New Problems of Realism in Martín Rivas

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.