UC Irvine

Fernando Alegría's trio of Chile's dictatorship novels are blistering amalgams of literary imaginative prose, memoir and political history, unprecedented in Latin American fiction.

The tragic and untimely death of Salvador Allende during a Sept. 11th, 1973 military strike intended to end his presidency weighed heavily on Alegría, stimulating my inquiry into his dictatorship novels to understand their ontological, cultural, political and theoretical significance in relation to our basic human rights.

In Una especie de memoria, El paso de los gansos, and Coral de guerra, Alegría speaks for Chile's less fortunate, insisting on addressing the tortured and the aggrieved, the victims of political persecution and the "disappeared" at the hands of the dictatorship personified by General Augusto Pinochet. Inviting these Chileans to center stage, Alegría ensured the downtrodden and dismissed—those who had pinned all their hopes for a more just society on Allende—would not be relegated to invisibility merely because they had been born poor and had idealistically come to believe change could be made at the ballot box.

The legal and philosophical notion of sovereignty, as well as its literary theoretical dimension needs renewal. Alegría's three novels provide a key to creating a safe resistance through a revolutionary recalibration of insilio or "internal exile" of the individual, who—under Pinochet—becomes an object of contempt, of rejection and violent reprisal. Consequently, this study includes perspectives on power, sovereignty and human rights by a number of thinkers from antiquity to the present.

The meaning of "sovereignty" has evolved under their watch. Individual worth diminished when dissident colonists wrote "We the People...," thus galvanizing the power of military and civilian dictatorships, reason enough to re-articulate and renew our belief in sovereignty of the self as the fundamental basis for all social contracts. Would that governments and corporate entities be sublimated to the concept of sovereignty in its purest state; the truest expression of sovereignty burnished into the Zeitgeist as an expression of literary theory. Fernando Alegría's fictional truth has been midwifed and all ontologies, tautologies, languages and relationships can finally be unshackled.

Key terms: sovereignty, rights, violence, literature.