Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative by Roberto González Echevarría

By Roberto González Echevarría

Delusion and Archive bargains a brand new conception concerning the starting place and evolution of the Latin American narrative, and concerning the emergence of the trendy novel. rather than following the normal different types arrange by way of literary heritage, Professor González Echevarría explores the connection of the narrative to the language of authority: the legislation within the colonial interval, technology within the 19th century, and anthropology within the 20th century. The publication includes readings of significant works within the culture similar to Garcilaso el Inca's Comentarios reales, Sarmiento's Facundo, Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, and García Marquez's Cien años de soledad.

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It mounts up, amounts to the law, the law of fiction. Fictions are contained in an enclosure, a prisonhouse of narrative that is at the same time the origin of the novel. It is not by chance that Cervantes began to write the Quijote in jail, nor that the narrator-author ofHistoria de Mayta (1984) should seek the ultimate truth about his character in a prison. The Archive goes back to the origins of Latin American narrative because it returns to the language of the law, the language that the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos will find in the innermost recesses of the jungle, where a city awaits him.

That is to say, the fictions Latin American culture has created to understand itself. What is left is the opening up of the Archive or perhaps only the story about the opening of the Archive the story I hope to be telling in this book. The Archive is a modern myth based on an old form, a form of the beginning. The modern myth unveils the relationship between knowledge and power as contained in all previous fictions about Latin America, the ideological construct that props up the legitimacy of power from the chronicles to the current novels.

The first issue is, precisely, one of legitimation, as the trial to decide upon the canonization of Columbus clearly reminds us. Archival fictions like El arpay la sombra bear the indelible imprint of the law, the form of writing that was generated by the initial political circumstances that made Latin American narrative possible. The first and defining set of circumstances that determined the emergence of such narrative was the development in Spain and its colonies of a modern state, and the fashioning of a legal system to sustain it by controlling individuals.

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