(Re)viewing Columbus: The 'Discovery' through the Eyesof Recent Spanish American NovelistsF.J. Lasarte

Introduction

This evening, in keeping with the fact that 1992 marks five hundredyears since Christopher Columbus's first voyage, I would like to give youa rapid overview of how Columbus and his undertakings have beenportrayed in the work of recent Spanish American fiction writers, that isto say in narratives written during the last twenty years or so.

I have entitled my lecture (Re)viewing Columbus because the works I willbe discussing all cast a revisionist look at their subject matter, a lookwhich is at the same time meant to be an evaluation and a judgment.The result is a fresh glance at the historical past, an alternative viewwhose purpose is to question the official version of events, to question lahistoria oficial. I should make it clear, however, that the alternativeproposed by these writers is no more than a fictional alternative, with allthe subjectivity and distortion one finds in prose fiction. Their projectdoes not entail setting up a new 'official' or 'scientific' version of thepast, which is what a revisionist historian would do. Indeed, a reader whowanted to get a coherent narrative of the 'facts' which make up Colum-bus's voyages would be poorly served if he turned to, say, Abel Posse orAlejo Carpentier. We should see these novels instead as examples. of afictional-historical discourse which enriches, in a critical way, thereader's understanding of the past.

A couple of minutes ago I was careful to use the phrase "five hundredyears since Columbus's first voyage" and not the term 'discovery ofAmerica'. The idea that Columbus discovered America, for many yearsuncritically accepted, has now been put into question by various culturaland political constituencies. Thus, some prefer to speak of el encuentro(the encounter, or meeting) of 1492, a concept which suggests aconfrontation between two equal cultures. Others, of course, go muchfurther than that and would exchange 'discovery' for 'genocide' or

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'ecocide', definitely a one-sided view which finds nothing good in thearrival of the Europeans in the lands which came to be called the NewWorld. This evening, given the limited amount of time at my disposal,I will not speculate as to what label is most applicable to the events of1492. I think, however, that you will be able to tell what position thewriters under consideration take on the issue.

My talk consists of a commentary on three novels which portray thoseevents of five hundred years ago: El mar de las lentejas (Sea of Lentils),by the Cuban Antonio Benitez Rojo, published in 1979; El arpa y lasombra (The Harp and the Shadow), by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, alsopublished in 1979; and Los perros del paraiso (The Dogs of Paradise, andthe only one of the three translated into Dutch, as De honden van hetparadijs), by the Argentine Abel Posse, from 1987. My criterion inselecting the texts was, simply, that the three have Columbus as animportant character.

Now, where do these narratives fit within °the larger context of theliterary and cultural history of Spanish America? They are, first of all,examples of the historical novel, in the broadest sense of the term, thatis to say narratives which portray people or events informed readers willrecognize as belonging to 'history'. And, second, they are examples of theSpanish American 'new' narrative which began in the 1960s and 1970s,when writers such as Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, andCarlos Fuentes, to name just a few, -undertook the collective project ofmodernization known as the boom, a project which entailed a drasticbreak with the literary realism dominant until then. To be sure, the 1960sand 70s saw the publication of few historical novels, but so many haveappeared since that time, that it is perfectly justified to speak of the'new' Spanish American historical novel. Indeed, Foro Hispanico, therecently founded scholarly journal for Hispanic Studies in the Nether-lands, chose this timely topic - 'La nueva novela hist6rica hispano-americana' - as the title for its first issue.

The origins of the 'new' Spanish American historical novel are to befound, interestingly enough, in pre-boom times, in Alejo Carpentier's Elreino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World), published in 1949, andwhich tells the story of the slave uprising in Haiti which led, at the turnof the nineteenth century, to independence from France and to theestablishment of a black regime. Carpentier's novel, while thoroughlyresearched and based on historiographical sources, is, at the same time a

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blend of the real and the magical. This departure from literary realism,which Carpentier called lo real maravilloso, or 'magical realism',represented for him the most faithful way to render (and respect) thehistory of Spanish America, which he calls, on account of its mixture ofcultures and religions, of its mythical dimensions and landscapes, 'achronicle of lo real maravilloso'.

Thirty years later, in 1979, that same Alejo Carpentier delivered a lectureentitled 'La novela latinoamericana en visperas de un nuevo siglo' (TheLatin American Novel on the Eve of a New Century), in which heemphasized the need to maintain a closer link between the novel and thepolitical and social history of the continent. Indeed, he called upon LatinAmerican novelists to become cronistas de Indias, chroniclers of the NewWorld, whose work should encompass the continent's past and presenthistory, with the aim of effecting fundamental political changes. Whetherthese new narratives have been effective political instruments or not isopen to question. But there is no doubt that recent Spanish Americannarrative fiction has become, to a substantial degree, historicized, as wesee in the work of Benitez Rojo, Posse, and Carpentier.

Carlos Fuentes has underscored the cultural significance of the newhistorical novel in his book Valiente mundo nuevo: epica, utopia y mitoen la novela hispanoamericana (Brave New World: Epic, Utopia, and Mythin the Spanish American Novel), published in 1990. He explains thatfiction writers are able to do what few historians can, namely to continuere-inventing the past so that it may not die, so that it may be able toprovide a sense of cultural continuity and show Spanish America the wayto the future. And he goes on to say that the new historical narratives, byfashioning an alternative to the official version of events, have broughtto the forefront Spanish America's syncretic, polycultural, and multiracialcharacter.

The turn towards the historical past, a turn which has been made not onlyby the writers under consideration tonight, but also by boom superstarsthe likes of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, must also be seen as partof a larger debate which addresses the relationship between history andfiction, which brings into question the existence of a firm dividing linebetween the two types of narratives. This is a debate, I should add, whichhas not only involved literary critics (and novelists), but also professionalhistorians, though it must be said that the latter group is greatlyoutnumbered by the former. It can be argued, along these lines, that since

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history and fiction are both forms of written discourse and entail puttingtogether a narrative, they are ultimately not all that different from eachother. This is, in fact, the point made by the historian Hayden White inhis book Metahistory (1973), where he insists that supposedly objectiveworks of history are, first and foremost, literary and rhetorical artifacts,which reflect an authorial consciousness and its cultural and ideologicalpreferences and, therefore, cannot be accurate representations of pastreality. And more recently - and certainly more significantly, given thefact that White was considered something of a crank by his fellowhistorians - Simon Schama, of Harvard University, and no crank inanyone's book, has tried his hand at historical fiction. Schama, wellknown in this country as the author of The Embarrassment of Riches: AnInterpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, last year published abook entitled Dead Certainties, in which he writes 'history' _ he writes,for example, about the events surrounding the battle of Quebec - usingthe devices of 'fiction', such as multiple perspective and interiormonologues. I should add that Schama is the first to admit that he foundhis inspiration for Dead Certainties in the work of novelists, among themGarcia Marquez. In literature Schama found the most satisfyingrenditions of 'historicity', of the dramatic and specific qualities ofhistorical action. Schama's book suggests, in other words, that completelyaccurate depictions of events, that is to say depictions limited toverifiable incidents, would not necessarily be the most authentic.Schama's drastic and courageous step, by blurring the dividing linebetween the writing of history and the writing of fiction, gives strongsupport to the view that masterful narrators such as the Spanish Americannovelists under consideration tonight do indeed a better job of bringingto life historical figures and events, so that the reader experiences thepast both in a more vivid and a more critical manner.

Benitez Rojo 4

The first novel I am going to discuss is El mar de las lentejas by AntonioBenitez Rojo. Published in Cuba in 1979, Benitez Rojo's novel encom-passes four different (and connected) strands of Spanish American andSpanish history: Columbus's second voyage, the reign of Philip II ofSpain, the conquest of Florida by Menendez de Aviles, and the beginningof the black slave trade in America. The events narrated cover thus aperiod of about one hundred years, from the late 1400s to the late 1500s.For obvious reasons I am going to limit myself to the first of the fourstories.

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Benitez Rojo, who now teaches Latin American Studies at AmherstCollege in Massachusetts, has written that he found his inspiration for Elmar de las lentejas in the reappraisal of history brought on by theupheavals of the Cuban revolution. He conceived of the novel as aregional project, something which would lead him to a deeper under-standing of the historical origins of Caribbean culture. I should explain,at this point, the novel's curious title, which has nothing to do withCaribbean agriculture or cuisine. It is instead an allusion made to themistake made by a sixteenth-century cartographer, Guillaume le Testu,whose map of America gives the Caribbean the name La Mer de Lentille,confusing Antille with the French word for lentil. The title itself couldtherefore be considered a commentary on the blurring between 'fact' and'fiction' which America seems to have produced in the imagination ofEuropeans, as well as to the freedom to invent which accrues to thewriter of historical fiction.

In El mar de las lentejas, the story of Columbus is told from the pointof view of an invented character, the soldier Ant6n Baptista, who sailedto America in 1493, as a member of Columbus's second expedition. Thus,though Columbus is one of the novel's main characters, the protagonistis Baptista, with the result that past comes to us through the experiencesof a common man, and not through those of a major (and recognizable)historical figure. (This, as we shall see, distinguishes Benitez Rojo fromCarpentier and Posse, who make Columbus their protagonist.) The readerfollows Ant6n Baptista in his journey from Spain to the Lesser Antillesand Puerto Rico, a journey which ends with his arrival on Hispaniola,where he settles, searches for gold, fathers children, and participates -though marginally - in the violent political turmoil of the period. Thenarrative ends with Ant6n's death, at the hands of his son by an Indianwoman. The setting is, for the most part then, Hispaniola, the islandwhich Columbus made his chief settlement and which today is shared bythe Dominican Republic and Haiti. And the time frame is more or lessten years. I say more or less' because the narrative contains no specificdates. The only way to date the events of Ant6n's life is throughoccasional allusions to recorded events. Thus we know, for example, thathe died not too long after the shipwreck which caused the death ofFrancisco de Bobadilla on 30 June 1502.

Now, how should one interpret Benitez Rojo's choice of a commonsoldier for the protagonist of El mar de las lentejas? His purpose is not,as one might think, given the time and place of the novel's publication,

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an attempt to democratize the arrival of the Spaniards in America, or toshow that the Spanish underclass was as much a victim as the indigenouspopulation. Ant6n Baptista, as I will show presently, is very much thevillain of the piece. Instead, what we see here is Benitez Rojo's adherenceto the historical novel as that genre was defined by the Marxist literarycritic Georg Lukacs in 1937. According to Lukacs, the historical novel isa narrative which portrays individuals, for the most part average humanbeings, who function as representatives of historical-social types, as theyundergo personal crises which coincide with the larger historical crisiswithin which they find themselves. The idea is to put the contemporaryreader in touch with the past in order to arrive at a critical understandingof the present.

Benitez Rojo begins his Columbus narrative in a very effective manner,with a scene which emphasizes the destruction and degradation broughton by the arrival of the Spaniards on Hispaniola. This occurs in ChapterII of the novel, which is set toward the end of Ant6n Baptista's life andopens with the description of a column of people making their way alonga jungle path. At its center, carried by four exhausted Indians and armedwith a crossbow, we see Ant6n Baptista. The rest of the procession ismade up of Indians: men, women (several of them pregnant), andchildren, all of whom clearly belong to Ant6n. And among them standsout a naked man who has been brutally tortured - his lips, ears, and nosehave been sliced off - and who is shown carrying two poles nailedtogether in the shape of a cross, over which has, been draped a suit ofarmor. This scene functions emblematically, as a powerful dramatizationof the encounter between Spaniard and Indian. The native populationfinds itself degraded, with its leaders deposed, its women taken, its menenslaved, killed, or tortured. The cross, instead of announcing the arrivalof Christian values, serves here as the bearer of death and destruction.(Posse also plays with the cross, since he writes that Columbus broughtthe cruz-horca to America, a cross which in a pinch could also serve asa gallows from which to hang the uncooperative.) In a later, more explicitpassage, Ant6n is called "the Lord of sorrowful Indians, the Lord of Fear,the Lord of iron and nightmares, the Lord of death".

In the portrayal of Ant6n Baptista I see an attempt to combine the social-historical type and the individual, though it must be said that the first ofthe two is uppermost in Benitez Rojo's mind. The character we meet inthe novel's first scene is something of a caricature, someone whorepresents all those members of the lowest stratum of Spanish society

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- the impoverished and illiterate swineherds from Extremadura - whomade their way to America smitten with gold fever and who, even if nogold was to be found, suddenly acquired terrible power. Benitez Rojodoes not hide his contempt for such men, whom he describes as riff-raff,on account of their false pride and counterfeit nobility. Only now andthen does he show Anton as a complex character with fears and desires,as someone feeling remorse and love.

Columbus is a much less clearly delineated figure. We see him only a fewtimes, always from the outside, and as something of an eccentric, adreamer who can also be a schemer. While obsessed with his search forIndia and Japan, with the thought that the Earthly Paradise lies just overthe horizon, he can also calculate what profits - first in the form of gold,later in the form of Indian slaves - the new lands might be made to yield.He is the man who can both speak of winning the Indians' souls and saythat they should be tortured if they fail to obey.

El mar de las lentejas is a novel about Spaniards, and the same is trueabout the Columbus narrative it contains. If the author's sympathies liewith the Indians, whom he sees as doomed, these serve primarily asbackground characters. And while something is made of their courageand their life of leisure amid a plentiful nature, we find no mention ofthat commonplace of the time, the myth of the noble savage. The author'sinterest lies, instead, with the economic role played by the Indians, aspurveyors of gold or as its substitute. In fact, the theme unifying the fournarratives of El mar de las lentejas is the economic motivation whichunderlies the events narrated. Not religion, then, or personal glory, butmaterial gain is what drives Spaniards to explore and colonize America.And this is something which Benitez Rojo sees as a calamity for Spain.Gold brings nothing but anguish to Antbn Baptista (and ruin to the islandof Hispaniola).

Carpentier

I go on now to the second navel now, El arpa y la sombra, by AlejoCarpentier, which was published in 1979, the same year as El mar de laslentejas. Carpentier has explained that he was moved to write it by hisirritation on discovering that an attempt had been made in the nineteenthcentury to canonize Christopher Columbus, to make him a saint of theCatholic Church in time for the celebrations of 1892. Two popes, Pius IXand Leo XIII, backed up by 850 bishops, had three times made an

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official request that Columbus be considered for beatification, the firststep leading to sainthood. Thus, Carpentier writes El arpa y la sombra inorder to demolish the myth of Columbus as the virtuous bringer of thetrue faith to the American pagans, a myth which had been sponsored bythe European political right and which clearly did not square withCarpentier's own Americanist and leftist political views.

El arpa y la sombra is divided into three sections. The first and the third,bath quite short, concern the process of beatification and tell of how itcame to be set into motion and of its failure: The middle section,narrated by Columbus himself, has the form of an interior monologue.We follow Columbus's thoughts as he lies in his deathbed, waiting forarrival of a confessor. Full of guilt and remorse, he has decided to tell all,to reveal at last the truth of his own life and of his voyages across theAtlantic, to tell "things that will cause scandal and confusion, will changethe evidence and uncover deceit". And the confessional mode turns out tobe an astute rhetorical strategy, since setting up Columbus as the authorof his own demythification has the effect of heightening the credibilityof the new version of events. Columbus's truth is, of course, Carpentier'sfiction, something the latter takes as his prerogative. He has. written,specifically in connection with El arpa y la sombra, that he is a followerof Aristotle, in believing that it is not the novelist's job to tell things asthey happened but as they should or might have happened.,

A good deal of Columbus's interior monologue goes over familiar ground,retelling the recorded details of his life, both private and public. Thus weare told of his long search for printed sources which would justify theidea that he could reach Asia traveling toward the west, and of theequally long search for a powerful sponsor. There are, as well, frequentreferences to the streak of mysticism in his character, to those momentsof crisis when he heard the voice of God, to his belief in signs and omenspredicting that he was predestined for great things, that he would in factfulfill the prophecies of Isaiah, and to the conviction that his thirdvoyage had brought him to the gates of the Earthly Paradise. Whileadmitting his deficient mathematical and navigational skills, he gives adetailed account of his sailing expeditions, which took him all over theMediterranean, along the cost of Africa as far as Guinea, and mostsignificantly to Iceland, the jumping-off point for the Vikings who madetheir way first to Greenland and then to North America.

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Now, what interests us most tonight is that part of Columbus's confessionwhich supports Carpentier's critical project, in other words those eventsin his life which show he was no saint. From the very beginning,Columbus admits he is a sinner, saying that of the seven deadly sins onlysloth was unknown to him. Lust, in fact, seems to be a particularweakness of his, to the point that he fathers an illegitimate child andbecomes the lover of queen Isabella. He confesses to having been acharlatan all his life, a picaresque figure who climbed to the top on thestrength of his lying and conniving, a Genoese with allegiance to nonation. (The insistence on Columbus's Genoese nationality, together withthe suggestion that he was of Jewish ancestry, must be interpreted, Ithink, as Carpentier's way of needling the Spaniards, who claimColumbus as one of their own.) And the persona he adopts throughoutis that of the carnival showman, someone who made his way aroundEurope with his act, first in order to obtain the backing he needed andthen to justify what he had done in America.

However, the greatest source of remorse for Columbus is his materialism.As he searches his conscience, he realizes that he was motivated by greed(and by the desire for personal advancement). It was never his intention,he admits, to bring Christianity to America. He had no interest inconverting or baptizing anyone; that was the task of those who wouldfollow. Gold was his god. When he crossed the Atlantic he wasn'tsearching for the Promised Land but, instead, for the Golden Calf. Hewent as a banker, not as an apostle. And it fills him with guilt that in hisdiaries he wrote the word 'gold' more than two hundred times, and 'God'a mere fourteen. Finally, when real gold was not be be found insufficient quantities on Hispaniola, his greed made him turn to the Indianslave trade.

And how are the Indians portrayed in El arpa y la sombra? Carpentier,like Benftez Rojo, shows them from the outside. There is no major Indiancharacter. Instead we see the Indians through the words of Columbus thecharlatan, who changes his view of them to suit his needs. At first heconsiders them peaceful and simple people after all, they believe thatthe Spaniards have come down from heaven - who will make good sub-jects for Ferdinand and Isabella. Later, and in the absence of anyevidence, he calls them cannibals, in order to justify their being soldinto slavery. And finally, after the uprisings on Hispaniola, they arerebels against the crown, also to be enslaved. This evolving view of theIndians, which goes from idealization to degradation, reflects the

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destruction of their society and way of life, something Columbus seemsto regret only at the end of his life. For as he waits for the confessor, heaccuses himself of having been a false Christophoros. Instead of bearingthe word of the Gospels across the ocean, he came as the "Prince ofCalamities, Prince of Blood, Prince of Tears, Prince of Plagues - one ofthe horsemen of the Apocalypse".

The Indian characters of El arpa y la sombra also serve as vehicles forCarpentier's critique of Spanish society, a critique which at the same timemust be read as implicit praise for indigenous American values.Columbus reports how the Indians he brought back to Spain from hissecond voyage, soon to die of disease, reacted to what they saw all aroundthem: with repulsion and fear. Dieguito, the last survivor, explains thathe and his companions found European civilization to be false, cruel, andviolent. To them the Spaniards were filthy and evil=.smelling, and surelywore so much clothing in order to hide sores and deformities. Theirchurches they saw as a version of hell, on account of all the beggars andcripples which congregated there. But Dieguito's strongest condemnationis reserved for the indifference with which the rich regard the miseryand disease surrounding them. What we have here, of course, isCarpentier delivering a socialist critique of class society.

El arpa y la sombra delivers a negative verdict on Columbus in twodifferent ways. At the end of the novel, the request for his beatificationis turned down by the church authorities, the reasons being a common-law marriage and slave trading. And at the end of his monologue,Columbus passes judgment on himself, when he recalls that his shipsbrought unknown diseases, greed and lust, the sword and the torch, andchains.

Posse

The third novel I am going to discuss is Los perros .del paraiso by AbelPosse, published in 1987. It is the most complex of the three and,therefore, the most difficult to summarize. Like Carpentier's novel, it hasColumbus as its protagonist, but it is otherwise quite different. First ofall, Posse has chosen to tell the story of Columbus within a much widerhistorical context, so that the reader sees him against the background ofthe European transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Hegives a good deal of attention, in this regard, to the important changeswhich took place in Spain in the second half of the fifteenth century, as

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a new political reality emerged as the result of the marriage of Ferdinandof Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Posse is particularly interested in thegrowth of Iberian imperialism. His narrative of Columbus's voyages isthus preceded by a discussion of closely connected events: the conquestof Granada, the unleashing of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition,and the persecution of the Jews. Compared to the agressive Renaissance,the Middle Ages turn out to be a time of peaceful slumber. And Possesuggests that we are still living within the expansionist era, with itsemphasis on conquest, progress, and development, which began in thefifteenth century.

(I think I should explain that my account of Los perros del paraiso,centered on the novel's significance as a critique of history, necessarily- and regrettably - fails to do justice to Posse's sense of humor, to hisway with the absurd and the grotesque. I have rarely read a work whereseriousness and irreverence mix so effectively.)

Los perros del paraiso tampers with history in a much more obvious waythan the other two novels. Indeed, it would be quite reasonable to discussit in terms of its affinity with magical realism and fantastic literature,genres within the new Spanish American narrative which we tend toassociate with the work of writers such as Garcia Marquez, Carpentier,and Borges. (It is interesting, incidentally, that Carpentier, in writing Elarpa y la sombra, does not indulge in the genre he practically invented.)Posse's divergence from literary realism - that is to say, his implicitquestioning of la historia oficial - appears primarily in the form ofoutrageous anachronisms and highly improbable incidents. But his novelalso criticizes historians explicitly, for taking the easy way out, forfailing to use their imagination in recovering the historical past. Hisstated aim is to provide an alternative to the leaden prose of officialhistorians, 'delirious' historical fictions - the term 'delirious' comes fromPosse himself - which can be read as a poetic counter-history.

For example, Posse carries out his critique of Iberian economic, political,and religious expansionism by means of anachronisms which set up acomparison between Spain and Nazi Germany. There is talk of a NewOrder in the Iberian Peninsula, and at court there is a society known asthe SS. As power reaches but from the center, it takes the shape of aswastika, la svdstika del poder. Ferdinand and Isabella play around withNazi slogans as they contemplate the use of terror as an instrument ofpolicy against Moors and Jews. Columbus's crossing of the Atlantic is

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just as filled with anachronisms. The four voyages combine into one,lasting ten years, from 1492 to 1502, so that Columbus can pass freelyfrom one command ship to another, from one moment in time to anotheryears away. On the way over to America they pass other ships, such asthe Mayflower and the Queen Mary. And there are a number of amusingscenes involving the Aztecs and the Incas. It seems that, prior to 1492,Aztec navigators had already explored the Antilles and the Sargasso Sea,while the Incas had flown in their hot-air balloons. as far as Dusseldorf,where they found the inhabitants pale and apparently quite unhappy.This gives, of course, a new twist to the concept of the discovery.

As I have already mentioned, Los perros del paraiso is also a biographyof Columbus. Indeed, Posse covers the basic facts of his life, but this isonly a point of departure for a .portrayal which turns out to be ratherlopsided. It is lopsided because Posse emphasizes Columbus's mysticalbent at the expense of everything else. We notice this right away, duringColumbus's first appearance, described as the subversive presence of themutant, of the poet". What interests Posse - what is important, in otherwords - is Columbus the seeker of the Earthly Paradise, and this becomesthe centerpiece of the narrative. In a remarkable reversal, for instance,Posse shows Columbus actually being afraid of finding the riches of theOrient, since it would mean that he had not reached his lifelong goal, theEarthly Paradise. And once in America, he does not behave as a despoilerof nature but as its protector, and as a sincere - if naive - enemy ofmaterialism. Convinced beyond any doubt that he is in Paradise,Columbus forbids work, the wearing of clothing, and the practice ofreligion, all of them now unnecessary. Caught up in a delirium all his.own, then, he turns out to. be the strongest opponent of Iberian ex-pansionism in America.

Now, the identification of America with the Earthly Paradise serves avery important critical purpose, despite the fact that it comes to uschiefly as the delusion of a madman or a dreamer. It recalls, first of all,the utopian aspirations of those Europeans who, despairing of what theysaw as the evils of their own culture, dreamt of another place whichmight be innocent and unspoiled. And in doing so, of course, it makesthe devastation of America by Europe all the more tragic. It creates aironic gap which Posse han fill with his amazing narrative, a counter-history whose aim is to show how Columbus's imagined, prelapsarianAmerica collapsed back into history. ,

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Like Garcia Marquez' Macondo, Posse's Earthly Paradise is a metaphor,a poetic microcosm which succinctly recapitulates the history of SpanishAmerica. The return to the state of nature does not last long. Columbus'sdreamy edicts are soon subverted by the ambitions of his companions, asgreed, competitiveness, and power-seeking reassert themselves. TheGenoese, described as agents of multinational corporations, alarmed atColumbus's zero-growth policies and the absence of marketing op-portunities, scheme for the return of commerce. The first military coupd'etat takes place, organized by a colonel, naturally. Erotic freedom isreplaced by organized prostitution. The church decrees that the Indiansaren't angels after all, and the slave trade is initiated. The exploitation ofnatural resources begins, and manufactured goods arrive from abroad.The United Fruit Company, Philips, and Thomas Cook, among others,open branch offices in Paradise. King Ferdinand, angered by the factthat Columbus has rendered America unexploitable, sends Francisco deBobadilla over with orders to arrest him and bring him back in chains.And so, with Columbus's departure, the novel closes and the reader isbrought back to the realm of la historia oficial, though all the more alertafter having undergone Abel Posse's tour de force.

We have seen tonight, in three different novels, three very differentimages of Columbus: the entrepreneur, the rogue, and the dreamer. Noneof them quite fits the Columbus put together by professional historians,the man we find, for example, in Columbus (1991), the first-ratebiography by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. This is quite right, I. think,since it is in the gaps and contradictions and repetitions created by suchdissonant versions of a powerful cultural icon that the Spanish Americanpast is being reviewed. It would be unfortunate, and boring, and false,if it all made sense.

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List of works citedBenitez Rojo, Antonio, 1979. El mar de las lentejas. Editorial Letras, Cubanas,La Habana.

Carpentier, Alejo, 1979. El arpa y la sombra. Siglo XXI, Madrid.

Carpentier, Alejo, 1949. El reino de este mundo. E.D.IA.P.SA., Mexico.

Carpentier, Alejo, 1981. 'La novela latinoamericana en visperas de un nuevosiglo'. In La novela latinoamericana en visperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos.Siglo XXI, Madrid. p. 7-32.

Ferndndez-Armesto, Felipe, 1991. Columbus, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

1991. Foro Hispanico 1. Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam.

Fuentes, Carlos, 1990. Valiente mundo nuevo: epica, utopia y mito en la novelahispanoamericana. Mondadori, Madrid.

Lukacs, Georg, 1937. The Historical Novel. Beacon Press, Boston.

Posse, Abel, 1987. Losperros del paraiso. Plaza y Janes Editores SA., Barcelona.

Schama, Simon, 1991. Dead Certainties. Knopf, New York.

Schama, Simon, 1988. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of DutchCulture in the Golden Age. University of California Press, Berkeley.

White, Hayden, 1973. Metahistory: The Historicallmagination in Nineteenth-CenturyEurope. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

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