“El oro de Bizancio se fatiga en San Marcos”

Perucho and the Fantastic Re-Invention of History

Abstract

Considering Venice as seminal literary topos as many Hispanic and Hispanic American writers of the second half of the XX century did, in this article we analyze different texts by Juan Perucho who ‘portrays’ the lagunar city steeped in history. They are little-known texts, with dense literary and historical references, from “lyrical cells” (cf. P. Gimferrer) to short fabulations in prose; where the historiographical precision -always questionable- is created telling deliberately improbable stories that are paradoxically much more truthful than the real one. From these texts emerge that inventing a ‘fantastic’ Venice serves Perucho precisely to demonstrate -as Calvino did with his trilogy Our Ancestors, in the same years- that it is easier to approach a “revivalistic” interpretation of history (cf. C. Argan) i.e. imagining an anachronistic revitalization of the past, instead of believing that it is possible to narrate the lost past of a unique place only by knowing it historically.