In Search of the Absent Revolution: Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s Novels of Invented History

Abstract

It would not be inaccurate to say that Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá has been for decades the Puerto Rican writer most deeply concerned with the island’s colonial history, particularly the period marked by Spain’s domination. His first published work, La renuncia del héroe Baltasar (1974), thoroughly re-imagined Puerto Rico’s eighteenth century, and two other novels, La noche oscura del niño Avilés (1984) and El camino de Iyaloide (1994), returned to the same historical period.¹ However, much to the chagrin of some of Rodríguez Juliá’s initial critics, his eighteenth-century novels do not follow the typical patterns of traditional historical fiction. As Aníbal González noticed not long after the publication of La noche some of the novel’s first reviewers were historians like Fernando Picó and José Curet, who complained: “¡Esto no es una novela hist6rica!” (583) [This is not a historical novel!]. Although one could accuse those initial critics of holding an excessively limited concept of what a historical novel is, they were in fact responding to peculiarities in Rodríguez Juliá’s works that do set them apart from traditional historical fictions. As a matter of fact, these novels even go beyond the ludic, metafictional, parodic, and heteroglossic model that Seymour Menton proposes for what he calls “new” historical novels in Latin America. Although Menton adequately distinguishes those new historical novels from traditional ones, one implicit trait that they both seem to share in his account is the use of documented history as their point of departure, even if new historical novels often question the validity claims and paradigms of accepted historical accounts.