Tzvetan Todorov – The Conquest of America
The first two chapters describe Columbus’ initial encounters with the “Indians” of America. It hinges on a pursuit of material goods, gold, and immaterial values, evangelical aspirations. But Columbus inscribes value upon the Indians, according to hermeneutical authority, i.e. scriptures and etc. The discussion regarding myth of the noble savage and the violent savage in Chapter 3 (35-50) explores how the explorers-conquerors perceive the Indians at once as equals “before God”, but objects; inscribing them into a position of inferiority. “Columbus speaks about the men he sees only because they too, after all, constitute a part of the landscape.” (35)
The end of the chapter “Columbus and the Indians”, which examines Columbus’ inability to grasp the concept of language, demonstrates the problem of communication between two foreign peoples (refer to p.38 and the gift-exchange). In experiencing this difficulty, Columbus reduces their simplest actions as expressing “awe” in the explorer-conquerors, as “if they came from the heavens”. Rather than understanding the voices of the Indians, to allow for the meaning of their actions to speak to them, Columbus and company projected a “Christian” image-concept on them, the universalizing move. But alas, this universalizing move falters badly once the Indians violently resist the Christian faith and divine images foisted upon them, and, hence, re-enters the image of the brute and the necessity for a slave trade. Later on, a discussion of monotheism and the polytheistic religions for the Aztecs only confirm that the European faith could not coexist with any others. The Europeans invariably fall back upon the binary of good and evil; noble and savage, when judging the essential nature of the Indians. Because, as Todorov demonstrates throughout the first two chapters, Columbus’ “amateur naturalism” enabled him to see the Indians as part of the landscape, bringing back specimens of the natives, with great diversity, back to the Sovereigns in Spain. For him, the Indians were much like the animals and the natural beauty of the land, objects that pleased the eye and confirmed his Good. “Even when there is no question of slavery, Columbus’ behavior implies that he does not grant the Indians the right to have their own will, that he judges them, in short, as living objects.” (48)
In section entitled “Conquest”, Todorov examines the reasons behind the Spaniards’ victory over the Aztecs. He paints an image of a melancholic Montezuma, the Aztec monarch resigned to the possibility of defeat. Could it be a sense of guilt that motivates him? His Aztec empire succeeded a previous dynasty; was it fated that his empire were to fall to the Spaniards? Todorov writes at the end of the chapter “The Reasons for Victory”: As for the Aztecs, they describe the beginning of their own end as a silence that falls: the gods no longer speak to them. “They asked the gods to grant them their favors and the victory against the Spaniards and their other enemies. But it must have been too later, for they had no further answer from their oracles; then they regulated the gods as mute or as dead” (Duran, III, 77) (62).
In the proceeding chapter “Montezuma and Signs”, Todorov engages in an analysis of Montezuma’s deficiency in interhuman communication. In exploring Aztec prophecies, omens, and chronicles, Todorov explains why the Aztecs were deficient in interpreting signs. Montezuma’s aloof approach to messages gathered and received from the Spaniards (68-74), seem to indicate that a dark foreboding carried within the mind of the Aztec monarch. The Aztec civilization, as Todorov points out in a previous chapter, is a highly diverse one, where the villages surrounding Mexico City see the Spaniards as the lesser of two “evils”, in some cases embracing them as liberators. However, Montezuma is far more preoccupied his relation to “fate” than with relationships with people. The story of Montezuma ordering any who came to see him not to look directly at him, or else risk death, is indicative of his detachment from the interhuman, but also a strict adherence to the ‘collective past’ – given that the ‘law’ regarding the uniqueness of the body of the sovereign being kept out of sight was one put in place by Montezuma I.
| “The individual’s future is ruled by the collective past’; the individual does not construct his future, rather the future is revealed; whence the role of the calendar, of omens, of auguries. The characteristic interrogation of the world is not, as among the Spanish conquistadors (or the Russian revolutionaries), of a praxeological type: “what is to be done?”; but epistemological: “how are we to know?” And the interpretation of the event occurs less in terms of its concrete, individual, and unique content than of the preestablished order of universal harmony, which is to be reestablished.” (69) |
The point becomes far clearer when Todorov clearly states it: “Would it be forcing the meaning of “communication” to say, starting from this point, that there exist two major forms of communication, one between man and man, the other between man and the world, and then to observe that the Indians cultivate chiefly the latter, the Spaniards the former?” (69). Indeed most of the chapter attempts to illustrate how the soothsayer plays the integral role to communications and relationships within the Indians.
On pages 84-85, the Aztec conception of time is very relevant to their fascination with omens and prophecies. “Prophecy is memory”, the past and future are one of the same. “Prophecy is rooted in the past, since time repeats itself; the propitious or disastrous character of days, months, years, centuries to come is established by the intuitive investigation of a denominator common to the corresponding periods of the past.” (85) This conception of time correlates to Montezuma’s pensiveness regarding the change of dynasties. “We see how reluctant Montezuma is to admit that an entirely new event can occur, and that what the ancestors have not already known might come to pass.” (86) Todorov sums this up very concisely: “Again, we are dealing with a prophecy fabricated a posteriori, a retrospective prospection. But that there should be a need to forge this history is revealing: no event can be entirely unprecedented; repetition prevails over difference.” (86)
Needless to say, Todorov places this Aztec conception of time in contrast to the Spaniards. This is namely an infinite progression towards the final triumph of the Christian spirit; Montezuma’s “incapacity to produce appropriate and effective messages”, as Todorov points out, only confirms the “excellence of the Christian religion” for the Spaniards. (87) Todorov cites an example of this where Montezuma sends gold to persuade the foreigners to leave his land, while other chiefs offer women as inducements. Neither gifts produce the intended consequences. Rather, they embolden the desires for conquest, provide for “additional justification for conquest”. (88) Even the sacrificial-cannibalistic warning sent by the Indians only further solidified the determination of the Spaniards to fight, or as Todorov puts it, “to conquer or to die in the cauldrons”. (88)
“The facts, of course, belie the enthusiastic descriptions of the Indians’ friends: we cannot conceive of a language without the possibility of lying, as there is no speech which does not know metaphor. But a society may favor or, quite the contrary, strongly discourage any discourse that, rather than faithfully describing things, is chiefly concerned with its effect and therefore neglects the dimension of truth.” (90) The lack of lies, the stringent belief in truth, as (91) indicates, correlates to a seeing through of motives, therefore the Indians had no recourse to dissimulation. The woman/man-words/weapons distinction for the Aztec warrior contributed to the aforementioned inability to communicate.
“The cultural model in effect since the Renaissance, even if borne and assumed by men, glorifies what we might call the feminine side of culture: improvisation rather than ritual, words rather than weapons. Not just any words, it is true: neither those that designate the world nor those that transmit the traditions, but those whose raison d’être is action upon others.” (92) Todorov mentions on many occasions that this inability to improvise lead to defeat for the Indians. But why were the Christian Spaniards anymore adept at improvisation, this supposed “feminine” quality?
“War, moreover, is only another field in which to apply the same principles of communication we can observe in peacetime; we find certain similar responses to both occasions. Initially, at least, the Aztecs fight a war subject to ritualization and to ceremonial: time, place, and manner are determined in advance, which is more harmonious but less effective.” (92) Hence, according to Todorov, the Indian approach to communication and signs define their approach to war.
“The Aztecs cannot conceive and do not understand the total war of assimilation the Spaniards are waging against them; for them, war must be ended by a treaty establishing the amount of tribute to be paid the victor by the vanquished. Before winning the battle, the Spaniards had already won the decisive victory, which consisted in imposing their type of war; their superiority was henceforth no longer in question.” (93) Todorov ends the chapter by tying all of this together:
“The Spaniards win the war. They are incontestably superior to the Indians in the realm of interhuman communication. But their victory is problematic, for there is no just one form of communication, one dimension of symbolic activity. Every action has its share of ritual and its share of improvisation; all communication is, necessarily, both paradigm and syntagm, code and context; man has just as much need to communicate with the world as with men. The encounter of Montezuma with Cortés, of the Indians with the Spaniards, is first of all a human encounter; and we cannot be surprised that the specialists in human communication should triumph in it.”
| “But this victory from which we all derive, Europeans and Americans both, delivers as well a terrible blow to our capacity to feel in harmony with the world, to belong to a preestablished order; it effect is to repress man’s communication with the world, to produce the illusion that all communication is interhuman communication; the silence of the gods weighs upon the camp of the Europeans as much as on that of the Indians. By winning on one side, the Europeans lost on the other; by imposing their superiority on the entire country, they destroyed their own capacity to integrate themselves into the world. During the centuries to follow, they would dream of the noble savage; but the savage was dead or assimilated, and this dreams was doomed to remain a sterile one. The victory was already big with its defeat; but this Cortes could not know.” (97) |
The parochial production of signs on a purely empirical, phenomenal interhuman level, or in Martin Buber’s term, I-It, leads to the diminishment of the sacred, of the unforeseen encounters with spirit. The claim that Todorov makes is that the demise of the sacred was contributed to by these first encounters between alien peoples. With the imposition of the illusory form of communication, one detaches from the mystical origins necessary for communication, further entrenches the linear pursuit of a final triumph of the Christian spirit. Since this imposition triumphs, they are no longer able to communicate with the world. The world no longer speaks to them, as it is a medium, as means through which the ultimate fate is brought to being. It is not yet “purely rational” in modern terms, but it is, of course, a thoroughly utilitarian and pragmatic approach to the world. Because the Europeans made lying a legitimate form of communication, truth is whatever fits with one’s mission for the moment. The Other, indeed, is a living object, only to confirm the singular truth.
In the chapter entitled “Cortés and Signs”, Todorov concludes his analysis of semiotics with an examination of how Cortés mastered the discourse between the Spaniards and Indians. “The difference between Cortés and those who preceded him may lie in the fact that he is the first to have a political and even historical consciousness of his action.” (99) In fact, Cortés was not merely a pirate, seeking merely material gain. His mission was far more ambitious, and, as Todorov indicates later on in the same chapter, reminiscent of the political thought of Machiavelli. “Hence it is to him that we owe the invention, on the one hand, of conquest tactics, and on the other, of a policy of peacetime colonization.” (99) Todorov contends that both conquest and colonization, in this specific example – between Cortés and Montezuma, hinged on a mastery of semiotics.
Hence, it is quite fitting that the chapter begins with a discussion of translation, and how it was an indispensable tool for Cortés. The Aguilar-La Malinche-Cortés double translation sets up a discussion about the ambiguous position of La Malinche. But Todorov sets her up as a personification of the synthesis of diverse traditions that Cortés employs. “La Malinche glorifies mixture to the detriment of purity – Aztec or Spanish – and the role of the intermediary. She does not simply submit to the other (a case unfortunately much more common: we think of all the young Indian women, “offered” or not, taken by the Spaniards); she adopts the other’s ideology and serves it in order to understand her own culture better, as is evidenced by the effectiveness of her conduct (even if “understanding” here means “destroying”). (101)
Well, her value is expressed in her relation to language, and the function that serves for Cortés’ mastery over the production of information and signs. Todorov, invariably returns to the subject of religion, as it plays a central function to communication for both sides. “Christianity”, Todorov explains, “is, fundamentally, universalist and egalitarian.” (105). He explicates the incapability of a monotheistic and universal religion, like the Christianity of the Europeans, with the polytheistic pagan religions of the Indians. (105-106). This discussion extends to an exploration of how Christianity came into conflict with the traditional hierarchies of the pagan religions. (106-110) These discussions about religion sets up a larger problem of myth, one that Cortés unscrupulously exploits for political gains. The duplicity of Cortés signs reveals a goal-oriented, rather than ideological pursuit, of ends. Todorov carefully navigates through the textual evidence before him to reach this point.
“Initially Cortés has a constant concern for the interpretation which the Indians – the Others – make of his actions.” (110) Todorov provides examples of how Cortés punished pillagers in his own army, for they were perpetuating a sour impression of themselves. “Cortés had the crier announce that, on pain of death, no one was to touch anything but food – this in order to enhance his fame and good will among the natives (Gomara, 29).” (111) Todorov restates the point: “Cortés wants the information the Indians received to be the same information he issues; he will therefore very carefully distill the truth in his own remarks, and he will be particularly pitiless with regard to spies: those whom he captures will have their hands cut off.” (111) He would also send contradictory signals to the Others, as a means to confuse them, while also compounding the indecision of Montezuma; as evidenced in the story regarding the tax collectors (112 – 113). Cortés exploits as master of communication and appearances are broached (112-116). “More generally, in the world of Machiavelli and of Cortés, discourse is not determined by the object it describes, nor by conformity to a tradition, but is constructed solely as a function of the goal it seeks to achieve.” (116) Cortés, as Todorov explains, exploits the myths of the Indians, i.e., the Lucays, to his advantage – in the case of the Lucays, to satiate a need for laborers (116-17).
This culminates in a recount of how Cortés tries to occupy that place of Quetzalcoatl, a figure that is at once “historical (a leader) and legendary (a divinity). Are we given the reason for Montezuma’s defeat? Whether Cortés was successful in shaping the myth itself is beside the point. It is the discourse he imposes on the communication between the two people that is of central importance.
“The Indian accounts of the conquest, especially those collected by Shagún and Durán, tell us that Montezuma identified Cortés as Quetzalcoatl returning to recover his kingdom; this identification is given as one of the chief reasons for Montezuma’s failure to resist the Spanish advance.” (117) However, as Todorov points outs, there is an “obvious hiatus between these two states of myth: the old version, in which Quetzalcoatl’s role is secondary and his return uncertain; and the new one, in which Quetzalcoatl’s return is absolutely certain.” (117) He goes on to recount how Cortés may have been able to impose his interpretation of the myth onto the language of the Other. “Even if Montezuma does not take Cortés for Quetzalcoatl (moreover, he does not particularly fear Quetzalcoatl), the Indians who supply the accounts – i.e., authors of the collective representation – do; this has immeasurable consequences. Thus by his mastery of signs Cortés ensures his control over the ancient Mexican empire.” (119) The varying narratives, from Diaz to Sahagún, have different approaches to the place of the individual in the narrative. This is related to the question of perspective, the more general problematic.
| “We can pursue this comparison of the modalities of representation on the level of imagery. The figures show in the Indian drawings are not individualized internally; if they are intended to refer to a particular person, a pictogram identifying that person appears alongside the image. Any idea of linear perspective, and hence of an individual viewpoint, is absent; the objects are represented in themselves without possible interaction between them, and not as if someone were seeing them. Map and sketch are freely juxtaposed…The Aztec sculptures are worked on all sides, including the base, even if they weigh several tons; this is because the object’s observer is as little individual as its executant; representation gives us essences and is not concerned with the impressions of any one man. European linear perspective may not have originated from the concern to validate a single and individual viewpoint, but it becomes its symbol, adding itself to the individuality of the objects represented. It may seem bold to link the introduction of perspective to the discovery and conquest of America, yet the relation is there, not because Toscanelli, inspirer of Columbus, was the friend of Brunelleschi and Alberti, pioneers of perspective (or because Piero della Franscesca, another founder of perspective, died on October 12, 1492), but by reason of transformation that both facts simultaneously reveal and produce in human consciousness.” (121) |
“The knowledge, here theoretical, of language testifies to a new attitude, no longer of veneration but of analysis and of a new consciousness of its practical utility; Nebrija writes in his Introduction these decisive words: Language has always been a companion of Empire.” (123)
It would be far to simplistic to respond to Todorov’s thoughts on perspective as ushering in the modern subject, the sovereign individual, as a presupposition to a modern world. The linear perspective alters the artist-audience relation. The individuality of the perceiver contributes to the uniqueness of the work? The exploration of the narratives at the end of the chapter appears to be doing that. Hence, the modern subject, as Machiavelli states, appears before the structures of modernity come to being. Representation and perspective are central to this shift. Although it still is unclear why.
It is fitting that the third part of the book is entitled “Love”. And although the chapter “Understanding, Taking Possession, and Destroying” starts with an account of an laudatio of the Aztec world provided by its conqueror, Cortés, it soon becomes clear that the admiration is directed towards objects, and not the subjects who created them (129). The chapter basically examines the disasters that befell the Indians. But Todorov does not take the simplistic standpoint that the Spaniards were responsible for it all, for he is careful not to take even the number of lost Indian lives at face value, i.e. “millions or thousands”. What Todorov appears to be concerned with, more than anything else, is the very modern means through this violence was perpetrated. Three reasons are listed for the diminution of the Indian population: 1) by direct murder; 2) by consequence of bad treatment; and 3) by diseases (133). He takes on the last two reasons first. Bad treatment is correlated to the Spaniards’ pursuit of wealth, treating the Indians as objects and instruments. There is no sensitivity to the suffering of the Indians, because, as Cortés admiration of objects can attest to, the productive labor via the objects they produce is the value of an Indian. “Certainly the question is one of economic murder in all these cases, for which the colonizers bear the entire responsibility.” (135)
In regards to the question of disease, the question of whether the Spaniards intentionally unleashed biological doom upon the Indians, as Todorov notes, is beside the point. “They (the Spaniards) do not know the secrets of bacteriological warfare, but if they could, they would not fail to make use of disease quite deliberately’ we can also assume that in most cases they did nothing to prevent the spread of epidemics. That the Indians die like flies is the proof that God is on the conqueror’s side. The Spaniards may have presumed a little with regard to divine benevolence on their behalf, but, on the evidence, the outcome was incontestable.” (135) The account of Motolinia, a member of the first group of Franciscans to land in Mexico in 1524, in his Historia states, “Mexico has incurred the wrath of God, and is justly punished” (135). These “plagues” are then explicated from 135-38. “Or rather, while condemning exploitation, cruelty, and bad treatment, he considers the very existence of these “plagues” as an expression of the divine will and a punishment of the infidels (138).
Todorov goes on to provide an account of the massacre executed by the Spaniards upon the Indians. He concludes that although wealth is a motivation for such cruelty; wealth alone does not provide an adequate in explaining everything (143). “Everything occurs as if the Spaniards were finding an intrinsic pleasure in cruelty, in the fact of exerting their power over others, in the demonstration of their capacity to inflict death.” (143) Todorov provides a distinction between sacrifice – “performed in public and testifies to the power of the social fabric, to its mastery over the individual – and massacre. (144)
| “Massacre, on the other hand, reveals the weakness of this same social fabric, the desuetude of moral principles that once assured the group’s coherence; hence it should be performed in some remote place where the law is only vaguely acknowledged…Massacre is thus intimately linked to colonial wars waged far from the metropolitan country. The more remote and alien the victims, the better: they are exterminated without remorse, more or less identified with animals. The individual identity of the massacre victim is by definition irrelevant (otherwise his death would be a murder): one has neither the time nor curiosity to know whom one is killing at that moment. Unlike sacrifices, massacres are generally not acknowledged or proclaimed, their very existence is kept secret and denied. This is because their social function is not recognized, and we have the impression that such action finds its justification in itself: one wields the saber for the pleasure of wielding the saber, one cuts off the Indians’ nose, tongue, and penis without having any ritual meaning for the amputator.” (144) |
It soon is clear whom Todorov is speaking about. “Far from the central government, far from royal law, all prohibitions give way, the social link, already loosened, snaps, revealing not a primitive nature, the beast sleeping in each of us, but a modern being, one with a great future in fact, restrained by no morality and inflicting death…when he pleases.” (145) The chapter ends with another question: “But what if we do not want to choose between a civilization of sacrifice and a civilization of massacre?” (145)
“So that any investigation of alterity is necessarily semiotic, and reciprocally, semiotics cannot be conceived outside the relation to the other.” (157)
“There exists a realm in which development and progress are beyond doubt; this is the realm of technology. It is incontestable that a bronze or iron ax cuts better than one of wood or stone, that the use of the wheel reduces the physical effort required. Now these technological inventions themselves are not born of nothing: they are conditioned (without being directly determined) by the evolution of the symbolic apparatus of proper to man, an evolution we can also observe in certain social behavior.” (158-160)
The chapter, “Equality and Inequality”, pivots on a discussion between Las Casas and Sepulveda on the Indians. Las Casas takes the Christian (egalitarian) approach; Sepulveda takes the Aristotelian route. “The declaration derives from fundamental Christian principles: “God created man in His image; to offend man is to offend God Himself. Las Casas therefore adopts this position and give it a more general expression, positing equality as the basis of all human policy: “The natural laws and rules and rights of men are common to all nations, Christian and gentile, and whatever their sect, law, state, color and condition, without any difference.” He even goes one step further…in specifying that he means an equality between ourselves and others, Spaniards and Indians…” (162) Todorov notes how Las Casas idealizes the other; much like Columbus did with his ‘noble savage’ (163-164). This is done to show that “Christian qualities” are inherent in the Indians, making them all the more likely to be converted. But as Todorov mentions, Las Casas’ thoughts on the Indians provide no observational account of the Indians. “We must acknowledge that the portrait of the Indians to be drawn from Las Casa’s works is rather poorer than that left us by Sepulveda: as a matter of fact, we learn nothing of the Indians.” (165) Todorov admits that Las Casas’ prejudice (of equality) is as problematic as Sepulveda’s prejudice (of superiority) (165). “The postulate of equality involves the assertion of identity, and the second great figure of alterity,” Todorov states, “even if it is incontestably more attractive, leads to a knowledge of the other even less valid that the first.” (167)
