The Miraculous Lie: Lope De Aguirre and the Search for El Dorado in the Latin American Historical Novel

This is a critical study of five twentieth century Latin American historical novels, published between 1947 and 1986, whose theme is the most infamous of all searches for the fabled and elusive kingdom of El Dorado. This doomed expedition was undertaken by Pedro Ursua for Philip II in 1559, and featured as chief protagonist the charismatic caudillo and the first colonial rebel against the Spanish crown, Lope de Aguirre. The five novels - Arturo Uslar Pietri’s El Camino de El Dorado , Abel Posse’s Daimon , Miguel Otero Silva’s Lope de Aquirre, Principe de la Libertad , Jorge Ernesto Funes’ Una Lanza por Lope de Aguirre and Cronica de Blasfemos by Felix Alvarez Saenz - in their distinct styles and publication dates mirror the changes in approaches to fiction taken by Latin American authors as a whole in the same period. In transposing Aguirre’s story to the novelistic page, these five Latin American novelists give a revisionist and authentic voice to a Latin American cultural founder, reviled in his time by the official reporting channels of the Spanish state and provide a chronology of stylistic development for the Latin American novel of the mid to late twentieth century.