History, politics and fiction: some examples from the contemporary Latin American literature

Abstract

In front of Rosalba Campra’s assertion saying that the readings are as epochal as writing, where every historical circumstance makes certain texts, contemporary or not, to be read as illuminating the moment in which they are read, we present this work from a central question: what are the relationships between history, politics and fiction that are bundled in the texts? Today we know that, beyond all illusion or critic automatism rightly referred by Campra, there is a textuality or some corpora that speaks to us with great insistence about events linked to the dictatorships that ravaged until the last decades of the twentieth century in the Southern Cone of Latin America. That productions have not only been materialized in novels and stories, but also in poetry, cinema, painting, theater, etc. In this sense, the relationship between the creators of fictions and their times founds an empirical justification that, in different cases, allows us to glimpse an interpretation of these discourses that circulates in a time and in a certain place. The article discusses the value of the category “historical novel” and takes up the proposal by Linda Hutcheon, “historiographic metafiction”, which allows to realize the interdiscursive relationship between history/fiction. Three Chilean novels (Lemebel, Bolaño and Tatiana Lobo Wiehoff) are presented to re-visit the events of the last Chilean dictatorship.