Abstract
There has already been much talk of Christopher Columbus, and I will be no exception to this rule. There is also much talk of Cortés and Pizarro, conquistadores and executioners from Mexico and Peru. By virtue of the cinema and the film made by Werner Herzog in the early seven-ties in the Peruvian Andes, there is sometimes talk of Lope de Aguirre, the “Wrath of God.” However, we almost never talk of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. However, Cabeza de Vaca is a great man, even a very great man. He felt the dizziness of space, and there were not so many to do so. Several trails lead to him. We could learnedly cite some American essays, or, more recently, two or three pages of La Conquête de l’Amérique. La question de l’autre (1982) by Tzvetan Todorov. Another possibility is offered by a film from the Mexican director Nicolás Echevarría whose title matches the not so banal surname of the conquistador. His name, Cabeza de Vaca, or “Cow Head” is a maternal inheritance and not an unusual sobriquet. In 1991, at the height of the wave of often mediocre blockbusters devoted by the Hollywood industry to the “discovery” of America and its fifth centenary, Echevarría proposed a different reading of the event, one that is more respectful of the views and culture of the First Peoples. He attributed the lead to Juan Diego, a great Spanish actor whose interpretation was nearly performance art. It fell to Diego to embody a man confronted with the problem of communication and cohabitation with other men, natives of the current Texas, whom he knew were separated by a radical otherness.
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Notes
Yves Berger, “Préface,” in Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Relation de voyage, trans. Bernard Lesfargues and Jean-Marie Auzias (Arles: Actes Sud, 1979), 12.
Paul Zumthor, La Mesure du monde: Représentation de l’espace au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 162.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 471.
Thomas Gomez, L’Invention de l’Amérique. Mythes et réalités de la conquête (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 60.
Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave, 2011).
José Rabasa, L’Invention de l’Amérique. Historiographie espagnole et formation de l’Eurocentrisme, trans. Claire Forestier-Pergnier and Eliane Saint-André-Utudjian (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002 [1993]).
For the American side, see William Boelhower “Inventing America: The Culture of the Map,” which appeared in the Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines, 13, no. 36 (April 1988): 211–24.
Roland Barthes, L’Aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 125.
Alonso de Ercilla, La Aracauna, X V, 13, trans. Alexandre Nicolas (Paris: Utz, 1993), 281.
Pascal Quignard, rb (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 27, 28.
Giorgio Agamben, L’Ouvert. De l’homme et de l’animal, trans. Joël Gayraud (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2002), 59.
In fact, Agamben’s “anthropological machine” falls in the wake of the “mythological machine” (macchina mitologica) of his compatriot Furio Jesi, Germanist and anthropologist. Opting for a political reading, Jesi deconstructed the myth based on the denunciation of a propaganda mechanism from a speech hiding its origins, naturalizing its historical significance, and supplying a genuine “mythological machine.” See for example Furio Jesi, La Fête et la machine mythologique, trans. Fabien Vallos, with an introduction by Giorgio Agamben (Paris: Mix, 2008 [1977]).
Pierre d’Ailly, Imago Mundi, Latin Text and French Translation of the Four Cos-mographic Treaties of d’Ailly and Marginal Notes by Christopher Columbus (Gem-bloux: Duculot, 1930), 240–41. Haly is the astrologer Abū l-Hasan ’Ali ibn Abi l-Rijāl, who lived between the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh century. He is more known in Europe under the name of Haly Abenragel.
Fernando Pessoa, Message, [1934] in Poèmes ésotériques. Message. Le Marin, trans. Michel Chandeigne and Patrick Quillier (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988), 132.
Luis de Camões, Les Lusiades, V, 50, trans. Roger Bismut (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980), 109.
Jean-Yves Loude, Lisbonne. Dans la ville noire (Arles: Actes Sud, 2003), 82.
See Odile Gannier, Les Derniers Indiens des Caraïbes. Image, mythe et réalité (Matoury, Guyane: Ibis Rouge, 2003), 205–8.
Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious World: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 194.
Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2002 [1975]), 279.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indias (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1959), 17.
José Manuel Fajardo, Lettre du bout du monde, trans. Claude Bleton (Paris: Flammarion, 1998 [1996]).
See Francisco López de Gómara, Historia General de Las Indias, XIII (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 28.
Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, El descubrimiento de España (Oviedo: Ediciones Nobel, 1996), 73.
Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 53.
Stefan Zweig, Amerigo. Récit d’une erreur historique, trans. Dominique Autrand (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996 [1942]), 59.
Albert Ronsin, Le Nom de l’Amérique (Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue, 2006), 202–4.
See Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme. Petit Traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974).
Julien Gracq, La Forme d’une ville (Paris: Corti, 1985), 2.
Xavier Moret, América, América. Viaje por California y el Far West (Barcelona: Península, 2001 [1998]), 221–22.
Francisco López de Gómara, Historia General de Las Indias, XIII (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 299.
See Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: Seuil, 2006 [2004]), 276–312. The author mentions other notable cases, such as Martín Ignacio de Loyola, the nephew of the founder of the Society of Jesus, or that of Salvador Correia de Sá, who worked between Brazil, Angola, and Mombasa.
Barron Field, cited in Paul Carter, The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 2001 [1995]), 404.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamerlan, 2, V, 3, 159, trans. Philippe de Rothschild (Paris: Albin Michel, 1977), 243.
See D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: ReWriting the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008),125–55.
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© 2013 Bertrand Westphal
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Westphal, B. (2013). The Invention of Place. In: The Plausible World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364593_5
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