When I first started reading and working on Lumpérica I felt that I was never going to be able to understand anything about it. This was some eight years ago. Today, so many readings after, I have things to say about it. But perhaps the most important thing is the fact that this novel, still eight years later, teaches me and forces me to constantly learn more and more. I must say that reading this novel I have come to understand Merleau-Ponty's words when he referred to "labor" of a painter, "you do not see the painting. You see according to the painting." To read Lumpérica is to learn to read according to it, and in that sense, it is to learn to perceive and to be conscious of mental and emotional processes for which we do not have access unless it is by reading a language like the one this novel proposes.I am not going to start with readings about the novel however. I am going to start in the inverse direction as how I started working with this novel. I will start, then, by giving information about Chile that will be able to help us understand the novel when we read it. After that, I will give some of the textual analysis that I have done in the last four years and show the extreme connection between the social, political and cultural structures of the time and the syntaxes of her writing.
There are many terms that I will be using in this dissertation which are not completely explained. My intention is to have the reader slowly enter into what those words mean and how I am using them so that the reader would be able to sense all the different layers of meaning and signification that many of those terms convey. In this, I am just trying to find a method that would best represent the work of Diamela Eltit. I am working under the desire to learn as much as possible from this kind of writing and I consider that in order to maintain that learning process and to pay tribute to this work I ought to find a form of writing that can account to the innumerable unstable meaning and images that it generates.