El triunfo del simulacro: el caso de la novela El impostor de Javier Cercas

Abstract

This article aims to problematize why Enric Marco, the impostor in Javier Cercas' 2014 novel, found it so easy to pretend to the world that he was a survivor of the Nazi Germany Holocaust during World War II. To this end, Cercas' novel El impostor (2014), which attempts to reconstruct the way in which Enric Marco constructed his imposture, will be related to Jean-François Lyotard's theoretical approach to The Postmodern Condition (1979) and subsequent studies on the subject. Likewise, postmodernity and its link with the not so recent neologism of post-truth (Žižek, 2005), crucial to understand the way in which truth and lies are constructed in contemporary societies, will be studied. Finally, Jean Baudrillard's proposal about the society of the simulacrum (Culture and Simulacrum, 1978), also continued by other theorists, will be explained to complement the discussion and point out the way in which "simulated realities" predominate in postmodern societies.