Reading from exile: traces of the essay in Rosa Chacel's diaries

Abstract

In 1982, the two volumes of Rosa Chacel's intimate diaries were published, titled, respectively, Alcancía. Ida and Piggy Bank. Lap. They had been written between 1940 and 1981, so they covered almost four decades of his exile in Brazil and constituted a reliable testimony of the impact of the intellectual diaspora during the Franco regime on the “post/autonomous” condition of literature written inside and outside of Spain after the Civil War. However, this “post/autonomous” condition was not only manifested in the testimony that Chacel offered of the difficulties experienced in exile – which showed the impossibility of writing separate from the experiences of a subject marked by the political history of the 20th century. – but, as I will defend in my communication, by interspersing the commentary on different literary works in the autobiographical narrative, the author crossed the borders between the intimate diary and the essay, and, thus, demonstrated that the thinking around Literature is crossed by the supports – the private notebook, in this case – in which it materializes. The readings of Michel Butor, Cesare Pavese, André Gide, Graham Greene or T. S, Eliot, among others, recorded in Alcancía, are intertwined with the narrative of one's own life. On the one hand, this means ending the opposition between a genre such as literary criticism – linked to the rise of public opinion – and autobiography – linked, on the contrary, to the intimate sphere – and, thus, expanding the supports in the that it is possible to express a legitimate opinion about literary texts. On the other hand, by introducing reading as an essential part of autobiography, Chacel questioned a notion of value intrinsic to texts to underline their dependence on individual experiences. In short, the intimate diary, whose publication is part of the progressive interest that, at the end of the 20th century, the literatures of the self begin to awaken, becomes a support that increases the possibilities of establishing a reflection on the most beyond the dynamics of legitimation and recognition that Pierre Bourdieu pointed out as constitutive of the contemporary literary field, a facet that deserves to be explored when trying to understand the changes in the conditions of production from the last decades of the 20th century to the present.