Constructing the Criollo Archive

5. After the Sublime: The Rationalization of Colonial Space

167 After the Sublime Chapter Five After the Sublime The Rationalization of Colonial Space In the Rusticatio Mexicana the sublime serves as a medium for thinking through the problem of mapping that which is not easily grasped and incorporated into Western semiosis. At the same time, it stages a drama through which the position of a criollo subject of literary discourse and knowledge is stabilized. Nevertheless , Landívar’s labor does not conclude with the establishment of an irreducible, natural force as the metaphysical core of a criollo patriotism. Rather, over the course of the next eight books of the Rusticatio Mexicana, he attempts to chart a variety of spheres of human activity in which the inhabitants of New Spain have developed modes of knowledge that enable them to intervene upon and assert authority over parts of their environment . In this section, they are depicted as having developed a prosperous and self-sufficient mode of existence, in accordance with sets of principles that have emerged out of the process of their interaction with American nature. The description of agricultural and industrial forms of economy in the viceroyalty serves to develop a narrative of criollo agency. In the sections that follow, I will discuss certain of the models of production and social organization that Landívar represents and analyzes in books 4 through 11 of the Rusticatio Mexicana, namely, purple dye, a beaver community, precious metals, and cattle raising.1 Dye Making: Landívar’s Demystification of the Marks of Distinction and Imperial Power The rewriting of the history of the development of solutions to the problem of how to render an unruly or unrepresentable space 168 Chapter Five meaningful and productive begins in books 4 and 5 with the depiction of dye manufacturing in Guatemala.2 The opening quartet of book 4 incorporates the reader into the work of the text, reiterating the course of the journey so far in the first person , and pointing toward the next step: Postquam Neptuni uitreos inuisimus agros, regnaque Vulcani tremulis armata fauillis, uisere fert animus roseum cum Murice Coccum, ac totum fixis oculis lustrare laborem. (Landívar 4.1–4) Now that we have looked into Neptune’s glassy territories and Vulcan’s fiery kingdoms armed with quivering embers, I am inclined to view the cochineal with the murex, and to examine all of their processing with attentive eyes. With these words Landívar begins to insert a narrative of production into the representation of a space most commonly depicted as resistant to human attempts to fit it into a framework of rationalization and manufacture. In this fashion, he initiates an attempt to show that while America may offer a natural environment filled with enormous and overwhelming features, it is not the empty space bereft of signs of human activity depicted by Buffon and Cornelius de Pauw. In place of such an image, Landívar endeavors to render visible the traces of American subjects’ interventions on their material surroundings . Significantly, the first commodity he considers is one through which colonial subjects have made a lasting impression not only on their local geography, but also on the map of human history. Landívar represents the contribution of American labor to a universalist schema with the following invocation: Tu, quae puniceo, Tritonia Virgo, colore intextos auro Regum perfundis amictus, et Lydam laetaris acu uicisse puellam; dic mihi, quae dederit regio tibi prouida fucos, atque orbem Cocco, tyrioque impleuerit Ostro; quis legat haec campis, quae mittant semina terrae, et quo nascantur regalia germina cultu. (4.5–11) You, virgin Tritonia, who dyes with purple the robes of kings, embroidered with gold, and rejoices, having surpassed the Lydian maiden with the needle, tell me which region gave 169 After the Sublime you dyes, and supplied the globe with cochineal and Tyrian purple, who gathers these in the fields, which lands provide the seeds, and by what tilling the royal shoots spring forth. Having set up a fictional intersubjective dialogue with the Roman deities Lydia and Tritonia (Athena), Landívar starts to recount a story in which the process of the production and inscription of purple dye as the universal sign of social ranking on clothing is to be traced back to an American origin. With the formulation of this rhetorical request to Tritonia, he is able to integrate the account of the dye’s elaboration into the order of universal knowledge and...