Articulaciones de la Otredad: una Convergencia en la Obra de Neruda y Mistral

Abstract

This thesis is mainly concerned with the cultural discourses in the literary works of two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. Their discourses are studied from the perspective of their articulation of “Otherness”, that is, women, nature and the ethnic subject. These are three elements that make up Latin American culture that speak from the margins. Using this perspective, it is possible, then, to redefine the relationship between these two poets and to identify the way in which they converge in their search for the Latin-American identity.

This study seeks to demonstrate that these two poets shared and defended an easily recognisable Hispanic American cultural discourse- a discourse that attempts to define Hispanic-American identity as a cultural phenomenon that is inherently different from those of Anglo America and Europe. This shared vision of culture occurred thanks to the socio-aesthetic trend offered by Modernismo, which led Mistral and Neruda to become conscious of their mission as Hispanic Americans, that is to say, to become artists from and within their own cultural backgrounds.

This notion of a characteristic Hispanic-American cultural discourse would continue until its consolidation in the Latin-American Boom.

Both Mistral and Neruda demonstrate that in Latina America the imposition of European culture resulted in the degradation of the Pre-Columbian culture. Furthermore, they maintain that the subjugation of Native-Latin-American cultures has been a conscious action by the dominant groups, first the Europeans and then the Mestizos. Nature is also presented as a victim of the same socio-political and cultural order. A third subaltern element emerges in their work: women. As a subject inserted in an overwhelmingly male-dominated society, the female individual has historically been at a disadvantage vis-à-vis men. Nonetheless and, because of the conjoining and dialogical relationship between these three elements, where subordination does not exist; a decentralization of androcentric Latina America societies takes place. Thus, an alternative discourse arises within the poets’ work.

When reconstructing the cultural practice of the subordinated subjects in the historic present, the poets arrive at a different way of positioning their discourse within the geopolitical- cultural space that is Hispanic America. This is an alternative discourse that emanates from a rationality that is different from the Western one, which gives shape to a “border thinking”.

The theoretical apparatus used in this investigation employs tools from different traditions: Cultural Semiotics, New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Post-Colonialism and Women’s Studies. Special emphasis will be given to the theoretical inputs of Latin American historians and philosophers such as Arturo Roig (Intercultural Philosophy), Enrique Dussel (Philosophy of Liberation), ("geopolitics"), Humberto Maturana and Walter Mignolo ("Border Gnosis").

The thesis is divided into three parts, each part comprises of two chapters:

First part: The presence of the Native people in Mistral and Neruda’s poetic works. Chapters I and II are concerned with the poets’ esthetic- ethical project through which they seek to legitimize the discourse of the ethnic subject in Hispanic America, and to position it in a dialogue of equality with the dominant Eurocentric discourses.

Second part: The legacy of the Native people: an alternative view of Nature in the poetry of Mistral and Neruda. Chapters III and IV deal with the manner in which Mistral and Neruda relate to the Latin American environment. Here I propose that the two poets reveal an ecological awareness emanating from their inherited Pre-Columbian cultural practice. They propose rescuing Nature, victimized by five centuries of Eurocentric ideology.

Third part: Deconstructing the colonial inheritance: the monolithic woman. A dialogue Neruda– Mistral. Chapters V and VI explore the different images of women that both Neruda and Mistral represent in their work, and the “articulation” of the female subject with the other subaltern subjects: Nature and Ethnic subject. The poets propose that women can and should be agents of their own speech, thus deconstructing the entire order imposed by a phallocentric ideology.

In conclusion, Neruda and Mistral’s holistic and socio-aesthetic discourse opens the horizon to multiple local stories, deconstructing the oneness of historiography’s meta-narrative, and the centrality of the European discourse and its hegemonic power. Therefore, the cultural, economic and political Hispanic American subordinated status, imposed by the West and the USA, counteracts with a Hispanic American “heterogeneous unity", a unity based on "intercultural dialogue" that takes place in this geo-cultural area. This entire project is consolidated during the Latin American literary movement called the Boom, when the Eurocentric discourse was fully decentralized and the Boom proclaimed the universality of every local narrative. During this period, Latin America emerges as a great geo-political-cultural “locus of enunciation”, with the tree of liberty and corn as its symbols.