Spatial Turn and Socio-Political History Displacement, Memory and Oblivion in Selected Works of Contemporary Chilean Fiction

Abstract

After centuries in which historiography and literary narrative have assigned evident preeminence to the temporal sequence of events, marginalizing the spatial dimension, recent decades have seen a return to the centrality of space. Related to the spatial turn are both the weakening of historicity (Jameson) and a contemporary spatialist way of life (Aínsa). Based on the observation that the spatial turn refers to a heightened attention to the territorial aspect of the historical world (Schlögel), it is worth asking about the new relationship established between space and history (the time of the historical world) and what happens if “spatiality” and “historicity” are conceived together. Our proposal is to consider travel as a practice in which processes of creating a topographical space linked to historical and cultural events take place. On this basis, we propose a reflection on a set of fictional works published in Chile over the last decade: works centered on the experience of travel in which the spatial dimension explains (and relates to) historical time. The movements through the territory of the characters in the three selected novels (El brujo, by Álvaro Bisama; El tercer paraíso, by Cristian Alarcón; Piñen, by Daniela Catrileo) will serve to establish a relationship between travel (movement toward or through a territory as a subjective or collective experience) and the reworking of historical-political and/or historical-cultural traumas in spaces that function as a primordial dimension in which the relationship between human beings and the things of the world is negotiated (Gumbrecht).