The attention of readers of Armas antárticas has understandably been captured primarily by the poem’s pirates, the larger-than-life robbers, explorers and would-be conquistadors who abruptly irrupt into the Antarctic space in the third canto and remain there until the conclusion. Many other strands of the poet’s meandering narrative derive something of their significance from the context of this threat. The effective marginalisation of the dangers of restive frontiers, unassimilated Amerindians and internal unrest allow the work’s urgent advocation of defence to be concentrated almost exclusively on the vulnerable Pacific coast, a lifelong preoccupation of the writer himself. What has largely failed to attract analysis is that the English and Dutch incursions fit into a much broader pattern of repetitions exploring the possibilities of conquest, and the desires which motivate it. If the poem’s starting point is the providential conquest of Peru, its ending with the starving misery of the pious settlers of the Strait plants the reader in a starkly different world. While Arauco domado follows the ‘middle way’ of Acosta and the Jesuits in promoting the smaller-scale, minimally violent, missionary-oriented entradas as a model for incorporating the stubborn remnants of Amerindian resistance into the Christian polity, Miramontes writes at a time when the American Jesuits themselves openly questioned the justification of any further offences on the frontiers. In the midst of the controversies over the guerra defensiva from Tucumán and Lima to Madrid, his poem presents a scenario in which such future conquests, whether the greed-fuelled ambitions of the English, the idealistic attempts to possess the new world of the South, or the persistent war of attrition against the indios de guerra, are manifestations of fruitless, tragic and sometimes perverse desire. For all its militaristic emphasis, there is paradoxically a moderately pacifist strain in his work. The wars which follow the conversion of the Inca Empire are clearly justified only when they are defensive, as in his view were those waged against piracy, and the poem consistently opts, with Erasmus, for improving rather than increasing the realm. Indeed, the programmatic speech of his ‘sagaz viejo’ has parallels with the theocentric pacifism emerging in certain other branches of discourse in Lima during this period, from the Christology of Diego de Hojeda’s La Christiada (1607) to the occasional expansiveness of Luis de Valdivia’s memoranda, and is a theme which merits further investigation.
Nonetheless, for all its religious orthodoxy, Armas antárticas presents the field of conflict largely as a theatre in which fortune looms larger than Providence. Once devoid of the epic teleology of prophecy and prodigy, the supernatural becomes a sphere of mystery, whose influence on the course of events remains inscrutable to the human observer. As a result, the focus falls back onto the human, empirical, political community which has been at the heart of all the poems addressed in this book. While Ercilla shows a fascination with the republican community of the other, and Oña presents a viceroy-general who, for all the absolute reach of his majesty, acts in a civic capacity towards his Spanish subjects, Miramontes combines both preoccupations in his evolving portrayal of the Spanish American urban community. The image of the viceroy is more holistic than in any of his predecessors, and at the same time more limited. A static, localised figure, understood in civic rather than global or sacral terms, his constant, defensive preparation is itself portrayed as a heroic virtue, while the more conventional heroism of active strategy, military valour and ethical discipline is the property of the experienced generals and soldiery themselves.
In civic as well as military affairs, if the government of the viceroyalty is regal in name, it tends to be mixed in practice. For all its focus on Lima, the society of the viceroyalty is nevertheless centrifugal and fragmented, consisting of many interconnected urban political communities. This is no longer the oligarchic republicanism which so fascinated Ercilla, but rather a constellation of polities operating informally but effectively through the prudent deliberations of their senior citizens. In this model, practical experience reigns supreme, and the spectre of rebellion and dissent is definitively dispelled. When these local initiatives cooperate with the necessary foresight of the central authority in Lima, the internal harmony and effective defence of the realm are secured, but this is an ideal rarely attained fully during the course of the poem. If unrest is symbolically banished from the bounds of the city, it persists, a challenge to conscience and to consciousness, in the still unintegrated alternative racial polities displaced to its ill-defined peripheries, joined to the centre by the sea over which control can never be fully established. The poem closes with both these and the corsairs temporarily at bay, but still mobile, on the shifting margins of the Antarctic world. As in La Araucana and Arauco domado, its future remains open.
Conclusion
‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by the gods’, Georg Lukács famously writes in
The Theory of the Novel.
1 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. by Anna Bostock (London, 1971), pp. 88. Lukács, and another great theorist of the modern novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, present a picture of the epic genre that has had a long afterlife in the study of both forms. For Bakhtin, the epic is set in the ‘absolute past’; its subject is based on tradition rather than personal experience, and ‘an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is, from the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives’.
2 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, TX, 1981), p. 13.The world of colonial conflicts into which the authors of this book have taken us is not, precisely, one abandoned by the gods. An isolated Marian apparition in the Araucanian assault on La Imperial in La Araucana, the demonic council and prophetic voices of Arauco domado, the prodigies and miracles which bring about the ‘era de la clemencia’ in Armas antárticas, all act as reminders of the ongoing intervention of Providence in human affairs. There are indications of a supernatural design in history, but, on the whole, the bards do not presume to inquire into it. If, for Oña, the divide between the forces of the devil and those of Christianity is stark, the cosmic schema nevertheless leaves the impression of a post-facto, somewhat decorative explanation for successes and failures already thoroughly explained by more ordinary means. For Ercilla and Miramontes, the slender threads connecting fortune, fate and Providence are largely imperceptible to the human observer. Rarely in these poems is the reader granted a ‘descent from heaven’, or a view from above, and when such a vision is granted, as on the dizzy heights over Saint-Quentin, it tends to raise more questions than answers.
The gaze of these works is, instead, consistently earth-bound, fixated far less on the relationship between man and God than on those between the diversity of human communities across a globe whose histories felt increasingly connected. Ethics, politics, and warfare are in the poems very human creations. This gives them an open-endedness, a radical contingency, which makes the mirror-images of history the most lucid way of exploring them. Nor is this the Providential model of history often associated with writings on the Spanish Empire, but rather the humanist art and instrument of political education, an empirical testing ground on which to dramatise problematic ideas. If they are exemplary, this is less for making manifest a transcendental moral typology than for demonstrating, on pragmatic grounds, how the successes and failures of peoples act as an analogy to the present.
The past is, for the most part, a recent one in these poems, and even when it is remote in time, a series of uncanny reflections on the present collapse any comfortable sense of distance. Metapoetic interventions make clear that the story might be told in many different ways; there is nothing absolute about it. Personal experience intrudes paradigmatically and unforgettably in the veteran Ercilla’s memories of the violence he witnessed at the other side of the world in his youth, and even when this personal note is more muted, as in Miramontes, there is still a sense that the authors have a stake in the ongoing conflicts. There is an urgency in their reflections on the rise and – more often – the fall of political communities despite their poetic indirectness, or perhaps more so, because of the emotional weight and vividness with which the epic invests them.
Patterns of repetition have emerged insistently in this study as a means of showing how political ideas develop in this new branch of the epic tradition, and it is worth bringing together now some of the most consistent threads. The poems are, to some extent, mirrors of princes, viceroys and commanders, and, true to convention, they often frame their discussion of governance in terms of the moral virtues. These virtues are primarily assessed, however, on empirical and pragmatic grounds, in terms of their political effectiveness. For Ercilla, the delicate balance of clemency and justice culminates in the paradoxical situation of an enemy whose crimes loudly demand the latter, but in which the former is the only viable path to peace. Oña and Miramontes restore the focus to more orthodox, cardinal virtues, but put them to work in very distinctive, and surprisingly adaptable, ways.
Even more striking is the evolution of the political communities represented in the three poems. Time and again, we have seen how what appear at first to be simple imitations of established motifs take an unexpected turn, setting up and then challenging the reader’s expectations about the peoples they represent. Thus, the Araucanians of the southern frontier, the island-dwellers of a third New World, and the Carthaginians of Dido become a series of paradoxical republics with parallels to the collectives at odds with Spain in Europe. Their counterparts in Arauco domado regress to the familiar tropes of barbarity, yet are also perversely courtly and pliable. The Amerindians of Miramontes divide into an intractable, but redeemable, frontier and a politic, but separate, centre, while it is instead the cimarrones who present a novel and disconcerting set of political and ethical dilemmas. Republicanism remains an important theme throughout: if this loses its distinctively humanist and Machiavellian framework in the later poetry of Lima, models of mixed governance within the urban environment are nevertheless persistently explored in relation to the república de españoles, and its consensual, viceregal head, a kind of ‘golden mean’ adapted to its setting.
Almost invariably, these ideas emerge and are placed under productive strain only in response to the threat or fact of violent conflict, and however aestheticised it may be, the presence of violence is never a mere device. While the wars against piracy and rebellion or on the frontier loom large in contemporary discourse, with their diffuse battlegrounds, ill-defined parties and absent sovereigns they tend to fall between the ethical codes and prescriptions elaborated by the scholastic tradition in the first half of the sixteenth century. The imaginative strategies harnessed to explore the ethical consequences of a particular conduct in war are, therefore, an attempt to shape a response to challenges which were immediate but as yet under-articulated.
While pacifism is arguably an overstatement for the pessimism towards expansive conflict often apparent in the works, these texts do challenge scholars to broaden their thinking about the possible diversity of attitudes towards warfare during this period, even within military circles. To differing extents, the poems exhibit a distinctive strain of scepticism towards imperial expansion. Such scepticism is evinced by differing means – whether a simple silence on the issue, an interlocking series of narratives of unrequited desire, or exemplary patterns of aggression and decline – but in each case, yet again, it appears to respond less to abstract conviction than to contemporary and local concerns.
While
Arauco domado and
Armas antárticas are part of the formative years of the lettered republic of Lima, it is equally clear that they are the product of a particular historical moment. The term
antártico, with its connotations of strangeness and erudition, familiarity and difference, is vital to both these poems. It aptly reflects the atmosphere of novelty, innovation and experimentation of the poetry of the turn of the century, and the civic but outward-facing vantage point of the global Peruvian metropolis. It is a term which becomes prevalent in colonial Peruvian literature from the 1590s, and which just as suddenly disappears around 1610.
3 Firbas, ‘La geografía antártica’. This is, as the argument has made clear, a time of literary and cultural as well as socio-political transition in the Viceroyalty, and this seems to be reflected in the relative freedom with which the authors use their form, pushing at the boundaries of the epic, and continuing an explicit dialogue with the provocative motifs of Ercilla. Both of them, however, also pointed uncomfortably towards the fragility of the emerging literary community. If
Arauco domado was received and imitated in Spain with eagerness, its reception in the Americas in the wake of numerous lawsuits and attempts at censorship must have seemed very different. Miramontes, and many of his contemporaries in different parts of the region who engaged with similarly controversial conflicts and without influential patrons, risked missing out on publication altogether.
Epic poetry continued to be composed in colonial Peru into the seventeenth and indeed eighteenth centuries, but those later productions bear the mark of a different era. Ever the careerist, Oña can serve as a barometer of the change: his El Ignacio de Cantabria [Ignatius of Cantabria] (1639), about the early life of St Ignatius of Loyola, and El Vasauro [The Golden Cup] (1635), on the reconquest of Alhama de Granada, are resolutely centred on Europe. Like Rodrigo de Carvajal y Robles’s Poema heroico del asalto y conquista de Antequera [Heroic Poem on the Siege and Conquest of Antequera] (1627), which similarly turns from colonial polemics to the era of the Reconquest with a local (in this case Andalusian) slant, these poems evade the recent history of the Viceroyalty, and the ‘cosas de guerra’ of the military revolution which Ercilla recounts with such vividness. The ways in which they, in turn, develop ideas of political community and expand the boundaries of the epic form are worthy of their own investigation: the political allegory of Tasso, for instance, is incorporated into an existing tradition of political thought in a much more systematic way than in the poems of this book, and questions of contemporary policy are by no means absent. The more the poets distance themselves from their own immediate context, however, the less there is a sense that the ongoing disputes of the reign of Philip IV are debates in which the authors continued to feel a real possibility of participation. While the authors strive towards stylistic innovations inspired in Tasso and Góngora, their poetics is less self-consciously flexible and surprising than the eclecticism of the earlier tradition. This is not to say that the questions explored in this book simply disappeared. It may be that they took new guises: the polymetric, autobiographical narrative of Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán’s time lived among the Mapuche in his Cautiverio feliz y razón individual de las guerras dilatadas del reino de Chile [Happy Captivity and Individual Explanation of the Prolonged Wars of the Kingdom of Chile] (1673), for example, or the work of another soldier, Melchor Jufré del Águila, in his poetic dialogue on the Chilean frontier and astrology in Compendio historial del descubrimiento y conquista de Chile [Historical Compendium of the Discovery and Conquest of Chile] (1630). The Antarctic world had opened up to new models of global interaction, just as its new explorers now bypassed the suggestively narrow gateway of the Magellan Strait to brave the wide but hazardous ocean at Cape Horn.