Roberto Bolano's "By Night in Chile" Finale, Chirot Project & Real Chilean Literary Salon Above Torture Cellar That Inspired Bloan Scene
Following 9/11/2001, the immense shifts in the American uses of language, imagery, attitudes, and the ongoing hacking away of the Constitution appeared to me as an incredible acceleration of the reactionary politics and culture that began with President Ronald Reagan's "New Morning (or 'Mourning') in America."
What is even more eerie than the swiftness of events and the changes they make possible, is how quickly a society is swept up into this "new world," and how easily it is for large segments of the population to accommodate themselves to situations and language which previously they would have found appalling.
Yet that accommodation is prepared for ahead of time, in ways which are at once noticed and overlooked at the time, and once the long string of "small" events turns into an avalanche sweeping everything in its path out of the way, one is more aware then ever of how little "resistance" at all had been prepared. In fact, it is as though the smooth path for the avalanche to gather full speed had been under steady construction all the time, often claiming to be a "new form of resistance" as it smoothed away the frictions in the gleaming path.
I began trying to find ways to express the inchoate swirling masses of fragments and speeds creating the new corporate-State fascism that 9/11 made possible to justify in the name of Security. Increasingly, the US was becoming an alien place, in which words and images take on the meaning of their opposites. This is the formulation found in George Orwell's 1984 with regards to language: that "Newspeak" makes possible such equivalences as War=Peace, Freedom=Slavery, Love=Hate. In a bizarre way, one finds in the "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" "logo" of a movement in writing yet another example of the creation of a system of equivalences, in which "meaning" and "content" are removed as obstacles to the "radical" Form. This allows for claims to be made for a "resistance" in language and writing which is a "Newspeak" "double talk" in which "resistance" ="reflection," with "reflection" not as "critique," but as a mirroring of what it claims to be its opposite, the language of the State.
In an earlier work, ANIMAL FARM, Orwell had examined how the equivalences which begin as "equality" make possible and reveal in time the previously concealed new concept that while "all animal are are equal," "some are more equal than others."
This concept of there being within "equality" the actual existence of groups who are "more equal than others," allows for actions by these elite groups and individuals to be carried out above and beyond the Laws which all others are supposed to be ruled by.
That this exceptionalism is a "proof and demonstration" of "Freedom," means that the Free can decree what is in fact Slavery for others. However, since that Slavery is decreed by those who are "Free," it is taken to mean that it is not Slavery at all that is being imposed, but indeed, a new form of "Freedom."
By creating an appearance of "resistance in language," it becomes openly possible to mirror the State and its actions while being "above criticism" as a "critique," because the approach in language "appears" to be "oppositional" simply by substituting antonyms for synonyms. That this is the same method used by Orwell's "Newspeak," is. of course denied. For how could it be so, when on is continually instructed and assured that the languages of State and Poetry are vehemently defined as "separate" in terms of Form.
The emphasis on Form creates the illusion that one's Poetry and its poets, writers, are separated from the "meanings" and "contents" of the context which they inhabit. By virtue of this Formal Exceptionalism, oneself and Poetry may "rise above the fray," and so present a "superior form of resistance," than the derided, "outmoded" ones of public protests, "protest poetry," and "street actions."
I was working on these ideas for some time, always hoping to find somewhere some examples of how to set about examining and articulating them in writings as well as RubBEings and Visual Poetries of various street found kinds, when a painter friend in Vermont sent me a copy of Roberto Bolano's novella Distant Star, which had just appeared in translation in an American edition.
This book was both a revelation and a recognition of ways in which to write of of post 9/11 USA, by linking it with Bolano's post 9/11/73, itself a an event engineered and prepared for by the US, the CIA and, as I found some years later, the Chicago School Economics of Friedman's "Shock Doctrine" as brilliantly detailed in Naomi Klein's book by that name.
In Bolano's Distant Star and By Night in Chile, a nation's Poetry is presented as another way of creating an accommodation with the Fascist State. The concept that via Form one may separate writing from the State in such a society makes possible the co-existence of torture, secret prisons, disappearances, mass murders, censorships and the support of similar regimes routine.
To state the obvious and "critique" the situation is to be exposed as a "nonbeliever" in the Forms by which the "separations" in Form are used to in effect make "Invisible" the "separations" in actuality. In order to maintain the "equivalences" which conceal that "some are more equal than others," it is necessary to maintain "separations" which literally Wall in or out anything that would "dirty" the appearances which are allowed to be Visible.
In Distant Star, the aviator-poet Carlos Weider creates the "New Chilean Poetry" as a series of "stages" of "development," leading from Sky Writing to the private exhibition of a room whose walls and ceiling are covered by the arrangement of hundreds of Polaroids of tortured, mutilated bodies set against eerily similar backgrounds, arranged in grotesque mannequin poses,with some of the victims seeming to be, against all odds, still barely living. Among these the novella's narrator reports that there are a great number of the students and young poets who have recently disappeared from their usual haunts.
Weider's Atrocity Exhibition proves too extreme for even the Pinochet military officers to stomach, and Weider is forced to go "underground," his work consigned to appearing in the clandestine publications of Bolanos book of Borgesian "Imaginary Beings," "Nazi Literatures of the Americas." (Distant Star is an enlargement of the final "chapter" in this recently translated volume.)
Weider's "problem" is that he "states the obvious" in presenting the condoned tortures, disappearances, sky writings of Opus Dei slogans, plagiarized poetry presented as "original," all of which "make Visible" as a " triumphal" State of the Art Art of the State all those things which the State which to keep "disappeared' into the realms of the "Secret" and the "Invisibility" which are its foundations.
These Foundations which Poetry is to separate itself from though declaiming and dancing on the floors which are the ceilings of the Foundation, create the truly grisly final scenes in By Night in Chile, in which Emily Dickinson's idea that "Nature is a Haunted House, and Art a House which tries to be Haunted," is put severely to the test.
In By Night in Chile, the Opus Dei slogans of Weider's sky written "New Chilean Poetry" forced to go "underground," are "recalled" in the Opus Dei narrator's depictions of that "underground" as the secret Foundations of Official Chilean Poetry.
The Extreme Experimental aspects of Weider's "New Chilean Poetry" as the Secret Foundations of the officially sanctioned "avant-gardes" of Chilean Poetry in By Night in Chile are connected with the aid of an American married to a Chilean writer in whose house the "Hauntings" of Emily Dickinson's House take on another aspect entirely.
This American figure now works no longer for others and indirectly for the US, but directly for the US itself, and so 9/11 in Chile repeated as 9/11 in the US, presents scenes similar to those in Bolano's Chile-set works. Today, the "official" "avant" and "mainstream" American Poetry repeat the "separation" of the Literary Salon floor which is the ceiling of the "New Extreme Experimental American Poetry."
Writing of the protests against torture and the "Dirty War" in Algeria, Simone de Beauvoir noted that until one understands that torture, "the excesses of the Army," the violent enforcement of Occupations are not "separate" problems "unique to the current regime," but are instead the routine functioning of the entire system of that society, one is not capable of effecting any "change." The claims to "exceptionalisms" and "Formal separations," produce not a "distance from" the Foundations secreted away in the ground, but instead lead only to an ever accelerating increase in violence, Walls of separations, prisons, tortures, attacks,
and their accompaniments in censorships, bannings, blacklistings, surveillance, disinformation, propaganda and the Occupations aboard reflected in the increased force required to make the "Homeland Secure."
"The New Extreme Experimental American poetry" is my own "book of Imaginary beings"
in which the original Military and Security aspects of the term "avant-garde" are
rejoined with their Artistic and Poetic "separations." In the first avant-gardes of the 20th Century, this direct connection was hailed vociferously and enacted violently in "War, the world's hygiene" by the Italian futurists and attacked vociferously and violently by Dada, born of an anti-War fervor which extended to an anti-Art of a NO to the lies of an entire system capable of creating War.
A sign of the entropy of today's separations from the pro and anti War positions of Italian Futurism and Dada can be seen in the Formal and Aesthetic treatments of the manifestos of Marinetti and Tzara, the major PR specialists of the movements. As in effect Propagandists, it is a "sign of the times" that they are elevated to Canonical status at the expense of the great many other artists and aspects of both movements. In this way, separation enables the Aesthetic to be removed from the political and militant aspects which are at the heart of Italian Futurism and Dada.
This separation also enables the "exceptionalism" of Texts over that of the visual and aural aspects except as they are registered in "Formal Terms" reducible to "textualization." (Rather than the more complex and "dirty" "contextualization" One of the "advantages" of textualizing being that is a way of presenting, literally, a much "cleaner appearance on the page," than the "dirtiness" of the visuality and aural "Noise" which Italian Futurism and Dada worked with.)
In the "clean, Formal" textual "avants" today, one finds a similar "exceptionalism" in which "dirt" and "noise" need to be removed for the maintenance of smooth surfaces in which no "cracks" or "faults" are allowed to impede the steady rolling of that "progress" advertised by the PR of safely canonized "avant-gardes."
In order to maintain this "liberatory" canonicty, though, it is necessary to ignore events going on in which the removal of "dangerous texts," "dangerous thinkers," and "dangerous art" are becoming so routine as to be "almost unnoticed." In fact, just this year the distribution of an entire press--Pluto Press, one of the leading publishers in the English language of texts by a large number of the world's leading contemporary philosophers, economists, Leftist and Anarchist thinkers, Middle Eastern scholars, historians,theorists----has been stopped in the USA. Art exhibitions, theatrical and musical events have been closed down, Professors and teachers and students forced out of their institutions, and all of it given very little notice.
These "disappearances" are ignored in the major mainstream media, as it far more "exciting" to raise the fear levels by the focus on the disappearances of a very few almost all Caucasian girls and young women. This new form of "terrorism" is examined with a barely contained voyeurism in which the victims are put on display in a hysteria-amped form of "runway" show turned into "runaway" amplifications of the most trivial details, fueling endless speculations in order to raise the value" of the ratings.
The creation of "exceptional" cases reinforces the sense of "exceptional dangers" which lie everywhere in wait. The underlying appeal is to ever more vigilance, ever more fear, and ever more hatred of the "terrorists" who "stalk the streets and chat rooms." To underline the "terror" of the criminals who walk among us, an endless stream of fictional and "real life" prison shows creates the voyeurism of making of each viewer an eye of the panopticon of Security and Surveillance. Close-up examination of criminals, complete with interviews and case histories, becomes a form of training for the country with the world's largest prison population.
At the same time, the State and Military and Private Contractors forbid with increasing interference and force the depiction of any scenes of the violence and abductions, rapes, horrors of War.
The proliferation of the voyeurisms at home, in which the public may become the spectator of each stage of the hunting down, capture, interrogation and prison existences of ever more persons, is a fertile training ground for the revival of the WW2 programs for Homeland Surveillance by "ordinary citizens" and trained firemen, police officers and security guards in the "detection" of "suspicious persons" who may just turn out to be "terrorists in a sleep cell," or the quiet planner of the next 9/11. These programs are beginning to be installed in various cities, with an eye how better too organize and train them. Soon enough "citizens security" will be turning in all manner of persons who have incurred their dislike, just as bounty hunters in Afghanistan turned in their personal "enemies" to the Americans as "enemy combattants," "Al Queda members" and "terrorists."
Soldiers and Intelligence officers have reported using effectively methods for capturing "suspicious Iraqis" that they have learned from various fictional TV shows watched avidly by the Occupying Forces in their air conditioned quarters.
This blurring of distinctions between the fictional and the "real"--pushed to even further linguistic extremes by the new Tru network, which proclaims itself to be "Not Reality. Actuality"--helps to generate the possibility of ever more forgeries being used in order to create wars, as was done by suing the "Italian letter" and "information" of "Curveball" to invade Iraq.
As the "Creation of Reality" so beloved by Karl Rove supercedes the "reporting of reality," the Invisibilities of things NOT THERE becomes far more of a threat than the Visiblity of THINGS WHICH ARE THERE.
And at the same time, the Visibility of things "seen as threats," needs to be physically disappeared, as with Pluto Press.
The Non-WMDs of Iraq, the Non found Nuclear Program of Iran, all these are causes for War, yet once War is in ful swing, these places with their events, deaths, tortures, War Crimes, become forbidden to be shown, vanish, disappear into those Invisiblities on the other side of Walls Virtual and Concrete.
On his recent International Travels, Senator Obama made two great scenes of appearing at examples of Walls. One was his prolonged appearance at the Wailing Wall, and the other his speech in Berlin, in which he spoke vividly of the no longer existing, invisible Berlin Wall and its Fall as a sign of the other walls to come down around the world.
Since the United States and Israel are the two major Wall builders of the present, the Wailing Wall is shown to be an exception, and the now-gone Berlin Wall is "raised" as an example of the "bad Walls" which need to be removed, so that "good Walls" may remain standing.
While offering a rhetoric of Unity without Walls, the Senator also emphasized the message of exceptionalisms.
By maintaining exceptions while propounding Unity, one is able to "justify" how it is that "some are more equal than others," and some may be "above the laws" which are supposed to be "common to all."
The only way to maintain these exceptions is by a forceful separation both physically and in what is allowed as language and images to present the Visible at the expense of the Invisible, the Hidden in Plain Site/Sight/Cite which is the Foundation of the House in which on one floor some dance and declaim poetry, while just below, others are tortured, forced to speak in what Dmitry Tsevtkov, the Russian artist, states as "Language is a fascism, not because it censors, but because it forces to speak."
In a similar way, media surveillance and voyeurism make possible a forcing to speak, to be seen, as a form of "infotainment" in which the citizenry is not only a spectator, but has the possibility of becoming an "agent" capable of "reporting suspicious persons," who may disappear from view entirely, or become hyper-visible in the ongoing spectacle.
In terms of language, the "forcing to speak" begins with the scanning of texts for "suspicious words" and "suspicious Forms." In effect, what is required is a conformity to a narrow range of accepted and approved standards, and beyond that, if none of the "flag words" or "Forms" have appeared, anything is allowed to be presented. In effect, a continual weeding out of words, ideas, forms, is taking place, so that an increase in conformity produces a "safety in numbers." The "growth" of "movements and groups, the increase in the proliferation and acceptance of their codes and signs, indicates indeed that these are indeed "safe," and not only that, "good for one." The coupling of the ethical to the aesthetic produces in turn a kind of "ethnic cleansing" of ideas, forms, words, so that "exceptionalisms" may become in fact "hegemonic." A narrow range of ideas, words, Forms, may become in this way perceived as very "open," simply because "the competition" has been entirely or nearly, removed.
In Bolano's Distant Star and By Night in Chile, what is important is that the darker sides of these actions and terms becomes "seperated" from the Public Face of Power and Poetry. This results, ironically, in the Military Fascists' banishing of the "too extreme" Carlos Weider, the most fervent in every respect of the "New Chilean Poets," who is also, as an aviator, a National hero. What is demanded is not the plagiarized, Aerial and Photographic expression of a "New Actuality," but on the contrary, the quiet, Institutional figure of the well respected critic-Priest, a combination of the Sacred and the Secular whose union is found in the criticism which perpetuates the National Poetic Language.
As a hearer of Confessions, this figure cannot reveal any secrets to which he becomes a party, which includes the knowledge "too late," of those other confessions being obtained by torture.
It is this figure whose Blessing and assistance is needed by the Generals in order to preserve an appearance of "civility and civilization," and the orderly progression of Chilean Poetry into its Future.
In the US today, the figure of Institutional Poets fits the role of Bolano's Priest-Critic, producing the sense of an "avant" progressive American poetry which at the same time presents no obstacle to the State, and underscores the continuing role of the US as "Number One" in the production of "avants" whose "resistance" is "recognized" and "applauded" by the Institutions which at the same time are disappearing various individuals, texts, art exhibits, film screenings, musical events and entire Presses and methods of thinking and creating deemed "insupportable," by the very persons in charge of insupportable tortures, Occupations, mass murders, collective punishments and the steady flow of ever more refugees, prisoners, starvations, drugs and diseases.
from the Dinges Archives of OPERATION CONDOR
CONDOR List from prison
CONDOR Clandestine Magazine
9/11 1973: Bombing of Presidential Palace, CHILE--Pinochet Coup backed by USA--
- Posted on Sunday, August 3, 2008
Downstairs from her glittering Chilean salon, there was a torture chamber
Helen Hughes / MCT
Writer Pia Barros tells about the literary meetings in the home of U.S. citizen Michael Townley and his Chilean wife Mariana Callejas who was indicted in the death by car bombing of General Carlos Prats and Mrs. Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974. | View larger image
By Jack Chang | McClatchy Newspapers
SANTIAGO, Chile — During the darkest years of this country's military dictatorship, Mariana Callejas was an up-and-coming writer and the hostess of the era's most glamorous literary salon.
Chile's leading authors trekked up to Callejas' hillside mansion every Thursday night to talk literature, have a few drinks and sometimes dance until the next morning. The salon offered a respite from the fear and violence of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's Chile, in which nearly 3,200 dissidents died or disappeared at the hands of government agents.
Writer Carlos Iturra, who attended the meetings, said in an e-mail that he'd always remember those nights for "the good writers who were formed there" amid the "dances, drinks, laughs and debates."
Horror lay just below the glittering surface, however, as it often did during the 1973-90 military dictatorship.
Callejas was more than just a writer; she was an agent of the DINA, Chile's dreaded National Intelligence Directorate. Her then-husband, U.S. citizen Michael Townley, one of the U.S.-backed Pinochet regime's chief assassins, later was convicted of setting off the 1976 car bomb that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington.
As the literati danced and debated upstairs, Chilean intelligence officers were downstairs torturing dissidents and manufacturing the toxic nerve agent sarin in a secret laboratory.
That hidden history was exposed June 30 when a Chilean judge sentenced Callejas to two 10-year prison sentences for her role in one of Townley's most notorious crimes, a 1974 car bomb attack that killed former Chilean army chief Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife, Sophie Cuthbert, in Argentina. The same judge sentenced Chile's former intelligence chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, to two life sentences for masterminding the attack.
That landmark sentence, the harshest ever meted out to former officials of the Pinochet regime, has spurred writers in Chile to recall the surreal history of the era and Callejas' famous Thursday soirees.
"The story of Mariana Callejas is a novel, or at least a long story," said Enrique Lafourcade, one of Chile's best-known writers and a frequent guest at the salons, which ran from 1974 to 1978. Like the other writers, Lafourcade said he knew nothing about Callejas' secret life.
"Mariana was involved in many things," he said. "She wanted to help writers, but she was also involved in the anti-communist fight because of her love for Michael."
Callejas and Townley eventually divorced.
She's out on bail while she appeals her conviction.
She testified to court officials that she'd played no part in the Prats and Cuthbert murders. Townley has said, however, that Callejas joined him on the mission and even tried unsuccessfully to detonate the radio-controlled explosives that killed the couple.
Under U.S. pressure, the Pinochet regime expelled Townley to the United States in 1978. He served five years in prison for the Letelier murders, participated in a witness protection program and recently was released, said journalist John Dinges, who's written extensively about the history of the Pinochet regime.
"I definitely think Callejas was excited by all this, and it was a big adventure for her," Dinges said. "She was entirely without scruples. She didn't seem to do it for ideological reasons."
Callejas appears to have drawn inspiration from her dark history for her 1981 short story collection, "The Long Night," which is filled with tales of assassination missions, political prisoners languishing in jails and a bomb attack that bears a striking resemblance to the Prats murder.
In an interview last month with the Chilean magazine Ercilla, Callejas remembered those years as "marvelous, intense, a lot of passion for literature," but she refused to comment on the charges against her. She continued to write well after her marriage with Townley ended, and she published a book of short stories last year.
"Although for years, people have woven many myths about the supposed sinister aspect of the salon and the house, the myths come from those who know neither one nor the other," Callejas said to Ercilla. "Worse still, they don't know anything about me."
Chilean writer Pia Barros, however, said that before one salon meeting she bumped into evidence that something more than short stories was being created at the Callejas mansion.
Walking up to the house one night, Barros said, she mistakenly opened an outside door and found a hidden room filled with cots, laboratory equipment and camouflage fabric.
"I went up to the salon and didn't say a word," Barros said. "We left after half an hour and we never went back. We also never told anybody what we had seen."
Callejas' salon has lived on in Chilean literature. Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano ended his celebrated novel "By Night in Chile" with an account of the salon and the story of Callejas and Townley.</p>
Bolano imagined the Callejas character, years later, wandering around the empty mansion, shunned by her friends and abandoned by her American husband.
"The house already didn&amp;#39;t seem the same: All its splendor, a nocturnal and unpunished splendor, had disappeared," Bolano wrote. "Now there was only a house that was too big."
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McClatchy Newspapers 2008
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