Writing while Walking: Alonso Ovalle and the Construction of the World’s End Narrative in An Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile (1646)

In his book The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, the Irish writer Oscar Wilde cited a text by an unknown Jesuit or, rather, what that Jesuit had heard, when he referred to the “flutes of human bones” (114) made by certain indigenous people after they defeated Spanish soldiers on the southern border of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This was a sort of cannibalism, but which ended with musical performance and ritual consummation.1 The most likely explanation is that Wilde had read a curious partial translation into English from 1703 of a book written by the Chilean Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle (1603–1651) that was published in Rome in 1646.