Written in Exile

Chilean Fiction From 1973-Present

Ignacio Lopez-Calvo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317944270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

On September 11, 1973, Chile's General Pinochet led a quick and brutal military coup ousting the Allende government. Ignacio Lopez-Calvo argues that the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship and the subsequent imprisonment of any Allende sympathizers shaped Chilean narrative into two structural forms: liberationist narrative --cathartic, journalistic testimonies that provide models for revolutionary behavior against authoritarianism and demystifying narrative, which uses the events of 1973, as well as the colonial aspirations of European countries, as a "Paradise Lost" backdrop in which the characters of this type of fiction are able to create their non-political realities that become models of democratization.

1. Introduction

The historic transcendence of the radical changes carried out by Salvador Allende’s administration, along with the coup d’etat carried out by the Chilean Armed Forces under General Augusto Pinochet’s leadership on September 11, 1973, constitute a symbolic and almost mythical milestone in the conscience and collective subconscious of Latin American intellectuals. A great number of writers were exiled or self-exiled, thus creating the cycle of exile narratives analyzed in this book. The Chilean narrative in exile during the last third of the century is part of a broader body of literature aimed toward the encounter of Latin American identity with the inhabitant of the more industrialized countries, especially those of Europe and the United States. Intellectuals such as Leopoldo Zea, Samuel Ramos, Octavio Paz, or Gustavo Gutiérrez present a valid alternative discourse: that of Latin Americans who demand the right to be recognized as equals in relation to Europeans and North Americans. These theoretical works become an instrumental background for a large amount of contemporary Latin American literature. In several texts of the Chilean cycle of the narrative in exile there are echoes of Rodó’s Ariel¹ (1900), Fernández Retamar’s Calibán, apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América (1971), Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America; 1971), along with some essays that belong to all the disciplines of a cultural movement that emerges in the sixties in Latin America soon to be exported to the rest of the world: Latin American liberation thought. The Chilean novel, embedded in Latin American literature, presents a model to the world in an attempt to erase Eurocentrism, and thus gain access to a plural and multicultural twenty-first century, in which it would no longer be possible for a single axiological system to impose itself beyond all borders. It explores the problems in the Chilean culture in contrast to its European and North American counterparts. The ultimate goal is to raise awareness about the fundamental problems of contemporary societies, and those of the oppressed in particular. In a time when the entire world seems to have accepted the social, political and cultural European and North American models, Latin American writers and artists feel the need to preserve their cultural identity. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1990, Mexican writer Octavio Paz explained that, although he considered himself a descendant of Spanish masters such as Lope and Quevedo, Latin American literature had ceased to be a mere transatlantic reflection of European literature: “We are Europeans, yet we are not Europeans. What are we then? It is difficult to define what we are, but our works speak for us” (2). He announces the end of cultural dependence and the dawn of a new era in which Latin Americans finally feel a sense of belonging to their century: “For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French, and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home” (4).

Many authors, in fact, consider their cultural production to be one of the main defensive tools they can use to diminish the alienating effects of globalization. Literature in particular is a useful device to reflect the constant evolution of human nature. Far from the inferiority complex shown by authors such as Sarmiento or Alcides Arguedas, contemporary Latin American writers assert themselves against Eurocentrism, and try to have the same ontological status, while concurrently expressing their common preoccupation. Carlos Fuentes summarizes these values by assigning an important social role to literature: “La base para una cultura democrática en Iberoamérica es la continuidad cultural, de la cual tanto la democracia como la literatura son manifestaciones. Ambas crean la dimensión de la sociedad civil” (17).² Regardless of its effectiveness, for lack of other means, literature becomes the only subversive weapon available to the victims of repression and intellectuals, with which they alleviate their frustration and profound disappointment. Beginning in September of 1973, the writing process is used within the constraints of Chilean concentration camps and, later, in exile, as a humanizing window of expression that helps the individual recover his or her dignity and decency. In reality, it is the only available means of retribution or healing.

Post-structuralist literary critics, however, have revealed certain implicit mechanisms of oppression embedded in culture. Michel Foucault, for instance, associates the notions of discourse, including literature, with those of power and state. He considers discourse to be a defensive weapon used by power structures that changes according to its historic dimension. Power determines, therefore, what truth and knowledge are, who possesses them, what and where the truth can be said: “Formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analyzed, not in terms of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power” (Power 77). Similarly, John Beverley states in the introduction to his book Against Literature (1993): “The animus against literature that these essays carry is due above all to literature’s connection with the formation of the modern state and the conditions of maintaining and redefining capitalist hegemony, particularly in situations of colonial or neocolonial domination” (XIII). Latin American liberation thought, as well as the liberationist Chilean narrative in exile, represent alternative dialectic confrontations to this monopoly of history and truth. These narratives propose a counteranalysis of history that questions and censures official discourse. Both liberation theology and literature draw attention toward self-examination, injustice and hypocrisy. They are, indeed, counterhegemonic expressions, as they do not legitimize established power. Yet, even if subversive action is implicit in the very moment of the writing process, their goal was to reach or recuperate the sphere of power.³

Though numerous critical essays analyze the texts,⁴ and several critics⁵ are well aware of the intimate dialogue between Latin American narrative and liberation thought, to date there are not sufficient studies carried out to verbalize these connections. Several critics have stated the need for this kind of study. In 1986 Ariel Dorfman mentioned: “The history of a captive people blends with the evolution and apprenticeship of the speaker, who has grown and become politicized in jail. To the official, dominant Christianity of the chaplains, he opposes revolutionary Christianity, liberation theology, the multiplying of the loaves” (Some Write 145).⁶ Cedomil Goic follows the same line of thought two years later and warns about this important gap in Latin American studies. He insists that there is a compelling need to analyze the influence of Gustavo Gutiérrez and Paulo Freire in Latin American society and literature (31).⁷ In this context, John Beverley says:

Although, from a metropolitan perspective, postmodernism is identified with Latin American Boom narrative of the sixties, this new literature, particularly in its testimonial forms draws its inspiration and forms not from a previous literary or artistic avantgard but from the spread of popular struggles themselves and from the new forms of mobilization and discourse associated with liberation theology (Against Literature 111).

The same manner in which the publication of The Manual of the Christian Knight (1503) and The Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus initiated an important literary reaction, the texts by liberation theorists⁸ set in motion an enormous literary production all over Latin America. Its impact on the literature of the Chilean exile narrative cycle is particularly relevant, not only due to influential Chilean theologians such as Pablo Richards, but also because from the early sixties until 1973 Chile was a haven for intellectuals who had been forced to leave their homelands in order to escape repression or death. Mario Benedetti claims that “en América Latina no hay ningún sector, ningún campo específico, que esté ajeno a lo político, a lo social, a lo económico; que esté al margen de las luchas por la liberación” (48).⁹ In 1968 Benedetti declared that instead of referring to formalist or structuralist theorists, it was more useful for the analysis of Latin American works to bear in mind thinkers that were familiar with the needs and realities that inspired those texts, such as Octavio Paz, David Viñas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, René Depestre, Ángel Rama, Antônio Cândido, and Aimé Césaire. According to Benedetti,

En Europa, revelar en forma casi excluyente la importancia de la Palabra, puede expresar una actitud básicamente intelectual; [. . .] En un país subdesarrollado donde el hambre y las epidemias hacen estragos, donde la represión, la corrupción y el agio no son un elemento folklórico, sino la agobiante realidad de todos los días [. . .] atrincherarse en la Palabra viene entonces a significar algo así como darle la espalda a la realidad (43).¹⁰

Undoubtedly, to the list of authors that Benedetti proposes one can add the names of writers of liberation thought in all its disciplines. One of the goals of this book is to close the gap in the study of the interconnection between the Chilean novel and liberation thought.¹¹ It is assumed that the exile novels establish a dialogue with liberation thought. Regardless of its current dynamism and vigor, liberation thought had an undeniable influence on Latin American intellectuals. It represents a kind of substratum often underlying in the exile novel. The very use of the vocabulary originated in the sphere of liberation thought underscores this. Nonetheless, certain conflicts reflected in the literature anticipate some theoretical formulations of liberation thought by several years. It is not strange since they both question present reality and denounce injustices and their causes. What indeed changes is the type of social commentary. The allegoric abstractions in the novels, which in some cases are on the verge of surrealism, represent utopian concepts in the theoretical stipulations. From this perspective, both liberation thought and the exile novel are contrasted dialogically in order to develop the analysis of a broad and unequal narrative domain. The study of literature from a historical perspective and of contemporary thought as its background provides a solid ground for interpretation. Isabel Allende explicitly states this in her interviews¹² as well as in her autobiographical work Paula. We find her interest in the dialectic tension between the institutional Catholic Church and the priests closer to the tenets of liberation theology. The latter drift away from power to align themselves with the dispossessed and the oppressed, and try to shed light upon the sources of their oppression and alienation.

Chilean liberationist discourse denounces structures of subordination that represent yet another link in the chain of domination in Latin America. Some Chilean writings offer an alternative model to the chaotic and oppressive situation, while others present the characters nostalgically lamenting the loss of the paradise for which they had fought so firmly. Other accounts develop a meticulous scrutiny of the causes of the coup. In general terms, there is a consistent line of thought that underlies the cry of protest against intolerable situations that is consonant with the efforts of liberation thought.

This analysis is limited to the Chilean novels written in exile. These works, however, are often contrasted and compared to the novels written in Chile during the same period, as well as the narrative written abroad after the electoral defeat of General Pinochet in the plebiscite of October 5, 1998. Generally, the intertextualities with liberation thought are more numerous in the novels written in exile than in those written in Chile, because in their case there is no reason for camouflaging the ideological and political content. The writing process is not subject to an ideological superstructure, state or self-censorship. In Chile we find that, as Manuel Alcides Jofré explains, the discourse is more subjective, existential and psychological, with a primary focus on the representation of the wealthy middle class and the old aristocracy (202). Novelists sometimes choose existential nihilism or symbolic oneirism of characters that are unreal, Mephistophelean, Rabelaisian, carnivalistic, or even taken from classic horror cinema. We often find characters that feel alienated in an environment that they do not understand. The commonplace of the ubi sunt, the nostalgia of paradise lost, the disappointment, and the pessimism produced by the failure of the historic ideal that held so much hope, are the background for the plots. The protagonists enclose themselves in a solipsism that is expressed in circular and desperate monologues.

The conclusions are unstable, as they exist in an evident state of formation, searching for solutions to a problem that has evolved along with history. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous stories become interdependent, and together they prepare us to reach inductively the essential findings in this narrative body. Through the analyses of the ideological premises of the texts, light is shed on some meanings that otherwise may have remained obscure. It is necessary for the exegesis of a discourse to integrate it in a system that clarifies its nature and reveals its implications.

Historical conflicts are especially relevant to the narrative frame in its two expressions, inside and outside of Chile. Together with the triumph of the Cuban (1956–9) and Sandinista (1974–9) revolutions, the historic coup carried out by the military junta was a milestone for Chilean people and, in particular, for Chilean intellectuals. It was so influential that, according to Seymour Menton, it probably kept the country from following the continental trend of what he calls the “New Historical Novel”: “The explanation may lie in recent Chilean novelists’ greater concern with the immediate past: the military coup against the Allende government in 1973, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the exile experiences many of them shared” (26). Though Chilean exile literature can be considered to be part of Western tradition, it is precisely the peculiarity of the circumstances that makes it sui generis. The presence of the context as a frame of reference is so important for the recodification of the works that quite often Chile, the country, is itself one of the protagonists. Torture in Chile and exile are equally obsessive aspects among the topics of this literature. It would have been difficult to ignore such a wave of hate, imprisonment, torture, massacre, defamation, and lack of all kinds of freedom. As Isabel Allende explains in Paula, the material that some people thought to be a narrative plot that was too improbable actually coincided with real facts. The anecdote of the priest who discovered the dead bodies in the Lonquén massacre and went on to tell the Cardinal, coincides with the plot in Of Love and Shadows. Even in atemporal novels such as Casa de campo, by José Donoso, social reality is relevant, though its representation is abstract, modified or distorted.

Within the novelistic representation of Chilean reality, we find a very noticeable division of the society into different worlds that reflect the country’s social heterogeneity. One can perceive the oppressed and ostracized people of pre-Columbian descent, conscious or not of the injustice in their life, having to depend economically and ideologically on a master. Their counterparts are the criollo oligarchy, who seem to feel exiled in their own land. Some accounts reflect a sentiment of nostalgia for their ancestor’s Europe, a place that is, paradoxically, unknown to them. Another prominent figure among the characters is the dictator or patriarch, who perceives himself as a superman who must organize his cosmos and defend the western world from communist evil. We might also observe a charismatic and providential leader that directs his demagogy to the enrichment of his ego, by assuming the role of liberator of the weak. To complete the presentation of the cast of characters, we have the New Man and Woman who rid themselves of their submissive mentality and dedicate their lives to the benefit of the community in the struggle for social justice. Along this line, certain characters in some narratives suffer a noticeable psychological evolution because of the social and institutional crisis of the country. By virtue of their dialogic structure and their self-criticism, many of these writings invite the reader to carry out a hermeneutic activity. They not only problematize the official truth, but also attempt to provoke the readers, who are invited to change their values and participate in a praxis that will assist in the transformation of the structures of oppression. As reflected in these accounts, one of the best ways to change people’s consciences is to unmask the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Social and Historical Context
• 3. Contextualization of Liberation Thought and the Exile Discourse in the Chilean Narrative Abroad
• 4. Tension Among Social Classes: Preliminaries of the Disaster
• 5. The Testimonial and Liberationist Narrative
• 6. Other Discourses of Liberation
• 7. The Demythologizing Novel
• Appendix. Chronological List of the Main Analyzed Works
• Bibliography