The one assumption which most disables an attempt to take seriously as literary texts such works as Cortés Letters and Diaz' Conquest is that which takes literariness as a matter of extrinsic, stylistic polish or, at best, as pertaining to certain formal qualities of a work which have no bearing on its political or historical status. Thus Diaz' translator, while he generally lauds Diaz' historicity, allows that "by his own confession, Diaz was a poor stylist," though "for all the roughness of his style, Bernal Diaz could sometimes be picturesque" [J.M. Cohen, 1963]. And, as if having read this passage, Cortés' translator opines that "with the exception of a number of well-turned remarks [Cortés] shows scarcely more literary skill than Bernal Diaz." It is precisely this separation between historical and literary value which disables us from seeing the literary shape of these works. In the case of Cortés, for instance, one cannot begin to understand the denseness of the narrative achievement until one places it in the context of the various conflicting demands of both his political situation as an unauthorized conquistador and his discursive situation as agent-historian. The conflict of Cortés' political situation may be summarized as one between his need to show himself as vitally important to the founding of a Mexican empire and his need to show himself as not powerful enough or ambitious enough to pose a threat to the Spanish throne. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that Cortés was only in the most narrowly legalistic sense not subject to the authority of Diego Velázquez. Velázquez had sent Cortés out on his expedition and had a commission from Charles V giving him power over the newly discovered territory. Thus Cortés' decision to explore further than his commission authorized and his subsequent battle with Velázquez' punitive expedition nearly constituted rebellion against the crown. Cortés could skirt these problems only by feigning ignorance of Velázquez' commission and having himself declared, through a legal loophole, the "chief justice captain and our leader" of the new territory, the founding of which had voided the authority of the instructions under which Velázquez had sent him out.

By arguing that he is essentially a better subject of the Crown than Velázquez, Cortés establishes his prima facie preferability as a conqueror. Accordingly, the First Letter, written by two of Cortés' soldiers, mentions Velázquez' greed constantly, even as it offers Charles gold as an incentive to commission Cortés. Thus the Letter urges

that this land was very good and to judge by the samples of gold which the chieftains had brought, most wealthy also, and moreover, that the chieftain and his Indians had shown us great goodwill: for these reasons, therefore, it seemed to us not fitting to Your Majesties' service to carry out the orders which Diego Velázquez had given to Hernando Cortés which were to trade for as much gold as possible and return with it to the island of Fernandina in order only that Diego Velázquez and the captain might enjoy it, and that it seemed to us better that a town with a court of justice be founded and inhabited in Your Royal Highness' Name.

In other words, because the land is wealthy and has a lot of gold, Cortés should not obey his original injunction to find gold and return with it; and in order to prevent Velázquez and Cortés from enjoying the gold to the detriment of Charles V, sole power should be given to Cortés. This logic only makes even minimal sense, of course, if one assumes that Cortés is a more reliable deputy than Velázquez.

Cortés himself has two, more powerful arguments however. The first is that he and only he is able to effect the conquest of New Spain. When he tells the King of his response to Panfile de Narváez' expedition, authorized by Velázquez to wrest control of the conquered territory from him, he explains that "when I saw the great harm which was being stirred up and how the country was in revolt because of Narváez, it seemed to me that if I went to where he was the country would, in great part, become calm, for the Indians would not dare to rebel once they had seen me." The interesting aspect of this situation is that it is a shadow play of Cortés' own conquest. Narváez is a shadow-Cortés, conquering where Cortés has conquered while Cortés is a shadow-Moctezuma, protecting the territory which is now his empire. But Cortés is a far more effective Moctezuma than the original even as Narváez is only a weak parody of Cortés. Cortés' mere appearance in a territory, going to where Narváez was, will quiet the populace. In other words, only Cortés can hold the land for Charles; and he holds it not only more effectively than Velázquez through Narváez, but even more effectively than Moctezuma himself.

Cortés' second argument involves directly his role as agent-historian. We can see its aspects by considering in conjunction two odd moments. In the first, the writers of the First Letter describe their investigation of an island:

This island is small, and nowhere is any river or stream to be found, so that all the water which the Indians drink comes from wells. The land consists entirely of crags and rocks and forests; the only produce the Indians have is from beehives, and our deputies are conveying to Your Highness samples of the honey and beeswax from the hives for Your Inspection.

Be it known to Your Majesties that the Captain urged the chieftains of that island to renounce their heathen religion; and when they asked him to give them a precept by which they might hence-forth live, he instructed them as best he could in the Catholic Faith.

This passage raises, I think, two questions. First, why does Cortés bother to send back samples of honey and beeswax? Surely that was not considered a valuable gift, worth taking up the place of gold. Second, why is the passage of description linked to that of proselytization? To get a closer fix on the first question, let us

juxtapose against this passage another in which Cortés offhandedly verifies a bit of information by saying, "all of which I later heard more fully from Mutezuma." The power of this seemingly subsidiary remark is that it suddenly spotlights Cortés' ability to be a first-hand gatherer of information. Only he can have his facts verified by Moctezuma himself. And this, of course, is where the sending of the honey and beeswax enters. Those are not presents of value, but tokens of Cortés' having been there on the scene. By seeing the beeswax and Moctezuma as incidents of finding information about the land, the linking of the proselytization immediately becomes clear as the exchange activity, the dissemination of information about religion. And we can now see the connection between Cortés' claim to be the proper choice for conquistador of the new lands and his claim to be the historian to be listened to (after all, Velázquez could write letters too). Just as he was the only one who could hold the land, he was also the only one who could supply reliable information about it and convey accurate information to it, simply because he was the only one who was on the scene, the only one who was witness to or supplier of any kind of information at all.

Both of these arguments for his political and narrative value, however, can also become arguments against those values, and in the same ways. The problem with Cortés' claim to be a shadow-Moctezuma, a reliable holder of the land, may be seen clearly in the light of J. H. Elliott's terse explanation, "it was the policy of the Castilian Crown, firmly laid down in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, that no subject should be permitted to grow overmighty." In other words, the very thing that made Cortés valuable, his power, also made him a threat. And the narrative situation is similar. Remember that the agent-historian, in his claim of firsthand factual knowledge always implicitly disallows his reader any valid judgement of his own, erasing the reader's authority. Thus what made Cortés a better choice of narrator than Velázquez, his physical participation and consequent special knowledge, for the very same reason tended to efface the audience to whom it was directed, Charles V.

But there is one more twist here. If Cortés' role as agent-historian seemed to give him too much power in one way, in another it did not give him nearly enough. To the extent that an agent-historian rests his authority on the knowledge of the facts, he is at the mercy of those facts. He does not claim to make his history but to report it. Thus even as the conquistador must react randomly, as best he may, in the face of the unknown, the narrator can only record and re-enact those reactions. He cannot control them. Such a situation is, of course, unstable, involving shifting judgements, shifting events. This formal instability is radically exacerbated, to say the least, by the fact that Cortés wrote his Second Letter after having lost Tenochtitlan but before having reconquered it. In the face of this instability, partly a result of events but partly built into the type of history he wrote, what remained of Cortés' claim to be powerful enough to win and control a new empire?

Cortés' handling of this problem in his Second and Third Letters entails a rhetorically brilliant manipulation of the possibilities of agent-narration. His first manoeuvre is to distance the narrator from the agent as sharply as possible in a history that still claims eyewitness knowledge as its authority. By stressing foreshadowing and design, Cortés, as much as he can, erases the possibility of contingency in the conquest he describes, thus creating what I will call here a narrative of control. The erasure of contingency, the insistence upon control, starts almost from the beginning of the Second Letter, when Cortés first mentions Moctezuma (although he writes as if he had referred to him in a prior letter):

I also spoke of a great lord called Mutezuma, whom the natives of these lands had spoken to me about, and who, according to the number of days they said we would have to march, lived about ninety or a hundred leagues from the harbor where I disembarked. And trusting in God's greatness and in the might of Your Highness's Royal name, I decided to go and see him wherever he might be. Indeed I remember that, with respect to the quest of this lord, I undertook more than I was able, for I assured Your Highness that I would take him alive in chains or make him subject to Your Majesty's Royal Crown.

This passage may not seem surprising until one remembers to place it in the context of other conquest narratives, which generally give some account of the relatively late discovery of Moctezuma's existence, the initial ignorance of his precise status and power, and the determination to go to see him which, by supplying a unified motivation and goal, hence-forth gives each history its individual plot design. Here there is neither discovery nor learning but an establishment by fiat of the goal of further activity and even a prediction of the extent to which the goal was effective: he did see Moctezuma, he did not manage to bring him back alive. Nor should the last admission of failure confuse us here. We must remember that Cortés did not have to mention an undertaking of which in fact he knew very well he had never informed Charles. The failure to fulfil the promise to capture Moctezuma was a failure of the agent Cortés. Nevertheless, the narrator's prediction here encompasses both the beginning and the end of the plot at once, replacing the agent's discoveries and surprises with the narrator's foreknowledge and control.

With seemingly astonishing daring, Cortés tests his replacement of agent with narrator by writing his narrative of control from a moment when control is lost. This may be less daring than necessity, though. Given that Cortés had not written before the noche triste, he could not wait until after the attempt at reconquest to write because obviously he could not know that of which he is concerned to assure Charles, that he would successfully retake the city. Moreover, since he had sent for aid, he needed to explain any reports Charles might get from elsewhere about the suddenly unstable situation. By writing precisely when all was up in the air, though, he could substitute his narrative's fore-knowledge for actual event. To see how this substitution works, consider together these passages:

Believing, therefore, that if the ships remained there would be a rebellion, and once all those who had resolved to go had gone I would be left almost alone, whereby all that in the name of God and Your Highness had been accomplished in this land would have been prevented, I devised a plan, according to which I declared the ships unfit to sail and grounded them; thus they lost all hope of escape and I proceeded in greater safety and with no fear that once my back was turned the people I had left in the town would betray me.

…So Your Highness may be assured that if it pleases Our Lord to favor Your Royal good fortune, all that was lost, or a great part of it, will shortly be regained, for each day many of the provinces and cities which had been subject to Mutezuma come and offer themselves as Your Majesty's vassals, for they see how those who do so are well received and favored by me, whereas those who do not are destroyed daily.

The first passage, noticeably does not describe the event of destroying the ships so much as the thinking behind devising a plan, making a plot. In a situation in which "what has been accomplished" could have been "prevented," Cortés through designing overcomes contingency. It is the narrative description of designing primarily, and the grounding only as a result of that designing, that creates the desired result. Cortés' prediction of success in the second passage has precisely the same narrative shape. It is foreknowledge based on reason and calculation. And the entire vector of the narrative encourages us to take design itself as effective because what the narrative foresees occurs.

In a narrative that insists on control rather than contingency, spatial facticity has entire priority over temporal event. Indeed Cortés emplois his narrative so that, as nearly as possible in a linear narrative, temporal sequence is erased. Here, for instance, is Cortés' account of his response to a group of Indians who wanted to join his forces although they had previously killed some Spaniards: "as they could not therefore excuse themselves from all blame, their punishment would be to return what belonged to us, and if they did so, although they deserved to die for having killed so many Christians, I would make peace with them because they begged me to do so." Despite the density of past event and future possibility that hovers behind this passage, it is more nearly, in Erich Auerbach's terms, a case of flat, foregrounded narrative, such as Homer's Odyssey, rather than layered and backgrounded narrative such as the Bible's. A rather large complex of events is held together and resolved in a single moment through a series of logical connectives, "as," "therefore," "if," "although," and, unstated but implied, a "then" after "if and a "nevertheless" after "although." The Indians' past crime and future punishment are all contained in a single proposition, present in space rather than extended through time. The meeting itself is a linguistic event parallel to this sentence since it is the event that signifies all these various resolutions, the return of Spanish property and the making of peace. The suggestion of the narrative as a whole is that the conquest exists almost as a single, externalizable, logical proposition rather than an unpredictable sequence of events.

Not surprisingly, in this form of emplotment, the Aztecs have very little interiority or psychological density. They are neither good nor bad but simply external objects that exist in relation to Cortés' various plots and designs. Here for instance is Cortés' first discovery of the Aztec empire's fragile political situation:

When I saw the discord and animosity between these two peoples I was not a little pleased, for it seemed to further my purpose considerably; consequently I might have the opportunity of subduing them more quickly, for, as the saying goes, 'divided they fall.' … So I maneuvered one against the other and thanked each side for their warnings and told each that I held his friendship to be of more worth than the other's.

Cortés' political shrewdness has often been remarked upon nor do I mean to dispute it. But it is a shrewdness that runs in extremely narrow grooves. These Indians, although they are political enemies, are virtually undifferentiated within the narrative. Between "one" and "the other" or "each" and "the other's" there is only the slimmest grammatical and virtually no semantic differentiation. Here, as in all the other passages which describe Cortés' political machinations, the Indians are merely blank counters, objects whose only importance is their relationship to and within Cortés' designs.

The tactics of erasing sequence in favour of control and of subordinating all objects of plot to narrative design may alleviate the inherent instability in the narratives of agent-historians, but they would not seem designed to assuage the Crown's fear of conquistadors becoming overly powerful. But here is the telling effectiveness of Cortés' enhanced split between narrator and agent. Although the narrative voice is one of almost imperial authority and contol, the agent-Cortés consistently effaces himself, pictures himself as an institutional embodiment rather than an individual leader. One sees this most strikingly in Cortés' response to a message from Panfilo de Narváez:

One of those clerics also told me that Diego Velázquez had empowered Narváez and the two clerics jointly to make this offer and any concessions I might wish. I replied that I saw no decree from Your Highness instructing me to deliver the land to them, and that, if indeed they brought one, they should present it before me and the municipal council of Vera Cruz in accordance with the practice in Spain.

It is easy to forget the political situation that makes this claim so absurd. Not only was Diego Velázquez the man who authorized Cortés' voyage but Cortés well knew that Velázquez already had imperial authorization for his activity. Vera Cruz, moreover, was the creation of Cortés that allowed him to have himself declared the Spanish captain in Mexico. Thus beneath the tip of this passage is an iceberg of rebellious, individual assertion. And yet Cortés manages to portray his insubordination here as a responsiveness to rules and regulations. And, as we saw earlier, he attributes the imminent retaking of Tenochtitlan not only to his machinations but to those machinations as simply a grounding of Royal good fortune. By assigning all of his active powers to the controlling narrator, Cortés is able to portray his agent-self as an object of institutional and Royal will, an object of plot almost as much as the Indians are, one of the external facts upon which the narrative of control calls for its authority. Cortés maintains enough of the form of agent-histories to rest his authority upon his first-hand knowledge. Indeed he enhances the spatial quality of this appeal by as much as possible de-temporalizing his narrative. But, by opening a rift between agent and narrator, he also succeeds in making the form more politically palatable.