Aditi Angiras The discourses of Columbus, Cortes and Las Casas in Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. — Tzvetan Todorov was born in Stalinist Bulgaria and came to France in the early 1960s.
His personal experience of the internal “otherness” which Julia Kristeva describes as “strangers to ourselves”, lead him to explore the American encounter which was a “unique event in the history of humanity” in that two continents, which had been oblivious to each other’s existence, came into a sudden and violent contact. In his The Conquest of America (1982), Tzvetan Todorov has given us a most interesting recent reading of Columbus and several others of the most important 16th century Spanish commentators on the New World.
Todorov constructs a narrative from a collection of texts : Columbus’s famous letters to Ferdinand and Isabella; Hernan Cortes’s Letters of Relation; Juan Gines de Sepulveda’s Demoncrates Alter and the writings of Bartolome de Las Casas, among others. For Todorov, what happened in 1492 was not merely the invasion and subsequent subjugation of the Indies by the Spanish Conquistadores, but was also an encounter between different ways of interpreting the world. This encounter was not only between the “civilized” and the “barbarians”.
It was also between the “past-oriented”, “tradition dominated” Aztecs who had no formal script and hence couldn’t generate ‘signs’ to communicate punctually and eventually unable to resist Cortes’s attack and the Europeans who could communicate through language rather than only directly to the world through external signs, and thus could understand the Aztecs much better than the Aztecs could understand the Europeans. It was also a clash of communication or rather the lack of it.
The Essay on Aztecs 2 Cortes Spanish Mexico
The Aztecs were the most powerful empire of in all of the New World. For hundreds of years, their empire dominated all other tribes, giving themselves more and more power. It took a great amount of luck and leadership to defeat the mighty Aztecs. Hernando Cortes, led by his desire for gold, took on the Aztecs and succeeded. Pride, diseases, weaponry, unity, and trickery from the Spanish all helped ...
Many language theorists would like to look at this a clash of cultures – oral vs written; and as the written word can capture the spoken word, the culture with an alphabetical formal script captured the one without. — Todorov’s book which is distinctly divided into four parts – “Discovery, Conquest, Love, and Knowledge” sketches the chain of reactions of the Spanish Conquistadors when they happened upon the people of the Americas, but not necessarily in that order.
When Columbus first anchored his ships on the shores of San Salvador ( Bahamas), his initial reaction is that of wonderment at the “marvelous” marvels of this New (found) World which appeared to be nostalgic of the Biblical (lost) paradise on earth, as described in the abstract of his log made by Bartolome de Las Casas. Todorov’s Columbus is a medieval explorer who rejoices at the discovery of the land but not its people.
His lack of interest in the people has been explained by Todorov as his inability to acknowledge the difference between them and themselves. Columbus’s recognition of the “otherness” as barbarianism comes only much later and in response to the resistance that the Indians began to offer when the Conquistadores grew audacious in their conquest and forceful in their acquisition of the native wealth. Columbus does not succeed in his human communication because he is not interested in them” (Todorov, Pg33) and soon the lack of understanding of the other lead to the expression of the self as force. “In Columbus’s hermeneutics, human beings have no particular place” and the incomprehension of their language and signs further alienate the other in favour of only the resources that belong to the other. Columbus’s summary perception of the Indians, powered by condescension and the belief in the superiority of the Christian persuades his preference for land over men.
According to Todorov, Cortes was more successful in his enterprise as a conquistador because he, unlike Columbus, at least engaged in some kind of communication with the Indians even if it was one-sided and his thirst for knowledge came hand-in-hand with his appetite for power and possession. “His expedition begins with a search for information, not for gold”. (Todorov, Pg 99) His campaign involved a meticulous understanding of the religious, linguistic and communication systems of the native civilization.
The Term Paper on Native Americans Indians War States
People have been living in the Americas for thousands of years. Only fairly recently, the past few hundred years, have foreigners begun to arrive and drastically disrupt the way of life of the aboriginal population. The situation has become so severe that a population that was one believed to be numbered in the millions, was at one point reduced to as few as 220, 000 in 1910, and entire tribes ...
He capitalizes on their myth of a fair-skinned Quetzalcoatl returning to them via the sea and eventually very dexterously digs his way through and finally succeeds in his conquest. Cortes’s key tactics were manipulation and dissimulation – at all points, he actively engages with the language of the natives and seeks to control the signs to his benefit. Cortes’ principal preoccupation is what the Indians will interpret from his actions and speeches. The message he wants to give is strategically planned — it is an information warfare.
La Malinche, a native woman with great talent for languages becomes Cortes’s interpreter and also his mistress. However, “this relationship has a strategic and military explanation rather than an emotional one” (Todorov, Pg101) and all the information that he gather through her, he uses it to his advantage in conquering the Indies. Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican bishop of Chiapas, stands apart among these other figures of Conquistadors and his gradual transformation from the colonizer to a sympathizer is informed by information – of the other, of his recognition of the otherness and an attempt at understand this otherness.
According to Las Casas, there is a universal love of God, but all religious expressions of this love are culturally specific, and as such relative. He theorizes the relative notion of the term barbarianism which was often used to de-humanize the natives: “A man will be called a barbarian in comparison with another man because he is strange in his ways of speaking and because he pronounces the other’s language badly. ( Todorov, Pg 191) Las Casas was touched by the massacres committed towards the Indies and wanted the Spanish Crown to stop these atrocities. However, all this is not informed by some great “knowledge”, for neither did he learn their language in an attempt to understand them better nor did his recognition of the Indies as humans come with an acceptance of their culture or faith.
How Can I Avoid Literal/Verbal Translation from My Native Language When Writing an English Essay
As a foreign English learner, , I constantly make grammatical and structural errors when writing in English even though I started learning English at a very early age and have a relatively better speaking and listening ability among my peers. In fact, many Asians, Mandarin users like me in particular, encounter such problem a lot when writing in the English language. As a consequence, I want to ...
The self, aware of its own identity, seeks to know the other without assimilating it to itself (Todorov) but Las Casas’s love for the natives was assimilationist in nature and like his fellow Spaniards he too believed that Christian faith could rescue them. How superficial and flawed this understanding was and how fatalistic even if less brutal, because Las Casas’s acknowledgment of the Indies does not amount to their appreciation, mere recognition of the difference does not also mean a respect of it.
As Todorov says, that Las Casas’s reasoning reveals “the religious rather than the religion. ” Like his fellow Conquistadores, Las Casas also wanted the assimilation of the American land into the Spanish Empire and of the assimilation of the native culture into that of Christianity. — Todorov claims that the backgrounds these men emerged from pre-determined the outcome of their social interaction and struggle for dominance and even though there was a difference in opinion, arising from a difference in interpretation, the Conquest of America was inevitable and unquestionable. – Sources: 1. Kristeva, Julia . Strangers to Ourselves .
