Les rapports complexes de li"Historia verdadera" de Bernal Diaz avec la verite (review)

Sabine Mund calls her book "minutieuse" (p. 7), and it is indeed a succinct study. At barely one hundred pages of text, it is more of an extended essay than a monograph. Its brevity makes it no less worth reading, however. The book is provocative, methodically argued, and clearly written in a style accessible to those for whom French is not their first language.

Mund's thesis is that Bernal Díaz del Castillo, despite the claim to truth in the title of his much-read and oft-praised account of the Spanish invasion of Mexico, is "far from being objective." She argues that he often alters or deliberately invents "certain decisive acts in the Conquest of Mexico" (p. 7). This is not an altogether original thesis, in that few scholars of the Spanish conquest any longer take Díaz's account, or that of any other conquistador or chronicler, as an unfiltered and unbiased representation of events. Mund's contribution, however, lies in her detailing of Díaz's inventions and her often compelling suggestion that they were willfully made, rather than innocent embellishments of an old man writing decades after the fact, as Díaz apologists have argued.

The heart of the book is an analysis of Díaz's descriptions of Tenochtitlan and the Mexica, supposedly drawn from his personal observations during the six-month Spanish sojourn in the city in 1519-20. Influenced by her mentor, Michel Graulich, who has written extensively on Mexica culture, Mund is especially concerned with how Díaz portrays that culture. She argues that the conquistador's would-be ethnographic contribution is marred by his continual harping on what emerge in his Historia verdadera as the "essential traits" of Mexica life: human sacrifice, cannibalism, sodomy, and larceny—the first two in particular being his "privileged themes" (pp. 77 and 83).

The explanation for this "particularly negative and repetitive" (p. 89) representation of the Mexica lies in the political context within which the Historia verdadera was produced. Pointing out that Díaz was present at the 1550-51 Valladolid debate on the nature of Native Americans, Mund proposes that Díaz's principal reason for writing his account was to defend the record of the conquistadors against accusations of Spanish atrocities by Bartolomé de Las Casas. His exaggerated and distorted portrayal of the Mexica, and his claim that Cortés frequently exhorted native leaders to renounce their "abominable customs," was part of Díaz's apologia for the conquerors and his justification of their destruction of Tenochtitlan.

Mund's little book is a big indictment of Díaz and his claims of veracity and eyewitness impartiality—and a provocative jab at "the admirers of Bernal Díaz" (William Prescott is singled out), who have been blinded by the apparent "freshness of first impressions" underpinning Díaz's narrative (p. 101). The letters of Cortés are now routinely described as self-serving; perhaps it is time for Díaz admirers to admit that the Historia verdadera is no less political in its goals and no more reliable in its descriptions of native culture.

As a Belgian publication, Mund's book is unlikely to be seen at conference book displays, let alone in a North American bookstore. Nevertheless, anyone interested in Bernal Díaz or in related topics in colonial Spanish literature and the history of the Spanish conquest will find the book worth tracking down.