History of a crisis: Mario Gongora's diario

Authors

  • Leonidas Morales T. Universidad de Chile

Abstract

The article examines the Diario by Chilean historian Mario Góngora (1915-1985), and specifically, its mode of realization of the private diary as a genre. According to the reading hypothesis, this mode of realization is defined in the Diario by the remarkable presence of features associated to a genre of mercantile accountancy in the bourgeois tradition: the ledger. The diary arose as a modern genre in 17th-century Europe under the influence of this kind of wrtiting. In Góngora this genre follows a pattern that is both dominant and consistent. The annotations in the Diario appear thus contaminated with the sense of a “record” as accountancy. And what is recorded day after day in the Diario, that is Góngora’s “capital”, are infinite, interminable readings and, amongst them, model lifestyles (religious, political, matrimonial). However, when these models are assumed biographically, they end up in failure. Actually, the Diario concludes with a generalized crisis of the subject. Following the order of a ledger, it can be said that the Diario finishes in a sort of “bankruptcy”.

Keywords:

diary, ledger, readings, crisis, genre