Jerry Williams: Peralta Barnuevo
Peralta Barnuevo, 1664-1743, a native of Peru, is one of the two acknowledged geniuses who flourished in the New World (the other being Mexico’s Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora). A walking library, his encyclopedic mind produced over 80works that range from history, religion and medicine to literature, astronomy and military engineering. The Dialogue of the Dead dates from 1728. I have provided you a copy of my version of Cliff Notes as a guide to the text.** My talk will cover these five topics of teaching the text, as listed on the back of the handout:**:
1. Socio-cultural and political circumstances surrounding its composition and anonymous publication;
2. The role of literary academies in 18th century Lima
3. The question of the colonial readership and “hidden” codes of communication
4. The influence of censorship on art and cultural production
5. The satirical tradition and influence of Góngora, Quevedo, and writers of antiquity (Horace, Juvenal)
Before I tackle the theoretical and critical aspects of the work, I would like to address on side of teaching a text which I have not heard referenced in the sessions that I have attended. In my case, it is a personal-political affinity that I share with the author, which guides my study of his works and which informs how I teach Peralta. The last time I taught the text in question, a graduate student asked why I had included it and Peralta as a course of study and why was Peralta important to me.
My answer: The advent of postcolonial studies opened the door to my examining the manner in which criollos reinvented themselves vis a vis their peninsular counterparts. The enlightened debates and writings of the 18th century seemed to be the ideal focal point for answering a question that had nagged me some time: How did enlightened Creoles,such as Siguenza y Góngora and particularly Peralta Barnuevo, who as a spokesperson for successive viceroys and as one who enjoyed the advantages of viceregal protection and who, in essence, extolled the greatness of the Spanish monarchy, respond to the question of their own “invention”? How did such a writer who was portrayed as an arresting cultural and political hybrid and whose anomalous stature led Europe to approach him from an assimilationist point of view, engage issues of race and class in his copious and well published writings that brought him the admiration of some of Europe’s leading thinkers? How could Peralta be a spokesperson for the very disenfranchised class to which he belonged and yet whose legitimacy he sought to defend repeatedly? To answer my questions, I have spent 10 years now studying Peralta’s major and minor works, preparing critical editions of selected texts, writing and lecturing in order to demonstrate that when writers such as Peralta and Siguenza wrote, oftentimes between the lines, at times openly and defiantly, about what they termed “nuestra America,” “nuestra criolla nación” and referred to themselves as “españoles americanos” they were not merely contesting their Old World detractors but were also confronting their invention by Europe and planting the seeds of an distinct intellectual separation, the introduction of a position that was as expressive and political as it was conceptual and ideological. I have come to find in Peralta’s writings a shift from an early loyalist expression which, by the end of his career became discouraged by the mantle of colonialism, in favor of a distinct sociopolitical identity. His early writings have the European readership in mind, whereas in his later works, particularly after he writes his “unrequited” opus, Historia de España vindicada, he shifts his focus to his “criolla nación” (Lima fundada, as an example).
Part of my work is to bring Peralta back into the fold of 18th century Latin American studies after more than a century and a quarter of neglect, and to have him become more than a parenthetical note in graduate and undergraduate classrooms.
Now, on to teaching the text.
The anonymous allegorical satire was Peralta's tool for defying the encroachment of censors who questioned the artistic merit of works thought to undermine the moral and literary climate of Lima. Attempts by select members of Lima’s centralized government to determine what constituted affronts to refined taste over common or public fancy (exemplified in the text by Lima's fishwives, lads, and mulatto women) offer arresting documentary evidence that academies, like other bastions of colonialism, were in transition toward self-government. That artistic freedom was not solely the right of the minions is attested to in the reactions of non-Academy members to the debacle, from a public of semiliterate street vendors to aspiring young poets. The language of poetry had filtered below and met new claims of ownership. It had ceased to be the private, coded oral and written communication of the aristocracy and was recognized for its power to penetrate, influence, and transform across class and cultural lines.
The satire is indicative of the extremist position that made itself heard in academies where aristocratic notions of literary competence were being challenged by more popular views on art and the rules governing it. The crime of the knavish poet in the Diálogo was to offer a product to the public that exceeded the boundaries of reason and propriety. True to the form of Menippean satire that exposes academic over social vices, the court of law censures the poet. Peralta, through Menippus, censures the court and the critics. Lima's cultural and political climate is deemed an opposing force to artistic expression.
The Diálogo requires that we invite our students to consider issues such as the criteria of artists, fundamental differences between culture and art, sponsorship and censorship (seeking patrons who had the power to censor by virtue of their political and social prominence), and ultimately, the question of readership. Peralta wrote for an audience that understood and knew how to assimilate the linguistic and literary contrivances he employed; the sophistication of this audience permitted it to access and to assess his ambiguous language in order to decode the devices he employed (anonymity, allegory, satire, and a clandestine press) as a way of shielding his creation from the long arm of censors.
In order to identify Peralta's readers we must first define the colonial readership and its responses to the medium of print, the value of literary competence in colonial society, the readership's regard for a book tradition, and the struggle of a disenfranchised literate and semi-literate minority whose discourse employed the official language and systems of communication it often sought to challenge. The literate minority or "interpretive community shared an awareness of print as power," which itself invites a look at audience-oriented criticism the query constantly posed by sociologists of literature regarding who reads what, namely "How (by what codes) is the audience inscribed within the system of a work? How does the inscribed audience contribute to the work's readability? What other aspects of the work, whether formal or thematic, determine readability or intelligibility? Finally, . . . what are the codes and conventions--whether aesthetic or cultural--to which actual readers refer in trying to make sense of texts, and to which actual authors refer in facilitating or complicating, or perhaps even frustrating, the reader's sense-making activity?"
Somewhat like the satirical writings of Concolorcorvo, Caviedes, and Terralla y Landa, which were also leveled at a diverse readership, the Diálogo was intended for viceroy Villafuerte's academy members, the aristocracy, censors, the clergy, and the military, individuals who could be said to share common beliefs and values. Yet included in the text are references to how the lower classes or "the people"--part of the implied reading community--felt about the plight of the accused poet. One Academy shade, horrified that public opinion has sided with the accused poet, believes that the public, by virtue of its class status, has no right to comment on matters of literary taste that it does not understand.
Satiric distinctions found in the Diálogo served to enhance the author's message about the insidious underpinnings of censorship. In a case that seems to foreshadow Carrió de la Vandera's use of a fictitious press, publication date, and author for his Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, Peralta's anonymity and the clandestine status of his text were protected by the literary device of being printed in the office of the Cumaean Sibyl, priestess of Apollo. According to Peralta's muse, Virgil, the Sibylline Books were to be consulted by the state in national emergencies.
Peralta’s dissatisfaction with reprobatory mandates could be said to have obeyed "a moral-didactic impulse” which led him to call upon the censors' conscience and sense of justice. In essence, was it not the case that political and cultural censorship exercised by Spain in its colonies had reached proportions intolerable to the disenfranchised citizenry of Lima, not to mention the substantial masses of illiterate residents and educated youth who, not coincidentally, had sided with the defendant? Peralta divined that it was indeed the hour for Februa to perform expiatory rites for all those suspected or accused by the intolerant colonial powers of poetic transgressions, or condemned for convening literary gatherings deemed to be not in accordance with academy protocol. His was a symbolic call for a one-year truce during which wrongs could be righted. Just as Menippus was disillusioned by the sad state of affairs in the world, so too was Peralta.
What is surprising is that the Diálogo also reveals an unexpected satiric dimension to Peralta's otherwise staid demeanor in that he ridicules the institutions with which he had associated himself for most of his life. Peralta's intention was to attack the Academia Limense not as an institution but rather the perversions within the institution, much in the same way that the anticlerical aspects of Lazarillo de Tormes can be said to criticize not the Church but rather the abuses of the clergy.
Lastly, as a publishing device, anonymity and pseudonymity, frequent in Menippean satire, rely on ambiguous language and irony (veiled criticism) to avoid censors. Rhetorical prescriptions and equivocal language (puns, double-speak, idioms, slang) which I footnoted in the Diálogo were intelligible to the readership to which it was directed, a readership that was in complicity with the author's design. Peralta's readers (fellow academy members) would have had few if any problems addressing textual indeterminacy, filling in gaps that his functional, ambiguous language demanded of them, or recognizing literary discourses that framed his satire.
As a Latin scholar, Peralta was familiar with emulators of Lucian and his satirical Nekyomanteia or Dialogues of the Dead, as well as Dialogues of the Gods. He would have known Quevedo's veiled use of satire in the composition of Los sueños ("The Visions," 1627), whose seven nights of dream-voyages and dialogues concluded with Lucifer decreeing what would have currency in hell (cf. Minos' ruling in Peralta's Diálogo). Peralta's use of Lucianic dialogue is in keeping with early Renaissance forms, notably Jovianus Pontanus (1426-1503) in his Charon, which influenced Erasmus (1466-1536) in the composition of three works: "Charon," The Praise of Folly (1509), and the Colloquies (1516), and Alfonso de Valdés (1490?-1532) who, in the preface to Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón (1530), acknowledged the influence of Lucian, Erasmus, and Pontanus. Another important source for Peralta was Satyra Menippaea, Somnium. Lusus in nostri aevi Criticos ("The Menippean Satire: A Dream. A Skit Upon the Critics of Our Day," 1581) by Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), a work that shares an ending similar to Peralta's Diálogo.
As background material, I invite a colleague from the English department to address the class on contemporary examples of satire, and a colleague from Classics to address Latin and Greek examples.
**TEXT OF HANDOUT
Jerry M. Williams. Censorship and Art in Pre-Enlightenment Lima. Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's 'Diálogo de los muertos: la causa académica' [Dialogue of the Dead: The Academy Suit]. Study, facsimile edition and translation. Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1994. pp. xviii + 213.
Supporting a cast of mythological characters associated with Menippean satire, the text is a veritable biographical gallery of Lima's academicians. In brief, the Dialogue's argument is introduced by the philosopher Menippus who has been ordered by Pluto to familiarize himself with the world above. Upon his return to the underworld, he carries with him a stack of scholarly papers in one hand and a crown of laurel and an olive branch in the other. Menippus' charge is to place the documents on board a vessel bound for the Lethe. The documents represent the considerable works of present and recently deceased poets whose verses have met with some form of censorship. With the aid of Mercury, Menippus has been able to visit the courts and palaces of Lima and has prepared a compendium of his travels. At first, Menippus is not recognized by Charon, god of the river Acheron who ferries souls of the dead, because of the pedantic speech which he learned in the other world. A contest of words ensues about the state of the world, with musings about the triumphs of French and German hegemony in Spanish America, how the greatness of the Spanish monarchy has been reduced to ruin, and how its colonies have been the target of political aggression by foreign empires. Typical is this reminder that the Peru in which Peralta lived and worked was experiencing the forces of change occasioned by dynastic and political adversities: "In the Indies . . . I saw Peru. It was always full of leeches stuck to its shores, grabbing hold of its ports" (En las Indias . . . reparé el Perú continuamente lleno de sanguijuelas, que pegadas a su costa, se estaban asidas a sus puertos). Most shocking to Menippus is a case he witnessed in which one poet intentionally encouraged another to assassinate in verse the character of several Academy members. Apollo, angered by the inflammatory verses and the effrontery, orders Mercury to retrieve the academy's insignias (olive and laurel) until the person responsible for the transgression has been tried and the academy is in full possession of its former dignity. Menippus, entrusted with the two emblems along with the writs of the Academy's lawsuit, ponders the case of this literary solecism and under orders from Mercury, sets out to deliver the court papers to the tribunal of Rhadamanthys and Minos, where the accused is to be sentenced.
Here a break in the colloquy occurs, and the subtitled "dialogue of the dead" takes place. The phantoms of the very founding members of the Academy wander the Plain of Asphodel and emerge to offer testimony. They discourse on censorship, on the nature and purpose of literary academies and their place in expanding the cultural life of Lima. As plaintiffs scandalized at the turn of events, they see in this impropriety the triumph of obscenity over decorum and the opening of the academy's gates to poetic hacks. An exchange of opinions continues with commentary regarding how the aesthetic transgression could only become a cause célèbre in the narrowness of the Limana Athenas. In anticipation of a negative verdict by the court, the Marquis of Villafuerte's academy falls under public attack as one of the academies where "gossip and ignorance" reigned.
As a backdrop to the notorious "academy lawsuit," artists, commoners, and the upper echelons of society have engaged in penning verses for and against the defendant. Menippus, siding with the aristocracy, argues for requiring the author to restore the offensive verses to their primary religious character. In Minos' court, Aeacus, renowned for his justice and piety, relates that the Academy, under the protection of Apollo and Mercury, and graced by the regency of Minerva's beauty, has been defiled by the example of "vile and envious poets, lay critics, and ignoramuses" (viles y envidiosos poetas y críticos laicos). Indicative of the Dialogue's caustic humor is this assessment of the unfortunate poet in question: "He did not manage to be well born because his was not a birth but rather an abortion. As far as wit, he is from a very poor lineage of souls; and his style exposes the genealogy of his mind" (Bien puede ser de buena sangre, pero es de mala vena; por más que sea de buenos padres, no ha de conseguir ser bien nacido, porque el suyo no fue nacimiento sino aborto. Lo que es su ingenio es de muy mal linaje de almas; y su estilo descubre la genealogía de su entendimiento). The judicium, its mockery of the legal system, and its language are revealing in that they pretend to bring an end to squabbles within the Academy. Of note is that the court decree, in accordance with what has been posited about certámenes and universities as forums for literary competitions, is to be affixed, like a pasquinade, on the doors of the university.
The decision of the tribunal, read by Aeacus, is a parody of certamen rules that dictated the parameters of composition. Both the verdict of the court of law and the rules of the contest are framed in language that is peppered with legal-sounding terms and phrases in an attempt to lend greater authority to the process. The writ against Villafuerte's academy mandates that it conform to the practices exercised in similar institutions. The poet is tried in absentia with no defense, and the court's ruling is said to be based on a combination of law, reason, and good taste. The arm for enforcing the court decision is public pressure and ridicule.