Post-Authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America's Southern Cone

2. Writing from the Margins of the Chilean Miracle: Diamela Eltit and the Aesthetics and Politics of the Transition

12 u 2 Writing from the Margins of the Chilean Miracle: Diamela Eltit and the Aesthetics and Politics of the Transition Juliet Lynd Author, professor, public intellectual and former performance artist Diamela Eltit has consistently been a voice of critique of the official discourse of the state, be it Pinochet’s military regime or the democratic governments that have followed. Her work reveals a suspicion of the rhetoric of the Transition, with its attendant illusions of egalitarianism and its adherence to the myth that the junta created an “economic miracle” out of the chaos of the Allende years.1 She suggests that Chile’s new neoliberal democracy is ill equipped if not altogether unwilling to resolve the pressing social issues that persist as economic and cultural forms of domination. Eltit’s resistance to Pinochet’s rule and participation in redemocratization movements was carried out principally from within the (highly politicized) artistic realm, although she did participate in the politics of Patricio Aylwin’s Transition government by serving as cultural attaché to Mexico from 1990–1993, thereby extending her support of transition efforts from within the system. Nonetheless, her post-dictatorship novels and essays reveal a profound unease with redemocratized Chile in general, and the objects of critique set forth in her earlier works in particular: the violence of the state, the stupefying lull of consumerism, the unchecked power of the private sector, the subjection of women to repressive gender codes, the suppression of indige- WRITING FROM THE MARGINS OF THE CHILEAN MIRACLE 13 nous cultures, and the exclusion of the poor from public life persist unabated throughout the so-called Transition. Eltit’s narrative subversions of the powers that structure both dictatorship and postdictatorship cultures insist upon the continuities in Chilean social life that undermine the discourse of the official Transition from dictatorship to democracy and point to the residual traces of authoritarian power and the multiple—political, economic and social—legacies of the Pinochet years. This is not to suggest that the real historical changes of contemporary Chile are lost within the trajectory of the author’s work, but democratic Chile is represented as a system under which brutal mechanisms of oppression thrive—through, for example, the suppression of the maternal and the displacement of the poor (problems originating pre-Transition, obviously)—and within which opposition is impossible. Furthermore, her nonfiction work points consistently to the 1973 golpe as a historic rupture and the defining moment of Chile’s democracy as well as its recent dictatorship, positing that the failures of democracy have less to do with the residual traces of authoritarian enclaves in the government than with the limits of a system determined to actively continue to yield power to the economic elites.2 Eltit’s devastating critique of contemporary Chile does not constitute an opposition to democracy per se. Her work, by representing the ruinous effects of neoliberal economic policy on the marginalized and underrepresented, stakes out a position for the literary text as a space in which to further the ideals of democracy. An analysis of her cryptic engagement with Chile’s Transition and historical shifts will reveal in her work an aesthetic that forges a representation of the changing configurations of the dynamics of power over public space, and explores the complexities of art’s strategic positing of solidarity with the marginalized as a utopian impossibility, but nonetheless a necessary project. While the “difficulty” of her texts seems to invite attacks not only of hermeticism, but also of elitism, her work nonetheless reveals a careful interrogation, however problematic, of injustices perpetuated by the contemporary political and cultural context. Before continuing with an analysis of her work—specifically her first novel, Lumpérica (1983), and her most recent Mano de obra (2002)—it will be worthwhile to situate her oeuvre within the political parameters of these larger theoretical questions that have surrounded literary and artistic production in postcoup Chile. Idelbar Avelar, in his interpretation of Eltit’s treatment of Chile’s political transitions, productively reads her novels as mourning-work, literary expressions of grieving over the defeat of the left: a mourning of the human losses of the physical and psychological repression carried out by the regime, but also of 14 JULIET LYND the effective dismantling of utopian discourse that accompanied the “epochal shift” from state to market authority, brought about symbolically to South America on September 11, 1973. He convincingly argues that this...