4 - The novel as myth and archive: ruins and relics of Tlön

Summary

Either that voice does not belong to that skin, or

that skin does not belong to that voice.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira, 1, 901–2

In the summer of 1947, the American Hispanist John E. Englekirk flew from Caracas to San Fernando de Apure to research in the field the genesis of Doña Bárbara (1929). At approximately the same time, Alejo Carpentier was traveling to the interior of Venezuela in the first of two journeys that would lead him to write Los pasos perdidos. In that summer of 1947 Rómulo Gallegos was in the midst of the political campaign that would take him to the presidency of Venezuela in December of that year. Gallegos was a politician whose only baggage, according to campaign promotion, was a book under his arm: that book was, needless to say, Doña Bárbara. The novel had culled from the countryside, from the endless llano, the essence of Venezuelan culture, which would now be transformed into a political program to save the country. Although Gallegos had toured the Apure while preparing to write Doña Bárbara, the region had entered the realm of writing long before. San Fernando had not only been described by Alexander von Humboldt, but also by Ramón Páez, the British-educated son of Venezuelan general José Antonio Páez, in his Wild Scenes in South America, or Life in the llanos of Venezuela (1862).