Alberto Blest Gana

RESUMEN / ABSTRACT Este artículo se propone exponer y discutir los valores que adquiere la estética del realismo en Los trasplantados (1904), novela tardía de Alberto Blest Gana. Para ello se describe someramente el primer desplazamiento de esta estética, su encarnación como novela nacional en un texto como Martín Rivas (1862), escrito y publicado en Chile y para los chilenos. Los trasplantados es una novela escrita y publicada en París tras más de treinta años de ausencia por parte de su autor; el uso que hace del realismo, si bien formalmente se parece al de la novela nacional, adquiere un sentido completamente distinto. La particularización de las mismas prácticas que en Martín Rivas definía a sujetos pretendidamente aristocráticos, la oligarquía chilena, aquí sirve para mostrar a los rastacueros, sujetos degradados en relación con la aristocracia europea. Se discuten brevemente esos hallazgos.
Palabras clave: Alberto Blest Gana, realismo, ideas fuera de lugar, Los trasplantados.

Los trasplantados (1904) de Alberto Blest Gana es una novela que no ha recibido la atención debida por parte de la crítica especializada. Su estudio es relevante en la medida en que permite establecer los rasgos distintivos de una novela clave -aunque poco visible- en la producción literaria del autor de Martín Rivas. El análisis de la historia de la adinerada familia Canalejas en el entramado social de París, que considera el diálogo intertextual, el comentario de la crítica precedente y la operacionalización de conceptos teóricos que iluminan las posiciones de deseo del relato, posibilita, entre otros aspectos, amplificar la reflexión sobre la significación de las escenas de lectura, del deseo mimético, del acontecimiento de la muerte y sus vinculaciones con la emergencia o superación del mal dentro del marco de la novelística del escritor chileno.

A  panorama of chilean history is framed by three generations of the Blest Family,. Three characters of the saga were pioneers in their respective fields of activity: the first was the founder of medicine in Chile; the second was the initiator of the chilean novel and the third was the creator of the Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT), the tenacious defenders of labour rights in the twentieth century. Father, son and grandson describe their life stories as a sinuous and complex journey, as it generally is when history is observed in detail.

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 discoursetwo main components of realismare 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.

A panorama of Chilean history is framed by three generations of the Blest family. The three characters of the saga were pioneers in their respective occupations: the first was the founder of medicine in Chile; the second was the initiator of the Chilean novel and the third was the creator of the Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT), the tenacious defenders of labour wrights in the twentieth century. Father, son and grandson describe their life stories as a sinuous and complex journey, as it generally is when history is observed in detail.Keywords: Alberto Blest Gana; Clotario Blest; the Irish in Chile.

In the scant scholarship relative to Alberto Blest Gana’s Mariluán, several critics have underscored the unfeasibility or superfluidity of the protagonist’s aspired project for restitution, indigenous assimilation, and fraternity in the Araucanía during the novel’s context of enunciation. Under the theoretical framework of Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler on dispossession, and in dialogue with the concept of “sediments of time” by Reinhart Koselleck, this study argues that an analysis of the overlapping chronologies in “play” in Mariluán serves to revise the statements seemingly offered for advancement nearly 160 years ago. Mariluán’s pseudo-revival of a Lautaro and the manner in which he makes himself “present” or “becoming,” and remains “present” after his beheading, can be re-signified as a means to challenge the terms imposed from structures that inhibit, subjugate, and seek to fully exterminate or nullify the “other” – insomuch in the 1860s, as in future temporalities involving repetitions of historical events and their related, yet distinguishable, singularities. Through a reconsideration of the protagonist’s aims that refute his call for cultural assimilation as a necessary means of integration, today’s status quo on indigenous issues can be re-problematised, to contest the pervasive logic of dispossession and advocate for more practical and politically inclusive structures that celebrate Chile’s plurality.