Representing the Other: Ercilla's La Araucana, Virgil's Aeneid, and the New World Encounter
2003; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cls.2003.0031
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoLike De Soto and Cortés, the reader of La Araucana also becomes a voyager, by extension one of the conquistadores who spread Spanish imperial power across the New World from Mexico to South America. The author, a courtier to Philip II of Spain, participated himself in the colonial adventures in Peru and Chile, and one approach to the poem has stressed what at one level seems obvious: La Araucana was dedicated to Philip II, the Indians depicted had rebelled against Spanish authority, and Ercilla's contemporaries understood clearly that the poem depicted the legitimate punishment of those who stood in the way of divinely sanctioned imperialism. 3 La Araucana contains three sections—accounts of the battles of St. Quentin and Lepanto and the invasion of Portugal—that are not integral to the Spanish activity in Chile, but they do serve to emphasize the grandeur of Spain and its ruler and therefore seem to reinforce the pro-imperial [End Page 394] theme. 4 Curiously, the poem does not have a dominant Spanish hero, but the pro-imperial line of criticism makes a virtue of necessity and posits that this space is filled by Philip II himself, thereby helping to construct and legitimate a national identity for Spain at a key point in its historical development. 5 Indeed, a study of the book trade in the New World reveals that La Araucana was the most widely disseminated representation of the conquest among the colonizers themselves. 6 Yet as sometimes happens in literary criticism, the opposite interpretation has been developed with equal persuasiveness. Menéndez y Pelayo, for example, notes that the natives had little direct influence on much of Latin American literature, but a significant indirect impact on poetry in Chile, for the determined resistance of the Araucanians became the principal theme of early colonial literature in that country. 7 This resistance was heroic, and in the process of writing about it, Ercilla ended up "presenting his clear preference for his enemies." 8 The female characters are treated with special sympathy, so that in the end, one can argue that the poem is presented from the perspective of the Indians. 9 From here, the next step is the appropriation of the poem into the national culture of Chile as "un libro nacional i querido: él es la fé de bautismo de nuestra nación" ["a beloved national book: it is the baptismal certificate of our nation"]. 10 Thus Ercilla becomes in the words of Pablo Neruda the "inventor y libertador" ["inventor and liberator"] of Chile, 11 and La Araucana stands as an anti-imperialist poem. 12
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