17 - The Brazilian and the Spanish American literary traditions: a contrastive view

Summary

The early texts of Iberian America as a whole could hardly be literature of the New World; they were, rather, literature about the newly discovered and gradually occupied lands that stretched from New Spain (today’s Mexico) to the river Plate basin. To our modern eyes these chronicles of conquest, beginning with the first inventories (the letters of Columbus and of Pero Vaz de Caminha, for example) have long seemed out of place within the canon of Iberian American literature, since they lack the conventional marks of both nationality – their authors, of course, were Europeans almost to a man – and literariness; with a few exceptions, they are marginal to the sacred triad – epos, drama, and the lyric – which defines the core of literature in the aesthetic sense. Yet one should avoid anachronism. After all, until the age of Voltaire, “literature” retained a primarily cognitive rather than aesthetic meaning; that is, literature meant learning rather than a body of imaginative works. This is precisely what these early colonial writings are: accounts of acquaintance, of a learning process. Besides, these texts are by no means devoid of literary value. Literary historians used to stress the coarse and unclassical, “Gothic” character of most such chronicles. Yet some of them – in the Brazilian case, beginning with Caminha’s letter of 1500 – evince rhetorical skills worthy of the best humanist writing of the Renaissance.