Jorge Edwards
CHILEAN WRITING AFTER THE COUP
There is no direct and immediate relation between a country's
political crises and the writing it produces. Chilean writers introduced the
military coup of September 1973 into their work, but this does not mean that
the nature of their writing was automatically changed by the occurrence of
the coup.
It
was only after some years - years of silence, perplexity, self–
questioning, dominating fear - that a new attitude on the part of poets, nov–
elists, playwrights, and essayists, became apparent.
One could also look at the situation from the opposite direction, that is,
from the experience of the past. Viewed from this angle and after the expe–
rience of the last years, it is easy to see that the writing of the sixties and
even of the fifties reflected a rupture with certain traditional ways, that it
was a result of the elements of disruption, profound contradiction and
frustration already active in society. That is, the great changes in Chilean lit–
erature, rather than appearing as a consequence of recent historical events,
instead preceded and announced those events. Accordingly, the writing of
recent years is the outcome, sometimes surprising and exciting, of trends that
began to appear in the fifties, like the writing on the wall of the biblical
banquet, announcements expressed with extremely clear signs that nobody
cared to see and ofwhich no one interpreted the real meaning.
In fact, since colonial times, much of the best Chilean writing has been
writing of anticipation, of announcement. In the eighteenth century the Jesuit
priest Manuel de Lacunza wrote what has become a colonial classic,
Coming
of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty (La Venida del Mesias en Gloria y Ma–
jestad).
In the book, one reads about a rain of consecrated wafers, each with
a tiny drop of blood in the center, falling over the convents, the patios, the
muddy streets of the city of Santiago. Today, reading a book like this, we
discover that our deep-rooted image of Santiago as a grayish, dull,
monotonous place where nothing ever happens has always been an incom–
plete and extremely ambivalent notion. The city's calmness could at any time
be shaken by geological, political, or even religious catastrophe. The gray
city, baptized by its Spanish founders as Santiago of the New Extreme, has
always held the hidden possibility of being turned overnight into a backdrop
for the doings of the Apocalyptic Beast.
When the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro wrote
Ecuatorial
after World
War One, he used the equator as an historial not a geographical metaphor.
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