Rhetoric
Christopher Columbus soon
demonstrates that language is inadequate to represent the objects of the Indies. His journal
brings the astonishment of the first day of the discovery but also the
verisimilitude of the second day in paradise. Although we have not been in
these miraculous islands we have already been in the Garden of Eden, so naming
them is renaming: their names refer to religious and imperial power. However,
the object is imposed as excess, and although the laws of perspective help to rationalize
the relationship between the central subject and the verifiable world, these
American objects exceed the field of vision. Objects overwhelm both the space of language
and the space of visual control. So Colon calls some trees "palms",
which for him are a “beautiful deformity". The oxymoron suggests they are
freakishly beautiful. That Antillean tree named by Columbus is the first grapheme
of the abundance discourse. Perhaps, the first seed of the baroque tree: it
shifts the symmetrical shape enshrined by perspective, and suggests the
circular and rich foliage of folding and unfolding. The American forest
highlights the edenic garden. This extension of language is not casual: the
objects are increased in their usefulness, in the promise of their fertility, their
value and wealth. Moreover, these shifts introduced concerns of other
communicative economy into the rules of rhetoric. Soon, an object will no
longer always be replaced with a word, be represented by a single name, or fall
within the same species, neither will be legible in the given Book of Nature;
it will rather be an object that expands itself onto words, depicted in
different names. Objects won´t be fixed symbols but signs of process within a
natural history that has just been written. Thus, the designative economy of
rhetoric, its rationality, logic, and moral exchange is displaced by a
bountiful economy that promotes wasteful signs and figures; metaphor and
hyperbole are pleased to show up and be included in the scenery of words. The
persuasion of a shareable truth becomes the demands a celebrant promise.
Appearances of the mixing
The grafting of a plant to another
is one of the principles of abundance that various chroniclers and historians of
Indies documented. The product of this mixture is not just the sum of an
American plant and the Spanish one, but also of the land that allowed this new growth.
The notion of the new is brewing in this practice, in a cultural scene of
plenty. And, therefore, it triggers, a real production of mixing. A parallel
phenomenon seems to occur in language contact, not only by the lending, to some
extent predictable, in the encounter of indigenous languages
with Castilian. It was inevitable, and would continue proliferating, the assimilation
and adaptation of Spanish vocabulary into languages prone to incorporate variations.
Therefore, various native languages increased their record by appropriating new
terms, or by including its declinations to Spanish words and verbs.
However, the standardization of the
language, its values of use, does not recommend mixing and disqualified
hybridism as license or excess. Joan Corominas, in his epistemological
Castilian dictionary, while documenting the use of "melon" quotes
Laguna (1555): "It is truly a bastard peach, because it is born of peach
grafted to quince quince." The notion of bastardy as the nature of grafting
is a disqualification both in nature and in the area of language (actually
denigrates the product of the mixture). Oliva Sabuco (XVII) goes to the same
family proceedings (explaining the purpose for its origins) to sanction:
"we see the children of degenerate parents out better and more virtuous,
or worst and more vicious ." In this space of control and sanction, the
new mixtures could only occur as excess: as an alternative scenery. In this space, language changes from grafting to hybridism, from transplanting to
miscegenation. What is new is showing that it
is the sum of all the parts that make up the American subject, made up of
difference and strangeness. However, what is new in America is always a future form.
The New World
hyperbole
The abundance gives way to the
miracle, then to the excess, from metaphor to hyperbole, and in the process it becomes
a fruitful discourse itself. Abundance is self-referential; it occurs as
sowing, transplanting, transferring, grafting elements onto the colonial
onstage, but it also soon occurs in the speech, which lavishes figures. More
classical is the notion of nature as a common good which, in the New World, all
enjoy. But nature has gone through the
application of Utopian Humanism and the idea that the sun is the good of the community,
because its light is collective. The Mexican "eternal spring" is a prodigy
but also a classic quote. But when indigenous chroniclers started to
describe their land, they were also able to find new sources for the hyperbole.
Tezozomoc Hernando Alvarez, grandson of Moctezuma, in his Chronicle Mexican
(1598) devotes more attention to the ornaments of the warriors that to war
itself. Even the projects of Bartolomé de las Casas demanded plenitude. The
fourteen "remedies" that he recommends are intended for the islands
"to become the best and richest land in the world, with all its indians
living there." Abundance claims a subject, and the impoverished man seems to
be the natural hero of an american Golden Age, as the Inca Garcilaso de la
Vega (1539-1616) believes of himself, being an improved prolongation of Spain.
Places and topics
Heraldry of the New World repeats
the topics of abundance. On November 10, 1558, King Philip II signed the Royal
Charter that granted to Popayan, Colombia, a coat of arms that could well be a
coat of arms for the very period of growing wealth controlled by the regional
power. The social and political history of Popayan demonstrates the process of
negotiation and competition among the founders and lords that got rich with
trade. Their wealth requires to be emblematically confirmed. Everything tends,
thus, to the language of the Baroque. All objects and attributes of Popayan coat
of arms emerge from the Old World, but now, the small Spanish town in the
Colombian Andes becomes a placid version of the golden city, now a fruitful
orchard chaired by the sun of abundance, and so also a place of virtue and joy.
Moreover, the cornucopia, also presides the patriotic coat of arms of new
countries after its independence from Spain, such as Venezuela and Peru. In the
first case, a bond unites the classic laurel branch to the local palm branch, in
the second, the vegetal kingdom is represented by the cinchona tree, one of the
"remedies" that since colonial times have promised well-being. The
animal kingdom is represented by the llama, the "sheep of Peru",
which caused the shock of early chroniclers. In heraldry, the mythical
wealth of the New World is part of the regional and national rhetoric, part of
the state building projects. Thus, abundance is no longer a prodigy and becomes
illustration. It carries, nevertheless, a constant feature of the imaginary
Latin American identity.
Mapping and inventory
Jacinto de Carvajal (ca . 1567 - ca
. 1650), recounts in his Descubrimiento del rio Apure the expedition led by Ochogavia Miguel in 1647, and does it so in
the most extreme Baroque style. Slightly
bizarre, with all the topics of the scenic baroque repertoire, the official
chronicler exalts the river journey as if it were a mythical enterprise. He
says to be already eighty years old but his curiosity about nature and people
are encouraged by the appetite of listing the Baroque world as a catalog of
abundances. Thus, he lists more than thirty different kinds of fruits and about
thirty-five species of birds. He also
provides information on ethnological groups Caribs; he lists seventy-two
ethnicities, although most of them can not be identified by those names today.
Fruits are distinguished using an entire comparative
repertoire: its colors, tastes, smells, sizes, shapes, similar or different
to others from Spain. These are fruits that exhibit the added value of their
appearance. Then, another value, the very pleasure of writing and saying new
names, the celebration of language in the language of a fruitful nature: merecures, chivechives, cubarros … And he concludes: " the Carib indians enjoy beyond those hinted
fruits, and the rest of ours. So is the abundance that I saw and experienced ... "(p. 242). The world is held in their names,
it’s born from them, recent and shining, but it is also shared and
communitarian, it is such a shelter gained by
language. This seems to be a
feature of Venezuelan colonial chronicles, their vegetal diversity and its
recent cities. It is the repertoire of the marvelous that occurs in the duration of a
time of joy and promise, almost without a shadow of the past. Even the most
important nineteenth century Venezuelan poem, "Ode to the agriculture of
the torrid zone" by Andrés Bello, humanist and jurist, linguist and poet, is
made out of the american catalogs; it is a eulogy that enumerates plants,
adding the american ones onto the Spanish ones, like daughters of the same
garden, the shelter of the new nation.
Joseph Luis de Cisneros was a fabrics
importer in the Guipuzcoana Company, the Basque trading company that, since
1742, obtained from the King of Spain monopoly privileges in Venezuela. Cisneros
gave a brief commercial treaty, a accurate description of the province of
Benezuela (1764). This brief description of rudimentary economic geography is
an inventory of the goods and products of wealth from a trade perspective. To
do this, the author does not require but to provide a list of fruits, live
stocks and manufactures won for each area. Their enumeration is animated by
faith in the exchange of goods as a demonstration of public health and of citizen’s
welfare. Trade perspective establishes a
public square of mediation, where people dialogues, negotiates and where goods
are produced and consumed, among resounding names, Creole and native flavors,
in always well-stocked stores. Among bountiful nature and joyful people, there
is the trading store, a sort of modern cornucopia that hangs between rural,
European labor migration, and urban development. The resonant names of the
villages and towns are centers of production, and products themselves of this
fruitful commercial discourse. Soon, this enumeration gives way to hyperbole:
"They eat away free Calves, good rams and sheep, and everything in abundance (p.
47). Cisneros writes from the public
square, where the market is the center of this prodigal vision: products parade
as an allegory of worldly wealth. This measure of desire seeks to transform
nature under the new ruling of industries.
In a gesture worthy of his dithyrambic empiricism, Cisneros finishes
listing all the ports and coves along the coast, and now without adjectives,
because the sum of the Caribbean Venezuelan geography is, ultimately, a verbal
cornucopia as it is an earthly one.
Questions to think about
- ¿What are the characteristic of the abundance discourse?
- ¿What does the author say about “mixing”? ¿How “mixing” and grafting was seen by Spanish academics?
- ¿What does the author say about the subjects of the new world?
- ¿How abundance is shown to become part of the new world identity and representation?
- ¿What happens with language in the new world?
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