Copyright by Regina Maria Faunes 2004

Copyright by Regina Maria Faunes 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Regina Maria Faunes Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Chilean Bildungsroman, 1862 - 1989 Committee: Naomi Lindstrom, Supervisor James Nicolopulos Charles Rossman César Salgado Mauricio Tenorio The Chilean Bildungsroman, 1862 - 1989 by Regina Maria Faunes, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2004 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my committee for their help and guidance. Special thanks are due to professor Naomi Lindstrom, whose patience, guidance, knowledge and encouragement were invaluable. I would also like to thank my husband, my mother and my children for their support and cheer. iv The Chilean Bildungsroman, 1862 - 1989 Publication No._____________ Regina Maria Faunes, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisor: Naomi Lindstrom The Bildungsroman details the maturation of a young protagonist, and his or her entrance into the world of adulthood. The coming-of-age process includes establishing and identity, culturally as well as personally, and entering the world of work, both as a means of economic survival and as a means of attaining a sense of self. The pattern of the traditional Bildungsroman has undergone changes in structure as the societies from which the texts spring have undergone transformations. The increasing difficulty of socialization and of achieving a stable cultural identity is a trend seen in coming-of-age novels, and is associated with the rapid pace of change undergone by traditional societies owing to capitalism, rapid industrialization, and neo-liberal economic policies which create a massive influx of foreign elements. This study analyzes how those changes are reflected in bildungsromane written by Chilean authors between 1862 and 1989. v Table of Contents Introduction .........................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Martín Rivas: Example of a Successful Coming of Age ...................14 Chapter 2 Losing One's Way in a Changing World……………………………..42 Chapter 3 Filling in the Gaps: Este domingo and Creating Something in aVoid 77 Chapter 4 No pasó nada: Coming of Age in Exile .............................................112 Chapter 5 Marco Antonio de la Parra: Recovering the Past to Create a Future in La secreta guerra santa de Santiago de Chile............................................140 Conclusion .....................................................................................................171 Works Cited.....................................................................................................178 Vita ................................................................................................................184 vi INTRODUCTION The Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel has been defined and redefined over time since the birth of the genre with its prototype, Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, published between 1794 and 1796. While this genre has been the object of intense study, critics have, however, most often focused attention on European novels. Definitions of this genre reflect concerns particular to the time in which the specific Bildungsromane studied were written. Critics like Jerome Buckley identify the characteristics of early European coming-of-age novels, producing a definition that revolves around outlining particular plot characteristics common to many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bildungsromane: A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination. His family, especially his father, proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts or flights of fancy, antagonistic to his ambitions, and quite impervious to the new ideas he has gained from unprescribed reading. His first schooling, even if not totally inadequate, may be frustrating insofar as it may suggest options not available to him in his present setting. He therefore, sometimes at quite an early age, leaves the repressive atmosphere of home (and also the relative innocence), to make his way independently in the city… There his real “education” begins, not only his preparation for a career but also – and often more importantly – his direct experience of urban life. (17) 1 Others like Patricia Alden study the novels in the context of the nation, in Alden’s case England, as well as the time period during which they were written. Most of these critics attribute a text’s specific characteristics to the social, political, or economic problems of England or Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Critical texts such as those of Buckley and Alden are part of an enormous body of literature dealing with the European manifestations of the Bildungsroman. Others, such as Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), focus on the Bildungsroman across borders, albeit with the common thread of the intensification of capitalism and the changes in society that it brought about as the backdrop for his analysis of the novels. Todd Kontje, in Private Lives in the Public Sphere: the German Bildungsroman as Metafiction (1992), emphasizes the changing role of the public sphere in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bildungsromane. This critic also traces the developments of criticism of the genre over time in The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre (1993). Martin Swales, Jeffrey Sammons, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gyorgy Lukács, and a host of other well-known critics have studied the Bildungsroman. In this study I concentrate on tracing the development of the genre over time in Chile. Chapter one focuses on Alberto Blest Gana’s celebrated novel Martín Rivas (1869) as an example of a text that adheres rather closely to the parameters set out in Buckley’s definition of the coming-of-age novel. In chapters 2 two through five I study texts that move away from the Bucklean pattern in significant ways, with the exception of chapter four, which is a study of Antonio Skármeta’s No pasó nada (1979). I will return later to the reasons for Skármeta’s novel being an exception to the trend; first, however, I must explain the general trend I have noticed in these texts. Owing to the fact that the Bildungsroman traces the coming of age of a protagonist, it is a genre that is greatly influenced by upheavals in society, and by changes in social mores. It stands to reason, then, that alterations to the scheme described by Buckley, particularly with respect to the successful integration and accommodation of the protagonist into the world of adulthood, can be linked to changes occurring in the larger society from which the texts spring. I postulate that as the social scape within Chile changes over time, from a traditional, rigidly class-structured society buttressed by an agrarian-based economy and a political system dominated by the terrateniente class, to a society in which class lines have blurred, capitalism has intensified exponentially, and the political power of the landed gentry has weakened while that of the bourgeoisie and the masses increased drastically; the successful integration and accommodation of protagonists into the world of adulthood is problematized. Coming-of-age novels in Chile follow patterns similar to those described by critics studying European novels; however, the time periods involved in their emergence and in the appearance of changes that take place in the genre are shifted toward the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. As Fredric Jameson points out: “Mientras Europa sufrió la masiva experiencia de la fragmentación y 3 modernización en un tiempo anterior, en que entre otras cosas el Bildungsroman y la autobiografía hacían su aparición, podemos decir que el Tercer Mundo lo experimenta ahora, en este siglo, en muchos lugares y en un período verdaderamente reciente” (126). Because transition from a traditional, agrarian- based economy to a modern, capitalist system occurred later in Chile than in Europe, the effects of these changes on the socialization of youth did not become an issue until a century later in the former than in the latter: “la inserción de la economía chilena en el capitalismo internacional comenzó a darse en forma intense y sostenida a partir de la explotación salitrera” (Muñoz Gomá 43). Another reason why Chilean Bildungsromane may show different characteristics from those written by European authors is the rate at which this transition occurred. Chile’s rate of transition from an agrarian economy, dominated by a traditional, rural oligarchy, to a modern, capitalistic one was swifter than that of Europe. This accelerated pace of change has an effect on the coming-of-age novel, for “when the status society starts to collapse, the countryside is abandoned for the city, and the world of work changes at an incredible and incessant pace, the colourless and uneventful socialization of ‘old youth’ becomes increasingly implausible: it becomes a problem, one that makes youth itself problematic” (Moretti, Way 4). Moretti’s observation regarding the European novels is applicable to the Chilean texts in that, with the exception of No pasó nada, as we move forward in time the protagonists’ coming of age is made more difficult

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