3 The Golden Mean of Colonial Governance in Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado

Oña had other reasons for anxiety, unspoken but no less immediate, as the first copies of Arauco domado reached the bookstores of Lima. Unlike Ercilla, he had neither the wealth nor the social standing to write for himself. He was ‘a professional writer, insofar as this was possible at the time’, meaning that his whole career, which from 1596 onwards consisted of a series of well-lined appointments in the colonial administration, depended on patronage, and this patronage was largely the product of his poetic talent and his ability to turn it to good use in the service of his patrons.2 Mario Ferreccio Podestá, prologue to his edition of Pedro de Oña, El Ignacio de Cantabria (Santiago de Chile, 1992), p. 21. Arauco domado was the product of a commission by the outgoing Viceroy García Hurtado de Mendoza (r. 1590–96), Marquis of Cañete (from 1591), to whose son the poem was dedicated and addressed. Hurtado seems to have pressured his young protégé to turn over the nineteen cantos with incredible presteza in not much more than a year (probably 1594–95), an urgency which the poet apologetically references with veiled complaint several times in the work. Born and raised in the Chilean frontier town of Angol in the heart of Arauco, Oña had lost his father, the veteran Captain Gregorio de Oña, to a Mapuche ambush the same year he was born. His early years are obscure, but by 1590 he had moved to Lima and matriculated in the University of San Marcos. Soon after, Hurtado, under whom Captain Oña had served in Chile, seems to have taken Pedro and his siblings under his wing. The new Colegio Real de San Felipe y San Marcos, a college of the university founded by the viceroy in 1592 to sponsor the studies of deserving descendants of soldiers and conquistadors, numbered Oña among its first cohort. When he graduated, Hurtado arranged for the licenciado his first position as corregidor, magistrate, of Jaén de Bracamoros, some 600 miles north of Lima.

Hurtado knew how to call in a favour, and had very clear ideas about what he wanted of Oña’s composition. Firstly, he was looking to vindicate his role as captain-general of Chile between 1557 and 1561, after the faint praise and occasional venom he had received in the Segunda and Tercera partes of La Araucana. This was partly a historiographical labour, and it is likely that Hurtado encouraged the Jesuit Bartolomé de Escobar’s contemporaneous revision of the manuscript of Pedro Mariño de Lobera’s Crónica del reino de Chile [Chronicle of the Kingdom of Chile] (c. 1595) in this light. To really accomplish the task, though, he needed an epic capable of rivalling the popularity and prestige of Ercilla’s. It is not coincidental that while Mariño’s chronicle was not published until the nineteenth century, Hurtado made sure to see Arauco domado promptly through the process of permissions and licences, financed its printing in the workshop of Antonio Ricardo, the only printer of Lima at the time, took some 60–80 copies back with him to distribute in Spain, and gained the licence for a second edition in 1599, which eventually appeared in 1605. Secondly, though, Hurtado was also looking to his juicio de residencia, the formal investigation carried out at the end of a royal official’s tenure, and to his reception and hoped-for recompense when he returned to Madrid. Two of his achievements as viceroy were particularly in need of a heroic veneer: the quelling of a rebellion in Quito against the imposition of a new royal sales tax, the alcabala, in 1592–93, and the defeat and capture of the English pirate Richard Hawkins in the bay of Atacames in 1594 by an armada dispatched from Callao under the command of Hurtado’s brother-in-law, Beltrán de Castro y de la Cueva. Both events had caused disruption in the social fabric of Peru despite their felicitous outcome, and Hurtado’s conduct in their management led to a number of accusations in the residencia. For the historical material of his narrative, Oña was to follow closely the sources vouchsafed to him by the viceroy: Mariño’s chronicle, for Hurtado’s protagonism in Chile; Pedro Balaguer de Salcedo’s Relación de lo que hizo don Beltrán de Castro, y de la Cueva […] [Account of What Don Beltrán de Castro y de la Cueva Did] (Lima, 1594), as the official account of the victory over Hawkins; a written relación Hurtado gave him concerning the alcabalas; and the viceroy’s own verbal account of his entry into Peru, as Oña would later reveal when questioned.3 José Toribio Medina, Biblioteca hispano-chilena, 1523–1817 (Amsterdam, 1965), I, p. 50.

Hurtado knew that the epic would elicit strong feelings in some quarters. He made sure to avoid sending it to the Archbishop of Lima (now Saint) Toribio de Mogrovejo, for the ecclesiastical licence which was a prerequisite for printing. Relations between the two had been strained throughout Hurtado’s tenure, whereas those with the Society of Jesus were very cordial, so the Jesuit Esteban de Ávila provided the aprobación instead. Oña, too, must have had some inkling of the controversial nature of his account of events in Quito, and made a number of alterations to those folios at Ricardo’s workshop to tone down his criticism of the rebels.4 Victoria Pehl Smith, ‘Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado: A Study and Annotated Edition Based on the Princeps Edition’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 1984), pp. 7–19. If the two hoped by these means to avoid any backlash against the poem, they were mistaken. No sooner was it printed than the dean of the ecclesiastical cabildo, Pedro Muñiz, ordered all copies to be withdrawn from circulation on the grounds of the lack of proper ecclesiastical licence and its ‘palabras y razones inciertas, malsonantes y ofensivas y escandalosas’ [untrue, obscene, offensive and scandalous words and phrases].5 Medina, Biblioteca, I, p. 48. A number of other notable figures followed, pressing their own complaints and litigations against the author, printer and booksellers. Oña was detained for several months from leaving for Jaén, but eventually escaped any charges; the copies sequestered by the cabildo, however, were as far as we know never released back onto the market.

For all these reasons – the tendency to compare the poet (usually unfavourably) with Ercilla, Oña’s readiness to lend his pen to exalt those in power, the panegyric of Hurtado’s crushing of Araucanian and quiteño rebels (the latter sometimes lauded as an early form of creole resistance to Spanish hegemony) – Arauco domado has usually been regarded in one of two ways. Critics have either dismissed the poem as a straightforwardly conformist work, reducing the nuances found in La Araucana to ‘an absolutist, Manichean text’,6 Mario Rodríguez, ‘Un caso de imaginación colonizada: “Arauco domado” de Pedro de Oña’, Acta Literaria, 6 (1981), 79–92 (p. 82). Cf. also Elide Pittarello, ‘Arauco domado de Pedro de Oña o la vía erótica de la conquista’, Dispositio, 14.36/38 (1989), 247–70; Salvador Dinamarca, Estudio del ‘Arauco domado’ de Pedro de Oña (New York, 1952), and the introduction to Gianesin’s edition. James Nicolopulos, ‘Pedro de Oña and Bernardo de Balbuena Read Ercilla’s Fitón’, Latin American Literary Review, 26.52 (1998), 100–11, attributes a similar reading to Oña’s ‘unique encomenderista perspective’ (p. 109), but such a perspective must have been more of an aspiration than a reality, since Oña’s inheritance in Angol was never recovered and his career unfolded entirely under the patronage of the central authorities of Lima. or emphasised the poet’s ‘dualidad criolla’, torn between his obligations to Hurtado and his sympathy towards Araucanians and creoles, and leading to fractures and even subversion as the narrative unfolds.7 José Antonio Mazzotti, ‘Paradojas de la épica criolla: Pedro de Oña entre la lealtad y el caos’, in Firbas, ed., Épica y colonia, pp. 231–61 (p. 232), repeated in Mazzotti, Lima fundida, p. 52. Cf. also Mazzotti, ‘El mirador criollo: Secretos de la Araucanía y la autoridad del testigo en Pedro de Oña’, Iberoromania, 58.2 (2003), 171–96, and Roberto Castillo Sandoval, ‘¿‟Una misma cosa con la vuestra”? Ercilla, Pedro de Oña y la apropiación post-colonial de la patria araucana’, Revista Iberoamericana, 61.170 (1995), 231–47. Both readings suggest a reluctant, somewhat confined poet, whose creativity and commission often pull in different directions.

In their totality, however, the paratexts of the poem tell a different story. The title page proudly declares the printer the ‘primer impresor en estos reinos’ [first printer in these kingdoms], and Arauco domado is the first substantial poem to be printed in Lima. It also contains possibly the first woodcut engraving, depicting the author proudly displaying the sash of the new Colegio Real with a caption affirming that it was made in his twenty-fifth year.8 José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Lima (1584–1824) (Santiago de Chile, 1904), I, p. lxxi. For the prefatory material, which (aside from Oña’s own prologues) is unfortunately not included in Gianesin’s edition, I use Pehl Smith. The nine laudatory poems in praise of the work and its patron by a dazzling range of local luminaries take the reader through the contours of the lettered culture of the city at the turn of the century. The verses, some of which are very accomplished, celebrate the youth of both poet and protagonist, and herald the coming of a new Golden Age in the viceroyalty. Francisco de Figueroa’s composition, for instance, adapts Horace’s Odes 3. 4 and 3. 29 to make the poet a new Virgil to García’s Augustus or Maecenas. While such emulative comparison between modernos and antiguos is standard for epic preliminaries, and the Virgilian Golden Age a commonplace of political panegyric, cumulatively these platitudes are taken a step further. Juan de Villela’s parecer on behalf of the Audiencia of Lima praises Oña’s innovations as a form of ‘natural’ poetry, at equal distance from both the Platonic model of divine inspiration and the Renaissance paradigm of imitation, verisimilitude and invention: ‘muestra su autor un natural facilidad, un caudal proprio y un no imitado artificio, con que, levantado en sus proprias fuerzas, descubre muchas lumbres de natural poesía, tanto más dignas en un hijo de estos reinos, cuanto […] tienen menos de cultura y arte’ [its author shows a natural ease, an innate abundance and an artifice without imitation, with which, raising himself up by his own strength, he reveals many rays of natural poetry, all the more worthy of a child of these kingdoms, in that they have less culture and art]. This sense of a new poetic culture recrafting a daunting, virgin landscape is captured with particular beauty in the canción of Diego de Hojeda, in a lyrical address to the rugged mountains, torrential river and dense clouds of Lima called to transform into a new Parnassus.

It is in this context that Oña’s poem is best understood. As Chapter 1 explains, the turn of the century is the key period for the emergence of a self-conscious republic of letters in and around Lima. The Academia Antártica is first named as such in Gaspar de Villarroel’s prefatory sonnet to Arauco domado, and Oña was its youthful, prodigious poster child. The poem, then, arises from and seeks to meet the broader aspirations of the emerging lettered class of Lima, a group and space in which the poet spent the formative years of his education, which claimed him as its own, and to which he constantly returned and contributed in succeeding years. In this light, both the expressions of humility in Oña’s prefaces and his later apologies for the poem’s digressions and incompleteness, which might both be read in part as a form of captatio benevolentiae, bely an explicit celebration of the novelty and ingenuity of his work. Oña’s rhyme scheme, while not completely unheard of in shorter forms of poetry, is a definite break with the Iberian epic tradition: he opts for ABBAABCC instead of ABABABCC, which as he observes gives a hesitant, halting rhythm to the stanzas. According to the prologue, this experimental choice is primarily for the sake of doing something different: ‘El nuevo modo de las octavas, por la nueva travazón de las cadencias, no fue por más que salir no de orden sino del ordinario’ [the new style of the octaves, because of the new connection between cadences, was done for nothing more than to be not out of order but out of the ordinary] (‘Prólogo’).

In structural terms, the poem also migrates some way from its original premise. After the first twelve or thirteen cantos it digresses from the wars in Chile to introduce an unusually prolonged intermezzo in an Araucanian shepherd’s hut which provides a framework for inserting accounts of the two recent events of Hurtado’s reign as prophecies. The ending is then rather abrupt, trailing off with both Chilean campaign and naval battle pending the Segunda parte amid poetic expressions of insufficiency. This arguably owes as much to the romanzo and indeed epic tradition, and to Ercilla’s precedent, as it does to any particular angst on the author’s part, and the unfulfilled promise of a second part to tell Hurtado’s feats in full is a convenient pretext for allowing the poet to be selective with his material. Such changes of direction in the poem point towards a deliberate process of generic expansion, insistently exploring the possibility of incorporating new spaces, themes, styles and genres within an already flexible epic tradition. Oña is in constant dialogue with his epic predecessors, most notably Virgil and Ercilla, but in the later cantos moves more explicitly into the terrain of lyric and bucolic.9 On Oña’s sophisticated imitative practices, see Sarissa Carneiro, ‘Arauco domado y la imitación articulada de la Eneida y La Araucana’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 69.1 (2020), 79–111. Undoubtedly aware that, following the rota Vergilii, the aspiring poet should work upwards from the humble style of pastoral to the sublime peaks of epic, he includes both within the same poem but traces the trajectory in reverse, and adds a number of other forms for good measure. The complex stylistic texture of the poem is similarly showy and experimental. Weaving together colloquialisms and cultismos, producing at times striking dissonances of form and content, it is ebullient with displays of virtuosity, from strophes composed almost entirely of anadiplosis (XII. 93), questions and exclamations (II. 38), polyptoton (XI. 6, VIII. 36) or paronomasia (VI. 4), to the moral exordia accumulating images of all kinds to illustrate an axiom.

The search for novelty is associated with Oña’s own self-fashioning as a creole poet of the frontier, a strategy also seen in other creole poets of this period. His origin in Angol is his source of authority to write about Chilean history, where Ercilla’s had been his military service and eyewitness testimony. He takes pains to justify his inclusion of words from indigenous languages, for instance, building on a tradition begun by Ercilla with the inclusion of glossaries in La Araucana, and often stresses his familiarity with Araucanian culture. No doubt he was aware that the most respected poetic treatises –Vida’s De arte poetica, Tasso’s Discorsi, Aristotle’s Poetics – all counsel the avoidance of new, foreign and rare words, as well as strange countries, gruesome descriptions and sexual euphemisms, which also feature frequently in Arauco domado. All such admonitions are blithely ignored by the debutant, whose neologisms come not from Latin, Greek or Italian, but from the outlandish languages of Mapudungun and Quechua, yet are wryly justified by an appeal to the sacrosanct poetic axioms of verisimilitude, decorum and mimesis.

Oña’s eagerness to strike out new paths in his poem is in tune with a more general optimism regarding the possibility of new achievements, of outdoing the revered poetic canon, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. In his Anotaciones a la poesía de Garcilaso [Annotations on the Poetry of Garcilaso] (1580), for instance, Fernando de Herrera affirms his own support for experimental lexical choices as part of a sustained claim that Spanish poetry, like the Castilian language, is a living organism, one still maturing and not yet at its zenith:

Reading the poem as an ambitious work which responds to a poetic climate of novelty and experimentation and engages with the contemporary hopes and anxieties of the political class of Lima places some of its political concerns into focus. Firstly, while Ercilla could take advantage of the inaccessibility of the Arauco wars to a Spanish audience to broach indirectly some immediate European concerns, the political environment of Europe is unlikely to have been more than an abstract reality for Oña himself, whereas the Chilean frontier remained a divisive and difficult theme. García Hurtado de Mendoza had, of course, to be given his due in the poem for the provisional pacification achieved in his campaign of the 1550s, but over this acknowledged success hung the shadow of his later reign. While the early correspondence from Lima to Madrid shows the viceroy in an optimistic and belligerent mood regarding the prospects of drawing a close to the Chilean conflict, on his return to Spain the situation was more precarious than before, and the court in some uncertainty over where to place the blame. Two years later, in 1598, this gathering storm would break in the massive Curalaba rebellion, which threatened to sweep away the Spanish presence in Chile altogether.

Secondly, the representation of the Indian more generally was a vexed issue for the institutions of the viceroyalty, who had agreed with the Third Council of Lima (1582–83) that the evangelisation of both new and existing territories had much still to accomplish, but had not yet established a stable consensus of opinion over past causes and future means, as the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta’s De procuranda Indorum salute [On Procuring the Salvation of the Indians] (1588) and its fraught journey towards publication makes clear.11 See Adorno, Polemics, p. 208. Thirdly, in contexts of rebellion and colonial governance more generally, the appropriate role and virtues of the viceroy, the ‘king’s living image’ as Cañeque puts it, were arguably both more pressing and less clearly defined than those of the king to the permanent inhabitants of Peru.

With these qualifications in mind, then, in this chapter I first pay attention to the representation of the Chilean campaign and the Araucanian political community. Oña establishes an intensive dialogue from the outset with Ercilla with the intention of justifying the historical (and ongoing) campaign, but also relates the conduct of the Araucanians to the contemporary problems of colonial governance in Chile and the Viceroyalty more broadly. This in turn implies a new approach towards conquest, evangelisation and acculturation which owes much to the reformist discourse represented by Acosta and the Jesuits. As the poem moves on, the two levels of this dialogue produce an apparent ambivalence in the representation of the Amerindians, which poetically broaches on the one hand the entrenched resistance, and on the other the potential promise of the colonial enterprise in the region. The chapter moves, then, to consider the poem’s hero, and the manner in which the arte militar of Chile overlaps with, evolves towards and differs from the mirror of viceregal rule, retaining a focus in both sections on the central themes of political communities, rebellion and conflict. With the guiding virtue of moderation, the Golden Mean, the poem’s attention moves towards internal governance of the república de españoles on the frontiers and within the city, a political community shown controversially to be both chronically unstable and capable of concerted demonstrations of loyalty and unity if managed with prudence.

Chapter 2 placed emphasis on the development of La Araucana within and between each of its parts, and the ways in which structural, linguistic and topical patterns of repetition signalled this. Clearly, such an analysis cannot be straightforwardly applied to a single work subject to the haste and external pressures of Oña’s. Nevertheless, patterns of repetition are of importance: if Ercilla involves the reader in a series of questions whose boundaries shift dramatically during twenty years of composition, Oña’s is a poem which employs the same structural openness to stage its own process of evolution, from an epic of the frontiers to a novel and experimental poem of the metropolis. This internal development proves, in turn, an attractive but problematic inspiration for the subsequent directions taken by the aspiring poets of Lima.