LITMIR.BIZ

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brawl I have never witnessed” (que te puedo jurar que no solamente no me he hallado en guerras, pero ni aun he visto riña particular ninguna).⁶⁶

      The transoceanic fleets that supported imperial warfare were not unfit spaces for writing on the matters of war either. The Portuguese poet and soldier Luís de Camões wrote part of Os Lusíadas (1572) while traveling and battling all along the Portuguese colonial possessions in the East and claimed to have saved his “sea-drenched Epic Song” (os cantos … molhados) from a shipwreck in the South China Sea by holding in his hands the actual sheets on which it was written.⁶⁷ Similarly, the common soldier and poet Gaspar García de Alarcón rhetorically asked the readers of his epic poem La victoriosa conquista … de los Azores (1585) “that they excuse the flaws of the work because I could not depart from the truth and because it was written at war, in the middle of the ocean; and because the military art that I practice is very different from that of writing in verse, with little study, little experience, and little time” (que me tomen en descuento el no poder salir de la verdad a que va arrimada, y escrita en un golfo, y parte della en la guerra. Y cuán diferente es el arte de milicia que profeso al componer en metro, con poco estudio, menos experiencia, no muy ayudado del tiempo).⁶⁸ The conventionally humble excusatio against the potential murmuradores or critics is indeed a proud defense of his professional role and of his military experience in the Marquis of Santa Cruz’s naval campaign against the French fleet of Philippe Strozzi during the wars that followed the Habsburg conquest of Portugal in the early 1580s.

      Many of the better-known chronicles and relaciones from the colonial American context were written by major and minor figures in the liminal spaces of the war of conquest in the new territories. The writing of war narratives was by no means limited to the leaders of the expeditions, such as Hernán Cortés. On the contrary, it was a widespread practice and was one of the main war genres in the soldiers’ republic of letters. Most famous among them, Bernal Díaz del Castillo took up the pen in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España in order to counter the accounts written by historians far from the field that exaggerated the role of the leaders in the accomplishments of the conquest.⁶⁹ The chronicler of the conquest of Peru, the plebeian soldier Pedro Cieza de León, attributed the faults of his chronicle of Peru to his “pocas letras” and to his “being too absorbed in the business of war.” “Many times,” he continues, “when most soldiers rested, I exhausted myself writing. The roughness of the mentioned lands, mountains, and rivers, the intolerable hunger and necessity, none of this ever prevented me from dutifully following my two occupations, writing and serving my company and my captain” (Muchas veces, cuando los otros soldados descansaban, cansaba yo escribiendo. Mas ni esto, ni las asperezas de tierras, montañas y ríos ya dichos, intolerables hambres y necesidades, nunca bastaban para estorbar mis dos oficios de escribir y seguir a mi bandera y capitán sin hacer falta).⁷⁰

      Perhaps the most emblematic and dramatic example of this gesture linking the practice of writing to the battlefield is Alonso de Ercilla’s prologue to his first Araucana of 1569. Although this work was published more than ten years after his return from the Chilean frontier, the poet claims to have written his powerfully realistic stanzas “amid the very war, in the very marches and sieges, often writing on leather because of the lack of paper, and on scraps of letters so small that barely six lines fit, all of which made it rather difficult to put everything together later” (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, algunos tan pequeños que apenas cabían seis versos, que no me costó después poco trabajo juntarlos).⁷¹ The representation of the practice of writing in the most distant spaces of the imperial frontier is a powerful rhetorical device to produce discursive authority, determining the enunciative structure and truth-value of soldierly texts in very important ways. The legitimacy of Ercilla’s poem is clearly linked to the detailed description of those rare moments provided by military otium, as in García Cerezeda’s case, “stolen” (hurtados) from the professional exercise of warfare. The very inadequacy of the “pasos y sitios” for the intellectual practice of writing and the material precariousness of those pieces of paper and leather—“poor diapers”—make his firsthand account “truer” (más verdadero), even if those pieces do not fit the eight lines required to compose an octava real, the basic metrical unit of Renaissance epic.⁷² The image of the soldier writing on the battlefield becomes the documentary and symbolic foundation of the historical authenticity of the soldierly text. The representation of the personal practice of war—“I am a soldier and I was there”—authorizes the poetic or narrative voice of a social subject whose discursive legitimacy relies on his military expertise and his direct contact with the spaces of war rather than on humanistic erudition, nobility, service at court, or inventive genius.

      Critics have often taken these assertions, particularly Ercilla’s, to be conventionally rhetorical at best, or plainly false. “One of the romantic fictions regarding the accounts of conquests in the Indies,” says Rolena Adorno, “is that they were written at night in military encampments by soldier-hidalgos who, with quill in hand, bravely ignored the intimidating sounds of enemy war cries and drums. Hernán Cortés and Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga are among the authors who create this familiar impression.”⁷³ Adorno’s skepticism about the truth of the Caesarian image of the soldier simultaneously fighting and writing on the battlefield is a standard and healthy reminder of the long tradition of a particular literary convention. While acknowledging the “retrospective quality” of most soldierly writing,⁷⁴ evidence supports my contention here that this trope refers to actual practices in the spaces of war, both in the New World and the Old, that gained prominence over the period. For the first Araucana of 1569, Ercilla’s brother-in-arms, the veteran captain Juan Gómez, wrote an aprobación where he legally testified that Ercilla was seen, by him and everyone else, “serving your majesty in that war, where he publicly wrote this book” (vi a don Alonso de Ercilla servir a Su Majestad en aquella guerra, donde públicamente escribió este libro).⁷⁵ Writing in the spaces of war was common, as we have seen, and the public nature of this practice in the case of Ercilla seems to make it a prestigious, collective activity and an integral part of the socialization processes of the Renaissance soldiery. Furthermore, our doubts about the actual truth of some of these statements should not prevent us from realizing the way in which they associate the authority of the written text with its material production, with the immediacy and urgency of imperial warfare and frontier spaces, with the contingencies of a military expedition on the Chilean frontier or of a sea journey from Macau to Goa.

      In addition to providing evidence for the intensity of literary practice in the spaces of war, the discussion thus far has made it clear that for these writing soldiers the construction of discursive authority is based upon the fundamental link between the soldier’s own enunciation, the material conditions of the battlefield, and the professional practices and institutions of the military corporation. The elaboration of this contiguity of pen and sword, of writing and fighting, is not always free of tension, but it will be crucial for understanding the rhetorical appeal of these texts for the society of soldiers. Moreover, the urgency of in situ writing, the material ephemerality of the soldierly text, is also important in understanding the memorializing drive of much of the heroic textual production on war. For “those who live dying” (los que moriendo vivimos), as veteran Torres Naharro put it, leaving a trace of who they were in writing must have been a particularly pressing impulse.⁷⁶

      Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, a soldier who fought in Italy and the Netherlands during the last years of the sixteenth century, held the matter of his epic poem La inquieta Flandes (1594) to “have been entirely seen by my eyes” (es toda obra por mis ojos vista), as did many other soldiers who offered their own firsthand accounts of their and their comrades’ exploits, but he also claimed that the lines of his poem were “watered with the blood of my veins, and written among the arms and the furor of death” (regada con la sangre de mis venas y escrita en medio de armas y furor de muerte).⁷⁷ However rhetorical, the image is a powerful reminder of the dire conditions under which soldiers carried out their daily lives. The wrecking of the body in the spaces of war, whether actual or metaphorical, threatens to disintegrate the very material support of soldierly narratives. The

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