Subjectivity
and Empire: Representations of Historiography in
Ricardo
Palma’s Tradiciones Peruanas
Michigan State University
As Edmundo O’Gorman argues in his book The
Invention of America, Spanish Colonial texts weigh heavily on the
establishment of American “reality.” (1) Spanish
American writers
confront that
reality in an attempt to make sense of it. In the nineteenth century,
the
narration of an imperial past both established and problematized
national
foundations. If on the one hand the imperial past was rejected by
liberal
intellectuals of the period as a reaction to colonial oppression, on
the other
hand, the past represented an important source of reflection and
knowledge in
the countries that had recently liberated themselves from Spanish
power.
Generally, Latin American fiction avoided Empire as a topic after the
wars of
Independence. Only in the second half of the century did writing about
empire
become a decolonizing gesture. As Benedict Anderson reminds us, “the
inner
compatibility of empire and nation,” also interconnects the discourse
of Empire
with nation building projects. Through the appropriation of colonial
discursive
spaces, the “emancipated subject” constructs itself and in the end the
“imagined community” can reflect on its location in history. Spanish
American
authors often revisited colonial times with a historical gaze that was
revisionist and was employed as a distancing devise for the examination
of the
present. The textual recreation and rewriting of empire in Ricardo
Palma’s work
produces a national subject with a concrete place in history. Palma’s
is a
gesture of mimicry as defined by Homi K. Bhabha, as it represents: “the
sign of
a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and
discipline,
which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power” (Location of
Culture
86).
Many critics have devoted numerous pages
to discuss
the formation of the genre known as the “Tradición,” but they fail to
mention
Mexican writer Guillermo Prieto as a “grandfather” of the genre, even
though he
has a text entitled “Tradiciones: El Arrollo del Muerto. La Cruz del
Sombrero”
published in El Museo Mexicano in 1843 (almost twenty years
before Palma
began to publish his Tradiciones in newspapers). As a familiar
essay
writer or costumbrista, Prieto addresses the formation of
Mexican
customs or traditions. In the introduction to these two stories, the
narrator
proposes to “contar un cuento” and continues:
Así los pueblos, por antiguos
que sean, conservan algunos de ellos sus
tradiciones como el hombre sus recuerdos infantiles. […]
—Un cuento, un cuento.
—Es una vergüenza: ¿Se
divierten ustedes con relaciones de vestiglos y de brujas?…
—Sí, sí, nos divertimos,
queremos un cuento. […]
—Allá va, no será un
cuento, porque efectivamente no tengo ninguno en la memoria; pero
¿ustedes
quieren una tradición?
—Venga.
—Será de mi tierra.
—¡Silencio! Oigan la
tradición del zacatecano.
—No, la tradición no es
de Zacatecas es de Jerez: sabrán ustedes por qué el Arroyo del Muerto
se llama
así.
—Ya escuchamos. (212)
The generic difference from the short
story is
developed in a narrative voice that corresponds with the tone of
Palma’s later Tradiciones.
The ironic twist of the narrative voice both asserts and questions the
verisimilitude of the story. Also, there is a comical presentation of
the
origin of an expression or name. Finally, the narration finds a causal
connection between past and present (normally absent in the “cuadro de
costumbres”). What appears absent, when compare with Palma’s texts, are
the
historical references and metahistoriographical commentary.
This essay’s intention is not to
diminish Ricardo
Palma’s accomplishments as the writer who “invented” the tradición
as a
new genre, but to rethink the role of this particular genre and
contrast it
with other important genres that forged Latin American national
identities such
as the novel, the essay, and historiographical writing. (2)
Tradiciones
Peruanas is an encyclopedic project that rewrites the past and
present,
while projecting a future for Palma’s contemporary Peru. His
achievement is not
merely to write about the traditions of the past and how they persisted
or were
eliminated in the present, but something beyond Prieto’s tradición:
Palma deconstructs the rhetoric of Colonial historiography and creates
a modern
reader who would ironically look to all the epochs in Peruvian culture.
After Independence, the colonial past
was
immediately rejected by writers and intellectuals. Writers were instead
interested in the present or in the recent past, in order to exalt the
newly
formed Republics. However, Andrés Bello proposed the study of Latin
American
history as a model for “emancipation” from Peninsular or European ways
of
thinking. Palma went into exile in Chile from 1860 to 1863; it is at
this point
that he became deeply interested in Peruvian Colonial history. He
published Anales
de la Inquisición de Lima and some Tradición-like legends
soon after
his return to Peru. All of this historical material seems to have been
recycled
in hundreds of tradiciones. His trip to Montevideo and his
contact with
the school of American historiography established by Andrés Bello seems
to be
crucial for the transformation of the Tradición as a genre. If
for
Prieto the tradición was an ahistorical observation on Mexican culture,
for
Palma it was a historical commentary with instruction on reading
Colonial history
as one of its main ingredients. Bello had pointed out the need to
rewrite Latin
American history and to discuss a method or philosophy about America’s
past:
Los historiadores formados por el siglo XVIII se dejaron preocupar
demasiado por la filosofía de su tiempo… […] Nuestro siglo no lo
quiere; exige
que se le diga todo; que se le reproduzca y se le explique la
existencia de las
naciones en sus diversas épocas, y que se dé a cada siglo pasado su
verdadero
lugar, su color y su significación. […] No he consultado más que los
documentos
y los textos originales, sea para individualizar las varias
circunstancias de
la narrativa, sea para caracterizar las personas y las poblaciones que
figuran
en ella. […] las tradiciones nacionales de las poblaciones menos
conocidas y
las antiguas poesías populares, me han suministrado muchas indicaciones
acerca
del modo de existencia, los sentimientos e ideas de los hombres en los
tiempos
y lugares a que transporto al lector. (231)
On the one hand, Bello indicates
the importance of method: the Romantic
objective “to individualize” (“individualizar las varias circunstancias
de la
narrativa”) and the creation of a national allegorical narrative (“para caracterizar las personas y las
poblaciones
que figuran en ella”). On
the other hand, national traditions or customs and popular
literature are represented at the heart of national identity. In this
sense,
Bello combines historiography and “fictions of the nation” as a basis
for the
decolonization of the emerging Republics. Palma’s Tradiciones
peruanas
offer a dialectical negation of colonial historiography, with their
ironic
ambivalence between past and present, colony and republic, romance and
tragedy.
(3)
Colonial historiography
represented the “truth” of the Spanish Empire, but it was a constructed
truth
that functioned in favor of the structures of power and institutions
that
relied on specific interpretations of reality. The Tradición is
not
simply an antiquarian move of conservation, as many have accused Palma
of
making, but rather a reframing of history and a way of creating an
alternative
history of Empire. Palma’s meta-historiographical observations
problematize the
relation between literature and history, Empire and Republic. José Carlos Mariátegui notes
in his Siete ensayos de la interpretación
de la realidad peruana: “Las Tradiciones de Palma tienen,
política y
socialmente una filiación democrática. Palma interpreta al medio pelo.
Se
burla, roe risueñamente el prestigio del virreinato y el de la
aristocracia. Traduce el malcontento
zumbón del demos criollo” (221). Palma’s appropriation of the
past is
quite different from that of other nineteenth-century conservative
Peruvian
intellectuals, such as his Peruvian contemporaries Felipe Pardo and
José
Antonio de Lavalle, who looked back with nostalgia to the time of the
Spanish
Empire. Antonio Cornejo Polar has argued that Peruvian Romanticism
tried to
nationalize Colonial times [“nacionalizar la colonia”] (56). Thus, the
discourse of history was an intellectual space of contention.
In his Tradiciones,
Palma problematizes the veracity and verisimilitude of Colonial
historiography.
In “El alacrán de Fray Gómez”, the narrator tells the story of the
miracles
performed by the famous monk. Fray Gómez performs a questionable
miracle by
placing his habit cord on the head of a rider who has fallen from his
horse and
the rider gets up, unharmed. Witnesses watching this cry: “Milagro,
Milagro”
and the narrator comments:
Y en su
entusiasmo intentaron llevar el triunfo al lego. Éste para substraerse
a la
popular ovación, echó a correr camino del convento y se encerró en su
celda.
La crónica franciscana cuenta esto
último de manera distinta. Dice que fray
Gómez, para escapar de sus aplaudidores, se elevó en los aires y voló
desde el
puente hasta la torre de su convento. Yo ni lo niego ni lo afirmo.
Puede que sí
y puede que no. Tratándose de maravillas, no gasto tinta en defenderlas
ni en
refutarlas. (210).
The two alternative versions
of the event present the reader with a dilemma. First, the narrator
offers the
most plausible explanation, which he then juxtaposes with the
Franciscan
chronicle which mystifies the sanctity of the miracle.
The narrator’s ultimate refutation of this
is more than suggested in his ironic “Puede que sí y puede que no.” The
text
directly attacks the 1882 restoration of a Colonial painting that
represents
two of the Franciscan monk’s miracles. The fictional discourse rejects
the
justification of the criollo oligarchy through the use of
chronicles
that mystify Imperial institutions such as the church, the Viceroy
governments,
and the Audiencias.
During the second half of
the twentieth century, las Tradiciones have always been
glimpsed at as a
minor genre in the Nineteenth Century. (4) However,
this vision does
not explain
its popularity well into the twentieth century and the amount of
“school of
imitators and followers” in many other countries who wrote tradiciones
as a serious and patriotic literary endeavor. (5)
Doris Sommer, for
example,
has studied the Latin American national romance as the main textual
metaphor
for the new republics. Also, one could argue it is through the tradición
that literary Americanism was starting to turn into the Panamericanism
proclaimed by modernista writers such as José Martí and Rubén
Darío. As
Palma proclaims:
En nuestras convicciones sobre
americanismo en literatura, entra la de que
precisamente es la Tradición el género que mejor lo representa. América
es el
teatro de los sucesos; costumbres y tipos americanos son los exhibidos;
y el
que escriba Tradiciones, no sólo está obligado a darles colorido local,
sino
que hasta el lenguaje debe sacrificar, siempre que oportuno se
considere, la
pureza clásica del castellano idioma, para pone en boca de los
personajes
frases de riguroso provincialismo, y que ya perderá tiempo y trabajo el
que se
eche a buscarlas en los diccionarios. (1475)
Palma and
his followers highlight the local color and linguistic particularities
of their
own countries, American history and “types.” Many critics find
connection with
the “cuadro de costumbre”, but the author himself once defined the tradición
as the “novela en miniatura, novela homeopática” (1475). Also, Palma at
times
announces his imitation of the crónica or the leyenda.
The Tradiciones peruanas
commentary on Colonial historiography has not been sufficiently
explored
critically. Many critics still believe that historiography was not
clearly
distinguished from fiction during the nineteenth century. As Doris
Sommer has
declared: “For the nineteenth-century writer/statesman there could be
no clear
epistemological distinction between science and art, narrative and
fact, and
consequently between ideal history and real events. Whereas today’s
theorists
of history in the industrial centers find themselves correcting the
hubris of
historians who imagine themselves to be scientists, the literary
practice of
Latin American historical discourse had long since taken advantage of
what
Lyotard would call the ‘indefiniteness of science,’ or more to the
point, what
Paul Veyne calls the ‘undecidability’ of history” (76). However,
reading Palma
we perceive that he clearly discerns between history and fiction, even
if at
times he sought the blending of both for specific aesthetic and
epistemological
objectives. American history for Palma is the rough stone that the
Latin
American writer needs to carve. He does believe in history, though. In his introduction to Clorinda Matto de
Turner’s Tradiciones cuzqueñas, Palma comments on the genre in
a
significantly self-reflexive way:
En el fondo, la
Tradición no es más que una de las formas que puede revestir la
Historia, pero
sin los escollos de ésta. Cumple a la Historia narrar los sucesos
secamente,
sin recurrir a las galas de la fantasía, y apreciarlos, desde el punto
de vista
filosófico social, con la imparcialidad de juicio y elevación de
propósitos que
tanto realza a los historiadores modernos Macaulay, Thierry y Modesto
de
Lafuente. La Historia que desfigura, que omite o que aprecia sólo los
hechos
que convienen o como convienen; la Historia que se ajusta al espíritu
de
escuela o de bandería, no merece el nombre de tal. Menos estrechos y
peligrosos
son los límites de la Tradición. A ella, sobre una pequeña base de
verdad, le
es lícito edificar un castillo. El tradicionista tiene que ser poeta y
soñador.
El historiador es el hombre del raciocinio y de las prosaicas
realidades. La
Tradición es la fina tela que dio vida a las bellísimas mentiras de la
novela
histórica, cultivada por Walter Scott en Inglaterra, por Alejandro
Dumas en
Francia y por Fernández González en España” (1474-75)
For Palma, The tradición offers
the aesthetic
“new dress” for history (‘puede revestir’). It is implied in the
impartiality
that history needs to give and the socio-philosophical point of view
that he
assigns to modern historians. It is in tradiciones
that the official crónicas
are questioned to develop this modern “scientific” sense of history.
One could
say that by parodying imperial historiography, specifically the ones
that
clearly change the narrative for “institutional self-legitimation”, he
undoes
colonial myths, because his texts show the holes and the
inconsistencies of
narratives, questioning their validity and creating stories that
satirize the
falsification of historical discourse, and more specifically, official
Chronicles. In a sense, it is a redefinition of history and a newly
respect for
discerning what is “fábula” and what “history.” Also, in the quote, he
links
the tradición with the historical novel. For
instance, the narrator of “La ‘nariz de camello’” makes ironic remarks
about
the old crónica: “Aquello de que la primera azúcar peruana se
produjo en
huanuco no pasa de una novela del historiador Garcilaso, como lo
comprueban
Feijoo de Sosa y Mendiburu.” (112). His refutation of the Inca Garcilaso
proves his
critical historiographical savvy that he also wants the “lector” or
reader to
acquire. (6)
Some critics who have
focused on Palma’s representation of the past get to the conclusion
that the
use of history in the Tradiciones peruanas is at best sui
generis.
Luis Loayza
emphasizes this notion: “La relación entre
anécdota y los datos históricos suele ser tenue y a veces es
prácticamente
inexistente” (523). This suggests that his interest in history is
tenuous and that the
connection between history and the narrative is not clear. However,
Palma
provides the reader with plenty of metahistoriographical commentary, to
subtly
guide the reading. For example, In “Quizá quiero, quizá no
quiero,”
the narrator sarcástically points out: “La boca se me hace agua al
hablar de la
Beatriz de mi cuento; porque si no miente Garcilaso (no el poeta, sino
el
cronista del Perú, que a veces es más embustero que el telégrafo), fue
la tal
una real moza” (37). This
Inca woman defies the edict of the viceroy, which forces all
widowed women of power to remarry important noblemen from Spain in
order to
prevent more rebellions like the Inca Manco’s. She initially resists,
but in
the end she remarries. The main irony in the story is that after all
her resistance,
during the wedding ceremony she declares “quizá quiero, quizá no
quiero.” She
doesn’t mind remarrying if she isn’t forced to share the same bed with
her new
husband. The
narrator notes: “debió doña Beatriz humanizarse con
su marido, porque…, porque…, no sé como
decirlo, ¡qué demonche! Sancha, Sancha,
si no bebes vino, ¿de qué es esa mancha? Ella dejó prole…; conque… chocolate que
no tiñe…”
(40). The story represents the stark reality of Empire and implies the
complicity of the Inca elites with the Colonial elites.
Palma’s tradición
serves as a device for rewriting historical material while cleverly
subverting
the dominant position of history by undermining the very basis of the
telling
of that story. It disrupts the coherence of the past (truth and
meaning). (7) For example, en “Un virrey y
un
arzobispo”, the narrator affirms: “De
seguro que vendrían a muchos de mis lectores pujamientos de confirmarse
por el
más valiente zurcidor de mentiras que ha nacido de madre, si no echase
mano de
este y del siguiente capítulo para dar a mi relación un carácter
histórico,
apoyándome en el testimonio de algunos cronistas de Indias” (218).
At a superficial
level, “el
parrafillo histórico” provides textual context and verisimilitude to
the
fiction. But this “mimicry” of the discourse of history becomes ironic
and
undercuts the illusion of “truth” in the chronicle.
To illustrate by means of comparison:
Esteban Echeverría introduces El
matadero with the ironic words: “A pesar de que la mía es historia,
no la
empezaré por el arca de Noé y la genealogía de sus ascendientes como
acostumbraban hacerlos los antiguos historiadores españoles de América,
que
deben ser nuestros prototipos” (282). In both texts, El matadero and
“Un virrey y
un arzobispo”, the metahistoriographical strategies call the reader’s
attention
to the “construction” of truth and discursive coherence only to subvert
it.
However, while Echeverría denies the validity of the historiography of
Empire,
Palma imitates its gestures, problematizing it. The humorous and
distanced
perspective of Palma’s narrator creates a space for readers to explore
their
own interpretations of a contested past. In this sense, the Tradición
is
a very anti-traditional genre whose mechanisms create alternative
historical
narratives. As Bhabha has pointed out:
“Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and
erase its
totalizing boundaries—both actual and conceptual—disturb those
ideological
manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist
identities” (“DissemiNation” 300).
Palma’s tradiciones
historicize the injustices and allegedly “fixed identities” of
different levels
of society—criollo, Black, mestizo and Indian. Empire
shapes
identities in the text, yet the narrator and the implied reader
carnivalize the
hegemonic power of the Church and Colonial administration with a
conspiring
laugh. We
see this clearly, for instance in texts that announce
historical parodies such as “Don Dimas de la Tijereta: cuento de viejas
que
trata de cómo un escribano le ganó un pleito al diablo” and “Tres
cuestiones
históricas sobre Pizarro: ¿Supo o no escribir? ¿Fue o no fue Marqués de
los
Atavillos? ¿Cuál fue y dónde está su gonfalón de guerra?” These kinds of Tradición
serve as a metaphor for the present as well. They criticize the
inequality and
injustice condoned by nineteenth-century Peruvian elites who based
their
privilege on constructed genealogies formed during empire. (8)
Palma’s texts create a
national subject who discerns the “tradition” from past to present, and
choose
to revoke and satirize injustice and power. Though humor,
Palma establishes a
fictional and complicit connection between reader (“mi lector”) and the
narrating voice of the Tradicionist who distances himself from
the past
and present with historical savvy and “popular” insight. In this frank
and
informal conversation, the text locates a modern collective subject,
who
rejects the Colonial past, but totally does not embrace modernity
either. (9)
The irreverent and ironic conversation negotiates between
historiography,
modern understanding, and the mediation of the “popular voice.”(10) Estuardo Núñez has pointed out
how the tradición popularized
history: “Por la vía de la tradición la historia alcanzó más difusión y
atractivo y pudo así llegar a las grandes masas antes renuentes a
seguir el
curso de los textos históricos especulativos y yertos” (xvii). In a cyclical form, the Tradición
claimed to
authorize “popular stories”, and but yet promoted the reading and the
studying
of national historiography. Also, through the use of this popular
stories o
“fábulas,” he could break the clear discursive hierarchies established
during
colonial times. By using collective voice of the “people”, chronicles
or crónicas
could be satirized and historical events questioned. One could argue
that also
the Tradiciones give people access to the “noble” historical
past for
its consumption by the new urban bourgeoisie while they make available
the
magical and fantastic superstitions of the people for “reform.”
In conclusion, though we might
consider Guillermo Prieto to be one of the first “recorders” of the
tradición, Ricardo Palma transformed the genre, embedding it heavily
with well-researched history, and going even further. The Tradiciones
Peruanas destabilize the fixed collective identities which were
solidified by imperial institutions and subsequently disseminated
through historiographical discourse. These fictions promoted a
rereading of the Colonial past and its pillars of aristocracy for the
consumption of a collective bourgeois criollo society. In an 1875
letter to the Argentinean Juan María Gutiérrez, Palma complained of the
anti-literary atmosphere in Peru, in contrast to the warm welcome his
Tradiciones received in Argentina. At the end of his days, Palma knew
that he had influenced many Latin American writers and he had had a
considerable effect on the study of Peruvian History. Ricardo Palma
employed the “popular” voice of the Traditionist to revisit colonial
myths and these new narratives created a sense of a modern Peruvian
collective self that both started to consume and question the discourse
of History.
Notes
(1). For more
about the
notion of America as a conquerable space see O’Gorman’s The
Invention of
America, p. 137.
(2).
Estuardo Núñez, editor of the Biblioteca de Ayacucho volume entitled Tradiciones
Hispanoamericanas mentions Palma as “el indiscutido creador del
género o
especie ‘tradición’” (XXII).
(3).
Doris Sommer also perceives Bello’s words as a call to fictionalize
history,
but she believes that history is transformed in romance or ideal
history: “The
glee I surmise in Bello’s exhortation to supplement history surely owes
to the
opportunity he perceives for projecting an ideal history through that
most
basic and satisfying genre of romance. What better way to argue the
polemic for
civilization than to make desire the relentless motivation for a
literary/political project?” (84). I would argue that history is
fictionalized
mostly in the Tradición and very rarely in the novel. See also Raul Ianes.
(4).
See José Miguel Oviedo, ed. “Prólogo.” Ricardo Palma. Cien
Tradiciones
Peruanas. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977. There Oviedo
observes: “hay
que agregar ahora que el
arte de Palma es, sin duda un arte menor. Aunque la variedad de asuntos
y enfoques es, como queda señalado, muy grande, Palma se repite y
autoimita
constantemente. El suyo es un arte de mistificación, incluyendo la
mistificación de la fórmula afortunada de la tradición” (XXXVIII). Later,
the critic confesses that Palma’s is not “great literature.”
(5).
See
“Prólogo” by Estuardo Núñez.
(6).
Palma’s
connection between “fábula” and “crónica” probably comes directly from
reading
Inca Garcilaso de La Vega’s Comentarios Reales:
y no escribiré novedades que nos
se hayan oído, sino las mismas cosas que los historiadores españoles
han
escrito de aquella tierra y de los Reyes de ella y alegaré las mismas
palabras
de ellos donde conviniere, para que se vea que no finjo ficciones en
favor de
mis parientes, sino que digo lo mismo que los españoles dijeron. Sólo
serviré
de comento para declarar y ampliar muchas cosas que ellos asomaron a
decir y
las dejaron imperfectas por haberles faltado relación entera. Otras
muchas se
añadirán que faltan de sus historias y pasaron en hecho de verdad, y
algunas se
quitarán que sobran, por falsa relación que tuvieron, por no saberla
pedir el
español con distinción de tiempos y edades y división de provincias y
naciones,
o por no entender al indio que se la daba o por no entenderse el uno al
otro,
por la dificultad del lenguaje. (I
46)
Here,
Garcilaso playfully alludes to the idea of refutation, truth and fact,
all
elements present in the best Tradiciones.
(7).
Paul Ricoeur explains how humans aspire to coherence of the past and
its
temporality. See Time and Narrative.
(8).
List of families during colonial times and their connection to the
present.
(9).
Julio Ortega
affirms “hecha en el interior de la cultura pluralizada, popular,
criolla; […]
hay en la tradición operatividades (“tecnologías del sujeto”) de la
nacionalidad
[…]” (430). I would locate this
“technology of the subject” in the “constructed” popular perspective that parodies the discourse of history.
(10). The importance of this concept of
“mediation” has been
theorized by Jesús Martín-Barbero in De los medios a las mediaciones:
Comunicación, Cultura y hegemonía (1987): “De ahí que la importancia
histórica de la posición romántica en este debate […] resida en la
afirmación de lo popular como espacio de creatividad, de actividad y
producción. (18, emphasis in the original). In the case of Palma, he
seems quite conscious of the “constructiveness” of tradition.
Works
Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time,
Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”.
---. The
Location of Culture. London,
Routledge, 1994.
Bello, Andrés. “Modo de escribir la
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