Something that has interested me throughout reading Comentarios Reales is the way it written and how Garcilaso de la Vega understands his role as an author. Despite constantly drawing from the oral histories that he heard in his childhood and the Inca communities he spoke with to write the first half of the book, he has nothing but disdain for this manner of preserving history. According to Garcilaso de la Vega, it was “la desdicha de nuestra patria” that despite their complex and important history and their great cultural and scientific achievements, “porque no tuvieron letras, no dejaron memoria de sus grandres hazanas.” Instead, their history was entrusted to the “flaca y miserable ensenanza de palabra de padres a hijos,” and thereby disappeared.
The goal of Garcilaso de la Vega is to preserve that history, by employing the European practice and style of book writing. As we have noted in class, he calls upon the works of other European authors and cites them very specifically. He is very methodical in his writing, such as in the passage where he describes the racial categories of the “hombre americano.” In the second half of the book, Garcilaso de la Vega moves away from a more distanced anthropological examination of the Inca Empire, ranging from foodstuffs to architecture, to a more involved and story-like account of the Spaniards in Peru. The detail with which Garcilaso de la Vega records the names and ranks of the people involved, the exact sequence of events and direct quotations, proves the point he is making, which is without written language, great quantities of detail become lost over time and only the most salient features of history remain.
In one interesting passage, Garcilaso de la Vega muses about those who commit historic acts and those who record those acts, saying “no se cuales dellos hicieron mas, si los de las armas o los de las plumas.” For him, his role is just as important as those people whose concerted efforts produce great empires, for without authors the achievements of these empires turn to dust.