Costaguana Writes Back/Along: di come Juan Gabriel Vásquez ha sfidato Joseph Conrad per scrivere un’iTentica storia della Colombia

In 2007, the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez published a historical novel entitled “Historia secreta de Costaguana” (“The Secret History of Costaguana”), which tells the history of Colombia from 1820 to 1903 (when the province of Panama became independent) intertwining it with the biography of Joseph Conrad. The first-person narrator, José Altamirano, claims to have met the Polish author, who at that time was writing “Nostromo”, in 1903 in London. On that occasion, he told him his life story and, at the same time, that of his homeland, Colombia. Then, according to Altamirano, the ex-sailor transformed Colombia into Costaguana, Panama into the Occidental Province and the interoceanic canal into the San Tomé mine, erasing him (Altamirano) from his own (hi)story. For this reason, after Conrad’s death, he decides to retell his version of events, which constitutes the text of Vásquez’s novel. The purpose of this study is to analyse the way in which the Colombian author constructed his own personal chronicle of his country’s history and of the biography of the Polish writer, by creating a complex intertextual structure, as well as through the use of parody and, in particular, of travesty. His account contends the hegemonic position (in the Gramscian sense) to the grand narratives that preceded it. One of them, maybe the most important, is the “official” history of Colombia, created in its image and likeness, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by the Bogotan “ciudad letrada” (Rama, 1984), which ruled the country from the capital. “Historia secreta de Costaguana” is also a case of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon, 1989), where the narrator constantly interrupts his tale to dwell on the explanation of his narrative techniques. By doing so, he makes explicit the fact that his version of events and (by analogy) those that preceded it are only some of the many possible representations of reality, but not reality itself. In this regard, it will be argued that Vásquez’s text could be interpreted as part of an iThentic universe (as opposed to “authentic”, with the “i” standing for “interactive”), that is to say a portrayal of the real world which is no longer one-dimensional but, rather, negotiated by a plurality of subjects. None of these narratives prevails over the others. On the contrary, they all contribute, with equal dignity, to the making of a “macronarrative” in which the “write back” is also, at the same time, a “write along”.