racial scorn and critical contempr

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Racial Scorn and Critical Contempt

Nueva cornica y buen gobierno by Guaman Poma de AyalaReview by: Rolena AdornoDiacritics, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter, 1974), pp. 2-7Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465117 .

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Guaman Poma de Ayala. Nueva cor6nicay buen gobierno. 1936. Reprint. Paris:L'Institut d'Ethnographie, 1968.

The colonies of the most brilliant coun-tries have left a legacy of centuries ofsilence: colonialism seems to kill fertilityand brutalize the power of creation. Oneonly has to look toward the Spanish Em-pire in America where I can assure youthat three centuries of domination pro-duced no more than three writers of meritin all of America.Pablo Neruda, in an address tothe Pen Club of New York, 10April 1972Neruda's remarks about Spanish Americancolonial literature, based on the rejection of colo-nialism as a political phenomenon, signal one of themajor shortcomings of contemporary criticism ofcolonial writings. Like many other commentators, hehas made political and sociological considerationsthe focus of a literary judgment which is foundedon reaction rather than analysis. Octavio Paz pointsto this practice as one of the general problems ofSpanish American criticism: "Art forms part of thepresent; and it is the criteria of the present-com-merce and politics, that is, buying and selling andpropaganda-which serve to judge art. A work isgood if it sells or if its 'message' supports my party"(Puertas al campo. Mexico City: Universidad Na-cional Aut6noma, 1966; p. 122). Where works fromthe colonial period are concerned, it is necessary toadd that it is the criteria of the past, as well as of thepresent, which are called into play. The writings ofthe early colonial period often serve, in the criticalforum, as a pretext for debating the broad historicalissues that faced the colony; analytic discussion ofthe given text is neglected. Besides the issue of colo-nialism, the questions of race and ethnic origin haveprovoked the commentary on the earliest colonialauthors and have obscured, if not prevented, theconsideration of the critical problems posed by theirwritings. The authorship of works from the earlySpanish colonial period runs the gamut from Euro-peans who never set foot in America, like HernainP6rez de Oliva, and those like Las Casas and Do-

mingo de Santo Tomas, who spent years in the col-onies devoted to the Indians' cause, to mestizo writ-ers like El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Amer-ica after the Conquest, and full-blooded Indiansknown as indios ladinos for their competency in bothindigenous and European languages. It is the last ofthese groups which arouses the passions of the crit-ics; racial bias in criticism has been particularly re-sponsible for exploiting this latter category of colo-nial texts to extract the "message that supports theparty."Rolena Adorno is presentlyworking on a critical editionof the Nueva cor6nica.

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The extent to which contemporary debate oncolonial issues has taken precedence over textualanalysis in recent criticism is illustrated by the dis-cussions of a seventeenth-century work, the Nuevacor6nica y buen gobierno, written by the PeruvianFelipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. That the Nuevacor6nica is almost unread outside Latin America, andall but unknown in foreign academic quarters, can bedirectly attributed to the efforts of literary critics. Thevarious methods by which its own editors and com-mentators have suppressed the book reveal thepseudo-issues that have been substituted for criticismand that have been detrimental to the disseminationand the general reputation of the colonial literatureof Spanish America.The manuscript of the Nueva cor6nica y buengobierno, completed around 1615, was discovered in1908 at the Royal Library of Copenhagen. The volu-minous text of 1200 pages includes some 450 full-page drawings, by the author. Unlike the chroniclesof Peru which utilize a limited number of illustra-tions complementary to the written text, the Nuevacordnica's sketches can be "read" in series as inde-pendent narrations. The author's cryptic notation onthe title page, which suggests that the book was in-tended for two separate audiences, literate and illit-erate, corroborates the need to consider the visualnarrations as an integral part of the text. While thenarration is principally in Castilian, there are pas-sages in Quechua, Aymara, and several indigenousdialects which are difficult to translate because oftheir archaic forms. The title of the work indicatesthe dual nature of the text as a history of ancientPeru, the Nueva cor6nica, (Paris: L'Institut d'Eth-nologie, 1936; reprinted in 1968; pp. 1-435), anda utopian treatise on the Peruvian kingdom of thefuture, the Buen gobierno (pp. 436-1178).With the exception of the Paris edition, whichis a facsimile reproduction of the entire manuscript,and a now out-of-print transcription of the originaltext, complete with the illustrations and Spanishtranslations of the Andean languages (Arturo Pos-nansky, ed. La Paz: Instituto "Tihuanacu" de An-tropologia, Etnologia y Prehistoria, 1944), the morepopular trend of editorship has been to publish onlysections of the work and to transform the text inways which document the patterns of reaction thathave substituted for bona fide editorial criticism.Thirty-five years ago, Julio C. Tello published Lasprimeras edades del Pert! por Guaman PominaLima:Museo de Antropologia, 1939) which he appropri-ately called an "interpretative essay" of GuamanPoma's version of pre-Incaic Andean history. In hispreface to the edition, Tello describes Guaman Pomaas an "Indian by blood and in spirit" (p. 5). To sup-port the opinion that the author's ethnic origin was,or should have been, the controlling factor of hisliterary creation, Tello performs major surgery onthe text, removing all those elements that reveal theinfluence of the conquistadores, in order to discoverthe "true thought of Guaman Poma" (p. 6). Theobvious fallacy of this "interpretation" is its assump-tion that Guaman Poma's prose obscures and sub-verts what he intended to write. What the moderneditor misses in his search for the hidden and "au-thentic" second level of discourse, to which he con-

siders himself privy, is that the "Biblical sentences"are not mere gloss but rather one of the main fibersof Guaman Poma's text. Over and above the sheerimpossibility of removing precisely those passagesthat reflect the "ideas of the conquistadores," the at-tempt to do so represents not the editorial desire toreproduce the text but to recreate it in a preferredimage.This unfortunate tendency of textual alterationhas been continued even in the most recent edition ofthe work. Luis Bustios Gilvez' three-volume versionof the Nueva cor6nica y buen gobierno is also de-signed to "interpret the true meaning of GuamanPoma's thought [ ...] thus maintaining, in all its as-pects, that which Guaman Poma wanted to say"(Lima: Editorial Cultura, 1956-66; I, 3-4). The edi-tor's preamble becomes an ironic postscript to thereader who has compared Bustios' interpretation withthe original text, because by opting for what theauthor "wanted to say" instead of what he actuallywrote, the editor manages to distort significantly oneof the work's most important viewpoints: the statusof Manco Capac, traditionally considered the firstInca of the historical dynasty. Guaman Poma's atti-tude toward the Incas, from whom he does not claimdescendence, is unusually complex, and an under-standing of his ambivalent point of view is essentialto the faithful rendering of the text.While the modern editor portrays the first Incaas an illegitimate usurper and calls all the Incas con-querors, usurpers, or invaders (Bustios Gilvez, I, 59,61), the original text describes the rule of MancoCapac as legitimate and rightful and calls all twelveemperors "capac apo legitimate inca by the law ofperu" (pp. 84, 117). Although Guaman Poma con-sistently scorns his contemporaries who call them-selves Incas as low-class Indians and declares that hehimself is descended from the original pre-IncaicAndean dynasty, his modern editor has distorted thedegree of anti-Inca sentiment in a text which, des-tined in part for a European audience, conveys anoverall sense of Peruvian solidarity and portrays theInca empire as the chief glory of the past and themodel for the society of the future. The desire torecreate Guaman Poma solely within the context ofa local ethnic background results in a narrowly chau-vinistic version of the text which subverts the com-prehensive outlook of Andean history presented inthe original.The tendency to invent the author and hiswork along lines of racial bias is in evidence in allthe categories of critical commentary on the Nuevacordnica y buen gobierno, from the brief remarks ofthe cultural histories of Latin America to the detaileddiscussion of the full-length monograph. The themeof the "essence of the indigenous soul," manifestingitself as the two sides of racism, is one of the mostpopular hobgoblins of Spanish American criticismdevoted to writers like Guaman Poma. The standardworks of Peruvian literary history have consistentlydismissed the Nueva cor6nica as the inarticulateproduct of an author who fits the racial stereotypeof the Indian as an inferior being. One commentatorcalls the book an "extensive and awkward cronic6n,"written by an author who "exhibits all the character-istics of the aborigine"; Guaman Poma's "inside-out

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Castilian and lack of syntax" are said to reveal anincipient culture and an infantile mind (Rub6nVargas Ugarte. Historia del Perd. Fuentes. 2nd. ed.Lima: Editorial Gil, 1945; p. 236). Echoing thesesentiments, Luis Alberto Sainchez refers to GuamanPoma's "almost childlike narration," as "a formlessjargon, marred by indigenism and developed in abarbarous syntax" (La literatura peruana. Asunci6n:Editorial Guarania, 1949; II, 123, 126). As in therecent editions of the work, the intellectual inepti-tude of the indigenous author is again put forwardin a tautology of prejudiced thinking.The pervasiveness of the ethnic and racial con-sideration is demonstrated by the most lengthystudies made of the book. The title of one of the onlymonographs devoted to Guaman Poma's work im-mediately places before the reader the issue of theauthor's race and forecasts its looming importancein the pages that follow. El cronista indio FelipeHuamnanPoma de Ayala (Lima: Editorial Lumen,1948), by RauilPorras Barrenechea, is a study basednot on the evidence of the text, but rather on thepremise that indigenism represents chaos and a lackof culture; Porras concludes that the author of theNueva cordnica is an exemplar of native backward-ness. The context of this absurdly extreme attitude isto be found in other of Porras' writings in whichindigenism is called a backward cult of the past andmestizaje is identified with the critic's view of thehighest ideals of Peruvian nationalism (El sentidotradicional en la literatura peruana. Lima: InstitutoRaPilPorras Barrenechea, 1969; pp. 19-20).

X, A second major obstacle to colonial criticismhas broader implications, extending beyond the au-thors with strong and controversial indigenous tiesto include writers who would never be branded as"Indians." The phenomenon of colonialism conjuresup a variety of platitudes which are elaborated at theexpense of the literature of the period. The opinionthat creativity cannot survive under a repressive polit-ical regime, for example, frequently makes a scape-goat of all colonial literature. A particular aspect ofthis myth of artistic sterility is the belief that the useof European literary formulae by authors born andeducated in America must be a submissive imitationof the foreign models. Ironically, the derogatory viewof the European-imitation factor can be discerned inthe statements of both Guaman Poma's supportersand detractors, and with equally erroneous results oneither side.

Indigenism becomes the battle line on whichthe war over foreign influence is waged, and onecamp is constituted by those who deny the input ofEuropean ideas for the purpose of finding in thework the exclusive representation of a native Amer-ican tradition. One of the most extreme examples ofthis approach is the argument that Guaman Poma'sbook is the ultimate artifact of a defunct Andeantradition of pictorial historiography. In the effort tomake of Guaman Poma the last of a line of Incanarrative painters and historians, the entire writtentext has to be ignored as irrelevant to the author'stask, and the 450 illustrations are linked to Andeanhistorical portraiture on the basis of Guaman Poma's

two dozen portraits of Inca royalty. In the commen-tator's quest for the complete identification of theauthor with indigenous tradition, he claims that thesehundreds of drawings-sacred, satirical, and histor-ical-are not even the result of an artistic impulsebut are instead "predetermined by the function ofpainting in the Incaic historiographic tradition"(Emilio Mendizibal Losack, "Don Phelipe GuamanPoma de Ayala, sefior y cacique, el ultimo quell-cacamayoc," Revista del Museo Nacional, Lima, 30,1961; p. 306). Adamant about disassociating Gua-man Poma from the mechanistic adherence to for-eign models, Mendizibal Losack makes the authorthe mechanistic and mindless imitator of the oppositecultural tradition.The importance of the new ideas brought bythe European domination has been discarded by theopposite camp which longs to equate, both for thecolonial period and for all time, indigenous originand cultural inferiority. One of these commentariesincludes a painstaking collation of texts, pointing outthat Guaman Poma lifted passages from the Euro-pean chronicles of Peru, such as those written byZarate in the sixteenth century and, later, Murtia, forthe ultimate purpose of proving that "the author ofthe Nueva cor6nica demonstrates, with repeated fre-quency, a peculiar ineptitude to make an adequateand coherent transposition of the narrations that hereproduces" (Ramiro Condarco Morales. Protohis-toria andina. Oruro: Universidad Thcnica, 1967; p.308). With regard to Father Murila, who was a con-temporary and personal acquaintance of GuamanPoma, the issue of who borrowed whose material isfar from settled; the bitter contempt with whichGuaman Poma regards Murfia in his text may bedue to the Spanish Mercedarian's covetous interestnot only in the Peruvian chronicler's wife but in hismanuscript as well (p. 906). In any case, the criticconcludes that European culture was entirely inac-cessible to the spirit of the indigenous historians andthat such narrators were merely the deficient expo-sitors of the reality which they lived and of the idealsprofessed by the nations of their origin (p. 296).Without such a predisposition mediating theexamination of the text, the biased reader would havefound in Guaman Poma's writing a thoroughly saga-cious interpretation of the events he narrates. Whatis unusual about the work-and here the irony im-plicit in the title "New Chronicle" is apparent-isthat the more or less standard sixteenth-century ver-sions of Peruvian history are replaced by a potpourriof Andean and Biblical lore that makes the Incasnot the origin but the terminus of indigenous Andeanhistory and the Spaniards a misguided band of hyp-ocrites who cannot claim to be the original mes-sengers of the Gospel in Peru. By means of an elab-orate fictional narration of history, the Nuevacor6nica draws the Andean world into the main-stream of Christian spiritual history, decisively coun-ters the European view of the Indians as pagans andtherefore subhuman barbarians, and negates thehighly touted religious justification of the Spanishinvasion of America.The same subversive, anti-Spanish argumenta-tion pervades the accounts of the post-Conquest civilwars which repeat entire passages from the chronicle


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of Agustin de Zirate, not as "incoherent transposi-tions," but as the springboard for a radically differentpoint of view. Through another complicated series ofhistorical inventions that exploit the main tenets ofsixteenth-century theories of war and conquest,Guaman Poma contends that Peru had been, from1532 onward, a willing and loyal member of theSpanish Empire and that the Indians are the sover-eign land owners of Peru, according to the preceptsof Divine, canon, and natural law (p. 958). ThePeruvian chronicler can hardly be called a deficientexpositor of his own reality but might better be de-scribed as an ingenious auto-didact who manipulatesthe moral, legal, and religious principles that thecolonists professed as the rules by which to play hisown game.The only critic to consider favorably GuamanPoma's link to European culture has completelywarped the evidence of Hispanization in the work.Elvira Tundidor creates Guaman Poma as a gentle-manly adherent to European ways of thinking in herlatter-day effort to justify the Spanish Conquest ofPeru as a liberation from Inca tyranny and despo-tism ("La queja indigena de don Felipe GuamanPoma de Ayala," Trabajos y conferencias. Estudiosde seminarios americanistas, Madrid, 3, 1959; 21-33,39-101). Her conclusions, in diametric opposition tothose that have already been examined, are the finalfootnote in this documentary survey of a type ofcritical commentary that has failed conclusively tobring the rigorous examination of the text of theNueva cordnica y buen gobierno into consideration.This catalogue of divergent and opposing claimsabout the nature of the work and its author revealsthat the sixteenth-century polemic on the dignity ofman and the morality of imperial conquest andcolonization is still being waged in the pages of cul-tural criticism devoted to the colonial period. As thesmoke of battle settles, the futility of the polemicalorientation becomes apparent. Guaman Poma as anauthor cannot be pigeon-holed into either of the easycategories of the aborigine-deified or barbaric-orof the colonial convert-rarefied or hack; the textitself possesses a richness and a depth which renderall the more superfluous the banalities that have al-most exclusively constituted the work's critical wages.Such possibilities for fruitful discussion as therole of illustration as text, the use of Quechua forvarious types of discourse, the problematics of thefictional history, and the study of Guaman Poma'srhetoric in general, represent only a few of the un-explored territories of this monster of creative ebul-lience. The generic heterogeneity of the work alonedraws the reader's attention to the extraordinaryfabric of the text. The expository narration is punc-tuated by biographies, sermons, prayers, myths, max-ims, and songs, as well as by monologues and di-alogues, both didactic and satiric. Among the moststriking features of the rhetoric is the appearance ofno less than twenty prologues which are found atvarious junctures of the narration; these "introduc-tory" texts can serve as a focal point for a criticalintroduction to the work.The exposition of the Nueva cordnica y buengobierno is prefaced by three epistolary prologues,directed to the Pope and the King of Spain, and a

general prologue for the "Christian reader" (p. 4-11). The first of the letters is addressed to the Popeand signed by the author, who beseeches pontificalprotection for "this kingdom of peru of the indies"(p. 4. Guaman Poma's lack of capitals is being pre-served here). The second epistle, destined for theSpanish King and bearing the signature of the au-thor's father, is presented as an introduction of theauthor and a recommendation of his work to themonarch by "don martin malque de ayala" (pp. 5-7).The letter is clearly the invention of the author, whoappears fashioned in the guise of a distinguishedpersonage, in this case the "son and grandson of thegreat lords and kings of ancient times and captaingeneral and lord of the kingdom," who intercedeswith the royal reader on behalf of the properly hum-ble Guaman Poma (p. 5). Thus introduced to theKing according to the rules of literary protocol, heproceeds, in the last epistolary prologue, to set forthfor Philip his grandiose narrative plan in a postureof feigned modesty (pp. 8-10). The prologue to theChristian reader which follows bears the stamp ofthe conventional prologue, briefly introducing thework and reiterating its format and purpose for thebenefit of the general audience (p. 11).

If the use of the prologue ended here, it wouldbe of little interest beyond its function as a literaryconvention. However, the reiteration of the prologueform throughout the work means that these "intro-ductory" texts perform a supplemental function; theyestablish the formal context within which an extra-ordinarily elaborate discourse addressed by the au-thor to the reader will be developed throughout thework. Since the stated project of the Nueva cordnicay buen gobierno is to preserve the kingdom of Perufrom destruction and the Indian race from genocide,the author attempts, by means of such a vast and com-plex formal network to draw his most influential (andpotential) readers into the monumental task by subtlyapprising them of their moral responsibilities. Themultiplication of prologues insistently implicates thereader in the discourse of the book, subjectinganonymity and indifference to powerful scorn; theincessant return to the same rhetorical code links thereaders to the discourse with an insistence that deniestheir anonymity and scorns their indifference.In addition to creating the work's audience, thesecond text among these prologues, together with anintroductory chapter that narrates how the writing ofthe Nueva cordnica came about, sets up an intratex-tual relationship through a lengthy and detailed pres-entation of a literary character who will appear asone of the central historical protagonists and moralarchetypes in the work. Don Martin Malque deAyala becomes the fictional fulcrum on which Peru-vian Conquest history turns, as the heroic figure whoallegedly established peace between Spain and Peruin 1532 by transferring Peruvian sovereignty, as theviceroy of Huascar Inca, to the Spanish monarchy.This excelentisimo senforis later portrayed as the lordwho led the loyalist Indian forces in defeating theSpanish rebels who plagued the kingdom with civilwars (pp. 375-76, 432-33). Throughout the work,Don Martin repeatedly appears as the model of theIndian lord, devoted to his people and the preserva-tion of the Christian faith and civil justice, who will

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reestablish the kingdom of Peru as a sovereign state(pp. 16, 736, 818-19). With the presentation of thispersonage, Guaman Poma completes the creation ofthe triad of participating forces in the discourse: theauthor, as witness and informant of the events he nar-rates; the various readers, who are constantly re-minded of their obligation to respond to those events,and the fictional historical exemplar, who negates thebarrier between past and future and formalizes theutopian reality.

Repetition and reiteration are Guaman Poma'sbasic rhetorical techniques for maintaining thesethree categories of formal protagonists, introduced inthe initial set of prologues, as the visible interlocu-tors of his exposition. The prologue continues toserve as the expressive mode for mediating interac-tion, but the introductory composition undergoes atransformation that places it at the end of the chap-ter which it accompanies, effectively converting whatGuaman Poma continues to call the prologue frompreamble to postlogue, or epilogue. The apparent re-dundancy of nineteen such texts, which are reallyepilogues to the various expositions, gives the impres-sion that Guaman Poma is indulging in an enthusi-astic misuse of one of the stock forms of literaryconvention. The effect of the "prologues," however,is that they serve-in addition to the functions men-tioned-as an ordering device of the encyclopedictext. They appear at the conclusion of virtually everychapter or group of chapters devoted to a specifictopic, and provide the means by which to continuethe dialogue with a reading public that is graduallyand explicitly categorized as representing every rel-evant sector of a universal audience.Each of the prologues is directed to the con-temporary social group which is the subject of theaccompanying chapter. The recurrent shift from ex-pository object to object of address, marking the co-incidence of reading subject and narrative object,constantly reinforces the dynamics of reader-iden-tification implicitly working in the exposition. Inevery prologue, Guaman Poma "creates" his readersand proceeds to engage in a monologue that variouslyconsoles, praises, harangues or condemns them. Theobjects of these lessons range from the King andPope and the ecclesiastical and civil authority ofcolonial officialdom to all the motley assortment ofcolonial opportunists, and from the displaced nobil-ity and civil officials of the Andean hierarchy to thelowliest tributary Indian and Negro slave. Concom-itant with the elaboration of the authorially definedaudience is a developing thematic which optimis-tically and zealously outlines a program for spiritualand social reform; it is eventually dissipated into anautobiographical lament of helplessness and despair.

Why, however, does the author fail to use theappropriate title of "epilogue" for these short com-positions? Since the evidence of his erudition clearlymakes his ignorance of the term impossible, the useof the term "prologue" must be attributed to somerhetorical design. The element of surprise created bythe displacement of the form from its conventionalintroductory location arrests the attention of thereader by the jolting force of the label. In its con-ventional location, the prologue would provide thereader with a destination in a chronological reading:

the main exposition. If the central body of the worktempts the reader to skip the prologue, GuamanPoma's displacement of that prologue awaits thereader after the main exposition has been read. If, onthe rhetorical level, the unorthodox placement of theprologue serves to launch a surprise attack on thereader, the question of anteriority, implied by theetymology of the term, is resolved at the fictionallevel. To what are these prologues anterior, if notto the composition of the text? In a work which con-stantly focuses on a world outside itself, both throughthe fictional creation of that historical/utopian realmbeyond the text, and the engagement of an extra-textual public, the prologues themselves seem to pointto something beyond the text.The nineteen concluding prologues of theNueva cor6nica y buen gobierno are the introduc-tion to action in the outside world, as it is envi-sioned in the text. The prologues are the direct linkto extra-textual reality, continually spanning the gapbetween the book and historical society, and servingas preamble to the task of saving Peru and her peoplefrom annihilation. The manner in which the pro-logues specifically serve as a bridge between theworld and the text, between history and utopia, canbe elucidated by an examination of one of the otherliterary genres that appears with frequency in thework: the biographical form of writing, employed inkey chapters devoted both to Inca and post-Conquesthistory. The importance of biography in the narrationhas already been signalled by the presentation of thelife of Don Martin Mallque de Ayala in the intro-ductory texts that preface the work. The biographiesof the twelve Incas and their royal consorts, thecoyas, foreshadow the narration of Inca history, themajor enterprise of the Nueva cordnica, and a seriesof biographies of the first nine viceroys introducesthe utopian treatise of the Buen gobierno. The his-torical personality, not the chronological narration ofevents, stands as the focal point of Guaman Poma'shistory; this emphasis is underscored by the appear-ance of a portrait of the subject that precedes everynarration. The Inca biographies begin with the iden-tification of the figure, followed by a minute descrip-tion of the costume and royal regalia that appear inthe drawings. It has always been assumed thatGuaman Poma's portraits are copies of original onesseen by the author, and that the written descriptionsrepresent the features of the historical artifacts (Rich-ard Pietschmann, "Nueva cor6nica y buen gobiernode Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, revisi6nsumaria," in Tello, p. 95). The lives of each of theroyal personages are summarized in a single page,ending with an account of the subject's death and thenumber of their legitimate and illegitimate heirs.While these brief narrations set forth the legendaryhistorical deeds of each Inca and coya as the authormay have heard them from his informants, the char-acterizations depart from the documentary mold anddwell instead on the features of the moral personalityof each subject. Guaman Poma's biographies are de-fined by the themes of the personal, more than thepublic, lives of each figure, and the explicitly moralinterpretation stands out when contrasted with thebiographical narrations by other seventeenth-centuryhistorians of Peru, for whom the continuity of ac-


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tions takes precedence over the individual figuresand the explication of personal characteristics is sub-servient to an interest in the social customs of Incacivilization in general. Guaman Poma's Inca biog-raphies capsulize two dozen ancient personalities inhighly individualized portraits which are onlyperipherally linked to the narration of the politicalhistory of the Inca empire by the chronologicalordering of their reigns.This type of historical writing is reminiscent ofthe exemplary biography of the Middle Ages, andGuaman Poma may have found a model in thefifteenth-century works of Fernin Perez de Guzmainand Hernando del Pulgar, whose Generaciones ysemblangas and Claros varones de Castilla were popu-lar items in the sixteenth-century colonial book trade,and with which Guaman Poma's biographical writ-ings share both format and many thematic features.By combining the documentary portraiture of theAndean tradition with certain traits of the Europeanmedieval biography, Guaman Poma creates an un-usual narrative document that establishes the focusof his utopian treatise. The royal biographies go be-yond history specifically by virtue of the prologueswhich conclude their presentations. Guaman Pomadirects his Inca biographies to the male descendantsof the Andean dynasty and preaches a lesson againstthe idolatry by which he has characterized their fore-bears; he urges his contemporaries to adhere to theirancient moral law and to take up the service of theChristian god. In the prologue that follows the seriesof coya biographies, Guaman Poma explicitly enu-merates the noble and humble classes of the femaleIndian audience to whom he addresses himself, anddelivers a more elaborate version of the sameproselytizing message.The examples of charity and vice that charac-terize all the royal biographies thus bear directly onthe society of contemporary Indians. Having broughtthe subtle and implicit exemplary value of the biog-raphies to the explicit level of a moral missionthrough the use of the prologues, Guaman Pomaestablishes the first premise of his utopian program:the Indians of Peru, particularly the nobles who mustset the example, should follow the religious andmoral precepts of Christianity in order to becomeworthy citizens of a new Indo-Christian state. Thebiographical form is thus projected beyond its modestanecdotal and historical frame and united with a

complementary discourse which grounds the uto-pianism of the work.The ancient biographies have their counterpartin the biographies of the Spanish viceroys that com-mence the discussion of contemporary Peruvian so-ciety. Together, the ancient and modern series estab-lish the formal symmetry of the work. The viceregalbiographies also serve to join the two parts of thebook by providing visual and verbal thematic con-tinuity with those of the Incas; drawings are againused to precede each narration, with many of theviceroys clutching either rosary or sword, as theIncas had been pictured holding the staff of theiroffice. The narration of the viceroys' public deedsis overshadowed by the consideration of the moralconduct of their leadership, providing a shift ofemphasis to public morality from the intimate, per-sonal morality that characterized the Incas and coyas.The prologue that follows the presentation of theviceroys is dedicated to the Pope and the King; eventhough Guaman Poma's specific proposals call for thereinstitution of Andean governance, these imperialauthorities are still to be the ultimate arbiters ofChristian justice, "in many kingdoms, empires, andall the universal world" (p. 486). The author insistson the continuing obligation of these readers to pro-vide for the welfare of the Peruvian kingdom, in atone much more forceful than that of the originalepistolary prologues; he ends his remarks with anurgent entreaty that they alleviate the plight of theIndians of Peru.The biography and the prologue function intandem. The former becomes the framework bywhich to elucidate the positive and negative stan-dards of conduct of the past, subsequently set forthby the prologue as the explicit model for the future.Out of the two series of biographies are projected theprinciples of personal living and of goVernance whichstand as the foundation of the utopian design;Guaman Poma utilizes the biography and the pro-logue to carry out a didactic mission of enormousproportions. This single example of Guaman Poma'srhetoric points to the complexity of the general nar-rative scheme and reveals the author's keen insightinto the potentially creative power of the fixedforms of European literary expression. The entirework demands a reading that ignores the rulebookof sixteenth-century literary propriety and that pos-sesses a readiness for textual surprises.

A Quarterly Journal Devoted to Research in theHispanicanguagesndLiteraturesJIISPAIC PublishedytheDepartmentfRomanceanguagesUniversity of PennsylvaniaGeneralditor:ussell.SeboldE 1 ) I E Managingditor:ose'M.RegueiroEditors: S. G. Armistead, P. G. Earle, P. M. Lloyd,G. SobejanoAssociate Editors: D. L. Catron, A. E. Foley,G. Gulldn, E. SeiverSubscription: $12.00 per yearWilliams Hall, University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia, Pa. 19174

dkClatifCS/Winter1974

racial scorn and critical contempr

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