Écritures de l’histoire chez Pedro Gómez Valderrama
Writings of History in Pedro Gómez Valderrama’s Short Stories

Summary/Abstract: The Colombian writer Pedro Gómez Valderrama (1923-1992) composes tales based upon historical facts, exploring their virtualities. In this study, we will focus on the historical tales from the short story collections Invenciones y Artificios (1975) and La Nave de los locos (1984). We will determine the different writing procedures by which Valderrama interrogates the act of writing history through fiction, and how, by an increasing reflexivity, he approaches the lived experience of time. This distinct mode of historiographical fiction takes three principal forms in his work, characterised by varying degrees of reflexivity and problematization: the apocryphal variations, which open to a trans-historical mode of thought and experience; the tales representing characters who are themselves writers and that question the historical efficacy of writing; and the essay-tales in which the narrator tends to identify with the author, formulating elements of historiographical theory and exploring the lived present.

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