Novelas Ejemplares Research Articles

Editor’s Note

7 Editor’s Note Bruce R. Burningham W e have now fully entered the season of Cervantine commemorations , a season that initially began in 2005 with the 400th anniversary of the publication of part one of Don Quixote. Now, well into 2013, we take note of the fourth centennial of the publication of the Novelas ejemplares. Two years from now, in 2015, we will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second part of Don Quixote. (Which is not to mention—at least not outside this particular set of parentheses—next year’s recognition of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s 1614 publication of his own preemptive and unauthorized “second part.”) Soon it will be 2016, the year we mark the fourth centennial of Cervantes’s passing, which will be followed in 2017 by the 400th anniversary of the posthumous appearance of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Novelas ejemplares, we begin this Spring 2013 issue with two articles on the topic. Brian Brewer examines “El celoso extremeño” and argues that Cervantes’s representation of Carrizales, whose jealousy, he says, corresponds to early modern notions of commercial ethics, transcends that of the traditional “jealous husband” in order to create a more nuanced character study involving an economic discourse that links jealousy and avarice. Eduardo Olid Guerrero, for his part, examines “La española inglesa” and upacks the various ways in which Cervantes’s representation of Queen Elizabeth I reflects ongoing early modern social and political debates about Machiavelli’s Prince. Following these two articles on the Novelas ejemplares, we offer two essays involving the representation of Islam—and, in particular, the concept of taqiyya (the permissible dissimulation of Christianity by a devout Muslim)—in Cervantes’s work. Robert Stone focuses his attention on 8 Cervantes Bruce R. Burningham Don Quixote itself and argues that the novel’s Morisco episodes should be read as a subtle form of literary taqiyya. Charles Patterson, meanwhile , focuses on Los tratos de Argel and argues that the play’s romance between Aurelio and Zahara is inspired by the Genesis story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, but only after this Biblical motif has been inflected through a series of Morisco legends. Continuing the theme of early modern Christian-Muslim geoplitical relations, Aaron Kahn revisits La conquista de Jerusalén por Godofre de Bullón (which, readers will remember, was also examined in the Fall 2012 issue by Moisés Castillo) and provides further arguments in favor of ascribing authorship of this anonymous play to Cervantes. The Spring 2013 issue’s collection of essays rounds out with two articles on government and the Panza family. Montserrat Pérez Toribio examines Teresa Panza’s administration of her household during Sancho’s absence and argues that Teresa’s theories of government are ultimately both Machiavellian and Tacitean. Ana Fernández Cebrián and Víctor Pueyo, for their part, examine the philosophical and political function of Don Quixote, and particularly its representation of Sancho, during the time of Primo de Rivera’s early twentieth-century dictatorship. Finally, we offer two book reviews. Paul Michael Johnson reviews Georgina Dopico Black and Francisco Layna Ranz’s monumental collection of essays USA Cervantes: 39 cervantistas en Estados Unidos, while Michael J. McGrath reviews Anthony J. Cascardi’s Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Many thanks, as always, to our peer reviewers and Associate Editors for their invaluable contribution to the journal. And thanks again to my editorial assistants, Kelsey Kuzniewski and Esteban Touma, for all their hard work in helping me produce this issue. BRB ...

Cervantes’s Language of the Heart in the Novelas ejemplares and Don Quijote

A diferencia de la perspectiva moderna que propone al cerebro como el centro del individuo, los pensadores y escritores del Renacimiento y tiempos medievales planteaban una topografía del yo enfocada en el corazón. Lejos de ser un mero órgano de la circulación, al corazón se le atribuían diversas funciones como la voluntad, la memoria, la conciencia y la emoción. En este artículo analizo cómo representa Cervantes el interior del individuo y el cuerpo humano en Las novelas ejemplares y Don Quijote, prestando atención especial a las maneras en que armoniza y contrasta con la tradición poética occidental y el naciente campo de estudios empíricos de la anatomía. Posicionado en un momento de transición en la historia intelectual occidental, la literatura de Cervantes refleja elementos de la patrística, poetas medievales, y descubrimientos científicos del momento.

Sacred Geometry and Alchemical Process in Miguel de Cervantes' 'Las dos doncellas'

Miguel de Cervantes' collection of short stories, Novelas ejemplares, differs from his other works: within this collection, Cervantes admits to having incorporated hidden mysteries – without identifying those mysteries. What Cervantes does not explicitly confess is that these mysteries involve alchemical references and that the plot of each of the thirteen stories illustrates different aspects of the alchemical transformation process. Moreover, in the specific case of the story 'Las dos doncellas', traditionally dismissed by critics as a rather mediocre work with unnecessary redundancy and a poor argument, the four characters (or four elements) and the circular and triangular structure of the plot represent hidden alchemical references and aspects of sacred geometry overlooked by dismissive scholars. In sum, not only do these alchemical references validate Cervantes' claim about concealed mysteries but they also further interrogate the Novelas ejemplares and enrich the text for the aware reader.La serie d...

IMPROVISATION IN THE GENESIS AND STRUCTURE OF THE QUIJOTE

7 0 Y I M P R O V I S A T I O N I N T H E G E N E S I S A N D S T R U C T U R E O F T H E Q U I J O T E R O B E R T O G O N Z Á L E Z E C H E V A R R Í A The concept of ‘‘definitive text’’ is based on religion or on exhaustion. – Jorge Luis Borges I wish to propose a relatively new idea about the Quijote: that the book’s genesis and structure depend on improvisation, with improvisation also being one of its main themes because it is at the root of self-reflexivity, one of the most discussed features of the Quijote and the novelistic genre that Cervantes’s work seems to have initiated. By self-reflexivity I mean how the novel came to be written, the various stages of its creation, and the identity and role of the author. Although traditionally bound as one volume, the Quijote is not one but two novels (Parts One and Two, as they are known), so I will then take them up in the order that they appeared , in 1605 and 1615, because each has a separate genesis and a di√erent structure. Cervantes did not set out to write the Quijote as we know it – a long narrative, with a loose and repetitive plot involving two protagonists , protracted multiple and varied journeys, and adventures which lead up to the hero’s return home and his death. Although 7 1 R there are lingering debates about his intentions, it seems clear to me and others that what Cervantes wrote at first was a novella, in the Italian style of Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello; it was roughly the same length as those that he published later as novelas ejemplares , as well as the ones that he inserted in Part One, like the ‘‘Curioso impertinente’’ (‘‘The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious’’ in Edith Grossman’s translation, which is the one I am using). The original story of what became the Quijote centered on a petty country nobleman who went mad because he read too many chivalric romances and decided to become a knight-errant himself. It took up the first five or six chapters of Part One in its final form, from the time Alonso Quijano decides to turn himself into Don Quijote until he is brought back home by his neighbor Pedro Alonso, battered and beaten, after the misadventure with the merchants from Toledo. The conclusion of this primitive tale might have been the scrutiny of Quijano’s library by the barber and the priest, who were gleefully assisted by Quijano’s niece and his housekeeper. It is possible that in those early chapters Cervantes followed the plot of a minor one-act play involving a fellow whose madness consisted of trying to become one of the heroes in the Spanish ballads. These were very popular in the sixteenth century because many rekindled the memory of the wars against the Moors. But some critics have argued that the play came after the Quijote and imitated it instead. Be that as it may, the point is that Cervantes ’s narrative model when he conceived the Quijote was the novella, a lengthy short story or a short novel centered on a single protagonist – a mature man not unlike other older protagonists found, for example, in his play El viejo celoso (The Jealous Old Man) or his novella El celoso extremeño (The Jealous Man from Extremadura). Older protagonists are not common in fiction, and one of the unique features of the character Don Quijote is precisely that, because of his age, he is beyond what Freud would call the ‘‘family romance’’: the reader learns next to nothing about Don Quijote’s family and very little about his background. His personality and his decision to become a knight are not determined by the past; they are the product of choices not governed by necessity, which is consistent with the aura of improvisation that we find in the novel...

Andalucía en las <i>Novelas ejemplares</i> de Cervantes: una reflexión sobre el espacio novelesco cervantino

El artículo analiza la imbricación de vida y literatura que las Novelas Ejemplares de Cervantes —o, para ser más preciso, algunas de ellas— llevan como un sello principal de su identidad artística; sello que implica, a su vez, una determinada visión de Andalucía, en general, y sobre todo de Sevilla, en particular: de una Sevilla que es a la vez objeto e inspiración de una peculiar mirada novelesca, necesaria para entender tanto algunas de estas novelas como la percepción literaria del espacio que hay en la obra de Cervantes.

La filiación genérica del <i>Coloquio de los perros</i>

Este artículo aborda el problema del género literario al que pertenece la última de las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes. Propone, entre otras cosas, que al ironizar los parámetros de verosimilitud, el Coloquio de los perros pone en entredicho la univocidad de sentido en el relato autobiográfico contado por el perro Berganza. Valiéndose de comentarios críticos, ya clásicos o recientes, busca la inscripción genérica de la obra en la tradición literaria asociada con la sátira menipea y los géneros cómico-serios, como los ha postulado Bajtín, poniendo especial atención en la figura y el ejemplo de Luciano de Samosata. Recalca el papel de la heteroglosia y los géneros intercalados en el Coloquio de los perros, así como los cruces dialógicos con otros textos y manifestaciones discursivas.

The Dog, the Knight, and the Squire Sigmund Freud's Reading of Cervantes

The essay describes a stage in Freud's literary education initiated by an early reading of Don Quixote in German translation. Fired by the depth and inventiveness of Cervantes's story-telling and the insight into human character it revealed, Freud conceived a desire to learn something of the language in which it was originally written; and the discovery of an excerpt from Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares in a Spanish reader led him and a schoolfriend to fashion for themselves a home-made Spanish as a medium for the construction of a private world. Assumption of the persona of Cipión, the dog who conducts a conversation with a fellow-dog in Cervantes's 'Coloquio entre Cipión y Berganza', made possible various kinds of self-image and distancing. Repeated readings of Don Quixote sharpened Freud's appreciation of different kinds of humour, provided dramatic images for himself and his fiancée along with opportunities to indulge his didactic impulses, and helped him portray, through contrast and parallel, characters encountered in his life and his reading. They also strengthened his appreciation of graphic art when he set himself to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Gustave Doré's illustrations. Some of Freud's comments bring into focus his time-conditioned social preconceptions, especially about the nature and social rôles of women. Freud subjects neither Don Quixote nor the 'Coloquio' to the kinds of psychoanalytic analysis he applied to the writings of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Wilhelm Jensen; but when his aesthetic delight in Cervantes's art led him into self-definition and character analysis, he took a decisive step towards enlisting literature in the psychoanalytic quest. A concluding summary of the rôle of Cervantes's writings in Freud's life and thought offers itself as a demonstration of the part literature may play in the lives of sensitive and intelligent people who have not made its aesthetic investigation their principal task.

Through the Bonfires of Petrarchism: Flemish Aesthetics in "El coloquio de los perros"

Only recently has Cervantine criticism assumed the intertwining of graphic and literary imagination to be a constitutive feature of Cervantes's creative process and production (Chaffee-Sorace 208), Thanks to Helmut Hatzfeld, Kari-Ludwig Selig, Edward Friedman, Frederick De Armas, George Camamis, Edward Dudley, and Diane Chaffee-Sorace, among others, this visual and pictorial component has also become a constitutive feature of Cervantes criticism, one that allows us to consider and explore the Cervantine works for what they are: fully embodied works of art. Although Cervantes's pictorial imagination is usually explored in relation to the Italian Renaissance and its idealized premises,1 in these pages, by studying the exemplary novella El de los perros, I argue for the existence of a much darker dimension in Cervantes's artistic sensibility. Through a departure from Italian molds, Cervantes's adoption of a Northern Flemish aesthetics provides El coloquio with a cohesiveness that allows it to unfold in the almost antagonistic directions of the exemplary and picaresque genres. My ultimate intent is to show how, despite its generic ambiguity, the dark aesthetic of this novella allows it to conduct an underlying moral critique of beauty.A pictorial approach to Cervantes is a logical component of the general consideration of a literary text as work of art.1 Traditionally, aesthetics has been considered the qualifying characteristic that allows us to identify an artistic object. As Arthur Danto states, [a]n artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic (The Art World 571). The definition of such aesthetic interest, however, has proven to be a rather problematic postulation which many attempt to divert by identifying aesthetics with aestheticism: that is, by making beauty the ultimate interest or intention of the artist. This tempting identification conveys problems of its own; even though aesthetics and aestheticism both explore the conception of beauty, they do it quite differently. While aesthetics is devoted to the perception and contemplative delight of beauty in the form of the comic, the tragic, or the sublime, aestheticism considers art as self-sufficient, as the ultimate justification for its own existence.3Cervantine criticism often makes notions of aesthetics and aestheticism interchangeable. When studying Cervantes's art theory, we tend to study Cervantes's conceptions of beauty and perception, perhaps (mis)guided by how Don Quixote-in the name of the beautiful-justifies what he does through what he sees. Inside and outside the Cervantine domains, beauty, especially female beauty, as a literary motif often becomes the ultimate justification for pursuits that transcend the artistic. As explored by Henry Higuera, Lisa Rabin and De Armas, Dulcinea embodies a link between beauty and imperialism, one which determines the creation of Don Quijote as an errant knight.4 These critics illuminate the indebtedness of Don Quijote's characterization of Dulcinea to Petrarchan conceptions of beauty,5 pictorial and mnemotechnical techniques of Renaissance artists,6 and the military aspiration of the translatio imperil.7 Even though such a combination results in the somewhat monstrous figure of Dulcinea-never completely free from the lowly presence of Aldonza-Don Quijote succeeds in fixing in his mind, and that of his reader, the mechanics of female idealization.El de los perros was one of the last works of Cervantes to be associated with any realm of beauty and pleasing or idealizing aesthetics. Female characters are almost totally absent from the novella, with the exception of an old woman, Canizares, who is depicted as a monstruous witch. In Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness, Alban Forcione understands this absence as the revealing synthesis of the total design of the Novelas ejemplares (1613), which are for the critic a collection of stories grouped by their pessimistic tone, overwhelming ugliness, and vision of disorder. …

Algunas calas en el uso de los nombres de color en <i>El Quijote</i>

Los nombres de color tuvieron un significado simbólico entre los siglos XIV y XVII que restringía en cierto modo su uso. En este artículo, el autor ejemplifica este uso en varios episodios de Don Quijote y las Novelas ejemplares.

A Companion to Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares

This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity, and supposed 'hidden mystery'. After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, and to the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices. Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.

The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (review)

CASCARDI, ANTHONY J., ED. Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. xvii + 242 pages.This is a frustrating volume, whose review I kept postponing. It has some good essays, but it is sloppy and unbalanced, not on the level of the Suma cervantina or the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Don Quixote. One misses the presence of the most distinguished and influential of Anglo-American cervantistas, such as Alien, Avalle-Arce, Close, Mancing, Murillo, Parr, or Riley.Melveena McKendrick provides one of the best chapters, Writing for the Stage, surveying thoroughly his theater and identifying some of its uniqueness and shortcomings. For content has primacy over form; was a storyteller and told stories in his drama (143). Mary Gaylord provides an unbiased and informed survey of Other Fiction, including a sympathetic reading of La Galatea, pointing out the varied topography of the Novelas ejemplares, and how Persiles shares with La Galatea a treatment of multiple versions of love. All of his fiction teaches that irony comes in many shapes and guises (125). I believe she overstates Persiles's popularity with its first readers (none of the six publishers of the 1617 editions brought out a second edition), and since she cites Saffar, it surprises that Ruth is not mentioned as someone who has addressed the question of the Novelas ejemplares ordering (127 n. 23).Fred De Armas studies and the Italian Renaissance and in the process deals intelligently and sensitively with Cervantes's views on love and literature; it is the article that best examines Cervantes's thought. Cervantes's longing for Italy is a longing for the Renaissance. Anne Cruz reviews recent psychoanalytical studies of in Psyche and Gender in Cervantes, and also provides briefer comments on Cervantes's female characters. Barry lie's The Historical and Social Context provides a history of early modern Spain, focusing on political history and to a lesser extent on economics. That there was a Moorish invasion (15) is rather an old-fashioned view, and it is surprising to see Isabel Ia Catolica's expulsion of Jews presented as a step toward strengthening the power of the Church (16).My only issue with Adrienne L. Martin's Humor and Violence in Cervantes is that she tacitly equates and Don Quijote; there is humor and violence in El licenciado Vidriera and Rinconete y Cortadillo, for example. On Don Qnijote her essay is persuasive: genius lies precisely in the ambiguities and profundity of his exploration of the literary relationship between humor (madness), comedy, and seriousness of purpose and meaning (166). This is precisely what Avellaneda does not get, she accurately notes. The author teaches us the truth through laughter (167). She concludes with an exploration of the different relationships between humor and violence in Cervantes's day and ours.Some essays are disappointing. Diana de Armas Wilson, in and the New World, starts on the wrong foot by calling La Galatea unreadable, full of classical furniture. exaggerated links she finds between and the Western hemisphere 1 have commented on elsewhere, in a review of her the Novel, and the New World (http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/reviews/wilson-.pdf, 9 June 2005). most inadequate is that of Alexander Welsh, The Influence of Cervantes; his only concern, as he himself says (80), is the influence of Don Quixote, primarily on British novelists. This ignores, for example, the influence of the Coloquio de los perros on Freud, the political use made of La Numancia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influence of Persiles in England and Germany, that of the Novelas ejeniplares in France, influence on Mark Twain and Gongora (La Galatea), and so on. Influence of Don Quixote does not even touch on the work's influence in Spain, its role in burlesquing the libros de caballerias and preventing them from being revived under the more tolerant reign of Felipe III. …

The Curious and Neglected Tale of La señora Cornelia

Of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares, La senora Cornelia is probably the most neglected. In a valiant attempt to rescue it from obscurity, Peter Dunn uncovered the tale's importance to a full understanding of the moral and philosophical structures that inform Cervantes' works. This essay sets out to show that the tale has another, complementary identity worthy of attention, an identity constituted by the manner of its telling rather than by its ideological framework. While La senora Cornelia reveals a vision of larger patterns of transcendental values and eternal verities, the fascinating detail of the text reveals the strong perception, not that truth does not exist, but that reality is never fully readable because reality, like fiction, is arbitrary. Cervantes, the writer who relishes detail, with wry amusement shows here how irrelevant detail can be. This is a text rich in tonalities and mischief, that makes fun of both idealistic and realistic modes of fiction.De las Novelas ejemplares, La senora Cornelia...

The Secret of Narrative: A Structural Analysis of Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares

This article, which offers analyses of five Novelas ejemplares, sheds new light on a key structural feature of Cervantes’s short stories. Long before Henry James began to compose fictions defined by what Tzvetan Todorov would call an “essential secret,” Cervantes was already experimenting with fictional texts that disorient the reader by problematizing or by failing to reveal the plot’s “secret” or central truth. Thus, this study undertakes a close reading of Cervantes’s stories in order to reveal how gaps and contradictions in signification make for “secretive” texts whose conclusions unfold in a contradictory “double movement,” given that doubt, questions, and general uncertainty arise precisely when the texts pretend to be finally offering the reader a sense of closure.

The poetry of history

The poetry of history

Cervantes o la relocalización del sujeto teatral

Cervantes was trapped in a paradoxical stance as a playwright: he had to defend his theater outside the stage. That situation led to the "virginal" publication (that is, with no previous performance) of most of his known plays, which, in turn, stressed another paradox: Cervantes conceived his playwriting as a "pure," intellectually-thrilling production in a context in which plays had turned into "mercadería vendible" ( Quijote I). My aim in this article is to analyze the extra-theatrical strategies by which Cervantes sought to relocate his relationship with theater and with literature at large, once he realized that it was out of touch with the massive marketability imposed by Lope's theater. These strategies are to be found, then, in his non-dramatic works ( Don Quijote, Novelas ejemplares, Viaje del Parnaso ) and were comprised of textual, authorial, and self-fashioning position-takings. Among the textual ones that we can identify are his prologues, the dialectical nature of most of his works (including the Viaje ), and isolated episodes in non-dramatic works such as Don Quijote . Concerning his authorial strategies, two can be mentioned: first, the reflexivity that he uses to look both at literature itself and, at the same time, at the outsider, the somewhat secondary role that he played in the emerging literary field; and, secondly, the use of a veiled but distinctive symbolic violence against Lope and the theater that he represents. Finally, Cervantine works after 1605 left behind a trace of self-fashioning, as his self-portraits and ironic self-deprecations and confessions frequently remind us. It could be argued that what Cervantes tried to do with these strategies was to inscribe himself as a character into the dramatis personae of the Spanish literary stage. (CMG)

Cervantes and the Material World

In this innovative revisiting of Don Quixote and the Novelas ejemplares, Carroll B. Johnson investigates in detail the cultural and material environment in which Cervantes placed his characters. Cervantes and the Material World reveals a recurrent preoccupation with the clash of two different economic systems: a reenergized feudalism and an incipient capitalism. Overturning the common assumption that Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and myriad other colorful characters carry out their adventures in a timeless social milieu, Johnson demonstrates how their perspectives and experiences are shaped by the events and crises of their immediate historical context. Johnson examines how questions of the distribution of wealth, the ownership of the means of production, and membership in one or another economic order permeate Cervantes's fiction. Thoughtfully contextualizing key excerpts, he suggests how business activities, legal codes, and other materialist practices actively impinge on the lives of the characters, influencing and in some cases determining their motivations and their possibilities for action. A major study that will change the face of Cervantes scholarship, Cervantes and the Material World is also an important resource for students of the Spanish Golden Age and Renaissance and baroque literature and culture.

"La fuerza del amor" or "The Power of Self-Love": Zayas' Response to Cervantes' "La fuerza de la sangre"

THE debt of Maria de Zayas' Ejemplos and Desenganos amorosos to Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares has been studied frequently. Given the popularity that the Novelas ejemplares enjoyed, their influence upon other authors of short stories was inevitable, even obligatory. And Zayas' work is often read as an elaboration of the style, themes, and content of Cervantes' ejemplos. Nonetheless, as Cervantes himself well demonstrated, imitation does not imply blind reverence to the model; for Cervantes, as for most writers of the Renaissance and Baroque, the practice of imitatio was a conscious effort to transform, and in the process hopefully surpass, the model. In fact, Zayas' texts readily lend themselves to multiple and paradoxical readings, making any imitation of or response to the content and themes of Cervantes' works unexpected and highly original. As Patricia E. Grieve has stated in her study of Zayas' practice of imitation and manipulation of hagiographic codes, her works not only (and thus transform) form and content, but radically undermine the ideological premises which commonly frame text and reading context: By foregrounding hagiography and transforming seventeenth-century male-approved reading matter for women into material for women's writing, while refusing merely to imitate it, Zayas creates a revisionist text that subverts hagiography's patriarchal discourse. She appropriates the content but revises the context of the stories, thereby circumventing the pitfalls of being a female voice in a male discourse. (89) I would add that this practice of irreverent imitation, of taking a male oriented discourse, subverting its premises, and recontextualizing it into a woman's text is the same practice Zayas employs in her transformation of Cervantes' works. In this essay I will discuss the ways in which Zayas' La fuerza del amor is a direct retort to the irony (whether intentional or not) of Leocadia's marriage in Cervantes' La fuerza de la sangre. I will argue that in fact Zayas' tale of marriage and deception is a conscious continuation of Cervantes' contradictory tale of rape, sin, and farfetched reconciliation. If La fuerza de la sangre ends with an uneasy declaration of marital bliss between Rodolfo, an aristocrat and a rapist, and his victim, Leocadia, La fuerza del amor openly exposes the cruel reality that this blessed state can and will bring. Cervantes' tale ends with Leocadia's surrender to her rapist's gaze and her tenuous reintegration into society as his honorable wife and mother of his children. In contrast, Zayas focuses on the pitfalls of marriage for women such as Leocadia and La fuerza del amor's Laura, beautiful objects of desire always lacking power and readily abused by husband and society. Nonetheless, Zayas enables her disgraced heroine to find in herself the power of self-love (this tale should really be titled La fuerza del amor propio) and establish her subjectivity apart from all male influence. First let us examine Cervantes' Sangre. In this ejemplo Leocadia, a virginal and extremely beautiful sixteen-year-old is abducted from her family's carriage by Rodolfo, a caballero whose inclinacion torcida, libertad demasiada and companias libres prevent him from honoring his or her honorable standing in society (77). She is taken to Rodolfo's room where, unconscious, she is raped. As the night evolves Leocadia first pleads for her death, then for her release, and manages to leave taking a crucifix that, as Marcia Welles establishes, will be both symbol and proof of her innocent sacrifice (247). Luisico, the product of this unworthy union, has an accident that miraculously brings him to his noble grandparents' house where he lies in the bed that seven years earlier had been the stage of his mother's disgrace. Leocadia, finally aware of her aggressor's identity, acts accordingly and, through Rodolfo's parents' grace and kindness, is able to regain her honor through marriage. …

The Crucible Concept: Thematic and Narrative Patterns in Cervantes's "Novelas ejemplares"

The Crucible Concept: Thematic and Narrative Patterns in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares. By E. T. Aylward. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1999. 327 pages. E. T. Aylward is one of the more innovative and fearless Cervantes scholars active today. He has few peers when it comes to advancing original-and provocative-interpretations. One expects him to do that, and in the present study he does not disappoint. Challenges to idles revues and idees fixes are salutary, of course. Criticism would stagnate without them. Aylward had previously advanced the view that Rinconete y Cortadillo and El celoso extremeno were of suspicious origin. Here he adds El licenciado Vidriera (LV) to that short list, linking all three to the Porras manuscript. Of all the points made here, the inclusion of LV among the texts of doubtful authenticity is probably the one that will provoke most discussion. The evidence adduced in support of this claim centers around commonalities he perceives among the three texts, specifically their experimental nature, which, in turn, has to do with their bipartite generic structure, the absence of flashbacks in all three, and their ironic tone. The author's procedure throughout is to focus on both form and content, in an effort to arrive ultimately at the work's sense or meaning. The study might thus be as an updated, post-structuralist sentido y forma. Indeed, the debt to Casalduero is acknowledged and is frequently evident. I sense an uneasy alliance between form and content, however-much more so than in Casalduero-and it is on that basis that I would classify the study as post-structuralist, or perhaps postmodern. The dis-ease of postmodernism is most evident in the contrast between the title itself, which relates to thematic content, and the stated intention of seeking the unity of the collection, its artistic wholeness, through its narrative structure (31). At the same time, the approach is reminiscent of the British School's thematic-structural approach to Comedia criticism. The concept of the crucible was suggested by Ruth El Saffar's notion of alchemical purgation, as she applied it to the Persiles. As Aylward says, viewed from this angle, Cervantes's Novelas can be seen to represent life as a sentimental crucible in which the protagonists' inflated egos undergo a process of psychological dissolution and coagulation in a series of harrowing and sometimes near-miraculous occurrences ... I have designated this `crucible concept' as the overriding thematic element that manages to hold together an otherwise curious and incongruous collection (11). Another kind of unity, or at least consistency, is seen in the fact that all of the novelas ejemplares can be considered literary experiments (195). In terms of structure, the stories are grouped according to narrative procedure and organization, with chapter one devoted to La Gitanilla and La ilustre fregona; chapter two to the symmetrical design of El amante liberal, La fuerza de la sangre, and La espanola inglesa; chapter three to the Porn-as manuscript, from which Rinconete y Cortadillo, El celoso extremeno, and El licenciado Vidriera are said to derive; chapter four to Los dos doncellas and La senora Cornelia; and chapter five to El casamiento enganoso and El coloquio de los perros. …

When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes's Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism

When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism E. C. Graf (bio) My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm. —Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation] We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale. —Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation] While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”! —Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York. For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes. Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries. In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a...

Cervantes lector en las Novelas ejemplares

A long and rich critical tradition has revealed the stamp of major literary works in the style of Novelas ejemplares. Nethertheless, beyond the standard poetical genres, of utmost importance is primordial, one finds signs of works which, through their variety and singularity, present a new Cervantes. Cervantes-the-reader is very wide and spans legislative or religious-toned texts, selections of beffe, agricultural books for example. Be it the memorisation of some lines in prose or verse, or it an attentive and specific perusal of ampler volumes or recent publications, a lot of examples open new vistas into Cervantes création.