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Imagining Christopher Columbus

by

Joanne Gass

California State University, Fullerton

1992

In their 1991 novel, The Crown of Columbus, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich have a bit of fun with our current preoccupation with the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. In the novel, a rich and greedy man involves a North American Indian professor and her poet lover, her troubled son, and their baby daughter in the search for the fabled crown which Columbus reportedly brought to the New World. Imagining that the crown is bejeweled with diamonds and rubies, or at the very least cast in gold--the treasure which served as the impetus for Columbus' journey and Spain's entry into the New World--, they set out to find the priceless object which Columbus supposedly left behind. When they do find the crown where Columbus left it in a tidal cave on a Caribbean island, they find it encased in a seamless case of Murano crystal glass which is itself encased in calcified bat dung perched upon an equally dung-covered stalagmite. Roger, the poet, records their discovery:

We knelt before the raised square and Vivian struck a match against its surface. Whatever it contained was long sealed--completely, hermetically, provided with a second skin impervious to the elements and wonderfully camouflaged by nature. No pyramid's secret room, no lava pit, no laser-equipped museum was safer, more permanent, more impenetrable. Whether by provident design or, more likely, by accident, the treasure of Europe that Columbus had transported to the Indies but never successfully delivered had remained the safest, the most secure cargo of all the many voyages since. If this was truly a crown as Cobb insisted, if it had once represented the hope for equity and respect between worlds, if it had been meant to symbolize a new beginning, a kingdom free of past mistakes, then its hard organic casket was indeed a fitting storage. (351)

            After chipping away the guano and just before shattering the crystal container, Vivian says:

"What we have here is Europe's gift to America.". . ."What we have here was the promise, the pledge, the undiluted intent, the preconceived idea before any fact was known. This little nothing, this box anyone can lift, was the bond, was supposed to be a fair trade. And Columbus left it unopened. Never given. Never accepted." (368)
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The priceless treasure which was never given and never accepted is indeed a crown--it is the "Crown of Thorns" (369). Europe's gift to America, it turns out, is the suffering symbolized by the Crown of Thorns. Dorris and Erdrich have imagined a promise brought by Columbus to the New World which he deliberately buried thus freeing him of any obligation to keep a promise which was never given. Instead, the dung encased crown, Columbus' gift to us, represents the greed, disease, slavery, and corruption which conquest brought to the New World.

Erdrich and Dorris have imagined a Columbus who betrayed a possibility--the possibility that two worlds could come together on an equal basis and both flourish, neither at the expense of the other. They have also imagined a Columbus who cannot imagine himself. Roger's poem commemorating the quincentennial begins in Columbus' voice:

I do not know myself. No more than the thread

woven in the field of cloth

knows the pattern. No more than the pattern

apprehends the mind that devised it, or the hand

that threw the shuttle or the strength

that bent and pegged the wooden loom.

No more than the garment

knows its purpose, its maker,

do I know Columbus. (310)

Roger's Columbus, and I might add the Columbus that we find in the Journals, sets out not just to discover a new world, but also to discover Columbus, and in the process he must imagine himself just as we in the last 500 years have tried again and again to imagine Christopher Columbus. As I hope that you will see before my lecture ends, our imaginations have been fired by this man, and the image that we have conceived of him has changed over the past 500 years. First, I want to spend some time talking about how Columbus imagined himself, then I will briefly review our Christopher Columbus as he has been imagined since his voyages of discovery, and finally, I want to talk about how three Latin American novelists have imagined Christopher Columbus--those novelists are the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Argentine Abel Posse and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. My purpose here is to show you that we North Americans have largely accepted the construction of a heroic Christopher Columbus; whereas in Latin America, and although I don't intend here to address the problem, for North American natives and black Africans all over the Western Hemisphere, for obvious reasons, I think, Christopher Columbus' image has a much darker hue. During this imaginary journey from 1492 to the present, I further hope to shed some light upon the reasons why the approaching quincentennial of Columbus' "discovery" of American is not going to be an unqualified celebration. The question, "Whom do you wish Columbus to be?" (282) seems to me not to be an unambiguous nor an irrelvant question in the approaching months.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I am not a historian; therefore, I will not be trying to reconstruct the "real" Christopher Columbus. I leave that task to the many historians who have made such an attempt in the past and who continue to try to do so today. With the approaching quincentennial, the number of authoritative biographies will no doubt continue to grow. The most recent one that I have in my possession is entitled, The Mysterious History of Columbus, written by John Noble Wilford. a highly respected journalist, scientist, and author. The book's title alone should give you some idea as to the problems associated with the historical Christopher Columbus. My interest is a literary one--I'm interested in the Columbus who has captured the imaginations of literally millions of people all over the western world for the past four centuries.

I will further complicate the issue, however, by stating that since there is very little verifiable data about the "real" Christopher Columbus, virtually all attempts to state who he was are essentially imaginary and therefore fall into the realm of literature. Columbus's journal of the first voyage is a copy, made by Fray Bartolomeo de las Casas, since the original disappeared no one knows where. Even the first biography, made by his illegitimate son, Fernando, is questionable, for Fernando admits "that his father died 'before I made so bold as to ask him about such things; or, to speak more truly, at the time such ideas were farthest from my boyish mind.'" (Sale, 52) Kirkpatrick Sale, in his very fine book, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, gives us a wonderful summary of the stories of Columbus's life, which his contemporaries recorded and which historians often repeat, even though there is no solid, independent documentation of them available:

The stories are colorful enough, many of the kind a man would be happy to have told about his early years, and traditional historians retail them unabashedly. There is, for example, the story of Colon's being shipwrecked off the Portuguese coast in 1476 and making his way to shore only by clinging to a ship's oar, a story of Fernando's for which there is no supportive evidence; there is the one about his being a pirate captain for King Rene of Anjou and deceiving his shipmates by a trick of the compass into sailing across the Mediterranean at night, a tale Fernando recounts from a purported 1495 letter of his father's for which there is no supportive evidence and so many unlikely circumstances as to make it almost laughable; and there is the one about his going into the mapmaking business with his brother Bartolome and earning a living in Lisbon with his fine hand and talent for bookselling, a story rendered by several Italian historians who didn't even know Colon and to which not even Fernando gives enough credence to include in his account. (52)

Sale's argument, essentially, is that historians aren't necessarily to blame for repeating these stories; he argues that Columbus himself fabricated himself because "he was a man truly without a past that he could define, without a home, or roots, or family, without even a sense, or love, of place. His early years are dark because, in a sense, they are empty." (53) Sale further asserts that Columbus originated these myths "through self-serving stories to his son and gullible chroniclers, to create the image of the valiant lone visionary against the disbelieving multitude." (61) In other words, Columbus set out to fill the void by creating himself, from his name on. In the beginning, he imagined himself the discoverer of the western route to India. But he did not imagine himself that forever; he, in fact, knew that he had discovered a world unknown to most Europeans by the end of his fourth voyage. In August, 1498, this entry appears in his Journal: (note the use of third person; this section comes from the abstract of las Casas)

The Admiral seems to have gone about 30 or 40 leagues at most since leaving the Boca del Dragon [off Trinidad]. . . .He observed that the land stretched out wider and appeared flatter and more beautiful down toward the west. . . .He therefore came to the conclusion that so great a land was not an island but a continent; and, as if addressing the Sovereigns, he speaks thus:

"I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown. I am greatly supported in this view by reason of this great river [the Orinoco] and by this sea which is fresh. . . .And if this is a continent it is a wonderful thing and will be so regarded by all men of learning." (Morison, 279-80, also quoted in Sale, 170-1)

At this time, Columbus was under a great deal of fire from Spain because he had not found the gold he had promised; therefore he was in a position which required he salvage something from his voyages. In addition, he had lost his title of governor due to rebellion and bad management of the settlements he had established in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea (his title gained from Ferdinand and Isabela) now identifies himself as the discoverer of a new world, and even better, he identifies this new world as the "Terrestrial Paradise" (Sale, 175). Since, on his return from the first voyage, Columbus had been given a coat of arms and he had dubbed himself Christoferens (Christ-bearer) in 1493, Columbus had by 1498 made himself not only the bearer of Christ to the new world, and the new world's discoverer, but also the restorer of the earthly Paradise to fallen man and fallen Europe. One of the authentic documents we have of Columbus's is the Book of Prophecies, which he began before 1502 which provides his final version of himself as prophet and liberator of Jerusalem and justifies his name of "Christ-bearer"; in it he writes that:

Cristobal Colon was chosen by the Lord as the divine instrument to fulfill the ancient prophecies that would rescue Christianity before the Apocalypse [believed then to be only 155 years away]. . .namely, to spread Christianity to the unblessed heathen populations around the world, and to provide the gold for financing the crusade to recapture the Holy Sepulcher from the infidels. That was why He led Colon, His Christ-bearer, to the new lands, the Otro Mundo, where by divine coincidence there existed both so many heathens and so much gold. (Sale, 189)

When he died on May 20, 1506, Columbus believed himself to have been martyred by his king and queen, stripped of the dignity, recognition, and wealth he deserved for his exploits. He died with his children, servants, and a few comrades around him (Sale, 214), but his death went unnoticed and officially unrecorded until ten years later. Thus he died as he believed he had lived, essentially alone and unrecognized by an undeserving world.

This "brave lone hero against the world" image is the one which we in North America at least, particularly seem to like, and is the one which most often appears in Anglo-American versions of Columbus's life and accomplishments, especially from the nineteenth century to the present day. The nineteenth century version of Columbus which most aptly conveys this notion, is Washington Irving's The Life and Voyages of Columbus, published in 1828 (Sale, 343). In it, Irving repeats all of the mythical episodes of Columbus's life and more creating a man of "epic proportions, flawed in minor ways yet heroic in all the elements that counted: a nineteenth-century romantic character who might have come from the pages of Walter Scott" (Sale, 344). Let me give you a brief sampling of some of Irving's Columbus:

Columbus was a man of great and inventive genius. . . . His ambition was lofty and noble, inspiring him with high thoughts, and an anxiety to distinguish himself by great achievements. He aimed at dignity and wealth in the same elevated spirit with which he sought renown. . . . His conduct was characterized by the grandeur of his views and the magnanimity of his spirit. Instead of ravaging the newly found countries. . .he sought to colonize and cultivate them, to civilize the natives. . . . A valiant and indignant spirit. . .ardent and enthusiastic imagination. . .a visionary of an uncommon kind. (Sale, 344)

Irving's Columbus is essentially the Columbus we have inherited.

Most of you, no doubt, saw the fine PBS series, Columbus and the Age of Discovery, which aired a month or two ago. It was beautifully filmed, exhaustively researched, and politically correct--if I may be so bold as to bring up a loaded term. By politically correct, I mean that it did not overlook the dire consequences which conquest brought--disease, destruction, greed, genocide. However, I think that in the final analysis, the Christopher Columbus which appeared in that documentary was consistent with the image he himself created of the "brave lone hero against the world." The final paragraphs from the glossy accompanying book to the series will illustrate what I mean:

The many conflicting aspects of Columbus appeal to equally conflicting parts of our personalities. Sometimes we admire Columbus the explorer, a man sublimely inspired by the prospect of open blue ocean and supremely competent to meet its fathomless challenge. Sometimes we look to the man who brought about an encounter between two worlds--a man who enriched the lives of millions yet unborn, but who exploited, enslaved, and destroyed millions of others. At different times and for different people he has been, as man and symbol, all of these things.

It is futile to apply today's moral standards to Columbus's deeds of five hundred years ago. He was nowhere near as large a person as he has become as a symbol; he was a man, imperfect and fallible. All he really tried to accomplish was to find a new way to the East, and all of his subsequent renown as the Discoverer of a New World was surely unintended.

If there is a core of nobility to Columbus, a part of the man uncolored by his deeds and their consequences good or bad, it is the part of him that searched for a new route, a new way. This much we can cherish without qualification; this much can still speak to our romance with adventure and discovery. It is, after all, what moves us in our own search for new ways of knowledge, and what will doubtless continue to lead us into dilemmas of Columbian proportions. Of all the places and things we have named after Columbus, the most fitting may be Columbia, the shuttle-caravel that sails from Earth to the dark edges of space, on yet another human quest for knowledge and profit, power and glory. (Dor-Ner, 341-2)

For us, the Columbian epic reflects our values. We imagine Columbus as our mythic progenitor, a hero of our past whose name and deeds we celebrate each October 12 and whose quincentennial strikes us as time to celebrate. We really don't understand what all the fuss is about; if the Rose Parade Committee wants Cristobal Colon, direct descendant of the original, to be the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade, why not? We will even go so far as to applaud their selection, under pressure of course, of a Native American to be co-Grand Marshal, but the past is the past after all, isn't it?

Our odyssey with the literary Columbus brings us finally to the imaginations not of our North American selves, but of our neighbors to the south--the Latin Americans. They, too, were "discovered" by Christopher Columbus (or Cristobal Colon), but they see themselves as having been conquered; whereas we see ourselves as the legatees of discovery--North America became ours--; we are the heirs of the conquerers; Latin America, on the other hand, struggles with the idea and the fact of conquest. I hope that you understand that I'm not making a facetious semantic difference; Latin Americans feel very differently about what happened in 1492 than we do. Carlos Fuentes, one of the authors whose novel I'm later going to discuss in more detail, has said this about the difference:

"Latin American culture, the culture in which we write, in which we create today, is permeated by the event of the conquest and by the world preceding the conquest, which is not true of North America. In Mexico and the Andean countries and Central America, the Indian world is alive, one way or another. Even if it's only alive in a corrupt religious ceremony, it is there. One can see it, one can visit it. Our language is permeated with Indian words, so it is not something of the past. The past is present in Latin America; the past is past in the United States." (Carpentier, xii)

The difference can perhaps be partially explained by the fact that we have kept ourselves separate from our Indian past--it is on reservations, so to speak. In Latin America, and especially in Mexico, the image of the union between Cortez and La Malinche (Cortez's native concubine) often stands for the combining of the two worlds of the conqueror and the conquered, and that combination is generally spoken of in words of derision; La Malinche, in particular, is frequently referred to as informer, traitor, whore. Whatever the reason, in Latin America, the past is present, and it is particularly present in the novels of some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The literary Columbus found in their novels is quite different from Washington Irving's and the PBS special's.

These three particular novels have three things in common:

1) they all employ epic conventions; 2) two of the novels overtly employ the Journals and the abstracts of Bartolomeo de las Casas, and the third one implicitly refers to the Journals; and 3) in employing the epic model, they alter the definition of epic in rather significant ways. After having said that, I think I should provide you with a brief definition of epic, so that we can have a common ground to work upon and a base from which I can make my comparisons. An epic is "a long narrative . . . in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures forming an organic whole through their relation to a central heroic figure and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race." (A Handbook to Literature, 177) The most famous epics are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. For my purposes, the most important part of the definition of epic has to do with the importance of the work to a nation or race. In all three novels, the heroic name of Christopher Columbus is central; more than that, however, all three novels focus upon Columbus's importance to Latin America.

The first novel I'm going to talk about was published in 1979 by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Its English title is The Harp and the Shadow. The novel's subtitle is "The Beatification of Christopher Columbus." Unlike the title, the novel is divided into three narratives: the first is the narrative of Pope Pius IX, whose sole desire is to make Columbus a saint, believing that by doing so he will unify Latin America in the nineteenth century--the century of independence for most Latin American countries from both Spain and the Church. Pope Pius IX's plan echos the conception of Columbus as epic hero:

The Ideal, the perfect way to join together the Christian faithful of the old and new worlds--as an antidote to the venomous philosophical ideas that had taken too firm a hold in America--was to find a saint whose acceptance was ecumenical, a saint whose fame was unlimited, incontrovertible, a saint of planetary wingspan, a saint so enormous, even larger than the legendary Colossus of Rhodes, that he could have one foot on the shores of this continent and the other on the banks of Europe, with a vision from above the Atlantic that embraced both hemispheres. A Saint Christopher, Christophoros, Porter of Christ,, known and admired by everyone, universal in his works and his prestige. (28)

Having first commissioned, then read and believed, a biography by Count Roselly of Lorgues, a French Catholic writer (31), the Pope concludes that Columbus's life was indeed worthy of a saint's, for Roselly could not be mistaken, and "he maintained that the great mariner had lived his entire life with an invisible halo over his head" (31).

The first section of the book--"The Harp"--ends with the Pope imagining the afternoon of Columbus's death:

Oh, to have been there that afternoon. . .. On that afternoon in Valladolid, how the cosmic images must have flowed, with Columbus's words transforming the poor country estate into a veritable Palace of Marvels! . . . Surely even Ulysses' tales in his allies' courts could not have matched the splendid tales of adventure that emerged that afternoon from the mouth of Columbus, who would discover the mysteries of death before nightfall, just as, in life, he had discovered the mysteries of a geographic beyond, previously unknown, which men had imagined since the happy age and happy times. . .. (31)

The Pope imagines that Columbus's confession would necessarily have been epic in its proportions and a revelation of even greater truths than had been previously known.

The second section of the novel--"The Hand"--is Columbus's confession. It is his confession to us, not to the Franciscan monk who stands by waiting to hear him and who Pope Pius IX devoutly wished he had been. As he speaks, the epic hero of Pope Pius's imagination, of the "fine words. . .inscribed next to [his] name on the tablet of history" (35), begins to unravel to be replaced by another figure--the figure of the self-authored man. He says:

. . . I got caught in such a web of fabulous stories that only in my full confession can I finally disentangle them and reveal to the astonished Franciscan who hears it that--with my mind always inflamed with the same thoughts; pursued night and day by the same idea; unable to open a book without trying to find, in the background, a verse, a portent of my mission; seeking presages, applying oneiromancy to the interpretation of my dreams, which led me to consult the texts of the Pseudo-Joseph and the Alphabetic Keys of the Pseudo-Daniel, and, therefore the tract of Artemidorus of Ephesus; living such a feverish, disturbed life, designing more or less fantastic plans--I became a tremendous and unabashed fake. . . (55)

Since the first section of the novel reinforces the image of Columbus as epic hero, most of the second section unravels it; but, in the end Columbus opts to "put on the mask of the one I wished to be but was not: the mask that will become my death mask--the last of the countless masks that I have worn through my existence since the uncertain beginning. . .. But there will be no reckoning. I will say only what could be inscribed in marble about myself. From my mouth comes the voice of the other who has often inhabited me" (128-9). The priest hears the epic voice, not the truth.

The third, and final, section--"The Shadow"--returns to the Vatican where a debate rages over whether or not Columbus should be beatified. Witnesses range from Bartolome de las Casas to Victor Hugo to Jules Verne, and observing the entire spectacle is the spirit of Christopher Columbus, who comments upon the proceedings. When the jury decides not to make him a saint because his miracles cannot be verified, he says sadly, "I came from mystery and I returned to mystery without leaving a painted or drawn trace of my human image" (157). And then he disappears, "for there are discoveries so momentous--though possible--that by their very immensity they annihilate any mortal who dares to enter them" (158). The discovery, the epic, becomes Christopher Columbus. Even though we, as readers, have become privy to the "truth" of Columbus's journeys and life, Carpentier seems to be saying that what remains is the imaginary--the epic--figure.

The second novel, written in 1987, is The Dogs of Paradise, by the Argentine Abel Posse, and it won the 1987 Gallegos Prize for the best novel written in Spanish for the previous five years. The Dogs of Paradise is also an epic (or at least it employs a sufficient number of allusions to epics to draw attention to its epic qualities), but Posse's epic and its appeal to national significance, has a sinister twist to it. The novel is a weave of stories--a Penelope's tapestry, if you will--which include one more version of Columbus's Journals, the story of the insane, violent, and erotic courtship of Ferdinand and Isabela, their expulsion from and persecution of Jews and involvement in the Inquisition, and the story of the prophecy of the white god who will come to Tenotichtlan.

The novel begins in fifteenth century Europe where an exhausted, guilty, and corrupt civilization celebrates a Danse Macabre--a dance of death. Because Europe is on the verge of collapse, "Angels and supermen were needed. The sect of the seekers of Paradise, inexorably, was born" (8). Columbus, and Ferdinand and Isabela, then become the seekers of Paradise, and the novel follows two paths to the new world--the first path is the Quixotic, deluded path of an idealistic Columbus who truly believes that he seeks and finds Paradise; the second path is the Machiavellian path of Ferdinand and Isabela which pragmatically leads to conquest, to pillage, to destruction, and to the eventual apotheosis of the swasitika in both Europe and Latin America (and I think we can assume that Abel Posse has Chile and Argentina as well as a number of countries where fascist dictatorships have flourished in mind here).

Columbus's journey to the new world is truly an odyssey in this novel. Posse has structured the Columbus narrative in such a way that it follows an episodic line which can, I think, be compared to Odysseus' journey. First of all, it takes 10 years; in this novel the four voyages are collapsed into one ten year quest for paradise. Second, Columbus has several stops along the way (actually the four voyages), some of which tempt him to end his quest. Third, he does find the land of his quest--Paradise. However, Columbus is also the deluded Don Quixote who thinks he has completed a heroic quest but who in fact has brought with him the disaster of Spanish conquest. One example will suffice to show the duality. Columbus has found his paradise, and he makes the following proclamation:

"There will be no more death," he pronounced. "We are in the land of eternity. This is the House, that is, the Garden, from which Adam was expelled because of his error, and woman's innate evil. As it was prophesied, only by following a descendant of Isaiah may we return. We have transcended. This event will change our lives and the course of world history. You must be calm and try to comprehend. Be prudent, like the ministers of God you are. Men of our ilk are little prepared. But gradually their murky souls will open to receive the light. There are already signs. (244)

At the same time as Columbus is making his proclamation, "the Spanish were unloading the instruments necessary for transferring and reconstructing one world in another." The first instrument they unloaded and erected--the cross-gibbet. Columbus only sees the cross; he does not recognize its sinister aspect.

Columbus proclaims himself governor of Paradise, proclaims complete freedom, and lies down in a hammock at the foot of the Tree of Life. Of course, soon corruption spreads everywhere with the help of the church, which has lost its usefulness in Paradise--no guilt, no need for religion--, and of the Spanish who have no market for goods since Columbus declared nudity and communal freedom. When Columbus is overthrown, Latin America's first caudillo takes his place. Columbus is returned to Spain in chains, and the conquest resumes its inexorable course, and Paradise disappears. In its place, the cross-gibbet and the swastika and SS. Posse asserts in the novel that Isabela inaugurated the SS and established "the brotherhood of men and women faithful to the royal couple." In a note, Posse says:

About the birth of the sect of the SS, see Prescott's History (of Ferdinand and Isabella) and the work of the Ballesteros Gaibrois, among others. It is no secret, according to authors such as Pauwels, Sanchez Drago, Gergier, and others, that Hitler expressed his unconditional admiration for Isabella of Castile to Goring and his adherents. Austrian, and common to the end, the Fuhrer wore a scapular of yellow plush that guarded a sprig of wheat from La Mancha, and a portrait of Isabella. (54)

Posse further connects the conquest of the new world to Nazism by emphasizing Ferdinand and Isabela's role in the Inquisition and the persecution, expulsion, and anhialation of the Jews; in doing so, he also implicitly connects this genocide with the genocide visited upon the natives of Latin America.

The novel isn't completely bleak, however. The title, The Dogs of Paradise, provides the one glimmer in an otherwise bleak scene. When Columbus reports on his discovery, he notes:

"It is remarkable, but fear is unknown here. Not even in birds;. . .they light on people's shoulders." "There [are] dogs that never barked (strange mute dogs unable to believe that anything might be stolen)." (240)

The dogs, I think, symbolize the people who greeted Columbus, who, ironically, gave things away and could not believe that anything would ever be stolen. When, in fact, Columbus is overthrown, and everything is taken, the dogs silently revolt, hold the town for an hour, then silently retreat into the jungle. But they are there:

Since that day, and for all time, these standard-bearers of nostalgia have declared rebelliousness through lack of action. They did not fade into remote forests with the arrogance of the jaguars, or flee to high treetops like the quetzals and delicate orchids. Ever since, in silent packs, they have wandered field and town, from Mexico to Patagonia. Rarely, spurred by extreme hunger, they have attacked sheep and horses. (Stories of these episodic assaults abound in the vice-regal history of Rio de la Plata and Nueva Granada. Once, after the turn of the twentieth century, the dogs even surrounded and cut off a small military fort.)

They are ubiquitous, these irrelevant creatures no kennel club would register. (300)

The novel ends with Paradise lost and the natives decimated. But the dogs, those silent mongrels, survive. Some day they may stage another rebellion, and this time Paradise may very well be regained.

The third and final novel with which I'll end my talk is Carlos Fuentes' 1987 novel, Christopher Unborn. Fuentes entire corpus engages the problem of Latin American history, and he is especially concerned with his native land, Mexico. This novel is about history, but only obliquely so. Columbus's Journals provide part of the text, and the voyage itself is implicit throughout the novel; but the novel isn't really about Columbus's discovery of America in 1492, nor is it about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. This novel is about the future discovery of America. It is an optimistic odyssey toward a future discovery which will perhaps bring a truly new world into being.

The odyssey in this case is that of a fetus, conceived on epiphany, January 6, 1992, and destined to be born on October 12, 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in the new world. His parents, Angel and Angeles Palermo, deliberately conceive him so as to win the "Discovery of America Contest" in Mexico; winner to be announced on October 12, 1992. The rules of the contest state that the baby must be born at precisely midnight, and if he wins, his future is assured:

[he will be] proclaimed PRODIGAL SON OF THE NATION. His education shall be provided by the Republic and on his eighteenth birthday he will receive the KEYS TO THE REPUBLIC, prelude to his assuming the positon, at age twenty-one, of REGENT OF THE NATION, with practically unlimited powers of election, succession, and selection. (6)

The contest is designed to provide a perpetual dictator for Mexico; its creators are corrupt; the country is corrupt; and the country has been carved up by the United States and multi-national companies, so that only a portion of it remains, and that part includes Mexico City.

Like Tristram Shandy, Chrisopher the fetus learns about his world from his mother's womb, and what he learns is that history paralyzes us--he says, "All of the cold rains of the world come to us from the Escorial" (523); that the new world must be a truly New World and it must encompass a New World of Pacifica:

the New World is no longer here, it's always elsewhere, celebrate the Quincentennial by leaving behind your Old World of corruption, injustice, stupidity, egoism, arrogance, disdain, and hunger. . .. turn your backs on the tyrannical Atlantic which fascinated and dominated us for five centuries: end your foolish fallacious fascistic fascination with the Atlantic world, turn your backs on that past look to the future because it's there we men and women are triumphing who simply said this to ourselves , only this: Behind the mask of glory is the face of death; let us renounce glory, force, domination, let us save the West from itself by teaching it once again to deny power to power, to stop admiring force, to open its arms to the enemy. . .to choose life over death. . . (513)

Finally, he learns that what will save the world are art, because "we are all Columbuses, those of us who bet on the truth of our imagination and win; we are all Quijotes who believe in what we imagine" (522); and love, "because if two people really love each other. . .that's the most revolutonary thing in the world that changes the world. . ." (504).

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Christopher Unborn is its ending. Christopher is not born alone; he is a twin, and his twin is a girl to whom he says:

we need each other, I cannot see half of the world without you. . .nor can you without me, let's go out to answer the world, to be responsible in the face of reality, stretch out your little hand and touch mine, please, repeat with me the last thing I say to you:

I tell you this: with the facility that we leave behind the achievements and the ruins. Everything builds and feeds the future, success as well as failure. Everything, therefore, will be ruins. Except the present, girl. Except the present instant in which we were chosen to remember the past and desire the future. (530)

The twins are born in the Pacific Ocean on Columbus Day, 1992. They are the product of everything that has come before them. They emerge from the water holding the promise of a New World build upon love and imagination. Fuentes isn't asking us to forget the past; nor is he asking us to deny Christopher Columbus; he is merely asking us to imagine a new Christopher Columbus and with him and his sister to discover and create a new world.

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