The Review of Contemporary Fiction

E. Luminata by Diamela Eltit
Jeffrey DeShell

Diamela Eltit. E. Luminata. Trans. and Afterword by Ronald Christ, with Gene Bell-Villada, Helen Lane, and Catalina Parra. Lumen, Inc., 1997. 234 pp. Paper: $15.00.

E. Luminata is an active unworking, a vigorous defying of psychological characterization, chronological story, unequivocal occurrences, and limiting or limited signification. It immediately brings to mind Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day and Beckett’s The Lost Ones, but refuses the coherence and presence of these equally tenebrous texts. This active unworking makes any sort of metatextual comment, let alone interpretation, difficult: to summarize what “happens” in the novel’s ten chapters (just over two hundred pages)—a woman in a gray dress stands looking at a neon sign in the middle of a deserted plaza one night in Santiago—is to say next to nothing. The text agrees to, indeed requires, interrogation and interpretation, while simultaneously refusing and escaping such inquiry.
It is this very act of resisting that the text both “is about” and “is.” Eltit sees complicity between critical interpretation and political totalitarianism. She writes, “I am interested in . . . cracking the monolith of completed stories,” and is attracted by “the rebellious circulation of strategic fragments oppressed by official cultures.” To Eltit, writing is an “act of liberating meanings and of protecting against the ideologizing of literature.” In other words, it is literature’s resistance to unequivocal meaning, its refusal to be allegorized, its detachment from significance, that gives it its truly revolutionary power.
I did have some trouble with the novel: Eltit’s insistence on the substantiality of the book in her introduction—“An experiment may turn out or not; what I make is a work”—as well as Christ’s placing it within a tradition of great (instead of minor) literature in his afterword, belies the novel’s fugitive quality. I also had some problems making the connections the text requires: I must confess that I left the novel feeling it just eluded my grasp. Still, it is important to realize that E. Luminata is a text—in the most extreme sense of the word—and as such is profoundly contentious, discomforting, and unstable. [Jeffrey DeShell]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction E. Luminata by Diamela Eltit Jeffrey DeShell Diamela Eltit. E. Luminata. Trans. and Afterword by Ronald Christ, with Gene Bell-Villada, Helen Lane, and Catalina Parra. Lumen, Inc., 1997. 234 pp. Paper: $15.00. E. Luminata is an active unworking, a vigorous defying of psychological characterization, chronological story, unequivocal occurrences, and limiting or limited signification. It immediately brings to mind Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day and Beckett’s The Lost Ones, but refuses the coherence and presence of these equally tenebrous texts. This active unworking makes any sort of metatextual comment, let alone interpretation, difficult: to summarize what “happens” in the novel’s ten chapters (just over two hundred pages)—a woman in a gray dress stands looking at a neon sign in the middle of a deserted plaza one night in Santiago—is to say next to nothing. The text agrees to, indeed requires, interrogation and interpretation, while simultaneously refusing and escaping such inquiry. It is this very act of resisting that the text both “is about” and “is.” Eltit sees complicity between critical interpretation and political totalitarianism. She writes, “I am interested in . . . cracking the monolith of completed stories,” and is attracted by “the rebellious circulation of strategic fragments oppressed by official cultures.” To Eltit, writing is an “act of liberating meanings and of protecting against the ideologizing of literature.” In other words, it is literature’s resistance to unequivocal meaning, its refusal to be allegorized, its detachment from significance, that gives it its truly revolutionary power. I did have some trouble with the novel: Eltit’s insistence on the substantiality of the book in her introduction—“An experiment may turn out or not; what I make is a work”—as well as Christ’s placing it within a tradition of great (instead of minor) literature in his afterword, belies the novel’s fugitive quality. I also had some problems making the connections the text requires: I must confess that I left the novel feeling it just eluded my grasp. Still, it is important to realize that E. Luminata is a text—in the most extreme sense of the word—and as such is profoundly contentious, discomforting, and unstable. [Jeffrey DeShell]

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