In both texts, pain is not merely shown to be relational but is made into the very medium of relation. And in distinct but related ways, the Poemas humanosand Jamás el fuego nunca seek to undo this sealing-off, to cross the boundary that would separate the body in pain from others said not to be suffering. In keeping with the logic of both texts, I call these thwarting, forestalling forces “anaesthetizing.” For “anaesthesia, as men call it,” in Vallejo and something called “ether” in Eltit index a collective sealing-off of sensibilities.
Offering a new account of Eltit’s return to Vallejo, I attend to the authors’ shared engagements with the forces that, across centuries, thwart political possibilities and dampen collective energies. This essay reads César Vallejo’s Poemas humanos alongside Diamela Eltit’s novel Jamás el fuego nunca.
I argue, furthermore, that by recurring to the figure of the specter as an allegory of the forcefully disappeared, Eltit is creating a spectral ontology of the remains in order to interpellate the world of the living with regard to the repressed past.Anaesthesia, Ethics, Cesar Vallejo, Diamela Eltit Abstract In this article, I study Diamela Eltit's novel Jamás el fuego nunca (2008) and argue that her work questions the place of unidentifiable and unlocalizable remains have within the rhetorics of mourning in a post-dictatorial context. The search for the disappeared body has turned towards forensic anthropology in order to assist with the identification of remains and the causes of death. It has been four decades since the military coup d'état in Chile however, legal and criminal questions regarding the disappeared bodies of Pinochet's regime are still unanswered, not only because the perpetrators remain unpunished, hence, the question of the viability of justice and the proper closure of national trauma are still in suspense, but also because the conditions of death and disappearance are not clear.
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