2 - Por la patria: Mother, Family and Nation

Summary

Todas íbamos a ser reinas,

De cuatro reinos sobre el mar:

Rosalía con Efigenia

Y Lucila con Soledad.

Gabriela Mistral, ‘Todas íbamos a ser reinas’

The Violence of the Oedipal Narrative

Eltit was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature in 1985 to complete her second novel, Por la patria (1986), the first female author in Chile to have been accorded this prestigious prize. Eltit concedes that Por la patria is her most marginal novel if judged in terms of its subdued critical reception and sparse critical readings to date. However, it is this novel, she states, which is the most meaningful to her, as an author: ‘si tuviera que decir que soy escritora es porque escribí ese libro’.

While employing staple narrative strategies associated with the boom writers, such as a shifting narrative voice and time frame, Eltit acknowledges the profoundly fractured structure of her novel, which she links to the violent death of her father in 1983. She has spoken publicly of how her subsequent grief dramatically affected the structure of her novel: ‘la escritura que realizaba se contaminó por la cercanía del duelo, afectando mi sintaxis en grandes extremos y llegué a escribir la novela más límite que he producido hasta ahora’. This syntactical rupture was a trigger for unleashing a torrent of language that Eltit found hard to restrain, but which allowed her to identify what she describes as ‘la memoria de mi origen y desde allí, las diversas memorias que me habitaban en estado larvario’. The title of the novel, she states, is a coded epitaph to her father and, by extension, an epitaph of solidarity to all those killed or disappeared in Chile through the systematic violence of the military. Por la patria, a phrase that echoes the vow taken by soldiers to defend their homeland, and which was ominously repeated by the Chilean military as a justification for their repressive actions, becomes a titular dedication embedded in irony. The loaded implications of the term ‘patria’ and the destructive operations of those who act in its name are mercilessly exploded by Eltit in a novel whose tone leans more towards that of an elegy for her country (and father/fatherland) than a eulogy.