Abstract
AS RECORDED IN MATTHEW 27:3–10 AND IN ACTS 1:16–20, Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve disciples, betrayed Jesus Christ for 30 pieces of silver; he led Roman soldiers to the garden of Gethsemane and identified Jesus with a kiss. Although he later repented and committed suicide, Judas had earned the infamous stature of the most detested villain in human history. Antinomians, like the evangelist Nils Runeberg in Borges’s “Three Version of Judas” (1944), believe his evil actions were as useful to the universe as those of the ill-served messiah. Evil, for them, is a hidden dimension of good, part of the same metaphysical unit. As portrayed in literature, sacred or secular (Dante, Léon Bloy, G. K. Chesterton, and so on), Judas is a complex figure: a treacherous, deceiving bandit, but also the person who forced Jesus to assert his divine powers and establish a new order on earth.
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Notes and References
José Enrique Rodó, Hombres de América (American Men) (Mexico: Editorial Novaro, 1957), 137.
The confusion in terminology has been analyzed by, among other critics, Earl E. Fitz in his book Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 121–145, hereafter cited in the text.
Octavio Paz, “Translation and Metaphor,” in Children of the Mire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 115–41.
The best biographical and critical essays on Darío are by José Enrique Rodó, “Rubén Darío” [1899], in Obras completas de José Enrique Rodó, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967); and by Octavio Paz, “El caracol y la sirena [R.D.]” (The Snail and the Syren), Cuadrivio (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1965). Also valuable are Ricardo Gullón, Páginas escogidas (Selected Writing) (Madrid: Cátedra, 1984), with a chronology and selected bibliography; Ivan A. Schulman and Manuel Pedro González, Martí, Darío, y el modernismo (Marti, Darío, and Modernismo) Lily Lutwak, ed., (Madrid: Gredos, 1969); and El Modernismo (Madrid: Taurus, 1975).
See Homero Castillo, ed., Estudios críticos sobre el modernismo (Critical Studies on Modernismo) (Madrid: Gredos, 1968); and Raúl Silva Castro, ed., Antología crítica del modernismo (Modernismo: A Critical Anthology) (New York: Las Américas Publishing, 1963).
See Stavans “Whitman, Colón, Darío.”
Carpentier finished the manuscript on 10 September 1978.
Roberto González Echeverría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 214, and especially 215–20. This book came out two years before the publication in Spanish of The Harp and the Shadow; thus it does not contain an examination of that novel. Yet González Echeverría’s analysis of most of the Cuban novelist’s narratives is not only compelling but essential to anyone beginning the ardous project of reading it.
Independent of the Vatican investigation, Hispanic America also felt the controversy—primarily, during the ten-year period of religious examination, in the research of the investigators combing the records of every country from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico to South America, but also in theological debates and literature. By 1935, David Vela, with Church approval, was still publishing on the subject. His text, “El mito de Cristóbal Colón” (The Myth of Christopher Columbus) (Publicaciones de la Academia Guatemalteca [November 1935]: 5–154), one of the last in a long list, promotes Columbus as a preromantic spirit and an inspirational figure. His work was preceded and followed by a number of texts with ecclesiastical approval, including Enrique Bayerri y Bertomeu’s Colón tal cual fue (Columbus The Way He Was) (Madrid: Manuel, Obispo de Tortosa, 1961).
Juan José “Barrientos in Colón personaje novelesco,” perceives part 2 of The Harp and the Shadow as an autobiographical account along the same lines as Robert Graves’s l, Claudius (1934). He discusses Carpentier’s novel vis-à-vis Blasco Ibáñez’s En Busca del Gran Kan ([In Search of the Grand Khan] [1929] Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1978) and comments on Columbus’s secrets, his origins, his marital and love affairs, his dishonest purposes, and his vision of the natives.
Abel Posse, The Dogs of Paradise [1985], translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Atheneum, 1989), 78–79, hereafter cited in the text as Dogs.
Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus (New York: HarperCollins), 81, hereafter cited in the text as Crown.
Dorris and Erdrich quote Dunn and Kelley’s Diary (see chapter 2, note 11) and reprint Columbus’s letter to Prince John from Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, with Other Original Documents Relating to His Four Voyages to the New World, 2d ed., translated and edited by R. H. Major (London: Hakluyt Society, 72–107). They also quote from his diary as it appears in Fuson, Log of Columbus.
See Paul Claudel, The Book of Christopher Columbus [1927] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930, hereafter cited in the text as Book for a similar premise.
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© 1993 Ilan Stavans
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Stavans, I. (1993). The Villain. In: Imagining Columbus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63347-0_6
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