Gómez Suárez de Figueroa was born in Cuzco in 1539 and died in Spain in 1616. His mother was the Inca princess Chimpu Ocllo, later baptized as Isabel Suárez, and his father was the captain and nobleman Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega. How Gómez Suárez de Figueroa became a canonical “author” in the Spanish language and better known as Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, is a fascinating story of self–fashioning that involves the most amazing journey through personal and collective memory, the Renaissance, with its revival of Greco–Roman culture, and the will to recover the Inca past for posterity. Garcilaso has been fortunate with his critics. With the exception of a nineteenth–century Spanish critic who failed to appreciate Garcilaso’s ethnographic presentation of the Inca empire, and the ethnohistorian María Rostworowski, most of his biographers and analysts have described and brought out the complexity, subtle maneuverings, and intelligence of the Inca’s task with satisfied admiration.
His attempt, well into the sixteenth century, to write an account of the Inca empire that corrected and contradicted official Spanish historiography, was a monumental project for one man alone. El Inca: Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega by John Grier Varner (1968) still stands as the best biography and overall study of the political and intellectual milieu in which Garcilaso had to move in order to safeguard his person, arrange for conditions favorable to becoming an intellectual, and see to the possibility of writing and being published. He changed his name several times and each time the changes coincided with a new stage of consciousness and self–assurance. From the time of his birth the rights and the social and economic standing of mestizos had diminished rapidly. Officers of the crown considered them dangerous rivals, treacherous allies, and racially inferior (Mazzotti, 1996: 22–3). Mestizos did not fare any better with the Indians. In fact Guamán Poma, for a set of very complicated reasons that included wanting to stop the sexual practices that engendered mestizos, almost always illegally, recommended that the existing mestizos move to the Spanish towns. Garcilaso wrote to suture the split and the trauma that the conquest brought about. But he never rejected his father. Instead he sought to clear his name of accusations made about his conduct in one of the many battles of the civil war in which Spaniards changed sides easily.
For Garcilaso, mestizaje did not mean hybridity, as some recent commentators have wanted to label his efforts. Neither did it mean syncretism. Nor did it mean writing in between two worlds as if dangling from the edges that separated them. One of the purposes of his writing was to bring the two worlds together, in a dynamic of double valence, to create an epistemological and aesthetic space where double voicing was possible. The Inca in Spain practiced a doubled consciousness of wholeness rather than hybridity of dismemberment and paranoia (Castro–Klaren, 1999). From an Andean perspective, in love with the concept of duality, he sought complimentary and reciprocity. The binary of the duality of the khipu can also be seen to inspire the Inca’s efforts to find a harmonious “new world.” Each of the parts was to remain whole, with a logic of its own, and come together in a dance of complementarity. In a telling gesture of his Andean search for complementarity and reciprocity he translated from the Italian (1590) the Dialoghi di Amore by Leon Hebreo (1535), for in this piece from the “Old World” he found not so much inspiration as confirmation for the development of his capacities as a Andean writer and for his philosophical and aesthetic of complementarity.
As an illegitimate mestizo in Spain and despite his Jesuit connections, Garcilaso needed to authorize himself as a subject of knowledge in order to intervene in the ongoing discourse on the Indies. Any cursory reading of the Royal Commentaries yields an ample list of the many contemporary and ancient authors that Garcilaso read in order to prepare for his work. Further confirmation of his firm grasp of issues and debates came to light when in 1948 José Durand found the Inca’s last will. It included a list of the books he owned, which was considerable, given the size of private libraries at the time (Durand, 1963). The Inca had clearly immersed himself in the Italian Renaissance, the Christian theological and philosophical tradition, the rediscovery of Greek and Roman culture, and the literature and political thought of his Spanish contemporaries. He had difficulties in assembling an equally rich bank of sources for his writing on the Incas. Garcilaso relied chiefly on his memory, the memory of friends in Peru who responded to his letters and answered his queries, the chronicle authored by Cieza de Leon, and the great book that the Jesuit Blas Valera was writing in Latin on Inca history. The Inca seems to have incorporated this massive treatise wholesale into his commentaries. Beyond the efforts to recover the memory of the Inca world, the chief move that Garcilaso made was to claim greater and better authority over all Spanish theologians and historians, based on his knowledge of Quechua, his free access to the amautas on his mother’s side of the family, and his persistent demonstration of errors incurred by the Spaniards owing to their ignorance of Quechua and their misunderstanding of Andean concepts which only a thorough knowledge of the language could prevent. With one single move, Garcilaso authorized himself and deauthorized most of the detractors of the Indians, something that Las Casas would have dearly loved to do, but could not do because he never learned any Indian languages. Garcilaso slyly argued that not knowing Quechua and wanting to understand Andean culture was like not knowing Hebrew and wanting to understand the Bible.
Margarita Zamora (1988) has written at length on how Garcilaso deployed his savvy understanding of philology to institute Quechua as a language of knowledge comparable only to Latin or even Hebrew in the Christian tradition of exegesis. Antonio Mazzotti and other critics have pointed out that the majority of studies on the Inca concentrate on the humanist aspects that allow for the configuration of his works, an emphasis which does not allow for an analysis of the many features of both content and style that resist the European colored lenses. In Coros Mestizos del Inca Garcilaso (1996) he seeks to remedy the situation. He posits a reading of Garcilaso in which Quechua narrative modes and understanding of the past, concepts of time and subject, operate as a kind of subtext (28–9). Mazzotti brings out in Garcilaso the presence of the conventions of Quechua oral narrative and especially the discursive tradition of the Cuzco court and all the symbolism that such choral tradition implies (31–2). This kind of interdisciplinary study surpasses the more narrowly conceived literary and philological analysis. It brings to bear the information and methods made available by iconography, archeology, and ethnohistory in order to detect in the Inca’s text more than sheer information conveyed by the Cuzco arts of memory. Studies of post–conquest textualization of Andean memory in alphabetic texts and iconographic structures show that Garcilaso’s change of names owes as much to Spanish costumes of the time as to Andean practices of naming according to life stages. Christian Fernández (2004) analyses in detail Garcilaso’s coat of arms and shows how Garcilaso redeploys the European conventions of fields and arrangement of totems in order to represent his filiations with the Andean Amaru (97–111), the symbol of his panaca (37).
Garcilaso wrote at the time when the erasure of Amerindian memory and knowledges was already advanced. He wanted to stem the wave of forgetting that the claims of alphabetic writing, as the only site of memory, had already spread over the Amerindians’ sense of the meaning of their cultures. Drawing on the organizing principles of Roman historians, in chapter after chapter, peppered with seemingly arbitrary digressions, Garcilaso places the stones that together amount to the rebuilding of the Inca empire and way of life. He systematically moves from the location of the Andes in a world that is one and a human kind that is one, to the particulars of the Andean landscape, the agricultural system, social organization, war, legal, religious, and communications systems. Garcilaso stages his narrative rhetoric in order to assure his reader of the veracity of the facts and events presented and to distinguish his history from fables and fictions (Fernández, 2004: 32; Mignolo, 1982). Mignolo has pointed out that the Inca makes clear that he is in charge of writing history, that is to say, he organizes and gives meaning to the materials while his sources simply tell the story (relato) as best they remember (90).
The fact that he entitled his book “commentaries” and not history has always puzzled his readers. It has been said that