384
PARTISA REVIEW
obvious in the play: if you want to survive, you have to follow a strict pro–
hibition against remembering things. There is a permanent vigilance over
one's past. It is continually being examined and revised under the eye of the
Chilean Big Brother. ...
We can well imagine that our new creativity has emerged from those
dirty curtains, those blackboards and chairs, in the midst of the shouts and
wails of that woman in labor and the singing ofthat strange
bolero.
We have
already gone down a long road and are convinced that the worst is over. In
the process, we have learned a lot about our past writing and our history. In
a certain way, we have contributed to the rescue of our writing from obliv–
ion, but we have also invented it.
It
also can be read as a single text, a sym–
phonic organism where each book, each fabric of work and of words, strikes
its own unique and indispensable note. The obsessive divisiveness of literary
genres, typical of the old criticism, has lost all meaning today. There was, one
could say, a cultural tissue that was torn by violence, dictatorship, stupid cen–
sorship and hysterical intolerance. But this tissue has been slowly, patiently
and vigorously rewoven. This means that we are finding a way out, with or
without the help of Mephistopheles or Purgatory, and that we could meet
soon in a place that is certainly not Paradise regained but is surely far from
the Inferno.
