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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Requiem for a National Wound in Three Dictatorship Novels Underscoring Sovereignty of the Self by Chile’s Fernando Alegría DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Spanish By William Alexander Yankes Dissertation Committee Associate Professor Horacio Legrás, Chair Distinguished Professor Gonzalo Navajas Associate Professor Santiago Morales-Rivera Emeritus-Professor Francisco Asencio Lomelí, UCSB 2018 © 2018 William Alexander Yankes DEDICATION My intellectual mentors across the years are many. Perhaps more significantly haunting are the gestures, the glances, the fragments of words from people whose paths I crossed if ever fleetingly, sometimes manifested in a hopeful gaze darting at me expectations from this traveler with a passport to see worlds they couldn’t, while I bear their circumstance as a burden in that inclination of mine to write about their plight. In authoring this doctoral dissertation I aim to bring together --if only on the page-- people with the power to create social change in contact with those who are mired in merely yearning. I penned this work with their flashback inhabiting me, including the shantytown children I saw from the train in that dusty Chilean village. May their futures harbor hope for lives fulfilled. Born in Brazil to Chilean parents and raised in Chile, I recall President Salvador Allende personally and directly. Enrolled in the all-boys Naval Academy, I was part of the inaugural formation that stood firm while he smiled down upon us benevolently. President Allende walked slowly by as my fellow-cadets and I offered a symbolic salute. Alegría, on the other hand, was an Allende confidant, friend and ideological ally who represented the Allende government in the United States as a diplomatic envoy. After moving with my parents to the United States during the Allende regime, I felt the need to understand the processes that transpired in the country of my upbringing, realizing that I had become a voluntary exile myself, thus bringing personal closure to the diaspora of my family of four members. My study of Alegría’s dictatorship novels helped me to understand not only Chile better, but the social processes and the literature that has emerged from them across Latin America, a region I have traveled widely meeting people of all walks of life with the aim of producing inspiring creative works to help elevate a socio-political conscience across the social strata. ii “The governments of the people are better than those of princes” The Discourses, Book I, Chapter LVIII --- Machiavelli “Democracy is a question of human dignity” --- Sweden’s Olof Palme iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION x INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 51 FIVE PRECURSOR NOVELS 51 CHAPTER 2 87 DICTATORSHIP NOVELS 87 Una especie de memoria: A Country Unfurls in Six Decades 87 CHAPTER 3 157 El paso de los gansos: Apocalypsis in Chile 157 CHAPTER 4 245 Coral de guerra: Sovereignty of the Self Makes a Stand 245 CONCLUSION 332 Sovereignty of the Self Reclaimed 332 WORKS CITED 345 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I attempted in vain to break away from chaotic Latin America, but its people, its culture and literatures seduced and ensnared me. After many horseback treks across mountains and valleys, I canoed and rafted on rivers, hopped on old buses, hitched rides, took plains and trains as a sojourner throughout Latin America across the long years. I stayed at hamlets, met deep country folk, listened to their vernacular, and shared meals with them by the fogón. The stream of time gave me the longest ride until I found safe harbor at the University of California, Irvine, where my PhD committee professors welcomed my thesis concept: sovereignty of the self -- the right of each person to live unscathed even under the oppression of violent dictatorships. Chile is deeply etched in my personal history, prompting me to explore Chilean author Fernando Alegría’s work on a humanity rendered vulnerable to a violent military dictatorship. Alegría’s prolific contribution to the region’s literature and to literary theory inspired me to pay him homage for his groundbreaking theoretical vision. Looking for a kindred spirit in academia rather than a mere institution that would accept my application, I was invited to pursue a master’s degree in Latin American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when I met with Prof. Francisco Ascencio Lomelí, who encouraged him to write a master’s thesis on the Chilean colonial-era chronicle Cautiverio feliz, which shows that the indigenous of Chile, the Mapuche, had a more advanced social structure and relationship with nature than the Spanish colonists. That chronicle identifies the psychological and cultural origins of Latin American dictatorships with the military Conquests in the 15th and 16th centuries. Furthermore, Dr. Lomelí knew the Chilean author Fernando Alegría v well. On that basis, he agreed to participate in my PhD committee for my work on Alegría’s dictatorship novels, focusing on the thesis of sovereignty of the self pitted mostly against Pinochet’s military dictatorship. This work became my doctoral dissertation in Latin American literature at the University of California, Irvine, where professors Horacio Legrás, Santiago Morales and Gonzalo Navajas for their individual guidance and their patience with me during my doctoral studies struggles at the University of California, Irvine’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. They have played crucial roles in the theoretical studies I’ve incorporated into this PhD Dissertation. Consistent with her master thesis work on “Emotional Architecture,” Katherine Vallin is an uncompromising aesthete. She has applied her intuition and scholarship as a production designer of feature films that have enjoyed international recognition. Gregarious and proudly politically incorrect on matters of crucial social relevance, she possesses a rare talent for soulful rhetorical spontaneity emanating from her humanistic sensibility. To her creative initiative I owe the title of my dissertation. I would not want to omit my friendship with J. B. Kennedy, and his mentorship. He is an American poet, heir to the lyricism of Robertson Jeffers, but then J.B. became a zealous owner of his own mastery of the poetic language. He is a stalwart warrior for human justice through his published poems of rage against dictators. He is possessed by a yearning to live in a United States where humanitarian social democracy is the culture of the land. J.B. steered me during my critical beginnings when he ran his second-hand bookstore and I would pour into the books he selected for me during the years I lived on my sailboat –with barely the space for a bunk bed and a typewriter-- at King Harbor Marina in Redondo Beach, California. vi This work is especially dedicated to my brother Max, the first “doctor” in the family. By becoming an internal medicine specialist after conquering medical school in Chile while undergoing great hardship, then at a medical school impaired by a dearth of proper didactic instruments, but for a teaching faculty that was gifted with keen clinical instincts in the highlands of Ecuador, he then pursued his specialty at a precarious teaching hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Now a valued doctor in Visalia, California, he showed me across the years what level of soldiering is required toward the attainment of a worthy purpose. He is tenacious, loyal and supportive. Even though he is my younger brother, on many aspects of life I look up to him. To my beloved parents, now in heaven, I owe fortitude and artistic sensibility. Theirs is the admonition not to ever forget that art represents a fragile humanity. Their European/criollo eyes through which they viewed the Latin America of their and my birth led me to travel and explore the continent I would later re-visit in its literature. I owe a special and profound gratitude to Samuella Delora Lee—Samuelita, Sami. Across the decades and the many years of shared laughter and essential conversations, she has encouraged me to “plant acorns”—veritable seeds that may eventually grow and bear fruits. Through her companionship and love, Sami instilled in me her view of life as a spiritual lesson, and scholarship as a route for service to others. vii CURRICULUM VITAE William Alexander Yankes 1981-84 Research assistant and interviewer of diplomats for the think- tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in its Latin American Division while a student at Georgetown University 1984 B.S.F.S. Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service, Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service 1990 Georgetown University Magazine article reporting from the Berlin Wall. Awarded the German Academic Exchange Commission grant, a German government’s invitation to report from Berlin and Bonn upon the opening of the Berlin Wall. 2004 M.A. in Professional Writing, University of Southern California 2012 M.A. in Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 2015 Film Studies at UCLA’s MFA Film Program through the Inter-Campus Exchange Program with the University of California, Irvine 2017 After writing, producing and directing the documentary feature film in progress, The People Chile Forgot, and the short film comedy, He Did What?! Both student films screened at Los Angeles City College Cinema Department 2018 Ph.D. in Spanish -- Latin American literature, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Latin American dictatorship literature, specifically Chilean dictatorship literature. CONFERENCES Viña del Mar, Chile: “La soberanía individual en la narrativa de la dictadura de Fernando Alegría”, Instituto Literario y Cultural Hispánico. October 14, 2017. viii Special guest lecturer with a paper titled, “El derecho de ser” (The Right to Be) for the Instituto de Relaciones Internacionales and the Instituto de Comunicaciones at the Universidad del Mar, Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico.