This article by Adriana Valdés is a continuation of “Escritura y silenciamiento” (Writing and Silencing) published in 1977 in Revista Mensaje, a text that would have been unthinkable at the height of the repression and censorship of the dictatorship (1973–90). This text therefore provides a fragmentary outline of the material produced between 1977 and 1990. The author attempts to explain the reasons for “her writing” based on the impossibility of fully describing a scene, much less offering a broad analysis beyond what had already been said (Roser Bru, Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe, Diego Maquieira, Enrique Lihn, and José Donoso). The text nonetheless includes sharp criticisms of works and writings, citing analogies to dictatorial speeches on the subject of their meanings. Valdés discusses the ways in which literature and works of art were circulated; at that time books were scarce, with short print runs and limited circulation, and were surreptitiously passed from one person to another. As regards the visual arts, the author notes that criticism was difficult, both because of the constraints imposed by censorship and because the cryptic language artists were forced to use made their works hard to read. She stresses the efforts that were made to produce art that used symbolism that could be understood at various levels, thus granting them wider circulation (in exhibition and urban spaces, galleries, competitions, and so on). Paradigmatic examples of this sort of strategy include Bru (who used images of violence or loss without alluding directly to the dictatorship) and Leppe (who violently reworked his material in an allegorical reference to the authoritarian nature of the regime).
