Alencar, Blest Gana y Galván: narrativas de exterminio y subalternidad.

Abstract

José de Alencar' s O Guarani (1857), Alberto Blest Gana's Mariluán (1864) and Manuel deJesús Galván's Enriquillo (1882) give form to a narrative of extermination that laid down a cultural consensus over Indian genocide in XIX century Latin America. Beyond readings that have underlined the fictional rescue of a native figure, these novels delimitate, organize and naturalize a disappearance. The emptiness left by a native character lost in their final pages, installs the zero degree of a writing that articulates against them the genealogy of a political community. The erasure of native agents opens the entrance to a historical fiction where they can be accepted only as a spectral and subaltern figure, as the mourning for their remote and heroic failure, over a narrative that consecrated its extirpation from a national future.