CHAPTER 1

Voice and the Written Wordin the Cajamarca "Dialogue"

Understanding Latin American literature as a complex systemof multifaceted conflicts and contradictions carries a principleobligation: to examine the basic duality of literature's structuralmechanisms, that is, orality and writing. This problem precedesand is deeper than bi- or multilingualism and diglossia in that itaffects the very materiality of discourse.

In literary production, orality and writing have their own codesand histories and are based on two strongly differentiated rationalities,with a wide and complicated zone of interactions separatingthem. In Latin America this zone is exceptionally fluidand complex, especially if one rightly assumes that its literature isnot solely the one that the lettered elite write in Spanish or otherEuropean languages, and the one that can become quite unintelligibleif its links with orality are severed.

It is certainly possible to distinguish the many shapes that therelationship between oral and written literature may take, severalof which have been treated exhaustively by philologists, especiallythe conversion of oral discourse into written texts (for example,Homeric poetry). In other cases, however, as in Amerindian literatures,classical philological instruments seem to be insufficient.

THE CAJAMARCA CHRONICLE

I would like to first examine what could be called "ground zero"of this interaction, or the point at which orality and writing donot merely reveal their differences but evidence their mutualestrangement and their reciprocal, aggressive repulsion. This point of frictionis documented and, in the case of Andean history, even has a concretedate, setting, and cast of characters. I am referring to the "dialogue" betweenAtahuallpa Inca and Father Vicente Valverde in Cajamarca on theafternoon of November 16, 1532.

This is not the origin of our literature, which goes back to the lengthyhistory lived and breathed long before the conquest, but it is the mostvisible beginning of the heterogeneity that has characterized Peruvian,Andean, and, in large part, Latin American literary production ever since.Obviously in other areas of the Americas there are situations similar to theone acted out by Atahuallpa and Valverde in Cajamarca.

For my purposes let us put aside for the moment the commentaries concerningthe inevitable miscommunication between two people who speakdifferent languages. Neither is it very helpful to analyze the job well orpoorly done by Felipillo (or Martinillo), one of the first interpreters utilizedby the conquistadors. My focus is on the clash between orality, formalizedhere by the supreme voice of the Inca, and writing, which in thiscase becomes incarnate in the book of the West, the Bible, or a text derivedfrom it, all of which sets in motion an extensive and complicated series ofacts and repercussions.

I shall first describe the event according to the chronicles, then brieflyexamine its vestiges in several ritual dances and songs and, more thoroughly,in "theatrical" texts that, despite their common theme being Atahuallpa'sexecution, consistently include sporadic references to the topic Iintend to study. Nevertheless I need to clarify why I give such importanceto an event that in principle seems to have no other relationship to literaturesave that it has been the point of reference for many chronicles andother, later texts.

At issue is a broad concept of literature that assumes a complete circuitof literary production, including the reception of the message andattempts to explain the problematics of orality, to mention just two basicpoints. But above all it has to do with something much more importantthat to this day continues to leave its mark on the richly textured fabricof our written culture and the whole of social life in Latin America: thehistoric destiny of two ways of thinking that from their first encounterrepelled each other because of the very linguistic material in which theywere formalized. This presages not only a series of more profound and dramaticconfrontations, but also the complexity of processes of transculturaloverlapping. With the Cajamarca "dialogue" both the great discourses thatfor five centuries have expressed and constituted the abysmal condition ofthis part of the world and the inevitable dissonances and contradictionsamong the various literatures produced here are in nuce.

In other words, Valverde's and Atahuallpa's gestures and words may notbe "literature," but they compromise its very material on the decisive levelthat distinguishes voice from written word, thereby constituting the originof a complex literary institutionality, fragmented in its own base. It couldbe said that they allow for the interplay of several discourses, especiallythe Bible (which, even in its sweeping universality, also seems to relate tothe intertext peculiar to Andean literature), the longstanding discourseof imperial Spain, and the one that from then on came to be globalized as"Indian" (obviating even more Andean ethnic differences) with its signifiersof defeat, resistance, and revenge. Together they contain the seedbedof a never-ending story.

These gestures and words serve to condense the historical-symbolicmemory of the two sides of the conflict and therefore are so frequentlyreproduced in the imaginaries of their literatures. At the same time theyconstitute the emblem of the tenacious Latin American preoccupation thatthe pertinence (or not) of the language with which it represents itself includesthe image of the other.

There are few testimonies of those present at Cajamarca. All are, obviously,from the Spanish side. As cases in point, I offer these: "When Atabalivahad advanced to the center of the open space, he stopped, and a DominicanFriar, who was with the Governor, came forward to tell him, on thepart of the Governor, that he waited for him in his lodging, and that he wassent to speak with him. The Friar then told Atabaliva that he was a Priest,and that he was sent there to teach the things of the Faith, if they shoulddesire to be Christians. He showed Atabaliva a book that he carried in hishands, and told him that that book contained the things of God. Atabalivaasked for the book, and threw it on the ground, saying: — 'I will not leavethis place until you have restored all that you have taken in my land. I knowwell who you are, and...