LA ELECTRICIDAD DE LUMPÉRICA

Diamela Eltit’s 1983 debut novel uses artificial light as a metaphor for difficult times, but it also and more significantly has the pact between the State and the market pass through electrification. In other words, to illuminate is to see more in order to ignore what has been annihilated. Eltit founds her poetics on this paradox and undertakes one of the most radical and innovative literary projects in the Spanish language. This article connects Lumpérica with Fuerzas especiales, published thirty years later, and shows that Eltit’s first novel already established the tie between light and the terrible destruction of the material world and its butterflies.