Réécritures fictives de la vie de Christophe Colomb
Fictional Rewritings of Christopher Columbus’s Life

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores the historical representation of Christopher Columbus and the ways in which William Carlos Williams and Alejo Carpentier tried to take advantage of the multifaceted representations of the New World’s conquest in order to realize their own fictional constructions of the historical figure and the events around it. This paper will prove that both authors made use of the same archives about Columbus’s voyages, although each of them chooses a different way of plotting them, resulting in two antagonistic rewritings of Columbus’s figure. These rewritings expose the limitations of historical writings and deconstruct the cultural myth and the concept proposed and kept alive by historiography. Dealing with one of the most common features of historical fiction – the use of intertextuality – both writers present an alternative vision of history. They both unwrap not only the myth of discovery, but they also expose the ways in which historical knowledge was and can be created and manipulated through language.

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