This is a most important book on Garcilaso Inca that should be of interest to many Renaissance scholars. A collection of articles and unpublished papers written over a decade, with different approaches and goals and yet a strong unity of purpose: to restore Garcilaso's works to the cultural and intellectual context in which he writes. Those dense pages contain a thorough, lucid, well-written review of the evolution of Garcilasismo that reveals how it has been marked and marred by excesses of interpretation due to changing political, ideological, and national agendas.
Garcilaso served in a foundational role for national literary history in mestizo Peru. Yet his cultural paradigm was unstable; its meaning (Indigenous, European, mestizo) changed frequently with times and trends. Colonial studies of late—departing from the notion that an American-born historian must question, resist, pervert, be against somehow all peninsular models—have read Garcilaso as a rebellious or subversive colonial subject. Personal details, such as being born out of wedlock as a mestizo, are taken as preconditions for his anti-systemic ethos.
Without denying Garcilaso's personal and colonial circumstances, Rodríguez Mansilla sets out to undo the enduring image of a racialized Inca, branded by his bastard and colonial origins, instead proposing text-centered readings, immersing himself in the text and its cultural contexts, and coming out with a new Garcilaso firmly rooted (intellectually, socially, and emotionally) in Andalucía, where, after all, he spent the last fifty-six of his seventy-seven-year life. The model is at its best in chapter 4, on La Florida and Ambrosio de Morales.
Not all is roses: as this book also has agendas to push, it cannot be completely free from the kind of pasión Garcilaso rejected in historians and Rodríguez Mansilla faults other critics for following. Chapter 2, for example, explains how Garcilasismo has largely failed to see the difference between the person and the self-fashioned persona the author left for us and modern readers have eagerly fed for their own needs, anachronistically projecting our present over the past. One can hardly disagree: we like to think we have overcome Sainte-Beuve's biographism, but we have not. This happens every day, everywhere, particularly when the passion inherent to biography gets complicated with nationalism and its knack for creating identity myths. Still, we should not underestimate the weight of a person behind any text and behind any persona. At one point Rodríguez Mansilla uses the word mezquino (43) to summarily dismiss argumentation that includes illegitimacy or race. Whether we read it as mean or petty, the adjective carries a value judgment, showing a kind of pasión symmetrical to those positions Rodríguez Mansilla so aptly rejects, thereby undermining his own stance. He sounds most apasionado when downplaying the importance of blood in Spain: he sufficiently demonstrates Garcilaso's multifaceted integration to his Andalusian milieu but fails to recognize how getting there was a long, hard process. Being born out of wedlock was a serious condition in 1560, particularly amongst the nobility; so was being mestizo. Incorporating those circumstances into our reading (à la Sainte-Beuve, alas!) cannot be dismissed as mezquino arguments.
Rodríguez Mansilla has amassed and assimilated an oceanic bibliography, which he navigates with ease: whether quoting, arguing against, or intertextually alluding, he is on a continuous, cordial dialogue with critics of different origins and kinds, carefully distinguishing voices from echoes among them, and defining critical genealogies in what becomes a comprehensive and useful status quaestionis.
This is instrumental to another successful part of the book's agenda (with droplets of pasión) that deserves much attention: its extensive questioning of the makeshift boundaries that turned colonial and peninsular studies into largely different disciplines, with different methods and discourses and many specialists contentedly ignoring the other side of the spectrum or devoting token attention to it. By claiming the Spanish Siglo de Oro as Garcilaso's intellectual landscape, Rodríguez Mansilla is not making him a peninsular subject, but extending the period denomination to both sides of the Atlantic and underlying that “todo el mundo es uno” (“all the world is one”; Garcilaso, Florida [1605], 265v).
