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 on a neighboring mountain’’ (I, 14, p. 90) [lo más cerrado de un monte (p. 155)]. The English misses the absolute superlative, ‘‘lo más,’’ and ‘‘monte’’ is more than a mountain; it is the wild. English also erases the oxymoron implicit in her going into that which is most impenetrably closed: ‘‘se entró por lo más cerrado de un monte’’ (p. 155). ‘‘Más cerrado’’ does mean ‘‘thicket,’’ but the original metaphor is a hyperbole. It is ‘‘closed,’’ shut, made inaccessible by so much vegetation. The act of entering what is most firmly closed vaguely suggests the impossibility of coming back out. The monte is a kind of prison. There is no assurance that Marcela will be able to tend to her herd there and will most likely become a wild renegade like Car-

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denio. In fact, the place where Cardenio makes his dwelling clarifies, retrospectively, to what extent Marcela’s flight into the monte is a self-inflicted punishment. Wandering in the bush, Cardenio relates, ‘‘I inquired of some goatherds, whereabouts the most craggy part of the mountain was, and, according to their directions, thither I rode, resolving to put an end to my life’’ (I, 27, p. 217) [y allí pregunté a unos ganaderos que hacia dónde era lo más áspero de estas sierras. Dijéronme que hacia esta parte. Luego me encaminé a ella, con intención de acabar aquí la vida (p. 314)]. The original says, ‘‘lo más áspero de estas sierras,’’ like ‘‘lo más cerrado de un monte.’’ This is the place where the galley slaves presumably went. Marcela follows the same course as Cardenio’s, perhaps with the same intention of ending her life, thus repaying in kind her debt to Grisóstomo. As a court in the literary tradition the proceedings follow a predictable path to a logical, reasonable resolution in which justice is done. As a court of law, there appears to be no restitution or resolution in that Grisóstomo is dead, Marcela’s suitors are unsatisfied, and the legacy of both lovers is lost and foreclosed. But there is a settlement of sorts, a squaring of accounts, because, while Grisóstomo is dead, Marcela is condemned to a kind of rustication by having to flee into the thickest part of the wild, to be a pariah in a lawless milieu from which she might not be able to leave. One could perhaps say that while Grisóstomo suffers a real death, Marcela is condemned to a civil death.∞Ω The linchpin between the two judicial codes—the civil and the courtly—is marriage, but in both cases as a meaningful absence. In the courtly love tradition marriage was not an option, and one could argue that Grisóstomo is violating that law by proposing to wed Marcela, while she remains steadfast in her refusal, thereby complying with it. In the judicial situation in which the episode is couched the avoidance of marriage is an implicit offense that brings about the correlative loss of their estates by both parties. If not justice, at least a kind of parity has been reached. Don Quijote’s ruling stands in both kinds of court: a successful marriage of love and the law. But Grisóstomo’s cadaver, cradled in his literary texts, upsets the apparent harmony that has been achieved. Their being burned after all seems to give the episode’s conclusion a disquieting effect that lingers beyond it, as if justice has not really been completely done. The arbiter and judge of the whole conflict, let us not forget, is Don Quijote, a madman who lost his reason by reading too much and by attempting to reenact in the real world of the present the fantastic actions and values of fiction and of the past. There seems to be an unescapable indictment of literature in the episode, but it is a nuanced one. Literature, by suggesting to Marcela the existence and attainability of a pastoral world of pure freedom, leads her to act as if it were possible to live oblivious to

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the laws of society. Grisóstomo takes to the hills to meet her in that world, but finds that its laws are just as rigorous, if not more so, than those from which he sought to escape. By following those rules to the letter he has to kill himself. The lesson seems to be that literature offers a simulacrum of freedom unrestrained that is as alluring as it is deceiving and perilous. Its wages are extremely dangerous, as Grisóstomo finds out the hard way. There is no freedom, except perhaps in the limitless interval that the prisoner of sex envisions between punishment and death—the long life ahead of him after the galleys— or in the wilderness where Marcela winds up we never know for how long. It is a term without term. But as we shall see with the other characters that we meet in the wild, the reach of the law is just as long and pervasive there. The Marcela and Grisóstomo interlude prepares the way for the stories that follow, from those that begin in the Sierra Morena to the very last one involving Vicente de la Rosa and Leandra. But first there is the hilarious episode of Rocinante’s tryst with the mares, which is a translation of the GrisóstomoMarcela story into the language of animal love and real, not pastoral, nature. Don Quijote and Sancho say their good-byes to those present at the burial and take off after the fleeing Marcela, ‘‘entraron por el mesmo bosque donde vieron que se había entrado la pastora Marcela’’ (p. 159), which Smollett renders as entered ‘‘the same wood to which Marcela had retreated’’ (I, 15, p. 92). The sequence from one adventure to the other is clear: knight and squire go into the very same wilderness in which the young woman took refuge to look for her and offer their assistance. It is the very same lawless despoblado to which she is condemned or that she chooses because of its promise of unrestricted freedom. There is, of course, also a thematic link: love and rejection spark the conflict between Rocinante and the mares too, only now its outcome is outright violence. Actually, what Don Quijote and Sancho find in the forest is a locus amoenus in the best Renaissance tradition. They seek shade and coolness at the height of the day’s heat (remember that the novel takes place in the summer) and find a perfect clearing that offers also plenty of grass and water from a brook. The setting brings to mind the Petrarchan ‘‘chiare, fresche et dolce acque.’’ The muleteers from Yanguas—they are also called Galicians, to emphasize their rusticity—have chosen the same spot for the same reasons. Their mares will be able to rest, graze, and drink in that glade and glen. The locus amoenus is, of course, redolent with pastoral allusions. It is the traditional place for lovers to meet, inflamed with Neoplatonic passion and resplendent in their perfect physical and spiritual beauty. The noon hour, perfect in its symmetrical centeredness, adds to the aura of the place and time: full light to reveal every detail of flawless bodies, as if time itself were stopped to arrest change and potential

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decay. Don Quijote and Sancho should have found Marcela here, as they will Dorotea a little later in a similar spot. The connection between this episode and the previous one is also at the highest, most abstract level. Like Marcela, Rocinante and the mares are contaminated by love’s plague because of excessive freedom. Sancho ‘‘had been at no pains to tether Rocinante, secure as he thought, in knowing him to be so meek and peaceable, that all the mares in the meadows of Cordova, could not provoke his concupiscence’’ (I, 15, p. 92) [No se había curado Sancho de echar sueltas a Rocinante, seguro de que le conocía por tan manso y tan poco rijoso que todas las yeguas de la dehesa de Córdoba no le hicieran tomar mal siniestro (p. 159)]. The mares have also been allowed to roam free to graze. After the fray, when Don Quijote and Sancho find comfort in the squire’s ass, which was the only one not injured, it is said that the latter had ‘‘also gone a little astray, presuming upon the excessive licence of the time’’ (I, 15, p. 98) [que también había andado algo distraído con la demasiada libertad de aquel día (p. 167)]. It is in this lawless site that Rocinante makes his surprising move on the mares, who receive him with their hoofs and teeth, being more interested in grazing than in love. I cannot help but see in this a grotesque version of Marcela and Grisóstomo, with the mares playing the role of the elusive shepherdess and Rocinante that of the ardent poet and astrologer. Or, more likely, with Rocinante playing his master, who after all has gone in pursuit of Marcela too, and whom he resembles more than Grisóstomo because of his frail physique. Nature’s realm appears to be fraught with violence too, as both the mares and their keepers beat to a pulp the poor nag and the two adventurers. Or perhaps Rocinante’s transgression consists in not having observed the laws of nature, which regulate love according to precise periods of fertility and infertility. It seems more likely that the scene highlights the disorder that prevails in the wilderness to which Marcela escaped, and the deceptiveness of topoi—here etymologically commonplaces—like the locus amoenus. The jocular nature of the episode withdraws from it all the meaningful solemnity that its Renaissance setting suggests and casts a backward glance toward the preceding episode to remove some of the tragic aura that surrounded it. The whole sequence that begins with the goatherds who feed the protagonists leads to another adventure with keepers of animals—the men from Yanguas who are herding their mares. The first were kind and hospitable, the second aggressive and violent. The knight and his squire are about to enter the thick of the novel, which will be a counterpoint between the Sierra Morena, a wilderness like the one in which Marcela was lost, and Juan Palomeque’s inn, the temple and courthouse where the complicated love stories of Part I will be resolved.

6

Broken Tales: Love Stories in the Quijote, Part I

The interpolated stories that come after the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode and Rocinante’s disastrous flirtation make up the core of Part I of the Quijote. They peak and are resolved, for the most part, together with the main plot, which involves the persecution, capture, and return home of the knight. This is a set of narrative strands tightly woven around the two principal drives in the book: Don Quijote’s love quest for Dulcinea and the series of crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated by the hidalgo that lead to his pursuit and apprehension. The interpolated stories have in common with the central plot, with the Marcela-Grisóstomo interlude, and with each other the perpetration of offenses due to passion that result in injuries to honor, body, and property, with the consequent need for restitution, recompense, requital, pardon, or revenge. In all of them marriage looms as the inevitable and most appropriate form of reparation as well as the most effective kind of narrative closure. The culmination of this suite of intertwined stories is the captive’s, in which religious conversion intimates a kind of synthesis of contraries that not only surpasses worldly barriers but even transcends the Neoplatonic convergence typical of Renaissance plots. The tale could be seen as the counterpart of sixteenth-century Spanish mystical poetry, in which courtly love and Petrarchan conventions are adapted to express religious fervor and union not merely with the beloved but with God.

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Another common feature of these stories is that their telling or reading is interrupted in one way or another, something that also happened in the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode. As we saw, that narrative was broken off several times and picked up by different tellers. The stories that follow are cut off in various ways. Sancho’s funny tale about the goats is suddenly stopped precisely because of his ban on interruptions; Cardenio’s by Don Quijote’s untimely intervention and the novella ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ by Don Quijote’s nightmare and slashing of the wineskins. The captive’s tale is also cut off at one point. The concluding and unfinished story of Vicente de la Rosa and Leandra is interrupted by the convergence of narrated events with the present—by its very nature a current event can have no end as it is being reported. The sense of this nonending is that the new fiction, mediated by the law, is a text in the making for which closure, by creating a good story, could constitute the most blatant kind of untruth: that the shape of fiction, of closure itself, is a device to mask rather than reveal the truth. Interruption, by upsetting the narrative order, is the break needed for the emergence of the truth, the arrival at an unexpected ending, or both. In the episode of Don Quijote’s fight with the Basque, the whole novel is suspended, and one could say, with Vicente Gaos, that the entire book is built on interruptions, that there is hardly any coherent or organic plot.∞ This, perhaps the most famous interruption in Western literature, allows for the intervention of the narrator, who tells the well-known tale about how he ran out of text, stumbled upon the rest of the manuscript, but in Arabic, and had it translated. The gap lays bare the conventionalisms of fiction and the true nature of the text we read: that it is an abyss of tellings and retellings from which no ultimate truth can be expected. The only reliable truth, to which the interruptions give access, is about the deceitful nature of narratives, even when they are sanctioned by the law, because of the disruptive powers of desire. This truth emerges out of the violence of the breaks, which ironically only love itself can repair when submitted to the social contract backed up by religious doctrine—that is, marriage—yet another set of stories that can solely promise a temporal truce. This troubling self-denial, which also avails itself of a convention drawn from chivalric romances (the ‘‘found’’ manuscript), sets the tone for the whole book—but, significantly, through an interruption, not at the beginning, when one would expect principles to be set. It is a break in the narrative that prepares the one at the end of the book. An interruption does not have the privileged place of a beginning, being an accident presumably independent from the narrative in question. Breaking off the narrative, however, is one with the violence in the interpolated stories, a violence in which, once again, love and the law are closely

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implicated. Closure, when it occurs, involves a restitution, ordinarily, as I have said often, by way of marriage. More mundane restitutions are made at the inn as the love stories are being resolved; for instance, the second barber is compensated for his lost basin, as we saw in my second chapter. The sociolegal background and ensuing conflicts present in the MarcelaGrisóstomo episode are greatly expanded in subsequent stories. These involve unequal marriages and most of them contain violence of some sort. But although penal law again looms over the episodes, the most developed legal aspect in them derives from testamentary law, something already at issue in the Marcela-Grisóstomo conflict. Inheritance and marriage codes, both regulating succession, drive and constrain the characters; restitution and compensation cooperate to make whole what they damage in the process of channeling their desires. The same symbolic topology reappears as a counterpoint between city or inn and wilderness or despoblado. This going back and forth from one to the other is punctuated by interruptions in the narratives.

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As Don Quijote and Sancho wait out the night in the episode of the fulling hammers (I, 20), Don Quijote asks the squire to tell a story to help pass the time. After complying with some preliminary traditional storyteller formalities, Sancho proceeds to tell the tale of Lope Ruiz and Torralba, a couple of young goatherds from Extremadura. This is an explicitly rural folktale, as Sancho’s elaborate beginning shows, but it has a contemporary air to it. It is something that might have happened recently and has already become part of the traditional narrative stock. Lope loved Torralba, but Torralba did something to make him jealous; Lope’s love turns into hatred, at which point Torralba’s love is rekindled. Lope flees with his flock but has to cross the Guadiana River, and there is only a small boat in which just one goat at a time can cross. Sancho begins a one by one enumeration of the crossings, asking Don Quijote to keep track of the number or he will not continue, and when the knight falters the squire halts the telling irrevocably. After Don Quijote expresses astonishment at the requirement and unexpected finish, the action returns to the fulling hammers. It is easy to dismiss Sancho’s folktale as merely amusing, but it is too one of the love stories of Part I, connected thematically and structurally to them and offering a clue about their deeper link to each other and to the questions of love and the law. The relation is made explicit at the moment when Cardenio, about to tell his tale of woe, asks Don Quijote, Sancho, and the goatherd not interrupt him or the story will end: ‘‘ ‘If you desire, gentlemen, that I should, in a few words, inform you of the immensity of my misfortunes, you must give

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me your promise that you will not by any question or otherwise, interrupt the thread of my doleful story; for, if you should, that instant I will break off the narration.’ This warning recalled to the knight’s memory, the story recounted by his squire, which still remained unfinished, because he had not kept an exact account of the goats, as they passed the river’’ (I, 24, p. 175) [—Si gustáis, señores, que os diga en breves razones la inmensidad de mis desventuras, habeísme de prometer de que con ninguna pregunta, ni otra cosa, no interromperéis el hilo de mi triste historia; porque en el punto que lo hagáis, en ése se quedará lo que fuere contando. Estas razones del Roto trujeron a la memoria a don Quijote el cuento que le había contado su escudero, cuando no acertó el número de las cabras que habían pasado el río, y se quedó la historia pendiente (p. 262)]. The resemblance of Sancho’s story to that of Marcela and Grisóstomo is manifest, as is the courtly love cast of the relationship between these rustics. Don Quijote himself remarks, when Torralba’s love increases in the measure in which she is rejected by Lope, ‘‘That is the natural disposition of women, said Don Quixote, to disdain those who adore them, and love those by whom they are abhorred’’ (I, 20, p. 134), a common topic in cancionero-style poetry. ‘‘Es natural condición de mujeres—dijo don Quijote—: desdeñar a quien las quiere y amar a quien las aborrece’’ (pp. 213–14). Here it is the young man, Lope, who flees with his herd, pursued by the ardent lass, who carries with her a crude makeup kit, presumably the better to seduce him. She, by the way, is another virile rube in the mold of Aldonza and other women in the Quijote and in the literary tradition, as we saw: ‘‘Torralba, who was a thick, brawny wench, a little coy, and somewhat masculine, for she wore a sort of mostachios’’ (I, 20, p. 134) [era una moza rolliza, zahareña y tiraba algo a hombruna, porque tenía unos pocos de bigotes (p. 213)]. (The word Sancho uses, rolliza, is more ‘‘full-figured’’ than ‘‘thick,’’ by the way, and it is used admiringly, as difficult as it may be for a contemporary audience to understand.) Because of the interruption we never find out if Lope and Torralba meet, make up, and marry, which would again be the expectation for these two young people of comparable social class. Torralba, like Marcela, was the daughter of a rich stock farmer, and therein may lie a slight hint of conflict, though Lope’s three hundred goats are proof that he is far from poor. Sancho’s insistence on adhering to traditional conventions in storytelling and Don Quijote’s comments about them and about the tale itself highlight the episode’s concern with the nature of narrative and the kind of stories included in the novel. This is something that, as we all know, worried Cervantes a great deal and has been the focus of much modern criticism as well as imitation, for instance by Borges. Sancho insists that his account adhere to what he considers

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the real by having the crossing of each goat mentioned, just as he insisted that he could actually visualize Torralba as he described her, though when questioned by Don Quijote he confesses that he has never seen her. Sancho has absolute faith in the story as told him. His narrative theory is a reductio ad absurdum of mimesis—each and every goat most be reported. Furthermore, he is adamant about keeping count of the goats, and if the number and total are botched up the story must stop without reaching the end. Earlier Sancho had embarked on what would have become an infinitely receding sequence when he began to trace back Torralba’s genealogy, but Don Quijote cut him off. On the one hand Sancho demands absolute literality (each goat accounted for), on the other strict adherence to narrative progression in the most conventional sense (one, two, three . . . ; father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on): narrative form (the sequence as shape) versus referentiality (each goat). These are the polar opposites of representation, manifest in this folktale to show the limits of narrative, a common Cervantes ploy. When they clash, as Don Quijote’s fumbling and his irritation show, the story breaks up all together. In the context of love and the law this issue of narrative representation reveals other dimensions pertaining to truth, culpability, revenge, and restitution. Here interruptions are very significant and, seen in relation to the interrupted episode of the Basque, give the measure of the novel’s ultimate take on fiction. I will allow myself an interruption of my own here. (A contemporary incident inspired my interest in the interruption of narratives and its relation to the truth: the case of Susan Smith. On October 25, 1994, Smith, who is white, claimed that a black man had stolen her car with her two boys in it: Michael, aged three, and Alex, fourteen months. For nine days the entire United States was riveted to news of the search for the boys and the culprit, as Smith’s town of Union, South Carolina, rallied around her. The frantic search turned up nothing, and Smith appeared repeatedly on television, pleading tearfully for the return of her sons. Everyone believed her story, probably even herself by the time she had repeated it so many times. But Sheriff Howard Wells eventually began to ask questions and poke holes in her tale until she confessed to murder. She had driven her car into a nearby lake with Michael and Alex inside. It came out that Smith, who was divorced, had been dumped by her lover, Tom Findlay—heir to a local fortune, single, and a playboy—because he did not want to become an instant father by marrying her.≤ Until the sheriff interrupted her story, Smith’s account of the events sounded plausible, even compelling, particularly to a public willing to believe that blacks are capable or perhaps even inclined to commit such crimes. It was a coherent story both within itself and within the context of general assump-

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tions and convictions—it fit with other stories, imagined and believed by many. A black man jumps into your car at an intersection, mauls you, pushes you out, and drives away with the children in the back. But in the light of day? And how could he dispose of the children or hope to obtain a ransom for them? None of these questions bothered the believing public until the narrative flow was broken. Smith’s initial story is what Anthony G. Armsterdam and Jerome Bruner call a ‘‘script,’’ as opposed to a ‘‘narrative,’’ in their fine book Minding the Law.≥ A script tells the norm and is part of what people generally believe in a society. Smith’s story is a script that becomes a narrative because of the sheriff’s interruption.) Back to Cervantes. We read at the beginning of chapter 28 of Part I, after we have ‘‘heard’’ Cardenio’s tale in two installments, the following self-referential mock admonition: ‘‘in this our age, so much in need of enjoying agreeable entertainments, not only of his [Don Quijote’s] true and delightful adventures, but also of the intervening episodes, which are no less real, artful and delicious than the main story itself, the twisted, reeled and ravelled thread of which is continued thus. Just as the curate was ready to offer some consolation to Cardenio, he was prevented by a voice that saluted his ears in these mournful accents’’ (I, 28, p. 219) [en esta nuestra edad, necesitada de alegres entretenimientos, no sólo de la dulzura de su verdadera historia, sino de los cuentos y episodios della, que, en parte, no son menos agradables, artificiosos y verdaderos que la misma historia; la cual, prosiguiendo su rastrillado, torcido y aspado hilo, cuenta que, así como el cura comenzó a prevenirse para consolar a Cardenio, lo impidió una voz que llegó a sus oídos, que, con tristes acentos, decía de esta manera (p. 317)]. I am interested not just in what the text says but in the interruption itself, a speech act of sorts that performs the function of interrupting in these narratives. Just as the priest is about to reply to Cardenio he is ‘‘prevented’’ by Dorotea’s voice, which will provide part of the missing information in Cardenio’s account. There can be no comforting of Cardenio yet—interruptions rarely promote comforting. The words Cervantes used to refer to the buildup or spooling up of narrative strands bring this out. They are drawn from spinning—rastrillado, torcido, and aspado—and are reasonably well translated by Smollett as ‘‘twisted, reeled and ravelled.’’ But in the original they have (at least for me) a more violent or literal inflection. In other words, ‘‘twisted, reeled and ravelled’’ are common terms in English whose metaphoric origin is now faded. In Spanish, the words used by Cervantes, applied allegorically to narrative, are shockingly fresh and evoke more directly the physical actions

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they describe. Rastrillar is to rake out the excess fibers from the thread; torcer is to twist together many threads in order to make a string or a rope; and aspar is to twist two sticks to weave strands together, as is done on a smaller scale with the needles in knitting. The cross marriages—Luscinda with Cardenio, although she had been married to Don Fernando, and Dorotea’s to Don Fernando, although she had been in Cardenio’s care—replicate the positioning and action of the two sticks used for aspar. In short, the relation among the stories, including the main plot, is predicated on blunt cuts and crisscrossings, not on smooth transitions. These are made possible by interruptions. Interruptions have two related purposes in Part I of the Quijote. First, by stopping the narrative flow they reveal the narrative’s flaws, pointing out its potential falsehood. Unstopped, the story follows its own laws of development from within, fostering a truth that depends on its inner coherence, like Sancho’s ‘‘one goat, two goats, three goats . . .’’. These are the stories the characters want to have others believe and that perhaps they also believe about themselves—they are scripts, to return to the terminology of Armsterdam and Bruner. They are self-referential in the strongest sense and selfcontained, even when adhering to the rules of notarial or forensic rhetoric, or particularly when they do. Second, the interruption facilitates the emergence of a different, challenging, or adversarial truth, unknown to the teller himself and certainly to his or her interlocutors. By breaking the continuity and violating its own laws of inner development the interruption releases a different version, even if only by postponing the end, by deferring closure. This is the reason narrators do not want to be interrupted or react angrily when they are, as in Cardenio’s case. Police questioning, cross-examination, the psychoanalytic session, and more benignly the dialogue, are versions of this. Bakhtin’s theories about the origins of the novel are of some relevance here, though in his approach dialogue lacks the violent, contentious nature of the sort of exchange I am talking about here.∂ Cardenio’s story is the paradigmatic one and, as we saw, is linked explicitly to interruption as a device. His warning is in earnest. He is not to be interrupted, and he gives the following reason why: ‘‘I give you this precaution, added he, because, I would briefly pass over the detail of my misfortunes, the remembrance of which brings fresh addition to my woe; and the fewer questions you ask, the sooner shall I have finished the relation, although in order to satisfy your curiosity to the full, I will not fail to mention every material circumstance’’ (I, 24, p. 175) [Esta prevención que hago es porque querría pasar brevemente por el cuento de mis desgracias; que el traerlas a la memoria no me sirve de otra cosa que añadir otras de nuevo, y, mientras menos me preguntáredes, más presto acabaré yo de decillas, puesto que no dejaré por

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contar cosa alguna que sea de importancia para no satisfacer del todo a vuestro deseo (p. 262)]. He is interrupted when he breaks Don Quijote’s own flow of thoughts by mentioning Amadís of Gaul, which sends the knight into a long tirade about the value of chivalric literature.∑ Cardenio reacts by digging from his subconscious a slanderous story about Queen Madásima, which provokes Don Quijote’s violent rejoinder and Cardenio’s attack. The interruption has revealed Cardenio’s fixation on having been betrayed by a woman, which he has translated into the twisted version of a chivalric romance. Betrayal is the story beneath the story he is telling and also beneath the one that now arises. Cardenio has elevated Luscinda into a queen from the chivalric world but prostituted her by saying that she was having an affair with a mere surgeon (surgeons were not as prestigious then as they are now, ranking somewhere next to barbers). That Don Fernando is transformed into a surgeon in Cardenio’s psychotic episode adds to the implicit violence of his fantasy, but it is a reflection of certain elements of the surface story he tells—the one about his misfortunes. Don Fernando had a knife with which he planned to kill Luscinda, and Luscinda herself had another with the intention of committing suicide. Cardenio fears that Don Fernando has already possessed Luscinda with the same ruse that he used to seduce Dorotea. Like a surgeon, Don Fernando has cut into Luscinda with his weapon—his sexual organ/scalpel—spilling her blood as he deflowered her. This paranoid fantasy turns out not to be true, but if Cardenio believed it within himself, it goes a long way in explaining his pusillanimous behavior at crucial moments. Deep within himself he feared that it was too late, that Luscinda was already ruined and not deserving of his love or fit for marriage.∏ When everything is cleared up in the scene of the betrothals, closure is brought about, the wound is, as it were, cured—Luscinda’s imaginary one and Cardenio’s psychological one. The postponed end finally arrives after all the interruptions and all the violence. It is, needless to say, a brilliant move on the part of Cervantes to have this drama transferred to the realm of literature, as it was a literary text that provoked the interruption—Amadís de Gaula. (One could even read here an echo of the Paolo and Francesca episode in Dante’s Divine Comedy, if only because in both a book of chivalry is involved.) The interruptions, which are forced and premature endings, and the restarts, which are accidental new beginnings, mirror the strained social and legal predicaments of the characters involved in the interpolated stories and the damage that they do to each other. The economic, social, and ultimately judicial context that was the background of the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode is greatly expanded here to encompass deep social and economic issues in Castile during the sixteenth century. The judicial situation is accurate, precise,

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and the source of the conflict in which Don Fernando, Cardenio, Luscinda, and Dorotea are entangled. The impending marriage of Luscinda and Cardenio is one that is again dictated by circumstances as well as by mutual attraction. Cardenio says that Luscinda is ‘‘a maiden as well born and rich as I’’ (I, 24, p. 175) [doncella tan noble y tan rica como yo (p. 263)]. The description he gives of their youth and early love is like the implicit blueprint for the marriage of Marcela and Grisóstomo, only that it was nearer to taking place. Their marriage was ‘‘an union which the equality of our age and fortune almost seemed to arrange on their own’’ (I, 24, p. 176) [cosa que casi la concertaba la igualdad de nuestro linaje y riquezas (p. 263)]. But the ambition of social advancement first postpones the marriage and later leads Luscinda’s parents to marry her off to Don Fernando, whose status as the son of a grandee would make her leap up in social class. Cardenio’s father tells him to postpone asking for Luscinda’s hand in marriage until he finds out what the duke, Don Fernando’s father, wants to do with him. (Literal commentators of the Quijote are convinced that the duke is the Duque de Osuna, a Spanish grandee, and Rodríguez Marín thought that he had figured out the exact legal case on which Cervantes based the story. I am not a literal reader of the book, nor do I believe that a single incident can be the source, but Rodríguez Marín’s information does furnish proof about the existence of cases of this kind in the archives of the period.)π Luscinda, for her part, writes in the letter she sends to Cardenio that her father betroths her to Don Fernando, ‘‘swayed by the advantage which he thinks Don Fernando has over you’’ (I, 27, p. 213), which conveys quite accurately what the original says—‘‘llevado de la ventaja que él piensa que don Fernando os hace’’ (p. 309). Ambition moves Luscinda’s and Cardenio’s fathers, or at least that is what he thinks. She refers to her father as ‘‘my covetous father’’ (I, 27, p. 213) [mi padre el codicioso (p. 310)]. But in his recollection of the wedding scene, Cardenio calls her ‘‘avaricious, since the wealth of my rival had shut the eyes of her love’’ (I, 27, p. 216) [sobre todo codiciosa, pues la riqueza de mi enemigo la había cerrado los ojos de la voluntad (p. 314)]. And ‘‘in fine, I concluded that superficial love, slender understanding, vast ambition and thirst after grandeur, had obliterated in her memory those professions by which I had been deceived’’ (I, 27, p. 217) [me resolví en que poco amor, poco juicio, mucha ambición y deseos de grandezas hicieron que se olvidase de las palabras con que me había engañado (p. 314)]. Cardenio’s reckless praise of Luscinda when speaking to Don Fernando and other details are part of the Renaissance tradition of love stories of this kind, in which triangles of desire, such as the one in ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity,’’ are set up (as Girard has written of so compellingly).∫ Dudley has plausibly suggested too that there is a

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homoerotic relationship between Don Fernando and Cardenio in which the women, I would add, act as mediators.Ω What is different here, however, are the economic, social, and ultimately legal determinations: the key to these is very precisely inheritance laws and practices in Castile. Cardenio and Luscinda are of the low nobility—hidalgos—with sufficient wealth to make their marriage desirable. Both would gain: she social status, because Cardenio’s is higher; he wealth, because she is rich. Her estate would become Cardenio’s dowry, guaranteeing succession, a reassuring prospect to her parents because she is a woman. The added capital would even improve the lineage. Dorotea, the rich farmer’s daughter, is far below Don Fernando’s status, and his marrying her would anger his father—she is his vassal. (Her name rhymes with Dulcinea, of course, so there is something of a mirroring or echoing effect here, a version of what Don Quijote and Dulcinea’s romance could have been.) The duke is so wealthy that while the increase of the estate would be welcome, it would not be much of an incentive. The character most vexed by judicial and economic pressures is Don Fernando, who is the source of most of the troubles, having seduced Dorotea and married Luscinda under false pretenses. He is guilty of estupro and the priest plans to denounce him, whereupon he would become a fugitive from justice, like Don Quijote. His actions have sent Cardenio and Dorotea to the wilderness and left Luscinda in a dangerous situation from which she also wants to escape. (But she is abducted by Don Fernando from the convent in which she has taken refuge, a story that is merely sketched and that threatens an infinite proliferation of adventures and recalls Sancho’s cautionary tale about the goats.) Don Fernando is a Don Juan type who has caused injury to Cardenio’s and Dorotea’s families, not just to them individually, by compromising their honor and estate, meaning their social status and economic position. There is an implicit cause for his criminal actions: Don Fernando is an anxious segundón, a second-born son. In the Middle Ages Castilian law had elaborated the institution of the mayorazgo: an entailed estate, a mass of wealth and property whose integrity and continuity was guaranteed by exceptional testamentary laws. As the name implies (hijo mayor, eldest son), the mayorazgo consisted in the privileging of firstborn males in matters of inheritance—he inherited the title and the bulk of the endowment. The mayorazgo was an entailment devised to ensure the accumulation and retention of wealth within one family by preventing its dispersal through marriages. By the middle of the twelfth century the king allowed the establishment of mayorazgos that comprised entire villages. A mayorazgo could also be a royal grant from the king as reward for some special deed. In the Siete partidas the legal foundation of the institution was ultimately grounded on the conspicuous endorsement of primogeniture in the

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Bible, making specific mention of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his first and most beloved son.∞≠ The Partidas also explicitly allowed the testator to forbid his heir from alienating the inheritance by sale or other means, obliging him to pass it on to his own firstborn son.∞∞ Important legislation about the establishment of mayorazgos was issued in the Leyes de Toro of 1505, giving commoners the possibility of founding them. It was yet another measure by the crown to reduce the power of the aristocracy. But the new legislation also allowed for the coalition of two or more large mayorazgos, whose power could rival the crown’s. Charles V took care of this danger by authorizing in such cases a second son or even a daughter to inherit a part of the mayorazgo, thus breaking it up.∞≤ The proliferation of mayorazgos generated a class of segundones, or secondborn sons, who were left out of the patrimony. They had the social status their usually illustrious names conferred upon them but no financial substance or position in society and an uncertain future. As Elliott writes in Imperial Spain: ‘‘Just under these two groups of magnates [grandees and títulos], who formed the élite of the Spanish aristocracy, came a group which differed from them in having no corporate entity of its own, but which none the less enjoyed an acknowledged position in the social hierarchy. This group consisted of the segundones—the younger sons of the great houses. These possessed no title of their own, and were generally victims of the mayorazgo system which reserved the bulk of the family wealth for their elder brothers. Since their resources tended to be limited, they were likely to devote themselves in particular to careers in the Army or the Church, or to serve the Crown as diplomats and administrators.’’∞≥ The term segundón, by virtue of its suffix, an augmentative, is derogatory— grandulón (lummox), regalón (spoiled), coquetón (flirt), empollón (nerd), güebón (lazybones), and so forth. It clearly points to the embarrassing position of someone who can, because of his heritage, act with the self-sufficiency of his class but has little substance with which to back it up. The way out of this situation was contained in a refrain of the times—‘‘iglesia, mar, o casa real’’—that we encounter in the captive’s tale later in the novel applied to the sons of a man who is not a grandee and must all seek their own fortunes because of their father’s profligacy. The segundón, as Elliott explained, could join the church, usually in a good position acquired for him by his family, go to sea in search of fortune or as a soldier, or join the retinue of a nobleman as a servant—the higher up the master the better. Cut off from their parents’ legacy, the segundones became social and economic climbers anxiously trying to make up for their deficiency in status. In the Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they became a class unto themselves—a laborious one, one should say, desperately seeking social and economic advancement.

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Don Fernando’s situation and actions betray all the features of this class— Don Fernando is a segundón, a second son of Duke Ricardo. In fact, the text reads ‘‘un hijo segundo del duque’’ (p. 265), which Smollett translates as ‘‘the Duke’s second son’’ (I, 24, p. 177), instead of ‘‘a second son.’’ Rodríguez Marín wants to correct the original to ‘‘el hijo segundo del Duque,’’ literally ‘‘the second son.’’∞∂ But, as the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Spanish Academy explains, segundón meant, by extension, any son who was not the firstborn.∞∑ Segundón expresses the very condition of ‘‘secondariness,’’ of not being the primogénito who inherited all. The segundón is essentially he who is not first, the only position with entitlement. When Cardenio appears in his home, explicitly to be the companion of his older brother, who is in line to be their father’s successor and already a marquis, Don Fernando ingratiates himself with the visitor and wins him over to his side. Cardenio is like a rival, or someone who reminds Don Fernando of the role that he would be called upon to play if he chose ‘‘casa real’’ as his destiny. He could be a competitor in that, by becoming the ally of his older brother, he may come closer to wealth and power than Don Fernando himself, prevented as he is by law from acquiring them from his father. Don Fernando is the odd man out—literally number three in this case, worse than second. So he lures Cardenio away and soon finds himself as his rival for Luscinda’s favors. His seduction of Dorotea could have an economic motive too, even if he leaves her at first. In fact, when he does agree to marry her, Don Fernando is, potentially, founding a estate that could conceivably become a new mayorazgo that he could pass on to their firstborn son. Restitution takes on a whole new meaning when viewed from this perspective. Readers of Cervantes’ time would have easily and immediately recognized all the testamentary conflicts involved in Don Fernando’s actions, how the law impinges in his frantic love life. Dorotea is the victim of Fernando’s treachery but she is not a passive character by any means, and her actions are also dictated by the economic and legal determinations that drive the others. She is the daughter of commoners who are, however, Old Christians and wealthy, and hence capable of social advancement. Her father is ‘‘Clenardo the rich’’ (I, 29, p. 231) [rico Clenardo (p. 332)], and he and Dorotea’s mother have great ambitions for their daughter: ‘‘I was the mirror in which they beheld themselves, the staff of their age, and shared with heaven their whole attention and desires’’ (I, 28, p. 222) [Era el espejo en que se miraban, el báculo de su vejez y el sujeto a quien encaminaban, midiéndolos con el cielo, todos sus deseos (p. 321)]. The story that she concocts, while in the role of Princess Micomicona, about Pandafilando taking away her kingdom, reveals that one of her fears is that Don Fernando (whose name rhymes with that of the giant) will steal her property. She is ever mindful of her estate. In describing herself Dorotea stresses that she is the

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one who runs the prosperous family farm: ‘‘By my advice, they received and dismissed their servants; the tale and account of what was both sowed and reaped, passed through my hands. I managed the oil-mills, the vineyards, the herds and flocks, the beehives, and everything that such a rich farmer as my father, may be supposed to possess: in short, I was the steward and mistress’’ (I, 28, p. 222) [por mí se recebían y despedían los criados; la razón y cuenta de lo que se sembraba y cogía pasaba por mi mano; los molinos de aceite, los lagares del vino, el número del ganado mayor y menor, el de las colmenas. Finalmente, de todo aquello que un tan rico labrador como mi padre puede tener y tiene, tenía yo la cuenta, y era la mayordoma y señora (pp. 321–22)]. (As in the description of Grisóstomo’s wealth, one hears in a passage like this the voice of Cervantes the tax collector.) So, while Dorotea is a woman and a vassal, she is well aware of her rights and legitimate aspirations, not to mention what an asset her own physical beauty can be. When Don Fernando sneaks into her chamber determined to possess her by any means, she makes the decision to surrender motivated by love, pragmatism, and greed. In telling her story to the priest, the barber, and Cardenio, Dorotea repeats what she told herself at that crucial point: Neither shall I be the first, who by marriage, has risen from a low station, to rank and grandeur; nor will Don Fernando be the first nobleman whom beauty, or rather blind desire, has induced to share his greatness with a partner of unequal birth. Since therefore, I neither make a new world nor a new custom, it is but reasonable in me to embrace this honor that fortune throws in my way; and although the love he professes should not survive the accomplishment of his wish, I shall nevertheless, in the sight of God, remain his true and lawful wife. Besides, if I treat him with disdain, I see he is determined to transgress the bounds of duty and avail himself of force; in which case, I shall be dishonored and inexcusable in the opinion of those who do not know how innocently I have incurred their censure, for, where shall I find arguments to persuade my parents that this cavalier entered my apartment without my knowledge and consent? (I, 28, p. 226) [Sí, que no seré yo la primera que por vía de matrimonio haya subido de humilde a grande estado, ni será don Fernando el primero a quien hermosura, o ciega afición, que es lo más cierto, haya hecho tomar compañía desigual a su grandeza. Pues si no hago ni mundo ni uso nuevo, bien es acudir a esta honra que la suerte me ofrece, puesto que en éste no dure más la voluntad que me muestra de cuanto dure el cumplimiento de su deseo; que, en fin, para con Dios seré su esposa. Y si quiero con desdenes despedille, en término le veo que, no usando el que debe, usará el de la fuerza, y vendré a quedar deshonrada y sin disculpa de la culpa que me podía dar el que no supere cuán sin

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ella a venido a este punto. Porque ¿qué razones serán bastantes para persuadir a mis padres, y a otros, que este caballero entró en mi aposento sin consentimiento mío? (pp. 326–27)]

Dorotea is faithfully following both religious doctrine and Castilian law, which condoned premarital sexual relationships after a betrothal such as the one she has forced Don Fernando to make.∞∏ He has sworn to marry her not only before God, but before herself and her servant. When she pleads her case at the inn, Dorotea invokes these oaths, appeals to Don Fernando’s conscience, and assures him that by law he is not compromising his or his family’s status because nobility is transmitted by the father, not the mother’s blood, in Castile. She convinces Don Fernando with a speech (I, 36) that has as much verve as Marcela’s and is also couched in forensic rhetoric and terminology. Dorotea’s story is as compelling as Cardenio’s, but she is more composed and determined to obtain some sort of restitution. Her situation is complicated by the fact that her father is Don Fernando’s vassal and could hardly be the one to seek revenge or compensation according to custom. But by law she has recourse to both. Cardenio, on the other hand, being a man and an aristocrat like Don Fernando and the duke, offers to stand up for her, clearly because it is also in his interest. He makes the promise in strict accordance to law and custom: ‘‘I swear upon the faith of a gentleman and a Christian, that I will never abandon you, until I see you in the arms of Don Fernando, whom, if I cannot by reasonable arguments, bring to a true sense of his duty towards you, I will then use that privilege to which every gentleman is entitled, and, in single combat, demand satisfaction for the injury he has done you, without minding my own wrongs, which I will leave to the vengeance of heaven, that I may the sooner revenge yours upon earth’’ (I, 29, p. 232) [yo os juro por la fe de caballero y de cristiano de no desampararos haste veros en poder de don Fernando, y que cuando con razones no le pudiere atraer a que conozca lo que os debe, de usar entonces la libertad que me concede el ser caballero, y poder con justo título desafialle, en razón de la sinrazón que os hace, sin acordarme de mis agravios, cuya venganza dejaré al cielo, por acudir en la tierra a los vuestros (pp. 333–34)]. Lost in the translation are the precise legal formulas used by Cardenio, specifically his allusion to challenging Don Fernando to a duel; a riepto is the proper legal term, the most ancient form of settling scores. The riepto was the object of much debate in the sixteenth century, with aristocrats claiming, as Cardenio does, that it was their privilege to take the law into their own hands from Visigothic times, but that the crown had made this illegal in the sixteenth century.∞π Now that he is reassured of Luscinda’s virginal condition and the questionable legality of her marriage to Don Fer-

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nando, Cardenio is encouraged to take action, and he invokes what he believes to be his right. Don Quijote avails himself of the same right when challenged by the Knight of the White Moon. Dorotea tells her story while in the garb of a farmhand, but in a locus amoenus that is more in keeping with her flawless Renaissance beauty. In Cervantes perfect physical beauty is possible, even common among both young men and women, but these specimens are most often found dressed the wrong way, or they appear in the wrong setting. Dorotea is dressed as a man, which, as we learned from other cases, is part of her allure. In the wilderness she represents undifferentiated, pure desire, before the emergence of the law. Transvestitism is rampant in the Sierra Morena. First the priest dresses as a princess, then the barber puts on the dress when the priest proves squeamish. There are characters in drag ogling characters in drag: the barber, dressed as a woman, leers at the beautiful Dorotea, who is dressed like a man. When the priest addresses Dorotea he simply tells her that she can claim to be whatever she wants—man or woman—meaning that she can use feminine or masculine endings and pronouns, as Spanish allows for gender distinctions in the speaker. The despoblado here is a place so far outside the law that genders have yet to be defined—it is even pre-grammatical. Dorotea’s story is briefly interrupted by Cardenio, who cannot refrain from saying something when he hears about his own misfortunes from her point of view. This is the rest of his own story, which he himself did not know, and when he reveals to Dorotea his identity, parts of her story that she did not know fall into place. The interruptions are like the seams between the pieces of a large puzzle. For Cardenio the crucial piece is the scene at the wedding of Luscinda and Don Fernando, which had appeared proleptically in the chivalric story that he blurted out when Don Quijote interrupted him: the business about Queen Madásima and the surgeon. An example of Cervantes’ psychological sophistication is that Cardenio can only remember the fight with Don Quijote as if it had been dream, but cannot recall what provoked the fracas: ‘‘Cardenio immediately, as if it had been the faint impression of a dream, recollected and related the quarrel which had happened between the knight and him, though he could not remember the cause of the dispute’’ (I, 29, p. 233) [Vínosele a la memoria a Cardenio, como por sueños, la pendencia que con don Quijote había tenido, y contola a los demás; mas no supo decir por qué causa fue su quistión (p. 334)]. Cardenio’s story has a gaping hole, a crack at the climax that is contained within another break: Don Quijote’s interruption. It is like the scar left by a deep wound. But now he and Dorotea begin to discern a potential happy ending to their misfortunes at the intersection of their stories: the deleted motive, the gap in the story concerns the legality of Fernando’s and

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Luscinda’s marriage and her retaining her virginity. It is that chasm, fraught with violence and erased from Cardenio’s memory, that needs to be filled in the melodramatic and conclusive scene at Juan Palomeque’s inn. Cardenio expresses his desire for restitution using legal terms to describe the damage inflicted on him and Luscinda: ‘‘I think we have room to hope, that heaven will one day restore what mutually belongs us, as it is neither alienated, ruined nor irretrievable’’ (I, 29, p. 232). The original reads: ‘‘bien podemos esperar que el cielo nos restituya lo que es nuestro, pues está todavía en su ser y no se ha enajenado ni deshecho’’ (p. 333). The last part is a notarial formula used in contracts involving the assessment of properties and their resale value when returned to the original owner. I think, too, that ‘‘está todavía en su ser’’ (it remains whole in its integrity) is a euphemism to say that Luscinda is still virginal, as is ‘‘deshecho’’ (undone). His invocation of heaven means that, once rescued from the wilderness, the law—both human and divine—will again take effect and their story will have a happy ending. It is a stroke of genius that this process of restitution will be motivated by Don Quijote’s own nightmare, which comes to interrupt the reading of the novella ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ (at the point, incidentally, when the truth is about to be revealed). In the dream Don Quijote completes the story of Princess Micomicona, that is, Dorotea’s predicament translated into the language of chivalry, like Cardenio’s psychotic delusion. (This version of Dorotea’s imbroglio, true to the name she assumes, is a grotesque parody of her story: ‘‘mico’’ means monkey, Micomicona is the twice monkey, with an augmentative like that of segundón to boot, hence suggesting ‘‘to mimic’’ as in ‘‘monkey see, monkey do.’’) The ‘‘ending’’ of Dorotea’s story in that register is what breaks off the reading of ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity.’’ That story will resume and come to its very tragic ending, while those of Cardenio, Luscinda, Dorotea, and Don Fernando will have a purely comic one.∞∫ This is yet another intersection, with the accent on section, a crossing of break lines that is significant by way of contrast, like the aspar, or the manipulation of the sticks in weaving. The ending of ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ reveals its artificial, literary quality when the reading is concluded, as the priest remarks; the others, in the court-like scene of the reconciliations, manifest their contemporary, realistic nature, in spite of the comedy-like ending. It is not just that before marriage everything is comic and after marriage everything is tragic, but that ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ is not drawn from the archives but from the stock of literature, and takes place in a faraway Florence drawn from Italian collections of stories. The intertwined, broken tales make a whole, exuding a forensic kind of truth—a pragmatic justice that is the basis of the social. Javier Herrero sees in this both a triumph of religion and an indication of changing

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social values as the result of the emergence of the bourgeoisie: ‘‘It is true that Neoplatonism, associated with the tradition of courtly love, was still the accepted poetic and artistic vehicle for aristocratic sentiment: but through the influence of Christian humanism, and as an expression of the strength of the new bourgeoisie, the preoccupations with secular life and, above all, marriage, replaced the stylized conventions of chivalry and the austere ideals of monasticism.’’∞Ω This may be true, particularly if we take into account the economic and legal background that I have been examining. But no sooner do the tales of Don Fernando, Luscinda, Dorotea, and Cardenio get sorted out than two others appear, linked by an overarching story about the effects of inheritance law: the captive’s tale and that of Clara and Don Luis derive from the initial partition of his estate that a father from Extremadura made. The captive’s tale is so important that Luis A. Murillo has argued that it is the kernel of the whole book, and more recently María Antonia Garcés argued that it encodes the traumatic experience that turned Cervantes into a writer and is the cipher of his creative imagination.≤≠ It is easy to see that the stakes are much higher here. If the others involved the potential marriage of socially unequal partners, the differences between Ruy Pérez de Viedma and Zoraida-María are much more radical: race, religion, and language. Their love overcomes obstacles beyond anything the other young couples in the book had faced. The captive’s tale is one in which the power of love is shown to be so great that it conquers the greatest impediments; this is the reason it is interspersed with the story of Don Luis and Clara, the most clearly Neoplatonic and Garcilasian of the interpolated novellas. Their story repeats the now familiar conflicts of class disparity and social status. Don Luis becomes a derelict like Cardenio, and in some ways too the captive, who is also an outcast. The difference is that Don Luis is a poet and a singer of exceptional talent. His poetry, modulated by his beautiful voice, is a purveyor of harmony. His appeal is Orphic: those who hear him are enchanted. (‘‘Si de mi baja lira/tanto pudiese el son que en un momento/aplacase la ira’’ [If the sound of my lowly lyre, / were powerful enough to calm the ire]), to recall Garcilaso. This conflict is going to be resolved by a father who is also a judge, an oidor, sanctioning its legal validity. From the beginning, an aura of impending resolution announces a happy ending. The captive’s tale is also caught in that aura. The awakening of Zoraida’s love is through the gaze. From her window she espies Ruy in the courtyard and decides that he is the most ‘‘caballero’’ of all the men—she means, of course, the most handsome. He is captivated by her exquisite white hand, and later by the radiance of her incomparable beauty. Their attraction is so powerful that it

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is not hindered by their inability to communicate except by sign language. No words are necessary to express their love. But Zoraida’s is more powerful still, because it includes loving Ruy’s religion and her desire to formally convert. Her spiritual conversion to Christianity is what has driven her to him, and their union will not take place until she is properly baptized. Postponement, in this instance, occurs because of the need for this sacrament to be administered so that matrimony, also a sacrament, can follow the proper sequence. Cervantes is following in this part of the captive’s tale the conventions of the novela morisca, or novel with a Moorish theme, a fashion of the times. These novels usually involved love between two young lovers, one of whom is a Moor, or thinks that he or she is a Moor. But Cervantes’ tale has a more serious mood. Like Marcela and Dorotea, Zoraida is a very independent and strong-willed young woman—she too wants her freedom.≤∞ Her conversion to Christianity and flight with the captive has led her to betray her own father, Agi Morato, the most tragic figure in Part I of the Quijote. She has also abandoned her elevated position and her wealth, some of which winds up in the bottom of the sea. Zoraida transforms herself to become a Christian and the captive’s wife; she converts in the most radical way. As was the case with Dorotea, Luscinda, and Clara, her wedding will have to wait a while, but all the barriers have fallen or are about to fall. Notice that no mention is made of her being a Moor and Ruy a Christian: there were no religious or civil laws against such a marriage. Her becoming a Christian suffices to make them equal before God and the crown, although we shall see that this becomes problematic by the time Cervantes writes Part II because of the expulsion of the moriscos. ZoraidaMaría’s prospects are good now that the captive has found his brother and can be restored to a good social and economic position. The three brothers have done well and their respective estates will grow, particularly that of the pirulero, the one who went to Peru and became rich. Zoraida-María’s and Ruy’s formal betrothal winds up the love stories in Part I, except for the little tale about the wayward she-goat and the unfinished one about Vicente de la Rosa and Leandra, about which I already spoke. Could one say which prevails in the resolution of these conflicts, love or the law? I think that the most significant feature in the ending of these intertwined stories is the enclosure in which it takes place: Juan Palomeque’s dilapidated inn. This is the court of law and love in which the lovers find each other and resolve the conflicts that have brought them grief and separation. It is not an imposing building. But the inn is by definition the most transitory of structures, almost literally a crossroads bespeaking transience rather than permanence. It is the site of chance encounters and the commingling of the most diverse peoples, not that of appointed meetings among homogeneous groups

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engaged in common pursuits. Appropriately, the inn is flimsy, slapped together around what must have originally been a stable, and does not even offer a solid roof to protect its occupants: ‘‘El duro, estrecho, apocado y fementido lecho de Don Quijote estaba primero en la mitad de aquel estrellado establo’’ (p. 171). This is rendered by Smollett as ‘‘The bed of Don Quixote . . . so hard, so narrow, crazy and uncomfortable, stood foremost, and exactly in the middle of this ruinous hayloft’’ (I, 16, p. 101). But ‘‘estrellado’’ means that the stars can be seen through the holes in the roof, and could even be a sarcastic contrast with Renaissance castles, on whose roofs the zodiac was often depicted.≤≤ The inn’s inhabitants are not sheltered by a solid, artful construction like the state archive in Simancas or Eleanor’s palace in Aquitaine. Yet it contains representatives of the most important strata of society, some of whom hold influential positions in it: the judge; the priest; Don Fernando, who is a nobleman of exalted status; and, of course, troopers belonging to the Holy Brotherhood. It is a building that bespeaks the fragility of the unions sanctioned within it and, because of all the violence that has taken place between its feeble walls, the likely possibility that further interruptions will break this interlude of provisional peace. It is one with the kind of truth stories and interruptions allow us to glimpse, which can only dwell in such an outrageous court. In Part II the inn will be replaced by the duke’s mansion—a more solid structure but a veritable house of fictions. The stability of the unions sanctioned at Palomeque’s inn is not very promising. Dudley has written perceptively that ‘‘it is difficult to imagine Fernando undergoing the fundamental character change necessary for a convincing reconciliation. In fact most modern criticism has failed to produce a believable reading of his repentance. From the point of view of a modern psychological reading, his acceptance of Dorotea at the inn seems contrived or at best temporary. It is just a matter of time until he will again be back to his old tricks.’’≤≥ But one need not appeal to a modern psychological perspective: Cervantes has encoded transitoriness in the theater-like reconciliations. Don Fernando may be about to marry into some financial substance, but he is still a segundón, so he may indeed go back to his old ways to assert his very masculinity. Cardenio, on the other hand, has been mentally ill and when sane has proven to be rather cowardly. He has shown some verve now that he is supported by a whole cast, including a judge, troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and Don Quijote. But it could also be a matter of time before he again shows his weakness or his madness. Luscinda may, again, give him reason for it, as she has shown herself to be unreliable in keeping promises when pressured by circumstances. The next interruptions in these stories will likely lead to tragic endings, once

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the marriages have been realized and new erotic and legal demands appear on the horizon. The ending of Part I is the last of the interruptions in the book.≤∂ The narrator relates that he knows that Don Quijote died because an old doctor gave him a leaden box containing some parchments with several epitaphs. But little is known of a third sally in which the knight went to Saragossa for some jousts. There is a gap between the moment in which the narrative stops with Don Quijote safely at home and his presumed death. This halt is nearly as arbitrary as that when the action is arrested with the Basque and Don Quijote about to tear each other with their swords, though not as dramatic. The mad hidalgo has been captured and returned to his village by the priest and the barber, closing a loop in the action, but that is not the end of his adventures. It is an open ending, a door left ajar through which Avellaneda, author of the apocryphal Quijote, would enter. One could say that this inconclusive finish is one with the series of interruptions throughout the book; it is the forever open way to the truth. Closing it would be the most blatant fiction of all. For those fond of kabbalistic connections and numerology I have to add that there is another ending announced in these last pages of the Quijote that has extratextual significance. The omitted adventures in Saragossa would have taken place on an April 23, the date at which the famous jousts were held in that city. It is toward that date and city that Don Quijote sallies forth in Part II and in Avellaneda’s Quijote. When this bogus second Quijote appeared, Cervantes, to make his different, had his hero head instead for Barcelona. Cervantes did not know—he could not have known, of course—that April 23 would be the date of his own death (it is also Shakespeare’s, but not the same day because England and Spain were not on the same calendar). Going toward it and avoiding it, playing tag with death, Cervantes created his masterpiece. This is perhaps the underlying reason for the autobiographical turn of the Quijote in the waning chapters of Part I. Subconsciously Cervantes must have known, particularly given the age at which he was writing the novel, that he was literally in mortal combat with death itself, the biggest and most definitive of all interruptions.

7

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

Everything in Part II of the Quijote is more complex than in Part I because Part I is like the wax tablet upon which Part II is written—or, better, like a palimpsest on which there are many writings and rewritings. Part I is to Part II what the Amadís de Gaula and other chivalric romances were to Part I: it provides the basic narrative structure and situations on which new ones are based. The adventures of Part I are present in Don Quijote’s and Sancho’s memories and in those of the characters who have read the novel and in some cases try to reenact them. The protagonists now know that they are in a book, in fact, they eventually discover that they are in two books. The play of mirrors was intensified by the publication of Avellaneda’s spurious Quijote in 1614, which forced Cervantes (and his characters) to compete for legitimacy and authenticity. That the real author of the bogus sequel, whose name is an obvious pseudonym, is unknown, adds yet another imponderable to the game: he is an anonymous impostor. Cervantes’ masquerading schemes as author have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as an elusive and abusive—yet real—Cide Hamete Benengeli has emerged to claim ownership of his now famous protagonist. Appearing when Cervantes was well on his way to producing a second part, Avellaneda’s work spurred him to finish and to finish off Don Quijote to prevent further copies. This gives Part II a work-in-progress quality and piles on yet another layer of irony, making the accident of Avella-

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neda’s sequel an integral part of Cervantes’ Part II. One inspired scholar even proposed that it was Cervantes himself who hid behind Avellaneda’s nom de plume—that it was an elaborate and laborious ploy of his own to extend his literary games from the fictional to the real world.∞ One can see where Borges/ Pierre Ménard may have got his idea. In this house of mirrors the stakes of the game are higher than in Part I. At the Cave of Montesinos, which many consider the culmination of Part II, Don Quijote ‘‘meets his own madness,’’ as Edward Dudley aptly put it.≤ He confronts it at least two more times as he faces mirror images of himself—not just metaphorically copies of him, but copies that have the power to actually reflect, either materially or because of their name. First, when Don Quijote defeats the aptly named Knight of the Mirrors (Sansón Carrasco), whose ‘‘reflective’’ quality could not be more obvious but is also encoded in a subtle play of words that announces his second appearance. (Cervantes’ prose flows so effortlessly that it is easy to miss these subtleties.) The term used to refer to the small mirrors attached to the knight’s armor is luna: ‘‘muchas lunas pequeñas de resplandecientes espejos’’(p. 741), which Smollett aptly renders as ‘‘a number of small moons formed of the brightest looking-glass’’ (II, 14, p. 541). ‘‘Luna’’ primarily means ‘‘moon’’ and suggests ‘‘lunacy.’’ But luna also means the bright surface of a mirror that reflects, as opposed to its frame, borders, or dull backside. When Don Quijote is later defeated by the Knight of the White Moon (still Sansón Carrasco), he again faces his own insanity. The redundant whiteness—the moon is already white—suggests self-reflection, infinite repetition, and blankness: the void. It is as if Don Quijote were vanquished by a force issuing from within himself. The duel is an eerie scene that takes place on a beach, the threshold between the sea, an endless expanse, and the land. It is the book’s most sublime moment, and there are many sublime moments in Part II. As Don Quijote and Sancho return home, they will one more time fall prey to the duke and duchess in their house of gags and pranks, as if doublings and redoublings were now the rule—which they are. In fact, not only are episodes from Part I reenacted in Part II, but episodes from Part II itself are repeated and parodied, as when Sancho falls in the pit and relives his master’s experiences in the Cave of Montesinos. Raymond R. MacCurdy and Alfred Rodríguez claim that in this parody of a previous episode within Part II Cervantes is showing the innermost secret of his aesthetics.≥ There are at least two internal authors in Part II: the butler who scripts the Pageant in the Forest and Barataria, and Altisidora, who concocts several pranks of her own. And when the duke and duchess recount to Sansón Carrasco Don Quijote’s adventures at their house, it is as if there were already an internal reader of Part II within Part II itself—

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Carrasco is being told the adventures that we have just read. When the knight and his squire march into their village toward the end of the book, Sancho proclaims that Don Quijote returns ‘‘the victor of himself’’ (II, 72, p. 930) [vencedor de sí mismo (p. 1209)], the most difficult victory of all. The mirrors have all collapsed onto one another, leaving us with the memory of the virtual reality that their mutual reflections created. Far behind are now the officers of the Holy Brotherhood, the adventures of rustics disguised as shepherds, or the antics of anxious segundones. In Part II the law is elevated to politics and love to a complicated dance of shadows with models higher than mere knights and damsels in distress. Part II probes into the origin of the law, into the politics of power and the power of politics, to dismantle, or at least see from the inside, the moorings of the state—not so much the applications of codes as their foundations in the political. Part II practically begins with a wide-ranging discussion about politics incited by the priest, the barber, and eventually Sansón Carrasco, to test Don Quijote’s sanity. It is a very topical exchange with precise references to Spain’s current political predicament: governed by a weak monarch who is controlled by favorites, validos, and advised by all manner of schemers. Often lampooned in the literature of the times, these spontaneous advisors were derisively called arbitristas—from arbitrio, opinion or idea. Today we call them political scientists.∂ J. H. Elliott writes in Imperial Spain: ‘‘Brought face to face with the terrible paradoxes of the Castile of Philip III, a host of public-spirited figures—such men as González de Cellorigo and Sancho de Moncada—set themselves to analyze the ills of an ailing society. It is these men, known as arbitristas (projectors), who give the Castilian crisis of the turn of the century its special character. For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis—of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong. It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion.’’∑ Now that the state is a matter of reason—a product of the intellect—that can be affected by planning, and that can indeed be thought of as a work of art, many are tempted to offer solutions to its problems, some of them truly wild. This role as arbitrista is what the characters of the novel, particularly Don Quijote, are playing in this early scene. Part II of the Quijote is a political novel, no doubt the first, that deals with contemporary and even current crises in government and offers a bitter critique of the society of the period, particularly the ruling classes. In that opening discussion at Don Quijote’s house, there is reference to ‘‘the infinite num-

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ber of impertinent memorials’’ (II, 6, p. 489) [tanta infinidad de memoriales impertinentes (p. 672)] that the king receives, followed by a critique of frivolous courtiers and the decay of the empire as a result. In chapter 12, before the Cave of Montesinos episode, there is a hilarious satire of humanists, with their penchant for irrelevant intellectual pursuits, which undermines the hope that from them could emerge a state that would be a work of art. Don Quijote’s continued praise of the military, in wistful tones and always favorably compared to the career of letters, is but a thinly veiled critique of the state of the Spanish armies and the power of bureaucrats. At the end of Sancho’s government of Barataria there is a pointed condemnation of the Spanish bureaucracy as corrupt. There are many allusions to cohecho (corruption) throughout Part II, as when Teresa Panza says that as long as her husband comes back rich from his stint as governor, she does not care if he got the money through cohecho. And, of course, Part II takes up in great detail the burning contemporary issue of the expulsion of the moriscos, about which much more in a forthcoming chapter. Finally, if in Part I we found minor representatives of law enforcement and a judge on his way to the New World, in Part II there appears a viceroy, the highest state official in the whole work and one of the highest in Spain’s chain of command. The far-flung Spanish dominions in Sicily, Mexico, and Peru were organized as viceroyalties, or vice-kingdoms, following an Aragonese model.

❖

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The first adventure in which Don Quijote and Sancho engage in the knight’s third sally is the search for Dulcinea in El Toboso itself and in the middle of the night, a ghoulish journey into darkness. Dulcinea and her ‘‘palace’’ are nowhere to be found as knight and squire feel their way around to the sound of barking dogs and other creepy animal noises. Love is a quest into the dark night of the soul, only that instead of Saint John of the Cross’s pilgrimage to God, the characters merely find a farmhand on his way to work. But he is not even from El Toboso and is unable to give them directions. No human or divine guidance is available—they merely bump into the church, an incident that elicits a line from Don Quijote that has merited much commentary supposing that it is a barb against religious authority because of the turn of phrase. They are in a no-place, a no-man’s land contrived by Don Quijote’s desire and Sancho’s lies. Lost, they opt to take cover in the wild, lest they be found by the villagers who will be none too happy to find such prowlers in their streets and at such an hour. This nonadventure (which announces that cities will now figure in the

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novel) leads to the appearance of the ‘‘Enchanted Dulcinea’’ and the beginning of the process that will wind up with Alonso Quijano’s return to sanity. Part II is a convoluted journey through love’s madness to sanity and death. The background is now not so much the courtly love and chivalric traditions as the sober, deep, and profoundly revolutionary poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, to whom there are many references and whose verses are often quoted, in one occasion a full stanza.∏ A distinguished heir to Petrarch, Garcilaso places madness and death at the core of the courtly love tradition, giving a somber hue to beauty and desire. Spanish-language poetry came of age in his work. More importantly, perhaps, Garcilaso, a courtier, poet, and soldier, embodied the ideal knight of a bygone era, when the Spanish Empire was powerful and proud. His presence in Part II is in consonance with the political intention of the novel. A clue to the change from Part I to Part II are the buildings and landscapes where the action now occurs. If Part I took place in despoblados or in a dilapidated inn somewhere in the middle of Castile, Part II will move indoors to a summer mansion, a rich house in Barcelona, or the elaborate Montesinos’s Cave. Indoors and in poblado rather than despoblado, the characters move within the domain of the law. Part II begins with a polite debate in Don Quijote’s home and returns to that same home to conclude in the knight’s death chamber. Roofs, structures, solid walls now shelter the characters. Don Quijote spends leisurely days at the house of Diego de Miranda, is locked in a bedroom where he is wooed by a dueña, Sancho presides in a hall at Barataria, they dine at the duke’s country home, and the knight dances at Don Antonio Moreno’s house in Barcelona. Adventures will still begin and occasionally unfold on the road, like that of Roque Ginart, but the most important ones will be staged indoors or in a lavishly ornamented outdoors: the Pageant in the Forest and Camacho’s wedding are cases in point, but there are others, like Altisidora’s mock funeral in the courtyard of the duke’s house. Enclosure, building, architecture, arch-texture, convey a sense of lawfulness and order and suggest that love is contained by art and artifice. This is a false impression, however. The law does not necessarily mean reason—in the arch of architecture there is lodged also the arcanum, the irrational mystery of interdiction. Roofs and walls contain the threatening infinite of open spaces and untamed nature—the unlawful—but within them art erects its own forms of mischief and chaos. The law, too, is a human creation and as such flawed by desire, perhaps even more than nature itself. An increasing sense of the twisted contrivances of art and politics pervades the novel as the protagonists approach the coast. It culminates when they reach Barcelona, that most beautiful and

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cosmopolitan of Spanish cities (it is not even Spanish), and the Quijote becomes an urban novel, again perhaps the first. Like the duke’s palace, Barcelona is full of games and pranks, some of them cruel, and its port is the scene of a miniature naval battle; law in the city is also the purveyor of violence on a grand scale.

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Self-reflexiveness is the hall and hallmark of Part II, the overarching structure and theme under which all others fall. (I am playing on the origin of ‘‘hallmark,’’ which is Goldsmith’s Hall in London, the seat of the Goldsmith Company.) It contains within its translucent walls the novel’s elusive sense, whose very elusiveness is inherent to it and part of the overall meaning.π Much has been made about the elaborate games of self-reflection in the Quijote: multiple manuscripts and authors, allusions to Cervantes himself, characters who read or hear about the book in which they appear, and so forth. This is the element that modernist fiction, famously in Latin America with Borges as the chief practitioner, has focused and elaborated upon.∫ But in the Quijote, rather than pointing to the ‘‘death of the author’’ and other current critical topics, self-reflexiveness or self-referentiality has a more historically and politically grounded sense—a more richly significant one. Texts issue from texts and characters appear as creations of characters because a self-referential world is one that is man-made; it is self-enclosed and functioning according to human agency, not to divine rule, although the structure of a cosmos ordered by God remains and beckons like an empty shell whose host has left. That is to say, a structure of thought or conceptual system centered on a first principle—now hollow—is still the vehicle for a conception of the world and the self—it is only that the agency of that first principle is implicitly voided. All this owed much to the currents of thoughts that ran from Copernicus to Galileo and had a decisive impact on Western thought, particularly on Descartes. A world that is not geocentric conflicts with all the received notions handed down by antiquity and Catholic teachings. Because such daring assumptions ran counter to religious doctrine, Américo Castro, who best charted Cervantes’ indebtedness to the most daring ideas of his time, called him ‘‘a skillful hypocrite.’’Ω The main theme of Part II of the Quijote is that the world is man-made and hence fragile, provisional, doomed to failure and always threatening to vanish. What the game of mirrors emphasizes is the ethereal, flimsy, and temporal quality of all human products, particularly the self. These products are elusive, illusory, and deceiving because of their lack of substance and their transitoriness, in contrast to the presumed permanence of the world beyond—the world

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of immutable essences in the Christianized Platonic vision of eternal life. The emblem of Part II is the baroque desengaño, the falling off of the scales from one’s eyes to gaze into the void of the real and the unfathomable self. As Otis Green has written: ‘‘desengaño is related to the sort of awakening to the nature of reality that the Prodigal Son must have experienced: ‘I will arise and go to my father.’ This waking to true awareness is called caer en la cuenta: to have the scales fall from one’s eyes, to see things as they are. Such a state of mind is desirable. Disillusionment comes to be viewed, even to be venerated, as a sort of wisdom—the wisdom of the Stoic sapiens, or wise man of antiquity, who was fully aware of what constituted the summum bonum, the supreme good, and was utterly unenticed by everything else.’’∞≠ Desengaño, undeception, recognition of the fake nature of the trompe l’oeil: Part II is, in one word, baroque. It is redolent with a feeling of infinity, games within games in receding sequences; a world without bounds emerging from the new discoveries of science. It is also filled with a sense of decay, of deterioration, derived from the melancholy perception that the Spanish Empire is in irrevocable decline.∞∞ There were baroque elements in Part I, particularly the grotesque features of characters like Maritornes, the play of illusion and reality, the multiplicity of fictional levels, and the chiaroscuro ambience of the episodes at the inns. The holes in the roof of Juan Palomeque’s inn also give a hint of infinity. But Part I still contains many elements of what could be called Renaissance aesthetics in characters such as Marcela and Dorotea, whose perfect beauty reflect Neoplatonic ideals. The same is true of some of the settings, like the locus amoenus where Dorotea is first seen. Nature, present because so much of Part I takes place outdoors, is bountiful and orderly, even in the Sierra Morena. There always seems to be fresh grass and water for the animals, as in the adventure of the fulling hammers. There is also an underlying sense of optimism and mirth, even when Don Quijote is returned home in a cage, a scene that occurs on a Sunday and has a carnivalesque air. After all, most of the amorous conflicts are resolved in Part I. This changes in Part II because changes have occurred to bring about a retrenchment in post-Trentian Spain, an effort to return to preRenaissance ideas and doctrines, a return to the Middle Ages. José J. Arrom has written: ‘‘It is generally agreed today that the baroque was in Europe an artistic climate created by the spiritual environment of the Counter Reformation. This climate acted like an obscure force that pushed toward a return to what prevailed before the irruption of the Renaissance, to jump back onto grounds that, because they had not been turned, appeared to be more solid. In this leap back, Europeans . . . would up regressing into intellectual and artistic currents that were aesthetically akin to the Gothic and intellectually to the Middle Ages.’’∞≤

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In Spain this meant the imposition of Neoscholasticism as the ideology of the state, an intricate, self-sustaining, convoluted form of reasoning to match the labyrinthine cast of the patrimonial bureaucracy. But there is no going back in time, no unwinding of history back to the Middle Ages. Every origin sought in search of foundations turned into a contrived, made-up simulacrum of an origin, not a past revived but a pulsating present. The resulting tortured, pessimistic, and baroque worldview was uncannily modern, as I have argued in Celestina’s Brood. The pervasive self-reflexiveness of the 1615 Quijote issues from it, reflecting the interconnected nature of neo-scholastic thought, functioning on its own self-contained and tightly regulated syllogistic discourse and ultimately based on authorities—texts emerging from texts.∞≥ But it is, of course, a very distorted reflection that reveals its flaws and grotesque disconnection from the real: both the outside world of nature and the inner world of the self. The most poignant dramatization of this is found in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poem ‘‘Primero sueño.’’ The baroque structure that looms as emblem of that overarching selfreflexiveness of Part II is the very building housing the archive, literally the beautiful Renaissance castle at Simancas that was turned into the state repository for official documents after first having served as a prison.∞∂ Here the correlated and mutually referenced mountain of documents produced by the bureaucracy was stored, classified, and encoded—along with all those recopilaciones de leyes, whose cumulative system it mimicked. Like the baroque Part II, made of texts that issue from texts and refer to other texts, these documents lead one to the other, the very procedure for establishing the truth— active, operative, current, legalistic truths leading to exculpation or culpability, debt, liability, merit, and so forth almost ad infinitum. There is something funereal about this enclosure, this crypt or mausoleum, sarcophagus-like in its stony monumentality. In it, in this memento mori, power presumably lies (in both senses of the word). But the power is not there, it is ultimately invested, though its actions are endemically postponed, in the body of the king, the final authority who putatively adjudicates in all cases, but particularly those in which the documents do not yield an easy answer in their articulation.∞∑ Power, then, is invested in the king’s frail body, bound for an equally monumental structure—the royal castle, shrine, and sepulcher at El Escorial. The king’s body is the void outside Las meninas that must be filled by our own body—by every body and everybody who stands before that painting. This is also an important political statement that issues from the games of self-reflection in Part II: that the common person, the new inhabitant of this decentered world, can aspire to occupy the center and become himself the power; even if it is only for a few days, as in the case of Sancho, or for the

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Velázquez’s Las meninas, 1656. Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

few minutes that the spectator occupies the place of the king in Velázquez’s painting.

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Much has been made of the parallel between Cervantes and Velázquez in recent years because of the readings of Las meninas and the Quijote proposed by Michel Foucault at the beginning of Les mots et les choses.∞∏ I would like to suggest, however, that the strongest affinity between the Quijote and Las

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meninas is not just philosophical but political, and is intimately related to the elevation of the law to its political origins in Part II, and hence also to the selfreflexiveness of both works. Let me consider the painting briefly. Las meninas (The Maids of Honor or, literally, The Little Ones), from the Portuguese ‘‘Meu nino,’’ which means ‘‘my child,’’ refers to young people of either sex, of noble lineage, who, as a servants, attended the king or queen or the prince and princesses. Velázquez painted Las meninas about 1656. It shows Princess Margarita Teresa, preparing to pose for a portrait, being handed a glass of water by lady-in-waiting María Agustina Sarmiento. On her left is Isabel de Velasco, daughter of the Count of Colmenares, who is bowing. In the foreground, to the right from the perspective of the spectator, stand female dwarf María Barbola and the minuscule midget Nicolasito Pertusato, who is putting a foot on the dozing dog. The relevance of this painting to the Quijote lies chiefly in the issues of selfreflexiveness and the man-made, as I have been suggesting: in both novel and painting the creator has been given a prominent place and in both they appear in their function as authors of the very work in question. Hence it is not just that they are the creators, but that what the painting and the novel represent is the act of authoring, the act of creating, of producing work.∞π Las meninas seems to capture a moment, not a very significant moment, but one signaled to be a specific one by trivial gestures such as the gaze of the painter, which seems to have just been averted toward us; or the midget who has just put his foot on the dog; or the two figures on the right, on the second plane, who appear to be caught in a moment of conversation; or the man who is leaving through the back door, who has turned around for one last look at the room or at the painting. This framing of an insignificant moment can be equated in the Quijote to the issue of the contingent, the instantaneous, the serendipitous, the many chance encounters that make up the narrative, as well as to the trivial—objects, people, actions that are part of daily life and have no particular relevance. In Las lanzas (The Surrender of Breda) the moment caught is historical (though the horse on the right has just lifted its right rear hoof), but not in Las meninas. Nothing seems to have been elevated to be in this painting or in the Quijote; everything seems to have been caught up while in the flow of ordinary existence. In Las meninas, in fact, the painting being created and the subjects of the painting, the most important elements, are not available to the eye. Of the painting being made we only see the reverse, its inner workings, its artifice and the material elements that make it up rather than the finished product. Of the subjects—those being painted, presumably the king and queen—we see only the reaction they have produced on others. The supports

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Velázquez’s Las lanzas, 1634–1635. Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, NY, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

of the painting—stretcher, easel, the canvas itself—appear to be a deliberate depiction of the backstage of representation—its shop, as it were, since we are in Velázquez’s studio. This is akin to the narrative of the lost manuscript in the Quijote and the awareness of the characters in Part II that they are in a book. In Las meninas, as in the Quijote, the line between reality and representation is blurred. Either art encompasses all of life, or life all of art, without there being a clear demarcation between the two. We make art and life, and sometimes try to make life be like art, as in the case of Don Quijote. It is a kind of hyperrealism achieved by subjecting to scrutiny the process of representation. In Las meninas this is achieved in several ways, but mostly by the trick of having the spectator suddenly assume a place in the act of creation, perhaps as its object. At the best angle to look at the painting the spectator becomes the model for the painting, being sucked in by the whole scene. It is a trompe l’oeil, a ‘‘trampantojos.’’ This is like the role of the reader in the Quijote, which is highlighted by the fact that the protagonist—the knight—is first and foremost

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a reader. Hence we go on to occupy the role of Don Quijote as we read, just as we do in Las meninas as spectator-subject of the painting. But the most obvious way in which both painting and book erase the line between fiction and reality is by the inclusion of the creator in both. That Velázquez is inside the painting has many consequences, the first of which is to humanize him, to make him one with his creation, therefore as fallible and contingent as his creation. He is not above what he creates, a figure of God to the world he creates, but rather he is one with that world. This explains the double thrust of the device. I mean by this that, sure, the creator has been placed in a prominent, visible role, but his authority is, at the same time, severely undermined—we see his tricks from within his art. In the Quijote this is evident in the fact that the narrator claims not to be the author of the work but the transcriber of a translation from the Arabic. He is in the work he is creating—I emphasize the present participle—but he is not the original source of it. This is tied to the question of improvisation that I have mentioned before and to the famous Cervantine errors or oversights. A flawed creator, no better than his creatures, is bound to make mistakes; a work of art, being a human, not a divine product, cannot be perfect. In Las meninas this effect is achieved by the lateral position of Velázquez in the painting and his slanted and partial view of the room because he is gazing out toward the observer. We see him and ourselves in the back mirror while he can see only us and not the rest of the room that we can see with our broader, unfocused gaze. We can see, however, only the back of the painting. The entire room can only be seen by adding Velázquez’s gaze to ours: there is no all-encompassing view of the space. We can see what he sees only on that mirror placed about where the vanishing point of perspective would be. Irony emerges from these incomplete views, which hamper our comprehension of what exactly is happening totally and absolutely. There is more, because it is not a sure thing that the figures in the mirror on the back wall represent ourselves, given that the mirror is not quite in the very center, at the vanishing point or ‘‘point de fuite.’’ In fact, one could almost detect a pun on Velázquez’s part in his having that man, just to the right of the mirror, leaving through the back door—he is fleeing near the vanishing point, or ‘‘punto de fuga.’’ If it is true that man was also named Velázquez (actually José Nieto Velázquez), as some claim, the game of associations becomes even more complicated. So, like the Quijote, especially Part II, Las meninas is radically self-reflexive: Velázquez paints himself in the act of painting, within a chamber whose perspective, as well as that of the spectator, suggests that as one views the canvas, one becomes the object of the artist’s gaze and the focus of his work. We become the subject of the painting. I would like to emphasize that Velázquez is

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portraying himself in the act of creation and that creation is himself as he produces it. The painting highlights human creativity, agency, and work in the origination of the art object. No divine inspiration, no copying of classical models—the work, as we plainly see, is Velázquez’s own. Velázquez has usurped the central, privileged position that the monarchs should occupy as fitting subjects of a royal painting by a court artist. He is more important than the king and queen. That space of the king and queen, moreover, is empty until the spectator steps in front of the canvas and is swallowed up by the play of reflections. The crown’s place is empty and can be taken by whoever happens to be viewing the work to share an exalted centrality with the painter—we too can be king or queen for a day in the virtual Barataria created by art. Velázquez’s gesture is a Cartesian self-discovery through the act of creation: je peins, donc je suis, ‘‘I paint, therefore I am.’’ His act of self-affirmation does not depend on an outside authority, be it royal or divine, but on himself—it does not depend either on reality, but on his construction of himself as the ultimate reality. Within that enclosed chamber, like those in the Quijote Part II and the Simancas Archive, all the perspectival lines converge on the self of the creator and on his activity as producer of the work. The power of the monarchy has been weakened, not only politically and in actuality, but also as a process of conceiving the state that will eventually lead to the Enlightenment. Cervantes, too, produces in Part II a work that exists in a palace of reflections and selfreflections independent of God and king, though not rejecting either. The game of literature and of life is played while both are distracted, perhaps playing another game. The law can be made by a squire, elevated to ruler of a fake kingdom, just as we can become the subjects of a painting in the making by a court painter, no matter how common we may be.

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Although testamentary law is still present in the rewriting of the stories from Part I (rewritings are part of the self-referentiality), the law is now seen in relation to the constitution of the state and to its national and international projections. Among the already mentioned issues of national policy are the very contemporary ones about the expulsion of the moriscos, the problem of Catalan brigandage, the excessive influence of the church in state affairs, the irresponsibility of the aristocracy, and corruption in government. Among those of international policy there are the Turkish threat, piracy in the Mediterranean, Catalan separatism, and the pressing problem of the state’s finances, dependent as they are on loans from foreign bankers. In Part II the protagonists range beyond Castile into Catalonia, which is to say that the novel practically ventures beyond Spain, but, true to the self-reflexiveness, a beyond that is still

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Spain. In fact, the whole question of the state is taken up in the Barataria Island episodes, and also in part in that counter-utopia that is Roque Ginart’s band of outlaws. These criticisms of current social and political conditions are scattered throughout Part II. Don Antonio Moreno is a friend of the brigand Roque Ginart and of the viceroy, suggesting that there is something seditious about these personages. Catalan brigandage was sometimes allied to Huguenots in France. Worse, perhaps, both Moreno and the viceroy are frivolous and lament losing Don Quijote as a toy with which to play once he agrees to go home after his defeat. The viceroy acts with prudence in the case of Ricote’s daughter and her fiancé, but perhaps also a bit indecisively; he must await a ruling from the capital, the bane of all centralized bureaucracies, particularly patrimonial ones. The bitter exchange between the ecclesiastic and Don Quijote at the duke’s dinner table alludes to the excessive power of the church in temporal affairs, and Don Quijote’s advice to Sancho when he is about to become governor is full of pointed references to the political ills of the period. His first admonition is against ‘‘cohecho,’’ or corruption. But the subtlest and most cutting critique is embedded in the love story involving Dueña Rodríguez’s daughter. The young woman has surrendered her honor to the son of a rich farmer who does not want to make good on his promise of marriage. She asks Don Quijote to intervene because the duke, who could and should act, would not because he borrows money regularly from the lad’s father and cannot afford to offend him: ‘‘because, in fact, the young rogue’s father is extremely rich and lends him [the duke] money; nay, becomes surety for him when he happens to be in trouble, so that he would, by no manner or means, give him the least concern of uneasiness’’ (II, 48, p. 767) [y es la causa que como el padre del burlador es tan rico y le presta dineros, y le sale por fiador de sus trampas por momentos, no le quiere descontentar, ni dar pesadumbre en ningún modo (p. 1021)]. The translation does not quite convey how the duke is beholden to his creditor because of the urgency of his financial woes. In the original the latter is ‘‘fiador de sus trampas por momentos,’’ meaning that he often bails the duke out of pressing debts at the last moment. This reveals how the duke and duchess underwrite their expensive entertainments at their country mansion and seems to me to be as clear a reference as can be to the situation of the Spanish crown, always on the verge of defaulting on its loans to German bankers, like the famous Fuggers, and hoping to be saved by last-ditch schemes or by the anxiously awaited arrival of the next shipment of silver from Mexico or Peru. The most politically allusive of all episodes in Part II is, of course, the one about Sancho’s government in the Isle of Barataria, which is also a synthesis of

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baroque themes and structures discussed before. In Barataria the origins of the law and the political are sought in a past that is both medieval and timelessly at the founding of the social. The gist of this episode is given by the butler when he says: ‘‘My lord governor, said the butler, your lordship speaks so much to the purpose, that I am struck with admiration, to hear a man so illiterate as your lordship (for, I believe you do not know your letters) make so many observations full of sagacity, and give counsel so much above everything that was expected from your lordship’s capacity, by those who sent us, as well as by ourselves who are come hither. Every day produces something new: jokes are turned to earnest, and the biters are bit’’ (II, 49, p. 771) [Dice tanto vuesa merced, señor gobernador, que estoy admirado de ver que un hombre tan sin letras como vuesa merced, que a lo que creo no tiene ninguna, diga tales y tantas cosas llenas de sentencias y de avisos, tan fuera de todo aquello que del ingenio de vuesa merced esperaban los que nos enviaron y los que aquí vinimos. Cada día se veen cosas nuevas en el mundo: las burlas se vuelven en veras y los burladores se hallan burlados (p. 1025)]. Sancho, the common man, can rule without learning because he is endowed with the capacity to interpret and apply natural law. This is a medieval retention or recuperation, in line with the return to pre-Renaissance ideas Arrom mentioned, that contrary to expectations (like Sancho’s acumen), serves as vehicle for a modern concept: that the common person is intelligent enough to rule him- or herself and others. Now we see that the squire’s refranes, his many proverbs, are a form of natural wisdom passed down orally through the ages—it is a wisdom good enough to form the basis of the law. The series of episodes in Barataria have to do with the unraveling of aristocratic authority and the emergence of the common person as potential ruler. Sancho is wise beyond all assumptions and in spite of all pranks his dignity remains untouched; the mockers are mocked. The point is that in the baroque theater of Barataria, what is planned as a prank turns out to be true: Sancho is a good governor. (He is the opposite of another ‘‘king for a day,’’ Prince Segismundo in Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, who has been tutored by Clotaldo but fails his first trial in the throne.) This surprising outcome thwarts the designs of the duke and duchess and runs counter to the authorial intentions of the butler who has scripted the whole episode. In Barataria, the much-discussed ‘‘Quixotization’’ of Sancho reaches its peak: he is educated by his dealings with the knight. One should not lose sight that his ‘‘failure’’ is not due to any fault of Sancho’s but to the contrived nature of Barataria, built of pranks upon pranks to upset the squire. As Manuel Durán has written: ‘‘it is also in the second part when the interaction of the two main characters, the knight and his squire, reaches a climax. Sancho Panza becomes increasingly ‘quixotized’ and even at certain moments occu-

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pies the center of the stage, having become temporarily the novel’s central character.’’∞∫ It is like the spectator—like any of us—occupying the place of the monarchs while viewing Las meninas. Barataria is a mock utopia, a Renaissance dream that finds its highest exponent in Thomas More: the notion that a perfect society can be established following a rational, even artistic design.∞Ω (In chapter 2 I spoke about Maravall’s contention that the Renaissance state—Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s—was conceived of as a work of art.) The idea, evidently, goes back to Plato’s Republic, and in the Quijote it also reflects all the treatises about the art of government, including, of course, Machiavelli’s, as well as those on the education of princes. There was no shortage of those in Spain, the most influential being Fray Antonio de Guevara’s Reloj de príncipes (Valladolid, 1529). Barataria turns this tradition upside down. The theoretical and political traditions are both contained and satirized in the very conception of the ínsula, the island (Don Quijote uses an archaic term drawn from chivalric tradition that Sancho fails to understand means ‘‘island’’). Barataria, as island, projects three things. One, the idea of self-containment and self-sufficiency, of roundness, completion, and beauty. It is the creation of the duke’s butler following the conception of the modern state as a work of art that began with the Catholic kings. Two, the relatively recent discovery of the Caribbean islands, where Spain had set up new societies almost from the ground up, as it were. Three, the wished-for but never reached islands of classical tradition: the Antilla or Ante-island. This tradition of the fugitive island—of the ‘‘isla a su vuelo fugitiva,’’ to remember Góngora—has been beautifully studied by Simone Pinet, who charts its appearance in classical, medieval, and Renaissance atlases.≤≠ All this is behind Sancho’s unfulfilled desire. Barataria has the elusiveness that one associates with Atlantis. The assumptions in all this bookish background are mocked in Cervantes through his natural, illiterate ruler, who could not be an heir to it, yet became a capable governor. This is also part of the desengaño: the disillusionment, the awareness of the failure of human knowledge and the limitations of human agency. Anthony Grafton opens the introduction to his magnificent New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery with these words: ‘‘Between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.’’ He goes on to quote Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta, who writes the following in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias: ‘‘Having read what poets and philosophers write of the Torrid Zone, I persuaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would not be able to endure the violent heat, but it turned out otherwise. For when I passed [the Equator] I felt so cold that I was forced to go into the sun to warm

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myself. What could I do then but laugh at Aristotle’s Meteorology?’’≤∞ (This is mocked, by the way, in Part II, chapter 29 in the ‘‘enchanted boat’’ episode.) Ironically, the proliferation of books brought about by printing begins a process by which the book was severely tested and ultimately devalued. The ability to read many books did not bring one closer to the truth but to an inordinate, perhaps infinite enlargement of the library, perhaps to Don Quijote’s madness. The function of books changes not only because the printing press makes them available in larger quantities, but also because they are no longer seen as reliable purveyors of knowledge. The scrutiny of Don Quijote’s library and Altisidora’s dream clearly show some of the quandaries that this new situation opens up. In the former a cleansing by fire of the library is a futile and belated attempt to reduce the number of books Don Quijote reads. In the latter some devils appear to be playing a game of tennis, the balls being volumes that fall apart when they are smacked with flaming rackets. (It is no accident that the book to be most thoroughly pulverized by one of the players is Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quijote.) These brittle books, full of air, are many but valueless; they must all be apocryphal or stolen. Sancho does not need them to be able to rule well. Barataria is also a consideration of the origin of the law by having a primitive government in which both ruler and judge are the same person—power and the responsibility for justice are invested in the same individual, recalling ancient modes of legislation going back to the Bible. Freud’s allusion to Barataria in Totem and Taboo is instructive in this regard. For him the episode is a playing out of the suffering a savage king must undergo to pay, as it were, for his exalted position. This is reenacted chiefly in the hilarious scene in which Sancho is denied food by the fake doctor Pedro Recio. Freud is drawing an analogy between certain neuroses and the behavior of primitives, focusing on the ambivalent attitude toward kings and its analogue in the relationship of children to their fathers. ‘‘Here the importance of a particular person is extraordinarily heightened and his omnipotence is raised to the improbable in order to make it easier to attribute to him the responsibility for everything painful that happens to the patient. Savages really do not act differently towards their rulers when they ascribe to them power over rain and shine, wind and weather, and then dethrone or kill them because nature has disappointed their expectation of a good hunt or a ripe harvest.’’≤≤ And later: ‘‘Thus also the taboo ceremonial of kings is nominally an expression of the highest veneration and a means of guarding them; actually it is the punishment for their elevation, the revenge which their subjects take upon them. The experiences which Cervantes makes Sancho Panza undergo as governor on his island have evidently made him recognize this interpretation of courtly ceremonial as the only cor-

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rect one. It is very possible that this point would be corroborated if we could induce kings and rulers of to-day to express themselves on this point.’’≤≥ He goes on to make the unavoidable comparison with the Christian myth: ‘‘Why the emotional attitude towards rulers should contain such a strong unconscious share of hostility is a very interesting problem. . . . We have already referred to the infantile father-complex; we may add that an investigation of the early history of kingship would bring the decisive explanations. Frazer has an impressive discussion of the theory that the first kings were strangers who, after a short reign, were destined to be sacrificed at solemn festivals as representatives of the deity; but Frazer himself does not consider his facts altogether convincing. Christian myths are said to have been still influenced by the aftereffects of this evolution of kings.’’≤∂ Sancho is a stranger arbitrarily picked as ruler, he suffers, and his reign is short-lived. Becoming a figure of authority has risks and can bring pain as much as pleasure, all part of the heavy responsibility of power. It is the responsibility to uphold the law that evidently Spain’s Habsburg rulers are shirking, as well as the suffering that goes with it.≤∑ From Sancho’s point of view it is also a lesson about the disappointment of all achievements: once obtained, things are never quite what we imagined or desired, and they do not last very long anyway. This is the powerful desengaño element of these episodes in the island and their consideration of the law in relation to politics, both in abstract terms and specifically referring to Spain’s current situation.

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Love stories similar to those in Part I appear in Part II, but, as we can see in the case of Dueña Rodríguez’s daughter, they are considerably more complicated, have far-reaching consequences, and find no satisfactory resolution like those brought about by Don Quijote at Juan Palomeque’s inn. Some of the stories are contrived by the duke and his minions, particularly that very inventive butler who conceives of the Pageant in the Forest and Barataria. But even those are not resolved: Tosilos does not marry Dueña Rodríguez’s daughter, and Sancho sees through the prank about Clara and Andrés Perlerino. Of the stories in the main plot, Ricote’s daughter does not marry Gaspar, Altisidora plays the role of the rejected Dido, and Claudia Gerónima kills her fiancé Vicente Torrellas in a fit of jealousy. (This story is another exception to the trend by which everything that happens before marriage is the stuff of comedy and after that of tragedy.) The only story that comes to a happy conclusion is Camacho’s wedding, not through Don Quijote’s intervention, however, although he does support Basilio as he did Marcela in Part I, but by the young man’s elaborate scheme to subvert the social order by using religion. A staged,

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provisional wedding winds up as legitimate by the way Basilio manipulates doctrinal technicalities about marriage, though in truth according to both civil and religious law Quiteria and Camacho could have appealed. (This is a complicated story to which I devote the next chapter.) The most important unresolved love story is Don Quijote’s and Dulcinea’s. Don Quijote never disenchants her, although Sancho does ‘‘complete’’ the lashes that make up a parody of restitution. He is paying back for his lies and their consequences. The knight manages to disenchant her only when he regains his sanity. Love is the vehicle to sanity, but only through a madness in which distorted images of famous lovers are contrived: Altisidora as Dido and Dulcinea as Beatrice in the Pageant in the Forest. The grandest love story in Part II is not that of Don Quijote and Dulcinea, however, nor their models from Part I, drawn from the chivalric and courtly love tradition. As with the law, the stakes are higher now and the models are more exalted: Dulcinea is a transvestite Beatrice and Don Quijote is pursued by Altisidora, a mock Dido and the most interesting female figure in Part II. In the background story of Aeneas and Dido love and the law coalesce with the theme of politics and with desengaño. Allusions to The Aeneid abound in Part II. Both Don Quijote’s descent to the Cave of Montesinos and Sancho’s fall into the pit recall Aeneas’s visit to Hades. The journey toward Barcelona vaguely evokes Virgil’s hero’s trek toward what would become Rome. Altisidora often appears surrounded by or near flames, evoking Dido’s suicide in the pyre. She openly plays the role of the spurned Carthaginian queen to Don Quijote’s prudent and pious Aeneas. In the political context that I have been examining, this evocation of Rome through Virgil has a tinge of nostalgia, of melancholy for the grandeur of the Spanish Empire, whose model was of course Rome’s—this may go a long way to explaining the turn to the political in Part II of the Quijote. The current state of the empire does not quite rate an Aeneid in perfectly crafted dactylic hexameters, but a prose epic about a mad hero pursued by a fake Dido. The Aeneid is also a poem about the founding of a polity, a city, a state; hence allusions to it refer to the birth of the law and of government. In this sense the cluster of allusions is, like Barataria, a probe into the principles of law and the law of principles. Virgil was conscious of creating a national poem, and one wonders if Cervantes did not feel that his novel would also become a national epic, though a degraded one. One can also see that by playing Aeneas Don Quijote is coming closer to sanity, for the Virgilian hero was certainly a prudent lover, not a mad one like those in the courtly love tradition or in chivalric romances. Love is shunned in favor of the law, but Don Quijote is not going to be the founder of any city. He is going to find and found himself, a great

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accomplishment, no doubt, as Sancho proclaims, but a sign of his disillusionment with bringing justice to the world, of finding and upholding the law, of founding, perhaps, a polity in consonance with his ideals. It is again the legalese in Cervantes’ prose that gives the clue here. As in Part I, there are references to many legal documents and acts in Part II. The lion keeper wants to make sure that the other characters bear witness to the fact that he is being forced to perpetrate a crime against the crown: it is committed on the highway, in despoblado, and the animals are being sent to the kings. What he shouts to them is a legal formula, a form of attestation: ‘‘I call all present to witness that I am forced, against my will, to open the cages, and let loose the lions, and I here declare that this gentleman is chargeable with, and answerable for, all the harm they shall do, as also for my salary and perquisites over and above’’ (II, 17, p. 560) [—Séanme testigos cuantos aquí están como contra mi voluntad y forzado abro las jaulas y suelto los leones, y de que protesto a este señor que todo el mal daño que estas bestias hicieren corra y vaya por su cuenta, con mis salarios y derechos (p. 764)]. Smollett quite successfully captures the legal terminology, the ‘‘cuantos aquí están,’’ ‘‘contra mi voluntad y forzado,’’ ‘‘protesto a este señor,’’ ‘‘corra y vaya por su cuenta.’’ The lion keeper’s speech is like the dictation of a document that would begin something like, ‘‘Let the record show . . .’’ When, at the end of his rule in Barataria, Sancho appears before the duke to give him a report, he is undergoing what was known as a juicio de residencia. It was a proceeding to which high government officials—viceroys, governors, and the like—had to submit themselves as they left office to provide proof of their honesty and effectiveness during their tenure. But all these documents, virtual or real, are part of the prose of the bureaucracy that we are by now accustomed to finding in the Quijote. Part II’s conclusion is marked by two legal documents with much higher significance: Don Quijote’s will and his death certificate. In the first the good hidalgo makes restitution to his housekeeper, niece, and Sancho for all the grief that he has caused them and the work that they have done without recompense. The document is drawn up and dictated to a notary public in accordance with all the rituals prescribed by the law and adhering to the expected notarial formulas. It is an interesting document because, being childless, Don Quijote has no immediate legal heir. His hidalguía is not going to be passed on to a son. It ends with his death. What is left of his fortune is bequeathed in its entirety, except for the sums left to Sancho and the housekeeper, to the niece, who is the daughter of a sister. He does make provision to annul the bequest if the niece marries a fellow who reads romances of chivalry, a prudent measure that he has learned not only from his own misadventures but from those of all

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those young men he met throughout, like Cardenio, who were steeped in them. No courtly love and no chivalry: Don Quijote’s niece and future husband will run the estate with as much wisdom as Diego de Miranda, the Man in Green (II, 18). The death certificate is to be seen in conjunction with the affidavit that Don Quijote has Alvaro de Tarfe sign declaring that he had never seen him before, hence invalidating Avellaneda’s Quijote. Tarfe is a character in the apocryphal sequel. With his signature Tarfe also attests to his own nonbeing—a character in a false book, he could not be more of an absence. He signs a certificate of unbirth, as it were, the most outrageous document in the whole novel. Instead of being a legal text that conveys the truth, it is a fictional legal text that attests to the fictionality of another, creating an infinite regression of texts with no possible end. Both this document and Don Quijote’s will are elegant jokes about the relationship of the law to fiction—about their complicity and coeval birth, which is a form of death at the same time, or the elimination of the dividing line between them. The will presumably forecloses the possibility of new sequels to the novel, being active and enforceable then within the realm of fiction like a death certificate in the real world. The affidavit guarantees the legitimacy of one fiction and disqualifies another but at the same time blurs the separation of legitimate and illegitimate fictions. There is no way out of this gallery of mirrors, except through death, real death, from which Cervantes is not far as he completes the Quijote. Don Quijote’s death makes all of his life like a dream, with death the only access to a true, permanent life. It is not just his madness that is like a dream but everything else: his madness is a dream within a dream. This is not a book that has a plot in the Aristotelian sense, so that the life of Don Quijote is what gives it form—this is drawn from the picaresque and from chivalric romances. Hence the Quijote has to end with the hero’s death. Death is a form of closure that everyone understands, even those who never heard of the Poetics. It gives life shape by making everything converge in it, as Quevedo said memorably in a poem. Cervantes is showing that the novel cannot be bound by the artificial shapes of art, but by the shape of life as everyone understands it and as it is recorded in depositions and verified by death certificates. All this acquires depth when we take into account that his own death is near as he writes about Don Quijote’s. Because the death that cannot be written out or postponed is Cervantes’ own, the ‘‘siempre, segura muerte’’ (death, forever sure). Cervantes has played so much with his own link to the creation of Don Quijote that one is left with a sense of ambiguity about whether he felt that he owned the character. He is the most reticent and at the same time visible and assertive author. Is his death the death of the author of the Quijote? The prologue to the

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Persiles, written only a little later, shows a man resigned to his impending death, as if death were merely a part of life. There is an identification of Cervantes with Don Quijote in their deaths that is more profound than simply the issue of not allowing anyone else to continue the Quijote. Life as lies, as literature, has to come to an end for him too: a form of truth must be reached on the brink of death. Cervantes seems to be saying that he, like Don Quijote, is renouncing a life of make-believe.

8

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

Of all the love stories in the Quijote, Part II, none is more entertaining and comedy-like than the episode of Camacho’s wedding. In fact, some critics believe that the episode was to be the basis for a play Cervantes never got around to writing.∞ The episode is in some respects a rewriting of the love stories in Part I, especially those of Cardenio, Luscinda, Dorotea, and Don Fernando, but with reminiscences also of the Marcela-Grisóstomo tragic conflict. It is one of the few stories in Part II that is not contrived by characters within the fiction, though the way in which Basilio stages its resolution and the wedding festivities give it a theatrical quality akin to that of others, such as the one involving Tosilos and Dueña Rodríguez’s daughter, and Altisidora’s mock wooing of Don Quijote. Camacho’s wedding is also the one love story in Part II that has a happy ending, sealed not just by the union of the young lovers but by Camacho’s forgiveness of the offenders—they did thwart a legally and religiously sanctioned marriage. But while these are all significant aspects of the Basilio-Quiteria-Camacho love triangle, what stands out in this episode is how the issues of love and the law are elevated to a higher sphere, that of religious doctrine as codified in canon law. This Cervantes accomplishes by the way in which he weaves in classical mythology and, above all, by how sedulously he presents current and pressing questions about marriage in the Spain of the times. There is also, I will argue here, a symbolic subtext that suggests a

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resolution of the uneasy mixture of classical mythology and Christianity and of the questions of canon law concerning marriage. Don Quijote and Sancho hear about the impending wedding of ‘‘Camacho the Rich’’ to Quiteria on the road, from the students who engage in the fencing match. They are natives of Quiteria’s village who are returning home to enjoy the feast and to find out how the unresolved problem of Basilio’s love for the young woman will be played out. The potential conflict has by now a familiar ring: it is to be an unequal marriage. Basilio, clever and charming, is skilled at sports and music but has no capital or profitable skills. Quiteria has noble blood but is not wealthy, while Camacho is fabulously rich but a commoner. Their marriage will be beneficial to both in social and financial terms, the ostensible reason why Quiteria’s parents want her to forget Basilio. When the protagonists hear this, they launch into a discussion about marriage in which Don Quijote defends the traditional position giving parents the right to marry their children off to whomever they deem convenient, and Sancho the more modern one holding that people should marry whomever they love. Curiously, as the episode develops, their positions are reversed. Sancho is swayed by the amounts of food he enjoys at Camacho’s wedding feast, Don Quijote by Basilio’s pluck. (It is a Cervantean practice to foreground a story and the characters in it before the action unfolds, something he may have learned from writing for the theater—those familiar with Molière will recall similar procedures in his plays. The same device is used in the Marcela-Grisóstomo episode and in Cardenio’s.) The story, like the one about Ricote’s daughter, abounds in details of village conviviality, depicting a peaceful life. It is the kind of custom-bound existence that leads to the formulation of laws, the basis for the kind of communal consensus that winds up as written codes—derecho consuetudinario, or common law. Basilio and Quiteria, who live in contiguous houses, grow up together loving each other, and it is everyone’s expectation that they will marry, providing continuity to the changeless history of the village. Their love is explicitly compared to that of Pyramus and Thisbe, who, as everyone knows, communicated through a hole in the wall separating their houses. This allusion is an ominously tragic note. The student who is telling the story says: ‘‘This Basilio is a neighboring lad and townsman of Quiteria, and there is nothing but a partition-wall between his house and that of her parents, whence Cupid took occasion to renew the long forgotten loves of Pyramus and Thisbe; for Basilio became enamored of Quiteria, even from his tender years, and she smiled upon his passion with all manner of honorable indulgence’’ (II, 19, p. 575) [Es este Basilio un zagal vecino del mismo lugar de Quiteria, el cual tenía su casa pared y medio de la de los padres de Quiteria, de donde tomó ocasión el amor

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de renovar al mundo los ya olvidados amores de Píramo y Tisbe; porque Basilio se enamoró de Quiteria desde sus tiernos y primeros años, y ella fue correspondiendo a su deseo con mil honestos favores (p. 783)]. The love of Pyramus and Thisbe is not as forgotten as the student claims, however. Lorenzo Miranda, the son of Diego de Miranda, whose house the protagonists have just left, wrote a sonnet on the theme that is quoted in full, clearly also as a form of foreshadowing. What the student means by ‘‘long forgotten’’ (los ya olvidados amores) is that the love of Pyramus and Thisbe belongs to the past, not to the present, as does that of Quiteria and Basilio. Following the classical tale, when Basilio reaches manhood and Quiteria the requisite age to marry (sexual maturity in both cases, one presumes), her father forbids the young man to visit her any longer and arranges for her to marry Camacho the Rich ‘‘to free himself from all sorts of jealousy and suspicion’’ (II, 19, p. 575) [por quitarse de andar receloso y lleno de sospechas (p. 783)]. The way in which Quiteria’s father expresses his concern makes it clear that he believes she is capable of carrying on a sexual liaison, and there is even a hint that it may have already begun or is near happening. Once he learns of the impending wedding Basilio goes mad in a way not too dissimilar to Cardenio, with similar outward symptoms, but he is very different in that he is determined not to let Quiteria be taken away from him, using his unprofitable but efficient skills for the purpose. I retell this part of the plot to underline from the start one detail that could go unnoticed but that later becomes significant retrospectively: that the prohibition arises when Quiteria and Basilio attain sexual maturity. She has clearly begun to menstruate—it is said that she is eighteen and he twenty, so they are quite capable of reproducing. Up to then Quiteria’s parents did not see Basilio as a threat, nor could they hope to create a legacy through Quiteria’s children by a wealthy man. Separating the young couple is a way of ensuring that Quiteria will not have a child by the impecunious Basilio, who has added to his various abilities that of impregnating her. Given their proximity and upbringing together there is a faint hint of the incest prohibition lurking in the background, suggesting that more than a social and economic conflict is at stake—that their separation stems from a kind of primal law, an atavistic forbidding of the fusion of bloodlines. This is another instance of what I have been saying about the irrationality of interdictions and the origins of the law. The ban leads to the clash that makes up the core of the story but also hints at its resolution. The episode is built on such antitheses, on oppositions that lead to transformations, to metamorphoses—dynamic transmutations of shapes and of matter. The Pyramus and Thisbe story is drawn, of course, from

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem that begins: ‘‘My intention is to tell of bodies changed / To different forms.’’≤

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John Sinnigen has correctly observed that Basilio’s victory is due to his artfulness and his will, to his contriving an ending to the episode different from what it appeared to be about to have: The final result of the action of Camacho’s wedding is the confirmation of the propriety of romantic love and the rejection of the illegitimate claim on love by interés [greed]. The same conclusion was provided by Cardenio’s tale. There are, however, important differences between the two stories. Cardenio’s tale ends in a venta [inn] to which the hand of fate had led the two couples. The ‘‘Bodas de Camacho,’’ however, ends in a teatro [theater] and the conclusion is brought about by Basilio’s industria [craft]. The difference between these two endings reflects a significant difference between Part I and Part II. In Part I only Don Quijote and the priest (and very briefly the ventero [innkeeper] in Chapter II) acted as ‘‘authors’’ in the sense that they tried to impose fiction on reality. The role of art was of secondary concern to the other characters. In Part II, however, art and artifice are extremely important and a larger number of characters (from Sancho Panza to the Duke and Duchess) act as ‘‘authors’’ by using fiction to impose their wills on other characters. In the ‘‘Bodas de Camacho’’ Basilio acts as ‘‘author’’ because he is not content to let fate decide the end of the story. Therefore he imposes his will on the other characters by using fiction to alter the course of the story away from its ‘‘natural’’ ending.≥

I would add that the art and artifice involved in thwarting the ending of the story, being all of Basilio’s making, are man-made, as are all such constructions in Part II. The most clearly man-made of these is the law, both civil and canon, which is the reason Basilio can so cleverly manipulate it. This is because one of the attributes Basilio appears to have is a legalistic mind, though there is no hint that he is a law student, as was the case with the prisoner of sex studied in chapter 1. For all the zany ingenuity of the ruse he uses to recover Quiteria, there is a very carefully laid legal foundation to make their wedding valid. In this preparation and in the trick Basilio uses Cervantes has embedded a detailed, nuanced discussion of the debates about marriage that arose in post-Trentian Spain, when the council’s resolutions on the matter were incorporated into statutory law. Of course, Part I was also written after the Council of Trent, but in 1605 Cervantes was more interested then in the resolution of love stories within the framework of inheritance issues and the

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foundation of estates, whereas now he is more interested in the foundations of marriage as sacrament—in the law before the law that involves the transformation of bodies. Events cannot develop and come to closure in Camacho’s wedding, as they did in Part I, simply through the providential intervention of Don Quijote and be cast in terms of testamentary regulations. The quandaries now are at once more elemental and deeper. These involve the issues raised by clandestine marriages, with the attending dangers of polygamy, the disturbing issue of possible annulments of invalid ones, which ran counter to the Catholic prohibition of divorce, and the absence of social or religious legitimation, as neither priest nor magistrate need be present at the moment the vows are made. This direct communication with God without the mediation of the church smacked of Protestantism, as did the potential dissolution of marriages, made more dangerous in Spain because Erasmus had written in favor of the practice. In the most concrete of terms there was the question of the heavy burden imposed by acts of compliance, the levity and fleetingness of which seemed all out of proportion to the unbreakable bond that they sealed—the accidente irreparable (irreparable accident) as Don Quijote calls marriage, using Scholastic terminology. You say ‘‘I do’’ in the middle of the night, in a fit of passion, alone somewhere with your lover, and you are yoked for life with no reprieve. Can free will be so freely expressed and at the same time be so easily relinquished? Should mere words with no witness and no authority to validate them constitute an unbreakable bond? We have seen some of this in the stories in Part I when Cardenio claims that Luscinda cannot marry Don Fernando because she is already married to him, and when Dorotea maintains that Don Fernando is married to her. With the whole group present at Juan Palomeque’s inn, including the priest, the promises made there as the conflicts are resolved are binding on legal and religious grounds. In Camacho’s wedding the situation is considerably more complicated by the way the marriage is executed. It is, appropriately, a conflict deserving a baroque, Scholastic mind to ponder it because of all its legal and doctrinal subtleties. Basilio’s multiple skills include acting, of course: he convinces everyone that he is mortally wounded and on the very brink of giving up the ghost. But he is even more proficient in canon law than in acting. He first explains that he will commit suicide to remove the obstacle to Quiteria’s good fortune, as the heavens appear to want her to have it. He means, of course, that they are already betrothed and the wedding cannot continue while he is alive. When he beseeches Quiteria to marry him in articulo mortis he blackmails her, and the others, by saying that he will refuse being confessed by the priest before expiring unless she complies with his wishes. All those present know that, as a

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suicide, Basilio is going straight to hell if he does not confess and repent before dying, putting enormous pressure not just on Quiteria but also on the priest and even on Camacho to give in to his wishes. Denying his request is tantamount to condemning his soul to eternal damnation, for suicide is a mortal sin. To do so would be worse than murdering him. Quiteria and those involved would not just be selfish in worldly terms, but worse, cruel on religious grounds. From injured party (the wedding has been ruined) they are turned into offending party before the most transcendental of courts and the highest possible judge. Basilio is caught between two sentences without term—marriage or hell—and has put everyone (particularly Quiteria) in the predicament of having to decide which will be his fate. Camacho is encouraged by Basilio’s followers, who know what is about to happen. They are so ‘‘clamorous in soliciting him to consent to Quiteria’s giving her hand in marriage to the hapless youth, whose soul would otherwise perish in despair, that he was persuaded, and as it were compelled to say, that if his bride would grant that favor, he should be satisfied, as it would only for a moment delay the accomplishment of his desires’’ (II, 21, p. 591) [pidiéndole que consintiese que Quiteria le diese la mano de esposa, porque su alma no se perdiese, partiendo desesperado desta vida, que le movieron, y aun forzaron, a decir que si Quiteria quería dársela, que él se contentaba, pues todo era dilatar por un momento el cumplimiento de sus deseos (p. 804)]. When she and everyone else give in, Basilio extracts from Quiteria vows that carefully include words that explicitly express that she is giving her consent freely and under no external pressure: ‘‘what I request, O fatal star of my destiny! is, that thy consent to this exchange of vows may not be a mere compliment to deceive me anew, but that thou wilt confess and declare there is no restraint upon thy inclination, while thy hand is given and delivered to me as thy lawful husband; for it would be cruel to use deceit and dissimulation with one in such extremity, who has always behaved with thee with such sincerity and truth’’ (II, 21, p. 592) [Lo que te suplico es, ¡oh fatal estrella mía!, que la mano que me pides y quieras darme no sea por cumplimiento, ni para engañarme de nuevo, sino que confieses y digas que, sin hacer fuerza a tu voluntad, me la entregas y me la das como a tu legítimo esposo; pues no es razón que en trance como éste me engañes, ni uses de fingimientos con quien tantas verdades ha tratado contigo (p. 805)]. The clever mention of ‘‘to deceive me anew’’ is a clear indication that there had been a clandestine marriage between Quiteria and Basilio and that he considered her wedding to Camacho an infidelity or even bigamy. ‘‘Ni para engañarme de nuevo,’’ as the original reads, can mean ‘‘to deceive me anew,’’ but also ‘‘to cheat on me again.’’ He is, one more time, accusing her and the others of doing harm to him, not the other way around. When she replies,

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Quiteria follows Basilio’s promptings and utters the right words and then some: ‘‘No force upon earth would be sufficient to bias my will; and therefore, with all the freedom of inclination, I give thee my hand as thy lawful wife, and receive thine in the same terms, if thou bestowest it with the same good will, undisturbed and unconfounded by the calamity into which thou hast been hurried by thy own precipitate conduct’’ (II, 21, p. 592) [—Ninguna fuerza fuera bastante a torcer mi voluntad; y así, con la más libre que tengo te doy la mano de legítima esposa, y recibo la tuya, si es que me la das de tu libre albedrío, sin que la turbe ni contraste la calamidad en que tu discurso acelerado te ha puesto (p. 805)]. She wants to make sure that the validity of the marriage cannot be disputed by alleging that Basilio was not in possession of all his faculties when making the vow or in a hurry because of his imminent death, which is what ‘‘discurso acelerado’’ means. He replies with the required words: ‘‘ ‘I do,’ answered Basilio, ‘without either disorder or confusion; but, on the contrary, with all the clearness of understanding with which heaven hath thought proper to endow me, I deliver myself for thy true and faithful husband’ ’’ (II, 21, p. 592) [—Sí doy—respondió Basilio—, no turbado ni confuso, sino con el claro entendimiento que el cielo quiso darme, y así me doy y me entrego por tu esposo (p. 805)]. In legal terms, canonical and civil, the marriage is validated by Quiteria after Basilio springs on everyone his surprising resurrection: ‘‘The bride, however, expressed no mortification at the deceit; on the contrary, hearing somebody observe that such a marriage, obtained by fraud, could not be valid, she said she confirmed it anew’’ (II, 21, p. 593) [La esposa no dio muestras de pesarle la burla; antes oyendo decir que aquel casamiento, por haber sido engañoso, no había de ser valedero, dijo ella que le confirmaba de nuevo (p. 806)]. Camacho also acquiesces, driven by his resentment of Quiteria’s disdain and the frightful thought that if she loved Basilio before marrying him, she might well continue to do so after the wedding, with worse consequences for him than he had just suffered. He attributes the whole thing to Quiteria’s fickleness, which is not completely off the mark, given that we learn later that she was not in with Basilio in his plan to upset the wedding, which shows that she did change her mind on the spot, as she probably had before when her parents induced her to marry Camacho. (‘‘La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento.’’) The point of all this is how carefully crafted the entire episode is in legal terms, civil and canonical. Let us observe closer the background of all the legal preparation to understand better what moral, religious, and legal forces are in play. In a long commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Erasmus wrote about the church’s unusual inflexibility with regard to the indissoluble nature of marriage. He speaks about the ease with which two irresponsible adolescents

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could marry in secret, using the mediation of seedy go-betweens, under the influence of madness or drunkenness, without any of these circumstances altering the sacramental nature of the union, made by God and which no man can tear asunder.∂ Why, he asks, can civil or religious authority not put an end to such a marriage and allow a guiltless spouse (in cases of adultery) to remarry? The Spanish church, zealously searching for traces of heresy in Erasmus’s works, rejected and denounced this proposition. But during the Council of Trent clandestine marriages and their indissolubility had been a carefully debated issue, with someone like Juan de Avila, who considered marriage to be a sacrament, arguing in favor of annulling clandestine marriages because they could in certain cases lead to bigamy, as in the Camacho-Basilio-Quiteria situation. The council could not agree to this without appearing to be giving in to Protestant ideas and instead proclaimed that the church detested clandestine marriages and ordered the clergy not to celebrate weddings without published banns and the presence of witnesses. This doctrine was incorporated by Philip II into Spanish statutory law in 1564, remaining as the foundation of marriage in Spain until the nineteenth century.∑ Marcel Bataillon, whom I am following closely here, concludes that, whatever his opinion on clandestine marriages and their possible annulment, Erasmus (who wrote an Encomium Matrimonii in 1497, published in 1517) and many other Renaissance thinkers praised matrimony often and eloquently. For the great Erasmus and Cervantes scholar, the consensus of the sixteenth century held matrimony in very high regard, with frequent praise for the monogamous union that only God can sever—in short, Christian marriage. Cervantes alludes in various ways to the ceremonies imposed by the Council of Trent to regulate marriage and limit clandestine ones, without it being clear if he condemned or accepted these. In a long footnote to his El pensamiento de Cervantes, Américo Castro cites many instances of both spontaneous clandestine marriages and others in which providentially a priest appears and the union is properly sanctioned according to the dictates of the Council of Trent.∏ He opines that Cervantes favored the first kind, but occasionally deferred to church authority by having priests pop up at the critical moment. I do not think that it is a question of which kind of marriage Cervantes liked, which we will never know, but how one or the other kind fit the needs of the narrative in question.π The issues raised by Trent allowed him to probe into marriage at a deeper level than mere doctrine and made for stories with a richer gamut of possibilities as a conclusion, as is evident in the Camacho wedding episode. At bottom the question is if marriage is a social contract or a sacrament. If it is the latter, as is clear with the Eucharist and other sacraments, the union involves a literal kind of transubstantiation, a transcendental metamorphoses

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of matter. In the case of marriage a blending of bloods makes the union irreversible—if, in the biblical injunction, man and woman do become one flesh.∫ In terms of the ritual itself, it is a matter of conferring upon words a magical or talismanic power to effectuate this mystical union. This is evidently what Don Quijote believes. He urges Quiteria to comply with Basilio’s desperate request: ‘‘here nothing was required but the ‘I do’ of assent, which could have no other effect than the trouble of pronouncing it, as the bridal bed must also be the tomb of such a marriage’’ (II, 21, p. 591) [—Aquí no ha de haber más de un sí, que no tenga otro efecto que el pronunciarle, pues el tálamo de estas bodas ha de ser la sepultura (p. 804)]. What Don Quijote says (‘‘que no tenga otro efecto que el pronunciarle’’) means that under normal circumstances the mere voicing of the words has the effect of legitimizing the marriage, which would be its only effect here, as no consummation will take place. But the mere utterance has the requisite power of legitimation no matter what happens afterward. Looking at the episode with all this background in mind it would appear that Cervantes is favoring the earlier, clandestine ‘‘I do’’ that Quiteria presumably uttered to Basilio, while at the same time having them observe the ceremonies prescribed by the Council of Trent at the suspended wedding ceremony. It is, it seems, the middle course, adhering to the basic requirement of mutual consent expressed before God, but sanctified by formal religious and civil ceremonies. More importantly, it presents multiple possibilities for ending the story and allows Cervantes to finish it with a double ending, consonant with the two rituals: one for a wedding that does not take place and another, at Quiteria’s house, for the one that did. This is part of the theatrical nature of the episode, which, as in the Tosilos story, contains a surprise ending not only for the characters but also for the reader.

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The sacramental nature of marriage lurks in the subtext of the story through the allusion to the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, pointing to the origin of matrimonial law at its most elemental level. By going to the foundations of love and marriage, Cervantes is doing here what he did with the origins of the law in the Barataria interlude. His deployment of the myth has something in common with similar practices by Góngora, Calderón, and other baroque writers, as well as with Velázquez in some of his paintings. Its source for Cervantes and the whole Renaissance and baroque was, as I said, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As in the rest of continental Europe and England, Ovid had a long, profound, and sustained history in Spain and not just in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Ω Nearly a hundred years ago, Rudolph Schevill published the results of his

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long and exhaustive investigation of Ovid’s influence in Spain from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.∞≠ He found most pervasive that of Ovid’s works on love, the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, in which he found the origin of what he called ‘‘Ovidian love stories,’’ mostly tales of seduction. He discusses several in Cervantes’ work, including the Quijote. I find Ovid’s presence in these stories to be so diluted into more direct sources like Boccaccio as to be somewhat irrelevant. But the Metamorphoses also had a very long and sustained life as an authoritative source for mythological fables. For instance, Alfonso X (the Wise), whom we encountered when discussing the Siete partidas, made much of Ovid in his epoch-making Grande e general storia, an ambitious work encompassing the entire history of the world as was then known. Alfonso gives special importance to mythology, which he considers a disfigured history that he attempts to interpret, with sometimes bizarre explications. Mythology also plays a prominent role in his Libros del saber de astronomía, in which constellations, such as that of Perseus, retain their names.∞∞ Alfonso’s source is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, seen by church authorities then as a kind of pagan bible because it provided an all-encompassing cosmic history. In the fifteenth century Juan de Mena, a learned poet who wrote major historical and allegorical works such as El laberinto de fortuna, is steeped in the Metamorphoses, his authority on mythological fables. The first Spanish translation of the Metamorphoses appeared in 1490, during the reign of the Catholic kings.∞≤ With the incorporation of Italianate poetics in the first half of the sixteenth century, classical myths attained more prominence, particularly in the works of Garcilaso de la Vega, and Ovid was, again, the obligatory reference. Among the learned humanists of the period, the Salamanca-based Cristóbal de Villalón, author of dialogues in the classical style, wrote a play called Tragedia de Mirrha (1536) based on the Metamorphosis. Juan de la Cueva, among the ‘‘founders’’ of the Spanish national theater in the second half of the sixteenth century, wrote Tragedia de Ayax Telamón, inspired by the same work of Ovid. In the baroque, the predilection for mythology goes hand in hand with the advent of culteranismo and gongorismo, the practice of writing obscure, intricately argued prose in the first instance, and complicated and allusive poetry in the second. Góngora, of course, availed himself of Ovid in his mythological poems, and held him up as an example of a poet who reveled in difficulty and obscurity. His ‘‘Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’’ was one of many Renaissance and baroque efforts to imitate Ovid. He also wrote a satirical ballad on the theme of Pyramus and Thisbe. Calderón de la Barca wrote many mythological pieces for the theater, including autos sacramentales, allegorical plays on the mystery of the Eucharist, in which he goes back to the medieval practice of interpreting Ovid in

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Christian terms. I provide this quick overview to show that Cervantes is following conventions common in his time and immediately before and also to discern how his incorporation of classical myth differs from that of other artists of his time. Before I look more closely at the role that the Pyramus and Thisbe story plays in Camacho’s wedding, I’d better join the tradition of retelling the myth. There lived in Babylon, the city founded by Queen Semiramis, a boy and girl of incomparable beauty who resided in contiguous houses (‘‘contiguas tenuere domos’’). Their proximity led them to love each other, but their parents disapproved and they had to communicate through a hole in the wall that separated their houses. Desperate to see each other, they made plans to flee their families and meet one night at the tomb of Ninus, Semiramis’s late husband, which was next to a mulberry tree, loaded with snow-white fruit. Covered with a veil, Thisbe was the first to arrive at the spot. While she waited for Pyramus, a lioness appeared. She had come to drink from a nearby fountain and cleanse her mouth from the blood of some cows she had recently slain. Frightened, Thisbe fled to hide in a cave, but in her haste she dropped her veil. The lioness mangled and stained it with blood before she left. Pyramus arrived and was shocked by the sight of the lioness’s footprints and the bloody veil. He assumed that Thisbe had been killed, and became desperate at her loss and the guilt he felt for having led her to such a dangerous place. He plunged his sword into his body and when he pulled it out the wound spurted blood like a fountain, turning red the fruit of the mulberry tree. Thisbe returned and was disturbed first by the change in the color of the fruit and then by discovering Pyramus dying on the ground. She kissed him and tried to revive him; he lifted his eyes to her, but death closed them. In despair, Thisbe blamed their parents, requested that her ashes be buried with her lover’s, and implored the gods that the color of the fruit remain red in remembrance of their cruel fate. She then fell on the sword with which Pyramus had killed himself. The parents and gods complied with her request: their ashes were placed in the same urn and the tree’s fruit became red as it ripened. This is a tragic story in which a cruel fate befalls the characters because of a misinterpretation, although it could be easily read as an admonitory tale about the recklessness of youth. I think that the myth goes back to a conjunction of love and death at the very moment when love ripens and is about to become regenerative. It is a myth of spring, as it were, perhaps of that cruelest of months. The young lovers, driven by desire, are to meet at the tomb of Ninus, where they find their bloody death not at the paws of the lioness but by their own hands. The bloody veil can be seen as an image of the hymen, rent in the act of love, a bloody event that recalls the onset of menstruation and the

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capacity for reproduction but also the recurrent death of a woman’s ova. The red of the fruit is a symbol of both resurrection and death, as it recalls menstruation in its periodic coloring. That the lioness is a female encourages this interpretation, as does the fact that Thisbe sees her through the moonlight (‘‘Quom procul ad lunae radios Babylonia Thisbe/vedit et obscurum timido pede fugit in antrum’’). I would venture to say that the myth reenacts a tragic human predicament, symbolized by the spilling of blood at conception, birth, and death, leaving open the possibility that the law, here in the form of the parents’ disapproval and interdiction, can overcome or forestall fatality; yet it is also clear that the prohibition is allied with death, too, because it leads to the catastrophe, as Thisbe proclaims, and because it may have arisen due to the advent of menstruation. In Ovid the conflict appears to resolve itself in beauty, as the blood of the lovers becomes the red fruit of the tree. This is the transformation that occurs; the transubstantiation of bloods yields a beautiful object—an impasse valuable for its own sake without issue or moral conclusion. The whole Metamorphoses is about the conversion of bodies—human and otherwise—into other forms of matter, a kind of poetic physics, or physics of poetry. This is precisely what happens in the story of Camacho’s wedding. In Cervantes the myth is not retold with a didactic, satirical, or aesthetic purpose—in fact, as we shall see, it is not quite so much retold as recycled. It is not an Ovid moralisé, a Renaissance retelling to emulate Ovid, or a baroque version in a satirical or parodic vein, as in Góngora’s ‘‘Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea,’’ or his own ballad of Pyramus and Thisbe. Although it is reminiscent of Velázquez’s adaptation of classical myth, in which the legends are contrasted or mingled with scenes of a withered present far from classical perfection and timelessness, it is also quite different in that the shape of the story is barely manifest. (In 1911, José Ortega y Gasset claimed that what Velázquez means by mixing classical gods with unsavory characters from everyday reality is that there are no gods, and no meaning, if we take the gods to be the embodiment of the higher sense things acquire when seen in connection to each other. Velázquez, he says, is an ‘‘atheistic giant, a colossal impious man. With his brush he banishes the gods as if smacking them with a broom. In his ‘Bacchanal’ there is not only no Bacchus, but a rascal is impersonating Bacchus.’’)∞≥ Let us look at three paintings by Velázquez with mythological subjects to contrast them with Cervantes’ use of myth in the Camacho’s wedding episode. Los borrachos (Bacchanal) has nine figures, two of which seem to be dressed—or rather, undressed—for a bacchanal. The others are lusty peasants, roughly clothed in contemporary dress and with the same unposed air that characterized the naturalistic genre scenes called in Spanish bodegones.

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Velázquez’s Los borrachos, 1628. Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

These sought and achieved an effect of a casually chosen slice of life. But Los borrachos is carefully composed around the light flesh of the bogus Bacchus in the center. Jonathan Brown says that attempts to interpret the painting as ‘‘a parody of the Olympian gods or as a sermon on the evils of drink’’ have failed, and that instead ‘‘Velázquez intended to represent Bacchus as the giver of the gift of wine, which freed man (temporarily) from the harsh, unforgiving struggle of daily life. . . . Deprived of the beneficent liquid, the beggar finds no respite from the hardships which, in sober moments, will be shared by all the company.’’∞∂ In La fragua de Vulcano (Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan) all the characters participate in the action, casting converging gazes toward the classically idealized figure of Apollo, who enters from the left in a blaze of splendor. He has come to warn Vulcan, who is unsuitably married to Venus, that his wife is having an affair with Mars. The expression of shock and wary disbelief on the smith’s honest face contrasts with the sophisticated indifference of Apollo’s Olympian profile. The other smiths stop work to hear the astonishing news with deep concern. The setting, with the armor and blacksmith’s fittings, is contemporary. Brown writes: ‘‘Painters in the seventeenth century overwhelmingly preferred to illustrate the denouement, when Venus and Mars are

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Velázquez’s La fragua de Vulcano,1630. Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource, NY, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

trapped in bed by Vulcan’s finely woven net of steel. Velázquez chose to avoid this rowdy, burlesque finale in favor of the devastating but psychologically delicate moment when the crippled blacksmith hears from Apollo the news of his wife’s infidelity. . . . The figures, although correctly rendered, are common men, not statues come to life, as they would have been in the works of many a contemporary Roman painter.’’∞∑ Velázquez was in Rome when he did this picture. Finally, Las hilanderas (The Spinners) is a masterpiece painted around 1657 and thus a very late work contemporaneous with Las meninas, and nearly as complex and ambitious. In it Velázquez has combined two subjects, one from classical mythology and the other from the present. In fact, there are two subjects from classical mythology. In the foreground we have the activities of tapestry manufacturing as was done in factories under royal patronage in Madrid, and in the alcove in the back the classical tale of the weaver Arachne. The tapestry hanging on the back wall of the alcove is the key to the relationship between the two scenes. It is a woven copy of Titian’s The Rape of Europa, one of the most celebrated of Jupiter’s erotic adventures with mortal women. Arachne had challenged Minerva, patroness of weavers and goddess

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Velázquez’s Las hilanderas, c. 1657. Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

of wisdom, to a weaving contest. It was called a draw, but because Arachne’s tapestry was judged to be the equal of Minerva’s, and further because it depicted such a scandalous act by her father, the goddess punished Arachne by turning her into a spider. This is the reason Minerva is shown gesturing angrily. Brown believes: ‘‘By inserting a quotation of this famous work [The Rape of Europa] into the composition, Velázquez implies his belief in the nobility and transcendental value of the art of painting. . . . In The Fable of Arachne Velázquez seeks to reconcile the artificial world of myth with the palpable world of visual reality without sacrificing the decorum required by the one, or the verisimilitude, by the other. . . . The contrast between the foreground, where sturdy women toil at burdensome tasks, and the refined atmosphere of the artist’s atelier [seen in the back] is perhaps Velázquez’s way of implying his conviction about the distinction between craft and art.’’∞∏ In Cervantes, the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe is given in shards or analects with a faint outline that is like a distant memory—something like the alcove in the back of Las hilanderas. Needless to say, in Cervantes the conclusion is quite different from the original as it appears in Ovid. We find here, and elsewhere in Cervantes, a new way of dealing with myth, more forward look-

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ing to Joyce than backward to the Renaissance and Middle Ages. But the vestiges of the mythical story are distinct enough: the beauty of the young lovers, their shared childhood, the parental prohibition, the effort to overcome their forced separation, the manner of suicide, and the presence of animal blood. Some of the details are so specific that I am inclined to believe that Cervantes had Ovid’s text in front of him as he wrote, or (a likely possibility) that he had a prodigious memory for significant or striking particulars. For instance, when Basilio feigns being in his death throes, his eyes are very much a part of the act: ‘‘Basilio lay, with his eyes already fixed’’ and ‘‘Basilio unfixing his eyes’’ (II, 21, pp. 591, 592) [Basilio ya los ojos vueltos; Desencajó los ojos Basilio (p. 805)]. This recalls the moment when Thisbe asks the dying Pyramus to answer his ‘‘carissima Thisbe,’’ whereupon ‘‘Ad nomen Thisbes oculos a morte gravatos/Pyramus erexit visque recondidit illa’’ (He heard the name of Thisbe, and he lifted / His eyes, with the weight of death heavy upon them, / And saw her face, and closed his eyes). Other such specificities are the scabbard mentioned in Ovid, transformed into the staff in which Basilio carries his sword and the tube within which he conceals fresh animal blood, and the discussion about whether or not to pull out the sword from Basilio brings to mind the way Pyramus’s wound spurted blood when he pulled his weapon from it. These are like those very vivid memories from a dream that is otherwise fuzzy and difficult to recall, and, as with dreams, may very well be hints of a deeper meaning. As in Velázquez, there can be no doubt that Cervantes is taking his leave from classical models as paradigms to be imitated by pointing out the time gap that separates the present from them: ‘‘los olvidados amores.’’ Pyramus and Thisbe live in fabulous Babylon, Semiramis’s legendary city, a paragon of Oriental sensuality, while Basilio, Quiteria, and Camacho live in a humble Spanish village. A scene further on in Part II gives us the clue as to the effects of this temporal gap. Don Quijote and Sancho stop at the inn where they will meet Alvaro de Tarfe, the character from Avellaneda’s apocryphal Part II, and they are shown into a low apartment with old painted leather hangings, such as are used in country places, in one piece of which some wretched hand had drawn the rape of Helen, who was carried off from Menelaus by her presumptuous guest; and in another was represented the story of Dido and Aeneas, the unhappy queen standing upon a lofty tower, making signals with a white sheet to her fugitive lover, who, in a frigate or brigantine, was flying from her coast. He observed, of these two history pieces, that Helen showed no marks of compulsion; but, rather exhibited her satisfaction in a roguish smile, whereas, from the eyes of the beautiful Dido, tears as big as walnuts seemed to fall. (II, 71, p. 924)

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This sight provokes a comment from Sancho that is astonishing proof of the degree to which Cervantes knew that he had created a new literary myth: ‘‘I’ll lay a wager, said Sancho, that, in a very little time, every cook’s cellar, tavern, inn, and barber’s shop in the kingdom, will be ornamented with pictures containing the history of our achievements; but, I should be glad to see them painted by a better workman than him who made these daubings’’ (II, 71, p. 925) [—Yo apostaré—dijo Sancho—que antes de mucho tiempo no ha de haber bodegón, venta ni mesón, o tienda de barbero, donde no ande pintada la historia de nuestras hazañas. Pero querría yo que la pintasen manos de otro mejor pintor que el que ha pintado a éstas (p. 1203)]. Anyone who has been to Spain knows how prescient this remark is, as images of Don Quijote and Sancho are all over, and their figurines, curiously evoking Picasso’s painting of the heroes, are for sale everywhere, not to mention that there is a huge statue of the knight and his squire in one of Madrid’s most important squares. (John J. Allen and Patricia Finch have done an exhaustive study of the many places in which Don Quijote’s image appears, from computer mouse pads to comic books and everything in between.)∞π Don Quijote takes the cue and launches into an observation leading to a critique of Avellaneda, the first to retell their myth, as it were: ‘‘Thou art in the right, replied Don Quixote; he that painted these pieces is just such another as Orbaneja, a painter of Ubeda, who, being asked what he was painting, answered, Whatever comes out: and if he chanced to represent a cock, he wrote under it, This is a cock; that it might not be mistaken for a fox. Such a person, I suppose, is that same painter or author, for it is the same thing, who ushered into the world the latterly published history of the new Don Quixote, for he has painted or described whatever came out’’ (II, 71, p. 925) [—Tienes razón, Sancho—dijo don Quijote—, porque este pintor es como Orbaneja, un pintor que estaba en Ubeda, que cuando le preguntaban qué pintaba, respondía: ‘Lo que saliere’ . . . Desta manera me parece a mí, Sancho, que debe ser el pintor o escritor, que todo es uno, que sacó a luz la historia de este nuevo don Quijote; que pintó o escribió lo que saliere (p. 1203)].

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The point is that the classical mythological figures (Helen and Dido) are badly reproduced; the bad painter of today improvises not only as he represents them, but also as he depicts contemporary reality, so that even the new figures (Don Quijote and Sancho) are unfaithfully copied. It would appear, then, if we contrast the knight himself with his chivalric models, that what comes out—‘‘lo que saliere’’—is always new, distorted, and a variation of previous models, like the Quijote: both the knight in relation to chivalric heroes and the book in relation to chivalric romances and all previous literature. As is his wont, Cervantes is giving the reader a clue about his own method of composition and artistic ideas in what to all appearances is a throwaway scene, a filler used to lampoon Avellaneda. The episode also sheds retrospective light on the relationship of the Pyramus and Thisbe episode to Camacho’s wedding. The version in the Quijote is one that repeats with variations the original, barely recognizable through a deliberate act of interpretation of its scattered relics, ruins like those of ancient monuments and buildings strewn all over the former territories of the Roman Empire. But what the remnants of Pyramus and Thisbe suggest in the episode of Camacho’s wedding is a probe into the deeper issues in the myth that are related to marriage. Cervantes picks up the latent religious questions concerning the fusion of bodies and souls and the continuities between apparently distinct manifestations of the physical world—the atavistic links between prohibition, desire, death, and ritual, the point at which love and the law intersect dangerously and precariously at the very moment in which the wedding is being celebrated. What is at stake is the sacramental nature of marriage even prior to theological interpretation, to the adoption of doctrine, and to the elaboration of a symbolic, ritualized displacement of the threatening violence in matrimony—foremost the deflowering—which is transformed from explicit to implicit it the wedding feast. The elements for this interpretation are scattered throughout the episode, like the memories of the myth to which they allude. I ask the reader’s indulgence as I attempt to join them. I shall have to trace an itinerary of blood, as it were, picking up the trail left by the Pyramus and Thisbe myth. When the protagonists ride into the canopied field that has been so prepared for the wedding celebration, ‘‘The first object that presented itself to the eyes of Sancho, was an entire calf spitted whole upon an elm branch, roasting by a fire of wood the size of a middling mountain’’ (II, 20, p. 582) [Lo primero que se le ofreció a la vista de Sancho fue, espetado en un asador de un olmo entero, un entero novillo; y en el fuego donde había de asar ardía un mediano monte de leña (p. 792)]. The scene not only recalls pagan sacrifice but the youth of the slain animal about to be consumed establishes a link with the young couple about to marry. The calf is

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the sacrificial victim at the ritual, offered to the gods in place of the young man and woman who are going to be the protagonists of the ritual—the slaughtered animal is their proxy (Basilio implies, as we saw, that he is going to sacrifice himself for Quiteria). The ritualistic killing of the calf has already taken place, but the implicit butchery alludes to the blood that will be spilled at the consummation of the wedding, a token or gift also to the deities to forestall the blood that could also be shed at the potential conflict between the families being joined. The tale of Romeo and Juliet is but one of the stories about such conflicts coming from the tradition. To add to the significance of this novillo, it is already ‘‘pregnant’’: ‘‘in the belly of the roasting calf were sewn a dozen suckling pigs, to make it tender and savory’’ (II, 20, p. 583) [En el dilatado vientre del novillo estaban doce tiernos y pequeños lechones, que, cosidos por encima, servían de darle sabor y enternecerle (p. 793)]. The violence, the blood, announce gestation and the spilling of more blood as the new human being, the most basic purpose of the marriage, is produced. Now, these animals are going to be consumed at the feast together with the enormous quantities of wine and white bread, whose symbolism, in Christian terms, could not be clearer. But we are not, not here anyway, at that specific level yet. To consume and to consummate go together in the wedding celebration. As the celebrants and their guests eat and drink they establish a continuity with the natural world around them: with the animals and plants through the meat and vegetables that they eat, with the earth itself as they ingest the wine it has yielded through the vines. It is a form of transubstantiation, of transforming one substance into another, through actions that involve violence and pleasure. This is precisely what is also going to occur as the marriage is consummated. Basilio’s intervention postpones the blood Quiteria would shed in Camacho’s bed, substituting it for the fake blood that he has concealed and spills as he feigns suicide. This blood that stains his garment—appropriately ‘‘interspersed with crimson flames’’ (II, 21, p. 690) [jironado de carmesí a llamas (p. 802)]—recalls that of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the blood of the calf who commands the kitchen area, which is ‘‘sacred’’ to Sancho—‘‘looking upon that place as a sacred sanctuary and respected retreat’’ (II, 21, 593) [pareciéndole aquel lugar como sagrado (p. 807)]. It is this proxy blood that suspends the real blood that would seal the marriage by making Camacho’s and Quiteria’s commingle, like the ashes of Pyramus and Thisbe in the urn, and foreshadows Quiteria’s eventual blood in Basilio’s bed. I believe that there is a hidden blood that also plays a role in this itinerary and that is related to the postponement of Quiteria’s hymeneal bleeding— another blood, like Basilio’s fake one, that impedes that of consummation. I know that my evidence is tenuous here, but I am not in a court of law but

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reading a literary text. To put it bluntly: I believe that on her wedding day Quiteria is suffering her menstrual period. When she first appears at the ceremony, the narrator describes her thus: ‘‘Venía la hermosa Quiteria algo descolorida, y debía de ser de la mala noche que siempre pasan las novias en componerse para el día venidero de sus bodas’’ (p. 802), rendered by Smollett as ‘‘the fair Quiteria was paler than usual; and this change of complexion must have been owing to the bad night which brides always pass, in striving to compose themselves for the approaching day of their nuptials’’ (II, 21, p. 589). This is good enough, but ‘‘descolorida’’ does not just mean ‘‘pale,’’ but to have ‘‘lost the color on your face,’’ indicating a more serious cause than just sleeplessness, and ‘‘componerse’’ does not simply mean ‘‘to prepare.’’ Cervantes had ‘‘pálida’’ available. ‘‘Descolorida’’ can mean loss of color because of loss of blood, and ‘‘componerse’’ can mean to make herself up but also to recover from an ailment—to get or look better after an ailment. But we cannot argue medicine here and quibble over words in the hope of reaching the truth. My suspicion was aroused by similar words used in the Cave of Montesinos episode to describe Belerma, when it is said that she looks as if she might be menstruating but is not (she is actually menopausal): If she now seemed a little homely, or not quite so beautiful as fame reported her, the change proceeded from the bad nights and worse days she passed in that state of enchantment, as I might perceive in her large wrinkles and wan complexion; nor did that yellowness and those furrows proceed from any irregularity in the monthly disorder incident to women; for, many months and even years had passed since she had the least show of any such evacuation; but, solely from the anguish of her heart, occasioned by that which she holds incessantly in her hand, and which renews and recalls to her memory the misfortune of her ill-fated lover. (II, 23, p. 606) [y que si me había parecido algo fea, o no tan hermosa como tenía la fama, era la causa las malas noches y peores días que en aquel encantamiento pasaba, como lo podía ver en sus grandes ojeras y en su color quebradiza. Y no toma ocasión su amarillez y sus ojeras de estar con el mal mensil, ordinario en las mujeres, porque ha muchos meses, y aun años, que no le tiene ni asoma por sus puertas, sino del dolor que siente su corazón por el que de contino tiene en las manos, que le renueva y trae a la memoria la desgracia de su mal logrado amante. (p. 823)]

‘‘Quebradiza,’’ the word Cervantes uses to describe Belerma’s color, is fairly well translated by Smollett as ‘‘yellow,’’ and her complexion as ‘‘wan’’ is good too. The word derives from ‘‘quebrar,’’ to ‘‘break,’’ and when applied to a color it means faded or faint. My oblique observation here is that Cervantes’ description of Quiteria’s face, with the hasty and passing explanation for the

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source of her lack of color, could be a euphemistic way of saying that she had her period, or avoiding having to say it. If not, why mention at all that she looks pale? If I am right in my diagnosis, Quiteria’s menstrual blood would be an impediment to the consummation of her marriage, or at least a deferral, as the condition is laden with all manner of superstitious injunctions and forebodings. (These are not just Spanish but exist in most cultures.) It would be a providential blood that would make one marriage impossible and another possible. Its effect would be like that of the animal blood Basilio uses to stop the wedding. Quiteria’s menstruation, her regla, or ‘‘rule,’’ as is said in Spanish, would be a superior law, inherent in the blood itself and determining the outcome of the conflict. Even if you, dearest reader, do not buy my reading of her pallor, there is enough bleeding in the episode to construe a symbolic kind of menstrual blood that impedes the marriage. This is the law before the law, which Don Quijote, as he intervenes in favor of Basilio, interprets as being God’s design: ‘‘those whom God hath joined, no man shall put asunder’’ (II, 21, p. 593) [que a los dos que Dios junta no podrá separar el hombre (p. 807)]. With this statement, echoing Matthew 19:6, normally quoted at weddings, the marriage is definitively legitimized. Marriage is seen as ordained by God, part of a divine plan that supersedes custom and law, overriding all considerations of unequal social or economic status. The intimation is that it precedes all such constructs, being embedded in the blood itself, in the general transformation of matter according to divine grace. In the Pyramus and Thisbe classical myth, there is no salvation: the lovers’ fusion and commingling is achieved only as ashes in the funerary urn. The only positive outcome is the recurrent reddening of the mulberries, an image of splendid beauty, but lacking transcendence. Not so in the Quijote episode, in which a form of justice has been made and there is every reason to believe that the commingling of bloods will lead to regeneration, the birth of a new human being. Camacho’s wedding elevates the conflicts of love and their resolution beyond the laws of men to a religious, sacramental realm, without abandoning the commonality of everyday experience and the agency of man—we must not forget Basilio’s industria, his craftiness. In this realm it gives the lie too to classical myth without making an explicit statement in favor of Catholic theology, in spite of the nod to marriage before a priest. The spoken dance at the wedding, a kind of hackneyed epithalamium, is wrong in its interpretation of what will happen. The show, obviously scripted by a follower of Camacho, predicts his victory: wealth will defeat love. But the opposite occurs; it is a weak representation of mythology, like the one in the wall hangings at the inn. Classical stories cannot predict or determine the future or provide rules of

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behavior in the present. But, as we saw with Pyramus and Thisbe, they may contain the ancient seeds of human predicaments and serve as a memory for the race. Cervantes, in short, has gone beneath or beyond the debates about marriage to consider the sacrament in its most material sense. He has come up with a law before the law, a force so compelling in blood itself as a substance that it drives the lovers to a true metamorphosis of each into the other. It is as if an obscure fate drew them together, charting a plot to unite them in spite of the various obstacles along the way. It is a story that reappears in ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ one of the Exemplary Stories, in which a child issues out of the fusion of bloods and which I will discuss in another chapter. These subplots are daring and disturbing because in them love and the law are complicit in uncanny designs to generate a new story, a new myth, freed from the burden of the past. It is this quality in general that destined Cervantes’ creatures to figure in so many reproductions and guises.

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

This chapter being the last on the Quijote, and hence a transition to those on the Exemplary Stories and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, I will begin with a summary of the previous two, a kind of preliminary or provisional conclusion to the book. In chapter 7 I argued that in Part II questions pertaining to love and the law are elevated to a higher level in which they merge or constitute the political. The emphasis, with regard to the law, is not so much on its application to individual cases as on the foundations of the law in the constitution of the state. Part II takes place indoors, rather than on the road, and has a baroque makeup: episodes are contrived by characters within the fiction, like the butler at the duke’s house, and they appear to be rewritings of previous ones in Part I, or even within Part II itself (Sancho’s fall in the pit, a retake on Don Quijote’s episode in Montesinos’s Cave). Everything in Part II is man-made, not provided by nature, as was generally the case in Part I. The law too, is the product of man’s agency, as is art itself and the literary text. I used an analysis of Velázquez’s painting Las meninas to illustrate this, as the painter has often been compared to Cervantes. I stressed that Las meninas shows Velázquez in the act of painting, and of painting himself in the act of painting: human agency is on display as is the self of the artist. Moreover, he, a court painter, is painting himself instead of the monarchs, who are absent but whose position

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we as observers occupy. This elevates both Velázquez and his subjects in that he is both the creator and object of his work, and we as observers deserve the attention of a court painter and stand in place of the king and queen. I compared this to the self-reflexiveness of the Quijote, augmented in Part II by the publication of Avellaneda’s apocryphal sequel. The characters now know that they are in two books: Part I and Avellaneda’s. I moved on then to the Barataria Island episodes, in which Sancho becomes king—as we do when looking at Las meninas. The point is that Sancho, an illiterate peasant, can indeed be an effective ruler. The power of books as sources of knowledge has been undermined by what amounts to a medieval retention that is part of the baroque. Sancho is endowed with sufficient knowledge to interpret and apply natural law. Barataria is a false kingdom but in it Sancho, both ruler and judge, reenacts the foundations and foundation of the state: the origin of the law. The elevation of the legal consists of a return to its beginnings and principles. In this and in much else Part II constitutes a bitter critique of the political situation of Spain at the time. A shift in models for Don Quijote’s deportment also signals this change. In his dealings with Altisidora he is more Aeneas to her Dido than Amadís to her Oriana. Virgil’s The Aeneid, a poem about the founding of Rome, the quintessential city and prototypical polity, is in the background of much of Part II of the Quijote. I concluded with a brief analysis of three legal documents at the end of the book: the affidavit that Don Alvaro de Tarfe, the character from Avellaneda’s Quijote, is made to sign swearing that he had never seen the real Quijote and Sancho, hence declaring his own fictionality; Don Quijote’s death certificate, which is Cervantes’ way of bringing closure to the book and foreclosing potential sequels, and which pretends therefore to be a document effective outside the fiction, though it is clear that it could not be, as history and the Pierre Menards of this world have proven; and Don Quijote’s will, in which he leaves everything to his niece, except for a few things to Sancho and the housekeeper. But Don Quijote, a childless bachelor, cannot bequeath his hidalguía, and the death of Alonso Quijano is not that of Don Quijote, who disappeared as Quijano regained his sanity. What the will does do is end the book by certifying the protagonist’s death, a kind of finish understood by common readers not acquainted with or interested in debates about Aristotle’s Poetics. Death is life’s closure and the will is the document that gives access to a bureaucratic afterlife in the archive. It is a legal epitaph. In chapter 8 I focused on that well-known episode of Camacho’s wedding to show how love too is elevated by bringing it down to principles and beginnings. I couch my discussion in the context of debates about clandestine marriages in the Council of Trent, whose conclusions were incorporated into

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Spanish statutory law. The issue was if words pronounced in secret, with no ecclesiastical or civil authority present to ratify their validity, constituted a marriage. Such marriages could lead to polygamy, but dissolving them would go against the church’s ban on divorces. The council decided to discourage secret marriages and insist that proper rituals be performed. This is behind the story of Quiteria, Basilio, and the rich Camacho, which, like those in Part I, involves an unequal marriage because the young woman is poor, as is her neighbor and suitor. I read the resolution of the conflict against the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe as it appears in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. As in Ovid, in Cervantes’ story there is an itinerary of blood, involving the animals killed for the feast, the fake blood of Basilio’s mock suicide, and what I construe as Quiteria’s menstrual blood. I maintain, through a close reading of various words, that Quiteria is menstruating on her wedding day, a fortuitous impediment to her marriage to Camacho as well as blood announcing her deflowering by Basilio. Her menstruation, her regla, is a law before the law that determines the resolution of her conflict and the consummation of the marriage. As in Barataria with the law, love has been brought back to a foundational level, one that is inherent in the classical myth, a record of its timelessness. Cervantes has brought the myth from fabulous Babylon, Queen Semiramis’s city, to an insignificant village in Spain, a process that he has inscribed in the scene at the inn where Don Quijote and Sancho meet Don Alvaro de Tarfe. Two wall hangings there depict Helen of Troy’s abduction and Dido’s lament when Aeneas abandons her. Don Quijote and Sancho comment on how poor the representations are and hope that theirs, in the future, will be better, anticipating that they too will become myths. The disfigurement of those myths points at the gap between the fabulous past and the fallen present, but the protagonists’ hope of a better fate as objects of representation also speaks for the present’s relevance and future. Myths are a memory of the race that can be reenacted in the present. New myths, however, can emerge.

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In his classic Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Northrop Frye writes: ‘‘The romance is nearest of all literary form to the wish-fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age a ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy.’’∞ Although, as I have said before, the concept of ‘‘romance’’ does not exist in Spanish, the form obviously does in the chivalric romances, even if they are called novelas de caballerías, and in other narrative genres. The pervasiveness of the form, as Frye suggests, is that it can

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be easily adapted to ideologies subtending political entities, such as nations, and that it has an obvious link with psychological constructs. In the Quijote, Part II there is a significant interplay between a virtual overall romance, a Spanish myth of national unity, and the small-scale one in the story involving Ricote, a morisco, and his daughter, who is betrothed to a young Castilian nobleman. As in other cases, in Part II love and the law are elevated to greater questions involving the origins of both and their involvement with broader philosophical and political issues. If there is an episode in the Quijote that we cannot read innocently in the twenty-first century it is the one about Ricote, Sancho’s morisco neighbor who has been expelled from Spain along with nearly all of his brethren. With the twentieth-century’s ethnic cleansings, the Holocaust, mass murder by fascist and communist regimes, and exiles provoked by religious and political persecutions still so fresh in our memories, Ricote’s ordeal has a distressingly familiar air. The expulsion of the moriscos, which began in 1609, like that of the Jews in 1492, shows that the consolidation of a modern state was not brought about without depredations and atrocities that would become common, and much worse, in centuries to come. Not that the search for social, political, and religious cohesiveness by states or nations had been free of these evils before, or that they are by any means inherent to what we call the West. The novelty in sixteenth-century Spain was the implementation of such policies as part of a deliberate and elaborate plan to define the nation through the machinery of a patrimonial bureaucracy, aided by its judiciary and lawenforcing branches, including, of course, the Holy Office of the Inquisition. But 1609 was not 1492, and the moriscos were not exactly like the Jews. The Jews were a domestic issue with little international projection. The expulsion of the moriscos, aside from the various incidents that led up to it, was provoked by the fear that they were collaborating with nations that were enemies of Spain, like the Turks and the Moors of Morocco. It does not matter how much of this fear had a basis in fact. The fear of connivance between external and internal enemies as justification gives the expulsion of the moriscos a decidedly modern aura. Spain was defining itself as a nation by drawing its real and ideological frontiers, in contrast with and defense from enemies that threatened it both materially and doctrinally. This is clearly reflected in the Quijote and constitutes another instance in which the origins of the state and the law surface as a major issue and are linked to a love story. Ricote’s saga culminates in a naval battle, literally off the shores of the peninsula and very near the end of the novel. Moreover, Ricote’s daughter’s amorous conflict, the last love conflict in the book, unfolds at the same time as the knight’s defeat and the beginning of his return home. Part of it takes place abroad.

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Both Spain’s shores and the end of the fiction are frontiers, one of the nation and the other of the text—novel and nation have reached their limits. This is the reason why Ana Félix’s story takes on the form of a Byzantine romance and is thus related to Cervantes’ posthumous The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, which ranges through a vast geography from Iceland to the Mediterranean and winds up in Rome. Errantry and pilgrimage are very much a part of this Quijote episode and the Persiles, as if to emphasize their involvement in matters of international politics announced in the discussions involving the priest, the barber, and Sansón Carrasco at the beginning of the novel. Cervantes was working on the Persiles as he wrote the Ricote episodes, which may explain why it is like a Byzantine romance in miniature: or, better, that it is made up of allusions to the romance form while taking place in a realistic setting. As is well known, the Byzantine romance, called in Spanish novela bizantina because, as I have mentioned, we do not have the concept of romance in our language, was a narrative form first developed in the Hellenistic period that flourished in the late Roman Empire. (Hence ‘‘Byzantine,’’ but also because of their intricacy and complexity, as when we say in English a Byzantine argument.) The most famous of these narratives is Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, known in Spanish as Historia etiópica de los amores de Teógenes y Clariclea, published in 1554 as Historia ethiopica de Heliodoro in a translation from the French. This book is the model of Cervantes’ Persiles, about which we will have a chapter later. Such tales, at first in verse and later, during the Middle Ages, in prose, contained thrilling adventures in strange lands, usually of separated lovers who finally meet, with shipwrecks, close calls, mistaken identities, and in which the marvelous abounds. The anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, includes a green man who survives decapitation. The emphasis is on the adventures, the complicated plots and subplots, the idealized characters and the marvelous. There is no character development (generally they do not age) and no attention to realistic details. In fact, in criticism and literary history the romance is opposed to the novel because of these features. The chivalric romances that Cervantes parodied in the Quijote were the descendants of these, also called ‘‘Greek novels.’’ The romance form had a great deal of currency in the Renaissance, influencing the work of Ariosto and Tasso, which, of course, Cervantes knew very well. The Byzantine romance elements in the Ricote episodes, in addition to giving the novel and the political issues that it raises an international dimension, also suggest the possibility of reconciliation and harmony at the novel’s conclusion, an apotheosis of love and the law united. The romance components of the story, however, are like teasers, and are cast against a larger romance, a Spanish national myth, to which they allude: because, significantly, the wed-

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ding of Ana Félix and Pedro Gregorio is postponed pending a ruling by the highest judicial authority in Madrid. Marriage will also take place after the end of Part I in the stories involving Zoraida and the captive as well as Luscinda, Dorotea, Cardenio, and Don Fernando, but in these cases the betrothals at the inn, with the priest present, are tantamount to matrimony. The situation is different with Ana Félix and Pedro Gregorio. An exception would have to be made to allow her to stay in Spain and a pardon granted for her having returned to the Peninsula, a crime often punished by death. She is disenfranchised and a criminal for having defied the edict of expulsion. Ana has to regain her citizenship and a ruling in her favor has to be made pardoning her and her father for the transgression. The last love story in the Quijote is left open for arbitration. Love cannot overcome the law, except in literature, and this will be the point. A brief explanation is in order here about the moriscos and about Ricote. The moriscos were the Arabs who remained in Spain after the fall of Granada in 1492. They are the former residents of what had been Al-Andalus and had been in the Peninsula for centuries. After 1492 their living conditions changed, but in different ways and according to the period and region, owing to the fragmented nature of Spain as a polity and to the diversity of laws and local exemptions (the fueros). At first, when policy toward them was dictated by Hernando de Talavera, archbishop of conquered Granada, they were allowed to go on living as they had before, retaining their customs, language, and religion. But when Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros took over, there was a radical change. Being the queen’s confessor, he was as close to power as possible. Jiménez de Cisneros was a commanding intellectual and political figure of the period, responsible for the foundation of the University of Alcalá, the production of the polyglot Bible, and the creation of chairs for the study of Greek and Hebrew. But he was a zealot when it came to religious uniformity and passed harsh measures forcing the moriscos to change their habits and language and to convert or leave. These measures were unevenly enforced and were ineffective in assimilating the moriscos into the dominant culture. When they were applied vigorously revolts broke out, as they did periodically throughout the sixteenth century. The moriscos had their defenders and the crown was busy fighting the Protestants to the north and the Turks in the south, simultaneously organizing its American empire to the west, so their situation was allowed to remain largely the same, except for the decrees of 1569 that provoked open warfare for a time. Philip II, it seems, was really in favor of leniency and against forced conversions. The situation grew worse at the beginning of Philip III’s reign, perhaps because of the growing sense of insecurity due to economic collapse, protracted and inconclusive wars in the

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Netherlands, and weakness in the throne. This, together with the threat of morisco complicity in conspiracies instigated from abroad, led to the order of expulsion in 1609. Ricote, a storekeeper in Sancho’s village, has done very well and he and his family are in the process of being assimilated, to the point that his daughter is being courted by a rich ‘‘old Christian’’ of noble lineage. Marriage to him would mean total integration. Both Ricote’s wife and his daughter are Christians and he claims to be well on the way to becoming one. From what Ricote and Sancho say, and the friendship and neighborliness that they display toward each other, it is clear that the morisco is part of the social and economic fabric of the village. In Castile the moriscos were fewer and lived in relative isolation from their culture, lacking the context provided by their large numbers in areas such as Valencia. Ricote’s name means, of course, ‘‘very rich’’ or ‘‘filthy rich,’’ having the same augmentative ending as ‘‘Quijote.’’ This certainly reflects his economic status, to judge by all the wealth and jewels confiscated from his wife and the treasure that he has buried outside the town. He also throws money around freely in trying to solve his daughter’s predicament. But the name Ricote may also indicate that he hails originally from the Valley of Ricote, in Murcia, having taken on a toponym for a name, a common practice among both moriscos and former Jews (conversos).≤ This potential link to Valencia is enough proof for Francisco Márquez Villanueva that Cervantes is alluding to the sad fate suffered by the Murcia moriscos; he suggests that Cervantes was against the order of expulsion, in spite of what he has Ricote say in the novel.≥ (He is one of those scholars still taking sides in a political battle that took place four centuries ago but that defines and overdetermines their scholarship, to the point of accusing those who speak of morisco rebellions and complicity in conspiracies as being against the moriscos.) There is an episode in the Persiles in which the moriscos are complicitous with invading Turks (book III), so the matter is not as simple as it seems, as we shall see. Be that as it may, Cervantes has faithfully followed current history in creating the character of Ricote and laid out in detail the conflicts and dilemmas surrounding the expulsion of the moriscos. He has painted a full picture that includes Ricote’s going to France, Italy, and Germany in search of a suitable country in which to settle, and the sad fact that the Spanish moriscos were not well received by their correligionists across the Strait of Gibraltar—they became double exiles there. The case is complicated by Ricote’s actions, which constitute crimes against the crown. As soon as the expulsion decree was issued, many moriscos tried to stay by any means, and once expelled, many tried to sneak back into Spain, as Ricote does. For a time death was the

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punishment for such an action. Ricote has also broken the law by hoarding and concealing gold, as the crown was attempting to arrest the drain of wealth that would accompany the departure of the moriscos, many of whom were rich. Burying treasure is as old as the human race, but in the Spain of the period it was encouraged by very specific economic conditions. With the inflation of the 1590s, Spanish currency had lost its value. By stockpiling and hiding gold, Ricote is preserving the only true net worth available against devaluation. (Burying treasure in the land he is forced to leave also has a symbolic dimension, of course.) His fellow fake pilgrims also come to Spain to collect gold and take it out of the country, in spite of the checks at the frontiers, by stitching the metal to their clothes. All this adds to Ricote’s dangerous legal plight. These current and pressing criminal and political dramas are shrouded in the Quijote in a web of amorous and legal conflicts, in consonance with what we have seen all along Part II.

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Don Quijote and Sancho leave landlocked Castile and arrive in the cosmopolitan port city of Barcelona, the greatest urban center of the Aragonese crown, and the jewel of Catalonian culture. This is no forgotten village in the midst of arid Castile, nor a sleepy El Toboso silhouetted in the darkness of night by eerie barks and brays. But before arriving in Barcelona the knight and his squire meet Roque Guinart, the notorious Catalan brigand and his gang of outlaws. He is a character drawn from real life. Guinart’s well-organized band is a counter-utopia, run ruthlessly but with scrupulous honesty and justice by their compelling leader. Guinart is no illiterate desperado. Like other characters in Part II he knows about Don Quijote and treats the knight with respect and courtesy. Don Quijote finds a kindred spirit in the outlaw, whose life of adventure and self-sufficiency he admires and finds similar to chivalric ways. The bandit, a romantic figure, is perhaps the living origin of chivalry, roaming through the countryside imposing his own kind of justice and fighting those who oppose it. Guinart is the founder of his group, the drafter of its laws—he is both ruler and judge. The band is a self-enclosed association that is like the embryo of civil society—its kernel or microcosm. The band is very much like Monipodio’s brotherhood in ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo,’’ one of the pieces in the Exemplary Stories, and recalls Rafael Salillas’s study of picaresque life as the blueprint of human society—governed and organized by humanity’s baser instincts and desires, that is, by its true self.∂ Guinart’s group is also very much like Sancho’s Island of Barataria because of its isolation. As in Barataria, in Roque Guinart’s band the ruler is at the same time judge, embodying, as in primitive societies, judicial and executive powers. Appropriately, as the

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protagonists move into Barcelona, the only city to appear in the Quijote, Cervantes delves again into the origins of civil society, the foundations of the law and of the state. Guinart and his men are also a link between Sancho’s meeting with Ricote, who is disguised as a German pilgrim, and the Byzantine romance unfolding of the love story in which the morisco’s daughter is the protagonist. Thematically, Guinart and Barcelona represent the international projection of the novel as it approaches the end. Banditry in Catalonia was a problem for the Spanish crown in the sixteenth century. The phenomenon had its own regional causes but was also a reflection of the tensions between Castile and Aragon, between center and periphery, which had by no means disappeared with the union of the two crowns achieved with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Autonomist, secessionist Catalonia chafed under Castilian rule, first because of the authoritarian character of the Catholic queen, later under the emperor and his heirs—the imperial Habsburgs. Castile looked inward or westward toward the Indies, Catalonia outward and eastward to its Mediterranean and Italian colonies. Castile, land of castles, piles of rock built on arid land as it moved south with the Reconquista; Catalonia a maritime power, sending out to sea from its magnificent port of Barcelona ships laden with goods, soldiers, and government officials. Guinart figures in this outward projection. Brigands were viewed as dangerous by the crown, because Catalan bandits often had contacts with French Huguenots. Catalonia was not only a Mediterranean threshold but also a frontier with Protestant France. Guinart has connections with powerful individuals in Barcelona, like Antonio Moreno, who is, in turn, a friend of the viceroy. The bandit is the one who provides Don Quijote with safe passage to the city because of his network of influence in Catalan society. Guinart represents a political danger beyond the disruptions he causes within the national territory by his lawlessness; it is a political danger of an international nature because he is a potential ally of Spain’s enemies abroad. He threatens the integrity of the state, the very foundation of laws. But this threat, though serious in the eyes of the crown, is nothing compared to the one posed by the moriscos, with which it merges significantly in the novel. This was a threat that had peaked earlier, in 1569, when the moriscos revolted. As Elliott writes in Imperial Spain: The Protestant peril was growing hourly, and it was growing at a moment when the danger from Islam seemed also to be mounting to a climax. For Catalonia was not the only region of Spain where revolt and heresy threatened. On Christmas night of that terrible year 1568—the year of the danger in Catalonia, of the cutting of the sea-route through the Bay of Biscay, and of the arrest and death of Philip’s son and heir, Don Carlos—a band of Morisco outlaws led by a certain Fárax Abenfárax broke into the city of Granada,

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bringing with them the news that the Alpujarras had risen in revolt. Although the rebels failed to seize the city, their incursion signalized the outbreak of rebellion throughout the kingdom of Granada. Spain, which had surrounded itself with such strong defenses against the advance of Protestantism, now found itself endangered from within; and the threat came not, as was expected, from the Protestants, but from its old enemies, the Moors.∑

This revolt followed a pragmatic sanction drawn up at the end of 1566 and published in January of 1567 whose decrees were not new, but whose enforcement now seemed inescapable. The pragmatic included the prohibition of speaking or writing in Arabic, the obligatory use of Castilian dress, the abandonment of traditional habits such as bathing, and, of course, the cessation of all religious practices. How to bring about the conversion of moriscos to Christianity became a vehemently debated issue, concomitant with similar debates about the conversion of American native populations in Spain’s American empire. The arguments ranged from forced conversion to peaceful proselytizing—catechization. All efforts failed and the controversy became more urgent as morisco conspiracies with affiliates in Morocco, like the one in Seville in 1580, were discovered. Others involved covert contacts with France, particularly with Henry IV, which were highly disturbing to the Spanish crown. By 1590 talk of expelling the moriscos began in earnest, but because of Spain’s multiple wars at the end of the sixteenth and beginnings of the seventeenth century they enjoyed a respite, as attention was diverted elsewhere. There was also a division between Castile and Aragon on the matter, and the Aragonese exemptions and legislative immunities made expulsion of the moriscos in Valencia a difficult legal matter. Those moriscos in Castile, who had wound up there after an earlier pragmatic dispersing them to forestall revolt, were free but relatively rootless, like Ricote. In Valencia, on the other hand, they were prized vassals who paid considerable taxes to their lords, constituted the backbone of agricultural labor, and had been there for centuries. The aristocracy in Valencia did not look upon expulsion with favor, but eventually the Council of State agreed on it as the only solution, and in 1609 the process began. It lasted several years, which included the final six of Cervantes’ life, when he was trying to complete Part II of the Quijote and rushing to put the finishing touches on The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. He also published in those years the Exemplary Stories, his plays, and the Voyage to Parnassus. It was a time of feverish activity in which Cervantes, aware that his time was short, was coming to a balance of his life and works. It was also at a moment in Spanish life when awareness of the nation’s decline as an imperial power was very keen. The morisco question added to the unrest in Spanish consciousness, to

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the collective fear that the foundations of national unity were cracking, and that the central myths of the nation were being dismantled. The challenge to the ideology of the state came not only in the form of resistance to Christianity and to Spanish customs, but in a rethinking of Spain itself in morisco literature, meager as it was because of the persecution. As Luce López-Baralt has written: ‘‘the Morisco texts were not only linguistically hybrid. They also rethink Spain from the Islamic point of view. The texts were written, as the Spanish saying goes, ‘al revés de los cristianos’ [inverting Christianity]. They force us to get acquainted with a concept of Spain the fundamental cultural, religious, and social values of which have been inverted: Islam is the true religion, Muhammad is the Prophet of God, and we should pray to Allah.’’∏ Spanish central myths of national and religious integrity reached back through the Reconquista, which had culminated with the fall of Granada to the Catholic kings in 1492, to the perceived catastrophe of the Moorish invasion in 711, when the legendary unity of Hispania was shattered. Fear of the moriscos and their connivance with Turks and Moors unleashed a phantom in the national subconscious. The Turks had once been the center of the powerful Ottoman Empire, defeated at Lepanto, that shining moment of Cervantes’ military life, and were still feared and despised. The acerbic Covarrubias refers to them in his Tesoro as: ‘‘turk. We know this nation more than we need, because it lorded over such a large portion of the world. They are a vile people with bad habits who lived from stealing and abusing others. . . . There are specific histories of this people. Father Gerónimo Román, in his República de los turcos, mentions their origin and etymology of their name, saying that they are called Turks because they devote themselves to theft, lived like barbarians, were very poor, and did not consider it injurious to others to steal from them.’’π (The ‘‘bad habits’’ to which Covarrubias alludes include, most of all, homosexuality, a view of the Turks that is reflected in the story of Ana Félix and Pedro Gregorio—when in the hands of the Turks, the young man has to be disguised as a woman so as to be less attractive to men.) All of these dreads hovered around a core anxiety about the integrity of Spain as a nation. Elliott, putting it succinctly, calls it the fear that ‘‘the Reconquista would be undone.’’∫ Archbishop Juan de Ribera, eventually named viceroy of the kingdom of Valencia in 1602, wrote to Philip III a year before that he feared Spain would be ‘‘lost as in the time of the Visigoths.’’Ω It was this apprehension, exacerbated by the resistance of many moriscos to integrate into Spanish society, that brought about the expulsion, the historical context of Ricote’s daughter’s story.

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The source of the primal fear of national disintegration is a subtext involving one of the core political myths of modern Spain, the one that emerges with the

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Catholic kings. Not surprisingly, Spanish national mythology about the origins of the nation includes a legend about illicit love and treason that presumably precipitated the fall of Spain to the Moors in 711. Theogonies often begin with lovers’ transgressions, a break of the primal law. It is this master love story that is behind that of Ricote, his daughter, and her suitor. It is perhaps a version of the biblical fable of the Fall, but other stories, some classical myths, seem to have influenced it too. The protagonists of the myth of national catastrophe are Don Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king; Count Don Julián, governor of Ceuta, across the Strait of Gibraltar and a key stronghold against a Moorish invasion; and his daughter Florinda, or La Cava. The basic plot—there are many variants—is that King Rodrigo raped or seduced Florinda, and the outraged Count Don Julián, in revenge, opened the way to the Moorish invasion. Florinda, it is clear, was not an unwilling partner in all this, hence her nickname La Cava, derived from the word for whore in Arabic. She is the Helen of Troy of this saga. The Visigoths were eventually routed at Guadalete and the full takeover followed, beginning eight centuries of Moorish domination that ended with the fall of Granada in 1492. We know, of course, that this is the stuff of national mythmaking, that during those eight hundred years Christian and Moorish kingdoms were often allied, and that the relationship was frequently one of convivencia, or conviviality. It is clear that very little in the story really happened as it was told, though there may be shreds of factual truths here and there. The whole of it is so thick with variants that the roles of some of the protagonists change, and others are added. But the truth of the story is irrelevant. The fable of Don Rodrigo, La Cava, and Don Julián is a powerful tale of political self-definition through warfare to undo an outrage whose origin is sexual, and as such an important component of Spain. What counts, in short, is the creation of the legend and the role that it plays in Spanish national consciousness as a myth of origins. This is the romance of which Ana Félix’s and Pedro Gregorio’s is a variant. The theme of Don Rodrigo, La Cava, Don Julián, and the fall of Spain became one of the principal ballad topics in the late Middle Ages, continuing through the sixteenth century to Cervantes’ time. These ballads, or romances, dealt with other mythic figures, like the Cid, and were transmitted orally for the most part, though printed collections began to appear soon in the sixteenth century. These ballad cycles constituted whole stories told in fragmented form in the individual poems, some separated one from the other by centuries—the implicit whole is the romance as defined by Frye. Narrative necessity more than historical accuracy prevailed, of course, hence we have romances about the Cid’s youth to round out the figure of the hero, about whose early life very little is really known. The legend of Don Rodrigo is also filled out to make up a whole story. It culminates in the most famous of the poems, about Don

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Rodrigo’s penance, decreed by a hermit he finds in his wanderings after the defeat at Guadalete. He is put in a tomb with a huge snake with seven heads that chews his most sensitive parts: It’s eating me up, eating me up, starting with my most sinful part, and from there straight to the heart, the source of all of my sorrows. [Ya me come, ya me come, por do más pecado había, en derecho al corazón, fuente de mi gran desdicha.]∞≠

The story was taken up by printed literature at a crucial period of Spanish history. The first to find inspiration in the legend was Pedro del Corral, author of the Crónica sarracena, or Crónica del Rey Rodrigo con la destruyción de España, written around 1443 but not published until 1499, during the reign of the Catholic kings. It is very much like a chivalric romance and the first historical novel with a nationalist theme, according to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, that most authoritative of Spanish literary historians.∞∞ Del Corral turned Don Rodrigo into a knight-errant and embroidered considerably on his love affair with La Cava. Predictably, the most interesting part comes after his defeat at Guadalete, when Don Rodrigo meets the hermit who imposes on him the ghastly punishment we already saw. Rodrigo resists various temptations by the devil, who appears to him, of course, in the guise of Don Julián and La Cava. Don Rodrigo finally redeems all his sins through the horrendous ordeal with the snake. He dies on the third day and bells peal on their own to announce his demise. I furnish these gruesome details to show that this is the kind of story likely to be deeply embedded in the Spanish subconscious—it is a nightmarish tale of sexual transgression and treason at the origin and establishment of the polity wherein the law will be forged. In the sixteenth century a morisco from Granada, Miguel de Luna, fabricated a story that he said he had found at the library in El Escorial and that he called Verdadera historia del rey don Rodrigo y la pérdida de España (Granada, 1592). Although inferior to the Crónica sarracena, it is the text in which La Cava first acquired the Italian name of Florinda. De Luna used a device that may have had an influence on Cervantes’ creation of the Quijote: he attributes authorship of the text to one Albucásim Taric Abentarique, a Moorish historian who could be the original Cide Hamete Benengeli.∞≤ Sometime after 1604, the great Lope de Vega wrote a play entitled El último rey godo, a broadranging historical piece in which the first act represents the love of Don Ro-

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drigo and La Cava, the second Don Julián’s revenge and the rout at Guadalete, and the third the beginning of the Reconquest with Don Pelayo and the victory at Covadonga. (Don Pelayo was a Visigothic aristocrat who defeated the Moors at the legendary battle of Covadonga in 718, thus starting the Reconquest. He was proclaimed the first king of Asturias, in northern Spain, where the Christians had taken refuge after the invasion of the south.) Lope again included an episode from the legend in his long epic Jerusalén conquistada (1609). Lope’s El último godo gives the full measure of the national myth of Fall and Redemption by rounding off the story with the beginning of the Reconquest by Don Pelayo at Covadonga. But the myth was part of a more generalized discourse because of the ballads, which constitute a whole cycle with Don Rodrigo as protagonist. Don Julián had become an example of vengeful treachery, as we can observe in Part I of the Quijote when Cardenio, upon learning of Fernando’s betrayal, exclaims: ‘‘O villain! more ambitious than Marius, more cruel than Cataline, more savage than Sylla, more fraudulent than Galalon, more treacherous than Vellido, more vengeful than Julian, and more covetous than Judas’’ (I, 27, p. 210) [¡Oh Mario ambicioso, oh Catilina cruel, oh Sila facinoroso, oh Galalón embustero, oh Vellido traidor, oh Julián vengativo, oh Judas codicioso! (p. 306)]. Luscinda and Florinda rhyme, of course, perhaps a kind of phonetic allusion to the story. La Cava, meanwhile, is mentioned in the Zoraida episode when the ship in which she is fleeing sails into a cove next to a promontory called ‘‘Cava Rumia, which signifies, The wicked Christian woman, there being a tradition among them that Cava, on whose account Spain was lost, is interred in that place; for Cava, in their language, implies a Wicked Woman, and Rumia signifies Christian, so they look upon it as a bad omen, when they are obliged, by necessity, to drop anchor here’’ (I, 41, p. 357) [el de la Cava Rumía, que en nuestra lengua quiere decir ‘la mala mujer cristiana,’ y es tradición entre los moros que en aquel lugar está enterrada la Cava, por quien se perdió España, porque cava en su lengua quiere decir ‘mujer mala,’ y rumía, cristiana: y aun tienen por mal agüero llegar allí a dar fondo cuando la necesidad los fuerza a ello (p. 484)]. Sancho and Dueña Rodríguez allude to the very verses quoted before in Part II, chapter 33. Says Sancho: ‘‘ ‘and that from his riches, pastime and embroidery, Rodrigo was taken to be devoured by serpents, if the rhymes of old ballads do not lie.’ Here Donna Rodríguez, the duenna, who was one of the hearers, interposing, ‘Wherefore should they lie?’ said she, ‘for the ballad says as how they thrust king Rodrigo alive into a tomb full of toads, lizards and snakes, and two days after, he was heard to cry with a weak and doleful voice, ‘‘Now they eat me! now they gnaw the part in which I sinned so heinously!’’ ’ ’’ (II, 33, p. 675) [y de entre los brocados, pasatiempos y

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riquezas sacaron a Rodrigo para ser comido de culebras, si es que las trovas de los romances antiguos no mienten.—Y ¡cómo que no mienten!—dijo a esta sazón doña Rodríguez la dueña, que era una de las escuchantes—: que un romance hay que dice que metieron al rey Rodrigo, vivo, en una tumba llena de sapos, culebras y lagartos, y que de allí a dos días dijo el rey desde dentro de la tumba, con voz doliente y baja: ‘Ya me comen, ya me comen / por do más pecado había’ (p. 907)]. It is evident that the collective imagination and the dueña practice amplificatio, embroidering on the horror of the punishment.

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In the Ricote episode Cervantes is dealing with very current and hot political events, so contemporary to his novel that fictional and historical time coalesce, giving the book an almost journalistic quality. Cervantes’ cautious position on the matter of the expulsion may very well stem from this contemporaneity of the events he narrates—perhaps he was as fearful as Sancho of legal reprisals by the authorities. He is writing about real time in real time. The events in question raise issues about the very integrity of the nation, about its political foundations, which means its myths of origins and its self-definition against its enemies abroad. Barataria and other episodes dealing with these matters were contrived by the characters and hence doubly fictional. But Ricote and his daughter Ana Félix are caught in the mesh of very current history. Part II, which began with the discussion involving Sansón Carrasco, Don Quijote, the priest, and the barber about Spain’s international conflicts, circles back to them at the end in the most concrete fashion possible. The Quijote approaches documentary realism as Don Quijote returns to sanity, an interesting confluence. But the trials of Ricote and his daughter have another familiar ring by now: hers is another unequal marriage, like those of Fernando and Dorotea and Cardenio and Luscinda in Part I, and Camacho and Quiteria in Part II. Surprisingly, as the novel moves toward historical realism, this love story acquires an almost small-town tone that contrasts with its international ramifications. The stories in Part I and Camacho’s wedding take place in villages and fields relatively far from the place where Don Quijote and Sancho live, and toward which they will return. Ricote and his family, on the other hand, are from their village, the one whose name the narrator does not want to remember—home is now near and far. Ricote is Sancho’s neighbor, aware of the squire’s poverty, while Sancho knows Ricote and his family well. He followed their ordeal with concern and compassion when the order of expulsion was made public. The squire is able to tell his neighbor about his kin’s last days in the village, for Ricote (as we know) had left earlier to search for a convenient nation in which to settle. Thus we learn, with the morisco, about Ana Félix’s involvement with

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Pedro Gregorio, a mayorazgo belonging to a prominent family. Ricote’s tale is filled out by Sancho but it is left incomplete and is taken up again only when the knight and his squire are unwittingly caught in the naval battle outside Barcelona. Now we learn, along with Ricote and the Catalan authorities, including the viceroy, the fate of Ana Félix and her suitor. Dorotea-like, she has taken arms against a sea of trouble, disguising herself as a man and her lover as a woman to escape from the Turks who have captured them. The story, which began like all the others with the problems of mismatched young lovers, acquires an international dimension and the shape of a Byzantine romance: cross-dressing, lovers who resemble each other in their beauty so much that they are like siblings, beastly suitors bent on ravaging the young lovers, potentially incestuous relations, protracted sea journeys with shipwrecks and bizarre adventures in strange lands, miraculous encounters and rescues, constant action with little character development. But the marriage conflict begins with common problems about wealth and social status, to which the difference in race and religion are added, as in the Zoraida-captive story in Part I. However, Ana Félix is a Christian since birth and her mother a convert, so the difference is mostly one of customs, which Ricote is quick to point out has kept morisco women from having much to do with Christian men. The expulsion, however, gives a new twist to what could have been a highly conventional Romeo and Juliet kind of story, or even one like those in the novela morisca, which is also in the background here. The novela morisca, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was usually about a young man in love with a morisca woman; the two eventually marry after suffering captivity and other ordeals. Like the romance morisco, or Moorish ballad, it was a translation into literature of the morisco problem. But with the expulsion of Ricote’s family and Pedro Gregorio following Ana Félix into exile, the story takes on a different, more serious character, blending in love with the themes of politics and the origins of the law. This is obvious because the case of the young couple’s love winds up before the viceroy, the highest government authority to appear in the Quijote, in a court scene reminiscent of those in which the love conflicts in Part I were resolved. While the differences between the myth of La Cava and the story of Ricote are many, I believe that they are linked by the fear of national disintegration, by the feeling that the stability of the state is threatened by sexual misconduct and unchecked miscegenation. The legend is to the episode in the Quijote what the Pyramus and Thisbe story from Ovid is to Camacho’s wedding. But here the background is of a compelling and urgent contemporaneity. This is what gives the story of Ana Félix and Pedro Gregorio a transcendental political dimension beyond the immediate legal issues that their union raises. Pedro

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Gregorio is a mayorazgo, heir to a fortune and a title; Ana Félix is morisca and rich. Because she is Christian, the only impediment to their union is based on custom, for as we have seen titles and estate are passed down to the firstborn male heir in Castile. There was no law against the marriage of an old Christian and a recent convert, except that now, with the expulsion of most moriscos, it has become illegal for Ana to stay, even if she can somehow prove the sincerity of her religious faith, and she could be severely punished for having returned. She is not a convert, as she and Ricote are at pains to express: she was born already a Christian because her mother was a sincere, though recent, one. Ana absorbed Christianity with her mother’s milk, as she says, so the expulsion is unjust and unjustified in her case. The crux of the situation is this, as Ricote explains. He is not against the expulsion, which he finds necessary given the seditiousness of his correligionists, but laments that the minority of those moriscos who are genuine Christians should have to suffer the consequences of acts they did not commit and did not support. The solution to the conflict, to whether Ana Félix and Pedro Gregorio can marry, can redress the injury done to loyal moriscos who have assimilated. Their marriage would be a fusion of bloods and beliefs, aided by the Neoplatonic beauty of both spouses, which announces an apotheosis of love triumphant. It would cancel or hold in abeyance the fear of national collapse brought about by a reenactment of that original catastrophe of foreign invasion provoked by La Cava and her father, Count Don Julián. But it is a form of closure that the story postpones because the real historical situation has had no closure yet: the effects of the moriscos’ banishment, its success or failure, are yet to be known. All that is evident are the reasons for the decree and the pain caused to those forcibly exiled. The novel cannot anticipate historical solutions, even in terms of a conventional literary love story. Cervantes pays homage to the official in charge of enforcing the expulsion in La Mancha through Ricote’s words in answer to Don Antonio’s offer to go to the court to negotiate a pardon for Ana: Ricote, who was present at this conversation, said: ‘‘Neither tears, entreaties, promises, nor presents will avail with the great Don Bernardino de Velasco, to whom His Majesty has entrusted the charge of our expulsion; for, although he really tempers justice with mercy, as he perceives the whole body of our nation contaminated and gangrened, he applies the actual cautery instead of the mollifying ointment; so that, by his diligence, prudence, sagacity, and terrifying threats, he has sustained upon his able shoulders the weight of that vast project which he has successfully put into execution, without suffering his Argus eyes, which are always alert, to be blinded by all our industry, stratagem, fraud, and solicitation. He is resolved that none of our people shall remain concealed, lest, like a hidden root, they may hereafter bud and bring

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forth fruit which may be poisonous to Spain, already cleansed and delivered from those fears that arose from the prodigious number of the Moors. An heroic resolution of the great Philip III who has, at the same time, displayed the most consummate wisdom in committing the execution of the scheme to the courage and ability of Don Bernardino de Velasco.’’ (II, 65, pp. 892–93) [No—dijo Ricote, que se halló presente a este plática—hay que esperar en favores ni en dádivas; porque con el gran don Bernardino de Velasco, conde de Salazar, a quien dio Su Majestad cargo de nuestra expulsión, no valen ruegos, no promesas, no dádivas, no lástimas; porque aunque es verdad que él mezcla la misericordia con la justicia, como él vee que todo el cuerpo de nuestra nación está contaminado y podrido, usa con él antes el cauterio que abrasa que del ungüento que molifica; y así, con prudencia, con sagacidad, con diligencia y con miedos que pone, ha llevado sobre sus fuertes hombros a debida ejecución el peso desta gran máquina, sin que nuestras industrias, estratagemas, solicitudes y fraudes hayan podido deslumbrar sus ojos de Argos, que contino tiene alerta, porque no se le quede ni encubra ninguno de los nuestros, que como raíz escondida, que con el tiempo venga después a brotar y echar frutos venenosos en España, ya limpia, ya desembarazada de los temores en que nuestra muchedumbre la tenía. ¡Heroica resolución del gran Filipo Tercero, y inaudita prudencia en haberla encargado al tal don Bernardino de Velasco! (pp. 1165–66)]

The case remains open beyond the end of the novel. Readers never learn if Ana and Don Gregorio do marry, as we know or assume is the case in other stories. The verdict is left for higher legal and political authorities than priests, regional judges, and officials—or knight-errants. Now defeated, Don Quijote is in no position to offer succor to the couple or to Ricote, and Sancho is careful to limit his help to not denouncing his neighbor to the authorities, in itself a punishable offence. Justice is delayed indefinitely: love cannot be the victor against the law when the stakes are so high as national unity and the integrity of the state. Ultimately, the significance of Ricote’s story is the radical way in which it confronts the themes of love and the law within the more profound context in which they appear in Part II. By his expulsion, Ricote has been left devoid of legal substance in the most radical fashion: removed from the national territory, he is left not just bereft of citizenship but outside the very ground to which he belongs. He is made to endure worse than a civil death. He stands before the beginning of the legal and beyond its end, literally in a no-man’s land. Exile was a common punishment for various crimes in Spain, a practice derived from Roman law, where it was also frequent. Ricote is condemned to a life of errantry, to a no-place often defined in Spanish law, beginning with the

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Partidas, as some island designated for the purpose of placing the culprit beyond terra firma. The Byzantine romance in which Ana Félix is involved in her love affair with Pedro Gregorio highlights this errantry and projects it to a purely fictional realm. This realm is one in which genders have yet to be defined and appear interchangeable and where marriage is forever interrupted or postponed, sometimes by prohibitions as elemental as that of incest. There is a hint of this in the parallel, almost prenatal adventures of the two lovers, who are at pains to acquire a sexual identity before they can even consider forming a heterosexual couple capable of marriage and founding a social unity with legal substance and possible heirs—an estate, a furtherance of the mayorazgo. The Byzantine romance represents the enactment of polar, dual dimensions by going beyond and to the origins of the law at the same time. Its domain is literature, where a real resolution can always be suspended, blending the real political need to leave pending Ana’s and Pedro’s wedding with the absence of closure fiction allows, even while demanding it. Desire, love in the form of the Neoplatonic union of the two beautiful partners, is the only force capable of sustaining the hope of a happy ending. The romance form is not realized as closure is forestalled. National unity remains an open question for which literature can furnish no effective solutions and perhaps not even hope—it can only hint at the common origin of the desire to bring about closure in both its own fictions and ideology by their persistent elaboration of myths cast as conflictive love stories. In Part II Cervantes seems to have realized the novel’s engagement with the present and its potential to probe into major contemporary concerns. He brings love and the law back to their origins as issues of philosophical, literary, social, and political significance, and forward to a future yet unknown— its is a brilliant blending of the picaresque, the romances of chivalry, and the whole tradition of idealistic Renaissance art. If the picaresque, as Salillas had claimed, constituted the beginning of criminology, the novel, as Cervantes fashions it out of so many disparate elements, will lay bare the mechanisms of the social and political forces that shape the present. Love and law, interdiction and desire, are at the core of the myths of the nation, creating new, necessary myths that writers of Cervantes’ stature will cast in their fictions to test their viability and examine their value, values, and instrumentality.

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

This fear that a terrible event may be brought on by its mere mention is out of place or pointless in the overwhelming disorder of the real world, but not in a novel, which should be a rigorous scheme of attentions, echoes, and affinities. Every episode in a careful narrative is a premonition. —Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘Narrative Art and Magic’’

I suppose that the question everyone asks when reading Exemplary Stories is whether, had Cervantes not written the Quijote, this collection would have won him a prominent place in Western literary history. But, since he did write the Quijote, a more pertinent question is how this collection is related to the masterpiece, not only in terms of quality, but also of themes and narrative structures. Exemplary Stories, a work of which Cervantes was proud because it made him the first to have ‘‘novelado en lengua castellana’’ (to have written novellas in the Spanish language), is a superb group of stories, among which there are some true brief masterpieces.∞ Given the inclusion of similar stories in the Quijote, Part I, and in a different way in Part II, it is safe to say that Cervantes favored this kind of long short story, and that he invested considerable creative effort in them. I would venture also that the decision to assemble and publish the volume of twelve stories was influenced by the criticism Cervantes received for inserting several stories in Part I of the Quijote. It is known

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that he had a few of the exemplary stories already written—some even published in an anthology—and realized that he would not be able to incorporate them into the larger books that he was working on, like Part II of the Quijote and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. One of the innovations of Exemplary Stories is that there is no overarching fiction connecting the stories, no group of narrators who leave the city to escape the plague and who speak according to given themes, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Here we have a collection of twelve novellas, under Cervantes’ name, with no false attributions or fake authors like Cide Hamete Benengeli. It is an assertion of authorship that reflects Cervantes’ newly acquired fame and authority after the success of the Quijote. I agree with Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce that Cervantes wrote various works at the same time, so that it is difficult to establish a teleology, as Ruth El Saffar tried to do.≤ In the case of the Quijote one can discern the movement from Part I to Part II because Part II has to take Part I as a point of departure. But this does not apply to other works that he had in the loom at the same time as the masterpiece, which may date from earlier periods and were revised or not but without pressure to write with or against a previous one. Cervantes published quite a few books toward the end of his life but they can hardly be seen as an evolving project with a discernible single intention or focus. Exemplary Stories is made up of multiple disconnected pieces that cannot be placed in a satisfactory chronological pattern according to when they were written, and the sequence in the book is no guarantee of a gradual thematic or formal progression from one to the next. The traditional division into ‘‘idealistic’’ and ‘‘realistic’’—the first derived from the Italian literary tradition and the second from the picaresque—breaks down too often to be useful. The story I am going to discuss here can hardly be called idealistic, but it has been categorized as such by some. Let me take up briefly the two words in the book’s title: ‘‘novelas’’ and ‘‘ejemplares.’’ By ‘‘novela’’ Cervantes meant the Italian ‘‘novella,’’ a long short story by our standards—the short story as we know it did not develop until the advent of newspapers in the eighteenth and principally the nineteenth century.≥ The adjective ‘‘ejemplares’’ in the title has caused much confusion, complicated by Cervantes’ own enigmatic statement about the stories’ ‘‘exemplariness.’’ He writes: ‘‘I have called them ‘exemplary,’ and on close examination you will see that there is not one from which you cannot extract some profitable example; and were it not for the fact that I do not wish to labor the point, I might show the delicious and wholesome fruit to be gathered from each individual story as well as from the collection as a whole’’ (p. 4) [Heles dado nombre de ejemplares, y si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se

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pueda sacar algún ejemplo provechoso; y si no fuera por no alargar este sujeto, quizá te mostrara el sabroso y honesto fruto que se podría sacar, así de todas juntas, como de cada una de por sí (p. 8)]. This sounds ironic to me: one could find moral profit; I would show you how. But if one could find a moral if one were told how it is because exemplariness in moral terms is not central to the book. Américo Castro has argued that, now that Cervantes has become important and apt to be heard by those in power as a result of the success of the Quijote, he is pandering to them with this turn to the ‘‘exemplar.’’ He supports his contention by alluding to the rewritings of two of the stories, which had appeared earlier in an anthology along with ‘‘The Pretended Aunt.’’ The rewritings, which Castro purports were intended to tone down their prurience and his having left out ‘‘The Pretended Aunt’’ from Exemplary Stories are evidence of his moralism.∂ There may be something to this but only tangentially, for some of the stories left in the book are still quite salacious—for instance, ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ and ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs.’’ ‘‘The Pretended Aunt’’ would have raised the total of stories in the book to thirteen, a number Cervantes may have wanted to avoid, though it is true that the story is nearly pornographic in some details and very much derived from the Celestina in tone and spirit. But Part II of the Quijote is very critical of the aristocracy and those in power, as we have seen. Others have struggled with the possibility of the stories being a series of moral parables. But Cervantes never wrote such kind of literature. There is no question, of course, that there are profound ethical issues involved in some of the stories, and that characters are caught in deep moral dilemmas, but the stories are not moral allegories or commentaries on current ideological debates such as Erasmianism, as critics like Alban Forcione claim.∑ I believe that the answer is simpler. Ejemplar may be an adaptation of the medieval term exemplum, in Spanish esiemplo, which indeed meant a tale with a moral. Recasting medieval forms was a common practice in the baroque. But it is a playful adaptation: one could find morals in the tales if one looked or were told how to find them. I think that ejemplares has the sense of muestrario, a collection of stories with varying themes and techniques, a cross section of possibilities—the stories are examples of the kinds of stories that can be written. In this I am inclined to accept Bruce W. Wardropper’s idea that the stories are forms of eutrapelia, meaning a good twist or trope, a trick like those of a magician or acrobat.∏ The exemplariness of the exemplary stories is that Cervantes plays with the limits of narrative in all of them, sometimes by a reductio ad absurdum of a genre or subgenre like the Byzantine romance (‘‘The Generous Lover’’), the picaresque (‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’’ and ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’’), or the sentimental tale (‘‘The English Spanish Woman’’). All of

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these are obsolete genres and subgenres that he tries in miniature form, as in a laboratory of fiction. This same kind of muestrario is what Cervantes offers at the end of Part II of the Quijote, when he has a mini novela morisca, a smallscale Byzantine romance, a tale about brigands, and so forth. Returning to chapter 1, these stories are examples of what cannot be narrated, like the horror of the prisoner of sex’s incest, his rustication to a world of men, his narcissism; or the blood itinerary in the Camacho’s wedding episode in Part II of the Quijote. Deep in the exemplary stories are tales that cannot be told, unnarratable stories because they reveal the common root in the irrational of desire and its proscription. Love and the law figure prominently in the stories in the way that I have been analyzing those themes here, with love really being the unifying thread throughout. In ‘‘The Glass Graduate’’ (It should be ‘‘The Glass Lawyer’’), Tomás Rodaja is given a love potion by a scorned lady that turns him mad: he believes that he is made of glass and must take special care of his body lest it be broken. ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’’ is Cervantes’ proposal for a different kind of picaresque: the students-to-be wind up in Monipodio’s brotherhood, which controls crime and sexual traffic in Seville. There is a gay grandeur to crime in the Seville portrayed by Cervantes. I am particularly interested in three of the stories because of the radical way in which the themes of love and the law are deployed: ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage,’’ and its sequel, ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs.’’ This chapter is devoted to the first of these.

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No story of Cervantes has been more severely criticized than ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ Avalle-Arce begins his commentary by simply stating that the story is ‘‘a bold novelistic experiment and a failure at the same time.’’π My former teacher Manuel Durán begins his by saying: ‘‘Perhaps the only description that fits this novelette is ‘Italianate Absurd Melodrama.’ ’’ He winds up with this blast: ‘‘Cervantes had so many excellent tales to his credit that he thought he could afford this ‘bomb.’ ’’∫ Yet others, beginning with Jean Pierre Florian in 1796, have considered ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ the best of Exemplary Stories, and the list of other advocates includes Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Luis Astrana Marín, and Joaquín Casalduero.Ω I count myself among the admirers. I believe that ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ is the most perfect and modern of the Exemplary Stories, and given the competition the choice is not easy. It is a story that could have been written by a modern master like Jorge Luis Borges, but he and all the others learned their craft reading Cervantes anyway. ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ begins with a crime, in a manner that makes the story seem like it is taken out of an archive of court cases. It is an abduction

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perpetrated at night, in the open road (despoblado), against a helpless old hidalgo and his family, followed by a rape, forced confinement, and a flight from the city by the criminal, who makes no reparations to the woman and her family for their injured reputation or to the son who is born as a result of his actions. Rodolfo is no good. The plot follows a sequence of events that forces him back to the city, to the house, room, and bed where he committed the crime, and thereby to his making restitutions to Leocadia, Luisico (the child), and the rest of the old hidalgo’s family by marrying the young mother. It is a tale of damage and compensation, of injury and restoration, but one in which the process of making whole is complicated and tightly woven by a series of repetitions and unexpected connections. Rodolfo’s crime is ghastly in ways not seen elsewhere in Cervantes. In the Quijote, Dorotea is seduced by Fernando, but the sexual act is by mutual consent and with no other violence than the moral one and the actual deflowering. But Leocadia is raped while she is unconscious, a lifeless body. This underlines the preeminence of inanimate things in the story—like blood, the moon, a crucifix—that seem to have a life and an inclination of their own, independent of the characters’ will and agency. Leocadia’s body, not Leocadia, is injured, and Leocadia’s most tangible proof of the crime is Luisico, the child that her body produces as a result. He is concrete proof of the crime and will bring about with his blood the identification of the culprit and his being sentenced to marry his mother. Luisico issues from Leocadia’s body, inseminated while lifeless by one nearly accidental act, as Leocadia herself calls it. Leocadia is not guilty of anything, as her father, who would be the most affected by her loss of honor, recognizes. It is as if the crime had been committed against somebody else and Leocadia were a virgin mother, a daunting suggestion that religiously oriented readers of the story seem not to have picked up. And Rodolfo lacks an identity, a face, and even his voice is masked. He disappears for a long time—seven years—a temporal void in which he is nonexistent. No one is looking for him because of the self-imposed silence of Leocadia and her family, who fear dishonor. Uncanny elements come into play—particularly the repetitions of gestures, of accidents, of faints—that create a rhythm and suggest a meaning. This is what is haunting about ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ It is a story about the uncanny, about the familiar becoming unfamiliar, about the return of phenomena and of things.∞≠ ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ then, begins with a wanton crime. The love stories in the Quijote and the other exemplary stories contain in their plots violent acts but always as part of a larger plot. In the interpolated stories in Part I Fernando is the worst sexual offender, but he is a seducer with a stereotypical

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modus operandi that he seems to follow with regularity. He is drawn to women of the lower classes whom he ravages, exercising what he believes is his seigneurial right. His seduction of Dorotea is a premeditated act, the culmination of a plan that involves her servant, but at the crucial point she gives her consent. She is later the object of an attempted rape, but she fends off her assailant, whom she knew well. ‘‘The Impertinent Curiosity’’ relates the protracted development of an obsession that brings about a catastrophe. In Part II there are seductions, such as the one of Dueña Rodríguez’s daughter, but again, these follow recognizable patterns of behavior by men and women of different social classes. In Exemplary Stories there are injurious acts committed because of passion, as when the rejected woman in ‘‘The Glass Graduate’’ feeds Tomás Rodaja a substance that turns him mad, or when the envious lady-in-waiting of ‘‘The English Spanish Woman’’ gives Estefanía a poison that ruins her beauty and nearly kills her. In ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’’ Juliana la Cariharta laments that her lover and pimp, Repolido, beats her, but when questioned by the other prostitutes and thugs she confesses that she enjoys it and tells a tale of mutual sadomasochistic delights. But in ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ the violent acts committed against Leocadia and her family have no antecedents or previous development; she does not know her assailant or vice versa, and the attack does not evolve from a plan or compelling sequence of events. It is sudden, unmotivated, vicious, and owing to Rodolfo’s impetuous whim. The victims have no recourse and no defense. They are first overpowered physically and then cowed morally, having fallen prey to unchecked desire and social forces superior to their own. The incident, which takes place on the outskirts of Toledo, reads very much like the sort of case that is drawn from the city’s court archives and that today we would find in newspapers and media reports. ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ is clearly one of the tales in Exemplary Stories without a literary antecedent. Its frightening appeal lies precisely in the wantonness of the assault and the innocent and vulnerable nature of the victims. Leocadia’s father is an old, poor hidalgo, accompanied by his wife, daughter, small son, and a maid. He is no match for Rodolfo and his accomplices, who are youthful, strong, armed, and bent on pleasing their friend, a wealthy aristocrat who gives them money (he is ‘‘liberal,’’ meaning generous). Leocadia is a mere sixteen, brought up with such caution by her parents that she claims never to have heard men’s voices, save for her father’s and her confessor’s. She is not only virginal but clearly devoid of any experience with love, though under duress she proves to be a quick study and also to be thoroughly schooled in the harsh laws of the honor code. The two groups are lambs and wolves, as the text reads.

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The legalistic cast of the case extends beyond the gruesome crime that sets it off, which shocks the reader and provokes in him or her a sense of injustice. The revulsion at the physical, moral, and social injuries caused by Rodolfo and his associates creates not only the expectation of but the need for punishment and recompense. The law was made to deal with violence committed against the weak, to redress physical and material injuries, and to ensure recompense for losses incurred by such acts. That the story begins with an appalling act of abuse makes it obligatory that its development will lead to some sort of settlement, which, as we have seen all along, can take the form of marriage as both compensation and punishment, increasing the woman’s dowry to make her attractive to other men even though she has been ruined, or even pardon. Rodolfo’s crime and statutory punishments were clearly defined by Spanish law. Francisco Tomás y Valiente writes: ‘‘According to the law of the Partidas the rape of a virgin who was not a nun was punished by the loss of half of one’s assets if the rapist were an ‘honorable man’ [a nobleman], and by a flogging and five years of exile on some island if he were a commoner. But in practice these sentences were not applied. Usually the punishment was the one dictated by canon law for this crime, which was to marry the raped woman or give her a dowry established by the judge. To this alternative sentence Castilian judges also customarily added the loss of freedom to satisfy the need for public vindication. In short: the rapist had the choice of getting married, providing a dowry, or going to jail.’’∞∞ In another publication Tomás y Valiente writes the following about a case that occurred precisely in Toledo: ‘‘In a 1586 case of rape by force and in the wilderness [despoblado], the Toledo justices condemned the accused to two hundred lashes and eight years in the galleys, without stating at all that he could marry the injured woman. Both parties appeal and a little later the young woman’s lawyer asks for permission for her to grant a pardon to the offender, ‘provided he marry her,’ because this would be in her best interest. The judicial permission is issued, the pardon granted, and the wedding celebrated.’’∞≤ The event that opens ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ makes for a necessary unfolding leading to one of these outcomes. I insist on the fact that the crime follows no previous development: it is a pure beginning, a fresh start. The unfolding of the story will have to follow from it without any other complications. A huge sense of debt is created by Rodolfo’s act, calling for a proportionately severe punishment and restitution. The story is studded with legalisms to describe the crime, its scene, and its resolution. In this it too has the air of having been drawn from the archive. The narrator says that Rodolfo will be so named so as not to further tarnish his reputation, and Leocadia’s name is also what ‘‘they want to call her.’’ This is a

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notorious case whose actors are still alive in the present of the telling; hence the original document from which the case is drawn has to be slightly altered to protect them. The description of the time and place also has an elliptical quality typical of a legal document, as if blanks were being filled in a form or the conventions of the artis notariae were being followed: ‘‘The night was bright, the hour eleven, the road lonely and their pace leisurely’’ (p. 24) [La noche era clara; la hora las once; el camino solo, y el paso tardo (p. 239)]. It is as if Cervantes were saying, ‘‘You, reader, know how this is reported in the document I am glossing.’’ The procedure by which Leocadia, her parents, and above all Rodolfo’s mother get at the truth of the matter adheres closely to that of a criminal investigation, involving the collection of material evidence, its interpretation, the interrogation of witnesses and of the accused and victim. The final scene—when the case is solved, the manner of restitution agreed upon, and the marriage that closes the plot takes place—has the by now familiar court-scene aura, with Rodolfo’s mother acting as judge and the priest sanctifying the pardon and union. There are other legalistic elements that are familiar to us. The first and most obvious is that the assault takes place in despoblado, literally outside the city in this case, beyond the reach of the many police that Toledo has, whose existence gives Leocadia’s father a false sense of security. ‘‘Trusting the vigilant police’’ (p. 24), the text reads [Con la seguridad que promete la mucha justicia (p. 239)]. It also occurs at night. Crimes committed in despoblado and at night, as we know, were considered particularly heinous in Spanish penal codes, precisely because the victims could not enjoy the protection of neighbors or police forces. Leocadia’s family’s calls for help are not heard. The scene is also a road, leading from the river to the town. Crimes on roads, as we have seen, came under the jurisdiction of the crown and its police forces, such as the Holy Brotherhood. All of these factors aggravate Rodolfo’s offenses, adding to the singularity and appeal of the case, and hence to its deserving to be rescued from the archive and told as an exemplary story. Beneath the crime and punishment plot there also lurks the issue of an unequal marriage, highlighted by Rodolfo’s abuse of his power as an aristocrat. Leocadia’s father is a poor hidalgo, long on honor but short on wealth. She laments that were her parents rich she would not have found herself in the predicament that she is in, implying that they would have been protected by servants and private guards, not found alone on the road. But the disparity in social and economic class also underscores the possibility of restitution by marriage. Because Rodolfo is so much richer and of a much higher social class, marriage to him would be sufficient compensation for the injuries and damages that he has caused. This appears to be the case at the end, when he marries

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Leocadia and recognizes Luisico as his son. Everybody seems to be happy: Rodolfo’s parents have gained not only a beautiful and virtuous daughter-inlaw, but more importantly another male heir capable of giving continuity to their legacy; Leocadia’s have their honor restored, their daughter married to a wealthy aristocrat, and their grandson in line, as firstborn son, to inherit from his father and grandfather a considerable estate. In terms of the legal plot there seems to be a satisfactory ending to ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ a turn of events as astonishing as the crime itself: the achievement of criminal and civil justice and the atonement of sin by the marriage sanctified by that priest who pops up at the appropriate moment to marry Rodolfo and Leocadia. The viciousness of the crime is counterbalanced by the surprising and joyous resolution. Two eminent Cervantes scholars—Alban Forcione and John J. Allen—have adduced enough evidence to mount a considerable case in favor of reading ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ as the retelling of a miracle story drawn from popular religious lore.∞≥ The role that the silver crucifix plays in the resolution of the conflict and allusions to the miraculous by characters support this interpretation. Allen claims that the story of the Cristo de la Vega, an image of Christ in a Toledan church of the same name, has some influence on ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ A legend retold by the Spanish romantic José Zorrilla, known as ‘‘A buen juez, mejor testigo’’ (If the Judge Was Good, the Witness Even Better), tells the story of a young, impecunious woman who brings her fiancé before the image of Christ to swear that he will marry her. He goes off to war and upon his return reneges on the promise. The young woman drags him back to the church and asks the Cristo de la Vega if it is true that the young man had sworn to marry her. The Christ pulls a hand off from the cross and lowers his arm. In some versions the statue actually speaks. Faced with such proof, the man relents and marries the woman. The fact that the church in question is the basilica of Saint Leocadia, the name of our heroine in ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ and that in 1587 her remains had been returned from Flanders to Toledo, suggests to Allen that the legend was probably in the back of Cervantes’ mind as he wrote the story. It is quite possible, though it seems tangential to me and remains external to ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ Forcione buttresses his reading with his familiar appeal to the romance form, which he maintains is that of miracle stories: plots involving the supernatural, characters lacking development who seem to be moved by the unfolding of the story and happy endings. Couched in the context of Spanish religiosity in the period, which Forcione reconstructs through thick description and relentless scholarly accumulation of details, there is an inevitability to his reading that is hard to resist. I find readings of ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ in connection to miracles unsatisfactory while at the same time not entirely wrong. There is no question

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about the intensity of religious feeling among Spaniards in the period nor of Cervantes’ sincere Catholicism. But the problem is precisely that: that there is no question, hence to address it as an issue is a distortion. It is a kind of hermeneutic pleonasm, a redundancy. Spain’s and Cervantes’ Catholicism are so inherent to the story as to make the kind of work Allen and Forcione perform superfluous and extraneous to the text. It is beside the point, as it were. Of course there were those legends of miracles, surely Cervantes and his readers were aware of them, there is no doubt that at some prima facie level of reading the surprising resolution of the case in the story may appear to be like a miracle. Yet in the story there is nothing supernatural or that can be construed as miraculous because it violates common physical laws. In ‘‘A buen juez, mejor testigo’’ the image of Christ on the cross, made of wood, moves an arm. There is not the slightest hint of any such event in ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ Everything follows along as the report of a court case in which there was this happy settlement, brought about by some concurrent incidents and accidents, some of which were the result of the characters’ intentions and plans, as when Rodolfo’s mother makes Leocadia appear at the final dinner dressed in a shockingly beautiful fashion. Nothing escapes the commonplace and the ordinary, and while the accident in which Luisico was wounded, which starts the unraveling of the plot, could be construed as providential, it cannot be called that definitively, of course. I think that my admired colleagues and friends read the story motivated by a conventional view of Spain held among American Hispanists and by a desire to tame Cervantes’ text by reducing it to a narrative pattern with admittedly deep cultural roots but independent of literary discourse. It is like being in a jail cell and reaching out through the bars to grab a key that will open the door. In literature we can imagine ourselves outside and free. In my view what is profoundly original and disturbing in ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ is how the questions of crime, punishment, and restitution escape this kind of reading, giving the story a modern cast in which miracles are not denied but are not tendered as explanation for how things turn out. Besides, Cervantes’ story is important as literature, while miracle stories are read only by the pious or by scholars in search of miracles to solve their quandaries.

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‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ is so compelling as literature because of the relentless, pitiless concert of repetitions that fosters a sense of inevitability, a conspiracy of elements that one does not associate with human agency: lifeless bodies, blood, moon, light, steps on a staircase, a bed, are in collusion with each other. It is a whole network of signs that seems to be acting in consonance, but not

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guided by the characters. In fact it sometimes appears that the concurrence of these elements dictates the characters’ actions. This gives the text a certain detachment from author, characters, and readers, as if the story were writing itself in a language that belongs to none of them. It is a strange language made up of apparently heterogeneous elements, whose only common feature is to belong to the material world. They are brute and mute, yet animated and articulate through a grammar of their own, with its own accidents. It is like a higher law, as it were, that incorporates and assimilates the transgression and its punishment, that makes them part of itself as text. There is in the story an uneasy amalgamation of love and the law, a synthesis that leads not to a clear resolution in which atonement and recompense effectively erase the crime. It is another of the ‘‘unnarratable’’ stories.∞∂ Common language is silenced in ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ When Rodolfo grabs Leocadia she loses her voice: ‘‘deprived of voice to cry out’’ (p. 25) [el sobresalto le quitó la voz para quejarse (p. 240)], and the assault occurs in ‘‘the silence of night’’ (p. 25) [el callado silencio de la noche (p. 240)]. She hears his voice only when he leaves her on the street, but he changes it and speaks with a Portuguese accent: ‘‘in a feigned voice and speaking a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish’’ (p. 30) [en voz trocada y en lengua medio portuguesa y castellana (p. 244)]. She claims, as we already saw, that the only male voices she had heard were her father’s and her confessor’s. Leocadia’s father wants to keep the affront quiet, lest he be dishonored, and she asks Rodolfo to admit to his guilt and not come up with any excuses: ‘‘tell yourself that you offended me accidentally, without attempting to excuse it’’ (p. 28) [Haz cuenta que me ofendiste por accidente, sin dar lugar a ningún buen discurso (p. 242)]. In the darkness of the room in which she is raped, Leocadia has to feel around to identify things with her hands, even touching Rodolfo to ascertain that he is not a ghost of some sort. Reality is invisible and mute. The rape occurs while Leocadia is in a faint, her body unable to utter a protest or even comprehend the act. She is aware of what happened only because she is hurt, ‘‘I in pain?’’ (p. 26) [¿Yo lastimada? (p. 241)]; the only way her body speaks to her at that moment is through the pain, but it will be more eloquent later. Leocadia faints three times, Luisico once when he is hit by the horse, and Rodolfo once at the climax of the scene when Leocadia is identified by her mother. At crucial moments characters cannot speak, or do so poorly, as Rodolfo does to hide his identity. Leocadia’s shame is such that she wants to erase her own name and that of her family and does not want to learn Rodolfo’s. She reads only the material world around her: the hangings on the walls, the number of steps on the stairs, the features of the bed, the pieces of furniture, and the crucifix she steals as

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tangible proof of her presence in the room. Leocadia reads the language of things rather than that of people. Like the physical memory of the assault, she places more confidence in the speech of matter than in human discourse. She is right, for it is bodies and things that will tell the story. Leocadia and her family have managed to suppress the crime, and Rodolfo has erased it from his memory to the point that he hardly remembers it as he leaves for Italy. But then Leocadia feels herself to be pregnant and her body begins to speak for her. The child is the most material evidence of the crime. It is an ambivalent proof and judgment because on the one hand Luisico’s mere presence is an accusation, while on the other it is a blessing, not just because he is a human life, but individually because of the many fine qualities he possesses. Among these the most significant is his very early ability to read Latin and Spanish and to write very neatly.∞∑ He is a body endowed with speech, with language. Leocadia’s body speaks by repeating the unseen face of her assailant in Luisico’s, who looks so much like his father that he startles his paternal grandparents with the resemblance. Leocadia’s body speaks because it is the offended part, as she was unconscious when raped. It is a speech that betrays her in the sense that she did not want to know or see Rodolfo’s face, but Luisico’s shows it to her unwittingly and independent of his or her intention or desire. She does not want to see his face because she does not want to remember it: ‘‘holding in my memory the image of the cause of my suffering’’ (p. 27) [ni guardar en la memoria la imagen del autor de mi daño (p. 242)]. But her body retains the imprint and reproduces it in Luisico’s face. The erased image is replaced by a tangible copy of the face, as if memory were physically inscribed. Blood speaks, too, here and elsewhere, as we shall see; this is its power, which is also the call of the blood in the sense of its voice, its language. In the story the language of blood is not as gentle and benign as that of miracles. In the darkness of the room in which she is raped, Leocadia is only able to discern objects because of a window ‘‘through which the light of the moon entered so brightly that Leocadia could see the colors of the hangings that adorned the room’’(p. 29) [por do entró el resplandor de la luna, tan claro, que pudo distinguir Leocadia los colores de unos damascos que el aposento adornaban (p. 244)]. She is able to see not only shapes but also colors. The moon was complicitous in the crime because it allowed Rodolfo to be struck by Leocadia’s beautiful face, which led to his wanting to possess her.∞∏ It illuminated her face for his gaze. On another level, the moon also intervenes if, through the conventional association of lunar and menstrual cycles, one considers how fortuitous it was that Leocadia was ovulating the night that she was raped. There is also the link between all those faces, the ones that Rodolfo and

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his friends look at impudently, Leocadia’s and Luisico’s beautiful ones, and ‘‘las caras de la luna,’’ the faces of the moon. But more significantly there is the silver crucifix, which is, together with Luisico, the most tangible proof of the crime. Silver is the metal conventionally associated with the moon and with mirrors and reproduction because it reflects reality. It is as if the crucifix had preserved in its silvery essence the moonlight of the night of the crime, with its incitement to lust, but also, with its projection of light, the possibility for the truth to be revealed. The crucifix will facilitate the final resolution by constituting such a proof, which will again bring the lovers together in the same bed. It is also, by the way, material proof of Leocadia’s own crime of theft. So it is an ambivalent sign, on the one hand religious and tending to truth and on the other erotic, with a clear reminiscence of blood and sacrifice. This disturbing conjunction, this crossing of contradictory thrusts, as it were, explains why Leocadia suddenly desires Rodolfo at the end, contrary to all conventional psychological expectations. In addition, because of his uncanny resemblance to his father, Leocadia has been looking at Rodolfo’s face in Luisico’s, a twist by which the rejected face becomes the desired one, and a love perversely kindled by the son, a stand-in for his father. Such is the power of blood, which also explains why, in a very real sense, Rodolfo gets away with it. Implicit in the faces of the moon and on reflection is the notion of repetition, which is at the core of ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ and in a sense constitutes blood’s power. Leocadia faints three times, as we saw, and we can—as with the Camacho wedding episode—trace an itinerary of blood in the most literal sense: one blood leading to the other or becoming significant in relation to the next. It is an itinerary that is also an enunciation because repetition is the foundation of language, of the production of meaning through signs. The first blood would be Leocadia’s at the rape scene and the second Luisico’s at that of the accident with the horse and later on the very bed on which his mother was raped. There is an irresistible call back to that bed, a golden or gilded one, as Leocadia discovers by the light of the moon. The independence of this itinerary from human agency is proposed by Leocadia herself. She attempts to displace or cancel Rodolfo’s culpability by saying the violation was an ‘‘accident,’’ as we have already seen. Her use of the term is a Neoscholastic echo typical of the times, but what Leocadia probably means is that it does not issue from Rodolfo’s ontological essence, but from the contingency of his sudden burst of desire after having seen her face by the light of the moon. By removing the intentionality she is also diminishing her dishonor, blaming the whole thing on something unintended, hence incapable of causing offence. This is the reason she does not want to see Rodolfo’s face or learn who he is. Rodolfo is like an anonymous force that has overtaken her, in

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a scene reminiscent of Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla. He is his body. Unwittingly, of course, she is removing the act from the realm of language, in which honor codes and laws are expressed, and attributing it to a force that propels matter, inanimate things, which are appropriately the ones that will become articulate and in a sense tell the story. Leocadia also attributes the assault to the power of blood, to the irresistible thrust of sexual desire, of lust (today we would blame testosterone). Blood has the power of representation, of re-presentation and of reproduction. Luisico’s noble qualities, passed on through the noble blood of his father, are a case in point. He ‘‘was fair of face, gentle of disposition, quick of wit, and in all his acts befitting that tender age gave evidence of having been begotten by a high-born father’’ (p. 33) [de rostro hermoso, de condición mansa, de ingenio agudo, y en todas las acciones que en aquella edad tierna podia hacer daba señales de ser de algún noble padre engendrado (p. 247)]. This is ironic, of course, because Rodolfo does not give evidence of possessing such qualities, except for the physical beauty. Cervantes, in any case, like most Spaniards of the period, had a deterministic, pre-modern concept of genetics.∞π In the prologue to Part I of the Quijote he says that ‘‘I wish this book, as the child of my understanding, were the most beautiful, sprightly and discreet production that ever was conceived. But, it was not in my power to contravene the order of nature, in consequence of which, every creature procreates its own resemblance’’ (p. xlvi) [quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse. Pero no he podido yo contravenir al orden de naturaleza; que en ella cada cosa engendra su semejante (p. 9)]. The fact that Leocadia is saying things whose ultimate meaning she cannot be aware of underscores that the power of language, when not lacking, is impaired. The sense of what she says is beyond Leocadia as Rodolfo is unable to check his appetite. Their only meaningful and productive dialogue is with their bodies. If the rape is the first accident, the second accident is Luisico’s with the horse, which provokes the second bleeding (actually the third, counting the implicit one at his birth) and precipitates the series of events that lead to the finale. His paternal grandfather notices the resemblance to his son because of the blood, the language that he reads on the boy’s injured head and face. This second bleeding reenacts or supplants the first because it is as if Luisico were born, or conceived anew in blood and violence. It is the repetition of a beginning, an uncanny and logical impossibility that highlights the ‘‘translogical’’ nature of the language of blood and things. The sexual symbolism of the bolting horse is obvious; his fury is like Rodolfo’s and its consequences are

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similar. The horse’s owner and rider was ‘‘unable to check it’’ (p. 33) [detenerle en la furia de su carrera (p. 248)]. It is highly significant that the mishap occurs as Luisico carries a message from his maternal grandmother to another relative: he speaks, he is language, the language of blood. The horse runs over him as if to silence him, as his mother was silenced at the first bleeding, but contradictorily he will speak through his wound to his paternal grandparents and begin to uncover the truth. The face first speaks to them when Luisico is unconscious; it is an eloquent but mute face that speaks when silent. The story is cast in the language of paradox, one that cannot express the law, but instead the conspiracy of things and meanings before or after language. This is expressed somewhat laconically with the saying ‘‘When God gives the wound, He also gives the medicine’’ (p. 36) [Dios da la llaga da la medicina (p. 250]). There appears to be a restoration of order at the end with the restitutions made. Leocadia has a husband and Luisico a father. Rodolfo has been ‘‘condemned’’ to marry Leocadia, a beautiful woman such as he desired. The grandparents are all happy, particularly Rodolfo’s parents, who now have a new male heir to whom to pass on the legacy. But how could so much good come from something as evil as Rodolfo’s crimes? And how can Leocadia suddenly feel that she is deeply in love with him? She says that Rodolfo is ‘‘the one she already loved more than the light of her eyes’’ (p. 41) [al que ya quería más que a la luz de sus ojos (p. 255)]. These are, significantly, the eyes that he had blinded and that her parents had lost in losing her. But they are also the eyes that have been gazing at Luisico, preparing her to fall in love with Rodolfo, whose copy he is. Rodolfo is not repentant, as Don Fernando appeared to be at the end of the Quijote, Part I. When he receives the news that his parents have arranged for him to marry a beautiful woman he is happy to return, ‘‘eager to make his the fair bride his father held out to him’’ (p. 37) [con la golosina de gozar tan hermosa mujer como su padre le significaba (p. 251)]. Once back, when his mother shows him the picture of an ugly woman and tells him that she is the one they have chosen for him, he refuses because that her ‘‘plainness should delight his eyes I fear is impossible’’ (p. 39) [fealdad alegre los ojos del esposo paréceme imposible (p. 253)]. He argues that the married couple has a right to ‘‘deleite’’ (delight) in order to fulfill marriage’s ‘‘second purpose’’(p. 39) [segunda intención (p. 253)], meaning having children. Desire, pleasure, must drive the spouses to conceive, to reproduce. Rodolfo confesses without ambiguity that he seeks beauty in a woman: ‘‘there are those who look for rank, some for discretion, others for beauty, and I am one of these last’’ (p. 39) [unos

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hay que buscan nobleza, otros discreción, otros dineros y otros hermosura, y yo soy de estos últimos (p. 253)]. He has not changed at all: ‘‘It is beauty that I seek, beauty I desire’’ (p. 39) [La hermosura busco, la belleza quiero (p. 253)]. Leocadia was wrong: the rape was no accident independent of Rodolfo’s essence but part of his very being, which is driven by lust. David M. Gitlitz, in a superb article on the story to which I am deeply indebted, calls Rodolfo ‘‘a libidinous sob.’’∞∫ The one who has been transformed is Leocadia, who upon seeing Rodolfo for the first time in his full splendor is left dumbfounded. He returns from Italy: ‘‘so handsome and so gallant he looked as he entered his father’s house that he seemed the glass of fashion and the mold of form’’ (p. 38) [entró en casa de su padre tan galán y tan bizarro que todos los extremos de la gala y de la bizarría estaban en él todos juntos (p. 252)]. She is smitten as she gazes at him in the same way that he did at her the first time, without his being aware. Rodolfo does not know that she is looking at him because Leocadia is concealed: ‘‘[She] had hidden herself, gazed on him with wonder and emotion’’ (p. 38) [Suspendiose Leocadia, que de parte escondida le miraba (p. 252)]. ‘‘Suspenderse,’’ the word used in the original to describe her reaction, is to be left speechless. Her look is correlative to the one he gives her, from behind a veil, when he first sees her on the road. The result is that, as we saw, she begins to love him more than the light of her eyes. The rape is now an alluring and perverse memory, as she ‘‘began to turn in her imagination what had happened with Rodolfo’’ (p. 41) [Comenzó a revolver en la imaginación lo que con Rodolfo había pasado (p. 255)]. She herself is decked out by her mother-inlaw to make her attractive to Rodolfo. We must remember that other than her beautiful face he had not really seen her in the act of raping her, which the narrator attributes to his youthful lust, which needs few enticements. Now Leocadia’s body is outfitted and ornamented and she comes to table with ‘‘her natural beauty set off and enhanced by all the devices of adornment’’ (p. 40) [más hermosa muestra que pudo dar jamás compuesta y natural hermosura (p. 254)]. Her dress is studded with diamonds that ‘‘dazzled the eyes of the beholders’’ (p. 40) [con ellos entretenían y turbaban la luz de los ojos que los miraban (p. 254)]. She blinds those who look at her, meaning that she, contradictorily, impairs Rodolfo’s vision of her. But blindness works again, as his desire for her is rekindled. Leocadia appears, relevantly accompanied by two maidservants: ‘‘lighting the way with two wax tapers in silver candlesticks’’ (p. 40) [delante della venían dos doncellas alumbrándola con dos velas de cera en dos candelabros de plata (p. 254)]. Silver, again, as source of light, reminiscent of the silvery light of the moon during the first encounter and the silver crucifix. She is illuminated by the same light that was complicitous in her rape

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and that also brightened the room in which she was raped so that she could gather the evidence of the act. It is also a ‘‘moonish’’ light of memory, embedded in the substance of the crucifix and her recollections of the act, which are now tinged with desire. These are memories that reawaken Rodolfo’s desire and awaken hers retrospectively. The repetition of the act is what uncannily brings about the resolution by uniting the lovers again as tremulous flesh, even though through the proper social and legal channels. Because desire still rules. Rodolfo, once the word ‘‘husband’’ has been uttered, abandons all decorum and grabs Leocadia again: ‘‘having removed the barriers of dignity and decency that the surroundings might have put in his way, he bent his face to that of Leocadia’s and, pressing his mouth to hers, he seemed to be waiting for her soul to breathe itself forth that he might receive it in his own’’ (p. 42) [llevado de su amoroso y encendido deseo, y quitándole el nombre de esposo todos los estorbos que la honestidad y decencia del lugar le podía poner, se abalanzó al rostro de Leocadia, y juntando su boca con la della . . . como esperando que se le saliese el alma para darle acogida en la suya (p. 256)]. He is silencing Leocadia again, possessing one more time her mute body. She comes to as he kisses her mouth and gently tries to pry herself loose. This is an exact reenactment of the rape scene. Once the marriage has taken place, officiated by that priest who conveniently shows up for the purpose, Rodolfo can hardly wait to find himself alone with his new wife, presumably in the same old bed, furthering the repetition: ‘‘so great was his desire to be alone with his beloved wife’’ (p. 43) [tan grande era el deseo de verse a solas con su querida esposa (p. 257)]. The house is calm, like the first time, and in that vacuum of sound and light, of voice and gaze, in which they first met, they again have their bodies join to engender a long and lasting progeny. As with Luisico, it is that brood that speaks the truth of the story, breaking the silence: ‘‘The house was buried in silence. But not the truth of this story, for the numerous children and the noble offspring of this happy couple left who still live in Toledo would not consent it’’ (p. 43) [toda la casa estaba sepultada en silencio, en el cual no quedará la verdad de este cuento, pues no lo consentirían los muchos hijos y la ilustre descendencia que en Toledo dejaron (p. 257)]. It is the bodies that issue from their carnal union who speak the truth. Cervantes is playing here with the meaning of ‘‘verdad,’’ which is made to mean the ending, conclusion, or ultimate significance of the story. The language of blood, like that of the story, is one of paradox, not of ambiguity. Ambiguity suggests a possible resolution; paradox enunciates the convergence of contraries. It performs their nonresolution in the text. There is nothing ambiguous about paradox. Take the relationship between life and death expressed through the faints in ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ when bodies

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become lifeless while still being alive and generate life while appearing to be dead. All the faints are intimations of death. Leocadia’s at the beginning turns her into a lifeless body, a stump or column, as she herself calls it. But every faint, particularly her first and Luisico’s, which are accompanied by blood, leads to a rebirth, as if death were giving birth to life. This is why Leocadia calls the bed where she is raped and to which Luisico is taken a tomb: ‘‘the bed was that which had been the stone of her grave’’ (p. 35) [aquella era la misma cama que tenía por tumba de su sepultura (p. 249)]. The bed is the tomb in which Luisico was conceived, and where he is taken to die and be reborn after the accident. It is the bed in which Leocadia and Rodolfo will engender that long progeny. Life and death at cross purposes, in paradoxical union—like the very shape of the crucifix that plays so important a role. The crucifix is the X of a nonlanguage, a crude symbol of nonsignification, the generic X of a signature that does not identify—Rodolfo’s namelessness as criminal. It is the X that marks the spot of that no-place in which Leocadia was raped, a void of sound, no voices, and of recognizable shapes, no light. It is a language that signifies through the brute and mute force of its own shaped materiality, like all those objects through which the story is told. This is the deep meaning of the crucifix, not that of the drippy miracle story. Leocadia, it must be remembered, first picks it up as evidence of the crime and as instrument for a secret design of hers, explicitly not moved by religious sentiment. She ‘‘hid it in the sleeve of her gown, not for reasons of devotion or to steal, but because of a wise design’’ (p. 29) [se le puso en la manga de la ropa, no por devoción o por hurto, sino llevada de un discreto designio suyo (p. 244)]. When she proposes to her father to use the crucifix to identify the culprit, to put the X on him, her father replies that it would not do, that it would lead to further confusion because her assailant could send a third person to pick it up. Like the X that it is, the crucifix cannot name. It can signify the paradoxical nature both of the text and of life’s forces. ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ does not neutralize the positive power of evil, incarnated in sexual desire and the acts that it induces. Crime is the foundation of the law, the transgression needed for its inauguration—on a smaller scale, Leocadia’s theft leads to her having justice. Criminal acts have a facticity that stands before the language of the law, constituting a proto-language of their own inscribed in bodies, objects, and things that are both suggestive and suggest meanings. Legal codes translate into social order through a form of control that literature does not allow to dominate the text because it amounts to attaching a meaning to things that is external to them and to the text itself, like all the contextual material adduced by my distinguished colleagues. They

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signify only in relation to each other in the text. (There are ample records of piety but not of depravity, except in literature.) Codes, like the honor code, want to silence the language of things, of matter aroused by the force of desire. This is the power in the power of the blood as glimpsed in Cervantes’ brief novel, another virtual story of the ‘‘unnarratable,’’ of that which, literally, cannot by told, cannot be related—it is beyond language, which is why things and bodies ‘‘speak’’ here. The story per se manifests itself only in the hidden text that I read here. If this is the case, the title of this exemplary tale must be read literally: it is about the power of blood, the substance itself, something that we had already seen in the episode of Camacho’s wedding. Characters in ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ can have no psychological development because the actors in the story are the things, the crude matter that makes up bodies and objects. The repetitions are not part of an aesthetic design, in the sense of being a composition with balanced members and discrete shapes that provide pleasure. The exemplariness of the story lies in its ability to display the workings of language in the process of being given form by desire and its interdiction, the play of yes and no at the foundation of the law. This operation cannot yield a sense of justice or a pious meaning. It is pitiless in its working and its implications, which is what makes ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ one of Cervantes’ most successful and modern stories.

11

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

While Cervantes’ works are inconceivable without the picaresque, he never wrote a proper picaresque novel and had a guarded attitude toward the new genre. The episode of the galley slaves in Part I of the Quijote (chapter 22) has embodied for criticism the gist of his reservations. The prisoners, common criminals of the sort who often appear in the picaresque, are portrayed sympathetically, and several are allowed to expound on their miseries and misdeeds. These first-person confessions are like miniature picaresque novels, including the one by the character I called ‘‘the prisoner of sex’’ in chapter one. The star of the group, however, is the insolent and loquacious Ginés de Pasamonte, who is considered so likely to escape that he is restrained in a spectacular way: he was shackled in a very different manner from the rest; his foot being loaded with a huge chain that went round his whole body, and his neck adorned with two iron rings, to one of which the chain was fastened; and the other was called a keep-friend, or friend’s foot, from which descended to his middle, a couple of iron bolts fitted with a pair of manacles for his arms, secured by a large padlock, in such a fashion, as to hinder him from lifting up his hands to his mouth, and to disable him from bending his head to his hands. (I, 22, p. 157) [Venía diferentemente atado que los demás, porque traía una cadena al pie, tan grande, que se la liaba por todo el cuerpo, y dos argollas a la garganta, la

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una en la cadena, y la otra de las que llaman de guardaamigo o pie de amigo, de la cual descendían dos hierros que llegaban a la cintura, en los cuales se asían dos esposas, donde llevaba las manos, cerradas con un grueso candado, de manera que ni con las manos podía llegar a la boca, no podía bajar la cabeza a las manos. (p. 241)]

Ginés may not take anything to his mouth or put his mouth to anything, but what the guards cannot do is to shut it. Ginés banters with them, insinuates that they are themselves guilty of some kind of scam involving expenses at an inn, and launches on a tirade of self-promotion as the author of a book about his life. This is Ginés’s well-known exchange with the commissary and Don Quijote: ‘‘He tells nothing but the truth, said the commissary; for, he has actually written his own history, as well as could be desired, and pawned the manuscript in jail, for two hundred rials.’’ ‘‘Ay, and I shall redeem it, said Ginés, if it were for as many ducats.’’ ‘‘What! Is it so entertaining?’’ said Don Quixote. ‘‘Yes, answered Ginés, it is so entertaining, that woe be unto Lazarillo de Tormes, and all who have written or shall write in that manner. What I can affirm of mine, is, that it contains truths, and such ingenious and savory truths, as no fiction can equal.’’ ‘‘And what is the title of your book?’’ said the knight. ‘‘The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte,’’ replied the other. ‘‘Is it finished?’’ Said Don Quixote. ‘‘How can it be finished, answered the author, when my natural life is not yet concluded? I have already written my whole history from my birth till the last time I was sent to the galleys.’’(I, 22, p. 158) [—Dice verdad—dijo el comisario—; que él mesmo ha escrito su historia, que no hay más, y deja empeñado el libro en la cárcel en doscientos reales. —Y le pienso quitar—dijo Ginés—si quedara en doscientos ducados. —¿Tan bueno es?—respondió don Quijote. —Es tan bueno—respondió Ginés—, que mal año para Lazarillo de Tormes y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren. Lo que sé decir a voacé es que trata verdades, y que son verdades tan lindas y tan donosas, que no pueden haber mentiras que se le igualen. —¿Y cómo se intitula el libro?—preguntó don Quijote. —La vida de Ginés de Pasamonte—respondió el mismo. —¿Y está acabado?—preguntó don Quijote. —¿Cómo puede estar acabado—respondió él—, si aún no está acabada mi vida? Lo que está escrito es desde mi nacimiento hasta el punto que esta última vez me han echado en galeras. (p. 243)]

This remarkable passage encapsulates not only Cervantes’ take on the picaresque, but an incisive exposition of the genre’s poetics and an exacting critique of it.∞ The critique is also an opinion about its newness in relation to the

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unfolding of literary history. Renaissance authors wished to follow classical models and genres, but the picaresque was a radically new kind of literature, deviating from this practice. Cervantes is considering here this departure from aesthetic norms and questioning if the picaresque can really follow a different path of development, as it appears to claim. This seems like a lot, perhaps too much critical theory for such a brief passage, so I will unpack it as prolegomenon to my discussion of ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ and ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs,’’ which together constitute Cervantes’ final statement on the picaresque. The title of the book Ginés has written—The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte— is a direct allusion to the first picaresque novel, which was entitled La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades (The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, and of His Fortunes and Misfortunes). It was published in 1554. As Guillén noted, the new genre installed the vida, the ‘‘life’’ or ‘‘life story’’ as its narrative form; it is a life told from birth to the moment the rogue sets out to write it. To call it ‘‘autobiography’’ would elevate the picaresque vida to an inappropriate rhetorical level because it is the life of a low-life type, often a criminal, and follows more the notarial arts than classical models. The implication of ‘‘life’’ as a genre in which an individual’s term of existence is narrated by himself involves an impossibility that Cervantes gleefully points out. How can I narrate my entire life when to be able do so means that life cannot have ended and thus reached its full span? This is, to be sure, the quandary of all autobiographical writing, going back to Saint Augustine’s Confessions. One way out of the impasse is for the writer to claim that he has undergone a radical conversion, whereby his life, up to the moment he starts to tell it, is like that of a dead man, someone whom he no longer is. Another way out is the one the great nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis followed in his The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: the narratorprotagonist of the novel is already dead. But authors of picaresque lives were not quite ready to be so radical. Guillén’s point, however, is valuable. Picaresque narratives tell a life, not a well-wrought story having an Aristotelian-style tight plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They refuse to be literary in that way. In work going back to the 1970s that culminated in my Celestina’s Brood, I added to the critical corpus that the life told by picaresque narrators is that of a criminal giving a deposition before a judge or someone in authority, more specifically a representative of the judicial or penal branch of the Spanish bureaucracy. This uncouples the picaresque from literary tradition and links it to social and political developments. I maintain that such a confession is precisely the kind Lázaro makes as he tries to explain away his immoral and in

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fact unlawful marital situation: he is married to the mistress of an archpriest in order to serve as a front for their illicit relationship. I added, furthermore, that by adhering to a nonliterary form, indeed a bureaucratic formula drawn from the notarial arts (the relación or deposition), the picaresque is claiming to reveal a truth more valid than that of conventional literature, which is artificial by its very nature, as well as greater originality precisely because it has deviated from received literary tradition. Using legal rhetoric to mimic and mock the law, the picaresque is aiming at the very core of social and political authority: the modern, bureaucratic state founded by the Catholic kings and perfected by their successors Charles V and Philip II. Against all those classical forms that Renaissance authors imitate, adhering to the doctrine of mimesis, the picaresque offers a humble but truer form of writing drawn from the testimony of those at the bottom of the social ladder—indeed, often outside of society because they are often inside its prisons. As Rafael Salillas wrote, and I have mentioned before, the picaresque is in this respect the birth of the social sciences.≤ Hence we have in the picaresque a detailed picture of human life at its most elementary. It deals with hunger, abuse, violence, and the way characters cope with these in order to survive, which is often by recourse to crime.≥ By the time Cervantes began to publish his important works, the picaresque formula had been refined and expanded by Mateo Alemán in his massive Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache, published in 1599, followed in 1604 by a Segunda parte de la vida de Guzmán de Alfarache, atalaya de la vida humana. The ambiance of criminality, of lowlife in towns, inns, and roads, is greatly expanded by Alemán, whose book became a best seller and was known simply as El pícaro. Lazarillo was a masterpiece of succinctness, while the Guzmán is expansive and digressive, with interpolated tales, and, owing to the heightened religious zeal of Philip II’s Spain, endowed with visible moralistic purposes. Many adventures are followed by a sermon interpreting the sins and crimes committed by the protagonist and others. The Guzmán is a somber book in which Alemán makes literal the device of the conversion: Guzmán, who spends time as a galley slave, writes from an atalaya de la vida humana, as the subtitle proclaims, a ‘‘watchtower of human life.’’ It is obvious that the barbs in the Quijote episode are directed at Alemán, although it is the Lazarillo that is mentioned. Like Guzmán, Ginés has been a galley slave and has written a voluminous autobiography. But Cervantes has critiqued the conventionalisms of the picaresque not only by pointing at the absurdity of claiming to encompass an entire life in Ginés’s book but also by unveiling the artificiality of conversion as a form of closure: its elastic, fictional, narrative-device nature, which makes it suspect as the expression of a sincere turn to the good and a forsaking of the life of crime.

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Ginés has been to the galleys before; he is a recidivist. He has to await another turning point in his life to be able to resume writing his autobiography, with each sentence to the jail being the requisite conversion. But, of course, there can be an infinite number of these, none of them guaranteeing his being reformed—on the contrary. Ginés’s literal conception of autobiography serves Cervantes to show the asymptotic nature of the convergence of life and writing, with conversion being the device to make them coalesce arbitrarily. The notarial arts can also be subverted by the wily criminal author, whose penchant to violate the law extends to his creative practice. Cervantes appears to be making a statement about the picaresque as a new literary genre and about its being privy to truth as a result. Once the genre becomes literature it cannot make such a claim. Ginés implies as much when he speaks about the ‘‘ingenious and savory truths’’ of his life, which are better than fiction itself. Once functioning as a literary genre with its own kind of conventions and devices, the picaresque has no particular advantages over other forms of literature and its evolution follows the same rules as others, with novelty coming not from its relation to the truth by way of the nonliterary but by how its own conventionalities are deployed or violated. In writing his picaresque autobiography Ginés is an author, not just a criminal, but he is certainly that too. Cervantes’ most obvious revision of the picaresque formula is Ginés own light-hearted, impudent self-defense, and the fact that he is an author not by being a repentant criminal but because of his lively imagination and verve. This is really the reason why he has to be burdened with so many chains, which, as I mentioned, can trap his body but cannot silence him. Not only will he reappear as Maese Pedro in Part II of the Quijote to reassert his talents as author, but in the passage quoted he boasts of his intelligence and success as a writer by relating how he has been able to pawn the book, showing that he has readers, one of whom is the guard who speaks so highly of his work. The very fact that he has written the book in prison (like Cervantes, who claims to have begun the Quijote in Seville’s jail) shows that Ginés is undeterred by confinement, that his spirit and imagination soar beyond the bars, and that within the jail he has a life in which guards read his writings and others are willing to buy them. Ginés’s vida is not somber like Guzmán’s. Debasing and sordid, life in prison is not without gaiety, grandeur, and creativity; prisoners, often marked by physical defects that individualize them (Ginés is cross-eyed), are as interesting or more so than characters drawn from conventional literary works. Criminal life, Ginés seems to intimate, may very well be more revealing of the human condition than that of other social classes. Chávez’s Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla corroborates what Cervantes is suggesting here and elsewhere: inside jail life still thrives in all its sordid, bizarre, and variegated ways.

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Ginés represents all of this and more because, as an author, he links the picaresque to authorship as a historically evolving role in the production of literature. There is an unavoidable correlation in Cervantes between criminal deceitfulness and authorial talent, between wit in the sense of ingenio, of inventiveness, and the delinquent mind. It is because he possesses these qualities that Ginés has to be shrouded in chains, lest his deviant imagination concoct yet another prank. This is, again, why he claims that all the truths of his Vida are ‘‘tan lindas y tan donosas’’: ‘‘ingenious and savory,’’ says Smollett, but ‘‘beautiful and witty’’ is closer to the original. What Ginés suggests is that his art makes the factual beautiful as well as truthful, the ideal combination sought by Renaissance poetics but expressed here by a convicted criminal of limited book culture (he must have read the Guzmán). Ginés is not aware of any kind of poetics, although he is following that of the new picaresque genre. He can dispense, like Cervantes in the 1605 prologue to the Quijote, with bibliographies and canonical lists. The connection between Ginés and the figure of the author, which he will continue to be in Part II with his puppet show, suggests that he stands for the modern writer, like Cervantes himself, no longer beholden to the classical tradition because he aims at a wider audience, not just the humanist elite. Alemán, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes belong to the first generation of Spanish writers who had to earn a living—through their craft, if possible, or by some other means.∂ Before them writers were usually wealthy or belonged to the clergy. But only Lope could support himself by writing because the theater was profitable enough and he enjoyed a monopoly. Cervantes, on the other hand, tried to rely on aristocratic patrons who, for the most part, did not come through. The pawning of Ginés’s book alludes to the fact that selling their works was an important consideration for these writers, that their cunning had to extend beyond the wit needed for literary creation to the world of business and dirty monetary transactions. There they had to be as cunning as pícaros. The picaresque is a fundamental element in Cervantes’ work because through it he learned the value of representing the messy world of his present, particularly that of criminals or underworld types. He finds in criminals, not just Ginés but also Roque Guinart, the Catalan bandit of Part II of the Quijote, compelling figures because of their audacity to oppose the law and the inventiveness that their free lifestyles display. Cervantes was fascinated by that life, as he demonstrates in ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’’ through the positive portrayal of Monipodio and his criminal brotherhood in Seville. Monipodio, whose name suggests that he has lost a leg or a foot, presides over a gallery of thugs, pimps, and prostitutes. He rules Seville from his house by trafficking in

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pleasure and violence (the way Celestina controlled Salamanca from hers). Pimps and whores with colorful nicknames and outrageous habits parade through Monipodio’s house as Cervantes indulgently resorts to words drawn from their lingo, the language of germanía. Some of the nicknames allude to physical traits that individualize them, like Juliana la Cariharta, who presumably has a full face—‘‘cari’’ from face and ‘‘harta’’ from sated or full. Her boyfriend Repolido’s name suggests that he is hairless, probably as a result of a venereal disease. Monipodio is extremely hairy, an intimation of sexual prowess. His brotherhood is an alternative society, a counter-utopia over which he presides like a sage Sancho over the Island of Barataria. In that utopia people and things acquire new names according to their features, which are contingent, the product of accidents, like violence and illness. Therefore it is a language in the making, not a received and frozen code—the flaws and corresponding names are like rebirths into new identities. Laws are drawn up ad hoc according to need. They are in flux, like the language in which they are cast and like picaresque fiction. In writing about pícaros Cervantes was learning about himself and his art. Besides the somber, pessimistic tone, Cervantes also rejects from the picaresque, particularly Alemán’s, the singular point of view that allows that brave and bizarre world to be filtered through the wit of a single character. Cervantes very often allows characters to tell their lives, but always in a dialogic context in which they can be interrupted, as with the broken tales of Part I of the Quijote discussed in an earlier chapter. In Part II other characters relate their lives and many do in The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda; it is a common narrative device. But what Cervantes always avoids is the monologic confession-style narrative that Lazarillo inaugurated. Most critics have attributed this rejection of the picaresque first-person narrative to Cervantes’ perspectival approach to reality. Leo Spitzer wrote a memorable piece on how this is manifest in Cervantes’ own style and even his choice of words.∑ It seems clear that Cervantes preferred to present various versions of events from multiple points of view, something dramatized to great comic effect in Part I of the Quijote in the episode of the barber’s basin. Erich Auerbach, in a polemical chapter of his book Mimesis, proposed that the Cervantean was precisely this refusal to be pinned down on anything.∏ One of literature’s pleasures for Cervantes is to twist things around, to look at them from various angles, to point out the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, and to astonish with the ability to hold together what appear to be contrary, multifarious, and mutually exclusive views of reality and of human nature, including its manifestations among the criminal and marginal elements of society. Multiple perspectives are also in keeping with the Renaissance probing of

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the self whose main exponent is Montaigne. Montaigne’s irony is often the clash between voices within his own inner self, as it is also in Cervantes, with the prologue to the 1605 Quijote being the best example. Cervantes’ penchant to represent the real through the eyes of criminals is because they are, by their very nature—Ginés is the model—duplicitous, protean, apt to lie to save their skins or just for the fun of it. Gaiety, joy, taking pleasure in wit and fancy are very much a part of the criminal’s character as Cervantes portrays them and also as he sees himself as author. He is the first writer to find a kinship with them and to see his craft in relation to theirs in the deepest sense. In doing this, Cervantes is also breaking with the implicit mimetic, literalist pact between the picaresque and the legal discourse from which it draws its form, and the attendant aura of culpability that peaks in the Guzmán. The law as limit and possibility of his discourse is enabling only in the breach, in the act of being twisted and turned as it is subjected to the freedom of the imagination—the freedom that Don Quijote grants Ginés when he releases him from his chains. The gayest, most liberating prank of the pícaro-author is to use legal discourse to make literature by removing its constraints and links to authority and punishment.

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While, as I have said before, it is impossible to discern why Cervantes organized the twelve pieces in Exemplary Stories the way he did, there is no denying that there must be something to his having placed last ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ and ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs,’’ as there must be to ‘‘The Gypsy Girl’’ being first.π I would say that the concluding linked stories—the only time Cervantes did this—are last because they make up a bold experiment with narrative form. They are last because there is no beyond; Cervantes reaches here the limits of storytelling. Together the stories are a version of the ‘‘framed narrative,’’ a device that harkens back to the dawn of Western storytelling, which arrived in Spain from its Eastern sources through the Arabic side of its culture, as María Rosa Menocal has studied.∫ This is the tale within which another is told, as in The Thousand and One Nights. But in the baroque context of Cervantes’ later work they also constitute a play of illusion, not unlike the episode of the Cave of Montesinos in the Quijote—an infinitely receding sequence of tales within tales from which, as from a labyrinth, it is a challenge to escape. But, surprisingly for such kind of story, the theme and ambience is contemporary, realistic in the extreme, save for the fact that the framed story is told by a dog. In other words, this is not a story that happens in a fabulous, remote era with idealized or stock characters. So on the one hand the work is a highly

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sophisticated literary game, while on the other it portrays a world of soldiers, rogues, prostitutes, and dogs. Illusions here are drawn from a current and fallen present time, not from a distant, blatantly fictional region of the past, a world of knights and damsels in distress, with dragons and other fabulous monsters typical of the chivalric romance or the fairy tale. It is an audacious blending of the picaresque with the most radical literary fiction. A mixture of high and low styles, it is an explosion of narrative forms and even of literary discourse and of language itself. The blend of oral and written traditions ironically brings back the linked stories to their popular origin. Framed narratives of this kind, some of them in the shape of brainteasers or riddles, are part of the popular tradition, as are fantastic stories about animals with human qualities, including speech. Cervantes has his characters allude to the obligatory classical sources (Aesop, Milesian tales), but animal parables, legends, and even jokes abound in oral lore too. Today they find renewed life in cartoons and video games. The narrative scene of Cervantes’ linked stories is the first variation on the picaresque that he performs. In Lazarillo the rogue tells his life to a judge. In ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ Ensign Campuzano speaks to his friend, Licentiate Peralta. (Lesley Lipson has opted for ‘‘Graduate Peralta,’’ but as in the case of ‘‘The Glass Graduate,’’ licenciado, as the dictionary of the Spanish Academy states, is usually the form of address for lawyers, so I will use Licentiate to retain that link to the law. Moreover, as I have indicated in a previous chapter, most graduates of the period had law degrees.) Peralta, with his mildly ridiculous name (‘‘Pera-alta’’—high pear) is a lawyer, a jurist of some sort, but he is not acting in that capacity as he listens to his friend’s story and later as he reads the manuscript of ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs.’’ The coercive situation is no longer in effect; Campuzano is not seeking exculpation and Peralta is not discharging his professional duties. Still, the fact that Peralta is a lawyer makes him a specialized reader, one whose opinion about the veracity of ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’’ is worth having. He is presumably trained in reading and determining the validity of a deposition. With regard to ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ he is ostensibly prepared to gauge how the lovers fool each other by misusing the law. Campuzano’s and Estefanía’s is a complicated and hilarious anecdote, perhaps the funniest in Exemplary Stories. Like ‘‘The Call of the Blood’’ it reads like something drawn from a record of court proceedings: ‘‘the case of the soldier fooled by a floozy who lost all his money and wound up in the hospital to boot.’’ This frame tale, although the most conventional in outward appearance of the two interlocked stories, is quite daring even if seen against the background of the preceding stories in the book and of Cervantes’ work in general. It is a

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story in which marriage is deconstructed, so to speak, as a social and legal institution as well as a narrative device. ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ is like a story told backward, from a false beginning that should be an ending (the marriage) to a finale that is a complete disintegration and winds up in illness and possibly temporary madness. As we know, marriage is the traditional ending of many tales, both popular and literary, and plays such a role in many of the stories in Cervantes’ novels. It brings closure to the trials and adventures of lovers separated by a variety of incidents; channels desire to the proper end of legitimate reproduction; establishes a new family, a basic unit of social, civil, and religious life; and generally restores the order upset by love’s inherent recklessness. From a legal standpoint it is essentially a contract, from a religious one a sacrament. In the theater marriage (often multiple) is the typical comic ending, as opposed to a tragic one in which order is not reestablished. In ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ the institution of matrimony, instead of being a restitution of order, is the crime itself, and the man, instead of being the perpetrator of the burla (the deceit, or engaño) is its victim instead. He is the one who tells the story, as the con woman flees, the last in a series of inversions of roles. (It is the man who usually makes himself scarce to evade responsibility or even the police.) Estefanía manipulates the customs, conventions, and laws that make marriage possible to violate the laws, customs, and conventions of the institution. ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ shows how love and the law can be corrupted to accomplish the opposite of what regulated desire is expected to achieve—this is one of the things that make it so original and is another of the ‘‘unnarratable’’ stories that I have been teasing out of Cervantes’ work. Estefanía speaks the language of love and the law in reverse, as if we played an audiotape backward and heard nothing but noise. The comic in the story is not restored order but the erasure of order or even of its possibility. Estefanía goes scot-free, even if she is left with faked jewelry, while Campuzano winds up in the hospital with syphilis, his wife’s parting gift, a delayedaction revenge for his own deceits, which are tame in comparison to hers. The picaresque often involves a duel of wits, such as the ones between Lazarillo and his masters. In his duel with Estefanía, Campuzano is much the loser. Her flight at the end is an intimation of pure freedom, like that of the prisoner of sex after Don Quijote releases him. Estefanía disappears too, never to be heard from again (though she must also be sick). The suggestion is that she is outside the law (hence of the story and of writing), living a presumably carefree existence and bilking other Campuzanos. The overarching irony of the entire situation is that the marriage between Campuzano and Estefanía is one in which the bride and groom enter without any illusions regarding love and beyond all conventions concerning innocence

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and purity. Theirs is supposed to be a marriage with no private illusions and sustained by no public hypocrisy, free of all potential conflicts. Estefanía makes perfectly clear that she has been a woman of loose morals, no virgin bride she, who is willing to settle down to a comfortable retirement in the company of a man who will legitimize her status. She is a whore, as she tells him with coy circumlocutions and feigned sincerity: ‘‘Ensign Campuzano, it would be folly to try and pass myself off as a saint. I have been a sinner and I still am’’ (p. 239) [Señor Alférez Campuzano, simplicidad sería si yo quisiera venderme a vuesa merced por santa. Pecadora he sido, y aún ahora lo soy (III, p. 225)]. As compensation for her deficiencies and unsavory traits Estefanía will provide him with a home and all the pleasures that her ample experience in all matters promises. Campuzano, though he realizes that ‘‘she is not excessively beautiful’’ (p. 239) [no era hermosa en extremo (III, p. 224)], wants to have a good time, but only for a time, and enjoy her and the attentions she will give him before going off to war. In exchange he will support the house with the small capital represented by his flashy jewels. He knows, of course, that these are counterfeit, so his plans are not long range. Estefanía, on the other hand, is aware that her occupancy of the house will be short—though not as brief as it turns out to be—so her plan is to make a quick getaway with the loot. A marriage without mutual or self-deceptions about chastity or beauty turns into an escalating series of deceits and counterdeceits; a love firmly planted in desengaño, in disillusionment, turns into a dangerous play of illusions. Estefanía uses law and custom to dupe the ensign. She begins by declaring herself to be bereft of family and fortune: ‘‘I have not inherited wealth from either parents or relations’’ (p. 239) [Ni de mis padres ni de otro pariente heredé hacienda alguna (III, p. 225)], which is probably a truthful statement about her social and economic condition. As we have seen there was no place for single women in Habsburg Spain, other than becoming nuns, so it is clear that the motive for her actions is to find one, even if impermanent and based on falsehood and crime. That place will literally be the house that she offers the ensign, one that she is occupying temporarily with the consent of the owners. The house is the tangible symbol and foundation of marriage, of respectability and enfranchisement, both of which she lacks. The word casa is the etymological root of the word for marriage in Spanish: casamiento. As the caustic Sebastián de Covarrubias put it in his Tesoro: ‘‘casado. El que ha contrahido matrimonio, porque luego le obligan a poner casa y pucheros’’ (Married: he who has married, because they make him set up house and provide the soup).Ω (The pun is lost in English.) To be married is to be housed, as it were, to found a ‘‘casa,’’ meaning a family which, if noble, would be called

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the ‘‘casa Mendoza’’ or ‘‘casa Manrique,’’ like ‘‘house of York’’ in English. The house and the bodies of the spouses are the physical components of a marriage. So Estefanía’s deceit is based on falsifying the house, the legal site of sanctioned cohabitation, the very ground of marital union and civil existence. In the period casa was the unit of population; households, not individuals, were counted. Population figures were based on the number of vezinos, which meant families living separately in their own houses. From the very beginning of Spanish, asserts Corominas, ‘‘ ‘vezino’ appears with its two principal meanings, which are: ‘each one who has house [casa] and a place in a town,’ very frequent in archaic documents and exemptions [fueros], and ‘one who lives next to another.’ ’’∞≠ (Estefanía’s first crime is to dispose of the house and everything in it as if it were all hers, a form of theft, of course, not to mention an abuse of trust. The next crime and sin is to set up house with Campuzano having married him under false pretenses and without intention of remaining with him as a wife. A deeper pun, perhaps just embedded in the word itself and unintended on the part of Cervantes, is the one suggested by casa (house) and miento (I lie). Their marriage is properly sanctioned by civil and canon law, a further irony and perhaps their gravest civil and religious transgression.∞∞ The business side of it is taken care of with Campuzano’s moving in with his jewels, by which as a man he completes and grounds the family unit and provides it with financial substance. Estefanía purports to give in dowry not only the house but all its contents, some of which she claims to have created herself by her own labor. The religious ceremony, though not described in great detail, does take place in the manner prescribed by civil and canon law, including the banns: ‘‘our betrothal was settled upon there and then and we set about getting ourselves registered as bachelor and spinster of the parish, and during the three holy days that came together at Easter, the banns were read and on the fourth day we were married. The ceremony was attended by two friends of mine and a youth whom she introduced as her cousin’’ (p. 240) [aquella vez se concertó nuestro desposorio, y se dio traza como los dos hiciésemos información de solteros, y en los tres días de fiesta que vinieron luego juntos en una Pascua se hicieron las amonestaciones, y al cuarto día nos desposamos, hallándose presentes al desposorio dos amigos míos y un mancebo que ella dijo ser primo suyo (III, pp. 226–27)]. Campuzano fears the binding nature of marriage in a legal and religious sense. Once Estefanía disappears he rues that ‘‘whether I like it or not, she’s mine and I’m stuck with her’’ (p. 245) [mal que me pese, es prenda mía (III, p. 233)], meaning that no matter what and where she might be, she is still his wife and he is responsible for her and liable for her actions. They have both violated the law and committed a mortal sin by defiling a

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sacrament of the church. Annulments would be possible if one or the other were to prove that he or she entered into the marriage under false pretenses, but since both did, it is unlikely that this would come to pass. The marriage was executed with crooked intentions, but it was a marriage and would remain so till death did they part. This legal aspect of the union is no illusion and no deceit, though, of course, the fact is that by her disappearance, becoming a fugitive from justice, the marriage is over for all practical purposes. The implication is that what Estefanía has done to Campuzano is her modus operandi—that she has done it before and will do it again. She is a serial bride who is a menace to marriage as institution.∞≤ Cervantes has manipulated narrative form in the same way that his character Estefanía, who is like an author within the fiction, has manipulated the law. She has tricked the trickster and Cervantes has toyed with our expectations as readers. When the story begins it seems inevitable that the soldier, decked out in all his fake finery, is about to fool this veiled lady, who appears so demure that she barely shows him a hand. The story is about to follow a conventional pattern leading up to a seduction and disappearance by the soldier, which he has already prepared by protesting that he is on the verge of being transferred abroad. Instead there is a marriage that comes too soon in the plot to be an ending and that is too devoid of conflict to promise any: she is no deflowered virgin seeking redress, and they are not from different social classes and hence unable to wed. When the marriage takes place and there follows a period of matrimonial bliss, the story seems to have ended without really having begun. The unexpected return of the true owners of the house unravels the series of lies, fabrications, and frauds perpetrated by Estefanía and her accomplice (her ‘‘cousin’’ was most likely her pimp). Conflicts arise after marriage, not in the form of tragedy, as we have come to expect, but as a complete breakdown of the story: one protagonist vanishes and the other is admitted to a hospital where he temporarily loses his mind. The absence of tragedy in postmatrimonial life, together with the comic beginning that should have been the finale, make ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ a formless, unnarratable story, like that of the prisoner of sex discussed in chapter 1. There is no ending to the story, only a nonending of sorts and the transition to the next, which turns it retrospectively into a mere preamble or pre-text—literally a ‘‘pretext,’’ a nonstory, forever stalled in a beginning-ending devoid of recognizable shape. A story that seems to have been taken out of an archive of court cases leads to a literary text, a blatant fiction that becomes its ending. The legal is transformed into literature by means of this process. The progeny of the dubious marriage of Estefanía and the ensign is ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’’: deceits, lies, impostures, and Estefanía’s bolt to freedom yield a literary text in the making, a

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work in progress. With marriage pulverized, love and the law exploded, the stability of all discourses is unsettled to beget literature. The story that follows is Estefanía’s and Campuzano’s magic child, like the two puppies that are born from La Montiela, a witch. An inverted picaresque, a love story turned inside out, ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ engenders ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs,’’ a metapicaresque, in which the conventions of the new genre are given further twists and turns leading up to another nonending, an interrupted or broken tale if there ever was one. Estefanía and Campuzano rival Ginés as picaresque authors.

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‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’’ begins with a painstaking discussion about its own possibility of being, the process by which the text came about, and throughout its entire length the two protagonists bicker and banter about the appropriateness of what is being narrated.∞≥ Only the Quijote surpasses this tale in selfreflexive convolutions. But, as in the Quijote, particularly the 1605 prologue, all this is done with a flair and lightness that adds to the mirth, not with any heavy-handed theoretical disquisitions like those by the canon of Toledo in the Quijote, Part I. It is all part of the fun, which begins with the hapless ensign trying to convince his lawyer friend that the dogs did speak and continues with the animals’ witty repartee. It is obvious, from the very beginning, that Cervantes is writing much more than a parodic takeoff on the picaresque. The story is really a probe into the issue of authorship (his own), the possibilities of fiction, and the nature of literature in a world ruled not by the abstract Renaissance ideas but by the enabling and at the same time constraining forces of the law. The notebook that the ensign turns over to Licentiate Peralta to read is called both ‘‘novela’’ and ‘‘coloquio,’’ and he tells his friend that he wrote from memory what he had heard the dogs say during a night in which he feigned being asleep. This is how he describes the creation process: ‘‘There is another matter,’’ said the Ensign, ‘‘for since I was listening so attentively and my mind was in such a sensitive state, while my memory was receptive, sharp, and unpreoccupied by other thoughts (thanks to the large quantity of raisins and almonds I had eaten), I learned it all by heart and the following day I wrote down all that I had heard in virtually the same words, without looking for rhetorical flourishes to embroider it, nor adding or subtracting anything to improve it. The conversation did not take place on a single night, but two consecutive nights, although I have only one—the life story of Berganza—written down. I intend to write the story of his companion Scipio (which was narrated on the second night) when I can see that this

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Bride Who Never Was one does not meet with disbelief or, at the very least, derision. I’ve got the dialogue tucked away in the front of my shirt. I put it in dialogue form to avoid having to insert ‘Scipio said, Berganza replied’ which tends to lengthen the narrative.’’ (p. 249) [—Pues hay en esto otra cosa—dijo el Alférez—: que como yo estaba tan atento y tenía delicado el juicio, delicada, sotil y desocupada la memoria (merced a las muchas pasas y almendras que había comido), todo lo tomé de coro, y casi por las mismas palabras que había oído lo escribí otro día, sin buscar colores retóricas para adornarlo, ni qué añadir ni quitar para hacerle gustoso. No fue una noche sola la plática, que fueron dos consecutivamente, aunque yo no tengo escrita más de una, que es la vida de Berganza, y la del compañero Cipión pienso escribir (que fue la que se contó la segunda noche) cuando viere, o que ésta se crea, o, a lo menos, no se desprecie. El coloquio traigo en el seno; púselo en forma de coloquio por ahorrar de dijo Cipión, respondió Berganza; que suele alargar la escritura. (III, pp. 237–38)]

There is both an explicit and implicit confession of authorship in this statement, particularly if one looks at the original Spanish. There is no question that, having heard what the dogs said and re-created it from memory the next day, as he claims, the product could hardly be a verbatim transcription. I wish to underline the gap between oral performance and transcription—between voice and text—to dispel any notion that, as the ensign suggests, he merely practiced some sort of stenography. The text is the result of a literary elaboration in which decisions about style intervened: the avowed effort not to use rhetorical flourishes and the adoption of the dialogue form. The ensign, moreover, wants to see what kind of reception the first dialogue has before writing the second, which he has presumably still stored in his memory. He wants critical feedback, a reader, to help him complete his work in progress. Campuzano needs Peralta the same as Berganza needs Scipio and Cervantes needs us—what he wants and gets from his reader is the fundamental literary pact whereby the reader accepts temporarily the fictionality of what he reads. The time of reading is that span, which is experienced by Peralta while Campuzano dozes off, as if to erase his concrete, tangible self from the operation. The scene of literary creation is thus set up in all its dynamic force, with an unfinished text being consumed by a reader and an implied author whose presence is only virtual. What is said indirectly about the process of creation is even more telling. The ensign is ill, as we know, and his mental faculties are sharpened by his sickness and by the cure to a point beyond the normal. He is in a state of heightened awareness and imaginative enervation: physically weakened but on a mental high. It is just the kind of physical and mental state to promote

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literary creation. ‘‘Sotil,’’ the word he uses to describe his state of mind, means both fragile and sharp—‘‘sotil ingenio’’ was a praiseful way of referring to a poet in the Golden Age. The ensign has been so debilitated by his treatment that Scipio thinks that he is in no condition to listen: ‘‘there is a soldier close by undergoing a sweat treatment, but at the moment he will be more inclined to sleep than listen to anyone’’ (p. 252) [aquí cerca está un soldado tomando sudores; pero en esta sazón más estará para dormir que para ponerse a escuchar (III, pp. 244–45)]. We know since Plato that poets write as in a spell (Phaedrus), and the ensign is in such a mood. Of course, it is one that was brought about by love. He is literally suffering from love’s malady—syphilis— which is very funny in the context of the literary tradition of the sick lover poet. The ensign is an author in the throes of overwrought inventiveness and creativity due to a venereal disease, truly Venus’s plague. Love’s poetic labor has been reduced to this condition of the writer. One should not discount either that the hospital from which he is emerging is called Hospital de la Resurrección. The ensign has died and been resurrected, transformed from soldier into writer by love’s effects, which are in this case dramatically physical. He turns out to be a more daring author than Ginés de Pasamonte. But like Ginés, what Campuzano is telling in his ‘‘novela’’ is the story of his life, both as he has lived it and as he would have liked to have lived it. It is a life transformed by the hallucinatory state in which he finds himself, but it is a true confession, the intimate if cryptic disclosure of his innermost self—of his sufferings and his longings. The clue to understanding the profoundly personal nature of the text Campuzano has written is where he keeps the manuscript before he turns it over to Peralta. In the translation he says, ‘‘I’ve got the dialogue tucked away in the front of my shirt’’ (p. 249), but in the original it reads, ‘‘el coloquio traigo en el seno’’ (III, p. 238), which means ‘‘I bring the dialogue in my breast.’’ ‘‘Seno’’ also meant, according to Covarrubias, ‘‘el hueco que haze la vestidura’’ the hollow made by a garment), but its main sense is ‘‘breast’’ or ‘‘bosom.’’∞∂ The association is made clear further down where it reads: ‘‘sacó del pecho un cartapacio’’ (III, p. 238), translated as ‘‘With this he drew a notebook from his breast’’ (p. 249). The implication is that Campuzano brings his text close to his heart because it is figuratively close to his heart and he values it so. The ‘‘novela’’ and ‘‘diálogo’’ are accounts of the ensign’s two lives: the first a novelized account of the one he has lived, his picaresque autobiography; and the second, to be told by what Freud would call his superego, is the one he would like to have lived. The story of Berganza’s life (his name suggests ‘‘bergante,’’ a worthless rogue) is the encoded—like a nightmare—account of Campuzano’s sordid life. Scipio’s (the name suggests military grandeur) is the life he aspired to have. (Scipio, of course, is an

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allusion to Scipio Africanus, Hannibal’s conqueror, but perhaps also to Scipio Emilianus, who reduced Numancia.) If told, Scipio’s life would be Campuzano’s wish-fulfillment dream, which is perhaps why it is left untold. Another revealing detail is that Campuzano sleeps as Peralta reads, and the ensign awakens on his own the moment his friend finishes reading. It is as if the reader were tapping directly into the writer’s dream world, which both leave when the reading stops. Campuzano has turned his life’s experiences into literature by a highly inventive transformation of the picaresque autobiography, of the legalistic relación. At the end, the benevolent critic Peralta gives author Campuzano his approval: ‘‘Although this dialogue may be invented and never really took place, I consider it so well written that the Ensign may proceed with the second,’’ and he adds, ‘‘I appreciate the craftsmanship of the dialogue and its inventiveness, so be satisfied with that’’ (p. 305) [—Aunque este coloquio sea fingido y nunca haya pasado, paréceme que está tan bien compuesto que puede el señor Alférez pasar adelante con el segundo. . . . Yo alcanzo el artificio del Coloquio y la invención, y basta (III, p. 231)]. What Berganza has told is a picaresque autobiography, Campuzano’s, following and twisting the conventions of the relación by the use of literary devices attributed to the author’s heightened mental state. First he tells where he was born, the Seville slaughterhouse, and then he moves on to relate the rest of his life until the moment he and Scipio discover that they have the ability to speak and to reason like humans. This is the conversion that makes the autobiography possible, though here it is a truly radical one from animal to man. In picaresque novels the protagonist’s life, after leaving his parents, consists of terms with various masters until he reaches maturity. In ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’’ the mutation is easy, as the dogs naturally have owners whom they serve and from whom they learn the bad and the good, like the pícaro. The lives of picaresque protagonists begin with dubious births. Their parents are criminal themselves, as with Lazarillo, Guzmán, and Pablos, and their mothers so promiscuous that their legitimacy is questionable. There is a strong suggestion of determinism (here is where Salillas’s theories come in), promoted by the rogue as he attempts to exculpate himself: how, coming from such a background, could he have turned out otherwise? In Cervantes’ tale this conventionality of the picaresque—the rogue’s problematic birth—is blown up grotesquely with the possibility that at least Berganza, but probably both dogs, were children of La Montiela, a witch. The story, as told by La Cañizares to Berganza, is that La Camacha, the top witch, jealous of the younger La Montiela, transformed her babies into dogs. The story of this birth is complicated by Berganza’s earlier statement that he was born in Seville, and by Scipio’s very pedantic and skeptical commentary on the matter. The most

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compelling element, however, is the role of the witches in the birth of the dogs, because this constitutes the origin and beginning of the dogs’ lives, and presumably also of the text. It impinges upon both the start and finish of ‘‘The Dialogue’’ as it explains potentially their very ability to speak and reason and points at a future beyond the end, even beyond the untold life of Scipio, which is the more immediate impending but postponed narrative. The suggestion that the dogs are the witch’s brood reveals that the ensign is anxious about his origins, full of regret for his slothfulness, lack of initiative, and the various petty crimes that he may have committed in the past, perhaps with a previous Estefanía. We need not subject the story to a psychoanalytical reading to figure out that his mother was probably a whorish, Celestina type (not unlike Estefanía), that he had to learn to live by his wits in a world in which the criminals and the police were indistinguishable, and that he was not to ever tell the truth about himself in a direct manner. This is another reason why he turns to literature: both to hide the truth about himself and to seek a deeper one. Peralta relieves him of his melancholy reflections on his life by praising the manuscript and encouraging him to write the next one, the one that will be blatantly imaginative, wish-fulfilling, joyous, and quixotic. Shame, regret, the wear and tear of life on the soul can be transformed into literature. Ironically, Campuzano has also his fugitive bride to thank; through the dubious vehicle of love’s illness, she transformed him from a tramp into a writer, which allowed him to tap into the depths of his subconscious to be reborn with a renewed and profound awareness of who he is.∞∑ Ginés de Pasamonte’s picaresque biography was stalled by the continuation of his life, which made a conclusion impossible until a sincere conversion to the good occurred or death intervened, foreclosing writing either way. Campuzano has solved that dilemma by taking his own picaresque life to a different, more blatantly literary level, taking the devices of the picaresque and blowing them up, as it were, to reveal their fictionality and to probe deeply into the question of form and meaning. The principal device that appears to suffer in this process is the single point of view, which has now become double. More importantly, however, he has removed the literal obligation of picaresque fiction and allowed it to incorporate the realm of dreams, hallucinations, and desires. This he accomplishes by transforming the rogues into dogs, releasing himself from the constraints of the human to reveal a more profound vision of the human. What makes this possible is love and its legal and religious bond, marriage—the ultimate acceptance of legal adulthood and civil existence as a vezino. This is a step Ginés had not taken, giving his figure and virtual picaresque a callow complexion—death is far off, I am not attached, I can have as many adventures as I want and worry later about the end of my life

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and the form-giving finale of my book. Campuzano’s fraudulent marriage and resulting love’s illness is the threshold he crosses toward a more mature conception of his life and of writing. Submitting and violating the institution, the contract, allows him to envision other dimensions of life and experiment with new forms of writing. Casamiento and engañoso, marriage and deceitful are the nearly oxymoronic pair by whose friction Campuzano discovers the constraints and releases of the social and even religious covenants that govern desire: the point at which love and the law can produce truly uncanny visions and shapes. When Riley asks in his fine piece on these stories ‘‘whose autobiography is it anyway,’’∞∏ the answer has to be ‘‘Cervantes’ own, of course.’’ Cervantes is the child of his own created bride.

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Cervantes’ Literary Will: The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda

It is likely that The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda would not have been the enigma that it has been for criticism had Cervantes not made it a point to praise this work in such vehement terms and dramatic circumstances—almost literally as he lay dying. Nearing the end he seemed to pin his hopes for immortality on this very strange novel that we know he had no chance to revise and polish. The diminishing number of chapters in the last two books shows that Cervantes rushed to finish at whatever cost to balance and symmetry. His statements on the Persiles are clear, direct, and have ringed in Cervantes criticism for four centuries. In the 1613 prologue to Exemplary Stories he wrote: ‘‘After them [the Exemplary Stories], if life does not desert me, I shall offer you The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda, a book which dares to compete with Heliodorus, unless it takes a drubbing for its boldness’’ (p. 5) [Tras ellas [Novelas ejemplares], si la vida no me deja, te ofrezco los Trabajos de Persiles, libro que se atreve a competir con Heliodoro, si ya por atrevido no sale con las manos en la cabeza (I, p. 65)]. In the 1615 dedication to Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses (Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes) he wrote: ‘‘Afterward will come the great Persiles, and later Las semanas del jardín [Weeks of the Garden], later still the second part of La Galatea, if my elderly shoulders can carry such a load’’ (Luego irá el gran Persiles, y luego Las semanas del jardín, y luego la segunda parte de La Galatea, si tanta carga pueden llevar mis ancianos hombros).∞ 213

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Again in 1615, in the dedication to the Count of Lemos at the front of the Quijote, Part II, he made his most elaborate statement: and with this I take my leave, offering your Excellency The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda, a book which I shall finish within four months, Deo volente, and which is sure to be either the worst or the best written of books of entertainment in our tongue—but I must say that I repent of having said the worst. For according to the opinions of my friends, it will attain the highest possible excellence. Come, your Excellency, with all the health we can wish you; Persiles shall be ready to kiss your hands, and I your feet, as your Excellency’s servant, which I am.≤ [y con esto me despido, ofreciendo a Vuestra Excelencia Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, libro a quien daré fin dentro de cuatro meses, Deo Volente, el cual ha de ser o el más malo o el mejor que en nuestra lengua se haya compuesto, quiero decir de los de entretenimiento; y digo que me arrepiento de haber dicho el más malo, porque según la opinión de mis amigos ha de llegar al estremo de bondad posible. Venga Vuestra Excelencia con la salud que es deseado, que ya estará el Persiles para besarle las manos. (p. 623)]

He signed the dedication to the Persiles, also to Lemos, on April 19, 1616, almost six months after writing these words. Four days later he died. As Manuel Durán puts it, ‘‘It seems probable that Persiles and Sigismunda, Cervantes’ last novel, was his favorite work. It is certain that he never invested as much care and love in the composition of any of his other works.’’≥ But would Cervantes have attained the fame he did with only, or with mostly, this book? The answer has to be no. The Persiles is an important book because it was written by the author of the Quijote. It is a bold experiment, as Cervantes claimed, and it is a very interesting work because of it, but it is uneven, showing both that Cervantes finished it in a hurry and that he had been at work on it for many years. It was affected by the changes or waverings in style that he underwent during a long period. It seems apparent, for instance, from internal and external evidence that between the two halves of the Persiles, each composed of two books, stands the massive effort of the Quijote. Even if one adheres to the notion (as I do) that Cervantes’ works, lumped in the last decade of his life, are difficult to set in chronological sequence, much less an evolving progression, it is impossible to deny that the Persiles is a patchwork, the quilt left of a work in progress that the author tinkered with throughout his creative life. For a reader who knows Cervantes from the Quijote the disappointments are many. The Persiles lacks a character of the stature of Don Quijote, one that became a literary myth like Don Juan and Faust. It does not have a Sancho to

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bring with him the world of peasants and pícaros, with its rich language and wealth of popular lore. Lacking a Sancho, the Persiles is missing the mirth and the humor of the Quijote and the mixture of high and low rhetorical styles. With few exceptions, the characters of the Persiles speak in the stilted speech of the Neoplatonic abstractions that most of them represent; they never stray from the noble style. They lack intimacy and believability, steadfast as they are in their convictions. The landscape, except for the chapters of book III that unfold in Spain and that were obviously written after the Quijote, is conventional and bookish, particularly that of the northern regions that Cervantes drew from relatively obscure sources. The Persiles does not have the degree of self-reflexiveness found in the Quijote, though it does have some. If the Persiles was Cervantes’ literary will, as Marcel Bataillon has claimed, what legacy did he intend to leave, and why and how was he so deluded as to not see that his most enduring masterpiece would be the Quijote?∂ Was it merely a work of his dotage? The Persiles shows some of the same baroque tendencies as the Quijote, Part II. Matters concerning love and the law are elevated to abstract principles or reduced to bare beginnings. The plot goes well beyond that Barcelona beach that drew a vague barrier between Spain and the rest of the world, giving this novel a decidedly international dimension already announced in the Catalan episodes of the Quijote. The book, in fact, has a global dimension that is both spatial and temporal; it encompasses the world, even the universe, and the whole span of human history from the cave to Saint Peter’s cathedral in Rome. As Edward Dudley brilliantly put it: ‘‘this novel [the Persiles] begins with a terrifying picture of human sacrifices in a savage kingdom and closes amid the baroque splendor of Rome. This reminds us that the glittering world of the Spanish Habsburgs not only reached around the world but to the gates of heaven—where entry proved more difficult.’’∑ This reach, or overreach, is, it seems to me, what Cervantes had in mind when he spoke in such superlative terms about the project. I will proceed with my analysis very deliberately, aware that most nonspecialized readers have not read the Persiles, including most Hispanists.

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The full title of the book is Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional, first translated into English as The Wanderings of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1854)—the most recent translation is entitled The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story. The hesitation in translating ‘‘trabajos’’ stems from the multiple meanings of this word and the interference of its common meaning as ‘‘works’’ in the sense of ‘‘labors.’’ But I would actually prefer that word, ‘‘labors,’’ because it conveys what Cervantes

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tried to say with ‘‘trabajos.’’ I believe that ‘‘trabajos’’ is meant here as ‘‘labors’’ in the sense of ‘‘love’s labors’’ and also in that of Hercules’s labors, which in Spanish is rendered as ‘‘los trabajos de Hércules.’’ So ‘‘trials,’’ ‘‘wanderings,’’ ‘‘tasks,’’ and ‘‘ordeals’’ together would encapsulate what Cervantes means by Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: the tribulations of these lovers in attaining their long-desired and persistently postponed union. The names of the protagonists are meant to be strange and obviously fictional: Persiles, who goes by the name Periandro, and Sigismunda, who calls herself Auristela. There are few Sanchos, Teresas, Tomés, Aldonzas, or Roques in this book. There is a Spaniard named Antonio and a few others with comparable names in book III, when the group reaches Spain. ‘‘Northern Story’’ is meant to recall the Aethiopica and compete with it in geographical originality by situating the action in a region rarer, more remote, and hence perhaps more appealing to the reader than Africa. The northern scenes of the first two books is a literary conceit meant to excite the reader’s curiosity. It is the equivalent of an interplanetary setting in today’s fiction and film. The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda was published posthumously by Cervantes’ widow in 1617, a year after his death. The book was well received by the public, indeed it was, according to Durán, ‘‘an immediate success comparable to that of Don Quixote. The years that followed its posthumous publication in 1617 witnessed ten editions in Spanish, translations into French, Italian and English, and imitations in drama and prose fiction. This success was not of short duration: in the eighteenth century, new editions, translations, and imitations continued to appear. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a serious scholar, the Swiss Jean-Charles Simonde de Sismonde, could claim, in his De la littérature du midi de l’Europe, published in 1813, that many readers considered it to be Cervantes’ masterpiece.’’∏ The Persiles continued to have influence on novelists through the nineteenth century. A novel like Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1825–27) still shows traces of it. But its critical reception declined sharply during the second half of the century, in the age of realism. The influential literary historian Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo believed that writing the Persiles was ‘‘a sterile task’’ on Cervantes’ part.π The unchanging characters, the highly rhetorical dialogues, the allegorical cast of the plot, the sheer artificiality of the whole ensemble did not appeal to those imbued in the poetics of realism or accustomed to reading realist novels. Being the least realistic of Cervantes’ work, the Persiles was viewed by many as a step backward in the development of his works and of the novel as a genre. The Quijote and some of the exemplary stories, on the other hand, seemed like worthy and determining precursors of the modern novel, even of

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the experimental fiction that emerged with the avant-garde in the twenties of the last century. It was only in the latter years of that century that the Persiles began to receive serious critical attention, and revealingly, an avant-garde Latin American writer like Alejo Carpentier showed a predilection for it as early as 1949. He uses a quotation from the Persiles as epigraph of his trailblazing The Kingdom of this World. Carpentier realized the potential of Cervantes’ novel as precursor of magical realism, the trend that he was initiating with his own novel (much more about Carpentier in the next chapter). The critical attention that the Persiles has received of late has been sustained and sophisticated, though no one harbors the illusion that it will dethrone the Quijote as Cervantes’ masterpiece. The Persiles is a Byzantine romance in the style of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. Byzantine romances, as we saw when discussing the story of Ricote’s daughter, were long narratives with complicated plots and no character development, leading to a climax in which, after numerous bizarre adventures, usually including spectacular shipwrecks and cliff-hangers, the beleaguered lovers meet and marry. Throughout the protagonists display unflinching devotion to each other and obstinate chastity in the face of constant temptations. The reader’s attention is held by the suspense about what will happen, but also by the desire to know what already happened, for the origins of the protagonists and their sorrows is unknown until the end. The best example is, of course, Heliodorus’s novel, the one Cervantes cites as his model. Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, the oldest and best of the Greek romances, was first brought to light in modern times in a manuscript from the library of Matthias Corvinus, found at the sack of Buda (Budapest)in 1526 and printed at Basle in 1534. There are two sixteenth-century Spanish translations, one from 1554 and the other from 1587—probably the one Cervantes read, though obviously he could have seen both. The first translation was from the 1547 French translation; the second was done by comparing a Latin translation and a Greek text. One can understand why a book such as this would become popular in the sixteenth century. Along with the chivalric romances it provided the kind of entertainment that a new class of readers would crave, and that the recently developed printing presses could deliver in sufficient numbers. The plot, reduced to its barest components, is as follows. The daughter of Persine, wife of Hydaspes, king of Aethiopia, was born white. Fearing an accusation of adultery, the mother gives the baby to the care of a gymnosophist—a naked philosopher from India. The child is finally taken to Delphi and made priestess of Apollo under the name of Charicleia. Theogenes, a noble Thessalian, comes to Delphi and the two fall in love. He carries off the priestess with the help of an Egyptian employed by Persine to

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look for her daughter after her abduction. Numerous adventures befall the lovers: there are storms at sea, attacks by pirates and bandits, wars, ambushes, betrayals, mistaken identities, sudden recognitions, live characters confused with dead ones, dead ones who speak, witchcraft, and other obstacles of every imaginable kind that postpone the happy ending. But after many adventures—many trials—the chief characters meet at Meroë at the very moment when Charicleia is about to be sacrificed to the gods by her own father. Her true birth is made known, and the lovers marry. The rapid succession of events, the variety of the characters, and the elegance of the style give the Aethiopica great appeal. But it is above all the suspenseful plot that characterizes it and made it popular. The Aethiopica shows at every turn that Homer and Euripides were Heliodorus’s favorite writers. He, in turn, was imitated by major European authors, not just by Cervantes. Racine planned a play based on the novel, and the early life of Clorinda in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered is almost identical as that of Charicleia. As in today’s Hollywood, the presses were avid consumers of new and old stories—they needed plots. The plot of the Persiles is just as contrived as that of the Aethiopica. Persiles is the prince of Thule and Sigismunda the daughter of the king of Friesland. For reasons unknown to other characters and to the reader, they have had to leave their respective lands and embark upon a laborious journey to Rome pretending that they are brother and sister. They travel under the false names of Periandro and Auristela. Their trip begins in the glacial northern regions of Europe and moves to the North Pole, where they are taken hostage by barbarians whose religious and political beliefs demand that they sacrifice beautiful women to their gods. Through various adventures, involving cross-dressing, mistaken sexual identities, willed deceptions, and other ruses, they manage to escape, acquiring along the way a host of fellow travelers, some of them quite improbable. Antonio, for instance, is a barbarian, but the son of a Spaniard and desirous to visit his father’s country, so they head in the direction of the Iberian Peninsula. They finally reach Lisbon as the third book begins. The next two books take them through Portugal, Spain, France, and finally Italy. The Spanish episodes are reminiscent of the Quijote and some of the exemplary stories. In a few there are the familiar conflicts involving unequal marriages, and crimes and punishments of various kinds. At one point, in Murcia, the moriscos help the Moors from Morocco raid a Spanish town. Invented conflicts, and others drawn from literature, mingle with real and contemporary ones. In Rome, not before a few last capers, they finally obtain a papal blessing for their union, their true identities are revealed, and their long-postponed marriage realized. This stark summary leaves out many stories in which the protagonists participate and many others involving secondary characters. One

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of the commonly used, and sometimes abused, narrative devices is to have a newcomer tell his or her life. Some of these ‘‘lateral’’ adventures are as selfcontained and independent as those in the Quijote, Part I and the pieces in Exemplary Stories.

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Alban Forcione’s two books from the seventies truly began the modern criticism of the Persiles.∫ Prior to his work the most sustained had been Joaquín Casalduero’s relentless allegorical reading and that of his critics, particularly William Entwisle.Ω In Cervantes’ Christian Romance Forcione maintains that the overarching allegorical meaning of the Persiles is ‘‘the movement of universal history and the destiny of the individual soul as understood by the Christian religion.’’∞≠ The protagonists do travel from a largely pagan north to Rome, the epicenter of Roman Catholicism. Forcione appeals to a loose concept of allegory, derived from Northrop Frye and presumably characteristic of romance, falling somewhere between myth and naturalism—it would be realism. This flexibility allows him to account for the many elements of the Persiles that do not quite fit into a strict allegorical scheme. For instance, all the episodes in book III that are contemporaneous take place in Spain and are realistic, as well as the considerable number of self-reflexive moments in the novel. Forcione’s virtues and follies as a critic stem from his adherence to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism with fundamentalist fervor. The insights stem from his application of the notion of romance to Spanish texts, a concept alien to criticism in that language. Its use clarifies for us much about the Persiles because it reveals and explains the nature of its model—the Greek romance, called in Spanish novela griega or novela bizantina. His blindness results from imagining that Cervantes was writing with and against a critical construct devised by Frye in the twentieth century as part of his own compelling critical fiction. All of the exceptions and deviations from romance that Forcione is forced to note in the Persiles lead one to ask why he uses Frye’s concept at all. To do so, as he does, is as mechanical an a priori attribution to the work as Casalduero’s allegorical reading, a simplistic this-for-that exercise. Forcione was more convincing in his earlier book, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘‘Persiles,’’ in which he studied the work in relation to literary theory in the Renaissance and baroque. He writes what I consider the best description of the Persiles seen in terms of the critical and theoretical debates of the period: if it could ever be said that a work of literature is almost exclusively a product of literature and literary theory, it could be said of Cervantes’ final work Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Everywhere the eclectic character of the

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Forcione and Durán agree that the blueprint of the Persiles is already present in the conclusion reached by the canon of Toledo in chapter 47 of the Quijote, Part I about the romances of chivalry: and the whole thing being expressed in an agreeable style and ingenious invention, that borders as near as possible, upon the truth, will, doubtless, produce a web of such various and beautiful texture, as when finished, to display that perfection which will attain the chief end and scope of such writings, which, as I have already observed, is to convey instruction mingled with delight. Besides, the unlimited composition of such books gives the author opportunities of showing his talents in epics, lyrics, tragedy and comedy, and all the different branches of the delicious and agreeable arts of poetry and rhetoric: for, epics may be written in prose as well as verse. (I, 47, p. 411) [—Y siendo esto hecho con apacibilidad de estilo y con ingeniosa invención, que tire lo más que fuere posible a la verdad, sin duda compondrá una tela de varios y hermosos lizos tejida, que después de acabada tal perfección y hermosura muestre, que consiga el fin mejor que se pretende en los escritos, que es enseñar y deleitar juntamente, como ya tengo dicho. Porque la escritura desatada destos libros da lugar a que el autor pueda mostrarse épico, lírico, trágico, cómico, con todas aquellas partes que encierran en sí las dulcísimas y agradables ciencias de la poesía y de la oratoria: que la épica tan bien puede escrebirse en prosa como en verso. (p. 550)]

Forcione goes as far as to speculate that the hundred pages of a romance of chivalry that the canon says that he has written may very well be the first draft of the Persiles.∞≤ The theory would be more persuasive if this novel had been a chivalric romance, but it is still a plausible assumption. In any case, I agree that in the Persiles Cervantes is eclectic in his appropriation of form even more than he was with the chivalric romances, but there is no protagonist to medi-

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ate the process, as in the Quijote. When he says that he is competing with Heliodorus Cervantes means it: he is not following him slavishly but improving upon him. Cervantes attempted to do the same with all the other genres at which he tried his hand—and I mean his hand. Cervantes was experimenting in the Persiles with what became the sentimental novel. This is one of the false starts in the book because it is not followed through satisfactorily. But it is one of the forward-looking elements of the Persiles, a new road to take after the Quijote. Not following up on the Quijote was not only a matter of physical but also of intellectual and artistic exhaustion. There was little more to do along those lines, no way that Cervantes could surpass himself in that regard. (This is the lesson Pierre Menard heeded in Borges’s well-known story, which I will take up in the next chapter.) So I believe that Cervantes saw in a formula of what would become the sentimental novel a fresh path to follow. All of this experimentation is happening concomitantly, of course, for he was writing and revising these books— including the Quijote, Part II—at the same time. The Persiles was to be a detailed analysis of the psychology of love through the interaction of several protagonists caught in a complicated web of erotic relationships. The individual psychology of each character is not as important as the dynamic among all of them, making apparent the gradations, subtle differentiations, and clashes that constitute love as the concrete manifestation of desire in the broadest sense. The Persiles would be a scholastic summa of love, an intricate machinery of feints and moves, of pursuits and evasions, parallel to the syllogistic machinery of Neo-Thomist argumentation. The novel is like a structuralist construct, made up of binary oppositions in which the characters are like functions and the settings and actions arranged according to contrasting pairs—a large theorem of desire. The feeling most explicitly dissected is jealousy as a motivating force, the thrust that raises and lowers the splenetic temperature of the lovers and pushes the plot along. A simulacrum of canon law is what organizes this complicated love construct—the injunction against incest. But it keeps desire simmering at the same time, with flashes of transgression that titillate the characters as well as the readers. This balancing act is the pith of form in the Persiles, a tightly enforced symmetry of desire and interdiction, of love and the law. For practically the entire length of the novel’s protracted and proliferating plot the protagonists pretend to be brother and sister; not until the very end can they make known the true nature of their love and their desire to be united in matrimony. Deception and playacting overcome attraction temporarily and organize love relationships on false appearances, casting desire in a thick mesh of feigned and concealed feelings. Sentimental life can be subjected to form through the law,

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but form can be attained only in the counterfeit world of art. Everything that happens is fake, save love itself, a deep-seated Platonic force whose projected dance of shadows deceive and delight at the same time; life is subject to the rules of art. Love is submitted to the law of art, for society’s organization is like a work of art, a work of art in the making. It is as if life were organized by the duke’s butler in the Quijote, Part II, as if it were a pageant not just in the forest but throughout a vast geography encompassing a primitive North and a baroque South as well as the sweep of human history. I believe that this grandiose conception is the reason why Cervantes put so much stock in the Persiles. Nothing like it had been tried before on this scale. Such a conception of life as art, including sentimental life, is behind all the incidents involving paintings, particularly those about the large canvas depicting the whole span of the characters’ adventures. Within the fiction of the novel it is painted to facilitate telling their story to the curious they encounter along the way. But it is also as an attempt to transfer narrative fiction to the realm of the pictorial because, if all of life is art, then all arts share the same conception and are translatable one to another. The painting is like one of those vast canvasses by Velázquez—Las lanzas—representing a historical moment, but even more ambitious in its temporal range and coverage. Art, all art, is all-encompassing: monumental. This baroqueness is what characterizes the Persiles and brings it close to the Quijote, Part II, but it goes further. The hallmark of this baroqueness is strangeness because in it everything is seen at a distance against a background, not blending with it. Cervantes’ art in the Persiles is the art of the rare and strange, often a mixture involving the primitive and the ultracivilized designed to astonish the reader. The primitive in the novel, as in Góngora’s Soledades and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, is a contrived primitive; it draws its features not from itself but from its contrast with the highly cultured. Nothing escapes art, not even what would appear to be primitive. In the Persiles the names are strange, the geography of the first part is exotic in the extreme, with all those cold countries so remote to his potential readers. Even the model, the Aethiopica, is strange, beginning with its cacophonous full title in Spanish: Historia etiópica de los amores de Teógenes y Clariclea. The first two books of the Persiles are the ones redolent with the exotic. There are no pages like this anywhere else in Cervantes’ work. His northern world is exotic by its very temperature—coldness gives the landscape a remote, lunar kind of blankness. It is the whiteness of the empty page or the unpainted canvas, a degree zero of representation, like the back of the picture Velázquez is painting in Las meninas. The arctic setting is designed to inspire awe, even fear. Ships are trapped in ice, characters trudge through snow, the

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sun seems to be forever absent. Some of the barbarians live in caves, others in very primitive dwellings. They are dressed in pelts. Their customs and beliefs are odd, apparently devoid of the most basic Christian virtues. This is as close as Cervantes came to creating fantastic literature. It is true that the cold, dark North stands in contrast to the bright, warm South. The primitive is dark, the civilized is luminous. But besides this allegorical requirement, there is obvious relish in the invention of such a bizarre environment and weird characters. The chronicles of the discovery and conquest of the New World may be among the sources of exoticism in the Persiles. Cervantes drew much information about the North from travel books and geographical treatises, many of which were very fanciful by our standards of accuracy. But the Spaniards’ account of their adventures in America and their foundation there of new societies after defeating and subjecting to their rule the native populations may very well be the main inspiration for the early chapters of the Persiles. Although the barbarians of the first two books of the novel are more akin to Eskimos than to Aztecs or Incas, their depiction as strange people with primitive customs—particularly religious and sexual—recall familiar themes in works by Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and others. A central topic in these works is the contrast between the laws of native populations and those of the invading Europeans and the polemic about why and how to impose on them an alien legislation. This is a burning topic during the sixteenth century with which Cervantes was surely familiar. It dovetails with the thrust in his work toward an increasingly abstract and foundational consideration of the law, with his interest more in its origins and principles than in the details of its codification and application in specific cases. The Isle of Barataria episodes in Part II of the Quijote show this tendency, as discussed in a previous chapter. American natives were the embodiment of human groups that could be classified as barbarians, if adhering to the etymological and classical origin of the word as those who do not speak well—those, that is, who do not speak ‘‘our’’ language. Eduardo González and Diana de Armas Wilson have explored how in the episodes with the barbarians Cervantes seems to be probing the root of the human psyche as it develops in social life—indeed, as he makes up the laws. González, through a Lacanian reading, proposes that Cervantes is presenting a society that is not only pre-Oedipal but even pre-sexual. The cross-dressing and undifferentiated desire are those of beings who are monosexual rather than homosexual. The issue of homosexuality was a favorite one among chroniclers of the discovery and conquest of America, perhaps because the practice was popular among certain groups, but more likely because its correction and punishment were one of the excuses to subject the natives to Spanish

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rule.∞≥ For de Armas Wilson Cervantes is formulating the ideal of an all-male society as the subconscious desire behind the barbarians’ organization—a society that excludes females that would in turn be the hidden origin of patriarchy, the origin of the Law and of the laws. For her the unfolding of the Persiles suggests the possibility of a society that incorporates the otherness of woman by becoming capable of speaking both the language of the paternal law and that of the subverting woman. She finishes her passionate and very smart book thus: ‘‘At the threshold of the Persiles, and at the close of his life, Cervantes’ primal couple shows readers how men and women can become ‘bilingual.’ It is this kind of collaboration that signifies the real ‘labors’ of Cervantes’ title—learning the language of the Other.’’∞∂ I find this to be more wishful thinking than what there is in the Persiles. After all, the story does end in Rome, the Rome of Saint Peter and of the foundation of the church. The pope’s blessing is needed for the culminating marriage with which the book ends. The pope, successor to Saint Peter, is the very embodiment of the father and of the Law. It is true, however, that Cervantes has presented the pre-legal and the arch-legal together, as opposite poles of the human. Alexander A. Parker, expanding and refining Forcione’s allegorical interpretation, writes: the work has a three-fold structure in which each recurrence of the pattern of the quest is enacted in a different dimension of history. The three stages are first humanity’s emergence into primitive barbarism, secondly the development of civilization, and thirdly the age of Christianity. The last two were traditionally called the Law of Nature (where reason is the only guide) and the Law of Grace (where reason is illuminated by Revelation). The pattern is a geographical one: first a desolate arctic region, then the lands and islands of Northern Europe, then the journey from Lisbon (where the travellers land) to Rome. From the North Pole to Rome: that is the symbolical trajectory of the work. The pattern of the book is therefore humanity’s progress from barbarism, through humanistic civilization, to Christianity, and the lives of the protagonists demonstrate the same progress in the individual sphere; first the tempestuousness of passion, secondly the emergence of reason, and thirdly the acceptance of religious faith.∞∑

This baroque synthesis of barbarism and civilization is the book’s motive force, only that its drive is not a sequential or teleological quest toward its realization. Prey to desire, the characters oscillate between its two poles; in the Persiles this pendular movement is the story—or, better, the many, many stories. Also in consonance with the elevation of the law to an abstract or more general level observed in Part II of the Quijote, love conflicts in the Persiles are

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cast against a backdrop not of civil or criminal but of canonical law: hence its close formal association with Scholasticism. Throughout the book the protagonists engage in what is for all practical purposes an incestuous relationship: they are lovers who feign being brother and sister, making filial love the mask of erotic desire. There is much titillation in a sexual relation that is forever postponed, deflected, and sublimated. The lovers outwardly obey an injunction against a faked relationship to comply with the incest prohibition, which, as we have seen since chapter 1 of this book, is among the crimes still considered sins by Spanish law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This counterfeit of law and compliance is operative throughout, and only at the end, in Rome, the seat of canonical authority, is the prohibition lifted as the sham is revealed and truth prevails. But until then, the masquerade of love and the law gives the book its shape. As in the duke’s house in Part II of the Quijote, very profound matters are being dealt with, but all at a fictional level: only that here they finally reach or announce a conclusion in the consummation of Persiles’s and Sigismunda’s love. The truth puts an end to fictions and to the book—the truth is not the story nor does it provide form. In the novel’s unfolding fictitious compliance with the incest prohibition allows for the plot to be expanded and complicated by delaying a conclusion that would bring the novel to a premature ending, abolishing form. This meshing of canon law and artistic form is the Persiles’s baroque core, which, as in Calderón’s theater, blends theology and art to generate an intricate, subtle, and multilayered work. It is a complicity of love and the law that accounts for the book’s very status as a work of art. The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda is not a failed Greek romance because it was never intended to be one. It is not a Christian romance in the sense that the characters’ pilgrimage is unusually or contentiously Christian or Catholic. Theirs is a pilgrimage to light, but the end of the journey is not just an apotheosis of fulfillment or revelation. The protagonists were Christian from the beginning, but hardly pious in a fanatical or ostentatious way. They wanted to reaffirm their faith by complying with a requirement that they imposed on themselves in a manner similar to the self-imposed obstacles of courtly love. The plot of the Persiles is an amplification of courtly love’s programmatically retarded and forever delayed consummation of love. Arriving at Rome before the marriage can take place is little more than a required restraint to fulfillment that, as observed, allows for the development of the plot, the emergence of various adventures, and the enjoyment of artistic creation. Life can become art only through postponement of the end. The delay of the ending is like holding off death. This concurrence of death and sexual fulfillment—embedded in some languages like French, in which orgasm is called ‘‘the little death’’—

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makes of desire a headlong rush into self—or mutual—annihilation. This is the reason for so many tragic love stories. The art of love, the art of loving— art, in short—is the elaboration of techniques for the pleasurable postponement of delight. I believe that this is the significance of the protagonists’ journey to Rome, what is beneath the conventional movement toward Saint Peter’s church. Since I know that this may seem odd and perhaps even gratuitously heretical or sacrilegious, I will restate it in a more direct way. The elaborate voyage to Rome and to amorous satisfaction that makes up the Persiles is meant to delay the lovers’ union because postponing the end delays death and generates pleasure in the process. The life of Persiles and Sigismunda after their marriage—with its long progeny projected to greatgrandchildren—is dealt with in one sentence, whereas reaching Rome takes all of four books. I cannot help bringing up also in this inversion and subversion of values that I am proposing here that Rome and love make up a palindrome in Spanish: roma-amor. Rome is love in reverse and vice versa. The Persiles is made up of such complicated linguistic, tropological, symbolic, and allegorical schemes. Its texture is made up to be slowly, deliberately, caressed, enjoyed in all its fine and rich complexity. This baroque is baroque in the extreme and very like certain kinds of Oriental art. The strangeness mentioned before is an ingredient in this pleasure-giving dimension of the book and an essential component of its delaying stratagems. Cervantes did not create in the Persiles a work to be finished in one gulp, but one to be savored slowly, lest you get to Rome too quickly. Cervantes labored to create a vast textual machine in which all parts meshed throughout so that the smallest piece would contain, as in a nutshell, the whole. This very combination of fragment and whole, of the smallest unit and the overarching structure, is itself representative of the inner workings of this vast combinatorial: the large and the small, polar opposites, combined, conjoined to generate both pleasure and meaning: pleasure because of the unexpected, astonishing interaction of opposites, which join instead of cancel each other; meaning because the contrast of differences is at the base of signification. Language—pace Saussure—is constituted by such a concert of correlated contrasts. The desire to construct such a signifying machine is, like many other aspects of the baroque, a return to a medieval practice. The façade of any great Gothic cathedral reveals how all levels of signification and representation are interconnected by explicit and implicit references to the Bible, the church fathers, and the entire ensemble of organized doctrine. It is the sort of signifying unity that we find in Dante. Of course, this kind of sublime textual and doctrinal correspondence is no longer possible in the baroque, which is why it produced flawed or unfinished masterpieces like Góngora’s Soledades and Cervantes’

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Persiles, but not a Divine Comedy. (Joyce’s Ulysses was the last attempt to achieve it.) The signifying axis has been broken by the reemergence of the classical world in the Renaissance, by the breakdown of the medieval worldview as the result of the discovery and conquest of America and by the scientific discoveries of the early seventeenth century. The presence of the chronicles of the discovery and conquest in the Persiles signals to what degree Columbus’s journey ruined the possibility of pilgrimage by abolishing the centeredness of medieval cosmology and symbolism—the earth and Rome are no longer the only centers, perhaps not even the most important. The kind of textuality to which Cervantes aspires, and this is also a medieval recovery, calls for an infinite commentary. Every detail, every figure is related to and contains the whole. Critical analysis should disdain no component as irrelevant or unimportant, no matter how small. Conscious (and fearful) of this, I will limit my commentary to chapter 1 of book I which, being the beginning should contain (or aspire to) the whole. For the sake of clarity I will proceed from large to small and apply conventional categorizations of figures and levels of meaning. In the text these are all present at the same time and on the same plane, of course. The beginning of the Persiles reads as follows: At the top of his voice Corsicurbo the barbarian was shouting into the narrow mouth of a deep dungeon which seemed more a tomb than a prison for the many living bodies buried there. And although the terrible and frightening din could be heard both near and far, no one clearly understood his words except the miserable Cloelia, whose misfortunes held her locked in those depths. ‘‘Have that young man we committed to you two days ago, Cloelia,’’ the barbarian was saying, ‘‘hauled up here bound by this rope I’m letting down and keep his hands tied behind his back just as they are; and see if among the women of the last group of prisoners there might be one who deserves our company and the pleasure of the light of the clear sky above us and the fresh air surrounding us.’’ At this point he let down a thick rope, and after a short time he and four other barbarians pulled up a youth with the rope tied tightly under his arms. He seemed to be about nineteen or twenty years old and was dressed in rough linen like a sailor, but handsome beyond all possible exaggeration. First the barbarians checked his manacles and the cords that tied his hands behind his back. Then they shook out his hair, which covered his head with countless rings of pure gold. When they had cleaned his face, which was covered with dust, such marvelous beauty was revealed that it amazed and softened the hearts of those who were to be his executioners. The countenance of the gallant youth showed no signs of distress; on the contrary, with eyes that even seemed happy, he lifted his face and surveyed the sky, saying in a clear and

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The Persiles begins in medias res, as is customary in Byzantine romances. We find Periandro (Persiles) in a dark pit hearing, but not understanding, Corsicurbo’s shouts. The barbarian is asking that the handsome young man be pulled out and put on a raft for unknown purposes. The play of opposites is immediately set up: the barbarian is coarse, the young man beautiful; Cor-

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sicurbo expresses himself in an incomprehensible language, the young man in articulate speech; the barbarians live in a pre-civilized state, the young man is a Christian. It goes on. But the point is that the structure is one of binary oppositions by which each of the contrasting qualities is augmented. The young man’s beauty is great in the measure in which Corsicurbo is grotesque. The barbarians vessels are mere logs tied together, the barest minimum of craft and industry, whereas the ship to which Periandro is taken is large and well equipped. This is what one could call the tropological level: the pit is like a tomb but is filled with live bodies. But the act of pulling Periandro out of the pit is clearly symbolic of birth. He is brought out to life like a newborn from the womb. Again, there is a joining of opposites because when Periandro later faints on the deck of the ship, it says that he regains consciousness ‘‘as if from death to life’’ (p. 19) [como de muerte a vida (p. 54)]. The protagonist makes his first appearance as if coming to life from death. In the Persiles human life is reduced to its lowest point, here to its very beginning by leaping from death. Life and death are also engaged in a pendular swing of opposites as absolute beginnings and ends. But Periandro is also pulled from darkness to light, which adds to the scene an allegorical dimension and suggests already the entire journey from the dark North to the bright South, from pre-Christian ignorance to Revelation. In this allegorical level the meaning of the barbarians is clarified. They live in a preChristian era and engage in savage rituals, such as killing and cremating beautiful young men to feed their ashes to their aspiring rulers. This is a conspicuous distortion of the Eucharist, perhaps even a probe into its origin as dogma, meaningful only at the allegorical level; otherwise it is just a bizarre custom. But the main allegorical components are dark and light, which also evoke death and life, now in a spiritual sense. The clash between darkness and light—literally a chiaroscuro—also recalls the opposition at the core of the Persiles between movement and stasis, between pilgrimage as a journey from ignorance to Revelation, from the Law of Nature to the Law of Grace, and the continued interchange of light and darkness throughout. This conflict is not explicitly resolved in the book, which, of course, makes the joint presence of light and dark prevail over the prevalence of one or the other. The baroque way of the Persiles implies that Revelation and light might dwell in Rome, but also darkness and desire; as Quevedo’s memorable sonnet says, ‘‘Buscas a Roma en Roma, oh peregrino/y en Roma a Roma misma no la hallas’’ (You look for Rome in Rome, O pilgrim / and Rome in Rome itself you cannot find). Persiles and Sigismunda engage, while in the Eternal City, in adventures such as the ones that brought them there, and the whore who tries to seduce the young man is one of the best-drawn characters in the book. The

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Rome of the seventeenth century had been involved in not a few internal and external conflicts of its own and had even been sacked by Charles V’s troops in 1527. In the baroque everything is provisional and liable to become its opposite in no time—literally. Cervantes’ flawed prose epic conceals its true grandeur in the failed effort to make it perfect. Love and the law stalk each other in Rome, origin of Roman law, former center of the civilized world and the universe, in search of a sublime fusion that is not quite realized, except in the road that led to the formerly Eternal City. I believe that one can discern in the preceding discussion the grandeur of the Persiles as a literary project and why Cervantes considered the work so important. It is significant that he did not achieve success and insignificant that the product is so flawed. As an aesthetic construct holding together art and life by turning life into art it is as ambitious and insane as Don Quijote’s mad effort to make the world conform to the rules of chivalry. In this the Persiles was very appropriate not so much as a project of Cervantes’ dotage as of the end of his life: an all or nothing bet when both all and nothing were at stake.

13

The Novel after Cervantes: Borges and Carpentier

Historians, critics, and theoreticians of literature are all after the origin and nature of the literary imagination, no matter what terminology or method they use, and I am no different. What I have been pursuing in my study of the intertwined and interdependent forces of love and the law in Cervantes is the spark, the pith of his creativity, at the intersection of discourses issuing from those drives, a crossroads at which stories take shape in language. My point has been that with the advent of the modern state, aided by the printing press, a new kind of narrative emerges—the novel—and that this genre is about legal conflicts and their resolutions because the new social conditions are unstable and leading to radical changes that will not come about fully until the eighteenth century. The new developing social structure consists of an incipient leveling of classes, the feeling that through the law commoners and peasants can appeal to codes and kings that will protect them from the powerful, and at the same time that the new laws identify them as potential transgressors. This identification—in the civil and even police sense—literally comes from the development of the notarial arts and the organization of record keeping and archives, such as the one in Simancas. The new protagonist has a leading role, to be sure, but he is also a criminal, or a potential one. Since he or she is telling his or her own story in the picaresque, the narrator’s culpability extends to that of the writer himself.

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Authors, who are no longer aristocrats or clergymen, are subject to laws and liable to be punished, as Cervantes himself was more than once. The characters’ and authors’ crimes are often of passion, as desire leads them afoul of the new legislation, while simultaneously they are protected by it if their misadventures lead to marriage. Marriage and prison are the most common ways of bringing the author-protagonist criminals to justice. The many love stories in the Quijote, including the knight’s adoration of Dulcinea, are subject to restrictions imposed by the law. Those who go astray are caught, are forced to confess, and are punished or married—or punished by marrying. If in telling their stories they deviate from the truth they will be interrupted to let what really happened emerge. The novel, whose prose of the world, of the everyday transactions of citizens, was partly derived from the notarial arts, will be the textual vehicle that emerged to contain all of these stories. The novel’s connections to the law will continue to the present: epiphany while in Seville’s jail remained as an enduring origin, an indelible trace. The history of the novel and the law takes two paths, one internal and the other external. The internal one, which is the more important of the two and is vast in numbers and persistent through time, involves the proliferation of protagonists who are fugitives from the law, who commit crimes and are punished. These crimes are often of a sexual nature or involve a conflict of love. The list is endless, from Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables and Rastignac in several by Balzac to Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.∞ Emma Bovary is progressively ground down by the law for her sexual misconduct and profligacy. Huck and Jim are fugitives in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Hester Prynne is punished for her erotic misdeed in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, perhaps the perfect love-law story of the nineteenth century. Nabokov’s Lolita is the confession of a sex offender whose obsession with the ‘‘nymphet’’ elevates her to the roster of great ladyloves of the West, from Beatrice and Laura to Joyce’s Molly Bloom. In modern Latin America the examples are many, like Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a short novel about a crime of passion drawn from archives that has a sixteenth-century air to it: a groom slays his wife on their wedding night when he discovers that she is not a virgin. But the archetypal story is Manuel Puig’s The Kiss of the Spider Woman, in which the ‘‘lovers,’’ two men, a political activist and a gay, are jailed together for their respective transgressions against the law and love. In their cell, the gay man seduces the activist by telling him the plot of movies that he has seen. Storytelling is used to transcend the prison and to make the hard-boiled revolutionary, whose mind is filled with ideological formulas, more sensitive. Among the descendants of the love-law dyad are entire subgenres like the detective novel

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and the novela judicial, the novel whose focus is a trial. Many of these become movies and, of course, television shows, such as Witness for the Prosecution or Perry Mason. There is a whole subgenre of films and TV shows about trials. The external path is the history of the novel’s brushes with the law, in other words the series of novels that have provoked trials or the persecution of their authors. Here the list is also quite extensive, but the highlights are Madame Bovary and Ulysses. Flaubert’s novel was deemed ‘‘an outrage to good morals,’’ but the author was finally acquitted. The trial, however, turned the book into a best seller, a pattern that would be repeated throughout history and which made authors long for a loud scandal to promote their books. Joyce’s controversial novel provoked a well-publicized trial in the United States when its importation was prohibited because of its presumably pornographic content. A diligent judge made the heroic effort of actually reading Ulysses and allowed its circulation in the United States. Other cases, including one involving Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, also received some publicity, but the longest record of censorship, persecution, prosecution, and confinement of novelists belongs to totalitarian regimes. In many cases the political nature of repression was masked as a defense against immorality (communist and fascist regimes are moralistic and puritanical in the extreme). The Soviet Union, of course, has the record for this sort of activity, surely because its repressive state was the longest lasting of the totalitarian societies in Europe. In Latin America there have been quite a few cases of political harassment. The most recent and notorious involve the Cuban government’s relentless persecution of Reynaldo Arenas, who was jailed often and had his manuscripts confiscated. Arenas was brought up on a morals charge as a homosexual to censor his literary production, whose recurrent theme, above all in Hallucinations, is persecution and flight. His story, as told by himself in Before Night Falls, later turned into a film, is one that a contemporary Cervantes could have written. It is like the story of the captive in the Quijote, Part I, a prisoner who persistently tries to escape, frequently by spectacular means. In the twentieth century the love persecuted by the law is often homosexual love, the bête noire of repressive regimes, as it had been with the Holy Office of the Inquisition—the worst ‘‘fornicación calificada.’’ Instead of providing a survey of love and the law in the novel after Cervantes, which could make up another book, I shall concentrate on two texts that, like Puig’s and Arenas’s, have inspired my approach: Borges’s ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’’ and Carpentier’s The Harp and the Shadow.≤ Borges’s famous short story, a dismantling of Cervantes’ canonization in Spanish-language criticism and the biography of a figure of dubious morality, a potential criminal, told by someone who is perhaps a Nazi, allows me to build

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my own critical construct on the ruins of the bridge between grammar and the imagination, between the law and literature. Carpentier’s novel, with Queen Isabella of Castile as one of the protagonists, brings me back to the beginnings of this book, to the moment when the centralization of the Spanish state and the expansion and codification of the law made possible the emergence of the picaresque.

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In his classic Books of the Brave, Irving Leonard records how, by the spring of 1605, as the annual fleets made their way to the New World, numerous copies of the just published El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha crossed the Atlantic. In fact, by his sedulous calculations, Leonard estimates that a good portion of the book’s first printing made the voyage, and that not a few of the volumes met a fate common to travelers at the time by sinking to the depths of the ocean. But many did make it to the ports of Spain’s American empire, and a mere two years after the publication of Cervantes’ book (in 1607) the figures of the knight and his squire made their appearance in a Lima carnival.≥ There is much significance in this journey of the books, not the least of which is that their excursion was strictly speaking illegal, given that the shipment of novels to the colonies had been forbidden by the zealous Spanish crown—the novel was already being policed. We know, however, again thanks to Leonard, that because of the imperial bureaucracy’s lax discharge of its duties, this prohibition was mostly observed in the breach, as were other government decrees, which were greeted with the cagey formula ‘‘se acata, pero no se cumple’’ (complied with, but not implemented). The Quijote’s early and furtive journey to what would become Latin America prefigures the book’s rich and perplexing legacy in the literary history of the region, where this classic of the language would be read and rewritten in ways that reveal much about its founding and revolutionary role in the history of fiction. How the Quijote has been rewritten in Latin America in contrast to Spain is important because these rewritings issue from disparate strands in the literary tradition of one single language; hence their differences are a significant lesson about a literary work’s connection to its national origins. In Spain, the Quijote underwent a process of canonization that began in the eighteenth century, just as the Spanish American colonies were starting on the ideological and political road that led to independence. The canonization of Cervantes’ book in Spain eventually involved the identification of ‘‘Spanishness’’ with the novel’s hero, and its conception a kind of telluric birth from the volksgeist: that source in which the romantics placed the birth of writing of both the law and literature

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proper to a people, as we saw in an earlier chapter. Cervantes had presumably expressed the very essence of Spain—or allowed it to express itself through him—and this is what made the Quijote a classic of the language and the founding of the nation.∂ This yearning may be for a reenactment of the twin births of literature and the law, of having grammar be the ultimate law and poetry its most important expression. The identification of the book with Spain climaxed in the Generation of ’98, when the question of national identity reached a crisis, provoked by Spain’s crushing defeat in the Spanish American War. As the last of the Spanish colonies in America were becoming independent, the beatings suffered by proud Don Quijote became a national myth to help Spaniards bear their country’s valiant but unsuccessful battle with the new Knight of the White Moon: the modern, powerful, fully armed United States of America. Nothing typifies better the incorporation of Don Quijote into the national mythology than the disastrous naval battle of Santiago de Cuba, when Rear Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete lost the entire Spanish fleet in an insanely heroic act ordered by the Spanish government. But the preceding does not apply to Latin America, where the Quijote was not part of any national mythmaking. It was around 1898, as a matter of fact, that Modernismo, the first literary movement begun in Latin America, was peaking and exerting influence back in Spain. Modernismo and Noveintaiocho constitute a parting of the waters in Spanish-language literary history, although they share some common traits. How has Cervantes been read and rewritten by Latin Americans who cannot identify with Spanish obsessions about a Spanish essence while writing in Spanish? How can one read a classic in one’s own language without being involved in a process of monumentalization, cultural self-probing and even nationalistic or ethnic narcissism? The recovery of the Quijote by literature took different paths in Spain and Latin America, as did that of the baroque poets.∑ Borges taught Latin American writers (including Carpentier) how to assimilate the innovations of European modernism, and also that they (the Latin Americans) were a part of that movement, in spite of their perceived geographical or even cultural marginality.∏ He also taught them how they were and at the same time were not part of the Spanish literary tradition, with the test case being the Quijote. In fact, Borges wrote with some irritation about how the Spanish were misreading the novel. In a 1947 special issue of Sur to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Cervantes’ birth, Borges wrote: ‘‘What paradoxical glory that of the Quijote. The bureaucrats of literature exalt it, they see (they have decided to see) in its negligent style the acme of Spanish prose, and a jumbled museum of archaic terms, malapropisms, and

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proverbs. Nothing makes them happier than to pretend that this book (whose universality they never stop proclaiming) is a kind of Spanish secret, kept from other nations on earth but accessible to a select group of villagers’’ (Paradójica la gloria del Quijote. Los ministros de la letra lo exaltan; en su discurso negligente ven (han resuelto ver) un dechado del estilo español y un confuso museo de arcaísmos, de idiotismos y de refranes. Nada los regocija como simular que este libro (cuya universalidad no se cansan de publicar) es una especie de secreto español, negado a las naciones de la tierra pero accesible a un grupo selecto de aldeanos). π Carpentier, for his part, taught Latin American writers how to turn Latin American history into narrative fiction; or, better yet, how early American historiography and the novel were linked at birth, with the linchpin being Cervantes. How can a literary tradition cohere within a language without the ideological and emotional grounding of a sense of nationality? How can a literature continue to exhibit continuities over historical divides—how does an origin endure through and in spite of history? With the Quijote anointed as the vessel of the very essence of the language and spirit of the nation, how can a Latin American writer presume to rewrite that which is essentially tied to the nation that his own nation struggled not to be? One could also ask if this is not a fundamental American condition, the search for origins that are nondetermining and stand precariously on a break with the past? And wouldn’t the very quest constitute a profoundly contradictory operation, the search for a nonessential kind of essentialism? Perhaps this is the fate of all American literary efforts and the first lesson to be learned from Borges’s and Carpentier’s complicated rewritings of the Quijote.∫ In modern Spain, then, the Quijote is read because it is associated with the essence of language and nationhood: therefore with a motivated conception of the origins of language and literary tradition, with a genealogically determined birth of the text. In Latin America the Quijote is read for its suggestion of its unmotivated conception in language, hence by delving into origins that are contingent because they are historical (Carpentier) or that pitilessly question themselves by denying their own legitimacy (Borges). Borges’s and Carpentier’s relative foreignness to Spanish surely influenced their skepticism, their refusal to easily recognize an enabling connection between language and the imagination, and between language and the shape, cohesiveness, or meaning of the literary text. But it may also reflect Cervantes’ own deepest disbelief, as reflected in the air of improvisation and serendipity attendant to the plot structure and details of Part I—the notorious olvidos cervantinos (Cervantean oversights) that may constitute the farthest questioning in the Quijote about the coherence of the work and even that of the author’s own self, truly perilous

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cracks of nihilistic madness. The lack of motivation is what provokes the turn to Cervantes’ play of authorship. Another slightly foreign Latin American author (let’s just say Argentine), Julio Cortázar, obviously focused on chance and improvisation as crucial factors of literary creation in his Hopscotch, elements that he may have also derived from the Quijote. Morelli (notice the non-Hispanic name), the internal author in Cortázar’s novel, is a modern version of the narrator in Cervantes’ book. Melquíades’s manuscript in One Hundred Years of Solitude and the various textual plays with the status of writing in I the Supreme and the character of Patiño are all turns to the second most important character created by Cervantes in the Quijote: not Sancho but the author—or authors—in the fiction. By insisting on these elements a Latin American reading of Cervantes’ masterpiece uncouples creation from any essence that gives the text an ontologically determined or revealing order. The second lesson to be learned from Latin American rewritings of the Quijote is that Cervantes as a figure of the author is more important than Don Quijote the character, whereas in the Spanish readings Don Quijote is more important: Cervantes in Latin America, Don Quijote in Spain.

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Borges first read Cervantes in English and Carpentier’s forays into his father’s library were mostly in French.Ω The point of departure of ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’’ is that Menard was not even a Spanish speaker by birth or upbringing. This fact is crucial in Borges’s reading of Cervantes’ book, as suggested by that story and other texts. Columbus, whose writings Carpentier places at the beginning of Latin American fiction in The Harp and the Shadow, was not a native Spanish speaker either, but he wrote his famous accounts of the discovery in that language. A nonnational origin of writing is fundamental in Borges’s and Carpentier’s conceptions of the origins of narrative, in clear opposition to the Spanish readings of Cervantes, grounded in the romantic bonding of language, the nation, and literature. In this regard ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’’ is a kind of muffled yet wildly subversive manifesto. ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’’ is an experiment in authorship without the presumed determinations of the role in the post-romantic era. Menard, as author of the Quijote, lacks the essential qualities of an author within the doctrines originating in romanticism: (1) he is not of the nationality defined by the language of the work; (2) he is not a native speaker of the language in which the work is written (this does not necessarily follow—he could be of another nationality but a native speaker; and (3) he is not a contemporary of the work, from which follows that he has experienced more history (in his case three centuries) than the original author, having therefore

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knowledge of subsequent developments of the work’s nation of origin and language. We know from Menard’s ‘‘visible’’ (p. 444, emphasis in the original) work that he was interested in abstract systems, ahistorical and disconnected from emotion or experience: for instance, chess or the elaboration of a poetic language so pure that it in no way resembled everyday speech. Menard wants to write a Quijote without the ‘‘españoladas’’ (p. 448, Hispanicizing boutades) that Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta would have recommended (p. 53).∞≠ (Maurice Barrès was an anti-Semitic novelist who developed a theory of the collective unconscious of clearly fascistic connotations.) This would be a Quijote without a Spain self-consciously Spanish that turned the book into ‘‘an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions’’ (p. 94) [una ocasión de brindis patrióticos, de soberbia gramatical, de obscenas ediciones de lujo (p. 450)]. The key here is grammar, which to the deluded Spaniards would be the common ground of language, literature, and an enduring national origin—a law. Menard, for his part, faces the task of writing or rewriting the Quijote as a Latin American author would: in possession of the language but not quite a part of its history, tradition, and even grammar. He is, in this sense, a radical ‘‘outlaw.’’ To imagine a literature without the nation is Borges’s radical experiment in ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’’ at the height of the nationalistic frenzies of the 1930s, some of which led to fascism, as in the case of Barrès, or, as we shall see, the very narrator of the story. But why the Quijote? Why not ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Divine Comedy? Or ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Brothers Karamazov’’? For two reasons. The first is that, after all is said and done, the fact is that Spanish was Borges’s language of choice for his work, and it is the language of his own nation, Argentina, a new polity far in time and space from the origins of Spanish (some would say also grammatically distant from that language). I say choice because he could have decided early in his career to become an English, German, or perhaps even French author because of family background and his Swiss upbringing. He could have been a Pessoa, an author who seems to have been invented by Borges, or an Apollinaire, or a Conrad (all authors who wrote in languages other than their own). These were all options and examples that Borges may have had in mind when he wrote ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote.’’ But because Spanish was indeed the language in which he wrote, Borges was moved to speculate about how he belonged to it or it belonged to him, and how he was or was not a part of its legacy. The Quijote had to loom as the grandest literary creation in Spanish. This is why there is an agonistic tone in Borges’s story, which styles itself as a kind of elegy to the recently deceased Menard, as if it had been the prodigious effort to complete his task of

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rewriting the Quijote that had killed him. Because Menard was unable to finish his work, though the narrator confesses that he likes to read or think of the entire novel as if it had been written by Menard. It is in the inconclusiveness of his task and in Menard’s dying that we find in Borges a romantic substratum, a glorification after all of the author that, on the surface, the story appears to deny. This is the contradictory core of ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote.’’ The second reason why Menard attempted to write the Quijote (and not some other work) is precisely that Cervantes had made available to Borges and even exhausted most possible experiments about authorship, from the very notion of authority to the connection of language and nationality to creation—was not the Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli the ‘‘author’’ of the original Quijote? This was not in any of the other masterpieces that Menard might have chosen, or if so only because they had derived it from Cervantes. Cervantes created himself as author surrounded by several doubles as the second most important character in the Quijote. The author of the Quijote is that manifold character that includes (at least) the narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli, and the translator. In him (in them) Cervantes gave us a prolix and dizzying dramatization of the modern mind in search of knowledge of self and of the inner workings of the literary imagination. In that quest the mind found itself and the complex operations by which it invents itself as it creates literature. It is a fragile construction—an unbearable lightness of being—fraught with self-doubt and surrounded by mirages of its own making. To speak, to write, this emerging self must create yet another, like the friend who comes to Cervantes’ aid in the 1605 prologue, who will give him a temporary and precarious sense of being, or the student who recognizes him on the road in the prologue to the Persiles. There is no selfsame projection outward, and creation must take the guise of someone else’s work or someone else’s look: a found manuscript, written in a language not known by the narrator, who must seek help to have it translated, a friend or stranger who answers back, a Ginés de Pasamonte, an Ensign Campuzano, and so on. This self is a creation that babbles, ‘‘I invent myself, therefore I might be,’’ not ‘‘I think, therefore I am,’’ as Descartes would famously say a few years later. Because invention, even of self, is too grand an illusion and agency is always compromised by uncertainty. This frail self is, ironically enough, Cervantes’ most enduring character—it has a resilient kind of fragility. The venue of expression is necessarily irony, the resignation to always be of at least two minds, particularly about oneself. In the Quijote the modern mind finds that literature, as a human product, cannot escape the limitations of the human; hence the author can only feign to be outside of his work looking in, controlling his fictional world externally like

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Maese Pedro his puppet show. This modern agent, who thinks and writes and invents and therefore is, has no nationality. In this Cervantes is anticipating Vico and pointing to the universalism of the Enlightenment. Need we rehearse again the Quijote’s games of authorship, where the origin of the text is, as best as it can be ascertained, a Moorish historian with a penchant for lying? Or the process by which the text is generated, involving a translation by someone whose competence seems to be only that he knows the languages in question, and allows himself the impudence of appending a marginal note to the effect that ‘‘This same Dulcinea so often mentioned in the history, is said to have had the best hand at salting pork of any woman in La Mancha’’ (I, 9, p. 53) [Esta Dulcinea del Toboso, tantas veces en esta historia referida, dicen que tuvo la mejor mano para salar puercos que otra mujer de toda la Mancha (I, p. 108)]. This intrusive translator also intervenes to question the authority of the author, as if wanting the reader to believe that he has re-created and annotated the work as he performed his modest task. Borges latches on to this elusive quality of the Quijote’s author. Is Menard like Cide Hamete or like the translator? If the Moor was indeed a liar, Menard had a penchant for writing the opposite of what he believed in, as the narrator of Borges’s story claims. Cervantes made Menard possible by being himself a Spanish author without ‘‘españoladas’’ because he lived before the history of Spain made exceptionalism a mode of inquiry, a self-reflection and a selfdisplay before a Europe from which it felt increasingly distant. Menard is the Cervantes Cervantes would have been in the twentieth century had he been able to skip the Spanish eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a Cervantes, that is, who could have been an Argentine educated in Geneva and working in a Buenos Aires library. Borges’s implicit identification with Menard also belies the rejection of the romantic in his story. In the final analysis ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’’ proves that it is impossible to leap out of history and uncontrollable contingency: that both encourage the tendency to err. The narrator of Borges’s story gives 1602 as the date for the Quijote (it is 1605, as we know) and clearly misreads the fragment about history that he quotes by not taking into account that it is parodic. Cervantes did not write seriously ‘‘truth, whose mother is history’’ (p. 94) [la verdad, cuya madre es la historia (p. 449)]. Who is the narrator of ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,’’ and what other misreadings does he add to this proliferating collection? Why does he focus on that passage on history? And why does he refer to the readers of the magazine where the partial list of Menard’s publications appear as ‘‘deplorables,’’ adding that they are ‘‘few and Calvinist (if not Masonic and circumcised)’’ (p. 88) [son pocos y calvinistas, cuando no masones y circuncisos

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(p. 444)]. Was he, in spite of his criticism of Maurice Barrès, an ultra-Catholic, anti-Semitic fascist? Menard, whom he is eulogizing, was certainly a literary thief, whose new technique for reading was one of ‘‘deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution’’ (p. 95) [técnica del anacronismo deliberado y de las atribuciones erróneas (p. 450)]. Creation appears as an act of theft accompanied by prevarication and even perjury, no less. Borges’s story is also the biography of a delinquent told by someone of highly dubious moral and political leanings: the law and its violation stand, again, at the source of storytelling.

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As in Borges, in Carpentier the important figure is Cervantes, not so much Don Quijote.∞∞ The Harp and the Shadow, written when Carpentier knew that he was dying of cancer, is the most sustained treatment of Cervantes available in modern Latin American fiction, one that incorporates Borges. He sets up a prolix series of intertextual associations between his novel and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, Cervantes’ last book, because like him, Carpentier is summing up his life and works on the brink of death, and also, as Frederick A. de Armas has shown, in this work the Cuban author found a source for his theory of magical realism.∞≤ Carpentier is also drawn to the fantastic, imaginative quality of the Persiles as an affirmation of the power of fiction, and establishes a connection between the misty and mysterious world of Iceland with which Cervantes opens his novel and the supposed trip to those regions undertaken by Columbus early in his career. Columbus, it should not be forgotten, was also arrested and returned to Spain in shackles at one point, a fugitive from justice. Carpentier clearly wants to link Columbus to Cervantes and Cervantes to himself as authors to speculate about the nature of literature and specifically the Latin American narrative tradition.∞≥ He is following Pierre Menard in this, of course. In The Harp and the Shadow Columbus is summing up his life on his deathbed as he awaits the priest who will administer the last rites. Carpentier was to die two years after the publication of The Harp and the Shadow, Cervantes died four days after signing the ‘‘Dedicatoria’’ to the Persiles, and Pierre Menard is already dead in the story. The author’s death is a prominent feature in all these fictions because they hold in the balance the all or nothing of beginnings and ends and the pressing need for telling the truth in such portentous moments. Like the Persiles, The Harp and the Shadow closes in Rome, where it began, as if to mark the finality and transcendence of their endings. Another association between Columbus and Cervantes is through Maese

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Pedro’s (that is, Ginés de Pasamonte) ‘‘Retablo de las maravillas,’’ mentioned several times in The Harp and the Shadow. When the admiral returns in triumph and goes on a promotion tour of his discovery, he sets up a show for the king and queen in Barcelona, in which he dresses up the Taíno Indians whom he brought over and displays them at court. He calls this company his ‘‘Spectacle of the Marvels of the Indies’’ (p. 100) [gran compañía de Retablo de las Maravillas de Indias (p. 133)]. The translation erases the allusion to Cervantes’ one-act play ‘‘El retablo de las Maravillas’’ (something like ‘‘Pageant of Marvels’’) and Maese Pedro’s puppet show. Carpentier’s association of Columbus with Cervantes—Ginés de Pasamonte as Maese Pedro is also in the background—is revealing of his own probe into his vocation and practice as a writer. This is largely contained in Columbus’s musings as he remembers his life on the brink of death, when he again alludes to the ‘‘Retablo’’: ‘‘When I search through the labyrinth of my past, in this my final hour, I am astonished by my natural talents as an actor, as the life of the party, as a wielder of illusions, in the style of the mountebanks in Italy who, from fair to fair—and they often came to Savona—brought their comedies, pantomimes and masquerades. I was an impresario of spectacles, taking my Pageant of Marvels from throne to throne’’ (p. 120) [cuando me asomo al laberinto de mi pasado en esta hora última, me asombro ante mi natural vocación de farsante, de animador de antruejos, de armador de ilusiones, a manera de los saltabancos que en Italia, de feria en feria—y venían a menudo a Savona—llevan sus comedias, pantomimas y mascaradas. Fui trujamán de retablo, al pasear de trono en trono mi Retablo de Maravillas (p. 160)]. Cervantes’ projections as author in the Quijote provide Carpentier with a character to play, as he assumes the role of Columbus on his deathbed meditating on his record as writer. Carpentier shrouds this meditation in a vast historical and speculative mantle. Carpentier was obsessed with the discovery of the New World and its impact on the writing of history and fiction. Here the association of Columbus with Cervantes is most significant. Simplified, the road from the admiral to the author of the Quijote would go like this. By irrefutably demonstrating the roundness of the earth, leading to the Copernican revolution and a new conception of the universe as infinite, Columbus made possible Montaigne’s detached ironic perspective, such as he displays in his famous essay ‘‘On Cannibals,’’ to which there are direct allusions in The Harp and the Shadow. The fact that the world is now known not to be the center of the universe has decentered Western thought. The inversion of values implicit in Montaigne’s text is dramatized in the speech by one of the Taínos that Columbus has brought back to the Old World, a hilarious passage in which the Europeans are mer-

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cilessly assessed from the outside. It is Montaigne’s irony that makes Cervantes’ and Carpentier’s possible. (Knowing Carpentier, I know that he would not have disdained the cryptogram CCCC: Columbus-Copernicus-CervantesCarpentier.) The consequences of the cleave on historical and literary discourse caused by the discovery is The Harp and the Shadow’s central theme. Carpentier dramatizes it by focusing on the ambiguities surrounding Columbus and his writings. But The Harp and the Shadow is of particular relevance to my theses in this book because in it Carpentier has returned to the origins of the modern novel by going precisely to the very moment and characters in history when our story begins: Queen Isabella of Castile and Christopher Columbus. He has also cast that story within a framing story centered on a trial: the one at which Columbus’s beatification, leading to canonization, is debated and a verdict rendered. The judicial nature of the story is deeper, however, as is its relation to the picaresque and criminals’ confessions. Columbus is on his deathbed preparing himself for the arrival of the priest who will hear his confession and administer the last rites. What he is in the process of doing is what in the Catholic Church is called an ‘‘act of contrition,’’ a review and summary of one’s sins in preparation to telling them to the confessor. It is an inner confession, a silent rehearsal of what will be the actual story told to the priest. So the narrative situation of the criminal-sinner telling his ‘‘case’’ to a person in authority is in the background, only that here it is a confession sanctioned by canon law instead of civil codes. This is the reason why Columbus vows to tell all, as Ginés de Pasamonte was awaiting the end of his own life to be able to tell the entire story, and as Guzmán undergoes a conversion to the good before telling his life up to that moment. Totality is a requirement, an unreachable goal, as we saw also in ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs.’’ The novelty here is that in The Harp and the Shadow we never read the actual confession but are privy only to a virtual one; it is literally a pre-text in all the senses of that word: a text that precedes the text, a the text that offers excuses for wrongs committed, the text that takes the place of another that will never be told, like Scipio’s forever postponed autobiography. The reader knows that what he reads is an unreliable text, if there ever was one. Columbus is a worse liar than Cide Hamete Benengeli. On the verge of death, like Scheherazade, Columbus will embroider on his memories and lie even to himself—he is at the point and place to create literature out of life. The one confession he does make is precisely the biggest lie (or, perhaps better, the biggest lay)—an affair with Queen Isabella. The Harp and the Shadow projects back the history of the New World, of its incorporation into Western history, as the grandest love story imaginable: a steamy tryst between the queen and the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. The

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negative ruling in the case of Columbus’s beatification is due, above all, to his lasciviousness, whose tangible proof was an illegitimate child. His other sin is to have introduced slavery to the New World. We are dealing here with a Columbus guilty of the atrocities of colonization, not just lust. In line with other novelistic protagonists, he is a criminal preparing his confession, which also turns out to be a sin and a crime because it is deliberately false. This is not a Columbus fit for statues. Is his love affair with the queen a displacement of his lust and guilt into a wish-fulfillment dream meshing eros and the will to power? Here is an original sin (or fantasy) for the ages, fornicating with the Catholic queen (one wonders what the punishment would be according to the Inquisition’s classifications). It was during her reign, as we know, that the new legislation began to be drawn up at the cortes de Madrigal and Toro and the early compilations that led to the all-important one of 1567. It was her marriage to Ferdinand that began the process of unification of the Peninsula and of the Spanish legal system. Queen Isabella stands for the law in The Harp and the Shadow, while Columbus represents love and desire, expressed both through his ambition and spirit of adventure and nakedly by his relationship with Isabella, which begins right at the encampment of Santa Fe, from which she and Ferdinand were conducting the assault of Moorish Granada. Christopher’s and Isabella’s adulterous union is a parody of the Neoplatonic fusion of opposites under the heat of passion: love and the law meet in the bed in which discoverer and queen frolic, and out of which America and modern history emerge like their illegitimate children. Carpentier had an allegorical penchant, and this is the loftiest one he created, only that the love of these two exalted personages is so improbable and so physical that the novel turns into a huge joke, a burla like those created by the duke and duchess in Part II of the Quijote. It is a grand imaginative prank to have Columbus and the Catholic queen together in bed; it is the novel’s and Carpentier’s most daring deviation from history, the hottest imaginative spark. It is the lie of literature. The Neoplatonic background of The Harp and the Shadow, I believe, is a rereading and interpretation of one of the early, and certainly most important, books written by an American: Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas. A contemporary of Cervantes, el Inca was born in Cuzco of an Incan mother and a conquistador of noble lineage—in fact of the lineage of great poets like Garcilaso de la Vega, the Marqués de Santillana, and Jorge Manrique. Through his father El Inca was also related to his contemporary the great baroque poet Góngora. Garcilaso grew up in the viceroyalty of Peru, but moved to Spain as a young mestizo and son of a union that was not sanctified (his father married a Spanish lady, not his Incan mother), where he became an accomplished humanist and translator into Spanish of that most influential

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book of Neoplatonic philosophy, Leone Hebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore. It was there that he changed his name not just to that of his father but to that of his ancestor Garcilaso de la Vega, already recognized as the greatest poet in the language and whose works were much in fashion at the time (I have pointed out some of the many allusions to him in the Quijote). Later he wrote his masterpiece, The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, in two parts. The first told the history of Inca kings in Peru before the arrival of the Spaniards, the second the violent story of the civil wars among the conquerors, in which his father played a significant though ambiguous role (he was accused of conniving with enemies of the crown). Together, as William Ilgen argued in a beautiful article, the two parts of The Royal Commentaries of the Incas constitute a Neoplatonic fusion of the author’s two warring sides, accomplished by an act of love—the act of writing.∞∂ Part I is about his mother’s legacy, Part II about his father’s. The conqueror and the Incan maiden produced this illegitimate son, first American author, by an act of love, and he in turn through another produced this book, whereby he bound his legacies in harmonious beauty. This is in the background of Carpentier’s mock allegory about the birth of America as the bastard child of Columbus and Queen Isabella. In the novel, Columbus’s impression (or lie) that his enterprise was forged in bed with the queen and that their love attained a Neoplatonic purity is clear. As he revises his life he says: ‘‘In my life there came one surpassing moment when, setting my sights high, very high, I abandoned the lust of my body and ennobled my mind with a complete communion of spirit and flesh, and a new light illuminated the darkness of wayward actions and thoughts’’ (pp. 153–54) [en mi vida un instante prodigioso en que, por mirar a lo alto, lo muy alto, desapareció la lujuria de mi cuerpo, fue ennoblecida mi mente por una comunión total de carne y espíritu, y una nueva luz disipó las tinieblas de mis desvaríos y lucubraciones (pp. 197–98)]. Against such loftiness and purity we have the scenes in which the admiral romps with Columba, as he calls the queen, in the intimacy of their lovemaking. Columbus is deluded on this other bed, his deathbed, as he recalls his life and passes judgment on it. Memory lies and his lies are still driven by desire, the desire for greatness, the lust for immortality. This is a Columbus-Carpentier that is human, all too human, and this is the reason why his candidacy for sainthood is denied. In Columbus we have another author who is not a native of the language in which his text is written. This was a grave irreverence on Borges’s part because he was dealing with the greatest monument of the Spanish language. But the matter is very serious in Carpentier’s novel too. In The Harp and the Shadow the foreign author is none other than the inaugural one of the Latin American literary canon—in traditional histories and anthologies of Latin American

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literature the first text is always a fragment from Columbus’s Diary. To make the matter even more complicated, that Diary, as we know, does not exist as such. It was lost. All we have are the quotations inserted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in his compendious Historia de las Indias, some of which are reconstructions. Like the Quijote, the founding text of the Latin American literary tradition is a quilt of languages, citations, translations, and rewritings—its existence is like a Borgesian puzzle. But it is the origin. This is why The Harp and the Shadow is like an ‘‘Aleph’’ of Latin American literature, with oblique allusions to—and quotations from—classics, like Esteban Echeverría’s ‘‘El matadero,’’ Sarmiento’s Facundo, Neruda’s Canto general, Lezama Lima’s ‘‘Rapsodia para el mulo,’’ and so forth. It is as if Columbus’s modest letters and reports contained, like kabbalistic vessels, all the future texts of the Latin American literary tradition. There is a parallel subplot to this in the tangential story about Columbus’s body, parts of which would have had to be kept in the Vatican’s archive of relics had he been sainted. This is a macabre prank of Carpentier’s to underscore the elusiveness of the textual origins and always debated legitimacy of the admiral’s texts. The authenticity of Columbus’s remains is a matter of dispute, with Havana, Seville, and Santo Domingo claiming to have the real ones. Columbus’s last material cipher—his relics—are as ambiguous as his texts and as elusive as his birthplace: they lack a verifiable beginning and end. Carpentier’s shadowy figure also appears in the background of this story, if we remember that he wrote his novel after learning that he was dying of cancer. Because The Harp and the Shadow is also the chronicle of a cadaver foretold: Carpentier’s, who will become one in Paris but will wind up at Havana’s Cementerio de Colón, as if guided a destiny foreseen by Carpentier’s ghoulish imagination to merge, if not with the admiral’s bones, at least with his name. This point bears repeating: the inaugural text of Latin American literature is not, like the Poema de mío Cid, the kernel of Castilian letters according to traditional philology, but the diaries of a Genoese of uncertain linguistic and cultural lineage. The foundation of Latin American literature is a hybrid text written in faulty Spanish and rewritten by Carpentier, a Menard whose Spanish was not native either. The link between natural language and literature is broken in Carpentier because for him, a baroque, creation is always artful, never natural. But there is an even more personal connection in all this, linking unnatural language to lies and to the origin of the literary. The narrator in the Quijote says that Benengeli, being an Arab, was something of a liar, as we saw. We have already also seen that Menard was wont to write exactly the opposite of what he felt or believed. Carpentier’s Columbus,

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as he prepares for his final journey, tells himself about the many lies that he has told, not only to his men in that fateful first voyage but also in his manuscripts: ‘‘I made up an imaginary past designed to take the place of the Savona tavern. . . . I quickly pulled out of my sleeve an uncle who was an admiral; and I made myself a graduate of the University of Pavía in whose cloisters I had never set foot in my whole damn life’’ (p. 63); ‘‘So I resorted to a lie, a deception, the constant lie in which I was going to live (and this I will tell the confessor)’’ (p. 73); ‘‘And the evidence of those falsehoods is here, in these drafts of my accounts of my voyages that I keep under my pillow, and that I pull out now with trembling hand—terrified of itself—to reread what in these final moments seems to me like a vast Repertory of Lies’’(p. 84); ‘‘Of the seven Indians we captured on the first island, two have escaped. And we are lying to the ones who are left (another deceit), denying our intention of taking them to Spain’’ (p. 90) [fui haciéndome de una mitología destinada a hacer olvidar la taberna de Savona—¡honrarás padre y madre!—, con dueño lanero y quesero arrimado a las canillas de sus barriles, diariamente trabado en trifulcas con borrachos impecuniosos. De repente, me saqué de las mangas un tío almirante; me hice estudiante graduado de la Universidad de Pavía, cuyos claustros jamás pisé en mi jodida existencia (p. 85); Por ello me resolví a recurrir a la mentira, al embuste, al perenne embuste en que habría de vivir (y esto sí lo diré al franciscano confesor a quien ahora espero) (p. 97); Y la constancia de tales trampas está aquí, en estos borradores de mis relaciones de viajes, que tengo bajo la almohada, y que ahora saco con mano temblorosa—asustada de sí misma—para releer lo que, en estos postreros momentos, tengo por un vasto Repertorio de Embustes—y así lo diré a mi confesor que tanto tarda en aparecer (p. 112); De los siete indios que habíamos capturado en la isla primera, dos se nos habían fugado. Y a los que nos quedaban tenía engañados (seguían los embustes) negando que tuviese intenciones de llevarlos a España (p. 120)]. All these references to lies, we are now allowed to suspect, are oblique allusions to Carpentier’s own lies and obfuscations about his life. The biggest of these fibs turned out to be precisely about his birthplace. In the speech accepting the Cervantes Prize, delivered in the presence of King Juan Carlos— no less—Carpentier mentions Havana as ‘‘the city where I was born.’’ But now we know that this was a lie that he had sustained through all of his life, and that he had been born instead in Lausanne (Switzerland), making the issue of his birthplace a polemical one, as Columbus’s has been. This revelation may also finally account for Carpentier’s notorious and stubborn French r when speaking Spanish, which dogged him all of his life and made some, like Juan Marinello, write that in the Havana of the twenties he was sometimes taken

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for a foreigner.∞∑ I believe that Carpentier must have figured that he would eventually be found out, and in these words spoken through Columbus he is offering a veiled apology to be understood posthumously. The subject of lies in Carpentier is not to be taken lightly, as mere titillation and gossip. To lie is a serious activity that brings up in The Harp and the Shadow rather important issues, including the nature of fiction, as Cervantes suggested by creating Cide Hamete Benengeli. In lying Columbus (and Carpentier) is creating or constructing a self, but is that not the way we all build our self-image in this post-Freudian era? There is in lying a radical disconnection from the truth of the self as possibility and as actual performance, as enunciation. But the act of lying itself is its own truth, like literature. Lying to oneself, of course, is a more complicated act, which raises the issue of irony and has at its root a measure of self-censure and even self-loathing that is evident in Columbus’s musings and even points at their source in Augustine. Is one’s sense of self also a pack of lies? What isn’t a lie? Finally, for now, the question is how is lying different from writing literature? Is literature not a socially sanctioned form of lying? Beyond each work, if lying is the foundation of the canon in Columbus, how can literature be edifying, almost in the literal sense of apt to build monuments or become a monument itself, like the one of Don Quijote and Sancho in Madrid’s Plaza de España? The disturbing point here is that Borges and Carpentier, following Cervantes’ lead, find literature and language fraught with lies, inconsistencies, and discontinuities, all of which taken together may constitute a deeper kind of truth about humankind. Carpentier was obviously aware of this and confronts the issue of truthfulness with yet another prank. The other narrator of The Harp and the Shadow is Pope Pius IX, Mastai Ferreti, who is pondering the issue of whether or not to put forth the beatification of the admiral. Of all the narrators mentioned here, Pope Pius IX is the only one institutionally endowed with infallibility. But he also fails. He culls what he thinks is the truth about the admiral from the record and forwards the petition to have him beatified, only to have it denied at the trial years after his death. It is no trivial prank for Carpentier to assume the voice of a pope. It was to several popes that Pietro Martyre d’Anghiera, perhaps more than Columbus the original Latin American narrator, addressed his elegant history of the New World in the last decades of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century (Pietro Martyre was yet another writer who did not use his native language, but he solved the issue by writing in a language that no longer had native speakers: Latin). Mastai Ferreti’s failure to canonize Columbus is the final meaning of Carpentier’s searing meditation on literature and authorship, not to mention self-knowledge

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and self-projection. The canon, not even the inaugural founding text, can be anointed with infallibility, particularly an American canon. That the trial in this novel is a mock trial for beatification elevates the legal to the otherworldly, but always with an ironic wink: it is like a rehearsal of the final judgment. The otherworldly in The Harp and the Shadow is the realm of literature, represented in the novel by allusions to Inferno IV, the canto in which limbo appears. A quotation from that canto is the epigraph to the last section of Carpentier’s novel. The souls of all the great figures of antiquity who were not Christians only because they lived before Christ are placed in limbo. They dwell there in a marvelous castle, in the timelessness of eternity, with a faint smile on their faces—neither happy nor sad—forever engaged in conversation about their works. Aristotle, Homer, Virgil are all there as in a perpetual seminar on literature and philosophy. The same timeless quality obtains in the trial about Columbus’s beatification, in which writers from various epochs appear as witnesses. The whole thing is like a translation of the history of the novel, with crimes, punishments, archives, confessions, into a transcendental realm leading to a kind of immortality, the only one imaginable in the modern era—that hall of fame of literature whose register would today be Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. Its archive would be my own Myth and Archive, literalized in The Harp and the Shadow by that lipsanatec, or repository of ostea sacra (sacred bones), the relics classified and stored for future use in churches throughout the world. The joke here, of course, is that there were no authentic bones of Columbus, as there are none of Cervantes. Their last worldly remains have disappeared, their texts their only trace, but as literature these still bear evidence of the desire that shaped them: they are, to remember Quevedo, dust in love.

Notes

Introduction 1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953 [German original 1946]); Alexander A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967). 2. Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘‘Pecar en las colonias: Mentalidades populares, Inquisición y actitudes hacia la fornicación simple en España, Portugal y las colonias americanas,’’ Cuadernos de historia moderna (Madrid: Universidad Complutense), no. 18 (1997), pp. 51–67. 3. Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, tr. J. R. Jones (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1986]), p. 129. 4. Georges Bataille, Les larmes d’Eros (Paris: Pauvert, 1961). 5. Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, tr. Montgomery Belgion. Rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 [French original 1940]). 6. Alexander A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature: 1480–1680 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975). 7. Quintiliano Saldaña, ‘‘La criminología de El Quijote (notas para su estudio),’’ Revue hispanique 68 (1926), p. 552; Rafael Salillas, ‘‘La criminalidad y la penalidad en el Quijote,’’ El ateneo de Madrid en el III centenario de la publicación de ‘‘El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha,’’ conferencias (Madrid: Imprenta de Bernardo Rodríguez, 1905), pp. 85–118; Rafael Alvarez Vigaray, El derecho civil en la obra de Cervantes (Granada: Editorial Comares, 1987), p. 43; Horacio N. Castro Dassen, El

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derecho en ‘‘Don Quijote’’ (Buenos Aires: Arayú, 1953), pp. 7–8 (but Castro Dassen also speaks of Cervantes’ reading and studying the law, though not in a university context); Ivo Domínguez, El derecho como recurso literario en las novelas ejemplares de Cervantes (Montevideo: Publicaciones Lingüísticas y Literarias del Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Montevideo, 1972), p. 78. Others who have written on the law in Cervantes are: Rodolfo Batiza, Don Quijote y el derecho: Cultura jurídica de don Miguel de Cervantes (Mexico City: Librería de Manuel Porrúa, 1964); V. Carreras y Artau, La filosofía del derecho en ‘‘el Quijote’’ (Gerona: Carreras y Mas, 1903); Ignacio R. M. Galbis, ‘‘Aspectos forenses en la obra cervantina: El Quijote a la luz del derecho natural,’’ in Cervantes: Su obra y su mundo, actas del I congreso internacional sobre Cervantes, ed. Manuel Criado de Val (Madrid: Edi-6, S.A., 1981), pp. 699–705; Antonio Martín Gamero, Jurisprudencia de Cervantes (Toledo: Fando e Hijo, 1870); José Pérez Fernández, Ensayo humano y jurídico de ‘‘El Quijote’’ (Madrid: Imprenta Pueyo, 1965).

Chapter 1. The Prisoner of Sex 1. Edward Dudley has written in ‘‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque’’: ‘‘The role of love in the Quijote is often overlooked in favor of more abstract considerations, but there is a valid case for the proposition that love, that is, the relation between the sexes, is the basic concern of the entire book.’’ The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 119. 2. I base this generalization in the following statement by Bruce W. Wardropper in his classic article on Calderón de la Barca’s comic plays: ‘‘In a comedy like Casa con dos puertas these tragic dimensions [in the wife murder plays] are missing. The bachelors and spinsters in our kind of play are not one flesh. At most they are bound by a promise of marriage which society and the Church recognize as provisional. It is no crime, no sin, to break off an engagement. And in the skirmishings of courtship, in the prelude to marriage, what will, after the ceremony, be a matter of life and death is just a risky game.’’ ‘‘Calderón’s Comedy and His Serious Sense of Life,’’ Hispanic Studies in Honor of Nicholson Adams, ed. John Esten Keller (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1966), p. 186. 3. Rougement, Love in the Western World. 4. José Antonio Maravall, ‘‘The Origins of the Modern State,’’ Journal of World History 6, no. 4 (1961), pp. 789–808. It may be well to remember here that Ferdinand of Aragon was one of the models for Machiavelli’s The Prince. 5. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 75. 6. See Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also Francisco Romero de Castilla y Perosso, Archivo general de Simancas (Madrid: Imprenta y Estereotipía de Aribau y Compañía, 1873); and the recent edition of the Instrucción para el gobierno del archivo de Simancas (año 1588) (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura-Dirección eneral de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1989). 7. Francisco Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta (siglos XVIXVII-XVIII) (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1969).

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8. Cristóbal de Chaves, Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla, ed. José Esteban (Madrid: Clásicos El Arbol, 1983). 9. Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile: 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 127. 10. ‘‘Ejecutar el delito de noche o en despoblado eran circunstancias agravatorias, porque en realidad disminuían las posibilidades de defensa y de auxilio a la víctima; su cercanía a la alevosía es clara; pero suele aludirse, especialmente a la de ejecutar el hecho en yermo, con independencia de la alevosía.’’ Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 350. 11. Ibid., p. 252. 12. Gonzalo Martínez Díez argues that torture as a method of obtaining confessions came from Roman law, not from the Visigoths, who did not include it or softened it in their codes from the time they invaded the Peninsula until the Moorish invasion. It was revived in the Siete partidas, which were influenced by Bologna and with the resurgence of Romanism during the Reconquest. It was abolished in the early nineteenth century. See his ‘‘La tortura judicial en la legislación histórica española,’’ Anuario de historia del derecho español 32 (1962), pp. 223–300. 13. Diccionario de autoridades (Madrid: Gredos, 1963 [1726–39]), 3–4, p. 38. 14. Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. de Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Alta Fulla, 1987 [1611]), folio 300, recto. 15. Ibid., p. 854, folio 134, recto. 16. Kagan writes in his Lawsuits and Litigants: ‘‘By the 1580’s, law students at Salamanca numbered just over thirty-eight hundred, a figure that represented well over half of the total number of students registered at the university’’ (p. 142). And: ‘‘Most educators of the period believed that education’s primary purpose was to prepare students for the vita activa et civile, and in this context law was considered as the culmination of preliminary training in Latin, the classics, rhetoric, and philosophy. Law, moreover, was thought to provide students with knowledge of the peaceful, ordered world of Imperial Rome, which so many thinkers and statesmen in the sixteenth century sought to construct anew in the guise of the Monarchia Christiana’’ (p. 144). 17. ‘‘Furthermore, universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly the larger ones, were notorious for their riotous life; drinking, gambling, and whoring were common distractions.’’ Richard L. Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 203. 18. I am following here the article by my good friend Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘‘Pecar en las colonias.’’ 19. Don Juan also says ‘‘mozo soy’’ when he is caught with Isabela by his uncle and the king. He tells his uncle Don Pedro: ‘‘mozo soy y mozo fuiste;/y pues que de amor supiste,/tenga disculpa mi amor.’’ (I, 62–64). I quote from Tirso de Molina: Comedias, ed7th ed. , ed. Américo Castro (Madrid: Clásicos Castellanos, 1963), p. 150. 20. In the Spain of the sixteenth century the distinction between crime and sin is blurred as the gravity of the offence increases. This is certainly the case with incest. As Tomás y Valiente writes: ‘‘Delito y pecado serán así realidades más que paralelas convergentes, y su gravedad se gradúa en cierto modo recíprocamente. En los casos en que la ley humana castiga acciones como la herejía, el adulterio o el incesto, tales delitos son

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graves y pueden penarse severamente porque encierran una grave ofensa a Dios, es decir, porque son pecados mortales.’’ El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 221. 21. ‘‘un pecado que llaman en latin incestus, que quier tanto dezir, como pecado que ome faze yaziendo a sabiendas con su pariente, o con parienta de su muger, o de otra con quien ouiesse yazido, fasta el quarto grado; o si yoguiesse alguno con su madrastra, o con madre, o fija, o con su cuñada o con su nuera, o si alguno yoguiesse con muger de Orden o con su afijada o con su comadre,’’ Cuarta partida, título II, ley 13. I am quoting from Las siete partidas del Sabio Rey D. Alfonso el Nono, copiadas de la edición de Salamanca del año 1555 (Valencia: Joseph Thomàs Lucas, 1758), partida IV, p. 27.

Chapter 2. Spanish Law and the Origins of the Novel 1. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La epopeya castellana a través de la literatura española, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1959), p. 43. Also: ‘‘Los invasores germánicos aportarán una nueva concepción sobre la función social de la justicia fundada en una autonomía personal más amplia de los hombres libres frente al poder del Estado, limitando así la iniciativa del poder público en la investigación y represión penal. El delito era ante todo una ofensa personal, y el proceso, una relación social teñida de carácter privado.’’ Martínez Díez, ‘‘La tortura judicial,’’ p. 233. 2. See Irene Zaderenko, ‘‘El procedimiento judicial de riepto entre nobles y la fecha de composición de la Historia roderici y el Poema de mío Cid,’’ Revista de filología española 78 (1998), pp. 183–94. A somewhat dated, more comprehensive study is Alfonso Otero Varela’s ‘‘El riepto en el derecho castellano-leonés,’’ in his Dos estudios históricojurídicos (Rome: Cuadernos del Instituto Jurídico Español, no. 4, 1955), pp. 7–82. 3. Jacob Grimm, ‘‘Von der Poesie im Recht,’’ in Kleinere Schriften 6 (1882) (Hildesheim: Olms, 1991), pp. 152–91; John A. Alford and Dennis P. Seniff, Literature and Law in the Middle Ages: A Bibliography of Scholarship (New York: Garland, 1984), p. 5. 4. Colin Smith, The Making of the ‘‘Poema de mío Cid’’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 81. 5. Charles M. Radding argues that the renewal had begun in Pavia in his The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence: Pavia and Bologna, 850–1150 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 6. John A. Alford, ‘‘Literature and Law in Medieval England,’’ PMLA 92, no. 5 (1977), pp. 948–49. 7. Ibid., p. 941. 8. Smith argues, based on internal evidence, that Per Abat was, at least, a civil lawyer (as opposed to a canonical one). At the very least, he says, Abat was a notary: ‘‘He [Abat] was no mere outsider with an amateur interest, but a practising professional, to judge by the detail that he deals in, the precision and unapologetic air of his terminology, and his occasional mildly pedantic addition of matter not wholly relevant to plot or characterisation. He was at the least a notary, but beyond that, was acquainted with legal aspects of marriage at high social levels and with affairs within the competence of the monarch’’ (The Making of the ‘‘Poema de mío Cid,’’ p. 79). On the author of La Celestina, see Stephen Gilman’s The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of ‘‘La Celestina’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), particularly pp. 300–4.

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9. José Bono, Historia del derecho notarial español, 2 vols. (Madrid: Junta de Decanos de los Colegios Notariales de España, 1979–82). 10. I have written on this in ‘‘The Life and Adventures of Cipión: Cervantes and the Picaresque,’’ collected in my Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 45–65; and more broadly in my Myth and Archive. See also Parker’s Literature and the Delinquent. 11. Angel del Río, Historia de la literatura española, rev. ed., vol. 1, Desde los orígenes hasta 1700 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963 [1948]), p. 25. 12. Smith, The Making of the ‘‘Poema de mío Cid,’’ p. 77. 13. I am following in this the classic work by A. P. d’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1951). 14. Juan Ruiz (Arcipreste de Hita), Libro de buen amor, ed. Julio Cejador y Frauca (Madrid: Clásicos Castellanos–Espasa Calpe, 1963), p. 62. 15. Maravall, ‘‘The Origins of the Modern State.’’ 16. In Lawsuits and Litigants, Kagan writes: ‘‘Outwardly, the royal judiciary in the sixteenth century had many of the bureaucratic characteristics of modern government. . . . But the resemblance ends there. It was actually closer to what Max Weber described as a ‘patrimonial bureaucracy.’ . . . Office in such bureaucracies is not conceived as a public trust . . . but part of the private patrimony of the ruler’’ (p. 166). 17. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 18. See Maravall, ‘‘The Origins of the Modern State,’’pp. 803–4. 19. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants, p. xx. 20. ‘‘The Recopilación contains 6,377 laws taken from among a total of more than 200,000—an enormous number and yet only part of the total for a century of life (it means an average of one law per day, granting that the Sunday was sanctified).’’ Javier Malagón Barceló, ‘‘The Role of the Letrado in the Colonization of America,’’ The Americas 18, no. 1 (1961), p. 11. See also Francisco Márquez Villanueva. ‘‘Letrados, consejeros y justicias (artículo-reseña),’’ Hispanic Review 53 (1985), pp. 201–27. 21. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants, p. 7. 22. Covarrubias offers this remarkable description of the discipline of the prisoners in the galleys, which uncannily anticipates some of Foucault’s: ‘‘Tiene cosas particulares la galera, que bastan a formar un buen volumen; pero yo sólo quiero ponderar lo que importa la disciplina, que la mayor parte de la chusma de los que están al remo, son hombres facinorosos, que cada uno por sí trahía alborotado un pueblo, sin poderse averiguar con él, y dozientos déstos en una galera están tan domésticos y disciplinados, que a sólo un silvo del cómitre ponen con tan gran presteza por obra lo que se les manda, que parecen un pensamiento, sin discrepar uno de otro, como si todos ellos fuessen miembros de una sola persona y se governassen por ella’’ (Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 621). 23. ‘‘No es exageración decir que caer en las redes de la justicia era una auténtica desgracia, que comportaba graves consecuencias difícilmente evitables, se fuese o no culpable’’ (Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 182); ‘‘Siendo así la situación, lo mejor que podía hacer un individuo cuando se veía envuelto como sujeto principal o secundario en una causa penal, era huir’’ (p. 183).

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24. For details see the previously mentioned Romero de Castilla y Perosso, Archivo general de Simancas; and Instrucción para el gobierno del archivo de Simancas. 25. ‘‘Así, la común tradición romanista, el ámbito europeo de los sucesivos movimientos culturales de la Edad Media, la difusión de la imprenta, las universidades y tantos otros factores, produjeron la homogeneidad de trato de los problemas jurídicos penales, y la similitud y parentesco entre las legislaciones y las obras científicas elaboradas en todos los países europeos’’ (Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 113). Kagan writes: ‘‘Insistence on written procedures meant also that most lawsuits consumed reams of paper, or as one royal visitor to the chancillería of Valladolid put it: ‘There are pleitos of ten thousand and twenty thousand pages’ ’’ (Lawsuits and Litigants, p. 37). He adds: ‘‘Briefs were so important that many litigants had their briefs printed and elaborately bound at considerable expense’’ (p. 61). The reason for this was also the prestige that writing well acquired: ‘‘both advocates and attorneys appear with increasing frequency in the documents and literature of the fifteenth century, and by the end of the century the number of legal practitioners, qualified and unqualified, was increasing so rapidly that the crown in 1495 required every new advocate to have studied both canon and civil law at a recognized university for a fixed term of years (later set at five)’’ (p. 63). He adds: ‘‘As letrados, advocates prided themselves on their learning and detailed knowledge of law, and many were apt to display this expertise publicly in court . . . many of the briefs they prepared were intentionally padded . . . to impress the judges’’ (p. 69). 26. Antonio de Nebrija, Vocabulario español-latino (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1951 [1495]), fol. a. ii. v. 27. The entire passage in which this famous statement appears, which is the first sentence of the prologue to the Gramática, in which Nebrija dedicates the work to the queen, reads as follows: ‘‘Cuando bien conmigo pienso, mui esclarecida Reina, i pongo delante los ojos el antigüedad de todas las cosas que para nuestra recordación y memoria quedaron escriptas, una cosa hállo y sáco por conclusión mui cierta: que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.’’ Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. Antonio Quilis (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces, 1989), p. 109. 28. See my Celestina’s Brood. 29. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 30. Auerbach, Mimesis. 31. Saldaña, ‘‘La criminología de El Quijote.’’ 32. Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 127. Lazarillo de Tormes also refers to his situation as a ‘‘caso.’’ 33. Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 316. 34. Smith, The Making of the ‘‘Poema de mío Cid,’’ p. 81. 35. Castro Dassen, El derecho en ‘‘Don Quijote,’’ pp. 124–27. 36. Ignacio Rodríguez Guerrero, Tipos delincuentes del ‘‘Quijote,’’ 2 vols. (Quito: Editorial Casa de la Cultura, 1966). For other work on law in Cervantes see the bibliography. 37. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants, p. 20. This is an idea Kagan repeats several times: ‘‘Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Castile entered a prolonged period of demo-

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graphic change and economic expansion’’ (p. 133); ‘‘the changes set in motion by economic expansion and population growth were the fundamental cause of much of the increase in litigation recorded in Castile’s courts’’ (p. 136).

Chapter 3. Engendering Dulcinea 1. Courtly love in Spain has been studied by Otis Green in Spain and the Western Tradition: The Castilian Mind in Literature from El Cid to Calderón, particularly volume 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), and more recently by Parker in The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature. I have also profited from Robert Folger’s Images in Mind: Lovesickness, Spanish Sentimental Fiction, and Don Quijote (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002). 2. Ruth El Saffar and Diana de Armas Wilson make the following statement concerning the purpose of their edited volume, Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993): ‘‘The contributors to this volume express, albeit in vastly different ways, what we see as a common vision of the Cervantes unconscious, one that undermines the Freudian story in ways similar to the work of postFreudian writers such as Melanie Klein and Abraham and Torok. Klein’s excavations in the pre-oedipal real reveal the origins of the Terrible Mother in the child’s frustration and rage when she fails him. Although she is a source of gratification, her power to reject allies her with Kali and Medusa and all the mythological figures that portray the monstrous aspects of woman. It is precisely those aspects—the terrifying, death-dealing, rejecting aspects of the mother/goddess—and the corresponding failure of the father to rescue the son from her that Cervantes exposes in his works’’ (p. 17). Although my reading of Dulcinea here could perhaps be aligned with this view, I am not comfortable with Freudian or revisionist-Freudian readings of Cervantes. I detect in the editors’ statement much wishful thinking, as if it were possible, or more to the point desirable, to turn Cervantes into a critic of Freud’s patriarchal theories, thereby making him acceptable to contemporary feminist doctrine. Don Quijote, because of his age and the scanty details about his ancestry, is safely beyond the reach of the family romance required to mount a Freudian (revisionist or not) attack on his works. Don Quijote is free to invent himself, and because of his Christian faith, he is beyond original sin and guilt. Cervantean irony, too, makes it difficult to make any ideology disguised as method stick when applied to his work. The effect of irony is flux and transformation, so the gruesome psychoanalytic melodrama, with its stock characters—terrifying mothers, castrating fathers, and frightened children—is dissolved by the laughter. There are valuable insights in some of the pieces contained in this book, but Cervantes’ works (and his subconscious) are, on the whole, out its of reach. 3. Schwartz, ‘‘Pecar en las colonias.’’ 4. See the entertaining and informative Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography, by Marion Meade (New York: Penguin, 1991 [1977]). 5. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 2, The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 6. Américo Castro has argued that illiteracy was a sign of not being a converted Jew, as reading, writing, and intellectual activities in general were associated with them. ‘‘Old

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Notes to Pages 42–48

Christians’’ like Sancho boasted of not being able to read and write. De la edad conflictiva: Crisis de la cultura española en el siglo XVII, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 1972). 7. Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 47. 8. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, tr. and ed. John Jay Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 150. 9. Tomás y Valiente writes: ‘‘Según una ley de las Partidas el estupro de mujer virgen que no fuera monja se castigaba con la pérdida de la mitad de los bienes si el estuprador era ‘ome honrrado,’ y con azotes y cinco años de ‘destierro’ en una isla si era ‘ome vil.’ Pero en la práctica esta ley no se cumplía; usualmente se imponía la pena que el Derecho Canónico señalaba a este delito, que era la de casarse con la estuprada o dotarla con una cantidad de dinero fijada por el juez; a esta pena alternativa se añadía por costumbre de los jueces castellanos otra de privación de la libertad, para satisfacer con ella ‘la vindicta pública.’ En resumen; el estuprador podía o casarse, o dotar, o ser preso, a su elección.’’ El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 361. Kagan also adds: ‘‘Virginity, for example, was a highly prized asset for girls seeking a suitable marriage, yet court records of the Habsburg era indicate that countless young women, often under the ‘promise of marriage,’ surrendered ‘their flower and virginity’ to some insistent male. Such promises, then as now, were easily broken; the difference is that it was customary in the sixteenth century for the dishonored girl, through the offices of her father, brother, or guardian, to bring the man responsible into court. . . . the accused was given the alternative of either marrying the girl or providing her with a dowry sufficiently large as to render her attractive to other prospective mates.’’ Lawsuits and Litigants, p. 240. 10. Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, 2, p. 38. 11. Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, ‘‘Dulcinea,’’ in En un lugar de la Mancha: Estudios cervantinos en honor de Manuel Durán, ed. Georgina Dopico Black and Roberto González Echevarría (Salamanca: Ediciones Almar, 1999), p. 209. 12. Andre Michalski, ‘‘El retrato retórico en la obra cervantina,’’ in Cervantes: Su obra y su mundo, actas del I congreso internacional sobre Cervantes, ed. Manuel Criado de Val (Madrid: EDI-6, 1981), pp. 39–46. The author provides a useful survey of the rhetorical portrait throughout Cervantes’ work. 13. Carroll B. Johnson, Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quixote (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). I am not persuaded by Johnson’s entertaining book. The niece plays a very small role in the book. 14. Diego Angulo Iñiguez writes (and I translate loosely) that the Arabs, in representing Medusa’s head, turned the blood that dripped from her neck into a beard, and the beautiful Greek feminine head was transformed for centuries into the horrible face of a giant. It comes into the West in this guise because of the technical superiority of Arabic astronomical treatises, and appears so in Alfonso el Sabio’s Lapidario: La mitología y el arte español del renacimiento (Madrid: Imprenta y Editorial Maestre, 1952), p. 10. 15. Jocobo Sanz Hermida’s ‘‘Aspectos fisiológicos de la dueña dolorida: La metamorfosis de la mujer en hombre,’’ Actas del tercer coloquio internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas (Alcalá de Henares, 12–16 Noviembre 1990) (Alcalá de Henares: Anthropos-Editorial del Hombre, 1993), pp. 463–72. Sherry Velasco makes valuable connections between Cervantine masculine women and Juan Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios in her ‘‘Marimachos, Hombrunas, Barbudas: The Masculine Woman in

Notes to Pages 48–69

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Cervantes’’ Cervantes 20, no. 1 (2000), pp. 69–78. Mary S. Gossy takes a more contemporary approach of the dyad Dulcinea-Aldonza in her ‘‘Aldonza as Butch: Narrative and the Play of Gender in Don Quijote,’’ in Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 17–28. 16. Javier Herrero, ‘‘The Beheading of the Giant: An Obscene Metaphor in Don Quijote,’’ Revista hispánica moderna, año 29, no. 4 (1976–77), pp. 141–49. 17. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, tr. Neville Coghill (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959), p. 117. 18. Volumen complementario, p. 484. 19. For details concerning the presence of Dante in this and other episodes of Part II, see William T. Avery, ‘‘Elementos dantescos del Quijote (segunda parte),’’ Anales cervantinos (Madrid), 13–14 (1974–75), pp. 3–36. 20. Javier Herrero, Who Was Dulcinea? (New Orleans: Graduate School of Tulane University, 1985), pp. 17–18.

Chapter 4. The Knight as Fugitive from Justice 1. Chaves, Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla. 2. As quoted in Volumen complementario, p. 275. 3. See John M. Hill, Voces germanescas, recogidas y ordenadas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press Publications in the Humanities, 1949). 4. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Jorge Mañach, Indagación del choteo, 2nd. ed. (Havana: La Verónica, 1940 [1928]). 5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1966 [1957]). 6. Though there are debates about the exact date of composition of the book, it can be safely said that the story had circulated in manuscript in the decades prior to its publication. The bibliography on this topic is endless. The best studies are to my mind Claudio Guillén, ‘‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’’ and ‘‘Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,’’ in his Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 71–106 and 135–58; Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Lazarillo de Tormes en la novela picaresca (Barcelona: Ariel, 1972); Parker, Literature and the Delinquent; and my own ‘‘The Life and Adventures of Cipión: Cervantes and the Picaresque,’’ in Celestina’s Brood, pp. 45–65. 7. Salillas, ‘‘La criminalidad y la penalidad en el Quijote.’’ 8. Ibid. See ‘‘Pícaro,’’ in Joan Corominas’s Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, cuarta reimpresión (Madrid: Gredos, 1997), 4, pp. 520–23. 9. A. R. Nykl, ‘‘Pícaro,’’ Revue hispanique 77 (1929), pp. 172–86. Nykl refutes this theory, which had been advanced by De Haan. 10. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants, p. 127. 11. Martínez Díez, ‘‘La tortura judicial en la legislación histórica española.’’ 12. Javier Herrero, ‘‘Sierra Morena as Labyrinth: From Wildness to Christian Knighthood,’’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 27, no. 1 (1981), pp. 55–67.

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Notes to Pages 72–82

13. The quotes are from Las siete partidas, Setena partida, título I, ley 9; Setena partida, título VIII, ley 3; Setena partida, título XXXIV, ley 4.

Chapter 5. The Amorous Pestilence 1. The Volumen complementario contains ample bibliographical information on pp. 356–57n317.2. 2. Herrero, ‘‘Sierra Morena as Labyrinth.’’ 3. For a brilliant consideration of this topic, see Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 4. Rougement, Love in the Western World. I have also been informed by Octavio Paz’s beautiful update of courtly love’s legacy in his La llama doble: Amor y erotismo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993). 5. Although I give the page number of Smollett’s translation here I have had to reconstruct the translation, for he left out that the uncle was a priest and missed completely the legal inflection that I discuss regarding ‘‘poder.’’ 6. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 4, pp. 176–77; Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 808. 7. Que no vala la carta del Rey, que donzella o biuda case contra su voluntad. Don Alonso en Alcala peticion. 31. era 1386. Do¯ Enrique. II. en Burgos era de. 1411 pe. 4. Do¯ Iuan. I. en Burgos era. 1417. pe. 19. Si acaesciere que por importunidad nos mandaremos dar alguna carta, o mandamiento, para que alguna donzella o biuda, o otra qualquier, aya de casar co¯ alguno, contra su voluntad, y sin su cosentimiento, ¯ mandamos que la tal carta non vala: y que por ella fuere emplazado, que no sea tenudo de parecer ante nos, y por no parecer no incurra en pena alguna (Recopilación de 1567, p. 39). LEY XI Que ningun señor apremie à ninguna su vasalla para que case contra su voluntad. Don Iuan.I. en Valladolid: año de. 1385. peti. 7. Do¯ Enrique. II.en Burgos era. 1411. peticion. 4. Mandamos q ningunos de los grandees de nuestros reynos, ni personas que tengan vasallos, apremien a ninguna dueña ni donzella a que case contra su voluntad con ninguna persona: ni assi mesmo apremien a los padres y madres de las tales mugeres para que se hagan los tales casamientos, so pena de la nuestra merced. Y mandamos que sobre ello se den nuestras cartas a quienquiera que las pidiera para el cumplimiento de ello (p. 40). 8. ‘‘de mejor condición es el varon que la muger en muchas cosas, e en muchas maneras, assi como se muestra abiertamente en las leyes de los Titulos de este nuestro libro, que fablan en todas estas razones sobredichas.’’ Partida 4, título XXIII, ley 2. 9. I am availing myself here of both Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española; and Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico; as well as Enrique Alcaraz Varó and Brian Hughes, Diccionario de términos jurídicos: Inglésespañol-spanish-english, 6th ed. (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 2002). 10. Volumen complementario, p. 301. 11. The link between Grisóstomo and St. John Chrysostom has been pointed out earlier by critics. Anthony Cascardi mentions that the names of the two main charac-

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ters in this episode derive from the hagiographic tradition: ‘‘Like his friend Ambrosio, Grisóstomo bears a saintly name; they recall Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Ambrose’’ (Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997], p. 229). Carroll Johnson had already noted the irony in Cervantes’ naming of Grisóstomo: ‘‘To say the least, Chrysostom goes well beyond Saint Paul in recommending celibacy over marriage. His work enjoyed great influence, and On Virginity is one of the standard sources of support for the dogma of the virginity of Mary. The name of Marcela’s ill-fated lover, in other words, leads the reader, through an ironical Cervantine about-face to an unimpeachable source of justification for the life-style that Marcela herself as adopted’’ (Madness and Lust, p. 97). 12. See Herman Iventosch, ‘‘Cervantes and Courtly Love: The Grisóstomo-Marcela Episode of Don Quijote,’’ PMLA 89 (1974), pp. 64–76. In a subsequent issue there was an exchange of letters on the matter between Iventosch and Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce. 13. This is what Robert Folger contends in his well-argued and researched Images in Mind: Love Sickness, Spanish Sentimental Fiction, and Don Quijote (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002). 14. Ibid. 15. Frederick de Armas has skillfully teased out of the poem not only the Virgilian elements derived from the pastoral, but even some that seem to reflect the Aeneid, which gives it an unsuspected epic cast (‘‘Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel: The Portrayal of a Literary Career,’’ in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002], pp. 268–85). This adds value to the ‘‘Canción desesperada’’ because it thickens its field of allusion to a pagan classical world within which Grisóstomo’s suicide is more congruent and increases his heterodox daring. But, to my mind, the ‘‘Canción’’ remains a hackneyed Renaissance poem. 16. There are two excellent articles on Don Quijote’s and Marcela’s speeches: Mary Mackey, ‘‘Rhetoric and Characterization in Don Quijote,’’ Hispanic Review 42 (1974), pp. 51–66; Thomas R. Hart and Steven Rendall, ‘‘Rhetoric and Persuasion in Marcela’s Address to the Shepherds,’’ Hispanic Review 46 (1978), pp. 287–98. 17. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 173–74. 18. Hart and Rendall, ‘‘Rhetoric and Persuasion in Marcela’s Address to the Shepherds,’’ p. 296. 19. Muerte civil meant that the person lost all rights, except the right to will property after death. Through it the individual ceased to exist for the law.

Chapter 6. Broken Tales 1. Vicente Gaos, ‘‘El Quijote y las novelas interpoladas,’’ in his Claves de la literatura española (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1971), pp. 189–90. 2. I am following these books about the case: Andrea Peyser, Mother Love, Deadly Love: The Susan Smith Murders (New York: Harper, 1995); George Rekers, Susan Smith: Victim or Murderer? (Lakewood, Colo.: Glenbridge, 1996); Linda H. Russell and Shirley Stephens, My Daughter Susan Smith (Brentwood, Tenn.: Authors Book Nook, 2000).

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Notes to Pages 97–105

3. Anthony G. Armsterdam and Jerome Bruner, Minding the Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 4. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 5. Edward Dudley writes the following about Cardenio’s injunction against interruptions: ‘‘as he proceeds it becomes evident that the real reason is that he is autistic and wants above all not to be challenged in his dubious interpretation of the events. Only in this way can he continue to blame fate (suerte) for what has happened. In reality the events were all of his own making.’’ ‘‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque,’’ p. 132. 6. Dudley maintains that Luscinda is not a virgin, that she and Cardenio had ‘‘physical communications’’ before they met Don Fernando (ibid., p. 133). I see no evidence of this. When Cardenio says that Luscinda cannot marry another because she is already his wife, he means that they are betrothed to each other, not that they have consummated their love. It seems to me out of character that the fainthearted Cardenio would have gone as far as to deflower Luscinda. 7. Francisco Rodríguez Marín, ed., El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Atlas, 1947), 2, pp. 339–40n27. 8. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, tr. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965 [French original 1961]). 9. ‘‘But in fact he [Cardenio] is an anti-Don Juan, a lover who has isolated himself from his beloved, and this is the basis of his neurotic attraction for Fernando, the real Don Juan. Both these young men are depicted by Cervantes as having serious sexual hang-ups, and their none-too-healthy attraction for one another stems from their weakness.’’ Dudley, ‘‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque,’’ p. 129. 10. Partida II, título XV, ley 2. The Partidas already argue that favoring the firstborn male in matters of inheritance, particularly of kingdoms, prevents the properties’ dismemberment and weakening. See Alfonso el Sabio, Las siete partidas, II, pp. 173–74. 11. Partida V, título V, ley 2. 12. The legislation on mayorazgos in Cervantes’ time had been laid out in the Nueva recopilación of 1567. I am using the copy of this recopilación in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, contained in the Repertorio de la Nueva Recopilación, published by Diego de Atienza in 1571. There is a more accessible reprint of the 1640 recopilación published by Editorial Lex Nova (Valladolid, 1982), in five volumes, where the legislation on mayorazgos from the 1567 recopilación is reprinted (2, pp. 12–16). 13. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 103. 14. Rodríguez Marín, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, 2, p. 230. 15. Diccionario de la lengua española (Madrid: Real Academia Española—Espasa Calpe, 1956), pp. 1, 186. 16. It may be well to recall here the already quoted passage by Kagan: ‘‘Virginity, for example, was a highly prized asset for girls seeking a suitable marriage, yet court records of the Habsburg era indicate that countless young women, often under the ‘promise of marriage,’ surrendered ‘their flower and virginity’ to some insistent male. Such promises, then as now, were easily broken; the difference is that it was customary in the sixteenth

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century for the dishonored girl, through the offices of her father, brother, or guardian, to bring the man responsible into court. . . . the accused was given the alternative of either marrying the girl or providing her with a dowry sufficiently large as to render her attractive to other prospective mates.’’ Lawsuits and Litigants, p. 240. 17. See Zaderenko, ‘‘El procedimiento judicial de riepto entre nobles y la fecha de composición de la Historia roderici y el Poema de mío Cid.’’Riepto means to tell again the story of the insult. Covarrubias devotes two brief entries to it in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española: ‘‘riepto: Es según la ley de partida ‘acusamiento que faze un fidalgo a otro por corte, profaçandol de la traición o del aleve que le hizo; e tomó este nombre del riepto, que es una palabra de latín que quiere dezir recontar otra vez la cosa, diziendola la manera como la fizo, etc.’ Demanera que la ley le da la etymología del verbo repeto, is, vide supra verbo repto’’ (p. 910). ‘‘repto: Acusación que pone un hidalgo contra otro de alevosía; porque le haze culpado y reo se dixo reptar, y tal acusación repto. Es término castellano antiguo, de que usan nuestras corónicas y las leyes de la partida, las quales le dan otra etymología’’ (pp. 905–6). Tomás y Valiente explains that the crown made such duels unlawful to preserve for itself the right to punish and further harness in the nobility by reducing their rights, but that it was unsuccessful and both kinds of recourse survived together in the sixteenth century: ‘‘Lo más frecuente era la venganza privada. Con lo cual el binomio ofensa-venganza privada, propio de las sociedades no controladas por un poder público fuerte y eficaz detentador del ius puniendi; coexistía con la teoría y legal pareja de conceptos delito-pena. He aquí una de las profundas contradicciones de aquella sociedad regida por la Monarquía Absoluta.’’ El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 48. The Council of Trent also prohibited the riepto, canon 19, 25 session. Don Quijote invokes his ‘‘right’’ to riepto in the Dueña Rodríguez episode in Part II. 18. Herrero, Dudley, and Allen all speak in one form or another of the redemption brought about by Don Quijote at the inn. Dudley observes that only the conflicts that are brought to the inn find resolution. Herrero gives this a religious dimension. I have trouble taking this seriously because Don Quijote is, after all, a ridiculous madman, and while it could be argued that God’s providence is so pervasive and mysterious as to bring about redemption through the agency of such a character, the opposite could also be argued: that providence, chance, or whatever determines the course of events is a serendipitous, comic force that does characteristically have its way in such laughable fashion. I have trouble finding much solemnity and piety in the Quijote, without my denying that it is a profoundly Christian book. See John J. Allen, ‘‘The Providential World of Cervantes’ Fiction,’’ Thought 55, no. 217 (1980), pp. 184–95; Dudley, ‘‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque’’; and Herrero, ‘‘Sierra Morena as Labyrinth.’’ 19. Herrero, ‘‘Sierra Morena as Labyrinth,’’ p. 55. 20. Luis A. Murillo, ‘‘El Ur-Quijote, nueva hipótesis,’’ Cervantes 1 (1981), pp. 43–50; María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002). The latter is by far the most complete and compelling study of Cervantes’ captivity and its relation to his work. But it seems to me reductive to propose, using ‘‘trauma theory,’’ that the experience in Algiers accounts for Cervantes’ development into an author and much less to explain the Quijote. There were thousands of captives in Algiers, but only one wrote the masterpiece. Cervantes’ turn to the

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autobiographical toward the end of the book is one more way of including himself in the fiction to create his favored infinitely receding sequence and also to state obliquely that even those truths that we think closest to us because they pertain to our lives can become fiction, or are indeed fictions. Garcés’s book, nevertheless, is very valuable to appreciate the historical, cultural, and political background of the captive’s tale. 21. Ciriaco Morón Arroyo criticizes Francisco Márquez Villanueva’s interpretation, who claims that Zoraida, a typically Cervantean character, exercises her desire for freedom within a religious context but not motivated by religion. Religion—that is, becoming a Christian—allows her to be free, even at the expense of bringing grief to her father, Agi Morato. Morón Arroyo claims, on the contrary, that the whole tale takes place within very precise theological guidelines, which he puts forth by quoting (mostly) from Saint Thomas Aquinas. His point is that the issue of baptism is dealt with in a very strictly theological way (she has not been baptized because she has not been in mortal danger, and the baptism of adults should take place after learning about the faith, except if faced by a life-threatening danger). The same is true, he maintains, regarding Zoraida’s use of her father’s wealth and her leaving him behind in grief. Conversion to Christianity justified any break with natural relations of kinship, if these came into conflict with the duty to convert that anyone who had heard about the Christian doctrine had. All of this sounds plausible, but it is hard to imagine Cervantes as a theologian, and much less as a Scholastic theologian. See Morón Arroyo’s ‘‘La historia del cautivo y el sentido del Quijote,’’ Iberoromania (Tubingen), no. 18 neue folge (1983), pp. 91–105. Márquez Villanueva’s study is contained in his Personajes y temas del ‘‘Quijote’’ (Madrid: Taurus, 1975). 22. Volumen complementario, pp. 316–17. 23. Edward Dudley, The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics of Romance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 260. 24. The last ‘‘episode’’ of the book is the ‘‘prologue.’’ Read from next to last page of ‘‘Prólogo,’’ which gives the text a circularity and self-enclosed character—there is no outside authority to determine its shape.

Chapter 7. The Politics of Love and Law 1. See the introduction to Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. F. García Salinero (Madrid: Castalia, 1987), p. 31. 2. Dudley, ‘‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque,’’ p. 119. 3. Raymond R. MacCurdy and Alfred Rodríguez, ‘‘Algo más sobre la visitación subterránea de Sancho Panza,’’ Crítica hispánica 3, no. 2 (1981), pp. 141–47. They write: ‘‘El paralelo que estudiamos, con ofrecer una curiosa ‘parodia de una parodia,’ resulta, asimismo, una manera de espejo reflector de todo el proceso creativo de Cervantes en su obra maestra’’ (p. 143). And also: ‘‘Cervantes elabora con la ‘aventura’ sanchopancesca—por lo menos para el lector que recoja todos los indicios que siembra el novelista—una innovadora y, a la vez, socarrona ‘re-parodia-. Con ello toca el gran novelista, adrede, los límites estéticos de su propio proceder artístico. Pues límite de la creación paródica parece ser, y límite innovador e insuperable, una ‘auto-parodia’ que es, además, ‘parodia de una parodia’ ’’ (p. 145).

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4. The irrepressible Covarrubias has the following to say under alvedrio: ‘‘Y otras vezes arbitrio vale tanto como parecer que uno da; y el día de oy ase estrechado a significar una cosa bien perjudicial, que es dar traças como sacar dineros y destruir el Reyno; porque de ordinario los que dan estos arbirtrios son gente perdida. Verdad es que a estos tales pocas vezes se les da oydos, porque como ha de pasar el arbitrio por hombres de ciencia y de conciencia, se los rechaçan, y entre otros males que hazen es acovardar a los que podrían darlos, por el mal nombre que han puesto a este genero de suplir necessidades y remediar faltas.’’ Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 108. 5. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 294. For Elliott’s more recent and exhaustive treatment of Spain’s problems see his The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in the Age of Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 6. Elias Rivers, ‘‘Cervantes y Garcilaso,’’ Homenaje a José Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Gredos, 1983), pp. 565–70. Rivers sees the presence of Garcilaso as part of a retrenchment into a kind of classicism. These are the allusions to Garcilaso in Part II: in chapter 8 there is an allusion to Garcilaso’s ‘‘Egloga III’’; in chapter 12, the sonnet that the Caballero del Bosque recites is very Garcilasian; Lorenzo de Miranda is a poet in the Garcilaso mold in chapter 18; in chapter 46, Don Quijote’s own poems sound very much like Garcilaso; in chapter 58, the Arcadians are prepared to do a reading of a Garcilaso eclogue; in chapter 69, during Altisidora’s ‘‘funeral,’’ a whole stanza from ‘‘Egloga III’’ is inserted in the poem read out loud, and when in the next chapter the musician is quizzed about this he practically says that Garcilaso is part of a general poetic discourse, and hence need not be acknowledged as source. 7. See Manuel Durán, La ambigüedad en el ‘‘Quijote’’ (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1960). 8. See my ‘‘Cervantes y la narrativa hispanoamericana moderna: Borges y Carpentier,’’ Unión (Havana), año 10, no. 37 (1999), pp. 4–13. This essay is incorporated into the last chapter of the present book. 9. Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes. Anejos de la Revista de Filología Española—Anejo VI (Madrid: Imprenta de la Librería y Casa Editorial Hernando, 1925), p. 249. 10. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, 4, p. 44. 11. See Helmut Hatzfeld, ‘‘Baroque Style: Ideology and the Arts,’’ Bucknell Review 7, no. 2 (1975); pp. 71–79; also my Celestina’s Brood and ‘‘Los dos finales de La vida es sueño: Una lectura cervantina,’’ in Literatura y pensamiento en España: Estudios en honor de Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, ed. Francisco La Rubia-Prado (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003), pp. 55–75. 12. José J. Arrom, Esquema generacional de las letras hispanoamericanas: Ensayo de un método, 2nd ed. (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1977), p. 66. 13. See chapters 2 and 3 of Ciriaco Morón Arroyo’s Nuevas meditaciones del ‘‘Quijote’’ (Madrid: Gredos, 1976), pp. 58–159. Morón Arroyo traces convincingly the pervasiveness of Neoscholastic discourse in the period and its echoes in Cervantes’ prose. I am less convinced by the underlying thesis of his book that the Quijote is shot through with Neoscholasticism. 14. See my Myth and Archive.

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15. Richard M. Morse, ‘‘Political Foundations,’’ in Man and Society in Latin American History, ed. Sheldon B. Liss and Peggy K. Liss (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 72–78. 16. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 17. Helmut Hatzfeld has noticed that Velázquez liked to paint people at work, as in Las hilanderas and La fragua de Vulcano. See his excellent ‘‘Artistic Parallels in Cervantes and Velázquez,’’ Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1952), 3, pp. 265–97. 18. Manuel Durán, Cervantes (New York: Twayne, 1974), p. 107. 19. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 20. Simone Pinet, ‘‘El Amadís de Gaula como arte de marear: En torno a la ínsola non fallada,’’ Medievalia 31 (June 2000), pp. 23–35. 21. Anthony Grafton, April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 1. 22. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, tr. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage, 1946), p. 67. 23. Ibid., 69. 24. Ibid. 25. The fullest treatment of this is in Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares.

Chapter 8. A Marriage Made in Heaven 1. Stanislav Zimic, ‘‘El ‘engaño a los ojos’ en las Bodas de Camacho del Quijote,’’ Hispania 55 (1972), p. 882. 2. I quote from Rolfe Humphries’ translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), p. 3. 3. John Sinnigen, ‘‘Themes and Structures in the ‘Bodas de Camacho,’ ’’ Modern Language Notes 84, no. 2 (1969), pp. 167–68. 4. I am following, almost translating, and paraphrasing Marcel Bataillon, ‘‘Cervantes y el matrimonio cristiano,’’ in his Varia lección de clásicos españoles (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), pp. 238–55. 5. But clandestine marriages had been forbidden since the Leyes de Toro of 1505, issued under the Catholic kings. Here is the text of the law, incorporated into subsequent ‘‘Recopilaciones’’: ‘‘Mandamos que el contraxere matrimonio, que la yglesia tuuiere por clandestino con alguna muger, que por el mismo fecho el y los que en ello interuinieren, y los que de tal matrimonio fueren testigos, incurran en perdimiento de todos sus bienes, y sean aplicados a nuestra camara y fisco, y sean desterrados destos nuestros reynos, en los quales no entren sopena de muerte. y que esta sea justa causa para el padre y la madre puedan deseredar si quisieren a sus hijos, o hijas, que el tal matrimonio contraxeren, en lo qual otro ninguno no pueda acusar, sino el padre: y la madre, muerto el padre.’’ I quote from Repertorio de la Nueva recopilacion de las leyes del Reyno, hecho por el Licenciado, Diego de Atiença, con privilegio. Impreso en Alcalá, en casa de Andres de Angulo, Año de 1571. This volume contains the 1567 Recopilación, with indices compiled by Diego de Atienza. The text quoted is from libro quinto, título primero, ‘‘De los casa-

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mientos,’’ p. 280. It is reproduced, with minor changes, in Recopilación de las leyes de estos reynos [1640], 2, p. 2, recto. As with ‘‘riepto,’’ the crown wanted to exercise control over all social commerce, while the people, probably the aristocrats, wanted the freedom to do as they pleased. 6. Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, pp. 376–78n74. 7. This is also the opinion of Crisanto Rodríguez-Arango Díaz in his exhaustive ‘‘El matrimonio clandestino en la novela cervantina,’’ Anuario de historia del derecho español 25, no. 1 (1955), pp. 731–74. 8. See the probing discussion of this concept in Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 9. For England see Frederick S. Boas, Ovid and the Elizabethans (London: English Association, 1947). 10. Rudolph Schevill, Ovid and the Renascence in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1913). 11. Angulo Iñiguez, La mitología y el arte español del renacimiento, p. 9. This monograph is particularly informative about painting and the decorative arts. See also Angulo’s more narrowly focused ‘‘Velázquez y la mitología,’’ III centenario de la muerte de Velázquez conmemorado por el Instituto de España (Madrid: Imprenta de Editorial Magisterio Español, 1961), pp. 49–62; and Hatzfeld’s ‘‘Artistic Parallels in Cervantes and Velázquez.’’ 12. Angulo Iñiguez, La mitología y el arte español del renacimiento, p. 11. 13. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘‘Tres cuadros del vino (Tiziano, Poussin y Velázquez),’’ Obras completas (Madrid: Alianza Editorial-Revista de Occidente, 1983), 2, p. 58. A different view is expressed by Diego Angulo Iñiguez, who maintains that Velázquez simply turns his back on the idealization of pagan gods typical of the Renaissance but does not mock them. See his ‘‘Velázquez y la mitología.’’ 14. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 66. 15. Ibid., 74. 16. Ibid., 253. 17. John J. Allen and Patricia Finch, ‘‘Don Quijote en el pensamiento de Occidente: Una selección,’’ in En un lugar de La Mancha: Estudios cervantinos en honor de Manuel Durán, ed. Georgina Dopico Black and Roberto González Echevarría (Salamanca: Colegio de España, 1999), pp. 23–35.

Chapter 9. Love and National Unity 1. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 186. 2. Angel González Palencia, ‘‘Cervantes y los moriscos,’’ Boletín de la Real Academia Española (Número especial para conmemorar el cuarto centenario del nacimiento de Cervantes), 27 (1947–48), p. 115. 3. Márquez Villanueva, ‘‘El morisco Ricote o la hispana razón de estado,’’ in his Personajes y temas del ‘‘Quijote,’’ pp. 229–335. This piece contains a great amount of useful information, but it is marred by the author’s perspective, which is that of a critic of

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modern Spain as a projection of the Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the theories of Américo Castro. According to this view Cervantes could not have had but a negative opinion of the expulsion, being, as Márquez Villanueva anachronistically calls him, ‘‘un liberal instintivo’’ (p. 305). Ricote’s statement praising the man in charge of enforcing the order of expulsion causes Márquez Villanueva great distress and leads him to distortions such as the one just quoted. 4. Salillas, ‘‘La criminalidad y la penalidad en el Quijote.’’ 5. Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 227–28. 6. Luce López-Baralt, ‘‘The Moriscos,’’in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Saymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 476. 7. Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. ‘‘turco. Esta nación es más conocida de lo que avíamos menester, por aver venido a señorear tan gran parte del orbe; gente baxa y de malas costumbres, que vivían de robar y maltratar a los demás. . . . Ay historias particulares desta gente. El padre fray Gerónimo Román en la República de los Turcos haze mención de su origen y etymología, diziendo averse llamado turcos, porque se davan a robar y vivían como bárvaros, y eran muy pobres y no les parecía hazer agravio a nadie tomando lo ageno’’ (p. 983). 8. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 232. 9. As quoted by Márquez Villanueva, Personajes y temas del ‘‘Quijote,’’ p. 264. 10. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Flor nueva de romances viejos, 19th ed. (Madrid: Austral, 1973), p. 54. 11. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Orígenes de la novela, ed. Enrique Sánchez Reyes (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaeines Científicas, 1961), 2, pp. 90–91. 12. For the potential influence of this book on the genesis of the Quijote see Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘‘Don Quixote: Story or History?’’ Modern Philology 53 (1965), pp. 1–11.

Chapter 10. The Exemplariness of the Exemplary Stories 1. ‘‘y es así, que yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana.’’ Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1982), 1, p. 4. All quotations in the text are from this edition. ‘‘I am the first to write short stories [novellas] in Castilian.’’ Exemplary Stories, tr. and ed. Lesley Lipson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 5. This volume does not contain ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ which I quote from Spanish Stories and Tales, ed. Harriet de Onís (New York: Pocket Library, 1956), pp. 24–43. The translation is by Harriet de Onís. 2. Avalle-Arce writes: ‘‘el método de composición cervantino implicaba escribir varias obras a la vez, al menos en sus últimos años.’’ Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1970), p. 46n10. El Saffar’s teleology leads her to the unacceptable notion that Cervantes’ whole work was moving from a realistic novel form to an idealistic, romance-style one, which would seem to have things backward. The romance form, culminating in the Persiles, would be the completion of a religious itinerary that took Cervantes from skepticism to belief. See From Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’s ‘‘Novelas ejemplares’’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

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3. See my introduction to The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 3–22. 4. Américo Castro, ‘‘La ejemplaridad de las novelas cervantinas,’’ in Hacia Cervantes, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 1967), pp. 451–74. 5. Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Stories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 6. Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘‘La eutrapelia en las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes,’’ Actas del séptimo congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Giuseppe Bellini (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1982), pp. 153–69. 7. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, introduction to Novelas ejemplares, I, p. 25. 8. Durán, Cervantes, pp. 71–72. 9. See list provided by Ruth El Saffar in her From Novel to Romance, p. 128n21. 10. The process of discovery and its relation to trauma anticipates Freud’s theories of the uncanny in his well-known essay ‘‘The ‘Uncanny,’ ’’ in Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), pp. 122–61. 11. Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta, p. 361. 12. Francisco Tomás y Valiente, ‘‘El perdón de la parte ofendida en el derecho penal castellano (siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII),’’ Anuario de historia del derecho español 31 (1961), p. 70. 13. Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, pp. 354–97; and John J. Allen, ‘‘ ‘El Cristo de la Vega’ and ‘La fuerza de la sangre,’ ’’ Modern Language Notes 83, no. 2 (1968), pp. 271–75. R. P. Calgraft also offers a religious interpretation in his ‘‘Structure, Symbol, and Meaning in Cervantes’ ‘La fuerza de la sangre,’ ’’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 58 (1981), pp. 197–203. 14. This is the reason ‘‘feminist’’ interpretations of the story, such as Marcia L. Welles’s and Rosilie Hernández Pecoraro’s, do not reach the disturbing core of the story, which is not precisely a moral one, as they would wish. The same is true of Edward Friedman’s reading, which is based on a bourgeois sense of what is right that is irrelevant to ‘‘The Call of the Blood,’’ where evil is a force beyond the ethical. See Marcia L. Welles, ‘‘Rape and Resolution of Class Conflict: Cervantes’ ‘La fuerza de la sangre,’ ’’ in her Persephone’s Girdle: Narratives of Rape in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), pp. 39–50; Rosilie Hernández Pecoraro, ‘‘La fuerza del amor or the Power of Self-Love: Zayas’ Response to Cervantes’ ‘La fuerza de la sangre,’ ’’ Hispanic Review 70 (2002), pp. 39–57; Edward Friedman, ‘‘ ‘La fuerza de la sangre’ and the Rhetoric of Power,’’ in Cervantes’ ‘‘Exemplary Novels’’ and the Adventure of Writing, ed. Michael Nerlich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1989), pp. 125–56. 15. Ivo Domínguez notes that Luisico’s smaternal grandparents’ efforts to educate him stem from their knowledge that, because of inheritance laws, they would not be able to will him much of their already meager fortune. It is another instance that shows Cervantes’ familiarity with current legislation. See his El derecho como recurso literario en las novelas ejemplares de Cervantes, p. 54. Alvarez Vigaray adds further details in El derecho civil en la obra de Cervantes, pp. 162–63.

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16. It is remarkable that Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz) finds the moonlight the most memorable element in the story. See his ‘‘Al margen de la fuerza de la sangre,’’ in Con Cervantes (Buenos Aires: Austral, 1947), pp. 38–40. 17. Kagan writes: ‘‘Although some humanist thinkers, notably Juan Luis Vives (1492– 1540), acknowledged the importance of education in helping to mold a man’s character and wit, most Castilians believed otherwise; nature, not nurture, was the key to character, intelligence, and personality. Blood determined a man’s good qualities as well as his bad ones.’’ Lawsuits and Litigants, pp. 194–95. 18. David M. Gitlitz, ‘‘Symmetry and Lust in Cervantes’ ‘La fuerza de la sangre,’ ’’ in Studies in Honor of Everett W. Hesse, ed. William C. McCrary and José A. Madrigal (Lincoln, Neb.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1981), p. 121.

Chapter 11. The Bride Who Never Was and Her Brood 1. In my view Claudio Guillén inaugurates the modern approach to these novels in ‘‘Toward a Definition of the Picaresque’’ and ‘‘Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque.’’ I have written on the matter in ‘‘The Life and Adventures of Cipión: Cervantes and the Picaresque,’’ in Celestina’s Brood, pp. 45–65. The bibliography on the subject is immense so I will allude only to items relevant to my discussion. In general, the most important studies are by Pamela Waley, ‘‘The Unity of the ‘Casamiento engañoso’ and ‘Coloquio de los perros,’’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 34 (1975), pp. 201–12; Ruth El Saffar, ‘‘El casamiento engañoso’’ y ‘‘El coloquio de los perros,’’ Critical Guide to Spanish Texts 17 (London: Grant and Cutler, 1976); E. C. Riley, ‘‘Cervantes, Freud, and Psychoanalytic Narrative Theory,’’ Modern Language Review 88 (1993), pp. 1–14; Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of ‘‘El casamiento engañoso’’ and ‘‘El coloquio de los perros’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Galen Brokaw, ‘‘Holistic Fiction: Cervantes’ ‘El casamiento engañoso’ and ‘El coloquio de los perros,’ ’’ Romance Languages Annual 10 (1999), pp. 460–66. The most thorough among these is Forcione’s thickly contextualized and tightly argued study of the two Cervantes stories under discussion here. As in his work on other works by Cervantes, Forcione provides a wealth of pertinent information regarding doctrinal, philosophical, and theological writings of the period against which he pits the stories. The overarching ideological mantle is the pith of form, which is predictably that of romance and drawn from miracle stories where shape and belief coalesce in the cultural imagination. This form is temporarily unsettled by Cervantes’ tales, only to be reconstituted even if only in a virtual or proleptic fashion. Forcione’s work is extremely helpful but, to my mind, off the mark because he assumes a Cervantes obsessed with theological issues (being part of a fanatically Catholic Spain) and shuffling narrative genres handed down by Renaissance tradition (satire, romance, and so on), as if deciding which one to use or parody. Lawlessness is tantamount to disorder in an abstract way not related, as I try to do in this book, to actual laws. To my mind, Cervantes’ take on the picaresque and on literature in general is more independent of religious concerns and of literature itself as conceived by authors still under the sway of Renaissance ideals. In other words, my Cervantes is more lay and modern in his conception of narrative fiction. In saying this I by no means wish to devalue Forcione’s distinguished work, from which I profit more than I probably know.

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2. Salillas, ‘‘La criminalidad y la penalidad en el Quijote.’’ 3. For a convincing expansion of these ideas, see Giancarlo Maiorino’s At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). 4. See ‘‘Originality: The New Literary Genres,’’ in Green’s Spain and the Western Tradition. 5. Leo Spitzer, ‘‘Linguistic Perspectivism in the Don Quijote,’’in Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays, ed. Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 225–71. The piece was originally published in 1948. 6. Auerbach, ‘‘The Enchanted Dulcinea,’’ in Mimesis, pp. 334–58. 7. Quotes of the original and translation are from Novelas ejemplares, ed. Avalle-Arce; Exemplary Stories, tr. Lipson. 8. María Rosa Menocal, ‘‘Life Itself: Storytelling as the Tradition of Openness in the Conde Lucanor,’’ in Oral Tradition and Hispanic Literature: Essays in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, ed. John Miles Foley and Mishael M. Caspi (New York: Garland Press, 1995), pp. 469–95. 9. Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 314. 10. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 5, p. 751. 11. My friend and Yale colleague Mercedes Carreras, a Spanish lawyer, tells me that because of the false information wilfully furnished by the bride and groom the marriage could be annulled according to still-current legislation in Spain. Other crimes committed by Estefanía include her illegal occupation of the house and the injury (syphilis) that she inflicted upon Campuzano. According to canon law the marriage was also invalid. All this applied too in the time of Cervantes. 12. The falsification of family relations is what this story has in common with ‘‘The Pretended Aunt,’’ of course. It not only constituted a fraud, it was a crime by virtue of the fact that blood ties are at the foundation of many legal relations. The fake aunt, a Celestina type like the witches in ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs,’’ uses her fake niece, passing her off as a virgin by performing restorative surgeries on her. In so doing she is also falsifying one of the most important assets a woman had, particularly if she planned to marry. 13. E. C. Riley was the first to show that the dialogic setting of the story—the frame dialogue and the story itself—is very much like a psychoanalytic session. He begins by recalling Freud’s own fondness for this Cervantean tale, and suggests that in this (as in other cases), literature not only anticipated psychoanalysis but actually influenced its development. Riley goes on to demonstrate how the episode recounting the birth of the dogs from the witch fits with Freudian notions of the ‘‘primal scene.’’ But Riley is not willing to take the step of saying that the whole thing—both ‘‘The Deceitful Marriage’’ and ‘‘The Dialogue of the Dogs’’—is Campuzano’s autobiography, though he does ask: ‘‘Recalling that the colloquy has been written down by Campuzano and by Cervantes, one might well ask: whose autobiography is it anyway.’’ ‘‘Cervantes, Freud, and Psychoanalytic Narrative Theory,’’ p. 8. 14. Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 933. 15. Mary Gaylord has noted that figures of the author in Cervantes are consistently

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characters with one or several flaws and of dubious authority. See her ‘‘Cervantes’ Portrait of the Artist,’’ Cervantes 3, no. 2 (1983), pp. 83–102. 16. Riley, ‘‘Cervantes, Freud, and Phsychoanalytic Narrative Theory.’’

Chapter 12. Cervantes’ Literary Will 1. Miguel de Cervantes, Obras completas, ed. Angel Valbuena Prat (Madrid: Aguilar, 1962), p. 181 (my translation). 2. From The Adventures of Don Quixote, tr. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1950), p. 466. Smollett’s translation does not include this text. 3. Durán, Cervantes, p. 174. 4. ‘‘El Persiles, testamento de Cervantes, nos lo muestra profundamente preocupado por la apasionante cuestión de la verdad de la historia que relata.’’ Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, tr. Antonio Alatorre (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), p. 780. 5. Dudley, ‘‘The Wild Man Goes Baroque,’’p. 116. 6. Durán, Cervantes, pp. 155–56. 7. Menéndez Pelayo, ‘‘Cultura literaria de Miguel de Cervantes y la elaboración del Quijote,’’ in Discurso acerca de Cervantes y el Quijote leído en la Universidad Central, el 8 de mayo de 1905 (Madrid: Librería Cutenberg de José Ruiz, 1905), p. 14. 8. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘‘Persiles’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘‘Persiles y Sigismunda’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 9. Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de ‘‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’’ (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1947). Entwistle’s review appeared in Modern Language Review 43 (1948), pp. 426–29. 10. Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 58. 11. Forcione Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘‘Persiles,’’ 3. 12. Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 5–6. 13. Eduardo González, ‘‘ ‘Erase una vez una isla obstinada. . . ,’ ’’ in La persona y el relato: Proyecto de lectura psicoanalítica (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1985), pp. 107–52. 14. Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘‘Persiles and Sigismunda’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 252. 15. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature, p. 123. 16. Miguel de Cervantes, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story, tr. Celia Richmond Weller and Clark A. Colahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 17; Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, pp. 51–52.

Chapter 13. The Novel after Cervantes 1. On Balzac’s legal training and its influence on the Comédie humaine, see Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 167–68.

Notes to Pages 233–236

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2. I am quoting from the following editions. ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote,’’ in Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), pp. 88–95; ‘‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,’’ Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), pp. 444–50. (The story was first collected in Ficciones (1944), but it is signed ‘‘Nîmes, 1939’’) The Harp and the Shadow, tr. Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1990); El arpa y la sombra (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1979). 3. Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World, ed. with a new introduction by Rolena Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 307. 4. For the background of this see Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to ‘‘Don Quixote’’: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in ‘‘Quixote’’ Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 5. Of course I am referring only to Spanish-speaking Latin America. A more comprehensive treatment would have to include Machado de Assis’s Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas, whose playful narrator is perhaps the most direct descendant of Don Quijote’s. I have studied the link between the Spanish and Latin American baroque in Celestina’s Brood. 6. See my ‘‘Carpentier, crítico de la literatura hispanoamericana: Asturias y Borges,’’in Isla a su vuelo fugitiva: Ensayos críticos sobre literatura hispanoamericana (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1983), pp. 179–203. 7. I am quoting from ‘‘Nota sobre el Quijote,’’in Páginas de Jorge Luis Borges, seleccionadas por el autor, estudio preliminar de Alicia Jurado (Buenos Aires: Editorial Celta, 1982), p. 175. See also ‘‘Magias parciales del Quijote,’’ in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), p. 667. 8. But beyond this, as an approach, perhaps even as a method, I prefer to derive my readings of texts and plot literary history from what I conceive as the readings of an earlier text performed by a later one: Cobra of Celestina, for instance. I do not see such critical rewritings as anxious misreadings in a struggle for an ever elusive and undefinable originality, as does my truly dear friend and colleague Harold Bloom. I view them, instead, as homages to the tradition, celebrations of the still living and currently relevant (vigentes) elements of a classical text. I understand these rather as instances of sheltering and legitimation that reactivate the classic, under whose aegis and guise the new text emerges. I much prefer the readings embedded in the new literary text than the work by writers turned critics about the classics (I like Terra Nostra infinitely more than Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura). I would not deny that my preference may be due to the need for my critical intervention to draw out the reading that one literary text performs on another. But it also stems from my deep-seated belief that there is an unspoken core in each text, unchartable in all its extension, whose prime mover (whose combinatorial search engine, one would say today) is the recycling of earlier texts motivated by new circumstances. The initial anxiety comes not from the facticity of tradition, but from a need to fend off the new with the shield of the old, true, and tried: to defuse the threatening now by subsuming it into some old myth whose efficacy has stood the trial of the ages, which is the role mythology and religion play in traditional societies. The new text finds the current, surviving aspects of the old and allows them to live again in itself, as itself. This is

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a critical act, act having here for me the meaning of performance, séance, función, show. In some privileged texts, like the Quijote, or ‘‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,’’ the process that I have been describing is thematized, becoming the story itself. 9. ‘‘When I later read Don Quijote in the original, it sounded like a bad translation to me,’’ writes Borges in the ‘‘Autobiographical Essay,’’ quoted in Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York: Dutton, 1978), p. 77. For Carpentier see my Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 10. I take this Rodríguez Larreta to be an allusion to Enrique Larreta, the Argentine novelist who in La gloria de don Ramiro attempted to write in the Spanish of Philip II’s Spain. Borges’s Menard is not interested in that kind of pastiche. 11. Rita de Maeseneer has charted and enumerated the many allusions to Cervantes and the Quijote is her excellent ‘‘Cervantes y Carpentier: Una lectura múltiple,’’ in Actas del II congreso internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas, ed. Giuseppe Grilli (Naples: Società Editrice Intercontinentale Gallo, 1995), pp. 817–30. De Maeseneer’s conclusion, with which I agree, is that ‘‘Un repaso de las menciones más fragmentarias en los demás ensayos corrobora esta conclusión, ya que Carpentier recurre a Cervantes para justificar sus propias ideas’’ (p. 827). 12. Frederick A. de Armas, ‘‘Metamorphosis as Revolt: Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda and Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo,’’ Hispanic Review 49 (1981), pp. 297– 316. 13. The association between Columbus and Cervantes had been made before. The two were seen as fortuitous discoverers who stumbled upon things they did not intend to find and whose significance was beyond their capacity to even understand. This association of the two is part of the ingenio lego label attached to Cervantes, the notion that he was a sort of untutored wit. Américo Castro did much to dispel this notion is his 1925 El pensamiento de Cervantes, and later scholars have abandoned the old saw of Cervantes as the natural talent devoid of learning. But the issue is really not closed, given that Cervantes himself, it seems to me, goes to great pains to show the gap between intention and result in his work. Ultimately no creator can be fully conscious of the ramifications or reach of his discovery. The same is true of Columbus. It would be too much to expect for one man to be responsible for the repercussions of a discovery as radical as his. 14. William Ilgen, ‘‘La configuración mítica de la historia en los Comentarios reales del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,’’ in Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana en honor a José J. Arrom, ed. Andrew P. Debicki and Enrique Pupo-Walker (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1974), pp. 37–46. 15. Juan Marinello, ‘‘Una novela cubana,’’ in his Literatura hispanoamericana: Hombres-meditaciones (Mexico City: Ediciones de la Universidad de Mexico, 1937), p. 171.

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Primary Works Cervantes, Miguel de. The Adventures of Don Quixote. Tr. J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1950. ———. ‘‘The Call of the Blood.’’ In Spanish Stories and Tales, tr. and ed. Harriet de Onís. New York: Pocket Library, 1956, pp. 24–43. ———. Don Quijote de La Mancha. Ed. Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes, 1998. The companion volume, called Volumen complementario, contains notes, commentaries, and bibliography. ———. Exemplary Stories. Tr. and ed. Lesley Lipson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. Tr. Tobias SmollettWare, Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1998 [1755]. ———. Novelas ejemplares. 3 vols. Ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1982. ———. Obras completas. Ed. Angel Valbuena Prat. Madrid: Aguilar, 1962. ———. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1970. ———. The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story. Tr. Celia Richmond Weller and Clark A. Colahan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Fernández de Avellaneda, Alonso. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. F. García Salinero. Madrid: Castalia, 1987.

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Index

Abat, Per, 21 Acosta, José de, 127 Aesop, 202 Al-Andalus, 161 Alemán, Mateo, see Guzmán de Alfarache. Alfonso VI, 17, 18 Alfonso X (The Wise), 3, 12, 22, 71, 72, 80, 101, 102, 143, 174, 181 Alford, John A., 19, 20, 21 Allen, John J., 150, 183–84 Álvarez Vigaray, Rafael, xix Amadís de Gaula, 36, 37, 41, 63, 99, 112 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 238 Arabs: invasion of Spain, 23 Arbitristas, 114 Archpriest of Hita (Juan Ruiz), see Libro de buen amor. Archive, xv, 3, 14, 15, 16, 29, 32, 37, 62, 100, 178, 206, 231, 232; repository of stories, 30

Archivo General del Reino (Simancas), 3, 27, 110, 119 Arenas, Reinaldo, 233 Ariosto, Ludovico, 69, 84, 160 Aristotle, 20, 62, 128, 157, 196, 249 Armas Wilson, Diana, 223, 224 Armsterdam, Anthony G., 97, 98 Arrom, José J., 118, 126 Astrana Marín, Luis, 178 Auerbach, Erich, xiv, 30, 200 Augustine, Saint, 56, 196, 248 Autos sacramentales, 81, 85 Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista, 176, 178 Avellaneda, Alonso Fernández de, 111, 112, 113, 128, 132, 149, 150, 151, 157 Avila, Juan de, 141 Bakhtin, M. M., 98 Balzac, Honoré de, 79, 232 Bandello, Matteo, 56

287

288

Index

Bandolerismo (brigandage), 64; in Catalonia, 164 Baroque, 1, 118, 126, 215, 224, 225, 226, 230, 235, 246 Bataille, Georges, xvi Bataillon, Marcel, xvi, 141, 215 Bloom, Harold, 249, 273 n. 8 Boccaccio, Giovanni, xviii, 1, 2, 31, 42, 56, 143, 176 Borges, Jorge Luis, xiv, xx, 95, 113, 117, 157, 175, 178, 221, 231–49 Bruner, Jerome, 97, 98 Byzantine romance, 160, 164, 171, 174, 177, 178, 217, 219, 228 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 3, 33, 44, 126, 142, 143, 222, 225 Canavaggio, Jean, xvi, xix, Capellanus, Andreas, 37, 42 Carpentier, Alejo, xiv; magical realism and the Persiles, 217, 231–49; Harp and the Shadow, 241–49; The Kingdom of This World, 217 Casalduero, Joaquín, 178, 219 Castiglione, Baldassare, 57 Castro, Américo, 117, 141, 177 Castro Dassen, Horacio N., xix, 33 Casuistry, 31, 32 Catholic kings (Ferdinand and Isabella), xiv, 3, 6, 24, 26, 34, 127, 143, 164, 166, 167, 197, 233, 243, 244 Celestina, La, xv, 2, 4, 18, 21, 28, 37, 47, 60, 177, 200, 211 Cervantes, Miguel de: autobiographical component of fiction, 34, 212; and Avellaneda, 112; Catholicism, 184; commissary officer (tax collector), xix, 81, 104; civil and penal profile, xx; death, 111, 132; documentos cervantinos, xx, 27; knowledge of the law, xix, 8, 68; Lepanto, 166; psychological sophistication, 106; theology 12; Works (other than the Quijote): ‘‘Call of the Blood,’’ 63, 155, 175–93, ‘‘Deceitful Marriage,’’ 177, 202–7,

‘‘Dialogue of the Dogs,’’ 33, 177, 207– 12, 243, ‘‘Divorce Court Judge,’’ 5, ‘‘English Spanish Woman,’’ 177, 180, Exemplary Stories, xix, 34, 57, 156, 163, 165, 175–78, 213, Galatea, 213, ‘‘Generous Lover,’’ 177, ‘‘Glass Graduate,’’ 178, 180, ‘‘ Jealous Man from Extremadura,’’ 42, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, 213, ‘‘Old Jealous Man,’’ 42, ‘‘Rinconete and Cortadillo,’’ 163, 178, 180, 199, Semanas del jardín, 213, Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, 133, 156, 160, 162, 165, 176, 200, 213–30, 239, Voyage to Parnassus, xix, 165, 241 Charles V, 8, 27, 102, 197, 230 Chateau d’Amour, 21 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2, 48 Chaves, Cristóbal de, 4, 28, 55, 198 Chivalric romances, 77, 131, 158, 174 Chrysostom, Saint John, 82 Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar), see Poema de Mío Cid. Civil death, 173 Clemencín, Diego de, 55 Cohecho (Corruption), 115, 125 Columbus, Christopher, xiv, 223, 227, 237, 241–49 Comedia (Spanish theater of the Golden Age), 3 Comedy, 5 Conrad, Joseph, 238 Convivencia, 23, 167 Copernicus, Nicholas, 117, 242, 243 Corominas, Joao, 58, 80 Corral, Pedro del, 168 Cortázar, Julio, 237 Cortés, Hernán, 223 Cortes de Madrigal, 3, 64 Council of Trent, 118, 137, 141, 142, 157 Count Don Julian, 167, 172 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, 9, 31, 80, 166, 209 Criminal: and authorship, 199, 201 Cueva, Juan de la, 143

Index D’Aquitaine, Eleanor, 37, 87, 110 Dante Alighieri, xviii, 1, 5, 35, 36, 37, 39, 52, 61, 62, 69, 87, 99, 130, 226, 227, 232, 238, 249 de Armas, Frederick A., 241 De Rougement, Denis, xvii, 2, 79 Descartes, René, 117, 124 Desengaño, 118, 127, 129 Despoblado, 6, 18, 25, 63, 64, 66, 69, 106, 131, 179, 181, 253 n.10 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 223 Dolce stil nuovo, 36 Domínguez, Ivo, xix Don Quijote: canonization in Spain and Latin America, 234–35; chance in its composition, 76; closure in, 15, 72, 93, 94, 172, 174; death as, 132; reparations as, 62, 63, 73–74; death certificate of Don Quijote, 157; geographical precision, 32; improvisation, 77; legalistic tone of, 5; loose structure, 77; plot, 62, 71, 72, 76, 93; stories drawn from penal archive, 29; testamentary law, 9, 79, 101, 108, 124, 172; subconscious of Don Quijote, 36, 45, 50, 53; will of Don Quijote, 131–32 Don Rodrigo, 167, 168 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 232, 238 Dudley, Edward, 100, 110, 113, 215 Durán, Manuel, 126, 178, 214, 216, 220

289

Finch, Patricia, 150 Flaubert, Gustave, 232, 233 Florian, Jean Pierre, 178 Forcione, Alban, xvi, 177, 183–84, 219– 20, 224, 270 n. 1 Fornicación: simple, 11; calificada, 11, 14 Foucault, Michel, 27, 120 Framed narratives, 201–3 Frazer, Sir James, 129 Freedom, 16, 21 Freud, Sigmund, 128–29, 248, 257 n. 2 Frye, Northrop, 55–56, 158, 167, 219 Fuero juzgo, 22 Fueros, xvii, 3, 22, 23, 25, 31

Echeverría, Esteban, 246 Eire, Carlos, 25 Elliott, J.H., 3, 102, 114, 164, 166 El Zafar, Ruth, 176 Enlightenment, xviii, 240 Entwistle, William, 219 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 138, 140, 141, 177

Galileo, 117 Gaos, Vicente, 93 Garcés, María Antonia, 108 García Márquez, Gabriel, 232, 237 Generation of ’98, 235 Genesis, 2, 19 Girard, René, 100 Gitlitz, David M., 190 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 82, 84, 214 Góngora, Luis de, 55, 60, 127, 142, 143, 145, 222, 226, 244 González, Eduardo, 223 González Echevarría, Roberto, xiii, 28, 119, 196, 249 Grafton, Anthony, 127 Greek tragedy, xvi Green, Otis, 118 Grimm, Jacob, 19, 21 Grimmelshausen, J.J. von, 57 Guevara, Fray Antonio de, 127 Guillén, Claudio, 196 Guzmán de Alfarache, 4, 33, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 197, 199, 200, 201, 210, 243

Faulkner, William, 84 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 223 Ferreti, Mastai (Pope Pious IX), 248 Ficino, Marsilio, 57 Fielding, Henry, 57

Hart, Thomas R., 86 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 232 Hebreo, Leone, 245 Heliodorus, 160, 213, 216, 217–18, 222 Henry IV (of France), 165

290

Index

Herrero, Javier, 52, 69, 76–77 Holy Brotherhood, 3, 6, 10, 25, 30, 33, 63, 64, 69, 70, 72, 78, 110, 114, 182 Homer, xviii, 30, 36, 61, 151, 158, 249 Horace, xvi Hugo, Victor, 232 Huguenots, 164 Ilgen, William, 245 Inquisition (Holy Office of), 3, 25, 37, 84, 159, 233 Irony, 52, 66, 76, 77, 78, 123, 201, 243 Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco, 161 John of the Cross, Saint (Juan de Yepes), 85, 115 Joyce, James, 19, 36, 149, 227, 232, 233 Juan Carlos de Borbón, King, 247 Juan Manuel, Don, 31 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor (Juana de Asbaje), 119 Justice, 21 Kagan, Richard L., 6, 26, 27, 33, 65 Lacan, Jacques, 223 Lafayette, Madame de, 57 Las Casas, Bartolomé, 246 Law: buildings, 37; canon, 79, 84, 135, 225; clash with love, 2, 4, 37; common (derecho consuetudinario), 135; complicity with love, 53; criminal, 225; flawed by desire, 116; grammar, 19; influence in Cervantes’ narrative, xviii; and poetry, 19; kinship to literature, 17, 20; origins of modern in Bologna, 20, 21, 27; and rhetoric, 21; and social continuity, 2; statutory, 141, 158 Lazarillo de Tormes (Vida de), 28, 33, 56, 57, 60, 61, 196, 200, 202 Legal writing, xiv, xvi, 105, 197; and details in fiction, 30 Leonard, Irving, 234 Lesage, Alain-René, 57 Lezama Lima, José, 246

Libro de buen amor, 18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 43 Lipson, Lesley, 202 Literature: on trial, 78 López-Baralt, Luce, 166 López de Ubeda, Francisco, 57 Love: clash with law, 2, 4, 37; complicity with law, xviii, 53; and chivalry, 1; courtly, 225; criminalization of, 16; privacy and boudoir, 37 Luna, Miguel de, 168 MacCurdy, Raymond R., 113 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 196 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 57, 127 Magical realism, 217 Mailer, Norman, 6 Mann, Thomas, 57 Manrique, Jorge, 244 Manzoni, Alessandro, 216 Maravall, José Antonio, 24, 127 Marinello, Juan, 247 Marqués de Santillana (Íñigo López de Mendoza), 43, 244 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco, 162 Marriage, xiv, xv, 2, 4, 5, 34, 41, 42, 77, 78, 83, 94, 109, 111, 134, 137, 151, 183, 203, 232; clandestine, 138, 158, 170, 171, 173, 174, 204–5, 266 n. 5 Martyre d’Anghiera, Pietro, 248 Mayorazgo, 81, 101–2, 172, 174 Mena, Juan de, 143 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, 168, 178, 216 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 18 Menocal, María Rosa, 201 Miller, Henry, 233 Modernismo, 235 Molina, Tirso de, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 12, 34, 44, 188, 214 Montaigne, Michel de, 57, 201, 242–43 Montemayor, Jorge de, 84 More, Thomas, 127 Moriscos (expulsion of), 159, 161–63, 165–66, 172

Index Morón Arroyo, Ciriaco, 45 Murillo, Luis A., 108 Nabokov, Vladimir, 232 Natural law, 23, 68, 126 Nebrija, Antonio de, 27, 28 Neoplatonism, 39, 41, 90, 108, 118, 172, 174, 215, 222, 244, 245 Neoscholasticism, 119, 221 Notarial arts (artis notariae), 21, 27, 32, 86, 182, 198, 231, 232 Novel: connections to the law, 232; history of, xvii; modern, 19, 174 Novela judicial, 233 Novela morisca, 109, 171 Novellino (Il), 31, 56 Oedipus, 2, 13, 19, 46 Ortega y Gasset, José, 145 Ovid, 135–37, 142–45, 148, 149, 151, 154, 158, 171 Owl and the Nightingale, 21 Parker, Alexander A., xiv, xvi, xviii, 224 Parody, 77 Patronato real, 24 Petrarch, Francesco, 36, 46, 81, 84, 90, 116 Philip II, 8, 25, 27, 141, 161, 197 Philip III, 161 Picaresque, xvii, 4, 22, 30, 32, 33, 54, 55–58, 60, 61, 74, 174, 194–201, 215, 231 Piers Plowman, 21 Pinet, Simone, 127 Poema de Mío Cid, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32, 167, 246 Poggioli, Renato, 86 Psychoanalysis, 20 Puig, Manuel, 232 Punishment, xv, xvii, xviii, 8, 12, 18, 21, 22, 25, 28, 29, 30, 62, 184, 249 Quevedo, Francisco de, 4, 33, 57, 61, 210, 229, 249

291

Racine, Jean, 218 Reconquista, 23, 24, 164, 169 Relación, 28, 197 Relación de la cárcel de Sevilla, see Cristóbal de Chaves. Renaissance, 39, 57, 63, 78, 79, 90, 91, 92, 106, 118, 127, 141, 142, 143, 145, 148, 196, 197, 200, 227 Rendall, Steven, 86 Rhetoric, 85, 105 Rico, Francisco, 10 Riepto, 105 Ribera, Juan de, 166 Riley, E. C., 212 Río, Angel del, 22 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 237 Rodríguez, Alfred, 113 Rodríguez Guerrero, Ignacio, 33 Rodríguez Marín, Francisco, 100, 103 Rojas, Fernando de, see La Celestina. Roman Empire, 151, 160 Roman law, 18, 20, 22, 23, 81, 173, 230 Romance, 55–56, 158, 174 Romance (ballad), 55–56, 167; morisco, 171 Saldaña, Quintiliano, xix, 30 Salillas, Rafael, xix, 57, 174, 197, 210 Sanz Hermida, Jacobo, 48 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 246 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 226 Schevill, Rudolph, 142 Scholasticism, 87, 138 Schwartz. Stuart, xvi, 11, 37 Scipio Africanus, 210 Scipio Emilianus, 210 Segundón, 101–2, 103, 110, 114 Seniff, Dennis P., 19 Sennigen, John, 137 Shakespeare, William, 21, 83, 152, 171 Siete partidas, see Alfonso X (The Wise). Sin: original, 20 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 160 Sismonde de Sismonde, Jean-Charles, 216

292

Index

Smith, Colin, 19, 22, 32 Smith, Susan, 96–97 Smollett, Tobias, 9, 47, 57, 68, 90, 97, 103, 110, 131, 199 Spain: casuistry of legal system, 32; Catholicism as ideology, 25; empire, 116, 118; exceptionalism, 240; first modern European state, xvii, 3, 24, 159; laws’ kinship to literature, 17; legal system, xv, 244; increasingly centralized judiciary, xvii, 4, 26; litigious society, xviii; national myth, 160, 166– 70, 174, 235; penal system, 3, 8; proliferation of laws, 28; Visigothic codes, 18 Spanish legal codes: Ordenanzas de Madrigal (1476), 26; Ordenamiento de las Cortes de Toledo (1480), 26; Ordenanzas reales de Castilla (Ordenanzas de Montalvo) (1484), 26; Leyes de Toro (1505), 26, 102; Nueva recopilación (1567), 26, 80; Recopilación de las leyes de Indias (1681), 26 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 21 Suicide, 82, 87, 88, 90 Talavera, Hernando de, 161 Tasso, Torquato, 84, 160, 218

Tomás y Valiente, Francisco, 8, 27, 30, 42, 43, 181 Transvestite, 43, 47, 53, 106, 130, 171 Trial scene, 18 Twain, Mark, 57, 232 Unnarratable stories, xiv, xviii, 7, 52, 185, 193, 206 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 36, 37, 46, 81, 83, 87, 108, 116, 143, 245 Vega, Garcilaso de la (El Inca), 244–45 Vega, Lope de, 3, 34, 44, 168, 169, 199 Velázquez, Diego, 119–24, 127, 142, 145–48, 149, 156, 157, 222 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 240 Villalón, Cristóbal de, 143 Villancicos, 81 Virgil, xviii, 36, 52, 84, 129, 130, 150, 157, 249 Visigoths, 18, 105, 167 Wardropper, Bruce W., 177 Weber, Max, 25 Zorrilla, José, 183