Abstract
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS I HAVE TRIED TO SHOW HOW immediately after Christopher Columbus’s death in Valladolid in 1506 his image began another crucial voyage, one beyond time and space. This new Odyssey was across the realm of the human imagination. His caravel was the printed word, and readers were his most loyal crew. For five centuries, biographies, novels, short stories, plays, and poems for young and old alike,1 describing his life and examining his legacy, have populated libraries worldwide in huge numbers and in almost every language. And as we have seen, the admiral was transformed into a mythical figure with three identities: the conventional man, fragile, feverish, and impatient, sometimes foolish and sometimes brave and wise; the traitor and villain, a diabolical, unmerciful creature; and the hero and messiah, a redeemer not only of the suffering but of the nearsighted.
“Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister. “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”
“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice. And she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and, when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your tea: it’s getting late.” And Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
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Notes and References
Books for children and young adults have also embraced the Genoese navigator as a protagonist. Among the most outstanding: Peter Sis, Follow the Dream, ages 5–10 (New York: Knopf, 1991); Deino C. West and Jean M. West, Christopher Columbus: The Great Adventure and How We Know about It, ages 10–14 (New York: Atheneum, 1991); Miriam Schlein, I Sailed with Columbus, illustrated by Tom Newsom, ages 8–12 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Barbara Brenner, If You Were There in 1492, ages 8–12 (New York: Bradbury Press, 1990); Milton Meitzer, Columbus and the World around Him, ages 12 and up (London: Franklin Watts, 1990); Jean Marzollo, In 1492, ages 4–8 (New York: Scholastic, 1990); Ken Hill, Voyages of Columbus, illustrated by Paul Wright, ages 8–12 (New York: Random House, 1991); Stephen C. Dodge, Christopher Columbus and the First Voyages to the New World, ages 12 and up (London: Chelsea House, 1991); Susan Martin, I Sailed with Columbus: The Adventures of a Ship’s Boy, illustrated by Tom La Padula, ages 10 and up (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1991); Olga Litowinsky, The High Voyage: The Final Crossing of Christopher Columbus, ages 10–14 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1991); Kathy Pelta, Discovering Christopher Columbus: How History Is Invented, ages 8–12 (Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1990); Betsy and Giulio Maestro, The Discovery of the Americas, ages 6–10 (London: Lethrop, Less & Shepard Books, 1990).
See chapter 1, note 19. On the relationship between Vespucci and Columbus, see Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, Colombo e Amerigo Vespucci (Genoa: Edizioni Culturali Internazionali Genova, 1987).
Here is a partial and very limited inventory of such places, holidays, institutions, and monuments: Columbus, Ohio; Columbus Circle, N.Y.; Columbia University in New York; Colombia, South America; El Dia de la Raza in Mexico; Columbus Day in the United States; the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago; Colombo, Sri Lanka; British Columbia, Canada; Washington, District of Columbia. Kirkpatrick Sale lists and describes these places at great length in The Conquest of Paradise (296–364). John Noble Wilford, in The Mysterious History of Columbus, is also interested in Columbus’s geographical and architectural posterity.
Gabriel García Márquez made Simón Bolivar’s revolutionary dreams, his individual and political collapse, and his final days on the Magdalena River the subject of his novel The General in His Labyrinth [1989], translated by Edith Grossman (New York: Knopf, 1990).
Also comparing the mariner to the man of La Mancha are Jacob Wassermann, in Christopher Columbus: Don Quixote of the Ocean, and Gianni Granzotto (Christopher Columbus. translated by Stephen Sartarelli [New York: Doubleday, 1985]), who asserts: “Columbus and Don Quixote, each in his own way, extended these limits [of reality], expanded the minds of other men. They gave others a glimpse of new freedoms attainable only through a rejection of common sense” (151).
See Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).
V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon (New York: Vintage, 1984), 206. See also Guillermo Schmidhuber, “La hispanidad y el personaje teatral de Cristóbal Colón” (The Hispanic World and Christopher Columbus as a Dramatic Character, Ideas ’92 5 [Fall 1989]:35–43).
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Sur (May 1939).
See my analysis of both Borges and Lem in “Borges and the Future,” Science-Fiction Studies [17, 1] (March 1990):77–83.
Darko Suvin, in Metamorphosis of Science Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 6, 22, 59, briefly comments on the Utopian views of Columbus and his affinity with science fiction.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 139
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© 1993 Ilan Stavans
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Stavans, I. (1993). Conclusion: In Search of the Future. In: Imagining Columbus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63347-0_8
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