I.  Introduction

    Chile is covered with shadows
    the valleys are burned, briars have grown
     (Anteparadise, 117)

Chile is a narrow country that constitutes the western fringe of South America.  Its landscape is diverse and extreme: craggy seacoasts, daunting mountain ranges, jungle and forest, the metropolis and ghetto.  But between September of 1973 and May of 1988 Chile had a singular feel to it; it was a land caught breathless beneath a repressive totalitarian ruler.  That man was General Augusto Pinochet, leader of the military Junta that overthrew the existing government and killed the legally elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende.  Creative artists of any type who were to remain in Chile were webbed somewhere into a continuum that spanned on one extreme from collusion with authoritarian forces to its opposite, resistance to them.  Many writers who desired to comment on their society were impelled toward enigmatic political critique in their work.   Poet, Raul Zurita Canessa,  was no exception.   But in Zurita's second volume of poetry, Anteparadise,   we see complex rhetorical strategies at work, some of which seem to suggest protest and some which might indicate retreat.   Tracing his precise position on that continuum becomes difficult.  The central concern for this inquiry is an analysis of ZuritaÕs enigmatic approach and a probing of the political resistance or collusion of  particular poetical choices.  To ascertain the motives behind enigmatic strategies, one must comprehend the social ambiance in order to contextualize those motives.  That is best accomplished by looking at social conditions after the military coup, at instances of ZuitaÕs poetic ambiguity, and at the ramifications of Zurita's art event: the skywriting of a poem over New York City.   Finally,  issues of the body as a site for protest amplify and codify social conditions,  so it is critical to consider Zurita's attempted self-blinding.

Anteparadise spans a substantial 209 pages with translations and the original Spanish en face.  The Dantean reference is fully intended.  Zurita writes in the Introductory Note to Anteparadise:

  Dante, on the last page of La Vita Nuova promises to write

  a poem in which he hopes to write about his beloved what

  has never been written about any other woman.  Many years

  later he finished the Divine Comedy, but to accomplish that

  his beloved had to die.   Well, from all those open spaces to

  the south of the Rio Bravo, I have tried to imagine the trip

  in reverse, to pass not from the promise to the work, not

  from the New Life to the Comedy, but from the Comedy to

  life--opening from within ourselves like a flower, from the

  work to the promise, from the Old to the New World; to the

  shores of the land that loves us.

      (Anteparadise, Intro Note).

Dante becomes a useful starting point for Zurita as he contemplates the act of writing the beloved.  For the Chilean it is a journey through poetry and into his ÒbelovedÓ country and the writing itself is the path toward promise.  It is with that intensity of consciousness and unlikely optimism that Zurita strides into the writing of Anteparadise.  In keeping with its nod to his Dantean predecessor, it is a book that has an epic feel to it, with poems not so much of an identity discreet from one another, but as pieces that continuously inform one another.  As the reader progresses through the book, the poems and their images begin to accrue, to pile up; the text folds in upon itself with its steady self-referentiality.  We see such a pattern begin in the opening pieces called "Zurita".  In it Zurita writes this line: "huddled against the boat's planked deck/".  (Anteparadise 5).  Twelve pages later we see a single line that occupies an entire page: "I saw him releasing the oars:/". (17).  Another ten pages deeper into the book we get this opening to the piece called "The Beaches of Chile X":

  I saw him huddled against the boat's deck

  releasing the oars   The beach was still

  mirrored in the opaque light of his eyes

     (27).

Here Zurita begins to interweave these separate images.  The folding or the looping finally works itself out when the next page reveals again only a single line:  "All Chile was becoming white in his pupils:/". (29). In this way the sequence of poems-- and because of this self-referentiality it must be seen as a sequence-- perpetually casts an image then hinges off that image by recasting it.  For the reader,  the poems have a kind of transformative movement to them because of this varying of the image, this pushing of it always toward the slightly different.  But there is something else.  Something evanescent but emotional.  In these poems is something that stirs to the surface, that by turns appears and fades.  It is terror; it is desperation; it is that which redeems.  This is the nature of Zurita's work.  Out of his brilliant haze a picture forms, but it is as mysterious as a tear that falls from the eye of a marble saint.  We cannot name it; we cannot trace it; we do not know if it is a condemnation or a sign of redemption.

 II.  Radical Ambiguity

   She denied, saying , I laughed not, for she was afraid

   And he said,  Nay; but thou didst laugh

       (Genesis 18:15)

Raul Zurita was born in Santiago Chile on January 10, 1951.   According to the introduction to Zurita's poems as they appear in the 1986 anthology, Poets of Chile, "new Chilean poetry is being measured in terms of Raul Zurita. "  He is a poet now in his late forties and one who was creating poetry that drew tremendous critical attention in his native Chile when he was but thirty.  In 1979, the acclaimed literary critic Ignacio Valente wrote a series of pieces on Zurita's first book,  Purgatorio.  These essays appeared in the newpaper El Mercurio and two resonant quotes affected the way that the Chilean literary public was to understand Raul Zurita.  Valente wrote that Zurita "was the dauphin of Chilean poetry," and that he was "the legitimate heir to the greats." ( Conversaciones con La Poesia Chilena 107).  This began to secure a central place within a rigorous literary tradition for a young and experimental poet. 

The time in which he lived, and where he lived created a unique intersection of political forces that have come to bear upon his poetry.  Zurita chose to stay in Chile after the military takeover and this choice was significant in shaping his work.  After the coup d'etat, many Chilean intellectuals, writers and artists were forced into exile.  The situation for artists who remained in Chile after this event was restrictive and precarious.  Juan Armado Epple writes of this in his introduction to  Poets of Chile:

  Those who remained in Chile, under a regime that imposed

  censorship on all cultural manifestations that made reference

  to the social dimensions of life and its problems, created a

  system of self-defense known as self-censorship.  These poets

  were obliged to retreat to private circles of creation.

         (Poets, v).

The epigraph with which Zurita begins his book of poetry, Anteparadise, exemplifies this impulse toward self-censorship :

  hey Zurita--he told me--get

  those evil thoughts out of your head

     (Anteparadise, epigraph page).

A need to modify ideas, to "get evil thoughts" out of one's head, arises from the risk that poets with a proclivity toward social criticism faced in the ensuing months and years after the coup.

This risk was not an abstraction for Zurita.  In an interview with Juan Andres Pina, he tells how at 22 years old, he was rounded up with a large group of students and faculty from the university and how he was detained on board a ship for 21 days. The hold of the ship was large enough to accomodate about 200 people, but there were in excess of 800 prisoners.  Zurita was deprived of sleep and taken out for questioning about a briefcase full of poems that he had with him.  The poems were of an experimental style and had small drawings on them.  Repeatedly he was asked by different interrogators what were the meanings of these poems.  Repeatedly he refused to explain them, remarking only that they were just poems.  Finally, one of his captors threw this briefcase of poems into the ocean.  "Your poems are idiotic," he told him.   (Conversaciones 205,206).  The danger of physical reprisal for poets who were of a collectivist sensibility was real.  Zurita tells that he was a member of the Young Communists while at university.  (206).  And we find out in Epple's introduction  that the "Pinochet government tried to impose a free market economic system and at the same time to control the circulation of ideas by permitting only those that expressed individualistic values" ( Poets, vi). 

A useful question would be: how can one write poetry within such a system?  Another option to exile or to the retreat of 'creating in private circles,' is the masking or subterfuge of social critique as it appears in the poems.  Although we do not know the nature of the poems that were within Zurita's briefcase at the time of the detention and interrogation, we do know that they were in an experimental style with small drawings on them.   Another detail that may serve to illuminate how his poems were seen is the confusion that they caused his interrogators.  Although they did not fully understand the nature of his work, they felt somehow threatened by it. This play of signification makes Zurita's poetry doubly threatening, all because of its subtlety.  

Subtlety is a potent method for burying critique.  One way this subtlety can be accomplished is through the use of metaphor and its potential ambiguities.  What may have been a stylistic choice for Zurita early on in his poetry turned out to be a choice that ensured his poetic (and physical) survival.   Metaphoric ambiguity became a smokescreen for Zurita, from behind which he could critique his society at length.  Metaphor was subterfuge, and mask.  We see how Zurita uses the Chilean landscape in order to metaphorically express the literal terror and suffering of his people during the dictatorship.    In "The Beaches of Chile I" from Utopias, the first section of Anteparadise:

  Those weren't the Chilean fates they

  wept receding the entire beach was

  becoming an open sore in his eyes

     (Anteparadise, 7).

Here Zurita takes a natural landscape transforms it into a festering wound.  The literal end of that metaphoric equation is the tainting of what is naturally lovely in the country by the oppressive dictatorship.  With the absence of freedom, with the many disappearances and murders perpetrated by the government's Secret Police, DINA, (Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional), with the rampant fear and ambience of terror, it may be difficult to view the landscape with the same eyes as one did before the coup.  A landscape that once was a site of beauty and of recreation, cannot, according to the poet, be seen the same way under the current political conditions.  The 'Chilean fates' may be the disturbing turn that Chilean society had taken.  The ambiguity of the metaphor also suggests something quite particular: the Fates of Greek mythology.  This puts the reference into the realm of the literary.  But if one considers the origin of the Fates, three sisters, and daughters of Zeus,  who  were responsible for the destinies of humankind, it is significant to recall that for the Greeks the Fates were invoked and beseeched to look kindly upon the supplicant for important events.  Weddings and births saw the invocation and prayer to the Fates.  If the supplicant had lived the right way, then the Fates granted him or her good fortune.  In this way, the Fates were used as a kind of moralistic check.  The further ambiguity of  "they /wept" is also obfuscating: are these the people of Chile weeping at their fates or are the Chilean Fates weeping?  To create Chilean Fates is a near patriotic appropriation of the Greek myth, and yet, if we consider the full ramifications of  the Fates weeping, it is foreboding.  To allow for the people weeping at the current political situation is  more critical and riskier, given the deadly constraints on what can and cannot be expressed about the government. 

The near patriotic sensibility is significant also.  The smokescreen here is not merely a fabrication to disorient would-be oppressors, but also a bona fide sense of national pride.  The poet is never content to merely provide the substantive critique, he must also offer against this unacceptable situation its converse: salvation.  We see this in the second stanza of "The Beaches of Chile I."   

 Those weren't the beaches they found but the clearing of the

 sky snow white before his eyes as if they were detached

 reflecting throughout Chile the open wounds they washed

      (Anteparadise, 7).

Here is a shift in perspective from a viewing of the beaches to a looking upward at the sky.  The visual sense is the locus of perception and through it the poet has the ability to envision the tainting and the terror and also the clearing away of that terror.  It is as if Zurita's internal vision, that which he can see inside his mind, is projected onto the landscape, transforming it.  Where his vision is unblinking we see the open sores, where his vision is hopeful, we see the clearing sky.  But in order to achieve that hopeful vision his eyes must be "as if they were detached."  By detachment, Zurita may mean the distance from the material conditions necessary to view these conditions as breaking up, as clearing.  "Detached" may also indicate a kind of blindness (as in "detached retinas") necessary ironically to see the situation as hopeful at all.  But if the eyes could be separate this way then they would be "reflecting throughout Chile the open wounds they washed."  Would this act of self-mutilation, this blinding of the eyes, or this  great opening of them that would ensue from this detachment, somehow cleanse Chile's wounds?  Here is a sense of martyrdom in the poet.  It is through the poet's tears that Chile may be cleansed.  Metaphor is able also to transform suffering into redemption.  But that redemption must have its sacrifice. To a  Catholic sensibility, his is a familiar price paid for salvation.  For Zurita vision is both crucial and vulnerable.  He must see and acknowledge the suffering, but he also must suffer in order to do that.  In writing the suffering, he experiences a kind of martyrdom.

Vision recurs as a site of critical complexity for the poet, a place for his own imaginings to begin and the site of another type of ambiguity.  Here is another example of the subterfuge that the poet creates in the first poem of Anteparadise.  In it we more substantively get at his vision.   It's entitled, simply, "Zurita."

 As in a dream, when all was lost Zurita told me

 it was going to clear

 because in the depths of the night

 he had seen a star.  Then

 huddled against the boat's planked deck

 it seemed that the light again

 lit my lifeless eyes.

That's all it took.  I was invaded by sleep:

    (Anteparadise, 5).

Here are several significant Zuritan tropes.  One is the ambiguity of the pronouns.  Zurita is both the teller of the vision: "Zurita told me/...he had seen a star" and the doer of the action who responds to this hopeful vision: "huddled against the boat's planked deck/...the light again/ lit my lifeless eyes./"   The vision that Zurita sees,  enables or prompts (the other) Zurita to have another kind of vision.  Both are described from different perspectives. Zurita creates a character of himself by describing himself in the third person, and then is subjected to the influences of that character by shifting to the first person.  The fact that what is to follow, the entire book of poetry,  may be a dream  (indicated by "I was invaded by sleep:") also acts to absolve the poet from particular scrutiny.  This book could be said to be a dream, a hallucination, a Dantean fantasy.

We may recognize this divided or multiple subjectivity from the opening line of the epigraph already discussed and with which Zurita begins Anteparadise: "hey Zurita--he told me".  The greatest confusion for the reader arises from the unusual choice that the poet makes in referring to himself in the third person while including the words of an unidentified other: "he told me".  He is both object and speaker.  This foregrounds and also diminishes the presence of the poet when we read.  When Zurita refers to himself this way, he reminds the reader of the artifice of the poems, that there are in fact stories invented by a writer and that these are not necessaily true accounts of his opinions or experiences.   But this pronoun interchanging also creates a confusion for the reader that does not require the speaker of the poem or the writer, for that matter, to be locked into a polemic.  Someone is telling Zurita: "get/ those evil thoughts out of your head/".   It may be Zurita censoring himself, as I suggested earlier, in which case he is willingly complying with the pressures to conform his thinking, or it may be the voices from the outside telling him what not to think.  This ambiguity does not require him to commit to either definitively, and because of this, he cannot be held accountable for a negative social commentary.  This pronoun confusion then allows for social critique but also is an effective form of self-defense against his government's harsh and often violent intolerance for critique. 

Another possible layer of meaning is situated in the poetic.  Zurita may have used ambiguity to de-center his reader for poetic purposes.  He could have been locating himself within (and straining against) a poetic tradition that identifies an absence of pronoun antecedents as a radical departure.  A reader could therefore trace his radicality to issues of  clarity, and as such, issues of style.  This allows space for the poetry to be read as elitist and individualistic--a reading quite in keeping with Pinochet's ideologies for art.  The ambiguity, the lack of easily accessible meaning narrows the scope of Zurita's readership.  It is a poetry for the literary world.  This is not a folk art, nor is it something created to assuage the suffering masses.  Here Zurita occupies a sketchy territory.  Is he in collusion with the oppressors because of his high-brow literary stylistic choices or do the stylistic choices bury a critique?  In order to keep writing and publishing during politically troubled times, a poet must collude even if it comes within the framework of resistance.  Though Zurita threatens on two layers, one ideological (though difficult to name) and the other, intellectual (through the literary, rhetorical confusion), he is also recuperated into an elitist echelon: experimental poets who write in a manner of radical individualism.  This whimsy protects him in that it suggests an ahistorical quality to his work and sensibilities.  He can be read as a poet who writes about the self, and about the imagination.  If we read Zurita this way, the question surfaces of whether or not art can or ought to exist outside the political.  Although it would be inaccurate to describe Zurita as a collaborator, these same difficulties have been unravelled by others.  Steven White, editor of Poets of Chile writes:

  While it may be true that technical concerns have superceded

  social concerns in Zurita's poetry, it would be misguided to

  categorize the work as ahistorical.  One of Zurita's poetic

  recourses,   for example,  is the political allegory in "The Cordilleras

  of Il Duce."  (133).

The very presence of the notion of "recourse" in White's observation is significant.  It suggests the artistic limitations that Zurita and poets like him were facing.  Here, also we discover the editor's imprecision.  For Zurita, it is 'el Duce,' rather than 'Il Duce,'the latter of which was the term used to describe Mussolini.  White comprehends the richness of the allusion to Mussolini, but he makes the mistake of precise allocation to him.  In the reference to "el Duce" Zurita manipulates the historical memory of a leader who was so out of step with the needs of his people that they eventually murdered him by means of a brutal lynching.  That he uses allegory to talk about this leader is important.  The allusion to Pinochet is as certain as allegory allows.

III.  Radical Departure: The Sky as Page

   In a world of incommunication, poetry renewed its

   secret and overt mission of clarifying the new situations

   of life and breaking through isolation and solitude

      (Poets, v).

The strategy that Zurita uses to camouflage his critique of the Pinochet regime also articulates itself as a technical departure in poetry.  Radical ambiguity with its willful absence or confusion of referents constitutes a rhetorical choice that does not offer up an easy reading of the text.  Moreover, it pushes the poetry into the realm of the experimental.  The current preeminence of clear, easily accessible narrative poetry is as real in Chile as it is in the United States.   Zurita desired to break with form, to be able to critique his culture, yet still to communicate.  Nothing exemplifies this intersection of impulses more powerfully than his project to write a poem in the sky.  In this gesture,  Zurita exposes the limitations of the written page; he takes his poetry to the place of the classic metaphor of boundlessness: the skies.

Zurita tells Juan Andres Pina in the interview published in  Conversaciones con la Poesia Chilena, how as a child he remembered seeing airplanes do skywriting.  The messages written across the sky were advertisements for detergents: "Perline" and "Radioline".   But these made an impression on him and eventually the notion occurred to him to compose a text as large as those words.  His first fantasy was to somehow enlist a pilot from the Chilean Air Force to do the skywriting.  The idea was to use one of the same types of airplanes that bombed the presidential palace during the 1973 coup to create this poetic text above the Chilean landscape.  This would, according to Zurita,  also demonstrate that art was something that contained the hope, at least emblematically, to transform the world, that it could even transform the airborne agents of terror into a medium for artistic creation.  But it was impossible to accomplish this dream in Chile.  He was finally able to see it done in the sky over New York in June of 1982 with the help of his friend Arturo Fontaine Talavera.  Each brief line of the poem, called "The New Life", was photographed after it was skywritten.  The photos of the lines of the poem appear within the book, Anteparadise.  Each page of it is startling  blue with white smoke etching out the words.  It is certainly an unusual inclusion in a book of poetry.

Why write in the sky?  William Ferguson  of the University of Pennsylvania, one critic of Zurita's skywritten poem in Anteparadise,  says this:  

  Zurita is the creator of a poem-happening called

  "The New Life"  said to have been produced by

  skywriting over Manhattan in 1982 (MI DIO ES

  HAMBRE..."); the event, faithfully recorded in

  color in the present volume, at least had the charm

  of the ephemeral.

    (World Literature Today, 427).

Here the critic (in keeping with the overall tenor of dismissal of all of Zurita's work, not only of Anteparadise, but also of his earlier book, Purgatorio, which Ferguson accomplishes in a mere three paragraphs) trivializes the skywriting event.  By writing that the project  "at least had the charm of the ephemeral," Ferguson fails to observe the significance that the skywriting suggests outside of itself.  We get a different sense of the event of the skywritten poem by looking at what the poet himself says about it.  In the Introductory Note that Zurita provides  for Anteparadise, he writes: 

  When I first designed this project, I thought  the sky was

  precisely the place toward which the eyes of all communities

  have been directed, because they have hoped to find in it

  the signs of their destinies; therefore, the greatest ambition

  one could aspire to would be to have that same sky as a page

  where anyone could write.

      (Anteparadise, Intro. Note).

Here it seems more significant that the sky becomes a page where anyone could read what is written.  That "anyone," however, had to be anyone in New York City who could look up and read Zurita's message. Though he sent his poem out as an homage to all minority groups throughout the world, he was more specifically communicating with "the Spanish-speaking people of the United States."  (Intro. Note).   "The New Life" originally occupied the concluding position of the book.

  MY GOD IS HUNGER

  MY GOD IS SNOW

  MY GOD IS NO

  MY GOD IS DISILLUSIONMENT

  MY GOD IS CARRION

  MY GOD IS PARADISE

  MY GOD IS PAMPA

  MY GOD IS CHICANO

  MY GOD IS CANCER

  MY GOD IS EMPTINESS

  MY GOD IS WOUND

  MY GOD IS GHETTO

  MY GOD IS PAIN

  MY GOD IS

  MY LOVE OF GOD

    (1).

In this, the brief skywritten lines become momentary emblems of that which we value or fear  beyond reason.  These phrases represent that which is immutable and which we idealize.  Zurita writes that "if these words that are so often used, that are so strong, so irreducible and so criticized,  survive, their force will radiate even beyond death itself.  It is the idea that God survives also in his complete obliteration "    (Conversaciones, 219).   "MY GOD IS NO"  exemplifies this paradox.  That paradox is reinscribed by the writing (the skywriting) then dissapation (the breakup, the blowing away) of the line.

The reader of such a text might wonder as to the meaning of these lines as they appear.  Do these lines, does this act of skywriting a poem have merely "the charm of the ephemeral" or is there more to it than that?  The poem does fail in that it perhaps does not communicate the same message that the author intended.  We require Zurita's explication in order to fully comprehend the poem's import.  But this also points interestingly to the intertextuality  of it: in the book, the photos are reproduced, the poem is printed on one page by itself, and the author writes about it in the Introductory Note.  The skywritten poem has a life beyond itself, as much conceptual art does.  It points to cultural conditions, it points to conditions within the art world.  It points to that from which it is departing .  Zurita is interested in this central paradox: that this act of writing which is in fact, so ephemeral, will also suggest transcendence to those who read it.  It blows away, but somehow remains.  The matter, the smoke is transformed.  The skywritten poem's power then is conceptual rather than aesthetic.  We may not be able to point to this poem as a beautiful and stirring work,  but we can say that it is provocative, and that it does in fact create a compelling layering of connotation.

In his book of critical studies on Chilean poetry and the authoritarian experience, Rodrigo Canovas writes this of the skywriting project:

  Anteparadise culminates  with "The New Life", a poem

  written in New York.  This art event (which intervenes

  on reality, modifying the course of our daily life), draws

  us to its most obvious dimension: a subject (who is watched,

  censored) is capable of projecting his ideas outside, out

  into the world; in other words, the Chilean community has   

  recovered its voice.

    (Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigan: Literatura Chilena y Experiencia

     Autoritaria, 87).

In impacting the physical world, this act of skywriting becomes a poignant promise of change.  Here, the act of writing a poem in the sky supercedes the material of the poem itself.  In metaphoric resonance, the boundaries of our visual perception are emphasized, are enlarged; the enduring (the skies themselves) and the transient (poetry) are made to interact.  The hope that this metaphor of impacting the world inspires in critics like Canovas may be tantamount to the hope that "The New Life" inspired in others throughout Chile who heard about it or were able to see the photos.  But for Zurita himself,  the skywriting as a point where all eyes might be turned became the locus of a bitter personal irony.  In spite of the projection of the large and transient lines that for Zurita represented transcendence, these words of hope still could not be sprawled across the Chilean sky.  Zurita, despondent, decided to blind himself.  When Juan Andres Pina asks him about this act of self-mutilation that came out of his contemplation of the skywriting and just before finishing Anteparadise, Zurita tells him of a realization:

These writings that I thought had been infinitely more eloquent,   would never be seen by those for whom I had invented them. 

They would be able only to imagine them, like some kind of    inverted sketch.  I saw a contradiction between the enormous    impact of the visual, like a text in the sky, and the reality that

  then its author could not see it.  Finally I opted also not to see,

  at least in the physical sense.  (Conversaciones, 215).

The decision finally to stop seeing refers to the day in 1980 when Zurita attempted to blind himself.  Out of the act that departed most radically from a poem inscribed on the page, and out of the hope that Zurita felt was thwarted, came the paradoxical outcome; Zurita wished no longer to see.   Here is his account of the event:

On 18 March 1980, I went out to buy pure ammonia.  I used    scotch tape to hold my eyelids open, but when I threw the     ammonia, the reflex to close the eyes was so strong that my    eyelids strained against the tape, pulling it loose, allowing

  only a portion of the liquid to make contact with my eyes. 

  All of this appeared in the local papers, because I was left

  in pretty bad shape:  I burned part of both corneas and at the

  beginning I couldn't see anything.  I ended up with minor

  lesions...But it is important to know that this was a solitary act.

  There were many interpretations of it from the most psychiatric   

  to the most sociological; there were studies of it in relation to the  

  times.  (Conversaciones, 216).

This act (among others ) of harming the self created a persona for Zurita, one that also became fodder for the literary critics.  This sensational act, though personal and psychological in nature became another potential site for Zurita's radical responses to his authoritarian government.  As such, it gained interpretation as an artistic event unto itself.  In the introduction to Zurita's section of Poets of Chile, the author writes:

  Some critics have portrayed Zurita's corporal acts of self-

  aggression and "exhibitionism" as sensationalist and

  scandalous.  Others have located the acts in their artistic

  and historical contexts and hailed Zurita as a proponent

  of a new "vanguardia."

      (Poets, 133).

Here, even an act of self-mutilation may be read as a response to the artist's position within the Chilean culture of his time.   Or it may be understood as merely a psychological event, one that is personal and has no bearing whatsoever upon social conditions.  One thing is certain: it is Zurita's unique subjectivity within his culture that became the site of his pathological desire to blind himself.  He had identified the struggle that he faced and internalized it.  This act was a literalization of what was not supposed/ allowed to be seen.  He made these issues concrete by bringing them back to the body.  Here is nothing intellectual, nothing poetical, but simply the human body: in Chile, the locus of so much injury and suffering.   At the end of Anteparadise, when the last poem is finished, we find this, a testament from friend and lover of Zurita and fellow artist, Diamela Eltit:

  On March 18, 1980, the man who wrote this

  book assaulted his eyes, in order to blind

  himself, throwing pure ammonia on them.

  He was left with burns on his eyelids,

  part of his face and just minor lesions

  on the corneas; at the time he only told

  me, weeping, that the beginning of

  Paradise could no longer be.

  I too wept beside him, but what does it

  matter now, since that same person has

  managed to conceive all this wonder.

       Diamela Eltit

       (Anteparadise, 207).

The fact that Zurita decided to include this note within the book suggests a foregrounding of this event on a literary or artistic level.  This problematizes how we read it.  The attempted self-blinding is a psychological, a solitary act.  But it can also be read as metaphoric.  Susan Bordo writes in her essay on the body as a site for pathological protest:

  The body, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, is a

  powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules,

  hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture

  are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete

  language of the body.  The body may also operate as a metaphor

  for culture.

     (Gender, Body, Knowledge, 13).

Why else include a record of this self-mutilation in a book of poetry?  Metaphor is Zurita's operative language.  As in the poems themselves, where Zurita takes on the burden of  becoming an emblem for the Chilean people, so he does the same in this gesture, allowing his body to be read as the emblem of the Chilean people's bodies.  As such, this can also be read as an act of protest.  Susan Bordo goes on to write :

  The pathologies of . . . protest function, paradoxically,

  as if in collusion with the cultural conditions that produce

  them, reproducing rather than transforming precisely

  that which is being protested.

     ( 22).

Through a bodily literalization of the censored vision, a type of imposed metaphoric blindness,  Zurita enacts a reproduction of oppressive codes.  He (nearly) blinds himself.  Bordo notes that what appears to be collusion is really a form of protest, albeit a desperate, and pathological one.  This points to conditions of overwhelming constraint. 

Zurita's self in the poems is always a site for the internalization of his surroundings.  It is a mode of impacted subjectivity.  A pertinent question might be: how does one reconcile this attention to the psychological with the political?  Zurita renders in the poems his experience and in Anteparadise moves toward the collective.  In the act of self-mutilation, the body becomes that palpable intersection.  Because the body had been already politicized through the torture and murder of countless Chileans, it is fitting then for Zurita to reveal that suffering through the body.  But a further problem arises: how important is this simulated martyrdom for the people of Chile?  Is it tenable? Is it useful? Or is it enigmatic and personal to the point of being solipsistic?

IV.  Conclusions: When Models Fail

    we should keep on proposing Paradise,

    even if the evidence at hand might

    indicate that such a pursuit is folly

  (Anteparadise, Intro. Note).

If we comprehend the full gravity of consequence for those who openly spoke out against the establishment, it becomes clearer and clearer why Zurita's poems are so murky.  Censorship is an intolerable byproduct of the Junta, but the threat of death is even more paralysing for artists.  The many murders of outspoken artsists embodied the physicality of that threat.  The seams of Zurita's world began to unravel.  He writes:

  This work was written under conditions common to

  Latin America: a military dictatorship and the tragedies

  that follow in its wake.  At the time I began Anteparadise

  I no longer believed much in tradition.  When we are

  witness to so much unnecessary pain, all history seems to

  fail, and with it all the great models for making poetry, art,

  literature.

     (Anteparadise, Intro. Note).

The great models could no longer do justice to the experience, nor were these models safeguards against the worst possible outcomes.  Zurita needed to invent a poetics that both exposed the terror and protected the poet.  His enigmatic strategies permitted him the luxury of coninuing to write.  This does not necessarily implicate him in the oppression, however.  It demonstrates him to be an artist who is capable of survival within deadly conditions.  If his acts and poetic choices can be read multiply,  if they have a personal, poetic, and psychological layer of meaning, then to take in the complexity of those layers must be an unwieldy activity.   The primacy of a political reading, one that reads his choices as smokescreen for political critique, is  only one approach.  But this type of analysis does not inauthenticate the work, even if it must inevitably reduce it.  It appears that the chaos that swirls from his work, that originates from those very technical choices, also viscerally renders what must have been a fragmented and disorienting experience.  In this way  the poems are authenticated by both their devastating beauty and by their location in history.  Significant also to remember is that Zurita can never leave the reader alone with the terror.  Wherever he exposes the malady, he must also propose the salvation, even if it is to be gained in the other world, beyond death, beyond all suffering.  He tells us in the Introductory Note to Anteparadise: "I think that the meaning of art, its only purpose...is to make life more humanly livable."

WORKS CITED

Bordo, Susan    Gender/ Body/ Knowledge.  pp. 13, 21.

Canovas, Rodrigo   Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigan: Literatura Chilena Y Experiencia Autoritaria.  p. 87.

Chavkin, Samuel   Storm Over Chile.  pp. 231-232, 234-235.

Ferguson, William   World Literature Today, Volume 61 #3.  p. 427

Pina, Juan Andres   Conversaciones con la Poesia Chilena.  pp. 205-206, 210, 215-219.

White, Steven F., editor     Poets of Chile: A Bilingual Anthology 1965-1985.  pp. v,vi,133.