Contents
Preface to the Duke edition
Preface
Acknowledgments
i    A clearing in the jungle:
from Santa Monica to Macondo
2     The law of the letter: Garcilaso's Comentarios
3     A lost world re-discovered: Sarmiento's Facundo and E. da Cunha's Os Sertoes
4     The novel as myth and archive: ruins and relics of Tlön
Notes
Bibliography
Index
I
A clearing in the jungle: from Santa Monica to
Macondo
The Roman legalistic tradition is one of the strongest components in Latin American culture: from Cortés to Zapata, we only believe in what is written down and codified.
Carlos Fuentes
I
After a painful journey away from the modern world, the protagonist of Alej o Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (1953) reaches Santa Monica de los Venados, the town founded by the Adelantado, one of his traveling companions.2 Santa Monica is but a clearing in the South American jungle on which a few huts have been built.3 The nameless protagonist has arrived, or so he wishes to believe, at the Valley-Where-Time-Has-Stopped, a place outside the flow of history. Here, purged of civilization, he hopes to rekindle his creative energies, to return to his earlier life as a composer; in short, to be true to himself. The narrator-protagonist plans to write a threnody, a musical poem based on the text of the Odyssey. Musical ideas rush to his mind, as if he had been able at last to tap a deep well of creativity within him. He asks the Adelantado, or Founder of Cities, for paper to write all this down. The latter, reluctantly, for he needs them to set down the laws of his new society, gives him a notebook. The narrator fills it very quickly in a frenzy of creativity and begs for another. Annoyed, the Adelantado gives it to him with the admonition that it will be the last one. He is forced to write very small, packing every available space, even creating a kind of personal shorthand, to be able to continue his work. Later, feeling sorry for him, the Adelantado relinquishes yet another notebook, but the narrator-protagonist is still reduced to erasing and rewriting
1
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
what he has composed, for he lacks the space to move forward. Writing, erasing, rewriting, the narrator-protagonist's belabored manuscript already prefigures the economy of gain and loss of the Archive, the origin unveiJed, the mode of current Latin American fiction made possible by Carpentier's novel. Many other such manuscripts will appear in the works of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa as emblems of the very text of the Latin American novel.
When the narrator decides to go back to civilization temporarily, he does so with the intention of procuring enough paper and ink to continue his composition once he returns to Santa Monica. He does neither. Instead of finishing his threnody, the narrator-protagonist writes a series of articles about his adventures, which he tries to sell off to various publications. These may be, within the fiction, the fragments that lead up to the writing of the text we read, Los pasos perdidos (as in other modern novels,  an unfinished manuscript represents, within the fiction, the novel in which it appears). The return to Santa Monica is never accomplished either, for the rising waters of the river cover the inscription on the trunk of a tree that marked the channel to the town. There is writing everywhere in the jungle, but it is as unintelligible as that of the city from which he wishes to escape. The protagonist is caught between two cities, in one of which he must live. What he cannot do is live outside the city, outside of writing.
Two events, related to the need for paper, occur at the same time that the narrator-protagonist is pestering the Adelantado for notebooks. The first is when Fray Pedro, another traveling companion, insists that the protagonist marry Rosario, the native woman with whom he has paired off during his journey upriver. The second is the execution of Nicasio, the leper who raped a girl in the town. The narrator, who has a wife back in the modern world, does not want to subject Rosario to a hollow ceremony and cannot bear the thought of her treasuring a piece of paper from one of the notebooks that he so desires, on which the marriage certificate would no doubt be written. But Rosario, it turns out, has no urge to seal their union according to laws that would tie her down and make her subservient to him. Nicasio, killed by Marcos when the narrator-protagonist is unable to pull the trigger, is said to suffer from the leprosy of Leviticus, that is to say, from the malady that led nomadic tribes to draw up laws excluding those infected with the disease as they
ACLEARINGIN THEJUNGLE                               3
settled down in a given place. Marriage and the execution of Nicasio are events that stand at the beginning of the need to write, like thet creative impulse of the narrator-protagonist. All three will find their way into the notebooks hoarded by the founder of cities. Writing begins in the city with the need to order society and to discipline in the punitive sense. The narrator-protagonist recognizes that the clearing he seeks is already occupied by civilization:
No sólo ha fundado una ciudad el Adelantado, sino que, sin sospecharlo, está creando, dia a dia, una. polls, que acabará por apoyarse en un código asentado solemnemente en el Cuaderno de ... Perteneciente a ... Y un momento llegará en que tenga que castigar severamente a quien mate la bestia vedada, y bien veo que entonces ese hombrecito de hablar pausado, que nunca alza la voz, no vacilará en condenar al culpable a ser expulsado de la comunidad y a morir de hambre en la selva ...                    (p. 268)
Not only had the Adelantado founded a city, but, without realizing it, he was creating day by day a polls that would eventually rest on a code of laws solemnly entered in Notebook ... Property of... And the moment would come when severe punishment would have to be imposed on anyone killing an animal in the closed season, and it was apparent that this little, soft-spoken man would not hesitate to sentence the violator to being driven from the community to die of hunger in the forest...                                 (p. 209)
Writing is bound to the founding of cities and to punishment.4 The origin of the modern novel is to be found in this relationship, thematic traces of which appear throughout its history, from Lazarillo and El coloquio de losperros to Les Miserables, Der Prozess, and El beso de la mujer araüa.
The reader of contemporary Latin American fiction will no doubt recognize in Santa Monica de los Venados and the story about the unfinished manuscript - both of the threnody and the novel -prefigurations of Macondo and of Melquiades' writings in Cien aňos de soledad (1967). Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos is a turning point in the history of Latin American narrative, the founding archival fiction. It is a book in which all the important narrative modalities in Latin America, up to the time when it was published, are contained and analyzed as in a kind of active memory; it is a repository of narrative possibilities, some obsolete, others leading up to Garcia Márquez. Los pasos perdidos is an archive of stories and a storehouse of the master-stories produced to narrate from Latin America. Just as the narrator-protagonist of the novel discovers that he is unable
4                                       MYTH AND ARCHIVE
to wipe the slate clean to make a fresh start, so the book, in searching for a new, original narrative, must contain all previous ones, and in becoming an Archive return to the most original of those modalities. Los pasos perdidos brings us back to the beginnings of writing, looking for an empty present wherein to make a first inscription. What is found instead is a variety of beginnings at the origin, the most powerful being the language of the law. Thus Los pasos. perdidos dismantles the central enabling delusion of Latin American writing: the notion that in the New World a new start can be made, unfettered by history. The new start is always already history; writing in the city. Because of his anxiety about origins, the narrator-protagonist's is the quintessential Latin American story and its critical undoing; hence its foundational quality both in terms of Latin American history and the history of the novel. By foundational I mean that it is a story about the prolegomena of telling a Latin American story. For instead of being relieved of history's freight, the narrator-protagonist discovers that he is burdened by the memory of the repeated attempts to discover or found the newness of the New World.3 Los pasos perdidos is the story of this defeat that turns into a victory. In loosening the central constitutive idealization of Latin American narrative from its moorings, Carpentier's novel opens up the possibility of a critical reading of the Latin American tradition; one that would make manifest the stories, including the one of which the narrator is the protagonist, that constitute the Latin American narrative imagination. It is in the process of baring the consciousness of his narrator-protagonist that Carpentier lays out the ruins ofthat construct as a map for his fresh narrative project. But what are the fragments, the analecta in those ruins, and what do they have to do with the notebooks that the narrator-protagonist seeks from the Adelantado in Santa Monica de los Venados?
The answer, as a kind of counterpoint, is found in Garcia Márquez' Cien aňos de soledad, a text in which those master-stories are again told and the vestiges of the origin found by Carpentier examined in greater detail. Cien aňos de soledad contains, as in a blow-up, a map of the narrative possibilities or potentialities of Latin American fiction. If Carpentier's novel is the founding archival fiction, Garcia Marquez' is the archetypical one. This is the reason why the Archive as myth constitutes its core.
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
5
2
This man had in his possession a leaden box which, so he said, he had found among the ruined foundations of an ancient hermitage, that was being rebuilt. In this box he had found some parchments written in the Gothic script but in Castilian verse, which contained many of the knight's exploits and dwelt upon the beauty of Dulcinea del Toboso, the shape of Rocinante, the fidelity of Sancho Panza, and the burial of this same Don Quixote, together with various epitaphs and eulogies of his life and habits. Such of these as could be read and understood the trustworthy author of this original and matchless history has set down here, and he asks no recompense from his readers for the immense labours it has cost him to search and ransack all the archives of La Mancha in order to drag it into the light.                                                                               Don Quijote, I, 52s
To most readers, the Latin American novel must appear to be obsessed with Latin American history and myth. Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra (1976), for instance, retells much of sixteenth-century Spanish history, including the conquest of Mexico, while also incorporating pre-Columbian myths prophesying that momentous event. Carpentier's El siglo de las luces (1962) narrates Latin America's transition from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth, focusing on the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. Carpentier also delves into Afro-Cuban lore to show how Blacks interpreted the changes brought about by these political upheavals. Mario Vargas Llosa's monumental La guerra del fin del mundo (1980) tells again the history of Canudos, the rebellion of religous fanatics in the backlands of Brazil, which had already been the subject of Euclides da Cunha's classic Os Sertoes (1902). Vargas Llosa's ambitious work also examines in painstaking detail the recreation of a Christian mythology in the New World. The list of Latin American novels dealing with Latin American history and myth is very long indeed, and it includes the work of many lesser known, younger writers. Abel Posse's Daimón (1978) retells the story of Lope de Aguirre, the sixteenth-century rebel who declared himself free from the Spanish Crown and founded his own independent country in South America. As the title of the book suggests, Posse's fiction centers on the myth of the Devil and his reputed preference for the New World as residence and field of operations, a theme that had been   important   in   two   earlier  Latin  American   masterpieces,
6                                       MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
Carpentier's El reino de este mundo (1949) and Joäo Guimaräes Rosa's Grande sertäo: veredas (1956).
Given that myths are stories whose main concern is with origins, the interest of Latin American fiction in Latin American history and myth are understandable. On the one hand, Latin American history has always held the promise of being not only new but different, of being, as it were, the only new history, preserving the force of the oxymoron. On the other hand, the novel, which appears to have emerged  in   the  sixteenth  century  at  the  same  time  as   Latin American history, is the only modern genre, the only literary form that is modern not only in the chronological sense, but also because it has persisted for centuries without a poetics, always in defiance of the very notion of genre. Is it possible, then, to make of Latin American history a story as enduring as the old myths? Can Latin American history be as resilient and as useful a hermeneutical tool for probing human nature as the classical myths, and can the novel be the vehicle for the transmission of these new myths? Is it at all conceivable, in the modern, post-oral period, to create myths? Are the coeval births of the novel and the history of Latin America related beyond chronology? Can a new myth make the New World intelligible? More importantly for our purposes, can a novelistic myth be inscribed in the clearing that the narrator of Los pasos perdidos seeks, and is such a myth the archival fiction this novel and others following it turn out to be? Because it is the repository of stories about the beginnings of modern Latin America, history is crucial in the creation of this myth. Latin American history is to the Latin American narrative what the epic themes are to Spanish literature: a constant whose mode of appearance may vary, but which is rarely absent. A book like Ramón Menéndez Pidal's La epopeya castellana a través de la literatura espaňola7 could be written about the presence of Latin American history in the Latin American narrative. The question is, of course, how can myth and history coexist in the novel? How can founding stories be told in this most ironic and s elf-reflexive of genres? The enormous and deserved success of Garcia Márquez' masterpiece Cien aňos de soledad is due to the unrelenting way in which these forms of storytelling are interwoven in the novel, which thereby unveils the past of the narrative process in Latin America and leads to a consideration of the novel as genre.
It is an uncritical reflex of philologically inspired literary history
A  CLEARING  IN THE JUNGLE                               7
to think of the evolution of the novel in the same terms as that of other literary genres. This is a vestige of a kind of primitive historicism that is modeled on the natural sciences and which, in the case of the history of conventional literary forms, has yielded impressive results. I do not think that the same can be said of studies 0n the novel. I am not convinced by theories that attempt to make the novel evolve solely or even chiefly from the epic, or any other literary form. The most persistent characteristic of books that have been called novels in the modern era is that they always pretend not to be literature. The desire not to be literary, to break with belles-lettres, is the most tenacious element in the novel. Don Quijote is supposed to be the translation of a history written in Arabic, or of documents extracted from the archives of La Mancha; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes is a deposition written for a judge, The Pickwick Papers are The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Being a Faithful record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures, and Sporting transactions of the Corresponding Members: Edited by Boz- Other novels are or pretend to be autobiographies, a series of letters, a manuscript found in a trunk, and so forth. Carpentier once exclaimed that most modern novels were received by criticism with the complaint that they were not novels at all, making it seem that, to be successful, the novel must fulfill its desire not to be literature.8 He cited as examples A la recherche du temps perdu and Ulysses. A number of years ago Ralph Freedman made a useful suggestion concerning the origins of the novel:
Instead of separating genres or subgenres artificially and then accounting for exceptions by stipulating mixtures and compounds, it is simpler to view all of prose fiction as a unity and to trace particular strands to different origins, strands which would include not only the English novel of manners, or the post-medieval romance, or the Gothic novel, but also medieval allegory, the German Bildungsroman, or the picaresque. .Some of these strands may be close to folk material or to classical epics, others may have modeled themselves on travelogues and journalistic descriptions of events, and others again suggest drawing-room comedies and even lyrical prose poetry, yet all, to varying degrees, seem to mirror life in aesthetically defined worlds (life as myth, as structure of reality, as worlds of feeling or quotidian reality) .. .9
I wish to retain from Freedman the notion of multiple origins and add that the origin of the novel is repeated, over and over again, only retaining the mimetic act vis-ä-vis a nonliterary form, not directly as
8
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
a mirror of life. The novel's origin is not only multiple in space but also in time. Its history is not, however, a linear succession or evolution, but a series of new starts in different places. The only common denominator is the novel's mimetic quality, not of a given reality, but of a given discourse that has already "mirrored" reality. It is my hypothesis that the novel, having no fixed form of its own, often assumes that of a given kind of document endowed with truth-bearing power by society at specific moments in time. The novel, or what is called the novel at various points in history, mimics such documents to show their conventionality, their subjection to strategies of textual engenderment similar to those governing literature, which in turn reflect those of language itself. It is through this simulacrum of legitimacy that the novel makes its contradictory and veiled claim to literariness. The power to endow a text with the capacity to bear the truth is shown to lie outside the text by narratives that we call novelistic; it is an exogenous agent that bestows authority upon a certain kind of document owing to the ideological power structure of the period, not to any inherent quality of the document or even of the outside agent. The novel, therefore, is part of the discursive totality of a given epoch, occupying a place opposite its ideologically authoritative core. Its conception is itself a story about an escape from authority, which is often its subplot. Needless to say this flight to a form of freedom is imaginary, a simulacrum predicated on textual mimetism that appears to be embedded in narrativity itself, as if it were the t/r-story, the irreducible masterstory underlying all storytelling. This is perhaps the reason why the law figures prominently in the first of the masterstories the novel tells through texts like La vidä de Lazäňllo de Tormes, Cervantes' novelas ejemplares, and the crónicas de Indias. The novel will retain from this origin its relation to punishment and the control of the State, which determines its mimetic penchant from then on. When the modern Latin American novel returns to that origin, it does so through the figure of the Archive, the legal repository of knowledge and power from which it sprung, as we observed in Los pasos perdidos.
Although I have learned a good deal from the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, as should be obvious, my approach here diners considerably from his. In the first place, because I like to see the novel as part of the textual economy of a given epoch, not simply or even primarily that part considered literary. In the second, I place more
A  CLEARING IN  THE JUNGLE
9
emphasis on texts that are part of official culture in the formation of the novel. In addition, I will include in my purview texts such as facundo which are not considered novels in the conventional sense. My departure from Bakhtin may be due to the nature of my object of study - the Latin American narrative — which is created under circumstances that are considerably different from the European novel that interests him. I believe that Bakhtin dismisses too easily the role of official texts, which to my mind are fundamental in the formation of the modern novel. Bakhtin writes that "Carnival is the people's second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life. Festivity is a peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages."10 He also writes: "This is why the tone of the official feast was monolithically serious and why the element of laughter was alien to it" (p. 9). Bakhtin conceives of the official as something alien to society, as if officialdom were something extraterrestrial, imposed on humanity by some foreign invader. But what he calls official is as much a part of society as laughter and carnival; in fact, one could not exist without the other.
Having said this, however, I should make clear that I do share certain assumptions with Bakhtin. For instance, that humankind is a producer of texts, that these texts never exist individually, but in relation to others, and that there is no possible metatext, but always an intertext.'l That is to say, that I believe that my text is part of the economy of texts that it attempts to describe and classify, that my book is necessarily also an archival fiction. To my mind, the problem with Bakhtin is that he is still within the sphere of influence of classical anthropology, in the sense that he feels that the folk are some sort of privileged element of humankind, as the non-Europeans were to anthropologists, where something true, that can be betrayed by another part of humankind, survives. This is why he has trouble with the written. Writing is precisely part and parcel of officialdom. Here is where I choose to follow Michel Foucault. For Foucault, mediation is the very process of constraining, denying, limiting, invented by humanity itself; these hegemonic discourses which oppress, watch, control, and furnish the models parodied later, models without which parody itself could not exist. Cutting, slicing, locking up, writing, authority, is as much a contrivance of humankind as its antidotes. This is what I do not see present in Bakhtin's theories, and this is why he idealizes the folk. Intertextua-lity is not a quiet dialogue of texts — a pluralistic utopia perhaps born
10
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
of the monolithic hell Bakhtin lived through — but a clash of texts, an imbalance among texts, some of which have a molding and modeling power over others.
The object of my study, then, is not simply the Latin American novel, but more broadly the Latin American narrative, and within that narrative an evolving core whose chief concern, particularly since the nineteenth century, is with the issue of the uniqueness of Latin America as a cultural, social and political space from which to narrate. The search for uniqueness and identity is the form the question of legitimacy takes after the colonial period. The very first narrative of Latin America is determined by the issue of legitimacy as granted by the documents through which the first modern state -Habsburg Spain - dealt with the issue of enfranchisement.
In sixteenth-century Spain, the documents imitated by the incipient novel were legal ones. (I use incipient only to signal a beginning, not to suggest that as the structure was established it first yielded a kernel; the whole structure is assumed to have been present in Lazarillo, the very "first" novel.) The form assumed by the Picaresque was that of a relation (report, deposition, letter bearing witness to something), because this kind of written report belonged to the huge imperial bureaucracy through which power was administered in Spain and its possessions. The early history of Latin America, as well as the first fictions of and about Latin America, are told in the rhetorical molds furnished by the notarial arts. These cartas de relation were not simply letters or maps, but were also charters of the newly discovered territories. Both the writer and the territory were enfranchised through the power of this document which, like Lazarillo's text, is addressed to a higher authority, as in the case of Hernán Cortés, who wrote to Emperor Charles V. The pervasiveness of legal rhetoric in early American historiography can hardly be exaggerated. Officially appointed historians (with the title of Cronista Mayor de Indias) were assigned a set of rules by the Crown and the Royal Council of the Indies which included ways of subsuming these relaciones into their compendious works. Latin American history and fiction, the narrative of Latin America, were first created within the language of the law, a secular totality that guaranteed truth and made its circulation possible. It is within this totality that Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, wrote his Comentarios reales de los incas (1609), for, as will be seen in greater detail, the mestizo's book is an appeal to exonerate his father. Like Lázaro,
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE                             II
1 .jrcilaso addresses a letter to a higher autority to gain enfranchisement.
Since the eighteenth century, all forms of narrative, but particularly the novel, have had to compete with those created or adapted first by the natural and later by the social sciences. These were the true stories. Balzac, Galdós, and Dickens were the social analysts and theoreticians of their time, as was, even more forth-riffhtly, Zola. A study of the relationship of the European novel to scientific forms of hegemonic discourse has yet to be written, as far as I know. Our study is concerned with the strand of the narrative that takes us to Latin America, where the mediating force of science was such that the most significant narratives did not even pretend to be novels, but various kinds of scientific reportage. Consequently, in Latin America, in the nineteenth century (until the teens of our century) the narrative assumes the form of a new hegemonic discourse: science, and more specifically the scientific consciousness that expresses itself in the language of travelers who journeyed across the Continent, writing about its nature and about themselves. Scientific exploration brought about the second European discovery of America, and the traveling naturalists were the new chroniclers. Traces of their writings are present in the journey the narrator-protagonist undertakes in Lospasosperdidos (the diary form of parts of the novel is also derived from this kind of writing) and in those by Melquiades in Cien aňos de soledad. Comparatively little attention has been paid to this vast process of exploration and reportage, whose dimensions can be glimpsed by looking at the recent Travel Accounts and Descriptions of Latin America and the Caribbean 1800-1920: A Selected Bibliography, compiled by Thomas L. Welch and Myriam Figueras, and published by the Organization of American States (1982).12 Though selective, this volume contains nearly three hundred pages of tightly packed entries. The names of these scientific travelers are quite impressive, ranging from Alexander von Humboldt to Charles Darwin, and including the likes of Robert and Richard Schomburgk, Charles-Marie de la Condamine, Captain Richard Burton, and many others. Their fictional counterpart is Professor Challenger in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), whose voyage to the origins of nature takes him to South America.
A consciousness that expresses itself in the language of the scientific   travelogue   mediates   the   writing   of Latín   American
12
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
narratives in the nineteenth century. I am aware that the canon of Latin American literary history places conventional novels such as Amália and Maria at the centre of the evolution of Latin American narrative. This is an uncritical copy of European literary history which veils the fact that the most significant narratives, the ones that had a powerful impact on those that followed in the twentieth century, were not novels copied from European models, as Mármoľs and Isaacs' texts were, but issue from the relationship with the hegemonic discourse of the period, which was not literary, but scientific. This is so, even, of course, in the case of some conventional Latin American novels, such as Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (Cuba, 1880), which owed much to reports on slavery in Cuba that were cast in a sicentiric mold. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), Anselmo Suárez y Romero's Francisco (1880), and Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes (1902} describe Latin American nature and society through the conceptual grid of nineteenth-century science. Like the chronicles of the discovery and conquest, which were often legal documents, these are books whose original role lies outside of literature. Francisco was originally part of a report sent to the British authorities documenting the horrors of slavery in Cuba. Latin America's history and the stories of adventurers, who sought to discover the innermost secrets of the New World, that is to say, its newness and difference, are narrated through the mind of a writer qualified by science to search for the truth. That truth is found in an evolutionary conception of nature that profoundly affects all narratives about the New World. Both the self and science that make this conception possible are reflections of the power of the new European commercial empires. The capacity to find the truth is due not so much to the cogency of the scientific method, as to the ideological construct that supports them, a construct whose source of strength lies outside the text. The "mind" that analyzes and classifies is made present through the rhetorical conventions of the travelogue. Sarmiento ranges over the Argentine landscape in a process of self-discovery and self-affirmation. In his book he dons the mask of the traveling savant, distanced from the reality he interprets and classifies according to the intervening tenets of scientific inquiry.
This particular mediation prevails until the crisis of the 1920s and the so-called novela de la tierra or telluric novels.13 This modern novel avails itself of a different kind of mediation: anthropology. Now the
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
J3
nromise of knowledge is to be found in a scientific discourse whose „bject is not nature but essentially language and myth. The truth-bearing document the novel imitates is the anthropological or ethnographic report. The object of such studies is to discover the origin and source of a culture's own version of its values, beliefs, and history through a culling and retelling of its myths. Readers of anthropology are aware that in order to understand another culture, the anthropologist has to know his own to the point where he can distance himself from it, and in a sense disappear in the discourse of method. Distancing, a process whose counterpart can only be found in modern literature, involves a kind of self-effacement. This dramatic process has been beautifully expounded by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques, a book in which he devotes a good deal of space to his stay in Brazil. John Freccero and Eduardo Gonzalez have studied how much this book has in common with Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, and today Clifford Geertz and others are studying, from the point of view of anthropology, the relationship between the discourse of anthropology and that of literature in a way that is prefigured in the Latin American novels that I shall be dealing with here.14
Anthropology is the mediating element in the modern Latin American narrative because of the place this discipline occupies in the articulation of founding myths by Latin American states. But, of course, anthropology assumes such mediating power also because of the role anthropology plays in Western thought and the place Latin America occupies in the history ofthat discipline. Anthropology is a way through which Western culture indirectly affixes its own cultural identity. This identity, which the anthropologist struggles to shed, is one that masters non-historical cultures through knowledge, by making them the object of its study. Anthropology translates into the language of the West the cultures of the others and in the process establishes its own form of self-knowledge through a kind of annihilation of the self. Existential philosophy, as in Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset and Sartre, is akin to this process, because it is only through an awareness of the other that Western thought can pretend to wind back to the origin of being. The natives, that is to say, Latin Americans or in general those who could be politely called the inhabitants of the post-colonial world, provide the model for this reduction and beginning. The native has timeless stories to explain his changeless society. These stories, these myths, are like those of the West in the distant past, before they became a
i4
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
mythology instead of a theogony. Freud, Frazer, Jung, and Heidegger sketch a return to, or a retention of, these origins. Anthropology finds them in the contemporary world of the native. The modern Latin American novel is written through the model of such anthropological studies. In the same way that the nineteenth-century novel turned Latin America into the object of scientific study, the modern Latin American novel transforms Latin American history into an originary myth in order to see itself as other. The theogonic Buendia family in Cien aňos de soledad owes its organization to this phenomenon, as does the very concept of Macondo, which recalls the village-studies common in ethnography.
The historical data behind my hypothesis concerning the modern novel and its relation to an anthropological model are extensive and I shall return to it in the last chapter. Suffice it to say that Miguel Angel Asturias studied ethnology in Paris under Georges Raynaud, an experience that produced in  1930 his influential Leyendas de Guatemala. One of the Asturias' classmates at the Sorbonne was none other than Alejo Carpentier, who was then writing jEcué-Yamba-O! (1933), a novel which is, in many ways, an ethnological study of Cuban Blacks. Carpentier's interest in anthropology never abated. For instance, at the time he was writing Los pasos perdidos in the late 1940s, he followed the Griaule expedition closely as well as the activities and writings of the group of anthropologists who took refuge in New York during World War II.15 Another Cuban writer was also preparing herself in Paris in those years: Lydia Cabrera, whose pioneering studies of Afro-Cuban lore would culminate in her classic El monte (1954). In more recent times, Severo Sarduy has been a student of Roger Bastide, and his De donde son los cantantes (1967) is, amongst several other things, an anthropological study of Cuban culture, seen as the synthesis of the three main ethnic groups inhabiting the island: the Spanish, the African and the Chinese. Borges' 1933 essay "El arte narrativo y la magia," where the art of storytelling is compared to two kinds of primitive cures outlined in The Golden Bough, is but one indication of the widespread impact of Frazer on Latin America. Traces of this influence are visible in Octavio Paz, Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, as well as in many others. Lydia  Cabrera  is  perhaps   the  most  significant  author  here because she stands for a very important kind of Latin American writer who sits astride both literature and anthropology. Cabrera is
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
15
a first-rate short-story writer, just as she is a first-rate anthropologist Her teacher, Fernando Ortiz, was also claimed by literature and his influence on modern Cuban letters is vast. Examples of writers straddling literature and anthropology are plentiful. The most notorious in recent years is Miguel Barnet, whose Biografia de un ámarrón (i966) not only contains all the perplexing dualities and contradictions ofthat relationship, but is also the perfect example of a book whose form is given by anthropology yet winds up in the field of 1 he novel. The Peruvian Jose Maria Arguedas is without a doubt the most poignant figure among these anthropologist-writers: a novelist and anthropologist, Arguedas was brought up by Indians and his first language was Quechua not Spanish. He felt within himself the contradictions and the tragedy inherent in the relationship between anthropology and literature with an intensity that in rcjťjg led him to choose suicide.
Arguedas' extreme solution is a literal version of the reduction of the self inherent in the process of rewriting Latin American history in 1 he context of the anthropological mediation. Method, discourse, writing, take the place of life. Arguedas' gesture has its literary counterpart in Los pasos perdidos and Cien aňos de soledad. Arguedas' radical effacement of self, like the one practiced by Barnet as he ruins, or pretends to turn, himself into Esteban Montejo, is part of the "unwriting" involved in the modern Latin American narrative. For the most recent Latin American narrative is an "unwriting" as much as it is a rewriting of Latin American history from the anthropological perspective mentioned. The previous writings of hi^lory are undone as the new one is attempted; this is why the chronicles and the nineteenth-century scientific travelogues are present in what I call the Archive in modern fiction, the mode beyond anthropology, inaugurated by Los pasos perdidos. The new narrative unwinds the history told in the old chronicles by showing tliiit history was made up of a series of conventional topics, whose coherence and authority depend on the codified beliefs of a period whose ideological structure is no longer current. Those codified beliefs of the origin were literally the law. Like the Spanish galleon Humbling in the jungle in Cien aňos de soledad, the legal discourse in the chronicles  is  a voided  presence.   Likewise,  modern novels disassemble the powerful scientific construct through which nineteenth-century Latin America was narrated by demonstrating the relativity of its most cherished concepts or by rendering literal the
i6
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
metaphors on which such knowledge is based. The power oi genealogy is literalized in Cien aňos de soledad by, among other devices, the stream of blood that flows from Jose Arcadio's wound to Ursula. The presence of the European naturalists Robertson and Bonplant in Augusto Roa Bastos' Yo el Supremo attests to this second voided presence, as do the obsolete and partially magical scientific instruments that Melquiades brings to Macondo, soon to be replaced by the machinery of the banana company which comes to exploit the area.
But the paradigmatic text among these unwritings is Carpentier's Lospasosperdidos, This is no accident. Carpentier was associated from the beginning of his career with avant-garde artists, particularly the surrealists, who were intimately associated with anthropological pursuits. It is clear that in Caracas, when he was writing Los pasos perdidos, he kept a close eye on developments in anthropology, especially French anthropology. I have already mentioned Carpen-tier's interest in the group of anthropologists (among them Lévi-Strauss and Leiris), who took refuge in New York during the war, and suggested that the musicologist Schaeffner may have been the model for the narrator-protagonist of the novel, but there were others, who were in Venezuela at the time actuallyjourneying to the sources of the Orinoco.16 Essentially, the journey the narrator-protagonist makes is that of an anthropologist, and the whole novel is so much like Tristes tropiques because it could very well be taken as the personal account of an anthropologist formed in the avant-garde years surveying the state of his discipline and of himself at a time when  ethnography was going through a crisis which severely undermined its discourse. But what he brings back is an archaeology of Latin American narrative forms.
As the narrator-protagonist of the novel travels upriver - clearly the river in which Melquiades dies many years later — he writes about his voyage as if it were a journey back not only through time but through recorded history. Hence he passes through various epochs, the two most significant of which are: the nineteenth century with its traveling European scientists, who provide him with a way of interpreting nature and time; and the colonial period of Latin American history, characterized by activities such as the founding of cities; in short, the beginning of history in the New World as set down by the charters of those institutions - the cartas de relation. There are other epochs, reaching all the way back to prehistoric times, but the
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE                             17
above are the most important ones, because they are present not only thematically or allusively, but through mediating texts themselves, through the very substantiality of their voided forms. The era of the petroglyphs, for instance, is narrated in the language of the naturalists and the founding of cities in that of the legalist chronicles. At various points in the novel the narrator-protagonist plays the roles of conquistador,  naturalist,  and also anthropological expert in myth, comparing stories he hears in the jungle to those of classical times, looking, in short, for the founding structure of storytelling. He plays these roles because none is current any longer, none provides him with the ideological underpinning to reach a truth, a beginning, an origin. His own story is the only one that he can authenticate, that is, his story about looking for stories, telling past stories, repeating their form. The narrator-protagonist's text is organized according to a set of rhetorical conventions - hollowed out, obsolete, extinct — that reveal themselves as such in the process of reading. In the fiction of the novel, the narrator-protagonist cannot remain in what he termed the Valley-Where-Time-Has-Stopped, the origin of time and history, for, as we saw, he needs to secure enough paper to set down the music he has begun to compose. In the fiction, the quest for that degree zero of time and history on which to inscribe a rewriting of Latin American history has not been found; the protagonist escapes from one city to find another city. But in the writing of the novela clearing has been reached, a metafictional space, a razing that becomes a starting point for the new Latin American narrative; the clearing for the building of Comala, Macondo, Coronel Vallejos, for the founding of the imaginary city containing all previous forms of Latin American narrative as well as the origins of the novel; a space for the Archive. That razing involves the various mediations through which Latin America was narrated, the systems from which fiction borrowed the truth-bearing forms, erased to assume the new mediation that requires this level-ground of self and history. This clearing is the point at which Cien aňos de soledad begins, and the reason why the world is so recent "que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas habia que seňalarlas con el dedo" (p. 71); ("that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point"  [p. i]).17 It is also the place that the last Aureliano seeks at the very end when he discovers how to translate Melquiades' manuscripts. He reads in a frenzy "descubriendo los
l8                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
primeros indicios de su ser, en un abuelo concupiscente que se dejaba arrastrar por la frivolidad a través de un páramo alucinado, en busca de una mujer hermosa a quien no haria feliz" (p. 492); ("discovering the first indications of his own being in a lascivious grandfather who let himself be frivolously dragged across a hallucinated plateau in search of a beautiful woman whom he would not make happy" [p. 421]).18 What is left for the novel after Lospasos perdidos and Cien aňos de soledad? Clearly, only fiction. But novels are never content with fiction; they must pretend to deal with the truth, a truth that lies behind the discourse of the ideology that gives them form. So, paradoxically enough, the truth with which they deal is fiction itself. That is to say, the fictions Latin American culture has created to understand itself. What is left is the opening up of the Archive or perhaps only the story about the opening of the Archive -the story I hope to be telling in this book.
The Archive is a modern myth based on an old form, a form of the beginning. The modern myth unveils the relationship between knowledge and power as contained in all previous fictions about Latin America, the ideological construct that props up the legitimacy of power from the chronicles to the current novels. This is why a kind of archive, usually containing an unfinished manuscript and an archivist-writer, appears with such frequency in modern novels. The Archive keeps, culls, retains, accumulates, and classifies, like its institutional counterpart. It mounts up, amounts to the law, the law of fiction. Fictions are contained in an enclosure, a prisonhouse of narrative that is at the same time the origin of the novel. It is not by chance that Cervantes began to write the Quijote in jail, nor that the narrator-author of História de Mayta (1984) should seek the ultimate truth about his character in a prison. The Archive goes back to the origins of Latin American narrative because it returns to the language of the law, the language that the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos will find in the innermost recesses of the jungle, where a city awaits him. That city, which the Adelantado had called Santa Monica de los Venados, becomes Macondo, the story of which is the myth of the Archive. Let us read in detail the contradictory origin and nature of that myth in Cien aňos de soledad, the archetypal archival fiction.
A CLEARING IN  THE JUNGLE
19
3
The importance of myth in Cien aňos de soledad'was noticed by the first commentators of the novel, and later studies have again taken up the topic19 It seems clear that myth appears in the novel in the following guises: (1) there are stories that resemble classical or biblical myths, most notably the Flood, but also Paradise, the Seven Places, the Apocalypse, and the proliferation of the family, which with its complicated genealogy, has an Old Testament ring to it; (2) [here are characters who are reminiscent of mythical heroes: Jose Arciidio Buendia, who is a sort of Moses; Rebeca, who is like a female Perseus; Remedios, who ascends in a flutter of white sheets in n scene that is suggestive not just of the Ascension of the Virgin, but more specifically of the popular renditions ofthat event in religious prims; (3) certain stories have a general mythic character in that jhe\ contain supernatural elements, as in the case just mentioned, and also when Jose Arcadio's blood returns to Ursula; (4) the beginning of the whole story which is found, as in myth, in a tale of violence and incest. All four, of course, commingle, and because Cien am< de soledad tells a story of foundations or origins, the entire novel ha.-» a mythic air about it. No single myth or mythology prevails. Instead, the various ways in which myth appears give the novel a mvlhical character without it being a distinct version of any one myl h in particular.
Al the same time, there is lurking in the background of the story tin* overall pattern of Latin American history, both as a general design made up of various key events and eras, and in the presence of specific characters and incidents that seem to refer to real people and happenings. Thus there is a period of discovery and conquest when Jose Arcadio and the original families settle Macondo. There is in this part of the book little sense that Macondo belongs to a larger political unit, but such isolation was in fact typical of Latin American towns in the colonial period. Even the viceroyalties lived in virtual isolation from the metropolitan government. The sense of beginning one has when reading about Macondo was shared by some of the conquistadors, who, for instance, when encouraging Gonzalo Pizarro to rebel against the Crown, urged him to declare himself king of Peru, thinking that the deeds he had accomplished with his brothers were of the kind to merit the establishment of a new monarchy. The appearance in Macondo of Apolinář Moscoso
20
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
and his barefoot soldiers is the beginning of the republican era, which is immediately followed by the outbreak of the civil wars in which Colonel Aureliano Buendia distinguishes himself. Though Colombia is the most obvious model for this period, nearly the entire continent suffered from civil strife during the nineteenth century, a process that led to the emergence of caudillos. Argentina, with Facundo Quiroga and Juan Manuel Rosas, could just as well be the model for this era in Macondo's history. This period is followed by the era of neocolonial domination by the United States and the struggles against it in most Latin American countries. These culminate in the novel with the general strike and the massacre of the workers. There are, unfortunately, countless models for this last, clearly defined period in the novel. After the flood, there is a time of decay before the apocalyptic wind razes the town at the end. The liberal priest and the various military types who surround Colonel Aureliano Buendia are among the characters with counterparts in Latín American history. Lucila I. Mena has already demonstrated that some of the historical incidents in the novel can be documented, and a sedulous critic with time and the proper library can probably document many others.20 But to carry this sort of research much further than Mena has would be a rather gratuitous critical exercise. Set against the global, totalizing thrust of the novel are these historical details which, without being specific, are nonetheless true in a general sense. Each of the above-mentioned epochs is evoked not only through major historical events but also through allusions to specific minor incidents and characters. For instance, early Macondo is inhabited by a de jure aristocracy made up of the founding families, which is analogous to towns in colonial Latin America where the first conquistadors and their descendants enjoyed certain privileges and exemptions, a situation which, in some measure, provoked the civil wars of Peru.
The blend of mythic elements and Latin American history in Cien aňos de soledad reveals a desire to found a Latin American myth as well as the voiding of the anthropological mediation. Latin American history is set on the same level as mythic stories; therefore, it too becomes a sort of myth. The lack of specificity of the various incidents, which appear to represent several related or similar events, points in that direction. The Latin American myth is this story of foundation, articulated through independence, civil war, struggle against United States imperialism, all cast within a
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
21
genealogical line that weaves in and out, repeating names and characters. There is a Whitmanesque thrust to the brash declaration of the existence of a literary language that underlies this mixture of historical fact and mythic story in Cien aňos de soledad. The novel is in fact intimately related to similar efforts in poetry, such as the ones by Neruda in his Canto general^ Nicolas Guillen in his El diario que a diario and Octavio Paz in his Piedra de sol. Canto general in particular is one of the most important sources of Garcia Márquez' novel. Framed by Genesis and Apocalypse, fraught with incest and violence, the story of the Buendia family thus stands as Latin American history cast in the language of myth, an unresolved mixture that both beckons and bewilders the reader. Latin America's irreducible historicity - its discovery creates an awareness of tran-sitoriness and change that propels Western consciousness into modernity, self-questioning and relativity - constantly undermines the language of myth.
This duality — history/myth — is present throughout Cien aňos de soledad, separating the world of writing from the atemporal world of myth. But the play of contradictions issuing from this duality reaches a precarious synthesis that is perhaps the most important feature of the novel. Myth represents the origin. Latin American history is narrated in the language of myth because it is always conceived as the history of the other, a history fraught with incest, taboo, and the founding act of naming. Latin American history must be like myth to comply with this conception, which issues from the authority of the anthropological mediation. The novel's persistent preoccupation with genealogy and supernatural acts performed by various characters belongs to this mythic realm.21 History, on the other hand, is critical, temporal, and dwells in a special place: Melquiades' room in the Buendia house, which I have chosen to call the Archive. The room is full of books and manuscripts and has a time of its own. It is here that a succession of characters attempt to decipher Melquiades' parchments, and the last Aureliano, in an epiphanic inspiration, orally translates nearly the whole manuscript and dies. What occurs here, the text of the novel suggests, is unrepeatable. In the fiction of the novel, on the other hand, there are many repetitions. Ursula, for instance, twice feels that time is going around in circles and that members of the family follow one or two patterns of behavior indicated by their names. Time is circular in the fiction but not in Melquiades' room. The Archive appears to be
22
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
successive and ideological, while the plot of the novel itself is repetitive and mythical. Cien aňos de soledad is made up of two main stories: one has to do with the family and culminates in the birth of the child with the pig's tail, while the other is concerned with the interpretation of Melquiades' manuscript, a linear suspense story that culminates in Aureliano's final discovery of the key to the translation of the parchments. The product of incest and revelation is the same: Does it stand for truth? And if the truth of the novel is like the child with the pig's tail, what are we to conclude about the nature of novelistic discourse?
That there should be a special abode for manuscripts and books in Cien aňos de soledad should come as no surprise to readers of modern Latin American fiction. There are analogous enclosures in Aura, Yo el Supremo, El arpay la sombra, Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Oppiano Licario, to mention a few of the novels in which the figure plays a prominent role. One could also say that this enclosure is prefigured in the box where the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos keeps the manuscript of his threnody. What is characteristic of the Archiveis: (i) the presence not only of history but of previous mediating elements through which it was narrated, be it the legal documents of colonial times or the scientific ones of the nineteenth century; (2) the existence of an inner historian who reads the texts, interprets and writes them; and finally (3) the presence of an unfinished manuscript that the inner historian is trying to complete. In Cien aňos de soledad the most tenuous presence is that of the legal texts, but one can infer it from the allusions to the chronicles that were in fact relaciones, and particularly in the founding of Macondo, for the founding of cities, primordial activity of conquistadors, was closely connected to the writing of history. The vagueness of this presence is only so in relation to the others, for at least two critics have convincingly argued in favor of the overwhelming influence of the chronicles in Cien aňos de soledad.22 The presence of nineteenth-century travel books is evident in the descriptions of the jungle and at a crucial moment when Jose Arcadio Segundo hears Melquiades mumble something in his room. Jose Arcadio leans over and hears the gypsy mention the name of none other than Alexander von Humboldt and the word equinoccio, which comes from the title of the latter's book, which in Spanish is Viaje a las regiones equinocciales del Nuevo Continente. In Macondo's Archive, there are in addition two key works: the so-called English Encyclopedia and The Thousand and One
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
23
V 'hts. These two books play an important role in Melquiades' riting, and the Encyclopedia is instrumental in the decoding of his manuscripts. The existence in Melquiades' fiction of precisely these two books adds a peculiar twist to the Archive, one that points to its own literary lineage.
I do not think it would be too farfetched to say that The Thousand and One Nights and the so-called English Encyclopedia together are ailusions to that master of fictions: Borges. In fact, Melquiades is a figure of the Argentine writer. Old beyond age, enigmatic, blind, entirely devoted to writing, Melquiades stands for Borges, the librarian and keeper of the Archive. There is something whimsical in (rareía Márquez' inclusion of such a figure in the novel, but there is a good deal more. It is not difficult to fathom what this Borgesian figure means. Planted in the middle of the special abode of books and manuscripts, a reader of one of the oldest and most influential collections of stories in the history of literature, Melquiades and his Archive stand for literature; more specifically, for Borges' kind of literature: ironic, critical, a demolisher of all delusions, the sort of thing encountered at the end of the novel when Aureliano finishes translating Melquiades' manuscript. There are in that ending further allusions to several stories by Borges: to "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," for Macondo is a verbal construct; to "El milagro sccreto," in that Aureliano, like the condemned poet, perishes the moment he finishes his work; to "El Aleph," for Aureliano Babilo-nia's glimpse of the history of Macondo is instantaneous and all-encompassing; and particularly to "La muerte y la brujula," for the moment of anagnorisis is linked to death. Like Lönnrot, Aureliano only understands the workings of his fate at the moment of his death.
The Archive, then, is like Borges' study. It stands for writing, for literature, for an accumulation of texts that is no mere heap, but an arche, a relentless memory that disassembles the fictions of myth, literature and even history. The masterbooks in the Archive are, as indicated, the Encyclopedia and The Thousand and One Nights. The Encyclopedia, which Aureliano has read, according to the narrator, from A to Z as if it were a novel, is in itself a figure of the totality of knowledge as conceived by the West. But how is it knowledge, and how has Aureliano read it? The moment we consider the order of knowledge in the Encyclopedia and the way in which Aureliano reads it, we realize the paradoxes inherent in the Archive as repository of
24                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
history. The Encyclopedia is organized, of course, in alphabetical order, without the order of the entries being affected by any chronological or evaluative consideration: Napoleon appears before Zeus and Charles V before God. The beginning is provided arbitrarily by the alphabet as well as by the sequence: apocalypse must appear in the first volume. The Thousand and One Nights, on the other hand, stands for a beginning in fiction, or beginning as fiction, as well as for a series of individual, disconnected stories linked only by the narrator's fear of death. Aureliano is like Scheherazade, who tells her stories on the verge of death. Neither book seems to have a priority over the other. Both have a prominent place within the Archive, providing their own form of pastness, of documentary, textual material. The order that prevails in the Archive, then, is not that of mere chronology, but that of writing; the rigorous process of inscribing and decoding to which Melquiades and the last Aureliano give themselves over, a linear process of cancellations and substitutions, of gaps.
Writing and  reading have  an  order of their  own,  which is preserved within the Archive.  It might be remembered that in Melquiades' room it is  always  Monday and  March for some characters, while for others his study is the room of the chamberpots, where decay and temporality have their own end embodied in the essence of eschatology. The combination of feces and writing in the Archive is significant enough. Writing appears as an eschato-logical activity in that it deals with the end. Yet, writing is also th/* beginning insofar as nothing is in the text until it is written. Henc the prevalence of Monday and March in the secret abode o Melquiades, the beginning of the week and of spring respectivel' (March, not April, is the "crudest month" in Garcia Márquez) Melquiades is both young and old, depending, of course, on whethe or not he wears his dentures; he presides over the beginning and th end. The Archive, then, is not so much an accumulation of texts a the process whereby texts are written; a process of repeated combin ations, of shufflings and reshufflings ruled by heterogeneity an< difference. It is not strictly linear, as both continuity and disconti nuity are held together in uneasy allegiance. This fictional archive of course, is a turning inside out of the Archive in its politica manifestation, a turn that unveils the inner workings of the accumu lation of power; accumulation and power are a rhetorical effect ii this  archive of archives.  This  is  the reason why the previou,
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
25
diations tnroUgh which Latin Americans narrated are contained
"n the Archive as voided presences. They are both erased and, at the
me time, a memory of their own demise. They are keys to filing
cvstenis now abandoned, but they retain their archival quality, their
jower to differentiate, to space. They are not archetypes, but an
arche of types.
This process is manifest in the way in which Melquiades' manuscript is written and translated. Throughout the novel we are told that Melquiades writes indecipherable manuscripts, that his handwriting produces something that looks more like musical notation than script, that his writing resembles clothes hung on a ]ine. Eventually Jose Arcadio Segundo discovers, with the aid of the Encyclopedia, that the writing is in Sanskrit. When Aureliano begins to translate from the Sanskrit, he comes up with coded Spanish verses. These verses have different codes, depending on whether they are even or odd numbered. Aureliano is finally illuminated when he sees the dead newborn being carried away by the ants and remembers the epigraph of the manuscript, which is supposed to read: "Elprimem de la estirpe está amarrado en un árboly al ultimo se lo estdn cotniendo las hormigas" (p. 490); ("The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants" [p. 420]) (emphasis in the original). He realizes then that the manuscript contains the story of his family and hurries on to translate it to discover his own fate and the date and circumstances of his death. I shall return to the significance of all this, but not before I complete the description of the manuscript and ils translation, for it is very easy to leap to false conclusions about Melquiades' writing.
Aureliano begins to translate the text out loud, jumping ahead twice to arrive at the present faster. Once he reaches the present he has a second illumination: that he would die in the room where the manuscript is kept once he finished translating the last line of poetry ("el ultimo verso"). Is this the text of Melquiades' version of the history of Macondo, and is this version Cien anos de soledad? Even if in fact it is Aureliano's translation that we read, then some changes have been made. The text is neither finished nor definitive, like that ot the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos. To begin with, the epigraph has been omitted. In addition, Aureliano's leaps to get to the present have either not been accounted for in this version or the holes they left have been restored. But when and by whom? The only ■solution to this enigma is to say that our reading - that each reading
26                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
- of the text is the text, that is to say, yet another version added to the         í
Archive. Each of these readings corrects the others, and each is          [
unrepeatable insofar as it is a distinct act caught in the reader's own          I
temporality. In this sense, we, like Aureliano, read the instant we          I
live, cognizant that it may very well be our last. This is the         í
eschatological sense announced in various ways by the Archive: the          í
chronicle of a death foretold.                                                                         i
The radical historicity to which the Archive condemns us belies its apparent atemporality and the bizarre order that the master-books within it have. It is a historicity that is very much like the one to which the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos is condemned *at the end of that novel. In fact, Aureliano's reading of the manuscript in search of his origins and of an understanding of his being in the present is analogous to the reading performed by Carpentier's character in search of the origins of history and of his own beginnings. Such dearly achieved historicity in spite of the circularity and repetition of the family's history is somewhat ironic, given the sense of ahistoricalness with which many readers, intoxicated by the similarity of names and by Ursula's notion that time is going round and round, leave the novel. Such historicity, however, is needed to represent, within the anthropological mediation posited, the "lucid" consciousness of the West, able to understand itself by posturing as the other, but unable to abandon the sense ol history to which writing sentences it. This is a sentence from which we can gain acquittal by means of a willful act of delusion, but one that Cien anos de soledad, for all its fictive force, does not allow the reader.
There is a significant fact that few readers of Cien aňos de soledaa remark upon: Even though the novel begins with Colonel Aureliano Buendia facing the firing squad, the one who dies at the end is not Aureliano the soldier, but Aureliano the reader. This displacement, plus the fact that Aureliano's moments of vision are flashes of insight parallel to the rebel's, seem to suggest a most significant connection between the realms of history and myth, one that constitutes a common denominator of the repetitions of the family history and the disassembling mechanisms of the Archive. In the Archive, the presence of Melquiades and Aureliano (and in Aura, Felipe Montero, in Yo el Supremo, Patino, etc.) is an insurance that the individual consciousness of a historian/writer will filter the ahistori-cal pretense of myth by subjecting events to the temporality oi
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE
27
'tine   But in ^m a^os ^e so^dad the death of these figures is
■   H'ntive of a mythic power that lurks within the realm of writing, a
rv that makes the Archive possible. In Yo el Supremo this is clearly
■   Hieated by Patino's being a "swollen foot," that is an Oedipus ■ho pays a m&n Pr*ce f°r n*s knowledge. In Cien anos de soledad
a irrliano suffers a similar fate. He commits incest with his aunt, 1 neenders a monster with her and dies the moment he has a glimpse f his fate. Aureliano is the propitiatory victim necessary for us to be able 10 read the text, for us to acquire the arcane knowledge we need to decode it. He (we) is/are no Oedipus but more likely the Minotaur, which brings us back to Borges (and also to Cortázar). The ritualistic death - which prefigures Crónica de una muerte anun-ciada - is necessary because of the incest committed both at the genealogical and the textual level. In both cases, what has been rained is a forbidden knowledge of the other as oneself, or vice versa. The most salient characteristic of the text we read is its heterogeneity. However, this heterogeneity is made up of differences within similarity. The various versions of the story are all related, vet differ in each instance. Their difference as well as their relation is akin — valga la palabra — to the relationship between the incestuous characters and the broader confrontation between writer and a primitive other who produces myth. Put differently, the self-reflexiveness of the novel is implicitly compared to incest, a self-knowledge that somehow lies beyond knowledge. A plausible argument can be made that the endresults of both are similar, in the most tangible sense, or at least related. When the ants carry away the carcass of the monstrous child engendered by Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano, its skin is described in terms that are very reminiscent of Melquiades' parchments. The English translation blurs that similarity. It reads: "And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated hag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging ..." (p. 420). The Spanish reads: "Era un pellejo [it was a skin] hinchado y reseco, que todas las hormigas del mundo iban arrastrando .. ." (p. 349). I need not go into the etymological and historical kinship uniting skin and parchment because the novel itself provides that link. The parchments are once described as "parecian fabricados en una materia árida que se resquebrajaba como hojaldres" (p. 68), and the books in the Archive are bound "en una materia acartonada \■ pálida como la piel humana curtida" (p. 160). The English reads: "The parchments that he had brought with him and that seemed to
28
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
have been made out of some dry material that crumpled like puff paste" (p. 73), and "the books were bound in a cardboard-like material, pale, like tanned human skin" (p. 188).
The monster and the manuscript, the monster and the text, are the product of the turning in on oneself implicit in incest and self-reflexivity. Both are heterogeneous within a given set of characteristics, the most conspicuous of which is their supplementarity: the pig's tail, which exceeds the normal contours of the human body, and the text, whose mode of being is each added reading and interpretation. The plot line that narrates the decipherment of the manuscripts underscores our falling into this trap. Like Aureliano, we follow along in search of the meaning of the manuscripts, constantly teased by scenes where Melquiades appears scratching his incomprehensible handwriting onto rough parchment, by scenes where Jose Arcadio Segundo or Aureliano make preliminary discoveries that eventually lead them to unravel the mystery. But like Lönnrotin "Lamuertey la brújula," and like Aureliano himself, we do not discover until the very end what the manuscripts contain. Our own anagnorisis as readers is saved for the last page, when the novel concludes and we close the book to cease being as readers, to be, as it were, slain in that role. We are placed back at the beginning, a beginning that is also already the end, a discontinuous, independent instant where everything commingles without any possibility of extending the insight, an intimation of death. This independent instant is not the novel; it is the point to which the novel has led us. By means of an unreading, the text has reduced us, like Aureliano, to a ground zero, where death and birth are joined as correlative moments of incommunicable plenitude. The text is that which is added to this moment. Archive and myth are conjoined as instances of discontinuity rather than continuity; knowledge and death are given equivalent value. Death, as we shall see, is the trope for the Archive's structuring principle.
It is a commonplace, almost an uncritical fetish, to say that the novel always includes the story of how it is written, that it is a self-reflexive genre. The question is why and how it is so at specific moments. Clearly, Cien aňos de soledad is s elf-reflexive not merely to provoke laughter or to declare itself literary and thus disconnected from reality or history. In Garcia Márquez, and I dare say in all major Latin American novelists, self-reflexivity is a way of disassembling the mediation through which Latin America is narrated, a
ACLEARINGINTHEJUNGLE                                 20,
mediation that constitutes a pre-text of the novel itself. It is also a way of showing that the act of writing is caught up in a deeply rooted mythic struggle that constantly denies it the authority to generate and contain knowledge about the other without, at the same time, generating a perilous sort of knowledge about itself and about one's mortality and capacity to know oneself.
What do we learn about Latin American history in Cien aňos de soledad? We learn that while its writing may be mired in myth, it cannot be turned into myth, that its newness makes it impervious to timelessness, circularity, or any such delusion. New and therefore historical, what occurs in Latin America is marked by change, it is change. Garcia Márquez has expressed this by tantalizing the reader with various forms of history as writing, of history as Archive. He has also achieved it by making Borges the keeper of the Archive, for the figure of the Argentine ensures that no delusions about literature be entertained. In a sense, what Garcia Márquez has done is to punch through the anthropological mediation and substitute the anthropologist for a historian, and to turn the object of attention away from myth as an expression of so-called primitive cultures to the myths of modern society: the book, writing, reading, instruments of a quest for self-knowledge that lie beyond the solace mythic interpretations of the world usually afford. We can always use Cien aňos de soledad to escape temporality, but only if we willfully misread it to blind ourselves of its warnings against that. Latin American history can only become myth enmeshed in this very modern problematic that so enriches its most enduring fictions.
It is not toward a high-pitched rationality that Cien aňos de soledad moves, but toward a vision of its own creation dominated by the forces that generate myth. This is perhaps most evident if we consider that the Archive may very well be the most powerful of cultural retentions and the origin of the novel. The Archive is, first of all, a repository for the legal documents wherein the origins of Latin American history are contained, as well as a specifically Hispanic institution created at the same time as the New World was being settled. As is known, the great archive at Simancas, begun by Charles V but finished by the King Bureaucrat Philip II, is the first and possibly the most voluminous of such storehouses in Europe. The same Herrera who designed the Escorial had a hand in planning the archive, that is to say, in turning a castle that was originally a prison into the archive. Simancas became the Archive in
30                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
1539; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes,y de sus fortunasy adversidades was published in 1554. The Archive and the novel appear at the same time and are part of the same discourse of the modern state. Latin America became a historical entity as a result of the development of the printing press, not merely by being "discovered" by Columbus. Latin America, like the novel, was created in the Archive. It may very well have been Carlos Fuentes in his Terra Nostra who most clearly saw the connection, making Cervantes the inner historian in that novel. In terms of the novel's ability to retain and pass on cultural values, the message contained in books such as Fuentes' and Cien aňos de soledad is indeed disturbing, for they tell us that it is impossible to create new myths, yet bring us back to that moment where our desire for meaning can only be satisfied by myth.
4
Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles I and Philip II can truly be called - all four, not only the last one - papermonger kings, for they all indeed were, each in his or her own way. And the most seasoned fruit of their tenacious and intelligent archival policies was the world-famous Simancas Archive, near Valladolid, which was then a true capital ... Philip IPs shrewd foresight, aided by Juan de Herrera's solid technical knowledge, turned a fifteenth-century castle into the first fire-proof Archive known to Europe, and crowning the efforts of his predecessors, he managed to gather there the central Archive of the State.
José Maria de la Pena y Cámara, Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla.
Guía del Visitante.23
And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament; and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and a great hail.             Revelation, 11,19
I am interested in the cluster of connections between secrecy (or privacy of knowledge), origin and power encrypted in the concept of Archive. This is so, perhaps, because like the modern novel, my own discourse tends to mythify the Archive, to use it as a heuristic device to investigate, conjure, or invent its own foundations. By heuristic device I mean, in the best of cases, that the Archive is a hypostasis for method, for my method in this book; in the worst, it is a wild card or joker around which to build a system to read the history of the Latin American narrative and the origins of the novel. If my apprehensions about the contamination of my discourse by that of
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE                             3I
the novel turn out to be justified, then Archive is a sort of liturgical object that I invest with the faculty of calling forth the innermost secrets of the narratives - the hidden, secret origin. Whichever of these it is, the term is derived from the reading of Los pasos perdidos and Cien aňos de soledad offered above. Though my theoretical debts should be obvious, I fancy to read this new history of the Latin American narrative, and its origin, by activating a self-interpreting discourse latent within it. That is, I wish to legitimize my theory by drawing it from within my very field of study. I am conscious of the circularity of this approach, but circling around a point (like the plane that comes to rescue the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos) may be revealing, may allow one to see, or at least make one think he or she sees it from many perspectives. The reader will decide on the usefulness of my approach, and whether by circling I am not really spiraling into the ground, or mistaking dizziness for insight.
Etymologically, "archive" has a suggestive background that supports, I hope, the work that it is made to perform here. Corominas writes: "Archivo, 1490, Tornado del latin tardío archivům, y éste del griego archeion 'residencia de los magistrados,' 'archivo,' derivado de arkhe 'mando,' 'magistratura'." ("Taken from late Latin archivům, and this from the Greek archeion, 'residence of the magistrates,' 'archive,' derived from arkhe 'command,' 'magistracy.')"24 The dictionary of the Spanish Academy reads: "Archivo (Del lat. archivům, y éste del griego [...] principio, origen) m. Local en que se custodian documentos públicos o particulares. 2. Conjunto de estos documentos. 3. fig. Persona en quien se confia un secreto o recóndítas intimidades y sabe guardarlas./fig. Persona que posee en grado sumo una perfección o conjunto de perfecciones. Archivo de cortesía, de la lealtad." (From the Latin archivům, and this from the Greek [...] beginnings or origin.) Masculine. Building in which public or private documents are placed for safekeeping. 2. The sum total of these documents. 3. Figurative. A person to whom is entrusted a secret or very private knowledge and knows how to guard them/ Figurative. A person who is endowed with the highest degree of perfection or sum of perfections. To be an archive of courtesy or of loyalty.") Power, secrecy and law stand at the origin of the Archive; it was, in its most concrete form, the structure that actually housed the dispensers of the law, its readers, the magistrates; it was the building that encrypted the power to command. In Philosophy arche is the primordial stuff in the beginning, the first
32                                     MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
principle. In Anaximander and the earlier Greek philosophers it was a substance or primal element, with later philosophers, especially Aristotle, an actuating principle, a cause. It is this word arche which appears in the first verse of the Fourth Gospel: "In the beginning was the word." All observable regularities were viewed as reflections of the arche's enduring presence in the cosmos.25 So arch, as in monarch, denotes power, to rule, but also the beginning, that which is chief, eminent, greatest, principal; it denotes primitive, original. Through the arche, in addition, archive is related to arcane, to arcanum (Webster, "arcanum, A secret, a mystery, esp. one of the great secrets that the alchemists sought to discover; hence, a sovereign remedy"). So Archive suggests not only that something is kept, but that which is secret, encrypted, enclosed, and also the common, though old-fashioned Spanish word for chest, for safe, for trunk, like the trunk found in Lazarillo de Tormes and Aura.26 Trunk, area, according to the Academy: "Caja, comunmente sin forrar y con una tapa liana que aseguran varios goznes o bisagras por uno de los lados, y uno o más candados o cerraduras por el opuesto. Especie de nave o embareación (Noe). Ant. sepulero o ataúd." ("Box, commonly without a lining, which has a flat lid secured by several hinges on one side and one or more locks on the other. A kind of ship or boat (Noah). Old Spanish, sepulcher, tomb."). Power encrypts knowledge of the origin, the principles, kept in a building or enclosure that safeguards the law, the beginning of writing; it also kept the body after death, like a relic of life, possessor still of its darkest secrets, abandoned abode of the soul. It is no accident that the word archivo, according to Corominas, appears to have entered Spanish in 1490, during the reign of the Catholic Kings, two years before the discovery of America; it was in that period that modern archival practices began, organized by the new state created by Ferdinand and Isabella. The mystery of the object, its prestige, is made a functional part in the foundation of the modern state, and a key figure in the narratives therein generated.
Like the Archive, the novel hoards knowledge. Like the Archive's, that knowledge is of the origin, meaning that it is about the link of its own writing with the power that makes it possible, hence with the possibility of knowledge. In the beginning that power was the law, but later, other origins replaced it, though preserving the seal ofthat initial pact between power and writing. The modern novel retains those origins and the structure that made them possible. While the
A  CLEARING  IN THE JUNGLE                             33
knowledge kept there is difficult to plumb, hence its secretiveness, it is not private, but on the contrary common property. It can be read, and it is indeed read. The very act of reading and sharing that knowledge assumes the form of ritual, of celebrating the common knowledge, the transpersonal history. Archives keep the secrets of the state; novels keep the secrets of culture, and the secret of those secrets.
It should be evident that the archaeology of narrative forms that I seek to describe owes much to Foucault's theories about discursive regularities and their relation to power in society. I am interested in the place of narrative within discursive practices overdetermined by power structures that either base or project their authority through them. The novel's contamination with non-literary forms of discourse justifies the association I propose here with the language of the law, that of natural science, and with anthropology. But, most of all, at the point of departure and arrival of the project, it is the Archive that seeks our attention. I am also inspired by Foucault's version of the Archive, though mine has somewhat different characteristics because, in spite of the novel's pull away from literature, it is ultimately in that ambiguous and shifting space called literature that my Archive is lodged. I wish to retain from Foucault, above all, the negative, proscriptive element of his Archive, because interdiction, that is negation, is at the beginning of the law, hence of writing and of the novel. Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge:
The Archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements and unique events. But the Archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with specific regularities; that which determines that they do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us are already growing pale. The Archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system ofenunciability [...] far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.27
Narrative in general, the novel in particular, may be the way in which the statement's status as escapee is preserved, the Counter-
34
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
Archive for the ephemeral and wayward. The novel endows the negativity of the Archive, the proscription of the Archive with a phantasmagoric form of being, embodying only, particularly in the modern period, the Archive's very power to differentiate. The following, from Foucault again, would be an apt description of the modern novel, one that, as we shall see, has already taken shape in another text by Carpentier, though these lines could also be about Melquiades' room in Cien aňos de soledaď.
The description of the Archive deploys its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practices; it begins with the outside of our own language (langage); its locus is the gap between our own discursive practices [...] it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history; it snaps the thread of transcendental teleologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned man's being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other and the outside. In this sense, the diagnosis does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we arc difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and discovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make.28
The dispersive quality of this Archive is found in the modern novel's apparent grab-bag approach to history, its endemic power to negate previous narrative forms from which it takes texts rather than continuities; the power, in short, to question received knowledge and its ideological coagulations as identity, culture, educational institutions, even language, or perhaps better, ultimately, language itself. By letting loose the arcana, by breaking open the safe, the novel-Archive unleashes a ghostly procession of figures of negation, inhabitants of the fissures and cracks which hover around the covenant of writing and the law.
Carpentier's last novel, El arpay la sombra (1979), deployed and displayed the inner workings of this Archive in a way that is most instructive. The protagonist of Carpentier's novel is Columbus; not Columbus in his role as discoverer of the New World as much as Columbus the first writer of the New World, Columbus as origin of the Latin American narrative record. In one strand of the narrative
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE                             35
I c Discoverer appears on his deathbed in Valladolid. He is •viewing his life to prepare for the visit of the priest who will confess , ■ anC; administer extreme unction. Technically, as he remembers 1 is life, Columbus is performing an act of contrition, a sort of inner larrative atonement. He is also rereading and commenting upon some of the texts that he wrote about his most famous deed, the ones that we all read in the opening chapter of all anthologies of Latin American literature. Carpentier finished El arpay la sombra when he knew that he had terminal cancer, in a sense also on his deathbed and as a kind of final audit of his life as novelist. Since Carpentier's texts often, almost obsessively, deal with the origin of Latin Vnerican history, with the beginning of the Latin American narrative tradition, Carpentier's identification in his role as writer with Columbus is evident. In the conventional scheme of Latin American literary history Columbus' texts constitute the origin, the beginning of the narrative tradition, the foundational writing. Columbus was the first to name things in the New World, like Blake's Adam, a gesture that in Carpentier's Neo-Romantic ideology signals the start of Latin American literature.
But Columbus is not the only projection of Carpentier in El arpay la wmbra: there is also Mastai Ferreti, that is to say, Pope Pius IX, who is described, in the opening scene of the novel, with his pen suspended over a sheet of paper, hesitating whether he should sign the documents that will set in motion Columbus' beatification process. This would constitute the first step toward an eventual canonization of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Like Columbus and Carpentier, Mastai is both a reader and a writer: he has gathered as many documents as possible about the Discoverer to prepare the dossier that must be presented at the trial in which, once read and examined in detail, sentence will be passed in the case. Columbus' authority as narrator, of course, rests on his being at the beginning: his is the prestige of the origin. Mastai's authority rests on his erudition, and needless to say, on his office. Carpentier's identification with Pius IX is clear and ironic. Like Carpentier Mastai was a man of two worlds: Europe and Latin America. Having once gone on a mission to Latin America, he identified with the New World, where he became an avid reader of Latin American and Spanish texts. Mastai is the Compiler of the Dossier, the Researcher for Facts and Documents, the Curator of the File, the Archivist par excellence. By means ofthat signature that he delays in scribbling, his
36
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
sacred presence will endow with authority the texts that he has gathered: Mastai creator of the canon, canomzer of the Latin American narrative tradition from Columbus to Carpentier, Alfa and Omega. Columbus, because he occupies the origin, and Mastai because of his investiture, are capable of making the texts sacred-they are texts outside the flow of history, hence possessors of an irreducible truth about history, texts containing a story of mythic proportions, the stories that make possible all other stories. They are the key to the Archive.
Mastai and Columbus are figures of the Archive, hoarders of secrets, owners of the first, most archaic rule, emblems of authority and power. Columbus jealously keeps his texts under the pillow from where he pulls them out to read and reread them. He later hides them under the bed. The Archive keeps and hides, it guards the secrets, which is the first law. Mastai keeps his papers in a portfolio which, one assumes, is part of the Vatican Archive. This Archive is evoked in the novel through yet another repository: the Vatican's stockpile of saints' bones, the ostea sacra kept and classified to be distributed around the world to constitute the relics each church requires. This is the lipsanateca. The Archive safeguards, retains, orders dissemination, both commands it and organizes its regularities as a discourse. The Archive keeps the arcanum, the secret. It keeps the secret of Columbus' texts, their foundational arch-texture, from which, like the bones in the Vatican dispensing sacredness, issue the Latin American texts; origin as death, as cut, as void, as proscription, as negation. The secret is the negation, the prohibition, the origin of law. It is the proscriptions that Fray Pedro will have to write in the notebooks that the narrator wants in Los pasos perdidos. Columbus, his texts, is the modern myth that Mastai wishes to sacralize, compiling the documents at the origin and of the origin, submitting those documents to the Archive's arche.
Mastai signs the document and sets in motion the judicial process.
The judgment goes against Columbus. He is not beatified, hence he cannot be canonized. The canon that the Keeper of the Archive seeks to establish is not sanctioned. This Archive's origin is not a library, volumes here float unbound, without pagination; this is its true secret, the negation in the origin. The Archive contains essentially nothing. This is the contradictory force that constitutes the Archive, the cut, the loss, whose image is the eschatology of
A  CLEARING  IN THE JUNGLE                             37
Nlelquiades' abode, the bones signifying death in Carpentier's.
I (eath's dark perimeter encircles the Archive and at the same time ihabits its center. This secret is also revealed in the part of El arpay r sombra where Columbus the reader comments on his own texts nd declares them to be false, a tissue of lies:
Y la constancia de tales trampas cstá aquí, en estos borradores de mis relaciones de viajes, que tengo bajo la almohada, y que ahora saco con mano tcmblorosa - asustada de si misma - para relcer lo que, en estos postreros momentos, tengo por un Vasto Rcpcrtorio de Embustes.
And the proof of such tricks is here, in these drafts of my travel accounts that I keep under my pillow, and^that I now pull out with a trembling hand, afraid of itself, to reread what in these final moments I consider a Vast Repertory of Lies.29
The Archive does not canonize, because the first law of the Archive is a denial, a cut that organizes and disperses. This negation is represented by the phantasmic figure of Columbus, present as a ghost at his own trial; present and absent at the very moment when his sacralization is denied. That afterlife of Columbus' is the escape from the Archive, the thrust to freedom forever present in the narrative, only that it is a fictive supplement, a fake afterlife. This is the profound statement made by Carpentier about the novel, himself on the verge of death; that it is that cut, one of whose representations is extinction itself, that rules the Archive, and constitutes the ultimate form of knowledge. The truth of the Archive, the secret of its secret, is that it contains no truth but that "dispersion that we are and make," as Foucault put it, the image of which in El arpay la sombra is the lipsanateca, the collection of bones to be disseminated throughout the world, relics of an order that only exists in the dissembling memory of the Archive, or in our desire to projectour fictive capacity upon it.
It is this dissembling quality, this empty space where the novel's capacity for retention and loss balance out, that leads to the series of breaks in history, breaks where the novel's mimetic desire leads it to choose a different form in reaction to changes in the textual field in which it is inscribed. A new non-literary document will acquire the legitimating powers lost by the previous model, and the novel will follow that form as it had done originally in relation to the legal documents of the Archive. This mimetic displacement is more important than superficial, aesthetic changes, such as those that
38                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
novels outside of the core of the tradition will undergo. Texts lil that will not be remembered except in conventional literary hist< ■ ries; they will be forgotten, and this is what is important, by the ne novels that will look always outside of literature to implement radical change. This is why the history of the Latin American nov- 1 proves to be so deficient, except when told by the internal process 1 reading and rewriting that I have been sketching here. That is 1 ■. say, when that history is told by the Latin American novel itself. The history of the Latin American novel has been variously tol< For the most part, however, no matter what method the história employs, the blueprint of evolution and change continues to be th; ■ of European literary or artistic historiography. Whether he or she t ■ a thematic historian of the novel or of Latin American literature j. general, or one whose approach purports to be socio-political an ' hence  Marxist inspired,  ordinary  categories  like  romanticisn naturalism, realism, the avant-garde, surface sooner or later. If it -questionable that this historiographic grid is applicable to Euro pean literature, it is even more so regarding the literature of Lati 1 America. What undermines this approach is, to begin with, th-inclusion of the narrative within the broader concept of literature, 0 belles-lettres. As I have suggested, what is most significant about tr. novel, or even about prose narrative in general, is that its point t departure is to deny that it is literature. The novel, as we have seei continues to exist without a poetics because the main tenet of i" poetics is to have none. The novel dons a disguise to appear 0 something else; the novel is always something else. That somethin-else includes a desire to preserve secrets about the origin and histoi of a culture, and in this it may be related to the epic (as Luká< suggested, and others, like Bakhtin, continued to accept),30 but als ■ its Protean ability to change and to disavow the knowledge/pow( ■ equation lodged in those secrets. For reasons about which one ca 1 only speculate, this phenomenon seems to be particularly prevaler in Latin America, where the greatest narratives are not novels (bi-1 appear to be so), or are novels pretending to be something else. I have in mind, of course, Columbus' diaries and letters about th-discovery, Sarmiento's Facundo, Euclides da Cunha's  Os Sertôe Lydia Cabrera's El monte, Martin Luis Guzman's El águila y t serpiente, Miguel Barneťs Biografia de un cimarrón, and many othei> This is the reason for including in my discussion books such 2 Facundo and Os Sertöes, which do not claim to be novels, but in no'
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE                             39
j jtlCT so, appeal to the most basic conceit of novelistic discourse; not to be literature. It is a hopeless task to force texts such as these into a conventional history of the Latin American novel, and a blatant error to leave them out. It is clear that they are the very core ofthat tradition.
I seek to produce a history of the Latin American narrative that řoes beyond the surface differences determined by artistic trends, looking for the subtext determined by the phoenix-like quality of novelistic discourse, a subtext that takes into account the synchroni-citv between the Picaresque and the first narratives of and about Latin America, and delves into the relationship between novelistic discourse and nonliterary forms of hegemonic discourse. The novel razes all previous constructs to create itself anew in the image of another text, a text which, as I suggest, is endowed with specific power to bear the truth at a given moment in history, owing to a given set of socio-economic circumstances. That truth, in the case of the narratives being discussed here, is about Latin America itself as a cultural entity, as a context or archive from which to narrate. The first issue is, precisely, one of legitimation, as the trial to decide upon the canonization of Columbus clearly reminds us. Archival fictions like El arpay la sombra bear the indelible imprint of the law, the form of writing that was generated by the initial political circumstances that made Latin American narrative possible..
The first and defining set of circumstances that determined the emergence of such narrative was the development in Spain and its colonies of a modern state, and the fashioning of a legal system to sustain it by controlling individuals. The evolution of narrative prose prior to 1554, when Lazarillo is published, is of interest, but of minor relevance when compared to the importance of the state bureaucracy and the emergence of texts, based on models provided by the bureaucracy, to allow individuals, often criminals or otherwise marginal people, to obtain exculpation or enfranchisement. There are fabliaux, oral and written tales, Petronius, Boccaccio, Don Juan Manuel, Chaucer, // Novellino, Juan Ruiz and the novelistic elements of Dante's Commedia, but all these are absorbed into a large quilt with a radically new pattern when Lazarillo "writes": "Puessepa Vuestra Merced que ami llamanLázaro de Tormes ..." ("May Your Worship know that I am called Lázaro de Tormes ■ ••".) A different mimetic contract is established by that enunciation, which has the form of a legal act. The object ofthat mimetic
40                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
contract will be violated, as the novel or the narrative takes different forms, but not its basic structure.
This version of the history of the Latin American narrar wishes,  then,   to  find,  analyze and describe  those  breaks  ;■ renewals, believing that the central strand in that narrative oh such an underlying structure and tells the same story about a straint, mimesis, and escape. I do not believe, of course, thai cv Latin American narrative within a given period is dependent each of the models offered here; but I do argue that the major o. are, and that is the structure that defines the tradition, the canon the key to the canon, as it were. Hence I do not maintain that psychological novels ofEduardo Barrios, for instance, are as rrui as La vordgine, or that any servile imitation of Paul et Virginie t compare with Facundo, or that the last echo of the noavean rut stands next to Biografia de un cimarrón. What determines the ceiui ity of these works is their rewriting or their being rewritten. 7) Nostra takes up Cervantes, the chronicles of the conquest of Mexi Cien anos de soledad, Tres tristes tigres, but not Maria, or Santa. Nov like these last two do fit in the conventional European historiog phic scheme, precisely because they are mere echoes. It is import, to determine if Gamboa's novel is naturalistic or not, and how-romantic Isaacs was. Not so with narratives at the core of the tradition, which are redeployed violently as they insert the new form assumed by the narrative. Hence the chronicles of the expluraiior accounts are turned into part of the new Archive, or passed off a; mythic, foundational stories.
In the chapters that follow I plan to analyze the main fornix thai the Latin American narrative has assumed in relation to three kind:-of hegemonic discourse, the first of which is foundational both ibj the novel and for the Latin American narrative in general: le^a1 discourse during the colonial period;  the scientific, during iht nineteenth century until the crisis of the 1920s; the anthropologic ai during the twentieth century, up to Lospasosperdidos and Cien own dt soledad. I will then return to the Archive, to the current mode perhaps beyond the anthropological mediation, the locus on which my own text is situated. It would be aseptically formalistic \\o\ to recognize that the law, nineteenth-century science and anthropology are powerful cultural, not merely narrative, constructs. Lath America continues to be a culture of lawyers, as well as one whnsf beliefs about itself are strongly colored by science and anthropology
A CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE                             4I
hsorbing preoccupation with the issue of cultural identity, the »resent belief in the uniqueness of Latin American nature and ifluence on everything. It is because of the weight of these forms seourse within the culture that I believe them to play such an ■irtartt role in the narrative, not the other way around. There, is oubt either, that both anthropology and science, as they existed were present in Latin American narratives since the colonial )d. Ramon Pane, and many of the friars and missionaries that wed him, embarked on activities and wrote reports that were ursors of modern  anthropology.  The same can  be said of ice. From Columbus on, and particularly in writers like Fernande Oviedo and Jose de Acosta, there was a curiosity about rican reality and an effort at description and classification. But ier anthropology nor science became disciplines per se until , nor did they acquire, until much later, a hegemonic position in ion to the discovery and dissemination of the truth. No matter, r embryonic presence surely facilitated their acquiring such a .s in Latin American culture and narratives, as well as the bility of remaining as strong memories in modern narratives as those by Carpentier and Garcia Márquez. Bv hegemonic discourse I mean one backed by a discipline, or embodying a system,  that offers the most commonly accepted description of humanity and accounts for the most widely held beliefs of the intelligentsia. Within such a discourse, the individual finds stories about himself and the world that he or she finds acceptable, and in some ways obeys. Prestige and socio-political power give these forms of discourse currency. When they are abandoned, they are merely stories or myths, voided of power in the prezent, the way in which we read about Melquiades' scientific prowess in the early chapters of Cien aňos de soledad. It does not escape me  that  the   hegemonic  discourse  described   here  comes  from "on 1 side" Latin America; therefore Latin America appears to be constantly explaining itself in "foreign" terms, to be the helpless via im of a colonialist's language and image-making. There is a level ai which this is true and deplorable. However, in Latin America, in c\ cry realm, from the economic to the intellectual, the outside is also always inside; Garcia Márquez and Vargas Llosa hardly think like Ihmcros or campesinos. This duality, which is for the most part a stance, or in the worst of cases, a posture, is present from the start, for iiistance, in Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Latin America is part
42                                     MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
of the Western world, not a colonized other, except in founding fictions and constitutive idealizations. In addition the internalization of these forms of discourse is not a passive process, nor ;i celebration, but a dialectical struggle with no victor and no satisfactory synthesis, save through fiction; if our individual subconscious is not made up of nice stories about mommy and daddy, neither is our history composed of epic tales leading to independence and cultural identity, yet both are irreducibly ours, and part of our stories. The Latin American narrative, both in the stories it tells, and in the structure of those stories, reflects a struggle to free the imagination of all mediation, to reach a knowledge of self and collectivity that is liberating and easily shared; a clearing in the current jungle of discourses of power, emblematized in the one the narrator of Los pasos perdidos seeks, or in the remote and foundational Macondo created by the Buendias. But since this foundation has not yet occurred in reality, and is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future, the stories told here, which I think are masterstories, are about a process toward liberation, not the story of its accomplishment. Nor is one naively to suppose that similar stories culled from the European tradition could be substantially closer to such a desideratum. Pollyanna only exists in Eleanor Porter's novel, and in the naive doctrines of dull ideologues and bad novelists.
I have chosen the most representative works, at the risk of covering territories better charted by others. I begin with the law and shall end with a return to the law in the Archive.
2 The law of the letter: Garcilaso's Comentarios
It's a nice thing for you to try and persuade me that all these fine books say is nonsense and lies, when they are printed by license of the Lords of the Royal Council - as if they were people who would allow a pack of lies to be published ...
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, I, 32'
1
No event prior to it, and few since, has been written about as much as the discovery and conquest of America. It is commonplace to say that America was "discovered" by the printing press that made the news available to many throughout the Western World. Columbus' letter to Luis de Santángel, written in February of 1493, was quickly printed and distributed in Latin translation as well as in versions in vernacular languages. Soon, by 1500, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera had written his first set of "decades," which already attempted to incorporate Columbus' deed into history.2 Other distinguished historians, with or without the official approval of the Spanish Crown, set out to write the history of America: Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Francisco Lopez de Gómara, Bartolomé de las Casas, Francisco de Herrera y Tordesillas, Jose de Acosta, are among many others. Writing the history of America, of course, was no ordinary task. The discovery and conquest pushed these historians' skills and received ideas to the limit. How could this new story be told in a language burdened by old stories? How did this event affect the idea of history held until then? How did America fit in the scheme of sacred and secular history? Where was America in the Holy Scriptures, where in the classical tradition? Why had the Church Fathers not written about this land teeming with people whose origin was difficult to establish?
43
..                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
44
Writing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was not coi ceived as an activity whereby a naked consciousness, faced with fresh empirical or spiritual phenomenon, expresses its reaction nihilo. Writing was then an activity that took place within a gj K\ strict rules and formulae which comprised what could loosely 1 called rhetoric. Therefore, writing the story of America had to tai place through such a network, which had connections to broad systems that regulated social activity. The narrator-protagonist Los pasos perdidos wished to void himself of all prior mediations in U clearing at Santa Monica. Even the most recalcitrant renegade;, the sixteenth century - Lope de Aguirre, for instance - felt that write they had to do so according to a prescribed set of norir Aguirre's seditious letter to Philip II, one of the more outlandi texts of the period, was still a letter written and sent to the Ernper according to the rules of the Empire, one of which granted ; subjects the right to communicate in writing directly with the King thus bypassing the bureaucracy of the State. Aguirre's letter, like ih( letter th.Qpica.ro writes in Lazarillo de Tormes, is an act of defiant e a* well as one of compliance. Felipe Guamán Porna de Ayala's ruNinr\ of the New World, particularly of Peru, was written from th( outraged perspective of a victim, to denounce the conquest. Hi.-command of Spanish was (perhaps defiantly) precarious, nevertheless Guamán Porna complied, sometimes excessively so, with tin rhetorical norms of the day, as in his numerous prologues. Whn America was discovered and conquered, writing was a tight h regulated activity through which the individual manifested his ir her belonging to a body politic. Justina's convoluted meditation^ m writing, at the beginning of the picaresque novel bearing her ikutk (La picara Justina, 1605), is the most remarkable example of this phenomenon.
One of the truisms about Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, is th.il he wrote well. No matter what we make of the Comentarios reales de lo\ Incas, the fact remains that, by any standards - whether of his lime or ours - Garcilaso was indeed a great stylist.3 He had a pen< h.int for using just the right word, his sentences have a measured cadence, an inner rhythm leading toward a logical resolution, and there is, more often than not, an elegant touch of irony. Only Cervantes, Garcilaso's contemporary, with whom he shared a crepuscular humanism, was a better prose writer in Spanish ai the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth cenruiv.
THELAWOFTHE  LETTER                               45
lid Garcilaso write so well? Why did this mestizo son of a
■ -li conqueror and an Inca noblewoman endeavor to produce
inHshed prose as he wrote his vast history of the New World?
Hsu   it might be remembered, not only wrote a history of
fispanic  Peru,  but what  amounts  to  an  entire  history of
•ica from pre-Incaic times to about 1580, when the last Inca
wa> defeated. Such a vast span of time encompassed quite a
1 array of subject-matter: from the succession of Inca emper-
\hom he viewed with a deference usually reserved in the
ksaiice for their Roman counterparts, to the daily life of the
s h conquistadors in Peru; from noblemen vying for political
f  to the riff-raff who rushed to the New World in search of
v and social advancement. The Comentarios and the História
I del Perú also included Garcilaso's own compelling auto-
iphy, filled with the drama of his father's participation in the
conquest and government of Peru, and the tragedy of his mother's
life; his father's failure to make her his wife, the defeat of her people;
and most poignantly the demise of her family, which was that of the
la.^r ruling Inca.4 What sustained Garcilaso's prose style through
su(h  a broad  and  varied  undertaking?  Why  and  under what
circumstances did this illegitimate mestizo learn to write so well?
Answering this question will allow me to posit and describe the first
mediation through which the story-ef Latin America was narrated,
as well as to speculate about the relationship between writing the
hisinry of the New World and  the parallel emergence of the
Picaresque, that is to say, of the novel.
In the sixteenth century writing was subservient to the law. One of the most significant changes in Spain, as the Peninsula was unilied and became the center of an Empire, was the legal system, whii h redefined the relationship between the individual and the hotly politic and held a tight rein on writing. Narrative, both fictional and historical, thus issued from the forms and constraints of leyal writing. Legal writing was the predominant form of discourse in ihe Spanish Golden Age. It permeated the writing of history, sustained the idea of Empire, and was instrumental in the creation of the Picaresque. The way the Inca wrote, and the reason why he and other chroniclers wrote, has a great deal to do with the development of notarial rhetoric that resulted from the evolution and expansion of the Spanish State. To write was a form of enfranchisement, of legitimation. The picaro, the chronicler, and in
46
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
a sense the whole New World, seek enfranchisement and a valid tion of their existence through the writing of their stories.
By the time Garcilaso wrote his masterpiece,  the histojy   , America  had   been   told   and   retold   by  numerous   historian explorers, and discoverers, so that what the Inca undertook was.   ■ necessity, a revisionist task. But, while the freshness of the storv J, told may have been lost, that of Garcilaso's perspective as a u rit ■ was not.  Writing from his dual point of view as Indian ar European, Garcilaso offered a dramatic account of the history . • America that not only told the story but also reflected upon tl. telling. This quality is of the utmost importance to understand]']!, how Latin American history became a story that could be told; Ik it could be added to that of the West as it was known then; and Ik . an individual with roots in the New World could tell his or her t. story. Garcilaso's writings were produced within a complex pr<K in which various rhetorical possibilities offered themselves as me of expression and vied with each other for hegemony. This proc involves notarial rhetoric as well as Renaissance historiograph)-, origins of the picaresque novel as much as those of Don QuijoU.
2
In rhetoric, more than in anything else, the continuity of the old Euro p tradition was embodied.                                                        C S. Lo
America existed as  a legal document before it was physi<. discovered. In the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, the Catholic Kings di up a contract with Columbus,  before he set out, outlining considerable detail his, and the Crown's, rights over any discove territories. The papal bull Inter Caetera of 1493 was also a legal t by which the Spanish Kings were declared proprietors of the r realms. Francis I, who was none too happy with these claims, ra; that he wished to see the will in which Adam had bequeathed si vast territories to Spain. Columbus' claims soon became the ob of bitter disputes with the Crown. The Admiral and his heirs si for many years, referring back to the Capitulaciones, and though honorific side of the claim was granted, their proprietary plea i not.6 The Crown had soon realized that Columbus' family wishec acquire precisely the sort of power that the State was trying to wi from the Castilian aristocracy.7 The importance of Columt
THE   LAW  OF THE  LETTER
47
nds was such that even the official history of the discovery and ,.st was affected. America was not only a legal document -e it was discovered, but soon thereafter became the object of mied legal jousting. The sixteenth century is marked not only ,e protracted cases involving Columbus' heirs, but also by llv lengthy litigation involving Cortés, Pizarro, Cabeza de and other conquistadors, not to mention the thousands of provoked by the issuance of the New Laws (1542). partially cine the encomienda system, and the disputes concerning the s of the native population.8 In 1544, a weary Hernán Cortés, aerated by judicial battles that would rage for over a century his death, wrote to Emperor Charles V: "más me cuesta iderme del fiscal de vuestra Magestad que ganar la tierra de :nemigos" ("I find it more difficult to defend myself from your prosecutor than to conquer the lands of my enemies").9 Columbus' legal entanglements brought about the foundation of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1512, the first of what was soon to become one of the most important institutions in the New World, one that would  eventually define  the  territorial  boundaries  of many of today's Latin American republics.10 The founding of the first Audiencia as a result of Columbus' contested rights is a clear example of what was at stake socially and politically in the process of conquering the New World. To gain wealth, power, a title, and vassals was the aspiration of Spaniards for whom a sense of worth meant a sense of being.11 A clash with the Crown was all but inevitable. The disci) ver er s and conquerors were soon followed by the letrados, the lawyers who "reconquered" the new territories for the Crown. Basking in the reflected power of the State that they represented, the letrados clipped the wings of the conquistadors' aspirations. Military action was followed by legal action. As Malagón Barceló put it:
The lawyer or letrado is found in every advance of the conquest and colonization. At the discovery of the Pacific, an escribano accompanied Balboa. Every city had the official act of its birth drawn up by the scribe who accompanied the founding expedition. In my opinion there is nothing equal in history to the act of founding drawn up by the Spanish scribe. It gave the geographical situation of the new urban nucleus, the name of the founder, how it was established, and how the lands were divided, etc. Above all, it detailed how the picota, formerly of seigneurial power, now acquired the significance of royal sovereignty.12
4                                       MYTH AND ARCHIVE
The legalistic, bureaucratic character of Spanish administration pervaded the Empire. Haring, in his authoritative history, goes so far as to say that the Spaniards,  "like the Romans [...] were pre-eminently creators oflaws and builders ofinstitutions. Of all the colonizing peoples of modern times, the Spaniards were the most legal-minded. In the new empire they speedily developed a meticulously organized administrative system such as the world had rarely seen."'3 Legal papers covered the New World, charting it and binding it to the Old through the written language. The generators of these papers were the letrados and their minions: escribanos, notarios, and other members of the state bureaucracy charged with drawing up, copying, and filing documents. Just as in Spain, where the letrados formed a class that would eventually dislodge the aristocracy from positions of power, in the New World they eroded the power of the conquistadors. Garcilaso's father belonged to this latter class, and Garcilaso to that of the letrados.14
Though medieval in many ways, the new political system created by the Spanish was  modern  because individuals defined  their relationship to it in legal, not genealogical terms. J. H. Parry writes in his The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century: The deliberate, self-conscious purpose which was so characteristic of the imperialism of the Spaniards and so conspicuously lacking in that of the Portuguese, and later that of the British, reflected the immense influence and importance of the Spanish legal profession. Sixteenth-century Spain led the rest of Europe not only in the practice of law and government, but also in the abstract field of jurisprudence. The Spanish jurists, before the middle of the century, evolved a theory of sovereignty distinct equally from the narrow kinship of the Middle Ages and from the unbridled absolutism pictured by Hobbcs and his followers. It was, in fact, a theory of a constitutional state, possessed of the right of legislation and unrestricted in its sphere of action, but restricted in its exercise of power by the man-made laws and customs of its subjects.'5
If the most significant characteristic of the new State was its legalistic make-up, the most visible feature was the pervasive meticulousness of its organization and the entanglement of the individual in a complex set of relationships with the central power. The system was so thorough that it sought to regulate not only individuals, but also its own codes: for instance, by creating the position of cronista mayor, a person officially appointed to write the State's version of history. An equally prominent characteristic, one
THE  LAW  OF THE  LETTER
49 that bespeaks its modernity, was the urban-oriented-organization of the Spanish Empire. The first thing Cortés did upon setting foot on the Continent was to found the city of Vera Cruz, an act that enabled him to communicate directly with the Crown through letters drawn up by the city's municipal government.36 The Casti-Han state as reproduced in America was urban; the citizenship of individuals was  civic,  of the city.  Celestina and  Lazarillo are eminently urban characters. The serf was linked to the feudal lord by "natural codes," or better, by codes whose tropological coherence was conveyed through nature metaphors of strong referential appeal:  the land,  kinship,  in short,  tradition.  In  the Spanish settlements the very grid of the city reflects the political mediations that stand between the citizen and the State. This is particularly evident in American cities, whose layout was dictated by the central government. No sooner had a town been founded than its plan was deployed according to the model stipulated by the Crown a plan in which the symbols of the powers of the State were prominently placed at the very center - the plaza mayor, with its church, town hall and the most characteristic symbol of all, thepicota or whipping post' Any reader of Garcilaso's História general del Perú will soon discover that the pillory was no ornament, and that very famous heads wound up on it with frightening frequency. Thepicota symbolized the law; it was a reminder of the individual's.subservience to the State. The evolution of this most phallic symbol of seigneurial power is indicative of the evolution of the Spanish State.17 Before the unification of the Peninsula, each town's pillory displayed the coat of arms of the local lord, under whose authority punishment was meted out. After the accession to power of the Catholic KWS pillories bore the Castilian coat of arms. At the pillory, the citizens of the domain were whipped, tortured, shamed, their severed organs put on public display. The pillory is predominantly urban in that it presupposes that the culprit be seen by others as he is being humiliated. The punishment becomes a spectacle of the city as well as a display of the machinery of the State at work. Urban justice involves public shame, a public acknowledgment that breaking the law of the State is not only an ofTense against a paternal figure but against an organic set of interdictions. Lazarillo and Celestina are likely candidates for a turn at the pillory. Guzman "writes" as a galley-slave.« Writing, like the whipping post, involved a relationship with a code of interdictions set up by the State; that is to say
50
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
the relationship was not merely legal but more specifically penal The history of America and the incipient novel are mediated b such a relationship. Guzman, the protagonist of the quintessentia picaresque novel, writes as a prisoner, Lazarillo as someone wh has been accused. The importance of such a penal relationshii of the individual with the state is reflected in the evolution r pillories in Latin America. With the passage of time they becam even more elaborate. Some of them are ornate baroque con structions that parallel similar developments in sculpture ;in, architecture.
If America existed first as a legal document, the proliferation r laws and edicts that accompanied its conquest was stupendous, as -a paroxysmal dissemination of the printed word were needed t preserve its being. Thousands of laws were promulgated before th famous Recopilación of 1681 - according to one expert, almost a la\ per day, excluding Sundays.19 This proliferation of legal writing wu due to the meticulousness of the Spanish State and to the casuistry f the Spanish legal system. The production of so many documents lc to the construction of the great archive at Simancas. The buildin itself- medieval castle, later prison, finally archive - is an embler both of the evolution of the Spanish monarchy and of the nature r the documents it sheltered and classified. As J. H. Elliott write? "Anyone who spends any length of time in the great state archive t Simancas cannot fail to be impressed by the overwhelming mass, r documentation generated by the Spanish administrative machine i the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Habsburg Spain was pioneer of the modern state, and the presence of the state can be fe" at every turn in the history of Spain and its overseas possessions, a once influencing and being influenced by the societies it seeks t control."20 Like the Escorial, the archive at Simancas was a kind ( mausoleum, a tomb for myriads of texts containing the lives an. deeds of individuals throughout the vast Spanish Empire, set in it very center, next to the seat of power. Later, in the eighteen t century, the Archivo de Indias was built in Seville to keep th documents related to Spain's possessions in the New World. It is. treasure-house of information that has not been exhausted  by generations of zealous scholars.21 The millions of legal papers thai it contains still have the allure of offering total knowledge about American origins. It contains in its vaults - appropriately buill in the city that was the capital of picaresque life - the writings <>f
THE  LAW OF THE   LETTER                                5I
■    iidtods of Lazarillos, Bemal Diaz's, and others who wrote about .hejr lives to the central authority.
Jr is no accident, then, that Fernando de Rojas, the author of La Celestína, was a lawyer: the law saturates the Spanish literature of the ("■olden Age and is a determining factor in the origins of the novel. Not a few among the great Spanish authors of the sixteenth and .cventeenth centuries spent time in prison. Garcilaso de la Vega
the poet), Fray Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz, Mateo Alemán, Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo and Calderón de la ISarca were all incarcerated at one point or another, while Lope de Vectra and Luis de Góngora barely kept one step ahead of the law.
ľ Ik- great playwright was exiled from the capital because of his -•andalous love life, and Góngora narrowly escaped being impli-
■ ated in a murder. Spanish Golden Age literature, particularly the i ove! and the theater, is filled with allusions to the law. Lawyers,
aether with officers from all echelons of the imperial bureaucracy,
■■opulate plays and stories, both as protagonists and in secondary
olcs (the most famous being perhaps Cervantes' Glass Licen-
iate).22 The picaro is a creature conceived in the web of the law,
. -hile many a comedia (not to mention the entremeses) contains a scene
11 which a judge or a lesser official sets up on stage his writing
i-araphernalia to pass sentence or record an event (Cervantes' El
\e.z de los divorcios is a case in point). There are many well-known
■lays in which the legal authority and jurisdiction of alcaldes and
•rrutidadores is at the core of the conflict, and the so-called honor
■ Iramas often involve a legal dispute concerning the rights of the
j tragéd husband. But it is particularly in the plays that pit officials ■'various ranks against one another that the legal and administrate upheavals of Spain under the Habsburgs are best reflected. El 'ralde de Zalamea, in the versions by Lope and Calderón, and, of ■mrse, Fuenteovejuna,  are the outstanding examples.  Cervantes, iittself a member of the state bureaucracy, filled his works with vuuciles, oidores, licenciados, and other officers. The Quijote is full of liest- characters, and one of the many memorable scenes in the book ihe one involving the galley-slaves who tell the mad hero the crimes for which they have been sentenced. The scene enacts the typical picaresque situation of the criminal telling his story to someone in higher authority (the fact that authority is vested in a madman is a typical Cervantean debunking of power).23 Guzman de Aljarache, El Buscón, and Lapícara Justina are teeming with characters
52                                     MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
who are either representatives or victims of the law. To Quevedo, lawyers and other officers of the Spanish legal system were, together with deceived husbands, the favourite target of his corrosive humor. Lawyers were as much an obsession with him as doctors were with Moliěre. The reason for this, as Lia Schwartz Lerner has written, is very much in keeping with the entire process of bureaucratization that withdrew power from the aristocracy to place it in the hands of government functionaries.24
A brief consideration of the Spanish legal system is in order to explain how the centralization of the Spanish State bears upon the writing of the story of America and the origins of the Picaresque. Haring, Ots Capdequi, Schäfer, Elliott and others have more than adequately described how this centralized state functioned.251 need not repeat their work here, except to say that Spain was governed through a conciliar system, with each council having under its jurisdiction an area of the empire (be it geographical or administrative). The significance of this kind of organization lies in the fact that, though these deliberate bodies had a practical impact on decision-making, as well as a duty to voice their opinions, theoretically, final authority remained with the Crown which could and did exercise it. This model, consisting of a deliberative body answering to a higher authority, is repeated in lower echelons. In the case of the Peninsula, during the reign of the Catholic Kings, and even before the discovery of America, two institutions have to be taken into account as forerunners of the Imperial State, both of which, impervious to local rights, policed the people: the paramilitary Santa Hermandad (so feared by Sancho) and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Haring states:
The government of Castile in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [...] was rapidly becoming an absolute, patrimonial monarchy. Like other growing nation-states of Europe as they were consolidated in the age of the Renaissance, it escaped from the medieval limitations of Empire and Church and the feudal rights of the nobility - also from the acquired rights of municipal autonomy represented in Spain by the fueros of its principal cities. The superiority of the state over all long-standing customs, local privileges, and private jurisdictions was more and more accepted.26
Ots Capdequi and other legal historians have remarked in passing how fruitful it would be to think of the Spanish State in terms of Max Weber's well-known categories to which Haring alludes,  and Magali Sarfatti has carried out precisely such an
THE  LAW OF THE  LETTER
53
analysis in her well-documented Spanish Bureaucratic Patrimonialism in America.21 But it was Richard Morse, in an influential essay, who laid the groundwork for an interpretation of the Spanish State that would take into account the ideology that supported it as well as the way in which it functioned.28 Morse maintains that Latin American society was founded on (and continues to be guided by) certain principles prevalent in sixteenth-century political theory, as propounded by Francisco Suárez, the eminent Jesuit exponent of Thomist political philosophy in Spain: "Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) is generally recognized as the thinker who most fully recapitulated Thomist political thought in Spain's age of Barock scholastik [...] His fresh marshalling of scholastic doctrines, under powerful influences of time and place, encapsulated certain assumptions about political Man and certain political dilemmas that pervade Hispanic political life to this day."29 Morse believes that Neo-Thomism offered a justification for a set of socio-political realities in Spain and her Empire. It is ironic and revealing that what is no doubt a modern feature of the Spanish Empire should be sustained by a political ideology whose sources are so thoroughly medieval. Sarfatti, following Morse, concludes:
For more than three centuries, the American territories were subjected to a structure of government and administration which can be defined as patrimonial and bureaucratic. This structure, legitimized by a tradition expressed in the Thomist and neo-scholastic doctrines, was already apparent in Spain at the time of the Conquest. Later in the sixteenth century, when the Crown no longer had to reckon at home with the challenge posed by the nobility or the urban bourgeoisies, this model of government - expressed in the economic sphere by the mercantilist theory - was even more forcefully brought to bear upon the New World.30
In what way did this patrimonial bureaucracy affect the writing of Latin American history and the origins of the novel? And what does patrimonial bureaucracy really mean in terms of the functioning of the Spanish State?
The patrimonial state, according to Weber's theory, is one which "grows out of the narrow sphere of domestic power (that is, generally, land-based lordship) by an extension of the patriarchal bonds that linked the lord to his kin, retainers and serfs."31 In other words, the patrimonial state is a symbolic extension of the domestic structure of power, whose source and center is the paternal figure of the lord. Legitimation is granted within this structure of power by
54                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
adherence to tradition, rather than to law, and the locus of tionality is the land, the fiefdom within which such powe operational, hence the pillories bearing the lord's coat of arm The bureaucratic state, on the other hand, is organized c basis of the functional rationality of the system, whose authorit legitimacy are inherent in its operational validity. Consequ functionaries within this organization are chosen according tc ability to operate in the bureaucratic machinery; ideally, they ( owe their position to a favor granted by the lord or monarch Spanish State was a patrimonial bureaucracy insofar as powe lodged in the seigneurial authority of the Crown. But at the time, and increasingly so after the sixteenth century, the bt cracy became a self-enclosed, self-regulating, machine whost was paper and which was oiled with ink. The encomienda systei all it appeared to be feudalists, exemplified this power struct By undermining or removing its hereditary character and su ing conquistadors to the rules set forth by the Crown, the eticoi was an extension of the patrimonial bureaucratic state. The sc] tic origin of the duality present in the patrimonial bureau system is clear. Morse summarizes Suárez' doctrine in the folií manner:
Natural law is a general rule; conscience is a practical application < specific cases. Natural law is never mistaken; conscience may be. S and the body politic are therefore seen as properly ordered by object ŕ external natural-law precepts rather than by consensus sprung frc promptings of private consciences [,..] God is the author of civil j but He created it as a property emanating from nature so that no í would lack the power necessary for preservation. A proposition of th allowed the view that most of the pre-Columbian Indians were noi sí but lived in societies ordered by natural law [...] The people t delegate but alienate their sovereignty to their prince,33 The casuistry of the Spanish law, which made for the writing of st many documents, is a direct result of this view of the State, for "tí adjudicate is to determine whether a given case affects all of societj or whether it can be dispatched by an ad hoc decision."34 Here lief precisely the bridge, so to speak, from the patrimonial to thf patrimonial bureaucratic state.  Increasingly, paternal authorit) becomes an entelechy against which to adjudicate in a manner that rather than being ad hoc, answers to an internal, systemic, bureau-cratic structure. In other words, in the patrimonial bureaucrac)
THE LAW OF THE LETTER                                55
-nation is granted through the alienated political codes that become a simulacrum of seigneurial power. The individual ience which can and does err, writes to the embodiment of -U law (Lázaro to Your Lordship, Cortés to Charles V) to oatt- and recapture his or her legitimacy (Cortes, it might be
0  remember, had taken actions of more than questionable ■v at the start of his enterprise). This is the beginning of the ■sque, and of the novel: the story of a new, civil individual, who , on his own, subject to no myths and to no tradition.
i tics is the mediating code of frozen casuistry. The symbolic nľähips of the patrimonial state are replaced with the codified of the bureaucratic one. The symbolic relationships of the r are replaced by the graphic signs of the city: the pillory ig the arms of Castile; writing, and the overwhelmingly ornate ecture of churches and viceregal courts. The viceroys stand in ; King, but will also be cogs in the machinery of the State. The y of America as well as the emerging novel will be the letter the dual writes to this absent father, whose presence is felt only rh. the codes, like writing, that denote his absence. In his
1  dictaminis, Guido Faba, one of the great Bolognese dictatores srs of rhetoric), calls the letter a libellus, technically a legal >n sent to someone who is absent.35 The letter he writes is the s carte ďidentité, and the letters that conquerors, such as Cortés, axe not only cartas, both in the sense of letters and maps, but í of the New World.
'ruth is that many do not really write, but translate, others merely de versions and most of the time perversions.
Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espaňola, 161136
Out of this relationship between the individual and the State the novel will emerge, as the writer-protagonist of the Picaresque writes a report on his life to an absent authority. The proliferating formulae of notarial rhetoric invaded the writing of history as well, which also reflected the ideology of the State, but through the highflown rhetoric of Renaissance historiography. Law and history are the two predominant modes of discourse in the colonial period. Their truthfulness is guaranteed by the mediating codes of the State, chiefly notarial rhetoric.
5°"                                     MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
The overwhelming presence of the State, a bureaucratized figu of patrimonial authority, or rather, a rigural image of authority ca in the rhetoric of the imperial bureaucracy, is at the core of t]. Picaresque. It would be limiting not to see the development of Lat American narrative against the backdrop of the emerging modei novel in the Picaresque. The two are not only coeval, but a produced within a broader context, or text, of which they a versions and, in some cases, perversions. When seen in the conte of the foregoing discussion the Picaresque appears as an allegory legitimation. Thepicaro is orphaned or illegitimate. A creature of tl city, the center of the new patrimonial bureaucracy, he see legitimacy through the codes in which the new authority is hypost tized: the rhetoric of the new State. His conscience is being clean by this exercise in which he imitates the models furnished by th rhetoric; he belongs, he is like that hypostatized figure. He is mad up by its writing.
Compliance with the rhetorical norm on the part of the picaro ha a significant counterpart in one of the more remarkable documenl-of Colonial Spanish America: the infamous requerimiento?1 This te> was read to the bewildered natives  by a conquering group 01 Spaniards, informing them that unless they declared themselves t-be subjects of the Spanish Crown, they would be attacked, thei possessions confiscated and their freedom forfeited. This documen was dutifully read before battle, in the presence of a notary wiv. stamped his signature to attest that proper procedure had been followed. Their consciences lightened by the ritual recitation of th requerimiento, the conquistadors could then make war on the Indiar -with as much brutality as they deemed necessary. The performanci like Lazarillo's written confession, is an action that at once show*-subservience and grants freedom. Mimicking the rhetorical norm. voicing the text of authority, as it were, frees one, insofar as the action is part of the functionality of the bureaucracy, a functionality that carries its own authority because it, in its turn, stands for the power of the Crown. Reciting the requerimiento is an act of imitating the simulacrum of patrimonial authority, of being like the simulacrum of power that rhetoric contrives. In the case of the picaro and many of the chroniclers of America, however, the rhetorical vehicle is not the requerimiento, but the relación - a report, deposition, or even a confession in the penal sense.
The relación pledges to be a textual link with the source of power
THE  LAW  OF THE  LETTER
57
,,oh the maze of bureaucratic formulae that supplanted patri-jal  authority.  A great  deal  of narrative  in  colonial  Latin >ric;i - Columbus, Pane, Bernal Diaz, Cabeza de Vaca and jrlc^s others - was written in this form. It was a way of ensuring enfranchisement of the author and of lending credence to his .. 1 One might recall here that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz' famous uesta a Sor Filotea is a plea that is quite similar to these.) The legal lUla   like that of the requerimiento', gave formal, bureaucratic ling and approval to what the documents contained, as if Don iote could get a notary public to declare officially that the .anters exist. The Picaresque, that is to say, the modern novel, rges to lay bare the conventionality of this process of legiti-on, to uncover its status as an arbitrary imposition from the Ulll...ide, rather than inner validation that successfully links the individual and the story of his life to the State. The jfticaro-author, like the cronista-relator, struggles within language to show the limits of the kind of promise such an outside verification entails and to create a space where the story of the individual can have its own form of substantiality - the text. This is so because language itself, like the bureaucracy,  is  now  conceived  as  a functional  system  whose operations override the impact of outside authority. Just as the law is codified, Nebrija's Gramática, and the debates over Erasmianism in the sixteenth century, are evidence of this conception.38 The novel is the process by which language submits to the conventions of rhetoric at the service of power, in order to show that writing does not afford the kind of individual self-presence that the bureaucracy promises, that the letter always remains undelivered like the one in Garcia Márquez' El coronet no tiene quien le escriba. Yet language does submit to the models of rhetoric, in a mimetic move that appeals to the freedom from authority afforded by the functionality of rhetoric ;md of language itself. Rhetoric is the bureaucratic part of the palrimonial bureaucratic state, the part that both constrains and delivers by means of its own rationality, by its own process of self-verification, a process that is presumably independent of patrimonial authority. Both the novel, and the history of the New World, merge in their effort to at once legitimate and free the individual. Pablos, Quevedo's picaro in El Buscón, speaks, at the end of the novel of leaving for America, a voyage Mateo Alemán made and Cervantes wished to make. The New World is an escape because of the very freedom  afforded  the new as  something not yet codified.  The
58                                     MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
thematic reflection of this is the topic of utopia that runs throun Latin American letters.39 The novel offers the same kind of Übe. ation by its imitation of the forms through which the state transact   '-power.  This  process  remains  in  place in  the  Latin  Americar ^ narrative until the present, though the kind of mediation varies.      "~" The  rhetorical  conventions  of the  relación,  mimicked  by the   ~ Picaresque, appear again and again in the extant texts of the colonial period, volumes of which have been published, though » should be obvious that volumes more could be culled from the various existing archives, particularly the one in Seville. Seville, the capital o^picardia, as well as the gateway to America, is now the site of the largest collection of texts pertaining to the New World, and a veritable textual prison-house.40 The formula of the relación is n-only simple but revealing in its own naivete and seemingly innoc ous capacity to contain facts. In 1575 Philip II issued an ordinant concerning the style of these documents. He stated that "el estilo s< breve, claro, substancial y decente, sin generalidades, y usando c las palabras que con más propiedad puedan dar a entender ! intención de quien las escribe" ("the style should be brief, clea-informative, and decorous, devoid of generalities, and should u: the most appropriate words to express the intention of the perse writing").41 Instructions concerning the style of these letters coi tinued to appear in 1595, 1605, 1634, 1645, and J74-8- The prescri] -tions range from an order to pare down the ritualistic forms . address to the size of the margins and what was to be written in thei (sometimes a summary to save the reader time) .42 In the relación t\ author states his name, lineage, place of origin and then goes on 1 report - for the record, so to speak - what has taken place, be it a ■ expedition, the review of a viceroy's tenure in office, a grievance or a deed leading to a petition. When Lazarillo says that he is writing ;it the request of Your Worship, he is invoking a formula of legalistic language, the "motivación," or compliance with a request to draw-up a document. Compliance with the formulae, the very act of writing according to it, is a way of inscribing oneself in the general functionality of language. The act is crucial in a legal sense; its substance is to imitate, to perform the gesture prescribed  (pre-scribed) by the law; to find liberation as well as enfranchisement through the law. "Pues sepa vuestra merced ante todas cosas que .1 mi llaman Lázaro de Tormes, hijo de Torné Gonzalez y de Antona Pérez, naturales de Tejares, aldea de Salamanca"; "Yo, fray Ramón
THE  LAW  OF THE  LETTER                                59
hre ermitaňo de la Orden de San Jerónimo, por mandate
*?an.t" !- t. seňor Almirante y virrey y gobernador de las Islas y de la
^el* U Finne de Indias, escribo lo que he podido aprender y saber
rrrncias e idolatrías de los indios, y de cómo veneran a sus
dc las crroncias sc
"" híí ol these formulae in the opening sentence of the Quijote clear < u»J
(J   have  these  quotations  in  Spanish  to  preserve  the
S   iiir rone of the naming and the ritualistic cadence.) There is a formula^                           ...             .                       „ ,     „  ..
P    un lue.ir de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acor-A   J ic"1 even ifthe purpose ofthere/ödon is denied by intentionally
a ■♦tirur the name of the place in La Mancha where the action begins. 'I he first person reporting, even negatively, is pertorming
. T-uM prescribed by the relación. The presence of the "I" in the
'.scnr narrating story, which comes from the relación, will give the
novel,  h'oin   the   Picaresque  on,  its   autobiographical  and  self-
•flexive cast. Through these humble formulae, the relación sought to establish the legitimacy of the author on two counts: genealogical and territorial. Both genealogy and residence are criteria for naturalization in the Spanish Empire, a process that was obviously problematic in the Indies and around which the picaresque novel, of course, revolves, at least until Fielding's Tom Jones. Birth and marriage are the acts through which the picaro relates to the law, hence they will be important topics in the novel for centuries to come.43 Lázaro is not only from Tormes, but of Tormes: Guzman is both from and of Alfarache. The act of writing seeks self-presence through compliance with the rhetorical mold. It is a legal kind of ontological gesture, and the formulae furnish the symbolic link with family and territory, with lineage and state. Lazarillo, Guzman, ľablos, and particularly Justina, tear apart these texts because they emphasize the liberating part of the covenant and twirl language in a dizzying demonstration of its radical conventionality. The simulacrum of power replaces power itself in order to void it. Columbus, Cortes, Bernal, and Garcilaso, establish their own precarious and often contested protestations of civil and political being through legal language.44
The give and take of legal language issues from its very dialectical and polemical nature. No utterance can occur in legal proceedings without assuming a question or a response, in short, a dialogue of texts. This is no theoretical dialogue, however, but one that is part of legal rhetoric itself; truth, existence in the civil sense, propriety, all emerge from such a confrontation, hence the dialogic nature of the
6o
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
relationship between Lazarillo and Your Lordship, or between D . Quijote and  the galley-slaves.   Such a dialectical exchange disposition is also to be found in the different kinds of legal rhetc-through which the story of Latin America was originally told.45
Legal language, in the form prescribed by notarial arts, was i ■ the only discourse of the State at the time of the conquest America. There was a more deliberate way in which the New Wo . i was incorporated into the body politic: the language of history, mi specifically of Renaissance historiography, at the service of cent lized political power.46 If the key figures of notarial rhetoric w . scribes and lawyers, the key figures of historical writing indue..-secretaries as well as appointed and self-appointed court história -Like notarial rhetoric, historical writing was mediated by vi powerful institutions: the Royal Council of the Indies and the crom major.47 By the spring of 1493, Columbus' letter to Luis de Šantám   ' was being translated and disseminated throughout Europe, and I 1500, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera was sending to Italy the first of ■ De Orbe Novo decades, incorporating the New World into history. 1 seven short years the issue of how to interpret the discovery of 1 ■ New World, of how to inscribe it into a larger historical pattern, w already being worked out. The question was a matter of gri interest to historians, theologians, and philosophers, who woi ■ I debate it earnestly. But there were also very pragmatic politii   I factors involved in the interpretation of this overwhelming historii event.
The claims of the Portuguese Crown to the newly discover territories and its active interest in Columbus' exploits was the fi such consideration.  Later, other powers came to vie with tl -Spaniards for the newly "discovered" lands. The papal bull of 14-. and the Treaty of Tordesillas gave jurists, philosophers, and the -logians their first chance to discuss the problem and to attempt   ■ reach practical solutions. But these arrangements did not quell t. desire of powers other than the Spanish for the New World. With t ■ division of Europe as the result of the Reformation, the dispute to ! on an even more acrimonious tone. In this climate, the writing ■ history was no innocent activity, and the Spanish State, ever jealo ■ of its hold on its vastly increased territories, was at pains to conti  ' it. An overarching ideological construct was erected to justify ai ■ ratify Spanish territorial rights.
Another pragmatic consideration that influenced the concepti- 1
THE  LAW OF THE  LETTER
6l
•rican history was its bearing on the various legal proceedings
■ ."ntr the conquistadors and the Crown. Marcel Bataillon has
', -n how official historiographers, from Peter Martyr to Gonzalo
'ndez de  Oviedo,  and  Francisco  López  de  Gómara were
[v(\ by the disputes between the Kings and Columbus' heirs.48
ľ     illon proves that the omission of Columbus' landings on the
-incut- tierra firme as opposed to the islands - on the part of court
Hans obeyed the Crown's desire not to grant control over such
.-t u-rritory to the Admiral's family. The bitter disputes con-
nir the fate of the natives had a similar impact on historiogra-
, i     \i would not be far-fetched to say that Bartolomé de las Casas'
,. 1 minous História de las Indias was written as a legal brief, against
I     -crsions offered by Oviedo and others of the treatment given to
II ■   ins. The protracted disputes about the New Laws and the enco-,1   icla system - which, in some cases, led to sedition — no doubt
alfected the writing of history. Legal battles raged at all levels
■ ■ in 1 he conquest of America, determining the way in which the
,  ,r\ of this process was written. Garcilaso's Comentarios reales are
"    mediated by such historiographical overdeterminations.
I lis branch of the State's discourse was not concerned with the
■ ,   Iry details of everyday life; nor was it usually cast in the formu-
rhetoric of the notarial arts. On the contrary, Renaissance histoid, raphy strove for elegance and beauty and couched the ideology i e conquering State in the harmonious prose of humanism and in '   1 anistic conceptions of history. It was only at this level that the n ■ ; sophisticated justifications for the conquest could be articu-I 1   I. The most important rhetorical device which structured these l>i    iries was of medieval origin: figural interpretation as a way of j 1    ing the providential nature of the Spanish enterprise in the New ľ ■■■Id.49 There is a homological relationship between the elegance 1   ued by humanist historians and the organic, systemic organism of the patrimonial bureaucratic state. The former reflects the
■   ■ r. There is an incompatibility between notarial rhetoric and his-■■   igraphy that takes the form of a legalist dialogue: the historio-
!'hy of the state is the authority to whom notarial rhetoric
'■hesses itself, the overall archive where information about people
1 I events will be classified and thus submitted to the constraints of
er. Knowledge about individual lives and deeds becomes power
ie archive or in the text of official historians.
I lie existence of an official historian in Castile dates back to the
62
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
reign of John If (1406-54).50 The first official historians 1 significantly enough, notaries who set down the actions o king, applying the practices of their trade. These notary-histc were usually chosen from among the secretaries of the kir that in later years the offices of secretary and court historian usually  combined.   In  the  Renaissance,   secretaries   to  pr kings or otherwise powerful individuals were the keepers o guage.51 They were often great humanists, a practice that tinued in Spain in the sixteenth century, as in the case of Fr; co López de Gómara, who was not only a remarkable hun historian but also Hernán Cortes' secretary. In the first half 1 sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown attempted to contrc flow of information from America by having all documents through the Council of the Indies and, of course, by usin Crown's power to license the publication of books, not to me the watchful eye of the Holy Office of the Inquisition ar vigilant bureaucratic network. It was the Council who deterr the legality of documents and issued laws to control what pened in the New World. History was far from exempt from control.
Peter Martyr, and even Oviedo, wrote like court historians latter in particular aspired to be named official historian t Indies and hence presented a summary of his work in progr* the Emperor in 1526. This sumario, which takes its title from jargon, is not only a history, but a petition as well. More < control came to be exercised after the mid-point in the cei Finally, in 1571, Philip II created the position of cronista mayo charged him with writing the official history of the New W The position existed until the eighteenth century, though very little was accomplished by those who held it in its phases. But what is significant is the way in which the a mayor was conceived. The document creating the position c nista cosmógrapho (which I am assuming is the same as mayor) ; that the individual holding the post should be attached t Council of the Indies, that he should keep the cosmograr charts of the New World, keep strict account of the geograf. location of the various parts of the realms, and keep recoi eclipses and other natural phenomena, making sure that the at which they occurred was duly recorded. The 1571 cédula on to state:
THE  LAW  OF THE  LETTER
63
fa memoria de los hechos Mcmorables y seňalados que a auido y
3as yndias, se conseruc, el coronista cosmographo de yndias baya
■ escriuiendo la história general dellas con la mayor Precision y
nue ser pueda, de las costumbres, Ritos y antiguedades, hechos y
imientos que sc entendieren, por las descripciones historias y otras
nes y aucrigaciones que se enuiarcn a nos, en el consejo; la cual
este en el, sin que de ella sc pueda publicar ni dejar leer Mas de
Hlo que a los que el consejo pareciere que sea publico.
« 1 hit 1 the memory of deeds that are significant and worthy of recollection 1 -.u ]iave taken place and will take place in the Indies be preserved, the hronicler-cosmographcr of the Indies should always be engaged in writing hrir "cnera! history, with as much precision and truthfulness as possible. He should write about the customs, rituals and myths of the people that are known through descriptions, histories and other accounts [relaciones] and enquiries sent to us at the Council [of the Indies]. Said history should be in his possession, no publication thereof being made, nor any part be read exec p l what the Council deems should be made public.52
The document further stipulates that to facilitate the work of the cronisla cosmógrapho secretaries and other officials should send him, at die Council, all the documents pertaining to transactions in the Empire and that the historian "guarde y tenga con secreto sin las cormmicar ni dejar ver a nadie sino solo a quien por el Consejo se le mandare, y como las fuere acauando, las vaya poniendo en el arehiuo del secretario cada Aňo, antes que se le pague el vltimo lercin del salario que ouiere de auer" ("keep them secret, not communicating them to anyone, nor allowing anyone to see them except as ordered by the Council, and that as he finishes using them, he should deposit them in the Secretary's archive each year, before the last third of his salary is paid to him [the cronista]").
The decree of 1571 was followed by a. real cédula signed by the King the following year, which was sent to the various audiencias, instructing them to make available to the cronista all information pertaining to their jurisdiction. The order is remarkably broad and inclusive. I quote from the copy sent to Santa Fe de Bogota:
Prrsidi-nte y oidores de nucstra audiencia real, que residen en la ciudad dc Santa \'c del nuevo reino de Granada, sabed: que deseando que la memoria de la-, hechos y cosas acaescidas en csas partes se conscrven; y que en ruieMtí) Consejo de las Indias haya la noticia que dcbe haber de ellas, y de las o i ras cosas de csas partes que son dignas de saberse; habemos proveido piTäona, a cuyo cargo sea rccopilarles y hacer história de ellas; por lo cual
64                                     MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
os encargamos, que con diiigencia os hagais luego informar de cualesquirra persona, asi legas como religiosas, que en el distrito de esa audienciu hubicrc escrito o recopilado, o tuviere en su poder alguna história, comentarios o relacäones de algunos de los descubrimientos, conquistas entradas, guerras o facciones de paz o de guerra que en esas provincias o en parte de ellas hubiere habido desde su descubrimiento hasta los tiempos prcscntes. Y asimismo de la religion, gobierno, ritos y costumbres que los indios han tcnido y tienen; y de la descripción de la tierra, naturaleza \ calidades de las cosas de ella, haciendo asimismo buscar lo susodicho, 0 algo de ello en los archivos, oficios y escritorios de los escribanos do gobcrnación y otras partes a donde pueda estar; y lo que se hallare origi-nalmente si ser pudiere, y si no la copia de ellos, daréis orden como se mu, envíc en la primera ocasión de flota o navíos que para estos reinos vengan.
President and judges of our royal court at Santa Fe, in the new Kingdom <>i Granada, be advised that: wishing to preserve the memory of events occurring in this realm, and wishing that our Council of the Indies have the information about them that it should, as well as other things in the realm that it should know, we have provided a person, whose charge it is to gather all this and write a history of them. For this reason we ask you to inform, with all dispatch, all persons, be they secular or religious, who within tlic jurisdiction of this court has written or compiled a history, or has in his possession a history, commentary or compilation of data about discoveries, conquests, attacks, wars or factional disputes, having occurred in those provinces from the time of its discovery to the present time. We also wish 10 receive information about the religion, mode of government, rituals and customs that the Indians had and have, also a description of the land, ab well as the nature and qualities of the things on it, asking you to search Ihr this too, or whatever there might be about it, in archives, offices and papers of secretaries and anywhere else where such information may be kepi. Whatever is found we wish to have in the original, if not a copy, which you should order to have sent to us in the first fleet of ships bound for I hi-. kingdom.53
Juan Lopez de Velasco (1571-91) and Licentiate Arias de Loyola (1591-96) were the first official historians of the Indies, but it was not until the tenure of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (159ti-1625) that an individual took to heart the task of compiling a geneial history of the Indies worthy of the orders issued by the Crown. His compendious História general de los hechos de los castellanos en las isla\ 1 tierrafirme del mar Océano, published in Madrid from 1601 to 1615 is ns monumental a task of re-writing as has perhaps ever been accomplished.  Herrera, who was a contemporary of Mateo Alemán.
THE  LAW  OF THE   LETTER                               65
\fi<ruel de Cervantes, and Garcilaso, lists at the beginning of his r'k njs historical sources: these include all of the great histories of .j jvjew World published or unpublished (including the Inca's). (lornposed in an impeccable style, his História general is a wide-. iniring apology for the conquest of America and the glory of the .Spanish (particularly Castilian) State.54 Herrera y Tordesillas' official history did not go unchallenged,
■  hich proves the dialectical nature of the relationship between I isturiography and  notarial rhetoric.   In   1600,  Francisco Arias
I uvila y Bobadilla, a personage with the quaint title of Count of ľuňonrostro (Fist-on-Face), took Herrera y Tordesillas to court for
.hiit he was about to publish about his grandfather Pedrarias I 'ávila, the ferocious conqueror of Darien. Although Herrera tried
1 appease Arias by making slight changes in his manuscript, the lirigious count continued to sue until 1610, when a court finally
■  .-creed that Tordesillas was not obliged to change anything unless . » was confronted with more reliable testimony than he had.55 1 iivi-11 that the actions in question had taken place nearly a century ■■■fore, the only way to challenge the historian was by producing
oiarial documents of the period that would question the veracity of ! s writing. The decision in favor of the court historian is ample mnľ of where power lay in the confrontation between the documents in the archive and the overarching history that was charged iih giving them a certain organization and meaning. It is well ■■onh keeping this in mind when considering Garcilaso's História neral del Perú. ''Language is the handmaiden of Empire," said Nebrija in the
■   plication of his Gramática to the Catholic Kings in 1492.56 Writing .is a fundamental feature of the Spanish Empire, not only for the
: H.sims given, but also because Spain's was the first large state to be
■.ailťd after the printing press was perfected.57 The Spaniards
ught the Indians how to read and write with the purpose of
1 titrating them more effectively into their polity. Never was an
■   ipire more permeated by the letter. In the sixteenth century there is already a university in Hispaniola (The University of St.
. .íomas Aquinas) and the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco was
- ■Linded in Mexico City in 1536 with the express purpose of teaching
I   ighi natives Latin and rhetoric. In 1512, the Franciscans had
iuu-d in Seville 2,000 ABC primers to teach the Indians how to
■ -id. and the bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, acquired
66
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
12,000 copies in 1523 in Alcalá de Henares.58 The Spanish E was ruled by the law, and the law could only be learned, di; nated and obeyed by people who knew how to read and Writing, as we have seen, was a form of legitimation and liber Garcilaso wrote, and wrote well, because he was encouraged so by the socio-political context in which he grew up.
But how, specifically, did Garcilaso learn to write? Thei poignant pages in the Comentarios in which the Inca reminisces how a priest took him and the other mestizos under his wing to them Latin, rhetoric and history. Garcilaso remained in toucl his classmates throughout his life, and some of them sen information for his book from Peru. His experience with ther obviously an important and memorable part of his childhood.' are also moving scenes in which Garcilaso portrays himself father's scribe or secretary, when the latter was corregidor anc justice of Cuzco. In book 8, chapter 6 of the História general det after relating an incident involving an exchange of letters be Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and Viceroy Hurtado de Men the Inca writes: "Yo tuve ambas las cartas en mis manos entonces yo servia a mi padre de escribiente en todas las carte escribia a diversas partes de aquel ímperio; y asi respondió a dos por mi letras" ("I had both letters in my hands, for I then s my father as secretary for all the correspondence he had various parts of the Empire, and I wrote the replies to these letí my own hand").59 The Inca must have already been a good 1 when his father employed him as a scribe, and as a scribe Gar must have mastered the legal or notarial rhetoric of the time was to be an experience as crucial as learning to write. In cai out his duties as a scribe, the young mestizo had ample evidei the power of writing in the Empire. Taking dictation from his í the Inca learned, at the very foot of authority, the link bei writing and legitimation, as he drew up briefs, wills, petition' other documents. Writing hypostatized the voice that rang sc him, carefully modulating the tropes and the formulae of the Writing would become the Inca's obsession.60 This practice v have a telling effect on the Comentarios reales. The scene of the m taking dictation from his father can be seen as an emblem of American writing in colonial times.
This notarial rhetoric, which may appear to us today as the interesting kind of writing, was an important area of Renais
THE  LAW  OF THE   LETTER
67
" tic activity, and in the history of its development many
levant to students of literature come up: not only matters
■J   but of point of view, the intended reader, rules for glossing
ind so forth. The law {legislar, from "to read") is above
. 'sf em of reading and writing, a prescribed way of interpreting.
'reit humanists who rekindled classical rhetoric were the
-mes who codified legal or notarial rhetoric.61 In fact, rhetoric
Uncovered m B0l0gna by these very humanists, who were rCd with creating a discourse capable of acting as a system of ' „c for the bankers and merchants of the Italian cities. It above all, Rolandino Passagieri who, in his Summa and Aurora, the rules and gave the models that, from the thirteenth century -OLild be used in the rest of Europe and in Latin America, in cases until the eighteenth century. He is the forefather of the ■)S who came to the New World. Notarial rhetoric became an riant branch of rhetoric in Spain during the reign of the ■)]ic Kings due to the fundamental changes in the legal system ioned before and as a reflection of the great impulse given to ing by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros. Artis notariae, or manuals .e notary, appeared in the Peninsula, and the Italian models selves were imported. These arts of the notary contained rules riling. In some cases they were mere formulae, in many others were very much like the manuals of style still used today to elective writing. Sentence construction, the use of tropes, and iciions for the redaction of the various parts of the documents ven, along with specific models to copy and forms for inserting : appropriate places the contingent details of a given case. A nt is taught how to write a letter asking his parents for money. er leaches a wayward woman how to ask her husband to take :iek. If one were to make up a list of these exempla, it would be [o come up with a project for a kind of Decameron. Indeed, I ci that this kind of manual may be the model used by 'guez Freyle in planning El Carnero, which contains precisely an array of cases. Notarial rhetoric furnished a method for _)orating into writing the events of everyday life; in fact, those scaped the law: adultery, illegitimacy, delinquency in general; c individual cases that deviated from Natural Law. In this, ial rhetoric plays a more decisive role in the development of lie prose than the sermo humilis to which Auerbach refers.62 'ial rhetoric is connected to society's codes much more directly
68
MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
and significantly. It is a mode of representing that which escap and by doing so brings it back into line. It is the fine mesh that tr; everything into writing, from domestic quarrels to the discover^ ■ the Pacific. The picaro writes to exculpate himself; the very act writing is a way of coming clean, of using formulae through wh-i' his actions are harnessed by society's rules of representation. (i course, submitting to such formulae was also a way of liberati oneself from the authority that purported to control writing fr«, , without by mimicking the simulacrum that took its place.
The letrados were the keepers of writing in the colonial period i only in their official capacity as rhetoricians and scribes, but alsc men of letters - lettered men, men of the letter, who lived by and   ' the letter. The tradition of the lawyer-writer, so prevalent to this c" in Latin America, began with these humble officials of the St bureaucracy. Don Nicolas de Irolo Calar, author of the first La i American treatise of notarial art, the Politico, de escrituras (Mexi 1605), was also a poet. He summarized his doctrine, which he ba -up with numerous examples to be used according to the individ cases, as follows:
La cual [brevedad], de más de lo dicho, es motivo, incita y anim aprender lo que sc prctcnde saber: supuesto lo cual y que de ir las escritu con no más de lo que han mencster son mcjor y más bien entcndidas, y 1 por poner lo que no es de importancia arguye ignorancia, y que iría n fiiera de Camino el que viendo dos caminos para ir a una parte, dejas-más corto y más llano, y finalmente el mejor, y quisiese ir por d otro, d . el que quisiera acertar no poncr más de aquello que sea necesario 1 escritura,  dando  de  mano  a proHjidades y vejcces que  todavía u algunos, como si no tuviéramos hoy mejor lenguaje, más elegante y r pulido. Uscse en cada tiempo lo que corre, y advicrtase que cada dú ponen las cosas en mayor policía y primor, y también en que por lo di-no sc quiere decir que sc ponga sólo lo esencial y sustancial en escrituras, que esto sería ílevar mucha sequedad y mostrarse por eíias    ■ poco práctico el escribano, que adornadas han de ir y parecerá bien 1 vayan con algunas razones que hagan buena consonancia. Y porque puedan tener ningun defecto, y en efecto tengan toda perťección, se llcv; cuando se  fueren ordenando,  cuidado  con  tres  cosas.   La primer; principal que vayan con las fuerzas que requieren. La otra, con claridac  1 la otra, que cada cosa se ponga y asiente en su lugar, y todo de mancra 1 lo uno llamc a lo otro.63
[Brevity] is, in addition to what has already been said, an incitement; encouragement to learn that which one aspires to know. And besi
THE LAW OF THE  LETTER
69
ncnts are easier to understand if they contain only the necessary
m-uion. To do otherwise would be as clear a proof of one's ignorance
on being shown two ways to reach a certain place, one rejected the
route, tne most direct one over flat ground, in favor of the other more
•nit route. The key to success is to include in the document only what is
nial leaving out the long-winded phrases and old-fashioned flourishes
some still use, as if we did not have access to a better, more polished
1 (.|(.ir;int language. Always use the most up-to-date language and notice
1 r irrealer care and order with which documents are more and more being
ritten. Do not, however, take this to mean that one should include only
,    bait' minimum in documents. This would make them very dry and
make .ill too evident the inexperience of the scribe. Documents need some
adornment and a good impression will be made if they contain sentences in
krrninii with the subject-matter ... and in effect, reach the highest degree
of peifcetion. Documents should be written according to three rules. First
iiid fhtfinost they should have the necessary proofs. Secondly, they should
be clear. Thirdly, everything should be written down and recorded in its
piopei place, and the whole be organized in such a way that each part
u-l-Atv* i<> all the others.
lrolo's concern with beauty, as well as with notarial thoroughness, is evidenci; of the letrados' literary bent, and of the role they played in the production of the language of the narrative of Latin America in the colonial period. Irolo was not exceptional in his poetic inclinations. Silvestře de Balboa y Troya de Quesada, author of the epic poem lispejo de padencia (Puerto Principe, Cuba, 1608), was an escribano. The list of modern Latin American authors who studied law or actually became lawyers would be a very long and illustrious one, including Jose Marti, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, to name but three.
The preceding could be summarized as follows. The novel, as well as much of the history of the New World, was told within the rhetorical constraints imposed by the new, centralized state of Spain, ft was through the rhetoric of the notarial arts, and not as a result »fa literary tradition, that the authors of La Celestína and the picaresque novels were able to incorporate the details of everyday life into their fictions. These fictions involved the life of the disenfranchised of society, who sought legitimation through the very act of writing. Thematically this was expressed in La Celestína and the Picaresque by the orphanage or illegitimacy of the protagonist, in the chronicles by the real issue of enfranchisement in the new society (the mcomienda, the state bureaucracy). The novel and the history of
96
70
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
the New World - as well as later narratives concerned with t uniqueness of Latin America - are like letters written to a cutiti authority, because legal rhetoric always implies a textual e\ch<i . or dialogue, a petition or appeal or an answer to some mjj accusation. Like the pillory, which served to let the indinc1. expiate his deviance in a public display of shame, writing, coir .■-clean, is an act through which pardon, reunification with clu* h   ; politic is pursued. This dialogue or exchange inherent in I  ,: rhetoric is present within the text of the novel or chronicle in vnr   .. ways. In the chronicle, the relation, or written report, i-> tr   ■ subsumed within the larger rhetoric of Renaissance historiograp.'--which is the global text that will then incorporate its trivial de . . -into an overall, harmonious formulation wherein power h < ■■ tained. In the Picaresque the dialogue is implicit in the exculpa and in the protestations of innocence. It is also present in the a< ■   ■ conversion, which presumably leads the ßkaro to write becauv  ■.. has converted to the good life. This conversion is present in   '• chronicle, as well as in the novel, in the very act of compliance \ ■■; the rhetorical norm, which is a form of mimicking authority assuming its form thereby freeing itself from the outside source oj power that determines it. The dialogic exchange is also e\ idcnr in the fact that a relation could also be a reading of the record ro summarize or refute the allegations and the evidence; the relation can be a commentary, and there were relatores in charge of summarising the lengthy proceedings. In any relation the /wö/o-chronic! e r i«, not only recounting his life but revising the version of it previously given to the authorities. Lázaro answers  "Your Worship" to correct versions of his activities reported to that personage. Garcilaso fand Bernal, of course) writes his Comentarios as a relation in this respcr* Ultimately, what the mimicking of legal rhetoric accomplishes is i' legitimation of the voice which narrates the story. How else tou" ' the likes of Lazarillo, Garcilaso or Bernal presume to write a bo-' themselves? In that legitimation of the voice in the present lies t*. creation ofthenovelistic voice, capable of recording events thai ha' ■        j not been consecrated by literary or rhetorical tradition.                          *
Garcilaso wrote well because his good rhetoric was a simulacra ■■ of the order of the Empire, an order that is itself a simulacrum of ť" authority invested in the figure of the King. Garcilaso was h' father's scribe in two senses: he wrote on his behalf and in hi^ stca ■. that father being the hypostasis of power that rhetoric itself and i í ■
THE  LAW OF THE  LETTER
ľ!
of the King represented. Just as he assumed his father's name -rite  Gomez de Figueroa becoming Garcilaso de la Vega, el his writing replaced the father. The better the Inca wrote, the 1 ser he came to gaining the ever-elusive legitimacy that writing, as mediation between  the source of power and  the individual, rornised. The Comentarios reales de los Incas is an allegory of legitimation parallel to the one contained in the Picaresque, only that here the allegory extended to include the whole New World as well as the mestizo.
Since Vour Worship writes me to relate these matters very fully, I have thought it best to start not in the middle but at the beginning. In this way Your Worship and others may receive a complete account of my life.
La vida de Lázarillo de Tormes, 155464
Most readers of Garcilaso's Comentarios reales de los Incas would be hard put to identify Garcilaso's book with notarial rhetoric or with the Picaresque, but this is because only the first part of the work is commonly read. That is the part dealing with Garcilaso's Incaic background; it is a history of pre-Hispanic Peru, particularly the succession of the Inca monarchs until the arrival of the Spaniards, and a thorough account of Inca culture, specifically their religious beliefs. Post-romantic ideology, most notably indigenismo, has made this part much more attractive than the second one, which is concerned with the conquest of Peru and the civil wars that followed it. Yet this second part is essential to the book's plan, perhaps the very spark that inspired the Inca to write. What makes the Inca's story so Latin American is not the narrative of his non-European origin, but the need to include it as part of the scheme of his legitimation. In a sense, one could say that the first part fits within the design of the second and is dependent on it, rather than the other \v;iy around. The História general del Perú is mostly concerned with the heroic yet sordid affairs of the Spaniards, in their savage struggle for the spoils of conquest. It is the paternal side of the book, as it were, where the issue of the patrimonial bureaucracy and its authority over writing are most clearly at stake.65 It is also the most autobiographical part of the Comentarios, for it is concerned with Garcilaso's own times, not with that of his forebears. Published posthumously, the book was conceived as a second part of the
72
MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
Comentarios reales, and Garcilaso had named it as such, but publishers, for reasons that are not entirely clear, changed title.66
Garcilaso begins this second part with a detailed account of h.... the precious metals extracted from the mines in Potosi and oil   i regions of Peru brought great wealth to Spain and Europe >|, general. He aims to prove the value of what the first conquistado-among them his father, accomplished: "ganaron un imperio i ■ grande y tan rico que ha enriquecido a todo el mundo" ("they woi great and wealthy empire that has enriched the whole world" With an eye for economic detail worthy of a modern histori. u Garcilaso compares the price he paid for a pair of shoes upon  u arrival in Spain to what the same pair would cost at the time h( i writing. Hunger for wealth and power moves men in the Hislc general del Perú, and Garcilaso relishes examples of the result] -.-corruption, violence, and chicanery. He recounts the civil wars fn   . the privileged and legally valid perspective of an eyewitness;    n eyewitness, moreover, who at the time of the action saw events a child (like Lázaro's feigned perspective), and thus with a fresh, i ■■ to say astonished vision of things.  The story is an appeal     : legitimacy not only in the political world of the times, but a   ■ within the text itself, as Garcilaso's protestations about the valid i of his point of view reveal. Here Garcilaso's training as a scribe i ■ doubt served him well, for the presence of notarial rhetoric  ;• especially prominent. But there is an even more compelling a ■■ concrete reason to view the entire book as in many ways de termín ■ by the artis notariae.                                                           /
Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega, Garcilaso's father, belonged   ■ one of the most distinguished families in Spain.68 The Inca coi. ■! count  among  his  paternal  ancestors   a  very  illustrious  line    '• personages of rank, some of them the best poets of the langua;. from Jorge Manrique to his namesake Garcilaso de la Vega, li great lyricist. But Sebastian was a segundón, that is to say, no   . first-born male, who had gone to the New World in search ■■" fortune, as was frequently the case. While his actions in the conqu   ' and civil wars bore eloquent testimony to his zeal and desire to 1   ■ up to very high social ambitions, Garcilaso's father had falter I once. In the midst of the Battle of Huarina, Sebastián apparen " offered his steed Salinillas to the dismounted Gonzalo Pizarro, l! leader of the seditious group (he was at the time a prisoner   '
THE  LAW OF THE  LETTER
73
s,  but  trusted   to  roam  about freely on  his  honor,   an
ous position at best in a very muddled political situation).
'Phis act of either gallantry or of political prudence would cost
c.hastián and Gomez de Figueroa, the future Inca, dearly. Owing
the thoroughness of the bureaucratic system and the increasing "mportance of writing and archival practices, this stain - if, indeed, there was one - remained indelibly stamped upon Sebastian's record, hampering his son's efforts at court to make good his demands as a direct descendant of a conquistador. Historians, whose record was a relevant part of legal proceedings, also recounted the incriminating scene at Huarina. Garcilaso struggled against the version in the legal record and in the historians' writings through appeals against the former and through corrections of the latter in his own history. The Comentarios reales are woven around that scene of the horseless traitor being offered a mount by Garcilaso's father. In this sense, the book is actually a relation, a letter of appeal to the Council of the Indies to have Sebastian's name cleared and Garcilaso's petitions granted. It also resembles a relation in the sense that it is a summary of the record, a culling of the written evidence and a commentary on it. Prior to writing the book Garcilaso had appeared in person before the Council of the Indies to argue his case. After quick deliberations, the decision went against the Inca. It was never reversed despite his untiring efforts, which followed the line, though on a smaller scale, of the great legal proceedings involving Columbus, Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, and the Pi/arros. The story of Garcilaso's fruitless appeals to the Council, along with his version of the story, appears in the second part of the Comentarios reales.
Agustín de Zárate, whose work Garcilaso often glosses, comments at the start of his História del descubrimientoy conquista del Perú (1555) thai he was unable to write the book while in the New World for fear thai Francisco de Carvajal, one of Gonzalo Pizarro's minions, would slay him.69 Writing the history of Peru in the sixteenth century was a dangerous political act. The history of Peru involved heroic deeds on a huge scale, given the nature and extension of the terrain and the civilizations that the Spaniards conquered, but mostly it involved the wars that erupted among the Spaniards themselves which taxed to the limit the system of government and law sketched before.
1 he civil wars of Peru were a result of the struggle between the ccniral government in Spain and the conquistadors in the New
74                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
World. In brief, in 1542 the Crown passed the New Laws lirr the encomienda system which allotted land and Indians to w< conquistadors. The untiring efforts of Bartolomé de las Casa< others on behalf of the Indians had a good deal to do wit) issuance of these laws. But they were also the result of politica economic calculations on the part of the Crown. With the aid 1 encomienda system, the early conquistadors had become a de f q not a de jure', landed aristocracy with a ready supply of serfs Indians). Not only had they become dangerously powerful hence capable of secession (as happened more than once), but also hoarded land and Indians in a way that made it diffici reward new waves of conquistadors who would be willing to e: the territories and wealth of the Crown. The New Laws came shattering blow to the first conquistadors because they limite number of "lives" for which an encomienda lasted, as well as the in which it could be inherited.70 While in Mexico a revoll averted, in Peru one broke out. The revolts continued throu^ Garcilaso's childhood and early life until he left for Spain in 1 Let us review more closely what was at stake and how Gar< stood on the political issues being fought over. The main one wí New Laws limiting the encomienda system. The limits were as fol encomiendas would henceforth not be hereditary; officials o government could not have encomiendas and had to turn theirs 01 once; and, finally, anyone implicated in the revolts of Pen whichever side, would have to relinquish his encomienda and h forth be unable to have one. Sebastián, and by implication G laso, was affected by all three provisions. Blasco Nunez Vela sent by the Crown to enforce the laws, but was opposed by Goi Pizarro,  who defeated  him.  Nunez  Vela was  killed  in b Licentiate la Gasca took his place and did battle with Pizarro was soundly defeated at the battle of Huarina. The fact tha Crown's forces were routed at Huarina surely explains the obsti with which  the authorities  remembered  Sebastian's genei toward the rebel leader.
The letrados, who replaced the conquistadors, came to enforc laws. They had the backing of the Crown and of the disenfranc soldiers who expected rewards for every deed performed in fa\ the King. But the civil wars continued, many disenchanted sol joined the ranks of the rebels because they felt that they had not properly rewarded for their loyalty to the Crown. Loyalty
THE  LAW  OF THE  LETTER
75
were difficult to establish, since all sides often claimed both.
the peninsula, the popular classes sided with the Crown
ist the aristocracy. Eventually, with the abrogation of many of
■   I ws peace was established, but the legal status of the estate of
. .r a conquistador remained a tangled affair, complicated by
- ions concerning their marriages to women from Spain.71
1, rcilaso made his claim before the Council of the Indies as the
, .fa first conquistador, a nobleman, and of an Indian woman of
nbie rank - the aristocracy of the Incas having been recognized in
prtain cases.72 But Sebastian's lapse at Huarina and his compli-
ated marital situation made things difficult for the Inca. Garci-
iso's father married Doňa Luisa Martel de los Ríos, a Spanish lady,
tiá married off Chimpu Ocllo, Garcilaso's mother, to Juan del
'edroche, a Spaniard of lesser rank. The Inca's illegitimacy and the
ick of legal foundation for his appeals were unequivocal, yet his
00k  and his adoption of the name Garcilaso de la Vega, is a
ornate to his father, in whose defense he wrote, and whose identity
c seemed to want to assume. Varner writes:
uc Cfrimez' eventual decision to adopt the name Garcilaso de la Vega was tspiml by an intense devotion to his father and was made in a passion of cfensc and pride. Under the name which Lope Garcia Castro [a member ť the Council of the Indies who suspected the loyalty of Sebastián] had illicd. he would attempt to forge a new route to fame and fortune, and he oultl wear it proudly when he renewed his pretensions at Madrid. Be that 3 it may, from this time forward Gomez referred always to himself as ■arrikifeo de la Vega, though when clarification demanded it he frequently jdcii "who was known in the Indies as Gomez de Figueroa." And then as h: years passed and he began to awaken to the former glories and the jiTCtu miseries of his mother's people, the mestizo, again in a passion hich mingled both pride and defense, embellished his adopted name with :1 Indio" or "el Inca."73
rancksco de Carvajal, Gonzalo Pizarro's ruthless field marshal, keel to refer to those who changed allegiance during the civil wars í kjtdnreSy weavers, because they went back and forth. The weave of ■arciliiso's Comentarios is so complex because his father was a caver of sorts, and Garcilaso's own position was not simple either, ■arcilaso's claim involved the ownership of Indians as well as that land. To adopt his father's identity, he had to be the lord of his 101 her1 s people. Garcilaso also would have had to abandon his role * scribe, as letrado, assigned him by Sebastián. Given the politics of
76                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
the time, Sebastián had to be opposed to the letrados (when answ ing other accusations regarding his performance as corregidor Cuzco, Sebastián once protested emphatically that he was no letrado). Which was Garcilaso to represent, the voice of the mastei the letter of the scribe?
The relación's narrative situation (answer or appeal to hig| authority) is evident in the entire Comentarios reales, once one tal into consideration the legal struggle in which the Inca was engat when he thought of writing the book. The Comentarios were ci ceived as part of the record in a legal petition that required the h to give proof of his worthiness. Such worthiness could only proven by furnishing evidence of the noble lineage of his father a mother and of the former's service to the Crown in the New Wor The first part of the Comentarios is written with the purpose showing the nobility of the Incas, that is to say, of establishing 1 noble lineage of the maternal side of Garcilaso's family. On this s his claim is based on the fact that the Incas were lords of Pi because of their heroic and civilizing activities against the barl rism of previous Indian cultures. In the last chapter of the Histc Garcilaso makes explicit his purpose in writing both parts:
Habiendo dado principio e esta nuestra história con el principio y origen los Incas, reyes que fueron del Perú, y habiendo dado larga noticia de conquistas y generosidades, de sus vidas y gobierno en paz y en guerra y la idolatria que en su gentilidad tuvieron, como largamente con el fa' divino lo hicimos en la primera parte de estos comentarios, con que cumplió la obligation que a la patria y a los parientes maternos se les del: Y en esta segunda, como se ha visto, se ha hecho larga relación [ emphasis] de las hazaňas y valentías que los bravos y valerosos espaňc hicicron en ganar aquel riquísimo imperio, con que asimismo he cumpl (aunque no por entero) con la obligación paterna que a mi padre y a : ilustres y generosos compafieros debo ... (iv, pp. 173-4)
Having begun this history with the commencement and origin of the Ii kings in Peru, and having noticed at length their conquests and genen deeds, their lives, their government in peace and war, and the idolatrc religion they had in heathen times - all of which were performed at lenj in the first part of these Commentaries, with divine aid - we fulfilled 1 obligation we felt toward our mother country and our maternal stock, the Second Part, as we have seen, a long account was given of the deeds a heroic actions that the brave and valiant Spaniards performed in conqu ing that wealthy empire, wherein we have fulfilled, even though í completely, our paternal obligations, which we owe to our father and illustrious and generous companions.74
THE  LAW  OF THE   LETTER
77
I icas were "kings in. Peru" and carried out "conquest and deeds," making that part of the world fit for the advent of -tiaiiity. The primera parte is a lengthy plea attempting to lish the splendor of Inca (not Indian) culture, based on oral vriiten testimony, leading up to the "treachery" of Atahualpa, usurps the rightful claims of Garcilaso's maternal relatives. ualpa's culpability is a cornerstone in the rhetorical structure > Comentarios. With it the Incajustifies the Spanish invasion and craies his maternal relatives from having surrendered too easily c conquering Europeans. In any case, the primera parte is part of Jiole appeal, but it involves only one aspect of it; proving that [ncas were noble by lineage and deed, and that they were zed people worthy of retaining their privileges in the new t*-. in a sense, Garcilaso is complying with the 1571 ce'dula by im about "the customs, rituals and myths of the people," but he 0 pleading for their recognition. Garcilaso is arguing in favor of te _ the Incas - not of a race. The segunda parte, in contrast, is a ilex, multilevel plea to exculpate Garcilaso's father and the liards as a whole, to make good the Inca's pretensions in lish society. In this sense, the first part fits within the design of econd; it is a necessary first step in the process of exculpation •estitution through writing. Like Lázaro, Garcilaso wants to tell ntire story, which involves the lives of both of his parents. As he in the last book of the História, his claim is "acerca de los cios de mi padre y la restitución patrimonial de mi madre" th reference to my father's service and the restoration of my íer's inheritance").
íe legal efficacy of the first part of the Comentarios in one instance fied Garcilaso greatly, and revealed better than anything else, lature of his historiographic enterprise. He writes the following e penultimate chapter of the História
bernador Martin Garcia de Loyola dejó una hija habida en su mujer änta, hija del principe don Diego Sairi Tupac. La cual hija trajeron a ňa y la casaron con un caballero muy principal Uamado don Juan ]uez de Borja. La católica majestad demás del rcpartimiento de indios a infanta heredó de su padre le ha hecho merced (según me lo han 0 de la corte) de título de marquesa de Oropesa, que es un pueblo que orrey don Francisco de Toledo fundó en el Perú, y le ílamó Oropesa -íe quedasc memoria en aquclla tierra de la casa y cstado de sus padres aelos. Sin esta merced y título me dicen que entre los ilustrísimos "es presidentes del concejo de Castilla y de Indias y cí confesor de su
I
78
MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
majestad y otros dos oidores del mismo concejo de Indias se tra consulta de hacerle grandes mercedes en gratificación de los much seňalados servicios que su padre el gobernador hizo a Su Majestad restitucion de su hercncia patrimonial. A lo cual me dicen que no si poco nuestros Comenlarios de la primera parte por la relation [my emph sucesiva que ha dado de aquellos Incas. Con esta nueva me doy gratificado y remunerado del trabajo y solicitud de haberlos escriti esperanza,. como en otras partes lo hemos dicho de galardón alguno.
Governor Martin Garcia Loyola left a daughter by his wife, the prin the daughter of Prince Don Diego Sairi Tupac. This daughter was bro to Spain and married to an eminent gentleman called Don Juan Enriqi Borja. His Catholic Majesty, as I hear in letters from the capital, conferred on her, in addition to the allocation of Indians which the prir inherited from her father, the title of marquesa de Oropesa, a town foui in Peru by Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo and called Oropes commemorate in Peru the house and estate of his parents and ancestor addition to this grant and title, I am told that the illustrious presides the Royal Council of Castile and of the Indies, His Majesty's confessor, two other judges of the Council of the Indies, are considering the que; of bestowing other great favors on her in recognition of the many nol services her father the governor rendered His Majesty, and in restitute her patrimonial inheritance. I am informed that the-First Part of Commentaries has been of no little assistance in this, by reason of this aco there given of the Inca kings. This news gratifies and rewards me few labor and care I have taken in the writing of the work, which I undert as I have said elsewhere, without any hope of reward.75
The parallels between the princess and Garcilaso are striking. ] her, he is of noble lineage on both sides, and like her, his fathei his view) performed valuable services to the Crown. It follows th his account of Incan grandeur is admitted as evidence in her cas should also be in his, and his specific mention of the officials at I: the councils who favored her is clearly a reference to his own fai before them. In Garcilaso's mind, the princess's claims are no n valid than his. But the point is that the first part of the Comenta the one most commonly thought of as merely a memoir or a vř plea in favor of the recognition of Inca culture, is no less a pal Garcilaso's relación to the authorities.
The restitution of Chimpu Ocllo's patrimony in the general se not merely as inheritance, was a vast historiographic and legal t for it involved a revision of the record that cast the developmer Andean history as a teleology leading up to Inca civilizatior
THE LAW OF THE LETTER
79
csitated a thorough philological and historical commentary on íish histories, as well as a translation of oral records and onal recollection into the language of Renaissance historiogra-A succession of monarchs worthy of Rome demanded a history in the high style, and Garcilaso endeavored to do so whenever ible.76 But the restitution of Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega, for jns that have been described, was an even more complex ]em because it involved the very conception of the whole work Garcilaso's relation to authority; that is to say, of writing within oatrimonial bureaucracy of the Empire, the question of repre-ition and self-representation. The central issues at the core of narrative of Latin America and the origins of the novel are ained in that relationship.
inter has told in great detail and with no small measure of aence of Garcilaso's efforts before the Council of the Indies, so I
not go over the details here. Suffice it to say that, in Spain, ;ilaso led a relatively modest life. He was partially dependent on renerosity of his paternal relatives, a situation that no doubt I him given his pretensions concerning the lineage of both of his nts. In a society as stratified as Spain's was then, and as erned with purity of blood, Garcilaso's anxieties had a real i. Without his lineage Garcilaso was a mere letrado; with it he a man of substance. The História general del Perú, the debt that ;ilaso pays his father and his companions) is also an investment lakes to acquire such substance. In contrast to the first part of lomentarios, the História deals with what could roughly be called >resent, although Garcilaso is writing about events that took ; fifty years before he commits them to paper.77 In this history of ^resent - of events that have vigencia, currency, even in legal s - the discursive elements typical of the relación are more int. Garcilaso is narrating here the fine mesh of contemporary ry, sometimes from day to day and from hour to hour, events he himself witnessed. He emphasizes throughout the book that iw the events he narrates with his own eyes and uses legal inology [testigo de vista) to validate his position as witness. iisms abound in the História, and the very nature of the text is of a relación, both as an account of his and his father's life and s and as a culling and summary of the documentary evidence of
ase.
ie História General del Perú is an oblique biography of Sebastián
8o
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
Garcilaso de la Vega and an even more indirect autobiography Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, the narrator. The book is a relation the guise of an história; the history of the conquest of Peru is tf framing narrative, but the focus of the overall, broad picture blurred, while the marginal figure of Sebastián, in a corner, appe; in sharp relief, but if observed closely, one can also see the contoui ■ Garcilaso's own profile. The history begins with the legal esta lishment of a corporation by the triumvirate that will undertake t: conquest of Peru, as if to set down the legal foundations of t| enterprise, and winds up with the trial and execution of the last In. claimant to the Crown, Tupac Amaru. The story, then, ranges fro-the first legal acts leading to the conquest of Peru to the iii subordination of the kingdom to the Spanish Crown, sealed at t pillory. Garcilaso objects to the harsh treatment of the last Inca a invests his story with a tragic tone.78 As a mestizo with royal lr-blood, he does not wish to see the claims of his maternal forebe. r threatened. The history also encompasses the life of Sebastián, w1 dies shortly before the execution of Tupac Amaru. Historv an. biography run parallel courses and blend with one another: in sense, the history of Peru is the life of Sebastián, replaced in t1, writing by his pleading son, his scribe.
Sebastian's biography begins with his arrival in Peru with il Pizarros and continues until his death. It contains a detailed an-touching account of his expedition to conquer Buenaventura, a u of survival in the jungle that anticipates some of the pages in mode * i Latin American novels such as La vorágine and Lospasosperdidos. T.ii account is of paramount importance because it establishes Sob. tián as one of the original conquistadors, therefore entitled to t h ■ privileges and exemptions. Most important, it establishes that   ■ obtained new territories for the Crown, hence he is due land a-Indians. The story of Sebastian's life continues with his particij ■ tion in the quarrels among the conquistadors and later the civil v\,s' that raged after the arrival of viceroy Blasco Núňez Vela. Gap laso's father is mentioned hundreds of times in the História, u r; ■ privilege for one whose highest rank in the government was corre. dor of Cuzco for a few years and who was a mere captain in il army.79 His son is careful to mention Sebastián among those on f ■■ side of the Crown, and he is at pains to show him in a good light every turn. Garcilaso is, of course, careful to review the record ■ what happened at the Battle of Huarina, collating the vařit■ i*
THE  LAW OF THE   LETTER
shed versions and questioning their validity. He winds up this ue biography with a panegyric of Sebastián, allegedly written funeral oration by a ecclesiastic who begged the Inca not to I his name. The oration takes ten pages of two columns in the oteca de Autores Espaňoles edition, and it is yet another : aphy of Sebastián, in the elegiac mode. The oration appears in liddle of the last (eighth) book of the História. Whether or not ilaso himself wrote it is difficult to say and perhaps of little rtance. What matters is that he chose to include it. It is a aary of the details of Sebastian's life scattered in the text, one of evices used to finish the História.
cept for this oration, Garcilaso's biography of his father is not in the pure Renaissance style of, for example, Lopez de ara's portrait of Cortés, but there are traces of it in the História. e is, in fact, throughout this second part an effort to write the ry of Peru in the style of the great Renaissance historians, like iardini.80 This is evident particularly in the descriptions of ;s, in the account of political maneuvering, and in the elo-ce of some of the speeches recreated by the Inca. The provi-alist unfolding typical of Spanish Habsburg historiography is nuch in evidence, and the meshing of Sebastian's life with the cal history of Peru, which obeys a Renaissance conception of as hero and protagonist of history. This is also true of the iptions of the original conquistadors, who appear as heroes in h of fame and power, as veritable princes in the Machiavellian , even if they really turned out to be so mostly in the pejorative ing of the term. This is the way in which Garcilaso's book lies with the higher forms of the State's discourse, the way in i his text appears to reflect the harmony of political and social r that the State wishes to convey in the representations of its inery at work. It is the all-encompassing, capacious Archive to i all the well-written relaciones are sent, with the voice of "Your hip" modulating the totalizing discourse of the State. This side ernal in the sense of being a simulacrum of the father through oquence of the authoritative State.
t this is not the only form of compliance with the discourse of täte. There is a second, conflicting model that dismantles the and predominates in the Inca's discourse: the notarial rhetoric : appeal, of the relation. The history of the civil wars is fraught legalisms both in the telling and in the story itself. Garcilaso
82
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
wants to date, name, place, validate and corroborate. He offei own eyewitness account as well as those of others, such as Got Silvestře, an old conquistador he meets in Spain who gave Gare much information for his Florida?1 He is sedulous in followin formulae of notarial rhetoric to establish the veracity of his tex often recounts individual cases, which turn out to be like : stories, describing the lives of the protagonists, large and small <y the conflict.82 This part reads like a picaresque novel, not onh because it is full of characters and incidents that appear to havi come out of the Guzman de Alfarache, but because the style itself, y, \\\ its emphasis on the concrete, the quotidian, the base, is very much like that of Mateo Alemán and other novelists, and also because tin narrative perspective is that of a child.
It is as a witness that Garcilaso inserts himself in the narrali\t and tells his autobiography. We see him listening to stories from hi' classmates about what happened in this or that event or takiru position at his father's house in order to be able to observe festivitic; or other events taking place in the plaza in front. We also see hini taking refuge in the house with his mother as his father's enemies loh cannonballs at it. It is as a witness that he can refute what historian: have said or add what they, for whatever reasons, have left out Garcilaso wants to correct the record, giving a truer relation Consequently, he is careful to cite those whose names do not figmx in a battle or conspiracy, and to tell the true story of what happen« at such and such an event. Legal language avails him of tha possibility.
Needless to say, some of these events are exceedingly dramatic, a: when a dinner is interrupted by a bevy of conquistadors who comt to murder the king's envoy, and Garcilaso and Sebastian escape over the roofs of neighboring houses. Or when Garcilaso relates as ; witness what happened at the execution of Almagro, or one of the Pizarros, and how he and his childhood friends played with a rotting part of Francisco de Carvajaľs dismembered corpse. Details, froir the color of the putrid flesh of the cadaver, to the qualities of a gi\ cr horse, are offered. The História, then, is filled with the documentan need to name, place, and date. The Archive absorbs the waywaid the trivial, and the marginal and turns them into knowledge anc power.
Garcilaso is scrupulous about mentioning everyone present ai every event. He is also careful to place and date each event with
THE  LAW OF THE   LETTER                                83
■e to details of his own life that sustain the truthfulness of the He is, naturally, diligent in consulting written sources,
e published histories to letters from his friends back in Peru.
lis it is evident that he wishes to set the record straight, that aspires to get at a truth that is not only the historian's
verisimilitude but the judge's executive kind of verification and action. Writing is a legal act.
The most carefully planned aspect of this notarial style are the r ts of conquistadors present at actions that favored the Crown, -here Sebastian's name never fails to appear. Careful planning is fco evident in passages where Garcilaso feels that the historians inve unfairly left out the names of conquistadors, or where some of their deeds have not been sufficiently recorded. But this concern emerges most clearly in the reading of the written sources. One cannot take lightly the title Garcilaso gave his most sustained narrative enterprise: Comentarios. As a genre, the commentary spanned both the humanistic and the notarial sides of the work. Commentaries were often written to explicate a classical text or even a fairly contemporary one like the commentary on the poetry of Garcilaso's namesake that Fernando de Herrera published. There is an inherent humility in the genre that fits in with the narrative situation of the relación. The commentary is an answer to an authoritative text: a fragment that depends for its form on that of the m.istertext. A commentary is a parasitic text and Garcilaso in part develops a parasitic relationship with the texts of his predecessors. But a commentary is also a legal text, the sort of text composed by a relator who, culling from the available record, submits a summary of a rase to test its validity.83 And that is very much the mode of the entire Comentarios reales.
Garcilaso is pleading before the Archive, before knowledge classified and stored by the State, which has determined that his father is guilty. To establish his case Garcilaso has to review the record and interpret it. He has to create his own archive, which will compete with the one the Council of the Indies has at its disposal. He reads the Spanish historians, particularly Francisco Lopez de Oótnara, Agustín de Zárate and Diego Fernandez de Palencia, to sift from them the most truthful version of events. The História, in particular, is a tissue of quotations from these authors. A large percentage of the body of Garcilaso's text has been literally copied -a la letra, as he says so many times - from the historian's books. The
84                                     MYTH AND ARCHIVE
Comentarios, particularly the História, is like a large quilt, made nn. patches of other works. It is a dialogue of texts, within the larr,' dialogue of the text with the authority of the Archive.
In the beginning I was the notary, dust covered and in no hurry, inventor of the inventory.
Nicolas Guillen84
Nowhere is this process more clearly displayed than in the descri tion of the Battle of Huarina and the entire chapter Garcila devotes to reviewing the versions given by the historians about 1 father's actions. The scene, in which the mestizo pleads his case person, and Lope Garcia de Castro thunders accusations about 1 father at him, dramatizes the whole structure of the book.
Garcilaso first gives his own version of Huarina, based on what heard from combatants on both sides and on what Gonzalo Silv< tre, who fought on the side of the Crown, told him. He is extreme careful to establish the validity of his point of view by giving mini details, even the color of some of the horses, and by citing testirno from both sides. What is at issue, of course, is whether his father c indeed give Gonzalo Pizarro his horse, because that leader's o\ horse had been killed or maimed in the battle, and whether in doing,  Sebastián saved the rebel from death, defeat, or hoi Garcílaso's account is based on what Gonzalo Silvestře told hi and Silvestře was precisely the one who wounded Pizarro's hoi while trying to capture him. No witness could conceivably offei more reliable testimony. According to what Garcilaso says Sil\es' told him, the wound to Pizarro's horse was very slight and could r have incapacitated the animal. But the incident is further cloud by the fact that Pizarro's horse died shortly after the battle, a Gonzalo kept Salinillas for quite a long time. Garcilaso, who fand himself as an expert on horses, goes on to explain that Gonzah horse died far from the battlefield, not from a wound, but from hy vi been allowed to drink too much water. He further shows that by t time his father allowed Pizarro to use Salinillas, the battle was ov hence his action could have had no bearing on the outcome.
These laborious justifications appear in what is also a very míru description of the battle, showing how Pizarro emerged victori«
THE LAW OF THE LETTER
85
ise of Carvajal's superior ability as a field marshal. Garcilaso is
ius to prove that Carvajal was a great soldier and Pizarro a
hv leader whose claims were not entirely without merit, in part
spel the accounts given by other historians. It is to these
unts that the whole description of the battle is aimed, for
)ns that Garcilaso makes quite explicit. The Inca vows that the
rians meant no evil to his father, that they wrote according to
,   testimony given them, but argues that the testimony was false.
j  remembers his classmates telling him about his father's appar-
■nt misdeed at Huarina, and also that his father had a notary public
iraw up a document dispelling the rumor, signed by over twenty
■ombatants on the Crown's side. Garcilaso goes on to tell the story
if his dramatic appearance before the Council of the Indies, a story
fcdl is the origin of the Comentarios reales and that is an enactment of
lie picaresque-relación narrative situation:
)o manera que no sin causa escribieron los historiadores lo que dicen, y yo srribo lo que fué, no por abonar a mi padre, ni por esperar mercedes, ni on pretension de pedirlas, sino por decir verdad de lo que pasó, porque de ste (lelito que aplican a Garcilaso, mi sefior, yo tengo la penitencia sin aber tenido la culpa: porque pidiendo yo mercedes a Su Majestad por los iTvidos de mi padre y por la restitución patrimonial de mi madre, que por aber muerto en breve tiempo la segunda vida de mi padre quedamos los «nás hermanos desamparados y viéndose en el consejo real de las Indias is niobanzas que de lo uno y de lo otro presenté,- hallándose convencidos quťllos seňores con mis probanzas, el licenciado Lope Garcia de Castro, uť1 (lespués fue por presidente al Perú, estando en su tribunal, me dijo: tQué merced queréis que os haga Su Majestad, habiendo hecho vuestro adrc: con Gonzalo Pizarro lo que hizo en la batalla de Huarina y dándole qtiťlla tan gran vitoria?" Y aunque yo repliqué que habia sido testimonio 1I50 que le habian levantado, me dijo: "Tiénenlo escrito los historiadores ;: quereislo negar?" Con esto me despidieron de aquellas pretensiones y "miron las puertas a otras que después acá pudiera haber tenido ...
he historians therefore did not write as they did without cause; and I riir what passed, not to justify my father, or in the hope of reward or with 'H idea of claiming one, but merely to tell the truth about what happened, ui ihis crime has been imputed to my lord Garcilaso, and I have done the "nance for it without any guilt or blame. I asked His Majesty to reward .y father's services and restore my mother's property - for as my father's lie r widow died soon after him, we brothers and sisters were all ipoverished. But when the Royal Council of the Indies studied the itlrnce I presented about all this, and they were convinced of the solidity
86
MYTH AND  ARCHIVE
of my case, a member of the court, Licenciáte Lope Garcia de Cast ro. i was after president of Peru, said to me: "What reward do you expect Majesty to grant you when your father did as he did at the ban!, Huarina and gave Gonzalo Pizarro that great victory?" And althouj; replied that this was false witness that had been brought against me said: "The historians have written it: are you going to deny it?" With they dismissed my claims and closed the door against others I might h made since .. ,85
The historians in question are the same three that Garcilaso been glossing and correcting throughout his text: Agu s tin de /ár: Francisco Lopez de Gómara, and Diego Fernandez, el Paletui Gómara, whom Garcilaso calls on occasion "that Imperial Oh lain," was not only the historian of the conquest of Mexico, but of the greatest humanists of sixteenth-century Spain, totally d eve to the policies of Philip II, to whom he dedicated his compendi and elegant História general de las Indias (Antwerp, 1553).86 His t is triumphant verging on the propaganda s tic. Agustín de /ár. author of an História del descubrimientoy conquista de la provincia del }\ de las guerrasy cosas seňaladas en ella (Antwerp, 1555), was a ft accountant, sent to the New World with Blasco Nunez Vela.'17 was rewarded for his good services there by being put in charg the royal treasury in Flanders, where he published his book. ; dedicated to the Emperor. Garcilaso tends to favor his testing because Zárate was present at many of the events he descril though he also corrects him when necessary. Diego Fernande: resident of Palencia, hence el Palentino, was a shadowy figi obviously a notary or scribe turned historian. His História del I' published in 1569, shows signs of his having had access to pri\ documents, which may mean that he was a secretary.88 The bun also dedicated to Philip II. Although Garcilaso quotes other hi-ries, these three books are the ones he obviously has at hand ;i' writes, for they are quoted extensively in the História. These ,\vc historians to whom Licentiate Garcia de Castro confidently allu. in his encounter with the mestizo in the chambers of the Coune: the Indies. They constitute the most resilient vault of the Arch i The voice of the witness rings feebly against Lope Garcia Castro's blast, which probably echoed in the chambers of council. Like Garcilaso's commentary, woven around the texl of archival historians, the voice is in a parasitic relationship to unwavering core of the story.  Garcilaso pits the details ul
THE  LAW  OF THE  LETTER
87
■ pledge against the overarching, absorbing truth of the Archive, account of Gonzalo Silvestře against the harmonious prose of T órjez de Gómara. It is at this point that Garcilaso offers a direct raternent about the importance of his own life that echoes the one • Ijiz&rillcrs prologue: "Perdónenseme estas impertinencias, que , he dicho por queja y agravio que mi mala fortuna en este particular me ha hecho y quien ha escrito vidas de tantos, no es mucho e diga algo de la suya" ("I hope I may be pardoned for this tire--orrie outburst, which I have included in dudgeon against my ill fortune in this matter: one who has written the lives of so many others can hardly be criticized for saying something of his own").89 Tli f particularidades that Garcilaso always gives and insists upon are the wayward details, the criminal, as it were, which can only be trapped by a particularized relación. His book is ultimately both a relation and a history, better yet, the dialectical interplay between the two. Writing, by appearing in the guise of the State's rhetoric, acquires an illusory freedom by compliance, a mimetic process that will determine from now on the form of the novel and the narrative of Latin America.
A late historian of the discovery and conquest of America, Juan Rodriguez Freyle, a bureaucrat at Santa Fe de Bogota, wrote a hook well into the seventeenth century, that lays bare the structure of Garcilaso's and its relation to the origins of the novel. The book is commonly known as El Carnero and was published in 1636. The fact that Garcilaso wrote at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century makes his work contemporary to the picaresque novels which pick up the legacy of Lazarillo de Tormes (1^54) and, in a deliberate and reflexive way, create the picaresque genre. I refer especially to Guzman de Alfarache (1599) by Mateo Alemán, but also to Francisco de Quevedo's El buseón, written earlier but not published until 1626, and Francisco Lopez de Ubcda's La pícara Justina (1605), already mentioned. The work of ihc Inca, as I have observed, shares fundamental features with the Picaresque, but it cannot be a reaction to it since it is a parallel phenomenon. This is not the case with Rodriguez Freyle, whose book takes into account not only the principal aspects of the picaresque tradition, but also the most important chronicles of the discovery and conquest of the Indies. The work of Rodriguez Freyle is a  crepuscular,   disbelieving   and   irreverent   synthesis   of Latin
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
American history, one that tilts more decisively in the direction the novel than Garcilaso's text. Rodriguez Freyle's critical pet so, tive is what allows for the kind of reading proposed here. He is t theoretician of the Archive.
The settings, events and characters of El Carnero are the same those of the Picaresque, but the work offers itself as, or pretends be, a history of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, together w\\\ series of more or less impudent stories, none of which is narrated the first person like the stories of Lázaro, Guzman, Pablos, Justi and the others. Because several of the stories contained in the be are so anthological, no critic has stopped to ask what El Carnero is a whole. As with the Comentarios reales, however, the issue of what t book is or pretends to be is a crucial one that can only be answered the context of my discussion of notarial rhetoric and renaúsai historiography.
Rodriguez Freyle dramatizes, in the global construction uf work, the quarrel among the various rhetorical forms from u hi the Picaresque emerges as a result of the socio-political evolution the Spanish Empire. The principal contestants in that quarrel ; history, as conceived by the humanists who construct the ov arching ideological legitimation of the State, and the bureaucra rhetoric also created by the Empire, through which the individi communicated to acquire his or her own legitimacy. The disposui of the battle is already evident in the title of the book, which reads its entirety: El Carnero. Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Beirut Granada de las Indias Occidentales del Mar Océano y fundación de la cha de Santa Fe de Bogotaprimera de este reino donde sefundó la real audinui cancillería,  siendo  la cabeza se hizo Arzobispado.   Cuéntase en c I la descubrimiento, algunas guerras civiles que habia entre sus naturales, costumbres, gentes,y de quéprocedió este nombre tan celebrado de El Dora Los generates, capitanesy soldados que vinieron a su conquista, con todos presidentes, oidores y visitadores que han sido de la Real Audiencia, i Arzobispos, prebendados y dignidades que han sido de esta santa i^/e catedral, desde el ano de 153g que sefundó, hasta 1636, que esto se escribe: algunos casos sucedidos en este Reino, que van en la história para ejemplo,} para imitarlos por el daňo de la conciencia.90 Intrigued, and for gu reason, by the brief title by which the work came to be krur (whose meaning I will examine), few readers have stopped to n< the irony of the complete title, especially seen in relation lo 1 contents of the book, and without skipping over its outran
THE LAW OF THE LETTER
89
Tth The work which the title names is the opposite of what the er proclaims. The "casos sucedidos en este Reino," which the > mentions at the end as a mere addition, are the predominant nent while the history proper is only a pretext for framing the •ies. This pretext is of great significance, but the inversion must underlined: instead of the stories being an aggregate of or i plemen t to the history, the history itself has become a rhetorical it ion. Like the major histories of the New World El Carnero ins at the beginning, from discovery and conquest to the nidation of the City, but this whole cycle is given as a brief, oductory summary. Years of bloody battles, heroic deeds and founding of cities occupy a few chapters, while the adventures
misadventures of don Juan-like husbands and not too virtuous Tied women are historicized with a wealth of details. The casos ci i rally take up the whole book. It is evident that El Carnero, seen ;s totality, is a corrosive critique of the chronicles of the discovery
conquest of Latin America, beginning with the title itself, which .inds one of Herrera y Tordesillas' História general de los castellanos n islasy tierra firme.
'lie model parodied in El Carnero is the ideal of Spanish historio-oln in the sixteenth century and beyond, analyzed above, which ibiiies rules of stylistic decorum with an overall providentialist 1 of medieval origin. Opposing that model was notarial rhetoric, eh, as we also saw, is the more humble rrieans of expression jugh which the common people carried out their transactions i the State. In El Carnero, as in the Comentarios, there is a frontation between the vast program of Habsburg historiogra-, whose principal exponent was probably López de Górnara, and narration of an individual life. The former implied a lineal and monious evolution of history reflected in the elegant and coher-urganization of the text, while the latter, in contrast, narrates an vidual existence, trapped in the trifling network of daily life cast
text whose model and sources are not literary but bureaucratic. ' historiography of the Indies searches for general laws of orical evolution and attempts to codify them in an organic text. ■ ca.\os that Rodriguez Freyle relates are concerned with the law
most concrete and social sense. From the perspective of Lopez
ióiuara, the historiography of the Indies is related to poetics, to rhivalric romances, to the most elevated models of Renaissance ic; from the perspective of the casos, it is related to the Picaresque
90                                    MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
which sought its form not in literature but in legal formulae suc.i the relación. In El Carnero history, presumably the essence of book, becomes a pretext, whereas the stories, the gossip, w] . |, could have been a mere rhetorical ornament or exempla, bee;   . central and more substantial. This bold inversion on the pai   .,. Rodriguez Freyle is mainly a critical move: like the picaro's relat   • his entire book is a contrived act of mimicking, a liberation thro i |, feigned compliance.
Susan Herman's brilliant discovery of the meaning of the sh .-i title El Carnero clarifies the significance of Rodriguez Fre\   \ critique. Herman has succeeded in establishing that "carne- r refers neither to the leather in which the book was bound, nor to í I   i which adorns the foreheads of several husbands in the story; ral!n * it is derived from carnarium and alludes by analogy to the place wl-i i ■ discarded papers were thrown.91 "Carnero" meant the wastepai- i basket at the Santa Fe de Bogota audiencia, the bin where the texli. u remnants of a variety of legal cases were discarded. The Picaresc ■ whose world of "casos" {like Lazarillo's) Rodriguez Freyle evok— by means of this founding metaphor, is also the product of tb -textual byproducts of the penal  bureaucracy.  The wastepa|-i-basket of the Santa Fe court is a mock Archive, a textual storeho ■-■■ which contains, in pell-mell fashion, the lives and deeds of pic   -and individuals like Garcilaso who lived almost virtually on   !n margins of the law. The wastepaper basket of the court at Bogoť i-not Don Quijote's library; what matters in the new literát i:-inaugurated by the Picaresque and colonial Latin American nai ■.-tive is precisely that it pretends not to be literature.
The cases that make up the major portion of El Carnero are ab"'i illicit sexual activities; that is to say, in the context of the functi-i -performed by the lawyers who drew up the documents that woi:"i-! up in the trash bin of the audiencia,  about marriage and il-transgressions committed against the institution. The classical; "i I medieval literary tradition behind this theme is well-known, an« would be foolish not to recognize its importance in El Carnero. I-: many ways Rodriguez Freyle's book is a sort of colonial Became.-But the combination of transgressions against the institution ■ I marriage and its legalistic background is more properly part of -I " picaresque tradition as I have been analyzing it here, whicl    -already part of the Renaissance. The all-important issue of leg ■ ■ macy, which is also at the core of Garcilaso's literary enterprise it- i"
THE  LAW OF THE  LETTER
91
ke in the prurient elements of El Carnero. There is a connection
ween the illegal and indiscriminate sexual activity El Carnero
.-trays and the proliferation of writing as law. It is by revealing the
'   inection that Rodriguez Freyle provides the most significant
.ight into the origins of the novel. '" Barry Sieber and Javier Herrero have demonstrated convincingly
11|tf sexuality permeates Lazarillo at all levels, and in a study of two
, Cervantes' exemplary novels I have shown to what extent .„. trimonial vicissitudes play an important role in the founding
.,Ie of the Picaresque.92 Lázaro, Guzman, Pablos, Berganza, l pión and other picaros are either offspring or parents of dubious ,. ■ liugal fidelity. Lázaro and Pablos end up marrying or living with ....men whose sexual activities are anything but legal. There is no ...ntract that legitimizes the picaro's relationship with society or the ,. te except the relación, the report or letter that he himself writes. |i-'th the pícaro's marriage as well as the document he writes about
.1^ life are proof that writing, in its proliferation, reflects the . vorder of the world, not its submission to the law. This is the same aclusion at which the reader has to arrive in Garcilaso's review of ■ p record concerning the Battle of Huarina - the text of the Archive ..■ntains power but not truth, it punishes but does not exculpate. I iie document written by the/izWo-novelist unveils this. Thepicaro's it is ambiguous, proliferating, polysemic, while taking the form of .   egal document that is expected to guarantee its fidelity to the
Kts,  and  beyond  that,  the  cohesiveness  of the  State,  which thorizes and backs up truth and its circulation. Just like the laws
uking up the derecho indiano, marriage in the Picaresque and El f rnero "se acata pero no se cumple," its authority is recognized, but 'i t obeyed except in its external form. This is the most subversive
'pect of the Picaresque and the Comentaňos reales that El Carnero I "ings out, one that points at the process whereby the texts that ii ost forcefully attempt to rule society and reflect its values are A own to labor in the opposite direction; it is the process through
■ liich the discourse of the novel is created. El Carnero performs this
■ 1 itical function in relation to the language of the law much in the - me way as the Comentarios reales performs it in relation to the
■nguage of history. The emerging novel is the meeting place of both
itiques.
El Carnero also exposes another fundamental feature of the novel, ■ lieh persists until today and that is the starting point of this study;
Q2                                          MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
that it is not derived mainly from a literary tradition, but from 01 he manifestations of language closer to the functioning of the moden state. The novel imitates not reality but the conventions of thos other manifestations of language, using them as founding fables t-show that in their origin and functioning they are similar [■ literature.
3
\ jost world re-discovered: Sarmiento's Facundo and E. da Cunha's Os Sertöes
i
vii English traveler at the beginning of the nineteenth century, referring to hi> journey by canoe and mule that could last as long as fifty days, had i-riucn: "This is one of the most miserable and uncomfortable pilgrimages hm a human being can make." This had no longer been true during the rst eighty years of steam navigation, and then it became true again forever .-■hi'ii the alligators ate the last butterfly and the maternal manatees were one. the parrots, the monkeys, the villages were gone: everything was ,„-,,■.                   Gabriel Garcia Márquez, El amor en los tiempos del cólera1
.""he opening sentence of Esteban Echeverria's "El matadero" is .mbiguous, but at the same time clearly programmatic: "A pesar de .nie la mia es história, no la empezaré por el area de Noé y la rnealogía de sus ascendientes como acostumbraban a hacerlo los .nriguos hístoriadores espaňoles de America que deben ser nuestros irolotipos" ("Although the following narrative is historical, I shall mi begin it with Noah's ark and the genealogy of his forbears as was vom once to be done by the ancient Spanish historians of America vho should be our model(s").2 This is quite a portentous beginning ;>r ii mere novella, but Echeverria's is a very ambitious text. The argentine writer wanted to depict in his story the ruthless repression o which opponents of Rosas' dictatorship were being subjected. .'he explicit scenes of mayhem are presented in the clinical tone of a cientific observer describing natural phenomena. In the story, a oung man who is very clearly a projection of the author is assaulted >y the rabble who work or just assemble at the Buenos Aires laughterhouse. These thugs represent the barbaric supporters of licrator Juan Manuel Rosas, who ruled Argentina from 1829 to ■832. The young man is slain as if he were just another animal. "El ■natadero" is a political allegory, but also much more. Echeverria's uttement about history is important for two reasons.  First, it
93
94
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
acknowledges a desire for continuity of purpose in Latin America history. The historians to whom Echeverria refers are obviously the chroniclers of the discovery and conquest of America. Like them he wishes to place the New World within a large historical outline hence his allusion to the Bible. Writing the narrative of Latin America involves writing about the beginning of history. But, at the same time that Echeverria invokes the chroniclers as his models he signals a break with them. This break is evidence of the emergence of a new masterstory in the narrative of Latin America. The story will not depend on a providentiahst design reaching back to biblical events for coherence and meaning, like the Spanish chronicles did yet it will have a beginning just as powerful as theirs in determining the unfolding of Latin American history. Echeverria's history will be of the present. After the sentence just quoted, Echeverria writes: "Tengo muchas razones para no seguir ese ejemplo [that of the chronicler's], las que callo por no ser difuso. Diré solamente que los sucesos de mi narración pasaban por los aňos de Cristo de 183 ..." (pp. 12-13) {"Numerous reasons I might adduce for not following their example, but I shall pass them over in order to avoid prolixity, stating merely that the events here narrated occurred in the 1830^ of our Christian era" [p. 210]). In the vast expanse of time encompassed by the Christian era, within which the chroniclers assembled their capacious historical machines, Echeverria's own time in the present is privileged as the start. That present is distinctive and historical because Latin American nature endows it with the power to break with the past and create a new and distinct sequence. The break is represented by violence in "El matadero." the violence whose victim is the educated young observer, who could not remain detached enough from the phenomena that he watched. The violent present is its own antecedent, its own start. Echeverria's novella marks the beginning of a new Latin American masterstory, mediated by the most authoritative discourse produced in the West since the eighteenth century: modern science. "El matadero" may very well contain all of the most important elements in thai masterstory.
It is not by chance that Echeverria should be the writer to signal in such a clear fashion a break with the previous masterstory, which was based on the relationship between writing and the voluminous, legal production of the Spanish Empire. The decadence of the Spanish Empire since before the eighteenth century is a fact t
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
95
d not be belabored here. What is important, however, is that ' vers such as  England,  who were taking a forward leap to rk-rnity through the industrial revolution came increasingly into ntact with territories in the Spanish Empire. Spain, which had hvioiisly lagged behind in the development of science and tech-loü'V, was either being replaced by independent republics, or its n t rôl was so weak in the territories it did hold that communication -ith other European powers via contraband was extensive.3 Illegal nn,nierce with England and France was a fact of life in Spanish colonies from the beginning of Spanish rule, but as the Spanish Fmpii'-' l°st *ts §r^P'  smuggling increased or was replaced by ourright takeovers, as in the case of the English occupation of Havana in 1762 and that of Buenos Aires in 1806. Contacts such as these with Spanish territories were often decisive in changing colonial societies, propelling them sometimes ahead of Spain into the new mercantilist world created by the Industrial Revolution.4 In a sense, whether the territory in question was independent of Spain or not. it was often entangled in a web of commercial and cultural relalions with other European powers that turned it into a neo-eolonv of such growing empires. In Spain itself, after the accession lo power of the Bourbon dynasty, and particularly during the reign of Charles III, a sizeable elite, sometimes with the support of the Grnwn.   tapped   into   the   sources   of the   Enlightenment,   and attempted to bring about radical reforms. The gyrations of Spanish law became ever more abstract, increasingly less concerned with the reality of the new societies, except where it constrained the native, Creole oligarchy, which was European and U.S. oriented. Hence a new kind of hegemonic discourse emerged. Perhaps the last important work to emerge from the law-narrative relationship was Alonso Carrióde la Vandera's El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1773), which turns nut to be about the circulation of documents in Spanish America, and where the complex games of authorship lead to the inescapable conclusion that the book is its own picaresque protagonist, as Karen Stolley has brilliantly shown.5
Given the kind of relationship the former Spanish dominions established with the new powers, one in which furnishing raw materials was the most important role, it is not surprising that nature should be the focus of such discourse, though this is not the only motive. And given the advancement of Argentina with respect to the rest of Latin America as well as its apparently boundless
0,6                                          MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
natural resources, it should come as no surprise that Argentin, writers should be the focus of attention, though similar exampd abound in the rest of Latin America. This new masterstory does rn-s derive its cogency from a direct observation and imitation of Lat; American nature, but from the mediation of works by numcroi,. scientific travelers who should rightly be considered the secon I discoverers of the New World. If the first discoverers and settle-* appropriated Latin America by means of legal discourse, these ne.\ conquistadors did so with the aid of scientific discourse, whicli allowed them to name again (as if for the first time) the flora an fauna of the New World. This discourse had its own rhetoric, which differs considerably from what we identify as scientific today. The; travelers wrote accounts in the form of diaries and travelogues ih.4 did  not fall entirely  outside literature.  There  was,  in fact, promiscuous complicity between literature and scientific report at that made it relatively easy for Latin American writers to assimila these narratives. The new Latin American narrative absorbs th: second voyage, this pilgrimage in search of Latin American hi -torical uniqueness through the textual mediation of Europe;»--science.
But the law does not disappear altogether from these narrative Echeverria's scene of frenzied lawlessness also reveals the Iran formation of legal discourse in this second masterstory, and how . continues to appear as an important vestige until the present. 1 reli i to the law in the literal sense as legal codes, not to the more abstra sense in which I use it in this book as the hegemonic discourse th. mediates the narrative; the law which, under different guises, serv< • as the model the narrative follows. The law as penal code appeal» again through individuals who are outside of it, who have commi -ted an infraction that isolates them from the norm, like the thugs i-Echeverria's  story.  Whereas  in  the colonial  period  lawlessnr--centered on questions of legitimacy - bastardy, adultery, secession now violence is the issue, a violence that excludes yet does iw: threaten legitimacy. Being outside the law in the sixteenth centur meant one did not exist in a civil sense. In the nineteenth centui and after, lawlessness does not exclude; the criminal Other i h a1 Other Within, created by the split of Latin American society im-urban and rural worlds as a result of modernity. That Other ■» within a law that includes the observer, an observer who, in the ca» of the narrative,  both fears  and desires  to  be like him.  Ihi*
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
97
clusiveness does not mean, of course, that the Other Within will . f» given a place in Latin America's stratified society, but rather that
■ PrePresents a nature which* newly interpreted by science, beckons c an all-inclusive law that will explain the otherness of the New
World as a whole. From now on the Latin American narrative will
,ieal obsessively with that Other Within who may be the source of
ill- that is, the violent origin of the difference that makes Latin
\mťľica, distinct, and consequently original. This problematic will-
icmain as a strong vestige not only in obvious texts such as Horacio
Ouiroga's stories, but also in more recent ones like Cortázar's
£<\xoltl." Facundo Quiroga, Antonio Conselheiro, Doňa Barbara,
Oometrio Macias, become the central characters of their respective
■jooks because they are lawless and violent in some way. Their
randeur is a measure of their otherness, of their straying from the
norm; in their cases, literally from the law. The Latin American self
lioth fears and desires that Other Within, because of his lawlessness,
■nd [ravels to meet him. But the only way to apprehend him is
h rough the mediation of a hegemonic discourse, which is now that
f modern science, as disseminated by the naturalists who turned
■he New World into their living laboratory.
As with legal discourse,  the new is a dialectical process of : nitation and distortion, a process that becomes itself the subtext or
■ rue masterstory. No book exemplifies this operation more dramati-. ally and no book leaves a deeper imprint on Latin American
■ arrative, than Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), a near contemporary of El matadero," perhaps even its full-blown version.
ľacundo is a book that is impossible to pigeonhole; it is a sociological »lud y of Argentine culture, a political pamphlet against the dictator-»iip of Juan Manuel Rosas, a philological investigation of the
■ rigins of Argentine literature, a biography of the provincial caudillo I acutido Quiroga, Sarmiento's autobiography, a nostalgic evo-
■ ation of the homeland by a political exile, a novel based on the "igure of Quiroga; to me it is like our Phenomenology of the Spirit. Whatever one makes of the book, Facundo is one of those classics ' hose influence is pervasive and enduring and which is claimed by - *\eral disciplines at once. The fact that Sarmiento rose to become
resident of Argentina and put into practice policies that had such a
98
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
tremendous impact on the course of his country's history adds to i canonical status of his book. The most recent evidence of Facuna lasting relevance are the debates around the figure of Caliban symbol of Latin American culture, a polemic whose origin is fou in Sarmiento.6 Another, perhaps more durable resurgence is t proliferation of dictator-novels in Latin America, all of which he their common source in Facundo? Carpentier's El recurso del mét (1974) pays the most explicit homage to the Argentine, not only such thinly veiled allusions as giving the name of Nueva Cordova the provincial  town in which  part of the  action  takes  plac ■ Carpentier's novel is a critical reflection of the mimetic proce between European and Latin American texts that Facundo sets 1. motion. That process is one of the reasons for its continued presen . in the Latin American literary imagination. It is, therefore, not !■ accident that Facundo centers on the issue of authority and power Facundo 0 civilization y barbaric en las pampas argentinas was writti 1 while Sarmiento was in political exile in Chile, fleeing from tin dictatorship of Rosas. As with many classics, much to the frustrate of positivistic critics, the text evolved through various editions,    ■ that it is really impossible to say which is the definitive version ■ Facundo, When it first appeared in 1845 in Santiago de Chile, t] book was called Civilizacióny barbaric. Vida de Juan Facundo Quirogc aspecto fisico, costumbresy hábitos de la República Argentina. The secon edition dropped the pair civilizacióny barbaric, a formula that wou1 spawn a progeny of commentators and become a topic of Lati American literature and thought. The book is now simply calli Vida de Facundo Quirogay aspecto fisico, costumbres y hábitos de la Repúbh Argentina, seguida de apuntes biográficos sobre el general Fray Felix Ala (1851). There are several other editions in Spanish, including 0 printed in New York in 1868 and one in Paris in 1874. Whatever ť changes, the core of Sarmiento's book continued to be the life . Facundo Quiroga, a caudillo, or strong man, from the Argentin pampas,   whom  Sarmiento  wishes  to  study in  order  to  bettt understand Rosas and the genesis and exercise of political power i his country. By studying Facundo Quiroga, Sarmiento hopes t isolate an early stage in the development of dictatorship, its seed, a it were. Although he was Sarmiento's contemporary,  Facund Quiroga's violent present harks back to the origin - a present origii The study of Facundo Quiroga leads Sarmiento to his description ( the pampas and the society of gauchos from which the caudil
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED                          99
red (though, strictly speaking, Facundo was from Llanos de la
)   power and authority are somehow lodged in the seminal
. 0f Facundo Quiroga, a barbaric product of the land who,
iento knows, is at the contradictory core of Argentinian, and by
sion, Latin American culture (what Hegel, when he spoke of
leon, called a world-historical individual).8 Yet he, Sarmiento
if is also a part ofthat culture; the part that will be, he hopes,
alized future. It is with fascination and repulsion that Sar-
o approaches Facundo Quiroga, like someone delving into the
dancer recesses of his or her own subconscious. The grandeur of the
book is predicated on this antithetical origin, a cauldron of warring
contraries in which author and protagonist embrace like Dioscuric
twins, joined and separated by their correlative differences.
Facundo Quiroga was not, of course, the only caudillo, nor was he necessarily the most ferocious. He was one of many who emerged alter Independence, and who vied with each other in a struggle for life that certainly appeared to be based on the survival of the fittest. (Their wars reappear in those of Colonel Aureliano Buendia in Cien mos de soledad.) By 1819 the caudillos with their gaucho bands were the lords of much of the countryside: Estanislao Lopez was master of Santa Fe, Francisco Ramirez controlled Entre Ríos, Aráoz ruled Tucumán. Quiroga was the strongman of Rioja, where he had been born to a family that prospered, but he had wandered off to war, winding up in a Chilean cell, where he is reported to have killed the Spaniard who helped him escape. Though notorious, Facundo Quiroga was not necessarily unique. It was the group of outlaws, of caudillos, not Facundo Quiroga himself, who eventually gave one of tliem, Rosas, power. (Stricto sensu Rosas' title continued to be Governor of the province of Buenos Aires, though the other Governors delegated to him the power to represent them abroad.) But when he was ambushed and killed at Barranca Yaco, reportedly on direct orders from Rosas, his life acquired a neatness that elevated him from mere type to legend.9 To understand him Sarmiento needs the aid of science.
Sarmiento's relationship to Facundo Quiroga is homologous to the one his book establishes with the discourse of scientific travelers and thinkers whose names he mentions and whose texts he quotes or uses as epigraphs throughout. The role of this web of texts - some placed in liminal positions, others quoted in the body of the work —is tu lend authority to Sarmiento's discourse, to serve as a model, and
100                                   MYTH AND ARCHIVE
to give Sarmiento legitimacy as author. For Facundo Quiroga to b intelligible (that is, to be legible), he has to conform to the scientif categories and rhetoric of modern science; yet, to be compelling airworthy of attention he has to fall out of them. To be readable \. Europeans or to those steeped in European culture, Sarmiento h; * to write a book that conforms to their discourse; yet, to be himseh and hence interesting to them, he has to be different and original. A -established by the relationship between the discourse of the law an narrative in colonial times, the mimetic act will serve as a form o liberation, both because of the formal compliance implicit in th very act of representation, and because of the self-annulment th; i takes place in that process of compliance, in the absorption an i denial of the authoritarian relationship established. The dimensior--and reach of this subtext increase from Sarmiento to Euclides d Cunha. But let me first turn to the mediation or model.
3
To be able or not to perceive the distinctive hues ofthat which is Creole [i.. Latin American] may be insignificant, but the fact is that of all the foreig travelers (not excluding, by the way, the Spaniards), no one perceives thei better than the English: Miller, Robertson, Burton, Cunninghan Graham, Hudson.                                                               J. L. Borges
Travel literature has been a mainstay of writing about the Ne1. World and, in fact, many, if not all, of the relaciones mentioned in tb previous chapter were récits de voyage, beginning with Columbus Diario. The discovery and conquest of America gave rise to a gre< deal of travel literature, much of it concerned, even if at time-incidentally, with scientific reportage. The cronista cosmógrafo, as see ■ before, was expected to tally as much information as possible abou natural phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions and storms. Trav< literature, as Percy G. Adams has shown in his compendious bool. has been an important part of European letters since Herodotus and has evolved according to changing historical conditions withou ever becoming a genre, or even being confined to prose. Adams ha-also shown how travel literature may have influenced the emergeno of the modern novel, mostly though parody.11 The fact that parodie ■ of travel  books  as  influential  as   Gulliver's  Travels and   Candic-appeared already in the eighteenth century (with the latter including a journey to South America) is evidence of the influence of tráví!
A  LOST  WORLD  REDISCOVERED                        101
rature jn tne period that I am concerned with, and of its being
ne of the forms the novel assumes. The travel literature relevant to
purposes here, however, is specifically related to the rise of
meiern science. Hence, while the history furnished by Adams,
which only reaches to the end of the eighteenth century, is relevant
as background, scientific travel to Latin America in the modern era
has c liaracteristics of its own, determined by the new conception of
nature formulated by modern science.
The importance of the copious travel literature produced by the numerous scientific travelers who criss-crossed Latin America in the cjo|ueenth and nineteenth centuries has not been totally overlooked, though as a body of writing it has yet to be systematically studied. 'Jo date Edward J. Goodman's is the best general introduction to the subject.12 In Latin America, the only important work on the travelers was done by Carlos J. Cordero, whose Los relatos de los viftji'ros extranjeros posteriores a la Revolución de Mayo como fuentes de hiüoria argentina is much more than the title announces.13 The relevance of travel literature to Latin American literary history has all but been ignored. The overall import of travel literature in the general context of Latin American culture was established in 1944 bv Mariano Picon Salas, who wrote, with his customary perspicuity:
Tin1 growing interest of European countries, notably England and France, in assuring the freedom of the seas for their own international trade, together with the spirit of research in natural history characteristic of the ace made the eighteenth century a period of scientific expeditions [...] Commercial and political advantage was thus identified with scientific curiosity. Some of these eighteenth-century travelers, Louis de Bougainville for instance, cleverly combined a scrutiny of nature with adventure ami brought back information of interest to both their monarchs and their academies of science. With specimens from so many distant places, botanical gardens, mineralogical collections, and museums of "curiosities" were established in European capitals from Madrid to Saint Petersburg.14
The combination of economic interest, scientific inquisitiveness, and desire for adventure characterized the travels of European scientists for nearly two centuries. Picon Salas lays out most of the major characteristics of European scientific travel literature in the modern era. Modern imperial powers, through institutions charged wiih acquiring and organizing knowledge (scientific institutes, jardins des plantes, museums of natural history, Tiergarten), commission individuals possessing the scientific competence to travel to
102
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
their colonies or potential colonies to gather information.'^ there, these often colorful individuals engage in a variety of a tures in the pursuit of knowledge and profit. The result is thou of books describing, analyzing, and classifying the flora, I landscape,   social   organization,   ethnic   composition,   fossi mations, atmosphere, in short, everything that could be kno\ nineteenth-century  science.   The  equation  between  powei knowledge, between collection and possession could not be cl> particularly when one takes into account that many of the tra\ as in the case of Captain Francis Bond Head, were representati corporations involved in some sort of economic exploitation, si mining.  In many other instances the exploration and res carried out by the travelers  had a direct or indirect mi application, and in fact, travelers like Captain Richard Burton military men. The various attempts that the British Empire mi occupy territories vacated by the Spanish are less mediated ma tations of this relationship between knowledge and power, as those by the United States when it emerged on the world scene economic and military power in its own right (there were quite travelers from the United States).16 This means, paradox (given that they were often active agents in fierce economic exp tion), that these scientific travelers were more often than not a of progress, and that their efforts had in some instances a revoh ary impact on Latin American societies. The case of Alexandr Humboldt is, of course, the most notorious in this regard.
Backed as they were by the might of their empires and armed the systemic cogency of European science, these travelers and writings became the purveyors of a discourse about Latin Ame reality that rang true and was enormously influential. Their t discursive activity, from traveling itself to taxonomical prac embodied truth and exuded authority through its own perform The influence of this travel literature was immense, not on political developments within the very reality they described, b the conception ofthat reality that individuals within it had of i of themselves. A crucial component in that Creole mind wa scientific knowledge of Latin American nature, which was in i cases made available or possible by scientific travelers. Si evidence of the enduring influence of scientific travel books in 1 America since the beginning of the nineteenth century can be f in a journal such as El Plantet, published in Cuba by Doming
A  LOST  WORLD REDISCOVERED                        IO3
xfnjiie and the group of Romantic writers who first conceived the
tion that there could be a Cuban literature. In addition to poetry,
„c-ivs and history, the journal contained long pieces by the Cuban
tu'ralist Felipe Poey, accompanied by drawings of animals and
. 'ants much like those found in the travel books.17
The obsolete legal discourse of Spanish colonization was replaced
I ■ scientific discourse as the authoritative language of knowledge,
if-knowledge, and legitimation. This scientific discourse became
V uhject of imitation by Latin American narratives, both fictional
.■id non-fictional. Conventional literary history, which focuses on
. irks that fall within the sphere of influence of European literature
»i.ch as Jorge Isaacs' Maňa (1867) and José Mármoľs Amália (1851,
\r\). hardly take into account the powerful influence of scientific
j avel books on those very novels and on Latin American narrative
1 the nineteenth century in general. The mediation of the travel
I )tiks is present as much in Sarmiento's Facundo and Lucio V.
Mansilla's Una escursión a los Indios Ranqueles (Argentina, 1877) as in
t irilo Villaverde's description of sugarmill life in Cecilia  Valdés
iluha, 1880) and, as will be seen in greater detail, Euclides da
( unlia's Os Sertöes (Brazil, 1902).1S It is the hegemonic model in
I itiri American narrative until the 1920s and appears as a strong
- stige in archival fictions from Los pasos perdidos to Cien aňos de
ledad and Yo el Supremo.
Although one would look in vain for traces of it in manuals of
erature and specialized journals, the sheer volume of books about
I «in America by European and U.S. scientists is staggering. As
indicated in the first chapter, thousands of these books are listed in
■fC recent  bibliography  published   by  Thomas   L.   Welch   and
Myriam Figueras, Travel Accounts and Descriptions of Latin America and
': Caribbean 1800-igoo: A Selected Bibliography (1982), and I am sure
nat  many  more   could   be   added   if the   temporal   span  were
I roadened backwards and forwards. I am also certain that research
■ the publications of the various learned institutions of France,
•'crmany, Belgium, England, and the United States would reveal
many more names and texts that were not published separately as
■■loks. This proliferation is comparable only to that of legal docu-
■ cms during the first 200 years of Spanish domination, or until the
■ mous Recopilación of 1681.
I he travel books play a similar role in relation to the narrative, ough the differences are also quite significant. To begin with,
104
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
these scientific texts obeyed no anonymous rhetorical rules. were  they penned  by  notaries.  The  scientific travelogues   i ,i authors with resounding names, like Charles-Marie de la Gn    . mine, Louis de Bougainville, Alexander von Humboldt, Ch.   . % Darwin, Peter Wilhelm Lund, Captain Francis Bond Head, R. ,,, and Moritz Richard Schomburgk, Captain Richard Burton. N- i   |; the books were written by scientists in the strict sense, or even it [ 11 more inclusive sense prevalent in the nineteenth century. A- ** Samuel Trifilo says with reference to English travelers in Argen i, "The accounts were written by a wide cross-section of B      |. society - soldiers, merchants, naturalists, diplomats, business n-engineers, miners, missionaries, adventurers, tourists, and m others."19 Again, as opposed to the humble formulae of the Sp; ■ i I, bureaucracy or even the sophisticated histories written by hur -i -ists, the scientific travelogues are literary by almost any stand ■
These scientists were as much imbued with literature as the of the era were fascinated and influenced by science (Goetbi   , i instance). Besides, the travelogues not only gave an account c    '. objects found but also of the process by which they were found. JiM. is, the story of the traveler's life as he journeyed in search of th secrets of nature, which of course also turns out to be a voyage o self-discovery. These travelers were powerful writers, and the sroric* they told are fraught with dangerous and droll adventures. Thci passion  for nature,  as  intense  as  that  of the  poets,  produce compelling examples of the romantic sublime.20 This is true not onl in the masterworks, like Von Humboldt's Voyage aux regions équinix dales du Nouveau Continent, but also of the minor ones, like Reisen i Britisch-Guiana in den Jahren 1840-1844, by his disciple Moritz Rich an Schomburgk. In addition, some of the travelers were themsehe-artists or carried artists in their retinue for the purpose of drawing 01 painting the landscape or the specimens under scrutiny - in som--cases because "they could not be preserved, in others so thai th reader could "see" them in their natural habitat. The practk--appears  to have its remote antecedent in the so-called J )rak< Manuscript of the sixteenth century, which contains a remarkahl array of drawings in color.2' As a result, the books these traveler-produced were remarkably valuable objects, containing beau tilu illustrations of the flora, the fauna, geological formations, huma.1 types, and occasionally the party of scientific adventurers.
The prevalence of journeys of this type during the nineteenii
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
IO5
tury was such that they became a topic in Western popular •■ ion up t0 our thnes, when, almost as a subgenre, travel adven-.- have invaded the cinema and television. In the nineteenth ■ ltury the most notable examples are, of course, the novels ofjules erne and, closer to our time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost 7orld (1912); which some have mentioned as a possible source of arpentier's Los pasos perdidos. Professor Challenger's journey in -lrc'h of living specimens from the prehistoric era takes him to a areau, deep in the South American jungle, where plant and animal e have been kept outside of the evolutionary process.22 The ■jentific result of the expedition consists not only of the account we ■ad. but also of some pictures of the prehistoric monsters, needed to mvince the general public as well as the properly skeptical ■iennfic societies. The scientific traveler's human and technical ■obc into the uncharted regions of the colonial world was literary )t only in his own perception of nature, but increasingly as a erary topic as well.
If one were to single out the most important element in the ientific travelogues and the one that had the most powerful influence on narrative, their own and others modeled after it, it would have to be time, or more precisely history, and even more specifically natural history.23 Latin American nature had been a source of wonder to Europeans since the discovery, and the Spanish chronicles are filled with quaint descriptions of natural objects, beings and phenomena that were strange, or out of the ordinary to the author, and for which there was no word.24 The stranglehold of Xeo-Scholastic philosophy was too tight to allow the Spanish to conceive of Latin American nature as a system obeying a different historv, to think actually that Latin American nature could in fact be Other. A great deal of intellectual energy was spent on forcing divergent natural phenomena into Aristotelian categories, as in the case of Father Jose de Acosta's monumental História naturaly moral de la\ Indias (1590). It was like fitting a square peg into a round hole, and the results were not surprisingly monstrous, as parts from various classifications were invoked to account for animals that seemed to have been put together with pieces from different puzzles. An iinimal was not the result of a unique history, but a collage of pans drawn from other creatures, out of whose unchanging shape a wing, a leg or a claw had been borrowed. Much of the charm and pott er of baroque Latin American literature is based on the tropolo-
I06                                   MYTH AND ARCHIVE
gical contortions required to describe the New World as a s> reshuffled bits from the Old. The European travelers brough idea of history that would allow Latin American nature to pre i ■ the basis for an autonomous and distinct Latin American bi i-this, along with the truth-bearing power of their discourse, is   ., lure to the Latin American imagination. On the political side result was independence from Spain. On the narrative sici   | provided a new masterstory, the one Sarmiento attempted to wi i. The elements of that masterstory are determined as much I.
science as by the voyage. The voyage of scientific or quasi-scier i , travelers was part of the romantic Bildungsreise. Traveling is emblem of time, both personal and historical. Not only is nan i i history a kind of clockwork ticking away the complicated periodi , of evolution, but the observing self of the traveler is also swept a ■. in the swirl of time. This double movement of subject and ol |.  ■ creates an asymptote whose expression is the romantic topi   . | longing for a lost unity of self and cosmos, an organicky that w   I include the observing self. In Europe the poets always trav ■ south, preferably to Italy, like Goethe, Byron, or Müsset, to regi-.i. where nature, together with the ruins of a splendid pagan ]■ could kindle or rekindle inspiration, and actually transform the As Goethe writes in his Italian Journey: "Above all, there is notl. i. that  can  compare  to  the  new life  that  a reflective  indivi- ■ i experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marro ■ ■ my bones."25 That symbolic South is analogous to the worl-I ■ ! nature found elsewhere in Africa or Latin America in that     i-outside the modern world that the poet flees; a modern world wli -most bewildering and perverse feature is that it determines flight from itself and absorbs it. Within that "visionary South,"    -Wallace Stevens would call it many years later, poets traveled to i ■ ■ provinces, as in the case of the Spaniard Mariano Jose de Li"   ■. Echeverria himself, or Villaverde in his Excursion a Vuelta Abu Extremely revealing figures  in  this respect  are  those of L i'i Americans, or descendants of Latin Americans, who return to 11 ■-1: countries of origin and write travel books in languages other i   ■■ Spanish. One is Ramón Páez, a son of Venezuelan caudillo \ Antonio Páez, who was educated in England and wrote Wild See? South America or Life in the Llanos of Venezuela (New York, 1862), 1 I ■ 1 an 1847 journey, a book that would influence Venezuela's r1'-
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
IO7
tant fiction, Doňa Barbara. Another is Maria de las Mercedes Cruz y Montalvo, Countess of Merlin, a Cuban aristocrat rried to a French general in Madrid during Bonaparte's occu-Hon who wrote La Havane in 1844.27 For these travelers, the edicament of scientific travel becomes literal - they wind up being th subject and object of their gaze, and the language they use taches them artificially from who and what they are in the same y that scientific discourse presumably establishes a distance tween naturalists and the world they study. The narrator of Los sos perdidos is their anguished descendant.
Traveling was an ordeal, a detachment from the world known to * traveler in search of knowledge of nature and of himself. The ;al was, of course, a self-discovery in which nature and the self mid be one, in which the luxurious and even somber beauty of the tural world would be in harmony with the soul in search of its secrets. Thomas Belt intones, in his remarkable The Naturalist in Nicaragua: "Alone on the summit of a high peak, with surging green billows of foliage all around, dim misty mountains in the distance, and above the blue heavens, checkered with fleecy clouds, that have traveled hundreds of miles from the north-east, thoughts arise that can be only felt in their full intensity amid solitude and nature's grandest phases. Then man's intellect strives to grapple with the great mysteries of his existence, and like a fluttering bird that beats itself against the bars of its cage, falls back baffled and bruised."28 The rhetoric of scientific travel narrative is permeated by the figure of this narrator-hero who undergoes trials for the sake of knowledge, 'fliese trials were not trivial, given the primitive means of transportation available, the weight, volume, and fragility of the cumbersome scientific instruments, the epidemics to which the traveler was exposed and to which his body was far from immune, and the difficulties in communicating with the "natives" of the various regions visited. Many European scientists succumbed to diseases; others lost their reason. Belt, for instance, died in Denver, Colorado, at age forty-five, of a "mountain fever," while Joseph Juissieu, a botanist who accompanied La Condamine, lost his mind when, according to Goodman, "the collection of plants he had so laboriously gathered with the greatest of effort was lost through carelessness."29 To these difficulties one might add those involved in securing specimens of plants, rocks, or animals, preserving them ihrough taxidermy or some other method if necessary, and sending
I08                                   MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
them back to the metropolis for analysis, classification, and eventu-il display. Von Humboldt's many trunks filled with desiccated speci mens made long and circuitous voyages of their own. Some still hav not arrived at their destination.
The most arduous trial, however, was for the traveler to retain his sense of self at the same time as he searched for knowledge, and nor any kind of knowledge, but one with cosmic implications, for ň involved the origins of time and the innermost secrets of a natural world to which he too belonged. Specialization had not yet dulled the sensibility of scientists, and their awareness of the literary dimensions of their enterprise made them receptive to their persons involvement in the reality they observed. Hence, it was not easy to be detached from the reality described and at the same time not distort it, and it was difficult to write with detachment in the midst or a world that threatened to unveil secrets that could conceivably jolt the traveler out of his identity. This was so, particularly in the cast: of travelers like Francis Bond Head, whose exploits as a horseman made him akin to the gauchos, in such a way that one feels that he was becoming one with them. But, to write for a European public, scientific or otherwise, the traveler had to remain European, had to persevere in his identity in spite of the lures of the wild. His discourse demanded it. The rhetorical strategy that kept this distance was the constant expression of wonder, of surprise. achieved through repeated comparisons between the European and the colonial world. But distance was created mostly by the prat lice of classification and taxonomy {for which Linnaeus had provided a whole new language). The other world, or the world of the Other, is classifiable, apt to become the object of a taxonomy. The soul, the spirit of the traveler, interposes the grid of classification between his desire to fuse with the object of his study and that object itself. In these books, Latin America becomes a museum of living natural history, a zoological and botanical garden in which, in contiguous enclosures, animals or plants live separated sometimes by centuries of evolutionary history.
In some of the voyages this perseverance in European identity is manifested in a spectacular fashion, as when the Schombui£>k brothers, who are traveling under British auspices, fire salvos in the midst of the jungle to celebrate the Queen's birthday. Their expedition into Guiana and Venezuela is like a capsule of European time within the vast time-machine of nature. In popular fiction this
A  LOST  WORLD REDISCOVERED
IO9
1 -ment of the voyage is expressed in the elaborate preparations that u . travelers make to carry with them a European environment. In r les Verne's La Jangada, a novel about the Amazon, for instance, 1 f> huge raft built by French travelers becomes a Noah's ark for European life, an island of civilization floating downriver through the deepest jungle. European paraphernalia insulates the traveler from the reality outside, but as in Verne's contrived vehicles, ornate Windows are built to observe and classify flora, fauna, and human samples. "Civilized" impedimenta are both a form of isolation and a noint of view; both instruments and means of travel are representations of method, emblems of the travelers' discourse. Hence Captain Nemo's observatory-like window in the Nautilus, which allows him to view rare fish and plants in the depths of the ocean. The image of Captain Nemo peering into the depths at unusual specimens allows us to posit the characteristics of travel narrative derived from science, the previous ones having been derived from the very activity of travel itself. The notion of depth expresses the conception of reality as natural history; an unfolding, or, of course, an evolution in time, which accounts for differences in flora and fauna because evolution took diverse paths in different regions. 1 ime, in other words, is not the same in every place. A given e\olutionary path leads to a different set of species. Travelers journeying through the colonial world searched for those differences in the hope of finding a master combination,'the key to history, or the beginning or beginnings of it all. But Nemo is also looking at animals that belong to a prehistory, animals that were somehow left out of the evolutionary process and either became extinct or very rare. In the nineteenth century Latin America became the field of sludy of a significant group of paleontologists who hoped to find the secrets of evolution in prehistoric animals preserved by a quirk or accident of history. This is what Professor Challenger - the protagonist of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World- searches for on thai fictional plateau in the South American jungle, a plateau whiih, given its elevation, due to a violent upsurge of the earth, isolated its flora and fauna from the rest of thejungle, creating some vjri of natural genetic laboratory. (The model for Conan Doyle here is obviously the Galapagos Islands and the role they played in IWwin's observations and theories.) This "splendid isolation," as (ieorge Gaylord Simpson described it in one of his fascinating books on 1 he subject, preserved the origins in the present.30 Scientific
no
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
travelers in Latin America looked not only for current specimen flora and fauna, but for specimens that represented a backward 1 into the origins of evolution. Hence, to travel to Latin Anw meant rn flnH híctr.i~*r;,-. .-u~ .—<--' -       **
— —..—, .v uavu Lu -L,aun Amer: * meant to find history in the evolution of plants and animals, and find the beginning of history preserved — a contemporary. |jv; origin. It is the present depicted in Echeverria's "El matadero"
the violent f-im» ,-.f *-V.~ ~------J.:_--
93
4
Nos instruments dc physique et d'astronomie excitaient ä leur t-tJur h curiosité des habitants.
A. von Humboldt, Cumaná, 16-18 November 170031 Sarmiento's fascination with the work of European travelers i§ well-known. He quotes them often, and even states: "A la America del Sud en general, y a la Argentina sobre todo, ha hecho falta un Tocqueville,   que,   premunido  del   conocimiento  de  las  teorias sociales, como el viajero científico de barómetros, octantes } brúju-las, viniera a penetrar en el interior de nuestra vida política, como en un campo vastísimo y aún no explorado ni descrito por la ciencia. v revelase a la Europa, a la Francia ..." (p. 10) ("South America in general, and Argentina in particular, has needed a de Tocqueville who, armed with the knowledge of social theory, like the scientific traveler with his barometers, octants and compasses, would come and penetrate into the depths of our political life, as if it were a vast territory still unexplored by science, and reveal it to Europe, to France ...")32 (These instruments that Sarmiento longs for and that travelers lugged through Latin America will appear in Cim aňos de soledad as part of Melquiades' equipment.) Sarmiento's la^cina-tion with the methods and practices of modern science was undeniable and unabashedly expressed in other writings. What is revealing here, however, is that he equates social and natural science, lie believes that the instruments of both are alike. Hence this is not an empty pronouncement on the part of Sarmiento.^Given ihr significance of the instruments as a representation of method, Sarmiento's pronouncement is like a methodological profession of fail h and an identification of the model of his discourse (in a sense the instruments play a role analogous to that of the notarial art1- in the colonial period). De Tocqueville's gaze upon North American social life is the optical perspective — the instrument mediated or enabling
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
I I I
f view - that Sarmiento wishes to attain to look at South
P01   .      pje js himself the de Tocqueville that he claims "South
. Ya" needs. De Tocqueville, however, is a mere emblem of the
-   rific travel book that determines Facundo as a text. How do the
s     nrteristics of scientific travel narrative sketched above appear
Si Sarmiento's book?
cirnniento's journey  away from  Argentina  may  have  had  a
litical motive, but it is also analogous to the ordeal of separation
a' cussed in reference to the travel books. It is the trial that leads to
•riting- In feet, the very act of leaving Argentina, which appears in
kind of prologue or epigraph  (not included in the  English
translation), is directly linked to writing. Sarmiento scribbles a
political harangue, in the form of a French quotation:
\ fines del aňo 1840 salía yo de mi patria, desterrado por lástima, esiropeado, lieno de cardenales, puntazos y golpes recibidos el dia anterior en una de esas bacanales sangrientas de soldadesca y mazorqueros. Al pasai pur los baňos de Zonda, bajo las armas de la patria que en días alrwh babia pintado en una sala escribí con carbón estas palabras:
on Nt 11'15 PAS LES idees.
EI sobici no, a quien se comunicó el hecho mandó una comisión encargada de doscifrar el jeroglíŕico, que se decía contener desahogos innobles, iiisulioí' v amenazas. Oída la traducción: ";Y bien! - dijeron - ^qué sigmlit .i esto?" Significa simplemente que venia a Chile, donde la libertad biillaba aún, y que me proponia hacer proyectar los rayos de las luces de su picnsa h.ista el otro lado de los Andes. Los que conocen mi conducta en Chile, saben si he cumplido aquella protesta.                                (no page)
Tow ai d ihe end of the year 1840 I was leaving my homeland, exiled by pit>. bc.uen up, full of welts and cuts inflicted upon me the previous day by the blows of the soldiery and government thugs. On passing the Zonda Baths 1 wrote the following words in charcoal beneath the national coat of aims, which in happier times I myself had painted on the wall of one of the rnuin?."
ON NI   'MT. PAS LES IDEES.
Informed of the deed, the Government sent a committee charged with inter pi v\\ tig the hieroglyphic, which was reputed to contain vile impudences, insults and threats. Upon hearing the translation they said: "So w hai ? What does this mean?" It simply means that I was on my way to Chili. where freedom still shines, and that I intended to project the rays of Chile's bright press upon the other side of the Andes. Those who are famili,tr with my activities in Chile can say whether I have been true to my imnilion.                                                                        (my own translation)
112                                   MYTH AND ARCHIVE
It is revealing how much Sarmiento here resembles trn Echeverría's "El matadero," and how much his leaving is < ,.     ' °: of an act of violence. Leaving and writing are violent acts ■ n. . i   ! in this liminal text, not quite yet in the book, but projectin   ■..,,  " the reason for beginning it. Leaving and writing are ,w[, i'" Facundo as they are in the travel books. They represent an < ,j separation. Sarmiento will discover his own self and d    .   ,..* Argentine culture by moving away and seeing it from afai   I [ been routed away from it, as if he were the issue of a vic-i   ■      ,( bloody rebirth. Of course, he is at once moving from his ow ■ < i ,, and to it as object of study, as opposed to the travelers w       , from their culture to an alien one which they will stu I     | difference is  crucial because it denotes  one of the pi .' i M contradictions in Facundo: The terrain actually to be trave1- ' i that of Argentina but that of the texts by the European tra      i   ;. is a known fact that Sarmiento's acquaintance with the pam|        , mostly through books, particularly the one by Sir Fran-1- li., | Head, Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across tL /',,, • • and Among the Andes, a work he quotes in French.33 The self-disov. i in Facundo is thoroughly mediated by texts, just as the texts of ! travelers are mediated by scientific discourse. This double m   I -ation is Sarmiento's version of the perseverance in a European    I the equivalent of the scientist's European impedimenta. Onlv ). the manifestation ofthat perseverance is textual and correspond ' ■ the intertextual web of quotations, epigraphs, and allusion* in ■ ■ book. Legitimation, self-recognition, power, authority are all in ■ * ted in the chameleon-like ability of Sarmiento's text to blend in. m ■ with the land, but with the European texts about the la nil. I)-course and its object are one, because the object is always aire u discourse.
The literary character of that mediation is also revealed    ■ curious feature of Sarmiento's discourse: He often compares gau life to various oriental societies as they are described by Enror   ■ ■ orientalists.34 If the gaucho is the origin of Argentine culture, ■'■ deep stratum of the Argentine self, that origin is the solidly liiei  i figure of a gaucho dressed in the garb of a bedouin as described I ■ French, German and British travelers. At times the gauch ■   * compared to unabashedly literary texts by the likes of Victor Hu» ■ The congruence of European science is to the discourse of   ■ scientists what this textual prisonhouse is to Sarmiento's: die ■ ■ ■
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
"3
,sliriiably keeps him from becoming one with his object of ■hieh paradoxically, becomes his object of study because he )ľoduct ofthat construct. The origin, the self, and the history elf are literary figures, fictions of the European literary rioti as much as products of scientific inquiry. > is a sense in which Sarmiento's mixing of European texts eniific and literary origins unveils the profound complicity ĺ those forms of discourse, disavowing the possible objecti-1 scientific truth-bearing quality of the scientists' books. he scientists project onto their object of study a vision as with values and desires as that of literature itself. The in gaze is one, whether it be scientific or artistic; its object is :r created out of its longing for an origin and organicity, an lat it depicts, classifies and describes as it creates a discourse r predicated on the adequation of scientific discourse and an íat it has molded for itself. It is in this circularity that science iern literature reflect each other, as Sarmiento's use of both Kinu;» <» texts reveals because of his ambiguous position as both subject and object. It is by revealing this circularity that Facundo breaks free of the mimetic bond out of which it was created as a text. There are other characteristics drawn from scientific travel books in Facundo beyond this double mediation, most notably Sarmiento's classificatory practices, particularly of the gaucho. Among the most memorable pages in Facundo (the ones that most of us remember from elementary and high school) are those devoted to the description of the various kinds of gauchos: the minstrel, the pathfinder, the track-finder, the outlaw. Each of these types is described minutely, from his attire to his daily routines. The gaucho is to Sarmiento like a species of vegetable or animal life whose various families he finds, describes, and classifies for the European observer. The same taxonomical compulsion is carried over to larger blocks of Argentine life, as when the various kinds of cities are analyzed and contrasted, for instance, Córdoba vs. Buenos Aires.
VVluu is remarkably modern about this classification is that it holds simultaneously multiple layers of time, that it reflects depth in the sense discussed before. Buenos Aires and Córdoba occupy the same lime in the present, but belong to two different eras separated perhaps by centuries. The pampa may be the remote origin of all and ii so, is contemporaneous with later manifestations of Argentine culture that it has determined. Facundo Quiroga is an earlier stage
114
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
of Juan Manuel Rosas, though they are contemporaries (thi both born in 1793, but the caudillo was cut down in 1835, wl i|,   1' dictator lived a long life in exile until 1877):
Desenvolviéndose  los  acontecimientos,  veremos  las  montoner vinciales con sus caudillos a la cabeza; en Facundo Quiroga últim ■ triimfante en todas partes la campafia sobre las ciudades y doi   1 éstas en su espíritu, gobierno y civilización, formarse al fin el £   '. central, unitario, despótico del estanciero don Juan Manuel Ro clava en la culta Buenos Aires el cuchillo del gaucho y destruye la ■  ■■    1 los siglos, la civilización, las leyes y la libertad.                         (p,
As events succeed each other, we shall see the provincial moi .■, , headed by their chiefs; the final triumph, in Facundo Quiroga 1 country over the cities throughout the land; and by their subjue ■ :■
spirit, government, and civilization, the final formation of the.....
consolidated despotic government of the landowner, Don Juan *'-i Rosas, who applied the knife of the gaucho to the culture of Bueno   \   . and destroyed the work of centuries — of civilization, law and libe.
Another significant feature of the book's temporality is the        1, which  the origin is  conceptualized.  Although  Sarmientn ■■ . alludes to the Spanish and even Indian history of Argenti       h
origin is the pampa, which appears as an absolute beginnin    .....
to history, represented by the topic of nomadic, shepherd sc  1 an origin shared with other cultures, such as the Oriental o    -*  h Argentina, however, that origin is present at the same timt      1 history that has followed it. Facundo, like the books by the tr;     ' 1* purports to display the dynamics of history in a spatio-te   y     1 display, a kind of arrested-animation exhibition, highlight«  .■ \ ■ various shapes that the accidents of evolution have createc 1   ■ ■ specific region described. The book is like a gallery of typ "   ii>> epochs, held in synchrony by the machinery of scientific dis-   ' 1 ■ Perhaps the best way to visualize this kind of represent. '   ■   ■» through a painting.  In  1859, the U.S. artist Frederick '  '   ■   1 unveiled his enormous canvas "Heart of the Andes," based ■ expeditions to South America, but mostly inspired by Alt       1 von Humboldt's writings. Church followed von Humbolď - | ■ -ception that, in the Andes, "at a single glance, the eye     1 ■  *
majestic palms, humid forests  [...]  then above these fc......
tropical vegetation appear oaks and sweetbriar, and above      - '■ barren snow-capped peaks." A disciple of the renowneo    1 '•-
A  LOST WORLD  REDISCOVERED
US
Cole, Church was a member of what is known as the
' ' .       River School of painting, which delighted in portraying the
!  '  tv of the North American landscape. In "Heart of the Andes,"
vcr ne attempted to give an all-encompassing view of nature's
in the manner of von Humboldt's ambitious Cosmos: A Sketch
p'irdcal Description of the Universe?5
Nirjniento, of course, is not missing from that picture. Like the
Hers his life is part of the narrative, as we saw in the quotation
■■ .-   the book's prologue or epigraph. Sarmiento weaves himself in
■ ■■ out of the picture as observer, classifier and commentator, as
h as author of the account. His authority is bolstered not only by
.'., »xtensive quotations from scientific and literary texts, but by the
-e of his having been there, of his having a special knowledge
■ icrrd through the ordeal of travel and observation. He often
• ■■. -s to his life in Chile, where, as a foreigner, he is naturally the
,, .  c 1 of attention. The sense of being out of his home country, often
■ virssrd by the travelers, appears in these vignettes in which
*» . nieiito recounts how Chileans dealt with him, and what is of
•(■si to them about him because he is different and foreign.
I he.se laborious preparations - a propadeutic - lead Sarmiento to
bis specimen: Facundo Quiroga, whose life is set in the center of the
book like an odd insect trapped in a glass paperweight. The story of
Facundo Quiroga's life obeys no conventional rhetorical rules for
writine a biography. Life, biography, has the emphasis here on the
bio - life is biological. Life is a concept much in vogue in nineteenth-
ceniurv science, and the debate between organicists and mechani-
cisis is well-known. It is a concept that left a deep imprint on
European thought and literature, culminating perhaps in Nietzsche
or in I "namuno, and the Hispanic versions of Lebensphilosophie called
lilalism'j. Sarmiento accounts for Facundo Quiroga's character and
fate in scientific terms. The caudillo is motivated by an excess of life, a
thru,-» 1 1 hat leads him inevitably and tragically to Barranca Yaco,
where be knows he will be slain. Facundo Quiroga's surfeit of life is
visible in the shape of his head, in his stoutness, and in his fiery eyes.
These are biological accidents that determine his fate, that make his
life conform  even  more  to  a  tragic  pattern. Just as  Facundo
Quiroya's originality is the result of accidents, so is the whole of
gaucho culture, a serendipitous accumulation of random events.
1 he pni peria, the social nucleus of gaucho life, develops from the
chance meetings of gauchos:
ii6
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
Salen, pues, los varones sin saber fijamente a dónde. Una vuelta ganados, una visita a una cría o a la querencia de un caballo predi invierte una pequeňa parte del dia; el resto lo absorbe una reunion ei venta o pulpería. Allí concurren cierto numero de parroquianos c alrededores; allí se dan y adquieren las noticias sobre los anii extraviados; trázanse en el suelo las marcas del ganado; sábese dónde el tigre, dónde se íe han visto rastros al león; allí, en fin, está el cantor ■ fraterniza por el circular de la copa y las prodigalidades de los que p( ... y en esta asamblea sin objeto publico, sin interes social, empie; echarse los rudimentos de las reputaciones que más tarde, y andanc aňos, van a aparecer en la escena politica.                                    (pp_ ,
The men then set forth without exactly knowing where they are goii turn around the herds, a visit to a breeding-pen or to the haunt of a fai horse, takes up a small part of the day; the rest is consumed in a rende; at a tavern or grocery store [pulpería]. There assemble inhabitants r neighboring parishes; there are given and received bits of inform about animals that have gone astray; the traces of the cattle are desc upon the ground; intelligence of the hunting-ground of the tiger or < place where the tiger's tracks have been seen, is communicated. The short, is the Minstrel; there the men fraternize while the glass goes ar at the expense of those who have the means as well as the disposition t for it ... yet in this assembly, without public aim, without social int are first formed the elements of those characters which are to appear on the political stage.                                                                       (pp.,
Even the gaucho's poetry is due to accidents of the terrain, irres rities like those of his body: "Existe, pues, un fondo de poesie nace de los accidentes naturales del pais y de las costun excepcionales que engendra" (p. 36) ("The country consequ derives a fund of poetry from its natural circumstances [accid and the special customs resulting [being engendered] from Ü [p. 27])-
The notion of accident is decisive because it determines Fac Quiroga's freedom, his flight from the norm, his originality. V he defeats regular armies he does so because he is free to non-conventional tactics that befuddle his enemies. An acciden inaugural by definition: it is an event independent of the past wb becomes a unique form of present violently broken off from histc a new form  of temporality,  like the series  of tumultuous £ narrated in Echeverria's story. An accident is a beginning like th that paleontologists hope  to find in  caves  and digs;  Facui Quiroga's penchant for brutality is an expression of his freedom.
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED                        llj
mn in the present, he validates Rosas' inclination to violence, »armiento's own escape from the model furnished by the ific travelers.
en Sarmiento finally arrives at the beginning of his life of ,do Quiroga, we read:
entre las ciudades de San Luis y San Juan un dilatado desierto que, faíta completa de agua, recibe el nombrc de travesía. El aspecto de is soledades es, por lo general, triste y desamparado, y el viajero que te oriente no pasa la ultima represa o aljibe de campo sin proveer sus le suficientc cantidad de agua. En esta travesía tuvo lugar una vez la a escena que sigue. Las cuchilladas, tan frecuentes entre nuestros is habían forzado a uno de ellos a abandonar precipitadamente la de San Luis, y ganar la travesía a pie, con la montura al hombro, a fin apar a las persecuciones de la justicia. Dcbían alcanzarlo dos neros tan iuego como pudieran robar caballos para los tres. eran por entonces sólo el hambre o la sed los peligros que le [aban en el desierto aquel, que un tigre cebado andaba hacía un aňo do los rastros de los viajeros, y pasaban ya de ocho los que habían ľtimas de su predilección por la carne humana. Suele ocurrir a veces ellos paises en que la fiera y el hombre se disputan el dominio de la leza, que éste cae bajo la garra sangricnta de aquélla; entonces el npieza a gustar de preferencia su carne, y se le llama cebado cuando ado a este género de caza; la caza de hombres. El juez de la campaňa ata al teatro de sus devastaciones convoca a los varones hábiles para :ría, y bajo su autoridad y dirección se hace la persecución del tigre que rara vez escapa a la sentencia que lo pone fuera de la ley. ndo nuestro prófugo había caminado cosa de seis leguas, ereyó oir r el tigre a lo lejos y sus fibras se cstremecieron. Es el bramido del n gruňido como el del cerdo, pero agrio, prolongado, estridente, y 1 que haya motivo de temor, causa un sacudimiento involuntario de vios, como si la carne se agitara ella sola al anuncio de la muerte. mos minutos después el bramido sc oyó más distinto y más cercano; venia ya sobre el rastro, y sólo a una larga dištancia se divisäba un io algarrobo. Era preciso apretar el paso, correr, en fin, porquc los ■ainidos se sucedían con más frecuencia, y el ultimo era más distinto, más braute que el que le precedía.
Al ti ti, arrojando la montura a un lado del Camino dirigióse el gaucho al "bol que había divisado, y no obstante la debilidad de su tronco, lizrncnte bastante elevado, pudo trepar a su copa y mantenerse en una »min na oscilación, medio oculto entre el ramaje. Dc allí pudo observar la tvna que tenia lugar en el Camino: el tigre marchaba a paso precipitado, íendo el suelo y bramando con más frecuencia a medida que sentía la
ii8
MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
proximidad dc su prcsa. Pasa adelantc del punto en que ésta se lif)K separado del camino y pierde el rastro; el tigre se cnfurece, remolin(. hasta que divisa la montnra, que desgarra de un manotón, esparciendo < el aire sus prendas. Más irritado aún con estc chasco, vuelve a buster ■ rastro, cncuentra al fin la dirección en que va, y, levantando la vista, di\ j a su presa haciendo con el peso balancearse el algarrobillo, cual la ftá<. caňa cuando las aves se posan en sus puntas.
Desde entonces ya no bramó el tigre; accrcábase a saltos, y en un ;il>rir cerrar de ojos sus enormes manos estaban apoyándosc a dos varas del sue sobre cl delgado tronco, al que comunicaban un temblor convulsi\n en iba a obrar sobre íos nervios del mal seguro gaucho. Intentó la fiera dar i ■ saito impotente; dio vuelta en torno al árbol midiendo su altura con uj< enrojecidos por la sed de sangre, y al fin, bramando de cólera se acostň en suelo,  batiendo sin césar la cola,  los ojos fijos  en su presa, la hot entreabierta y reseca. Esta escena horrible duraba ya dos horas mor uhla postura vioíenta del gaucho y la fascinación aterrante que ejercía sol«c. la mirada sanguinaria, inmóvi!, del tigre, del que por una fuerza invencii) ■ de atracción no podia apartar los ojos, habían empezado a debiliur m -fucrzas, y ya vcia proximo el momento en que su cucrpo extenuado ib.t caer en su ancha boca, cuando el rumor lejano de galope de caballos Iv & esperanza de salvación.
En efecto, sus amigos habían visto el rastro del tigre y corríau ňi esperanza de salvarlo. El desparramo de la montura les reveló el lugat cle i escena; y volar a él, desenroílar sus lazos, echarlos sobre cl tigre, empanuk ciego dc furor, fue la obra de un segundo. La fiera, estirada a dos lazu«,, n půdo escapar a las puňaladas rápidas con que en venganza de s ■ prolongada agónia ie traspasó cl que iba a ser su víctima. "Entonces suj: qué era tener miedo", decía el general don Juan Facundo Qu i tog; contando a un grupo de oficiales este suceso.
También a él le liamaron Tigre de los Llanos, y no le sentaba mal c>>( ■ denominación, a fe.                               (pp. 71-3; emphasis in the origina
Between the cities of San Luis and San Juan, lies an extensive desert, 1 .die the Travesia, a word which signifies want of water [on the contrary, it mean a watercrossing]. The aspect ofthat waste is mostly gloomy and unprorni' -ing, and the traveler coming from the east does not fail to provide his t hiß [canteens] with a sufficient quantity of water at the last cistern which h passes as he approaches it. This Travesia once witnessed the followin strange scene. The consequences of some of the encounters with lames s common among our gauchos had driven one of them in haste from the cit of San Luis and forced him to escape to the Travesia on foot, and wMi hi riding gear on his shoulder, in order to avoid the pursuit of the law. Tw comrades were to join him as soon as they could steal horses for all three-Hunger and thirst were not the only dangers which at that time aw idle
A  LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
"9
in the desert; a tiger that had already tasted human flesh had been
owing the track of those who crossed it for a year, and more than eight
sons had already been the victims of this preference. In these regions,
^re man must contend with this animal for dominion over nature, the
ner sometimes falls a victim, upon which the tiger begins to acquire a
, ■ ference for the taste of human flesh, and when it has once devoted itself
'.. rhis novel form of chase, the pursuit of mankind, it gets the name of
■<-eater. The provincial justice nearest the scene of his depredations calls
.    the huntsmen of his district,  who join,  under his authority and
■   dance, in the pursuit of the beast, which seldom escapes the con-uences of its outlawry.
\Vhen our fugitive had proceeded some six leagues, he thought he heard distant roar of the animal, and a shudder ran through him. The roar of tiger resembles the screech of the hog, but is prolonged, sharp, and
. -cing, and even when there is no occasion for fear, causes an involuntary nor of the nerves as if the flesh shuddered consciously at the menace of
■   th.
■"he roaring was heard clearer and nearer. The tiger was already upon
trail of the man, who saw no refuge but a small carob-tree at a great
.    ;ance. He had to quicken his pace, and finally to run, for the roars
Ind him began to follow each other more rapidly, and each was clearer
[ more ringing than the last.
it length, flinging his riding gear to one side of the path, the gaucho ied to the tree which he had noticed, and in spite of the weakness of its ik, happily quite a tall one, he succeeded in clambering to its top, and
■   ping himself half concealed among its boughs which oscillated vio-i    :ly. Thence he could see the swift approach of the tiger, sniffing the soil
■    [ roaring more frequently in proportion to its increasing perception of '„  nearness of its prey. Passing beyond the spot where our traveler had left
■'    path, it lost the track, and becoming enraged, rapidly circled about 1 ■ il it discovered the riding gear, which it dashed to fragments by a single
■  w. Still more furious from this failure, it resumed its search for the trail, n I at last found out the direction in which it led. It soon discerned its prey,
der whose weight the slight tree was swaying like a reed upon the
■ mmit of which a bird has alighted.
The tiger now sprang forward, and in the twinkling of an eye, its 11 -nstrous fore-paws were resting on the slender trunk two yards from the
■und, and were imparting to the tree a convulsive trembling calculated
1 ■ Let upon the nerves of the gaucho, whose position was far from secure.
I   2 beast exerted its strength in an ineffectual leap; it circled around the
■■ :, measuring the elevation with eyes reddened by the thirst for blood,
I at length, roaring with rage, it crouched down, beating the ground
■ ideally with its tail, its eyes fixed on its prey, its parched mouth half
120                                   MYTH AND  ARCHIVE
open. This horrible scene had lasted for nearly two mortal hours- t gaucho's constrained attitude, and the fearful fascination exercised o\ ■ him by the fixed and bloodthirsty stare of the tiger, which irresistih attracted and retained his own glances, had begun to diminish his strenei '• and he already perceived that the moment was at hand when his exhaust  ! body would fall into the capacious mouth of his pursuer. But at tl-. moment the distant sound of the feet of horses on a rapid gallop gave h ■ hope of rescue.
His friends had indeed seen the tiger's foot-prints, and were hastenii on, though without hope of saving him. The scattered fragments of t ■■ saddle directed them to the scene of action, and it was the work oj i moment for them to reach it, to uncoil their lassoes, and to fling them o\ ■ the tiger, now blinded with rage. The beast, drawn in opposite directio1 * by the two lassoes, could not evade the swift stabs by which its destin- ■ victim took his revenge for his prolonged torments. "On that occasion I knew what it was to be afraid," was the expression of Don Juan Facun- ■ Quiroga, as he related this incident to a group of officers.
He too was called -'the tiger of the Llanos," a title which did not ill be i him ...                                                                                               (pp. 73-1
Sarmiento has encrypted in this story, on the threshold of Facund-. Quiroga's life, the central tropological mechanisms of his book. Tl ■ story can be read as an allegory not only of the caudillo's life, b .' more interestingly of the life of Facundo the book; of its existence u relation to Sarmiento and the books by the scientific travelers. Tl -quasi-liminal text, on the verge of the full story, is a version of th •.• masterstory of the narrative of Latin America whose kernel 1-Echeverria's "El matadero": both center on violence and sacrifio Here, however, the internal dialectics from which the story issu- -are more forcefully present.
It is a curious fact that the first sentence of the life of Facunt > Quiroga already contains a trope that announces the mastertrop -of the story, as if beginnings always had to contain in embryos ■ form middles and ends. The desert between San Luis and San Ju;i 1 is called a travesia because of its absolute lack of water; yet o;i normally calls a travesia the crossing of a body of water. Hence tl name means, in this specific context, the opposite of what ■ ordinarily does; it is a kind of natural catachresis, as if langua.' communicated in a mysterious, non-rational way, by doing violen- -to conventional relationships between signifier and signified. 1 ■ understand language we have to be able to master a code that is n--! the universal one, which we presume to be based on a layen-l
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
121
mory of human exchange. The desert is called a water-crossing '■,-i-ause of its absolute lack of water, therefore we must be ready to ... d the opposite of what words appear to mean. We know from \i íado Alonso and others, of course, that a term like travesia entered V rentine Spanish as far back as 1575 like many other words ..rrowed from the language of seafaring that the colonists brought ^ ■ h them after the inevitable crossing of the ocean, a linguistic .1 ^nomenon common to the Spanish of the Americas.36 Be that as it i. y, the inversion remains, whether it is a historical retention or a ,   lewed misnomer.
The watery metaphor is continued when we are told that travelers >i ist store up water before embarking on a journey through the
■ : -ert at the last represa, that is to say, the last dam or lock. Now,
■  ' -esa is given here as synonymous to aljibe, a well or cistern, which , ,,i;s contain water, but it seems that it gets its name because it n rks the boundary of the desert, not because it provides water. 1 ie metaphoric body of water to be crossed is fenced in by dams
I ere the traveler must load up on that which is missing from the .-.a thus contained. If we remember that the vast wastes of the I iinpa are often compared to the sea in Facundo, we can understand '.. ter that, within the tropological system of the text, which seems
■ ■be made up of a series of inversions, the earth can be water. What s1   these inversions have been preparing the reader for is the
■ usual, the out-of-the-ordinary, the "strange scene" about to be
ü 'rated, one in which man is the object of the chase, not the other
■'•./  around.   Strangeness,   uniqueness,   pervades   the   story   of
1    :undo Quiroga, the singular specimen, the mutant that is going
explain a distinct Latin American strain.
The singularity of the gaucho, his existence outside the norm, is
stressed by the fact that he is often an outlaw. This gaucho in C ticular flees the city because he has stabbed a man to death in ■■' of the frequent outbursts of violence against fellow men and ■ 1 mals that punctuate the life of a gaucho. The gaucho's violent '. i-ure makes him both a man of nature and a man outside the law. I 1 e the catachresis that describes his habitat, the gaucho lives in a '■ -ľld of transgressions, of rupture, of breaks. This condition is
'■■ :her emphasized in this particular case by the gaucho having to '■ ■ ^el on foot. The horse was the gaucho's way of life, practically
1 -m birth. The "strange story" is not only about an individual who 1 ' ictions outside the law, but one who is, at this specific moment,
122
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
outside his own law, where he can be prey to an accident like the'i that in fact befalls him. The story is about an instance, original -unique, hence capable of engendering an individual as exceptio, as Facundo Quiroga.
The tiger enters the "strange scene" also under the banner c misnomer. We are dealing here not with a tiger, of course, but wit species of jaguar, "tiger" being one of the approximations used Europeans to name American natural phenomena that did not a\ conform to their categories. Be that as it may, like the gaucho, tiger is running away from the law because he kills men. This is ordinary tiger. He belongs to a special kind that is partial to hun flesh. Once he has tasted a human, the tiger acquires a prediJcct for humans, a predilection that is based on a very intimate, sec and forbidden knowledge. To be cebado means to be "primed,' have a foreknowledge that incites desire; to have or have aire; had a morsel of what one desires, a teasing, partial sampling. 1 knowledge and desire for more of the same - a same that is aire; part of one, being inside, consumed - is the aesthetic counterpar the scientific curiosity of the travelers; the literary aspect t Sarmiento unveils through the pell-mell mixing of textual tidl from science and literature. The tiger's ability to capture hums his  technique in  following a scent,  his  hermeneutic power interpret the signs of human presence,  are predicated on I foreknowledge.  Like the textual  doubling in  the mediation discourses, knowledge is predicated on foreknowledge, on captur an object that discourse has itself molded. There is, preciscK sense in which this knowledge exceeds the norm, goes beyond tu need for food. To be cebado means not only to be primed, but to fat, to be satiated. One can cebar an animal, fatten him for the and the table. Hence the taste for human flesh on the part of the ü is a forbidden knowledge in that it is like a vice, a desire that exce need. There is in the beautiful descriptions of the animal. \ ticularly of his violent acts and perseverance in his pursuit of prey to the point of giving his life in the effort, a reflection oft doubly vicious character,  at once meanness,  and addiction pleasure. To be cebado is to have a penchant for extravagance, luxury, to be driven by an excess of life, like Facundo Quiroga. 'I foreknowledge acquired through the taste of flesh is in consona with the communication established between the tiger and gaucho, which is not merely a digestive one.
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
I23
n   auCho learns of the tiger's presence through the roar of the
"l in reaction to which "sus fibras se estremecieron," meaning,
rse  his muscle fibers, his flesh. Taste is not the only sense
. which the flesh of the gaucho and the tiger communicate. It
Jained in the next line that the roar of the tiger is like the grunt
•    DUt shrill and long. Even when there is no reason for fear
here has to be translated thus), it causes one's nervous
n to shudder involuntarily, as if the flesh itself became agitated
í <?olo anuncio de la muerte" ("by the mere announcement or
at of death"). The tiger's roar establishes a communication with
»aucho's flesh that bypasses language. Later on, the same kind
f understanding is established when the tiger communicates a
emor to the tree that acts directly upon the nerves of the gaucho.
opposed to the vagaries of communication through language and
s tropological relays, delays, and detours, the language the tiger
icaks to the gaucho communicates directly, producing in him a
mtradictory feeling of fascination and mortal fear. Tiger and
audio understand each other subliminally, that which is being
iminunicated being itself sublime: terror and desire. This identifi-
ition and communication between tiger and gaucho by means of a
lblime language says much about the masterstory embedded in
armiento's book.
The language of the pampa, as shown, breaks with the received mguage of social communication; words often mean, irrationally, ;*ainst history, the opposite of what they normally signify. That inquage is like the one the tiger and the gaucho speak. Meaning is oi conveyed by the established code but by a given feeling, a feeling íat stands at the threshold of the need to trope, at the very origin of mguage. The pampa is not merely a plain - a blank page - but a lence whose vastness provokes, like the sea, a feeling of the infinite íar incites both fear and longing. The "strange story" narrates an ccident; an accident cannot have an antecedent, otherwise it would 01 be one. Since it does not have anything prior that explains it, the ccident has to be narrated in a catachretic language, whose odd gns are like the unique specimens involved. The fact that Facundo tuiroga acquires his nom de guerre from this scene is a clear id i cation of how naming proceeds in this language. The gaucho cals from the animal his already mistaken name. By killing the ger. the gaucho names himself. Naming is a violent activity, a re;ik with the norm, with the law. This would be of no particular
124
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
interest if the story were narrated with detachment by the Sarmiento uses for classification, the rhetoric of the travelers   | allows him to hold up as distinct, strange and uncivilized that \, | he is describing. But this is not the case.
Until Facundo Quiroga breaks in to explain that it was then |i he learned about fear, the reader does not know that it w;-caudillo himself who was telling the story. Sarmiento has almost ir i. ceptibly surrendered the narrative voice to the protagonist hin ■• ■ This   prosopopeia   creates   an   identification   between   Fac i ■',. Quiroga and Sarmiento that is parallel to the one just establ    i between the tiger and the gaucho. The gaucho cannot evad    I, bloodthirsty stare of the tiger, which both attracts him and thre.    |1H him, drawing him toward the animal's enormous mouth. A rr--u with a voice, but with no articulate language, a language that i:  -| . spoken through the eyes, as if being deflected, monstrously, thr i.   , another organ. A language of gazes, of looks, that return'    I; inquisitive stare of the gaucho, that classificatory, affixing glar ■ ■ . man. The gaucho cannot speak out of fear. The mouth of the    .. i has stolen his voice, like Facundo Quiroga stole Sarmiento -   I Sarmiento the detached, civilized observer, or is he, like the ga ■ 'i up in the tree, vibrating with the sublime language of fear:" í) again, like the tiger, drawn in opposite directions by the two las .. -pulled by fear and desire toward certain annihilation? If one into account that time and again Sarmiento insists that K ■■* -commands through fear, then the chain of identifications bee -i i-even more interesting: the tiger is like Facundo Quiroga, who i-   i ■ Juan Manuel Rosas, who is like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. I "i language of the text is not that of the scientific travelogue bu'    i accidental language of literature,  a subliminal language w'i system is that of breaking the system, and whose aim is to be um | " like the gaucho and the tiger, to partake of their violent beaut
Sarmiento, or better, Sarmiento's discourse is like the tij made up of misnomers, of violence represented as catachi *■ motivated by a desire for the object that turns him into the obje' '    -Facundo Quiroga's and the tiger's voice blend one with the 01 Sarmiento's discourse is cebado, primed, satiated, yet desirou   '■■ more, and reveals at the same time this quality to be the fun-1 -mental one in the scientific traveler's discourse. It is the artistic   11 aesthetic excess in those books, which Sarmiento feeds on to c: •    ■ an outlaw discourse, beyond the taxonomies of science. Foi   " ■
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
I25
that unique, monstrous prey, that mutant that marks the
tion of Latin American narrative discourse, his own dis-
•* has to be unique and monstrous, the product of a different
It is for this reason, and for no other, that Facundo is a founding
Latin American narrative; it contains in a dramatic fashion
'■"..   rcond masterstory, one that will prevail until the novela de la m and remain a strong vestige until the present. Bui there is more, of course, for in killing the tiger the gaucho is
"Hing himself, or at least prefiguring his own death in Barranca V co Facundo Quiroga's life is the stuff of tragedy. His excess of i r» like a tragic hubris, leads him to the grandeur of his power as
.-'H as to his death, about which he is warned on several occasions. I [e cannot escape his fate because, in order to be free, his life has to ..c determined by accidents that release him from the norm. Fear,
he language he knows, can make his flesh shudder in anticipation of .leath   but fear cannot tell him what to do to avoid death; if
nvthing, fear leads  him to death.  Sarmiento,  the omniscient
arrator in the book, is caught in the same trap. Given his ■ Jentification with Facundo Quiroga and Rosas, their demise is his
■wn demise. He too is blind to his own fate, which is to be like them. I a literary history Sarmiento lives because of Facundo Quiroga. What Sarmiento has found in his voyage of discovery and self-. iscovery is a present origin, one that speaks through him, hol-owing out the voice of his scientific language. His authority will not
■e attained by it, but by the tragic sacrifice of his protagonist, which
e re-enacts in the text. This tragic fusion is a reflection of the linear
me introduced by the evolution of nature, which brings everything
■> an end, inexorably, so that it will be reborn in a different guise, lusion with the object of analysis is the escape from the hegemonic
iscourse, the subplot of this second masterstory, a flight into the ibyss of time. Escape from mediation is figured in nineteenth-
entury narrative by this joining with the object of observation, . rhich is a fusion with mutability. This vertiginous sense of time will
emain in Latin American fiction in the endings of novels like (larpentier's El reino de este mundo and Garcia Márquez' Cien aňos de
úedad, narratives in which the action is brought to a close by a
iolent wind that blows everything away. That wind first swept ■cross the pampas in Sarmiento's Facundo.
126
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
.,. because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did noi a second chance on earth.                                Gabriel Garcia Main,
In a prefatory note to the first edition of Os Sertöes (Rio de Jam 1902), Euclides da Cunha writes that he is moved to publish book, even with considerable delay after the events that it recou porque a sua instabilidade de complexos de fatores múltiplos c d samente combinados, aliada äs vicissitudes históricas e deplorável situ mental em que jazem [subracas sertanejas do Brasil], as tornarn t? efémeras, destinades a proximo desparecimento ante as exigéncias centes da civilizagao e a concorréncia material intcnsiva das con t migratórias que comecam a invadir profundamente a nossa terra.
the instability of the multiple factors and diverse combinations thai; make up this ethnic complex [the "subraces" in the backlands of Hn together with the vicissitudes of history and the lamentable lack oí mi enlightenment which prevails among them, is likely to render thebi; 1 short-lived, destined soon to disappear before the growing exigrnd civilization and the intensive material competition offered by the sin v immigrants that is already beginning to invade our land.38
This urgent conception of the fleeting nature of time and mutability of the real world, as shown by the swift evolution disappearance of entire human groups, is at the very cor Euclides' compelling masterpiece.39 Os Sertöes is a book thai c much to Facundo, but it is much greater, and provides a gratic synthesis of Latin American narrative in the nineteenth cent whose impact can still be felt in novels like Severo Sarduy's O
As was the case with Sarmiento, the gap between the ami intention in writing the book and the final product is quite wide: a chasm into which Euclides' "scientific racism" sinks, and pessimism acquires a tragic hue that exceeds the scope of the pu positivistic doctrine that guided him. Euclides'efforts topreserv future historians a sketch ofthe history of Canudos and its proia. ists develop into an in-depth study of Brazilian history and id en an analysis whose very grandeur is a consequence of its failure spite of Machado de Assis' distinction as a novelist, it is Eucli hybrid book - half reportage, half scientific analysis and al! lii ture — that has had the widest circulation and impact in the re
A  LOST WORLD  REDISCOVERED
I27
America, as Mario Vargas Llosa's recent rewriting of Os
' r in La guerra del fin del mundo has confirmed once again.41
■lie facundo, Os Sertöes centers on an extraordinary figure who
ndies the backward forces ofthe hinterlands, engaged in mortal
bat with "civilization," represented by the cities on the sea-
In Os Sertöes the eccentric figure is not a strongman like
mdo Quiroga, but Antonio Conselheiro, the leader of a grass-
; religious movement that mobilized the dirt-poor people ofthe
)te flatlands of the northeast - the sertäo - in the last decade of
nineteenth century. These sertanejos, many of them criminals
icansaceiros), fugitives and convicts, become a significant force, and
make themselves strong in a makeshift citadel, Canudos. The events
thai make up the story of Os Sertöes are of stark and redundant
simplicity- The recently installed (1889) Republic considers the
relitrious movement a threat to its political stability and sends a
military expedition to suppress it. But, to the embarrassment ofthe
government,  the army is soundly routed by the rebels. Three
military expeditions of increasing might fail to take Canudos, until a
ľourth one manages to reduce it to the ground - literally, for the
arrnv uses dynamite to smash every building, in what we would call
:oday a scorched-earth campaign. But Canudos never surrenders
md the paroxysmal violence lasts until the very end, with an
íppalling death toll on both sides.
The story is worth retelling to chart its crescendo, as well as to íoic its repetitive nature. What begins as a minor conflict in a •emote hinterland escalates into a confrontation of national and ■■ven international proportions, whose most significant character is ■hat it continually thwarts prediction and defies conceptualization. Cause and effect seem to have an incremental rather than a -■cquential relationship. This unpredictability foils the politicians md the military in their interpretation of events. They are the first 'readers" of Canudos who fail in their interpretive effort and suffer he consequences. The Republic is ridiculed and the government is lcsuibilized. Politicians in the capital claim the rebels are supplied ')>■ foreign powers interested in reinstating the monarchy, while the ert/mejos believe that the Republic is inspired by the Devil himself. I'bese colossal misreadings define what takes on the aura of a onfrontation between eras and civilizations, not between opposing actions within a single country. The repeated failure ofthe military xpeditions acquire in Euclides'  Miltonian style a nightmarish
128
MYTH AND ARCHIVE

quality. The Republic's errors are re-enacted by Os Sertoes ;i . coincidence that gives the book its poignancy and pathos.
Os Sertoes is a blow-up of Facundo, but as with most enlargen ■ n it is not simply a bigger copy but also a distortion. Then monstrous progression from Sarmiento to Euclides da Cunha   11 scientific instruments that Sarmiento wished to turn upon I    . America have metamorphosed in Euclides into the machines oi ■ made possible by modern science, and which are turned upoi- i backlands of Brazil in order to possess it in the most tangibl forcible way. There is a rigorous correlation between ínstrumei war and methods of scientific inquiry, between the planni military campaigns, and Euclides' own deployment of his seit ■ discourse. The violence that marked the passage of time in Ft has become a generalized and convulsive state of war in Os Ser' constant escalation without a discernible rate that winds up ii   i, orgy of bloodshed and indiscriminate destruction that blurs i difference between soldiers and sertanejos. It is a violence wi ' ->u measure and without end, for Canudos never surrenders.   I synchrony between nature and culture that made Facundo Qui ■: a freak embodying the latter, becomes in Euclides a vast o • i . coalescence of deviant forces that ranges from geological uphe to the shape of Conselheiro's head. Time is abnormal gr ■ ■ ■ violence a general deviance from, sometimes literally a rupture .  ■ ň the norm, the law. Nature, in Os Sertoes, expresses a tragen   ■ cosmic proportions, one that the text itself can embody becausi ■   . own hubris and anagnorisis, because of its own inherent    I» i rancy.42
If it is true that Euclides was not as prominent a figu n Sarmiento, he was, on the other hand, more systematically i m I ■   I with  the spirit and  methods  of nineteenth-century scien< ■     \ military engineer by training and profession and later an engin-     i; civilian life as well as a scientific traveler (to Peru) in his own ■ ■   ü Euclides voices throughout Os Sertoes, to the very last line, a fa  I   n science that is manifest in his ceaseless allusions to major and vi ■■■ figures of the various disciplines, ranging from geologists to ps pathologists, and including some of the many naturalists   • I ■ traveled through and described Brazil.43 In a way Euclides rell ■ • Brazil's commitment to science in the nineteenth century, whi ' various reasons outstripped that of the rest of Latin America <' was that for most of the nineteenth century, under the monan '

A  LOST WORLD  REDISCOVERED
I29
retained more ties with Europe than the nations whose endence had led immediately to the formation of republics. ier was the discovery of precious metals in the interior of
which led to much scientific travel connected with mining, it as it may, from early on Brazil established institutions for romotion 0f scientific research and exploration such as the "ial Museum, founded in 1818, and the Sociedade Velosiana ;ncias Naturais, which was created in 1850. As far as scientific •ation is concerned, Nancy Stepán writes the following in her ritative Beginnings of Brazilian Science, from which I have led the information offered above:
•adition of scientific exploration of South America established by oldt gained momentum in Brazil with the opening of Brazil to can trade after 1808. Many expeditions were sponsored, some úy and others by foreign governments. The travels of the French list Auguste de Saint-Hilaire in 1816 were followed by those of d'Orbigny, who was sent by the Museum d'Histoirc Naturelle de and by those of the German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, as accompanied by the botanist Friedrich Sellow. With the marriage Archduchess Leopoldina, daughter of the Austrian Emperor, to the an Prince Regent, Dom Pedro, a number of scientists came to Brazil er court to examine Brazilian vegetation and animals. Most famous wo Bavarians, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann t Von Spix, whose massive, many volumed Flora brasiliensis (the first t of which was published in 1829) eventually took sixty-six years to ite, and remained the standard textbook on Brazilian botany until to the twentieth century. In the steps of the French and Germans the Russian-sponsored expedition of Baron Georg Heinrich von ioríf, a German diplomat in the service of the Tsar, who collected a ium of 60,000 specimens for St. Petersburg. The English were well ;nted with the visits to Brazil of Charles Darwin, Henry Bates, Russell Wallace, and the botanist Richard Spruce. American [i.e. science began its own tradition of scientific exploration in Brazil he Thayer expedition, led by the distinguished Swiss-born zoologist Agassiz, came to Brazil in the winter of 1865-1866 to explore the m. This stage of exploration led to the amassing of a large amount of ant scientific data.44
re ways than one Euclides is heir to the tradition of Brazilian
e sketched by Stepán, and more specifically to the engineering
at the Military Academy that had been founded in 1810.45
:hool was to "prepare them [the cadets] for the surveying and
130
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
exploration of what was virtually unknown land" and "repre: a deliberate effort by the Prince Regent to alter the traditi-literary mentality of the country" (p. 25). In Os Sertoes, Et made a heroic attempt to stave off the literary by sedulously he . the voice of the land surveyor in him, and by rememberii scientific authorities that he had learned to trust.
Euclides casts a fine net of scientific studies over the se\ capture the essence of the events  at Canudos,  an excep ■ historical upheaval that has to be brought to order throm , discourse of knowledge and power. His original reports on Cai  ■ which he wrote as war correspondent to 0 Estado de Säo Paulo intended for an urban public that shared his confidence in s-and the military.46 Euclides' trust in science is as manifest 1 Republic's in the efficacy of conventional warfare to overrun rebels. A detailed inventory of Euclides' references to sciri authorities would no doubt reveal the depth and breadth ■ readings.47 Particularly in the first section of Os Sertoes the nun references is considerable, and they include the names of ,\l d'Orbigny, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, and others 1 tioned by Stepán. But he also appeals to geologists, paleontol ■ ■ botanists, pathologists. A list of names mentioned in the fir-1 chapters reads as follows (in order of appearance): Rocha  I Buckle,   Eschwege,   Lund,  Liais,   Huxley,  Fred  Hartt,   G-il Martius, F. Mornay, Wollaston, Herschel, Barón de Capa-i 1 Tyndall, Saint-Hilaire, Humboldt, Andres Reboucas, Beaur-1 Rohan, J. Yofily, Morton, Meyer, Trajano de Moura, Broca, !'■ Draenert, Aires de Casal, Varnhagen, Taunay, Orville I1 Foville, Gumplowicz, Maudsley, Vauban ... On occasion Eu assumes the perspective of a scientific traveler as he descrifc -landscape: "E o observador que seguindo ešte itinerário de * paragens em que se revezam, em contraste belissimo, a amp1' dos gerais e o fastígio das montanhas, ao atingir aquele ponto ■ surpreendido ..." (p. 96) ("The observer who has followed si • itinerary, leaving behind him a region where the broad sweep Campos   forms   a  most  beautiful  contrast  with   the  moi 1 summits, upon reaching this point stops short in surprise" [ ■ Sometimes Euclides even encourages the reader to travel wit! 1 ■ 1 as if reading Os Sertoes were like a geographical exploration     I paragem formosissima dos compos gerais, expandida em chaj   ■ '■ ondulantes - grandes  tablados onde campeia a sociedad-


A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
131
iros ••• Atravessemo-la" (p. 95)  ("This is the exceedingly
[ful region of the Campos Gerais, an expanse of undulating
an enormous stage where the rude company of vaqueiros, or
"' hovs holds forth. Let us cross this stage" [p. 7]). At other times,
evokes a traveler as he "passes" by a given landscape: "Vai-se de
cnrnbra com um naturalista algo romäntico imaginando-se que
rali turbilhonaram, largo tempo, na idade terciária, as vagas e as
rrentes" (p- I03) ("It is one that well accords with the fancies of a
mewhat romantic naturalist who imagined that here, a long time
ín the Tertiary period, the waves and swirling currents of the
:ean were to be found" [p. 15]).
Although Euclides' first versions of the events were the reports tat he wrote as a correspondent for 0 Estado de Säo Paulo, Os Sertoes is it structured by the author's actual journeys as a war correspon-mt or even by a chronological unfolding of the events - even ough, when they are recounted, the events do appear sequentially, id the travel books leave an imprint of a different kind. Like irmiento and the scientific books they both used as models, uclides structures his book following an approach to the subject ■ym large to small, from the general to the particular. Consequently i first describes the "Land" (A terra), the "Man" (0 hörnern), and en moves on to relate the "Struggle" (A luta), and each of the [peditions (Putnam's division of the book in his translation does )t reflect this structure faithfully). Leopoldo Bernucci writes, irceptively, that this division obeys Euclides' deterministic vision, at it is informed by causal succession.48 Like Sarmiento, Euclides cuses on Conselheiro as the central specimen of his herbarium, :tailing as much as possible his biography and subjecting him to e scientific theories about human character typical of nineteenth-ntury science, which were founded predominantly on physiology. haracter, determined by race and other often "abnormal" íysical forces, is destiny. Like Facundo Quiroga, Conselheiro is a nd of monster, a mutant, an accident. His elusiveness, as the iject of observation and military pursuit by the Republic, owes uch to this freedom from chartable antecedents. Scientific travel does leave an imprint on the structure of the »ok, but on a metaphorical level. If there is an analogue to the ployment of the material it is the military campaigns, which also gin by "taking" the territory, and wind up by capturing the :adel and finally the leader, albeit only his body. The voyage was
r32
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
implicit in  the military operations,  which  could  be see grotesque but not totally inaccurate figure for a scientific p] performed by European travelers to the colonial world. Tí knowledge and power conspire in these operations to br wayward into line, dead or alive, to subject him to the pret periodicity of nature, as represented by nineteenth-century ■ or to declare him an aberration inhabiting an origin in e: before the beginning of order, and which may explain the oro mutant must be pinned like a rare bug in a display case, as spectacle as a specimen. But like the military campaigns coi by the Republic, Euclides' plan is often frustrated by the vae chance and the ever-present menace of the mutable. The s and burdensome Krupp guns, mired in mud and unable to d city too flimsy to offer resistance to cannonballs,  is  th dramatic representation of the failure of the  "instrume science to reduce the Other to discourse. The guns have been there as an extension of knowledge, like the very mind naturalist, like the textual web with which Euclides wishes 1 the events.*9
Though not determining the structure of Os SertÖes, E journeys and his presence at some of the events do e\ additional element of scientific travel. He occasionally write saw, as if he were traveling along with the reader over the More often than not, however, the echo of the naturalists' ogues is heard in Euclides' own surprise and marvel at the bi grotesqueness of the scene he is describing. Euclides is a presence who attempts to reduce the odd to the familiar, anc in with astonishment and wonder when he cannot find the rr do so. The scientific traveler interposed the grid of classi between his evolving self and the reality he described, as a defending himself from the possibility of collapsing into tha reality, of becoming one with it. Euclides, like Sarmiento ; travelers, often appeals to classification, though more system than the Argentine. But he also appeals to the rhetoric of ment, to the language of the sublime, to account for the pre; his fragile and transfiguring self before a reality that is bew1 as well as compelling. Euclides' evolving conscience, his heii: awareness of failure, is also an important representation unfolding of time - his version of his own interiority as it gri asynchronous both with nature and his own intentions.

A  LOST  WORLD  REDISCOVERED
ISS
•epresentation of time and change is much more impressive
n  SertÔes than in Facundo because of the repetition and the
rhrony between the time of the city and that of the hinterland,
een the grid of science and the lay of the land. A persistent
ce of irony in Euclides' book is the constant exhibition of this
arity. Until the very end, the Republic miscalculates how much
e it will take to overpower Canudos. The forecasts are always
e of the mark. A campaign expected to take but a few days in-
■■ifies into a war that lasts many months. It is, in fact, a war
hout end, for the citadel never surrenders, and even when the
Hers are busy ensuring that not a stone is left standing, resistance
opears. The time of Canudos expands into infinity, marked by
asynchrony of convulsive violence.
"ime appears unique in the sertäo because it is construed as being time of the origin. Like Facundo, Euclides' book purports to be a be into the origin, an origin that is found in the Other, that Other hin who is a purveyor of violence. Like Facundo Quiroga, onio Conselheiro is a unique specimen, living in a unique time in a unique place. But Conselheiro is a specimen that speaks, in fact, whose chief feature is his ability to mesmerize the titudes with his rhetoric. His oratory is designed to frighten and ■ersuade:
assombroso, arirmam testemunhas existentes. Uma oratoria barbara c piadora, fcita de excertos truncados das Moras Marianas, desconexa, rusá, agravada, äs vezeš, pěla ousadia extrema das citacöes latinas; scorrendo em frases sacudidas; misto inextricável c confuso de elhos dogmáticos, preceitos vulgares de moral crista e profecias úxulas ... Era truancsco e era pavoroso. Imagine-sc urn bufao batado numa visäo do Apocalipse ...                                     (p. 221)
se persons still living who heard him preach tell us that his sermons : barbarous and terrifying, calculated to send chills down the spines of istencrs. They were made up of mutilated excerpts from the Hours of V] they were disconnected, abstruse; and at times, to make matters .e, he daringly had resort to Latin quotations. Couched in broken .ses, they were a hopelessly confused mixture of dogmatic counsels, the ar precepts of Christian morality and weird prophecies. It was a nish performance, but dreadful. One has but to imagine a buffoon dened with a vision of the Apocalypse.                                   (p. 133)
pite of Euclides' repugnance, the characterization of Consel-o's rhetoric could not be more apt and forceful. Conselheiro's
134
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
singularity is verbal expression, like the uniqueness of Euclidot ,,. text, which is as much a pell-mell collection of disparate frag] as the Counselor's sermons. Uniqueness, then, is expressed   ■   d SertÔes, through a language that, ultimately, must partake < I n. singularity of nature's flawed products, of the tragic grandeur ■ .|   . mutants, as was the case with Facundo Quiroga and the tiger in s , miento. As with Facundo, but on a much larger scale, the uniqu i of Os Seriôes is that it posits and enacts a transcendental hun i.i.,
that is like nature's own, a language like the one in which the g;.....
and the tiger communicate. It is a language capable not so mu '•, ,.■ capturing the Other as of allowing the Other to capture the Sel 11 |S a language of inversion in which the beautiful and the ťri- i i mingle. It is a language that can translate the gazes, the mm i . vibrations and the piercing roars of the beast. Consequently, i .,. selheiro's speech is termed pavoroso, capable of instilling term
It is a language whose transcendence lies in its ability to ah ■■■ error.
Os Sertöes recounts an escalation of errors that lead to a pai ■• -mal synthesis of truth and aberrancy. While the Republic inei   ■   ^ the volume and might of its expeditions, what eventually briii victory — or the semblance of victory - is that its soldiers becnrr uncos,50 or discover that they had been jagungos all along. In ■■ I. words, Canudos absorbs the Republic, which can only defeat i  .■ becoming like it. There are many instances in the concluding   I   i ters of the book in which this identification is clear. It is Kuc i> ■ -greatest insight, powerfully dramatized in the scenes of fro    i  i mayhem during the last moments of the campaign, in whi< I   'i asserts that he is describing actions that cannot be coven    I ■ history, that antecede human history:
Realizava-se urn recuo prodigioso no tempo; um resvalar estonteaď-  i alguns sécuíos abaixo. Descidas as vcrtentes, em que se entalava 2    ■ ■ ■ furna enorme, podia representar-se lá dentro, obscuramcnte, urn (   ■    ■ sanguinolento da Idade das cavernas. O cénario era sugestivo. Os 3   1 de um e de outro lado, negros, caboclos, brancos e amarelos, tra intacta, nas faces, a caracterizacäo indelével e multiforme das racas podiam unificar-se sobre a base comum dos instintos inferiores e m;i       \ animalidade primitiva, lentamente expungida pela civilizacäo, ress     1 inteirica.                                                                                      (p
An astounding miracle was accomplished, and time was turned back for a number of centuries. As one came down the slopes and caught si
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
ISS
lormous bandits' den that was huddled there, he well might have icd that some obscure and bloody drama of the Stone Age was here fntr pince. The setting was sufficiently suggestive. The actors, on one .,   alK| the other, Negroes, caboclos, white and yellow skinned, bore on ■  jr countenances the indelible imprint of many races —races which could njlt;(j only upon the common plane of their lower and evil instincts. A amiih't* animality,  slowly expunged  by civilization,  was here being 1 jsurrcard intact.                                                                        (p-444)
ľhat cauldron of primitive perversity incorporates both soldiers and ,naiirs; jt is the ultimate truth. Nature's capacity for mutation can "■cover the wayward and the weird, if there is a special space for its eratology. The sertäo is the blank page, without brilliance {"esta pátnna sem brilhos," p. 538), in which all mutations are possible, ■'ven rivers that appear to flow from the sea (p. 155). This is the ■eason why nature "expresses" itself in Os Sertöes through a rhetoric nd a poetics. This "translation" (a very common term in the book) .if nature's mutability into rhetorical figures and poetic categories 'here have already been profeáas esdrúxulas) is Euclides' attempt to have his discourse overcome its contradictions, that which ultimately turns the limp language of classification into the enervated -peccli of literature,  the way  by which discourse escapes the egcmony of the model discourse by joining its elusive object. In Os lertöes mutants are tropes. Let us look at this a little more closely.
In O.1 Sertöes nature is a menagerie of tropes^ mutants of rhetoric 1 hat reflect the mutants in the hinterlands. It is difficult to forget the ■ lonslrous tree that grows underground, to survive the droughts:
Vcem-AC. numerosos, aglomerados em caapöes ou salpintando, isolados, as
ľiacc^as, arbusculos de pouco mais de um metro de alto, de largas folhas
ipcssas c luzidias, exuberando floragäo ridente em meio da desolacäo
■:ral. Säo os cajueiros anöes, os tipicos anacardium humile das chapadas
:idas. (is cajuts dos indígenas. Estes vegetais estranhos, quando ablaque-
■ios nn roda, mostram raizes que se entranham a surprcendente pro-
1 .ndura. Xäo há desenraizá-los. O eixo descendente aumenta-lhes maior ä
■i.edida que se escava. Por hm se nota que ele vai repartindo-se em divisôes
.colômicas. Progride pela terra dentro até a um caule único e vigoroso,
nbaixo.
Nan sao raizes, säo galhos. E os pequeninos arbusculos, esparsos, ou
pontiuido em tufos, abrangendo äs vezes largas areas, uma árvore única e
■lorme. inteiramente soterrada. Espancado pelas canículas, fustigado dos
us, roído dos exuros, torturado pelos ventos, o vegetal parece derrear-se
íbaies desses elementos antagônicos e abroqueíar-se daquele modo,
136
MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
invisivel no solo sobre que alevanta apenas os mais altos renovos m majestosa.                                                                                         '   c
Grouped in clusters or standing about isolated here and there are 1- 1, numerous weedy shrubs of little more than a yard in height, with ' 1        " lustrous leaves, an exuberant and pleasing flora in the midst of th-desolation. They are dwarf cashew-nut trees, the typical Anacadia    •      ' -the arid plains, the cajuys of the natives. These strange trees h; which, when laid bare, arc found to go down to a surprising depth   ' no uprooting them. The descending axis increases in size the fur I are scraped, until one perceives it parting in dichotomous divisioi        , 1
continue underground to meet in a single vigorous stalk down b<
These are not roots; they are bows. And these tiny shrubs    .   1   ,, about or growing in clumps, covering at times large areas, are in n enormous tree that is wholly underground. Lashed by the dog-( fustigated by the sun, gnawed by torrential rains, tortured by tl ■     1   j these trees would appear to have been knocked out completel struggle with the antagonic elements and so have gone undergrou   I     i| manner, have made themselves invisible with only the tallest shoo majestic foliage showing aboveground.                                      (1
Through adaptation, these trees survive the struggle for exister--The process involves a radical transformation, an inversion of ho tree is made. This inversion allows the tree to turn adverse c n-ditions to advantage. The tree absorbs the error of nature - the 1. ■ -of water - and turns it into its strength by deforming itself. It is t! -tumultuous power of transfiguration that astonishes and fright- ■.* the  traveler -  causes  him   "pasmo"   (p. 125)   ("astonishme. [p-36]) - as Conselheiro's oratory does to his listeners. C---sequently rhetorical terms are used to describe the convolution: ■ . nature, and the word "expressive" appears regularly to designal peculiar twist of the land, or an arresting weather phenomen-u Erosion, for instance, leaves "expressive" furrows upon the mo 1 -tains: "Os sulcos de erosäo que as retalham säo cortes geológi   * expressivos"  (p. 94)   ("The erosion furrows that cut them ol   ■ significant geological cross-sections"  [p. 6]).51 At other times   ■ peculiar manifestation of nature is depicted in terms drawn fr ■ poetics, for instance, a worm that is eating away the body of a d< i-i soldier is termed: "o mais vulgar dos trágicos analistas da materi 1 (p. 112) ("most vulgar of the tragic solvents of nature" [p. ii, Conselheiro, because of his apocalyptic millenarianism, appeai   I "no epilogo da Terra" (p. .222) ("at the time of earth's epilog!'-
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
I37
i)  "Tragedies" and "parodies" abound in Euclides' char-
i!  _' at[on of the sertäo and the actors of the events at Canudos.
'■   ^   kejr0 possesses, in the imagination of the people, "urn traco
1   '. ■ io de originalidade trágica" (p. 219) ("a tragic power.. .and
1   _ ( degree of originality" [p. 131]). Thejagunps often seem to be
' . I ing the military strategies of their adversaries: "No dia 15
-e ideassem atrevida paródia ä recente vinda do comboio ..."
.. ) ("On July 15, as if they had been staging a bold parody of
er event..." [p. 351])- There is no question that this natural
*, ' igy is to be reflected in the text. Euclides writes: "Se nos
1 :i icássemos nas imagínosas linhas dessa espécie de topografia
:a, de que tanto se tem abusado, talvez näo os compre-
, M I     ;mos melhor. Sejamos simples copistas" (p. 178) ("Were we
■. .mber ourselves with the imaginary outlines of this species of
■ I   ; topography, which has been so much abused, we should not
,!,,. I i i make ourselves any more clearly understood; we should be a
...    Dpyist" [p. 89]).
\    1 Facundo, all of the abnormalities, all the transfigurations,
.vithin an anomalous time and space, which is described in
two crucial  instances,   appropriately,   as  a   "hiatus."  The first
instance is at the beginning, when Euclides is reporting on the
uniqueness of the land:
Al)Oid;tndo-o, compreende-se que até hoje escasseiem sobre täo grande tra to de territorio, que quase abarcaria a Holanda (g°i 1' - io°2o' de lat. e ŕ--f. de long. O.R.J.), notícias exatas ou pormenorizadas. As nossas inelhores cartas enfeixando informes escassos, lá tém un claro expressivo, un hiato, Terra ignota, em que se aventura o rabisco de um rio problemático ou idcalizacäo de uma corda de serras.                                           (p. 96)
As one approaches it, one begins to understand why it is that, until now, the dcifa or exact details concerning this vast tract of territory, which is almnsr equal to the land of Holland in extent (g°i 1' - io°2o' of latitude and ä}.0"'}51 of longitude), have been so very long scarce. Our best maps, conveying but scant information, show here an expressive blank, a hiatus, labeled Terra ignota, a mere scrawl indicating a problematic river or an idealized mountain range.                                                                (p. 9)
The second instance appears as the concluding massacre is being portrayed: "Canudos tinha muito apropriadamente, em roda, una cercadura de montanhas. Era un paréntese; era urn hiato; era urn vacuo. Näo existia. Transposto aquele cordäo de serras, ninguem
138
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
mais pecava" (p. 538) ("Canudos was, appropriatel) er surrounded by a girdle of mountains. It was a parenthesis, a 1 It was a vacuum. It did not exist. Once having crossed thai c of mountains, no one sinned any more" [p. 444]).
"Expressive  blank" is,  appropriately enough,  an oxyn hence the space in which Canudos' teratology of tropes exisrs i contradictory and deformed. It is the space between the ant; forces, the locus of violence, chance and change. It is a tin-space before history, a prelapsarian opening, thus no sim li could have occurred. It is a place before the law, before gression, the fault before a sin. There is a haunting propriety gap being termed a hiatus, as if it were an interruption in tbc J verse, a stop to avoid the cacophony of contiguous vowel: similar sounds, itself a break from some superior law that j\ af generate   something   anomalous.   The   conflictive   hiatus Canudos exists and the monstrous events take place is test-tube in the laboratory of some demented genius, a coop the mutating time of the origin can come about in spurts of ii prey to no predictable periodicities. This hiatus is the cave splendid isolation - the paleontologists searched for in their for a distinct origin. The peculiar expressivity of the blank eo that of nature as represented by the transcendental language text, for this is the place where the ultimate mutation occur-, mutation is the absorption of error, the growth upon cm building upon the fundamental fault of the beginning, JiJ subterranean tree, which can thrive in the drought and dr exuberant, majestic shape from it. The hiatus is the eerie grccr in which the "traco superior ä passividade da evolucao vegel (p. 122) ("a higher stroke in the evolution of vegetable passi\ i bred, the rarefied ambience in which one can read the **j perigosa" (p. 327) ("this dangerous page"), and undersiai "lici.0 eloquente" (p. 374) ("the eloquent lesson").52 This nu language to which Euclides often appeals is that capacious Jar - one that can scribble a problematic river on a map - w hie the seríäo, can absorb it all, even its antagonists, like Conseliici his followers.
The last, or rather the ultimate, representation of this spac the closing pages of the book, in which the exhumation of C heiro's body and the severing of his head are reported. The hi clearly now Conselheiro's grave, and his rotting body, partie
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
I39
■ uriilent head, is the monstrous language of the sertäo and the 1   Jts sublime expression is stench, which represents putrefac-the very image of an anomalous, matter-transfiguring time. ■)iv;ik in tne ground, the pit, is very much like the one invoked describe the uniqueness and isolation of the area. This is so also at heturical level because the ending has been arbitrarily conjured; s a violent cut in the flow of the narrative, a break: "Fechemos ]ivn>" (p- 571) ("Let us bring this book to a close" [p. 475]). - ice Canudos does not surrender, there is no "organic" way of •ling 'he story; like Conselheiro's head, the story has to be cut. !Jy violence will represent violence. Every act performed in that tsing parenthesis is a futile effort to represent Conselheiro's most ^ressive features - the photograph, the affidavits, the language of ence. The passage reads:
ia [0 cadaver] num dos casebres anexos ä latada, e foi encontrado .cas ä indicacäo de um prísoneiro. Removida breve camada de terra, ireceu no triste sudário de um lengol imundo, em que mäos piedosas /iam desparzido algumas flores murchas,  e repousando sobre uma ■ sira vclha, de taboa, o corpo do "famigerado e bárbaro" agitador. ava hediondo. Envolto no velho hábito azul de brim americano, mäos zadas ao peito, rosto tumefacto e esquálido, olhos rundos cheios de terra ial o reconheceram os que mais de perto haviam tratado durante a vida. [)esenterraram-no cuidadosamente. Dádiva preciosa - único prémio, cos despojos opimos de tal guerra! - faziam-se mister os máximos rcss'iiardos para que se näo desarticulasse ou deformasse, reduzindo-se a umři massa angulhenta de tecidos decompostos.
ľotografaram-no depois. E lavrou-se uma ata rigorosa firmando a su idemidade: importava que o pais se convencesse bem de que estava, afinal extinto, aquele terribilíssimo antagonista.
Kcsíituíram-no ä cova. Pensaram, porém, depois, em guardar a sua rabeca tantas vezeš maldita — e como fora malbaratar o tempo exumando-o d<: novo, uma faca jeitosamentc brandida, naquela mesma atitude, cortou-!ha: e a face horrenda, empastada de escaras e de sánie, apareceu ainda uma vez ante aqueles triunfadores.
'I rouxeram depois para o litoral, onde deliravam multidöes em festa, .Kju'.'íe cranio. Que a cičncia dissesse a ultima palavra. Ali estavam, no rrlf\o de circunvolucôes cxpressivas, as linhas essenciais do crime e da ■oucura ...                                                                                            (p. 572)
li |( .onselheiro's body] was lying in one of the huts next to the arbor [and Aas found thanks to the directions of a prisoner]. After a shallow layer of .MriJi had been removed, the body appeared wrapped in a sorry shroud - a
I40                                   MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
filthy sheet - over which pious hands had strewn a few withered floy. There, resting upon a reed mat, were the last remains of the "notorious ■ .. barbarous agitator." They were in a fetid condition. Clothed in his old   " canvas tunic, his face swollen and hideous, the deep-sunken eyes filled v   " dirt, the Counselor would not have been recognizable to those who in    , course of his life had known him almost intimately.
They carefully disinterred the body, precious relic that it was - the prize, the only spoils of war this conflict had to offer! - taking the gre< precautions to see that it did not fall apart, in which case they would 1 had nothing but a disgusting mass of rotting tissues on their hands. 1'. ., photographed it afterward and drew up an affidavit in due form, certif 1 its identity; for the entire nation must be thoroughly convinced that at this terrible foe had been done away with.
Then they put it back in its grave. Later, however, the thought occui ■ to them that they should have preserved the head on which so rr maledictions had been heaped; and, since it was a waste of time to exh   1. the body once more, a knife cleverly wielded at the right point did the t]   I the corpse was decapitated, and that horrible face, sticky with scars pus, once more appeared before the victor's gaze.
After that they took it to the seaboard, where it was greeted by delir' ■ multitudes with carnival joy. Let science have here the last word. Stani out in bold relief from all the significant circumvolutions were the essei outlines of crime and madness.                                                           (p. ,| ■
Virtually fused with the earth, whose capricious mutabiliť expressed, Conselheiro's body occupies, literally, a hiatus, temp' ■' •' and physical. He is now beyond all measure of normal time, - ■ remains, in death, a powerful expressive presence. Conselheiro r- . ■ not be recognizable to those who knew him intimately, yet his b- ■ ■ is the ultimate expression of the transcendental language of nai 11 ■ and of the book. His body as sign goes beyond nature, beyond .' . annulling all contradictions; in the hiatus, as a hiatus, death ci ■■ -not here mean extinction, but an expansion into infinity of 1 special space in which the anomalous dwells. Because his bod-  . now a relic, death has not stilled its capacity to be expressive; on ■ contrary,  it has  enlarged  it.  The detached head  can prov-1 delirium in the crowds and unleash a carnivalesque celebrat:--i Full of earth, the eyes are now literally the telos, his gaze is now \ !i of the earth itself. With dirt staring out of his sunken sock    -Conselheiro's blank stare is that of the expressive blank it: ■ I Beginning and end all in one, Conselheiro's body is that relic    ■■ paleontologists search for, the specimen that will unlock the sec ■"" of an aberrant beginning.
A LOST WORLD REDISCOVERED
141
Conselheiro's ultimate act of signification, which does not close ■he book, but leaves it open like his desecrated grave, is through
bose "círcunvolucôes expressívas, as linhas essenciais do crime e da
hucura •■•" - these are the tropes, the figures indelibly written
on his monstrous face, a last page that refuses to yield any secrets,
nd whose sublime expression is fear and the odor of decay. A hiatus
vithin a hiatus, Conselheiro's body and wandering head never
■incel Conselheiro's project. Os Sertöes remains an open book, as the ■ lots at the end of that last sentence reveal, and as the very last -entence of the book - a chapter unto itself- proclaims, still anxious i or the certainties of science: "E que ainda näo existe urn Maudsley :ura as loucuras e os crimes das nacionalidades ..." (p. 573) ("The
rouble is that we do not have today a Maudsley for acts of madness
.nd crimes on the part of nations ..." [p. 476]). Sarmiento's and Euclides' flight from the scientific model is to
nimic it, and conversely to fuse with the object ofthat discourse.
fhis is the fleeting point of their texts. In doing so, however, they have left monumental characters and a complex, contradictory
iinguage that points to a different source of narrative that is not in
aw, nor in science, but in logos: in language and myth. Facundo Ouiroga and Antonio Conselheiro are tragic figures who anticipate 1 he next masterstory, which is mediated by the discipline concerned
vith the madness of nations: anthropology.
4
The novel as myth and archive: ruins and reJii -,
of Tlön
Either that voice does not belong to that skin, or that skin does not belong to that voice.
Pedro Caldcrón de la Barca, En la vida todo es verdady todo menlira, i, 901-2'
In the summer of 1947, the American Hispanist John E. Eng]' 11-, flew from Caracas to San Fernando de Apure to research in the ■■ >| the genesis of Doňa Barbara (1929).2 At approximately the time, Alejo Garpentier was traveling to the interior of Venezut       1 the first of two journeys that would lead him to write Los perdidos. In that summer of 1947 Rómulo Gallegos was in the 1    !-of the political campaign that would take him to the presiden Venezuela in December of that year. Gallegos was a polil ■    n whose only baggage, according to campaign promotion, was a !■ under his arm: that book was, needless to say, Doňa Barbara. I ii novel had culled from the countryside, from the endless llam essence of Venezuelan culture, which would now be transfoj 1 into a political program to save the country.3 Although Gallegn-  1 ■■■ toured the Apure while preparing to write Doňa Barbara, the k     ■ had entered the realm of writing long before. San Fernando had : only been described by Alexander von Humboldt, but aN ■   ■ Ramón Páez, the British-educated son of Venezuelan general I Antonio Páez, in his Wild Scenes in South America, or Life in the IIa Venezuela (1862) .4 As Escenas rústicas en Sur America 0 La vida en los. de Venezuela, the book had been one of the most important souk  -Doňa Barbara, furnishing Gallegos with much of the informati< 1   ■■ the folklore of the Apure region. Another important souri-Englekirk explains,  was  Daniel  Mendoza's  El llanero  venrz
142
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE
HS
dio de sociológia venezolana), a book published in 1922, whose
■ipiions of the plain are derived mostly from von Humboldt. It
apparent that Englekirk would have done better had he
, d in Caracas and regularly visited the Biblioteca Nacionál.
1; .t Enelekirk's trip and the article that he wrote about it are a
rkable novelistic coda to Gallegos' novel, almost as revealing as
ne the other traveler in that summer of 1947, Alejo Garpentier,
,, d publish  a  few years  later:  Los pasos perdidos.  Englekirk
, ,i    ded to retrace Gallegos' steps in the author's own research
■  iey to the llano prior to writing Doňa Barbara. What he found, ■      -ver, was that the people of the Apure region had incorporated
ovel into local lore. Englekirk found plainsmen whom Gallegos I   .   jsed as models and who now, like characters in the second part
1 1 m Quijote, knew that they had an added life in fiction. They had ,. ... me experts in that fiction and were eager to act as guides and
.    nentators. Englekirk's journey eventually brought him back to
I       cas and to don Rómulo's study, a place obviously closer to the lources of the book and the headquarters not only of a political >aign but also of the fictional world that enfolded the people of
.   \.pure, and soon the whole of Venezuela. So thick was that
■    n that Gallegos was unable to shed much light on the creation .    i j novel for Englekirk. The author too had been swallowed up by
novel's voracious fictionality. Gallegos' house, paid for with ties from his famous book, bore the name of Marisela, one of nost memorable characters in Doňa Barbara, and his whole mal mythology, not to mention the program of Acción Demo-ica, was dominated by the irresistible power of the "devourer of
II ■ 1 " Gallegos seemed to have been invented by Doňa Barbara and I i-   elled into public life by its creed of cultural and national
1    nation.
I spite of its obvious debt to Facundo and Os Sertöes, Doňa Barbara arning point. Latin American fiction is no longer determined by naturalists' conception of nature, but by myths of cultural
■ linings, and authority itself-the possibility of being an author-
■  redicted on being able to generate a discourse capable of
■   lining and expressing those myths. Such authority extends nd the world of literature. From being the author of Doňa
'■     vra Gallegos can go on to become the "author" of Venezuela.
I   '   fiction turned out to be ephemeral compared to the lasting
ct of the book. The military — descendants no doubt of Facundo
144
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
Quiroga, and also of the enchanters who plagued don Quijc toppled don Rómulo less than a year after his election. Englekirl unwitting projection of Gallegos' authorial persona, will writ( article as a kind of meta-end to Doňa Barbara, and anticipate major figure in modern Latin American fiction: the Archiv( repository of stories and myths, one of which is the story a collecting those stories and myths. The inaugural archival firtic that recent tradition would be the other text that issued from summer of traveling through Venezuela, Carpentier's Los perdidos.
This tale of two texts - Doňa Barbara and Los pasos peuin contains the story of Latin American fiction in the modern pe that is, from the r 920s to the present. It is a story that center anthropology as the hegemonic discourse that makes possibk Latin American narrative. Legitimacy is now obtained by min ing the texts that constitute anthropological discourse, and textual subplot of flight away from hegemony is from those am pological texts. I shall first look at the sweep ofthat story and tin works by two very different authors who nevertheless strainer limits of the relationship between anthropology and narrative: J Luis Borges and Miguel Barnet.  This is a story that lu-satisfactory ending because it brings us to archival fictions, w make up the current mode of Latin American narrative, the 01 which my own discourse probably belongs.

As a discipline, anthropology becomes a hegemonic discourse i Latin American narrative in the twentieth century, but the disc pline itself had some of its beginnings during the colonial period ( what would become Latin America.  This is so from the vei moment of discovery. In 1494 Columbus left Fray Ramon Pane i Hispaniola with the charge of learning the language of the nati\ Tamos, finding out about their beliefs, and writing a report abour h discoveries. The Spanish Crown was interested in the native-religion to gauge how difficult it would be to convert them t Christianity.  Pane,  a Catalan with an imperfect  command < Spanish and no prior knowledge of the native population, dutiiull went to the hills, lived among the Tainos, learned as much a^ h could of their language and religion, and by 1498 had written a t rul
[■HE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    145
■linary document, his Relation acerca de las antigüedades de los p'inc's Relación anticipates many of the issues debated today rhropologists, issues that have also been significant in modern ■    -Xnu'rican fiction until the very present; for instance, Mario Llosa's 1987 novels/Aar Wor. Can one truly know the Other hnut doing violence to him or her and to his or her culture? Is riinination with Western culture desirable; will it not bring ut dtM 1 uction? Is it possible to write about one's knowledge of Other without distorting his or her culture beyond recognition? r impí,lií,ifrle to avoid making fiction out of any such attempt? The irre fare of Pane's report, a story that reads as if it had been t<en b\   Borges,  makes it an  even more  compelling textual ■nornenon. Not only was the Relación written, one presumes, in Ity Spanish, but the original was lost, not, however, before urnbus' son Hernando had copied it and included it verbatim in biography of his father that he wrote. But the manuscript of -nando's book on the Admiral also disappeared, not, however, ;>re it was translated into Italian. The Historie delia vita, et de' jatti l 'ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, which appeared in Venice, in q, contained, of course, Pane's Relación, in Italian. contemporary scholars, most notably Jose J. Arrom, have sedu-jly translated Pane's text back into Spanish.5 I carefully avoid ing "back to the original," because modern versions, using our ned philological methods and greater knowledge of Arawak ure, are more faithful in transcribing the names of Taino gods n Pane could have been, and the Spanish is, needless to say, dess. The delicate textual archaeology that yielded these ver-is involved cleansing of any trace of Italian the names of those s and removing the vestiges of sixteenth-century Italian that ered as the Relation passed through that language. Pane added her puzzlements to his premonitory text by writing in a very ■conscious manner. He complains a number of times that he is ure of the story-line of Taino theogony, because he has heard dieting accounts from different informants, but adds that, even if lad had the time or certainty about alternatives to rewrite his 3rt, he was, like the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos, short on er and  hence  could not make several drafts. All of these culties, and no doubt his own good will, led Pane to assume a rming and in many ways exemplary humility before the Tainos their beliefs, and his report, for all its faults, remains a
146
MYTH AND  ARCHIVE
fundamental source of information about the religion ofthat ex . ■ minated people. At the same time, the variegated history of the t< its existence in several languages none of which could be clain either as  the original  or the definitive  one,  together with n, uncertainties introduced by Pane himself, make the Relación a &, „■ example of the kind of literariness that current anthropologists claiming for their writings and of the attendant crisis in anthro. logy as a discipline. There is no doubt, from the point of view -.i Latin American literature, that Pane's Relación uncannily anf- .-pates many of the topics that are fundamental in modern novels l|l Los pasos perdidos and El hablador.
Pane's efforts and report are but the beginning of a wide-rangi and controversial campaign to acquire knowledge about the K World's native populations, carried out in the sixteenth and sev i. teenth  centuries  both by members of religious orders and government officials such as the cronista mayor? Works by Fi Bartolomé de las Casas  and  Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,   ■ mention only the most prominent, were written to prevent ■ 1 Spaniards from enslaving the Indians by documenting the richn- -of their civilizations, and hence their full-fledged membership in i. human race. As is known, some friars, like Toribio de Motolin took the side of the natives to the point of becoming one with the even taking an Aztec name.7 Native writers like Alba Ixtlilxoch Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, and Guaman Poma de Ayala so ■ emerged   to  give  characterizations   of their  own  cultures.  II. polemic rages to this day because in some areas, such as Peru a 1 Mexico, the destruction brought about by the conquest has not 1-to a viable cultural or political synthesis. The bases for the discoui ■ about the Other have changed, but not the fissure that makes tl ■ discourse necessary or even possible, as El hablador makes amp1 clear.
The knowledge-gathering activities of the friars as well as 1 natives' own testimonies and pleas had a tremendous political ai ■ intellectual impact in Spain and the New World. The debates abc the right to seize territories and peoples divided the Crown and 1 theological advisors, created turmoil in the colonies, and shook l'* ■ ideological foundations of Western knowledge.8 The work of t 1 friars in particular is not only an invaluable source for, but precursor of, modern anthropology, as much in method of resear as in the manner of writing reports. (There are, of course, mai
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE
I47
texts from the colonial period that offer as many premonitions
Pane's in terms of the future of anthropology and the Latin
terican narrative, most notably Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's
\  ifrasios.)9 For the narrative, the problem of describing American
irures in a Western discourse created an important topic: that of
ting about an Other whose culture is radically different from the
hor's yet who is in possession of a knowledge that appears to be
1 •,](• and functioning on its own, in spite of the differences. In
■   n.ii story about an Other who can be other and human at the
1ť lime, a fact that threatens not only the right to hold power over
•i or her,  but erodes any self-assurance about the universal
idiiv of the culture pretending to exercise control over his or hers.
I   ; Casas was quite explicit on this point in his many moments of
:, »pair. The Latin American narrative returns to this topic in the
-1   dem period, spurred on precisely by modern anthropology,
.;)sc- source is perhaps, in the non-Hispanic world, Montaigne's
iv   ''On   Cannibals."   Montaigne's   well-known   ironies   were
,.   iciments in Las Casas, Sahagún, Motolim'a, and Guaman Poma,
irlv because they were closer to the destruction and genocide.
. ,esc authors did not write ethnographic reports, given that such a
.. tnrical vehicle was non-existent in the sixteenth and seventeenth
.   nines. Their texts were, of necessity, part of the exchange of legal
■'iiments that prevailed in the colonial period. It was the only way
.    ,;iying what they had to say, and the most effective way to give
I   ir writings an immediate political impact. Hence, as with the
cription of nature, what later became a masterstory is already
mi in colonial times. What Pane lacked was the discourse of a
.    ripline in which to see reflected the problematics of his own
course.   Modern   anthropology  would  furnish   that   to  Latin
\i K'lican writers.
I'lic scientific travelers who swarmed over the New World from
eighteenth century on not only knew the writings of Las Casas
s 1 others, which had been widely disseminated to make up what is
!    nvn today as the Black Legend, but were themselves interested
■■ h in the European-like culture of cities in the crumbling Spanish
!   ípire, and in that of the non-European peoples who remained.
i    -n 1 hough the natural world was the focus of the travelers' gaze,
■ y provided a wealth of information about indigenous popu-
1   .01^. Modern anthropology began as a branch of natural history,
i   ;-ľľw out of the evolutionary conception of reality developed by
148                                   MYTH AND  ARCHIVE
nineteenth-century science.  Human culture was perceived as progression in which native American peoples stood somewhere n the early stages. Like nature in the New World, "contenipora-savages" could furnish information about the ancestors of mode man; consequently American Indians were often the object of wr ■ George W. Stocking, Jr. has called "Victorian anthropology," in .. important book of the same name.10 This anthropology was ruled 1 ■ a set of rhetorical guidelines whose function is comparable to ti ■ 1575 royal order the Spanish Crown sent to the Indies to regula ■ writing about "natives." Stocking writes: "At the same meeting committee was set up, with Lane Fox as secretary, to draw up bn forms of instruction 'for travelers, ethnologists and other anthror . logical observers.' By 1874, the committee, in which Tylor playec  ■ dominant intellectual role, had produced the first edition of Notes a Queries  on Anthropology, for the   Use  of Travellers  and Residents Uncivilized Lands. Although the dropping of 'ethnologists' from tl intended audience of Notes and Queries suggests a settling back ir ■ the armchair, the men who in that little volume proudly label   ! themselves 'anthropologists' clearly anticipated a period of hai work and slow progress within an accepted framework, one tr would be remembered as having established the new science < 1 a solid empirical, theoretical and institutional footing" (p. 258). 1 ■ describe the material culture and physical characteristics of thí natives meant to follow the methods employed to analyze the flc and the fauna. Von Humboldt and his followers provided mu-knowledge about Indian and African cultures in the Americas, b not on  the scale of the  chroniclers  and friars,  although soi travelers became particularly interested in one or another hum.-group. Francis Bond Head, as we saw, wrote a detailed report on ti gauchos.11 Just as specimens of the flora and fauna were display in museums, "primitive cultures" became part of the entertainme 1 of the belle époque, alongside circus freaks and other shows, such the one in Brazil where Antonio Conselheiro's severed head w displayed to the delight of the multitudes.12 Travelers often h ■ pictures of the natives made, both for scientific and entertainme purposes, just as they had pictures made of specimens from t natural world.13
Latin American travelers like Lucio Mansilla in Argentina ai Cirilo Villaverde in Cuba, to give but two examples, also wrc ■ about non-Europeans in the New World; the first about Indians, t ■■
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                  149
rond about Blacks in Cuba's sugarmills. These reports, however,
e n0t written in an effort to incorporate those populations into a   ,
. nre inclusive culture or polity. On the contrary, and as we saw in
^ rmiento and Euclides da Cunha, these reports were often per-
f*ated by a "scientific racism" that decried the deleterious influ-
ce non-European races had on the moral, intellectual, cultural,
. ,d material progress of Latin America. Inferior races could play a
., [e even if a negative one, in natural history, but not in cultural
jtory. The new republics, as is known, often engaged in cam-
jgns  to  exterminate  the  Indians,  now  under  the  banner of
itemization. It might be remembered here that Charles Darwin
at the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel Rosas in the pampas while
i e latter was leading a raid against Indians, and that Mansilla's
ia excursion a los indios Ranqueles was  not a  mere fact-finding
pedition, but a military campaign, no matter how ironic and
- if-deprecating the Colonel was or how critical of "civilization."14
I ie urge to modernize moved the republics away from the Indian
. st and against the Indian present. Romantic literature, par-
■■ ularly poetry, made idealized figures of the natives which had
tie in common with their current or past counterparts. These
i 1 dians came from Europe, mostly from Chateaubriand. In the
i  iribbean, where Blacks occupied a position somewhat but in
ility not quite, analogous to that of Indians, the situation was
nilar, though the struggle against slavery generated some early
idies of African cultures.15 But no one thought, save in the most
'lized and abstract romantic poems or novels which invoked
1 niversal" feelings such as love or grief, that the Indian or the
I "lack had anything to say that could be incorporated into Latin
1 nerican culture, or that their history was anything but ancillary in
e composition of the nascent independent states. They were not a
■■irce of stories that could express the innermost secrets of Latin
\ nerican society, nor could their beliefs compete with the know-
Ige offered by "civilization" in general, or by scientific reportage
1 particular. As we saw in Esteban Echeverria's "El matadero" and
^ rmiento's Facundo, the histories told by the Spanish chronicles
re left behind. The new story had to be of the present. In the
;sent Indians and Blacks appeared as part of nature, part of the
»lent becoming of the New World, but not its voice.
World War I , as we know, brought the nineteenth century to an
d, tearing down the ideological certainties of the West. In Latin
I !=iO
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
America this meant the demise of Positivism, at the most vi level.16 But it also meant disillusionment with nineteenth-cen science. The crisis of the West, or the decline of the West to g\ Spengler's widely known title, removed natural science as ■ mediating discourse in Latin American narrative, and made wa a new one, that of anthropology. But this was not an anthropo ■ whose foundation was natural science anchored in the theoi evolution and its corollaries. The decline of Positivism in Eui . itself had   changed   the   foundations   of Western   anthropo] Stocking writes: "Although it reflected changes in the colt situation and domestic ideological contexts of anthropology   : antievolutionary reaction was part of a more general 'revolt ag Positivism' in European social thought. It involved both a rea tion of the role of'irrational' factors in human life, and a critiqi the methodological and epistemological grounding of preva  ■ scientific determinisms."17 Such a reassertion  also meant i■. European culture was no longer seen as the logical or even desii goal of evolution; culture began to be conceived in a plural wa rather, the idea that culture, not cultures, constituted the w ■. became a central tenet of the new anthropology. The shift is ■ precisely to what the native had to say. What the new discc seeks is not so much knowledge about the Other as muc knowledge about the Other's knowledge. Anthropology appear -i a discipline capable of integrating into the polity as well as   ■ Latin   American   consciousness   the   cultures   of non-Euro peoples still very much present in the New World, that O- i Within analyzed by Sarmiento and Euclides da Cunha. It v totalizing discourse embracing all products of the human mind th promised to make whole political entities that were severely fni-mented and often at war with themselves. Anthropology also offen; those countries the possibility of claiming an origin different fro. that of the West; a fresh beginning that could lead away from tl debacle of Western civilization. Anthropological knowledge coul correct the errors of the conquest, atone for the crimes of the pas and make for a new history. Ironically this healing promise wa.s reflection of the role anthropology played in the West. Anthropoloy offered the West a mirror in which to look at its own battered cul tut to plot a new beginning, though, of course, in practice it was legitimation of vast colonial enterprises that harked back to ill nineteenth century.18 Anthropology drew the veil of science over th
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                  151
ce of colonial occupation. It is this "prestige" of anthropology
source of scientific knowledge about culture, as well as its
tlicity with modern art (particularly with the Surrealists), that
. it a dominant form of discourse in Latin America.19
thropological knowledge provided the Latin American narra-
vith a source of stories, as well as a masterstory about Latin
-ican history. In fiction, Latin American history will now be
In the form of myth, a form derived from anthropological
todies. The relationship of the Latin American novel to anthropo-
1-ideal discourse is homologous to its relationship in earlier periods
r, ]aw and science. Revealingly, anthropologically mediated Latin
\merican narratives lead, through a process analogous to one that
akes place within anthropology itself, to a crisis in anthropological inowledge. If in the novel we move from a Gallegos to a Borges, a ^arpentier and a Garcia Márquez; in anthropology we go from gronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Griaule to Clifford Geertz, fames Clifford, George Marcus, Talal Asad, Vincent Crapanzano, fames Boon, Michael Taussig, and several others who are subject-ng anthropological discourse to a radical critique.20 Latin Werican narrative may well be the design on the reverse side of the )icture, or the mirror-image of the crisis in anthropology as a
liscipline.
The historical scheme I offer here for anthropology is derived rom James Clifford's influential work, now available in The Pre-licament of Culture. The parallel plots of anthropology and Latin American narrative are as follows: the period between the wars is me in which authoritative texts are produced both in anthropology and the anthropologically mediated Latin American novel; after World War II, and in the case of the Latin American novel, after Los pasos perdidos (1953), the authority of anthropological discourse is voided. The evolution of anthropological discourse took the following path, according to Clifford:
In the 1920's, the new field worker-theorist brought to completion a powerful new scientific and literary genre, the ethnography, a synthetic cultural description based on participant observation [which] may be briefly summarized [as follows] ... First, the persona of the field worker was validated, both publicly and professionally. In the popular domain, visible figures like Malinowsky, Mead, and Griaule communicated a vision of ethnography as both scientifically demanding and heroic. [...] the field worker was to live in the native village, use the vernacular, stay a sufficient
I52                                   MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
(but seldom specified) length of time, investigate certain classic suhjr -[■■-] the new ethnography was marked by an increased emphasis on 1: power of observation. Culture was construed as an ensemble of chanictr istic behaviours, ceremonies and gestures, susceptible to recording explanation  by  a  trained onlooker.   [...]   certain powerful  theoretic abstractions promised to help academic ethnographers "get to the hocn of a culture more rapidly [...]  the new ethnographer tended to lhr thcmatically on particular institutions. [...] In the predominantly svnec dochic rhetorical stance of the new ethnography, parts were assumed Ui 1 microcosmos or analogies of wholes. This setting of institutional fin-grounds against cultural backgrounds in the portrayal of a coherent u or . lent itself to realist literary conventions.          (The Predicament, pp. 20--}
These realist literary conventions in ethnography correspond 1 those of the regionalist or telluric novel in Latin American fiction kind of novel that prevails precisely between 1920 and 1950. ca essentially in a nineteenth-century realist mold. Doňa Barbara is -course, the quintessential telluric novel. Around 1950 there is, thej both in anthropology and in Latin American fiction a ai\e , conscience, provoked by a political awakening on the part of the o hin of anthropological study. The liberation of the post-colonial wurl< and in Latin America events such as the Cuban Revohuioi undermined official stories such as the ones both literature an anthropology provided about Latin American culture or culture There was also an apparent complicity between anthropologic;-conceptions of culture, their application to Latin America, an United States hegemony in the area that was vehement I denounced in the 1960s. This is the subject of Vargas Llosa's I hablador. In anthropology the crisis has generated a highly critic; metadiscourse. Clifford writes:
Henceforth, neither the experience nor the interpretive activity of il scientific researcher can be considered innocent. It becomes necessarv I conceive ethnography,  not  as  the  experience  and interpretation of circumscribed 'other' reality,  but rather as a constructive negotiaiio involving at least two, and usually more, conscious, politically signified!" subjects.   Paradigms  of experience  and  interpretation  are yielding v paradigms of discourse, of dialogue and polyphony.                       (p. \\
In Latin American narrative there is a parallel evolution to bighl self-reflexive forms that turn back onto earlier narratives to reve;1 their literariness, rather than the validity of their knowledge aboi. culture, annulling the anthropological mediation by showing il \\n
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    153
literary conceit all along. More recent forms then turn onto the ladiscourse itself to reveal its literariness. These are the archival fi-tions: Terra Nostra, Yo el Supremo, De dondeson los cantantes, El arpay la •ombra, El libro de Manuel, Rayuela, Oppiano Licario, to name but a few. Of course, in the case of most practitioners of the metadiscourse among recent anthropologists-victims of the "epistemologicalhypo-chondria" of which Geertz speaks - they gladly avow the literary duality of anthropology.21 Literary means to these anthropologists a discourse that does not assume method to be a transparent medium, but that is embedded in rhetoric, and as such, partaking of the (Ti'iieral circulation of texts in a given epoch. It also means a nonau-rhnritative discourse containing several voices, including, -most importantly, that of the object of study. Finally, it means a text with multiple layered meanings which is never fixed, like Pane's Relación.
So there is in the present a coincidence in the urge to declare anthropology literary both in anthropology itself and in the Latin American narrative. In the latter this turn constitutes the escape from the constraint of the model discourse by means of the legitimizing act of mimesis. In recent fiction this move takes the form of a rťiurn to the Archive, the legal origin of the narrative in Latin America. The Archive does not privilege the voice of anthropological knowledge, nor does it abide by the discourse of anthropology in method or practice. The Archive questions authority by holding warring discourses in promiscuous and mutually contaminating contiguity, a contiguity that often erases the difference separating them. The Archive absorbs the authority of the anthropological mediation. Later, of course, in the archival fictions, the Archive is shown to be also a form of mythic discourse, not removed from the literary but a part of it. This swerve is, in turn, directed against the authority of the metadiscourse, by showing that the literary is not an independent category outside language, but language itself in its most vulnerable and self-revealing manifestation. Narrative invalidates the stance of the metadiscourse, showing that it is always part of the mythic.
3
Choses rares ou choses belles ici savamment asscmblccs, comme jamais encore vues. Toutes choses qui sont au monde.
On the facade of the Musée de ľHomme
154                                   MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
During the 1920s, in the wake of World War I, institutions wet. created in many Latin American countries to gather informatio 1 about the cultures of indigenous or African peoples present in the:i territories. A powerful agent in bringing about this reversal was th-Mexican Revolution, one of whose central programs was a vind cation of the Indian legacy, as well as a recognition of the presence ( Indian cultures in the make-up of modern Mexico.22 The state mad a sustained  effort in  anthropology  and  related  fields  such a archaeology, founding museums, academies, schools, journals, an-1 other institutions.23 Although without undergoing a political uphee val as profound as Mexico's, in Peru and neighboring Andea 1 countries the pre-Hispanic past was extolled and the study 0 present indigenous cultures was institutionalized. The foundation c Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, the rekindling of ind genismo are all part and parcel of this movement.24 In Argentin 1 there was a rekindling of interest in gauchesca literature, while in th Caribbean attention was focused on Blacks. The Afro-Antillea movement was promoted by anthropologists such as Fernand Ortiz, who was the first president of the Sociedad de Folklór Cubano in 1923, and founded the Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura in 1925, and in 1937 the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos, which published the journal Estudios Afrocubanos.25 In Brazil, the Week of Modern Art in Säo Paulo (1922) celebrated the country's indigenous and African past, and attempted a mock vindication of cannibalism as a cultural practice. The influence of these self-proclaimed antropófagos was far-reaching. They exemplify the convergence of avant-garde movements and the more widely accepted and institutional search for national identities. Mario de Andrade's Macunaima (1928) combines anthropology and avant-garde novel-istic techniques to create a modern mythic hero. Both the institutions founded by the various governments and the avant-garde artists sought the discovery or creation of a national culture, a discourse, as it were, bespeaking the uniqueness of Latin America and of each individual  subculture within it.  The presence of anthropology in both as a mediating element, an authoritative method  delimiting  the  possibilities  of discourse,   is  shockingly evident, and the participation of writers, artists, and intellectuals in general in this enterprise is a very significant episode in modern Latin American history. Concepts, methods, and often knowledge itself was derived either from the work of European-based anthropo-
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    I55
oeists, or from that of European-trained native anthropologists, •uch as Ortiz himself and his disciple Lydia Cabrera. Anthropology 1S a set of given discursive possibilities, as the very possibility of AŕTÍting about Latin American culture, is a given within and against which much of Latin American narrative is written in the twentieth „entury. I have already mentioned in the first chapter a number of writers who combined literature and anthropological research, and ine could add others like the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, the ßrazilian Darcy Ribeiro, and the Mexican Juan Rulfo. But the point is that these writers make explicit a relationship between literature and anthropology that is implicit in the core of Latin American narrative in the modern period; in other words, Fernando Ortiz and Gilberte Freyre articulate in their scientific works what in the narrative is an inherent effort to represent culture that is ethnographic in its conception.26
The regionalist or telluric novel was conceived through this institutionalized anthropological grid. These novels are concerned with myth, religion, magic, language, genealogy, the impact of modern modes of production on traditional societies, retentions from earlier periods, in short, with the totality of a culture viewed and described from the outside, often through a narrator who follows a protagonist traveling to the jungle, the llano or the pampa. As novels, these books generally adhered to the practices of nineteenth-century realism. The anthropological mediation is evident as much in the stories about the creation of each novel as in the actual text. These ancillary stories or pretexts serve to legitimize the persona of the novelist as a knowledgeable individual, much in the same way that the public and professional figures of anthropologists were legitimized by stories of their voyages and sojourns in the wild. One could call these stories fables of validation or legitimation. For instance, it is part of the tale always told about the composition of novels such as Don Segundo Sombra (1926) and Doňa Barbara that both Ricardo Güiraldes and Rómulo Gallegos traveled to the pampa and the llano, respectively armed with notebook and pen to record unusual words, strange stories, customs regarding horsemanship and cattle-ranching, in fact, everything that any self-respecting anthropologist doing fieldwork would note. In the most advanced statement on the telluric novel, Carlos J. Alonso has convincingly argued that the project of novelists like Gallegos, Güiraldes, and Rivera was modern because of their critical perspective, which they
156                         "         MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
sought to conceal, but was fundamental to their task: "The atter to produce a text of autochthony places the writer in an eccen perspective with respect to his or her own cultural circumstance 1 the resulting displacement, the author necessarily becomes als critic in spite of the unproblematic assumption of immediacy which his project is predicated."27 The critic that the nove1:, becomes is essentially an anthropologist,  because anthropoli furnishes the only discourse capable of authoritatively analyzi and narrating the autochthonous, hence the fable of legitimati and  the various  information-gathering activities  to which ť, devoted themselves once in the field. Alonso's most produci insight is to realize that the "quest for identity" project implici telluric novels is itself a myth, a reflection, I would add, of the v 1 discourse on which it is based. He writes: "The Latin Amerii quest for cultural identity could itself be regarded as a cultural m   ' of foundations; but a myth that narrates the story of an essen 1 : cultural schism, capable nonetheless of endowing the affairs of I collectivity with the requisite meaning and purpose. In the e through this myth of permanent cultural crisis, Latin Amerii intellectuals have paradoxically found an effective narrative    I cultural identity" (p. 36). This reading is only possible from perspective of the re-reading of the telluric novels that more reo 1 fiction has made possible, from the point of view of the archi fictions to which, ultimately, Alonso's own book belongs.
In Los de abajo (1915; 1924), Mariano Azuela, with a stroke ' genius, included the figure of the outside observer inside the no* ■ 1 Dr. Cervantes (no less), who is forever frustrated in his efforts ■ understand the revolutionaries with whom he travels. A cení I concern of these so-called novelas de la tierra was to cull and reci .■ information about sectors of Latin American culture which, wh ■ contemporary and part of that culture, were outside modern: more importantly, these were illiterate populations, possessi essentially oral cultures, thus fulfilling an important prerequisite w be the object of an anthropological study. In his position as outsider, the anthropologist-author searched for the secret of his own uniqueness, and the key to an originality that would be measured by i is distance from the routines and commonplaces of the West. The insistence on being there- to use Clifford Geertz'formula-and being able to convince the reader of the authenticity of what is being written, takes a peculiar form in the case of the Latin American
THE  NOVEL AS  MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
IĎ?
. hor because his conceit consists in affecting to have always been ,re given that he is a native of the culture.28 But, at the same time, i has to be outside to be able to record it, to inscribe it. \ nthropology furnishes the novelists with the methodological ' istruments, the rhetoric or discourse to be both there and outside. On the most elementary level, as we saw, he or she carries a pad and
en to record what is out there. These efforts were not always as ateurish as tney seem_ if it is true that Güiraldes, Gallegos, and Rivera had really very little, if any training in ethnography, other writers, particularly those more closely associated with the avantgarde, did have some, or by their extended stays "in the field" developed methods close to those of professionally trained anthropologists. One should remember here two further fables of validation or legitimation. Carpentier has written in La musica en Cuba ÍIU46) about how he attended Afro-Cuban rituals with reverence, but also with notebook and pen to record the music as much as the story being acted out.29 The results are found in his 1933 novel .■Lrue'-Yamba-Of, which includes the quite reliable transcription of an initiation ceremony.30 Another story is that of Joäo Guimaräes Rosa, who was not only a great Brazilian writer but also a medical doctor. Guimaräes Rosa spent years caring for the dirt-poor people of the sertäo. Since they could not pay him he would ask them to tell him stories in return for his services. From the stories that he collected he wrote many of his own short stories as well as his masterpiece Grande sertäo: veredas.31
These novels are guided by a philological approach derived from nineteenth-century anthropology. The anthropologist-author aims to fix a text, containing a set of cultural practices and a group of stories. The study of this mythology is shrouded in the mystery of words, whose origin the anthropologist-author attempts to find, and whose meaning he discovers and sets. Novels like Don Segundo Sombra or Canaima are philological works in this sense. Often, as in Doňa Jiárbara, La vorágine and jEcué-Yamba-O! the books come equipped with glossaries, and Carpentier's novel even has illustrations. The narrative voice in these novels frequently contrasts a peculiar usage \vii.h the standard Spanish one. Gallegos, Güiraldes, and most regionalist novelists are experts in folklore and rural speech, and their novels show it. They are also at pains to reproduce through odd, presumably phonetic spelling, the peculiar pronunciation of their characters, creating an even stronger clash between their
158                                   MYTH AND ARCHIVE
speech and the voice of the narrator. These books attemp inscribe, to turn into writing, the oral culture or subculture question, using the philological instruments of anthropology. Ji
in the actual creation of the novel and within the text, the trapp-
of method are present.
Anthropology as a form of hegemonic discourse is also evidn. . the regionalist novel because of the inordinate attention pai ■ matters of genealogy. Genealogy, as we know, is very mud element in conventional novelistic tradition, and could even either a remnant of the epic or something willfully copied from  .' ■ epic by novelists attempting to give their works an epic dimr-n.si Be that as it may, genealogy is a fundamental element in modi . Latin American fiction, not merely as a measure of time, nor a  . reflection of myth, but also because the regionalist novel studies ■■■ family as a group, and how values are transmitted from genera t   ■■ to generation, as well as in social practices. The complex gencalr cal structure of Doňa Barbara has a mythic, theogonic dimi-nsi   1 but it is also a study of the clash between the conception of . family unit in rural Venezuela and urban Caracas. The apolht-f   -of genealogy one finds in Cien aňos de soledad is a parody of this asp-  ■ of the regionalist novel. The study of myth and the family com n ■ -gle and give the regionalist novel a peculiar character, bul o».' because myth and the family are aspects ofthat synechdochi   1 rhetoric that ethnography finds suitable for a holistic studv  ■ ■ society.
Another  aspect  of anthropological  discourse  evident   in   •'■■ regionalist novel is the comparative method, which appears in \\v -books mainly in contrasts between the oral subcultures and   ' dominant culture, though comparisons between oral subcultin  -also abound. Chronological contrasts are also drawn, pitting "■■■ state of a given group before the arrival of the Europeans with d   .! present condition, or chronicling the decline of a group as a roiil   ■. a specific form of exploitation, as in the case of La vordgine and   .' rubber industry, jEcué-Yamba-O! and sugar production, or /*'» Segundo Sombra and Doňa Barbara and cattle-ranching. There is sense of loss in these telluric novels, a nostalgia for a past whv traditional values prevailed and non-European cultures were tru -to their nonhistorical "essence." The recuperation ofthat state i the mission of the novels, a mission that can be achieved by lindin a modern, all-encompassing myth that will make whole the dispa-
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    159
fragments of the present: one Venezuela, one Argentina, or one
áco, united in an apotheosis of cross-cultural communion?
he most interesting and enduring among these novels explode
er the pressure of their internal contradictions. These novels are
ideal subjects for myth criticism as some have thought, but are
iselves a form of myth criticism. The disparate mythic elements,
strands of various stories, plus the contemporary, historical plot
Iving the protagonists, cannot coalesce under the all-embracing
alk'ü'ory or metamyth. In regionalist novels the language of the
narrator is about magic, but it is not magical. In these texts the
]jrerary element is found precisely in their inchoate nature, which
reveals the trappings as well as the inadequacies of method. These
novels are mock anthropology that unmasks the conventionality of
ethnography, its being a willful imposition on the material studied
as an act of appropriation. This revelation, when it occurs as in Doňa
Barbara, constitutes the flight of these texts from the hegemonic
discourse that mediates them - a flight into literariness.32
The solution to this dilemma, still under the mediating influence of anthropology, was to write novels whose inner coherence imitated thai of sacred texts, even including numerological and symbolic correspondences, and leaving no fissures between the world of the characters and that of the narrator. This was the great achievement ol'the Carpentier of El reino de este mundo (1949) and of Miguel Angel Anurias' fiction in general. René Prieto has described Asturias' novelistic project in this way;
hike Joyce, who conceives Ulysses in terms of a complex narrative framework in which each chapter is linked with a section of the Odyssey, an hour of day, an organ of the body, an art, a color, and a musical instrument, Asturias builds his American idiom on the basis of layered relationships embracing elements, animals, colors and numbers [from Mayan lore] interlinked amongst themselves.33
In 1927 Asturias had translated, edited and published the Popol Vuh in Paris; better yet, and closer to Pane and Borges, Asturias translated into Spanish Georges Raynaud's French translation. His novels, particularly Hombres de maíz, which is the one being discussed above by Prieto, profited from the knowledge he acquired in that anthropologico-philological restoration. Asturias' novels also gained from the various textual siftings that the Mayan material went through, and from the traces that those siftings left in the final
i6o
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
text. The Mayas had no writing and no books in the way the \\ conceives of them. They certainly had no novels. Their contem rary descendants write no novels either - unless they are ca] Miguel Angel Asturias - and probably read very few of th< Spanish versions of Mayan myth are always translations, and concoction of a numerological system bonding the contempor plot of the novel with the rigid language of sacred lore is a produc the literary imagination, not of ritual. Hombres de maiz is a nove the measure in which it pretends to be myth, not because it is my Jose Maria Arguedas' answer to these dilemmas in his at biographical novel Los rios profundos is to narrate in the first per; the life of a boy who, like him, lived among Indians and lean Quechua before Spanish. Very much like The Portrait of the Artist Young Man, Los rios profandos is a Bildungsroman in which the yoi protagonist is sent to a school where he is to learn to live in society his parents have chosen for him. It is a deeply troubí experience because for Ernesto to learn from the Spanish-speak priests and his classmates means to forget, or worse, to scorn the of those who raised him. Los rios profundos is almost an allegory ab the conquest of Peru and the forced acculturation of the native; Western civilization. It is not quite that because its most profoi message is precisely that the wounds of the conquest have healed, hence an overarching construct that will, as in Astur pretend to bind together the knowledge of the natives acquired by anthropological practice, and their own knowledge of themselves, is not possible. The disharmony at the core of Peruvian society is conveyed through the broken syntax of the narrator's discourse, which very often obeys the linguistic structures of Quechua. There are flashes of poetry in this fractured Spanish, catachreses created by the interference of another language. Moreover, as John Murni (an anthropologist) says about his colleague's fiction, for Arguedas the issue was "how to transmit to the reader of Spanish not only compassion for the oppressed, but a sense that the latter also had a perception, a world view of their own, in which people, mountains, animals, the rain, truth, all had dimensions of their own, powerful, revealing, and utterly unlike the Iberian ones."34 Los rios profundus represents through its very incompleteness and flaws the tense dialogue of cultures that makes up contemporary Peru, a dialogue in which the acquisition of knowledge about the other can still lead tit genocide.
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE
i6i
Given his unimpeachable credentials in anthropology, Arguedas' ^ )le of legitimation is a much more dramatic one. By means of it, he arly wanted to make a statement as much about his texts as about ; life. When he killed himself in 1969, Arguedas was expressing^ t only a measure of his despair, but also perhaps of his guilt for ving made use of anthropological knowledge to approach a part of inself, a process that was already a kind of partial suicide. Feeling, rhaps, that he had stilled through inscription one of the voices thin him, he felt that the proper thing to do was to annihilate the j her. In Arguedas the anthropological mediation is not bypassed, in Asturias, by exposing its literariness, but by denouncing its lent, repressive nature, and by stressing the limitations inherent the kind of knowledge that it can generate. In Arguedas conquest i knowledge are still linked. Anthropology, which he practiced der the auspices of the sort of state organization to which I have aded, was implicated in cultural genocide. He did not see a way t of the headlong rush to destruction that the arrival of the book i the cross in the Andes seemed to have started.
4
>m early on, Borges has both profited from and offered a radical tique of anthropological discourse and its relationship to narrative. This is an aspect of Borges' work that can be easily overlooked because he wrote no novels and his fiction is considered to be inimical to the novela de la tierra. In "El jardin de senderos que se bilurcan" there is a passage that appears to be a critique of any kind of discourse that attempts to contain a country or a culture in the way that regionalist novels do. The protagonist says: "Pensé que un hnmbre puede ser enemigo de otros hombres, de otros momentos de oiros hombres, pero no de un pais: no de luciérnagas, palabras, jardines, cursos de agua, ponientes" ("I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of different moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind").35 Yet in May of 1940, Borges published a story that is to my mind his regionalist novel, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Given Borges' distaste for the novel in general, and his disdain for realism and most forms of regionalism, it is not surprising that his novela de la tierra should be about a totally imaginary region. Borges was critical of regionalism and skeptical, if
IÖ2
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
not mocking, of all efforts to define an independent Latin Amern consciousness or a  unique  Latin American  literature.  He \ positively repelled by the link between such ideological enterpri and government programs. But he was hardly indifferent to th intellectual,  cultural  and political  enterprises.36 Borges  him. began his literary career as a regionalist poet in Fervor de Buenos A (1923) and worked closely with Ricardo Güiraldes. He was 3 fascinated by gauchesca literature, making quite a few valua contributions himself in stories such as "El Sur" to a thematic t was essentially Argentine fin fact, "El Sur" is, in some ways, a st about a fable of legitimation like the ones just seen in relation to telluric novel). In "El Aleph," furthermore, Carlos Argentino, v is bent on writing a national epic is the quintessential telluric wri and no matter how ironically he is portrayed, his project is imp( ant enough to be a central concern of the story.
So, instead of reading one of the canonical novelas de la tierra, enterprise admirably performed by Alonso, I will concern mv with the unwriting of the ideological and literary project beh such fictions in Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Borges' st is in this respect a greater challenge, not only because of the cavca • offered above,  but because it has  been read  and  re-read as metaphysical fancy, outside the context of Latin American issue The following analysis does not dispute other interpretations, hi •• considers them too determined by the surface metaphysical tone t 1 the  story.  As we  shall  see,   "Tlön,   Uqbar,   Orbis  Tertius"  1-corrosively aware of the mimetic pact between Latin America . narrative and the anthropological mediation.
In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" Borges reveals the artifice of r ľ ■ regionalist   novel   by   creating   an   entirely   imaginary   counu described with the methodological precision of an ethnographer report. In a sense, what Borges does is to turn the regionalist nm-' inside out, performing in the process a severe ideological critique <■ the anthropological mediation. The style of the entry in the encyi U -pedia, where the narrator finds the information, is described ; follows: "El pásaje recordado por Bioy era tal vez el único sorprcn-dente. El resto parecia muy verosimil, muy ajustado al tono gener; de la obra y (como es natural) un poco aburrido. Releyéndolc descubrimos bajo su rigurosa escritura una fundamental vaguedad (p. 432) ("The passage remembered by Bioy was perhaps the «ml startling one. The rest seemed probable enough, very much i-
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    163
keeping with the general tone of the work and, naturally, a little H nil. Reading it over we discovered, beneath the rigorous writing, a fundamental vagueness" [p. 19]). The key word here is the technical term verosimil, lost in the somewhat careless translation, which means realistic by virtue of the text's adherence to rhetorical norms for representing reality. The suggestion is clear: regionalist novels arc fantastic, not realistic, the methodology that legitimizes them is no more than a pre-text to elaborate a cogent fictional world, ethnography is always literature. The authoritative voice of method is as literary, as fantastic, as the stories that it uncovers.
Borges had anticipated this critique in a 1932 essay that is a direct answer to an anthropological treatise that had vast repercussions in Latin American literature, as well as many others, James (;. Frazer's The Golden Bough?1 In this essay, "El arte narrativo y la rtiagia," Borges writes about novels and stories and their relation to clu: "primitive mind." He contends, as he will on several occasions, ihat novels are as chaotic as the real world, unless they are onnstructed like detective novels. Such stories, he says, are carefully constructed worlds in which there are secret connections between e\ents. Borges is interested in the secret of those connections, which u e accept without blinking. For Borges causality is the most important element in a story, but he asserts that causality in stories is as fantastic and as magical as the primitive cures described by I'razer, which depend on tropological relations between wound and {nre, or between cure and and the weapon that inflicted the wound. Primitive medicine is based on belief in such a system of metaphors; magic would be the efficacy of such a system in affecting reality. In reading and writing stories, and in accepting detective stories as 1 caustic, we indulge in the same kind of magic we assume to be l\pical of primitives. Hence our "study" of primitives by means of anthropology, and our writing about them using the literary conventions of ethnography, reveals much about us, much that is a mirror image of the object we purport to describe or analyze. The links that we establish between events, our own metatexts about the primitive, are cast in a rhetorical mold that is not radically unlike his. Given these propositions, Borges' Others in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" are not going to be "contemporary savages," like iituse of Victorian anthropology, but imaginary beings that inhabit .i kind of metatextual utopia.38
In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" that metatext happens to be
164                                   MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
about a non-existent realm, but the procedures and tropes tf   ■ make it up are the same as those in ethnography; in fact, one co   ii say that the story actualizes the metadiscourse of ethnography. ■] , fable of validation or legitimation in Borges' story has, thereft . been internalized, has been made a part of the narrative. Lea 1 mation is not granted here by a journey to the wild, by *cbei- ■ there," but by the discovery, in a pirated version of the Britannica   .| an article about Uqbar, a country that the narrator and his fri(  ,i Bioy cannot find in any atlas  (Bioy is, of course, Adolfo B ■ Casares,  an Argentine writer of fantastic fiction,  a detail t: vacuums into the fiction Borges' context at the time of writir Uqbar is a very odd place indeed, but it is described by ■ 1 encyclopedia, as we saw, in the flat tone characteristic of si   Ii reference works. A second fable of validation is provided by   '. appearance of another encyclopedia,  produced  by a charat   1 who   is   drawn  out  of the  world  of European  expansion t ■ generated   modern   anthropology.   Legitimation   in   Borges  d   -honor to the etymology of the word both as law and as reading. T textual space of the encyclopedia, which stands for all the knowlc in  the  West,   a  compendious  and,   at  the  same  time,   sliní frantic repository of information,  is organized according to most banal of conventions, the alphabet, yet can absorb anyilr reducing to common knowledge the most distant and diflci   ■■ cultural practices. Uqbar, knowledge of which the encyclopr  1 owes to the work of various German ethnographers and travel 1 has a literature that is obsessively devoted to the description of imaginary regions: Meljnas and Tlön. These are the telluric no-    -within the fictional telluric novel of Borges' story, the rest of whirl 1 about Tlön, one of those regions, which is as odd as Uqbar, if . ■ more so. Information about Tlön is acquired from an Encyclopedt Tlön, obtained from a blurry Englishman, appropriately nan ■ ■ Herbert Ashe, who came to Argentina to work on the British-!) ■■ railroads after some adventures in Brazil; he is obviously a figur  ■ I the European traveler, vaguely reminiscent of Francis Bond IT<    I Borges is notorious for the creation of this kind of mise en ahm underline the textual nature of most phenomena. In this c ■ however, the presence of the encyclopedia in a remote neighborly    I of Buenos Aires - as far as Borges would travel from the city - m ■ the role played by the English engineer, clearly point not only to literary nature of ethnographic writing, but also to the soun ■  ■ '
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE
165   •
h discourse in institutions fostered by the British Empire. As we
, 1)W.  growth  of the Britannica  during  the  nineteenth  century
■alleled the expansion of the Empire, culminating in the tenth
■ lion, published in 1902, the date given in Borges' story for the veiopedia. Herbert Ashe merely heightens the atmosphere of
\ i.torian   colonial   life   that   permeates   "Tlön,   Uqbar,   Orbis
■n . ľtlUS.
Iíut Ashe is significant in another way. He transmits the Encyclope-
(,f Tlön to the narrator through death,  as it were; it is a
.   ti mrňous gift, a partial key to the secrets ofthat elusive region.
I ■ ..-i e is something funereal about Ashe anyway, beginning with his
y name. He is, according to the story, one of those Englishmen
s 3 suffer from "unreality." The point is that, like the Buendia who
1   nages to translate Melquiades' manuscript in Cien aňos de soledad,
*  le establishes a link between knowledge and death that will be
.   of the main components of archival fictions. Death is a meta-
■  . ir for the impossibility of knowledge, or about the impossibility of i   :e being any discourse about the Other that is not based on a
sntially lethal power. Like Melquiades' manuscript and like all luscripts found in the Archive, the Encyclopedia of Tlön is a partial unfinished work; Ashe is only able to produce one volume. Like
. 1 nography, according to Clifford, this encyclopedia is predicated synecdoche, only that here, the part can hardly be expected to
11 duce a whole. The sum total knowledge about Tlön is hopelessly
■   >mplete and is in need of further invention or investigation. But ■le knowledge may be fragmentary and partial, the fiction is - encompassing, as the reader discovers in the epilogue, where it is
■    :aled that Tlön may be the fabrication of an international sect of I' nists. The inversion has been completed. From a discourse 1   -gned to describe and discover the codes of a given culture,
íography becomes a mastercode to invent a society. Tlön is to 1 ■ ges as Venezuela is to Gallegos. Hence, Venezuela is like Tlön. ,;    Tlön is a negative culture; in it things seems not to add up, but
subtract down." While I am not unaware of the metaphysical 1 ; Hcations of this, I am more taken by the way in which Borges has
ritten, or unwritten the rules that govern the production of
ourse about another culture. Also by how he has anticipated '    : Macondo would be like a house of mirrors, and that the sources
. Carpentier and Englekirk found in the Apure were always
■ ady stories.
166
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
5
Barnet has in no way pretended to have written literature, although he hi produced one of the most accomplished Cuban literary works of thjl century.                                                         Manuel Moreno Fraginals-*-
Biografia de un cimarrón was first published in 1966 by Cuba's Instituto de Etnológia y Folklore, an entity whose origins are the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos and other organizations founded by Fernando Ortiz. Barnet, once Ortiz' assistant, and who helped him pack and catalogue his library toward the end of the master's life, was among the original group of researchers when the Instituto de Etnológia y Folklore opened its doors. He was on his wav to becoming an anthropologist, perhaps Ortiz' successor. Biografia é un cimarrón which, as the institution that published it guaranteed, was intended as an ethnographic study, would change Barnet's life, perhaps as radically as Doňa Barbara changed Gallegos'. The enormous success of the book as a work of literature, both in Cuba and abroad, led Barnet to become an author both of various other testimonial narratives and of several books of poetry. Today he occupies a position at the Union de Escritores, y Artistas de Cuba not at the Instituto de Etnológia y Folklore (which has in any case been disbanded). Barnet's procedures are rather conventional. He interviews his subjects, researches the social and historical contexts in libraries and archives, and then writes a first-person account in chronological order. Biografia de un cimarrón was, and continues to he, an important book because it reached to the core of the anthropological mediation and reopened issues that had been opened by Pane, Sahagún, Guaman Poma and other chroniclers of the discovery and conquest of America. Barnet's book, in addition, seemed to cut through the ritualistic arguments about socialist realism and modernism, which had been rehearsed once again in the Cuba of the 1960s, and answered Carpentier's challenge in Los pasos perdidtn. Moreover, in a local context that had nevertheless international repercussions, Biografia de un cimarrón returned to the questions around which Cuban literature had begun as a self-conscious activity and an institution in the 1830s. Barnet established a link with anti-slavery narratives of that period such as Manzano's Autobiografia, and with a whole tradition that is, as William Luis has demonstrated, at the evolving center of Cuban narrative since tiie first half of the nineteenth century.40 It was through anthropology
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                 l6"7
that Biografia de un cimarrón tried to bypass the snares of the literary, hut anthropology is so ingrained in Latin American narrative that it was hardly an escape, and escaping is a theme of paramount importance in the book. If one looks at Biografia de un cimarrón as an object one finds that outwardly it resembles as much a regionalist novel as an ethnographic monograph. There is a photograph of Jvlanuel Montejo, an introduction, and a glossary at the end, very much like the ones found in novels such as Doňa Barbara and ■Ecue'-Yamba-O!. It is true that the introduction and the first-person account have separated the voices of the narrator and the protagonist but on the whole Biografia de un cimarrón appears as a logical sequel to the Latin American regionalist novel. But this is a sequel in which anthropological discourse is made evident to legitimize itself and the results of its research. What the book says is backed up by the Instituto de Etnológia y Folklore.
Such legitimation is sought not only in the mimetic act of making the book an ethnographic monograph, but also by means of the introduction. There, young ethnographer Miguel Barnet dutifully explains how he went about his research, and later how he wrote Biografia de un cimarrón. The story of how Barnet discovered Montejo in a nursing home while doing research on Afro-Cuban religions, how he came to know him, the shared intimacies, the gifts offered to ease their relationship, the hours spent in conversation, has become as well-known as those about the regionalist novelists and their excursions to the pampa and the llano in preparation to write their novels. The difference is that Barnet is more professional in method. The story of how Barnet rearranges what Montejo tells him to give it a chronological order and to put it in a historical context harks back to Pane and to the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos. Here is where the productive conflicts begin. What is more authentic or legitimate, to retell the story as Montejo remembered it, or to put it in chronological order, as Barnet's anthropological training demands? Who is responsible for the historical context? Is history the sequence of epochs into which Barnet divides Montejo's life in accordance with the cant of official history, or is it Montejo's perception of the flow and significance of events from the perspective of his 106 years of age? Barnet writes in the introduction: "En todo el relato se podrá apreciar que hemos tenido que parafrasear mucho de lo que él nos contaba. De haber copiado fielmente los giros de su lenguaje, el libro se habría hecho dificil de comprender y en exceso
168
MYTH AND ARCHIVE
reiterante" (p. io)41 ("Throughout the story it will be obviou: the reader that I have had to paraphrase much of what he told u< I had faithfully reproduced his way of speaking, the book would have been difficult to understand and much too repetitive"). Rut what if repetition is an essential part of Montejo's rhetoric, a mnemonic device, a formula like those present in oral literaturo, particularly in epic poems? Barnet's introduction opens as maivv questions as it answers, and is thus an essential part of Biografia de un cimarrón. Even when Barnet disavows any desire to write literature he invokes the most fundamental novelistic topic, that of denying that the book is a novel.
As opposed to the confidently knowledgeable introduction, chc: first-person account begins with a defiant expression of the inabilitv to know, and an affirmation about the existence of things thai cannot be explained:
Hay cosas que yo no mc cxplico de la vida. Todo eso que tiene que ver ran la Naturaleza para mi es tá muy oscuro, y lo de los dioses más. Ellos son los llamados a originär todos esos fenómenos que uno ve, que yo vide y que r.« positivo que han existido. Los dioses son caprichosos c inconformes. Por eso aquí han pasado cosas tan raras.                                              (p. i-,1;
There are things about life I just don't get. Nature's a complete mys ten tr me and the gods more so. They're supposed to be the ones who made all ihc extraordinary things people sec and that I have seen and which reall) dc. exist. But the gods are moody and greedy. That's why there are such odd goings-on here.
This clash between the authorial voices of Montejo and Barner is what constitues the book. It is a clash in which the narrators and their echoes and multiple reflections are often shuffled, shifted, and exchanged. Because if in this inaugural utterance Montejo plays the role of naive informant, in many others he plays that of knowledgeable, outside observer. One of Montejo's most remarkable traits is that he assumes an ethnographer's perspective vis-ä-vis the ethnic groups that surround him, not only the Chinese and the White; (Galicians, natives of the Canary Islands, Turks - who are really Lebanese - and Jews), but also with respect to the various Black nationalities represented among the slaves and former slaves. including his own. Montejo never marries and settles down. In hi4 years as a maroon (from cimarrón, a runaway slave) he is constantly on the go. He is a perpetual traveler who is forced to join a slave
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    169
■(■immunity only when he is captured. He is never at home in any of ht'sc groups, however. Constant movement gives him a com-ntitalive perspective, and trains him as a keen observer of others. Thi"> makes Montejo at once the best and the worst kind of informant. The best because of his powers of observation and his ability to establish a distance, the worst because he does not speak from inside any culture. In fact, Montejo cancels the possibility of tlifiv being a reliable inside informant. Like an ethnographer, Montejo travels; he is a shifting perspective, a moving point of view, observing the cultures that he passes through. He is also a shifting perspective on his own shifting, that is, on the movement of his own consciousness.
Montejo's  most  remarkable feature is not his  penchant for communion with others but rather his yearning for solitude. He spends years in the wild alone, years in which he speaks to no one and retreats in to a paleolithic life-style. It is an existence he comes to like, one in which he learns the language of nature and develops a rit h inner life. Montejo is escaping the horrors of slavery, but at the same time he is delving deep into himself to find freedom from humankind in general. His journeys into the Cuban manigua are like those of the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos, a flight from history, a voyage back in time to a prelinguistic world, free from the loner* of existence as much as from the chains of slavery. This rnvihic journey, this death and resurrection, make him wiser and stronger. Silence teaches him about the questionable value of words and makes him intolerant of garrulousness.  In his opinion the Chinese in Sagua la Grande babble in their incomprehensible tongue just to be a bother ("para joder," as he puts it, p. 90). Montejo was evasive with other Blacks as he may have been with Barnet: "Muchos negros querían ser amigos míos. Y me pregunta-baii que hacia yo de cimarrón. Y yo les decía: 'Nadá.' A mi siempre mc ii;t gustado la independencia. La salsa y la escandalera no sirven. Yo estuve anos sin conversar con nadie" (p. 58) ("Many Blacks who wanted to be my friends asked me what I did when I was a maroon.  And  I  would  say  'Nothing.'  I've always liked  being independent. Dancing around and carrying on are no good. I spent years without talking to anyone"). Montejo rejects rituals of communal bonding, rituals in which the various African ethnic groups strengthened their bonds. The culture Montejo develops in the wild is as negative as Tlön's: it is almost a reduction to the mere structure
170
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
of culture and being, a system emptied of content and wound up function as a mechanism for analysis that precludes participation. I ■ is a negativity like the language of Tlön that in Montejo is expresse by the significant negativity of silence. Montejo is as much t> ethnographer as Barnet.
Yet in a curious way Montejo's detached perspective, his memoi being a sort of archive of different narrative possibilities - he oh-speak of and about the Congo or the Lucumi - is a reflection ■! Neo-African culture in the Caribbean. Montejo moved amor-several ethnic groups who had different languages and religion languages and religions that are still alive in Cuba today, as well; in New Jersey and Miami. It would be naive to think that the;. cultures and languages remained pure in Cuba, that they were ne affected by their violent insertion into Western history. They wer indeed, profoundly affected, and Neo-African culture in the Caril bean tends to be synchretic, even absorbing Catholicism. "['V. resilience of neo-African culture is one of the most remarkab ■ factors of Caribbean life and history. Languages, religions, and a ! sorts of cultural practices survived the horrors of slavery and lau the scorn of racial and class discrimination. Neo-African cullui also survived being turned into an object of ethnographic study.
The institution created by slaves to oppose slavery was tf> maroon society or palengue, some of which became impregn;ib!' citadels. But there were palenques of many sizes. Their chief functio-was to provide refuge to maroon slaves and resist the attempts (■ return them to the plantations. They were societies under sicgi made up of individuals whose origins could and often were vci. disparate. The palenques were as odd and as metadiscursive as Tlöi These were pluralistic societies harboring many languages an< praying to many gods, with the one common purpose of survival.' Neo-African culture allowed gods from multiple theogonies (■■ coexist, tacitly accepting a kind of religious pluralism and thu* achieving a flexibility that may also go a long way to explain then survival. So, if one feature of Neo-African society was (and is) it-clandestinity,  the other was  its  capacity to  absorb  parallel ci conflicting theogonies as well as a Babel of tongues. This, it seems t" me, explains Montejo's relativistic wisdom, his being a storehouse (I stories without giving pre-eminence to any of them. Montejo was living Archive, and the text of his story as much an Archive a" Melquiades' manuscript in Cien aňos de soledad.
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                I 7 I
Jn this regard Montejo and Barnet invoke a topic in Cuban
[terature, one that goes back to the anti-slavery narratives of the
,ii]Ľieenth century. When a slave became old and infirm, and
hrrefore useless for productive work, he was often made into a
uardiero. Aguardiero was a keeper of the boundaries who lived on the
roriüers between sugar plantations as a guard or gate-keeper.
Hcrause of their age and their commerce with many different people
fast-guardieros also became keepers of the traditions. These wise old
rion could be consulted on many matters, ranging from social
jraciices and religious lore to the medicinal quality of plants and the
■v'licreabouts of somebody. The guardieros sat on the fence, as it were,
traddling the divisions between African cultures, and became
.■tluiologists in their own right. I do not say this in a metaphorical
ťii^e, or as a boutade. Anti-slavery narratives like Anselmo Suárez y
Romero's Francisco or Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés incorporated
he guardieros and some of their knowledge. Both these authors
raveled to the provinces to witness slave society in the sugar mills.
|J\ an astonishing turn of fate those novels figure among the most
mpnrtant sources of information in Fernando Ortiz' early work on
Vfrican religions in Cuba.43 Ortiz, as we have seen, was Barnet's
mentor and the knowledge and experience that he gathered from the
uardieros is one of the voices in Biografia de un cimarrón> one that finds
.11 echo in Montejo's own as well as in Barnet's.
ís there in Montejo's story about his life as a maroon not only a
ale about attaining a plural perspective, but also an allegory of the
U'.xt's escape from the mediation of the hegemonic discourse? Isn't
his first-person account like that of the picaro and other delinquents
•vhfi live on the margins of the law and tell about their lives through
'he formulae of the notarial arts? Is Montejo's life not a return to
■he Archive, not only those in Carpentier, Fuentes, and Garcia
Márquez, but the original in the sixteenth century? Montejo's story
■akes  the form of the  picaresque autobiography being told  to
"Oineone in authority, in this case Barnet, the representative of the
Insiituto de Etnológia y Folklore. Like the pícaros, Montejo escapes
he constraints of hegemonic discourse by mimicking it and therefore
bsnrbing it. Montejo shows that Barnet's method is literary from
lie .start. Unlike the picaro, however, and also unlike Ernesto in Los
m profundus,  Montejo is old, incredibly old. The delusions of
miucence are not his. There is no fresh start, his age is capacious
ike the Archive, it allows him to contain all the fresh starts, all the
I72                                   MYTH AND  ARCHIVE
promises of a new beginning. Like Melquiades and Borges 1 possession of a knowledge that is at once all-inclusive and a' the gaps and the unfinished stories.

On the other hand it is not possible for us to describe our own archiv it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which 1 what we can say - and to itself, the object of our discourse - its m appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of a' lation, historicity, and disappearance.                           Michel Foe
It is time to recapitulate and examine again archival fictions. re-enter Melquiades' room.
The evolving nucleus of the Latin American narrative trad concerned with the uniqueness, difference, and autonom cultural entity that defines itself within and yet against a po totality, real as well as invented, that could be called the disco the West. That tradition is generated in relation to three m tations of Western hegemonic discourse: the law in the o period, the scientific writings of the many naturalists who 1 over the American continent in the nineteenth century, and a pology, which supplies a dominant version of Latin Arr culture in the modern period both through the writings of peans and through the discourse of the State in the form of ins of folklore, museums, and the like. The law in the colonial sets  the structure of the relationship  between Latin Air narrative and dominant discourses. Legal writings deal with macy,  enfranchisement,  and  self-definition in  the  contex patrimonial—bureaucratic state that controls writing and knowledge, which it safeguards in great storehouses like the A at Simancas and the Escorial, both created by Philip II. L: emerging modern novel in the Picaresque, Latin American tive in the colonial period deals with delinquency and a gener of legitimacy. These obstacles are circumvented through mi the imitation of the forms of forensic rhetoric to gain freed showing the conventionality of legal language, its being z simulacrum to disguise arbitrary power. The performance mimetic act grants a momentary suspension of the censorio punitive power of judicial language. This structure of cons imitation and release is the masterstory of Latin American na

THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                I 73
h prevails until the present, particularly in the other two major festations of hegemony.
I ie traveling naturalists furnished a version of American unique-by their representation of time and change as conceived by itionary nineteenth-century European science. The Latin rican narrative imitates their representation of Latin American mens, and takes advantage of their concept of mutation as well the exceptional time in which this process takes place to escape ominant discourse by fusing with its transfiguring object. After [Q20S, ethnography, often aided by Latin American states, ided a way to represent the originality of Latin American is, customs, speech, and other cultural phenomena. This is the urse the Latin American narrative will imitate. The result was ovela de la tierra or telluric novel, a highly critical and hybrid uct whose rhetorical model was furnished by anthropology, e mastery it escaped also by fusing with its object of study, by ing the literariness of ethnography. A very self-conscious )graphy in the present is contemporaneous with a form of Latin rican fiction that I call archival fictions, the most prominent festation of which is Cien aňos de soledad. It is a kind of novel that -ers the three previous mediations and hypostatizes their :ting function in the figure of the Archive, which harks back to junding mediation. The quintessential Archive is Melquiades'
in the Buendia household, in which the gypsy writes the ry of the family and Aureliano Babilonia later deciphers it with id of the Encyclopedia and The Thousand and One Nights. These val fictions, which are my hermeneutical model, constitute in
ways a dialogue between Foucault and Bakhtin, a counter-. of prison and carnival.4"5
chival fictions are narratives that still attempt to find the cipher .tin American culture and identity, hence they fall within the ation provided by anthropological discourse. In the same ier as current ethnography, these books no longer accept the utional discourse of method as a given, accepting the litera-s of all representations of the Other, even, or perhaps :ially, if it is an Other Within, as is the case with the Latin rican narrative. Archival dictions have not given up on the lise of anthropology, but they probe into anthropology itself, ning a kind of ethnography of anthropology, as in Mario as  Llosa's  novel El hablador.  At  the same  time that they
1^4                                   MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
undermine the bases of anthropology, archival fictions privilege tl-language of literature into which both the novel and anthropoloj. take refuge. This is a literature that aspires to have a functi< i similar to that of myth in primitive societies and that in fact imitat- -the forms of myth as provided by anthropological discourse. Tl . mutual mirroring between the discourse of method and its obje. here is not seen as antagonistic or conflictual, but part and parcel -I that category, the literary, into which all forms of storytelling ai displaced. So the difference between archival fictions and th< i-predecessors is that they pretend to be literature, not any other for u of hegemonic discourse, yet in doing so they are in fact in a mime.i-relationship  with  current  anthropology.  The obvious  question, difficult to answer, is: is anthropology still a form of hegemonic discourse, or is it being replaced by another discourse not yet apparent?
Archival fictions also remain within the anthropological mediation because through it the narrative reaches back to the foundii^ mediation, the discourse of the law. This is so because in anthropology the law stands for the primordial code of a given society, the master key to all of its codes. As the Law, legal discourse is the basic medium for the exchange of values, the metaphor of metaphors, the most archaic rule; both the ruling rule, as it were, and the most ancient. That rule of rules contains all previous mediations, all the guises of the law as hegemonic discourse. In archival fictions all the previous simulacra of the law parade as in a ghostly procession, like the dynasty of bodies that Philip II brings to El Escorial in Fuentes' Terra Nostra. Emptied of power, the phantoms of previous mediations appear as in a wake of fictions. Myths from various theogo-nies are also found in the Archive. As we saw, Cien aňos de solednd reflects, alludes, or remembers myths from several traditions. The Archive is a myth of myths.
How are archival fictions mythic, and how is the Archive a modern myth? First, they are mythic because archival fictions deal with the origin both in a thematic and in what could be called a semiotic way. By the origin I mean the beginning of history, or a commonly accepted source of culture. Figures endowed with founding significance like Columbus and Philip II appear frequently in archival fictions, as well as regions endowed with an originary aura, like thejungle or the village; activities like the founding of cities, Unbuilding of monuments, the redaction of histories occupy characters
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                I 75
in archival fictions. Latin American history, as in Cien aňos de soledad, appears as being made up of a series of high points common to the whole continent and reducible to a single, shared story. These thematic origins are important in the mythic constitution of archival fictions, but more so are what I call semiotic ones. Here I refer to the functions of the Archive troped in these novels, like the gaps in the manuscripts, the floating texts, the storehouse function, in hoarding and accumulation. This accumulation function is semiotic in that it sorts the vestiges of previous mediations and displays them. Archival fictions are also mythic because, ultimately, they invest the figure of the Archive with an arcane power that is clearly originary and impossible to express, a secret that is lodged in the very expression of the Archive, not separate from it and hence impossible to render wholly discursive. This is why archival fictions incorporate death as a trope for the limits, for with death a sacralized, nondiscursive language becomes prevalent. This sacralized language cannot be sustained, however, for there is no hegemonic discourse to back it up, no authority to give it the proper intonation, or against which to establish a counterpoint. Nostalgia for this sacred language is evident in political doctrines that rewrite the past as teleological, apocalyptic, and leading to a single history. Such allegories remain outside the Archive. The Archive as myth is modern because it is multifarious, relativistic, and even thematizes relativism and pluralism as inherent qualities of literature, the language into which it escapes. Mythification is a version of the masterstory of escape from the strictures of the dominant discourse through fusion with one of the main objects ofthat discourse: myth. Heterogeneity of cultures, languages, sources, beginnings, is at the core of the Archive's founding negativity, a pluralism that is a subversion or sub-version of the masterstory. The Archive culls and looses, it cannot brand or determine. The Archive cannot coalesce as a national or cultural myth, though its make-up still reveals a longing for the creation of such a grandiose politico-cultural metastory.
Telluric novels were sustained by a pragmatic belief in the efficacy of literature as a political tool. Novelists like Gallegos had faith that once literature could express the essence of Latin American culture, a national or continental myth could lead to a kind of political anagnorisis, a blinding revelation that would in turn become the basis of a useful political program. The complicity of
*■!§                                       MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
anthropology and Latin American states is a testament to this and evidence of the existence of a coalition of political, literary scientific discourses. The only pragmatic quality of archival fit is to turn the gaze of a new, nonauthoritarian ethnology onto coalition to display its inner springs, its ideological supports, a as its constitutive idealizations. But in doing so archival fi< cannot escape their own mystifications which, as we saw, le their own mythification, one that renders them, no doubt efficacious as purveyors of political programs. In a way, this m due to a loss of faith among writers about their anointme political messiahs in their roles as writers, which has not stc them, of course, from playing political roles as authors (that public figures with a prestige and charisma that have po worth).
Archival fictions, then, return to the law as origin in order to into the structure of mediation as the constitutive structure of American narrative, or perhaps of the Latin American imagin; These novels reach back to the legal origins of the narrative t into the relationship between power and knowledge, or bette the empowerment of knowledge through language in the lega hence ritualistic, act of writing. This probe brings forth the vi arbitrary nature of the act of empowerment and its link to pi ment and incarceration. Narrative, be it novelistic or histc often neutralizes this violence by thematizing the first escape the strictures of hegemonic discourse, by fleeing the law, Biografia de un cimarrón. Archival fictions also deal with the ace lation of knowledge and the way in which knowledge is organic culture. As storehouses of knowledge archival fictions are ata accumulations of the given. This is why archival fictions are historical, and consist of a complex intertextual web that inc rates the chronicles of the discovery and conquest of America, fictions, historical documents and characters, songs, poetry, sc fie reports, literary figures, and myths, in short, a grab-bag of that have cultural significance. The organization of the Ar defies conventional classification because classification is at but it does not abandon this basic function of the Archi generate an inchoate, heteroglossic mass; a mass of document other texts that have not been totally, and sometimes not partially  absorbed,   that retain  their raw,  undisturbed or: existence as evidence of the non-assimilation of the Other.
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE
I77
\rchive, as is evident in El arpay la sombra, also stands for loss, for
ptiness, frequently hypostatized as old age and death. In El arpay
sombra Columbus' bones, like the documents in the Archive, are
!:gpersed, linked by gaps. Archival fictions are also crypts, like the
I -corial itself, a figure of the very book we read, monumental
-, positories of death's debris and documents lacking currency. If the
Xrchive's secret is that it has no secret other than this dialectic of
tin and loss, this secret of secrets is uncovered through a set of
aires and stories that characterize it like a subconscious of Latin
\merican fiction.
Archival fictions are again concerned with the law because of ■ heir interest in the origins of the mediation process and the constitution of the narrative. The fact that the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos, the original archival fiction, writes his composition in notebooks destined to contain the first laws of Santa Monica de los Venados suggests such a connection. So does the fact that the "case" on which Crónica de una muerte anunciada is based is culled from the brief drawn up many years before for the murder trial, and gathered by the narrator from the flooded Palace of Justice of Riohacha. This remarkable passage in Garcia Márquez' novella is the most meaningful expression of the Archive in recent fiction. The passage recounts the narrator's search for the brief:
Todo lo que sabemos de su carácter [the lawyer's] es aprendido en el sumario, que numerosas personas me ayudaron a buscar veinte aňos dcspués del crimen en el Paiacio de Justicia de Riohacha. No existía clasificación alguna en los archivos, y más de un sigto de expedientes estaban amontonados en el suelo del decrépito ediŕicio colonial que fuera pur dos días el cuartel general de Francis Drake. La planta baja se inundaba con el mar de leva, y los volúmenes descosidos flotaban en las olicinas desiertas. Yo mismo explore muchas veces con las aguas hasta los lobillos aquel estanque de causas perdidas, y sólo una casualidad me permitió rescatar al cabo de cinco aňos de búsqueda unos 322 pliegos síilteados de los más de 500 que debió tener el sumario.
Kverything that we know about his character has been learned from the brief, which several people helped me look for twenty years later in the l'.ilace of Justice in Riohacha. There was no classification of files whatever, and more than a century of cases was piled up on the floor of the decrepit colonial building that had been Sir Francis Drake's headquarters for two days. The ground floor would be flooded by high tides, and the unbound volumes floated about the deserted offices. I searched many times with water up to my ankles in that lagoon of lost causes, and after five years of
178
MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE
rummaging around only chance let me rescue some 322 pages niched fr01. the more than 500 that the brief must have contained.46
The dilapidated  Palace of Justice,  dating from colonial timer obviously alludes to the constitutive presence of the law in thf founding period. Its decay recalls the time of the naturalists - eve: the shaped stones that house the law will atrophy and beconr somewhat monstrous, as we shall see. The ruined palace stand then, for the presence of the law as origin of the narrative, nov hollowed out; it recalls the stage-set Palace of Justice in the first pae of Los pasos perdidos, the Palacio de las Maravillas in El arpa y , sombra, and, of course, El Escorial in Terra Nostra. It even goes bac-to the ruined building cited by Cervantes in the last pages of the fir part of Don Quijote, in which a manuscript containing the story of tl mad hero is found, which I quoted in the first chapter ("This mai had in his possession a leaden box which, so he said, he had foun : among the ruined foundations of an ancient hermitage, that w;-being rebuilt. In this box he had found some parchments written i the Gothic script but in Castilian verse, which contained many 1 i the knight's exploits ..."). The construction of archives and th origins of the law are intricately connected, even etymologically. Bi-here law as architexture, as arch-texture is a vestige. The fact th; the Palace of Justice became the headquarters of a dashing an I lawless Francis Drake suggests the reincarnation of the law ; narrative. But there is more.
The   volumes   are   unbound,   unclassified   and   float   throuel-deserted offices because the power of the original Archive is sus pended. A ruined palace of justice, the Archive functions as a sign an allegory of the origin. Only the shell of the allegory remains, ai empty form from which other meanings emanate; meanings that an unique to this specimen, which through change has evaded th' uniformity of the law. Descosidos does not really mean unbound, in the sense that the documents are yet to be bound. In fact, descosido could very well mean that these documents were once bound and have now literally fallen apart, become unsewn. If, indeed, ih Archive is like Borges' study, it is like Borges' study after that masie demolisher of fictions is through thrashing the books. They onl1 become volumes  again  when  they  are  rewritten  as  novels  b'-Fuentes, Carpentier, Garcia Márquez and others, simulacra of ih original Archive. The absence of classification points to the import
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                I 79
nce of the unusual spaces between the documents. Here those gaps
re filled with water. The documents float as opposed to being
rounded, to being connected solidly to matter - to the earth - a
. ondition that would provide them with a stable set of symbolic
leanings, such as the ones in the novela de la tierra. (Earth, tierra, is, of
. ourse, a metaphor for the congealed ideology informing the surface
, reject of telluric fiction.) The fact that the offices are now deserted,
■ iat the  letrados have  disappeared,  further serves  to  withdraw
uthority from these papers. The letrados have left, leaving scattered
•aces of their foundational presence, as well as of their exit. They
re a conspicuous and significant absence, like the ruined state of
ie Palace of Justice. Water could very well be the figure of time
■ere, particularly since it is a water that ebbs and flows according to
ie laws of nature, to the tides. This mar de leva is a vestige of the
.aturalists'  time  machinery — in   Cien aňos de soledad the  most
■owerful vestige of the naturalists' time is the wind that razes the
)wn at the end of the novel.47 The Palace of Justice is very much
ke the trash bin of Bogota's audiencia in Rodriguez Freyle's El
• 'arnero, but it is a trash bin with a clock inside.
One cannot fail to notice that it was chance that allowed the 1 arrator - a figure of the author - to find the documents that he did : xover. It is chance, we might recall, that rules the life of Facundo 1 )uiroga. The author re-covers scattered documents. Hence, the ;ory based on them and its ensuing arrangement'is due to chance, not to any given rule or law. But chance could also be a reflection of fortune, the force that naturally rules the tragedy recounted in Crónica de una muerte anunäada} the elusive law of destiny that in earlier stories shaped the lives of Facundo Quiroga and Antonio Conselheiro. The story and the text that contains it duplicate each other on the sheen of the water that floods the Palace of Justice, turning its floor into a mirror, a reversed and illusory dome; an inverted law overarching yet undermining the constitution of the text. It is the mirage of a roof that does not shelter, that only reflects, that does not house. The floor, the ground, on the other hand, is here a watery mirror that reflects, but cannot support anything.
The manuscript the narrator seeks to assemble is a sumario, technically a summary, but in any case a kind of adding up, or summing up, and merely 322 "pliegos salteados" (my emphasis; this important adjective was left out of the translation); that is to say, f hat the pages were not consecutive, that there were gaps between
i8o
MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
them. Actually, sumario conveys a sense of incompletion at tl
origin, since it is a gathering up of relevant documents leading up
an eventual summation, but not yet accomplished.48 The pag
were slapped together to form the story, but then the story contai:
those gaps, the "saltos" that make it a series of "pliegos salteados
Furthermore, the ideal number of pages, the round 500 that the bri
is understood to have originally contained, is now replaced by t]
very incomplete 322. But incomplete does not mean insígniŕicar
322 is also a number that appears to open an infinite repetition
two's, the sign of the initial repetition, the one that denies t]
originary power to one. And three, the opening, is full of mythic ai
tragic resonances. Furthermore, 322 also suggests a winding dow
a diminution; not two three, but three two. The Archive in i
modern version does not add up, literally and figuratively; it is not
suma, but a resta, an intermittent series of subtractions. Archiv.11
fictions reveal the constitutive gaps that shine between the doci
ments on the watery floor of the Palace of Justice. In them, t\ •
Archive is something between a ruin and a relic.
From the crumbling Palace of Justice in Riohacha we can move' ■ national and even imperial archives in Asuncion and El Escoria The documents that Patino supervises in Yo el Supremo are containe ■ I in the Paraguayan Archives of State, while in  Terra Nostra tl-Escorial houses Philip II's papers, books and bodies - a genealogy 1 -i real corpses. As in Crónica de una muerte anunciada, these are literal -zations of the figure of the Archive. One need not expect the figu] ■ always to be so legible. The manuscript that Consuelo keeps in . trunk and Felipe Montero restores and rewrites in Fuentes' An -(Felipe Montero's name is etymologically a pleonasm, for montér are lovers of horses, but may ver)' well also be an allusion to th original archivist, Philip II) is another manifestation of the Archiv-If Montero is a figure of the author of modern Latin America 1 fiction, which I believe he is, his task is to rewrite the papers oft! Archive, to write an archival fiction, which he does. To do it he mu ■ fill the gaps. This area not only has a figural link to the Archive, bu an etymological one as well. Like its distant predecessor in Lazaru de Tormes it appears to be threatened by rats; the area could lea1 . could lose some of its documents.49 It is significant that Consuelo"-diseased husband, the author of the manuscript, was an officer ii Porfirio's army, hence, though not directly related to the State an the law, his manuscript has its fictive origin close to the source 1 1
THE  NOVEL  AS  MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
181
nofitical power. Like Patino, the General is the underling of a dictator and a writer of sorts. As we shall see, it is significant that he ;s dead. Like the letrados, who have abandoned the Palace of Justice, the author here is also gone; all we have is his incomplete legacy.
The Archive is at once capacious and incomplete. Capaciousness, which is related to safe keeping and the atavistic enclosure function of the Archive, is a reflection of the totalizing force of the Law. The law of laws would contain all. Melquiades' manuscript supposedly encompasses the entire history of the Buendia family, that is, of iVlacondo and the novel's whole fictional world. Garcia Márquez' project recalls that of the cronista mayor in the colonial period, particularly Herrera y Tordesillas'. The national archive in Yo el Supremo presumably safeguards all of the nation's documents: the record of each of the transactions that together make up the power of the state. The manuscript blown away by the hurricane in Oppiano Licario is a summa, the Súmula nunca infusa de excepciones morfológicas. The size and capacity of the Vatican Archive in El arpay la sombra need not be belabored. The Archive's capacity, its totalization, is an emblem of its power. The Archive contains all knowledge; it is, therefore, the repository of all power. The crypt-like quality of the Archive and its association with death is partly derived from this sense of completion. But it is also a vestige of former mediations, that is to say, of law as legitimation, science as the expression of time, and anthropology as the metacode capable of containing all codes, or a synecdochical expression of all codes. The Archive is an image of the end of time. In El arpay la sombra Carpentier places a figure of the Archive in the afterlife, in a circle of Dante's Inferno. The Archive is apolcalyptic, it is like a time capsule launched into infinity, but without hope of reaching eternity.
Capaciousness is sometimes reflected in the size of archival fictions, as in the case of the monumental Terra Nostra, but size is not always the measure of totalization, as is evident in the ř/r-archival fiction "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," or in the relatively brief El arpay la sombra. In some cases, in fact, as in Cien aňos de soledad, capaciousness is achieved through the reduction of all of history to a myth-like story, or, by centering, as in El arpay la sombra, on a mythic figure of the origin, like Columbus, who would contain all ab ovo. This tendency in recent Latin American fiction has led some critics and novelists to speak of a "novela total." Vargas Llosa says the following about Cien aňos de soledad in his book on Garcia Márquez:
l82                                   MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
"Fictitious reality is everything. It contains its own origin, he v ! creates and what is being created, he who narrates and what is be i narrated. Thus, since the narrator's life is all of life, his death me. ■■ the extinction of everything. The novel commits the same murdei   ■■ god that the novelist wishes to perpetrate by exercising his vocat ■. as writer. One ambition reflects the other."50 Vargas Llosa a. ,i other critics are right in noticing the totalizing tendency, but tl-attribute it to the novel of the boom, when it is present since Lospc perdidos. They fall prey to the illusion of totality, without notic that so-called total novels underscore their own incompleten through some of the devices seen before. They also fail to notice tl ■ the totalizing reduction of history to the language of myth is itself reflection of an ethnographic discourse that still remains outside totality, making its composition possible.
The Archive is incomplete as evidenced by the many unfinisl .: or mutilated  documents  that it contains.  This  incompleten generates the hoarding, the cumulative thrust of archival fictio There are holes in Melquiades' manuscript that are not account   ■ for in the "final" version that we read. The lawyer in Crónica oh recovers parts of the manuscript. The narrator-protagonist of J pasosperdidos leaves his threnody unfinished. The Súmula nunca inj   ■ de  excepciones  morfológicas  is   scattered   by   the  hurricane.   Fel  ■ Montero must fill the gaps in order to rewrite General Llorent manuscript in Aura. Consuelo tells him: "Son sus memorias incci clusas. Deben ser completadas. Antes de que yo muera" ("They his unfinished memoirs. They have to be completed before I die The General's manuscript is not unfinished, but has holes burned i it by "el descuido de una ceniza de tabaco," and stains, "mancl dos por las moscas" ("some of them with holes where a careless z !■ had fallen";  "others heavily fly-specked").51  Columbus' mar i -scripts, like his scattered skeleton, are incomplete and hence i rewritten in El arpay la sombra (as they really were by Bartolomé ■!■■ las Casas). This incompleteness appears as a blank, either at the e ■ ■ or elsewhere in the manuscript, and signals not only a lack of closiv that works  against  the Archive's  capaciousness  and desire totalization, but more importantly it underscores the facts that ga. » are constitutive of the Archive as much as volume.
In addition to the unfinished or mutilated manuscripts, tl fundamental discontinuity appears in other guises. The very noti of Archive is based more on contiguity than continuity, separati ■ ■
THE  NOVEL AS  MYTH  AND  ARCHIVE                    183
and difference as much as culling and adding up, safekeeping and bringing together. As with the encyclopedia, the principle of organisation is not necessarily related to any intrinsic quality of the material in the Archive. An exogenous agent sifts, ranks and separates. The source ofthat agent's power is a secret the Archive Hoes not comprise, yet it is the most important. Hence there is a radical and foundational fault in the Archive. That arbitrariness and incommensurateness are often represented in archival fictions by old age and death, as anticipated in the discussion of Borges and Barnet, that is, of Herbert Ashe and Manuel Montejo.
The presence of old, dying or dead characters in current Latin American fiction is remarkable and significant. We have already seen several: Melquiades, Columbus, Montejo, and Consuelo. But there are many others, like Anselmo in La casa verde, the aging dictator in El otoňo del patriarca, Dr. Francia in Yo el Supremo, Florentino Daza in El amor en los tiempos del cólera, the Seňora in Colibrí and Cobra in the novel ofthat name, and Empress Carlota in Fernando del Paso's Noticias del Imperio (1987). These oracular figures are links with the past and repositories of knowledge, like living archives. But their memories are faulty and selective. Senility is a figure for the gaps in these archival characters. Senility, curiously, here becomes a force for exuberant creativity, for originality. Senility is, in the context of my discussion, a metaphor for the incompleteness of the Archive, but also for the force, the glue by which texts are bound together. There is a whimsical creativity in these characters' recollections that is parallel to how selection takes place in the Archive in the creation of fiction, and which is found in their lapses of memory. These often decrepit characters (dilapidated like the Palace of Justice) stand in opposition to the figure of the Romantic child-like poet, whose presumably fresh vision shapes much of modern literature, yet share with him a creative élan born not of remembrance as much as of forgetfulness. Their age also approximates them to death, one of the founding tropes of archival fictions. Death stands for the gap of gaps, the mastergap of the Archive, both its opening and closing cipher. Consuelo's husband, author of the manuscript Felipe rewrites, is dead, so is Melquiades by the time his manuscript is read, and so are the narrators in Pedro Páramo.
Sometimes, as in El otoňo delpatriarca or Noticias del Imperio, one of these terrible and capricious oldsters is the narrator; while in others,
184                                   MYTH AND ARCHIVE
as in Biografia de un cimarron, the old, oracular figure absorb' author, who stands for method, for discipline, for instiiufi discourse. Felipe Montero is also absorbed by Consuelo and in becomes her dead husband-author of the manuscript, and in Supremo, old and cantankerous Dr. Francia and Patino m ere c a secretary ages and joins the ranks of dying yet living arch Melquiades, always the paradigm, is old beyond ago, ail(j narrator as well as his readers and rewriters have to struggle wit apocalyptic vision. Narrative self-reflexiveness, as seen in the chapter, is a figure of death. Self historicizing brings fori h tin wherein these dead or dying figures spin their web of writing like Ashe, that timid and funereal author, all of these int< historians are touched by death because they narrate the blank the gaps; like their faulty memories they create from the discunt ties, from the breaks. Their narrative issues from the lapses." are ruins at the origin, like the various crumbling buildim Carpentier's fiction and the Palace of Justice in Crónica de una n anunciada. Creators of fictions, these figures wind up entom hi their own fictions, in their own archives, like Philip II in El Ľsc they lead the parade of ghostly forms voided in the Archive; the the  seat  of theory.52  This  theory  unveils  the workings ol mediation process whereby fiction has been engendered. The the mediation.
Perhaps the most significant of these figures is not so r Melquiades as Bustrófedon, the character in Guillermo Gal Infante's  Tres tristes tigres. Bustrófedon is dead when the t begins, yet he is the source of the language games that the ( characters play; he is not only an oracular source, but the source of language in the fiction. He inhabits the gap of gaps, h. died of an aneurism of the brain, an interruption of his discu powers that allowed him to break up language in his charade way. Bustrófedon's textual production is preserved in magne tapes, the sum total of which is the figure of the Archive in this nov Silvestře,  Cue,   and  the  others  replay  these  tapes  and  repp Bustrófedon in a manner similar to the process of translation an decoding of Melquiades' manuscript by the Buendias. The chi. acters in Cabrera Infante's novel engage in an interpretation ai commentary of Bustrófedon's textual legacy, mindful thai if m contain a dark and important secret. That secret is the pcculi-breakdown of language enacted by Bustrófedon. Death as gnp
THE NOVEL AS MYTH AND ARCHIVE                    185
, evident in Tres tristes tigres because it is at the source; it is the >d presence of the production of language. The gaps we intuit in
I miades' manuscripts are displayed as the foundation of the ascript within Tres tristes tigres, a manuscript that here is figured roicescript. Tres tristes tigres is founded upon an archive of voices,
, .j in the same way as Pedro Páramo, another archival fiction. The i could be said of Rayuela, a novel that centers on the wake of madour, La Maga's child who brings together the figures of the ntic child creator and the dead archival source in modern j American fiction (in this novel, the figure of the Archive is the ng number of dispensable chapters, which contain the theory hich the novel is based).53 Bustrófedon, Melquiades, Rocama-, the dead narrators in Pedro Paramo, Consuelo's dead husband, [1 death as the violent origin of discontinuity, the discontinuity nakes up the Archive.
ese old, dying or dead figures share with the ruined Palace of :e at Riohacha the mark of time, of time as change, as tion. In this they are also a vestige of the naturalist's medi-. These figures are often not only old or dead but, like the iscripts they sometimes hoard, they are mutilated, or mon-s in some other way. Time is written on their bodies as des, deformations, or disease. Much is made in Terra Nostra of in tes* mangled arm. In Yo el supremo Patino drags around his en foot; the patriarch in El otoňo delpatriarca tows his enormous, ated testicle; Consuelo, the very image of time, can transmute If into a young Aura; Melquiades is a wizard. Bustrófedon, , appears to be the most significant. His aneurism is literally an •uption of the natural flow of physical self, which is the source 1 figurative deformations, the mutations of language in Tres tigres. Through these physical ailments and deformations these .cters reach back to Facundo Quiroga and Conselheiro, mutants of an earlier age that left an indelible imprint in archival
li( turns.
The lapse represented by death or by the faulty memory of old initiators does not signal an escape from the dominating discourse, but the opposite. The lapses and the Lapse stand for the gaps and čuť», the proscription of language, the origin of the law. Death is a uopp for interdiction, and forgetfulness for the creativity from within interdiction, which is the mark of the Archive. This explains the sced-Hke function of Rocamadour and Bustrófedon, as well as of
l86                                   MYTH  AND ARCHIVE
Dr. Francia, the dead narrators in Pedro Paramo, and the death- i countenance of Ashe, and his posthumous production of the book The gap is the mediation, the founding hole, the limit of limits Archival fictions return to the gap at the core of the Archive, because it is the very source of fiction. This installment of death and old <u>Ľ as founding tropes to figure the Other, the power of hegemonic discourse, its originary and modelling force, is a mythification of the archive, of the Archive, the displacement of the language of method to the realm of myth and the sacred. Death tropes, mythifies the gap-its appearance in archival fictions is in no way a revelling in literal death, but a metaphor for the negativity of limit. Hence the Archive is not a Bakhtinian carnival but, if it is, it takes place within the confines of Foucaulťs prison.
Is there narrative beyond the Archive? Do archival fictions give way to new kinds of narrative that announce a new masterstor\? What would the new hegemonic discourse be? Can narrative evet really break the mimetic bond sealed by the law in the sixteenth century? Obviously archival fictions continue to be produced in Latin America, if one considers that Noticias del Imperio, which exhibits all of the major features outlined above, was published as recently as 1987. But there seems to exist a desire to break out of the Archive, one that is no longer merely part of the economy of the Archive itself. Is a move beyond the Archive the end of narrative, or is it the beginning of another narrative? Could it be seen from within the Archive, or even from the subversions of the Archive? Most probably not, but if one form of discourse appears to be acquiring hegemonic power it is that of communication systems.54 Perhaps a new masterstory will be determined by them, but it is difficult to tell with any degree of certainty from the Archive.
Notes
1    A clearing in the jungle: from Santa Monica to Macondo
1   The New York Times Book Review, 6 April 1986, p. 34.
2  John G. Varner defines Adelantado as, "Title given a man who was sent out to explore and govern new lands." In the "Glossary of Spanish and Quechuan Words," appended to his El Inca: The Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1968), p. 387.
3  All references are to Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos, ed. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (Madrid, Cátedra, 1985), p. 252; The Lost Steps, tr. Harriet de Onís (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 189-90.
4  Although my debt to Michel Foucaulťs Surveiller et punir (Paris, Galli-mard, 1975) should be obvious (more on this later in the text), my study of the relationship between the novel and the law has been enriched by the current movement in the U.S. academy generally called "the law-litérature enterprise," which appears to háve culminated with the foundation of Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (on whose Editorial Advisory Board I am honored to serve). The first issue of thatjournal is recommended as an entryway into this already vast field of enquiry and debate. I have also learned much from the special issue "Law and Literature" of the Texas Law Review, 60, no. 3 (1982), which contains a lively exchange capped by a lucid piece by Stanley Fish ("Interpretation and the Pluralist Vision," pp. 495-505). A recent book by judge Richard Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988), though somewhat belligerent and short-sighted, contains a useful overview of the issues as well as ample bibliographical information in the footnotes.
The "law-literature enterprise" has been dominated, not surprisingly, by the issue of interpretation. Deconstruction and other schools of literary criticism, have invaded the law with their claims about the arbitrariness of the sign, hence questioning the validity of interpretations and the truth-value of monumental texts such as constitutions and legal codes. Fish shows that the pluralism that emerges is itself a
.87
188                                 NOTES  TO   PAGES 4-I3
position, allied to a conception of literature tied to a liberal ideology f()1 the past two centuries. My position is that the shifting shapes of whai i< called narrative or the novel is determined by outside forces tlm determine it in a given moment, and that these changes take pU>(-( initially in the rhetoric of the law. In the U.S. the issue of rhetoric ;mc its relationship to the law, both as a matter of instituting pow<-(persuasion) and as a historical phenomenon (the evolution of modfri legal practices in Renaissance Bologna) has not been given enou^l attention.
5   I have studied in great detail this process in my Alejo Carpentier. Th, Pilgrim, at Home (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977).
6   The Adventures of Don Quixote, tr. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, Pengnit Books, 1968), pp. 457-8.
7   Of course, Mcnéndez Pidal's monumental enterprise is based m philology, so for him the epopeja is an origin that persists in Spanisl literature. I would invert the perspective and say that, in many ways, the epopeya is an invented origin, as is the history of Latin America for Latin American literature.
8   Tientosy diferencias (Montevideo, Area, 1967), p. 7.
9   Ralph Freedman, "The Possibility of a Theory of the Novel," in Thr Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Interpretation and History, ed.-,. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene and Lowry Nelson Jr. (New Ha\ni. Yale University Press, 1968), p. 65. It is obvious now that Mikluil Bakhtin had made a similar proposal years earlier, but this was urn known when Freedman wrote his piece.
10  Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indi;in.i University Press, 1984), p. 8. Henceforth all quotes, indicated in ihr text, arc taken from this edition.
11   The most reliable summary of Bakhtin's ideas on these issues is Tzevetan Todorov's Michail Bakhtine. Le principe dialogique, followed h\ Ecrits du Cercle de Bakhtine (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1981). Ih.iw also profited from my friendship with my colleague and great Bakhiin scholar Michael Holquist.
12   See also Edward J. Goodman, The Explorers of South America (New York. The Macmillan Co., 1972). Jean Franco, "Un viaje poco románticu: viajeros británicos hacia Sudamcrica, 1818-28)," Escritura (Caracas. Year 4, no. 7 (1979), pp. 129—41. Goodman's book contains «m excellent bibliography on exploration in Latin America.
13   On the novela de la tierra the most advanced work is Carlos J. Alonsu's The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
14  John Freccero, "Reader's Report," Cornell University, fohn M. Ol'm Library Bookmark Series, no. 36 (April 1968); Eduardo G. Gonzalez, Alfo
NOTES  TO   PAGES   I 4-I 9                                t8q
Carpentier: el tiempo del hombre (Caracas, Monte Avila, 1978). Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford University Press, 1988). 1 c Carpentier corresponded with André Schaeffner, a musicologist who participated in the Griaule expedition (see note 27, pp. 89—90, in my edition of Los pasos perdidos). While in New York a group of anthropologists closely associated with the avant-garde and which included Claude Lévi-Strauss, published a journal called VVV, the cypher giving access to Santa Monica de los Venados in Los pasos perdidos. It is quite possible that the narrator-protagonist of the novel was modeled on these anthropologists. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 117—85. Clifford's excellent book is a must reading for anyone interested in Carpentier. The Cuban novelist was in intimate intellectual contact with the world described by Clifford, from the writings of Michel Leiris, a potential model for the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos, to Lévi-Strauss. The relationship between this group and Carpentier deserves more detailed study and reflection. Carpentier mentions the group of artists and anthropologists and the magazine VW'm one of his last novels, La consagración de laprimavera (Mexico: Siglo xxi, 1978), p. 273.
16   See René Liehy, Yakú. Expedition Franco-Venezolana del Alto Orinoco (Caracas, Monte Avila, 1978). This expedition, which also included Marc de Civricux, took place in 1951.
17  All references are to Gabriel Garcia Márqucz, Cien aňos de soledad (Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1967), and to One Hundred Years of Solitude, tr. Gregory Rabassa (New York, Harper & Row, 1967). I have also consulted the two critical editions extant by Joaquin Marco (Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1984) and Jacques Josct (Madrid, Cátedra, 1984).
18   I have had to change the translation, for this is one of the very few places where Gregory Rabassa made a mistake.
19   See, for example, Ricardo Gullón, Garcia Márquez 0 el olvidado arte de contar (Madrid, Taurus, 1970) and Carmen Arnau, El mundo müico de Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Barcelona, Ediciones Peninsula, 1971). There have been many studies since along these lines. The most convincing is by Michael Palencia Roth, "Los pergaminos de Aureliano Babilonia," Revista Iberoamericana, nos. 123—4 (I983), pp. 403—17. Palencia Roth's splendid piece argues in favor of the biblical myth of Apocalypse as the principal one in the organization of the novel and insists on the influence of Borges on Garcia Márquez. As I will argue below, however, no single myth controls the novel, and no transcendence is allowed by  the constantly undermined and  undermining world of
19°                               NOTES TO  PAGES   20-22
20
21
writing, of the Archive. Only if we could escape the verbal, then tl of simultaneity and atemporality of which Palencia Roth sne-persuasively, and which arc characteristic of myth, would be do On the influence of Borges on Garcia Márquez see: Roberto Goi Echevarria, "With Borges in Macondo," Diacritics, 2, no. 1 ( pp. 57-60 and Emir Rodriguez Monegal "One Hundred Years of St The Last Three Pages," Books Abroad, 47 (1973), pp. 485-g. ] learned a good deal from this article, in which the author singl Melquíades' room as an important feature of the novel, and insi the notion of the Book as key to an understanding of the text. Lucila I, Mena, "La huelga de la comparua bananera como exp de !lo real maravilloso' americano en Cien aňos de soledad," i Hispanique, 74 (1972), 379-405.
Patricia Tobin has written an illuminating chapter on genealogy j aňas de soledad in her  Time and the Novel:   The  Genealogical Iml {Princeton University Press, 1978). Another excellent study, writ someone trained in anthropology, is Mercedes López-Baralťs aňos de soledad: cultura e história latinoamericanas replanteadař idioma del parentesco," Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (San J11 Puerto Rico), Year 6 (1979)* PP- 153~75-22  Iris M. Zavala, "Cien aňos de soledad, erónica de Indias," Insula, n (1970), pp. 3, 11: Šelma Calasans Rodrigucs, '''Cien aňos de soleda erónieas de la conquista," Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, 38, (1983), pp. 13-16. Garcia Márquez' interest in the erónieas de established beyond doubt in Zavala's article, was made evident in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize: "Los cronistas de Indi legaron otros incontables [testimonies of astonishing events and in the New World]... En busca de la fuente de la eterna juven mitico Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca explore durante ocho afios e de  Mexico   [sic],   en  una  expedición  venática  cuyos  miemb comíeron  unos  a  otros,  y  sólo  llcgaron  cinco  de  los  600  c emprendieron," El Mundo {San Juan de Puerto Rico), Sund; December   1982,   p. 21—C.  An   English   translation  of this  a> appears in Gabriel Garcia Márquez: New Readings (Cambridge Unh Press,  1987), pp. 207—11. In a long interview published as a Garcia Márquez said: Yo habia leido con mucho interes a Cri Colon, a Pigafetta, y a los cronistas de Indias ...,"£/ olor de la gi Conversation con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (Bogota, Editorial La Negra, 1982), p. 32. The early history of Macondo furnished ir funcrales de la Mamá Grande" links the origins of the town to C( Latin America through legal documents setting down the propi rights  of the  Matriarch:   "Reducido  a sus  proporciones  reale patrimonio físico [de la Mamá Grande] se reducía a třes encomie
NOTES TO  PAGES  3O-43
I91
aCKudicadas por Cédula real durante la Colonia, y que con el transcurso del tiempo, en virtud de intrincados matrimonios de conven-iencia, se habian acumulado bajo el domino de la Mamá Grande. En ese territorio ocioso, sin limites defmidos, que abarcaba cinco munici-pios y en el cual no se sembró nunca un soio grano por cuarenta de los propietarios, vivían a título de arrendatarias 352 familias," Losfunerales fó la Marná Grande  (Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana,   1967),
pp. 134-5-
Jose Maria de la Pena y Cámara, Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla. Guía
del visitants. (Valencia, Dirección General de Archivos y Bibliotecas-Tipograíía Moderna, 1958), p. 35. For a thorough and official description and history of the Archive at Simancas, see: Francisco Romero de Castilla y Perosso, Apuntes históricos sobre el Archivo General de Simancas {Madrid, Imprenta y Estereotipía de Aribau y Co., 1873). In mid-October, 1785, 253 trunks full of documents arrived at Seville in two expeditions consisting of thirteen and eleven carts respectively. These papers, drawn from the Archive at Simancas, would constitute the Archivo de Indias in Seville, whose organization was due to the enlightened, Bourbon Spanish monarch Charles III.
24  Joan Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana (Madrid, Gredos, 1961), p. 59.
25   The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, Macmillan, 1967), I, p. 145. ■26 I am referring to the box in chapter 2 of Lazarillo in which the priest
hides the bread, and the trunk in Aura where Consuelo keeps the manuscripts left by her dead husband. There is a more thorough discussion of this in the last chapter. ■ľ] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, Pantheon Books, 1982),  p. 129.   Originally  LArcheologie du savoir  (Paris,  Gallimard,
i969)-2$ Ibid., pp. 130-1.
29  Aiejo Carpenticr, El arpay la sombra (Mexico, Siglo xxi Editores, 1979), p. 112. My translation.
30  Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, tr. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1971; original German publication, 1920); M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981).
2    The law of the letter: Garcilaso's Comentarios
:  Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote, tr. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1968), p. 280. I have changed "Lords of
192                               NOTES TO  PAGES 43-46
the Privy Council" to "Lords of the Royal Council." Cervantes \ "Concejo Real."
2 European Americana: A   Chronological Guide to  Works Printed in í Relating to the Americas 3493-1750, ed. John Alden, with the assistar Dennis C. Landis, Providence, John Carter Brown Library (New1 Readex Books, A Division of the Readex Microprint Corpora 1980), vol. 1. Also relevant are: Europe Informed. An Exhibition of Books Which Acquainted Europe with the East (Cambridge, Mass., Hai College Library - Sixth International Colloquium on Luso-Bra; Studies, 1966), of comparative interest; Exotic Printing and the Expc of Europe, 1492-1840, An Exhibit (Bloomington, Indiana, Lilly Lib] Indiana University, 1972); and the beautiful and informative cata) of an exhibition at the John Carter Brown Library in Provid Rhode  Island,  compiled  by Julie  Greer Johnson,   The Book i Americas. The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Cultur Society in Colonial Latin America (Providence, The John Carter B Library, 1988).
3 I am using for the English the excellent Royal Commentaries of the Ina General History of Peru, tr. with an introduction by Harold V. Liverr foreword by Arnold J. Toynbee (Austin, University of Texas r 1966), 2 vols. References to the Spanish are to Obras completas dr, Garcilaso de la Vega, edición y estudio preliminar del P. Carmelo Í-de Santa Maria, S.I. (Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Espaňoles, i 4 vols.
4  Biographical information, unless otherwise indicated, is drawn John Grier Varner's superb El Inca, The Life and Times of Garcilaso
Vega (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1968).
5   English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, vol. 11 o Oxford History of English Literature, ed. F. R. Wilson and Bonamy D( (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 61.
6  Pleilos colombinos, ed. Antonio Můro Orejón (Seville, Escuela de ] dios Hispanoamericanos, 1964).
7   On the issue of centralization I am guided by, Juan Bcneyto P "Los medios de cultura y la centralización bajo Felipe II," Ciua Dios (Valladolid), no. 150 (1927), pp. 184-99; J- H. Elliott, Imi Spain 1469-1716 (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1966); Charles Gii Spain in America (New York, Colophon Books, 1966); C. H. Haring Spanish Empire in America (New York, Harcourt, Brace and M 1963 [1947]); C. H. Haring, Las instituciones coloniales de Hispanoan siglos XVI a XVIII (San Juan, P.R., Instituto de Cultura Puerl queňa, 1957); H. G. Koenigsberger, The Practice of Empire (Em Edition of The Government of Sicily under Philip II of Spain) (Ithaca, Co University Press, 1969); Ramón Menéndez Pidal, "Idea Imperi
NOTES TO  PAGES 47-48                                I93
Carlos V," in his Mis pdginas Preferidas. Esludios Unguisticos e históricos (jVladrid, Gredos, 1957), pp. 232-53; J. M. Ots Capdequi, El estado espanol en las Indias, 2nd. ed. (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1046); J- H. Parry, The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century (New York, Octagon Books, i974[i94o]); Claudio Véliz, The Centralist " Tradition of Latin America (Princeton University Press, 1980). Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico {Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966 [1929]). On the disputes over the rights of the Indians the reader may consult the classic works by Lewis Hanke.
Quoted in Luisa Cuesta and Jaime Delgado, "Pleitos cortesianos en la Biblioteca Nacionál," Revista de Indias, Year 9 (1948), p. 262. C. H-  Cunningham,   The Audiencia in the Spanish  Colonies  (Berkeley, University of California Publications in History, 1919); J- H. Parry, The Audiencia of New  Galicia: A Study in Spanish  Colonial Government (Cambridge  University  Press,   1948); Javier  Malagón  Barceló,  El distrito de la audiencia de Santo Domingo en los siglos XVI a XIX (Santo Domingo,  Editora Montalvo,   1942);  Silvio Zavala, Las instituciones juridicas en la Conquista de America, 2nd cd (Mexico, Porrúa 1971 [1935]). Américo Castro, De la edadconflictiva (Madrid, Taurus, 1961). "The Role of the Lelrado in the Colonization of America," The Americas, 18, no. 1  (1961), p. 7. I owe much to this fine article as well as to Francisco  Márquez Villanueva's  "Letrados,   consejeros y justicias (artículo—reseňa)," Hispanic Review, 53 (1985), pp. 201-27. The most thorough study of the letrado is in Richard L. Kagan's Students and Society in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), who links the rise of this figure with developments in educational  policy.   Kagan writes:  "Previously,  the letrado was  a marginal figure in Castilian society, a learned specialist, represented in a few small universities and a handful of places in the cathedral chapters, monasteries and courts of law. But thanks to Ferdinand and Isabel and the Habsburgs, he acquired a central position in Castile, and as his numbers increased, so did his political influence and social prestige" (p. 85). On the "reconquest" of America by the letrados see J. M. Ots Capdequi, El estado espaňol en las Indias, p. 55. An indispensable source of information concerning the relationship between the New World and the Spanish Crown is Ernst Schafer's El Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias. Su história, organización y labor administrativa hasia la terminaäón de la Casa de Austria (Seville, Publicaciones del Centro de Estudios de História de America, 1933-47)-Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, p. 25.
Angel Rama made valuable observations about the letrados in his posthumous book, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, New Hampshire, Edi-
NOTES TO   PAGES 48-
-49
ciones del Norte, 1984). It is known that Rama did not have a i ha, review this book, which promised to be a coherent theou- 0 evolution of Latin American elites and their intellectual prodiu ii0 it stands, however, La ciudad letrada is based on what appear s i() very scanty knowledge of the sixteenth century. For instanrr. } makes the shocking claim that the traza of colonial cities, which tor form  of a  chessboard,  was  influenced   by  Neoplatonism  ;nic codification  of abstract forms  by  mathematics  in  Descaruv traslación [de un orden social a una realidad fisica] fue facilitiula 1 vigoroso desarrollo alcanzado en la época por el sistema más ;ibst de que eran capaces aquellos lenguajes: las matemáticas. c,-aplicación en la geometria analítica, cuyos métodos habían si< extendidos por Descartes a todos los campos del conocimiento hun por entenderlos los únicos válidos, los únicos seguros e incoiiiar dos. El resultado en America fue el diseňo cn damero ..." (p. {j) Descartes (1596-1650) did not publish his Discours until 1637. most colonial Latin American cities had been founded foi  o century. The model for Latin American cities was Santa I< encampment from which the Catholic Kings laid siege to Ci ras Rama's conception of the letrado is too vague, because it is not b;i among other things — on knowledge of Derecho Indiano, nor familiarity with the questions of writing and reading dist usst Américo Castro (see the article by Francisco Márquez Villanucva is also wrong when he claims that the letrados, in his ver\  »t conception of the type, washed to keep others illiterate. The idi orders and the Crown were interested in creating at least a el; lettered  Indians  to  inculcate  both  religious  dogma  and   (he legitimation of power, hence the abecedarws and other device^ ;m this purpose. We cannot, of course, judge such efforts b\ m< standards since they now seem paltry in number,  but the\ significant at the time.
15   Parry, The Spanish Theory of Empire, p. 2.
16   Vittorio Salvadorini, "Las 'relaciones' de Hcrnán Cortés," The (Boletin del Institute Caroy Cuervo), 18, no. 1 (1963), pp. 77-97- Vit gives ample evidence concerning Cortés' background in law and r important observations about the relation as a form of wrifiiij; Cortes' education, J. H. Elliott writes, in a crucial article n conquistador: "But there is no doubt that his two years in Salarn followed by a long period of training and experience as a notarv, fi Seville and then in Hispaniola, gave him a working knowledge of and a close acquaintance with the methods and technicalir Castilian laws" (p. 43), "The Mental World of Hernán Co Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 17 (1967), pp. 4
NOTES TO  PAGES 49-5 I
195
André Saint-Lu makes a similar point about Bartolomé de las Casas' i „ai training in the introduction to his edition of the Brevisima relation de la destruction de las Indias (Madrid, Cátedra, 1982), p. 49. There are two informative books on American pillories, both by Qonstantino Bernaldo de Quirós, La picota en America (Havana, Jesus Jvíontero, 1948), and Nuevas noticias sobre picotas americanas (Havana, Jesus Montcro, 1952).
\ Pármeno's mother spent half a day on a picota-like structure as punishment for being a witch. See Fernando de Rojas, La Celestína, ed. Dorothy Severin (Madrid, Alianza, 1969), p. 124. "The Recopilación contains 6,377 laws taken from among a total of more than 200,000 - an enormous number and yet only part of the total for a century of life (it means an average of one law per day, granting that the Sunday was sanctified)," Malagón Barceló, "The Role of the Letrado," p. 11. See also Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las Indias (Madrid, Consejo de la Hispanidad, 1943), 3 vols. There is a useful anthology containing, among other documents, the "Capitulaciones de Santa Fe," edited by Francisco Morales Padrón, Teoríay leyes de la Conquista (Madrid, Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1979).
) Spain and its World 1500-1700. Selected Essays (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989), p. xi.
There is a marvellous book on the Archivo de Indias that includes a good deal on Simancas and archival practices from the Catholic Kings to the eighteenth century by José Maria de la Pena y Cámara, Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla. Guía del visitante (Valencia, Dirección General de Archivos y Bibliotecas—Tipografía Moderna, 1958). The enthusiastic Pena y Cámara, who was Director of the Archivo de Indias when he wrote the book, refers to the archives from the chancelleries of Valladolid and Granada brought to Simancas as "potosíes genealógi-cos" (p. 9).
Ivo Domínguez, El derecho como recurso literario en las novelas ejemplares de Cervantes (Montevido, Publicaciones y Lingüisticas Litcrarias del Insti-tuto de Estudios Superiorcs de Montevideo, 1972). The importance of the law in the origins of Spanish literature seems to be greater than one might have suspected, particularly if one accepts Colin Smith's theories about the author of the Poema de Mio Cid. Making a great deal of the court scene at the end of the poem, Smith writes, "In my view the author cannot have been other than a lawyer, or at least a person who had been trained in the law and had considerable technical knowledge of it," Colin Smith, ed., Poema de Mio Cid (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972), p. xxxiv.
On the writing—reading situation in the Picaresque, see Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, "The Life and Adventures of Cipión, Cervantes
ig6                               NOTES  TO  PAGES 52-56
and the Picaresque," Diacritics,  10, no. 3 (1980), p»   , -life"  example of picaresque dialogue is found in ,t (] precisely,  the author of the most famous picaresque Alemán. In it, the author of Guzman de Alfarache quesiiuu. galeotes working in  the  mines  of Almadén.  The  text commentary, has been published by Germán Bleibet" in Secreto' de Mateo Alemán sobrc el trabajo forzoso en Almadén," Estudios de História Social (Madrid), Year 1. riu pp. 357-443.   Márquez  Villanueva  writes:   "La verdar espaňoles vivían bajo el terror obsesivo de algún irunj ("Letrados, consejeros yjusticias," p. 214).
24   "El letrado en la satira de Quevedo," Hispanic Review. --, \ í
25   Koenigsberger's is the most succinct account I have Inn, vivid picture of how this centralized bureaucracy u t gleaned from the many instructions found in the Recopilacii reynos de las Indias about how to channel the paper flow to ( the Indies.
26  Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, p. 3.
27   Magali Sarfatti, Spanish Bureaucratic Patrimonialism in Amer Institute of International Studies, 1966). Sarfatti char detail how the Spanish bureaucracy functioned.
28  Richard M. Morse, "Political Foundations" in Man, Stat Latin American History, eds. Sheldon B. Liss and Peggy J York, Praeger Publishers, 1972), pp. 72—8. The article aj nally in The Founding of the New Societies, cd. Louis Hartz ■
29  Ibid. p. 75.
30   Sarfatti, Spanish Bureaucratic Patrimonialism in America, p. 7
31   Ibid.-p. 19.
32  Ibid. p. 7.
33   Morse, "Political Foundations," p. 75.
34  Ibid. p. 76.
35   Quoted by Charles B. Faulhaber in "The Summa of Gu Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice ofMediev> James J.  Murphy (Berkeley,  University of California p. 94-
36   "Vcrdad es que muchos no escriven sino trasladan, otro.' más vezes pervierten."
37   Lewis Hanke, "The Requerimiento and Its Interpreten História de America, no. 1 (1938), pp. 25-34. Hankc wri promulgated the Requerimiento in due form, the Spanish ca official report back to Spain with the necessary signat conscience was clear" (p. 28). Concerning the issue of coj authority in the Spanish legal system, John Leddy P
1    !'i
■'i.-i.

NOTES TO   PAGES  57-58
I97
cussing specifically  the formula se acata pero no se cumple:  "The
mula's origins go back to the Roman law concept that the prince can
I no injustice.  The  T obey'  clause signifies  the recognition by
»ordinates of the legitimacy of the sovereign's power who, if properly
irmed of all circumstances, would will no wrong. The T do not
cute' clause is the subordinate's assumption of the responsibility of
itponing the execution of an order until the sovereign is informed of
se conditions of which he may be ignorant and without a knowledge
ľhich an injustice may be committed." "Authority and Flexibility in
Spanish  Imperial  Bureaucracy,"  Administrative Science  Quarterly
)rnell University), 5, no. 1 (i960), p. 59.
Nebrija's famous dictum that language is  the handmaiden of
pire Eugenio Asensio writes, "Antonio de Nebrija colocó la lengua
a via central de la história. La lengua acompaňa al proceso orgánico
la suprema creación del hombrc, el Estado, con el que florece y sc
rchita," "La lengua compaňera del Imperio(a)," Nueva Revista de
iogía Espaňola, 43, cuadernos 3—4 (i960), p. 407. Asensio gives the
manistic background of Nebrija's ideas. On the debates on language
ing the sixteenth century, sec Mary Lee Cozad, "A Platonic-
stotelian   Linguistic   Controversy   of the   Spanish   Golden   Age,
naso de Frías' Diálogo de las lenguas (1579)" in Florilegium Hispani-
; Medieval and Golden Age Studies Presented to Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, ed.
n S. Geary (Madison, Wis., Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1983),
203-27. On Erasmianism and the debates concerning the trans-
im of Holy Scripture the classic continues to be Marcel Bataillon's
sme et ľEspagne, which I have read in the augmented Spanish edition
smoy Espa.ua. Estudios sobre la história espiritual del siglo XVI, 2nd edn.
;xico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966).
n Durán Luzio, Creación y utopia, letras de hispanoamérica (San José, ta Rica, Editorial de la Universidad Nacionál, 1979). The most ;ant and influential consideration of the topic is, of course, Alfonso es' Ultima Tule, in which the great Mexican essayist discusses the nonitions of a new world in European literature as a desire to wer a lost paradise. As Durán Luzio amply shows, the topic persists ,atin American literature to the present.
'cción de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y coloni-ón de las posesiones espaňolas en Américay Oceania, sacados en su mayor parte, Real Archivo de Indias (Madrid, Imprenta dc Manuel B. Quirós, 1-84).
pilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 1, p. 653 (3, titulo 16). :re are three excellent articles by Antonia M. Heredia Herrera on style of letters and other legal documents from which I have learned ;h: "Los cedularios de oficio y de partes del Consejo de Indias: sus
198                               NOTES TO  PAGES  59-62
tipos documcntalcs (s. xvn)," Anuario de Esludios Americanos (Se (1972), pp. 1-60; "Las cartas de los virreyes de Nueva Esp corona cspaňola, en el siglo xvi (características diplomática.« cronoiógico y de materias)," Ibid., 31 (1974), pp. 441-506- " como lipo diplomático indiano," ibid. 34 (1977), pp. 65-95 T the most important for my purposes here. 43 For more details sec Diego Luis Molinari, "Naturalidad y co iización en el derecho de Indias," Revista furídicay de Ciencic (Buenos Aires), Year 32 (1915), pp. 698-714. Marriage and le were poignant questions in Colonial Latin America, partie regard to the relationships between conquistadors and Indiai and their issue. Varner discusses the problem as well as the k that tried to solve it (El Inca, pp. 101-10).
44  Bernal's commentary of Lopez de Gómara's História is a c where the text's existence depends on its polemical relat another. López de Gómara's text, though criticized, serve memoire for Bernal, and in a very real sense structures it.
45   Bakhtin, of course, is in the back of my mind here. My depart him lies in my including in this intertextual dialogue a host of t outside the literary realm.
46  Santiago Montcro Diaz, "La doctrina de la história en los tr espafioles del Siglo de Oro," Hispánia. Revista Espaňola de h (i 941), pp. 3-39. I have also learned a good deal about there!; between historiography and the relaciones from Lewis Hanke' sion oiLa relaäón de Potosí in his "La villa imperial de Potosí. Shell, no. 42 (1962), pp. 4-10.
47 My information on the cronista mayor comes from the documem later and also from Rómulo D. Carbia, La erónica oficial de Occidentales. Esludio kistóricoy erítico de la historiografia mayor de America en los siglos XVI a XVIII (Buenos Aires, Biblioteca de .' dades, 1934).
48   Marcel Bataillon, "Historiografia oficial de Colon, de Pedro Oviedo y Gómara," Imago Mundi (Buenos Aires), Year 1, no. PP- 23-39-
49   Erich Auerbach, "Figura," Scenes from the Drama of European j foreword by Paolo Valcsio (Minneapolis, University of M Press, 1984 [1959]), pp. r 1-76.
50  Carbia, La erónica oficial.
51   Secretaries were not only in charge of correspondence, but wer keepers of Archives. On the role of secretaries in the Renaiss Gary Sanziti, "A Humanist Historian and His Documents; < Simonettaj Secretary to the Sforzas," Renaissance Quarterly, (1981), pp. 491-516. In reference to Spain, there is Haywar
NOTES TO  PAGES 63-65
199
n's masterful study Francisco de los Cobos: Secretary of the Emperor Charles
(University of Pittsburgh Press,  1958), which gives an excellent
count of the role of secretaries within the highest spheres of the
)anish bureaucracy. The leyes de Indias were explicit and even prolix in
outlining the duties of secretaries, particularly those of the Council of
the Indies. The entire titulo seis of Book it is devoted to "los secretarios
del Concejo Real," ibid., pp. 277-95.
"Códice de leyes y ordenanzas para la gobernación de las Indias, y biien tratamiento y conservation de los indios (aňo de 1571)," in Colec-riíín de documentos inéditos, vol. xvi, p. 458.
■> --Real cédula," issued at San Lorenzo el Leal on 5 August 1572, printed in Antonio Caulin, História corográfica, natural y evangélica de la Nueva Andalucía, Provincias de Cumaná, Nueva Barcelona, Guayanay vertientes del no Orinoco (Caracas, George Corser, i84i[i779]), pp. 3-4.
.1 Antonio de Herrera y Tordesilías, História general de los hechos de los caste-llanos en las islas i tierrafirme del mar Océano (Madrid, Imprenta Real-Juan Ľ'lamenco, 1601). Herrera y Tordesilías states in the front matter that, in addition to reading "Los autores impresos y de mano que han eserito (-f)sas particulares de las Indias Occidentales," he has "seguido en esta história los papeles de la cámara real y reales archivos, los libros, regis-iros y relaciones y otros papeles del Real y Supremo Concejo de las Indias, dejando aparte muchas cosas por no poderse verificar con escri-11.1 ras auténticas."
j Carbia, La erónica oficial, p. 121.
j Anensio, "La lengua compaňera". Nebrija's work made its way to the Nrw World very soon: "AI aňo siguiente- 1513-se entregan al bachi-llerSuárez, que se trasladaba a la Isla Espaňola 'a mostrar gramática a los hijos de caciques,' veinte ejemplares del Arte de la langua castellana de Antonio de Nebrixa ...," Jose Torre Revello, "Las cartillas para rn.senar a leer a los niňos en America espaňola," Thesaurus, 15 (i960), p. 215. C. Bermúdez Plata prints the cédula authorizing the sale of Nebrija's books in the New World in "las obras de Antonio de Nebrija en America," Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 3 (1946), pp. 1029—1032.
- On printing in colonial Latin America see Stephen C. Mohler's "Publishing in Colonial Spanish America; An Overview," Revista Inter-americana de Bibliografia/Inter-American Review of Bibliography, 28 (1978), PP ■ 259-73 and Antonio Rodriguez-Buckingham's "The Estab-lishment, Production and Equipment of the First Printing Press in South America," Harvard Library Bulletin, 26, no. 3 (1978), pp. 342-54. These are useful updates, but the classic works by Jose Toribio Medina continue to be the main source of information on the matter. Mohler is particularly useful on laws restricting the printing and circulation of books.
200
NOTES TO PAGES 66-67
58 The first figure is from Richard L. Kagan, Students and Society, p. 21 second from Jose Torre Revello, "La enseňanza de las lenguas 3 naturales de America," Thesaurus, 17 (1962), p. 501. See also by same author, "Las cartillas ..." The most recent update of this top by Gertrui van Acker, "The Creed in a Nahuatl Schoolbook of 1 ci LIAS (Amsterdam), 11, no. 1 (1984), pp. 117-36. Van Acker de the  teaching methods  of the missionaries.  Other useful  books education in colonial times are: Francisco Borgia Steck, O.F.M. primer colegio de America, Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. Con un estudio del Codi Tlatelolco, por R. H. Barlow (Mexico, Centro de Estudios Francisca 1944); Pedro Henríquez Urcňa, "La cultura y las letras coloniale Santo Domingo" in his Obra critica, ed. Emma Susana Speratti Pifj prologue by Jorge Luis Borges (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Econórr i960), pp. 331-444; Robert Ricard, La Conquéte spirituelle du Méx Essai sur l 'apoštolát et les missionaires des Ordres Mendiants en Nouvelle-Esp de 1523-24 a 1572 (Paris, Institut d'Ethnologie, 1933). On the teacl of Latin and the classics during the colonial period, see Ignacio Os Romero, Floresta de gramática, polüica y retórica en Nueva Espaňa (1 1767) (Mexico, Universidad Nacionál Autonoma de Mexico, ig There are, of course, numerous works on education in colonial L America, particularly those by John Tate Lanning.
59  Royal Commentaries, 11, p. 1430; Obras completas, iv, p. 137.
60   Margarita Zámora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History h Comentarios reales de los incas (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
61   "Medieval Italian rhetoric was quite a different thing from Ciceroi humanism in the Renaissance. For the most part it was quite munc and practical activity, called ars dictaminis or ars notaria. Ars dictai had   to   do  primarily  with   letter-writing;   its   practitioners,   ca dictatores, wrote about the principles of epistolary composition, app them to specific situations, and made formularies of letters for us< various occasions both by individuals and by town government princes. Ars notaria was the craft of the notaio or notary, whose chief t, revolved around drawing up documents and contracts; his cli might also be either private individuals or public officials. While two arts were distinct, they were very closely related. Often the m and the dictator were the same person; writers on notaria inclu precepts  of composition  in  their  works,   and  manuals  of dick sometimes contained notarial forms," Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wist Petrarch to Valla (Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 205-6. With advent of the Renaissance, humanism and notarial rhetoric at service of the law drew closer, beginning in Bologna. In this and o matters concerning rhetoric and humanism I am guided by Seij
NOTES TO  PAGES 67-68
201
excellent account. For the history of notarial arts from Bologna to Castille I am indebted to Juan Antonio Aiejandre Garcia, "El arte de la notaria y los formularios del derecho común hasta la ley del notariado," Revista de História del Derecho (Universidad de Granada), 2, no. 1 (1977—8), Volumen Homenaje al Profesor M. Torres Lopez, pp. 189-220. This article is good on the transition from the ars dictandi to the ars notariae. Aiejandre Garcia says that the latter were late in arriving in Castille, which leads one to suspect that it was Ferdinand's side of the union that brought, from Catalonia, more developed notarial arts. See Z. Garcia Villada, "Formularios de las bibliotccas y archivos de Barcelona siglos x-xv," Anuari de ľlnslitut de Estudis Catalans, 4 (191 i—12), pp. 533—52. Aiejandre Garcia believes that there were many formularies in CastiUe during the sixteenth century. A broader and, for my purposes, excessively detailed study of the notarial arts in Spain is found in Jose Bono, História del derecho notarial espaňol (Madrid, Junta de Decanos de los Colegios Notariates de Espaňa, 1982), 2 vols. Further information and polemics can be found in the papers collected in Cenienario de la Ley del Notariado. Sección Primera. Estudios Históricos, vol. 1 (Madrid, Junta de Decanos de los Colegios Notariales de Espaňa, 1964). About the medieval sources in Castille, I have consulted the classic study by my admired friend Charles B. Faulhaber, Latin Rhetorical Theory in Thirteenth Century Castille (Berkeley, University of California Publications in Modern Philology No. 103, 1972). The most remarkable and useful book on rhetoric in colonial Spanish America is Ignacio Osorio Romero's Floresta de gramática, poéticay retórica en Nueva Espaňa (1521-176-7). Examples of formulae may be found in Ludwig Rockingcr, ed. Briefsteller und Formelbucher des elften bis vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (New York, B. Franklin, 1961 [1863-4]), 2 v°ls- On Passaggeri, see Rolandino Passaggieri, Aurora, con las adiciones de Pedro de Unzola, version al castellano del Illmo. Seňor Don Victor Vicente Vela, y del Exemo Seňor Don Rafael Núňez Lagos (Madrid, Ilustre Colegio Notarial de Madrid - Imprenta Góngora, 1950). The introduction to this beautiful edition has been published separately by its author, Rafael Núňez Lagos, as El documento medievaly Rolandino (notas de história) (Madrid, Imprenta Góngora, 1951).
62   Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953), pp.i52ff.
63  Julian Calvo, "El primer formulario juridico publicado en la Nueva Espaňa, la Politica de escrituras de Nicolas de Irolo (1605)," Revista de la Facultad de Derecho en Mexico, 1, nos. 3-4 (1951), p. 58. Calvo writes in the introduction: "Con los descubridores Uegaron los primeros escri-banos a dar fe de los primeros actos de aquéllos. Escribanos de nao, de
202
NOTES TO  PAGES  Jl-J2
armadas, de minas y registros, de concejo trajeron consigo su formación jurídica y sus hábitos profes ion ales, de los que eran integrante los antiguos formularios espaňoles. Virreyes, Audicn Cabildos dieron lugar a su vez a nuevas especializaciones del ofi escribano. Los formularios judiciales y extrajudiciales fuerori sólo recibidos, sino que Ilegaron a constituir una pieza fundarticr la vida jurídica de la Nueva Espaňa. [...] El repertorio de an formularios espaňoles [,..] fue integramente conocido en Li " Espaňa y usado por notarios y escribanos de todas clases en el cu de su oficio [...] Todos ellos forman parte de la cultura jurídica Colonia y en sus bibliotecas y librerías hallaron obligado aeon (p. 48).  He adds,  "Junto a los formularios propiamente die colecciones de formulas redactadas para servir como arqurti modelos, mas no para su aplicación directa- encontramos en la i1 Espaňa numerosos esqueletos, formas o machotes cuyas clai esenciales se hallan redactadas siguiendo los formularios conor en los que se intercalan los blancos o espacios necesarios pa rellenados en cada caso de aplicación" (p. 49). In his indispn "La literatura notarial en Espaňa e Hispanoamérica,  1500--1 Anuario de Estudios Americanos (Seville), 18 (1981), Jorge Lujáu ľ writes:   "La   formación   de   los   escribanos   era   fundamenial practica. Luego de terminada la educación elemental, hacia Ids r. anos, eí aspirante a escribano era colocado como aprendiz en la 1 de un  escribano.  No habia  una duración fija,  pero genct.il terminaba esta etapa antes de los veinte aňos" (p. 101). Luj.'ui ľ provides  a fairly  long  list of formularios which  is  known  10 circulated in the Indies. He asserts that "las obras sobre pi-notarial tenian una gran venta," to judge by the frequency with they appeared in ship manifestoes. He draws this information Irving Leonard's classic Books of the Brave. I have also consulted ." Luján's more compendious Los escribanos en las Indias Occidental particular en el Reino de Guatemala  (Guatemala City,  Instituro temalteco de Derecho Notarial, 1977).
64   "Y pues vuestra merced escribe se le escriba y relate el caso tin extenso, pareciome no tomarle por el medio, sino del principal, p se tenga entera noticia de mi persona."
65   William D. Ilgen was the first to refer to this part as the paternal ■ his "La configuración mítica de la história en los Comentarios rea Inca Garcilaso de la Vega," Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana ei de José f. Arrom, eds. Andrew P. Debicki and Enrique Pupo-V (Chapel Hill, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Language Literatures, 1974), pp- 37-46.
66   According to Harold V. Livermore, in his Introduction to fhf
3
NOTES TO PAGES  7 2-7 5                                203
lation of the Comentarios being used here the title was changed by the Royal Council, (p. xxvi).
Comentarios, iv, 66-7; Commentaries, n, p. 1,317. Ramon Iglesia writes, concerning Hernando Colon's biography of his father: "El libro de Hernando, en el que se propone refutar todas estas afirmacioncs [critical of the Admiral], es, pues, básicamente un alegato en defensa de su padre, escrito de ocasión, obra polémica." Vida del Almirante don Cristobal Colon eseritapor su hijo don Hernando, edited with a prologue and notes by Ramon Iglesia (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1947),
p- *3-
Varner, El Inca, is my source here. Daniel G. Castanien's El Inca
Garcilaso de la Vega (New York, Twayne, 1969) is also a reliable source.
It is a curious fact that Garcilaso was also related to the great baroque
poet, don Luis de Góngora.
"No pude en eí Peru escrivir ordenadamente esta Relacion (que no
importära poco para su perfección) porque solo averla alia comengado,
me huviera de poner en peligro de la vida, con Maestre de Campo de
Goncalo Picarro, que amenacaba de matar ä qualquiera que escriviese
sus hechos, porque ententió que eran mas dignos de la lei de olvido (que
los Athenicnses Hainan Amnistia) que no de memoria, ni perpetuidad."
História del descubrimiento y conquista de la provincia del Peru,y de las guerras,y
cosas seňaladas en ella, acaecidas hasta el vencimiento de Gontalo Pizarro,y de sus
sequaces, que en ella se rebelaron, contra su Magestad, in Historiadores primitivos
de las Indias Occidentals,__que junto, tradujo en parte, y saco a la luz,
ilustrados con cruditas notas, y copiosos indices, el ilustrisimo seňor
D. Andres Gonzalez Barcia (Madrid, Imprenta de Francisco Martinez
Abad, 1749), 1, dedicatoria.
0  On the issue of succession regarding encomiendas and the legitimacy of claimants there is a fine account in Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain, pp. 114-15.
1   Chapter 7 of Varner's book gives an excellent account of the problems of marriage and succession in colonial Peru (see especially pp. 156—7).
2  Technically, however, Sebastián was not among the first conquistadors. On the status of the Incas under Spanish rule see John Howland Rowe, "The Incas Under Spanish Colonial Institutions," Hispanic American Historical Review, 37, no. 2 (1957), p- 157, and George Kubier, "The Neo-Inca State (1537-1572)," Hispanic American Historical Review, 27, no. 2 (1947), PP- 189-203.
3  Varner, The Encomienda in New Spain, pp. 225-6. Max Hernandez and Fernando Saba have attempted a psychoanalytic interpretation of the name changes in their "Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, história de un patrom'mico" in Perú: identidad nacionál (Lima, Centro de Estudios para ei Desarrollo y la Participación, 1979), pp. 109—21.
204                               NOTES TO  PAGES  76-83
74   Comentarios, iv, pp. 173-4; Commentaries, 11, pp. 1485-6.
75   Comentarios, iv, p. 173; Commentaries, 11, p. 1485.
76   The best treatment of rhetoric in Spanish historiography cont be Santiago Montero Diaz', "La doctrina de la história en tadistas espaňoles del Siglo de Oro," pp. 3-39. A useful m Francisco J. Ccvallos' "La retórica historiográfica y la acultun tres cronistas peruanos," Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 20, no. 3 pp. 55-66. Cevallos is good on the providentialist design in Gz But on Garcilaso's debt to Renaissance historiography, the indi ble source is Enrique Pupo-Walker's História, creacióny profec textos del Inca Garcilaso dela Vega (Madrid, Jose Porrúa Turanzas
77   Father Carmelo Sáenz de Santa Maria notes in the introductio Biblioteca de Autores Espaňoles edition that in the História G makes reference to four dates as the time in which he writes, all 1 1611 and 1613. Garcilaso died in 1616.
78   The trial and execution of Tupac Amaru, last of the Inca emp narrated in the last book of the Comentarios.
79   I have counted over a hundred instances. The index of the edition has a half-column entry for Sebastián. That is, of courst rough indication of his importance in the book, since there ar chapters devoted to him.
80   See Enrique Pupo-Walker, História, creacióny profecía and als< vocación Uteraria del pensamiento histórico en America. Desarollo de la
ficción: siglos XVI, XVII, XVIIIy XIX (Madrid, Gredos, 1982).
81   Varner writes the following about Silvestře in the introductio superb translation of this book: "But the bulk of his [Garcilaso came to him orally from the aforementioned noble Spaniard, w eventually cornered in Las Posadas. The identity of this mai some reason leaves shrouded in mystery; nevertheless there is s' evidence for speculation, and historians in general have conclu< he was none other than Gonzalo Silvestře, a native of Hei Alcantara, whose fine horsemanship and exceptional boldn played as he gallops through the pages of The Florida threat times to eclipse the glory of the Adelantado [Hernando d himself." The Florida of the Inca, tr. John Grier Varner and Jc Johnson Varner (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1980), p.
82   Of these the most dramatic is the account of Carvajal's life ant but there are many others, just as anthological as the story c Serrano, so much discussed by criticism, which appears in th( parte.
83   See Fernando Diaz dc Toledo, Las notas del relator con otrai anadidas. Agora nuevamente impresas y de nuevo aňadidas las cosas . primeramente. Las notas breves para examinar los escrivanos. Carta <
NOTES TO  PAGES  84-9I
205
navios. Carta 0 poliza de seguros. Nuevamente Impressos en Burgos, ano j co 1. Relación in this sense means both a reading of a case to note what is relevent and a summary. Covarrubias in his Tesoro describes the relator as: "oficio en los consejos o audiencias, el que refiere una causa bien, y fielmente, sin dano de ninguna de las partes," p. 138.
■i,          Al principio fue el notario,
polvoriento y sin prisa, que inventó el inventario. From El diario que a diario. Translation from The Daily Daily, tr. Vera M. K-utzinski (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989), p. 3.
■^r  Comentarios, ni, p. 360; Commentaries, n, 1153-4.
^(j Francisco Lopez de Gómara, La história general de las Indias, con todos los deseubrimientos, y cosas notables que han aeaeseido en ellas dende que se genaron hasla agora (Antwerp, Casa de Juan Steelsio, 1553)- Garcilaso's quotations from Lopez de Gómara, though certainly selective, are accurate.
■{^ Augustín de Zárate, História del deseubrímiantoy conquista.
■$ Diego Fernandez, Primera y segunda parte de la história del Perú, in Biblioteca de Autores Espaňoles, vols. 164-5, ed. Juan Pércz de Tudela Bueso (Madrid, Ediciones Atlas, 1963).
ío Comentarios, m, p. 360; Commentaries, 11, 1154.
jo I am using the edition published by Bolsilibros Bcdout (Bogota, 1973)-There is an English translation by William C. Atkinson: The Conquest of New Granada (London, Folio Society, 1961).
)i Susan Herman, "The Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada, Otherwise Known as El Carnero: the Corónica, the história, and the novela" unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Yale University, 1978. It was not, in all likelihood, Rodriguez Freyle himself who gave the title Carnero to the book, but later commentators. It does not matter, of course; what is important is his conception of the scrap paper of the Bogota Audiencia as the fictive origin of his manuscript. For an update of the issue the reader should consult Herman's "Toward Solving the Mystery of the Name Carnero Placed on Juan Rodriguez Freyle's History," which I have been able to read in manuscript thanks to the generosity of the author.
)2 Harry Sieber, Language and Society in La vida de Lazaňllo de Tormes (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Javier Herrero, "The Great Icons of the Lazarillo: the Bull, the Wine, the Sausage and the Turnip," Ideologies and Literatures, 1, no. 5 (1978), pp. 3-18; Roberto Gonzalez Echcvarria, "The Life and Adventures of Cipión."
2o6
NOTES  TO   PAGES  93-99
3    A lost world re-discovered: Sarmiento's Facundo and E. da Cun
Os Sertöes
i Love in the Time of Cholera, tr. Edith Grossman (New York, Alfa Knopf, 1988), p. 337.
2 Esteban Echeverria, "EI matadero" in El cuento hispanoamericano. A gía critico-histórica, ed. Seymour Menton. 3rd edn (Mexico, Fonc Cultura Económica, 1986), p. 13; "The Slaughterhouse," in The I Anthology of Latin American Literature, tá. Emir Rodriguez Moneg.il ( York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), vol. 1, p. 210. The story was pro! written about 1838.
3 C. H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York, Hare Brace, and World, 1963 [1947]); Jorge I. Dominguez, Insurml. Loyalty. The Breakdown of the Spanish Empire (Cambridge, Mass., Hai University Press, 1980); T. Halperin Donghi, Politics, Economic-Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period (Cambridge Univ< Press, 1975).
4  Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: complejo económico-social del (, (Havana, Ciencias Sociales, 1978). Translated as The Sugarmill > York, Monthly Press, 1976).
5   Karen Anne Stolley, liEl Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes: un itim critico," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 198y
6   See "The Case of the Speaking Statue: Ariel and the Mat^is Rhetoric of the Latin American Essay," in my The Voice of the M<. Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin, Vi sity of Texas Press, 1985), pp. 8-32.
7   I have written about the dictator novel in terms that may be relc\. the discussion here in "The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhdo Dictatorship," The Voice of the Masters, pp. 64-85.
8   "Such are all great historical men - whose own particular aims in those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit. [.. .1 individuals  had   no  consciousness  of the  general   Idea  thi-v unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, were practical, political men, who had an insight into the requiicr' of the time - what was ripe for development. [,..] When their obj< attained they fall like empty hulls from the kernel. They die eaik Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar; transported to St, I h like Napoleon." G. H. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, in trod u by C.J. Friedrich (New York, Dover Publications, 1956), pp. Napoleon is one of Sarmiento's most frequent references.
9 For the poetic, legal and narrative versions of Quiroga's dr.n. Armando Záratc, Facundo Quiroga, Barranca Yaco: juicios y U->iv» (Buenos Aires, Editorial Plus Ultra, 1985).
NOTES  TO   PAGES   IOO-IOI
207
laNación, 3 August 1941.
Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington University of Kentucky Press, 1983), p. 275.
Edward J. Goodman, The Explorers of South America (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1972). See also his The Exploration of South America: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, Garland Publishing Co., 1983). Another charming and entertaining book on the subject is Victor Wolfgang von Hagen's South America Called Them: Explorations of the Great Naturalists La Condamine, Humboldt, Darwin, Spruce (New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1945)-
Carlos J- Cordero, Los relatos de los viajeros extranjeros posteriores a la Revolución de Mayo comofuenles de história argentina. Ensayo de sistematización bibliográfica (Buenos Aires, Imprenta y Casa Editora "Coni", 1936). Cordero provides reliable bibliographical information on each book, a biographical sketch of the author, and a table at the end with information about the professional expertise, purposes of the trip and nationality of each author. His book gives ample evidence of the importance of these travel books at the time they were written. Their translations were sometimes commissioned by the Argentine government.
Mariano Picon Salas, A Cultural History of Spanish America: From Conquest to Independence, tr. Irving A. Leonard (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1962 [original edition 1944]), pp. 155-6. There are also the following works on travel literature: Lincoln Bates, "En pos de una civilización perdida: dos audaces viajeros del siglo xix exploran la America Central," Americas (OAS), vol. 38, no. 1 (1986), pp. 34-9; Chester C. Christian Jr., "Hispanic Literature of Exploration," Exploration (Journal of the MLA Special Session on the Literature of Exploration and Travel), 1 (1973), pp. 42-6; Evelio A. Echeverria, "La conquista del Chimborazo," Americas (OAS), vol. 35, no. 5 (1983), pp. 22-31; Iris H. W. Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1981). Engstrand's superb book should be read in conjunction with Maria de los Angeles Calatayud Arinero's Catálogo de las expedicionesy viajes cientißcos espaňoles siglos XVIIIy XIX (Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1984). Continuing the list: Jean Franco, "Un viaje poco romántico: viajeros británicos hacia [sic] Sudamérica: 1818-1828," Escritura (Caracas), year 4, no. 7 (1979), pp. 129-41. (This article is one of the few, and perhaps the first in recent times, to notice the importance of travel-accounts as writing; there was no contradiction, however, as Franco assumes, between the economic motivation of the journeys and the romanticism of the writers); C. Harvey Gardiner,  "Foreign Travelers' Accounts of Mexico,   1810-
208
NOTES TO  PAGE   I 02
■ l
1910," Americas (OAS), vol. 8 (1952), pp. 321-51; Gardin editor of a series of travel books called Latin American 1, , '  " *'' introductions to the following two volumes are importa:      1       ''' Bond Head, Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (C           " "
Southern Illinois University Press,  1967), pp. vii-xxi   ant         'i "''
Hassaurek, Four Years Among the Ecuadorians (Carbondale   •*, Illinois University  Press,   1967),  pp. vii-xxi;  Ronald Hil Significance of Travel Literature With Special Reference to t i    > and  Portuguese  Speaking World,"  Hispánia  (AATSP) pp. 836-45; Sonja Karsen, "Charles Marie dc la Condamin in Latin America," Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia!Int     1 Review of Bibliography, vol. 36, no. 3 (1986), pp. 315-23; Jose   1 "El Brasil visto por los viajeros alemanes," Revista de Indü no. 83 (1961), pp. 107-27; Mary Louise Pratt, "Scratches <-. 1 1 of the Country; What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the ]! Critical Inquiry, 12, no. 1  (1985), pp. 119-43, arid her "Fi ■■ Common Places" in Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of I ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, \Jv California Press,  1986), pp. 27-50. Though these articles tially about Africa, there are useful observations about Lati    \i Arthur Robert Steele, Flowers for the King. The Expedition <     '. Pavón and the Flora of Peru (Durham, Duke University Pr Samuel Trifilo, "Nineteenth-century English Travel Books tina: A Revival in Spanish Translation," Hispánia (AATSP). pp. 491-6. See also Clifford Gccrtz, Works and Lives: TheAnth   • Author (Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 35fr.
None of these works approach the depth and beauty of Pa . 1 The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (\ Alfred A. Knopf,  1988), which is about the founding of * Marshall Sahlins' superb Islands ofHistory (University of Chi 1985), though more relevant to my next chapter, centers c i  ' Cook's travels through the South Pacific.
15   There were, in fact, quite a few Spanish travelers also, pari the first years of the Bourbon dynasty. See the books by <   ■ 1 Engstrand, and Steele. At the same time, Spain had been tr     ■ travel accounts since the seventeenth century. The latest up< topic is by R. Merrit Cox, "Foreign Travelers in Eighteent 1 * Spain," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Romanticism John Clarkson Dowling, cd. Douglas and Linda Jane Barnettť    N Delaware, Juan dc la Cuesta, 1985), pp. 17-26.
16  There were also U.S. travelers who explored what would I was already a part of, their country, as is the case of Willian   '.' (1739-1823). His Travels Through North & South Carolina, Geor
NOTES TO   PAGES   IO3-IO4
209
West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscoul-pes or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791) "caught the pagination of the Romantics and influenced, among others, Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Emerson, and Wordsworth," according to Edward Hoagland, the General Editor of the Penguin Nature Library, to whom I owe this information, as well as a copy of the 1988 edition of Bartram's Travels, with an introduction by James Dickey (New York, Penguin). See also A. Curtis Wilgus, "Viajeros del siglo xix: Henry Marie Brackenridge," Americas (OAS), vol. 24, no. 4 (1972), pp. 31-6. Melville, of course, not only traveled to Latin America, but left in Benito Cereno a literary record of that experience. See Estuardo Núňez, "Herman Melville en la America Latina," Cuademos Americanos (Mexico City), 12, no. 9 (1953), pp. 209-21.
j El Plantet, 2nd series (October 1838). On the foundation of the Royal Botanical Garden in Mexico City, see Engstrand, pp. 19-21.
} The literary tendency known in conventional literary history as costum-brismo is not free from the traveler's influential gaze. Costumbrismo, or the description of the quaint and unique, often the vestiges of colonial times, is in a way a description from the outside. That outside is the one furnished by a point of view that feels superior because of its knowledge of something else. That something else, if not always science, was at least a method, a way of looking.
) Trifilo, "Nineteenth-century English Travel Books on Argentina," pp.491-2.
) Miguel Rojas-Mix, "Las ideas artístico-científicas de Humboldt y su influencia en los artistas naturalistas que pasan a America a mediados del siglo xix" in Nouveau monde et renouveau de ľhistoire naturelle, presentation M. C. Bcnassy-Berling (Paris, Service des Publications Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris in, 1986), pp. 85-114. Rojas-Mix studies the influence of von Humboldt on painters like the ones mentioned in the next note. Von Humboldt himself was an artist, as Rojas-Mix reports, and even wrote one volume of poetry, Die Lebenskraft oder der rhodische Genius, which has been studied, in conjunction with his scientific ideas, by Cedric Hentschei, "Zur Synthese von Literatur und Naturwissenschaft bein Alexander von Humboldt" in Alexander von Humboldt: Werk und Weltgeltung, ed. Heinrich Pfeiffer (Munich, Piper,
1969), PP- 31-95-
I am guided here by Vcrlyn Klinkenborg's description of the manuscript in the exquisite catalogue of the exhibition Sir Francis Drake and the Age of Discovery (New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1988). It seems that Drake was not only accompanied by artists in his travels, but was himself a deft painter of natural phenomena. On the artists, see Donald C. Cutter and Mercedes Palau de Iglesias, "Malaspina's
210
NOTES  TO   PAGES   IO5-I06
Artists," The Malaspina Expedition (Santa Fe, Museum of NY^ \i Press, 1963); Donald C. Cutter, "Early Spanish Artists on the V west Coast," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 54 (1963), pp. 150-7; \t-\s \\ Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World; Barbara Stafford ' "• Sublime: The Taste for Nature's Colossi ..." Gazette des ßeau    ■„', (April 1976), pp. 113-26; Jose Torre Revello, Los artistas pintore expedíciou Malaspina (Buenos Aires, Universidad de Buenos An. Institute de Investigaciones Históricas de la Facultad de Filo-. i; Letras, 1944). There is an anonymous note on an exhibition of 1 ■ 11 from travel books in Americas (OAS), 5, no. io (1953), pp. za- ■    ■,. Cuba the books by La Plante and Irene Wright became classic?   ". quite possible that a book such as Neruda's Arte depájaros was in :■ 1   i by some of the works of artists contained in travel books. N    ,!. Guillen's El gran Zoo also appears to follow the same formal. H  ■.-1 not normally considered as part of art history, the work prodiu   ■ I. these artists was often of superb quality and should occupy die   I they deserve in shaping an artistic vision of the New World. G ■  -1 I Garcia Márquez avers that he looked at drawings from travel   .... when writing El amor en los tiempos del cólera, see Raymond  !    ". Williams, "The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space and Wiiiir.   \ , Interview with Gabriel Garcia Márquez," Publications of the M Language Association of America, 104 (1989), pp. 131-41.
22   Rob Rachowiecki writes, in an article relating a journey to \|.    : Roraima, in the area of Guayana visited by Carpentier when h-      ■ writing Los pasos perdidos:   "The plateau summits of the tepu separated from their surroundings by almost impenetrable cliff they harbor a flora and fauna that is not only distinct froi     "i lowlands, but is different from mountain to mountain. Iudei I   ■ remote are  the  summits  that   19th  century scientists  debate I  i!i possibility of prehistoric dinosaurs surviving atop the isolated m      1 . This idea was popularized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's science ]    1   . novel, The Lost World, published in 1912. The book is said to havi    ■   ■ based on Roraima and the 'lost world' tag has stuck to this day."    I i ■ Lost World of Venezuela," Americas (OAS) 4, no. 5 (1988), p. ((
23   I am guided here, above all, by Michel Foucaulťs Les Mots el les (Paris, Gallimard, 1966) and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great O Being (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936).
24  Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World from Christopfier Cn/un, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, tr. Jeremy Moyle (University of Pitis      .'■ Press, 1985 [original 1975]).
25   "Überhaupt ist mit dem neuen Leben, das einem nachoViiki -I ■ Menschen die Betrachtung eines neuen Landes gewärt, nie! ■ vergleichen. Ob ich gleich noch immer derselbe bin, so mein it I-
NOTES TO  PAGES   106-I 10
211
aufs innerste Knochenmark verändert zu sein." In Italienische Reise, Goethes Werke (Hamburg, Christian Wegner Verlag, 1950 [1967]), vol. xn, p. 146. I have learned much about this "grand tour" from a paper by my dear friend Giuseppe Mazzotta, which centers on W. H. Auden's poem "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno," and reviews the works of travelers through Calabria in the nineteenth century. The paper is entitled "Travelling South" and is unpublished.
,fi Larra casts a critical view on his own country in his famous essay "La diligencia," which is a kind of travel-account of his journeys through the provinces of Spain. He had spent a good deal of time in France and looked upon Spain from the perspective of a foreigner. Fernán Caballero, in her novel La gaviota (Madrid, Espasa Calpe, i960 [first edition 1849]), includes a footnote to justify a lengthy description of a convent. Her reason is that such a description "tendría interes para los extran-jeros que no conocen nuestros bellos y magnos edificios religiosos" (p. 33). In a sense her book, along with much of costumbrismo in both Spain and Spanish America, appears as a travelogue for foreigners and city dwellers.
_>7 Villaverde's book is modeled after those of the European travelers and narrates an experience that in some ways anticipates the plot of Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos. See Antonio Benitez Rojo's chapter in La isla que se repite (Hanover, New Hampshire, Ediciones del Norte, 1989). There is a modern edition of Villaverde's book (Havana, Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981).
The most advanced work on the Countess is Adriana Méndez Rodenas' "A Journey to the (Literary) Source: The Invention of Origins in Merlin's Viaje a La Habána" which I have read in manuscript thanks to the kindness of the author.
8  Thomas Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, with a foreword by Daniel H. Janzen (University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 147. The first edition is from 1874. Beit was an English engineer whose work was much admired by Darwin.
9  Goodman, The Explorers of 'South America, p. 191.
-o George Gaylord Sympson, Splendid Isolation: The Curious History of South American Mammals (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980) and Discoverers of the Lost World: An Account of Some of Those Who Brought Back to Life South American Mammals Long Buried in the Abyss of Time (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984). Sarmiento, who seems to have had time to read everything, knew the work of some of these paleontologists well, above all that of Argentine Francisco J. Muňiz, whose biography he wrote. It is now collected in volume xliii of Obr as de Domingo F. Sarmiento (Buenos Aires, Imprenta y Litografia Mariano Moreno, 1900).
"i  Voyage aux regions équinoxiales Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799, 1800, 1801,
212                                NOTESTOPAGESIIO-I27
i8o2, 1803 et 1804, par Al. de Humbold et A. Bontdan     ' Grecque-Latine-Allemande, 1816), 11, p. 303.                     '        '
32   I quote from Facundo o civilizacióny barbarie en laspan'ic,
del texto, prólogo y apéndices de Raul Moglia, xilo    ,             '
(Buenos Aires, Ediciones Peuser, 1955). The transli, ■     ■     1 mine.  Unless otherwise indicated translations an   n   1    / Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or Civilize with a biographical sketch of the author by Mrs. Hi          M ,
American from the third Spanish edition, New Yc       .     _   ,, i960 Hafner Library of Classics].
33   I have used C. Harvey Gardiner's edition,  (Cart     .   ,     s Illinois University Press, 1967). The original is fron        ■
34   Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage B
35   I take the information and the quote from Mary Sayre Ha "The Cosmos Recaptured," Americas (OAS), vol. 35, no i p. 41.
36  Amado Alonso, Estudios Unguisticos:  temas hispanoamerkanos (Madrid, Gredos, 1976), p. 55.
37   "Porque las estirpes condenadas a cien afios de soledad no teu segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra." (Buenos Aires, Sudar 1967), p. 351; One Hundred Years of Solitude, tr. Gregory Raba: York, Harper and Row. 1970), p. 422.
38   Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertöes, edicäo erítica por Walnice \ Galväo (Säo Paulo, Editora Brasiliense, S.A., 1985), p. 85; R the Backlands, tr. Samuel Putnam (University of Chicago Pre; p. xxix.
39   Following the custom of Brazilian critics, I will refer to Eu ' ■ Cunha always as Euclides.
40   I have learned much from Leopoldo Bcrnucci's authoritative ' V real,   aquém   do   imagínário:   D. F.   Sarmiento   e   E.   da  t unpublished   manuscript.   I  wish  to  thank  my dear colle allowing me to read this piece, and for all his expert advice on I  1 da Cunha.
41   Carpentier devoted one of his columns in El Nacionál (Cai Euclides' book, calling it "un gran libro americano.'1 "'Los si September 1951, p. 12. Borges alludes to Os Sertöes in "Tres de Judas," Ficcwnes,  Obras completas  (Buenos Aires, Emeo p. 516m Some of the success Euclides has had in Latin Ameri   ■ part due to the rewritings of his book in the works of the I-novelists of the Northeast, who were widely translated into ** and, lately, needless to say, in the brilliant counterpoint offere-   ■ Guimaräes Rosa's  Grande sertäo,  veredas.  But, in general ť ■ impact on Latin America comes from the fact that he furtf ■  ■

notes to pages 128-131                             213
lition of Sarmiento, which was taken up later by writers like Rómulo
legos and others,  and continues  to the present with critics of
[tiiento and Rodó like Roberto Fernandez Retamar. Pedro Henri-
z Ureňa writes, in his influential Las corrientes literarias en la America
ánicu, that Os Sertöes is, in the opinion of many, "la más grande obra
..jta hasta  la  fecha  en  el  Brasil"   (Mexico,   Fondo  de  Cultura
nómica, 1949)- Published in the original English in 1944, the book
tains the Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard for the academic year
y-i, Guimaräes Rosa's superb novel would today compete for the
or of the best work ever written in Brazil.
■ in the relationship between Euclides and Vargas Llosa see Sara
tro-K-larén's two articles, "Locura y dolor: la elaboración de la
3ria en Os Sertöes y La guerra del fin del mundo" Revista de Cňtica
Limaria Latinoameričana, year 10, no. 20 (1984), pp. 207-31; "Santos and
Caneacewos: Inscription Without Discourse in Os Sertöes and La guerra del
fiti del mundo," Modern Language Notes, 101, no. 2 (1986), pp. 366-88. The
most reliable and illuminating work on the topic, however, is Leopoldo
Bcrnucci's História de un malentendido (un estudio transtexlual de La guerra del
im del mundo de Mano  Vargas Llosa), University of Texas Studies in
Contemporary Spanish-American Fiction, vol. 5  (New York, Peter
I.dtig, 1989)-
Tliis aberrancy explains Euclides' stylistic "bad taste and errors."
Antonio Candido refers to Euclides' style as "brillante, difuso, no pocas
veces del mal gusto, pero personal." Introducción a la literatura de Brasil
■.Caracas, Monte Avila, 1968), p. 56.
For biographical information I am relying on the material furnished by
Putnam in his translation as well as that provided by Gaiväo in her
critical edition.
Nancy Stepán, Beginnings of Brazilian Science:  Oswaldo Cruz, Medical
Research and Policy, i8go-ig20 (New York, Science History Publications,
1976), pp. 26-7.
I am not saying that Brazil was a leader in the advancement of scientific
research, but merely stating that there was a commitment to science
that was stronger than in other Latin American countries. Stepán
'ibid.) emphasizes that Brazil was in a dependent situation vis-ä-vis
huropean countries in terms of scientific development.
kuclides da Cunha, Canudos (diario de uma expedicäo), introduction by
(jilberto Freyre (Rio de Janeiro, Jose Olympio, 1939).
I nfortunately Galväo's otherwise excellent edition does not provide
footnotes detailing Euclides' debt to science, nor an index of names.
ľiunam's translation, however, does have such an index, and some
noies on the naturalists.
llhtoria de un malentendido, p. 209.

214                            NOTES TO PAGES  132-146
49   On this topic see Daniel R. Headrick's illuminating The Tool Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (K,'    ľ/"ff Oxford University Press, 1981).                                                        ilr*
50   In his Glossary Putnam writes:  "this word, originally r > ruffian, in Cunha comes to be practically synonymous with w' ,. "" '* inhabitant of the backlands."                                                       '"'" ,,r
51   Putnam often translates expressivos as "significant," which I • 111 admissible, though it undermines Euclides' effort to "trar       ■'■l"'S rhetoric of nature into tropes and figures.                                           '"
52   I have considerably changed the translations, which were of' ■!,. in Putnam's version.
4    The novel as myth and archive: ruins and relics of T
1            O esa voz no es de esa piel o esa píel no es de esa voz.
2  John E. Englekirk, "Doňa Barbara, Legend of the Llano," H (1948), pp. 259-70.
3   The best account of the elections is found in John D. Ma democrática: Evolution of a Modern Political Party in Venezuela ( University Press, 1966), pp. 49-106. Gallegos' speeches ar from the period are contained in his Una posición en la vida, (Caracas, Edíciones Centauro, 1977)- A remarkable acco-festivities at Gallegos' inauguration, which consisted mi Pan-Venezuelan display of folklore (mainly music and d; recently been reissued. See Juan Marinello, "Dias de Venezii de las Americas, no. 170 (1988), pp. 55-63.
4  Englekirk, "Doňa Barbara," pp. 264-5.
5   Ramon Pane, Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios: elpr, escrito en America, nueva version con notas, mapa y apéndico Juan Arrom (Mexico, Siglo xxi Editores, 1974).
6   Colección de documentos inéditos, relativos al deseubrimiento, conau nización de las antiguasposesiones espaňolas, de Américay Oceania sc archivos del reino,y muy especialmente del de las Indias (Madrid, In Jose Maria Pérez, 1881), p. 458. For more details on the cro see chapter two of this book.
7   Fray Toribio de Motolinía, História de los indios de la Nuew 1 Georges Baudot (Madrid, Castalia, 1985). The best genei. this subject continues to be Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Mexico. An Essay on the Apoštoláte and Evangelizing Methods oftkt Orders in New Spain: 1523-1572, tr. Lesley Byrd Simpson University of California Press, 1966 [original French editi< See chapter two in particular, "Ethnographic and Linguists of the Missionaries," pp. 39-60.

NOTES  TO   PAGES   I46-15O                             215
evvii Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Jus lice in the Conquest of America Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949). On the turmoil aused in the New World by the New Laws, see Lesley Byrd Simpson, "he Encomienda in New Spain. The Beginnings of Spanish Mexico (Berkeley, Jniversity of California Press, 1966 [1929]), and, of course, Garcilaso e la Vega el Inca's Comenlarios reales, Part two. 1 )n Cabeza de Vaca, sec the new, forthcoming edition by Enrique I 'upo-Walker. The Naufragios, of course, have been claimed by both nthropology and literature. Claire Martin has written important ages on the relationship between Cabeza de Vaca's report and Alejo larpenticr's Lospasosperdidos in her "Alejo Carpcntier y las erónieas de iidias: orígenes de una escritura americana," unpublished Ph.D. issertation, Yale University 1988. ■ ieorge W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, The Free ress, 1987).
nrneys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes, ed. C. Harvey Gardiner Harbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967 [ 1826 original]). xpeditions like the one led by Malaspina discussed in the previous iiapter also described the natives.
harles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in urn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985),
.138.
aintings and drawings of non-European peoples abounded in both
uropean and Latin American books. Some foreign and domestic
aintcrs began to pay attention to Indians and Blacks, though often
íeir images are heavily influenced by classical conceptions of the body,
Dparel, and gestures. For a good collection of such images sec Mexico
'istrado por Europa del Renacimiento al Romanticismo, the catalogue of an
chibition presented at the Palacio de Iturbide, Mexico City, from 24
larch to 30 June 1983.
ancy Stepán, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (New
aven, Archon Books, 1982), and, by the same author, Beginnings of
razüian Science:  Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, i8$o~ig2o
'Jew York, Science History Publications, 1976). Sec also D.F. Sar-
iento's Conflictoy armonias de las razas en America (Buenos Aires, 1883),
id Martin S. Stabb's "El continente enfermo y sus diagnosticadorcs"
. his America Latina en busca de una identidad (Caracas, Monte Avila,
)6g). Racism in various guises was part and parcel of "Victorian
nthropology" (see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology).
3r instance, Jose Antonio Saco's História de la esclavitud and Richard
tadden's report on slavery in Cuba, which contained some literary
orks by the members of Domingo del Monte's literary cenaclc.
:e Stabb's "La rebeíión contra el cientificismo" in his America Latina en
'.sea de una identidad, pp. 55-90.
2l6
NOTES TO  PAGES   I5O-I5I
17   Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 287.
18   Talal Asad, ed. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter ;'\j(> Humanities Press, 1973).
19   It is a well-known fact that André Breton had in his Paris a r many artifacts from Africa and other regions studied by run gists. The relationship of modern painting, particularly Pit-ethnography is also common knowledge. Les Demoiselles t was based on some African masks that Picasso saw at the T Museum. The best account of this commingling of anthropo the avant-garde is Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years: The On. Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (New York. Books, 1968).
20 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author f University Press, 1988); James Clifford and George E. Maicu.-Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Utiiv California Press,   1982); James Clifford,   The Predicament nj Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art  (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1988). For an excellent article abmi pology and literature in Africa, with many insights relevant America, see Christopher L. Miller, "Theories of Africans: T! tion  of Literary Anthropology,"   Critical Inquiry,   13,  no.   1 pp. 120-39. Miller develops more fully these ideas in his Blank. Africanist Discourse in French (University of Chicago Press, iqf* Miller sees an escape from Western ethnological discourse ii literature through a process of assimilation and distortioi similar to my version of Latin American narrative. Then- i review of Miller in Manthia Diawara's "The Other('s) At Diacritics  18, no.   1   (1988), pp. 66-74.  For an insightful ci relativism in anthropology in the context of current debates. Mohanty's "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Criticism," The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2, no. 2 (ig8g), pp. i-A fruitful  polemic has  arisen  between  the group  of i< anthropologists mentioned above, and one of their precursors. W. Said, whose Orientalism is a landmark study of imperial 1 tations of the other. James Clifford writes that what Said oppo reifying glance  of the  anthropologist  is   a  form  of "old-f existential realism" (p. 259). Said replies in his wide-ranginq senting the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critiiu 15, no. 2 (1989), pp. 205-25. His somewhat predictable cli.nt essentially the revisionists' projects are an aesthetic respon crisis. There is a certain anachronism in Said's percept io "Third World," both in concept and terminology (which sou much a product of the U.S. 1960s), but more alarmingly an al






NOTES  TO   PAGES   I53-I54                             217
approach to imperialism, which he appears to view as being the same everywhere and at any time. Aside from the distortions this constitutive idealization may produce, by moving far beyond his areas of com-netence Said falls into reifying cliches and misrepresentations of his own, such as referring to "Central and Latin America" (p. 215). But, beyond these quibbles, the problem with Said, which Clifford identifies with his comment about existentialism (one should say Sartreanism), is to assume that an "aesthetic" response cannot be subversive, or that Said's own constructs are more effectual as actual agents of change. His call to do away with anthropology is one that could be considered - and has been in Latin America, as I explain here - but I would hesitate to encourage anyone to dispense with Borges, Garcia Márquez, Carpen-tier, Vargas Llosa and others. I doubt that many in Latin America would.
Works and Lives, p. 71.
Jesus Silva Herzog, Breve história de la Revolución Mexičana, 2nd edn. (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962). See also Alejandro D. Marroquin, Balance del indigenismo. Informe sobre la politica indigenista en America (Mexico, Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1972). The most remarkable monument to this movement is, of course, the splendid Museo Nacionál de Antropológia, in whose entrance one reads the following inscription, which leads to a visual display of the history of anthropology and of pre-Hispanic Mexican cultures: "El hombre creador de la cultura ha dejado sus huellas en todos los Iugares por donde ha pasado. La antropológia, ciencia del hombre que investiga e interpreta esas huellas y a los grupos humanos contempo-ráneos, nos enseňa la evolución biológica del hombre, sus característi-cas y su lucha por el dominio de la naturaleza. Las cuatro ramas de esa ciencia única; antropológia fisica, linguística, arqueología y etnológia nos dicen que de diferentes modos, todos los hombres tienen la misma capacidad para enfrentarse a la naturaleza, que todas las razas son iguales, que todas las culturas son respetables y que todos los pueblos pueden vivir en paz." It is worthwhile reading the Guía ofiáal of the Museum to understand how deeply ingrained anthropology is in contemporary Mexican official culture.
In a chapter entitled "El momento presente, 1920-1945," Pedro Henríquez Ureňa writes: "Después de planteles de excepcional importancia, como el Museo Nacionál de Mexico, el Instituto de Filológia de Buenos Aires y el Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Brasil, sc establecen muchos nuevos; tales, el Museo de Antropológia en Lima; el Instituto Nacionál de Antropológia, en Mexico; el Labora-torio de Ciencias Biologicas, en Montevideo." História de la cultura en la America Hispánica (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1964 [1967]),
2l8
NOTES  TO  PAGES   154-157
pp. 133-4. The very concept of culture in the title of this book is reflection of the impact of anthropology on Latin American literature i general. On the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, see Igi];lc-Bernal, Román Pifia-Chan and Fernando Cámara Barbachann, '[] Mexican National Museum of Anthropology (London, Thames and Hudsoi 1968). Another important institution was the Instituto Panameiirjr de Geografia e História, founded in Havana in 1929, as reported i Pánfilo D. Camacho, "Cuba y la ereación del Instituto Panamericai de Geografia e História," Revista Bimestre Cubana (Havana), 63, nos. 2, 3 (1949). PP- 223-30.
24   The most recent update on the history of Mexican indigenismo is found i Frances R. Dorward, "The Evolution of Mexican indigenista Liter ,itm in the Twentieth Century," Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia/1nie American Review of Bibliography, 37, no. 2 (1987), pp. 145-59. For Per the best work is Efrain Kristal's sedulous The Andes Viewed from the C,H Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru 1848-ig^o (New Yot Peter Lang, 1987). Kristal lucidly plots the relationship of poliiic movements to the representation of the Indian in Peruvian literatur discarding accuracy as a criterion for success, and underlining il ideological nature of each construct.
25   See Ortiz's speech inaugurating the Sociedad in Estudios Afrocvb<mi\ (Havana), 1, no. 1 (1937), pp. 3-6.
26   A whole cssayistic tradition concerned with the issue of culiural identity and profoundly influenced by anthropology began in the l.aiin America of the twenties and lasted until the fifties, roughly from Mariátegui to Paz and Fernandez Retamar. Some of these writer.s. like Paz, wrote about anthropology, as his Le'vi-Strauss 0 el f es tin de L\opo (Mexico, Joaquin Mortiz, 1968) attests. Others, like Arguedas and Roa Bastos wrote anthropology. I have dealt with the essay in my Th> ľ»;cť of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Lilt-rahm (Austin, The University of Texas Press, 1985).
27   Carlos J. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Aulochthony (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 6. Alonso hokN thai the novela de la tierra issues out of a sense of crisis, a crisis about the Mains of Latin American culture and modernity. He centers that crisis on iwo events, the Spanish American War and the Centenary celebr.nums around 1910, which made Latin Americans take stock of the predicament of their countries. He also underlines the important c of Pan-Americanism as a policy, which forced Latin Americans (<> compare their cultures to that of the United States. The desire to posir the autochthonous issues from these stimuli.
28   "Ethnographers need to convince us [...] not merely that they ilicin-selvcs have truly 'been there,' but that had we been there we should
NOTES TO PAGES   I 5 7— I 63                             2IQ
have seen what they saw, felt what they felt, concluded what they concluded," Works and Lives, p. 16.
29  La música en Cuba (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946), p. 236.
30  iEcué-Yamba-0! (Madrid, Editorial Espaňa, 1933), pp. 173-90.
31   "Guimaräes Rosa, born in Codisburgo in 1908, belonged to an old patrician family. He studied medicine in Belo Horizonte, and after graduation, set up his practice in a rural area. It has been said that quite frequently he would ask for a story in lieu of payment." Emir Rodriguez Monegal, The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), u, p. 677.
32   See my "Doňa Barbara writes the Plain" in The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1985), pp. 33-63.
33   René Prieto, "The New American Idiom of Miguel Angel Asturias," Hispanic Review, 567 (1988), pp. 191-2. This is, of course, the so-called "magical realism" or "lo real maravilloso americano," of which I have written in Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, Cornell University Press). Michael Taussing has also noted to what degree "magical realism" was a mediated version of the Other's — that is the Indian or the Black - cultural practices. Shamanism: A Study in Colonialism, and Terror and the Wild Man Healing (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 201.
34  John V. Murra, "Introduction," Jose Maria Arguedas, Deep Rivers, tr. Frances Horning Barraclough, Afterword by Mario Vargas Llosa (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1978), p.xi. Fernando Alegria writes, perceptively, about Los rios profundus: "Una impresión iniciál pudiera confundir su lenguajc [Arguedas'] con el de un reconcentrado etnólogo y arqucólogo. Y, de pronto, eso que podría ser un catálogo de iglesias, plazas, muros, artesanos y ruinas, se pone a vivir inde-pendientemente ..." Nueva história de la novela hispanoamericana (Hanover, New Hampshire, Ediciones del Norte, 1986), p. 263.
35  Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1966 [1944]), p. 103. The translation is from Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York, Grove Press, 1962), p. 94. It was probably Borges himself who gave a Wordsworthian turn to the English version.
36   See Emir Rodriguez Monegal, "Borges and Politics," Diacritics, 8, no. 4 (1978), pp. 55-69.
37   Borges also wrote a review of Frazer's The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion, now collected in Textos cautivos: ensayos y reseňas en "El hogar" (I93^I939)i eo1- Enrique Sacerio Gari and Emir Rodriguez Monegal (Barcelona, Tusquets, 1986), pp. 60-1. Another reader of Frazer was Jose Lezama Lima, Las eras imaginarias (Madrid, Fundamentos, 1971), p. 26.
220                            NOTES TO   PAGES   163-180
38  James E. Irby, "Borges and the Idea of Utopia," Books Abroad 4c (i97i),pp.4ii-i9.
39   "Barnet no ha pretendido en forma aíguna hacer literatura ai haya logrado una de las más acabadas obras literarias cubanas d siglo." Review of Biografia de un cimarrón, in Casa de las Americas 1 (1967)) P- :32-
40   William  Luis,  Literary Bondage:  Slavery in   Cuban Narrative  (A i University of Texas Press, 1990).
41   Miguel Barnet, Biografia de un cimarrón (Havana, Instituto de Etm y Folklore, 1966). The book has been translated into English a Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (London, The Bodley Head, 1060   ", the translation is so poor that I have decided to furnish my own
42   See the excellent collection of essays edited by Richard Price A.' Societies: Rebel Communities in the Americas (New York, Anchor E ■
1973)-
43   Fernando Ortiz, Hampa Afro-cubana. Los negros brujos. Apuntes pi estudio de etnológia criminal, prologue by Alberto N. Pamies (M 1 Ediciones Universal, 1973 [1906]).
44   The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, tr. A  *; Sheridan Smith (New York, Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 130.
45   Of Bakhtin I am referring, of course, to both The Dialogic Imagir, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981'    ■■ Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, Inc      1 University Press, 1984). In the case of Foucault I have in mind bot    ■' Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language and Lam Countermemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, Cornell '   ■: versity Press, 1977).
46   Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Bo ■■ Editorial La Oveja Negra, ig8i),p. 129: Chronicle of a Death Foreto 1 Gregory Rabassa (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 98-9.
47   Actually,   mar de  leva  can   also  be  interpreted  as   the  opposi periodicity; that is, it can mean, also significantly, accident, sin-really means a swelling up of the sea caused by a storm that took     1 ■ far away. It seems to mc that the interpretation can hover bet ■ these two poles, both furnished by the naturalists' discourse, becai  ■ Spanish the meaning of the phrase is changing from its original sei       1 unique upheaval to refer to the tides.
48  The Diccionario of the Real Academia says: "For. [forense] Conjun  ■ ' actuaciortes  encaminadas  a  preparar  cl juicio  criminal,   had    ■  ■ constar la perpetración de los delitos con las circunstancias que pu      1 influir en su calificación, determinar la culpabilidad y prever ■ castigo de los delincuentcs."
49  The area appears in the second chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes.
NOTES TO PAGES   182-186                             221
co Mario Vargas Llosa, Garcia, Márquez: história de un deicidio {Barcelona, Barral Editores, 1971), p. 542. Emir Rodriguez Monegal attributes to the influence of James Joyce's Ulysses the totalizing desire of what he calls the new Latin American novel, El Boom de la novela latinoameričana (Caracas, Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 1972), p. 88. It would be foolish to deny the powerful influence of Joyce on Latin American novelists who, like the Irish master, wrote from a strategic marginal position, but from our point of view Joyce also falls within the anthropological mediation. Carlos Fuentes, writing about Vargas Llosa's La casa verde finds that the totalization occurs when language in the present re-activates all of language in the past, the parole rearranges langue, in his Saussurian terminology. La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico, Joaquin Mortiz, 1969), pp. 35-48. See also: Robert Brody, "Mario Vargas Llosa and the Totalizing Impulse," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 19, no. 4 (1977), pp. 514-21, and Luis Alfonso Díez, Máňo Vargas Llosa's Pursuit of the TotalNovel (Cuernavaca, CIODC, Serie Cuadernos, No. 2, 1970).
51   I quote from the bilingual edition, tr. Lysander Kemp (New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1975), pp. 20-21 and 54~55-
52  This ghostly parade is what links archival fictions to the Neo-baroque. See my La ruta de Severn Sarduy (Hanover, New Hampshire, Ediciones del Norte, 1987).
53  Another archival fiction is Cortázar's Libro de Manuel, in which an album of newspaper clippings is being composed for when the child -Manuel - grows up.
54  I have written elsewhere about what is being called the post-Boom, suggesting that there is a novel beyond those' by the masters here discussed that would not be determined by the nostalgia of origins or by the longing for uniqueness and identity. I (and others) have suggested that this kind of novel would be more plot-oriented and hence more conventional in narrative structure. Only Sarduy, Manuel Puig, the remaining Boom authors Garcia Márquez, Vargas Llosa and very few others appear to be writing this kind of fiction, however, while others have taken advantage of the situation to return to a kind of naive realism that plunges them back into problematic of the novela de la tierra without the powerful, layered, critical apparatus that the great novels of the 1930s displayed. See my La ruta de Severn Sarduy, and Donald Shaw's lucid "Toward a Description of the Post-Boom," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 66 (1989), pp. 87-94.