Political Discourse, Aesthetic Tissue and Fantastic Self-Action in Lumpérica, by Diamela Eltit

Abstract

Lumpérica (1983), the first novel by the Chilean storyteller Diamela Eltit (1949), confirms the author as one of the most important figures of the Latin America narrative during the eighties. Among the values of the novel, its function as a pioneer and precocious work stands out in the extensive narrative work of her generation. However, the main feature of her writing is that it far exceeds the narrow boundaries of the literature that raises against the dictatorial regime. The nature of this literature was marked and conditioned by an inflexible aesthetics as well as a hackneyed and an anachronistic testimonial poetics. Furthermore, the concepts of the Genette’s model are not enough to define the bonds and commitment between the author and the story, which develops itself in the limits of the autobiography, although it does not observe the norms of the autobiographical genre. Under those circumstances, it is necessary either to coin a new term (―homobiographic‖, for instance) to refer to the degree of authorial presence in the novel or to resort to a recent label created by Alberca: ―fantastic autobiofiction‖.