Virtuous Capital for a Miraculous Escape: Love, Devotion, and Synchronicities in Cervantes’ “The Captive’s Tale”

Abstract

Virtuous Capital for a Miraculous Escape:Love, Devotion, and Synchronicities in Cervantes’ “The Captive’s Tale” Vicente Pérez de León Alá y Marién, su madre, sean en tu guarda, señora mía. Don Quijote I, 39, 415 In the story of “The Captive” – Don Quijote I, chapters 39-41 – several characters of the main plot – Don Quijote, Sancho, Fernando, Luscinda, Cardenio, Dorotea, together with the remaining hosts at the inn – become witnesses, an improvised audience of the recounted adventures of a young soldier and a Muslim renegade. Just arrived from Algiers, Ruy and Zoraida decide to make public the details of their accidental escape. Due to the complexity of this story, gender, historical, religious and trauma theory approaches, among others, have contributed to enrich its analysis. This paper will complement them by exploring details about the flow, accumulation and negotiation of its “virtuous capital,” in a revisitation and expansion of several of Bourdieu’s key concepts related to symbolic capital, such as habit, hysteresis, religious field and “Don Quixote effect” – suggesting its counterpart, the “Sancho effect.” The proposed approach will contribute to a more clear understanding of the attitudes and relationships established between the main characters of the tale, namely: –The origin and nature of Zoraida’s faith in Algiers, and her choice to marry Ruy. –The escape agreement among Zoraida and the three prisoners. –Ruy’s reintegration and acceptance of his family at his arrival to Spain. This story, essential to understand religion and spirituality in the first part of Don Quixote, has been thoroughly studied from its folkloric and historic perspectives (Chevalier 1983: 405-11 and Garcés 2002: 182-232). The presence of several [End Page 97] details about Cervantes’ biography has additionally inspired the exploration of the relationship between life and fiction in the novel.1 The first polemic aspect of this tale is the marriage of Zoraida and Ruy, which Castro interprets as a harmonic process of “dos seres concordados” (1972: 143), whereas Márquez Villanueva (1975: 132-34) and Percas de Ponseti (1975: 226-42) believe that, by marrying Ruy, Zoraida is being disloyal to her father. Zoraida’s decision can be better understood if contextualized in the tradition of blood and spiritual families: “Yet here Zoraida merely accompanies her literary sisters as they all heed Christ’s repeated exhortations in the New Testament to cast off the ties of blood kinship in favour of spiritual family” (Matthew 12.46-50, 10.29; Luke 14.26) (Remensnyder 2007: 666). Epitomized in Zoraida’s identity by being “portrayed in terms of an ambiguous frontier between history and fiction, and between the Spanish and the Maghribi cultures” (Garcés 2002: 206), a second relevant topic of discussion is the presence of opposed religions and cultures in the tale’s plot. The religious and cultural ambiguity of the novel has been studied as a submission of Maghribi’s into Christian’s identity, in the context of : “[…] [a] desire to translate and expand the Christian foundation myth so as to include the Arab Other in the definition of the Christian Self” (Graf 1999: 80-81) (2001: 146). This article will contribute to enrich these essential discussions by exploring Zoraida’s motivation towards Ruy and her desired presence in Christian Spain together with the relevance of the development of her spiritual breed in the novel, which originates in her acausal coincidences, experienced with Virgin Mary, which help to integrating both her religious and cultural identities. The theoretical frame suggested in this essay originates in Verter’s proposal of expanding Bourdieu’s2 “religious field” concept into the idea of “spiritual capital,” defined as a dynamic and unstable accumulation of individual spirituality.3 Accepting the possibility of “quantifying spirituality” opens the possibility of studying the way some individual’s identities are created by its accumulation. For the purposes of this paper the concept of “virtuous capital” is defined as “spiritual capital.” On the one hand embedded in the Cervantine philosophy of “being son of one’s deeds,” on the other hand conditioned by the transcendental nature of concurring acausal coincidences. Synchronicities are the association of a conscious being to something meaningful, and eventually provoking its...