Rubén Darío in Chile: bourgeoisie and poetic-intellectual production

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of lyrical poetic creation and intellectual work that Rubén Darío challenges in texts published during his stay in Valparaíso and Santiago. Abrojos (1887), Azul... (1888), and several chronicles published in newspapers, particularly those with a small circulation, such as El Heraldo, are among the texts. This creative practice contrasts the figure of the bourgeois, an ascendant subject in Latin American societies at the end of the century, with that of the creative subject in artistic and intellectual creation. The hypothesis is that Darío is questioning the superficial, uncompromising, and mercantile status of the work of art that predominates in the Chilean cultural scene, primarily through the use of a minor genre such as the chronicle, and he anticipates a debate that will take place with even greater fervor during the avant-garde period of the 1920s. As an alternative to the circulation regime of the work of art as merchandise, he proposes the idea of a true, autonomous art, closed in its own aesthetic sensibility. However, this process is contradictory because he positions himself as a poet and cultural critic in a state of in-betweenness: dissatisfaction with the bourgeois condition in which he must subsist and a desire to postulate a creative work that occupies an important place within a society in the midst of a peripheral modernization process.