Subject and Carnivalesque in Colonial Satire: A Study of Juan del Valle y Caviedes’s “Coloquio Entre una Vieja y Periquillo a una Procesión Celebrada en Esta Ciudad”

SUBJECT AND CARNIVALESQUE IN COLONIAL SATIRE: A STUDY OF JUAN DEL VALLE Y CAVIEDES'S "COLOQUIO ENTRE UNA VIEJA Y PERIQUILLO A UNA PROCESIÓN CELEBRADA EN ESTA CIUDAD" Antony Higgins University of New Mexico T his article offers a critique of sorne of the presuppositions which inform scholarship on colonialSpanishAmerican satire. Specifically, I attempt to question an assumption that 1take to inform much of that scholarship, namely the notion that satire is a discourse that endlessly fractures and subverts the hierarchies and norms out of which the order of viceregal societies was constructed. By focusing on the work of the seventeenth -century satirist of Lima society, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, 1investigate the hypothesis that an apparently critica! discourse might simultaneously function to re-stabilize the coordinates of the power structure of viceregal Peru, even as it seems to question and fragment them. In order to develop this line of analysis 1offer a reading of Caviedes's poem "Coloquio entre una vieja y Periquillo a una procesión celebrada en esta ciudad," seeking to demonstrate how this work brings to light sorne of the problems involved in reading colonial Spanish American satire.1 I argue that Caviedes's poem plays out a crisis of white letrado subjectivity in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. 1 conceive of Caviedes as an individual who is unable to write from the position of coherence available within the framework of the "lettered city" or "republic of letters," but who has to work within a broader and more unstable social sphere where the twin dynamics of the market and of mestizaje are increasingly disrupting the structure of a society organized, from its inception in the middle of the sixteenth century, around the ordering center of white male intellectual subjectivity.2 I. Critica! Articulations of Parody and Satire. Although there are a wide variety of definitions of the terms parody and satire, I will base my own discussion on the following commonly accepted distinction: I regard satlre as a mode in which a writer questions the norms, values, and inconsistencies of a given social order, while the work CALÍOPE Vol. III No. 2 (1997): pages 72-85 w Antony Higgins 0.J 73 of parody is primarily oriented towards the rearticulation of the mechanisms of objects more readily identified as texts, be they specific genres, styles, linguistic or symbolic systems.3 At the same time, however, 1allow for the combination and confluence of the two in any gi~n work, particularly in view of the shifts in conceptions of the social sphere produced by semiotics, and structuralist, and post-structuralist thought. Recent studies in both Hispanism and the broad field of literary studies have sought to reappraise the contributions of parodie and satirical writings to the history of literatures in western Europe and the Americas. Historically accorded a low position within classical hierarchies of genres and styles, satire has been recuperated for playing an important role in the configuration of both popular and erudite literary, forms, particularly in Bakhtin's work on medieval and Renaissance folk culture.4 Likewise, the status and significance for literary history of parody, often seen as a purely destructive and parasitic mode of writing, have been the subject of revisionist critica! readings, oriented towards consideration of different writers ' exploitation of that genre as a form of meta-literature, a medium in which to reinvent and retheorize the stylistic and structural features of canonical genres or individual works.5 In the field of Spanish American colonial literary studies satire and parody have also become more common objects of study, particularly for the roles these genres have played in the articulation of discourses which critique and transgress the established order of viceregal societies. Of particular importancehave been the studies realized by Lúcia Helena Castigan and Julie Greer Johnson on the canon of Spanish American and Brazilian satirical writing produced during the colonial period. Johnson's book, in particular, reconstructs a teleological narrative of counter-hegemonic texts written from the perspectives of individuals relegated to the lower echelons of the hierarchies of the colonial regime due to their gender or race (xvii, 155-63). Her account of the genre's trajectory in the...