Ana María Laguna and John Beusterien, eds. Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes

Abstract

Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes contains eleven essays in which scholars who mostly hail from universities in the United States analyze erotic desire in several works by Cervantes and a few other Spanish authors from the first half of the Seventeenth Century. The editors invoke an understanding of love as “a master metaphor” (4) for other kinds of desire in seventeenth-century texts. This approach will be familiar to readers of Calíope and students of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poetry thanks to major monographs in our field by Ignacio Navarrete, Roland Greene, Leah Middlebrook, and Isabel Torres. According to this line of interpretation, the language of erotic desire enabled writers to explore other kinds of desire and construct corresponding subjectivities: around the desire for poetic glory, for overseas empire, for rational understanding, or for national unity. In Laguna and Beusterien’s view, the mutation of love into a “master metaphor” was the consequence of the exhaustion of Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms towards the end of the sixteenth century. Thus, their framework largely repeats the received wisdom on the subject.The essays are organized into four sections. The first one consists of two chapters dealing with female desire in Cervantine works. In “Egocentricity versus Persuasion: Eros, Logos, and Pathos in Cervantes’s Marcela and Grisóstomo Episode,” Joan Cammarata and Ana María Laguna propose that the famous episode in chapters 11–14 of part 1 of Don Quijote (1605) expands the pastoral genre by introducing a pastoral of the self. Marcela’s advocacy for self-love aims to reach “emotional and perhaps erotic self-fulfillment in . . . solitude” (34). In “The Deceived Gaze: Visual Fantasy, Art, and Feminine Adultery in Cervantes’s Reading of Ariosto,” Mercedes Alcalá Galán explores Cervantes’s engagement with Orlando Furioso by focusing on women’s adulterous desire and how they deceive the gaze of their jealous husbands in the interlude El viejo celoso, from Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses (1615), and in El curioso impertinente, the novella contained in chapters 33–35 of part 1 of Don Quijote. By providing specific contexts that derive from unjust actions on the part of men, Cervantes explicates and even excuses the adulterous behavior of women, thus denouncing the self-defeating expectations of patriarchal structures and vindicating female agency.The three chapters of part 2 also deal with Cervantine texts and assess the impact of emerging epistemologies of perception, reason, and emotion on that author’s conception of love. In “El Greco’s and Cervantes’s Euclidean Theologies,” Eric Clifford Graf argues that Euclid’s isosceles triangle theorem, also known as the pons asinorum or “bridge of asses,” provides the figurative and literal structure for the triangular desire of El curioso impertinente and the visual disposition of El Greco’s Flight into Egypt. Both works advocate the path of logos or ratio to turn away from eros or libido, which is unbridled desire, to reach agape or caritas, the rational version of love. In a string of feats of the kind of logic, popularized by influential scholars in early modern Spanish studies, whereby, in the absence of an emphatic indication to the contrary on the part of the text, a sign could be and therefore must be an allusion to an obscure piece of Renaissance arcana, Graf affirms that certain references in Don Quijote to asses, triangles, and bridges allude to Euclid’s pons asinorum (93). The other two essays of part 2 deal with displays of emotion that frustrate expectations. In “Love and the Laws of Literature: The Ethics and Poetics of Affect in Cervantes’s ‘The Little Gypsy Girl,’” Eli Cohen applies modern affect theory to what he considers Preciosa’s “denials of emotion” (118) in the first of the Novelas ejemplares (1613) by Cervantes. La gitanilla inverts “the typically misogynistic configuration of the opposition reason–emotion” (122). Instead of getting carried away with emotion, as women and gypsies were presumed to do, Preciosa masters her passions, displays consummate rhetorical skill, and even places emotion and judgment in a mutually transformative relationship, what Cohen calls “an economy of affect and reason” (130). In “Eros and Ethos in the Political and Religious Logos of The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: Anomic Characters in Cervantes,” Jesús Maestro focuses on those characters of the author’s posthumous romance who suffer from anomie, the loss of moral selfhood due to alienating conditions. Anomie befalls them when they subvert “the norms and expectations of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy” but does so by skirting overt transgressions that were punishable under law (136).The essays in part 3, perhaps the most cohesive in the volume, turn to literary reconstructions of socially-sanctioned norms and notions of sexual deviance. In “Sexy Beasts: Women and Lapdogs in Baroque Satirical Verse,” Adrienne L. Martín explores poems by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, and an anonymous author in which women invite lapdogs into enigmatic and secluded domestic spaces, thus replacing men with ridiculous yet unnatural sexual partners. In these texts, male poets use toy dogs to construct fictions of aberrant female sexual behavior from which “any affective relationship” is absent (164). In “Sexual Deviance and Morisco Marginality in Cervantes’s The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda,” Christina H. Lee proposes to understand Cenotia’s desire for Antonio in connection to her subaltern status as a Morisca. Cenotia’s supposed sexual deviance, in Lee’s reading, is “a metonymical gesture that seeks to counter her rejection from the Spanish body politic” (178). In other words, Cervantes uses the cliché of the sexually ravenous Morisca woman to subvert it. In the third essay of the cluster, “The Black Madonna Icon: Race, Rape, and the Virgin of Montserrat in The Confession with the Devil by Francisco de la Torre y Sevil,” John Beusterien analyzes the racialized meaning that skin color had acquired after the sixteenth-century rise of the enslavement of Black Africans and the drive to eliminate Moorishness in Spain. Through the rape of a White Christian woman by a Black Christian man, La confesión con el demonio (ca. 1655) turns skin color into an “overriding visual signal of identity difference” (201) and thus teaches its audience “to see race, and, in so doing, it propagates racism” (192).The fourth and final part groups essays on epic convention. In “For Love of the White Sea: The Curious Identity of Uludj Ali,” Diana de Armas Wilson summarizes the life of the Calabrian convert to Islam and Ottoman admiral (ca. 1518–87) who inspired the character of Uchalí Fartax, the captor of Captain Ruy Pérez de Viedma in chapters 39–41 of part 1 of Don Quijote. Although in the introduction Laguna and Beusterien present this essay as an exploration of a masculine heroic ideal in Ottoman culture, that of a pious man devoid of personal erotic ambitions, none of that is present in Wilson’s essay, who instead ties her sketch to the rest of the volume by emphasizing that Uludj Ali loved the sea and he died from overexertion during sex. In “Writing a Tragic Image: Eros and Eris in Lope de Vega’s Jerusalem Conquered,” Jason McCloskey analyzes book 5 of Lope’s 1609 epopeya trágica, where crusaders behold mythological paintings that, through the means of tragedy, invite viewers to consider “the destructive consequences of ambition, envy, pride, and lust” (239). The failure of Christians to heed the lessons and their subsequent repetition of the mistakes of the Giants, Icarus, or Phaëthon serve Lope’s aim in Jerusalén conquistada to subordinate eros “to the eris of tragedy” (230), where the work finds its unity and differentiates itself from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). In the final essay of the collection, “The Unromantic Approach to Don Quixote: Cervantine Love in the Spanish Post-War Age,” Ana María Laguna examines the debate around Don Quijote’s love for Dulcinea between two generations of Spanish intellectuals: those of the Generation of ’98, such as Miguel de Unamuno and Ramiro de Maeztu, and those of the Generation of ’27, such as Pedro Salinas, Max Aub, and Luis Cernuda. Laguna challenges Anthony Close’s conflation of nearly two centuries of Spanish Cervantine criticism in his 1978 The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote.” By demonstrating that whereas Unamuno or Maeztu saw Don Quijote’s disastrous epic undertakings in the name of love as invitations to resurrect Spain’s imperial past, Cernuda and other exiled writers working in United States universities shifted the focus to “the illusionary dimension of this emotional experience” that is love in Cervantes’s works (257).Goodbye Eros features excellent essays on female desire by Alcalá Galán, Cammarata and Laguna, and Lee; on the masculinist gaze by Beusterien and Martín; on the replacement of eros with eris or strife by McCloskey; on the economy of emotion by Cohen; and on the history of ideas surrounding love and the meaning of Cervantes’s works by Laguna. Like many edited volumes, Goodbye Eros lacks substantial cohesion, and unfortunately it features three essays that, in the opinion of this reviewer, should have been reviewed and revised more rigorously.