in general? Do you have a consistent kind of relationship with your translators or does it depend on the translation?
I’ve always felt that translating is a form of rewriting, in a very real sense, it is writing a book. What Daniel did was really valuable as it revealed his writing, his process. It’s unusual but very necessary to transit the territories of the written word. I celebrate this gesture of his and think his book should be promoted, reflected on and studied in order to show how a translation arises, a book with its own author, a book by Daniel that brings together work, desire, a very sophisticated and elaborate dance between words. Something that is chaotic and transparent at the same time.
Beyond the literary aspects of translation, how do you feel your work translates socially and culturally? Are there some things non-Latin American readers should keep in mind when approaching your work?
Of course it is very stimulating to be translated. I am pretty provincial, but I also know that what I write is minority literature, as the Argentine poet Perlongher said, in the case of my novels they are “muddy” (barrosas) rather than baroque (barrocas). I don’t really know, I can’t perceive how readers from other geographies compromise with what I write, what they compromise with, how they draw up the spaces, the bodies, the irony, the powerlessness.
I am glad that you mentioned the Baroque because it is a fascinating era to draw from, given that at first glance your work might seem orthogonal to traditional influences, although a deeper look reveals similar interests in formal experimentation and the marginalized. What drew you to this period and which figures are most important to you?
I read Luis de Góngora’s Las Soledades, which I found complex, amazing, because of the grammatical turbulence, the “disobedience” to grammar, the rhythm, the difficulty of deciphering what the story was. I could understand that this extreme, sonorous grammatical disorder reflected a shipwreck and a surprising way of extolling the power of the Spanish language. Spanish 16th-century theater. The Latin American Baroque, the excesses of which have been extensively praised and reflected on. Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy. The Baroque is an immersion in written language. I am fascinated by vernacular languages and their grammatical rule-bending, I admire and respect them because it is a whole community that produces these ventures, it is a type of Baroque that I seek to take up and put across in my own writing, a Baroque that allows me into its spaces.
Another aspect of your writing that strikes me is how defined it is by corporeality. Whether it is pain or pleasure, you viscerally capture the embodiment of your subjects in such a way that it can define the work, as you did in Lumpérica. Is this focus something you intentionally set out to achieve or something you found yourself falling into? Is it related to your interest in the limits of language and in the experiences of the marginalized?
Yes, it is complex to inhabit in a literary way a territory populated by a living group in words, by spaces materialized by words. In my particular case the idea is to give it every possible complexity, the ambiguity that lives in us, the dark night and the dawn. Only in this way is it possible to access a corporeality, but first I need to enter the intimacy of those confused or aggressive or resigned thoughts, that I can only perceive if I go inwards, as far as I can, so much so that they, in turn, feel forced to expel me so that I can put their bodies in front.
You’ve had various visiting professorships at universities in the United States, such as Berkeley, Stanford, and NYU. In terms of Spanish-language influences, you’ve spoken of Severo Sarduy, Vicente Huidobro and Spanish Golden Age theater. Could you tell us about any non-Spanish language influences on your work? Are there any contemporary figures whose work you admire?
It’s true, I have dedicated a significant part of my life to academic activities, first as a secondary school teacher in public schools, then at university. I traveled around the United States, living in Spanish, and it was very interesting to be a Latina there. Perhaps the most intense part was my work at NYU as Distinguished Global Professor in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program, which allowed me to make contact with writers from different parts of the Americas. I had already done this work before in Chile and I had the necessary experience to dialogue, ask questions, and support writing. In fact, I’ve read a lot: Beckett, Joyce, Lispector, Lessing, Capote, and so on.
At Asymptote we are always motivated by literary discovery. Are there any new or young writers from Chile that you’re excited about and would recommend to our readers?
There are outstanding, diverse, indefatigable writers in Chile today, and I follow them attentively, among others, just to name two: the echoes of memory in the work of Nona Fernández, the minority audacity in the work of Matías Celedón, but there are many more. Naming is selfish because of what is left unnamed.
