Simón Bolívar whit no “theology”

Abstract

A persistent, subsequently confirmed, rumor spread in the 1980s claimed that the argument of The General in His Labyrinth, the final days of Bolivar, "might have been given as a present" to García Márquez by his fellow countryman and long-time friend Alvaro Mutis. Previously, Mutis had published an autonomous fragment of his unfinished project, the short story "El último rostro", in the volume La mansión de Araucaíma (1978). The existence of a common theme with variations on either side represents a clear case of intertextual dialogue between the two works. What is more, the properly philological intertextuality is within another, which covers the "text of the world". In exploring these two concentric intertextualities, I have tried to descry, through a "poetics of defeat", the way Mutis and Márquez deconstruct the Bolivarian (para) mythology and "theology" in particular, implemented from both the right and the left, and restore their hero's truly historical dimension and human character.