Customer Reviews

E. Luminata

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

L. Luminata is a very clever book. Lector must be compromited with each pages, each lines. The literary space is Chile under the Pinochet's dictature that shows the torture, the horrors and marginality whom that was out his goverment. The woman is symbol of breaking, of opossition and unhapiness.

"How now Witte, whether wander you?" -- Shakespeare

E. Luminata is truly exquisite, preternaturally so. A symbol of existing under vexing duress, this defiant minefield dance ("from my own poor, particular trenches" - Eltit) is a promenade of linguistic efficacy and daring imaginative prowess. The protagonist crosses a public square, as the women protestors once did -- dancing as the only allowable form of (silent) protest for the holocaust of the invisible/tortured Chilean men -- during the cesspool of Pinochet's dictatorship. From this embankment, E. Luminata apprehends her anguished sphere of existence through the gaze of those who encircle her; those who bear witness as she bewails, bodily, the treacherous, swirling rapids of the city she inhabits. It is textual performance art and embodies the troughs of the infernal prance, with rollicking glimpses of salvific crests, towards a techno-baptismal. The experience of reading E. Luminata is, at once, a starling/refuge and the throwing down of a linguistic gauntlet (as in, la fleur of "a city reconstituted/out of some operetta") -- by true wit-mongering maestro(s):

As Diamela Eltit wrote in the Author's Forward, "Writing in that space was something passional and personal. My secret political resistance. When one lives in a world that is collapsing, constructing a book perhaps may be one of the few survival tactics...The part of me that writes is neither comfortable nor resigned and does not want readers who are not partners in dialogue, accomplices in a certain disconformity. The (ideal) reader to whom I aspire is more problematic, with gaps, doubts - a reader crossed by uncertainties...pleasure and happiness, but disturbance and crisis as well."

My acquaintance with E. Luminata brought such unexpected depth to a song that I've always loved by Sting, "They Dance Alone (Cuerca Solo)" -- but never fully appreciated, multi-dimensionally, as I now do (as a teenager in the 80s, the preoccupation was more about Madonna's latest re-incarnation, rather than grasping the political surrealities and nightmares that loomed on distant shores). To read Diamela Eltit, we must travel "...as Portia's suitors come 'as o'er a brook' to see her..." (Shakespeare's Imagery by Caroline Spurgeon), checking our vanity or arrogance at the door and, instead, apprehending - with our hearts - her pencil's portraiture. In the wake of reading this novel, I witnessed our former Great Communicator & President's elaborate state funeral, and had to consider what Chilean women (devoid of the remains of their husbands/fathers/sons) must have thought -- witnessing a shining city upon a hill: the resplendent homage, the bereaved widow -- when they endured silently those inexplicable disappearances, still without a trace, the result of our evil empires clash. A Belmont versus Venice debate (in contrast to our binary wonts for black & white contrasts - or white-washing portrayals; the cry for a more nuanced perspective, a ying/yang distinction)...

Reading Diamela Eltit's novel thrusts us into the very experience of these women and their anguished dances in ways both unsettling and liberating. It also calls us forth, challenges us in our own literary dances with the taboo, our tendency to look askance when faced with linguistic beckonings, pleading that we bear witness to the suffering of others. This literati and her eroticized veterinary/venatorial allusions to mounting for 'top-dog' dominance contextualize Sting's opening lyrics: "Why are these women dancing on their own?/Why is there this sadness in their eyes?/Why are the soldiers here/Their faces fixed like stone?/I can't see what it is they despise/They're dancing with the missing/They're dancing with the dead/They dance with the invisible ones/Their anguish is unsaid." (from: Nothing Like the Sun) E. Luminata, by its stark contrast and avalanche of unfamiliar/ities, displays true bravery amidst great risk and the very real threat of torture and censorship. It's a visceral reading of another time and place, with its profound fragility of consciousness -- a Trojan Horse fingerpointing to a ravaged Troy (where the sudden disappearance of innocent/civilian/loved ones can occur before one's very eyes) -- something, perhaps, unfathomable to us, collectively, before 9/11.

This reading might mirror back to us -- by its bald contrast with our pulp fiction -- the dynamics of our often more Pirandellian world: for the most part less tragedy, more problematic comedy, or the tragi-comedy of which we partake, which blurs the real/unreal (think, 'reality tv') of our society and its convention/alities.

This recalls the work of another Latin American writer, Manuel Puig, and his ingenious depiction in the play "Under a Mantle of Stars" -- as when we provoke another until at their wit's end, and compelled to scrawl names within yellow wallpaper's mirror, signifying 'how' we occur, if not who we are (as in one case, mine very own - the coinage 'pamelodrama' in fury's hallway scribbled - by an exasperated yet, still collegial/kellner housemate, for my viewing edification each morn, a woefully/truly true tale). After pouring over E. Luminata's text, trying to envision the experience from which it's drawn -- the source of Chile's societal madness under dictatorship -- I was reminded of the opening quote of Shoshana Felman's book Writing and Madness: "But the gift a man makes of his madness to his fellow creatures, can it be accepted and then returned without interest? And if that interest is not the insanity of the one who receives the other's madness as a royal gift, what might its recompense be?" -- Georges Bataille

Certainly Diamela Eltit, within this translation's chrysalis, has made a royal gift -- edifying us/U.S. -- about the conditions of our military coup, as in my/America's spurious overthrow of their/Latin American democracy, and its anguishing results. Consider that without the artistry of such writers (as Eltit or Isabelle Allende), our collective conscience might have willingly/fully lost its memories. As Ronald Christ writes, in the Translator's Afterword, "Authors, Eltit herself, are different dictators, sayers, governors of words. Her governance resisted still another - deadly - outside as well as inside her book."

In spite of my grandiloquent dances within Zagazig towns, cryptic & baroque (to the utter, grammatical dismay of Wily Sirs), this rare and ground-breaking literary narrative is quite deserving of a broadly attentive English-speaking audience (hearty bards w/ bardic hearts unite): "That light we see is burning in my hall.../How far that little candle throws his beams!/So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

Academic Review:

Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois

E. Luminata, by Diamela Eltit reviewed by Jeffrey DeShell

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show_comment/635

The Review of Contemporary Fiction

E. Luminata, by Diamela Eltit

reviewed by Jeffrey DeShell

Trans. and Afterword by Ronald Christ, with Gene Bell-Villada, Helen Lane, and Catalina Parra. Lumen, Inc., 1997. 234 pp. Paper: $15.00.

E. Luminata is an active unworking, a vigorous defying of psychological characterization, chronological story, unequivocal occurrences, and limiting or limited signification. It immediately brings to mind Blanchot's The Madness of the Day and Beckett's The Lost Ones, but refuses the coherence and presence of these equally tenebrous texts. This active unworking makes any sort of metatextual comment, let alone interpretation, difficult: to summarize what "happens" in the novel's ten chapters (just over two hundred pages)--a woman in a gray dress stands looking at a neon sign in the middle of a deserted plaza one night in Santiago--is to say next to nothing. The text agrees to, indeed requires, interrogation and interpretation, while simultaneously refusing and escaping such inquiry.

It is this very act of resisting that the text both "is about" and "is." Eltit sees complicity between critical interpretation and political totalitarianism. She writes, "I am interested in . . . cracking the monolith of completed stories," and is attracted by "the rebellious circulation of strategic fragments oppressed by official cultures." To Eltit, writing is an "act of liberating meanings and of protecting against the ideologizing of literature." In other words, it is literature's resistance to unequivocal meaning, its refusal to be allegorized, its detachment from significance, that gives it its truly revolutionary power.

I did have some trouble with the novel: Eltit's insistence on the substantiality of the book in her introduction--"An experiment may turn out or not; what I make is a work"--as well as Christ's placing it within a tradition of great (instead of minor) literature in his afterword, belies the novel's fugitive quality. I also had some problems making the connections the text requires: I must confess that I left the novel feeling it just eluded my grasp. Still, it is important to realize that E. Luminata is a text--in the most extreme sense of the word--and as such is profoundly contentious, discomforting, and unstable.

"Hey Mr. Pinochet - It's foreign money that supports you. One day that money's going to stop. No wages for your torturers..."
- Sting from/ Nothing like the Sun

Firstly, kudos to the nourishing, feline finesse of the Translation Posse (most especially Gene Bell-Villada, Helen Lane, and Catalina Parra) -- speleologists and awakeners all -- whose alchemical gifts rouse hibernators from a decade(nt) 'leaden (casket) slumber.' Your surgical stapedectomy transfigured a seemingly deaf, often tin (shamefully monolingual) ear. Having finally stumbled aboard Christ's qui/(e)xotic craft, an alloy of stainless, steely nerves and Marian-heart -- who astonishes each time he, by sage Morphean example, cautions to "trust your nervous system" (to quote another iconoclastic guru, a.k.a. Richard Alpert) -- through the body artist, E. Luminata. The Translator's Afterward serves as a cornerstone and lucid catalyst towards apprehending the full splendor of the text. My deepest appreciation for the gentle mercy and unfathomable generosity of your labors to "unveil her peerless light." (Milton)

Foremost ~ Brava to the enchantress, Diamela Eltit, whose luminous prose throughout her lyrical labyrinth has offered a formidable and unflinching example; and, perchance, a buoyant, life-giving transfusion of l'ecriture feminine. Like the silent Chilean protestors with no Spanish to speak -- reminiscent, perhaps, of tall, shy, young-hearted women in untimid lumpen/garb -- your outcry reverberates, as the slashes on your arms haunt (the visual cover art and the deeper cuts of the photograph within). Knowing interior realms of personal agony, my unmarred skin reflects back, as I seek to comprehend the political crucible that would demand such public displays of self-immolation.

It recalls for me -- the new translation to celebrate the Centennial of Neruda's birth -- "The Essential Neruda" edited by Mark Eisner. As though E. Luminata spoke out to me, as Neruda, saying: "Sube a nacer conmigo, hermana/From the deepest reaches of your/disseminated sorrow, give me your hand.../potter poured out into your clay/bring all your old buried sorrows/to the cup of this new life/Show me your blood and your furrow.../the silent and split lips/and from the depths speak to me all night long/as if we were anchored together.../Fasten your bodies to mine like magnets/Come to my veins and my mouth/speak through my words and my blood." [Heights of Macchu Picchu: XII - Rise up and be born with me]

Truly, I am in awe of the interior resources and powers of discernment it took to compose this symbolic duende/dance, the brave focus amidst such perilous circumstances. My psyche has literally been transfigured by reading this textual masterpiece. Henceforth, I will be eternally indebted to E. Luminata. Gracias for singing our freedom...Muchas gracias.