The Literary Impact Of The New World: Columbus To Carrizales1
B.W. Ife
The meeting of two cultures which took place on a tiny island in the
Bahamas in October 1492 was understandably described by a contemporary
as the greatest event in the history of the world, save only for the
incarnation and death of Him who created it.
2
With five centuries of
hindsight, the encounter gives greater cause for commemoration than
celebration. That is equally understandable. The consequences of the
1492 voyage for the peoples of the Caribbean, and of the whole American
continent, were truly awful. That first contact unleashed a wave of
epidemic, of exploitation, of social and cultural deracination, of
demographic catastrophe from which the native peoples of the Americas
have only now begun to recover.
3
And for Columbus, too, the encounter
brought more heart-ache than joy. But it is fruitless to imagine what
might have been; to expect that Spain, once having stumbled clumsily
upon a New World, would quietly close the door and tiptoe away. There is
no life without contact, and there is no contact without pain. Human
beings, human societies and civilisations, are constantly knocking
against each other, invading each other's space, each other's bodies,
wreaking havoc in each other's lives. And as with so many other
encounters, after that meeting on the beach on Guanahaní, in the grey
light of dawn on 12 October 1492, nothing in Spain or America was ever
the same again.
In this article I want to use that encounter as a way of bringing
together two sets of issues, neither of which has really been properly
examined in the context of the other: the birth of America in the
European consciousness, and the birth of the novel in Spain. These are
large and somewhat heterogeneous concepts, too large to be manageable in
the space of an article without unacceptable levels of generalisation,
yet ripe perhaps for yoking together-I trust without undue violence-in
that most sober and festive of devices, the conceit.
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The conceit I have in mind is embodied in a man of no consequence, in
his forties, on board a ship becalmed in mid-Atlantic, on his way to the
Indies. Behind him lies a life of restlessness, frustration and despair;
ahead, though he is not to know it yet, lies one of success followed by
disaster and ruin.
I refer not to Christopher Columbus, though he will be prominent in
my argument, but to another-fictional-voyager to the New World, Felipe
de Carrizales, the jealous old man from Extremadura, in Cervantes's
novel of the same name. The match is not perfect, as befits a conceit.
Columbus was 41 when he made his momentous voyage, not 48; he was not a
nobleman down on his luck, and he did not leave behind him quite as many
broken hearts as Carrizales evidently did. Nevertheless, the parallel
which Cervantes draws between these two travellers is eloquent in its
way. Separated by a hundred years, and by the thousands of desperate
souls who had made the journey in the meantime, these protagonists from
history and fiction are brought together by common goals: the search for
gold, and the search for self-definition.
4
I often wonder which of these
objectives was uppermost in Cervantes's mind when he described the
American dream as 'a delusion common to many, and a remedy privy to
few'.
5
My purpose in drawing attention to this transient congruence of two
figures from history and literature is not just to introduce the theme
of the impact of America on literary developments in early modern Spain,
but to do so in a way which highlights a larger and more problematic
conceit in Spanish literary culture of this period. The real terms of
the comparison are two outstanding features of writing in the Spanish
Golden Age: the rich body of literature about America on the one hand;
and on the other, the great series of experiments in prose fiction which
constitute the origins of the modern novel. Are they related, and if so,
how? The question indicates vividly how Spanish writing in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries takes us to the heart of what Louis A.
Montrose has called 'the historicity of texts and the textuality of
history',
6
and ultimately to the larger question which has been burning
in my mind for some time: why was the novel born in Spain?
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Classic accounts of the rise of the novel, such as that of Ian Watt,
7
point to a number of factors which come together in eighteenth-century
England to create a recognisably new kind of fiction. The features of
this new literary form are said to be the overthrow of conventional
plots, a focus on the particularities of person, place and time and on
the authentic experience of the individual, and the application of
techniques of formal realism. Few nowadays would subscribe to the notion
of the novel rising anywhere
8
-still less in eighteenth-century
England-but the Spanish literary landscape from the 1480s through to the
middle of the seventeenth century is marked by an astonishing quantity,
variety, and richness of books of prose fiction: courtly, epistolary,
chivalresque, picaresque, byzantine, pastoral; novels in the first
person, novels in the third person, novels in dialogue, novels in verse;
books set in the past, in the present, in Spain, in Europe, in the Near
East and the Far North, books set everywhere and nowhere. Even without
Cervantes, the range and the quality of Spanish fiction of the Golden
Age is not equalled by any other European culture of the period, and the
question why this should have been so cannot be avoided.
Ian Watt's account of the origins of the novel may have been
superseded in certain crucial respects, but what has not been overtaken
is his strong awareness of the necessary conditions of any literary
movement: literacy and education. In the context of eighteenth-century
England, Watt emphasises the importance of the growth of a reading
public among the newly-literate bourgeoisie, and among women in
particular. As far as literacy is concerned, there are reasons to
suppose that Spain produced a more literate society at an earlier period
than almost any country in Europe. Work done by scholars such as
Philippe Berger and Sara Nalle shows surprisingly high levels of book
ownership among Spaniards of all classes by the early years of the
sixteenth century, and relatively high levels of literacy, particularly
among men, by the end of the century.
9
It is not hard to see why. The
Catholic Monarchs worked hard at producing a meritocratic letrado class
to service their design for a unified state, and they put in place the
primary, secondary and university education system which would help to
bring that about.
10
The church also gave high priority to promoting the
growth of education and literacy, among women as well as men. Clearly,
these developments had knock-on benefits for Spanish society as a
whole.
But the necessary conditions of education and literacy are, by
definition, not sufficient in themselves to account for the
extraordinary richness of Spanish prose fiction in the Golden Age. They
certainly help to create the environment, but it would be hard to argue
that in themselves they constitute the catalyst. Spain may well have
enjoyed higher levels of literacy and of educational provision than some
other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, but she did not have a
monopoly of these benefits, and, in any case, literary culture is very
often the preserve of an élite who can be expected to be literate no
matter how disadvantaged the cultural context.
Over 25 years ago, A.A. Parker tried to break out of a similar
vicious circle created by the growth of the picaresque as a cultural
phenomenon in early modern Spain. The question is related to my own.
11
Why, if social conditions in Spain were not dissimilar to those of other
European countries, did the picaresque take hold in Spain and not
elsewhere: 'It is surely unquestionable that, if the new realistic novel
of the sixteenth century needed a society in which vagrancy and
delinquency were prominent, it could just as easily have been born in
any other country as in Spain.'
12
The solution that Parker proposed was
literary rather than socio-economic: 'It would be pointless to deny that
there were economic and religious strains in the social life of Spain
and that these could be reflected in literature, but it is not easy to
assess the influence of such things on the rise of a new literary genre.
There must, of course, have been some connexion between its emergence
and the social life of the country at that particular period, but it is
much safer to look for signs of the connexion in the literature
itself...The problem is essentially one of literary history.' (14). In
the case of the question which I am posing, it may be possible to find
both historical and literary factors which were specific to Spain and
which might have stimulated the growth of fiction. For if we ask what
did Spain have that others did not, one obvious answer is: America, and
writing about America.
13
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The literature of Spanish discovery and conquest in the New World is
extraordinarily rich both in quantity and quality.
14
It falls into four
broad categories: the eye-witness accounts by the men of action, men
like Columbus, Cortés, and Bernal Díaz; the accounts of the first
ethnographers, the friars who were sent to carry out the spiritual
conquest and who found themselves recording whatever they could of
indigenous culture before it was too late; then there are the dry-shod
historians, to borrow Oviedo's disparaging term,
15
men who never got
their feet wet, but sat at home trying to make sense of it all; and
finally, drawing on all this work as well as the fruits of classical
learning, there is the great literature which fuelled the debate about
the moral, philosophical, religious, and ethnographical implications of
the conquest.
16
Taken as a whole, this enormous body of writing paints a picture of a
thrusting, active, mobile society, but not an unthinking one. While the
conquistadores pushed forward the frontier of misunderstanding, cutting
a great swathe of culture shock through the indigenous societies of
mainland America, the missionaries tried to gather up the precious
fragments as they fell, and piece together the very mentality which they
were attempting to invade. Not all of this is to Spain's discredit. For
while the historians applied a uniformly providentialist gloss to events
in America, they were engaging in an almost unprecedented way with the
contemporary world, writing about events as they were unfolding, talking
to and about people who were often still alive, and in the case of
Bernal Díaz, provoking a dialogue with those who were there and who took
part.
There are a number of obvious parallels here with the contemporary
fictional portrayal of action in both its heroic and anti-heroic modes.
But there is also a parallel with the contemplative thrust of much
sixteenth-century Spanish prose fiction, the propensity to stand back
from action and question the moral basis of that action. For the events
in America did not go unchallenged, and the outstanding spokesman for
the opposition was the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas: a
meticulous scholar when he needed to be (if it were not for him we would
know virtually nothing of Columbus's first voyage), and yet at the same
time a fanatical propagandist.
17
His advocacy of the Indian cause gave
Spain a reputation for brutality from which she has never fully
recovered, but also led to an open debate about the legitimacy-legal and
moral-of the conquest. It is not often that a nation puts its head in
its hands and cries with anguish 'my God, what have we done?'
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The first sixty years of discovery and conquest produced literally
hundreds of works of description and analysis, as Europe tried to fathom
the strangeness of the New World. However, the difficulty of adducing
this body of writing as evidence in a discussion of the origins of
Spanish fiction lies in the fact that to do so is simply to push the
crucial question one step backwards. Why should the discoverers and
conquerers-men whom we are used to thinking of essentially as men of
action-have turned their hand to writing in such large numbers and at
such length? Even if the stereotype of the Renaissance
soldier/poet-well-bred, cultivated, and polymathic-ever existed, such a
figure can only have been exceptional, and the men with whom we are
dealing were in any case rarely, if ever, from that class. We may be
reasonably certain about the educational background of the friars and
the clergymen, but for the rest, what we know of their formal education
suggests that it must have been rudimentary in the extreme.
Columbus came from a family of weavers and wine merchants, most of
whom were barely literate, and there is no record of his having
undergone any formal education at all. Nevertheless, he must have picked
up some schooling, because later in life he read widely in contemporary
and classical geography. Nor should we forget that the language in which
he wrote his Journal was not his mother tongue, nor even his principal
adopted language, Portuguese. Cortés's family was of rather better stock
and he may have spent a couple of years at Salamanca University, but he
had certainly left there by the age of 16, without taking a degree, and
earned his living for a time as a notary. Bernal Díaz's father was a
local government official and his brother also entered government
service, but Bernal himself is not on record as having had any secondary
education, and he frequently alludes, and not just in formulaic
self-deprecation, to the lack of polish in his written style. Las Casas
was the son of a small merchant, studied Latin in the academy at Seville
cathedral, but began his career as a soldier rather than a scholar.
Whatever scraps of education these men had, they were certainly not
among the letrados, the new meritocracy who were flocking to the
universities and who would eventually staff the burgeoning government
service. The conquistadores were, for the most part, those whom the
education system left behind, and perhaps a system which equipped its
drop-outs to write on occasion like Livy and Tacitus could repay closer
attention today.
However, the quality of education available to the men who carried
out the discovery and conquest is not, I think, the important issue.
What helps to account more effectively for the existence of such a large
body of writing about America are the conditions and the constraints
under which it was produced. As I have argued elsewhere,
18
the very
notion of the conquistador as a free agent is almost certainly
misplaced. The benefits of the modern centralised state under
construction in Spain could not be had without the contraints, and the
conquistadores were constrained wherever they went by a far-reaching
network of controls administered from the centre by the Crown and the
Church. Although the discoverers were always in conflict with that
bureaucracy, they could not ignore it. The business of discovery and
conquest may have been delegated to private individuals, but it was not
done without strict contractual obligations which were closely
monitored. Columbus himself sailed with two Crown officials on board
whose job it was to keep tabs on progress, look after the Crown's
interests and see that all the proper formalities were carried out. The
control of detail in matters taking place at the furthest edge of the
known world is remarkable indeed, as is the rapid growth of the
bureaucratic and constitutional mechanisms in Spain needed to keep track
of the discoveries across the Atlantic.
19
The close administrative supervision under which men like Columbus
and Cortés worked, and the constant requirement to report back to the
centre, may help to explain something about the peculiar quality of
their writing. By 'quality' I do not mean literary merit, although this
is in many cases very considerable indeed. I refer rather to the strong
note of defensiveness which frequently comes through in their reports.
The administrative imperative may not always produce good literature,
but it does foster a strong sense of accountability. The shrewd
conquerors learned not just to live with but to harness the power of the
document and the written record, and to turn it to their advantage.
Nevertheless, when the conquistadores write they often seem to be
looking over their shoulder and fending off criticism, justifying
themselves and their every action and decision.
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The requirements of a tightly-organised, centralised administration
go some way to accounting for the huge volume of writing which came out
of the New World in the early years, but they do not explain everything.
When Columbus writes in the prologue to his Journal that he intends to
keep a detailed daily record of the voyage, noting everything he may do,
see or undergo,
20
he is not responding to purely administrative
pressures. Columbus knew that deeds are not enough when one is working
at the edge of the known world and the rewards are to be found at the
centre. If he was definitively to stamp his personality on his
achievements, he would have to do so in writing, and the act of
assertion implied in resorting to the written word was particularly
crucial in his case. Columbus more than any other discoverer/writer of
this period had to face the epistemological consequences of the dramatic
conflict between textual authority and first-hand experience. As Anthony
Pagden has shown, the power of authority was such that when 'experience
directly contradicted the text, it was the experience, which was
unstable because of its very novelty, which was likely to be denied or
at least obscured'.
21
This conflict was to be that much greater for
Columbus because of the interest he had vested in preserving the status
of the authorities which had dictated his initial hypothesis.
The way out of this impasse, as Pagden goes on to argue, was to
'create a text where none had existed before' (54), to invent new genres
or to make new versions of old genres, to combine chronicle,
autobiographical narrative, natural history and legal deposition, to
recognize 'that the presence of America demanded a new kind of writing',
and then to go on to endow the resultant text with authority by appeal
to the authorial voice. José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las
Indias (1590) may have been the first book not just to do this but to
theorize about it, as Pagden asserts, but the practice had certainly
been adopted by Columbus a good hundred years earlier. In his Journal of
the 1492 voyage he took the simple log-book and the rutter and
transformed it, even in the imperfect form in which it has come down to
us, into a subtle analysis of his struggle to come to terms with an
unknown and barely fathomable reality.
22
The commonplace observation-bequeathed to us by Antonio de Nebrija,
the publication of whose grammar of Spanish gave proper cause for
quincentenial celebration in 1992-that 'language is the companion of
empire' more than proved its worth in the context of America. Not only
were the Spanish confident-in themselves, in their technology, command
structures, and religious ideology-, they also enjoyed what Samuel
Purchas called a 'literall advantage'.
23
The advantage lay less in the
fact that they were able to represent the world more accurately or
manipulate it more effectively than the indigenous societies-they
certainly were able to do the latter, both in the service of the Crown
and the Church and in the pursuit of personal interests-; it lay much
more in the fact that Spain was able to develop forms of writing through
which it could cushion the impact of the New World, and control, mediate
and ultimately possess the new reality, both politically and
intellectually.
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We can see this process at work from the outset, in the founding text
of the conquest, the Journal of the 1492 voyage. For Columbus's first
act in the New World, as he went ashore that October morning in the
company of Martín Alonso and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, captains of the Pinta
and the Niña, and the secretary of the expedition, Rodrigo de Escobedo
and the accountant, Rodrigo Sánchez de Segovia, was one of possession;
the assertion of right to property, and the appropriation of a people
and a culture through language. The legality of the act of possession
was more problematic than Columbus himself allowed.
24
Whatever view one
has of the early modern world, simply marching into another territory
and taking over was not acceptable. For an act of possession to be legal
there had to be witnesses (the Pinzón brothers); there had to be Crown
representatives (the secretary and the accountant); and there had to be
someone to give possession. Columbus knew about these formalities,
because at the beginning of the prologue of the Journal he describes the
handing over of the keys of the Alhambra to the Catholic Monarchs by the
defeated Boabdil in a ceremony at which he claims to have been
present.
25
There were circumstances under which one of the parties, the present
owner, could be dispensed with, but only when the lands being annexed
were 'res nullius', when they belonged to no one. But these, surely,
were the lands of the Great Khan; how could they be considered 'res
nullius'? The legal precedents clearly put Columbus in some difficulty;
either the islands belonged to someone, or they did not. Evidently,
Columbus decided they did not. And if they did not, who were all these
people who inhabited them?
For Columbus to resolve this paradox he had somehow to disregard the
reality he had before him, a reality which he describes in some detail:
the crowds of young, handsome Indians, mostly men, who swim out to the
ships and cheerfully exchange their own goods-cotton, spears,
parrots-for the sailors' trinkets. Friendly people, generous,
good-looking, but completely characterised by lack. 'It seemed to me
that they were a people who were very poor in everything', Columbus
writes. 'They go as naked as their mothers bore them...they do not carry
arms and do not know of them...they have no iron...they are quick to
repeat what is said to them, and I believe that they could very easily
become Christians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of
their own. God willing, when I come to leave I will bring six of them to
Your Highnesses so that they may learn to speak.'
26
Almost
unconsciously, and within minutes of landing, Columbus has scraped bare
the reality of the New World and created a tabula rasa on which to
inscribe a new political and cultural reality of his own.
27
The negative
definitions-they are not aggressive, wear no clothes, know no weapons,
have no property, do not speak,
28
and above all have no religion-promote
a state of non-existence; and although this is legally and politically
convenient (they become thereby 'null'), and evangelically convenient
(they are ready for the imprint of the faith), it creates a radical
paradox at the heart of the text-lands filled with innumerable people
can still be in another, crucial, sense empty.
29
As with the process of stripping bare, that of reinscription begins
in the Journal entry for that first morning. We are told that the
landfall island was called in the language of the Indians Guanahaní.
Columbus, of course, did not know that at the time; the name was
supplied by someone who transcribed the Journal at a later date.
Columbus himself called the island San Salvador, and he went on to
rename all of the islands he visited: Santa María de la Concepción,
Fernandina, Isabela, Española. As he made his way gingerly around the
shores of the Caribbean, he literally and metaphorically 'christened'
the islands, headlands, bays and rivers he encountered on the way. Only
one island, Cuba, resisted the permanent imprint of its new name
'Juana', possibly because the form 'Cubanacán' suggested so strongly
that this indeed was the territory of 'el Gran Can'.
To say that Columbus 'renames' the islands is not strictly correct;
in point of fact, the verb he uses is dar nombre, 'to name'. In spite of
the fact that he usually seems to know what the islands are 'really'
called in the language of the inhabitants, as far as he is concerned
they are nameless until he names them.
30
But there is an irony here: we
know that Columbus made his first landfall on an island called
'Guanahaní'. But no-one to this day knows for certain where Guanahaní is
or was. By suppressing the Indian name, Columbus inadvertently
dis-established the site of his greatest triumph.
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But linguistic colonialism is not limited to the act of naming.
Language, Columbus knew, is legislative by its very nature;
31
it works
by classifying and codifying, and its real power lies not in the way it
reflects reality, but in the way in constructs a sense of reality.
Through writing, Columbus presses the shape of his own culture onto the
soft clay he sees before him. And this, in spite of the fact that speech
as such was of little use to him in the hours and days which followed
that first meeting. In that sense he was powerless-the Indians could not
understand him, nor he them. But while he was unable to manipulate them
directly through speech, he could manipulate them indirectly through
writing.
I saw some (Columbus writes)
who had signs of wounds on their bodies
and in sign language I asked them what they were, and they indicated
that other people came from other islands nearby and tried to capture
them, and they defended themselves. I believed then and still believe
that they come here from the mainland to take them as slaves.
32
In two sentences Columbus both admits his lack of understanding-they
communicated, or failed to communicate, in signs-and claims to intuit a
hierarchical world in which these people are attacked and enslaved by
another, presumably more powerful and more war-like people; a people who
fulfil the role of the great, absent, oriental civilization which is
Columbus's ultimate goal. The Journal text is full of such
constructions, of the man-eating caribs, of the marvellous landscapes,
of the commodious bays in which all the ships of Christendom might
safely ride at anchor; and of the naked Indian cacique who comes aboard
the Santa María on 18 December and whom Columbus clothes in the
discourse of savage nobility, grace, gravitas, innate authority and,
above all, generosity: "He and his tutor and counsellors are very sad
because they could not understand me nor I them. Nevertheless, I
understood him to say that if I wanted anything from there, the whole
island was at my disposal".
33
What we see, from the very first pages of the Journal is a picture of
a traveller not so much describing as inscribing, literally creating an
image in writing as the journey unfolds, and overlaying that image on a
reality which has been wiped clean for the purpose.
34
The Journal format
is crucial to this process. Day by day, as the fleet edges its way along
unknown shorelines and into unknown inlets, so the daily entries in the
journal mark the stages by which a new world is constructed. As the
ships feel their way towards the horizon, space is converted into place
by the inscription of names on a chart and letters in a journal. As Paul
Carter has pointed out, there is a headland in NW Australia called Cape
Inscription. It was given that name by Emmanuel Hamelin in 1801 when he
found there two inscriptions left by Dutch discoverers in 1616 and 1697.
It is a paradigm of what Carter calls 'spatial history', the facts of
which are:
...not houses and clearings, but phenomena as they appear to the
traveller, as his intentional gaze conjures them up. They are the
directions and distances in which houses and clearings may be found or
founded...spatial history begins not in a particular year, nor in a
particular place, but in the act of naming. For by the act of
place-naming, space is transformed symbolically into a place, that is, a
space with a history. And by the same token, the namer inscribes his
passage permanently on the world, making a metaphorical word-place which
others may one day inhabit and by which, in the meantime, he asserts his
own place in history.
35
In Columbus we have a classic case of a traveller who asserts his own
place in history through the act of naming and through the creation of
word-places in the pages of his Journal. The first person, the
'I'-witness, which characterises the journal format constantly claims
attention and reinforces an overpowering sense of self.
Your Highnesses (he writes in the Prologue to Their Majesties)
...resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of
India to see the said princes and the peoples and lands...and you
ordered that I should not go by land to the East, which is the customary
route, but by way of the West, a route which to this day we cannot be
certain has been taken by anyone else.
36
The touching arrogance of the prologue to the Journal is not
untypical of those who seek self-knowledge and self-definition through
the passage of time and place. It is echoed by Don Quixote himself as he
rides out one morning reciting to himself the account of his adventures
which he imagines some chronicler to be writing at that moment. Like all
wanderers, Columbus and Quixote are trying to repair their sense of
displacement. The traveller's journal staunches that fundamental lack by
articulating new places of the imagination, whose creation helps to
build a sense of self.
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In the case of Columbus, however, the realities of textual
transmission have been unkind. For what we have is not the journal
Columbus wrote, but the Journal which history has decreed would survive.
When Columbus returned to Spain in March 1493 he presented his journal
to the Catholic Monarchs, in token of his achievement. It must have been
a moving and rather satisfying moment for him, to be able to offer
tangible proof of something which his detractors had said was not
possible. Along with the other tokens of possession-the gold, the
spices, the Indians themselves-he offered them the most positive proof
of all: words in a book. Isabella had the journal copied, retained the
original and gave the copy back to Columbus. Both the original and the
copy are lost, but what we do have is a digest made by Las Casas at some
time in or after the 1520s. The result is a curious hybrid of
first-person narrative and third-person summary.
Las Casas began the digest thinking that he would summarize the whole
document, except the prologue which he evidently thought important
enough to transcribe in full. What begins, then, as history: 'This is
the first voyage with the courses and route which the Admiral don
Christopher Columbus took when he discovered the Indies...' is swept
aside in a powerful assertion of self: 'Your Highnesses resolved to send
me, Christopher Columbus...to the said regions of India.'
37
Thereafter,
Las Casas's summary is frequently interrupted by Columbus's own voice
bursting through: 'estas son palabras formales del Almirante'-'these are
the Admiral's own words'.
38
Throughout the digest, the two persons
struggle for supremacy. Columbus's own construction of events is framed
and sometimes overlaid with Las Casas's selective and often critical
commentary.
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The Journal of the 1492 voyage, the founding text of America, is,
then, in the form in which we have it, an extremely rich and complex
document, and one which can be read as a paradigm for many of the
salient features of sixteenth-century prose fiction in Spain. At the
heart of the Journal there is a traveller, a wanderer, searching for
fulfilment through the location of a place. As he travels, he records
his progress, not just forward progress in purely geographical and
navigational terms, but progress towards the construction of the reality
he seeks. He inscribes his cultural and ideological values on the
features of the landscape, on the blank sheets of his chart and his
journal. As he does so he stakes his claim to selfhood, to permanence
and fame. And while all this is going on, another writer in the text is
chronicling the career of Christopher Columbus, first Admiral of the
Indies.
There is here, I would suggest, a clear analogy with the complex
issues raised by the construction of self in the early Spanish novels.
On the one hand we have the heroic image of militant christianity in the
chivalresque, with the knight as the champion of cultural and religious
values at large in a hostile landscape. On the other, lies the
self-fashioning picaro, narrating his way through enemy territory, the
socially and economically hostile world of the urban poor, and being
allowed, in the process, to self-destruct. The text of the Journal as it
survives points forward to the complex interaction of first-person
narrative and third-person commentary which is so characteristic of
Spanish fiction in the sixteenth century. Defining the self through
action and destroying the self through the critique of action is a
thread which runs throughout both terms of my comparison; and anyone
looking, say, for precedents for the structure and ethos of a novel like
Guzmán de Alfarache, would be wise to include the 1492 Journal in his
enquiry.
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I have been suggesting that in at least one of the key texts which
helped to create the idea of America in the European consciousness, the
writer displaces one form of reality with another of his own making. I
suspect that this happens to us all from time to time, but what made the
procedure so urgent in the case of Columbus was the negative standpoint
from which his writing inevitably departed. Put simply, he was not where
he expected to be; he had failed to achieve his objective and he had to
replace that failure by something else. The skill with which he achieves
this displacement is quite astonishing, particularly since he appears
able to look at, write about and simultaneously disregard a reality
which he had before his eyes: 'innumerable people' can at the same time
be 'nothing'.
Nevertheless, the controlled double vision which Columbus sustains
throughout large parts of the Journal fails at crucial moments. For of
all the ways in which the conquistadores fall short of their
objectives-power, wealth, recognition, reward-their failures of
comprehension and communication are perhaps the most serious. The absent
addressees back in Spain, those who in many cases held the keys to
reward and recognition yet had no knowledge or experience of the local
conditions, had to be made to understand, to re-live, the problems faced
by the conquistadores-the terrain, the culture, the sheer size of
everything. And this had to be done when they themselves were often at a
loss to understand that reality. In his second letter, before attempting
a comprehensive description of Mexico, Cortés voices a characteristic
complaint about the difficulties he faces as a narrator:
Most powerful Lord (he writes), in order to give an account to Your
Royal Excellency of the magnificence, the strange and marvellous things
of this great city of Temixtitan and of the dominion and wealth of this
Mutezuma, its ruler, and of the rites and customs of the people, and of
the order there is in the government of the capital as well as in the
other cities of Mutezuma's dominions, I would need much time and many
expert narrators. I cannot describe one hundreth part of all the things
which could be mentioned, but, as best I can, I will describe some of
those I have seen which, although badly described, will, I well know, be
so remarkable as not to be believed, for we who saw them with our own
eyes could not grasp them with our understanding.
39
There is nothing formulaic in this admission of failure. No matter
how self-sufficient men like Columbus and Cortés may have been in
action, in the end they had to appease the politicians and the
paymasters. They had to learn quickly and effectively how to set the
record straight, and to use the written word to gain political and
financial support in the pursuit of their aims. And, as we have seen,
they used writing as a tool to stamp political, linguistic and
conceptual authority on the unknown. But the reality all too often
rebelled.
The results of this rebellion take a number of forms. Sometimes,
further acts of appropriation result. Native words and concepts, alien
to the world and the language of Spain, are ingested wholesale into the
dominant discourse-hamaca, canoa,
cacique. Sometimes, the writers give
up altogether. Columbus frequently confesses himself at a loss to know
what to say, unmanned by his own inarticulacy. At the most functional
level, his command of Spanish breaks down at moments of high emotion and
great stress (witness the absurdly grandiloquent prologue; or the
incomprehensible syntax in the account of the cacique's visit aboard the
Santa María). More often he is simply unable, he says, to capture the
reality in words, unable to proceed, to explain or describe:
...these lands are so good and so fertile...that there is no one who
could describe them, and no one could believe it unless they saw
it...(16 December)
...there can be no better people or land, and in such quantity that I do
not know how to describe it...(24 December)
...I went in and saw a marvellous arrangement of rooms which I could not
describe...(3 December)
40
Columbus's resolution of this problem, as Stephen Greenblatt has
shown in an important study, is through recourse to the marvellous,
because genuine inarticulacy will not do: there is too much at stake. A
show of inarticulacy can be eloquent up to a point; the poet's classic
invocation of his muse at moments of emotion can be used to create an
illusion of ecstasy, of feelings too intense and a presence too powerful
to be articulated in language. And there is undoubtedly something of
this in Columbus's constant babbling of the word 'maravilloso', by far
the most frequently used adjective in his text. But there comes a point
when the explorer simply must devise a form of expression which will
make the powerful people back home understand what it is like to operate
at the furthest edge of the known world.
41
The usefulness of the word 'marvellous' to Columbus is that it
combines two different standpoints in one. As a noun, a 'marvel' is
something strange, prodigious, something which induces a strong sense of
otherness, of the extraordinary. The source of the marvellous is outside
the self. But as a verb, 'to marvel' is to experience an intense inner
feeling, a silent awe of the prodigious, and to have both a strong sense
of the gulf between self and other and a strong sense of the other in
the self. The adjective brings both these meanings into play, and
Columbus uses the term both to make the reality exotic and to make the
inarticulate expression of wonder stand in for the reality he is
attempting to convey.
As Greenblatt has argued, the pursuit of the marvellous lies at the
centre of all Columbus's writing because there is a fundamental syncope
in his experience, a gap to be filled between expectation and
achievement:
...the marvellous is precisely the sense that will confirm the power and
validity of Columbus's claims against those cavilling skeptics who want
more tangible signs of gain. Not to manifest and arouse wonder is to
succumb to the attacks against him. The marvellous stands for the
missing caravels laden with gold; it is-like the ritual of possession
itself- a word pregnant with what is imagined, desired, promised.
42
The more prodigious the reality can be made to seem, the more he can
bring about the desired union of East and West: because the East has
always been marvellous, the West must also be marvellous, so that the
West and the East can become one.
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To see this process at work, we do not have to look further than
either of the two letters which Columbus addressed to the Catholic
Monarchs and to Luis de Santángel immediately on his return to Lisbon in
March of 1493. The first of these has recently come to light, in the
form of the so-called Libro copiador, a collection of nine transcripts
of Columbus documents, of which seven were previously unknown.
43
These brief accounts, like the text of the Journal itself, are
powerful tokens of achievement and of claim to reward. They rehearse the
trajectory of possession: San Salvador, Santa María de Concepción,
Fernandina, Isabela, Juana, 'and so on, to each a new name', and then
they go on to detail what we have already learned of the lands and the
people. As in the Journal, the people have nothing-no clothes, no
property, no weapons, no religion-but the lands themselves are
wonderfully rich, both for their flora, their lush, fertile vegetation
and copious gold-bearing rivers, and for the supply of some of Europe's
most expensive imported goods-gold, pepper, mastic, aloe, rhubarb and
cinnamon.
Then, as if to set the seal on these marvels, whose eloquence he has
so far largely invoked by appealing to the cupidity of his readership,
he concludes by alluding to the truly prodigious. 'I have found no
monsters' he confesses to Santángel, 'as many expected', but he ends
nevertheless with references to islands populated exclusively by women,
cannibals, people with tails, people without hair, and to lands yielding
'gold beyond measure'.
44
The letters of 1493 allow Columbus to assert
two kinds of wonder, the monstrous as well as the marvellous: he does
not claim to have seen the first kind, but he constantly asserts
first-hand experience of the second.
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In some ways it is not surprising to see the credibility gap bridged
by recourse to medieval travel literature, and in particular to
Mandeville and Marco Polo, since the expectations of both Columbus and
his contemporaries had been based on this conjunction of prior
discourses.
45
As Edward Said has shown, for the western world the East
has always been a fiction originating in texts and in the imagination.46
46
The most effective way in which Columbus could assert his claim to have
reached the East via the western route was simply to recite back to his
readers the very texts and images on which the enterprise had been
founded-he simply recycles medieval views of the East via the Caribbean.
Cortés does it too, more subtly and with greater skill, in the
elaborate, awe-struck, descriptions of Moctezuma's palaces and pleasure
grounds, the rituals of his court and his collection of curiosities-all
of which cast the Aztec emperor in the hybrid role of oriental potentate
and Renaissance Man. And Cortés does it also in the set-piece
word-pictures-of the market at Tenochtitlan, the pitched battles during
the great siege, the prodigious natural obstacles overcome during the
march to Honduras.
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Once again we reach a point at which the two terms of my comparison
intersect. The conquistadores are drawing on literary
sources to create prodigies in the text and a sense of wonder in their
readers; and the novelists are witnessing the effectiveness of
energia and admiratio at work in a
non-fictional context.
47
Visual vividness and excitement
stimulated by the exceptional are, again, constants of Spanish fiction
from Amadís through Don Quixote and the
Persiles and beyond;
48
and they
were techniques not invented in America, but put to such good effect in
the American context that writers like Cervantes could not help but
develop them within their own aesthetic.
The classic example of the intersection of American history and
Spanish fiction is, of course, Bernal Díaz, and the first glimpse of the
Aztec capital:
Next morning, we came to a broad causeway and continued our march
towards Iztapalapa. And when we saw all those cities and villages built
in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and
level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns
and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed
like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our
soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It is not surprising
therefore that I should write in this vein. It was all so wonderful that
I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard
of, seen or dreamed of before.
49
The passage is an effective one and has attracted much comment.
50
Its
effectiveness lies in the way it finds an analogy between the wonder
experienced by the men in Mexico, and the wonder experienced from the
armchair, by the reader of fiction back home. What I doubt the passage
can sustain, however, is the view that the conquistadores in some way
modelled themselves on the heroes of the chivalresque. For one thing,
this passage was written in the 1560s when reference to Amadís had
become a commonplace way of signalling surprise and delight at the
exotic, and it appears to be the only allusion of its kind in the first
wave of writing about America. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that
Columbus had made four voyages to America, and died, and Vespucci had
published his account of the New World, before even the first edition of
Amadís ever saw the light of day. Rather than the conquerers modelling
themselves on Amadís, I wonder if the influence did not run the other
way.
In fact, I suspect that we have here a case of two related phenomena
arising quite independently from a single set of circumstances. It is
difficult to account for the rise and popularity of the chivalresque in
sixteenth-century Spain. At first sight it seems anachronistic that
fourteenth-century Arthurian material should resurface so vigorously at
a time when chivalric issues were all but things of the past. Was the
popularity of the novels of chivalry, then, purely nostalgic? But there
is also a case to be made for the renewed currency of knighthood in the
years immediately following the completion of the reconquest. This was
an age which was re-living the spirit of the crusades. Columbus's own
true objective was not really China at all, but the recapture of
Jerusalem. And Amadís de Gaula embodies not just chivalric heroism, but
high religious ideals: his heroism lies in his virtue.
There may well be a clear common cause, then, between the project of
the western route, with its promise of a renewed economic, diplomatic
and religious thrust against Islam, and the emergence of a fictional
symbol of militant christianity. And as I have suggested elsewhere,
51
a White Christian hero makes a good role model for an administration that
was trying to build a political and religious hegemony out of what was
left of a multi-racial, multi-cultural society. For the better part of
the sixteenth century the knight was an unassailable cultural expression
of the dominant ideology of Spain.
It is strange, then, to see the conquistadores so often associated
with a form of culture which represented a social orthodoxy from which
they themselves were excluded. Letters from America are always written
from the margins, social as well as geographical. Columbus's
construction of self is so often characterised by marginality: he is a
foreigner-it shows in his command of language-, he was mocked by his
detractors, and the role he feels most comfortable in is that of Job.
52
Cortés writes as a renegade, constantly trying to make his peace with
the administration in Spain, yet for ever at odds with the officialdom
foisted on him. Bernal Díaz, again, writes as the underdog, the
General's right-hand man but never mentioned in dispatches. These men
are all outsiders and they all want what outsiders always want: they
want in, and they can't get in. If I were looking for literary
counterparts, it would be to the picaresque, not necessarily to the
chivalresque, that I would turn, and to that whole body of fiction in
Spain concerned with the margins of an oppressively orthodox society,
with the urban poor, the new christians, gypsies, criminals and
women.
Yet it would be unwise to emphasise overmuch the distinctions between
the high culture of chivalresque romance and the low culture of the
picaresque. For one thing, these genres co-existed and appealed equally
to an educated readership; for another, Cervantes showed that the two
genres could be reconciled into a new form of imaginative discourse that
would become characteristic of Hispanic fiction on both sides of the
Atlantic to the present day. Both types grew up in response to the
demands for recreational literature made by a new reading public among
the professional classes of early modern Spain. The nature of that
demand was varied. In terms of plot, what readers liked most was some
kind of journey. Virtually all the heroes of Spanish fiction at this
time are wanderers, in search of something-a grail, a cure for their
love, social acceptability or economic well-being. Like Columbus, whose
search for Jerusalem was thwarted, most fail in their objective, but
some find peace of mind, or marriage, or in the Persiles, another holy
city-Rome. As plots go the quest is pretty conventional, but it was the
plot of the age, the plot of a dynamic, restless, questing society.
Spanish Golden-Age fiction is open-air stuff, whatever the genre;
interior scenes are few, and largely set in taverns, the place where
human lives most often intersect. Domestic interiors-such as the parody
of bourgeois life to which Carrizales returns from America, or the scene
of Leocadia's rape in La fuerza de la sangre-are dark, oppressive, and
life-threatening.
Within these plots, the heroes wander across real landscapes, through
real towns, and encounter real poverty, corruption and oppression-even
if the wicked enchanters have sometimes turned them into giants and
ogres-, and in doing so they construct for themselves a sense of who and
what they are. Sometimes that sense of self consists in upholding a set
of values against a hostile force, whether it be chivalric virtue at the
most heroic level or just the everyday personal integrity that Cervantes
most admires in his fellows. Sometimes that self is crafty, shifty and
morally transparent. But the particularities of time and place, and
especially of person, are definitely there, as Lazarillo learns to his
cost on the bridge at Salamanca.
53
What we do not find, however, are the techniques of formal realism
that Watt considered central to the rise of the novel in
eighteenth-century England. A scrupulous concern for versimilitude, yes;
real-life and low-life settings and characters, certainly; but not
conventional realism of the kind which it has been traditional to
associate with the modern novel. I think we are now used to seeing that
kind of realism, if there ever was such a thing, as a passing phase in
the broader history of the novel. The world of Spanish fiction in the
sixteenth century, whether heroic or satirical, is illuminated from
within by that light which the writers from America tried to kindle in
their readers' imaginations, the light of admiratio, of pleasurable
surprise, astonishment, wonder and awe. And it is illuminated from
outside by the piercing searchlight of moral significance.
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The argument of this paper has been constructed around a conceit. If
the purpose of a comparison is to draw attention to likeness, a conceit,
as Helen Gardner put it, makes us 'concede likeness while being strongly
conscious of unlikeness'.
54
Some may find my comparison far-fetched, but
I have not been suggesting that there are direct textual influences at
work here, although there are reasons to believe that Cervantes for one
read widely in the contemporary literature about the New World.
55
If I have concentrated on Columbus, it is largely because he makes such an
unlikely literary figure. And, with the exception of the letter to
Santángel, no writer of Golden-Age fiction could have read anything
Columbus wrote.
But that is not the point. What I am suggesting is that if the
novelists of the Golden Age had read Columbus, and the many other
letters that arrived in Europe from America, they would have found there
a great deal which was central to their own aspirations. They would have
found a very eloquent example of the way in which language can bring new
worlds into being.
56
They would have found a prototype of the way in
which a persona is constructed by interaction with the world through
which it moves. They would have found many examples of the vivid
representation of the prodigious, and a way of looking at the natural
world that saw in it a source of wonder rather than dismay. And they
would have found a vision of the world which lay bare the system of
moral and spiritual values against which the lives of men and women
would ultimately be judged. Like Carrizales, becalmed in mid-Atlantic,
they might have thought back over the many perils which they had
experienced in their years of wandering and pondered the intemperate
course of the lives they had led, and perhaps resolved, like him, to
mend their ways in the future.
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