La centralidad del discurso del 'Héroe' en la construcción del mito nacional: Una lectura de la historiografía conservadora desde el género

Abstract

The idea of Chile as an unitary nation, that is built by the historiographical conservative discourse, is fundamented in the integrating construction of the relation between the collective and specific subjects which, under the supposition of a motherland demanding duties, constructs solidarity by the sacred action of one of its own, the national heroe, who is capable of reaching personal sacrifice with the aim to protect the community. The triade virility-heroe-nation, linked to the image of a founding or sacrificing subject, seems like a symbolic ordering that assures the transcending of nation and, through this, the inmortality of the heroe, who solves magically the imaginary contradiction of the community regarding its cosmogony. The unperishableness of nation is garanteed through the use of violence, and intimidation towards an “other” out of the group, which assures the exercise of the group’s internal solidarity. Therefore, the action of the heroe allows the transition from an internally conflicted past towards a future, meant as a particular project that assures the continuity of nation and historic projection. The conservative historiography, definitely, reads the history of Chile as a religious tale about the constitution of a new lineage that revalues the process of independence as constrution of a new legitimacy, where the last of the old order (with Bernardo O ́Higgins as the ilegitimate son - “huacho”) will turn into the first of the new lineage, sacralization process that finds its peak in the conservative interpretation about Arturo Prat, where the (Chilean) lineage already consolidated, wishes for Latin America the superior values that has already installed.