Redefining Latin American Historical Fiction

The Impact of Feminism and Postcolonialism

H. Weldt-Basson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349447237, 9781137277565
• eBook ISBN: 9781137349705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Current scholarship on Latin American historical fiction has failed to take feminism and postcolonialism into account. This study uses these important contemporary discourses as a starting point for a new definition of the Latin American historical novel that includes national identity, magical realism, historical intertextuality, and symbolism.

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Introduction: Feminism and Postcolonialism—New Directions in Latin American Historical Fiction

Helene Carol Weldt-Basson

Theoretical Overview of the Historical Novel

The evolution of historical fiction throughout the twentieth century has been the topic of numerous studies. The principal tendency of contemporary scholarship on the topic is to trace the impact of postmodernism on recent manifestations of the genre. For those unfamiliar with the term postmodernism, it refers to both a period (the era following modernism) and a philosophy. According to Linda Hutcheon and Jean-François Lyotard (Lyotard, 34), the following characteristics can generally be attributed to postmodern fiction or art:

(1) postmodernism rejects elitism, political conservatism, and the autonomy of art associated with its predecessor, modernism, in favor of cultural democratization and a generally contestatory stance;

(2) postmodernism views all knowledge as subjective, a human construct, thus questioning the transparent relationship between history and reality;

(3) postmodernism is centered on the concept of difference, recognizing distinctions of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and deconstructing binary oppositions that schematize human nature (Hutcheon, 3–53);

(4) postmodernism opposes all master or metanarratives with their pretension to absolute truth (Lyotard, 34).

This postmodern stance, which has dominated (albeit overlapping with modernism) the literary scene since the 1980s, explains to a large degree many of the changes wrought on historical fiction, both inside and outside Latin America. As we will see in the following pages, most of the current studies on Latin American historical fiction focus precisely on changes evidenced in the Latin American New Novel to the traditional model of the historical novel as defined by the Marxist critic Georg Lukács in the 1930s, in his landmark book The Historical Novel. Lukács largely defines the classical form of the genre on the basis of the nineteenth-century works of Sir Walter Scott. The essential characteristics of the genre include representation of a distant past, historical figures as minor rather than major characters, the hero as an average man who represents social trends and historical forces (the “world-historical individual” in Hegel’s words), past historical events as a prehistory of the present, and adherence to historical facts (Lukács, 21–61).

Although most studies begin their discussions with Lukács’s work, the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni was an important precursor to Lukács’s study. Manzoni was both a writer of historical fiction and a theorist who contemplated the contradictions inherent in historical fiction in his nineteenth-century book On the Historical Novel. According to the critic Sandra Bermann, Manzoni built his work on a scrupulous adherence to history (Bermann, 21). For Manzoni, the only real difference between historical fiction and history proper was that the former had the poetic license to fill in the “interstices of history” (Bermann, 23), the gaps in words, thoughts, and feelings of historical subjects that do not appear in the historical record. Nonetheless, Manzoni was torn between the exigencies of remaining true to historical fact and those of writing a piece of fiction. This essential contradiction between the didactic value of the historical novel and the reality that historical fiction “lies” through invention led Manzoni to predict the eventual decline of the historical novel (Manzoni, 126). Paradoxically, to some degree, we can think of Manzoni’s ideas on historical fiction as a very early anticipation of the postmodernist notion of post-history: there can be no complete adherence to historical fact because “facts” are subjective, based on individual perceptions and interpretations, and thus the concept of history is negated. I will return to this idea later on in my discussion of the effects of postmodernism on the Latin American historical novel.

After Lukács’s study, there was a large temporal gap in important theoretical studies on the historical novel until Joseph Turner’s article “The Kinds of Historical Fiction: An Essay in Definition and Methodology” appeared in 1979. By that time, many years had passed since the publication of Lukács’s book, leading Turner to take a totally different theoretical approach to the historical novel, largely focusing on the different ways in which invention is employed in historical fiction. Turner defines three types of historical novels (Turner, 337–345):

(1) the disguised historical novel, which includes no actual historical characters or events, but creates parallels between its characters and historical figures;

(2) the invented historical novel, which refers back to a distant past (the world before the author was born). Since the characters and events are removed from the author’s experience, even though they are invented, they acquire a historical nature; and

(3) the documented historical novel, in which real historical figures appear, and in which the novelist is in a position similar to that of the historian, but may fill in the gaps in recorded history with invented details.

Turner ultimately makes an interesting observation regarding the different purposes of historical novelists. He suggests that they may write in the “original mode,” in which their aim is to create a compelling vision of the past; or they may write in the “reflective mode,” in which the gap between past and present is recognized and bridged; or they may write in the “philosophical mode,” in which their concern is if or how history itself is possible (an anticipation of Hayden White’s concept of metahistory).¹ Turner’s study is of value because it defines a new set of aims for historical fiction that go beyond Lukács’s embodiment of social trends and forces to reflect upon the concept of history itself.

Another gap followed Turner’s article, and no major new reflection on the concept of the historical novel appeared until 1986, when the noted Latin Americanist Daniel Balderston published The Historical Novel in Latin America: A Symposium.² This book compiles a number of interesting studies on the historical novel, featuring a theoretical study of the genre by the noted scholar Noé Jitrik. Jitrik proposes a broad definition of the historical novel that includes works that focus on local customs, social psychology, and sociopolitical issues. According to Jitrik,

La novela histórica se propone representar conflictos sociales ... pero también ... podrían entrar manifestaciones costumbristas, de crítica social o política y aun de psicología social ... en tal abanico, una constante insoslayable sería la referencia a hechos históricos ... En suma ... lo que peculiarzaría la noción de novela histórica es la referencia a un momento considerado como histórico y ... cierto apoyo documental realizado por quien se propone tal representación.

(Jitrik, 20–21)

[The historical novel proposes the representation of social conflicts ... but also ... manifestations of costumbrismo, social or political criticism or even social psychology could enter into this category. ... In this spectrum an inescapable constant would be the reference to historical events. ... In sum ... what would be peculiar to the notion of historical novel is the reference to a moment that is considered historical ... and ... certain documentary support achieved by the one who proposes such a representation.]

(my translation)

The common denominator shared by all these different varieties of historical novel (political, sociological, psychological, and costumbrista) is their reliance on a historical referent and historical documentation.

In the early 1990s, at least three major studies of the historical novel were published: Naomi Jacobs’s The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (1990), Roberto González-Echeverría’s Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990), and Seymour Menton’s Latin America’s New Historical Novel (1993). All three are extremely important, because for the first time, these works took into account the significant changes that had begun to occur in the content and style of historical fiction as a result of formal innovation and experimentation in the novel, especially in Latin America, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s.

Although Jacobs does not speak specifically about the Latin American historical novel, the categories she defines are important for its analysis. Jacobs defines three types of contemporary historical fiction (Jacobs, xx):

(1) Fiction biographies: fictional works that treat a time period in the life of a single historical figure. These works employ both modernist and postmodernist techniques and do not subscribe to the objectivity of historical biography although they may include historical facts;

(2) Fiction histories: fictional works in which historical figures are representative of “unchanging patterns of human behavior” and thus reduced to simplified types. Real characters are present to aid the writer’s satirical cultural analysis, and not to bring history to life;

(3) Recombinant fiction: fictional works that mix historical and mythical figures to destroy all boundaries between fiction and history.

What is of particular interest in Jacobs’s study is that she is one of the first critics to include works that mix history with myth or fantastic elements within the category of historical fiction. In Latin America, such novels are generally considered “magical realist” works, and, as we shall see, they have been specifically excluded from the historical novel genre by such critics as María Cristina Pons in her book Memorias del olvido: la novela histórica de fines del siglo XX (1996) (Pons, 101).

Although González-Echeverría does not focus on contemporary Latin American fiction in Myth and Archive (with the exception of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude]), he defines several of the major characteristics that will come to be associated with the postmodern historical novel. González-Echeverría asserts that “the new narrative unwinds the history told in the old chronicles by showing that history was made up of a series of conventional topics whose coherence and authority depend on the codified beliefs of a period whose ideological structure is no longer current” (15). In other words, González-Echeverría points to the deconstruction of history, and the exposure of its ideological subjectivity, and is thus among the first to suggest the postmodern view of history that permeates the contemporary Latin American historical novel. González-Ecehverría also pioneers the discussion of the historical novel’s use of documents, both legal and scientific, which he refers to in his study as the “archive.”

Seymour Menton’s Latin America’s New Historical Novel (1993) is the first book that actually attempts to identify the moments of evolution or change in the Latin American historical novel and define the characteristics of what he terms the “New Historical Novel.” Menton identifies the birth of the new historical novel with the works of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, specifically in 1949, the year of publication of El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World] (Menton, 22). Subsequent critics, such as María Cristina Pons, disagree with Menton’s chronology, citing Carpentier as more of an aberration than as the initiator of a new trend (Pons, 105). According to Menton, this new novel is characterized by six important traits:

(1) The subordination of the mimetic recreation of history to the illustration of three philosophical ideas: the impossibility of ascertaining the truth value of history, history’s cyclical nature, and the unpredictability of history;

(2) The conscious distortion of history through omissions, exaggerations, and anachronisms;

(3) Famous historical figures as protagonists instead of minor characters;

(4) Metafiction (reference to the writer’s own creative process);

(5) Intertextuality with other texts and historical documents; and

(6) Dialogism, parody, the carnivalesque, and heteroglossia as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin.³

Menton’s study, like González-Echeverría’s, is among the first to chronicle the shift in Latin American historical fiction toward postmodernism.

The ideas of these critics are later echoed by a number of other scholars, such as Peter Elmore, who in La fábrica de la memoria: la crisis de la representación en la novela histórica latinoamericana (1997) focuses on how historical fiction uses past historical moments, such as the Conquest and Independence, to reflect on contemporary historical events and crises, emphasizing the contestatory dimension of such historical fiction. Several years later, Mark Hernández made similar observations in his study titled Figural Conquistadors (2006), which focuses on the re-reading of the chronicles by post-boom writers in order to articulate a counterdiscourse to official history on the conquest.

I have already cited the important work of María Cristina Pons, Memorias del olvido: la novela historica de fines del siglo XX (1996), for her dissention with other critics on the historical novel. Although Pons notes the important effect of postmodernism on the Latin American historical novel, she does not focus on this aspect of contemporary historical fiction as do most of other critics, and instead, turns her attention to delimiting the concept of historical fiction. Pons asserts that the presence of history is not a determining factor of the historical novel, but rather what is significant is the purpose of employing history in the novel. If history serves a merely decorative purpose, then a novel should not be considered historical. History must have a structural role in the novel for it to be viewed as truly historical. According to Pons, historical novels are inevitably political, and no distinction should be made between historical, political, and testimonial novels.⁴ Pons disagrees with Lukács that the historical novel must refer to a distant past, but emphasizes that it must adhere to a linear time, to Bakhtin’s time–space chronotope, and thus cannot present a mythical or cyclical time. In this way, Pons excludes magical realist novels from her definition of historical fiction, dissenting with González-Echeverría’s, Menton’s, and Jacobs’s definitions of the genre and excluding all the “Boom” novels (with the exception of Carpentier’s) from the category of historical novel. Pons also cites the use of historical documents or textualized history in the contemporary Latin American historical novel. Finally, she defines several important differences in the evolution of the Latin American historical novel vis-á-vis that of Europe. In contrast to Scott’s nostalgia for the past and essential conservatism, the Latin American historical novel has been characterized by both the search for identity during the chaos of the post-independence era and an essentially liberal ideology (Pons, 27–101).

Most of the other critics who wrote about historical fiction since 1998 have emphasized the role of postmodernism in the historical novel. Both Celia Fernández Prieto in Historia y novela: poética de la novela histórica (1998) and Magdalena Perkowska in Historias híbridas: la nueva novela histórica latinoamericana (1985–2000, [2008]) focus purely on the postmodern character of the most recent Latin American historical fiction. Prieto defines two basic kinds of historical fiction: novels that follow the traditional model (Scott’s) and those that are postmodern. The postmodern novel distorts historical material and proposes

historias alternativas, apócrifas o contradictorias sobre sucesos o personajes de gran relevancia histórica: De hecho estas novelas presentan los hechos desde la perspectiva de los perdedores, de las minorías marginadas o excluídas de la Historia, mostrando así que privilegiar una tradición textual implica aceptar una específica versión de la realidad histórica a expensas de otras versiones diferentes. (150)

[alternate, false or contradictory histories about events or characters of great historical relevance. In fact these novels present events from the perspective of the losers, the marginalized minorities or those excluded from history, showing that privileging a textual tradition implies accepting a specific version of historical reality at the cost of other different versions.]

(my translation)

Prieto emphasizes an important dimension of postmodern historical fiction: the fact that postmodern historical novels gi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Feminism and Postcolonialism—New Directions in Latin American Historical Fiction
• 2. Ashes of Izalco: Female Narrative Strategies and the History of a Nation
• 3. In Search of the Absent Revolution: Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s Novels of Invented History
• 4. The Galleys of History: Mirages and Madness of a Journey
• 5. Archaeologies of Identity: Revisions of the City and the Nation in Two Novels by Ana Teresa Torres
• 6. Santa Evita, History, Fiction, and Myth: A Narrative from Another Side
• 7. Chaos and Simulations of History in Mujer en traje de batalla
• 8. The Plural History of Memory: A Polyphonic Novel by Ángela Hernández
• 9. (In)submissive Imaginaries in the Contemporary Brazilian Historical Novel: A Reading of Um defeito de cor by Ana Maria Gonçalves
• 10. El sueño del celta: Postcolonial Vargas Llosa
• Notes on Contributors
• Index