So: Sir Walter Scott, the European creator of historical novels saw history as a continuum on which they could trace the roots of their identity, but Latin American writers saw Independence as a break with history, and a moment in which a new identity must be forged
This creates historiographical problems for the novel. In Latin American historical fiction, history is always questioned, old histories are rejected, and new histories and new identities are constantly under construction.
People keep writing novels in which the family is used to try to create a history, and/but family origins are in question and family legends turn out to be wrong. But many of these novels try to show a relationship between family and national history so that readers can imagine themselves, their families, and their personal history as part of a national narrative—and even of a nation that doesn’t exist yet, or that has just been decimated through war. The nation can still exist and be reimagined in these fictions and thus get reborn.
This works, and sometimes doesn’t; some texts reveal their doubts about the possibility of this project by undermining their own arguments through weird twists in plot. There’s a scene in one novel where a maid burns a library of colonial texts saying nobody reads those books, nor has for a generation at least: colonial history is irrelevant now.
It is primordially important for Latin Americans of this period to know something of their history, but totally reject Spain and reject the colonial period. This contradiction shows up as conflictive narrative desires.
Leslie: part of why they must totally reject Spain is that they need to say that what they keep from Spain isn’t colonial; i.e. they continue colonial practices but identify themselves with Nativeness at some level and with European countries like France. I am fascinated by this move, whereby the criollo at the top of the power pyramid restyles as the oppressed insurgent.
Axé.
