JORGE EDWARDS
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one dimly perceives that salvation will arrive only when logic and rationality
pass through the "gates of excess" - gates of madness and excess more in–
tellectual than erotic - to arrive in a green, fertile place:
"Have you seen those endless pastures stretching out?"
New writing in Chile is dominated by ideas of salvation and redemp–
tion, a redemption that takes one to the future while forcing a reexamination
of the past. After reading my last book,
El AnJitri6n (The Host),
a Chilean
version of the old Faust legend, a transcription into the creole guitar of an
operatic subject - to use an expression applied by Borges to the gaucho
Faust of Estanislao del Campo - people were perplexed. They have
asked me why the Devil, instead of buying the soul of my Faust, is inter–
ested only in buying his past and offers a deal to provide him with a
different past, one specially adapted to today's realities. I don't pretend
to
give an answer here. But I want to demonstrate that all recent Chilean
literature, and in a certain sense all of Chilean society, is obsessed with
the past and the future and with the interplay between them: Original
Sin, Purgatory, Paradise Before the Fall ... In the writing of another
young poet, Diego Maquieira, the lyrical voice is curiously ubiquitous. It
is a voice hidden behind pillars, doors, the cloisters of colonial convents,
or the offices of the Holy Inquisition; at the same time it is heard in
noisy pubs where the atmosphere turns tense as the curfew arrives.
In Diamela Eltit's last novel,
El Cuarto mundo (The Fourth World),
we
go back to our dark memories of prenatal, primordial waters and the con–
fused collision of bodies. When those forms are born, thrown into the outside
world , they are immediately sold, as everything else is in our flamboyant
new capitalism.
In connection with this idea of the past, I think Marco Antonio de la
Parra's description of the beginning of the new theater after the military coup
is extraordinarily illuminating. A new play,
Brisca
(a popular game of cards),
was written in about two hours and put on stage, after five or six days of
rehearsal, at the Medical School of the University of Chile in Santiago.
Scenery was created with an old dirty curtain, two blackboards, a small
table, three chairs, and a huge pistol on the table. A voice sings a popular
song, announcing that the end of the world has finally arrived. The three ac–
tors are three obstetricians waiting for a woman in labor. It is soon revealed
that the woman's labor pains have lasted for five hundred years, and that the
three men are not really doctors. Nobody wants to do that kind of work
anymore. The play's audience also learns that a popular singer has just been
assassinated by Vietnamese terrorists. And one more important thing is
