382
PARTISAN REVIEW
uses," as the verse goes; a vision pervaded by dominant anxiety and by the
feeling that a period of history was ending. Paradoxically, the novelty of my
generation's narrative was correlated with the use of the old, ofthe decayed,
issuing in what one critic defined as a "Literatura de la decrepitud."
One wonders today what was decaying, what was headed for its de–
struction, and where its origins lay. Was there a lost paradise in any given
moment or place in our past? Or was this a generation that invented its own
mythology? Again, it is a paradox that the new quality of this writing wasn't
only that of an eroded, broken, dusty landscape. There was also a very sig–
nificant shift in the point of view. Stories were now all being told directly or
indirectly from a marginal, eccentrically subjective point of view: from the
eyes of children or of very old people, of extravagant and self-destructive
people, or of madmen. One finds correlations in the work of William
Faulkner, one of the novelists we read most, or with Cervantes, the first
modern writer in the Spanish language. What did this portend? In Jose
Donoso's
Casa de campo (Country House),
written after the September 1973
coup (and conceived, as Donoso himself has said, the very same evening
af–
ter watching the news on Spanish television), children, who had been central
characters of our narrative prose in the fifties, were used by him in his novel
as allegories for the frustrated Revolution. They share, in Donoso's
metaphor, the same purity, illusions, playfulness, and folly as the Revolution.
The grownups would soon come back to restore order and discipline, with
the opportune help of uniformed
mayord011w,
the butler and the head servant
of the house....
The reader easily can imagine that the period of restored discipline,
which properly and classically begins with a thorough cleaning out of the
country house, would be also a period of severe punishment. And just so, a
writer of the younger generation, Raul Zurita, would become, through his
first works, a poet of punishment. Zurita starts with a new reading of the
past, and he takes up not only the Chilean past. He reads Dante anew, and
attempts to rewrite the
Commedia.
But in the
Commedia,
Dante is only a
visitor to the Inferno, under Virgil's guidance, while in Zurita's work the lyri–
cal voice is neither in exile nor paying a visit, but is talking from inside a
place. And as Zurita wants to maintain a degree of hope, his
Commedia
has
no
Inferno,
and it begins with
Purgatorio:
a place of punishment, yet a place
of redemption to come.
On reading this poetry, one feels that there will be salvation, and that
salvation is related in a way to Chile's grandiose nature, a nature which is no
longer that of Neruda's epic poetry but which represents instead a landscape
of the mind. The mind in
Purgatorio
is ill, as the whole country is. Zurita's
purgatory is the all-encompassing hospital in Enrique Lihn's last poems. And
