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274   Chapter 7 Trial of the Century: Humor, Rhetoric, and the Law T here had been no firm boundary between popular and high cultures in the Spanish world before the eighteenth century, and Alonso Carrió de Lavandera’s mixture of the practical and the jocose was truly a reflection of the cultural paradigm that supposedly enlightened literati and officials had been trying to overturn since the triumph of the Bourbon Philip V in the War of the Spanish Succession. Perhaps Carrió feared that he would soon be living in a humorless century: the apex of high culture in Spanish America during the second half of the century was the eloquence of Virgil, Ovid, and their French neoclassical followers and the critical spirit of Father Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro , who did not suffer ribaldry or irony gladly. On the other hand, mock trials were not only a preferred resort of deadpan satirists in the eighteenth century; according to the European literary journals and newspapers that arrived in Lima, they were highbrow academic exercises for the ostensibly enlightened in Paris. We have seen the Francophilia of some elites, which constituted part of the material reality against which Carrió reacted in New Spain and, later, Peru. The pages that follow examine Carrió’s anecdote about the Guatemalan mock trial as an exemplum that comments on not only Bourbon court culture—including the alliance of supposedly enlightened literati and Crown officials—but also the protocols of the courts of law. This chapter begins by making the case that the public challenge to solve the 4Ps from Lima riddle and the Guatemalan mock trial at which it is solved did not spring from popular culture, or orality; they form a rhetorical construct. It goes on to demonstrate that the riddle itself closely tracks prescriptions for the invention of riddles. Both of these beginning sections present Carrió’s dialogue with classical, medieval, renaissance, baroque and Enlightenment authorities on humor. In my view, the Spaniard from Guatemala’s practical joke (“burla chistosa ”) on the peruleros should be approached as Carrió’s manifestation of what was known to previous generations of intellectuals and politicians as urbanity. The discussion continues with an examination of a number of other witty stories and sayings found in El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes—stories and sayings that could have been written two hundred years earlier and that challenged the sense of hu- Trial of the Century   275 mor that Bourbon elites were promoting for their “illuminated” century. A review of the potential literary and social stimuli for Carrió’s invention of the trial of wits in Santiago de Guatemala follows, including rhetorical prescriptions, medieval jousts, and French academic and political culture. The chapter concludes by analyzing the Guatemalan tale in light of rhetorical and legal distinctions between friendly insult and defamation of character. Crafting the Guatemalan Tale: The Rhetoric of the Risible and the Ridiculous As befits an account that details the contradictions between hegemonic discourse and material reality in eighteenth-century Spanish America, Carrió mocks lawyers and judges in the Guatemalan tale. The jocose tale was neither historical in the modern sense nor fictional in the eighteenth-century sense. The challenge and the mock trial proceedings in Santiago de Guatemala never took place, but the activities censured by either solution to the 4Ps riddle are, indeed, part of the historical record. How, then, can we make sense of the tale as a rhetorical unit and of the larger rhetorical unit in which the tale is embedded, the exposé itself? Cicero’s treatment of humor in On the Ideal Orator offers us several initial leads. Cicero was an important source for Baldassare Castiglione, whose treatment of humor was influential in renaissance Spain through Juan de Boscán’s translation , Los cuatro libros de El cortesano (1994). Castiglione’s work, I am convinced, holds many of the interpretative keys to Carrió’s sense of humor in his report and to the Guatemalan tale in particular. Antonius, one of Cicero’s interlocutors, noted that Caesar, the expert on humor, warned, “We ought take account of the people, the case, and the circumstances, so that our joking should not detract from our authority” (2001, 184). If the inspector was to maintain his authority vis-à-vis his social inferior Concolorcorvo within the text, and Postal Inspector Carrió was to maintain his authority outside of the text, within Liman society, the author Carri ó had to heed this advice, and he did. The Guatemalan tale and the...

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