Rubén Darío, Valparaíso and a local history of the senses

Abstract

In the framework of an investigation that attempts to construct a local history on the most significant transformations and alterations that the senses experienced within a particular historical formation, Valparaíso between the 1820s and 1920s, the objective of this article is to examine those “innervation” or “sensorial alterations” in eight chronicles written by Rubén Darío during his stay in the city (1886-1889). Such a research project proposes as a hypothesis that a local history of the senses can be constructed in Valparaíso in the indicated period, by establishing the “synaesthetic regimes” that intervene in disputes over the sensible in the historical formation defined as an object. Such a task is carried out through a reading operation that identifies, within a discursive heterogeneity, the “sensory alterations” that led to the conditions that historically made possible the appearance of processes of normalization, quantification and discipline, of power effects that operated on the social and institutional construction of subjectivity during the time, as well as of the tensions and resistance to such power. This article examines these shocks in the collaborations that Rubén Darío published in the newspaper El Heraldo between February and June 1888.