La narrativa chilena y el riesgo de la insignificancia

Abstract

The greatest value of our narrative, cloistered as it is under a roof of steel, is the self, which has left otherness and the collective in the dark. This narrative is rigorously ascribed to capitalist realism, centered on an essentialist, dehistoricized, emotional, and privatized self in terms of the narrative’s concern by his/her protagonist subject and his/her affective environment. It is also a narrative without expectations for the future, a constant journey towards a childish or adolescent past. The definition of the historical moment that Chilean literature is currently going through is that of a slow but determined decline towards insignificance. It is not about to disappear; on the contrary, it is being published abundantly, even in a pandemic. I do not mean that valuable works have not been published in this century. There are and in good number. Rather, we are witnessing a shift of the literary as a whole into an area of cultural insignificance; it is a narrative that is on the way to becoming a consumer niche defined by a decidedly declining rank. Literature seems not to be rebelling against this dramatic fact.