Exploring Diamela Eltit’s Atelier: Towards a Theory of Narr-Action

In Eltit's work, the act of inhabiting the margins does not simply coincide with the dialectical and divisive play of center periphery. It is a gesture of evasion, of escape, of besieging the stability of certain discursive and narrative practices that emphasizes the liberated movement of meaning. It is an act that, above all, re-establishes the distance between author, work and reader, and abolishes the divisions. A writing of proximity and implication, in which the act of reading eludes any objectivity and activates and mobilizes literary practice. I will call this writing practice, this exercise in the word, which moves unpredictably between genres and forms and questions the regimes of meaning, “narr-action”.