I propose rejecting it and suggesting that it be entered in next year's book review competition, and then next year rejecting it because it's not really a book.
"majority of the comments" by comment count, word count, or byte count? And do the meta arguments count towards the decision on whether the majority was reached? :-)
Was it supposed to be obvious that the song was written by someone named after Tupac Amaru II, and not the leader of the rebellion himself? (I had mistakenly assumed the review meant the latter, until looking it up.)
Yeah, I thought that was a great ending, but you need to know something about rap. I'm tempted to make it a link to the rapper's Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur ), but not sure if that would be too much meddling.
I did put another Wikipedia link to the overall case in there.
A long time ago I've complained how a certain review[1] wasn't for me because it was too poetic-y for plain old me. I still think about the review occasionally, and while my complaint from back then stands, I have since expanded on it. It's this meddling you're alluding to that bothered me, too. Not in the sense that you specifically meddled with the Don Juan review, but that the author himself put too many explaining links into it.
The complaint is that you should either be matter-of-fact and be generous with citations, or you stick to the clever/funny format you've chosen for the review and explain little, if anything. Give the reader just enough hints to have them go on a journey of their own understanding. If the reader didn't need the hints in the first place, great, they can feel clever about it. If the reader needed the hints and refuses to reasearch for themselves, so be it and let them eat cake. If the reader rises to the challenge, let them find out for themselves; something as simple as a Google search can bring a measure of satisfaction even if it leads to the very same Wikipedia article you would've linked anyway.
In any case, don't try to be clever *and* provide too many explanations. It's like unironically explaining your own joke.
In that sense, I agree that a Tupac Shakur link would've been too much for sure, and the Ronald Ray Howard one was borderline because the interested reader could not have messed up the google search.
This review could have benefited from a little more seriousness. I don't have time to go over it right now (and at any rate it would be best if specialists weighed in), but:
a) AFAIK, we have no real evidence that Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui ever saw Ollantay on stage, or read it. It may very well postdate the rebellion entirely.
b) There's something that everybody should know: while poetry is nearly universal (it is closely related to song - this also explains why highly formal poetry is so common), theatre has developed very, very few times in the history of mankind, and spread by diffusion. We need strong evidence if we are to postulate yet another independent invention of theatre, and, in Ollantay's case, we have evidence *to the contrary*. (There _is_ partial evidence that a Mayan play, Rabinal Achi, has strong pre-colonial elements. Compare it with Ollantay...)
Here b) is so basic that there's now no doubt a market for academic papers complicating it. Has it really not filtered into general knowledge? (Borges was aware of b) in the middle of the 20th century (see his story on Averroes), and many of his readers would have found out through him.)
Greece, India, China are the ones everybody agrees on. Chinese and Japanese theatre may have forked before the stage where everybody agrees it's already theatre and not just street performance. And then there's Rabinal Achi.
It doesn't even need that. I believe there are a couple of plays that only have one speaking part But they do have a stage and a few props.
I think the line between story telling and plays is very fuzzy. There are lots of cases where it's quite clear which side of the line it is on, but there are instances everywhere along the dimension. Exactly where you put the division is nearly arbitrary. And there's also a fuzzy line between plays and dance.
All of these seem like natural steps to us. The alphabet also seems natural to us. The point is - the independent invention of something that we can recognize as a form of theatre, however alien, is something slow and rare.
(Of course we can recognize theatrical monologues as theatre: they are part of a tradition that has more than one speaking part. Whales descend from quadrupeds.)
At any rate, this is all a bit moot, since talking about deuteragonists and Aeschylus highlights the extent to which Ollantay is a conventional "modern" play.
I think you could say this was the function of the chorus in Greek theater. They could address the audience directly in the manner of a storyteller while the actors would be portraying the parts written for them.
Pre-Islamic Indonesia (and to an extent even Islamic Indonesia) have been heavily influenced by South Asian civilizations, so I'd be surprised if the development of drama was completely independent. But maybe i'm wrong.
> Chinese and Japanese theatre may have forked before the stage where everybody agrees it's already theatre and not just street performance.
Is there supposed to be a difference between those two concepts?
Coincidentally, I was just referred to a youtube video in which a famous Chinese singer is quoted as saying that it's important not to pronounce tones when you're rapping in Chinese, because if your rap had tones it would sound like you were performing shulaibao, which is low-class. (Rap isn't low-class, it's modern and hip.) Shulaibao is rhythmic speech in Chinese, often used comedically or for (mock) verbal combat.
I worry this will boil down into a semantic argument. But is there a real divide between public performance, dance show, myth retelling etc and "theatre"?
One evolves into the others slowly (at the scale of centuries) - and only now and then. Ollantay is not just basically Spanish theatre in Quechua - I hear it has influences of 18th-century Italian melodrama.
That may all be true, but to me the review’s power isn’t in proving causality -- it’s in showing how a story, however constructed, can resonate so precisely that it shapes perception, and sometimes, fate. Whether Ollantay predated the rebellion or not, the myth still did its work.
Did it? A story on a rainforest ("anti") leader courting the Inca's daughter and impregnating her may for all we know have made the rounds before Ollantay was written, but what evidence is there that it influenced José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Tupac Amaru II)? What is far more likely is that general awareness of the Incas, and in particular of Tupac Amaru, leader of the post-Atahualpa Incan resistance and JGC's imagined or real ancestor, played a role in getting a rebellion against colonial exploitation started. Analogous things have happened in many places.
Fair enough, direct influence is impossible to pin down. But I didn’t read the review as trying to prove that so much as showing how story and history can start to rhyme, until the myth itself takes on a kind of agency.
I’ve thought it through a bit more, and I was probably too quick to wave past your point. If Ollantay really did come before the rebellion, that’s one way a story can get under someone’s skin and steer what happens next. But if not, then it’s more a case of myth being retrofitted to history, and I’m not so sure that kind of blurring is either harmless or especially truthful.
From the review the setting of Ollantay seems fundamentally christian so it doesn't make sense for a pre-contact origin. There was a major fad in the 1700's of europeans writing things usually critical of western society and put it in the mouths of exotic peoples from the iroquois to persians.
Thanks for this helpful perspective. It sounds like you know a bit about the history of this play. I'm curious about the following on Wikipedia (which is the only source I've checked):
"There are six original copies of this play. One is from around 1770 and attributed to the priest Antonio Valdés, and is held in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Cuzco, Peru. Two are believed to be derived from this one, written by Dr. Justo Pastor Justiniani and Justo Apu Sahuaraura Inca, and held in the General Archive of the Nation of Peru and the National Library of Peru, respectively. Two others are found in the Dominican Convert of Cuzco, and the third was published by Johann Jakob von Tschudi on the basis of a manuscript with origins in La Paz, Bolivia. "
Should we be surprised at the two others, and the claimed manuscript in La Paz, that are supposedly *not* derived from Antonio Valdes?
I wouldn't go with what Wikipedia says on this, let alone with what one can read between its lines. I'll deal with this after my deadlines, if it hasn't been dealt with already.
Brief update (first deadline cleared). I consulted a very well-reputed historian who has written about the matter. The wording below is mine.
TL;DR That Ollantay is 18th-century is blindlingly obvious; everything else is much less certain.
a) Ollantay's manuscripts are, out of linguistic grounds alone,
- clearly 18th century,
- not quite from the same time.
Remember that Quechua spelling, not being standardized, followed phonetics, and that phonetics kept (and keeps) evolving, so there are telltale signs dating everything. Ollantay's manuscripts are not identical and show linguistic change between themselves.
Also, for crying out loud, the verse in Ollantay follows Spanish eight-syllable meter.
b) It fits well into its actual (general) time and place: there was a living tradition of Quechua drama (in the 18th century, not in the 15th or whenever).
c) That Ollantay was written by Valdés is much less certain; it's the right century and the right environment, but, if one of the manuscripts is dated correctly, he would have had to write it when he was ten.
d) There's no real, solid evidence linking Ollantay to Tupac Amaru, though the rumors are old.
More on b): there was a Criollo landowning class in the highlands of colonial Peru that actually learned Quechua, became bilingual and adopted or rather constructed an Andean identity for itself, reimagining the Incas to some extent in their own image; it was important to them to think of themselves as being descended from or in some sense inheritors of Incan royalty, all while denying or minimizing the link of peasants working their land with the Incas (I know, the second half is bizarre, but I've heard this before). Where exactly does the author of Ollantay figure in that story - as a beneficiary of their largesse, as patrons of the Quechua arts? We do not know who he was - in fact we do not know who the authors of any of the extant Colonial Quechua dramas are, except for Juan de Espinosa Medrano (17th century - read up on him; be careful with what Wikipedia says, though, as usual).
See Bruce Mannheim, The language of the Inka since the European invasion. especially 72-74 and 148-152. Got the pdf - I'm sure it's floating online somewhere.
Here's the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Averroes's Search," about how even the most learned man in medieval Muslim Spain can't picture what Aristotle meant by "tragedy" and "comedy" because even his high civilization doesn't have stage plays:
do you know of a good source to read more about the origins of theater, its spread between cultures, rarity of its independent development? this is a surprising claim, but plausible
It strikes me as a little more likely to be one of those things that someone said once for no particular reason, but that people then sought to justify by making skewed readings of history.
As an example of something fishy, Garald mentions that he thinks there is dispute over whether Chinese "theater" and Japanese "theater" diverged before or after they "counted" as "theater".
But this is a very strange dispute to have, because there is no evidence of Japanese theater that could apply to it - Chinese theater is well documented before Japanese history begins. (Japanese history begins late, roughly around 700 AD.)
More generally, the conceptual framework necessary to describe this dispute immediately entails that you can always make it true that theater didn't develop independently somewhere by changing the definition of what counts as theater until it privileges the areas you prefer.
On that matter, I *think* the issue is that claim that Chinese popular entertainment (street performance) made it to Japan very early on but Chinese drama (scripted, literary) did not, and so the Japanese did their own thing. I agree that it would have been odd for their to be no cross-influence. But that's really very much not my area. Go ask someone who knows.
At any rate, the grey bits around the picture don't mean the picture isn't clear.
I'm not the wokest guy in the world (I was literally contemplating spending my middle and old age finding a way to fight feminism until I realized I didn't really have a praxis)... but one could argue the Spanish running the extractive institutions were much more responsible for the ensuing killings rather than the play. The Irish tend to look fondly on the prior rebellions before the ones that finally worked, even if they mostly got a lot of Irish people killed at the time. (Deiseach can jump in and correct me.)
OK, I get it, it's a joke. But usually these days people tend to blame the oppressive institutions rather than the people doing the rebelling.
The cognitohazard bit is a neat idea, though--maybe everyone has their own personal King in Yellow (a play mentioned by Robert W Chambers and often referred to in Cthulhu Mythos stories that drives the reader insane). I wonder if you could counteract the problem by outlining what it would be? Actually trying to write it is probably too dangerous.
I sometimes wonder if the Black Legend was really all that exaggerated, if that level of resource extraction was still going on by the time of Napoleon.
The idea of a "Black Legend" is itself Spanish propaganda. That doesn't mean it's necessarily false, merely that it's a term that would exist whether it was false or not.
The only part of it that's lies is the implication that everyone else wasn't just as bad.
The mean lifespan of a slave on a Caribbean plantation was 7 years. They needed to constantly import more, because the conditions were horrible enough that it made sustaining the population naturally completely impossible. And it really didn't matter much who was running the plantations.
The miners in South America had similar life expectancies, and Spain used the local population to sustain it instead.
One notable thing is that quite a few Spaniards in Spain felt bad about how other Spaniards in the New World were treating the Indians: e.g., Bishop de Las Casas in the first half of the 16th Century. The King took the Bishop's human rights activism seriously and invited him to debate what the policy should be at the court.
Not too much came of it -- the riches were just too good to pass up -- but it seems like the Spanish were well ahead of, say, the English in developing a guilty conscience over their treatment of the Indians.
I'm less inclined to treat that as representative of 16th-century Spaniards and of the Spanish empire in general than you are, I think, for three reasons.
First, Charles V was Flemish. He never set foot in Spain until he was seventeen. ("It was said that only those regions that had not set eyes on their French-and Flemish-speaking king refrained from revolt at the start of his reign." The quote is from Roger Crowley's Empire of the Sea.)
Second, he seems to have been a man who, in most respects, was better than the men around him; who actually tried to live up to the virtues expected of an heir of Charlemagne, who fought in the front lines himself at Tunis, who made war with the Ottomans, instead of his own subjects, his chief priority.
(My favorite story: In the build-up to the Council of Worms, Martin Luther was offered a safe-conduct to debate with the Pope, with Charles V as guarantor; he debated it with his friends, because he was confident that, like Jan Huss, he would be going to his death, but finally decided yes. When the negotiations failed, the Pope (Leo X) offered Charles absolution of his oath, and Charles had the virtue to deny the Pope's offer and give Luther twenty-four hours to get out of town before the sentence of heresy and outlawry went into effect.)
So when you talk about Las Casas - well, yes, Charles is unusually willing to listen to decent people and seriously consider trying to do the right thing before deciding that he needs that money to fight the French and Ottomans. I think that's evidence that Charles is, by the extremely low standards of his time, an unusually good person, not of the 16th-century Spanish empire's benevolence.
And the third is that the Spanish were ahead of the English in all their relations with the Indians, for good and for evil, because they met them first. The first English colony is in 1607, and the Quakers are condemning colonial abuses against the Indians from when they show up in 1656. The first settlement is 1493, and the New Laws are 1540. I'll freely admit that de Las Casas was pleading on behalf of the Indians well before then, but I'll also admit that I don't know who the first Englishman to plead for good treatment of the Indians is - in both cases, we only notice when it gets big.
"but I'll also admit that I don't know who the first Englishman to plead for good treatment of the Indians is - in both cases, we only notice when it gets big."
They were all pretty bad TBH, but the Spanish apologists do have a point that there are a lot more indigenous people left south of the Rio Grande.
One of those un-PC things you don't see mentioned much over here is that the Catholic church actually kept them from being even worse. There's a long, long history of Catholic-Protestant conflict in Europe that's mostly forgotten over here except by history buffs.
Yeah, there was always the ultimate effort of an appeal to the pope. How much the secular government would bother paying any attention to that was another matter, but there was in theory at least an authority that could over-ride the civil government.
>> They were all pretty bad TBH, but the Spanish apologists do have a point that there are a lot more indigenous people left south of the Rio Grande.
It seems to me that the more accurate statement is that the `number of indigenous people left' is inversely proportional to the absolute latitude (as in, Argentina doesn't have many indigenous people left either). Which makes me think that the load bearing ingredient is more likely to have been stuff like disease burden on European settlers, rather than Catholicism vs Protestantism or England vs Spain.
There might be something in it, but the fact is that in California the number of natives sharply decreased after the takeover by the US as a direct result of its policies.
Also, even Argentina has 2.5x more native Americans per capita than the US. Chile also has a moderate climate and has 10x more natives.
Also, in Canada the French got along much better with the Natives and there are many more French-Indian mixed-race people.
I’m pretty sure there was a huge disparity in population density between *north of the Rio* (or north of the Valley of Mexico?) and the Yucatán and major parts of South America.
The Spanish get a bad reputation but were pretty decent as colonial masters of that time go.
They introduced lots of useful domestic plants and animals, technologies like metal working and water mills, printing presses and universities. The spanish kings also empowered humanist catholic priests that forbid the enslavement of indians centuries before the anglo-americans did anything similar and also did some interesting things like the jesuits missions in Paraguay that helped the indians improve their lives.
Before the spaniards the Americas consisted of very poor and brutal societies which at best had barely an early neolithic level of development and after independence Hispanic America had at least a century of civil wars, revolutions and dictatorships.
Brutal yes ... but 'early neolithic' understates their tech level and organization. Silver was refined in South America for over a thousand years before the Spanish came, as well as copper, and they knew of bronze alloys as well. They even did some sintering with grains of native platinum.
And of course the Maya had a written language, and socially they were organized in to cities large enough to impress the Spanish when they encountered them, and were quite good at astronomy.
The Inca at least I would consider early Bronze Age, though the Aztecs didn't have the same level of metallurgy.
My impression is that the highest civilizations of the New World in 1491 tended to be more erratically developed than their counterparts in the Old World: i.e., some aspects would be very advanced but other aspects would be lagging behind. E.g., the Spanish had Chinese inventions like paper, gunpowder, and the compass.
This is probably due to the New World being smaller so fewer inventions and harder to get around (even today it's hard to travel by land from Mexico City to Cuzco across the Darien Gap).
It's not clear to me why they would have been any more brutal than anyone else. Early American people were... people. Different, yes, in fascinating ways, yet also the same.
I don't know why human sacrifice was widespread in Mesoamerica and not in most of the Old World, but it certainly was and that on its own significantly affects how "brutal" a civilisation is IMO
radically different scales, and levels of officialness - the Catholic Church was strongly opposed to witch hunts, while ritual human sacrifice was the raison d'etre of the Aztec empire.
Thank you for the mention! See above what I said about Yeats and his play. It seems that there is a point when frustration, national sentiment (e.g. the Celtic Twilight and general revivalist attempts to promulgate a pure or native Irish culture separate from the mainstream Anglicised one of the time including historical examples of the past rebellions) and an inciting event - like a play - all come together and strike the spark that ignites the fire.
A play *on its own* probably wouldn't have sent out Tupac Amaru on his course of rebellion, but if it was the last piece in an already existing dissatisfaction with the colonial rule, his efforts to improve matters for the natives going nowhere, increasing identification with his indigenous heritage, etc. then it might have been "we were great before the Spanish came, we can be great if they are no longer the ones in charge, and peaceful means are getting us nowhere - the only thing they will pay attention to is force", then yes it could have lit the fire.
Eh, you're one of the few people on here who knows a lot about Catholicism, so I figured it was only fair.
I basically agree with what you're saying. The whole cognitohazard thing's a bit overstated, at least when it comes to rebellions. It needs more than a play, as you say.
Let me share with you this quote from a ghost story collection from 1928 written (but of course) by an Englishman. The narrator is very much an unreliable narrator, but the attitude is not too far off the mark 😁
"And then it was time for the Riviera, its boomed beauty, its bloody brood. What a region! I have cruised the Mediterranean fairly extensively, and it is no Sea for me. What merits the Southern Latins may once have possessed is a matter of opinion; that they retain any today seems to me untenable. A breed of pimps, parasites, and horse-torturers, the choicest surviving examples of that cretin civilisation which is Catholicism's legacy to the world. And it has always seemed to me that members of races vastly their intellectual and moral superiors become debased and degraded when brought into contact with them, though I know the region attracts the worst."
The human mind is the single most complex system we know of. That it's outputs could be controlled by something as simple as a statement in a language, well, "It strains credulity, at that." Individual thought and behavior cannot be reliably predicted nor controlled, not even by that individual.
Infinite Jest also features a type of King in Yellow that leaves the viewer so consumed with a specific desire that they can no longer think about anything else. Feeding themselves or performing basic life sustaining actions are out of the question.
But the actual King in Yellow, based on the Wikipedia entry, seems most interesting because if its banality. Imagine reading an cognitohazard that forced you to care about nothing except a certain small section of Canadian tax law. That is the King in Yellow.
This is maybe my favorite one yet, but is it meant to be written as a factual account or more in the Sam Kriss mode of fictional truth? I tried to find some evidence that Tupac Amaru II actually heard Ollantay and couldn't (though I didn't try very hard).
Also immediately thought of Sam Kriss, although imo this doesn't meet the (high!) bar of his best work - although maybe that's because my favorite part is when his essays lift off from the plane of reality and ascend into madness, and that wouldn't be appropriate for this venue.
I agree that the flavours of the pieces are somewhat similar, but I also think they reach somewhat opposite conclusions about Hinckley as a tie-in. This review positions people as victims of their stories, but Kriss' piece seems to put people like Hinckley in the driver's seat with respect to the stories themselves.
What I found is a Spanish-language blog mentioning briefly something on the lines of "it is said that Ollantay was performed in front of tupac amaru before the start of is rebellion", so I think it's likely false, but not made up by the author of this review specifically
When it comes to Sam Kriss, I see the fiction not the truth. He always just posts a bunch of made up stuff that doesn't seem to lead to any coherent point.
I was thinking the same thing: between the subject matter rhyming with his new piece and the ending, what several commenters are noting as historical inacuracies, I strongly suspect Kriss submitted this one.
I didn't mean that it was literally his review. The writing is too rationalist-adjacent (overuse of "mostly") and earnest for him, I think. But I still loved the it!
I'm 60% certain this is by Sam Kriss. A fluffy confection built on a shocking event, complete with tongue-out raspberry, one of the standard templates for Krissian stories.
I also thought the subject matter, ideas, ending twist etc are very much like Sam Kriss. But the writing itself doesn't read like him much at all. Note also the american spelling.
Wikipedia says that, rather than deciding not to attack Cusco, Túpac Amaru II attacked the city and failed. Also the articles for him and the play don't mention each other.
A brilliant review about a mediocre play that became a great story. The cognitohazard framing is spot on. The play wasn’t responsible for the rebellion; it just happened to find the right person at the wrong time.
Maybe I’m not fully getting the joke here, or maybe I’ve thought too much about apologetics, but isn’t it incredibly more likely that the play was written after the real-life events, rather than before? I’m interested in the specifics of how the different copies matched, if we carbon dated the manuscripts, if there are date stamped records of the guy that came to find it, etc.
IMO the intrigue of “who wrote it” or whatever is important to the prose of this review and a quick aside at the very end would have added to it. I get the vagueness is fun but now I want to know the actual answer.
The review mentions in a full two paragraphs that this is an unresolved question in the actual scholarship, starting with "It must be reiterated that scholarship on this point is incredibly varied".
The review's joke is that Túpac Amaru II (and people named after him, like the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur) had the ability to write "information hazards" that are powerful enough to incite deadly violence in just the right kind of receptive people, like how "Soulja's Story" inspired Ronald Ray Howard to shoot a policeman. No, it's not stringent logic; that's what makes it a joke, but a joke with just enough funny coincidence[1] to not be a silly joke.
[1] It's not actually a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I hear you, and I’m sure existing scholarship not resolving the issue or having consensus but I’m from the part of rationality that likes to think the traditional institutions are incompetent and if I just had the data I requested the answer would be trivial to discern.
"She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin."
What a hoot. Wayback int eh 1950's there was a female Peruvian singer whose stage name was Yma Sumac. From Wikipedia:
"Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo (born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo; September 13, 1922] – November 1, 2008), known as Yma Sumac (or Imma Sumack), was a Peruvian singer. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. ... Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart"
She still had some popularity and her records were still around in the late 60s when I was in college, but I guess that she is completely unknown to younger people now.
I went on a Wikipedia binge about her a few weeks ago and was going to mention that here! For years I only knew of her as an occasionally entry in crossword puzzles. (Any three letter sequence that involves two vowels and a common consonant is going to show up a decent amount, even if Yoko Ono and Brian Eno are more common.) But I think I heard one of her songs on the radio and realized she had to be part of the inspiration for the opera singer in The Fifth Element.
Somehow my Wikipedia binge about her didn’t turn up this character from this play.
I am not totally sure about that. In the wake of classic rock, interest in various exotic genres was created. The Beatles went to India an created a flurry of interest in classical Indian music. I remember going to sitar and tabla concerts in the 60s. Bob Marley became a pop phenomenon and Caribbean genres like reggae and ska got lots of attention and radio play. Paul Simon was a one man effort to promote African and Latin American music and had some huge successes with them.
Before rock, Americans assumed that Continental Europeans were pretty good at music and would occasionally treat them as stars. From the Beatles on, virtually all pop music had to come from English speaking countries.
And in the wake of the European crack-up (WWI, Great Depression, WWII) the US became the leading global power and culture followed political and military dominance. So? At the same time the US was very open to foreign cultural influences, particularly from the Anglosphere. Good for US.
The British were pretty broke from, say, 1945-1960. Then they got back on their feet in the 1960s and were highly welcomed by their American allies in the Big One. One of my weirdest theories is that Woodstock was a victory party, delayed a generation, for WWII.
I remember, and I remember some discounting of her claims by stating that she was, in fact, North American and had re-invented herself ("Yma Sumac" being "Amy Camus" backwards).
Seems that this is one of those "debunkings that are just as made up as what they claim to debunk":
"For years, rumors circulated that Sumac was a housewife from Brooklyn whose real name was "Amy Camus", which she reversed to become Yma Sumac. The origin of the rumor may plausibly be traced to a cleverly formulated review by influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, who used literary device, in a December 1950 column, to suggest that Sumac's voice was in fact a theremin, that Xtabay—or Axterbay—was Pig Latin for Baxter, and that the name of the singer was Amy Camus, who took Serutan (a contemporary laxative: "natures" spelled backwards)."
She was referenced in a song "Joe Le Taxi" sung by the (very) young Vanessa Paradis (14/15 years old at the time it became a hit) who was later the partner of Johnny Depp:
The conclusion reminds me of the painting "The Wild Chase" by Franz von Stuck, which shows Wotan charging on horseback, sword drawn, leading a procession of the unhallowed dead. What is intriguing is that Wotan looks suspiciously like Adolf Hitler, iconic hair and mustache as such. Conspiracy has it that Hitler saw this painting as a youth, and modeled himself after it.
And when the painting was drawn? 1889, the same year that Hitler was born
To be fair, the play is a comedy (they get married in the end), whereas in real life it's a tragedy (they die).
In general it's true we should all feel compelled to do our duty, for a life well lived, although those are some pretty dark examples in the end. I suppose karmic debt is personal, so who am I to say.
> This was a position designed to make the curaca identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of corregidor, it was also a way to get very rich.
Curacas didn't _get_ very rich. They were born rich. The position was usually hereditary.
> from a 1780 population of 1.2 million, 100,000 people were killed.
The source for the 100,000 figure appears to be "La oración de la tarde: novela escrita sobre el célebre drama del mismo titulo" written by Antonio Rotondo (page 326). At least that's what Wikipedia says: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebeli%C3%B3n_de_T%C3%BApac_Amaru_II
It's interesting that Rotondo says (translated from Spanish): "A pardon was immediately published, and the principal leaders of the insurrection having accepted it, the insurrection was suppressed, and thus the last sparks of the terrible uprising in Spanish South America were extinguished, in which more than 100,000 people perished, both rebels and loyalists". This seems to contradict the reviewer's statement that after the main battle "this was not so much a war as a series of massacres. Anybody who might conceivably offer resistance was killed". Does he/she have another source besides Rotondo? Is he/she talking about the time following the main battle yet before the pardon was issued?
Rotondo also says (translated from Spanish): "[the leading Spanish general Jose del Valle] finally managed to return with his depleted column to Cuzco, where he found that during his expedition the chief José Gabriel Tupac-Amaru, his wife, his two sons, an uncle, a brother-in-law and several relatives, all had been executed in the public square". This appears to contradict the reviewer's statement that "the general who led the Spanish army pronounced his opinion on what should happen to Túpac. This sentence was carried out".
Maybe these are just minor details, Rotondo was novelist not a historian after all. But then, why use him as a source at all? Unless there's a better source confirming the extraordinary 100,000 figure.
"Don Antonio Valdez was a parish priest in Tinta,......Around 1775, he invited José Gabriel and some other honored guests to a performance of a play he had finished putting together. Set in Cuzco in the 1400s, Valdez told his assembled audience that Ollantay was a Castilian version of a Quechua play.4
After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,"
The most important thing for this reviews' sequence of events is how solid this claim is. If we know the future Tupac saw the play, that is actually a big deal. If the date of the play is actually nebulous and could have been after the rebellion, well that's a whole other thing.
I sent my digital servants to find out the truth of this matter, and the impression I got is that the idea that Tupac Amaru saw the play is on shaky foundation and is likely wrong, but the reviewer didn't completely make it up out of thin air:
"The primary basis for the claim comes from 19th-century writers. Sir Clements R. Markham (1910) reported that when he visited the parish of Laris near Cusco in 1853, he met Pablo Justiniani – an octogenarian priest “in direct descent from the Incas”. Justiniani told Markham that he had “the text of the drama of Ollantay” and recalled details of its recent history. Importantly, Justiniani recalled that the play had been performed at Tinta “before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru”, who was by then the leader of a rebellion. Markham notes: “it was acted before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru, a friend of [Antonio] Valdez, who headed an insurrection against the Spaniards in 1782”."
> He was so persuasive in this effort that he (and Valdez the priest/playwright) convinced the bishop of Cuzco to send a delegation back to Madrid, led by Túpac’s uncle, to argue in front of King Charles III.
I am really not surprised that Charles III of Spain did nothing, since it seems to have been his chief hobby.
I really enjoyed the review, so it's disappointing to learn from the comments that the arrow of causality likely doesn't go from the play to the rebellion.
Also, about the modern murderers triggered by the songs: isn't it likely that unstable people are bound to get triggered by something while ordinary people are bound to not get triggered by anything? So there's probably no piece of art for you specifically.
The uncomfortable question then becomes where we draw the line between "unstable" and "ordinary." Also this typology seems to be making certain assumptions.
Naturally everything is a spectrum, I would say that the examples from the reviews are the guys who are unstable, and could likely have been triggered by a whole bunch of things, not the one specific piece of art that triggered them in reality.
I can't speak to Shakespeare, but the Irish rebellion was undertaken by a broad network of people working together toward rational ends (regardless of whether we approve of their goals and means or not). They probably included unstable people, but I don't perceive the majority of them as characterized that way.
eh, i grew up in fundamentalist circles, and one of the annoying things about them was the idea that items like books weren't just information, they were vessels for demons to act on you and just owning them wasn't good. It felt like they spiritualized the Necronimicon, in that items have their own malignant, corruptive power.
the idea of a cogitohazard is a secularized version of this: in both cases the information alone is secondary to some non-rational power that would drive you mad well beyond agreement or inspiration. The review ending with "something coming over him," due to a song, that led to murder; similar tack. A targeted cursed object, but still one that overpowers a weak will.
There is always some temptation to mythmake things as having power like this. A play driving a revolution by charming a person to become a character...but is it true or do we really see it? Not sure. You think with the sheer deluge of information we would.
It is plausible that mania/psychosis/delusions/drugs/politics would transfigure an otherwise harmless stimulus into a life's mission, on the understanding that it's not so much the stimulus that's causing it but the interior state. That's a little different to the claim that a regular person minding their own business can be possessed.
I'm reminded of the science behind Red Flag laws--no one just wakes up one day and becomes a mass murderer, always there were signs that various people ignored. Madness seems mysterious so we attribute mystical powers to it, but the mundane truth is that the unraveling of a mind is a gradual thing. It has to happen by degrees because of the complexity of the thing unraveling. Untying a Gordian Knot would be trivial by comparison.
Is there evidence that stage plays existed in the pre-Columbian New World? They aren't universal.
I recall Jorge Luis Borges' short story “Averroes’ Search” in which the medieval Muslim philosopher is trying to translate Aristotle's writings on tragedy and comedy, but he doesn't realize that the Greeks had stage plays because his culture doesn't have them.
The usual pattern is to read a book, watch a movie, listen to a song, and be convinced that this is the life changing epiphany, only to complete forget it in a few days.
Or years. When I was much younger, the novel "Shadowland" by Peter Straub changed my life. Sadly, I no longer remember how or why. When I read it now... nothing happens. How disappointing.
How do we decide the body count of a play? Cato (written 1712) was widely quoted by American revolutionaries. Does it get a portion of the tally of men killed arguing with King George III?
For example:
“What a pity it is / That we can die but once to serve our country.”
“It is not now time to talk of aught but chains or conquest, liberty or death.”
I enjoyed this. Whatever triggered him there does seem to be a weak tendency for colonials to flip and take the side of their adopted people. I think of Lawrence of Arabia in this vein and more obscurely, Rachel Dolezal.
The 'happy ending' would not have to be a modification per se, so much as a fabrication, if the original tradition ends with Ollantay's doom implied but not performed. It's unpleasant to enact a gruesome execution on stage, or even to versify it in any detail, so if the original might just have ended at a point its audience would have understood as tragic, but became ambiguous when lost in cultural translation.
"She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin."
Now there is a sentence to make you wonder how many convents there were in Peru before the Conquest. Joking aside, this story doesn't sound weird enough to have come from an alien civilization, or even a much earlier version of this civilization.
And Tupac Amaru's story, dramatic though it is, doesn't sound any more unlikely than the near-contemporary Pugachev revolt in Russia, or the Taiping Revolt in China a century or so later. There have been a lot of unsuccessful rebels, and a lot of them came to bad ends.
"The play centres on the 1798 Rebellion. The play is startlingly nationalistic, in its last pages encouraging young men to sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen ni Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state. The title character first appears as an old woman at the door of a family celebrating their son's wedding. She describes her four "beautiful green fields," representing the four provinces, that have been unjustly taken from her. With little subtlety, she requests a blood sacrifice, declaring that "many a child will be born and there will be no father at the christening". When the youth agrees and leaves the safety of his home to fight for her, she appears as an image of youth with "the walk of a queen," professing of those who fight for her: "They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever."
The premiere of Cathleen ni Houlihan initially confused Dublin audiences who had expected a comedic play due to the actor Willie Fay's prior association with comedies. However, Gonne's reputation as an ardent nationalist helped them to understand the “tragic meaning” of her role, as described by Yeats. By the third night the theatre was so crowded that customers had to be turned away."
For another example of play that sniped - in this case not a person, but a crowd & a people - see La Muette de Portici (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_muette_de_Portici) which inspired the Belgian rebellion of 1830 against the Dutch and lead to Belgium becoming a country.
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Hip Hop King and Saint, Tupac Amaru Shakur, told people that "tupac amaru" meant something like "intelligent warrior", instead of "shining serpent"
Yes, Tupac means The Shining One, and Amaru means serpent.
Tupac studied Shakespeare as a kid, used Shakespeare in his art and life, and also studied ballet and played the Rat King in Nutcracker. Like Muhammad Ali, Tupac faced death through Shakespeare, and found a warrior's courage to run toward violence instead of away. As in Ollantay, it is by believing you are about to face death that you become worthy to rule. People having near death experiences and terminal illnesses report that life becomes vivid. Precious. They wish to act and create and LIVE. And if, like Tupac, they are given a few years after facing death, they live life fearlessly and creatively.
I bet he identified with "Puck" the mercurial fairy, partially because of his name, and because Tupac did explicitly talk about how he identified with his "gemini" birthday nature and having 2 sides. And because "puck" sounds like "tu pac", and Tupac's lyrics are clear proof that he makes explicit associations between words with similar sounds.
His friends said Tupac would flip through like 5 characters in a single day. A sensitive and wise Tupac for the ladies, a thug Tupac, an artist Tupac, and so on...
He'd put on glasses and otherwise change his "costume". He seems like the type to change his scene setup, too, to make the scene "work"
And he created reality and changed the world by performing "scenes", same as in your play and story.
The thing is, Tupac 100% KNEW about the story of his name, the ancient emperor.
Did he also know the story of the revolutionary Jose Gabriel who fought for his people and took Tupac's name and acted heedless of death as if he was a character in a play?
Yes, definitely.
Tupac saw the pattern and lived it out. There are clues outside of culture's explicit knowledge, hints at how the exceptional succeed in changing the world. As Ollantay's priest says, "My power will enable me
To make of thee a greater prince."
Art can let people use a reality distortion field like Steve Jobs to face the unfaceable, like incoming death.
Tupac and others like Sylvester Stallone and Jim Carrey also knew about living in great poverty and the streets, and so had less fear and higher risk tolerance.
Tupac in particular also focused a lot of his efforts on being sexier to women, just as the character in Ollontay:
"Yet will I fight all these combined
And risk all else to gain my end,
And whether it be life or death
I’ll cast myself at Coyllur’s feet."
A young drama kid named Tupac Amaru Shakur reads that, and sees that the way to get girls, as a self-described skinny kid from the gutter, was to overthrow the king, make himself ruler like a shining serpent, face death fearlessly, and create new social realities with art.
He played it all the way, heedless of danger, until death took him at 25, the age he predicted he would die at.
Is Scott-sniping (i.e. guessing which of the reviews is authored by him, apparently a time-honored tradition from the past years) still allowed? If so, this one's got my vote.
"During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time "The King in Yellow." I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the fire-light. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing from the hearth and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens, where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow."
The conventional account of Tupac Amaru II's adoption of the name is that he became interested in what we might retroactively call Quechua nationalism largely from reading the Comentarios Reales de los Incas, a text whose very existence challenges the thesis of this review.
It's kind of weird for this essay to constantly refer to "taxes and free labor". Taxation in corvée labor is common throughout history, an especially prominent form of taxation in kind. It's still legal in the United States despite the prohibition of slavery. And labor taxation is always seen as a form of taxation. Why are we separating it out so much here?
> But Ollantay, being simply a regional warlord, is not a suitable match for a princess.
I'd like to know more about this. In my model of society, "regional warlord" means essentially a duke, someone who occupies the level of status immediately below "king" or, as the terminology may be, "emperor". There can be only one royal/imperial family, so unless the princess is required to make an international marriage a regional warlord is about the best she can hope to do. A regional warlord is, by definition, a little king who is subject to a greater one.
Is this a case where (a) international diplomacy was so well-developed that an Inca princess could not realistically marry into an Inca noble family; (b) the structure of Incan society was radically different than the structure of every other society with a nonzero number of "warlords"; (c) Spanish culture of the time had some strange perspectives which infected the play; (d) the author of the play had no idea what Incan society had been like; or (e) something else?
I am not an expert on ancient Quechuan society, but lots of plausible alternatives come immediately to mind, because they have appeared in other societies across history:
1) A Royal can only marry another Royal
2) Marriages were defined by political alliances, and regional chiefs aren't powerful enough to count
3) Concepts like "Emperor", "King" and "Duke" have too many Western cultural assumptions associated with them that they conceal certain subtle but important nuances in the ancient Quechian political structure
4) The statement itself is an interpretation by a Spanish educated priest and doesn't accurately communicate the real reasons the marriage was impossible
5) Even by our own standards, "Regional Warlord" might be something more like "Local Barbarian Ally." Imagine a Celtic Warlord trying to marry the daughter of the Roman Emperor.
> Even by our own standards, "Regional Warlord" might be something more like "Local Barbarian Ally." Imagine a Celtic Warlord trying to marry the daughter of the Roman Emperor.
But Ollantay has already commenced an affair with the princess and impregnated her, right?
A Celtic warlord might be too small-time to marry an imperial princess (or not; I don't really know what happened to them - I don't think they were generally sent to form marriage alliances with Persia), but in that case, he'd be living far, far from Rome, with no chance to seduce her.
Note that Mongol warlords married Chinese imperial princesses all the time. One princess left a rich legacy of poems about how much she hated living there.
One probably-relevant factor is that there would have been plenty of Chinese princesses.
Keep in mind we are dealing with a work of fiction here, even if it had been inspired by historical events. So the correct question is what thematic image of royalty is being presented within the story. It appears to be one in which princesses can get involved in hot love affairs with a bad boy, then regret it later.
This violates the rules because it's a book!
It's a play!
Technically, it's a rebellion.
I propose that we spend the majority of the comments arguing about whether a play qualifies as a book.
I propose rejecting it and suggesting that it be entered in next year's book review competition, and then next year rejecting it because it's not really a book.
The ambiguity between “play” and “book” mirrors the ambiguity between story and history in the review itself.
That fits my playbook.
I don't normally reply just to say "lol," but this caught me off guard and genuinely made me cackle, hahaha.
Someone should review this thread!
This comment is going to make me do something bad.
"majority of the comments" by comment count, word count, or byte count? And do the meta arguments count towards the decision on whether the majority was reached? :-)
it's the book of the musical of the play!
the graphic novelization of the book of the musical of the play!
Was it supposed to be obvious that the song was written by someone named after Tupac Amaru II, and not the leader of the rebellion himself? (I had mistakenly assumed the review meant the latter, until looking it up.)
Yeah, I thought that was a great ending, but you need to know something about rap. I'm tempted to make it a link to the rapper's Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur ), but not sure if that would be too much meddling.
I did put another Wikipedia link to the overall case in there.
it's perfect the way it is
Yes, the last line was *chef’s kiss*
I loved the ending, but I don't see why it didn't just say "That song was written, of course, by Tupac." Hits just as hard and is true.
Tupac's the rapper's full name was Tupac Amaru Shakur.
Wait, really? I haven’t felt this weird vertigo since Unsong.
His parents named him after Tupac Amaru II, because he was a native who rebelled against the colonizers.
Huh. TIL
True, but the review doesn't say that the song was written by Tupac Amaru Shakur. "Tupac Amaru" isn't a legitimate way to refer to Tupac Shakur.
Killer line.
A long time ago I've complained how a certain review[1] wasn't for me because it was too poetic-y for plain old me. I still think about the review occasionally, and while my complaint from back then stands, I have since expanded on it. It's this meddling you're alluding to that bothered me, too. Not in the sense that you specifically meddled with the Don Juan review, but that the author himself put too many explaining links into it.
The complaint is that you should either be matter-of-fact and be generous with citations, or you stick to the clever/funny format you've chosen for the review and explain little, if anything. Give the reader just enough hints to have them go on a journey of their own understanding. If the reader didn't need the hints in the first place, great, they can feel clever about it. If the reader needed the hints and refuses to reasearch for themselves, so be it and let them eat cake. If the reader rises to the challenge, let them find out for themselves; something as simple as a Google search can bring a measure of satisfaction even if it leads to the very same Wikipedia article you would've linked anyway.
In any case, don't try to be clever *and* provide too many explanations. It's like unironically explaining your own joke.
In that sense, I agree that a Tupac Shakur link would've been too much for sure, and the Ronald Ray Howard one was borderline because the interested reader could not have messed up the google search.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-don-juan
I’m slow on the uptake, I needed some of those explainers ;)
This review could have benefited from a little more seriousness. I don't have time to go over it right now (and at any rate it would be best if specialists weighed in), but:
a) AFAIK, we have no real evidence that Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui ever saw Ollantay on stage, or read it. It may very well postdate the rebellion entirely.
b) There's something that everybody should know: while poetry is nearly universal (it is closely related to song - this also explains why highly formal poetry is so common), theatre has developed very, very few times in the history of mankind, and spread by diffusion. We need strong evidence if we are to postulate yet another independent invention of theatre, and, in Ollantay's case, we have evidence *to the contrary*. (There _is_ partial evidence that a Mayan play, Rabinal Achi, has strong pre-colonial elements. Compare it with Ollantay...)
Here b) is so basic that there's now no doubt a market for academic papers complicating it. Has it really not filtered into general knowledge? (Borges was aware of b) in the middle of the 20th century (see his story on Averroes), and many of his readers would have found out through him.)
> theatre has developed very, very few times in the history of mankind
How many?
Greece, India, China are the ones everybody agrees on. Chinese and Japanese theatre may have forked before the stage where everybody agrees it's already theatre and not just street performance. And then there's Rabinal Achi.
Seems odd. An oral tradition of storytelling needs to just one or more extra story tellers to create a play.
Edit. But then, I suppose, it needs literacy for the play to survive and be reproducible.
I think it was one of these reviews which taught me that Greece didn’t develop the second actor for decades, possibly centuries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuteragonist
In the sense of Peter Defeel's comment, I would argue that the storyteller is the chorus, and the protagonist is the first extra storyteller.
The chorus is the part that tells you what's happening. The protagonist delivers his own lines.
It doesn't even need that. I believe there are a couple of plays that only have one speaking part But they do have a stage and a few props.
I think the line between story telling and plays is very fuzzy. There are lots of cases where it's quite clear which side of the line it is on, but there are instances everywhere along the dimension. Exactly where you put the division is nearly arbitrary. And there's also a fuzzy line between plays and dance.
All of these seem like natural steps to us. The alphabet also seems natural to us. The point is - the independent invention of something that we can recognize as a form of theatre, however alien, is something slow and rare.
(Of course we can recognize theatrical monologues as theatre: they are part of a tradition that has more than one speaking part. Whales descend from quadrupeds.)
At any rate, this is all a bit moot, since talking about deuteragonists and Aeschylus highlights the extent to which Ollantay is a conventional "modern" play.
I think you could say this was the function of the chorus in Greek theater. They could address the audience directly in the manner of a storyteller while the actors would be portraying the parts written for them.
Indonesian shadow puppets could be considered a play. And thus another branch of the development of theater.. which is more related to cinema.
It did not develop from any of the already mentioned ones?
Apparently not. I’m only going by Wikipedia though.
Pre-Islamic Indonesia (and to an extent even Islamic Indonesia) have been heavily influenced by South Asian civilizations, so I'd be surprised if the development of drama was completely independent. But maybe i'm wrong.
Most of the stories used for shadow puppet theater descend from Hindu and Buddhist traditions. So I am assuming it predates any Islamic influence.
> Chinese and Japanese theatre may have forked before the stage where everybody agrees it's already theatre and not just street performance.
Is there supposed to be a difference between those two concepts?
Coincidentally, I was just referred to a youtube video in which a famous Chinese singer is quoted as saying that it's important not to pronounce tones when you're rapping in Chinese, because if your rap had tones it would sound like you were performing shulaibao, which is low-class. (Rap isn't low-class, it's modern and hip.) Shulaibao is rhythmic speech in Chinese, often used comedically or for (mock) verbal combat.
I worry this will boil down into a semantic argument. But is there a real divide between public performance, dance show, myth retelling etc and "theatre"?
One evolves into the others slowly (at the scale of centuries) - and only now and then. Ollantay is not just basically Spanish theatre in Quechua - I hear it has influences of 18th-century Italian melodrama.
That may all be true, but to me the review’s power isn’t in proving causality -- it’s in showing how a story, however constructed, can resonate so precisely that it shapes perception, and sometimes, fate. Whether Ollantay predated the rebellion or not, the myth still did its work.
Did it? A story on a rainforest ("anti") leader courting the Inca's daughter and impregnating her may for all we know have made the rounds before Ollantay was written, but what evidence is there that it influenced José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Tupac Amaru II)? What is far more likely is that general awareness of the Incas, and in particular of Tupac Amaru, leader of the post-Atahualpa Incan resistance and JGC's imagined or real ancestor, played a role in getting a rebellion against colonial exploitation started. Analogous things have happened in many places.
Fair enough, direct influence is impossible to pin down. But I didn’t read the review as trying to prove that so much as showing how story and history can start to rhyme, until the myth itself takes on a kind of agency.
I’ve thought it through a bit more, and I was probably too quick to wave past your point. If Ollantay really did come before the rebellion, that’s one way a story can get under someone’s skin and steer what happens next. But if not, then it’s more a case of myth being retrofitted to history, and I’m not so sure that kind of blurring is either harmless or especially truthful.
It reminded me of "The Myth of Scotland" although I just skimmed that book and don't know how conclusive it is, though parts are entertaining.
Makes me think of Baudrillard. The story doesn’t just sit on top of reality. After a while it’s the only reality anyone knows.
From the review the setting of Ollantay seems fundamentally christian so it doesn't make sense for a pre-contact origin. There was a major fad in the 1700's of europeans writing things usually critical of western society and put it in the mouths of exotic peoples from the iroquois to persians.
E.g., Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson.
Thanks for this helpful perspective. It sounds like you know a bit about the history of this play. I'm curious about the following on Wikipedia (which is the only source I've checked):
"There are six original copies of this play. One is from around 1770 and attributed to the priest Antonio Valdés, and is held in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Cuzco, Peru. Two are believed to be derived from this one, written by Dr. Justo Pastor Justiniani and Justo Apu Sahuaraura Inca, and held in the General Archive of the Nation of Peru and the National Library of Peru, respectively. Two others are found in the Dominican Convert of Cuzco, and the third was published by Johann Jakob von Tschudi on the basis of a manuscript with origins in La Paz, Bolivia. "
Should we be surprised at the two others, and the claimed manuscript in La Paz, that are supposedly *not* derived from Antonio Valdes?
I wouldn't go with what Wikipedia says on this, let alone with what one can read between its lines. I'll deal with this after my deadlines, if it hasn't been dealt with already.
Any updates on this?
Wish me luck meeting deadlines.
Brief update (first deadline cleared). I consulted a very well-reputed historian who has written about the matter. The wording below is mine.
TL;DR That Ollantay is 18th-century is blindlingly obvious; everything else is much less certain.
a) Ollantay's manuscripts are, out of linguistic grounds alone,
- clearly 18th century,
- not quite from the same time.
Remember that Quechua spelling, not being standardized, followed phonetics, and that phonetics kept (and keeps) evolving, so there are telltale signs dating everything. Ollantay's manuscripts are not identical and show linguistic change between themselves.
Also, for crying out loud, the verse in Ollantay follows Spanish eight-syllable meter.
b) It fits well into its actual (general) time and place: there was a living tradition of Quechua drama (in the 18th century, not in the 15th or whenever).
c) That Ollantay was written by Valdés is much less certain; it's the right century and the right environment, but, if one of the manuscripts is dated correctly, he would have had to write it when he was ten.
d) There's no real, solid evidence linking Ollantay to Tupac Amaru, though the rumors are old.
More on b): there was a Criollo landowning class in the highlands of colonial Peru that actually learned Quechua, became bilingual and adopted or rather constructed an Andean identity for itself, reimagining the Incas to some extent in their own image; it was important to them to think of themselves as being descended from or in some sense inheritors of Incan royalty, all while denying or minimizing the link of peasants working their land with the Incas (I know, the second half is bizarre, but I've heard this before). Where exactly does the author of Ollantay figure in that story - as a beneficiary of their largesse, as patrons of the Quechua arts? We do not know who he was - in fact we do not know who the authors of any of the extant Colonial Quechua dramas are, except for Juan de Espinosa Medrano (17th century - read up on him; be careful with what Wikipedia says, though, as usual).
See Bruce Mannheim, The language of the Inka since the European invasion. especially 72-74 and 148-152. Got the pdf - I'm sure it's floating online somewhere.
Thanks for the follow-up, this is fascinating!
OK - he liked my summary above.
Here's the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Averroes's Search," about how even the most learned man in medieval Muslim Spain can't picture what Aristotle meant by "tragedy" and "comedy" because even his high civilization doesn't have stage plays:
https://www.pierre-legrand.com/borges-averroess-search.pdf
do you know of a good source to read more about the origins of theater, its spread between cultures, rarity of its independent development? this is a surprising claim, but plausible
It strikes me as a little more likely to be one of those things that someone said once for no particular reason, but that people then sought to justify by making skewed readings of history.
As an example of something fishy, Garald mentions that he thinks there is dispute over whether Chinese "theater" and Japanese "theater" diverged before or after they "counted" as "theater".
But this is a very strange dispute to have, because there is no evidence of Japanese theater that could apply to it - Chinese theater is well documented before Japanese history begins. (Japanese history begins late, roughly around 700 AD.)
More generally, the conceptual framework necessary to describe this dispute immediately entails that you can always make it true that theater didn't develop independently somewhere by changing the definition of what counts as theater until it privileges the areas you prefer.
On that matter, I *think* the issue is that claim that Chinese popular entertainment (street performance) made it to Japan very early on but Chinese drama (scripted, literary) did not, and so the Japanese did their own thing. I agree that it would have been odd for their to be no cross-influence. But that's really very much not my area. Go ask someone who knows.
At any rate, the grey bits around the picture don't mean the picture isn't clear.
I'm not the wokest guy in the world (I was literally contemplating spending my middle and old age finding a way to fight feminism until I realized I didn't really have a praxis)... but one could argue the Spanish running the extractive institutions were much more responsible for the ensuing killings rather than the play. The Irish tend to look fondly on the prior rebellions before the ones that finally worked, even if they mostly got a lot of Irish people killed at the time. (Deiseach can jump in and correct me.)
OK, I get it, it's a joke. But usually these days people tend to blame the oppressive institutions rather than the people doing the rebelling.
The cognitohazard bit is a neat idea, though--maybe everyone has their own personal King in Yellow (a play mentioned by Robert W Chambers and often referred to in Cthulhu Mythos stories that drives the reader insane). I wonder if you could counteract the problem by outlining what it would be? Actually trying to write it is probably too dangerous.
I sometimes wonder if the Black Legend was really all that exaggerated, if that level of resource extraction was still going on by the time of Napoleon.
The idea of a "Black Legend" is itself Spanish propaganda. That doesn't mean it's necessarily false, merely that it's a term that would exist whether it was false or not.
The only part of it that's lies is the implication that everyone else wasn't just as bad.
The mean lifespan of a slave on a Caribbean plantation was 7 years. They needed to constantly import more, because the conditions were horrible enough that it made sustaining the population naturally completely impossible. And it really didn't matter much who was running the plantations.
The miners in South America had similar life expectancies, and Spain used the local population to sustain it instead.
> The miners in South America had similar life expectancies
Do you have a source for this?
They do seem to have been significantly worse than average. Everyone was terrible, of course, but Spain seems to have been even worse than normal.
One notable thing is that quite a few Spaniards in Spain felt bad about how other Spaniards in the New World were treating the Indians: e.g., Bishop de Las Casas in the first half of the 16th Century. The King took the Bishop's human rights activism seriously and invited him to debate what the policy should be at the court.
Not too much came of it -- the riches were just too good to pass up -- but it seems like the Spanish were well ahead of, say, the English in developing a guilty conscience over their treatment of the Indians.
I'm less inclined to treat that as representative of 16th-century Spaniards and of the Spanish empire in general than you are, I think, for three reasons.
First, Charles V was Flemish. He never set foot in Spain until he was seventeen. ("It was said that only those regions that had not set eyes on their French-and Flemish-speaking king refrained from revolt at the start of his reign." The quote is from Roger Crowley's Empire of the Sea.)
Second, he seems to have been a man who, in most respects, was better than the men around him; who actually tried to live up to the virtues expected of an heir of Charlemagne, who fought in the front lines himself at Tunis, who made war with the Ottomans, instead of his own subjects, his chief priority.
(My favorite story: In the build-up to the Council of Worms, Martin Luther was offered a safe-conduct to debate with the Pope, with Charles V as guarantor; he debated it with his friends, because he was confident that, like Jan Huss, he would be going to his death, but finally decided yes. When the negotiations failed, the Pope (Leo X) offered Charles absolution of his oath, and Charles had the virtue to deny the Pope's offer and give Luther twenty-four hours to get out of town before the sentence of heresy and outlawry went into effect.)
So when you talk about Las Casas - well, yes, Charles is unusually willing to listen to decent people and seriously consider trying to do the right thing before deciding that he needs that money to fight the French and Ottomans. I think that's evidence that Charles is, by the extremely low standards of his time, an unusually good person, not of the 16th-century Spanish empire's benevolence.
And the third is that the Spanish were ahead of the English in all their relations with the Indians, for good and for evil, because they met them first. The first English colony is in 1607, and the Quakers are condemning colonial abuses against the Indians from when they show up in 1656. The first settlement is 1493, and the New Laws are 1540. I'll freely admit that de Las Casas was pleading on behalf of the Indians well before then, but I'll also admit that I don't know who the first Englishman to plead for good treatment of the Indians is - in both cases, we only notice when it gets big.
"but I'll also admit that I don't know who the first Englishman to plead for good treatment of the Indians is - in both cases, we only notice when it gets big."
Maybe Roger Williams of Rhode Island?
Seems plausible. The New World isn't my field of expertise.
They were all pretty bad TBH, but the Spanish apologists do have a point that there are a lot more indigenous people left south of the Rio Grande.
One of those un-PC things you don't see mentioned much over here is that the Catholic church actually kept them from being even worse. There's a long, long history of Catholic-Protestant conflict in Europe that's mostly forgotten over here except by history buffs.
Yeah, there was always the ultimate effort of an appeal to the pope. How much the secular government would bother paying any attention to that was another matter, but there was in theory at least an authority that could over-ride the civil government.
>> They were all pretty bad TBH, but the Spanish apologists do have a point that there are a lot more indigenous people left south of the Rio Grande.
It seems to me that the more accurate statement is that the `number of indigenous people left' is inversely proportional to the absolute latitude (as in, Argentina doesn't have many indigenous people left either). Which makes me think that the load bearing ingredient is more likely to have been stuff like disease burden on European settlers, rather than Catholicism vs Protestantism or England vs Spain.
There might be something in it, but the fact is that in California the number of natives sharply decreased after the takeover by the US as a direct result of its policies.
Also, even Argentina has 2.5x more native Americans per capita than the US. Chile also has a moderate climate and has 10x more natives.
Also, in Canada the French got along much better with the Natives and there are many more French-Indian mixed-race people.
I’m pretty sure there was a huge disparity in population density between *north of the Rio* (or north of the Valley of Mexico?) and the Yucatán and major parts of South America.
The Spanish get a bad reputation but were pretty decent as colonial masters of that time go.
They introduced lots of useful domestic plants and animals, technologies like metal working and water mills, printing presses and universities. The spanish kings also empowered humanist catholic priests that forbid the enslavement of indians centuries before the anglo-americans did anything similar and also did some interesting things like the jesuits missions in Paraguay that helped the indians improve their lives.
Before the spaniards the Americas consisted of very poor and brutal societies which at best had barely an early neolithic level of development and after independence Hispanic America had at least a century of civil wars, revolutions and dictatorships.
TIL that Cahokia and the Great Serpent Mound are on par with Stonehenge; thanks for the compliment!
Well, maybe Chichén Itzá and Machu Picchu
Maybe they were early neolithic north of the Rio Grande. The Incans were smelting and working copper, which places them in the chalcolithic.
Brutal yes ... but 'early neolithic' understates their tech level and organization. Silver was refined in South America for over a thousand years before the Spanish came, as well as copper, and they knew of bronze alloys as well. They even did some sintering with grains of native platinum.
And of course the Maya had a written language, and socially they were organized in to cities large enough to impress the Spanish when they encountered them, and were quite good at astronomy.
The Inca at least I would consider early Bronze Age, though the Aztecs didn't have the same level of metallurgy.
My impression is that the highest civilizations of the New World in 1491 tended to be more erratically developed than their counterparts in the Old World: i.e., some aspects would be very advanced but other aspects would be lagging behind. E.g., the Spanish had Chinese inventions like paper, gunpowder, and the compass.
This is probably due to the New World being smaller so fewer inventions and harder to get around (even today it's hard to travel by land from Mexico City to Cuzco across the Darien Gap).
It's not clear to me why they would have been any more brutal than anyone else. Early American people were... people. Different, yes, in fascinating ways, yet also the same.
I don't know why human sacrifice was widespread in Mesoamerica and not in most of the Old World, but it certainly was and that on its own significantly affects how "brutal" a civilisation is IMO
Eh. It's not like the witch trials were all that humanitarian in comparison.
radically different scales, and levels of officialness - the Catholic Church was strongly opposed to witch hunts, while ritual human sacrifice was the raison d'etre of the Aztec empire.
Thank you for the mention! See above what I said about Yeats and his play. It seems that there is a point when frustration, national sentiment (e.g. the Celtic Twilight and general revivalist attempts to promulgate a pure or native Irish culture separate from the mainstream Anglicised one of the time including historical examples of the past rebellions) and an inciting event - like a play - all come together and strike the spark that ignites the fire.
A play *on its own* probably wouldn't have sent out Tupac Amaru on his course of rebellion, but if it was the last piece in an already existing dissatisfaction with the colonial rule, his efforts to improve matters for the natives going nowhere, increasing identification with his indigenous heritage, etc. then it might have been "we were great before the Spanish came, we can be great if they are no longer the ones in charge, and peaceful means are getting us nowhere - the only thing they will pay attention to is force", then yes it could have lit the fire.
Eh, you're one of the few people on here who knows a lot about Catholicism, so I figured it was only fair.
I basically agree with what you're saying. The whole cognitohazard thing's a bit overstated, at least when it comes to rebellions. It needs more than a play, as you say.
Let me share with you this quote from a ghost story collection from 1928 written (but of course) by an Englishman. The narrator is very much an unreliable narrator, but the attitude is not too far off the mark 😁
"And then it was time for the Riviera, its boomed beauty, its bloody brood. What a region! I have cruised the Mediterranean fairly extensively, and it is no Sea for me. What merits the Southern Latins may once have possessed is a matter of opinion; that they retain any today seems to me untenable. A breed of pimps, parasites, and horse-torturers, the choicest surviving examples of that cretin civilisation which is Catholicism's legacy to the world. And it has always seemed to me that members of races vastly their intellectual and moral superiors become debased and degraded when brought into contact with them, though I know the region attracts the worst."
Do Italians torture horses?
The human mind is the single most complex system we know of. That it's outputs could be controlled by something as simple as a statement in a language, well, "It strains credulity, at that." Individual thought and behavior cannot be reliably predicted nor controlled, not even by that individual.
Infinite Jest also features a type of King in Yellow that leaves the viewer so consumed with a specific desire that they can no longer think about anything else. Feeding themselves or performing basic life sustaining actions are out of the question.
But the actual King in Yellow, based on the Wikipedia entry, seems most interesting because if its banality. Imagine reading an cognitohazard that forced you to care about nothing except a certain small section of Canadian tax law. That is the King in Yellow.
There's a Borges story, "The Aleph," no, it's "The Zahir" about a coin that if you get it in your change you can never stop thinking about it.
Thanks, that was a fun little read.
You, sir, have earned my respect.
"It’s because Ollantay wasn’t for us. It was for him."
In anarcho-dramatist circles the technical term for this is "double-reverse-incepto-mousetrap"
This is maybe my favorite one yet, but is it meant to be written as a factual account or more in the Sam Kriss mode of fictional truth? I tried to find some evidence that Tupac Amaru II actually heard Ollantay and couldn't (though I didn't try very hard).
Now that you mention it I do get a Krissian vibe from this one, wouldn't be shocked if he was the author (of the review, not the play)
I'll go one further and suggest we open a prediction market on whether Sam Krissy was the author of Ollantay.
Also immediately thought of Sam Kriss, although imo this doesn't meet the (high!) bar of his best work - although maybe that's because my favorite part is when his essays lift off from the plane of reality and ascend into madness, and that wouldn't be appropriate for this venue.
Never heard of this author and it sounds interesting. Would you be so kind to mention one of your favorites of him, for me to read?
His Taylor Swift essay ("Taylor Swift does not exist") is a very good example of this, as are many of his China travelogue posts from last year.
Interestingly, the mention of John Hinckley reminded me of a recent piece by Sam Kriss about him: https://thepointmag.com/politics/american-idols/
I agree that the flavours of the pieces are somewhat similar, but I also think they reach somewhat opposite conclusions about Hinckley as a tie-in. This review positions people as victims of their stories, but Kriss' piece seems to put people like Hinckley in the driver's seat with respect to the stories themselves.
What I found is a Spanish-language blog mentioning briefly something on the lines of "it is said that Ollantay was performed in front of tupac amaru before the start of is rebellion", so I think it's likely false, but not made up by the author of this review specifically
When it comes to Sam Kriss, I see the fiction not the truth. He always just posts a bunch of made up stuff that doesn't seem to lead to any coherent point.
I was thinking the same thing: between the subject matter rhyming with his new piece and the ending, what several commenters are noting as historical inacuracies, I strongly suspect Kriss submitted this one.
I didn't mean that it was literally his review. The writing is too rationalist-adjacent (overuse of "mostly") and earnest for him, I think. But I still loved the it!
I'm 60% certain this is by Sam Kriss. A fluffy confection built on a shocking event, complete with tongue-out raspberry, one of the standard templates for Krissian stories.
It was submitted by Sam Kriss, but it's an unpublished story by Borges that was actually composed by a forgotten Incan genius in 1491.
I also thought the subject matter, ideas, ending twist etc are very much like Sam Kriss. But the writing itself doesn't read like him much at all. Note also the american spelling.
"It has become commonplace to assert
that Antonio Valdez, whose manuscript was the first to come to light,
organized presentations of Ollantay for Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui,
known as Tupac Amaru II. If this is true, these representations would
probably have taken place prior to the rebellion itself. Lienhard has
described this scenario as a legend (78nl7), because critics have perpetuated these claims without citing any source. The "legend" originates
with Clements Markham who states that Antonio Valdez was a good
friend of Tupac Amaru II, and insinuates that he transcribed the play from
the oral tradition in order to present it for the rebel leader (Markham 106;
Ollantay 6; Incas 145, 148). Markham implies that he obtained this information in 1853 from Dr. Pablo Justiniani, an elderly priest from Lares
who was a friend of Antonio Valdez, who remembered the Tupac Amaru
rebellion, and who made a copy of Ollantay from Valdez's original manuscript. Although there is no other evidence that corroborates the link
between Ollantay and Tupac Amaru II, it is consistent with the kinds of
cultural practices involved in the Inca renaissance and their relationship
to revolutionary sentiments."
This is the most reputable-looking source I found which mentions it: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Galen-Brokaw/publication/265903525_Ollantay_the_Khipu_and_Eighteenth-Century_Neo-Inca_Politics/links/57bc683b08ae52593355c67b/Ollantay-the-Khipu-and-Eighteenth-Century-Neo-Inca-Politics.pdf
Wikipedia says that, rather than deciding not to attack Cusco, Túpac Amaru II attacked the city and failed. Also the articles for him and the play don't mention each other.
A brilliant review about a mediocre play that became a great story. The cognitohazard framing is spot on. The play wasn’t responsible for the rebellion; it just happened to find the right person at the wrong time.
Maybe I’m not fully getting the joke here, or maybe I’ve thought too much about apologetics, but isn’t it incredibly more likely that the play was written after the real-life events, rather than before? I’m interested in the specifics of how the different copies matched, if we carbon dated the manuscripts, if there are date stamped records of the guy that came to find it, etc.
IMO the intrigue of “who wrote it” or whatever is important to the prose of this review and a quick aside at the very end would have added to it. I get the vagueness is fun but now I want to know the actual answer.
The review mentions in a full two paragraphs that this is an unresolved question in the actual scholarship, starting with "It must be reiterated that scholarship on this point is incredibly varied".
The review's joke is that Túpac Amaru II (and people named after him, like the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur) had the ability to write "information hazards" that are powerful enough to incite deadly violence in just the right kind of receptive people, like how "Soulja's Story" inspired Ronald Ray Howard to shoot a policeman. No, it's not stringent logic; that's what makes it a joke, but a joke with just enough funny coincidence[1] to not be a silly joke.
[1] It's not actually a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
I hear you, and I’m sure existing scholarship not resolving the issue or having consensus but I’m from the part of rationality that likes to think the traditional institutions are incompetent and if I just had the data I requested the answer would be trivial to discern.
A lot of the time the "proper historical data" doesn't exist.
Hmm. I think the real cognito-hazard may be the review itself. It's presentation of reality seems to have a very strong pull on a lot of us.
Interesting article, as a Peruvian I'm quite familiar with Tupac Amaru II, and I've read Ollantay in high school.
This review was clearly meant for ME (/j)
Very good one. The idea of historical events as dramatic plays reminds me of Borges "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" https://ucrliteraryanalysis.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/theme-of-the-traitor-and-the-hero.pdf
"She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin."
What a hoot. Wayback int eh 1950's there was a female Peruvian singer whose stage name was Yma Sumac. From Wikipedia:
"Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo (born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo; September 13, 1922] – November 1, 2008), known as Yma Sumac (or Imma Sumack), was a Peruvian singer. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. ... Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yma_Sumac
She still had some popularity and her records were still around in the late 60s when I was in college, but I guess that she is completely unknown to younger people now.
I went on a Wikipedia binge about her a few weeks ago and was going to mention that here! For years I only knew of her as an occasionally entry in crossword puzzles. (Any three letter sequence that involves two vowels and a common consonant is going to show up a decent amount, even if Yoko Ono and Brian Eno are more common.) But I think I heard one of her songs on the radio and realized she had to be part of the inspiration for the opera singer in The Fifth Element.
Somehow my Wikipedia binge about her didn’t turn up this character from this play.
The Fifth Element was a great movie. One of the most anti-woke movies ever.
In what ways is it anti-woke?
Because Luc Besson is a pedo, which I understand are the tip of the spear of the anti-woke crusade.
(/s and in poor taste)
As I recall it satirizes a number of oppressed minorities in very unflattering ways. It was also extremely funny.
It's more punk than anything else.
American popular music tastes were more cosmopolitan before rock took over.
I am not totally sure about that. In the wake of classic rock, interest in various exotic genres was created. The Beatles went to India an created a flurry of interest in classical Indian music. I remember going to sitar and tabla concerts in the 60s. Bob Marley became a pop phenomenon and Caribbean genres like reggae and ska got lots of attention and radio play. Paul Simon was a one man effort to promote African and Latin American music and had some huge successes with them.
Before rock, Americans assumed that Continental Europeans were pretty good at music and would occasionally treat them as stars. From the Beatles on, virtually all pop music had to come from English speaking countries.
And in the wake of the European crack-up (WWI, Great Depression, WWII) the US became the leading global power and culture followed political and military dominance. So? At the same time the US was very open to foreign cultural influences, particularly from the Anglosphere. Good for US.
The British were pretty broke from, say, 1945-1960. Then they got back on their feet in the 1960s and were highly welcomed by their American allies in the Big One. One of my weirdest theories is that Woodstock was a victory party, delayed a generation, for WWII.
"American popular music tastes were more cosmopolitan before the gramaphone took over."
Fixed that for you. (https://pressbooks.ccconline.org/accintrotomedia/chapter/6-2-the-evolution-of-popular-music/)
I remember, and I remember some discounting of her claims by stating that she was, in fact, North American and had re-invented herself ("Yma Sumac" being "Amy Camus" backwards).
Seems that this is one of those "debunkings that are just as made up as what they claim to debunk":
"For years, rumors circulated that Sumac was a housewife from Brooklyn whose real name was "Amy Camus", which she reversed to become Yma Sumac. The origin of the rumor may plausibly be traced to a cleverly formulated review by influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, who used literary device, in a December 1950 column, to suggest that Sumac's voice was in fact a theremin, that Xtabay—or Axterbay—was Pig Latin for Baxter, and that the name of the singer was Amy Camus, who took Serutan (a contemporary laxative: "natures" spelled backwards)."
She was referenced in a song "Joe Le Taxi" sung by the (very) young Vanessa Paradis (14/15 years old at the time it became a hit) who was later the partner of Johnny Depp:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_le_taxi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulay2FvUEd8
"Joe le taxi
Et Xavier Cugat
Joe le taxi
Et Yma Sumac
Joe, Joe, Joe"
The conclusion reminds me of the painting "The Wild Chase" by Franz von Stuck, which shows Wotan charging on horseback, sword drawn, leading a procession of the unhallowed dead. What is intriguing is that Wotan looks suspiciously like Adolf Hitler, iconic hair and mustache as such. Conspiracy has it that Hitler saw this painting as a youth, and modeled himself after it.
And when the painting was drawn? 1889, the same year that Hitler was born
To be fair, the play is a comedy (they get married in the end), whereas in real life it's a tragedy (they die).
In general it's true we should all feel compelled to do our duty, for a life well lived, although those are some pretty dark examples in the end. I suppose karmic debt is personal, so who am I to say.
> This was a position designed to make the curaca identify more with the Spanish and less with the Indians. Like the position of corregidor, it was also a way to get very rich.
Curacas didn't _get_ very rich. They were born rich. The position was usually hereditary.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curaca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuraka
> from a 1780 population of 1.2 million, 100,000 people were killed.
The source for the 100,000 figure appears to be "La oración de la tarde: novela escrita sobre el célebre drama del mismo titulo" written by Antonio Rotondo (page 326). At least that's what Wikipedia says: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebeli%C3%B3n_de_T%C3%BApac_Amaru_II
It's interesting that Rotondo says (translated from Spanish): "A pardon was immediately published, and the principal leaders of the insurrection having accepted it, the insurrection was suppressed, and thus the last sparks of the terrible uprising in Spanish South America were extinguished, in which more than 100,000 people perished, both rebels and loyalists". This seems to contradict the reviewer's statement that after the main battle "this was not so much a war as a series of massacres. Anybody who might conceivably offer resistance was killed". Does he/she have another source besides Rotondo? Is he/she talking about the time following the main battle yet before the pardon was issued?
Rotondo also says (translated from Spanish): "[the leading Spanish general Jose del Valle] finally managed to return with his depleted column to Cuzco, where he found that during his expedition the chief José Gabriel Tupac-Amaru, his wife, his two sons, an uncle, a brother-in-law and several relatives, all had been executed in the public square". This appears to contradict the reviewer's statement that "the general who led the Spanish army pronounced his opinion on what should happen to Túpac. This sentence was carried out".
Maybe these are just minor details, Rotondo was novelist not a historian after all. But then, why use him as a source at all? Unless there's a better source confirming the extraordinary 100,000 figure.
Interesting
Good writeup, very interesting.
"Don Antonio Valdez was a parish priest in Tinta,......Around 1775, he invited José Gabriel and some other honored guests to a performance of a play he had finished putting together. Set in Cuzco in the 1400s, Valdez told his assembled audience that Ollantay was a Castilian version of a Quechua play.4
After seeing the play, something changed in José Gabriel’s life. It began with his name. He started claiming that he was a direct descendant of Túpac Amaru, the last Incan emperor,"
The most important thing for this reviews' sequence of events is how solid this claim is. If we know the future Tupac saw the play, that is actually a big deal. If the date of the play is actually nebulous and could have been after the rebellion, well that's a whole other thing.
I sent my digital servants to find out the truth of this matter, and the impression I got is that the idea that Tupac Amaru saw the play is on shaky foundation and is likely wrong, but the reviewer didn't completely make it up out of thin air:
"The primary basis for the claim comes from 19th-century writers. Sir Clements R. Markham (1910) reported that when he visited the parish of Laris near Cusco in 1853, he met Pablo Justiniani – an octogenarian priest “in direct descent from the Incas”. Justiniani told Markham that he had “the text of the drama of Ollantay” and recalled details of its recent history. Importantly, Justiniani recalled that the play had been performed at Tinta “before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru”, who was by then the leader of a rebellion. Markham notes: “it was acted before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru, a friend of [Antonio] Valdez, who headed an insurrection against the Spaniards in 1782”."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Incas_of_Peru/Chapter_10
And that's about it. And also there's this paper if you want something less fun and more serious: https://go-gale-com.translate.goog/ps/i.do?p=IFME&u=googlescholar&id=GALE%7CA197234128&v=2.1&it=r&sid=IFME&asid=7fefb114&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
> He was so persuasive in this effort that he (and Valdez the priest/playwright) convinced the bishop of Cuzco to send a delegation back to Madrid, led by Túpac’s uncle, to argue in front of King Charles III.
I am really not surprised that Charles III of Spain did nothing, since it seems to have been his chief hobby.
I really enjoyed the review, so it's disappointing to learn from the comments that the arrow of causality likely doesn't go from the play to the rebellion.
Also, about the modern murderers triggered by the songs: isn't it likely that unstable people are bound to get triggered by something while ordinary people are bound to not get triggered by anything? So there's probably no piece of art for you specifically.
The uncomfortable question then becomes where we draw the line between "unstable" and "ordinary." Also this typology seems to be making certain assumptions.
Naturally everything is a spectrum, I would say that the examples from the reviews are the guys who are unstable, and could likely have been triggered by a whole bunch of things, not the one specific piece of art that triggered them in reality.
I can't speak to Shakespeare, but the Irish rebellion was undertaken by a broad network of people working together toward rational ends (regardless of whether we approve of their goals and means or not). They probably included unstable people, but I don't perceive the majority of them as characterized that way.
eh, i grew up in fundamentalist circles, and one of the annoying things about them was the idea that items like books weren't just information, they were vessels for demons to act on you and just owning them wasn't good. It felt like they spiritualized the Necronimicon, in that items have their own malignant, corruptive power.
the idea of a cogitohazard is a secularized version of this: in both cases the information alone is secondary to some non-rational power that would drive you mad well beyond agreement or inspiration. The review ending with "something coming over him," due to a song, that led to murder; similar tack. A targeted cursed object, but still one that overpowers a weak will.
There is always some temptation to mythmake things as having power like this. A play driving a revolution by charming a person to become a character...but is it true or do we really see it? Not sure. You think with the sheer deluge of information we would.
review was entertaining to read.
It is plausible that mania/psychosis/delusions/drugs/politics would transfigure an otherwise harmless stimulus into a life's mission, on the understanding that it's not so much the stimulus that's causing it but the interior state. That's a little different to the claim that a regular person minding their own business can be possessed.
I'm reminded of the science behind Red Flag laws--no one just wakes up one day and becomes a mass murderer, always there were signs that various people ignored. Madness seems mysterious so we attribute mystical powers to it, but the mundane truth is that the unraveling of a mind is a gradual thing. It has to happen by degrees because of the complexity of the thing unraveling. Untying a Gordian Knot would be trivial by comparison.
True or not, this is a great story and would make a great plot for a novel
Is there evidence that stage plays existed in the pre-Columbian New World? They aren't universal.
I recall Jorge Luis Borges' short story “Averroes’ Search” in which the medieval Muslim philosopher is trying to translate Aristotle's writings on tragedy and comedy, but he doesn't realize that the Greeks had stage plays because his culture doesn't have them.
> But maybe something else is for you and for me
The usual pattern is to read a book, watch a movie, listen to a song, and be convinced that this is the life changing epiphany, only to complete forget it in a few days.
Or years. When I was much younger, the novel "Shadowland" by Peter Straub changed my life. Sadly, I no longer remember how or why. When I read it now... nothing happens. How disappointing.
How do we decide the body count of a play? Cato (written 1712) was widely quoted by American revolutionaries. Does it get a portion of the tally of men killed arguing with King George III?
For example:
“What a pity it is / That we can die but once to serve our country.”
“It is not now time to talk of aught but chains or conquest, liberty or death.”
Great kicker. “I thought I’d bring a little truth to the young troops . . . “
I enjoyed this. Whatever triggered him there does seem to be a weak tendency for colonials to flip and take the side of their adopted people. I think of Lawrence of Arabia in this vein and more obscurely, Rachel Dolezal.
The 'happy ending' would not have to be a modification per se, so much as a fabrication, if the original tradition ends with Ollantay's doom implied but not performed. It's unpleasant to enact a gruesome execution on stage, or even to versify it in any detail, so if the original might just have ended at a point its audience would have understood as tragic, but became ambiguous when lost in cultural translation.
"She gives birth off-screen, and her daughter, who she names Yma Sumac, is raised in the convent to be a consecrated virgin."
Now there is a sentence to make you wonder how many convents there were in Peru before the Conquest. Joking aside, this story doesn't sound weird enough to have come from an alien civilization, or even a much earlier version of this civilization.
And Tupac Amaru's story, dramatic though it is, doesn't sound any more unlikely than the near-contemporary Pugachev revolt in Russia, or the Taiping Revolt in China a century or so later. There have been a lot of unsuccessful rebels, and a lot of them came to bad ends.
Reminds me of Yeats and his play "Cathleen Ni Houlihan" of which he later asked in a poem: "Man and the Echo":
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_butler_yeats/poems/10349
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathleen_ni_Houlihan
"The play centres on the 1798 Rebellion. The play is startlingly nationalistic, in its last pages encouraging young men to sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen ni Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state. The title character first appears as an old woman at the door of a family celebrating their son's wedding. She describes her four "beautiful green fields," representing the four provinces, that have been unjustly taken from her. With little subtlety, she requests a blood sacrifice, declaring that "many a child will be born and there will be no father at the christening". When the youth agrees and leaves the safety of his home to fight for her, she appears as an image of youth with "the walk of a queen," professing of those who fight for her: "They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever."
The premiere of Cathleen ni Houlihan initially confused Dublin audiences who had expected a comedic play due to the actor Willie Fay's prior association with comedies. However, Gonne's reputation as an ardent nationalist helped them to understand the “tragic meaning” of her role, as described by Yeats. By the third night the theatre was so crowded that customers had to be turned away."
For another example of play that sniped - in this case not a person, but a crowd & a people - see La Muette de Portici (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_muette_de_Portici) which inspired the Belgian rebellion of 1830 against the Dutch and lead to Belgium becoming a country.
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> I'm always looking for interesting ways to spend my evenings.
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Hip Hop King and Saint, Tupac Amaru Shakur, told people that "tupac amaru" meant something like "intelligent warrior", instead of "shining serpent"
Yes, Tupac means The Shining One, and Amaru means serpent.
Tupac studied Shakespeare as a kid, used Shakespeare in his art and life, and also studied ballet and played the Rat King in Nutcracker. Like Muhammad Ali, Tupac faced death through Shakespeare, and found a warrior's courage to run toward violence instead of away. As in Ollantay, it is by believing you are about to face death that you become worthy to rule. People having near death experiences and terminal illnesses report that life becomes vivid. Precious. They wish to act and create and LIVE. And if, like Tupac, they are given a few years after facing death, they live life fearlessly and creatively.
I bet he identified with "Puck" the mercurial fairy, partially because of his name, and because Tupac did explicitly talk about how he identified with his "gemini" birthday nature and having 2 sides. And because "puck" sounds like "tu pac", and Tupac's lyrics are clear proof that he makes explicit associations between words with similar sounds.
His friends said Tupac would flip through like 5 characters in a single day. A sensitive and wise Tupac for the ladies, a thug Tupac, an artist Tupac, and so on...
He'd put on glasses and otherwise change his "costume". He seems like the type to change his scene setup, too, to make the scene "work"
And he created reality and changed the world by performing "scenes", same as in your play and story.
The thing is, Tupac 100% KNEW about the story of his name, the ancient emperor.
Did he also know the story of the revolutionary Jose Gabriel who fought for his people and took Tupac's name and acted heedless of death as if he was a character in a play?
Yes, definitely.
Tupac saw the pattern and lived it out. There are clues outside of culture's explicit knowledge, hints at how the exceptional succeed in changing the world. As Ollantay's priest says, "My power will enable me
To make of thee a greater prince."
Art can let people use a reality distortion field like Steve Jobs to face the unfaceable, like incoming death.
Tupac and others like Sylvester Stallone and Jim Carrey also knew about living in great poverty and the streets, and so had less fear and higher risk tolerance.
Tupac in particular also focused a lot of his efforts on being sexier to women, just as the character in Ollontay:
"Yet will I fight all these combined
And risk all else to gain my end,
And whether it be life or death
I’ll cast myself at Coyllur’s feet."
A young drama kid named Tupac Amaru Shakur reads that, and sees that the way to get girls, as a self-described skinny kid from the gutter, was to overthrow the king, make himself ruler like a shining serpent, face death fearlessly, and create new social realities with art.
He played it all the way, heedless of danger, until death took him at 25, the age he predicted he would die at.
Is Scott-sniping (i.e. guessing which of the reviews is authored by him, apparently a time-honored tradition from the past years) still allowed? If so, this one's got my vote.
The implication that Tupac thought following the script would end well because Valdez had changed the ending from tragedy to triumph is a nice touch.
Anyway, there's something vaguely Sam Krissy about this review which I like, if stylistically very different (shorter paragraphs by far, for example).
"During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time "The King in Yellow." I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the fire-light. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing from the hearth and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens, where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow."
- The Repairer of Reputations
The conventional account of Tupac Amaru II's adoption of the name is that he became interested in what we might retroactively call Quechua nationalism largely from reading the Comentarios Reales de los Incas, a text whose very existence challenges the thesis of this review.
Close enough. Welcome back, Borges.
It's kind of weird for this essay to constantly refer to "taxes and free labor". Taxation in corvée labor is common throughout history, an especially prominent form of taxation in kind. It's still legal in the United States despite the prohibition of slavery. And labor taxation is always seen as a form of taxation. Why are we separating it out so much here?
> But Ollantay, being simply a regional warlord, is not a suitable match for a princess.
I'd like to know more about this. In my model of society, "regional warlord" means essentially a duke, someone who occupies the level of status immediately below "king" or, as the terminology may be, "emperor". There can be only one royal/imperial family, so unless the princess is required to make an international marriage a regional warlord is about the best she can hope to do. A regional warlord is, by definition, a little king who is subject to a greater one.
Is this a case where (a) international diplomacy was so well-developed that an Inca princess could not realistically marry into an Inca noble family; (b) the structure of Incan society was radically different than the structure of every other society with a nonzero number of "warlords"; (c) Spanish culture of the time had some strange perspectives which infected the play; (d) the author of the play had no idea what Incan society had been like; or (e) something else?
I am not an expert on ancient Quechuan society, but lots of plausible alternatives come immediately to mind, because they have appeared in other societies across history:
1) A Royal can only marry another Royal
2) Marriages were defined by political alliances, and regional chiefs aren't powerful enough to count
3) Concepts like "Emperor", "King" and "Duke" have too many Western cultural assumptions associated with them that they conceal certain subtle but important nuances in the ancient Quechian political structure
4) The statement itself is an interpretation by a Spanish educated priest and doesn't accurately communicate the real reasons the marriage was impossible
5) Even by our own standards, "Regional Warlord" might be something more like "Local Barbarian Ally." Imagine a Celtic Warlord trying to marry the daughter of the Roman Emperor.
> Even by our own standards, "Regional Warlord" might be something more like "Local Barbarian Ally." Imagine a Celtic Warlord trying to marry the daughter of the Roman Emperor.
But Ollantay has already commenced an affair with the princess and impregnated her, right?
A Celtic warlord might be too small-time to marry an imperial princess (or not; I don't really know what happened to them - I don't think they were generally sent to form marriage alliances with Persia), but in that case, he'd be living far, far from Rome, with no chance to seduce her.
Note that Mongol warlords married Chinese imperial princesses all the time. One princess left a rich legacy of poems about how much she hated living there.
One probably-relevant factor is that there would have been plenty of Chinese princesses.
Keep in mind we are dealing with a work of fiction here, even if it had been inspired by historical events. So the correct question is what thematic image of royalty is being presented within the story. It appears to be one in which princesses can get involved in hot love affairs with a bad boy, then regret it later.
I was expecting this review to go "But actually none of that happened" for like half the length.
Rainer Maria Rilke has a lovely poem about this sort of experience:
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.