ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the representation of Bolivar's tuberculosis is largely informed by Romantic mythologies of consumption and adds to the novel's metafictional dimension. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1989 novel El general en su laberinto is the fictionalised account of Simon Bolivar last months, on his journey from Santa Fe de Bogota to his death in San Pedro Alejandrino on 17 December 1830. Garcia Marquez's account of Bolivar's illness intertwines some of the author's recurring themes power, epidemics and death with material drawn from the historical record and various medical and literary traditions of understanding and representing disease. Like other works by Garcia Marquez, El general explores fiction's potential to draw upon the equivocality of concepts whose transparency has been taken for granted; like other contemporary historical fictions, it takes the body as the focal point of an aesthetic which enables a re-imagining of the past and a meditation on the process of writing about it.
