Whose Story? Whose History?: The Conradian Hetero-text of Latin American Fiction

Abstract

Abstract:The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.