2
Republicanism, Rebellion and Empire in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana
In the first canto of the
Primera parte of
La Araucana, as Alonso de Ercilla first introduces the Araucanian people, he briefly mentions a beautiful spot where the caciques
1 A cacique is an indigenous leader or, as Ercilla defines it in the glossary with which he prefaces the Primera parte, a ‘señor de vasallos’ [feudal lord], La Araucana (Madrid, 1569), fol. π6v. gather to vote on resolutions in times of crisis:
Hácese este concilio en un gracioso
asiento de mil florestas escogido,
donde se muestra el campo más hermoso
de infinidad de flores guarnecido;
allí de un viento fresco y amoroso
los árboles se mueven con ruido,
cruzando muchas veces por el prado
un claro arroyo limpio y sosegado,
do una fresca y altísima alameda
por orden y artificio tienen puesta
en torno de la plaza y ancha rueda,
capaz de cualquier junta y grande fiesta,
que convida a descanso, y al sol veda
la entrada y paso en la enojosa siesta;
allí se oye la dulce melodía
del canto de las aves y armonía. (I. 39–40)
[This council takes place in an attractive site favoured with a thousand glades, where the countryside is at its most beautiful adorned with an infinity of flowers; there in a cool and pleasant breeze the trees rustle and sway, while criss-crossing the meadow flows a clear, clean and calm stream, where a cool and tall poplar grove through order and artifice they have planted around the plaza and broad circle, spacious enough for any assembly and great celebration, restful and inviting, which prohibits the sun from entering and passing through in the wearisome siesta; there is heard the sweet melody of the song of the birds in harmony.]
While Chile is defined at the outset as a ‘fértil provincia’ (I. 6), this is no ordinary geographical description. All its features, as a contemporary reader would instantly recognise, are highly stylised and recall similarly Arcadian landscapes in the eclogues of Garcilaso de la Vega, Ercilla’s much-admired lyric predecessor.2 For Ercilla’s self-fashioning in relation to Garcilaso, see Luis Gómez Canseco, ‘Garcilaso y la construcción de La Araucana’, forthcoming in Revista de Literatura, which identifies no fewer than six imitations of the eclogues in the passage quoted above; Felipe Valencia, ‘Las “muchas (aunque bárbaras)” voces líricas de La Araucana y la índole poética de una “historia verdadera”’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 49 (2015), 141–71; and Felipe Valencia, The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora (Lincoln, NE, 2021), pp. 57–85. An álamo is most famously inscribed with Elisa’s epitaph in Égloga III. 30. Poplar trees, native to the northern hemisphere, are rather out of place in southern Chile, but very much at home in European bucolic, where they are often inscribed by sorrowful lovers. Sandwiched in between a terse summary of the cartographical, political and military features of Arauco, and a survey of Araucanian religion and physiology, the intrusion of this pastoral idyll into what Ercilla describes in the proem as a relación (I. 3) is something of a jolt.3 The relación, originally a legal document denoting an eyewitness account, expanded into a semi-official methodical description of new lands and peoples and then into a form of history in its own right in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire: see Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 35–36. Ercilla’s opening canto mimics several features of the new genre, such as its plain style, appeal to eyewitness authority, destiny for the eyes of the king, and some of its ordering (see also Rubiés, ‘The Concept of Gentile Civilization’, p. 335). Standing out structurally as well as thematically with its (unusual) enjambment between the two stanzas, the passage signals to the reader that what is being described, for all its claims to historical truth, is nonetheless also the work of fiction. Not coincidentally, it is precisely at the point when we first enter the space in which the Araucanians gather alone and unwitnessed that we encounter this marker of a transition to the realm of the imagination; here, the poet is especially free to invent and explore. That the Araucanians’ political activity takes place in an Edenic setting, bearing none of the signs of urban or even agricultural life, might at first suggest that, for all the preceding descriptions, they live in something close to a state of nature, or at least do not constitute a fully fledged civitas. Yet this poetic excursus is not quite what it seems: one brief, postponed clarification reveals that the glade is, in fact, a feature not of nature, but of landscaping, ‘por orden y artificio […] puesta’. It is doubly the work of artifice: that of the author, and that of the Araucanians. Through their combined craftsmanship, this locus amoenus has been sculpted into a kind of plaza, the civic and political centre of every Spanish city. The Araucanians are not simply products of the natural environment but manipulate it in such a way as to make it into a political space comparable to, if altogether different from, the republics of Europe. So where does nature end and the city begin?
This little interlude is typical of the kind of surprise Ercilla delights in springing on his readers. Often, as here, such disconcerting swivels of perspective are achieved thanks to the eclectic texture of the poem, which continually navigates between genres and models of imitation, including history, tragedy,
romanzo, cartography,
relación, travel writing and lyric, as well as the existing diversity of classical and Renaissance epic. This changeability, playfulness, inventiveness and ambition is often overlooked by critics who seek to impose a stern ideological interpretation on the poem, whether that be pro- or anti-indigenous, imperialist or anti-imperialist, or a ‘fractured subjectivity’ between the two, to name some of the divides across which the poem has frequently been read.
4 Davis, Myth and Identity, p. 20, one of many critics to see Ercilla as fundamentally conflicted and ambiguous. Two of the most convinced advocates for Ercilla’s anti-imperial stance are Karina Galperin, ‘The Dido Episode in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and the Critique of Empire’, Hispanic Review, 77.1 (2009), 31–67, and Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago, 2004), the latter of whom is also one of the few to acknowledge playful elements in the poem. The opposite view is taken by, among others, Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies, and the poem’s two modern editors, Isaías Lerner and Luis Gómez Canseco, the latter of whom frequently attributes Ercilla’s ideological conformity to political and financial self-interest: see for instance ‘“Codicia fue ocasión”: Lecturas económicas de La Araucana (y una apostilla gongorina)’, in Federica Cappelli and Felice Gambin, eds, Poderoso caballero: Il denaro nella letteratura spagnola dal Medioevo ai Secoli d’Oro (Pisa, 2021), pp. 99–114. Ercilla’s own statements about his epic, in the paratexts to its several editions and in metaliterary comments within the work itself, are notoriously sparing and equivocal. In the prologue to the
Primera parte, he anticipates, in tortuously conditional phrasing, that ‘a alguno le pareciere que me muestro algo inclinado a la parte de los araucanos’ [it might just seem to some that I appear a little biased towards the Araucanians], before going on to justify his praise for them. When he gifts a custom-made copy of the 1578 printing of the first and second parts to his Habsburg patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, he gives a twist to the usual topoi of such dedications by declaring that the audaciousness of addressing such an illustrious benefactor is matched by the audaciousness of the poem itself: ‘juntándose con esto ser la historia toda de atrevimientos y osadías, se me ha pegado tanto de ella que oso poner delante de tan gran majestad este tributo’ [with the whole history being made up of audacity and daring deeds, so much of it has stuck to me that I dare to place before such a great Majesty this tribute].
5 This rare and possibly unique edition has only recently been uncovered and described by Luis Gómez Canseco, from whose article I quote: ‘Una impresión desconocida de La Araucana’, Nuevas de Indias. Anuario del CEAC, 3 (2018), 60–76 (p. 70). These ‘atrevimientos’ certainly seem to have been greeted by some early readers with surprise. Esteban de Garibay, a Basque historian, recalls how in 1570 the work was greeted with great acclaim but also with astonishment by those acquainted with the author, who was known for his extreme reserve: ‘como este caballero […] sea de tanto silencio y reposo en todos sus tratos, muchos dudaron que fuese suya’ [since this gentleman (Ercilla) is so quiet and composed in everything he does, many doubted that it could be his].
6 José Toribio Medina, ed., La Araucana: Edición del centenario ilustrada con grabados, documentos, notas históricas y bibliográficas, y una biografía del autor (Santiago de Chile, 1910–18), vol. II (1913), p. 525. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Flemish Jesuit André Schott noted in his literary encyclopedia that those who encountered
La Araucana for the first time still read it compulsively and with shock: ‘ut cum stupore legunt, sic de manibus non deponunt’ [they read with such amazement that they cannot put the book down].
7 André Schott, Hispaniae Bibliotheca, sev de Academiis ac Bibliothecis: Item Elogia et nomenclator clarorum Hispaniae Scriptorum (Frankfurt am Main, 1608), p. 322.This chapter takes the poem’s many surprises and contradictions as a starting point rather than an impasse. These are a hallmark of Ercilla’s style, and in part a consequence of the manner in which political ideas are dramatised, interrogated and made to evolve across the three parts of the epic. One of the many genres with which the poem interacts is the humanist political treatise, and in particular with one of its most provocative cultivators, Niccolò Machiavelli. There is often an assumption that Machiavelli’s ideas were taboo in Golden Age Spain, with disagreement over the extent to which they influenced the theory and practice of rulership despite official censure, but in fact the reception of his writings was complex, occurred in several stages, and responded in different ways to different aspects of his thought, as Chapter 1 sets out. The Spanish Inquisition did not include the Florentine on its Index of Prohibited Books until 1583–84, much later than its Roman counterpart, by which time his works had been circulating freely for decades. The Spanish translation of the
Discorsi by Juan Lorenzo Otevanti (1552, 1554) went through two editions, was dedicated to the future Philip II and received the explicit approval of Charles V;
8 See the recent critical edition by Keith David Howard, ‘Discursos de Nicolao Machiaveli’: Juan Lorenzo Ottevanti’s Spanish Translation of Machiavelli’s ‘Discourses on Livy’ (1552) (Tempe, AZ, 2016). the
Arte della guerra was widely disseminated both in the original Italian and in Diego de Salazar’s popular Spanish adaptation
De re militari (1536), and Puigdomènech cites evidence for the reading of the other major works at least until the 1580s and 1590s, particularly
Il principe and the
Istorie fiorentine. The ‘anti-Machiavellian moment’ in Spain, then, often highlighted in intellectual histories of the period, seems in practice to have been somewhat late in arriving, and less than uniform in its effects. Moreover, as we now know thanks to decades of rigorous historical research, Machiavelli’s thought was itself complex and multi-faceted; he gained just as much renown as ‘an exponent of a distinctive humanist tradition of classical republicanism’ as for his polemical thoughts on the art of government.
9 Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1981), p. v. Ercilla responds to both these strands, and it is partly through a Machiavellian filter that the themes of republicanism, kingship, war and empire loom so large in the poem. Needless to say, his interest is not a purely scholarly one; the poem’s fixation on such ideas always reflects on their actual implications for Spain’s dealings with its neighbours and possessions and the heterogeneous theatres of conflict with which Ercilla and his circles were directly or indirectly concerned.
Political thought in
La Araucana cannot be properly assessed unless its prolonged process of composition and publication are given due weight. With only a few, mostly very recent, exceptions, the complex material and editorial history of the poem is rarely considered in its analysis.
10 Notably Plagnard, Une épopée ibérique; Paul Firbas, ‘A Poetics of términos: Lexis and Moral Geography in Ercilla’s Expedition to the Extreme South in La Araucana’, in Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500–1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 189–204; and Miguel Martínez, ‘Writing on the Edge: The Poet, the Printer, and the Colonial Frontier in Ercilla’s La Araucana’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26.2 (2017), 132–53; all these draw, as I do, on Juan Alberto Méndez Herrera, ‘Estudio de las ediciones de La Araucana con una edición crítica de la Tercera parte’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), whose demonstration that the additions to the third part were authorial and the work of an author who continuously edited his poem was unfortunately not absorbed into subsequent scholarship. Plagnard and Gómez Canseco also bring to light further new aspects of the poem’s textual history: see Gómez Canseco, ‘Una impresión desconocida’; ‘Adiáforas y variantes de autor en La Araucana (1589–90)’, Janus, 8 (2019), 20–41; ‘Un documento inédito en torno a la impresión de la Primera, Segunda y Tercera partes de La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla (Madrid: Pedro Madrigal, 1590)’, Etiópicas. Revista de Letras Renacentistas, 15 (2019), 9–24; and ‘El retrato de Alonso de Ercilla en La Aracana. Variantes y función’, Lemir: Revista de Literatura Española Medieval y del Renacimiento, 23 (2019), 255–62. The same might be said for the fundamental differences between the three parts of the poem, published more than twenty years apart and showing an evolution in style and thought over time, perhaps in dialogue with some of its readers. Having enjoyed a privileged upbringing at court, Ercilla initially left for Peru to assist in quelling the rebellion of Francisco Hernández Girón, but was too late, and found himself fighting the indigenous rebellion in Chile almost by accident, at twenty-three years of age, with no direct experience of warfare. His stay there between 1557 and 1558 was brief, but would determine his identity for the rest of his life. While his self-representation as a soldier-poet and loyal servant of Philip II was undoubtedly a source of pride and prestige, the near-obsessive return to his memories of the Chilean war might also bear the hallmarks of a veteran still haunted by what he did and witnessed there, and by the weight placed by such figures as Fray Gil González on his conscience (see Chapter 1). Ercilla famously claimed that he had written the poem ‘en la misma guerra y en los mismos pasos y sitios, escribiendo muchas veces en cuero por falta de papel, y en pedazos de cartas’ [during the war itself, on the ground and in the same locations, often writing on leather for want of paper, and on scraps of letters] (‘Prólogo’). While certainly an example of ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, modelling himself after both the authors of earlier ‘gunpowder epics’ and Garcilaso’s own profession of arms and letters, ‘la pluma ora en la mano, ora la lanza’ [now with a pen in hand, now with a lance] (XX. 24),
11 cf. Garcilaso, Égloga III, line 40, ‘tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma’ [taking up now the sword, now the pen]; for the notion see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 2005). occupying leisure time on a campaign with writing was not unheard of, and one former comrade-in-arms did indeed testify that Ercilla was seen ‘públicamente’ writing the poem during his period of service.
12 Medina, La Araucana, vol. I (1910), p. 72.Notwithstanding these early beginnings, the
Primera parte was certainly extensively reworked by the time it appeared in print some twelve years later, albeit that this labour did nothing to assuage the author’s ‘miedo de publicarla’ [fear of publishing it], as he professes in the first sentence of the prologue. By this time, Ercilla had supplemented his experiences of the Chilean campaign with a spell in Lima in the viceroy’s guard (1559–61), spent time in Panama and the Caribbean, where he had planned to assist in crushing Lope de Aguirre’s rebellion, but found him already dead, and returned to Madrid with few means on his mother’s death in 1563. It seems that for several more years he may have harboured plans of returning to Peru,
13 Doubtless at Ercilla’s instigation, the Empress María wrote to Philip II to request ‘something in the Indies’ (an encomienda) as a reward for his service in 1564, but this never materialised: Medina, ‘Vida de Ercilla’, in La Araucana, vol. III (1917), p. 106. Despite such aspirations, the poem shows a relatively consistent hostility towards the settlers and encomenderos in Chile. but in the meantime occupied himself with other matters, such as travelling to the imperial court at Vienna to accompany his sister to meet her new husband, administering her estate when she died shortly after, and seeing the birth of his only, illegitimate, son Juan in 1568, who would die young serving in the Spanish Armada. Even before his departure to the Americas, he had travelled extensively in Philip’s entourage, on his journey through Europe to Flanders (1548–51), and then to England for the marriage to Mary Tudor in 1554, and after his return he was frequently absent from Madrid on diplomatic, military and personal business around Spain, Italy, Germany, Bohemia and Portugal. This experience of different ‘naciones’ or peoples is another important part of the authorial identity on which he capitalises in the poem and, according to many political thinkers of the era, one that would make him well equipped to advise the king to whom he dedicates his work.
Ercilla’s return to Spain saw his slow and steady rise to prestige and prosperity through a combination of royal favour, an advantageous marriage (in 1570), fortuitous inheritance and considerable profit as an informal moneylender, as well as the sensational success of the book itself. Each of the editions directly overseen by him contains his portrait, and from 1578 these proudly sport the red cross of the Order of Santiago, the stamp of the highest nobility and recognition, awarded by Philip II in 1571.
14 Gómez Canseco, ‘El retrato’. Even by 1568–69, he was in a position to be able to finance the printing of
La Araucana and retain the rights to publication for himself, and at least from 1580, he enjoyed an influential position as a royal censor responsible for
aprobaciones de libros. As a result, he was able to profit more from and maintain a much tighter control over his work than most contemporary authors.
15 See Luis Gómez Canseco, ‘Ercilla y el precio de La Araucana (1569–1632)’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, forthcoming. All the evidence suggests that he utilised this control to continuously polish and edit, introducing frequent revisions before and sometimes during the printing process in the editions of 1574 (all the
princeps copies had sold out by 1571), 1578 (in quarto and octavo), 1589 and 1590, which result in a plethora of different variants and states of the text. While the three parts of the work are not autonomous, they do represent distinct stages in its development, and one of the richest results of assessing them individually is the illumination of the complex patterns of repetition between them. As specific allusions, settings, scenarios and figures of speech recur, the reader is encouraged to compare and contrast, and thus to continually modify the conclusions drawn. In order to facilitate such an analysis, I therefore dedicate separate sub-sections to each of the poem’s parts.