Chapter I - RDU - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

27there is a centripetal force which may lead the discourse in the novel towards a “faithfuland coherent construction of the past” and another centrifugal force directly “relatedwith the crisis of the concept of truth.” which expresses itself in the deconstruction ofeach discourse that might have an aspiration to be a true reconstruction of the past. 15(Sklodowska qtd. in Grützmacher 149) Authors led by the centrifugal force tend toridicule and make a parody of all serious interpretations of history and of its charactersand they arbitrarily combine images and elements of different epochs in a playful,postmodern manner. These novels never stop mocking any aspiration of faithfullyrepresenting the past and its actors and they keep violating three basic restrictions of thetraditional historical novel: a) not to fictionalise those aspects that history did notregister b) to avoid anachronisms, that is, to avoid contradictions between the culturalmaterial of the period described by the novel and the one provided by official history,and c) to create realistic historical fictions, that is to make the logics of the fictive worldcompatible with the logics of reality. (cf. Viú 167-178) On the other hand, authors ledby the centripetal force will produce works located at the opposite end where sourcesare faithfully respected. In these novels you cannot find any questioning of what isconventionally accepted as true about events or people. Even if they play withconventions, they do not get too far from them either, so that the reader may not losetotal faith in the possibility of reconstructing the past and the characters that populatedit.It is not difficult to perceive the presence of these two different forces in themajority of Latin-American historical novels of the second half of the XXth century,states Grützmacher. (149) Although the Polish critic, Aínsa and Sklodowska theoriseabout Latin-American historical novels, I argue that their ideas are still valid, useful andhelpful to describe works from other origins. Summarising, Grützmacher concludes it isbetter to divide historical novels, not in new and traditional. He would rather situatethem in the two different poles he suggests in his article. Then, novels dominated by thecentripetal force would be closer to the pole of the traditional model and thosedominated by the centrifugal force would be closer to the pole of a postmodernnarrative. (149)There is one last and highly significant aspect that Fernando Aínsa points out inLatin-American historical novels of the last decades which I would like to mentionbecause I think it could easily be used to describe Barker’s trilogy. Aínsa argues that15My own translation