The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative

449 Pages·2008·15.51 MB·English

by  Rolena Adorno

THE POLEMICS OF POSSESSION
IN SPANISH AMERICAN NARRATIVE
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rolena adorno
The Polemics of Possession
in Spanish American Narrative
yale university press new haven & london
Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for
inclusion in the eBook.
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton
McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright ∫ 2007 by Rolena Adorno.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Set in Scala Roman and Scala Sans by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adorno, Rolena.
The polemics of possession in Spanish American narrative / Rolena Adorno.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-300-12020-2 (alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-300-12020-6 (alk. paper)
1. Spanish American fiction—To 1800—History and criticism. 2. Latin America—
Civilization—16th century. 3. Latin America—Civilization—17th century. 4. Spain—In
literature. 5. Imperialism in literature. 6. Colonies in literature. I. Title.
pq7082.n7a256 2007
863%.30998—dc22
2007015551
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
1 Overview: The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American
Narrative 1
2 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and the Polemics of
Possession 21
3 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Polemicist and Author 61
4 Councilors Warring at the Royal Court 99
5 Historians of War and Princely Warriors 125
6 The Encomendero and His Literary Interlocutors 148
7 The Conquistador-Chronicler and His Literary Authority 172
8 The Amerindian, Studied, Interpreted, and Imagined 191
9 The Narrative Invention of Gonzalo the Warrior 220
10 The Narrative Reinvention of the Conqueror-Captive 246
vi contents
11 From Guancane to Macondo: Literary Places and Their
Predecessors 279
12 Seeing Ghosts: The Longevity of ‘‘Serpents in Sandals’’ 308
Notes 325
Bibliography 383
Index 415
preface
The Polemics of Possession is the culmination of three decades of research
and reflection about colonial texts and their legacies. The etymological
resonances of polemics and possession are intentional, if only metaphorical.
Polemical as warlike harks back to the ancient Greeks, even though the
term as we know it has its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century origins in
the field of theological disputation and its Enlightenment-era plenitude in
many other types of disputation and controversy. My choice of the term
derives from this later, broader usage, even though its referential echoes
of war and religion are central to my inquiry. Possession, too, has many
resonances. I use it first and foremost here in its meaning as a concept of
law, as it relates to physical control and implies ownership, actual or
asserted, or occupancy and actual control without ownership, and the
ownership or control, for example, of war captives as slaves. ‘‘Poseer’’ and
‘‘posesión’’ were used in Castilian at the time in this legal sense, as evi-
denced by Bartolomé de las Casas’s use of the term in the expression ‘‘to
have and to possess,’’ referring nonredundantly to Amerindian societies’
actual and legal (de facto and de jure) possession over their ‘‘princedoms,
kingdoms, states, high o≈ces, territorial jurisdictions, and domains.’’ I
also use possession in its broader sense, as defined by Sebastián de Covar-
rubias’s Castilian dictionary of 1611 and exemplified in the Oxford English
Dictionary as ‘‘holding or having something (material or immaterial) as
viii preface
one’s own or in one’s control.’’ Thus I expand its use beyond concepts of
sovereignty and the ownership of lands to include those of the practice of
governance and self-governance, the enjoyment of the full exercise of
human intellect and reason, and the actual or perceived holding of author-
ity, be it political, historical, or literary.
In the territorial sense, possession cannot do without the preparation
of, or recourse to, a map or chart. The reader will find many maps in this
volume, one of the earliest being a fragment of a world map, dated 1527
and attributed to Hernando Colón, and the latest, the maps that Patrick
Pautz and I created in 1999 for our study of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s
La Florida account and his other continent-spanning endeavors. But there
is one map that until recently had been missing, and it is the earliest of all
those that are relevant. To my great dismay, when I was preparing to show
this unusual map to my graduate seminar at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library in the fall of 2006, I learned that this map, the
first published European representation of a New World city, had disap-
peared. The Beinecke publicly announced that it had gone missing from
its collections in June 2005. The map comes from Praeclara de Nova Maris
oceani Hyspania narratio (1524), the Latin edition of Hernán Cortés’s sec-
ond and third letters, the Spanish-language original of the second having
been signed by him on October 30, 1520, and published in Seville in 1522
(fig. 1). The famous second letter is the most spectacular of Cortés’s five
letters to his emperor, Charles V, because it describes events that include
the decision to conquer Mexico, the Spanish march to the Mexica (Aztec)
capital of México-Tenochtitlán, Cortés’s brilliant description of the city, his
reception by the Mexica lord Moctezuma, the imprisonment and death of
Moctezuma, and the Spaniards’ retreat on the fateful night of June 30,
1520 (‘‘la Noche Triste’’).
The consummate mastery of Cortés’s narration is matched by the
powerful graphic rendering of the city. It is accompanied by a map of the
Gulf of Mexico that had been the object of my close attention in my
coauthored 1999 study of Cabeza de Vaca, but for my 2006 graduate
seminar I wanted my students to examine the map, part cosmological,
part historical, of México-Tenochtitlán. Here the island city floats in its
own lagoon, and, with its neatly arranged buildings and towers, evokes
Venice more than the Indies. All similarity ends there, however, for at the
center of the map a headless idol in human form is depicted with racks of
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