This paper attempts to develop the following idea: that Miguel de

Cervantes challenged the canonical concept of historiography formulated

during the first century of the Spanish Empire. In his last novel, The Labors

of Persiles and Sigismunda, the imperial idea of historiography as a

discourse that narrated true accounts its contested through different

articulations of the mechanisms of fiction in order to confront the early

modern theory of History. This idea of history, however, could not be

accomplished without the experience of the New World. As the Spaniards

were seeing how other cultures recorded their memories through instruments

that escaped from the reign of the letter, the Europeans were establishing the

word as the only successful instrument for recordkeeping true history.

Nevertheless, years after the encounter of this two worlds, Cervantes will

raise his voice and attempt to question the idea of true history related with

the letter.

Before the publication of Persiles, the Spaniards confronted the

aborigines of an unknown territory at the west of their world. The Europeans

asked them about their histories, and the indigenous people showed them

drawings. These people were the Aztecs, and they showed the Europeans an

amoxtli, which was the paper where the tlacuilo (the Aztec “scribe”), wrote

memories using pictographic signs. Those signs were not words but another
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system of communication. To the eyes of the Aztecs, the amoxtli was the

instrument used to know the past events and the holder of the community’s

memory. However, such affirmation produced rejection among the men of

letters of. For the Spanish scholars of that time, just to think of recording

history through painting was insane. For them, History had to be recorded

with letters and in the format of a book as they recognized the word as the

best vehicle of transmission of knowledge.

Nonetheless, it was not just the suitable instrument for recording

History but also the maximum expression of civility. In fact, it was this idea

about the necessary connection between History and the written word what

made the missionaries and colonizers to reject the non-alphabetical

recordkeeping instruments of the indigenous people of the Americas. In the

case of Mesoamerica, since the Aztecs and the Mayas used pictographic and

ideographic signs (or in “simple” words: “drawings”) to record their

memories but not words or something similar, the colonizers considered

them as communities without History. This Spanish preference for the

alphabetical recording did not allow the Europeans to see that there were

other methods to record memory outside of the realm of the word. For the

Spaniards there was only one instrument that was able to hold the truth of

History: the written word.

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As the Spanish empire was erasing the record system of other

cultures, at the same time it was consolidating the word as the only carrier of

true history. The history of the Aztecs in their codices, therefore, was

considered as a mere fiction and not a reality. The word acquired the power

of discerning what was truth and what was false. If the book said it, it was

truth. Thus, that hierarchy imposed by the word would be questioned in the

case of Cervantes.

Thus, in order to discuss the intervention of Cervantes in this debate,

we must have in mind what was the idea of History during the time of

Cervantes; and in order to displace ourselves from our idea of

historiography, we should explain the key difference of the concept

nowadays and during the Renaissance. Differently from today where

historiography deals with how to understand the development of human

actions through the time- as we can see in Hegel’s dialectics of the Spirit and

Marx’s class struggle-, in the Renaissance, history was concerned with how

to write a historic narration. In other words, contrary to the modern idea of

historiography based on a “philosophical” approach- seeking an idea that

helps to understand the connections of the events- the scholars of the

Renaissance were discussing the art of narrating history.

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Thus, if historiography was an art, it was necessary to separate it from

other written arts. Although there were many definitions of historiography,

most of the scholars saw as the key component of an historical account the

veridical on its statements; and therefore, they defined history as the true

account of true events that could have happened in the past or are happening

in the present. But what were the criteria of truth in that time for a narration?

The criteria came from the Aristotelian modalities (modalidades) of de dicto,

which is the truth of the narration, and de re, which was the truth of the past

events. Moreover, the criterion was more pragmatic than logical-semantic.

Therefore, the value of “true” was incrusted in the “efficient cause” (the

historian), and in the “final cause” (the final aim of the narration: the

magistra vitae.) (See Mignolo, “El Metatexto historiográfico…”) Thus, the

veritable of the discourse is retained in a) the recognition of the historian as

a savant, and b) the final aim of the narration (the exempla) that must be in

concordance with the dominant ideas of the society. However, at the end the

dominant ideas gave the authority to the person narrating the events. In the

epoch of Cervantes, this is the core element that separates historiography

from other arts: the value of truth of its narration. Differently from history,

which dominions were the true events, fiction dealt with verisimilitude.

According to the well-known differentiation of Aristotle, fiction imitates

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truth in order to represent what would happen instead of what happened,

which was the pursuit of history. Thus, history was true events and fiction an

imitation of “reality.”

Nevertheless, Cervantes wants to break that division. For the author,

the line that separates history from fiction was everything but clear. Indeed,

it was for sure for him that history and fiction were the same, as he explains

in the Persiles: “La historia, la poesía y la pintura simbolizan entre sí y se

parecen tanto, que cuando escribes historia, pintas, y cuando pintas,

compones.” (371) What Cervantes wants to show is that history, fiction and

painting have the same possibility to express “truth”, and therefore, the

separation between is just nomenclature. Furthermore, Cervantes will try to

explain that the separation is blurred by the fact that the ars historica and the

ars poetica have as their possibility to account the “truth.”

Cervantes’s first attempt to erase the separation between history and

fiction is through the title of Persiles. If we return to this novel, we will

notice that the author describes this work as a “Septentrional History”. Most

scholars acknowledge that the title is a clear reference to the Heliodorus’s

Historia Aethiopica as they argue that there are several intertextual

references to this work in Persiles. Nevertheless, the reference to “history”

in the title goes beyond this intertextuality. The gesture of Cervantes is quite
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odd because it mistakes the usual classification of the historical with

fictional texts. In other words, the title moves his fictional work to the genre

of historical accounts along with the chronicles and annals of the time,

though he knew well that The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda belonged

to the classification of the ars poetica and not the ars historica. This error of

classification is not trivial. What Cervantes is indicating is that his novel can

be taken as a true account or as a byzantine novel. In other words, Persiles

can be taken as a true history- and therefore, the reader will be falling into

the quixotic play of reading fiction as truth-, or as a byzantine novel, which

separates what is fiction and what is truth. In the end, the question is why

Cervantes opens the possibility of considering the Persiles as a true account.

The answer is in the final aim, or the moral example that the author wants to

give in Persiles.

If in Quixote, Cervantes depicts a man who has fallen in the game of

fiction with a tragic end, in Persiles he wants us falling like the Quixote but

not with the same end. Indeed, the author wants us to believe in the spirit of

the principal characters, Persiles and Sigismunda, as Quixote believed in

Amadís. For that purpose, he must blur the separation between history and

fiction; and in order to do that, he must seek “truth” in fiction. Thus,

Cervantes breaks the delicate walls used to construct the notion of history in
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his time. As we said, the veritable in history was based in the pragmatic

criterion of the final cause (the final aim of the text) and not from the reality

or the scientific veracity, as we consider true accounts nowadays. Thus, in

order to subvert the criterion, he will demonstrate that the final aim (the

magistra vitae) of historiography is achievable through other discourses, and

the chosen one for him was the epic form.

In the Discourse on the Heroic Poem, Torquato Tasso explains that

the final aim of the epic form is the teaching of the highest virtue, of the

heroic one, to the readers. Moreover, Cervantes takes the final aim of the

epic form and translates it to the final aim of the historical account, the

magistra vitae. Since the final aim of history it’s a truth, Cervantes sees in

the virtue of the main characters, Persiles and Sigismunda, the truth that he

wants to teach as a moralizing attitude toward his readers. Thus, in the story,

the heroic virtue of Persiles and Sigismunda is their strong Christian beliefs.

For that purpose, the story centers in the peregrination to Rome of both.

However, during the travel they will have to prove their religious beliefs

while they suffer calamitous events that endanger their identities as Christian

models. Thus, it is precisely the accounting of this virtue, which is the

affirmation of the Christian beliefs, what Cervantes wants to equate with the

final aim (magistra vitae) that gives the value of “true” to history. In
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Persiles, the great lesson that Cervantes wants to teach is the Christian virtue

in these characters. From the final aim of Cervantes, which is the

demonstration of the maximum virtue of his protagonists, he seeks to give

an exemplum of life, and therefore, to occupy the niche of the historical

account.

In the third book of The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda, Cervantes

depicts two young men that were narrating their calamities as prisoners in

Algiers. However, the two mayors of the town identified the young men as

liars after asking them some questions about Algiers. In fact, the two mayors

had been real prisoners in the African country, which allowed them to see

the deceiver discourse of the young men. After recognizing that they were

not real prisoners but just two students from Salamanca, the mayors changed

and ended up helping the young men. The majors gave them details to

accurate their, as Cervantes says, “feigned history” of the imprisonment in

Algiers so the students would not been caught cheating again. Through this

story, Cervantes recognizes this quite odd construction, a very antithetical

one called “feigned history.” What this antithesis intends to demonstrate is

the possibility of mixing the false and truth, fiction and history, since among

them there is no separation.

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Finally, I will bring into discussion one last example of Cervantes’s

intention of showing the vague line between history and fiction. In one part

of the narration, Persiles asks a painter to draw in a canvas several events

that happened to him and his friends. As requested, the painter makes this

huge canvas with the accounts of the group. Then, Persiles assigns to

Antonio, the barbarous friend that Persiles met in the first part of the novel,

to do the labor of the dramatic description of the canvas, which would serve

as a true document of the tribulations the group suffered. Nonetheless,

regardless the concordance between what really happened to the group of

Persiles and his friends and the drawing, the document cannot be considered

as a true document because the narration and the canvas belong to the space

of fiction. Thus, what Cervantes is trying to do is to insert the reader into a

box of three layers (the canvas, the novel and our reality) where between the

canvas and the novel there is historical veracity. In this sense, there is truth

in the novel, or at least an accuracy between events that happened in

different dimensions (the one in the canvas and the other in the novel as

separated from the canvas) Thus, contrary to the epic poem or tragedy where

the movement is to bring historical facts to the poetic work in order to obtain

a verisimilar effect and remain inside the sphere of the fiction, Cervantes

moves to the opposite side: going from the poetic work in his ultimate
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dimension (the canvas) to a second dimension (the people observing it inside

the novel) where what the reader believes its fiction becomes truth.

If Cervantes attempts to erase the line that separates fiction from

history it is because Cervantes acknowledged how deceitful is the letter in

the construction of the true history. His critique centers in the problem of the

representation of the word. For Cervantes, the letter is able to build a world

that does not belong to the real one, and therefore, that letter loses its

support. In the end, signs only refer to signs. However, how does the word

could affirm itself as a carrier of truth and history? What I want to explain is

that the conquest of America reinforced the privilege of the word as the

maximum utterance of truth.