JORGE EDWARDS
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mask has freed his poetic voice from a suffocating rationality, a dictatorial use
oflanguage. The poet Enrique Lihn invented a very different alter ego, Don
Gerardo de Pompier, who was a turn-of-the-century decadent aesthete, a
sort of Chilean Don Quixote always in violent and comical conflict with the
barbarous doings of his own time. In his last years, Lihn was deeply con–
cerned that the contamination of Chilean life by the manifestation of the mili–
tary regime was a trap that reduced mental horizons and transformed
Chileans into professionals of anti-Pinochetism, a dull full-time occupation. He
wrote:
I don 't concern myself with the Dictator
he in his own hospital, me in mine ...
Every Chilean was sick, but to cultivate an obsessive, monothematic
discourse was not the best escape.
When it was said in the past century that Chile was "the England of
Souh America," it was also said that Chile was a country of historians, not of
novelists or poets, because Chileans lacked the necessary imagination to
write fiction or poetry. With the appearance of the great twentieth-century
poets, Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, it was then said that we
could produce great poetry but not novels, because nothing worth telling ever
happened in Chile.
Now terrible things have happened, and poems, novels, dramas, es–
says, stories, and "artefactos" have appeared. I really don't know whether a
country needs to suffer in order to produce creative writing.
It
seems at first
glance to be a romantic theory. What I do think is that Chile's experience has
led us to invention but also to reflection, to rereading, rewriting, paraphrasing
and parody. We have been able to perceive more clearly the real unity of
our literary tradition. The Christ of Elqui, that ghostly memoir of a city that
became unreal, is a fictional ghost, although it has been used only in poetry. It
could also perfectly fit into some of our recent novels, as is the case with Don
Gerardo de Pompier, the character who rambles among the writings of En–
rique Lihn.
From a distance of more than thirty years, it seems now that the new
writing of the fifties, a turning away from regionalist writing and apparently
indebted only to European and North American currents, was also a decisive
assimilation of the writing of some of the great poets who preceded us. It
brought to narrative prose the vision of Neruda's
Residencia en la tierra
(Residence an Earth)
and Huidobro's
Altazar
and
Ecuatarial,
of Gabriela
Mistral's
Tala
and of Rosamel del Valle's surrealism.
It
was a vision of decay,
of time's erosion of things, "of false astrologies and somewhat lugubrious
