Mario Góngora, the historian who read 621 books in 3 years
A biographical article about Mario Góngora's life and works
Note: This article, taken from Diario Chañarcillo, gives an outline of Mario Góngora’s life and studies as well as impressions from students and his close contacts. This interview also provides an outline of his major works. I plan on translating at least one of his other essays (Hope and Civilization of the Masses) and thought the present article - a sketch - would be helpful for English-speaking readers to whom Góngora is largely unknown.
In 1934, at the age of 19, Mario Góngora began to keep a diary, which he continued writing until 1937, when he finished his studies in law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and went on his first trip to Europe. Despite being an outstanding student, he did not want to go through with his law degree, and later, in his notes, he would declare his complete lack of interest in law.
Once back in Chile, Góngora began to study History at the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, and in 1944 he qualified as a State Professor of History and made this profession his life.
Leonidas Morales had the responsibility of reading his manuscripts, which he describes as being part of adventure story. Góngora’s notes in his diary are of his diverse readings, he says, so that “the singular thing about his diary is that he turned reading, the book, into the main field of learning to direct one’s life.”
The “Diary of Mario Góngora”, in which this work is recorded, is the first publication in a series of Selected Works, which Ediciones UC and Editorial Universitaria have prepared together with distinguished authors.
The publication of this work allows us to get to know Mario Góngora, and, through him, other young people who lived with passion the experience of opening up to the adult world, the world of ideas, politics, but also, of love”, explains María Eugenia Góngora, dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities and the University of Chile, and daughter of the historian, who released her father’s diary for publication.
The Teacher
María Eugenia Góngora was at the book launch, which took place at the Lea + bookshop at the GAM, alongside Gabriel Salazar, winner of the National History Prize (2006) and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the University of Chile.
At the occasion, Salazar highlighted the legacy of his “Teacher”, and valued the depth of the construction of identity of a young man between 19 and 23 years of age who lived through the deepest crises of the 20th century - the First World War, the Great Depression of 1929, and the Second World War.
“What Mario Góngora read – two or three books a day – was pure Western European culture, trying to absorb all the humanistic knowledge of the West. That is how he became charged with an exceptional intellectual and cultural depth. That is what I felt when he was my teacher. He commanded a natural respect”, he says.
“He read everywhere – on the beach, in the hills, at the Plaza de la Constitución, at the foot of Santa Lucía Hill to look at the little girl who was in I don’t know which flat. He opened himself to the space everywhere he went; he was open to everything it could give. Beauty, colour, life”, Salazar explains.
He even levitated
Patricio Bernedo was a student of Góngora’s in the 1960s at the University of Chile’s Institute of History and recalls that “upon reading his diary, one gets the impression of being in the presence of Don Mario’s unique character. Among other things, it is very striking that a student in his twenties had read 621 books in the space of three years, including philosophy, literature, art, logic, history, law, and religion.”
He relates an anecdote: “He was such an unusual teacher that there were even stories among the students that he had such a high capacity of concentration that he could levitate.”
The Curriculum
Mario Góngora del Campo (1915-1985) is considered one of the most important and influential Chilean historians of the 20th century. His thought had Christian roots, but he was open to the stimuli, in its concepts and models, of 19th and 20th century European historiography. He was a distinguished professor at the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University.
Of his books, undoubtedly the one most widely read and most fertile, but at the same time the most controversial, is the “Historical Essay on the Nation of the State in Chile in the 19th and 20th Centuries” (1981).
Two posthumous works contain various texts by him alongside several interviews. “Political Freedom and the Economical Idea of Government in Chile from 1915-1935” (1986), and “Hope and Civilization of the Masses and Other Essays” (1987).
Diario Chañarcillo (Diario : Copiapó)-- jul. 8, 2013, p. 28