Transnational Cervantes 9781442621626

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TRANSNATIONAL CERVANTES

This ambitious work aims to utterly change the way Don Quixote and Cervantes’ other works are read, particularly the posthumous The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda. William Childers sets out to free Cervantes’ work from its context within the histories of the European national literatures. Instead, he examines early modern Spanish cultural production as an antecedent to contemporary postcolonial literature, especially Latin American fiction of the past half century. In order to construct his new context for reading Cervantes, Childers proceeds in three distinct phases. First, Cervantes’ relation to the Western literary canon is reconfigured, detaching him from the realist novel and associating him, instead, with magic realism. Second, Childers provides an innovative reading of The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda as a transnational romance, exploring cultural boundaries and the hybridization of identities. Finally, Childers explores traces of and similarities to Cervantes in contemporary fiction. Theoretically eclectic and methodologically innovative, Transnational Cervantes opens up many avenues for research and debate, aiming to bring Cervantes’ writings forward into the brave new world of our postcolonial age. (University of Toronto Romance Series) william childers is an associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College.

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WILLIAM CHILDERS

Transnational Cervantes

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2006 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. Reprinted in paperback 2014 ISBN 978-0-8020-9045-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1511-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper University of Toronto Romance Series Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Childers, William Transnational Cervantes / William Childers. University of Toronto Romance Series Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9045-4 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-1511-3 (pbk.) 1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616 – Political and social views. 3. Nationalism and Literature – Spain. I. Title. II. Series: University of Toronto romance sereies PQ6348.A3C44 2006

863’.3

C2006-902389-1

Excerpt from Floricanto en Aztlán by Alurista reprinted by permission of The Regents of the University of California from UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Not for further reproduction. This book has been published with the help of a subvention from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

para Félix Martínez Bonati

‘Das – ist nun mein Weg – wo ist der eure?’ so antwortete ich denen, welche mich ‘nach dem Wege’ fragten. Den Weg nämlich – den gibt es nicht! Also Sprach Zarathustra

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Contents

Preface: Transnationalizing Cervantes ix Acknowledgments xxiii Part One. Decolonizing Cervantes 1 Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 3 Internal Colonialism in Early Modern Spain 4 ‘Under my cloak, I kill the king’: Reading and Resistance 14 La Mancha as Borderland 23 2 Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 44 Carpentier, Forcione, and the ‘Persiles’ 45 The Marvellous as a Contested Site in European Culture 49 Ontological Ambiguity and Generic Hybridity in Cervantes 55 Cide Hamete Benengeli: The Other Within 68 Conclusion 76 Part Two. Cervantes’ Transnational Romance 3 Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda 83 Feliciana de la Voz: A Secularized Miracle Story 89 ‘Según es cristiana la gente’: Antonio de Villaseñor’s Return to Quintanar de la Orden 106

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Conclusion: The Reader as Pilgrim 121 4 Turning Spain Inside Out 125 Mapping the Fictional Realms of Persiles y Sigismunda 126 Transitions: Toward a Poetics of Social Restructuring 131 A Nation Traversed by Its Borders 151 Part Three. Cervantes Now 5 Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain 163 The New Hispano-Muslims 164 Splicing the Broken Thread 169 An Internal Colony in Sixteenth-Century Spain 171 Cervantes’ Moriscas: Yesterday and Tomorrow 177 6 Chicanoizing Don Quixote 194 ‘Launch against the Windmills!’ 196 Three Readers Rewriting 198 From the Morsico Jofor to the Ghost Dance Cult 203 Don Quixote, the Novel, and the Postcolonial World 216 Conclusion: Cervantes and Shakespeare: Toward a Canon of Spanglish Literature 223 Colonial Quixotes 230 Shakespeare, Race, and the Spanish Inquisition 234 Toward an Americanist Reading of Persiles y Sigismunda 238 Notes 243 Works Cited 273 Index 295

Preface: Transnationalizing Cervantes

This book reconfigures Cervantes’ place in literary history. Its transnationalizing strategy simultaneously disassociates his work from European post-Enlightenment modernity and connects early modern Spain with other temporalities and geographies. Transnational Cervantes strives to reinvigorate our understanding of his texts within their original historical circumstances, and at the same time open up new possibilities for reading them in our own day. I affirm the relevance of his seventeenthcentury texts to pressing concerns of the twenty-first century by establishing analogies between the historical period during which the nation-state began to emerge and its current crisis. I have chosen to describe this new configuration as ‘transnational,’ first of all to indicate how it opens up Cervantes’ texts to contexts beyond Spain and ultimately beyond Europe as well, but also to emphasize that it involves a working through of the nation as a category for historical interpretation. The prefix trans- can have many meanings, as is notoriously the case with post-. (See Appiah’s influential ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’). Literal or metaphorical movement across, over, through, or beyond connects all the uses of trans-, from transportation to translation to transubstantiation. A frequent figurative meaning is a movement in which one thing becomes something else – a transformation. The trans- in transnational suggests that we only move beyond the nation by going through it, by revisiting its founding myths, by re-examining the invented tradition it projects back into time immemorial. Tradition (where trans- is shortened to tra-) is etymologically tied to treason, for what is carried forward, transmitted from one generation to the next, changes along the way and turns imperceptibly into something else. It becomes necessary to retrace the

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steps that have led us to where we are now, in order to reach a vantage point in the past from which to ask after paths that were not taken. What has become of them? Are they still available as possibilities to be realized? The emotional investment of imagined communities in their narratives of origin and growth makes such interrogations appear transgressive. Cervantes’ writings and the period during which he lived together offer a privileged site for this interrogation. Spain at this time is not fully consolidated as a modern nation state. The conglomeration of absolutist monarchy, overseas empire, Hapsburg family possessions, recalcitrant Catholicism, and an emerging mercantile economy are really only its raw materials. Etienne Balibar discusses the ‘long “pre-history”’ of national formations, which ‘consists of a multiplicity of qualitatively distinct events’ that ‘do not even belong by nature to the history of the nation-state, but to other rival forms (for example, the “imperial” form).’ He adds, ‘It is not a line of necessary evolution but a series of conjunctural relations which has inscribed them after the event into the pre-history of the nation form’ (Race, Nation, Class 88). He posits a ‘threshold of irreversibility,’ after which the disparate elements coalesce, and other models of state organization lose their viability. In terms of chronology, he admits that this threshold ‘is obviously impossible to identify with a single date,’ but in a note he suggests: ‘If one did, however, have to choose a date symbolically, one might point to the middle of the sixteenth century: the completion of the Spanish conquest of the New World, the break-up of the Habsburg Empire, the end of the dynastic wars in England and the beginning of the Dutch War of Independence’ (105n2). Don Quixote belongs to this threshold; it cannot be said to be definitively on one side or the other. Indeed, throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, Iberian ambitions pulled in two different directions: the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. These external objects of imperial desire corresponded with internal conflicts. The struggle against the Ottomans and the Barbary Coast pirates for control of the Mediterranean, insofar as it was perceived as a war with Islam, overlapped with the civil wars fought against the Moriscos (Braudel II.1055–87). New World conquest, too, had consequences for the homeland. The famed debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda over the rights of the Indians sent shock waves through Spain, dramatizing the dilemma over whether to identify with imperial power or colonial resistance.1 Furthermore, the ongoing religious wars between Protestants and Catholics had their internal counter-

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part in the vigilant scrutiny of Spaniards’ own faith by the Inquisition. Thus the question of the limits of national identity, of the border between inside and outside, remained unresolved. The claims of Muslims, autochthonous peasants, and religious mavericks asserted themselves across this permeable frontier. Seen in this framework, the concern with purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) can be understood as a protonationalist attempt to fix this limit, and thereby define the Spanish ‘people’ through symbolic exclusion of ‘othered’ conversos and Moriscos. The point is to avoid assuming that ‘Spain’ became a modern state overnight in 1492 and then proceeded to conquer the New World and punish deviancy within its own borders, from an unswerving position as the nation that it would eventually become. Instead, the colonization of the New World and the imposition of a unified national identity turn out to be parallel processes. Religion plays a particularly important role. Militant national Catholicism furnishes the rationale for the exclusions on which this national identity will be based, and the conversion of the indigenous of the New World gives impetus to the sense of mission. But awareness of ‘enemies of the faith’ – Protestants, Muslims, and Jews – in the midst of Spanish society was encouraged as well. As I argue in chapter 1, the Spanish peasantry underwent a dramatic transformation in this period, absorbing a radically different version of ‘Christianity.’ The ‘local religion’ of the Middle Ages that William Christian has studied was grafted onto a new, state-controlled religion that assigned local people a global role as ‘keepers of the faith.’ As we will see, the Inquisition provided the crucial link between church, state, and populace.2 Cervantes wrote during this threshold period of national formation, and his writings now seem to many to point in a different direction than the one Spanish society actually took. Used judiciously, the concept of ‘resistance’ is a valuable hermeneutic tool for conceptualizing the tension between Cervantes’ texts and Castilian leadership. This is not to say that he was a rebellious subject; Mariscal’s concept of ‘contradictory subject’ seems more helpful. For writers like Mateo Alemán and Miguel de Cervantes, however much they may have perceived the shift in momentum toward a more xenophobic, ideologically closed society, other possibilities remained viable. In the case of Cervantes, those possibilities led him, as I will argue in my reading of Persiles y Sigismunda in chapters 3 and 4, to propose a more porous, less exclusive concept of national identity, compatible with a certain cosmopolitanism. It is through the reconstruction of that conception that I will be able to tap into a transnational, centrifugal force in Cervantes’ fiction.3

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Assigning Cervantes’ works to the threshold of Spanish nation-formation situates this study between two ongoing intellectual endeavours. On one side, it shares a certain family resemblance with a number of studies that have appeared over the last fifteen years, such as Mariscal’s Contradictory Subjects, Redondo’s Otra forma de leer el ‘Quijote,’ Johnson’s Cervantes and the Material World, and Fuchs’s Mimesis and Empire. What unites these studies into something like a tendency is their attentiveness to the specificity of Spain’s early modernity.4 Rather than jumping to consider the literature of the ‘Golden Age’ in the light of European high modernity, this perspective strives tenaciously to take early modern texts on their own historical terms. Though focused on economic, political, and sociocultural issues of Counter-Reformation Spain, the authors mentioned (especially Mariscal and Johnson) seem to keep one eye on similarities between Baroque forms of subjectivity and public life, on the one hand, and our current predicament, on the other. Often only hinted at, these analogies suggest an affinity whose basis I explain in terms of the history of European colonialism. The early modern period corresponds with the initial phase of European expansion, when the consolidation of empire at home was still far from being a fait accompli. Today’s postcolonial vantage point has once again led to a critical perspective on European/North American world hegemony. What the early modern/colonial and post-modern/colonial perspectives share, then, is their difference from the highwater mark of the European bourgeoisie’s smug sense that what was best for their small elite was best for humanity as a whole. Though such views have not disappeared, they can no longer lay claim to being the dominant ideology of our time. The other endeavour in relation to which I wish to situate Transnational Cervantes is the emerging field of global literary and cultural studies. Once the affinities mentioned above are grasped, the value of early modern Spanish studies for a globalizing approach to literature and culture reveals itself. Among proposed global models, the Caribbean now exercises a special attraction. The construction of a postmodern Caribbean, pioneered in Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, has opened the way for such theorists as Timothy Reiss and Peter Hitchcock to ground their new, transnational approaches in the postcolonial literatures of that multilingual space. The twenty-first-century Caribbean and the early modern Mediterranean world share significant features of topography and the interaction among multiple languages and cultures. But more to the point, the competition among fledgling empires that overflowed from the Mediterranean came to define the ‘West Indies’ in

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the modern period. There is thus an organic relation between these times and spaces that, with few exceptions, has not garnered attention from those who now turn to the Caribbean for inspiration. Reiss’s brilliant essay ‘Caribbean Knights,’ discussed in the conclusion to this book, constitutes a partial exception to the above generalization. Reiss uses what he terms the ‘Quijote paradigm’ to interpret the relation between colonial history and literary creation in several Caribbean novelists, but does not attempt to explain the historical foundation of his Quijote paradigm in Cervantes’ Spain. He relies instead on the formulations of Spanish intellectuals of the Generation of ’98, whose quasimystical evocations of the Castilian landscape he boldly recontexualizes. Transnational Cervantes lays some of the groundwork for a fuller exploration of the connections between that new context, in a specific local geography of the New World, and the historical circumstances under which Don Quixote first appeared. Peter Hitchcock has introduced the term ‘imaginary state’ as a supplement to the ‘idea of the Nation,’ which he admits ‘exerts specific imaginative constraints on cultural transnationalism’ (11). This tension, between the national perspective, which, as I argued above, we must work through, rather than believing we can simply abandon it, and a broader cultural configuration, informs Transnational Cervantes. Indeed, the entire argument of this book rests on the claim that Cervantes straddles this divide. Appropriated by the Spanish state as a symbol of national pride, at the same time he has often appealed to those in exile who consider him a symbol of everything the Spanish nation excludes and rejects. No one has articulated this more effectively than Juan Goytisolo, a modern renegado who professes no love for ‘Spain.’ In a remarkable formulation, he has encapsulated the sense of identity he espouses, which embraces all those who have rejected monocultural Spain – from the mudéjares, mozárabes, and conversos, to Blanco White and Américo Castro – by declaring himself to be of ‘Cervantine nationality’ (‘Nacionalidad Cervantina’). This book tries to contribute to mapping the imaginary state that could correspond to that designation. One of the subsidiary goals Transnational Cervantes must take on is the dismantling of the current understanding of Cervantes’ place in literary history. When histories of the vernacular literatures came to be written under the spell of nineteenth-century nationalism, Cervantes was positioned firmly within a tradition imagined as stretching back centuries before him. Further, the position assigned to him in that tradition was

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that of the privileged canonical author of Spanish literature, incorporated into a system of modern European literatures. In this configuration, Cervantes is Spain’s ‘classic,’ the equivalent for Spanish literature of Shakespeare, Dante, or Goethe; and Don Quixote is the first modern novel, Spain’s major contribution to modern Western literature. Thus the definition of Don Quixote as the originator of the modern genre par excellence has functioned as the lynchpin around which Spanish literary history is organized and inserted into European literature. This paradoxically both guarantees and limits Spain’s place in the configuration of the modern literatures, rendering unnecessary the further study of its literary productions (including Cervantes’ other works), since the genre it supposedly created subsequently flourished elsewhere. Between these two idées reçues, then, there is a fundamental complicity that sequesters Spanish literature as a relatively minor literature within the European tradition (behind England and France, certainly), at the same time severing its connections to Semitic traditions and to the literatures of the Americas.5 As I argue in chapter 2, Don Quixote prominently displays both these dimensions of the Spanish-language tradition. Its approach to the marvellous is indebted to the Arabic tradition that powerfully influenced Castilian narrative going back to the thirteenthcentury reign of Alfonso the Wise. The deliciously playful irony introduced by this cultural hybridity, boldly manifest in the ‘Arab historian’ Cide Hamete Benengeli, is precisely what has so appealed to Latin American writers, for whom Don Quixote has served as a source of inspiration quite different from the nineteenth-century European novel. The unqualified repetition ad nauseam of the cliché that Don Quixote is the ‘first modern novel,’ though perhaps intended simply as an honorific, a compliment to the book’s originality and influence, in practice has masked the importance of cultural hybridity in its creation. A statement meant to give Cervantes’ masterpiece stature actually has tended to shrink its multifarious, transcultural significance down to a single dimension.6 Viewing Don Quixote as a modern novel not only introduces a distorted hermeneutic that flattens the work and disables innovative readings; it relegates most of Cervantes’ other fiction to the dustbin of literary history. Elevated romance predominates in La Galatea, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, and much of the collection entitled Novelas ejemplares. Multi-generic composition is a hallmark of all of Cervantes’ long narrative. From this point of view, Persiles y Sigismunda has more in common with Don Quixote than is usually recognized. Each is the inverse of the

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other: whereas Don Quixote concerns a rather ordinary hidalgo from La Mancha who travels in his imagination to the far-off worlds of romance, Persiles y Sigismunda is the story of two characters who journey from the exotic lands of romance through the everyday world of the reader, including la Mancha. Like Cervantes’ masterpiece, the under-appreciated, under-read book that absorbed his final efforts as a writer is also a compendium of literary forms, incorporating multiple genres and spreading them out across a fanciful European geography stretching from Iceland, Scotland, and Lithuania in the North, to Lisbon, Algiers, and Naples in the South. In this context, Persiles y Sigismunda acts as a counterweight to Don Quixote. Reading this relatively forgotten, underrated work defamiliarizes Don Quixote, a book so saturated with commentary that a fresh encounter with the text has become difficult. If, as his statements about it indicate, Cervantes was just as proud of this Baroque text, seemingly so alien to our sensibilities, as he was of Don Quixote, what does this tell us about the way we read him? Persiles y Sigismunda can also serve as a counterweight to the insularity of Don Quixote, whose hero never leaves Iberia. The former is written on a much grander scale, incorporating characters from a dozen or more countries, who travel by land and sea throughout Europe, from Scandinavia to Rome. As Cervantes’ most transnational composition, it reveals another facet of his imagination, and demands that we rethink the broader context of that very Spanish book for which he is so much better known. It may strike some as protesting too much to insist that Persiles y Sigismunda remains a neglected work. Certainly the recuperation of Cervantes’ posthumous romance has come a long way since Casalduero wrote the first study that took its aesthetic merit seriously, just over half a century ago. Although it is still not unusual for illustrious Cervantists to ignore Persiles y Sigismunda altogether, two of the leading North American specialists on Cervantes, Forcione and Wilson, began their careers by studying it, and one of the final projects of the great French Cervantist Maurice Mohlo was a new translation into French. Not many individual works of Spanish literature of the Golden Age have been the subject of half a dozen book-length monographs in the last fifteen years. Nonetheless, most of what has been written on Persiles can easily be cut off from the rest of Cervantes criticism. Little has been done since the work of Forcione and Ruth El Saffar on Persiles, over two decades ago, to use this seemingly eccentric Cervantine text to alter the way we view the rest of

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his writings, not to mention the way we see Spanish literature in relation to Europe and Latin America. In Transnational Cervantes I try to establish an angle of approach that gives Persiles y Sigismunda a prominent position side by side with Don Quixote, and thus helps us to reconsider Cervantes’ place in world letters. Transnational Cervantes is divided into three sections of two chapters each. Though the book as a whole presents a single, complex argument, I have tried to write each chapter so that it stands alone. Part One, ‘Decolonizing Cervantes,’ focuses on broad historiographical issues, repositioning Cervantes’ fiction in terms of the social and political changes taking place in early modern Spain, and establishing comparisons with Latin American cultural practice. Part Two, ‘Cervantes’ Transnational Romance,’ offers a reading of the posthumous Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, his greatest work after Don Quixote, as a transnational romance. Part Three, ‘Cervantes Now,’ makes the four-hundred-year leap to the present, considering examples of ways his early modern narratives can continue to signify in our postcolonial era. Together, then, the three sections of this book constitute three stages in a single argument, by means of which (1) the traditional approach to Cervantes is dismantled; (2) Persiles y Sigismunda, an important, but relatively neglected work, is taken up as a way to offset the one-sided emphasis on Don Quixote; and (3) the new configuration achieved in the first two parts is used as a tool for transnational, presentist readings. Chapter 1, ‘The Colonized Imagination,’ serves as the introduction to the book as a whole, presenting the concept of internal colonialism as a key to understanding the cultural history of Spain’s ‘Golden Age.’ Internal colonialism, along with Aníbal Quijano’s broader abstraction, ‘coloniality of power,’ are shown to be flexible concepts capable of drawing a number of different cultural issues together, especially where the imposition of Catholic orthodoxy across different sectors of society is concerned. The section entitled ‘La Mancha as Borderland’ focuses on the region Cervantes returned to again and again in his works, offering an explanation for its prominence based on its strategic position as the empire’s ‘backyard.’ Chapter 2, ‘Cervantes and lo real maravilloso,’ looks at elements of the supernatural in Don Quixote, Persiles y Sigismunda, and the Novelas ejemplares, pursuing the analogy with Latin American magical realism first introduced over half a century ago by Alejo Carpentier. Crucial for the reading of Persiles y Sigismunda which follows, this chapter sets out to

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show how Cervantes struggled to wrest control over the representation of the supernatural from ecclesiastical authorities, paving the way for a lay appropriation of structures of meaning generally reserved for religious discourse with a firm doctrinal basis. Chapter 3, ‘Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda,’ begins a new section of two chapters concerned with the interpretation of Cervantes’ last work. Yet at the same time this chapter continues to explore Cervantes’ rejection of religious control over cultural practices. It treats the pilgrimage theme, not in relation to the allegorical peregrinatio vitae, but in the context of the practice of pilgrimage and other aspects of the social history of sixteenth-century Castile. The result is a changed picture of Cervantes’ last-completed work in relation to the religious institutions of his day. Chapter 4, ‘Turning Spain Inside Out,’ looks briefly at the fictional worlds of Persiles y Sigismunda and how transitions among them are structured, before offering an interpretation of the work as a whole, in terms of an alternative vision of Spain within the larger contexts of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic world. The last section, ‘Cer vantes Now,’ consists of two exercises in ‘presentism,’ included in Transnational Cervantes as examples of the kind of criticism the four preceding chapters aim to make possible. They bring Cervantes’ texts to bear on contemporary issues, including immigration, minority cultures, and the role of European national languages and literatures in a postnational and multicultural United States. Chapter 5, ‘Remembering the Future,’ views the Moriscos in Cervantes’ texts as a background to the current immigration from Morocco, in order to emphasize the continuity between the descendants of Muslims expelled from the Iberian Peninsula four hundred years ago and the new Islamic presence in post-Franco Spain. It culminates with a consideration of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar’s provocative understanding of Zoraida as her own cultural predecessor.7 Chapter 6, ‘Chicanoizing Don Quixote,’ brings together four Chicano novelists who have appropriated the figure of Don Quixote as a symbol of resistance to Anglo-American culture. By examining the common ground in their symbolic use of Cervantes’ character, and considering the context in which it emerged, I articulate a Chicano reading of Don Quixote, whose validity I then attempt to demonstrate by arguing that Cervantes originally composed the work under analogous conditions of internal colonialism. In the conclusion of Transnational Cervantes, entitled ‘Cervantes and Shakespeare: Towards a Canon of Spanglish Literature,’ these two writers are placed head-tohead as the leading figures of the Hispanic and Anglo canons within the

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contemporary United States. The goal of this audacious juxtaposition is to drive home to North American readers just what is at stake in the reconfiguration of literary history enacted here. In concluding this preface, I would like to discuss briefly the methodological principles I have tried to follow. My historicizing of Cervantes’ writings proceeds by reading them as if over the shoulder of a possible seventeenth-century reader. What knowledge might such a reader share with Cervantes about their social world that would condition the meaning of his texts? To begin with, of course, our hypothetical reader would know other works of Spanish literature, such as Celestina, Amadís de Gaula, La Diana, and Guzmán de Alfarache, not to mention dozens of comedias by Lope de Vega and his followers, and the works of lyric poets such as Garcilaso, Herrera, and Góngora. But we should not forget that during the Counter-Reformation the popularity of devotional treatises far outstripped that of secular literature, and so our reader would surely know Fray Luis de Granada, for example. Things get murkier once we begin to speculate concerning the oral culture readers would be familiar with, and the many cultural practices and institutional realities that we can only reconstruct through painstaking archival research. Generally, my assumption is that however exceptional the cases I read about may appear, Cervantes and his contemporaries would have known about similar examples, though usually not the same ones as I find in the archive. Particularly, my research concerning the appeals of lawsuits to the Consejo de Órdenes and visits by Inquisitors has convinced me that around 1600 even the average manchego would be quite familiar with legal proceedings and issues of religious orthodoxy. Nonetheless, I recognize that reconstructions based on archival documents are more tangential and fragile than traditional source criticism or history of ideas, though perhaps more creative as well. They also have, in my view, the important virtue of taking us beyond a purely elite culture, and bringing us closer to the ordinary people whose fictional counterparts inhabit Cervantes’ writings. Yet this attempt to read through the eyes of a seventeenth-century reader is only half of the hermeneutic circle, in the historicist terms in which I understand it. The other half consists in the opposite movement, back to the present, but from the perspective initially achieved through historical reconstruction. This is a process, as it were, of ‘dragging Cervantes through the centuries,’ to show the relevance, not simply of his texts, but of the entire constellation of meanings they establish in

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relation to their historical circumstances. I accept the label ‘presentism’ for this aspect of my project, but I hasten to add that if literary works did not have meaning for us in the present, there would be no reason to read them. The old view (not completely abandoned) was that literary works have such meaning because ‘just anyone’ reading them can understand and enjoy them, and their lives will be enriched as a result. This could be taken in an empirical sense, with no concern for the stability of their meaning and value over time. A grander theoretical claim underlay this way of reading in most instances, though: the universal subject. If we discard the claim to universality, how can we make sense out of the literature of the past? As I see it, we must tunnel through the intervening historical time from both ends, much like a child tunneling under a sandcastle. There can be no question of a positivist reconstruction of every potentially relevant aspect of four hundred years of cultural history. The process is undoubtedly hit-or-miss, but eventually numerous crisscrossing tunnels accumulate. In places where nodes appear, they open the possibility of going back into the past and coming out somewhere else. Walter Mignolo’s project of horizontally linking up local histories as an alternative to Western universalism comes to mind as a large-scale model of this process. Transnational Cervantes is, more than anything else, an attempt to establish a place in that dialogue for Cervantes, which is to say, a place in the postcolonial landscape for a shard from Western Europe’s own past. Ultimately I hope to have contributed, in however small a way, to breaking down the distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ literatures. In other words, this book forms part of a (much) larger project of dismantling the Western canon altogether. The question of Cervantes’ meaning in the present is neither arcane nor banal. The year 2005 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Part One of Don Quixote. The level of interest has been high, not only in Spain but around the world, with numerous events, publications, and conferences. A series of constituencies have promoted the centenary always with an eye to exploiting Cervantes’ prestige to further their own interests. The Junta de Castilla–La Mancha, and in particular their office of tourism, have, understandably, taken advantage of the occasion to aggressively promote their region, whose most famous native son, though fictitious, still inspires tremendous local pride. Spanish programs at universities around the world have organized innumerable events, which ultimately have self-promotion as their goal. Even

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tributes by other novelists often seem to turn the mad knight into a figurehead for literature itself, in a defence of reading that does indeed appear quixotic in an age of internet browsing and instant, disposable everything. The best funded and best orchestrated campaign is that of the Spanish government, coordinated through the Instituto Cervantes, a state agency for promoting Spanish culture around the world, and through Spanish embassies and consulates in every corner of the globe.8 Even with the Partido Popular out of power, this state-run campaign inevitably tends to favour Castilian triumphalism. But it is heartening to see how everyone claims their piece of what turns out to be a large and incredibly varied pie. We all stand to learn from one of the most interesting attempts to capitalize on the centenary, that of a number of Algerian writers, who point out, in essence, that the ‘inventor of the modern novel’ spent five years captive in Algiers before writing Don Quixote.9 At a time when the old confrontation between Christendom and the Muslim world has intensified dramatically, surely Cervantes, who fought against the Ottomans, was captive in Algiers, and in his mature years showed a peculiar mix of Maurophilia and Islamophobia, still has something to teach us about ways Spaniards could participate in a new cosmopolitanism. It is fitting to mention here the special role that the town of Baeza, in the province of Jaén, has played over the years in my understanding of Spanish history and culture. Baeza is a traditional agricultural community in the heart of the olive oil producing area of Southern Spain. I have spent much of my adult life in Baeza, for it is my wife’s hometown. I first visited in 1987, and subsequently have lived there off and on, spending normally three months in the summer even when living somewhere else. Our two children, Isabel and Manuel, were born in New York City but baptized in the parish of San Andrés, where the image of the patroness of the town, Nuestra Señora del Alcázar, is kept. They have dual citizenship of course, and we are raising them between Brooklyn and Baeza, an odd combination by any standard. Now, while they are young, we spend as much time in Spain as we can. Our neighbours in Baeza are Moroccan, and my daughter sometimes plays with their daughter, a lively girl of five or six. Although I am not a citizen of Spain, having two children who are has made me feel that I have something of a stake in Spain’s future. The way of life of the inhabitants of Baeza, without their being entirely conscious of the fact, is an accumulation of beliefs and practices that stretch back to the Reconquest. The special meanings that still attach there, for example, to words like moro and judío, have little to do with the

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town’s recent history or with local residents’ encounters with individuals of other faiths. I have long felt that Baeza (and here the names of hundreds of Spanish towns could be substituted) is what it is, not because modernization, beginning in the Enlightenment, swept away all traces of the civilization that existed there before it, but rather due to a slow process of building modern culture onto a foundation that is anything but modern. This book contains no ethnographic data concerning Baeza. Yet there is a sense in which the approach I take to Cervantes has been irremediably influenced by my experiences there, and my efforts to understand its people and the way they see the world. It has served me as a palimpsest, by means of which to read back through the layers of historical change that separate us today from Don Quixote and Persiles y Sigismunda. Whether I have read accurately or not, I leave to others to judge. A final note concerning transcriptions from archival documents and translations. All transcriptions and translations from archival documents are my own unless otherwise noted. Translations of works published in Spanish are mine unless another translator is listed in the works cited. Even when I use published translations, however, I have freely modified them to capture the relevant nuance of the original, though I always include the reference to the corresponding page numbers for the convenience of the English-language reader.

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Acknowledgments

Though most of this book was written during the last five years, there are sentences and even whole paragraphs from as long ago as 1994. During this time I have discussed the ideas and analyses it contains with many more people than I could list here. To begin with, I want to thank those who read part or all of the manuscript at different stages: Hector Calderón, David R. Castillo, Edward Dudley, Daniel Eisenberg, Alban K. Forcione, Francisca García Ruiz (my wife, who reads everything I write, la pobre), Patricia E. Grieve, Carroll Johnson, Félix Martínez-Bonati, Luis Andrés Murillo, Gonzalo Sobejano, Marcia Welles, Diana de Armas Wilson, and the anonymous readers both at the University of Toronto Press and at the journals where earlier versions of some chapters appeared. Their suggestions, which I have always taken very much to heart, are greatly appreciated. Edward Friedman, James Parr, and Frederick de Armas supported my work during a difficult period. Many people gave encouragement or advice when I was unsure where I was heading or how I would get there: Robin Bower, Bruce Burningham, Israel Burshatin, María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, Anne J. Cruz, Samuel Danon, Francisco Fernández Izquierdo, Baltasar Fra Molinero, José Jiménez Lozano, Larry LaFontaine-Stokes, George Mariscal, Leticia Mora, Kathleen Myers, Sara Nalle, Bradley Nelson, David S. Reher, William Sherzer, Barbara Simerka, Bob Viscusi, and Eduardo Urbina. They may not all remember, but I certainly do. Special thanks to my students, from whom I have learned a great deal over the years, especially Max Aguilera-Hellweg, Luis Aranda, John Branch, Rosario Cárdenas, and Michael Powell; and to Daniel Castro, Mario Gonzáles, and Genaro González, bright spots in the mostly dark Texas years. My sincere gratitude to all the archivists without whose help an important dimension of this book could not have taken shape,

xxiv Acknowledgments

above all don Marcelino Angulo (archivist of the ADC) and Francisco Moreno, who gave me access to the private papers of Juan Martín de Nicolás, his wife’s uncle. I also want to express my profound appreciation for the patient labour of my editor at University of Toronto Press, Jill McConkey. Finally, I thank my mother-in-law, Manuela Ruiz Aguayo, from whom I have learned so much, and who suffers more from what she experiences as the loss of her daughter than I could ever redeem with such paltry fruits as a work of scholarship, even on Cervantes. Extensively revised versions of the following previously published articles are included here, by permission: ‘Según es cristiana la gente’: The Quintanar of Persiles y Sigismunda and the Archival Record, Cervantes 24.2 (2004): 5–41; ‘Recordando el futuro: Los moriscos cervantinos y la inmigración magrebí actual,’ in Francisco Caudet and Kerry Wilks, eds. Estas primicias del ingenio: jóvenes cervantistas en Chicago (Madrid: Castalia, 2003) 73–98; and ‘Chicanoizing Don Quixote,’ Aztlán 27:2 (2002): 87–117. The archival research and much of the writing was conducted under two summer research grants from the Research Fund of PSC-CUNY and a year-long grant from the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation.

PART ONE Decolonizing Cervantes

It’s not often one hears about how the Spaniards themselves were multicultural, intercultural. Because to us their culture was a single whole that they imposed, denying differences, denying interculturality. However, they were denying their own reality, weren’t they? But this just demonstrates that humanity has no other destiny than the recognition of its own diversity. Not that diversity is a product of the present because we are discussing it now, but rather because for thousands of years it has been and is today the richness of civilizations. Rigoberta Menchú1

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1 Introduction: The Colonized Imagination

In this introduction I establish the main parameters of the interpretation of early modern Spanish cultural history that will serve as the basis for this book. The paradigm developed below centres on the application to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile of the concept of internal colonialism. The chapter is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses primarily on the formation of religious identities during the second half of the sixteenth century, when the Counter-Reformation was fully underway. As I will argue, these changes were fundamental to the reconfiguration of Spanish society during Cervantes’ lifetime. The second section looks at examples of cultural practices that resisted such changes, including the circulation of prohibited manuscripts and clandestine reading practices. The chapter ends with an investigation into the local history of la Mancha, attempting to account in historical terms for the special attraction that region had for Cervantes, by seeing it as a borderland of empire, straddling past and present, metropolis and colony, history and fiction. The colonization of the New World and the imposition of Catholic orthodoxy in Spain itself were parallel processes, with a similar underlying ideology and structure of power. I use the term ‘internal colonialism’ to highlight this parallelism. This perspective is in large part an organic outcome of my study of the literary and cultural history of Spain in the early modern period. It is also motivated by a desire to continue the effort at reducing the divide between Peninsular and Latin American studies, begun by the previous generation of Hispanists. Beyond this, I hope to contribute in however small a way to breaking down the even greater barrier between ‘Western civilization’ – somehow thought of as a compact mass of interconnected elements from which something called

4 Decolonizing Cervantes

‘modernity’ burst forth fully grown, as if from the head of Zeus – and the rest of the world, subject during the same period to colonial domination. As many theorists of colonialism now assert, modernity and coloniality are two sides of one coin; without colonialism, there would be no modern Europe. And it has seemed to me necessary to begin to search for ways to study coloniality within Europe, not only ‘outside’ it.1 Internal Colonialism in Early Modern Spain When the Spanish monarchy began its conquest and colonization of the New World, a parallel process of internal colonization was also beginning, leading eventually to the imposition of a centralized authority and state-sanctioned culture on a heterogeneous population. While this internal colonialism initially focused on the Jewish and Islamic ethnoreligious minorities, it eventually spread to other groups, including nonCastilians generally, cristianos viejos in rural areas, and movements antithetical to the goals of the Counter-Reformation, such as Erasmian humanism and alumbradismo. No sector remained entirely unchanged, and the organization of the entire society was irrevocably altered. The following pages offer a definition of internal colonialism that clarifies its applicability to early modern Spain. I then explore some specific examples, focusing on the shaping of ethno-religious identities. The concept of internal colonialism has been used in many contexts, most frequently in the analysis of systemic inequalities along regional, racial, and ethnic lines in former colonies in the Americas. In Latin America, its primary reference is to the continued subaltern status of indigenous peoples after independence, with the criollos taking over from Spaniards the role of colonizers.2 In the United States, minority groups, especially Chicanos and African Americans, have been theorized as internal colonies.3 The most typical use of the term implies a temporal sequence from the external colonialism of European imperialism to internal colonialism after independence. Nonetheless, Michael Hechter describes nation formation in early modern Europe as a process of internal colonialism, paralleling the earliest phase of European colonialism in the New World. Hechter is concerned with the incorporation of the ‘Celtic fringe’ in Britain (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland), but he sees the same process at work in France and Spain: Most modern states were initially composed of two or more distinct cultural groups. In the course of their development, effective bureaucratic adminis-

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 5 trations arose in certain regions of the territories later to become the modern States of Western Europe. It was in these core regions – Castile in Spain; Île-de-France in France; first Wessex, then London and the Home Counties in England – that strong central governments were first established. Each of these small areas had, to varying degrees, distinct cultural practices from those of outlying, peripheral, regions. (4–5; emphasis in the original)

He goes on to argue that internal colonization and external colonization were two manifestations of ‘the same social forces,’ whereby Absolutism was imposed throughout Europe and in the Americas (31–2). While the paradigmatic form of colonialism is external, internal colonialism equally manifests the crucial features emphasized by colonial theory, in particular the underlying tension, found in all colonial systems, between adoption of the culture of the colonizer and ghettoization within the native culture. To clarify the status of internal colonies, Aníbal Quijano has developed the concept of ‘coloniality of power.’ This form of power, characteristic of all colonial systems regardless of their geographical configuration, involves a double movement that simultaneously imposes an alien cultural identity on the colonized population, and assigns them a subordinate position in the social hierarchy. This subordination is tied to racial categories, and so inscribes the inferior status of the colonized group permanently into the social structure, at the same time incorporating the conflict between social groups as a permanent structural feature. While their original identity is no longer available, then, full participation in the ‘superior’ culture of the colonizer is also denied them. Despite pressure to abandon their religion and forms of expression, the colonized nonetheless strive to maintain both, either through clandestine practices (with the inevitable distortions this implies), or by the more indirect strategy of a resistance that consists in adopting the dominant culture, but in such a way as to subvert its meanings, introducing elements of their own native culture. As with other recent models of colonialism, Quijano’s theory of coloniality of power emphasizes that despite the imbalance of power, colonized groups are not merely passive victims. Within the political and economic limits imposed by the colonial situation, they play an active role in shaping the cultural environment in which they live (Quijano 114–19).4 Coloniality of power was operative at all levels of sixteenth-century Spanish society, and among all groups. Although the Moriscos and conversos are the most obvious examples, it is important to recognize that

6 Decolonizing Cervantes

the cultural identity of cristiano viejo peasants was also reshaped during this period, and that a vastly transformed society emerged from this process by the century’s end. Although my analysis differs from his in significant ways, it is indebted to the fundamental insight that Américo Castro brought to Spanish historiography, namely, that one cannot write the history of the religious minorities as separate chapters in the history of Spain, lamentable but inconsequential except for their possible economic impact. Coloniality of power directed toward one group necessarily affects the others. As we will see, it had especially far-reaching implications for the position of the Christian peasantry in the emerging national identity of Spain. As David Nirenberg has shown, violence and conflict were constitutive of the relations among the three religious groups throughout the Middle Ages. In the medieval context, the rivalry among them was a defining feature of the identity of all three communities. Ritual violence of the kind studied by Nirenberg can therefore be understood as a paradoxical recognition of the legitimacy of the existence of the rival groups. It must be distinguished from the violence instituted by the monarchy itself, from 1478 forward: the creation of the Spanish Inquisition under the direct authority of the crown, rather than that of the Pope (1478); the prohibition of Judaism, with the consequent expulsion of those who refused to convert (1492); the forced conversions and migrations of Muslims during the sixteenth century, and their eventual expulsion (1609–14). It is misleading to conceive of the prohibitions, first of Judaism and then of Islam, in purely religious terms, without taking into account their social and cultural implications. Before the imposition of Christianity, mudéjares and Jews belonged to semi-autonomous communities whose privileges and obligations, however limited, were legally guaranteed and protected. Subsequently, the ‘new Christians,’ judeoconversos as well as Moriscos, became internal colonies: their culture was declared to be devoid of value and they were forced to adopt the dominant culture; yet when they did so, they remained stigmatized and were viewed with suspicion. What changed was that the state no longer recognized separate spheres of Jewish and Islamic life and belief encapsulated under the concept of their ‘law’ (ley); thenceforth their difference from the dominant culture became a sign only of their inferior status as members of an internal colony. Yet a consciousness of the separateness of their identities remained throughout the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth. Both groups were subjected, then, to the unbearable ambiguity at the root of all colonialism: their own culture was

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 7

rendered valueless, except as a sign of inferior status or of defiant (even ‘quixotic’) resistance; yet they were not accepted as fully belonging to the new culture imposed upon them, and became instead the object of vigilance, scrutiny, and suspicion. A condition of possibility for these measures was a bureaucratic apparatus capable of operating simultaneously at the national and local levels. As is well known, the Spanish Inquisition, originally created to police the Jewish converts to Christianity, gradually extended its role to include the entire population, incorporating such ‘popular’ infractions as blasphemy and bigamy into an expanding definition of heresy. The Inquisition thus helped to extend the power of the monarchy into even the remotest corners of the realm and the most ordinary activities of everyday life. Of the two religious minorities, the Moriscos were more segregated from the rest of the population, forming the most clearly delimited internal colony. Though the Conquest of Granada in 1492 ended Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula, Islam was not immediately prohibited, nor were the dozens of mudéjar communities throughout Spain directly affected at first. But under Cisneros’s regency, all Moriscos were required to convert to Christianity. Even then, a fifty-year reprieve from persecution by the Inquisition delayed the inevitable conflict, which broke out in the second Guerra de las Alpujarras (1568–71). That civil war ended with the scattering of the Moriscos of Granada throughout Old and New Castile in 1571, dismembering the last remnant of Nasrid civilization. Continuing fears of a conspiracy of the Moriscos of Aragon and Valencia with the Turks finally persuaded Philip III to expel them from all the territories of the Crown, an operation carried out from 1609 to 1614.5 Though an undetermined number remained, the Muslim (or postMuslim) ethno-religious minority ceased to exist as a social force of any real weight in Spain, at least until the large-scale Moroccan immigration of recent years.6 The Morisco internal colony as such existed for a specific period, then, of about a hundred years, from the early sixteenth century until the early seventeenth. The Moriscos were under pressure to give up, not only their specifically religious practices, but cultural ones as well. In his 1567 Memorial in response to Pedro de Deza’s pragmática prohibiting spoken and written Arabic, along with all Moorish customs, including dress (particularly the veil), traditional music, and public baths, Francisco Núñez Muley argues persuasively that these practices are not specifically tied to Islam, but amount, rather, to regional differences.7 Mercedes García-Arenal’s

8 Decolonizing Cervantes

Inquisición y Moriscos shows that the Moriscos from Granada who were distributed among the towns of Castile were viewed with suspicion by their neighbours for precisely these kinds of cultural differences (64– 114). An important source of friction was their aversion to eating pork, which had long served as the litmus test for the sincerity of Jewish converts to Christianity. To make matters worse, the Granada Moriscos, like all good Andalusians, cooked with olive oil. Their neighbours, who used lard, complained to the Inquisitors of the smell, also claiming it caused bad breath (García-Arenal 68–73). My own research in the libros de testificaciones of the Inquisition of Cuenca confirms that for local residents in the towns of la Mancha any cultural difference, however trivial, became the marker of a distinct ethnicity, and therefore made the Moriscos the object of scrutiny and suspicion. Virtually all of the accusations against Moriscos gathered by inquisitors in visits to the towns of the diocese of Cuenca in the 1580s and 1590s concern cultural practices, not religious beliefs per se. Dietary restrictions, chief among them not eating pork, top the list, of course; almost as frequent are the descriptions of the dances at Morisco weddings, and the way they shrouded their dead. They are accused by their neighbours of speaking Arabic, of kissing a man’s hand as a respectful greeting, but very seldom of holding heretical beliefs. Even the way a mother combs her daughter’s hair might be scrutinized and reported to the Inquisition as suspicious behaviour.8 Nonetheless, even as the Moriscos were expected to abandon every last distinguishing mark of identity, their separation from the community of cristianos viejos was maintained through a series of measures instituted in order to keep track of their whereabouts and their descendants. Lists of the names of the Granada Moriscos assigned to each of the towns and cities of Old and New Castile were kept and updated every few years by means of roll calls organized town by town, family by family.9 The Inquisition also solicited lists of Morisco residents from local priests, sometimes including the priest’s opinion of each family’s degree of Christianization.10 Moriscos were forbidden to leave the town to which they were assigned without a ‘passport’ issued by local authorities, including a physical description, name, trade, and permission to travel.11 When Morisco children were baptized, the priest was required to make a marginal note that the parents were ‘cristianos nuevos de Moriscos.’12 Taken in combination with the pressure to adopt the cultural practices of the majority, this concern to firmly delineate their separate status marks the Moriscos as an internal colony, subject to the double bind coloniality of power always imposes.

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 9

Although they faced similarly contradictory pressures, the judeoconversos constituted a very different kind of ethno-religious minority. To begin with, they were primarily an urban population, less concentrated in any one geographical area, and less distinctive in language and customs than their Morisco counterparts. Further, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews had converted to Christianity in the wake of the terrible pogroms of 1391, and many more had made the same choice by the time the edict of expulsion swelled the numbers of conversos once again in 1492. To some extent, the possibility existed for conversos to ‘pass’ as cristianos viejos, especially after several generations or by moving away from their birthplace. In many instances, a family would even forget their Jewish ancestry, ceasing to have any awareness of their converso status (only to have it revealed when someone in the family applied for a position requiring proof of limpieza). At the same time, especially in local settings, the sambenitos hanging in the parish church could stand as reminders, generation after generation, of the caste to which a given family belonged. In consequence, while some conversos were able to ‘infiltrate’ Spanish society, others were unable to avoid a painful, public awareness of their unequal status. Across this continuum another can be drawn, representing the degree of sincerity in the conversion. The existence of ‘cryptoJudaism’ in Spain throughout the sixteenth century, though controversial, seems to have been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.13 Certainly there were many sincere converts to Christianity whose children were brought up without any knowledge of or identification with Judaism. The existence of gradations here is, as in the case of the Moriscos, an obvious consequence of the forced nature of many conversions, and the vigilance of local residents, who dutifully spied on their converso neighbours. The various positions created by the intersection of these two axes can be thought of as articulating a field on which points could be mapped as on a grid. If one moves far enough away from the point of intersection in any direction, a clear identity emerges, freed of internal contradictions, however alienated it may remain. Moving toward the center, ambiguity increases, both in terms of self-perception and the suspicions of others. This ambiguity at the center appears to be the feature of converso identity that led Walter Mignolo to characterize it as a ‘borderland,’ that introduced an interior frontier into the emerging world system: The converso will never be at peace with himself or herself, nor will he or she be trustworthy from the point of view of the state. The converso was not so

10 Decolonizing Cervantes much a hybrid as it was a place of fear and passing, of lying and terror. The reasons for conversion could as easily be deep conviction or sheer social convenience. Whatever the case, he or she would know that the officers of the state would be suspicious of the authenticity of such a conversion. To be considered, or to consider oneself a Jew, a Moor, or a Christian was clear. To be a converso was to navigate the ambiguous waters of the undecided. (29)

Mignolo rightly identifies the emergence of this converso consciousness as a consequence of the increasing concern in sixteenth-century Spain with ‘purity of blood’ (limpieza de sangre). Further, he considers purity of blood to be the germ of the role of racial purity in the modern/colonial world system. If we recall the importance of grounding the inequality of the colonized in a genealogical system mentioned by Quijano in connection with coloniality of power, it is easy to see that the converso is the prototype of the colonized subject.14 Indeed, to be a converso was, perhaps even more excruciatingly than in the case of the Moriscos, to be caught in the colonial double bind. No matter how completely one might succeed in acculturating oneself to Christian society, the existence of the purity of blood statutes, which limited the access of conversos to an increasing range of political and ecclesiastical positions, as well as to a number of trades and professions, meant that one might at any moment find one’s way blocked by an unexpected revelation of non-Christian ancestry. Purity of blood came to play a central role in the reshaping of the religious identity of the Christian peasantry as well. In a pair of seminal articles published in the 1970s, Juan Ignacio Gutiérrez Nieto mapped out in two stages the strategic exploitation of the converso situation by the monarchy. His account clarifies the role of concern with limpieza in the forging of a national culture committed to overseas empire and the Counter-Reformation. First, from the beginning of his reign, in a process Gutiérrez Nieto calls the ‘Tibetization’ of Castile, Philip II reinforced the purity of blood statutes, extending their application from ecclesiastical positions to the different branches of the monarchy, municipal governments, and even elementary education.15 Beyond any religious motivation these measures may have had, they were clearly calculated to exclude the nascent bourgeoisie from power by reasserting the privilege of the aristocratic caste and its corresponding militarist, anti-bourgeois values (‘La discriminación de los conversos’ 108–13). According to Gutiérrez Nieto, a new identity for the Castilian commoner was then forged in the campaign to dignify agricultural labour, undertaken in response to the demographic crisis at the end of the

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 11

sixteenth century. Overburdened by increased taxation, Castilian peasants migrated to the cities in large numbers, abandoning their fields, and undermining the agricultural base of the economy. Stimulating production through financial incentives such as tax relief was out of the question, given the dependence of the court and indeed the empire itself on the income generated by Castilian agriculture. Therefore the semi-mythical image of the peasant as cristiano viejo was created, by means of which the peasantry was encouraged to participate in the ideals of the nobility, including military valour, religious fervour, and loyalty to the crown. For Gutiérrez Nieto, the concern with honour and purity of blood on the part of the peasantry, so characteristic of the theater of Lope and Calderón, is nothing more than a strategy for achieving that identification with aristocratic values: ‘For participation in these values on the part of the peasantry to make any sense within the social context of the period, it will be necessary, in turn, to grant their blood a certain quasi-noble status, as we will see, and, on the other hand, to assign them certain modes of behavior belonging to the nobility, such as the defense of sexual purity’ (‘Limpieza de sangre’ 502). In a society in which the power base of the upper aristocracy had been rendered secure through the estatutos de limpieza, the resentment of the peasantry toward hidalgos and conversos (the primary political and economic powers at the local level) could be safely exploited in the ideological construct of the cristiano viejo. Far from being a primordial feature of the peasant class, then, the sense of honour deriving from the peasant’s purity of blood was an idea implanted by the ruling classes to obtain their willingness to continue supporting the top-heavy court society that formed the power base of the Hapsburg empire.16 The theatre became the most effective medium for this propaganda campaign, and the theme of the honra de los villanos, as practiced by Lope, Calderón, and other dramatists, was its most powerful weapon. As Américo Castro showed in Aspectos del vivir hispánico, the basis of this theme was the popular anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages, directed against the nobles as a class, suspected by the commoners of having Jewish ancestry. But this sentiment was harnessed in the service of a new, unified identity for the Spanish nation. In this way a national culture was forged which externally resembled the pre-existing organization of local communities it was designed to replace, and which incorporated certain elements of the pre-existing worldview of Spanish peasants. The point here is not to claim, naively, that their limpieza gave Old Christian peasants access to enhanced status in the social structure in

12 Decolonizing Cervantes

any real sense. In Poder, honor y élites en el siglo XVII, Maravall incorporates the function of purity of blood statutes within a larger process of consolidation of monarcho-seigneurial power, from which the lower classes remained excluded. As Maravall points out, it was easier, even at the highpoint of concern with limpieza, for wealthy conversos to bribe their way past the background checks that officially excluded them from positions of civil or ecclesiastical authority than for a labourer or humble artisan to even be considered for such posts (116–18). Thus the ideological function of purity of blood far outweighed its role as an operative social category. Gutiérrez Nieto’s periodization shows concern with limpieza in decline towards 1600, and, as Kamen has documented, public debate over the validity of its exclusions never ceased altogether.17 All of which confirms that purity operated on a symbolic plane to consolidate national unity around religious identity. Once that goal was well on the way to being achieved, the institutional role of the statutes was discreetly tucked away as part of the larger framework of social differentiation preserving aristocratic privilege.18 If purity of blood and the sense of honour together formed one pole of the imagined community that would henceforth unite the rural peasantry and the urban underclass in a national popular culture directed from above, the other pole was the conjunction between loyalty to the king and the defense of the faith. Most important to appreciate here is the degree to which the Tridentine reforms represented the imposition of an alien set of beliefs on the peasantry. As William Christian has shown, pre-Tridentine peasants in Castile practiced a local religion based on the agrarian cycle and the worship of those specific saints who had intervened to save their communities from famine and plague. Their belief system was grounded in the survival of the group in the harsh conditions of this world, not on the immortality of the individual soul (Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain). The Counter-Reformation led to what Jean-Pierre Dedieu has aptly termed the ‘Christianization’ of rural Spain. This process involved a combination of seemingly benign measures – teaching the catechism, regularizing worship – with more aggressive ones: prohibition of heterodox practices and doctrines, repression of local cults, destruction of some shrines, and trial and punishment of those whose beliefs and practices did not comply with the officially sanctioned ones.19 These Spaniards, then, were subject at the same time as the Moriscos to a coloniality of power that prohibited their traditional religion and assigned them a new, alien set of values and beliefs. The great difference

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 13

is of course that in the case of the Old Christians the extent of the transformation could be camouflaged by claiming that it was only a matter of instruction in the doctrines of the religion they already professed. Though strictly speaking correct, this way of putting it masks the degree to which the popular culture of the Middle Ages had come under attack. For centuries irregularities in the religious life of peasants were of little concern to the church. The official culture of the elite and the popular culture of the majority co-existed without any question of eradicating the latter or imposing the former.20 The Counter-Reformation changed all that by dissolving the boundary that had so long separated them, leaving the Old Christian peasantry exposed to the authority of the monarchy (and its agent, the Inquisition) in essentially the same way as were the Moriscos and conversos. A final difference must be noted, however, insofar as their pre-existing connection, at least in name, with the official religion of the state meant that Old Christians’ ultimate destiny was to be incorporated into the Spanish national identity being forged in Madrid. In practice, the privileging of the villano cristiano viejo over his outcast counterparts among the ethno-religious minorities was more apparent than real; it amounted to a symbolic status within the emerging national identity whose practical consequences were limited to such advantages as being virtually exempt from burning at the stake, though certainly Old Christians still came under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.21 The colonial contradiction is operative here as well, since identification with aristocratic values and the new orthodoxy committed the peasantry to abandoning their traditional culture and values, but did not open to them the doors of power. In practice, the process that has been termed the refeudalization of the régimen local, whereby municipal governments were ‘stacked’ with regidores perpetuos from the estate of the hidalgos, restricted commoners’ access to political involvement as compared to the first half of the sixteenth century. According to Jerónimo López-Salazar Pérez, this led to a situation of ‘perpetual conflict,’ a structural feature of coloniality of power in Quijano’s definition, as we saw above.22 The demands made on the peasantry by the monarchy, including regularized religious practice, increased military service and quartering of soldiers, as well as unrelenting taxation, are compensated by a merely symbolic participation in the prestige of the empire. Though this participation has the appearance of being chosen, these are subjects who have been formed, as Anthony Cascardi puts it, to be desirous of control (‘The Subject of Control’).

14 Decolonizing Cervantes

By around 1600, then, the old configuration of religious and social identities based on rivalries between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and between nobles and commoners, had been replaced by a new one based on the distinction between those to whom was extended the privilege of inserting themselves into the hierarchical organization of the Spanish state, even at the lowest rung, and those pariahs whose exclusion functioned to mark its boundary. Those included found themselves stripped of autonomy, and subjected by an absolutist monarchy established as the sole power. Recent approaches to the history of Spanish political institutions emphasize that absolutism was always a negotiated settlement.23 Nonetheless, the monarchy’s political monopoly was guaranteed by the fact that there was no other power available with which to negotiate. Each social group continued to maintain a vestige of its earlier separate identity, from which pockets of resistance could form, but they could not be joined up with one another to create a counter-hegemonic project since their meaning as resistance depended on their isolation from the only cultural project able to draw together all social groups, the militant religious orthodoxy of the Counter-Reformation. Yet, as the next section of this chapter sets out to show, such pockets of resistance did indeed exist. The participants, not all of whom would necessarily have ever met face to face, were organized and held together by a variety of clandestine practices involving the circulation and reading of printed books and manuscripts. In some cases, as we will see, the texts themselves were prohibited – precisely, I might add, in order to prevent their being used as catalysts for communities of resistance. In others, only the reading practices facilitated by the texts were illicit. These are examples of what Manuel Peña Díaz has termed ‘slanted’ readings (lecturas sesgadas), or ‘prohibited readings of permitted books’ (85). ‘Under my cloak, I kill the king’: Reading and Resistance ... and you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his taxes, and you know the old saying: under my cloak, I kill the king. Which exempts and excuses you from all respect and obligation, and you can say anything you desire about this history ... Don Quixote I, ‘Prologue’ 3–4 [... y tienes tu alma en tu cuerpo y tu libro albedrío como el más pintado, y estás en tu casa, donde eres señor della, como el rey de sus alcabalas, y sabes lo que comúnmente se dice, que debajo de mi manto, al rey mato. Todo lo cual te esenta

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 15 y hace libre de todo respecto y obligación, y así, puedes decir de la historia todo aquello que te pareciere ...] (Don Quijote, I ‘Prólogo’ 51)

The burgeoning field of book history increasingly focuses on reading. Yet writing the history of reading presents severe methodological difficulties, since, as one of the leaders of this tendency, Roger Chartier, acknowledges, it is ‘a practice ... that only rarely leaves traces, that is scattered in an infinity of singular acts, and that easily shakes off all constraints’ (The Order of Books 1–2). For data on reading in the Spain of the Hapsburg monarchy, we are fortunate, as in so many areas of cultural and social history, to have the documents of the Inquisition at our disposal. The inquisitors were understandably curious about what defendants read, as well as how they read it, and with whom. In this section, I will turn my attention to some heterodox reading practices recorded primarily in Inquisition documents. In the prologue to the 1605 Don Quixote, Cervantes explicitly broaches the question of the relation between reading and both textual and political authority. The narrator, here identified with the author, tells a (fictional) story of how we came to hold in our hands the book we are reading, indeed, how the prologue itself, the words we are reading at this very moment, came to be written. Having completed his manuscript, this fictional version of Cervantes declares, he found the prologue the most difficult part of the text to write, so much so that he despaired of ever publishing his work. He would prefer to publish the text without the external trappings of textual authority: footnotes, a list of works cited, etc. – yet he fears exposing himself to ridicule and criticism if he does. The friend’s advice is to incorporate footnotes at random and plagiarize a list of works cited from somewhere else: ‘at least,’ the friend adds, ‘a lengthy catalogue of authors will give the book an improvised authority. Furthermore, no one will try to determine if you followed them or did not follow them, having nothing to gain from doing so’ (‘Prologue’ 7–8) (por lo menos servirá aquel largo catálogo de autores a dar de improviso autoridad al libro. Y más, que no habrá quien se ponga a averiguar si los seguistes o no los seguistes, no yéndole nada en ello [57]). Though he pokes fun at the hypocrisy of pedantry, the friend encourages ‘Cervantes’ to go along with it for the sake of his reputation as an author. In a bizarre stroke of added irony, the author’s response follows the spirit, but not the letter, of this advice: ‘his words made so great an impression on me that I did not dispute them but acknowledged their merit and decided to make this prologue out of them’ (8, emphasis added) (de tal manera se

16 Decolonizing Cervantes

imprimieron en mí sus razones, que, sin ponerlas en disputa, las aprobé por buenas y de ellas mismas quise hacer este prólogo [58]). The result is a sly neutralization of the forms of textual authority the friend recommends that he fake. The strongest statement of this effort to undermine authority over the text places the reader ambiguously in the twin positions of surrogate monarch and regicide: ‘you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his taxes, and you know the old saying: under my cloak, I kill the king’ (3–4) (tienes tu alma en tu cuerpo y tu libre albedrío como el más pintado, y estás en tu casa, donde eres señor della, como el rey de sus alcabalas, y sabes lo que comúnmente se dice, que debajo de mi manto, al rey mato [51]). Like the king over his taxes, you are sovereign in your own home, where ... you kill the king. What is skipped over in this evocation of absolute authority and its opposite, regicide, is, of course, the position both author and reader are expected to occupy in the political space of the real world, that of loyal subject. The issue of royal authority, especially over the written word, is frequently evoked in Don Quixote: the parody of the Inquisitor in the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library; the innkeeper’s insistence that the chivalric romances must be true, since they are published with the king’s authorization; the freeing of the galley slaves, who are chained by order of the king; the Canon of Toledo’s proposals concerning the censorship of literary works according to neo-Aristotelian precepts: all of these are examples of how we are reminded of the same extratextual authority of the king we were instructed to set aside in the prologue. But of course Cervantes’ own book was published under that authority, as were all printed books at the time. Manuscripts circulated more freely, as Fernando Bouza has shown in his path-breaking Corre manuscrito. As a motto for fiction as a cultural practice, then, ‘under my cloak, I kill the king’ suggests that we play at having a power and autonomy we remain perfectly aware is denied us outside the fiction. Far from being a disinterested, neutral field of contemplation, reading is a space of empowerment, however much the extension of this liberation beyond the text is left to the reader’s imagination. Though the prologue represents this as a private experience that takes place in the reader’s own home, let us not too hastily equate this with bourgeois notions of self-cultivation by the private citizen. After all, in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, Cervantes also speaks of setting up a billiard table in the public square. The superimposition of the subversive potential of privacy on the open,

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 17

collective space of the public square yields an image of hidden practices that nonetheless sustain networks of readers, conscious of participating in communities of resistance. Cultural historians, investigating different groups’ strategies for resisting the internal colonialism examined above, have uncovered reading practices that correspond to such an image. In the pages below I discuss five of these. Two are specifically tied to the manuscript, while the other three exemplify Peña Díaz’s notion of ‘prohibited readings of permitted books.’ All are concerned in some way with religion, but they have definite political consequences. While Cervantes may not have known about all of these practices, he must have had an inkling of some of them. Insofar as he strove himself to create an oppositional form of reading for the audience of his fiction, his work belongs to the visible tip of an iceberg whose hidden bulk consists of an enormous quantity of acts of illicit reading. In the Madrid of Philip II, the dreams of a young visionary, Lucrecia de León, were transcribed and circulated in manuscript copies among ‘a loose coalition of disgruntled churchmen and courtiers,’ most of whom were previously followers of the celebrated soldier-prophet Piedrola (Kagan 4, 95–101, 128). The criticisms of these fanatically orthodox Catholics were based on the perception that in the pursuit of its own interests, the Crown was neglecting the defense of the faith. The reading of Lucrecia’s dreams became a vehicle for their own political opposition. Under a veil of symbolism, the dreams attacked the policies of the king, prophesying a dramatic overthrow of the monarchy. A secret cult called the Holy Cross of the Restoration grew up around her; cult members wore at all times ‘a black scapular emblazoned with a white cross, a garment fashioned precisely after one Lucrecia had seen in her dreams’ (Kagan 127). Lucrecia also dreamed of a refuge from the Armageddon she prophesied, called Sopeña. In the spring of 1588 her supporters constructed it. On property belonging to Fray Lucas de Allende’s brother, Cristóbal, in the side of some cliffs overlooking the Tagus, near the town of Villarrubia, Mendoza [Lucrecia’s chief agent, Alonso de Mendoza] began directing preparations to transform several caves into a survivalists’ bunker. In March or April 1588 the caves were reportedly enlarged and stocked with stores of wheat, oil, and wine, even some firearms. Mendoza’s correspondence confirms the purchase of these and other provisions, along with shipments of various church ornaments intended to furnish a small chapel that was

18 Decolonizing Cervantes reportedly designed by Juan de Herrera, the royal architect. Permission of the papal nuncio to have mass said in this chapel was also secured. (Kagan 124)

Villarrubia de Santiago is un lugar de la Mancha, thirteen kilometres east of Ocaña, belonging, as its name indicates, to the Order of Santiago. Thus a group of clerics and courtiers from Madrid were driven mad by reading not libros de caballerías, but the prophetic dreams of a semiliterate nineteen-year-old. They responded not by setting forth in search of adventures, but by building a secret refuge along the banks of the Tagus. In 1590, Philip II personally ordered Lucrecia’s arrest by the Inquisition of Toledo, probably to avoid the scandal of a public trial for sedition. Her trial dragged on for five years and ended with her being given a relatively light sentence: one hundred lashes, banishment from Madrid, and two years seclusion in a religious house (154–5).24 At the opposite end of the religio-political spectrum are aljamiado manuscripts, which circulated in clandestine form after the prohibition of Arabic and Islam. These texts, written in Spanish with Arabic characters, have been found hidden in caves or in the walls and columns of houses, centuries after the expulsion of the Moriscos. Their contents included legends, prophecies of the destruction of Christian Spain (known as jofores), religious instruction, translations from the Koran, as well as discussions of magic, medicine, and sexuality. The use of Arabic script reveals a concern with keeping the contents hidden should they fall into the wrong hands. On the other hand, the use of Spanish indicates that the texts were written for Moriscos who, however much they might wish to keep their religious and ethnic identity alive, no longer knew Arabic, or at least not enough to read an entire text. The practice of writing in aljamiado thus inscribes both vertices of the double bind of internal colonialism. To read such a text was to participate in a specific community: descendents of Muslims who were struggling to maintain some knowledge of the religious faith and customs of their ancestors. To copy, loan, or give away an aljamiado manuscript was a way of extending and strengthening that community.25 Most aljamiado writings are, of necessity, anonymous. Yet one author stands out, known to modern scholars as the Mancebo de Arévalo. He wrote at least four works: the Tafsira (Tratado), the Sumario, the Breve compendio (on which he collaborated with Baray de Reminio) and a lost work, Peregrinación del Mancebo de Arévalo, which narrated his journey to

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 19

Mecca (Narváez Córdoba 14–15). The first two are compilations of Islamic doctrine, passed from hand to hand by sixteenth-century Moriscos in their effort to preserve their cultural and religious identity. Both have recently been published for the first time.26 As María Teresa Narváez Córdoba explains in the introductory study to her edition of the Tratado, internal evidence indicates they were written around 1533 (26). Basically, what we know about their author is what he himself tells us. He travelled tirelessly all over Spain, seeking out those who could offer him instruction and guidance. We see him in Granada visiting the Mora de Úbeda, a woman in her nineties, famed for her knowledge of the Koran. She sends him to see a cousin of hers who lives in the Vega de Granada. These Morisco elders feed his imagination with idealized memories of life in under Moorish rule. In Toledo he meets with a converso who, interestingly, expresses solidarity with him, explaining that being among Muslims abates his sorrow. He travels throughout la Mancha meeting with the mudéjares there. His name appears in the writings of the last generations of Moriscos before the expulsion, who refer back to him as an authority (Narváez Córdoba 18–31). When Don Quixote goes to the second inn, after the beating he receives from the Yangüeses, he interferes with the tryst between Maritornes and a muleteer (arriero) whom the narrator describes as ‘one of the rich muleteers of Arévalo’ (I.16, 171; uno de los ricos arrieros de Arévalo), adding that Cide Hamete makes particular mention of him because he knew him very well and it was said that they were distant relatives (171). The Arabic author of Don Quixote, cousin of a muleteer from Arévalo! Of course the reader assumes that this muleteer, like the translator of Cide Hamete’s manuscript, is a Morisco. Must we consider his being from the same town as the most celebrated author of clandestine Muslim devotional texts as simply a coincidence? On the one hand, we do not know whether Cervantes could have been aware of the Mancebo, whose function as a conduit for Muslim resistance after all depended on secrecy. On the other, as Cardaillac comments, Moriscos who worked transporting goods from one part of the peninsula to another took advantage of their journeys to deepen their knowledge of Islam (71). This at least was notorious. Evidently there was a flourishing Morisco community in Arévalo, from which the Mancebo emerged, and Cervantes took his inspiration for the muleteer in chapter 16 of Part One.27 The history of reading also affords significant examples of readers who decode ostensibly orthodox printed material in a way that renders it

20 Decolonizing Cervantes

unorthodox. These may be idiosyncratic readers such as Bartolomé Sánchez, who developed a religious system of his own based in part on a bizarre appropriation of a book of Horas de Nuestra Señora printed by Juan de Ayala in Toledo, which he bought from a neighbor. As Sara Nalle explains in Mad for God, her study of Sánchez’s trials, a woodcut in the book corresponded with a vision he had had some months before, of the Virgin with God the Father and Christ. Sánchez interpreted this as a representation of ‘the true Trinity.’ This book of hours was apparently the only book he ever owned, and he devoured it in search of answers to his spiritual quest. ‘Bartolomé spent so much time studying the book that he could quote parts of it by heart to the court’ (Nalle, Mad for God 64). The woodcut confirming his vision became the basis for his rejection of the Holy Spirit, and with it, much of Catholic doctrine. In Sánchez’s system, Christ was sent by God to save mankind, but was crucified before he could complete his mission. Those who worship the Holy Spirit and the Cross (as well as images and relics) are therefore the modern equivalent of Pharisees. These heterodox ideas tipped the scales of reason over into madness when the quixotic Sánchez – isolated, as he saw it, in his awareness of the hypocrisy of institutionalized Christianity – became convinced that he himself was the Messiah come again. Nalle speculates about the possible sources of his religious views, including contact with conversos and alumbrados; the one thing we know for sure is that reading a printed book of hours, perfectly orthodox and apparently harmless, served as a catalyst for his madness. He offers an image, perhaps, of what Don Quixote might have become had he been driven mad, not by chivalric romances or pastoral literature, but by devotional treatises. Sánchez voiced his views publicly, but his ideas were too idiosyncratic to find sympathetic listeners. However, extended groups did coalesce around deliberate practices of reading printed books against the grain. Peña Díaz, for example, discusses the way reading devotional literature aloud provided a pulpit from which the alumbrados could preach their charismatic approach to cultivating the inner light. For the inquisitors, the challenge was to distinguish between reading from authorized religious works, whose orthodoxy had been certified, and improvised commentary, which could easily slide across the thin line separating the inspired from the heterodox. María de Cazalla, tried by the Inquisition during 1531–5, read to her followers in her large kitchen. Witnesses describe her reading from a book she held in her hand and then extemporizing: ‘the kitchen was big, and full of people, and Maria de

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 21

Cazalla read from a book and then spoke, and everyone kept silent, as if they were listening to a sermon’ (quoted in Peña Díaz 88). Around the same time, Francisco Ortiz (tried by the Inquisition, 1529–32) read to assembled alumbrados from the Vulgata, which he translated as he went along (‘declarando el romance della’) thus turning a permitted reading (the Bible in Latin) into a prohibited one (the Bible in Castilian) on the spot (88). This is a good place to call to mind Sancho’s repeated references to the sermons he heard preached in his parish church, his main source of religious instruction. For individuals to give sermons in their own homes, usurping the authority of printed devotional works, or even the Vulgata itself, was no small matter. For all the suspicion of heresy that plagued them, the alumbrados were nevertheless Christians. The reading practices of certain conversos provide a more subversive example of the appropriation of authorized texts. Charles Amiel has shown that crypto-Judaism in la Mancha was kept alive partly by the special use made by Jewish families of a work of moral philosophy titled Espejo de consolación, whose author, a Franciscan named Juan de Dueñas, though entirely above suspicion of heresy, happened to take from the Hebrew scriptures all but two of his principal examples of patience in adversity. This popular book went through some forty editions between its first publication in 1540 and the discovery of the use to which it was being put, in 1591, after which it abruptly ceased appearing, though it was not actually placed on the Index until 1632. Equipped with a handy alphabetical listing of over four hundred Biblical personages, this book inadvertently supplied an encyclopedia of Jewish lore to converso families thirsty for knowledge of their religious tradition. In cryptoJewish circles in la Mancha, the local patriarch would read aloud from the Espejo de consolación as if it were a bible, before his own family members and invited guests. The text turns up as well in Inquisition trials of conversos in Mexico, Manila, and Lima, this last in the case of Duarte Enríquez, who valued it above any book he had ever read, and insisted that if he could get his hands on a copy, he would buy it no matter what the price (‘Les cent voix de Quintanar’ 524–31). The preceding five examples of alternative forms of reading connect religious beliefs and practices, heretical or not, to what amounts to political opposition. This connection is not a spontaneous invention in each case; rather, it is a direct consequence of the coloniality of power in the late sixteenth century: pressure was being brought to bear on cultural traditions and systems of belief, which meant in turn that adopting alternative positions with regard to religion had clear political overtones.

22 Decolonizing Cervantes

Interestingly, the religious content of each of these practices points in a different direction: fanatical orthodoxy in the case of the followers of Lucrecia de León; crypto-Islam and crypto-Judaism where the religious minorities are concerned; a set of quasi-mystical beliefs which flirted with Protestant autonomy from the clergy in the case of the alumbrados; messianic insanity in that of Bartolomé Sánchez. All reject the authority of the Spanish state, either directly (Lucrecia, the jofores), or indirectly, by defying the Inquisition (Bartolomé Sánchez, the alumbrados, the crypto-Jews of la Mancha). The concern with information or instruction appears in every case to be subordinated to a more basic aim: to participate in a community of readers who have access to the same texts and read them in a similar way. Such practices as dictation, copying by hand, and reading aloud supplement the written text, helping to ensure that the reading experience is not a merely individualistic one. Between the larger society and the individual, another entity takes shape: the group of people who have also read these same texts. Between the public and private spheres, another space takes shape, defined by solitary or collective acts of reading, by means of which a community of resistance is formed and maintained. These communities can be contrasted with two other types of communities shaped by reading, both of which resemble them in certain respects: Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ and Stanley Fish’s ‘interpretive communities.’ Like the imagined communities Anderson uses to define modern nationalism, they are based on a network of people who have not necessarily met face to face, but who are united by the mediation of the text. The imagined communities of nationalism exist in the public sphere, mediated by newspapers, novels, and later radio, cinema, and television, while the aforementioned networks are necessarily clandestine. Fish’s concept of interpretive communities of readers constructed around shared conventions of decoding is useful here as well, though his emphasis on their lack of a grounding outside the acts of interpretation on which they are based is not applicable in a context of coloniality of power.28 These readers’ acts are not ‘inconsequential’ (a favourite word of Fish’s), but rather place them in great danger. Fish’s concept is historically limited to bourgeois culture, where reading is safely cordoned off (and confined) in a protected area. Like these subversive readers, Don Quixote feels a need to put himself in danger, transforming himself into a knight errant instead of following his first impulse to become a writer: ‘he often felt the desire to take up his pen and give it [Don Belianís de Grecia] the conclusion promised

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 23

there; and no doubt he would have done so ... if other greater and more persistent thoughts had not prevented him’ (I.1, 20) (muchas veces le vino deseo de tomar la pluma y dalle fin [a Don Belianís de Grecia] al pie de la letra, como allí se promete; y sin duda alguna lo hiciera, y aun saliera con ello, si otros mayores y continuos pensamientos no se lo estorbaran [I.1, 72–3]). Another feature these interpretive communities share with Don Quixote is the curious recurrence of la Mancha in the topographies they evoke. In Lucrecia’s case this is clearly a result of proximity to Madrid; in that of the conversos of Quintanar, it appears to be more related to a cultural and political distance from centres of power that far exceeds the geographical separation. Together, this paradoxical proximity and distance is what constitutes la Mancha as a curious sort of borderland within the empire. La Mancha as Borderland Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago ... Don Quixote, I.1, 19 (emphasis added) [En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho que vivía un hidalgo ...] (Don Quijote I.1, 35; emphasis added) ... continuing their journey, the beautiful band of pilgrims reached a place neither very small nor very large, whose name I don’t remember, and in the midst of the town square, through which they had to pass, they saw a lot of people assembled ... The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda III.10, 247 (emphasis added) [... el hermoso escuadrón de los peregrinos, prosiguiendo su viaje, llegó a un lugar, no muy pequeño ni muy grande, de cuyo nombre no me acuerdo, y, en mitad de la plaza dél, por quien forzozamente habían de pasar, vieron mucha gente junta ...] (Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda III.10, 527; emphasis added) Juan de Ayala, who appears to be Count Salazar’s commissioner for transporting the Moriscos, arrived in this town demanding a cart for transporting Moriscos ... Having seen his commission and conferred about it, the councilmen declared that they obey the commission as is their duty, but as far as carrying it out is concerned, this is a very poor and needy town, and eight to ten days ago they gave a cart with four mules to carry saltpeter to Málaga in his Majesty’s service. Moreover, for all the Moriscos that have been expelled from this town, they gave carts and pack animals to transport them. Furthermore, Count Salazar’s order does not specify

24 Decolonizing Cervantes that this town has to give the carts mentioned in the said commission, without any payment or interest at all ... Quintanar de la Orden, minutes of the town council meeting of 18 August 161129

Most readers would presumably attribute Cervantes’ decision to use la Mancha as the main setting for Don Quixote to the comic effect of making a knight errant hail, not from some distant, exotic land, but from an ordinary rural area familiar to readers in Madrid and throughout Castile as a rather uninteresting provincial backwater.30 However, at least two other Cervantine works, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and Rinconete y Cortadillo, include episodes set in la Mancha, and the unspecified location of El retablo de las maravillas should probably be thought of as a town in that region as well.31 Certainly, autobiographical factors must have played a role: in 1584 Cervantes married Catalina de Salazar, of Esquivias, not far from the northern limit of la Mancha; and as a recaudador he made frequent journeys across that region from Madrid to Andalusia. Yet taken together the following factors should lead us to take a closer look at la Mancha in the works of Cervantes: (1) it is one of the geographical areas to which he returned most frequently, rivalled only by Algiers and Seville; (2) it is the main setting of his most influential and admired masterpiece, Don Quixote; (3) it is the setting for a crucial episode, arguably the climactic scene, of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, his longest and most ambitious work apart from Don Quixote; and (4) the ‘minor’ works where la Mancha is evoked, Rinconete y Cortadillo and El retablo de las maravillas, are among the most frequently cited and widely admired of his writings. This section views la Mancha through the lens of contemporary border theory. Admittedly, a number of other regions of Spain could also be thought of as ‘borderlands,’ and some, such as Seville or Extremadura, figure prominently in Cervantes’ fiction. Seville, however, is a very different kind of borderland from la Mancha. Where Don Quixote’s rural backwater belongs as much to the past as the present, urban Seville links the present to the future. On the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, furthermore, the Barbary Coast forms a kind of external border, a hybridized extension of Spain beyond the Peninsula. Though a full treatment is beyond the scope of this chapter, in concluding this section I will briefly take up these borderlands as well. To begin with, two notions of la Mancha seem to stimulate Cervantes’ imagination: on the one hand, the idea of a crossroads, an area one passes through on the way from Madrid to Andalusia (Rinconete y

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 25

Cortadillo), or from Portugal to France (Persiles); and on the other, a kind of empty non-place, the closest region to Madrid where one could already feel lost ‘in the middle of nowhere’ (Don Quixote, Retablo). Taken together, these two notions suggest the idea I wish to explore below, that of la Mancha as borderland. First, however, a brief excursus concerning the theoretical concept of borders is called for. Border theory, which emerged in the 1990s in the wake of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera (1987), takes internal colonialism as a starting point, but moves beyond the critique of institutionalized racism on which that concept was originally based, providing a more nuanced view of the interaction between the internal colony and the dominant culture. As in the case of postcolonial theory generally, here too there has been a ‘cultural turn’ away from an exclusive focus on denouncing the unjust political and economic circumstances under which the colonized exist, and towards the exploration of the complex, divided consciousness of the colonial subject. At the same time, attentive to the constant back and forth movement across the borders separating national cultures both from one another and from the minority discourses within the nation, border theory highlights the disavowal by means of which dominant cultures evade the problems posed by internal colonies. Unlike the homogeneous public sphere where liberal multiculturalism condescends to ‘recognize’ other cultures, the borderland is a shifting zone of coming together, where the separateness of cultures is swept away, and easy distinctions between ‘self’ and ‘other’ collapse.32 Far from rejecting the theory of internal colonialism, Anzaldúa presupposes it, referring to Chicanos as ‘a colonized people in our own territory’ (19). Yet rather than dwell on the ways in which they have been victimized, she emphasizes the strategies they have developed to negotiate their relation with the prevailing cultural values, in order to ensure their survival as a people. Those living in the borderlands do not isolate their culture as if to protect and preserve it, but instead they choose certain elements from each and eliminate others, creating a ‘new mestiza’ identity in the process. This may mean rejecting aspects of local tradition, such as the machismo Anzaldúa associates with Mexican society (38–9). At the same time it means embracing any who wish to participate in the project, even if they come from ‘outside.’ This porous quality of the borderland makes it an alternative model to traditional nationalism, which defines cultural identity by exclusion. Borderlands become spaces where the stark choice between static

26 Decolonizing Cervantes

‘preservation’ of tradition and the wholesale adoption of post-Enlightenment modernity can be overcome. Anzaldúa’s essay both theorizes and exemplifies the appropriation of a living tradition that nonetheless implies no unwavering commitment to a fossilized past. Her re-appropriations of Christian symbols such as the Virgin of Guadalupe (49–53) and Aztec myths such as the goddess Coatlicue (63–73) enact the creative process she describes, whereby a new cultural identity is woven out of the very threads composing the old one. Continuity with the past and productive change are here seen as compatible. The notion that change requires abandonment of tradition and embracing of modernity as defined by Occidental reason now appears to be a bogeyman invented to frighten the colonized subject into the very jaws of the monster that is devouring it. Instead of a ‘one size fits all’ globalization that imposes a single model of ‘development’ everywhere, change coming from the borderlands implies respect for local knowledge, and destabilizes the epistemological superiority of the metropolis. In Local Histories, Global Designs, Walter D. Mignolo, explicitly drawing on Anzaldúa, employs the concept of ‘border thinking,’ as a broad heading under which to group a number of developments in oppositional thought. For Mignolo, border thinking starts from the local histories of colonized peoples (including internal colonies in postcolonial societies), drawing on local experience to critique the ‘global designs’ emanating from former metropolitan centers. Also discussed under this heading is Moroccan philosopher Abdelhebir Khatibi, for whom the Maghreb ‘far from being ... an ontological site, similar to the idea of the nation, is, on the contrary ... a geohistorical location that is constructed as a crossing instead of as a grounding’ (69; emphasis added). Though presented as a corrective to Western topographical concepts, this approach is equally applicable to the Iberian peninsula, particularly, as we will see, to la Mancha. One of the principal ways border thinking manifests itself is in what Mignolo terms bilanguaging, the coming together of two languages on unequal terrain as part of a subject’s lived experience. As opposed to bilingualism, the merely instrumental use of two languages by a single individual, bilanguaging, for Mignolo, implies a radical incorporation of the linguistic divide into one’s own person, in such a way that the self is traversed by this boundary. Further, the linguistic divide in bilanguaging itself replicates the colonial difference between dominant and subaltern languages, in such a way as to signify opposition to the global design that created such a hierarchy of languages in the first place. Anzaldúa deals

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 27

with this aspect of life in the borderlands in a chapter of her essay titled ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue,’ where she differentiates among some eight different varieties of English, Spanish, and Spanglish spoken by her community. In this context, Spanish, which sometimes bursts forth in the midst of an English sentence, is a sign of cultural resistance: ‘We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture’ (85). Yet at the same time, Anzaldúa acknowledges that the Spanish of the borderlands, a subaltern language, delegitimized and cut off, is ‘an orphan tongue’ (80). As I will explain further below, for manchegos of Islamic heritage, Arabic was just such an orphan tongue, which lent itself to various practices of bilanguaging with Spanish. The linguistic practices of the borderlands thus destabilize the convergence of nation, territory, and language that grounds nationalist ideologies, opening the way toward a redefinition of literary studies through ‘transnational cultural studies’ (Mignolo 217–49). In many ways, la Mancha, a rural area of New Castile occupying parts of the modern provinces of Toledo, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, and Albacete, forms a borderland in the imaginary of early modern Spain. The multiple meanings that attach to this area are the result of its own local history, overlaid by literary representations generated primarily in Madrid. Although located physically near the center of modern Spain, la Mancha embodies the ethno-religious, political, and socio-economic borders of the emerging national identity. As we have seen, it was an area well known to Cervantes, one he returned to again and again in his writings. It was also chosen by Lope de Vega as the setting for several plays concerning the role of the rural peasantry in the Spanish nation, in relation to the monarchy and the church. To grasp the significance of Don Quixote’s Manchegan origins, it is necessary to consider the layers of historical and cultural meaning that had accumulated around that region by 1600. La Mancha lies between Old Castile and Andalusia and is crossed by the thousands who journey from Madrid to the cities of the South: Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada, Cádiz, Málaga. One also crosses the northern edge of la Mancha when travelling from Madrid to Valencia. During the long, slow process known somewhat misleadingly as the ‘Reconquista,’ la Mancha was a buffer zone between Christian and Islamic territories. In the most rapid period of Christian expansion, from the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) to the conquest of Seville (1248), the area was initially depopulated of its Muslim inhabitants, and subsequently repopulated, primarily by

28 Decolonizing Cervantes

Christians, but also by significant Jewish and Muslim communities, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.33 Even after the actual border between Christian- and Muslim-held territories had moved further south, below the Guadalquivir, where it would remain until the Conquest of Granada in 1492, la Mancha was the region that stood between the Catholic traditionalism of Old Castile and the dynamic hybridization taking place along the southern and eastern fringes. Even into the second half of the sixteenth century, Andalusia and Valencia remained to a large extent Morisco regions, where Islam was still practiced fairly openly, albeit illegally, and Arabic was spoken. When the rebellion known as the War of the Alpujarras ended in 1571 with the decision to evacuate the Moriscos and scatter them in small groups in towns throughout Castile, it was through la Mancha that they had to pass. As many as possible were settled in the towns of what had remained, essentially, the border region separating Christian and Muslim Spain.34 At least some of the Moriscos of la Mancha struggled to retain Arabic as an underground ‘orphan language,’ speaking it in the home, singing in Arabic on festive occasions and, in some cases, praying in the language of their ancestors. As described above, a clandestine literature on a variety of religious and secular topics circulated in aljamiado, Spanish written with Arabic script. The bilanguaging practices of these Moriscos helped keep la Mancha a cultural and linguistic crossroads, even as the ethnic ‘purification’ of the Peninsula advanced.35 This frontier zone played a crucial role in the history of the military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara, which received enormous grants of land in New Castile and Extremadura in exchange for their role in the conquest and political reorganization of these regions. These military orders were created on the model of the various orders that participated in the Crusades (the Knights Templar and the Order of St John are the principal two). As Carlos de Ayala Martínez points out, the three areas in which Christian military orders were active in the Middle Ages were the Middle East, the Baltic, and the Iberian Peninsula, which correspond to ‘the borderlands of Christendom’ (33). Unlike the crusading orders, however, the Spanish ones concentrated their military activity and the property they accumulated in one geographical area, in which ‘the front line of combat merged with the colonization of space and exploitation of resources’ (50). This allowed them to consolidate enough power to constitute, as José Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez explains, ‘a power that clearly competed with those deployed in the interior of the Peninsula, within each of the distinct kingdoms’ (11). At the close of the

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 29

Middle Ages they governed most of la Mancha through a quasi-feudal system of encomiendas. The comendadores functioned as feudal lords, but with the difference that they were members of religious orders with a clear hierarchy and an efficient bureaucracy. The Orden de Santiago alone controlled a vast territory of approximately 23,000 square kilometres, concentrated in la Mancha and Extremadura, comprising over 200 villages and towns, with a population of around 200,000 people, and an annual income of more than 30 million maravedís (Ayala Martínez 51). For over two centuries, from the fall of Seville in 1248 until the final Castilian campaigns began in earnest in 1484, the border with the Islamic kingdom of Granada shifted only slightly. During this period, the Spanish military orders served little purpose militarily, and were no longer needed to organize the colonization of the reconquered lands. They continued to administer the territories they had acquired during the Reconquest, but this role was increasingly coveted by the monarchy, which saw the orders as an impediment to the expansion of its power, and even to some extent as a rival. Throughout the fifteenth century the kings of Castile sought to increase their control over the orders, but it was only under the Catholic Monarchs that the position of maestre of the three major orders was incorporated into the monarchy. The definitive integration of the military orders into the bureaucracy of the Absolutist monarchy came in 1523 when Charles V created the Consejo de las Órdenes Militares. Major changes in the relation between the military orders and the lands they administered resulted from incorporation. The Consejo de Órdenes, a branch of the monarchy, ruled the territories formerly governed directly by the orders themselves. This gave local communities access to royal power, but it also inserted that power more directly into the lives of ordinary people. The role in local affairs of the caballeros of the orders was greatly diminished as a result. Membership in a military order (un hábito de Santiago, Calatrava, or Alcántara) became a mark of prestige bestowed by the king on nobles he deigned to favour, often for reasons relating to intrigues and rivalries within court society. The caballeros of the various orders mostly lived at court, and those who held encomiendas received an income, but played no active role in governing. The medieval requirement that comendadores live within the confines of their encomienda ceased to be enforced.36 The feudal structure of the orders was broken apart into two essentially unrelated functions. The administration of the localities belonging to the orders was taken out of the hands of the caballeros themselves and placed instead in those of the

30 Decolonizing Cervantes

career bureaucrats of the Consejo de Órdenes, and the position of a caballero de hábito was effectively reduced to that of a courtier. Some encomiendas provided the titleholder with enormous wealth; but, as Helen Nader has documented in detail, during the sixteenth century the crown sold off a considerable portion of the property belonging to the orders, so that little by little even the economic impact of the caballeros gradually diminished. Despite the diminished role of the caballeros de hábito, however, the Consejo de Órdenes functioned throughout the seventeenth century as the governing body for territory belonging to the military orders. Thus authorities associated with the orders continued to exercise both direct power and an important prestige function. One example of this maintenance of feudal structures are the frequent and extremely thorough visits by agents of the Consejo de Órdenes to the towns of each order, the records of which are preserved in the section of Órdenes Militares in the Archivo Histórico Nacional. Thus even as incipient modernization changed its status vis-à-vis state power, towards 1600 la Mancha continued to straddle the imaginary line separating medieval and modern periods, on the border between past and present. In addition to the religious and historical senses of borderland borne by the region, la Mancha’s proximity to Madrid made it the closest borderland, politically speaking, between the Imperial Spain of the Hapsburgs and the increasingly impoverished countryside. As the court society replaced the traditional seigneurial order, predominantly agricultural, rural areas had fewer ties to the upper echelons of power. Plunged into a demographic and economic crisis by the excessive taxation needed to maintain the military power behind the empire, as well as to feed the court itself, la Mancha was destabilized and depopulated.37 At the same time, the practice by the Hapsburg monarchs of the sale of offices, especially that of regidor perpetuo, open only to hidalgos who could prove their limpieza de sangre, led to the creation of local oligarchies in which rival clans competed with one another, and with the pecheros, for control of town councils. The documentation in the Archivo Histórico de Toledo (a juridical archive for the Consejo de Órdenes, housed in the AHN in Madrid) leads to the unmistakable conclusion that the monarchy did nothing to discourage this struggle for power within the régimen local. Rather, every effort was made to ensure that the crown would play the role of supreme arbiter of local conflicts, thus extending its power into the daily lives of residents. Simultaneously, new forms of social and cultural control were introduced, and already existing ones intensified, producing a systematic disruption of the way of life of New Castilian peasants. We have already

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seen, in the opening section of this introduction, how ecclesiastical and monarchical absolutism converged on the question of religious orthodoxy, with the Inquisition functioning to enforce the narrowing of beliefs and practices. The steady pressure of inquisitorial scrutiny was reinforced by abrupt interventions whose disruptive potential was even greater. The sudden influx of thousands of Morisco refugees from Granada, provoking what we would nowadays call a humanitarian crisis, was followed by several decades of surveillance and regimentation of this group, culminating in an equally abrupt uprooting of families on whom local communities had come to rely for cheap labour, families whom, in many cases, the communities had tried to integrate socially – with varying degrees of success. In the epigraph to this section, with reference to the project of the expulsion of the Moriscos, the ayuntamiento of Quintanar de la Orden expresses exasperation at the seemingly unending demands for cooperation and resources made by the crown and its agents: ‘this is a very poor and needy town, and eight to ten days ago they gave a cart ... [F]or all the Moriscos that have been expelled ... they gave carts and pack animals to transport them.’ Parallel to the increase in exploitation, control, and surveillance of the population, there was, naturally, a greater military presence. The constant movement of troops across the Peninsula, either to embark for a foreign intervention or to put down a regional rebellion, meant that quartering soldiers was a frequent obligation, and one that fell squarely on the shoulders of the commoners. Hidalgos and familiares of the Inquisition were exempt, and the bitter disputes that arose concerning these exemptions show how onerous the burden was. Furthermore, the war machine of the Hapsburg empire was always in need of foot soldiers, so levies became more frequent. Towns were called upon to supply specific numbers of young men, almost as a form of tribute, and to supply fiadores in the case of desertions, which seem to have been common.38 Finally, the production of supplies for the imperial armies, whether in the form of grain or munitions, was a constant drain on already overburdened agricultural producers. This is illustrated by the disputes arising in the 1580s between Ambrosio de Carrión, in charge of royal saltpeter production in la Mancha, and local residents, whom he prohibited from cutting brush which they traditionally used for firewood when cooking their midday meals while at work in the fields. Carrión insisted he needed the fuel for his saltpeter refinery, and arrested and fined peasants caught ‘stealing’ it. Saltpetre, a key ingredient of gunpowder, was, of course, a much-needed commodity for the empire.39 The increased involvement in local affairs on the part of centralized

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authorities, either monarchical or ecclesiastical, constitutes la Mancha as a borderland in the extension of coloniality of power across Spain. In this respect, it is hardly surprising to see local residents adopting attitudes toward authority that resemble those associated with the colonized subjects of the New World. The formulaic response of colonial administrators when decrees arrived from Madrid that contradicted the interests of local oligarchs is characterized by what we might call, following Bhabha, ‘sly civility’: ‘la ley se acata pero no se cumple’ (roughly, ‘we recognize the authority of the law, but we do not put it into practice’). This formula is echoed by the authorities in Quintanar who insist that ‘they obey the said commission as is their duty, but as far as carrying it out is concerned, this is a very poor and needy town ...’ La Mancha is thus constituted as an intermediary space between the colonizing powers and the American colonies. The term ‘Castilla la Nueva’ had its origin, of course, in the Reconquest, but in this context the parallelism between that name and the names of the virreinatos of the American colonies (Nueva España, Nueva Granada) suggests a similar status vis-à-vis the metropolitan center. Under these conditions, increasing numbers of landless peasants and even small landholders abandoned the countryside for the cities. In the case of la Mancha, this would mean especially Madrid, the very metropolitan center from which the changes causing the crisis emanated. These displaced peasants formed a significant part of the theatre-going public, and clearly contributed to the broad base of Lope de Vega’s popularity. Migrants from rural to urban areas would have been the primary audience for plays concerning the honra de los villanos. In effect, at the same time as la Mancha was being newly constituted as an internal borderland between the monarchy and its colonial empire, a representation of rural Spain was being forged in the theatre of Lope de Vega which was designed to ensure the formation of subjects desirous of royal control. The formula employed by Lope in such plays as Peribáñez and Fuenteovejuna exploited, in the service of monarchical absolutism, an age-old collective resentment toward the figure of the comendador, preserved in the popular imagination in the form of romances and legends, despite the fact that the comendadores had long since ceased to reside in towns belonging to the military orders or to play any active role in their administration.40 At the same time as the audience’s anger is directed against this non-existent authority, distracting them from the structures of power actually operative in their lives, references to the medieval role of the military orders invite the descendents of repobladores to identify

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with the Reconquista. Nostalgic identification with the ethno-religious struggles of the past also underlies Lope’s El niño inocente de la Guardia, a historical drama set in la Mancha, designed not only to encourage popular anti-Semitism but to equate it with support for the Inquisition. Thus Lope presents the displaced campesino manchego with a nostalgic vision of his patria chica as a quasi-mythical ‘heartland’ of traditional values. Yet this escapist vision, whose invented tradition coincides perfectly with the ideologies of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy and imperial expansion, scrupulously avoids any reference to the economic and political problems of the historical present, as a result of which many of those in the audience found themselves in Madrid in the first place.41 Given this historical background and the ideological use made of it in the comedia nueva, what is the resonance of the phrase ‘de la Mancha’ appended to Don Quixote’s name? More broadly, what significance can we now attach to Cervantes’ insistent return to this setting? Once we remind ourselves of the role of the military orders in the local history of la Mancha, Don Quixote’s outrageous fascination with knight errantry takes on a more geographically specific meaning. ‘And the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had belonged to his greatgrandfathers and, stained with rust and covered with mildew, had been lying forgotten in a corner for centuries’ (I.1, 22) (Y lo primero que hizo fue limpiar unas armas que habían sido de sus bisabuelos, que, tomadas de orín y llenas de moho, luengos siglos había que estaban puestas y olvidadas en un rincón [75]). The arms Don Quixote dusts off and carries across the plains of la Mancha belonged to his ancestors, who would have used them to fight in the Reconquest and consequently would have been rewarded with the hidalguía and the lands he inherited, lands he sells to buy books of chivalry. The literary motif of knight errantry is a stylized representation of the returning Crusaders, members of military orders whose reintegration into European society was facilitated by these Christian allegories depicting them heroically as roving agents of justice. In a Europe still without firearms, knights armed with sword, lance, and suits of mail, and mounted on horseback, were a ‘wild’ and potentially dangerous force that had to be reintegrated into society. When a descendant of such warriors is driven mad, several centuries later, by the fanciful tales of knights from exotic lands, we have come, in a sense, full circle. The literary image of the knight errant and the region of la Mancha as Cervantes and his audience knew it are really two different historical products of the military orders that played such a key role in the creation of Europe in the Middle Ages. One is the

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distillation of an attractive legend in the imaginations of people at court and eventually in the collective oral tradition of the romancero. The other is a vestige of the decadent historical reality.42 When Don Quixote sallies forth from his village at the beginning of Part One, the space he enters overflows with people in transit. Most of the novel takes place in what Bakhtin describes as the chronotope of the road, which he considers ideally suited for displaying a linear sequence of encounters ‘governed by chance’ (Dialogic Imagination 243–5). As a few examples will show, the multiple trajectories of the characters Don Quixote meets slash the diagonal lines of an enormous ‘X’ through the heart of New Castile. The silk merchants from Toledo are headed for Murcia, to the southeast. The haunting funerary procession by torchlight goes from Baeza to Segovia, that is, northwest. The captive and Zoraida, having landed at Vélez Málaga, have crossed Sierra Morena into la Mancha, towards the northeast. Their intention is to go to León, to the northwest, but instead they go back down to Seville, southwest, as do a number of other characters. Dorotea/Princess Micomicona follows almost the same trajectory, from Osuna/Málaga to la Mancha. As an Asturian, Maritornes came to la Mancha by heading mostly south, but also east. The muleteer from Arévalo would have crossed south and east as well. The principal movement of Part Two, of course, is to the northeast, towards Zaragoza initially, and then Barcelona. The crisscrossing pattern formed by all of these trajectories confirms the image of la Mancha as an interior border of Spanish territory, one which reverses the normal relation of interior and exterior. La Mancha as borderland signifies, in the last analysis, this traversing of Spain by its own limits. Another way of approaching the issue of la Mancha in Don Quixote is to ask the question: We know it is meant as a joke, but who is the butt of the joke? Only impoverished local hidalgos? When we look at Don Quixote from the perspective of the history of la Mancha and what it had become, it seems that not only local petty nobility is being made fun of here, but anyone who would seriously try to revive heroic values based on a claim of continuity between the Christians who fought the Moors and the cristianos viejos inhabiting the regions taken in the Reconquest. The figure of Don Quixote ridicules the identification with aristocratic ideals of valour and honour that was being encouraged in even the humblest peasant and urban ganapán. This makes him an ideological counterweight to Lope’s plays based on the honra de los villanos.43 It is only a small step to say that pointing out the absurdity of such an idealization of la Mancha was a way of undermining the project which

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 35

the image of the villano honrado was meant to shore up, that is, the identification of the Castilian peasantry with the monarchy and its overseas empire. In at least this limited sense, Don Quixote de la Mancha can be read as a work written along the border between fantasy and reality, as a form of resistance to the spread of coloniality of power throughout Spanish society. From this perspective, Sancho Panza can be seen as a farcical parody of the villano honrado, ‘cristiano viejo por los cuatro costados’ (Old Christian on all four sides [of his lineage]), who brings social reality into contact with an idealized representation just as surely as Don Quixote does for knight errantry. The romantic stories of knightly adventures do not lure Sancho nearly as powerfully as his greed and desire for social mobility. Like the urban peasants in the audience of Lope’s plays, then, he identifies with ‘noble’ values only in the hope of ascending in the hierarchy. Certainly, Cervantes ridicules his ambition to join the ruling class – including becoming a slave trader if Don Quixote should make him ruler over a population of blacks – but this satire need not be taken to suggest that peasants like Sancho should ‘know their place.’ Once we see the way la Mancha functioned in the nascent national consciousness, we can see in him, rather, an unmasking of the ideological construct identifying the cristiano viejo peasant with the projects of the monarchy. In the Barataria episode, Cervantes allows Sancho to demonstrate the peasantry’s capacity for self-government, then abruptly shows how the nobility exercises control over the peasant’s self-image, persuading him to renounce any claim to participate in the political process. Sancho is thus a representative example of the Castilian peasant as the subject of internal colonialism. (I return to the question of Sancho as a colonized subject in my analysis of the Ricote episode in chapter 5 below.) The depth of the historical irony of Don Quixote’s adventures can only be fully grasped when they are viewed in the context of la Mancha as the borderland of the empire. Alonso Quijano and Sancho Panza, a rural hidalgo and pechero whose lives are unbearably closed and stagnant, arguably as a consequence of the dismantling of their world by the Absolutist monarchy and the Counter-Reformation, undertake a series of adventures. But instead of going to Madrid or Toledo or Seville, as a good pícaro would, they cross the Manchegan countryside, giving us a pretty fair sample of the degradation of the social milieu around them. At the same time the literary motif of knight errantry is used to contrast these adventures with the heroic values being celebrated in Madrid. The ideals of the imagined illustrious past are brought into contact with the

36 Decolonizing Cervantes

degraded reality of everyday life, precisely the comparison that Lope’s comedia nueva so scrupulously avoids. Seeing the central plain of la Mancha as a borderland thus helps us to understand the degree to which the imagined community of early modern Spain was already traversed by what were conceived of as its own limits. Ironically, the literary work today considered to be most emblematic of that time and place calls on the reader to look from an oblique angle of extreme distortion, viewing a rural area in the midst of a demographic and economic crisis through the lens of knight errantry. If, as I am arguing here, the purpose of that distortion was to create a sense of outrage at the absurdity of the contrast, then the more we know about late sixteenth-century la Mancha, the better we will understand Don Quixote.44 The Manchegan episode of Rinconete y Cortadillo and the brilliant entremés El retablo de las maravillas continue this satirical-critical approach in the representation of rural New Castile. An inn on the way from Madrid to Seville is just the place for Rincón and Cortado, two young pícaros, to meet and recognize one another by their comically contradictory appearance, even as they engage in an exaggerated parody of formal address.45 Just as the pícaro is neither courtier nor mere criminal, la Mancha is neither the court (Madrid) nor the corrupt city run by Monopodio (Seville), from which trade to the New World colonies is administered. The idea of la Mancha as a non-place, between extremes, not a destination but only a transitional lugar de paso, is clearly expressed in this amusing exchange: ‘Where is your grace from, sir nobleman, and to what good place are you journeying?’ ‘I do not know where I came from, sir knight, nor where I am going either.’ ‘Well, certainly,’ said the older one, ‘your grace does not look as if he were from heaven, and this is no place to settle down, so there is nothing to do but move along.’ (Exemplary Stories 85–6) [– ¿De qué tierra es vuesa merced, señor gentilhombre, y para adónde bueno camina? – Mi tierra, señor caballero, no la sé, ni para dónde camino, tampoco. – Pues en verdad –dijo el mayor– que no parece vuesa merced del cielo, y que éste no es lugar para hacer su asiento en él: que por fuerza se ha de pasar adelante.] (Novelas ejemplares I, 193)

Another of the works Cervantes set in la Mancha is El retablo de las maravillas, which can be read as the antithesis of Lope’s El niño inocente de

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 37

la Guardia. The use here of the technique of ‘discovery’ to reveal simultaneously the emptiness of the stage and of the villagers’ pretensions of limpieza de sangre constitutes a dismantling of the ideological and theatrical underpinnings of Lope’s comedia de santos and with it, the linking of limpieza de sangre to national and religious pretensions to superiority over the ‘impure.’ In other words, El retablo uses the borderland setting of la Mancha to stage a deconstruction of the borders between those included and those excluded from the nation.46 The other side of Cervantes’ representation of la Mancha is the use of this geographical space as the setting for a utopian vision of Spain as an open society. The two most important examples are the harmonious gathering of wandering couples at the Inn in Part One of Don Quixote, and the chapter of Persiles in which the utopianism of the pilgrim band converges with the idealized depiction of Quintanar de la Orden. Here Cervantes puts forward an ideological construct of his own, which can be taken as an alternative to the image of the cristiano viejo peasant. In both instances a Spaniard who has been at least fifteen years abroad in a hostile environment returns as part of a mixed-race couple, joining a group who have gathered to form a temporary community set off from the larger society, where the usually strict rules for social behaviour are temporarily placed in abeyance. These spontaneously formed temporary communities offer what I consider to be Cervantes’ own positive contribution to rethinking the emerging national identity of Spain. Instead of a definition by exclusion, he seems to have been experimenting with ways in which social groups could define themselves as loose entities whose open weave allowed for continual redefinition and change. I believe Cervantes saw fiction as a space for creating and exploring such communities. The Manchegan episodes of Persiles y Sigismunda, especially the culminating episode of Antonio de Villaseñor’s life, which takes place in Quintanar de la Orden, will be analyzed in detail in chapter 3 below. Here I would simply like to suggest that the choice of la Mancha as the locus for a utopian alternative to internal colonialism was conditioned by its status as the borderland of empire, as it were the colonial metropolis’s own backyard. Pointing to the absurd contradiction between the professed ideals of the monarchy and the ludicrously underdeveloped state of the nearest rural area implied a critique of existing structures of power. Cervantes seizes on the forgotten and dispossessed region closest to Madrid to depict a different vision of Spain from the official one. Imperial power, though it tries to give the impression of invincibility, can never be allpervasive. Cervantes’ la Mancha shows how the blank spaces within the empire can be used to write the history it excludes.

38 Decolonizing Cervantes

Cervantes’ fiction includes two characters whose Manchegan origins are incorporated into their very names: Don Quixote de la Mancha and Bartolomé el Manchego. Both of these characters begin their fictional trajectories in la Mancha and travel far beyond their home region. Don Quixote makes it to the beach in Barcelona before he is forced to turn back by the Caballero de la Blanca Luna. Bartolomé el Manchego – admittedly a minor character – is first introduced, rather abruptly, in chapter 11 of Book Three of Persiles y Sigismunda, just as the characters are leaving la Mancha on their way to Valencia. Bartolomé travels with the protagonists as far as France, where he runs off with Luisa la Talaverana. His journey parallels that of the protagonists who bail him out of jail in Rome. He and Luisa finally end up in Naples. Unlike Don Quixote, whose toponymic epithet is added to his name from the first chapter, Bartolomé is not referred to as ‘el Manchego’ until he reaches Italy, in chapter 1 of Book Four. It would seem that the farther away from la Mancha he gets, the more important it becomes to remind the reader of his place of origin. Neither Alonso Quijano nor Bartolomé ever goes to Madrid, unlike so many manchegos of Cervantes’ day, who filled the theaters to watch plays in which Lope de Vega represented them to themselves as never having left their villages, participating imaginatively in an idealized, static intrahistoria such as Unamuno posited in En torno al castecismo. Instead of heading for the metropolis, these two move laterally, coming into contact with other parts of the empire, including the virreinato of Naples and the Catalunya of Perot Roca Guinarda, stringing together a series of local histories that, even if they do not directly oppose the Hapsburgs’ global designs, at least begin to open up an alternative to them. In closing, a few words are in order about other borderlands of early modern Spain, at least those deployed by Cervantes in his writings. Seville stands out prominently in several texts. As a consequence of its status as the official port of Spain’s overseas empire, it was the diametrical opposite of la Mancha: urban, cosmopolitan, teeming not only with wealth from the Indies but also, to judge by literary depictions, pícaros and all those looking to make some fast cash. Focusing on the New World background to the Seville of El celoso extremeño, James D. Fernández attempts to show how ‘the colonial experience influenced and informed domestic social relations and vice versa’ (978). ‘Infected,’ as it were, by the chaotic heterogeneity of the New World, Seville provides the perfect setting for exploring the consequences of colonialism for Spain itself:

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 39

‘The site of constant and intense migration and contact between races and cultures, early modern Seville was, like many cosmopolitan cities or imperial capitals today, a focal point for discussions about how to create obedient citizens’ (978). Two Novelas ejemplares, El celoso extremeño and Rinconete y Cortadillo take Seville as their setting, as does the first act of El rufián dichoso. Overall, the city emerges in Cervantes as a place toward which characters travel from elsewhere, a magnet drawing people from all over Spain and beyond. In El celoso extremeño, Carrizales settles in Seville on his return to Spain, rather than in his native region of Extremadura. The reader first encounters Rinconete y Cortadillo on their way to Seville, stopping in at a dusty roadside inn not unlike those found in Don Quixote. In the 1605 Don Quixote, in the vast ‘X’ described above as the figure cut through la Mancha by characters’ trajectories, Seville predominates as a destination. In Part One, we find the following characters going to that city: the prostitutes outside the inn in Don Quixote’s first sally, along with the muleteers they accompany (I.2); the Basque lady and her entourage, en route to the Indies to join her husband (I.8); Vivaldo and his companions, who take time out to attend Grisóstomo’s funeral (I.14); Andrés, after the beating he receives from Juan Haldudo (I.31); the oídor Juan Pérez de Viedma, on his way to Mexico with his brother Ruy Pérez de Viedma, and the captive and Zoraida who, in order to accompany him, turn back from their intended itinerary toward the captive’s hometown in León (I.42). In Part Two, Seville has disappeared as a destination, replaced by Barcelona and the opening that cosmopolitan city represented toward the Mediterranean in general, and to Italy in particular. Of course, as Redondo comments, the southward migration in Part One reflects sixteenth-century reality (64). Cervantes himself often made the trip back and forth between Madrid-Esquivias-Toledo and Seville during the years when he must have been working on Don Quixote. But poetically his insistent linking of Seville, ‘the fourth largest city in Europe and the home of an astonishingly diverse population’ (Fernández 978), with rural Extremadura and New Castile makes it one of the twin poles of an opposition between the stagnant, provincial backwaters of the empire and its dynamic centers of commerce and cultural dialogue. If past and present meet in la Mancha, Seville borders on present and future. Cervantes delights in depicting young men, like Rinconete y Cortadillo or Andrés, going there to seek their fortunes. Vivaldo and his companions try to persuade Don Quixote to go there, insisting it is a good place to find adventures, and it appears in the innkeeper’s list of

40 Decolonizing Cervantes

places he exercised errant knavery (which he pretends was knight errantry) in his youth (I.3). Figuratively, Seville is the locus of a different kind of limit to the power of the monarchy than we found in la Mancha. This limit is not due to an earlier set of identities that absolutism could not entirely displace, but rather to the fact that new identities are being forged faster than the state can handle. Cervantes and others associated Seville with the indiano figure, of whom Mariscal has written that he defied the traditional oppositions on which Spanish identity was being constructed, particularly the tension between the aristocracy and the merchant class: It is within this transitional and contradictory space that the textual representation of the indiano appears. Not yet a bourgeois and an ‘aristocrat’ with questionable origins, he constructs his identity upon the unstable ground of wealth accumulated through commerce and an ‘ethnicity’ born of contact with distant colonies. His loyalties have almost nothing to do with still emergent notions of nationality (that is, ‘Spanishness’) and, because of his geographical mobility, very little to do with older forms of regionalism. (‘The Figure of the Indiano’ 65)

Even more than Carrizales, the ultimate representative of Seville’s status as the border between Spain and its New World Empire is really the under world kingpin Monopodio. This lord of misrule confronts the reader with de facto Sevillian political autonomy, in defiance of the crown and all its officials. If Don Quixote’s debasement of chivalry enacts a debunking of the pretense that the historical present is grounded in a heroic fiction of past achievements, Monopodio’s parallel system of property rights gives the lie to Spain’s claim on the New World territories and its hopes for the future grounded on the expected income from those ‘possessions.’ The Barbary Coast, especially Algiers, constituted another important borderland of the Spanish Empire. In their comprehensive study of the thousands of Christians who converted to Islam to participate in a lucrative economy based on piracy, Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar estimate that nearly half of the residents of Algiers in this period were either Christian captives or ‘renegades’ (422). They came from as far away as Stockholm, but most were from the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Spaniards made up the largest single group. In this space, as the Bennassars phrase it, ‘Europe, especially southern Europe, was reinvented’ (422). This reinvented Europe brought together men

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 41

(and some women) from across the continent, neutralizing the national and class divisions that usually separated them. A single language, the lingua franca, blended together their various vernacular tongues. They had the freedom to choose their religious and political affiliations, no longer simply imposed by birthplace and station, based on self-interest. The meritocracy that replaced the traditional hierarchy of lineage was attractive, above all, to the low born, whose ambitions found no limits in Algerian society. Where class mobility is concerned, in fact, the ‘pirate republics’ of the Barbary Coast represent a precocious modernizing tendency far outstripping the extreme social conservatism of early modern Iberia. In studying the ambiguities of renegade identity, the Bennassars note that even for many who remained loyal to the faith of their ancestors the temptation to convert must have been strong. Money and power were the primary motivation of those who renounced Christianity, though in some instances it was only to facilitate escape back to Christian lands. Renegades often returned to Christian society after years and even decades of living as Muslims. If they presented themselves before the Inquisition and confessed, they usually received only penitential sanctions. Captive Christians, who knew how hard it could be to resist conversion as a path to freedom, did not necessarily view renegades with hostility. Solidarity continued strongest among compatriots, even across the religious divide (Bennassar 433). Algiers offered, then, another way of being Spanish, an identity not defined by any specific set of religious beliefs or political allegiances, but by a shared history, culture, and set of geographical references. From this borderland perspective, then, even becoming a Muslim was not tantamount to a definitive renunciation of Spanish identity. Algiers is one of the most frequently occurring place names in Cervantes’ writings. It provides the principal setting for two full-length plays, Los baños de Argel and El trato de Argel, and for the Captive’s Tale in Part One of Don Quixote, as well as a bit of farce in Book Three of Persiles y Sigismunda (the false captives episode, III.10, 527–39). The Algerian port city of Orán, which at the time was a Spanish outpost, is the setting of another play, El gallardo español. A number of episodes from various works either directly or indirectly evoke the Barbary Coast piracy that in those years made the western Mediterranean so uncertain for European travelers. Obviously, his own undoubtedly memorable experience as a captive played a role in his predilection for writing about the North African frontier. The reading public could be counted on to take an

42 Decolonizing Cervantes

interest in Algiers, and Cervantes himself could speak on the subject with the authority of firsthand knowledge. Naturally, he exploited the opportunity wherever possible. Still, he had achieved a remarkable level of self-irony concerning this experience by the end of his life. The episode of the false captives in the posthumous Persiles y Sigismunda shows two young men, who have never left Spain, telling the made-up story of their Algerian adventures as a way of tricking curious bystanders out of a little cash.47 And what image did he present of Algiers and the other places on the Barbary Coast that figure in his work? They constitute a zone of conflict, certainly, and of struggle for the Christian captives who awaited ransom from Spain or a chance to escape, but above all, they form a compendious space where different Mediterranean cultures – Turkish, Jewish, Spanish, Moorish, and Morisco – could encounter one another. They were the space of the lingua franca which, it seems, he himself learned to speak, for he reproduces examples in his texts. Movement across national, linguistic, and religious borders characterizes this milieu. Characters such as the renegade and Zoraida in the Captive’s Tale convert back and forth between Christianity and Islam. Cervantes’ interest in renegades, in fortress outposts, in pirate raids on the Spanish coast such as the one he depicts in Persiles y Sigismunda, bespeak a concern with suturing the widening gulf between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Most importantly, his repeated efforts at engaging audiences, in the theater and on the page, to vicariously ‘cross over’ the strait of Gibraltar and look back across at Spain indicate that he understood the North African coastline could serve as an outpost from which contemplate and interrogate Iberian identity. Whereas la Mancha is an internal borderland region that deconstructs ‘Spain’ by demonstrating how that fiction of identity is traversed by its own limits, Seville and Algiers are borders that unravel the outer limits of the nation, projecting it beyond itself, toward the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, respectively – that is, toward Latin America and the Islamic world. As I set out to show over the next several chapters, Cervantes pulls material into his work from those extensions beyond the territory of ‘Spain’ proper, by means of which he throws into question the emerging definition of ‘Spanishness’ as Counter-Reformation orthodoxy upheld by an Old Christian peasantry. For Cervantes, fiction is the space for exploring such alternatives, for articulating other cultural projects than the ‘cultura dirigida’ of the Baroque (Maravall). The next chapter investigates a specific aspect of

Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 43

the nature of that space, and its communicative strategies, namely, how Cervantes appropriated the supernatural in an ambiguous fashion that neutralized its relation to official religious doctrines. With this introductory chapter, it forms a historiographical and methodological pair aimed at overturning the established context for reading Cervantes within the national literature of Spain. From there, I will focus more specifically on Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, offering a detailed reading of that work as a ‘transnational romance.’ The last part of this book consists of attempts to bring a postcolonial Cervantes to bear on contemporary issues: the first deals with the Moriscos and contemporary immigration to Spain from Morocco; the second, with Don Quixote as a Chicano cultural hero, symbol of the resistance to U.S. neo-colonialism. I conclude with a meditation on the current and future roles of Cervantes and Shakespeare in North American literary studies.

2 Cervantes and lo real maravilloso

... dice el mismo Alejandro de otro monstruo marino, el cual le certificó un Diaconeto Bonifacio Napolitano, hombre de muy grande autoridad, haber visto en España ... que tenía el gesto como hombre algo viejo, la barba y el cabello crespo y respeluzado, el color casi azul, todos los miembros eran de hombre, aunque era de muy mayor estatura; solamente se diferenciaba en tener unas pequeñas alas, con que parecía hendir el agua cuando nadaba. [... that same Alexander tells of another sea monster, which a certain Diaconeto Bonifacio Napolitano, a man of great authority, affirms he saw in Spain. He looked like an old man, with thinning curly hair and beard, and nearly blue skin; his members were all human, but exceptionally large; he only differed in having small wings, with which he apparently cut through the waves as he swam.] Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas (1570) ... Pelayo corrió en busca de Elisenda, su mujer ... y la llevó hasta el fondo del patio. Ambos observaron el cuerpo caído con un callado estupor. Estaba vestido como un trapero. Le quedaban apenas unas hilachas descoloridas en el cráneo pelado y muy pocos dientes en la boca, y su lastimosa condición de bisabuelo ensopado lo había desprovisto de toda grandeza. Sus alas de gallinazo grande, sucias y medio desplumadas, estaban encalladas para siempre en el lodozal. [Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife ... and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with mute stupor. He was dressed like a rag picker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud.] Gabriel García Márquez, ‘Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes’ (1972)1

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 45

The juxtaposition above highlights the similarities between early modern Spanish and postcolonial Latin American efforts to bring the marvellous into contact with the everyday. This chapter is about the Baroque taste for admiratio and Cervantes’ persistent exploration of its relation to the world he and his readers shared. This topic necessitates returning to such familiar issues as the role of neo-Aristotelian precepts in Cervantes’ poetics, especially the ‘legitimacy’ of certain departures from verisimilitude, and the place of the romance genre in his fiction. I doubt that it is possible to provide a more nuanced account of these questions than Alban K. Forcione’s in Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles.’ I wish instead to recontextualize within the sphere of cultural politics a topic that up to now has been dealt with exclusively in terms of a depoliticized history of aesthetic ideas. My goal is not to demonstrate that Cervantes was a magical realist avant la lettre, for such a thesis would be untenably anachronistic. Nonetheless, I will try to show that there is a certain common ground between Cervantine fiction and magical realism, and that the basis for that common ground is their shared confrontation with coloniality of power.2 Carpentier, Forcione, and the ‘Persiles’ In his influential prologue to El reino de este mundo (1949), where he first presented his idea of lo real maravilloso, Carpentier used the presence of the marvellous in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda to exemplify the concept. For Carpentier, the crucial feature distinguishing marvellous realism from European fantastic literature generally and Surrealism in particular is the presence in the author’s own social world of a belief system according to which the marvellous events that take place in the fiction could really happen: To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints, nor can those who are not Quixotes enter, body, soul, and possessions, into the world of Amadis of Gaul or Tirant le Blanc. Certain phrases of Rutilio about men transformed into wolves from The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda turn out to be prodigiously trustworthy because in Cervantes’ time, it was believed that people could suffer from lupine mania. Another example is the trip a character makes from Tuscany to Norway on a witch’s blanket. Marco Polo allowed that certain birds flew while carrying elephants

46 Decolonizing Cervantes in their claws. Even Luther saw a demon face to face and threw an inkwell at its head. (86)

In Europe such beliefs have gradually declined; as a result, attempts, for example by the Surrealists, to provoke the effect of the marvellous have become sterile and mechanical. ‘The problem here is that many of them disguise themselves cheaply as magicians, forgetting that the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle)’ (85–6, emphasis added). For this alteration of reality to be unexpected, it must seem not to have been simply contrived by the author. According to the logic of Carpentier’s theory, this can only be avoided if there is a simultaneous presence within the author’s society of contradictory worldviews. In Latin America this condition is met, since ‘we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies’ (87). Toward the end of the essay, Carpentier explains further why America is the continent of lo real maravilloso: ‘Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing [mestizaje], America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies’ (88). As we have seen however, despite his rejection of European models, Carpentier claims Cervantes as a predecessor, and justifies the claim by the historical argument that early modern Europeans had not yet lost their faith in marvellous occurrences. In 1949, when Carpentier first published this reading of Persiles y Sigismunda, the current resurgence of interest in Cervantes’ posthumous romance was not yet underway. True, Casalduero’s book on Persiles and Atkinson’s two essays exploring the role of El Pinciano in the poetics underlying Cervantes’ late work were already available. But it would only be as a result of Riley’s Cervantes’ Theory of the Novel and Forcione’s Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles’ that the neo-Aristotelian theory of the ‘legitimate marvellous’ would be definitively established as the appropriate background against which to interpret the inverisimilar events in Cervantes’ final work. One way to read Carpentier’s comments on Persiles, then, is as an anticipation of these later critical developments by a fellow writer who intuitively grasped what Cervantes was doing, though he lacked the erudition to account for it in historical terms. Essentially, this is how Frederick de Armas approaches the intertextuality Carpentier-Cervantes in his well researched and subtly argued study ‘Metamorphosis as Revolt.’ De Armas congratulates Carpentier on his

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 47

prescience: ‘The prólogo to El reino de este mundo evinces an understanding of the complexities of Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda long before these were seriously considered by critics’ (315). But this compliment also establishes an exact equivalence between Carpentier’s reading and those by Cervantists, effacing any specifically Latin American contribution. Further, de Armas sees Carpentier’s own practice in El reino de este mundo as the direct application of what he learned from Persiles; he thereby assimilates Carpentier to the European literary tradition: ‘Carpentier ... cannot be fully understood in the American context. His profound knowledge of Spanish Golden Age literature permeates his fiction’ (315). Crucial to de Armas’s argument is his claim that both Cervantes and Carpentier follow Tasso’s advice, in Discorsi del poema eroico, to set marvellous events in distant, exotic lands to assist in the suspension of disbelief. By vicariously adopting the perspective of the cultural other, we can indulge in the aesthetic enjoyment of fantastic stories, returning to our more rational, European worldview when we have completed the reading. This recasts Carpentier and his readers as ‘Western Europeans’ for whom ‘Haiti is just such a distant and exotic land’ (310), failing (or refusing) to grasp that Carpentier’s project is precisely to forge a panCaribbean identity in which the European would be seen as a foreign element. Similarly, de Armas sees Cervantes projecting the marvellous events of Persiles y Sigismunda to the exoticized northern periphery of Europe, while maintaining a stricter standard of verisimilitude for the southern regions with which the reader would be more familiar. Yet Persiles, too, presses for an increasing interpenetration of the elevated worlds of romance and the realm of everyday experience. Cervantes, like Carpentier, appears to aim at a broader definition of Spanish identity in a transnational context.3 Without being entirely false, then, de Armas’s view is certainly Eurocentric, indeed unabashedly so. In this chapter, I will attempt the opposite. Instead of assimilating Carpentier’s practice to Renaissance literary theory, I will try to read Cervantes from the perspective of Latin American marvellous realism. Before I proceed with my own argument, though, some historical background is called for concerning the aesthetic category of the legitimate marvellous and how critics have described Cervantes’ use of it. Long before Don Quixote, there was an awareness in European letters of the seductive power fantastic events (such as those that fill the pages of chivalric romances) exercised over the imaginations of readers. This awareness was expressed both in anxiety over the lack of truth-value of

48 Decolonizing Cervantes

such fictions, and in a desire to exploit the enjoyment readers derived from them. A watershed in this issue is the debate over Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which culminates in Tasso’s codification of a system of rules for poetic composition that could reconcile verisimilitude, religious orthodoxy, and marvellous subject matter. The Spanish theorist who most powerfully articulated similar neo-Aristotelian views was López Pinciano, with whose 1596 treatise Philosophia antigua poética Cervantes was undoubtedly familiar. Indeed, it is widely accepted that it was López Pinciano’s praise for the Aethiopica that inspired Cervantes to ‘compete with Heliodorus’ by writing Persiles y Sigismunda in imitation of the Byzantine romance.4 The precepts for legitimating the marvellous are designed to distance it from ordinary experience. This amounts to a quarantining of the products of the imagination, cordoning them off to prevent their contaminating the discourses of truth. Thus Luiz Costa Lima has argued that Italian neo-Aristotelian poetic theory, which presents itself as a defence of poetry, is in fact an attack on the power of the imagination, intended to guarantee the epistemological superiority of reason, thereby constituted as the sole discourse of truth. In Costa Lima’s reading, this serves the function of guaranteeing that the modern individual will be subject to the discipline of reason, and the ‘unruly’ imagination will not be given free rein. It was Alban K. Forcione who irrefutably demonstrated that Cervantes both understood and applied the principles of this theory, and at the same time refused to allow his novelistic practice to be constrained by them. Forcione showed that while Cervantes exhibits his knowledge of the Aristotelian principles of verisimilitude and unity, he also understands that it is not these rules that give literature its power. That power, which may be sharpened or directed by theoretical principles, has its source in the human imagination. It follows that the freedom of the artist cannot be absolutely subject to such rules, if works of art are to move their audiences profoundly. As Forcione amply demonstrates, even in Persiles y Sigismunda, where Cervantes seems to have had Tasso very much in mind as he wrote, he openly flouts the rules, thereby focusing attention on the untamed element of pure fantasy within fiction, which is actually its greatest charm. Forcione’s brilliant reading of the dialogue between the Canon of Toledo and Don Quixote (chapter 3 of Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles’ ) detected the presence of this tension there as well, demonstrating, in a sense for the first time, that Persiles belonged to the same body of work as its author’s undisputed masterpiece. All who work on Persiles today owe Forcione a great debt,

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 49

for he can literally be said to have established a place for it within the Cervantine canon.5 Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles’ thus demonstrated that the apparent orthodoxy of Persiles y Sigismunda with respect to literary form is both exceeded and contained by a larger ironic assertion of the freedom of the artist which cannot itself be contained.6 Forcione’s next book, however, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, presented the work as entirely orthodox from a religious point of view. I argue in chapter 3 below that this apparent orthodoxy is also exceeded by a fuller sense of human spirituality, irreducible to a doctrinal message, which refocuses the meaning of Christianity on the source of its efficacy, local communities and their practices. Everywhere in Persiles y Sigismunda we see control over religious faith taken out of the hands of the clergy and restored to individuals and groups of believers, who integrate its value into their very worldly lives. To overcome the contradiction between Cervantes’ daring literary experimentation and his supposed religious orthodoxy, we must grasp the common grounding of poetics and religious doctrines in the cultural embodiment of power. As stated above, the remainder of this chapter attempts to construct an alternative context for Cervantes’ concern with artistic freedom, in relation to internal colonialism and its consequences. Drawing on Carpentier’s model of marvellous realism as a superimposition of at least two worldviews, I will focus on moments of ontological ambiguity, generic hybridity, and transculturation. By ontological ambiguity, I mean an instance in which the marvellous is presented in such a way that the reader can neither ‘believe’ nor ‘disbelieve’ it; it is left, rather, indeterminate, suspended. The mixing of genres includes various combinations of elevated romance with satire or parody. Transcultural elements come from two main areas: the Islamic heritage of Spain, and the Celtic or ‘Pagan’ roots of both chivalric romance and European witchcraft. Within this context, as I will try to show, Cervantes’ use of the marvellous becomes a marker of resistance to the church’s monopoly over the supernatural – which is as much as to say, over what can be represented as real. First, however, we will take a brief detour through the cultural history of a crucial distinction: the marvellous versus the miraculous. The Marvellous as a Contested Site in European Culture Is there any greater joy than seeing, before our very eyes, you might say, a great lake of boiling pitch, and in it, swimming and writhing about, there are many snakes, serpents, lizards, and many other kinds of fierce and fearsome creatures,

50 Decolonizing Cervantes and from the middle of the lake there comes an extremely sad voice, saying: ‘Thou, O knight, whosoever thou mayest be, who looketh upon this fearful lake, if thou wishest to grasp the treasure hidden beneath these ebon waters, display the valor of thy mighty heart and throw thyself into the midst of its black and burning liquid, for if thou wilt not, thou canst not be worthy of gazing upon the wondrous marvels contained and enclosed within the seven castles of the seven enchantresses which lieth beneath this blackness?’ Don Quixote I.50, 428 [¿Hay mayor contento que ver, como si dijésemos, aquí y ahora se muestra delante de nosotros un gran lago de pez hirviendo a borbollones, y que andan nadando y cruzando por él muchas serpientes, culebras y lagartos, y otros muchos géneros de animales feroces y espantables, y que del medio del lago sale una voz tristísima que dice: – Tú, caballero, quienquiera que seas, que el temeroso lago estás mirando, si quieres alcanzar el bien que debajo destas negras aguas se encubre, muestra el valor de tu fuerte pecho y arrójate en mitad de su negro y encendido licor; porque si así no lo haces, no serás digno de ver las altas maravillas que en sí encierran y contienen los siete castillos de las siete fadas que debajo desta negregura yacen?] (Don Quijote I.50, 584)

As the quote above indicates, the marvellous as Don Quixote understood it entails an element of risk, of hurling oneself into danger, to emerge on the other side of a limit that remains undisturbed in ordinary life. As we saw in the preceding section, Cervantes treated ironically the sixteenth-century project of controlling this transgressive dimension of the marvellous through precepts designed to ‘legitimate’ it. In the following pages, we will look beyond Renaissance poetics, and consider the struggle for control over the aesthetics of admiratio in a context that is more than purely literary. The true point of departure for any discussion of admiratio in modern European culture is the medieval theological distinction between the marvellous and the miraculous. The church’s control over the powerful emotions evoked by the supernatural depended on a hermeneutic of the miraculous. As long as a theological framework unambiguously contained and domesticated it, admiratio could be effectively harnessed in support of the authority and power of religious institutions. As signs of the holy, the mysterious and inexplicable would move believers’ hearts. But the emotions of fear and awe are volatile; the marvellous, experienced as pure fascination, or even as doubt about what is and is not possible in the material world, creates an opening in the ontology of church doctrine, through which the imaginations of believers could be

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drawn. When the marvellous remained intractable to theological explanation, it threatened the onto-epistemological exclusivity of Christianity. Thus for Jacques Le Goff, the marvellous, having pre-Christian roots and persisting throughout the Middle Ages, ‘was one form of resistance to the official ideology of Christianity’ (32). Though initially repressed by the church, it was partially legitimated through the orthodox category of the miraculous. The high point of this effort by theologians to explain the marvellous by reference to the unifying principle of God’s will came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In terms strikingly similar to Carpentier’s criticisms of post-Romantic attempts to recreate the fantastic, Le Goff complains of the predictability that results: The miracle depends only on the will of God, in which respect it may be distinguished from natural events, which are of course also willed by God but are determined once and for all by the regularity that God has built into his creation. Nevertheless, the miracle is also subject to God’s plan and to regularity of a certain kind. Many miracles are obtained through the intercession of saints, for example. Despite changes in the nature and sources of hagiography, I think it is possible to detect a growing lassitude in medieval man’s attitudes toward the saints: the moment a saint appears, one knows what he is going to do. Given the situation, there is no doubt that he will multiply loaves or raise the dead or exorcise a demon. There is no surprise about what will come to pass. In other words, at some point hagiography ceased to partake of the tradition of the marvelous. (31)

Explicitly denying that it can be reduced to Todorov’s category of the fantastic, Le Goff suggests that a distinctive feature of the marvellous is that it is produced by a plurality of forces or organizing principles at work in the world (30). By suggesting that it comes from God, the miraculous explains away the marvellous, just as surely as do the laws of nature. In the case of the fantastic, the supernatural occurrence represents only a hole in the fabric of the scientifico-rational worldview – it does not come from an elsewhere that would represent an alternative to that worldview. As will be discussed further below, unlike the fantastic in Todorov’s account, the medieval marvellous thus shares with Carpentier’s real maravilloso the co-presence of more than one explanatory model. This is an important point, to which I will return. Research by medieval historians shows the domestication of the marvellous at work in the slow gestation of a characteristically modern form of rational subjectivity. In Metamorphosis and Identity, Caroline Walker

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Bynum examines theological and learned discourse concerning marvels in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. She finds evidence of an increasing fascination with the strange, which she attributes to a desire to contain it as a threat to stability, ‘an obsession,’ as she puts it, ‘with accounting for change’ (110). ‘The enthusiasm for wonders was less an impulse to collect the odd than an effort to organize things into the more or less explicable’ (ibid.). While Christian doctrine demanded acceptance of irreducible transformations and the mixing of contrary natures, especially in the mystery of the Incarnation and the daily miracle of the Eucharist, in other areas there was ‘a profound resistance to metamorphosis and metempsychosis’ (86). Thus in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica, those who suffer from lycanthropy do not really change their natures, but merely put on an outer wolf-covering that disguises them temporarily. Bynum’s findings reinforce Le Goff’s claim that the clergy sought to explain away any manifestation of the marvellous that could not be reduced to the miraculous. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt the church’s monopoly on the supernatural. Yet she also shows that the subject’s ambivalent feelings of fascination and anxiety when faced with the unexplained were being harnessed in the service of that monopoly. According to Benedicta Ward in her seminal study of medieval miracle collections, this period also saw a significant change in the use of miracle stories in the biographies of saints. Whereas the primary motivation for the collection of miracle stories had previously been the prestige gained for a specific shrine by means of astonishing and wondrous tales, Ward credits Bernard of Clairvaux with introducing what she terms a ‘didactic approach’ to miracles, ‘which saw wonders as subservient to virtue’ (175–6). A layer of explanation was thereby added, a buffer between the portent and the gaping spectator. God’s purpose in permitting certain individuals to perform miracles was to provide a sign not only of his power but also of their sanctity, a seal of approval for their virtuous lives. Around 1200, centralized control of the canonization process was instituted, vesting the papacy with the final authority it still retains to recognize sainthood. Admission to sainthood was based on an appropriate combination of miracles and a virtuous life. A regularized bureaucratic procedure was soon codified. ‘This precision about the place of miracles and the kind of miracles in the life and after the death of a saint marks a new stage in the use of miracles for the official recognition of sanctity’ (Ward 191). It is possible, then, to piece together a process of domestication of the

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marvellous in European culture beginning in the twelfth century; this process culminates in the Baroque, as we shall see. It is part of the vast cultural transformation Herbert Frey calls ‘the Europeanization of Europe,’ through which the rational and individuated subject was shaped. This transformation involved both the creation of the isolated individual and the consolidation of transnational bureaucracies. An important example of this confluence is the institution of annual private confession in all Catholic lands. Through such measures, according to Frey, the values of Christianity were gradually internalized. Eventually the Europeanization of Europe gave way to the process we call modernization, whereby, as Foucault argued in such works as Discipline and Punish and volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, power penetrated ever deeper into the interiority of subjects taught to think of themselves as autonomous. The early modern period marks a new phase in the exploitation of the marvellous for inculcating official doctrines and values. On the one hand, the existing structures of the miraculous were beleaguered. Even before the Diet of Worms in 1521, Christian Humanism had cast doubt on the institutionalized forms of the miraculous that had grown up around the cult of saints: relics, images, apparitions, miracle cures. Luther’s denunciations went further than Erasmus’s gentle satire, undermining the church’s use of awesome ceremony and visual spectacle in the production of faith and extraction of movable goods. Once the Protestants denied the fundamental marvel of daily life for believers, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, ecclesiastical authorities had to develop a strategy. The Counter-Reformation would emphasize those specific points of doctrine through impressive spectacles and festivals, increasingly widespread by the end of the century. At the same time however, fear of heresy led to tighter controls over any manifestations of the supernatural that threatened to cross the line separating the orthodox from the heterodox. William Christian’s book on apparitions traces the trajectory of one such phenomenon, from a medieval environment in which those who claimed to have witnessed apparitions were eagerly supported as illustrious members of local communities, to a changed atmosphere in the Renaissance, in which publicly claiming to have seen an apparition had become dangerous. Such control of popular religious practices is inseparable from a parallel process in imaginative literature. We must keep in mind the penetration of religion into every area of culture in our period. The approval or disapproval of ecclesiastical authorities plays a crucial role,

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both in active literary production and, especially after the mid-sixteenth century, in terms of censorship. This placed severe limitations on the autonomy of the literary field. Writers who flirted too openly with the boundary between orthodox and heretical treatment of supernatural themes risked incurring the wrath of the Inquisition. Thus the relative positions of religious and recreational texts deserve special attention. As Keith Whinnom pointed out in his influential article on the ‘bestseller’ in the Golden Age, the most popular writer of the day by far was Fray Luis de Granada, whose Libro de la oración went through well over one hundred editions. The success of devotional writings poses a serious challenge to our modern conception of secular literature. A writer like Cervantes could not simply assume the existence of a ready-made audience for his libros de entretenimiento; rather, he had to compete with the church for influence over the imaginations of his readership, and the marvellous was too powerful a tool to simply renounce. Baroque poetics succeeded in harnessing the marvellous through the technique of suspensión, described by José Antonio Maravall (Culture of the Baroque 215–20). As Maravall has shown, the Baroque is not so much an unleashing of the imagination as a further deployment of its powers in the service of political and religious orthodoxy. The point of suspensión was to temporarily disrupt the subject’s ability to react or comprehend in order to subsequently channel it all the more powerfully in a certain direction: Such is the meaning of this baroque technique: to employ the most diverse means to suspend the mind, provoking, after a moment of provisional and transitory arrest, a more efficacious release, impelled by the bursting forth of what had been held back and concentrated. This liberating of pent-up forces must always take place only after they have been situated before a channel guiding them in a certain predetermined direction. (220)

The possibility exists, however, that the reader or spectator who has been thus suspended might not follow in the direction that has been laid out, or might even remain suspended indefinitely. The manipulative power of the marvellous that suspends and then releases the pent-up energy of the audience member depends on the active participation and therefore to some extent on the consent of the subject. However, this consent is not, or at least not normally, a conscious assent to all the ideological consequences that result. Rather, it is simply a willingness to experience the satisfying release of emotional tension. This is in contrast to Cervantes’

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approach to the marvellous, since he often creates texts that provoke the feeling of suspensión, but do not provide a clear channel in any definite direction. The reader remains suspended, and in that state is able to contemplate and reflect upon, as if from outside, mechanisms of aesthetic response to which he or she is normally subjected. One of the primary techniques Cervantes uses to achieve this effect is one I call the ‘ambivalent marvellous,’ in order to distinguish it from the ‘legitimate marvellous.’ As we will see in the next section, it is closely linked to the blending of romance with more realistic modes, the hallmark of Cervantes’ mature style. Ontological Ambiguity and Generic Hybridity in Cervantes Cuéntase dellas que se convierten en lobos, así machos como hembras, porque de entrambos géneros hay maléficos y encantadores. Cómo esto pueda ser, yo lo ignoro y, como cristiano que soy católico, no lo creo; pero la experiencia me muestra lo contrario. [It’s said they turn themselves into wolves, males as well as females, for there are sorcerers and enchanters of both sexes. How this can be, I don’t know, and as a Catholic Christian I don’t believe it, but experience shows me just the opposite.] Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda I.8, 189 (emphasis added) The stories they tell about those old magicians who changed men into beasts only amount, according to those who know most about it, to the fact that by their great beauty and their charms they attracted men, made them fall deeply in love with them, and kept them in subjection to such an extent that, by making them do whatever they wanted, they seemed like beasts. But in you, my boy, experience shows me the opposite; for I know you are a rational being and yet I see you in the form of a dog ... Exemplary Stories 229 (emphasis added) [Lo que se dice de aquellas antiguas magas, que convertían los hombres en bestias, dicen los que más saben que no era otra cosa sino que ellas, con su mucha hermosura y con sus halagos, atraían los hombres de manera a que las quisiesen bien, y los sujetaban de suerte, sirviéndose dellos en todo cuanto querían, que parecían bestias. Pero en ti, hijo mío, la experiencia me muestra lo contrario: que sé que eres persona racional y te veo en semejanza de perro.] (Novelas ejemplares II, 337; emphasis added)

From the twelfth century forward, secular literature incorporating magical elements forms a counterpoint to the project of either containing or

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explaining away the marvellous. The primary shape this literature takes is the romance genre, especially romances of chivalry, where wizards, monsters, and sundry enchanted beings appear at every turn, in an astonishing outpouring of fantasy. In Northrop Frye’s formula, ‘romance is the structural core of all fiction,’ because it unites all fiction in ‘a single, integrated vision of the world, parallel to the Christian and biblical vision’ (15 emphasis added). Erich Köhler understands chivalric romance as a courtly literature in which the lesser nobility (the knightly stratum) drew on the oral culture of the marvellous (Celtic tales) in an attempt to oppose the hegemony of the monarchy and the clergy, erecting an alternative culture to promote its own counter-hegemony (15–61). Yet this alternative vision also has the metaphysics of Christianity at its core. Thus Fredric Jameson can argue, in his influential essay on romance, that ‘it would seem that this genre is dependent for its emergence on the availability of a code of good and evil which is formulated in a magical, rather than a purely ethical, sense’ (158). Even while asserting the lesser nobility’s cultural autonomy vis-à-vis ecclesiastical authority, then, romance is founded on an unambiguous moral code, and a stable set of values. The characters move in a world of marvellous events whose meaning (Good vs. Evil) is identical to the miraculous events in saints’ lives, and is equally clear. As in Bakhtin’s explanation of the chronotope of chivalric romance, here too the extraordinary has been reduced to the ordinary, the knight’s ‘native element.’ Paradoxically, ‘the normal condition of his world’ is ‘the miraculous “suddenly”’ (The Dialogic Imagination 152, emphasis added). The basis for the chivalric theme in Cervantes’ masterpiece was the sixteenth-century revival of the genre occasioned by the introduction of the printing press in Spain. Once more, chivalric tales appealed to the lesser nobility, though now it is the expression of a backward looking nostalgia for lost power rather than an orientation toward the future. Maxime Chevalier explains this in terms of the rise of Absolutism: For them the Amadís craze was a literature of escape from the unpleasant realities of their age ... The archaic character of the customs and society represented in the chivalric romances was the principle of their success. Passionately reading these heavy volumes, the gentlemen of Charles V’s and Philip II’s time experienced feelings of nostalgia. Nostalgia, perhaps, for the vanished knighthood that died with the waning of the Middle Ages. But nostalgia as well, undoubtedly, for the bygone independence of the nobility, which retreated further and further before the advance of royal absolutism. (102)

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As Anthony Cascardi has argued in Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age, profound changes taking place in the social structure, which he characterizes in terms of a shift from caste to class, led to a sense that the previously stable, fixed order of things, which provided the moral foundation of the magical world of romance, had become uncertain. What had been understood to be naturally given presented itself as artificially constructed, and therefore subject to change. The stability of the romance world gave way to a reconstructed, artificial order, that covered over but could no longer fill the void of Baroque desengaño. It was under these conditions that Cervantes reappropriated and transformed the romance genre and the residual element of magical narrative for which it was the vehicle, putting them to a new set of uses. Certainly Don Quixote mocks the nobility’s anachronistic enthusiasm for a courtly literature that had long before served the political interests of their class, and still bore the traces of their former glory. Yet, as Ruth El Saffar and her generation of North American Cervantists demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s, there is much more to the story of romance in Cervantes than this.7 Romance permeates Cervantes’ texts. The list of works in which scholars have found romance patterns would come close to being a complete list of his fiction. At most, two of the Novelas ejemplares – Rinconete y Cortadillo and El licenciado vidriera – might be left out. Despite its dark realism, El coloquio de los perros, in Forcione’s multilayered, finely wrought reading, partakes of the initial movement of romance, the descent into the underworld. Even its grotesque imagery of corruption and decay bears a relation to romance: ‘The parodies of the Colloquy point with a harsh denunciation to the failures of the present, to the enormous distance that separates them from the excellences which man normally associates with the formal perfections of romance and celebrates in his sacred texts. In a sense the Colloquy, like the anti-romantic genre with which it has obvious affinities, the picaresque novel, actually preserves romance by assuming and utilizing the moral power of its imaginative archetypes’ (Cervantes and the Mystery 57).8 Of course, this critical discovery could be considered a result of the lens itself with which the texts are studied, a case of archetypal criticism run amuck. After all, did Frye not tell us that ‘romance is the structural core of all fiction’ (15, emphasis added), the realist novel merely a ‘displacement’ of romance? Presumably a clever critic looking for such patterns could find them even in the bleakest naturalist novel. The romance patterns in Cervantes, however, are not buried at the core of his stories, or cloaked in displacements – they are there on the surface, in plain sight, only treated ironically, inviting us, as the above quote by Forcione

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suggests, to take the measure of the distance between our world and the idealized world they represent to us. Yet when we try, we find it bafflingly distant and at the same time tantalizingly close. And we are left, of course, to reflect upon our own desire. This is one of the most characteristic effects of Cervantes’ writing, which turns us all into Quixotes at one time or another. Interpreting (and reinterpreting) this effect is one of the primary tasks of Cervantes scholarship. One of the specific ways Cervantes produces it is through what I propose to call the ambivalent marvellous. This term embraces a range of features found in numerous Cervantine texts, which I will briefly exemplify, before going on to take a closer look at El coloquio de los perros. The texts have in common the element of ontological ambiguity, that is, a lack of clarity concerning exactly what it is that has happened, or how it has happened. Is this a supernatural event or does it obey natural causality? How can we tell? The ambiguity can be of a fairly trivial sort, as in the love potion (hechizo) a Morisca hechicera prepares for Tomás Rodaja, in El licenciado vidriera. The narrator, following post-Tridentine doctrine, explicitly denies such potions can ‘force free will’ (128) (forzar el libre albedrío [52]). Yet when Tomás recovers from the illness it provokes, the hechizo has produced a most extraordinary effect: He got better but remained possessed by the strangest madness anybody had ever seen. The poor wretch imagined that he was all made of glass, and under this delusion, when someone came up to him, he would scream out in the most frightening manner, and using the most convincing arguments would beg them not to come near him, or they would break him. (128) [Quedó sano, y loco de la más extraña locura que entre las locuras hasta entonces se había visto. Imaginóse el desdichado que era todo hecho de vidrio, y con esta imaginación, cuando alguno se llegaba a él, daba terribles voces pidiendo y suplicando con palabras y razones concertadas que no se le acercasen, porque le quebrarían]. (53)

Is this the result of a magic potion or not? The question is undecidable, but arguably immaterial, since the whole episode of the hechicera serves as a mere pretext to set up the situation on which the story is based. Rutilio’s tale presents a similar case in Persiles y Sigismunda. He tells of flying through the air with a witch from Italy to Norway, and then stabbing her after she transformed herself into a wolf and attacked him. The discussion of whether such transformations are possible and the fact that we have only Rutilio’s word as evidence cast doubt on the ‘veracity’

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(within the fiction) of these supernatural events; on the other hand, no other explanation is offered for how Rutilio arrived in Scandinavia, and he is undeniably there when he tells his story. Once again, the supernatural element, having served its purpose as a pretext for bringing about a certain narrative result, simply remains suspended, neither confirmed nor denied. In these and the examples below, the ambivalent marvellous has the effect of suspending us between two worlds. Sometimes the movement goes from this world toward the elevated sphere of romance, and sometimes it moves in the opposite direction; in either case, it is arrested somewhere in the middle, before the resolution that Maravall associates with the Baroque technique of suspensión can be completed.9 The running joke of the enchanters Don Quixote says pursue him is initially presented as a mere delusion, though from the start we have at least one character other than Don Quixote who believes in them, the ama, who brings holy water and tells the priest: ‘Take this, Señor Licentiate, and sprinkle this room, so that no enchanter, of the many in these books, can put a spell on us as punishment for wanting to drive them off the face of the earth’ (I.6, 45) (Tome, vuestra merced, señor licenciado; rocíe este aposento, no esté aquí algún encantador de los muchos que tienen estos libros, y nos encanten, en pena de las que les queremos dar echándolos del mundo [109]). As the novel continues, however, the ‘fact’ that Don Quixote is pursued by malicious enchanters takes on a life of its own. For one thing, they become a regular feature of the imaginative landscape: so much is said about enchanters and enchantment that the reader, though never called on to ‘believe’ in their extraliterary existence, nevertheless becomes accustomed to hearing about them. A second reason is that the other characters increasingly play the role of enchanters, in such a way that Don Quixote’s belief in them becomes somewhat less the direct consequence of his madness and more the result of others’ manipulation of him. After all, the debilitating effect Dulcinea’s enchantment has on him in Part Two is real within the fiction – real enough to kill him. As Luis Murillo puts it in The Golden Dial, ‘the “abduction” and enchantment of Dulcinea has become a psychological fiction. And by this fiction, is not Dulcinea “abducted” and held “enchanted” by time itself? That is, by time out-of-time, and out of the reach of the knight’s effectualness?’ (149). Then there is Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Moorish sage whose source of knowledge about Don Quixote is never explained within the fiction. The power of fiction to create worlds and penetrate into their most secret corners is thematized as a quasi-supernatural phenomenon. Thus

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at the beginning of Part Two the astonished Sancho tells Don Quixote that their story has been printed: ‘... and he [Sansón Carrasco] says that in it they mention me, Sancho Panza, by name, and my lady Dulcinea of Toboso, and other things that happened when we were alone, so that I crossed myself in fear at how the historian who wrote them could have known about them.’ ‘I assure you Sancho,’ said Don Quixote, ‘that the author of our history must be some wise enchanter, for nothing is hidden from them if they wish to write about it’ (II.2, 472) [... y dice que me mientan a mí en ella con mi mesmo nombre de Sancho Panza, y a la señora Dulcinea del Toboso, con otras cosas que pasamos nosotros a solas, que me hice cruces de espantado cómo las pudo saber el historiador que las escribió. – Yo te aseguro, Sancho – dijo Don Quijote – que debe de ser algún sabio encantador el autor de nuestra historia; que a los tales no se les encubre nada de lo que quieren escribir.] (II.2, 57)

Indeed, within their world, as it would be in ours, the narrator’s special access to events no one has witnessed, and even to characters’ thoughts, is a violation of the laws of what is possible and probable. This is the last remnant of the marvellous that the nineteenth-century realist novel cannot eliminate entirely, but only banish from the mimetic frame. Cide Hamete Benengeli is a device whereby fiction itself, the human capacity to create representations of nonexistent things, is thematized as marvellous, even if the effect is a comic one. Elsewhere we can begin to see more clearly the scandal the unencumbered use of this capacity can cause in a society where the marvellous is directed toward the representation of transcendent but invisible things, which the public is obligated by law to believe are real: saints, angels, gods. A pervasive manifestation of the ambivalent marvellous in Cervantes is its use to represent the quasi-transcendent, a charmed atmosphere that predominates at certain moments, which the characters attribute to divine intervention, while the reader understands it to be the author’s doing. Certainly the most important example of all is the gathering of four pairs of lovers in the inn (Don Quixote I.32–46), where coincidence is piled on top of coincidence, and conflicts melt away as if by magic. The ‘magic’ in this case is fiction itself, but from within the narrative it is experienced as divine Providence. Fernando tells his part of the story of Luscinda’s abduction, ending with their arrival at the inn, ‘which for him

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had been the same as coming to heaven, where all the misfortunes on earth reach their conclusion and end’ (I.36, 321) (que para él era haber llegado al cielo, donde se rematan y tienen fin todas las desventuras de la tierra [I.36, 456]). In the following chapter, the arrival of Zoraida on a donkey led by the Captive, who asks for shelter at an inn, a clear figuration of the Nativity, reinforces the religious overtones of these chapters.10 Periandro and Auristela (the false names by means of which Persiles and Sigismunda hide their true identities throughout most of the work) are often ambiguously portrayed as superior beings, their ‘marvellous beauty’ serving as a marker of this condition. As I will explore further in chapter 4 below, Persiles y Sigismunda is a work incorporating multiple fictional worlds, and these characters are privileged in being able to travel from one world to another. At times, when they enter a world, their presence there has a recognizable transformative impact. The clearest example is their arrival at the Fishermen’s Isle in Book Two, chapter 10, just in time to prevent two unhappy marriages by switching the couples in accordance with the wishes of the couples involved, rather than those of their families and community. The initial greeting directed to Auristela (‘Oh you – whoever you may be – must be something from Heaven!’ 141 [¡Oh tú, quienquiera que seas, que no puedes ser sino cosa del cielo! 343]) gives way to Carino’s confession to Periandro: ‘Because I believe your arrival at this particular time and juncture was miraculous – for you’ve delayed my wedding – I’m sure my misfortune will be set to rights by means of your counsel’ (142) (Por tener milagrosa esta tu llegada a tal sazón y coyuntura, que con ella has dilatado mis bodas, tengo por cierto que mi mal ha de tener remedio ... [344]). The episode culminates with Auristela’s changing the partners of the marriages in the middle of the ceremony, declaring to those assembled: ‘This is what Heaven wants’ (144) (Esto quiere el cielo [344]). The most marvellous thing about the entire work, in fact, is the presence, throughout most of Book Three, of these characters from the elevated world of romance in the geographical space of seventeenthcentury Spanish readers’ quotidian experience. Persiles y Sigismunda is Don Quixote inside out: instead of a madman stranded in La Mancha who travels in his imagination to the magical lands of adventure, characters from those magical lands really do visit the everyday world of La Mancha. What is at stake is not so much the specific content allowable in one or another narrowly circumscribed recreational space of fiction (the quarantining of the marvellous in ‘exotic lands’ contrasting with a more

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realistic style for the familiar), but the bringing into contact of the marvellous and our everyday world. The monopoly over the supernatural needed to be challenged in the space of everyday life, and the legitimization of the marvellous along the lines Tasso envisioned left that realm entirely intact. This is why Book Three of Persiles y Sigismunda, in which the idealized couple of the title visit Spain, is crucial to the overall structure of the work as completed. It is also why it is necessary to see the limits of Armas’s argument that Cervantes legitimates the marvellous by locating it in distant lands. Cervantes’ solution, in which ontological ambiguity plays an important role, is different than Tasso’s. The result is a fictive discourse that, as Frye says of romance, is parallel to religious discourse, but at the same time is capable of inflecting ordinary experience. This practice, rather pointing than toward nineteenth-century realism, points toward a marvellous realism that undermines attempts to restrict imagination’s scope to ‘metaphysical’ questions governed by religious authority.11 In the above examples, the ambivalent marvellous envelops certain characters or settings in a golden aura of perfection and beauty. The effect can be also be unsettling, however, and it is this aspect I wish to focus on in concluding this section, by considering the representation of witchcraft in The Dogs’ Colloquy (El coloquio de los perros). Not unlike Don Quixote, El coloquio de los perros hides the profundity of its exploration of the human predicament behind a veil of playfulness. The very substance of this text is the ontological doubt concerning who or what the dogs really are. Stories in which animals talk are as old as Aesop; but to open the text with their astonishment at the fact that they are speaking is an original stroke of genius: Berganza. Brother Scipio, I hear you speak and I know that I am speaking to you, and I cannot believe it, for it seems to me that our speaking goes beyond the bounds of nature. Scipio. That is true, Berganza, and this miracle is greater in that not only are we speaking but we are speaking coherently, as if we were capable of reason, when in fact we are so devoid of it that the difference between the brute beast and man is that man is a rational animal and the brute irrational. Berganza. All you say, Scipio, I understand, and the fact that you are saying it and that I understand it makes me even more amazed. (195) [Berganza. – Cipión, hermano, óyote hablar y sé que te hablo, y no puedo creerlo, por parecerme que el hablar nosotros pasa de los términos de naturaleza.

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 63 Cipión. – Así es la verdad, Berganza, y viene a ser mayor este milagro en que no solamente hablamos, sino en que hablamos con discurso, como si fuéramos capaces de razón, estando tan sin ella que la diferencia que hay del animal bruto al hombre es ser el hombre animal racional, y el bruto, irracional. Berganza. – Todo lo que dices, Cipión, entiendo, y el decirlo tú y entenderlo yo me causa nueva admiración y nueva maravilla.] (Novelas ejemplares II, 299)

The reader who is of even an only slightly philosophical turn of mind will quickly recognize that this passage uses talking dogs to thematize the astonishing fact that the ordinary operation of human language allows us to communicate our thoughts to one another. Where does this capacity come from? What does it mean? Berganza’s autobiographical discourse is immediately framed, then, by the quintessential Renaissance question of ‘the dignity of man.’ In the course of Berganza’s story, a possible explanation for the dogs’ ability to speak is offered, in the witch Cañizares’ tale of how the famous hechicera Camacha changed the twin sons of her disciple and rival Montiela into dogs. Now, it would have been a simple enough matter to write a fabulous tale about a witch who turns people into animals, and readers would readily understand that fiction gives such licence without implying that either author or reader believe such things to be possible in reality. But Cervantes has created a story in which what happens within the fictional world is unclear. The narrators are all unreliable, and moreover, they themselves assert their unreliability: they doubt their own capacity to know and speak the truth. The central knot is Cañizares’ monologue, a larga arenga that takes up about one tenth of the entire text. In it, Cervantes makes a self-confessed witch express her own doubts and uncertainties concerning the very practices in which she engages. Her knowledge of sorcery is limited, so that she herself is astonished by the powers of Camacha, who turns people into animals: ‘I’ve never managed to find out how it’s done’ (229) (lo que yo nunca he podido alcanzar cómo se haga [337]). She admits that even where the brujería she practices herself is concerned, she does not know whether what she experiences is real or imaginary: Some people think we go to these gatherings only in our imagination, and that through it the devil presents to us images of all those things which we say afterwards have happened to us. Others deny this, and say that we really go, body and soul. I myself hold that both these views are true, for we don’t

64 Decolonizing Cervantes know whether we go in imagination, or in reality, because everything that happens to us in our imagination happens in such an intense way that it can’t be distinguished from the times when we go really and truly. (232) [Hay opinión que no vamos a estos convites sino con la fantasía en la cual nos representa el demonio las imágenes de todas aquellas cosas que después contamos que nos han sucedido. Otros dicen que no, sino que verdaderamente vamos en cuerpo y en ánima; y entrambas opiniones tengo para mí que son verdaderas, puesto que nosotras no sabemos cuándo vamos de una o de otra manera, porque todo lo que nos pasa en la fantasía es tan intensamente que no hay diferenciarlo de cuando vamos real y verdaderamente.] (340)

To this confusion Cañizares adds an extraordinary moral ambiguity, claiming that she desires to repent, but acknowledging herself incapable. Her Celestinesque confession culminates in a frank listing of her limitations that seems designed to elicit compassion from the reader: I’m not so old that I can’t live another year, although I am seventy-five. Now that I can’t fast because of my age, or pray because I get dizzy, or go on pilgrimages because of the weakness of my legs, or give alms because I am poor, or think good thoughts because I am addicted to backbiting (and in order to do good one must first think good thoughts), all my thoughts are bound to be evil. Nevertheless, I know that God is good and merciful and that He knows what is to become of me, and that is enough. Now, let’s put an end to this conversation which is making me very sad. (235) [No soy tan vieja que no pueda vivir un año, puesto que tengo setenta y cinco; y ya que no puedo ayunar, por la edad; ni rezar, por los vaguidos; ni andar romerías, por la flaqueza de mis piernas; ni dar limosna, porque soy pobre; ni pensar en bien, porque soy amiga de murmurar, y para haberlo de hacer es forzoso pensarlo primero, así que siempre mis pensamientos han de ser malos; con todo esto sé que Dios es bueno y misericordioso y que Él sabe lo que ha de ser de mí, y basta. Y quédese aquí esta plática, que verdaderamente me entristece.] (343)

This discourse presents the figure of the witch, one of the pillars of that magical ethics of pure good and pure evil on which Jameson claims romance is based, as a rather ordinary, even pathetic old woman. This astonishes Berganza even more than witchcraft per se, leaving him wondering: ‘Who made this evil old woman so knowledgeable and so wicked? How does she know all this about harmful and culpable evil? How does

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she understand and talk so much about God and do so much of the devil’s work? How does she sin so deliberately without the excuse of ignorance?’ (236) (¿Quién hizo a esta mala vieja tan discreta y tan mala? ¿De dónde sabe ella cuáles son males de daño y cuáles de culpa? ¿Cómo entiende y habla tanto de Dios y obra tanto del diablo? ¿Cómo peca tan de malicia no escusándose con ignorancia? [344]). Over and against the exploratory, uncertain discourses of Berganza and Cañizares, Cipión’s judgments are firm and unwavering: ‘All these things and others like them are frauds, lies or manifestations of the devil ... Camacha was a false deceiver, and Cañizares a liar, and Montiela a foolish, malicious and wicked woman’ (278–9) (Todas estas cosas y las semejantes son embelecos, mentiras o apariencias del demonio ... La Camacha fue burladora falsa, y la Cañizares embustera, y la Montiela tonta, maliciosa y bellaca [346–7]). Yet his moral-didactic voice is the equivalent for this text of the Canon of Toledo in Don Quixote, whose point of view is not ultimately privileged, and whose statements, despite the confidence with which they are uttered, resolve nothing. Further, as was the case with Tomás Rodaja’s madness in El licenciado vidriera or Rutilio’s presence in Scandinavia in Persiles y Sigismunda, the dogs’ ability to speak is never otherwise explained. La Camacha really existed. A certain Leonor Rodríguez of Montilla, nicknamed ‘la Camacha,’ was tried for sorcery by the Inquisition of Córdoba, and punished with public whipping in an auto-da-fé held there in December 1572. As González de Amezúa noted, Sebastián de Escabias’s Libro de casos memorables de Córdoba tells of a local legend that she and her daughter turned a certain Alonso de Aguilar into a horse (González de Amezúa II, 455–61).12 The description of the auto transcribed by Rafael Gracia Boix, however, reveals an entire group of Montilla witches rounded up in the early 1570s (94–100). Like the other women accused, la Camacha admits to a series of basically Celestinesque practices including conjuring the devil and using a variety of love potions and spells. But she alone insists that she learned her magic from ‘moras y cristianas’ and took an unbaptized Moor as her lover so he would teach her such things (echóse con un moro sin bautizar porque la enseñase estas cosas [94]). Proud of her large repertoire of spells, she explains that she learned many of them in Granada (95). Cervantes spent time in Montilla around 1591–2, and must have heard about these women. Amezúa derives from this the conclusion that Cervantes drew his material on witchcraft from popular beliefs and practices, which were still widespread, ‘a subterranean current, hidden but powerful, running from one region to another and flourishing in mysterious practices that everywhere take on a similar

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form’ (460). While the most celebrated witch trials in Spain took place in the North, in Logroño, where the Celtic influence is strong, Leonor Rodríguez’s confession shows that the ‘subterranean current’ Cervantes tapped into also included a Morisco element. Indeed, magic appears to have played an important role in the clandestine culture of the Moriscos, in which orthodox Islamic beliefs mixed with popular ones in the absence of any legitimate religious authority. Cervantes shaped the fictional Camacha from such a flowing together of disparate cultural traditions.13 At what effect is Cervantes aiming when he merges playful storytelling and the very real, very current controversy over witchcraft? At the most immediate level, it is a remarkable achievement to make a fabulous tale of talking dogs so powerfully tangible and immediate. The dividing line between a world in which human beings can be turned into animals and one in which they cannot shifts from the conventional separation between fiction and real life to an ill-defined, permeable border within the fiction, creating a powerful illusion of the dogs’ actuality. An echo of that fictive-actual border enters real life as well, in the similarity of all the characters the dogs meet to those found in readers’ everyday experience. The result is an opening of the reader’s capacity for questioning, turned toward the most mysterious aspects of human existence, the very ones over which the Church claims the exclusive right to an authoritative discourse. In Forcione’s reading, the principal mystery to be pondered is the moral corruption of human society, exaggerated in the nightmare vision of Berganza’s tale. Though the prevailing imagery of Coloquio de los perros is grotesque, ‘even in his most somber work Cervantes situates his own exploration of evil within the metaphysical framework provided by orthodox Christianity ... The miseries which afflict the human being in his life on earth ... are somehow necessary ingredients ... of an ultimately benevolent providential design’ (Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness 63). In reading the text as a ‘Christian miracle,’ whose underlying pattern is that of sin and redemption, Forcione compares the rhetoric and imagery to that found in devotional writing such as Juan de Ávila’s sermons or Luis de Granada’s treatises: ‘From the opening paragraph ... imagery of physical infirmity, disease, decrepitude, filthiness, and death dominates the imaginative world of the Coloquio de los perros ... The imagery of physical infirmity and disease is, of course, prominent in Christian depictions of sin, its contagious power, and its consequences, from the Bible on down to the sermons, manuals of piety, guides for sinners, and religious fictions of Cervantes’ time’ (85). The message of

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redemption, apart from its being an implicit pattern in Christian culture, is primarily suggested to Forcione by the fact that Campuzano wakes up just as Peralta finishes reading, so that the closure of the fictional text is timed to coincide with a reawakening, figured here as a resurrection. Without denying the validity of such a reading, I consider the opposite view just as tenable: that the pattern of sin and redemption established through the generic hybridity of fable, picaresque novel, and sermon does not achieve the release of completion, and we are left instead en suspensión, faced with the negative impression of an unredeemed, perhaps irredeemable, world. Forcione confidently distinguishes Peralta’s falling asleep and awakening from similar actions of Cañizares earlier in the narrative, which are only ‘a travesty of the sacred.’ The prophecy of Montiel’s sons’ recovery of their human shape is equally a travesty, surely, of the Last Judgment: ‘They will return to their true form / when they see the mighty speedily brought down / and the humble exalted / by that hand which has power to perform it’ (230–1) (Volverán en su forma verdadera / cuando vieren con presta diligencia /derribar los soberbios levantados, / y alzar a los humildes abatidos / por poderosa mano para hacerlo [338]). The most aggressive travesty, of course, are Cañizares’ words to Berganza: ‘I hoped that heaven would grant that before these eyes of mine closed for the last time I should see you, my boy, and now that I have seen you, let death come and take me away from this weary life’ (228) (Bien esperaba yo en el cielo que antes que estos mis ojos se cerrasen con el último sueño te había de ver, hijo mío, y ya que te he visto, venga la muerte y lléveme desta cansada vida [336]), which closely echo Simeon’s prayer of thanks at having lived to see the Messiah (Luke 2:29–32). An analogy is thereby created between a true believer encountering the living God, and an old hag meeting up with a dog that does circus tricks. The redemption of this world is placed on the same level as the magical transformations within the fiction. Yet this no more implies that Cervantes is a religious skeptic than his use of popular belief in witchcraft means that he personally held spells and potions to be efficacious. Sandwiched between merely escapist fiction and the intense surveillance of the Baroque public sphere, Cervantes’ text hints that the world may not be redeemable, even while its author would deny – would have to deny – such implications.14 How can we decide between such opposed readings, one of which views Coloquio de los perros as an expression of Christian orthodoxy, the other taking it as a deconstruction of Christian doctrine that places it on the same level with heretical practices such as sorcery and witchcraft? We

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can select whichever of the two readings we choose, but either way we are viewing Cervantes’ intentions against the backdrop of the church’s hold on public speculation about the supernatural. Ultimately, the extreme opposition between the possible readings is a product of coloniality of power, which distorts meanings in such a way that the author’s ‘own’ intentions are placed forever out of reach. Our post-Romantic notions of self-sufficient authorial intention are out of place in early modern Spain, where any meaning the author may wish to convey is culturally constrained to an unprecedented degree. This undecidability is a far cry from Tasso’s notion of the legitimate marvellous. Here, the two worldviews are so insistently superimposed on one another that they become inextricably intertwined. The reader does not merely accept certain marvellous events as verisimilar temporarily because they are represented as taking place in another geographical and cultural milieu. Both within the fiction and outside it, the orthodox and the heterodox are simultaneously present, so that the reader, disconcerted, does not finally know what to think. The above examples of the ambivalent marvellous produce a range of emotions – comic, sublime, terrifying. There appears to be some correlation between the emotion produced and the kind of supernatural occurrence employed. Enchanters of the kind found only in chivalric romance produce a comic effect because no one really believes in them. Witches, arguably because of the popularity of belief in them, produce a more disturbing effect: a shudder runs through the reader’s view of the world. To return to the first epigraph of this section, in which Rutilio’s Scandinavian rescuer explains his contradictory position concerning witchcraft – ‘as a Catholic Christian I don’t believe it, but experience shows me just the opposite’ (como cristiano que soy católico, no lo creo, aunque la experiencia me muestra lo contrario) – it is illuminating to compare this with the formula of obedience of the Spanish colonial authorities, cited in chapter 1 above: ‘we obey the law, but do not put it into practice’ (la ley se acata, pero no se cumple). The need to hold simultaneously to two competing explanatory systems can thus be seen as a consequence of internal colonialism. The following section tries to understand why this is so by focusing on the other within, who becomes an anchor for the ambivalent marvellous outside the official worldview. Cide Hamete Benengeli: The Other Within I immediately went with the Morisco to the cloister of the main church [i.e., the Cathedral] and asked him to render the notebooks, all those that dealt with Don

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 69 Quixote, into the Castilian language, without taking away or adding anything, offering him whatever payment he might desire. He was satisfied with two arrobas of raisins and two fanegas of wheat, and he promised to translate them well and faithfully and very quickly. But to facilitate the arrangement and not allow such a wonderful find out of my hands, I brought him to my house, where, in a little more than a month and a half, he translated the entire history, just as it is recounted here. Don Quixote I.9, 67–8 [Apartéme luego con el morisco por el claustro de la iglesia mayor, y roguéle me volviese aquellos cartapacios, todos los que trataban de don Quijote, en lengua castellana, sin quitarles ni añadirles nada, ofreciéndole la paga que él quisiese. Contentóse con dos arrobas de pasas y dos fanegas de trigo, y prometió de traducirlos bien y fielmente y con mucha brevedad. Pero yo, por facilitar más el negocio y por no dejar de la mano tan buen hallazgo, le truje a mi casa, donde en poco más de mes y medio la tradujo toda, del mesmo modo que aquí se refiere.] (Don Quijote I.9, 143–4)

At this point, readers familiar with Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique may object that my category of the ambivalent marvellous is indistinguishable from his concept of the fantastic: a literary mode in which realism predominates, but something exceptional happens that defies rational explanation. This genre, like the marvellous, tears a rent in an established ontological structure, the rational-scientific worldview of the realist novel. There are two primary differences between Todorov’s fantastic and the ambivalent marvellous. First, the ontological structure Cervantes’ fiction challenges is not a rational-scientific one, but is rather itself a religious conception, maintained by a specific institutional authority. Second, and this is the focus of the pages that follow, the ambivalent marvellous is not simply a rupture in the prevailing ontology of the work, but rather a vacillation between two possible, but mutually exclusive systems of explanation. To understand the importance of this distinction, it is necessary to return to Carpentier’s prologue to El reino de este mundo. For the purposes of my discussion, there are three salient features in Carpentier’s definition: (1) marvellous realism arises where there is a copresence of a rational worldview with a non-European one (indigenous, Afro-Caribbean); (2) a similar hybridity of worldviews existed in Europe itself at an earlier time, as revealed by beliefs in magic and miracles, but has gradually been lost; and (3) certain features of Cervantes’ work, such as the elements of the fantastic in Persiles y Sigismunda and Don Quixote’s belief in the marvellous adventures of chivalric romance, constitute him

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as a practitioner of this mode avant la lettre. Essentially, then, Carpentier’s theory of lo real maravilloso is a poetics of cultural hybridity under colonialism. In this section I map this cultural poetics onto Cervantes’ ambivalent marvellous, primarily by focusing on Cide Hamete’s Muslim identity.15 Le Goff speaks of two great ‘repositories’ of the marvellous in the medieval West: the ‘Oriental’ and the Celtic. By ‘Oriental’ he means such tales as circulated in Spain through translations from Arabic and Greek produced during the reign of Alfonso X, ‘el Sabio’ (the Wise), such as Calila et Dimna (1251) and Sendebar (1253). These tales combine elements of low comedy, scenes from everyday life, and the marvellous. Their cultural presence in Spain could reach Cervantes through the literary tradition running from Pedro Alfonso’s twelfth-century Disciplina clericalis through Juan Manuel’s fourteenth-century El conde Lucanor, and through the continued presence of the Moriscos in Spain until the early seventeenth century. Of course, Cide Hamete Benengeli is the carrier of this tradition in Don Quixote. Roberto González Echevarría considers the multiplication of narrators through Cide Hamete to be the feature of Don Quixote that has most appealed to Latin American writers, precisely because of the way it displaces the idea of any essentialized cultural identity or preordained order to which the text could correspond.16 Significantly, García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, the quintessential magical realist novel, employs a similar device, Melquíades’ Sanskrit manuscript of the Buendía family history. In both Melquíades’ and Cide Hamete’s manuscripts, crossing between the world of fiction and the world of the reader’s reality also involves crossing between languages, cultures, and worldviews. Both of these fictional authors are magicians with a special power, a gift applicable only to one subject, the Buendía clan or Don Quixote. Thus Cide Hamete’s pen explains the quasisupernatural destiny linking it to the mad knight: ‘For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him’ (II.74, 939) (Para mí sola nació Don Quijote, y yo para él [II.74, 592]). Through this device, fictional narrative itself, the very existence of the text we are reading, becomes a marvel. While there are many studies of Cide Hamete as a structural device in Don Quixote, focus on his meaning within the historical context of early modern Spain is relatively recent.17 Cide Hamete’s text, recognized for its role in destabilizing narrative authority, is insistently linked to instances of cultural hybridity at three crucial points: when it is first introduced (I. 9); when it appears to have run out at the end of Part One (I. 52); and when it is finally and definitively completed at the end of

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Part Two, with Cide Hamete’s farewell to his pen (II. 74). Significantly, he is introduced at a point in the narrative containing references to the marginal cultures and languages of Spain, and echoes of medieval Iberian multiculturalism. The manuscript in Arabic sold on the streets of Toledo recalls an earlier time, before that language and the customs associated with it had been outlawed in Spain. The ease with which a Morisco translator is found leads the narrator to comment: ‘it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter, for even if I had sought a speaker of a better and older language, I would have found him’ (I.9, 67) (no fue muy dificultoso hallar intérprete semejante, pues aunque le buscara de otra mejor y más antigua lengua le hallara [I.9, 108]), referring, of course, to Hebrew. This is one of the few references to the conversos in Cervantes’ entire œuvre. Thus the Toledo of the three religions and Alfonso el Sabio’s school of translation are implicitly contrasted with the current situation. Carlos Moreno has shown that the process of translation and transcription on which the fictional text is based reenacts in a detailed way the practice of translation from Arabic, mainly by Jewish scholars, in thirteenth-century Toledo (209). The Morisco’s laughter at the marginal note about Dulcinea’s having ‘the best hand for salting pork’ (67) (la mejor mano para salar puercos [108]), meat forbidden to Muslims, further emphasizes the dividing line between cultures.18 Eric Graf reads the fight with the Basque that frames the discovery of the manuscript as a parody of militarist fables of Castilian hegemony, into which Cervantes ‘weaves the laughter of the Arabic Other’ creating ‘a dizzying deconstruction of national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic subject positions’ (77). That the narrator, under these circumstances, should use the cathedral of Toledo, epicenter of Castilian Catholicism, as an out-of-the-way spot, suited for the negotiation of the terms of the translation, constitutes a radical infiltration of Islam into Castilian religious identity as well. Although stated in an offhand manner, his invitation to the Morisco to live in his own home as his guest during the time it takes him to translate Cide Hamete’s manuscript opens the possibility of intimate intercultural dialogue, in a space free of suspicious onlookers. The naturalness with which the Morisco and the narrator undertake this project contrasts starkly with the historical reality of the time. We are fortunate to have detailed documentation of a specific occasion when a need for translators from Arabic arose as a result of found manuscripts. When the primary narrator runs out of information at the end of Part

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One of Don Quixote, he explains that a lead box was found in the foundations of an old hermitage, containing poems about Don Quixote and the other characters. Thomas E. Case has persuasively argued that this lead box is a reference to the libros plúmbeos hoax. The libros plúmbeos, circular lead tablets inscribed in Arabic found on Granada’s Sacromonte in 1595 (whence the name, ‘holy mount,’ by which that area is still known today), purported to be pre-Islamic sacred writings, but were actually carefully crafted, probably by Alonso del Castillo and Miguel de Luna, to form a syncretic bridge between Christianity and Islam. The perpetrators of the hoax were apparently making a last, desperate attempt to create a hybrid identity that would facilitate the Moriscos’ integration into Spanish society. The ‘discovery,’ which sparked a lively controversy over the authenticity of the relics, was preceded by the ‘recovery,’ in 1588, of a lead box containing a parchment in Latin and other supposedly sacred objects. As Case shows, the lead box at the end of Part One is clearly patterned on the events of 1588, and therefore constitutes an ambiguous reference to the Morisco crisis.19 The libros plúmbeos created a need for translators. The archbishop of Granada, Pedro Vaca de Castro y Quiñones, who believed wholeheartedly in their authenticity, sought out anyone who could read Arabic. A Morisco by the name of al-Hajari, living in Granada at the time, explains in an autobiographical narrative how a priest who had gotten wind of his knowledge of Arabic took him to see the archbishop: [T]he priest looked at me and said, ‘You know how to read Arabic? Do not be afraid [to admit it], because the archbishop is looking for someone who knows something of reading Arabic, so that he may explain something written in that language that has come to light.’ He took me to his house. He had books of every art and language. He brought me books in the Arabic language. I read and translated for him some words which he was unable to read. Then he met me another day and told me: ‘The archbishop has ordered me to bring you with me to his presence.’ I said to myself, ‘How shall I save myself, as the Christians kill and burn everyone on whom they find an Arabic book or of whom they know that he reads Arabic?’ (Harvey 278; emphasis added)

In the event, the archbishop is quite pleased with al-Hajari’s translation and pays him well. He also gives him written authorization to translate from Arabic to Spanish and vice versa. Some time later, friends from his hometown visit al-Hajari in Granada and are terrified to see he owns a book in Arabic:

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 73 After greeting them in the customary way, I opened the book. But when they saw that it was written in Arabic they became extremely afraid because of the Christians. I told them: ‘Do not be afraid. The Christians honor me and respect me for my ability to read Arabic.’ But all the people from my town thought that the Christian Inquisitors who used to sentence and burn to death everyone who manifested his adherence to Islam in any way, or was reading the books of the Muslims, would condemn me as well. Driven by this extreme fear, the Andalusians used to be afraid of each other. They only spoke about religious matters with someone who was ‘safe,’ that is, someone who could be trusted completely. Many of them were afraid of one another. (Harvey 280)

Al-Hajari’s account helps us see the scene in the Alcaná of Toledo as a parody of the entire libros plúmbeos affair. But rather than simply ridiculing the participants, it draws attention to the distance separating that celebration of a newfound Arab-Christian tradition from the prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and fear. As often happens with Cervantes’ optimistic images of social life in early modern Spain, the contrast with how things really were is so sharp that we must assume his readers would have perceived the irony.20 Both Case and Ellen M. Anderson share the view that Cide Hamete himself is perhaps not an Arab but a Morisco. The textual basis for this is a passage concerning the arriero who punches Don Quixote at the inn: ‘he was one of the wealthy muledrivers of Arévalo, according to the author of this history, who makes particular mention of this muledriver because he knew him very well; there are even some who say he was a distant relation’ (I.16, 112) (era uno de los ricos arrieros de Arévalo, según lo dice el autor desta historia que deste arriero hace particular mención, porque le conocía muy bien, y aun quieren decir que era algo pariente suyo [I.16, 201]). Cide Hamete could therefore be thought of as a convert to Christianity, possibly practising Islam in secret, in accordance with the doctrine of taquiyya, which allows Muslims to pretend to practise another religion in order to avoid persecution (see Cardaillac 85–98). Yet another layer to his complex, hybrid identity is added by the possibility of thinking of his manuscript as having been written in aljamiado, that is, Spanish written with Arabic characters, used by the Moriscos to circulate clandestine manuscripts, including religious treatises and even translations of the Qur’an (see the section on the historicity of reading practices in chapter 1 above). In a suggestive article, Luce López-Baralt has analysed the intertextuality between Cide Hamete’s farewell to his pen and Sura 68 of the Qur’an,

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which concerns Al-Qalam, the divine pen, first of Allah’s creations, by means of which everything that came after was created. In both texts the uniqueness of the pen is emphasized, as are its power and authority, and the association between what it writes and destiny. Further, López Baralt focuses attention on the theme of madness pervading Sura 68 – people will think the prophet is mad for what the divine pen has written through him. In this close comparison, numerous details are shown to correspond in surprising ways. For example, Cide Hamete’s pen is hung from an espetera as if to dry it out. López Baralt ties this to the notion that the ink of Allah’s creation has long since dried and what is written is written; neither Avellaneda nor anyone else should try to write another sally for Don Quixote. López-Baralt points out that Cervantes could have acquired minimal knowledge of the Qur’an in Algeria, or just as easily through contact with Moriscos from Granada who had been relocated after the Guerra de las Alpujarras. She describes the drawings of AlQalam frequently found in aljamiado manuscripts from this period: ‘More than once I have come across in the clandestine manuscripts a giant pen of light that writes its transcendent message across the sky, while on other occasions ... the calamus writes on a piece of silk carried by the archangel Gabriel (Yibril). The calamus always writes alone, without any hand touching it’ (346). Thus she finds Cervantes introducing an element of hybridity with Islamic culture precisely at the moment in which he playfully endows his act of creation with a mystic aura. The other great repository of the marvellous mentioned by Le Goff are Celtic tales of magical adventures. The best known example of the eruption of Celtic material into medieval high culture is of course the chivalric romance, especially as practiced by Chrétien de Troyes. In one of the most profoundly original works of scholarship on Cervantes in recent years, Edward Dudley has shown how the Celtic material resurfaces in Don Quixote in ways that cannot be explained away as mere parody. Dudley has patiently studied extant versions of the Celtic tales from which chivalric romance derived its supernatural elements, demonstrating that much of what appears to the modern reader to poke fun at the courtly romances can actually be found in the older legends on which they were based. For example, the fact that Don Quixote is greeted on his arrival at the inn by a swineherd’s horn is reinterpreted by Dudley in relation to the swine god Moch (128–42), associated with enchantments, secret meanings, and hidden identities. This reading shows Cervantes’ text to be permeated by disguised symbols and motifs from Celtic myths. The composite Dorotea/Princesa Micomicona is reinterpreted as a banshee, a shape-shifting Celtic fairy (230, 252–3). Indeed,

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Don Quixote’s madness itself can be associated with the eccentric behaviour that served as a distinguishing feature of the hero in Celtic lore. Dudley analyses the narrative structure of the work in terms of a latent rivalry between Don Quixote and Cide Hamete, as a consequence of which the debunking of a ludicrous madman is recast as the expression of a malevolent bias on the part of the Arabic historian against the Christian knight (210). By linking up all the Celtic motifs and by displacing the realist spin the narrator places on the mad knight’s adventures, The Endless Text establishes what amounts to a reading of Don Quixote in a Celtic key. Dudley’s Quixote is a result of hybridity between pre-Christian Celtic, medieval Christian, Arabo-Islamic, and early modern proto-rationalist worldviews. The catalyst of this hybridity is the mock-heroic struggle between a knight enthralled by Celtic legends of magical adventures, and an Arab historian who is part Moorish enchanter, part sceptical Morisco. The challenge that the chivalric romances inherently posed to ecclesiastical authority has already been discussed above in connection with the contested site of the marvellous. This is perhaps an appropriate place to recall Vivaldo’s feigned discomfort with the fact that knights errant commend themselves to their ladies before going into battle, but not to God (I.13, 175). Though his tone is jesting, he acknowledges, in effect, that the chivalric romance as a genre offered a rival vision to official religious discourse. Especially in Part Two, Cide Hamete Benengeli displaces the authoritative discourse of Christianity in another direction. He invokes Allah’s blessing once the third sally gets underway (II.8, 92), and swears by Mohammed (II.48, 399), but also insists on his knowledge of ‘Christian’ values: ‘I, though a Moor, know very well, through the communication I have had with Christians, that holiness consists of charity, humility, faith, obedience, and poverty’ (II.44, 741) (Yo, aunque moro, bien sé, por la comunicación que he tenido con cristianos, que la santidad consiste en la caridad, humildad, fee, obediencia y pobreza [II.44, 371]). In fact, there is nothing in this definition of holiness that Cide Hamete would not know already as a Muslim. The most perplexing passage where he expresses himself in religious terms comes at the beginning of chapter 27, when he is about to reveal that Maese Pedro is really Ginés de Pasamonte. So startling is his language that the Morisco translator feels the need to intervene with an explanation: Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter with the words I swear as a Catholic Christian ..., to which his translator says that Cide Hamete swearing as a Catholic Christian when he was a Moor, which he undoubtedly was, meant only that just as the Catholic Christian, when he

76 Decolonizing Cervantes swears, swears or should swear the truth, and tell the truth in everything he says, so too he was telling the truth, as if he were swearing as a Catholic Christian, when he wrote about Don Quixote, especially when he told who Maese Pedro was ... (II.27, 637) [Entra Cide Hamete, coronista desta grande historia, con estas palabras en este capítulo: ‘Juro como católico cristiano ...’; a lo que su traductor dice que el jurar Cide Hamete como católico cristiano siendo él moro, como sin duda lo era, no quiso decir otra cosa sino que así como el católico cristiano cuando jura, jura, o debe jurar, verdad, y decirla en lo que dijere, así él la decía, como si jurara como cristiano católico, en lo que quería escribir de don Quijote, especialmente en decir quién era maese Pedro ...] (II.27, 249)

Whether intentionally or not, this passage encapsulates the transition from mudéjar to Morisco, which is to say, from autonomous religious minority to internal colony. According to the translator’s interpretation, Cide Hamete swears as a Muslim, but with the same conviction and sincerity as a Christian would swear. This view harks back to the thirteenth-century arrangement, whereby in order to give legal testimony Christians swore by the Bible, Jews by the Torah, and Muslims by the Qur’an, each at the entrance to their respective places of worship (O’Callaghan, ch. 7). There is obviously a more malicious way of understanding Cide Hamete’s oath, which is that he, as a Muslim practicing taquiyya, falsely pretends to be a Christian. A Muslim, he swears as a Christian to tell the truth about Ginés de Pasamonte’s deception! After the prohibition of Islam, many Muslims found themselves forced to convert, at least externally. Of course, like the previously mentioned discussion of sanctity and Christian values, this passage ultimately hints that the distinction is less significant than the dogmatic systems in question would make it appear, since in either case, one is morally obligated to tell the truth if one swears to do so, under whatever label. Despite their rivalry at one level, Don Quixote and Cide Hamete conspire, as it were, to displace the religious discourse of Christianity, opening another discursive space for fiction, in which cultural/religious identity and truth are fluid constructs negotiated between narrator and audience. Conclusion We shall see the far from accidental convergence between the patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism. Said, Culture and Imperialism

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I conclude this chapter by examining some implications for literary history resulting from my claims about Cervantes, generally understood to be one of the founders of modern literature and a giant of the European canon. To link his work to medieval repositories of the marvellous and pre- or early modern hybridity of cultures in Spain, rather than to the realist novel and nineteenth-century nationalism, is to reopen the question of his ‘place’ in literary history. What kinds of periodization and geography of cultures could replace those time-honoured – but arguably distorting – concepts? First, disassociating Cervantes’ practice as a fiction writer from high realism disrupts the illusory continuity of the linear development of the novel. It therefore implies a rethinking of what we are accustomed to calling the European tradition. Underlying that construct is the notion of a single culture that passes through distinct phases (classical, medieval, modern, postmodern) while remaining in some fundamental sense ‘one.’ This tradition is capable of simultaneously preserving and renewing itself so that nothing is lost. Each succeeding epoch, each succeeding generation absorbs what came before and then adds its pinnacle to the top. Yet such a view cannot withstand scrutiny. At its origin we find the scandal of the quixotic marvellous covered over by the repetition ad nauseam that Don Quixote is the first modern novel – making it the originator of a tradition to which it does not itself belong.21 Once the coherence of the so-called European tradition is placed in question, it becomes possible to configure other geographies for distinct periods of what had been taken to form a single line of development. Born in the mid-sixteenth century on the Iberian Peninsula and writing in Spanish, Cervantes belongs simultaneously to three overlapping geographies: the European (still conceptualized at that time as ‘Christendom,’) split by the Catholic-Protestant divide; the Mediterranean, divided into North and South, but also East and West; and the Atlantic, which for him meant Seville and the Spanish colonies of the New World. As a model for a transnational historiography of culture, Paul Gilroy’s construct of the Black Atlantic is instructive in this context. Gilroy uses the chronotope of the ship – a favourite one for Cervantes, especially in Persiles y Sigismunda – as a way of talking about the multilingual, multi-ethnic space of the Atlantic. Certainly a similar cultural space could be conceived for the Mediterranean, and that would seem to be the geography within which Cervantes’ imagination was most at home, despite the pull exerted by both America and the Northern lands.22 Seen in this light, ‘Spain’ as a national unity dissolves into a number of distinct regions positioned differently in relation to the three transnational spaces I have named.

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The privileging of ‘Europe’ is displaced, as is the definition of Cervantes as only a Spanish/European writer. In Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes’ most insistently transnational and multilingual work, the motif of pilgrimage serves to incorporate the Iberian peninsula into a vast continuum linking the geography of characters’ trajectories to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the New World.23 The same narrative that links these geographical entities also figures them as distinct fictional worlds regulated by an array of different stylistic principles. Where Don Quixote uses parody to decentre narrative authority, Persiles y Sigismunda goes even deeper, challenging the underlying coherence of mimetic uniformity. As we will see over the course of the next two chapters, this challenge figuratively denounces Hapsburg authoritarianism and the support it drew from both the Church and the prevailing patriarchal family structure. The effort to represent ‘reality’ homogeneously is thereby linked to the attempt to define the nation monologically. Thus I approach Persiles y Sigismunda as a transnational romance that subjects the imperialist model of Spanish identity to a deterritorialization, in which the ‘closed’ Spain of the Counter-Reformation is reintegrated into the community of nations surrounding it. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said ascribes to the novel a privileged role in what he terms the ‘consolidation’ of post-Enlightenment European colonialism. For Said, one of the ‘principal purposes’ of the realist novel was ‘almost unnoticeably sustaining the society’s consent in overseas expansion’ (12). It was thus part of the same hegemonic project that brought the bourgeoisie to power and sustained its dominance over the working classes. In penetrating readings of, among others, Conrad and Kipling, Said shows that even when the specific content of novels seems to question the imperialist project, it does so in terms that implicitly accept the presuppositions that make empire possible, thus circumventing a more radical critique. One of the main reasons the realist novel can perform this function is that a conception of power compatible with colonialism is embedded in its very structure: The crucial aspect of what I have been calling the novel’s consolidation of authority is not simply connected to the functioning of social power and governance, but made to appear both normative and sovereign, that is, selfvalidating in the course of the narrative ... There is first the authority of the author – someone writing out the processes of society in an acceptable institutionalized manner, observing conventions, following patterns, and so

Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 79 forth. Then there is the authority of the narrator, whose discourse anchors the narrative in recognizable, and hence existentially referential, circumstances. Last, there is what might be called the authority of the community, whose representative most often is the family but also is the nation, the specific locality, and the concrete historical moment. (77)

As we have seen in this chapter, Cervantes’ writing undoes the consolidating authority Said mentions. The primary agent of that undoing in Don Quixote is an Arab historian and magician. Although his practice of fiction writing cannot simply be assimilated to Latin American magical realism, it is closer to that post-realist poetics than to the nineteenthcentury European novel. Only a very reductive reading of his masterpiece as a stage in the development of high realism, coupled with an extreme neglect of the rest of his œuvre, especially Persiles y Sigismunda, has made it possible to misconstrue Cervantes as a modern European writer tout court. From within modernity, such misconstruing was not just excusable – it was almost inevitable, due to the overriding need to claim strong cultural antecedents as precursors. Today, however, in our postcolonial/postmodern age, we need to construct a different Cervantes, one more attuned to our own sensibilities and concerns. The following two chapters offer a reading of Persiles y Sigismunda designed to accomplish such a reconstruction.

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PART TWO Cervantes’ Transnational Romance

I, señor Arnaldo, am made like this thing they call place, where everything fits, and nothing is out of place ... The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda II.12, 153 Yo, señor Arnaldo, soy hecho como esto que se llama lugar, que es donde todas las cosas caben, y no hay ninguna fuera del lugar ... (Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda II.12, 363)

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3 Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages ... Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

Nearly four hundred years after Cervantes’ death, his posthumous masterpiece, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a complex, innovative work exploring cultural identity and social organization, is still widely read as a conventional expression of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy. Beginning with Diana de Armas Wilson’s Allegories of Love, however, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that Cervantes’ text ironically undercuts such an ideologically closed reading.1 Nonetheless, irony alone does not explain the pervasiveness of religion in the work, in particular the importance of the pilgrimage theme, one of its structuring elements. The theme, ubiquitous in Persiles y Sigismunda, serves as the pretext for the main plot, the protagonists’ journey to Rome, as well as appearing repeatedly as a motif in other characters’ travels. It is the importance of this religious motif that has been used to support an allegorical reading of this work as an example of the peregrinatio vitae (‘pilgrimage of life’), a narrative of spiritual progress of which Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is the best known example. Yet this interpretation is based on a superficial examination of the way Cervantes deploys this thematics.2 For the most part, up to the present the only alternative to the Counter-Reformist reading has continued to be simply pointing out ironies and inconsistencies that undermine it. A few noteworthy exceptions contribute to a new approach to the religious dimension of Cervantes’ last work. Near the end of his life, Molho described Persiles y Sigismunda as an ‘enigmatic book’ produced out of the frustration of seeing spiritual impulses suffocated and imprisoned by the post-Tridentine

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church (‘La religión en Cervantes’). In a similar vein, Scaramuzza Vidoni writes of the scattering of sincere Christians far from institutional centers in the ‘dark’ northern regions, and the corresponding absence of the ‘powerful ecclesiastical apparatus’ in the representation of Rome, concluding that this juxtaposition implies a different religiosity than that promoted by the Counter-Reformation. In his forthcoming study of Persiles y Sigismunda Michael Armstrong-Roche refers to this alternative religious program as combining Erasmian and Pauline elements. Like Molho, he sees Cervantes turning to fiction for a novelistic alternative to the stifling of such spiritual energies within the church. In the analysis of the pilgrimage theme that follows, I argue that Cervantes harnessed elements of popular devotion, wrenched free of the Tridentine program, and used them as part of a creative exploration of human possibilities that could exist outside the religious institutions of his day. Rather than adhering to theological abstractions, Cervantes uses the motif of pilgrimage as a structural device for linking distant characters and places in a loose unity based on the family resemblance among their journeys. Those who form part of this network enter thereby into a cohesive group of continually changing members and shifting goals, a flexible, open society that forms a decisive contrast to the rigid, monolithic social worlds they left behind. By connecting these representations of sacred journeys to religious practices and identities in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, this chapter moves beyond simply pointing out the ways Cervantes’ ironic handling of his material falls short of a doctrinally ‘pure’ treatment. Instead, I will draw on medieval and early modern popular practices, as well as on Victor Turner’s anthropological approach, to show Cervantes opposing the new ideological meaning the Counter-Reformation sought to impose on pilgrimage, and reconfiguring sacred journeys as a counterweight to ecclesiastical absolutism in Spain. ‘A pilgrimage may be described as a journey to a sacred shrine or sanctuary for a religious motive’ (The New Catholic Encyclopedia 11: 362). Taking this minimal definition as a starting point, we quickly see that none of the journeys in Persiles y Sigismunda fully qualify. The protagonists undertake the journey from their distant Scandinavian homeland to Rome, not for religious motives, but as an excuse to leave the court of Thule before Persiles’ older brother, Maximino, returns. Maximino has just inherited the throne, and is expected to marry Sigismunda, daughter of the queen of neighbouring Frislanda; but Persiles is in love with her. Persiles and Sigismunda disguise themselves as pilgrims, travelling under assumed names in order to hide their identities, but their journey is really undertaken to postpone Sigismunda’s marriage.

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Similarly, Feliciana’s visit to Guadalupe, an intense encounter with the sacred at an established shrine, is hopelessly ambiguous as far as her initial intention is concerned. She, too, disguises herself as a pilgrim and flees her homeland, to avoid being caught and killed by her father and brother. She sets out initially for Rome, but the narrator’s description of her ‘vow’ leaves the religious motive in doubt: ‘mainly in order to turn her back on the land where her honor lay buried, she asked them to take her with them as a pilgrim to Rome’ (III.4, 211) (lo principal por volver las espaldas a la tierra donde quedaba enterrada su honra, pidió que consigo la llevasen como peregrina a Roma [III. 4, 461]). In any case, she goes no further than Guadalupe. This constitutes a double negation: the initial motivation for the journey to Rome is unclear, and anyway it is never fulfilled. The pilgrim vagabond, who travels from shrine to shrine to keep herself busy (‘para disculpar su ociosidad’ III.6, 224; 488) journeys to shrines with the intention of completing the institutionalized romerías established for them. It would of course be ironic if hers turned out to be the only ‘true’ instance of pilgrimage in Persiles. In fact, her journeys are missing an essential feature: she obviously does not consider the shrines to be sacred in the requisite sense, for she simply travels from one to another according to the calendar of festivals and whenever she happens to be, attracted by the prospect of seeing something spectacular.3 The count, who appears briefly in Book Three, is the only character whose pilgrimage appears to meet all criteria. He is planning to make the trip to Rome for the purpose of earning the Jubilee year indulgence, the most fully institutionalized pilgrimage in Christendom. The only problem is that this pilgrimage never takes place: he dies before he can even leave for Rome, certainly not an auspicious indicator of the value in Persiles of such officially sanctioned sacred journeys. Once we move beyond these four examples, we find variations presenting more or less recognizable instances of some features of pilgrimage mixed with elements of other themes, especially marriage. Thus two characters, Antonio de Villaseñor and Renato, find spiritual awakening on journeys which initially have no religious meaning. Such examples, in which ordinary travel spontaneously takes on a religious import, show that the thematization of pilgrimage in Persiles involves a sidestepping of the institutionalization of sacred journeys in favour of a more unstructured practice that overlaps with ostensibly secular journeys. The spiritual event on which pilgrimage depends cannot be planned, nor can it be limited to a specific, officially sanctioned location. According to Siegfried Wenzel, the striking characteristic shared by

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all examples of the ‘pilgrimage of life’ (peregrinatio vitae) is that the protagonist’s movement empties this world of reality, epistemological validity, value, and ethical significance, while all reality, truth, and value are concentrated in the other world. In Persiles y Sigismunda, the possibility of such asceticism is raised several times and each time rejected. These moments are spread throughout the work, one in each of the four Books: the lamentable death of Manuel de Sosa; the return of Renato and Eusebia to France; Constanza’s extremely short-lived resolution to take the veil, discouraged by Sigismunda; and Sigismunda’s own aborted plan to enter the convent. In the first of these, the choice of the convent over marriage leads to death. The other three all overturn an initial impulse to lead a celibate, ascetic life devoted to thoughts of heaven rather than involvement in this world. Instead the characters choose marriage. An otherworldly understanding of pilgrimage is thus inappropriate to the treatment of the theme in this work, intertwined as it is with themes of human society and especially romantic love. Along with numerous Cervantists, Sigismunda had misunderstood the meaning in this context of the Augustinian formula, ‘our souls are in continual movement and cannot stop or rest except at their center, which is God’ (III.1, 193) (están nuestras almas siempre en continuo movimiento, y no pueden parar ni sosegar sino en su centro, que es Dios [III.1, 429]). Though the formula reappears two more times – IV.2, 308; 639, where Arnaldo calls Auristela, not God, his center; and also at IV.10, 337; 690 – Persiles y Sigismunda is focused on the continuous movement of our lives in this world, not on the stasis of their final destiny in the afterlife, which it does not deny, but from which it constantly turns away.4 Not only does the thematization of pilgrimage in Persiles y Sigismunda not correspond to this model, in fact it appears to have been written in direct opposition to it, allowing one to speak of a de-allegorization of pilgrimage. For Cervantes’ characters, the goal of pilgrimage is to enrich this life and the relationships we have in it with other people by seeking a shared experience of the holy which can infuse some of its power into our earthly existence. It is thus a quest to find the sacred on earth, in companionship with one’s fellow human beings. This brings Cervantes’ representation of pilgrimage closer to the experience of real pilgrims than to the allegorical ‘pilgrimage of life.’ The individual spiritual development of the two characters named in the title is simply not the main focus of this work. Social interaction and cultural negotiation are its underlying themes, and pilgrimage serves as a device for exploring them by gathering characters from many lands and many walks of life into a single narrative frame that can itself be moved from one geographical location to another.5

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Victor Turner’s anthropological approach to pilgrimage provides a basic theoretical orientation for understanding this deployment of the theme. For Turner, pilgrimage is one equivalent in modern societies of what he terms the ‘ritual process.’ Some members of a community, temporarily abandoning their habitual place of residence, also leave behind the structural categories that normally order their lives. This liminal condition opens them to a more immediate experience of solidarity with others, based on the underlying cohesiveness on which the social is built, which Turner termed communitas. He was convinced that the temporary bracketing of social structure in the ritual process could make liminality a vehicle for social change. As the liminal phase in a social drama, pilgrimage is a boundary-crossing phenomenon through which individuals leave their familiar social world behind and participate in another world with the other members of the spontaneously formed pilgrim community. Pilgrimage bridges gaps between rich and poor, male and female, sacred and profane, nature and culture, healthy and sick. It need not replicate, and may even overturn the hierarchies in place in the world left behind, in the name of a higher unity than that represented in the system of social, political, and economic relations between individuals conceived as members of status groups.6 Cultural historians such as William A. Christian and Sara T. Nalle have shown that the Counter-Reformation threatened local religion in Spain by regularizing and homogenizing observance, thus helping to forge a monolithic national identity based on the twin poles of crown and mitre. Due to its spatio-temporal diffusion, however, pilgrimage was able to maintain something of its semi-institutional character despite pressures aimed at increasing the doctrinal purity of the individual pilgrim’s experience. This tension between popular religiosity and orthodoxy is discussed below in relation to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which the characters visit in Book Three of Persiles y Sigismunda. I examine recent work on the miracle collections at Guadalupe by Françoise Crémoux in order to support my claim that pilgrimage constituted a site of struggle between competing conceptions of Christian devotion. In my view, Cervantes intuitively grasped the meaning of these changes, and saw in pilgrimage a practice that continued to enjoy relative autonomy from the forces restricting religious and secular life in the ever narrower official culture known today as the Baroque. Out away from their parishes, wandering in the countryside, with no habitual routine to dictate their movements, pilgrims are harder to control than the same subjects in their usual environment. Devotional treatises could influence the way the faithful approached their experience, but could not dictate its content.

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Cervantes gravitated toward this zone that had not come fully under church control, and he drew it into the realm of the written word, thereby borrowing for his fiction something of the free-floating existence enjoyed by those who escape their everyday cares and take to the road. Fundamental to his reappropriation of this practice is the contrast between pilgrims’ experience of communitas and the conflictive world around them. Beginning with Philip II’s reign, a narrow and xenophobic sense of identity was being consolidated, based on a vertical alignment of patriarchy, Catholicism, and the monarchy, and on the exclusion of Jews, Muslims, and Protestants. As I argue in chapter 1 above, this linking up of ideological elements was imposed through a form of internal colonialism. Ironically, Cervantes employs a Christian religious practice to disarticulate this identity, reinscribing pilgrimage into its popular context, and in the process putting forward a different vision of Spain, simultaneously more localized (Guadalupe, Quintanar) and more open to change and contact with the outside, indeed one could even say more ‘cosmopolitan.’ This chapter focuses on two of the principal Spanish episodes of Persiles y Sigismunda: the story of Feliciana de la Voz (Book 3, chapters 2– 5) and the culmination of the subplot involving Antonio de Villaseñor (Book 3, chapter 9). As I show in my analysis of the episode, Feliciana’s tale reinscribes one woman’s successful rebellion against patriarchy into the landscape of the shrine legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe, thus associating Feliciana with the Virgin and her male relatives with desecrating Moors. This reversal of inside and outside effectively turns ‘Spain’ inside out, casting her father and brother’s obsession with honour as decidedly un-Christian and un-Spanish. In the opposite movement, Antonio integrates his mestizo family into the heart of la Mancha, creating a Christian utopia in the midst of a society in crisis. My research into the local history of Quintanar de la Orden has uncovered, in fact, layer upon layer of corruption, hypocrisy, and religious conflict. Cervantes’ projection of a harmonious, inclusive community of faith onto this historical reality thus constitutes an implicit challenge to the project of teaching Spaniards to see themselves as the militant defenders of a Catholic empire, both within and beyond Spain. These characters’ trajectories ultimately contribute in several ways to Cervantes’ transnational strategy in his posthumous romance. Profoundly anchored in the local geographies of Extremadura and la Mancha, they nonetheless incorporate characters from distant lands. And the specific places they invoke resonate historically in ways that call into question Spain’s enclosing of itself within its own borders. The Arabic place name

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‘Guadalupe’ reminds us of a time when Muslims ruled the area where the image of the Virgin housed there today was hidden to protect her from desecration. Quintanar is called ‘de la Orden’ because the military order of Santiago ousted the Moors from that area. But if the toponyms in these tales hark back to a time before post-1492 Christian Spain had even been imagined, they also project forward into the future, toward the multicultural societies that Spanish colonization of the New World would create. Thus I complete my discussion of the Feliciana episode below with a consideration of the implications of Cervantes’ reinscription of the Guadalupe story into the landscape of Extremadura, precisely at the moment when, whether he knew it or not, the cult of this manifestation of the Virgin was rapidly taking even deeper root on the other side of the Atlantic, in Mexico. By the same token, Antonio de Villaseñor’s return to his homeland, though it might seem to reaffirm land-locked Castilian isolationism, in fact enacts the folding over onto seventeenthcentury peninsular reality of the mestizo future awaiting Spain in the New World, for Cervantes clearly patterned the island where Antonio meets Ricla and forms a family with her on stories he had read in New World chronicles. In this way, Cervantes, precisely by restoring pilgrimage to its anthropological foundations in localized popular practices, was able to make of it an instrument for overcoming the exclusionary national identity created by the ideology of Spanish imperialism. Feliciana de la Voz: A Secularized Miracle Story After hundreds of pages of exotic adventures in distant lands, involving characters from all over Europe, the arrival of the protagonists of Persiles y Sigismunda in Spain early in Book Three must have produced a pleasurable expectation of self-recognition for seventeenth-century Spanish readers. If we join Michael Nerlich in reading this work as Cervantes’ attempt to conceptualize the unity in multiplicity of European identity, these chapters will undoubtedly tell us something about the place reserved for Spain in that configuration. Will that role indeed be, as Philip II dreamed, that of the continent’s spiritual leader, imposing the decrees of the Council of Trent throughout Western Europe and the New World? Some such expectation informs the protagonists’ expression of relief on having crossed the border from Portugal: Now we can stride forward safe from shipwrecks, storms, and robbers, for Spain, judging by the fame it has as the most peaceful and holy region on earth, can certainly promise us a safe journey. (III.4, 210; emphasis added)

90 Cervantes’ Transnational Romance [Ya podemos tender los pasos, seguros de naufragios, de tormentas y salteadores, porque, según la fama que, sobre todas las regiones del mundo, de pacífica y santa tiene ganada España, bien nos podemos prometer seguro viaje.] (III.4, 459; emphasis added)

Yet their first adventure in the author’s homeland presents a very different picture. Having chosen a husband against her father’s wishes, Feliciana flees for her life, pursued by her male relatives. Her brother unsheathes his dagger to kill his own sister in church, but the cooler-headed father insists on dragging her into the street first, to avoid desecrating the temple. The pilgrims encounter a murdered man in the countryside, are accused of the crime and nearly fleeced by corrupt officials, but an innkeeper steps forward bearing a letter which proves the man’s own cousin murdered him. At every turn, it seems, they encounter treachery and deceit, corruption, violence, and a barbaric disregard for the both rule of law and Christian charity. Clearly the initial glimpse the reader gets of Spain is calculated to produce a disconcerting effect. Yet these chapters also contain glimmers of light: the spontaneous generosity of the cowherds who take Feliciana in and hide her from her pursuers; the quasi-miraculous vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe; and Feliciana’s own resilient personality, her charm, beauty, and sublime power in song. The question, in reading this episode, is to understand the relation between the predominantly negative image of a corrupt and repressive society, and the scattered moments of a more positive vision of Spanish identity, which coalesce around the foreign pilgrims as around a magnet. The culminating scene takes place at the shrine of the Virgin at Guadalupe, the leading pilgrimage site in early modern Castile. Cervantes thereby inscribes Feliciana’s story into the context of popular devotional practices, restoring to pilgrimage its deep rootedness in the landscape, and thus its autonomy from ecclesiastical and state power. In the following pages, I read Feliciana’s story as a secularized miracle story confronting the church’s monopoly on the supernatural.7 Cervantes rewrites the origin legend of the shrine of Guadalupe, asserting its local Extremaduran character against assimilation to the centralizing tendencies of the Counter-Reformation. Just as Feliciana’s revolt against her father’s wishes asserts her right to control her own sexual and reproductive activity, the parallels between her story and the shrine legend assert local autonomy over spiritual life. According to the earliest surviving version of the origin legend, from a manuscript dated 1440, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, attributed

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to St Luke, belonged to Gregory the Great, who gave it to the young Isidore of Seville as a present. On the way to Spain from Rome, the ship carrying the image was miraculously saved from a terrible storm. Subsequently it was venerated at Seville until the time of the Moorish invasion, when fleeing monks hid it in the mountains of Extremadura. After the major push of the Christian Reconquest of the thirteenth century, it was accidentally discovered by a cowherd. Some versions give his name as Gil Cordero and specify 1326 as the year. In all the versions, the cowherd sees the Virgin and discovers the precious image of Guadalupe in a manner typical of the shrine legends known as the shepherds’ cycle, involving stories of images discovered by herdsmen in the countryside. In the most frequent version, the Virgin appears to Gil Cordero when he is beginning to skin a cow he has found dead after hunting for her for three days. He has just cut a cross on the chest of the animal when, to his astonishment, it revives; at the same time, the Virgin appears. She resurrected the dead cow, as she will later resurrect Gil Cordero’s son. She tells him to bring the people there to dig, and when they find an image of her, hidden centuries before to prevent its being desecrated by the Moors, they should establish a shrine on that very spot. Once they find the image, they build a humble shrine on the site of today’s monastery.8 This basic narrative was a fundamental element of the experience of pilgrimage to Guadalupe. Though the resurrection of the cow and the boy are unusual, in other respects the legend of Guadalupe is fairly typical of the shepherds’ cycle. Further, the emphasis in the legend on escape from the Moors and the Reconquest situate Guadalupe in a frontier zone or borderland between Christian and Muslim territories. Nonetheless, a monastery and then a town quickly grew up around the new shrine, transforming the site from a remote backwoods location to a crossroads on the route from Lisbon to Madrid. According to William Christian ‘Guadalupe ... was the richest and most popular shrine in fifteenth-century Castile. Indeed, it maintained its pre-eminence ... until the nineteenth century’ (Apparitions 88). But if the shrine flourished, it also grew away from its humble roots. By the sixteenth century, Guadalupe was no longer in the countryside, but at the centre of a thriving town. Rather than a symbol of the power of the weak, it served as palace and bank to Castilian monarchs (Local Religion 155).9 At the same time, as Christian has shown, the devotion to the Virgin in Spain during this period stood for liberation from the control of the church, the vindication of the humble against the powerful, and the

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sacralization of the natural world; in all, the Virgin was a symbol of a power outside established structure. The most dramatic form this symbolism could take was that of a direct apparition. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the witnesses of apparitions were generally ‘marginal figures, like shepherds and children’ (Local Religion 81). ‘The stories validate the local as opposed to the governmental or bureaucratic, and the common person, even the weak, as opposed to the nobility and the strong. Power structures are surprised and converted; ultimately they assume control of the sacred enterprises they first refused to accept’ (Apparitions 73). Yet over time apparitions declined in the face of repression by the Inquisition. Whereas fifteenth-century seers received admiration and respect despite their low status, in the sixteenth century it was more likely that they would be publicly whipped. Apparitions had become ‘a dangerous enterprise’ by 1585, when Diego Pérez de Valdivia, in a devotional treatise, ‘warned beatas and nuns to pray that they not have visions or apparitions’ (Local Religion 90; emphasis in original). Christian tells the stories of seers who were punished rather than believed, ‘victims of a general climate of closure’ (Apparitions 185). By the mid-sixteenth century, then, worship at Guadalupe was a thoroughly institutionalized practice with ample ties to power. Any shepherd who came forward with an apparition story like that on which its founding was based would be likely to find himself brought before the Inquisition as a lying heretic. Using the miracle collections in the archive of the monastery, Françoise Crémoux has reconstructed the ‘play of interactions between popular religiosity and the attitude of the Church’ (190). Her study reveals an ongoing tension, embedded in the history of the shrine, between its institutional clout and the popular devotion that formed the ultimate ground of that power. The miracle stories were carefully filtered by the monks in a complex process of recording, revising, and collecting intended to promote but also to shape the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were then recirculated at various levels: through public readings held at the shrine, manuscript copies distributed to select visitors, and, apparently, a project to publish an anthology of miracles (50–6). The multiple levels of dissemination demonstrate that these collections were part of a systematic effort to maintain and extend what I referred to in chapter 2 as the church’s ‘monopoly over the supernatural.’ Nonetheless, because the raw material came primarily from the lower classes, they are at the same time the site of an ongoing negotiation. From the start, then, the intervention involved in collecting the miracle

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stories implies an attempt to regulate the practice of pilgrimage in accordance with Christian doctrine. Crémoux sees evidence for a tightening of this control, however, after the Council of Trent. A number of miracles from the last decades of the sixteenth century have been crossed out, with marginal notes indicating that they were not approved by ecclesiastical authorities (59). At the same time, there is a dramatic decline in the number of miracles registered, attributable primarily to the adoption of stricter standards for what would ‘count’ as a miracle. Crémoux also argues that the late sixteenth century was the critical moment in the transition from medieval peregrinaje to the more typically modern romería (88). Medieval European pilgrimage promiscuously crossed borders delimiting all kinds of social and political categories. Geographically, it was characterized by distant wandering; indeed, the internationalism of the great age of pilgrimage helped to create Europe as a geographical entity (see Sumption, ch. 8). As far as the liturgical calendar is concerned, it respected only the restrictions imposed by climate. Weather permitting, pilgrims could go anywhere at any time. Finally, it was also a practice that cut across class distinctions. Even the wealthiest of nobles and most powerful of princes undertook pilgrimages in the High Middle Ages. In all of these senses, the CounterReformation led to more restricted devotional practices, as Crémoux’s research confirms. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the number of foreigners visiting Guadalupe dwindled. A shrine which still had a markedly international character at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by 1600 it was almost exclusively Castilian. Guadalupe thus came to be associated with Castilian hegemony on the peninsula and imperial ambitions beyond it (Crémoux 73–7). Corresponding to the more restricted geographical distribution of pilgrims was the concentration of visits to coincide with the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, September 8, a concentration that became more and more pronounced as the century drew to a close (ibid. 86–7). The association of pilgrimage with the lower classes also became more pronounced. The truly powerful nobility and clergy chose to express their devotion through generous gifts, which they no longer felt obliged to make in person (ibid. 119–22). For Crémoux it is this combination of more localized geographical distribution, increased concentration around a single date, and a more exclusively popular appeal, that defines the romería as opposed to the medieval tradition of peregrinaje. She documents a gradual shift in terminology

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favouring the use of the family of words associated with romero (romera, romería) over those relating to peregrino (peregrina, peregrinación, peregrinaje). In the same period, the hábito de peregrinos begins to be seen less frequently, which she takes as a sign that ‘a certain practice of pilgrimage is beginning to disappear’ (105). Indeed, there was a tendency to view with suspicion the wandering pilgrim who, in true medieval style, journeyed far beyond his or her native land, dressed in a pilgrim’s habit, surviving on the charity of those met by chance. After all, vagabonds and thieves could easily use the loose fitting, anonymous tunic with hood as a pious disguise. In 1590 Philip II even signed an edict prohibiting Spaniards from wearing a pilgrim’s habit (Crémoux 103). Yet it is the medieval form of pilgrimage that predominates in Persiles y Sigismunda: these pilgrims wander across many lands, wearing the familiar pilgrim’s habit. Cervantes understood the efficacy of this form of pilgrimage in creating opportunities for liminal communitas between strangers who meet on the road, especially when these strangers hail from different native lands. In this way, he appropriates a residual practice as a way to authorize his own emergent, oppositional one. Paradoxically, despite the shrinking scale and scope of the pilgrimage and tighter control over the production of miracles at the original shrine, this is also a period of expansion for the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Numerous churches and chapels named for her are founded throughout the Peninsula. The spectacular growth of devotion to her across the ocean in New Spain is really a seventeenth-century phenomenon, despite the fact that the legend of Juan Diego places the apparition in the first half of the sixteenth century. Far from discouraging this expression of popular religiosity, the goal appears to have been to shape it without diminishing its force; or as Crémoux puts it, ‘to channel it in an ever narrower way, along the straight path laid down by the CounterReformation’ (190). When the episode of Feliciana de la Voz is inserted into this historical context, the meaning of Cervantes’ text in its original cultural setting becomes clear. Cervantes here restores pilgrimage to its authentic role as a popular form of religious practice, wresting control from ecclesiastical authority. What is more, that authority is clearly aligned with patriarchal power at all levels of society, in such a way that Feliciana’s tale reveals the mediating role of the feminine in maintaining social cohesion, a role ordinarily obscured by masculine domination.10 Yet relying as they do on the cultural tradition all members of this community share, these meanings do not constitute an open challenge to the existing order of society. They merely reveal the hidden basis of its functioning.

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Feliciana’s experience corresponds to Victor Turner’s anthropological model of pilgrimage, comprising the stages of conflict, separation, ordeal, and reconciliation. During the days she spends with the protagonists of Persiles y Sigismunda, she occupies a liminal state corresponding to her change of status from daughter to wife. Of course, this change of status does not follow the norms of the patriarchal social order: she chooses her own husband against her father’s wishes and in flagrant violation of his authority. Her choice of Rosanio thus constitutes a challenge to the gender hierarchy. The resulting conflict leads to a temporary loss of status, to which she responds in turn by joining the egalitarian pilgrim society represented by Periandro/Persiles, Auristela/ Sigismunda, and Antonio and his family. She goes through a pilgrimage process comprising multiple stages: an initial rejection of her established social identity, followed by a symbolic rebirth into a pastoral realm; the abrupt decision to make a pilgrimage to Rome, which will ultimately be carried out only as far as Guadalupe; an experience of communitas involving shared dangers; the revelation of a higher, spiritual order in which the hierarchical structure of her society is neutralized; and an eventual return to her own community, after undergoing a transforming process whose final consequences remain ambiguous. From the first moment, when an unknown rider gives a newborn infant to the pilgrim band in the woods at night, Feliciana’s tale presents astonishing and portentous events, surrounded by an atmosphere of danger and mystery. Shortly after the pilgrim band reaches the cowherds’ camp, Feliciana herself breathlessly arrives, further heightening the tension and suspense. She tells how she fled her father’s house on foot after giving birth out of wedlock, leaving the suitor her father favoured behind in the parlour, her lover Rosanio having gone ahead of her on horseback, with their baby. In the cowherds’ camp, Feliciana is first reduced to the most basic level of existence, in which mere survival is the primary goal, and then rebuilds her sense of self out of a broad awareness of her relation to the natural world. When she arrives at the camp, fear, exhaustion, and the urgent need to hide give her no time to speak; her father and brother, hot on her trail, come right up to the cowherds’ hut. The cowherds hide her in an oak tree, where she spends the night; the narrator playfully describes the oak as ‘pregnant’ (‘Preñada estaba la encina’ III.3, 205; 451). In the morning, ‘reborn’ into this woodland space, Feliciana shows remarkable self-determination. She tells her whole story, in spite of the shame one might expect her to feel. She states categorically that the child the pilgrims received in the woods the night before is not hers.

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Finally, she decides to go with the pilgrims to Rome. Taken together, these events mark this wilderness as a liminal space in which the obligations which subordinated her to a series of males are suspended. Feliciana herself is transformed accordingly; in this new setting she appears selfpossessed, autonomous, radically free of all ties, not only to father and brother, but also to husband and son. She decides for herself to turn her back on her home and freely enter into new social relations of liminal communitas. The first time the pilgrims stop to rest, their enjoyment of a conventional locus amoenus is interrupted by Diego de Parraces’ falling dead in their midst. From the point of view of the pilgrim process, this episode serves to further incorporate Feliciana into the group of pilgrims by involving her in a common danger with them. There is also the suggestive parallel between Parraces’ fate and her own: like Parraces, she is being hunted down by relatives who want to kill her. The similarity between these two characters’ situations gives them a paradigmatic quality. Outside the communitas of the pilgrim band, the most intimate forms of betrayal characterize the social world through which they move. Chapter 5 of Book Three takes place entirely at the shrine of Guadalupe, opening with the sublime impression the chapel, adorned with ex-votos, makes on the pilgrims: They entered her temple, expecting to find on its walls purple cloth from Tyre, damask from Syria, and brocade from Milan hanging for adornment; they found instead crutches left by the lame, wax eyes left by the blind, arms hung there by the maimed, and shrouds cast aside by the dead, things from all these people who, after having been bowed down by misery, are now alive, healthy, free, and happy, thanks to the generous compassion of the Mother of Compassion, who in that little place has her blessed Son take the field armed with her countless miracles. These decorations commemorating miracles made such an impression on the hearts of the devout pilgrims that they gazed all around the church and imagined they could see captives come flying through the air with their chains wrapped around them, then go hang them on the holy walls, and the sick dragging their crutches, and the dead their shrouds, searching for a place to put them because there is no more room in the holy church, so great is the number that already cover the walls. (III.5, 217) [Entraron en su templo, y donde pensaron hallar por sus paredes, pendientes por adorno, las púrpuras de Tiro, los damascos de Siria, los brocados de Milán, hallaron en lugar suyo muletas que dejaron los cojos, ojos de

Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda 97 cera que dejaron los ciegos, brazos que colgaron los mancos, mortajas de que se desnudaron los muertos, todos después de haber caído en el suelo de las miserias, ya vivos, ya sanos, ya libres y ya contentos, merced a la larga misericordia de la Madre de las misericordias, que en aquel pequeño lugar hace campear a su benditísimo Hijo con el escuadrón de sus infinitas misericordias. De tal manera hizo aprehensión estos milagrosos adornos en los corazones de los devotos peregrinos, que volvieron los ojos a todas las partes del templo, y les parecía ver venir por el aire volando los cautivos envueltos en sus cadenas a colgarlas de las santas murallas, y a los enfermos arrastrar las muletas, y a los muertos mortajas, buscando lugar donde ponerlas, porque ya en el sacro templo no cabían: tan grande es la suma que las paredes ocupan.] (III. 5, 471–2)

Through these ex-votos, Cervantes emphasizes the Virgin’s role as the special protectress of the weak, the poor, the marginalized, those who have fallen en el suelo de las miserias. His pilgrims are moved by the absence of signs of wealth and worldly power. They are affected most by what they do not see, the miracles only suggested by the ex-votos. Our Lady of Guadalupe is portrayed, then, as a defender of unrepresentable values, values that even appear to subvert the systems in place for the representation of status. No one could be more representative of the weak and marginalized at this moment than Feliciana. The association of the Virgin with the vulnerable and needy, as opposed to the wealthy and powerful, already establishes her as Feliciana’s protector against her male relatives, the representatives of the patriarchal order. Beyond this relation of protectress to protected, however, a number of parallels suggest something more akin to identification between the frightened young woman and the Mother of God. Certainly both Feliciana and the Virgin Mary were pregnant out of wedlock, both endure scorn and shame, both take shelter among animals, both flee for their lives shortly after giving birth. The most important parallel, however, comes from the shrine legends of the shepherd’s-cycle type: like the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Feliciana has to be hidden in order to protect her from ‘desecration.’ Feliciana herself is the lost and found sacred object, hidden to save her from the Moors. Like Gil Cordero searching for his lost cow, the protagonists spend three days in the woods, on their way to Guadalupe, before they find Feliciana on a wooded hill. Like Cordero, the men who rescue Feliciana are cowherds. Although the image in the Guadalupe legend was found in some sort of underground

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hole or cave, Feliciana hides in a hollow oak. But the hollow oak is also a frequent hiding place in other found object shrine legends, in particular those of the shepherds’ cycle. Unlike real origin legends, this story contains no miracles per se, though the Virgin implicitly plays some undefined role in bringing about the happy resolution. The culminating recognition scene follows Feliciana’s bursting into song, moved by the mysterious power of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But what is more remarkable is that the beautiful Feliciana of the Voice, having kneeled down and folded her hands over her chest, weeping tender tears with a peaceful face and without moving her lips or making any other sign or movement that would indicate she was a living creature, released her voice to the wind, lifted her heart to Heaven, and began to sing some verses she knew by heart ... with which she dazzled the senses of everyone listening. (III.5, 217; emphasis added) [Pero lo que más es de ponderar fue que, puesta de hinojos, y las manos puestas y junto al pecho, la hermosa Feliciana de la Voz, lloviendo tiernas lágrimas, con sosegado semblante, sin mover los labios ni hacer otra demostración ni movimiento que diese señal de ser viva criatura, soltó la voz a los vientos y levantó el corazón al cielo, y cantó unos versos que ella sabía de memoria ... con que suspendió los sentidos de cuantos la escuchaban.] (III.5, 472–3; emphasis added)

The description contains a quasi-supernatural element in her strange immobility, as if a force greater than her own will had overpowered her to express itself through her body. The coincidence that her father and brother enter the church while she is singing suggests the ‘intervention’ of the Virgin herself, who as it were makes Feliciana reveal her identity by moving her to sing at this very moment. The purpose of this intervention would presumably be to prevent her from going to Rome. Like the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the shrine legend, she belongs to this landscape, and a quasi-miraculous causality serves to reassert that bond to the local setting, typical of authentic pilgrimage. A significant consequence of these parallels is the equivalence between Feliciana’s father and brothers and the Moors from whom the image of the Virgin originally had to be hidden. The text inscribes them as desecrators, both when they seek to capture and kill her, and when the brother attempts specifically to avenge his honour in church, before the altar of Our Lady of Guadalupe. If Feliciana is identified with the

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Virgin and her male relatives with the sacrilegious Moorish invaders of the eighth century, the text thereby enacts a radical realignment of inside and outside. The cultural space with which the reader is called on to identify includes Feliciana and all those who help her, among them the local cowherds; two Scandinavians, Periandro and Auristela; a Spaniard recently returned from fifteen years’ exile in barbarian lands; his wife, modelled by Cervantes on the Amerindians he had read about in New World chronicles; and their mestizo children. Feliciana’s father and brother are now excluded as outsiders, and along with them, implicitly, the entire patriarchal order for which they stand: both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the bureaucratic authority of the crown and its representatives. Here and elsewhere in Book Three, Cervantes gives visibility to a submerged current of feminine resistance in early modern Spain, one which connects a series of Spanish women to foreigners moving within the territorial limits of the country at the same time as it separates them from the dominant culture of their own society. This newly defined space of representation effectively gives an open, public place to a hidden cultural interior, turning Spain inside out, pushing the authoritarianism of Absolutism and the Counter-Reformation temporarily to the margins. Homi K. Bhabha describes this unravelling of the nation by a splitting that emerges from within in his justly celebrated essay ‘DissemiNation’: ‘Once the liminality of the nation-space is established, and its signifying difference is turned from the boundary “outside” to its finitude “within,” the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of “other” people. It becomes a question of otherness of the people-asone. The national subject splits in the ethnographic perspective of culture’s contemporaneity and provides both a theoretical position and a narrative authority for marginal voices or minority discourse’ (150). This amounts to a working through of the national from inside, thereby establishing a transnational sphere in the most literal sense of trans- as ‘through’ or ‘across.’ Culture then comes to occupy, not the sharply defined territory of the nation, but a borderland or liminal zone that crosses what it is meant to demarcate, the in-between that Bhabha identifies with a Third Space of cultural hybridity. Yet this achievement by liminal figures of narrative authority – voice – does not last. The struggle between Feliciana and her family spills out onto the street, where it is taken up by the townspeople, ministers of justice, and a mysterious group of men who suddenly arrive. Among them is Rosanio, come to claim his bride. Feliciana, now silenced forever, is reincorpo-

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rated into her community as daughter, sister, wife, and mother. Political institutions reappear, and even the Virgin is attended by a priest, the first cleric mentioned in the episode. Feliciana’s story reveals the gaping wound of gender conflict before the reader’s staring eyes, and then delicately drops over it the thinnest of veils. The contrast between the social order and the order of nature implies that women receive more equanimous treatment in the latter, thereby undermining claims that the gender hierarchy of the former is ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable,’ let alone just. Yet the conclusion of the tale appears to reassert the status quo without a ripple. Feliciana’s voice, which dominates the episode in both her narration and her song, is silenced by the reconciliation of the men who surround her. From the moment her singing is cut off abruptly by two men intent on taking her life, not a single word spoken by her is recorded by the narrator. She shrinks to the stature of a child by the side of her lover: ‘While Rosanio was saying this, Feliciana was clinging to him, trembling and frightened ...’ (III.5, 219) (Mientras Rosanio esto decía, Feliciana estaba pegada con él, teniéndolo asido por la pretina con la mano, toda temblando, toda temorosa ... [III.5, 475]). Nowhere are we told that Feliciana was again asked to identify the child as her son; his identity is guaranteed by the fact that he resembles Feliciana’s brother, as one of Rosanio’s friends explains to him: ‘Look, señor don Sancho, I have a precious token of yours at my house, a nephew I am keeping for you, that you cannot deny without denying yourself – he looks so much like you’ (III.5, 219) (Mirad, señor Don Sancho, que tengo una prenda vuestra en mi casa, un sobrino os tengo, que no le podreis negar si no os negais a vos mismo: tanto es lo que os parece [III.5, 476]). If Feliciana’s adventure is to be assimilated to a pilgrim process whereby social conflicts are worked out, where is the transforming impact? In my view, her pilgrimage has such an impact, though it is dependent on the reader’s willingness to perceive it. Feliciana returns to the world she left, one in which men decide women’s fate, and men control women’s fertility. But does she find it as she left it? At the very least it has become possible for a young, unmarried woman to have a child out of wedlock and to choose her husband against her father’s wishes, without suffering any serious consequences for this act, which had been presented at the outset as a crime punishable by death. Just as we saw that the idea of a miraculous intervention of the Virgin on Feliciana’s behalf was suggested without it being possible to say that it was concretely represented in the text, so the idea of a transformation of Feliciana’s social world is

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powerfully suggested, even demanded, yet finds no definite shape within the story. Like the walls of the shrine at Guadalupe, the existing systems of representation are overfilled, and no new meanings of the sort Cervantes would like to create can be hung on them. If that is so, then we must learn to read like the pilgrims contemplating those walls: imagining what is not there by reference to what is. As the analysis below of the culminating scene of Antonio de Villaseñor’s adventure will show, we can sometimes be helped in this task of completing the indeterminate images of fictional works by reference to archival documents from the same historical period and geographical location. As we have seen, the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura was a leading pilgrimage center in medieval and early modern Iberia, the focus of both popular devotion and of royal patronage. I have interpreted Cervantes’ reinscription of the original legend into Feliciana’s tale as a reaffirmation of authentic pilgrimage in the face of efforts by church officials to channel devotional practices in the direction of a rigid orthodoxy, trying at the same time to show how that reaffirmation opens a critical perspective on the larger project of forging a national identity based on militant Catholicism. In modern times, of course, the cult of the Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe has been outshone by that of the Mexican Virgin bearing the same name, who reportedly appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531, at the site of a temple to the Aztec goddess Tonatzín in Tepeyac. Even today, mystery shrouds the historical relation between these shrines, and controversy still surrounds the early decades of the cult of Guadalupe in New Spain. Could Cervantes have known of the veneration of this new image of the Virgin on the other side of the Atlantic? If he did, he may have intended Feliciana’s tale to have repercussions for the understanding of Mexican as well as Spanish Catholicism. If not, what relevance does the Feliciana episode have to the New World? It is hard to say just how much Cervantes could have known concerning the spread of the cult of Guadalupe to Mexico. D.A. Brading gives a detailed printing history of early narratives of the apparitions. The first published account mentioning Juan Diego and the miraculous origin of her image was Miguel Sánchez’s Imagen de la Virgen María, which appeared in Mexico in 1648. Mateo de la Cruz’s Relación de la milagrosa aparición de la santa imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, the first version published in Spain, did not appear until 1662. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the shrine had a growing reputation for

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miracles; Bernal Díaz del Castillo refers in his Historia verdadera, which he is believed to have written in the 1560s, to ‘Tepeaquilla, which they now call Our Lady of Guadalupe, where she works and has worked many wonderful miracles’ (Brading 54–5, 76; emphasis added). But would the fame of these miracles have reached Spain during Cervantes’ lifetime? Certainly there would have been individuals in Spain who knew of the miracle-working painting, but with no published references to it, affirming that the news could have reached Cervantes by word of mouth remains speculative. On the other hand, as Crémoux points out, from the middle of the sixteenth century the cult was in an expanding phase. Around the same time as the sanctuary was created at Tepeyac, another was founded in Baena (Granada), and during the next hundred years or so chapels dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe sprang up all over Spain. The foundation of the Mexican shrine is only ‘the most spectacular example’ of an extension of the cult across the Atlantic that was also attested by the increasing numbers of New World pilgrims visiting the basilica in Extremadura (Crémoux 188–9). In this context, if we recall the network of ‘tantalizing American connections’ Diana de Armas Wilson sees in the references to the conquistadores Orellana and Pizarro in Feliciana’s tale (Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World 129–30), we can see Cervantes’ reinscription of the origin legend as a response to a larger trend within the colonial project as a whole, that of the export of Marian cults to the New World, of which he would certainly have been aware.11 Like its Spanish namesake, the Mexican cult shows signs from its inception of a tension between popular piety and official attempts to channel it. The legend of the Virgin’s appearing in 1531 to an Indian and of his difficulties in persuading the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, of the authenticity of his visions establishes at the outset a confrontation between Church authorities and the spontaneous faith of a humble indigenous peasant. Juan Diego represents the equivalent type, for his shrine legend, of Gil Cordero, the cowherd to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared in the sparsely populated countryside east of Cáceres. Certainly his legend has contributed to the extraordinary attraction of this pilgrimage for Mexico’s indigenous and poor mestizos. Yet in recent years some have challenged the cherished notion that this cult began among the indigenous population a mere ten years after the Conquest. Historian and Vincentian priest Stafford Poole, for example, after reviewing all possible early sources, concludes that there is no evidence for indigenous involvement of any sort before Sánchez’s ac-

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count. Finding no mention of the apparitions in sources that can be reliably dated before 1648, he concludes that Miguel Sánchez created the legend himself. ‘In that year there suddenly appeared a cult legend, European in substance and form though with an Indian as protagonist, of which nothing had been recorded before’ (214). He separates the sixteenth-century devotion to Mary at Tepeyac from the later apparition devotion, which he sees as a precocious expression of criollismo (217). On this account, the Spanish colonizers established the cult of the Nativity of the Virgin at Tepeyac. She came to be called ‘Guadalupe’ because she was, in their minds, the ‘same’ Virgin as they had venerated in Spain. Of course, the Mexican painting is of the Immaculate Conception, surrounded by a sunburst and standing on an upturned moon supported by an angel, in accordance with the description in Revelation 12, whereas the primary image in the chapel in Spain is a small, dark Madonna and child. There is a secondary image in the Extremadura shrine, however, that ‘bears a striking resemblance to that of Tepeyac,’ according to Poole, particularly concerning the details tying it to Revelation. Details, Poole adds, that ‘were later additions to the Mexican image,’ suggesting ‘a deliberate effort to adapt the latter to that of Extremadura’ (74–5). At the heart of the controversy is the question of the name. Competing explanations for the adoption in Mexico of the same name as the principal Marian shrine of Castile reflect opposing views of the origin and meaning of the cult. For advocates of a spontaneous adoption of Marianism among Nahuatl speakers, the idea that Juan Diego actually gave the Virgin’s name as ‘Guadalupe’ is unappealing, since that would imply a fairly advanced stage of indoctrination by local missionaries, making the cult, however popular it eventually became, essentially a product of their evangelization. They prefer to believe that he said something in Nahuatl, perhaps ‘Tlecuauhtlacupeuh,’ which would mean ‘she who comes flying from the region of light like an eagle of fire’ (Jeanette Rodríguez 45–6) or ‘Coatlalopueh,’ which Gloria Anzaldúa renders ‘she who has dominion over serpents’ (Borderlands 49–53). The Spaniards then (mis)interpreted her Nahuatl name as ‘Guadalupe’ in accordance with a title more familiar to them, though ironically based on an Arabic toponym.12 Nonetheless, the earliest existing account of how ‘Guadalupe’ was adopted suggests the extreme opposite view, that the name was chosen as a way of cashing in, quite literally, on the success of the Castilian image. As William Christian explains, the Hieronymite monks strove to

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protect their order’s claim on the name: ‘Hieronymite monasteries tried to keep a monopoly on publicly venerated images of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a given city, but it was difficult for even the most litigious order to maintain a monopoly over a devotion when they were simultaneously propagating it throughout the land with questors’ (Apparitions 87–8). In the early twentieth century, the great ecclesiastical historian Mariano Cuevas found two letters from the 1570s in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, in which Diego de Santa María, a Hieronymite monk, complained to Philip II that around 1560 the officials running the chapel at Tepeyac had changed the name of their image to Guadalupe in order to take advantage of the frequent practice of bequeathing alms to the sanctuary of Guadalupe in Extremadura. They were moved to do so, according to this monk, because of a true life pícaro who showed up in Mexico with forged documents purporting to be from the monastery of Guadalupe and managed to collect a considerable sum. According to Santa María, many were giving alms to the Mexican shrine in the false belief that the money was going to the Extremaduran one. ‘Or at least they must believe that this hermitage and that monastery are one and the same thing, and thus the monastery is being cheated, both in the temporal and the spiritual realms, and so are the faithful, who think of themselves as brethren of the holy house of Guadalupe and expect to enjoy the sacrifices, prayers, and spiritual benefits of the ancient Brotherhood’ (Cuevas 533). Convinced that the new Mexican devotion was costing his order money and prestige, the monk defended their trademark, insisting that the Mexican chapel should either change its name or be turned over to the Hieronymites (Cuevas 531–8). The ‘authenticity’ of her cult thus turns, exactly as in Feliciana’s case, on the question of the man who speaks for her. Did Juan Diego really exist? The earliest attempt to prove his historicity was an expedition to his reputed hometown of Cuautitlán by Antonio de Gama and Francisco de Siles in 1666. The statements they took from local inhabitants whose ancestral memories confirmed Juan Diego’s real existence are still the primary foundation of attempts to document Sánchez’s account as something more than legend. The Mexican poet and scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700) provided the visionary’s pre-baptismal name of Quauhtatoatzín from a manuscript that has conveniently disappeared (Brading 117). While the movement to beatify him began in earnest in the 1980s and achieved success in 1990, opinions still vary both inside and outside the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Few are indiscreet

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enough to acknowledge that they simply do not believe there ever was such a person, however. Yet, incredibly, the abbot of the basilica at Tepeyac himself, Guillermo Schulenberg Prado, did just that in 1995. The resulting public furor forced him to resign (Brading 348–9). Schulenberg represents a current of opinion according to which the origin of the cult matters less than the meaning it holds for believers today. The mass of the faithful, nevertheless, understandably do not wish to see the image they venerate as a colonialist implant. Despite widespread doubts, Juan Diego was canonized a saint of the church by Pope John Paul II on 31 July 2002 in an impressive ceremony in Mexico City. He is reported to be the ‘first Indian saint.’ Like her Iberian counterpart, then, the morenita de Tepeyac has always been a double-sided figure, now representing the spiritual empowerment of the marginal and underprivileged, now helping to consolidate the economic and cultural power of ecclesiastical authority. Famously, the parish priest of Dolores, Miguel Hidalgo, led an army of indigenous and mestizo insurgents against Spanish rule under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1810. In the twentieth century, however, she was appropriated by the conservative forces of the counter-revolutionary Cristero militants, whose flag she adorned (Brading 312–17). In consequence, many Mexicans, especially Mexican women, associate Our Lady of Guadalupe with antifeminist Catholic traditionalism. In yet another twist on the same screw that we saw Cervantes turning in his rewriting of the Guadalupe shrine legend, Chicana feminists have rehabilitated the figure of Guadalupe in writings and images designed to portray her once more as a symbol of empowerment for the downtrodden, especially when they are women. The most famous of these images are Yolanda López’s self portraits as a dynamic jogger surrounded by a Guadalupe-inspired halo and clutching a fistful of paintbrushes. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña reminds us in ‘The Two Guadalupes,’ in Mexico there is still a reactionary Guadalupano movement that is not above using intimidation to frighten people into accepting the status quo, even as the Virgin of Guadalupe represents, especially in Los Angeles, a progressive force that simultaneously resists Anglo-American cultural dominance and Mexican-American patriarchal family structures. Feliciana de la Voz’s story of rebellion and reconciliation is thus more appropriate than ever. Marian devotion continues to occupy a fault line of cultural politics, and in exploiting this Cervantes displays remarkable prescience.13

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‘Según es cristiana la gente’: Antonio de Villaseñor’s Return to Quintanar de la Orden They all arrived together and the first to speak was Antonio, to his own father: ‘Is there, by chance, sir, a hostel for pilgrims in this town?’ ‘Given how Christian the people are who live in it,’ his father answered, ‘all its houses are hostels for pilgrims; but if there were no other, this one of mine, according to its capacity, would serve for all the rest.’ The Trials of Persiles y Sigismunda III.9, 239 [Llegaron todos juntos y el primero que habló fue Antonio, a su mismo padre: – ¿Hay, por ventura, señor, en este lugar hospital de peregrinos? – Según es cristiana la gente que le habita – respondió su padre – todas las casas dél son hospital de peregrinos; y, cuando otra no hubiera, ésta mía, según su capacidad, sirviera por todas.] (Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda III.9, 515)

Antonio de Villaseñor’s return to his hometown of Quintanar de la Orden marks a turning point in Persiles y Sigismunda.14 At this moment the Spaniard who has accompanied the protagonists from the beginning, and who thus serves as a stand-in for the reader, reaches the end of his journey. At least since Astrana Marín’s biography, scholars have known that Villaseñor was the name of a leading local family of hidalgos in Quintanar, and it is taken for granted that Cervantes knew some people in the town (Astrana Marín VII, 437– 40). Yet there has been no attempt to correlate the fictional representation with historical reality, despite the fact that this is one of the few instances in which Cervantes provides information specific enough to make such a comparison possible. Moreover, he chose to locate this pivotal episode of Persiles y Sigismunda in the same part of la Mancha as forms the principal setting of Don Quixote. (Quintanar is only eight kilometres from El Toboso.) Bringing together a fictional text and a series of historical documents referring to the same time and place poses the problem of the relative status of each type of representation. Despite the temptation to privilege the archival material as referring to ‘historical reality,’ one must keep in mind the circumstances under which the documents were produced, by whom, and for what purposes. Like literary works, archival documents are texts, themselves in need of interpretation. At the same time, the comparatively coherent and relatively disinterested perspective of the fictional text gives it a validity of its own. Although it does not purport to be a factual account, Persiles y Sigismunda incorporates aspects of the

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worldview of its author, himself an early modern Spaniard with firsthand knowledge of the phenomena described in his book. Ultimately it might be best to think of literature and documentary sources in terms of a mutual critique according to which each draws attention to the other’s inadequacies. When they are confronted with one another, contingency is restored to the literary discourse while to historical documents is added the imaginary element of the desires, aspirations, and regrets of living subjects. Antonio de Villaseñor’s Trajectory The trajectory of Antonio de Villaseñor, the bárbaro español, displays the full anthropological significance of pilgrimage, even though he does not initially intend to undertake a sacred journey. This subplot parallels the main plot of the work from its first episode, the Barbaric Isle, to its last page, which announces the marriages of Antonio’s children, Antonio mozo and Constanza, who travel with the protagonists all the way to Rome. The younger generation functions as a sort of placeholder, keeping open the connection to Antonio padre, making it possible to map the entire trajectory of the protagonists from the northern lands to Rome onto his wanderings (and those of his family). Antonio is the only Spaniard in the work who leaves Spain and later returns. Like the original intended reader, he travels to the world of fantasy, accompanying Persiles and Sigismunda on their various adventures, and then goes back to the everyday world from which he set out. The pilgrimage process, with its power to transform both the individual and the society, is here a model of the reading process. The interpretation of his story is indeed of particular weight in understanding the work as a whole. The people he meets while travelling, with whom he shares the joys and hardships of the journey, offer an alternative to the hierarchical social world Antonio leaves behind. What he learns about the possibilities of disinterested human companionship carries over on his return and has a transforming impact on his New Castile home. The initial impression the reader receives of this home is of a world dominated by social structure, in which human beings are reduced to their rank and status, and no intimacy is possible. The contrast between this and the utopian microcosm of his cave on the Barbaric Isle could not be greater. Yet when Antonio returns to Quintanar, the representation of the place is markedly different in style, with an emphasis placed on Christian charity and mutual support. In effect, it is not the place he

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left behind, and this transformation, poetically speaking, is the result of his pilgrimage. According to his life story as he tells it, he was a young man very strongly committed to upholding the honour due him according to his rank. This is hardly surprising, given the portrait, admittedly brief, that he sketches of life in his hometown. Antonio and his neighbours live in constant awareness of subtle differences in prestige, ready at any moment to draw their swords over some petty pundonor. Having duelled with a nobleman more powerful than himself, Antonio is obliged to flee. After a number of other misadventures, including a remarkable ‘conversion experience’ on an island where he is nearly devoured by wolves, he washes ashore on another island, on which he finds a habitable cave. Antonio makes a thorough search for other human beings, but finds only one: Good luck and merciful Heaven ... provided me with a barbarian girl about fifteen years old who was walking around hunting for colorful seashells and tasty shellfish among the cliffs, boulders, and rocks on the beach. She was stunned to see me, her feet took root in the sand, she let go of the little shells she held and the shellfish all scattered; clasping her in my arms without saying a word to her, nor she to me, I went straight into the cave and brought her to this same spot where we are right now. I placed her on the ground, kissed her hands, caressed her face, and made every sort of gesture and sign I could to show her I was gentle and loving. Once she got over her first fright, never taking her eyes off me, she touched me all over my body and, from time to time, all fear now forgotten, she would laugh and embrace me, and then taking from her clothes a kind of bread not made of wheat, she put it in my mouth and spoke to me in her language, asking me, I later learned, to eat it. (I.6, 39) [La buena suerte y los piadosos cielos ... me depararon una muchacha bárbara de hasta edad de quince años, que por entre las peñas, riscos y escollos de la marina, pintadas conchas y apetitoso marisco andaba buscando. Pasmóse, viéndome; pegáronsele los pies en la arena; soltó las cogidas conchuelas y derramósele el marisco; y cogiéndola entre mis brazos, sin decirla palabra, ni ella a mí tampoco, me entré por la cueva adelante, y la traje a este mismo lugar donde agora estamos. Púsela en el suelo, beséle las manos, halaguéle el rostro con las mías, e hice todas las señales y demostraciones que pude para mostrarme blando y amoroso con ella. Ella, pasado aquel primer espanto, con atentísimos ojos me estuvo mirando, y con las

Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda 109 manos me tocaba todo el cuerpo y, de cuando en cuando, ya perdido el miedo, se reía y me abrazaba, y sacando del seno una manera de pan ... me lo puso en la boca, y en su lengua me habló, y a lo que después acá he sabido, en lo que decía me rogaba que comiese.] (I.6, 174–5)

Antonio and Ricla discover one another in a space from which all status relations have been cleared away. Unlike the inhabitants of Antonio’s birthplace, unlike the members of any human group during normal social interaction, these two are freed from the necessity to perform, to engage in theatrics, hiding some part of themselves behind a mask while letting some other aspect, some codified role, show itself. The emotions Ricla feels and shows on seeing Antonio are indicative of a radical break with everything previous. Astonishment is followed by curiosity mixed with caution, which gives way to joyful abandon: ‘from time to time, all fear now forgotten, she would laugh and embrace me’ (de cuando en cuando, ya perdido el miedo, se reía y me abrazaba). Ricla’s laughter reflects her giddy sense of freedom. There are no other eyes to judge their behaviour, no prior expectations to limit or predetermine what these two human beings should be to one another. Cervantes has taken them as far outside any sociocultural context as he could imagine. In this extreme removal from scripted identities, Antonio and Ricla discover an intimacy and mutual concern prior to any identification with a class or status group within a hierarchical structure of power. The discovery they make, which inspires Ricla’s laughter, is that of pure alterity, and of their own capacity to love another human being independently of social obligations. This discovery of human solidarity is also an encounter with the sacred, as it may be celebrated in a natural shrine, without the need for any temple or official priesthood: ‘The thing is, then,’ responded the barbarian woman, ‘that my many comings and goings from this place were sufficient cause for this boy and this girl to be born to me and my husband as a result. I call this man my husband because, before he knew me completely, he gave me his word to be mine in the way he says is customary among true Christians. He has taught me his language, as I have taught him mine, and in it he also taught me laws of the Catholic Christian faith. He baptized me in the water from that creek over there, although not with the same solemnities he told me are usually performed in his land. He explained as much of his religion to me as he knows and I gave it a place in my heart and soul where I have given it as much

110 Cervantes’ Transnational Romance credence as I have been able to. I believe in the Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, three separate who are all the one true God ...’ (I.6, 40–1) [Es, pues, el caso –replicó la bárbara– que mis muchas entradas y salidas en este lugar le dieron bastante para que de mí y de mi esposo naciesen esta muchacha y este niño. Llamo esposo a este señor, porque, antes que me conociese del todo, me dio palabra de serlo, al modo que él dice que se usa entre verdaderos cristianos. Hame enseñado su lengua, y yo a él la mía, y en ella ansimismo me enseñó la ley católica cristiana. Diome agua de bautismo en aquel arroyo, aunque no con las ceremonias que él me ha dicho que en su tierra se acostumbran. Declaróme su fe como él la sabe, la cual yo asenté en mi alma y en mi corazón donde le he dado el crédito que he podido darle. Creo en la Santísima Trinidad, Dios Padre, Dios Hijo, y Dios Espíritu Santo, tres personas distintas, y que todas son un solo Dios ...] (I.6, 176–7)

Antonio’s cave thus becomes a space for experiencing liminal communitas. At the farthest remove from his own community, he finds the opposite of the vertically structured relations generated and sustained by publicly enacted rivalry that prevailed in his birthplace. He learns Ricla’s language and she learns his. He converts her to Christianity (though before his exile he never gave any indication of being the slightest bit devout) and they raise their children in the faith. They never see or meet anyone else on the island (which turns out to be the Barbaric Isle on which Periandro and Auristela are nearly killed) until the night when it is burned. They then escape with the protagonists, with whom they make several more narrow escapes before finally reaching Quintanar. When they arrive, they find Antonio’s family has been reconciled with that of the Count, the brother of Antonio’s antagonist in the duel. Now the Count is dying due to a confrontation between the townspeople and soldiers quartered there, in which he tried to intervene to make peace and was shot. Just before he dies, he marries Antonio’s daughter Constanza, definitively sealing the reconciliation between the two families. The pilgrimage process has thus opened a space for communitas within Quintanar, realigning the internal conflict that precipitated Antonio’s flight as a confrontation between the townspeople and a common foe against which they are unified. The militarism Antonio had made the principle of his existence is now perceived as an external power, representing only the absolutist monarchy’s oppression of local residents. Though born in the heart of the leading nation of the Counter-

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Reformation, in order to have a profound religious experience and experience authentic human solidarity, Antonio de Villaseñor has to journey to the distant edge of the North Sea. As Diana de Armas Wilson has shown, the inhabitants of the island, presumably including Ricla, were modelled by Cervantes on Amerindians about whom he had read (Allegories of Love 109–29). The transformation in personal values Antonio has achieved as a result has made him a different man. It is he who has been converted and transformed by Ricla and the experience of helping her raise their children. This new Spanish family, open to receiving cultural influences from other nations, rather than concerned with imposing religious orthodoxy on them, fits into a new, utopian Quintanar de la Orden which has been imagined to go along with it. But neither Antonio’s mestizo family nor the imagined community into which it is inserted corresponds to the Spain of the first decades of the seventeenth century. Here Cervantes has fused his understanding of the popular practice of pilgrimage with the Erasmian ideals his generation inherited from their humanist teachers, to present a story which could hardly be more critical of the direction Spain had taken, culturally and socially as well as politically. As if in order to inscribe such a notion of resistance into their wandering trajectory, Cervantes has the pilgrims discuss visiting two key places, at this stage in their journey, but they decide not to, though in each case the places are nearby: Madrid, the political centre of Spain; and Toledo, its ecclesiastical centre.15 Un Lugar de La Mancha: Quintanar de la Orden, Circa 1590 The image of the towns of La Mancha that emerges when one begins to research their local history and to read the documents preserved in Spanish archives could not be farther from this utopian vision of harmony among different social classes and ethno-religious groups. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Quintanar was a town split by factionalism and class tensions, both between hidalgos and labradores ricos, and among different families within the local oligarchy. There was also a large converso minority living under constant suspicion of judaizing, and a substantial Morisco minority composed of refugees from Granada. At the same time, taxation that was increasing at a much faster rate than productivity threatened to plunge the town, like others in the region, into a severe demographic and economic crisis (Martín de Nicolás, ‘La reconstrucción del Común de La Mancha’). The composite picture that emerges when one studies the available documentation confirms the

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conflictive nature of the local social order as depicted in Book I, chapter 6, while contradicting the idealized picture of the Quintanar to which Antonio de Villaseñor returns. In the following pages, specific points from Cervantes’ text anchor a series of forays into the archives, in which these contradictions are explored. ‘Bravo estáis, señor Antonio’ Antonio de Villaseñor is forced into exile by a confrontation in the street with the second son of a local noble family. Antonio slashes his antagonist in the face and then stands before him with his sword drawn, in a dramatic scene in which, from Antonio’s point of view, his status in his community is challenged and he defends it. His ‘enemy,’ who is never named, treats him too familiarly in public after his return from fighting in ‘the war that his majesty, our Caesar, Charles V was waging in Germany against some of the rulers there’ (I.5, 33) (la guerra que entonces la majestad del César Carlo Quinto hacía en Alemania contra algunos potentados de ella [161–2]). The whole scene takes place during a festival, when the principal hidalgos and caballeros of the town are gathered in the plaza: A gentleman, the second son of a titled nobleman who had his estate near my hometown ... turning to me with an arrogant smile, addressed me: ‘You’re looking gallant, señor Antonio. His experiences in Flanders and Italy have certainly improved him, for he truly looks very fine. And good Antonio should know that I like him very much.’ (I.5, 34) [Un caballero, hijo segundo de un titulado que junto a mi lugar el de su estado tenía ... volviéndose a mí, me dijo: ‘Bravo estáis, señor Antonio; mucho le ha aprovechado la plática de Flandes y de Italia, porque en verdad que está bizarro; y sepa el buen Antonio que yo le quiero mucho.’] (I.5, 163)

The patronizing tone, combined with the arrogant use of vos (‘Bravo estáis’) to exaggerate the class difference between the two, is a calculated move from within the habitus16 of early modern Spanish society, designed to put the ‘upstart’ Antonio in his place before he has any chance to make a bid for higher status based on his travels and his experience as a soldier. At the same time, the local noble is clearly baiting Antonio by hinting specifically at the basis of that potential bid for changed status. According to the rules for representing status in this community, the speech is not one Antonio should simply ignore, and he responds with

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an exaggeration of his own, addressing the caballero as ‘vuesa señoría’ though he is not entitled to that term of address. When he is asked by one of those present why he does this, his rival offers him a chance to back down, suggesting that perhaps he is using señoría in place of merced, ‘in the Italian manner.’ At this point a confrontation can no longer be avoided without loss of face: ‘I know very well the polite usages and ceremonies that go with good breeding, I am addressing Your Lordship, not in the Italian manner, but because I understand that anyone who addresses me with the common ‘you’ must be a Lordship, in the Spanish manner. As the son of my own deeds and noble parents, I deserve a ‘your Grace’ from any ‘Lordship’ and anyone who says otherwise – and here I put a hand on my sword – is far from being wellbred.’ Then, speaking and acting at the same time, I gave him two good slashes on the head, by which he was left so stunned that he didn’t know what had happened to him, nor did he do anything to satisfy the affront, which I maintained, standing there with my naked sword in my hand. (I.5, 34) [Bien sé – dije yo – los usos y las ceremonias de cualquiera buena crianza; y el llamar a vuesa señoría no es al modo de Italia, sino porque entiendo que el que me ha de llamar vos ha de ser señoría a modo de España. Y yo por ser hijo de mis obras y de padres hidalgos, merezco el merced de cualquier señoría, y quien otra cosa dijere – y esto echando mano a mi espada – está muy lejos de ser bien criado. Y diciendo y haciendo, le di dos cuchilladas en la cabeza muy bien dadas, con que le turbé de manera que no supo lo que le había acontecido, ni hizo cosa en su desagravio que fuese de provecho, y yo sustenté la ofensa, estándome quedo con mi espada desnuda en la mano.] (I.5, 165)

In order to fully grasp the meaning of this duel, we must take a closer look at the nature of street violence in sixteenth-century Castile. In recent years, research into the régimen local has shown the extent to which Spanish towns were the locus of factional struggles. Despite the Castilian tradition of dividing power equally between hidalgos and pecheros, the sixteenth century saw local governments become increasingly dominated by hidalgos through the sale of offices by the Crown, especially that of regidor perpetuo, which was not open to pecheros. In order to consolidate power, local oligarchies used a combination of symbolic public violence and manipulation of the legal system, aimed at discrediting the claim to

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hidalgo status of rival families, primarily through allegations of Jewish ancestry. Bullying, intimidation, and slander were the favourite approach; what decided the balance of power was who could get away with denying the hidalgo status of members of the other faction, backing it up with a combination of physical force and unending litigation. From this point of view, the much discussed issues of honour, limpieza de sangre, and female chastity were tools in the struggle for position within local elites.17 In Quintanar, the Ludeña clan dominated local politics throughout the sixteenth century. Juan Manuel de Ludeña was the patriarch of this family during the middle decades of the century, functioning as the de facto chief of what was in effect the local mafia. Dozens of pleitos in the Archivo Histórico Nacional attest to the Ludeñas’ ruthless use of public humiliation of their enemies to protect their privileged status. The technique of provocation clearly resembles that used against Antonio de Villaseñor by his unnamed assailant. The main difference lies in the specificity of the context. In the archives, such scenes always turn out to be part of a larger intrigue, a ploy engaged in by a clan or other social group in a bid to keep or acquire power. They are never just a spontaneous encounter between two individuals.18 When Antonio returns to Quintanar, he finds his family and his rival’s have made amends, and are now united by bonds of friendship, mutual protection, and, by the end of the episode, matrimony. Conflict resolution is tied to the profoundly Christian, forgiving nature of both the count himself and the collective identity of the town, as articulated by Antonio’s father. The internal strife that had characterized Quintanar is displaced, and a new boundary is drawn between a cohesive, harmonious community and the interests and authority of the Crown. The historical Quintanar de la Orden is also a place of frequent public confrontation and violence, through which, as in Persiles y Sigismunda, adjustments to an individual’s status within the community are dramatized. But in the archival record these encounters take the form of premeditated acts of political manoeuvring, through which a local oligarchy terrorizes rival claimants by planning and organizing scenes of violent confrontation and humiliation. Here it is difficult to see how a change of heart by the initial participants could bring about as complete a transformation as we see in Cervantes’ text. Once we compare the fictional representation with the archival one, the former begins to take on the appearance of a utopian fantasy.

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¿Hay, por ventura, señor, en este lugar hospital de peregrinos? Though the pilgrim band in Persiles y Sigismunda often arrive at nightfall and have to look for lodging, only in Quintanar do they specifically ask if there is any hospital de peregrinos. There were, in fact, three hospitales in Quintanar at different times during the sixteenth century, and although none of them is specifically described as being de peregrinos, this is hardly surprising since Quintanar was not on any major pilgrimage route. One of the three hospitales, founded by a local physician, Dr Pablo de la Mota, was the centre of an ongoing controversy. The earliest record of a hospital in Quintanar was ‘el hospital de la plaza,’ founded in 1511, old and rundown by the second half of the sixteenth century. It had three beds, and no property or income of its own. A local resident, Juan Morcillo, gave money to start another, also quite modest, when he died in 1573. Both of these are mentioned in the response to question 54 of the Relaciones topográficas, dated 1575. The town council voted to sell the older one on 27 January 1578 (AHPT, protocolos, V 13.342). Then, in February of 1591, a local physician, Pablo de la Mota, died, leaving a substantial portion of his estate to found a hospital in Quintanar, naming his own uncles, Dr Francisco de Mota and Pedro Sánchez, as caretakers (AHN, OO MM, Libro 9). From that moment forward this hospital is a source of scandal. Though the property is to be administered in perpetuity by members of the Mota family, the good doctor made provision in his will for the ayuntamiento and the Prior de Uclés to oversee their administration. Years go by and repairs are not made, accounts do not balance, and the discrepancy grows between the earnings of the property tied to the hospital and the pittance the caretakers actually spend keeping it up. Growing impatience can be felt in the comments in the actas del ayuntamiento concerning the negligence of those responsible. Pablo de la Mota left most of his personal fortune for the creation of a well endowed hospital for the poor and for travellers. Such generosity was rather unusual in Quintanar. More often those who could afford to would leave their money for capillas, whose greater visibility brought more prestige. Yet the end result of Dr Mota’s generous gesture was not an institution benefiting the poor, established on a sound financial footing, but an endless headache for the town council and a source of illicit income for Dr Mota’s living relatives. Could Cervantes have known about this local controversy? If we assume he did, how should we interpret his oblique reference to it, which

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he could not assume most readers, even in his own day, would recognize? When Antonio asks ‘Is there by any chance a hospital for pilgrims in this town?’ is this a leading question, una pregunta con intención? Cervantes leaves it unanswered: is there one or not? Clearly for anyone from Quintanar, for anyone who knew Pablo de la Mota, or perhaps for someone aware of the administrative issues facing towns of the Orden de Santiago generally, the question would be taken as a reference to this sore point. Certainly the neglect of their duties by Mota’s heirs and everyone else concerned inflect ironically Diego de Villaseñor’s answer, which says, in effect, ‘We are so devoted to Christian charity we have no need of a hospital de peregrinos ... Which is fortunate because, due to the greed and irresponsibility of a few of us, we do not really have one.’ ‘Según es cristiana la gente’ When Diego de Villaseñor answers that all the houses of the town would be open to pilgrims, ‘según es cristiana la gente,’ he means, of course, that they live according to the ethical imperatives of Christianity, especially where charity is concerned. The previous examples of factionalism and corruption cast doubt on the applicability to the inhabitants of Quintanar of such an assumption. But surely they at least belong to the Christian faith in the most literal sense? At the time Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda was published, Judaism and Islam had been prohibited for over a hundred years in this part of Spain. But as it turns out, a significant minority, numbering perhaps in the hundreds, was practising or attempting to practise either Judaism or Islam in secret. As Charles Amiel has shown, Quintanar was the centre of a ‘homegrown’ Manchegan variety of crypto-Judaism, kept alive from one generation to the next from the 1480s right up to the arrest and trial of one hundred members of the Mora and Villanueva families in the 1590s, most of them residents of Quintanar. His research in the Inquisitorial archives of Cuenca leaves no doubt that twelve branches of the Mora family proudly but secretly practised Judaism as they understood it, including the dietary laws, prayers, feast days, and ritual slaughter. Their use of Christian devotional literature to learn about the Hebrew scriptures is discussed in chapter 1 above. Inquisition records demonstrate a regular pattern of harassment of this converso community throughout the sixteenth century, with a number of trials for blasphemy and irreverence. There was an attitude of suspicion directed toward them; their behaviour was scrutinized in a way that of a cristiano viejo would not be. But only when Juan de Buenaventura, a servant who had lived with the

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Moras, went to the Inquisitors with more damning evidence, did they begin to put together the case that would end up destroying the converso community in Quintanar. Reaction in the town itself was mixed. Of course the arrests were one of the main topics of discussion in Quintanar during this time, and there were also those, such as a certain Juan Hernández, who defended at least some of the accused. He was reported to have declared publicly that Juan López de Armenia, arrested by the Inquisition, was ‘the best Christian’ in Quintanar. His listeners were scandalized by the implication concerning the religiosity of the townspeople: ‘They told him not to say such things, for if the said Juan López de Armenia were the best Christian there was in Quintanar, they would not have taken him away. What did that say about the rest of the people in Quintanar, if he were the best Christian and the Inquisition arrested him?’ (ADC, L 326, fol. 176v).19 What it means to be a good Christian, and how Christian the population is, are matters of public discussion in Quintanar in these years. Another response was that of Alonso Hernández Morterón, alcalde ordinario, who confronted Alonso de Pobeda, the notario de secrestos of the Inquisition, who had set up a stall in the main square, where he was selling some farm implements that had been confiscated from the goods belonging to the conversos. According to Hernández Morterón, the inquisitors had taken away all of the best possessions of the defendants: ‘What did they mean, he asked, coming around here to sell off junk and odds and ends, after taking away the best goods? And he was told it was none of his business, and that they did it this way because no one there would buy anything. Even when, to serve His Majesty they offered odds and ends like mats and tubs for the grape harvest, which is what was needed in this town since this year the harvest is so plentiful, no one would buy them except on credit and at a lower price than their real value’ (ADC, Inq. 332/4743, fol. 4r). The hotheaded alcalde had the nerve to arrest the notario, which led to the trial of Alonso Hernández Morterón for desacato al Santo Oficio (disrespect toward the Holy Office). The case reveals local residents’ envy of the conversos, their desire to get their hands on conversos’ property, and even a feeling of entitlement, as if they expected to be rewarded for all those years of vigilant spying. In the minds of some cristianos viejos, the essential quality that defined a Christian was that of not being a converso. If property was confiscated from the conversos because they were not Christian enough, they reasoned, it ought to be turned over to the real Christians of the town, the cristianos viejos.

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The Moriscos were another group in Quintanar whose Christian status was ambiguous to say the least. According to the list of their names prepared for the Inquisition in 1594 there were 219 Moriscos in Quintanar (ADC, Inq, 338/4836, fols. 249–54). During their four decades in the town, they were carefully watched and controlled by local clergy, the governor, the Inquisition, and the officials of the Consejo de Ordenes. Accusations against them by their neighbours made during the visit to Quintanar by the inquisitor Velarde de la Concha in 1590 confirm that their degree of Christianization varied greatly, as did the attitude towards them on the part of the local residents. Like the conversos, their presence made religious identity an issue. An incident that clearly impressed the town, to judge from the number of times it appears in their testimony, was the death seven or eight years earlier of a Morisco whose family, under the shroud, dressed his corpse according to their traditional practice (ADC, L 326, fol. 201v). Another recent event that had startled the town was the death of Miguel Bernal in 1586, who on his deathbed declared himself a Muslim, stubbornly refusing confession, even when taken to die in prison. His corpse was dumped on the outskirts of town for the children to throw rocks at it, and later burned along with a few tattered clothes, all he possessed in the world.20 Typical of the way the dividing line between religions was interpreted is a conversation between the Morisco Miguel Pérez and his neighbour, Juan Ortiz. As Ortiz reports it, he asked Pérez if he lived better in la Mancha than he had in Granada, to which Pérez answered that life was much harder for the Moriscos than it had been in Granada. Ortiz pointed out that they were being taught Christian doctrine better than before, to which Pérez still responded that they were better off in Granada. It seems that Ortiz became a bit exasperated at this point. The tone changes: ‘“Come over here, Pérez. Since coming here, you seem to be following the law of God and keeping his commandments like we Christians do.” And the said Miguel Pérez answered: “Look, señor, we do so no more than when we were in our own land, but we say so for appearance’s sake”’ (ADC, Inq. Libro 326, fol. 239). Whether we think of Miguel Pérez as consciously engaging in taquiyya (the practice, sanctioned by Islamic law for selfprotection, of pretending outwardly to accept another faith) or as just reacting spontaneously to his new circumstances, his explanation reveals a double consciousness at work within the Morisco minority. At least some of them paid lip service to Christianity, while continuing to think of themselves as Muslim, though this might only manifest itself in private or on one’s deathbed. Yet that Muslim identity was little more than a

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vestige, consisting mainly of the inner sense of refusal of the dominant religion, combined with a few fragmented memories of cultural practices whose meanings had been almost entirely forgotten. ‘Christianity’ in Quintanar, then, consisted mainly of a clustering of different forms of hypocrisy around a common nucleus of official beliefs to which many residents, including many cristianos viejos, paid only lip service. To be ‘Christian’ in this context is to be a corrupt hypocrite, like Dr Pablo de la Mota’s uncles, or perhaps a childishly ‘holier than thou’ beata, like Dr Arnau’s daughter, who gives her father’s Morisco farmworkers tortilla de huevo with pieces of tocino for lunch, then comes and hunts for the pork behind the trunk where they were sitting, to see if they are secret Muslims (ADC, L 326, fols. 223v–224r). In this social environment, it is hardly surprising that we find few examples like Pablo de la Mota, of unselfish Christian charity. And given the example the local cristianos viejos set for the conversos and Moriscos, it is hardly surprising that they engage in a practice of dissimulation. The irony of Diego de Villaseñor’s description of the townspeople opens up the question of the definition of what it meant to be Christian in early modern Spain. If the people of Quintanar – and of New Castile generally – do not welcome all into their midst, but rather expel, punish, and persecute those who do not share strict orthodoxy, what claim can they make to being called ‘Christians?’ If, for many in Quintanar, the primary value of being able to proclaim oneself cristiano viejo are the advantages this can bring one over those who can be accused of having Jewish ancestry, what has their concept of Christianity to do with welcoming pilgrims into their homes? In the light of these ironies, the utopian outcome of Antonio’s return home makes Quintanar begin to emerge as a most unlikely scene for a multiracial, multi-ethnic fantasy in which Christian, Moor, Jew, and Amerindian could somehow be reconciled, despite the expulsions, despite the Inquisition, Tridentine orthodoxy, and Spanish imperialism. Was this fantasy Cervantes’ dream of a different Spain, or had his indefatigable optimism deluded him to the extent that he himself believed it? How likely is it that Cervantes knew about the persecution of the conversos from Quintanar? How aware would he have been of the situation of the Morisco refugees? These matters were cause for public scandal in Quintanar, and local residents would have talked about them when they went to other towns for business. During this period Cervantes lived on and off in Esquivias and travelled frequently across New Castile, and could easily have gotten wind of the situation. We can only escape from the realm of speculation by acknowledging the two possibilities

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concerning that irony: either it is authorial (intended by Cervantes) or historical (an unintended product of the historical circumstances in which he wrote). Today, reading Persiles y Sigismunda (and indeed all of Cervantes’ texts) means taking into account both of these possibilities. Authorial Irony versus Historical Irony When the fictional image of the Quintanar to which Antonio de Villaseñor returns has been confronted with the image that emerges from the archives, the resulting contradiction between the idyllic depiction of local harmony and the harsh reality of seventeenth-century la Mancha is bitterly ironic. After over fifteen years of wandering, of longing for home, Antonio comes back to Spain, much as Cervantes himself might have, or any number of young men of his generation, hoping to find it as he had left it, if not changed for the better. In Persiles y Sigismunda Cervantes has incorporated a fantasy in which this dream comes true. Antonio’s trials and patience in suffering are poetically linked to a change for the better in his town through the analogy with pilgrimage. But Quintanar at the end of the reign of Philip II was the locus of intensified strife. The deepening local crisis, which reflects the larger crisis into which much of Spain, and especially New Castile, had been plunged, appears to be the ironic subtext of Antonio and his father’s dialogue on his arrival. Was this irony part of Cervantes’ intention when he created this scene, or is it only a fortuitous consequence of the juxtaposition of his text with certain events in local history, events of which he might not have had any knowledge? Ultimately this question is unanswerable, since it depends on pure surmise concerning what Cervantes did and did not know about local affairs in Quintanar. What if we assume no such knowledge on his part? In some ways, the points of contact between Cervantes’ depiction of Quintanar and the historical place that shares that proper name become all the more interesting if we think of them as unintended coincidences. What this would suggest is that without knowing it or meaning to do so, Cervantes contributed to the creation of a web of ironies, with Quintanar as the nucleus. References to everyday occurrences are bound to turn up something that will resonate with the historical records, once we sift through them. That resonance is bound to produce certain ‘irony effects’ when we do so, given the nature of fictional representation and the profound social tensions at work in early modern Spain. In this reading, as soon as Cervantes begins to make reference to aspects of everyday life,

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he lays his fiction open to being compared with the daily reality of the places to which he refers. Parallels and overlaps whose specific content he could not have known will emerge as a result. This kind of historical irony surfaces when a more or less naively optimistic image is brought into contact with a more or less cynically degraded social reality – something like the poetics of Don Quixote, in fact. How is this irony related to the artistic intention of the author? We might argue that it touches it only at the infinitely small point of the proper names – Quintanar, Villaseñor – that Cervantes included in his text, perhaps only to give it a kind of ‘authentic flavour.’ But once that flavour is on our tongue, how can he, how can we, limit the ways in which it alters the taste of the whole? Whatever Cervantes may have consciously ‘meant’ by these references, he did intend to anchor his text in the stream of extraliterary reality, and in so doing, he made it a potential carrier for the kind of connections I am here attempting to establish. If bringing the literary representation into contact with the archival record generates an ironic effect we can never definitively attribute to the author, bringing the historical ‘facts’ into contact with their literary counterpart re-inflects their meaning as well. The various strands of local history I have brought together here almost never seem to touch. The historical agents whose actions and words are preserved in the archives evidently lived as if they did not share the same social world as the groups or individuals they excluded from their conception of legitimacy. In this sense, the image of a unified community in Cervantes’ text restores their unrecognized responsibility toward those whom they had cast off. It is a bridge between different aspects of local history that, viewed only in the context their actual participants constructed for them, seem to have had nothing to do with each other. Yet their contrast with Cervantes’ idealized portrait of the town provides a frame for interpreting them together. It is as if history and literature needed one another, in order to be able to give meaning, even if only a negative one, to the lives of past centuries – those of forgotten peasants as well as of great canonical authors. Conclusion: The Reader as Pilgrim As the preceding analyses have shown, Cervantes’ fictional representations contextualize pilgrimage in relation to the social tensions of his time. The restoration of this cultural practice to its medieval roots despite the Counter-Reformation’s appropriation of popular devotion is

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the subtext for the episode of Feliciana de la Voz. The depiction of Quintanar de la Orden as the utopian goal of Antonio de Villaseñor’s personal odyssey uses this restored understanding of the efficacy of pilgrimage as a standard against which to measure the religiosity of rural Castile. Once we have examined concrete examples of how religious identity in Quintanar de la Orden was being shaped and exploited politically, the contrast with its image as the perfect destination for a lifetransforming pilgrimage could not be greater. With these examples, Cervantes shows that the gesture of appropriating localized practices by imposing doctrinally pure manifestations is never innocent. In the end it is a question, once again, of coloniality of power. Definite parallels can be drawn between the way that religious practices which are part of town life are regulated and directed, and the way the pilgrimage theme in literature came to be deployed through the peregrinatio vitae model. In both cases, what is at stake is the elimination of any space for expressing another cultural identity than rigid orthodoxy. As we saw in chapter 2 above, Cervantes was engaged at this point in his career in a struggle to break the church’s monopoly over the literary field. His treatment of the pilgrimage theme in Persiles y Sigismunda can be seen, in this context, as part of that effort. He draws on local culture and local history to support his own project of opposing the deepening control of culture emanating from the administrative centres of Castile. It is appropriate then, in concluding this chapter, to briefly return to the contrast with which it began, between Persiles y Sigismunda and the allegorical ‘pilgrimage of life’ genre. Central to pilgrimage is the journey itself in its spatio-temporal concreteness. Its meaning for the pilgrim is inalienably tied to the experience of journeying: to its enticements, vulnerabilities, hardships, dangers, and novelty. Its meaning is also inseparable from the other people who have made the journey before, are making it now, or will make it in the future. Pilgrimage is inherently local, bound to a specific place and to a community for whom that place has significance. It is a semi-institutional practice, for there remains always an irreducible particularity to each local shrine and its cult, which resists full incorporation into the body of doctrines and rituals sanctioned by religious authorities. The allegorization of pilgrimage abstracts away from these concrete, existential categories, watering down the experiential element. A form of pilgrimage is deployed in which the vital connection between movement in space and time and the spiritual value of the practice is loosened, the journey becoming an arbitrary and secondary vehicle, a mere metaphor. The

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intrinsically social nature of pilgrimage is eliminated, and the isolated pilgrim whose only motive is his or her own spiritual progress makes its appearance. Finally, the localized character of the practice is greatly reduced, first by encouraging devotion to universal, centralized sites, and ultimately by asserting the superiority of a purely conceptual journey, undertaken only in the mind. In the extreme form of allegorization, the very need to make a journey at all disappears, for the journey is now a mere metaphor. The intrinsically extra-institutional elements constituted by the unforeseeable encounter, the sudden danger, and the chance meeting, all of which are important in Persiles y Sigismunda, are eliminated. Other people are either extensions of the protagonist – symbols of some aspect or other of the psyche – or threatening antagonists who would anchor the self more firmly in this world, obstructing the escape to a purely spiritual beyond. No longer is the otherness of the holy associated with the presence of other people, with whom the pilgrim strives to identify; rather, these two forms of alterity are radically separated, and the presence of other human beings serves only as an indication that the pilgrim is still in the profane sphere. Similarly, life-threatening dangers that once highlighted the mutual dependence of pilgrims on one another now only suggest the need for cautious interpretation, scepticism, and doubt.21 What was an interpersonal issue of cultivating bonds with one’s fellow creatures has become a hermeneutic one: how to avoid the pitfalls of undesirable attachments. The local landscape and its historical meaning are replaced by a landscape whose features are neither the result of natural processes nor gradual accumulation over time, but are directly suggested by the doctrines they are meant to convey. In general, the organic unity which has its center of gravity in the pilgrim’s own physical body disappears; in its place there is an abstract, artificial unity generated by the conceptual relations of the doctrine to be illustrated, dependent not on the intelligibility or verisimilitude of a character’s actions or thoughts, but on the potential for symbolizing each of the separate elements of the doctrine by means of an appropriate image, whether or not it can be integrated into a coherent plot, with independent images used for the other elements. In rejecting allegorical pilgrimage and restoring to pilgrimage its social and spatio-temporal specificity, Cervantes cannot, of course, take the reader on an actual journey. Instead, he must create analogies to the experience of going on a pilgrimage. The most original and important of these analogies is the production of a series of world-images, which may be likened to the coherent social and cultural systems left behind by

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religious travellers, each of which is overcome in a violent rupture of the mimesis, comparable in turn to the sublime encounter with the sacred as wholly other. These worlds and world ruptures are examined in the next chapter. What should already be clear at this point is that Cervantes, in turning back to authentic pilgrimage from allegory, stops short at a point somewhere in between. The pilgrimage of his reader is neither purely experiential nor theological, but partakes simultaneously of features of both. Freed of the obligation to believe an authoritative discourse concerning things which cannot be seen or touched (in this text they are fictions, not mysteries of faith), the reader is nonetheless expected to engage imaginary rather than real objects, and to dedicate considerable time and energy to understanding them, though all the while they remain suspended, neither believed nor negated. In other words, the pilgrimage here is fictional, and self-consciously so. As I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter, Cervantes drew on the residual practice of pilgrimage in the creation of an emergent oppositional practice: the reading of fiction.22

4 Turning Spain Inside Out

It is not surrounded, but rather traversed by its limit, marked in its interior by the multiple furrow of its margin. Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’

In this chapter I interpret Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda as a transnational romance, whose decentring of the nation effectively ‘turns Spain inside out.’ Its meandering plot joins people and places in a complex geographical network, connecting much of the European continent and some of what lies beyond in a loose unity. Persiles y Sigismunda is transnational – not simply international or cosmopolitan – in that it situates Spain in the broader context of early modern Europe, demonstrating the permeability of the borders defining the territory of the Hapsburg monarchy, as well as the imagined community to which all ‘Spaniards’ belong. The primary focus of this chapter, then, will indeed be the problematic representation of Spain in Persiles y Sigismunda, for it is the proto-nationalist vision of a unified but isolated Spain that Cervantes strove to work through (trans-) in his final work. The crucial hermeneutic move for this reading is the synthesis of the pilgrimage theme (see chapter 3 above) and the heterogeneous structure of fictional realms (see below). When these two planes of the work are simultaneously brought into focus, the result is a pilgrimage through a kaleidoscope of changing models of the social world, in which the reader’s own society is incorporated side by side with others. The reader passes through Spain in a trajectory that provides a cross section of Spanish society. This has often been said of Don Quixote, but it is true in a much more literal sense here, since the characters’ path cuts across the entire Iberian Peninsula, from Lisbon to Perpignan. The result is a

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fleeting impression of Spain as one possibility among many, destabilizing the privileging of Counter-Reformation Iberia as the nation called upon to realize God’s will.1 This kaleidoscopic effect is achieved through a multi-generic composition that brings a series of fictional worlds together into one work. Once we understand the extraordinary mimetic structure of Persiles y Sigismunda, we can appreciate the boldness of this experimental text, worthy of the author of Don Quixote. To do so, we must move beyond the level of its explicit ideological content and learn to perceive the fault lines separating the large tectonic plates – I call them ‘fictional realms’ – across which its episodic plot moves. Attention to the micro-dynamics of the transitions from one realm to another is also important for grasping the full implications of the interrogation of national identity here, since it is in this process of making, transforming, and destroying fictional worlds that Cervantes suggests the malleability of the socially constructed world he shares with his readers. Before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the Spain of Persiles y Sigismunda, then, I will offer a general description of the fictional worlds the work incorporates, and an analysis of how some of the passages from one to another are managed. Mapping the Fictional Realms of Persiles y Sigismunda Although the charge seems incredible for an author of his stature, Cervantes’ final work has more often than not been condemned as a failure, a confused hodgepodge of disparate styles and elements that do not hang together, principally imitative and conventional, with whatever glimmerings of genius still show through nearly unrecognizable, buried as they are under mountains of insipid material which can only strike the modern reader as ‘of its time’ in the worst possible sense. Some have simply assumed it was carelessly written, perhaps over a long period, pointing to the presence of numerous trivial errors in consistency as evidence of their view.2 I believe such evaluations to be based on a gross misunderstanding of the author’s aims in the work and the techniques he used to achieve them. Though the esteem in which Persiles y Sigismunda is held today has changed substantially, this is as much due to its author’s canonical status and the general decline of evaluative criticism as to any correction of the misunderstandings referred to above. Much excellent work has been done on this text, but the structure of its overall composition has still not been adequately articulated. Although Cervantes claims to have written Persiles y Sigismunda to ‘compete with Heliodorus,’ the work derives little more than its external

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structure from Greek romance: an episodic plot based on the adventures and misadventures of a pair of young lovers far from home. The fictional world of a Greek romance is a homogeneous one, of a single tone and obeying a single set of laws, despite variations in content introduced by spatial distribution, and despite ups and downs in the situation of the hero and heroine and a shallow diversity of ‘dangers.’3 Persiles y Sigismunda unfolds in a heterogeneous world containing a series of distinct fictional ‘realms’ which sometimes butt up against one another in outright contradiction, and sometimes interpenetrate. I have chosen the term ‘fictional realms’ to emphasize the role of social and political structures in their definition.4 These various realms constitute images of different types of human community, with particular attention paid to the regulation of desire, the control of deviant behaviour, and the administration of justice. The reader’s journey thus presents a series of examples of social organization, the conflicts that result, and how those conflicts are resolved. These communities are seen at moments of flux and transformation, sometimes cataclysmic, at other times part of what might be termed an evolutionary process. They serve both to call into question the inevitability of the reader’s own social world, and to suggest how that world, once its malleability has been grasped, could be changed. The themes of cultural identity, intercultural dialogue, and social change can thus be traced through the metaphorical application of the pilgrimage theme to the reader’s movement through the various fictional communities presented. The concept of the ‘world’ of a work of fiction provides a useful hermeneutic tool for grasping the totality underlying the particular events and entities that appear in a narrative. While this notion has long been used in a pre-theoretical way, in recent years a full-fledged theory of fictional worlds has emerged, in which the intuitive sense of what is meant by a work’s world has given way to attempts to formulate definite rules for extrapolating the world from the work. One approach that has gained currency is based on the possible worlds of modal logic, and considers the fictional world to be as close as possible to the real world, except where something in the text indicates otherwise. Marie-Laure Ryan refers to this as the ‘principle of minimal departure.’5 In Ways of Worldmaking, Nelson Goodman proposed the opposite approach, arguing that the derivation of the world from a sample proceeds according to ad hoc principles, depending on the specific nature of the representation and the world it is meant to suggest. According to Goodman’s theory of samples, the features that are relevant will vary. He

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theorizes that art tends to maximize the features of the sample relevant to understanding the world-model represented, such that one can keep coming back to the sample in order to enrich one’s understanding of the work’s world. As Thomas Pavel argues in Fictional Worlds, a typology of fictional worlds might form a continuum, from those in which each individual statement counts relatively little towards the determination of the world to those in which each event narrated in the sample supplies new and fundamental laws with respect to the world depicted (101–5). In the former type, the real world provides much of the basis for our understanding. Such worlds do indeed obey the principle of minimal departure. At the other end of the continuum, however, are worlds where every detail weighs heavily in our sense of what the world is like, which must be seen in relation to a principle of ‘maximal’ departure (93). In these cases, stylization takes the represented world as far away from the real world as possible, in a certain direction. As a rule, Cervantine worlds exhibit such maximal departure in obedience to a specific stylistic principle. Most of his works contain several such ontologically distinct worlds, connected by a plot that functions to move characters from one to another. In general, these distinct regions or realms correspond to established literary genres such as pastoral, chivalric, or picaresque. Yet it is also frequent for the worlds depicted to include an element we would not usually expect to find, something that undercuts patterns familiar from conventional genres. This ironic distancing opens the possibility of a refracted, heterogeneous world, whose various ‘compartments’ the reader is able to enter and leave again at will. Such heterogeneity teaches readers to view the truth claims of representations sceptically – including representations of the nation and its historical destiny. Persiles y Sigismunda marks the culmination of Cervantes’ heterogeneous style. Each section of the work, sometimes each episode, seems to be imagined from within another fictional stylization of the world, from which everything else is excluded; and yet this changes again for the depiction of the next scene. Steven Hutchinson has called this style ‘improvisatory writing’ (215–16). Never did Cervantes’ pen sketch whole worlds with such deft, swift lines, only to strike them out again violently, or rearrange them ingeniously, standing them on their heads, turning them inside out. Further, he nowhere else dares so freely to transport his characters from one world to the next, making at least a certain privileged few pass through the transparent boundaries separating one from another. At the center of this whirlwind of discrete realms, Cervantes has placed a representation of his readers’ own world, early modern Iberia.

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As I will show in this chapter, Cervantes enacts a deterritorialization of the emergent nation state by transporting characters from Spain to the elevated realms of romance and bringing romance characters into Spain. What is supposedly excluded by its borders can in fact be found inside them. The remainder of this section will give a rapid survey of the fictional realms of Persiles y Sigismunda, as part of the groundwork for the more detailed analyses of the Spanish episodes to follow. The most obvious division within the text is between the Northern and Southern halves. The differences can be related to three factors: sea travel versus land travel; the exotic lands of the North Sea versus the more familiar territory of the Mediterranean; generic conventions and level of mimesis. Sea travel is more dangerous and unpredictable, lonelier, more isolated from population centres. The sea travellers of the first half experience only transitory drifting, whereas those in the second half follow a linear trajectory overland. A road passing from city to town and eventually to another city establishes a rhythm according to which everyday social life alternates with a liminal existence. It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing the last half, especially Book Three, as ‘realist’ in opposition to the previous two ‘fantastic’ books. Book Three obviously involves more frames of reference borrowed from the reader’s world, yet here too the information put in play is filtered through generic frames such as the picaresque, entremés, and pastoral. Thus the Spanish episodes of Persiles y Sigismunda are no less stylized than the Northern ones, but the stylization moves in another direction.6 Several factors complicate this schema of the two halves. A number of characters from the first half appear in the second, most importantly the protagonists and the characters who accompany them on their journey (Antonio de Villaseñor and his family). The French adventures (Book Three, chapters 13–19) represent a return to the romance models and high mimetic style of the first books, forming another bridge between the two halves. Another factor complicating a simple bipartite division of the work is the presence of several distinct fictional realms within each half. In the North, these are the Ocean of Longing on which the characters drift for most of Book One, and the Ocean of Adventure depicted in Periandro’s Tale; in the South, Spain, France, and Italy constitute separate realms. In addition to these, there are a series of pastoral oases scattered through the work, in both Northern and Southern halves (e.g., the Fishermen’s Isle, the cowherds’ camp), and a series of realms of intrigue (Policarpo’s palace, Cáceres, the Morisco town, and, in one of its aspects, Rome). These repeating series help to give

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coherence to the work as a whole, further diminishing the importance of the North-South divide. A final unifying factor is the cycle of change that drives the protagonists forward from realm to realm. In this cycle, the mimetic structure of the work itself goes through a convulsive expansion in which the various fictional realms collapse or are destroyed when their limitations are reached. The realms of intrigue and pastoral oases which appear at intervals form part of this cycle: the former belong to the narrow mimetic field which the characters burst apart, and the latter stand for the freer, fuller existence they enjoy as a result. Their alternation reaches its greatest acceleration precisely during the Spanish episodes, and Spain is pulled in contradictory directions as a consequence. The overall movement is an ever widening spiral integrating more and more of the possibilities of the various mimetic styles into a single frame. Its culmination is in Rome, which is thus decidedly not the most elevated realm of Persiles y Sigismunda, but the richest and most inclusive. Established genres play an important role in this composition. The major genres of romance all appear in somewhat altered guises by the end of the second book: the Ocean of Longing in Book One derives from sentimental romance; the Fishermen’s Isle is a transposition of the pastoral to a piscatory sphere; Periandro’s Tale is a chivalric romance, transposed to a maritime setting; Renato and Eusebia belong to a Christianization of the pastoral through an association of the ascetic values of hagiography with the beatus ille motif. This collage of generic worlds is achieved by the semantic re-contextualization of each genre to the sea. The oceanic desire of sentimental romance can thus be rendered in a parallel narrative frame to the linear action of the maritime chivalric in Periandro’s Tale, when he and the crew of his ship become ‘corsarios justicieros’ (pirates for justice). In the second half of Persiles y Sigismunda, there is a fleshing out of the material and social context. The fictional realms depicted have more points of contact with the extra-literary world, producing a form of mimesis whose level of departure from the reader’s own is less ‘maximal’ than in Books One and Two. Correspondingly, picaresque elements begin to be interwoven in the work at this stage. Book Three in particular provides readers with a world that mirrors the everyday world of early modern Spain, but in such a way that it floats atop a sea of erotic and aggressive impulses that could unravel the social fabric at any moment, creating in the reader an awareness of the imminent dissolution of the apparently solid and stable social order. This is achieved primarily through

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the dissolution and transformation of realms through which the reader passes on the way to the Spanish episodes. Before focusing our attention on those chapters, therefore, we should take a look at a few of the major transitions from realm to realm. Transitions: Toward a Poetics of Social Restructuring The orchestration of this complex play of mimetic styles involves an array of techniques for establishing transitions and for keeping conflicting strands from mixing within a given system. Transitions are sometimes abrupt, even catastrophic, and sometimes gradual. They may involve only the abandoning of a realm, but they may also entail its destruction or its dissolution into another that is thereby broadened to include it. Among the most violent transitions are the cataclysms in which the Barbaric Isle, Policarpo’s Palace, and the inn where Ruperta is staying are destroyed by fire. From these convulsions the plot gains the momentum needed to burst out of particularly restrictive realms. The catastrophe propels the survivors forward into a new phase of the narrative. The cycle of structuring and un-structuring enacted in the creation and destruction of these realms is analogous to the pilgrimage process described in chapter 3 above. The key structuring elements of jealousy, vengeance, and intrigue build up a tension which is released through destructive, purging fires, after which comes a pastoral oasis, emblematic of liminal anti-structure.7 Like the rites of passage, on which Turner showed pilgrimage is patterned, the transitions in Persiles y Sigismunda include moments of instability in which existing categories are suspended or inverted. They are often initiated by a transgression, a movement across the limit that separates the socially acceptable from the illicit. Most of the characters in this work, in fact, have transgressed a social norm of their communities, very often relating to gender roles and sexual behavior. Hutchinson’s term for their condition is ‘errancy,’ which has the advantage of implying an element of ‘error,’ that is, violation of a rule or taboo (91–117). The transgressors in Persiles y Sigismunda often find themselves, in their errancy, forced to cross the political borders separating European territories: Ireland, England, Portugal, Castile, Aragon, France, Milan, Lucca, Rome, and so on. The category they most frequently put in question is gender. Persiles y Sigismunda employs various transgendering strategies, including crossdressing (the protagonists, Tozuelo, and Ambrosia Agustina), the rejection of traditional female roles (Transila, Sulpicia, Feliciana, Isabela

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Castrucha), and the ‘feminization’ of male characters (Periandro, Antonio el mozo, Rosanio, Croriano, Andrea Marulo). The most extraordinary moment of transgendering comes in the opening chapters, where Periandro appears dressed as a woman and Auristela as a man, each convincingly performing the conventional romance traits defining the opposite sex – beauty and courage, respectively.8 The transnational dimension of Persiles y Sigismunda, one could say, is the result of an alignment of these different trans-actions: transitions from one realm to the next provoked by a transgression and leading to a transformation of the social world, timed to coincide with a literal or figurative border crossing. The following analysis begins with an account of the destruction of the Barbaric Isle, the first and in a certain sense the prototypical transition in Persiles y Sigismunda, which provides key insights into the poetics of social change in the work. From there, I move to a description of the complex juggling act by means of which Cervantes introduces characters from the realms of romance into a depiction of his readers’ own social space. This transition acts as the structural hinge by means of which Cervantes folds fantasy onto everyday life in such a way as to undermine the transparency and naturalness of the existing social order. In certain transitions, a figuratively ‘supernatural’ causality seems to intervene in favour of dramatic change, creating a literary counterweight to the Baroque harnessing of the supernatural in defence of sociopolitical stasis. I end this section with a consideration of the figural representation of the literary space constituted by these moments, the ‘pastoral oasis.’ The Destruction of the Barbaric Isle The Barbaric Isle is a fictional realm set up only to be knocked down, established to give the refugees who escape its destruction a place from which to flee. It is the exact opposite of a habitable world: a purely abstract, rigidly codified mould which requires that human beings be forced into categories far too narrow to contain them. No stable sociopolitical system exists, no set of laws or customs beyond those relating to the prophecy. No narrative other than the myth of epic conquest is possible within this space, which explodes on contact with individualized human emotion. After that holocaust, the survivors drift on an aimless sea of longing in which only particularized desire exists, and organized cooperation is unattainable. The entire dialectical sweep of Persiles y Sigismunda is contained within these extremes: the inflexible

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tyranny of a narrowly defined group vs. the chaotic, uncontrolled drifting of fathomless desire. All other human communities represented in the work strive to maintain a delicate balance between these poles. When they fail, their destruction or dramatic transformation follows. The destruction of the Barbaric Isle thus provides a blueprint for the process of social restructuring Persiles y Sigismunda projects. The founding prophecy states that the barbarian male who is able to avoid wincing when eating the powdered heart of a foreign, male sacrificial victim, must mate with the most beautiful woman the barbarians can buy or steal, and that the offspring of this union will be their king and lead them to world conquest. This prophecy recognizes two axes of distinction: male/female and native/foreign. Foreign males are reduced to the status of sacrificial victims, while native males are measured on a scale of valour. The relative value of foreign females is also determined by a single factor, their beauty. Nothing is said of native females. It is as though none existed. Apart from the basic distinguishing features of beauty, bravery, and foreignness, the differentiation of individuals in the world of the Barbaric Isle is kept to a minimum. Individuals are reduced to the traits required to establish their identity as needed for the prophecy; the semantics of character and personality go no further. Similarly, communication is very difficult, especially between men. Generally, women serve as interpreters. Some acts of communication and recognition go smoothly, but these are always the ones required by the prophecy, the only ‘social structure’ uniting this fragile group. The absolute domination of this proto-social space by the law established by the prophecy silences and obscures all other human possibilities. The barbarians form a community only insofar as they are each reduced to nothing more than what is dictated by the prophecy. As the rapid disintegration of the Barbaric Isle shows, this founding of the social by stipulation can be suddenly and unexpectedly superseded by immediate human contact. Through the dark, foggy realm generated by the dehumanizing prophecy, a ray of light may shine, an arrow may pass. A shaft of light or the shaft of an arrow: two directions in which the barbaric realm may be rent, either by spontaneous human sympathy or by unsanctioned rivalry. In either case, the emotion is presented as having already existed, hidden, before its sudden revelation brought such disastrous consequences. The Barbaric Isle turns out to be, then, a space in which a set of arbitrarily imposed rules are used to restrict desire by rendering all but a limited set of desires inexpressible. It exists solely

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as the dual structure of the manifest primitive law ordained by the prophecy and the censured desire which can only be said to have existed, hidden, after the Barbaric Isle itself has disappeared. As soon as affect incompatible with the law manifests itself, we pass out of the Barbaric Isle properly speaking. There are two occasions during the episode in which the action moves outside the barbarian’s realm: the wreck of the raft in chapter 1, and the outbreak of violence in chapter 4. Both exemplify the process whereby the limits on which the realm is based are overcome from within by an emotion pushing its way towards representation. In the first of these scenes, the as yet unnamed Periandro, intended as a sacrificial victim, is brought out of the mazmorra. Amid his golden curls, the beauty of his face shines forth, once his would-be executioners wipe the dust from it. Though they give no sign, the narrator tells us that his beauty ‘softened the hearts of those who were to be his executioners’ (I.1, 17) (enterneció los pechos de aquellos que para ser sus verdugos le llevaban [I.1, 128]). As they are crossing from the island where the foreigners are imprisoned to the Barbaric Isle itself, the archer who is guarding him recognizes and responds to Periandro’s fear: Seeing this, ... the barbarous archer, in whose hard heart the youth’s beauty had found pity, chose not to prolong his agony by keeping the arrow aimed at his chest; thus he threw the bow aside and, approaching him, made it known by signs as best he could that he did not wish to kill him. (I.1, 18) [Viendo lo cual, el bárbaro flechero ... hallando la belleza del mozo piedad en la dureza de su corazón, no quiso darle dilatada muerte, teniéndole siempre encarada la flecha al pecho, y así, arrojó de sí el arco, y llegándose a él, por señas, como mejor pudo, le dio a entender que no quería matarle.] (I.1, 130–1)

The archer sympathizes with Periandro and tries to communicate this to him. This is immediately followed by their shipwreck (18) (En esto estaban, cuando ... se levantó una borrasca ... [131]). The rising impulse of sympathy towards Periandro cannot be expressed from within the barbaric world; that world dissipates, the barbarians in the raft are all drowned, and Periandro is picked up by Arnaldo’s ship. Thus he is transferred into a world in which compassion can be translated into action. The other moment of crisis in the Barbaric Isle leads to its destruction. When Arnaldo brings Periandro, dressed as a woman for sale to the

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barbarians, he covers his face with a veil, ‘to strike suddenly, like lightning, with the light of his eyes in those of the barbarians’ (I.3, 26) (por dar de improviso, como rayo, con la luz de sus ojos en los de aquellos bárbaros [I.3, 148]). Bradamiro (one of only two barbarians to receive the individualizing dignity of a proper name), ‘from the moment he saw Periandro, believing, as everyone did, that he was a woman, hatched in his mind a plan to choose her for himself, without waiting for the laws of the prophecy to be tested and carried out’ (I.4, 27) (desde el punto que vio a Periandro, creyendo ser mujer, como todos lo creyeron, hizo disinio en su pensamiento de escogerla para sí, sin esperar a que las leyes del vaticinio se probasen o cumpliesen [I.4, 150]). The desire and the desperate plan which seeing Periandro dressed as a woman inspire in Bradamiro do not, in themselves, suffice to destroy the Barbaric Isle. Desires that are incompatible with the fulfilment of the prophecy may exist within this realm, as long as they remain hidden. The attempt to manifest those desires is what leads us beyond the Barbaric Isle. When Bradamiro announces, in a declaration phrased so as to emphasize that it is an assertion of individuated desire, ‘This maiden is mine, because I love her’ (I.4, 29, emphasis added) (Esta doncella es mía, porque yo la quiero [I.4, 155]), the fighting abruptly begins, revealing the existence of numerous suppressed desires which had coexisted within the realm for a long time, invisible, awaiting this breach, this opportunity to manifest themselves: Incited to revenge and fury, they all immediately took up arms and began to send death on their arrows in every direction. All the arrows having been spent, they still attacked each other ... son showing no respect for father, or brother for brother. On the contrary, as if they had long been made mortal enemies by many outrages received, they clawed each other with their fingernails and wounded each other with daggers, without there being anyone to put them at peace. (I.4, 30; emphasis added) [En un instante, incitados a la venganza y cólera, comenzaron a enviar muertes en las flechas de unas partes a otras. Acabadas las flechas ... arremetieron los unos a los otros, sin respetar el hijo al padre, ni el hermano al hermano: antes, como si de muchos tiempos atrás fueran enemigos mortales por muchas injurias recebidas, con las uñas se despedazaban y con los puñales se herían sin haber quien los pusiese en paz.] (I.4, 156; emphasis added)

At the high point of this intense explosion of aggression, a group of barbarians set the island on fire. We pass quickly, then, from the rays

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emanating from the suns of Periandro’s eyes to the arrows shot from barbarian to barbarian and finally to the flames which will utterly consume the island. Through the effect they exercise on the mind of one of the most daring of the barbarians, Periandro’s eyes shoot forth arrows of fire which reduce the barbarian’s world to ashes. Periandro is here an intruding force, whose power over the barbarians borders on the supernatural. But the flame that shoots from his eyes is only the spark that starts the conflagration. Once the violence is set in motion, it gains in intensity with astounding speed, and the barbarians begin to kill one another ‘as if they had long been mortal enemies’ (como si de muchos tiempos atrás fueron enemigos mortales). The reference to submerged tensions indicates that the barbaric realm is constituted both by the prophetic law and by what it represses. These tensions build up within the group and exert a pressure like that of water behind a dam; the appearance of the slightest crack bursts the dam, releasing all the pressure at once. The event that finally produces the rupture demonstrates the inadequacy of the barbarians’ categories for representing themselves and their world to one another. Where men are defined exclusively by their degree of bravery and women by their beauty, a foreign man and woman transgress those boundaries not merely by cross-dressing, but by displaying the defining trait of the opposite sex in the highest degree: Periandro, dressed as a woman, is a most beautiful one, and Auristela, disguised as a man, faces death with valiant stoicism: ‘not saying a word, like a gentle lamb he waited for the blow that was to take his life’ (I.4, 28) (sin hablar palabra, como un manso cordero, esperaba el golpe que le había de quitar la vida [I.4, 152]). The gender categories that are here undermined were in fact the basis of the fragile cohesion of the barbarian group, and it is thereby shattered. If we start to describe the barbarian realm as consisting of the Barbaric Isle, and assume that what is beyond that space is the outside, and what is within it the inside, we immediately find ourselves faced with two symmetrical exceptions. The inside is placed outside the Barbaric Isle in the form of the island of the mazmorra, and the outside penetrates into the interior of the isle in the form of Antonio’s Cave. The strait that cuts across the barbarian world, dividing the two islands, makes possible the intervention of the storm and Arnaldo’s ship. The cave, the only sheltering space described on the island, serves as a refuge in which an alternative to this primitive anti-society can develop in secret. The ship and cave are the spaces into which the action moves when it is pushed beyond the

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limits of ‘barbarity.’ These spaces are an outside to the Barbaric Isle which is already inside it, for they come into being through the revelation of human feelings and sympathies which exist in the barbaric world only while they remain hidden. What was ‘in’ the barbaric world but could not be contained by it forms the nucleus of these adjoining spaces. In its dependence on an outside for the fulfilment of its claims to universal authority, it is always already traversed by its boundaries, and cannot exclude from itself that which it would overcome. Indeed, it is this very permeability of the limits of representation that makes it possible to create transitions from one fictional realm of Persiles y Sigismunda to the next. In addition to its spatial configuration, the Barbaric Isle is also distinguished by its temporal dimension. When Antonio and his family, Transila, Rutilio, and the prisoners from the mazmorra leave it, the Barbaric Isle has been reduced to ashes. No one is left there, and the fictional realm built up around the bizarre prophecy has ceased to exist. Yet in chapter 8 of Book Four, Arnaldo, arriving in Rome, visits the pilgrims and explains that the Barbaric Isle has risen anew, phoenix-like, from its own ashes: ‘He said the Barbarous Isle was being resettled, the inhabitants carrying on their belief in its false prophecy’ (IV.8, 331) (dijo como se tornaba a poblar la isla Bárbara, confirmándose sus moradores en la creencia de su falsa profecía [IV.8, 679]). Its existence, then, is intermittent. It embodies a cycle of regeneration followed by destruction; from nothing a group crystallizes around the prophecy, grows in numbers and strength, accumulates greater and greater invisible deviant impulses, and finally, when the presence of alterity within it crosses a certain threshold, it bursts apart. All of the subsequent realms that appear in the work, however stylized and conventional they may be, will be more flexible and admit of a greater range of actions, yet they all eventually reach a similar crisis, a point at which events exceed the bounds of representation on which they are founded. This necessarily gives rise to either the dissolution of the realm or its expansion. This episode could be said, then, to provide a particularly striking example, one almost could say a parable, of the process that the entire plot of Persiles y Sigismunda embodies repeatedly, the birth and destruction of fictional realms within the work.9 Viewed as a model of the nation, the Barbaric Isle is an extreme example, a group so tightly integrated around its own self-representation that it is rendered incapable of incorporating new members. Paradoxically, however, in their pursuit of world domination these barbarians

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are convinced that their form of social organization can be expanded to include all of humanity. The inadequacy of this national project is immediately apparent. An axiology based only on the association of the masculine with courage and the feminine with beauty cannot hope to capture much of the richness of human reality. Yet as we have seen, the Barbaric Isle ‘is,’ strictly speaking, both itself and what it excludes, it is both pure codification of the human being and liminal communitas, though presented in such a way that the former masks the latter. Because it so rigidly defines this group and stifles any autonomous being from which change might arise, it is a petrified patria, with no ability to adapt. In a word, the Barbaric Isle is the embodiment of the attempt to construct a national identity exclusively based on coloniality of power. As Diana de Armas Wilson has argued persuasively, it functions as a parody of the Hapsburg monarchy and its expansive policies, constituting a warning against unhesitating identification with that imperial project (Allegories of Love 109–29; Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World 200–8). Persiles y Sigismunda points, in fact, in an altogether different direction. The reappearance of the Barbaric Isle at the end of the work may be taken as an acknowledgement that ultimately there is no representation of the nation, however inclusive it may appear to be, which is not constituted by what it excludes, and therefore the process of overcoming those limitations is necessarily endless. To name this society barbaric is to equate the open-ended practice of liberation initiated by its destruction with civilization itself.10 Into the Reader’s World At the opening of Book Three, Cervantes faces one of the most difficult, and at the same time one of the most important tasks in the writing of Persiles y Sigismunda: the incorporation of Periandro and Auristela and Antonio’s family into the familiar world of Western Europe. The presence of these characters from the northern lands of romance in the southern books introduces an ontological rupture not unlike that of marvellous realism, as described in chapter 2 above. Their presence in Spain provides the principal device by means of which Cervantes establishes the critical perspective on Spanish identity that characterizes Book Three. The first two chapters, which narrate their visits to Lisbon and Badajoz, accomplish the initiation of characters from a magical romance world into a stylized but still recognizable meridional Spain, without sacrificing either the fantastic, ‘superior’ nature of their identities or the radical challenge they pose to the world they are entering. Three sepa-

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rate moments comprise the main steps in this process: the description of the characters as they arrive in the port of Lisbon; the ekphrastic representation of the events of Books One and Two in a painting; and the encounter with a dramatist who wants to write a play depicting the events in the painting and yet at the same time tries to convince Auristela to become an actress. All three of these moments thematize issues of representation. They look back on the events of the first half of the work as part of a world from which the characters’ present environment is definitively severed; they condense those multifarious events into a single, homogeneous style; and they establish for the protagonists an ambiguous identity which assures that they will never simply ‘belong’ to the world they now enter.11 Initially, this transition to the European mainland is marked by the following passage, which describes the dress of these northern visitors with far greater detail than had previously been used for clothing: Soon this novel squadron of novel beauty left Belém. Ricla, moderately beautiful, but dressed provocatively in barbarian fashion; Constanza, most beautiful and swathed in skins; Antonio el padre, his arms and legs bare, but the rest of his body covered with wolf skins; Antonio el hijo, dressed the same way, but with a bow in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back; Periandro in a green velvet tunic and trousers, like a sailor, with a tightfitting, pointed cap that still couldn’t hide the golden ringlets of his hair; Auristela had all the elegance of the northlands in her dress, a most attractive grace in her body, and the world’s greatest beauty in her face. Indeed, all of them together and each one separately produced startled wonder and admiration in everyone who looked at them, but the peerless Auristela and gallant Periando stood out above all the rest. (III.1, 195–6) [Ya salía de Belén el nuevo escuadrón de la nueva hermosura: Ricla medianamente hermosa, pero estremadamente a lo bárbaro vestida; Constanza hermosísima y rodeada de pieles; Antonio el padre, brazos y piernas desnudas, pero con pieles de lobos cubierto lo demás del cuerpo; Antonio el hijo, iba del mismo modo, pero con el arco en la mano y la aljaba de las saetas a las espaldas; Periandro con casaca de terciopelo verde y calzones de lo mismo, a lo marinero, un bonete estrecho y puntiagudo en la cabeza, que no le podía cubrir las sortijas de oro que sus cabellos formaban; Auristela traía toda la gala del setentrión en el vestido, la más bizarra gallardía en el cuerpo y la mayor hermosura del mundo en el rostro. En efeto, todos juntos y cada uno de por sí, causaban espanto y maravilla a quien los miraba; pero sobre todos campeaba la sin par Auristela y el gallardo Periandro.] (III.1, 435)

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The reader, after accompanying these characters for hundreds of pages and seeing everything from their point of view, is suddenly turned one hundred and eighty degrees to now face these familiar figures as they might appear to a native of the Iberian peninsula, watching their arrival in Lisbon. They are made to appear foreign, barbarian, exotic. Features of their identities which previously had not distinguished them from their surroundings (and therefore had no meaning) now become meaningful as markers of difference. This is a typically Cervantine technique: through the power of fiction, the narrator’s mediating voice had led the reader to accept the strange, northern adventures as normal within the game of this work; unexpectedly, the rules are shifted, and the reader is reminded of their strangeness, and of the distance separating the world in which he or she lives from the idealized realms of fantasy. Such narrative ‘traps’ for the reader are used repeatedly in Don Quixote, beginning with the interruption of the fight with the Basque in chapters 8–9 of Part One. Here, startlingly, attention is drawn to the disparity between these fictional worlds precisely at the moment in which they are being magically brought together. A double perspective is established, in which the reader continues to identify with the pilgrims even while compelled to keep in mind their status as outsiders. The position in which the reader is placed is the critical point of view Georg Simmel defined as that of ‘the stranger’ who lives within a community while remaining at the same time a ‘halfoutsider.’ The reader is thus taught to see Spain from inside and from outside at the same time, living, if only for the duration of these chapters, an experience of internal exile.12 The painting Periandro commissions in Lisbon serves to extend this awareness across a number of chapters by providing the pilgrims with a portable lienzo that encapsulates the first two books within a single mimetic frame.13 The description of this painting is a tour de force in narrative technique that condenses, selects, rearranges, and transforms events, reducing all the heterogeneity of the northern adventures to a single vision, which can be held up to and contrasted with the world the northern characters have now entered. As a visual depiction of Books One and Two, this painting deviates from its model in a number of ways. Its streamlined account selects episodes according to criteria of condensation, relevance to the main plot (here conceived of as the story of Periandro’s adventures), and similarity of material. The ten islands of Books One and Two are reduced to six. One shipwreck is made to stand for two, one secondary character who narrates his story during the

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escape from the Barbaric Isle is made to stand for three, one lascivious woman past her prime (Cenotia) takes the place of two (Rosamunda is eliminated). Most of the characters who remain behind in the northern lands are cut out. The incorporation into the painting of their arrival in Lisbon is suggestive. In the description of the painting, this arrival precedes the portrayals of Policarpo’s palace and the Hermit’s Isle, which are thereby conceptualized as stops leading up to the narrative present. The narrator specifies that they are depicted in Lisbon ‘wearing the same clothing in which they had arrived’ (III.1, 198) (en el mismo traje en que habían venido [III.1, 439]) because by now they are no longer dressed in that fashion, having changed their ‘barbarian’ garb for that of pilgrims. Thus even their arrival in Lisbon is separated from their new identity. The painting, in recording the trace of their earlier identity at the very moment of arrival, is the navel which marks their rebirth into this new fictional space, and which they will carry with them during the first stages of their initiation into it. The location of the beautiful portrait of Auristela included by the painter is unclear. Presumably, she could appear in several other parts of the picture, though nowhere, in so detailed a painting, could there be as large and clear an image of her as seems to be implied by the narrator’s words: But the famous painter was at his best in his portrait of Auristela, which led people to say that he had demonstrated he could paint a beautiful figure, even though he did not really do her justice; for unless the hand holding it were guided by divine thought, no human brush was adequate to the task. (III.2, 199) [En lo que más se aventajó el pintor famoso, fue en el retrato de Auristela, en quien decían se había mostrado a saber pintar una hermosa figura, puesto que la dejaba agraviada, pues a la belleza de Auristela, si no era llevado de pensamiento divino, no había pincel humano que alcanzase.] (III.1, 439)

It does not appear that what is meant is a separate painting, but rather a larger-scale depiction of Auristela on the same canvas, in a space of its own. This recalls the representations of the Virgin in popular votive paintings known as retablos, which depict the events of a miracle for which the person who commissions the painting wishes to give thanks. The Virgin herself is generally represented on a larger scale in one of the

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upper corners. The spatial separation corresponds to the ontological difference between the Virgin and the temporal world, as well as suggesting her power over the scene taking place beneath her. Viewed as a secularized retablo, the painting reproduces a chivalric vision of the woman’s role as the quasi-divine inspiration for the brave deeds the knight accomplishes in her name. Here the entirety of the first half of the work is recast as Periandro’s heroic activity, all of which occupies, in the painting, one plane, one generic world. The painting tends to place the northern phase of the narrative at a distance, and from a distance it all looks to be much more of a piece. This wondrous canvas serves as a device for the definition of the pilgrims’ ambiguous status in the world of Book Three. In chapter 2 they enter Spain and stop in Badajoz, at the same inn as a troupe of actors with whom a dramatist is travelling. The dramatist desires immediately to write a play about what he sees in the painting. He worries about the genre, since he knows only the beginning and not the middle or end. Is it comedy, tragedy, or tragicomedy? And, how will he include ‘a lackey gracioso to give comic advice, at sea among so many islands, fires, and snows’ (III.2, 200) (un lacayo consejero y gracioso en el mar y entre tantas islas, fuego y nieves [III.2, 443])? Nonetheless, he still hopes to write the play and squeeze in the lacayo gracioso somehow, ‘despite all the rules of poetry and in defiance of those of dramatic art’ (III.2, 201) (a pesar de todas las reglas de la poesía y a despecho del arte cómico [III.2, 443]). This dramatist is a comic-parodic image of the Spanish author himself, faced with the outcome of his creative efforts thus far and trying to frame the remaining part he has yet to write. The difficulty in determining the genre stresses the variety of material already included and to come; the determination to accomplish his aesthetic goals, even if it means breaking all the rules of poetry and dramatic art, gives us an ironic self-portrait of Cervantes as a creative artist self-consciously placing his own imagination above the precepts of neo-Aristotelian literary theory (see Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the “Persiles” ). But the most interesting comment is the one concerning the lacayo gracioso, whom Cervantes will incorporate into the second half of the work in the person of Bartolomé. The dramatist is right to tear his hair over how he might be able to squeeze in such a figure ‘at sea among so many islands, fires, and snows’ (en el mar y entre tantas islas, fuego y nieves). As Casalduero pointed out, when the dramatist looks at the painting he accomplishes an even more reductive synthesis of Books One and Two, encapsulated by the double opposition of these four terms: mar, islas, fuego, nieves (179–80). What is excluded

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from their matrix is, of course, any possibility of representing the everyday social world of the Spanish audience, here emblematized by the lacayo. The fictional poet’s concern with not being able to fit him into the earlier episodes is an ironic way of drawing attention to the difference between the mimetic level of the two halves. It would be impossible to make Bartolomé travel to the northern lands, without undermining both the style of those episodes and characters and the overall mimetic consistency of the first half of the work. It is the great aesthetic triumph of Persiles y Sigismunda that the northern characters nonetheless move freely through the southern realms. Periandro and Auristela remain paradoxically both inside and outside of the fictional world of Spain which they inhabit for eleven chapters. The playwright speaks to Auristela about his plan to write a play based on her life and that of her ‘brother’ Periandro, and in the process tries to convince her to become an actress, presumably in order to play the lead role in her own life, representing herself on stage. But the description the dramatist gives her of the life of an actress, with its sexual innuendo, its emphasis on economic gain, and ironic juxtapositions of high and low positions in the social hierarchy, does not at all suit the character of the first two books. The poet is obviously mistaken in addressing Auristela as he does, but his confusion is comprehensible. Insofar as she is the figure in the painting, she cannot, according to the logic of this fictional world, enter an inn at Badajoz in flesh and blood. He treats her as if she were an ‘actress,’ ‘impersonating’ so grand a figure. Auristela’s exasperating answer corresponds to her status as a half-outsider in this fictional world: Auristela replied she hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said to her, for it was perfectly clear she didn’t know the Spanish language, and even if she did know it, her thoughts were on other matters, and her sights were set on other activities, perhaps not so pleasant, but at least more appropriate. (III.2, 201) [Auristela le respondió que no había entendido palabra de cuantas le había dicho, porque bien se veía que ignoraba la lengua castellana, y que puesto que la supiera, sus pensamientos eran otros, que tenían puesta la mira en otros ejercicios, si no tan agradables, a lo menos más convenientes.] (III.2, 445)

As a character from another fictional realm, she cannot communicate with the Spanish playwright at all. It is foolish for him to ask her to become an actress in his company because she does not belong to the

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same world as he does. As a character in the same fictional realm, she understands him and gently chides him for asking her to do something beneath her social rank. It is foolish for him to ask her to become an actress in his company because she belongs to a superior social class. The contradictory nature of these characters’ involvement in the lives of Spanish characters is emphasized in numerous minor details throughout Book Three. To restrict myself to the question of language, we are told Auristela does not understand the dramatist, but she still answers him; she cannot read the text of the poem Feliciana gives her, but Periandro (who we have no reason to think would speak Spanish any better than Auristela) recites Garcilaso from memory (III.8); Auristela herself tells Antonio’s family the part of her story left out in Periandro’s tale, presumably in Spanish. From here on they will generally be presented as fitting into the social world of Spain as members of an aristocratic class, though as foreigners fulfilling a religious vow they generally travel in a manner more befitting a lower rank, and the contrast between their true identities and their surroundings is thereby maintained. Scenes in which the nobly born pilgrims are singled out for special treatment recur periodically during the final two books (e.g., in Barcelona by Ambrosia Agustina, in France by Soldino). The tension between seeing them as having relatively high status, according to the internal standards of continental Europe, or as being absolutely superior, belonging to a wholly other standard is generally resolved by casting their mode of dress and travel in the guise of the pastoral, a literary mode in which aristocratic figures sojourning temporarily among rustics, sharing their manner of dress and the uncomfortable conditions of their existence, is perfectly normal. Their ambiguous relation to this world, in which at times they cannot participate due to the excessive stylistic clash which would result, leads to their playing the role of mere spectators in several episodes. The Lisbon painting resurfaces several times in the remainder of Persiles y Sigismunda. It makes a brief appearance in Cáceres, where Antonio actually shows it and tells the story it depicts twice: first as an accompaniment to the documents attesting to their nobility and integrity which they received in Lisbon, thus as an attempt to demonstrate before the judge that they were not the sort of people who could become highway thieves; and then after they have been cleared of any wrongdoing, as an entertainment for the citizens: ‘the younger Antonio again described the events painted on the canvas ... leaving the whole town amazed’ (III.4, 215) (Volvió Antonio el mozo a relatar el lienzo ...

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dejando admirado al pueblo ... [III.4, 469]). Once again, the double status of these characters is thematized in the two uses made of the painting. It is first used as evidence in a hearing concerning a brutal crime in which they are implicated, serving as an instrument in their participation in occurrences within this fictional world. Then it becomes a marvellous sign of their otherness, of their belonging outside this world and participating in it as entertaining fictions. The final references to the painting involve a similar pattern of movement back and forth between seeing the canvas as the ‘true’ story of the northern adventures and seeing it as a fiction within the fiction. First, it is shown to Diego de Villaseñor, Antonio’s father, as a document explaining how his son, his son’s family, and their friends came through hardships before finally arriving in Quintanar. The protagonists leave the painting in Quintanar, but it comes up again indirectly, when the alcalde of the town where the false captives are begging, once he has exposed their falsehoods and forgiven them, turns to Periandro: ‘Do you, too, señores pilgrims, have some canvas with you to show us? Did you also bring with you some story you’ll want us to believe is true, even though it may have been made up by Falsehood itself?’ (III.10, 251) (– ¿Vosotros, señores peregrinos, traéis algún lienzo que enseñarnos? ¿Traéis otra historia que hacernos creer por verdadera, aunque la haya compuesto la misma mentira? [III.10, 539]). Fortunately, the canvas was left behind in Quintanar, since to look at it next to the lying picture of the false captives is to find oneself face to face with the absurdity of its flights of fancy. As we saw in chapter 3 above, the utopian image of Quintanar de la Orden bears little resemblance to the historical reality. Conversely, as María Antonia Garcés has shown, the captives who are represented as ‘false’ ‘paradoxically relate a profoundly true story’ (250), based in all its details on Cervantes’ own captivity in Algiers. It thus appears that Cervantes has inverted the positions of the fantastic adventures of his characters and his own most intimate experience with a cultural world distinct from the one he shares with his readers. The result is a reciprocal mirroring of history and fiction. From the pilgrims’ own point of view, the canvas they left behind and the story they could tell are true, and if they showed/told them, they would want them to be believed. The author, however, shares with the reader the joke that they were composed ‘by Falsehood itself’ (la misma mentira), though we play at taking them as true (por verdadera). What is true in the real world is false in the fiction, whereas what is true in the fiction is a ‘false’ (or ‘idealized’) image. In both cases, however, what is depicted is an adventure in a

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distant land that establishes an outsider’s point of view on Spain. The distinction between what is ‘true’ and what ‘false’ has become unimportant – the primary question is how to represent Spain in relation to what is beyond it, employing one’s own experiences, reading, or pure invention, as needed. If I have dwelt at some length on the way Cervantes handles the introduction of the pilgrim band into Spanish territory, it is because the subtlety of his technique reveals the care he took to balance the familiar and the strange in creating a double perspective on early modern Spain. This delicate manoeuvre is a sine qua non for the way Persiles y Sigismunda opens before its readers the possibility of reshaping their society. Though Don Quixote insistently juxtaposes its readers’ everyday world with an elevated romance vision, it does so by inviting them to look at the world through the eyes of a madman. Here, a similar juxtaposition is achieved, but readers can now experience and reflect upon what it might be like to view their own society through the eyes of visitor come down to our world from a superior reality.14 Legendo Simulque Peragrando15 In chapter 3, I emphasized that the primary concerns of this work are social, not individual, and that this fact has been obscured by the insistence on viewing Persiles y Sigismunda through the distorting lens of the peregrinatio vitae. The individual trajectories of the characters cross relatively fixed realms, whose narrow codes of behaviour force them to abandon their communities. This could easily lead to a false sense that the work is only concerned with the individual’s capacity to overcome rigid social strictures and to adapt to new social environments. This is certainly a significant theme, and this malleability of the human is closely linked to the Renaissance conviction of the ‘dignity of man.’16 In the last analysis, however, most of the characters return to their communities, which are necessarily changed as a result of the intercultural experience of some of their members. The fictional realms of Persiles y Sigismunda themselves undergo change, and these transformations can be viewed as models of how cultural identities – including definitions of the nation – are shaped by the individuals and groups that inhabit them. In other words, the work explores the processes whereby social reality is negotiated. As the destruction of the Barbaric Isle demonstrates, the transformation of fictional realms can be the result of the exclusion from represen-

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tation of a submerged element within the group inhabiting it. When this element – a vague, unnamable longing – finally manifests itself, the structure of the existing mimesis changes, and the realm either expands to incorporate this new possibility or collapses. Once it is made manifest, the submerged longing appears to have been present from the start, awaiting a catalyst of some sort that will help to make it visible. The occasion that typically gives rise to these transformations is, as we have seen, an encounter with an outsider of great physical beauty. This beauty apparently provides an anchor in reality, outside the individual’s own subjective state, around which the vague and unrepresentable desire can coalesce. The experience of beauty thus introduces an element of rupture. This is no mere cliché of the romance genre, however. Cervantes is at pains to distinguish between the irresistible force that comes from outside and a conventional perfection attained within a single mimetic frame, according to a single canon of beauty. He does this in two ways. First, by insisting on its being a cross-gender phenomenon, opening his book, in fact, with a scene in which it is the beauty of a male character, Periandro, that produces the effect. In the Ruperta episode, it is once again a man, Croriano, whose beauty instantaneously transforms her tragic world into a space for the happy marriage of New Comedy. Second, by insisting that this ideal of beauty is not the opposite of ugliness, but actually is able to subsume and incorporate it. Thus Carino falls helplessly in love with the ugliest fisherwoman on the island, and, more importantly, Auristela loses her physical beauty (albeit temporarily) due to illness, without this diminishing in the least Periandro’s devotion to her.17 This ideal of a beauty so strange and powerful that it tears apart the system of representation into which it is introduced might be more properly termed ‘sublime.’18 It is frequently described in Persiles y Sigismunda as an encounter with the divine. In the Fishermen’s Isle episode and in the scene between Ruperta and Croriano this association with divinity takes on the overtones of a supernatural power. So there is a pattern at work, according to which an outside stimulus that takes the form of a strange, quasi-supernatural beauty, acts so powerfully on the submerged, unexpressed desires of individual subjects, that it makes them manifest themselves, thereby bringing about a radical transformation of their social world. Within the pattern just described, beauty is a very special signifier. It functions for Cervantes as a symbol of the power of imagination, a force that pushes people beyond the existing order, a yearning for the ideal that makes them question the legitimacy of the

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current model of the real and strive to create alternative versions of what is possible. Along with the astonished fisherman when Auristela/ Sigismunda appears before him, one could indeed ask: What deity is this? (qué deidad es ésta [II.10, 342]). Clearly, a very different sort of divinity from the God of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. As this analysis of the poetics at work in Persiles y Sigismunda shows, Cervantes has clearly set for himself the task of wresting power over the supernatural away from the church. He does not challenge the metaphysical claims of Catholicism directly, but invents a way of playing with mystery, ambiguity, the fantastic, and the imagination, that would make possible a reading practice outside the control of the church. The analysis of this form of resistance to the church’s monopoly over the supernatural was the subject of chapter 2 above, which compared Cervantes’ practice with the Latin American marvellous real, as theorized by Alejo Carpentier. Cervantes has created a space of fiction, then, that could serve as a replacement for the space of social integration provided by the less doctrinally based religious culture displaced by the Counter-Reformation. In this space of fiction, unlike the increasingly dogmatic space of religious beliefs and practices, social reality can be negotiated. For fiction to have this kind of transforming power, it must permit the reader to set aside existing assumptions concerning the real. The dimension of the real that lies beyond – and above – the reader’s experience is openended, indeterminate, undecided. The reader journeys to the limit of what can be represented using what Iser terms the ‘repertoire’ of the culture (Act of Reading 53–85); upon return, new possibilities and new questions dot the landscape. The reader’s pilgrimage in Persiles y Sigismunda is to the imagination itself, a power presented without a doubt as supra natura, but animated by a desire for liberating change, rather than serving to perpetuate a dogmatic, ‘closed’ view of the world. It is this model of fiction that allows Cervantes to interrogate the existing definition of the nation, and to turn Spain inside out.19 Pastoral Oases 20 Within the narrative, Cervantes insistently associates a particular type of space with this model of fiction: the pastoral oasis. Scattered throughout Persiles y Sigismunda are several realms that make use of pastoral motifs. On closer examination, these motifs reveal a regular pattern. They occur between major episodes or in a crisis within an episode, presenting a moment of relative calm and repose preceding or following a scene of

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danger and tension. Each of the four fires in the work is followed, however briefly, by such a pastoral scene. These moments of repose offer opportunities for the characters to reflect upon their situation, to think back over what has happened or look forward to what is ahead, but from a perspective of relative distance from events. In these moments, too, characters often meet and discuss their circumstances with one another, sharing a moment of friendly intercourse and camaraderie. The pastoral in Persiles y Sigismunda is associated with an open, egalitarian utopia, the diametrical opposite of realms of intrigue such as Policarpo’s palace, Cáceres, or the Morisco village. The function of these ‘pastoral oases’ in Persiles y Sigismunda is to serve as the literary equivalent of the pilgrim’s liminal experience, in which everyday structural categories are suspended in favor of a temporary revelation of the underlying basis of human solidarity. Numerous examples of spontaneous hospitality, often combined with a humble or rustic setting, particularly link the pastoral to the pilgrim’s encounter with liminal communitas. These scenes of pastoral hospitality include Antonio’s Cave, the Fishermen’s Isle, the Hermit’s Isle, the cowherds’ camp where Feliciana is protected, Antonio’s arrival in Quintanar, and Soldino’s Cave. Other scenes that include pastoral touches evoke to some degree spontaneous feeling in opposition to hierarchical structures and repressive institutions, but do not develop the topos of rustic hospitality per se. These include: Las Sagras de Toledo, the protagonists’ visit to Aranjuez, their fleeting encounter with a shepherdess outside Valencia, and their glimpse of Isabela Castrucha in the woods. In every instance of a pastoral oasis, the prevailing social order is temporarily put in abeyance, and a special freedom or licence is allowed. The pastoral emerges, then, as a marginal mode, in which fixed plots are set aside in favour of a moment of mere being together of the characters. The forward movement of the narrative is thereby suspended; the fall back into narrative is also a return to structure. In this sense, the reader’s own experience of the work mimics the pilgrim experience of the characters themselves, suggesting that reading serves as an instance of what Turner called the ‘ritual process’ of moving to and returning from a liminal state. Pastoral is for the reader what pilgrimage liminality is for the protagonists. When social structures are felt to be too restrictive, characters in Persiles y Sigismunda take to the road as ‘pilgrims’; similarly, when the mimetic structures on which fictional realms are based become too tight and cannot contain the characters, they burst out of them, often destroying the realm in the process. They then find

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themselves flung into a pastoral oasis, which serves as a placeholder filling the empty pages that would otherwise result from such a breakdown of representation. The pastoral oasis is thus one of the main compositional nodes of Persiles y Sigismunda, a formal category which plays a crucial role in moving the reader from the immediate experience of the represented objects to the larger question of their significance beyond the act of reading. The Spanish episodes in particular include many pastoral oases; indeed this entire section of the work is tinged somewhat by the innocence of the pastoral. There is a complex alternation here between pastoral, intrigue, low comic, and other realms, which interpenetrate one another. The highest saturation of Persiles y Sigismunda by pastoral scenes and a generally bucolic tone takes place between Feliciana’s flight from her father’s house and Antonio’s reunion with his family. Given the link between pastoral and the pilgrimage process it is hardly surprising that this should be so, since the two poles just mentioned correspond to two of the fullest moments of liminal communitas associated with pilgrimage in the work (see chapter 3 above). It is as if Periandro/Persiles, Auristela/ Sigismunda, and their companions were crossing Spain inside a pastoral bubble, which becomes a portable utopia from within which they contemplate the complex interweaving of human solidarity and violent conflict that characterize this section of the work. The characters that enter this bubble temporarily share in the protected status this space provides from the chaos around them. Spontaneously, they form a community with whichever group of pilgrim/refugees has coalesced around the protagonists. No passage more vividly reflects the immediate mutual understanding and unhesitating trust that characterize interaction within this pastoral bubble than the brief, enigmatic meeting with the Valencian shepherdess, who comes abruptly out of the woods, and ‘without standing on ceremony or greeting them in any way’ (sin hacerles ceremonia de comedimiento alguno) engages in the following exchange with Periandro: ‘Señores, shall I ask for it or give it?’ To this Periandro replied, ‘Beautiful lass, if it’s jealousy, neither ask for it nor give it, because if you ask for it, you diminish your self-respect, and if you give it, your reputation. If the one who loves you has any sense, knowing your worth he will value you and love you well, and if he has none, why would you want him to love you?’

Turning Spain Inside Out 151 ‘Well said,’ replied the village girl, and saying goodbye, she turned around and slipped back into the dense trees, leaving them astonished by her question, her abruptness, and her beauty. (III.12, 259) [– Señores, ¿pedirlos he o darlos he? A lo que respondió Periandro: – Hermosa zagal, si son celos, ni los pidas ni los des, porque, si los pides, menoscabas tu estimación y, si los das, tu crédito; y si es que el que te ama tiene entendimiento, conociendo tu valor te estimará y querrá bien y, si no le tiene, ¿para qué quieres que te quiera? – Bien has dicho – respondió la villana. Y, diciendo adiós, volvió las espaldas y se entró en la espesura de los árboles, dejándolos admirados con su pregunta, con su presteza y con su hermosura.] (III.12, 556)

This mobile community, which flits in and out of the narrative, provides the reader with an alternative to the existing order. Held up against a series of specific situational contexts in which abuse of power and authority force characters to seek refuge with the pilgrim band, it suggests the possibility of another social model for early modern Spain. A Nation Traversed by Its Borders Eleven chapters – roughly two-thirds of Book Three and over one fifth of the entire work – take place in Spain. Clearly, part of the pleasure of Persiles y Sigismunda, both for its author and for its original audience, would have been the special enjoyment of seeing their own native land through the eyes of a group of foreign travellers. Understanding the role of the Spanish portion of Persiles and Sigismunda’s trajectory within the overall story of their adventures is certainly a key to any adequate interpretation of the work. The pilgrims’ Spanish itinerary can be divided into three main linear segments: first, the region of Extremadura, focusing on the story of Feliciana de la Voz; second, la Mancha, including Quintanar de la Orden and the town of the false captives; and finally, the Levantine coast, from the Morisco village to Barcelona. Badajoz and Perpignan are introductory and concluding border points. In Badajoz, the protagonists enter Spain and there they meet the dramatist who would like to compose a play based on their story, whose role as a jocose stand-in for Cervantes I discussed above. Perpignan is a ‘summing up’ of the

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entire Spanish experience as a whole, with a somewhat allegorical flavor, that condenses a compendium of the Spanish chapters into a single vivid image. Cutting across the division into linear segments, each separated from the others by a clear boundary and each a self-contained unit with its own integrated space, is a further distinction between urban, ‘novelistic’ spaces, in which the pilgrims feel out of place and at times threatened, and a series of pastoral oases, where they are more at ease, more in touch with the people they encounter and the natural world that surrounds them. The result is a double articulation: the division into vertical bands (from each of which one passes forward irreversibly into another) is offset by the repetition within successive provinces of similar styles of mimesis and similar tensions between them. Consequently, the Spanish chapters present the reader with a cyclic alternation between urban and rural, between suspicion and trust, and between confinement and freedom. One may speak, in general, of a correlation between these pairs of opposites, such that cities and larger towns are associated with suspicion, imprisonment, and danger, while the rural sphere, typically pastoral, connotes trust and relative ease, with the paradoxical result that one is actually safer on the road. The middle, Manchegan phase emphasizes the solidarity of the rural and avoids the urban, cynical sphere altogether. Here a lightness of tone pervades almost all the episodes, and the protagonists are free from actual physical danger to their own persons for the longest number of pages in the entire work. In scenes which explicitly raise the possibility of visiting first Toledo and then Madrid, they deliberately choose not to enter either of the two largest cities close to their path. As I argued in chapter 3, Antonio de Villaseñor is a surrogate for the reader within the work. What is most remarkable about his adventures is not the fact that he goes to the exotic northern lands and later returns, but rather the people he brings back, including his own children, born in the cave on the Barbaric Isle. Those who accompany him, particularly Periandro and Auristela, form the core of the portable utopian community that moves across Spain. They draw into their circle a variety of characters who for one reason or another have been cast off or marginalized. Thus the device of bringing these characters from the idealized world of romance to and through Spain functions like a magnet to draw together a series of otherwise unrelated incidents that, cumulatively, present an opposing point of view to the triumphalist vision disseminated by the official culture.

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That Cervantes looked back nostalgically to the Erasmian heyday of the reign of Charles V, and that he strove for ideological open-endedness and avoidance of closure in his fiction, are positions too often repeated to need to be argued for here. In Persiles y Sigismunda, in my view, Cervantes goes farther than in any previous work, even Don Quixote, for he not only critiques the imperial project and its impact on rural Spain, but he also begins to imagine a response, a kind of decolonization of Castile itself. And fictionality, as we shall see, has a crucial role to play. Essentially, Persiles y Sigismunda presents two contradictory images of Spain in tension with one another. One is the Spain of the elite, of the ruling classes, including the aristocracy, the crown and its administration, and the upper echelons of the clergy. They control the means of representation, what Bourdieu terms the field of cultural production. The other Spain is ubiquitous, but invisible. It would not be accurate to say that it is opposed to the first one, because it has no access to representing its own desires to itself. It almost cannot be said to exist, since it cannot be found. But through fiction, Cervantes draws together a few of its fragments, gathered along a route stretching from Badajoz to Barcelona. Extremadura and the Levantine coast are regions of conflict, in which the submerged element enters into a more or less open struggle with the controlling forces. The result is a stalemate: a series of provisional successes at constructing a counter-hegemony are ironically undercut by the reader’s awareness that the protagonists’ presence visibly alters the social reality of the places they visit. The most dramatic example for these peripheral regions is undoubtedly the episode of Feliciana de la Voz. As we saw in chapter 3 above, while she shares the primary plane of the narrative with the protagonists, her voice is heard and her desires can be articulated in such a way that they make irrepressible demands on the patriarchal social world she inhabits. When the protagonists move on, she is silenced once more. At the very heart of seventeenth-century New Castile, however, an extended space is opened up where the ‘other’ Spain, normally excluded from representation, can take center stage. For a number of chapters, culminating with Antonio de Villaseñor’s return to Quintanar de la Orden, it is the power of the monarchy and the church that is marginalized, and we see local people, in alliance with individuals from distant lands, solving their problems in their own way. The confrontations with authority in the episode at Las Sagras and the interlude of the false captives are ludic in tone, and are resolved in favor of the ‘trans-

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gressors.’ Though he scolds his daughter, Pedro Cobeño accepts her choice of husband and appears only somewhat annoyed with her for getting pregnant before marriage. The false captives episode takes place in a town of la Mancha ‘whose name,’ the narrator says, echoing the opening sentence of Don Quixote, ‘I don’t remember’ (III.10, 246) (de cuyo nombre no me acuerdo [III.10, 527]). They are exposed as lying charlatans, but the alcalde ends up inviting them to his house for dinner, promising to teach them to lie better so they can avoid being caught next time. In this context of flagrant but ultimately harmless disregard for authority, the pilgrim band explicitly avoids the centres of power, Toledo and Madrid. A stone’s throw from the capital, we find rural communities, living according to their own codes, that simply do not belong to the nation as the monarchy defines it. As the mutiny of the quintanareños against the king’s troops makes clear, these New Castile villagers regard the royal army as an invading force. Meanwhile, outside the Iberian Peninsula, Spaniards such as Antonio de Villaseñor and Soldino have been living in caves, keeping alive a Spain that neither belongs to the national project of the Habsburg empire nor to the culture surrounding their retreat, the Barbaric Isle or the French countryside, respectively. Antonio and Ricla together create a hybrid society whose pre-Tridentine foundations hark back to Erasmian Christianity’s affirmation of sincere personal faith over institutional trapping. They raise their children in a bilingual setting in which the sacraments of marriage and baptism require no intervention by the clergy. Ricla’s frank expression of belief, the most perfect declaration of faith in the entire work, is voiced by someone who has never entered a church, confessed to a priest, or taken communion. This secret enclave of Christian Humanism, protected against barbarians obsessed with imperial power, comes into existence during the reign of Philip II. Once the long awaited rescue takes place, and the ‘barbarians’ are ousted from power, Antonio is able to return to la Mancha and incorporate his family into a society that, as we saw in the previous chapter, bears no resemblance to the historical reality of late sixteenth-century Quintanar. The cave on the Barbaric Isle preserves a remnant of the Spanish Renaissance for a future time of which Cervantes and his readers can only dream, when they will no longer need to hide their true convictions from prying inquisitors and Baroque ideologues. Though that time never came, Book Three projects this utopian vision across a Spanish landscape that is poetically transformed as a result. Chapter 18 of Book Three concerns another Spaniard living in exile

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in a cave, Soldino. But this cave, which he explains he dug out himself, turns out to be an ingenious shortcut to a fertile, but uninhabited valley, which Soldino has made his own: ‘I made this valley mine ... Here I’m lord of myself; here I have my spirit in the palm of my hand’ (III.18, 286–7) (hice mío este valle ... aquí soy yo señor de mí mismo, aquí tengo mi alma en mi palma [III.18, 601–2]). His name brings together the Spanish for soldier, soldado, and a typically pastoral suffix, -ino. Like Antonio, he fought under the emperor Charles, before retiring to this secret pastoral enclave he created in the French countryside. As Ruth El Saffar pointed out in Beyond Fiction, he is a stand-in for the author (162– 3). Though they have not met him, he knows the names and past histories of the characters. He stage directs their movements and provides advice and hints about how their stories will come out. Soldino even prophesies regarding the battle at Lepanto, in which Cervantes actually fought under Juan de Austria. Soldino chose to withdraw altogether from public life rather than serve under Philip II (Allen 91–2). In praising his current life, he says he has chosen peace over war, and sought to escape the intrigues and hypocrisy of the Baroque court in the simplicity of nature. Though he has chosen to live across the border in southern France, he avoids contact with the French almost entirely. He explains his preference in the following enigmatic fashion: If you should wonder about seeing a Spaniard in this foreign land, consider that some places and towns in the world are healthier than others, and this one where we are now is more so for me than any other. (III.18, 288) [Si os maravillare de ver a un español en esta ajena tierra, advertid que hay sitios y lugares en el mundo saludables más que otros y éste en que estamos lo es para mí más que ninguno.] (III.18, 604)

Here nostalgia for Charles’s reign is combined with disillusionment concerning life in the Spain of Phillip II. Though Soldino’s reasons for preferring to live in exile are left ambiguous, the clear implication is that changes in Spain during his lifetime have led him to this reclusive existence. Apparently he leaves his ‘hermitage’ only when the opportunity arises to speak with someone who he believes will benefit from his prescience. If we think of the artificial world he has created for himself as a figurative representation of the worlds of fiction, this statement by Soldino implies a role for fictional discourse as a critique of the present that simultaneously points toward a different future: ‘Here I’ve found reasons to be happy and reasons to feel sad, which though still in the

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future are so certain, as I see it, that they are on a par with truth itself.’ (III.18, 287) (Aquí he hallado causas para alegrarme y causas para entristecerme que aún están por venir, que serán tan ciertas, según yo pienso, que corren parejas con la misma verdad [III.18, 602]). Like Antonio in his cave on the Barbaric Isle, Soldino appears to be waiting in a kind of suspended animation for the transformation of Spanish society that would make his return possible. His sanctuary locks him into an escapist isolation in which fantasies of a different future only call attention, ultimately, to the shameful inadequacies of the present. The story of Isabela Castrucha, ‘la fingida endemoniada’ (the woman who fakes possession by a demon), takes place between Spain and Italy, moving in and out of the territories belonging to the Spanish Crown; but it culminates in Lucca, a semi-independent Italian state concerning which the narrator comments: ‘There, more than anywhere else, are Spaniards welcomed and accepted, for they don’t issue commands there, rather they make requests’ (III.19, 291–2) (Allí, más que en otra parte ninguna, son bien vistos y recebidos los españoles, y es la causa que en ella no mandan ellos, sino ruegan [III.19, 610]). The inn the pilgrims share with Isabela is a space free of patriarchal, monarchical, and ecclesiastical power, ruled by women, in accordance, moreover, with frank sexual desire. Isabela, a Spanish-born orphan, is being taken by her uncle to marry against her will in Capua, Naples, her parents’ place of origin. The stop in Lucca provides her with the opportunity she needs to meet with her beloved, Andrea Marulo, with whom she is reunited by means of the ploy of pretending to be possessed by a demon. The Lucca episode further problematizes the distinction between Spain’s inside and outside, since this is a space outside of Spain that allows Spanish characters’ authentic, but hidden and illicit desires to manifest themselves. In each of these three cases, Spaniards find freedom, happiness, and spiritual renewal only through an experience of exile. They stand metonymically for a larger diaspora of those displaced, both within and beyond Spain, by the fiscal and cultural policies of Philip II and his son. Thousands fled to the New World (Cervantes tried to join them), flocked to the cities, went off to the wars in the Low Countries and elsewhere, or even became renegade pirates in North Africa. Persiles y Sigismunda uses this growing pool of Spaniards outside of Spain as a poetic resource for figuring forth an aspect of Spanish identity that can neither be represented in the Iberia of the Counter-Reformation nor definitively repressed. ‘Spain’ is thus divided internally in a way reminscent of the Barbaric Isle, whose mazmorra was located on a neighbouring island,

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leaving a strait in the middle, creating a space traversed by its own boundaries. Antonio’s and Soldino’s caves, and Lucca as a whole constitute such an exterior to Spain that nonetheless belongs to it. The text also puts in play the notion of internal exile. Two characters in particular, Mauricio and Carino, reveal that they have lived for a period of time within a community from which they experienced a profound alienation. Mauricio admits that, in general, there are many customs in his native Hibernia with which he does not agree, especially the jus primae noctis, but he pretends to go along with them: ‘I followed the customs of my country, at least insofar as they were compatible with reason, and when they were not, with false appearances I acted as if I were following them, for at times dissembling is advantageous’ (I.12, 62) (Seguí las costumbres de mi patria, a lo menos en cuanto a las que parecían ser niveladas con la razón, y , en las que no, con apariencias fingidas mostraba seguirlas, que tal vez la disumulación es provechosa [I.12, 214]). Carino, desperately in love with the ugly fisherwoman, Leoncia, is trying to choose between flight and marriage with the beautiful Selviana, whom he does not love, when the protagonists arrive and solve his difficulty for him. In both of these instances we see a deliberate, strategic limiting of the subject’s self-representation, designed to make it coincide with the expectations of the social group. At the same time, then, as Persiles y Sigismunda opens a space where a secret España profunda can manifest itself, it also projects beyond the borders of Spain several enclaves of a submerged, islolated Spain. Nor is it surprising that a feature shared by all of these manifestations of an alternative Spanish national identity are associated with the pastoral. The utopian genre par excellence, the pastoral in Persiles y Sigismunda is mapped onto a definite topography, allowing us to speak of a process of deterritorialization in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari use the term, which they associate with ‘nomadism.’ In A Thousand Plateaus they distinguish ‘smooth’ spaces of nomadic deterritorialization and ‘striated’ spaces of State territorialization. Nomads are not primarily defined by their movement, but by this smooth space they occupy. ‘One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space’ (385) ‘The sea is perhaps principal among smooth spaces ... But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed routes, constant directions, relative movements ... One of the reasons for the hegemony of the West was the power of its State apparatuses to striate

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the sea’ (387). The pastoral oases in Persiles y Sigismunda pull together a series of deterritorialized, nomadic spaces within the nation. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on the strategic importance for the modern state of striating the space of the sea necessarily calls to mind, for the reader of Persiles y Sigismunda, the distinction between the smooth, deterritorialized ocean of longing and the rigidly structured, striated space of the ocean of adventure. Thus Persiles y Sigismunda in its entirety enacts what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the interminable back and forth between deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Moreover, characters like Mauricio and Carino serve to indicate that this phenomenon is not unique to Spain, but occurs in all human groups represented in the work. The tension between the official self-representation of the nation and the secret desires of individuals exists necessarily. What varies is the degree to which it is possible for those secret desires to push their way from the political unconscious to the surface of public recognition. The final layer of complexity in the exploration of this problematic in Persiles y Sigismunda is the figuration of the work’s own power in the assistance the protagonists provide to others in moments of crisis. Their interventions demonstrate that fiction can provide a medium for bringing submerged social tensions to light. This implicitly carries with it the notion of fiction as an agent for social transformation.21 It seems apparent that, in Cervantes’ conception, only through a struggle does this liberated cultural space come to be anything more than a mere illusion, and even then its mode of existence is that of a fragmentary series of isolated enclaves that can never be consolidated into a fully unified national identity. Further, as we have seen, its various instantiations move through time at different rhythms, some seeming almost outside of time altogether, others stuck in a nostalgic attempt to hold onto a bygone era, still others projecting forward to consummate desires for which the present makes no allowance. In their trajectories, then, the characters of Persiles y Sigismunda reflect what Homi K. Bhabha describes as the time lag produced by modernity’s unevenness. It is this time lag that disrupts the lock-step march of unidirectional ‘progress,’ and ‘keeps alive the making of the past’ (254). From Raymond Williams’s crucial notion of how residual practices can be appropriated by emergent ones in their struggle against the dominant culture, Bhabha derives a ‘projective past.’ Rather than fixating on ‘the conditions of an obscene past – might have been’ the projective past looks forward to ‘the conditionality of a new birth – could have been’ (253).22

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Cervantes ended Persiles and Sigismunda, and his own career as a writer, with just such an ambiguous projection. Having married the companion of her many trials, Sigismunda ‘lived in companionship with her husband Persiles until great-grandchildren extended her days, for she saw them in her long and happy posterity’ (vivió en compañía de su esposo Persiles hasta que bisnietos le alargaron los días, pues los vio su larga y feliz posteridad [IV.13, 713–14]). This closing sentence expresses in the past tense what could only have taken place in the future, since Persiles and Sigismunda belong, essentially, to Cervantes’ own generation, and in 1616 they would not yet have achieved this ripe old age in which they enjoyed their great-grandchildren. Further complicating matters, as Carlos Romero points out in his edition, Iceland was a Protestant country by this time, and in any case was not ruled by its own monarch, but by the king of Denmark, also Protestant. He fails to mention, though, that the text does not actually tell us that they returned to Iceland, nor that they ever occupied the throne there. In other words, Persiles y Sigismunda ends by optimistically projecting its protagonists into a future that nonetheless remains politically, religiously, and geographically indeterminate. We have seen Cervantes struggling to reverse the centripetal tendency cutting Spain off from the rest of the world and marginalizing significant elements of its own population. This exertion in a centrifugal direction impels him beyond the borders of ‘Spain’ and ultimately beyond the confines of his historical time. To continue interpreting his work, we must now take the leap that he himself, in his mortality, was unable to, though his work projects it. In the two chapters of the next section I attempt articulations of meaning his work still holds for us today, first from the perspective of an increasingly globalized Spain, and then from the transatlantic vantage point of the contemporary United States.

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PART THREE Cervantes Now

The oral tradition – stories, epics, and songs of the people – which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula ‘This all happened long ago’ is substituted with that of ‘What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow.’ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

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5 Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain

Un factor esencial de la historia que se escribe es la postura vital del historiador dentro del tiempo en que escribe. [An essential factor in the writing of history is the vital stance of the historian in the time of writing.] Américo Castro, España en su historia

On Thursday, 11 March 2004, the municipal archivist in Baeza interrupted my research on the War of the Alpujarras to let me know that she would close early that day. She had to attend the silent gathering outside city hall for the victims of the terrorist attack. ‘What terrorist attack?’ I asked. Hadn’t I heard? No, I had spent the morning in the archive and had not spoken to anyone. Thus I learned of the shocking and brutal bombings on rush hour commuter trains in Madrid that morning, bombings that claimed nearly two hundred lives. Like most people in Spain, she and I both thought initially that the attack had been carried out by ETA, the Basque separatist group, but it turned out to be the work of Moroccan terrorists associated with Al Qaeda. As the terrorists obviously intended, the attack influenced the result of the national elections that took place three days later, though the story of how that came about and what it means for Spain is anything but simple. In the event, the ruling party, which had sent troops to Iraq, was ousted by the opposition, whose leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, promised to bring them home. Shortly after taking office, he fulfilled his promise.1 Much later I perceived the irony of my personal experience. I had to break off researching the last major battle between Christianity and Islam on Spanish soil so the archivist could show respect for the victims

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of the latest phase of that millennial conflict. As I write, a year has passed since the attack. It marks a before and after, undoubtedly, in the history of Spain’s relation to the Islamic world. But that history is a long one, marked by many turnings in the way, one of which took place in the years prior to 11 March and, in a certain sense, paved the way for it: the return of large numbers of Muslims to the Iberian Peninsula, after an interruption of nearly four hundred years. For the last few years, Spain has had the fastest growing immigrant population of Western Europe, and much of this new immigration comes from North Africa. The change is dramatic, since in little more than a single generation Spain has gone from a country whose citizens had to emigrate to find work, to being a country to which workers from other countries flock in search of a better life. The long-term impact on Spanish society will become clear only as the century progresses. The Moriscos in Cervantes’ works are the subject of this chapter, seen against the backdrop of the history of Spanish Muslims, past and present. Ricote, Zoraida and various other Morisco characters that appear in Don Quixote, Persiles y Sigismunda, and the Novelas ejemplares are among the most prominent representations available of Muslims and their descendents living in Christian-dominated Spain. As such, it is my hope that they may serve as models for the future, as well as reminders of the past. The New Hispano-Muslims Who are these new immigrants, and how are Spaniards already adapting to their presence? According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), the total number of foreigners residing in Spain was nearly five times greater in 2004 than in 1998: it went from 637,085 (1.6% of the total population) to 3,034,326 (7%). (See Los extranjeros residentes en España and España en cifras, 2005.) Changes in countries of origin accompany this increase. In 1998, although more foreigners residing in Spain came from Morocco than any other single country, the second greatest number were from Great Britain. Indeed, four of the top five countries of origin for such residents were members of the European Union. (Spain has long attracted large numbers of retirees from other European countries, but this is not the type of immigration that grabs headlines.) By contrast, since 2003 Ecuador has topped the list, followed closely by Morocco, Colombia, and Romania. Great Britain had fallen to fifth. More immigrants to Spain come from Latin America than any other geographical area (35% of the total); over a third are Europeans, and about a fifth

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are African. These are volatile changes, and statistics can become outdated in an astonishingly short time. The INE shows 3,972 Ecuadorians resident in 1998, compared with 475,698 six years later.2 There is a significant concentration of immigrants in certain areas, particularly along the Mediterranean coast and in Madrid. Vast areas of Spain, including Galicia, Castilla-León, and Extremadura, still have few immigrants. Nevertheless, some qualifications are in order. Many small towns in rural, agricultural areas had virtually no foreign residents a few years ago, and now do have such communities, often all from a single country. Talayuela, in the province of Cáceres, offers an example. The introduction of Virginia tobacco in the mid-1990s created a boom in this farming community of around 8,500 residents, attracting, as of 2001, some 4,000 Moroccans. Comparing Talayuela with El Egido, where xenophobic violence exploded in 2000, Barbolla Camarero warns that although things have gone well so far, ‘it is enough of a breeding ground to need to be on the alert’ for signs of racism (354).3 Maps compiled by the INE clearly show that the country of origin of the predominant group varies from one town to the next (Los extranjeros residentes en España 32–6). Thus although increasing encounters with foreign residents are a part of most Spaniards’ experience, how it is experienced and what that experience means can vary tremendously, from region to region, from town to town, and from one year to the next. Two demographic factors concerning Spain’s own population are relevant for interpreting the influx of immigrants. The birthrate in Spain steadily declined throughout the 1980s and 1990s, dipping below 1.2 children per woman in 1998. At that time it was the lowest in Europe (España en cifras, 2003–2004, 10). This obviously produced some concern, resulting in calls to open up the borders. With the increased immigration the birthrate has begun to pick up slowly. Their higher birthrate will have a multiplying effect on the growth of immigrant communities relative to the rest of the population, though statistics concerning foreign residents will not reflect this, since these children are Spanish citizens. España en cifras 2005 thus incorporates statistics concerning the number of children born to foreign mothers. The total has steadily climbed over the last few years, reaching 12 per cent of total births in 2003. Coupled with the low birthrate, the movement of Spaniards themselves towards the Mediterranean coast and Madrid continues to deplete certain areas, such as Galicia, the Basque territory, and Asturias, the mythical centre of Visigothic resistance to the eighth-century Moorish invasion. This major shift toward urban cen-

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tres and coastal areas swells their populations with both foreign-born and native-born newcomers. The Moroccan population presents certain peculiarities. Most notably, the predominance of men over women is about two to one, most of them single and between the ages of 20 and 34. This is by far the largest gender imbalance in any immigrant group. (Among immigrants from Latin American countries, especially Ecuador, women outnumber men.) Though Moroccan communities are spread through many areas of Spain, the largest are found in Catalunya, Andalusia (particularly Almería, where xenophobic violence in El Egido took place in 2000), and Murcia. In the latter region, however, Moroccan agricultural workers are being displaced by Ecuadorian immigrants. The dramatic increase in immigration has led to fears of a backlash. Non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and academics keep a close watch on public opinion. Interestingly, attitude surveys show Spaniards defining themselves as extremely tolerant. The ‘index of xenophobia’ in Spain has tended to be among the lowest in Europe, and the increase in immigration has not altered that situation substantially (Díaz Nicolás Los españoles 17–19). Nonetheless, there are those (among them María Angeles Cea D’Ancona) who have offered important, substantive criticisms of the data on which the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) relies for their barometers of public opinion concerning immigration. Díaz Nicolás and Ramírez Lafita, in La voz de los inmigrantes, have offered an alternative method of information-gathering which is to ask the immigrants themselves regarding their experience. Their work does reveal a general feeling among interviewees that Spaniards are less racist than other Europeans (166). Nevertheless, ‘North African and sub-Saharan immigrants feel more discriminated against than other immigrants, while Asians and, above all, Latin Americans feel less discriminated against’ (157). Statistics do indicate that African immigrants are perceived less positively. For example, in the June 2002 ‘barometer,’ responses to the question whether the government should encourage immigration more from some regions than others broke down as follows: 52.5 per cent chose Latin America, 21.3 per cent Eastern Europe, 4.3 per cent sub-Saharan Africa, and only 2.3 per cent Morocco and other North African countries (www.cis.es). The role of the media in this discussion can hardly be over-emphasized. This is dramatically reflected in the number of people surveyed who count immigration as one of Spain’s top three problems. During summer months, when news of immigrants reaching the coast in pateras

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(dinghies) appears daily on Spaniards’ TV screens, concern over immigration soars; in winter, it subsides (CIS ‘Barómetros’ 2002). Nicolás Lorite García is a specialist in the treatment of immigrants in the media and director of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona’s MIGRACOM (Observatorio y Grupo de Investigación de Migración y Comunicación). He directed a group project analysing the media representation of immigrants and how it has evolved. In 1996, the media had no coherent approach to immigration, tending to rely heavily on official sources and present only isolated events deemed newsworthy. By 2000, as the level of immigration rose dramatically, the media could hardly ignore the phenomenon, but tended to sensationalize it, emphasizing the ‘avalanche’ of immigrants pouring into the country. The predominant visual image presented was that of handcuffed foreigners driven away in police vans. In 2002, the last year covered by the five-year study, ‘Immigrants are beginning to be treated as citizens or neighbours,’ though most people when asked what comes to mind when the subject of immigration is mentioned still refer to the boatloads of undocumented Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans being intercepted along the coast (11–15). In addition to looking at how the media portray immigrants, the study quantifies how much time or space they devote to the topic, as compared with other news. The authors point out the woeful lack of attention in the media to news from immigrants’ home countries, resulting in widespread ignorance of the political and economic factors underlying the decision to emigrate in the first place. This is especially true of Africa. On the other hand, for months after 11 September 2001, the World Trade Center attacks dominated the news, leading the authors to ask what the impact may have been on Spanish public opinion of such a prolonged exposure to ‘the official American anti-Arab perspective’ (109).4 Fear is a factor in public opinion. The belief is widespread that Spain has become more dangerous as a consequence of the new immigration, and the events of 11 March 2004 have only added to that perception. Thus the xenophobia Spaniards consciously disavow resurfaces in a growing feeling of insecurity, out of all proportion to any real increase in crime.5 As criminologist Elisa García España points out in Inmigración y delincuencia en España, it is true that statistically the ‘delinquency rate’ is upwards of four times higher among the foreign population than the overall national average. Though most of these crimes are against property, and do not constitute ‘cause for alarm,’ the situation should be addressed (490, 508). She acknowledges that part of the problem is the

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state’s own tendency to criminalize undocumented immigrants, which marginalizes them from law-abiding circles, pushing them into a criminal milieu. The new Ley de Extranjería passed in 2000 addresses this to some degree. But for García España the primary factor contributing to delinquency is the uprooting (desarraigo) of immigrants from their social environment, since the ‘social controls’ on individuals’ behavior are considerably weakened when they leave their families and communities behind. This is particularly relevant in the case of Moroccan immigrants, the group with the largest proportion of single men. García España thus argues in favor of an immigration policy that would help foreign residents establish roots (arraigo) in their new home. In the first place, she would reduce ‘illegal’ immigration by making legal immigration easier. Other proposals include better access to public services, housing, and university scholarships. But above all, those who immigrate legally should be encouraged to bring their families. She considers this the chief factor in the lower delinquency rates among Asian and Latin American immigrants. An important implication of her study, then, is that Spain needs more Moroccan women immigrants.6 One issue that has attracted a lot of attention in Spain is the notion that Spaniards ought to be more tolerant of newcomers because so many emigrated in search of work during the difficult years of the Franco regime. But ironically this approach can backfire. Liliana Suárez-Navaz’s fieldwork shows how Andalusians experienced solidarity with Muslim coworkers decades ago, when they worked side by side in Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Germany. ‘The European frontier before 1986 was drawn in the Pyrenees, where French border controls scrutinized Spanish and Moroccan workers alike as immigrants from the ‘South.’ Andalusian identity was symbolically opposed to Europe’s identity and to that of other rich regions of Spain such as Catalonia’ (‘Mediterranean Rebordering’). In a process Suárez-Navaz terms the ‘rebordering of the Mediterranean,’ Andalusians have learned to use identification with Europe to make themselves feel superior, and now look down on the Moroccans living among them. In effect, the ‘border’ of Europe has moved south.7 In my view, an even longer cultural memory needs to be cultivated. Though critical of the tendency to romanticize Muslim Spain, Mercedes García-Arenal, a leading specialist in Morisco history, cautiously opens the door to a use of historical awareness to bridge the gap between cultures when she draws attention to the high level of cultural syncretism during the mudéjar period, from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth

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centuries (‘El islam en la Península Ibérica’). In 2005, El Legado Andalusí sponsored a touring exhibition titled ‘España y Marruecos: Una historia común’ (a common history), and the king and queen of Spain travelled to Marrakech for its inauguration. Thus a historical sensibility is emerging that interprets the current presence of immigrants from the Maghreb as part of an ongoing, millennial relationship across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar. But there will continue to be a backlash, and those who wish to portray the present situation negatively can also draw on the past, as César Vidal does in his best-selling España frente al Islam. For Vidal, Spain has been ‘cruelly battered’ by its proximity to Islam, against which it has served Europe as a bulwark for over a thousand years (467). Vidal’s virulent attacks on Islam sometimes border on the comic, but after 11 March his book found a ready market among conservative Spaniards who sought the comfort of a simple answer, vilifying Spain’s enemies and reasserting national unity and strength. He asserts the danger of Moroccan immigration allowing for the formation of a Muslim ‘fifth column’ within Spanish territory, ‘for the first time since the seventeenth century’ (468). As a work of history, España frente al Islam does not deserve to be taken seriously, but as a cultural phenomenon, its popularity reveals just how uncertain the future of Muslims in Spain is today – as it was for the Moriscos Cervantes depicts in his writings. At the time of this writing, new immigration continues apace, even as the higher birth rate among the immigrant population guarantees a ripple effect that will last for generations. The Spain of 2025 will be much different from the Spain of 1975, and the immigrants and their children (who will be Spaniards) will participate in this transformation. Mosques have been springing up all over, especially in Barcelona and Madrid. A new chapter is being written in the history of Islam in Spain. This time it will not be outlawed, nor will an attempt to expel all Muslims be made. Some form of convivencia, of living together, will have to be established. Splicing the Broken Thread Although much has been written about the Moriscos in Cervantes’ works, today’s vantage point on the topic is a new one, created by the changed historical circumstances. For over three hundred years, the story of the Moriscos stood as the final chapter of a closed book, the end of Islam in Spain. One could celebrate or lament the outcome of nearly a thousand years of convivencia, but in either case one knew it was over

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and done with long ago. Emphasis naturally fell on the endpoint, the expulsion itself and the interminable debate over whether it was inevitable or not. There remains considerable disagreement over the question of whether the decision was a hasty, imprudent one, the result of the excessive influence of an extremist minority, or if it really reflected the view of the majority at the time.8 Many have tried to discern Cervantes’ opinion, generally in the hope of claiming the cultural prestige of the author of Don Quixote for their own position. Almost everything written about the three episodes involving Moriscos in the mature work of Cervantes purports to demonstrate once and for all whether the author favoured or opposed the expulsion. Undeniably, the characters do indeed condemn the Moriscos and approve of their expulsion. Yet opinion is still divided between those who take the characters’ words at face value as the direct expression of the author, and those who favour an interpretation based on authorial irony.9 In his celebrated essay on the Ricote episode, Márquez Villanueva joined what he saw as Cervantes’ sympathy for the Moriscos to the interpretation of Spanish culture used by Américo Castro and his followers to oppose the underlying ideology of the Franco regime. His determination to extract from Cervantes’ texts a condemnation of the expulsion led Márquez Villanueva to make of irony an unequivocal sign of opposition, encoded to evade censorship, though the meaning would be only too clear for the sophisticated reader who knew how to read between the lines. This equation of irony with opposition tout court has contributed to the polarization of viewpoints, since those who refuse to believe Cervantes was opposed to the expulsion therefore feel compelled to deny the presence of irony in the passages dealing with this theme. Instead they assert that the anti-Morisco discourse Cervantes places in the mouths of certain characters must be taken as the author’s own opinion.10 In fact it is quite possible to accept the presence of irony in the Morisco episodes without making the leap of seeing them as a veiled criticism of the expulsion. As Martínez Bonati persuasively argues (Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel 26–31), the quest for the author’s own opinion is misguided, for communication of the author’s opinions is not the purpose of this text. Cervantes’ ‘game’ of fiction aims, rather, at allowing the reader to engage in a disinterested contemplation of questions whose urgency outside of the fictional frame makes it hard to reflect deeply and calmly about them. From this perspective, the function of irony is to remove the issue from its immediate political context,

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establishing fiction as a neutral space to pursue an understanding of the social or political phenomenon, bracketing off the decision about how it should be resolved. The time has come to initiate a new phase in the interpretation of the Moriscos in Cervantes, by means of an approach that will allow us to escape from the labyrinth of passions in which criticism was confined. A new beginning is called for, given the change in the historical circumstances relevant to the topic. Franco’s anti-democratic, intolerant regime, which defended National Catholicism and celebrated the imposition of religious unity by the Catholic Monarchs and the Hapsburgs, has disappeared from Spain. The arrival of wave upon wave of Moroccans has brought Islam back to Spain, and it is difficult to imagine under what remote circumstances it could ever again disappear. This turn of events, which will surely help to transform twenty-first-century Spain, has already changed the shape of Spanish history. The expulsion of the Moriscos no longer marks the ‘definitive’ absence of the Muslim minority. It has become instead the beginning of a long parenthesis, and the nearly onethousand-year presence of Islam prior to it will henceforth represent the normal state of affairs in the peninsula, re-established after what is no longer the endpoint, but merely a hiatus. When we take up the question, today, of the Moriscos in Cervantes, the expulsion need no longer be the primary focus of our attention. Here I will concentrate, instead, on the convivencia between Christians and Muslims (or former Muslims) as it is represented in the texts themselves: a complex relationship characterized by a mixture of desire, nostalgia, anger, and fear. Now that the time has come to splice back together the broken thread (‘anudar el roto hilo,’ as Cervantes says in the prologue to Persiles), the main thing is to see how certain aspects of the cultural past can be useful for understanding and responding to the current situation. Can Cervantes help us learn to recognize the new immigrants as the descendants of Spaniards long ago expelled, now returned to claim their rightful place within the nation? An Internal Colony in Sixteenth-Century Spain If we return to the examination of the texts themselves to see how Cervantes represents, not so much the elimination of the Moriscos by state intervention, as the existing relations between Christians and Moriscos, the most notable feature is variety. The Moriscos of the three texts are from three different regions: Granada (Coloquio de los perros), la

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Mancha (Don Quixote) and Valencia (Persiles y Sigismunda). And where their integration into the dominant social order is concerned, they offer three clearly differentiated possibilities: 1. The Morisco translator of Part One and Ricote and his family are examples of the Moriscos of New Castile, where this minority was undergoing a gradual process of integration. Though by no means equivalent to complete assimilation, the level of integration already achieved in those regions by 1609 was enough to make their expulsion unnecessary.11 In the most natural and offhand way, the narrator explains that he invited the Morisco he met in the street in Toledo to live with him at his house while he translated Cide Hamete’s manuscript. Ricote considers himself a Spaniard through and through: ‘No matter where we are, we weep for Spain, for, after all, we were born here and it is our native country ... and now I know and feel the truth of the saying that it is sweet to love one’s country’ (Don Quixote II.54, 813) (Doquiera que estamos lloramos por España, que, en fin, nacimos en ella y es nuestra patria natural ... y agora conozco y experimento lo que suele decirse, que es dulce el amor de la patria [II.54, 451]). Nonetheless, he admits that where religion is concerned, he is somewhere in between Islam and Christianity. His wife and daughter, on the other hand, are sincere Christians (452). His daughter Ana Félix is engaged to a certain don Gregorio, a cristiano viejo from a wealthy family, heir to a mayorazgo (entailment). The description Sancho gives of the sorrow on the part of their neighbours when Ana Félix and her mother are forced to leave makes it clear that they were well loved and accepted as members of the community: Your daughter looked so beautiful when she left that everybody in the village came out to see her, and they all said she was the fairest creature in the world. She was crying and embracing all her friends and companions, and all those who came out to see her, and asking them all to commend them to God and Our Lady, His Mother, and she did this with so much feeling it made me cry, though I’m not usually much of a weeper. (II.54, 816) [Salió tu hija tan hermosa que salieron a verla cuantos había en el pueblo, y todos decían que era la más bella criatura del mundo. Iba llorando y abrazaba a todas sus amigas y conocidas, y a cuantos llegaban a verla, y a todos pedía la encomendasen a Dios y a Nuestra Señora su madre; y esto, con tanto sentimiento, que a mí me hizo llorar, que no suelo ser muy llorón.] (II.54, 453–4)

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2. At the opposite extreme are the Valencian Moriscos, who live apart in a town of their own, where the only cristianos viejos are the priest and the local scribe. It is a town where Islam and Muslim customs predominate, and where the few Moriscos who have sincerely converted to Christianity have to practise it in secret. The inhabitants of this ‘lugar de Moriscos’ identify so strongly with Morocco that they exile themselves, taking to the sea in sixteen bajeles, but not without first burning and destroying all they can of the abhorred Spain they leave behind. 3. The Moriscos of Granada occupy a position between these extremes. They work and earn money as part of Spanish society, but their participation is merely economic. Their way of life is distinct, and although their numbers and wealth increase, they remain a community apart. Projected into the long term, their destiny appears to be neither true integration nor voluntary emigration, but rather to grow within the dominant society until they have reached the point of being able to claim the right to exercise political power. At least, that is what the slandering dog who describes them fears: Bear in mind that there are a lot of them and that every day they earn and hide a certain amount of money, and that a slow fever finishes a person off just as effectively as a quick one. And as they are increasing in number, so the number of those who hide money always grows, and will go on growing without stopping, as experience shows. (‘The Dog’s Colloquy’ 242) [Considérese que ellos son muchos y que cada día ganan y esconden, poco o mucho, y que una calentura lenta acaba la vida como la de un tabardillo; y, como van creciendo, se van aumentando los escondedores, que crecen y han de crecer en infinito, como la experiencia lo muestra.] (Novelas ejemplares, II, 350)

These differences between degrees of integration are reflected in the spatial configuration structuring their everyday lives. As a shopkeeper, Ricote passes his days in a town where the majority are cristianos viejos, sharing public space with them. Similarly, the Morisco translator moves freely from the street market to the Toledo cathedral to the narrator’s house. The Valencian Moriscos live in a space of their own, where Christians are at risk if they enter. Between these two extremes, although the garden of the Morisco from Granada does form a separate space, it is an open one, which allows free access to Christians, who enter and leave at will, as in the case of the poet and impresario who discuss the production of a play while Berganza listens.

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Recent historiography confirms this varied image of the Moriscos. García-Arenal has shown that even with a new influx of Moriscos after the War of the Alpujarras, an integration process was indeed taking place in New Castile. The knowledge of Islamic doctrine among the Moriscos of La Mancha dwindled as the sixteenth century reached its close. Yet even after the rebellion was put down, crypto-Islam was certainly practised in certain areas where large populations of Moriscos were concentrated, such as Hornachos in Extremadura, in Valencia, or in the Crown of Aragon. Studies of local communities, such as those by Bernard Vincent on three towns in Valencia (‘Las multiples facetas’) and Francisco J. Flores Arroyuelo concerning the Valle de Ricote, confirm the worthlessness of broad generalizations. Detailed examination reveals a range of attitudes even in a single town. On the part of old Christians these range from friendship with Moriscos to hostility and suspicion. The Moriscos themselves exhibit varying levels of determination to hold on to their ethnic identities, even within a single family.12 Despite the differences among the three texts, there are certain shared features that allow us to generalize concerning Cervantes’ representation of the Moriscos. In all three the idea of expulsion arises as a possible ‘solution’ to the Morisco ‘problem.’ Again, the issue is neither whether Cervantes supported such a solution before it took place, nor if he approved of it afterwards. What is clear is that in all cases, whatever the degree of integration achieved, the coexistence of Moriscos and cristianos viejos is experienced as a problematic situation, even an unbearable one, and the irresistible yearning for a resolution of the tension it causes is felt by all of the characters. On the other hand, the careful reader is bound to feel disconcerted when, in Persiles y Sigismunda and Don Quixote, the Moriscos themselves are the ones who express enthusiastic approval for the expulsion. Those in favour are not just any Moriscos, moreover, but ‘good’ ones, for whose sake alone such a measure would obviously have been unnecessary, even unjustifiable. This is undeniably an element of irony. Another example of such irony is the application to the Moriscos by the dog Berganza of the insulting epithet canalla (< L. canis, dog). The irony neutralizes the polemical force of anti-Morisco discourse, but leaves its concepts intact, allowing us to examine them dispassionately. When we undertake this examination, drawing together the fragments of that discourse from each episode, we find certain arguments and comparisons that appear in at least two out of the three, and one metaphor that appears in all three, that of the serpent at the breast. In

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all three it is either stated or implied that the Moriscos are not ‘firm’ or sincere Christians. Berganza accuses them of being avaricious and stingy. Ricote does not include this argument in his justification of the ‘banishing’ (destierro) of his people (nación), limiting himself to mentioning their weak and insincere conversion to Christianity and their ‘evil and outlandish efforts’ (ruines y disparatados intentos), by which he apparently refers to their alleged attempts to convince the Turks to invade Spain with their help.13 Still, he himself constitutes an example of their tendency to hoard, for he tells Sancho he is going back to unearth a treasure he left buried outside their village. The demographic argument is repeated in nearly identical terms in both Persiles y Sigismunda and El coloquio de los perros. The number of Moriscos is on the rise, according to both Berganza and Jarife, because they neither go to war nor join the clergy. Berganza also accuses them of not being drunkards: ‘their sober living makes them more fertile’ (242) (el vivir sobriamente aumenta las causas de la generación [350]), and the jadraque also mentions as one of the reasons for their population growth that they are not permitted to emigrate to the New World. They both make the same comparison: the Moriscos are like the twelve sons of Jacob who entered into Egypt, whose numbers had swelled to 600,000 when they fled from bondage. There are several levels of irony here. In the first place, the Moriscos are here associated with the chosen people, whom God caused to multiply, and the Christians are identified with the Egyptians, unjust tyrants. The comparison thus establishes an analogy between the Jews and Muslims. The two religious minorities share the fact of being enslaved peoples, oppressed by an imperialist nation.14 It is evident that the accumulation of wealth and the growth of a population are not intrinsically negative phenomena; they only become alarming when one presupposes that the Morisco presence is malignant.15 Finally, all three employ the same metaphor: the Moriscos are serpents Spain is nursing at her breast. That is, they are born and reach adulthood in Spanish territory, but they constitute there an alien and destructive presence, that grows and nourishes itself on the resources of the nation, only to strengthen itself according to its own economy, whose dynamic contributes nothing to the health of the social body in its totality. This metaphor comes from the Oresteia, when Clytemnestra dreams prophetically that her son is going to kill her. As in the previous case of biblical intertextuality, the irony here is multifaceted. The metaphor presents the conflict between Christians and Moriscos as a family quarrel. Superimposing the metaphor on the references to the Hebrews

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in Egypt, we find the resulting image is one of the three religions as three branches of one genealogical tree. Once again, the irony can be turned against the dominant group, since the vengeance Orestes takes in the Oresteia is presented as partly justified, and he is protected by Athena, who creates a system of state-sponsored justice for the purpose. In contrast, the (in)justice of the Absolute monarchy is established in order to punish the Moriscos, who occupy the same structural position as Orestes.16 These arguments are in fact typical of anti-Morisco literature, as Márquez Villanueva has demonstrated. The pastiche of this discourse, placed ironically in the mouths of Moriscos and dogs, serves here to obviate its ideological impact. At the same time, the Moriscos are pictured as a separate social group, a ‘nation’ unto itself, but contained within Spanish society, aware of its own marginalization, determined to increase its power relative to the dominant group, by means of its own labour, savings, and mutual support. This is of course precisely the image of the Moriscos as an internal colony, as I theorized the application of that concept in chapter 1 of this book. As I explained there, the Moriscos are the classic example of an internal colony in sixteenth-century Spain. Their contradictory status is typical of the colonial double bind. In any internal colony there is at one and the same time the insistence that they be incorporated into the dominant society, for example as an inexpensive source of labour, and a concern to place limits on this incorporation, obliging the colonized to remain in a subaltern socio-economic position. Also characteristic is the fear that the group in question might empower itself, in spite of everything, through the only means available: increasing their numbers and accumulating wealth. The presence of this fear could be taken almost as a litmus test for whether the group in question is an internal colony. The anti-Morisco discourse of the sixteenth century, so similar in this respect to anti-immigrant sentiment in our own time, certainly passes the test. The claim that the colonized are actually a burden on the dominant group, rather than being productive members of society, is another characteristic feature of the discourse of internal colonialism, and it leads to the tendency to blame the subaltern group for the evils of society, evils which in fact result from their colonial situation, and of which they are themselves the primary victims. Whether Cervantes echoed anti-Morisco discourse to parody it or because he shared its assumptions makes no difference here; whatever his personal views may have been, his texts clearly reveal the condition of internal colonialism under which the Moriscos lived in every region of Spain.17

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In fact, it is their condition of being an internal colony that allows us to understand the different forms of integration of the Moriscos into Spanish society, and the limits of that integration in each region. On the one hand, after 1492 the Kingdom of Granada was annexed as a quasiexternal colony, contiguous to Andalusia, and a slow and difficult process of political, economic, administrative, and cultural incorporation began. Granada constituted for most of the sixteenth century an internal colony in the most literal sense: an annexed territory populated by a distinct ethno-racial group that was brought under submission by force. A colonizing class of powerful nobles was established (such as the Mendozas) whose allegiance was divided between protecting their vassals and serving the king who had placed them there. The situation in Aragon and Valencia is somewhat more complex. The dominant class in these areas also treated ‘its’ Moriscos like feudal vassals, but because those in power did not identify with the monarchy as strongly as the nobles in the south, they protected the Morisco population more aggressively from the internal colonialism emanating from Castile. Of course it was in their own interest to do so: the cheap labour of the Moriscos was the foundation of the economy of these kingdoms. Just how selfinterested their protection really was is evidenced by the melting away of Valencian aristocratic opposition to the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, as soon as they were told they could have the property that would be confiscated in the process (Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent 180). In Castile, on the other hand, the Christian population itself went through a dramatic transformation. It is no exaggeration to speak here as well of a process of internal colonialism, as discussed in chapter 1 above. Both cristianos viejos and mudéjares passed through a ‘Christianization’ process that nevertheless did not affect both groups equally. The cristianos viejos were taught to think of themselves as ‘Spaniards’ and to identify with the projects of the monarchy, while the Moriscos were excluded from this emergent proto-nationalism, and eventually expelled. Cervantes’ Moriscas: Yesterday and Tomorrow In his treatment of the Morisco internal colony, Cervantes insistently gives narrative form to their ambivalent identities and to the questions of whether and how they could manage a ‘decolonized’ integration into the dominant society. He returns repeatedly to a specific narrative approach to the Morisco theme, in which a sympathetic female character of great beauty passes through mortal danger to escape her Muslim

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community and join the Christian one. In its broad outlines this pattern follows the plot of Byzantine romance. All three of its major instances share an atmosphere of uncertainty and painful separation, ending on a note of tentative optimism. The first example of this pattern concerns a Morisca-in-the-making, Zoraida. The second is the expelled Morisca who seeks to return, Ricote’s daughter, Ana Félix. The third involves a Morisca who remains behind when her entire community voluntarily exiles itself to Morocco. This is Rafala of Persiles y Sigismunda, Book Three, chapter 11. When we last see her, Zoraida is about to marry Ruy Pérez de Viedma an Old Christian from León, thus seeming to guarantee her acceptance in Spanish society. Her story appears in the 1605 Don Quixote, before the expulsion, so there was still ample reason to hope that some form of integration would be possible for her. Ana Félix hopes to marry don Gregorio, and if she does, perhaps she will be able to stay, with the viceroy’s help, despite the expulsion order. Rafala has no Christian suitor to vouch for her. Her case is the most uncertain, but also the most openended. Though Persiles y Sigismunda was published in 1617, the episode takes place sometime during the sixteenth century, long before the expulsion, but the reader knows that eventually the fateful day will arrive. All three of these women are presented as individuals whose integration into Spanish society seems desirable. But in each case, subtle hints remind the reader that their optimism is naive – they do not seem to fully understand the prejudices they face. These stories all contain elements that might be termed ‘realistic,’ in the sense that they incorporate aspects of the social circumstances reflected in historical documents. But they also incorporate aspects of the ‘maurophile’ idealization popularized in El Abencerraje and Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada.18 The mixture of fantasy and reality is most intense where they seem most closely to follow historical fact, as in the largely autobiographical tale of the Captive and Zoraida’s escape, or the episode of Ricote, which has often been praised for incorporating a true to life Morisco character, instead of a romantic Moor. This means we must read with some caution, attentive to the subtle ways in which Cervantes shapes our perception of events. For a reader aware of the critical juncture the Morisco question had reached by 1605, ‘The Captive’s Tale’ presents a serious challenge: the integration of converts from Islam through mixed marriages, pointing toward a future society in which the ethno-religious conflict would be overcome. Zoraida, of course, is not a Morisca, at least not yet. Her

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trajectory re-enacts the transition from Moorish princess to Morisca refugee, putting in play all of the ambiguities surrounding maurophile fantasies. As Jaime Oliver Asín showed, Cervantes based this fascinating character on the real-life daughter of a wealthy and powerful renegade known as Hayyi Murad. When he imagined her, perhaps as early as 1590, he could not have known that the Moriscos would be expelled. Her future in Spain is uncertain. This uncertainty reflects the complex attitudes, in Spanish society at that time, toward mixed marriages between former Muslims and Old Christians. On the one hand, the monarchy recognized the value of such marriages and encouraged them by offering incentives to Moriscas or Moriscos who chose to wed cristianos viejos, including land grants and the same privileges they would enjoy if they themselves were Old Christians.19 On the other, such marriages entailed a struggle. A number of appeals were made in the late sixteenth century to the Consejo de Órdenes by the offspring of Moriscas married to cristianos viejos, claiming cristiano viejo status. Though the suits were ultimately successful, the records show their neighbours and local officials considered these individuals to be, essentially, Moriscos.20 In his memoir written in exile in Tunisia, al-Hajari, a Morisco from Hornachos, tells of a friend who loved a Christian woman. ‘On the day they went to church with the bride in order to conclude the marriage, the bridegroom had to wear a coat of mail under his clothes and to take with him a sword because her family had sworn they would kill him on the road’ (Harvey 283). The entire episode of the Captive and Zoraida’s escape and arrival in Spain is fraught with tension. Based on the chronology of his tale, he has been in Algiers for about eighteen years. Coming back after so long, speaking Arabic with his companion, and dressed in Moorish style, he might naturally come under suspicion of having been a renegade. In keeping with the maurophile tradition, it is Zoraida’s extraordinary beauty, once she removes her veil, which deflects suspicion from her and from the captive as well: ‘Since it is the prerogative and charm of beauty to win hearts and attract affection, everyone surrendered to the desire to serve and cherish the beautiful Moor’ (I.37, 327) (Y como la hermosura tenga prerrogativa y gracia de reconciliar los ánimos y atraer las voluntades, luego se rindieron todos al deseo de servir y acariciar a la hermosa mora [I.37, 463]). The priest mediates for him before the judge (oídor) who happens to arrive at the inn that evening, and who, fortunately for him, also happens to be his brother. Thus, although the

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Captive and Zoraida achieve acceptance that night at the inn, the possibilities for the extra-literary integration of Moriscos who are neither so beautiful nor so fortunate remain unresolved.21 Cervantes wrote ‘The Captive’s Tale’ at least five years before the expulsion, perhaps much more if we accept Luis Murillo’s suggestive hypothesis that this text is the earliest section of the 1605 Don Quixote (‘El Ur-Quijote’). After the expulsion, he returned to the same pattern on two more occasions: the Second Part of Don Quixote and the posthumous romance Persiles y Sigismunda. The Ricote-Ana Félix episode is the epicenter of all of Cervantes’ writing on the Morisco theme. It is divided between a relatively more ‘realistic’ meeting between Sancho and Ricote in Don Quixote II.54 and a stylized, Byzantine denouement in chapters 63–4. To begin with, I want to emphasize that despite its appearance of authenticity, even chapter 54 embellishes the real condition of the Moriscos in New Castile. Ricote tells Sancho he left before the expulsion because he saw it coming and wanted to find a place to settle with his family. He has been to Germany and now is returning to unearth a fortune in gold and jewels he left buried in their town. As it happens, in 1608–9 the Inquisition of Cuenca demanded reports from the towns of its jurisdiction in la Mancha because of rumors that, during the last two years or so, Moriscos had been leaving the towns where they were assigned in order to go to France, the Barbary Coast, or other places, taking their property with them. Clearly the inquisitors were concerned to find out whether the emigrants were trying to get the jump on the expulsion order (not issued for Castile until 1610) and get out of Spain with more wealth than they would be allowed to take afterwards. The assumptions underlying this survey call to mind Ricote’s scouting expedition and buried treasure. But the reports demonstrate that the inquisitors were barking up the wrong tree. Very few Moriscos are missing, and of those that are, most left because they married in nearby towns, a few went to pursue job opportunities, and another contingent fled to escape creditors. Again and again, the emphasis is on how poor the Moriscos are. Most of them work as day labourers. Many are said to have nothing at all (‘muy pobre,’ ‘no tiene possible ninguno,’ ‘no poseía hacienda ninguna’). Perhaps three or four in a given town are tenderos de especerías, modest grocers who would never have been able to amass the fabulous wealth Ricote recovers in la Mancha before he turns up to help his daughter ransom her beloved (ADC, Inq. Leg 729, num. 975). In my analysis, the two parts of this episode work together in the following way. The Sancho-Ricote encounter, replete with carnivalesque

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elements, evokes a lost solidarity between Castilian peasants of whichever ley (literally ‘law,’ the popular term at the time for religion, as well as ethnic identity). It thus harks back to the mudéjar period, which it evokes as a time of more or less harmonious co-existence. Their meeting concludes, however, with a renunciation of that solidarity on Sancho’s part. Ana Félix’s story, in contrast, rather than looking nostalgically backward, tries to peer into a profoundly uncertain future, calling on the reader to imagine what fate could possibly await an ethnically mixed couple after the expulsion has already been carried out. The meal shared by Sancho, Ricote, and the false German pilgrims, with its rustic fare, abundant wine, and improvised solidarity exemplifies the immediate, intense connection Victor Turner referred to as communitas. In his theory of pilgrimage, discussed in chapter 3 above, the bonds of communitas that often form among pilgrims who meet on the road constitute the basis of the social efficacy of pilgrimage. A necessary condition for communitas is liminality, the bracketing of all structural categories defining our relationships to others. Here the most intense moment of liminal communitas comes when they have drunk from the wineskins: From time to time one of them would take Sancho’s right hand and say: ‘Español y tudesqui, tuto uno: bon compaño!’ And Sancho would respond: ‘Bon compaño, jura Di!’ And he burst into laughter that lasted for an hour, and did not remember anything that had happened to him in his governorship; for during the time and period when one eats and drinks, cares have no jurisdiction. (II.54, 812) [De cuando en cuando, juntaba alguno su mano derecha con la de Sancho, y decía: – Español y tudesqui, tuto uno: bon compaño. Y Sancho respondía: – ¡Bon compaño, jura Di! Y disparaba con una risa que le duraba un hora, sin acordarse entonces de nada de lo que le había sucedido en su gobierno; porque sobre el rato y tiempo cuando se come y bebe, poca jurisdición suelen tener los cuidados.] (II.54, 450)

This scene of solidarity is linked to the popular carnivalesque tradition analyzed so penetratingly by Mikhail Bakhtin in his studies of Rabelais

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and Dostoyevsky. According to Bakhtin, carnival and other festivals gave expression to a medieval popular culture that was the exact inversion of the official dominant culture. In the carnivalesque parody with which the masses responded to the Christianity of the political and ecclesiastical elites, material existence in this world is opposed to otherworldly values: the body and its functions – eating, drinking, excreting, coitus – are opposed to the spirit; the ‘lower’ organs of generation and defecation are opposed to the head, the reasoning faculty; collective existence (birth, reproduction, and death) is opposed to individual immortality. Precisely at the historical moment when Sancho and Ricote sit down to enjoy the ‘bon compaño’ (and the gargantuan wineskins) of the German pilgrims, the repression of this popular religion was well underway; and precisely in this moment the pioneering writers of Renaissance and Baroque literature, especially Cervantes and Rabelais, drew from the rich reserve of the medieval imaginary in creating what would come to be seen as modern literature.22 The incorporation of the meeting with Ricote into this carnivalesque tradition establishes a deep connection between these two neighbours: beyond the religious doctrines of Islam and Christianity, they share a sensibility, and even a vision of the meaning of human life and its possibilities for salvation or redemption. Their solidarity rests, then, not on the abstract notion, empty of all specific content, of universal humanity, but on a specific popular tradition, anterior to modernity, whose materialist and sceptical basis, opposed to the ultramundane doctrines of Islam and Christianity, celebrates the body and its functions and the participation in collective life, accepting the death of the individual as a dissolution into the group. This shared sensibility is neither Christian nor Islamic, but incorporates the ‘leyes’ of both medieval castes into a worldview that cannot be reduced to the official dogmas of either. In Cervantes’ text, however, this solidarity is carefully circumscribed, and ultimately consigned to the past. To begin with, the carnivalesque imagery is presented in nominally Christian terms: they gnaw on ham bones and drink wine. The toast, ‘Español y tudesqui, tuto uno,’ though it employs the Mediterranean lingua franca associated with North African piracy, makes no reference to Islam or the Moriscos, but to Germans (i.e., Lutherans). The larger unity into which Ricote is incorporated is Christendom, freed, however, of dogmatism – Protestant or Catholic, it’s all one – but the Morisco is only included when he is disguised as a pilgrim. Sancho himself imposes an explicit limit on his solidarity with Ricote when he refuses to accompany him in search of his buried

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treature, ‘because I’m not the least bit greedy ... and because I think it would be treason against my king if I helped his enemies’ (II.54, 814–15) (porque no soy nada codicioso ... como por parecerme haría traición a mi rey en dar favor a sus enemigos [II.54, 452]). We are brought face to face with the prohibition imposed by the expulsion, an external intervention that made the coexistence of neighbours a highly charged issue of national politics. When Sancho and Ricote embrace and separate at the end of the chapter, they cross a metaphorical threshold toward modernity, which will treat each of them very differently, though it leaves neither of them unchanged. The peasant Sancho has begun to think of himself as a Spaniard, the loyal subject of his king.23 Cervantes introduces this scene immediately after Sancho’s renunciation of his governorship. In his triple renunciation – of solidarity with Ricote, and of class mobility and self-government – Sancho seems to act with self-determination, but his choices have been manipulated by the duke and duchess, and thus reveal the impact of coloniality of power. From this moment on, there will be no dimension of local, traditional culture beyond the reach of royal power; yet this penetration of a centralized authority into all aspects of everyday life does not take the external form of a tyrannical imposition, but rather appears as a preference of the people themselves.24 In this fashion, the medieval popular culture that had mediated between religious traditions is eroded, and the incipient Spanish nation learns to accept its new identity with little or no resistance.25 The basis for solidarity between Old Christians and former Muslims is gone, then. In the denouement of this tale in chapter 63, the carnivalesque aesthetic gives way to a Baroque mise en scène, and in place of an intimate encounter between two neighbours who share a meal by the roadside, we have a dramatic military-political spectacle, narrated in the ‘Byzantine’ manner. Here the anachronistic Ricote recedes into the background and Ana Félix, awaiting her future husband and the possibility of remaining in Spain, bears the full burden of representing whatever hope is left for some tiny remnant of the onceflourishing Hispano-Muslim civilization to persist. In a number of ways, Ana Félix’s story is the inverse of the Captive’s Tale. Whereas Zoraida travelled from her native Algiers to la Mancha, Ana Félix goes from her native la Mancha to Algiers, for her a foreign country. Zoraida helped Ruy Pérez de Viedma escape from his Algerian captivity, while don Gregorio follows his beloved and is thereby taken captive. Zoraida’s painful separation from her father provides an emo-

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tional climax to ‘The Captive’s Tale.’ The reader doubts they will ever see each other again. Ana Félix joyfully reunites with her father in the climactic moment of her story, but we have every reason to doubt they will be allowed to stay together. These inversions link Zoraida and Ana Félix across the gulf that separates the hope for a positive resolution to the Morisco crisis, still possible in 1605, from the disappointment at the ‘final solution’ adopted in 1609. What the two stories above all have in common is this attractive figure of the bold Moorish/Morisca woman, whose beauty serves as her primary ‘letter of recommendation’ (carta de recomendación II.63, 526). She wants to join Spanish Christian society because she idealizes it. The fantasy is thin enough for the reader to see through, but in another sense, as we will see, it serves as a challenge to its audience. The story Ana Félix tells, like so many of the plots of Cervantes’ heroines, belongs to the Byzantine romance genre. Like Persiles y Sigismunda it includes references to pirates, captivity in Algiers, narrow escapes from death, a beautiful woman dressed as a man, a gallant young man dressed as a woman, and a series of separations and re-encounters. Techniques from Byzantine romance appear as well, including a dramatic scene that begins in medias res and is interrupted at a critical moment in order to allow the missing part of the story to be told through secondary narration (Ana Félix tells her own story with a noose around her neck, awaiting execution). The elegant style of the prose, adorned with puns and figurative language, contrasts with the simpler style of the Sancho–Ricote meeting. The artificiality and theatricality of the scene serve to emphasize that what we are seeing is a fantasy. Ultimately, the expulsion of the Moriscos is reduced to a pretext for setting the plot in motion, precipitating the young lovers’ journey, with all the ups and downs that follow: captivity in Algiers, the necessity of cross-dressing, the expedition led by Ana Félix in search of her father’s buried treasure, right up to the naval battle between the bergantín and the galleys, just witnessed by those who are listening to the secondary narration of the unfortunate Morisca. The political theme is thus eroticized. Transgression of the king’s order of expulsion is the only means by which these lovers’ desire can be fulfilled, and the transgression is thereby justified, but exceptionally, without setting any precedent or implying a more general rejection of the policy. Thus, in contrast to the illicit and clandestine atmosphere of the meeting between Ricote and Sancho, this scene can take place in the port of Barcelona, before the Viceroy and the large crowd who have gathered. Any hint of collective

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resistance or ‘betrayal of the king’ on the part of groups of peasants opposed to the expulsion has been eliminated. Here we have only two people who plead for an exception, but without clemency for them implying any consequences beyond their specific case. They are left hanging in a historical limbo, in which the future of individual petitioners cannot add up to anything tangible, visible. It is as if their ‘case’ had been entirely separated from the Morisco question that originally gave rise to it.26 Yet even in the midst of the harrowing escapes and fortunate coincidences typical of the romance genre, Ana Félix’s story exhibits certain historically accurate details. She is not yet twenty, the narrator tells us. This means she was born in the 1590s, and, assuming her family to be among those relocated to la Mancha from Granada in 1570, her parents would probably have been young children when they came. She belongs to the new generation of transplanted Moriscos whose integration into Castilian society, though far from perfect, showed definite progress. She presents herself as a sincere Christian, distressed that her own uncle, a Muslim according to Sancho (fino moro), takes her and her mother to Morocco. Both her acculturation and the way it divides her family are verisimilar. In 1580, a certain Luisa Santiago, a Morisca residing in Socuéllamos, testified to the Inquisition that on her wedding night, her husband became infuriated when he found out that she did not speak Arabic. ‘The aforesaid Luis López, her husband, told her that if he had known she didn’t know it, he wouldn’t have married her.’ Their subsequent married life consists of a strange tug-of-war: he tries to get her to learn Arabic, and she tries to teach him the fundamental prayers of Christianity. She was born in Almería around 1560 and relocated to Socuéllamos when she was about ten years old. The striking thing about her testimony is that it reveals how divided the Morisco community really was. Living in the same town, her future husband did not even know until their wedding night whether she really did not speak Arabic, or simply pretended very well in public (ADC, Inq leg 283, num 3945). Nor is Ana Félix’s self-representation as a sincere Christian improbable. In Quintanar de la Orden in 1610, a Morisca widow, Isabel Hernández, gave herself and her four children as ‘slaves’ to the Virgen de la Piedad (Our Lady of Piety), to serve at her shrine in perpetuity. Though this was obviously a ploy to avoid expulsion, there can be little doubt of her sincerity as a Christian if she was willing to go to such lengths. The help of local officials, including the parish priest, a notary, and a lawyer, would presumably not have been extended to her if they

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harboured the slightest suspicion of her being a crypto-Muslim. The Count of Salazar, placed in charge of the expulsion by Philip III, issued an official authorization for them to remain, a transcription of which was discovered by Martín de Nicolás, Quintanar’s tireless local historian (La Piedad 36–9). In the episode of Rafala and the Morisco town in Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes finally manages to reinscribe this individual situation into a socio-political context, where the fate of an entire community hangs in the balance. As analyzed in the preceding chapter, this posthumous work consists primarily of a series of interpolated episodes in which a similar cycle is repeated over and over: an individual enters into conflict with the norms of the community and is forced to leave; the resulting journey initiates a process – analogous to the pilgrimage process described in chapter 3 above – leading, in most cases, to an eventual reintegration into the community, widening in the process the limits of what is permitted in that society. In this way, social progress becomes a theme in Persiles y Sigismunda. On the other hand, there are social groups presented as being too narrow, unable to admit any variation, any exception to their strict rules. Communities that are too rigid become petrified. To judge by the example of the Barbaric Isle, in the most extreme cases, they destroy themselves (see chapter 4 above). In their trajectory across the peninsula, the pilgrims form an alternative social group, a portable community, in which individuals ejected from other communities can join together in a space that, however utopian it may seem, can be located within Spanish territory. This group of pilgrims that cross the national territory, offering aid and support to the rejected and marginalized of a variety of communities, present us with an alternative vision for unifying the social fragments of a geographical region without imposing on them the level of cultural cohesiveness of the modern nation-state. The episode of the Morisco raid exemplifies this cycle. In this case, however, the exclusion that sets the process in motion is not the exclusion of the Moriscos from Christian society, but the exclusion of Christian converts from the Morisco community by the crypto-Islamic majority. In a surprising variant on the overall pattern, instead of forcing Rafala and Jadrique to leave, the community excludes them by abandoning the Peninsula, leaving them behind. As frequently occurs in Cervantes’ fiction, the protagonists ‘just happen’ to arrive at the climactic moment. The artificiality of this device

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converges in Persiles y Sigismunda with a certain quasi-divine quality of Periandro and Auristela, as if there were a kind of magical causality at work. The quasi-supernatural power of the protagonists usually serves to suddenly manifest a hidden transgression, the revelation coinciding with their arrival. Here Rafala, a secret Christian, reveals her true identity to Auristela and Constanza in order to save their lives: her father, in whose house they are lodged, is departing with the rest of the inhabitants of the village, that very night, and he has only invited them to stay at his home either to murder them or take them captive to the North African coast. Such mass self-deportations, frequent along the coasts of Granada and Valencia until about 1570, were carried out in raids by Barbary Coast pirates, usually with the prior knowledge and consent of the Moriscos. The towns were sacked, Christian residents taken captive, and churches and sacred objects profaned. The correlation between intensified pressure to assimilate culturally and years when such raids were most frequent, suggests that they constitute resistance, albeit in an extreme form, to coloniality of power.27 Rafala sends the pilgrims to the local church to find an uncle of hers, the ‘jadraque’ Jarife, ‘a Moor in name only’ (III.11) (moro solo en el nombre [III.11, 546]; Romero Muñoz glosses ‘jadraque’ in an erudite note as equivalent to ‘sacristan’). Rafala’s crypto-Christianity is a manifestation of the ironic perspective Cervantes uses to turn the Morisco question on its head. This time the anti-Morisco discourse is in the mouth of Jarife, who explains that a grandfather of his, a great astrologer, had prophesied the expulsion by ‘a king from the house of Austria’ and a ‘prudent and illustrious adviser’ (Philip III and the Duke of Lerma). Prophecy is frequent in Persiles y Sigismunda, from the opening chapters of book One – the prophecy of the world empire on the Barbaric Isle, Mauricio’s premonitions – to Book Four – Soldino’s predictions, the Roman gallery of empty frames awaiting the portraits of future poets whose names and the titles of whose works are given. Here, though, the prophetic tone links Persiles y Sigismunda with the jofores, a clandestine genre that circulated in Spain at this time. Jofores were aljamiado texts (written in Spanish but with Arabic script) predicting the destruction of Christian Spain as a punishment for not honouring the treaty signed by Fernando and Isabel in 1492 in which the defeated Moors were promised the right to practise Islam and speak Arabic.28 The apocalyptic tone of Jarife’s prophecy harmonizes with the nihilism of the scene. With extraordinary violence and commotion, the inhabitants expel themselves – although it would almost be more accu-

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rate to say that the town destroys itself. They leave Rafala and Jarife as if they were the sole surviving refugees of a cataclysmic natural disaster. In contrast, the narrator remains calm, even indifferent, as do the priest and the scribe, the only cristianos viejos of the town. Rafala and Jarife witness the fulfilment of the secret desire they have been hiding throughout their entire lives. On arriving at the church the next morning, Rafala cannot contain her joy: ‘A Christian, a Christian and free by God’s grace and mercy!’ (III.11, 257) (– ¡Cristiana, cristiana y libre, y libre por la gracia y misericordia de Dios! [III.11, 552]), she shouts. Jarife repeats his prophecy with the same ecstatic tone as his niece: On, noble youth! Come, invincible king! Trample, smash, crush every inconvenience or obstacle and leave us a pure Spain, cleansed and cleared of this evil caste of mine, that so darkens and diminishes it! Now, noble counselor, as prudent as distinguished ... let the seas be filled with your galleys loaded with the useless weight of the descendants of Hagar; fling to the opposite shore these briars, brambles, and other weeds that hinder the growth of Christian fertility and abundance! (III.11, 258) [¡Ea, mancebo generoso! ¡Ea, rey invencible! ¡Atropella, rompe, desbarata todo género de inconvenientes y déjanos a España tersa, limpia y desembarazada desta mi mala casta, que tanto la asombra y menoscaba! ¡Ea, consejero tan prudente como ilustre ... llénense estos mares de tus galeras cargadas del inútil peso de la generación agarena; vayan arrojadas a las contrarias riberas las zarzas, las malezas y las otras yerbas que estorban el crecimiento de la fertilidad y abundancia cristiana!] (III.11, 553)

Here two details trouble the perceptive reader. First, Rafala and Jarife are the only ones who react this way – we hear nothing of the responses of Periandro and his group, nor of the priest, though the narrator makes a point of contrasting the scribe’s reaction with Rafala and Jarife’s: They waited until it was light and ... then they descended from the tower and opened the church, which Rafala entered with her face bathed in happy tears and her beauty enhanced by the excitement. She prayed before the holy images and then embraced her uncle, first kissing the priest’s hands. The scribe neither worshipped nor kissed anyone’s hands, for his soul was entirely given over to regret for the loss of his property. (III.11, 257) [Dejaron entrar el día ... y entonces bajaron de la torre y abrieron la iglesia, donde entró Rafala, bañado con alegres lágrimas el rostro, y, acrecentando con sobresalto su hermosura, hizo oración a las imágenes, y luego se abrazó

Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain 189 con su tío, besando primero las manos al cura. El escribano ni adoró, ni besó las manos a nadie, porque le tenía ocupada el alma el sentimiento de la pérdida de su hacienda.] (III.11, 552–3)

It should be remembered that this scribe is the only cristiano viejo in town besides the priest. The second troubling detail is the hollowness of this triumph, given the fact that there is no one else left in the town. Rafala is now Christian, free, and alone. Jarife begs Philip III and Lerma to trample and destroy until the land is free of the Moriscos, but here at least this discourse sounds strangely out of place: trample and destroy is what the Turks and Moriscos have just done the night before, and they have in fact left the area clean and pure, and empty. The scribe weeps over the loss of his property, but these two Christian Moriscos have lost a great deal more: their families, their community, their world. At the moment, they are celebrating, but what will become of them? The village is now a ruined place where society must be entirely rebuilt. Four inhabitants remain: two are New Christian Moriscos and two are cristianos viejos. At no point in the chapter are they shown to speak a single word to one another. Their reactions could not be more divergent. And yet the priest and the scribe represent the new Spanish society into which the two refugees will have to integrate themselves. The comparison between the Morisco society that has just destroyed itself and the Spanish Christian one seems unavoidable. Will Spain know any better how to welcome Rafala and Jarife? Are they not, in fact, among those who remain only to be expelled later, in 1609? Of all the ironic details in Cervantes’ texts about Moriscos, this is the most bitter. They celebrate the triumph of Christianity and display their enthusiastic embrace of the dominant society, but they have no community into which to integrate themselves. Do the immigrants from the Maghreb have any more of a place in Spain today? Viewed as a variant on the same pattern as Zoraida and Ana Félix, Rafala represents yet another combination of similar elements. As was the case with Zoraida, the dividing line between Christianity and Islam separates her from her own father – but here it is the father who leaves for the North African coast, while she remains. Like Zoraida, Rafala acts to save a group of Christians, in this case not only from captivity, but perhaps even death. Together, they face the dangers of a harrowing transition, though unlike either of the other two examples, they make no sea journey themselves. Their narrow escape leaves Rafala alone in the world except for a single man, though here it is not her beloved,

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but her uncle. The sincerity of her Christian devotion is not more in question than in the other two cases, but she is alone in not having a Christian suitor who can cement her belonging to Spanish society. In this sense, her future seems the most uncertain of all. Though Zoraida and Ana Félix are left hanging, their imminent marriages reassure us that somehow things may work out for them. Rafala’s situation, especially when brought into focus in this way, presents the greatest challenge to Cervantes’ original readers, for he implicitly leaves to them the responsibility of finding a place for this very determined woman. On the edge of town there is a stone cross that the fleeing Moriscos knock over on their way out, one of the final acts of vandalism the narrator includes in a list that gives the impression of a violent convulsion, produced as it were by an irrational natural force, such as a tornado or an earthquake: The raiders set fire to the town and also to the doors of the church, not really hoping to get in, but to do whatever harm they could. They left Bartolomé on foot by hamstringing his pack animal; and they knocked down a stone cross standing at the entrance to the town while shouting out Mohammed’s name. (III.11, 257) [pegaron fuego al lugar, y asimismo a las puertas de la iglesia, no para esperar a entrarla, sino por hacer el mal que pudiesen; dejaron a Bartolomé a pie, porque le dejarretaron el bagaje; derribaron una cruz de piedra que estaba a la salida del pueblo, llamando a grandes voces el nombre de Mahoma ...] (III.11, 550–1)

Rafala appears the next morning carrying a makeshift cross she fashioned out of cane, more fragile and less permanent than the stone one that was overturned, but more flexible, light, and also green, as with new hope. This is a living cross, and one that is easier to bear. It is also hers, made with her own hands. The stone one could stand poetically for a petrified and immobilized society, paralyzed by its internal conflicts, unable to open itself to accept the change it so desperately needs. And Rafala’s green cross would be a symbol, then, of the new society about to be founded, a possible future Spain forgot, that has been waiting nearly four hundred years to be remembered. These episodes all occupy a fragile utopian space, beyond which the reader intuits the prevalent islamophobia of early modern Spain. Cervantes’ audience knew how sadly mistaken the idealized image of

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Christian Spain shared by Zoraida, Ana Félix, and Rafala really was. Their stories thus constitute an ironic challenge to his readers, in his own time and up to the present day, to imagine a different Spain, one more capable of living up to the optimistic portrait these women hold in their imaginations. Of the three, Zoraida remains the most compelling. The intensity of her wish to enter Christian society cannot erase her enigmatic otherness. On the contrary, her fervent devotion seems somehow of a piece with the Islamic identity she repudiates: no other character in Don Quixote exhibits such strong religious sentiment. Generations of scholars have understood the mysterious attraction she exercises over Cervantes’ imagination in autobiographical terms. She is a captive’s fantasy, the exotic beauty that singles him out and accompanies him on the adventurous escape Cervantes himself could not succeed in making, despite a number of attempts.29 More recent interpretations consider the ambivalent nature of her character in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, associating her enigmatic qualities with the lack of the phallus, veiled during her extraordinary adventure, but destined to be revealed once she reaches her destination.30 Such readings illuminate the dark corners of Cervantes’ maurophile eroticization of the ethno-religious tensions that, in addition to dividing early modern Spanish society, also run like a thread through his own life. They nonetheless leave the mysterious Zoraida on the other side of the historical divide separating past from present. It took an Algerian writer to finally establish continuity between the sixteenth-century captive’s fantasy and our own time. On a visit to Madrid in 1992, Assia Djebar penned ‘Fugitive, et ne le sachant pas’ (Fugitive without knowing it), a striking tribute to Zoraida that she later incorporated in her 1995 autobiographical novel Vaste est le prison (So Vast the Prison). Djebar identifies with Zoraida on a number of levels. Her letters to the captive, written in Arabic only in order to be translated into Spanish, make her ‘the metaphor for Algerian women writing today – among them myself’ (173). This illegible, effaced writing is ‘the writing of a fugitive, a writing whose very essence is ephemeral’ (172).31 Like Zoraida, Djebar, who writes in French and lives part of the year in Paris, turns to Europe to escape the ‘vast prison’ of traditional Muslim womanhood, only to find herself permanently enshrined in the ambiguous space she calls ‘the in-between of two languages’ (l’entre-deux-langues). As Michèle E. Vialet has shown, the ‘two languages’ whose in-between Djebar occupies, in addition to French and Arabic (or Berber), include oral versus written. So Vast the Prison displays a fascination with written texts

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that go unread, that are effaced or destroyed, and with spoken language, especially within women’s communities, that resonates long after the words themselves have ceased to echo. At the same time as she herself identifies with Zoraida, she also compares her with her own mother, born in Cherchell, a town on the Algerian coast settled by Moriscos after 1610. She tells how her mother cherished a transcript she had made as an adolescent of noubas, Andalusian songs still passed down in the oral tradition of her community, and how that manuscript was destroyed by French soldiers during the Algerian war. They did not know what the text meant, but its Arabic characters rendered it suspect. Also during the war, Djebar’s brother was arrested without her parents being informed of his whereabouts. Her mother searched for him through the prisons of France, a courageous journey that Djebar describes as an inversion of Zoraida’s, since she is seeking the captive in Europe, in hopes of bringing him back across to Algeria. These crossings and re-crossings by Algerian women, Zoraida, Djebar, and her mother, repeat an endless cycle in which they ultimately find no resting place on either side. Writing serves less as an anchor for the self than as a way of tracing its ceaseless movement. ‘Fugitive without knowing it ... up to the moment in which I become conscious of my permanent condition as a fugitive – I would even say: as someone rooted in flight – just because I am writing and so that I write’ (176). Djebar’s bold reading views Zoraida less as a convert to Christianity than as a woman seeking liberation for herself and others: ‘Freeing the slave-hero from the dungeons of Algiers, she sets herself free from the father who has given her everything except freedom ... She exchanges her gilded cage for an elsewhere that is boundless but uncertain’ (172). At the PEN four-hundredth anniversary tribute to Don Quixote, held in New York City on 16 April 2005, Djebar once more spoke of Zoraida, describing her this time as ‘a figure of passage,’ not only in the literal sense of passing across the Mediterranean, but also between languages and cultures. ‘More than metaphor,’ Zoraida becomes the prototype of a female cultural go-between, an inversion of Cervantes himself, female and Muslim, but engaged with him in a common project. She is thus ‘the person who was missing for Cervantes,’ and in fact, Djebar concluded, ‘on both shores of the Mediterranean, for Spanish and Algerian women, Zoraida is still the one missing. She has been missing for four hundred years.’ What strikes us today as mysterious about Zoraida is her uncanny vacillation between belonging and not belonging to Spanish society.

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More than a foreigner, she is that which had become estranged from European civilization, and has now returned. For in truth, Islam has always been one of the religions of Europe. Modern Europe came into being in a constant dialogue with Islamic thought and cultural expression, and has never ceased, in spite of the worldly success of its modern world empires, to contemplate itself in the mirror held up to it by Islam. True, ‘Zoraida’ names a missing ingredient in the integration of Muslim immigrants in contemporary Europe. But she is not the marginalized Muslim woman whom we merely tolerate because our pre-existing values tell us we must. She is our beloved sister or wife, with whom we desire to create a new society, new values, and a new future, above all, for the women of the Mediterranean, who live today under a shared patriarchal system that is only more blatant in Muslim countries. Spain’s own historical experience with Islam can play a role in helping the rest of Europe to see the necessity for this transformation, but only after working through the persistent fear of the Islamic other that masks an even deeper collective desire for a forgotten dimension of its own history without which Europe can never be whole.

6 Chicanoizing Don Quixote

me habló en el sueño el pájaro tenoch it is here now la tierra de mañana get up and labra plant the seed of our self-assertion in the land the feet of our fathers stood here huellas cicatrizadas clamor for andante caballero bearers of the royal plumage of our caciques launch against the wind mills! – amérika’s – Alurista, Floricanto en Aztlán (1971)

In this poem by Alurista, as in a number of works of Chicano literature, Don Quixote is evoked as a symbol of cultural resistance to AngloAmerican hegemony. Of course, anyone who struggles against virtually insurmountable odds may be compared to the mad knight. But why would Chicano writers identify with a cultural monument of Spain, the European power that first colonized the New World? Perhaps Don Quixote and Sancho have simply been adopted by the culture of Spanish America to such a degree that they are no longer associated in the popular imagination with the Spanish Empire per se.1 In this chapter, I nonetheless argue for the existence of a deeper affinity, and based on it, a distinctive Chicano reading of Don Quixote. To ground this reading, I

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explore the historical parallels between these writers’ situation and Cervantes’ own, in order to suggest that their reading is a valid one that in turn provides new insights into the original. Thus although I begin by tracing the way Cervantes’ hero serves as a model for several Chicano writers, and by describing their reading of Don Quixote, I then use that reading to reinterpret Cervantes’ own work in relation to the historical context in which it was written. I consider the reciprocity of this approach to be of particular importance; in my reading these two traditions illuminate one another.2 The Chicano reading of Don Quixote presented here will be based primarily on three specific works which take Cervantes’ text as a model: Daniel Venegas’s Las aventuras de don Chipote (1928), Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975), and Genaro González’s The Quixote Cult (1998). Nicolás Kanellos considers Don Chipote, originally published by the Los Angeles daily El Heraldo, to be ‘the first Chicano novel’ (2–6). Given this prominence, it is significant that its title, basic structure, and several of its main characters are modelled on Don Quixote. The Road to Tamazunchale received wide acclaim as the first Chicano novel to incorporate elements of magical realism. Again, it is highly suggestive to find Arias drawing on Cervantes in creating a bridge between Chicano and Latin American writing. The primary interest of Genaro González’s novel in this context is as a recent example of the use of the Quixote paradigm by a Chicano writer.3 After treating the appropriations of Cervantes’ character by these three male writers, I will end this chapter with a discussion of Cervantine elements in a Chicana author: Ana Castillo, whose novels The Mixquiahuala Letters and So Far from God both display a subtle intertextuality with Don Quixote. Before elaborating further on the Chicano reading of Don Quixote, I want to clarify as best I can the larger goals of this critical endeavour. Nowhere do I discuss the ‘impact’ or ‘influence’ of Cervantes on Chicano writers, or make sweeping claims concerning the pervasiveness or centrality of his role in Chicano letters. To do so would be to fall into a neocolonialist trap I am most careful to avoid. The point is not to show Chicano writers to be dependent on European models, but to argue more modestly that there are some Chicano writers who have found in Cervantes’ hero a figure with whom they feel a particular affinity, and to explain that affinity by drawing attention to parallels between Cervantes’ historical circumstances and those of the writers who reference their work to his. This opens the way to a discussion of the impact of Chicano writers on Cervantes, reversing the usual way of thinking about influence.

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Their way of reading this established masterpiece has its own validity, and can contribute significantly to our understanding of Don Quixote in the twenty-first century. To read Cervantes from a Chicano perspective is thus to begin to break down the artificial barrier separating the so-called Western tradition from non-Western ones, a crucial step toward true decolonization of the literary and cultural traditions the United States has inherited from Europe and other parts of the world. From a colonial perspective, it is inconceivable that any relation other than one of dependency could exist between Spanish literature and Chicano literature. Some Chicano writers and scholars are therefore moved to deny that any relation exists; but such cordoning off of Chicano studies unwittingly serves the interests of those who defend the ‘purity’ (and ‘superiority’) of the ‘Western’ tradition. A relation like the one I sketch below, in which a fruitful dialogue exists between the two traditions, moves beyond such one-sided colonial logic. ‘Launch against the Windmills!’ Wherever the figure of Don Quixote appears in Chicano literature, whether directly or implicitly, he is associated with cultural resistance directed against the Anglo-American mainstream.4 While there is an element of paradox in this appropriation of a text produced in one of the colonizing states of Europe at the dawn of the modern age, the apparent contradiction dissolves when the relation between Don Quixote and the social history of early modern Spain is fully grasped. This entails a new historiography of the novel, however, for Don Quixote was written well before the completion of the process Edward Said has called the consolidation of imperialism, through which a culture directed toward colonial domination was constructed, with the European realist novel playing a major role. As argued in Part One of this book, Cervantes’ novelistic practice, far from serving as an instrument for imposing a monolithic cultural model throughout the Iberian Peninsula, resists the uniformity aimed at by internal colonialism. The heterogeneous structure and multigeneric composition of the Cervantine novel affirm the heterogeneity of Spanish society at the threshold of the modern age, even as it was placed under siege by Counter-Reformation orthodoxy and the expanding power of the Absolutist monarchy.5 While the struggle to maintain such heterogeneity was eventually lost on Iberian soil, it was carried forward successfully in much of Latin America. To name but one example, the seminal essay México profundo (1987) by the

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late anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla details the vital presence of Mesoamerican civilization as the foundation of life in Mexico to this day. The defence of pre-modern cultural hybridity and the corresponding rejection of the homogeneity imposed by modernization thus form the basis of the deep affinity between Cervantes’ great creation and Latin American literature in general. I discussed in chapter 2 above a well known manifestation of this affinity, the way the contemporary Latin American novel has worked beyond the constraints of nineteenthcentury realism, rediscovering in the process the value Cervantes’ texts still retain as models. The most familiar example is the style known as magical realism, which Alejo Carpentier, evoking Cervantes as an antecedent, has tied to the continued presence in Latin America, in opposition to modern European rationalism, of worldviews deriving from Amerindian and African civilizations. As Carpentier himself points out in the prologue to El reino de este mundo, medieval Europe possessed a similar alternative in the miraculous stories of saints’ lives, with their deep roots in the Greco-Roman and Celtic traditions. That cultural richness was systematically undermined in the modernization process which took place from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, yet vestiges still survive in the both the literary and the oral traditions of Cervantes’ day, and contribute to the rich formal variety of his writing. Another manifestation of the affinity between Cervantes and Latin American literature, the one that directly concerns me here, is the use by Chicano novelists of the Quixote paradigm. Like certain marginalized groups in early modern Spain, such as the Moriscos and the conversos, the Chicanos constitute an internal colony in the twentieth-century United States. In resisting this colonization, they quite appropriately make use of a quasi-mythical character originally conceived under similar conditions nearly four hundred years before. Although within Spain itself this richness was lost, and as a result the European understanding of Don Quixote was impoverished, through the eyes of Chicano readers this dimension of the work can be rediscovered. In each of the novels discussed here, there is one character that is particularly identified as quixotic, and this character is presented as part clown, part innocent dreamer and/or defender of the downtrodden. He is typically a border crosser and a transgressor, and his struggles on behalf of Chicanos and Mexicans constitute a form of opposition to Anglo-American colonialism. I will examine each of the three briefly, and then use them as the basis for describing a Chicano reading of Don Quixote. As I hope to show, their interpretation, though it implies identi-

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fication with the mad knight, is as far from the Romantic interpretation as it is from the tough-nosed insistence of ‘hard’ readers who view Cervantes’ protagonist as a mere clown. The subtle ambiguity of the Chicano reading is a consequence of a deep understanding for which the parallels between the historical reality of these authors and Cervantes’ own alone can account. I will examine these parallels, with an emphasis on the shared element of resistance to internal colonialism, concluding with a brief discussion of some of the consequences of this line of inquiry for both the historiography of the Chicano novel and the future role of Cervantes studies in the United States. These final reflections will be framed as a critical response to the monocultural theory of the novel espoused by Richard Rodríguez in Days of Obligation. Three Readers Rewriting In the earliest of the three novels, Las aventuras de don Chipote, the protagonist combines elements of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: he is a quixotic dreamer, but he also struggles ambitiously to achieve economic success for himself and his family. In their study of Venegas’s novel, which contains a useful list of parallels with Cervantes’ text, Erlinda González-Berry and Alfred Rodríguez (1996) point out the carnivalesque laughter pervading Don Chipote. They draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, originally developed to explain the persistence of medieval practices involving blasphemy and irreverence in the work of François Rabelais. Although González-Berry and Rodríguez focus most of their attention on the comic dimension of the carnivalesque, we should not forget that for Bakhtin the point of this sensibility was the way it inverted and mocked the values prevalent in the official culture of the Middle Ages. The carnivalesque in Cervantes has been traced to similar roots in such studies as James Iffland’s De fiestas y aguafiestas, in which the subversive and oppositional intent of laughter and carnival in Cervantes are highlighted. Don Chipote’s roots in popular culture and carnivalesque humour allow Venegas to achieve an ambivalence similar to that of the original on which it is modelled. His text constitutes an acerbic indictment of the treatment of Mexican immigrants in the Southwest, yet is at the same time light-hearted and life affirming. The protagonist is by turns endearing and exasperating; through a narrative technique which carefully regulates the distance between the reader and the protagonist, Venegas achieves a bittersweet tone not unlike Cervantes’. The following passage from the first chapter gives a sense of the ironic

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juxtaposition of styles, reminiscent of the opening chapters of Don Quixote: All was peace and calm. All of nature had entered into a state of respite, except for poor Don Chipote, who, completely worn out from the daily grind, continued to poke at an ox’s ass. So, obliged by his numerous progeny, he was forced to bring up the rear of his horny beast, occasionally breathing in the hardly consoling emanations from the animal’s posterior duct. Poor Don Chipote, at noontime, after polishing off the tacos he carried as provisions and sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette, was half-asleep and laid himself down to rest on a pile of corncobs; he dreamt that the cornfields, rather than ears of corn, yielded a harvest studded with glittering gold coins, and he felt downright extraordinary because now he would no longer need to work. Dreams, only dreams – because, of the little he had planted, half was devoured by crows and the other half was left to be shared among his numerous progeny, the dog, the cat, and the herd. (21) [Todo era paz y calma. Toda la naturaleza le entraba al descanso menos el pobre de don Chipote, que, bien bombeado con la friega del día, seguía picándole la cola al buey, pues obligado por la numerosa prole, tenía que seguir a la retaguardia del cornudo aspirando de vez en cuando las poco confortadoras emanaciones del conducto trasero del animal. El pobre de don Chipote, cuando al mediodía, después de arrempujarse los tacos que llevaba de bastimento y chuparse el cigarro de hoja, quedábase entre dormido y despierto y se ponía a soñar en las mazorcas, veía que las milpas en vez de dar elotes con maíz, éstos venían claveteados de relucientes aztecas y se sentía rico y que ya no tendría necesidad de trabajar. Sueños, puros sueños, porque de lo poco que sembraba, la mitad se lo tragaban los cuervos y la otra quedaba para ser repartida entre su numerosa prole, el perro, el gato, y los bueyes.] (11–12)

In the end, Don Chipote, like Don Quixote, returns to his rural village after a series of adventures on the other side of a border that, for him too, separates fantasy from reality. Like Cervantes’ seventeenth-century readers, Venegas’s primary audience of Mexicans living in 1920s Los Angeles would have felt superior to this protagonist at the same time as they identified nostalgically with the values he represented. On one level, they were much better adapted to life north of the border than he would ever be, and could laugh ruefully at his naive blunders. Yet this

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laughter would be tinged with a melancholy longing for the traditional life they had left behind, and to which they would probably never return.6 One feature linking Venegas’s novel to both Don Quixote and the Chicano novel of the seventies is the importance of the oral tradition. Much of the stylistic effectiveness of Don Chipote derives from the mixing of Chicano slang of the twenties with the cultivated sensibility of a writer who has read widely. The oral tradition – and the pre-modern, agrarian world view communicated through it – continued to play a decisive role in the key Chicano narratives of the formative period. In his studies of two of those key narratives – Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Última and Tomás Rivera’s ... y no se lo tragó la tierra – Héctor Calderón finds a strong presence of folk motifs deriving from both the pre-Columbian and Hispanic traditions. In Anaya’s book, the pre-modern, mythic dimension is so strong that Calderón considers it a romance, with deep roots in medieval/pre-Colombian belief systems (‘Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Última’). On the other hand, Rivera’s novel displays a transitional sensibility, with the oral tradition brought into contact with self-consciously modern experimentation (‘The Novel and the Community of Readers’). Indeed, Calderón associates Rivera with Cervantes in this regard, pointing out that both belong to the first generation of professional writers in their communities. It is interesting to note that for both Anaya and Rivera their use of the point of view of a child whose understanding of the world is still developing allows them to incorporate elements of folk beliefs, magic, and a sense of the mystery of life. Their departures from the strict ontology of nineteenth-century realism are thus justified by the confusion about what is real entailed by the child’s perspective. Though in principle the mixing of realism with elements of fantasy and the supernatural connects these narratives with Latin American magical realism, they do not go as far in this direction as Ron Arias in The Road to Tamazunchale, where the coherence of the fictional world is definitively ruptured by events which cannot happen in a realist novel, but which are witnessed by the entire community, such as a midsummer snowstorm on the Eastern bank of the Los Angeles river. The role of Don Quixote as a model for Don Fausto is therefore particularly significant, given the crucial position of Arias’s book as a turning point in the development of Chicano literature.7 In Arias’s novel, Don Fausto is an aging Mexican immigrant, who at times resembles the defeated, disillusioned Don Quixote toward the end of the second part of Cervantes’ novel. Yet he still imagines he is partici-

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pating in marvellous adventures, such as an expedition through time and space to the Peru of the colonial period. Don Fausto crosses and recrosses the border between fiction and reality. After his return to East L.A., an Andean named Marcelino mysteriously appears leading his herd of alpacas onto a freeway on-ramp. When Don Fausto fashions himself a cape from the shawl of his deceased wife, his resemblance to Don Quixote is abundantly clear: Fausto ... pulled out the fragile, pink cape his wife used to wear on cold nights. He tied the silk tassles under his chin and left the shed. Of course, the fit was perfect, and although the cloth was wrinkled and only hung down to his ribs, there was still a bit of sheen left. For a while Fausto postured in the sunlight next to the trash cans, then marched around the old, headless incinerator. While looking up through the muzzle of smog, he stepped on a hoe, and the handle banged his forehead. ‘Eva,’ he apologized, ‘I need your cape. I’ll put it back when I’m done.’ Taking the hoe by its rusty head, he entered the house with his staff and announced he was ready. He wasn’t sure where he was going, either to the river or to the mountains. Maybe the Lincoln Heights bus. Cape flapping, Fausto reached the bus stop on Riverside Drive and sat on the bench next to two young women wearing shorts and halter tops. They stopped chewing their gum and openly examined the odd figure with the hoe. (24)

The obvious model here is Don Quixote’s encounter with the prostitutes outside the inn during his first sally. Another parallel between Arias’s novel and Cervantes’ masterpiece is the episode in which Don Fausto, who has observed U.S. military personnel crossing the border on weekend drinking sprees without being questioned, helps a group of undocumented immigrants enter the country by dressing them up as U.S. Marines, getting them good and drunk on tequila to complete the disguise. As in the episode of the galley slaves in Don Quixote, the absurd and amusing scene reveals a more bitter injustice lingering just beneath the surface. And as in Cervantes, the protagonist here sympathizes with and tries to help the underdog, who in this context is Mexican. The parallels between the galley slaves and mojados episodes of the two novels clearly demonstrate the convergence of intention and technique in the two works. In Raúl Homero Villa’s interpretation of the intertextuality between Don Quixote and The Road to

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Tamazunchale, Arias uses the chronotope of the quest romance to critically defamiliarize the barrio of East L.A. (159). Essentially, Cervantes accomplished a similar defamiliarization of the elements of the seventeenth-century Manchegan countryside – inns, windmills, galley slaves, muleteers, prostitutes, etc. – by bringing them into contact with the chivalric world of romance. My third example, The Quixote Cult, Genaro González’s second novel (1998), uses autobiographical fiction to paint an irreverent portrait of the Chicano movement, rather in the tradition of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People. González was active in MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization) in South Texas during the late 1960s; the demise of that organization as a result of the formation of the Raza Unida Party left him rather disillusioned.8 To tell the story of the unconventional activists who were shut out when the movement ‘went legit,’ González chose to use the figure of Don Quixote. The characters of his novel, perceiving the futility of their efforts, cultivate a tone of ironic self-mockery. They use a car nicknamed ‘Rocinante’ to get to demonstrations, and on several occasions are directly compared or compare themselves to Cervantes’ hero. This is the first Chicano novel to incorporate extensive intradiagetic references to Don Quixote as a book the characters read and discuss among themselves. In part these passages recreate conversations González remembers having in real life. For example, he really did take a course in which Don Quixote was discussed in terms similar to those found in chapter 11, ‘The Unbeatable Foe.’ Some references are based on subsequent reading, however. A character explicitly mentions a critique of the romantic interpretation: ‘Some say Cervantes saw Quixote as ridiculous and out of touch, which is how people in his time saw him too. All that stuff about noble causes and fighting against all odds, all that’s what we want to believe now’ (250). González explained to me that he was referring to a passage from Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote. He also said that his interest in using Cervantes’ anti-hero to tell this story was that it would allow him to take the leaders of the movement off their pedestals, viewing events from a more human perspective and including the negative side of their activities (infighting, drug use, wavering commitment, competing interests or even, in some cases, frustration leading to apathy). He feels that the African-American Civil Rights movement has become more the stuff of legend than real life, and fears the same thing could happen to the Chicano movement. This desire to bring the potentially larger than life figures of a protest movement back down to earth parallels Cervantes’

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technique in Don Quixote, where the goal could be said to have been to bring Amadís and other super-heroes from chivalric romance down to earth, but without destroying in the process the reader’s ability to sympathize with them.9 The title of the novel refers specifically to a bit of dialogue towards the end, in which a friend tells the protagonist, De la O., that the activists really constitute a cult, similar to the Ghost Dance cult of the Plains Indians, whose members prophesied the demise of the Whites. After this conversation, De la O. comes to the conclusion that his friend is right, the Chicano activists do form a cult: the Quixote cult. That night I dream about a march that’s at once strange and nostalgic. Coco and Marcos are there, and so is Gabi, and many others who drifted into the movement and then drifted away. They all have vaguely familiar faces, the kind that only appear in dreams, and where, even though you know their identities, if you look too closely they’ll dissolve into strangers ... Leading the march is the old don himself, carrying a lance and banner. They remind me of Picasso’s scraggly outlines, except that now both rider and horse are stripped down to their skeletons, like those Posada prints from the Revolution. Following them in the distant shadows, a trail of protesters carry their own banners from the movement. I can only make out one of the slogans: Viva la muerte. (208–9)

This recognition of the movement as a quixotic cult is a culminating moment in the consolidation of the reading of Don Quixote that runs through these three novels. ‘Quixotic’ here is no longer an accusation made from outside, but the ironic juxtaposition of a commitment to fight with an awareness of how small one’s individual contribution really is in the larger scheme of things. This irony at one and the same time consoles those who resist Anglo cultural domination as they experience the frustration caused when goals are not met, and protects them from taking themselves too seriously. From the Morsico Jofor to the Ghost Dance Cult What follows is an initial attempt to sketch the broad outlines of this Chicano approach to Don Quixote, based on these three novels for which Cervantes’ work is a primary model. This is Don Quixote seen from within the Chicano literary movement, defined by Manuel de Jesús Hernández Gutiérrez as the project of self-representation of the internal colony

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formed by the mexicanoestadounidenses of the Southwest (28–56). The reading presented below, grounded in an understanding of the social reality of early modern Spain, is simultaneously true to the situation of the Chicanos in the twentieth-century United States and to Cervantes’ historical circumstances as well. It thus offers, I would argue, valid new insights into the original work that are revealed with a unique clarity when it is seen from a Chicano perspective.10 As Bruce-Novoa has pointed out, the Chicano novel rewrites history in order to contest the prevailing Anglo-American version of reality. In this ‘revisionist dialogue’ with the dominant culture, the writer takes a combative stance that ‘aggressively proposes a restructuring of the symbolic design which would radically redistribute the signs of value ... with the participants assuming the qualities of communal champions’ (32). The language of chivalry (combat, champions) as well as of reversal (restructuring, redistribute) in this account call to mind Don Quixote, the warrior-cum-carnival king, as an appropriate alter ego for those engaging in this extraordinarily unequal struggle. Further, Bruce-Novoa categorically rejects the value for Chicano narrative of the paradigm of nineteenth-century realism, whose effect, he argues, ‘is to leave the monological stance of established historiography intact, which by extension verifies the concept of centralized control, not only of the historical text, but of cultural production in general’ (36). He finds the alternative to such monologism in the ongoing, open-ended mixture of fiction and history in the work of Nash Candelaria and Rolando Hinojosa, whose writing (in true Cervantine fashion) puts into play ‘a dialogue of perspectives’ (41). The three novels examined above have a number of features in common which make them especially well suited for the dialogical approach described by Bruce-Novoa. At the formal level, all share an unpredictable episodic structure rather than a tightly organized plot. Genaro González specifically mentioned this to me as one of the features that attracted him to Don Quixote as a structuring device. In his novel the characters discuss this aspect of Cervantes’ text, which they consider truer to life because of this feature: A Chicana behind me says she read the novel a while back, in Spanish. One or two students glance at the instructor’s thick book then back at her with a mixture of awe and disbelief. ‘I had trouble following it,’ she admits, ‘and not just because of the old-fashioned Spanish. I’m used to novels where everything’s tied together. A plot that follows ... well ... a plot.’

Chicanoizing Don Quixote 205 ‘Like in Dickens,’ says the instructor. ‘There you go. But this book was lots of disconnected episodes, and one character after another. There wasn’t much ...’ – she tries retrieving the right word with a motion of her hands – ‘... much continuity. But afterwards I realized that life is like that.’ (The Quixote Cult 78–9)

González employs a similarly loose, episodic style, with characters dropping in and out of the narrative, and no real resolution at the end. He felt that pointing out the parallel with Cervantes would help to legitimate his narrative strategy. Thus we find a Chicano novelist, just as Latin American writers from Juan Montalvo to García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier have done before him, using Cervantes to justify his departures from the predominant canon of nineteenth-century realism. Ironically, Cervantes becomes the authority on how to evade the authoritarian monologism of the omniscient narrator of high realism.11 Another feature all three share is a similarly ironic tone – all could be called comic novels, though they are all also novels of disillusionment. In all three, this ambivalent tone foregrounds their affinity with Cervantes. All implicitly expect the reader to identify with, not deride, the character who serves as a figure of Don Quixote. And yet, this identification is tempered by a melancholy awareness of his failure, at least in terms of the value system of the dominant culture. In victory or defeat, however, he always stands for Mexican/Chicano culture and community, in opposition to the dominant Anglo-American mainstream. The quixotic figure in Chicano literature often belongs to an older generation of Mexican immigrants, whose tie to the country of their birth is admired, even as it appears anachronistic given the almost exclusive focus on the United States as the locus of the action. The quixotic character at times represents nostalgia for Mexico and an agrarian, pre-modern set of values, which are simultaneously rejected as belonging to the past, yet are still somehow embraced as a defence against unbridled modernization. Arias’s Don Fausto is such a figure, as are the Yaqui Loreto in Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán and Don Heraclio Cavazos in Genaro González’s first novel, Rainbow’s End. In Peregrinos, Loreto lives in a kind of limbo between reality and his melancholy, dreamlike memories: The fact of the matter was that old man Loreto had a head full of cobwebs. Grand ideals and dignity were the threads that time kept half intact, woven halfway, unraveled. (21) [Es el caso que el viejo Loreto tenía el cerebro lleno de redes: altos ideales y

206 Cervantes Now dignidad eran los hilos que el tiempo conservaba a medias, tejidos a medias, desmadejados.] (29–30) The old man refused to give up his concept of honor which was in direct conflict with his chronic hunger, and his subsistence became more problematical each day. (22) [El viejo no cejaba en sostener conceptos de honorabilidad que estaban en pleito con su hambre crónica, y a cada día se volvía menos posible su subsistencia.] (30) The man was reviewing his experiences insistently, as though looking for the error that by some accident had altered things, transforming what could have been sublime into something ridiculous and absurd. (24) [Repasaba el hombre sus experiencias obstinadamente, tal si buscara la falla que en algún percance hubiera trastocado las cosas, convirtiendo lo que pudo ser sublime en algo disparatado, absurdo.] (33)

The Mexican Revolution often serves as the focal point of these quixotic values, its failure to put its ideals into practice viewed romantically through the lens of nostalgia. Indeed, this reading takes elements of the Romantic interpretation, which viewed Don Quixote as the exemplary hero of the Ideal in its perennial struggle with the Real, but it combines them with a strong dose of self-mockery. ‘Yes, we know we are quixotic,’ these writers seem to be saying, ‘but what choice do we have, given our circumstances?’ Thus cultural resistance is justified less by any hope of ultimate success than by the need to inspire a desire to continue the struggle. Don Quijote fills this need well, since even in defeat there is something attractive – and amusing! – about his refusal to give in. As a practice of resistance to the dominant culture, Chicano self-representation requires a redistribution of the symbolic values attached to things and people in a given social milieu. Don Quixote is again appropriate, for his archetypal gesture is to rebaptize himself, his horse, his ‘lady,’ etc., in the creation for himself of a new identity which rejects the prevailing system of values and representation of the world. A common thread running through all these adaptations of the figure of Don Quixote is the focus on a specific socio-political context (Anglo versus Chicano), rather than a merely abstract philosophical struggle between ‘the Real and the Ideal’ which formed the basis of the Romantic reading. The Chicano writers examined here anchor this ahistorical Romantic reading, which has been

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justly criticized as anachronistic, in relation to their readers’ specific socio-historical circumstances.12 The ultimate foundation of this contextualization is the analogy between Chicano writers’ problematic relation to modernity and Cervantes’ own. Cervantes lived during a transitional period when the nation state had not yet been consolidated, whereas Chicanos experience the colonial time lag discussed by Homi K. Bhabha (see below), for, by and large, they were excluded from modernity when it reached the Southwest in the nineteenth century. In chapter 1, I employed ‘internal colonialism’ as a theoretical tool for grasping the difference between Spain’s early modernity and the fully fledged modern culture that produced nineteenth-century nationalism and the realist novel. This term began to be applied to racial minorities in the United States and throughout Latin America beginning in the late 1960s. Its use has always provoked strong sentiments, and it remains controversial. Some discussion of its application to the Chicano situation is therefore warranted. The decolonization of Asia and Africa sparked a vogue of using ‘internal colonialism’ as an explanation for ghettoized racial and ethnic minorities. Marxist social scientists of an activist bent used the model to draw attention to institutionalized racism and the cycle of poverty. In Latin America sociologists like Pablo González Casanova and Rodolfo Stavenhagen popularized the term; in the United States, it was associated first with the Black Power movement and with Robert Blauner’s sociological theory of racism, which focused mainly on African Americans, but quickly was picked up by Chicanos. The notion of Blacks and Chicanos as internal colonies offered an alternative to assimilationist models that compared these groups to European immigrants, implicitly or explicitly assigning them the responsibility for their marginalized status and the social and economic inequalities separating them from the mainstream. Frantz Fanon’s militant stance and his tactical support of nationalism (in The Wretched of the Earth, for example) also appealed to a generation that felt an urgent need to act. The focus was thus on objectifiable social and economic structures, and on a politics of change. Progress for the groups in question was to be achieved through autonomous organizations empowering them separately from primarily White political institutions. The first years of the 1970s saw seminal statements of the internal colonialism model as it applied to Chicanos. Tomás Almaguer’s ‘Toward the Study of Chicano Colonialism’ appeared in the journal Aztlán in 1971, its second year of publication. In 1972, Rudolfo Acuña used the

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concept in the first edition of Occupied America, and in that same year ‘The Barrio as an Internal Colony,’ signed by Mario Barrera, Carlos Muñoz, and Charles Ornelas, bluntly presented the case: Adopting this point of view means accepting that the present disadvantaged situation of Chicanos is the result of oppression by the dominant Anglo society, and that this oppression is not confined to the past but continues today ... In political terms, the situation of internal colonialism is manifested as a lack of control over the institutions of the barrio, and as a lack of influence over those broader political institutions that affect the barrio. In essence, then, being an internal colony means existing in a condition of powerlessness. (480–1; emphasis in original)

Not surprisingly, this defeatist view lost ground, especially as more Mexican-Americans moved into the middle classes. In the second edition of Occupied America (1981), Acuña chose to restrict the colonial model to the nineteenth century. Almaguer forcefully repudiated his former views in 1987. Comparing the Chicanos with Native Americans and African Americans, he found that ‘Mexicans were never subjected to the same state-sanctioned forms of labor coercion that other minority groups experienced’ (‘Ideological distortions’ 17). Based on a narrow equation of ‘colonialism,’ with coercive state power, the very scholars who had introduced the term sought to limit its use in order to avoid what they now saw as exaggeration of the oppressiveness of U.S. society, at least where Chicanos were concerned.13 Ironically, even as Chicano scholars pulled back from earlier talk of the barrio as internal colony, postcolonial theory emerged, articulating a very different view of colonialism. Intellectuals in recently decolonized states, such as Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies group in India, uncovered previously unrecognized strategies for resistance, thus rejecting the view of the colonized as passive victims. Edward Said’s Orientalism, which appeared in 1978, paved the way for a Foucauldian analysis of colonialist discourse, as something distinct from political structures per se. Postcolonial theory came to focus on the creative response to coloniality of power, and on the inevitable dialogue between colonizer and colonized. The monolithic view of colonial regimes that had led Chicano intellectuals to rethink their adoption of the internal colony model was replaced by a subtle examination of interaction between cultures in situations of unequal power relations. In Local Histories, Global Designs, Walter Mignolo praises Bolivian

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anthropologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui for ‘not being afraid of speaking of “internal colonialism”’ (96), despite other more fashionable alternatives. Although ‘the concept has been criticized from the hegemonic disciplinary perspective,’ it helps strike ‘a balance between class and ethnicity’ (104–5). It is because she deals with Andean peasants ‘not just as social classes but as ethnopolitical communities’ that ‘“internal colonialism” could be more appropriate’ (198). Chicano writers’ adoption of Don Quixote as a symbol of cultural resistance obliges me to view them as part of an ethnopolitical community also, and for that reason I still believe internal colonialism to be the most adequate framework for this discussion. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that Mignolo himself, while speaking of Sarmiento’s project to ‘civilize’ nineteenth-century Argentina as internal colonialism, generally prefers broader categories such as Quijano’s ‘coloniality of power’ (discussed in chapter 1 above), ‘global coloniality,’ or his own notion of an ongoing struggle between ‘global designs’ and ‘border thinking.’14 The important point is not to decide once and for all whether this or that label objectively describes a social and political reality that is ‘out there,’ independent of the discourse we use to describe it. Obviously, the position of Chicanos/Mexican Americans has changed over the past four decades, both as a result of social advancement, at least for some, and because of vast waves of new immigration filling in the bottom rungs of the ladder. At the same time, the theory of colonialism has been rendered more flexible. Its field of reference is no longer restricted to the political and economic coercion of colonial regimes, but includes the project of attempting to impose a new cultural identity on the colonized, as well as the strategies for resistance. ‘Colonialism’ or some variant thereof thus provides the most sophisticated field for understanding the tension within immigrant groups between ‘assimilation’ and other forms of integration. Regardless of the terminology we use to describe it, however, what should not be lost from view here is the analogy between the experience of Chicano writers in the twentiethcentury United States and the presence of marginalized groups in Cervantes’ Spain, with whom he could have identified, either vicariously or personally. For a number of Chicano writers, Don Quixote stands for resistance to their situation of internal colonialism, that is, to the cultural hegemony of Anglo-America. Such an association may seem paradoxical if we think of Cervantes’ masterpiece merely as a cultural product of the nation that conquered and colonized Mexico in the sixteenth century. Yet this

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reading ultimately suggests a new way of interpreting the relevance of Cervantes’ own historical circumstances to his writing. As discussed in the preceding chapter, the Moriscos are the clearest example of an internal colony in early modern Spain. Like the Chicanos of the Southwest, they were set apart from the dominant culture of Spain by race/ ethnicity, language, religion, and cultural tradition. Like the Chicanos, they lived in territory that had once been under the dominion of their own people. The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 can be likened to the mass deportations of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s and 1950s – with the difference that the growth of the U.S. economy led in each case to new waves of immigration when cheap labour was needed. It has taken nearly four hundred years for the Spanish economy to accelerate to the point that the descendants of the expelled Moriscos are returning in large numbers to their ancestral home in search of employment (see chapter 5 above). In comparing themselves to both Don Quixote and the millenarian Ghost Dance cult of the Plains Indians, Genaro González’s characters are unaware of the aljamiado texts which prophesied the end of Christian domination of the Iberian peninsula in strikingly similar fashion, predicting that Christian Spain would be punished by God for mistreating the Moors and failing to live up to agreements to respect their language, religion, and customs, similar to agreements between the U.S. government and both Native Americans and Mexican citizens living in the Southwest at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848).15 Undoubtedly, such prophecies arise in the imaginaries of all colonized peoples. It is tempting to dream that the historical mission of the New World is to undo the errors of the Old (and perhaps in the process to help twenty-first-century Spain make the difficult transition to becoming a multicultural society once again). Certainly such utopian visions can be found in some Chicano and Mexican writers. In Memories of the Alhambra, for example, Nash Candelaria’s protagonist, the Novomexican José Rafa, travels to Seville in search of his Spanish conquistador roots. He meets a certain Señor Benetar, who traces his ancestry back to the Moors. In a dream Benetar tells him, ‘We did not succeed in the Old World ... The Christian and the Moor got together; the Jew and the Christian got together ... But all three did not get together as equals. You have the chance in the New World to bring them together – Spanish, Indian, Anglo’ (162). On waking, José is forced to acknowledge the similarity between them: ‘Well. Yes. In what is now the United States the

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Anglos defeated us. So, in a way, we are a conquered people. Like the Moors’ (163).16 While the Moriscos constitute the closest parallel with the Chicanos, a number of other groups in Cervantes’ Spain were subject to coloniality of power, that is, pressure to assimilate to a single cultural model, a pressure backed by force. The conversos come to mind, but also all those who sympathized, as Cervantes himself clearly did, with Erasmian humanism and the relatively ‘open’ Spain it represented. The imposition of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy in rural areas that had maintained their own local religious traditions for centuries represents another form of internal colonialism. In this regard a Chicano reading can help us to understand an aspect of the relation between Don Quixote and the historical context in which it was first produced. This point concerning popular religion demands further inquiry. Following Héctor Calderón’s previously mentioned argument, both Cervantes and the Chicano writers who came to prominence in the 1970s belong to the first generation of professional writers in their communities (Calderón 1991). The modernization process of which they are a consequence still coexists with a strong oral tradition, which they incorporate into their work. In Cervantes, this manifests itself in the carnivalesque inversion of values. Thus Sancho Panza’s devotion to his stomach represents the antithesis of the Christian asceticism parodied in the novel’s protagonist. Similarly, the Chicano sensibility termed ‘rasquachismo’ inverts the dominant culture’s devaluation of the markers of Chicano identity, celebrating the junk-pile aesthetics of the barrio. In his seminal essay on the topic, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto uses Las aventuras de don Chipote as one of his prime examples of rasquachismo, pointing to some of the same features González-Berry and Rodríguez define as carnivalesque. The reason is simple: both have their roots in the same resistance to assimilation on the part of a colonized group within the society. One of the most characteristic features of the rasquache sensibility is hacer rendir las cosas, making do with what one has, through the re-use of mass-produced items in a new context, such as old tires or plastic bottles used as decorative planters. In this sense, Don Quixote is the original rasquache hero: what better example of rasquachismo than the wireand-cardboard visor he jerry-rigs for his helmet, and, later on, the barber’s basin he wears on his head? In both cases, what is especially rasquache is the pride with which this vato loco displays his cheap, imita-

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tion, homemade armor. The distance separating these laughable approximations from real knight-errantry is a consequence of the double bind that allows Don Quixote to strive for the heroic ideal but does not permit him to attain it. The same double bind gives Chicanos access to Anglo-American cultural values even as it takes away any legitimate possibility of being recognized as having adopted them. Rasquache names the sensibility that comes about as a result of this frustration. Before concluding this chapter, I wish to acknowledge that the Chicano reading offered above is only one model of how Latino/a writers have appropriated Cervantes, although it is a crucial one since it goes to the heart of the issues surrounding Chicano literature in its formative stage. Like that early version of Chicanismo, however, this reading approaches Don Quixote from a predominantly masculine viewpoint. This is true not only because the writers mentioned above are all male, but also because their identification with Don Quixote himself leaves unchallenged the chivalric depiction of female characters, which Cervantes ridiculed for the passivity assigned them. Though the elaboration of a full-fledged Chicana interpretation of Don Quixote is beyond the scope of this study, a brief exploration of Ana Castillo’s more tangential intertextuality with Cervantes can at least give some notion of how such a perspective would differ from the one I have presented. I will concentrate on two of her novels: The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) and So Far from God (1993). Though very different from one another, both incorporate Cervantine touches within a larger project that addresses the representation of women in Chicano as well as Anglo culture. Unlike the novels examined above, no character in either book is directly modelled on any of Cervantes’ creations. The Mixquiahuala Letters consists of forty letters the narrator, Teresa, writes to her intimate friend, Alicia, over the years. The primary theme is women’s self-realization, independently of their role as objects of male desire. In a literary game borrowed from Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, Castillo invites us to choose among four different sequences of chapters in our reading of the novel, labelling them as follows: ‘for the conformist,’ ‘for the cynic,’ ‘for the quixotic,’ or, ‘for the reader committed to nothing but short fiction’ (who reads each letter as a separate entity). The ‘quixotic’ reading evokes the sense in which these women’s search for fulfilment comes into irresolvable conflict with the social world in which they live and by which their own interiority has been shaped. Letter 11 is the first one to be skipped by the quixotic reader but read by both the

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cynic and conformist. In it, Teresa makes an important admission that seriously undermines the feminist quest: We weren’t free of society’s tenets to be convinced we could exist indefinitely without the demands and complications one aggregated with the supreme commitment to a man. Even greater than these factors was that of an ever present need, emotional, psychological, physical ... it provoked us nonetheless to seek approval from man through sexual meetings ... (45)

It is easy to appreciate why the quixotic feminist reader would want to skip over this letter. Interestingly, the only letter containing an explicit reference to Don Quixote is letter 38, another of the six that the quixotic reader should skip. In this letter, Vicente das Mortes (‘of the Dead’) dances all evening with Alicia, whose hair-do and dress ‘with Cinderella sleeves’ give ‘the illusion of innocence’ (131). Over and over he whispers ‘Dulcinea’ in her ear, and each time, she displays ‘a smile that oozed with honey at its sound’ (132). Alicia is the more uncompromising of the two in her pursuit of release from traditional roles. She chooses voluntary sterilization as a sign of her rejection of marriage and motherhood. For her to be seduced by the role of Dulcinea symbolically enacts the death of the illusion that any feminist quest can entirely escape contamination by patriarchy. Letter 38, accordingly, appears only in the cynic’s reading. For the author to propose alternative readings implies that no final, totalizing meaning is available for this text. This gesture recalls the play in Don Quixote with various levels of unreliability, as well as Cervantes’ declaration of his readers’ autonomy in the 1605 prologue. Castillo’s juxtaposition of a quixotic feminism with other, less unyielding approaches to self-realization for women also recalls an important Cervantine technique, that of bringing into a single narrative a kaleidoscope of variations on one narrative pattern, allowing the reader to judge among them by comparison.17 Clearly, no single reading of The Mixquiahuala Letters is complete without the other two; Castillo’s incorporation of the quixotic as one of three recognizes the need for faith in one’s ability to reach the goal, but suggests that it ought to be accompanied by large doses of self-mockery. Thus we are not too far from the way earlier Chicano authors had used Don Quixote, only realigned to a feminist perspective, and thus a critical stance toward the sexism in both cultures, Anglo and Chicano. Though it is not as easy to single out a character on a quixotic quest

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and no explicit references to Don Quixote occur in the text, a deeper Cervantine affinity pervades So Far from God, Ana Castillo’s third novel. To begin with, Castillo adopts narrative techniques that disrupt the transparency of the mimetic illusion, similar to those distinguishing Don Quixote from the high realist novel. Consider the following juxtaposition of playful chapter headings: ‘8. What Appears to Be a Deviation of Our Story but Wherein, with Some Patience, the Reader Will Discover That There Is Always More Than the Eye Can See to Any Account’ (So Far from God 120); ‘Chapter XXIV. In which a thousand trifles are recounted, as irrelevant as they are necessary to a true understanding of this great history’ (Don Quixote II.24, 614; Donde se cuentan mil zarandajas tan impertinentes como necesarias al verdadero entendimiento desta grande historia).18 Similarly, in both novels references to other versions of the same events the narrator is now telling serve to undermine authorial control: Some authors say his first adventure was the one in Puerto Lápice; others claim it was the adventure of the windmills; but according to what I have been able to determine with regard to this matter ... (Don Quixote I.2, 25) [Autores hay que dicen que la primera aventura que le avino fue la del Puerto Lápice, otros dicen que la de los molinos de viento; pero lo que yo he podido averiguar en este caso ...] (I.2, 81–2) The sorrowful telling of Francisco’s demise takes as its point of departure an adventure (or what was seen by some people as a warning) ... But this all depends on who is telling the story, and as far as anybody has been able to put it all together, it begins something like this ... (So Far from God 120)

Even information as fundamental as the names of principal characters remains doubtful: ‘Some claim that his family name was Quixada, or Quexada, for there is a certain amount of disagreement ...’ (Don Quixote I.1, 19) (Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de ‘Quijada’ o ‘Quesada,’ que en esto hay alguna diferencia ... [I.1, 71]); ‘She became known simply as La Loca ... Moreover, La Loca herself responded to that name and by the time she was twenty-one no one remembered her Christian name’ (So Far from God 25). In both novels, narrative unreliability creates a vacuum as far as authority over the text is concerned, and thus opens the door to a proliferation of mimetic systems. In Don Quixote, these are mainly the conventional genres of sixteenth-century fiction: chivalric romance, pastoral

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literature, the picaresque novel, etc. In So Far from God, they come from twentieth-century popular culture: telenovelas, movies, self-help books, New Age pseudo-spirituality, and, above all, devotional Catholicism. The closest equivalent to the parody of chivalric romance in Don Quixote that we find in Castillo’s novel is, in fact, the debunking of such devotional practices as the veneration of saints, ascetic denial of the flesh, and penitence. At the end of the novel the protagonist, Sofia, whose daughter, La Loca, became the focus of popular veneration after her death, founds a worldwide organization called M.O.M.A.S., Mothers of Martyrs and Saints, whose absurd activities are narrated with malevolent glee. Like Cervantes’ ridicule of Don Quixote’s chivalric dream, however, a certain admirable quality persists in the various ways women in So Far from God try to overcome the narrowness of society’s expectations for them. Ultimately, then, the novels share an implied analogy between conventional fictional roles and social conformity, whose flip side is the alignment of a strategic originality in fictional representations with liberation in the real world. The parallels between chapter 9 of So Far from God and chapter 5 of Part Two of Don Quixote, once perceived, are so striking that it is hard to imagine Castillo could have written it without having Cervantes’ text specifically in mind. At this point in Cervantes’ novel, Sancho Panza tries to convince his wife that it will be good for their family if he becomes a governor. In chapter 9, Sofia invites a neighbour – her ‘comadre’ – over to discuss her plan to run for mayor. In both cases, much of the humour derives from their serious discussion of the consequences of something the reader considers an impossibility. How could Sancho ever come to be the governor of anything? Sofia can never be mayor, since Tomé is not even an incorporated town, and has no mayor of its own. Yet in both cases, the impossible becomes real: Sancho gets his ‘ínsula,’ and Sofia’s campaign for mayor leads to a grass-roots movement to save the dying agricultural town, earning her the honorific title ‘La Mayor Sofi’ among local residents (149). This chapter is the most Cervantine in the novel. Much like the famous de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme (whose name I do not care to remember), the narrator announces the withholding of the comadre’s name – ‘The comadre (whose name it is best not to reveal here ...)’ (131). Later in the chapter there is a full-scale duel of proverbs between the comadre and Sofia’s husband, reminiscent of Sancho’s excessive use of proverbs in Part Two. This chapter is the one place in So Far from God where the economically depressed agricultural base of rural New Mexico is discussed, recalling as well the realities of late sixteenth-

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century la Mancha. And just as Sancho’s brief but successful stint as governor serves to demonstrate the peasantry’s capacity for self-rule, Sofia’s ability to mobilize her neighbours and save the town through a wool-producing cooperative exemplify the empowerment of workingclass women of colour. In this respect, Castillo’s transformation of the dialogue between Sancho and Teresa into a dialogue between two women is suggestive of the way she has built onto the meaning already latent in Cervantes’ text. The episode of La Mayor Sofi provides a link between So Far from God and Massacre of the Dreamers, Essays on Xicanisma (1994), written around the same time. This challenging book not only struggles against Mexican/Chicano machismo, but simultaneously critiques white middle-class feminism, which Castillo considers inadequate for herself and other ‘Third World’ women. Sofia, her comadre, and other women in Tomé, rather than striving to achieve the abstract, universal individualism espoused by mainstream Anglo-American feminism, create their own path to fulfilment, based within their communities and experience. Curiously, Castillo tries in Massacre of the Dreamers to anchor this experience in the social history of Spain and the Mediterranean, long before Cortés landed. In a highly speculative but very suggestive chapter of this book, Castillo argues that Mexican machismo has its deepest roots in the ‘ancient’ Mediterranean culture shared by early modern Spanish Catholics and North African Muslims (63–84). She emphasizes some of the same features that Assia Djebar associates with the ‘imprisonment’ of women: male jealousy, female enclosure, honour, and woman as enigma (72). A Chicana reading of Don Quixote could take up, then, the parody of the courtly love idealization of women we find in the pairing of DulcineaAldonza. At the same time, however, such a reading would find much to admire in that striking series of strong female characters that stand over against Dulcinea in the 1605 Don Quixote: Marcela, Dorotea, Camila, and Zoraida. Thus we might safely assume Castillo would not object to expanding Djebar’s claim that Zoraida is still ‘the one missing for women on both shores of the Mediterranean,’ to include the two sides of the Atlantic as well. Don Quixote, the Novel, and the Postcolonial World While I have argued for certain historical parallels between Chicano writers in the southwestern United States in the twentieth century and Cervantes in early modern Spain, it is important to recognize that these

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parallels are not merely coincidental nor are they only a consequence of a repeating pattern of cultural dominance and resistance. They are the result, ultimately, of the fact that during the period of colonization of Latin America, Spain was still in the early stages of modernization. As Michael Hechter has shown, the modern European state coalesced around a specific local nucleus, which then imposed itself on the periphery through a process of internal colonialism. Part of this process was the imposition of a uniform culture throughout a wide territory, as distinct from local traditions, which were too dependent on direct personal contact among members of a group. The basis of the sense of belonging to a national identity would ultimately have to be internalized in order for the widely diffused and abstract constructions of national identity at the level of the modern state which Benedict Anderson has referred to as ‘imagined communities’ to take hold. The ground of this sense of belonging to the state, cultivation of individual interiority, would eventually be established as the highest goal of human existence within the value system of the civilization of modern Europe, which came to be imposed at all levels of society between the end of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment.19 This revaluation of values, which led to what Herbert Frey has termed ‘the Europeanization of Europe,’ was still underway when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. In Spain, the Europeanization process took the form of the internal colonization resisted in Cervantes’ writings. In the New World, the imposition of Western civilization was at least partially unsuccessful in some of the areas colonized by Spain. The encounter between Chicano and Anglo cultures in the United States is but the latest frontier in this ongoing historical process, whereby the individualism which came to characterize modern Europe is imposed on communities whose social structure and understanding of life are collective. The Chicano writers examined here intuitively grasp that a similar struggle is dramatized in Cervantes’ text, and use it to interpret their own situation. The convergence between Don Quixote and writers of Latin American and Chicano literature confirms that the basis of the connection between them lies in their problematic relation to European modernity, of which the consumer culture of the contemporary United States is but the extreme (and perhaps final) form. Here it is necessary to restate briefly the main argument of chapter 2 above, which concerns cultural hybridity and the marvellous in Cervantes’ writings. In his famous prologue to El reino de este mundo and in his acceptance speech for the 1978 Cervantes prize, Carpentier established the Cervantine novel (including

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both Don Quixote and Persiles y Sigismunda) as a model for magical realism, due to its mixture of the realism of the picaresque with ‘that fourth dimension of the human being which is the imaginary dimension’ (‘No tuvo España’ 53). Carpentier views the modern European novel which culminated in the psychological realism of the nineteenth century as a more limited offshoot, incapable of exhausting the richness of the novel as Cervantes practised it. In effect, he argues that Don Quixote and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda were written before European civilization had completely foreclosed on the belief in the miraculous which characterized the split ontology of the Middle Ages (‘Prólogo’). In his extraordinary study of the presence of Celtic tales in Don Quixote, The Endless Text, Edward Dudley amply demonstrates the validity of Carpentier’s thesis, showing how a residual belief in the miraculous colors every page of Cervantes’ masterpiece, even as the work mocks such beliefs. At the very least, this residue betokens ambivalence concerning the cultural uniformity being imposed in early modern Europe as the price of ‘modernity.’ In turn, magical realism has been traced by Carpentier and others to the ongoing presence, in Latin American cultures, of a hybrid worldview combining elements of modernity with non-European belief systems. Thus European modernity, as it moves forward under the spell of the myth of progress, encounters its own past in the colonies. This cyclical movement inextricably intertwines the histories of the Western nation state and of the colonial world. Again and again, the ‘same’ confrontation between tradition and modernization is acted out on different soil. As Bhabha, referring to what he calls the ‘time-lag of modernity’ explains: ‘The archaism of colonial racism, as a form of cultural signification (rather than simply an ideological content), reactivates nothing less than the “primal scene” of the modern Western nation: that is, the problematic historical transition between dynastic, lineage societies and horizontal, homogeneous secular communities’ (The Location of Culture 250). This ‘problematic historical transition,’ brings about a coexistence, ‘within the cultural history of the modern imagined community, of both the dynastic, hierarchical, prefigurative “medieval” traditions (the past), and the secular, homogeneous, synchronous cross-time of modernity (the present)’ (250). Of course, Don Quixote is very much concerned with a coexistence of modernizing tendencies such as the absolutist monarchy and the mercantile economy with the medieval past of knight-errantry, the latter persisting in the European imagination throughout the modern period, as the cycles of popularity of

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chivalric romance from the Amadís craze to Sir Walter Scott to C.K. Rowling attest. Bhabha is thus close to Carpentier when he suggests that in the cultural conflicts modernization breeds throughout the world, Europe confronts its own past, the collective trauma of its own difficult birth. Given what we know of his experiences in Algeria, but also in la Mancha, Madrid, and Seville, perhaps we can count Cervantes among ‘those who have seen the nightmare of racism and oppression in the banal light of the everyday’ (The Location of Culture 254). Certainly the refusal to either hold onto the past or affirm the present and foreseeable future that he figuratively expresses in Don Quixote is close to the attitude Bhabha attributes to such ‘witnesses:’ ‘They represent an idea of action and agency more complex than either the nihilism of despair or the Utopia of progress ... This is not defeatism. It is an enactment of the limits of the “idea” of progress, the marginal displacement of the ethics of modernity’ (254-5). We thus find a disjunction between Cervantes, writing his way through the ‘primal scene’ of early modern Europe, and the high realist novel, which has left the transitional phase of early modernity behind. This time lag in the history of the novel is cast into greater relief by considering Richard Rodríguez’s claim, in Days of Obligation, that the novel is a Protestant genre, the product of the nascent individualism of the rising bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century England. Of course, Rodríguez here echoes Ian Watt’s familiar argument in The Rise of the Novel associating the emergence of the novel with Puritanism, focusing in particular on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet Rodríguez, writing in the last decade of the twentieth century, must grapple with the major contemporary counterexample, the boom in the Latin American novel. Chapter 9 of Days of Obligation, titled ‘The Latin American Novel,’ is really a discussion of the expansion of Protestantism in Latin America, as well as the influence of Protestant individualism on the Catholic Church. Despite the title of the chapter, no Latin American novelists or novels are specifically mentioned. Rodríguez’s implication is nonetheless clear: if the novel is now flourishing in Latin America, a fact seen by many as a shift in momentum away from Anglo hegemony in our hemisphere, he sees this rather as the result of the same transformation which is responsible for the spread of Protestantism: modernity – Anglo-Saxon modernity – is finally making its presence felt in Latin America. In this view, the novel remains, despite all appearances, a quintessentially Anglo-Saxon and Protestant genre, its conception of human existence within the social world is exclusively

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individualist, and the monocultural theory of the history of the novel remains undisturbed. Consideration of the ideological basis of this claim highlights the relevance of Cervantes to Chicano studies. Already in his thoughtful review essay on Rodríguez’s first book, Hunger of Memory, Tomás Rivera observed in 1984 that ‘Richard Rodriguez clearly illustrates a colonized mind’ (410) insofar as, mesmerized by his own desire to identify with the dominant culture, he ignores the contributions of Hispanic civilization to world literature. Rivera takes Rodríguez to task for his Anglocentric canon, and for failing to recognize ‘the most important element of Hispanic culture – the context of the development of the distinct religions in the Spanish peninsula – the Judaic, the Christian, and the Moorish’ (409). In effect, Rivera had Rodríguez pegged as an ideologue of monoculturalism, for whom there can be only one public language and one public culture in the United States. Taking the novel as representative of modernity, he associates the rise of this genre with the realist novel of the period of maximum European colonial expansion, and avoids mentioning Cervantes altogether. In ‘Where Does the Novel Rise?’ Diana de Armas Wilson takes the opposite view, arguing that the novel grows out of the contact of different cultures and the hybridization of forms. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, she refers to the discourse she thus deconstructs as the ‘English-only rise of the novel,’ linking this style of explanation to the monoculturalism of Proposition 227. As Carpentier’s arguments make clear, Rodríguez and Wilson are talking about two distinct novelistic traditions. Don Quixote and Latin American magic realism both belong to the more inclusive of the two, whose chronological span both pre-dates and outlasts the modern European novel. It is a genre that is simultaneously pre- and post-modern. This shows more than ever that the embracing of Cervantes – especially a postcolonial Cervantes – has more to do with rejecting Anglocentrism than with affirming Eurocentrism. Essentially this is less a question of what one reads than of how one reads it. Thus Ilan Stavans has argued, concerning what he perceives to be the entrenchment of Spanish departments in narrowly circumscribed approaches to a limited set of canonical texts: Students are offered a rigid travelogue through the Iberian Golden Age, Cervantes, the Generación del ’98, and the Spanish Civil War, as well as through Colonial Latin America, modernismo, and the artistic movements of the twentieth century in the Americas. This list is commendable, although,

Chicanoizing Don Quixote 221 once again, the context surrounding it is deficient to the core, thus crippling the student with a distorted view of Hispanic civilization. These masters ... ought to be studied in ways that highlight their own artistic condition and how it related to the present times. What I am advocating, then, is a reframing of the issues. I do not want to replace them with others more ad hoc to the times. Teachers ought to make these Iberian and Latin American classics come alive, the way Shakespeare and Henry James can come alive through refreshing pedagogical strategies. Otherwise, they cannot help but be stiff, dusty, and antiquated. It’s all a matter of perspective, for Quevedo, Cervantes, and Sor Juana, to name only three, seem to me much more urgent than a considerable portion of what is written today in Spanish. (54)

As I have tried to show, the Chicano novel has stronger ties to the Cervantine tradition than to the modern realist novel, not only because of the Spanish language and the heritage of colonialism, but ultimately due as well to Cervantes’ direct experience of that ‘primal scene’ of the modern Western nation of which Bhabha speaks. These markers situate him, like his mad knight, as well as the protagonists of his posthumous Persiles y Sigismunda, as a half-outsider with respect to European modernity. While it is true that the Crown, the conquistadores, encomenderos, and clerics of Spain played a colonizing role in the New World, we should not forget that on the Iberian Peninsula a variety of different groups within Spanish society were also experiencing colonization by both monarchical and ecclesiastical Absolutism. This chapter has raised the issue, then, of how one specific community in the New World has seen its own postcolonial situation reflected in the work of a Spanish author writing on the cusp of modernity. In concluding Transnational Cervantes, I wish to raise the much broader issue of Cervantes’ ‘place’ in our hemisphere, and in Anglo-America particularly. To get to the heart of the issue in the brief space of a conclusion, I find there is no better approach than to confront that ‘other’ European writer of Cervantes’ generation whose position here remains privileged, though for reasons that often go unexamined: Shakespeare. Just as I wish to establish the connection between Cervantes and the descendants of the former colonial subjects of Spain, so I think it necessary to remind my readers that Shakespeare’s position in the United States is also a consequence of European colonialism. If Anglo-Americans view Shakespeare as in some sense ‘their’ classic, this identification is generally untroubled by awareness of having once been a colony of England. Nonetheless I must insist upon this shared element in the reception by

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all New World readers of the European literary tradition, a tradition that we have had to transplant in order to claim it as ours. For it is my hope that one day it will cease to be possible for thousands of people to read Don Quixote every year in the United States without seeing any connection between this Hispanic classic and the millions of Spanish speakers who have made this country their home.

Conclusion: Cervantes and Shakespeare: Toward a Canon of Spanglish Literature

In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omelet pa’ los sábados, lentil pa’ los viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa’ los domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income. El resto lo employaba en una coat de broadcloth y en soketes de velvetín pa’ los holidays, with sus slippers pa’ combinar, while los otros días de la semana él cut a figura de los más finos cloths. Livin with él eran una housekeeper en sus forties, una sobrina not yet twenty y un ladino del field y la marketa que le saddleaba el caballo al gentleman y wieldeaba un hookete pa’ podear. El gentleman andaba por allí por los fifty. Era de complexión robusta pero un poco fresco en los bones y una cara leaneada y guanteada. La gente sabía that él era un early riser y que gustaba mucho huntear. La gente say que su apellido was Quijada or Quesada – hay diferencia de opinión entre aquellos que han escrito sobre el sujeto – but acordando with las muchas conjecturas se entiende que era really Quejada. But all this no tiene mucha importancia pa’ nuestro cuento, providiendo que al cuentarlo no nos separemos pa’ nada de la verdá. The opening of Ilan Stavans’ Spanglish version of Don Quixote 1

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and William Shakespeare both died on 23 April 1616 – the same date, though not the same day, since England was still on the Julian calendar and Spain was using the new Gregorian one. Cervantes was sixty-eight, a failed playwright and poet, still struggling to succeed in court society, yet destined to be remembered as Spain’s greatest writer. Shakespeare, about to turn fifty-two, was a suc-

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cessful playwright and theatrical entrepreneur, able to retire comfortably to the town of his birth. Although they occupy analogous positions at the pinnacles of their respective national literatures, certain differences need to be kept in mind. First, Cervantes’ stature derives from a single work, Don Quixote, while Shakespeare’s draws on a dozen or so of his plays. Another major difference is the language itself. English has changed more in the ensuing four centuries than Spanish. Shakespeare sounds more archaic, while Cervantes is closer to the everyday speech of our own time. This difference is offset, however, by the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are theatre, and they continue to be publicly performed and successfully adapted for the screen, while Don Quixote is read privately and, for the most part, silently. To conclude Transnational Cervantes, I have chosen to imagine a position for Cervantes in the contemporary United States, side by side with Shakespeare such that the two authors appear as the ‘figureheads,’ respectively, of the Latino and Anglo canons. Though intended as a call for increased attention to Cervantes, my argument cuts both ways: insofar as Shakespeare’s position is one of pre-eminence, allowing any writer ‘equal billing’ would necessarily diminish the Bard’s stature in relative terms. Genius aside, Shakespeare would not represent the apex of literary culture in the United States if it were not a former British colony in which English is the dominant language. Though this may seem a selfevident and almost trivial statement, I wish to draw two consequences from it that will be decisive in what follows: (1) Shakespeare had to be transplanted to this continent in order to be established as the preeminent figure of ‘our’ literary tradition. Thus we cannot reject Cervantes’ claim to a similar transplanting on the grounds that he does not ‘belong’ to this soil – neither does Shakespeare. (2) As the presence of other linguistic traditions advances in the United States, the classics of those traditions will have a stronger claim to status. Spanish has advanced rapidly over the last two decades, and appears to have reached a critical mass from which it is difficult to imagine it will recede in the foreseeable future. Because of this increase, because of the people who now live here whose native language is Spanish, Don Quixote deserves a place alongside Shakespeare as one of ‘our’ classics. Of course, Don Quixote is a masterpiece from Spain, a work of ‘European literature,’ and the new immigrants to the United States from the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Andes are not Europeans. But then, Shakespeare is a European author as well, and Anglo-Americans are not Europe-

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ans, but rather citizens of former colonies of Europe, like the Spanishspeaking immigrants. The difference between us that does seem relevant to me here is the gap in literacy rates, which reflects the unequal distribution of wealth and education. Undeniably, if Spanish turned out to have no real future as a written language in the United States, this would undermine the viability of any practical attempt to elevate Don Quixote to a status rivalling that of Shakespeare. But to put this forward as an argument against the claim, on principle, that Cervantes should rise in stature with the growth of Spanish would be to cynically insist that the cultural sphere faithfully reflect economic inequality. In the current context, that would amount to a neo-colonial affirmation of the ‘superiority’ of the ‘civilization’ that finds itself in possession of greater wealth and power.2 Another approach to shoring up Shakespearian pre-eminence is to claim that, on the basis of historical precedent, his writings speak more to Anglo-American identity and circumstances. The foundation of U.S. society and culture is British, and Shakespeare is Britain’s greatest author. Although Samuel P. Huntington never refers to Shakespeare in Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, he insists – wrongly, as I will argue – that the national culture of the United States has always been ‘Anglo-Protestant,’ and that every immigrant group has assimilated to that identity. Spanish-speaking immigrants – but primarily Mexicans – constitute the main challenge Huntington sees to this anachronistic ‘melting-pot’ model. Here, one could at least expect him to engage in a Weberian comparison of the values of ‘Hispano-Catholics’ and ‘Anglo-Protestants,’ however clichéd: community versus individual, extended family versus nuclear family, loyalties based on local ties and personal histories versus ‘civic’ and rational commitment to the state, reliance on God’s direct intervention in human affairs versus the Protestant work ethic. But the alarmist chapter on ‘Mexican Immigration and Hispanization’ (221–56) deals only with statistics concerning high dropout rates and low wages among Mexican immigrants, presented in the context of the claim that, unlike previous immigrant groups, the Mexicans form a separate, inassimilable enclave – what I have termed throughout this book an internal colony. Hiding behind the pretence of neutrality statistics always give, Huntington thus exploits the stereotype of the ‘dirty Mexican,’ portraying the impoverished immigrants as ‘undesirables’ who are themselves the problem (as opposed to free trade driven globalization, union busting, outsourcing, and other practices typical of the ‘savage’ capitalism of our day). Like Richard Rodríguez before him

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(see the concluding section of chapter 6 above), he refuses to see our neighbours in this hemisphere as having a cultural tradition of their own, that could contribute to the creation of a new cultural identity for the United States, perhaps one more integrated with the rest of the Americas. The ‘bunker mentality’ he has adopted can only see the penetration of one’s own identity by other cultures as a threat, not as resource for renewal and transformation. Fortunately, an alternative vision of ‘America’ exists, with antecedents in U.S. intellectual history. Randolph Bourne’s prescient essay ‘TransNational America’ (1916) still provides a powerful rebuttal to ideologues of Huntington’s stripe. Nearly a century ago, Bourne declared ‘the failure of the “melting pot”’ (266), defending the right of immigrants to maintain their cultural identities, since, really, the dominant culture in the United States was only a transplanted, colonial British one (‘They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian’ 270). Thus, against those ‘accusing the so-called “hyphenates,”’ Bourne insists that ‘it is only because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed the epithets that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of “hyphenated English-Americans”’ (274). Like other transplanted groups, the Anglo-Saxons look back to their mother country, but hypocritically attack others for doing so. Taking as a point of departure that ‘there is no distinctively American culture,’ but only ‘a federation of cultures’ (283), Bourne suggests that ‘our American cultural tradition lies in the future’ (284). It will be achieved by means of a ‘new cosmopolitan outlook,’ integrating elements so that ‘no national colony within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that its cultural case is being prejudged’ (292). With astonishing foresight, he sees that the creation of this integrated whole presupposes acceptance of ‘dual citizenship,’ which necessarily will include ‘that free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us’ (295). Ultimately, his vision for the United States is that it will be transformed into a place of constant circulation, a kind of world borderland: ‘America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of any threads of all sizes and colors’ (297). I have rehearsed Bourne’s argument at some length, for I think it worth reflecting upon the fact that it speaks so directly to our situation now. We have been here before, evidently, and what he calls ‘a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs’ (286) was won by the same recalcitrant faction that today would have us believe the current struggle is entirely

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unprecedented. Let us not be too easily seduced by numbers, and consider what we must do to avoid having people one hundred years from now, looking back on our calls for more open-ended understanding of cultural identity in the United States, discover to their surprise that they were not the first to have thought of it. Huntington sees Mexicans only as a threat to what he imagines to be the unified national identity of the United States. At one point he even compares them to an invading army, wondering out loud at what he considers the apathy and lack of outrage of lawmakers and the general public (317–18). One might well ask how a Harvard political science professor – even a notoriously reactionary one like Huntington – can stoop to this level of immigrant bashing and not find himself shunned on all sides as beyond the pale? Only, I think, because of the vulnerability of his target. Who will stand up for undocumented Mexican immigrants? At the risk of seeming to fall into the quixotic gesture of Ron Arias’s Don Fausto and ‘coming to the rescue’ of the mojados, armed, not with tequila but Quixotes (see chapter 6 above), I mean to suggest that the most effective answer to this racist provincialism is to do whatever we can to build up Hispanic culture in the United States, especially in its written form. Recognition of the value of a group’s culture really can translate into more respect for members of that group. Or at least, the converse seems to be true: members of groups whose culture gets no recognition are unlikely to find themselves respected. But here, coalition building is desirable. Though the Mexican cultural tradition is truly admirable, the pan-Hispanic one imposes itself with irresistible grandeur. As Randolph Bourne’s new cosmopolitan outlook would have it, our cultural tradition lies in the future. In the current context, that brings us to the recently created neologism ‘Latino,’ increasingly used to designate a consolidated ethnic minority in the United States that is Spanish-speaking or of Hispanic heritage. Latinos are the fastest growing minority group in the United States today. Though concentrated mainly in certain states, they are now living in every corner of the country. But ‘Latinos’ are a diverse group who do not share any clear defining characteristic beyond being the descendants of people who once lived in a former Spanish colony. Not all are people of colour. Many do not speak Spanish fluently, some not at all. A small sub-group speaks only an indigenous language. Some are immigrants or the children of immigrants, but others have been in the United States for many generations. For example, in South Texas there are families that never immigrated to the United States. They were there

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before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), and the border simply passed over them. Most Latinos are politically left of center, but the opposite is true of Cuban Americans. Many Latinos, especially among the fastest-growing group, Mexicans, will not complete high school. Finally, many do not consider themselves Latinos at all, preferring to use only the national denominations: Dominicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Mexicans, and so on. Latinos form a ‘new ethnicity’ in the sense that Stuart Hall introduced this term in a widely read 1989 essay where he announced ‘the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ (443). In place of racialist essentialism, ethnicity has to be recognized as ‘a politically and culturally constructed category’ useful in a Gramscian ‘war of position’ (443–4). This implies ‘the splitting of the notion of ethnicity between, on the one hand the dominant notion which connects it to nation and ‘race,’ and on the other hand ... a positive conception of the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery’ (447). The postnational conception of ethnicity Hall proposes is open-ended and constantly being redefined by those who choose to identify themselves with it. [W]e all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture ... We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our sense of who we are. But this is also a recognition that this is not an ethnicity which is doomed to survive, as Englishness was, only by marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing and forgetting other ethnicities. This precisely is the politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity. (447)

But how can such a new ethnicity have an identity, a tradition? Could Don Quixote be appropriated by this group as part of its legitimizing strategy? Not, obviously, in the closed sense of exclusive proprietary rights. It is long since a North American classic as well, as the Cervantine influence in Washington Irving and Mark Twain attests. In thinking of Don Quixote as a Latino classic, language is obviously an important factor – but not only in the obvious sense that the text of Don Quixote is written in Spanish. As a consequence of the colonial/postcolonial condition of Latin American countries, Cervantes’ masterpiece is deeply ingrained in the cultures and language of the immigrant groups embraced by the category ‘Latino.’ Indeed, in Latin America, Don Quixote is imposed as an obligatory canonical text, part of the legacy of colonialism, but in the U.S. Latino context, that need not be the case. Making the work available for use by

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a postnational ‘ethnicity of the margins’ such as U.S. Latinos could even be a way of beginning to dislodge it from its fixed, monumentalized position in the national literary histories of Spain and Latin America. Stephen Greenblatt, in a recent issue of PMLA, has argued against such a strategic use of literary history to strengthen the position of marginalized groups. He sees a risk of ‘cynical opportunism’ in the artificiality of an approach like Hall’s self-consciously constructed ethnicities: Literary history, like any other form of history, has to commit itself to a vision of truth, however provisional, nuanced, and epistemologically modest. If the assumptions of an originary or primordial culture or of a stable linguistic identity progressively unfolding through time or of an ethnic, racial, or sexual essence are misguided, then they must not be embraced, even with a sly wink and a whispered assurance that the embrace is only ironic and performative. (57; emphasis added)

In the name of Truth, there is to be no embracing of misguided notions, not even with a sly wink. To prevent this, Greenblatt proposes ‘mobility studies,’ an approach that would trace intentionally bizarre cultural trajectories as a way of undermining attempts to construct any coherent ethnic narrative. Essentially the equivalent of a literary free trade agreement, Greenblatt’s dispensation gives everyone the right to claim everything, as long as they do not try to ground their claim in anything less capricious than the senseless circulation of texts.3 An alternative to this argument can be seen in Roberto Fernández Retamar’s ‘Contra la leyenda negra’ (Against the Black Legend), where the Cuban intellectual employs, as a strategy for inventing a Spanish tradition free of the taint of imperialism, an interpretation of Spanish history close in spirit to my own emphasis on coloniality of power. Insisting on ‘the intimacy we now feel and always will feel for this other Spain’ (71) (lo entrañable que nos es y nos será siempre esa otra España [424]), he lays claim to a rather inclusive literary canon – Cervantes is there, and Machado and Miguel Hernández, but so are the Poema del Cid, Quevedo, and Azorín. And he clarifies that for him, the Black Legend remains even today an issue of power, of cultural control. ‘Is there any earthly reason why those infested with the Black Legend should presume to tell us that the errors and horrors of Spanish reaction require us to forget what – in a parallel line – is also our heritage, should presume to make us ashamed of it?’ (72) (¿A santo de qué los inficionados por la

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Leyenda Negra van a venir a decirnos que los errores y los horrores de la reacción española deben hacernos olvidar que ésa es también una herencia (o una línea paralela) nuestra, o hacernos avergonzar de ella? [425]). Though the basis for the argument Retamar attacks is somewhat different from Greenblatt’s, the principle is the same: what, indeed, gives Greenblatt the authority (‘a santo de qué’) to deny a specific cultural group’s right to forge a canon for themselves (‘hacernos olvidar que ésa es también una herencia nuestra’)? There is something wonderfully Cervantine about the ‘sly wink’ to which Greenblatt reduces performative theories of identity. Perhaps it is indeed sly to point out that Don Quixote, left up for grabs by the demise of traditional literary history, still retains a modicum of cultural capital, and that since it is written in Spanish ... Why not claim it? Above all, in attempting to carve out a place for Cervantes alongside Shakespeare in the cultural configuration of the United States, I am very much aware that this also obliges us to reflect on the basis for Shakespeare’s prominent role in ‘our’ culture. In the Anglophone United States, it feels ‘natural’ to us to think of Shakespeare as ‘ours’ in a way that thinking of Cervantes as ‘belonging to’ an Andean peasant from Perú or Ecuador does not. Accepting the adjustment to our cultural repertoire I am suggesting would imply a loss of innocence surrounding Anglo-American claims to participate in European high culture, which involve a calculated forgetting of our own former colonial status. In the end, putting Cervantes on a pedestal next to Shakespeare has the inevitable effect of de-naturalizing the Bard’s monumental status, drawing attention to the scaffolding itself. The point is thus not to simply to rectify an imbalance by erecting Shakespeare and Cervantes as the Twin Peaks of a Eurocentric canon for the Western Hemisphere. Rather, these two figures need to be placed in a dialogic relation, where each reciprocally calls into question the assumptions that have conditioned the reception of the other, throughout the Americas. Between them they open the possibility of ‘the uncoupling of languaging from national literature’ envisioned by Mignolo (223–35). Given the current configuration of population and languages, there is, paradoxically, a privileged place reserved for Cervantes in the crumbling (of the) literary canon of North America. Colonial Quixotes In the preceding chapter, I discussed a number of Chicano novelists for whom Don Quixote served as a convenient heuristic for expressing their

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complex attitudes and emotions vis-à-vis their own minority cultural identities and the need to resist the dominant culture. In accounting for this appropriation of Cervantes’ foolish hero (or heroic fool), I suggested that these writers ‘intuitively grasped’ the parallels between changes taking place in early modern Spain and their own subjection to internal colonialism in the twentieth-century United States. In recent years, there have been at least two strikingly similar attempts to articulate parallelism between Don Quixote and New World writers. In The Southern Inheritors of Don Quixote, Montserrat Ginés examines shared elements between Cervantes’ masterpiece and the works of five writers of the southeastern United States (Mark Twain, James Branch Cabell, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy). In ‘Caribbean Knights,’ a chapter of Against Autonomy, Timothy J. Reiss develops a highly original Quixote paradigm whose operation he traces in an array of West Indian authors writing in different languages (including Alejo Carpentier, Samuel Selvon, René Depestre, Paule Marshall, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Braithwaite). Each of these studies employs a bold strategy of comparative literary history that eschews the issue of influence even more radically than I do in ‘Chicanoizing Don Quixote.’ In the end, I limited myself to novels in which there was undeniably a conscious, deliberate evocation of a recognizable Quixote pattern in one or more characters. Neither Ginés nor Reiss adopts such a limitation. Doubtless, the writers they study have read Don Quixote, and some of them refer to Cervantes at one time or another (most notoriously Faulkner). But the free use they make of literary and historical analogies is exemplary for a poetics of literary cross-pollination. Of the two, Ginés’ approach is closer to my own, based as it is on the repetition of specific elements in the historical juncture faced by Cervantes and by the southern writers. What she describes as the basis for their receptivity to Don Quixote is essentially a version of the time lag of modernity in the colonial context, as described by Bhabha. Slavery created the conditions for such a time lag in the southern United States, for ‘the institution of slavery ensured that the traditional hierarchical structures of a rural society remained pre-eminent’ in contrast to the rapid modernization of the North (3). Drawing on Vilar’s account of the consciousness of decline in Cervantes’ Spain, she compares this with Southerners’ quixotic espousal of the Lost Cause as a form of resistance to modernity (3–4). For the writers she studies, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s Protestant hero of capitalist self-reliance, held no attraction. Don Quixote was another matter, however:

232 Cervantes Now Many southern writers showed an innate sympathy toward the essentially quixotic attitude of tilting against windmills, of upholding concepts of honor and chivalry, however outmoded they appeared to be in a makeshift, materialistic, and secular world. This attitude stemmed from the conflict between an inherited tradition and the values of the modern society ... Modern values ushered in the democratization of society and cultural uniformity, both consequences of the South’s incorporation into the world of industrial capitalism. Fully aware of the futility of their characters’ endeavors, these authors viewed their quixotic strivings with irony and often with humor, but theirs is also a vision full of affection, sympathy, and understanding. (5)

In ‘Caribbean Knights,’ Timothy J. Reiss undertakes a very different kind of critical project. Reading Don Quixote ‘as a figure of the mingling of cultures but, more importantly, as an allegory of debates about history’ (361), he draws on Azorín’s and Maeztú’s appropriations of Cervantes’ hero for their projects of national renewal (regeneración nacional ). The Generation of ’98 found an almost mystical significance in the rootedness of Don Quixote in the landscape of la Mancha. Reiss brilliantly reinterprets this rootedness as a feature of ‘Quijote’ that can be transferred to other local histories: ‘Quijote’s meanings lie in the landscapes of his travels. Their very ambiguity is tied to these landscapes: Castilian La Mancha, Incan Andes, modern Haiti ... This, whatever Maeztú or Azorín may have wanted to the contrary ... makes Quijote endlessly disponible, available to adopt and give back meanings according to the landscapes in which he moves’ (370). In the colonial or postcolonial Caribbean, Quixote’s ‘quest’ stems from the necessity for ‘transforming a history by telling and making it differently’ (385). The local landscape serves, as it does in Don Quixote’s la Mancha, as a space for negotiating the difficult transition from disillusionment about what has been lost in the colonial destruction, to a creative adventure in the remaking of culture. In his boundless optimism, Don Quixote believes he can remake himself and his world in the likeness of his fantasy. For Reiss, he is the figure of this remaking in Caribbean literature, although the writers he studies may not themselves be aware that their work resonates in this way with Cervantes’ novel. ‘The lament for lost cultures ... begins to be put behind. Their stories can now be stored “against some future use.” The cultures they embed are to be recovered and reset in new-built and newfound ways’ (402). Certainly it is not too big a stretch for the rasquache hero discussed above, in relation to The Road to Tamazunchale and the

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other Chicano novels I looked at in the preceding chapter, to become associated, in Caribbean literature, with cultural hybridity and transformation. Pulling together these three quixotic families of writers – Chicanos, white Southerners, West Indians – to draw out the resemblance among their ways of situating themselves before Cervantes’ text, one is faced with the common element of colonialism, internal or external. Although the context varies, and along with it, the ideological meaning of the Quixote paradigm, throughout the Americas writers feel that Don Quixote speaks to them. The entire western hemisphere consists of former colonies, and if there is any sense in which we have ‘a common literature’ it must be because we share a common postcolonial condition, even when the ‘outcome’ of colonialism diverges in terms of political and economic power. What especially interests me here is to see how Cervantes becomes less a unifying factor than a potential facilitator of dialogue across cultures. This is emphatically not a question of the ‘universal appeal’ of a work of literature, but rather of a series of particular appeals that bear a certain family resemblance. And the family among whom those resemblances occur, once again, is the family of writers on whom modernity does not sit entirely comfortably, writers who have experienced on some level the colonial time lag with respect to the modern world. The pivotal example of this dialogic role for Cervantes in the literatures of the Americas is Faulkner. Ginés devotes one third of her book to him, and this is hardly excessive, given his avowed enthusiasm for Don Quixote, of which he said in an interview ‘I read that every year, as some do the Bible’ (quoted by Ginés 72). She compares Faulkner’s critical view of the ‘idealism’ of those who identify nostalgically with the antebellum south to the parody of an hidalgo like Don Quixote, who desires to resuscitate a Golden Age of chivalry in the heart of la Mancha (Ginés 105–23). It is especially interesting to note in this regard that southern blacks are an internal colony, like the Moriscos in Spain, and that Faulkner and Cervantes both experience coloniality of power primarily by witnessing how it affects a social group to which they do not themselves belong. Reiss’s Quixote paradigm fits Faulkner as well as it does the Caribbean literature he analyses, for his quixoticism appears precisely in the tension between rootedness in a historically bounded landscape – Yoknapatawpha County – and a need to recreate that landscape beyond the past that haunts it. Fascinating in this respect is the extraordinary success of Faulkner’s work in Latin America, where his understanding of the power of fiction to re-imagine local histories provided a

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crucial antecedent for both Rulfo’s Comala and García Márquez’s Macondo. The reverberation of these Cervantine echoes is emblematic of the circulation of literary models in the Americas. With the Boom of the Latin American novel, this ongoing exchange of influences between Anglo and Latin America continues. Despite knowing it would raise some eyebrows, and perhaps even hackles, among fellow Cervantists, I chose the opening of Ilán Stavans’s Spanglish Quixote for the epigraph to this chapter. Later, in Los Angeles, I listened to James Iffland’s intelligent critique of Stavans: his opportunism, the artificiality of the peculiar lingo he has invented, which bears little resemblance to ‘real’ Spanglish, and, most damning, the possibility that his campaign in defense of this ‘new American language’ could in the long run do more to hurt the people on whose behalf he claims to advocate. Yes, yes, yes, I agree. And yet ... I still find something of value in his ‘blasphemous’ rendition, really only a publicity stunt, a tomadura de pelo intended to provoke a reaction. When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Yes! That’s exactly what we need! A Spanglish Quixote!’ It seemed to capture so perfectly the transnational whirl in which we read Cervantes’ masterpiece in the contemporary United States. Only gradually have I arrived at the realization that Stavans has come too late. His gesture is superfluous. The Quixote we read here is always already Spanglish, whether we like it or not. When we read Don Quixote, we position ourselves at the confluence of the Anglo and Latino: Washington Irving, Lizardi, Twain, Montalvo, Dickens, Galdós, Faulkner, Borges, Nabokov, García Márquez, Rushdie, Álvaro Mutis ...4 Shakespeare, Race, and the Spanish Inquisition Writers as varied as William Faulkner, Ron Arias, and Paule Marshall make use of a Quixote paradigm that speaks to their different experiences of the postcolonial. Scholars working on early modern Europe, however, show disappointingly little interest in the cultural models arising on the Iberian Peninsula in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At times, as we shall see, this avoidance seems almost wilful. Moreover, in the United States, a country with a growing Hispanic population, neglect of Spanish-language literature, particularly of ‘classics’ whose cultural capital is comparable to that of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dante, is complicitous, albeit inadvertently, with the marginalization of that population. A prime example is Loomba’s stimulating book Shakespeare, Race, and

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Colonialism, which contains many references to Spain, but not one to any work of Spanish literature. The theoretical framework for discussing race in early modern Europe relies entirely on the situation regarding conversos and Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain, used repeatedly to exemplify early modern race relations. More specifically, Spanish purity of blood laws are taken as the prototype of modern racism. It is worth quoting a typical passage at some length in order to show the degree to which, in discussing these issues, Loomba uses Spain as her theoretical stepping-stone: Emerging national/imperial identities in Europe could never be entirely pure, could never successfully erase the long histories of intermingling. When Isabelle and Ferdinand entered the Alhambra to take the keys of the palace from Boabdil, the last Moorish king, they were dressed in Moorish clothes. Their triumphant identities could only be fashioned by appropriating their ‘others’ ... [Their] order that Jews and Moors should dress like Christians and melt into the pot was no expression of liberalism but part of an attempt to create a homogeneous Christian nation. It was to result not in integration, but in further waves of expulsion, and greater anxieties about the nature of human identity, culminating in the infamous ‘blood laws’ whereby the Inquisition attempted to probe ever deeper into human beings to identify who a true Christian might be. Thus, as the nations of Christian Europe initiated their attempts to conquer and shape other people in their own image, what we call modern racism was born. (16–17)

I find nothing objectionable in Loomba’s analysis here; in fact, she is referring to the process I call internal colonialism, analysed in chapter 1 above. And it is a positive development that the Inquisition and other aspects of the ‘attempt to create a homogeneous Christian nation’ are here seen as typically European gestures – turning the Black Legend on its head. What does trouble me, however, is the lack of interest in Spain’s own cultural expressions, even as Spanish history is exploited to trace European racism back to Shakespeare’s day. This ability to find in Shakespeare’s texts a recognizably modern preoccupation with race helps make possible innovative interpretations. Why not extend those interpretations to Spain’s own literary productions? Further, the importance of Spain in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism has been played down in subtle ways. The curious reader who consults the index to see what Loomba says about Spain finds only four page numbers, including neither the passage quoted above nor about a dozen

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similar passages referring to ethno-religious tensions specific to Spain. An interesting example is the discussion of the medieval taboo against mixed marriages in the chapter on The Merchant of Venice. According to Loomba’s note, the passage, which talks about laws and practices designed to limit miscegenation, is based on David Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence. Nirenberg’s archival research was done exclusively in the Crown of Aragón, but here Loomba makes no reference to Spain, reducing it to an unnamed shadow presence with which to contrast the situation in England: ‘In England where the population had not been so heterogeneous, fears of miscegenation heightened as overseas contact spread’ (159, emphasis added). The repetition of such minor details forms a pattern. Spanish history is freely raided for insights into racial tensions more visible there than elsewhere, but this implies no commitment to finding out what Spaniards themselves had to say about race. Loomba’s chapter on Othello is inspired, to my mind the best part of the book. She shows how the play counterposes stereotypes about gender relations in Islamic countries with anxieties concerning the control of women’s sexuality and the policing of the border between self and other, in both racial and religious terms. The play invites Englishmen to compare themselves not only with Muslims, but also with Italians and Spaniards as well. Following Eric Griffin and Barbara Everett, she links Iago to Santiago Matamoros: ‘Iago’s hatred of Othello definitely invokes the hostility of the Old Christians in Spain towards the newly converted Moors there’ (104). The play thus evokes a rivalry between Catholics and Muslims to which Shakespeare and his audience might complacently consider themselves immune. Yet Loomba insists that ‘such anxieties were not confined to Spain’ (105). In the end, it seems, religious difference cannot explain away the residual racial element, and therefore the discomfort Othello generates cannot be overcome simply by rejecting religious fanaticism. ‘In fact, the power of this play is that it brings blackness and religious difference into simultaneous play while also making visible the tension between them’ (107). It is instructive in this regard to consider Andrés de Claramonte’s El valiente negro en Flandes, a play from this period that focuses more exclusively on race, isolating it from the issues of religion and gender that give Othello its tragic force. Juan de Mérida is black, but also very ambitious. He joins the Spanish forces fighting in the Low Countries under the Duque de Alba, and rises by degrees until he becomes maestre de campo, is made a caballero de la orden de Santiago, and marries a white woman of the aristocratic class. Admittedly, El valiente negro can by no means compete

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with the sublime poetry of Othello, but it has its own blunt eloquence, which led Frantz Fanon to quote lines such as the following to show that the modern feeling of racial inferiority already existed in the early seventeenth century: ¡Qué ser negro en el mundo infamia sea! ¿Por ventura los negros no son hombres? ¿Tienen alma mas vil, mas torpe y fea? [That it should be a disgrace to be black in this world! / Are blacks not men? / Do they have a baser soul, more clumsy and uglier?] ... ¿Tanta bajeza es ser negro? ¿Tanto tizna el desdichado color de mi rostro? [Is it so vile to be black? / Does the unfortunate / color of my skin leave such a stain?] ... ¿Que esto es ser negro? ¿Esto es ser Deste color? Deste agravio Me quejaré a la fortuna, Al tiempo, al cielo y a cuantos Me hicieron negro. [What is it to be black? Is it being / this color? For this outrage / I will denounce fate, time, heaven, and all those / that made me black.] (Valiente negro 493–95; Black Skin, White Masks 213–16)5

There are two versions of Claramonte’s play, in one of which he marries a leading aristocratic lady from Mérida. Popular audiences saw this version on stage, evidently identifying with a black man whose ambition led him to defy racial taboos. The other version, published in 1638, was revised for an audience of readers of printed books, who belonged to a higher socio-economic class that would find the interracial marriage scandalous (Rodríguez López-Vázquez 5). As Loomba herself comments, after the usual discussion of Spanish concern with limpieza de sangre, ‘all over Europe, the nobility were often understood as a “race” distinct from ordinary folk’ (7). Here we have a convergence, then, of race and class that compliments in interesting ways the convergence of race and gender in Othello. Moreover, the possibility of comparing the two versions raises issues about the reception of plays concerning such controversial topics.

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Is Loomba obligated to discuss Spanish literature, then, perhaps even El valiente negro specifically? This seems to me a reasonable expectation given how clearly bound up her work is with issues of Spanish social history. After all, it is hard to imagine how Loomba could justify ignoring El valiente negro en Flandes on the grounds that the Spanish context is too different from the English one, when she herself has chosen to refer to this context so frequently in her book. Naturally, she is not a specialist in Spanish Golden Age drama, and may have been unaware of Claramonte’s play, an obscure work that has never been translated into English (though a German translation recently appeared). Further, the principal study of the representation of blacks in Spanish Golden Age theatre is Bartolomé Fra Molinero’s La imagen del negro en el teatro del Siglo de Oro, also in Spanish. But Loomba refers to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and recommends it as a useful book for thinking about race. There she would at least have come across references to a seventeenth-century Spanish play dealing very explicitly with race. My point could be summed up this way. I see a danger here – which would in fact be much less significant in a critical work that did not mention Spain at all – of inadvertently reinforcing the Black Legend by giving the impression that Spaniards were as racist as Englishmen, if not more so, but did not produce the kind of ambiguous works questioning the assumptions of racism that Shakespeare did. That is a false impression, and a reader who came away from Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism with such a sense would have been misled. But in all fairness, those of us who work on early modern Spanish literature have the first responsibility, to provide compelling, up-to-date interpretations of such texts in English, so our colleagues in comparative literature and even in English departments can read them. ‘The fault ... is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings’ (Julius Caesar I, ii, 140–1). Toward an Americanist Reading of Persiles y Sigismunda It would be hard to argue with the claim that anyone with a serious interest in the literature of the Americas will want to read Don Quixote because of the pervasiveness of its influence in the western hemisphere. The same could be said about Shakespeare, but not specifically about many other European writers to the same degree. A goal of this book has been to affirm this judgment concerning Don Quixote, but with a difference. Reading more of Cervantes’ work, especially Persiles y Sigismunda, will provide such a reader – whatever his or her native language(s) might

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be – with a place from which to rethink the terms of the reception of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and the European tradition in all the corners of this hemisphere. Persiles y Sigismunda gives us leverage over the conventional but erroneous reading of Don Quixote as the originator of the modern realist novel. Further, Persiles y Sigismunda, of all Cervantes’ works (except El rufián dichoso) is the most concerned with America. The parallels with The Tempest are suggestive. The unnamed island of that play, though located on the map between Tunisia and Naples, is found imaginatively in the Caribbean. There is a tradition of Tempest criticism going back over a century that interprets the play in exclusively Americanist terms. Diana de Armas Wilson has persistently argued that a similar geographical ambiguity occurs in the first six chapters of Persiles y Sigismunda, which take place on an unnamed ‘Barbaric Isle’ located geographically somewhere in the North Sea, but imaginatively in the New World. ‘Cervantes is engaged in a curious discursive struggle ... to accommodate American elements to European discourse’ (Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World 184). In a manner strikingly similar to Shakespeare, then, Cervantes wrote a late work set in Europe, with an explicitly European geography and European characters, but with a fantasy New World island projected into it. It is as if both of these writers felt a similar reluctance to end their careers without writing about America, but a similar reticence about creating a work clearly and openly set in the New World, which neither of them ever visited, and which their reading must have shown them was very different from the only world they knew, the Old one.6 The result, in Cervantes’ case, is an island populated by ‘fictional barbarians who are half-European and half-American’ (Wilson 105) by means of whom Cervantes begins his last completed work with ‘a six-chapter parody of Iberian expansionist policies’ (Wilson 181). Another fascinating aspect of Persiles y Sigismunda is the frequency with which the narrator mentions that characters are speaking another language, or do not understand one another’s language. The adventures at the start of the work bring together characters from many countries, and Cervantes makes a point of telling the reader who is speaking Polish, Spanish, Italian, and so on. During the chapters in which Periandro and Auristela travel through Spain, the reader is occasionally reminded that they do not speak Spanish. Wilson discusses at length the character Transila, who is kidnapped by the Barbarians to serve as their interpreter (209–18). The culminating revelation of the protagonists’ true identities comes in a conversation on which Persiles eavesdrops outside Rome. Hidden from view, he moves closer so he can hear: ‘lo que más le admiró

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fue que hablasen en lengua de Noruega, estando tan apartados della’ (IV.12, 698). The encounter between Ricla and Antonio de Villaseñor, which I analysed in chapter 4 above as an example of liminal communitas, presents a remarkable example of what Walter Mignolo terms ‘bilanguaging,’ in which individuals’ experiences across languages mark their bodies as well as their lives. Initially, Antonio sees Ricla on the beach of the Barbaric Isle; their bodies communicate what they cannot yet say to one another in words: She was stunned to see me, her feet took root in the sand, she let go of the little shells she held and the shellfish all scattered; clasping her in my arms without saying a word to her, nor she to me, I went straight into the cave ... Once she got over her first fright, never taking her eyes off me, she touched me all over my body and, from time to time, all fear now forgotten, she would laugh and embrace me ... (I.6, 39) [Pasmóse, viéndome; pegáronsele los pies en la arena; soltó las cogidas conchuelas y derramósele el marisco; y, cogiéndola entre mis brazos, sin decirla palabra, ni ella a mí tampoco, me entré por la cueva adelante ... Ella, pasado aquel primer espanto, con atentísimos ojos me estuvo mirando, y con las manos me tocaba todo el cuerpo y, de cuando en cuando, ya perdido el miedo, se reía y me abrazaba ... (I.6, 174)]

As Ricla herself explains, completing the narration Antonio began: [M]y many comings and goings from this place were sufficient cause for this boy and this girl to be born to me and my husband as a result. I call this man my husband because, before he knew me completely, he gave me his word to be mine ... He has taught me his language, as I have taught him mine, and in it he also taught me laws of the Catholic Christian faith. (I.6, 40–1) [[M]is muchas entradas y salidas en este lugar le dieron bastante para que de mí y de mi esposo naciesen esta muchacha y este niño. Llamo esposo a este señor, porque, antes que me conociese del todo, me dio palabra de serlo ... Hame enseñado su lengua, y yo a él la mía, y en ella ansimismo me enseñó la ley católica cristiana. (I.6, 176)]

This bilingual, mestizo family will eventually return to Spain, adopting a Christian identity; but the pre-linguistic communication and cultural exchange on which their relation is based persists in the reader’s imagination until the end of Persiles y Sigismunda. Bilanguaging, a cultural practice Mignolo associates with border thinking, arises where the colo-

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nial difference comes up against the global designs emanating from metropolitan centres. The role of bilanguaging in the representation of cultural hybridity in Persiles y Sigismunda is arguably the most profoundly authentic dimension of its engagement with America. In contrast, The Tempest glosses over linguistic differentiation, despite Greenblatt’s insistence on the recognition of Caliban’s cultural alterity (Learning to Curse 31). Twice in the play, characters are surprised to find that the natives of the island speak their language – the first is Ferdinand, who on hearing Miranda speak, exclaims, ‘My language? Heavens! / I am the best of them that speak this speech, / Were I but where ‘tis spoken’ (I.ii, 429–31). Stephano, on hearing Caliban speak, whom he had taken for a monster, also wonders, astonished, ‘Where the devil should he learn our language?’ (II.ii, 65–6) Of course, in both cases, the answer is that Prospero has taught them. The modern reader may wonder, what language is it that all these characters, from Catalunya, Naples, and Milan, share? Of course, at one level, it is English, the only language everyone in Shakespeare’s audience understood. Within the fiction, however, which would it be? Tuscan? Neapolitan? Catalán? In contrast to the linguistic pluralism and mimetic precision of Persiles y Sigismunda, in fact, The Tempest refuses even to raise such questions of translation and inter-linguistic communication. As I argued in chapter 4 above, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda configures within the geography of Spain a fictional space for constructing an open-ended, evolving national identity. That space permits individuals from all over Europe and beyond – Ricla, a native of the Barbaric Isle, is figuratively an Amerindian – to form a spontaneous community where intercultural dialogue can take place, enriching the sociocultural context that surrounds them. This alternative vision of Spanish identity is itself incorporated into a narrative that renders permeable all borders and limits within the geographical space of Europe, even while opening Europe out toward America. For the New World reader, the mixing of cultures and languages in Cervantes’ last book can serve to counterbalance his all-too-Castilian masterpiece, Don Quixote. Persiles y Sigismunda is a book in which the weight of everyday life that drove Alonso Quijano and Sancho Panza from their sleepy town of la Mancha has been lifted. The lightness of the book is tied to the characters’ comings and goings, from their countries of birth and their local communities, and above all from Spain itself. The hybridity and intercultural dialogue it evokes, in the last analysis, flourished in our hemisphere even during Europe’s fiercest nationalist epoch. Yet we are also inheritors of that nationalist

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tradition in the prevailing understanding of cultural identity and the homogeneous public sphere in which intercultural exchange is supposed to take place. In our postcolonial age, the arrival in Europe of migrants from the former colonial empires has made such movement of peoples commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic. The space of fiction Cervantes uses to represent a Baroque intercultural public sphere can serve readers in the United States and, indeed, throughout the Americas as an image of the postmodern multiculturalism in which we have already begun to live. Given the similarities in our current circumstances, European readers may also profit from such an Americanized reading of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Perhaps the time has finally come for Cervantes’ other masterpiece to come down off the dusty shelves of scholars and begin once more to circulate where its author intended, among the enthusiastic readers of Don Quixote, his first great literary success, but not his last.

Notes

Abbreviations ADC AGS AHN AHPT AHT Inq OO MM

Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca Archivo General de Simancas Archivo Histórico Nacional Archivo Histórico Provinciano de Toledo Archivo Histórico de Toledo Inquisición Órdenes Militares

Preface: Transnationalizing Cervantes 1 David Lupher has shown that the arguments of Las Casas and his followers led some Spaniards to question their long-standing identification with Rome, and consider the numantinos who resisted the Roman conquest of Iberia as their ‘true ancestors.’ Among the questioners was the young Cervantes, whose Cerco de Numancia identifies with the fight for local autonomy against imperial power. See also Simerka’s reading of the play as an example of counter-epic literature. 2 Balibar mentions ‘state religion’ as a ‘transitory form of national ideology’ that nevertheless in some countries ‘lasted for a long time and produced important effects by superimposing religion on national struggles’ (Race, Nation, Class 95). Given the Franco regime’s reaffirmation of national Catholicism as the ideological basis of the Spanish state, it is fair to say that in Spain’s case, this ‘transitory form’ lasted a very long time. 3 Luis Avilés has characterized Persiles y Sigismunda as a ‘centrifugal’ response to the dilemmas of imperial power, as opposed to Gracián’s Criticón, which he sees as ‘centripetal.’

244 Notes to pages xii–4 4 A watershed for this tendency was the special issue, Spanish Nation Formation of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, guest edited by Alberto Moreiras in 2001. 5 Ironically, this remains true even at a time when scholars in English are exploiting those connections to ground their own postcolonial approaches to early modern British literature, especially Shakespeare. I take up this issue in the conclusion to this book. 6 The claim that Don Quixote is the first modern novel is almost never explained or justified, though it is seldom overtly challenged either. Yet many critics, especially those who focus on sixteenth-century antecedents to Cervantes, implicitly undermine the notion. Rosalie Colie’s view of it as a ‘book of books’ certainly works in the opposite direction. For Auerbach, it is ‘a merry play on many levels,’ that ‘has not been attempted again in European letters’ (354, 358). James Parr, in classifying Don Quixote as an ‘anatomy,’ specifically acknowledges that some may perceive such a view of as a ‘threat to its honorific status as “first modern novel,” whatever that may mean’ (164, emphasis added). Martínez Bonati’s Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel is the most thoroughgoing, sustained critique of this persistent miscategorization. 7 I thank Mireille Rosello for drawing my attention to Djebar’s appropriation of Zoraida. 8 The official centenary website of the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha (www. donquijotedelamancha2005.com) maintained a daily calendar of events giving a fair idea of the scope of the celebration. As recently as 30 May 2006, this website was still available. 9 For more on the perspective of Algerian writers on Don Quixote, see the concluding section of chapter 5 below, as well as my forthcoming essay ‘Zoraida’s Return.’ Part One: Decolonizing Cervantes 1 Menchú made these remarks, which I have translated from her Spanish, at a roundtable discussion after listening to Carlos Fuentes discuss the role of Islamic culture in Medieval Iberia, and the subsequent repression of that role from the time of the Catholic Monarchs forward. The roundtable closed the Brown Symposium on ‘España y América’ at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, February 1999. 1. Introduction: The Colonized Imagination 1 Ranajit Guha provides a thoughtful defence of ‘global postcoloniality’ as a name for the current historical convergence, rather than ‘postmodernism.’

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For Guha ‘colonialism is constitutive of and presupposed in modernity even if it is not always explicitly acknowledged to be so’ (41). Pioneered in the 1960s, the term ‘internal colonialism’ has always been controversial, and nowadays many prefer more neutral-sounding terms, such as ‘subaltern’ and ‘postcolonial.’ Nonetheless, Walter Mignolo defends Rivera Cusicanqui’s insistence on the concept of internal colonialism for precisely the reasons that make its use relevant here, concern with ethnic identity, as opposed to class and political status alone (197–201). The application of Fanon’s theories of colonialism to African Americans was famously pioneered in Carmichael’s Black Power (1967). See Blauner as well. For discussion of the concept in Chicano studies, see chapter 6 below. Among Quijano’s examples of ‘cultural subversion’ are two manifestations of the Baroque as ‘contraconquista’ that José Lezama Lima used in La expresión americana: the doors of the church at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, and the sculptures of Aleijadinho. This established Latin American approach to the cultural issues surrounding colonization points in the same general direction as Bhabha’s examinations of ‘mimicry’ and ‘hybridity’ as strategies of resistance. See The Location of Culture, esp. chs. 4, 5, and 6. The best introduction remains Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent’s Historia de los Moriscos. In English, we now have L.P. Harvey’s masterful Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 and Mary Elizabeth Perry’s The Handless Maiden. Both focus one-sidedly on Morisco resistance, though Perry is careful to avoid essentializing their crypto-Muslim identity. In parts of Andalusia, though, such as Cadiz and Seville, a clandestine Muslim community lived on the fringes of the dominant culture throughout the modern period. The most authoritative account to date of the Moriscos who remained after the expulsion is François Martínez’s La permanence morisque en Espagne après 1609. Barbara Fuchs explores the logic of Muley’s arguments in her commentary on his text, ‘Virtual Spaniards.’ Examples abound in the libros de testificaciones. The hair-combing example is from Catalina de Escamilla’s testimony, taken in 1585. Shortly after the arrival of the Moriscos from Granada, she had watched her neighbour in the yard behind her house, combing her little girl’s hair. ‘And every time she killed a louse, she sucked in her breath, and when this witness asked her why she did that, the said Morisca answered, “Among us, doing that means sucking out the blood from the lice,” and nothing else happened’ (ADC, Inq., L 326, fol. 9v). Her Morisca neighbour was of course not arrested and tried by the Inquisition on the basis of this testimony. An interesting example in the AHN is OO.MM. AHT, núm. 7356. ‘Lista y aberiguaciones de los Moriscos de la villa de la Mota y de la villa del Campo

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de Critana del año de 1583.’ This document includes physical descriptions of each of the Moriscos registered. Bernard Vincent has studied a similar list from Córdoba, arriving at the conclusion that there was no significant difference in facial features or skin tone between the Moriscos and cristianos viejos (‘¿Cuál era el aspecto físico de los Moriscos?’). Harvey arrives at essentially the same conclusion: ‘It is likely that whatever differences that might be visible at the level of individuals, at the level of the population as a whole they were insignificant’ (6–10). See, for example: ADC, Libro 210, which gives parish priests’ commentaries concerning the level of christianization of each family. In Pedroñeras, many Moriscos are said to be ‘well taught’ (bien instruidos) in the doctrines of the faith, whereas another family is lisited as ‘boçales, por falta de lengua,’ that is, ignorant (of the faith) due to their incomprehension of Spanish (folios 89–90). Numerous trial records in the AHN concern Moriscos arrested for violating this requirement, who appealed their convictions to the Consejo de Órdenes in Madrid. A few examples: AHN OO MM, AHT, 38.462 (Almagro); 38.347 (Damiel); 37.019 (Almonacid de Zorita); 50.432, 51.706, 54.065 (all from the partido of Quintanar de la Orden). I have seen these marginal notes in the libros de bautizo of Quintanar de la Orden. José Jiménez Lozano told me he found one in Valladolid in which the parish priest, evidently a Morisco sympathizer, instead of the usual ‘cristianos nuevos de Moriscos,’ had written ‘nuestros hermanos de Granada.’ His book Sobre judíos, moriscos y conversos illustrates the range of attitudes towards the Moriscos in Castile and Andalusia. He insists the expulsion of 1609–14 was not celebrated by the populace or the parish priests, despite the official triumphalist rhetoric. Charles Amiel’s painstaking reconstruction of crypto-Judaism as practiced in la Mancha in the 1590s seems to me decisive here. Fanon’s attentive reading of Sartre’s The Anti-Semite and the Jew confirms that the Jews formed an internal colony in the rest of modern Europe as well. Indeed, the analysis of the impact of colonialism on the subject, pioneered in Black Skin, White Masks, proceeds by way of an understanding of Jewish consciousness. See Black Skin, White Masks, ch. 6, ‘The Negro and Psychopathology.’ Ortega y Gasset appears to have been the first to speak of a ‘tibetanización’ of Spain, by which he meant the climate of closure and isolation, reinforced through a religious ideology, especially at the Madrid court itself. The term appears in Una interpretación de la historia universal, a series of lectures Ortega gave in 1948–9.

Notes to pages 11–13 247 16 If this ideology indeed attained willing participation from the peasantry, then the Absolutist monarchy achieved hegemony in the Gramscian sense. In that case, a difference in the final outcome would exist between the internal colonialism I am analysing here and such a classic example of modern European colonialism as British rule in India, where, according to Guha, the British colonial regime was characterized by ‘dominance without hegemony’ (43). 17 Kamen argues on this basis that purity of blood never reached the level of ‘national obsession’ Castro claims. But, as Mariscal puts it, ‘It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from the debate about blood that early modern Spanish society was tolerant and free of racism’ (Contradictory Subjects 41). In practice, I would argue, limpieza served more for the consolidation of Counter-Reformation Catholicism among the lower classes than for the exclusion of judeoconversos. Unfortunately for them, the conversos played the role of what Zm izmec calls the ‘symptom’ of ideology, without which it has nothing to work against (325). 18 Cascardi’s reconciliation of Castro’s account of the cultural impact of Spaniards’ limpieza ‘obsession’ with Maravall’s understanding of the social structure of estates informs my own (Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age 1–2, 24–7). I thank David R. Castillo for helping me reach this understanding of how Maravall’s position can be reconciled with Castro’s. 19 Sara T. Nalle’s God in la Mancha is a detailed study of the impact of the Counter-Reformation on the social world of New Castile. Her findings largely confirm the image put forward by Christian and Dedieu. 20 Frijhoff’s valuable essay ‘Official and Popular Religion in Christianity’ tells how the ‘integration’ of elite and popular Christianity in the Middle Ages gave way to a marginalization of ‘superstitious’ practices by ‘an elite, which consciously regards itself as being above the masses in so far [as] it has emancipated itself through its knowledge from the “irrational” collectivity’ (80). 21 In Mad for God, her study of a fanatical heretic who believed himself to be the Savior, Nalle affirms that Bartolomé Sánchez was almost surely spared from being burned alive only because he would have been the first cristiano viejo to receive that punishment at the hands of the Inquisition of Cuenca. 22 ‘The constant state of conflict of municipal government [el régimen municipal] in this period clarifies a great deal concerning the social reality of the time’ (López-Salazar Pérez 254). José Manuel de Bernardo Ares, the leading scholar on local government under the Hapsburgs, expresses his full agreement, referring to ‘these eloquent words, which I wholeheartedly adopt as my own’ (‘El régimen municipal en la Corona de Castilla’ 57n99). For more on the régimen local in la Mancha, see ch. 4 below.

248 Notes to pages 14–24 23 See Bernardo Ares’ excellent survey of the issues surrounding the terms ‘absolutism’ and ‘state’ when applied to Hapsburg Spain in ‘El gobierno del Rey y del Reino. La lucha por el poder desde la perspectiva municipal.’ 24 After Blazquez Miguel et al. made available extensive transcriptions from Lucrecia’s trial record and selections from the dreams themselves, Kagan’s English-language study appeared, followed by Osborne’s The Dreamer of the Calle de San Salvador, an annotated edition of 35 dreams in English translation. Bouza also cites Jordán Arroyo’s 1998 dissertation, a study of the rhetoric and imagery of the dreams. 25 Harvey offers an excellent survey of aljamiado studies (122–203). López Baralt’s ‘La literatura aljamiado-Morisca: Crónica de la destrucción de un mundo’ is still a useful introduction. Galmés de Fuentes includes a bibliographical essay on manuscripts and editions as a chapter of Los Moriscos (desde su misma orilla) (53–85). More comprehensive, though somewhat outdated, is Bernabé Pons’ Bibliografía de la literatura aljamiado-Morisca. Barletta’s recent Covert Gestures brings a new level of theoretical sophistication to the study of aljamiado writing. 26 The Tratado appeared in 2004 in an edition prepared by Narváez Córdoba. Fonseca Antuña edited the Sumario as Volume 12 of the Colección de Literatura Aljamiado-Morisca, published in 2002. Though the Arabic-laced Spanish requires patience, these transcriptions into the Roman alphabet are accessible, with effort, to anyone fluent in Spanish. 27 Narváez Córdoba indicates the connection without speculating about how it came about (26n21). The existence of the Morisco community in Arévalo is attested by the case of Agustín Ribera, tried by the Inquisition for conspiring to incite a rebellion of the Moriscos of Castile in 1540. (See Narváez Córdoba 22n15, as well as Tapia Sánchez La comunidad Morisca de Ávila 226–32.) 28 Without reference to Fish, Peña Díaz employs the concept of interpretive communities in characterizing the different varieties of ‘prohibited readings of permitted books’ he has documented: ‘In such acts fundamental tensions in the history of modern reading are reflected: the porous boundaries between manuscript and print, the weak border between reading out loud and reading as critique, the intermediary role of readers for the illiterate who were nonetheless far from ignorant, the formation of interpretive communities and their relation to collective identities, etc.’ (89; emphasis added). 29 AHPT, Protocolos, 13.170, fols. 185v–186r. This passage will be discussed below for the parallelism with the classic formula of Spanish viceregal ‘sly civility:’ ‘la ley se acata, pero no se cumple’ (‘the law is obeyed, but not carried out’). 30 César Vidal, in his recent Enciclopedia del Quijote, calls la Mancha a ‘cross-

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roads’ (lugar de cruce) and explains Cervantes’ choice in these terms: ‘the choice is a stroke of genius not only for the extraordinary, seamless leap from myth to reality, but especially because its character as a transitional space [lugar de paso] allows this territory to serve as the setting for a great variety of human types’ (348–9). The use of the term gobernador rather than corregidor shows that the town belonged to the military orders. This makes it a reasonable assumption, especially coupled with the frequency of la Mancha in Cervantes’ work, that the town is manchego. Anzaldúa’s book remains the best introduction to border theory. Criticism in the Borderlands is a useful survey of its application in literary criticism. Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s interrogations of what he terms the ‘New World border’ have had a significant influence on my understanding of borderlands. Through punning and humour, his performance texts enact the unravelling of the separations all borders, physical or conceptual, attempt to impose. See Julio González’s compendious Repoblación de Castilla la Nueva. While acknowledging the conventional explanation that la Mancha was ‘a symbol of rusticity,’ and the antithesis of anything heroic, Augustín Redondo also suggests that Cervantes chose it because of the larger numbers of conversos and Moriscos living there at the end of the sixteenth century, in comparison with Old Castile (63–4). These bilanguaging pratices lead Narváez Córdoba to refer to the Mancebo de Arevalo’s prose as ‘the strangest Spanish of the Golden Age’ (68). Like other aljamiado writers, he engages in linguistic operations similar to those found today in Spanglish. He code switches, incorporating entire words and phrases from Arabic into his text, but he also coins words by applying Spanish morphology to Arabic terms. A frequent example is jaleqar (create) and its derivatives, jaleqasión (creation), jaleqado (creature), from the Arabic root j-l-q. Elena Postigo Castellanos has studied the social and political role of the military orders in the seventeenth century, when the process described here reached its final phase, with the entire institutional structure, including the Consejo de Órdenes, functioning almost exclusively as an arbiter of prestige at court. See Martín de Nicolás, ‘La reconstrucción del Común de la Mancha’ and La crisis de la España imperial en una villa manchega, two fine examples of a local historian tracing the impact of central policy in rural areas. One easily finds such cases in the archives of the Órdenes Militares as that of the conscripts from El Toboso who fled the king’s service in 1598. The comisario de infantería ordered the arrest of the bondsmen (fiadores), explain-

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ing: ‘If no one were punished for this sort of thing, they would all run off and desert, therefore on His Majesty’s behalf I demand the aforesaid or their bondsmen be arrested, and that other soldiers be named to be sent in their place’ (AHN OO MM AHT núm. 7.338). AGS, Guerra antigua, Leg. 77, fol 197; Leg. 231, fol. 231; Leg. 238, fols. 61– 63; Leg. 239 fol. 221; Leg. 243, fol. 354; Leg. 277, fols. 140, 141; Leg. 390, fol. 281. The towns that challenged the authority of the contador de salitre were Quintanar de la Orden and El Pedernoso. Residents’ complaints focus primarily on the antiquity of the custom that Carrión has disrupted, and the severity of the punishment. Though located in the modern province of Córdoba, not la Mancha, Fuenteovejuna does belong to the ‘frontier’ region to the north of Sierra Morena, including la Mancha, Extremadura, and part of Córdoba, almost all of which belonged to the military orders. This reading of Lope’s comedias concerning the honra de los villanos differs sharply from Noël Salomon’s, for whom Lope in these plays managed to capture the authentic worldview of the rural peasants of Castile. Salomon himself finds this achievement inexplicable, finally claiming that sometimes an author expresses something without really understanding it, something that perhaps belongs more to the future than the present (841–2). For further reflections on the contradiction between the chivalric ideal and the decadent reality of sixteenth-century Spain, see my article ‘Don Quixote and the War of the Alpujarras.’ Nonetheless, Calderón explicitly compared Don Mendo in El alcalde de Zalamea to Don Quixote, showing that the target of the satire was quickly seen at least by some as narrowly limited to the ridiculous figure of the impoverished hidalgo obsessed with his genealogical superiority and the obligations and privileges he believes it implies. In describing the mimesis of Don Quixote as an oblique distortion, I have in mind David R. Castillo’s characterization of Cervantes’ masterpiece as ‘anamorphic literature’ in his refreshing study (A)wry Views where the question ‘What are you laughing at?’ is answered in the following terms: ‘Cervantes directs our laughter against the mystical blindness that sustains the Spanish Empire; and against all myths, for that matter ... Cervantes’s novel would thus function as an anamorphic mirror that constructs oblique images of society’s ideals, especially those dependent upon chivalric and pastoral utopias’ (86–7). My reading of the character Don Quixote as an unmasking of the illusory values on which Spanish national identity was being constructed is also indebted to Vilar’s seminal essay, ‘Le temps du Quichotte,’ where the knight’s madness is interpreted as a symbolic depic-

Notes to pages 36–57 251 tion of the fact that ‘detached from reality, the Spain of 1600 prefers to dream’ (14). 45 Isado Jiménez traces the picaresque itineraries that cross la Mancha, demonstrating the significant role played by this region in the genre, particularly in the apprenticeship of the pícaro. Especially useful are the maps he includes at the end of his article. 46 See my forthcoming article ‘Ese tan borrado sobreescrito.’ Also Gerli, who reads El retablo de las maravillas as a critique of Lope’s Arte nuevo (95–109). 47 Maria Antonia Garcés’ Cervantes in Algiers offers one explanation: he returned obsessively to the scene of his captivity, as part of a life-long creative effort to master the trauma it caused him. Cervantes’ repeated escape attempts demonstrate how much he suffered during his Algerian captivity. Whether it produced in him a trauma that so profoundly scarred him he spent decades struggling to overcome it, readers of Garcés’s book will have to decide for themselves. 2. Cervantes and lo real maravilloso 1 Antonio Castro Díaz presented this juxtaposition of quotes as an epilogue to his talk on Jardín de flores curiosas at the ALDEEU conference in Jaén, July 2003. 2 Without explicitly raising the political issues I discuss here, Michael Armstrong-Roche has arrived at similar conclusions concerning the affinity between Persiles y Sigismunda and magical realism, drawing suggestive conclusions for a non-linear understanding of modernity and literary history. See the ‘Epilogue’ to his forthcoming study, Cervantes’ Epic Novel. 3 See Michael Nerlich’s suggestive reading of the pan-European dimension of Persiles y Sigismunda, as well as chapter 4 below, ‘Turning Spain Inside Out,’ in which I offer a reading of Persiles y Sigismunda as a transnational romance. 4 A number of scholars of Spanish literature have traced this genealogy, including Atkinson, Riley, and, most thoroughly, Forcione (Cervantes y Sigismunda, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ chs. 1 and 2). 5 Except for its virulent tone, Mack Singleton’s vicious attack in ‘The Persiles Mystery’ is typical of the reception of Persiles y Sigismunda at the time, which set for criticism the task of explaining how the same man who wrote Cervantes’ great masterpieces could have written Persiles y Sigismunda, a work which was considered by most to be a complete failure. 6 See also Forcione’s essay, ‘Cervantes and the Freedom of the Artist.’ 7 Above all, it was Ruth El Saffar’s reappraisal of Cervantes’ treatment of romance that made possible the recuperation of an entire dimension of his

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work that had been neglected by scholars. For El Saffar the novel was only a middle stage in Cervantes’ working through the dualistic tensions from which his work derived its energy. She traces his trajectory ‘from pastoral romance to parody romance to quest romance’ (251) in her two books on romance in Cervantes, Novel to Romance and Beyond Fiction. Cf. El Saffar’s similar remarks in ‘The Truth of the Matter,’ where she associates the nightmare world of Berganza’s tale with the demonic phase of quest romance (246–7). Examining the treatment of magic in Persiles y Sigismunda and Coloquio de los perros, Christian Andrés also concludes that ‘ambiguity dominates these texts’ (538), though without pursuing the aesthetic issues such an intentionally ambiguous ontology raises. Cf. E. Michael Gerli’s suggestive reading of the reconfiguration of religious identities and national myths in ‘“The Captive’s Tale,” Rewriting Myth and History’ in Refiguring Authority. In this respect, I can agree with Lozano Renieblas’s description of Cervantes’ project in Persiles y Sigismunda as an attempt to ‘broaden the limits of fictional discourse,’ though not with the way she links this to a teleological development of realism: ‘The broadening of the limits of fictional discourse is the chief characteristic of his works, which amounts to saying that they mark an advance in the construction of realism. In Don Quixote, Cervantes incorporates the comic element; in Persiles y Sigismunda, the marvellous’ (18). Álvaro Huerga has studied the existing documentation and proven that la Camacha was not actually involved in the Alonso de Aguilar shape-shifting incident. The inquisitors’ initial belief that the Montilla women were ‘really’ practising witchcraft and cavorting with familiar spirits eventually subsided, as shown by a 1577 letter in which the Córdoba inquisitors admit this to be ‘el negocio más sin fundamento y más falso que se ha visto en ningún tribunal’ (as false and baseless a case as has ever been seen by any tribunal; AHN Inq. leg 2393, quoted in Huerga, 462). Like most Spaniards of his day, Cervantes associated witchcraft with the Morisco minority. As Díez Fernández and Aguirre de Cárcer point out, the magic used by Cenotia, the Morisca witch in Persiles y Sigismunda, derives from medical knowledge passed down through oral tradition. From Moriscas, Leonor Rodríguez may have learned the use of herbal concoctions to alter physical and mental states. García Ballester studies the marginalized medical practices of the Moriscos in Medicine in a Multicultural Society. In a similar vein, Nerlich describes El coloquio de los perros as ‘a secularized passion’ (‘On the Philosophical Dimension’ 311) in which ‘mankind

Notes to pages 67–72 253 [strives] to discover sense and to establish order in this chaotic world determined by chance’ (313). Even as prophetic utterances link Berganza to Christ, María Antonia Garcés has shown that Cañizares is ‘an apocalyptic vision of the mother ... a desecration of that saintly body which represents the highest construct of the Christian civilization regarding human conception and nurturing’ – the Virgin Mary (‘Berganza and the Abject’ 302). 15 The concept of magical realism has, of course, a complex history, well charted in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris’s useful volume. Broadly speaking, there are two camps. Some try to define magical realism in purely theoretical terms, as a specifiable variant of the fantastic, while others follow Carpentier’s lead, acknowledging, essentially, that it cannot be understood independently of the historical context of colonialism. Irlemar Chiampi brilliantly analyses this divergence and articulates a lucid defense of Carpentier’s approach in El realismo maravilloso. 16 Cf. Costa Lima’s similar argument in The Dark Side of Reason (4–11), where he links Cide Hamete directly to the relativizing role of fictionality in Cervantes. 17 The principal exception is Castro’s ‘El cómo y porqué de Cide Hamete Benengeli.’ See also Stagg’s discussion of Cide Hamete as an Algerian sage in ‘El sabio Cide Hamete Venengeli.’ At the PEN club tribute to Don Quixote held at the New York Public Library on 16 April 2005, Salman Rushdie called Cide Hamete an homage to the Arabian roots of the marvellous tale, which he pointed out ‘really’ came from India. He characterized Don Quixote as the novel uniting the literature of the East and the literature of the West. His own homage to Cide Hamete comes in The Moor’s Last Sigh, whose narrator addresses the reader from an Andalusian town named Benengeli. Bruce Burningham brilliantly analyses the interplay between Don Quixote and The Moor’s Last Sigh in ‘Salman Rushdie, autor del Cautivo.’ 18 Américo Castro took the existence of a Morisco community in El Toboso as an indication that Dulcinea was a Morisca who prided herself on this skill as a way of compensating for her status as a cristiana nueva (‘Cervantes y el Quijote a nueva luz’ 81). See also López-Baralt (Huellas 38) and Case (17– 18). In fact, El Toboso had a smaller contingent of Moriscos than neighbouring towns, as numerous documents demonstrate, for example, BN Ms 18.432, ‘Relación de los Moriscos de Sigüenza, Cuenca y Uclés.’ 19 Miguel José Hagerty has edited the seventeenth-century Spanish translation as Los libros plúmbeos del Sacromonte. For more about their history, see Cabanelas Rodríguez, El Morisco granadino Alonso del Castillo, ch. 10 (261–94) and ‘Intento de supervivencia en el ocaso de una cultura: Los libros plúmbeos de Granada.’ Harvey devotes an entire chapter to the events and

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their implications in his new book (264–90). The classic studies are those by José Godoy Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (1868) and Miguel Asín Palacios, Noticia de los manuscritos árabes de Sacro-Monte de Granada (1912). Now there is also A. Katie Harris’s doctoral dissertation, Forging identity (Johns Hopkins, 2001). Al-Hajari wrote his mainly autobiographical work, titled Kitab Nasir al-din (The Defender of the Faith), in Tunisia. It was first published in 1987. The 1997 edition by Koningsveld et al. includes an English translation. Harvey quotes extensively from his account of the libros plúmbeos affair (277–84). Martinez-Bonati’s Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel provides a thorough refutation of the misleading notion that Don Quixote is the first modern novel. Sola and de la Peña’s Cervantes y la Berbería is an outstanding source for understanding the space of the Mediterranean as a zone of cultural hybridity in the late sixteenth century. See also Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar’s comprehensive study of the renegades, Los cristianos de Alá. Michael Nerlich brilliantly reads Persiles y Sigismunda as a novel concerned with European unity. Wilson makes a convincing case for the connection with America (Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World 183–208). I suggest that Persiles y Sigismunda is also a more Mediterranean book than is sometimes supposed (see ch. 5 below).

3. Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda 1 Wilson (Allegories of Love), Williamsen, Nerlich, Castillo and Spadaccini, and Sacchetti have all pointed out elements that undermine the thesis of strict orthodoxy, including the playful, ironic tone permeating much of the work, even where spiritual matters are treated; the absence of the clergy and of most orthodox religious practices from the work; the frequency of preTridentine marriage; the use of sacred vows, such as the pilgrimage of the protagonists to Rome, as a mere pretext for secular purposes; and awareness of the pagan roots of popular Christian practices (such as the festival of la Monda de Talavera). 2 Casalduero and Avalle Arce articulated this reading decades ago. Over the years others have contributed to grounding it in the religious culture of the time, including Hahn and DiSalvo. Though now it has been challenged, for a long time it was simply not questioned that this was the only way to read Persiles y Sigismunda. 3 William Christian has discussed this character under the heading of abuses of the institution of the pilgrimage shrine. He characterizes her practice as ‘a means of livelihood and spiritual entertainment’ (Local Religion, 123).

Notes to pages 86–91 255 4 The impact in Persiles y Sigismunda of the Augustinian belief that the soul’s restless movement will continue until it finds its centre in God (Confessions I, I, 3) is not to give prominence to the other-worldly goal of human existence, but rather to its fascinating variety and ceaseless change. As Hutchinson explains: ‘[T]he ultimate repose in divinity lies outside the scope of Cervantes’ novels, which deal with the perpetual wanting and striving of this life ... [T]he soul’s continual motion propelled by desire is a condition, perhaps the condition, of being in the world; perfect repose has no place here’ (56–7). 5 The depiction of Rome as a decadent capital city fails to live up to the image of the City of God on Earth demanded by the allegorical reading. At least since Mary Gaylord Randel’s article focused on this issue, there has been a tendency to point out how disappointing the Rome of Persiles y Sigismunda is in this regard. Mack Singleton stated it bluntly in his review of Forcione’s Cervantes’ Christian Romance : ‘If Rome is the end-point of the spiritual allegory, then that “final cause” is a deep disappointment. Aside from the catechistical lesson which Auristela receives, there is little to indicate that any character in the book is aware that his presence in Rome has the slightest spiritual significance’ (87). 6 Turner’s general theory of the social efficacy of ritual liminality is presented in The Ritual Process. The book he wrote with his wife, Edith Turner, focuses on Christian pilgrimage as a ‘modern’ example of this process. 7 This reading draws on Forcione’s view of La fuerza de la sangre as a ‘secularized miracle,’ where he uses this and other episodes from Persiles y Sigismunda to explore Cervantes’ use of miracles (Humanist Vision 317–97). Unlike Forcione, I focus on the specificity of the landscape to avoid collapsing the tale into an abstract manifestation of Christian doctrine. Lozano Renieblas’s commentary is helpful: ‘By means of a complex and skilful weaving together of local elements, Cervantes endows the region of Extremadura with a profound organic unity. He thus grounds Feliciana’s tale in its setting in a way that renders Extremadura irreplaceable, as part of a geographically defined world’ (178). 8 The earliest known version is from the fifteenth century. Christian includes a transcript in an appendix to Apparitions (276–9). Cremoux’s study begins with a comparative analysis of the different versions of the legend. 9 Crémoux provides a complete account of the rise of the shrine. See also Sicroff concerning Guadalupe and the fiscal success of the Jeronymite order. Starr-LeBeau focuses on the late fifteenth century, but in her final chapter she gives an insightful synthesis of the shrine’s role in the consolidation of the Absolutist monarchy: ‘The Crown was also recreating an imagined Christian community, legitimated by the Virgin of Guadalupe and other

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religious devotions that emphasized the unique, sacralized role of the state’ (256). Her book shows the basis of this community was the exclusion of religious minorities, which entailed a profound transformation of Christians’ self-understanding of their own religious culture. Turner accounts for the importance of Marian devotion as a logical consequence of the patriarchal structure of Western societies: ‘In patrilineal, patrimonial, and patriarchal social systems, attachments through women (not merely the maternal bond alone) come to stand for the seamless unity of the whole community, its materia prima, so to speak – as against the association of paternity and, by extension, masculinity, with property, law, the delimitation and demarcation of rights and duties, the rules of succession to high office’ (Image and Pilgrimage, 199). From his use of such sources in El rufián dichoso, we know that Cervantes avidly read narratives of the evangelization of the New World. Canavaggio in fact believes he consulted at least two different sources. Luis Becerra Tanco, writing in the seventeenth century, gives two other Nahuatl versions of the name the Virgin could have spoken: Tequatlanopeuh, ‘she who comes from the mountain peaks’ or Tequantlaxopeuh ‘she who vanquished those who used to feed upon us’ (Villalpando 23). Poole ends his skeptical account with the following affirmation: ‘Guadalupe still remains the most powerful religious and national symbol in Mexico today. The symbolism, however, does not rest on any objective historical basis. Despite that it will probably endure, if only because it can be interpreted and manipulated by succeeding generations to meet the needs of the Mexican people’ (225). This section is an abridged version of my article ‘“Según es cristiana la gente”: The Quintanar of Persiles y Sigismunda and the Archival Record,’ which appeared in the Fall 2004 number of Cervantes. In the article I discuss the archival documents in greater detail. This reading owes much to George Mariscal’s article, ‘Persiles and the Remaking of Spanish Culture,’ where he argued that the integration of Antonio’s family into early modern Spain problematized ‘the traditional nexus of blood and caste’ on which a restrictive sense of Spanish national identity had been based (100–1). In a later revision, Mariscal muted his earlier enthusiasm for Antonio and Ricla’s marriage, emphasizing the fall back into Counter-Reformation orthodoxy represented by Ricla’s conversion to Christianity and Antonio’s decision to return to Spain (‘The Crisis of Hispanism as Apocalyptic Myth’). Habitus is Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the native competence of members of

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a culture, which allows them to improvise responses to new social situations from within established categories. See his discussion of the sense of honour, as well as the chapter on the habitus in Outline of a Theory of Practice (10–16, 72–95). Armstrong-Roche makes a strong case for seeing the habitus of pundonor represented in Antonio’s tale as evidence that the meridional Spain of Persiles y Sigismunda is in some ways as ‘barbaric’ as the Barbaric Isle to which the text rhetorically opposes it. This promising development opens up a whole new perspective on sixteenth-century Spain. Worth singling out is Jaime Contrera’s pioneering book, Sotos contra Riquelmes, which demonstrates how rival clans in Murcia attempted to turn the Inquisition to their own ends, with disastrous results. Bernardo Ares has made important theoretical contributions, as well as coordinating others’ efforts. For present purposes, López-Salazar Pérez’s article on the régimen local in towns belonging to the military orders of la Mancha, is especially useful. The pleitos in question are to be found in the section devoted to Órdenes Militares, within the juridical archive known as the Archivo Histórico de Toledo. Two particularly good examples are: AHN, OO MM AHT 22.082, and 51.409. Juan Hernández was reprendido by the Inquisición de Cuenca as a perturbador (ADC, Inq., 326/4678). This event was duly reported by the familiar Damián Gallardo when it happened (ADC, Inq., 300/4297). All the same, several vecinos came forward to tell the story to Velarde de la Concha in 1590. Nothing could be more antithetical to pilgrimage as thematized in Persiles y Sigismunda than the distrustful attitude pervading Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In one scene, Christian is led out of the Way by Vain Confidence, and is left lost in darkness when his new companion falls into a pit. The author’s own marginal comment could not be more explicit: ‘see what it is too suddenly to fall in with strangers’ (104). In a similar vein, Armstrong-Roche suggests that Cervantes harnesses the power of typology (the reading of figures from the Hebrew scriptures as anticipations of the New Testament) to construct Persiles y Sigismunda as a post-Tridentine novelistic alternative to scripture. In both cases, we are dealing with a process of secularization that appropriates religious practice, freeing it from its dogmatic framework. The concepts of residual, dominant, and emergent practices allow Raymond Williams to construct a model of cultural change that is not based on a strict materialist determinism in his influential essay ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.’ In

258 Notes to pages 124–7 Williams’s model, residual practices remain in the culture, half-forgotten, and can often be recovered and given a new, oppositional meaning in emergent practices. 4. Turning Spain Inside Out 1 Hanneken also sees Persiles y Sigismunda undertaking to ‘dismantle the hegemonic model of cultural interpretation’ through techniques of inversion and irony (338). 2 Of course, such slips and inconsistencies are just as frequent in Don Quixote, an acknowledged masterpiece. Baena’s Discordancias cervantinas, brings together in one place the fullest catalogue yet of the errors in that work. Among those who have drawn attention to slips in Persiles y Sigismunda, see Osuna (‘Vacilaciones y olvidos’), Harrison, and Beringer. Romero mentions many in his edition, though Baena exaggerates only slightly in his appendix concerning errors in Persiles y Sigismunda when he comments: ‘More are being uncovered on a daily basis’ (350). 3 The intertextuality between Persiles y Sigismunda and Greek (or ‘Byzantine’) romance is, understandably, a frequent topic in criticism on Cervantes’ posthumous romance. Rather than devote unnecessary space to it here, I recommend to interested readers the thorough treatments by González Rovira, Lozano Renieblas, Sacchetti, and Armstrong-Roche, along with Deffis diCalvo’s useful article applying Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. 4 While similar to Martínez Bonati’s ‘regions of the imagination’ (Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel 39–75), the ‘realms’ of Persiles y Sigismunda constitute, as he says, another order: ‘Anyone who reads in this strange journey only a succession of varied adventures in changing settings (in the manner of the traditional Byzantine novel that it superficially imitates), without perceiving the transcendental changes of imaginative atmosphere behind the geographical mutations, fails to grasp the plenitude of the work that subdued Cervantes’s final efforts. The loss is comparable to that of a painting reproduced in black and white’ (65). I have chosen the term ‘realm’ to evoke the frequent correspondence between the boundaries separating them and political borders, such as those between Spain, France, and Italy. On the multi-generic composition of Persiles y Sigismunda see Forcione (Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles’ 154–5), Wilson (Allegories of Love 5–6), and my own ‘Correr la pluma.’ To my knowledge, Hutchinson is the first to have offered short descriptions of some of the separate worlds of Persiles y Sigismunda. 5 Ryan bases her model on philosopher David Lewis’s arguments in ‘Truth in Fiction.’ She first presented it in ‘Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of

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Minimal Departure.’ Prominent among the objections addressed in the expanded version included in Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory was the issue of genre conventions, such as enamoured shepherds or talking animals, which seem to violate the principle. Ryan shored it up by claiming that readers still follow it for everything not covered by the specific features of the genre, but Pavel seems closer to the mark when he allows for varying degrees of departure depending on the work. In Martínez Bonati’s Aristotelian formulation, fictional worlds are not lists of states of affairs at all, but rules for what is possible, probable, and necessary in the work (‘Towards a Formal Ontology of Fictional Worlds’). This implies a complex process of hypothesizing, testing, and confirming that harmonizes well with Cervantes’ subtle technique of playfully manipulating readers’ expectations. There has been much discussion of the ‘two halves’ view of Persiles y Sigismunda, according to which the work does not fully cohere, because it was written in two phases. Osuna (‘Las fechas’), Avalle-Arce, and Romero all hold this view in some form. Others, chiefly Forcione and Lozano Renieblas, argue for the unity of the work. Lozano Renieblas includes a lucid discussion of the problem and the history of critical views of it (119–26). It does not seem to me entirely implausible that Cervantes changed his plans while writing Persiles y Sigismunda, perhaps after a period of time during which he worked on other projects. At the same time, however, the finished work has a coherent structure and meaning. In any case, it entirely falsifies the work to view the southern books as more ‘realistic.’ As Hanneken remarks, ‘the atmosphere of the Mediterranean lands is just as inexact as the Northern ones’ (334). In Cervantes’s Christian Romance, Forcione analysed this cycle in terms of ‘spiritual’ progress, whereas I view it as the manifestation of a social dynamic. Eduardo González interprets the opening section of the work in Lacanian terms, as an allegorization of the origins of gender differentiation. This ambiguity surrounding gender led Ruth El Saffar to posit León Hebreo’s androgyne as the figure underlying the entire thematic structure of the work (‘Fiction and the Androgyne in the Works of Cervantes’), an intuition Diana de Armas Wilson worked out in detail in Allegories of Love (78–105). The Barbaric Isle and its dramatic annihilation undeniably lend themselves to allegorizing interpretations. Several striking ones have been offered, according to which it is, variably, an allegory of a primitive stage of the history of civilization (Casalduero), of the dependence of civilization on violence (Bandera), of the origins of sexual difference (Eduardo González), or of the inevitably self-defeating impulse toward imperialism (Wilson). In

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my view, these interpretations are subsumed by an understanding of the episode in terms of the dynamics of representation and representability put in play throughout Persiles y Sigismunda. The reading I offer here, however, is thematically inflected in a manner similar to Wilson’s. In a process he terms ‘reverse ethnography,’ Armstrong-Roche sees the Barbaric Isle holding up a kind of mirror to Spain and Europe as a whole, since the expectation that in comparison the southern adventures will lead the characters through ‘civilized’ lands is never really met. Rather, they encounter echoes of the Barbaric Isle in every place they visit. Hanneken briefly discusses the effect for the reader of having to ‘insert the international characters from the first half of the book into the cultural praxis of the Mediterranean,’ and assumes that ‘Cervantes hoped to force the reader to reflect on the new heterogeneity within Spain represented by the Villaseñor family and many other international characters, and to imagine the possible new cultural practices that would inevitably result from such heterogeneity’ (333–4). Simmel’s brilliant essay analyses ‘the unity of nearness and remoteness’ in the figure of the stranger within the group. ‘The stranger, like the poor and like sundry “inner enemies,” is an element of the group itself. His position as a full-fledged member involves both being outside it and confronting it’ (402– 3). The mention of ‘inner enemies’ connects the stranger to internal colonialism. Like Fanon and Sartre, Simmel associates this position of interiorized outsider with the Jews of Europe (see chapter 1, n14). Obviously the character who most fulfils the role of the stranger in Persiles y Sigismunda is Antonio de Villaseñor, who, as we have seen, functions as a stand-in for the reader. Aurora Egido has correctly labelled the painting as a mnemonic device for the reader that recapitulates the events of Books One and Two, and has pointed out the way it is projected through the entire second half of the work through the copies of Auristela’s portrait. In his much earlier article on painting in Persiles y Sigismunda, Selig aptly refers to this canvas as a reductio of the first half of the work. This reductio is necessary because the material of the first two books is too varied and diffuse to be held in the reader’s imagination all at once, and must therefore be reduced to a handy checklist of events which can be forced into a single plane. It is not merely a case, then, of helping the reader remember, but of completely restructuring the events of Books One and Two so that what was there presented as a series of separate fictional realms (all the varieties of elevated fiction) can now be felt as a single, homogeneous romance world. Armstrong-Roche also draws attention to the paradoxical fashion in which the last two books of Persiles y Sigismunda succeed in defamiliarizing the

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Catholic South, making it appear far more similar to the ‘Barbaric’ North than the reader might have anticipated. This slogan, ‘reading is like pilgrimage,’ was engraved on the title page of Mateo Aleman’s Guzmán de Alfarache. In my dissertation, ‘“Ángeles de carne”: Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda and the Invention of a Humanist Aesthetic,’ I interpreted the work in just these terms, citing Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. Cervantes uses almost exactly the same technique to test the lover in Persiles y Sigismunda and in La española inglesa. Lapesa studied this convergence years ago, relating it to the religious concerns in both works. More recently, Barbara Fuchs has returned to these two closely related texts for her analysis of ‘passing’ in both (Passing for Spain 87–110). Under the influence of post-structuralist thought, the Kantian sublime underwent a major revival in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While downplaying the ethical component, a number of theorists chose to emphasize the role of the sublime in unravelling the ground of the mimetic illusion. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘The Sublime Offering’ describes the sublime as the effect of the work’s being undone by interrupting its own limits, creating a ‘pulsation’ in the unity of the beautiful. This pulsation of a beauty that comes and goes, that ‘presents its own interruption’ is comparable to Auristela’s beauty, which pulsates as ugliness. Insofar as Persiles y Sigismunda plays with the dissolution even of that which the work presents as the supreme value, beauty, it participates in the same relentless critique of all representational systems as Don Quixote. As Jesús G. Maestro indicates in his review article, one of the strengths of Isabel Lozano Renieblas’s ‘new reading’ of Persiles y Sigismunda is that it uses genre to argue against the frequently repeated view that Cervantes’ posthumous work expressed a closed religious orthodoxy. The religious theme is simply a part of the Byzantine genre, and implies no particular commitment to Counter-Reformation orthodoxy beyond the pages of the book. As this chapter makes clear, however, I would like to go one step further than such a neutral secularization and argue that in fact Cervantes is engaged in a struggle to wrest control over the imaginary from the Church. See Lozano Renieblas, particularly 172–6. I take the term ‘pastoral oasis’ from Renato Poggioli, who defines it as a brief respite on the narrative path, an interruption in the progress of the hero towards his goal. The pastoral oasis is ‘a bucolic episode, which breaks the main action or pattern, suspending for a while the heroic, romantic, or pathetic mood of the whole. Accordingly the topos [of the locus amœnus] itself is but an idyllic prelude to a bucolic interlude, where the characters

262 Notes to pages 148–65 normally rest from their adventures or passions’ (Poggioli 9). Typically found in Renaissance epic and romance, such oases offer an opportunity for reflection upon the values and beliefs on which the hero’s action during the rest of the work is based. Though the pastoral oasis functions primarily as a device for deepening the otherwise linear structure of the adventure plot, it can also serve, on occasion, to expose the exclusivity of the heroic project, or even to question its validity. 21 As the above analysis should make clear, I wholeheartedly endorse Cascardi’s claim that in this work, ‘Cervantes has set aside the drama of paternal authority, dominance, and revenge in the hopes of defining relationships “horizontally,”’ and that in this sense, ‘Cervantes’s romance begins to define a “post-patriarchal” cultural space’ (‘Reason and Romance’ 293). I cannot entirely share, however, his characterization of this cultural space in Kantian terms as the ‘moral projection of a universal community of mankind,’ due to the impossibility of ever constituting it outside the socially constrained dynamics of representation-repression outlined above. 22 Bhabha’s direct source for this distinction is a poem by Sonia Sanchez. Her repudiation of the ‘pulse of death’ in the phrase ‘might have been’ calls to mind Joseph Silverman’s rather naive dream of ‘the pluralist paradise that Spain might have been’ (166). The point is not to look backwards with regret, but to project a different future based on our knowledge of unrealized possibilities of the past. 5. Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain 1 Outside Spain, some misconstrued voters’ anger as cowardice. Resentment toward the arrogant political style of Aznar’s Partido Popular (PP) had been mounting, and the public perception was that they tried, during the days before the election, to exploit the terrorist attack by blaming it on ETA. The PP leadership understood that their strong stand against ETA over the years, coupled with the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, meant that it would favour them politically if people believed ETA was behind the attack. Unfortunately for them, the voting public in Spain made the same calculation, and the interpretation that the government was not being forthcoming about the attack spread very quickly. The damage the PP did to their own public image by trying to deceive the public was incalculably greater than the damage the terrorist attack alone would have produced. 2 For these statistics, I have supplemented the highly useful booklet Los extranjeros residentes en España, 1998–2002 with the more recent España en

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cifras, 2003–2004 and España en cifras, 2005. Though INE statistics appear reliable overall, this rise in numbers was partly fuelled by a change in immigration law that allowed undocumented immigrants access to health care if they registered as local residents. This resulted in an even more sudden increase in the statistical record during the first years of this century, though there seems to be no reason to doubt the overall picture of a quadrupling of the immigrant population. In his research, Barbolla Camarero gave open-ended questionnaires to schoolchildren, most of whom answered with moderation. ‘Son personas como nosotros’ (They are people like us [326]) is a typical response. However, a small but vocal minority responded very agressively: ‘Son unos cabrones ... ¡Hay que cortarles los cojones!’ (They’re all bastards! We gotta cut their balls off! [334–5]). This useful book includes specific examples taken from all the media studied, reproduced on an accompanying CD-ROM. Lorite García also authored a more recent article on the subject for the electronic journal Red Digital, titled ‘Cómo tratar la inmigración en los medios pensando en la interculturalidad,’ and coordinated a project through Forum Barcelona 2004 to develop a series of ‘best practices’ for representing immigrants in the media, ‘Inmigración y medios de comunicación.’ Both are available online. In fact recent years have seen a decline in the rate of crimes per thousand inhabitants in Spain. During the same period, according to García España and Pérez Jiménez, the sense of fear and insecurity among the citizenry has dramatically increased. They attribute this disparity to the influence of the media on public perception. In Mujeres musulmanes en España, Gema Martín Muñoz and Ana López Sala provide the disheartening news that the disproportion has actually increased in recent years. They also mention a prior study they conducted on the image of Muslim women in the Spanish media, in which they concluded that ‘on many occasions, far from taking an interest in the women themselves, they are above all an instrument by means of which to denigrate the Muslim cultural world’ (16). In addition to the article, which is available electronically, her dissertation has now been published in book form. Her claim concerning Andalusians’ capacity to see themselves as outsiders within Europe is poetically expressed by Antonio Muñoz Molina in a memorable passage from Sefarad where, sitting in a tavern in Göttingen, the autobiographical narrator suddenly sees himself in a mirror: ‘I saw my hair, so black, my dark eyes, the white shirt with no tie and the stubble already shadowing my chin, all of which made

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me look undeniably like a Bulgarian or Turk, along with the formal jacket, a bit wrinkled from days of travelling and carelessness, which also looked like one of those jackets emigrants wear, the kind you see in the photos from the sixties of Spaniards who emigrated to Germany’ (559). At the end of Heroicas decisiones, the most thorough examination of the question to date, Rafael Benítez Sánchez-Blanco concludes that no historical necessity was at work in the decision to expel, and there were many who rejected the intransigence of the Patriarch of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, who strenuously pushed for the expulsion during the last quarter century of his life (431). The first systematic attempt to demonstrate Cervantes’ irony was Márquez Villanueva’s essay on Ricote. Subsequently, among those who have defended the irony thesis are Quérillacq, Martínez López (who ties the Ricote episode to that of Roque Guinart in a very suggestive manner), and Martínez Bonati; Moner and Riquer are two of the principal irony deniers. Moner and Riquer happen on the same phrase, according to which it is ‘hard to see’ (difícil de ver) the elements of irony in these texts. In fact, the irony is very easy to see, especially when Cervantes places anti-Morisco discourse in the mouths of his Morisco characters. What is difficult is to fix its meaning. To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they mean it is hard to see the irony the way Márquez Villanueva does, as a clear sign of opposition. García-Arenal’s discussion of the relations between Moriscos and cristianos viejos in New Castile, though it reflects tension, clearly shows the deterioration of the Moriscos’ religious and cultural identity (Inquisición y moriscos). My current research on the Moriscos of la Mancha, though still in its initial stages, appears to confirm this impression. An example of the latter is Angela Hernández’s experience with her first husband, who tried to prevent her and their sons from violating Islamic dietary restrictions, though she and her boys ‘ate everything’ (comían de todo). When apparently well-meaning neighbours brought the matter to the Inquisitor’s attention during his visit to Priego, they initiated proceedings. By the time they called Angela to testify in Cuenca, however, her husband had died and she had remarried (ADC Libro 326 folios 1–3; ADC, Inq. 317/ 4584 and 766/1316). For more on their attempts to conspire with the Turks, see Hess. To my knowledge, Álvaro Molina is the only one to have called attention to the irony of this comparison. In fact, the most significant demographic trend of the sixteenth century was the growth of the Old Christian population, which far outweighed any

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modest increases in the Morisco population. As Harvey concludes in his discussion of this point, ‘The final expulsion was a cruel coup de grâce to a community long in decline, not a measure of self-defense taken by Christian folk in any real danger of being demographically overwhelmed and outbred’ (13). Did Cervantes intend the meanings implied in his choice of metaphor? We cannot be sure he even had in mind the origin of the phrase. In any case, the contradiction demonstrates the difficulty, especially in a Mediterranean context, of formulating an exclusivist concept of the nation without falling into family metaphors that open the way to having their meanings twisted. Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent refer to the ‘colonial’ situation of the Moriscos of Granada, without drawing attention to the term (e.g., 137, 138). In ‘Virtual Spaniards,’ Barbara Fuchs explicitly uses the term ‘internal colonized’ (14), although without theorizing about its exact meaning. Cirot’s article introduced the term ‘maurophile’ and provided what is still the most comprehensive survey of the field. He was also the first to draw attention to the contradiction between literature and historical context at the root of this genre. Carrasco Urgoiti’s pioneering El moro de Granada en la literatura consolidated this literary corpus as an object of study. After Israel Burshatin’s innovative essay on El Abencerraje, the prevailing view that maurophile literature implies real-life solidarity with the Moriscos of flesh and blood gave way to a more sophisticated understanding of the Orientalism at work in the nostalgic image of the Romantic Moor. For example, Gallego Burín and Gámir Sandoval reproduce a royal decree rewarding those who participate in such marriages in Granada, dated 1530 (224–5). The case of Iñigo Navas is revealing. He came to Almagro from Granada with the Morisco refugees, but claims he has the right to bear arms because he is not Morisco. His mother and grandmother were, but his father and grandfather were Old Christians. (AHN, OO MM, AHT 37.113) I discuss the atmosphere of tension and suspicion surrounding the Captive’s Tale at greater length in my forthcoming essay ‘Circumcision and the Captive’s Tale.’ The principal studies of the carnivalesque in Cervantes that have made use of Bakhtin’s theory are those by Durán, Redondo, Parr, and Iffland. See as well Mancing’s recent review of the topic in, ‘Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes.’ As Stallybrass and White’s influential essay indicates, the carnivalesque element contributed to the subversive dimension of modern literature from its inception. On the subject of the loyalty of the Moriscos, see Haliczer, who has studied a

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late sixteenth-century survey that shows a high degree of identification with the monarchy on the part of the Moriscos of Aragón. This is in keeping with the main argument of Cascardi’s ‘The Subject of Control.’ In a previously published version of this chapter, ‘Recordando el futuro,’ I analyse this aspect of their meeting at greater length. I also return to it in ‘“¡Oh hideputa, bellaco, y cómo es católico!” : Sancho, Blasphemy, and the Baroque Public Sphere.’ Forcione masterfully describes the solidarity between Sancho and Ricote in terms of Cervantes’ quest for an ‘authentic pastoral’ (‘Cervantes en busca’). Comparing this outcome with that of Zoraida’s story in Part One, Carroll Johnson arrives at a similar conclusion: ‘In both texts there is an inverisimilar scene of public recognition, reconciliation, and restoration, possible only in fiction’ (67). Still, Martínez López draws suggestive historical parallels between Ana Félix and Roque Guinart in the context of Catalán politics at the time. As it turns out, Roque Guinart had already been pardoned by the viceroy and was serving in Naples as a captain of the infantry when Part Two was published. Martínez López establishes an analogy with the Moriscos’ situation, suggesting that both cases implicitly cast doubt on the king’s policy, hinting that the viceroy should do the same with Ricote and any other Moriscos in Catalunya as he had already done with Roque Guinart: namely, pardon them. In this account I follow primarily Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent (86–7, 142–3) and García Martínez’s seminal essay ‘Bandolerismo, piratería y control de Moriscos.’ Romero Muñoz gives useful background as well in his edition of Persiles y Sigismunda (551n33). It was a time of crisis for the Moriscos who faced the destruction of their civilization, but also for Spanish society in general. The libros plúmbeos, the final desperate attempt of the Moriscos to save themselves by means of a forged set of texts that presented a syncretic bridge between Christianity and Islam, are as symptomatic of the age as the treatises of the arbitristas. See chapter 1 above for a fuller discussion of aljamiado literature, with bibliographical references. For more on the libros plúmbeos, see the section on Cide Hamete Benengeli in chapter 3 above. Oliver Asín established Zoraida’s historicity in his carefully researched essay ‘La hija de Agi Morato.’ Subsequently, in ‘El Ur-Quijote,’ Luis Murillo shed considerable light on Zoraida’s role in the creation of the 1605 Don Quixote, hypothesizing that the relationship between the captive and Zoraida was a primitive version of Don Quixote-Dulcinea. More recently, Garcés has brought together and synthesized the available material concerning the autobiographical background to the Captive’s Tale in Cervantes in Algiers.

Notes to pages 191–6 267 30 For Garcés, ‘the enigma that lurks behind Zoraida’s veil ... is the enigma of desire, which escapes language, eluding representation’ (‘Cervantes’s Veiled Woman’ 830). Smith notes that, although Zoraida temporarily succeeds in subverting patriarchy, ‘as the narrative ends, the phallic order seems complete once more’ (234). 31 These letters are written to be effaced in the sense that they are not meant to be read in Arabic, but to be translated into Spanish. As Garcés points out, that process exactly parallels the fictional process whereby the text of Don Quixote itself was produced from Cide Hamete’s Arabic manuscript (‘Cervantes’s Veiled Woman’ 822). 6. Chicanoizing Don Quixote 1 Mexico alone affords a range of examples, from Posada’s ‘Calavera de Don Quijote’ to the ubiquitous depictions of Don Quixote and Sancho in the popular arts. Rojas Garcidueñas’s study catalogues more than three hundred years of such instances. Genaro González explained to me that at one point he considered the title The Quixotic Cult, but did not care for the sound of it. He said he preferred ‘Quixote,’ because it ‘sounded Mexican.’ In effect, the -xo/jo- combination or the -ote suffix are found in such Mexicanisms as guajalote, híjole, elote, papalote, etc. 2 Similarly, in his study of popular festivals in Mexico and Spain, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, Max Harris argues persuasively that the traditional dances of moros y cristianos in modern-day Spain show evidence of the influence of Aztec rituals on Iberian popular culture. 3 Genaro González was also kind enough to meet with me in March 2001 to discuss the factors that led him to use Don Quixote in writing about the Chicano movement in South Texas. 4 The earliest example of which I am aware of Don Quixote’s being used by a Spanish-language author in the southwestern United States as a symbol of fidelity to his cultural roots is an essay by Luis Tafoya titled ‘Los paisanos de Don Quijote: Lo bien que conocía Cervantes la índole de sus compatriotas,’ published in La Revista de Taos on 21 July 1911. As Doris Meyer explains, ‘Tafoya appeals for cultural unity and collective resistance to assimilation by drawing an analogy to a comparably threatening bicultural situation between Spain and France [in 1808]. His article focuses on the symbolic value of the hapless knight’s indomitable spirit’ (170). 5 The best account to date of the difference between the poetics underlying the Cervantine novel and that of the modern realist novel is Félix Martínez Bonati’s, especially in chapter 1, ‘Cervantes and the Regions of the Imagination’ (39–75).

268 Notes to pages 200–5 6 As noted above, Kanellos (1999) proclaims Don Chipote to be the first Chicano novel. González-Berry and Rodríguez disagree on the grounds that Venegas’s novel does not reflect a Chicano consciousness, since he ‘encourages return to Mexico, or, even better, discourages his countrymen from ever crossing into U.S. territory’ (110). For a lucid examination of the rationale for withholding the designation ‘Chicano’ from any novel prior to Tomás Rivera’s ... Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971) and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Ultima (1972), see Hernández-Gutiérrez (8–27). 7 In his interview with Bruce-Novoa, Arias mentions a course he took at Berkeley on Don Quixote as one of the three courses that made his formal education worthwhile (Bruce-Novoa 241–2). The professor who taught the course, J. Richard Andrews, is best known for his Introduction to Classical Nahuatl. Might Andrews have treated the young Arias to a postcolonial reading of Cervantes, avant la lettre ? 8 Armando Navarro has studied the Chicano movement in South Texas and the role of MAYO in two books, Mexican American Youth Organization and The Cristal Experiment. 9 Despite this sustained dialogue with Cervantes’ text, González acknowledged that he would never have accepted such parallels during the years of his involvement with the Movement in the late 1960s, due to a rejection of the literature and culture of Spain, the nation of the conquistadors. Over the years, his sensitivity to Spanish imperialism has evidently diminished. With the distance of three decades, the ambivalent figure of Don Quixote has helped González to sum up his mature judgment of the activism of his youth, which he still embraces, but in a more detached, ironic spirit. 10 While I would insist that this is a valid reading, it is not a univeral one. Because he generously encouraged me when I presented ‘Chicanoizing Don Quixote’ at the Southern California Cervantes Symposium in April 2001, I dedicated it to Luis Murillo when it appeared in Aztlán, and sent him a copy. In his letter of response, gracious and supportive though it was, he gently countered the sectarian nature of the operation of ‘Chicanoizing’ by insisting on the ‘universal appeal’ of Don Quixote. While it is hard to deny that anyone can enjoy the story, it does not have a single, universal meaning. Rather than asserting a universal understanding of Cervantes’ works, Transnational Cervantes aims to articulate a series of interconnected perspectives in dialogue both with one another and with specific sets of circumstances. 11 In chapter 2 above I discuss González Echevarría’s explanation of Latin American novelists’ enthusiasm for Cide Hamete in terms of the antiauthoritarian atmosphere that figure helps create.

Notes to pages 207–10 269 12 The Romantic reading was most clearly formulated by Schelling in Die Philosophie der Kunst : ‘Don Quijote and Sancho Panza are mythological persons extending across the entire cultivated earth, just as the story of the windmills and so on are true myths or mythological sagas. What in the restricted conception of an inferior spirit would have appeared intended only as a satire of a certain foolishness, this poet has transformed by the most fortunate of inventions into the most universal, meaningful, and picaresque image of life ... The theme on the whole is the struggle between the real and the ideal’ (Schelling 234). Anthony Close has rejected this interpretation in terms which are far too sweeping, condemning out of hand any approach which sympathizes with the hero and views the work as having a more serious intention than the parody of chivalric romances. What the entire debate reveals is the need to thoroughly ground any reading sympathetic to the hero in an interpretation of the historical circumstances under which the original was composed. 13 In general, the term fell into disfavour, though some continued to use it. To my knowledge, Barrera never renounced it. Gonzáles offers a good example of the theoretical time lag between Chicano studies and postcolonial theory when he expresses relief that the internal colony model has been abandoned in favor of ‘more nuanced interpretations,’ despite ‘backsliding from the old sixties militants’ (2). His account of the vicissitudes of the term is useful, however (263–4n3). Despite the polemics surrounding the internal colonialism model, Manuel de Jesús Hernández-Gutiérrez’s study constitutes a rigorous theoretical renewal that demonstrates its viability and flexibility. 14 A similar concept is Bhabha’s ‘minority discourse’ (157, 229–30). To begin with, his understanding of the cultural consequences of colonialism is essentially discursive. His discussions of minority discourse presuppose the same dynamic vis-à-vis the modern state as his analyses of colonial hybridity and resistance. 15 The following passage from the ‘Llanto de España’ (‘Lament for Spain’) is typical: You, Spain, will burn with the passions of your sins, like a kettle afflicted by a great fire. Your sorrows and maladies will increase with the huge fires that will burst forth from within you. You will find yourself in the hands of servants. Justice will be in the hands of the Jews. The offices of the Church will be left to Jewish converts [marranos] and subject to corruption and denigration. Then the giant boar will come forth from moist springs, bringing five piglets, and they will violate you in many places, Spain. With their tusks they will stab you and the giant

270 Notes to pages 210–25 boar will rape you. The evils that overtake you will be immense. In five places the sword of justice will penetrate you. Woe to you, Spain, and to your powerful chief, with no virtuous crown, for your sinful acts are abhorrent to Allah. The blood of the humble poor demands vengeance upon you! (Sánchez Álverez 246) 16 Chicano identification with the Moors is evoked explicitly by several writers, especially those from New Mexico. Here is another example, this time from Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Ultima, when the boy Antonio has gone to the hills to look for medicinal herbs with Ultima, the curandera: ‘She spoke to me of the common herbs and medicines we shared with the Indians of the Rio del Norte. She spoke of the ancient medicines of other tribes, the Aztecas, Mayas, and even of those in the old, old country, the Moors’ (Anaya 39). 17 For a recent analysis of this technique in Part One of Don Quixote, see David Quint’s Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times 1–90 (admirable in its attention to textual detail). 18 Simon Romero indicated these chapter headings as evidence of ‘a certain trace of Boccaccio or Cervantes’ in the novel in an interview with Ana Castillo in the 18 June–1 July 1993 issue of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s NuCity. 19 To have finally placed in question the supreme value of a self-sufficient form of individual subjectivity is one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century, an achievement which began in 1900 with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and culminated in the work of Michel Foucault. This shift in values is a necessary first step towards the recognition of the equal validity of non-European forms of civilization, including those which predominated in the pre-modern period in what is now Europe. Conclusion. Cervantes and Shakespeare: Toward a Canon of Spanglish Literature 1 Quoted from the Spanish daily La Razón, 6 July 2002, p. 22. Stavans’s project of ‘translating’ Don Quijote into Spanglish was a front page story in La Razón that day, and sparked a minor controversy – which seems to be the whole point. The ‘translation’ of the opening of Don Quixote into Spanglish has been reprinted as an appendix to Stavans’s Spanglish. 2 The point of this argument is to cross the cables of Charles Taylor’s restriction of his model of multiculturalism to cultures ‘that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time’ (66). Does Cervantes ‘belong’ to such a culture, and if so, to which? I would argue that he belongs

Notes to pages 225–39 271

3

4

5

6

equally and simultaneously to several, including, for example, Chicano literature. As if anticipating such a possibility, Taylor goes on to add, ‘I have worded it this way to exclude partial cultural milieux within a society, as well as short phases of a major culture’ (66). On what grounds does he impose this exclusion? The fact that Greenblatt uses, among other examples, Jorge Luis Borges’s eclectic and highly idiosyncratic canon to exemplify the approach he is describing points to the neo-colonialism underlying his attempt to protect an open access to ‘world culture’ for a privileged cosmopolitan elite. Greenblatt’s evocation of Borges repeats the frequent evasion of the Argentine writer’s postcolonial status. In this respect Mutual Impressions, another of Stavans’s projects, the critical anthology he edited of Latin and Anglo American writers’ comments on one another’s work, points more in the direction of a truly Spanglish Quixote than his absurd, attention-grabbing pseudo-translation. Fanon did not read Claramonte’s play himself. In Peau noire masques blancs (172–5) he translates into French some of the lines Oliver Brachfeld gives in the original Spanish in Les sentiments d’infériorité, where it is used as the basis for an entire chapter on the racial inferiority complex (271–6). Brachfeld was a follower of Alfred Adler who left his native Hungary for Barcelona, where, in the early 1930s, he taught at the university, ran a literary magazine called Europa and published his own writings and translations into Spanish from Hungarian and German. During the Civil War he emigrated to Paris, returning to Barcelona in the 1940s before settling finally in Venezuela. How exactly he came to read El valiente negro en Flandes is still a mystery. Part of El rufián dichoso takes place in Mexico, but the setting is limited to the monastery, thus avoiding the issue of how to depict the street life or rural scenes that fill the pages of the rest of Cervantes’ works.

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Index

Abencerraje, 178, 265n18 absolutism: ecclesiastical, 84, 221; Moriscos and, 176, 183, 221; and national identity, 29–32, 35, 40, 56, 221, 247n16, 255–6n9; resistance to, 16, 99, 110, 196; state formation and, x, 5, 14, 56, 218, 247n16, 248n23. See also Hapsburg monarchy; internal colonialism Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 202 Acuña, Rodolfo, 207–8 Adler, Alfred, 271n5 admiratio. See marvellous Aeschylus (Oresteia), 175–6 Alemán, Mateo (Guzmán de Alfarache), xi, xviii, 261n15 Alfonso X, ‘the Wise,’ xiv, 71 Algeria, xx, 179, 183, 191–3, 219, 244n9; as borderland to Spanish empire, 40–2, 145 aljamiado manuscripts, 18–19, 187, 210, 266n28 allegory, 86, 122–3 Almaguer, Tomás, 207–8 Alpujarras, War of the, 7, 74, 163, 174 Al Qaeda, 163

alumbrados, 20–1 Alurista, 194 Amadís de Gaula, xviii, 56, 203, 219 America. See Anglo America; Latin America; New World Amiel, Charles, 21, 116, 246n13 Ana Félix (Don Quixote) 172, 178, 183–6, 189, 191 Anaya, Rudolfo, 200, 268n6 Anderson, Benedict, 217 Anderson, Ellen M., 73 Andrés, Christian, 252n9 Andrews, J. Richard, 268n7 Anglo America: identity, 224–6; literary canon, in relation to Don Quixote, 228–30, 234; resistance to, xvii; 105, 194, 196– 7, 203–6, 209, 212, 217–21; sexism, as compared to Chicano culture, 213 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 25–7, 103, 249n32 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, ix Arabic: in Cide Hamete’s manuscript, 71–3; script, in aljamiado texts, 18, 73–4, 249n35; spoken, by Moriscos, 8, 27, 185; in Zoraida’s letters, 267n31 archival documents, xviii, xxi, 106–7,

296 Index 111, 120–21, 256n14; vs literary texts, 106–7 Arévalo, Mancebo de, 18–19, 249n35 Arévalo, Morisco community of, 19 Arias, Ron, 195, 200–2, 232, 234 Ariosto, Ludovico, 48 aristocracy, 10–13, 34, 40, 56, 144, 153, 177, 236–7. See also hidalgos Aristotelian literary theory, 16, 45–6, 48, 142, 258–9n5 Armas, Frederick de, 46–7 Armstrong-Roche, Michael, 84, 251n2, 257–8n22, 258n3, 260n10, 260–1n14 Asín Palacios, Miguel, 254n19 Astrana Marín, Luis, 106 Atkinson, William C., 46, 251n4 Atlantic world, x, xvii, 42, 77, 101–2, 216, 242 Auerbach, Erich, 244n6 Augustine, St, 86, 255n4 authority: disregard for, 68, 151, 153–4; local, 8, 32, 68; monarchical, 4–6, 13, 22, 31–2, 78, 99, 114, 183; narrative, 15–16, 70, 74–9, 99, 205, 214, 268n11; patriarchal, 95, 99, 262n21; religious, 21, 30–2, 50–6, 62, 66, 69, 75, 93–4, 99, 102, 122, 124 Avalle Arce, Juan Bautista, 254n2, 259n6 Avilés, Luis, 243n3 Ayala Martínez, Carlos de, 28–9 Aznar, José María, 262n1 Azorín, 229, 232 Baena, Julio, 258n2 Baeza, xx, 34, 163 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 34, 56, 181–2, 198, 258n3, 265n22. See also carnivalesque; chronotopes

Balibar, Etienne, x, 243n2 Bandera, Cesáreo, 259–60n9 Baños de Argel, 41 Barbaric Isle (Persiles y Sigismunda), 107, 110, 131–8, 186, 240, 259n8, 259–60nn9–10 Barbary Coast, 40–2 Barbolla Camarero, Domingo, 165, 263n3 Barcelona, 184 Barletta, Vincent, 248n25 Baroque: coloniality of power, 245n4; Persiles y Sigismunda, xv, 242; public sphere, xii, 42, 67, 87, 154–5, 182, 242; taste for the marvellous, 45, 53–4, 57, 132, 183 Barrera, Mario, 269n13; Carlos Muñoz, Charles Ornelas and, 208 beauty, 132–3, 136, 179–80, 261n18; and sublime, 147–8 Benassar, Bartolomé and Lucile, 40–1, 254n22 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, xii Benítez Sánchez-Blanco, Rafael, 264n8 Beringer, Arthur A., 258n2 Bernabé Pons, Luis Fernando, 48n25 Bernardo Ares, José Manuel de, 247–8nn22–3, 257n17 Bhabha, Homi K.: hybridity and colonial discourse, 99, 245n4, 269n14; time lag of modernity, 158, 207, 218–19, 221, 231, 262n22 bilanguaging (Mignolo), 26–7, 240 Black Legend, 229–30, 235, 238 Blauner, Bob, 207 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 196–7 border crossing, 93, 131–2, 197, 199, 201, 228 borderland: Algiers as, 40–2; alterna-

Index 297 tive to traditional nationalism, 25; converso identity and, 9–10; Extremadura as, 24, 91; la Mancha as, 3, 23–33; Seville as, 38–40; the United States as, 226 borders: European, 168, 241; of fiction, 66, 201, 258n4; of self and other, 226; of Spanish national identity, xi, 25, 34, 88–91, 125, 129, 151, 155, 157–9 border theory, 24–7, 249n32 ‘border thinking’ (Mignolo), 26, 209, 240 Borges, Jorge Luis, 234, 271n3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 153, 256–7n16 bourgeoisie, xii, 10, 78, 219 Bourne, Randolph, 226–7 Bouza, Fernando, 16, 248n24 Brachfeld, F. Oliver, 271n5 Brading, D.A., 101, 104–5 Braithwaite, Kamau, 231 Braudel, Fernand, x Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 204, 268n7 Bunyan, John, 83, 257n21 Burningham, Bruce R., 253n17 Burshatin, Israel, 265n18 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 51–2 ‘Byzantine’ (Greek) romance, 48, 126, 180, 183–4, 258n3, 261n19 Cabanelas Rodríguez, Darío, 253n19 Cabell, James Branch, 231 Calderón, Héctor, 200, 211 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 11, 250n43 Camacha, la (Coloquio de los perros), 63–6, 252n12 Canavaggio, Jean, 256n11 Candelaria, Nash, 204, 210–11 canons, literary, xiv, xvii–xx, 77–9,

219–22, 224, 228–30, 234, 241–2, 271n3 captives, 40–2, 145, 183, 187, 192, 251n47 Cardaillac, Louis, 19, 73 Caribbean, xii–xiii, 47, 69, 224, 232–3, 239 Carmichael, Stokey (Black Power), 245n3 carnivalesque, 180–2, 198, 211, 265n22 Carpentier, Alejo, xvi, 45–7, 69–70, 197, 205, 217–19, 231, 253n15 Carrasco Urgoiti, María Soledad, 265n18 Casalduero, Joaquín, 46, 142, 254n2, 259–60n9 Cascardi, Anthony J., 13, 57, 247n18, 262n21, 266n24 Case, Thomas E., 72, 253n18 Castile, xi, xx, 3–11, 24–9, 71, 89–93, 103, 113, 122, 153, 177, 180 Castillo, Ana, 195, 212–16; The Mixquiahuala Letters, 212–13; So Far from God, 214–16; Massacre of the Dreamers, 216 Castillo, David R., 247n18, 250n44; and Nicholas Spadaccini, 254n1 Castro, Américo, xiii, 6, 11, 163, 170, 253nn17–18 Castro Díaz, Antonio, 251n1 Catholic Church: monopoly over the supernatural, 49–53, 62, 92, 122, 148, 261n19. See also CounterReformation Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella), 29, 171, 187, 235 Cea D’Ancona, María Ángeles, 166 Celoso extremeño, 39 Cerco de Numancia, 243n1

298 Index Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de: Algerian captivity, 178, 219, 251n47; as ‘classic’ of Spanish literature, xiv; as an early modern writer, xii, 79, 221; as a European writer, 77–9; experience of internal colonialism, 209, 219, 233; fiction, reflections on, 16–17, 37, 60, 66, 124, 127–8, 140, 155, 158, 170; fictional self (in ‘Prologue’ to Don Quixote), 15–16; influence in the Americas, 228, 230–4, 238–9; interest in New World, 102, 256n11; knowledge of local events in Spain, 102, 115–16, 120; la Mancha and, 24–5, 219; and magical realism, 45, 77–9; political opinions of, 170–1; relationship to Spanish state, xi; and Shakespeare, 221, 223–5; slips and errors committed by, 126, 258n2; Spanish identity of, x–xii, 42–3, 128–9; as world author, xvi. See also individual works Charles V, 29, 56, 112, 153, 155 Chartier, Roger, 15 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 83 Chevalier, Maxime, 56 Chiampi, Irlemar, 253n15 Chicano literature, 194–222, 230–1, 269–70n16, 270–1n2 Chicano movement, 202–3, 268n9 Chicanos: as an internal colony in the U.S., 197, 203–4, 207–12 Childers, William, 258n4, 261n16, 265n21, 266n25 chivalric romance, 33–4, 47, 49, 56, 68–9, 74, 130, 142, 202, 214, 218 Chrétien de Troyes, 74

Christian, William A., Jr, xi, 12, 53, 83, 91, 103, 254n3, 255n8 chronotopes (Bakhtin), 34, 56, 202, 258n3 Cide Hamete Benengeli (Don Quixote), xiv, 59, 70–6, 172, 253n16, 267n31, 268n11 Cirot, Georges, 265n18 Cisneros, Francisco Jiménez de (Cardenal Cisneros), 7 Claramonte, Andrés de, 236–8, 271n5 Close, Anthony J., 269n12 Colie, Rosalie L., 244n6 colonialism: and modernity, xii, 4, 217, 244–5n1; ‘double bind’ of, 5, 6, 10, 13, 18, 176, 212; postcolonial theories of, 208–9. See also internal colonialism coloniality of power: defined, 5; and clandestine reading practices, 21– 2; in early modern Spain, 5–14, 138, 183, 210; in la Mancha, 32; and the marvellous, 68; and postcolonial theory, 209; resistance to, 122, 187, 208, 229 Coloquio de los perros, 57, 62–8, 171, 173–5 communitas (Turner), 87–8, 110, 138, 149, 181, 240 communities: fictional, 121; imagined, 22, 111, 125, 217, 255–6n9; interpretive, 22; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 127, 148–52, 186, 189; of readers, 22–3, 200, 221; religious practices of, 49, 122; temporary, 37; transformation of, 95, 100, 114, 127 Contreras, Jaime, 257n17 conversos: as borderland, 9–10; confis-

Index 299 cated property of, 117; as internal colony, 9–10, 197; as prototype of modern racism, 10, 235; clandestine reading practices of, 21; in Quintanar, 111 convivencia, 169–71 corruption, 88, 90, 115–16 Cortázar, Julio, 212 cosmopolitanism, xi, xx, 88, 125, 227 Costa Lima, Luiz, 48, 253n16 Counter-Reformation: as internal colonialism, xii, 12–13, 53, 121, 196, 211; Persiles y Sigismunda and, 83–4, 148, 261n19; and religious orthodoxy, 93–4, 110–11, 256n15; and Spanish ‘closure,’ 78, 99, 125, 156 Crémoux, Françoise, 87, 92–4, 255nn8–9 cristianos viejos (Old Christians): as internal colony, 10–13; self-definition in contrast to conversos, 117; semi-mythical identity of, 11–13; separate identity from Moriscos, 8, 173–7, 181–3, 188–9 crypto-Islam, 22, 76, 116, 118, 174, 186. See also Moriscos crypto-Judaism, 9, 21–2, 116, 246n13. See also conversos Cuevas, Mariano, 104 Dante Alighieri, xiv, 234 Dedieu, Jean-Pierre, 12 Deffis de Calvo, E., 258n3 Defoe, Daniel, 219, 231 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 157–8 Depestre, René, 231 Derrida, Jacques, 125 deterritorialization, 128–9, 157–8 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 102

Dickens, Charles, 234 Diego, Juan, 101, 102, 104–5 Díez Fernández, José-Ignacio, and Luisa-Fernanda Aguirre de Cárcer, 252n13 Díez Nicolás, Juan, 166 DiSalvo, Angelo J., 254n2 Djebar, Assia, xvii, 191–3, 244n7 Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, and Bernard Vincent (Historia de los moriscos), 245n5, 265n17, 266n27 Don Chipote. See Venegas, Daniel Don Quixote (novel): anniversary of, xix–xx, 244n8; Celtic influence in, 74–5; Chicano/a reading of, xviii, 194–6, 203–7, 209–12, 216, 230–1; compared with Persiles y Sigismunda, xv, 125, 146, 153; enchanters in, 59; historical context of, x; and the modern novel, xiv, 77–9, 218, 244n6, 254n21, 267n5; Moriscos in, 172–6, 178–86, 191–3; the muleteer of Arévalo, 19; ‘Prologue,’ 15–17; narrative technique, 140; Romantic interpretation of, 206–7, 269n12; setting in la Mancha, 33–6, 38; scenes in the inn, 60, 179–80; Seville in, 39; utopian vision of Spain in, 37. See also Cide Hamete; Don Quixote (character); Sancho Panza; Zoraida Don Quixote (character): association with la Mancha, 33–4, 38; rivalry with Cide Hamete, 75–6; symbol of resistance to U.S. hegemony, 194, 196–8, 205; as transgressor, 197–8 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 182 Dudley, Edward, 74–5, 218 Durán, Manuel, 265n22

300 Index Egido, Aurora, 260n13 ekphrasis, 139–45 El Egido, 165 El Saffar, Ruth S., xv, 57, 155, 251– 2nn7–8, 259n8 empire, Spanish: borderlands of, 30– 3, 35, 37, 40; Castilian peasantry and, 11; critical perspective on, 138, 239, 259–60n9; impact on Spain, x, 4, 11, 30, 89, 119; in the New World, 4, 194, 268n9; parodied, in Barbaric Isle, 138; and Francoist ideology, 171. See also nation; Spain Erasmianism, 4, 53, 84, 111, 153–4, 211 Española inglesa, 261n17 Espejo de consolación (Juan de Dueñas), 21 ETA, 163, 262n1 Europe: Cervantes and, 77–9; early modern racism in, 235; Europeanization of, 53, 217, 270n19; Islam in, 193; literary canon of, xiii–xiv, 77, 222; in Persiles y Sigismunda, xvii, 89, 125, 131, 138–9, 241, 254n23; reinvention in North Africa, 40–1, 193. See also under nation Everett, Barbara, 236 exile, xiii, 112, 140, 154–7, 173, 178–9 expulsions: of Jews, 6; of Moriscos, 6, 7, 170–1, 174, 177, 181, 183, 210 Extremadura, 24, 28, 39, 165, 174, 250n40; as setting for Feliciana episode of Persiles y Sigismunda, 88–91, 101–4, 151, 153, 255n7 Fanon, Frantz, 161, 207, 237–8, 246n14, 260n12, 271n5

fantastic literature, 45, 51, 69, 129. See also marvellous Faulkner, William, 231, 233–4 Feliciana de la Voz (Persiles y Sigismunda), 85, 90, 94–100, 105, 121–2, 144, 149, 151, 153, 255n7 Fernández, James D., 38 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 229–30 fiction. See under Cervantes fictional worlds, 125–8 Fish, Stanley, 22, 248n28 Flores Arroyuelo, Francisco J., 174 Forcione, Alban K.: Persiles y Sigismunda, xv, 49, 258n4, 259nn6– 7; Cervantes and Aristotelian precepts, 45–6, 48–9, 142, 251nn4, 6, 255n7; Coloquio de los perros, 57, 66–7; Ricote, 266n25 Foucault, Michel, 53, 270n19 Fra Molinero, Baltasar, 238 Franco, Francisco (dictator), 171, 243n2 Freud, Sigmund, 270n19 Frey, Herbert, 53, 217 Frijhoff, W.Th.M., 247n20 Frye, Northrop, 56 Fuchs, Barbara, xii, 245n7, 261n17, 265n17 Fuentes, Carlos, 244n1 Galatea, xiv Gallardo español, 41 Gallego y Burín, Antonio, and Sandoval Alfonso Gámir, 265n19 Galmés de Fuentes, Alvaro, 248n25 Garcés, María Antonia, 145, 251n47, 252–3n14, 266n29, 267nn30–31 García-Arenal, Mercedes, 7–8, 168, 174, 264n11 García Ballester, Luis, 252n13

Index 301 García España, Elisa, 167, 263n5 García Márquez, Gabriel, 44, 70, 205, 234 García Martínez, Sebastián, 266n27 Garcilaso de la Vega, xviii gender, 100, 131–2, 259n8 genre, xiv–xv, 45, 49, 56–7, 69, 75, 122, 128–31, 142, 147, 214–15, 258–9n5, 261n19. See also Byzantine romance; chivalric romance; pastoral; picaresque; romance Gerli, E. Michael, 251n46, 252n10 Ghost Dance cult, 203, 210 Gilroy, Paul, 77 Ginés, Montserrat, 231–3 Godoy Alcántara, José, 254n19 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xiv, 234 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 105, 249n32 Góngora, Luis de, xviii Gonzáles, Manuel G., 269n13 González, Eduardo, 259n8, 259–60n9 González, Genaro, 195, 202–5, 210, 267nn1, 3, 268n9 González, Julio, 249n33 González-Berry, Erlinda, and Alfred Rodríguez, 198, 211, 268n6 González Casanova, Pablo, 207 González de Amezúa y Mayo, Agustín, 65 González Echevarría, Roberto, 70, 268n11 González Rovira, Javier, 258n3 Goodman, Nelson, 127–8 Goytisolo, Juan, xiii Gracia Boix, Rafael, 65 Gracián, Baltasar, 243n3 Graf, Eric, 71 Gramsci, Antonio, 228 Granada, 7–8, 19, 28–9, 31, 72, 74,

111, 118, 171–7, 185, 245n8, 246n12, 265nn19, 20. See also Moriscos Granada, Fray Luis de, xviii, 54, 66 Greenblatt, Stephen, 229–30, 271n3 Griffin, Eric, 236 Guadalupe, Virgin of (Extremadura), 87–8, 90–4, 96; shrine legend, 90–1 Guadalupe, Virgin of (Mexico), 26, 101–5, 256n13 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 210, 228 Guha, Ranajit, 208, 244–5n1, 247n16 Gutiérrez Nieto, Juan Ignacio, 10–12 habitus (Bourdieu), 256–7n16 Hagerty, Miguel José, 253n19 Hahn, Juergen, 254n2 Hajari, Ahmad ibn Qasim al-, 72–3, 179, 254n20 Haliczer, Stephen, 265–6n23 Hall, Stuart, 228 Hanneken, Jaime, 258n1, 259n6, 260n10 Hapsburg monarchy, x, 11, 15, 30–1, 38, 78, 125, 138, 171, 247n22. See also empire, Spanish; and individual monarchs Harris, A. Katie, 254n19 Harris, Max, 267n2 Harrison, Stephen, 258n2 Harvey, L.P., 245n5, 245–6n9, 248n25, 253–4nn19–20, 264–5n15 Hebreo, León (Judah Abrabanel), 259n8 Hechter, Michael, 4–5, 217 Heliodorus, 48, 126. See also Byzantine romance Hernández-Gutiérrez, Manuel de Jesús, 203–4, 268n6, 269n13

302 Index Herrera, Fernando de, xviii Hess, Andrew, 264 Hidalgo, Miguel (el padre Hidalgo), 105 hidalgos (social class), 13, 31, 33, 56, 106, 111–14 Hieronymite Order, 103–4 Hinojosa, Rolando, 204 Hitchcock, Peter, xii–xiii honour: purity of blood and, 11–12, 34–5, 250n41; treatment in Persiles y Sigismunda, 85, 88, 98, 108, 112–14, 256–7n16 Hornachos (Extremadura), 174 hospitals, in sixteenth-century Quintanar, 115–16 Huerga, Álvaro, 252n12 Huntington, Samuel P., 225–7 Hutchinson, Stephen, 128, 131, 255n4, 258n4 hybridity, 70, 75, 77, 99, 197, 217, 218, 233, 241, 254n22, 269n14 hypocrisy and corruption, 88, 90, 115–20 Iffland, James, 198, 234, 265n22 immigration: and crime, 167–8, 263n5; media representation of, 166–7, 263n4; Mexican, in the United States, xvii, 198–201, 209–10, 222, 224–5, 227–8; Moroccan in Spain, xvii, 164–9, 189, 210; and public opinion, 166–9; rapid growth in Spain, 164–6, 262–3n2 indianos, 40 Inquisition: as agent of internal colonialism, xi, 6–8, 13, 16, 18, 31, 33; and birth of modern racisim, 235; and censorship, 54, 154;

cristianos viejos and, 117; and crypto-Islam, 118–19, 248n27; and crypto-Judaism, 116–17; of Cuenca, 8, 116–17, 180, 245n8, 246n10, 264n12; libros de testificaciones, xviii, 8, 118–19, 185, 245n8, 246n10, 264n12; in local politics, 257n17; and reading, 15, 21–2, 54, 72; and religious repression, 92, 119, 154; witchcraft and, 65, 252n12 Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), 164–5, 262–3n2 internal colonialism, xvi–xvii, 3–14, 207, 245n2, 260n12; Castilian peasantry and, 10–13; Chicanos and, 197, 203–4, 207–10, 231, 269nn13–14; in early modern Spain, xvi, 3–14, 88, 171–7, 196–7, 207, 231, 235; in Europe, 4; and the marvellous, 68; in Latin America, 4, 207; in the United States, 4, 197, 207, 233. See also under Chicanos; conversos; Moriscos irony, 58, 83, 143, 203, 205, 254n1, 268n9; authorial vs historical, 120– 1, 265n16; in Cervantes’ treatment of Moriscos, 170, 174, 187, 189–91, 264nn9–10 Irving, Washington, 228, 234 Isado Jiménez, Pedro Jesús, 251n45 Iser, Wolfgang, 148 Islam: Christianity and, 27–9, 182, 266n28; Cide Hamete and, 71–6; conversion to and from, 40, 42, 178; prohibition of, 4, 6–7, 18–19; in Spain, xvii, 49, 66, 169–74, 187, 193, 244n1; war with, x, 163. See also crypto-Islam; Moriscos; Muslims islamophobia, xx, 190

Index 303 Jameson, Fredric, 56 Jews, xi, 4–7, 175, 220, 235; as internal colony in Europe, 246n14, 260n12; conversion of, 9; exclusion from the Spanish nation, 88; expulsion (see under expulsions). See also conversos Jiménez Lozano, José, 246n12 jofores (Morisco prophecies), 18, 187, 210, 269–70n15 Johnson, Carroll, xii, 266n26 Kagan, Richard L., 17–18, 248n24 Kamen, Henry, 12, 247n17 Kanellos, Nicolás, 195, 268n6 Khatibi, Abdelhebir, 26 Köhler, Erich, 56 la Mancha. See Mancha, la Lapesa, Rafael, 261n17 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, x, 243n1 Latin America: affinities of Cervantes’ work with, xvi, 47, 79, 197, 218; Cervantes’ reception in, xiv, 70, 205, 228, 268n11; Chicano literature and, 200; coloniality of power and, 245n4; Faulkner’s success in, 233; immigration to Spain from, 164, 166, 168; internal colonialism in, 4, 207, 217; marvellous and, 45–6; novelistic tradition, 218–20; and Peninsular studies, 3, 196–7, 220–2; Seville and, 42. See also magical realism Latinos, 227–9 Le Goff, Jacques, 51, 70 León, Lucrecia de, 17–18, 248n24 Lepanto, 155 Lewis, David, 258–9n5 Lezama Lima, José, 245n4

Libros plúmbeos, 72–3, 253–4nn19–20, 266n28 Licenciado vidriera, 58 liminality, 95–6, 109–11, 129, 131, 138, 149, 181. See also communitas limpieza de sangre. See purity of blood lingua franca, 41, 42, 182 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernández de, 234 local government, 13, 30, 113–14, 247n22 local history, xviii–xxi, 26–7, 33, 38, 111, 120–3, 232–4 locus amoenus, 96. See also pastoral Loomba, Ania, 234–6, 237 Lope de Vega Carpio, Félix. See Vega Carpio, Félix Lope de López, Yolanda, 105 López Baralt, Luce, 73–4, 248n25, 253n18 López Pinciano, Alonso, 48 López-Salazar Pérez, Jerónimo, 13, 247n22, 257n17 Lorite García, Nicolás, 167, 263n4 Lozano Renieblas, Isabel, 252n11, 255n7, 258n3, 259n6, 261n19 Lucca (Italy), 156 Lupher, David A., 243n1 Machado, Antonio, 229 Madrid: destination of displaced peasants, 30, 32, 38; terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004, 163, 169; and Toledo, evasion of by characters in Persiles y Sigismunda, 38, 111, 152, 154 Maestro, Jesús G., 261n19 Maeztú, Ramiro de, 232 magic, 58–9, 63–6, 252nn12–13. See also marvellous

304 Index magical realism, xvi, 45, 79, 195, 197, 200, 218, 220, 253n15 Mancebo de Arévalo. See Arévalo, Mancebo de Mancha, la (historical reality): between past and present, 30; borderland, 23–33; crypto-Judaism in, 21; ‘empire’s backyard,’ 30, 37; ‘Reconquest’ and, 28–9 Mancha, la (in Cervantes’ works): xv–xvi, 24–5, 33–8; Don Quixote 33–6, 38, 183, 232; Persiles y Sigismunda, 37–8, 106, 120, 151, 154; Retablo de las maravillas, 36–7; Rinconete y Cortadillo, 36; utopian image of, 120, 179–80 Mancing, Howard, 265n22 manuscripts, 16–19 Maravall, José Antonio, 12, 41, 54 Mariscal, George, xi–xii, 40, 247n17, 256n15 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco, 170, 176, 264nn9–10 Marshall, Paule, 231, 234 Martín de Nicolás, Juan, 111, 186, 249n37 Martín Muñoz, Gema, 263n6 Martínez, François, 245n6 Martínez Bonati, Félix, 170, 244n6, 254n21, 258n4, 258–9n5, 264n9, 267n5 Martinez López, Enrique, 264n9, 266n26 marvellous, 45–51; ambivalent, 55– 69, 98, 136, 186–7; in chivalric romance, 56; and the Church’s monopoly over the supernatural, 49–53, 62, 92, 122, 148, 261n19; distinguished from the fantastic, 51; and the everyday, 61–2, 138–46;

Latin America and, 46–7; legitimate 46–8; vs miraculous 49–51; repositories of, 70, 197. See also under Persiles y Sigismunda maurophilia, xx, 178–9, 265n18 MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization), 202, 268n8 Mediterranean world, x, xii, xvii, 40– 2, 77, 168, 192–3, 216, 254n22, 260n11, 265n16 Menchú, Rigoberta, 1, 244n1 Méndez M., Miguel, 205–6 Mexico, 196–7. See also Guadalupe, Virgin of (Mexico). See also under immigration, Mexican to the United States Meyer, Doris, 267n4 Mignolo, Walter D., xix, 9–10, 26–7, 208–9, 230, 240, 245n2 militarism, 31, 110 military orders (Santiago, Calatrava, Alcántara), 28–30, 89, 249n31, 250n40, 257n18; Consejo de Órdenes, xviii; incorporation into the Spanish monarchy, 29–30 minimal departure, principle of (Ryan), 127–8, 258–9n5 modernity: Cervantes’ fraught relation with, 79, 221; colonialism and, 4, 244–5n1; early, xii; Latin American, and Cervantes, 217–18; literature, 182–3, 265n22; and the state, 186. See also time lag of modernity Molho, Maurice, xv, 83 Molina, Álvaro, 264n14 Moner, Michel, 264nn9–10 Montalvo, Juan, 205, 234 Montemayor, Jorge de (La Diana), xviii

Index 305 Montilla (Córdoba), witchcraft trials, 65–6, 252n12 Moors. See Moriscos; Muslims Moreiras, Alberto, 243–4n4 Moreno, Carlos, 71 Moriscos: alleged population increase, 175–6, 264–5n15; antiMorisco discourse, 174–6, 187; Cervantes’ treatment of, xvii, 164, 171–93; Cide Hamete as a, 73, 75; clandestine practices of, 18–19, 245n8; in Coloquio de los perros 173– 6; controls on, 8, 245–6n9; in Don Quixote, 172–6, 178–86, 191–3; intermarriage with cristianos viejos, 179, 265nn19–20; as internal colony, 6–8, 76, 171–7, 197, 210, 233, 245nn5–12, 265n17; and magic, 65–6, 252n13; in la Mancha, 31, 74, 185, 264n11; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 173–6, 178, 186–91; in Quintanar, 111, 118– 19; as a race, 235; regional differences among, 171–4; remaining after the expulsion, 245n6; in Spanish history, 169–71; stereotypes concerning, 175–6; translator of Cide Hamete’s manuscript, 71–3, 173; variations in degree of assimilation, 185 Morocco, xvii, 164–9 mudéjares. See Moriscos Muñoz Molina, Antonio, 263–4n7 Murillo, Luis Andrés, 59, 180, 266n29, 268n10 Muslims: Cide Hamete as, 70–6; and European identity, 192–3, 236; in medieval and early modern Spain, xi, 7, 14, 18–19, 27–8, 88–9; in Spain today, xvii, 164–9, 175, 220;

women, 168, 191–3, 216, 263n6. See also Moriscos Mutis, Álvaro, 234 Nabokov, Vladimir, 202 Nader, Helen, 30 Nalle, Sarah T., 20, 83, 247nn19, 21 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 261n18 Narváez Córdoba, María Teresa, 19, 248nn26–7, 249n35 nation: Barbaric Isle as a model of, 137–8, 260n10; European, 4–5, 131, 217, 235, 251n3, 254n23; fictional realms as models of, in Persiles y Sigismunda, 125–6, 128, 131–2, 136–8, 148, 158; -state, x, 186, 217; submerged currents within, 99, 153–8. See also Spain; Spanish national identity Navarro, Armando, 268n8 Nerlich, Michael, 89, 251n3, 252– 3n14, 254nn23, 1 New Castile: Counter-Reformation in, 247n19; in Don Quixote, 34, 39, 180; la Mancha in, 27; military orders in, 28; Moriscos in, 7–8, 172, 174, 180, 264n11; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 107, 199, 153–4; in Rinconete y Cortadillo, 36. See also Mancha, la new ethnicities (Hall), 227–9 New World: Cervantes and, 77, 156; colonization of, and internal colonialism, 3–4, 32, 89, 194, 217, 221; Don Quixote and, xiii, 221, 231; Europe and, 210–11, 222; and modernity, 221; Moriscos prohibited from going to, 175; Persiles y Sigismunda and, 78, 89, 99, 101–2, 239, 241; Rufián dichoso and, 239,

306 Index 256n11; Seville and, 36, 38–40; Spanish empire in, x–xi, 89 Nirenberg, David, 6, 236 nobility. See aristocracy; hidalgos nomadism, 157–8 North America. See Anglo America; United States novel, as a genre. See realism. See under Don Quixote Novelas ejemplares, xiv; ‘Prologue,’ 16. See also individual titles Núñez Muley, Francisco, 7 O’Callaghan, Joseph F., 76 Old Christians. See cristianos viejos Oliver Asín, Jaime, 179, 266n29 Ortega y Gasset, José, 246n15 Osuna, Rafael, 259n6 Parkinson Zamora, Lois, and Wendy Faris, 253n15 Parr, James, 244n6, 265n22 Partido Popular, xx, 262n1 pastoral, xviii, 129–32, 144, 148–52, 156–8, 214–15, 261–2n20 patriarchy, 94, 97–100, 105, 153, 156, 193, 216, 262n21, 267n30; and Marianism, 256n10 Pavel, Thomas, 128, 258–9n5 Peña Díaz, Manuel, 14, 17, 248n28 Percy, Walter, 231 peregrinatio vitae (allegorical ‘pilgrimage of life’), xvii, 83, 85, 122, 146 Pérez de Hita, Ginés, 178 Perez Galdós, Benito, 234 Perry, Mary Elizabeth, 245n5 Persiles y Sigismunda, Los trabajos de (The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda), xiv–xvii, 81–159, 254–62; Americanist reading, 238–41;

Carpentier’s reading, 46–7; caves in, 108–10, 136–7, 154–6; characters’ avoidance of Madrid and Toledo, 38, 111; compared with Don Quixote, xv, 125, 146, 153; and Counter-Reformation, 83–4; desire in, 133–5, 156–8; division into two halves, 129–30, 259n6; and European unity, 125, 254n13; fictional ‘realms,’ 61, 125–31, 136–8, 149, 258n4; France in, 129, 155; genres, 129–30; inconsistencies, 126, 258n2; languages, 143–4, 239–40; la Mancha in, 24, 37–8, 106, 151; marvellous, 46–7, 58–9, 61–2, 138– 48, 218, 251nn2–5; Moriscos, 173– 6, 178, 186–91; neglect of, xv, 79, 126; painting in, 139–45, 260n13; pastoral, 148–52; pilgrimage theme, 83–9, 122, 125, 141, 146–8; purported religious orthodoxy, 49; social change in, 100–1, 127, 130, 132, 146, 148, 156, 158, 186; and Spanish national identity, 125–6, 138–46, 148, 151–9, 260n11; surrogates of the author in, 142–4, 154–6; transgression, 131–2; transitions among fictional realms, 131–47; as transnational romance, 125, 251n3; utopian vision of Spain in, 37, 150–9, 186, 191. See also Barbaric Isle; Feliciana de la Voz; Villaseñor, Antonio de Philip II: and Lucrecia de León, 17–18; and purity of blood, 10; Relaciones topográficas, 115; restrictions on religious practice under, 94; social tension during his reign, 120; and Spanish ‘closure,’ 88–9, 154–6

Index 307 Philip III, 7, 156, 186–9 picaresque, 57, 67, 129–30, 215, 218, 251n45, 269n12 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 261n16 pilgrimage: as authentic popular practice, 84–9, 92–4, 101, 111, 121– 4; and border crossing, 93; in Persiles y Sigismunda, xvii, 83–9, 122, 125, 146–8; peregrinaje vs romería, 93–4; of the reader, 121–4, 146–8; transforming impact of, 100, 107, 181 Poggioli, Renato, 261–2n20 Poole, Stafford, 102–3, 256n13 postcolonial: approach to Cervantes, xix, 43, 220–1, 232–4, 244n5, 268n7; as a label for our era, xii, xvi, 79, 242, 244–5n1; Latin America, 45, 228, 271n3; theory, 25–6, 208, 269n13 Postigo Castellanos, Elena, 249n36 postmodernity, xii, 77, 79, 220, 242, 244–5n1 postnational identities, xvii, 228–9 practices: of cultural resistance, 5; heretical, 65–7, 252n13; linguistic, 27–8, 240; localized, xx, 89, 122–3; narrowing, due to prohibitions, 7– 8, 12–13, 31, 49, 53, 215, 247n20, 254n1; reading, 14–23, 148; reconstruction of, xviii; religious, official vs. popular, xvii, 53, 84, 88, 94, 182, 215, 254n1; residual, emergent, and dominant (Williams), 124, 158, 257–8n22. See also carnivalesque; crypto-Islam; crypto-Judaism; pilgrimage presentism, xvi–xviii, xix, 79, 158–9, 161, 163–4, 169–71, 192–3, 228–30, 242

Protestantism, x–xi, 22, 53, 77, 88, 159, 182, 219, 225, 231 purity of blood, x, 10, 235, 237; and cristiano viejo identity, 10–12, 37, 114, 247n17 Querillacq, Rene, 264n9 Quijano, Aníbal, xvi, 5, 209 Quint, David, 270n17 Quintanar de la Orden (Toledo): archival record, 106, 111–22; borderland of empire, 23–4, 31, 32, 37, 89, 250n39; conversos in, 116– 17; hospitals in, 115–16; idealized, in Persiles y Sigismunda, 119–22, 144–5, 149, 151, 154; Moriscos in, 111, 118–19, 185–6; 246nn11–12 Qur’an, 73–4 Rabelais, François, 181, 198 race, 37, 39, 210, 227–8, 235–8 Rafala (Persiles y Sigismunda), 178, 186–91 Randel, Mary Gaylord, 255n5 rasquachismo, 211 realism, 69, 77, 129, 197, 200, 204–5, 218–19, 221, 267n5 ‘Reconquest,’ xx, 27–9, 32–4, 91 Redondo, Augustín, xii, 39, 249n34, 265n22 regidores (local office), 13, 30, 113 régimen local. See local government Reiss, Timothy J., xii–xiii, 231–2 Renaissance humanism, 63, 146, 154 renegades, xiii, 40–2, 254n22 representation, 134; limits of, 137–8, 149–50, 153, 158, 259–60n9, 261n18 Retablo de las maravillas, 24, 36–7, 251n46

308 Index Ribera, Juan de, 264n8 Ricote (Don Quixote), 170, 172, 180–4, 264n9 Ricote, valle de, 174–5 Riley, E.C., 46, 251n4 Rinconete y Cortadillo, 24, 36, 39, 40 Riquer, Martín de, 264nn9–10 Rivera, Tomás, 200, 220, 268n6 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 209, 245n2 Rodríguez, Richard, 198, 219, 225–6 Rodríguez López-Vázquez, Alfredo, 237 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis, 163 Rojas Garcidueñas, José, 267n1 romance: in Cervantes’ fiction, xiv– xv, 45, 57–9, 251–2n7; in Coloquio de los perros, 57, 64, 252n8; and everyday experience, 47; and lowmimetic genres, 49; pastoral and, 261–2n20; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 61–2, 78, 125, 129–30, 132, 138, 142–7, 152, 260n13; theories of, 56. See also Byzantine romance; chivalric romance Rome, 85, 95, 130, 255n5 Romero, Simon, 270n18 Romero Muñoz, Carlos, 159, 258n2, 259n6, 266n27 Rosello, Mireille, 244n7 Rowling, C.K., 219 Rufián dichoso, 39, 239, 256n11, 271n6 Ruiz Rodríguez, José Ignacio, 28 Rulfo, Juan, 234 Rushdie, Salman, 234, 253n17 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 127–8, 258–9n5 Sacchetti, María Alberta, 254n1, 58n3 Said, Edward, 76, 78–9, 196, 208 saints’ lives, 52

Salazar, Count of (Bernardino de Velasco), 186 Salomon, Noël, 250n41 Sánchez, Bartolomé (deluded peasant in Nalle’s Mad for God), 20, 247n21 Sánchez, Miguel, 101, 103 Sánchez, Sonia, 262n22 Sancho Panza: Chicano perspective on, 194, 198, 211, 215–16, 267n1, 269n12; as colonized subject, 35, 183; parody of the villano honrado, 35; and Ricote, 180–3, 266n25 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 209 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 246n14, 260n12 Scaramuzza Vidoni, Mariarosa, 83–4 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 269n12 Schulenberg Prado, Guillermo, 105 Scott, Sir Walter, 219 secularization, 257–8n22 Selig, Karl-Ludwig, 260n13 Selvon, Samuel, 231 Seville: as borderland, 24, 38–40 Shakespeare, William, xiv, xviii, 221, 223–5, 230, 234–9, 241, 244n5; Othello, 236–7; The Tempest, 239, 241 shepherds’ cycle (of shrine origin legends), 91, 97 Sicroff, Albert A., 255n9 Silverman, Joseph H., 262n22 Simerka, Barbara, 243n1 Simmel, Georg, 140, 260n12 Singleton, Mack, 251n5, 255n5 Smith, Paul Julian, 267n30 Socuéllamos (Albacete), 185 Sola, Emilio, and José F. de la Peña, 254n22 Spain: Cervantes’ critical view of, 111, 143–8, 159, 260–1n14; double

Index 309 perspective on, in Persiles y Sigismunda, 88, 138, 140, 146, 148, 150–9, 260n11; early modern, xii, xvi, 197, 266n28; in Europe, xvii, 89, 125, 164, 168–9; immigration to, 164–9; Islam in, 169, 193, 220; low birthrate, 165; public opinion concerning immigration in, 166–9; representation of immigrants by the media in, 166–7; utopian vision of, 37, 90, 150–9, 179–80, 190; xenophobia in, 166–9, 176. See also under Spanish nation. Spanglish, 27, 223, 234, 249n35, 270n1, 271n4 Spanish language, in the U.S., 224–5, 228, 234 Spanish national identity: Cervantes’ participation in shaping, 37, 42, 158, 241; defined by exclusions, xiii, 11–13, 89, 168–9, 256n15; deconstruction of, 125–8, 148, 151–9, 250–1n44; formation of, x–xiii, 1, 5, 13, 138; Moriscos and, 172, 175–7, 191; open identity of, 90, 241; Spain beyond Spain, 156– 7; Spanish, xvi, 78, 88, 210 Stagg, Geoffrey, 253n17 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, 265n22 Starr-LeBeau, Gretchen D., 255–6n9 Stavans, Ilan, 220–1, 223, 234, 270n1, 271n4 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, 207 strangers, 94, 140, 257n21, 260n12 Suárez-Navaz, Liliana, 168 sublime, 96–7, 124, 147, 261n18 Sumption, Jonathan, 93 supernatural. See magic; marvellous surrealism, 45–6

suspensión, 54–5, 59, 66 Tafoya, Luis, 267n4 Talayuela (Cáceres), 165, 263n3 Tapia Sánchez, Serafín de, 248n27 taquiyya, 73, 118 Tasso, Torquato, 47–8, 62 Taylor, Charles, 270–1n2 time lag of modernity (Bhabha), 158, 207, 218–19, 231, 233 Toboso, El, 249–50n38, 253n18 Todorov, Tvetan, 51, 69 Toledo, 18–20, 39; in Don Quixote, 34– 5, 71, 73, 172–3; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 111, 152, 154 Torquemada, Antonio de, 44 Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Los. See Persiles y Sigismunda transnational perspective, ix–xiii, 27, 53, 77, 226, 234, 241; in Persiles y Sigismunda, xvi–xvii, 43, 47, 78, 88, 99, 125, 132, 251n3 Trato de Argel, 41 Trent, Council of, 12, 58, 83–4, 89, 93, 119, 154, 254n1, 257–8n22. See also Counter-Reformation Turner, Victor, 84, 87, 95, 131, 149, 255n7, 256n10; and Edith Turner, 255n7 Twain, Mark, 228, 231, 234 United States of America, xvii–xviii, 197–8, 216–17, 220–2; as a former British colony, 224–5, 230; national identity of, 225–7 utopianism: in Chicano literature, 210; Don Quixote, 37, 219; in Persiles y Sigismunda, 37, 88, 107, 111, 114, 119, 122, 145, 149–52, 157, 186, 191

310 Index Valencia, 7, 27–8, 38, 149–50, 173–4, 187, 264n8 Vega Carpio, Félix Lope de: role in forging Spanish identity, xviii, 11; use of la Mancha as a setting, 27, 32–3, 35–6, 250n41; El niño inocente de la Guardia, 33, 36–7 Venegas, Daniel (Las aventuras de don Chipote), 195, 198–200 Vialet, Michèle E., 191 Vidal, César, 169, 248–9n30 Vilar, Pierre, 231 Villa, Raúl Homero, 201–2 Villaseñor, Antonio de (character in Persiles y Sigismunda), 37, 85, 88–9, 101, 106–22, 129, 145, 152–3, 240, 260nn11–12 Vincent, Bernard, 245n5, 245–6n9 violence: and interethnic rivalry, 6, 187–8; irrepressible, 134; statesponsored, 6; ubiquity in early modern Spain, 90, 113 Walcott, Derek, 231 Ward, Benedicta, 52

Watt, Ian, 219 Welty, Eudora, 231 Wenzel, Siegfried, 85 Western literature, xiv, xix, 196 Whinnom, Keith, 54 White, Blanco, xiii Williams, Raymond, 158, 257–8n22 Williamsen, Amy, 254n1 Wilson, Diana de Armas: Barbaric Isle, 111, 138, 239, 259n8, 259– 60n9; Persiles y Sigismunda, xv, 83, 102, 254nn23, 1, 258n4; ‘Where Does the Novel Rise?’ 220 witchcraft. See magic Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 211 ðiñek, Slavoj, 247n17 Zoraida (Don Quixote), 34, 42, 61, 266nn26, 29; in Assia Djebar’s reading, xvii, 191–3, 216, 244nn7, 9; and the Morisco question, 178–80, 184, 189–90