Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786

Performing America

Susan Castillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134374885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Susan Castillo's pioneering study examines the extraordinary proliferation of polyphonic or 'multi-voiced' texts in the three centuries following the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Taking a selection of plays, printed dialogues, travel narratives and lexicographic studies in English, Spanish and French, the book explores both European and indigenous writers of the early Americas. Paying particular attention to performance and performativity in the texts of the early colonial world, Susan Castillo asks:

• why vast numbers of polyphonic and performative texts emerged in the Early Americas
• how these texts enabled explorers, settlers and indigenous groups to come to terms with radical differences in language, behaviour and cultural practices
• how dialogues, plays and paratheatrical texts were used to impose or resist ideologies and cultural norms
• how performance and polyphony allowed Europeans and Americans to debate exactly what it meant to be European or American, or in some cases, both.

Tracing the dynamic enactment of (often conflictive) encounters between differing local narratives, Castillo presents polyphonic texts as not only singularly useful tools for exploring what initially seemed inexpressible or for conveying controversial ideas, but also as the site where cultural difference is negotiated. Offering unparalleled linguistic and historical range, through the analysis of texts from Spain, France, New Spain, Peru, Brazil, New England and New France, this volume is an important advance in the study of early American literature and the writings of colonial encounter.

1 Introduction

‘Well then,’ said Don Quixote, ‘the same thing happens in the comedy and life of this world, where some play emperors, others popes, and, in short, all the characters that can be brought into a play; but when it is over, that is to say when life ends, death strips them all of the garments that distinguish one from the other, and all are equal in the grave.’

‘A fine comparison!’ said Sancho; ‘though not so new but that I have heard it many and many a time, as well as that other one of the game of chess; how, so long as the game lasts, each piece has its own particular office, and when the game is finished they are all mixed, jumbled up and shaken together, and stowed away in the bag, which is much like ending life in the grave.’

‘Thou art growing less doltish and more shrewd every day, Sancho,’ said Don Quixote.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes created the immortal duo of Don Quixote, knight-errant, dreamer and tilter at windmills, and Sancho Panza, his ruthlessly practical peasant companion, at a time when European imperial endeavours in the New World were at their peak. In the above excerpt, Don Quixote evokes the pervasive theatricality of human behaviour, and the ineluctable fact that all humans, whatever their rank, ultimately face the final curtain of death. Sancho Panza, ever the pragmatist, counters this with a rival metaphor, that of the game of chess, in which each piece has a designated strategic function; after the game is over, the pieces are ‘jumbled up’ and returned to the oblivion of the pouch. Both metaphors are singularly appropriate to describe the textual encounters between European and indigenous writers in the years following initial contact between European explorers and settlers and the native peoples of the Americas. On reading the texts emerging from this period, one is struck by the awareness existing both among Europeans and among indigenous writers and performers of the Americas of the power and effectiveness of theatrical gestures. At the same time, however, contact between such radically divergent cultures is, like a game of chess, a struggle for supremacy where carefully elaborated strategies and tactical ploys play a vital role. Moreover, the result of this contact is indeed a ‘jumbling up’ of ideologies, political systems and cultural practices. In both Don Quixote’s theatre of dreams and Sancho Panza’s pragmatic chess game of gambits, tactics and resistance, what is clear is that the dynamic interaction between the players (in the double sense of the word) transforms them irrevocably.

The idea for this book arose when I was co-editing with Ivy Schweitzer the anthology The Literatures of Colonial America. As we went through the arduous process of selecting the texts that were to be included in our anthology, I was fascinated to observe the extraordinary proliferation of polyphonic texts in which both European and indigenous writers of the early Americas represent their interactions. In our own times, the only event that could possibly compare with the world-shaking magnitude of the original encounters between Europeans and natives both in terms of mutual incommensurability and of epistemological rupture would be a confrontation with beings from another planet who are similar to us in form, but whose beliefs and cultures differ radically from our own. Consequently, texts emerging from the Americas and from the European imperial powers in the three centuries following first contact reverberate with a cacophony of European and native voices attempting to make sense of each other for a variety of pragmatic ends: to impose and defend their own belief systems or to resist and subvert competing ideologies; to define their own positions as human beings inhabiting different geographical locations in a transatlantic world in which all the old certainties had been called into question; to reach a certain degree of mutual accommodation that would enable them to co-exist with one another in reasonable harmony; or, when this was not possible, to relegate opposing voices to silence.

It is probably the case that I find the theme of cultural interactions particularly appealing due to my own rather unconventional history. I was born in the American South and grew up in French-speaking Louisiana. From childhood, I have always felt a fascination with languages and the possibility they offer us of shifting between different ways of looking at the world; for example, as my friends and I were playing in the long Louisiana evenings, the idea of the loup-garou was far more frightening to us than the boring old Anglophone bogeyman. Probably because of this childhood perception of language as something imbued with power and magic, I went on to study Spanish literature at university and at the age of 23 went to live in Portugal, where I worked as a university lecturer and free-lance literary translator. Originally I had wanted to write a Ph.D. thesis on women in the work of Miguel de Unamuno, but this proved not to be possible at that time. I thus completed my Ph.D. dissertation (written in Portuguese) on Leslie Marmon Silko, and went on to write and publish on Native American writers.

I became increasingly aware, however, that the position of an Anglo- American scholar (based in Europe, to complicate things even further) in Native American Studies is similar in many ways to that of men in feminist scholarship, in that it is vital to position oneself very carefully, do one’s homework thoroughly, and be highly sensitive to issues of power and disempowerment. Even so, I found that many Native American writers and critics view scholarship by Anglo-American critics as an act of imperial aggression. While I do not agree with this position (which would seem to imply that only British men from Stratford-upon-Avon could study Shakespeare, only Southern expatriate women could write on Southern expatriate women writers, and so forth), I could nonetheless understand and, to a degree, sympathize with, the reasons underlying their attitudes. As I have always been fascinated by colonial texts, it seemed to me that a change in the direction of my own scholarship to a focus on texts from the early Americas would not only enable me to continue to study the interaction between indigenous and European cultures, but would also allow me to put my linguistic skills and my background in Spanish, French and Portuguese to good use. Finally, in 1996, coinciding with changes in my personal circumstances, I took up a lectureship in American Literature in Scotland, where I encountered the supreme linguistic challenge: Glaswegian. The recurring pattern of my life has thus been one of negotiating between diverse cultures, languages, academic disciplines and historical traditions, of attempting to discern patterns in the similarities I often encountered while revelling in the creative ferment arising from the differences.

Initially, I had planned to limit the focus of the present study of plurivocal interactions between Europeans and natives of the early Americas to the genre of dramatic dialogues, a paratheatrical literary form that flourished in the writing of most European maritime powers and in the Americas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. As my research progressed, however, I was dazzled by the number and variety that I encountered on both sides of the Atlantic not only of dramatic dialogues meant to be read or recited but also of actual plays, travel narratives and lexicographic studies that stage encounters between European and native characters. The proliferation of polyphonic texts and genres in this period is easy to understand; the formal features of such texts would be singularly appealing on the one hand for Europeans who were wrestling with questions of place, identity and actual physical survival, and on the other, for indigenous writers who were attempting to make sense of the often incomprehensible behaviour of the new arrivals and to articulate their own responses to events. These plays and dialogues allowed natives, colonists and settlers not only to attempt to understand what initially seemed unintelligible and inexpressible, but also to construct a series of viable, and mutable, roles for themselves which could be played on a world stage to several different audiences, both in Europe and in the New World.

Dialogical writing and polyphonic performance have had a long history on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Western European tradition, the term ‘dialectic’, derived from the Greek dialektos, has diverse meanings; depending on context, it can signify debate, discourse, dialogue, or conversation.¹ Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, attributes the invention of the practice of dialectic to Zeno of Elea, who had become known for his ability to rebut the hypotheses of his opponents through skilled argumentation. It was Plato in his Socratic dialogues, however, who used the genre to greatest effectiveness. R. McKeon, in ‘Dialectic and Political Thought and Action’² characterizes Platonic dialogues as ‘simultaneously defining terms, clarifying minds, and discovering the truth about things’. Plato draws an interesting distinction, however, between dialectic and rhetoric. For him, the former is a genuine attempt to acquire knowledge and discover truth through plurivocal argumentation, while rhetoric is described as a ‘spurious method’.³ Aristotle, however, viewed rhetoric as the reverse of dialectic. What he meant by this has engaged scholars for centuries; contemporary thinkers such as Sloane and Farrell describe the Aristotelian tradition of dialectic as a discursive practice or mode of enquiry which requires the analysis of both sides of a given argument.

Lucian, in his satirical dialogue ‘Menippus or the Descent into Hades’ uses fictitious figures such as the Cynic philosopher Menippus and an imagined descent into the underworld to satirize the foibles of his own culture. In contrast, in Ciceronian dialogues the emphasis shifts from the ideas expressed to a preoccupation with historical accuracy and verisimilitude. Whatever the type of dialogue, however, in the dia-logic triangle of writer, reader and text, what becomes crucial in the analysis is the issue of authority. Is the reader expected, as a result of the arguments exposed, to draw her own conclusions? Does the dialogue represent the process of examining opposing views, or is the communicative exchange set forth on the page merely a device to convey the author’s views to the reader in a less overt and thus more persuasive form? T. O. Sloane, a contemporary philosopher, sums up the difference between rhetoric and dialectic in the following terms:

Dialectic begins in uncertainty and proceeds through enquiry towards more certainty . . . Rhetoric, however, begins in controversy and proceeds through enquiry to find the means whereby this or that audience . . . may be attracted to a certain resolution of the controversy.⁴

What is certain, however, is that this potent combination of rhetorical and dialectical capacity made polyvocal texts a singularly useful tool in conveying controversial ideas. Early Christian writers such as Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho, for example, used the genre in their proselytizing efforts, and many catechistic texts were structured in question-and-answer form.

The nature and objectives of dialogic texts, and the tension between dialogue and dialectic, continued to be debated in the early modern period, when the genre took on new vitality. Virginia Cox, in her study The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, has analysed the ways in which Italian dramatic dialogues of the sixteenth century appropriated Classical traditions. In Renaissance dialogues arising from the Platonic tradition, Cox suggests, emphasis is placed not on the actual setting but on the content and evolution of the arguments themselves. In neo-Ciceronian dialogues, however, there is a clear preoccupation with fidelity to historically verifiable circumstances, and the realistic representation of historical personages, as would befit an epoch obsessed with portraiture. In both neo-Platonic and neo-Ciceronian dialogues, however, what is fore-groundedis the actual process of persuasion. Cox goes on to characterize the concern with communication as the most salient feature of the dialogue as literary genre, and concludes,

The dialogue is unique among the familiar genres of argument and exposition, in that, at the same time as presenting a body of information or opinion, it also represents the process by which that information or opinion is transmitted to a particular audience, at a particular place and time . . . it seems reasonable to assume that when any age adopts on a wide scale a form which so explicitly ‘stages’ the act of communication, it is because that act, has, for some reason, come to be perceived as problematic.⁵

When European explorers, missionaries and settlers arrived in the New World, they encountered rich and extraordinarily vibrant and diverse traditions of performance. Performance in the early Americas, however, is often dismissed as ‘merely’ ritualistic, or on the other hand the ritual aspects of performance are exoticized as markers of cultural difference. Anthropologist Victor Turner, for example, has suggested that ritual forms the basis of all theatrical activity, which would seem uncontentious. Some of the other facets of Turner’s work, however, are highly problematic: for example, his search for common elements in rituals emanating from widely diverse cultures and a concomitant erasure of their geographical and cultural specificity; and particularly his positing of a teleological, universal evolution of performance from a presentational, ‘liminal’ stage characteristic of ‘technologically simpler societies’ to a more evolved, ‘liminoid’, representational phase. As Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins point out in their Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, such an argument is deeply flawed and potentially elitist, in that it suggests an evolution of theatrical practices from those existing in ‘primitive, uncivilized’ cultures towards those encountered in Western industrialized societies. Gilbert and Tompkins offer a useful characterization of ritual as ‘efficacious for the community and enacted for a particular audience to preserve the order and meaning of anything from harvests to marriage, birth and death’.⁶ Even here, however, the distinctions between ritual and drama are fluid in that many dramatic productions, by enacting, denouncing or even erasing features of a given culture, are attempting to perpetuate certain cultural values at the expense of others, as indeed could be said of almost any ideological form.

In any case, on their arrival in the Americas European explorers and settlers encountered a dazzling array of performative practices. Among the Aztecs, for example, warfare was highly ritualized and contained incipient theatrical elements, with a format of elaborate declarations of hostility and a struggle with obsidian knives. The purpose of these ritualized conflicts was to provide sacrificial victims. In one of the most valuable extant descriptions of pre-contact indigenous culture (published in 1581), Father Diego Durán characterized the spectacles staged in pre- Conquest Mexico as notable for their lavishness and pageantry, with careful attention given to the layout of performance and audience space, costumes, settings, and so forth. One particularly evocative description is that of Tlacaxipehualiztle or ‘Flaying of Men’, in which sacrificial victims were sacrificed by men costumed as deities:

The prisoners were brought out and lined up at a place called Tzompantitlan, which means something like ‘Mount Cavalry’ or ‘Place of Skulls.’ At this place there was a long low platform upon which stood a rack where the skulls of sacrificial victims were strung and where they remained permanently as reminders of these sacrifices, as relics. The prisoners were arranged in a file and were told to dance; all of them were there, dancing. And all the victims were smeared with chalk, their heads were feathered with down, and on top of the head each wore some white feathers tied to his hair. Their eyelids were blackened and around their mouths they were painted red. Then the men who were to perform the sacrifice came out and stood in a row, placed according to their rank. Each one was disguised as a god. One of them wore the garb of Huitzilopochtli. Another was dressed as Quetzalcoatl, another as Toci (Our Grandmother). Another represented Yopi, still another Opochtzin (the Left-Handed One); another was Totec (Our Lord) and finally one wore the garments of Itzpapalotl (Obsidian Butterfly). Then one warrior was disguised as a jaguar, another as an ocelot, and yet another as an eagle. All carried swords and shields, inlaid with gold and gems, and all these sacrificers were covered with featherwork and rich jewels.⁷

The action took place on a platform adorned with paintings and with a floral arbour bearing the insignias of the gods. Durán describes in some detail the singing and dancing which ensued to the beat of drums, and the rites by which the prisoners were expected to defend themselves by hurling balls of pitch pine and by brandishing a feathered sword at the sacrificers. Death, however, was inevitable, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Performing God and Mammon
• 3 Performing history
• 4 Performing the Noble Savage
• 5 Performing the Creole
• Notes
• Bibliography