I.4.5 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 839023
This excerpt is from “El presagio de América,” the first chapter (part 21) of the book Última Tule, by Alfonso Reyes [(Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1942)]. After exposing the idealized myths of the Conquest, as set forth by European chroniclers, the Mexican author rhetorically calls for a New World utopia to be established by Latin American intellectuals. Invoking the metaphor of Seneca’s “ultima Thule,” Reyes suggests that Latin Americans have the duty to forge the destiny of America as if it were a continent emerging from beyond the sea’s horizon. As with “The Christening of America” [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.5], this selection from Última Tule is from Alfonso Reyes’s Obras Completas [“El presagio de América,” Última Tule in Obras Completas, vol. XI (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1960), 11–62, 57–62].
WE HAVE ALREADY DISCOVERED AMERICA. But what can be done with America? Once awakened, the American Crusades followed the Medieval Crusades. From this moment on, the fate of America—whatever the contingencies or errors of history might be—began to be defined before mankind as the likely place to realize a more equal form of justice, a liberty more wholly understood, a more complete happiness that is better shared among all men, a republic to be dreamt of, a Utopia. The powerful clarion call of trumpets announces America to the minds of the grandest Europeans. What a spring of dreams! Just as America appears on the scene, as would a Nereid in an eclogue of the sea, the bookshops begin to register an abundant surge in utopian narratives. The humanists revive the genre of political dialogue in the style of Plato and, with their gaze fixed upon the New World, they begin to conceive of a more felicitous humanity. [Thus,] dogmatisms break apart at the mere sight of novel customs. The possibility is conceived that other civilizations might be more faithful to the Earth; and the “naked philosopher” of Peter Martyr [d’Anghiera] foreshadows [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau’s “noble savage,” so imbued with innate virtue, just as the fruits of the earth burst with nectar. American exoticism, which [Gilbert] Chinard, [Emile] Dermenghem, and others have studied thoroughly, gives literature a new flavor. In contrast to Eastern exoticism—which was merely picturesque and aesthetic— American exoticism connotes a moral and political intention. That is, by using the marvel of America, literature seeks to substantiate an image that had been posited a priori: the Golden Age of the ancients, the state of natural innocence—all this without taking as a given the heretical aspects [inherent] in this idea. Who among the most honored masters of European thought could escape the dazzling glare? It leaves its mark on Erasmus [of Rotterdam], on Thomas More, [François] Rabelais, [Michel de] Montaigne, [Torquato] Tasso, [Francis] Bacon, and Tomasso Campanella. Just as Juan Ponce de León was delirious to find the fountain of eternal youth in Florida, so philosophers seek from this New World an inspiration for the political betterment of all people. The duty to insist upon this is perhaps the truest tradition of the continent.
Montaigne’s testimony is singularly eloquent. The drama of the Discovery plays out in his soul, set to the pure music of the ideals that continue to stir us. Montaigne recognizes that the mere contrast between the Old and the New Worlds awakened him to an understanding of all the doctrines that Bacon and Shakespeare would discern [from that contrast]: namely, forgiveness and charity. During Montaigne’s youth, America was expanding day by day, and its growing gravitational pull seemed to lift it up above the moral level of the time. [Montaigne] would avidly read the accounts by the chroniclers of the [West] Indies; moreover, being a civil servant in Bordeaux, he would witness the arrival of the goods originating from that abundant new land and was amazed [by it all]. One of his servants had lived in Brazil for ten years, and he used to describe to him the mores of the indigenous people. Montaigne took an interest and began translating the poetry and songs of the cannibals. Always disposed to open the way toward paradox, he was pleased to wonder whether the so-called normal civilization was not, after all, an enormous deviation. Could the man of America—
El preciosamente Inca desnudo [the exquisitely naked Inca]
Y el de plumas vestido mexicano [and the Mexican clad in feathers],
—just as [Luis de] Góngora’s lines put it—not be closer to the Almighty? If only social norms did not have a merely relative foundation. In the end Montaigne discovers the refinement and art within the paradisiacal Tupi-Guarani way of life. Certainly, Montaigne would say to himself that these indigenous peoples are cannibals. But is it not worse to enslave and destroy nine tenths of humanity as the Europeans do, than it is to eat your fellow men? America tortures its prisoners of war, but in Montaigne’s opinion Europe allows much worse tortures in the name of religion and justice. So, witness here, in the mind of a paradigmatic European, the hint to the most advanced and audacious perspectives that would be proffered by the modern spirit. Disappointment in the errors of Europe was becoming part of the intellectual milieu. It contaminates both Protestantism and Puritanism—even more Quakerism that had just established itself in [North] America. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church was also making its [own attempts] at societal utopias: within Vasco de Quiroga’s workshops in Mexico [Michoacàn], in the first missions set up in [southern] Brazil and throughout the Jesuit Empire in Paraguay.
What a radiant promise the New World was for all those dissenters and reformers! While the merchants were securing their profits, religious apostles embarked on their redemptive mission, but legions of dreamers were longing for hope. It can be said that America was discovered (almost “invented”) as the place in which the most chimerical forces could overflow. Those who were thirsty, either in their bodies or souls, discovered and invented America, [as did] those who needed houses of gold in order to satisfy their hunger for luxury, or even those with a clear conscience [who needed] a place to sow and instill both ideas: of God and of goodness. Later on, America remained a haven for the persecuted: it is already a hospitable home for the forbidden religions of the Huguenot and the Puritan; it is already a land where the condemning eye offers a truce for Cain’s rehabilitation.
The European colonization came afterward. In the following centuries, America would be burdened by a slow gestation period, and so its aspirations would lay dormant. If the seed was sown during the Discovery, then that seed— now that admirable governance of the Vice-Royalties that channels [America’s] spiritual energy—lies quietly warmed beneath the soil. It is not dead, quite the contrary. As republics are liberated, the ideal [of America] is [further] defined and characterized by its universality. Throughout the nineteenth century, the most ardent Utopians—be they spiritualists, socialists, or communists—headed toward the New World as a Promised Land in which to realize the happiness that everyone aspires to, albeit under different names. Today, hope spans across the continent, and it offers itself to Europe as a preserve for humanity.
Either this is the meaning of history or history has no meaning at all. If it is not as such, then it should be, and all we Americans know it. Urgent contingencies or foreign affronts could divert our course one day, one year, even one century, but the grand path will prevail. The decline of America is as certain as that of a star, [however] it began as an ideal and remained an ideal. America is a Utopia.
In conclusion, before its discovery, America had already been intuited in the dreams of poetry and in the insights of science. The pressing need to determine the political configuration of the land corresponded to the necessity of settling its borders. The king of the fable had a broken coin; he lacked the missing fragment necessary to decipher the riddle of his fate. Either, just as in Plato’s Atlantis, all spoke of a continent that had disappeared into a vortex of oceans; or, just as in Seneca’s ultima [ultimate] Thule,1 all speak of a continent emerging from beyond the sea’s horizon. Well before her presence was felt, America was noted by absence. We could say in the language of pre-Socratic philosophy that a world without America was in a state of imbalance with regard to matter and the elements, over-constrained as hubris or injustice. For a time, America seemed to flee before the keel of the captivated explorers.
Once America was discovered, the human mind—inexhaustible in its determination to advance social well-being—began to theoretically conceptualize Utopias and Perfect Republics: those promising new territories that could serve as a refuge. In the practical sense, endeavors of political and religious expansion arise, no longer confined by the limitations of Old Europe. The pretext [of the Discovery] had been a humble thing: a culinary privation due to the lack of spices from the East once Constantinople had fallen to the power of the Turks. The real motivation was a material and base matter: the economic exploitation of the colonies, the desire for immediate wealth. But in spite of all this, the ideal had been set in motion.
Given that life never proceeds in a straight line, from that moment on, among the vicissitudes of history, between vacillation and chance, America appears as the stage for all attempts at human happiness, for all righteous adventures. And today, before the disasters of the Old World, America gives hope new value. Her colonial origin—the same that obliges her to look outside herself for the reasons for her actions and her culture—gave her early on an international sensibility, an enviable elasticity so that she [might] perceive the vast human panorama, [both at the] individual [level] and as a whole. American culture is the only culture capable of disregarding ethnic and national partitions. On a course bound toward homonoia [harmony], an egalitarian empathy acts as the equalizer between the two main characters of the American drama: [namely] the homogeneity of the Latin world and the sameness of the Saxon sphere. The nations of America are not as foreign to one another as the countries of other continents. Three centuries in the making; one century of exhausting efforts unleashed by independence and novel organizational structures; a half century more of cohesiveness and cooperation. Such is, from a sweeping perspective, the path of America.
1
Seneca writes of Thule in Medea: “There will come an age in the far-off years when Ocean shall unloose the bonds of things, when the whole broad earth shall be revealed, when Tethys shall disclose new worlds and Thule not be the limit of the lands.” Seneca, Medea, in Seneca’s Tragedies, trans. Frank J. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), lines 376–379.—Ed.