A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

but also the ever-present fear of their rebellion against subjugation. All five of these instances take place during 1536 and 1605, a significant detail because it underscores Rodríguez Freile’s view of the indigenous as an essentially wretched representation of humanity that plagues his kingdom for at least an entire century.

      Histories of Latin American literature often isolate El carnero as a privileged, unique, and wonderfully ambivalent instance of a referential narrative gone astray due to what is perceived as a lack of historical rigor that results in an outburst of literary imagination. Such discursive deterioration, according to these critics, accounts for the seemingly indecisive position of El carnero inside a recognizable literary genre, which becomes a sign of its historical objectivity compromised by a supposedly negligent historian. According to this widely held belief, colonial literary narratives are not only the deliberate product of fiction writers, but also the unforeseen end result of history irresponsibly written. Such frivolity, as assigned to the historian from Santafé de Bogotá, is embraced as a fortunate mistake that brings about the modern, prestigious Latin American literary narratives. Guiseppe Bellini’s history of Latin America literature, one of the most widely available, states that Rodríguez Freile started with the sincere intention of being a historical chronicler but soon got carried away with fiction: “El carnero is precisely the product of the author’s defiance of his original plans.” Or, as literary historians Eduardo Camacho Guizado and José Miguel Oviedo have respectively put it, this is the case of “a book full of literary possibilities, of novelistic virtuosities, which does not go beyond historiography” and a “disintegration of history into tales.”

      All of these efforts to place El carnero inside the realm of a discursive literary formation have, of course, more to do with the epistemological and ideological framework that informs late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary critics than with the ones that informed Rodríguez Freile. As Walter Mignolo clarified as early as 1982, such framework has allowed literary critics and literary historians to retrieve from the past those texts which show, from the perspective of their reception, certain properties deemed today as literary, even though such properties were not present in the production of those discourses. Literary critics’ choice to consider a historical text of the past as literary today is, certainly, a legitimate decision, especially if their interest is improving the quantity and complexity of the Latin American literary canon. However, such choice, by virtue of its exclusive attention to a literary discursive formation (that in turn requires an exclusive competence in European literacy), has called excessive attention to the Spanish or Euro-American perspective and has left aside the standpoint of other subjectivities (such as the native Americans, poor mestizos, and people of African descent).

The still-dominant tendency in the study of El carnero has been to embrace the notion of the unquestionable ascendancy of Castilian language and culture in a territory that, still today, shows the cultural, social, and political clashes brewed in the colonial period. El carnero, as a text that intends to memorialize the first hundred years of the Spanish and criollo presence in the Muisca territory, and which was written in a language that only the Spanish and Euro-American elite was able to read and enjoy, it is a cultural artifact whose production was only possible within the “colonial situation” that benefited Rodríguez Freile and his ethnicity, yet caused great detriment for his “Others.” Understanding such a text today, when the land of the Muisca in which Rodríguez Freile lived and wrote is still inhabited by many Muisca descendants who deplore and resist the postmodern version of that “colonial situation,” demands an reading of El carnero not limited to its insertion into the vicissitudes of European-based literary typologies. Also very relevant to its understanding is the social and political life of its author, his cultural and material context, and his conflictive relationship with the Muisca – the very subjects that surrounded him with services and tributes during the writing of his history.

      References and Further Reading

      1 González Echeverría, Roberto (1990). Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      2 Rodríguez Freile, Juan (1961). The Conquest of New Granada. Trans. William C. Atkinson. London: Folio Society.

      3 Safford, Frank, and Palacios, Marco (2002). Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.