Novelists to the Rescue! National Crisis and Regional Solidarity in Fin de Siècle Spanish America

• In Event: Critical Times: Writing, Art and Entertainment in the Long 19th-Century

Abstract

The Peruvian novelist Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (1845-1909) and her Colombian contemporary, Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913), differed on politics and theology, but shared a sense of national and regional crisis and a belief in narration as a possible solution. When the protagonist of Acosta's Una holandesa en América (1876) arrives at her Irish father's upriver plantation after spending most of her childhood in the Netherlands, she soon finds herself diagnosing and correcting national and familial ills that include her father's morphine addiction, the narrow worldview of her siblings, and the peculiar combination of isolation and connection she shares with them. The title character of Cabello's El conspirador (1892) (based on real-life cacique Nicolás de Piérola) is in some sense a polar opposite. Born and bred into Lima's corrupt political class, he stages his narrative as a cautionary tale for the nation's youth and an explanation of the circumstances that have enticed or compelled him to become one of those people guilty of placing personal ambition above the republic (and the republican form of government itself). What both books share is a faith in narrative as a self-correcting act, that the art of telling undoes or the errors that made the story a story. I will argue that both novels share not only a focus on bad education and its consequences, but also a self-conscious argument for storytelling as a pedagogical act.

Author

• Ronald D Briggs, Barnard College