Chilean literature
The Chilean literature is literature Chile in Spanish and therefore part of the Hispano-American literature. The hesitant writing down of Mapuche literature since the 20th century is not the subject of this article.
Colonial times
Literary works from the time of Spanish colonial rule in Chile are rare. The theologian Pedro de Oña (1570–1643), the first author born in Chile, wrote a heroic epic about the Araucanian War and the life of the Inés de Suárez in 1596 based on the work La Araucana by the Spanish poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga .
The humanist educated Ercilla, who is considered both a founding father of Latin American literature and a Chilean national author, writes far more elaborately than his Chile-born detail-obsessed epigone. Ercilla came from Madrid, had fallen out of favor in Chile and, in his epic poem composed in eight-line stanzas from the 1560s to 1580s in the style of the Renaissance , which was formally based on Homer , Virgil and Ariostus , had extolled the death-despising bravery of the Araucans and heavily criticized the role of the Spanish conquerors.
The Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle (1603-1651) wrote the first prose and illustrated description of the national nature of Chile ( Histórica relación del reino de Chile y de las Missiones y Ministerios que exercita la Compañia de Jesus , published in 1846 in Spanish and Italian in 1646 in Rome ). He also devotes a great deal of space to the Araucanian War.
Republicanism and Romanticism
Chilean literature did not develop until after independence. As in Argentina, newspapers played a major role in this. The first regular (nationally and republican oriented) newspaper La Aurora de Chile did not appear until 1812, but by 1830 around 100 newspapers, some of which were very short-lived, had been produced. At first, Literatura did not see itself as art, but as essayistic reflection and political educational activity in the context of the construction of the new state with the intention of influencing the public politically, but also in the context of the rapidly emerging clashes between conservatives and liberals.
Later, in Chile, as in other Latin American countries, the familiar scheme of the sequence of stylistic epochs was repeated. The Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781–1865), an educator and great didactic, lived in Chilean exile since 1829. His students founded the Sociedad literaria in Santiago in 1842 , in which younger authors proclaimed a national literature in the spirit of Romanticism. José Victorino Lastarria (1817–1888) was the leader of this liberal-radical movement, whose goals he propagated in the novel Don Guillermo , which is metaphorically encoded with myths of the Mapuche . She also included Salvador Sanfuentes (1817–1860), Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865), Alberto Blest Gana (1830–1904), Guillermo Matta (1829–1899) and Eusebio Lillo (1826–1910).
Since the 1850s, scientific literature - especially the writing of history by Diego Barros Arana and Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna - experienced an upswing.
Realism, Modernismo, Late Romanticism
Blest Gana, who descended from Irish and Basque ancestors and was sent as ambassador to several European countries, gradually developed in his novels to become the first important representative of realism in Chile. His first novel Martín Rivas (1862) is a socially critical family story, part of a Chilean comédie humaine modeled on Balzac , which has been filmed five times since 1925 and also adapted for the theater and as a musical. The author's works are still part of school reading in Chile. They were formative for the authors of the 1867 generation, which also included Zorobabel Rodríguez (1849–1901), journalist, essayist, novelist and lexicographer of Chilean vocabulary.
Baldomero Lillo Figueroa (1867–1923) combines a realistic, costumbrist style with social protest. In his short stories he describes the hard life of the miners; later he turned to symbolism. The influence of French naturalism can already be seen in the depictions of the life of the upper classes by the writer, essayist and diplomat Luís Orrego Luco (1866–1949).
In 1886 Rubén Darío from Nicaragua visited the country and stimulated the development of modernism . Its representatives Francisco Contreras (1880–1932) and Carlos Mondaca (1881–1928) remained internationally unknown. The nationally highly revered poet Diego Dublé Urrutia (1877–1967) is considered the founder of Chilean criollismo ( creolism ). The poets Carlos Pezoa Véliz (1879–1908) and the late romantic Max Jara (1886–1965) stayed away from the trend of modernism .
1914-1950
The vulnerability of the relatively affluent country, which for a long time was dependent on saltpetre exports, made itself felt through the isolation during the First World War and the subsequent falling saltpetre prices. The economic situation did not improve until 1924 and the middle classes expanded. Nevertheless, many authors were dependent on entering the civil service and z. B. to work in the diplomatic service. This led to better knowledge and dissemination of non-Spanish European literature.
Prose: criollism , imaginismo
After the turn of the century, the “interest in 'one's own'” increased: the fixation of Chilean literature on post-colonial topics was shed, and under the influence of European naturalism a popular literary movement developed which produced detailed studies of the milieu. The first prize winner of the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile ( Nacional de literatura for short ), the most important Chilean literary prize, which has been awarded annually since 1942 , was the naturalistic writer, poet and playwright Augusto d'Halmar (1882–1950), who was already before the First World War had explored the life of the Chilean bohemians ( Juana Lucero , 1902). His friend Fernando Santiván (1886–1973) also wrote his first, award-winning novel Ansia (1910) about his life as a poor man of letters . The conservative lawyer Jenaro Prieto (1889–1946) was a representative of the social satirical novel, which precisely described the Chilean idiosyncrasies . His novel El socio (1928), whose hero perishes in a lie, is required reading in Chilean secondary schools; it has been filmed six times.
In 1914 the group Los Diez or Los X ("The Ten") was founded around the architect Pedro Prado (1886–1952), who wrote poetry and novels. His work Alsino , a mixture of novel, prose poem and fairy tale, is about a boy from the country, a Chilean Icarus , who dreams of flying. Prado adds a dash of imagination and exoticism to the criollist-modernist keynote. Alsino deals in allegorical form with the mission and the fate of the Latin American intellectuals and is one of the last significant works of Modernismo, beyond which it already points. In 1949 Prado received the Nacional de literatura for this . The later diplomat Salvador Reyes Figueroa (1899–1970) is one of the “imaginists” of the Chilean “Generation 27” . In 1926, Pablo Neruda wrote the first Chilean avant-garde prose work El habitante y su esperanza , which contains neither a consistent story nor a clear narrative situation, which dissolves the fixed image of reality.
In the 1930s, Chile suffered again from the fall in saltpetre prices. The socialist movement grew stronger, in 1933 the Partido Socialista de Chile was founded; but at the same time there was a wave of nationalism. The literature turned increasingly to social issues. An important representative of the regionalistic-naturalistic, so-called criollistic novel - a late variant of Costumbrismo under the influence of Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant - was Mariano Latorre (1886–1955), who used the local dialect in his novels about rural central Chile. Other creators of criollistic works were the socialist activist Manuel Rojas (1896–1973), who was influenced by William Faulkner and made his breakthrough in 1951 with Hijo de ladrón , and Marta Brunet (1897–1967), who rejected the criollistic idyll and later the psychological novel turned to. The works of the doctor and diplomat Juan Marín (1900–1963) oscillate between criollismo ( Paralelo 53 Sur ) and avant-garde futurism ( Looping , 1929).
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Also Eduardo Barrios (1884-1963) authored by naturalistic beginnings psychologically realistic novels. He is considered the most important Chilean prose writer after Blest Gana; his novel Gran señor y rajadiablos (1948; Eng . El huaso - the Chilean gaucho is not only a cattle farmer, but also grows grain) depicts the life of a former landowner. Joaquín Edwards Bello (1887–1968), who came from a well-known British-Chilean industrialist and banker family, wrote first naturalistic, sometimes Dadaistic, then increasingly psychologizing novels. Despite all the stylistic diversity, his love for his hometown Valparaíso and nationalism are two constants of his work; he also developed sympathy for German National Socialism.
Avant-garde poetry
Chile has an uninterrupted lyric tradition in the 20th century. It achieved international level in poetry through Gabriela Mistral (1889-1959), the daughter of a Basque-Indian family. Her first volume of poetry, Sonetos de la Muerte , made her known throughout Latin America. Her poetry is colored in a modernist way, but is devoted to everyday topics in simple language ( sencillismo ). In 1945 she was the first Latin American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature . Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948), who lived in Paris and Madrid from 1916 to 1925, published in 1911 Ecos de alma (“Echoes of the Soul”), the first modernist volume of poetry in Chile. Under European influence, he developed the futurism- related theory of creacionismo : all parts of the poem and the whole are something new that has no relation to the outside world and does not have to arouse associations with anything outside the poem. He was inspired by the works of the Dada artist Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia . Huidobro was the first representative of the avant-garde in Chile, which was characterized by special creativity and unusual word creations. As a poet, Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) also had an extraordinary wealth of associations and made use of a spelling in which neither syntax nor punctuation were valid. He was initially influenced by surrealism . He interrupted his poetic career by participating in the Spanish Civil War. He put his poetry as well as his competitor Pablo de Rokha (1894–1968), who was also an important poet, in the service of political agitation. De Rokha turned against Pablo Neruda, whom he described as a bourgeois and accused of plagiarism .
Other poets of this time were the representatives of a turning away from it all Imaginismo Angel Cruchaga Santa María (1893-1964), Humberto Díaz Casanueva (1906-1992) with his poetry El aventurero de Saba (1926) and Salvador Reyes Figueroa with Barco ebrio ( 1923). Other poets of the era were Juan Guzmán Cruchaga (1875–1979), who also worked for the theater, and Pedro Prado.
drama
Until the 1930s, theater performances in Chile were a private matter. Antonio Acevedo Hernández (1886–1962), a self-taught novelist and playwright, was the founder of Chilean theater and the socio-critical drama of the 1930s, which also reflected the consequences of the saltpetre crisis. Víctor Domingo Silva (1882–1960), journalist and diplomat, devoted himself to patriotic subjects in the theater as well as as a poet and novelist. His exalted patriotism earned him the reputation of the poeta nacional .
1950-1973
In the 1950s, the dominance of the conservative-liberal parties decreased. They won the elections for the last time in 1958, but after the Cuban Missile Crisis the United States gave massive support to the anti-communist Christian Democrats . With increasing political conflicts and the emergence of broader groups of readers, everyday language, political agitation and satire as well as new compositional techniques moved into Chilean literature.
Poetry
Neruda, who worked as an activist in Spain in the late 1930s, had to go into exile from 1949 to 1952, but then returned to his poetic work with all his might. His main work is the anthemic Canto General , a monumental reflection of American history. The 1971 Nobel Prize laureate worked for the Salvador Allende government as ambassador in Paris. Neruda's pathos that it is incompatible with the lives of the workers aroused opposition from the younger generation. The movement's spokesman was the poet, mathematician and physicist Nicanor Parra (1914–2018), the founder of “antipoesy” ( Poemas y antipoemas 1955; Antiprosas 2011) and winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2011. With slang vocabulary, black humor and irony, he resisted the flood of metaphors in Latin American literature, refused to accept perfectionism and violated all current poetic and aesthetic principles. This younger generation also includes the poets Miguel Arteche (1926–2012), Enrique Lihn (1929–1988), Jorge Teillier (1935–1996) and Efraín Barquero (* 1931) - the members of the generación literaria del 1950 .
prose
Since the 1940s ( generación del 1938 ), new stylistic and compositional techniques influenced by Europe have prevailed in prose . To be mentioned are Carlos Droguett (1912–1996), Fernando Alegría (1918–2005), Enrique Lafourcade (1927–2019), the socially critical agitator Nicomedes Guzmán (1914–1964) and Volodia Teitelboim (1916–2008). Benjamín Subercaseaux (1902–1973) wrote the three-part novel Jemmy Button (1950; German "Drive without a compass") the life story of a young indigenous man who was taken from Tierra del Fuego to England by the captain of the HMS Beagle , where he lived in the house of a country pastor lives and should return to convert the "savages". This culture-critical development novel is interspersed with historical reflections, ethnological descriptions and natural history observations; he plays skillfully with forms and linguistic means and tries to express the Chilean attitude towards life.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, as in other Latin American countries, there were considerable social and economic upheavals, as a result of which the middle classes strengthened and a book market emerged. This was the foundation of the prose literature boom in the 1960s and 1970s. The women of the generación del 50 like Marta Jara , the narrator Elena Aldunate (1925–2005) and the teacher Elisa Serrana (1930–2012) became more and more involved in political and literary life. Serrana, who herself came from a large landowning family, took into account the passivity of middle-class Chilean women in her novels. Her family property was expropriated by the Allende government. Mercedes Valdivieso (1924–1993) wrote a series of novels that portrayed female "heroines of politics". La brecha (1961) is considered one of the groundbreaking feminist novels in Latin America and provoked massive criticism from the conservative side. After the dictatorship it was reprinted several times in Chile and the USA.
Francisco Coloanes (1910–2002) realistic stories from the world of fishermen and sailors are set in Tierra del Fuego, which he discovered for literature. José Donoso (1924–1996), who lived in Spain and the United States for a long time, placed former marginal figures in society - poor Indians or transvestites - at the center of his work.
drama
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Teatro Nacional Chileno , founded in 1941 as a university and student theater, was one of the most progressive stages in Latin America. Its founder (together with Pedro de la Barra) and one of the most important authors and directors was the Spanish exile José Ricardo Morales (1915–2016), who also published books by Spanish emigrants in Chile.
The dictatorship 1973–1990
The coup against elected President Allende in September 1973 destroyed the country's cultural structure, in which disadvantaged groups had also increasingly participated. Some went into exile. a. Carlos Droguett, Fernando Alegría, Enrique Lihn, Ariel Dorfman (the author of the play Death and the Maiden ), Jorge Edwards (later winner of the Cervantes Prize ), the novelists and narrators José Miguel Varas (1928–2011) and Mauricio Wacquez (1939– 2000), as well as the Spanish-born narrator Poli Délano (1936–2017) and the playwright and film director Ernesto Malbrán (1932–2014). Omar Saavedra Santis (* 1944) and Roberto Ampuero (* 1953) went to the GDR, as did Gonzalo Rojas (1917–2011), who was influenced by the Spanish Generación del 27 and later moved to Venezuela and the USA. Franklin Quevedo (* 1919) was imprisoned and emigrated to Costa Rica. Donoso emigrated to the United States, where he wrote the macabre satire Curfew about attempts by various politicians to exploit Pablo Neruda's death.
Probably the most famous contemporary writer in Chile is Isabel Allende (* 1942), President Allende's niece, who went abroad in 1975. Her novels such as Das Geisterhaus , Fortuna's daughter , Eva Luna ; Paula or The Infinite Plan have been published worldwide. Many of her books are shaped by both magical realism and autobiographical.
Also Antonio Skármeta (* 1940) and supporters of Salvador Allende, left after the military coup in 1973, the country and later lived in West Berlin. He wrote novels and short stories in concise laconic prose, which often dealt with the military dictatorship. His novel With burning patience (German 1985), dedicated to Pablo Neruda, became a bestseller in Germany. From 2000 to 2003 Skármeta was the Chilean ambassador to Germany. Luis Sepúlveda (* 1949) went underground for a year, where he founded a theater group in Valparaiso; after his arrest and sentencing, he was able to go abroad under international pressure. He became known through his short novels Der Alte, der Liebesromane and Die Welt am Ende der Welt .
The authors who remained in the country and who had their say since the late 1970s, such as Floridor Pérez (* 1937), had to work under difficult conditions; they could not build on the traditions and were extremely isolated compared to the Generación del 60 . Enrique Lafourcade turned against the Latin American dictatorships several times in his novels ( Adiós al Führer , 1982; El Gran Taimado , 1984).
present
The writers who remained in Chile could hardly publish during the dictatorship. The traumatization caused by the dictatorship continued to have an impact until the 1990s. Authors like Donoso were reluctant to work on the consequences of this, while bold political propaganda disappeared from literature. Ramón Díaz Eterovic (* 1956) became known for his series of detective novels about the detective Heredia, which he began in 1987. Many of his novels deal with crimes under the Pinochet dictatorship. It was the “literature of the return” that examined the past more thoroughly from the perspective of exile. The politician Roberto Ampuero , who lived in exile in the GDR and Cuba and since 1983 in the Federal Republic, wrote detective novels with a political background ( El último tango de Salvador Allende , 2012). Omar Saavedra Santis returned to Chile after exile in the GDR and works as a narrator, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Nona Fernández (* 1971) describes everyday life in Santiago in novels and TV series, dealing with dictatorship and colonial history. She also works for the theater.
The influences of exile and return literature as well as the global book markets have contributed to a transculturación of Chilean literature. This influenced the spatial conception, shaped places and metaphors for crossing boundaries, forgetting and remembering and contributed to the development of new cultural inventories of signs. Various authors critically followed international literary trends with their descriptions of the damage caused by globalization. The writer, editor, and film director Alberto Fuguet is considered a critic of both Macondismo , that is, commercialized magical realism, and Americanized pop culture. As an associate editor, he published the anthology of short stories McOndo (a pun on Macondo ). It collects contributions from Latin American authors born in the 1950s who have left the exotic but backward world of magical realism such as the commercial culture of shopping malls, cable television and environmental pollution behind. The author and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña (* 1948), who was influenced by Zen Buddhism and eco-feminism, also criticized ecological destruction, cultural homogenization and economic inequality; she lives in New York.
The author of surrealist poetry and prose Roberto Bolaño reminiscent in its Bibliomanie of Jorge Luis Borges . Bolaño had lived in Mexico since he was 13, returned to his homeland after the military coup in Chile in 1973 to fight the dictatorship, was arrested and emigrated to Spain in 1977, where he was awarded several literary prizes. In 2004 his posthumously published masterpiece 2666, which was overflowing with metapoietic excursions and subplots, fluctuating between cold and empathy, was largely located in the eerie criminal misogynist milieu on the border between Mexico and the USA . It begins with a search by several European literary scholars for an anonymous German writer and Nobel Prize candidate who turns out to be a fled Wehrmacht soldier . The deconstruction of the modern literary scene is only loosely linked to the other episodes. In 2017, El espíritu de la ciencia-ficcion, about the wild life of two Chilean writers in Mexico , was published from his estate .
Alejandro Zambra (* 1975) ties in with Bolaño's work in terms of style and content in his stories ( Mis documentos 2013 ). Like other authors of his generation, he still grapples with the consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship. He is considered one of the most important contemporary Spanish-speaking authors.
- Book market
The Chilean book market in itself is very limited. Only a few books achieve high print runs; they are quite expensive because of the high VAT. About half as many books appear per million inhabitants as in Argentina and a quarter of the new editions appearing in Germany. Half of Chileans don't read books at all. Since around 2000, however, smaller publishers have emerged that have successfully brought out small editions.
- theatre
With the exception of the Chilean National Theater and the National Ballet, all stages are dependent on private funding. But there are good permanent ensembles that operate on private stages. The director Andrés Pérez worked in France at the Théâtre du Soleil ; After his return to Chile he successfully experimented with elements of street theater and circus with his Gran Circo Teatro, founded in 1988 . The La Troppa group also works with puppets. Luis Ureta leads the group La Puerta and devotes himself to time-critical issues, Horacio Videla , a student of Pérez, attracted attention with his Teatro Onirus with successful interpretations of classics.
literature
- Michael Rössner (ed.): Latin American literary history. 2nd ext. Edition. Stuttgart / Weimar 2002.
- Michael Rössner: The Hispanoamerican literature. In: Kindler's new literary lexicon. Vol. 20. Munich 1996. pp. 40-62.
- Anthologies
- Wolfgang A. Luchting (Ed.): Chile. Modern storytellers of the world. Tübingen / Basel 1973.
- Andreas Klotsch (Ed.): Explorations: 24 Chilean storytellers. Berlin 1974.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rössner 2002, p. 42 ff.
- ↑ Dieter Janik: The Beginnings of a National Literary Culture in Argentina and Chile: A Contrastive Study on the Basis of the Early Periodicals (1800-1830). Tübingen 1995, p. 10; 17th
- ^ Aníbal González: Companion to Spanish American Modernismo. Boydell & Brewer, 2007, p. 98.
- ↑ Rössner 1996, p. 245.
- ↑ Rössner 1996, p. 51.
- ↑ Rössner 1996, p. 245.
- ↑ Rössner 1996, p. 245.
- ^ [DB:] Benjamin Subercaseaux: Jemmy Button. In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 16: St-Va, Munich 1996, p. 160.
- ↑ Friederike von Criegern de Guiñazú: Lárico, lúdico, lacónico: Floridor Pérez and his Chilean poetry. Göttingen 2010, p. 106.
- ↑ Anne Newball Duke: "La otra orilla" culture contact in the Chilean exile and return Literature 1980-2011. Münster 2018.
- ↑ Doris Wieser: 'Literatura gay' in Brazil and Portugal. In: Susanne Klengel u. a .: Novas Vozes: On Brazilian literature in the 21st century. Frankfurt 2013, p. 56.
- ↑ Land without readers. Focus, May 28, 2010
- ↑ Article in Memoria chilena
- ^ Website of the La Puerta Theater