Introduction

This article forms part of broader research on environmentally oriented practices in Chilean literature and culture that emerged prior to the institutionalization of ecocriticism and environmental humanities as disciplinary fields. Rather than examining self-contained texts or finished works, this study concentrates on a practice situated at the periphery of authors’ writing and categories such as oeuvre, totality, or production of transcendental meaning: handwriting traces and marginalia.

My purpose here is to examine and describe a corpus of handwritten annotations found in the book collection of the Chilean intellectual Luis Oyarzún Peña (1920–1972), particularly those that reveal his early engagement with environmental themes and botanical knowledge which later inform his pioneering work in humanistic environmental reflection. Through this examination, I seek to reflect on the documentary value and significance of these annotations as objects of ecocritical inquiry. To this end, I put forward three theoretical propositions. First, traces and marginalia can constitute a legitimate archive for understanding the formation of environmental thought. Second, these traces reveal reading and writing as continuous rather than discrete practices. Third, when applied to lateral, ephemeral, fragmentary, or processual textualities, ecocriticism can expand its own analytical and methodological questions.

These propositions emerge from examining nearly four decades (1934–1972) of Oyarzún’s annotations in botanical treatises, naturalist travel narratives, philosophical and essayistic texts. Oyarzún’s traces and marginalia reveal not only what he read but how his environmental thought developed through reading as a material and situated practice. Accordingly, this article contextualizes Oyarzún’s position in the landscape of early Chilean environmental humanism, emphasizing formative stages of engagement with environmental and botanical issues. Finally, the article reflects on how these marginal inscriptions dispute conventional boundaries between reading and writing, archive and work. This practice ultimately expands ecocriticism’s reach, encompassing both the processual and material dimensions of a specific intellectual trajectory.

Early environmental humanism in Chile: Luis Oyarzún

Examining early environmentally-oriented practices illuminate the genealogy of a discursive sensibility that precedes institutional codification. The genealogic pulse in ecocriticism, environmental cultural studies, and environmental humanities has a substantial history, including foundational compilations and anthologies that shaped the fields’ early contours. Significant volumes such as Carolyn Merchant’s Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (1994), Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), Laurence Coupe’s The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000), alongside more recent publications, like Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry’s comprehensive four-volume anthology Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources (2021), demonstrate that foundational gestures in the expanding field of green humanities tend to perform textual archaeology, constituting genealogies of precursors and texts that prefigured environmental literary discourse.

These varied efforts make evident how the field has consistently sought to deepen its historical foundations by recovering precursory voices and intellectual formations. Along these comprehensive compilations, more focused historiographical approaches have emerged. A prime example is David Mazel’s A Century of Early Ecocriticism (2001), an anthology which gathers pre-1964¹ environmental texts by academics, journalists, and authors who engage with environmental concerns. The collection includes works that evaluate the literary merit of nature-oriented writing, offer cultural visions of landscape, wilderness, and conservation, and feature metareflective commentaries by nature writers themselves. In a cognate approach, but operating at an even more specific level, scholarly reassessments such as Dominic Head’s analysis identify what he terms an ‘ecocriticism avant la lettre’ (2002: 24), or proto-ecocritical elements, in Raymond Williams’ classic The Country and the City (1973) and subsequent essays. These studies illustrate how ecocritical historiography parses and categorize environmental sensibilities through the careful excavation of environmental thought produced within diverse intellectual traditions and moments in history.

In the context of Latin American culture, Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes’ compilation The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2021) comprises five centuries of intellectual production that can be analyzed through an environmental studies lens to demonstrate how the Global South has developed and articulated ecological perspectives rooted in distinctive intellectual backgrounds and material conditions. Notably, an absence in French and Heffes’ compendium is Chilean writer Luis Oyarzún, a significant omission given his status as one of Latin America’s earliest environmental thinkers whose work bridges environmentalism with aesthetics, philosophy, and cultural criticism. His public interventions address pressing environmental concerns such as conservation, pollution, and biodiversity loss in the Chilean context. While Oyarzún’s broad literary and critical output includes poetry, narrative, travelogue, literary and art criticism, translations, and historiography, he is best known primarily for his influential intimate diary and secondly for his essays on culture and aesthetics.

Among the latter is Defensa de la Tierra [Defense of the Earth] (1973), a posthumously published collection of essays that Oyarzún prepared before passing away. This volume captures the author’s systematic reflection on what he termed as the ‘ecological topic’ (Oyarzún, 1971),² anticipating key issues in contemporary environmental debates within the humanities (Donoso, 2016, 2020, 2021). The book is a lucid manifesto against anthropocentrism and a passionate call for conservation policies aimed at protecting Chile’s natural heritage. The essays articulate a vibrant conservationist standpoint that ranges from fostering a citizenly affection for nature, denouncing polluting practices in both urban and rural contexts, to highlighting the threat of extinction faced by native plant species and recounting proto-ecological discourses in Chile’s history—especially from the 19th century.

Defensa de la Tierra is a selection from Oyarzún’s intimate diary rearranged to impart an essayistic tone and express an enunciative position firmly rooted in the Latin American cultural criticism tradition. Thus, as both author and reader of himself, Oyarzún assembled the most eloquent passages of his diary addressing the environmental crisis. Moreover, as a scholarly reader, he backed the work with a vast bibliography spanning botany, biology, geology, ecology, philosophy, ethics, travel literature, colonial chronicles, poetry, and nature writing. Oyarzún’s ecological thought is best understood within a complex intellectual, cultural, and material framework that shaped his environmental engagement throughout his life. Far from being a mere literary figure, Oyarzún was deeply embedded in a broad interdisciplinary conversation that intertwined aesthetics, philosophy, science, and culture, forging a pioneering articulation between these fields and early environmentalism in Chile. As we will see, his work is marked by a practice of reading and writing that reveals porous boundaries between personal history, textual consumption, and literary production.

On marginalia

Within environmental humanities, and especially in the archaeological quest to identify intellectual precursors in Chile, scholars like Pablo Chiuminatto, Sofía Rosa, and Andrea Casals have advocated for metacritical approaches that revisit secondary texts—or, in other words, everything that Gérard Genette (1997) terms ‘second-degree’. For instance, Chiuminatto and Rosa (2018) suggest analyzing ‘the folds that manifest the reverses of references and bibliographies’ and recovering ‘authors and lines of unexplored research’ (243–249), explicitly focusing on proto-ecological readings and writings (Casals and Chiuminatto, 2019: 18). But how does this work when the author’s personal library is preserved, as in the case of Luis Oyarzún? His book collection is housed at the Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) in Valdivia, the city where he spent his final years. His conserved library offers a rich, material locus from which to explore the genealogy of his environmental thought beyond his published works.

While the reconceptualization of references, paratexts, and citation networks as archaeological apparatuses or reading machines opens valuable pathways for reconstructing disciplinary genealogies, it seems a necessary methodological elasticity to situate personal libraries themselves at the center of such analyses when accessible. The intricate reliefs of Oyarzún’s environmental thought are embedded, in part, within the materiality of his book collection. Oyarzún’s personal library reveals dimensions unattainable, elided, or absent through conventional bibliometric, referential, or even metacritical methods: the circulation and origin of texts, evidenced by provenance marks, dedications, and ownership inscriptions; patterns of reading appropriation and engagement, expressed through marginalia, annotations, and other ephemeral traces; sustained and recurrent interaction with specific themes or authors, as deduced from sets of books and subcollections; and the concrete conditions framing the intellectual labor, manifest in the books’ quality, languages, conservation status, and the vestiges they can contain.

Theoretical literature on the reading-writing continuum provides valuable insights here. Roland Barthes (1989) described himself as a reader who, far from distraction or disinterest, would intermittently raise his gaze from the page to write about what he was reading. Taking Barthes’ thoughts further, one can conceive of a radical reader-writer who collapses the distance between the two activities, creating a minimal distance between what he has read and what he has written, a space where everything becomes production. Traces and marginalia appear in this precise liminal space. Oyarzún’s personal library inhabits what Maurice Blanchot calls the ‘imaginary space of the work’ (1982: 18), wherein the distance between reading and writing dissolves.

Handwriting traces, marginalia, and insertions in books constitute textualities associated with an imperfective aspect, in logical opposition to the perfective ones characterized by completeness and totality, such as a finished text or work. Imperfective forms are inherently fragmentary, unfinished, palimpsestic, or in progress, encompassing materialities like drafts, manuscripts, brief notes, and diaries. According to Lawrence Buell, no ‘fact about environmental writing is more fundamental than its pluriform nature’ (1995: 144). Therefore, ecocriticism, environmental textual studies, and diverse approaches with philological vocation more broadly, could appraise marginalia as autonomous objects of analysis, equal in epistemic value to other textual forms instrumental in reconstructing the historiography of early environmental literary practices. In this regard, consider the concept of ‘green philology’, coined by Jose Manuel Marrero. ‘Green philology’, Marrero points out, ‘focuses on the poetics that emanate from texts of the past and also chooses the eco-poetics that allow them to be reinterpreted in the present and made useful for the future’ (2021: 425).

Readers mark or write in their books for their own future reference, unwittingly extending their presence to come. As H. J. Jackson (2016) puts it, writers ‘are conditioned to make notes in books’. Perhaps writers are the most inclined to transgress the materiality of the book because of the coercion that many of them impose on their own work (Piglia, 2005: 21). Moreover, in general, those compelled to critically reflect on literature externalize their presence, their ways of producing meaning, their dialogues with their object of attention, and their discoveries through traces and marginalia (Stoddard, 1985: 1–2; Camille, 1992; Chartier, 1995: 20; Orgel, 2015: 4–7; Chapron, 2020: 8–12). For any researcher, going through an author’s library is an intense experience, but encountering some signs, marks, or autograph glosses has a deeper resonance: decoding the marks, underlining, and annotations left in the margins opens new pathways for critical, speculative, and materially grounded exegesis.

Oyarzún’s personal library³

Luis Oyarzún moved from Santiago de Chile to Valdivia in March 1971 to assume a position as professor of art theory and history at the UACh, as well as oversee the university’s nascent department of public and cultural engagement. As expected, he brought with him his extensive personal library, although space constraints prevented housing the entire collection at his residence. Some copies were kept at the home of his brother Fernando, psychiatrist and university professor, while others were temporarily stored in a warehouse of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution of UACh. Eventually, this portion was transferred to the depository of the Central Library. Following Oyarzún’s death in November 1972, his mother, Hortensia Peña, decided to donate the books to UACh, an action that was formalized during 1973.

The inventory documenting this donation consists of a 176-page carbon-copy list (Figure 1) on flimsy paper that details 5,520 items in correlatively numbered bibliographic entries. Some correspond to multivolume collections or clusters of periodicals—journals, weeklies, newspapers, magazines, etcetera—suggesting that the total number of items donated likely exceeds 5,600. The document lacks an official date or deed of cession. The list was compiled meticulously by the young brothers Fernando and Eugenio Oyarzún, using two different typewriters, one mechanical, one electric, to inventory their uncle Luis’ library. The consistent application of bibliographic descriptors, the inclusion of the items’ provenance information, the foresight in making multiple copies of the document, the practical division of the document, and minimal transcription errors point to a high degree of precision. This level of attention suggests the guidance of their father, Dr. Fernando Oyarzún.

Figure 1

A page from the original donation list, showing the methodical recording of bibliographic data.

Eugenio and Fernando employed two strategies to organize the indexing process. First, they divided the data into separate lists marked at the center of each first folio with Roman numerals (I to VI), comprising 33, 32, 37, 18, 33, and 23 pages, respectively. Second, each list was subdivided into sections of varying length that denote both provenance and the original order of grouped items. Yet, the underlying logic of Luis Oyarzún’s intended classification remains unclear. While groups of common origin often share thematic or disciplinary connections, in the last two years of Oyarzún’s life there was apparently no established classification procedure. Walter Benjamin observed that ‘Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories’ (2007: 60), an insight that aptly characterizes the later state of Oyarzún’s library and exposes the complex interplay between order and disorder, routine and oblivion, memory and affect, all inherent to personal collections and archives.

After the donation, the library processed Oyarzun’s library for cataloguing. In addition to standard institutional stamping and call number assignment, each volume received a commemorative ex-libris (Figure 2) inside its front cover. The corpus was distributed across three distinct locations: most copies went to the General Collection, while a few volumes were kept in Historical and Reserve funds due to considerations related to age, value, or binding. Over time, some volumes were relegated to storage as library personnel deemed them unsuitable for circulation. Part of the stored collection was eventually sold or discarded to manage bibliographic surpluses, leading to the fragmentation of Oyarzún’s personal library.⁴

Figure 2

Bookplate provided by the UACh Libraries for Luis Oyarzún’s books. The illustration depicts a tree extending its roots to form the letter ‘L’. Circa 1973, unknown artist.

Oyarzún’s traces and marginalia

Richard Oram observes that while examining ‘a single volume annotated by a writer may offer considerable insights […] the study of an entire library, or even a significant portion of it, may open a much wider [interpretative] window’ (2014: 3). During my research stay at UACh Libraries, I initially surveyed 467 items from the cession list, subsequently narrowing my focus on 101 volumes most relevant to understanding Luis Oyarzún’s ecocritical and environmental thought, alongside other crucial aspects of his work such as intimate writing, aesthetics, philosophy, poetry, travel literature, and intergenerational connections. I discovered several volumes often bear Oyarzún’s handwritten traces, marginalia, inserted notes, postcards, and other ephemera. Using an overhead A3 scanner, I digitized 2,202 images, along with approximately 300 smartphone photographs from an additional 100 books.

Among these materials were 19^th century travel and exploration diaries by naturalists Félix de Azara and Charles Darwin, annotated by a young Oyarzún between 1934 and 1936 (Figures 3, 4, and 5). Further archival evidence confirms that he became acquainted with the work of Henry David Thoreau around 1945, notably through an anthology gifted by Nobel Prize poet Gabriela Mistral (Figures 6, 7, and 8). As I write, I continue to examine scanned pages from botanical painter Marianne North’s two-volume autobiography, which reflects Oyarzún’s deep engagement with botany circa 1950. This period also coincides with his explorations of philosophical works by Bergson and Bachelard, whose aesthetic ideas on spatiality and landscape influenced his thought. Significantly, Oyarzún’s interests expanded to embrace Zen Buddhism and other Eastern spiritual traditions, topics he further developed in his diary and the book Diario de Oriente [Eastern Journal] (1960). Although the botany manual by Rodulfo Armando Philippi that Oyarzún carried on excursions was not found, I examined Víctor Manuel Baeza’s botany volume annotated with handwritten notes later integrated into Oyarzún’s personal diary and an essay from Defensa de la Tierra (see Oyarzún, 1995: 201; 1973: 50–54) (Figures 14 to 17).

Figure 3

Volume II of Félix de Azara’s journeys, featuring two variants of Oyarzún’s ownership signatures. One of them includes the date when he began reading the book.

Figure 4

Page 153 of Azara’s travels, with Oyarzún’s signature and reading date at the top. The question ‘¿arvejas?’ [peas?] is written in the right margin.

Figure 5

Charles Darwin’s Beagle diary with Oyarzún’s ownership signature. Like Azara’s book, this one has successive annotation that dates the progress of Oyarzún’s reading. Below his ownership signature is the date ‘December 1934’.

Figure 6

Cover of the anthology El pensamiento vivo de Thoreau [Thoreau’s Living Thought] (1940).

Figure 7

The dedication reads: ‘A Luis Oyarzún, compañero admirado y querido: esta alma limpia, fuerte y formadora. Gabriela’ [To Luis Oyarzún, admired and beloved companion: this noble, pure, strong, and creative soul. Gabriela].

Figure 8

In the books collected by Oyarzún around the 1940s, this scheme of underlining and attention cross marks in the margin is common, as seen here in Thoreau’s anthology.

Let us now turn to a corpus of annotated texts from Oyarzún’s personal library to delve into two research queries: what meanings emerge from Oyarzún’s handwritten traces and marginalia, and how these interventions relate to broader ecocritical and environmental inquiries.

Figures 3, 4, and 5 document marginalia from Félix de Azara’s and Charles Darwin’s travel journals, showing Oyarzún’s characteristic signature and acquisition date on the title page, as well specific page marks indicating reading progress. Oyarzún’s marginalia reveal a persistent botanical curiosity that began in his youth with scientific books and intensified in adulthood. These annotations also contain brief notes expressing doubts or clarifying the content when needed. Critical scholarship (Morales, 1995; Pérez-Villalón, 1999; Grau, 2009; Valdés, 2011; Donoso, 2016, 2020; Donoso and Vidangossy, 2023) has observed Oyarzún’s fascination with nineteenth-century naturalists’ travel narratives as profoundly influential for his own environmental writing, especially in their synthesis of empirical data and scientific nomenclature with geographical, historical, and botanical cultural imaginaries. This synthesis is not merely theoretical but manifests materially in textual and discursive level.

Beyond picturesque narrations, these travel accounts seem to have served as a catalyst for Oyarzún to develop an essayistic style with varied storytelling elements. An illustrative example of this ecocritical displacement is Oyarzún’s essay ‘Resumen de Chile’ [Summary of Chile] in Temas de la cultura chilena [Themes of Chilean Culture] (1967). There, he revisits narratives of European travelers in Chile, particularly chronicles, memoirs, and field notebooks by 19th century men of letters and scientists who describe the felling of extensive areas of forests, woodlands, and thickets to fuel mining operations and smelters in northern Chile. The exhaustion of natural resources contributed to erosion and desertification processes in the area. This emphasis on geological, botanical, and landscape modifications demonstrates how Oyarzún’s essayistic writing incorporates fragments of environmental history and testifies to a certain affective and critical shift regarding what can become an object of reflection, anticipating cultural approaches to ecology.

Rather than documenting Oyarzún’s enthusiasm for Azara’s and Darwin’s journals, these annotations exemplify what we might term residual persistence. Following Raymond Williams, the residual is something that has acquired its form in the past ‘but is still active in cultural and discursive processes’, not simply as vestiges, but as present, effective elements (1977: 122). For ecocriticism and environmental humanities, both fields being centrally concerned with textual analysis and discursive positioning, marginalia can take on particular significance. They allow tracing the early stages of intellectual appropriation that mature into sustained dialogues with history and culture, revealing reading and writing as continuous, evolving practices rather than isolated or discrete acts. Thus, Oyarzún’s annotations offer more than evidence of reading; they elucidate the gradual formation of an idiolectal discursive practice unfolding over time.

Similar conclusions could be drawn from another revealing sample, which, although lacking annotations, bears Oyarzún’s characteristic reading marks alongside a dedication by Gabriela Mistral (Figures 7 and 8). The volume in question is El pensamiento vivo de Thoreau [The Living Thought of Thoreau] (Figure 6), a 1940 anthology edited by Alfred O. Mendel. Mistral likely gifted this book to Oyarzún in February 1945 in Petropolis during his study tour of Brazil as a secondary school teacher.⁵ The exact circumstances of the exchange remain uncertain, though the inscription (Figure 7) clearly marks this as a meaningful intellectual transfer. Previous studies on Oyarzún’s ecological thought (Donoso, 2021: 259) noted that the author references Thoreau—that seminal figure for environmentalism—only once in his Diario íntimo [Intimate Diary] (Oyarzún, 1995: 303). The same absence occurs in Defensa de la Tierra, a text connected with diverse environmental traditions and walking narratives, where one might anticipate references to the author of Walden (1854). This very elision heightens the significance of the Thoreauvian anthology. The volume contains multiple marks—underlining and crosses in the margins (Figure 8)—that are similar to other findings from the mid-1940s.

My interpretation is that, although Thoreau receives limited explicit treatment in Oyarzún’s writings, he valued and read this modest edition attentively, likely inspired by its provenance from Mistral in the year she received the Nobel Prize (December 1945). Equally important, this omission invites critical reflection on scholarly expectations. It prompts us to broaden our focus and to consider not only explicitly referenced authors and ideas but also the discreet absences that hover at the margins—or elements that remain present yet elude direct acknowledgment because they seem too evident to have been overlooked. Such absences reveal intellectual and cultural dynamics that perform quietly but substantially within a corpus, repertoire, or archive. In critical terms, the residual could be reformulated as the persistence of precarious or minimal forms that nonetheless underpin and shape more complex discursive and affective magnitudes. Recognizing these residual elements enables a more precise understanding of how ecocritical and environmental thought is elaborated not only through what is said but also through silences and gaps—which sometimes appraise the cultural texture and affective possibilities of the archive more effectively.

On another note, among the botany books in Oyarzún’s extensive personal library, three volumes form a cohesive set that document his enduring interest in the plant world. This trilogy of works—and their layered annotations—not only illustrate Oyarzún’s enduring botanical curiosity but also exemplify the dynamic interplay between marginalia, intellectual exchange, and the production of environmental knowledge. These works are distinguished not only by their content but by the handwritten vestiges they exhibit, which span different periods in Oyarzún’s life, from youth to adulthood. Notably, one volume contains marginalia that operates as a ‘pretext’ (Gresillon, 1994) for published writings, establishing a clear link between marginal notes and paratextual or metatextual elements articulated through Genette’s (1997) framework.

This set includes Las plantas [The Plants] (1878), a six-volume work from the Enciclopedia para la juventud [Encyclopedia for Youth] by Celso Gomis (1841–1915), a Spanish engineer and anarchist intellectual. Bound as a single tome, the six volumes show marks that indicate exhaustive reading. The handwritten annotations take several forms: typographical corrections, marginal crosses marking passages of interest (echoing mnemonic techniques documented in Thoreau’s anthology), and succinct metatextual clarifications distinguishing Spanish and Chilean terms for flora and fauna (Figures 9, 10, and 11). The second volume is J. D. Hooker’s Botany (1881), which includes on its title page an ownership inscription dated 1953 and two sketches likely rendered by Oyarzún: one depicting a vine, the other an abstract seaweed-like form (Figures 12 and 13). The third is Víctor Manuel Baeza’s Los nombres vulgares de las plantas silvestres de Chile y su concordancia con los nombres científicos. Y observaciones sobre la aplicación técnica y medicinal de algunas especies [Common Names of Wild Plants of Chile and their Correspondence with the Scientific Names. Observations on the Technical and Medical Application of Some Species] (1930), displaying a similar 1953 inscription.

Figure 9

Volume I of Las plantas [The Plants], by the Spanish engineer and anarchist educator D. Celso Gomis.

Figure 10

About ivy, Oyarzún notes: ‘Las hojas machacadas limpian [se refiere a limpiar llagas] y tiñen de negro’ [The crushed leaves clean [referring to cleaning sores] and dye black].

Figure 11

Here, several reading marks are observed. On the upper right it reads ‘china’, the name given in Chile to the ladybug insect.

Figure 12

Botany, by J. D. Hooker, obtained by Oyarzún in 1953.

Figure 13

One of the drawings described depicting a vine plant.

Baeza’s botany preserves especially rich marginal traces, including numerous annotations and exchanges (Figures 14 to 17). Close analysis, carried out with the guidance of Eugenio Oyarzún—who transcribed his uncle Luis’s notebooks to compile the Diario íntimo—has confirmed that these marginalia were penned both by Luis Oyarzún and his friend Roberto Humeres. Two distinctive signs on the title page communicate layers of ownership and appropriation: the prior owner’s name is obscured using the same ink as Oyarzún’s signature, while a hastily sketched six-petal rosette appears beneath the subtitle level (Figure 14). A note in the bottom left margin of page 24 (Figure 15) reads: ‘What we called ‘humeriana morbida’, a wordplay that parodies Linnaean classification. Underlying this boutade, however, is an actual botanical record from an excursion undertaken by Oyarzún and Humeres. This annotation acts as a conceptual pretext’ (Gresillon, 1994), later elaborated in three entries in the Diario íntimo (see Oyarzún, 1995: 201, 216, 218) and in the essay ‘Orquídeas chilenas’ [‘Chilean Orchids’] included in Defensa de la Tierra (1973: 50–54). Lastly, Figures 16 and 17 reproduce four pages showcasing a detailed botanical dialogue between Oyarzún and Humeres about a plant referred to as ‘flor del aire’ [air’s flower].

Figure 14

Los nombres vulgares de las plantas silvestres de Chile y su concordancia con los nombres científicos. Y observaciones sobre la aplicación técnica y medicinal de algunas especies [Common Names of Wild Plants of Chile and their Correspondence with the Scientific Names. And Observations on the Technical and Medical Application of Some Species], by Víctor Manuel Baeza, 1930.

Figure 15

Two of the numerous notes left in Víctor Manuel Baeza’s book. On the right, in the margin of the entry ‘AZULILLO’, it reads: ‘Maybe «prince»?’

Figure 16

On the left page it reads: ‘Flor de estrella → La llamada por nosotros «Flor del aire», en Caleu. Ver Mutisia Spinosa R. et Par (pg. 88) ¿O Mutisia ilicifolia? Llámese también hierba del jote o flor de granada’ [Starflower → The one called by us “Air’s flower”, in Caleu. See Mutisia Spinosa R. et Par (p. 88) Or Mutisia ilicifolia? Also called vulture grass or pomegranate flower].

Figure 17

On the right: ‘La llamada por nosotros «Flor del aire» (Caleu)’ [The one called by us ‘Flower of the air’ (Caleu)].

Other notable botanical texts include Marianne North’s autobiography Recollections of a Happy Life (1892), acquired in 1952 according to the ownership inscription. Twelve years later, Oyarzún translated the pages dedicated by the painter-botanist to her journey through Chile in 1884 in search of the araucaria (Araucaria araucana) and the chagual (Puya venusta), for the quarterly cultural magazine Mapocho.⁶ The translation represents Oyarzún’s ongoing involvement with botanical knowledge and reflects his contribution in mediating environmental culture within the Chilean context. Oyarzún’s readers are well aware that his fondness for botany lies at the very core of his later critical intervention in environmentalism from a cultural perspective. As widely documented in his diary, throughout the 1950s he maintained an amateur interest in botany, undertaking numerous excursions into the countryside to identify local native flora. This botanical focus explains the significant accumulation of specialized texts in his personal library during this decade. Botany remained a constant thread throughout his writing projects until the end of his life. The enduring commitment to botanical knowledge not only discloses Oyarzún’s personal interests but also situates his environmental thought within a culturally rich and scientifically informed framework, underlining the interdisciplinary nature of his humanistic legacy. For example, Defensa de la Tierra, which Oyarzún described as a collection of ‘texts on the ecological topic’ with reflections ‘from a personal, botanical, landscape and literary point of view’ (Oyarzún, 1971), was originally conceived to feature illustrations by the eminent Chilean botanist Carlos Muñoz Pizarro drawn from his Flores Silvestres de Chile [Wildflowers of Chile] (1966), as explicitly requested by Oyarzún (see Oyarzún, 1972). Posthumously published in October 1973 through the efforts of his friend Jorge Millas, Defensa de la Tierra contains a cover by Chilean painter and photographer Mario Toral, alongside botanical illustrations from Muñoz Pizarro’s Sinopsis de la Flora Chilena [Synopsis of the Chilean Flora] (1959).

To systematize the diverse marks and annotations in Oyarzún’s library, and based on consolidated scholarship regarding traces and marginalia (Camille, 1992; Jackson, 1992, 2001; Orgel, 2015; Martínez and Ortiz, 2018) along with recent archival practices and methodologies (Chenoweth, Baron-Raiffe, and Koeser, 2018), I propose the following typology:

1. Margin attention marks: non-linguistic marginal symbols (e.g., crosses, ticks, or lines) that highlight content without directly interacting with the text itself (e.g., Figures 10 and 11).

2. Drawings: non-linguistic hand-drawn visual forms with aesthetic, descriptive, or representative purposes, whether related to the text or not (e.g., Figure 13).

3. Underlining or framing: marks applied directly to the text (lines, boxes, or brackets) that emphasize specific words or passages (e.g., Figure 8).

4. Autographic and heterographic signatures: annotations indicating ownership, acquisition circumstances, or dedications (e.g., Figures 3, 5, and 12)

5. Marginalia: handwritten linguistic notes in the margins that, regardless of their length, function as metatexts, pretexts for later writing, or paratexts indicating aspects of the reading event (e.g., Figures 10, 11, 15, 16, 17).

This taxonomy allows a systematic mapping and categorization of Oyarzún’s readerly interventions. Also, it opens paths for analyzing additional material modifications, such as inserted ephemera, photographs, postcards, clippings, and deliberate deletions, relating them to both the annotated texts and Oyarzún’s published writings (Chenoweth, Baron-Raiffe, and Koeser, 2018). Given that these annotations cover nearly four decades (1934–1972), applying stratigraphic analytical methodologies (Giannachi, 2016: 34–35) could enable researchers to trace the evolution of Oyarzún’s reading practices across different periods, disciplines, and fields of inquiry, shedding light on how these textual interactions shaped his humanist environmentalism.

As a preliminary conclusion, this classification can offer to ecocriticism a methodological framework that recognizes marginalia as legitimate archives of environmental knowledge production. Each category reveals specific dimensions of ecological thought in formation: attention marks evidence selective reading patterns that privilege certain aspects of natural or scientific texts; drawings capture the visual and embodied dimension of botanical knowledge; underlining signals moments of critical recognition; signatures document the temporal appropriation of environmental texts; and marginalia constitute proper spaces where emerge a cognitive interchange that identifies with the text and yet also stands outside it. Applied to Oyarzún’s corpus, this taxonomy exposes that environmental thought develops through fluxes of connections, associations, and discursive sedimentations, allowing researchers to trace not only the history of canonical or hegemonic environmental ideas but also the materiality of their production and the role of materiality in constructing interdisciplinary knowledge. Importantly, in our case, interpretative procedure seeks to politicize ecocriticism’s approach, positioning marginalia as sites where environmental thinking and praxis entangle, thus broadening the scope and methodology of environmental humanities beyond canonical texts.

Conclusions: On an archival becoming

Abstracting certain theoretical possibilities related to the annotated corpus left by Oyarzún enables us to explore how his marks and marginalia transform books into archival documents. Beyond revealing Oyarzún as a reader-writer who anticipated environmental literary practices, these handwritten traces undergo what we might term an archival becoming. By this concept, I understand the displacement of library materials into archival space. We can conceive Oyarzún’s annotated volumes as a distinct series, no longer mere bibliographic objects but also documents from the archive of environmental thought’s formation in the Chilean, Latin American, and Hispano-American contexts. Each annotated page exists simultaneously as a bibliographic artifact and intellectual trace, demanding a materially oriented approach that can account for both dimensions without reducing one to the other. In this sense, annotated books exceed their primary function, demanding conceptual relocation to a new object regime. This relocation offers glimpses into literary historiography, reading practices, and, crucially, the history of environmental thought from the perspective of humanities.

Further theoretical reflections can be hypothesized from Oyarzún’s handwriting annotations. At a primary level, the archival becoming arises from a deeper semantic affinity between archival practice and environmental studies. Both fields share a conceptual vocabulary—preservation, conservation, rescue, recovery, material culture, and resilience—which now encounter at the core of interdisciplinary practices. These terms reflect how the Anthropocene’s epistemic and political challenges affect all facets of human experience, including the production of knowledge and memory. As Claire Colebrook suggests, ‘the inscriptive event of the Anthropocene is an extension of the archive, where one adds to the readability of books and other texts, the stratifications of the Earth’ (Craps et al., 2018: 507).⁷

In this vein, the idea that the archive itself extends into the Earth, rendering its dynamic and layered sedimentations legible within a more-than-human timescale, offers a compelling image through which ecocriticism meets Oyarzún’s marginalia. These annotations inhabiting his personal library model environmental knowledge as an accumulation of intertwined strata, where scientific observation, intimate writing, ecological discourse, and cultural memory intersect and coalesce at the margins. Such material inscriptions encourage ecocriticism to embrace archival methodologies essential for unveiling localized, situated epistemologies of the environment. Consequently, it affirms the critical role of material-cultural scholarship in broadening the horizons of ecocritical investigation. In this context, the preservation of vestiges of early environmental discourses that emerged before formal institutionalization creates new paths for producing memory and history, especially when these traces originate from authors who anticipated ecocritical theoretical frameworks in peripheral contexts.

Oyarzún’s annotations, spanning nearly four decades (1934–1972), will have faced the inevitable degradation and vulnerability of paper, ink, and binding. Yet preservation extends beyond mere conservation: digitizing and cataloging these marginalia would create what Arlette Farge calls ‘a new object’ that, emerging from pre-existing forms, makes possible ‘a different narration of reality’ (2013: 62–63). Such a document collection would require interdisciplinary collaboration across literature, historiography, library science, and environmental and digital humanities—assembling memory and resilience to confront increasingly opaque visions of the archive’s future in the climate crisis. This interdisciplinary imperative reflects broader transformations in how we conceive the archives. While earlier archival anxieties centered on 20th century historical traumas (Farge, 2013; Didi-Huberman, 2008), current scholarship grapples with material threats from climate change and the conceptual challenges of archiving in the Anthropocene (Tansey, 2015; Parikka, 2015; Winn, 2020; Verticchio et al, 2021). The preservation and study of Oyarzún’s marginalia thus constitute an act of both historical recovery and theoretical intervention, and they can constitute part of alternative genealogies of environmental thought, thereby expanding ecocriticism’s archive beyond its established centers and conventional temporal frameworks.

The very act of preserving and digitizing these marginalia responds to converging imperatives: the material fragility of the annotated books themselves, the historical significance of early environmental thought in Latin America, and the methodological possibilities they open for ecocriticism. The proposed classification system—distinguishing between attention marks, drawings, underlining, signatures, and marginalia proper—serves not merely as a descriptive taxonomy but as an analytical framework recognizing these traces as legitimate objects of ecocritical inquiry. This shift matters because it acknowledges that environmental writing develops not only through published texts but also through the intimate, processual engagement with active reading.

Marginalia function also as a genre of writing that, following Banting, ‘operates not along the voice-ear axis but rather along that of the eye and the hand’ (1986: 120). This shift from voice to trace, from authorial work to readerly inscription, challenges writing’s modern teleology.⁸ If the archive releases writing from ‘the bondage/the binding of the book’ to inaugurate ‘a veritable carnival of inscriptions’ (Banting, 1986: 122), then Oyarzún’s annotated library exemplifies this polyphonic composition: botanical sketches interweave with philosophical notes, while reading dates overlap with brief fragments of future essays or diary entries. Such materials compel what Stoler calls a ‘poetics of detail’ (2002: 87), where meaning is obtained not from immediate explanation but from sustained attention to presence itself. Through this careful attention, we engage with Benjamin’s paradox of reading ‘what was never written’ (qtd. Antelo, 2021: 52), confronting marginalia’s oxymoronic nature as texts both secret and communicative, personal yet legible to future readers.

Is the book still the same object after being annotated? Oyarzún’s marked volumes suggest otherwise. As botanical names fill margins, as sketches accompany youth readings, as reading dates frame chapters, these books cease to be mere vessels of others’ thoughts. They become hybrid objects where the distinction between reading and writing collapses. This transformation embodies what Stuart Hall identified as the archive’s unpredictable futurity, where ‘it is impossible to foretell what future practitioners, critics, and historians will want to make of it’ (2001: 92). There is an inherent perlocutionary dimension associated with the composition of new archival study objects that raises one of Farge’s (2013: 122) essential questions: ‘how can we invent a language that will grasp what we are looking for’? For Oyarzún’s marginalia, this means abandoning the pursuit of definitive meanings in favor of creating new signifiers. The task is not only hermeneutic, but creative. Luis Oyarzun’s annotated books were never intended to be environmental texts, yet they now function as sources revealing how environmental thought emerged through intimate dialogue between reader and text.

Acknowledgments

Project no. 3230822, Postdoctoral Program of the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Research (FONDECYT), National Research and Development Agency (ANID) of the Chilean Government.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.