This paper attempts to develop the following idea: that using different positions

and loci of enunciation, Miguel de Cervantes and the indigenous Mesoamerican

challenge the canonical concept of historiography formulated during the first century of

the Spanish Empire. In both cases, it is contested the imperial idea of historiography as a

discourse that narrated true accounts. However, in the case of Cervantes, he used

different articulations of the mechanisms of fiction in order to confront the theorist of

History as we can see in his last novel The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: Historia

Setentrional. Differently from Cervantes, the Mesoamericans “scribes” of the codices had

a different procedure of narrating accounts from the past through logographic and

phonetic signs that to the eyes of the Spaniards where just mere “drawings” with no

sense. Thus, their codices greatly conflicted the notions of to record true accounts.

Although Cervantes and the Mesoamerican codices differed each other, they understood

that there were different ways of recording History and not just the one that the imperial

power was claiming to be.

First, we must have in mind what was the idea of History during the time of

Cervantes; and in order to displace ourselves from our idea of historiography, we should

explain the key difference of the concept nowadays and during the Renaissance.

Differently from today where historiography deals with how to understand the

development of human actions through the time- as we can see in Hegel’s dialectics of

the Spirit and Marx’s class struggle-, in the Renaissance, history was concerned with how

to write a historic narration. In other words, contrary to the modern idea of

historiography based on a “philosophical” approach- seeking an idea that helps to

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understand the connections of the events- the scholars of the Renaissance were discussing

the art of narrating history.

Thus, if historiography was an art, it was necessary to separate it from other

written arts. Although there were many definitions of historiography, most of the

scholars saw as the key component of history the truth on its statements; and therefore,

they defined history as the true account of true events that happened in the past or the

present. But what were the criteria of truth in that time for an historical narration? The

criteria came from the Aristotelian modalities (modalidades) of de dicto, which is the

truth of what was said, and de re, which was the truth of the past events. Moreover, the

criterion was more pragmatic than logical-semantic. Therefore, the value of “true” was

incrusted in the “efficient cause” (the historian), and in the “final cause” (the final aim of

the narration: the magistra vitae.) (See Mignolo, “El Metatexto historiográfico…”) Thus,

the veritable of the discourse is retained in a) the recognition of the historian as a savant,

and b) the final aim of the narration (the exempla) that must be in concordance with the

dominant ideas of the society. However, at the end, the dominant ideas give the authority

to the person narrating the events. In the epoch of Cervantes, this was the core element

that separates historiography from other arts: the value of truth of its narration.

Differently from history, which dominions were the true events, fiction dealt with

verisimilitude. According to the well-known differentiation of Aristotle, the fiction

imitates the truth in order to represent what would happen instead of what happened,

which was the pursuit of history. Thus, history was true events and fiction an imitation of

“reality.”
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Nevertheless, Cervantes wants to break that division. For the author, the line that

separates history from fiction was everything but clear. Indeed, it was for sure for him

that history and fiction were the same, as he explains in the Persiles: “La historia, la

poesía y la pintura simbolizan entre sí y se parecen tanto, que cuando escribes historia,

pintas, y cuando pintas, compones.” (371) What Cervantes wants to show is that history,

fiction and painting have the same possibility to express “truth”, and therefore, the

separation between is just a thing of classification. Furthermore, Cervantes will try to

explain that the separation is blurred by the fact that the ars historica and the ars poetica

share the possibility of accounting “truth.”

Cervantes’s first attempt to erase the separation between history and fiction is

through the title of the Persiles. If we return to this novel, we will notice that the author

describes is work as a “Septentrional History”. Most scholars acknowledge that the title is

a clear reference to the Heliodorus’s Historia Aethiopica as they argue that there are

several intertextual references to this work in the Persiles. Nevertheless, the reference of

“history” in the title goes beyond this intertextuality. The gesture of Cervantes is quite

odd because it mistakes the usual classification of the historical with the fictional texts. In

other words, the title moves his fictional work to the genre of the historical accounts

along with the chronicles and annals of the time, though he knew well that the Persiles

belonged to the classification of the ars poetica and not the ars historica.

This error of classification is not trivial. What Cervantes is indicating is that his

novel can be taken as a true account or as a byzantine novel. In other words, the Persiles

can be taken as a true history- and therefore, the reader will be falling into the quixotic

play of reading fiction as truth-, or as a byzantine novel, which separates what is fiction
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from what is truth. In the end, the question is why Cervantes opens the possibility of

considering the Persiles as a true account. The answer is in the final aim, or the moral

example that the author wants to give in the Persiles.

If in the Quixote, Cervantes depicts a man who has fallen in the game of fiction

with a tragic end, in the Persiles he wants us falling in the reality of fiction like the

Quixote. Indeed, the author wants us believing in the reality of the principal characters,

Persiles and Sigismunda, as the Quixote believed in Amadís. For that purpose, he must

blur the separation between history and fiction; and in order to do that, he must seek

“truth” in fiction. Thus, Cervantes breaks the delicate walls used to construct the notion

of history in his time. As we said, the veritable in history was based in the pragmatic

criterion of the final cause (the final aim of the text) and not from the reality or the

scientific veracity, as we consider true accounts nowadays. Thus, in order to subvert the

criterion, he will demonstrate that the final aim (the magistra vitae) of historiography is

achievable through other discourses; and the chosen one for him was the epic form.

In the Discourse on the Heroic Poem, Torquato Tasso explains that the final aim

of the epic form is the teaching of the highest virtue, the heroic one, to the readers.

Moreover, Cervantes takes the final aim of the epic form and translate it to the final aim

of the historical account, the magistra vitae. Since the final aim of history is a truth,

Cervantes sees in the virtue of the main characters, Persiles and Sigismunda, the truth that

he wants to teach as a moralizing attitude toward his readers. Thus, in the story, the

heroic virtue of Persiles and Sigismunda is their strong Christian beliefs. For that

purpose, the story centers in the peregrination to Rome of both. However, during the

travel they will have to show their religious beliefs while they suffer of calamitous events
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that endanger their identities as Christian models. Thus, it is precisely the accounting of

this virtue, which is the affirmation of the Christian beliefs, what Cervantes wants to

equate with the final aim (magistra vitae) that gives the value of “true” to history. In the

Persiles, the great lesson for the readers that Cervantes wants to teach is the Christian

virtue in these characters. From the final aim of Cervantes, which is the demonstration of

the maximum virtue of his protagonists, he seeks to give an exemplum of life, and

therefore, to occupy the niche of the historical account.

In other part of the Persiles, Cervantes depicts two young men were narrating

their calamities as prisoners in Algiers. However, the two majors of the town identified

the young men as liars after asking them some questions about Algiers. In fact, the two

majors had been real prisoners in the African country, which allow them to see the

deceiver discourse of the young men. After recognizing that they were not real prisoners

but just two students from Salamanca, the majors changed ended helping the young men.

The majors gave them details to accurate their, as Cervantes says, “feigned history” of the

imprisonment in Algiers so the students would not been caught cheating again (Para que

ellos no fuesen “pillados” mintiendo). Through this story, Cervantes recognizes this quite

odd construction, a very antithetical one called “feigned history.” What this antithesis

wants to demonstrate is the possibility of mixing the false and truth, the fiction and

history, since between them there is no separation.

Finally, I will bring one last example of the intention of Cervantes in showing the

vague line between history and fiction. In one part of the narration, Persiles asks a painter

to draw in a canvas several events that happened to him and his friends. Thus, the painter

made this huge canvas with the accounts of the group. Then, Persiles assigned to
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Antonio, the barbarous friend that Persiles meet in the first part of the novel, to do the

labor of the dramatic description of the canvas, which would serve as a true document of

the tribulations the group suffered. Nonetheless, regardless the concordance between

what really happened and the drawing, the document cannot be considered as a true

document since the narration and the canvas belong to the space of fiction. What

Cervantes is trying to do is to insert the reader into a box of three layers (the canvas, the

novel and our reality) where between the canvas and the novel there is historical veracity.

In that sense, there is truth in the novel, or at least an accuracy between events that

happen in to different dimensions (the one in the canvas and the other in the novel as

separated from the canvas) Thus, contrary to the epic poem or tragedy where the

movement is to bring historical facts to the poetic work in order to obtain a verisimilar

effect and remain inside the sphere of the fiction, Cervantes moves in the opposite side:

going from the poetic work in his ultimate dimension (the canvas) to a second dimension

(the people observing it inside the novel) where what the reader believes is fiction

becomes truth.

In conclusion, the Persiles attempts to erase the line that separates fiction from

history. But, let us come back to that beautiful phrase in the Persiles when it is said that

history, poetry (which in this case is ars poetica) and painting are alike. Such affirmation

would have produced rejection among the men of letters of that time. Indeed, for the

mind of the scholars of that time, just to think of recording history through painting was

insane since History had to be recorded with letters and in the format of a book. In fact, it

was this idea about the necessary connection between History and the written word what

made the missionaries and colonizers to reject the non-alphabetical recordkeeping

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instruments of the indigenous people of the Americas. For example, since the Aztecs and

the Mayas used pictographic and ideographic signs (or in “simple” words: “drawings”) to

record their memory as a community, the colonizers considered them as communities

without History. This Spanish consideration did not allow the Europeans to see that there

were other methods to record memory outside of the realm of the word. Therefore, for the

Spaniards there was only one instrument that was able to hold the truth of History: the

written word.

However, it seems that Cervantes rejects the assumption that only the book can

utters a true history. Indeed, the quote that refers to the connection of painting, the poetic

art and history confirms Cervantes’s idea about the existence of that allow to express a

true history. As we have seen, for the Spanish author it is possible to write history

through fiction. In addition, he also perceives the power of painting as an appropriated

method of recording history as we can see in the canvas that Persiles requests. Thus, what

connects Cervantes with the Mesoamerican recordkeeping systems is their belief in other

instruments to record memories outside the format of the written history.

Thus, let us change the locus of enunciation in order to understand that there is no

such fundamental relationship between history and the word as we see how memories

were recorded in Mesoamerica before the arrival of the Castilians. This hermeneutical

shift from the modern and colonial perception of history will allow us that the problem

that Cervantes’s was facing, which is the blurring separation between history, fiction and

painting, is just a construction of the European lineage of thinking as we will see that in

the Mesoamerican world that division never existed.

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Let me be clear. As far as we know, in the case of the amoxtli, which was the

paper where the tlacuilo (the Aztec “scribe”), memories were recorded memories using

pictographic signs. To the eyes of a nahuatl, which is the name for the people living in

the area of Mexico, the amoxtli was the instrument used to know the past events of the

community. In other words, it was the holder of the community’s memory. However, the

amoxtli was also the source where the nahuatl could acquire his or her identity. Based on

the idea that through the memory of the community the subject acknowledge

where the truth of the community could be reached by the memory of the ancient

accounts of the forefathers. Indeed, the use of mirror to know himself or herself was a

regular practice among Aztecs to apprehend his or her identity, or what Nahuatl culture

understood as “to have a face and a heart”, in order to have firmness in a world where

solidity was considered truth.

Ideas para el siguiente movimiento:

 Los codices son pinturas, no son letras y por lo tanto no pueden cargar con

la historia

 Al ser pinturas, demuestran que no son tan avanzados como los españoles

quienes tienen letras. (Colonización)

 Cervantes mantiene una crítica a la idea de una verdad que solo puede ser

expresada por la historia, pero también lo puede ser por medio de la

ficción y de la pintura (¿¿??)

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 Lo que los europeos consideraban como “pinturas” o “dibujos”, en el caso

de los andinos e indígenas, eran la verdad (histórica y filosófica.)

 La gran diferencia del amoxtli mexica y el libro es que uno refiere y el

otro es. Es la idea de representación la que está detrás. Uno lee la palabra,

otro el mundo