Constructing the Criollo Archive

2. Supplementary Authority: The Prologues to the Bibliotheca Mexicana

45 Supplementing Authority Chapter Two Supplementing Authority The Prologues to the Bibliotheca Mexicana While the Aprilis Dialogus establishes Mexico as a utopian site for the production of knowledge, erudition, and texts, the Bibliotheca itself involves an unending quest to produce and uncover texts, and to accumulate them in a location perceived by the European intellectual subject as pure materiality, a space defined by its blackness, by an absence of discourse. Its very structure is a symptom of this problematic, since the catalogue is not of itself complete, but has to be supplemented by other documents, or palimpsests.1 Thus, the Dialogus is followed by a series of prologues in which Eguiara y Eguren plays out his attempts to overcome that image of lack. Over the course of these prologues, he articulates the protean outline of the criollo subject as it moves between manifestations of both Hispanic and indigenous cultural production.2 At the same time, through the inclusion of the prologues, especially those that deal with the pre-Hispanic cultures of the region, Eguiara y Eguren acknowledges, implicitly, the uncertainty of the grounds on which the criollo will seek to stand as synecdochic representative of the heterogeneous field of Mexican society and culture. In his first prologue, Eguiara y Eguren sets out to explain why he has embarked on his task of writing. The Bibliotheca is not presented as an unsolicited and, therefore, presumptuous display of intelligence and erudition, but as a text whose existence has been required and demanded by another, as a truth that will displace a fiction comprising a series of falsehoods. The criterion that Eguiara y Eguren invokes in his explanation of his decision to compile the Bibliotheca is not overtly one of rebellion, but of the necessity of combating ignorance, of producing legitimate knowledge.As is usually the case with colonial 46 Chapter Two writings, the text of the work is offered as a kind of service. It is the sense of duty to the Spanish Crown and to the maintenance of its good image that requires Eguiara y Eguren, as political subject, to undertake a project of such dimensions. Proceeding from the invocation of the rhetorical figure of false modesty, and in an explicit criticism of Martí, Eguiara y Eguren proceeds to state his messianic commitment to the production of knowledge in the following terms: Ad amicos eruditione una et iudicio pollentes delata re, audendum nobis esse et totis viribus connitendum est constitutum , iactaque in Deum fiducia, pro eiusdem honore ac gloria meditatam BIBLIOTHECAM excolere palamque dare, quae nationi machinatam nostrae calumniam ab decano alonensi contundat, coerceat, obterat et in auras et fumum abiciat. Etsi enim ipsam eruditi quique et prudentes viri cuiusvis nationis et gentis litteris expolitae, despicatui habituri sint, explosuri, nec sine cachinis audituri aut lecturi, verendum est tamen, ne similes aliqui Emmanueli Martino inveniantur , omnem qui eruditionem suam et doctrinam ponentes in latinae et graecae linguarum cultura, poeseos amoenitate et romanarum inscriptionum veterum eruderatione, cetera negligant omnia et nescientes prorsus notissimas doctis viris historias et res, una cum alonensi decano gradiantur sententia praeiudiciisque ducti et fuco ab eius Epistola facto, eosdem errores imbibant et evulgent. (Prólogos 59) But having communicated about our project with friends [who are] outstanding equally for their intelligence and enlightenment , we decided that we should throw ourselves into the enterprise, devote all our efforts to it and, with confidence placed in God, complete the conceived catalogue and publish it, with the goal of obliterating, stopping, flattening, and turning into air and smoke the slander raised against our nation by the dean of Alicante. We know well that any wise and erudite subject of an educated nation will look at such a slander with disdain and censure, and that he will not hear or read it without loud laughter; but it is always to be feared that other Don Manuel Martís may appear who, having entirely devoted their erudition and sleepless nights to the cultivation of Greek and Latin languages, to the charms of poetry, and to the exhumation of old Roman inscriptions, have paid little attention to the rest, and that knowing nothing at all of the histories 47 Supplementing Authority and things well-known by many learned men, might go and join the dean of Alicante in his opinion, and allowing themselves to be dragged along by the prejudices and deceptive appraisals of his letter, might end up participating in...