Manuela, by Eugenio Diaz Castro, the Novel about the Colombian Foundational Impasse.

Abstract

This dissertation approaches Colombian national consolidation and nineteenth-century literature from a subaltern studies perspective. Its starting point is to explain why Eugenio Díaz’s Manuela (1858), the Colombian novel that best addressed the nation-building problems, was displaced during its time from the literary canon and replaced with Jorge Isaac’s María (1867). Although María was a novel that did not deal with any of the key nation-building problems of the day, it was paradoxically accepted as the national romance of Colombia. In seeking an explanation for this paradox, this research analyzes Colombian history, literature and culture of the 1850s. One of its principal findings is that the lettered city (Rama 1984) turned to the conservative pole of the field of literary production (Bourdieu 1993) as a political reaction to the growing popular liberal insurgency of the decade. Controlled by conservative grammarians, the Colombian lettered city not only assumed the task of expunging all colloquial, folk and popular language from the official narrative, but also attempted to exclude it from literature as well. This sequence of events accounts for Manuela’s marginalization because of the novel’s opposite divergence from the grammarians’ aim. Throughout its pages, the novel not only (re)presents and emphasizes the value of local, oral, and popular discourse, but also portrays obstacles to national consolidation from the perspective of the dominated classes. To demonstrate the way in which those obstacles were credited by the novelist to the elite’s attitude toward subalterns is the goal of the present study. It argues that in attempting to turn around the elitism of the lettered city of his time, Díaz subtly alerted the Colombian lettered city that the nation-state building process would be continuously delayed by leaving the majority of the population out of the nation-building project. This argument is substantiated by the examination of a number of important writings of the time and a comparison of them with Díaz’s novelistic depiction of both mainstream and marginal narratives involved in the struggle for hegemonic dominance of the nation-state.