ASPECTS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY AND CULTURE IN THE NOVEL TERRA NOSTRA BY CARLOS FUENTES

Abstract

A complete novel (novela total) Terra Nostra written by Mexican author Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) four decades after its first edition (1975) still represents inexhaustible material for hispanists, literary historians and scholars, who have been mosty focused on Latin American topics, motives and symbols in this book. As the novel abounds with intertextual elements related to the European history, culture and art, our aim in this paper was to perceive historical facts on which the author relies by taking them over, modifying and fictionalising them, as well as literary and artistic influences which are present in it. We studied characters from the traditional Spanish literature, skillfully interwoven into the novel and works of Spanish and Flemish painters which Fuentes used as scenography and symbol. Our investigation was based on the sources inside the novel, on the interpretations of the author in books and interviews published between 1976 and 2012, and on attitudes of many international and national experts for the Hispanic American lit- erature who, especially recently, wrote about various aspects of this novel. We also took advantage of the first digital edition of Terra Nostra in Spanish language (2013) and investigated the impact of Fuentes’s book to one of the crucial novels of the recent Serbian literature, The Siege of the Church of the Holy Saviour by Goran Petrović.
The results of our investigation indicate that Carlos Fuentes, using metahistory and intrahis- tory, in his story about the collision of the Old and the New world, bases his work on European history, literature and art, and pays tribute to Cervantes’s past, present and future Spain. Research- ing intertextuality of Terra Nostra we have indicated historical and narrative function of the El Escorial as the main scenery of the novel, pointed out to the author’s implication of the names/ historical characters Juan and Juana and the presence of three main figures from Spanish literature
– Don Quijote, Don Juan and Celestina. By using the examples from the novel we have illustrated attendance of European fine arts authors in Terra Nostra – Signorelli, Bosch, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. Finaly, by interviewing Serbian writer Goran Petrović for the purpose of this paper, we have opened a new possible topic of comparative research of Terra Nostra and The Siege of the Church of the Holy Saviour.