Cervantes in Moriscolandia

Abstract

277 Review Article_________________________________________ Cervantes in Moriscolandia _______________________________________William Childers Carroll B. Johnson. Transliterating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos. Ed. Mark Groundland. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. Trevor Dadson. Los moriscos de Villarrubia de los Ojos (siglos XV-XVIII): Historia de una minoría asimilada, expulsada y reintegrada. Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2007. Manuel F. Fernández Chaves and Rafael M. Pérez García. En los márgenes de la ciudad de Dios: Moriscos en Sevilla. Biblioteca de Estudios Moriscos 6. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2009. Francisco Moreno Díaz. Los moriscos de la Mancha: Sociedad, economía y modos de vida de una minoría en la Castilla moderna. Madrid: CSIC, 2009. Mercedes García Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano. Un Oriente español: Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. W hen he died suddenly in March 2007, Carroll Johnson was in the midst of an ambitious book project taking Cide Hamete’s ‘virtual’ manuscript as the entryway for uncovering a web of Morisco references throughout Don Quixote and other Cervantine works. Prompted by Tom Lathrop, Mark Groundland has edited the notes, drafts, and previously published material that, according to a 2004 outline, were to form that book. Caught at different 278 Cervantes William Childers stages in the research/writing process, these materials create an effect akin to visiting an Old Master’s studio exactly as he left it: here a large canvas lacking only final touches; there some curious sketches we cannot quite make out, next to a recently exhibited landscape just returned to the studio; scattered about, unfinished portraits and still lives await the one hand that could complete them. On some the paint is still wet; brushes and palette stand ready... My goal in this review article is, first, to give a sense of the overall project whose current state is the result, not of its author’s intention, but of his human frailty. I also wish to establish a dialogue between that project and several major publications in Morisco studies that Johnson did not have the opportunity to read; studies that have appeared precisely during the last five years and which, I will argue, represent a new direction in the field. It is hard to gauge how close he was to finishing this book, and thus how much the finished version would have reflected the new perspective opened by these studies. In any case, he bequeathed the recovery of a Hispano-Islamic subtext in Cervantes to us, his fellow cervantistas, so it is our task now, if we choose to continue it. I What would eventually become Transliterating a Culture began while Johnson was “working through” Carmen Bernis Madrazo’s El traje y los tipos sociales en el QUIJOTE (2001), where, “toward the end, in the section devoted to the costume of the Moriscos,” he came across “what is identified as a quezote” (Johnson 233). Following the term through various permutations, including queçote, quiçote, and quixote (“That’s right, quixote” 235), resulted in an article in this journal, “Dressing Don Quijote: Of Quixotes and Quixotes” (Cervantes 24.1 [2004]: 11-21), reprinted as chapter four of Transliterating a Culture (231-38). Johnson posits a double etymology deriving the name Quixote simultaneously from “the Christian, European, feudal-chivalric world” and “the ArabIslamic cultural orbit, the Other in opposition to which the officially approved Spanish identity was to be constructed” (237). And he argues Volume 32.1 (2012) 279 Review Article: Cervantes in Moriscolandia that this “dialectical opposition” within the protagonist’s name should lead us to rethink, among other things, “the relationship among the authorial presences—the Christian first and second authors, and the ‘historiador arábigo manchego’” (238).1 The discovery of a double etymology for “quixote” did indeed lead Johnson to a sustained rethinking of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the main focus of Transliterating a Culture. He concerns himself less with metanarrative puzzles than with the way Cervantes, through his fictional manuscript, “makes the relation between the Old Christian power structure and the unassimilable Morisco population a fundamental theme of the book we read” (239). The study of Cide Hamete...