Love and the Law in Cervantes

Love and the Law in Cervantes

R O B E R T O G O N Z Á L E Z E C H E VA R R Í A

Love and the Law in Cervantes

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Copyright ∫ 2005 by Roberto González Echevarría. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Sabon type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data González Echevarría, Roberto. Love and the law in Cervantes / Roberto González Echevarría. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-10992-x (alk. paper) 1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616 Don Quixote. 3. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616–Knowledge—Law. 4. Love in literature. 5. Law in literature. 6. Law and literature. I. Title. pq6351.g66 2005 863%.3—dc22 2005041844 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my peripatetic brothers Howard (Bloch), Carlos (Hortas), and Giuseppe (Mazzotta), in celebration of our Sunday morning walks

Pensaba en los misterios de la letra escrita, en esas hebras negras que se enlazan y desenlazan sobre anchas hojas filigranadas de balanzas, enlazando y desenlazando compromisos, juramentos, alianzas, testimonios, declaraciones, apellidos, títulos, fechas, tierras, árboles y piedras; maraña de hilos, sacada del tintero, en que se enredaban las piernas del hombre, vedándole caminos desestimados por la Ley; cordón al cuello, que apretaba su sordina al percibir el sonido temible de las palabras en libertad. Su firma lo había traicionado, yendo a complicarse en nudo y enredos de legajos. Atado por ella, el hombre de carne se hacía hombre de papel. —Alejo Carpentier, ‘‘Viaje a la semilla,’’ 1944 [He thought how mysterious were written words: those black threads weaving and unweaving, and covering large sheets of paper with a filigree of estimates; weaving and unweaving contracts, oaths, agreements, evidence, declarations, names, titles, dates, lands, trees and stones; a tangled skein of threads, drawn from the inkpot to ensnare the legs of any man who took a path disapproved of by the Law; a noose around his neck to stifle free speech at its first dreaded sound. He had been betrayed by his signature; it had handed him over to the nets and labyrinths of documents. Thus constricted, the man of flesh and blood had become a man of paper. —Alejo Carpentier, ‘‘Journey Back to the Source,’’ 1944]

Contents

Acknowledgments ix A Note on Translation xi Introduction xiii 1.

The Prisoner of Sex (Quijote, I, 22) 1

2.

Spanish Law and the Origins of the Novel 17

3.

Engendering Dulcinea 35

4.

The Knight as Fugitive from Justice: The Quijote, Part I

5.

The Amorous Pestilence: Interpolated Stories in the Quijote, Part I 75

6.

Broken Tales: Love Stories in the Quijote, Part I 92

7.

The Politics of Love and Law: The Quijote, Part II 112

8.

A Marriage Made in Heaven: Camacho’s Wedding (Quijote, II, 19–21) 134

9.

Love and National Unity: Ricote’s Daughter’s Byzantine Romance 156

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10.

The Exemplariness of the Exemplary Stories: ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ 175

11.

The Bride Who Never Was and Her Brood: ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ 194

12.

Cervantes’ Literary Will: The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda 213

13.

The Novel after Cervantes: Borges and Carpentier 231 Notes 251 Bibliography 275 Index 287

Acknowledgments

When Yale president Richard C. Levin asked me to deliver the spring 2002 DeVane Lectures, I immediately thought of the first piece of advice Don Quijote gave Sancho when he learned that his squire had been named governor of the Island of Barataria. The knight told Sancho ‘‘not to attribute your success to your own merits, to give thanks to Heaven for having disposed matters so beneficently in your behalf’’ (No atribuyas a tus merecimientos la merced recibida, sino que des gracias al cielo, que dispone suavemente las cosas). I, however, would like to thank Rick for the honor, and for the quixotic notion that I could follow the likes of Sidney Altman, Harold Bloom, Guido Calabresi, Nancy Cott, Anthony Kronan, Jaroslav Pelikan, Jonathan Spence, and so many other distinguished colleagues. I was fortunate to have had much help in coping with the crisis in which I suddenly found myself. I have been blessed with the encouragement and assistance of many colleagues at Yale who listened patiently when I tried out on them some of the ideas that I developed in the lectures and later in this book. Without enlisting them as accomplices or collaborators, I would like to thank Rolena Adorno, Howard Bloch, Harold Bloom, Josefina Ludmer, Oscar Martín (who provided much help with medieval Spanish topics), Giuseppe Mazzotta, María Rosa Menocal, David Quint, and Noël Valis. Another colleague, Mercedes Carreras, who is also a Spanish lawyer, gave me valuable advice on legal issues.

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Giuseppe Mazzotta attended every single one of the lectures and David Quint, who was writing his own book on Cervantes, came to several. Fellow pilot and Elizabethan scholar Lawrence Manley, from our English department, also attended quite a few and offered valuable comments. My longtime friend Cathy L. Jrade of Vanderbilt University read the entire manuscript and made numerous corrections, as did Georgina Dopico Black of New York University. The lectures and the book would not have been possible without the assistance of Anke Birkenmaier, student, research assistant, interlocutor, critic, editor, and stern advisor. She carefully read the entire manuscript and also taught a section of undergraduates attending the DeVane Lectures for credit. Isabel Jaén-Portillo led the section taught in Spanish and made insightful comments. Antonio Carreño Rodríguez, a teaching assistant in a more recent version of the course, also made insightful comments; he also procured for me a copy of the 1567 Nueva recopilación. Eagle-eyed Charlotte Rogers had the last look at the proofs. The graduate students who took the lectures as a course and with whom I had a seminar session at the end were essential to the realization of my project in their attentive reception. At that session, held at Beinecke Library, we indulged in the fetishistic pleasure of fondling first editions of Cervantes’ books. Everyone registered produced a superb paper. The students were David Assouline, José Cárdenas, Gisela Guerenstein, Ana María Mutis, Ryan Szpiech, Stephanie Tuttle, María Vázquez, and Estela Vieira. I also would like to thank my wife, Isabel, who came to all the lectures and endured my moods and odd behavior while preparing them. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the people who attended the lectures, many every single one of them. I was delighted to see a variety of ages in the audience, ranging from Adriana Apter, a mere ten, to retirees looking for something to do on a Thursday afternoon. Robin DuBlanc, a model copyeditor, rid the manuscript of the last remaining hispanisms and inconsistencies. Last but certainly not least, I wish to recognize the invaluable assistance, unwavering loyalty, and unqualified support of Mrs. Sandra Guardo, a true pillar of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale.

A Note on Translation

All quotations and references to the Quijote are to the following edition: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de La Mancha, coordinated by Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes, 1998); the companion volume, Volumen complementario, to which there are occasional references, contains notes, commentaries, and bibliography. I am using the 1755 Tobias Smollett translation (with occasional emendations to avoid archaisms) in the following edition: The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote (Ware, Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1998). Although Smollett numbered the chapters in Part I according to the division of four parts, I use the more conventional I or II for the 1605 and 1615 books, followed by arabic numbers to indicate the chapters, and then give the page number from this edition.

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The Yale College Catalogue states that the DeVane Lectures are a special series ‘‘open to the general public as well as to students and to members of the Yale community. They were established in 1969 as part of the DeVane Professorship, a position created in honor of William Clyde DeVane, Dean of Yale College from 1939 to 1963. The DeVane Professorship was intended to provide an opportunity for a scholar to work beyond the boundaries of a particular specialty or department and to transmit the excitement of that study to colleagues and students in other fields.’’ Faced with the task of addressing undergraduates, graduates, and a general audience, I chose Cervantes, thinking that it would be a subject of interest to all. Taking to heart the idea that the DeVane professor should stray from his or her field and experiment, I chose the topic of love and the law in Cervantes. Because he sets out to impose justice on the world, driven by his love of Dulcinea, Don Quijote seemed to embody these two forces of love and the law, a topic worthy of detailed exploration. With this I also intended to develop further the line of work I had begun in my Myth and Archive (1990) and to continue examining the impact on literature of Spain’s legal system during the Golden Age. My purpose here is to propose that the novel as a genre and Cervantes’ work in particular developed not only from the literary tradition but also from other kinds of discourse, above all the legal. I want to offer an account of the origins

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of realism different from that provided by Erich Auerbach in his classic Mimesis, and more narrowly by Alexander A. Parker in his Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe.∞ Auerbach’s magnificent book sees the emergence and evolution of realism in terms of the doctrine of styles; Parker sees the development of the picaresque from Spanish doctrinal-moralistic literature during the second half of the sixteenth century. I argue that the organization of a modern state in Spain, beginning in the reign of the Catholic kings and the attendant growth of a patrimonial bureaucracy, created a discourse dealing with criminals and common people that writers found compelling partly because it also pertained to them as subjects of the new polity. I wanted to show, moreover, that in fiction the law dealt primarily with conflicts of love, a synecdoche for social strife and evolution. Love and the law converge on marriage, the legal and religious institution at the foundation of the body politic. I concentrate on love stories in the Quijote, the Exemplary Stories, and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, the core of Cervantes’ narrative work, but I believe that a similar study of his theater could be carried out. By focusing on stories involving the legal strife provoked by love, I try to demonstrate how the law provides Cervantes with fresh narrative forms in which to recast traditional stories and create new ones drawn from contemporary life. I also show how legal situations and characters drawn from the judiciary fill Cervantes’ work and how judicial terminology permeates his prose. I demonstrate that the approach to the law evolves from Part I to Part II of the Quijote, from the particular to the more abstract and general, and show how, when read from the perspective of the law, both that masterpiece and some of the Exemplary Stories disclose aspects heretofore ignored. These I call ‘‘unnarratable’’ stories, subtexts dealing with the uncanny and/or the horrible—the unlawful, in the deepest sense, because it includes the irrational foundations of law itself. I wind up with a quick survey of the love-law dyad in European and American fiction and then home in on two major Latin American authors, Borges and Carpentier, who rewrite Cervantes in their quest to find the origins of American fiction. In doing so they delve into the romantic coupling of literature and the nation, the founding letters of the law and the laws of the letter, in fictions such as ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,’’ and The Harp and the Shadow. In the latter Carpentier has Columbus, the first European to write about the New World, engaged in a torrid love affair with Queen Isabella of Castile, which allows me to loop back to my opening chapters. Modern history and American fiction are the issues of that union of love and the law imagined by Carpentier. Stories not drawn from literary tradition but from legal cases—or like them, involving the tawdry underworld atmo-

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sphere of criminality—emerge in Spain from La Celestina and the picaresque on. Transgressions and their punishment are recorded in concrete detail. This kind of writing not only strives to direct the attention of the reader outside of literature, but its appeal is based precisely on the fact that it originates outside of literature, a perspective familiar to his or her own reality. The relationship of the legal background with narrative fiction presupposes that the literary imagination feeds not only on past-master stories still current but also on the minor, contingent stories found in contemporary legal archives. These are tales lifted from the textual net that the law as creation of the social mind throws over the transient; legal writing is the glue of the social contract, the netting of the human, of the fallible in a significant code. By delving into the legal archive the pool of stories is increased and given an air of the actual. The advent of print and the growth, unification, and centralization of the legal system in Spain led in two seemingly contradictory directions: one toward enmeshing individuals in a web of restrictions. They are now more subservient to the state and subject to its penal machinery; they are ‘‘booked,’’ as it were. But at the same time printed law led toward democratization, or at least toward a progressive leveling of social classes. The laws of the new state eroded the personal, arbitrary power of noblemen, who are themselves now not only subjects of the crown but must answer to its judiciary. The love-law stories in Cervantes reflect the social mobility or realignment resulting from these contrary forces. Love conflicts span the social gamut in Cervantes, from whorehouse strife to struggles among aristocrats, but most importantly love quarrels increasingly involve or reflect social warfare. Characters from different social classes meet, clash, meet again, marry. Illegality, transgression, corruption transform the system, rewrite the law, sometimes with blood, as in the Camacho wedding episode in Part II of the Quijote. Marriage appears often because it is the social contract that resolves conflicts by taming desire and directing it toward reproduction and restored social stability. The written record of the law becomes increasingly important to literature because it is the most extensive account of human interaction available—it is a primary form of recording life’s variety, an inscription of behavior prior to generalizations and formulas. It represents the raw contingency of the real. Because of this it is an invaluable repository for the emerging novel, a treasure trove of the vagaries of human conduct and misconduct. Deviants—the sinner, the criminal, the madman—will be the novel’s most coveted figures, as they are for the law. Literature becomes an archive of the forbidden, counterbalancing the copious repository of the pious, generally the context that has been used to read

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Cervantes because of its availability. The forbidden, on the other hand, tends by nature to be scarce in its public displays and leaves a scant record. There is a surfeit of information about the law, about how to suppress and punish crime and sin, but scant contextual documentation about the allure and manifestations of desire. This is where Marcel Bataillon, Alexander A. Parker, and Alban Forcione, scholars whose work I truly admire and from whom I have learned a great deal, go wrong. They misrepresent the literary text by relying solely on the overwhelming context of piety and interdiction. Literature is its own best context in this regard, or perhaps Stuart Schwartz’s work on Inquisition records, where the evidence of transgression is most readily available.≤ I am not interested in finding yet another orthodox Cervantes. I am looking for the one who writes probing the forbidden, reveling in it, not because he is allied to any given ideology or resentful group, but because he has discovered that this is the mission of literature that pretends to be truthful in the deepest sense. I fully agree with Jean Canavaggio when he writes in his excellent biography of the author: ‘‘The fact is that deviant, not to say perverse, attitudes attract Cervantes’ attention as much as, if not more than, the amorous ardor of seducers and fallen women—the necessary ingredients of Golden Age stories.’’≥ Why would the Quijote and all of Cervantes’ important narratives probe into the perversions of love, and what does this have to do with the novel and with literature in general? Why is it pleasurable to learn such unpleasant truths abut the human condition? Because literature allows us to enjoy vicariously and in relative safety the pleasures of the forbidden whose call is within all of us. Or perhaps because, following Georges Bataille, interdiction gives the forbidden a value of its own that literature feeds on.∂ It is here, ironically, where Horace’s dulce et utile meet—only that the sweet is the sweetness of the proscribed and the useful the contemplation and selfcontemplation of the human predicament. Driven by misguided nationalistic pride, Spanish criticism of Cervantes has recoiled from this aspect of his work, and English-language critics have chosen a similar path, driven by their conception of a Spain totally dominated by religious zeal and incapable of producing modern views of humankind. Before the sixteenth century the intersection of love and its control had not been cast as a conflict between desire and the law in institutional and contemporary terms. In the past love had been checked by ethics, customs, or religious doctrine in Western society and literature. In Greek tragedy the stern rules violated by the protagonists represent the collectivity but in an abstract way. In the classical epic transgressions were also against broadly conceived conventions such as honor, duty, the gods, and mostly fate. In the Middle Ages love was regulated by religious doctrine, by canon law. Beginning in the six-

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teenth century, however, the law, as represented by an increasingly organized judiciary and its attendant police, emerges in the Iberian Peninsula as a form of control, curtailment, and channeling of desire that is set in written (and printed) laws. This was due to the organization of the first modern state in Spain, aided by developments in moveable print, and by the effort to develop a centralized legal system whose model was Roman, the Renaissance imperial model. The continued compilations of laws in the Spain of the sixteenth century are moving toward the unification of the legal system under the new absolute monarchy, but curiously there is more of an accumulation of laws than a systematization, because new laws do not invalidate previous ones and there is resistance to unification because of the many fueros, or local exemptions. Codification was made manifest in the practice of the patrimonial bureaucracy more than in the actual written codes. In La Celestina (1499), the picaresque (beginning in 1554), and Cervantes, the representation of the law and its conflicts takes on this new guise. An important new feature, with a lasting effect on the history of the novel and the direct result of legal writing, is the frequent appearance of the tawdry, drawn from notarial documents that inscribe the everyday in all its unwieldy and irregular manifestations. An important feature is that the punishments provided by the law attempt to replace private revenge by the injured party or his (or more often her) relatives. Private vengeance obeys no codes, which is why the new Spanish judiciary tries to suppress it and punish it. Individuals are now pitted against codes and police forces representing the state, not personal enemies. Plots and their denouements differ from those of previous literature as a result. The well-known plays of the Spanish Golden Age stage conflicts between private vengeance and public (legal) punishment as a result of these social and political changes. In the new literature, in Cervantes, the religion of love charted by Denis de Rougement meets the legal brief.∑ My approach tries to take into account the actual functioning of the legal system at the time Cervantes wrote: not just the law in abstract terms, but the law as it was actually written and applied in Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Literature finds a sense of the concrete, the actual, the real in legal discourse that enters into conflict with narrative and stylistic conventions drawn from the stock of the European narrative tradition. Individuals are now subject to a state that they view not in the personal, traditional way— relations with equals, subordinates, and superiors—but as a complicated set of laws that mediate between them and the source of power. Heroism in the epic sense, even in the tragic sense, is now seriously compromised by the limitations imposed on the individual by the collective. This affects one’s self-conception as well as one’s conception of the

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community within which one lives. Cervantes’ works are the first sustained record of this process in literature. They show an increasingly litigious society because of the gradual erosion of social privilege that is leading to eighteenthcentury revolutions, to the Enlightenment, and eventually to bourgeois society. It is this that—other than his genius—makes him different from Dante, Boccaccio, and back through the canon to Virgil and Homer. In the love stories that I study here, a crime, punishable by law, is committed. There is a perpetrator, a victim, and a crime assessed in relation to a legal code, not just to mores or customs. The crime is defined in terms of current law and the culprit punished according to its stipulations. Plots are affected because what sets them in motion is the perpetration of a crime, as in ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ and the punishments and restitutions vary according to the law. In ‘‘The Jealous Extremaduran’’ there is a reversal of the expected ending and a drafting of a new legal document to seal it. So the law, I propose, influences the narrative—and Cervantes’ in particular—in the following ways: (1) style (the concrete, legal terms); (2) plots (crime, punishment, revenge, or pardon); (3) the incorporation of subgenres from the legal (confessions, depositions); (4) endings (resolution involves exculpation, punishment or pardon, and legitimation); (5) an increase of stories involving the question of marriage, which is the most tangible and textual level at which love and the law intersect in Cervantes and in subsequent narrative fiction; (6) the proliferation of judges, lawyers, bailiffs in fiction, particularly in Cervantes; and (7) the inclusion of or allusion to legal documents in the fiction and the fiction itself sometimes takes the form of one of them— specifically in the picaresque. The ‘‘unnarratable stories’’ that I tease out of some of Cervantes’ stories result from the deep complicity of love and the law. The law’s arbitrariness and irrationality are like those of desire itself— interdiction is not a given but a construct of the human. The consubstantiality of law and literature results from the common origin of both desire and interdiction in the irrational. This is the buried, yet coeval, kernel of the love-law dyad in Cervantes and in modern literature in general. The sadistic pleasure of the ‘‘no’’ meets the indulgent delight of the ‘‘yes.’’ The ‘‘thou shalt not’’ of our invented gods is fraught in the pleasure of negation and the equally pleasurable threat of punishment if transgression occurs. The irrational in love and in the law meet in a ritualized fashion in literature as contrived performing opposites, while revealing at the same time their secret affinity. This, I submit, is the literary, and the point at which Cervantes leaves behind all piety. It is for this reason that I am not interested in the ‘‘philosophy of love’’ in Cervantes, as Parker was in his erudite book, but in love as the shaping force of fiction, of narrative.∏ To

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deduce a ‘‘philosophy’’ from this is to abandon the literary in favor of the discursive in its blandest manifestation. The ‘‘engenderment’’ of Dulcinea, as I try to show in chapter 3 of this book, cannot be reduced to a set of ideas about love and ideals of beauty. Cervantes’ knowledge or acquaintance with legal matters and terminology is so apparent in his works that some have claimed that he had been trained as a lawyer or was in fact a great jurist. In a remarkable monograph, full of insights and useful information, Quintiliano Saldaña stated that Cervantes was ‘‘a prodigious criminalist.’’ More soberly, Rafael Salillas argues that both the picaresque and the works of Cervantes, because of their detailed representation of criminal types, are at the origin of the science of criminology. Rafael Alvarez Vigaray recalls how Cervantes refers to the legal profession in Voyage to Parnassus as that ‘‘grave oficio,’’ and maintains his juridical knowledge can be explained by his ‘‘amateur readings of juridical works.’’ More plausibly, Horacio N. Castro Dassen adduces that many of the legal terms used by Cervantes had slipped into common speech and he had learned others in the painful school of life. Ivo Domínguez, whose study of the presence of the law in Exemplary Stories is smart and measured, also attributes Cervantes’ juridical knowledge to ‘‘the personal experiences with the law, which were the best law professor that he could have had in his entire career.’’π Of course, Cervantes was not a lawyer or a legal scholar. The pervasive presence of the law in his works is due in part, as Castro Dassen says, to the contamination of everyday language by legal jargon because of the litigious climate that the growth of the judicial and penal bureaucracy created. It is also true, as Domínguez maintains, that Cervantes’ many clashes with the authorities must have taught him quite a bit about the new legal system. These bitter experiences include the irregular love life of the women in his family, which led to the birth of illegitimate children, as did his own affairs, which produced a daughter by a mistress who was married to another man. Cervantes’ own marriage was marked by prolonged separations and recriminations by his inlaws for his absences. His father’s life was spent one step ahead of his creditors, who had him incarcerated more than once. In fact, as Canavaggio details, Cervantes’ grandfather and father did time in the same Seville jail where he was interned twice himself. All of these experiences make Cervantes a representative citizen of the new polity. What sets him apart, I believe, was his job as a commissary officer collecting goods, mostly grain, to provision the ‘‘Invincible Armada.’’ Carrying out his rather delicate and contentious duties led to legal entanglements that got him excommunicated and put him in prison. As a commissary he was part of the new patrimonial bureaucracy and its convoluted legal mechanisms

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and record keeping. These were the activities that immersed Cervantes in the law as instituted and practiced in the Spain of his time: hands-on experience with the process by which the new state put the population at the service of its policies. He became intimately familiar with the workings of the judicial and penal bureaucracy in matters concerning inheritance laws as well as the constitution of estates and inheritance laws. Cervantes’ own civil and penal profile is drawn from the so-called documentos cervantinos left from the legal cases in which he was involved. They, and the experience as a commissary officer, left a long and broad trail in his fictions.

❖

❖

❖

I will plunge right into my topic without further theoretical and general prolegomena. I would like for the theory to become apparent in the course of my work with the actual texts. So-called theory has had a withering effect on literature and literary criticism: it makes them both boring. I also find that ‘‘theory’’ is more often than not an effort to make the strange familiar, to domesticate the rare, the new, and the original, which are the essence of literature. In other words, theory is a way of reducing anything and everything to what everybody is talking about at the expense of the specificity and difference inherent in each tradition, author, and text. I believe that teaching involves leading others to the unfamiliar, not making the unfamiliar like everything else they already know. I want to give the reader a Cervantes en su propia salsa, in his own sauce, not one rinsed out by theory or one whose peculiar flavor is smothered by some exotic or trendy seasoning. I will follow a Borgesian plan in the unfolding of the book. No, I am not going to simply reprint the Quijote and claim that it is mine, as Pierre Menard would like to do. I am thinking more about Borges’s ‘‘The Aleph,’’ which is based on a kabbalistic concept of emanation. Nearly everything that follows will flow from this introduction and the first chapter; it will be like an expansion, a commentary, an amplification. This book is like a set of expanding concentric circles, with unavoidable repetitions, some of them due to the pedagogical context in which it was conceived, which also accounts for the presence of information that the specialist may consider common knowledge.

1

The Prisoner of Sex (Quijote, I, 22)

More than chivalry or any other subject, the Quijote is about love.∞ Chivalry falls within the theme of love, not the other way around. Both parts of the novel are like love laboratories, with samples of nearly every kind of relationship conceivable, and specimens of almost every kind of lover. The permutations seem infinite, and the burgeoning accumulation of stories makes the book sometimes seem like a baroque Decameron, held together by Don Quijote’s peculiar madness and bizarre adventures. The gallery of lovers spans the entire spectrum: from damsels in distress to prostitutes, from would-be courtly lovers to seducers and cheats, from women dressed as men to men dressed as women and to a handsome young man dressed as a woman so as to be less attractive to other men. The couples range from Sancho and Teresa, peasants worried about marrying their children, to the duke and duchess, a bored, aristocratic middle-aged pair looking for entertainment. Juan Palomeque and his wife run a busy inn, where travelers can have a meal, a bed, and if the need arises Maritornes’s favors—she the homely resident harlot whom Don Quijote takes for the yearning and beautiful landlord’s daughter in the dark of night. Even the languid, bony Rocinante falls in love, but his advances to some mares are received with kicks and provoke a row in which his masters are again badly pummeled. Love’s adversaries in the Quijote are not giants and wicked knights, but the

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Prisoner of Sex

laws made to channel desire into social life, the laws that transform it into continuity and renewal within an orderly community ruled by the state and its codes, and embodied in the king and his representatives. In narrative fiction and the theater these laws lead young lovers to happy unions after a series of comic adventures, and married couples to tragic results after a series of errors. In Spanish Golden Age literature everything that happens before marriage is the stuff of comedy, and everything that happens after marriage the stuff of tragedy.≤ Don Quijote’s quest is the love of Dulcinea, as the pilgrim’s was that of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Every other goal is subordinated to this. The knight’s love is what moves him and the plot and the overarching story under which the multiple love stories unfold. Of course, Don Quijote is an ageing bachelor and Dulcinea is essentially his invention. Besides, as a lover in the courtly tradition, his desire is not to marry Dulcinea, and it would be unlikely that as an hidalgo he would be willing to marry Aldonza Lorenzo, for whom he seems to have felt a more worldly, if undisclosed, desire. Still, Don Quijote’s ardor is such as to make him into a criminal and fugitive from the law. Why is love so important in the Quijote and why do its effects continually make characters, not just the protagonist, run against or from the law? What is the result of the interplay of desire and interdiction, between love and its legal constraints in Cervantes? There is no dearth of antecedents for this clash of love and the law, of course, going back to the dawn not just of the West but of civilization itself. The conflict between desire and interdiction is enabling to each: love was made for the law and the law to control love. One did not follow the other; they emerge together as a dyad, each depending on the other for its existence. There is, so to speak, no free love. Hence we have the myriad stories, from Genesis on, about lovers’ transgressions. Human time, history, our fallen state, begin with the breach and in the breach, and are fraught with the memory of the infraction: Adam and Eve, Oedipus, all the rambunctious lovers in classical tradition and literature. Denis de Rougement has shown how, in the courtly love tradition to which Don Quijote is heir, love fabricates its own elaborate set of interdictions.≥ Courtly love feeds on those prohibitions and cannot exist without suffering from them. There are harbingers in Boccaccio and Chaucer, but, until we arrive at La Celestina in 1499, the law was an abstract, transcendental, religious, or even aesthetic kind of prohibition in Western literature. It did not take the form of actual laws and ministers of the law out to punish the lovers by sanctions or by marriage. Even in a work of Cervantes’ time (around 1620, just a few years after his death), Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla (translated as The Trickster of Seville), Don Juan’s punishment is eternal damnation (this is the inaugural play of the Don Juan myth). His last words in the

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play, as he is pulled down to hell, are ‘‘¡Que me quemo! ¡Que me abraso!’’ (I am burning! I am being consumed!). In Cervantes, love is checked not by God but by the Holy Brotherhood, not by God’s vicars but by the king’s appointed agents—bailiffs, sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, and the like. The reasons for this change are historical. Cervantes wrote after the consolidation of the first modern European state, which resulted from the Catholic kings’ unification policies, and internal changes that shifted the crown’s mandate from mostly judicial to executive.∂ These policies included the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, and the Holy Brotherhood at the Cortes de Madrigal in 1476, as well as the organization of an increasingly elaborate legal bureaucracy, a process decisively assisted by the development of moveable print. In his authoritative Imperial Spain, J. H. Elliott describes the Holy Brotherhood thus: ‘‘The Hermandad combined in itself the functions of a police force and a judicial tribunal. As a police force, its task was to suppress brigandage and to patrol the roads and countryside.’’∑ The Inquisition and the Holy Brotherhood were institutions whose jurisdiction did not respect regional exemptions and immunities; they could cross boundaries that were often beyond the reach of ordinary courts. The bureaucracy improved and increased record keeping exponentially, which in turn led to the foundation of the great archive at Simancas, the Archivo General del Reino, by Philip II in 1588.∏ It was the first state archive in modern Europe. Efforts to consolidate Spanish law by the Catholic kings and their successors, which harkened back to Alfonso el Sabio’s Siete partidas in the thirteenth century, were only partially successful, in great measure due to the many local privileges ( fueros) enjoyed by the fractious regions of the peninsula. (They may have seen the Partidas as the imposition of Castilian law on them.) But the penal system was strengthened, codified, and expanded, and the state bureaucracy began not only to print old and new laws but also to print and collect myriads of documents involving cases of all sorts.π This process had a decisive impact on literary history. It was from that archive that the picaresque novel emerged, creating a major new literary character and advancing the development of the modern novel and of literary realism in general. Spanish Golden Age literature, particularly the theater or comedia, fed on the conflicts provoked by the intent and reach of the new legislation, which was formulated to rein in the aristocracy and seal an alliance between the crown and the common people. Typically these are cases in which unruly noblemen take advantage of lower-class women, exercising their seigneurial rights, only to find that the laws of the kingdom do not protect them any more and that the peasants can defend themselves. I am thinking of wellknown plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca such

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as Fuenteovejuna, Peribáñez, El burlador de Sevilla, and El alcalde de Zalamea. The new laws, centralization, and printing shifted the relations of power and control; they unsettled traditional ones in which ancient privileges, unspoken and largely unwritten rules and patterns of sexual commerce prevailed in isolated situations. There are stories of this sort in Cervantes’ work, particularly in the Quijote, that we shall see in some detail later. The collision between love and the law is at the core of Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a society undergoing relatively rapid change, the conflicts generated by radical transition, be they economic, political, or social, flare up in or are at least symbolized by the turmoils of love, which are actually or potentially violent and can only be channeled through the law, which transforms erotic license into forced restraint. Through erotic violence or its transformation into the threatened violence of judicial punishment groups are renewed and merge with each other to forge new communities, and eventually a new state. Love’s wars are the fire that keep the melting pot bubbling. In the picaresque love appears only in the engenderment of the protagonist, who will be too young throughout the evolving plot to engage in erotic adventures. As in La Celestina, the pícaro emerges in a promiscuous low-class environment. Lázaro’s mother has a child out of wedlock with a black man, Guzmán’s cannot ascertain which one of her lovers is the father of the protagonist, and Pablos’s is notorious for her lasciviousness. This tawdry world will be represented in the Quijote by the prostitutes at the first inn and by Maritornes in Juan Palomeque’s. This is lawless love, or love by the unwritten rules of the whorehouse and the criminal gang. It is a significant kind of commerce between love and the law in that it seems to be the least restrained, the closest to the more base instincts and desires—the truest, as it were. It is also the kind that was most represented in the law and its establishments: the courts, the prisons, and the archives. A magnificent document from the 1580s, Cristóbal de Chaves’s Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla, provides ample documentation on all this, including the organization of sexual traffic in the jail itself, with its ranks of unsavory pimps, prostitutes, and corrupt officials.∫ This is love under the law yet paradoxically outside of it. It is the penal side of the love-law relationship. The other side is the one that leads to marriage. Prison and the altar are the sites where love is captured in the net of the law. Grisóstomo and Marcela, Dorotea and Fernando, Luscinda and Cardenio are all characters in the Quijote caught in complicated erotic predicaments leading to marriage. The difficulties are in some cases legal and reflect social and economic disparities similar to those found in the theater. Don Quijote’s

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intervention in the imbroglios caused by Fernando, Dorotea, Luscinda, and Cardenio results in a comedy-like finale with multiple marriage vows that restore order. Later in the novel there are other, graver cases involving the captive and Zoraida, and in Part II yet others, such as the one in which Ricote’s daughter is implicated. He is a morisco. In these cases the complications are still legal, but the differences are not just of social and economic class but of race and religion. In all, however, it is the presence of the law that gives a modern hue, a contingent, historical cast to these stories, which will not wind up with multiple murders, ascensions to heaven, or descents to hell. The punishments and rewards are more worldly and always include marriage as the ultimate solution and the provider of orderly closure to the narrative. The conflicts are not provoked by transgressions against morals or religious doctrine but by violations, or potential violations, of the law that need to be resolved in that realm as well as in the erotic. The legalistic tone of the Quijote is set relatively early in Part I, in chapter 22, when the knight and his squire set free twelve galley slaves. The episode also pits love against the law, though this has seldom (if ever) been noticed.

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The chapter of the galley slaves has been the object of much commentary, particularly the figure of Ginés de Pasamonte, that picaresque author within the fiction who reappears in Part II as puppeteer Maese Pedro. (He is by then—literally—a small-scale playwright.) Much has been made too of the disparity between Don Quijote’s sense of justice and that of the representatives of the law who keep the galley slaves. But the episode has a dimension that has gone unexplored and one minor character who has escaped attention, if the pun be allowed. This is the episode in which Don Quijote and Sancho meet the twelve galley slaves being led to the coast by their guards, to be placed in the vessels where they will toil as oarsmen for varying lengths of time. The knight is keenly interested in the reason why these wretches are kept in chains, seeing this as an opportunity to exercise his chivalric duty to take arms against abuses and injustices. Ignoring the advice of the guards, but with their resigned acquiescence, Don Quijote begins to interrogate the prisoners about their individual crimes and punishments. It is like a court scene in which the knight plays the part of the judge, and also like many a theatrical piece that uses the device, including Cervantes’ own interlude El juez de los divorcios (The Divorce Court Judge). The scene is also reminiscent of various episodes in Dante’s Inferno in which the pilgrim asks the condemned about the nature of their sins

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to understand their corresponding penalties. Don Quijote hears about six cases, determines that the men have been unjustly or excessively punished, and forces the guards to set them free with Sancho’s reluctant assistance. Once they are freed, Don Quijote demands that the men make a beeline to El Toboso, where they are to throw themselves at the feet and mercy of his lady love, the fair Dulcinea, to whom they will recount her suitor’s grand deed. The prisoners, not surprisingly, decline, citing various reasons, not the least of which is that as fugitives of justice they must scatter and flee ‘‘single and divided, and each by himself endeavor to abscond within the bowels of the earth, in order to avoid the Holy Brotherhood, which will, doubtless, come out in search of us’’ (p. 161) [solos y divididos, y cada uno por su parte, procurando meterse en las entrañas de la tierra, por no ser hallado de la Santa Hermandad, que sin duda alguna ha de salir en nuestra busca (p. 246)]. Enraged, Don Quijote hurls insults at them and they reply with a hail of stones that leaves the knight, his esquire, and their mounts battered and humiliated. The galley slaves’ ingratitude and Don Quijote’s high sense of forgiveness have been cited, the episode inviting all kinds of commentaries along ethical lines, contrasting divine and worldly justice and Don Quijote’s aristocratic and obsolete conception of justice against the new judicial system that has gradually become the law of the land since the Catholic kings. Richard L. Kagan writes in his Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile: 1500–1700: ‘‘By the time Cervantes wrote about a pathetic knight setting out to preserve justice by means of chivalric valor and courageous derring-do, most of his readers would have equated justice with the world of lawyers, judges, and other ‘men of the law.’ In this legalistic world, the figure of Don Quixote was not so much a joke as an anachronism. He represented a mythical age in which justice was possible without the help of lawyers and a bevy of legal briefs, but there was no room for an aging knight errant in the labyrinth of Castile’s courts.’’Ω The knight’s act of freeing the men, as Sancho rightly observes with alarm, makes them, along with the former prisoners, fugitive outlaws. Theirs is a serious caso de corte, for they have committed a crime against the crown, setting free men condemned by the king’s courts, whose representatives they have fought and injured in the process. The guard explains to Don Quijote that the prisoners are ‘‘gente de su Majestad’’ (p. 236) [slaves belonging to His Majesty (p. 153)]. Don Quijote’s are grave crimes, made worse by the act having been committed in despoblado, or on the open road, far from cities and the control of the law.∞≠ As they go into the Sierra Morena, so that Don Quijote can pine for Dulcinea and do proper penance for her, they are also in flight from the authorities, most specifically the Holy Brotherhood. Don Quijote, a prisoner of love, takes to the hills to make himself worthy of Dulcinea,

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following chivalric models. But Don Quijote, who has freed convicted criminals by violent means, is now himself a common criminal. From now until the end of Part I he will be sought by the authorities who, when they finally capture him, release the sad hidalgo to the priest and barber, aware that, given his mental condition, he would never be convicted. But Don Quijote is, nonetheless, sent home in a cage, a veritable prisoner of love and the law. This is the large story within which the one I would like to analyze falls.

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There is a galley slave who has eluded attention but is to my mind most significant in understanding the intertwined forces of love and the law in the Quijote. I believe that he embodies and in a sense even ‘‘performs’’ (or enacts) and goes beyond the limits of the love-law conflict in the novel, and is an example of Cervantes’ uncanny ability to create complex characters with an astonishing economy of means. The limits are those beyond which it is impossible to think or represent love and the law as forces generating recognizable shapes—the intelligible, the readable, the narratable. He is the inenarrable, the inexpressible, the uncanny—and in fact his is a virtual story of which we barely get a synopsis in the Quijote. It is a story about the story that cannot be told, as it were. This galley slave is a Don Juan type, a serial seducer caught and sentenced, not by divine law like Tirso de Molina’s, but by the laws of the kingdom. He is the only character in the Quijote tried, convicted, and sentenced for a crime of love. This is why I call him the prisoner of sex, but also because (apologies to Norman Mailer) he seems to have been the slave of sexual passion, a compulsive sexual addict; at one point he is carrying on with four women at the same time. Here is the scene: Then Don Quixote addressed himself to the next [galley slave], who answered his question, not with less, but infinitely more vivacity, than that of the former; saying, ‘‘I trudge in this manner, for having jested a little extravagantly with two of my female cousins; and with two more, who, tho’ not related to me, were in the same degree of blood to each other: in short, I jested with them so long, that in the end, there was such an intricate increase of kindred as no casuist could unravel. Every thing was proved against me, I had neither interest nor money, and ran some risk of having my windpipe stopped; but they only condemned me for six years to the galleys; I submitted to the sentence, as the punishment of my crime: youth is on my side, life may be long, and time brings every thing to bear: if your worship, Sir knight, will part with any small matter for the comfort of these poor wretches, God will requite you in heaven, and we upon earth, will take care to petition Him for long life and health to your worship, that you may be as happy, as by your goodly appearance, you

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Prisoner of Sex deserve to be.’’ The person who spoke in this manner, appeared in the dress of a student, and one of the guards said he was a great orator and excellent Latin scholar. (pp. 156–57) [Pasó adelante don Quijote y preguntó a otro su delito, el cual respondió con no menos, sino con mucha más gallardía que el pasado: —Yo voy aquí porque me burlé demasiadamente con dos primas hermanas mías y con otras dos hermanas que no lo eran mías; finalmente, tanto me burlé con todas, que resultó de la burla crecer la parentela tan intricadamente, que no hay diablo que la declare. Probóseme todo, faltó favor, no tuve dineros, víame a pique de perder los tragaderos, sentenciáronme a galeras por seis años, consentí: castigo es de mi culpa; mozo soy: dure la vida, que con ella todo se alcanza. Si vuestra merced, señor caballero, lleva alguna cosa con que socorrer a estos pobretes, Dios se lo pagará en el cielo y nosotros tendremos en la tierra cuidado de rogar a Dios en nuestras oraciones por la vida y salud de vuestra merced, que sea tan larga y tan buena como su presencia merece. Este iba en hábito de estudiante, y dijo una de las guardas que era muy grande hablador y muy gentil latino. (pp. 240–41)]

The prisoner’s allusion to the corruption of the system, from which he was unable to profit, shows how local custom (bribes, influence peddling) is being superseded by a system of centralized judicial practice. But this is not the only detail in which Cervantes reflects Spanish penal practice in the period. In fact, Cervantes’ scene follows closely developments in Spanish penal law in the second half of the sixteenth century. Philip II, first in 1552 in the name of his father, and then in 1566 in his own right as king, commuted the physical punishment for thievery from flogging to a term in the galleys. The change was not due to an increase in such crimes but to the need to provide galley slaves to the navy on the eve of the 1588 Invincible Armada adventure. As Francisco Tomás y Valiente writes in his comprehensive El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, ‘‘Since there was a need for arms to pull the oars, all these poor men, all this riffraff . . . were considered fodder for the galleys . . . with no more requirement than to have committed some theft and be older than twenty, or, beginning in 1566, seventeen.’’∞∞ Sentencing a criminal to the galleys also removed him from regional jurisdictions and made him subject to the crown, another measure in the direction of unification and centralization. Physical punishment for crimes other than theft, such as rape and incest, as in the case of our prisoner, could also mean a term of four and later six years as a galley slave instead of flogging or hanging. The nobility was exempt from physical punishment (called corporis afflictiva), which was by nature public, in order not to further tarnish their reputation.∞≤ So our prisoner is a commoner, older

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than seventeen, who has saved his neck because the general need for oarsmen has led to the commutation of his sentence to a six-year term as a galley slave. There are four words in this passage that merit commentary: burlar, declarar, parentela, and estudiante. (to fool around, declare, relatives, and student). All four suggest to me that this galley slave is not just a student but more specifically a law student. Notice that he is the one who makes a plea on behalf of his companions and that he states that his punishment fits the crime, as if he were knowledgeable in the law. (He distances himself from his mates by referring to them as ‘‘estos pobretes’’—these poor wretches.) I take declarar to be a legal term meaning to give a deposition. The Diccionario de autoridades states: ‘‘declarar. Vale también en lo forense deponer, testificar, decir debaxo de juramento el reo, testigo u perito en causa criminal o pleito civil’’ (In the forensic realm to depose, testify, to speak under oath a defendant, witness or expert in a criminal or civil case).∞≥ In Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), we discover that in the seventeenth century it also meant ‘‘to clarify’’ as well, which is the general meaning of the word here: ‘‘declarar. Manifestar lo que de suyo estaba oculto, obscuro y no entendido’’ (To make manifest what was hidden, obscure and not understood).∞∂ The word retains both meanings today, but it favors the legal. In the first edition of the Quijote there is no ‘‘devil’’ who can figure out the genealogy, but in later ones it was changed to ‘‘sumista,’’ an accountant—Smollett’s ‘‘casuist’’ is good enough. This tilts the prisoner’s case in the direction of a potential dispute about inheritance rights covered, of course, by testamentary laws. ‘‘Parentela,’’ even today meaning one’s extended family, is defined precisely by Covarrubias as ‘‘los parientes de un linaje’’ (relatives belonging to a lineage or genealogy), which also has a legalistic ring.∞∑ This genealogy is so entangled that no one could unravel it—brothers who are each other’s cousins, nephews who are also sons, and nieces who are also daughters. What the prisoner suggests is that no one, not even himself with his superior language and legal skills, could draw up the required document establishing legitimacy and setting out a legacy, an estate: who would inherit what from whom in a legally binding and clear fashion. (He has said that he has no money, so the whole thing is a sham, of course.) The genealogical confusion would be the prisoner’s worst crime, which he expresses with a legal term, as the inability to properly ‘‘declarar,’’ to depose, to translate into legal discourse his actions and their consequences. (At another, more literary, level, what he means is that his case is unrepresentable, which is certainly true.) But allusion to the entangled progeny may also be a subtle form of defense, for on the grounds of inheritance and

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estates, his misdeeds would constitute a civil, not a criminal, case. The distinction was not explicit in Spanish law at the time, but it was implicit and effective. We can detect in the text and subtext of his speech hints of the prisoner’s legal training. There is also historical evidence that suggests that ‘‘estudiante’’ means here law student. This young man was a good Latinist and a good rhetorician—a good talker, which inclines him to the law. But also the majority of students at the time studied law, whatever else they wound up doing later.∞∏ Law students were known for their raucousness individually and in groups.∞π Some appear in Cervantes’ other works. So I am further inclined to believe that the prisoner is a law student because of his rakish behavior. Notice his insolence and the levity with which he refers to his actions, and mostly that he is the one who attacks Don Quijote when the knight is felled by the stones his mates are throwing at him: ‘‘and no sooner had he fallen, than the student set upon him, and snatching the basin from his head, made a most furious application of it to the knight’s back, and then dashed it upon the ground with such force, that it went into a thousand pieces’’ (p. 161) [y apenas hubo caído [Don Quijote], cuando fue sobre él el estudiante y le quitó la bacía de la cabeza, y diole con ella tres o cuatro golpes en las espaldas y otros tantos en la tierra, con que la hizo pedazos (p. 247)]. This is the last appearance of the lascivious lawyer-tobe in the Quijote, as he loses himself in the wilderness, or the bowels of the earth, fleeing from the Holy Brotherhood. Part of my evidence about the student would have to also come from the next word I want to discuss, ‘‘burlar,’’ for law students were given to ‘‘burlas,’’ or pranks, as already seen. They were notorious pranksters. But because of Tirso de Molina’s play, ‘‘burlar’’ is the most significant word of the four I am discussing. Burlar can only bring to mind El burlador de Sevilla, or The ‘‘Trickster of Seville. Our prisoner of sex is certainly a burlador. To ‘‘fool around’’ is a good translation into contemporary English of what the prisoner says and particularly the tone of what he says, which I have already shown is a form of defense—Smollett’s ‘‘to jest’’ is dated. In the recent Instituto Cervantes edition of the Quijote that I am using here, coordinated by Francisco Rico, a note on page 241 explains that in the slang of thugs, called germanía, the verb burlar meant to have sexual commerce with someone. This may very well be, but the word, even in that specialized context, must have retained some of its ordinary meaning (to trick), otherwise I doubt that Tirso would have used it in his title. (Can you imagine Friar Tirso calling his play The F—— of Seville?) Burlar a álguien means to fool or deceive somebody, which is the way the word is used in Tirso de Molina, where it means to seduce someone by using trickery, which is what Don Juan does—passing himself off for other men, falsely

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promising matrimony, and so on. It is a form of estupro, or rape, and was condemned by Spanish law with varying degrees of severity. But notice that the prisoner has avoided the transitive form of the verb; he has not burlar a, tricked someone, but burlar con, fooled around with someone. He has turned his actions into consensual sex with two sisters who were first cousins of his, and two others who were not, implying their complicity in the ménage à trois, or in this case ménage à cinq. If we subject the fiction to common sense and experience, we will conclude that it would have been difficult to keep the affairs secret from the various women—if they objected to sharing him, of course. The prisoner seems to be saying that they were enjoying a couple of happy triangles until the children’s intricate lineage got in the way. (This sets him apart from Don Juan, who favored the one-night stand and did not father any children.) But, again, one should not miss the subtlety of this lawyer-to-be in characterizing his crime. It is not that he fooled around with first cousins of his, but that he did so ‘‘extravagantly.’’ Notice the adverb he uses to qualify his actions: ‘‘demasiadamente,’’ from the Latin de magis, ‘‘de más,’’ ‘‘too much,’’ ‘‘in excess.’’ Except that the normal form then and now in Spanish is ‘‘demasiado,’’ though the Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua does carry an entry for ‘‘demasiadamente,’’ an unusual way of adding emphasis to the adverb. It is the equivalent of saying ‘‘onliest’’ in English. So it is not the misdeed in itself but its reckless, prolonged, and excessive repetition that created the trouble for the prisoner. Had he fooled around less, or a little more discreetly with his cousins and the other girls, he would have found no trouble, he insinuates. There is no mention, of course, of incest, because as a simple case of fornication the law was in the prisoner’s favor. Having sex with these four women was not a grave offense at the time, supposing as we are allowed that they were single, as was the prisoner, and willing. This is what was called in the legal terminology of the period (here developed by the Inquisition, and one can hear its Scholastic ring), ‘‘simple fornication,’’ or ‘‘fornicatio simplex,’’ in contrast to ‘‘fornicación calificada.’’∞∫ Simple fornication meant sex between two unmarried people of opposite sexes; the gravity of fornicación calificada increased if one or both partners were married, minors, or both of the same sex. So the prisoner claims to have engaged in consensual simple fornication with four women, from which there issued offspring whose family ties were difficult to establish legally. The only intimation that incest could be an aggravating factor is implied by the children’s consanguinity, but like everything else he deals with it dismissively. So we have a law student who has impregnated two first-cousins of his as well as two other sisters and has produced a complicated progeny. He accepts

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his punishment as fitting his crime, and declares that he is young (mozo soy) and will have a life after the galleys, in a statement that recalls Don Juan’s refrain, whenever he is warned about the consequences of his actions: ‘‘Cuán largo me lo fiáis’’ (That’s very long-term credit you are giving me).∞Ω But while Don Juan is referring to death and eternal damnation, the prisoner is talking about life on earth and punishment by penal institutions. He is optimistic about the future, or at least boasts of fearlessness, a common trait among imprisoned criminals then (and perhaps today). There is a levity to his tone, an unconcerned posturing, that, again, may be part of a defense or a way of deflecting attention from the more serious aspect of his crime, which would, of course, be incest. Behind the veil of laughter and merriment, as is his wont, Cervantes has slipped in the more serious and damning trait of the character and his actions. The reader should not be fooled, along with Don Quijote, by this eloquent and charming con man: the prisoner has been found guilty and convicted of estupro, or rape, and incest, even if we believe his story about consensual sex.≤≠ The seduction of women by force or more subtle means, particularly virgins, widows, and nuns, had been severely punished by Spanish law since the thirteenth-century Siete partidas. The same body of law (still current in the sixteenth century as a supplemental source of authority) defines incest thus: ‘‘It is the sin that in Latin is called incestus, which means a sin a man commits by lying knowingly with his relative, or with his wife’s relative, or the relative of another woman with whom he has lain, or lying with a relative four times removed; or someone who lies with his stepmother, or his mother or daughter, or with his sister-in-law or daughter-in-law; or someone who lies with a woman belonging to a religious order, or with his goddaughter or her mother.’’≤∞ I think that the law is clear, particularly taking into account that cuarto grado, or four times removed, is established as part of the consanguinity punishable as incest. Technically, incest meant having sex with a relative with whom it would be illegal to marry, which extended to cousins, though dispensations could be obtained from the church—both prohibitions and exceptions were laid out in canon law. In spite of his fancy rhetorical flourishes, there is no question that (as he admits) the prisoner is guilty and his punishment fits the crime. And his most serious crime is incest, not just fathering a confusing endogamous clan—though that is, to be sure, what the prohibition seeks to avoid. Incest is among the crimes that were still also considered sins in the Spanish penal codes then, in spite of their gradual separation from theology—it is called a sin in the text from the Siete partidas just quoted. Cervantes, as usual, does not dwell on this theological aspect, but the sugges-

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tion is clear. Besides, if we continue to extrapolate and ponder the fate of the prisoner’s children and their mothers, we can see the gravity of his crimes. The prisoner, we have been able to observe, lives up to the guard’s description; he performs with gallardía, with brio, and proves to be a great hablador, or orator. He is self-assured, addressing Don Quijote with impudence, though their class differences are clear to him (he calls the knight ‘‘Señor caballero,’’ Sir knight). Given his record as a seducer of many women he must also be handsome and attractive. He is unrepentant, light-hearted, and has confidence in his future. There is something of the narcissist in him, to judge by his behavior—he is wearing his student gown to flaunt his superiority over his mates and even the guards. He is a braggart. I think that his narcissism is a clue to the darker side of the prisoner and what he means in the economy of love and the law in the novel. It is here that incest reveals unforeseen dimensions. There is in incest a narcissist element in that it involves desire for another who is part of oneself; the desiring I seeks to perpetuate itself with a minimum of difference. The other narcissistic element is the desire to create images of oneself, as would be the results of incestuous love, the children. There is also in incest a hint of perverse self-knowledge, if we mean knowledge in a broad biblical sense. It is a going back up the family tree to find and merge with one’s origins—sort of like making love to oneself. There are truly twisted elements to the prisoner’s aberrations; in his cousins he may have seen images of his own mother and desired them, if we continue to speculate. Taken to its ultimate consequences there is no extended story here because narcissism is a collapse of the self onto itself, which is what the classical myth suggests by having Narcissus drown in his own image. It is a narrative circumvolution that leads to silence, to self-cancellation, a form of representation that winds up as an impossibility. The prisoner takes to the extreme the relationship between love and the law by violating the fundamental taboo at the foundation of social life, the incest prohibition, which leads to the exchange of sexual partners and to the mixing of people from different clans or groups. Without it, reproduction within a social order would disintegrate, and the human would regress into the chaos of nature. Civilization would cease to be without that initial No, that first law. This is Oedipus’s tragedy. In the passage that I have been analyzing chaos is represented by that tangled genealogy beyond the control of the law that cannot be reduced to legal writing to enter into the social and political economy of the state. Having been trained to make the law intelligible, readable, the prisoner has made a mockery of it by acting in a way that resists writing and reading. That he is shackled when we first meet him shows that society’s

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guardians are aware of the dangers he poses. They carry with them the documents in which the prisoner’s story has been recorded, where he has been enmeshed in the net of legal writing: the sentence where his crime and punishment are laid out. Says the guard: ‘‘Though we have got along with us, the register and certificate of the sentence of each of those malefactors, we have no time at present to take it out and give you the reading of it’’ (pp. 153–54) [—Aunque llevamos aquí el registro y la fe de las sentencias de cada uno destos malaventurados, no es tiempo éste de detenerles a sacarlas ni a leellas (pp. 236–37)]. This is a story we never get to read but to which the prisoner has given his seal of approval, to then proceed to give his own version, his own reading. It is, in fact, an unreadable story because in its horror it exceeds the limits of the representable, and like narcissism, it is a narrative that folds onto itself, so it remains tucked in the guard’s bag and what we get is the prisoner’s self-serving account of it. The transition from stark legal document to literary text is represented by the process taking place in the spatial and temporal gap of rewriting by which the original is recast and left behind in the archive—in this miniaturized version the distance between the guard’s bag and the prisoner’s speech. But for all his braggadocio the prisoner is unable to understand the profound appropriateness of his punishment, which is meted out in a realm that transcends the law itself as written and practiced. He is sent out to sea, away from all women, to a world of men. An outcast from heterosexual society, the prisoner will be unable to engender any more images of himself. In order to vent his desires, he would have to take the next step in his own narcissistic fantasies and give in to homosexuality, another ‘‘fornicación calificada’’ that was the most severely punished by Spanish law. This is the harshest aspect of his punishment, the one with the deepest correlation to his crime: to be exiled to a male world, without sexual variety. This is, again, the unrepresentable, the unreadable story that remains hidden not just in the guard’s bag but even in the very text of the prisoner’s sentence. It is an ominous future, a possible ending to his story that looms before him as the most perverted kind of transformation. But he is freed by Don Quijote, for whom love could never be bound by the laws of the state, and he escapes we know not where. He escapes from the book, too, for unlike other characters like Andrés and Ginés, he never reappears. His disappearance is also significant. In the prisoner of sex Cervantes has anticipated a figure that would not emerge fully mature until a century later: the libertine. He is totally amoral, bent on satisfying his desires and contemptuous of law or custom. His nonchalant demeanor shows he is unconcerned with the consequences of his actions: he practices a freedom unrestrained. Even when convicted and punished

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he approves of his fate and even pretends to turn it into something compliant with his own wishes—he is willing to serve a sentence that he decrees is commensurate with his crime. What is most significant here is that he admits no constraints, not even of time; he boasts that he will have plenty of time to enjoy his life after the galleys. Because he does not fear time, the prisoner is not bound by the rules of succession or the teleology of finality. His life and desires, which are one, have no term—they will proliferate limitlessly like his progeny. This is the reason we never hear from him again. In the wilderness he will be lost in the shapelessness, the unreadability of his libertinism, of his unrestricted freedom—subject to no code. There can be no recurrence because there can be no sense to the ending of his story. Just as there is no free love, lawlessness cannot be envisioned, cast into language. With few exceptions, love stories in the Quijote have closure. After twists and turns the peripeteia, the adventures, lead to some sort of finale. In the intertwined stories of Part I, the conclusion is the traditional comic one in which the characters exchange marriage vows. In the ‘‘Curioso impertinente’’ (‘‘The Novel of Impertinent Curiosity’’) the story has a tragic ending. Love and the law provide a cycle, a pattern, a shape. Not so in the case of the prisoner, whose story, being one of absolute lack of restraint, can have no closure, no ending. His story melts down into formlessness because in it no law is recognized, much less obeyed. The prescribed ending provided by the sentence, the six-year term in the galleys to which he says he was condemned, has been abolished by Don Quijote’s actions. The prisoner is not going to the galleys, from which he may or may not return alive, but his fate would in either case be recorded, made a part of the archive. Instead he just flees and fades, leaving the reader with the memory of his sarcasm, his boastful unconcern, his mockery of the law. The most important love story without closure in the novel is Don Quijote’s. The knight is no libertine (in fact, there is no evidence that he ever had sexual relations, but none to categorically deny it either), but his pursuit of the ideal lady can have no satisfactory ending because it takes place in his imagination. Dulcinea multiplies—Aldonza Lorenzo, the peasant girl enchanted by Sancho, the page dressed as her in the Pageant in the Forest—yet remains the same. This is not unlike the prisoner’s proliferating women, anonymous in their own serial generality. Dulcinea, like them, is Woman, all women, the object of a diffuse desire beyond the physical, hence beyond the law. Don Quijote’s love, like the prisoner’s, has no temporal limit, except for that of his madness and his death. This is, I believe, the deep reason why Don Quijote releases the prisoner. He has found a kindred spirit. Like him he is a slave of desire. The prisoner is his correlative other, his inverted image. Perhaps this is

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why the prisoner beats up the knight, reverting to a primal violence against his kin not unlike the one he perpetrated against his girl cousins. Don Quijote envisions, like Cervantes, a world of freedom, but unlike his creator, he is not aware of its dangers, and he does not have to write a story that an idle or busy reader (like me) could understand. The criminalization of love’s transactions provided Cervantes with new inflections to old stories—and even some new stories. Hoarding, authoritarian, all-encompassing, the archive became an alternative, competing compendium of narratives, a canon enmeshed by writing within the new body politic. Some of the new stories manage to even escape the archive to form a constellation of impossible tales that Cervantes could not yet tell. They are also exemplary stories, but because of their virtual, liminal nature, they pointed to a literature that was yet to come.

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Spanish Law and the Origins of the Novel

A measure of the uniqueness of Spanish law, of its kinship to literature, and eventually its role in the emergence of the novel, is how the epic hero, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, ‘‘El Cid Campeador,’’ reacts to an outrage perpetrated against his daughters, Doña Elvira and Doña Sol. This is the episode known as ‘‘The Affront at Corpes’’ in the twelfth-century Poema de mío Cid, considered in conventional literary history as the Spanish national epic. In the Corpes oak grove, the Cid’s daughters are flogged and stomped upon by their husbands (wearing boots with spurs), the infamous infantes de Carrión, Don Diego and Don Fernando. Instead of swiftly and harshly punishing the offenders, the Cid appeals to King Alfonso VI, who has them brought to court at Toledo. Don Diego and Don Fernando are tried and sentenced to do battle against the Cid’s lieutenants, who dutifully dispose of them. Doña Elvira and Doña Sol are remarried, to the infantes of Navarra and Aragon respectively, a form of restitution to their father for his injured honor. It is remarkable that the victor of so many battles against Moors and Christians, wielding his feared sword Tizona, did not simply behead the cowardly infantes. It may be argued that with his restraint the Cid was demonstrating the depth of his loyalty to the king by abiding by his laws, even after being the victim of such an extreme offence. His relationship to Alfonso VI, who had sent him into exile, is central to the plot of the Poema. But the whole episode

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also reveals to what extent Castilian, and peninsular law in general, was pervasive, fragmented, and also at the very core of the incipient literary tradition. Castilians, as Ramón Menéndez Pidal argued in his elegant La epopeya castellana a través de la literatura española, were, of all the Germanic peoples in the peninsula, the only ones who inherited the Visigoths’ heroic poetry. But at the same time, and in apparent contradiction, Castilians were at odds with the Visigothic codes, which, because they were thoroughly influenced by Roman law, forbade ingrained Germanic customs, such as the right to private revenge, which was precisely at the foundation of their epic poetry.∞ Castilians retained both poetry and customs, and their incompatibility with the law accounts for the Cid’s astonishing behavior. King Alfonso VI was originally the ruler of León (he was now also of Castile), a region where legislation was profoundly Romanized and less likely to allow for the personal settling of scores—the riepto, or challenge to a duel to settle a dispute. (Riepto actually meant to recount the offense, which was done publicly in court, followed by the challenge.)≤ The Cid, therefore, made a grand gesture by not taking the law into his own hands, as everyone would have assumed he would, including probably the listeners or readers of the Poema de mío Cid. The issue, at bottom, is how both the hero and the poem respond to the law—what the outcome of the conflict will be. In both cases it is contrary to expectations. The poem’s overall plot concerning the Cid’s exile (a particularly Roman punishment), penance, and return to the good graces of the king, pivots on a judicial contest, within which the episode just recounted falls. The ‘‘Affront at Corpes’’ is the only incident in the Poema with an erotic tinge, for Rodrigo is the faithful husband of Jimena, herself a bastion of wifely virtues. The dastardly infantes’s spousal abuse is obviously driven by a psychosexual perversion stemming from their own deficiencies and resentment against their fatherin-law. The beating also followed the consummation of their marriages in their tents at the oak grove, a suggestive coincidence clearly linking love to violence and crime. Be that as it may, the resolution of the Poema’s plot is brought about by a juridical context, a discord between legal codes from different regions and between a vassal’s rights and the laws of the kingdom. The poem’s climax is a trial scene such as those that will continue to appear in Western literature until the present and such as that Cervantes will use in his theater and in Part II of the Quijote when Sancho is ruler and judge in the Insula Barataria. The infantes’s sexual crime was committed in despoblado, the wilderness, a site—as already seen—singled out by Spanish law as an aggravating circumstance because it is outside the reach of the law and of potential help. Love and the law intermingle in this, the kernel of Spanish narrative, which will develop through the Libro de buen amor, La Celestina, and the picaresque

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to Cervantes. The relation of the individual to the state through its written laws is central in that development, which produces the modern novel. But the association of law and literature has a longer history.

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In what John A. Alford and Dennis P. Seniff have called ‘‘the seminal study of the relationship between literature and law,’’ Jacob Grimm, the German romantic, argues for the common origin of both, citing linguistic evidence as proof.≥ He mentions many examples to underscore the poetic character of primitive legislation: its use of tropes, rhyme, and alliteration, for instance. As in the Poema de mío Cid, law and poetry commingle. In fact, at the time of the Poema’s writing, Colin Smith avers, ‘‘Lawyers wrote, by habit, a special formulaic language in documents of every kind, in Latin which was often rhythmical, alliterative, and rich in binary and balanced phrases.’’∂ The order law seeks to implement is akin to that of the literary text, which is its representation in language, Grimm maintains. In many societies law, religion, and poetry are one in their founding texts, which often wind up as their holy books. This bond appears inevitable because the law is the most basic system regulating human transactions, the code that founds the social. Hence it could be taken as the origin of all social codes, including or even beginning with the linguistic, and reaching all the way up to the religious and the aesthetic, as Grimm argued and I am willing to believe. Is there, in the pith of human thought, a grammar of both language and the law, a law of language, as it were, that regulates all others? It is a daunting proposition that has found many adherents. There is no question that grammar is at the foundation of the law and grammar constitutes the first tool to interpret the law. But being a romantic like Grimm, I favor more the poetic than the grammatical spark at the origin. Mere grammar cannot antecede or contain the creative will. In the Judeo-Christian West, perhaps everywhere, the law emerges with God’s ‘‘no,’’ His injunction in Genesis not to eat from the tree of knowledge. In the Greek world (that other origin) the founding prohibition seems to be that of incest—Oedipus. This is not clearly the case in the Garden, for Adam and Eve were kin in the most material sense possible. In any case, the law originates in a prohibition and a need for order: something that stops the flux, the chaos, the meaningless noise of untrammeled desire. The founding ‘‘no’’ is coeval in its emergence with desire, with love, with the ‘‘yes’’ that it opposes— Molly’s ‘‘yes’’ at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Desire is movement to which the law gives direction and form. This is why love stories are fraught with potential or actual violence, as in the ‘‘Affront at Corpes.’’ Poetic language is lodged in that dyad of the yes and the no, of desire and the law; rhyme, alliteration,

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tropes are the incantatory expression of this dance of contraries, based as they are also on rules that constitute them, and with them allow for meaning. Guilt and a yearning for exculpation are deeply embedded elements of this original drama, expressed in the doctrine of original sin—there can be no desire without prohibition and therefore no action without transgression. All other violations are repetitions of this original one, ritualized in religion and literature. Psychoanalysis, of course, is the modern, fallen version of all this because it has left behind the poetry at its source. The recurrent convergence of law and literature through history results from these shared origins—or, better, from this original oneness. Could a nostalgia for that unity motivate such convergences? It is a oneness in difference, or a difference that makes oneness. This is so because the pair must not be seen as a binary opposition equating the law with the rational and love with the irrational. The source of the law, of the no—fear, the will to power, hostility, guilt—may be as irrational as love itself. To that ‘‘no’’ one can always answer ‘‘why not?’’ which is what literature often dares to ask, as with the prisoner of sex. The idea that the law emanates from God covers with a veil of goodness and sense the irrational drive behind interdiction. I am interested here in the recurrence of this dialectic that takes place in Spain during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in developments leading up to it. The formal history of the law and literature association that culminates in Cervantes and whose beginning I have just sketched in the Poema de mío Cid, really begins in Bologna, with the birth of modern legal study and a revival of the Roman law tradition. The renewal in Bologna, which culminates a process begun in Pavia, according to Radding, occurs in the thirteenth century when the work of Aristotle is being rediscovered and the first universities founded.∑ In Bologna, as in Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca, the study of law was part of a broad humanistic curriculum within which literary texts and the teaching of what we consider today independent literary practices was common. This humanistic bent in the study of law continued until the present in Europe, including Spain and its overseas possessions that became Latin America. These are the areas where Roman law is the foundation of the judicial system. In England (and consequently in the United States) a rift between law and literature occurred in the sixteenth century and continues today.∏ But everywhere the affinity between the study of law and literature is based on the need to use words in strict, precise, and self-conscious fashion, and in the common medium of expression: language ruled by grammar and rhetoric. It has to do also with the careful reading of texts for meaning, coherence of argument, and ultimately the conveyance of the truth in a persuasive and even beautiful fashion. As John A. Alford writes, in an infor-

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mative essay on ‘‘Literature and Law in Medieval England’’: ‘‘In earlier times a legal education was less technical, more humanistic, as much a preparation for the world of practical affairs as for the bar itself—in sum, as compatible with a literary avocation as any other training might have been. For most of its early history, of course, the study of law was closely connected with that of rhetoric. Writers and lawyers both live by words, and pleading a case or drafting a judicial decision requires no less art than writing a narrative poem. Stendhal once remarked that the only perfect example of prose known to him was the Code Napoléon.’’π (Stendhal also said that he read the code every night to sharpen his prose). Alford goes on to mention numerous English writers from the medieval period and beyond who were trained in the law and to show how legal terms and court scenes appear in major works such as The Owl and the Nightingale, Château d’Amour, and Piers Plowman. The relevance of the law in Shakespeare is well known, and legal matters occupy prominent roles in such plays as The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. The same can be said for Spanish literature, particularly the Poema de mío Cid, the Libro de buen amor, and La Celestina, which closes the medieval period in 1499. Colin Smith has forcefully argued that Per Abat, author of the best-known version of the Poema de mío Cid, was trained in the law, and it is known that Fernando de Rojas, the likely author of La Celestina, was a lawyer.∫ It is not just because of merely linguistic and poetic affinities that law and literature shared the humanistic curriculum of medieval universities. Both, after all, are deeply concerned with justice, under whose aegis fall the major issues of human life, such as fate and freedom, good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and below these more mundane matters like restitution, revenge, forgiveness, birth rights, marriage, innocence and guilt, legitimacy and legacies, public and private debts, loyalty and treason. In both law and literature all of these questions emerge initially as stories cast in figurative language, whose coherence has to be restored and gauged to evaluate their truthfulness: who did what to whom, where, when, under what circumstances, and deserving what punishment or reward. Beginning with Bologna the stories had to be written up following the rules of the notarial arts then developed—the art of crafting legal documents.Ω The vehicles of these stories can be confessions, depositions or briefs, but also narrative poems, dialogues, plays, and later novels of varying lengths. Their trappings may vary but the core of the stories does not change from law to literature and vice versa. Their rhetoric and tropes are often quite similar. This is the reason Grimm reaches back to linguistic commonalities to plead for the original oneness of law and literature, more specifically of law and poetry. But the prose stories as such have

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common plots that are, if not independent of language, a kind of narrative grammar in its own right, with sequences involving crime and punishment, climaxes and resolutions in court-like scenes, and with characters of various types—perpetrators and victims, judges and advocates, policemen and executioners. The law captures in its nets the most interesting of characters because they deviate from it: scoundrels are more appealing than law-abiding citizens, as we know. They are compelling to literature for the same reason. Only the picaresque, which emerges in the sixteenth century, because of its relation to the law, is as capacious as the law itself to incorporate these figures and the ambiance of delinquency in which they live.∞≠

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For my purposes, the relevant history of Spanish law begins at the time of the Poema de mío Cid, which is roughly the same as that of the monumental Siete partidas, drafted by Alfonso X of Castile, known as ‘‘the Wise,’’ around the middle of the thirteenth century. (El Cid died in 1099 and the Poema as we have it is from around 1140; the Siete partidas were drawn up from 1256 to 1276.) The beginning of this history can be traced back to the significant fact that the Visigoths, who occupied Spain after the breakup of the Roman Empire, were the most Romanized among the Germanic peoples who swept over Europe. One of the consequences of this, as Angel del Río proposed in his beautiful and still valuable Historia de la literatura española, was the preservation in Spain of one of the greatest creations of Roman culture: its laws. Del Río writes: ‘‘The Lex romana visigothorum, whose influence extends eventually to the Fuero juzgo, is the most important compilation of Roman law in the West after the empire’s fall, leaving out Byzantium.’’∞∞ (By Byzantium he means, of course, Justinian and his code.) The Fuero juzgo was the most widely influential set of laws among the various regions into which the Visigoths settled and formed independent kingdoms. Fuero juzgo is the name usually given to the Visigoths’ Liber iudiciorum, thus called because some of its redactions, named Lex visigothorum vulgata, were given the title Forum judicum, from which Fuero juzgo. But only the Romance versions—Castilian, Galician, Leonese—should properly be called Fuero juzgo. The word ‘‘fuero’’ derives from the Latin ‘‘forum,’’ marketplace or place where justice is administered. But in Castile, the word ‘‘foro,’’ derived from ‘‘forum’’ and meaning the same thing, soon turned to ‘‘fuero’’ following normal evolutionary patterns from Latin to Castilian, and came to mean, from the ninth and tenth centuries on, ‘‘right,’’ ‘‘freedom from,’’ ‘‘exemption,’’ or ‘‘immunity,’’ as applied to the particular laws of a region, town, or village. Colin Smith felicitously translates ‘‘fuero’’ as ‘‘local charters.’’∞≤A feature of those kingdoms, as

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seen in my brief discussion about the Poema de mío Cid, was precisely their independence and fractiousness, a feature that was exacerbated by the Arab invasion of 711, which pushed them back to the northern areas of the Peninsula. The following eight centuries of warfare and coexistence, of reconquista and convivencia, did nothing if not help to solidify the autonomy of some of those kingdoms (a drive that survives today) and their clinging to their own version of Romanized Visigothic law. Each region, each village almost, cherished its fueros, refusing to recognize centralized rule. This is the tension reflected in the struggle between the Cid and the king. The clash between centralized and local authority, which already existed in Roman law, remains a constant in the history of Spanish jurisprudence and is at the center of the story I am sketching. It is conspicuous in the episode of the galley slaves. Each of those codes, in spite of their differences, was derived from Roman law and was anchored in the overarching doctrine of natural law. This was the theory that there were immutable laws that were derived from the reason with which God endowed humans and that were embodied in the person of the king. These laws were indisputable principles, understandable to all, and against which there was no recourse. Anything that went against them was by definition unlawful.∞≥ Natural law was the foundation of the Siete partidas and all subsequent Spanish legislation. The Siete partidas, by the way, were more like a legal encyclopedia than an actual code, and were used mainly as a supplement to existing laws, endowed with a traditional philosophical or doctrinal authority until the eighteenth century. However, their imposition as ruling general law was resisted by the kingdoms brandishing their fueros. The Siete partidas is a treasure trove of information about medieval Spain, and a great literary work in its own right, as its supple, archaic Spanish names the real in all its minute manifestations. The Siete partidas is the first instance of and monument to the emergence of a literary vernacular reflecting and expressing a current reality, as opposed to the epic, which dealt with a heroic past in verse and in an elevated style. In this sense the Siete partidas’s conjunction of the law and the representation of life in a vernacular language is a significant antecedent of the novel. The influence and very existence of the Siete partidas point out the significant association of the law with writing and the production of books containing legislation. If the common origin of law and poetic language is irretrievably lost in the mysteries of orality, there is no question about the alliance of literacy, and later printing, with the law. Rules beget or are begotten in writing—writing is the handmaiden or warden of order and control. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the Libro de buen amor, written less than a hundred years after the Siete partidas by the ribald Archpriest of Hita, ever

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aware of the consequences of transgression and its delights. (The book was composed between 1330 and 1347.) The Archpriest writes: In his kingdom, the king has the power, it’s a certainty, To grant exemptions, make laws and give rights: He has books and primers drawn up with all this, So that he who commits the crime knows his penalty. [Cyerto es que el rrey en su regno há poder De dar fueros é leyes é derechos fazer: Desto manda fazer libros, quadernos componer, Para quien faze el yerro qué pena deve aver.]∞∂

Books, primers, written laws proliferate in the various kingdoms as the reconquest advances and the yearning for the unification of the Peninsula under Christian rule intensified in some quarters. This, as we all know, will be accomplished by the consolidation of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon brought about by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469. Our story proper really begins with that communion of love and the law in the Catholic kings’ matrimonial chamber. (‘‘Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando,’’ is this couple’s rhyming motto—‘‘One is tantamount to the other’’ or ‘‘Each can mount the other’’). The unification of the crowns of Castile and Aragon was the beginning of the organization of a modern state in Spain because both of these kingdoms, particularly Castile, had already developed some of their important features. The six main elements of the modern state are, according to José Antonio Maravall: (1) the tendency toward drawing natural frontiers, like the Pyrenees or the sea; (2) the development of an incipient feeling of patriotism, or sense of community, often fostered in sharp distinction and contrast from others, such as Castile’s from the Arabs; (3) an effort to constitute closed political units such as the unified kingdoms under Ferdinand and Isabella; (4) a move toward mathematical calculation in economic matters; (5) the organization of a state bureaucracy whose ranks were filled by competence and efficiency rather than lineage; (6) an overall conception of the state as a work of art, not in the aesthetic sense but in that of ‘‘craft.’’ Maravall gives the feeling of community as the main drive in the case of Spain, citing the Catholic kings’ practice of naming people from their own region to the most influential positions in their localities, and particularly their effort to make the church a national church rather than one dependent on the Vatican, which they viewed as just another foreign power.∞∑ An example of this was the patronato real, extracted by Ferdinand and Isabella from the pope, by which the Spanish crown was empowered to make ecclesiastical appointments in its American empire. In short,

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a modern state is one in which the various institutions are centralized but function according to their own inner systems, which are presumably based on reason, efficiency, and the pursuit of coherence and synchronization of all spheres. In Spain and its overseas possessions this meant the creation of a bureaucracy along the lines of what Max Weber has called a ‘‘patrimonial bureaucracy.’’∞∏ This is an organization whose workings follow its own rules, predicated on competency, whose officers were chosen on the basis of their capabilities, not their social status, but in which ultimate authority rested with the ruler—hence patrimonial. All this reached its highest degree of efficiency and magnitude during the reign of Philip II, of course. We have an example of the system’s integration in the episode of the galley slaves. Many punishments, including death, were commuted to service in the galleys, where the prisoners supplied the motive force for those vessels that carried out the crown’s international policies—foreign affairs and the judiciary cooperating toward the common goal of strengthening and defending the state. Such unification increased as Spain took on the role of bastion of the Catholic faith against the rise of Protestantism. Two examples of this unification during the early years of the Catholic kings’ reign are the creation (or re-creation) of two very significant institutions of state control: the Holy Office of the Inquisition and the Holy Brotherhood. Seen from a purely systemic perspective, the Inquisition was a form of thought police. It sought to check not so much what subjects of the crown did as what they thought and expressed, verbally and in writing; as historian Carlos Eire often tells me, the most serious offence was not to commit a sin, but to state in public that doing it was not a sin. Foucault credits the Inquisition with being at the origins of modern (that is, post–eighteenth century) forms of state control—Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, and Castro’s Cuba are its progeny.∞π If one thinks of Catholicism as the ideology of the Spanish state, then the role of the Inquisition reveals itself not as a product of obscurantism and atavism but rather what it was: an institution charged with checking the subjects’ fealty to the crown. The Holy Brotherhood, about which there is much more in future chapters, was a transregional police force made up of local vigilantes organized at a national level. It was, though in a larval way, what a federal police force would be today. Because of the local fueros, or local and regional exemptions and immunities, it was easy and it appears commonplace for criminals to seek sanctuary in towns or districts beyond the jurisdiction of the place where they committed the misdeed and were sought by the authorities. The Holy Brotherhood, as it was reorganized from older vigilante groups (such as the Toledo Brotherhood mentioned in the Quijote), respected no such boundaries, and also policed rural areas (despoblado), which were

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largely unpatrolled, and in which bands of brigands could rule at will. They also patrolled the highways, which were under the supervision of the crown.

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As can be imagined, the judiciary came in for revamping and unification under the centralizing efforts of the Catholic kings. The judiciary was the principal institution in the patrimonial bureaucracy and the one in which reading and writing played the most prominent roles. Kings make laws and have books containing them written up, said the good Archpriest of Hita, and Ferdinand and Isabella were not remiss on this score. On the contrary, they set in motion a process for making the Spanish legal system homogeneous and coherent.∞∫ They and their successors did not even come close to achieving this, to be sure, but they did organize a judiciary and penal system that were much more thorough than ever before. So much so that Spain became a litigious society, and what took place in its judiciary was a ‘‘legal revolution,’’ as its best student, Richard L. Kagan, has exhaustively proposed in his Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile: 1500–1700.∞Ω The Catholic kings’ method for unifying the laws of the Peninsula was cumulative, a procedure that continued during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of drafting new codes that would bring about a synthesis of all previous ones, which would be superseded, they ordered compilations of previously existing legislation. The new laws would not invalidate the old laws, but were included alongside them, in what became a huge legislative tangle that was pervasive by extension rather than by cohesiveness—by accretion more than by codification. The first such compilation and revamping under Ferdinand and Isabella were the Ordenanzas de Madrigal of 1476, followed by the Ordenamiento de las Cortes de Toledo, 1480, and the most important Ordenanzas reales de Castilla, also known as Ordenanzas de Montalvo, issued in 1484. In 1505 there was a collection called Leyes de Toro, containing eighty laws, many dealing with important matters of property and inheritance. In the sixteenth century, when Cervantes was already twenty years old, and during the reign of Philip II, there was the 1567 Nueva recopilación. An idea of the cumulative nature of this legislative process is provided by the laws issued to rule over the American dominions—the so-called Leyes de Indias. By the time of the Recopilación de 1681, the Spanish crown had drafted an average of a law per day, not counting Sundays, since the discovery of the New World in 1492.≤≠ A growing population of judges, magistrates, lawyers, law clerks, notaries, scribes, and all manner of legally trained individuals sprang up to draft, interpret, and apply this cumbersome mass of laws. Many such individuals appear as characters in the picaresque and in Cer-

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vantes’ works. Kagan offers a very revealing graph about the growth of litigation in the years covering precisely Cervantes’ life.≤∞ It would be a mistake to see this society as possessing the capabilities to supervise and punish that Foucault has brilliantly described and analyzed because, as he himself argues, such capability did not develop until the eighteenth century and after, which is the period that he studies. But the Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a harbinger of things to come.≤≤ In Cervantes’ time, as Francisco Tomás y Valiente has written, it was a veritable catastrophe to fall in the net of the law—often, he says, the only recourse was to flee, as many, including Don Quijote, Sancho, the galley slaves, and Cardenio do.≤≥ The judiciary’s paper flow and its ability to gather, transmit, and store information grew exponentially, leading to the foundation in 1588 of the first modern state archive, the Archivo de Simancas, during the reign of Philip II (although documents had been stored there since the 1540s, during the reign of Charles V).≤∂ A beautiful renaissance castle near Valladolid, which had earlier served as a prison for notable individuals, safeguarded and classified a veritable deluge of documents. Improvements in printing were instrumental in this development of state supervision, legitimation, arbitration, and control.≤∑ The guards taking the galley slaves to the boats have with them documents relevant to each case, as we saw. The limited information we have about Cervantes the man we owe to this judicial bureaucracy, which kept records of his various scrapes with the law—from the accusation of his wounding a man in a duel early in life to the documents attesting to his imprisonment for irregularities in his accounts when he was collecting taxes to finance the 1588 Armada. The litigiousness that Kagan speaks about is certainly borne out by this largely insignificant but not overlooked hidalgo and soldier. The ‘‘documentos cervantinos’’ that we so avidly pore over in search of clues of his exceptional nature mostly attest to his having been a common subject, subject to the laws of the kingdom. A most significant feature of the centralization and systematization of the judiciary was the development of legal writing in style, range, and volume: that is, the control, supervision, and direction of drafting legal documents. This process began in Bologna, as I said, and involves the production and dissemination of primers of notarial arts, or artis notariae. The grammarian Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522) protests in his 1495 Vocabulario españollatino that he did not go to Italy, as others did, to obtain church subsidies or ‘‘para traer fórmulas de Derecho civil y canónico’’ (to bring back with me formulas of civil and cannon law) but to study the classics.≤∏ The primers brought to Spain gave instruction and provided examples geared to the education of the officers who made the evolving legal system function. Lawyers,

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judges, and others higher up in the bureaucracy would, of course, be guided by the rhetoric taught at the universities, which was part of the overall humanistic curriculum. But the ordinary documents in which the first contact between reality and writing took place followed the formulas of the artis notariae. It was this writing that netted the criminal, as it were. Just as reading primers were sent to the New World to teach the natives how to read and write Spanish, notaries had to be instructed in the art of drafting documents. Reading and writing were at the core of state formation and control, and language itself, as Nebrija famously put it in the prologue to his 1492 Gramática, addressed to Queen Isabella, is the ‘‘handmaiden of empire’’ (he has the Roman one in mind, of course).≤π It is in the context of this proliferation of laws, state control, and the pursuit, description, classification, and punishment of criminals that the modern novel emerges in the picaresque. As I have argued before in Myth and Archive and other publications, the rhetorical vehicle that the rogue uses to make his confession is a relación, a report, brief, or deposition that he addresses to higher authority, probably a judge in the case of Lazarillo. The criminal cloaks himself in an aura of legality and legitimacy by following a legal kind of formulaic, bureaucratic writing. This rhetoric is the tool he uses to protest his innocence or proclaim that he is the victim of society’s corruption. His story is like those of the criminals described in the Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla, most of which was written in the 1580s by Cristóbal de Chaves, a lawyer, in which the life of that prison is detailed. Seville’s prison house is of particular interest to us because, according to Cervantes, it was while doing time there that he first had the idea to write the Quijote. The prison is the hospital where the modern novel is born, and its temper will linger in the genre until the present. Writing and criminality, printing and prisons are its midwives and wet nurses. Its mother, to abuse the metaphor, was La Celestina, first published in 1499, as I said before, at the peak of Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s rule. In La Celestina, the city—purported to be Salamanca—is governed from the whorehouse: Celestina, the madam, controls magistrates and ecclesiastics.≤∫ Insights into the depths of love in La Celestina bring out all of the hypocrisies of social exchange. Customs and laws are denuded (valga la palabra) of their veil of virtue. But La Celestina, for all its incomparable grandeur, lacked one element that would be seminal in the origins of the novel: narrative itself, a narrator author or a narrator representing an author. Its brilliant dialogue was unique and remains so in literary history. But it strikes us today as an awkward medium imposed by the orthodox humanism of its author and times—still an imitation of classical models. This changes with the emergence of the ironic mock confession of Lázaro de Tormes, his mimicry of legal rhet-

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oric in the deposition telling his life—a clear precursor of the prisoner of sex’s speech. We now have the delinquent recounting his story, persecuted by the law but at the same time given substance and a voice as an individual by the law.

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The effects of these social and political changes on literature are very significant. In narrative fiction, plots will no longer be drawn exclusively from the literary or even the oral tradition but from legal cases or stories like them, featuring a tawdry underworld atmosphere of criminality.≤Ω Transgressions and their punishment or potential punishments are recorded in these stories, which seem pulled from police records. This kind of writing makes a claim to truth and authenticity not only from outside of literature but because it is from outside of literature. The nonliterary is favored because it is not tainted by art or buttressed by the past. This is a new kind of literature that generates its own poetics as it develops free from, though not oblivious to, the classical tradition—its repository or source is now the penal archive, the prison house of legal documents. The relationship of all this legal background with narrative fiction presupposes that the literary imagination draws not just from the master stories but also, perhaps principally, from the minor, contingent stories— from the textual net that the law as creation of the social mind throws over the transient and the tangible, to which author, characters, and readers belong. This is the gist of Cervantes’ prologue to Part I of the Quijote. The friend he makes up as his interlocutor tells him to fabricate his sources, to draft a bogus index of illustrious predecessors to lend legitimacy to his work. In other words, that he should dispense with tradition and authorities or deal with them without reverence. Cervantes’ archive draws its stories from other, less exalted sources; namely the criminal cases he has heard or read about and his own life. Why this turn to the legal, other than because of the long reach of the law? Because it is the enmeshing of the human, of the fallen and fallible, in a language that is contemporaneous to authors and readers. Both have become important because of the law—it enfranchises them. The delinquent, the transgressor, represents the individual, the self, the author, given both freedom and restraint by the law, to which they are tied by the medium of writing. The pool of plots is augmented and their nature changed, as we saw with the stories the galley slaves tell about themselves: one is a horse thief, another a pimp and sorcerer, and still another, the one I have analyzed above, is a sexual predator. The written record of the law is the most extensive account of human action and interaction available, and it is present, current, concrete, available to the human senses in a here and now that includes the author and his

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characters. It is a primary, even primitive form of recording life’s variety of deviances, a codification of behavior prior to abstractions and formulas: a kind of writing that antecedes the code. The code will be drafted to classify the criminal and apportion punishments. The written record represents the raw contingency of the real in the most immediate way possible. This is why it is an invaluable repository for the emerging novel, a treasure trove of the vagaries of human conduct. Deviants—the criminal, the insane—will be the novel’s most coveted subjects, as they are for the law. The contingency and specificity of the crimes and criminal types in the emerging novel are drawn from legal writing, wherein they are inscribed, and from the penal institutions in which they are circumscribed. Literary tradition, precisely because of its aura of pastness, lacked substance in the details, in the roughness of the present. Fictional characters will now exhibit distinguishing features, often deformities due to accidents of nature or to the violence prevalent in their world. Ginés de Pasamonte is cross-eyed, Juan Palomeque, the innkeeper in the Quijote, is lefthanded (he is known as El Zurdo), Maritornes is ugly in every detail, Sancho has a belly, Altisidora has bad breath, Monipodio limps, Aldonza smells, and in Part II the duchess has open sores on her thighs. Some of these are the kind of features low-life types would have, not a mark like Ulysses’ scar that Auerbach makes so much of in a beautiful chapter of his classic Mimesis.≥≠ As opposed to that hero’s hidden scar, the physical defects in the new fiction tend to be obvious and defining. They give the characters a distinctiveness that identifies them and often leads to their nicknames, like Palomeque and Monipodio—Lefty and One Foot. Notice that Ginés de Pasamonte is angered when the guard brings up his nickname (Parapilla). Quintiliano Saldaña writes that most criminals in Cervantes’ time had nicknames that appeared in the legal records to identify them—Juan Pérez ‘‘El Tuerto,’’ Damiana Sosa ‘‘La Caballona Machona,’’ Antonio ‘‘El Borgoñón,’’ and so on.≥∞ Legal writing specified, detailed, and individualized the deviants, provided a record of their contingent and accidental physical features and nicknames—it was a way of identifying that would allow apprehension, as when the officer of the Holy Brotherhood laboriously reads the description of Don Quijote contained in the warrant for his arrest, stopping after every word to look up and see if it matches a trait of the knight’s face (I, 45). The guards accompanying the galley slaves have details of each of their crimes and of their proclivities and personalities. One expounds on Ginés’s and his record at some length. Underworld, criminal types become protagonists in the new literary stories: pimps, prostitutes, cardsharps, a whole panoply of jailbirds. Tomás y Valiente insists on the casuistry of Spanish law and I believe that this is crucial in the origins and development of the novel—casos in picaresque novels, concrete

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cases, not general narrative patterns, make up the plots, and Don Quijote’s own story is referred to in the novel as a ‘‘caso.’’≥≤ It is the case of the ‘‘hidalgo’’ who went mad and committed a number of punishable offenses after giving himself a name not unlike those that the criminals sport. Casuistry entails a whole program of representation that is more detailed, technical, and stringent than the one inherited from traditional literary sources and practices. Originally a branch of moral theology, casuistry involves the consideration of cases of conscience against laws. Applied to the Spanish legal system, it meant the proliferation of cases, each of which had to be seen in relation to the applicable laws. Because of the cumulative evolution of Spanish law and the existence of all the fueros or local charters, the process was laborious and difficult. The key element, of course, is the ‘‘case.’’ A caso, according to Covarrubias, ‘‘Vale suceso que aya acontecido; y assi los juristas llaman caso la ocasión o proposición sobre que se funda la determinación de la ley o decreto; y en los pleitos lo primero en que se concuerdan es en el caso o en el hecho, que es todo una cosa.’’≥≥ Which could be translated as ‘‘An event that has already taken place. Hence jurists call a case the actions or propositions upon which the applicability of the law or decree is grounded; and in a legal dispute the first thing upon which jurists agree is the case or fact, which are one and the same thing.’’ A caso is not just what happened but the definition and agreement by both parties of what actually happened relevant to the law, or agreement to which specific laws or decrees can by applied. Etymologically, ‘‘caso,’’ like the English ‘‘case,’’ derives from the Latin ‘‘casus,’’ literally a fall. A case is an accident, something that has occurred at a given time and at a given place, an event or set of circumstances. In legal terms, then, a caso or case is the definition, the naming and in a sense the translating into legal discourse of this event. In short, the caso is what is representable within legal discourse: that portion of the real, including actions and their consequences, that can be circumscribed by the law. It is a distinct entity involving people, things, and actions that constitute a whole over whose interpretation lawyers can argue about but on whose existence they agree. It is the real as defined by the law. For the incipient novel, as well as for stories such as those included in collections like Il Novellino, the Decameron, and the Conde Lucanor, a case is a distinct narrative unit involving a concurring set of events, often centering on the commission of a crime. Casuistry has had a bad name in English because it became associated with priests making too fine distinctions to prove that an act in question did not conflict with a given law with which it could be plainly seen to clash. A discipline or practice that involves considering individual cases of conscience in relation to the law, casuistry was originally called upon to pass judgment

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prior to the execution of an act, whose potential unlawfulness it seeks to establish in advance. In Spanish law casuistry means applying the law to a specific act or circumstances a posteriori to determine first its very existence in legal terms, and later to test its potential criminality. In both senses, casuistry is founded on a particular, specific action involving individuals in concrete circumstances. The specificity, uniqueness, and particularity of actions, people, and circumstances is of the greatest relevance to novelistic discourse, which will derive from legal cases all of these characteristics to project an aura of the real and of contemporaneity that the reader can recognize. Colin Smith already ascribed to the legal tendency in the Poema de mío Cid the poem’s wellknown realism: ‘‘Some of the rightly lauded verismo of the Poema may also be owed not merely to the author’s temperament but to his legal training. Lawyers have to be hard-headed, concerned with detail, with property and its value, with the social status of clients. I select one aspect of verismo, the geographical.’’≥∂ Both the picaresque and the Quijote favor such geographical precision—de Tormes, de la Mancha. A case circumscribes, names, and brings into high relief what is unusual and therefore worthy of attention in a set of actions and people. Only those people possessing characteristics that make them unique enter novelistic discourse, and the definition and display of those traits, which are both physical and psychological, constitute the story. This is the reason why the picaresque emerges from the repository of legal cases that I have called the archive. A character such as the prisoner of sex is worthy of being included in the Quijote because of his unusual attributes, as are Ginés de Pasamonte and so many other characters who people Cervantes’ fiction—as the hero reviews each of their cases he is practicing casuistry. Their inclusion in literature depends on those characteristics that make them stand out, even or because they are at odds with the law—it is the oddity that turns them into ‘‘cases’’ and which often, as seen above, gives them new names fitting their traits and habits. The identification of such individuals was carried out according to the arts of the notary, which supplied the rhetorical devices, hackneyed as they may be, to name them, list them, and connect them to constitute a character. This intrusion of the legal into narrative fiction supplants the generally stereotypical features attributed to literary characters since the classical epic. The notarial arts stand at the foundation of novelistic discourse. It is probably because of this casuistry of the Spanish legal system that the picaresque novel first developed in Spain. The prose, the prosaicness of the real world underlies the whole new discourse of the novel because of its association with the prose of the law. This casuistry makes way for the concreteness of the new literature, focused on individuals, specific events, objects, and settings, spurning not just received literary but also philosophical traditions. The new

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narrative is inimical to abstractions and refuses to be read allegorically against a set system of ideas or doctrines. When this happens, as in the Guzmán de Alfarache, there is an unresolved mixture of narrative and doctrine, unalloyed discourses incapable of blending successfully. The contingency of the case, the specificity of this individual and this circumstance is not reducible to a legal code as it is not reducible to abstract ideas—each is a case. An ancillary but not unimportant effect of all this is the proliferation of legal documents and terms in the new fiction. Mention is made of contracts, arrest warrants, licenses of various sorts, and wills. The picaresque will assume the form of one of those documents, the relación, as I said before. Another peripheral but also significant effect is that fictional prose—Cervantes’—is studded with legal terms. Horacio N. Castro Dassen has actually drawn up a list he entitles ‘‘Indice de términos jurídicos y temas o pensamientos de derecho tratados en El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha’’ (Index of Judicial Terms, Themes, or Thoughts Pertaining to the Law in Don Quijote) that covers over three tightly printed, double-column pages.≥∑ Ignacio Rodríguez Guerrero has compiled a two-volume list of criminal types in the Quijote, and several others have written about the law in Cervantes.≥∏ A parallel effect is the appearance of characters related to the legal profession, be they lawyers or students (as we already saw in the first chapter) or those charged with the enforcement of the law: judges, sheriffs, bailiffs, officers of the Holy Brotherhood, and others. In some stories, like ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs,’’ a lawyer is the reader in the text. He occupies our position as reader because he is a trained reader, presumably better able to discern the truth of the text in question. Among the crimes committed by all these characters, those involving love play a leading role. Love conflicts span the gamut from whorehouse strife to struggles among aristocrats who are imbued with the rhetoric of the courtly love tradition. Lazarillo de Tormes, protagonist of the first picaresque novel, is involved in a sordid menage à trois with the mistress of an archbishop. Guzmán de Alfarache’s mother confesses that, after careful calculations, she cannot tell which of her lovers was the boy’s father. Pablos’s mother, in Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón, is so well known for her loose morals that many poets have written ribald verses about her (it says that they have done things ‘‘on’’ her). I already mentioned La Celestina, the source of all this, in which the protagonist is a whorehouse madam and go-between, surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, and thugs. As the sixteenth century progresses, love stories increasingly involve or reflect social strife and mobility, the social unrest that Kagan speaks about when he writes that ‘‘the tide of litigation was symptomatic of a society in which the traditional bonds of loyalty and fraternity were weakening as a result of the numerous changes—demographic, economic,

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social, legal, and political—that rapid growth and development in the sixteenth century had engendered.’’≥π Violence and crime are the agents of social change and development, as basic values, customs, and laws come under suspicion. Characters from different social classes meet, clash, meet again, often marry. Marriage as a form of closure appears frequently because it is the contract that resolves conflicts by taming desire and directing it toward reproduction and restored social stability—also because it is a sacrament through which differences are erased in what is, according to doctrine, literally a communion of the flesh. The core of Spanish Golden Age literature involves social clashes manifested in erotic confrontations resolved through recourse to violence and the law. The prime examples are Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla, and Calderón de la Barca’s El alcalde de Zalamea, which I mentioned before. There are others, like Lope’s El castigo sin venganza and A secreto agravio secreta venganza by Calderón, as well as his other honor plays. This social agitation is also represented in Cervantes’ fiction in erotic strife resolved through violence and inevitably the judiciary. Even the issue of Sancho Panza’s daughter and her prospects for marriage enter here, as do of course all those stories about young couples on their way to the altar. The evolving legal system makes possible solutions to these disputes that were inconceivable before. The law is above the harsh honor code and its promotion of private revenge, even with the atrocities that the law itself allows from today’s perspective. The crown’s laws protect the weak against the powerful, especially since the time of the Catholic kings, which is why the pícaro is entitled to write about his life and Cervantes’ fiction has a strong autobiographical component (as in the captive’s tale). This whole movement can be seen as part of an incipient social leveling leading toward bourgeois society, of which the novel will be an integral part. The law and the transformations it brings about in life and literature are the mold, the style, the rhetoric of an emerging order. Cervantes’ work, particularly the novellas variously inserted in both parts of the Quijote and several of his Exemplary Stories, offers prime examples.

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Engendering Dulcinea

Dulcinea is Cervantes’ boldest and most baffling creation. She is a complicated reply to the courtly love tradition, a radical take on the evolution of love in the early modern period, and a profound statement on desire and the imagination. Unlike Dante’s Beatrice, who is associated to the religious substratum of courtly love, Dulcinea is a secular conception, which is precisely why she is so original and closer to us. Beatrice dissolves in the sublime vision at the end of Paradiso. Dulcinea, without really having a part within the novel, is both imagined and corporeal. We recall her pungent body odor from Sancho’s construction of her in Part I, or her taking a quick sprint to leap onto her mount from behind in Part II, when she is impersonated, unwittingly, by a peasant young woman. We marvel at her touch in salting pork—according to a marginal note in the ‘‘original’’ Arabic manuscript—and are astounded by her incarnation as a transvestite in Part II, where she appears to reach the very limits of representation. Dulcinea does not give the impression of being distant and literary; rather, she seems current with our modern conceptions of love, fraught as they are with nagging doubts about love’s spirituality, and conscious of its dubious source in dark drives beyond our control. Don Quijote is an active protagonist in the novel, one of many characters who speak, fight, love, flee, or go insane. Dulcinea is his and other characters’ invention—a product of their desires, their imaginations, their prevarications,

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or their creative wills. She has no lines in the book. Yet she attains an actuality that is the equal of any other figure in the Quijote. In spite of her potential for vagueness she still ranks among the great lady loves of Western literature: not just Beatrice but Helen, Circe, Dido, Laura, and Molly Bloom, to name a few. Don Quijote’s love for Dulcinea is the grandest force in the book; it is the drive that keeps together the hero’s sense of self—his insane self—and gives meaning to his quest in spite of the many defeats. If the juridical cast of the main plot leads to the hero’s arrest at the conclusion of Part I, his quest for Dulcinea is a thrust toward sublime fulfillment that has no ending except when he regains his sanity at the close of Part II—which is no ending at all because, once he is sane, Dulcinea simply vanishes. Hers is the overarching love story that contains the others in the Quijote—it is their reference as source and contrasting backdrop. Although not obvious at first, Don Quijote’s relationship with the nonexistent lady has much in common with those stories, not the least similarity being the presence of the law. There is a virtual story, a potential conflict behind Don Quijote’s quest for Dulcinea, that does not unfold but that determines the hero’s idealization of her and informs the various images of the lady. This is the story that I hope to tease out here. The elements out of which Dulcinea is engendered are an unstable mix obeying a formula that varies according to her inventor and the contingency of the invention. One has to keep in mind that once the knight makes her up, others, notably Sancho and the butler at the duke’s mansion, reinvent her for various purposes. In Don Quijote’s case the literary sources are clear: the courtly love tradition as manifest in poetry going back to Provence, the dolce stil nuovo, Dante and Petrarch, and in Spain cancionero poetry, the chivalric romances, particularly the Amadís de Gaula, and the work of Garcilaso de la Vega.∞ This is Dulcinea as knight errant’s lady and as object of poetic inspiration. But Dulcinea also appears to Don Quijote as the peasant woman Sancho claims is the knight’s beloved, but enchanted, and again in the guise of Sancho’s invention in Montesinos’s Cave, to which Don Quijote’s subconscious adds a gruesome but significant detail when she asks him for a loan that he cannot give her for lack of funds. Sancho, for his part, who knows the real Dulcinea—that is, Aldonza Lorenzo, his neighbor’s daughter—supplies the only details about her actual physical features and life. She is of peasant stock, strong as an ox, somewhat smelly, and utterly lacking sophistication—she is hardly a lady with inteletto d’amore, to recall Dante. The butler who stages the elaborate pageant in the forest in Part II draws his Dulcinea from the literary tradition as a complicated, bisexual figure, who may stand for desire in the purest and most general state but is also a sharp probe into Don Quijote’s love.≤ The most profound Dulcinea is the one whom Don Quijote wills to life in

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his imagination—the one he needs to complete his own persona as knight errant. Here Dulcinea is the projection not just of desire but of the very urge to be, and the one who is a reply to the great ladies of the literary tradition: again Beatrice and Laura, and in Spain Melibea, Calixto’s beloved in La Celestina, Amadís’s Oriana, and Garcilaso’s Isabel Freyre. She stands for the timeless conceptions of love, whose real objects are necessarily at a remove from their creations by the lovers; hence they are the purest and most general products of the literary imagination, even in our everyday lives. (When in love we are all poets by necessity and create our beloveds.) The commonality of this emotion is the reason love is the most elusive aspect of Cervantes’ work and of Cervantes’ time—it is transhistorical, intimate, fiercely individual yet shared by all, secretive and devious by its very nature. The law leaves a trail of texts and even buildings: from codes and compilations to myriads of documents, from courthouses and state archives to jails, from pillories to scaffolds. There are professionals who deal with the law, but no reputable ones, until very recently, in charge of love. With love, the most private expression of the human, the record is necessarily less visible, and literature is a better archive than those in which laws and legal documents are housed. Love knows no specific space, and when it takes place in the boudoir, it is in the most hidden and least public of enclosures. Love leaves a documentary trail only in its transgression and proscription—its documents tend to be furtive and fugitive. Only through transgression or its avoidance does love generate public texts and rules. Some, like Stuart Schwartz, find a paradoxically rich record of erotic misbehavior in the papers of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, in which the sanctioning of love and its practices led to sophisticated classifications—a kind of scholastic eroticism, as we saw in chapter 1.≥ There is also good old Andreas Capellanus’s codification of Eros’s rules in his deliciously ironic twelfth-century The Art of Courtly Love (really a seduction manual), whose counterpart in poetry constitutes one of the monuments of the Western literary tradition. I refer, needless to say, to courtly love poetry, a combination of poetic and social laws in the form of an erotic legal system. At the court in Aquitaine Eleanor ‘‘heard’’ cases and rendered decisions as if she were a judge.∂ But here we are again in the realm of literature, of the imagination and of playacting, because it is difficult to believe that the contrived rituals of courtly love were actually or seriously practiced. Hence it was literature ruling social behavior and social behavior behaving as literature: an elaborate theatrics and poetics of love. Later, as literacy increased, love’s textual record burgeoned, particularly from the eighteenth century on, and Peter Gay has been able to cull valuable insights from letters, billet-doux, and the like in the nineteenth century.∑ But not yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries. Love’s record then was either literary or legible only in the traces of its suppression, which is to be expected, as love stories depend on the suppression of love for their plots. In literature this record is vast and pervasive during the Spanish Golden Age, as in the rest of Europe. Out of this mix Dulcinea emerges. But her origin in Don Quijote’s imagination had a more mundane beginning.

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I will begin by reconstructing the ‘‘real’’ relationship between Dulcinea and Don Quijote to see it in its sociohistorical, legal, and literary dimensions. I say ‘‘real,’’ of course, with all the available caveats, to resist Don Quijote’s own mystifications and those accrued through literary and critical history. Hence I will refer to Alonso Quijano and Aldonza Lorenzo in speaking of this affair, not of Don Quijote and Dulcinea. Dulcinea is first mentioned as Don Quijote’s ladylove as he is in the process of assuming his new identity. Here is the kernel of his invention of her as reported by the narrator at the end of chapter 1 of Part I: This [lady worthy of his affection], they say, was a good looking countrywench, called Aldonza Lorenzo, who lived in the neighborhood, and with whom he had formerly been in love; though by all accounts, she never knew, nor gave herself the least concern about the matter. He looked upon her as one qualified, in all respects, to be the queen of his inclinations; and putting his invention again to the rack, for a name that should bear some affinity with her own, and at the same time become a princess or lady of quality, he determined to call her Dulcinea del Toboso, she being a native of that place, a name in his opinion, musical, romantic and expressive, like the rest which he had appropriated to himself and his concerns. (I, 1, p. 8) [Y fue, a lo que se cree, que en un lugar cerca del suyo había una moza labradora, de muy buen parecer, de quien él un tiempo anduvo enamorado, aunque, según se entiende, ella jamás lo supo, ni le dio cata dello. Llamábase Aldonza Lorenzo, y a ésta le pareció ser bien darle el título de señora de sus pensamientos, y, buscándole nombre que no desdijese mucho del suyo, y que tirase y se encaminase al de princesa y gran señora, vino a llamarla Dulcinea del Toboso, porque era natural de El Toboso; nombre, a su parecer, músico y peregrino y significativo, como todos los demás que a él y a sus cosas había puesto. (p. 44)]

It should be noted that the narrator here says that she is ‘‘good looking’’ (de muy buen parecer), lest we allow ourselves to imagine Dulcinea as grotesque, as she has often been portrayed by criticism and some writers and artists. Later, as he prepares Sancho for his mission to take a letter to Dulcinea, Don

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Quijote provides more details about his relationship with Aldonza and about her background: And though it [the letter] be written by another hand, it is of small importance, because, now, I remember, Dulcinea can neither read not write, nor ever set eyes on any writing or letter of mine; for, our mutual love has been altogether platonic, without extending farther than a modest glance; and even that so seldom, that I can safely swear, in twelve years, during which I have loved her more than the light of these eyes, which will one day be closed in dust, I have not seen her more than four times, and even in these four times, perhaps, she has not perceived me looking at her more than once. Such is the restraint and reserve, in which her father Lorenzo Corchuelo, and her mother Aldonza Nogales, have brought her up! (I, 25, pp. 190–91) [Y hará poco al caso que vaya de mano ajena, porque a lo que me sé acordar, Dulcinea no sabe escribir ni leer, y en toda su vida ha visto letra mía ni carta mía, porque mis amores y los suyos han sido siempre platónicos, sin estenderse a más que a un honesto mirar. Y aun esto de cuando en cuando, que osaré jurar con verdad que en doce años que ha que la quiero más que a la lumbre destos ojos que han de comer la tierra, no la he visto cuatro veces; y aun podrá ser que destas cuatro veces no hubiese ella echado de ver la una que la miraba; tal es el recato y encerramiento con que su padre, Lorenzo Corchuelo, y su madre, Aldonza Nogales, la han criado. (pp. 282– 83)]

This record of Alonso Quijano’s encounters with Aldonza could be a parody of those of Dante’s with Beatrice, which were also sporadic (the first two separated by nine years, according to the Vita nuova). The glances are typical of the courtly love tradition, which acquire a Neoplatonic aura as we move into the Renaissance. The telling detail of Aldonza’s probable illiteracy begins to sketch a class profile that will soon filled out by Sancho. Don Quijote’s mention of Dulcinea’s parents allows the squire to identify Aldonza and to give the most complete description of her in the Quijote—and the only eyewitness one: I know her perfectly well, said Sancho; and this will venture to say, in her behalf, that she will pitch the bar, as well as ever a lusty young fellow in the village. Bless the sender! she is a strapper, tall and hale wind and limb, and can lift out of the mire any squire or knight-errant, who shall choose her for his sweetheart. Ah! the whore’s—chick! what a pair of lungs and voice she has got! I heard her one day howl from the belfry to some young fellows of her acquaintance, who where at work in a cornfield of her father’s; and though it was at the distance of half a league, they heard her as plain as if they had been right under the steeple; and what is better still, she is not at all coy, but behaves herself civilly; and jokes, and romps, and plays the rogue with any

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Engendering Dulcinea body. . . . But when one considers the affair, what benefits can my lady Aldonza Lorenzo—I mean, my lady Dulcinea del Toboso, reap from your worship’s sending, or having sent those, whom you overcome in battle, to fall upon their knees before her? especially, as they might chance to come, at a time, when she is busy, carding flax or threshing corn; in which case, they would be ashamed to see her, and she laugh or be out of humor at their arrival. (I, 25, pp. 191–92) [—Bien la conozco—dijo Sancho—, y sé decir que tira tan bien una barra como el más forzudo zagal de todo el pueblo. ¡Vive el Dador, que es moza de chapa, hecha y derecha y de pelo en pecho, y que puede sacar la barba del lodo a cualquier caballero andante, o por andar, que la tuviere por señora! ¡Oh hideputa, qué rejo que tiene, y qué voz! Sé decir que se puso un día encima del campanario del aldea a llamar unos zagales suyos que andaban en un barbecho de su padre, y aunque estaban de allí más de media legua, así la oyeron como si estuvieran al pie de la torre. Y lo mejor que tiene es que no es nada melindrosa, porque tiene mucho de cortesana: con todos burla y de todo hace mueca y donaire. . . . pero bien considerado, ¿qué se le ha de dar a la señora Aldonza Lorenzo, digo, a la señora Dulcinea del Toboso, de que se le vayan a hincar de rodillas delante della los vencidos que vuestra merced le envía y le ha de enviar? Porque podría ser que al tiempo que ellos llegasen estuviese ella rastrillando lino, o trillando en las eras, y ellos se corriesen de verla, y ella se riese y enfadase del presente. (pp. 283–84)]

There are a number of physical traits here to which I shall have to return. We confirm toward the end of Part I that, indeed, Don Quijote has never touched Aldonza. He says, when he is about to give his hand to Maritornes and the innkeeper’s daughter, who are about to play a cruel joke on him: ‘‘Receive, madam, said he, that hand, or rather that chastiser of all evil doers; receive, I say, that hand, which was never touched by any other woman, not even by her who is in possession of my whole body’’ (I, 43, p. 377) [—Tomad, señora, esa mano, o, por mejor decir, ese verdugo de los malhechores del mundo; tomad esa mano, digo, a quien no ha tocado otra de mujer alguna, ni aun la de aquella que tiene entera posesión de todo mi cuerpo (p. 508)]. The furtive and wellspaced encounters, the glances, the chastity, all belie the courtly love mold that shapes Don Quijote’s passion. He follows those rules as sedulously as he does those of chivalry. Those rules proscribe touching and make marriage an unavailable option. Alonso, known as El Bueno (the Good Man), admired Aldonza at a decorous distance for a full twelve years. Alonso Quijano did not have to fall in love with Aldonza Lorenzo. Instead—and more in keeping with his social position—he could have gone for a woman of comparable status belonging to the petty nobility of the region. She could have been a wealthier farmer’s daughter like Dorotea or Marcela,

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given to more ladylike occupations than carding flax or threshing corn. Dorotea ran the farm and was a musician; Marcela obviously read pastoral romances and poetry. Aldonza does hard labor, yells from a church steeple, and banters with the boys. She is essentially like one of them. But Alonso did see Aldonza and became infatuated with her before his fateful decision to become a knight-errant, a significant sequence. Once within his madness, Don Quijote could also have chosen a woman closer to Amadís’s Oriana and to the world of chivalry from among those of his social class. To be sure, Cervantes could well have had Alonso Quijano choose Aldonza so that she would be as far as possible from that world to underline the severity of Don Quijote’s illness and to show how little reality influenced his thinking. The grotesqueness of his choice increases as the gap between an Oriana and an Aldonza widens. This is clearly the overt reason. But I think that there is a deeper one, dependent on the interplay of love and the law, that helps explain some of Dulcinea’s more baffling features.

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It may appear that Dulcinea was created by a mechanical process making her every feature the opposite of those of the ladies in the courtly love and chivalric tradition: that she is the reverse of Neoplatonic beauty, and hence ugly and unattractive, except to someone like Sancho. But this is not the case at all, although it is, for instance, with Maritornes and other women in Part II. Sancho’s description of Aldonza Lorenzo follows different ideals of beauty that already had a literary tradition of their own and a standard comical situation to be displayed: the love of an aristocrat for an earthy, stout peasant lass. This is Alonso’s and Aldonza’s script to follow. Even in the strictest nonliterary terms, what we have in their romance is the love of a middle-aged petty nobleman, an hidalgo, for a country girl from his district. He could have married her, although there would have been some complications. As we learn from the interpolated stories in Part I, unequal marriages of this sort were not unusual, particularly because nobility was transmitted via the father in Castile, so any children would retain their social status. As Dorotea says in her appeal to Don Fernando to honor their betrothal, ‘‘If you think your blood will be debased, in mixing with mine, consider, that almost all the great families on earth have undergone the same intercourse, and that the woman’s quality in no manner affects illustrious descents’’ (I, 36, p. 311) [Y si te parece que has de aniquilar tu sangre por mezclarla con la mía, considera que pocas o ninguna nobleza hay en el mundo que no haya corrido por este camino, y que la que se toma de las mujeres no es la que hace al caso en las ilustres descendencias (p. 428)]. From what Don Quijote and Sancho say about Aldonza’s parents, there is no reason to believe that they were destitute, but her marriage to

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someone of Alonso Quijano’s class would still be highly desirable. He is a modest hidalgo but a landowner who can afford to sell parts of his estate to buy books of chivalry, and his lineage is of some distinction and of ‘‘old Christian’’ stock. Aldonza’s illiteracy was typical of the kind of upbringing such ‘‘old Christians’’ would give their children, particularly girls, so there would have been no religious or racial obstacles to their union.∏ The age difference was irrelevant in the period, as it continued and continues to be in Europe and other parts of the world. Cervantes’ other old gentlemen married to young women, like the ones in the short theatrical piece ‘‘The Old Jealous Man’’ and the story ‘‘The Jealous Man from Extremadura,’’ are in the Boccaccio mold and draw their humor from the predictable consequences of the uneven levels of sexual ardor. In any case, if Alonso Quijano’s love for Aldonza has lasted twelve years and he is around fifty when the novel opens, it began when he was merely in his middle to late thirties. The old men in the other works mentioned are decrepit. Yet marriage was not contemplated either, and this may explain Don Quijote’s bachelorhood as owing to the dire socioeconomic situation of the period, which affected everyone, including hidalgos like Alonso Quijano, and often led them to other options. Francisco Tomás y Valiente writes: ‘‘In a society in which there was a widespread dread of marriage as a result of the growing financial insecurity, typical of an age of stifling economic pressure with chronic famines and uncontrolled inflation; in a society in which many adult men devoted their youth to military or student life (then given to dissipation and often to idleness), or entered (with or without a true vocation) conventual life, there had to be many extramarital sexual relations, damaging to the honor of the deceived father, husband, or brother.’’π So in the situation involving Alonso Quijano and Aldonza Lorenzo there was also—we learn this too from the interpolated stories—the potential for abuse. Here is a mature nobleman aroused by a young peasant woman from his district who could have been tempted to exercise a seigneurial right, a derecho de pernada, that in the past would have allowed him sexual privileges without the responsibility of marriage. Seducing peasant women was a possibility even contemplated by Capellanus, who writes in his wicked treatise: ‘‘And if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their [peasant] women, be careful to puff them up with lots of praise and then, do not hesitate to take what you seek and embrace them by force. For you can hardly soften their outward inflexibility so far that they will grant you their embraces quietly or permit you to have the solaces you desire unless first you use a little compulsion as convenient cure for their shyness.’’∫ Ravaging Aldonza is something Alonso might have considered, but it is unlikely that he would have been able

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to overpower the brawny farmer, part of whose attractiveness is being muscular and somewhat manly. Anyway, by this time the aristocrat’s right to do such a thing was explicitly prohibited by the prevalent legislation and a court case would have probably followed. As Tomás y Valiente also writes, such a case would have ended in a settlement in which Alonso would have been forced either to marry Aldonza or to improve her dowry to make her marriageable despite her lack of virginity.Ω The conflicts making up the plots of poems, plays, and stories hinge on the possibility of figures like Aldonza being abused, but not until the early modern period. In medieval works they seem to be quite capable of taking care of themselves, as Aldonza probably could. But in all eras, the conflict is sparked by the attraction country women exert on upper-class men by their crudeness, which ostensibly promises a savage kind of sexual pleasure not available with women of their social class. More disturbing and deep-seated is the sexual role reversal or cancellation of difference suggested by the women’s strength and manliness. This adds a touch of perversity to the aristocrats’ fascination with them, reaching back into the deeper, primal forces of desire, where the object is still undifferentiated. The emergence of difference will depend on an act of creation akin to that of the literary text itself. Most crucial here is the ambivalent (having literally both sexual valences) allure of the transvestite, as we shall see when discussing the Pageant in the Forest, a heavily made-up figure in all senses of the word. Dulcinea in her various guises is the protagonist of this hidden drama in which, paradoxically, the idealized version of her functions as the law. The earliest country women who are sexually alluring in Spanish literature are the serranas, or young women from the hills (hillbilly babes) who appear in Juan Ruiz’s fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor (Book of Good Love). The Archpriest of Hita, as this lustful cleric was known, includes several poems in his masterpiece telling hilarious stories about robust, aggressive young women he encounters in his travels—he is the narrator-protagonist of his book. They are strong enough to carry him on their backs to their huts, where they shelter him from the cold, feed him coarse fare, and vigorously demand sexual favors in return for their help. The Archpriest speaks in a courtly tone, ‘‘Con miedo’’ (with fear), they in rough language: ‘‘Comamos deste pan duro; Después faremos la lucha’’ (Let’s eat from this hard bread / and afterward we’ll tangle).∞≠ The tradition of the muscular, irresistible serrana continued in the delightful ‘‘serranillas’’ by the fifteenth-century Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana. These are arte menor poems, written in popular short-verse forms about serranillas, again, young women from the sierras. As in the Libro de buen amor, the speaker in these poems, a

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cultivated man of superior social class, is enchanted by husky, hard-working cowgirls. The most famous of these serranillas is about ‘‘La vaquera de la Finojosa’’ (today Hinojosa, a cattle-farming region near Córdoba), a cowgirl who arouses the weary traveler as he journeys ‘‘vencido del sueño / por tierra fragosa’’ (vanquished by sleep / over rough terrain). She is minding the herd, however, and spurns his advances. In another poem he tells a cowgirl that he cannot believe that she is a peasant, given her beauty (and youth, for he says ‘‘que me fizo gana/la fructa temprana’’—I was aroused / by the unripe fruit). These are forerunners of Aldonza who excite upper-class men precisely by their rustic appearance and demeanor—by their masculinity. By Cervantes’ time the fetishistic attachment of an aristocrat to peasant women led to tragedies, particularly in the theater. In two of Lope de Vega’s best-known plays—Peribáñez and Fuenteovejuna, both written between 1610 and 1614—the action centers on the fixation of a comendador on a village maiden. In Peribáñez the comendador attempts to seduce Casilda before she marries Peribáñez, but is killed by the irate groom exercising his right to defend his honor. In Fuenteovejuna, Comendador Fernán Gómez attempts to abuse Laurencia and other peasant women, but the whole village rises up and kills him. In Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla, although Don Juan likes women of all classes, he takes particular pleasure in seducing the peasant Aminta and the fisherwoman Tisbea, both of whom appeal to him precisely because of their rural charms. And in Calderón de la Barca’s El alcalde de Zalamea, Isabel, the mayor’s daughter, is raped by the captain who was billeted to his house. The captain is garroted onstage by the outraged father, who is also discharging the duties of his position as mayor of the town. There is no doubt from Sancho’s description that Aldonza was this kind of rough, bucolic beauty and that she aroused Alonso Quijano precisely because of her rusticity—which is, by the way, inscribed in her name, for it seems that at the time Aldonza was the name for the quintessential country wench. She is transformed into Dulcinea not by means of a crass contrast with the ethereal beauties of courtly and chivalric literature but by a kind of transmutation that takes on different forms through her various inventors but whose kernel is that rough farm girl. The initial change is what could be called the literalization of courtly love, or perhaps only its misapplication. What prevents Don Quijote from approaching Aldonza may or may not be shyness, fear, or the economic conditions, but it is also, as his madness progresses, the undesirability of marriage or consummation as the goal of love in courtly conventions. Courtly love was the religion of love for its own sake, not for the object of the love— both person and purpose. It thrived on arousal and denial or on denial as a form of arousal. Once Alonso Quijano is Don Quijote he cannot aspire to

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marry Aldonza, if he ever did—hence he turns her into Dulcinea, who is beyond such worldly goals. He parries off all attempts to marry him to other women, as when Sancho insists that he wed Princess Micomicona. As Ciriaco Morón Arroyo has put it: ‘‘The idealized Dulcinea allows the knight not to have to become entangled in complications with any one concrete woman.’’∞∞ Throughout Part I Dulcinea remains the abstract, necessary object of Don Quijote’s desire and of the constitution of his new persona as knight-errant. The portrait we get from Sancho’s description, the marginal note in the Arabic manuscript about her ability to salt pork, and the Dulcinea the squire has to invent to cover up that he has not journeyed to El Toboso, provide the background of Don Quijote’s sexual attraction to Aldonza as due to her origin. The glimpse we are allowed into Don Quijote’s subconscious in Montesinos’s Cave does reveal that Dulcinea’s peasant origin—her strength, her smell, her virility—from which Sancho has drawn to concoct the enchanted Dulcinea, lies buried in his mind as the spark of his attraction to her. Otherwise she is the lady whose beauty the merchants from Toledo are reluctant to acknowledge, the one whose castle the freed galley slaves refuse to visit, and the one for whom Don Quijote does penance in the Sierra Morena and invokes whenever he is beaten up or humiliated. This is a love story without the trappings of love: no stolen kisses, secret encounters, clandestine letters, or even dialogue between the lovers. Dulcinea stands for the laws of courtly love, of which she is the guiding principle, and these laws appropriately prescribe restraint: Dulcinea fends off Aldonza. In that role she is incorporeal, almost an allegory of Platonic love, a drive to the good through the beautiful. She is also, ironically, the law.

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But the description of Dulcinea that Don Quijote gives Vivaldo, the traveler who quizzes him on their way to witness Grisóstomo’s burial, shows otherwise. The portrait is a crescendo of poetic clichés, with a masterful and revealing comic twist at the end. Don Quijote is carried away as he rushes from one convention of the rhetorical portrait to the next—always going from top to bottom∞≤ —until he barely catches himself just short of straying beyond decorum: her name is Dulcinea; her native country El Toboso, a village in La Mancha; her station must at least be that of a princess, since she is queen and lady of my soul; her beauty, supernatural, in that it justifies all those impossible, and chimerical attributes of excellence, which the poets bestow upon their nymphs; her hair is of gold, her forehead the Elysian fields, her eyebrows heavenly arches, her eyes themselves suns, her cheeks roses, her lips of coral,

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Engendering Dulcinea her teeth of pearl, her neck alabaster, her breast marble, her hands ivory, her skin whiter than snow, and those parts which decency conceals from human view, are such, according to my belief and apprehension, as discretion ought to enhance above all comparison. (I, 13, p. 80) [su patria, el Toboso, un lugar de la Mancha; su calidad, por lo menos, ha de ser de princesa, pues es reina y señora mía; su hermosura, sobrehumana, pues en ella se vienen a hacer verdaderos todos los imposibles y quiméricos atributos de belleza que los poetas dan a sus damas: que sus cabellos son oro, su frente campos elíseos, sus cejas arcos del cielo, sus ojos soles, sus mejillas rosas, sus labios corales, perlas sus dientes, alabastro su cuello, mármol su pecho, marfil sus manos, su blancura nieve, y las partes que a la vista humana encubrió la honestidad son tales, según yo pienso y entiendo, que sólo la discreta consideración puede encarecerlas, y no compararlas. (pp. 141–42)]

In 1624 the Portuguese Inquisition ended the sentence after ‘‘her skin whiter than snow,’’ because of the shocking suggestiveness of Don Quijote’s musings about ‘‘those parts which decency conceals.’’ It is a near slip that betrays that Alonso Quijano’s looks at Aldonza Lorenzo may have been leers inspired by a strong sexual desire. Those hidden parts of Dulcinea do play a role in Alonso Quijano’s and Don Quijote’s longings in disturbing ways. The contrast between that Dulcinea and her mundane origin as Aldonza Lorenzo is Cervantes’ reply to the courtly love tradition at the most elementary level and a extension of insights by more recent poets. Love cannot soar that far from the worldly without becoming a meaningless abstraction or a worthless game. There has to be an incarnation of it in the bruising and withering reality of the here and now, ruled by the presence of death and felt by a concrete, suffering self. This is the rigorous lesson Western literature learned in Petrarch’s stirring poetry about a dead Laura and in Spain in the work of his disciple Garcilaso de la Vega. The more profound aspect of Cervantes’ answer to this quandary is that each embodiment of Dulcinea is different, and that all of them are perversions of the ideal, not completely independent of it. This bewildering trend increases in Part II, where everything appears to lose itself in a game of multiplying reflections—the apocryphal Quijote, the Knight of the White Moon, and so on. Dulcinea’s reflections, however, are not the ghosts of Don Quijote’s family romance. One of the reasons for Dulcinea’s abstractness in Part I is that we never learn anything about Don Quijote’s parents. His only family is that niece whose own parents we do not know anything about, but whom someone has written is the object of the hidalgo’s incestuous passion.∞≥ He is, because of his age, safely beyond Oedipus. Don Quijote’s love is self-generated, willed and illusory at once, focused on a mas-

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culine Aldonza who could be the erasure of difference, the fulfillment of desire, and the ultimate convolution of the self onto itself in search of ever-fleeing stasis. Dulcinea’s final transformation into a transvestite in Part II may signal this: that she is a projection of Don Quijote’s own quest of self, an image of his own buried longings. She would be the self disguised as monstrous other, with gender a contrived difference—a form of alluring otherness. When Sancho gets near Aldonza he notices ‘‘a sort of mannish smell’’ (I, 31, p. 281) [sentí un olorcillo algo hombruno (p. 359)]. The peasant woman on a donkey—who smells of raw garlic—could be a perversion of the knight himself, his distorted self-reflection. She is a grotesque equestrian figure because of her mount, some of her features, and the fact that she is a woman. This cauldron of perversions at the source of Alonso’s and Don Quijote’s desire is exposed through a series of mildly obscene allusions and references.

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Part II, a profound interpretation of Part I, provides a reading of Alonso Quijano’s infatuation with Aldonza Lorenzo and her transformation into Dulcinea through her various incarnations. The stages are the enchantment of Dulcinea by Sancho, her appearance in the Cave of Montesinos episode, the enchantment of the twelve dueñas who grow beards that only Don Quijote can remove by slaying a giant, and her appearance as a transvestite in the Pageant in the Forest. Other than her strength and smell, Aldonza’s most significant feature is her bodily hair, which she shares with other country lasses and coarse women in the Quijote and other works. For instance, the goatherd Torralba, in Sancho’s truncated story in Part I, is very strong: ‘‘a thick, brawny wench, a little coy, and somewhat manly, for she sported some sort of mustachios’’ (I, 20, p. 134) [era una moza rolliza, zahareña y tiraba algo a hombruna, porque tenía unos pocos bigotes (p. 213)]. In Sancho’s description of Aldonza he says that she is ‘‘de pelo en pecho,’’ which Smollett chose to translate with English idioms of comparable meaning: ‘‘she is a strapper, tall and hale wind and limb.’’ But the Spanish expression, which suggests strength and courage, literally means that she has hair on her chest like a man. Celestina was a ‘‘vieja barbuda’’ (bearded old wench) and the serranas and serranillas also tend to have either facial hair or excess hair elsewhere on their bodies. Hair and masculinity, hair and an abundant sexual drive are synonymous going all the way back to the Bible and classical mythology. I am thinking of Samson and Absalom, of course, and also Medusa, who had in Spain a curious metamorphosis into a bearded figure.∞∂ But there were many bearded women in literature, art, and real life in the

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Spain of Cervantes’ time, to judge by Jocobo Sanz Hermida’s work on the topic.∞∑ According to the physiology of the time, beards, a sign of masculinity, grew because of the dry, hot constitution of a man’s body; by contrast, the female body, humid and cold, produced menstruation, a sign of femininity. A hot body on a woman generated more hair, including facial hair, and in some monstrous cases the emergence of male genitalia from within her own. Hence the bearded women in the Quijote, particularly Dulcinea, project both a heightened sexuality and one that threatens to become masculine in nature. Don Quijote, whose body is dry and hot, is endowed with a heated sexuality that draws him to these hairy ladies. Their sexuality, in turn, seems to want to become one with his through a process that dangerously tends to erase physical gender differences, as is revealed in Part II in the Pageant in the Forest. Beards and sexual organs converge as the temperature of bodies rises—hair leads to the pubic area, as we saw in the rhetorical portrait of Dulcinea painted by Don Quijote. The transformation of beards into pubic hair and mouths into female genitalia is too common to require reference to authority. The Quijote is its own authority in this. In Part I, the innkeeper’s wife makes the connection between ‘‘beard’’ and her own sexual organs through a complicated pun that Javier Herrero has unraveled with great delight.∞∏ This is the episode in which the priest and the barber borrow an ox’s tail that the innkeeper’s wife has hanging on the wall to hold her comb. They use it as a fake beard to deceive Don Quijote. The connection is shockingly clear in Chaucer’s ‘‘The Millers Tale,’’ when the woman, who has promised to stick her head out the window in the dark of night to receive a furtive kiss from her lover, offers instead her naked rear. He kisses it: And back he started. Something was amiss; He knew quite well a woman has no beard, Yet something rough and hairy had appeared.∞π

This cluster of resonances affixes Alonso Quijano’s desire to those parts of Dulcinea to which Don Quijote alludes with a chaste and urgent circumlocution in the description cited before—the rhetorical portrait that almost went too far. In Part II the bearded and mustachioed ladies are there to remind Don Quijote, who wants to suppress it, of his prurient desire for Aldonza, which could have driven him to commit estupro, a rape or unlawful seduction. The most significant of these ladies is, to be sure, the enchanted Dulcinea, that is to say, the country wench that Sancho wants to pass off as his master’s beloved. When Don Quijote protests about her bad looks, Sancho says that

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‘‘to tell the truth, I saw not her homeliness, but beauty, which was exceedingly increased by a mole upon her upper lip, something like a moustache, consisting of seven or eight red hairs, like threads of gold, as long as my hand.’’ ‘‘According to the correspondence which the moles of the face have with those of the body, said Don Quixote, Dulcinea must have just such another on the inner part of her thigh, of the same side; but, hairs of such a length, are, I think, rather too long for moles.’’ (II, 10, p. 516) [para decir verdad, nunca yo vi su fealdad, sino su hermosura, a la cual subía de punto y quilates un lunar que tenía sobre el labio derecho, a manera de bigote, con siete o ocho cabellos rubios como hebras de oro y largos más de un palmo.—A ese lunar—dijo Don Quijote—, según la correspondencia que tienen entre sí los del rostro con los del cuerpo, ha de tener otro Dulcinea en la tabla del muslo que corresponde a donde tiene el del rostro pero muy luengos para lunares son los pelos de la grandeza que has significado. (pp. 709–10)]

Aldonza’s ‘‘pelo en pecho’’ has migrated from the chest to her upper lip and from there to her groin to perturb the knight with the memory of his lust, unveiling, as it were, those hidden parts that he claimed decency wanted to keep covered, but toward which he rushed headlong down the rhetorical portrait. Casildea, the Knight of the Forest’s lady, a clone of Dulcinea invented by Sansón Carrasco, also has ‘‘barbas.’’ Sansón says, after being defeated by Don Quijote: ‘‘I confess, said the vanquished knight, that the clouted dirty shoe of the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, excels the dishevelled, tho’ clean beard of Casildea (II, 14, p. 544) [—Confieso— dijo el caído caballero—que vale más el zapato descosido y sucio de la señora Dulcinea del Toboso, que las barbas mal peinadas, aunque limpias, de Casildea (p. 745)]. (There are some obscene, nearly pornographic allusions encoded in what the wily Carrasco says here, as the editors of the Instituto Cervantes edition that I am using here point out.)∞∫ The culmination of all this is the appearance of the twelve enchanted dueñas, who have grown beards as a punishment and whom Don Quijote is expected to disenchant. This is all a farce, of course; they are wearing fake beards like the characters in the Princess Micomicona episode of Part I. The dueñas come onstage, as it were, sporting veils on their faces, which they remove suddenly and in unison to the shock of all: ‘‘So saying, the afflicted duenna and her companions, lifting up their veils, disclosed so many faces overgrown with huge beards, red, black, white and parti-colored; at sight of which, the duke and duchess were amazed, Don Quijote and Sancho confounded, and all present overwhelmed with astonishment’’ (II, 39, p. 708) [Y luego la Dolorida y las demás dueñas alzaron los antifaces con que cubiertas

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venían, y descubrieron los rostros todos poblados de barbas, cuáles rubias, cuáles negras, cuáles blancas y cuáles albarrazadas, de cuya vista mostraron quedar admirados el duque y la duquesa, pasmados don Quijote y Sancho, y atónitos todos los presentes (p. 948)]. All of these bearded women hit a raw nerve in Don Quijote’s subconscious, where lust and guilt are barely concealed. These in Part II not only confirm it but are even a parody of the whole thing because the radically weird form of their hairiness is manifest. Bearded, manly women represent a brutal kind of sexuality at the origin of Don Quijote’s attraction to Aldonza Lorenzo. That sexual attraction, animal in its source and represented by the strength, the smell, and the hair, was what caught Alonso Quijano’s attention, what created his fixation on Aldonza. That fixation, that fetish, is what could have driven him to ravage her, to exercise his seigneurial rights and hence to commit a crime that would lead to the kind of story that we get in Fernando and Luscinda, for instance. In Part II Don Quijote struggles to disenchant Dulcinea because the one Sancho has chosen as her stand-in reminds him of his prurient and perhaps even violent desire for Aldonza. He wants to overcome, to erase that memory by again turning Dulcinea into the idealized lady of his (literary) dreams. In short, the ‘‘enchanted Dulcinea’’ is, appropriately from Sancho’s point of view, a strong, hairy, sexual, vulgar woman—precisely like Aldonza, the origin of Don Quijote’s desire. To disenchant her means to remove those qualities from her by turning her back to the idealized Dulcinea who is so vague, ethereal, and unreal as to not have any sexuality at all. Don Quijote cannot accept the ‘‘enchanted Dulcinea’’ as she appears; he has to be blind to her reality because it rakes the still-burning ashes of his desire for Aldonza. Although there are no hairy women in it, the Pageant in the Forest is the culmination of the series of images of Dulcinea that remind Don Quijote of the origin of his love for her as Aldonza Lorenzo. This is the episode in Part II in which the duke and duchess have their butler stage an elaborate spectacle to frighten Don Quijote and Sancho and bring up the matter of Dulcinea’s enchantment as recounted to them by the squire. It is night, the whole party is outdoors after a day of hunting, when a series of carts filled with penitents carrying torches comes toward them. One cart, larger than the others—a ‘‘triumphal chariot’’—carries two figures. One, a nymph representing Dulcinea, is seated on a throne dressed in robes of silver tissue, bespangled with innumerable leaves of gold brocade; so that her dress, if not rich, was extremely gaudy: her face was covered with a delicate and transparent veil of fine tiffany, the rumples of which could not conceal the beauteous features of a young lady; and the

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number of lights enabled the spectators to distinguish her charms and her age, which seemed to be turned of seventeen but under twenty. Close by her appeared a figure clad in what is called a robe of state, that reached to his feet; and his head was muffled in a black veil. The cart had no sooner come opposite to the duke and duchess, and Don Quixote, than the music of the waits, the harps, and lutes, ceased all at once; then this figure rising, threw aside his robe, and, taking off the veil, disclosed to view the horrible and fleshless form of death. (II, 35, p. 687) [vestida de mil velos de tela de plata, brillando por todos ellos infinitas hojas de argentería de oro, que la hacían, si no rica, a lo menos vistosamente vestida. Traía el rostro cubierto con un transparente y delicado cendal, de modo que, sin impedirlo sus lizos, por entre ellos se descubría un hermosísimo rostro de doncella, y las muchas luces daban lugar para distinguir la belleza y los años, que al parecer no llegaban a veinte ni bajaban de diez y siete. Junto a ella venía una figura vestida de una ropa de las que llaman rozagantes, hasta los pies, cubierta la cabeza con un velo negro; pero al punto que llegó el carro a estar frente a frente de los duques y de don Quijote, cesó la música de las chirimías, y luego de las harpas y laúdes que en el carro sonaban, y levantándose en pie la figura de la ropa, la apartó a entrambos lados, y quitándose el velo del rostro, descubrió patentemente ser la mesma figura de la muerte, descarnada y fea. (p. 921)]

This figure identifies himself as the wizard Merlin and proceeds to tell an elaborate story about his research on how to disenchant Dulcinea and how he has come up with the formula to do so: Sancho must give himself 3,300 lashes on his naked buttocks. Sancho protests that he will not do such a thing, and then ‘‘the embroidered nymph who sat by Merlin’s spirit, rising up, took off her transparent veil, and disclosing a face which to all the spectators seemed more than exceedingly beautiful, addressed herself in these words, directly to Sancho Panza, with a manly assurance and a voice that was not very feminine in tone’’(II, 35, p. 730) [levantándose en pie la argentada ninfa que junto al espíritu de Merlín venía, quitándose el sutil velo del rostro, le descubrió tal, que a todos pareció más que demasiadamente hermoso; y con un desenfado varonil y con voz no muy adamada, hablando derechamente a Sancho (p. 924)]. She proceeds to berate him for his selfishness and cowardice. This is a scene redolent with internal and external allusions, typical of the baroque quality of Part II. Sancho’s offense is his having told the lie about his trip to El Toboso, which he then tried to substantiate by telling his master that the peasant girl on the donkey is Dulcinea enchanted. But it is not really that much of a lie, for the peasant woman is closer to the real Aldonza than to the imagined Dulcinea,

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which is precisely why Don Quijote needs to have her disenchanted, as we have been observing. There are clear allusions in this scene to Purgatorio 30, when Beatrice appears to Dante and is abandoned by Virgil as he is about to enter Paradise. The combination of personal revelation with Revelation gives the whole episode its sublime depth. Dulcinea’s diatribe against Sancho also recalls the Beatrice of Purgatorio 30 because it is here that she berates Dante for not having remained faithful to her after her death.∞Ω The grotesque contrivance of all this in the Quijote is what is left of revelation and stakes the difference between Dante and Cervantes. Because Don Quijote’s true revelation is finding Dulcinea in this guise, the only time that he lays eyes on her as he purportedly imagines her. Javier Herrero writes: ‘‘It is a remarkable twist of Cervantes’ irony that the incarnated Dulcinea is a lie of the dukes, built on a previous lie of Sancho. To top it all, Dulcinea is really a man: a page of the dukes that the butler has selected to play this role because of his beauty. Such is the ontological status of the earthly Dulcinea: a labyrinth of lies built upon lies, of contradictory appearances.’’≤≠ The contradictory element is most significant, however, not merely another Cervantine game about the elusiveness of the real. What is truly Cervantine, however, is that this complicated contrivance, the whole pageant, the figures, the verses, are the work of an internal author, another of those mouthpieces in the Quijote that project creation onto an abyss of infinite regression. The butler is no mere jester. His version of Don Quijote’s love, with its allusion to the Divine Comedy, is a profound and wildly deformed reflection of the knight’s psyche that takes the whole issue of love and the law in the book to another level. The butler seems to be reaching the very limits of representation and the farthest origins of literary creation itself. The elaborateness, the parodic distortions, the play with the very serious issue of revelation, both offered and denied, manifest the text as a perplexing response to dark drives beyond not only our control but more significantly also our comprehension. A concoction arises surrounded by images of death and desire, intertwined in grotesque figures whose meaning eludes us and whose material existence is all a series of fabrications. Because the revelation concerning Don Quijote, of which he is not aware, is the true nature of his desire. This is another unnarratable story, like that of the prisoner of sex, buried beneath the layers of ironies and ambiguities mentioned by Herrero. Because the most significant detail here is the ‘‘manly assurance,’’ and ‘‘not very feminine’’ tones in which ‘‘Dulcinea’’ expresses herself—that ‘‘desenfado varonil’’ and ‘‘voz no muy adamada.’’ We learn later that the butler had a page play her role. He is made to look gorgeous but cannot change his voice to disguise his gender. That voice is an echo (pun

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intended) of Aldonza’s strong one in Sancho’s description of her and an indication that the figure is a transvestite—a man disguised as a woman. The fair Dulcinea of Don Quijote’s imagination, even as played by this beautiful page, has beneath the veils and dresses a masculine kernel, a perverse virility (an excess of testosterone) that defined the peasant women’s savage sexuality. His coarse voice is evidence that he is not effeminate but manly even while disguised as a woman (like hair, a deep voice was a sign of masculinity in the physiology of the period). This is what is left of all those beautiful ladies of the poetic traditions: a contrived woman who is not even a woman. Nobody is perfect. Don Quijote obeyed the laws of courtly love so that Alonso Quijano, El Bueno, would not break those of society. Deep in his subconscious, even in his madness, Dulcinea represents for Don Quijote a desire repressed and transferred, transformed, deflected so as not to become sinful and criminal. Dulcinea is the law: she is beyond the reach of desire because consummation, much less marriage, were not options, and because she really only exists in the knight’s imagination. She is effective, because she is incorporeal, in projecting Don Quijote’s sexual drive elsewhere, away from Aldonza Lorenzo’s rustic allure. This is what, ironically, turns her into an elaborate form of interdiction; love has become the law. In spite of his observance of it, the knight will still become a criminal and wind up as a fugitive from justice.

4

The Knight as Fugitive from Justice: The Quijote, Part I

No sooner does Don Quijote set out from his village in search of chivalric adventures than he runs into a picaresque world at the first inn. The second inn, Juan Palomeque’s, is the one most readers remember, and rightly so, because of the crucial episodes that take place within it. It is the building that defines Part I, in contrast to the duke’s palatial home in Part II. But this first inn is also important because it is first and because it sets the tone or better, the dissonance, of the novel—the din of competing discourses of which it is composed (chivalric and picaresque in this case). Here, at the very threshold of his quest, Don Quijote will encounter, in the prostitutes and the innkeeper, the earliest representatives of the two themes that I am developing here—love and the law—in a picaresque setting replete with other transient characters of a similar ilk. The prostitutes represent love at its lowest level and the innkeeper the law, of which he has been a favorite object and whose representative he becomes mockingly when he knights Don Quijote. The novel’s plot will circle back to an inn, Juan Palomeque’s this time, in which Don Quijote will be subdued, caged, and returned home—a complete reversal of his accession to knighthood in the first inn. This first innkeeper is a retired pícaro, or rogue, who tells his own story to boast about a misspent but adventuresome youth. As with the prisoner of sex, here we have Cervantes drawing a round character with a few pen strokes.

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Readers of his time would recognize the innkeeper’s life as an itinerary of notorious picaresque emporia—gathering places where these rogues convened in large numbers to rejoice in each other’s company and in their collective rejection of society’s norms and the state’s laws. The population of rogues formed, in fact, a ‘‘countersociety’’—a society in reverse—with colonies in all the Spanish prisons, which were virtually run by the inmates, as we learn from Cristóbal de Chaves’s Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla.∞ The first innkeeper’s story is a map of picaresque life of sixteenth-century Spain, as Diego de Clemencín called it in his massive nineteenth-century edition.≤ His mock confession (relayed by the narrator) is a conceited chronicle in which he translates with great ironic flair his life as a criminal into a chivalric romance. It is the language of literature in the process of being contaminated by that of the jailhouse, as it is contained in the legal documents pertaining to the innkeeper, the only discourse capable of inscribing—that is, of restraining—this seasoned crook. But by his rhetorical skill, comparable to that of the prisoner of sex, he can subvert it. Instead of being told in the first person, as in a conventional picaresque novel, the innkeeper’s story is reported in an indirect style that underscores the ironic process by which picaresque adventures are narrated as if they were chivalric ones. The performance is very much a part of his selfdefinition as a devious, skillful trickster—hence the narrator is needed to act it out, as it were. The innkeeper avails himself of a common rhetorical ruse among thugs—a form of jocular transposition and inversion of meanings and values. In their jargon, called germanía, it was customary to say one thing to mean the opposite, a poetic display as elaborate and baroque as that of contemporary Góngora-style verse. ‘‘Germanía,’’ according to the Spanish Academy, derives from ‘‘hermano,’’ ‘‘brother’’; it is the secret language of criminal brotherhoods. It was also known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the language of the brothels.≥ The inversion of meanings is akin to the practice of ‘‘signifying’’ among American blacks and of choteo among Cubans.∂

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Before I look at the passage containing the innkeeper’s biography and move on to examine Don Quijote’s criminal career, I should perhaps give a thumbnail sketch of the picaresque, about which I have already written some in the chapter on the galley slaves, and about which there will be more in subsequent chapters. It is important that I do so too because there seem to be gross misconceptions about the picaresque in the English-speaking world. These stem from the term romance as applied to narrative in the American academy, thanks mostly to Northrop Frye’s influential Anatomy of Criticism. This is a concept that does not exist in Spanish and has no currency in Spanish-

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language criticism. (To add to the confusion ‘‘romance’’ means ‘‘ballad’’ in Spanish.) I find ‘‘romance’’ useful in English to refer to chivalric narratives, which have stereotypical characters with little development and standard plot lines. But this is hardly the case with picaresque stories, which we call ‘‘novelas’’ in Spanish and do not adhere to anything resembling Frye’s definition of ‘‘romance.’’∑ The picaresque, as a literary genre, was inaugurated in 1554 with the publication of the anonymous La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, and of His Fortunes and Misfortunes).∏ The Lazarillo established the conventions of the genre: it is the first-person narrative of a petty criminal who tells his life from birth to the moment he writes, emphasizing his poverty and troubled childhood, his serving a series of depraved and abusive masters, and his being immersed in a world of thievery, violence, prostitution, and pervasive corruption. This is a world that had already appeared, but in a different mode, in the 1499 La Celestina. Some of these elements had also been featured in European narrative fiction, particularly Italian, from Il Novellino to Boccaccio and later Bandello, but not all together at once, and without the aura of criminality and persecution by judicial and penal authorities. This change is manifest in the very rhetoric the text of picaresque fiction assumes, which is part of its defiant irony. The picaresque narrative took the form of a legal document: the deposition, or relación, that the criminal gives to account and justify his current predicament, his caso, or case, typically an entanglement with the law. Lazarillo’s plight is that he has married the mistress of an archpriest to serve as a cover for their cohabitation, which makes him a willing cuckold and an accessory to a clergyman’s corruption. His is no simple fornication, it is complex—a fornicación calificada. Lazarillo’s tone is one of ironic self-exculpation: how, having the life that I have had, could I have turned out otherwise? His is the first ironic novelistic voice, a truly revolutionary innovation in narrative fiction: a criminal telling his own life not to God, like Augustine, but to a judge, a lay temporal authority. This template was followed forty-five years later by the book that came to be known as the quintessential picaresque novel, Mateo Alemán’s (1547– 1614) Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), whose second part (1605) was called Atalaya de la vida humana (Watchtower of Human Life). Here the scope of the narrative has been greatly amplified and the pícaro, who has spent time as a galley slave, tells his life after having undergone a conversion to the good. So his confession is presumably one of repentance, offered as example of what not to do, but like all such pious literary texts, the relish with which evil is narrated belies the professed devout intentions. The novel is, nevertheless,

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studded with vexing sermonizing after each of the adventures. The zealotry of Counter-Reformation Spain has intervened in the years since Lazarillo. Still, the depiction of criminal life throughout a vast landscape that exceeds Spain to encompass Italy is so shocking and pitiless, that the Guzmán is, indeed, a powerful example of early realism. The picaresque mode continued in Spain with substantial variations in the works of Cervantes himself, but also in those of Francisco de Quevedo, Francisco López de Ubeda, and others. Elsewhere in Europe it had a vast and influential following in Lesage’s Gil Blas, von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, and so on until the present. There are quite a few modern picaresques, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Felix Krull and quite a few Spanish and Latin American ones. Spanish criticism credits the picaresque with being the origin of the modern novel. (The English, of course, claim the honor for Fielding, and the French, parbleu, for Madame de Lafayette.) Rafael Salillas, a brilliant if today nearly forgotten nineteenth-century Spanish criminologist, maintains that the picaresque, particularly Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, is the genesis of criminology as a science because of its detailed and uncensored depiction of criminal life.π He makes a very persuasive case. From the perspective of literature and Cervantes, what is most relevant is that in presenting the life of the hampa, or underworld, the authors of picaresque novels were laying bare the most frightful manifestations of the human, all too human in general, bereft of the embellishments of morality and customs. If the Renaissance was interested in the study of man, the picaresque constituted a deeper probe than the analyses of princes, courtiers, ironic selfanalysts, and Platonic lovers (Machiavelli, Castiglione, Ficino, Montaigne). For Salillas, as for Cervantes, criminal life inside and outside of prisons was like the negative (in all senses) yet accurate portrait of society. For Cervantes and for literature the most compelling aspect of picaresque life was the individuating detail, the originality of the deviant, his bizarre behavior, first captured in the fine net of legal writing, where his story would have first been told. In the picaresque the program of representation due to the casuistry of Spanish law (studied here in chapter 2) crosses over into literature to leave an indelible mark on the history of realism and of the novel. Cervantes found in the picaresque a poetics of the vile that he worked into the Quijote and some of the Exemplary Stories, as well as a poetics of everyday life, which elevated to literature the common things detailed in legal documents as they itemized and inventoried the real world in which the pícaro roamed. The origin of the word ‘‘pícaro,’’ from which the terms ‘‘picaresque’’ in general and ‘‘picaresque novel’’ in particular derived, has been the object of

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debate, as could be expected. I note that the Oxford English Dictionary has both ‘‘pícaro’’ and ‘‘picaroon’’ as being used in English already in the seventeenth century. The most likely origin is the verb ‘‘picar,’’ or ‘‘to cut,’’ according to the great etymologist Joan Corominas.∫ The jobs that some of these unsavory individuals held involved cutting: the ‘‘pinche de cocina,’’ or kitchen helper or porter, cuts up meats and vegetables, so he is nimble with knives. From there to ‘‘picar faltriqueras,’’ to snip pockets, was an easy transition, as was to stab people in order to kill them, maim them, or leave marks on their bodies. (‘‘Faltriqueras’’ were pockets hanging outside the pants, shirts, or vests that these characters would cut off and ran away with.) There is a great deal of aggression and physical violence in the picaresque, and the verb ‘‘picar’’ seems like an appropriate emblem of it. To this origin some had added ‘‘Picard,’’ the natives of Picardy—the old French province—who are said to have been particularly rowdy and dangerous as soldiers of fortune. Others have even claimed an Arabic origin for pícaro (‘‘to be poor’’—‘‘fakir-fígaro-fígaropícaro’’).Ω It seems to me that the most likely is ‘‘picar,’’ although I still have trouble with the dactyl ‘‘pícaro,’’ which is difficult to account for following the normal evolution of Spanish words from Latin to romance. Yet Corominas assures us that changes of that nature do occur, and, of course, ‘‘pícaro’’ could be a deliberate disfiguring of ‘‘picar’’ following the unconventional rules of the language of germanía, where such things occurred not only to the meaning of words but also to their pronunciation, because the pícaro’s secret jargon, or germanía, was given to wild troping and puns that transgressed ordinary laws of linguistic transformation, as those who spoke it eschewed those of society.

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This point brings me back to the passage in which the first innkeeper’s story is told: The innkeeper, who, as we have already observed, was a sort of a wag, and had from the beginning suspected that his lodger’s brain was none of the soundest, having heard him to an end, no longer entertained any doubts about the matter, and in order to regale himself and the rest of his guests with a dish of mirth, resolved to humor him in his extravagance. With this in view, he told him, that nothing could be more just and reasonable than his request, his conceptions being extremely well suited, and natural to such a peerless knight as his commanding presence and gallant demeanor demonstrated him to be: that he himself had, in his youth, exercised the honorable profession of errantry, strolling from place to place, in quest of adventures, in the course of which he did not fail to visit the suburbs of Malaga, the isles of Riaran, the booths of Seville, the marketplace of Segovia, the olive gardens of Valencia,

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the little tower of Granada, the bay of St Lucar, the spout of Cordova, the public houses of Toledo, and many other places, in which he had exercised the dexterity of his hands as well as the lightness of his heels, doing infinite mischief, courting widows without number, debauching maidens, ruining heirs, and in short, making himself known at the bar of every tribunal in Spain; that, at length, he had retired to this castle, where he lived on his own means, together with those of other people; accommodating knights-errant of every quality and degree, solely on account of the affection he bore to them, and to the coin which they parted with in return for his hospitality. (I, 3, pp. 15– 16) [El ventero, que, como está dicho, era un poco socarrón y ya tenía algunos barruntos de la falta de juicio de su huésped, acabó de creerlo cuando acabó de oírle semejantes razones, y, por tener que reír aquella noche, determinó de seguirle el humor; y así, le dijo que andaba muy acertado en lo que deseaba y pedía, y que tal presupuesto era propio y natural de los caballeros tan principales como él parecía y como su gallarda presencia mostraba; y que él, ansimesmo, en los años de su mocedad, se había dado a aquel honroso ejercicio, andando por diversas partes del mundo, buscando sus aventuras, sin que hubiese dejado los Percheles de Málaga, Islas de Riarán, Compás de Sevilla, Azoguejo de Segovia, la Olivera de Valencia, Rondilla de Granada, playa de Sanlúcar, Potro de Córdoba y las Ventillas de Toledo y otras diversas partes, donde había ejercitado la ligereza de sus pies, sutileza de sus manos, haciendo muchos tuertos, recuestando muchas viudas, deshaciendo algunas doncellas y engañando a algunos pupilos, y, finalmente, dándose a conocer por cuantas audiencias y tribunales hay casi en toda España; y que, a lo último, se había venido a recoger a aquel su castillo, donde vivía con su hacienda y con las ajenas, recogiendo en él a todos los caballeros andantes de cualquiera calidad y condición que fuesen, sólo por la mucha afición que les tenía y porque partiesen con él de sus haberes, en pago de su buen deseo. (pp. 55– 56)]

This is the life of an unrepentant thief and trickster who has been hauled before many criminal courts and lives off his ill-begotten fortune by continuing to fleece others. He has graduated from young pícaro and Don Juan type to middle-aged crook and is proud of it. There has been no conversion to the good here as in Guzmán de Alfarache; on the contrary, he shows a wistful regret for a criminal past now gone but hardly forgotten. However, the most interesting feature in the passage is the transformation of picaresque into chivalric adventures and the conquests of a common pimp into grand-style Don Juan–type erotic feats involving the seduction of widows and deflowering of maidens. The narrator echoes and magnifies in mock-heroic tones the innkeeper’s own sense of self-worth in a bombastic, if ambivalent, eulogy. This

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is the flip side of Don Quijote’s translation of tawdry, everyday reality into chivalric terms, as when he calls the whores at the inn ‘‘doncellas’’ (virgins), which astonishes and delights them because the very concept could not be further from their profession. The mockery highlights the innkeeper’s chicanery, holding him up as the very exemplar of criminality, cynicism, and radical lack of values. The narrator, echoing the innkeeper, accomplishes the transformation by a typically Cervantean twist, not just by following a germanía trope. By 1605, when Part I of the Quijote was published, the picaresque style of life had acquired a literary dimension, in great measure because of the success of Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. In other words, pícaro was a role one could play like that of knight; high and low literature had the same effect and followed common tropes, as did the language of germanía and Gongoristic poetry. The character that had been plucked out of the archive of criminal cases had become a novelistic type. It is conceivable, and Cervantes suggests it here and in ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo,’’ one of the Exemplary Stories, that some of the real pícaros had chosen that path not because of need but to play the role and to revel as a group in their collective rejection of society. They are, in a sense, doing the same as Don Quijote by adopting the style of a literary character and setting out on a life of adventure according to books read, not to society’s rules. This is the reason the innkeeper can transform pícaro into knight. Of course, given the mock-heroic tone and irony of the passage, it is most likely that the innkeeper is also shrouding in a literary mantle the reasons for his turning to picaresque life, which were more than likely poverty and his natural inclination to evil. The third-person indirect style allows the reader to perceive the distance between truth and its embellishment. The truth of the innkeeper’s story is no doubt written and stored in the criminal records of all those courts and tribunals mentioned, the veritable source and archive of picaresque lives. The traveling prostitutes, who are ennobled by Don Quijote’s chivalric rhetoric, are on their way to Seville with some muleteers. Picaresque life is migratory, and the inns in the Quijote serve as gathering places for the cornucopia of rogues of both sexes. Seville was the capital of picardía, the gateway to the New World, and in general a center of criminal life. (Seville was the only port through which Spain had commerce with its American empire.) These prostitutes bring to mind similar ones in La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Guzmán de Alfarache. But here they also stand in sharp contrast to Dulcinea and the knight’s imaginings about this farm girl elevated to the exalted status of courtly love lady. In their kindness to Don Quijote the prostitutes also

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reveal a common Cervantean topic: the goodness of delinquents within the rules of their own world and independent of their being outside the law. And the prostitutes are outside the law merely by being on the road, away from their homes and the protective legal custody of fathers and brothers. Their wandering ways are a component of their depravity. Lust and criminality— love and the law—surround Don Quijote at the inn, a background against which he thrusts the rhetorical flights drawn from the courtly love tradition and the chivalric romances. It is a contrast that also underscores the clash between the feats that Don Quijote thinks he is accomplishing and the criminal acts he is really committing. He sets out determined to deal with ‘‘grievances to be redressed, wrongs to be rectified, errors amended, abuses to be reformed, and debts to be settled’’ (I, 2, p. 9). Which in the Spanish has a more legalistic tone: ‘‘según eran los agravios que pensaba deshacer, tuertos que enderezar, sinrazones que enmendar, y abusos que mejorar, y deudas que satisfacer’’ (p. 45). (‘‘Tuertos’’ has the same origin as the English ‘‘tort,’’ in Latin ‘‘twisted.’’) The disparity between the justice he plans to dispense and the series of injuries, torts, and damages that he causes is crucial to understanding Part I of the Quijote because the knight’s criminal record contributes to the novel’s shape—a record that could be written by setting specific instances of misbehavior under each of the categories of offense that he plans to correct. It is a record that is the reverse of his intentions. The pursuit and capture of the hidalgo, and the restitution made for some of the injuries and damages that he causes, organize the book. The picaresque backdrop at the inn also defines Don Quijote, which is part of the reason he ‘‘officially’’ assumes his new identity there. It is the exact opposite, the mirror image, of the innkeeper’s turning his life as a pícaro into that of a knight. From now on Don Quijote’s criminal record, his wandering along roads and through wilderness and his catastrophic sojourns at Juan Palomeque’s inn make him into a pícaro instead of a knight. Don Quijote is the first hero in the Western tradition to be a fugitive from justice, one whose life is defined by flight from the authorities of an organized state. The wily Ulysses returns from war shrouded in glory, and his trek home is staked out by a series of obstacles that put his courage and mettle to the test. Aeneas’s journey takes him to the solemn task of founding Rome. The pilgrim in Dante’s Divine Comedy seeks transcendence in the sublime quest for Beatrice. The pícaros, Lázaro, Guzmán, and Pablos, lack the heroic grandeur to which Don Quijote aspires, but they do provide a close model and similar ambience, a world of criminals and representatives of justice within which the mad hidalgo will attempt to revive chivalric adventures. Don Quijote’s flight

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and capture are cast within the discourse of the law because he is now the citizen of a body politic whose morals and mores are at odds with his heroic aspirations and his outdated concept of justice. The pervasive presence of the law as context to Don Quijote’s actions is a sharp reminder of the knight’s real status—of the gap between what he thinks he is entitled to and that to which the changing social and political conditions have reduced him. As an hidalgo, or petty nobleman, he considered himself, if not completely beyond the reach of the law, at least due certain exemptions and privileges, which he elevates through the language of chivalry to the level of a caballero entitled to use the don—he was not as a mere hidalgo. Knights are above the law. But the law—that is, justice—does catch up with him, signaling the change in Spanish society, and the stark fact that he is not only heir to his deeds, as he says, but responsible for his actions—he is a subject, subject to criminal justice like any other. Hidalgos were gradually losing their privileges. The devastating humiliation of punishment is partly staved off by his madness, which protects him through Part I from the reality of his social condition and allows him to rationalize not only his defeats but his arrest and caging at the end. The mere fact that Don Quijote can be served with an arrest warrant reveals the erosion of the nobility’s exemptions—he is released to the priest and barber not because of his social status but because of his insanity. The convolution of the plot through punishment and reparation at the end make the whole story meaningful: it frames, as it were, the hero (pun intended). There are many unanswered questions about the structure of the Quijote’s plot, which seems to be merely episodic with no anticipated end in sight— there is one adventure after another, with characters who reappear and situations that are repeated, creating some patterns but with hardly a guiding line of development. No foreseeable end to his quest looms in the future, as in the case of Dante’s pilgrim. There is no sequence of actions linked by necessity to build an Aristotelian chain of events, either, though we know from chapters 47 and 48 of Part I that Cervantes was highly conversant with the Poetics and its Spanish and Italian commentators. Nor is there the overall shape that would be provided by the pícaro’s life, a plot structure already known and even parodied by Cervantes in the figure of Ginés de Pasamonte. This is the kind of plot that carries the rogue from birth to the moment he tells the story, proceeding through a series of events and masters that lead to his corruption and, in some instances, his conversion. There is no such pattern in the novel, in spite of Cervantes’ reference to the story of Don Quijote as a caso, clearly suggesting that what he found in the archives of La Mancha was a criminal case, the record of Don Quijote’s weird behavior and misdeeds. There is not even the

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story of a fabulous birth, like that of Amadís de Gaula, Don Quijote’s model, whose youth and training as a knight are narrated in loving detail in the bestknown chivalric romance. We learn, in fact, hardly anything about Don Quijote’s family and youth, as if a determining beginning had been purposely avoided. (The use of ‘‘lugar’’ in the first sentence of the novel is also a way of withdrawing any kind of determinism from Don Quijote’s origin in the most concrete fashion, as is the narrator’s refusal to reveal the name of the village.) In the first sentence of the book there is a clash between a beginning dictated by tradition, ‘‘In such and such a place there dwelt,’’ and a Renaissance author’s will to create an original work of literature: ‘‘whose name I do not care to remember.’’ There is also an echo of a legal document in which place and time are specified, as in a relación. Don Quijote’s only relevant life is the one he invents for himself as a literary character within the fiction. That life, however, is only good as a setup for the mounting yet disconnected number of episodes that occur in roads and inns. It is, in fact, the legal cast of the story, the knight’s criminal acts, persecution, and capture, that gives recognizable form to the plot, along with the partial reparations for the damages and injuries that he inflicts along the way. Don Quijote’s capture and submission at the end loops the plot, giving it a kind of closure. He is returned home caged, on a cart like the ones that were used to display criminals in order to hold them up to shame or carry them to the gallows. I will concentrate on this larger story here and leave the various shorter ones, beginning with Marcela and Grisóstomo, for following chapters.

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As we saw in chapter 1, after the galley slaves episode both Don Quijote and Sancho become fugitives of the law, although that was not their first misdeed by far. We discover in the final episodes in Juan Palomeque’s inn that the Holy Brotherhood had issued a warrant of arrest for the knight. Freeing the prisoners and injuring their wardens are Don Quijote’s most serious crimes, for they are committed directly against the crown, and in addition were offenses perpetrated in despoblado, on the open road, in an unpopulated area. As I explained, crimes in such places were singled out by Spanish law as particularly damnable because the victims had no chance of being helped by others—‘‘despoblado’’ means a barren place, a place without ‘‘pueblo,’’ without people, outside the town, a kind of wilderness, the uncivilized—literally, that which is not within the political because it is not in the polis or city. Despoblado is a place outside the scope of the law and of justice, the ‘‘unsheltered.’’ In other works by Cervantes the most hideous crimes are committed in such areas, as in ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ a story we will have

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occasion to examine later. In fact, most of Don Quijote’s crimes take place in despoblado; hence toward the end of the novel he and Sancho are called by one of the troopers of the Holy Brotherhood ‘‘salteadores de caminos’’ and the knight a ‘‘salteador de sendas y carreras’’ (p. 528): that is to say, highway robbers or a highwayman, individuals known for assaulting people on the open roads. This kind of criminal was accorded special attention and punishment in Spanish law because it was the crown’s charge to keep roads safe; therefore, offenses committed on them were considered against the crown, not against local or regional authorities. The laws were enacted and toughened in response to bandolerismo, or brigandage, a common scourge at the time that threatened the stability of the kingdom, represented in Part II by the figure of Roque Ginart. As we have already seen, there was a special police force organized to deal with such criminal activities in fields and roads: the Santa Hermandad, or the Holy Brotherhood. The Holy Brotherhood, which I have mentioned as an example of an institution created by the Catholic kings in their effort to achieve centralization, was sanctioned at the Cortes de Madrigal in 1476. The seat of the Holy Brotherhood was Toledo. It was essentially a revamping and consolidation of brotherhoods, independent vigilante forces scattered through Spain and dating back to the Middle Ages. The Holy Brotherhood’s duty was to patrol the despoblado, to pursue criminals who escaped from one jurisdiction to another, and to punish crimes deemed as rebellious against public order, including rape. It was more than just a rural police. It also acted as a court of justice whose sentences were notorious for their summary expediency and the severity and swiftness of the punishments meted out. Its cuadrilleros, or troopers, were feared and hated, and the institution declined as the towns that supported it through special taxes protested and eventually withdrew their financing. The troopers were like members of an official posse. By Cervantes’ time the strength of the Holy Brotherhood had been reduced and it was charged mostly with the control of brigandage, but consciousness of its presence and fear of its penchant to pass judgment and execute its harsh sentences without delay were still very vivid, as we can gather from Sancho’s apprehensions. He says that he can hear the troopers’ arrows buzzing around his ears because the Holy Brotherhood liked to execute criminals by tying them to a post and shooting them with their bows: ‘‘I give you notice, that all your errantry will stand you in little stead against the Holy Brotherhood, who don’t value all the knights-errant in the universe three farthings; and, in faith, this minute I think I hear their arrows buzzing about my ears’’ (I, 23, p. 163) [porque le hago saber que con la Santa Hermandad no hay usar de caballerías; que no se le da a

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ella por cuantos caballeros andantes hay dos maravedís; y sepa que ya me parece que sus saetas me zumban por los oídos (p. 248)]. The Holy Brotherhood is a constant and menacing presence in Part I. Juan Palomeque, the innkeeper, belongs to it, which leads one to believe that troopers and criminals were cut from the same cloth. But releasing the galley slaves and injuring the guards, while being the gravest offenses, are not the only punishable crimes the knight and (sometimes) his squire commit. Had Don Quijote been brought to trial at the end of Part I, the following list of offenses could have been produced against him. All of them are covered by contemporary Spanish law, and in some of the episodes there is direct allusion to the potential application of specific statutes. At that first inn, Don Quijote brains with his lance two carriers or muleteers who touched his arms while he is on their vigil. These are serious violent acts. When the first carrier touched Don Quijote’s arms, ‘‘[He] raising his lance with both hands, bestowed it with such good will upon the carrier’s head, that he fell prostrate on the ground, so effectually mauled, that, had the blow been repeated, there would have been no occasion to call a surgeon’’ (I, 3, p. 18) [alzó la lanza a dos manos y dio con ella tan gran golpe al arriero en la cabeza, que le derribó en el suelo tan maltrecho, que si segundara con otro, no tuviera necesidad de maestro que le curara (p. 58)]. And to the second: ‘‘[He] lifting up his lance, failed to break it into pieces on the carrier’s head, but not the head itself, which split into four’’(I, 3, pp. 18–19) [alzó otra vez la lanza, y, sin hacerla pedazos, hizo más de tres la cabeza del segundo arriero, porque se la abrió por cuatro (pp. 58–59)]. These are, of course, two cases of assault and battery resulting in serious injury. The episode in which Don Quijote forces Juan Haldudo to stop flogging Andrés is shrouded in legalisms and is one of several in which the issue of justice is at the forefront. Haldudo is not breaking the law by punishing Andrés, though he may be using excessive force. As in the galley slaves episode, Don Quijote acts as judge, but in doing so he has usurped Haldudo’s right to deal with his servant and threatened him with physical injury. We will learn later that Don Quijote’s actions have had the opposite effect of what he intended, and that in fact Andrés is a kind of pícaro on his way to visit places like those on the first innkeeper’s itinerary. In other words, he may very well have been guilty and Haldudo justified in punishing him. Don Quijote’s ad hoc seigneurial justice is out of step with current conditions and, in fact, leads to crime. We may remember here the lines from Richard L. Kagan’s superb Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile: 1500– 1700 that I quoted in chapter 1, which seem inspired by this very episode: ‘‘By the time Cervantes wrote about a

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pathetic knight setting out to preserve justice by means of chivalric valor and courageous derring-do, most of his readers would have equaled justice with the world of lawyers, judges, and other ‘men of the law.’ In this legalistic world, the figure of Don Quixote was not so much a joke as an anachronism. He represented a mythical age in which justice was possible without the help of lawyers and a bevy of legal briefs, but there was no room for an ageing knight errant in the labyrinth of Castile’s courts.’’∞≠ The irony is not just how ineffectual Don Quijote is, but how his actions to bring about justice are themselves criminal and punishable by law. The episode with the merchants from Toledo could have led to injury had Rocinante not stumbled, but Don Quijote did attack one of them in a fashion that, in spite of the chivalric models for the adventure, befitted a highway robber. Don Quijote has perpetrated here his first assault in despoblado against innocent and peaceful subjects availing themselves of the king’s highway. One of their servants beats him to a pulp in legitimate self-defense, settling the issue without recourse to official justice. After a brief stay at home and the acquisition of Sancho as squire, Don Quijote attacks the Benedictine friar in the episode that winds up with the battle against the Basque. This is another unprovoked assault: ‘‘and without waiting for any other reply, he put spurs to Rocinante, and couching his lance, attacked the first friar with such fury and resolution that, if he had not thrown himself from his mule, he would have come to the ground severely mauled, not without some desperate wound, nay, perhaps stone dead’’(I, 8, p. 48) [Y sin esperar más respuesta, picó a Rocinante y, la lanza baja, arremetió contra el primero fraile, con tanta furia y denuedo, que si el fraile no se dejara caer de la mula, él le hiciera venir al suelo mal de su grado, y aun mal ferido, si no cayera muerto (p. 100)]. The fight with the Basque is also punishable by law, as fighting in the open fields and roads—again, despoblado—was a serious offence, and the man sustains severe wounds: ‘‘he began to spout blood from his nostrils, mouth and ears’’ (I, 9, p. 55) [comenzó a echar sangre por las narices y por la boca, y por los oídos (p. 111)]. Sancho knows the gravity of the crime and is quick to suggest seeking sanctuary in a church, the only place safe from the reach of the law: ‘‘Sir, said he, I think it would be the wisest course for us to retreat to some church; for, as he with whom you fought remains in a sorry condition, ’tis odds but they inform the Holy Brotherhood of the affair, and have us apprehended: and verily, if they do, before we get out of prison, we may have a chance to sweat for it’’ (I, 10, pp. 57– 58) [—Paréceme, señor, que sería acertado irnos a retraer a alguna iglesia; que, según quedó maltrecho aquel con quien os com-

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batistes, no será mucho que den noticia del caso a la Santa Hermandad y nos prendan; y a fe que si lo hacen, que primero que salgamos de la cárcel que nos han de sudar el hopo (p. 113)]. Sancho is referring to being tortured, to which he, but not his noble master, was liable.∞∞ Sancho’s alarm is such that he insists: ‘‘I do know that the Holy Brotherhood commonly looks after those who quarrel and fight up and down the country’’ (I, 10, p. 58) [sólo sé que la Santa Hermandad tiene que ver con los que pelean en el campo (p. 113)]. In the episode with the men from Yanguas and their mares (who are so seductive to Rocinante), which is in parodic contrast with the Marcela and Grisóstomo story and a heavy satire of the courtly love tradition, Don Quijote injures another man: ‘‘the knight lent the first he met with such a hearty stroke with his sword, as laid open a leather jacket he wore, together with a large portion of his shoulder’’(I, 15, p. 93) [dio don Quijote una cuchillada a uno, que le abrió un sayo de cuero de que venía vestido, con gran parte de la espalda (p. 160)]. The men then proceed to thoroughly beat him, Sancho, and Rocinante and to flee for fear that they too can be hunted down by the Holy Brotherhood. More mayhem follows. Don Quijote kills more than seven sheep in the episode in which he takes the herds for armies of knights. This opens the list of property damage that he causes throughout Part I. The shepherds, in return, rain stones on Don Quijote and leave him for dead, fleeing in a hurry because they, like the men from Yanguas, also fear the Holy Brotherhood. There follows the adventure of the corpse, in which Don Quijote attacks the men in mourning who are transporting it, knocking one down and breaking his leg. The man claims that by injuring him Don Quijote has committed a great sacrilege and crime because he had already taken orders, alluding to specific statutes of the period. The man accuses Don Quijote of ‘‘having laid violent hands on consecrated things’’ (I, 19, p. 128) [ha puesto mano violenta en cosa sagrada (p. 206)], to which Don Quijote replies with a bit of pettifoggery that reveals his familiarity with the law, ‘‘I touched him not with my hands, but with my lance’’ (p. 152) [no puse las manos sino este lanzón (p. 206)]. To add insult to injury, Sancho plunders the supply ass that the men had with them. Breaking this man’s leg is the worst bodily injury that the knight causes in Part I, and whether the victim had actually taken first orders or not, Don Quijote would still be liable for a violent act committed in the open road and at night. Sancho would be prosecuted as a thief. Next comes the famous episode of the barber’s basin, in which the poor fellow is not injured because he jumps off his mount in the nick of time. But Don Quijote steals the basin, which Sancho assesses to be worth a handsome amount. Together with the provisions that they stole from the men with the

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corpse, Don Quijote and Sancho carry with them booty obtained by violent means on the open road. As with the merchants from Toledo, the Benedictine friars, and the men with the corpse, he has assaulted an innocent subject on the king’s highway. We have already looked closely at the episode in which Don Quijote frees the galley slaves and attacks their keepers, and here we are looking at how it structures the plot of the novel because Don Quijote is pursued and captured as a result. The whole chapter is packed with legalisms and with a very detailed depiction of the functioning of Spain’s criminal justice system, which clearly Cervantes knew well firsthand. The episode is not just about the law but about its enforcement, including, of course, deviations from it and institutionalized corruption. Sancho is the one most keenly aware of the danger they are in because of the seriousness of their offense, which has been against the crown, and not only because it was committed in the open road but because the condemned men were directly under the purview of royal authorities, as were all those assigned to the galleys. (Here domestic and foreign policy coalesced, as the prisoners provided the motive force for ships that enforced the latter.) Sancho provides the legal theory behind the potential sanctions against them. He says that the prisoners are ‘‘gente forzada del rey’’ (p. 236), translated by Smollett as a ‘‘chain of slaves compelled by the King to work in the galleys’’ (I, 22, p. 153), which reflects the legalistic precision of Sancho’s words. The squire further explains, like an expert jurist, that ‘‘la justicia, que es el mismo rey, no hace fuerza ni agravio a semejante gente, sino que los castiga en pena de sus delitos’’ (p. 236), rendered thus by Smollett: ‘‘justice, which is the king himself, never uses violence nor severity to such people, except as punishment for their crimes’’ (I, 22, p. 153). Sancho means that the king, in whom natural law is invested, or who incarnates it, is discharging his duties, not acting violently. When the priest catches up with them later and, to vex Don Quijote, tells a tall tale about having been assaulted by the freed prisoners, he corroborates Sancho’s legal interpretation. The perpetrator of the crime, he says, ‘‘was rebelling against his King and rightful sovereign, by acting contrary to his just commands, in depriving the galleys of their hands, and arousing the Holy Brotherhood, which hath continued so many years in undisturbed repose’’ (I, 29, p. 241) [quiso defraudar la justicia, ir contra su rey y señor natural, pues fue contra sus justos mandamientos. Quiso, digo, quitar a las galeras sus pies, poner en alboroto a la Santa Hermandad, que había muchos años que reposaba’’ (p. 344)]. ‘‘Rey y señor natural’’ means exactly that: his power to command issues from natural law. Don Quijote and Sancho, in fact, will from

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now until the end of Part I become fugitives from justice. They are being pursued both by the priest and barber and by the Holy Brotherhood, with the posses converging at the end to nab the knight. Don Quijote as fugitive from justice is a major ironic incongruity because of his perceived exemption from the law as an hidalgo and his deranged belief that he is a knight. But at this particular point—the episodes in the Sierra Morena—his being a fugitive is ironic in three particular ways that engage the overarching presence of penal law in the novel as applied to him. First, Don Quijote flees into the Sierra Morena to do penance for Dulcinea in the manner of chivalric heroes; but it is a penance, as Sancho reminds him, without a motive or reason because Dulcinea was not guilty of the sort of infidelity that Angelica committed in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, one of his master’s models. Don Quijote also has to make up his own delinquency to justify the penance: his only imaginable fault would be insufficient service to his lady, an infinite debt that is by definition impossible to repay. His is a punishment without a crime—his or his lady’s. Second, Don Quijote has, indeed, a genuine and pressing reason to become a fugitive because the Holy Brotherhood is surely after him for actual offenses. The lack of a real motive for penance is ironically counterbalanced by the genuine motive for flight, of which he is oblivious, but that more than justifies it. Don Quijote is a fugitive without a cause, but with a pending cause. Third, he is going to find in the Sierra Morena a mirror image of himself, Cardenio, who has a real reason to do penance because he has been betrayed by Luscinda and also because he has committed various assaults and thefts. He is remorseful too because his cowardice also led to his predicament. When Don Quijote and Cardenio meet they embrace like brothers. The ironic interplay between existent and nonexistent motives or causes is augmented by the Sierra Morena itself as a setting, as a place to expiate real and imaginary guilt—a site for literal rustication. The Sierra Morena is a true despoblado, in the juridical sense discussed before, and also a wilderness like the selva selvaggia of the Divine Comedy and of literary tradition. It is a labyrinth, too, as Javier Herrero has suggested.∞≤ Solitude and the starkest absence of civilization are its main characteristics, not to mention an inhospitable nature. Cardenio, the quintessential inhabitant of this landscape, is a wild man, with sporadically violent contacts with other human beings. Dorotea, his counterpart in the Sierra Morena, who completes this primal and alienated couple, is dressed as a man, as if to highlight the disorder prevalent in these woods; it is chaos prior to civilization and the separation of the sexes. She has been sexually assaulted by her employer and by the servant who helped her to escape, whom she hurls down a cliff when

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defending herself. We do not know if he survives. These are dangerous woods. Because of all this lawlessness, the Sierra Morena threatens to become allegorical—abstract in the purity of its lacks and absences and chartable by recourse to systems of thought and belief. But this tendency is counterbalanced by the juridical nature of the despoblado, which gives it a contemporaneous air, a factuality, that withdraws it from the literary and the ideological—it is a space named and classified by the legal codes in all their casuistry and contingency. Outlaws running away from the Holy Brotherhood hide here, not lost pilgrims in search of sublime salvation. Cardenio’s and Dorotea’s counterparts are the galley slaves, who must be hiding in the very bowels of the earth (as Ginés de Pasamonte put it), in parts not too dissimilar to the Sierra Morena. They must be in despoblados of their own, committing the kind of crime that the priest mentions in his made-up story about them. Like Don Quijote, they are true fugitives from justice, dwelling—confined, rusticated—in some hostile region. Will they be redeemed by this punishment? When Ginés reappears it is to steal Sancho’s donkey, but in Part II he has transformed himself into Maese Pedro, master puppeteer, a kind of redemption by art. Don Quijote emerges from the hills ready to take on the hideous giant Pandafilando de la Fosca Vista (Panphilanderer of the Menacing Gaze). After serving time in the Sierra Morena the conflicts in Part I are resolved, once the characters repair to Juan Palomeque’s inn. It is as if their season in the woods had purified them, as if the rustication had led to their conversion to the lawful. At the inn Don Quijote will add to the list of damages that he causes by slashing the wineskins and spilling their contents. But in so doing he slays the ghastly giant Pandafilando de la Fosca Vista and prepares the way for the scene in which justice will be served and order restored by the various marriage vows made or observed. Again, this may contain an allegorical suggestion, except for the grotesqueness of it all and the fact that the giant and the whole story of Princess Micomicona is a hoax. More importantly, the courtlike scene at which settlements are reached is, after all, Palomeque’s inn, the kind of picaresque abode that opened Part I. The criminal site becomes an improvised courtroom. There is an ironic appropriateness to this, for the inn and picaresque life are the true realms in which Don Quijote has moved and in which he himself will be recognized by the Holy Brotherhood troopers, one of whom recollected that among other warrants for apprehending delinquents, he had one against Don Quixote, issued by the Holy Brotherhood, on account of his having set the galley-slaves at liberty, as Sancho had very justly feared. This coming into his head, he was resolved to assure himself, whether or not the

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knight’s person agreed with the description, and pulling out of his bosom a bundle of parchment, he soon found what he sought, and beginning to spell with great deliberation (for he was by no means an expert reader) between every word he fixed his eyes upon the knight, whose visage he compared with the marks specified in the warrant, and discovered beyond all doubt, that he was the very person described. (I, 45, p. 393) [le vino a la memoria que entre algunos mandamientos que traía para prender a algunos delincuentes, traía uno contra don Quijote, a quien la Santa Hermandad había mandado prender por la libertad que dio a los galeotes, y como Sancho con mucha razón había temido. Imaginando, pues, esto, quiso certificarse si las señas que de don Quijote traía venían bien, y sacando del seno un pergamino, topó con el que buscaba, y poniéndosele a leer de espacio, porque no era buen lector, a cada palabra que leía ponía los ojos en don Quijote, y iba cotejando las señas del mandamiento con el rostro de don Quijote, y halló que sin duda alguna era el que el mandamiento rezaba. (pp. 527–28)]

The plot’s loop is closed—Sancho’s prophecy fulfilled—when the document with Don Quijote’s arrest warrant is read. (The warrant, by the way, like the sentences of the galley slaves, is another text mentioned but not reproduced in the novel—we do not get to read it.) The knight’s case is closed, as it were, as his body and the description yield a match. Here we have an instance where casuistry’s program of representation has been successful. It is now up to the priest to plead, as had the first innkeeper, that because of Don Quijote’s mental condition he will never be convicted, and to ask that the prisoner be released to him and the barber to return him to his village. Justice is prevailing, not just in the lofty realm in which abstract ideas, theories, and religious doctrines can be shuffled like cards, but in the real world of warrants, arrests, and the confinement of bodies. Because it is bodies, not souls, that are at issue in this fallen world ruled by the law, the priest acts as a lawyer, not in his capacity as minister of God. The priest’s argument about Don Quijote’s immunity by reason of his insanity is grounded in Spanish law going back to (at least) the Siete partidas in the thirteenth century. For instance: ‘‘The same thing that we stated about minors applies to madmen or those who are devoid of memory, who cannot be charged for actions committed while they were suffering their derangement’’; ‘‘We also state that if a man who is mad or devoid of memory, or a minor of less than ten and a half years of age, killed another man, that he does not commit any crime because he does not know, nor understand, the fault that he commits’’; ‘‘Furthermore, the man who is insane and does not act properly cannot be charged because he does not know or understand right from wrong’’

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(Esso mismo [of what is stated about minors], dezimos, que seria del loco, o del furioso, o del desmemoriado, que lo non pueden acusar de cosa que fiziesse mientras que le durare la locura; Otrosi dezimos, que si algund ome que fuesse loco, o desmemoriado, o moço que non fuesse de edad de diez años e medio, matasse a otro, que no cae porende en pena ninguna: porque non sabe, nin entiende, el yerro que faze); Otrosi, el ome que es fuera de su seso, non faze ningun fecho endereçadamente: porende non se puede obligar, porque non sabe, nin entiende, pro ni daño).∞≥ Closure, in the case of Don Quijote, is brought about within the limits prescribed by the law. These texts, these Partidas, are the foundation of those in force at the time and are effective in invalidating the one read by the officer of the Holy Brotherhood. Both function within the system. It is at the inn too where the barber whose basin was stolen is paid and the innkeeper recites a list of the expenses incurred by Don Quijote, Sancho, and their mounts, in addition to the substantial damages that they have caused in their two calamitous visits. The beginning of chapter 46 has the tone of a court settlement, with the representatives of the Holy Brotherhood exercising their judicial duties and the various parties’ damages paid and, in the case of the barber, with a document issued to prove it: the curate talked so effectually, and the knight himself acted such extravagances, that the troopers must have been more mad than he if they had not plainly perceived his defect; therefore they thought proper to be satisfied, and even performed the office of mediators betwixt the barber and Sancho Panza, who still maintained the fray with great animosity; for, the troopers, as limbs of justice, brought the case to an arbitration, and decided it in such a manner, as left both parties, if not fully satisfied, at least in some sort content with the determination, which was, that the pack-saddles should be exchanged, but the girths and halters remain as they were. With regard to Mambrino’s helmet, the curate, unperceived by Don Quixote, took the barber aside, and paid him eight reals for the basin, taking a receipt in full, that cleared the knight from any suspicion of fraud, from thence forward, for ever, amen. . . . The innkeeper, who took particular notice of the full satisfaction which the barber had received from the curate, demanded payment of Don Quixote for the damage he had done to the bags, and the loss of his wine, swearing that neither Rocinante nor Sanchos’s ass should stir from the stable until he should be satisfied to the last farthing. The curate pacified the landlord, and Don Fernando paid the bill, although the judge very sincerely offered to take that upon himself. In this manner, universal concord was restored, so that the inn no longer represented the disorder in King Agramante’s camp, but rather the peace and quiet that reigned in the time of Octavius Caesar: and this blessing was generally ascribed to the laudable intention and great eloquence of the priest, together with the incomparable generosity of Don Fernando. (I, 46, pp. 395–96)

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[En efecto, tanto les supo el cura decir, y tantas locuras supo don Quijote hacer, que más locos fueran que no él los cuadrilleros si no conocieran la falta de don Quijote; y así, tuvieron por bien apaciguarse, y aun de ser medianeros de hacer las paces entre el barbero y Sancho Panza, que todavía asistían con gran rancor a su pendencia. Finalmente, ellos, como miembros de justicia, mediaron la causa y fueron árbitros della, de tal modo, que ambas partes quedaron, si no del todo contentas, a lo menos en algo satisfechas, porque se trocaron las albardas, y no las cinchas y jáquimas; y en lo que tocaba a lo del yelmo de Mambrino, el cura, a socapa y sin que don Quijote lo entendiese, le dio por la bacía ocho reales, y el barbero le hizo una cédula de recibo y de no llamarse a engaño por entonces, no por siempre jamás amén. . . . El ventero, a quien no se le pasó por alto la dádiva y recompensa que el cura había hecho al barbero, pidió el escote de don Quijote, con el menoscabo de sus cueros y falta de vino jurando que no saldría de la venta Rocinante, ni el jumento de Sancho, sin que se le pagase primero hasta el último ardite. Todo lo apaciguó el cura, y lo pagó don Fernando, puesto que el oidor, de muy buena voluntad, había también ofrecido la paga; y de tal manera quedaron todos en paz y sosiego, que ya no parecía la venta la discordia del campo de Agramante, como don Quijote había dicho, sino la misma paz y quietud del tiempo de Octaviano; de todo lo cual fue común opinión que se debían dar las gracias a la buena intención y mucha elocuencia del señor cura y la incomparable liberalidad de don Fernando. (pp. 530–31)]

The priest has argued his case well and has taken care of the proper compensations. Restitution is a form of resolution, an ending of sorts, a kind of closure provided by the legal cast of the plot rather than by a literary device drawn from narrative tradition. The innkeeper and his wife are ‘‘made whole,’’ as it were, as was the second barber. But there are others, like the shepherds and the man whose leg was broken, who are not compensated for their losses or injuries. Part II of the novel, which is among various other things a profound commentary of Part I, with episodes sometimes matching ones from the first part as direct rewritings, has what I take to be a hilarious and complicated gloss on this scene of reparations at the inn. I am referring to the aftermath of Don Quijote’s destruction of Maese Pedro’s puppet show (II, 26), when the knight is made to pay for every figurine smashed, with the award being established according to the rank of the character each represents in the story and the amount of damage inflicted to the object itself. This is a brilliant passage in which literary characters acquire concrete existence, but only as figures in a puppet show, and while their injuries are reduced to the material damage done to their images, their status in the fiction also determines their worth. There are faint traces here of contemporary debates about religious images, but more to the point the fiction in Part I, shrouded in a legal mantle and resolved in a

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trial-like scene, is brought down to a miniaturized but real drama involving restitution in a manner that involves both fiction and the most trivial reality. It is as if Cervantes were saying that, indeed, the conflicts in Part I were of a judicial nature but transformed into literature to such a degree that they can be represented by this blatantly fictitious puppet theater. In short, this episode is a parody of Part I that underlines the literary role that reparations play. Cervantes, as is often the case, preempts critical commentary, such as mine here. After the reparations the charade to cage Don Quijote for the return home is organized. This is another masterstroke, by which the knight will be punished but on his own terms, at the level of fiction. Don Quijote will still engage in two more violent acts: his fight with the goatherd and the attack on those carrying an image of the Virgin. But the overall pattern of injury, damage, judgment, and restitution is closed at the inn. Two patterns have emerged from the foregoing. One is the overall story of crime, pursuit, capture, and confinement of Don Quijote, with the attendant plot of damages and restitution. The other is the one of rustication and redemption, or correction and reform, involving Don Quijote and the characters in the Sierra Morena. Both intersect at the inn, which is transformed from picaresque emporium into court of justice, with priests, policemen, judges, assessments of damages, negotiated settlements, and conscription. What gives shape to the Quijote, Part I are these underlying legal stories and the gradual merging of pícaro and knight to create a protagonist that will endure in the history of the novel: one caught in the net of the law, which confines him as it defines him and gives him social and ontological substance.

5

The Amorous Pestilence: Interpolated Stories in the Quijote, Part I

As soon as the Quijote was published in 1605 Cervantes came under attack for the way in which he had inserted so many extraneous stories in the book. There is no denying that at least the one called ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ is totally independent from the plot and characters in the novel, who are (with the exception of Don Quijote, who is asleep while it is read, and the priest, who reads it out loud) mere listeners. It is also true that there seems to be no end to the stories, from that of Marcela and Grisóstomo to the unfinished one of Vicente de la Rosa and Leandra as the novel winds down. They follow one another with persistent regularity. By the time we reach the adventure of Clara and Don Luis it is apparent that there is something comical about their very accumulation, as if Cervantes were saying to the reader, ‘‘If you think that I am finished with these, here is another!’’ But Cervantes was stung by the criticism, which he acknowledged at the start of Part II, when he has Sansón Carrasco say, as he gives to the knight and his squire a report about Part I, which he has read: ‘‘One of the faults that are found with the history, added the bachelor, is that the author has inserted in it a novel entitled The Impertinent Curiosity. Not that the thing itself is bad, or poorly executed; but because it is unreasonable, and has nothing to do with the story of his worship signor Don Quixote’’ (II, 3, p. 475) [—Una de las tachas que ponen a la tal historia—dijo el bachiller—es que su autor puso en ella una novela intitulada

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El curioso impertinente; no por mala ni por mal razonada, sino por no ser de aquel lugar, ni tiene que ver con la historia de su merced el señor don Quijote (p. 652)]. Cervantes also saw to it that the stories that he did include in Part II were woven into the plot, even if the devices used to do so are often blatantly contrived. Efforts to account for the presence of the interpolated stories in Part I have ranged from intricate formalist justifications to thematic ones, and combinations of the two.∞ I do not think that their existence and placement can be justified in terms of any overarching determining form, because it seems to me that Cervantes’ greatest innovation is to have let improvisation enter into his creative process and be apparent in the final product (which is, of course, not final at all). This is so, I believe, because he wants to assign a role to chance in his invention, which adds to the irony of the book by leaving in it an unassimilated residue beyond the control of the creative mind. There is an unfinished quality to the Quijote, both in the sense of there being no conclusive ending, particularly in Part I, and also no polish, no glow of perfection. It lacks finish, as it were. The self-reflexive games involving authors and manuscripts is the most blatant manifestation of this; a book that has presumably gone through so many hands and stages in getting to the reader can hardly aspire to be perfect. Thematic justifications for the stories, precisely because they tend to be less determining, are probably more plausible. The interpolated stories do reflect dominant themes of the principal plot, or make up series of variations on the topic of love, valuable for their richness and multiplicity more than for the cohesiveness of the whole ensemble. I believe that the underlying unity is found in the relation of the love stories to legal issues. Javier Herrero has shown how the stories in the Sierra Morena involving Fernando, Luscinda, Cardenio, and Dorotea are, in fact, ‘‘resolved’’ by Don Quijote as he slashes at the wineskins, thinking that he is slaying the giant Pandafilando de la Fosca Vista.≤ It is a kind of metafictional conclusion, in that the giant is the characters’ own concoction, or a fictional translation of Dorotea’s plight. That tight nucleus of narrative strands coheres at various levels, including the allegorical one that Herrero proposes: Don Quijote has killed the monster of lasciviousness, and the couples are now free to return to society, marry, multiply, and be happy forever after. But Herrero’s allegorical interpretation unravels once we remember that the whole thing begins as a hoax to return Don Quijote home. He can hardly be seen as the Christian knight who has brought about a moral ending to the conflicts because his agency is so ridiculous and he is a madman. Only the theme of love as the indistinct force behind everyone’s actions, including Don Quijote’s, is broad enough to account for movement in the plot.

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Herrero’s is only a partial solution, as grand as it is, because it does not account for the other stories, such as Grisóstomo’s and Marcela’s, Clara’s and Don Luis’s, Vicente’s and Leandra’s, and the captive’s and Zoraida’s. Cervantes was experimenting with a loose narrative structure without precedent, except in the chivalric romances that he is parodying, where tales engender other tales almost ad infinitum. But even in those the digressions tend to include the protagonist in some way. I am inclined to accept a variation of the thematic-formalist approach, seeing the connection among the stories and their own link to the main plot as guided by a sharing of what I would like to call commanding subjects—contents that rule form, as it were. Thus I think it best to read these stories against the backdrop of Don Quijote’s and Dulcinea’s, and as conflicts involving love and the law in the terms that I have been outlining. This kind of reading erodes the allegorical dimension that Herrero suggests by pitting the concreteness of conflicts and individuals in a social setting against the abstractions of the courtly love tradition and theological notions of justice—justice here is that which the real laws of the realm allow or forbid. Love and the law are transformed into literature in Cervantes by assuming the concreteness of their historically bound discourses. The quarrels in the interpolated stories involve crimes of passion, torts, grievances, and debts, and marriage is central to their resolution both as a potential or actual legal form of closure and as a literary one. (Literary in the sense that marriage is a convention of narrative and of the theater as an ending.) Differences of social status are often at the root of the lovers’ conflicts: not necessarily questions of wealth, because sometimes the commoners are richer than the aristocrats. This being so, the tale called ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ is probably included for contrast, being so purely and unequivocally literary in origin and structure, which is the reason why we, as readers, join the characters in the somewhat passive role of listeners. The story seems to exist in a pure literary realm before the picaresque and Cervantes. It is also the only story in Part I the main action of which takes place after marriage, thus having a tragic ending, whereas most of the others, which wind up with marriage, end as comedies. Tragedy seems literary in its self-enclosed perfection, whereas comedy has more ragged edges and thrives on improvisation, real or feigned. But there are exceptions, such as the story I am going to discuss here, because there are always exceptions in Cervantes that anticipate and preempt critical interpretations by revealing their foolhardiness in excluding the products of improvisation—their presumption of accounting for it all without leaving residues. The exceptions project onto interpretation the irony of the Cervantean text by showing its rends and tears, its blatantly futile efforts to

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hide its own improvisations, which are, like Don Quijote’s visor, incapable of sustaining the first good blow. The only solution is complicity, to join in the ironic self-doubt and disavowal of authorial control and authority. Contrary to my theory, the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode has a tragic ending although it occurs before marriage and because marriage is rejected as a solution.

❖

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The Marcela and Grisóstomo story is of special significance because it is the first and sets the tone for all the others and is linked to one of the main themes of the book, the one concerning the nature, function, and effect of literature on individuals and society. It is an episode in which love and the law are tightly intertwined and which culminates in a variation of the trial scene. Literature, as it were, is also on trial here. The framing episodes of the MarcelaGrisóstomo story are very relevant, too: the speech of the Golden Age and the fracas with the men from Yanguas provoked by Rocinante’s surprising lustfulness stand in sharp contrast to it while at the same time being clearly correlated. The interlude with the goatherds, during which Don Quijote delivers his speech on the Golden Age, a kind of overture, precedes the Marcela and Grisóstomo story. The battle with the Basque has just ended and the hero and his squire have fled into the forest. Sancho already feels that they are fugitives from justice because of the serious injuries suffered by his master’s opponent, as we saw. The Holy Brotherhood must be after them, he fears. But they find instead peace and solace with the goatherds, who offer them food, drink, entertainment, and hospitality. The Marcela and Grisóstomo conflict that follows focuses on the clash between literature and reality or, better, between an idealized past and a present perceived as a fallen time. This contrast is the main theme of Don Quijote’s speech on the Golden Age. The here and now is represented by the crass but kind goatherds, the idealized past by the image of the Golden Age that Don Quijote evokes through a series of literary topics. It is the kindness of the goatherds, however, that inspires Don Quijote to think of the Golden Age because, in spite of historical changes that are obvious to the point of being grotesque, human goodness remains a constant. The thread between the past and the present is not in the literary evocation but in the goatherds’ goodness and generosity, which are in consonance with fundamental concepts of the human in Cervantes. Literature, Renaissance literature, in its effort to revive the classical age, misses the mark by a wide margin. It is out of place and time. Don Quijote’s speech is replete with commonplaces and cast in a hackneyed, overblown rhetoric that leaves his audience dumbfounded. The goatherds are kind and receptive, even if they do not understand. An

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ahistorical, essential goodness and sense of justice prevails in spite of differences among the characters that could have led to violence, as often happens in the Quijote. The knight, overburdened with literature, does not realize that the Golden Age is now, not in the past. The gulf between idealized past and debased present is a very Renaissance quandary. The humanists felt a nostalgia for a classical antiquity from which they felt separated. They longed and labored to make that shining past present, as does Don Quijote. He incarnates the desire to defeat the flow of history by reactivating a glorious yesterday. What Don Quijote practices is a kind of hermeneutic anachronism.≥ For him every word is freighted with a kind of etiological myth, a myth of origins. That myth is deliberately, intertextually present in many Renaissance texts that are present in his speech. As a myth of origins Don Quijote’s personal past is thin, while his textual past is thick, dense, bulging with literary topoi. But literature appears very remote from the actual world because of the inappropriateness of Don Quijote’s rhetoric; these goatherds sitting in front of him could not be less like the shepherds of the pastoral tradition. They are stunned by his words. Not so Vivaldo, the traveler who joins Don Quijote to attend Grisóstomo’s funeral. As the knight expounds on the virtues of chivalry and the absolute need of a ladylove to accomplish the high deeds required of him, Vivaldo, a well-read man, remarks that it all seems like heresy to him. Don Quijote’s interpretation of chivalry as centered on love is dangerously close to a religion (Cervantes did not need Denis de Rougement to figure this out).∂ The speech and the exchange on chivalry foreshadow the dramatic episode climaxing in Grisóstomo’s burial because the same conflicting elements are present, only now in a very precise juridical context because someone has died in ambiguous circumstances. Literature, in fact, is also very much a part of the present and in a disturbing way, as the story of Marcela and Grisóstomo and Don Quijote’s very being demonstrate, particularly to those like Vivaldo who are in the know. The stakes are much higher now than during Don Quijote’s postprandial oration since a death is involved—a death in great measure provoked by literature. The conflict, involving injury, restitution, possible revenge, accusations, defense, judgment, and release from culpability, unfolds and is resolved in a decidedly judicial manner. There is a detailed socioeconomic background to this episode that will reappear in the other interpolated stories, except for that of ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity.’’ Issues of money, property, inheritance, and business in general have an almost Balzacian texture, with the law present concretely or implicitly in documents such as wills and trusts and as overarching set of principles to adjudicate conflicts. Testamentary law prevails, but penal and even canonical law also hover over the episode.

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Marcela is the daughter of Guillermo el Rico—William the Rich, Smollett calls him—a wealthy farmer. Her mother died in giving birth to her and when Guillermo passes too, she is reared by her uncle, a village priest who is the executor of her father’s considerable estate and her legal guardian. The text reads: ‘‘dejando a su hija Marcela, muchacha y rica, en poder de un tío suyo sacerdote y beneficiado en nuestro lugar’’ (p. 131) [young and rich and entrusted to one of her uncles, a priest and curate to our village (I, 12, p. 72)].∑ ‘‘Poder’’ means here ‘‘power’’ as in ‘‘power of attorney,’’ having sole legal authority over Marcela and her inheritance. ‘‘Muchacha’’ means a girl of a tender age, a minor; the word meant someone younger than what it means in today’s Spanish, according to Covarrubias and Corominas.∏ Marcela is to be her uncle’s ward until she marries. She grows up to be an incomparable beauty with countless suitors, many of whom would make a good match. But her uncle and guardian refuses to marry her off without her consent, which he could not do by law anyway. This is clear in the Recopilación de 1567, which states that not even with a letter from the king authorizing it can anyone be forced to marry another against his—or more likely her—will.π Marcela protests that she is too young to assume the burden of marriage. Her uncle postpones taking action for this reason, not to continue enjoying her fortune, as Pedro, the goatherd telling the story, makes clear somewhat defensively but also revealing the constraints of the bequest, which reflects age-old Castilian beliefs and laws going back to the Siete partidas about the inherent inferiority of women.∫ (Marcela, as do so many women characters in Cervantes, shows the obsolescence of this conception.) The background here is legally accurate and precise in that, once she married, Marcela’s husband would come into possession of her estate as dowry. Before that the uncle is in charge because, given the provisions of her father’s will, Marcela cannot hold the property or inherit it directly from him. But she is proud of her affluence and boasts that when she went off to be a shepherdess, it was to tend to her own animals, not somebody else’s. Wealth, even if held in trust by her uncle, gives her a considerable freedom of which she takes advantage. Grisóstomo, for his part, is a rich hidalgo—an ‘‘hijodalgo rico’’ (p. 129)— who also inherited property after his father’s death. As Pedro, the goatherd, put it: ‘‘About that time, the father of this Grisóstomo dying, he inherited great riches, that were in moveables and lands, with no small number of cows, sheep and goats, and a great deal of money; of all which this young man remained desolate lord and master’’ (I, 12, p. 71) [Ya en este tiempo era muerto el padre de nuestro Grisóstomo, y él quedó heredero en mucha cantidad de hacienda, ansí en muebles como en raíces, y en no pequeña cantidad de ganado, mayor y menor, y en gran cantidad de dineros: de todo lo cual quedó el mozo señor

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desoluto (p. 130)]. The English cannot do justice to the precise legal and financial terminology that Cervantes, the former tax collector, uses here to inventory Grisóstomo’s properties. ‘‘Muebles’’ and ‘‘raíces’’ refer respectively to ‘‘moveable properties’’ such as farm equipment and the animals that pull them and ‘‘buildings and land,’’ that is, real estate. ‘‘Ganado, mayor y menor,’’ while surely meaning ‘‘cows, sheep, and goats,’’ is legalese to refer to different kinds of farm animals who are not involved in work, something akin to saying ‘‘cattle on the hoof’’ in English.Ω Being a male, an adult, and an only child, Grisóstomo, unlike Marcela, inherits directly, taking over the farm, animals, and other properties. He is ‘‘señor desoluto’’ of all this, a legal term derived from the Roman ‘‘soluta possessio,’’ meaning that he is in complete and absolute legal possession of the property, without lien or mortgage, and not under the jurisdiction of a mayorazgo, a large estate owned and controlled by a nobleman.∞≠ When Don Quijote peers at Grisóstomo’s dead body he sees a man of about thirty. Grisóstomo is a young, unmarried, wealthy landowner of noble blood, but no longer a juvenile. Grisóstomo had been a student at the University of Salamanca for many years where he had become very learned. He excelled in astrology and was able to help his family’s business with this expertise, which allowed him to predict the weather and determine which crops should be cultivated in a given year. This is Grisóstomo speaking to his family and friends in Pedro’s reconstruction of the scene: ‘‘this year you must sow barley, and no wheat; here you must sow carabances, but not barley: next year there will be a good harvest of oil, but for three years to come there will not be a drop’’ (I, 12, p. 71) [Sembrad este año cebada, no trigo; en este podéis sembrar garbanzos y no cebada; el que viene será de guilla de aceite; los tres siguientes no se cogerá gota (pp. 129– 30)]. These are coarse, basic, elementary crops, whose yield would wind up in the family’s rustic pots and ovens, as well as in those of their counterparts in town and country. In this inventory I hear again the voice of Cervantes the former tax collector—even in the archaisms, such as ‘‘guilla.’’ It was from this sort of production that he had to exact a portion for the crown. Grisóstomo’s intelligence and learning enrich his family and eventually himself. With his knowledge he increases the value of his estate. Like Marcela, Grisóstomo is prosperous and very eligible. Together with these practical business skills, Grisóstomo has others that give him a more transcendental dimension. He is an astrologer and a poet in the Petrarchan and Garcilasian mold, as the ‘‘Canción’’ read at his burial by Vivaldo demonstrates. But he is also, in a more traditional vein, the village poet who writes villancicos (carols) for Christmas and the allegorical autos sacramentales for the Corpus Christi celebration. These, going back to the

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medieval miracle plays, were staged on carts in village squares. Grisóstomo is a religious poet, too. The autos centered on the mystery of the Eucharist, which they celebrated, and required a considerable knowledge of scripture and theology. (Grisóstomo’s name is a rural version of Crisóstomo, or Saint John Chrysostom, a father of the Eastern church, patriarch of Constantinople, known for his eloquence, hence Khrysos, ‘‘gold,’’ and stoma, ‘‘mouth.’’ He was a sort of ‘‘John of the Golden Mouth.’’)∞∞ If the prisoner of sex was a minor Don Juan figure, there is a Faustian side to Grisóstomo: love and absolute knowledge merge as the ultimate goal of his anxious quest. His suicide is very much a result of this volatile combination, as is, presumably, his decision to become a shepherd. There has been debate in criticism about whether Grisóstomo committed suicide or just died of love.∞≤ To me it seems beyond dispute that he killed himself. The words used to refer to his actions are clear. The very verb ‘‘desesperarse’’—normally ‘‘to become desperate’’—is often used in the Golden Age as a euphemism for suicide, and there are unequivocal allusions in Grisóstomo’s poem to killing himself. There may be reticence on the part of Cervantes to state straightforwardly that Grisóstomo was a suicide because it was not easy then to speak freely of what was and continues to be a mortal sin—the devil’s sin—particularly in the frivolous pastoral context of this story. But a suicide it is, I believe, which heightens the drama and raises the stakes of Grisóstomo’s venture. Besides, a suicide is also very much in keeping with Grisóstomo’s Faustian side, a suicide being the ultimate effort to acquire knowledge of the absolute, though at a very high cost. But the situation, before the demonic elements of Grisóstomo’s character take over, seems ripe for a marriage to Marcela that would join the two fortunes and perpetuate Grisóstomo’s noble line. It would be something of an unequal marriage because of her lack of noble blood, but as we have learned before, aristocracy was patrilineal in Castile, so their union would not ruin succession. In fact, the added wealth from Marcela’s side would surely improve it. But this potentially normal succession in rural Castile is thwarted, first by Marcela’s decision to dress like a shepherd and take to the hills and then by Grisóstomo’s to go after her in similar costume. In both cases the transformation was sudden and unexpected. Pedro, the shepherd telling the story, uses the same figure to narrate both: each suddenly awoke one morning and, out of the blue, dressed up as a shepherd and left for the fields. Once Marcela appeared so clothed, says Pedro, many others followed suit: ‘‘you cannot conceive what a number of rich youths, gentlemen and farmers immediately took the garb of Grisóstomo and went wooing her through the fields’’ (I, 12, p. 73) [no os sabré buenamente decir cuántos ricos mancebos, hidalgos

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y labradores han tomado el traje de Grisóstomo y la andan requebrando por esos campos (p. 133)]. They are all infected with the ‘‘amorous pestilence’’ (I, 11, p. 65)—as Don Quijote calls it in his speech on the Golden Age—a certain kind of love mediated by literature. By ‘‘pestilencia amorosa’’ Don Quijote is making reference to the well-known poetic and medical tradition of the amor hereos, aegritudo amoris, or mal d’amour, which is a malady that he suffers or feigns to suffer himself.∞≥ It is the kind of love sickness that could lead to death and that Sancho mocks in Part II when he says that ‘‘dying for love is a most ridiculous affair’’ (II, 70, p. 918) [esto del morirse los enamorados es cosa de risa (p. 1196)].∞∂ The thoroughly detailed social, economic, and legal background makes marriage a backdrop against which to see everything that happens—it looms as the expected conclusion that was thwarted by the unexpected events just mentioned. Marriage would have been the ordinary way of proceeding, the one that would have resolved the conflict through the sanctioned judicial and religious institutions. Nothing stands in the way: no Romeo and Juliet drama involving opposing factions, no insurmountable social and economic obstacles, no secret or public rivals, no concealed shameful past that suddenly becomes known. All the conventional narrative devices normally present to create a tragic story are missing. The availability of marriage and the lack of obstacles are present in their absence—‘‘brillan por su ausencia,’’ as we say in Spanish: they ‘‘shine in their absence.’’ Marcela and Grisóstomo should have wed and their family should have become the foundation of village life by providing wealth and prestige to the region. But their bizarre decision to become shepherds disrupts everything. Marcela and Grisóstomo are Don Quijote’s pastoral counterparts, as are all the others who roam the woods in pursuit of the young and elusive beauty. He wants to be a knight-errant like those he has read about in the romances of chivalry; they want to be like the shepherds in the pastoral poems and romances that they have read, turning their lives into literature. As in the courtly love tradition, obstacles to marriage and consummation are fabricated as part of the literary game, and Marcela’s chosen role as unattainable maiden furnishes the impediment. The pastoral, in its origin (if it can be determined), represents an ideal flight into absolute freedom and communion with a benevolent nature. Like a Diana in flight through the forest, Marcela is playing a mythological and literary role in disdaining not just Grisóstomo but marriage in general. Like a cold Galatea, Marcela is hard and indifferent to her suitors—‘‘Oh, más dura que el mármol a mis quejas’’ (Harder than the hardest marble to my moans), would write the great Garcilaso de la Vega, whose verses had already become ingrained in the language. Marcela’s models are

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plentiful. Grisóstomo’s suicide also belongs to the pastoral and Petrarchan traditions, certainly close to Cervantes with regard not only to the Italian sources but also to Garcilaso’s influential poetry from which I have just quoted. The whole episode is dense in literary allusion, including not only the pastoral up through Cervantes’ own romance La Galatea and the canonical Los siete libros de la Diana (1559) by Jorge de Montemayor, but also the Renaissance epic—Ariosto, Tasso, and their imitators. Marcela, Grisóstomo, and their followers are enacting literary scenes and playing literary roles to the detriment of their social and economic status and the future of their respective legacies. The story is masterfully told by several narrators in anticipation of the final scene, when Ambrosio and Marcela give their versions and Grisóstomo his by way of two documents that he leaves behind: a poem and his will. This perspectival narrative is one of Cervantes’ favorite devices, one that would have an enduring influence on narrative fiction to the modern period (think, for example, of Faulkner) and that invites reflecting upon the truth of the matter at hand from several points of view. The presence of Grisóstomo’s two texts seem to promote the idea of finality, being that they were the last texts that he wrote and that one is a legal document and the other a poem. The first would literally manifest his will beyond death, the latter his real inner sense of the truth, his most intimate confession. They are twin texts. The will, rather than dwelling on how to dispose of his considerable property, sets out instead the place and manner of his burial and the fate of the literary texts that he has written. There are clear allusions to Virgil in Grisóstomo’s decision to have them destroyed and pagan overtones in his desire to be buried where he first met Marcela rather than in consecrated ground—the lad who first reports of his death remarks that ‘‘he ordered himself to be buried in the field, like a Moor’’ (I, 12, p. 70) [mandó en su testamento que le enterrasen en el campo como si fuera moro (p. 128)]. It is also an unequivocal indication that Grisóstomo planned to kill himself—hence would not be entitled to burial in consecrated soil—so his will, like the poem, is also a kind of suicide note. The religious authorities in the village are concerned about the choices Grisóstomo made, noting their potentially heretical bent—these are matters worthy of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and its interpretation of canon law. The desire to have his literary production burned indicates, beyond merely the Virgilian allusion, an unrelieved anxiety to achieve literary perfection, the model of which is probably Petrarch, but it is also a reflection of Grisóstomo’s Faustian facet. Perhaps fortuitously, or more prosaically owing to Cervantes’ own deficiencies as a poet, the poem that is saved, thanks to Vivaldo’s bold action of reaching for it against Ambrosio’s wishes, is a cliche-ridden

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Petrarchan-style canzone, which would have been justifiably condemned to the flames. The reader is left to decide if the poem is weak on purpose or by accident. In either case, it is not as awful as to warrant the poet killing himself, but it is inferior enough.∞∑ There is more pathos than poetry in it, which may be a truer measure of the poet’s despair and the unattainability of his desires. Grisóstomo wants to extend his determination to achieve purity of love and aesthetic perfection beyond his own death, which is the implicit intention behind both texts. This is the reason why he turns his will, a legal document, into a set of stage directions for the ceremony of his burial and wants his papers destroyed—let us not forget that he was also a playwright who wrote allegorical plays for the feast of the Corpus Christi. The will is also the script for a play, a pagan play, however, in which his body, not that of Christ, as in the autos sacramentales that he wrote, is the protagonist. Although not etymologically true, as we saw, there is a vague echo of Christ in Grisóstomo’s name. Grisóstomo wants to shape the future—what will take place after he dies— as he shapes the words and conventions of poetry and theater to create literature, a literature as lofty as religious belief itself, if we remember Vivaldo’s words about the religion of love. He wants to endow his texts with the same proleptic power that allowed him to foretell the weather through astrology— it is a cosmic knowledge he seeks, a fusion with the absolute whose counterpart would be the work of Spain’s great mystic poets like Saint John of the Cross, who translated his desire for God into the most beautiful erotic poetry in the Spanish language. With his death Grisóstomo succeeds in this quest and, more importantly, in playing the role of disdained lover to the hilt. Through self-inflicted death he fuses life and literature, which he planned and carried out as the centerpiece of the ritual he orchestrates for his obsequies. His body is the main stage prop in this play of love. In real life, of course, the price of all this is incommensurate, but as a statement it allows no possible rejoinder. Marcela tells her side of the story in the form of a defense of her actions, a speech that has been correctly read in contrast to Don Quijote’s on the Golden Age. Both adhere to rules of classical rhetoric in various ways: his is epideictic, hers forensic. Don Quijote’s is celebratory, full of adornment; Marcela’s is based on logic and proof.∞∏ She argues, with ironclad logic and availing herself of the precise rhetorical devices needed to make her case, that she is free not to love and is therefore guiltless in the matter of Grisóstomo’s death. The burial ritual, the play planned and performed by Grisóstomo and his friends, is transformed by Marcela into a court scene. Not all are convinced by her arguments, and when she flees some try to go after her, but Don Quijote declares that she has proven her innocence and prevents them. His words are like a ruling:

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The Spanish original of Don Quijote’s words is fraught with legalisms and with the formulas typical of notarial rhetoric: ‘‘cualquier estado o condición,’’ ‘‘so pena,’’ ‘‘claras y suficientes razones,’’ and ‘‘a cuya causa es justo que.’’ The case seems to be settled there, but far from it. It has been argued that Marcela is arrogant, callous, and self-centered in the way that she makes her dramatic appearance and delivers her cold and logical defense at Grisóstomo’s very funeral. Marcela, Renato Poggioli claims, is narcissistic, self-absorbed, and hence cannot share herself with others. ‘‘An excessive concern with selfhood ends all too often in self-love: and no other detail proves this as eloquently as the fact that Marcela attends Grisóstomo’s funeral merely because it is also her trial. If she comes, it is not to pay the tribute of pity at the grave of a dead friend, but to use that grave as a tribune from which to plead the cause of the self.’’∞π Marcela’s elocution is like a rebuttal of Ambrosio’s eulogy, which was the appropriate kind of speech for a funeral, as well as Grisóstomo’s poem, a heartfelt retelling of his passion. By refusing marriage altogether she is seriously deviating from accepted social practice and religious doctrine—there was no place for unmarried women who do not become nuns in Habsburg Spain. As Hart and Rendall have written: ‘‘Marcela rejects not merely Grisóstomo’s suit but the very institution of marriage. . . . She believes that freedom is incompatible with marriage because marriage implies the subordination of wife to husband. But to reject marriage also means rejecting society itself: seventeenth-century Spain made no real provision for a single woman, one who refuses either to marry or to become a nun (the latter is, of course, the bride of Christ). It is precisely because she understands that society

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has no place for her that Marcela chooses to become a shepherdess, that is, to reject the real world for a ‘literary’ world which can be made into an image of her own desires.’’∞∫ Marcela may be exactly what Ambrosio calls her in what at first sounds like a commonplace from courtly love poetry and is actually derived from lines 97–98 of Garcilaso de la Vega’s ‘‘Elegía I,’’ a ‘‘mortal enemy of the human race’’ (I, 13, p. 82) [enemiga mortal del linaje humano (p. 144)]. (One of the conceits of courtly love poetry was to berate the beloved for her indifference with words that are really of praise.) Marcela is the enemy not just of humanity (or of ‘‘the human race,’’ as Smollett translates ‘‘linaje humano’’) but of human generation—‘‘linaje’’ acquires here a more etymologically grounded meaning as ‘‘lineage,’’ succession. Marcela is the nemesis of the human bloodline—of human reproduction and renewal. She and Grisóstomo are squandering their respective fortunes by having no heir, not to mention their youthful bodies, which will not now reproduce and multiply. In his case the omission is aggravated by the suicide, which would compromise the legacy because of his unholy death in addition to foreclosing the salvation of his soul in the hereafter. But in hers, being an only child and a woman, her estate would also be wasted, particularly because her guardian and next of kin, her uncle, is a priest and hence can have no legitimate children to whom the estate can pass. Here the detail of his vow of chastity, which parallels hers, becomes poignantly significant. This detail also allows us to gauge how carefully Guillermo prepared Marcela’s inheritance: by leaving her in the hands of a priest he chooses a male relative, who would have more legal weight than a female but would not threaten her chastity and would not be able to alienate or compromise the bequest by marrying himself. All of this weighs heavily in the outcome of the story and allows a different view of Don Quijote’s ruling in the culminating court scene. In that scene there is a coalescence of love and the law that may not be readily apparent. There is little doubt about the court-like kind of setting and procedure: Ambrosio and Grisóstomo are the accusers, Don Quijote is the judge, and the assembled real (meaning the goatherds) and faux shepherds are the jury. As we have just seen, the accusations are laid out in the poem and Ambrosio’s speech, Marcela delivers her explicitly forensic oration, Don Quijote rules in her favor and prevents those not in agreement from taking justice into their own hands. But this is a court in two senses: it is like a court of law, but it is also like a court of the courtly love kind. Mock trials involving difficult cases of love were held in Eleanor d’Aquitaine’s castle mostly, one assumes, for entertainment and to sharpen the wits—to acquire, as Dante would put it, ‘‘inteletto d’amore.’’ Speeches like Marcela’s, framed in the Scholastic

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discourse that she employs, were delivered and analyzed. Rulings were made according to the laws and conventions expressed in the poetry. In this kind of court Marcela’s arguments are unassailable and both her behavior and Grisóstomo’s follow well-known scripts involving the dialectics of desire and disdain. Don Quijote’s ruling, he being himself a communicant in the religion of love, could not be other than it was. Seen in this context everyone’s actions are coherent and comprehensible. The laws of love have been scrupulously observed, too literally in Grisóstomo’s case. But as the court of law, of real law, which the scene also resembles, the whole proceedings could have had a different interpretation, though not necessarily a different resolution—no court could force a young woman to actually marry against her will, though the pressures from her parents or guardian could be immense. There is, because of the socioeconomic and legal cast of the episode, an expectation of marriage that has not been fulfilled, a failed expectation that has caused irreparable damage to Grisóstomo and to others like him who pine for Marcela and offer to marry her. A debt has been incurred, augmented exponentially by Grisóstomo’s suicide—there is no possible restoration, no way to make him whole again. Marcela’s defense is against the existence of such a debt, but it looms over the entire incident. By killing himself Grisóstomo has made that debt infinite, impossible to repay, except perhaps and unwittingly by Marcela’s steadfast renunciation of love and her flight into the wilderness, which are a kind of expiation and perhaps even a show of faithfulness to his memory. The transaction is completed with her selfdenial, which now acquires a positive dimension that it lacked before, by balancing the equation and leading to a certain form of justice. The resolution is functional at both the literary and legal levels. Grisóstomo has lost all and is not even buried in consecrated ground. Marcela has also lost all and her body is relegated to the despoblado, to the wilderness into which she flees—an unholy state too; this is what Don Quijote calls the spot in the next chapter (p. 166), an ‘‘unfrequented place’’ (I, 15, p. 97) in English. It is significant that she goes into ‘‘the thicket