Carlos Fuentes's "the Two Shores": Between Counterfactualism and Cultural Allegory.

CARLOS Fuentes's short story "The Two Shores" was written in 1991 and published in The Orange Tree in 1992. The Fifth Centennial of the Spanish arrival to the Americas compelled many Hispanophone intellectuals at the end of the 20th century to reinterrogate critically the significance of this event. In consonance with the discursive politics of postmodernism (see Hutcheon 66), such reinterrogation paid attention not only to its negative effects, but also showed an interest in recovering the voices and discourse of all those who were traditionally marginalized from or oppressed by historical and political processes. The clearest sign of this interest - far beyond the anthropological - for the marginal individual who had been victimized by established power structures in the Latin American nations, was the Nobel Foundation award of the 1992 Peace Prize to a Maya-Quiche woman named Rigoberta Menchu. In this intellectual context, "The Two Shores" represents Fuentes's own contribution to revising the significance and impact of the Spanish arrival to the Americas. Fuentes's marginal narrator is a talking dead man, a sort of Derridean revenant who casts a doubt over the conceptual foundations of the discourse of the present and to whom the reader owes a "hospitable" welcome as a way of doing justice to the voices that have disappeared from the historical record (Derrida 175). But this narrator is, remarkably enough, not a voice representative of the victims of the genocide, but a Spaniard. Having been captive among the Mayas, Jeronimo de Aguilar has become an acculturated subject, a traitor to the Spanish imperialistic project, and a self-appointed secret champion of the voices silenced by history. Neither dead nor alive, neither Spanish nor Maya, rooted neither in the present nor in the past, and yet showing all these traits partially, Aguilar manifests the liminal, borderline condition of what Homi Bhabha calls the "freak social and cultural displacements" that epitomize contemporary literature (12).