La Nueva Novela de la Revolución Mexicana en cuatro obras contemporáneas: Los relámpagos de agosto, La familia vino del norte, Columbus y Zapata

The main goal of this study is to examine how four novels—Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Los relámpagos de agosto (1964), Silvia Molina’s La familia vino del norte (1987), Ignacio Solares’ Columbus (1996), and Pedro Ángel Palou´s Zapata (2006)— have demonumentalized Mexico’s history. The four novels chosen for analysis have all problematized the process of writing history; they have discredited history textbooks and have proposed its democratization. These writers variously employ individual and collective memory, photographs, parody, the grotesque, corridos (romances), and metaliterary techniques in order to invite the reader to reflect upon the creation of the text itself as well as the creation of official history. They emphasize and problematize the thin line that exists between history and fiction. These writers expose historiography, using their texts to propose an approach that looks at history as a literary creation akin to fiction. Hayden White, in Metahistory, reflects on the historical work and defines it as a verbal structure that it is formed by a narrative prose discourse (ix). Thus, White believes that every narration and description of the past is associated to a series of mental operations that involve a poetic act of imagination which predetermines the story that will be discovered. Roland Barthes also asserts that historical discourse is simply an imaginary elaboration (The Discourse 121). Such remarks clearly work to dissolve the history-fiction distinction (Woolf 494). This study applies Seymour Menton’s postulates about the New Historical Novel. Menton’s attention to the ambiguous line between history and fiction is useful in demonstrating how these texts demonumentalize the process of writing history. To highlight how forgotten memories and voices are crucial to the production of alternative versions of historical events. Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction is key to the study. This study serves to demonstrate that these four novels function as ahistorical texts and as an antidote to oblivion (Le Goff El orden, 146) because they negate official history and they fight against oblivion to keep all these memories from being forgotten.