Between the Alternate and the Apocryphal: Religion and Historic Place in Aguilera's La locura de Dios

Summary

The typical starting point for theoretical considerations of history and literature, particularly in sf, might best be summed up by Arthur B. Evans in his entry on ‘Histories’ for The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction:

History is fiction. Not the events, but the telling of them. From Herodotus to Jules Michelet to Howard Zinn, historians not only chronicle the past, they also invent its meaning. Writing history is not a scientific enterprise … History, as the word itself implies, always tells a story. (47)

Much of this approach is valid – the process of history making is in fact one of ‘making sense’ of events and of telling a story. And the linguistic connection between history and story is even starker in the Spanish language where the term for either is the same: la historia. But this starting point is arbitrary. An alternate critical timeline of historical theory itself might just as easily begin by asking why instead of if: why we find it necessary to fictionalize history. What do we make of the impulse to demand the fictional, narrative nature of the past? This is not a popular line of questioning – even less so when one suggests, as this essay will do via a reading of Spanish writer Juan Miguel Aguilera’s La locura de Dios, that religion plays a significant role in this problematic consensus.

Browsing the racks in a popular bookstore chain (which will remain unnamed) in the southern US reveals an interesting taxonomy. Sections are devoted to literature, to genres such as science fiction and fantasy, and of course a whole range of non-fiction topics. However, the section titled ‘History and Religion’ might be most striking to the literary critic. It seems this chain has decided not that history is fiction but that history is religion. Ironically, several instances bear this latter claim out – from the first council of Nicaea, to the backlash against the life of Jesus movements in the nineteenth century, and even in the reactions to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, there have been clear guidelines, enforced by orthodox consensus, for the writing of certain aspects of history.