Chaos and Madness : The Politics of Fiction in Stephen Marlowe's Historical Narratives [1 ed.] 9789042033023, 9789042033016

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Chaos and Madness The Politics of Fiction in Stephen Marlowe’s Historical Narratives

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 188 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens and Theo D’haen

Chaos and Madness The Politics of Fiction in Stephen Marlowe’s Historical Narratives

Mónica Calvo-Pascual

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2011

Cover: Image from the 1549-edition cover of Sebastian Brant’s Der Narrenspiegel, das gros Narrenschiff Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3301-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3302-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in the Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

1

Chapter 1 History and the Novel: An Overview

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Chapter 2 Mastering the Art: The Historical Novel and Local Color

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Chapter 3 Between Magic and Madness: A Portrait of Spain and Its Neuroses

39

Chapter 4 Postmodern Critique and the Hand of the Historian

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Chapter 5 Chaos, Complexity and Interpretation

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Chapter 6 Beyond Reference: Historiographic Metafiction Impinged by Science Fiction

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Chapter 7 The Novel Never Ends: On Alternative Worlds, Jewish Connections and Infinite Regress

155

Concluding Remarks

179

Appendix I

189

Appendix II

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research towards the writing of this book was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the European Regional Development Fund (research project HUM2007-61035FILO), and the Diputación General de Aragón (refs B019/2000 and H05). My thanks are due to the helpful staff at the Library of the University of Sussex and Senate House Library, where I carried out part of my research. I am very much indebted to Professor Francisco Collado Rodríguez for his academic supervision and instruction on chaos theory as well as for his recommendation of The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus as an interesting reading – my first contact with an unknown Stephen Marlowe whose prose would fascinate me and become the cornerstone of my research. My gratitude extends to Professor Susana Onega Jaén’s research team Contemporary Narrative in English, for their support and the theoretical baggage acquired during the teams’ fruitful discussions. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff at Rodopi, especially to Esther Roth for her editorial help and to Cedric Barfoot for his invaluable stylistic revision of my manuscript. My thanks also go to the late Stephen Marlowe, for all the pleasure derived from reading and analyzing such monumental novels. On a personal level, I want to thank my family for their understanding and for always giving me more than they could afford: my mother Raquel, my father Antonio, my sister Marta, and my granny Concha who would have loved to see this volume. And, of course, my warmest gratitude and love go to Mai, whose immense generosity and unfailing intellectual and emotional support have made the book possible. This is for you.

INTRODUCTION

Stephen Marlowe’s latest novels involve a degree of difficulty in terms of interpretation, and attempting to offer an overview of his biography and oeuvre also presents a challenge. Hardly any academic articles have been written about Marlowe’s fiction and the only information retrievable from the Internet consists of a few partial biographical notes and some listings – none of them taxonomic – of the novels and short stories he wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. This is completed by an interview for Publishers Weekly1 and Marlowe’s own casual participation in a literary blog (Gormania) in January/March 2006, where he expressed his opinions about some of his novels. Only in September 2009 did Greg Shepard, from Stark House Press, announce the beginning of a collaboration process with Marlowe’s widow, Canadian writer-editor Ann Humbert, to publish the author’s autobiography, Confessions of a Wandering Writer, possibly by the end of 2010.2 Born in 7 August 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, and christened Milton Lesser, in 1958 he officially changed his name to Stephen Marlowe – a pseudonym he used for publishing mystery and detective novels. During the first decades of his literary career, Marlowe wrote under several pseudonyms as well as under his real name: Stephen Marlowe, Andrew Frazer, Jason Ridgway, C[hristopher].H. Thames, Darius John Granger, Steve Wilder, and Adam Chase. After leaving Brooklyn to get a BA in philosophy from William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, Marlowe returned to New York in 1949. There he worked as an executive editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency3 until he started making money with his detective and 1

Wendy Smith, “Stephen Marlowe: Rootless in Art and in Life”, Publishers Weekly, 18 November 1996, 50-51. 2 Cullen Gallagher, “Interview with Greg Shepard of Stark House Press”, Pulp Serenade: A Home for Pulp, Noir, Hardboiled, Mystery, and Crime Literature. Vintage Artwork and Quotes for Every Book!, 2009 (http://www.pulpserenade.com/ 2009/09/interview-with-greg-shepard-of-stark.html). 3 Smith, “Stephen Marlowe”, 50.

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science-fiction short stories, which he published regularly in magazines like Amazing Stories, Galaxy, If, Manhunt, and Pursued. Under his various pseudonyms, Marlowe wrote sixty novels (see Appendix 1) and more than two hundred short stories (see Appendix 2). Stephen Marlowe started writing science fiction short stories at the age of twenty-two only to switch to mystery and suspense after he had finished his military conscription during the Korean War. He soon became a cult author for lovers of noir fiction mainly for his Drumbeat series, which present his best-known character: private eye Chester Drum, created by Marlowe in 1955 with The Second Longest Night. In 1997 he was awarded the “Life Achievement Award” by the Private Eye Writers of America. However, Marlowe acknowledged that he was embarrassed by some of his early writings and that only his last three books really mattered to him.4 Having been called “the most prolific mystery writer in the United States” by the New York Times,5 Marlowe decided he would love to be the best at something rather than the most prolific at anything. This is what apparently led him to shift from quick pulp writing to spending long periods doing thorough research for the historical novels he started writing. In fact, at that point Marlowe began a wandering, nomadic life that took him and his wife Ann to several European countries, where he spent the last three decades of the twentieth century gathering material for his novels. This wandering trait is shared by the protagonists of Marlowe’s most relevant historical novels, on which this book will focus, but also by his best-known character, Chester Drum, who was based in Washington, DC, but whose missions took him to places as diverse as Mecca, South America, Moscow, Rome, Berlin or Canada. If this element suggests a continuation between Marlowe’s early narrative and his later more highbrow literary works, this continuation is enhanced by one of the essential traits of his later work: political commitment. Clear as it is in the various criticisms his historical novels launch, the author explained that as early as 1958 he inserted his attack against Senator McCarthy’s notorious irregularities and abuses of power in a democracy in Violence Is My Business, where Drum’s antagonist and villain is another private detective “far better

4 5

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 51.

Introduction

3

connected in the Washington corridors of power, a henchman for lobbyists and McCarthyite politicians”.6 Among the other scarce information on Stephen Marlowe that is available one can find what looks like a thwarted or at least delayed attempt by filmmaker David Lynch to make a movie based on Marlowe’s last novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World,7 which fictionalizes the last days in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, and also a so far delayed production of a film called Cervantes, based on The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, which was planned to celebrate the fourth centenary of the publication of Don Quixote.8 The publication of a casebook with two of Marlowe’s earliest novels, Violence Is My Business and Turn Left for Murder, by Stark House Press under the rubric of Stark House Mystery Classics in 2006, led him to announce that: There are a couple more novels I want to write. And this opportunity Stark House Press gave me to look back at my early work strongly suggests that they will be as noir as I can make them. Noir is where I come from.9

Unfortunately, Marlowe’s wish was hindered by myelodysplastic syndrome, an illness that caused his death on 22 February 2008. Marlowe’s detective novels are, admittedly, the best known among his wide array of literary creations. However, my main goal in this book is to shed light on Marlowe’s production of historical novels, which deserve far more academic attention than they have received so far.10 Whether critics’ lack of interest in Marlowe’s oeuvre is a 6 Stephen Marlowe, in Gormania, 2006 (http://edgormanrambles.blogspot.com/2006 _01_01_edgormanrambles_archive.html). 7 Kirk Honeycutt, “Lynch’s Factory Rides ‘Straight’ Down Film Path”, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 August 1998 (http://www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/ hollyrep820.html). 8 Pamela Rolfe, “Don Quijote tilting at big screen”, 2006 (http://www. Reuters.com). 9 Stephen Marlowe, in Gormania, 2006 (http://edgormanrambles.blogspot.com/ 2006_01_01_edgormanrambles_archive.html). 10 The only academic articles published on Marlowe’s fiction are Helmbrecht Breinig, “‘(Hi)storytelling as Deconstruction and Seduction: The Columbus Novels of Stephen Marlowe and Michael Dorris/Louise Erdrich”, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, eds Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, Paderborn and Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1994, 325-46; Eduardo Urbina, “Historias verdaderas y la verdad de la historia: Fernando Arrabal vs. Stephen

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consequence of prejudice against his early mass culture production remains to be discerned. Yet, his works introduce several novelties that separate them from other contemporary novels of the same kind and turn Marlowe into what should be a relevant figure in the field of late twentieth-century fiction. In order to illustrate my point, I have selected three novels that can be seen as a trilogy, not only for the elements they share but also for the evolution they represent. These texts, Colossus: A Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad (1972), The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe (1987) and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; A Novel by Stephen Marlowe (1991), are presented as historical narratives that take as their protagonists three of the most outstanding figures in Spanish history and culture in terms of the arts, colonization, and literature, respectively. This Spanish trilogy, then, is made coherent not only by the central role that Spanish personages, history, and society play, but also for their common ideological framework and strong political commitment. Furthermore, the three novels’ sequence is a key cluster of works for they provide an illustrative exemplification of the evolution of the historical novel as a genre. Therefore we may say that these novels are representative of the development from the classical pattern of historical novel, realistic and to a large extent faithful to historical records, to a radical example of what Linda Hutcheon coined “historiographic metafiction” in the late 1980s. Marlowe’s Marlowe”, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, XVIII/2 (1998), 158-69; Hans Den Boer, “The Truthful Fiction of the Death and Life of the Author: Cervantes and Marlowe”, in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, eds Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP and London: Associate UP, 1999, 264-74; Francisco ColladoRodríguez, “American Historiographic Metafiction and European Tradition: The Case of Marlowe’s The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, VII (2000), 103-13; Mónica Calvo-Pascual, “Chaos and Borders in Stephen Marlowe’s The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus”, in Beyond Borders: Redefining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, eds Ramón Plo-Alastrué and María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2001, 55-65; “Pushing the Boundaries of Historiographic Metafiction: Temporal Instability, ‘Authority’ and Authorship in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe”, Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses, VII (2006), 23-31; “Fascism and Neurosis in Spain: Stephen Marlowe’s Ethical Stance in Colossus”, in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, eds Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, 272-90; “The Order/Disorder Binary in Stephen Marlowe’s Fiction: From Neurotic Subjects to Narrative Chaos”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos XIII (2008), 49-62.

Introduction

5

works are not only good examples to study this trend in progress but also an interesting source to explore the evolution of the concept of history and its deconstruction in postmodern ideology and narratives. It is also worth highlighting the strong potential of Marlowe’s novels to create new epistemological paradigms by means of their remarkable critical, theoretical, and narrative disruptions. Based on a positive view of chaos, his literature incorporates scientific notions intimately linked to the field of quantum mechanics in terms of the ideological set-up that is put forth and also, in formal terms, as a narrative metaphorization that perfectly replicates the structure and behavior of molecular structures in a state of non-equilibrium – that is, in a chaotic condition. At the same time, the Spanish trilogy is a work of metafictionality, metahistory, and metacriticism. While it provides good grounds for an in-depth study of the history/fiction binary and its ideological implications, it brings to light other issues that are sometimes bitterly and other times ironically – even skeptically – denounced. Marlowe’s political engagement in these works extends to transnational and timeless issues such as religious fundamentalism or colonization; yet, it also focuses on local tragedies on which he provides an alternative outsider’s point of view that is still a thoroughly researched and wellacquainted one. To be more specific, one of the most relevant assets of Colossus is the way in which the narration manages to launch a sharp criticism of twentieth-century Spain – the Civil War, Franco’s fascist dictatorship and beyond – by means of an astonishingly new interpretation of Goya’s paintings and of the historical period the artist depicted in his collections of satirical, grotesque etchings. This focus on Spanish themes is, besides, a feature of Marlowe’s fiction that separates him from the average North American author of historical narratives. The innovation lies on the fact that, far from the general tendency of US writers to locate historiographic metafictional works in the recent past of their own country, Marlowe’s novels are set not only in the European continent – in the oft neglected Mediterranean area – but also in a remote past, going back in time as far as the fifteenth century in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. In short, Stephen Marlowe was a highly cultivated, widely read, multifaceted author of popular genres, able to write profoundly critical, serious, scientifically informed historical narratives that reveal also an immense capacity for humor, irony, and satire, as well as a

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deep-felt knowledge of the predicaments and virtues of the human in its broader sense. Therefore this book centers on the analysis of three of his latest novels, not only for the thematic continuity they present in terms of their portrayal of Spanish history but also for the more interesting evolution they represent in terms of genre and of their treatment of the binary history/fiction. The texts move from a traditional (prepostmodernist) model of historical novel in Colossus (1972), through The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987) as a perfect example of postmodernist historiographic metafiction, to The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes (1991), another, less radical, instance of historiographic metafiction where fiction eventually defeats and takes over history – from which the story victoriously departs. Simultaneously, I also intend to show a continuation in the way the novels’ social and political commitment develops through variations on the order/disorder binary. Thus, madness interpreted as an alternative order of reason is the vehicle for political critique in Colossus. In The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus it is the orderly disorder of the novel’s chaotic structure that provides for a complex of interrelated criticisms. And finally, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes presents part of its socio-political critique through one among the maze of alternative realities allowed for by the chaotic understanding of the world the novel calls for. Following this double axis of analysis, I have divided my book into an introductory theoretical chapter offering a concise overview of the evolution of the historical novel as a genre, and three analytical chapters, each devoted to one of the novels. These three chapters in turn consist of two sections: the first one approaches the relation between history and fiction in each novel, while the second centers on the different notions of disorder and the political critiques developed in the novels. In addition, each chapter provides a detailed historical background of the periods depicted in the novels and of the historical personages, which allow for a richer interpretation of the interaction between factual and fictional elements in the texts under analysis.

CHAPTER 1 HISTORY AND THE NOVEL: AN OVERVIEW

As Elizabeth Wesseling elaborates in Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel, until the beginning of the nineteenth century there were two different types of historical work carried out by two separate groups of scholars. There were the érudits or antiquarians engaged themselves on auxiliary tasks for the keeping of historical material, such as the discovery, gathering, and storage of historical sources and documents. And there were the historians proper devoted themselves to the writing of history. At that time, there was no set of conventions to regulate the narrativization of source material. This allowed historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to follow the example of classical authors like Herodotus, Xenophon, and Livy, putting invented speeches into the mouths of historical personages. The historian’s task was, therefore, “not so much to reveal new information about the past, but to preserve and convey extant knowledge in as effective and entertaining a manner as possible”.1 Given the similarities between that pre-nineteenth-century conception of history and historical fiction, it is no surprise that the emergence of the historical novel in Britain was triggered by a temporary impoverishment of the historian’s art, which was reduced to an antiquarian type of writing during Sir Walter Scott’s lifetime.2 Thus, as Wesseling proposes: The historical novel became the companion of historiography by presenting itself as a vehicle for conveying historical knowledge. At the same time, it explicitly distinguished itself from historiography both in matter and mode. The proponents of the historical novel did not seek to cloak its fictionality, but they held that the use of invention 1

Elisabeth Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991, 44. 2 Ibid., 45.

8

Chaos and Madness in the service of vivification, embellishment, and the fleshing out of details where historiography only offered rough outlines was a highly desirable compensation for the shortcomings of a stylistically unattractive historiography. Furthermore, the historical novel represented aspects of the past that had as yet not been dealt with as extensively by historians, namely the daily lives of ordinary people.3

Wesseling’s distinction between a broad and a narrow concept of the historical novel is useful for the study of the evolution of this genre. While the first simply regards the genre as any kind of fictional narrative that incorporates historical materials – which might include nearly all the narrative ever written – the second involves certain additional narratological and thematic features with which a work has to comply in order to be classed as a historical novel. “The narrow concept”, the critic adds, “more or less coincides with the work of Scott”.4 After setting for the narrow approach to the historical novel, Wesseling follows Alastair Fowler’s three-tiered model of generic development to undertake a study of the evolution of the historical novel as a genre. Fowler’s scheme distinguishes between, first, the moment at which a genre emerges as a clearly recognizable literary form; then, a secondary phase of respectful imitation and emulation; and third, the moment when novelists begin to use the classical model of historical fiction for new purposes.5 In this light, the historical novel proper can be said to have emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century, when novelists started to locate the adventures of mainly fictional characters in detailed, historical contexts described with the help of information gathered by antiquarians regarding the manners, customs, clothes, and architecture of former ages. The unprecedented success of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) established the primary stage of the genre’s development. The secondary phase of the historical novel has been understood as the large-scale imitation of Scott’s Waverley formula, both within and outside Great Britain, which decreased toward the end of the nineteenth century. The third stage emerges in the early twentieth century, with the modernists’ formal innovations and their use of the historical novel not just to 3

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 28. 5 Ibid., 27. 4

History and the Novel: An Overview

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recount stories from the past, but to question the objective status of history – a stance that will reach its peak in the postmodernist period. However, it is not only precise detail and awareness of the idiosyncrasy of former epochs that define the historical novel in the narrow sense. Scott’s Waverley is considered the prototype of the genre because, for the first time in the development of modern literature, it combines “documented historical situations and events in a thematically significant way with the fates and developments of invented characters”. The historical consciousness that the fates of individuals were inextricably linked to the collective events and to historical processes that characterizes the historical novel emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century as a consequence of events as important as the French and American revolutions and the radical socio-economic changes brought about by the industrial revolution. Another essential feature in Scott’s novels was the embedding of historical events in a teleological pattern that presents history as “the manifestation of a divine ‘master plan’” for the progress and development of society.6 However, Scott’s belief in the possibility of objective historical representation and his progressive view of history were gradually eroded as the genre developed and his epistemological self-confidence and optimism were undermined. It is interesting to recall that the classical historical novel was defined by its complementary position vis-à-vis historiography in its role of propagating historical knowledge. The incorporation of historical events in the writing of fiction never questioned the authority and truthfulness of history as an academic discipline. On the contrary, the participation of historical novels and history plays in history did “compensate for the abstract quality of academic history by bringing the past to life”, by making history seem “natural and imaginable in concrete human terms”.7 But two prerequisites were necessary: consensus on the validity of this kind of knowledge should be sustained, and the novelist’s historiographic pretensions should be 6

Kurt Müller, “The Development toward Historiographic Metafiction in the American Novel”, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, eds Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, Paderborn and Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1994, 35. 7 Horst Steinmetz, “History in Fiction – History as Fiction: On the Relations Between Literature and History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, in Postmodern Studies 11: Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, eds Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, 90-91, 82.

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attested. In Wesseling’s words, “the classical model of historical fiction … was raised upon the assumption that historical knowledge in itself is a relatively unproblematic category”.8 Yet, since the late nineteenth century the status of historiography began to be questioned, and this, in turn, affected the way the historical novel was understood. The first outstanding attack came from Friedrich Nietzsche’s treatise Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1873-1875), where the philosopher derided both the values of objectivity and impartiality attached to history and Hegel’s idealization of the historical process. Nietzsche’s stance was followed and reinforced after the disaster of World War I, which made the claim for impartiality more poignantly questionable, as reflected in Theodor Lessing’s Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (1919). In this work, Lessing dismantled both Hegel’s teleological conception of history and Ranke’s objectivist ideal, arguing that the attribution of meaning, shape, causality and coherence to historical processes depends entirely on the interests of the historian.9 If this state of affairs made it clear that the traditional model of the historical novel was inadequate for the corresponding contemporary questioning of the validity of historical knowledge, critics agree that it was after World War II that postmodernist innovations and their metahistorical turn transformed the old model into a suitable vehicle for the scrutiny of the nature and possibility of history. Modernist writers were the first to redefine the historical novel as a means for inquiring into the epistemological problems of historiography through the representation of history as a projection of the historian’s consciousness, together with the strategy of multiple focalization, which revealed the polyinterpretability of the past by means of the juxtaposition of differing views of the same event.10 Yet, it is the emergence of postmodernism and the self-reflexive nature of its literature that will eventually bring about the literary trend known as historiographic metafiction. In that line, the epistemological preoccupations that characterized the modernist period as far as literary production is concerned gave way to the ontology of uncertainty that would define the times labeled as postmodernist. This step forward – and beyond – was partly the 8

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 73. Ibid., 70-71. 10 Ibid., 73, 85. 9

History and the Novel: An Overview

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outcome of the rethinking of earlier linguistics and of humanist notions such as the Cartesian individual. The notion of the individual dates from the Renaissance and defines Man as a free, intellectual agent independent of historical and cultural circumstances. This view was enhanced in the Enlightenment by Descartes’ conception of human Reason as not only autonomous but also fully conscious, selfknowable and coherent. Such a self-assured conception of Man was unchallenged until the early twentieth century, with the birth of psychoanalysis and Freud’s description of the human mind as constituted by two – conscious and unconscious – and then three – ego, superego, and id – separate compartments of which only one – the ego or conscious – was immediately accessible to human comprehension. This fragmentation of the psyche, so far conceived as a graspable, self-sufficient unity, was taken a step further by Freudian poststructuralist critic Jacques Lacan. According to Lacan’s theory of the psychic formation of the human being, the child becomes a subject when he enters the realm of the Symbolic – dominated by the Law of the Father – through the acquisition of language and the imposition of a Name understood as an original signifier of self and subjectivity. Thus, the child is removed from the area of integration of the preSymbolic Imaginary and barred from direct apprehension of the Real by the inescapable mediation of language. Furthermore, he is also estranged from knowledge of his self, which is structured “as a product of signifying practices which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious”.11 Consequently, the category of the subject questions the notion of the self as identical with consciousness. A further issue in Lacan’s theories that set a landmark in poststructuralism is his revision of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist study of the linguistic sign as a threefold entity whose units – signifier, signified and referent – hold a stable, univocal and immutable relation. This revision, in turn, runs parallel to that undertaken by Jacques Derrida after the Nietzschean exposure of the metaphoric quality of the act of linguistic signification. Both Lacan and Derrida take as their point of departure the structuralist tenet of the relational status of the range and correspondences between signifier and signified. Hence, Derrida goes on to argue that meaning 11 Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988, 2.

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is not immediately present in a sign – it is a matter of what the sign is not. Therefore, meaning is always absent from the sign, scattered or dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers. Moreover, Derrida contends that there is no fixed distinction between signifier and signified: the former always transforms into the latter, and vice-versa, barring any possibility of arriving at a final signified which is not a signifier in itself. Derrida concludes that “the sign marks an absent presence”12 since, first, signification deals with signs rather than with the objects those signs supposedly stand for; and second, it cannot reach beyond a play of différance, as the meaning of the sign not only differs from the object but also remains always postponed or deferred. In addition, Lacan suggests, the metaphoric quality of human language, which allows words to convey multiple and unexpected meanings, determines the autonomy of language – and, more specifically, of the signifier – from meaning. From the nonrepresentational status of language inevitably follows that the signified is always provisional, as every signified can function in turn as a signifier, and “since any signifier can receive signification retrospectively, after the fact, no signification is ever closed, ever satisfied”.13 An obvious, if unsettling, implication of Lacan’s and Derrida’s ideas is that, if the subject is constituted by and can only be known through language, it can never be a stable, unified entity. Fragmentation in the medium and subject of knowledge is parallel to the fragmentation of its object. The other founding father of poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, rejects any kind of global theorizing and totalizing forms of analysis and systematization. In an attempt to avoid the discrimination inherent in total, traditional forms of historical analysis, Foucault developed a vision of history he called “genealogy” after Friedrich Nietzsche’s book On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In contrast with traditional history, which explains events through their inscription into grand explanatory systems and linear processes, celebrating great moments and individuals, Foucault’s genealogical analysis favors the singularity of events which have been denied a history, and local, discontinuous, illegitimate knowledges “against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchize and order them in the name of some true

12 13

Ibid., 48; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 13.

History and the Novel: An Overview

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knowledge”.14 At the same time, it conceives historical beginnings as lowly, complex and contingent, and events as motivated by a multiplicity of factors. Significantly, Foucault’s favoring of local struggles over grand narratives coincides with Jean François Lyotard’s association of grand narratives with a political program or party, while little narratives are associated with localized creativity. Lyotard’s notion of postmodernism may be better understood by bearing in mind his use of the word “modern” to denominate “any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... marking an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject or the creation of wealth”.15 Thus, the advent of postmodernism marks a crisis in narrative’s legitimizing function, in its ability to compel consensus, and seems to be connected with the emergence, between the 1950s and the 1960s, of a new social and economic order – most acutely with the student revolts in 1968, whose thwarted attempt to break the structures of state power turned into an urge to subvert the structures of language and of any coherent belief system. The suspicion of total knowledges also affected the nineteenthcentury conception of history. As David Bennett argues, all the teleological master narratives “which once provided historiography with such grounding universals as human knowledge or reason, labour, class, and capital” – that is, the humanist Enlightenment, the Marxist, and the liberal capitalist metanarratives of emancipation – “have been revealed as the fallible projections of local rather than global interests”. With the destabilizing of these grand narratives, the very grounds of social and cultural periodization have seemed to dissolve. Consequently, as Bennett puts forth, “History has been radically ‘relativized,’ fissuring into a multiplicity of contingent, ‘local’ narratives or ‘micro-histories,’ discontinuous and incommensurable ‘times,’ whose interrelations are – in the absence of universals – uninterpretable”.16 14

Ibid., 64. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984, 17. 16 David Bennett, “Postmodernism and Vision: Ways of Seeing (at) the End of History”, in Postmodern Studies 3: History and Post-War Writing, eds Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990, 262. 15

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The teleological perspective that was being undermined in poststructuralist times – according to which history was itself understood as logos – developed when, after Hegel, writers found that Aristotelian guarantees of mimetic seriousness for art were subsumed under the category of the past. Hence, they derived that “if art or literature once offered access to that logos, to that realm of the true and the real, it could only be in the past”.17 Yet, the notion of time also underwent a radical shift from Hegelian to postmodernist times. Jameson explains this postmodernist notion of time in terms of Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia understood as a language disorder caused by the child’s failure to fully enter the realm of speech. Thus, since temporality and personal identity are an effect of language, the schizophrenic can only experience isolated, disconnected material signifiers that fail to link up into a coherent sequence. Jameson’s and Lacan’s theories, moreover, are not rare exceptions but, on the contrary, are rather generalized, like Foucault’s notion of history as uncontrollable and directionless. The questioning of the authority of history as a master discourse since the middle of the twentieth century derived from several factors. The experience of two world wars awakened critical attitudes towards all historical concepts. Twentieth-century writers became aware of the ideological character of language and narrative. At the same time, the development of mass media like television made more visible the existence of different cultures and histories previously obscured by geographical distance. Moreover, the end of capitalized History went hand in hand with the crisis of historiography, which became inevitable after the detected failure of all kinds of master narratives and the advent of poststructuralist theories in the 1960s that put forth the autonomy of language as a social construct totally independent from the realm of reference. As Brian Stonehill contends: In the word, the unit of language itself, we find in elementary form the same duality of creation and disruption of illusion which the selfconscious novel enacts on a macrocosmic scale .... We participate in Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief,’ every time we use language …. All fictions similarly require us to suspend our disbelief. The realistic novel does so covertly, as it endeavors to pass itself off 17 Allen Thiher, “Postmodern Fiction”, in Postmodern Studies 3: History and PostWar Writing, 11.

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as real life. But self-depicting fictions, by acknowledging the limitations of their own imitations, invite us to suspend our disbelief not only willingly but wittingly.18

In their claims for “Truth” and authority, like writers of realistic fiction, historians tend to treat language as a transparent vehicle of representation that incorporates no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse. Yet, postmodernist writers counter this by engaging in “writing which consistently displays its conventionality, which explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice”, that is, by developing a metafictional style in their narratives.19 As Patricia Waugh defines it: “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality ... through formal self-exploration.”20 This consciousness of the representational nature of language has been applied to traditional views of historiography in the last forty years. Linda Hutcheon explains that, in the postmodernist historical novel that she came to denominate historiographic metafiction, “History is not made obsolete: it is, however, being rethought – as a human construct”.21 The postmodernist, she proposes, “appears to coincide with a general cultural awareness of the existence and power of systems of representation which do not reflect society so much as grant meaning and value within a particular society”.22 This awareness materializes in postmodernist metafictional texts and their exposure of narrative as a linguistic artifact. Historiographic metafiction self-consciously calls attention to its ontological status as a play of signifiers without referents, among other means, by purposefully combining historical and fictional events and personages. The resulting confusion of attested historical fact and invention brings to the fore the erasure of the limits traditionally imposed between 18 Brian Stonehill, The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988, 15; emphasis in the original. 19 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984), London and New York: Routledge, 1990, 4; emphasis in the original. 20 Ibid., 2. 21 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, 16. 22 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, 8; emphasis in the original.

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them. But the mixing of both types of elements is not new: it was already present in the traditional historical novel, not to mention the epic. As Hutcheon puts it, the novelty “seems to reside in its manner, in the self-consciousness of the fictionality, the lack of the familiar pretence of transparency, and the calling into question of the factual grounding of history-writing”.23 This feature is one of the most notable defining traits of Stephen Marlowe’s 1980s-1990s novels. Yet, before going into detailed analysis of his narrative, it may be convenient to remark the idiosyncrasies of the US historical novel, which due to the country’s particular historical development, had a different origin and evolution. Apart from the scarcity of historical material caused by the country’s youth as a nation, the American pride in the notion of a new beginning reduced the speed and degree of development of a strong tradition of historical narratives. Some of the earliest examples are James Fenimore Cooper’s historical romances which, influenced by Scott’s model, take as their context and content the American Revolutionary period and transpire a sense of the progress of American civilization. Yet, in his works there is a harsh critique of the negative effects of that civilization process. This historical pessimism seems to be, according to Kurt Müller, “a distinguishing feature in the American development of the genre” together with “a strong sense of epistemological skepticism”24 that characterizes Cooper’s contemporaries Charles Brockden Brown and William Gilmore Simms. For his part, in his essay “The Difference between History and Romance” (1800) Brown elaborated the idea that historiography is based on speculation and conjecture and that the artists are “the true historians” in so far as they give coherence and meaning to historical events. Historical pessimism and epistemological skepticism were radicalized in the second half of the nineteenth century in historical novels like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), while twentieth-century modernist works such as John Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. (1930-1936) foreground the fluidity, instability,

23

Ibid., 35. Müller, “The Development toward Historiographic Metafiction in the American Novel”, 37. 24

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and fragmentation of modern experience, together with “an awareness of the problematic nature of historiographic re-construction”.25 However, the historical novel was a marginal genre in the US modernist movement. It was the political crises and revolutionary changes of the 1960s with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Vietnam War, and the various counter-culture and civil rights movements that awakened a renewed interest in history and its fictionalization. Thus, as Müller points out referring to works such as Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive (1969), Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), and the works by Thomas Pynchon and E.L. Doctorow, many contemporary US novels “focus on the violent and destructive aspects of history and replace the traditional notion of history as a meaningful, teleological process with concepts such as discontinuity, absurdity, contingency, apocalypse, entropy, and paranoia”.26 The novels of the postmodernist period, with the echoes of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, whose accounts were to a certain extent fictional, also reflect the way in which media culture influences the postmodern mind, reaching the point where fantasy appears more real than reality and the distinction between both levels is nearly, effectively blurred. Yet, what most canonical representatives of the US historical novel have in common is the location of their narratives in the recent past of the United States.27 It is the difference in content, indeed, that separates Stephen Marlowe’s historical novels from his contemporary fellow countrymen and women writers, since many of Marlowe’s historical narratives center on events and biographies that go back to distant epochs of European countries. This feature situates Marlowe’s historical fictions closer to the recent European tradition than to the North American one, as does the fact that in his best-known works within this genre – The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes – it is the famous historical personages themselves that acquire new (poststructuralist and postmodernist) voices and narrate their own achievements.

25

Ibid., 41. Ibid., 43. 27 Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, “American Historiographic Metafiction and European Tradition: The Case of Marlowe’s The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, VII (2000), 103-113. 26

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It might have been this difference in content and tone that postponed the publication of these novels in the United States. Marlowe himself explained that he had to publish The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus in the United Kingdom first because North American agents rejected it for its length and for its use of contemporary English to tell a fifteenth-century story taking place in Spain. As Marlowe ironically expressed, “one went so far as to carefully point out all the anachronisms that spoiled the book’s ‘authenticity’”.28 This proves the extent to which the character and intentionality of the novel were utterly misunderstood. In fact, it was not until The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus became an international best seller and received France’s Prix Gutenberg for best historical novel of the year that Scribners published it in the United States in 1988. More disquieting is the reception of The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes by some North American publishers who, according to Marlowe’s account, loved the book but would not publish it because they believed they were “the only person in America who had ever heard of Cervantes”.29 In fact, this novel was published in the United States by Arcade only in 1996, five years after its British edition, when The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1995) had proved a success and garnered critical acclaim. In line with the initial responses of publishing houses to Marlowe’s novels and as advanced in the Introduction, the area of literary research has not paid much attention to this author’s prolific oeuvre. I would like to highlight this determining factor here, which has made the writing of this book a challenge ever more appealing, since Stephen Marlowe’s historical novels are, for their intricacy, welldocumented foundations, craftsmanship, and ideological engagement, at the very least, worth reading and analyzing.

28 29

Smith, “Stephen Marlowe”, 51. Ibid., 50.

CHAPTER 2 MASTERING THE ART: THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AND LOCAL COLOR “No artist has a right to break the rules until he’s mastered them.”1

The main intent of this section is to situate Stephen Marlowe’s 1972 novel Colossus: A Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad within the history and evolution of a long-lived literary genre like the historical novel. For this purpose, before going into a detailed analysis of Marlowe’s text, it may be interesting to address some introductory notions about this genre as found in Avrom Fleishman’s The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf, which came out just a year before the publication of Marlowe’s novel. According to Fleishman’s theses, the structure of a historical novel must become a heroic – or anti-heroic – plot in the form of an individual’s career, in the sense that the author’s conception of a past age must be represented in the development of individuals as well as in that of society in general: “the historical novel is pre-eminently suited to telling how individual lives were shaped at specific moments of history, and how this shaping reveals the character of those historical periods.” Then, he argues, the ultimate subject of the historical novel is “man in history, or human life conceived as historical life”.2 Following from these bases, to which Colossus sticks (as will be shown below), Wesseling’s definition of genre can be taken as a tool for framing this novel within the development of historical fiction. She defines genre as “a conventional repertoire of stock motifs and themes, and a set of strategies for the literary representation of these thematic elements …. As sets of norms of which both readers and 1 Stephen Marlowe, Colossus: A Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad, New York: Macmillan, 1972, 101 (all further page references given in the text). 2 Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1971, 11.

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writers are aware, genres fulfill an important role in the process of literary communication.”3 Taking on this conception of genre, I will follow Brian McHale’s summary of the conventions or constraints with which traditional historical fiction complies. First, it respects established facts concerning the properties of historical personages and events. In order to avoid conflicts with the historical record, historical fiction tends to center on those aspects of the past about which official historiography has remained silent or obscure. Secondly, it tries to avoid anachronism in presenting both the material circumstances of life as well as the worldview of a particular historical period. Lastly, it conforms to the demands of plausibility and verisimilitude, which implies that historical novels are necessarily realistic.4 In fact, this circumstantial realism is given expression to through the most fundamental characteristics of the historical novel: the local color and the use of dialect. Colossus is also close to the style of the father of the historical novel, Sir Walter Scott, regarding the central theme of his works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought that Scott’s main preoccupation was the tension between the two basic principles that would determine the course of human history: “religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and the admiration of permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth, as the offspring of reason – in short the mighty instincts of progression and free agency, on the other.”5 In Marlowe’s novel this tension materializes, as will be touched on below, in the socio-political struggles derived from the division between the supporters of the Spanish Old Regime and those who advocated the import of Enlightenment ideas and the creation of a Constitutional State. On a narrative level, Scott generally made use of an omniscient, heterodiegetic narrator, while presenting historical materials through the eyes of a fictional character, whose responses to history were registered in detail. As Wesseling explores, Scott placed the adventures of fictional characters in the foreground of his novels and relegated historical personages to mere occasional appearances so as 3

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 18. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 84-96. 5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Epistolaris, ed. A. Turnbull, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1911, II, 183. 4

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to avoid conflicts with canonical history. Scott’s successors retained the basic features of the master’s formula by placing the adventures of fictional characters in the foreground, and by focusing on how historical events impinged upon the daily lives of ordinary people, in narratives free from anachronisms. It was Bulwer who took an important step forward and turned historical persons into the protagonists of his novels, basing his plots on their recorded careers and lives. This innovation resulted in a new type of historical fiction that became a success in the 1830s and 1840s. The traditional formula of a heterodiegetic omniscient narrator who relates an episode from the past could therefore be complemented with the perceptions of the participants in the historical events.6 Colossus: A Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad is apparently a realistic historical novel that centers on the biography of the Spanish painter of Aragonese origin Francisco de Goya y Lucientes – a very relevant figure in the history of art if not a maker of political history. Divided into six Books, the thirty-nine numbered chapters of the novel depict Goya’s life and the ways in which it was influenced and determined by the socio-political environment that enclosed his career, from his childhood in Saragossa to his old age exile in Bordeaux. Both aspects of the plot – his personal and professional evolution, and the course of historical events – are presented in a linear, teleological fashion. The scrupulous chronological order in which the story is narrated is only disturbed by the introductory chapter of each Book. These untitled introductory chapters recount some of the painter’s experiences as he recalls them as a deaf old man and always show some link that works as a prolepsis of the climactic moments of the chapters that follow. Coherence between the whole and its different parts is reinforced by the references made in these introductory sections to events narrated in previous chapters, as well as by the repetition all along the novel of metonymic phrases to refer to characters, such as “a certain arrogant elegance” or “those dark, hooded eyes” – a feature that becomes more recurrent in these introductions.7 The six introductory chapters also follow a strict

6

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 46, 51, 52, 61, 84. The overwhelming repetition of certain phrases is a constant in Marlowe’s novels. For example, the phrase “a legend in his own lifetime” – which appears once in

7

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chronological sequence of their own: they take place during a short lapse of time while the painter is in a café in Paris holding his duelling pistols and waiting for “the Prince of the Peace”. The whole novel consists of the old man’s recollections of his entire life while he awaits either death or revenge. At the same time, this gives cohesion and narrative closure to the novel, since the very last chapter of the book portrays the resolution of the Paris scene and the duelling motif. This sequence provides and maintains suspense throughout the novel, for it is not until Chapter 32 that the reader knows the reason why Goya wants to fight the duel. Regarding the structure of the novel, it is also worth bearing in mind that an Afterword closes the book and is included by the author in the table of contents as part of the fiction. In this final section – the only clearly metafictional element in the book – the author explains what happened to Goya and his family after the years narrated in the novel, how different historical sources have proved the most controversial questions he raises – such as the murder of the Duchess of Alba – and why he took “small liberties with chronology” and with some minor characters for dramatic reasons in the re-creation of some events (562). It is interesting to notice how the voice in the Afterword makes an effort to foreground the historicity and accuracy of his work, his apology for the scarce anachronisms clearly recalling Sir Walter Scott’s respect for the reservoir of established historical facts, which emerged in his restraint from anachronism – he even wrote that “he must introduce nothing inconsistent with the manners of the age”. As Wesseling points out, “although in actual practice Scott could not always resist the temptation to alter history for the sake of the plot, it is clear that he did not approve of flagrant transgressions of historical facts in principle”.8 Colossus takes the form of a fictional biography told by a heterodiegetic, omniscient narrator whose knowledge surpasses that of any of the characters in the novel. It displays facts not only of the past of some characters that no one else would know about, like the prophecy cast by a fortune teller regarding the short life the Duchess of Alba would live, but also a myriad of prolepses that advance future events. Yet, a further analysis shows the narrator’s acquisition of a Colossus – pervades The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, while the most frequent one in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes is “on the old road again”. 8 Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 64.

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protean quality in its progressive adoption of the point of view of several characters. Secondary characters become focalizers by means of strategies like the use of both free indirect style and interior monologue – the latter being reserved only for those characters who are emotionally close to the protagonist. For its part, it is logically the protagonist’s subjectivity that is rendered more profusely and through more diverse perspectives and techniques. The introduction to Book One presents the reader with an Aragonese, stone-deaf, old man in a French café in 1824 waiting with a case of duelling pistols. It is only in a very gradual, suspensekeeping manner that the narrator reveals the old man to be “Paco Goya”, painter to three kings, waiting for the “Prince of the Peace” to avenge a “cold-blooded murder” – which later on in the book will be revealed to be the murder of Cayetana de Alba’s, Paco’s life-long love and lover (5). Then, the narrator recounts how the painter starts hearing a voice and recalling a day in Saragossa sixty years before. So in Chapter 1, “Wanderers’ Bell”, we find seventeen-year-old Paco, who, after painting a reliquary cabinet in his natal village of Fuendetodos, engages in a row with a boy from a different village and unintentionally stabs him while a troupe of bullfighters from Navarra, the Apiñani brothers, help him to run away. In fact, it is this accident that starts the main plot of the novel: both the bullfighters and Goya must leave Saragossa in order to avoid prison sentence. The former cannot go back to Pamplona, where they had some unspecified trouble, so they decide to head for Madrid and invite young Paco to accompany them. For his part, after informing his family about the incident, Goya’s father talks to Padre Nicolás Pignatelli, a Jesuit collector of art, who bribes the mayor’s police so that Goya is allowed to leave Saragossa as a fugitive. He goes to Madrid with the Apiñanis, provided with a few coins and two letters of recommendation, one of them for Don Pablo de Olavide.9 At this point, an explanation is required of the historicity of events told. As a historical novel, Colossus relies on historical episodes for 9

It is interesting to notice that Goya accidentally runs away with the help of a powerful man. This is a recurrent motif in Marlowe’s historical novels: in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus the protagonist is helped by Columbus’s fictional benefactor Pighi-Zampini through the House of Centurione after having to run away from a society of assassins; in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes the benefactor is Rizio Rizione, Cervantes escaping from Spain to Italy as a fugitive after another accidental homicide.

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structuring the main thread of the story. It re-creates in a superb way both the daily life and the most outstanding affairs that took place from the late eighteenth century, through the sixty years that marked the history of Spain – the importing of European Enlightenment ideas allowed by the tranquility enjoyed during King Carlos III’s reign, the subsequent invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte’s French troops aided by King Carlos IV’s Minister Godoy, the War of Independence from the French, and the no less frustrating and harsh repression effected by the repositioned King Fernando VII after Spanish independence had been regained.10 Yet, the novel also adds fictional plots, characters, and invented happenings in the lives of historical personages that become confused with documented, factual ones. This is done mainly in the narration of Goya’s life and career for two different purposes: in some cases, characters and events are created in order to fill in the gaps left by traditional biography and historiography and to account for some parts of Goya’s life for which there is no explanation. In other occasions, other personages are made up and some historical data are manipulated so as to add suspense and a novelistic quality to the story. For instance, researchers on Goya’s biography state that the painter was a student of José Luzán’s in Saragossa from 1759 to 1762,11 as we can read in Marlowe’s novel, but they are unable to certify how he came to be in Madrid in 4 December 1763, at the age of seventeen, taking part in an extraordinary call for poor and skilful youngsters to become members of the Royal Academy of San Fernando.12 Therefore, Marlowe inserts the stabbing episode and the help of the Apiñani brothers – who “made their appearance in Madrid fifteen or so years before Goya did”, as the author acknowledges in the Afterword (562), as a motivation for the painter to move to Madrid. Some other characters like the brothers Vicente, José and Ramón Pignatelli are well-known in the history of Saragossa, but not so much their brother Nicolás, who is little known and mentioned.13 The fact 10

The Spanish form of the proper names of Spanish historical personages will be used throughout the present chapter as in Marlowe’s novel. 11 Coca Garrido, Goya, Barcelona: Editorial Escudo de Oro, 1996, 4; Teresa Grasa and Carlos Barboza, Goya en el camino, Zaragoza: Heraldo de Aragón, 1996, 6. 12 Grasa and Barboza, Goya en el camino, 18. 13 U. Benigni, “Pignatelli”: see http://www.enciclopediacatolica.com/p/pignatelli.htm, 1999; José Luis Jerez Riesco, “Pignatelli”: see http://www.carpediem.it/spagna/htm/ enclave.htm, 1993.

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that Marlowe takes this personage as an outstanding character sticks to the tendency in this novel to employ historical but non-relevant figures for the embodiment and development of fictional plots used to explain enigmatic historical events. Thus, Nicolás Pignatelli, who is known to have left Spain together with all the other Jesuits when they were expelled by King Carlos III, appears as a witness and scapegoat of a plot against Squillace devised by the Count of Aranda and Floridablanca. Going back to the protagonist’s career, documented sources suggest that after possibly staying for a while in Madrid attending Francisco Bayeu’s workshop, Goya went back to Saragossa that winter until the Pignatelli brothers encouraged him to take part in the San Fernando contest again in 1766.14 However, Marlowe changes the trajectory of his hero by making him fall in love with a fictional character. In his escape, Paco starts working as a restaurant dishwasher in exchange for food and bed. There he witnesses a fight between two majos,15 one of whom turns out to be painter Anton Rafael Mengs. Goya intervenes in the fight and rescues Rafael’s female companion, with whom the protagonist immediately falls in love. A component of mystery arises when the unknown girl calls Goya by his full name. This is clarified when the reader discovers that she is Mariana, the niece of Fernando de Silva, Duke of Alba, and of Don Pablo de Olavide, who received a letter of recommendation from Padre Nicolás Pignatelli and had been searching for Goya all over Madrid. So Goya becomes Olavide’s protegé and starts painting in a garret the patron finds for him, where he also learns from Mariana the Enlightened ideas Don Pablo so eagerly embraces. The interesting point here is that Fernando de Silva and Pablo de Olavide did exist, but Mariana apparently did not. Silva was one of the members of the most important and powerful noble families in the history of Spain: the dukes of Alba. Olavide (b. 1725, d. 1803) was a Peruvian theologian and lawyer with Jesuit friends who escaped from Peru to Spain on account of a trial against him for a fraudulent administration of the goods of the people who died in the earthquake 14

Grasa and Barboza, Goya en el camino, 19. Majos and majas is the name given to a certain kind of young people that populated Madrid in Goya’s time. They were characterized by a specific way of dressing, their liking for drinking and dancing in bars until late at night, and their bragging and proneness to get into fights.

15

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that destroyed Lima in 1746. He was accused, among other things, of enriching himself and of building the first theatre in Lima with the money that was left after rebuilding a church. He was finally prosecuted and imprisoned in Spain, having all his properties confiscated in 1754. Three years later he was bailed for health reasons and married Isabel de los Ríos, a wealthy widow who gave all her money to Olavide and allowed him to get in touch with the Court and travel all around the European continent. Marlowe’s well-documented study of his sources is evident in the accuracy with which he tells of how Olavide was sent to Sevilla by King Carlos III as governor of Sierra Morena in order to populate that backward, harsh land with European workers with whom he would be able to put his Enlightened ideas to the test.16 It is also clear if we consider the way he borrows the detail of Olavide’s construction of the first theatre in Lima and transforms it into something else: nothing is mentioned in the novel about Olavide’s past in Lima except for his (undocumented) affair with a Peruvian actress, with whom he had a daughter that was made to believe – as everybody else did – she was his niece. This girl, Mariana, is therefore a fictional character Marlowe inserts for several purposes. First and foremost, the presence of Mariana explains Goya’s undocumented stay in Madrid. Second, it provides a romance subplot that adds enough allurement to what would otherwise be but an uninteresting fragment of a poor boy’s work life in a then small, provincial city – Saragossa – and its surrounding area – the Cinco Villas. Third, a parallel is established between Goya’s relationship with Mariana – with whom he will have a son that will acquire relevance in future chapters – and with her cousin Cayetana de Alba – Fernando de Silva’s daughter. Finally, the character Mariana is also used to re-elaborate Olavide’s fall. According to historiographic sources, the governor of Sierra Morena was prosecuted as a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition due to the accusation of a Capuchin monk that denounced the liberal laws regarding both farming and religious attendance he put into practice in the Andalusia towns he was in charge of. He was judged and exiled to a monastery in Sahagún for eight years, and his goods were confiscated. After two years of reclusion, he escaped to Paris 16

Alfonso Pozo Ruiz, “Pablo de Olavide y Jáuregui (Lima 1725-Baeza 1803)”: see http://www.Pablo de Olavide biografia (1725-1803)_Sevilla_Las Nuevas Poblaciones. htm, 2005.

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with the Court’s and the Holy Office’s leave. The trial against him took place only because his friend the Count of Aranda was no longer Prime Minister and, free from Aranda’s influence, the King allowed the Holy Office to proceed.17 In Marlowe’s revision of the plot, the accusations and resolution of the trial stick to the source (193, 210), but the process is made effective not because Aranda had lost power but because he wanted revenge upon Olavide, since the latter failed to persuade Mariana to marry the Count when she was in love with Goya and expecting their – also fictional – child Antonio Francisco (135137). For his part, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Count of Aranda (b.1718, d. 1799), who became First Minister to the King after the Motín de Squillace and is known to have conspired against the Society of Jesus for their expulsion,18 is presented as a Machiavellian figure. In the palace of the papal nuncio in Madrid, Jesuit Nicolás Pignatelli witnesses a plan for a coup-d’état against the then First Minister to the King, Leopoldo di Gregorio, Marquis of Squillace. Pignatelli falls in the trap set by Aranda and the role he is ordered to play is the key to the Count’s simultaneous conspiracy against Squillace and against the Jesuits. Aranda’s plan succeeds and he himself tells the King that the Jesuits instigated the riots that came to be known as Motín de Squillace, which brought about the latter’s downfall and forced exile, and the rise of Aranda to the First Ministry. Marlowe’s account of the Motín de Squillace coincides with written sources in that it was motivated by several factors: the starvation provoked by a series of bad crops; the increase in the price of bread; the population’s unease at the fact that Squillace was a foreigner; the visible luxury and ostentation of his ordinary life compared to the people’s hunger. Yet, the definitive “tinder in a tinderbox”, as described in the title of Chapter 7, was Squillace’s edict banning broad-brimmed hats and flaring capes – Madrileños’ usual garments – because, he said, they covered the identity of criminals.19 The riots started during the Easter procession celebrating Palm Sunday in 1766 when a company of Walloon guards accompanied by 17

Various authors, Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Europeo Americana, Barcelona: Espasa, 1908-33, 962-63. 18 Ibid., 173-74; Various authors, Gran Enciclopedia de España, Zaragoza: Enciclopedia de España, 1990, 7256. 19 Gran Enciclopedia de España, 3761-62.

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tailors started cutting off the end of the majos’ capes.20 There are signs that the riots were organized. Yet, historians’ accounts of the Motín de Squillace diverge insofar as traditional views agreed on blaming religious orders, especially Jesuits, for its outbreak.21 Marlowe’s novel takes side and solves the issue by adopting the conspiracy theory that made the Jesuits look guilty while showing bullfighter Pascual Apiñani as the man who first rebels, the riots thus starting and developing spontaneously. It is significant that, similar to what happens with Nicolás Pignatelli, the author takes a factual though fictionalized personage to embody a relevant event such as the outbreak of the riots. Therefore, from the five real Apiñani brothers – Tuertillo, Juanito, Gaspar, Emérito and Santiago – the author slightly changes the name of the fourth – Emérito for Emeterio – and completely changes the name of the fifth one: Santiago is never mentioned in the novel, yet his substitute “Pascual” is the one who starts the riots and dies in them. Furthermore, the fact that the fictionalized historical character Nicolás Pignatelli is involved in the conspiracy allows the author to fill in one of the gaps in Goya’s life. At this time of the story, Paco is already the apprentice of Francisco Bayeu and is living with his family. As soon as the King’s police start chasing the Jesuits, Pignatelli takes refuge in Bayeu’s home. The King’s grenadiers break into the house with an Inquisition Dominican monk and seize the Jesuit. In a fit of anger, Paco hits an officer of the King. This incident forces him to flee from Spain to avoid being sent prisoner to the galleys at Cádiz. Goya’s mysterious four-year stay in Italy is thus explained.22 For its part, the Bayeu family is essential both to Goya’s life and career and to Marlowe’s novel. Francisco Bayeu y Subías (b. Saragossa 1734, d. Madrid 1795), a student of José Luzán and painter to King Carlos III, highly influenced by Mengs’ neoclassic academicism, had been director of painting at the Royal Academy of 20

It is most ironic – and Machiavellian – that later on Aranda managed to get rid of majos’ broad-brimmed hats and flaring capes by making them the uniform of the public executioner (Marlowe, Colossus, 127). 21 Various authors, Gran Enciclopedia de España, 3762. 22 Most historians agree that Goya went to Italy to learn from Italian models after several consecutive failures in different painting contests. See, for instance, Alfonso Pérez Sánchez, Goya: Grandes Artistas y Genios de la Pintura, Madrid: Planeta de Agostini, 2005, 10; Grasa and Barboza, Goya en el camino, 35.

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San Fernando since 1788 and its general director since 1795. He had two brothers and at least two sisters, Ramón, Manuel, Josefa, and another woman.23 Manuel (b. Saragossa 1740, d. 1809?) was a cleric and painter who, like Goya, was close to an already old-fashioned baroque.24 This similarity in style is reflected in the novel as an admiration of and close friendship with Goya. Ramón (b. Saragossa 1746, d. Aranjuez 1793) studied in the Academy of San Fernando, where he won the first prize and fellowship in the 1766 painting contest. He had worked in the Royal Tapestry Works since 1765, becoming Painter to the King together with Goya in 1791. His paintings were characterized by precise drawing and neoclassic academicist rigor. Ramón is presented as a jealous man, despising and envious of Goya’s style, always trying to bother him and mess up his life. A good example of his pettiness is his betrayal when he tells the King’s officers that Goya is a friend of the Jesuit Pignatelli so that he can be put under arrest. Marlowe reports how Ramón wins the gold medal in the 1766 contest but says his brother Francisco was one of the judges together with Mariano Maella, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Anton Rafael Mengs, while other sources affirm Francisco Bayeu was not part of the jury.25 The narrative is precise even in irrelevant details such as the title of the picture the contestants have to paint: “Juan de Urbino and Diego de Paredes, in Italy, in view of the Spanish army, discuss to which of the two should be given the arms of the Marqués de Pescara.” Yet, apart from the suggestion of nepotism in the novel, the fact that Goya is nowhere mentioned as having taken part in the contest is not acknowledged, but the narrator explains that Goya arrived thirty minutes late and did not have enough time to finish his painting. Goya’s marriage to Josefa Bayeu (b. ?, d. 1812) is also used for dramatic purposes. Goya first has sex with Josefa the night before fleeing to Italy, after being repeatedly rejected by his beloved Mariana who is already secretly pregnant with his child. Josefa’s first pregnancy appears as the reason why her brother Francisco uses his 23 Josefa’s name came to be known only because she married Francisco de Goya. The only proof that they had at least another sister is a reference to her marriage to a man connected to a Spanish prince (Pozo Ruiz, “Pablo de Olavide”, 16). Needless to say, their birth dates and places cannot be found in any encyclopedia. 24 Various authors, Gran Enciclopedia de España, 1399-1400. 25 Grasa and Barboza, Goya en el camino, 22.

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power to employ Goya in the Royal Tapestry Works of Santa Barbara. When this baby is born dead because Josefa gets ill before childbirth and they had no money for a doctor – since the painter was indebted after taking charge of his father’s debts – Goya decides to become rich and famous for Josefa’s sake. In all, they had eight children, of whom only the last survived and became Goya’s heir: the dead-born, Antonio, Eusebio, Vicente (a premature baby), María del Pilar, Francisco de Paula, Hermenegilda and Francisco Javier.26 In the novel, three of them are alluded to – the first (whose name is not even given), María del Pilar, and Javier. The figure of María del Pilar is used for dramatic purposes: she is first mentioned to explain Goya’s first illness, provoked by the excess of commissions he assumes when he has three families to support – Josefa and their three-month-old girl, Mariana and Antonio Francisco, and his parents and his sister Rita, who is very ill. It is in this context that the novel explains Goya’s creation of his painting “Cristo Crucificado” (1780), which has not received any good criticism,27 but which enabled him to become a member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando.28 Critics explain the sobriety and strict neoclassicism of this painting by suggesting that Goya tried to emulate Velázquez in his own “Cristo Crucificado” (c. 1630). However, when comparing the pictures it is easy to notice the huge differences between them, both in form and color as well as in concept and attitude. Once again, Colossus offers its own genuine account for this difference: in an attempt to help his sister and brother-in-law’s financial situation, Francisco Bayeu paints a neoclassical crucified Christ for Goya to copy. Goya does copy the painting, making his picture even more neoclassical than the original, since his admission to the Academy was requisite for him to be commissioned to paint one of the vaults of the temple of the Virgin of Pilar in Saragossa, again through the influence of Francisco Bayeu. Well-known and well attested are the problems Goya had due to the baroque style of the vault he painted, and his frequent arguments with Francisco and Ramón Bayeu on account of their divergences, as reflected in Marlowe’s novel. What is not so well known is the 26 Arturo Ansón, “La familia de Goya: ascendientes y descendientes”: see http://goya. unizar.es/InfoGoya/Vida/Familia.html, 1996. 27 Pérez Sánchez, Goya: Grandes, 14. 28 Garrido, Goya, 15.

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existence of a prize-giving ceremony in which the three painters were to be given a silver medal in acknowledgment for their work.29 After all the trouble and criticism he receives, Paco rejects the medal and refuses to stay in Saragossa until the day of the ceremony, but Josefa insists she wants to stay with her brothers and take the medal herself. While she stays with their baby girl, Goya goes back to Madrid in a fury and spends three days having sex with Barbara García, an embroiderer at the Royal Tapestry Works. On the fourth day, he goes back home and finds two letters from Josefa saying that María del Pilar has died from diphtheria and will be buried in Saragossa. But when Paco finds the letters, it is too late to attend the burial. To finish with Goya’s descent, Leocadia Zorrilla Weiss, his companion in his later life who moved to Bordeaux with him, had two children of her own, Guillermo and Rosario – some sources suggest that Rosario might have being Goya’s own daughter.30 Marlowe makes the most of this possibility and creates an affair between Leocadia and the painter, who are described having sex in the middle of the battlefield during the siege of Saragossa in the War of Independence against the French. Rosario is said to be the result of that bold event. There is some account of a second Bayeu sister who married Marcos del Campo, a brother of Francisco del Campo, who was Secretary to the King for Prince Don Luis, by means of whom Goya is supposed to have got in contact with the prince – King Carlos III’s brother.31 In Colossus, the second and younger sister is given the name of María del Carmen. After several unsuccessful attempts to flirt with Goya, María del Carmen marries the painter’s friend Juanito Apiñani, who competes in the bullring with two bullfighters who did live at that time and of whom Goya made several drawings and etchings: Pepe Hillo, who is given more prominence in the novel, and his rival Pedro Romero. Hillo, whose real name was José Delgado (b. Sevilla 1754, d. Madrid 1801), was killed in the ring by a bull named Barbudo, as the novel depicts.32 Marlowe’s account of Hillo’s life is precise even as to the date when he became a fully-fledged bullfighter, and elaborates on a temporary affair and an unrequited passion for the Duchess of Alba 29

As far as I know, there is no reference to this event in any biographical source. Garrido, Goya, 29; Pozo Ruiz, “Pablo de Olavide”, 46. 31 Pozo Ruiz, “Pablo de Olavide”, 16. 32 Various authors, Gran Enciclopedia de España, 3255. 30

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that stirs the bullfighter’s jealousy of Goya. It is worthy of note that the character María del Carmen marries not Marcos del Campo, who is not necessary for the story because Marlowe’s Goya gets into contact with the Royal Family by other means, but Juanito Apiñani, whose profession allows the narration to dwell for some time on bullfighting – thereby providing a stereotypical element of Spanish local color. The narrator approaches the history of bullfights by explaining that some critics have considered them a pre-Christian fertility cult. At other points of the story, some bullfights are described in very realistic terms, and it is precisely María del Carmen who suggests to Goya that he paint bullfights. The introduction of novelistic features in Marlowe’s depiction of historical accounts is enhanced by means of some other characters. First Minister José Moñino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca, (b. Murcia 1728, d. Sevilla 1808), a lawyer, politician and diplomat, was one of the most influential politicians in Carlos III’s reign. As a royalist and enlightened man, he led the process that resulted in the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Spain in collaboration with Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes. One of his main achievements was the creation of the Bank of St Charles, Spain’s first national bank. Because of the harassment inflicted upon him by the count of Aranda and his powerful Aragonese party, in 1788 he tried to resign but King Carlos IV would not accept his notice. He was finally dismissed by the King in 1792 for his weakness in respect to the French Revolution – and Aranda became the Secretary of the State for a short time, until he was replaced by Manuel Godoy.33 In Colossus, Floridablanca is dismissed for a very different reason: the Count tells King Carlos IV that his royal wife, María Luisa, is having an affair with Godoy. The pusillanimous King tells his wife about it. Her reaction is to make the King realize he cannot rule Spain without her help, and argues that Floridablanca has made up the story of her affair as an act of revenge since he tried to seduce her and she had rejected him. There are other relevant personages in Goya’s life whose recreation in the novel to a large extent is true. One of the most important is the Duchess Cayetana de Alba (b. 1762, d. 1802), from 1775 married to her cousin Don José Antonio Álvarez de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca (b. 1756, d. 1796). In respect to the main 33

Ibid., 4125-26.

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events of their lives as well as in the little details, such as the Marquis’s delight for Haydn’s music, the narrative is accurate.34 The relationship the Duchess and Goya have in the novel has been historically attested but naturally there are elements that seem to be the author’s pure invention, such as the fact that the Marquis had a very small penis, Goya and Cayetana first meeting in a patio de caballos35 when she was a little girl and then by a literal accident when the painter’s birlocho (a kind of carriage) turns right over, or the story of a gypsy fortune teller warning Cayetana that she would see “no old age” (250, 323). The novel also re-creates Goya’s visit to the Duchess in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Huelva) in 1796 and his painting her portraits there at her Coto de Doñana. Indeed, historians agree that it is the paintings gathered in Goya’s Álbum de Sanlúcar de Barrameda that corroborate the painter and the Duchess did have an intimate relationship.36 The same source asserts that the Albas’ was a very active palace in terms of social and cultural events, in direct competence with the Duchess of Osuna’s. The novel reflects this social gathering through the description of two parties: first, that in the Osunas’ palace where Cayetana and Goya spend some time together after his little accident, and then Cayetana’s, where she ridicules Queen María Luisa by making her servants and her fictional adopted black little daughter wear the same gown (brought from Paris) as the queen. There, Cayetana announces before all the Grandees at the party that, since the Queen had Cayetana’s palace burnt the last time she was disrespectful to the Queen, this time she will do it by herself so that the Queen does not have all the fun. As the author states in the Afterword, “books have been written to prove that the Duchess of Alba was murdered” (562) and less daring sources at least admit that she died “in not very clear circumstances”.37 These two incidents – the use of the identical gowns, and Cayetana’s bold accusation and the burning of her own palace – are the reasons why, in Marlowe’s novel, the Duchess’s murder at the hands of the Alba family’s doctor is ordered by the Queen with the mediation of Manuel Godoy. 34

Cf. Pérez Sánchez, Goya: Grandes, 26. Patio de caballos is the place by a bullring where the horses that take part in a bullfight are kept together with the harnesses and any other related implements. 36 Various authors, Gran Enciclopedia de España, 334-35. 37 Ibid., 335 (my translation). 35

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Colossus also addresses some of the most controversial issues concerning the history of Spain throughout the years it covers. A good example is the relationship between Queen María Luisa and Lieutenant Manuel Godoy, who supposedly had a long affair that affected the political situation of the country because of the excessive power exercised by Godoy, who became Minister of Justice and Foreign Affairs. Godoy refused to start a war against the French because he had invested all the money in the building of his new palace, even though French “Republican troops massed across the Pyrenees” and had beheaded the Spanish King’s cousin Louis XVI (316). Even worse, Godoy agreed on an alliance with France to wage war against England over Portugal, by which the Spanish frontier was opened to let the French troops approach Portugal – and, at the same time, encamp in Northern Spain. Ironically enough, it is the establishment of this alliance that gives him the title of “Prince of the Peace” (347). To settle the issue of the relationship between historical and fictional characters in the novel, the following table shows a comprehensive attempt to gather all the proper names and their status in the text: Historical personages that are just mentioned José Luzán (13) Voltaire (21) Rousseau (21) Diderot (21) Baron von Grimm (35) Machiavelli (89) Jesuit founders: Loyola and Francis Xavier (90)

Historical personages that play some role

Fictional characters related to real ones

Gaspar, Juanito, Tuertillo, Emeterio Apiñani (11) Goya’s parents: Doña Engracia and José (13-14) Goya’s siblings: Camillo, Tomás (13) and Rita (15)

Pascual Apiñani (11)

Nicolás and Ramón Pignatelli (16) King Carlos III (21) Fernando de Silva, Duke of Alba (33) Pablo de Olavide (33)

Mariana de Olavide (30) Mariana’s Peruvian dueña “the Indian” (39) María del Carmen Bayeu (103) Antonio, Marqués de Solís (128) Antonio Francisco de Solís y Olavide: “Paquito” (128) Bárbara García (162)

Mastering the Art Playwright Ramón de la Cruz (91) Mynheer Cornelius Van der Goten (159) Pedro and Francisco Romero (164) Velázquez (186)

Dr Rodríguez-Pereira38 (60) Leopoldo di Gregorio, Marquis of Squillace (65) Pedro de Abarca, Count of Aranda (69) Domenico Tiepolo (86)

Playwright Tomás Iriarte (244) Haydn (248)

Anton Rafael Mengs (91)

Singer La Caramba (259) Frederick of Prussia (272) Luther (275)

Francisco and Ramón Bayeu (93) Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (99) Manolo and Josefa Bayeu (103) Count Floridablanca (127)

Erasmus (275) Calvin (275) Dante (275) Petrarch (275) Boccacio (275) Cervantes (275)

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35 Midwife Zárate (175)

Mariano Maella (93)

José Delgado, Pepe Hillo (144) Cayetana de Alba (166) King Carlos IV and Queen María Luisa (184) María del Pilar (195)

Napoleon (275)

The Count of Gabarda (216) Allué (216)

Sebastián Martínez

Palafox (216)

In the Afterword, the author explains Dr Rodríguez-Pereira as “a composite of several physicians who figured importantly in Goya’s life” (562). Even though written sources assert that Goya never spoke again after he was struck by deafness, this doctor is given prominence by being attributed the characteristics of historical Dr Jacobo Rodríguez Pereira (1715-1780), a well-known teacher of deaf people whose students, for the first time in history, learned to speak despite their deafness and became successful and famous (http://www.planetavisual.net/sc/edu/historia/historia_ ps.htm). Although his method was never known, Marlowe depicts the doctor teaching Goya how to speak again.

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Actress La Tirana (323) Leandro Moratín (377)

The Duchess of Osuna (243) Manuel Godoy (247)

Bernardo Yriarte (377)

Don J. Antonio Álvarez de Todedo, Marqués de Villafranca (248) Javier (257)

Asensio Juliá (379)

Pepa Tudó (314)

Meléndez and Cabarrús (387) Verdier (487)

Tadea, Marquesa de las Fuentes (362) Melchor Gaspar de Jovellanos (378) Dr Peral (440)

Murat (488) Joseph Bonaparte (494)

Ceán Bermúdez (450) King Fernando VII (495) General Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (501) Leocadia (502) Mariano (509) Rosario (546)

Apart from the use, sometimes playful, sometimes more historically accurate, of historical personages in the novel, there are constant references to specific places in Madrid and Saragossa, as well as Aragonese customs, eating habits and traditions that give evidence of the author’s exhaustive knowledge of his subject of recreation. Likewise, this technique enhances the realistic character of the novel and the local color so essential to traditional historical fiction. A good proof for this is his reference to the New Tower of Saragossa, an architecturally unique sixteenth-century building destroyed in 1892 for commercial reasons, or places such as the Plaza de San Felipe, the

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Roman bridge over the Ebro river, the Seo cathedral, “the old Roman walls of Zaragoza” and the “barrio of Boterón” (212). Likewise, there are remarkably local references to olive oil and garlic, chilindrón chicken and Cariñena wines, the difference between the latter and Valdepeñas wine, the Festival of the Virgen del Pilar, the suddenness of Aragonese thunderstorms, or the stubbornness of Aragonese people – “Baturros”,39 as the author correctly puts it – (8, 66, 108, 224, 226). Marlowe even uses the expression Aragonese people use to define themselves: “as stubborn as a mule” (261). The narrator also involves himself with such issues as the origin of the Aragonese folklore song, the jota, of which the author further proves to have a deep knowledge. In this case, the narrator opts for the most exotic hypothesis – currently discarded by most historians – and states that it is a “wild dance the Moors had brought to Zaragoza a thousand years ago” (214).40 There are also accurate descriptions of the jota dancers’ costumes, of the music instruments played, and even the author’s translation into English of the lyrics of a very well-known jota is included twice in the text. This type of reference goes beyond the limits of Aragon and reaches elements of Spanish culture in general. A good example is the Andalusian tradition of cante hondo, described as a “haunting moorish wailing” (30, 196), and the inclusion of the lyrics of a cante hondo song about a woman named Petenera. Other instances are the references to the Domecq bodega in Jerez and its brandy; the good quality of “Toledo steel”; the fact that “the pole was a Navarrese specialty” in bullfights (147); the etymological origin of tapas – “a little cover for your cups” (205); the traditional use of a bota (a small wineskin) – to drink wine (205); castanets; the Alba family’s properties in Piedrahita, Doñana; the Statue of Neptune in Madrid; and the story of the Rocío miracle. Finally, the local color of the novel is further enhanced by the use of expressions in Spanish and literal translations into English of Spanish sayings and set phrases which replace the use of dialect typical of traditional historical novels. Thus, apart from phrases like: 39

This nickname given to the people from Aragon can have either familiar or pejorative connotations depending on its use. Its implicit semantic charge includes the stereotypical character traits traditionally attached to the Aragonese: stubbornness and honesty. 40 Various authors, Gran Enciclopedia de España, 5503.

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“Ay toro, toro ay!” and “He knows Latin and Greek” (147); “cuñado” (207); “corrida”, “alegría”, “matador”, “ante”, “callejón”, “Andaluz”, Sevillanos”, banderillas”, “picador”, “barrera”, “olés”, “muleta”, “señoritas” (296-97); or “Hillo has them in his pocket” (298), the reader can even find a parody of the way Spanish people of the time must have tried to pronounce the name of a British personage like the Duke of Wellington – “Viva Velintón!” (519). All these premises considered, one may reasonably conclude that Marlowe’s 1972 novel shares the most relevant, fundamental features that define the traditional type of historical novel as a well-established genre. The author has proved that he has mastered the rules before breaking them in future novels, just as Tiepolo advised young Goya to learn the rules of the neoclassic style of painting before rejecting and surpassing it.

CHAPTER 3 BETWEEN MAGIC AND MADNESS: A PORTRAIT OF SPAIN AND ITS NEUROSES

It is precisely a characteristic of Goya’s persona critics and historians agree upon that becomes the leitmotif of Marlowe’s novel: mental disorder. Starting from its very title, Colossus: A Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad revolves around the most repetitive word in the text – “madness”. It is my intention in this section to analyze the meaning and implications of that very concept depending on the context and the entity to which it is applied in different parts of the novel. Thus, I will mainly distinguish between madness as it is ascribed to Goya, and to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain and its population. Then, I will proceed to study the resulting corollary as a reflection of the Spanish reality contemporaneous to the publication of the novel. The first relevant point when accounting for the relationship between the protagonist and madness is that Goya is presented throughout the text as a sensitive, strong-willed, insightful artist who sticks to the ideals of peace and justice. The textual implications of the novel leave little space open to ambiguity since the omniscient narrator’s identification with Goya is present throughout in the recurrent use of interior monologue and free indirect style to portray the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. Moreover, this identification is reinforced by several instances in which the narrator restricts his point of view and limited knowledge to that of the latter, and even adopts Goya’s attitude and usual phraseology, as when it refers to Godoy’s “incredible stupidity” (347) or uses interjections like “Santa María” (553). Significantly, it is when social and political turmoil emerge after Carlos III’s death that Goya is suddenly assaulted by deafness and the haunting of witches whispering in his ears the monstrous scenes he has to paint. If the characteristics of his state of mind were to be described in Foucauldian terms, an evolution could be discerned from an initial

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outburst of passion provoked by “a horrible and unexpected sight, great grief, rage”, which make a great impression and provoke “sudden and violent nervous symptoms” that can result in “an immobility which may reach the point of death”, to a state of mania as defined by the French thinker.1 It is not coincidental that Goya’s first fit of deafness occurs when his head is struck in the popular riot triggered by Squillace’s ban of the use of some garments but fueled by the ongoing famine the population had been suffering. The following paragraph eloquently narrates the moment when the protagonist first feels the approach of the madness of violence that has absorbed the people and himself with them: Paco found himself part of the mob that stormed the royal arsenal .… Its madness seized him, its fury infuriated him, its insanity deranged him. Then outside the arsenal, something stroke his head. There was a ringing in his ears, and he fell .… It was madness, and the madness had touched him. He could feel it, waiting, crouching in the dark places inside him. It was madness, and no one was immune. (81)

Another interesting aspect of this crucial moment is the way in which madness and passion are explicitly related in the account of the painter’s reaction after getting away from the riot. When he arrives at Mariana de Olavide’s house, which has been destroyed by the mob, the sexual act in which they engage is described in the following terms: “out of madness passion, out of death life, the madness rising and falling, plunging and lifting and leaving them limp in each other’s arms like children afraid of the dark” (83). Likewise, the subsequent temporary fits seize Goya in crucial moments that will determine his emotional life. The first instance comes at a time when he is overworked because he suddenly has three families to support – his wife Josefa and their daughter María del Pilar, his parents and his sister Rita, and Mariana and her son Antonio Francisco. The second outbreak of Goya’s illness takes place when his baby daughter María del Pilar dies from diphtheria and is buried in Saragossa while he is having an extra-marital affair in Madrid. The third and most dangerous occurrence is after driving through the rain from Cádiz to Sanlúcar de Barrameda to see his lover Cayetana de 1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), London: Routledge, 2003, 84-85.

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Alba. This time, the painter becomes so seriously ill that he undergoes a temporary “general paralysis of the nervous system” (308), one of the strongest stages of Foucault’s definition of passion – his relationship with Cayetana being the event that will mark his life most deeply. Witches make their appearance during all these three periods. On the first occasion, Goya dreams of a coven of witches and wakes up with a terrible ringing in his ears that gradually becomes the noise of witches cackling. In this feverish state the painter suddenly decides to go to the palace and start working again. He then remembers Giovanni Battista Tiepolo telling him: “There’s a feeling of Spain in your work” (200; emphasis in the original). Thereby bringing together for the first time the concepts of madness, Spain and “the magic” – the latter inevitably attached to Tiepolo, who discovered it in Goya: the painter realizes that “the faint scratching” sound of his etching needle against the copper plate with which he made his particular diagnoses of the sicknesses of the country supersedes the nightmarish ringing in his ears (202). The second case has a similar resolution: after seeing a witch who pokes a pin in a rag doll in the form of his dead baby, which makes Goya deaf again, the ringing goes as soon as he finds a copper plate to etch. The third instance is different, as he recovers not by etching the reality of Spain, but by reading enlightened pamphlets2 – the content of which obviously had little to do with nineteenth-century Spain – and shouting that everybody is mad: Everybody. The king. The queen. Aranda. Godoy. The French. Their insane Robespierre. (327)

Goya’s hearing does not return, but this realization makes him go back to work and initiate a relevant experience: accompanied by Juanito Apiñani and two mules ironically named Manuel – after Godoy – and María L. – after the Queen – he starts a journey to rural Extremadura,

2

It is interesting to note here the link that Foucault establishes between madness and civilization in the nineteenth century. Madness was then conceived as the penalty of liberty and of freedom of conscience, the search for truth through attention to different opinions, and a mania for study as well as for abstract and complex knowledge (Madness and Civilization, 202-205).

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just to realize that they were “fifty miles west of Madrid … and they had gone back five hundred years” (334). There, in Badajoz, Goya and Juanito visit a madhouse open to visitors on Sundays for popular entertainment. The two men witness a horrific scene of naked inmates crammed together in tiny bare rooms. Both the interns’ and the spectators’ blank mad looks remind Goya of his own face when he was ill for the third time. There is a fire in the asylum, where Paco and Juanito rescue as many mad people as they can. Afterwards, feeling the call of Tiepolo’s magic, Goya paints the episode as “an affirmation of life” (343). This account of the madhouse experience is significant for its parallel with Foucault’s descriptions of the Hôpitaux Généraux in Madness and Civilization. Yet, it is also relevant for the contrast it establishes between the confinement and ill-treatment of the poor harmless inmates and the savagery of the free supposedly sane people who brutally kill a bull on the streets and tearing it into pieces and eating its raw meat. The contrast extends to the participants in an Easter procession, who wear chains on their ankles and flagellate themselves with sharp glass pieces affixed to the tips of leather whips – a clear criticism of the brutal, superstitious Spanish character and traditions. Goya’s transition to mania is marked by the influence of the witches that haunt his thoughts and creak and cackle in his ears up to the moment he fills all the walls in the House of the Deaf Man with the “Black Paintings” (543-44). At this point his state recalls Foucault’s definition of such mental disorder: The maniac’s imagination … is occupied by a perpetual flux of impetuous thoughts .… Mania deforms all concepts and ideas; either they lose their congruence, or their representative value is falsified; … in the maniac we find audacity and fury.3

Yet, Goya’s condition retains the trait of melancholia that permits “the sufferer to predict the future, to speak an unknown language, to see beings ordinarily invisible; this melancholia originates in a supernatural intervention”.4 It is in this audacious and furious mood that, inspired by the witches’ advice to work and live because “beyond the grave is nothing” (388), Goya starts working on the etching series 3 4

Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 119. Ibid., 96.

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called The Caprices, which includes his famous The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters and depicts a world of witches, monsters, deformity, death, and nothingness. As the protagonist puts it when trying to explain the series: “of course they’re ugly, they’re the sleep of reason, they’re the dark night of Spain” (403). The same impulse leads the painter to work on the series called The Disasters of War, based on his own experience as a witness of the War of Independence against the French. It is, in fact, the nothingness and the night of classical unreason that, according to Foucault, pervade and give birth to both Goya’s Disparates and his paintings in the House of the Deaf Man.5 The disturbing recurrence of the exclamation “nada, nada y nada” out of the painter’s despair and feeling of void (98, 152, 233, 309, 310, 466) actually seems to be anything but accidental. At the same time, the representation of the painter’s relation to the world around him allows the reader to apprehend the rage and animality – ascribed to madness in the Middle Ages6 – of the social environment. The first visible sign was the brutality of the population during the Motín de Squillace, when the Spanish even managed to open the gates of the Cárcel de Corte (Court’s Prison), as the French had done with the Bastille. Thus, Goya’s madness eventually becomes Marlowe’s strategy to target the socio-political conditions of the historical period. A conversation between Goya and King Carlos III foreshadows and summarizes the whole point: “– What sort of Spain will you paint?” “Wouldn’t that depend on Spain, Your Majesty?” The king turned on him sharply. “Then open your eyes and keep them open. You’ll see a time of turmoil, of despair and anarchy, of pighead politicians leading us into wars I’ve tried to avoid. You’ll see the dark side of the Spanish soul emerging, the bloodlust of the bullring spilling into the streets of Madrid. You’ll see the land ravaged. You’ll see a time of madness. Will you paint that?” (255-56)

In fact, Goya goes deaf forever as soon as France declares war to Spain in March 1793.7 It is after witnessing the events of 2 May 1808,

5

Ibid., 266-67. Ibid., 18. 7 Goya’s hearing problems, overemphasized as they are in the novel, could be interpreted as the “defect in transmission of sense impressions to the brain, [the] flaw 6

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when a popular revolt began fighting against Napoleon’s army at their entrance into Madrid, that he devised the painting he would later create and which gives its title to the novel: He saw a giant, looming over a landscape where people, carts, covered wagons were fleeing. The giant, whose massive fists could crush whole villages, smote the earth. (481)

The narrator keenly insists on “the futility of war. The madness of it” (533) and vividly portrays the process of the artist’s creation of The Disasters of War, wondering whether he is mad while etching the horrors, blood and butchering of human bodies that he had seen in the war. In fact, in passages like the following, etching is depicted as a sort of self-exorcism that liberates the artist from all the absorbed savagery: He had no plan, no focus, no direction. He fought the beast with his etching needle and his acid. He fought the callous indifference of a God who did not care. Stark black and white in a world gone mad. The beast in us all, no one is immune. (524)

Simultaneously, Goya is aware of the clear symptoms of his incipient insanity when he recognizes in the eyes of the madmen confined at the Hospital General of Badajoz the same look he had seen in his own reflection in the mirror. In his old age, the artist sometimes recalls this madhouse, where he believes he belongs, yet: “the knowing, he asked himself, wasn’t the knowing a sign that he really wasn’t mad? A madman thinks he is sane” (545). His assumption perfectly coincides with the one prescribed by the Encyclopédie’s definition of madness: “to depart from reason ‘with confidence and in the firm conviction that one is following it …. ’ The madman … deceives himself.”8 Following this argument and medieval literature on the madman as the guardian of truth engaged in making his contemporaries aware of the follies of men, the painter’s alleged madness is depicted as the courage to discern and represent the truth of a country dominated by vanity, greed, cruelty, and destruction. in communication” linked to the delirium of maniacs (Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 120-21). 8 Ibid., 98 (emphasis in the original).

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As the narrator puts it when interpreting Goya’s Caprices: The folly of men, the venality of petty officials, the insanity of living in a fourteenth-century world on the eve of the nineteenth. Spain, he thought. Poor Spain. Hold up a mirror, Jovino had said. (382)

In his search for the truth, which the witches repeatedly tell Paco to find, he fills the bare plaster walls of the House of the Deaf Man, “big enough to contain the truth”, with the Black Paintings – “not with madness but with the memory of madness” (555). It is at this time that the painter finally admits to himself, just as he questions whether there is a God and hates religion for its irrationality, that the witches do not exist either, their presence being but an invention of a deaf man for whom the constant noises he hears would otherwise be unbearable. In line with this, the painter’s career is portrayed as being always moved by “the magic”, a kind of inspirational creative energy whose purpose and meaning he does not quite grasp at the beginning. The first glimpse of its significance comes as soon as Tiepolo warns Goya about it: “You have the magic, Paco .… And I pity you …. It is a tremendous responsibility, the magic. It will torment you. It’s the price you pay. What will you do with it, Paco? To what use will you put it?” (100)

One of the earliest materializations of the magic as a curse of responsibility appears when the artist feels the pressing, dangerous need to paint his experience as a spectator of an Inquisition “Little Act of Faith” (192) – Autillos de Fe being the reduced, private version of earlier open, public Autos de Fe. Yet, it is when Goya engages in the Disasters of War that: [he] understood the meaning of the magic finally. To show this. That one power-mad man could cause such disaster. That an army could follow him blindly, for the glory of their nation. That the people could rise from fire and blood with an unspeakable barbarity of their own. That men could do this to one another. That the follies and bestiality he had etched in the Caprices were a foretaste of what men could do, and would do, in the name of God or in the name of No God as long as they lacked ... a hope for all the future still to come, a feeling of humanity – any other way was madness. To show that. To etch it. To

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Chaos and Madness attack the copper plates with the savage knowledge that he was right. (500)

Furthermore, this magic is repeatedly explained as being fed by the witches, which in turn are set as the essence of Goya’s madness. This seems to fit perfectly with Foucault’s closing remarks in Madness and Civilization: Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself …. The world is made aware of its guilt. Henceforth, and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable (for the first time in the Western world) in relation to the work of art .… Yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth. The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is.9

Goya’s apparent mental disorder unravels as the faithful lens through which the reader, just like the people who observe his paintings, can see the madness of the historical context that made it possible, at the same time as it emerges as a different logic of reason necessary in order to survive in such a cruel, grotesque world. Furthermore, the artist’s different order of reason is a metaphor of his defense of his personal style at painting. Thus, when his master Francisco Bayeu criticizes both the lines Goya draws as being “pure chaos” and his baroque excess of color in contrast with the “reason”, order and precision of neoclassical line and sobriety, the protagonist expounds his belief that Bayeu does not understand reason – since reason, for Goya, is color (105, 226). In other words, the protagonist’s personal conception of order is the chaos of the neoclassic. Hence, the critiques of Goya’s paintings as chaotic acquire a new, positive dimension, since this chaos appears as the new order of reason that

9

Ibid., 273-74.

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enables the artist to discern and cope with the chaotic, disastrous reality he reflected in those paintings. Indeed, this different mental order could be interpreted in the light of the notion that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put forth in AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which combines Deleuze’s Nietzschean philosophy of difference and Guattari’s psychoanalytic approach to micro-politics in the style of Foucault. In line with their post-structuralist hostility towards totalizing thought, Deleuze and Guattari develop a harsh critique of both Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which are exposed as attempts to liberate the subject from structures of social and psychic control “only in order to reinscribe it into the equally controlling structures of the authoritarian state and psychological normalcy”.10 In Anti-Oedipus, its authors picture the unconscious as a positive, creative “desiring-machine” that seeks ever new creative connections in a constant state of becoming. According to their political analysis of desire or “schizoanalysis”, capitalism brings about an excess of desire that its own control mechanisms manage to deform and channel into what they call the paranoid, fascistic ego-structures of the neurotic subject. Simultaneously, there is another type of subject that resists the manipulative control of capitalist mechanisms and acquires an irrepressible potential for revolution – the psychotic or schizo. As Mark Seems words it in his Introduction to Anti-Oedipus: Depression and Oedipus are agencies of the State, agencies of paranoia, agencies of power, long before being delegated to the family. Oedipus is the figure of power as such, just as neurosis is the result of power on individuals. Oedipus is everywhere .… Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what gives us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own repression. Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized at home, at school, at work. Everybody wants to be a fascist .… The neurotic is the one on whom the Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of being oedipalized.11

10

Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt, Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction (1991), London and New York: Routledge, 2002, 124. 11 Mark Seems, Introduction, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), London and New York: Continuum, 2003, xxxxi (emphasis in the original).

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According to Nick Heffernan’s reading of their work, Deleuze and Guattari explore Lacan’s definition of Oedipus as containing the means of its own deconstruction, since “it highlights the central role played by ‘Oedipalization’ in the reproduction of capitalism and thus any challenge to capitalism must first seek to unseat Oedipus”.12 Deleuze and Guattari are mainly concerned with the issue of fascism. In this respect, they argue that the masses under fascist regimes were not “innocent dupes” but that “at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for”.13 From their viewpoint, the socius or capitalist system has always been engaged in codifying the flows of desire in a way that prevents any form of desire to escape channeling and regulation. This psychic repression is effected through various mechanisms, the family being its main delegated agent. Thus, through the process of oedipalization, incestuous drives become the disfigured image of the repressed; or, to put it differently, repressed desire is manipulated, recoded and materialized into the spectre of incest. The Oedipus complex is therefore the result of this double operation: first distortion and then repression of the distorted desire. The authors go on to explain that “psychic repression distinguishes itself from social repression by the unconscious nature of the operation and by its result.” They discover the reason why people can desire their own fascist repression, exposing the collaboration of oedipalization with authoritarian regimes: “Psychic repression is such that social repression becomes desired .… Strictly speaking, psychic repression is a means in the service of social repression.”14 In addition, psychoanalysis itself reinforces this mechanism since it manages to foreground psychic repression as a consequence of Oedipus and the superego, thus pushing social repression into the background. Starting from a notion of desire as “a more thoroughly collective and political agent than psychoanalysis, with its cloistered familial terms of reference, will allow”,15 Oedipus is for Deleuze and Guattari the point at which desire “lets itself be caught” by the “capitalist order of 12 Nick Heffernan, “Oedipus Wrecks? Or, Whatever Happened to Deleuze and Guattari?”, in Redirections in Critical Theory: Truth, Self, Action, History, ed. Bernard McGuirk, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 119. 13 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 29 (emphasis in the original). 14 Ibid., 119. 15 Heffernan, “Oedipus Wrecks?”, 121.

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representation”.16 Or, as Heffernan puts it, “desire is divided against itself”, conspiring in its own capture.17 Bearing this in mind, it is necessary to highlight the clear contrast between two sectors of society that the narrator makes in Colossus. First, the general population is shown to be completely thoughtless and incapable of moving out of a herd-like paralysis. This condition leads them to reclaim power for the exiled “deformed tyrant Fernando VII the Desired” (495) after the Spanish victory over the French in the War of Independence. The people do this despite their awareness that the King would instantly once more assert his absolute power and that of the Inquisition while sentencing to death the authors of the Constitution. Then, those few influenced by the Enlightenment – and Goya most acutely of all – appear as a minority that can neither fit in nor stand the social context and popular masochism. It is in this sense that one could argue the painter is an embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the psychotic as a person who escapes and rebels against the Oedipalization process that turns people into socialized, undifferentiated elements of the neurotic mass – fascist by necessity – that needs and desires the figure of a dictator to lead their steps and legislate their lives. The standpoint of the novel on this issue is clearly reinforced by the convergence of different voices on the view of Spanish society in general as a neurotic mass. Thus, while Jovellanos and his Junta are writing a constitution borrowing from the French and the American ones, the omniscient external narrator expounds that “the people wanted Fernando. They did not understand a country without a king” (501). The narrator’s stance is supplemented by the opinions of the characters that may be considered as outsiders. Hence, it is the Duke of Wellington who, discussing the constitution of the revolutionary government with Antonio Francisco, Goya’s fictional bastard son – brought up and educated in France after Enlightenment ideals – says that the people want Fernando, who will tear up the Constitution and throw it to their faces. He calls Antonio Francisco naïve, because he does not realize Fernando will be “a worse tyrant than his mother” María Luisa (520). Those remarks make Goya’s son realize that:

16 17

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 262. Heffernan, “Oedipus Wrecks?”, 125 (emphasis in the original).

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Chaos and Madness We need more than Wellington …. And we need more than a constitution. Spain is even less ready for a constitution than France was. Passion is a good thing. Passion is living. But we’re too damned passionate. We need a leader. Someone to rally around. (520-21)

Certainly, the worst predictions are confirmed as soon as King Fernando VII is crowned. All pamphlets and periodicals except the Madrid Gazette are forbidden, the liberals of the Junta are arrested: The Constitution of 1812 is declared null, evil and noxious. Its authors are guilty of crimes against the State and the Crown, and will be punished. The Holy Office of the Inquisition, abolished by the antichrist King Joseph, is restored to its full properties and powers. (527)18

The neuroticism of the Spanish population is reinstated by the behavior of a group of blacksmiths, who read the proclamation that contains the above repressive information and start shouting: “Death to the constitution! Death to liberty! Long live the Inquisition! Long live Spain and the king!” (528)

Witnessing this outrageous spectacle, Antonio Francisco complains: “The people. We fought and died for them. We fought and died for Fernando. The Desired,” he said with a terrible scorn. “It’s what the people want. They don’t know. They don’t understand.” (528)

Indeed, the import of Antonio Francisco’s dying thoughts reinforces the significance of his presence as a fictional character in the novel: It is no longer worth it, even if we could rally our old people. Let Fernando reign. Let him take Spain to hell with him. Perhaps it is what Spain deserves .… Hated the French because they corrupted their own ideas. Mother taught me. Good ideas. Enlightened, and then the corruption. We could use a little of that enlightenment down here. I thought it would be simple .… The people aren’t ready. Perhaps they never will be ready. Show it, father. No one can show it the way you can, the way you had to. (534, 539) 18

Cf. José-Luis Martín, Carlos Martínez Shaw and Javier Tusell, Historia de España: La Edad Contemporánea (1998), Madrid: Taurus, 2001, 31.

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The issue whether the neurosis that thrives in Goya’s Spain is a matter of the country alone or a large-scale illness is settled by the painter’s thoughts in the House of the Dead Man after admitting to himself that there are no witches: The individual, confronted by the madness of the mob. An eternal confrontation, and a hopeless one, until there are no more Pyrenees. (554)

Yet, it is my contention that Marlowe’s representation of a neurotic Spanish society is by no means coincidental or restricted to the historical period represented in the novel. As literary critic Avrom Fleishman states: Only the novelist with a coherent conception of his own world can look back to a past age and see it as a coherent system. The historical novel, like all historical writing, is engaged with – if it is not necessarily compromised by – the present …. The reflection from the present to the past is completed when the historical novelist reaches not the present from which he began but the constants of human experience in history – however these may appear to him in his time and place.19

In this respect, the novel seems to bear a resemblance with the approach of new historians like Herbert B. Addams, J.H. Robinson, Carl Becker and Charles Beard, who insist that only those aspects of the past that are directly relevant to the present and can explain a present state of affairs are worthy of study.20 Indeed, Colossus is pervaded by references and parallelisms that shed light on a subtle underlying critique of Spanish reality at the time the novel was written – which the author must have witnessed since, as acknowledged in the Afterword, he was living on and off for ten years in Spain gathering material on Goya. In this sense, the depiction of the flourishing of Enlightenment ideas during the peaceful, liberal reign of King Carlos III clearly recalls the atmosphere of intellectual freedom and the institutionalization of public education for the poor enjoyed in Spain in the years of the democratic Second Republic (1931-1936) before 19 20

Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 14. Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 71.

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the Civil War (1936-1939) and to the subsequent repressive, fascist, dictatorial regime.21 As happened during Carlos III’s reign, the Second Republic was by far the most creative period in twentieth-century Spain in terms of literature, culture and fine arts – so much so that these years came to be known as the “Silver Age” of Spanish culture.22 In both eras people suffered the trauma of a war: in the early nineteenth century a war of independence that was also a civil war, and in the twentieth century a civil war proper, the result of both involving massive migration of the defeated side to France and the invalidation of the result of elections celebrated by universal suffrage – for the election of the Courts in 1810, and for the Government of the State in 1936. Together with these similarities, further resemblances between both periods can be brought to the fore. For a start, it is easy to discern certain parallelisms between the measures undertaken by the governments of Kings Carlos IV and Fernando VII, and those of the two extreme right-wing dictatorial regimes that surrounded the Second Republic. For instance, in the early 1920s Catalonian and Basque nationalisms were harshly repressed by Miguel Primo de Rivera’s “regenerationist” dictatorship,23 the constituent assembly was closed, and personal freedoms were curtailed. Likewise, Francisco Franco in his personal dictatorship forbade the free circulation of opinion and expression, banned the existence of political parties, imposed censorship on the press, and removed the right of association and of public meetings. A remarkable parallelism can be found in the political attitude towards the institution of monarchy held by the liberal and conservative sectors of society at the time in which the novel is set, and during the right-wing dictatorial regimes in Spain. Thus, in the 1920s intellectual figures like Ortega y Gasset wrote against the monarchy, which was considered as a residue of the past, and the antimonarchic feeling was such that King Alfonso XIII had to leave the country. A similar attitude towards this institution can be discerned in 21

Ana Aguado and María Dolores Ramos, La modernización de España (1917-1939): Cultura y vida cotidiana, Madrid: Síntesis, 2002, 154-302. 22 Martín et al., Historia de España, 439. 23 Cf. the treatment the Catalonian and Basque territories receive on the part of King Carlos IV and Godoy (429), and the way in which a Catalonian uprising is repressed by troops from Madrid (273).

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the treatment it receives from the enlightened and intellectual circles represented in Colossus. One of the clear representatives of the liberal standpoint in Marlowe’s novel is the group of friends that meet every Tuesday night in the private room of Café Apiñani to talk about politics: the “Society of the Lovers of Ugliness” (377). In fact, the importance of tertulias or intellectual gatherings has been outstanding during all repressive regimes, as they were in the mid 1920s with the emergence of Azaña’s republicanism advocating a new notion of educational and militant democracy. That is clearly the reason why gatherings were banned in Franco’s times, intellectuals being always one of the enemies that the right-wing had to fight. Another interesting coincidence in both centuries is the conflicts and alliances between religion and the State. First of all, it should be noted that in the Spanish society of Goya’s lifetime there were three different social layers that were clearly distinguished and static, with no possibility of the lower stratum ever going up the social ladder. The two privileged layers, the church and the nobility, held the ideological, political and economic control of the country. The former had the coercive apparatus of the Inquisition and the capacity to direct the minds of a population that stuck to the past and both feared and abhorred innovation while searching relief from the miseries of daily life in spiritual comfort. The Inquisition is indeed the instrument that has most helped and harmed the Catholic Church. Since the fifteenth century, it came to represent the mechanism by means of which the vast part of the Spanish population – the old Christians – controlled the minority of new Christians – the wealthy Jews that converted to Catholicism. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Holy Office was a powerful and invulnerable institution in Spain. Yet, by that time, both popular and royal support started to weaken since there were no longer Jews, Muslims, or converts to be dispossessed of their properties and to be executed. It is interesting to notice the wholehearted support given to the Tribunal of the Inquisition by the institution of the monarchy in exchange for the strengthening of the royal supremacy it enforced. However, the monarchy became weary of the Inquisition’s independence and gradually curtailed its power although it was still considered as an auxiliary apparatus of royal authority. Besides, the institution was further weakened by its financial ruin – heightened by the decrease in the number of trials.

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Yet, by the end of the eighteenth century, because of the irreligious outcome of the French Revolution in the neighboring country, the Inquisition found a reason to regain power, which developed into a stronger censorship over the literary, scientific, and cultural manifestations produced in Spain.24 A sudden change was brought about by the coronation of King Joseph I, when Napoleon himself abolished the Inquisition in 1811 and reduced the number of convents to one third. Finally, it is also noticeable that the discussion of the decision to maintain or abolish the Inquisition within the frame of the Constitution on the part of the Cortes de Cádiz was the longest-held and most difficult, since it took from December 1812 to February 1813, only for it to be re-established by King Fernando VII after his return in 1814. For its part, religion was one of the main problems during the Second Republic: Miguel Maura vehemently defended his position with the massive burning of convents on 11 May 1931, destroying more than a hundred religious buildings. The popular power of the Catholic Church caused internal problems in the Republican Government during the discussion of Article 26 of the Constitution, when the Members of Parliament had to decide whether to expel the members of all religious orders from Spain or just make a clear division between the State and the Church, the latter being their final choice. In contrast with this irreligious attitude, Franco’s regime made a strong alliance with the Catholic Church, whose greatest exponents unanimously supported the dictatorial regime at the beginning as a reaction against the excesses of the Republican Party. Conflicts between the State and the Catholic Church started in the late 1930s, when the Government tried to impose its own choice in the selection of bishops, only to be truly reconciled in 1953 when the State, through a concordat with the Holy See, made economic and juridical concessions to the Church. Yet, both institutions entered a gradual separation again in 1963. Finally, the progressive governments of Carlos III and the Second Republic have in common their attempts – successful in the first case and a failure in the second – to expel the Jesuit community from Spain. Thus, while Marlowe’s Count of Aranda plans a scheme to drive the religious order out of the country and nationalize its 24

Roberto Alcalá Flecha, Literatura e Ideología en el Arte de Goya, Zaragoza: Diputación General de Aragón, 1988, 255-57.

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properties, thereby foregrounding the relevance and implications of this event, Azaña’s Constituent Assembly settled for the dissolution of the Jesuit order and the nationalization of its properties in 1931. Furthermore, the link between Franco’s dictatorial regime (19391975) and the dark periods of repression and decline comprehended in the book – Godoy’s and Fernando VII’s rules – becomes clear when the narrator conspicuously refers to Godoy as the “virtual dictator of Spain” (384) and as “a mockery of a generalissimo” (428) with a “generalissimo’s uniform” (429, 467).25 Bearing in mind that Stephen Marlowe was to write two other novels of Spanish theme and that he was to live in the country for some more years, it is easy to understand why these straightforward references are rare in the book since overstrict censorship was one of the characteristics of Franco’s times, together with imprisonment for those who dared speak against the regime. Indeed, curtailment of the freedom of speech and press was even strengthened in 1969, when, due to the dictator’s physical decline, Franco’s government was experiencing a serious crisis. Therefore, bearing in mind Deleuze and Guattari’s political theories on psychosis and neurosis – contemporaneous to the publication of Colossus and springing from the climate created by the university revolts in France in May 1968 – together with the parallelisms between the period depicted and the decades previous to its publication, it is easy to discern in the novel a critique of the state of neurosis in which the Spanish population was subsumed. Significantly, some historians highlight the fact that between 1945 and 1959 Spanish society in general seemed to accept the regime passively without any attempt to rebel or complain, and that “after the 1950s, it was usual for Franco to keep society inarticulate and passive, totally alien to politics”.26 This unquestioned – neurotic – submission to a leader, so clear in the novel and in Franco’s times, is an outstanding contrast to the unanimous enthusiasm with which the Second Republic was received and the view that its proclamation “seemed a proof that the Spanish people could govern themselves and overcome the burden of tyranny with their own strength”.27 Colossus is a magnificent 25

“Generalissimo” is an anglicized form of the Spanish term “generalísimo”, by which the fascist dictator Francisco Franco was generally known, making reference to his role as general-in-chief of the rebellious National Army in the Spanish Civil War. 26 Martín et al., Historia de España, 401 (my translation). 27 Ibid., 291 (my translation).

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portrait of Spain in the twentieth century as much in the eighteenth, but it would not be fair to state that the focus of the novel stays within the bounds of Spanish history and character. Marlowe achieves the goal of the historical novelist as set by Avrom Fleishman: to reach not just the present from the past but “the constants of human experience in history”28 such as the neurosis underlying fascism.

28

Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 14.

CHAPTER 4 POSTMODERN CRITIQUE AND THE HAND OF THE HISTORIAN “History is, mostly, a toss of the dice.”1

Meta-historiography and metafiction The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe is an example of the narrative trend that Linda Hutcheon defines as historiographic metafiction: written “in the context of a serious interrogating of the nature of representation in historiography”, the novel is “intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay[s] claim to historical events and personages”.2 In fact, a thorough study of this novel reveals its foundations to be built upon an impressive historiographic research on the author’s part. The plots that constitute its narrative threads, as well as the protagonists and characters of lesser importance and their contextualization are extensive and accurate in their historiographic grounding, following the guidelines of the most relevant sources about the biography of Christopher Columbus and the discovery of Central America. As the autodiegetic narrator,3 Christopher Columbus, states somewhere about halfway through his account of Columbus’ First Voyage to the Indies, in the chapter titled “1492! (Continued)”, he intends to “build a story around its high points” (168). These high points follow closely and chronologically what has been stated about both the Great Discovery and its agents by the major historiographic sources. The first notable instance is the fact that Columbus’ yearning for voyaging west to reach the East Indies is increased by his 1

Stephen Marlowe, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe (1987), London: Bloomsbury, 1992, 1 (all further page references given in the text). 2 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, London and New York: Routledge, 1989, 50; A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, 5. 3 The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus sticks to Wesseling’s statement that “the narrative mode of the memoir-novel is necessarily internal, that is, the narrator and the hero are one and the same figure” (Writing History as a Prophet, 61).

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reception of Ser Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli’s charts and letters after the decease of his father in law, Captain Perestrello. The list follows with King John II of Portugal’s refusal to finance his Great Venture and the subsequent failed Portuguese attempt to execute Columbus’ project, his jobs as a map drawer and book seller, and the irregular and insufficient support from the Spanish Catholic Monarchs, received only after the conquest of Granada from the Arabs. Equally remarkable is Columbus’ relationship with the Spanish Inquisition through the mother of his son Fernando: Beatriz Enríquez de Harana – the orphaned daughter of Pedro de Torquemada and niece of the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. Accurate too is the account of the jobs of the protagonist’s two sons as the Royal Pages of Prince Juan and Queen Isabel.4 When the Great Venture starts, a myriad of events also follow the outlines delineated by historians, like the mutiny threat in the First Voyage, Martín Alonzo Pinzón’s mistaken cry of sighted land and Rodrigo de Triana’s correct one, or Pinzón’s deliberate accident with Pinta, as well as his later escape in search for gold. Once on solid ground again, the narrator sticks to the accounts provided by several historians for the description of Carib Indians as one-eyed, dogheaded man-eaters,5 and that of Guanahaní Indians as kind-hearted and physically more beautiful than Europeans. The same can be said of the accident suffered by the ship Santa María with Juan de la Cosa commanding and found guilty, and the rest of the crew’s disobedience and escape from the ship before kedging off. Equally faithful to documented facts are the representation of the two hurricanes weathered by Columbus’ ships, of Roldán’s and Hojeda’s rebellions, of Governor Bobadilla’s order to send Columbus and his brother Diego in irons on a ship to Spain, and of Columbus’ supposed conversation with God during the High (and fourth) Voyage.6

4 See Hernando Colón, Historia del Almirante (1537-1539), ed. Luis Arranz, Madrid: Historia 16, 1984, 60-61, 67, 85, 8-10. 5 See Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Obras Completas, Vol. XIV: Diario del primer y tercer viaje de Cristóbal Colón, ed. Consuelo Varela, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989, 77. 6 See Cristóbal Colón, Textos y documentos completos completos: Relaciones de viajes, cartas y memoriales (1541-1556), ed. Consuelo Varela, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982, 23, 25, 61, 65, 97, 228-29, 243, 297-98; also Colón, Historia del Almirante, 103-104, 96, 137, 135, 290, 292, 282-83, 279.

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Extreme accuracy ranges from the location in space and time of important events in the life of the discoverer to the names and characteristics of the historical personages involved in those events. Nevertheless, it must be noted that thorough scrutiny and research must be carried out in order to distinguish the cases in which the book strictly follows the lines demarcated by traditional historiography from those in which fictional characteristics and deeds are ascribed to factual personages who are thereby exploited as a means to develop purposeful (often politically charged) fictional plots. The table below displays the status of the wide range of characters that appear in the novel: Relevant Historical Characters Christopher Columbus (1) Susanna and Domingo Colón (1) Bartolomé and Diego Colón (6) Santiago and Luis de Santángel (9) Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) (13) Vanozza and Domenico D’Arignano (20, 25) Captain Perestrello and Felipa (40) The Lynch family (60) John Cabot (76) Sir Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli (81) Regiomontanus (Johann Muller) (85) Martin Behaim (94) Prior Juan Pérez, the Queen’s confesor

Historical Characters Just Mentioned Mussolini (14) Machiavelli (18) Lucrecia and Cesare Borgia (21) Joan of Arc (24)

Legendary/ Literary/Movie Characters Tristram and Isolde (46) Don Quixote (126) Billy Budd (162)

Cardinal Piccolomini (24)

Captain Ahab (173) Captain Queeg (192)

Sir Francis Drake (27)

Herne the Hunter (448)

John of Gaunt (46)

Hamlet (547)

Edward III (46)

Robinson Crusoe (555)

St Brendan (58) St Francis of Assisi (58) Eric the Red (74) Vasco de Gama (79) Galileo (104)

Fictional Characters The Amazon (9) Prospero PighiZampini (29) Brother Brendan/The O’Gaunt (46) Magíster Tom Norton (50) Yego Clone (201) Duke of Chispa de Cienmaricones (252) Petenera Torres (the Blue Pimpernel) (267) Espina de Chopito (383) Inocencia Premiada (427) Santi de Santángel (487) Pighi-Zampini’s grandson (566)

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(113) Martín Alonzo Pinzón (118) Luis de Cerda, Duke of Medinaceli (118) Waldseemüller (119) Beatriz Enríquez de Harana (128) Tomás de Torquemada (128) Dr Juan Sánchez (130) Pedro Enríquez de Harana (130) Vásquez de la Frontera (162) Juan, Peralonso, and Francisco Niño of Moguer (162) Rodrigo de Segovia, Crown Comptroller (162) Luis Torres (162) Juan Cosa (162) Chachu (173) Cristóbal Quintero (173) Pedro Terreros (173) Guacanagarí and Guarionex (218) José María Durán and Ricardo Ruiz (219) Brother Bernardo Buil (252) Mosén Pedro Margarit (295) Dr Álvarez Chanca (297)

Peter Schöffer (119) Johann of Gutenberg (119) Washington Irving (131) Ponce de León (136) Lope de Vega and William Shakespeare (157) Joseph Conrad (173) Captain William Bligh and Fletcher Christian (192) Dryden and Rousseau (202) Pablo Romero (241) Henry VIII (266) Martin Luther (266) Baroness D’Orzcy (273) Anne de Beaujeu (345) Louis XI and Charles III (345) Freud and Adler (355) Prince Juan and Princess Margaret of Austria (388) Queen Elizabeth I of England (411) George Washington (415) S.T. Coleridge (422) Dante (451)

Postmodern Critique and the Hand of the Historian Melchior Maldonado (314) Bernal de Pisa (328) Alonzo Ojeda (329) Antonio Torres (347) Brother Pane (353) Francisco Roldán (355) Diego and Fernando Colón (373) Juan Fonseca (408) Caonabó of Xaraguá (433) Anacaoná of Xaraguá (433) Higueymota of Xaraguá (433) Roger of Wendover (448) Cartaphilus (449) Archbishop of Armenia (449) Pedro Valdivieso (455) Diego Escobar (455) Cristóbal Rodríguez (455) Hernando de Guevara (455) Adrián Múxica (455) Francisco de Bobadilla (476) Governor Ovando (490) Matthew Paris (504) Diego Tristán (510)

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Jung (451) Catherine of Aragon (482) Goya, Titian and Rubens (502) El Quibián (518) Thomas More (531) Abraham Lincoln (547) Isaac Levi from Lisbon (563) Abraham of Lucena (564) Abu’l Qurra (568) Piri Re’is (568)

The autodiegetic narrator states in one of his self-reflexive digressions that “my aim is to be judged on equal terms with my biographers” (421). A historical personage who tries to compete with his future biographers is necessarily paradoxical and anachronistic – a

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factual impossibility. Stephen Marlowe’s Christopher Columbus seems to be “a decontextualized postmodernist figure”7 who frequently flies “off the map of time” (75, 356) and is capable of commenting on issues in centuries after the historical Columbus’ death. For instance, he states at one point in the narrative that he “was the worst thing that happened to Italy until Mussolini” (14). The list of anachronistic references is long but worth taking into account. For instance, the narrator mentions Joan of Arc’s sanctification in 1920. When he considers his discovery of new lands he expounds that “the world would see nothing quite like it until Cape Canaveral and the race for the moon” and that he did not beat “Neil Armstrong by almost 500 years” saying “one small step for a Christian, one giant step for Christendom” because “there are no half-billion T.V. viewers around the world to watch me, no periodical has purchased the serial rights” (39, 199). Many are the literary references that break the strictures of chronology, like the narrator’s constant allusions to sailor Francisco Niño as “our Billy Budd prototype” with his “Billy Budd smile” (162, 259). The narrator also mentions Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, Joseph Conrad, S.T. Coleridge, and Robinson Crusoe. But the most explicitly self-conscious anachronism reads as follows: Me: Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills … (Note that Cervantes wouldn’t publish the first part of his masterpiece until 1605. So this couldn’t have been precisely what I wrote on my scrap of paper in the olive press room. But it captures the flavor admirably.) (125-26)

However, this is not the only reference to Cervantes’ masterpiece since the adjective Quixotic is recurrent throughout the novel and there are also covert allusions, such as Columbus’ comment about “a location, the name of which I would rather not recall” (489). Similarly, in his early descriptions of the Indians, the narrator deals with Dryden’s, Rousseau’s, and “pop-culture ideas” on the myth of the Noble Savage (202). There are also straightforward references to his weird position in time, like “But your before is frequently my 7

Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, “American Historiographic Metafiction and European Tradition: The Case of Marlowe’s The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, VII (2000), 10.

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after” (273), or “in those pre-psychoanalytic days” (330), “but it’s a long way from Regiomontanus and Erasmus to Freud and Adler, so let’s pass over the psychoanalytic subtleties” (355), and “I come before Freud and Jung and the elucidation or invention of archetypal myths” (451). Columbus even states that “half a millennium later” the illness he suffers from in the text – the Whole Sick Syndrome – would be discovered but no cure found (342). He also talks about the Catholic Monarchs’ “premature Calvinism” (388) and the definitive abolition of the Supreme and General Council of the Inquisition in July 1834. Similarly, he explains why Elizabeth I, the “Virgin (alleged) Queen”, had to abandon one of John Cabot’s colonies and its settlers because there was no money left after the defeat of the Spanish Armada (411). The narrator also mentions Queen Catherine of Aragon and her marriage to “that nice King Henry the Eighth” (482, 488, 531). Cacica Anacaoná is described as “built along lines that later will be called ‘Wagnerian’” (433). And, as the autobiographer that knows what future historians will make of his deeds, he regrets “all unwittingly, I welcome to Hispaniola the crass eponymous opportunist [Amerigo Vespucci] who will displace me on all the maps of the world” (468). Not only the narrator but also the protagonist, as “ratified” by God’s words, has problems with time – to his question: “What am I doing ... already half dead from a disease that won’t even be identified for God knows how many centuries?” God answers: Never mind those centuries. Never mind your befores and afters, your pasts and your futures. All that is, is already identified, here. (547)

The use of blatant anachronisms, a commonplace in postmodernist literature, can be read as an ideological tool. Late nineteenth-century writers of historical novels found themselves constricted by the risk of psychological anachronism if they set to analyze or evaluate their characters’ inner motives, because the authors’ commentaries would be informed by their own norms and values.8 However, these strictures were completely banished by postmodernist authors’ free, self-conscious use of anachronism, which allowed them to launch judgments from the point of view of their own moral standards.

8

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 58.

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Yet, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus goes a step further than mere anachronism, as the narrator’s schizophrenic, anachronistic experience of temporality goes hand in hand with a few scattered reflections on the nature of time as a contingent, arbitrary category. This is the case of the replacement in 1582 of the Julian calendar by the Gregorian one, which removed ten days from the former and advanced the spring equinox to 21 March, so “the spring equinox fell on 25 March when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to rule Rome (and gave us the Julian calendar) but would fall on 11 March when Pope Gregory did his papal hatchet job on time’s map” (70). After pondering on the subjective nature of time, the narrator explains that for him “days, months, years – these are time’s coordinates that locate a moment as precisely as latitude and longitude locate a place” and also that he escaped the map of time for the map of geography to save his sanity after his lover Tristram’s death (71). In this sense, the implications of the narrator’s position with respect to temporal measurability may be better understood by attending to Paul Davies and John Gribbin’s classification of philosophers according to their understanding of “the present moment” and temporal sequences. The first group or “A-theorists” consider the present moment as objectively real and use “the concepts of the past, present and future, and the rich vocabulary of tenses that permeates human language”. The second group or “B-theorists”, whose point of view Marlowe’s narrator flatly shares: Uses a system of dates. Events are labelled by the date on which they happen …. This serves to place events in order unambiguously, and is the system that physicists use. The dates are simply coordinates, exactly analogous to the use of latitude and longitude for defining spatial positions on the surface of the Earth, and as far as the physicist is concerned that is all that is needed to give a complete account of the world. 9

As Francesca Benedict contends, the firm opposition of postmodernism to universalism has made questions of time and space – chronology and geography – of prime importance in a culture immersed in the process of redefining its links to history and to the 9 Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth: Beyond Chaos and Complexity (1991), London and New York: Penguin, 1992, 129.

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world.10 Just as the explanatory and/or emancipatory efficiency of the other master narratives is being radically questioned, the teleological or progressive character of history is being challenged by postmodernist historiographic metafiction – both in itself and as the foundations of traditional, realistic, historical novels. 11 In this line, when a text addresses, comments on, or describes events of the past while dealing with those of the present and the result “is born not of the sanctioned marriage of past events with present interpretation, but of the adultery/adulteration of the past with present phenomena”,12 the text transgresses the fundamental rule of historiography that the content must relate exclusively to the past. This game implies a process of delegitimatization as it brings to the fore the arbitrariness of the rules of historiography by respecting while simultaneously flouting them. In addition, the narrator’s anachronistic stance in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus may be seen as a parodic game with the belief of the philosophers of history Benedetto Croce and E.H. Carr that all history is contemporary history and that “great history is written precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by 10 Francesca Benedict, “From Story to History and Back: History in North American Literature in the 1980s”, in Postmodern Studies 11: Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, eds Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, 117-18. 11 Professor E.H. Carr offers the following explanation of the evolution of the teleological conception of history: “It was the Jews, and after them the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal towards which the historical process is moving – the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose, but at the expense of losing its secular character. The attainment of the goal of history would automatically mean the end of history: history itself became a theodicy. This was the medieval view of history. The Renaissance restored the classical view of an anthropocentric world and of the primacy of reason, but for the pessimistic classical view of the future substituted an optimistic view derived from the Jewish-Christian tradition …. The rationalists of the Enlightenment, who were the founders of modern historiography, retained the Jewish-Christian teleological view, but secularized the goal; they were thus enabled to restore the rational character of the historical process itself. History became progress towards the goal of the perfection of man’s estate on earth” (What Is History?, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, 110-11). 12 Abigail Lee Six, “Breaking Rules, Making History: A Postmodern Reading of Historiography in Juan Goytisolo’s Fiction”, in Postmodern Studies 3: History and Post-War Writing, eds Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990, 35.

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insights into the problems of the present”.13 But, at the same time, it also suggests certain political commitment in the line of Hayden White’s theory that “the contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past, not as an end in itself, but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time.”14 Simultaneously, the narrator’s amazing relation with temporal dimensions allows him to amend and criticize what is stated about him in future historiographic and biographical sources. Through parodic reappropriation, the narrator brings to light the role of the historian as a reader of fragmentary documents who, as readers of fiction do, fills in the gaps and creates ordering structures on inferential or speculative grounds. As Hutcheon suggests, using Lionel Gossman’s terms, this strategy brings to the fore the fact that: The historian’s narrative is constructed not upon reality itself or upon transparent images of it, but on signifiers which the historian’s own action transforms into signs. It is not historical reality itself but the present signs of the historian that limit and order the historical narrative.15

The narrator’s positioning in this line of thought is clear when he states: Both the official-religious and the familiar name of my Mariagalantesized flagship are lost to history. Further, my biographers are no more forthcoming about this third and southernmost of my Ocean Sea crossings than about the second – for all of them draw their material from what I have written, and within hours of our departure I came down with a relapse of the Whole Sick Syndrome and hardly wrote a word. (421)

Leaving aside the issues of temporality and the grounding of history, one of the most remarkable features of the relation between history and fiction in the book is the fictionalization of the lives of historical personages, sometimes just for fun, suspense or 13

Carr, What Is History?, 21, 37. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1986, 41. 15 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 30. 14

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entertainment typical of any adventure or romance narrative, but most of the time for some more intricate purpose. This is the case of the protagonist, who is attributed a convert origin from the very first page of the novel. Even though he is not aware of it until middle age, Columbus descends from Jewish parents who had to flee from Spain for religious reasons. This example, like many others, reveals a thorough research on the author’s part, given that most of these fictional features find their bases on recent or controversial historiographic studies. The protagonist’s status as a New Christian seems to find its confirmation in the conclusions drawn by W.R. Anderson, who argues that history has insistently merged two different people that were contemporaneous and had similar names: Cristoforo Colombo of Genoa, a weaver and trader of wool and sugar, and Cristóbal Colón, a Spanish sailor of Jewish origin, recruited by pirates Rene d’Anjou and Casenove-Coullon. This Colón sailed to England, Ireland, and Iceland, married Felipa Moniz Perestrello, and was the son of Prince Charles, King Ferdinand’s half-brother.16 Marlowe’s Columbus adjusts to Anderson’s Colón in several aspects such as his early journeys and marriage, even though some are either explicitly denied, like his being a pirate, or just casually suggested, like his kinship with Queen Elizabeth of Castile. More importantly, the detail of his possibly Jewish origin has many other implications. For instance, it allows for Christopher’s birth at sea – a joke on all the dead-end controversies raised around the issue of Columbus’ nationality.17 Columbus is born while his parents are crossing the Mediterranean Sea, from Valencia to Genoa, with other Jewish escapees. Among these, the future Pope Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia) names the newly born and adopts him as his protégé while advising the whole family to Italianize their names. This undocumented encounter brings about a series of fictional events that add a novelistic quality to a time span of otherwise no literary or historical interest. For instance, when little Christopher becomes an orphan in Italy, he and his two brothers, Bartolomé and Diego, are taken in by Roderigo Borgia. There, at court, Columbus is 16

W.R. Anderson, “Viking ‘Columbus,’ King of Spain. Viking? A descendent-King? He should have been”: see http://muweb.millersville.edu/columbus/data/new/ICQA-32.NEW, 1988. 17 Lucas de Torre, Cristóbal Colón fue extranjero: Prueba documental irrefutable, Madrid: B.R.A.H., 1927.

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seduced by Vanozza D’Arignano, one of the Pope’s historically documented married mistresses.18 Vanozza’s (documented) husband Domenico discovers the (fictional) affair and hires a society of assassins curiously denominated “the Brotherhood of the Golden Stag (or Hind)” for murdering Christopher (25). The menace, which will reappear throughout the novel, triggers the protagonist’s urge to leave the country and sail for England in an old, small ship that is wrecked near the Portuguese coast, where he is mistaken for pirate Colombo, also known as Guillaume de Casenove. Coincidentally, Casenove was one of Colón’s employers, according to Anderson’s account, which suggests the author’s knowledge of the hypotheses there put forth. The position of Marlowe’s Columbus as both historian and autobiographer grants him a vantage point over previous historians. In a process that highlights the hybrid nature – at once historical and fictional – of the text, certain aspects of the discoverer’s life and writings that historians have been unable to account for are taken as the seed for fictional subplots that increase the coherence of the story while simultaneously exposing the inefficiency of traditional historiography. In this line, one of the mysteries around the Discovery has been the fact that Pope Alexander VI suddenly granted Spain the monopoly over the Indies after persistently denying it to the Catholic Monarchs.19 The enigma is solved in Marlowe’s text when Columbus explains that it was a show of the Pope’s gratefulness to Christopher for saving his life when, as a child, the latter worked as a food-taster in Alexander VI’s Roman Court. Similarly, a cryptic handwritten note on the margin in historical Columbus’ copy of E.S. Piccolomini’s Historia rerum ubique gestarum about two dead people in Ireland20 is presented as the dénouement of Christopher’s fictional love affair with a female Oxford student in the British Isles. When the protagonist eventually reaches England after the accident near the Portuguese coast he meets and falls in love with Tristram, a young woman whose real name is Isolde but who is disguised as a boy so as to be allowed to pursue an 18

See Helen Donegan, “The Borgia Influence in Italy”, Italy With Us, II, 4: see http:// www.italywithus.biz/ezine/07kc/page2.htm, 2003. 19 See Colón, Historia del Almirante, 154. 20 “Men from Catay came to the East. We have seen many notable things, above all in Galway, Ireland: a man and a woman on some wood planks were swept away by the tempest” (Colón, Textos y documentos completos, 9; my translation).

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academic career.21 This fictional plot plays with some interesting material, such as the hypothesis by some historians that Columbus gathered news and maps on his northern European trips regarding the existence of land across the “Ocean Sea”. Everything starts when the protagonist finds out that a man called The O’Gaunt wants to purchase a map Columbus’ brother Bartolomé had given him, the ink of which had dissolved in the shipwreck revealing the words “Ireland the Great” where “terra incognita” used to be. The O’Gaunt turns out to be Franciscan Friar Brother Brendan, a mentally unstable young man who sometimes believes he is St Francis of Assisi and relives some episodes of the Saint’s work The Little Flowers. More importantly, he happens to be Tristram’s brother. Her emotional responsibility over him ends in the death of both siblings at the hands of the Lynch clan as a revenge for some opprobrium The O’Gaunt had committed against the family. This event has two relevant results: first, Columbus sets fire to the two bodies on a raft and helps it be carried away by the wind across the sea in an episode that recalls the historical Columbus’ marginal note mentioned earlier; second, Tristram’s tragic death makes the protagonist abandon the map of time and spend the following years traveling across the map of geography. In his journeys, Columbus visits Iceland, where he listens to sagatellers’ stories about the discovery of Greenland by Viking Eric the Red in AD 1000 and about the way Irish people – the first inhabitants of Iceland – fled when the Vikings invaded their country, sailing West until they discovered “Wineland the Good”, a green land populated by “Indians”. This wink to the theory that Christopher Columbus counted on more information than usually admitted by biographers adds up to the reference implicit in the other name by which The O’Gaunt is 21

Tristan or Tristram and Iseult or Isolde are the protagonists of a medieval legend, probably of Welsh origin, incorporated to the Arthurian cycle. This legend narrates how Tristram is invited to Ireland so as to take Isolde to Cornwall, where she is to marry King Mark. During the trip, both Tristram and Isolde drink a magic potion that induces them to pledge eternal love and leads them to a tragic end. The earliest version dates from 1180 and is attributed to Thomas of Britain (Diccionario Enciclopédico Salvat Ilustrado en Color, ed. Francesc Navarro, Barcelona: Salvat, 1992, 1355). Note the playful use of the legendary names Tristram and Isolde for one and the same character. If the main element of the legend is the beauty of a tragic, unattainable love, both tragedy and this impossibility are embodied in the character of Tristram/Isolde, since her special relationship with her brother bars any possibility of engaging in a relationship – with Columbus in this case.

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known – Brother Brendan, which explicitly evokes the figure of St Brendan. In the sixth century this Irish saint supposedly discovered a beautiful land he called “Promised Land of the Saints”. There is no agreement whether this land was the American continent or Newfoundland, and some sources question the very existence of the journey described in the ninth-century Latin manuscript Navigatio Santi Brendani Abatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot), while others suggest that historical Columbus may have been influenced by it.22 The reference to this personage in Marlowe’s text is anything but coincidental. In fact, at a certain point the narrator himself gives an account of the legend of St Brendan, who sailed in the sixth century “in a currach across the Ocean Sea to the very Ireland the Great which magically appeared on Bartolomeo’s map and brought me here to Galway”. However, Columbus somehow disavows this information by adding that “I would learn that the legend of St. Brendan was typical Irish mismanagement of fact” (58). Another neglected element in Columbus’ life which is foregrounded and made an impressive use of is the figure of the discoverer’s lover, Beatriz Enríquez de Harana. This personage has been purposefully and systematically ignored by historians, especially by her illegitimate son, Hernando Colón. The woman’s historical kinship to Tomás de Torquemada23 is the point of departure for the narrator’s insistent critiques against the Spanish Inquisition, with which he gets into trouble given his Jewish descent and convert identity. Likewise, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus responds to Valerie I.J. Flint’s complaint that “the impossibility of establishing any direct link between Columbus and [Martin] Behaim is one of the great frustrations” of historians.24 In the novel, “Martin Behaim of Nuremberg, a student of Regiomontanus, the world’s leading authority”, arrives at Christopher’s house as the emissary of Florentine Ser Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli to study the possibility of executing Christopher’s navigational project of going west to find a secure route to the Indies (94). Behaim’s presence has terrible consequences: he 22

See http://www.castletown.com/brendan.htm and http://www.newadvent.org. cathen/02758c.htm. 23 Colón, Historia del Almirante, 128. 24 Valerie I. J. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992, 5.

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makes Columbus’ wife pregnant and, just before her death on the streets, he convinces King John of Portugal to reject Columbus’ project in 1487. Behaim’s hidden intention is to carry out the enterprise himself with Portuguese help and with the terrestrial globe Bartolomé had invented and left behind in the court – a journey that did not succeed. Finally, Behaim as a cartographer is made responsible, together with the publisher Martinus Waldseemüller, for the misnaming of America after Amerigo Vespucci and not after Columbus when they publish an updated edition of Ptolemy’s map of the world. In another fruitful example of fictionalization, Columbus explains how he disappears from history during the two years after the Catholic Monarchs’ first refusal to sponsor his voyage to the Indies. In opposition to various historiographic speculations – that he became either a tramp or a houseguest of the Duke of Medinaceli25 – Columbus claims he spent that time working as a spy for the Monarchs and drawing the maps that would contribute most directly to the conquest of Granada in 1492 after eight centuries of Arab occupation. Curiously enough, not only does this attack bring documented facts and fiction to the same level, but it also becomes a self-aimed attack, as the narrator’s explanations of the real facts are equally invented. Finally, Columbus explains how he impulsively borrowed his signature from Cartaphilus, also known as the Wandering Jew – the protagonist of a story told by a character in one of Columbus’ secondlevel dreams, structured like a Chinese-box. Incidentally, this is, the signature that the historical Columbus used in his official documents, and which no historian has yet been able to decipher: .S. .S.A.S. XMY Xpo FERENS (450, 546, 563, 568).26

The intricacies of Columbus’ life are further heightened by the fictional traits and acts attached to other historical characters with 25

See Juan Manzano-Manzano, Cristóbal Colón: Siete años decisivos de su vida. 1485-1492, Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1964. 26 Colón, Textos y documentos completos, 147.

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whom the discoverer had contact. One of the most notable cases is that of Luis de Santángel, an Aragonese of Jewish descent who became Columbus’ benefactor and lent the Catholic Sovereigns what they needed in order to sponsor the sailor’s project.27 In Marlowe’s account, Columbus gets to know Santángel not in the Royal Court, where he is Keeper of Their Majesties’ Household Budget and one of the richest men in Spain, but by the mediation of Pighi-Zampini. This fictional Jewish banker and spy, who directs the peripatetic branch of the House of Centurione, received the protagonist through the letter of recommendation by Cardinal Borgia (a newly converted Christian himself) when Columbus had to flee from the latter’s Court after the threat of the Brotherhood of the Golden Stag (or Hind). This Jewish connection is significant in several ways. For a start, a few nights before Christopher was born, his parents were on their way to a synagogue that was set ablaze by Dominican monks after someone had betrayed the convert attendants. Columbus’ parents did not die there because their walk was delayed by the passing of a Catholic Easter parade. Santángel’s parents died in the synagogue, and it was Santángel himself who had informed the authorities. However, after having established a good position for himself with this precocious act of religious faithfulness, Santángel becomes the leader of the secret (and fictional) “Movers and Shakers” society, made up of the most influential New Christians in Spain. This underground relief organization strives to help converts, especially the young New Christians who converted under the pressure of the authorities and run the risk of being discovered for their Jewish beliefs by the Inquisition. Santángel’s role in the success of Columbus’ expedition is different in Marlowe’s novel from what appears in historical accounts. Santángel’s interest resides not only in his sympathy for the discoverer as a New Christian but also in the possibility – which becomes a condition – of sending all young hothead backsliders to the colonies, and of giving a percentage of the benefits to the “Movers and Shakers” to fund their campaigns. Another interesting historical personage that acquires particular relevance in the novel is Luis Torres, a convert translator and interpreter who travels with Columbus in the First Voyage of Discovery.28 The fictionalization of Torres’ entrance into the crew of 27 28

Colón, Historia del Almirante, 87. See Colón, Textos y documentos completos, 50.

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the First Voyage reflects the tragedy of those who had to leave their country for religious reasons. This character was heading for Huelva, where twelve ships were waiting for a thousand Jews from Castile and Catalonia to become exiles under the threat of death if they stayed in the country one more day, but instead he reaches Palos by mistake. With no time to reach Huelva before the ships depart, Luis decides to convert to Catholicism so that he can join Columbus’ journey. However, the relevance of Luis Torres stems from his relation with one of the main characters in the novel: his fictional sister Petenera Torres. Luis asks Columbus to give a letter to his family in Tarragona when he goes back to Spain after the First Voyage. When he arrives to their house he only finds Petenera since the other members of the family have been burnt alive for Judaism in an Act of Faith in Valencia. Columbus immediately falls in love and starts an affair with Petenera, who claims she will always hate him for leaving Luis in the colony recently established in the Indies. Curiously enough, Marlowe takes the name of this character from a traditional song of Andalusian cante hondo that deals with the identity of Petenera, a Jewess who disavowed her baptism as a Christian and was sung to be “the perdition of men”. This song, which was avoided by cante hondo singers for centuries because it was said to bring bad luck, became the source for a new style of songs popularly called peteneras. The lyrics of this song had previously appeared in Colossus and appear twice in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (250-51, 492), where Petenera herself explains that Santi, Luis de Santángel’s son, used to say that she was the Petenera in the song. Petenera is a key element in the novel because of her membership to the “Movers and Shakers” organization, where she is the bravest activist under the pseudonym of “Blue Pimpernel”. She turns out to be in close contact not only with Luis de Santángel, but also with PighiZampini himself. The climax of her performance arrives when, after being kidnapped and tortured in the dungeons of the Inquisition, she is set free on condition that Columbus, who had been accused of several religious inconsistencies, enters the dungeons and witnesses the tortures – the text’s excuse for describing the atrocities committed by Dominican monks supposedly on God’s behalf. The Blue Pimpernel is also relevant for the metafictional status of the novel. This is made explicit in the narrator’s self-conscious

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comment on the idiosyncrasy of this character, where he ironically empathizes with the reader’s amazement: A Blue Pimpernel, in late fifteenth-century Spain? But wasn’t the Pimpernel scarlet, and didn’t he (it was a he, wasn’t it?) rescue eighteenth-century noblemen from the French Revolution – at least according to the 1905 Baroness Orczy novel? This later usage of the Pimpernel has to be more than coincidence. All I can conclude is that the secret network at whose head stood that reckless beauty Petenera Torres was not entirely forgotten through the centuries, and that the bestselling baroness recognized a good subject when she saw it. She simply changed the Blue Pimpernel to Scarlet. Fair enough. (273)

The use of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s adventures as a source of intertextuality goes beyond the characteristics that may lead to a comparison between the events and circumstances in fifteenth-century Spain and eighteenth-century revolutionary France. Similarities also link the quality of both Marlowe’s and Baroness Orczy’s texts, since both attribute real details to fictional characters and, as the 1990 Spanish editor of D’Orczy’s complete works puts it: She re-created in her work the most important revolutionary events in France through a precise display of names, dates, and data (the result of a previous conscientious study of the best historians of her time). Furthermore, she managed to give expression to an imaginary situation that seems to emerge naturally from real possibilities and circumstances.29

By making real and fictional characters coexist, Marlowe creates what Michel Foucault called a “heterotopia” and different postmodernist writers call “the zone” – a shattering attack upon any possibility of ontological stability and consistency. Brian McHale, in fact, considers the heterotopian zone as a postmodernist tool to reveal the space of a fictional world as a construction – by deconstructing it at the same time as it is constructed or portrayed as a construct. Yet, through the figure of the Blue Pimpernel, the author goes further, creating what McHale defines as an “intertextual space”:

29 Emmuska D’Orczy, Obras selectas (1905), Barcelona: Carroggio, 1990, 20 (my translation).

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An intertextual space is constituted whenever we recognize the relations among two or more texts, or between specific texts and larger categories such as genre, school, period. There are a number of ways of foregrounding this intertextual space and integrating it in the text’s structure, but none is more effective than the device of “borrowing” a character from another text – “transworld identity,” Umberto Eco has called this, the transmigration of characters from one fictional universe to another.30

This strategy highlights from yet another front the explicit metafictionality of the novel, which comes to the extreme of suggesting that life equals the text – that there is nothing outside it, as Jacques Derrida insisted in his early years as a poststructuralist thinker.31 Another historical character whose life is amply fictionalized is Francisco Niño of Moguer, “our Billy Budd prototype” (162). As usual in the novel, he is given prominence for a purpose. Niño is presented as a shy, sensitive man who stands up for the well-being of women: during the First Voyage, he beats the Guanahaní sub-cacique Guarionex, who condemns his own wife to be publicly beaten for having sex with Niño. Niño’s offence to the sub-cacique precipitates Columbus’ intercession, for Guarionex decrees that his punishment would be to “put out his eyes, cut out his tongue, slice off his manhood, and then kill him” (216-17). This event seems to work as a precedent to make Niño’s reaction to the Act of Faith in Valencia more believable. There, he starts shouting against the Inquisition when a fourteen-year-old girl – Petenera’s niece, as Columbus later finds out – is burnt alive at the stake. This incident provokes Niño’s detention by the Inquisition. He is liberated only when Columbus intercedes for him in front of the Catholic Monarchs and they force the protagonist to accept Brother Bernardo Buil on the next voyage to the Indies as “Chief Missionary” (261-62). This incident explains why

30

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 18, 44, 56-57. 31 The narrator provides the reader with scant but significant examples of this stance, such as “As my parents did in Chapter I, scene one …. ” (320), or “The solution is so obvious I wonder that I didn’t think of it pages ago …. I can’t help thinking that my First Voyage ended with the destruction of Santa María …. The rest was anticlimax” (234, 239).

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Columbus sends religious people to the new land to evangelize the heathen Indians. Among the entirely fictional characters the most substantial is Yego Clone, as he himself chose to be named after his Guanahaní pronunciation of the name of Columbus’ son Diego Colón. Adopted by Columbus as his stepson and by the Catholic Monarchs as their godson, Yego is the first Archipelagan to be baptized. Always sensitive, humane and intelligent, Yego becomes the embodiment of values and ideas such as the positive effects that ethnic integration may have on the colonial subject and the destructive consequences that both an attempt at total assimilation and subjection may have on the same subject. When Columbus returns to Hispaniola after two and a half years, Yego looks and speaks like a real Spaniard to the point that at first his stepfather does not recognize him. This external transformation brings about correlative internal changes and conflicts externalized in the form of an irrational hatred against his stepfather that the boy himself cannot wholly comprehend. This strong feeling, alien to the native boy and in radical contrast with his previous admiration of and devotion towards his stepfather, springs from his emotional division between his people and his new father. To evaluate the significance of Yego’s reaction one must take into account the play of viewpoints that give coherence to the novel’s textual implications. The ideological stance of the text is reflected in the narrator’s depiction of the relations between the native and Spanish colonists and clergymen. Various injustices are strongly denounced, like the custom of Spanish men taking Indian married women as slaves without any respect for their lives. Equally outrageous is the racist, inhuman behavior of the “men of God”, since the priests insist that Indians do not feel because they do not have Christian souls. This position is clear when Mosén Pedro Margarit asks Yego whether Indians feel and tries to cut his head off by way of experiment. Some natives have their noses and ears chopped off by Spanish friars and Margarit orders their beheading for stealing some clothes and hawk bells. Cruelty on the Spaniards’ part is extreme, as shown by the narrator’s regret that “Irish wolfhounds” are being trained “to tear Indians to pieces” (343). Columbus as a character makes mistakes both of commission and of omission, but the position of Columbus as narrator is clear when he expresses his feelings about the war between the Spanish and the

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Indians adapting Martin Luther King’s famous phrase at the beginning of his reflection: I had a dream once in a Julian decade off time’s map … and this dream sent us to these islands where the natives raised no hand against us but revered us as gods from their very Heaven, and now we have brought them death. Enemy? We are the enemy. (356; emphasis in the original)

Columbus as protagonist, too, appears full of grief when Luis de Santángel tells him that the five-hundred Indians he sent to Spain as slaves have become a social marker of status and are dying of Spanish illnesses. Yet, it is at this point in the narration that the figure of Yego stands out as a counterpoint to the narrator’s partial justification of his fatal mistakes as a character in the past. One of the most reproachable actions on the part of historical Columbus is his trade of the natives he captured and shipped to Spain to be sold as slaves. This issue, which would inevitably alter the reader’s identification with the protagonist – if not necessarily with the narrator – is obliquely approached. When Christopher is dictating his instructions to send five-hundred natives to Spain so that they can be christened and “saved” from heathenness, several thunderbolts produce an error in the transmission of information and copyist Diego Colón understands “enslave” for “save” (350-54). Consequently, Diego enchains and places fivehundred innocent natives into a ship to be sent as slaves. The narrator justifies the fact that he did not undo Diego’s actions, first, to avoid increasing Diego’s lack of authority in the island, and second, because he had found no gold or treasures to send to the Monarchs and the slave market would make up for his failure. Yego Clone is further turned into a central point of the ideological grounds of the novel when a parallelism is established between him and Moses, the Biblical figure to which historical Columbus has been compared for centuries. The parallelism is invited by the Guanahaní cacique Guacanagarí’s explanation that Yego was found as a baby in a basket by the rushes on a river shore. This way, the colonized subject with his incarnated postcolonial message is substituted for the discoverer who spread God’s word across the “Ocean Sea”, in their respective tasks of saving the heathen peoples. Yego’s depiction as a colonial Moses leads to a further conclusion: Guacanagarí is portrayed

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as the bearer of one of the messages of the narrative. Just as, according to the Bible, Moses climbed Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God, Yego Clone climbed a mountain to see if Guacanagarí could help him remedy his momentary hatred of Columbus. So the native’s wisdom is expressed: First contact between alien cultures is always tragic for the more primitive …. No one is to blame for what had to happen. No man and no god. A thing happens because a thing happens. Seek no deep mysteries where none are hiding. Free will is a myth, predestination the same. Blind chance spins the world …. No one is to blame. This time. (438)

The representative of ancient native knowledge is exemplary in his capability for forgiveness, at the same time his words imply a notion of human progress corresponding to that of history for the humanist. Bearing in mind Guacanagarí’s speech, one might conclude that history is shown to be useless since people are unable to learn from the mistakes of the past. Previous errors are condemned as the history of colonization would go on and on in different times and places – and still does, in contemporary battles for territory and religion on the part of “civilized” countries all over the world. Finally, the plot around Yego’s death appears as a romanticized explanation of the use of the gallows in Hispaniola. Built by Columbus’ brother Barto in order to persuade the settlers against leaving and joining the followers of the rebel Francisco Roldán, the gallows are used for the first and only time in the book to punish Adrian Muxica for murdering Yego. Curiously enough, a story is developed around the figure of Muxica that looks highly fictional yet in general conforms to documented history. The novel tells about Anacaoná, Arawak cacica and widow of Caonabó, and about her teenage daughter, Higueymota. Through Hernando de Guevara’s testimony Columbus gets to know that Guevara fell in love with Higueymota and took her to Xaragua, where his cousin Adrian Muxica was ringleader and one of the earlier followers of the rebel Roldán. Once there, Guevara joined Hojeda against Roldán, when the latter forbade the lovers’ wedding and took Higueymota as his sexual slave. Despite appearances, so far the story sticks to historical

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accounts.32 The fictional elements arise in the protagonist’s treatment of the situation. He makes the most of the information which Guevara provides him with and meets Roldán to reach an agreement to stop confrontation. Columbus defers for ten pages the explanation why he conceded so much in the negotiation – concessions that, he admits, raised strong criticism from his biographers and, through disappointment, made the character Harana II desert and join Roldán’s forces. It is only by witnessing the result that the reader gets to understand the whole negotiation business: it was a maneuver Columbus planned with Harana II so that the latter could enter Xaragua, capture Muxica, and take him to Hispaniola to be judged and hanged there for murdering Yego Clone. Of the few characters that are fictional in both their genesis and qualities, only three are remarkable, in this occasion, for their playful names. These are the cases of Luis de Santángel’s very short, small secretary Espina de Chopito (“Small Cuttlefish Bone”); Inocencia Premiada (“Rewarded Innocence”), the spokeswoman for the womencolonists, who will marry Francisco Niño; and the Duke of Chispa de Cienmaricones (“Wit of a Hundred Queers”), whom Columbus meets in the Auto de Fe celebrated in Valencia. This ironic use of proper names is but another ingredient for the dismantling of any possibility of realism in the novel, while increasing its often comic tone. Questioning truth and genre Adding to the complex combination and blur of historical and fictional events and characters, and in parallel to the amendment, embellishment, or revision of lame historical records, a process of demystifying the figure of the discoverer is undertaken throughout the book. To start with, Columbus refutes various biographers’ statements about his childhood “mooning around the port and gazing out to sea as if I somehow knew from the age of nine or ten that it was my destiny” (9-10). The narrator argues that it was his brother Bartolomé who enjoyed this habit and who tried to convince a skeptical Christopher that the earth was round and that one could travel westward and return from the East. In fact, contrary to historians’ insistence, he adds that at the time “anybody with a decent fifteenth-century education knew the 32

See Colón, Historia del Almirante, 278; Rossiter Johnson, The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians, 8: http://www.literaturehead. com/section/johnson%252c-rossiter/great-events%252c-the/160.html, 2003, 161.

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world was round” (38). Then, he denounces how “these sensationalist scribblers” cast him on his first voyage as a pirate captain of an “armed-to-the-teeth caravel” that sinks, having to swim for his life to the Portuguese coast – when he was just one of the ordinary seamen aboard a poor felucca and had to be rescued after the shipwreck because he could not swim (34-36). More ludicrous is the deconstruction of the myth of Columbus’s “vigil of the First Voyage” which, he explains, did not really take place during the First Voyage but in an earlier trip to England – and he wandered along the deck every night not because he was pondering about the plausibility of reaching the East by sailing west, but to prevent a teenage nun-to-be (his future wife, Felipa de Perestrello) from sexually harassing him and the other men on board (44). The narrator also declares that, despite what his biographers may invent, he chose Puerto de Palos because it was poor and “bypassed by history” and he would have been ignored elsewhere as “just another out-of-work ship’s captain or a chart maker without a shop” (113) – which, he insists, he really was. In his consistent attempt to portray himself as an earthly human being, the narrator opposes the historians’ excessive attribution of religious zeal to his person: Some biographers insist that I was God-driven. I’m not sure what they mean, but I have to protest if they are implying the Joan of Arc syndrome. Despite what you may have read elsewhere, I’m no mystic and, especially after I learned of my antecedents, I was no more pious than is necessary to get ahead in the world …. But enough. Such ruminations embarrass me. (90)

The diminution of the discoverer’s religious character works not only against his biographers but also against the excesses of the historical figure himself. Much writing about Columbus’s supposedly God-driven labor of taking God’s message and salvation through baptism to the heathen Indies derived from his signature: “Xto Ferens” (Christ’s porter).33 The myth of Columbus as God’s Saintly Messenger is flatly refuted by the narrator’s recounting of one of his dreams, in which he appears as a giant St Christopher in the middle of a river – yet he flings the heavy Christ child from his shoulders instead of carrying Him to the opposite shore. And when Christ 33

See Colón, Textos y documentos completos, 147.

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suddenly becomes a grown man carrying a rood, the character Columbus plays in his dream meanly behaves just as the Wandering Jew did, to which Christ answers back that he will stay there until He returns – “which he doesn’t” (424-25). Columbus’s privileged religiosity – together with the narrator’s reliability – is finally challenged when the latter puts forth, after recalling his conversation with God during a storm, that “Possibly all this was no more than a neuropsychiatric aspect of the Whole Sick Syndrome. Possibly that’s all He was” (547; emphasis in the original). The narrator’s insistent and demolishing critiques against historiographic distortions of the/his “Truth” about his life and enterprise depending on the historians’ convenience or ideology reinforce not only the demystification of the heroic, saintly character of the discoverer but also the questioning of the reliability of any historical account, which the pervading blending of historical and fictional data invites. This is the case, for instance, when he states: My own son … Fernando, unwilling to spring from the loins of a semi-literate nobody who ran off to the sea at fourteen, sent me in his biography (a book I don’t recommend) to the University of Pavia so I could become a suitable father for the illegitimate son of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. (6)

Or “Thus – historians please note – it was Bartolomé Colón and not Martin Behaim who invented the terrestrial globe” (102). The examples are plentiful and straightforward: Some historians claim I’ve been guilty of certain exaggerations in recounting my early life. Maybe. What autobiographer isn’t? Or even what biographer? One Bartolomé de las Casas, the next scribbler after my son Fernando to write about me, is a case in point. He alludes to “noble ancestors,” and to an imaginary course of university studies which paled to Fernando’s mathematics, geography and astronomy. In his pages, I served under an “illustrious kinsman,” admiral of France; I leaped from a burning pirate ship, which I commanded, off the coast of Portugal and swam “while grievously wounded” to shore at Lisbon. Biographers? Why, some idiot even wrote somewhere that I believed the Orinoco was one of four rivers flowing from Paradise to Earth and that, Their Most Catholic Majesties willing, I would fit out 100,000 foot and 10,000 horse and slog upstream to find the Holy Sepulchre, the whole mad venture to be paid for with gold of the Indies.

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Similarly, the ideological character of historiography – and geography – and the relation between culture, power, and particular interests are overtly denounced in some of the narrator’s digressions such as the following: Can you imagine my biographer Las Casas, a pious bishop of the meek-shall-inherit variety, mentioning this? No, Rome to Las Casas was the center of the world from which power flowed and to which gold flowed in return, and my friend and mentor Roderigo Borgia bred no bastards, sold no benefices, sequestered no dead cardinals’ estates, and knew no more of poison than of acupuncture. There is a philosophical point here. History flows not into but from the pen of the historian, so who can say that I am right and Las Casas wrong? (21)

Columbus’ privileged position allows him to amend the mistakes made by historians, portrayed as the poor manufacturers of secondhand stories based upon partial written sources. Yet, the novel’s antitotalizing intent extends also to the figure of the first-person narrator, who frequently acknowledges the untruthfulness of some of his statements and writings as a character in the past: “I wrote elsewhere (not altogether accurately) that I went to the sea at the age of fourteen” (6). Moreover, he discloses how he manipulated the distance between the Portuguese coast and the Indies in order to make the project of his enterprise seem more feasible to John II of Portugal and how, in the First Voyage, he came to believe his own lies about the distance to cross so as to reach land. He even admits he lied to his son Fernando when he told him that he had studied in the University of Pavia in an effort to embellish his humble, illiterate origins. This confession to the readers puts into question Columbus’ reliability both as a narrator and as a historian – and by extension challenges any claim to truthfulness on the part of any historical record. Furthermore, this moment of sincerity brings doubts about any of the narrator’s critiques of previous historiography, as it conspicuously undermines his own earlier complaints against his son’s biography. The narrator finally shatters his own reliability as a historian when, reflecting on his conversation with prophetic Guacanagarí, he admits:

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“Of course, it is possible I imagined all this. In my day there was no clear demarcation between objective reality and the subjective experiences variously called metaphysical, mystical, delusional” (359). All the more so, when his attitude towards the validity of history gives a radical turn according to his interests – after constantly denouncing it as provisional, ideological and manipulating, he asserts: “History will attest what a thorn he [Juan Fonseca, archdeacon of Seville] was in the sides of these bold, simple, visionary men. So I think you may regard my account of our clash as objective” (417). One can conclude that, being an utterly postmodernist entity, the narrator can only provide contradictory, self-consciously selfundermining answers to the challenges and questions he himself raises. Even total critiques to total systems of knowledge or thought can no longer hold. As Hutcheon puts it, historiographic metafiction, just like postmodernism itself: Remains fundamentally contradictory, offering only questions, never final answers …. The myths and conventions exist for a reason, and postmodernism investigates that reason. The postmodern impulse is not to seek any total vision. It merely questions. If it finds such a vision, it questions how, in fact, it made it.34

Once The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe has been examined as an example of historiographic metafiction, mention should be made to its recurrent games with the notion of literary genre. It is widely accepted that the making of genres is located in specific historical circumstances, genres being dynamic and responsive to change. When dealing with the selfconscious character of historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon points out that “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking the forms and contents of the past”.35 This metafictional impulse towards formal reevaluation and innovation is ever present in Marlowe’s work and its constant playing with the notion of genre and with literary expectations. The issue is problematized from the very beginning of the book and it is even ironized by the self-conscious narrator in a straightforward manner: 34 35

Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 42, 48 (emphases in the original). Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 5.

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The narrator’s self-reflexivity on this point pays homage to the precocious metafictionality of Tristram Shandy, in which the narrator anticipates criticism that could be leveled against him because of small attention he pays to narrative rules and conventions:36 And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about? – Oh! ’tis out of all plumb, my Lord, – quite an irregular thing! – not one of the angles at the four corners was a right angle. – I had my rule and compasses, & c. My Lord, in my pocket.37

In fact, the motif of incorporating hypothetical critics’ attacks and the narrators’ responses to them extends also to early examples of historical novelists like Sir Walter Scott’s reply against accusations of historical inaccuracies in The Waverley Novel: “Odzooks, must one swear to the truth of a song?”38 The definition of The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus as “memoirs” may strike readers as somewhat unusual or ambiguous from the very moment they see it on the cover page. Memoirs, like autobiography, are characterized by the fact that the protagonistnarrator is the flesh-and-blood author of a book – which is what

36 See Inger Christensen, The Meaning of Metafiction, Bergen and Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981, 25. 37 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (17591767), London: Penguin, 1985, 134. 38 Sir Walter Scott, The Waverley Novels (1814-1832), XV, London: Macmillan, 1901-1930, xxv.

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distinguishes it from the novel and other fictional writings.39 Apparently, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus is a novel that claims to be the memoirs of a historical personage. But then, as soon as the readers open the book, they realize that the very first paragraph of the memoirs is not an account of the narrator’s birth or early life but a digression on chance and on its vital importance for the development of history. Indeed, the “autobiographical” account and, consequently, the adventure plot are recurrently interrupted by the narrator’s digressions on several topics – a feature of historiographic metafiction that Amalia Pulgarín explains as an expression of the postmodernist antitotalizing opposition to the old notion of the literary work as an organic unit.40 Most departures from ordered linearity constitute metafictional comments about the quality of the novel or memoirs. At one point the narrator offers a personal definition of the book he is writing as “an autobiography concerned with ‘psychology, motivation and all that’” (131). Sometimes he even represents his opinion about his way of writing, as when he regrets his tendency to digress and criticize other historians’ accounts: No, I’d better just write about myself. I’m what I know best. And if I occasionally depart from the traditions of autobiography, it’s just to set the record straight. (317-18)

Irony in the narrator’s self-reflexive comments reaches its highest point when he states: I wish I could write, as a novelist would, that Barto made all the difference. A novelist can get away with anything if it’s a good story. But unforgiving history looks over my shoulder as I pen these words. (344)

Yet, apart from these signs of self-consciousness, a definition of the text as regards its belonging to a specific literary genre is made even more complex by the text’s constant playful changes in style as well as in printed form. Patricia Waugh explains how metafictional 39

Tzvetan Todorov, “El origen de los géneros”, in Teoría de los géneros literarios, ed. Miguel Angel Garrido Gallardo, Madrid: Arco, 1988, 46-47. 40 Amalia Pulgarín, Metaficción: La novela histórica en la narrativa hispánica posmodernista, Madrid: Espiral hispanoamericana, 1995, 34-35.

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flaunting and exaggeration exposes the foundations of the instabilities of the real world: Novels are constructed through a continuous assimilation of everyday historical forms of communication. There is no one privileged “language of fiction.” There are the languages of memoirs, journals, diaries, histories, conversational registers, legal records, journalism, documentary. These languages compete for privilege …. Mikhail Bakhtin has referred to this process of relativization as the “dialogic” potential of the novel. Metafiction simply makes this potential explicit and in so doing foregrounds the essential mode of all fictional language …. The conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved in realistic fiction through their subordination to the dominant “voice” of the omniscient, godlike author. Novels which Bakhtin refers to as “dialogic” resist such resolution. Metafiction displays and rejoices in the impossibility of such a resolution.41

The self-conscious eclectic mixture of heterogeneous discourses displayed in many recent historiographic metafictional works is the outcome of the loss of faith in the totalizing and centralizing impulse of liberal humanist thought that is essential in Jean François Lyotard’s characterization of postmodernism. Standing as a literary correlate of the stylistic pluralism that characterizes present-day culture, this generic eclecticism represents a double challenge to the notion of totalization: firstly, being anything but hierarchically arranged, the different texts question and relativize each other’s authority and consequently that of any text and master narrative. Secondly, they frustrate any critical attempt to systematize and classify the literary work, thereby avoiding control and mastery by the academic authorities.42 The flow of the narrative in Marlowe’s novel is recurrently supplemented by the insertion of fragments of both fictional and historical documents, which break the linear development of the story and bring in new points of view onto the elaboration of the plots. As Wesseling points out, a major strategy for foregrounding the subjective nature of the documents is collage, a strategy that drives home the message that the documents cannot speak for themselves at all, but offer noise instead, because they do not concur with each 41 42

Waugh, Metafiction, 5-6 (emphases in the original). Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 37.

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other.43 For instance, the consequences of Christopher’s poisoning in Roderigo Borgia’s court are described in a medical memorandum written in scientific language. Several letters are inserted, such as that by Bartolomé Colón, and another by the Catholic Monarchs. Likewise, the text includes excerpts from the testimonies of the crew about the accident that caused the destruction of Santa María, of which history only has Columbus’ account.44 Fragments of professional interviews are presented as well, like those of the selection of members of the crew for the Second Voyage. There are also fragmentary remnants of Luis Torres’ personal diary and a dossier of Brother Buil’s questioning and Petenera’s answers under torture in the prison dungeons of the Inquisition. The book displays other paratextual elements, like chapter headings whose disposition and style remind one of conventional history books like Hernando Colón’s Historia del Almirante. In this respect, Hutcheon states that: “History-writing’s paratexts (especially footnotes and the textual incorporation of written documents) are conventions which historiographic metafiction both uses and abuses, perhaps parodically exacting revenge for some historians’ tendency to read literature only as historical document”, and that nowadays “the footnote is still the main textual form by which this believability is procured”.45 It is no coincidence that the only footnote in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus is the narrator’s acknowledgment of: The single inaccuracy in these pages. The famous rock horseman actually stands on a headland of the island of Corvo, westernmost of the nine Azores, not at Calheta Point on Porto Santo. But I claim poetic license for placing him there. (90)

The presence of this footnote produces an ambivalent effect. It is supposed to augment the believability of the narrator’s accounts, as it claims to acknowledge “the single inaccuracy” in the book. At the same time, both its metafictional quality and the fact that there is a self-conscious, deliberate mistake inevitably suspend the readers’ belief in the narration’s reliability. The narrator’s footnote becomes a 43

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 124. See Colón, Textos y documentos completos, 97. 45 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 83-84. 44

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parody of the traditional usage of footnotes in history books, revitalizing the device by giving it a new function in accordance with the needs and purposes of contemporary postmodernist historical novels. As for chapter headings, Hutcheon explains they move in two directions at once in historiographic metafiction: “to remind us of the narrativity (and fictionality) of the primary text and to assert its factuality and historicity.” She goes further when she attributes a Brechtian alienation effect to paratextual insertion in historiographic metafiction: The historical documents dropped into the fictions have the potential effect of interrupting any illusion, of making the reader into an aware collaborator, not a passive consumer …. This postmodern use of paratextuality as a formal mode of overt intertextuality both works within and subverts that apparatus of realism still typical of the novel genre, even in its more metafictional forms.46

On many other occasions, the flow of events is represented in the format of a play-script, with dialogues following the names of the speakers in block capitals and descriptive stage directions. The playlike character of some parts of the novel is highlighted by certain allusions, such as the narrator’s commentary that the Monarchs’ pages were “offstage” (138), and the fact that three consecutive chapters – VII, VIII, IX – are entitled “1492!” (144), “1492! (Continued)” (167) and “1492! (Concluded)” (198), imitating the structure of classical three-act drama. This concern with theatrical representation can be related to what Alison Lee describes as “postmodern performance”. She analyzes the transformations of narrative form into the format of a play text and the concern of some contemporary English novels with “aspects of performance such as role-playing, spectacle, staging, etc.” Lee says that “the self-consciousness of consciousness of the characters in these novels … indicates a concern with character (subject) formation” – a characteristic conspicuously shared by The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. Apart from foregrounding the representational character of representation, she concludes “these texts ... question the Realist view that identity is coherent or that there is a definable human essence, 46

Ibid., 85, 88-89.

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through their play with the creation and acting out of roles”.47 Additionally, Marlowe’s text rejoices in an extended game with style, in a demonstration that the way one writes is nothing but a set of conventions arbitrarily assigned to certain topics or contents, and that one can reveal their arbitrariness by playing with them and using certain sets of stylistic conventions to deal with unusual issues. The narrator is overtly self-conscious about his stylistic games: I ask you then to see (or rather not see) this episode in my life as Lope de Vega, that prodigy of nature with his 1800 plays, might have written it some 130 years later. He would write of Rodrigo, the last Visigoth king of Spain, and of El Cid, so why not of me? Or if not Lope de Vega, then his English contemporary William Shakespeare who, if he mined Spain for the material he cheerfully lifted from just about everywhere else, might have written a drama called Columbus. A play, then. The curtain falls on the hidden patio to rise on the same set several weeks later. (157)

The narration follows in an archaic tone, echoing Lope de Vega’s. In a similar mood, some other events are narrated with the romanticized stylization of a yellow-press “hypothetical newsmagazine” (239-40, 265-66), or in the swift tone of an adventure story. The most outstanding case is the appropriation of the language of romance, parodically used to recount a passionate sexual encounter between Columbus and the Blue Pimpernel, which is described in nearly pornographic detail. This fragment is relevant for its deliberateness in the use of the conventions of romance, since it follows a section in which a hypothetical later critic has been arguing with the narrator about the generic indefiniteness of the book and has suggested him to adapt the rest of the book to the conventions of romance. It is also significant because the romance fragment is narrated just to be immediately denied: No, no, no, that’s all wrong, stop! This isn’t my style, and beside it’s not what happened in any style. Let’s do it my way, okay? The truth’s important to me. (379)

47

Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, 80-81.

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McHale talks about similar examples as being “under erasure”. He focuses on Robbe-Grillet’s 1970 novel Projet pour une révolution à New York to analyze the sections of the book that are placed under erasure. McHale concludes: What is especially striking about [them] is their highly-charged, sensationalistic content …. The aim of such sensationalism is to lure the reader into making an emotional investment in the sequence under erasure, typically by arousing his or her anxieties, fascination with the taboo, or prurient interests. Having become “involved” in the representation, the reader thus resents it when the representation is derepresented, erased. The reader’s impulse to cling to the erased sequence heightens the tension between (desired) presence and (resented) absence, thus slowing the slow-motion flicker even further. The use of pornographic or quasi-pornographic materials for this purpose is the clearest example.48

This conspicuously metafictional strategy has, in Marlowe’s as in Robbe-Grillet’s work, “the effect of interrupting and complicating the ontological ‘horizon’ of the fiction, multiplying its worlds, and laying bare the process of world-construction”.49 This is, to conclude, just one more mechanism among those deployed by Stephen Marlowe in his all-affecting self-conscious deconstructionist project, not only for its generic playfulness but also for the effects of its game of selfdenial.

48 49

McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 102 (emphasis in the original). Ibid., 112.

CHAPTER 5 CHAOS, COMPLEXITY AND INTERPRETATION

Chaos theory and metafiction The philosophy of history has paid attention to the ambivalent nature of the term “history”, which simultaneously refers to two different levels of reality – namely, the res gestae, the actual deeds carried out by persons in former epochs, and the historia rerum gestarum, the narrative about those events. Objectivist philosophers of past centuries considered that the historia rerum gestarum purely reflected the res gestae, which served to increase the ambivalence of the term “history” 1 itself. As discussed in the previous chapter, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe shatters, through the metafictional strategies it deploys, the supposedly direct relation between these two levels of reality, thereby exposing the autonomy of the historia rerum gestarum with respect to the res gestae. It is the purpose of the present chapter to explore how the novel also dismantles the level of the res gestae through a reflection upon the interrelation between chance and determinism. A chaotic reading of the text will reveal a large-scale pattern that gives coherence to a number of apparently independent subplots and motifs scattered throughout the novel. The demolition of the res gestae’s transcendence starts in one of the narrator’s self-reflexive, philosophical musings, when he resorts to a classical authority to define the import of history: What’s the purpose of history? According to the father of all historians, Herodotus of Halicarnasus (c. 480-425 BC), it’s to perpetuate the memory of “great and wonderful deeds.” (462)

The striking aspect of this assertion is that, ironically enough, it comes at the end of the novel, when the foundations of history have already 1

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 83.

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been undermined by the continuous deconstruction of the importance of historical personages and events, which are reduced to a play of sheer chance occurrences. Of utmost significance from this standpoint is one of the first sentences in the book, a parodic reply to one of Albert Einstein’s most 2 famous statements: “History is, mostly, a toss of the dice” (1). In fact, the life of Christopher Columbus is presented as a series of lucky accidents that happen in the right order for their outcome to lead to other accidents in a sort of chain reaction. It is in this context that the narrator ponders: “Some pages back I wrote about glory and destiny, but at times I can’t help thinking these words mean only that the accidents of life happen in the right order.” He subsequently produces a series of questions in an attempt to decide whether the accidents that led to his becoming a sailor were “fate or happenstance” (96), reinforcing the view of the narrator’s life as a series of well-timed coincidences. In this line, the protagonist’s birth was possible only because an Easter parade got in the way and delayed his parents’ walk towards the Jewish synagogue where they were to celebrate the last Seder – and which was set ablaze by Catholic Dominican ministers. The second accident is Columbus’ birth at sea, which facilitates his future entrance in Roderigo Borgia’s Roman Court. As was indicated in the previous chapter, Columbus’ stay at the Court precipitates a long series of accidents: for a start, Domenico D’Arignano’s contract with the Brotherhood of the Golden Stag (or Hind) forces Columbus to run away and sail to England. Then, his contact with Pighi-Zampini (established again through Borgia) sends him aboard a poor, old felucca that sinks, arriving at the Portuguese coast. There he meets Captain Perestrello – a defender of the round-earth theories – and his little daughter, Felipa. Columbus marries Felipa and inherits Captain Perestrello’s letters and charts, which consolidate his yearning for reaching the Indies by voyaging west. Finally, chance plays a conspicuously decisive role in the protagonist’s life, as he agrees to play dice with Barto to leave to hazard the decision of who would sign on with King John II of Portugal’s Sprawling Navigational Complex

2

“God does not play dice with the Universe!” (in Davies and Gribbin, The Matter Myth, 203).

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and go east to St George of the Mine – which allowed the protagonist to improve his skills in sailing along the African coast. The narrator’s initial belief in chance as the engine of historical development and in life as a series of accidents that simply happen in the right order without any transcendent “grand design” (409) becomes meaningful when he listens to God’s words explaining to him that everything in his life went the way it did because “the time had come” for certain events to take place (564). This evolution allows him to discern some kind of hidden pattern or order structuring and giving meaning to the apparent randomness of events. This interpretation of the development of human affairs recalls the description of the chaotic behavior of molecular systems in a state of non-equilibrium as elaborated by the thermodynamic scientists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers: A system far from equilibrium may be described as organized not because it realizes a plan alien to elementary activities, or transcending them, but, on the contrary, because the amplification of a microscopic fluctuation occurring at the “right moment” resulted in favoring one reaction path over a number of other equally possible paths …. Self-organization processes in far-from-equilibrium conditions correspond to a delicate interplay between chance and necessity, between fluctuations and deterministic laws. We expect that near a bifurcation, fluctuations or random elements would play an important role, while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become dominant.3

Before going further into this issue, it may be convenient to recall that chaos theory, complex systems, and cultural and literary studies became associated as a result of a series of steps that, through the concepts of entropy and noise, ended up in a metaphoric parallelism between thermodynamic processes and information theory. Entropy was coined in the 1860s by Rudolf Clausius to refer to the decrease of energy available for work that occurs in any heat exchange as enunciated in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Some years later, James Clerk Maxwell published a paper deriving the properties of a gas from the most probable speeds of its particles, gas molecules’ speed being a correlate for heat – a measure of internal energy. 3 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1984), London: Flamingo, 1985, xxvi.

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Ludwig Boltzmann extended Maxwell’s statistical method and entropy came to be understood as a measure of the randomness or disorder in a closed system. As Hayles explains, “the hotter the gas, the more entropic it is in Clausius’ terms because the more heat it loses as it undergoes heat exchanges. It is also more entropic in Boltzmann’s sense because the faster molecules move, the more 4 mixed up they become.” In a parallel way, Claude Shannon, an engineer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories whose research formed the basis of modern information theory, devised a probability function that he identified with information. As James Gleick explains, “information” in Shannon’s theory was “a specialized value-free term without the usual connotations of facts, learning, wisdom, 5 understanding, enlightenment”. This theory was determined by the idiosyncrasy of hardware, since information was stored in bits – binary on-off switches – which became the basic informationmeasuring units. Information theory became a tool for grasping how noise in the form of random errors interfered with the flow of bits, and how redundancy – which is hard to quantify since it depends on people’s shared knowledge of the world and of their language – could make up for the trouble caused by those interferences. However, the fact that ordinary language contains more than fifty percent redundancy led to the conclusion that “the more random a data stream”, that is to say, the less redundant it is, “the more information would be conveyed by each new bit”. Given the similarity between Boltzmann’s equation for entropy and Shannon’s equation for information, the latter decided to call the quantity calculated by the function the “entropy” of a message, “entropy” thereby being “the name for the quality of systems that increases under the Second Law [of thermodynamics] – mixing, 6 disorder, randomness”. The idea of a probability function in a message therefore implies the existence of unexpected elements in combination with a quantity of elements that are easy to predict. Thus, the alliance between entropy and information came to be effective only when information 4

N. Katherine Hayles, “Self-Reflexive Metaphors in Maxwell’s Demon and Shannon’s Choice: Finding Passages”, in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund, Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990, 217. 5 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), London: Cardinal, 1991, 255. 6 Ibid., 257.

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was associated with novelty instead of with meaning: the less probable an element is to appear, the more information it conveys. As Warren Weaver suggests, a noisy message will be more surprising and hence will convey more information. It was Jeffrey S. Wicken that proposed to call what Shannon’s function measures the “complexity” of a message in order to “suppress the metaphoric potential of Shannon’s 7 choice”. Chaotic or complex systems, Hayles concludes, are: Disordered in the sense that they are unpredictable, but they are ordered in the sense that they possess complex recursive symmetries that almost, but not quite, replicate themselves over time. The metaphoric joining of entropy and information was instrumental in bringing about these developments, for it allowed complexity to be seen in information rather than deficient in order.8

As Paul Davies states, scientists have only recently started to understand how complexity and organization can emerge from featurelessness and chaos. Their research in “areas as diverse as fluid turbulence, crystal growth and neural networks is revealing the extraordinary propensity for physical systems to generate new states 9 of order spontaneously”. Also essential for my purposes here is Davies and Gribbin’s distinction between two types of systems in physics: first, they describe a linear system as “one in which the whole is equal to the sum of its parts … and in which the sum of a collection of causes 10 produces a corresponding sum of effects”. However complex a linear system may be, Davies points out, “it can always be understood as merely the conjunction or superposition or peaceful coexistence of many simple elements that are present together but do not ‘get in each 11 other’s way’”. In opposition, they define nonlinear systems as those that: Can display a rich and complex repertoire of behaviour, and do unexpected things – they can, for example, go chaotic. Without nonlinearity, there would be no chaos, because there would be no 7

Hayles, “Self-Reflexive Metaphors”, 234-35. Ibid., 224-25. 9 Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (1987), London and Sydney: Unwin, 1989, 1. 10 Davies and Gribbin, The Matter Myth, 38. 11 Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint, 25. 8

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The structural description of The Memoirs that follows shall reveal the book as a complex system that shows the four characteristics Davies attributes to complex systems: The first concerns their formation. Complexity often appears abruptly rather than by slow and continuous evolution …. Secondly, complex systems often … have a very large number of components (degrees of freedom). Thirdly, they are rarely closed systems; indeed, it is usually the very openness to a complex environment that drives them. Finally, such systems are predominantly “non-linear”.13

These features are intrinsic to Marlowe’s novel and spring mostly from the unexpected irruption of fictional characters and events and of intertextual references, which interact with the development of documented facts, thereby opening new lines of interpretation. One of the key elements in the novel is the narrator’s view of history as the interplay of chance and necessity, which contrasts with the reader’s disorientation as regards the apparently random (dis)organization of the various materials and sources in the novel. Yet, it can also be interpreted as an invitation to look for meaningful underpinning patterns or “grand designs” in the text. Indeed, this selfconscious appeal makes up for the absence – typical in metafictional novels – of the authoritative God-like omniscient narrator of realistic fiction, which functions as a guide for the readers to reach the message of the text. This absence inevitably creates in the readers of postmodernist narrative an impression of disorder and randomness and leaves them with a multiplicity of elements they must interpret, since the relation signifier/signified can no longer be considered univocal and stable. A metafictional text is, according to Peter Stoicheff, a selfreflexive problematization of language as a chaotic generator of significance with multiple interpretations, since “the text ceases to transmit the exterior world, and interrogates its own medium of

12 13

Davies and Gribbin, The Matter Myth, 40. Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint, 22.

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14

transmission”. A usual characteristic of metafictional works is their self-consciousness as complex, constructed artifacts which “inevitably contain elements that are not immediately decodable and that therefore function for their readers as what information theory would 15 call noise”. Noise – “anything that interferes with the receiver’s 16 receiving the same message that the sender sent” – may provide additional information not intended by the sender and play a 17 constructive role. In this sense, according to Paulson, literature can be defined as communication crafted to maximize the positive role of noise, and it is, he says, the noisy or non-assimilated elements in a system that are crucial to its continuing development and to the emergence of new levels of meaning that are neither predictable from linguistic and genre conventions nor subject to authorial mastery. Thus, a metafictional text defeats closure by ever adapting to new interpretations, which are essential to its generative process. In Stoicheff’s terms: To “understand” a metafictional text, one must reject seeing it as a vertical organization of a text’s components into a closed order that is interpreted as meaning. Rather, one replaces this view with the recognition of lateral patterns in which disorder becomes order, mystery becomes illumination and then fragments into a new disorder. This pattern generates the reader’s continual interpretation of the metafictional text and also the text’s self-generation, for the pattern is a manifestation of the text’s reading of itself.18 14 Peter Stoicheff, “The Chaos of Metafiction”, in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles, Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1991, 86. 15 William Paulson, “Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity”, in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, 43. 16 Hayles, “Self-Reflexive Metaphors”, 228. 17 A parallel process takes place “in accelerator experiments where opposing beams of highspeed protons are made to collapse with each other. In an energetic collision between two protons, newly created particles, called pions, are often observed to spew forth. These particles are not pieces broken off from protons; they have been created out of the energy of motion of the two particles, released when the protons are slowed by the collision. Because no energy has been borrowed from the vacuum, the newly created pions exist as independent, real particles in their own right” (Davies and Gribbin, The Matter Myth, 139-40). So matter – like meanings – is spontaneously created, not just transformed. 18 Stoicheff, “The Chaos of Metafiction”, 93.

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Stoicheff’s view of metafiction may be seen as a literary correlate of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ theory about the chaotic nature of both microscopic and macroscopic phenomena. Prigogine and Stengers describe how far-from-equilibrium systems are constituted by structures of molecules that interact with each other, high levels of potential energy resulting from each interaction. “Before they collide”, they argue, “the molecules behave independently of one another”, constituting what they call “the molecular chaos 19 assumption” of the system’s initial conditions. Prigogine and Stengers describe how the collisions of these initially independent molecules “produce, as if by a preestablished harmony, an apparently purposeful behavior” and consequent large scale coherence that results in a system that “is structured as though each molecule were 20 ‘informed’ about the overall state of the system”. Successive scales of interaction bring about a multiplicity of lateral levels of description, the scientists state, which are interconnected but, nonetheless, may not have a claim of preeminence. Going a step further, the parallelism between microscopic molecular systems and literary artifacts may be extended to either system’s relations with their contexts. As Prigogine and Stengers put it, “the interaction of a system with the outside world, its embedding 21 in nonequilibrium conditions”, may become the starting point for the formation of new dynamic states of matter – dissipative structures. Dissipative structures, they explain, actually correspond to a form of supramolecular organization. As happens to molecular structures, a metafictional text is not a closed, isolated system. It exists in the context of a multiplicity of cultural and literary discourses that place it in a state of non-equilibrium, especially when intertextual reference is overt: interaction among diverse intertextual sources may bring about unimagined patterns of signification which are endowed with harmony or order by interrelated implications from those absorbed external 22 influences. 19

Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 246 (emphases in the original). Ibid., 246, 171. 21 Ibid., 143. 22 Given the relevance of the binary order/disorder for my argumentation, it may be interesting to remark the parallelisms between thermodynamic descriptions of chaotic systems and Foucault’s accounts of several manifestations of mental disorders. For a start, the French thinker refers to madness as a proliferation of intertwined meanings 20

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Dissipative structures in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus In this line of argumentation, the fact that Marlowe’s book is written in a multiplicity of styles may point to a complex structure of different layers of narrative construction and interpretation. What is more, the intertextual echoes and the overtly fictional events inserted within the linear structure of the plot that deals with Columbus’ documented biography provide the novel with a complexity that can only be accounted for through a detailed study of those elements and, more specifically, of the way they alter the significance of historical events and call for different strategies of interpretation. As Paulson explains drawing a parallelism between molecular and literary self-generation: What appears to be a perturbation in a given system turns out to be the intersection of a new system with the first. In becoming aware of such a relation, the reader in effect creates a new context in which the previously disruptive event or variety is reread.23

As seen in the previous chapter, parallel to the autodiegetic narrator’s account of his personal and professional career runs a second level of meaning – namely, his multifaceted critique of historiography and geography. However, intertextual references provide a variety of additional scales of signification that interact with the previous ones, thereby raising a number of other issues and concerns. To start with, a Pynchonesque motif – a secret society of 24 assassins, the Brotherhood of the Golden Stag (or Hind), and the protagonist’s paranoid fear of it – acts as a catalyst for the succession that liberates the world from the control of form. Then, when dealing with passion, he puts forth that “imperceptible movements, often provoked by a slight external impact, accumulate, are amplified, and end by exploding in violent convulsions” (Madness and Civilization, 85). This clear similarity with the effect of the environment on molecular systems and of intertextual references in metafictional texts is enhanced by Foucault’s description of the classical conception of maniac vapors, whose “particles are in perpetual movement” and are “capable of provoking new pores and new channels” spreading themselves far (ibid., 119). Besides, like complex systems, delirium is said to be manifestly chaotic but ruled by the order of a second delirium which is pure reason, providing the former with a rigorous organization. 23 Paulson, “Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity”, 44. 24 Cf. the Tristero in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, London: Vintage, 1966. For further information on Pynchon’s narrative, see Francisco ColladoRodríguez, El orden del caos: literatura, política y posthumanidad en la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon, València: Universitat de València, 2004.

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of events that lead a runaway Columbus in all his steps towards the discovery of the New World. The secret society and Columbus’ paranoia become a recurrent motif throughout the book and a reminder of the chaotic nature of life and the large scale effects – such as the eventual colonization of half a continent – that may stem from a small cause like a teenager’s affair with an adulterous married woman. There is another outstanding Pynchonesque reference: the Whole 25 Sick Syndrome that Columbus suffers from conspicuously recalls the “Whole Sick Crew” – schlemihl Benny Profane’s circle of friends in Pynchon’s V. The characteristics of the Marlowesque illness work to reinforce even further the preoccupation with ontology and human identity that this intertextual echo brings in. Besides making the protagonist hallucinate and “get ahead of [him]self” (423) in his anachronistic recounting of events, and producing Christ-like stigmata on his hands, the illness gives him continuous sight problems – his eyes sting, run out of tears and even bleed. Columbus’ constant problems with his eyes overtly signal a problem with his I’s, as the narrator suggests when he talks about “an identity crisis like [his]” (432). Uncertainty about his identity starts with his own birth in the middle of nowhere – born in the Mediterranean Sea, he has no definite nationality – and extends to his religious doubts. Leaving aside his pervasive theological skepticism, religious indeterminacy is attached to him from birth, as his parents were Jewish backsliders converted to Catholicism to avoid expatriation (though they finally have to flee all the same). The significance and lifelong effect of this conflict is obvious in Columbus’ parents’ argument the night of the Last Seder about the naming of the baby: while his father wanted to give him a very Catholic name – Jesús or Joseph – his mother preferred a typically Jewish one – Moses Maimonides. Curiously enough, it is the future Pope Alexander VI that chooses the baby’s name and decides that it will have to be Italianized in a near future. Decades later, when Luis de Santángel tells Columbus that both of them are New Christians (that is, Jews converted to Catholicism) he starts wondering whether and why he really is a Catholic. His

25

Some of the symptoms of this illness have their origin in the historical Columbus’ accounts in his diary of some problems with his sight and wounds on his hands he actually suffered from (see Colón, Textos y documentos completos, 213, 295, 313).

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confusion and the vital importance of this uncertainty are clear when he complains: I was forty years old and suddenly inhabiting the body of a stranger …. I resumed my theological debate with myself …. What am I? Why am I? …. Numbed by Santángel’s revelations, I felt like an impostor unsure whom he was impersonating. (145-47; emphasis in the original)

Religious and identity indeterminacy are forever installed when Christopher’s question to God: “Who am I? … Why am I? … Am I a Christian or a Jew or what?” is followed by a playful: – Or what, says the voice as the lightning shimmers at the edges, to show amusement possibly. I remember once giving a similar answer. It’s one you can’t really argue with. (542)

With no positive answer from the ultimate universal Logos, Marlowe’s Christopher Columbus appears as nothing but a sliding signified in the signifying chain of the text – an ever-floating signifier, since there seems to be no closure, conclusion or telos in his life and narrative. Human identity as such, as well as the role of historical personages, is presented in the initial paragraph of the novel as depending entirely on chance and on one’s location in the space-time 26 continuum: If Holy Week and Passover hadn’t fallen at the same time the year I was born, none of this would have happened. Someone else would have become the most famous man in the world, give or take a few. There’s no telling what might have resulted. What if this other person, this surrogate me, didn’t come along until a few years later, maybe giving the Indians time to develop the wheel, or to stop warring interminably among themselves … ? (1)

26 The narrator’s stance in this respect is parallel to E.H. Carr’s: “Had Bismarck been born in the eighteenth century – an absurd hypothesis, since he would not have been Bismarck – he would not have united Germany and might not have been a great man at all” (What Is History?, 54).

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Moreover, human existence appears to be not only devoid of any stable essence but also configured as an infinite process. Columbus is always aware of his need to move and his inability to settle down. Not wholly conscious of why he says so, he tells his brother Barto: “I shall always be going away. Somewhere” (101). Furthermore, many hints about the possibility of reincarnation are scattered throughout the book. These are confirmed when one reads in the last pages of the book how Columbus as both narrator and protagonist becomes, immediately after his death, a teenage autodiegetic narrator whose name is never stated – his name is replaced by the three dots that “close” the book. Many additional lateral patterns of interpretation that are brought about by a number of historical, sometimes anachronistic, references. This is the case, for instance, of the narrator’s explanation of Sir Francis Drake’s ravaging of the Spanish Main more than a hundred years later as the final vengeance on Columbus at the hands of the Brotherhood of the Golden Stag (or Hind) since, as the narrator tells the reader: “I don’t have to remind you what name Sir Francis Drake chose for his piratical galleon” (27) – The Golden Hind. Further open patterns are the exposure of the close links between religion and politics, as revealed by Columbus’ fictional experiences in Roderigo Borgia’s Court; the parallelism between the Jews’ escape from Spain, some of them to the Central part of the American continent, and the Irish inhabitants of Iceland to “Wineland the Good” when their country was invaded by the Vikings; or the incursion into the French Court through Barto’s fictional romance with Anne de Beaujeau, Princess Regent to her brother Charles VIII at Fontainebleau. Likewise, there are several intertextual allusions that invite the incorporation of attached meanings and therefore enrich the connotations of certain events and characters. This is the case of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which is recurrent in the narrator’s admission of a certain “Ahab mania” and his obsession with the fabled East as if it were his “white whale” (181), and also of Billy Budd, Sailor, in his frequent comparison of kind-hearted, naïve, stuttering Francisco Niño of Moguer with Melville’s protagonist. Intertextual and anachronistic as well are the references to two famous cases of mutiny, whose status as fictional or factual is not clarified by the narrator. The first one is the mutiny portrayed in the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, based on Herman Wouk’s 1951 Pulitzer

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Prize-winning eponymous novel, whose action takes place aboard a non-factual ship named U.S.S. Caine, a World War II naval vessel governed by a mentally disturbed man. The second was also made into a film, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), but drawing upon factual bases: the merchant ship HMS Bounty’s Captain William Bligh suffered a mutiny at the hands of his one-time friend Fletcher Christian in 1789 during their trip to the West Indies. The implications of these references point to the difficulty of assessing both the circumstances that may lead to a mutiny and the captain’s responsibility since the two stories show completely different problems and outcomes. The readers who know the sources are free to judge by themselves the situation and instigators that led the crew of the First Voyage to nearly declare a mutiny against Columbus while being reminded that such an assessment is never an easy matter. Some other notable intertextual references are the dismal, deadly echoes brought in by the narrator’s mention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 27 during his Third Voyage, or the quotation of the last lines of North American Saul Bellow’s 1954 novel The Adventures of Augie March. There are other strategies that open further paths of signification in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. As Brian Stonehill states, “at its best, a self-conscious novel may be both ethically effective and 28 esthetically reflexive”. The novel’s ethical commitment is pinpointed by the inclusion in the book title of the author’s pseudonym after the word “with”, which somehow signals his presence or intervention. The book addresses ethical and political issues, one of the most notable being the consequences of the colonization process for the indigenous inhabitants of the Central and South American continent, mainly through the character of Yego Clone. For its part, the figure of the Blue Pimpernel reinforces the textual implications on the issue of gender relations. For instance, during a treaty negotiation with Roldán in which he demands fifteen Spanish women for his rebels, Columbus answers that “our women are not chattel but, like all citizens of Santo Domingo, are free to come and go as they please. We believe in open borders, openly arrived at.” And, as narrator, he adds: “I remain firm, historians please 27 It is relevant to point out that, according to some sources, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was to some extent inspired by the Wandering Jew story. 28 Brian Stonehill, The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988: 17 (emphasis in the original).

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note, on the Woman Gap” (464). A similar protest is lodged by Petenera when Mosén Pedro Margarit claims he is not a slave-owner since, although he does “own a dozen head of women” (391), they are a gift. Her answer speaks for itself when she accuses him of treating women as cattle. Furthermore, she complains rather in the tone of a twentieth-century woman involved in female liberation of the “hypocritical double standard” of “the whole male half of the human race” (288) when she insists on being on top while having sexual intercourse with the protagonist. The heroine’s fully anachronistic deconstructionist and feminist beliefs are made explicit in her answers to Brother Buil when he is interrogating her inside the Inquisition prison dungeons: A: Describing God as an actual father and an actual son sounds like He’s cast in man’s image, and that’s insulting to the Deity. If He is all-powerful, all-wise, all-good, how can He possibly resemble man? Anyway, what man? Your average Spaniard? Or an Englishman with a magenta face or maybe an Indian from across the Ocean Sea with a feather in his hair? Or come to think of it, perhaps even a woman? Q: That’s blasphemy. A: Is it? It’s just as sensible as saying God looks like you, Brother Buil. (397; emphasis in the original)

Petenera’s agnostic answer is just one more instance of the unorthodox character of the book. Indeed, it is preceded and followed by an overwhelming series of attacks upon the Catholic Church as an institution, heightened by the narrator’s detailed descriptions of the crimes and cruelties carried out by the Spanish Inquisition. Religious fundamentalism is indeed variously attacked from the initial pages. The narrator ironically marvels at the behavior of the Catholic Monarchs, who welcome filthy gypsy immigrants – who convert to Catholicism – and expel wealthy, clean, educated Jews, burning them alive within their synagogues if they do not convert and kiss a crucifix. But the denunciation of religious corruption is not limited to Spain, “Cardinal Borgia and the whole Roman curia having amply demonstrated that religion is more politics than faith” (58). The narrator’s cynicism is extreme when he concludes that “clerics don’t kill” (258) after witnessing an Act of Faith in Valencia. There, a smiling Dominican friar Brother Buil explains to him that dozens of

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heretics, mostly accused of Judaizing, are burned alive in each Act of Faith unless they repent, and that ninety per cent do after being bloodily whipped. Even dead heretics are burned so that their properties can be legally confiscated. Indeed, there is no escape since even those who abjure are killed in the garotte and then burned dead. The textual implications regarding religious intolerance as represented by the Inquisition is evident in the following conversation between Columbus and Luis de Santángel: “Is Fernando still more a Harana-Torquemada than – “Bite your tongue! Don’t even mention that fellow’s name.” Santángel crossed himself. I’d never seen him do this before. Perhaps he regarded it as a sign to ward off evil. Perhaps it was. (374)

When Columbus enters the prison dungeons of the Inquisition, he is led by Brother Virgilio, and the experience is compared to both Dante’s Inferno and the Book of Job. As the narrator puts it, “I entered Hell, right here in Toledo” (401). The description of the tortures executed by the institution are so hard that the narrator explains he has reached a compromise with his editors, who wanted to have them omitted: he will understate the horrors and tick with a prominent print mark the pages that are too cruel so that sensitive readers can skip them. Columbus even admits to having been “on the verge of concluding, thanks to Brother Buil and the Suprema, that religion is a kind of spiritual syphilis” (422). However, the narrator clarifies that, “having written all that, I’d better put it on record that this book is no antireligious tract” (408). Indeed, some religious men are depicted in a favorable light, such as Fray Juan Pérez at La Rábida Monastery, who wonders about the doings of the Inquisition: “how can such atrocities be committed in the name of the God I worship?” (418). The most outstanding representative of the abuses and barbarities committed in the name of the Christian God, Brother Buil, strays from the Christian faith when he confesses that he considers God less sophisticated and more “simplistic” than the Devil, but that it would be difficult to convert the people to the Devil. A clear contrast is marked when Fray Juan Pérez laments that he is afraid that he is impeding the work of the Holy Office because he lets Petenera and other refugees stay in La Rábida Monastery, “but things have come to such a pass, I truly believe that by impeding their work we are doing God’s” (506). God Himself, in

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his supposed conversation with Columbus, affirms that Brother Buil and Torquemada – and by extension the whole institution of the Inquisition – did not act for Him. The critique of Catholic fundamentalism is most patent in its relation with Jewish subjects. The textual implications are clear from the moment Columbus’ little son Diego, having a walk in the Jewish neighborhood of La Judería, calls Jews “Christ-killers”. A Jewish man hears the boy and replies that “it’s superstition that’s really running this country. You call it Christianity …. The Church has no faith in its own faith, so it’s afraid of ours” (154-55), and denounces the rumor that many “men of God” are spreading the falsehood that Jews drink 29 Christian children’s blood in profanation of the mass. Furthermore, there is a net of references throughout the novel that may lead to the conclusion that what provokes such a dangerous phobia in the most belligerent agents of repression is their own reflection in persecuted subjects: Beatriz Enríquez de Harana, the Grand Inquisitor’s cousin, is repeatedly said to have a semitic nose, Catholic Queen Elizabeth resembles Columbus, as the narrator insists, and the Royal Court she shares with her husband is Spain’s most peripatetic and nomadic, always on the move from one Spanish city to another. In this respect also significant is the figure of Pighi-Zampini, whose post as Head of the Centurione House of Merchants ensures that he appears in every place and at any moment Columbus needs his help. Thanks to their shared contact with Roderigo Borgia, he sends the protagonist to England in the poor felucca that sinks near the Lisbon coast when he was running away from the Brotherhood of the Golden Stag (or Hind). Pighi-Zampini appears again in Lisbon after helping Columbus to travel from Bristol to Galway in search of The O’Gaunt. After meeting again in Seville, Pighi-Zampini helps the protagonist to meet Petenera in Cádiz and later on arranges Columbus’ entrance to the Inquisition prison dungeons in Toledo in exchange for her liberation. What is revealing in the monarchic connection is that, in the last years of his life, Pighi-Zampini’s peripatetic Branch of 29 This libel in fact began to spread as early as 1144, when the Jews of Norwich, England, were accused of ritual torture, murder, and crucifixion of a Christian boy who was found dead during the Passover holiday. From then on, similar charges were leveled against Jews across Europe, claiming that, just as they had crucified Jesus, they satisfied their thirst for pure blood by drinking that of innocent Christian children.

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Centurione joins the Sovereigns’ Court in his new task of laundering their money. Equally telling is the fact that the Sovereigns’ Keeper of their Household Budget, just like their money launderer, is a convert: Luis de Santángel, who uses his post to exercise pressure from within the power structure as the head of the influential Movers and Shakers, and by using the Monarchs’ budget to finance Columbus’ voyages in order to send the young backsliders in danger to the colonies. Interwoven with the issue of Jewishness, there develops the more intricate underlying pattern that reveals the protagonist’s long searched for identity. A biblical layer of intertextuality comes into play to add a further complication in the discoverer’s character. As indicated earlier, Columbus has three dreams in which he impersonates the figure of a rather peculiar St Christopher. What is significant in these dreams is the elaboration of the character as an embodiment of the Wandering Jew: in the first dream he says to Jesus Christ the words uttered by the Wandering Jew according to the legend. The identification goes further in the dream contained within the second dream: Columbus, impersonating St Christopher in his dream, goes on to dream that he is Herne the Hunter – a legendary English figure who was granted immortal life in exchange for his hunting skills – and does little jobs in a monastery around the year 1230. There, he overhears the Archbishop of Armenia telling Roger Wendover, historian and chronicler of St Albans, a story about Pontius Pilate’s doorkeeper, Cartaphilus – meaning chart lover – or the Wandering Jew, who was punished by Jesus Christ to wander all his days “off the map of time” for knocking Him off balance. When the Archbishop says that he dined with Cartaphilus in Armenia, Herne (that is, (St) Christopher on a different level of consciousness) feels that he was the one who had dinner with the Archbishop. It is at this point that Columbus adopts Cartaphilus’ signature as his own. Columbus’ third St Christopher’s dream is even more daring, as the separation between two different ontological levels (consciousness and the unconscious as embodied in a second level dream) blurs and finally disappears. Columbus’ consciousness urges Herne the Hunter, the character he is playing in his second level dream, to take with him a copy of the book written by Roger Wendover that recounts the legend of Cartaphilus. Ontological boundaries finally blur as the book Columbus dreamed Herne took from St Albans actually reaches him

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through the agency of his two fictional lovers: Tristram/Isolde and Petenera Torres. As the narrator puts it: “That’s the way it happened. The first and last loves of my life, the only two real loves of my life, conspiring to tell me … what? …. I can’t just die without finding out what Tristram and Petenera were trying to tell me. Can I?” (564-65)

Wendover’s book is important because it establishes a link between the Wandering Jew and Christopher Columbus. This connection may have been inspired by the mysterious ending of the nineteenth-century Spanish play by Eugenio Sánchez de Fuentes Colón y el judío errante (1845), in which the discoverer shaking the Jew’s damned right hand leads to the implication that he becomes infected and a character also doomed eternally to wander. The presence of the book is also significant because it links two other scales of significance and intertextuality that function, in turn, as a recursive symmetry. On his trip to England, Columbus meets and falls in love with Tristram/Isolde. She spends her summers at Bristol, where she is apprenticed to alchemist Magister Tom Norton, who is in search of the philosopher’s stone. The chapter’s quality as a recursive symmetry is highlighted by the reproduction, word for word, of a twopage-long dialogue between Norton and Columbus in a dream by the latter. As was pointed out in the previous chapter, the historiographicmetafictional component is enhanced by the complication that Isolde is kidnapped by a fictional descendant of historical John of Gaunt, also known as “The O’Gaunt, … the Robin Hood of Ireland” (60) – Isolde’s mad brother, friar Brother Brendan, who believes himself to be St Francis of Assisi. And the narrator makes sure we read that the Saint’s stories are called The Little Flowers. The Little Flowers will allow for a retrospective connection between brother and sister and another couple of brother and sister who will appear later on: Luis Torres and Petenera Torres – the Blue Pimpernel. This pair again blends history and fiction, as the character Luis Torres is based upon Christopher Columbus’ accounts of a Jewish shipmate who worked as a translator between the crew and the native population of the rediscovered land. Yet, the figure of his sister is entirely fictional. Christopher meets and falls in love with her just as accidentally as happened with Tristram.

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The presence of Petenera in Columbus’ life brings in constant echoes of what he starts thinking of as the experience of some previous life of his own. The theme of reincarnation is thereby subtly introduced – after being suggested by Tristram’s exposition of Plato’s theory of love – and will dominate the closing pages of the book. The protagonist’s weird feeling starts when he listens to a haunting song about “Petenera, a lovely Jewess who disavowed her baptism as a New Christian” (250). The narrator’s exclamation is no less haunting: “Petenera! Why did the melody haunt me so, like the memory of events as yet unlived?” (251). Petenera’s song becomes a recurrent motif in the second half of the novel. Christopher and Petenera hear it together in a little bodega in Sanlúcar, where she tells him that Santi (Luis de Santángel’s son) used to sing it to her and tell her she was the one in the song. Santi eventually made the lyrics of the song come true by turning Petenera into “a femme fatale so he could be a tragic young lover” (494): he was caught by the Inquisition for getting involved in her cause because he idolized her brother Luis and, when the latter died, Santi idolized her and turned her into a sister figure. This case shows conspicuous similarities with the relation between Tristram and The O’Gaunt: Petenera risks dying for Santi, as Tristram did, when, following Brother Buil’s suggestion, she replaces him in the Suprema’s prison dungeons. The interpretation of the relationships between Tristram and The O’Gaunt, and between Petenera and his brother-figure, as a recursive symmetry is reinforced by the handicapped Santi’s dependence on Petenera after getting half his face burned and losing one eye during tortures by the Inquisition, which reminds the reader of The O’Gaunt’s dependence, due to his mental instability, on Tristram. And even more when the narrator makes an explicit comparison as he realizes that, just like Tristram years before, Petenera is renouncing him for the better of her brother-figure, and remembers the tragic ending of the Galway episode: And finally, faint behind me as I plunged deep into the woods, a single clear tenor voice brought back a ruined fortress high on a rocky island in a cold northern sea: Be praised, Lord, for our Sister Death From whom no man can escape ….

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The final reassertion of the symmetry comes up when Columbus reads what Petenera had written in the flyleaf of Wendover’s book in the hope that it would reach Luis’ hands: she got the book through 30 Abraham of Lucena, who had received it from an Oxford student and acolyte to an alchemist. To the comment that Lucena believed that the student was a girl masquerading as a boy – Tristram – Petenera reminds Luis of the time when he took her to the yeshiva – the school for the study of Talmud and Torah, which can only be attended by men – disguised as his visiting male cousin Pedrín. Going back to the correlation between chaotic molecular systems and metafictional texts, it can be argued, first, that the relation between these two pairs of sisters and brother-figures is the most notable recursive symmetry in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. Second, that most of the apparently random, noisy elements and references in the book, even those so subtle as the Whole Sick Syndrome recalling an outstanding Jewish fictional character, or the reference to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, at first sight behave as independently as particles in what Prigogine and Stengers call the molecular chaos assumption of the system’s initial conditions. And third, that, when these elements collide – and collude – they produce a large-scale coherence and the formation of a dissipative structure of supramolecular organization that amount, in the case at hand, to the revelation of the protagonist’s identity as the Wandering Jew. There are hints in this respect scattered throughout the novel, as when Columbus asserts that the way he feels best is in transit, wandering, and that he is “your perennial outsider” (318). A similar case is Columbus’ prayer for Yego’s health, promising to “keep on wandering and discovering for the rest of [his] life – ad majorem 30

Petenera’s mentioning the name Abraham of Lucena is an anachronism and homage to the factual Abraham of Lucena, a Sephardic Jew who travelled to Dutch New Amsterdam leading six groups of Sephardic families in March 1655 to investigate its business potential and created the first Jewish colony in what years later would become the United States of America.

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gloriam Dei” (439) if his stepson recovers from smallpox – which he does. However, it is important to recognize that the revelation of Columbus’ identity comes to the reader through an intricate narrative pattern while this revelation is only partially accomplished for the protagonist through the voice of two apparently omniscient entities: the Guanahaní prophet Guacanagarí and God. The former tells Columbus that wandering is his destiny, while the latter ends his mock-epiphany conversation with the word “Wandering …” (547; emphasis in the original). Remarkably enough, it is after the omniscient Guacanagarí’s death, which leaves the protagonist on his own to solve the riddle, that Columbus feels straightforwardly identified with the Wandering Jew for the first time. Moreover, he does so in his second St Christopher dream, its Chinese-box structure recalling the recursive pattern of a chaotic, metafictional text. Hence, this strategy can be interpreted as the textual implications’ subtle defense of the richness of complex, multi-layered narratives versus the limited, partial outlook that traditional realistic narratives and the privileged account of an omniscient narrator offer the reader. For its part, the protagonist and narrator’s identification as the Wandering Jew allows the reader to elucidate one of the main controversies in the novel: its blatant use of anachronism. In this respect, it may be useful to recall that the legend of the Wandering Jew appeared in the Orient and was brought to Western Europe by English soldiers who returned from the Holy Land after the Third Crusade in the twelfth century. It told of Cartaphilus, a Jewish doorkeeper in the Judgment Hall of Pontius Pilate who, taunting Jesus Christ on his way to Calvary, was told by Christ that he would wander the earth without ageing until His Second Coming. While being discarded by religious authorities as apocryphal, this story was interpreted as an allegory symbolizing the Jewish people’s global wandering and persecution due to their refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The story was strengthened when, as The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus recounts sticking to historical records, an Armenian bishop visited St Albans Monastery and said that he had recently dined with a man who confessed to being Cartaphilus – a story that Roger of Wendover included in his written chronicles. More strikingly, the Wandering Jew is reported to have traveled in Western Europe between 1740 and the 1920s as Count St Germain. Many are the accounts that marvel at the fact that this man had been

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seen in different cities after unusually large time spans, always with the countenance of a forty-five-year-old man. But the relevant issue in the interpretation of Marlowe’s novel is that he is said to have taken part in historical events like the settlement of the peace agreement between Prussia and Austria in 1760, or the deposition of Peter III of Russia in 1762 and the subsequent coronation of Catherine the Great. Even more surprisingly, in 1774 he apparently warned King Louis XVI about the approaching danger of the French Revolution, prophesied in 1914 that World War I would end in 1918 with the defeat of Germany and its allies, and that “the Antichrist[, a] tyrant from the lower classes who will wear an ancient symbol”, would lead 31 Germany into another World War in 1939. In this line of thought, the narrator’s comment that Christ told Cartaphilus he would wander “off the map of time” (450) and that Matthew Paris omitted the phrase in his edition of Wendover’s book for lack of understanding would explain the accounts of St Germain’s predictions and accord with the suggestions that the latter is a space-time traveler. Furthermore, this remarkable feature of the latest accounts of the Wandering Jew would explain and justify the narrator’s anachronisms in the novel, at the same time as they reinforce the identification between Columbus and the legendary figure. This also links with the issue of reincarnation since Count St Germain is said to have been buried several times. Besides, according to the Armenian archbishop, the Wandering Jew “when his days and his wanderings have brought him to the threshold of death, he finds himself recreated a young man with all the world’s map to wander again, and all the world’s wisdom to seek” (450). Indeed, this is exactly what occurs at the very end of the novel. Just as Christopher Columbus dies on 20 May 1506 – which happens to be Ascension Day, as the narrator purposefully points out – his consciousness and narrative voice merge with and become those of a teenager who is walking towards a bazaar. This new autodiegetic narrator is in some Muslim country but he does not seem to share this faith, as he does not prostrate to pray when the muezzin wails. Besides, he exclaims “God” instead of “Allah”, in contrast with the old Muslim chart-seller in whose shop he buys a map drawn in 1513 by Piri Re’is – a famous historical Ottoman admiral and cartographer who took as his source 31 Tom Slemen, “The Count of St Germain: the Real Doctor Who?”: see http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Park/5109/whovian.htm1?200620, 2006.

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for the South American continent many names of ports and areas directly from Columbus’ own maps. Significantly, the richness of detail and historical precision in just one page – the last one – allows the reader to reckon the date of the story time, which is coherent with the date of Columbus’ death and can give an estimate of the new narrator’s age. Piri Re’is of Constantinople (1465-1554) is said to be still alive, while the chartseller, Abu’l Qurra, a prominent Ottoman astronomer and mathematician, was born in 836 CE and died in Baghdad in 901 CE which translate as 1458 AD and 1523 AD respectively. This leaves a span between 1513 and 1523 that, together with the information that the protagonist has just received confirmation, may lead to the conclusion that the end of the book is set by the early 1520s in present day Baghdad. The novel ends with a narrator who is willing to visit a list of fabled places in the Middle East and whose thoughts mingle with a mysterious remembrance of some “strange St Christopher dream” (569) as he sees Columbus’ signature in a facsimile, suddenly feeling it is his own signature. The book’s closing sentence “and I know I will see them all as surely as my name is …” (569) reasserts 32 the open nature of both the story and the protagonist’s identity. .

32

In one of the very few critical articles published on The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, Helmbrecht Breinig argues that, since in the first edition of the novel “Stephen Marlowe” were the first words overleaf, the author’s pseudonym completed the three dots that “close” the book. This strategy, according to Breinig, merges Columbus’ identity and authorship with the author’s and, given the uncertain character of the latter, the question is passed on to the readers, who have to construe their own author, their own Columbus, and their own history (“(Hi)storytelling as Deconstruction and Seduction: The Columbus Novels of Stephen Marlowe and Michael Dorris/Louise Erdrich”, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, eds Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, Paderborn and Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 325-46). However, Breinig’s argument is obviously far-fetched and has no stable foundations given the fact that not every edition of the novel bears the author’s pseudonym overleaf. In fact, the 1992 Bloomsbury edition has no word at all in its back cover.

CHAPTER 6 BEYOND REFERENCE: HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION IMPINGED BY SCIENCE FICTION “Only once … upon a time? Never twice? Can’t a story ever…?”1

Death and life: a fictionalized biography The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; a Novel by Stephen Marlowe is an example of postmodernist historical novel that goes a step beyond the point of experimentalism reached by the author’s previous novel, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. While certain aspects like the blatant use of anachronism appear in a more subtle fashion and therefore achieve a less outrageous effect, one of the main divergences from the pattern followed in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus is that, at some point in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes – that is, in “Part the Second” – the reader progressively loses track of the protagonist’s documented biography for the sake of a parallel, by far more adventurous, development of affairs. Coherently with its title, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes is divided into two sections: “Part the First”, under the subtitle “The Death of Miguel de Cervantes”, comprises seventeen chapters that narrate Cervantes’ life since his birth up to the moment when he is hung in Algiers; “Part the Second”, subtitled “The Life of Miguel de Cervantes”, comprises twenty chapters that deal with the writer’s life since his unexpected, last-breath rescue from the gallows until 23 April 1616 (Gregorian Calendar). Besides, there is a Prologue preceding “Part the First” that, beginning in medias res and in the present tense, tells the protagonist-narrator’s cryptic account of how and why he is immediately going to be hung in Algiers unless something extraordinary happens. The fact that this sequence is 1

Stephen Marlowe, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; a Novel by Stephen Marlowe, London: Bloomsbury, 1991, 204 (all further page references given in the text).

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repeated word by word – with extra information provided by the narrator’s more thorough account and by the knowledge of some issues acquired throughout the book – in the last chapter of “Part the First”, thereby introducing “Part the Second”, signals both a point of transition and a radical break from one section to the other. Like The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes is a pseudo-autobiography narrated by an autodiegetic narrator, Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, who frequently insists that he must not dwell on certain topics that come to his mind because they are not related to his main concern: telling the story of his death and life. In fact, following the traditional pattern of autobiographical stories, “Part the First” starts with an account of the narrator’s descent, of the circumstances surrounding his siblings’ and his own birth, and of his earliest memories. However, the very first chapter is not just an innocent family presentation. As its title foregrounds, “Being an Exploration of the Columbus Connection and Other Family Matters of Consequence”, even before introducing the family members, the narrator tells of the undocumented friendship between his paternal great-grandfather Ruy Díaz de Cervantes2 and Christopher Columbus, who used to drink wine together before the latter discovered the New World. The motif of the Columbus acquaintance introduces the issue of Jewishness and the fact that the Cervantes family had converso blood on its paternal side. Furthermore, it self-consciously links this novel and the preceding one, pointing to the connection between them, since it reintroduces issues explored in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, like the discoverer’s uncertain identity – “raised in Genoa by probably Spanish, possibly New Christian, parents” – and also a recurrent phrase on Columbus’ account, who often referred to himself as a “monomaniacal navigator” (5). Indeed, to a certain extent The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes follows the same pattern as The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. As a clear example of postmodernist historiographic 2 A name that, curiously enough, also brings to mind another mythic Spanish figure, Ruy Díaz de Vivar, “el Cid Campeador”. However, research on Cervantes’ descent reveals that Ruy Díaz was the real name of the writer’s great-grandfather (see Krzysztof Sliwa and Daniel Eisenberg, “El licenciado Juan de Cervantes, abuelo de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra”, in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, XVII/2 [1997], 106-14).

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metafiction, besides being highly self-conscious, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes purposefully combines historical characters and events, both of prime importance and barely known, with fictional ones, placing them at the same ontological level in a way that demands thorough research to clearly distinguish the two kinds of characters. The table below displays the result of such research: Relevant Documented Characters Miguel de Cervantes (1)

Documented Characters Just Mentioned Zoilos (1)

Legendary/ Literary Characters Cide Hamete Benengeli (7)

Grandmother: Leonor de Torreblanca (5) Mother: Leonor de Cortinas (5) Sister: Andrea de Cervantes (5)

Homer (1)

Zoraida (9)

Christopher Columbus (5) Grandfather: Ruy Díaz de Cervantes (5) Petrarch (11)

Pierre Papin (11)

Father: Rodrigo de Cervantes (5) Grandfather: Juan the Patriarch (5) Brother: Rodrigo de Cervantes (6)

The Lovers of Teruel (212) Amadís of Gaul (212)

Signor Lomellino or Lomemín (54) Rizio Rizione, A Certain Mutual Acquaintance (54) Suora Donatella (69) Tasso’s niece Costanza (75) Father Nestore (77) The Old Cypriot (92)

Robin of Locksley

Taverner Gabriel

William Tell (139) Shakashik (209)

Brother: Juan the Obscure (7) Juan Rufo (16)

Mary Tudor (57)

Odysseus (212)

Queen Elizabeth I (57) Duke of Alba (58)

Aeneas (212)

Princess Eboli

Tomás Gutiérrez (16) Housekeeper María (18) Cristóbal Bermúdez (32) Gypsy Bizco (43)

Andreas Vesalius (39) Franciscan Fray Diego (39)

Ruy Gómez (58)

Iñaki Satrústegui Zumalacárregui, Picapleitos (8) Luis Blackslave, Goldfang (11)

Jocasta and Oedipus (74) Sindbad the Sailor (117) Alonso Quijano (132)

Sister: Luisa de Cervantes (7) Sister: Magdalena de Cervantes (7)

Prince Heir Don Carlos (27) Illegitimate Prince Don Juan of Austria (27) Alessandro 3

Rodríguez Montalvo (14) Duke of Sessa (24)

Midwife Zárate (49)3

Fictional Characters

Gypsy Bigotes (43)

Zárate is the name of the fictional midwife who helped give birth to Goya’s daughter in Colossus.

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Farnese, Duke of Parma (27) Pedro de Isunza (28) Niece Constanza (50) King Felipe II the Death-Loving (54) Don Antonio Sigura (59) Don Nicolás de Ovando (59) Torquato Tasso (66) Gaspar de Cervantes (66) Cardinal Guilio Acquaviva (66)

(58)

(248)

Muñoz (131)

Bustamante (63) Herrera (63)

Aldonza Lorenzo (340) Sir Gawain (397)

Pope Pius V (67)

Sir Lanval (397)

Michelle /Micaela Maltrapillo (138) Suleiman Sa’adah (164) Pirate Ajeeb (198)

Giovanni Battista Colombina (68) Cardinal d’Este (68) Rabelais (70)

Guy of Warwick (397) Ogier the Dane (397) Roland and Olivier (397) Pierre of Provence (397) McLaughlin of Scotland (397)

Bocaccio (70) Ariosto (70)

Cornelia Tasso (73)

Dante (70)

Pacheco Portocarrero brothers (83)4 Lope de Vega (85)

St Benedict and St Scholastica (73)

Dalí Mamí, Gimp the Greek (111)

Admiral Veniero (88)

Ramadan Pasha Dey (123) Arnate Mamí (137)

Captain Diego de Urbina (88) Ahmed Pasha (92)

Morato Maltrapillo (139) El Dorador (141)

Captain Sancto Pietro (93) Figueroa (109)

Anica Villafranca (153) Johan Heidenberg,

Herodotus (115)

4

Tiberius (76)

The Red Knight (397) The Green Knight (397) Yclept Dromio (413) Prester John (472)

Al-Kuz (202) The Old Woman of the East (206) Brigand Aurelio Ollero (284) Lombrizcacha (285) Baron Hasko von Nacht zu Nebel (288) Gypsy Anselmo (302) Drempel (334) Dominie Aaron Dweepziek (348) Maliverny Catlyn of Clynnogfawr Llanllyfni (355) Agulla de Espadón (374) Sir Gawayne of Wagenschot (407) Doctor Duguis (425) Paco Camporredondo (469)

Sir John

A man called Alonso Pacheco Portocarrero did play a part in the lives of the Cervantes family as a close friend to Andrea and Magdalena, but his role has been largely fictionalized in the novel, turning him into two brothers, Pedro (Killer) Pacheco Portocarrero and Pepe (Choirboy) Pacheco Portocarrerto, to whom a criminal, murderous trait has been added (James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, “Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Reseña Documentada de su Vida”, see: http://proyectoquijote.com, 2006).

Beyond Reference Abbot of Sponheim (155) Hassan Pasha Dey the Venetian (164) Onofre Exarque (170) Gerónimo Girón, Haroun (198) Pedro Laínez (237) Juana de Laínez (237) Catalina de Salazar y Palacios (237) Blas de Robles (253) Gaspar de Porres (253) Sir Francis Walsingham (288) Sir Francis Drake, El Draque (296) Christopher Marlowe (304) Pedro Lanuza Perellós (315) Santi Ambrosio (316) Lord Howard of Effingham (328) López Pereira (351)6 Ingram Frizer (351) Thomas Walsingham (352) Thomas Henneage (355) Thomas Phelippes 5

119

Mandeville (115) Vatsyayana (137) Ibn Batuta (146) Benjamin of Tudela (146) Mateo Vázquez (160) Antonio Pérez (160) Prefect Jorge del Olivar (161) Trinitarian Juan Gil (231) Roque Guinart of Cataluña (248)5 Captain General Sancta Cruz (288) Duke of Medina Sidonia (288) Johann Georg Faust (290) Pieter Breughel (348) Sir William Cecil (355) The Bacon brothers (355) Historian Juan de Mariana (371) Luis de Góngora (384) Ponce de León (384) Hyeronimus Bosch (388) King Felipe III

Historical Spanish bandit known as Perot Rocaguinarda or Perot lo lladre, who later appeared in Cervantes’ Don Quixote as character Roque Guinart (see: http://www.proyectoquijote.com/cms/index.php?module=Encyclopedia&func=letters earch&startnum=757&vid=1&letterget=All). 6 Ephraim López Pereira is a factual Austrian Jewish personage who established himself in England like the character in the novel, but he lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so this is a clear though purposeful anachronism on the author’s part.

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the Inglorious (447)

Audrey Shelton (355) Denis Zachaire (358) Doctor John Dee (358) Richard Baines (372) Luis Salvador (378) Isabel de Saavedra (382) Philip Hinchlo [Henslowe] (409) William Shakespeare (423) Gaspar de Ezpeleta (455) Francisco Robles (460) Printer Juan de la Cuesta (460) Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (464) Cristóbal Villarroel (474) Painter Juan Jáuregui (483)

The novel’s depiction of the main events in the life of Miguel de Cervantes is accurate in terms of both chronology and circumstances. Born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, Miguel moves with his family to Valladolid in their escape from creditors, and then to Cordoba to inherit the properties (or debts) of his grandfather Juan de Cervantes (Juan the Patriarch in the novel). Moving afterwards to Seville and then to Madrid, Miguel apparently studies in the Jesuit School. In his youth, he fights and kills Antonio Sigura, an event that forces his exile to Italy to avoid punishment of ten years’ banishment and the slicing off of his right hand. There, he arrives in Rome, where he counts on the help of his cousin Gaspar de Cervantes y Gaete. This enigmatic character introduces the protagonist to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva, for whom Miguel works as a butler. After soliciting a certificate of purity

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of blood, he enters the Christian Army led by Don Juan of Austria and in the galley Marquesa, under Captain Diego de Urbina, and fights in the Battle of Lepanto, where he is wounded in his chest and in his left hand, which is not amputated but atrophied for good. After recovery and resuming his military life, Miguel is traveling back home with his brother Rodrigo in the galley Sol when the vessel is assaulted by Barbary pirates and both brothers are taken to Algiers as prisoners. The novel is also historically accurate concerning the time Miguel spent in the dungeons in Algiers, the name of his master, the Greek renegade Dalí Mamí and even on the fact that Mamí was lame, Miguel’s failed attempts to escape, the names of some of the people he met there, and his voluntary exchange for his brother Rodrigo, who was thereby released and sent back to Spain. Finally, the novel is accurate on the fact that Miguel himself was ransomed for five hundred escudos in 1580 by the Trinitarian Order when on the verge of being sent to Constantinople as a punishment for trying to escape. However, no evidence has been found on the possibility of a failed attempt to hang Cervantes, so central to the novel, which pinpoints the relevance of fictional additions to the plot. After his return to Spain, Cervantes moved to Portugal, where apparently King Philip II assigned him a secret mission in Oran: the novel does not mention this event, but it may have been the source of inspiration for the protagonist’s involvement in the secret society of the Nameless, on which “Part the Second” focuses. Back in Madrid, Cervantes has an affair with Ana Villafranca, the wife of bartender Alonso Rodríguez, and with whom Miguel has a daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, as reflected in the novel. In 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, Cervantes marries nineteen-year-old Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, whom he meets in the village of Esquivias through her friendship with Juana Gaitán, widow of his friend Pedro Laínez. Two years later, Miguel moves to Andalusia where, according to different sources, he works as provisions commissioner for the Spanish Armada. Different problems in this post result in his being sent to jail several times and his being excommunicated twice. Apart from his literary creations, little is known about Cervantes’ life for the years that follow up to his death in 1616. Biographical sources assert that he spent all that time working for the Armada provisions. The only event that is precisely recounted and scrutinized in detail by Cervantes experts – in order to save his reputation – is the

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death of Gaspar de Ezpeleta close to the house where the Cervantes family lived in Valladolid, for which Miguel was arrested for a short time.7 Yet, as happened in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, the fictional elements added to Cervantes’ documented biography provide the ground for unexpected developments, supernatural occurrences, and the elaboration of the novel’s ideological and philosophical tenets. The first outstanding feature is the birth of Miguel’s youngest brother, Juan, whose existence is flatly ignored by most historical sources. When accounted for, sources remark that the only proof of his existence is the fact that their father Rodrigo mentioned him in his will. The enigmatic nature of his existence is made the most of by the narrator, who presents “Juan the Obscure” as a shy, silent boy who enjoys hiding in dark corners and spends his time disappearing and reappearing unnoticed. Interestingly enough, this quality will make Juan one of the leaders of the secret underworld society of the Nameless, which seeks information and secret knowledge. This anachronistic reference to Thomas Hardy’s turn-of-the-century novel Jude the Obscure brings in different connotations to the character of Juan. Just as Hardy’s novel portrays Jude as a gloomy man whose feeling of isolation makes him concentrate on books and scientific knowledge, Juan appears in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes as a socially isolated man whose liking for darkness and corners evolves into a passion for secret knowledge and the power it bestows. Their sister Andrea is given prominence too. Born only two years after their brother Andrés, who died as a baby, she is given her name after his. It is by the middle of the book that their father Rodrigo confesses on his deathbed that Andrea was adopted when a royal equerry was looking for a family with no converso blood to raise her and turn her into a bride of Christ in exchange for a sum of money that would be paid as a dowry to the convent, but which was used to pay Rodrigo’s debts and thereby keep him out of prison. Unaware of this fact, both Miguel and Andrea spend their lives tormented by an 7

See Martín Fernández de Navarrete, “Observaciones sobre el cautiverio de Cervantes”, in Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: http://cervantes.uah.es/ biografia/cronologia.htm, 2006. See also: http://www.tablada.unam.mx/poesia/ensayo s/libmor.html; and: http://www.educa.aragob.es/iesrsfra/Archivos_Varios/Lengua/Cer vantes/VIDACERV.htm.

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incestuous passion they must repress and which determines their destinies. For instance, it is to defend her honor that Miguel engages in the fight with Antonio Sigura, friend of Nicolás de Ovando, who fathered Andrea’s daughter Constanza – ludicrously named by Miguel’s father Rodrigo after a half-Indian prostitute. Another determining fictional plot stems from the incest theme in the novel. Crown Prince Don Carlos, who is said to have deflowered two hundred and twenty-eight virgins, is provided with the virgins by his bodyguard, Pedro de Isunza, a documented personage who worked as General Commissioner for the Armada with Miguel and got him out of prison twice in 1591-1592 and later appeared as a character in Cervantes’ novel La Señora Cornelia. One night “in 1562 (historical time) or 1564 (fictional time)”, as the narrator puts it due to his paradoxical relation to history and fiction, Pedro de Isunza takes the 229th virgin, Andrea, to the Prince. But Andrea runs away from him because he is a hunchback and smells of garlic – or, as the narrator reveals by the end of the novel, because she was scared by her close resemblance to the Prince, which made her think he could be her brother. Andrea’s escape, which causes an accident in which both the Prince and Isunza fall downstairs, provokes the latter’s dismissal and the emergence of an implacable obsession that will make him spend the rest of his life looking for her in order to take revenge for having caused his fall into disgrace and loss of power. Indeed, Isunza and his insane obsession will reappear throughout the novel until he finds her in the antepenultimate chapter. In addition, Andrea becomes the object of Miguel’s platonic love. They never have sexual intercourse, yet neither of them can love anyone else even though they eventually get married to other people. In a way that recalls Don Quixote’s perception of his idealized love Dulcinea del Toboso, Cervantes loses a realistic approach to Andrea, who is the most beautiful woman in Spain and does not age – for him, she always looks twenty-two.8 Moreover, the narrator’s passion for Andrea brings doubt regarding his own reliability as he places in 8

The narrator’s idealization of Andrea goes further since, in an attempt to clean his beloved’s reputation, he blames their sister Magdalena for all the problems both sisters have with their lovers and all their suits for breach of promise. In this respect, historical sources generally agree that the Cervantes sisters, contemptuously known at their time as “las Cervantas”, had quite a bad reputation (see Fitzmaurice-Kelly, “Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra”).

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several other characters’ mouths the words he uses to describe his (non-) sister’s beauty: Her beauty was like the caress of the sun on a windless winter day in high Castilla, or the silver track of a full moon on the sea bearing the enigmatic silhouette of an exotically rigged boat, or a pool of clear water in all that man-killing expanse of blazing sand and rock between Algiers and Spanish Oran at the exact moment the escaped prisoner realizes it is no mirage. (18)9

This kind of description, which recalls Petrarch’s accounts of his beloved Laura both in its use of elements of nature and in its idealization of the lady’s unattainable beauty and perfection, places Marlowe’s Cervantes in a position of unreliability similar to that of historical Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It is only when, in her forties, Andrea marries Santi Ambrosio, that Miguel suddenly becomes aware of the lines and crowsfeet on her face, acknowledging for the first time that she has aged. The mystery about Andrea’s identity is left open since, in her old age, the Fourth Key Bureau of the Royal Treasury goes to the Cervantes household to reclaim the government funds wrongfully spent – Andrea did not become a Carmelite, so she must return the money paid to her parents. In order to check that she is the child “of the most uniquely prominent man of his time”, an envoy must find “the birthmark in the shape of the Habsburg eagle on her right hip” (emphasis in the original; 471). Andrea lacks this birthmark, so the reader never knows for sure whether the threat of incest was real with Miguel, with the Prince, or with neither of them. The topic of unfulfilled incest is replicated in the novel by another couple of brother and sister: poet Torquato and Cornelia Tasso. When Miguel reaches Rome in his escape after killing Sigura, his cousin Gaspar de Cervantes asks him to accompany Torquato Tasso, after being in a mental hospital, in his return to Sorrento, where Cervantes will meet Tasso’s family. Thus starts a wholly fictional episode in 9

Cf. Juan Rufo’s words: “Andrea, whose beauty is like the caress of the sun on a windless winter day in high Castilla” (35), Pierre Papin’s: “Her beauty … is like the silver track of a full moon on the sea bearing the enigmatic silhouette o fan exotically rigged boat”, and Luis Blackslave: “Her beauty is like a pool of clear water in all that man-killing expanse of blazing sand and rock between Algiers and Spanish Oran at the exact moment the escaped prisoner realizes it is no mirage” (37).

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which, among other things, Cervantes discusses literature with the author of Aminta and gets a first glimpse of a world of secret agents that will become the center of his experiences after his non-death. On their way to Sorrento, Tasso tells Miguel about his paranoid fear that there is a cosmic master plan to destroy him, and also about St Benedict and his sister St Scholastica, who could not live without one another, and other incestuous stories like that of Jocasta and Oedipus. Once in Sorrento, Cervantes finds an extraordinary resemblance between Cornelia and Andrea, and immediately falls in love with the former. The parallelism between both women is enhanced by the fact that Cornelia, who according to historical sources had only a son, has a little daughter the age of Andrea’s daughter Constanza whose name is no other than Costanza and who is the daughter of Rizio Rizione, Andrea’s protector in Madrid.10 Cervantes has an affair with Cornelia while Torquato is in Capri trying to recover from madness. Only afterwards does the protagonist discover through his cousin Gaspar that it was Rizione’s plan to send Miguel there so that he fell in love with Cornelia. As Rizione expected, jealousy drove Torquato to a degree of madness that made him confess to Gaspar all the information he had gathered as an agent for the Holy League11 against the Sublime Porte.12 However, the fact that Miguel’s feelings were but a projection of his repressed desire for Andrea is brought to the fore, first, by his recognition of himself and Andrea on the couple formed by the Tasso siblings when he states: “I swear they looked so like us they could have been myself and my sister Andrea” (79);13 and then, when he tells his brother Rodrigo about their relationship, by the fact that he cannot remember Cornelia’s face and can only picture Andrea’s. 10

The parallelism is further complicated when the reader discovers that Andrea’s husband Santi Ambrosio – who is said to be the widowed son-in-law of Signor Lomellino or Lomelín, a close friend of Rizio Rizione – was at the time of his death a in Italy married bigamously to a young woman named Costanza. 11 The alliance between the Papal States, the Signori of Venice, and Spain and other Catholic maritime states in the Mediterranean to break Ottoman Turks’ control of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. 12 The government of the Ottoman Empire, used especially in the context of diplomacy. 13 The motif of these special relations between brothers and sisters recalls other couples in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus like Tristram/Isolde-The O’Gaunt, Luis Torres-Petenera Torres, and Santi Santangel-Petenera Torres.

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The protagonist’s third and last love is Michele/Micaela Maltrapillo, the fictional daughter of a factual renegade from Murcia, Morato Maltrapillo, who became friends with Cervantes during his Algerian captivity and was later immortalized in “The Captive’s Tale” of Don Quixote (Part One, Chapter XL).14 Similar to the case of Tristram/Isolde in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, Micaela is a girl with “disturbing amber eyes” (138) who has to disguise herself as a boy to survive in a world where women’s lives have little value. Micaela passes as a highly attractive teenage boy most men in Algiers desire but whom no one can touch since his safety is guaranteed by his father Morato’s business – carrying the ransomed prisoners back to Spain. Miguel accidentally becomes aware of the Maltrapillo boy’s real identity. To the reader’s amazement, the narrator says that he never wrote about Micaela to avoid fueling the critics’ doubts about his sexuality, since everybody believed she was a male.15 The game of ontological levels already initiated by the combination of historical and fictional characters is most ironically and playfully self-conscious here since, at the core of it, Marlowe’s narrator is calling attention to Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia”16 by explaining why historical Cervantes did not write about a woman that is but a fictional character of Marlowe’s own creation. Being approximately the same age as his niece Constanza, Miguel develops a protective affection towards Micaela. Her memory problem makes her stutter when giving signs and countersigns and links her to the protagonist, whose stuttering problem is a constant in the novel. Micaela’s stammering becomes significant when she has to enunciate a countersign in reply to a password question. These sign and countersign will be central both to the narrator’s stuttering problem in the dungeon and to Micaela’s recovery after a tragic episode: Gimp the Greek tries to seduce her and, on discovering that she is a girl, feels such disgust and hatred that he takes revenge by locking her into a galley where she is gang-raped by dozens of galley slaves until she is rescued by Miguel, Zoraida, and some secondary 14

In Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605-1615), Madrid: Edimat, 1998, 265 15 Even though he does not make much of it, to the experts’ questions about his sexuality, the narrator responds: “Why should the burden of rebuttal rest on me?” (181). 16 In Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 18.

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characters. This episode of her life causes a painful trauma for Micaela who, “trying to make herself invisible” (206), hides speechless and motionless with a new enigmatic character, the Old Woman of the East, a one-hundred-and-three-year-old woman who claims to come from the lost continent of Lemuria.17 Miguel visits Micaela every day and tells her stories with the purpose of getting some kind of reaction from her, which he eventually manages by telling her a story about a female knight-errant who needs Micaela’s help to remember a countersign in order to save the prince’s life and the whole world. The story is significant since the countersign is the sentence Micaela was unable to pronounce before. Her wish to save the world makes her react and, in her failed attempt to finish the sentence, ask: Tell me, Miguel. Please? What comes next? (223; emphasis in the original)

The importance of this utterance becomes apparent at the end of the novel since, these being the words with which the novel closes, a look back to this episode is necessary in order to interpret the whole novel. Micaela, aged fifteen, is brought back to Spain by his father, a selfish, insensitive man that tries to get her married to Miguel – whose love for Andrea prevents him from accepting – and then to a Basque rock-thrower. She reappears in “Part the Second” as secret agent Mnemosyne,18 sent in a mission to Záhara of the Tunas, in Cádiz. There, she will meet Cervantes again and tell him how, running away from marrying the Basque man, she went to Madrid in search of her friend Rodrigo (Miguel’s brother) but found Juan the Obscure instead, thus getting involved in some “dangerous games” with the secret society of the Nameless (296). When the mission is over, Micaela 17

This character will reappear in Part the Second, and the fact that in their first encounter she tells Miguel that Suleiman Sa’adah is retiring from spying makes the reader suspect that she will be involved in the Nameless society. 18 After so much has been made of Micaela’s poor memory, it is most ironic that her code name is Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek mythology, from which kings and poets receive their powers of authoritative speech according to Hesiod’s Theogony. Additionally, Micaela’s code name both contrasts and links her with Cornelia, after whose rejection Miguel seeks the waters of Lethe, which dead souls – unlike initiates, who drank those of Mnemosyne – drank in order to forget their past lives when reincarnated.

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reappears in England, where she is the fictional pet pupil of historical espionage-addict Thomas Walsingham at Scadbury House. After going to the Netherlands to help some Jewish escapees, Micaela returns to England where she marries the fictional Sir Gawayne of Wagenschot, calls herself Lady Waynescote, is known among the Nameless as “Em” and gets involved in English espionage intrigues that have as their ultimate consequence the destruction of all Nameless bases but the Main one. Cervantes gets hurt and enters a state of coma after protecting Micaela from a stone-bow shot by the fictional Butcher of Clynnogfawr Llanllyfni. The Butcher tries to kill her when she competes with the Butcher’s lover, historical Audrey Shelton, for the succession of old Walsingham as chief spy for the Crown. After Miguel recovers from his coma and disappears for four years, a radical shift takes place in his feelings and he acknowledges that he loves Micaela – indeed, for the first time, it is Micaela who always looks twenty-two to Miguel. The next time they bump into each other, Micaela explains to Miguel how Audrey finally won and became “the new W”, and that she has managed to survive thanks to historical Lord Howard of Effingham, who admitted her within his all-male entourage because he owed a favor to her fictional husband. After having sex with Miguel in a myriad positions she learned during her training at Scadbury House and “perfected in field work” (472), thereby recovering from her childhood trauma, they agree to leave together the following morning in search for a fictional twelfth-century man, Prester John, who is said to have been a descendant of Ogier the Dane. The fictional component here is substantial since, leaving aside the fact that Micaela thinks it is possible to find a man who lived five centuries earlier, both Prester John and Ogier the Dane are legendary characters whose factual existence has not been proved.19 But the Ezpeleta incident takes place, Miguel is arrested and misses his date with Micaela, who has to leave without him. That Micaela is the protagonist’s soul mate is clear not only from the fact that their names are the same both in the female and male 19

Prester John (or Presbyter John) was a mythical Christian king said to rule over a Christian nation lost among the Muslims and pagans in the Orient. His legend was popular in Europe from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Ogier the Dane (or Holger Danske) is a legendary Danish hero who first appears in an Old French chanson de geste. He sought revenge because a son of his was slain by Charlemagne’s son but, after killing the murderer, he made peace with Charlemagne so as to fight with him against the Saracens.

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versions and they share their stammering problem, but also from the development of the novel’s double (non-)ending. In the first ending, while ill with the thirsting sickness of which historical Cervantes died, Miguel accidentally sees Micaela in a coach, but she fails to hear his call. After entering the Congregation of the Unworthy Slaves of the Most Holy Sacrament, he dies an old, sad man, with the family cat at his feet showing her “pale blue eyes” (491) the color of Andrea’s. However, in the second one, Cervantes remains an energetic, younglooking though old man who refuses to enter a Congregation that his life-long rival Lope de Vega has entered and, just as he is dying with the cat’s “disturbing amber eyes” (494) at his feet, a voice pronounces Micaela’s countersign, thereby liberating him and enabling him to recognize her. He eventually manages to climb onto Micaela’s coach just to start telling her the story of his death and life.20 Another interesting character is Miguel’s brother Rodrigo, who embodies the author’s criticism of the military world. History tells how Rodrigo devoted his entire life to battling in the Spanish Army, and the novel presents him as a flat character whose love for discipline and his imposition of it upon his prison mates in Algiers place his life at risk. Furthermore, Rodrigo’s dependence on orders stultifies his own capacity to make any decision by himself, to the ludicrous extent that he cannot even eat or have sex because he cannot choose among the various dishes or make up his mind about what position to adopt. Powerless and disarmed in a world without orders, he can only go back to some battle or other until he dies in Nieuport in 1600. Cervantes’ wife, Catalina Palacios, is equally remarkable. This character is fictionalized into a sexually obsessed village girl who, incapable of restraining her sexual appetite but loyal and faithful to her husband, decides to enter the Tertiary Order of St Francis and take care of exotic animals in his absence. Catalina is a funny, lively character who speaks frankly about sex and even complains that she had to readdress her faith towards the Virgin because St Francis could not stop her lust. But at the same time she is portrayed with fondness and respect in her true love for animals and also in some illuminating assertions, as when she advises Cervantes to go on writing because,

20

The fact that the second ending is privileged is suggested by the fact that Jáuregui’s portrait shows Cervantes as a young looking man, as happens in the second ending, and not as an old looking one, as is recounted in the first ending.

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unlike successful Lope de Vega, he can make people feel through his writings. The figure of Cervantes’ niece Constanza is highly relevant as well. Her life is amply fictionalized from even before her birth, since she appears in the novel as a post-mature baby born after a forty-six weeks’ pregnancy with symptoms that make people think she is devilhaunted.21 One of those traits is the fact that, like Cide Hamete Benengeli, she has a left brown eye and a right blue eye. These two characters are further linked because Constanza has an imaginary friend with eyes like hers who tells her the date when Cervantes is going to rescue her from the Ovando mansion and what to say when, in her early twenties, she tells gypsies’ fortunes. After Miguel talks to her about Cide Hamete, the girl names her imaginary friend and her black cat with their same eyes “Benengeli”. There are some correspondences between Constanza’s documented biography and the novel’s depiction of it, like her affair with Pedro Lanuza Perellós, but again it is given a fictional turn as his relatives accuse the girl of witchcraft. Afterwards, she is emotionally involved with Lope de Vega and then falls in love with her own uncle, reinforcing the incest theme. Another interesting aspect is the use that the novel makes of the girl’s surnames, which are dubious in some historical sources: those who mention both – de Figueroa y de Ovando – do not bother to explain their origin.22 Constanza is thus presented as the biological daughter of historical Nicolás de Ovando, whose parenthood is affirmed by most sources and whose relationship with the Cervantes family is added a novelistic, criminal character. But she is also presented as the legal daughter of Captain Figueroa, a personage allegedly invented by lawyer Picapleitos but whose existence has been historically documented and whose death in battle is mentioned in the novel. Most shockingly, and either adding to the supernatural quality of the character or undermining the narrator’s reliability, Constanza’s eyes are eventually both blue after Miguel publishes Don Quixote, perhaps suggesting that once he has become immersed in the fictional

21

This may be read as a sign of the narrator’s unreliability or a projection of his initial hatred for a creature that reminds him of his beloved’s encounter with another man, since at the beginning he calls her “the postmature little bastard” (53). 22 See http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/933481405463397683825 7/p0000008.htm.

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world he has created – which for him is the truer one – Cervantes no longer needs to fictionalize the one he lives in. Fictionalization is extreme in the case of the characters deeply involved in the Nameless society, like Onofre Exarque. Historically, he was a merchant who lived and worked in Algiers, whom Cervantes and his friend Girón managed to convince to provide the money needed to buy an armed frigate for them to escape.23 However, the novel renders this character as the Abbot, one of the Innominates of the Nameless. Something similar happens to English playwrights such as William Shakespeare, also known as Yclept Dromio, and Christopher Marlowe, also known as Quillpusher and Quincy Purslayne, whom Marlowe’s Cervantes meets in some of his missions with the Nameless, of which they too are members. In contrast to Shakespeare, whose appearances are reduced to a minimum, Christopher Marlowe plays an important role in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes. The presence of this character enhances and foregrounds the historiographic-metafictional quality of the novel, since there is speculation that Christopher Marlowe operated as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence service while there is evidence that he did work for Queen Elizabeth I. Furthermore, it is interesting to notice that Marlowe was staying with Thomas Walsingham when his arrest was ordered on 18 May 1593 and was killed twelve days later by the latter’s servant Ingram Frizer, both being involved in intelligence networks. These two personages also appear in Stephen Marlowe’s novel as British intelligence agents, from whom Christopher Marlowe “exfiltrates”. The fictionalization of this character, who had quite a novelistic life himself, reaches the point of taking up the historically ongoing conspiracy theory that Christopher Marlowe might have faked his death, which fictionally allows him to run away from the threat of the British intelligence networks after having betrayed them and given The Three Thomases Dossier to the Nameless. Don Quixote and the intertextual space Some other characters have their origin in literary texts, which enhances the quality of the novel as what McHale denominates an “intertextual space” and Umberto Eco refers to as “transworld 23 See Francisco Navarro y Ledesma, “El ingenioso hidalgo Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra”: http://proyectoquijote.com, 2006.

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identity”.24 The implications of this feature have more extensive effects in this novel than in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus since the literary characters are taken not from other writers’ texts but from novels by both Stephen Marlowe and Miguel de Cervantes. Thus, midwife Zárate from Marlowe’s Colossus cohabits in the same world or text as characters from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, thereby blurring the limits between both authors. One of the characters that proceed from Don Quixote is Pierre Papin. Originally named Pierres Papin, in the seventeenth-century novel this character is a French knight invented by Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter XVIII).25 Yet, in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, he is the manager of a series of gambling dens deeply involved in the Nameless. For its part, Aldonza Lorenzo, the real name of Don Quixote’s beloved Dulcinea, appears in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes as a blonde, pretty vingt-et-un dealer at Papin’s gambling dens. Cide Hamete Benengeli is another example. Originally a fictional author within the rhetorical system of Don Quixote and a parody of the historians and chroniclers usually quoted in chivalry novels, Cide Hamete temporally acquires the status of a flesh and blood character in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes. Presented first as a eunuch astrologer in the Dey’s palace, he is described by the narrator as an Arab sage with godlike omniscience. Under the pseudonym of Badindjan (that is, Aubergine in Persian) he runs for Innominate of the Nameless after the Abbot’s death. And, as Dasim Zalambur,26 he presents himself as a Lebanese magus in Lady Waynescote’s fête at Loose Chippings before he becomes an astrologer again after guiding Cervantes through the Book of the Dead. Cide Hamete is probably the most multifaceted character in the novel. There is a comic trait related to his name since, contrary to what happened to Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, who called him “Berenjena” by mistake, Cervantes as a child mispronounces eggplant in Spanish and calls the vegetable “benengeli” instead of “berenjena” 24

McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 56-57. Cervantes, Don Quijote, 102. 26 Dasim is the demon of discord, one of the five sons of the Muslim fallen archangel Iblis or Eblis. Zalambur is one of Eblis’ other four sons: the demon of mercantile dishonesty, who presides over fraudulent business transactions. See: http://www.whiterosegarden.com/Nature_of_Evil/Demons/List_of_Demons/CD_cont ents/dasim.htm. 25

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(9),27 as he recalls when he first meets the astrologer in Algiers. Cide Hamete also enjoys a series of supernatural powers as well as an uncertain ontological status, enhanced by the fact that the narrator himself describes him as “my deus ex machina” (224). For a start, he is able to provoke a rainstorm to save Cervantes from death at the gallows after dishonestly and deceivingly exchanging the protagonist’s life for his soul in the cave where Cide Hamete was growing new genitalia. Cide Hamete also has a peculiar relation with time: the narrator explains that, to him, “past and present and future are one” (31) and he can see time forwards and sideways as well as backwards. For Cide Hamete, historical and fictional times are elastic, almost impossible to capture. In fact, it is through this figure that the novel’s theories on time are put forward. Thus, Cide Hamete explains that “the present moment does not exist …. The function of the present, my friend, is not to be but only to become”, and that eternity is “an endless present that becomes neither past nor future” (183; emphases in the original). Likewise, it is through the theories exposed by Cide Hamete that the novel emphasizes an issue that was already tackled in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus: the arbitrary nature of time measurement, as revealed by the fact that one date can refer to two different days according to the calendar that is used. This motif serves to dismantle the long-held thesis that Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on the same day. As the astrologer explains: Quite soon Pope Gregory will reform the calendar, and Spain will rightly adopt the change immediately. But stodgy England will characteristically cling to the old Julian confusion for more than a century, during which the two calendars will be separated by a gap of at first ten, then eleven days. So are you and Shakespeare really dying at the same time? According to the diverging calendars – those temporal frames upon which historians drape facts like wet laundry – you are. But logic says no. After all, then, is history any more trustworthy than fiction? (31-32)

27

“Berenjena” is persistently misspelled in the book as “berengena” to make the similarity between the vegetable and the astrologer’s proper name more visible to English-speaking readers.

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On top of that, as the narrator puts it, “Cide Hamete even gave me some useful vocabulary, about subatomic particles jumping from one energy state to another without passing through space or time” (emphasis in the original). This allows the narrator to talk about his “quantum jumps” (454), a concept which is totally anachronistic for the seventeenth century. Indeed, the novel is pervaded by anachronisms that are more subtle than in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, in so far as they appear mainly as technical vocabulary and expressions that were coined after the alleged story and narrating times, apart from the instances where the narrator mentions events that would happen after his time or what critics would say about his life and works. Yet, the narrator always makes clear that the latter cases are owing to Cide Hamete’s temporally privileged information. What in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus was blatant, in-the-face anachronism is therefore disguised through the intervention of a supernatural agency. Some of the anachronistic terms are specifically related to the realm of literature, like “willing suspension of disbelief” (131), “intimations of mortality” (176), “pathetic fallacy” (188), or “pulp” (461), while others are more general, like “demographics” (52), “homoerotic” (195), or “auto-orchiectomy” (444). Nevertheless, their use is far more subtle and covert than Columbus’ references to Sigmund Freud or Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon. This less radical use of anachronism prevents the readers’ suspension of disbelief from being abruptly and continuously disrupted. Returning to the ontological status of characters, it is necessary to remark that other personages are totally invented, like Rizio Rizione, also known as a Certain Mutual Acquaintance. His apparent omniscience and omnipresence, his wide scope of contacts and provider role, together with the awe he provokes in his contemporaries bears a strong resemblance to Pighi-Zampini in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. Equally fictional is Luis Blackslave, also known as Goldfang, Pierre Papin’s former slave whose ludicrous need to mock authority leads him to mock himself as new Innominate of the Nameless and destroy all its bases but the Main one. Invented too is Suleiman Sa’adah, also known as Solon the Wise, the Jewish former agent of the Nameless who retires and becomes a tulip merchant in Amsterdam, but his status is again problematized by presenting him as the uncle of Zoraida, a fictional character that would “later” appear in Don Quixote. There are also supernatural elements in the novel that

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come from Cervantes’ Don Quixote. This is the case of the flying wooden horse Clavileño28 and the Knight of the Mirrors,29 whose presence in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes enhances the metafictional quality and, again, the character of the novel as an intertextual space, thereby bringing to the fore its self-conscious blurring of ontological boundaries. In fact, as has already been suggested, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes is a highly metafictional novel. Selfconsciousness is apparent on the narrator’s comments on several issues, like the story he is telling, the order he follows, his process of creation of other works like Don Quixote, his tendency to digress in all his works, and his criticism of what will be stated about his works and life by Cervantes experts, as well as on his digressions about the nature of history, fiction, and life. One of the most visibly outstanding metafictional elements in the novel is the use of chapter titles whose syntactic structure clearly recalls the chapter titles in Don Quixote. Thus, titles like “In Which My Grandfather Loses an Argument and My Sister and I Share a Dream”, the other twelve chapter headings that start with “In Which … ”, and another one with “Concerning … ” constitute an explicit reference to Cervantes’ masterpiece, whose chapter headings start with “Que trata de … ” or “Donde … ”, like “Donde se concluye y da fin a la estupenda batalla que el Gallardo vizcaíno y el valiente manchego tuvieron”.30 This trait, which can be considered a homage to the seventeenth-century novel, has an ambivalent status: it reinforces the idea that both Don Quixote and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes were written by the same author, at the same time as its artificiality calls the reader’s attention to the fictional quality of the novel, thereby undoing any pretence of historicity and verisimilitude.

28

Clavileño is a wooden horse allegedly sent by Giant Malambruno to Don Quixote so that he and Sancho Panza can ride it and fly on it to a distant kingdom and break a spell. Being but a joke on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, once they are sitting on it, it is set fire and the firecrackers of which the horse is full explode, the two cheated men being nearly scorched (Cervantes, Don Quixote, 541-51 [Part Two, Chapters XL, XLI]). 29 The Knight of the Mirrors is one of the pseudonyms under which Sansón Carrasco challenges Don Quixote to a duel with the purpose of beating him and forcing him to return to his village (Ibid., 406-15 [Part Two, Chapters XIV, XV]). 30 Ibid., 52.

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Equally disturbing is the narrator’s use and abuse of foreign words. Just as Colossus deployed Spanish terms and described Spanish and Aragonese customs and idiosyncratic features to add to the local color of the novel, a tendency which decreased in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, the use of Spanish terms in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes achieves a different effect. The narrator frequently introduces Spanish words in italics, like “converso” (5), “maravedís” (6), “hidalgo” (7), “limpieza de sangre” (8), “migas” (9), “moriscos” (13), “hombre de negocios” (54), “matador de toros” (82), “¡Viva el Príncipe!” (96), “piñatas” (96), “inválidos” (104), “Soldado aventajado” (104), “hombre” (108), or “Dios mío” (108), to name just a few. Similarly, the narrator uses foreign terms in a way that may not be shocking. This is the case of European words when the protagonist is in the Royal Court, like “dialetto” (54), “verboten” (56), or “sotto voce” (58). Likewise, when Cervantes travels to Italy, he puts in his own or in other characters’ mouths words like “Savoir faire” and “savoir quand ne rien faire” (68), as Tasso says after returning from France, “piano mobile” (69), “È bella, bella!” (74), or “Sinistra, sinistra!” (106). When recounting his experiences in Algiers, the narrator uses words in Arabic, like “hajjis,” “hajar-al-aswad,” “Kaaba” (115), “Rawi!” or “jinni” (127). In contrast, the use of non-English words is denaturalized when the narrator translates into English or explains the meaning of these terms, since this reveals the fact that the novel is written in English for an English-speaking readership, breaking the illusion that the author really is Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Such is the case of examples like “cante jondo, deep song” (25), or “bizco – cross-eyed” (43). But it is even more self-conscious when the narrator concedes that “cuajada” is “rennet pudding, for anyone who hasn’t guessed by now” (489) and when he excuses his father’s apparent use of double negatives since, as Cervantes says, “he was speaking Spanish, after all” (6) and double negatives are correct in Spanish – regardless of the fact that his father’s words appear in English in the book, which makes this remark even more paradoxical. On self-consciousness: déjà-vu and beyond The departure from realistic conventions and the intrusion of metafictional elements goes further. For a start, the narrator comments at large on certain peculiarities of the novel that remind the reader of

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its narrative character and status as a construct. For instance, when explaining that he stuttered when he articulated plosive phonemes, the narrator says: “but I won’t clutter these pages with examples of my lamentable inability to communicate, except for an occasional reminder” (24). Later on in the novel, the narrator distributes the consequences of his fight with Don Antonio Sigura at the Royal Court following numbers and letters between brackets: “(1) … (2) … (a) … (b) … (c) … (d) …” (62). This example also points to the constructed nature of the account we are reading and therefore foregrounds its status as a narrative. References to the reader’s active role are plentiful and sometimes quite hilarious. This is the case when Cervantes says that his brother Rodrigo gave him a toy soldier telling him that “this will bring you luck, until we’re together again”, to which the narrator adds: “(A twopart statement, you will notice, and prophetic in both)” (64). Indeed, Cervantes’ good luck lasts only until the next time they meet, when the protagonist ends up as a hand-maimed captive in Algiers. The narrator’s asides to the reader are recurrent throughout the novel: “(remind me to tell you that one some time)” (103); “Read no symbolism into this …. Read into this what symbolism you will” (438, 441); “(see below)” (464); “(This was, a careful reader will note, …. Having noted it, the reader should disregard it as no more than one of those coincidences in which life abounds)” (470); or “(Don’t expect me to explain it)” (486). Also frequent are the narrator’s remarks about the fact that he is writing the story of his death and life, which at some points makes him explain why he only provides a summary of some events which have no direct implication for his purpose, or which he could not witness because he was somewhere else. For instance, he advances that, even though he will remain absent for a while, “Pedro de Isunza and his implacable obsession do not disappear from these pages” (159). Likewise, when captive in a dungeon in Algiers, Cervantes recounts what happened to the people he met there while he “was effectively offstage” (188) up to the moment “when I enter that story – and re-enter the story of my own death and life” (202). At one point the narrator stops himself from telling how he was chased by a pack of hungry wolves “because it’s no part of writing about writing, which I’m expected to do now, even though I’d rather get on with the story of my death and life” (455). Additionally, the account of a quite

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complex happening like the fête at Loose Chippings is admittedly inaccurate since, as the narrator confesses, he only has his brother Juan’s version, which is partial and fragmented owing to the fact that his attention was diverted by the presence at the party of Lady Waynescote, with whom he was secretly in love. This reveals the frail reliability of the narrated episode and, by extension, of the narrator that provides such a partial account. The narrator’s reliability is highly questionable, not only because of accounts like the above mentioned, but also due to other proofs of hesitation, like his wondering “Was my vision defective? Or was my memory just playing tricks on me?” (331) as he realizes that the oak he had been seeing all his life and eventually cutting wood from was really an elm and that the Bench of If-Only was not made from wood planking but from stone. Metafictional references do not stop at the level of this novel; their use is furthered by comments on other works like The Dungeons of Algiers or La Galatea, written by Miguel de Cervantes, which place those works and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes at the same ontological level. This is the case of the narrator’s description of Christian slaves in Algiers as “quixotic (if I may use the word before I created the character)” (113). The narrator also recounts how he accidentally came across a nice line for the beginning of a story to tell Zoraida as she lay dying: “In a place in La Mancha the name of which I don’t care to remember …” (203) and how he found himself “in one of those innyards I would later immortalize in Don Quixote” (295). Furthermore, the novel represents the time when Cervantes started writing his masterpiece in a prison in Seville. After writing the first nine chapters of Don Quixote, Cervantes goes away from his cell, the jail being deserted and full of the corpses of inmates and guards dead from a plague of malaria. In his escape from Seville on account of the plague, Cervantes gives his manuscript to a “lissom Negress” working at Tomás Gutiérrez’s inn, who gives it back to him through the agency of “the kindly old sereno” (night watchman) accompanied by the message that he should finish it for its good quality (450). It is at this point that the protagonist-narrator engages in a trail of thoughts that, in ironic accordance with his frequent digressions about the status and value of history and fiction, will explain Cervantes’ motives to incorporate into his masterpiece the figure of an author different from himself:

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What made me smile was the notion that I, a mere storyteller, could persuade readers to believe in adventures as absurd as Don Quixote’s. What I needed was an authority to lend his imprimatur, a bona fide historian with one of those confidence-inspiring foreign names like – well, Cide Hamete Benengeli (roughly, in Arabic: Cide, señor or lord; Hámed, he who praises or glorifies; and Benengeli, which you’ve seen doesn’t stand up to scrutiny but never mind.) (451)

Cervantes further plans how he will write, in Chapter IX, that he came across the manuscript of Don Quixote in the market in Toledo, and decides that “I’d also need somebody, probably a morisco, to translate” into Spanish the Arab’s accounts (451). Since moriscos have a passion for raisins, he would pay the translator with fifty pounds of golden raisins and three bushels of wheat to feed his family. And if readers object to anything, he would blame the Arab historian for the inaccuracies, because Arabs are not considered reliable by Spaniards.31 The narrator even comments that, as Cide Hamete told him, a critic would one day call Don Quixote “the first existential novel” and that self-created Don Quixote tries to impose his illusions on the real “(or absurd)” world, but that the world would not be more real “(or absurd)” if he abandoned (480). Cervantes’ concern with critics is clear since his initial reflections on the way Zoilos, “the first literary critic recorded in history” (1), heavily criticized Homer’s works when there was no one there to defend him, but that nevertheless he would rather have a Zoilos than nobody. Yet, since he knows through Cide Hamete what critics will say about his works and life, the narrator pokes fun on some of them for not knowing what to make of some of the characters that would later appear in his works. This is the case, for instance, of Zoraida – “what an enigma she is to Cervantes experts” (179) – a fictional character that appears in “The Captive’s Tale” in Don Quixote (Part One, Chapter XL)32 as the daughter of Muslim Agi Morato who escapes to Christian lands to change her religion. In The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, Zoraida is an 31

Significantly, it is Don Quixote’s most incredible adventures that are more directly identified as coming from Cide Hamete Benengeli (Jesús G. Maestro, “Cide Hamete Benengeli y los narradores del Quijote”, in Biblioteca Virtual Miguel De Cervantes: see http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/12482283119020404198624/ p0000001.htm, 2006). 32 Cervantes, Don Quijote, 267.

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atheist trance dancer, niece of the Jewish barber Suleiman Sa’adah, “sometimes erroneously called the Wise” (164), who works in the palace of Ramadan Pasha Dey as a dancer-healer. For its part, Chapter XX begins with a series of suggestions effected by Cervantes experts with regard to the writer’s presence at his father’s deathbed, suggestions that the chapter will contest. What is significant here is the narrator calling attention to the non-assertive style with which experts evade their deficient knowledge of some points of Cervantes’ biography: ‘probably’ … ‘nothing to suggest’ … ‘no reason not to assume’ … Everything including a double negative. Two, in fact. But how can they not hedge, these ex-post-facto tellers of my death and life? Until I became the son of my own works, I might as well have been another Juan the Obscure. (260; emphases in the original)

The narrator not only foregrounds the experts’ limited knowledge and their use of invented possibilities to hide their own professional shortcomings but also criticizes the fact that the unproved suggestions they put forth are frequently taken as facts, as happens with one critic’s rhetorical question: “Was the central mystery of this tormented genius’s life, then, sexual?” (265; emphasis in the original) and with another one who wrote that the “obscene servitude to the Dey” – that is, his suspected homosexual experiences in the Algiers prison – was one of the “twin headwaters of that bitter stream from which Cervantes’ tragicomic worldview would flow” (344).33 As happened in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, the narrator’s account of some events deconstructs his biographers’ emphasis on two aspects of Cervantes’ personality, which he supposedly had in common with Columbus: heroism and religiosity. Historians’ rendering of Cervantes as a heroic soldier is first questioned by his comic ignorance about the names of weapons, as he cannot distinguish between “the poniard (or was it a misericorde?) … (or was it a stiletto?) … (or was it a dirk?)” (43-44). Then, his heroism is utterly dismantled by the protagonist’s interior monologue that shows his struggle to fire a harquebus in battle and his failed attempt to hit his target: 33 The second headwater, which the critic never developed, is taken by the narrator to stand for his Jewish origin.

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And here I am, down on one knee on the threshing floor, firing my harquebus. Wish they weren’t all watching. Makes me nervous. How can harquebus weigh more now than when carrying up steepest part of hill? Breeches torn, must mend later. Remember: parrots frighten enemy …. Concentrate! Now! Pull serpentine back, so. Hold in position with left hand, so …. Holy Virgin! Will need three hands. At least. Where did powder flask get to? Wad hook, bullet extractor – ah, here. Spill powder into muzzle …. Don’t let go of serpentine! Wad after powder, ram ball in, so. Spill powder into priming pan, not on ground. Squeeze trigger. Gently. Serpentine end whips near cheek. Can feel heat. Beard on fire? Serpentine end hits pan, flash of priming powder …. Aim, clod! You’re forgetting to aim! BOOM! Embarrassed to find self flat on ground. Harquebus kicks like meanest mule in La Mancha. Shoulder dislocated? Or only badly bruised? Climb to feet. All examine target. Virgin but for single hole made by Rodrigo. (86; emphases in the original)

At the same time, the protagonist does not show any sign of the fervent Catholicism ascribed to him by his biographers, and he even utters sentences similar to those uttered by anti-religious Marlowesque characters such as Goya in Colossus and Columbus in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, such as “in this world of absurdities, did God or Anything Out There care?” (282). The metafictional character of the narrator’s comments on future critics goes further when he advances a criticism that will be launched on the very novel we are reading and, in his reply, Don Quixote and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes and their authors are again placed on the same ontological level: It’s bad enough when, in relating Don Quixote’s story, you keep interrupting yourself to tell what other characters are doing, but to be guilty of the same lack of focus in your own death and life is positively absurd. What can I say? In writing about a (possibly) self-deluded old man wandering the face of Spain as a knight-errant, I found it necessary to do some wandering as well. For my own story – well, you remember how confused things got at Lepanto and, even more, at the Plaza of Atrocities on the day of my execution. (306; emphasis in the original)

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Highly metafictional, too, the narrator frequently alludes to his tendency to present his story in a disordered way, anticipating future events. It is easy to find expressions like: “(of which more later)” (7); “But all that comes later” (14); “but all that in its place” (52); or, as Christopher Columbus used to apologize for his problems with chronology, “but I’m getting ahead of myself again” (366). However, the narrator gives his own explanation for his tendency to chronological and spatial disorder in contraposition to Lope de Vega’s obsession for order – “no confusion of points in time and moments in space, no jumping here, there, hill of Vomero to harbour of Lepanto (fortified town on the gulf of Corinth, Greek name Náfpaktos) in the turn of a page” (86). Lope’s ordered plays are the counterpoint, the narrator puts forth, to his own chaotic life. The narrator has also a marked tendency for digression, for which he self-consciously accounts on several occasions. For instance, when he dwells on the differences between his own style and Lope de Vega’s formula, he explains that it is “clearly a digression on my part but, as you may have noticed, digressions are mother’s milk to me” (87). Other examples of digressions include his explanation that moments of high drama, in life as in fiction, often degenerate into farce, or what the narrative would center on if he were writing a picaresque, “but this is no picaresque novel, just an account of my own death and life” (183). Indeed, it is in digressions that the most metafictional points are made. The narrator frequently questions the truthfulness of history and contrasts it with that of fiction, as when he argues that historians select data from the flood of facts thereby providing them with “a kind of meaning often confused with truth. Doesn’t the poet do the same? So tell me, whose is the truer truth?” (30). At a certain point, Juan Rufo tells Miguel that “a judicious blending of the false and the true produces something infinitely more effective than a straightforward lie – a newer, higher kind of truth than mere factual truth” (57). Significantly, law is also presented as fictional: “Half the hidalgos in Spain were ‘bona fide’ only through the legal fiction of repute or aspect” (59). More ludicrously, lawyer Picapleitos explains that, having invented the figure of Captain Figueroa as the father of Andrea’s daughter Constanza in order to avoid Nicolás de Ovando’s suit for the child’s custody, Figueroa (who was indeed a contemporaneous historical character) was given reality and even

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autonomy by the invented legal record in which he was mentioned, since “such legal fictions … have a life of their own” (159). Carrying the issue to an extreme, when Picapleitos’ nephew Fortuny forges Cervantes’ signature and makes illegal businesses in his name, which results in Cervantes’ imprisonment, the lawyer tells him that “in the world of documents, known by the legal profession to have greater reality than the real world, an authentic signature is an authentic signature” (396), even though both of them know that it is forged. The novel also attacks the possibility of epistemological certainty and any claim of unbiased knowledge and witnessing, of any direct access to so-called facts. Against those who vindicate that authors should only write about what they know, the narrator wonders: Write about what you know. Does anyone, ever? Can anyone, really? Do witnesses testify about what they know? Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. (474; emphasis in the original)

He later on explains that, when Ezpeleta was killed near the Cervantes’ house, Judge Villarroël wrote not a report of the witnesses’ unreliable accounts but what the Duke of Lerma wanted to read, and Lerma would in turn write on the margins what he wanted the world to think had happened, and this was passed to the archives of the Royal Academy of History. Therefore, what scribes know is at least third-hand, and they write what people will think they knew, not what they really know – if they do know anything at all. Facts are therefore reduced to their inevitably biased narrativization. So, in the narrator’s words, “the curious reader will find in the archives of the Royal Academy of History one version of what happened in those next few harrowing moments. I offer another, somewhat closer to the facts” (475). The narrator’s “facts” are that Cervantes killed Isunza in selfdefense even though, according to the lawyer’s legal documents – paradoxically written after this event in 1605 – Isunza was dead since 1593. This is the ultimate attack on the validity of written accounts since even legal documents, which allegedly provide a higher degree of accuracy and truthfulness to facts than historical records, are easy to manipulate, forge, and even invent according to the writer’s interests. Consequently, there seems to be no reliable access to facts, which are reduced to their own narrativization. On a different line, the narrator complains that Cervantes’ experts give a poor account of his stay in Italy even though, he argues,

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interesting things like his fictional acquaintance with Torquato Tasso and his sister Cornelia and his first glimpse of the secret world of espionage took place there. In this respect, he expounds: “But that’s history for you. No wonder that fiction, seeing the field abandoned, rolls up its sleeves and fashions its own sometimes serendipitous truth” (66). Thus, in his “serendipitous” account, the narrator includes the paradox that “historically, Tasso wouldn’t produce his pastoral drama until 1573. But fictionally” (69) the poet reads to the protagonist part of it, while the narrator gives a hypothetical reason why this could have been so. Yet, at some points the narrator concedes that “here, I ought to point out, history is for once in total accord with the greater truth of fiction” (78), or that “(History tells us – and fiction has no reason to contest it – )” (297) that in 1587 Sir Francis Drake set fire to all the villages on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia except Záhara of the Tunas because Sir Francis Walsingham wanted it intact. The debate for supremacy between history and fiction permeates the narrative, as when Cervantes states that “History informs us that Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, died on the night of 2-3 December 1592, of wounds and exhaustion. Fiction can add only that he ate sparingly” that night and was murdered – it is suggested – by Pedro de Isunza (342). There is a further transgression of the notion of history and, collaterally, of the narrator’s own story when he states that “History and fiction agree on this: Onofre Exarque a.k.a the Abbot died peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-four on Friday 16 April 1593” (358). Historically, Onofre Exarque was but a captive of no transcendence whom Miguel de Cervantes met in Algiers and, obviously, he cannot have been the Abbot, that is, the leader of the fictional secret society of the Nameless. The narrator also pokes fun at those who, like historians, are fond of recording dates, when he gives some concrete points in time “for date sticklers” (370). Not in vain, the most perverse and mentally disturbed character in the novel, Pedro de Isunza, is recurrently referred to and depicted as “a compulsive keeper of records” and dates (28, 455). Not only the binary history/fiction but also that of life/fiction is deconstructed in the novel. For a start, the narrator places both at the same level when he states: Living was a lot like telling stories – life and fiction two different versions of some greater reality, perhaps. And if there were no greater

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reality? Then life and fiction became even more important, didn’t they? … And who can say whether fiction imitates life or life fiction? (322, 365)

Yet, at some points the narrator contradicts himself when he separates both entities identifying his life with history and admitting that fiction and history do not always diverge: If this were only fiction, I could write here that they were married on April 23rd. But this is the story of my death and life, in which fiction and that lesser truth, history, from time to time form a seamless whole. And truth constrains me to say the wedding took place on a blustery day earlier in the month. (323)

Moreover, as the novel advances, the limit between life and fiction blurs, the former being reduced to the latter: “And right now I wish I were also somewhere else in this book, say two chapters along” (371). Metafiction becomes more radical when the writer makes use of elements that recall Borges’ and John Barth’s narratives. For instance, Zoraida, who has lived in many places with many gods which cancel one another out, suggests that maybe “God’s just a character dreamed up by some clever ráwi [storyteller]” (179). When recounting his imprisonment in the dungeons of Algiers, the narrator states that “characters have a life of their own that continues behind the storyteller’s back” and then tells what happened “while I … was effectively offstage” (188). Cervantes also explains that sometimes, when writing, a character refuses to do the simple thing the author wants it to do, or does the opposite, or a third unexpected thing. This is the case of Constanza, who kisses Cervantes “while I stood there foolishly, a character in a story I would never write, not knowing what to do until my treacherous body decided for itself, just like a character coming alive under my quill-pen” (323). Yet writing is also sometimes depicted as if it were a religion: the narrator comments on the fact that after publishing Don Quixote, he became an instant celebrity and that people started to talk of “The act of Creation” and “the writer as God” (454). Yet, he argues: Nobody is less like God than a storyteller because a marvelous thing happens, something the storyteller could never consciously make happen: … the story becomes part of the world that is, becomes more

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Another outstanding example of metafiction is the episode where Cervantes is trying to narrate the battle of Lepanto according to Lope’s formula: Cide Hamete Benengeli intrudes on the play’s characters’ conversations to criticize “ideology”, and a figure called “AUTHOR” does too, to argue with Cide Hamete (88). However, Cide Hamete’s most metafictional interference comes when Cervantes quotes what some biographers will say about his father’s death and he explains: “I have several pages of such quotes, courtesy of Cide Hamete, who can enter the future at will through the doorway of a present that does not exist” (260). It is at this point that the character acquires a life of its own and interrupts the narrator as quoted below. The fact that this conversation takes place not between two characters but between two entities at two different levels is marked by the use of dashes and inverted commas to signal Cide Hamete’s speech, while the narrator’s is unmarked: “–Would you kindly henceforth cease referring to me unnecessarily? It should be clear by now in the telling of your little tale that, whenever the ideas are at all original or come from a future to which you have no access, they can only come from me. It’s been well established that, while others merely see backwards in time, I can see forwards and sideways as well.” Sideways? “–You’ll see later. Meanwhile, no more according-to-Cide-Hamete. I have my own not-insignificant part to play in your story that transcends these trifling comments I make from time to time. Agreed?” Well … (261)

Ironically enough, from this moment onwards, as if in awe lest Cide Hamete gets upset, the narrator says things like: “I got this rhetorical question from a usually reliable (henceforth, at his own request, anonymous) source” (265). In this respect, it is interesting to notice the resemblance in content and tone between this extract and the conversation held between Columbus and God in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. Indeed, both Cide Hamete and God can be seen as occupying a similar position with respect to the protagonist-

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narrator, since both Cide Hamete and God enjoy a higher level of knowledge but are finally reduced to a character within someone else’s story. Thus, Columbus’ God wondered if he was a character in a world spun by a bigger god, while Cide Hamete, in failing to get Cervantes killed by the Knight of the Mirrors, is said to retreat into his own dream within Cervantes’ dream, where he appeared, probably, because he wanted to be known as the flower of historians through his appearance in Don Quixote. However, in the meantime, Cide Hamete Benengeli appears as a powerful figure who can not only influence the narrator’s knowledge but also the narrative itself. The most outrageous example is the case of the “erratum” Cide Hamete allegedly places in the middle of a scene which he interrupts in an attempt to divert both the narrator’s and the readers’ attention from the fact that it was he who had crossed a wall in Solon’s library and was a candidate for the Innominate of the Nameless under the pseudonym of Badindjan: At least I knew right away beyond the shadow of any doubt who he ________________________________________________________ ERRATUM: Several manuscript pages of chapter xxviii were found to be unaccountably missing on arrival at the printing works. The publisher regrets the inconvenience and asks the reader to proceed with the story. ________________________________________________________ charming little legend about some Sephardic crypto-Jews …. (351)

This newly inserted storyline about the crypto-Jews’ expedition follows until the narrator realizes and claims: We’d left me in the library of Suleiman Sa’adah now called Solon Wise, watching a man walk in through the wall …. As you’ll recall, he then tossed his erratum into my story, probably thinking that with so much else happening I’d forget I’d realized who he was. But I realized. (356)

The narrator acknowledges both the intrusion on the narrative of an entity he cannot control and his awareness of it, disturbing the readers’ suspension of disbelief and redirecting their attention to the textual, artificial quality of the narrative. Yet, further doubts about the status of this character are created when Cervantes interpellates the reader after exposing the information that Cide Hamete gave him regarding

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the future reception of the apocryphal second part of Don Quixote written by Avellaneda: Does it surprise you, my still mentioning him, after what happened? But how can I help thinking of him? Once he asked me, “Are you sure, ráwi, that I’m anything more than that disordered, irrational, lefthand side of your brain, a kind of jinni trapped in there from which the creative impulse comes?” But if that’s all he was, then how could he tell me about my death and Shakespeare’s, and what critics would write, and those quarks and bosons of his and – I almost left this out – that while I was writing Part Two of Don Quixote, Lope de Vega lived in a nearby street that would eventually be named Cervantes Street? Seeing into the future like that, and walking through walls, and then he goes back to being the fat fatuous astrologer to some dey? Don’t expect me to explain it. But he was real. (486)

Equally disconcerting is the episode where Clavileño and the Knight of the Mirrors make their appearance. After being hurt near his heart by a roundball in 1599 (a completely fictional event), the narrator reveals: For the rest of that year and the first three years of the seventeenth century, I seem to have disappeared. I’m not talking about relegation to unhistory: that’s happened to me before. But this time I vanished from the story of my death and life too. And relegation to unfiction is more difficult to take. I went missing even from myself. Historians, puzzled by my disappearance, would search for me rather like astronomers looking for an overdue comet …. As Cide Hamete would say, history has more than its share of off-days, so its non-sightings don’t trouble me. But for me not to know where I was during those almost four years is disturbing, and I want an explanation no matter where I have to look. (430-31; emphases in the original)

Poking fun not only at the shortcomings of history and biography but also at his own limited knowledge about his life – an acknowledgment that self-ironically shatters any claim of authority and reliability – Cervantes summarizes what historians guessed about his four obscure years and refutes it as insufficient and false. Then, he replaces those improbable hypotheses with a dream he dreamed while he was in a coma, where he hires a horse named Clavileño that, after being renamed as Spike, takes him to “a vast printed page, not

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topography so much as typography, the words whizzing by too fast to read” (431).34 There, after an argument with Cide Hamete, who is weeding the “printscape” from all its “-isms”, Cervantes engages in and wins a fight to death with the Knight of the Mirrors. According to Eduardo Urbina, “this association and identification with the fictional world of his own making gives his History, the story of his death and life, an especially playful quality and, simultaneously, a paradoxical and very Cenvantesque feeling of authenticity”.35 What is significant in the Knight of the Mirrors is that it is presented as Cervantes’ Doppelgänger, his equal but with his right – not left – hand maimed, the one the protagonist had already seen when his soul escaped his body hanging at the gallows in the last chapter of “Part the First”. The protagonist-narrator survives his double in a world of fiction and fantasy that makes up for the absence of historical accounts regarding that period of his life, just as he had previously survived his double at the Plaza of Atrocities – an event that pointed out to his non-death as a character but also, as Hans den Boer remarks, to “the death of the ‘historical’ Cervantes and to his new life as a literary character, or to the Death of History and the Life of the Imagination”.36 It is precisely this shift to a completely fictional personage and consequent departure from historicity that distinguishes The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes from Marlowe’s previous novel. In fact, the most relevant events in “Part the Second” bear no resemblance to the scarce literature on the writer’s life during that time span. Instead, the novel portrays its own alternative course of 34 This point of the novel clearly recalls Columbus’ complaint about historians’ hypotheses explaining his temporary disappearance from history before his First Voyage, which he resolves by revealing his fictional role in the Conquest of Granada. The present case goes further, firstly, because the narrator’s own ignorance equals that of historians and, secondly, because his explanation is even more far-fetched than Columbus’. 35 Eduardo Urbina, “Historias verdaderas y la verdad de la historia: Fernando Arrabal vs. Stephen Marlowe”, in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, XVIII/2 (1998), 158-69 (my translation). 36 Hans den Boer, “The Truthful Fiction of the Death and Life of the Author: Cervantes and Marlowe”, in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, eds Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999, 266. Even though I agree with this interpretation of the transition point in the novel, I must point out that den Boer’s assertion that Cervantes in “Part the Second” is his right-hand-maimed Doppelgänger does not bear close scrutiny.

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events in a way that recalls Wesseling’s definition of uchronian fiction as “the type of counterfactual fantasy which devises alternatives within the confines of documented history … by imagining an apocryphal course of events, which clearly did not really take place, but which might have taken place”.37 It is in this spirit, and in a subversively overt way, that the second part of the novel is cramped with fictional events that, for their blatant improbability, surpass the usual combination of history and fiction that characterizes historiographic metafiction. This is the case, for instance, of Cervantes’ job as a member of the secret society of the Nameless, or his encounters with his English contemporaries Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and the former’s flirtation with the protagonist. It is the case also of the supernatural elements whose impossible nature require an utter suspension of disbelief and question the reliability of the narration and, therefore, of any historical data previously provided, together with the ontological status of the whole narrative. Examples of this unsettling, improbable quality are the strange idiosyncrasy and circumstances surrounding the figure of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the episode of Cervantes’ dream and struggle on the Book of the Dead, or the appearance of demons and magicians at several points of the narrative. As Wesseling expounds, uchronian fiction may be regarded as “a subspecies of counterfactual historical fiction, that is, fiction which deliberately departs from canonized history”38 and which frequently involves some kind of science-fiction ingredient, like Tralfamadorians’ ability to see all aspects of time as a simultaneously existing network of possibilities in Kurt Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive. In The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, Benengeli’s relation with temporal dimensions is much in line with Tralfamadorians’ and this is what allows the narrator to know about future events and criticisms. Besides, the possibility of alternative developments from a specific situation is accounted for through anachronistic scientific explanations. This is advanced from the very Prologue and repeated in Chapter XVII where, on the verge of being hanged, the protagonist wonders: “Why shouldn’t there be another world somewhere … almost exactly the same, but where a few billion atoms have come together differently so that there are minor changes 37 38

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 101-102. Ibid., 102.

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… one of which is that I don’t die today, which happens to be 23 April 1580?” (2, 226). Events are described as the result of variations in the combination of atoms in opposition to contemporaneous (seventeenthcentury) teleological cause-effect explanations, of which history is the ultimate representative. The narrator is straightforward in this respect when he complains: “History! What sins of omission are committed in its name, what pivotal events ousted as unproven – as if lives obeyed the rules of a law-court instead of drifting like Lucretian atoms among the permutations of the possible” (65). Also related to atomic processes and closely linked to Wesseling’s concept of the uchronian, the binary possible/impossible is one of the narrator’s obsessions. For example, when criticizing playwright Lope de Vega’s formula, Cervantes makes a point that is clearly projected in the novel: I can never forgive the part of his formula that goes: Avoid the impossible. Why, just to have been born and lived, against what astronomical odds, in an infinite universe of atoms randomly coalescing, isn’t that the most wonderfully impossible of all impossibilities? Avoid the impossible? Might as well avoid breathing. (87; emphasis in the original)

At some points the literary confrontation between Cervantes and Lope is so strong that it seems the whole novel is written as a countermanifesto against Lope’s constraints.39 This is evident in the narrator’s failed attempts to recount the Battle of Lepanto sticking to the mandates postulated in Lope’s literary treaty, but also at a larger scale since, according to Lope, characters must be types subjected to action, which in turn depends entirely on the transmission of a message. In contrast, characters in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes are outstandingly round and rich in nuances. Similarly, the narrator provides Benengeli’s explanation of his stepping through walls in his belief that Lope would discredit his account as an impossibility: “I could say,” he told me, “it’s only a matter of infinitesimal atoms adrift in infinite space. To walk through a solid wall – an apparently 39 It is significant in the line of the two writers’ confrontation that Cervantes became a hero in Lepanto while, as the narrator remarks, Lope only tasted defeat at the Armada Battle, where he fought, and to whose disastrous failure, most ironically, Cervantes supposedly helped through his role in Operation Weltschmerz.

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So, no probable satisfactory explanation is provided for the impossible unless it is unfulfilled. As a corollary, taking up the memory of his father, who used to sit on the Bench of If-Only to regret his failure at achieving the different, better possibilities that his life might have become, Cervantes says that there is a Bench of IfOnly in every writer’s head from which to see the world and invent others. He thinks of one where he and Andrea would not have been siblings and therefore, perhaps, they would have ignored or even hated each other; and one where he would have been an Old Christian and would have wished his family had been related to Columbus, or where he would have become an anti-Semite. As a matter of fact, the narrator does not abandon his idea of parallel realities and recalls that he wrote pages back that maybe by killing the Knight of the Mirrors he was exiled to alternative worlds. Furthermore, he adds that if he was able to write about absurd things like wooden flying horses or enchantments in Don Quixote, it might be because he really was “lost in a maze of alternate realities” (455). Additionally, there is a wink to the power of counterfactual conjecture in the narrator’s digression about the similarity between asking and answering a question, which is compared to crossing out a word or scene. He asserts that answers can be implicit in the corresponding questions, just as crossing out an episode – like writing about an impossible, unfulfilled alternative – leaves a trace that can be felt by the reader: “then, deciding all this was too much to ask you to swallow, I crumpled the page and tossed it into the stove … figuring that even if I omitted it from this book, once I wrote it the idea would remain for you to ponder. And it did, didn’t it” (455). To conclude, the representation of alternative realities in uchronian fiction not only suggests other possible historical developments that might have been better – or worse – and leave a visible trace in the reader’s consciousness even though those possibilities are unfulfilled, but also supplements and reinforces the purposes of historiographic metafiction when, as in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, both types of fiction are combined. This

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is so because, as Wesseling puts it, the fact that postmodernist counterfactual conjecture “speculates about ways in which events might have taken an entirely different course … foregrounds the malleability of historical reality”.40 In this sense, the novel shares with The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus a similar critique and strategies. The main targets of its criticism are, again, the alleged heroism and religiosity ascribed to national relevant historical personages, the shortcomings and consequent lack of verisimilitude and of objectivity in biographers’ and historians’ written records, and the privileged position of history over fiction. These attacks, like the use of anachronisms, are elaborated in a more subtle way than in the previous novel, thereby achieving a stronger effect. The subtlety of these elements entails that the readers’ suspension of disbelief is not constantly disturbed by the narrator’s outrageous comments, as happened in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. Consequently, the larger degree of involvement in the reading produces a greater impact when the fiction that sustained the suspension of disbelief is dismantled, as is the case of the revelation of Benengeli’s status, which makes the readers question all their previous assumptions about the novel. Finally, one might add, while highlighting the contingency of the res gestae, the novel’s attacks on the historia rerum gestarum stem mainly from the exposure of its narrativization of facts and its deficiencies, while conceding a privileged position to fiction and the improbable.

40

Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet, 113 (emphasis in the original).

CHAPTER 7 THE NOVEL NEVER ENDS: ON ALTERNATIVE WORLDS, JEWISH CONNECTIONS AND INFINITE REGRESS

The deployment in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes of science fiction elements like atomic particles rearranging to create parallel realities brings this novel closer to The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. Intimately connected to this scientific approach is the use of chaos theory and the debate between determinism and free will. The present chapter will first focus on these aspects of the novel to later analyze its depiction of madness as an alternative mental order that places the protagonist close to the figure of Don Quixote. A subsequent study of the role of secret knowledge in the novel will lead to an assessment of the textual implications and their concern with religious fundamentalism and Jewish identity, which were also present in Marlowe’s previous novel. Secret knowledge and parallel realities Like The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes is written in a multiplicity of styles and formats including fragments of poems, summaries of events the protagonist could not witness, theatre play extracts and their rewritings according to different formulas and styles. In addition, the main plot of the novel – the narrator’s account of his own (non-)death and life – is complicated by other subtexts that enrich the implications of aspects of the novel that can only be accounted for through a study of those elements. Such is the case of the covert references to the art of steganography which, apart from its literal meaning as a secret encoding technique, brings in echoes of black magic. Other subtexts are the references to the figure of Johann Georg Faust, to the disturbing foreign and home politics of the British Empire, to the Crypto-Jews’ expedition to the Netherlands, and the inclusion in the lines of the Nameless of figures like Denis Zachaire and John Dee, all of which will be tackled in detail in this chapter.

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However, I shall first dwell on another related issue that is fundamental in the novel: the possibility of different versions of one reality. As Cide Hamete tells Cervantes when they meet in the “printscape” – a landscape of letters on a white page – of the Book of the Dead, the latter has: Never walked through walls or slipped sideways through time to glimpse the divergent futures fanning out from every routine choice made in the present – which is the only justification for the alleged existence of any present moment save one …. Like everyone else who ever lived, you are locked into a single version of reality, unable to remember those other futures except as a vague nostalgia for what can never be. Unless… Didn’t you write once that living was a lot like telling stories – life and fiction two different versions of some greater reality? … Then you know there is a virtual infinitude of possibilities in every story idea. (436)

Passages like the above suggest that The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes has chaos theory as one of its underpinning sources even though its structure is not as explicitly chaotic and references are not as recurrent and overt as in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. It is precisely in this mood that, after telling Cervantes about eleven possible developments of a boy-meets-girl story, Cide Hamete says that storytellers must also make choices, but that the greater reality “is free to unroll itself with limitless imagination through infinite time to include all possible versions of what was and will be. So there can be – and therefore necessarily is – a world in which each version of reality is the only reality” (437; emphasis in the original). The Cide-Hametean explanations of alternative versions of one reality resulting from slight changes in atomic configurations are obviously a rewording of the main generalization about the Gleickian branch of chaotics: a minimum alteration in a system’s initial conditions may bring about unexpectedly large-scale consequences. Besides, there are many elements that self-consciously remind us of the chaotic component of life and literature. Thus, the reader first encounters a graphic metaphorization of a bifurcation stage when Miguel de Cervantes and his brother Juan the Obscure are escaping kidnap at the hands of gypsies Bizco and Bigotes, who are chasing them. At that point, an army led by Rodrigo de Cervantes arrives and forks around Juan and Miguel, as a river would around a stone,

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thereby recreating an image frequently used in explanations of the behavior of molecular systems in chaotic conditions that serves, in this case, to rid the brothers of their persecutors. The novel is full of passages that center on how small details determine the course of events while a minor change could have led to a completely different outcome. This is the case of the narrator’s account of his fight with Antonio Sigura and the importance of the weapons with which they fought, given the protagonist’s scarce expertise and strength. This is but one example of the extent to which chance determines history: Had we used broadswords, the outcome would never have been in doubt, so much stronger was Sigura. A few strokes would have put an end to my story right there, or, rather, made it disappear into the maw of un-history, along with the vast majority of human lives. (61)

The different developments in the narrator’s story that stem from apparently insignificant coincidences or decisions sometimes undermine the accuracy of history: But the processing of Luis Blackslave would have its repercussions. For if Luis, broken in body though not in spirit, had not bought a mule and headed for Andalucía to spend what was left of his life under the healing southern sun, then my own life would have unfolded as history records it and not as I disclose it here. (156)

Luis Blackslave’s journey to Andalusia, where he becomes a member of the Nameless, does have a bearing on the protagonist’s future involvement with the secret society – completely departing from Cervantes’ biography. The effects of minor unexpected changes are emphasized throughout the novel. Such is the case of Von Nacht zu Nebel’s sudden terror in the execution of “Operation Weltschmerz”: “his panic changed everything” in the outcome of the plot, leading to the unplanned British exile of Micaela and even to the eventual sinking of the Spanish Armada (306). Similarly, the alleged widower Santi Ambrosio – son-in-law of Signor Lomelín, who had sent Cervantes to Italy after the Sigura incident in Liars’ Walk – falls in love with Andrea after she is rejected by lawyer Picapleitos, now known as Señor Zum. Since Ambrosio missed his appointment with the lawyer

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because he self-absorbedly left with Andrea, Cervantes can get an appointment with Señor Zum. But Cervantes does not have the patience to listen to the lawyer when he tries to explain that his own nephew forged Cervantes’ signature in illegal businesses as commissary for the Spanish Armada. Since the protagonist ends up in jail for Zum’s nephew’s crime and starts writing Don Quixote there, the creation of this literary masterpiece is portrayed as the result of chance or accident. Other instances of this chaotic interpretation of life are Cervantes’ regret that he might have gone to Teneduc with Micaela: “if only I hadn’t saved my sister Andrea’s life. Who wasn’t my sister. Unless she was” (481). Going a step further in its play with unfulfilled possibilities, the novel depicts in free indirect style Micaela’s thoughts that very night, pondering on what would happen if she had sex with the errand boy that knocks on her door. Then, it depicts Cervantes wondering whether he would have been on time if she had been delayed through her having sex with the boy, thus intruding into her non-verbalized thoughts and unveiling the presence of an omniscient narrator not limited to Cervantes’ consciousness or undermining his reliability as autodiegetic narrator. Finally, the novel also presents, in free indirect style, the boy’s sexual fantasy with Micaela. However, what is more recurrent and overt in the novel is the related conflict between fate or determinism and free will. Phrases like “as Fate or free will would have it” (316), which show no positioning with respect to the diatribe, are frequent. Another example is the protagonist’s internal debate when he is abandoned by his guide El Dorador in one of his failed attempts to escape from Algiers. At this point, Cervantes wonders whether he is fated to make the wrong choices, only to admit that “no, I was not ‘fated.’ To submit to fate was the folly of the weak, and in those days I worshipped at the altar of free will, the folly of the strong” (144). Deciding on free will over fate, he hears water from a well and manages to drink some, “free will definitely at work here” (145). Cervantes does not believe in fate either when he is so exhausted that he has to crawl to go on his way – “free will reduced to a vague awareness that death was not far off” (146). Nevertheless, believing in free will rather than in fate does not imply that individuals are in control of the different possible outcomes for the decisions they take. As the narrator puts it: “I’d cast the die” (144) when he decided to continue his escape in the desert without any

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help, implying that he had played his part in the hazard game of life by making his decision, and the result was to be seen. Only when a really negative event is approaching does the narrator forget about free will and blame fate. This is the case of the unfortunate late rescue of Micaela from the galley slaves’ gang rape, which results in the accidental death of Zoraida. The narrator describes the agents of the action, Ajeeb, Girón, and Zoraida, as “a ragbag of characters thrown together by Fate in a will-less world (unless the will is the author’s)” (199). However, at some determining points like his (non-)death at the gallows the narrator admits his sometimes cheeky recourse to determinism to avoid his responsibility: “Fate is to blame …. (I have conveniently forgotten that free will played its part in getting me into this mess)” (225). Only a few minor characters have a firm belief in a preordained world where individuals are but puppets in somebody else’s hands. A good example is the Protestant priest Dominie Aaron Dweepziek who, in his radical speeches, insists on “the only free will that ever did or ever can exist, which is to say God’s” (349). However, others like Drempel, a Nameless servant in the Low Countries, hold a more dubious relation to the issue, conceding limited space to free will: “consensual crimes … in that they imply free will in a world where all, all is preordained, are the worst crimes of all” (334; emphasis in the original). By contrast, the need to exercise one’s free will is exemplified in the figure of Rodrigo, whose will is buried from always following orders in the army and starts dwindling away physically as soon as he has no orders to follow. Rodrigo declines just like his namesake father did progressively when his wishes for a better life were barred by his wife’s opposition, until he died thunderstruck on the Bench of If-Only. Significantly, the Bench symbolizes the whole range of the unfulfilled possibilities of one’s life and the multiple alternative realities that might have been “if only” the wishers had dared make the necessary decisions. In the same line, during their argument in the landscape curiously called Book of the Dead Cide Hamete asserts that Cervantes’ only reality is the version in which he dies that very 23 April, since there is only “one reality to a customer”: That’s a natural law, like gravity. It’s what they mean by kismet. Think of the chaos if we could all choose divergent realities whenever we didn’t like the one we’re stuck in. (437)

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However, the astrologer’s deterministic view is demolished twice: first, the protagonist decides to face whatever possibility there is behind the door and defeats his double, the Knight of the Mirrors, surviving until another 23 April, sixteen years later. Second, the novel shows that characters are not all really stuck in the version of reality to which they are fated, since the protagonist can choose at the end of his life to climb onto Micaela’s coach and start telling her the story of his death and life instead of dying as a sad old man haunted by the remembrance of his sister Andrea. The prevalence of free will over deterministic views of human existence in the novel is in total accord with chaos theory. As thermodynamics shows, in a system far from equilibrium, the role played by the individual behavior of molecules can be decisive insofar as the amplification of a microscopic fluctuation is what favors one reaction path over other possible ones. As Prigogine and Stengers state, even though molecular systems seem to work in a very orderly way, constituting coherent patterns as if individual molecules followed a predetermined plan, “the ‘overall’ behavior cannot in general be taken as dominating in any way the elementary processes constituting it”.1 Rather, those elementary processes have an independent behavior whose spontaneous self-organizing patterns can be discerned only in retrospect and are never predetermined. That this is clearly the spirit of the novel is enhanced by the recurrent questioning of the existence of a grand design. Significantly enough, a god-like, nearly omniscient figure like Cide Hamete himself reveals his uncertainty when Cervantes has just saved his life: “if my life has any value in the grand cosmic design that, sometimes, I almost believe I can see even while I doubt it exists, I am in your debt for saving it” (130). Even if a grand design did exist, it is not clear that all its components would have a specific purpose in the plan. For instance, Cervantes at the gallows regrets that if he died at that moment it would seem “as if the randomly joined atoms that eventually had to become Miguel de Cervantes had combined to no purpose” (144). Furthermore, the idea of a random combination is incompatible with that of a purpose. The closest notion of a master plan in the novel is advanced by atheist Zoraida, who believes that there is indeed a master plan, although it is not divinely but humanly 1

Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 176.

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ordained by “A Certain Mutual Acquaintance” – the Innominate of the Nameless Rizio Rizione. The fact that talking about Rizione confuses people “had to be part of his grand design” in which they all have a part to play (179). At some points in the novel the theory of a grand master plan gains strength and the power of the society of the Nameless is more than apparent. Indeed, every event in Cervantes’ life seems to be governed through the agency of the Nameless. For a start, Rizio Rizione takes charge of all the financial problems of the bankrupt Cervantes family, supporting them and providing a rent-free flat for Andrea. Then, he arranges Cervantes’ first trip to Italy and his relationship to the Tasso siblings – in fact, Torquato believed there was a “cosmic master plan” to destroy him (72). The idea that everything is orchestrated by Rizione starts making sense when Cornelia reveals that Rizione is a friend of Andrea’s, whom Cornelia has apparently never met. And even more so when Cervantes’ cousin Gaspar obliterates all the traces of Cervantes’ role in the Tasso confession, “my first foray into the secret world of espionage”, and tells him that Rizione “vanished” Cornelia – “she isn’t. She never was” (84). In fact, as a Nameless agent, Gaspar is said to have “power over the collective memory of a whole town” (107) since, from that moment onward, nobody in Sorrento had ever heard of the Tassos because Cornelia knew too much of Cervantes’ role in Torquato’s confession. Nearly everybody in Cervantes’ life seems to be involved in the Nameless’ activities, like the prisoner-taverner Gabriel Muñoz – a secret agent who leads the protagonist’s steps and keeps him safe during his captivity in Algiers. Simultaneously, the reader discovers that Juan the Obscure is following Pedro de Isunza in Spain and writing his “Luis Blackslave Steganographic Notebooks” on Isunza’s interrogations of Blackslave’s witness-testimony about the accident involving Andrea and Prince Heir Don Carlos. He is writing the notebooks for A Certain Mutual Acquaintance, whom he had never met, and “insiders in the secret world had begun to suspect he was no longer even alive” (156). Other characters in Algiers are equally involved in the Nameless, like Suleiman Sa’adah who, tired of the secret world, where he has spent thirty-five years, decides to try his fortune in Amsterdam as a tulip importer. He takes with him his niece Zoraida’s work “The Confessions of a Trance Dancer”, where she has assembled all the secrets revealed to her by moribund powerful Turks,

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that might turn Constantinople upside-down, and which A Certain Mutual Acquaintance would approve if he were alive. On top of this, the man with whose help Cervantes tried to escape from Algiers, Onofre Exarque, turns out to be the Abbot – that is, the leader of the Nameless after Rizione’s death. But Exarque never came up to Cervantes’ rescue because the Nameless wanted the protagonist to stay there until he unknowingly found “The Confessions of a Trance Dancer” (246). A poststructuralist political point is made out of this treatise: as Suleiman explains to Cervantes, he destroyed the “Confessions” because, should they become known, power would have shifted to his people – Jews – on whom the Turkish civil service already depended. He could not allow this, Suleiman adds, because European countries would destroy one another if they did not have a strong Other – the Turkish enemy – to hate and fight together (349). Some minor characters like the Old Woman of the East, the “kindly old sereno”, Pierre Papin and Señor Zum – “Iberian counsel to the Abbot and his… associates” (277) – belong to the Nameless. As Juan’s free indirect style thoughts reveal, even Andrea serves the ends of the Nameless when she runs away from home and hides among gypsies in Triana after discovering she is not Miguel’s sister. Cervantes goes to Andalusia searching for her, the expenses suspiciously paid by Papin.2 There, after taking a job as fleet commissary, Cervantes is taken by three recruitment specialists to the “R&R Centre” of the Nameless, following the orders of Juan, also known as “the Maimed Man”. There, Miguel discovers … a mysterious complex of buildings east of Arcos de la Frontera that seemed not built upon but carved from the living rock of the rugged mountains – rumoured to be a community of religious fanatics, Lutheran or worse, or (the view of a vocal minority) the Rest and Rehabilitation Centre for some nameless organization that spread its sinister web from England to Transylvania and beyond. (284)

It is after being fully recruited that Cervantes discovers the real nature of the Nameless as an autonomous organization that, hiding in 2

The degree of Andrea’s involvement is suggested by the fact that, as Señor Zum makes clear, in the report on the Ezpeleta case Andrea’s name is left out of the account and she is said to have been with her husband in Liverno, in case she really had high origins. Luis Blackslave cannot appear either for the sake of Nameless anonymity (479).

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the dark corners of history, spies on monarchs and governments in search, as Juan words it, of Secret knowledge! On the sacred and the profane. Shake the tree of history, and see what forbidden fruit falls from its branches! (292)

The Nameless agents are immersed “in an endless quest for knowledge” (293). However, they do not have a political agenda. In fact, Juan the Obscure – like Benengeli – does not believe in ideology; he is described as a technocrat convinced that information clandestinely obtained is the key to overseeing – not interfering with – the powerful. The Nameless is thus set in contrast with another secret society of a radically opposite nature: the Phelippes Espionage & Esoteric Knowledge or PEEK, the world’s first fictional freelance intelligence network, founded by historical Sir Francis Walsingham’s cryptographer Thomas Phelippes. The latter society intends to sell its services to governmental or private customers and tries to do away with Nameless interference by bribing Luis Blackslave into destroying all the Nameless bases but the main one. The plot on the Nameless’ relation with knowledge foregrounds the fact that history is made up of a diversity of elements, of which only a few – the more convenient ones – are considered by historiography, while the more obscure side of it is left unrecorded and unacknowledged, and does not exist, historically speaking. At the same time, together with Juan’s rejection of any ideological or interventionist aim, the Nameless’ approach to knowledge for knowledge’s sake, without any intention of using it against or upon any people or country, can be read in the light of Michel Foucault’s theories on the interconnection of knowledge and power. This link is made explicit when the narrator wonders: “Was knowledge, I couldn’t help wondering, power?” (107). As Stuart Hall explains, Foucault “saw knowledge as always inextricably enmeshed in relations of power because it was always being applied to the regulation of social

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conduct in practice”:3 there is not “any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations”.4 Yet, like Juan and Benengeli, Foucault disagreed with the classical Marxist theory of ideology since it tended to reduce all the relations between knowledge and power to a question of class power and class interests. But, more interestingly for the analysis of the textual implications of the novel, Foucault unraveled how “knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of ‘the truth’ but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’.” The fact that knowledge operates in specific social and historical contexts and through specific strategies led Foucault to speak not of the “Truth” of knowledge in the absolute sense but of “a discursive formation sustaining a regime of truth”.5 Thus, Foucault described “Truth” as “a thing of this world” that: Is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned … the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.6

In this sense, the Nameless’ refusal to use the knowledge they gather may be read as a refusal of the notion of Truth, which goes hand in hand with the novel’s postmodernist attacks on concepts such as historical and factual truth, and the parallel exposure of the constructed and discursive or narrative nature of both facts and history. Furthermore, the Nameless’ abstention from applying knowledge prevents the imposition of any kind of constraint, disciplining or regulation, which would go against the postmodernist spirit of the novel. 3

Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation”, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997), ed. Stuart Hall, London and New Delhi: Sage, 1999, 47. 4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Tavistock, 1977, 27. 5 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation”, 49 (emphasis in the original). 6 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Brighton: Harvester, 1980, 131.

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In a different light, such untempered ambition for knowledge without any practical purpose recalls the famous Faustian figures that populate the history of literature. Indeed, the novel alludes to this character on several occasions. Cervantes recounts that he read in the archives of the Iberian base of the Nameless a file about Georg Faust (1479 Wittenberg-1538), a man who sold his immortal soul to the Devil, and whose story Cervantes had read in Steganographia, a work by Johannes Trithemius – also known as the Abbot of Sponheim (290).7 The narrator explains that Trithemius’ work can be read as a treatise on the summoning of demons or as a work on cryptography.8 Confusion about the nature of Trithemius’ treatise is made the most of by Cide Hamete Benengeli, who supernaturally rescues Cervantes from the gallows in Algiers after asking him a simple question like “Never heard of Trithemius?” to which the protagonist nods (229). Knowing only about the secret-message side of the book – indeed, the real one – Cervantes is cheated by Benengeli into a deceitful transaction, whereby the astrologer claims that Cervantes signed a document in an unfamiliar language stating that “in return for certain advantages, you cede your soul to the Devil for all eternity” (432). As Benengeli argues in the Book of the Dead, Cervantes exchanged his soul for godlike knowledge and power plus a bonus: his rescue from a certain death at the gallows and twenty additional years for him to live. There, Benengeli tries to throw the protagonist into a threedimensional etching of a hellish scene and, before letting Cervantes escape his coma dream, Benengeli denies being the Devil himself. However, he does not deny being Mephistophilis and Lucifer, who was replaced as God’s archangel-in-chief, St Michael. The notion that Benengeli might be the former is reinforced by Christopher 7

Ironically, the narrator explains in one of his various digressions that the Abbot of Sponheim is not the Abbot of the Nameless – that is, Onofre Exarque – and pinpoints that “Exarque”, meaning “super-abbot” in Greek, lies dying at the Nameless Main Base a thousand leagues from everywhere, while the Abbot of Sponheim had died in 1516 (291). 8 It should be noted that cryptography, prior to the twentieth century, referred to encryption, that is, the process of converting ordinary information into an unreadable ciphertext while steganography more specifically refers to the strategies used to make a message undetectable, for instance by means of invisible ink or other disguising mechanisms, to convey hidden information. For its part, it is also remarkable that Trithemius’s Steganography is not just open to those two readings; in fact, it is a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on black magic.

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Marlowe’s terror when he recognizes him at Loose Chippings – under the pseudonym of Dasim Zalambur – as the Mephistophilis he had created for his version of Faustus. Many are the references to the Faustian tragedy, either to Marlowe’s play, of which a few lines are quoted, or to the feelings that the historical figure and the legend attached to it convey to the protagonist. It is the latter instances that connect Cervantes with Faust on a supernatural level. For a start, when all the documents stored in the Iberian Base of the Nameless are burnt, the only remnant that is left is a fragment of Faust’s file, which is again inserted in the novel and makes Cervantes wonder: “why did the passage give me now, as when I first read it, an inexplicable shock of recognition?” (405). This thought, much in line with Columbus’ remembrances of past and future reincarnations, is reinforced by the protagonist’s awe at his feeling identified with Christopher Marlowe’s Faust “as if those lines foreshadowed my own future, and not a distant one” (416). The status of Benengeli, Cervantes’ own particular Mephistophilis, is radically questioned when he retreats into his own dream within Cervantes’ dream after suggesting that perhaps he is the genius within the writer’s brain. Therefore, one might conclude that the novel’s plot about Faustian contracts for knowledge is a metaphor for the sacrifices authors must make for the sake of their art. Additionally, the supernatural subtext of the novel is enhanced by the presence in the Nameless of two personages that are famous historically for their connections with the world of magic. The first one is Denis Zachaire, whom Cervantes meets in Oude Kerk. He was a sixteenth-century French alchemist who spent his whole life and his family’s fortune in search of the Philosopher’s Stone – a topic already dealt with in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus through the figure of Magister Tom Norton – and the Elixir of Life, which his autobiography claims he did finally find, giving place to the legend that he is still living in the South of France. The second one is John Dee – the English delegation chief of the Nameless, in Cervantes’ account. In Walsingham’s sole employ, Dee applies the paranormal to espionage and is said to have made Queen Mary Tudor barren. Historically, he was a British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer and, interestingly enough, occultist and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. Reviled as an evil magician and charged with treason against Queen Mary, Dee was immersed in Judeo-Christian

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magic and Hermetic philosophy, to which a Faustian trait is added by the fact that he turned towards the supernatural as a means of acquiring knowledge. This world of magic and intrigues that develops mainly in “Part the Second” might be read in the light of historical Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose Part Two reveals the knight’s life to be more closely linked to the chivalry novels, which in Part Two reflect his life rather than the other way round. In fact, the narrator of The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes undergoes a process similar to Don Quixote’s since he is absorbed by chivalry books. When Cervantes is imprisoned in Seville on a charge of defalcation, he starts reading books on knights-errant like Sir Gawain and Sir Lanval, Guy of Warwick, Ogier the Dane, Roland and Oliver, Pierre of Provence, the McLaughlin of Scotland, the Red Knight, and the Green Knight. He becomes so immersed in their chivalry stories that he ends up believing that “the more I read them the more rational their world seemed and the more absurd mine (and yours)” (397). In this mood he starts writing the first nine chapters of Don Quixote, for which he apparently finds inspiration in the circle of his in-laws. Cervantes’ mother disapproves of his marriage to Catalina de Palacios because, like his own paternal family, Catalina’s family has problems with debts, and also because they have a reputation for converso blood and madness in the family: her great-grandfather is said to have read tales of chivalry until he lost his sight and eventually believed the heroes in the books were real. The parallelism between Marlowe’s Cervantes and Cervantes’ Don Quixote is first suggested by the fact that Marlowe’s Cervantes chooses as his code name in the Nameless none other than a knight’s name, Amadis, in a clear reference to his childhood hero Amadis of Gaul. Then, it is reinforced by Cervantes’ belief that Don Quixote needs a sequel – Part Two – because “[Don Quixote] knows now that the place to look for the truth is in his own story that’s just been published” (458). Cervantes feels the need to write Part Two because the character he has created in Part One knows, as if he had a life of his own, that his truth must be searched in Part One. In a similar way, Cervantes’ own truth must be found in the story of his life, that is, in “Part the Second” – and in order to find it he must be “written” and brought to life in Part Two. Furthermore, parallel to the character he has created, when Andrea dies Cervantes’ world becomes a different, wrong world and he starts

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trying to find where the right world is. Realizing that he still has to write the part where Don Quixote faces and fights the Knight of the Moons or of the Mirrors, the narrator eventually ascribes a higher value to the fictional world of his writings than to the one he inhabits. In this line, he puts forth the following statement twice, in both endings of the novel: I got so engrossed in the story that I thought the book I was writing was the right world, the one I had to find. But it turned out not to be, it couldn’t be, because Don Quixote went home to die, after all the adventures he’d been through, in bed. (491, 493)

In the same manner, Cervantes will lie on his bed with the thirsting sickness after all his Nameless adventures – an ending for his own life that he rejects for the sake of the second, open one. The relation between Cervantes’ own death and life and Don Quixote’s is carried further by the fact that, after recalling the whole story of his death and life in a brief summary of its main events, the narrator decides not to write about any of it. Instead, he starts writing the title and the first lines of Don Quixote after wondering why writers should be “trammeled by firsthand knowledge” (398) when other artists like painters are not. At that point, the narrator reveals in a digression that the advice to write about what you know is bad and backward advice, since the writer must go beyond this. Ironically enough, he states that if the job is properly done, what you do not write about is still present lending its truth to what you do write. He thereby implies that the story of his death and life, which he knows about and is not writing yet, will strengthen the truth quality of Don Quixote, suggesting the parallelism between the lives of both subjects. The cliché that Don Quixote went mad from reading too many knights’ tales, which might be attached to Marlowe’s Cervantes too, can be read in parallel with the death of history and the life of the imagination put forth by Hans den Boer and could also be seen as the life of an alternate reality in the mode of uchronian fictions. The issue of madness acquires a different tinge when considering the case of Torquato Tasso, who is declared mad and has spent some time in a mental hospital. The interesting point about this character is that the only “proofs” of his madness are that, except for the few times when he believed in God, he “saw only a cosmos that mirrored his own disordered mind” (78) and that he believed there was a cosmic

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master plan to destroy him. In this respect, one can argue, first, that according to contemporary physics the cosmos is indeed a macrocosmic version of a molecular system in far-from-equilibrium conditions unless you believe in a puppet-master God that handles all the threads. Second, that poor Torquato was right about the Nameless’ conspiracy to destroy him and make him confess all the information he had gathered, since everything in his life, from Rizione’s fatherhood of Torquato’s niece Costanza to Cervantes’ arrival in Italy and his affair with Cornelia was orchestrated by the Nameless. Consequently, madness that is not really madness is associated to an awareness of the import and power of the Nameless, both in Tasso’s case and in Cervantes’ adventurous, uchronian involvement with it. Wandering … An important scale of significance in the novel is the protagonist’s relation with religion and its critique of religious fundamentalism. Cervantes’ alleged religiousness is questioned in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes as was Columbus’ in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus and Goya’s in Colossus. This issue, that is a constant in Marlowe’s works, is approached from a variety of perspectives. The narrator expresses his concern for critics’ accusations of anticlericalism and reviews of Don Quixote as a “thinly veiled attack on Holy Mother Church”. He declares that he does not even feel any resentment against the Church for having been excommunicated twice by Catholic “blind bureaucracy”. Parallel to this explanation, the narrator exposes that he was accused of prejudice against Turks and Moors – a consequence of his five-year imprisonment in Algiers – and of anti-Semitism because a character in his play The Dungeons of Algiers says that Jews are “effeminate people, infamous and worthless” (117). At this point, the narrator makes it clear that the speaker was a character he did not like much and his audience would not like either – thus raising the metaliterary debate on the differences between what characters may say and what the author thinks, that is, on the need to discern books’ textual implications. Yet, despite his attempts at rebuttal, Cervantes appears as a man with a dwindling faith, struggling to keep it when he tells himself that God is everywhere while feeling that He definitely was not in Lepanto. At the age of fifty-six he feels at a loss with no manuscript or faith.

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Furthermore, the novel’s critique of the Catholic Church is manifold. First, Cervantes exposes that “Rusty Old Christians” resent conversos for their rumored wealth and power. The envy behind Christians’ hatred against Jews is unveiled when the narrator explains that his father was tolerated in spite of his Jewish origin because he had not married into the nobility to taint others’ blood as other wealthy Jews did nor “could they accuse him of spreading the Lutheran heresy – which converted Jews allegedly did, just as surely as converted Muslims (called moriscos) spied for the Barbary pirates who ravaged the sea coasts of Andalucía and came in the night for little boys who wouldn’t eat their migas” (13). The narrator’s account reveals the cynicism of Christians who use religious discrimination to frighten children into their daily routines, bringing them up in fear and hatred.9 A degree of cynicism can also be detected in the narrator’s exposure of the superstitious character of Christian religion. He recounts how Crown Prince Don Carlos was saved from a serious illness by “the greatest physician of the day, Andreas Vesalius of the Low Countries (later condemned by the Inquisition for dissecting cadavers, but not executed)” (39), while the credit for saving the Prince was given not to Vesalius but to the miraculous power of some relics of Franciscan Fray Diego. The Church – far richer than the Crown itself – is also criticized for its greed, since its representatives refuse to pay the taxes charged by the Crown upon wheat and fodder to get funding for the Spanish Armada battle. As a commissary trying to extract the tribute, not only is Cervantes excommunicated twice and declared anathema but he also becomes the victim of frustrated murder attempt at the hands of a sacristan. Finally, the textual implications are clear when Cide Hamete – either omniscient sage or Cervantes’ creative genius – proclaims that the Devil is but “an invention of clever medieval ecclesiasts whose purpose was to terrify people into turning to God” (432). The critique of Christian religion extends to a denunciation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition – another constant in Marlowe’s fictions on Spain. Even though he explicitly says that he will not dwell on the details of the five months of torture inflicted upon Luis Blackslave in the chambers of the Inquisition, cynicism is overt on the narrator’s 9

This passage clearly recalls that in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus where a Jew complained to Columbus that Christians accused Jews of killing and drinking the blood of little Christian children.

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explanation that, since the Inquisition is allowed to interrogate suspects only once, tortures are not “terminated” but “suspended” (156) when the victim cannot undergo further torture, which is resumed after recovery. This idea is repeated when Cervantes recalls that people shunned him when his father was working as a doctor for the Inquisition in Cordoba. He adds that his father’s eyes looked haunted by what he witnessed, since “his job was to patch up the victims of torture so they could undergo more of the same”. But the novel also depicts passages of extreme cruelty exerted by Muslim people for religious reasons. For instance, Cervantes witnesses an act of revenge by two Muslims on a randomly chosen Christian slave for the death of their brother on the galley Marquesa. They chop off the slave’s tongue, ears, and penis before slitting his throat. However, the narrator admits that, though brutal, this is less hideous than the Inquisitional Autos-da-fé still prevalent in Portugal and hardly extinct in Spain (116). Another instance of Muslim cruelty is the Janissary captain who wonders how three-god Christians can consider themselves monotheists and slices off earless Alonso Quijano’s10 tongue for defending Christianity (135); and yet another, the assertion that “most Barbary pirates or re’is were renegades, converts to Islam who bent over backwards to show cruelty towards their former coreligionists in order to avoid any suspicion of apostasy, which under Islamic law was punishable by death” (111) – by impalement, to be specific. In fact, all religions are put at the same level as the narrator argues that they all venerate questionable objects and are shown as equally based on superstition. By way of example, the song about Cervantes, written and sung by ráwi Shakashik-Who-Sings-His-Own-Songs, turns him into a legendary hero whose stutter is interpreted as “the gift of tongues, glossolalia, that divinely inspired … communion with God. Their God, of course, not mine. But no matter” (209). Indeed, it is the song-inspired superstition about the drought Algiers was suffering as divine punishment for imprisoning Cervantes that allows Benengeli to rescue him from the gallows by bringing about a rainstorm. The narrator criticizes more fervently the injustices committed against Jewish people, an issue largely explored in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. The relevance of the Jewish theme in The 10

It should here be recalled that this is exactly Don Quixote’s real name.

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Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes is evident from its very first page, since the novel is dedicated, among other people, to Adam Zachary, a contemporary American professor of Jewish culture. To start with, the narrator alludes to the fear provoked by the age-old belief “that Jews were poisoners of wells, ritual slaughterers of gentile children, Christ killers” (364).11 The relation of Spanish popular culture and the status of Jews is more than evident in the typical piropo that the narrator uses to exemplify what a Spanish flattering comment is like: “If the Inquisition learned / How truly I worship you / And the false coin you’ve returned / They’d burn you for a Jew” (15). Besides conveying the belief that Jews cannot be trusted, the comment reveals the ease with which the burning of Jews was accepted by the general population. Cervantes’ regret at the popular belief that Jews are cowardly is emphasized through the repetition of a sentence like an echo in his unconscious: “Bastards and conversos are never brave” (88, 94, 97; emphasis in the original). Moreover, it is a despicable figure like Lope de Vega that pronounces one of the most anti-Semitic statements: he calls Ponce de León “converso professor of Christianity” and boasts that only “prison encourages some marranos to produce the occasional pearl” (384) because prison is the closest to stability that conversos can get, and for artists to produce good works they must know where they are going. Jewish nomadic existence is indeed explored in The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, which highlights the fact that all Jews are outcasts, always “on the road” since the fall of Jerusalem, one thousand five hundred years earlier, “thrown out of most countries of Europe, locked in ghettos in the rest” (349). This is why, as told in the story tossed by Benengeli after his Erratum, an expedition of Sephardic crypto-Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition led to Amsterdam in 1593. After declaring independence from the Spanish Empire in 1581 mainly for practicing Protestant Christianity – forbidden under Spanish rule – the Netherlands guaranteed religious

11 In 1321 Jews in central France were falsely charged of collusion with lepers to poison wells. After some 5000 Jews were killed in retaliation, King Philip V of France admitted that they were innocent. Likewise, in 1348 European Jews were blamed for the Black Death through the poisoning of wells, which led to the destruction of more than 200 Jewish communities throughout Spain, France, Germany, and Austria, and to the Jewish escape to and refuge in Poland.

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peace and tolerance by article thirteen of the Unie van Utrecht.12 This circumstance attracted the persecuted Jews of Spain and Portugal, who were practicing Judaism in secret – crypto-Jews. Curiously enough, the Nameless get involved in this through the agency of Lopez Pereira or Nuñez,13 a crypto-Jew with Nameless connections who seeks help from Micaela. She helps Lopez Pereira for the memory of her late friend Zoraida even though, she asserts, it is not the Nameless’ business to take care of the Jews. In line with the novel’s focus on the need to keep moving, if one phrase may be said to characterize The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, it is “on the old road again” (6, 44, 53, 65, 150, 173, 184, 240, 258, 330, 331, 332, 364, 400, 427, 449, 474, 495). Repeated by Miguel’s father Rodrigo every time he and his family had to move to another town on account of their debts, the “old road” phrase becomes recurrent also in Miguel’s vocabulary and is directly linked to his nomadic Jewish identity, which makes him feel nowhere at home. As Columbus’ in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, Cervantes’ Jewish origin is stressed from the very beginning of the novel. It is with contempt that Miguel’s mother Doña Leonor de Cortinas blurts out that in Rodrigo’s maternal side of the family, the Torreblancas, “there wasn’t a Rusty Old Christian among them”. As she explains to little Miguel and Andrea, “your grandfather the Patriarch married a Torreblanca, which is to say a New Christian, which is to say a converso, which is to say a person of Jewish ancestry, so his purity of blood, if any, did not pass to you children” (5). In addition, Doña Leonor’s purity of blood is also – though subtly – questioned by the narrator when he speaks of her “Old Testamentally relentless scorn” (6) on Rodrigo’s family. The family’s New Christian identity is reinforced by data that, in turn, highlight the positive traits of Jewish culture. For example, the narrator recounts how his father taught all his children to read and that “literacy was a strong indication of a converso hiding” (10). 12

The tolerant character of the Netherlands is emphasized in the novel by the speech given by Protestant Dominie Aaron Dweepziek, who speaks about the Protestant and Jewish peoples as being both “Chosen”, and declares that God has spoken to him of His plans for a Jewish community there in Amsterdam (348). 13 Lopez Pereira seems to be an anachronistic reference since the only well-known person of that name is an eccentric eighteenth-century Austrian Jew who lived most of his life in London and was treasurer of the Portuguese Synagogue there.

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The ironic textual implications of political correctness can be perceived in Doña Leonor’s always tactful approach to Jewishness: to Andrea’s talk about “Jew jobs” her mother reprehends that “you should say occupations appropriate for conversos”. And, to the girl’s question: “But, Mamá, aren’t we conversos?” Doña Leonor tentatively answers: “The probability … is not low. On your father’s side” (17; emphasis in the original). In this context, Doña Leonor explains that the Torreblancas were early supporters of Christopher Columbus and used to meet in the Genoese apothecary shop, where all the customers were conversos. Apart from the family’s going from one town to another, Cervantes’ nomadism was more intense as he travelled with his deaf father, helping him as an interpreter in his job as itinerant physician. In his increasingly homeless, rootless feeling he states: “the inns of Andalucía were home to me, and the open road my neighbourhood” (32). In fact, when Don John of Austria asks him where he comes from after being named a hero in the battle of Lepanto, Cervantes tells the Prince: “I’m from all over Spain. My family moved a lot” (114). The protagonist seems to be overwhelmed by his sense of not belonging anywhere, and he frequently insists that he has no home and has to keep going even though he does not know where. It is on one of his trips that the protagonist decides to explore the second “twin headwater” of the bitter stream from which one critic wrote that Cervantes’ tragicomic worldview flowed, an unidentified twin headwater that the narrator locates “in the city of waters, Amsterdam” (344). Cervantes explains how in Amsterdam he passed for an itinerant Jewish merchant, Miguel de Torreblanca. The retrospective account of this circumstance allows him, as narrator, to reflect on the nature of identity as a construct and on the effects that one’s explicit identification has on the others’ perception of that identity: “this crowd … were eyeing Miguel de Torreblanca, Jew. The me inside, a 100% standard … Christian gentleman of Castilla, was annulled” (361). Cervantes then wonders whether Jews could ever blend with the others, their noses visibly setting them apart, and whether his own Jewish-looking nose would set him apart. The question of Jewish identity is somewhere else shown as an unstable signifier that depends on who says what identity one has. The case is portrayed when Rodrigo Sr is offered a steady job as “Surgeon to the Córdoba tribunal of the Supreme and General Council of the

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Inquisition”, which, as Leonor states, “prosecutes conversos” so “everyone in this house figures to be a target” and “you can’t work for the Suprema unless you have limpieza de sangre”, which is “a matter of three generations”. Surprisingly though coherently, this allows Rodrigo to defend the following syllogism: Only those with pure blood … can work for the Suprema. Since they’ve hired me, it follows that I have it. And if I do, then you all do. (12)

The uncertain, contingent, and arbitrary nature of Jewish identity is furthered first by the fact that lawyer Picapleitos is hired to “prove” that in 1486 Juan the Patriarch already had pure blood and that his family never met people of “tainted origin” (19), including Columbus, and then by the fact that Miguel gets a Certificate of Purity of Blood, required for working in Italy. Therefore, the truth of identity, like that of history, is portrayed as depending on what is stated about them in documents that can be easily forged. Nevertheless, what most characterizes Cervantes as a Jew is his sense of being rootless and homeless and his pull towards keeping on moving. This is developed in one of the novel’s high points: Zoraida, on the verge of dying, asks Cervantes to tell her a story. After her disappointment at the set phrase “once upon a time … ” – “Only once … upon a time? Never twice? Can’t a story ever … ?” – the protagonist tells her that Spanish storytellers usually begin with a place. Her suggestion (“like a lost homeland you can … never find again? And even if you … can’t find it … you have to keep looking of you’ll die?”) makes Cervantes think of a wheat field in La Mancha, which his sister Andrea’s long hair has always reminded him of. Since being with Andrea is the nearest to being at home that the narrator can feel, he adds: And I began, for some reason I began, as I would again all those years later, so in a way it was as Zoraida wished, twice upon a time: “In a place in La Mancha the name of which I don’t care to remember …. ” (204)

The topic of being always in search for one’s homeland is nowhere better linked with the idea of process and repetition. The revealing image of Don Quixote starting twice is replicated in the novel by a

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series of images that imply repetition and, to a certain extent, infinite regress. The narrator’s theory of infinite regress or the possibility of inconclusiveness is clear in his digression about the nature of death: It’s often been said that at the point of death a person’s whole life passes in review before his eyes. I used to wonder why no one ever carried this notion, which for all I know is true, to its obvious conclusion. Which is that there is no conclusion.

In fact, when Cervantes is on the point of dying wounded by a shot next to his heart, he thinks of what happens to a dying person in the following eloquent terms: … his life does pass before his eyes – finally reaching the point where (or when, depending on whether you give precedence to space or time) he’s dying and his whole life passes before his eyes, his whole life up to the point where (or when) he’s dying and his whole life passes before his eyes, again reaching the point where .… Is space-time, with its vast vaulted distances bending back on themselves, elastic enough to accommodate this ad infinitum? If so, is that all that’s meant by immortality? And wouldn’t the quality of a person’s life determine whether this eternal return is Heaven or Hell? Intriguing questions, but how could I have answered them? None of this had happened to me. At least, not yet. (426; emphases in the original)

The image of infinite regress achieved through the repetition of a series of words is used again when the protagonist faces the possibility of death fighting with the Knight of the Mirrors. Graphically enough, the Knight’s armor is made up of hundreds of tiny mirrors where Cervantes can see hundreds of versions of his own reflection: “hundreds of miniature white knights mounted on miniature Spikes” (441) which, composing the story of his life, make another reference to infinite regress through the circular repetition of the beginning at the end of a sentence. The Knight’s movement … gives me the eerie impression of seeing in each one a different image of myself, from the childhood me to the me of middle age, so that, if I assembled them all, I could see in those overlapping mirrors the story of my death and life, until in one final mirror I would inevitably see myself mounted on Spike before the empty royal

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pavilion … as I see reflected in the Knight of the Mirrors’s armour the story of my death and life until in one final mirror … (441)

The same effect, which suggests that at any point the narrative will get lost in a circular process, is achieved in the final pages of the novel by the repetition of exactly the same words twice narrating the two different endings to the point when Micaela exchanges signs and countersigns with Cervantes without stammering. As he did in the dungeon of Algiers, he tells himself: “Say one sentence without stuttering and you’ll go free” (494). Seemingly, the narrator does go free when he calls Micaela’s name: everything changes suddenly and he climbs into the coach with his love, who asks him to tell her a story “as the way was long” and, as the narrator states: And I began with how my great-grandfather knew Columbus, and I didn’t stop until I reached the part where Micaela and I were in the coach, racing along the old road again. And she said, “Tell me, Miguel – what comes next?” (495)

These final sentences are ambivalent, to say the least. This “closing” passage evokes infinite regress again when just at the end the narrator says that he has told the story of the book from its first chapter up to this “ending” at the present time (narrative time). Therefore, this seems to be the point where the narrative enters the spiral of infinite regress. Yet, the very last sentence suggests that this infinite regress – that is, the protagonist’s never-ending repetition of the story of his death and life – is what liberates Cervantes both from death and from the grips of historicity, just as Micaela’s demand finally released her from her terrible state in Algiers. Bearing this in mind, I would like to conclude this section by pointing out that, even though – unlike The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus – The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes does not explicitly portray its protagonist as an embodiment of the Wandering Jew, it may be implicitly read that way or, at least, a certain parallelism may be drawn. First, his converso identity is linked to the fact that he feels the pull of nomadism, which invariably prevents him from settling and makes him be always “on the old road again”. And then, the fact that the novel does not end and his death and life start anew which implies that the character is immortal in his story and will never end, like the existence of the Wandering Jew, and like

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Cervantes and Don Quixote themselves, who became immortal thanks to the novel that, curiously enough, Marlowe’s Cervantes begins twice. This view is reinforced by the facts that, like Count St Germain or the Wandering Jew, who was involved in an eternal quest for knowledge, Cervantes is engaged in a search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake in his service for the Nameless after making a Faustian exchange with Benengeli. The novel’s deployment of the strategy of creating alternative realities different from Cervantes’ documented biography allows for the elaboration of issues that were already tackled in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, like the critique of religious fundamentalism and the suffering and ill-treatment of the Jewish community. Simultaneously, other themes are presented, like the relation between knowledge and power or between madness and fiction, while the recurrence of images of infinite regress calls for a connection between the protagonist and the figure of the Wandering Jew that places The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes as an ideological continuation of the previous novel.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Despite the use of very specific settings, a study of Stephen Marlowe’s narratives of Spain reveals that their interest surpasses the limits of the Spanish territory. These novels entail an overt concern not only for the notion of literary genre but also for several ideological preoccupations of the times when they were published. As my analysis has tried to show, Colossus: a Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad follows the pattern of the traditional, pre-postmodernist historical novel. As Avrom Fleishman demands from this type of narrative, Colossus centers on a heroic plot in the form of an individual’s career. It shows the ways in which specific historical moments shape individual lives while this shaping reveals the idiosyncrasy of the historical period. Colossus also sticks to the features that Brian McHale highlights of the historical novel: it respects established facts about the properties of the historical personages and events it depicts; also, in order to avoid conflict with accepted history, the novel centers on aspects of the historical past that remain obscure or about which historiography has stayed silent. The use of anachronisms is avoided both in the chronological representation of events and in the worldview of the period, or it is explicitly acknowledged as poetic license in the Afterword, thereby emptying it of any possible threat to the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and to the realistic quality of the novel. This realism, in turn, is enhanced by the plausibility of the narrated events, and also by the use of elements that foreground the local color of the narration and the use of dialect – in this case, of Spanish terms and expressions. On top of that, according to Coleridge’s description of the historical novel,1 Colossus portrays a period of tension between the regression of a totalitarian Old Regime and a progressive movement represented by the influence of the Enlightenment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain. The use of an omniscient heterodiegetic narrator is complemented by the focalization of events through the 1

For a detailed account of this point see page 20 in this book.

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eyes of different characters in a linear teleological pattern, while fictional elements are inserted only to add suspense and a novelistic quality to the plot and to fill in the gaps left by historiographic accounts. It is precisely the historically accepted trait of the protagonist’s alleged madness that lies at the core of the ideological stance of the novel. This feature, which has been explained in Foucauldian terms as a combination of passion and mania with some traces of melancholia,2 appears in the protagonist when the socio-political situation of the country is shaken by violence and incongruity. In line with Foucault’s thought, Goya’s madness is represented as the penalty for freedom of conscience and search of truth. This notion of madness is opposed to the irresponsibility and passivity of the general population in the face of the country’s repressive rule. Such a hypothesis is confirmed as the symptoms temporarily disappear whenever the protagonist denounces the irrationality of the period through his etchings, where he represents all the monstrous scenes he witnesses. Goya’s madness is disclosed as his ability to expose the ugly reality or madness of the situation of Spain in order to make the country aware and responsible for the barbarity it suffers. The contrast between Goya – together with those other characters influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment – and the general population and its political leaders is what calls for a reading informed by the tenets of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Their study of the revolutionary potential of desire as a collective and political agent and its consequent distortion and regulation on the part of the status quo leads to a distinction between two types of subject: the neurotic subject that desires social repression in the form of fascism in order to avoid the stronger weight of psychic repression, and the psychotic, whose desire escapes regulation, acquiring an irrepressible potential for revolution. In this light, the protagonist is presented as the highest exponent of psychosis in opposition to a mass that needs the repression exerted by a fascistic leader like King Fernando VII. In turn, and in the line of new historians, who argue that historical novelists must be aware of their own time and highlight aspects of the past that are related to a present state of affairs, the denunciation of the fascist, neurotic population in nineteenth-century Spain extends, 2

For further information on Foucault’s use of these notions see pages 42-43 in this book

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through emphasis on a series of parallelisms, to the fascist dictatorial regime and the passive acceptance on the part of the majority of the people that governed the country during the decades previous to the publication of the novel. For its part, through the self-reflexive use of certain motifs and narrative strategies, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe reflects some of the ideas that characterize the postmodernist period. The novel clearly responds to the changes in the notion of history that started in the late nineteenth century with the questioning of the objectivity and impartiality of history and heightened along the twentieth century with the subsequent inquiry into the epistemological problems signaled by modernist narrative and the self-reflexivity typical of the postmodernist novel. After the poststructuralist disruption of the stable relation between signifier and signified and the exposure of the instability of the subject as constituted by language, the assumption that language can no longer be conceived as a transparent vehicle for knowledge is brought to the fore by the postmodernist writing that self-consciously discloses and rejoices in its condition of artifice, thereby questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality through formal self-exploration. The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus does so by means of the features that serve to classify it as an example of historiographic metafiction after Linda Hutcheon’s coinage: its self-conscious combination of fictional and historical events and personages reveals the status of history as a play of signifiers without referents. Simultaneously, the progressive or teleological character of history is radically questioned both in itself and as the foundation of traditional, realistic historical narratives through the novel’s blatant use of anachronisms, which trespasses the rule of historiography that content must relate only to the past. Even though the use of anachronisms allows the novel to comment on problems of the present on the light of past events, as Colossus does, it manages to break the illusion of realism and to judge the past from present-day moral standards, escaping the strictures against the psychological realism of the nineteenth-century historical novel. The use of anachronisms is closely related to the novel’s stance regarding the nature of time – disclosed as a contingent and arbitrary category. It is precisely the autodiegetic narrator’s relation to temporality that enables him to criticize his future biographers, to amend their

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mistakes, and to fill in the gaps left by historiography about his life and adventures. This task is carried out by the insertion of fictional events and explanations, which destabilizes the frontiers between fact and fiction while unveiling the limitations of traditional historiography. Any claim of objectivity collapses when historians are portrayed as moved by their own ideology and interests in their attempts to craft stories from the available partial written accounts of historical facts, to which they have no direct access. The novel’s postmodernist anti-totalizing import extends also to the narrator’s account: he undermines his own reliability by acknowledging some untruths in his narration and also by defending his account as objective after systematically dismantling and denying the notion of objectivity. The narrator appears as an utterly postmodernist being that can only offer contradictory, self-consciously self-undermining answers to the questions he himself raises. At the same time, the novel rejoices in a continuous play with literary expectations and a generic eclecticism that reflects present day culture and challenges totalization in so far as it hampers critical attempts to classify the literary work, and the lack of hierarchical arrangement makes the diversity of texts question each other’s authority. In line with Michel Foucault’s notion of genealogy as opposed to history, the novel rejects grand explanatory systems and linear processes in favor of the singularity of events and of the view of historical beginnings as complex and contingent, motivated by a multiplicity of factors. This is rendered through the deconstruction of the importance of historical events. Such a deconstruction is carried out by showing outstanding events like the (re)discovery of a continent as the result of a series of lucky accidents. Emphasis on the concept of chance, together with the novel’s nonlinear structure, calls for a reading of the text as a chaotic generator of meaning. The lack in metafictional novels of the omniscient reliable narrator of realist fiction leaves the reader with an impression of disorder and randomness mainly through the feeling of undecidability provided by the presence of elements which are not immediately decodable and which are perceived as noise. The fact that noise plays a constructive role – it provides additional information – suggests that interpretation is no longer subject to authorial mastery. Hence, the text defeats the notion of closure by ever adapting to new readings.

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In accordance with the theories that study metafictional texts as literary correlates of molecular systems as described by the second law of thermodynamics,3 the multiple elements that constitute the novel behave independently of one another. However, the nonhierarchical interconnections between the different resulting scales of signification provide the whole with an appearance of large-scale coherence, as if the various elements were informed about the behavior of one another. The interaction of the metafictional text with the outside world – that is, the interaction of its multiple intertexts – places the text in non-equilibrium conditions, creating as a result new states of matter or dissipative structures that involve a form of supramolecular organization. Accordingly, the chaotic structure of the novel offers the possibility of developing a variety of meanings, like its denunciation of religious fundamentalism mainly in the form of Catholic superstition and the institution of the Holy Inquisition, and also of the centuries-long violence against the Jewish people. In this respect, the dissipative structure of the protagonist’s identity as the Wandering Jew is essential not only because it symbolizes the oppressive nomadic feature so salient in Jewish culture but also because of the strategy deployed to reveal this identity to the protagonist. In other words, while the apparently omniscient figures of God and Guacanagarí fail to give the protagonist a thorough account of his identity, this identity is revealed in a second-level dream whose complexity parallels that of a chaotic, historiographic metafictional text also in its mixture of historical, legendary, and fictional elements. This has been read as the novel’s privileging of complex, multilayered narratives over the limitations and partiality of traditional realist narratives dominated by an omniscient narrator. Simultaneously, the very nature of the most outstanding dissipative structure, Columbus’ identity as the Wandering Jew, frees the novel from the closure that would jeopardize and contradict its very open, chaotic quality. The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; a Novel by Stephen Marlowe displays an arrangement of historical and overtly fictional personages and events similar to that of The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus. However, metafiction and the destabilization of ontological borders go further than in the previous novel. For a start, 3

This idea is fully developed on pages 93-98.

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the quality of the novel as a heterotopia is heightened by the presence of mysterious characters from mythical lost continents and legendary heroes. Then, the transworld identity of certain characters sharpens the implications of the novel as an intertextual space, since these characters are taken from works of both Miguel de Cervantes and Stephen Marlowe himself. The coexistence of characters from Don Quixote and Colossus with those of The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes produces a shocking effect and constitutes a highly metafictional strategy that blurs the boundaries not only between historical Cervantes and Marlowe, but also between Cervantes as a character and his creator Marlowe as author of The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes. The novel reintroduces from The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus certain ideological features such as the notion of time as elastic and of temporal measuring as arbitrary. Yet, the use of anachronisms is not blatant now but deceptive. As a result, while anachronistic references are more subtle than in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus because they appear mainly in the form of literary concepts and technical vocabulary, those examples that are self-evident – that is, the narrator’s comments on future critics of his life and works – are acknowledged as coming from the supernatural agency of Cide Hamete Benengeli. The disguised use of anachronisms, which to a certain extent helps to maintain the appearance of realism and the reader’s very willing suspension of disbelief, unravels as a deception when Benengeli is eventually revealed as the genius inside the protagonist’s brain. Different strategies amount to the radical metafictional character of the novel, like the denaturalized use of foreign words, the close resemblance between chapter headings and those in Don Quixote, the constant calls to the active role of the reader, and the frequent digressions and comments on Cervantes’ works. Another mechanism to enhance the self-consciousness of the novel as an artifact is the representation of characters as entities that gain independence from the author’s wishes and interfere with the narrator’s accounts forcing the figure called “author” to interfere as well. The novel continues the task, initiated by The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, of dismantling the alleged validity of history through its metafictional exposure of the lucubration with which biographers mask their shortcomings. Besides, as Columbus did,

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Cervantes sets to fill in the gaps left by historiography with elements he acknowledges as fictional, while insisting that fiction is a superior kind of truth than history or fact. Fiction finally wins over history when the protagonist survives hanging in Algiers and his story becomes an example of uchronian fiction. This kind of fiction, which questions the status of every previously stated historical data, involves the science-fiction element of a simultaneous viewing of all temporal dimensions that allows for the existence of different parallel realities and reinforces the narrator’s belief that writers must not avoid the impossible. At the same time, speculation about the different course events might have taken reveals the collaboration of uchronian fiction with the purposes of historiographic metafiction, since the former foregrounds the malleability of historical events. In addition, this allows for the close link between madness and fiction established by the triple parallelism between Don Quixote and his search for his truth in Part Two of the eponymous book; Cervantes as the protagonist in Marlowe’s novel and his search for truth in the Don Quixote he is writing; and Cervantes as the narrator of The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes, who finds his truth not in the life of Cervantes as recorded by history but as he devises it in Part the Second of the novel. The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes and The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus also share the Gleickian notion that large-scale consequences can spring from minor causes or changes. In this case, it is not the discovery of a continent but the creation of a literary masterpiece that is presented as a consequence, to a large extent, of chance occurrences that determined the development of the protagonist’s career. Also taken up from the previous novel is the debate between free will and determinism – resolved as a combination of free will in the making of choices and a component of chance in the consequences of those choices – together with the critique of religious fundamentalism and the denunciation of the Jewish living conditions. In contrast, the reference to the Wandering Jew as an emblem for the Jewish predicament so outstanding in the previous novel is only subtly suggested here by the protagonist’s ever present need to be always on the move and by his Faustian quest for knowledge – reinforced by the various images of infinite regress whenever death seems to be close. This idea of infiniteness liberates the protagonist from death and the burden of historicity, making the story of his death and life get lost in

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a spiral of infinite regress that allows the story to happen, as Zoraida wished, far more than “once upon a time”. Finally, the study of these three novels reveals a certain evolution, mainly in relation to the binary history/fiction. While Colossus sticks to the mandates of the traditional, pre-postmodernist historical novel in accordance to Tiepolo’s advice that an artist should master the rules before daring to break them, The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus is a highly self-conscious example of historiographic metafiction well aware of the time when it was published and of how to flout the rules of the historical novel. Lastly, The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes emerges, within the genre of historiographic metafiction, as far more relaxed about the need to transgress conventions while still carrying out an effective deconstruction of the tenets and values that are the central target of this trend. Significant too are other motifs or common interests which function as links between the three novels. This is the case of the appearance of Zárate in Colossus and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; the lyrics of the Petenera song in Colossus and The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; or the digressions about the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, the role of cross-dressing, and the peculiar relations between couples of sisters and brother figures in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes. The most outstanding instance, common to the three novels, is the motif of the protagonist running away from his hometown with the help of a powerful man after an accident. This role of chance in an individual’s career is but a sign of the chaotic underpinning of the novels, which can be foretasted in Colossus through its emphasis on the consequences of accidents and in the explicit connection of chaos with the excess of color that characterizes Goya’s paintings in contrast with the order, sobriety, and precision of line of neoclassical art. This chaotic perspective is fully developed in the two later novels, where it works as a structural strategy that allows for a variety of ideological commitments, the most remarkable being the texts’ commitment to the Jewish cause and its fateful nomadic trait. The feature of nomadism, intrinsic to US culture from the colonies to the present and emblematized in motifs as diverse as those of the pioneer or the protagonists and writers of the Beat Generation, is key to the formation of Jewish identity and, apparently, also to Stephen Marlowe himself, who spent most of his life traveling

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across continents and even refused to own a house to avoid feeling trapped. Like molecular systems in a state of non-equilibrium, the import, value and scope of Marlowe’s engaging, well-crafted, magnificent historical narratives, cannot be contained due to their complexity and depth, which open up a proliferation of meanings and nuances. This feature of unexhausted interpretation makes Marlowe more prone to being read as a politically committed writer. Combining an elegant, rich and yet direct prose, Marlowe’s historical novels exemplify both an intricate dialogue between fiction and history and the epistemological relevance of crossing such a boundary. In an attempt to trigger the academic recognition Marlowe deserves, I hope that this book serves to stimulate a fruitful exchange of thought within interdisciplinary fields such as history, cultural and literary studies.

APPENDIX I: NOVELS PUBLISHED BY MILTON LESSER UNDER THE FOLLOWING NAMES OR PSEUDONYMS

Adam Chase Quest for the Golden Ape (1957)

Andrew Frazer Find Eileen Hardin – Alive! (1959) The Fall of Marty Moon (1960) C.H. Thames Violence Is Golden (1956) Blood of My Brother (1963)

Jason Ridgway West Side Jungle (1958) Adam’s Fall (1960) People in Glass Houses (1961) Hardly a Man Is Now Alive (1962) The Treasure of the Cosa Nostra (1966)

Milton Lesser Earthbound (1952) Jungle in the Sky (1952) Looking Forward (1953) The Star Seekers (1953) Slaves to the Metal Horde (1954) Recruit for Andromeda (1959) Stadium Beyond the Stars (1960) Spacemen Go Home (1961) The Lost World and the Men who Found it (1962) Walt Disney’s Strange Animals of Australia (1963) Secret of the Black Planet (1965)

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Stephen Marlowe Catch the Brass Ring (1954) Model for Murder (1955) The Second Longest Night (1955) Turn Left for Murder (1955) Dead on Arrival (1956) Mecca for Murder (1956) Killers Are My Meat (1957) Murder Is My Dish (1957) Trouble Is My Name (1957) Terror Is My Trade (1958) Violence Is My Business (1958) Blonde Bait (1959) Double in Trouble (1959; with Richard S. Prather) Homicide Is My Game (1959) Passport to Peril (1959) Danger Is My Line (1960) Death Is My Comrade (1960) Peril Is My Pay (1960) Manhunt Is My Mission (1961) Jeopardy Is My Job (1962) Francesca (1963) The Shining (1963)1 Drumbeat – Berlin (1964) Drumbeat – Dominique (1965) Drumbeat – Madrid (1966) The Search for Bruno Heidler (1966) Drumbeat – Erica (1967) Come Over, Red Rover (1968) Drumbeat – Marianne (1968) The Summit (1970) Colossus: A Novel about Goya and a World Gone Mad (1972) The Man with No Shadow (1974) The Cawthorn Journals (1975; also published as Too Many Chiefs) Translation (1976) The Valkyrie Encounter (1978) 1956 (1982; published in 1983 as Deborah’s Legacy) 1

Marlowe’s The Shining has nothing to do with the later novel with same name by Stephen King. Marlowe’s The Shining is a historical novel set in classical Greece.

Appendix I

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The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe (1987) The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; a Novel by Stephen Marlowe (1991) A Lighthouse at the End of the World (1995).

APPENDIX II: SHORT STORIES

This list of short stories (in order of date of publication) has been elaborated from information found on several websites. The most informative website (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Milton_ Lesser) has been taken as the point of departure and augmented with some of the works cited on http:// www.scifi.darkroastedblend.com /2005/10/milton-lesser.html and http://www.isfdb.org/cgibin/ea.cgi? Milton%20Lesser. Unless otherwise stated the stories were published under the name of Milton Lesser. 1949 “Queen of the Ice Men” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) “The Outcast” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) 1950 “All Heroes Are Hated!” “It’s Raining Frogs!” “Lunar Point of View” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) 1951 “‘A’ as in Android” “Anything Your Heart Desires” (as Stephen Marlowe) “Forty Days Has September” “From Hidden Worlds” “Fugue” (as Stephen Marlowe) “Gordak’s Cargo” “Pen Pal” “Somewhere I’ll Find You!” (as Stephen Marlowe) “The Circle” “The Old Way” “The Sense of Wonder” “Trans-Plutonian” “Voices in the Void” “When Flame Globes Dance”

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“You Take the High Road” (as Stephen Marlowe) 1952 “All Flesh Is Brass” “Ask a Foolish Question” “Black Eyes and the Daily Grind” “Ennui” “He Fell Among Thieves” “Jungle in the Sky” “Make Way for Your Corpse” “Ordeal on Syrtis” “Resurrection Seven” (as Stephen Marlowe) “Ride the Crepe Ring” “Rules of the Game” “Son of the Black Chalice” “The Impossible Weapon” “The Last Revolution” (as Stephen Marlowe) “The Lion’s Mouth” (appeared as “Secret of the Black Planet”) “The One and the Many” “‘What’s on Your Mind?’” “Wild Talents, Inc.” 1953 “Come Blow Your Horn!” “Crack of Doom” “Earthsmith” “Exterran” “Finders Keepers” “Halt the Blue Star’s Rising” “Picnic” “The Agent” (as Stephen Marlowe) “The Idols of Wuld” “The Irrationals” “Tourist on Minotaur Moon” “Voyage to Eternity” “World Without Glamor” 1954 “A Cold Night for Crying” “Cosmic Appetite” “Dead on Departure” “Double or Something”

Appendix II

195

“Give Away” “Intruder on the Rim” (also appeared as: “Operation Zero” in the same year) “Let Space Be Your Coffin” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) “Pariah” “Quickie” “Revolt of the Outworlds” “Sell It to Satan” “Slaves to the Metal Horde” “Tyrants of Time” “Ultimate Weapon” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) “You Can Live Forever” 1955 “Between Two Worlds” “But the Planet Died” (as C.H. Thames) “Bye Bye, Mindy” “Es Percipi” (as Stephen Marlowe) “Farewell, Mr. Ridley” “He Ran All the Way” “He Took What He Wanted” (as C.H. Thames) “King of the Black Sunrise” “Ladies in Waiting” (as Darius John Granger) “Newshound” “No Place to Live” “No-Risk Planet” “No Way Out” (as Christopher Thames) “The Big Bluff” “The Dictator” “The Double Occupation” “The Eye and I” (as C.H. Thames) “The Killer Within” (as C.H. Thames) “The Poison Pen” “The Rusted Jungle” “They Sent a Boy” (as C.H. Thames) 1956 “A Day for Battle” (as C.H. Thames) “A Town for Mr. Sntzl” (as Stephen Wilder) “A World Called Crimson” (as Darius John Granger) “All Good Men”

196

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“An Eye for the Ladies” (as Darius John Granger) “Better Change Your Mind” (as C.H. Thames) “Centauri Vengeance” (as Darius John Granger) “Chance of a Lifetime” “Code of the Bluster World” “Everybody’s Watching You” (as C.H. Thames) “Field Trip” (as Darius John Granger) “Forever We Die!” (as C.H. Thames) “Gateway to Infinity” (as Darius John Granger) “Intruder from the Void” “Juggernaut from Space” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) “Last Call To Doomsday” (as S.M. Tenneshaw) “Meet Miss Solar System” “Microscopic Nightmare” (as C.H. Thames) “My Shipmate – Columbus” (as Stephen Wilder) “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” “No Place for an Earthman” (as C.H. Thames) “Operation Disaster” (as Darius John Granger) “Planet of Doom” (as C.H. Thames) “Prison of a Billion Years” (as C.H. Thames) “Revolt of the Brains” (as C.H. Thames) “Social Climber” “Stop, You’re Killing Me!” (as Darius John Granger) “Summer Snow Storm” (as Adam Chase) “Terrorists” “The Cosmic Snare” “The Final Quarry” (as Adam Chase) “The Girl from Nowhere” (as Darius John Granger) “The Girl Who Hated Air” “The Graveyard of Space” “The Hero” “The Iron Virgin” (as C.H. Thames) “The Ivory Tower” “The Man Without a Planet” (as Adam Chase) “The Music of the Spheres” “The Passionate Pitchman” (as Stephen Wilder) “The Thing from Underneath” “The Thing in the Truck” (as Darius John Granger) “The Valiant Die Hard!” (as Adam Chase)

Appendix II “Through a Glass Darkly” “We Run from the Hunted!” (as Darius John Granger) “World of the Hunter” (as C.H. Thames) “You’ll Go Mad on Mars!” (as C.H. Thames) 1957 “Deadly Honeymoon” (as Adam Chase) “Disaster Revisited” (as Darius John Granger) “Do It Yourself” “Get Out of My World” (as Darius John Granger) “Gods Also Die” (as Darius John Granger) “He Fired His Boss” (as Darius John Granger) “His Touch Turned Stone to Flesh” (as Adam Chase) “Home Is Where You Left It” (as Adam Chase) “Legs on Olympus” (as Adam Chase) “Name Your Tiger” “School for Conquerors” (as Adam Chase) “So You Want to be President” (as Adam Chase) “The Early Bird” “The Earthman” “The Enemy Within” (as Darius John Granger) “The Exquisite Nudes” (as Adam Chase) “The Lady Had Wings” (as Darius John Granger) “The Man Who Made His Dreams Come True” (as C.H. Thames) “The New World to Conquer” ( as Adam Chase) “Think Yourself to Death” (as C.H. Thames) “Time Out” (as Darius John Granger) “Winged Planet” (as Adam Chase) 1958 “Blizzard-Brain” “Blonde Cargo” (as Adam Chase) “Drumbeat” (as Adam Chase) “Excitement for Sale” (as Stephen Wilder) “Mayhem Enslaved” (as C.H. Thames) “The Man Who Would Not Die” (as Darius John Granger) “The Space Breed” (as Adam Chase) “World Beyond Pluto” (as C.H. Thames) 1959 “The Most Important Man in the World” (as Darius John Granger) 1960

197

198

Chaos and Madness

“Divvy Up” (as Milt Lesser) “Drum Beat” (as Stephen Marlowe)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Ansón, Arturo, “La familia de Goya: ascendientes y descendientes”: see http://goya.unizar.es/InfoGoya/Vida/Familia.html, 1996. Benedict, Francesca, “From Story to History and Back: History in North American Literature in the 1980s”, in Postmodern Studies 11: Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, eds Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995, 11532. Bennett, David, “Postmodernism and Vision: Ways of Seeing (at) the End of History”, in Postmodern Studies 3: History and Post-War Writing, eds Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990, 259-79. Benigni, U, “Pignatelli”: see http://www.enciclopediacatolica.com/p/ pignatelli.htm, 1999. Breinig, Helmbrecht, “‘(Hi)storytelling as Deconstruction and Seduction: The Columbus Novels of Stephen Marlowe and Michael Dorris/Louise Erdrich”, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, eds Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, Paderborn and Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1994, 325-46. Brown, Charles Brockden, “The Difference between History and Romance”, Monthly Magazine, II/4 (April 1800), 251-53. Calvo, Mónica, “Chaos and Borders in Stephen Marlowe’s The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus”, in Beyond Borders: Redefining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, eds Ramón PloAlastrué and María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2001, 55-65. ————, “Pushing the Boundaries of Historiographic Metafiction: Temporal Instability, ‘Authority’ and Authorship in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe”, Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses, VII (2006), 23-31. ————, “Fascism and Neurosis in Spain: Stephen Marlowe’s Ethical Stance in Colossus”, in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, eds Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, 272-90. ————, “The Order/Disorder Binary in Stephen Marlowe’s Fiction: From Neurotic Subjects to Narrative Chaos”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, XIII (2008), 49-62. Carr, E.H. What Is History?, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.

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INDEX Abu’l Qurra, 113 Alba, Cayetana de, 22-23, 2526, 31-33, 40 Alonso Quijano, 171 Amadis of Gaul, 167 Anacaoná, 63, 78 anachronism, 18, 20-22, 62-63, 83, 111-12, 116, 134, 153, 179, 181, 184 Avellaneda, Alonso Fernández de, 148 Behaim, Martin, 70-71, 81 Bellow, Saul, 103; The Adventures of Augie March, 103 Billy Budd, 62, 75, 102 Blue Pimpernel, 73-74, 89, 103, 108 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 94 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 24, 43, 54 Brendan, St, 69-70 Brown, Charles Brockden, 16 calendar, Gregorian, 64, 115, 186; Julian, 64, 186 cante hondo, 37, 73 Carib Indians, 58 Cartaphilus, 71, 107, 111-12 Casas, Fray Bartolomé de las, 81-82 Casenove, Guillaume de, 6768

Catholic Monarchs, 58, 63, 68, 71, 75, 86, 104 Cervantes y Saavedra, Miguel de, 115-78; Don Quixote, 3, 123-26, 130-39, 141, 145, 147-48, 152, 155, 158, 16769, 175, 178, 184-85; La Galatea, 138; La Señora Cornelia, 123; The Dungeons of Algiers, 138, 169 chain reaction, 92 chance, 78, 85, 91-93, 96, 101, 157-58, 182, 185-86 chaos, 5, 46, 91, 93, 95-96, 98, 110, 155-56, 159-60, 186; chaotics, 156 Chester Drum, 2 Christian, new, 53, 67, 72, 100, 109, 116, 173; old, 53, 152, 170, 173 Christopher, St, 80, 107, 111, 113 Cide Hamete Benengeli, 130, 132-34, 139, 146-48, 15051, 153, 160, 163-66, 17072, 178, 184 Civil War (Spanish), 5, 51-52 Clausius, Rudolph J., 93-94 Coleridge, S.T. 14, 20, 62, 103, 110, 179; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, 103, 110 Collado-Rodríguez, Francisco, 4, 17, 62, 99

208

Chaos and Madness

Colón, Diego, 58, 67, 77, 106; Hernando, 70, 87 Columbus, Christopher, 57113 complexity, 91, 95-96, 99, 183, 187 converso, 116, 122, 136, 167, 170, 172-75, 177 Cooper, James Fenimore, 16 Coover, Robert, 17; The Public Burning, 17 Count of Aranda, 25, 27, 32, 54 Count St Germain, 111, 112, 178 Crane, Stephen, 16; The Red Badge of Courage, 16 Cristo Crucificado, 30 D’Arignano, Vanozza, 67 Davies, Paul, 64, 92, 95-97 Deleuze, Gilles, 46-49, 55, 180 Derrida, Jacques, 11-12, 75 determinism, 91, 155, 158-59, 185 différance, 12 dissipative structure, 98-99, 110, 183 Doctorow, E.L., 17 Doppelgänger, 149 Dos Passos, John, 16; U.S.A., 16 Drake, Sir Francis, 102, 144 Drumbeat, 2, 190, 197 Dulcinea del Toboso, 123, 132 Easter, 27, 42, 72, 92 Eco, Umberto, 75, 131 Einstein, Albert, 92

Enlightenment, 11, 13, 20, 24, 49-51, 94, 179-80 entropy, 17, 93-95 Eric the Red, 69 fascism, 48, 56, 180 Faust, Johann Georg, 155 Fleishman, Avrom, 19, 51, 56, 179 Foucault, Michel, 12-14, 4143, 46-47, 74, 126, 163-64, 180, 182 Fowler, Alastair, 8 fragmentation, 11-12, 16 Francis of Assisi, St, 69, 10 Franco, Francisco, 5, 52-55 free will, 78, 155, 158-60, 185 French Revolution, 32, 54, 73, 112 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 47, 63, 134 Fuentes, Eugenio Sánchez de, 108; Colón y el judío errante, 108 fundamentalism, 5, 104, 106, 155, 169, 178, 183, 185 genealogy, 12, 182 Gleick, James, 94 Godoy, Manuel, 24, 32-34, 39, 41, 55 Goya, Francisco de, 19-56 grand design, 93, 96, 160-61 Gribbin, John, 64, 92, 95-97 Guanahaní, 58, 75, 77, 111 Guattari, Félix, 46-49, 55, 180 Harana, Beatriz Enríquez de, 58, 70, 106

Index Hardy, Thomas, 122; Jude the Obscure, 122 Hayles, N. Katherine, 94-95, 97 Hegel, Friedrich, 10, 14 Heller, Joseph, 17; Catch 22, 17 Herne the Hunter, 107 heterotopia, 74, 126, 184 Higueymota, 78 Hispaniola, 63, 76, 78-79 historia rerum gestarum, 91, 153 historical novel, 2-4, 6-10, 1521, 23, 37-38, 51, 56, 63, 65, 83-84, 87, 115, 179, 181, 186-87 historiography, 7-10, 13-16, 20, 24, 57, 59, 65, 68, 8182, 99, 163, 179, 181-82, 185 Hutcheon, Linda, 4, 15-16, 57, 66, 83, 86-87, 181 in medias res, 115 infinite regress, 155, 176-78, 185-86 Inquisition, 26, 28, 45, 49-50, 53-54, 58, 63, 70, 72-73, 75, 87, 104-06, 109, 170-72, 175, 183 intertextual, references, 96, 99, 103; space, 74, 131, 135, 184 Isolde, 68, 108, 126 Jewish, 67, 70-72, 92, 100, 106-108, 110-11, 116, 128, 134, 140, 155, 170-75, 178,

209 183, 185-86; Jews, Crypto-, 147, 155, 172-73 Lacan, Jacques, 11-12, 14, 47 local color, 19-20, 32, 36-37, 136, 179 logos, 14, 101 Luzán, José, 24, 28 Lyotard, Jean-François, 13, 86 McHale, Brian, 20, 74, 89, 131, 179 madness, 6, 39-46, 51, 125, 155, 167-69, 178, 180, 185 mania, 40, 42, 180 Marlowe, Christopher, 131, 150, 166 Maxwell, James Clerk, 93, 94 melancholia, 42, 180 Melville, Herman, 102; Moby Dick, 62, 102 metafiction, 15, 57, 86, 91, 98, 115, 145-46, 183; historiographic, 4, 6, 10, 15, 65, 83, 85-88, 116-17, 150, 152, 181, 185-86 Motín de Squillace, 27-28, 43 Mutiny on the Bounty, 103 narrator, autodiegetic, 57, 61, 99, 102, 112, 116, 158, 181; omniscient, 21-22, 39, 96, 111, 158, 183 Navigatio Santi Brendani Abatis, 70 neurosis, 47, 50, 55-56 Newfoundland, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10-12 noble savage, 62

210

Chaos and Madness

noise, 86, 93-94, 97, 182 nomadism, 174, 177, 186; nomadic, 2, 106, 172-73, 183, 186 nonequilibrium, 98 Olavide, Pablo de, 23, 25-27 paranoia, 17, 47, 100 paratext, 87 Paulson, William, 97, 99 Petrarch, 124 Piccolomini, E.S., 68 Pignatelli, Nicolás, 23-25, 2729 Pope Alexander VI, 67-68, 100; Borgia, Roderigo, 82, 86, 92, 102, 106 post, modernism, 10, 13, 64, 83, 86; modernist, 6, 8, 10, 14-15, 17, 62-63, 65, 74, 83, 85, 87, 96, 115-16, 153, 164, 181-82; structuralism, 11-12; structuralist, 11, 1314, 17, 75, 162, 181 Prigogine, Ilya, 93, 98, 110, 160 Projet pour une révolution à New York, 89 pseudo-autobiography, 116 Puerto de Palos, 82 Pynchon, Thomas, 17, 100; V., 100 quantum mechanics, 5 Queen Elizabeth I, 63, 131, 166 Queen Mary I, 166

randomness, 93-94, 96, 182 recursive symmetry, 95, 10810 Regiomontanus, J.M., 63, 70 res gestae, 91, 153 Robinson Crusoe, 62 Royal Academy of San Fernando, 24, 28, 30 Saavedra, Isabel de, 121 Salazar y Palacios, Catalina de, 121 Santángel, Luis de, 71-73, 77, 79, 100-101, 105, 107, 109 Scarlet Pimpernel, 74 schizoanalysis, 47 schlemihl, 100 Scott, Sir Walter, 7-9, 16, 2022, 84; Waverley, 8-9, 84 Second Law of Thermodynamics, 93, 183 Second Republic (Spanish), 51-52, 54-55 Seder, 92, 100 self-consciousness, 16, 85, 88, 97, 135-36, 184 Shakespeare, William, 131, 133, 148, 150 Shannon, Claude, 94-95 Simms, William Gilmore, 16 Spanish Armada, 63, 121, 15758, 170 steganographia, 165 Stengers, Isabelle, 93, 98, 110, 160

Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 84 stigmata, 100

Index Stoicheff, Peter, 96-98 Stonehill, Brian, 14, 103 system, linear, 95; nonlinear, 95 Tasso, Torquato, 124-25, 136, 144, 161, 168-69 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 29, 38, 41-42, 45, 186 Torquemada, Tomás de, 58, 70, 106 Torres, Luis, 72-74, 87, 108 Toscanelli, Ser Paolo del Pozzo, 58, 70 transworld identity, 74, 132, 184 Tristram, 64, 68-69, 108-10, 126 Twain, Mark, 16; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 16 uchronian, concept of, 151; fiction, 150, 152, 168, 185; involvement, 169

211 Vega, Lope de, 89, 129-30, 142, 148, 151, 172 Vigil of the First Voyage, 79 Virgin of Pilar, 30 Vonnegut, Kurt, 17, 150; Slaughterhouse-Five, 17, 150 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 131, 144, 163, 166 Wandering Jew, 71, 80, 10708, 110-12, 177-78, 183, 185 Waugh, Patricia, 15, 85 Weaver, Warren, 95 Wendover, Roger, 107-08, 110-12 Wesseling, Elisabeth, 7-9, 1920, 22, 86, 150-51, 153 White, Hayden, 66 Whole Sick Crew, 100 Wicken, Jeffrey S., 95 Wineland the Good, 69, 102 Wouk, Herman, 102; The Caine Mutiny, 102