When Palma died in 1919, he was an icon of Peruvian letters, and one of the most popular writers in the Spanish–speaking world. In his final years, he had rejected attempts to publicly honor his service to the nation, and lived quietly, reading and dictating letters from his home. In spite of his disappointments, Palma’s reputation was secure; by the twentieth century, his traditions had been recognized as a foundational document about Peru’s past and a testament to the playful spirit of old Lima’s vox populi.
Toward a Definition of Palma’s Peruvian Traditions
José Miguel Oviedo writes that it is “a perilous adventure” to define the tradition: “its fabric has so many threads that one fears forgetting one of them or making an erroneous weave.”45The problem lies in the fact that the Peruvian Traditions comprise a broad array of different types of narrations: historical monographs about well–known historical personages, autobiographical anecdotes or reminiscences, sensational stories about major and lesser figures, lexical inquiries, and popular superstitions. Oviedo’s general, structural definition of the tradition invokes some of Palma’s most popular and widely anthologized traditions, such as “The Magistrate’s Ears”: The tradition begins with an anecdote or setting of the scene that is interrupted by a parenthesis in which historical context is offered before continuing with the narration of the story.46The problem with this model is that only a few of Palma’s traditions follow this structure.47The geneaological slipperiness of the tradition is underlined by Robert Bazin’s attempt to weave a definition through a sum of other forms: romantic legend+costumbrismo48+purity of expression=tradition.49This definition adjudicates the particularity of the tradition to the influence of genres that are dissimilar to it, raising more questions than answers. Another definition, largely discredited among critics, is to subordinate the tradition to historiography. The 1953 edition of the complete Peruvian Traditions, edited by Palma’s granddaughter, Edith Palma, resequenced Palma’s work in chronological order, positing the traditions as an overarching history of Peru, in violation of Palma’s own serialization of the traditions outside of the conventional teleologies of liberal historiography. These unsatisfactory attempts to define the tradition lend credence to Aníbal González’s claim that the very notion of genre is inimical to the tradition, which resists absolute categories because of its satiric nature.50Rather than a uniform genre or form, the tradition may be loosely described as a type of historical miscellany that results from the combination of orality, journalistic satire, and the fictionalization of historical miscellany drawn from primary and secondary historical documents.
Despite the difficulty in defining the tradition as a genre, a general account of some of its most salient traits can help set the stage for understanding the debate over its ideological nature. We begin by repeating that the tradition can take many distinct forms: a historical monograph such as “The Protectress and the Liberatrix” lacks the fictional verve of a tale like “An Adventure of the Poet Viceroy”; a sensational story of madness and violence, such as “The Christ in Agony” is not equivalent to “The Witches of Ica,” an account of popular superstitions; and the unabashed comic nature of “The Major’s Calf” is not shared by stories of colonial violence like “The Demon of the Andes.” The diversity of the Peruvian Traditions goes a long way toward explaining the difficulty in summarizing the tradition with a totalizing, singular definition. In spite of this caveat, some of the characteristics of the style, composition, and thematics of the traditions provide a more coherent view of the kind of narrative sensibility that binds them together.
The tradition is a hybrid narrative. Its nucleus is an anecdote, but historical digressions and ironic and exclamatory authorial interventions are added to the mix. Even in traditions that do not seem particularly inventive in their theme or form (such as some of the more historiographic “monographs”) readers find historical discourse combined with anecdotal, autobiographical, or humorous elements. In “The Protectress and the Liberatrix,” the biographies of Rosa Campusa and Manuela Sáenz are framed by autobiographical anecdotes from Palma’s childhood and youth. “The Knights of the Cape” might have been a dry historical anecdote if not for Palma’s artful characterizations and humorous asides, such as the passage in which a would–be political assassin skirts a puddle on his way to “bathing” himself in human blood. On another level, the prevalent combination of different discourses in the Peruvian Traditions, which varies in degree and in kind in different texts, also underlines how Palma empowered his documentary research with the freedom of the imagination, producing fiction through his “historical” sourcework. In “The Magistrate’s Ears,” for example, Palma loosely based his narrative on a brief anecdote recounted in Sebastián de Lorente’s Historia del Perú bajo la dinastía austriaca, 1542–1598 (1863). In Lorente’s concise narrative, a soldier of noble descent named Aguirre receives a humiliating lashing by order of a magistrate of Potosí for failing to pay a fine. Fearing reprisal from Aguirre, the magistrate fled to Lima, only to be murdered three years later with a stab wound to the right temple. Palma changes the names, introduces the thematic nucleus of the ears of the magistrate, dramatizes events by having the dishonored nobleman insinuate his threats to the magistrate on several separate ocassions, and changes the very outcome of the original story: Instead of being murdered, the magistrate loses his ears to his attacker and dies later of humiliation.51Clearly, Palma was not limited by his original source, but rather used it as a frame for his own invention; like a good tailor (one of his favorite metaphors for his work as a tradicionista), Palma delighted in “sewing” together different types of discourse.
In the past, critics underlined the criollismo of the Peruvian Traditions, or the use of a narrative style associated with a persona common to Lima, and whose hallmark was an impish view of society. In more recent years, this rubric has been broadened or replaced by the concept of orality, suggesting that the tradition represents a challenge to the conventions of liberal print culture in nineteenth–century Latin America and its class–based hierarchies of cultural value. Julio Ortega underlines the emancipatory potential of this deployment of orality: “With the materials of Tradition, Palma’s ‘tradition’ is a true deconstruction of what is constructed, of what is given and inculcated.”52The use of colloquialisms, diminutives, exclamations, curse words and other elements of oral culture make monumentalist or mythic representations of historical personages impossible, challenge instrumentalist representations of the past and provide the foundation for most of the humor in the Peruvian Traditions.53For example, in “Friar Martín’s Mice,” Palma simultaneously questions and celebrates the famous black saint, interjecting several memorable exclamations upon reporting Friar Martin’s “miracles,” such as “Don’t make me laugh, for I’ve one lip that’s cracked” and the final sentences: “And...and...and... isn’t this story all stuff and nonsense? No, of course not!” In “The Countess Who Was Summoned,” Palma introduces his historical context with a sentence that disarms the notion of writerly didacticism, evoking a scene of leisure and conversation: “Reader, a cigar or a toothpick, and let us speak of colonial history.” Often, the very premise of a tradition is predicated on orality, through a particular proverb or phrase that Palma seeks to explain through his tradition, thus making popular speech the raison d’être of his writing and not the exemplary lives of “great” men or the retelling of “great” historical events (see for example, “A Letter Sings,” “Margarita’s Wedding Dress,” “The Judge’s Three Reasons”). However, our emphasis on the orality (and ostensible populism) of the tradition as a narrative form needs to be tempered by an awareness that Palma’s colloquialism was partially mediated through print culture, particularly journalism, which had adopted mundane speech and wordplay as an important tool in its satiric arsenal.54In his youth, Palma had been a part of a romantic coterie of writers who used journalism to skewer the social and cultural world of Lima; before beginning to write his traditions, Palma was undo
ubtedly familiar with the conventions of political satire, including recourse to oral forms of address.
Aníbal González notes that the thematic content of a great number of the Peruvian Traditions may be classified under the rubric of the fait divers, or the human interest story, in which strange, intranscendent, absurd, or tragic events are narrated outside of the generic confines of the standard categories of modern journalism (such as the news story about politics, economics, culture, etc.). As defined by Roland Barthes, the fait divers problematizes causality, situating the events it narrates in an ambivalent or aberrant context that is hard to rationally explain. “The Royalist Smells of Death to Me” is a good example of the tradition as a fait divers: It narrates the execution of a civilian during the Wars of Independence, an all too common event during that conflict, within the frame of the civilian’s prophetic knowledge of the future death of the colonel who has ordered his execution. Similar violent prophecies that violate rational models of causality are fulfilled in “Friars’ Work!” and “The Countess Who Was Summoned.” The notion of the fait divers, along with Palma’s penchant for wordplay, underline how the Peruvian Traditions actively avoids the kind of historicity that is associated with modern national historiography, opting instead for lurid, ridiculous, and outlandish tidbits about personages known and unknown to “History.” Even when Palma writes about well–known historical figures, he defamiliarizes them and situates their stories outside of the orbit of the mythical fictions of national or continental identity, as in the case of “The Liberator’s Three Etceteras.” This tradition’s mention of the hygienic habits of Bolívar, and the focus on his sexual proclivities, ultimately results in a narrative that is more indebted to the notion of a humorous entertainment than to the inflated authority of liberal historiography.55In short, when Palma writes about foundational historical figures, he reframes them by portraying them as if they were living in the present, with all of their foibles and eccentricities intact.56
Finally, the sequencing of the Peruvian Traditions demands our attention as one of its revealing traits. Palma’s traditions were first published in newspapers in Lima, Valparaiso, and Buenos Aires before being collected in volumes. When Palma began publishing collections of his traditions in book form in 1872, he called each volume of traditions a “series,” but did not order each tradition chronologically within any given series. As a result, rather than a vertical telos, the Peruvian Traditions offers its readers a horizontal mosaic of stories about Peru’s past. In “A Viceroy and an Archbishop,” Palma concedes that a complete history of the era of the viceroys would be very difficult because of incomplete historical archives, “or because of the negligence of our forefathers as regards the recording of facts.” If a complete national history were an edifice, Palma envisioned his traditions as something much more modest: They were the stones that might, some day in the future, be used for the construction of a more complete national structure.57Regardless of such statements about the lack of resources for a totalizing history, Palma’s “mosaic” of the past enables his traditions to avoid positivist notions of historical development and narration, situating them instead in an oral continuum modeled by the informal transmission, from one generation to the next, of stories about the past (see for example “The Black Mass”). Rather than being a failure on Palma’s part, the random serialization of the Peruvian Traditions, like its subject matter and humor, presents a type of historical memory that foregrounds actors, “minor” events, and narrative conventions that are excluded from more sequential and “writerly” versions of the past.
The Peruvian Traditions and the Critique of Modernity
Palma’s traditions have been woven into the fabric of modern Peruvian consciousness as a particularly rich and familiar site of national memory. In fact, as Antonio Cornejo Polar has noted, Palma played a key role in “nationalizing” colonial history, integrating and disseminating it as a fact of the republic’s emergent national identity. Like Walt Whitman, José Martí, and Pablo Neruda in their respective countries of origin, Palma has become an emblem of national identity. Yet, what kind of Peruanidad (Peruvianism) does Palma represent? Is it the uncritical and retrograde yearning for a fictional, colonial past, or the democratic and populist irony of criollismo? The debate over the uncertain ideological sign of the Peruvian Traditions began in the nineteenth century with Palma’s first skirmish with Manuel González Prada. Between 1886 and 1888, González Prada gave a series of speeches later published in Pájinas Libres (1894), in which he called for the modernization of Peruvian letters through Positivism. In his analysis, Peruvian writers were plagued by anemic prose, false grandiloquence, archaism, senile purisms, and timidity. In particular, González Prada singled out the tradition (without naming Palma directly) as an example of the inert and reactionary literary scene: “in our prose the bad tradition still reigns, that monster engendered by bittersweet falsifications of history and the microscopic caricatures of the novel.”58González Prada implied that writers like Palma were not hearing the clarion call of Positive Science and its potential for expressive, cultural, and political renewal, opting instead for convoluted and vacuous prose in which “accidents modify accidents” and incommensurate periods are combined haphazardly.59
González Prada’s critique has had several notable heirs in the twentieth century who continue to fault Palma for his choice of subject matter and style of writing. Most forcefully, Sebastián Salazar Bondy restated the case in Lima la horrible (1964), arguing that in spite of his republican stripes, Palma was the most successful of all apologists of the colonial era. His traditions, Salazar Bondy argues, contributed to a colonial facade that occluded power relations between master and slave, foreigner and native, and rich and poor.60Salazar Bondy and other critics are essentially objecting to the phenomenon of perricholismo in modern Peruvian cultural history. The concept of perricholismo derives from the nickname of a notorious eighteenth-century actress and courtier, Micaela Villegas (1748–1819). When Villegas became the mistress of Viceroy Manuel Amat (who was 40 years her senior), details of their tempestuous relationship became the grist for conversation across Lima, serving as a kind of colonial–era soap opera. Villegas came to be known as “la Perricholi” either because an angry Amat once called her a perra chola (a half–breed dog), or because it was his custom to call her pretixol (from the Catalan word for beautiful thing).61Perricholismo, which springs from the fascination with the amorous intrigues and sumptious world of colonial–era high society and power, designates a form of reactionary nostalgia for colonial times.62
In spite of these critiques of the Peruvian Traditions, Palma found a surprising defender in the well–known Marxist theorist José Carlos Mariátegui, whose Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1917) insightfully explored the relationship between narrative and politics in Palma’s writings. Mariátegui distinguished Palma from other writers fascinated with the colonial era, and whose writings betray nostalgia for the colony: “The Tradiciones of Palma is politically and socially democratic; Palma interprets the common people. His ridicule, which reflects the mocking discontent of the criollo demos, undermines the prestige of the viceroyalty and its aristocracy. The satire of Tradiciones does not probe very deeply nor does it hit very hard. Precisely for this reason it is identified with the sugar–coated humor of the bland, sensual demos. Lima could not produce any other kind of literature and Tradiciones exhaust and sometimes exceed their possibilities.”63
In spite of the fact that Palma has been co–opted by “colonialist” ideologues, Mariátegui argues that Palma’s writing encodes the narrative ethos of a middle–class elite that resented the old reactionary aristocracy. Indeed, a closer look at other Peruvian chroniclers of the past underlines how Palma’s traditions artfully avoided the trap of nostalgia, and enshrined a kind of populist sensibility. One of Palma’s most successful followers was JoséGálvez, author of the best–selling collection Una Lima que se va (1921), and who in 1913 had received from P
alma the pen with which he had written the Peruvian Traditions; in a brief note that accompanied the gift of the pen, Palma encouraged the young Gálvez to use it to write “historical–sociological studies of Lima.”64 From the very title of his book (“The Lima That Is Fading”), nostalgia shapes Gálvez’s writing transparently: the old customs surrounding baptism, marriage, and the tertulias (social gatherings) are evoked as a lost plenitude.65Gálvez’s overtly didactic and judgemental tone is worlds away from the picaresque sensibility of Palma; in his study of the ghosts of Lima, Gálvez condemns old–time superstitions and the “detestable mania” of frightening children with lurid and fantastic stories.66In contrast, in “The Black Mass,” Palma adopts Granny’s voice and tells a witch–story to his children, exhorting them to pray “to blessed souls in Purgatory and your guardian angels to keep you safe and defend you from witches who suck the blood of children and make them scrawny.”
Palma’s own testimony about the meaning of the tradition, as expressed in some of the poetic prologues to his volumes of traditions and in his letters, clarifies the impulses behind his writing. First, Palma is forceful in his rejection of romanticism, which he considers a depleted aesthetic that has become hollow and false. Although Palma had been a pioneering romantic in Peru, by the 1870s he had become disenchanted with the volume and repetitive nature of romantic poetry. In his prologue–poem “Cháchara” (1875), Palma writes: “Precisely those that spill tears / on paper, are, in my view / smugglers of suffering, ridiculous / actors that mimic pain.”67At a deeper level, Palma rejects the division of cultural production into separate, and ultimately artificial, literary and historical spheres; the hollowness of romanticism attests to the depletion of literature as a social force within this arbitrary division of expressive domains.68Palma professes the tradition as a nationalist renewal of literature predicated on the rejection of romantic hysterics and on the reconciliation of the discourses of literature and history: “Since no one wanted to introduce the literary sickle / into historical matters / I told myself: ‘Gentlemen, without scruple, in this I surely don’t sin, here you have me.’”69The tradition is a literary form that seeks to overcome the trivialization of literature and its separation from the constructive, nationalist didacticism of historiography. Despite the distinctiveness of the tradition as an irreverent form of counterhistoriography, Palma always conceived of his writing as a nationalist venture. “The tradition is my offering of love to the country and to letters,” Palma wrote in 1872.70
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