Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo follows an Italian protagonist through the jungles of Costaguana, a fictional stand-in for Colombia. Yet Conrad has clearly repurposed Colombian history to embellish his novel. Nostromo is written from the perspective of a European expatriate witnessing the events of Colombian history. Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana, then, seeks to “reclaim” Colombian history from Joseph Conrad’s novel, over a century later. Vasquez’s protagonist, Jose Altamirano, promises a “true” historical narrative, “stripped of all the fictional transformations and embellishments of Conrad’s text” (Erdinast-Vulcan 3). At the same time, Vasquez uses a metafictional approach to call into question the narrator’s own telling of the story, creating ontological instability. This essay will attempt a postmodern reading of Secret History. I will argue that Vasquez combines mimesis and metafiction in his account of Colombian history to emphasise the “fictional” quality of history, where there is no one ontologically accurate version of history.
Vasquez’s novel follows a major postmodernist trend, an “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard 1). The metanarrative, which Jose refers to as “Big History” in the novel, lays claim on a single totalising interpretation of history, is destabilised by inclusion of heteroglossia, multiple viewpoints within one work. Postmodernism posits that there is no totalising “true” version of history. Instead, there are “multiple truths”, which “deprive the modern of its idea of a single anchoring centre” (Hutcheon 119). History is hence viewed as a multitude of differing, competing discourses, instead of a single ontological truth. Roland Barthes writes that the postmodern novel is a stage for heteroglossia, where “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation” (Barthes 1468).
Vasquez displays the heteroglossic nature of Secret History in his depiction of the burning of Colon:
“The inconsistent Angel of History gives us two different gospels, and the chroniclers will carry on banging their heads against a brick wall because it is simply impossible to know which deserves the credence of posterity.” (Vasquez 124)
The narrator gives two versions of how the burning of Colon happened, this forking of paths caused by the “inconsistency” of History. In the first, Pedro Prestan torches the city. In the second, the Conservative soldiers are the ones who torch the city, before putting the blame on Prestan. Vasquez depicts the burning with “multiple truths”. Both accounts of the burning of Colon are historic discourses. Secret History hence forms the stage for heteroglossia as it contains many discourses, blending “various texts thus creating an intertextual conversation between different discourses” (Barthes 1468). The heteroglossic nature of the novel creates ontological instability due to multiple, contradictory discourses. Vasquez undermines the idea of an ontologically “true” history.
As Linda Hutcheon writes:
both history and fiction are equally ‘discourses’, that is, ways of speaking about (and thus seeing) the world that are constructed by human beings; both are systems of meaning by which we make sense of the past – and the present. The meaning of history is not in the events but in the narrative” (Hutcheon 122)
History and fiction, in the postmodern sense, are similar in that they are discourses which we use to interpret the past. There is hence “no such thing as pure fiction and no such thing as history so rigorous that it abjures any use of novelistic techniques” (Genette 82). While fiction like Secret History is constructed and does not claim to be the “truth”, the postmodern lack of a single “true” history gives it a place in historical discourse, as it provides an interpretation of history, in this case the building of the Panama Canal.
Vasquez creates ontological instability by using metafictional techniques in Secret History. At the onset of the novel, the narrator states that:
It’s true that I am Colombian, and that all Colombians are liars, but I must declare the following what I am about to write is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (Vasquez 38)
On one hand, he claims that his account of Colombian history is “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The narrator claims complete mimesis. Yet the statement is contradicted with the statement that “I am Colombian all Colombians are liars”. Jose simultaneously claims to be telling the truth while declaring to the reader that he is a liar. Hence Vasquez calls to the reader’s attention the constructed nature of the story, blurring the line between fiction and history. This paradoxical claim places Secret History within the realm of historiographic metafiction, works of fiction that are “both intensely self-reflexive and paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon 11). While Vasquez’s narrator claims to be giving a “true” account of Colombian history, free of Conrad’s novelistic embellishments, he simultaneously undermines this declaration, fulfilling its “self-reflexive” nature. The reader is led to question the veracity of the novel given that its constructed nature is immediately made clear to them. Simultaneously, by drawing attention to its constructed nature, Vasquez situates other narratives like Nostromo as other discourses., encouraging readers to question their historical authority.
Vasquez further interrogates the authority of historical accounts through his depictions of Miguel Altamirano and Joseph Conrad. Both characters form a parallel in the novel: they document and to an extent write history. Miguel Altamirano writes a non-fictional history from his newspaper, the Stars and Herald, documenting the construction of the Panama canal. Joseph Conrad does the same, molding the history of Colombia into a fictional one for his novelistic ends. Miguel, while tasked to report a factual account of events concerning the building of the Panama Canal and railway, “rearranges reality” with his “Refraction stick”. In one account, he writes that deaths resulting from the railway numbered “almost ten thousand; in one from 1863 the sum was less than half that, and toward 1870 he wrote about ‘the two thousand five hundred martyrs’” (Vasquez 81). As Hayden White observes:
No given set of casually recorded historical event can in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements. The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like — in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the employment of a novel or a play. (White 84)
The building of the railway indeed presents the “historical event” of ten thousand dead and countless dead French engineers from yellow fever. As refraction causes an object submerged in water to appear distorted, Altamirano rearranges historical events and downplays the number of dead, creating a fictional history. In doing so he turns the events “into a story”. While the original event can be said to be non-fictional and “true”, the resulting story is closer to fiction than history as the writer, Altamirano, has embellished the event as a writer would a novel or a play.
Joseph Conrad does the same with the historical events that Jose Altamirano narrates to him, writing the “history of Colombia, or the history of Costaguana, or the history of Colombia-Costaguana” (202). Ignoring the fact that Jose Altamirano’s narration is in itself a “story”, in that he “decide when and how to tell what I want to tell, when to hide, when to reveal” (6), Conrad uses these historical events as story elements, creating yet another history. Like Altamirano, he rearranges the facts and story elements of history to create a new novel marketed to the West. Conrad changes Colombia to Costaguana and replaces Jose, the protagonist, to the Italian Nostromo. Both characters highlight, through metafictionality, the fictive element of history. In writing an interpretation of history, the discourse becomes a story through novelistic embellishments. Hence, Vasquez creates ontological instability by highlighting the fictive element in history.
In conclusion, Vasquez combines mimesis and metafiction to emphasise the discursive nature of Secret History. He depicts and emphasises the fictive element in history, challenging the idea of an ontologically accurate version of history. Instead, the novel functions as a staging ground for heteroglossia, allowing multiple historical discourses to compete among each other.
1859 words
Works Cited
Vásquez Juan Gabriel, and Anne McLean. The Secret History of Costaguana. Riverhead Books, 2012.
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. Royal National Institute for the Blind, 1964.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, general ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company: New York & London, pp.1466-1470
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Defining the Postmodern”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, general ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company: New York & London, pp. 1612-1615
Hutcheon, Linda. “Postmodernism”, The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, Routledge: London and New York, pp. 115-126
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.