Germán Campos Muñoz. The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies

One thing that cannot be denied is that Germán Campos's study has a broad perspective: it covers the culture and politics of a subcontinent (South America) over six centuries (from the sixteenth to the twenty-first). Moreover, it does so by following an infrequent fil rouge: the Classics. Even more: Campos maintains that the Classical tradition in South America should not be considered mere influence or a decorative nuance, but rather as an effective tool in the perennial exercise of defining the New World. The rhetorical productivity of such encounters with the Classics is expressed in key moments of Latin American cultural and political histories.Campos records five of those moments in each of the five chapters of his book. The first, Avatars, refers to the founders of the Classical American imaginary and the hidden tensions that underlie it: Father José de Acosta, Diego Mexía de Fernangil and "Clarinda," the anonymous author of the "Discurso en loor de la poesía" included in the Parnaso antártico (1608) of the aforementioned Mexía. In the second chapter, Corographers, he examines, among others, two unique cultural products: the text of the captions on the maps of the Lima walls by Fr. Pedro Nolasco Mere (1685 and 1687) and the Hispano-Latin heroic poem in praise of Lima by Father Rodrigo de Valdés (1682), both examples of the stigma of the "brief history" of Lima (and of the Classicist effort to grant Virgilian dignities to that history). The third chapter, Personae, focuses on the figure of Simón Bolívar, eulogized with both respect and with irony in Victoria de Junín. Canto a Bolívar (1825) by José Joaquín de Olmedo by drawing upon both Pindaric and Iliadic inspirations. Elsewhere, the figure of Bolívar is deprecated, such as in the story of the attack that the Liberator suffered at Bogotá, in 1828, following, in part, Julius Caesar's script. In the fourth, Mythographers, Campos discusses the myth of the minotaur in "La casa de Asterión" by Jorge Luis Borges (according to Campos, a "bio-mythography" that points to the place that the writer assigns himself in Argentine literature). He additionally discusses the myth of Orpheus in the twentieth century's various theatrical and cinematographic versions of the Brazilian Orpheus that involved, in a passionate controversy about how Brazil should be represented, Vinicius de Moraes and Caetano Veloso, among others. Finally, the fifth chapter, Pedagogues, discusses the ideological overtones of the conference held in 2001 in Erice, Sicily, titled "América Latina y lo clásico," organized by the Latin American Federation of Classical Studies.For those interested in Renaissance or late Renaissance poetry, the first chapter will be most interesting. In it, Campos begins by presenting general epistemological topics about the emergence of America in the European imaginary during the early Modernity: the Americas were new precisely because of their absence—a conceptual lacuna—in Classical literature. In trying to fill it, the Classics, Campos argues, became a mechanism "for bridging the ideologemes of the Old and New Worlds, and the consequent shaping of foundational academic figures after Greco-Roman paradigms—that is, as New World avatars of Classical authorities" (35).That is the case of Acosta, a new Pliny, whose encyclopedic Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) openly declares its filiation. To this list can be added those of Mexía and Clarinda. Campos assigns Mexía the role of avatar of Ovid in the New World and Clarinda, other roles. To do this, he resorts to four paratexts from the first part of Parnaso antártico: the dedication to Juan de Villela, the prefatory address "El autor a sus amigos," the poem-prologue "Discurso en loor de la poesía" by the anonymous Clarinda, and the sonnet "L'antigua Grecia con su voz divina" that, in turn, Mexía dedicates to her. Here, Campos implies that the avatar condition does not present itself unproblematically. In the dedication, for example, after telling the harrowing circumstances of a trip he made from Peru to New Spain, Mexía transforms himself from a book merchant into an exiled poet, following the trajectory of Ovid in his books Trista and Epistulae ex Ponto, in a stratagem of textual omissions and substitutions that Campos unveils by paying close attention to the obverse of Mexía's writing—to that which is left unsaid (53).Campos juxtaposes Clarinda's anonymous condition with Mexía's biographical silences and even with the obscurity of the poets of the Antarctic Academy, the literary group gathered in Lima during the late sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries. In his justification for the inclusion of Clarinda's poem as a preface to his translation of Ovid's Heroides (in his Parnaso), Mexía establishes a parallel between Clarinda and the female voices permeating Ovid's book. The anonymous writer, already veiled as nameless, is thus further concealed in her association with mythological women (62). Clarinda, in turn, dresses Mexía as Apollo and names him with his heteronyms (or rather, his synonyms or aliases): Delian, Sun, Phoebus. For all of its elaborate poetical and rhetorical apparatus, Campos states that the most important part of the Discurso is that it incorporates a unique list of local authors (specifically, eighteen), an entire generation of early viceregal poets who live in the locus amoenus of the Rímac River in Lima. Clarinda seeks to include a generation of unknown indiano poets in the lineage of Virgil, Dante and Camõens (in an unabashed translatio imperii et studii): "Thus while the author of the Discurso is a poet, she is also, as enunciator of a transatlantic history of poetry, a source of poetic authority—in a word, a Muse" (65), and a voyager crossing the universal history of poetry that reconstructs the Old World in the New (70). Both avatars are instrumental to the cultivation that follows the culling (i.e., the conquest).Germán Campos offers us a study rich in novel insights. Nevertheless, an argument based primarily on what is left unsaid or displaced tends to understate what is effectively said, namely, that Mexía's Ovidian drive probably can be reduced to a humanist adherence to a Classical paradigm, contrary to what Campos says (60). The "salvationist discourse," mentioned by Campos regarding the insensitivity of Mexía for local cultures, effectively labelled the native population as a "barbaric otherness" that had to be saved, and that was the Providential mission of the Empire. In that sense, the imperial cultural creations were universal (as part of the "intermittent immortality" that Yourcenar's Hadrian ascribed to Rome) and polycentric (or "invertebrate," if we adopt Ortega y Gasset's adjective), as they could be replicated everywhere, regardless of historic incongruences (Palladio is never just Vitruvius). The nymphs may swim in the Tagus as well as in the Rímac Rivers, and Mexía models his authorial persona as Ovid in the same way that Garcilaso de la Vega is doubled as Salicio and Nemoroso in his Égloga I. Only in that way may we fully understand Campos's final idea, that there is a turning point that resists being translated and requires being founded: the South. In effect, as he says, the South is deictic (72). I might say also it is diacritic: it is the differential feature of a universal phenomenon. Mount Parnassus emerges also in the Antarctic.