13 - The nineteenth-century Spanish American novel

Summary

Andrés Bello: nationalism and narrativity

In his article “Modo de escribir la historia” (1848), Andrés Bello (1781-1865) gave the following advice: “When the history of a country exists only in scattered, incomplete documents, in vague traditions which must be compared and evaluated, the narrative method is obligatory.” With this judgment Bello disqualified any effort to write works of philosophy of history because he considered it, in the case of Spanish America, premature. He thought the history of a young nation ought to be far removed from theoretical generalizations, that it ought to be a concrete narrative based on the examination and comparative study of those sources which refer to American events since the pre-Columbian era. One may suppose that Bello’s intention was to give the new nations ample room to develop historiographical discourse, an enterprise then in its infancy, before it was to be judged by more demanding standards of historiography. Nevertheless, I think there was another motive behind his strategy, a concern related to the question of nationalism. We can see this additional objective in his praise of the work of Bernal Díaz del Castillo: “no synthesis, no collection of historical aphorisms, will ever allow us to conceive so vividly the conquest of America” (“Modo de estudiar la historia,” 246). In other words, Bello favored the writing of history in narrative form because such a form, with the vitality of its story-telling, made it possible for the reader to identify with the protagonists of the exploration and conquest of the American territories.