First published in Spanish in 1994, then translated by Lynda Jentsch for a 2013 English version, Antonio Cornejo Polar’s book is a beautiful and strange thing. What it offers, in the guise of literary criticism, is a reconceptualization of all of Andean history. Cornejo Polar casts his eyes back to the days before the Spanish conquest and insists on continuities between that time and the present. These continuities, he argues, have made their ragged way through time, and still persist today, contributing to a mass of heterogeneous influences that is Andean culture and literature today. The book is written in outrage, not simply for the Conquest’s legacies of violence and dehumanization, but also for Andean peoples’ internalization of the Western European idea that human subjectivities are singular and coherent—and thus the heterogeneity that underlies contemporary Andean life must be impossible, or broken.
The book is also written in hope; Cornejo Polar’s readings of Andean texts map out the specific ways that heterogeneity has endured over time, in spite of the most concerted efforts to efface or homogenize it. There is something so immense and wonderful in Cornejo Polar’s vision that, ultimately, it exceeds the bounds of his writing. I am an outsider to Andean studies and should note that before I proceed any further. But it seems to me that the book founders at the moment it begins to take flight, or more specifically, if you trace Cornejo Polar’s notion of heterogeneity back to the root, what you find is a binary, a simplistic notion of orality opposed to literacy. I will suggest that this binary obscures, but also gestures towards, a world of difference that Cornejo Polar has not yet put into words. I want to begin, though, with a consideration of what and how he reads.
In his first chapter, Cornejo Polar looks at the “most visible beginning of the heterogeneity” (14), the historical encounter between Atahuallpa, the emperor of the Incan empire, and Father Vicente Valverde, a Spanish Dominican friar, in Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. Their dialogue is recorded in Spanish-language chronicles, indigenous “theatrical” texts, and ritual dances, and it concerns Atahuallpa’s confrontation with a book—a breviary that Valverde offers him as an overture to Christian conversion. But Atahuallpa has never seen a book before. He cannot open it, or in some versions seeks to converse with it as if it were another human being, and ultimately he throws it to the ground. Within Spanish ideologies of the time, this action is equivalent to rejecting God, and justifies Pizarro’s execution of Atahuallpa. And so the stories generally end. Cornejo Polar traces how, over time and tellings, the event acquired for indigenous peoples a sense of “Pan-Andean tragedy” (31), even as local tellers increasingly incorporated Spanish-influenced ideologies of writing: many festival re-enactments of the event have come to mock Atahuallpa’s ignorance of alphabetic text, while still grieving his death (51). At the same time, Cornejo Polar notes the decisive role of material medium: renditions of the incident in prose are bound to their own existent written structures and end, always, with Atahuallpa’s demise; however, danced versions have a greater capacity for open-endedness, and may sometimes conclude with Pizarro’s death instead (44-45).
In the second chapter, Cornejo Polar moves to a consideration of nineteenth-century works of literature, which, he argues, were bent on establishing an imagined community of indigenous peoples—a community so heterogeneous that only a violently homogenizing rhetoric could hold it together. Yet even in the most normative early novels, there are occasional irruptions of difference, or acts of suturing so explicit that they reveal their own heterogeneous origins. From here, Cornejo Polar moves to a consideration (in chapter 3) of more recent authorial attempts to bring heterogeneity to the surface of literary writing. Yet, he maintains, such attempts will always be incomplete because they focus on a conflict between languages (Quechua and Spanish) when the central difference is in fact between orality and literacy, a problem “deeper than bi- or multilingualism and diglossia in that it affects the very materiality of discourse” (13). The book concludes with another image, this one from a poem by César Vallejo, in which an independence fighter uses his finger, a “flesh quill,” to “write in the air” (166-67). The poem thus embodies the persistence of heterogeneity, describing a real person battling to let orality and literacy coexist in his life.
Cornejo Polar’s understanding of orality and literacy derives from Walter Ong’s “psychodynamics of orality,” a romantic conceptualization of “pre-literate” ways of being (1982; see chapter 3). Implicit in the conceptualization is the notion that human memory emerges through uses of speech and writing, and so, in the days before written texts, people experienced their lives and interactions in different temporal ways. Cornejo Polar latches onto this idea, yet, in applying the thinking to Andean life and literature, makes the same mistake I identify in Ong: both focus on the experiential implications of material differences between speech and written text, and overlook the ways cultural ideology may contribute to these differences. It seems pretty clear, however, that the version of alphabetic literacy at play in the Andes evolved over the course of Spanish and indigenous contact, as the Spanish consolidated their understanding of “writing” and “books” in opposition to the modes of inscription they found in the New World (Mignolo 1994), and locals increasingly relied on this vocabulary to mark and explain inequalities between themselves and the Spanish (Mannheim 1998; Rappaport 1994). From this perspective, the tale of Atahuallpa becomes an image not simply of heterogeneous cultural bits, but of ongoing, painful, mutually transformative dialogues among those bits.
Yet Cornejo Polar’s adherence to Ongian orality/literacy does not merely obscure the historical production of this binary in the Andes; it also elides pre-Hispanic forms of writing. Here I point to Mesoamerican traditions of pictographic, ideographic, and logographic inscription (Boone 1994; Monaghan 1990); to longstanding uses of khipus, knotted strings that served a record-keeping function for the Incan empire (Quilter and Urton 2002; Salomon and Niño-Murcia 2004, 2011); and to syntheses of the aforesaid with Spanish understandings of written text (Mannheim 2015). As inscription systems with iconic components and complex (or absent) relations with spoken language, these traditions have enormous potential for Cornejo Polar’s argument because they demand a re-evaluation of writing itself, and gesture to heterogeneous cultural practices that predated Spanish contact and persisted, in various forms, after it. What a shame that Cornejo Polar fails to recognize them.
But in the end, the book’s re-evaluation of Andean history sweeps these oversights into its movement, and gestures to ways of being that emerge from multiple, co-existent usages of text, tied to differential experiences of time. In pursuing the analysis, Cornejo Polar asks brave (if not always explicit) questions about the relations between textuality and memory. What is it, precisely, that different forms of text—from orally transmitted tales to novels to khipus—have in common, and how are they different? How do these similarities and differences require and constrain particular forms of memory, experiences of time, and ways of being? And how, then, might the Conquest be understood in terms of shifting textual usage? Cornejo Polar offers no clear answers. Yet this, I think, is the heterogeneity he ultimately is after, and I am grateful for his questions.
Works Cited
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1994. “Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge.” In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, 3–26. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mannheim, Bruce. 1998. “A Nation Surrounded.” In Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins, 383–420. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.
__________. 2015. “What Kind of Text Is Guaman Poma’s Warikza Arawi?” In The Copenhagen Guaman Poma Colloquium, edited by Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup. Copenhagen: Musuem Tusculanum Press.
Mignolo, Walter D. 1994. “Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World.” In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, 220–70. Durham: Duke University Press.
Monaghan, John. 1990. “Sacrifice, Death, and the Origins of Agriculture in the Codex Vienna.” American Antiquity 55:559–69.
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy?: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge.
Quilter, Jeffrey, and Gary Urton, eds. 2002. Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rappaport, Joanne. 1994. “Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the Colonial Period.” In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, 271–91. Durham: Duke University Press.
Salomon, Frank, and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. 2004. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham: Duke University Press.
__________. 2011. The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village’s Way with Writing. Durham: Duke University Press.
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[Review length: 1474 words • Review posted on December 8, 2015]