The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (review)

Rolena Adorno’s latest work is notable for its many ambitions. By placing arguments about the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the New World at the heart of Spanish American narrative, Adorno draws links between texts across several centuries, from the earliest discovery narratives to contemporary fiction. In the process, she provides superb readings of a variety of works from European and Amerindian traditions. That Adorno handles such broad and complex material with painstaking attention to detail and nuance makes this work of great interest to specialists in colonial Latin American literature and cultural history. Moreover, Adorno’s clear prose and nimble introductions to complex subjects will appeal to non-specialists as well.

To help manage the broad range of texts, Adorno organizes her argument around some key theoretical themes as well as a central point of literary history. Adorno argues for a reading of the works as events in themselves: “These works do not describe events; they are events, and they transcend self-reference to refer to the world outside themselves. This referentiality, however, is not historical, as in the historical truth whose referent is a past event. It is instead rhetorical and polemical, with the objective of influencing readers’ perceptions, royal policies, and social practices” (p. 4). Adorno bridges several genres by focusing on their rhetorical and narrative elements. She asserts, “as readers of narrative, not history, we ask not for verity but for verisimilitude, that is, consistency and completeness within the narrative system itself, not correspondence to the irretrievable events that stand outside it” (pp. 9–10). Throughout the book, Adorno returns to the ways colonial-era writers construct narrative consistency and how that consistency carries its own argument.

At a more practical and accessible level, Adorno organizes her readings with Las Casas as a nexus. Adorno convincingly shows how virtually every author she treats—from canonical literary figures to more obscure jurists—responds to Las Casas. Some of these connections are quite direct; she provides excellent discussions of court debates in Spain, including the famous Las Casas-Sepúlveda debate. One of the pleasures of the book is following Adorno as she reconstructs Las Casas as the nexus of colonial readers and writers through more subtle evidence, such as Garcilaso de la Vega unwittingly quoting Las Casas with admiration. Her readings in this regard are always well grounded and clear. Non-specialists will benefit from her periodization of Las Casas’ career in Chapter 3, especially the account of the evolution of his position on African slavery within the overall arc of his thought.

Although the return to Las Casas serves as a thematic guide, Adorno’s readings are not encumbered by it. Adorno weaves through several topics and authors. She begins with Guaman Poma (Chapter 2) before moving on to her full treatment of Las Casas. She then discusses various figures in the debates around the sixteenth-century Spanish court. The next three chapters (5–7) address historians of the conquest of Mexico, with particular emphasis on Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Chapter 8 analyzes literary imaginings of the Amerindian, with an insightful comparison of the editorial fates of Sahagún and Acosta, two of the great colonial “ethnographers” of Mexica culture. Chapters 9 and 10 address the captivity narratives of Gonzalo Guerrero and Cabeza de Vaca, respectively. She carefully covers the scant historical evidence of Guerrero’s existence and details the ways that Cabeza de Vaca’s story is continually reinvented. She concludes, “The lessons to be learned from these readings of the narrative written about Gonzalo Guerrero as well as the one written by Cabeza de Vaca and the retellings they have generated is that, contrary to common expectations, history, by keeping its secrets, lends itself to fictionalization” (p. 276). On that score, Adorno ends with a discussion of fictionalized places in colonial and modern narratives as well as of fictional representations of colonial figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature. [End Page...