MI SIMÓN BOLÍVAR (1930)

A NEW LITERARY PARADIGM

Abstract

This article highlights how the novel by the Colombian author Fernando González Ochoa, Mi Simón Bolivar ([1930] 2002), brings a new scope to the discursive configuration of the historical character Simón Bolívar – consecrated, heroized, and sacralized by the positivist Colombian historiography in nineteenth-century romantic literature – to a critical re-meaning of these idealized images. The hypothesis defends that González Ochoa's oeuvre is the precursor of the eventually considered second phase of the historical novel's trajectory. The said phase is composed of the modalities of the new Latin American historical novel and the historiographical metafiction. Anchored in assumptions by Aínsa (1991), Menton (1993), and Fleck (2017), the paper suggests how González Ochoa's novel precedes characteristics found in the critical modality of the new Latin American historical novel. Thus, when employing parody, carnivalesque, intertextualities, and metanarrative features. Therefore, the article upholds that this novel opened one of the most substantive paths of re-meaning the past in Latin America, a path to decolonizing the human being and the knowledge together with the effective practice of decolonial actions.