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The Invention of America Imaginary Signs of the Discovery and Construction of Utopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Fernando Ainsa

Extract

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“The ships that invented regions were directed toward the West”, announced Juan de Castellanos in 1587 in his Elegías dedicated to Christopher Columbus, and at the beginning of the 16th century Hernán Pérez de Oliva wrote a Historia de la invención de las Indias. The use of the word invention when speaking of the discovery of America may seem to be a semantic confusion or poetic license, viewed from the contemporary perspective of a discipline with well-defined limits, such as geography, since we usually understand invention as the transformation of things by man's intervention, while discovery is finding something that already existed so as to make it known to others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 37 , Issue 145 , March 1989 , pp. 98 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Elegias de varones ilustres de Indias, a long poem by Juan de Castellanos between 1570 and 1592. Biblioteca de autores españoles, Vol. IV, Barcelona, 1944.

2 Ernest Bloch, Le principe espérance, Paris, Gallimard, 1982, Vol. II, p. 363.

3 Marianne Mahn-Lot, Le découverte de l'Amérique, Paris, Flammarion, 1970, pp. 114-117.

4 J.H. Plumb, La muerte del pasado, Barcelona, Barral, 1974.

5 Utopian literature speaks of the time of desire and desired space as a counter-image of present reality. This time and space may signify the reclaiming of a mythical past (lost paradise or Golden Age) or of a future ideal society (rationalized utopia, futurist statements).

6 Alfonso Reyes, Ultima Tulé, in Obras completas, Vol. IX, p. 29, Fondo de cultura económica, Mexico City, 1960.

7 Leopoldo Zea, "América en la historia", Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1970.

8 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, the chapter on Columbus, in América y el Nuevo Mundo, anthology prepared by R. Diaz Alejo and Joaquin Gil. Buenos Aires, Joaquin Gil ed., 1942, p. 83.

9 Quoted by Marianne Mahn-Lot, op. cit., p. 90.

10 We developed this question in Identidad cultural de Iberoamérica en su narrativa. Madrid, Gredos, 1986.

11 Zea, op. cit.

12 Alexandre Cioranescu, "Utopia: The Land of Cocaigne and Golden Age", Diogenes, no. 75, 1971.

13 Jean Servier, "Histoire de l'utopie", Idées, Paris, Gallimard, 1967.

14 We developed this essential subject in "Utopia, Promised Lands, Immigration and Exile", Diogenes, no. 119, 1982.

15 José Lezama Lima recalls that in America during the early years of the conquest "imagination was not la folle du logis but a principle for assembling, recognition and legitimate differentiation". The chronicler of the Indies transplants the tales of chivalry to the American landscape. Fauna and flora are recognized in old bestiaries, books of fables and other books on magic plants. Imagination established the connections. José Lezema Lima, La expresión americana, Santiago, Chile, Editorial universitaria, 1969.

16 Raymond Ruyer, L'utopie et les utopies, Paris, PUF, 1950, p. 9.

17 The "utopian charge" of the 16th century is studied in detail by José Antonio Maravall in Utopia y reformismo en la España de los Austrias, Madrid, Editions Siglo XXI, 1982.

18 Arturo Andrés Roig, (Teoria y critica del pensamiento latinoamericano, Mexico City, FCE, 1981, p. 183) reclaims the studies on "knowledge by conjecture" among which he includes utopia as a "liberating discourse". He agrees with Horacio Ceruti Guldberg in that America, which was "first a utopia for others", elaborates utopias "for itself", which could be "the full exercise of the right to our utopia".

19 In Fernando Ainsa, "Notas para un estudio de la función de la utopia en la historia de América" (Anuario Estudios Latinoamericanos no. 16, Latino America a publication of the Centro Coordinador y Difusor de Estudios Latinoamericanos, Mexico City, UNAM, 1983, pp. 93-115) we insisted on the distinction between utopia and utopian function, using five particular instances in American history as references.