The Position of the Written Word | An Interview with Diamela Eltit
Interviews
By Daniel Hahn
Diamela Eltit is one of Chile’s most highly respected and critically acclaimed writers. She is the winner of countless prizes, domestically and internationally, both for individual books and for her work as a whole. But, despite several of these titles having been translated into English, she remains largely unknown in the Anglosphere. The latest attempt to remedy that regrettable situation is Never Did the Fire, which Charco Press has just published in my translation.
Never Did the Fire is narrated by a woman who is in a room with a man, a man with whom she shares an active militant past and a painful, disappointed present. It is a political book—but not only in its subject matter—and sometimes a challenging one. Certainly it was so for its translator, as I needed to grapple not only with some slippery meanings but also the author’s often complex style. But it was incredibly rewarding too, as the novel features multiple, subtly related layers, startling imagery, and stunning prose. Diamela and I touched on some of these aspects in the email exchange we had over the last couple of weeks.
Daniel Hahn: Never Did the Fire is a novel about political militants. Although you’ve never been a militant yourself, your writing itself always feels like a political act. In what way do you use writing to be subversive?
Diamela Eltit: I think all writing has political aspects. Even if somebody claims that a text sits outside that classification, the very statement is a political one. I say this because there is a “position” of the written word, with adherences to forms, social spaces, narrative lines, and affiliations. Personally speaking, the thing that matters most to me is where I position myself in my work on literature, subverting those consensuses that are most normalized by the major publishing projects, and working on borders or edges that carry risks in relation to overly centrist agreements. From my perspective, the point is not simply to approach political themes but to ask how the writing itself works to generate the politics of the approach.
DH: This relates to something I’ve heard you say before about wanting to use language to do new things. How often do these things, the things language is capable of, surprise you when you’re writing? And is it difficult while writing to resist the temptation to fall into the ordinary? Cliché and formula have a strong gravitational attraction, I think.
DE: One of the problems (among many) that challenges literature is that pedagogies of writing get created: forms that guarantee results, resorting to premade images that allow for a “good” understanding of the text, prioritizing a plotline, or taking refuge in total transparency. In my own case, I free the text from any pedagogical obligations or guidelines or trends. What matters to me is the flow, the unexpected. In the novels I’ve written, there are always sections (a few pages) that appear which I simply hadn’t anticipated, images that just showed up, nuances that might jeopardize the coherence of the narrative. I think the writing itself even in the act of writing can be liberating as it is liberated.
DH: Ah that will make sense to anybody who’s read the book. It reminds me of our conversation with Julián Fuks the other day, where we discussed his need to control every aspect of his writing—permitting this “flow” you describe feels very different. It means allowing for, as you say, the appearance of “the unexpected.” That feels high-risk! Surely some things that appear unexpectedly do not belong in your book. Or do you always trust the unconscious things? Do you always trust your instinct?
DE: The truth is, the novels that I’ve set out to write have always left space for autonomy. What I mean is that writing inspires writing, images construct images, and words seek out their space on the page. I do of course revise what I have written, but there are elemental areas that surprise me because even I had not anticipated them, even if they might be consistent with the throughline of the text. Well, I don’t know how else to explain it.
DH: For a translator, I think the most difficult thing to handle is ambiguity, and I feel your writing plays with it all the time. Many writers, I think, are not very comfortable with doubt, but you certainly seem to be.
DE: I do find ambiguity interesting because it opens up a space of uncertainty, of doubts, breaking up the univocity of a single version. I’m still thinking about fiction as a route, a way of accessing reality—and if we’re thinking about reality, we’re well aware of how quickly ambiguity can get about. Everything is a particular way. But it’s also another way without there necessarily having been a lie but merely other alternatives. Perhaps it’s problematic, but it’s a risk worth taking.
DH: That makes perfect sense as a writer’s opinion, but I wonder how you feel about the experience for a reader (if that concerns you at all). Because what you’re describing makes the reading feel unstable, unsettled. In Never Did the Fire, especially, the reader is never on very solid ground.
DE: To tell the truth, Daniel, as a reader, I do pay close attention to some texts that might be considered unstable, accepting the risk. You might maintain that Don Quixote is unstable. I mean, as a construction in which the narrator doesn’t know the exact name of his main character and madness shifts from the protagonist to the social apparatus in a way that’s dizzying.
DH: It might seem a paradox, alongside our talk of doubt and instability, but there’s also—and this is one of the most striking things about your work—an incredible concreteness, an extreme human physicality to what the reader experiences in this book. It’s mostly just two unhappy people in a small bed. It’s all discomfort, and crowding, and elbows and friction and knees and claustrophobia and joints aching. And other parts of the book give us startlingly clear pictures of elderly bodies in collapse, the physical detail of a person being punched or being shot, the blood on the road after a car crash. It’s intensely physical.
DE: Yes, now that I come to think about it, and based on what you have pointed out, there is an area of material violence. You’re right: the bed, the old people, the car crash, the robbery.
DH: Can I digress for a moment, to touch on the translation process itself? One of the strangest aspects of the process was not just inherent in the book itself, but the fact that I was keeping a public diary throughout. You were very kind to allow me to do this. (Talk about relinquishing control!) But I wonder if it was strange—or uncomfortable?—watching the translation happening so visibly, with such public scrutiny of every moment of the novel.
DE: Daniel, the truth is, I trusted Charco Press immediately, and you as translator, but this process of making the work visible did still surprise me. It was also, of course, an honor for the novel. The public transfer of languages in the construction of a text seemed interesting and productive. In addition to the poetics it implies, you were translating a minority writer. That excited me and still does. You might think of it as a kind of political act or, rather, the uniting of poetics and literary politics.
DH: While we’re back on politics, then . . . The novel is ten years old, and it was written at a time when much of the world, including Chile (where you are) and the U.K. (where I am), occupied a totally different political moment relative to our current circumstances. Does this particular political situation in which you’re living change how you think about writing? In bad times, do you ever question the power and purpose of literature?
DE: Just now, we have a government under President Gabriel Boric—a government that has its origins broadly in student struggle, and where the women involved are active feminists. This is a generation that recognises identities and promotes a territory that is more egalitarian in the face of the ferocity of neoliberalism. The problem lies in the fact that it has no majority in Congress, so redistribution will be the most difficult issue that it will have to tackle. We have a social horizon marked by racism and nationalism faced with migrations, growing drug trafficking, a difficulty of understanding between the State and indigenous peoples. We already know that we’re going through a complicated time, that the concentration of wealth and its power favors the right and even the far-right. That there are latent forces threatening not just Chile but the world, if we just think of Ukraine. This convulsion might mean that neoliberalism is falling in slow motion. (I’m not referring to capitalism but to this particular aspect.) But the fall of neoliberalism might take years upon years. Literature, as in all periods, will enter these issues convulsing us.
DH: Thank you. That’s a thought-provoking response. But I’m curious about the last sentence, which you just dropped in briefly at the end, with great certainty, as if the presence of literature in all this stuff is somehow inevitable. But why is that inevitable? What would we lose if literature did not, as you say, “enter these issues convulsing us”?
DE: Really I think that literature, from the point of view of fiction, does break in to deal with reality. I don’t think there’s any moment in history that is outside the various fictions that pass through literary spaces, of course, and from a variety of positions of the written word. Even what is understood as science fiction, or post-apocalyptic, dystopian texts that too is rooted in a reality exposing the dilemmas that define the convulsions that pass through different periods.
DH: That sounds somehow . . . positive? Never Did the Fire shows us the failure of a political movement. It shows defeat; it shows loss. It is absolutely not optimistic. But part of me feels like writing a novel about something is inherently hopeful. Maybe that’s just my being naïve?
DE: No, it’s not naïve, because memory functions as a defense against political crimes. It recalls massacres of defenseless bodies, it restores the militarization of the world and its means of extermination. The survivor or survivors are the witnesses, the tellers, the victims who speak.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with over eighty books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. He is a former chair of the Society of Authors and is presently on the board of a number of organisations that deal with literature, literacy, translation and free expression. In 2021 Daniel was made an OBE for his services to literature.
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