Alberdi or the pilgrimage of the novel

Abstract

In 1871, Juan Bautista Alberdi completed his only novel, Peregrinación de Luz del Día o Viaje y aventuras de la Verdad en el Nuevo Mundo, which was published in Buenos Aires in 1874. In this title, a constitutive duality can be appreciated; in that ‚or‘ which
both enumerates and separates, the borderline zone in which Alberdi chooses to move becomes legible: between the”‘verisimilar” and the “fantastic”‘ between fiction and history, between the essay, the diatribe, and the novel. In relation to this novel by
Juan Bautista Alberdi, it is important to note that it may be regarded as the inaugural work within an emergent novelistic corpus in Tucumán, a corpus to which the later fictions of Paul Groussac would subsequently be incorporated, followed in turn by the
prolific novelistic production of more than one hundred novels over the course of the twentieth century. If, as James Wood suggests, the novel ultimately teaches us how to read its narrator, it becomes essential to analyze in Alberdi’s work the operation of the
various thresholds that structure the text, the pendular movements of the narrative voice, and the ways in which the fictional work enters into dialogue with and rewrites texts by other authors, such as Eduardo Laboulaye and John Bunyan. This study will
also examine the intertextual and transfictional intersections that Alberdi constructs in relation to his own oeuvre.