VOY & VUELVO. THE POET AND HIS CROSS

Abstract

2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the publishing of the work of Nicanor Parra Sermones y Prédicas del Cristo del Elqui (1977). The following essay analyses this work, consummation of high-modernism poetry, evoking, in chronicle style, the historic city in which it was generated and released: a city of Santiago halfway between the Virgin of the San Cristóbal hill and the Entel tower. Forty years of distance between that vanished urban landscape
and us. Meanwhile, between the already agonic “literate city” of that time, in the shade of the dictatorship, and the present shining city, “leader in connectivity”, the hegemony of exchange-value saturates every space of visibility and use-value (the private and singular history of bodies and objects) is retired forever from circulation. In 2014, on the occasion of celebrating the hundredth birthday of the poet, a huge wooden finger crucifix was installed in the main hall of the Biblioteca Nicanor Parra of the UDP. In the next analysis, this brand-new vestige of the Voy & Vuelvo montage that hangs to this day, functions as a symptom of the post-historic Santiago, whose most conspicuous monument is the gleaming Costanera Center tower while the Entel tower becomes its most important modern relic.