Abstract
Abstract This article discusses a central feature in the poetics of Martín Rivas (1862): its realism. It describes the way in which the particularisation of experience and the breakdown of the old theory of the levels of discourse – two main components of realism – are embodied in the novel. Like its models in French realism, Martín Rivas focuses on the unique experiences of singular subjects. This particularisation, however, rarely acquires an interclass dimension, as it did in French forms. The “ideas of realism” are misplaced in Martín Rivas. The novel represents times, spaces, and people in the dramatically reduced frame of the times, spaces, and people of the oligarchy. It signifies a return to the same old rule that European realism had broken from. Blest Gana’s realism could be considered, therefore, as an example of the Chilean modo de ser aristocrático [aristocratic way of being], that is, a set of cultural operations which allow the oligarchy to live their privileges as natural, far from the bourgeois ethos. This insight can be a point of departure for an international discussion as we think about how these transformations might enter into dialogue with similar phenomena in other parts of the world.
Highlights
This article discusses the social and political projections of Martín Rivas (1862) and demonstrates how they are a feature of the novel’s poetics and mode of representation, which we can partially describe as realist
Martín Rivas serves as an example for novelas de costumbres, loosely translated as novels of manners, a relevant set of fictional works published during the mid-nineteenth century
As a specific mode of representation that crystallises in the European nineteenth century, during a period that is known in histories of literature as “realism,” especially as it pertains to France
Summary
This article discusses the social and political projections of Martín Rivas (1862) and demonstrates how they are a feature of the novel’s poetics and mode of representation, which we can partially describe as realist. As a specific mode of representation that crystallises in the European nineteenth century, during a period that is known in histories of literature as “realism,” especially as it pertains to France This is considered to be the basis of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative programs, among which Naturalism and Socialist Realism stand out. Realism’s enduring feature is a general trend in Western narrative that goes right along with the progression of modernity and capitalist expansion (Gramuglio 17–19) It is distinguished by its preference for particular aspects of the lived experiences of individual subjects. It finds formal expression in devices such as a proper name, a precise situation of the narrative in time and space, a causal sequence of events, and the development of a critical and original spirit in the narrator (Watt 9–34). Quotations of Blest Gana are given both in Spanish and English
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