BENSEN ART  Robert R. Bensen, Refining El Dorado: The Problem of
Cultural Continuity in Exploitation and Native Literatures of the
Americas, in PROTEUS, Spring 1992, Vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 32-37.
 
European knowledge of the Americas grew as the volumes of
exploration narratives and histories grew, as lines, names and
legends filled in the white space of maps.  Such knowledge was a
product of European perception and modes of inquiry, extended and
disrupted by the Americas.  In writers, sensitive to the novelty of
these lands, place takes on a fantastic character, requiring new
concepts of natural law, of human nature, and new definitions for
language that had evolved in the familiar terrain of Europe.
     The disparity between language and reality is a version of the
cultural and geographic disparity between Europe and the Americas.
Difficulties in the transplanting of language to new soil provide
a precedent for understanding the evolving of the literature of the
Americas in the present century.  Writers in the Caribbean and
Latin America, where those historical forces still lay close to the
surface of contemporary life, evidence the same problems of
language and representation that the early explorers faced.
     Part of a solution to those problems was adopting narrative
and cultural patterns of native American peoples.  The animistic,
metamorphic world of native tradition provided a groundwork for
Latin American novelists seeking to "make their reality credible,"
as Garc!a M rquez phrased it, in what has become the "Magical
Realism" movement. (14)  In one of the earliest such novels, Miguel
Asturias alternates chapters, using native and conventionally
realistic modes in both native and Ladino accounts of the story in
Men of Maize (1949).  Alejo Carpentier in The Lost Steps (1953)
reverses the El Dorado quest-narratives, sending the Musician up
the Orinoco River and among its peoples - an experience that first
disorients, then reorients his whole person.
     If we acknowledge the cultural continuity as well as
disruption of native American traditions and their problematic
relation to local development of colonial tradition, we better
understand the attempts to represent in literature native modes of
experience in relation to the colonial.  Any sense of a
postcolonial American literature must also account for these native
modes, which both complicate and illuminate the growth of textual
tradition.
     The linguistic problem of representing the things of this
world in the vocabulary of the other world pervades the literature
of exploration, beginning with Columbus's Journal of the first
voyage, in which he proceeds with increasing frustration at his
attempt to represent the Indies to his sovereigns.  The trees, he
says, "are as different from ours as day is from night, and so is
the fruit and the grasses and the stones and everything else"
(10/17).  Between day and night, light and dark, there are no
mediating lines of resemblance, no verbal connections between the
Indies and Spain.  The qualities of the isles drew him on a very
basic, sensual level.  In the last two months' entries in the
Journal, he leaves off accumulating proof that he is in Asia, and
is consumed with praising the beauty of the islands and discovering
more (Bensen 122-25: Todorov 12-13).  Like any educated European in
1492, Columbus knew he was in no danger of sailing into a
terrestrial abyss; but he did sail into a linguistic abyss, in
which his Mediterranean language faltered into ever more forced and
less forceful admiration of the beauty and strangeness of the
Indies.
     In one of the earliest attempts to categorize the natural
features of the Americas, Jos de Acosta presents his Natural and
Moral History of the Indies(1958) as overturning centuries of
European thought.  He writes of his first encounter with this
hemisphere as if it would be his last:
     When I passed to the Indies, I will tell what chanced unto
     mee: having read what Poets and Philosophers write of the
     burning Zone, I perswaded my selfe, that comming to the
     Equinoctiall, I should not indure the violent heate, but it
     fell out otherwise: for when I passed (into the Burning Zone),
     when the sun was there for Zenith...in the moneth of March, I
     felt so great cold, as I was forced to go into the sunne to
     warm me; what could I else do then, but laugh at Aristotle..
     and his Philosophie, seeing that in that place and at that
     season, whenas all should be scorched with heat, according to
     his rule, I, and all my companions were a colde?
 
     Acosta laughed, not only out of the relief of having survived,
but also at the accumulated knowledge of the Western tradition -
Aristotle, Pliny, Virgil, Ovid, and others - all of them disproved,
blown away, and so lightly, by a chilly wind.  He has broken
centuries of intellectual and physical constraint articulated by
the Roman writer Pliny, who (according to Acosta) wrote "(I)t is
not lawfull...to know what is beyond the Straight of Gibralter"
(1.24).
     Of course, by 1572 Acosta knew what lay in the Burning Zone:
the Spanish territories of Peru, the West Indies, Venezuela,
Guiana, New Spain, New Granada - all of them highly habitable.  His
is a literary laugh, calculated by a self located more in the
textual tradition of scholastic debate than in the world of
contemporary experience.  His battle with the ancients is on the
field of the printed page, in a narrative where his experience -
not that of the explorers and colonists who came before, nor that
of the Indians living everywhere - can decisively repudiate ancient
notions of geography.
     He overturns this accumulated knowledge in the lands in the
hemisphere opposite that of Europe - a world posited as impossible
by Lactantius, whom Acosta dismisses easily by affirming that "wee
that live now at Peru...finde not our selves to bee hanging in the
aire, our heades downward, and our feete on highe" (1.20).  But the
world that Acosta describes does turn European concepts of natural
law upside down.  He asks why in Peru, with the sun hotter than in
Spain in August, the inhabitants are better sheltered with a straw
mat than those in Spain under "a roof of wood or a vault of
stone?...Wherefore on the highest tips of mountain, even amongst
the heaps of snow, you shall sometimes feel great and insupportable
heat?" (1.99-100).
     This strange world undermines his language at the level of
naming.  The things of this world are so different from those of
Europe, he writes, that "to seeke to reduce them to the known kinds
of Europe...is to call an egge a chestnut" (1.279).  After a
lengthy debate over the meaning of "summer" and "winter" in the
tropics, he concludes in exasperation: "Yet it is no matter of any
importance to contend upon the significance of words.  Let them
terme them as they please..." (1.80).
     Acosta's verbal confusions are understandable.  Gabriel Garcia
Marquez wrote that "Latin American and Caribbean artists have had
to invent very little.  In fact, their problem has been just the
opposite: making their reality credible....When we speak of a
river, a European reader is not likely to imagine something larger
than the Danube....It's hard for him to imagine...the Amazon, which
is 5,500 km. long.  At Belem del Para the river is wider than the
Baltic Sea....The same thing happens with the word rain.  In the
mountains of the Andes...,there are torrential rains that can last
for five months" (13).
     The rivers of South America make Acosta marvel, and challenge
his own precepts of reasonableness and natural law and, indeed, of
human nature.  He writes that more than ten "great" rivers enter
Lake Titicaca, but only "one small current of water" leaves the
lake, which stream enters a smaller lake, which has "no issue."
The apparent diminishing of water leads Acosta to suppose that the
waters "dissolve and are dispersed" within themselves, eaten up, as
it were, growing smaller and smaller (1.83-84).  He shrugs at the
implausibility of that, saying that, after all, he is only trying
to disprove the Ancients' notion that the region was dry and
uninhabitable (1.84).  Indeed, the Ancients were right, but for the
wrong reasons, as "the greatest part of America is almost
uninhabitable through too great aboundance of water" (1.81).  The
rivers provoke him to reveal, but not to question, his assumptions
about human nature.  Certain Indians make their reed villages to
float on Lake Titicaca, "and often times the whole village changeth
from place to place," he writes; but these drifters "esteem
themselves not men," because they "do not till the islands of the
lake, but eat the reeds they build their villages from" (83-84).
The waters consume themselves, the natives consume the reeds of the
village; the nature of humanity and of natural elements themselves
is different here than in Europe.
     Even the lesser rivers, he writes, "surpasse the greatest of
Europe" (1.159).  He reserves his greatest wonder for the Mara$on -
though it is clear from the stories he relates of the expeditions
along the river that he may be referring to the Amazon or the
Orinoco.  He is very likely recalling Fr. Pedro Simon's account of
the murderous expedition of Lop de Aguirre, who followed the
Mara$on in search of El Dorado, executing first his commander and
then much of his company, and finally his own daughter.  Simon
calls the river Mara$on throughout, but near the end, he admits, "I
cannot determine which of the two (Amazon or Orinoco) is the
Mara$on, so it must remain unsettled..., and this is why I likewise
call the Orinoco, Mara$on" (109).  Where the name came from -
whether is was derived from the Spanish marana, a place of brambles
and thickets; or from Aguirre's calling his men Maranones "owing to
the entanglements and plots that daily occurred in that expedition"
(Simon 94), or as a pun from a Spaniard who first saw the expanse
of the river and asked, "Hic mare on non? Is this a sea or not?" -
no one can say.  But the linguistic confusion of names and rivers
points to the essential alienation, the estrangement of the
explorers from the place.
     The rivers are a maze in which the Europeans lose their way,
wander for years, are forced to eat saddles and boots and drink the
blood of their horses, and perish, or return to colonial cities
emaciated, unrecognizable.  It is a maze that allows them to leave
the constraints of civility and religion behind, throwing them into
areas of human nature that had not been dreamt of in their
philosophy.  No map could have untangled the Mara$on.  But the
journals and accounts of the El Dorado expeditions from 1530 to
1600 serve as clear guides to the entanglements of European man,
caught in an inconceivable wilderness onto which he projected his
wildest ambitions.
     Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of the Large, Riche, and
Beautiful Kingdom of Guiana (1595) consolidated the El Dorado
myths, and is a rich source for the study of the European response
to the new and strange lands.  The Orinoco itself is a significant
character in his drama, affording descriptions of the region as
both paradise and inferno, accessible only to the resourceful and
adventurous, such as himself:
     ...We might have wandred a whole yeere in that laborinth of
     rivers...:for I know all the earth doth not yeeld the like
     confluence of streames and branches, the one crossing the
     other so many times, and all so faire and large, and so like
     one to another,...(that) we were...caried in a circle amongst
     multitudes of llands....(39)
The final figure is one of utmost futility: the explorer in the
labyrinth, not recognizing terrain he had encountered before how
many times, not recognizing his own path because it was inscribed
in water.
     Ralegh escaped the navigational trap, at least, by overtaking
the canoe of a fleeing Indian, and forcing him into the barge to
guide them upriver.  Who else would know the way out, if not to a
place that never existed?  The figure of the captive native
conducting the explorers through the labyrinth of the river
provides insight into the means that novelists have used to
dramatize the conflict between European and native American points
of view in striving towards a uniquely American form of the novel:
through incorporating native modes of perception and narration.
     Assessing the use of native modes by novelists is fraught with
problems inherent in access to native cultures, in differences
between oral and literate cultures, and in the tendency to treat
oral cultures as if they were fixed in time, as Louise M. Burkhart
notes in her study of 16th-century religious conversion among the
Aztecs (5-14).  We are clearly at what she calls the "Dialogical
frontier" between native American and European cultures, and need
to take strict account of the contexts of texts on either side.
     Nonetheless, in examining both exploration narratives and
local native creation-myths, it is possible to appreciate the
enormous gap between the Europeans' and natives' relation to
locale.  We may observe that, as a case in point, the Orinoco River
serves the explorer as both a barrier and a conduit to reaching El
Dorado.  In the Watunna creation cycle of the Markiritare tribe,
however, the cultural associations with the river go understandably
deeper.  In one story, a woman named Frimene steals the birth-stone
containing the world's people from her brother Nuna the moon, who
intends to eat them.
     That woman fled into the jungle, her children in her stomach,
     her arms filled with gourds and baskets....The woman went on
     running and came to the Orinoco.  She couldn't get across.
     "Okay," she said.  "I can't get across.  The water will be my
     path...."She fled from her brother's house swimming....She
     said, "I'm the Water Mistress, the River Mother."  Then she
     changed into Huiio, the Great Snake, the River Mother.  She
     went beneath the water and hid.  She built her house at the
     bottom of the rapids.  She made herself mistress of the new
     water which was flowing everywhere. (Civrieux, Watunna 51)
The river is thus the site of the birth of the world's new people,
and an agent for the revenge of the death of Frimene by flooding
the world.  However, no excerpt can convey the phantasmagoric
labyrinth of the Watunna, as assembled by Marc de Civrieux over a
period of seventeen years.  It is available as a collection in
print rather than in the collective memory of the Makiritari, but
their patterns of animal and human metamorphosis, their relations
of mortals and divinities, of good and evil, of historical events
such as the Spanish contact in the 1700s, of the eight heavens and
three underworlds, delineate an imaginative and spiritual
expressiveness that reappears in similar form in many North and
South American native traditions.  Further, the river as a site for
mythic and cultural history takes on temporal dimension consonant
with beliefs about the development of the tribe (see Wilbert
160ff).
     Anthropologist Mary Helms finds among many riverrine tribes
the belief that physical distance up-or downriver signified
temporal distance, with the river mouth to the east the direction
of ancestral origin and the source of good, and headwaters to the
west not yet within time and outside proper social control (40-41).
In The Lost Steps Alejo Carpentier uses the relation between the
river and time in a novel based equally in El Dorado quest-narrative
and native myths.  He reverses the temporal direction of
the river, sending the Musician upriver to encounter tribes at
earlier and earlier stages of development, in a landscape moving
backward through geologic time.  He arrives at both the origins of
humanity and the creation of the world.  His temporal experience,
however, is a progression from birth - as at the river mouth he
repeats his own origin, being reduced to fetal helplessness in a
storm and being reborn in the arms of Rosario, a native woman - to
his possible future: a life remote from the 20th century, where he
can marry Rosario and compose his music unimpeded.
     Carpentier reawakens the natural man in his Musician by
disorienting him in a world drawn from native lore.  His ordeal
begins on an expedition up the Orinoco River - the reverse and
mirror image of the El Dorado searches - encountering first a
natural world of interchangeable forms:
     It was no longer possible to say which was tree and which
     reflection of tree.  Was the light coming from above or below?
     Was the sky or earth water? It was as though I was being spun
     round and round upon myself to make me lose my hearing before
     bringing me to the threshold of some secret dwelling. (161)
The river that had undone the seekers of El Dorado, robbing them of
their health, sanity, and their lives, Carpentier uses to tear down
the alienated self of his Musician before he begins to recover an
authentic self in subsequent encounters with native tribes that
move further and further back in human time as the landscape
regresses in geologic time.
     To determine the extent that particular native relations to
their lands inform the imaginative landscape of their tales, as we
have seen the rivers impress themselves upon the European
exploration narratives, is beyond the scope of this essay.  The
problems of validating ethnographic and literary "readings" of
transcribed stories and translated texts are enormous, but we can
readily observe the appropriation of native modes into the Latin
American novel, as they constitute fictive Indian character and
psychology.  The most successful such indigenista novels seek to
portray the Indian "from the inside," as Braulio Mu$oz has written,
inventing for the purpose the Magical Realist mode that places the
"Indians' magical world...of legends, myths and superstitions" at
the center of Indian consciousness (247).  Such works as the
Peruvian Jos Mar!a Arguedas's The Fox from Above and the Fox from
Below (1970) and Asturias's Men of Maize and The Mulatta and the
Fly (1963). as Mu$oz contends, succeeded in incorporating the
Indian into Spanish American in literature, if not in social and
economic fact (264).  What he calls the "dream" of the indigenista
writers to unify Latin America socioeconomically, and the failure
of that effort, is reflected in the problem of using native
material in the novel: the Indian is, on the one hand, presupposed
to be absorbed into the mestizo (mixed blood) culture, and, on the
other hand, to operate fully within a cultural continuity from pre-
European contact to the difficult present.
     The story of Gaspar Ilom at the beginning of Asturias's Men of
Maize is widely recognized as one of the most convincing
constructions of an Indian, particularly a Mayan world. Asturias
incorporates motifs from the Popul Vuh (which he had translated
into Spanish) and the refrain from Cakchiquel Annals in his prose
to portray Ilom in the relation of his dream (Brotherston 32-33):
        In the grass was a mule, on the mule was a man, and in the
     man was a dead man.  His eyes were his eyes, his hands were
     his hands....and his feet were his feet for taking him to wars
     as soon as he could get away from the snake of six hundred
     thousand coils of mud, moon, forests, rainstorms, mountains,
     lakes, birds and echoes that had curled itself around his
     body.  But how could he get away, how could he untie himself
     from the crops, from his woman, the children, the
     rancho...:his feet caught in the noose of the daily round,(2-3).
Asturias alternated native and Ladino versions of events through
native and conventionally realistic modes of storytelling, until
the conquering colonial forces destroy and repress the native, and
the natives' curse upon their destroyers is fully played out.
Gordon Brotherston has carefully assessed the degree to which
Asturias both interprets his Mayan sources and invents "the
folklore of the Maya on their behalf" and how the convincing
Magical Realist story of Ilom gives way to the "merely fantastic"
working out of the Mayan vengeance for his death under the
supposedly (for Asturias) omnipotent gods, who even in the Popul
Vuh had ceased to be powerful (36-37).
     The discontinuous and often threadbare remnants of native
cultures - the decline of Mayan civilization centuries before
Columbus, the burning of Mayan books by the Jesuits, and the
depopulation after European contact by warfare, enslavement and
disease, to mention one instance - has left artists and writers
with the same task the people have for whom they would speak: to
reassert what remains of traditional culture and to reconstruct
connections to what has been lost, a perhaps impossible, absurd,
but necessary task.  Brotherston's critique of Asturias's use of
Mayan gods might be modified if we think of that usage as a
continuation of the process of reculturation - warranting the
invention of Mayan folklore - that Asturias himself underwent,
which Brotherston fully describes.
     In his 1923 thesis for his law degree, Asturias (himself of
mixed Mayan and Spanish ancestry) proposed to solve "El problema
social del indio" by eliminating Indians genetically through
intermarriage and forced emigration to Europe.  But while studying
native religions through their literature at the University of
Paris, he began a long literary involvement with the Maya that led
him to articulate his ambition to be "the spokesman...of 'his
tribe'," and to deem the Maya world "worthy of respect and capable
of exerting the strongest fascination" (Brotherston 34-35).  His
strengthening of the ancient gods is an extension of strengthening
his own Indian identity and an assertion of indigenismo.  It is
also a use of a motif that antedates European contact.  In Genesis,
the first part of his trilogy Memory of Fire, the Uruguayan poet
Eduardo Galeano writes of the belief among certain Orinoco tribes
concerning the birth of their avenging god Kanaima.  Galeano writes
that, "he was a phantom born in (the) hearts" of the attacking
Caribs:  "He was not pain, but he hurt.  He was not death, but he
killed.  His name was Kanaima, and he was born among the conquerors
to avenge the conquered" (38-39).  The avenging spirits are also a
literary motif available to native American writers who believe
that the Americas still properly are Indian lands, in which Euro-Americans
 will continue to be resident aliens subject to the
influences, even retribution of the native spirit-world (see
discussion of protest writing in Ruoff 76-114).  In the Mexican-Laguna
 Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead
(1991), a Mexican revolutionary says that "the white man didn't
seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no
spirits of ancestors here."  The novel describes a severe
ecological collapse in the United States as a product of ignoring
native relations to the land, and narrates a series of apocalyptic
incidents where the spirits of the native dead drive white
Americans to madness and death.
     The problem of representing native American peoples in fiction
is an extension of their treatment in the journals of the earliest
European explorers.  The peoples whom the Laguna-Sioux writer Paula
Gunn Allen calls "las disappearedas" (304; she borrows the term for
those who vanished in recent Argentine and Chilean repression) are
those still subject to the myth of the "vanishing Indian" - but
they are still here, battling their disappearance willed by the
texts and policies of dominant colonial culture.
     Asturias's men of maize are, ironically, treated as no
different from vegetation by the dominant Ladinos, who hack and
burn them out of existence the way they clear land.  While that
method may kill a generation, it leaves at least some roots
sufficiently viable to sprout new growth.  Turning American lands,
its native products and peoples into commodities denatures and
dehumanizes both victim and victor.  To counter that process,
native American writers look for a usable past to create a livable
future, to locate themselves within traditional cultures, to
maintain their relation to their lands, and to oppose as people of
maize the ways of the "sons of the wind" - the white foreigners
"who came on the wings of a bad wind" (Mu$oz 284).
     The relation of both European explorers and native Americans
to the land, as evidenced in the early journals and oral myths, is
but one aspect of a problem that involves dissimulating questions
of human nature as questions of nature.  When Acosta denies the
humanity of the native people in the floating reed villages on Lake
Titicaca (I.83), he does so because their houses drift freely, with
no fixed reference to solid ground.  If they have no human
habitations, he reasons implicitly, they are not humans that
inhabit there.  In a profound parallel to Acosta's reasoning, the
legal Doctrine of Discovery - which entitled Europe to claim
American lands and provides the fundament of all U.S. Indian law -
holds that land not possessed by reason of proper use may be
claimed by Europe, a doctrine that implies a definition of human
nature that excludes native Americans by virtue of their cultural
practices of land use.
     The strangeness of the American geography (and its peoples),
as we have seen, disrupted the expectations and categories of
European explorers in ways that are evident in the discourse of
their journals and other relations.  The reformation of cultures
among the colonists and the native peoples produced hybrids of
language and other cultural forms, including the literature of the
Americans, in which are inscribed versions of attempts to
accommodate native ways of seeing in a world that persistently
excludes and marginalizes them. The Magical Realist movement in
Latin America began as an outgrowth of Indigenismo, reacting
against European surrealism in the belief that the Latin American
reality as seen through native eyes could produce a distinct way of
representing that world of difference.  Our exploration of texts
from the age of exploration and modern literature traces
ideological bases for the historical conflict between very
different cultures.  The forces set in motion by the Columbian
Encounter continue to preoccupy the new myth-makers of the
Americas, and I propose that the enduring effect of the
Quincentennial re-reading of the literature will be to generate a
new sense of the extreme difficulties of reconciling those opposing
cultures within history and the imaginative literature of the
Americas.