Performing Disappearance: Heaven and Sky in Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita

Abstract

On June 2, 1982, Raúl Zurita’s verses fly over New York. The discursive lines of “La vida nueva” (The new life) intersect the skyline of a smoggy city, hidden under a dense crowd of bodies and buildings. New York is then an optical lab where the laws of perspective meet things “which from afar seem gigantic and preposterous,”1 according to the impression that García Lorca wrote in a letter to Melchor Fernández Almagro. The metropolis has not yet announced the millenarian picture that two columns of black smoke will draw on September 11, 2001, with disturbing symmetry. On June 2, 1982, the smoke produced by five aircrafts projects 15 verses at a height of 4,500 feet. Zurita’s feat is summarized in that algorithm. His poem transforms the skyline of New York into a museum without boundaries, and turns its citizens into tourists in their own city: they are invited to visit the sidereal tableaux of a particular art gallery. However, this calligraphic exercise transcends its material representation. The author relates the fleeting gesture of writing in the air to the desire for eternity and permanence. The lyrical choreography culminates with the photographs of the literary process made by the artist Juan Downey, and the inclusion of “La vida nueva” in the book Anteparaíso (Anteparadise, 1982).