Content area
Full Text
At a reading at Boston College in 2016, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita (1950-) described the enterprise of poetry in the following manner: "poetry is the hope for that which has no hope, the possibility of that which has no possibility, the love for that which has no love."1 During his long career as a poet and artist- which shows no signs of slowing down, despite the fact that he is suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease-Zurita has published dozens of books of poetry and has received numerous international awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship (1984), Chile's National Literary Prize (2000), Cuba's José Lezama Lima Prize (2006), the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda (2016), the José Donoso Literary Prize (2017), as well as the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Reina Sofia (2020), among many others. Zurita's extensive body of work explores the Chilean landscapes of the desert, mountains, sea, and sky, the violent repression of Pinochet's dictatorship, as well as the tension between vision and blindness. The link between vision, (not) seeing, and violence is particularly salient in Zurita's first book, Purgatorio (1979), and reveals a complex exploration of mystical, phenomenological, and scientific inquiries in a highly original book of poetic and visual texts. In this article, I propose to interrogate the Bataillean "sovereign closure of the eyes" that Zurita's text embodies, especially in the context of the mixed-media electroencephalograms with which Purgatorio finalizes its experimental textuality. What results is a different understanding of the conditions of possibility of poetic vision in Zurita's hermetic literary project.
Envisioning Violence under Dictatorship: Purgatorio and the Subject in Crisis
Born in Santiago, Raúl Zurita was trained as an engineer in Valparaíso and married poet Juan Luis Martinez's sister Miriam at the young age of twenty.2 The two poets would write their groundbreaking neo-avant-garde works together in the early 70s, sharing a typewriter and literary inspiration.3 On the morning of Pinochet's September 11, 1973 coup, Zurita was imprisoned and tortured in the Playa Ancha stadium and subsequently on the freighter Maipo, where he was brutally beaten.4 Following the horror of the coup and its early years of brutal repression, Zurita returned to Santiago, where he was part of a circle of intellectuals and artists at the University of Chile who read deeply...