Celebration and Decadence of the Old Art of Telling Stories. From the Big Screen to the Orality: a Literary Denunciation of the Narrator's Loss of Legitimization

Abstract

The Chilean narrator Hernán Rivera Letelier (Talca, 1950) presents in his more recent novel, La contadora de películas (2009), a plot that proposes –in a first instance– an oblique and partial vision of the traditional link between literature, cinema and a "mixture of creating and telling stories" (in this case, transposition of the movie text to forms of oral story). From his incipit, the novel –located in a remote mining village of the northern interior of Chile– seems to be a celebration of two forms of "art", both threatened in the contemporary epoch: a first one, which is the transposing of the movie images to a verbal dimension, and a second one which is the "job" of counting histories, almost a ceremony of religious shades in certain communities. Nevertheless, in a second stage, the textual analysis demonstrates how both skills are about to decline, as consequence of the affirmation of technological appliances that –as a manifestation of the control exercised by the social device– practise a repression of the communicative powers of the human being. In this aspect, the novel connects with the studies that Gilles Deleuze had developed about those social structures dominated by the technology and characterized by a certain type of subjectivities, in which the creativity is stimulated only if a reward in monetary terms exists. The connection with Deleuze's thought happens, in Letelier's tale, for the link that the Chilean author establishes also with Walter Benjamin's prophetic reflections: the German philosopher, already in the decade of thirty of last century, had denounced the danger of extinction of two traditional forms of communication as the "art of constructing and reporting histories" and the habit of listening in a shared form. The moral message of Letelier's text reveals the disability of the human being to protect his atavistic habits from the historical, technological and sociocultural modifications of the postmodern era.