Hilda Mundy: vanguards chronicler

Abstract

In 2016, Biblioteca del Bicentenario de Bolivia and the publisher La Mariposa Mundial gathered an extensive collection of scattered texts by the Bolivian writer known mainly by her heteronym Hilda Mundy. Although its production was particularly profuse in the 1930s, its critical reception is a recent phenomenon linked to reflections on the national literature and, in a larger context, of opening or constituting archives. In this perspective, the work of Mundy reappears in the debate about modernity and the avant-garde as a process interrupted by the Chaco War but replaced today by virtue of the current critical and editorial operations in regard to the place of women in the national literatures.

In this work, I deal first of all with the forms of the law of editorial interpretation given to a poetics that the writer elaborated as a dispersion, as an anarchy or anti-archive located in a considerable variety of media, many of them journalistic, reason why I focus in certain aspects of these texts from the point of view of the chronicle. In the second part, I analyze the link with the avant-garde to observe how the same gesture of generic declassification that hinders the insertion of Mundy writings in the literary canon since most of his work was circulated in the press, is repeated when it departs from the demand for referentiality that this medium presupposes, in favor of a humorous and metaphorical exploration. Through these resources, among others, Mundy questions not only the logic of the sign and the narrative syntax but also the truth possibilities of the language system, diametrically posed by the cultural analysis regarding writing, in general, and her position as a woman in the intellectual field, in particular.