Discursive Strategies in the Works of el Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega
When Francisco Pizarro and Diego Almagro arrived in the land of the Incas, the glorious past of these “children of the Sun” was a very real presence in a land where time was cyclic and the present and even the future depended on an interpretation of the past. As the Spanish conquest of Peru proceeded it became irrevocably bound up with the history of the Incas. As they had been in Mexico, the white men were looked upon as gods. They, like the Inca kings, were called “Viracochas,” children of the Sun, and briefly the Incas and the tribes of Amerindians they controlled hoped that the new Viracochas would save them from the monstrous and illegal reign of Atahuallpa and restore the throne to the true Inca. How wrong they turned out to be. The Spaniards brought years of strife and bloodshed to the land of the Incas. Many chroniclers tried to capture this “encounter” and the years that followed it in a variety of chronicles. Foremost among them is the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega who contributed his La Florida, Comentarios reales de los Incas and its second part, Historia general del Perú to the list of New World history and literature.
Although the name of Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca belongs among the gallery of Spanish writers, his spirit belongs to Peru (Royal Commentaries xxxi). A mestizo with little formal education, Garcilaso traversed the privileged and cursed space between two disparate cultures both of which merged in his very being. He was able to articulate his world from several positions: first, from that of his father’s people, Spanish explorers and conquerors on an adventure that would yield untold riches for the Crown and innumerable evangelistic possibilities for the Church; second, from that of his mother’s people, the proud Incas who found their culture, their god, and their allegiance threatened; and finally from that of the scholar and historian he was to become. He was a man touched with a zeal to see the culture of his mother’s people recovered from ellipses of the Spanish chroniclers. Garcilaso was able to take the Spanish language beyond the limitations of European experience to rescue Inca culture from the misconceptions of Spanish official histories and to represent the psyche and the cultural, social, and political organization of a people whose oral tradition proved inadequate in a world of letters. The strategies he used to accomplish this feat are of particular interest to us today as we strain to hear voices that have struggled for centuries not to be silenced by the discourse(s) of the conquerors.
Writing in Spain in the late sixteenth century, Garcilaso showed many of the influences of the European humanists. He was a scholar, largely self-educated, who began as a translator and later showed a talent for creative writing. Garcilaso’s insistence on recovering the original Quechua from its misinterpretation by the Spanish historians was typical of Renaissance humanists who labored to read the Holy Scriptures in the orginal Hebrew and Greek and to purge from them the contamination of the ensuing years of intentional or unintentional misinterpretation.[1] Garcilaso understood the inadequacy of a discourse that comprises only one of many possible voices, realizing that all the voices in a narrative are dialogically interrelated, although he probably would not have expressed it in quite such sophisticated twentieth-century terms. As a discursive strategy, Garcilaso places the Quechua “texts” in a privileged position as the source with regard to the Spanish version. The Quechua “texts” are, of course, the oral tradition of the Incas recorded on the quipus, a series of knots tied on a rope of different colored string. Garcilaso has a connection to the source language of the Incas since Quechua was his first language, the language he imbibed with his mother’s milk. After assuring the reader again that the account of the origins of the kings was given him by the Inca, his mother’s uncle, he adds “I have tried to translate it faithfully from my mother tongue, that of the Incas, into a foreign speech, Castilian” (RC 46).[2] Garcilaso did not rely on memory alone. Although he spent his adult years in Spain, he was in communication with his family and friends in Peru until the end of his life and many of them contributed material which he carefully documents in his narrative.
In privileging the original language of Incas, Garcilaso echoes his fellow humanists. Nebrija wrote in his Apología concerning the importance of consulting the original languages of the Scriptures. His rhetoric about correcting that which is out of place, and amending that which is false and mistaken, is strikingly similar to Garcilaso’s own words noted above in the introductory “Notes on the General Language of the Indians of Peru” at the beginning of the Comentarios reales de los Incas. He is careful to note that the language is different in many respects from Castilian, Italian and Latin. Discussing the Spanish historians who add the letters b, d, f, g, j, l, rr and x to the detriment and corruption of the language (RC 5), he underlines the fact that language is supremely important, noting that “The Christians understood what they wanted to understand, supposing the Indian had understood them and had replied as pat as if they had been conversing in Spanish.” By way of strengthening the resounding of the native voice so that its share of the discourse may be heard and understood correctly, Garcilaso gives many other linguistic lessons in which he continues to illustrate how the official chronicles were often mistaken in what they understood and reported. He lists many examples to show “how far astray those who have not been suckled in the city of Cuzco itself may go (even if they are Indians) in interpreting the Peruvian language: those who are not natives of Cuzco are just as rustic and strange in the language as the Castilians” (RC 288).
The recuperation which Garcilaso undertook by privileging the original Quechua allowed Europeans to, in the words of Rolena Adorno, “hear a little better the voice of the other—to at least pick up its recuperable resonances” (Adorno 207).[3] It also allowed, and still allows today, the Amerindian culture to hear its own voice which had become muted or silenced beneath the layers of “official” narrative. By constantly going back to Quechua as the source language against which he verified his own work, Garcilaso inverted the process of filtering that the Spanish historians used to interpret the New World to the European reader.
Until the late eighteenth century Garcilaso was considered an outstanding authority on pre-Hispanic Peru. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, William Robertson and later William H. Prescott began to question Garcilaso’s use of sources and his “objectivity” as a historian. In 1905, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo called the Comentarios reales de los Incas a utopian novel and the debate about its historicity continued in earnest. Fortunately, a new perception of the Renaissance philosophy of language[4] and the application of its creativity to enhance historical documentation and to depict what the historian Carlo Ginzburg calls “less evident, but more deeply significant historical phenomena” (81), has led the modern day scholar to rethink the relationship between history and fiction.[5] The works of Garcilaso began to be studied as literature rather than history, generally emphasizing the fictional aspects of the work.
Enrique Pupo-Walker and Margarita Zamora deal extensively with the use of language in the work of Garcilaso. The former analyzes selected portions of text, relating the works of the Inca, principally the Comentarios reales de los Incas, with the literary and historiographic traditions prevalent in Garcilaso’s own time, calling Garcilaso a “virtuoso of the Spanish language and the eminent founder of the cultural discourse of America” (Historia 2).[6] For Pupo-Walker, Garcilaso not only describes a historic reality, but also seeks to use the contradictory and violent sense of a language which incessantly battles with itself to carve out a new cultural space. In effect, Garcilaso’s discursive strategy concentrates on correcting and amending the official histories as a means to recuperate the history and culture of the Incas. By her own admission, Zamora’s excellent work barely touches the Historia general del Perú, focusing instead on the role that language plays in the Comentarios reales de los Incas. She argues that Garcilaso’s task in the Comentarios reales de los Incas was “to reconcile the Inca experience of the past with the European world view, in an attempt to restore and ultimately vindicate the indigenous tradition” (3) and to open up Western discourse to Amerindian elements.
Although Garcilaso’s first original work was a genealogy of part of his Spanish father’s family, in his other texts he repeatedly asserts his close ties with the Incas. The title of his first publication, a translation of the Dialoghi d’amore of the Judo-Portuguese humanist Jehudah Abarbanel, better known in Spain as León Hebreo, illustrates such an assertion. He called it by the lengthy but revealing title La traducción del Indio de los tres Diálogos de Amor de León Hebreo, hecha de Italiano en Español por Garcilaso Inga de la Vega, natural de la gran Ciudad de Cuzco, cabeza de los Reynos y provincias del Piru. Dirigidos a la Sacra Católica Real Magestad del Rey don Felipe, nuestro señor. Garcilaso underlines that he was not just any Indian or mestizo, but a descendant of both the proud Incas, masters of an immense and splendid empire and children of the Sun, and the imposing Spaniards, conquerors of empires and champions of Christianity. It is this proud mestizo who offers the King of Spain the first fruits of the Indian mind in the dedicatory to the Diálogos de amor.
A perusal of the titles of Garcilaso’s remaining works would seem to suggest a linear reading beginning with La Florida, continuing with Comentarios reales and finishing with Historia general del Perú which was published after his death. Yet a closer sampling shows that he foregoes a Eurpoean linear narrative, a line on which the past will never return and the future stretches ahead endlessly, chosing instead to echo the Inca myths where the past is forever present and the future eventually becomes the past of the next cycle. There is no real beginning, middle or end, in the linear sense, in any one of his books. None of the three works deals exclusively with a single topic. The subject of La Florida is Hernando de Soto’s expedition on the North American continent, that of Comentarios reales de los Incas the history of the Inca empire, and that of Historia general del Perú the conquest of Perú. However, all three themes, i.e., pre-Spanish civilization, and Spanish exploration and conquest, are present in each work, building one upon the others.[7]
Considering La Florida, Comentarios reales de los Incas, and Historia general del Perú as an integrated project occasions a more cohesive picture of Garcilaso’s discursive strategies. In the Comentarios reales de los Incas Garcilaso subtly but constantly directs his readers attention to Spain’s brutal intervention in what he portrays as a pre-Christian utopia and amidst the strife among the quarrelling factions of Spaniards in the Historia general del Perú he constantly recalls for his readers the peace and prosperity, the “buen ejemplo,” of the Inca empire. Garcilaso alternately uses the official historians and chroniclers to authorize his own work and subverts their influence to redefine the discourse of the Conquest. The official histories marginalize the Amerindian stories. Garcilaso wants to feature them. His work invites his readers to consider the aggregate history, the before and after of the Spanish conquest. Thus it is the readers who may discover for themselves the underlying text. Garcilaso the writer was bound to his own time; his works are not because his readers know no such limitation. They bring to the reading a wealth of experience from other times and other places which raises Garcilaso’s work to the level of the universal. His discriminating readers allow Garcilaso’s books to, in the words of Pupo-Walker, “not only redeem the past but also take possession of the future with uncommon certainty.”[8]
In the process of considering how the works of Garcilaso under discussion here relate to each other and dialog with the official chronicles it is important also to examine the nature of the intertextuality and filtering they exhibit. González Echevarría notes: “Intertextuality is not a quiet dialogue of texts . . . but a clash of texts, an imbalance among texts, some of which have a molding and modeling power over others” (Myth 9-10). The narrative Garcilaso constructs in La Florida is first filtered through the memories and memoirs of eyewitnesses; Gonzalo Silvestre related his adventures with the de Soto expedition to Garcilaso himself and Juan Coles and Alonso de Carmona provided the manuscripts Garcilaso cites. Secondly it was filtered through Garcilaso. In spite of his insistence that his role was no more than that of a scribe, Garcilaso was a scribe who tinted the picture with his personality, his erudition, and a well-defined literary style (RC xxxii-xxxiii). Claiming the role of historian in the Comentarios reales and Historia general del Perú Garcilaso becomes also the critic as he selects certain excerpts from certain historians and either ignores or does not give much space to others. He does not merely “include” the work of the official historians and chroniclers; the abridging, editing and positioning of their accounts in relation to his own often erases the boundaries between them; in fact often by selecting and positioning it is the voice of Garcilaso we hear and not that of the historian he was quoting. Thus, there is a veritable confrontation of voices from the discursive world, the social world, and the political world. These voices emerge as readers are invited to search out the contradictions inherent in the official chronicles and to see instead the Amerindians as heroes of their own history. In short, discursive strategies similar to those which Garcilaso uses in La Florida continue in Comentarios reales de los Incas and Historia general del Perú. As Garcilaso strives to tell his version of the history of Peru from the first Inca to his own time, the use of intertexts is a sort of an inversion of the “official” filtering process by which the Amerindian history, myth, and legend entered into European narratives. In Garcilaso’s case it was a matter of carefully selecting the events of history, examining them within the European context in which they were written and unfolding them anew in an Amerindian context as well.[9]
In the “Preface to the Reader” Garcilaso tells us that “[t]hough there have been learned Spaniards who have written accounts of the states of the New World, such as those of Mexico and Peru and the other kingdoms of the heathens, they have not described these realms so fully as they might have done” (RC 4). Who, then, are these “learned Spaniards” to whom Garcilaso refers? At the time Garcilaso began to write
[t]he main facts of the Spanish conquest were already a matter of record. They were available in three major accounts, one by a representative of the royal treasury in Peru, Agustín de Zárate (a keeper of the Spanish quipus, as it were); the second by Francisco López de Gómara, a royal chaplain who never visited the New World, but who was entrusted with the official chronicle of its discovery and conquest; and the third by Diego Fernández of Palencia, called el Palentino, who served in Peru and wrote at the behest of the Council of the Indies. (RC xix)
Garcilaso refers the reader to the General History of the Indies of López de Gómara, although he mentions that the reader will find them in abbreviated form. “He wrote far away from the scene of events, and got his information from those who came and went, and told him imperfectly many things that had happened” (RC 13). Also we see Garcilaso’s examples reinforced by the accounts of two priests, the first of whom is Padre Blas Valera, whose papers were lost in the sack and destruction of Cádiz by the English in 1596; bits and pieces were saved from the pillage and presented to Garcilaso by Padre Pedro Maldonado de Saavedra of Seville. The second is Padre José de Acosta, who, says Garcilaso, “touches on this story of the discovery of the New World and regrets not being able to give it in full . . . since the old conquistadors had already disappeared when he visited those parts” (RC 14). All of the official chroniclers, the “learned Spaniards,” were Europeans who recounted the wonders of the “New World” through European eyes writing from inside a European Catholic society about the curious “Others” found in a strange new land far away, at the very margins of civilization as they knew it.
Entitled to be the heroes of their own history, this locating of the Amerindian subject by European historians had the effect of displacing them, in the extreme even erasing them from what often became idealized accounts of the exploration and conquest of far away exotic lands. At the least the Amerindians became marginalized in their own world and were replaced in the center of it by Spanish explorers, conquerors and colonizers who became the new heroes and therefore the subjects of what was to become the “history of the New World.” Idealization became reality as history unfolded and reality became idealized in the writing of it.
In Garcilaso we have an author who, in the autobiographical aspect of his writing, very carefully positions himself in relation to Spanish society into which he wishes to gain entrance. Baptized Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, once in Spain he adopted the name Garcilaso de la Vega and added “el Inca” indicating that there flowed through the veins of this mestizo not only the blood of the great Spanish lords of Sierrabrava and Feria, but also that of pagan emperors who from remote antiquity had held sway over the Children of the Sun (Varner and Varner xxiv). By choosing to identify himself as a mestizo Garcilaso was to take himself out of the discussion of “limpieza de sangre.” By proclaiming proudly rather than trying to hide his dual heritage, he made the purity of his blood a non-issue and in fact capitalized on what was at the time a social stigma. He used his background as descendant of the great Incas as authorization to write their “true” history and his background from great Spanish lords to authorize his rendition of the Spanish conquest of Peru. Of the latter he relates: “I heard [the tales] in my own country from my father and his contemporaries, whose favorite and usual conversation was to repeat the stirring and notable deeds performed in their conquests” (RC 13). With false humility he “admits” that his own memory is not perfect and calls upon the words of the official chronicles to reinforce his own narrative. He uses the authority of the Spanish writers when it suits him to legitimize his own and faults them when he does not agree, citing “original” sources such as his Inca relatives and the history, legends, myths and fables of the same.
Garcilaso never intended the Comentarios reales to be one book and Historia general del Perú to be another completely separate entity, one more important than the other. Over the years his account of the exotic in Comentarios reales de los Incas became privileged and came to overshadow his colonial discourse in the Historia general del Perú which was but one among a polyphony of chronicles of the Conquest. The break between the two parts was a natural one which the size of the manuscripts dictated. Garcilaso actually submitted Historia general del Perú under the title of Segunda parte de los comentarios reales de los Incas; he chose the title Historia general del Perú only because the royal censors refused to permit the publishing of Part Two under the title Comentarios reales de los Incas. They felt the word reales lent the book an “official” air and did not want the account to be confused with the official histories, i.e., those commissioned by the Crown.[10]
Garcilaso wrote in an attempt to correct the history of the conquest knowing full well that such a rewriting ultimately depended upon the active participation of the reader who, ideally, would contrast the various sources and be convinced by Garcilaso’s account. Reading as well as the needs and orientations of the readers change from century to century. Garcilaso and others like him have become so important to us today because we have an increased awareness of the need to hear other voices. Speaking of the necessity of studying the Amerindian texts to hear the voices from the past that relate to current ethnic problems, Juan Adolfo Vázquez reminds us that when considering all the political and social problems in Latin American today, we must remember that “the Conquest has not ended and neither has the resistance to the Conquest. We must note that, although they certainly have pre-Columbian roots, the molds, i.e., the paradigms or visions of reality, the world and of man which are in play are projected to our time in a continuous march all across the colonial and modern era” (From Oral 175-76).[11] Because the way readers look at the issues has changed, there is a more critical reception. Reading ultimately becomes the process of constructing a new narrative or at least altering the original. Rolena Adorno sums it up well when she says we must realize that the mechanism which can relegate writers and their works to marginality—or retrieve them from it—is in the hands of the reader and the critic (From Oral 3).
In the same way that the official chronicles replace the Amerindians with Europeans in the saga of the New World, Garcilaso seeks to reinstate the Amerindians to their rightful place, in the center of what was an operative civilization before the conquest. One strategy he uses to do this is the break he often makes in the flow of story he seems to be telling. For instance, in Book V Garcilaso stops the flow of Inca history to cite a prototype of good government which he invites his readers to see as exemplary and prophetic. Following that same train of thought, Chapter XXI shows that the “framework” was there for the Incas to accept the Spaniards as the various tribes of Andean Indians had once wisely accepted the Incas. Yet in Historia general del Perú, Garcilaso repeatedly “reports” that although the Indians wanted peace and to hear about the God of the Spaniards, the Spaniards destroyed rather than built: “and when they [Spaniards] realized the desire of the Indians for peace and friendship with the Spaniards and for the preaching of the holy Gospel, they proposed that all the terms should be accepted. But the disturbance caused by the arrival of Alvarado prevented any talk of peace and religion for the moment, and their [the Spaniards’] only concern was with war and cruelties, to the destruction of both Indians and Spaniards, as we shall see in the course of our history” (GHP 753).
Digressions such as these in all of Garcilaso’s work have generally been ignored or passed over lightly, but, like Berganza’s “digressions” that so annoyed Cipión in Cervantes’s “Coloquio de los perros,” this is no real digression but a different way of structuring a story. It is a means to conceal Garcilaso’s critique of the way in which the colonization of Peru was represented in the official chronicles. Juxtaposing passages from Historia general del Perú with passages from Comentarios reales de los Incas, we can see that Garcilaso continues in Historia general del Perú a discussion that he began in Comentarios reales de los Incas, i.e., using the example of the Incas to teach the Spaniards. At the end of the Book II, Chapter IX of Historia general del Perú Garcilaso notes: “Some of the Spaniards also took this course [of escaping into the forests like the despised and traitorous capitan of Atahuallpa, Rumiñaui] to escape from their enemies, as we shall see later” (GHP 754). By bringing to mind the Spaniards, Garcilaso is subtly able to criticize the behavior of the Spaniards by linking their behavior to the worst of the Indians. It is important to remember that Atahuallpa was not a “true” Inca. In his lust for power this bastard son of the last Inca king challenged and eventually murdered the legitimate heir, usurping the throne of the “true children of the Sun.” Garcilaso implies that the Spaniards, in their lust for gold, are doing the same. When reading this passage against, for instance, the parenthetical mention in the middle of a passage in Book Three, Chapter IV of Comentarios reales de los Incas, which describes some provinces the peacefully Inca conquered, that this was “where the bloody battle was fought between [two Spaniards] Gonzalo Pizarro and Diego Centeno” (RC 143), the criticism is intensified.
Many times Garcilaso is more overtly critical of how the Spaniards failed to capitalize on the civilization they found in place when they arrived in Peru. In the Comentarios reales de los Incas Garcilaso recalls the sophisticated social and political organization of the Incas. Thus an elaboration in Comentarios de los Incas allows for a “report” in the Historia general del Perú to take on a much more critical nature. For instance, in Book Two, Chapter VII of Historia general del Perú, Garcilaso notes, quoting López de Gómara: “Next day the Spaniards entered Cuzco without any resistance, and at once some began to pull down the walls of the temple which were of gold and silver, others to dig up the jewels and jars of gold that had been buried with the dead, and still others to seize idols made of the same metal. They also sacked the houses and the fortress, with still contained much gold from the time of Huaina Cápac” (GHP 748). Basically what Garcilaso presents in this account in Historia general del Perú is a report of what happened without explicit criticism, although he does note that the Spaniards, in their lust for wealth, treated the Indians badly in the process (GHP 749). However, in Comentarios reales de los Incas, Garcilaso has been much more expansive offering an opinion of what the Spaniards should have done: “Although the temple was so curious in its construction, it was destroyed by the Spaniards, like many other notable works found in Peru, which they should have gone to the trouble and expense of preserving so that in future ages people might see the great things they had won with the strength of their arms and their good fortune” (RC 292). Playing on his Spanish readers’ pride in the saga of the Conquest, Garcilaso uses a type of indirect criticism first as he points out how much greater the Conquest might have seemed if the Spaniards could look upon the marvels they had conquered. Lest this subtleness should miss its mark, Garcilaso continues more directly: “The Spaniards, as foreigners, have taken no notice of these marvels [the irrigation canals in this instance], either in caring for them, or esteeming them, or even referring to them in their histories. On the contrary, they seem to have let them go to rack and ruin either deliberately, or what is more probable, through complete indifference” (RC 296). The readers must, of course, actively seek out and compare and contrast the passages in the two books for a full appreciation of the pathos Garcilaso portrays.
Sometimes, more in keeping with the spirit of Comentarios reales de los Incas, Garcilaso says what the Incas did (almost always good). For instance, in Book Five, Chapter VIII, he states: “Soldiers [of the Inca] were not allowed to billet themselves on the villages at the cost of the vassals” (RC 255); and in Book V, Chapter XII: “Soldiers were never allowed to rob or sack provinces or kingdoms that were reduced by force of arms to surrender: their natives who surrendered were quickly appointed to peaceable offices or entrusted with military commands, as if the latter had been long and trusted soldiers of the Inca and the former his most faithful servants.” He continues by saying that the Incas might more properly be called “diligent fathers of families or careful stewards than kings” (RC 266). More often there is the implication that the Spaniards could have profited from following the Inca example in the treatment of those they conquered. Also from the Comentarios reales de los Incas: “[T]he Incas thought it better to advance gradually and impose order and reason, so that their subjects could appreciate the mildness of their rule and attract their neighbors to submit, rather than swallow up many lands at once, which would have caused scandal and made them appear ambitious and covetous tyrants” (RC 111).
The implication is that there was no need to sack and destroy; the Incas would have received as friends the Spaniards who came to them, they thought, sent from the Sun to lead them. He continues: “So they surrendered to the Incas’ will and were affably received without rancor or reproach for their past obstinacy. On the contrary they were received as friends, given food and undeceived about the Inca’s policy, being told that he did not want their lands to oppress them, but to do good to the inhabitants as his father the Sun had ordered. To prove it by experience, they handed out clothes and other gifts to the chief people, saying they were favors from the Incas. The common people were given supples to take home and all were very satisfied” (RC 144). Considering the dire economic situation of Spain, “Las Indias de Europa,” what appears to be mere information about the positive aspects of the Inca empire becomes sharp criticism of Spanish management in Peru. Remembering that the Spaniards disdained anything “native” and tried to import nearly everything they considered “cultured” from Europe, examples such as this become a wry type of humor: “In short, each province and tribe supplied whatever it produced, and never needed to import from outside what it lacked, for it had no other obligation” (RC 251). All of these examples are from the Comentarios reales de los Incas, which is billed as the pre-conquest history of the Incas; not coincidentally they are all very apropos to the situation in colonial Peru.
Garcilaso cites the efficient, just rule of the Incas over and over and emphasizes that the Spaniards’ failure to recognize the privileged position the Incas assigned them as “Viracochas,” children of the Sun, cost both sides in terms of the destruction the Spaniards imposed on the Empire of the Incas. In Historia general del Perú, Book II, Chapter VI, Garcilaso says: “Because of their Inca’s command the Indians were obliged to obey and serve the Spaniards even though it cost them their lives, as Atahuallpa had done. Therefore the Spaniards might ask whatever they wished, and the Indians would seek to satisfy them in everything” (GHP 746). The theme recurs in both books. The subtle criticism in the Historia general del Perú becomes more poignant when the reader considers it against the background of the numerous “examples” in the Comentarios reales.
Garcilaso was critical because the Spaniards ought to have preserved from the Inca civilization what was worth preserving and added something better in the place of what had been destroyed. One can almost hear the echo of his voice saying “Hear this, Spaniards, and heed the example.” He wrote not only to recount the past but to offer an example, a counterhistory, so to speak, for the present and future for those who might be able to hear the dim echo of the lessons of the myths and fables and legends of an earlier civilization.[12] In the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown sought to collect all the copies of the Comentarios reales de los Incas still in circulation while on the other side of the ocean San Martín sought to use it to instill patriotic fervor. And so the dialog continues, chapter after chapter. Criticism that ranges from subtle or mild becomes biting when the reading of one section is cross-referenced with another. Hidden among the myths, fables and histories lurks a criticism which is neither subtle nor mild.
In the work of the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega readers will find echoes of a civilization that was destroyed in a wave of discovery and conquest never since equalled. Garcilaso’s real value to the world of literature is his ability to weave the tales he gathered from his dual cultural background as Amerindian and European into the warp and weft of early American history. There is a project of recuperation in the work of Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca, as he developed a strategy for recalling and documenting the part of his heritage that had become lost in official histories and chronicles of which he had a propensity for questioning. He did not believe, like the Innkeeper in Don Quixote, that the official histories and chronicles were right because they were official: “It’s a nice thing for you to try and persuade me that all these fine books say is nonsense and lies,” says the Innkeeper, “when they are printed by license of the Lords of the Privy Council—as if they were people who would allow a pack of lies to be published . . .” (I: 32). As a reader Garcilaso appropriated closed European texts and corrected and amended them until they yielded up the voices that they had so successfully marginalized. He refused to be imprisoned in his mestizaje. He recognized the value of the Inca civilization but acknowledged that it was a heathen society. He recognized that the Spaniards were wrong to destroy all that got in their way, but acknowledged the fact that they brought Christianity. What makes his work dynamic is that Garcilaso is both participant and spectator in the story that he unfolds. His is a task of revising the European narrative and while his own story was not a new one, Garcilaso’s perspective as a writer was. Writing from his dual point of view, Garcilaso presented his readers with “a dramatic account of the history of America that not only told the story but also reflected upon the telling” (González Echevarría 46).
Garcilaso’s works are segmented when considered each as a closed entity. By reading them as an intersection of one with the others, the full impact of the tension they create among themselves may be felt. As his texts dialog with each other and with the official histories and chronicles they call forth voices of the past, not in vain, not just to report, but to open a space for Amerindian voices in what had become a European discourse. The Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega molds Amerindian and European discourses into one discourse that does not exclude native elements from “world” history. Critical arguments and criticism of the Spanish conquest of Peru are interwoven with the history of the Inca empire. La Florida sets up the dialog of encounter. Voices in Historia general del Perú create the background without which the nuances of criticism in Comentarios reales de los Incas cannot be perceived, without which they “do not sound”. Garcilaso directed his narrative not only to the “official” reader, i.e., the crown, but also to the discriminating private reader of his time and the ones who would follow. As long as readers continue to read, the voices will sound.
Works Cited
Adorno, Rolena. “Arms, Letters and the Native Historian in Early Colonial Mexico.” 1492-1992: Re/discovering Colonial Writing. Ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini. Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1989. 207-24.
___, ed. From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period. Latin American Monograph Series. Syracuse: U of Syracuse P, 1982.
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[1]For a concise summary of Humanism, see Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources.
[2]Quotations in English translation are from Royal Commentaries of the Incas (noted as RC) and General History of Peru (noted as GHP), Parts I and II.
[3]Adorno is not referring to Garcilaso, but in the context of her essay, the idea is applicable.
[4]See, for example, Kristeller and Struever.
[5]For varying degrees and types of textual analysis which support Garcilaso’s “accuracy and integrity as a historian, if not of his impartiality” (Zamora 5), see Luis Alberto Sánchez, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Aurelio Miró Quesada, and José Durand, who generally privilege the Comentarios reales de los Incas at the expense of the Historia general del Perú.
[6]“un virtuoso de la lengua castellana y . . . fundador eminente del discurso cultural de América.”
[7]It is reasonable to suppose that Garcilaso must have had the three books in process at more or less the same time. (See Varner 361-78, and Miró Quesada 249-50.) There is evidence that he had La Florida in mind as early as 1567. Given the length of time he took to write La Florida, the enormity of the task of compiling the entirety of what he planned as the two parts of the Comentarios reales del los Incas, the publication dates of the volumes (1605, 1609 and 1617, respectively), would seem to suggest that their writing was concurrent rather than solitary. (See Varner and Varner, Florida.) The publication of these books was the culmination of a lifetime of work on a single project: the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega’s representation of the Spanish encounter with the Amerindian world. La Florida begins the narrative and the Comentarios reales de los Incas and Historia general del Perú combine with it to complete the project. The “recycling” of La Florida del Inca in his other works is part of another study by this author (“La Florida del Inca in Comentarios reales de los Incas and Historia general del Perú,” forthcoming) and not delailed in this paper.
[8][S]us libros no sólo redimen el pasado sino que además ocupan el futuro con inusitada certidumbre” (Historia 199).
[9]In Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller, Nelson points out that even the most scrupulous historians must select, organize, and conjecture.
[10]For an account of the various problems involved in the publishing of Historia general del Perú, see Varner, El Inca, 361-78, and RC xxvi.
[11]“[N]os recuerdan que todavía no ha terminado la conquista, como tampoco ha terminado la resistencia a la conquista” and “conviene hacer notar que estos moldes o paradigmas o visiones de la realidad, del mundo y del hombre, que están en juego, si bien tienen raíces pre-colombinas, se proyectan hasta nuestros días. Y se puede señalar una marcha continua y seguida desde entonces y a través de toda la época colonial y moderna hasta hoy.”
[12]Spadaccini and Jara approach this idea in the introduction to 1492-1992: Re/discovering Colonial Writing, “Allegorizing the New World,” when they say, “Garcilaso’s discourse assumes the characteristics of an antilanguage that opposed the official history which renounced Inca culture as barbaric and tyrannical while reserving for Spain the niceties of civilization, virtue, and victory” (29-30). They go on to note the suspicion the Comentarios Reales caused later in eighteenth century Spain which was trying to still the rustling winds of independence.