Embodied Affect: The Humoral Body in the Naufragios

In scholarship on the Naufragios, the articulation of emotional experience has been read in relation to hagiographical discourses, indigenous mythologies, and colonial structures of power and knowledge. Margo Glantz (Reference Glantz and Glantz1993, 420) notes that the descriptions of bodily pain in the Naufragios evoke the iconography of the suffering body of Christ: “El texto proporciona abundantes datos para verificar las comparaciones esbozadas: las espinas, las cruces, las llagas, los malos tratos, la sangre, el sufrimiento corporal … las marcas corporales como signos de una hagiografía.” Turning toward the emotional reactions of indigenous communities, Jacques Lafaye (Reference Lafaye and Glantz1993, 24) suggests that the wonder or fear supposedly experienced by the Amerindians encountered by Cabeza de Vaca were mediated by the Quetzalcóatl myth, an association that brought about the perception of miracles “como fenómenos de psicología colectiva.” In an influential essay, Rolena Adorno (Reference Adorno1991, 167) pursues a different perspective by describing what she calls “the negotiation of fear.” For Adorno, fear constitutes “a weapon employed by both sides, the native Americans and the European. … Both groups created, managed, and manipulated it, depending on who had the upper hand.”

Despite their perspectival and methodological differences, these previous readings share an understanding of affective life as a transcendental, interior domain within which terms such as fear are accorded universal and unchanging meaning. These studies investigate and contextualize the discursive expression and political uses of a particular form of feeling, yet subtract feelings in and of themselves from historical and theoretical scrutiny. But while certain neurobiological components of the experience of fear may have indeed remained constant from the time of Cabeza de Vaca through the present, there likely existed other factors that distinguished not only the expression or uses of this form of feeling in the Naufragios but also its textures and modes of circulation in the early Americas. To what extent, in other words, is affect in the colonial Americas context specific, representationally and experientially? And can a reading of the Naufragios contribute to the exploration of such a question?

Recent work on affect and emotion in early modern culture provides useful bearings for a consideration of these questions. Strategically, this strand of research works against a presentist bias that ignores historical variations in regional cultures of emotion: as Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker (Reference Arab, Dowd, Zucker, Arab, Dowd and Zucker2015, 3) observe, “the broader interdisciplinary and sometimes ahistorical nature of much influential affect theory has tended to preclude precise historical inquiry into the production and maintenance of affective stances, sometimes robbing criticism of explicitly diachronic engagements.” But in addition to framing affect and emotion in themselves as historically situated entities—rather than as abstract, internal experiences, as assumed by Lafaye, Glantz, and Adorno—investigations of affect and emotion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe delineate a set of cultural norms and beliefs, such as the Galenic theory of the humoral body (Reference Floyd-WilsonFloyd-Wilson 2003; Reference PasterPaster 2004; Reference Paster, Rowe and Floyd-WilsonPaster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson 2004; Reference SchoenfeldtSchoenfeldt 1999; Reference TrevorTrevor 2004), which inform the expression of embodied affect in Cabeza de Vaca’s text. The Galenic notion of the humoral body suggests that the human passions respond to shifts in the circulation and consistency of four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—coursing through the bloodstream. In early modern European culture, Gail Kern Paster (Reference Paster2004, 2) observes, the notion of the humoral body gave way to popular “comparisons of the oceans to the human passions,” expressed in the iconographies “of the constant man as a rock amid the waves … [and of] the valiant mind as belonging to a man … undaunted by the waves battering his vessel.” As were the tides in the ocean, humoral fluids were considered sensitive to seasonal and temperature changes, dampening or arousing internal affections and external actions according to their viscosity: “Clear judgment and prudent action required the free flow of clear fluids in the brain, but melancholy or choler altered and darkened them.” Placing Cabeza de Vaca’s shipwreck narrative in this context prompts a rereading of the tumultuous oceans and flooded landscapes described in the text as analogous manifestations of the humoral dynamics of the chronicler’s embodied affects: the tale of a body threatened by unpredictable passions and struggling to maintain control, as vividly suggested by a passage describing a group of shipwreck survivors, huddled together to resist a storm:

Following Paster (Reference Paster2004, 2), it could be argued that, beyond providing a description of an actual event experienced by the chronicler or invoking the motifs of a shipwreck narrative, this and other similar passages explicitly recall for early modern readers the analogy of the oceans as passions as well as the iconography of “the valiant heart” attempting to hold steady against the sway of the humors, “undaunted by the waves battering his vessel.” The description of perilous seas in the Naufragios appears to anticipate early modern libidinal psychogeographies, rooted in humoral models of embodiment, where internal emotions are mapped out as physical spaces. As described by Giuliana Bruno (Reference Bruno2002, 237), Madeleine de Scudéry’s seventeenth-century Carte de Tendre (Map to the countries of tenderness), for instance, charts affections as topographical accidents, picturing a “Lake of Indifference,” a “Sea of Enmity,” a “River of Inclination,” and the “Windy Road to Tenderness.” Instead of constructing a libidinal psychogeography of this sort, however, Cabeza de Vaca’s text projects affective intensities outward, externalizing the shipwreck’s embodied affects and mapping them onto the turmoil of floods or the ravages of the sea in the New World.

Within the humoral model of embodied affect, the key test of a virtuous heart was thought to be the maintenance of its temperance under adverse circumstance. In the first sections of the Naufragios, such a task proves increasingly difficult as human and material losses mount:

In these critical instances, Cabeza de Vaca regularly appeals to the figure of Christ for divine intervention: “Como vimos que la sed crecía y el agua nos mataba … acordamos de encomendarnos a Dios nuestro Señor. … Plugo a nuestro Señor, que en las mayores necesidades suele mostrar su favor” (78). As noted, preceding scholarship proposes a figurative association between Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios and the suffering of Christ. Taking into account early modern notions of humoralism, these evocations of religious iconography also underscore one of the central concerns of the initial sections of the Naufragios: the regulation of the humoral body and the maintenance or renewal of its temperance after the shipwreck of the expedition. Within the humoral model, both the body of Christ and the body of the ordinary mortal were considered “vessels of liquids” (Reference PasterPaster 2004, 4). What distinguished one from the other was the former’s capacity to keep the humors, and the passions they arouse, always in check. This model of embodiment does not see in the body of Christ an entity that is immune to the movements of the humors—it conceives of it, rather, as a humoral body whose fluids maintained the greatest purity and stillness (Reference PasterPaster 2004, 2–5). Cabeza de Vaca’s frequent appeals to Christ in the midst of catastrophe appear in this light as the invocation of forms of humoral temperance that regulate affect and emotion in the first sections of the Naufragios.

Such appeals as well as the resonances of the iconography of the humoral body in the text begin to underscore the presence of historically contingent and culturally specific forms of embodied affect that connect the interior of the subject to the exteriority of the world in the Naufragios. Yet the most resonant scenes of affect and emotion in the Naufragios move away from the battered temperance of the chronicler and his fellow travelers and, in doing so, leave the familiar territory of early modern humoralism to enter new and uncharted affective worlds. In several instances the narrative turns toward forms of intersubjective transmission that cut across indigenous and European collectives; at other moments it registers the treacherous attempt to decode the codes and systems of feeling of the indigenous communities that Cabeza de Vaca encounters in his journey.

Intersubjective Affect: Tales of Affective Transmission

Daniel T. Reff (Reference Reff1996) has proposed that we move beyond the sphere of discourse and intertextuality to assess the lived experience and material realities governing central aspects of the expression of fear in the Naufragios. Reff argues that, beyond the intertextual resonances of European hagiographies, miracle tales, and indigenous myths, we can locate in these passages traces of the “reality of life” in New Spain following the conquest (118). The fear that afflicts indigenous subjects according to Cabeza de Vaca, Reff observes, “occurred at a time when Spanish slave raiding and epidemics of Old World diseases claimed thousands of Indian lives in the regions immediately to the South of where Cabeza de Vaca traveled. … [T]his information gave rise to fear of bearded, sword-wielding men who had the power to kill with disease” (118). Reff’s reading therefore builds on Adorno’s (Reference Adorno1991, 181) analysis, which already places the experience of fear in the Naufragios in the context of the spread of contagious disease. Tellingly, however, fear—and feeling in general—is seen in both Reff’s and Adorno’s commentaries as an aftereffect of information regarding the spread of contagious disease. What is traded and exchanged between Amerindian communities in northwestern Mexico in this context is data regarding the transmission of mysterious illnesses that afflict indigenous communities and for which Cabeza de Vaca performs mysterious, ritualistic “cures.” Yet if we consider feelings not only as historically and culturally situated experiences—as outlined in the previous section—but also as public, circulatory, intersubjective constructs, other kinds of networks and forms of transmission become noticeable. In the miraculous cures episodes of the Naufragios, for instance, Cabeza de Vaca serves as an affective mediator who trades with his indigenous “patients” various forms of emotional experience and expression:

In his performance of these cures, Cabeza de Vaca’s deploys verbal utterances (e.g., religious prayers) as well as ritual gestures (e.g., the sign of the cross, blowing on a patient’s skin), blending indigenous customs and European practices that remain at least partially unintelligible to his “patients.”Footnote ¹⁰ Cabeza de Vaca thus pieces together and circulates a range of what we can call “emotives,” borrowing a term developed by William M. Reddy (Reference Reddy2001). The statements a speaker makes about his or her emotions, Reddy claims, are examples of utterances that are neither exclusively descriptive nor purely performative (99). In Reddy’s definition, these utterances, constitute emotion-oriented speech acts with multiple, layered functions: “(1) a descriptive appearance; (2) a relational intent; and (3) a self-exploring or self-altering effect” (100). As such, these utterances do provide an account of internal feeling states, but they also initiate, foster, or terminate intersubjective relationships: “When a speaker says ‘I am afraid of you,’ it may be a way of refusing to cooperate with someone … to say ‘I am in love with you,’ may propose or confirm a long-term sexual liaison” (101). In addition, emotives are capable of forming or changing an affective bond, and they can also intensify or attenuate emotional states, as it arguably occurs during a declaration of love or a request for a conjugal separation (101). Emotives, Reddy concludes, “do things to the world … [they are] themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful” (101).

Cabeza de Vaca’s recombinant emotives—fusing European and indigenous traditions, as well as Christian prayers and indigenous healing rituals—appear to fulfill these dynamic, relational functions but bypass the mediation of comprehensible linguistic statements such as those listed in Reddy’s examples (e.g., “I love you”). In Cabeza de Vaca’s text, emotives unfold, instead, into instances where the brunt of what is transmitted is a gestural and bodily effect rather than the outcome of discursive interaction, and where the contents of these gestures are at least partially unintelligible to the receiver. Bypassing verbal expression, these passages in the Naufragios register emotives that mold and alter feeling states through opaque nonverbal signs: uncovering the body, blowing on the patient’s skin, and making the sign of the cross appear in this light as a particular kind of ambivalent emotive that is traded between subjects within cross-cultural interactions in the context of Spanish colonialism in the New World.

In other instances, Cabeza de Vaca’s text registers emotives that are traded through mimetic imitation. At one point, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions weep for the losses incurred during their shipwreck. Their indigenous interlocutors sit among the shipwreck survivors and reproduce the sorrow that unsettles them, adopting and reproducing the emotives they see them perform:

Here, Cabeza de Vaca sees the lamentation of the Amerindians as an empathetic response: “los indios … con el gran dolor y lástima que hubieron de vernos … comenzaron todos a llorar recio” (99–100). Yet as Janet Whatley (Reference Whatley1990, xxxiv) underscores in a different context, these exchanges of emotives may have also served alternative, ritual functions observed in other indigenous communities, such as the Tupinamba in South America, known to practice a “weeping greeting” or “welcome of tears,” underscoring once again the possibility that the emotives registered by Cabeza de Vaca’s text are never fully comprehensible, even when they succeed at establishing forms of empathetic communication and interaction.

These scenes of shared weeping as well as the miraculous cure episodes begin to delineate concrete manifestations of the exteriority and intersubjective circulation of affect and emotion in the colonial Americas: they trace social circuits through which forms of feeling travel, attaining specific functions. To flesh out these forms of circulation more fully, we can invoke Teresa Brennan’s (Reference Brennan2004, 2) theory of the “transmission of affect,” which challenges the notion of the individual subject as a self whose “emotions and energies are naturally contained, going no further than the skin”—a notion that has remained operative in Western culture since the Enlightenment. Significantly, as she fleshes out her critique of individual self-containment, Brennan invokes another bearing that helps us retrace the historical articulation of affective experience in the Naufragios beyond its references to humoral models of embodied affect. For Brennan, the early modern subject was not yet assumed to be an affectively self-contained individual: Michel de Montaigne, she points out, famously observed “that an old man would find his energy intensified … [in the company of a younger man] while the younger man … in his company would find his energy depleted” (160). Susan James (Reference James2003, 16) has noted along similar lines that for philosophers such as Nicolas Malebranche “emotions such as sadness could circulate among people” and that “in utero … the mother’s imagination could affect the shape of her child.”

This alternative model of subjectivity suggested by Brennan—a porous subject whose feelings do indeed travel farther than the skin, spilling over others—is arguably more congruent with the historical context of Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios than the figure of the self-contained subject of post-Enlightenment thought. Moreover, the forms of affective transmission described by Brennan and James in the context of early modern culture appear to apply to the colonial Americas as well: as the miraculous cure episodes and the weeping scenes mentioned earlier demonstrate, Cabeza de Vaca returns time and again to instances in which emotives are traded and feelings circulate intersubjectively through performance, ritual, or imitation. Perceived as an affective mediator or go-between, Cabeza de Vaca establishes a precarious conduit between communities built around disparate “systems of feeling” that govern the nature of the affective bonds and the modes of emotional expression available to their members (Reference RosenweinRosenwein 2002, 842). Yet it is also at this point that differences between early modern and colonial forms of affective transmission begin to surface. It is noteworthy in this regard that Brennan’s theory of transmission is predicated over a homogeneous field through which affect circulates without encountering obstacles or breakdowns. Processes of affective transmission in colonial contexts, in contrast, reveal the existence of conflictive and striated circuits: affective minefields where affective formations are always at risk of imploding into one another.

Affective Minefields and Emotional Untranslatables

A concrete manifestation of these affective minefields appears in the Naufragios shortly after Cabeza de Vaca performs a miraculous cure in a community ravaged by a mysterious illness. Once healed, Cabeza de Vaca notes, his patients are careful not to mourn those who had previously died from this affliction:

This passage registers the haunting presence of indigenous cultures of emotion presumably long in existence before Cabeza de Vaca’s arrival in the New World. Since the particular systems of feeling that organize these cultures of emotion do not seem fully compatible with European lexicons and referents, these elusive forms inhabit the margins of colonial discourse, surviving as shards of collective memory, as parahegemonic or counterhegemonic formations. Nevertheless, traces of these systems are registered by colonial texts themselves to a degree. They surface, for instance, in seemingly inconsequential details such as the method of punishment chosen for the child who cries in front of Cabeza de Vaca: “La llevaron muy lexos de allí … con unos dientes de ratón agudos la sajaron desde los hombros hasta casi todas las piernas” (218), an action that insinuates the existence of an organized, systemic array of norms concerning emotional expression and restraint that remains unknown to the chronicler and to his readers.

Additional traces of these systems of feeling emerge in the famous story of Mala Cosa, a demonic figure that, as Cabeza de Vaca recounts, comes out the underworld to terrorize indigenous communities, submitting their members to varied torments, twisting their limbs, cutting into their flesh and removing their organs, and paralyzing them with “fear” (164–168).Footnote ¹¹ What is particularly significant about the story of Mala Cosa for the present analysis is that it appears to signal the existence of two incompatible networks of feeling and the incommensurability of the cultural systems that organize them. According to the narrative recounted by Cabeza de Vaca, Mala Cosa’s appearance and his evil deeds make the Avavares shudder with fear: “Se les levantavan los cabellos y temblaban” (166). This tale, however, elicits at first the mockery of the Spaniards: “Destas cosas que nos dezían nosotros nos reíamos mucho burlando de ellas” (166). Yet shortly thereafter, when the victims of Mala Cosa show the Spaniards the physical scars of his violence etched on their bodies, the Spaniards, finally grasping the supposedly demonic nature of Mala Cosa, sympathize with the Avavares. Trading feelings, the Spaniards extend the Avavares their faith as refuge: “Les dávamos a entender que si ellos creyesen en Dios nuestro Señor … no tenrían miedo de aquél ni él osaría venir” (168).

Not unlike the punishment of a child who flaunts the system of feeling of her community, the story of Mala Cosa thus indexes public codes governing the experience, expression, and public circulation of affect and emotion. The defined affective effects of this story circulating among the Avavares is underwritten by a system Cabeza de Vaca and his companions first find laughable. Only afterward does the cognitive attachment of Mala Cosa to the figure of the devil cause in them a seemingly sympathetic reaction—seemingly because it is never entirely clear whether Cabeza de Vaca’s own fear is congruent with the effects the indigenous listeners of the tale of Mala Cosa experience upon hearing or retelling this narrative. In the interstices of this (mis)translation—indigenous “fear” of Mala Cosa converted into the Spaniards’ sympathetic fear of the devil—something slips. Discrepancies and dissonances in modes of experience and forms of expression underscore at this point the presence of indigenous systems of feeling whose cultural coding appears to be lost in translation. A distinguishing characteristic of affective transmission in colonial contexts thus appears to be its gradual unfolding into minefields within which not only the expression of emotion but the experience of affect and emotion itself becomes an opaque, recalcitrant, and untranslatable form—a collective experience that a text such as Naufragios can partially register but cannot comprehend.

The nature of affect and emotion as experiences that cannot always be translated across cultures has been debated in the fields of anthropology and sociolinguistics since the 1980s, when scholars begin to suggest that “not only did the expression of emotion vary across cultures but that people from different cultures had radically different feelings” (Reference Plamper and TribePlamper 2015, 98).Footnote ¹² When applied to the Naufragios, these forays into the cultural relativity of affective life and the untranslatability of emotion encourages a problematization of the conflation of European and indigenous systems of feeling into a single category. This conflation reproduces a rhetorical strategy deployed by Cabeza de Vaca himself: the “attachment” of indigenous affective and emotional experience to European molds and concepts,Footnote ¹³ applying terms such as espanto or lástima (98–100) to the feelings he notices in his indigenous interlocutors, without factoring in the potential presence of cultural gaps that may turn these terms into unstable, misplaced ideas. Following scholarship on non-Western lexicons of emotion and their cultural particularity (e.g., Reference Abu-LughodAbu-Lughod 1986; Reference LutzLutz 1988), a question that surfaces here is whether Cabeza de Vaca misrepresents not only the emotional expressions he notices but also the actual feelings encoded by those expressions.

These incongruities also offer a defined, feeling-oriented parallelism to the epistemological “problem of other minds”: the asymmetry between the direct access an individual consciousness has to its own mental states and the always indirect, inferential route through which this consciousness accesses the mental states of others. Because these modes of indirect access are granted by inference and analogy, doubts regarding their reliability always creep in: “Trust in analogical inference [of the mental states of others] is limited … and many believe that these bridge constructions easily collapse” (Reference SkirkeSkirke 2014, 229). In general terms, a similar asymmetry can be observed between a subject’s access to his own emotional states and the analogical inference of the emotional states of others: the inferences a subject makes about the emotions of others must always navigate the challenges inherent in all forms of interpersonal communication. Yet these challenges become even more pronounced in cross-cultural contexts, giving rise to emotional untranslatables linked to distinct systems and networks of feeling that cannot always be bridged. The narrative of Mala Cosa and the story of the punishment of the child who cries in front of Cabeza de Vaca outline these systems and networks as obscure figures that resist processes of attachment and cognitive assimilation. Within the affective minefields of a text such as the Naufragios, the “bridge constructions” that may make the affective experience of others comprehensible disintegrate into emotional untranslatables that are not merely discursive (i.e., failure to translate certain lexicons of emotion) but also experiential (i.e., failure to translate certain forms of emotional experience in themselves).

The existence of these affective minefields returns us to Fanon’s (Reference Fanon and Philcox2005, 56) notion of affect in colonial contexts as a highly ambivalent force that may be both destructive and generative—one that forms and severs bonds, produces moments of empathy as well as instances of miscommunication or incommunication, and constitutes a building block for intersubjective interaction and at the same time flinches like “an open sore.” A distinctive feature of the Naufragios is that Cabeza de Vaca’s unusual sensitivity as a chronicler and his close contact with Amerindian communities allows for these conflictive forms to be partially encoded, providing future readers with an opportunity for historical investigation into indigenous cultures of emotion—a project that dovetails with one of the vanguards in the historiography of the emotions: regional and comparative analysis of historical affects (e.g., Reference Plamper and TribePlamper 2015, 293; Reference Matt, Stearns, Matt and StearnsMatt and Stearns 2014, 7–8)—as well as a useful point of departure for future theorizations of colonial affect in the Americas.

Extrapolating from this reading of the Naufragios to scholarship on colonial Latin American literature and culture more broadly, it could be argued that the study of affect and emotion in general and the exteriority of feeling in particular may unfold into three interrelated areas: first, the investigation of the historical articulation of affective life in relation to concrete referents and contexts (e.g., early modern theories of humoralism and their transfer to the texts of colonial chroniclers in the New World); second, the exploration of the cultural specificity of forms and networks of feeling in the early Americas (e.g., the particularities of European and indigenous codes governing the experience and expression of emotion); and third, the theorization of colonial affect and its social circulation in the Americas (e.g., the emergence of affective minefields and emotional untranslatables). But this line of inquiry might also contribute to other disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors beyond the study of colonial texts. Although these contributions can be sketched out only most rudimentarily in the space of this article, I suggest, as a corollary, the potential alignment between an affective turn in colonial studies and the movement toward a reflection on the geopolitics of the senses and perception enacted by theorists and practitioners of decolonial aesthesis. In the introduction to a special issue on the topic, Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vásquez (Reference Mignolo and Vásquez2013, n.p.) sum up this movement as one that is “framed in the larger project known as ‘modernity/(de)coloniality.’ It considers aesthetics as being an aspect of the colonial matrix of power, of the imperial structure of control that began to be put in place in the sixteenth century with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit and the colonization of the New World. … Decolonial aesthesis starts from the consciousness that the modern/colonial project has implied not only control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also control over the senses and perception.”

The critique of the coloniality of power and knowledge, which traces its roots back to the work of Aníbal Quijano (Reference Quijano2000, Reference Quijano2007), is thus at present opening up into new territories by exploring the realm of the senses and the domain of the body. Emotion plays a crucial role in this context, because “la herida colonial, influencia los sentidos, las emociones, y el intelecto … la herida es sentida y sufrida … en las emociones y en el intelecto” (Reference Mignolo and Gómez MorenoMignolo and Gómez Moreno 2012, 9). The study of the exteriority of feeling in the colonial Americas may therefore add to these advances, underscoring the importance of considering not only the geopolitics and coloniality of power and knowledge but also the geopolitics and coloniality of feeling: the way feelings circulate within colonial racial and economic hierarchies, and the manner in which Eurocentric forms, lexicons, and systems of feeling marginalized other systems in the colonial Americas, as the attachment of indigenous affective experience to Western concepts and the partial erasure of its specificity in the Naufragios already insinuates.